 Live from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer. With me, Mr. Lady Aida on camera control behind the decks. We're broadcasting live from downtown Manhattan. We've got all sorts of good stuff in the show. We've got new products and videos and tutorials and like hot breaking pull requests. The hottest, the most breaking, the most poor requests. The most requested, the most pulled. The most pulled. So let's kick it off, Mr. Lady Aida. Tell them what's on tonight's show. On tonight's show, the code is USB host. You'll see why. We have an amazing new never before seen thing we're going to show off tonight. This good news means you save 10% off and need a free start all the way up to 11.59 p.m. or when I remember to turn the code off. We also have free stuff we'll talk about that. We'll be talking about our live shows, including Show and Tell, which we just finished up. We'll do a little bit of a recap. We'll talk about Desk of Lady Aida, including The Great Search, which we do every single week. We've got JP's product pick of the week. Do a little bit of time travel. Have a little fun retro tech show and telly type thing we're going to do. Advanced manufacturing. We have some New York City factory footage. Some really cool and clearly the best 3D printing projects we're going to show this week. We're going to do INMPI. We got some new products. We're going to answer your questions. We do that over on Discord. It's the way we can get to the questions because there's like a billion places that you can watch this video. All that and more on, you guessed it. Ask an engineer. Yay. Okay. Let's first pay some bills so we can compensate people for their skills. Code is USB host, Lady Aida. What do they get when they put things in the car? Okay. This video, although it's very cute, is really outdated. We're out of the perma-proto freebies. We're out of this. You don't get this. You don't get this. But we're thinking of some other stuff we could do instead. We do have KV2040s. However, we are running low on the pink PCV version. Oh, quick. They're going to be black, which is cool. The got eight different black afterwards. But if you still want the pink version, put $149 or more in your cart and check out. $199 or more, you get free PSGround shipping contracts in the United States. And I think as of today, we still have Circuit Playground Express is free. We order $299 or more. It's all in one development board. Kind of excited to refresh this as well, but we did get a big shipment of these. Hopefully, we'll get a big shipment of these soon. And we'll be able to keep these as the freebies. But as the chip shortage ends, we're dealing with Park Quakes, as it were. Park Quakes. All right. We have some live shows. We just finished up Show and Tell, which was just a few moments ago. We hosted it, and I think next week is Liz and FBSJP. So on the show and tell, I had a lot of neat music-related things, as always. If you want to check out this neat synth mod, we were trying to come up with a name. J.P. is modding this. It's called Computer Perfection. It's this game from the 70s. It came in this neat enclosure that I found, and I'm like, J.P., buy one of these off eBay, and let's turn it into something. So that's my pick of the week, only because I want help. I don't know what this genre is going to be called. It's like case modding, but it's not circuit bending. It's something else. It's taking really cool, interesting, weird toy enclosures, essentially, from a while ago, and putting very modern advanced things inside of it. J.P. How about synth stuffing? J.P. Yeah, synth stuffing. J.P. Synth stuffing the synth. J.P. Did you stop in synthesizers and stuff? J.P. Give me that. And then if you want to see a really good example of a chat GPT project that won't hurt your feelings, because I think folks are getting a little extreme on like, this thing's going to take over the world, or it's like, this thing is going to do everything for me. We're doing a teddy bear project, because it's great at just making up shit. J.P. Everything's wrong. It's a teddy bear. It's a teddy bear, Jerry. J.P. So, the teddy bear, you can ask it things like, are you a teddy bear? Or like, tell me a joke? And it uses chat GPT, and you can turn on and off the microphone yourself, and like, it's a very good open source, transparent way, literally, to figure out what type of interactive toys you could possibly make. So anyways, we showed that, and then we have a couple other projects on show and tell. They were all really good. But that was one of the ones that Anne showed off some anime to give stuff, what you're going to show a little bit later on in Ask an Engineer. And then DJ Devon came by and showed this really neat LED project. And also Bleeding Rainbow, my new favorite song. We did Desk of Lady Aida on Sundays. Lady Aida, we have a bit in two parts. What did you show off in part one? J.P. Well, this week, I talked a little bit about U2IF, which is the special firmware that we are going to make sure that works with all our RP2040 feathers. So you can run code on your CPython computer to control Canbus, or E-Ink, or other devices. So I don't know, it's kind of neat. I also showed off a prop feather that I'm designing. And it's not quite ready yet, but I wanted to just show it off. And also I talked about USB PD as a possible Neopixel driver. J.P. Yeah, it looks like some of the show got caught off. I'll have to see what happened on that YouTube upload. Yeah. Then we do the Great Search, brought to you by Digikey, and I'd have to forget that's when you show people how to find things on digikey.com. What did you help them find this week? J.P. Oh, so in this FUSB 302 USB power delivery breakout that I'm designing, I needed to find a low voltage, sorry, a low dropout regulator that would give me 3.3 volts from as high as 20 volts. And right now, all my LDOs that I stock, like the MiG 5 225 and the AP2112 and the RT9080 and all those other wonderful LDOs, they all go up to like 6 volts and some of them go to like 12 volts, but all of them go to 20 or above. So I wanted to source a 100 milliamp capable 24 volt LDO that would fit in my kind of standard 5-pin SOT 23 package and find one that's a good price. This is a really, this is actually kind of like a classic Digikey search issue, which is like they have 70,000 different low dropout regulators and you want one particular one and we did find a couple good options. So I know it's a common question, people like I need a regulator and I need to match these specifications. So check out this video. Alright, and then every single week we do J.P.'s product pick of the week, that's where J.P. broadcasts live from inside the product page where the discount's automatically applied. Here is this week's highlight. It is the AT Tiny 816 and the AT Tiny 616 breakout boards with CSAW. I can program this AT Tiny just like it's a baby Arduino. I've simply coded something that is reading button presses on this little step switch and is writing out to that LED. I've got a QT Pi and it's plugged in using the STEMI QT cable to my AT Tiny 1616. I am running these seven potentiometers into seven of the ADC pins on the AT Tiny. So that's able to read all of those analog values and then report them back to my QT Pi. All I'm doing is adjusting values and showing them on this