 I have a great search for you by digikey and I never think you digikey every week. Lady of user powered of engineering help you. Yes, you find the things that you're looking for on digikey.com. Lady, what are you looking for on digikey.com this week? Well, in celebration of the Raspberry Pi five release, there is this new thing, the PCIe connector slot, and there's going to be an M2 hat that comes out. This has been announced from Raspberry Pi training company. So you could plug in anything that has an M2 connection, which I don't have an M2 card here. I don't think I know I do. Let's go quickly to the overhead. I'll just show it off because I happened to happen to have one. So this is my this is what M2 looks like. This is a long 2280 M2 and we covered M2 connectors before. But this is kind of a thin PCB and it plugs into it snaps into these M2 connectors, not just a lineup, and then you could add very common things, adding disk storage, but also cellular modules are pretty common, like security tokens, whatever, accelerators and other configurations. So M2 is the physical format. PCIe is the standard of connectivity. So let's go back to the computer and I'll show that because this was kind of mixed up in my mind. I was like, oh, is M2 and PCIe the same thing? No, but there are sometimes you can use M2 shapes with PCIe wiring. So PCIe comes in a couple different sizes. There's up here 4, 16, and 1. And the 1, 4, and 16 is how many lanes of differential data they carry. In this case, on the Raspberry Pi 5, if I'm not mistaken, it's a single lane, which is still plenty, like it's a lot. There's other lanes, but apparently they're used for other tasks, maybe to control, communicate with the South Bridge or whatever. So however, this is just an electrical standpoint. This is a mechanical shape. So if you come down here and there's another PCIe, you can see a single slot. Let's see, go down. Okay, so they say like, okay, here's how many pins you get. Let me just zoom out here. So if you have one lane, you only have like this 18 pin times two sides. So 36 pins total configuration. And then if it's four lanes, it keeps going. You have like another set of pins and it goes up to 64. And then if you keep going up to eight pins, it's 49, so 98. And then all the way, 16 full lanes, which is like some massive video card, you'd get 82 pins or 164 total. So what we want to do is we want to get a PCIe connector, and we can make a little adapter from the flex cable on the Raspberry Pi to PCIe 1x. So let's go to Dukey and do that. So good news is that if you just type in PCIe, it'll actually come up with a bunch of edge board connectors, which is what we're looking for. So let me just take a look. Yeah, these look good. So one thing is I do want to have it stick up, not to the side, because some cards have like, they're meant to plug into a motherboard, and so they're slotted and they can be a little wide. I don't want something that requires right angle connection, unless the PCB is cut over. I prefer to have it just be vertical and be done with it, because that way you can plug it in. What's nice is that you can get foo hole as well as surface mount, but I'm going to be looking for surface mount. So let's start looking. We're going to look for active and let's just start with that. So it's active and then like normally stocking and no marketplace. We can just narrow it down already to 320. So the next thing is we need to know the card thickness. So it looks like there's like slim cards, let's do the positions. So as we looked over here for 1x, it's 36 pins. So let's do 36 pins and then card thickness. Yeah, that's right. It's basically one PCB thick. It's just card edge connect. And then we can decide how we want it to be connected. Do we want foo hole like this or surface mount? I want to go with surface mount. So let's go to surface mount, although there is foo hole as well. And then let's see what we got here. We've got a couple options. What I like about this one is it even comes with a pick in place connector where you can see it's got a nice solder retention, the big tabs on the side to make it sit in place. This one doesn't look quite right. This one looks good. Looks like there's actually quite a few options, which is kind of nice. I don't really care if it's... Well, I guess we can get in tape and reel to start, not tray because if we want to pick in place, I want to make sure that it comes in the right tape. It'll be a very thick tape. And yeah, these all say pick in place. So that's good contact material. I don't really know if that makes a difference. And then let's just look at pricing. Let's see what's available. So this one I think is some odd thing, but this looks right. 36 pin position, $2. Let's look at the 360 of it. Let's see if I'm loaded up. Yeah, it looks nice, right? Like, oh, there's even a little board guide, big solder tabs, and then solder connections. So you don't have to tell people don't yank back and forth. Just slot it down. But this connector would look really good and would make for a nice adapter. So then all we need to do is make a PCB that takes the FPC connector that's used on the Pi 5 and just follow the pinout wire directly to the PCIe slot because it's just a mechanical change and we're golden. So this is my pick from Amphenol, a PCIe mini express SMT module. And that's a great search.