 Live from New York, it's AskThisEngineer. Hey everybody, it's back to pink hair engineer time. I hope you enjoyed your not pink hair engineer time, but I'm back on my bullshit and I'm excited about it. The foliage of Elated changes throughout the season. So it's summer time, here we are. Hi, like an orchid. OK, so we've got an exciting show jam packed with goodies. Many of them are pink and purple as well. So you can look forward to that. And new products and we're back to having codes and we're back to having weird art stuff. Weird art stuff. So I'll say this, as the crisis has relented a little bit, at least here in New York and for parts of our lives, it's still not over yet. You can start to have other parts of your brain come back. And I was talking to a person here at Adaforn. I said, you know, for like 18 months I didn't have the melodies that I used to have in my head for the songs that we would do with Circuit Playground, our puppet series, or there was like art stuff I wanted to do. And just like it was just gone because it was all about like keep everyone safe. Let's like, eventually it was about vaccination. Before that it was like, let's make face shields for the city, let's make feathers for the ventilator project that they needed them for. And you really can't do art. No, there was no time to do art. So we have some fun art stuff and more. We've been writing some more articles. We've had a lot of stuff going on. So thanks for sticking with us all these months. And I really hope you'll enjoy the shows that we have coming up soon, including the one tonight. All right, what's this code? On tonight's show, the code is readme. We'll talk about why. But use the code, readme, on checkout, 10% off anything that's in stock in the Adaforn store all the way up until when I remember to turn it off, probably around 11 o'clock tonight. We'll talk about our Adafruit live series shows, including show and tell. You should check that out on all of our video channels. Time travel, look around the world of makers, hackers, artists, engineers, stuff that's going on and more. Little bit of jobs from the Adafruit jobs board, jobs.adafruit.com, post your skills or if you're a company, post up the job so you can find the talent that you are looking for. Main York City factory footage, some scenes here from Adafruit, some 3D printing. Everyone's favorite segment. IonMPI, new product introductions, brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit. We got some new products, we got some top secret. We answer your questions. We do that at the end of the show but you can load them up there. Adafruit.it slash discord. Join all 29,000 of us. We'll be up to 30,000 soon. All that and more on, you guessed it. Ask an engineer. Yeah. Alrighty. Let's start paying some bills. Let's do this thing. So don't forget, codes read me. When you add stuff to your cart, you get free stuff. $99 or more, you get a free promo-proto, half-sized breadboard. People love them for making their projects permanent. $149 or more, you get a free STEM IQT board. We've arranged about 20 boards we give away. Make an account and you'll get a different one each time. How fun is that? $199 or more, you get free UPS ground shipping in the content of the United States. And $299 or more, you get a free Circuit Playground Express, our favorite development board with everything built in. You don't even need to do any soldering. Jump right into writing code with MakeCode, code.org, CS Discoveries, Arduino, or our favorite Circuit Python. We do a bunch of live shows, including this one. We just finished up the show and tell. On the show and tell, we had our entire team, or some of them showing off some of the projects they did, and then we had a bunch of folks from the community. The show lasts about a half an hour. We've been doing this for over a decade. Go check it out. Go check it out on any of our channels. Gains fire. And if you have a project that you've built with Adafrit stuff, or not even Adafrit stuff, come on by. We also do retro hardware, little bit of everything. And some of the projects, yeah, some of the projects, Mark has been coming back and showing this lamp project. Pretty printing. There was an abandoned lamp for four years. His friends, everyone wanted to throw this lamp out. They put it on his porch, I guess it was a porch. This lamp was unloved. Unloved. Now this is the most special lamp in the world. He saw the light. Yeah, that's a good one. And now it's this beautiful RGB LED lamp. Looks great. And you got the willingness to fusion. Yeah, so check out a lot of the show and tell us too for project ideas. On Sunday, we do Desk of Lady Aida. The first part of Desk of Lady Aida is catching up on some of the stuff we were making. What did you show this week? Okay, I talked about the AT Tiny 8.1X series and UPDI, which is the way you program the single wire way to program and debug these chips. And I showed that I found some awesome code by a githubber named Brandon Something, I can't remember. They posted a programmer code that implemented UPDI in Arduino for the ESP. And I've been sort of reporting it over to our library. And so I went through the process of showing how UPDI works and how awesome it is. And I think I got signature data back from the chip. So halfway done. And then