display here. You could use these up to nine of these analog inputs for anything you want on your project. The AT Tiny 816 and 1616 CSAW breakout boards. And don't forget you can watch J.P.'s workshop tomorrow and you can see the super cool thing that he showed off on the show until today. And on Fridays, we have Deep Dive with Tim where you can learn all the innards of Circuit Python and more that's 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. Let's do a little bit of time traveling. We did stuff on the weekend and we do stuff with a kiddo now. So one of the things we wanted to do is have a very traditional Easter Sunday. What we did was... We did go to a friend's... Yeah, we did. We were going to go to an A-Comp, but I think the folks had the flu or COVID or something like that. So we did something else and we went on a train. We did stuff. But one of the things that we wanted to do was... We don't post pictures of our kids, so I'm a fan of Donnie Darko. So we 3D printed this Donnie Darko mask with PLA and then she's behind there with the bunny costume and then we made a Happy Easter from Adafruit. If you're familiar with Donnie Darko, this is... It's Easter-ish. Just like the Gremlins is a Christmas movie. It's fine. It's fine. This is getting in the spirit. So anyways, whatever you celebrate, whatever you do, happy spring time from us here at Adafruit. I like this. Never question our commitment to sparkle motion. Adafruit IO, our little bit of news that's big news for us is there's now over 2,000 devices for Whippersnapper. Lady Aida, for the folks who haven't tried this out yet, what is it and why should they try it out? So Whippersnapper is a service we have with Adafruit IO. It's kind of like a brand part of Adafruit IO where you can store, send, and retrieve data using a cloud service that we run. And it makes things easier for controlling stuff wirelessly because instead of you hosting your own MQTT broker or trying to figure stuff out with Azure or Google Cloud or AWS, we make it really, really easy for makers to log data, to retrieve data, to remotely control stuff. And Whippersnapper is a no-code way of doing that. Basically, we give you a firmware blob that you run on ESP32 or SAM51 or other like tons of different boards that are supported. You just tell it what your SSID password is in your Adafruit IO account, and then you can even control what hardware is set up. You can configure that on the web. It's free. It's easy. We're making it too easy to do IoT projects. That's what we've heard. So yeah, but now with, especially with our new feathers that have STEMIQT and all our sensors have STEMIQT, you can now build an IoT logging service like system, like you want to log your temperature and humidity, or you want to make sure there's no water leaking somewhere, or you want to turn a relay on or off. You can do all of that without any coding or soldering whatsoever. And it's free. Drag and drop. Simple things like I just want to know if my garage, if I left my garage door open, or like, I just want to know if something's leaking because I have to go out for two hours and something was kind of leaking. And I just want to get notified if that's happening. Like things like that, which is, you know, no one's going to build a device just to do that, like a commercial device, but you can do it really easy. And I think it's the only thing like it out there. So we have now 2000 different devices that are using it. So yeah, clicking along. Very neat. And it's free. Why? Because we hope you buy hardware from us once in a while. So you don't have to worry about it getting sold or just continue. Adafruit.io, there's always going to be a free tier. And then we also have Plus for people who like, they're starting to use it for like, business, business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you get many more, you get a lot more feeds and device, because we have to pay for the server. So if you're using a lot of resources, we ask you just sign up for a program. Yeah. And one of the things that we didn't like over the years is every time we used an IoT service, it would get discontinues or they purchase or sold. They'd merge with like Flurfer, Web, something. I hate Flurfer. And we're like, okay. And you don't, and your, your data gets shared with whatever company that acquires it. I mean, why do you kids a Flurfer feeder? Yeah. So, yeah. So we wanted to have something that everyone can, can use and just know it's safe, it's prohibited. And it's easy to use. That's right. Okay. Congratulations, Whippersnapper IoT. Yay. All right. So we have some RetroTech this week. This one's going to be a little different. We're going to show off the Apple product that you probably never heard of and never seen. The reason why I'm going to show this off this week is because there's actually like a beautiful like ebook online. It's all the like notes and letters and like things that Steve Jobs put together. I actually spent a big deal on this. I think like, it's been a multi, multi, multi year effort to kind of capture the things about Steve Jobs and how Apple came about. However, there's a story that's not being told and probably never be told, going to be told about Apple. Because if you look around, it's like, wow, like Apple's this like pro company, look at all this slick hardware. It was made, it was made by pirates doing TVB gone stuff and jamming radio waves. And I think that's something that should be celebrated in mischief and hacking and electronics. And if you think about it without that, there wouldn't be an Apple. So however you feel about, you know, big tech companies, Apple in particular was started by a bunch of phone freaking pirates. So this is the device. This is the first Apple product that they were called Apple at the time. But what I wanted to show is these cool baseball light cards. And let me switch to the overhead here. So lady, you could show these off. This is phone freaker cards, Berkeley blue, also known as Steve Wozniak. And then Oaf Tobar, which I can't find why Steve Jobs called himself that it was in one line in one book when I did some research. But can't really find out why he chose that. Maybe if I like put this through one of those word things, maybe it spells something else or if anyone knows, let me know, but flip over to the back. So this is that product all new for 72 in the spring of 72. Technical folks with pseudonym handles took to automating mob bell with a handmade gadget that produces tones and frequencies, which fooled the system to thinking they're the phone company. Now for a little bread, you can have one too. So this made free phone calls back when you could do stuff like that in 1972 back before it actually meant something. Of course, people like, what do you mean you pay for a phone call? Why don't you just use like Skype or something? It's free. Now you have to use to pay like by the minute. Yeah. So this is the first Apple product you've never heard of. This is how if you're using a Mac or iPhone or whatever, this is how it got here. And one of the things that I thought that was interesting is there's one clip I found the only place where I've heard Steve Jobs talk about his days of piracy. So he was introducing like something in 2006, I think. And the clicker wasn't working. And then he was talking about jammers. He's like, you know, like, you see this and you're like, wow, this guy's really charismatic. Like he can he like he's just like, okay, I'm gonna instantly tell him like a story. Yeah. And here's the thing. And here's the thing I like. And I like this because we're kind of living through our own little version is like, you know, we got a lot of shit for TV be gone, showing people how to turn TVs on. Oh, I still get like, you get a lot of shit for the pager stuff. For the pager thing we showed. Your thesis was the cell phone jammer. But the idea that you can explore technology and understand things and hack them and mod them and share the information. That's how the world's most successful computer company got here, whether you like it or not. It was formed by phone freaking pirates that wanted to like, you know, kind of screw over my bell, like they've become the now big company, which I think is the circle of life Simba. But you know, there was a time when they were the underdog. And that's how they thought about things. And like, how can we like work around stuff? And I think that's really important to hold that spirit. So that's why we'll keep trying to get into mischief. We'll make mistakes sometimes. I'll end up apologizing for things because I like pranks. But I think you get a little glimpse of it once in a while. And as the story of Apple continues to be told, some of these stories you don't really hear. So I thought this was a fun clip. So that's our retro for this week. I'll see you on the other side of the clip. We're going to bring some great stuff to market together. So let's take a look at this market and how big it is. My clicker's not working. Oh, there it is. Maybe it is working. So how big is this market? Well, let's take a look. Clicker is not working. All right. They're scrambling backstage right now. You know, when I was in high school, Steve Wozniak and I, mostly Steve, made this little device called a TV jammer. And it was this little oscillator that would put out frequencies that would screw up the TV. And Woz would have it in his pocket. And we'd go into like a dorm at Berkeley where he was going to school. And a bunch of folks would be watching like Star Trek. And he'd screw up the TV. And somebody would go up to fix it. And just as they had their foot off the ground, he'd turn it back on. If they put their foot back on the ground, he'd screw up the TV again. And within five minutes, he'd have somebody like this for the rest of the Star Trek episode. Okay. So maybe it's working now. Maybe they're going to have to click them for me. And that's retro tech for this week. All right. It's Python and Harvard time, Lydia. Yay, Blinker. It is time. Okay. So if you haven't already, please, please, please subscribe to our Python and Harvard newsletter. It's a different daily. And we don't do anything with your email address. I'm going to spam you. It is the biggest collection of Python and Harvard news in the world. So last week, we did the breaking news about the Raspberry Pi Python editor online, which is great because we don't want to build an online Python code. We don't want to do that. And so we're glad that Raspberry Pi is so you could use this for anything with Python, including circuit Python and stuff like that. So it's a neat code editor. It'll help young people age seven and older learn to write code. And it's for all their coding clubs, coder dojos. It's beta. They want folks to test it out and let them know how it works. And it's not just limited to students. So everyone can use it. And then I have a little bit of announcement before we talk about some of the things that we're working on right now. PyCon, we're going to have a couple of people there. Katnie and Jeff are going to be there. And here is what they want you all to know. Katnie and Jeff will be hosting three days of development sprints from 8am to 5pm, Monday, April 24th through Wednesday, April 26th. Jeff will be joining on Monday. The location will be termed during the conference. They want to let you know if you're attending, please let Katnie know ahead of time in the Circuit Python Dev channel on Discord. Or you can come find them at the conference. We'd love to meet up. We're looking forward to PyCon 2023. And we hope to see you there too. This is where we meet a lot of folks. Someone we hired at Adafruit. So if you're going to PyCon, please stop by and say hi to our team. And then last up before we talk about the kind of new thing that we're going to preview today. I thought this was neat. This is a Circuit playground using Circuit Python to make an edible Dungeon and Dragons cake that rolls dice. Cool. Isn't that neat? Yeah. I love it. It's supposed to make it easy. It's supposed to be like the programming doesn't get in the way of your project. Yeah. So in our Circuit Python news, this was in our internal Slack today. Lady is like, hey, Scott, could you get Circuit Python doing stuff with our new Feather DVI? And... This is Scott loves to drop hot images. So this is a Feather RP2040 DVI, the board that we released last week, we was with before, connected up to an HDMI monitor. And you see the native display IO and Ripple is on a monitor. This is cool. One, we've always wanted to be able to do really good screen captures of Circuit Python. Like, you know, if you're typing stuff, instead of taking a photo, you can actually now do a screen cap of display IO, which is super neat. Second, it means that people can do video sense and like cool video projects that display on a monitor using Circuit Python. And we have Arduino support right now, which it works great. But maybe you want to use Circuit Python that you know and love all the sprite stuff and maybe the video games that like, you know, we had the Pi Gamer people vote some games for the Pi Gamer for a TFT display. But now maybe they could port those games over. So maybe I'll have Scott adapt his cool thing about this is we have no idea what people are going to do with it. Like when I saw this, I'm just like, I can't wait till Todd but can kick the tires on this, because we finally have not only a screen, like, you know, directly from Circuit Python, you could, you know, there's other, there's ways to do things. And like, you can look at a screen. But this is going out to TV, you know, a big projector or projector. I mean, there's actually a lot. I mean, like it's like a lot of stuff has dbi input. Yeah. Also, you can, of course, convert dbi to other you can convert to NTSC. Yeah, there's a lot. And it's Python. So that just means like, anyone can make anything and plug it into these like monoliths that we just have stuck to our walls that don't do anything most of the time. So anyways, we'll get the word out. It's not on the nightly build yet. It needs to know it's not even it's like not even pulled in. It's breaking, breaking, breaking, breaking news. It's like so hot. Yeah. And he's got 16 bit, eight bit, four bits, two bit and one bit. So 320 by 240, but it's pixel doubled to 640 by 40. But most of our displays are 320 by 240. So it's actually very similar. I think he did say that on the one and two bit per pixel color, so it's like monochrome or near monochrome, he did get full 640 by 480. But maybe I didn't understand it. Okay. Don't forget, sign up in for daily. We deliver this every single week. And you'll