we do a segment called The Great Search, which has been really handy because there has been chip shortages and more. And one thing, Jepler is in the chat and he said, hey, hug report, thanks for mentioning that lead time thing, because we name checked them. We love when people tell us stuff and we love, give them credit, we love name checking because we're just like, hey, like, this is how. I didn't know about this page. This is how humankind transferred information for the longest time. And here's the other thing I've learned. Just because you know something doesn't mean someone else doesn't. And I think that's one of the things that we could all do better. It's like, hey, here's this cool thing, especially when you have a thriving community of electronic enthusiasts and open source folks. The whole point is to share this. So what was your pick of the week this week? So this week I was working on some real time clock breakouts and I talked about coin cell battery holders. There's two kinds. There's kind of the slide in the side style and there's the snap onto the top style. And so I showed off both which ones I'd like. I've used both and I showed where and when I use either one. And as well as showing how you can get them on Digikey and a couple of things to look for, especially if you're using multi-battery pack coin cells like you're stacking them up. All right, next up. JP's product pick of the week. This is one of the few if not only shows on the internet that broadcasts live from our product page. And we have a discount that's on the product itself. It's broadcast inside the product page and you could do everything on the product page. You don't need to leave the product page and JP shows you everything about it. So let's show a clip from this week's JP's product pick. The 24 LC 32 EE Prom breakout. This is some memory that you can write information to and it's not gonna go away when you pull the power on it. So what I'm gonna do is I'll go ahead and plug in one of my EE Prom breakouts and nothing fancy, I'll just reset the board. And now when it restarts, you'll see it loaded in the first four bytes of information on the EE Prom. So it looked at address zero, one, two and three. And from that, it grabbed these hex values. So what others? Those are the RGB values of a number of neopixels. So now what I can do is go ahead and unplug that just like a game cartridge, plug in a different one. And again, I'll just go ahead and reset. And now we've loaded in some different values right off of the chip there. That's the product pick of the week. It is the 24 LC 32 EE Prom breakout on I squared C stem a QT form factor. All right, JP's workshop is tomorrow. You can watch that. And if you watch the show and tell you'll see some of the things that he's usually gonna show but we have a clip. So we're gonna play the clip and then we're going to hop over to Circuit Python Parsec, take it away JP and then we'll play these back to back. The Circuit Python Parsec today, what I wanted to talk about is formatting strings along with numbers inside of your code. Sometimes you want to just simply print out to the serial or the REPL or to a display some information and you wanna format it nicely. So here are a couple of ways that you can do it. In the main loop of the program, what I'm doing is creating three variables named number one, number two and number three. And those are numbers that are created using this random dot rand int and then arrange. Then the next thing that happens is I go ahead and I print out the phrase that you see here below, random combo is and then a number like 29 left, 15 right, six left as if we're generating numbers for a combination lock. I'll go ahead and run that so that it is updating in real time. So you can see it waits four seconds and then it's going to go ahead and repeat that except this time it's generated a new number. Now what you can see about the way I am formatting this print statement is that it is kind of long and a bit confusing to deal with sometimes, especially when you look at all these commas. I wanted to do things like have the word random combo is, then a number, then the word left, then a comma, then quotes and then another comma. So it's totally doable but it can get a little confusing. So here's an alternate method. And this right here I think is a little more manageable sometimes. Here you can see I have the whole phrase as I wanna see it right here says random combo is and then I'm using this percent D, which means we're gonna go outside these quotes and grab the first variable as an integer number and plop that in. Then I have the word left, then I go and do the same for the next one. I grab this number two, then the word right comma and then the third one and I go and grab number three. So you can see if I save the code right now, it's gonna refresh and it looks the same. It actually prints out the same type of statement but it's really nice and clear and concise both the way it prints out but also the way we deal with it. If you have to change any variables here later, it's nice and neat and easy to understand. And that is one way that you can format your print statements inside of Circuit Python. And that is your Circuit Python Parsec. Friday, deep dive with Scott and this week, special guests Scott and