be able to, of course, follow along on that project and more very soon. All right. We're an open source hardware company. To prove it, we're not complaining about open source hardware licenses. It's a funny joke just for us. So we have a bunch of guides. We have a ton of guides. What's new on the big board this week, Lady? Okay. I'll be honest. I can't remember exactly what was from last week. Let's go to the bottom and I'll just do the last eight. Okay. Well, I can tell you, I can tell you. So the Apple II emulator, that's new. That's new. That's new. The glider update is here. We already did make it glow. Make it glow we did. The air lift, that's an update. The robotic teddy bears an update. And then these top ones are all new. Those are all new. Okay. Okay. The clear resin 3D prints we have a video we're going to show. So we saw a couple people make clear game boys cases with PCB way. They're translucent or transparent clear resin prints. And this is like something that's, it's, it's something that a lot of people want a 3D print. They want to make these beautiful clear like 90s style cases. And it's like really, really, really hard to do it even with a home 3D printer. That's really expensive. It's just really messy. It never comes up quite right. You always have to like do a lot of cleanup after the fact. So when we saw you can get parts 3D printed by a service, you know, it takes a couple of weeks and it's not an expensive, but it's also not like overly expensive. It's cheaper than getting stuff injection molded. And it looks really great. So no one Pedro did a video showing a couple of examples, including tinted plastic, press fit, key caps, et cetera. Very cool. It's not, wasn't sponsored by PCB way. I know people are sponsored for them and that's totally cool. But we actually just decided to do this on our own and we paid for all the parts and did a guide on doing animated GIFs in Circuit Python. We've had animated GIF playback in Arduino. You know, they're doing Circuit Python. It's not quite as fast, but you can still do a lot of animations. You know, if you just want to have like a startup screen or you want to have some animation and you don't want to have hand done sprites, load up a GIF. It does have to be in a certain kind of format, but it's a very, it's a, you know, non-compressed format, a very simple format. And you can play GIFs on your Circuit Python display, including the DVI displays. We'll try that out if we have enough memory. Liz did a library for the Wii classic controller. We've got a breakout that lets you plug in one of these sort of standard Wii controllers to its I squared C. It converts it to 7QT for easy plug and play with all of our boards. And this lets you add a controller very easily because I squared C is almost universally supported. And you don't have to worry about converting like SNES or NES, level shifting, whatever, latching. And the controller is really great. It's got two joysticks and lots of buttons. And then Katniss also started the guide for the Feather RP2040 with RFM radio. So good for Circuit Python use because the Feather M0 didn't have a ton of memory. The RP2040 has tons. And this board is great for making remote controls that use 900 megahertz and soon 433 megahertz will have a version. And there's a UFL connector, STEMI QT, One Circuit Python, we've got a library going, and Arduino support as well. Alright. And then I wanted to show just some quick, here's some of the animated GIFs that you can do. This isn't running, this isn't running the game. It's a GIF, but maybe that's useful. But this is the start too. It's like, you know, there's a lot of times where you want to show interfaces and things. That's this week's open source hardline. Let's do some factory footage later. Your footage will see some 3D printing. So we have the clear resin thing that we're going to show. And then we're going to do a speed up. So one of the things that we try to make super clear, so we don't get sponsored for any of these things, but people always assume to worsen one another, Twitter kind of run, human existence. So we put a specific note on this because PCBway does a lot of like sponsorships and they have people do stuff. We didn't get any money. We didn't do anything. We just use their service. We paid for it ourselves. But you know, for the folks that are active in the community, you can always assume we don't take sponsorship. And if we do, we'll say so. We'll say, yeah, this is brought to you by this thing. Yeah, brought to you by Digi. So I think that that's one of the things that we'll need to do more and more because everyone just assumes a worse than each other. And I don't blame people because why wouldn't you? Because everything is, you know, for the most part, a lie. So why wouldn't you assume assume the worst and you know, all these like you don't have to internet. You don't have to. It's a crummy way to go through life. Assuming the worst intentions are the worst in everyone. But we'll try to make sure we're always clear about this stuff because PCBway specifically, we didn't want anyone to say, oh, look, it should be way. That's what it sounds like. So anyways, we didn't get paid to do this. We just thought it was cool. Okay, let's play these videos back to back. And then we'll see you on the other side for IonMPI. You can get 3d printed parts in clear resin using the 3d printing service from PCBway. This video is not sponsored or affiliated with PCBway and the parts in here were purchased on our own behalf. These parts feature a crystal clear surface finish that are reminiscent of the transparent gadgets of the 1990s. They were 3d printed by PCBway using UTR 8100 resin with the spray varnish option. We think this is a good option for makers who don't want to deal with the hassle and mass of 3d printing in resin. Parts like this rotary crank feature hinges that allow two degrees of movement so you can have parts with print in place mechanisms. In our testing, our mechanical parts have a minimum clearance of 0.4 millimeters. That's the distance between the surfaces so you can have parts that move freely and don't fuse together. This print in place handle features pins with a diameter of 2 millimeters. These hexagon shaped keycaps showcase how backlighting your parts in clear resin creates a really nice edge lit effect. Start by going to PCBway's website and click the 3d printing called action. Click select CAD files to bring up the file browser dialog and navigate to your files. Then click the quantity box to choose your desired amount or enter a custom number in the text input. Under material, make sure resin is selected and then choose UTR 8100 transparent. You'll want the transparent varnish color option. If you want dyed parts, click on the surface finish drop down and choose from the color swatches or enter a custom pantone color in the text input. Once you're ready, click on the submit request button to proceed with the payment and shipping details. You can have your resin prints dyed with a custom pantone color like this Adabot minifig. We picked a bluish color that wasn't quite exactly the right shade of blue but it still looks pretty good so your choice of dye might vary. Our original model features separate parts that are supposed to be movable but because the tonches are below the recommended minimum the individual pieces were merged together resulting in a unified solid model. This snap fit case features a minimum wall thickness of 1.5 millimeters with a clearance of 0.2 millimeters. These are actually the exact same models we designed for FDM 3d printing and surprisingly they work just the same. If your parts feature standoffs with mounting holes be sure to make them slightly undersized so you can use a screw tap to create the threads. Parts like this back cover have a noticeable flex to them that allow them to bend slightly. We think clear resin parts are great for DOI electronics because they let you see what's inside and allow you to appreciate them even more. We hope this inspires you to check out PCBWay's 3d printing service for your next project. Before we go to Ion MPI, don't forget the code is usbhost here. I brought to you by Digikey. Any different this week? It's Skyworks. Lady, what is this week's Ion MPI? I'm glad you asked. This is I think the first time we've featured Skyworks which is so cool. Again, I always like to point out whenever we get to a new company. We've done many ADI, Maxim, TI, ST, NPIs but this one is from Skyworks. This is the, let me give the part number correctly, it's the SI3404 and SI3406 POE controller chip. This was actually brought to our attention by our BFF over at Digikey David Sandings. He said, check out this cool chip and I was like, oh yeah, that is really cool. Let's feature it on Ion MPI. This chip is a almost fully integrated POE compliant power delivery interface and high efficiency switching regulator. Okay, what does it mean? If you want to make something that is POE compatible so it can work with power over ethernet and it will be powered over the ethernet cable and you want to have it all integrated so you don't need like an external adapter of some sort, this chip pretty much does all the work for you. Now there's two versions, one I think is 13 watts and one is 34 watts. The 3404 is the lower wattage one. They're available in small packages and you don't need a lot of components to then make your product or project fully powered over ethernet while it's also getting data from that ethernet. Very handy and very easy to use. Now you're probably wondering, hey, Skyworks, that sounds really familiar. Yeah, that's right. That's the company that their chip fab is featured in such great tights, the Postal Service song from about 20 years ago. Wow, that's a deep cut. That's a deep cut and here's the thing. First off they're going on tour this fall. They didn't sponsor part of this but I've got to get, it's a great album if you haven't read it. The video... It would be great if the Postal Service and Deathcap for QT sponsored our show. That would be pretty sweet. What's interesting is I went back to see the video because I remember when the video came out that it had... Oh, top up post intent. Thank you. Everyone's favorite Skyworks video, correct? The logo is on the chip as they zoom out. It's like a promotional video for Skyworks and it had the Skyworks logo on the chip and it's now blurred out which is kind of a bummer. Oh, man, this is like all the songs in WKRP and Cincinnati. You can't listen to anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyways. I wonder if there's a version of it that is not blurred out. I looked, you know. Someone has a VCR tape somewhere. Somebody, please... Video tape. Well, the original MTV... You know what we could do? We could use some of those video AI services and put the logos back. Yeah. That's going to be the new thing where all the logos are blurred. Blurred logos. We're going to put it back. Hey, Skyworks, don't worry, we got you. Okay, great. But back to the topic at hand. I'll get tickets for this. It's going to be awesome. Next slide. It's a clicker. I've got a Mr. Lady. Yeah. Okay, so power either ethernet. What is it? If you've never used it before, it's actually quite popular these days. And, you know, the Raspberry Pi has a POE hat. And we have a bunch of devices around the house that can use a power over ethernet. Basically, historically, you know, if you had devices that were ethernet that used ethernet for communications, you would have the big long ethernet cable where you know, plugging to your... The Cat5 would plug into your RJ11 jack. And then you'd also have a separate power adapter. And here's the thing about the power adapter. It would always be different. It would be like... We have in the store like this 35-kit power adapter ends thing because like, is it 2.5 millimeters or 1.3, 2.2, negative polarity, positive polarity? You always have to like carry on this gigantic wall wart. And usually only a couple of watts of power usually need like, you know, 12 volts, 1 amp, maybe 2 amp. And for a lot of devices, you don't need that much current, but they do want to have ethernet, not Wi-Fi, because ethernet is going to be a lot more reliable. You can push a lot more data through it. And for stuff like IP cameras, like internet cameras or phone systems, you want the reliability of ethernet. You don't want your phone or your camera to stop working because like, you know, the ethernet, the Wi-Fi goes down. So ethernet is more reliable. But you know, you don't want to also have these gigantic wire cables all over the place. And I was, you know, in the text that, in the blog post that goes with this teacher, the INFPI, I linked to the video where they talk about Sci Labs, which was purchased, this part was purchased by Skyworks, that's why it started with SI. They talk about like why, you know, why they think power ethernet really took off for building automation. And they made a really good point. And it's kind of obvious, but at the time you realize it, which is in a lot of buildings to lay power cords like 120 volt or 220 volt, you need an electrician, you need permits, you know, you have to be, you have safety protocols, all are correct. You should be careful because you can get electrocuted if you don't wire up your outlets correctly. But ethernet can be pulled and routed and attached to anything by an IT professional. You don't need it, you don't need, yeah, even in the house, right? We have an ethernet that we just put around the, you know, around the edge of the molding. So a lot of times when buildings have to do retrofits, if you can do PoE, it's a lot easier than trying to get power into places that you didn't have, especially if it's like, oh, I need it on the ceiling for this camera or to every desk for the PoE, not PoE telephone system, or to the doors for the door entry for the badge, the badge entry system. So that's one of the reasons that these are extremely popular, is it really cuts down complexity and costs in building out. You will need to have on the other side a PoE capable switch. So this is where the power comes from. So this thing has like an enormous power adapter, or sometimes you plug directly into 120 volt power, but then you get eight ports of PoE, each one can do, you know, I mean, a total of 153 watts. And they will provide to you 48 volts on the extra pins that you negotiate with. And there's like a whole 802, you know, standard protocol for how they request the PoE. It doesn't just magically come out. You have to have a switch and you have to have the chip know how to request that data. You know, one option if, you know, if