Jimmo from MicroPython. And this is, I haven't met Jim person yet. So I don't have a photo but I have their GitHub repo. So check that out. Friday, Scott's gonna, I think, explore a bug together. No. And they're gonna do this on Scott's show. It's like a little play date. Yeah, it's cool. It's like a Python, MicroPython, play date. Well, the other thing that's neat is with Circuit Python, is it seven? Seven. With Circuit Python seven, the great merge has happened. So there's a lot more... Collaboration. Sinking up with MicroPython and Circuit Python and that allows us to do a lot more collaboration together and this is all good. So check that out on Friday. Okay. Next up, time travel, look around the world, makers, hackers, artists and engineers. First up, this was Phil B's home for abandoned computers or something like that. This is a video from Phil B of the week, retro hardware and more. I have no self-control. Some people adopt every stray animal they see. I adopt old computers. Sometimes you find a deal at a flea market or a yard sale and you bring it home, plug it in, you get a power light but no video. There's a couple of common causes for this and in some of these eight bidders like a Commodore or this Atari, if it's one of the custom chips, that's bad news because you're gonna have two or three machines that you mash together to maybe get one working one. But if it's the RAM, it's an easy fix. And all you need to troubleshoot this is leave the machine on for about five minutes and then give it the finger. Any bad RAM chips will be hot to the touch. RAM chips like the 4164 are dinosaurs but they're still easy to come by. I found these at Jameco for about $1.50 a piece. Swap out the RAM and you're ready to play minor 2049er. All right. I love these top tips. It's Python on hardware time. Yeah. Okay, so first up. Wait, did you mean to skip this one? Yes, I, yeah. I'm doing this one first. Sorry. Python on hardware, then I'm gonna skip back to that. I apologize. No, it's okay. So there's a lot of Python stuff coming on. I know, I know, I know. Yeah. Sorry, ignore me. No, it's fine. We went out of order. That's fine. So this is a little snapshot of the newsletter. A little bit of reminder, big news for Circuit Python is. It's a sneaky date. It's Circuit Python day. And it's 8.6, 2021. It's a Friday. Yep. And at Adafruit, there is no, there's no public holidays in August. So we decided it's a day off for our team. It's a float holiday if they want. But we'll have at 1pm so far on Friday, it's gonna be Catney, Jeff, Dan. At 3pm, you're gonna do a board tour. Board tour, board tour. Scott's gonna do a deep dive. And then we're gonna add some more Circuit Python folks throughout the day. And then we'll have some things for people to do. So if you have a Circuit Python project. It's a great time to show it off. Come by the Discord. You wanna contribute. You wanna have a bug fix. Do you wanna test out the latest releases? Yeah. Circuit Python day. And everything's recorded, so you don't have to worry about missing it. You can always watch it later. Okay, Scott was on the Talk Python to me live stream. This was with Damian, founder of MicroPython, Scott, Circuit Python. And check it out. Really good listen. Mike Kennedy is an excellent podcaster. And you can hear all sorts of things that have happened with MicroPython and Circuit Python. And I got through most of it. I have to still listen to the last bits. But I thought it was interesting about how both Damian and Scott come at, I think this Python experience in two different ways, but you could tell how well it's mashed and merged together now, especially with how we're doing things with our sensors and how we're doing things with peripherals and how there's this really powerful Python thing, this virtual machine that Damian made. So I thought it was neat to kinda watch them. It's good. Two of them together and talk about how a lot of these things work. Seven does zero alpha four. A lot of stuff is changing in seven, but there's a lot of good fixes as well. I mean, we're just cramming seven full of so many updates and fixes. It's gonna be a very big update, but also a very good update. There's a Moobeta. You can check that out. It's one of the editors that people like to use. I have some newsletter statistics. I'll talk about that in a second. And then the Python art, which I'm gonna skip back to, there's a lot of neat things you can do with Python. Like making keyboards with it or doing art with it or... Robotics. Yeah, making games or you name it, you could probably do it with Python right now. And so that's why we're excited about all the things going on in the world of Python and hardware. So this newsletter, yeah, don't forget the Circuit Python Day, but this newsletter is pretty popular and I wanted to go over some stats with it real quick. Oh yeah, we have the stats report. Yeah, so we were trying to figure out, we kinda knew things were still going okay, but we were just trying to figure that out. So I'll just give you the high level stuff. So we're almost up to 9,000 subscribers. Please consider joining at Adafruit Daily. We don't spam. How should you have to pay? Zero. It's free. We don't spam, we don't do weirdo tracking. We don't, I was reading a person's blog that I like and they were like, online commerce is terrible because you go to a website and now you're signed up for newsletter. Nothing ever works out. Computers are like, their fans start spinning because there's so many frameworks and things loading in and I'm just like, wow. We did, I think, a really good job with our newsletter because we keep it separate from the store experience. So anyways, we're almost up to 9,000 subscribers. Year-over-year growth, we did the quarterly thing. 12% quarter one, 10% quarter two so far. It gets a little bit harder, but this is a lot of people for a newsletter that's kinda hard to sign up for. We don't go out of our way and this is people that are interested. So we'll see. We wanna get to about 10,000. I think that's where it'll be in a good spot. But please send in the content and consider subscribing to the Python on Hardware News. And then 5.4 million dollars. What's that all about? What do you think this bought? A Virgin Galactic flight? I don't know. No, it bought an MNFT of the first internet. First internet. Source code for the WWW. Source code for the World Wide Web. Tim Berners- Is it like him he squirrels through all the code for three minutes? Yeah, so Tim Berners-Lee goes through this code and this was sold for, this is not crypto. You, I guess they could have paid in crypto. But it was 4.4 million and before everyone freaks out, this is what he said. I'm not selling the source code. I'm selling a picture that I made with a Python program that I wrote myself. Hey, that's why it's in the Python hardware section. And I'm saying that this might be the most expensive Python program ever made. 5.4 million and you get a copy of this. And you can go to this other website and just see exactly, that's one of the things about these NFTs. I said, for 5.4 million, you should throw in a next box where it was actually developed. So anyways, that's the Python on Hardware News. All of us can endeavor to sell a Python program for 5.4 million dollars. You just have to invent the World Wide Web. And that's Python on Hardware. Thank you, Blinka. All right, we're an open source hardware company and here's a little snippet from the Read Me podcast, which you did, which is why the code is Read Me. So this is a little audio, the marketing folks over at GitHub said, hey, we have this podcast coming out. I just rambled for 45 minutes. They didn't even get a word in. Here's a little snippet from Lady Aida, then we'll talk about it on the other side. I think it's actually better to try to teach and present electronics engineering from the top down. There's a problem you're trying to solve. And what skills and technologies do you need to solve it? Okay, and today you were part of the GitHub internal like keynote thing. And I'll say... The same thing, it was just me rambling for 15 minutes and they didn't get a word in. Your rambles are good. Well, that's why you're married to me, but not everyone. You give really good wisdom out there about how things could work at GitHub, how we can make computer science better together. There's a lot of things. Yeah, I just don't care. Well, no, it's... No, I mean, I care so much that I don't care. If other people care. I think a person had said... It's a caring sandwich. They really liked listening to your talk because you were very direct and honest about what we can all do to make computer science better and easier for folks. So anyways, this is a bit of a big deal. I wanted to show the site that they put together. This is on github.com. Ford slash read me, Ford slash podcast. I think either one of those gets there. I have a couple of people on the podcast. Yeah, but check this out. They're like, here you are. They did this thing. That's me younger. I don't do that anymore. They have a transcript, a full transcript. They have great interviews with all sorts of folks. And this is like a really neat like... Let me go to the... Let me see if I can go to the read me project homepage. You're on the like homepage right now. Look at this. Yeah. This is really neat. Yeah. So everyone can check this out. And I'll say just outsider looking in to the cultural initiatives they're doing at github, which is now part of Microsoft. They're doing a really good job. Maybe things will change later, but I'll just say from our point of view, from my point of view, I think github is doing a lot of good stuff right now, especially in how they're trying to get a lot of different voices. They are trying really hard. I think they recognize, and I talked about this in the video, which is not gonna be public, but also in this read me. The biggest challenge of github is social. It's not code. Yeah, I mean like we can always make actions CI a little faster and we can, you know, searching in forks, but like the biggest challenge that github has to deal with is when you have a community of millions of developers together, you're now at a party with millions of developers and that is not necessarily a fun place to be. Or how do you manage it? How do you get people to work together when there is no overarching structure? It's a self-organized community and like hundreds of thousands of self-organized community that are like interacting with each other. This is like multi, you know, multiple player RPG. Yeah. So anyways, I thought this was great and they did a