you're just showing this, you know, we have a PoE splitter, the PoE splitter actually has an SI3404 inside of it, which I thought was funny. But this is how it would work. You know, you have the hub on the top there. And you see it's powered and there's the Ethernet cord. The Ethernet cord goes into the PoE splitter, which then provides data Ethernet, and in this case, five volt USB power. But this is a little clunky, right? I mean, ideally, you would have it all built into your device. You just plug in the Ethernet cable, you don't need this separate device. So SyLabs developed this protocol, this portfolio for PoE, sold at the Skyworks. It's now a Skyworks sold and they have both the power managers, the power sourcing equipment, so like what provides the PoE power. And at the bottom, you see the latest series that SI3404 or 3406 came out a couple of years ago. The power devices that the other end that requests power. But integration is really easy. There's one of the things that I think is really neat about this family. You don't need a lot of components to get going. Almost everything is kind of done automatically. You do need a little bit of protection circuitry and some diodes and a big inductor, because the inductor of course can't be inside of it. But one of the things that SyLab is really good at is like kind of cramming everything inside, so you need a minimum number of components. So for example, the SI3404, the lower cost one, you only need two full wave rectifiers on the left there. That's because the power coming in from Ethernet is AC. And then you see there's a couple of passives, you have the sense resistor and inductor, a diode for the buck converter to convert from 48 down. And then the output voltage is just set by the FBH, the feedback resistor. This is the SI3406. It's a little bit more powerful. It looks like you don't need to have a full wave rectifier. But in this case, you do need to have a flyback inductor, so it doesn't do the buck mode. But maybe I don't trust me completely. It could be that it does. There are also isolated versions. These are the non-isolated. But if you see here, there's eval boards and I can show on the overhead real fast. This is the isolated eval board for the SI3406. And you see here, this is the chip. And then on the bottom, you have the full wave rectifier. And then here you see the opto isolator, it looks like, and then a flyback inductor. So this is fully isolated. So you don't have to worry about this ground messing with that ground, I think, for medical and other applications you might need to have isolated power. Okay, so let's go back. All these eval boards are available at Digi-Key, except for the one I just bought. But most of them are for the 3404, 3406, non-isolated buck, non-buck, etc. So pick those up. And the chips themselves, there's a lot of them in stock. And they're like under two bucks in quantity, which is a really good deal. It's cheaper than just like getting a, because you can't use non-switching power adapters anymore, which is good because the transformer based ones were very heavy, and also had a lot of like vampire power. So for like only a couple bucks like this, and then a couple of diodes and inductor, so maybe a bill of materials about $2, you can add power ethernet to any of your product or project designs. I'd like to have a company called Vampire Power. Vampire Power. All right, that's this week's Ion API. Oh, good old lady. Before we go off to new products, the code is usbhostuseiterloseit, 10% off the native restore. Anything we have in stock and you get all the free stuff that we have remaining. Let's do new products. What's new? It's time for some new products and some updated products as well. Some revisions. First up, we've got a revision for the ADT Sony 410. This temperature sensor from analog devices, which is why it's in red, it was a partnership with DigiKey and ADI. It's in beautiful red, now has a nice silk screen. And it's also, this was literally the last sensor before we STEMI QT applied everything. We finally ran out of the old PCBs. We now have the STEMI QT version of the sensor. It's a lovely temperature sensor. It's inexpensive. It's analog device quality, and now it's plug and play with STEMI QT ports on it. You can still use all of our existing circuit python and Arduino code. But I don't have to do any soldering. All right. And for the next one, before we go and talk about it, we have this like sort of rule at ADFURT is we don't want to put our logo on like shot glasses and like, you know, t-shirts in our pool or just like basically almost anything that's not electronic based. Yeah. But people all the time say I want ADFURT swag and we're like, I don't want to like print it on a pen or like rebrand someone else's soldering iron. I'm definitely glad that the whole shot glass thing is over. Yeah. It was like really nice. Yeah. And we're just like none into that. So anything that we put the logo on has to be special. And usually that's reserved for PCBs. So we have a workaround and here is one of this week's new products. Well, this is coming soon. They're not buying the store, but we do get nice photos because why not? These are PCB coasters. Two PCB coasters. And there's two designs. Yeah. One is aluminum PCB. So it's it's a stiffer material and one is FR4, but it's two millimeter FR4. Ironically, the aluminum is actually less expensive. But it comes in silver with lead free hassle on the top. And the gold one is again FR4, two millimeters thick, but it does have ENIG gold coat. So you have silver and gold. We're not going to make these forever either. So this is just a fun experiment. This is one of the few things within ADFURT logo. So yeah. We had two other PCB coasters that were actually down in the clearance section, if you want to pick them up. Now the hexagonal ones that we did as a partnership with I can't remember their names. Boldport. Boldport. Wow. That was a good find. Who says memory? Who? Who said your memory goes away? I forgot who said memory. Okay. So you're just coming soon. All right. So the start of the show tonight, besides you, Lydia, our community, our team, our customers, everyone who makes this thing go is yet another RP2040 feather. You're going to see a bunch of these because I designed a whole bunch in a row. This is the USB host feather. It's a big deal. I like that we're getting really weird boards out. This is a weird one. The DVI feather was weird. We're back on our bullshit. We are absolutely back on our bullshit. So this is an RP2040 feather, and it's got the Cortex M0 dual core, 133 megahertz, 8 megabytes of flash, boot button, reset button, STEMIQT, LiPo battery management, so you can take this portable and then recharge the battery. USB-C, all that could stuff it on the other end. In the space leftover, there's a USB host port. Yeah. So this is your standard type A USB port. And even though it's a surface mount package, it's quite strong. Believe me, I've definitely plugged and unplugged many, many a thing and it does not rip off. Although don't try. You could, if you really wanted to. And as well as that, there's also got a, to the left of it, you see that big inductor. There's a five-volt boost converter. And you see that thing that says five, kind of above the RX, kind of in the bottom right corner. That's a five-volt fuse so that if you happen to short the five-volt power, it won't accidentally damage your battery or your boost converter. And you might be saying, hey wait, the RP-24U doesn't have two USB ports. What's going on? Do you switch between the two of them? How do you do it? How do you do it? Good question. With a lot of hacky code. So this, the native USB is still the USB-C ports. That's how you program the board, get into the boot loader, do debugging, etc. And on the right is a PIO bit banged USB port. So you can actually, because this is a thing, the RP-24 does have native USB host. You can use the main port as host, but then you have to like unplug it every time you program it and it's like a total pain. So what this does is it has a separate single core dedicated just to PIO bit banging out USB host. And it works. And it works like kind of well actually, like considering your bit banging USB host, which I don't know who else has done it. It's based off of, I'm going to mispronounce their name. I think it's Sikong Donok is their name. They're a developer who wrote the PIO bit bang code in Pico SDK. And then we turned it in in fruit and tack, who works for us on TV USB, turn that into a supported interface in TV USB Arduino. So within Arduino, you can now plug in USB devices like mass storage, CDC, USB serial, HID, or you know, if you want to add other protocols, go for it. I think even hubs work and you can send and receive data as if it had a native USB port. Now, I'll say it's bit banged. It's this is not high speed. It's full speed. You're not going to get that's okay because there's some really good uses, but there's a lot of uses. And again, it's very, very rare to get a low cost device that has USB host. Usually you have to go to a very high end microcontroller to get two USB ports. So what could you use this for? So one is HID. Well, first off, one thing I thought would be cool is you plug in a USB key and then you do data logging to that USB key. So you can write and read data off of a USB key instead of an SD card with the new, you know, because then you get unplugged and then you're like, okay, my USB key is ready to go. Another thing you can do is it, which I use it for, is I use this to program microcontrollers. So if you have a board that programs like an ESP32 and you program it over the USB CDC, this can read and write the serial data as if it was just like a normal UART. And I use it to program USB, sorry, ESP32 boards over USB. And then we have a really big keyboard we're going to show you. Another thing is you can do HID remapping or other weird USB devices. So I'm going to go to us. You go to us because this is amazing. Okay. So you got this IntelliKeys and this is, this is a underneath is actually a touch matrix of 28 by 28 buttons. And you have this overlay that goes over. So this is just like a touch matrix. It's not a capacitive touch. It's a resistive touch. And it has like 28 or 24 by 24 or something like that matrix of keys. And then you can have these different overlays that go over it. So this is, you know, used in an assistive technology setting. And it's great because it's amazing. But these don't work with modern computers. That's right. And the reason they don't work for the modern computers is the company, I don't know what I'm busy, but they discontinued this product. And the way it works is it dynamically changes the first up the firmware is loaded with the driver. So the driver itself, it only is for I think windows. And I think it stopped working as a Windows seven and it loads the firmware for the Cypress easy USB chip through the driver itself. So when this connects, it says, hi, send me the latest firmware and the firmware binary blob is sent over USB. And then it re enumerates as the new device. Second, depending on what the overlay is, it has different devices. For example, this one has a mouse overlay as well. So this can act like a mouse keyboard, whereas this one has arrow keys, it's only a keyboard. So it comes as a different device. And when you talk to people who need a device like this, they're not really able to find something right now. Nothing that really does this, especially something that works with an iPad or a Chromebook or an Android tablet. So it doesn't work still on Windows. I think it's like you have still kind of got to work on Windows before you compile it, but it doesn't work on other devices. One thing I'll say, because I've talked to folks that are caretakers for primary caretakers for people that have accessibility needs, they're not Windows 7 experts. Yeah, and it's unsigned. Yeah, it's like, okay, all you need to do is like recompile a kernel. All of a sudden, it starts to, you know, it's like, you may as well just... But also maybe you want to use like a tablet. Like a lot of people are using tablets and phones these days. You don't want to fall around the laptop with them. And iOS has a lot of accessibility stuff, but there's nothing that plugs into it that's like this. So what you do is you've got, you know, this or you have other devices that are HID and you want to twist them or convert them or remap them. And then you plug it in. This is the IntelliQiz plugged in. I'm doing this live demo. I hope this works. I tried it before, but it works. Plugs of the USB host here. And then this is the feather. And then the USB side of the feather connects to a USB camera. These are like the camera adapters. Lady asked, she's like, do you have one of those lightning to USB connectors? And I enrolled in with two different types. This one works. And this allows you to connect keyboards to devices. So let's try. I'm going to go to the overhead. So let's see what happens with your iPad. Okay. So just take a second because it's like, it has to enumerate. What am I? How did I get here? Okay. Let me see. It didn't make the noise. I don't know. I will say that this is a live demo. Okay. There's a noise. I heard the noise. It just beeped. So now when I type on this, oh, do you want, can you put me in the corner? I can, I can, I can put us here like, like this. Yeah. Okay. So let me try it live demo. So I'm going to try typing. Hello. Enter. So there you go. This is like a scene from sphere. Yeah. And so like, again, something that is, it seems like, oh, what's the big deal? So USB can just plug it in, but it's actually so difficult to get this stuff working for the folks who know what this is and what this all about. You're going to freak out. You're going to be like, wait a second. So it does work. Okay. So here's the caveat, caveat incoming. This is only for Arduino. It's not supported in circuit Python at this time. And I do not know if or when we might be able to get it working. We could use some help. If somebody interested in helping. But we do have it working in Arduino. We've got mass storage, CDC and HID. So not every, like you can't necessarily plug in a camera and you can't necessarily plug in like your phone or a candle. Not everything is going to work. Just some of the really basic USB devices. But people could have every county, every city has people who have use these or now these are about to get thrown away or like during a warehouse somewhere. So this just means we could potentially unlock a lot of hardware for people with accessibility needs. Also, this is really cool. Like this is a cool