really good job with all of the interviews that they've been doing and we got to tune into their internal, all company meeting and full speed ahead. Good work, github. Credit is due. Next up, I wrote an article. I helped. It's my fault too. And this is about, this is a follow-up. So there is a patent role that's going after companies and they're going after companies that sold a PC Dweeno years ago for a patent that's already expired. And so the way it works, and Lady Aida will probably say this in a better way than I can, but you can tell me. So ARM is a licensing company. They say give us money because we're going to give you this IP and you don't have to worry about people suing you because it's like we took care of all of that. We developed them. In theory, that's how it should work. I don't know because I can't see the contracts because they're under NDA. However, from the SEC filing, ARM seems to imply that when you license their IP from them, they will identify you from any patent or intellectual property lawsuits based on their IP, which in my opinion, I'm not a lawyer and I have nothing to do with this case and I have no insight to this so I'm just totally mouthing off. ARM is the people who should be invalidating this patent. So ARM has the IP of the chip. NXP makes a chip with it. NXP sells this free-skill chip. Yes, but NXP has got to do with it. It's its ARM. No, I'm just saying, but this is the chain of events. Yes. The chain of events is ARM has this IP. NXP says, great, and we want to buy this thing and make it chip with it. Great, here's a free-skill ARM A9. And then LinkSprite, PCDuino put it on a board and then Spark's sold it. Spark is like five levels of indirection away from the intellectual property yet. They're the ones being sued for intellectual property because this patent role is like a teeny bit smart. They have like four brain cells and their four brain cells say we should be suing the small company that may or may not even have in-house counsel and not ARM, ARM, which is literally made of lawyers. Their goal is to get settlements really fast. But I'm saying they should be squished and ARM should be squishing them. So ARM, go squish. So we checked with our lawyers about this. Or license it if it's about 10. And we checked with our lawyers before we published this article that I'm gonna talk about in a second because it's not a great idea to like taunt the bear, you know, like, hey, patent rolls. But this is actually a big issue. And we had a patent roll come after us, but because there was a demnification in one of the service we use. So basically- And also when you get sued by a patent roll, you immediately have to sign NDAs and non-disclosures to get any, like it's all bullshit. So you can't talk about it. So we can talk about this cause we're not involved. Yeah. So for the, one of the patent rolls that came after Adafruit was really scary. They're like, we invented search. And they're like, give us $1 million now or we're gonna like sue you and then we're gonna get like 2 million. And it was like, it was nuts. And there was a bunch of prior art and the search stuff that we have, there's, we use different services and there was a demnification in it. It did go away, but it's always really scary when it's like, well, I guess we're gonna be in court forever. Check out the article. Yeah, so check out this article. And here is what I sent over to ARM. So you're probably asking yourself well, you're probably not, but in my version of how folks look at our articles, you're probably asking yourself, hey, Phil, you're the type of person that probably has a contact at ARM. Why didn't you just email their legal department and ask what's up? I did. So here's the questions I asked ARM and this is the article you can read on our site. Has ARM had a chance to look at suit that was filed against Sparkfun? Link to it. Does ARM think this suit has any merit? Has ARM licensed its IP for use in their cores? When companies license ARM for their microcontrollers or microcomputer cores, does ARM identify the licensee against patent suits? And you're probably thinking, boy, this would be great to hear from ARM. They have nothing to lose. There's no reason for them not to educate the public. But they should sort of step up and be like, hey, there's a reason we're a multibillion dollar company is that we will protect our licensees. So their response to all four questions was ARM does not comment on pending litigation. So I have the article up. You can check it out. We looked at their SEC filing that has an indication that this is one of the things that they might consider doing because it's kind of like the promise of the whole business model. Well, what's the point? Like why give them money if they don't? Yeah, so we'll see. And this isn't a ding on ARM. I know people are like, this is not the engineering side of ARM, this is the marketing and communication of the legal side. No, I actually think ARM is a juggernaut and I just want to kind of like unleash the juggernaut. Okay. Because I really don't like this troll. And I think ARM can go in and make a difference for- They could do a lot of good work for the- For small companies and makers and open all the way. For everyone, for everyone. For everyone. If they went in, like New Egg does a really