keyboard. This is neat. Okay. So that's a lot of demos. That's the USB host feather. Really neat. Also, of course, if you want to do USB host to something else, like you want this to go to iSquad C or you want to maybe have it read a keyboard and then have that come out through the UART, right? You could still program it very easily because the USB port, you're not doing that hot swap USB port thing. So it doesn't have to be USB to USB conversion. It can be USB to something else or back and forth or whatever. Anyways, I think it'd be interesting. Yeah. And you know, on a side note, Adafruit's still around. We're still able to do hardware. We want to do weird stuff like this. And even if you don't buy stuff for at least weird stuff like this, when you buy other things, it supports all this. Yeah. And this took a lot of development time. This was a heavy lift. It was a heavy lift, but we did it. Very cool. So that's this week's new product. Check it out. It's in the shop and you can get 10% off. Okay. Don't forget the codes USB host. We're going to do some questions. We do that over on Discord. Go to adafruit.it slash discord and you know, that's questions. That's questions. Okay. One that was earlier, do you know why the industries standardized on 48 volts? Someone said it was because of distance and like you could do. Yeah, you definitely need to have it be high voltage because ethernet cables can be very long, right? 100 meters is not a, you know, drops are not very uncommon. I think they probably just did some math and said like, okay, let's say you have the longest cable that, you know, gigabit ethernet or 100, you know, 10 base T supports and then you want to make sure you can get five watts at the other end and they just did some math and they said, here's the voltage. I will say you can't go above a certain voltage before safety regulations come in and usually 24 and 48 volts. Like if you go above that, it, there were as different IEC like safety regulations necessary. I think 48 was probably as high as they could go before those safety regulations kicked in. Okay. Couple comments on this. Accessibility is not talked about much, especially devices like this that work. They're just old. Thanks for showcasing this. It's super cool. Next up is someone who has been wanting a way to turn all these cheap USB MIDI controllers into MIDI DIN controllers. I cannot wait for USB host feather. Well, we also have the MIDI feather wings. So pop it on and like, yeah, it could, it could magically work. Next up, the USB host feather. Could it be a tool for a business to see if a bad USB stick is one of those ones with a virus? It'll definitely be able to tell. Like one thing it would be able to tell is whether it's only USB mass storage or if it has HID. You know, there's like the bad USB devices that, they look like a stick, but they're really. It's a keyboard that like goes to a website and downloads. Yeah, like you would know and it would say, Hey, you just plugged in something that has more than one. It's actually a hub inside. It isn't a mass storage only device. The only thing is I think. Avoid Stuxnet with the new Adafruit USB host. You could make something that filters it so you only get the mass storage, you know, in app, but it would be very slow because you're going through an RP2040, right? So you could make something that shuffles back and forth the USB scuzzy commands for mass storage. So it's like, you know, when you're, you plug it in, it's like, it's like a USB condom, but it wouldn't be very slow, but you could do it. Yeah, it'd be slow. However, it is a thing that you could put together off the shelf and you would know. There are devices that do that, but this is one that you can use for other things too. Someone said, pretty sure that 48 volts was chosen for data centers partially because of the battery chemistry in the early build machine rooms. I'm sure there's like 15 different reasons, you know? Yeah. You know, you always hear, there's, you know, you need to find the scopes article and stuff. It's like, why is a, why are railroads this side? It's like, because of the carriage wheels from the Roman Empire. That wasn't true or something. Maybe not. So if anyone knows for sure, it's a good story. Yeah. Next up, why is AVR dying? The relative simplicity of its PCB carrier is relative to say an RP2040 baseboard is much higher, or is it still alive and well? I think AVR is still around. I mean, a lot of people use Arduino and Arduino compatibles, but yeah, pricing wise, like, you know, when you can get an RP2040 for the same cost, about a dollar a piece, it's, it's tough, right? Like, why go with something that's 8-bit and 512 bytes of memory when you can get something with, you know, well, 250 kilobytes of memory. So that said, they're still used a lot. You know, we still use AVRs a lot. They're great when you want something very small. You don't want a lot of accessories. You don't need a lot of power usage. There's nothing wrong with them. I think that there's a lot of more options in the market now. Yeah. I mean, this kind of goes back to the parallel conversation we were talking about. So when Microchip bought Atmel, things, the chip development kind of stopped. Yeah. There should be a different there should be more. There should be like a CMD71 now. I think there's some people left and they probably went to other companies. Generally speaking, mergers and acquisitions don't make for better products. Generally speaking, maybe there's exceptions to the rule, but usually, you know, but there's opportunities. I'm so glad the RP2040 is around because we all have a lot more choices and we can get them. Next up, are there are the CANBA signals brought out accessible on ESP32 and STM32F405 feathers? The F405, yes, they are because I know that we did a test with them. Not every pin can use CAN. I believe only two or four of the pins can do it. On the ESP32, you can use any pins. Okay. Someone posted up the maximum length of a network cable 320 feet. The USB host feather, oh no, it's product ID 5723. Yeah. That's what it is. And it looks like some folks are posting up some information for what POE where the standard came from and how to like, there's POE plus. I mean, I read all this stuff, but I was like, I can't get into it. Well, the other thing is there's POE plus now. It goes on forever. There's a lot. Did you see those like crazy USB logos or like the Lex USB? I think they ended it too. They're like, nobody can keep track of it. All right. I think them's the questions, lady. Okay, cool. Good work. Thank you, everybody. Right on time, some clock. Oh, one last one. Can you recommend, oh, can you use the RP2040 can feather for standard RS485 columns? Oh, no, there's three of us. Yes. I have not used RS485, but I believe that you could use it, RS485, you know, from UART adapter board and then just use it with the RP2040 on the UAR pins. Okay. Okay. All right. Them is the show. Thank you so much, everybody. Special thanks to Takara, just up behind the scenes. Everybody in the chat. Thanks so much for filling the chat up with really good information tonight and being patient with all these live demos and more. It was an exciting show. Lots of new stuff. See everybody next week. This has been an Adafruit production. Here is your moment of zener. Hey, everybody. Good night.