good job at squishing some of the patents, they'll fight them. It would be good for ARM to say, look, enough's enough with these patent trolls coming after people for expired patents for things that were sold five years ago, for resellers five clicks down the food chain too. Yeah. Anyways, so speaking of open source hardware, we're an open source hardware company. We have 2,506 guides, Lady. Yeah. What are the guides on the big board this week? We actually have a couple updated guides with the new guides we have this week of the 3D printed stand for the MacroPad RP2040. Thank you, Nat and Pedro, for putting that together. We have the automatic Naughty Cat detector using Lobe, Microsoft Lobe makes it really easy to do visual recognition with your Raspberry Pi 4 and a camera and TensorFlow, which is awesome. And some Alyssa made a thing that detects when cats are on her kitchen counter and it will jingle some keys, although the motor that jingles the keys is already loud and scary enough. And then Jepler made Jep calculator or click-clackulator. It's a desk calculator written in Circuit Python and it looks really cool, it has custom keycaps. Wanna watch the video? Yes, we have a cat video. This machine learning project uses the Adafruit BrainCraft and Microsoft Lobe to detect if cats are on the counter. When a cat is detected, the keys will start jingling just a little bit and then after three attempts, if the cat is still there, the keys will start jingling a little bit harder. When multiple cats are detected, then it will instantly start jingling the keys hard in order to get them both off the counter. Once no cats are detected anymore, it will go back into sentry mode. This project uses a custom 3D printed stand that houses a servo to hold a wheel with keys attached to it in order to jingle them. Check out the Adafruit Learn System for a guide on how to build this. Okay, and tonight I'm skipping around a little bit. For the Python on hardware newsletter, we had a little bit of art this week. So I wanted to show folks what I was playing around with. This is this VQGAN thing plus clip and it's this AI. It runs on Colab. Runs on Colab, which is interesting. Which is great, you don't have to install Bazel. Yeah, and we've had some experience with like training AI models and machine learning. I try to stay away from, I try to stay away from AI and ML for things that are like already covered and people are like doing like military stuff and like face recognition, like don't wanna do that. So I like to do like art stuff usually with AI and ML. So this came out, I did a little blog post about it. It was from this website that I really like. Let me find the browser. So this is the generating images from an internet grab bag. So this is a website, I think it's called AI Doing Weird Things. Yeah, AI Weirdness. Generating images from internet grab bag. So this is neat. So the person who did this, they just typed in a car driving down a desert road in Monument Valley and this is what the AI came up with and like, that's pretty close. And so I'm just like, well, I wanna try this out. And so I did. And what I first did was a, unless I'm like, well, my first experiment will be Adafruit. And Adafruit one's really weird because it actually looks like Adafruit. So there's fruit in the background, the electronics grew out of this and like pink hair came out of it. And I made it, and when you make these. Looks a little bit like me. It does, it looks like a cosplay project on like a desk around here. Here's a little video of it thinking along the way. So I wanted to show this. I'll make it with Python. It's kind of cool, but here it is. Super freaky. Also that music was generated by AI too. And then I made another one, Adafruit Industries, and it made this. And this also looks like you. So like, the visions, you know, like. Kill me. Well, yeah. It's like one of the Ripley's that didn't make it in Aliens. So then I'm just like, well, let me try some other stuff. So this was Circuit Python. Okay. And this is taking the words and using this thing called clip and then taking the other thing. This is cat computer. I like this one. Because it's a little cat computer. This is Mickey Mouse in the style of Busquiat. And that looks exact. I mean, to me, I'm just like, that looks like it. This is Mickey Mouse in the style of Andy Warhol. And then this is a season finale of Loki. So I wanted to like. This is a total spoiler. I wanted to wire this up with like Twitter trends. So like, here's what like computers spit out. So anyways, that's that's just some of the art that we've been doing with Python and more. So you could check that out. All right, next up, a little bit of an announcement. We have less than 100 slots open for Adabox. Please, please, please. And it's shipping really, really soon. Like really, really, really soon. So if you want to get in, you got to book it like today. Yeah. Like today, today. So go to adabox.com. I'm going to drop some links in the chat. We have less than 100. We will be running out shortly. These go really fast. At the end, it's going to be good. It'll be something that we'll probably be out of stocking. We'll be able to get for a while. Cause these are, you know, usually tied to a chip shortage. Adabox gets the priority. So if there's something new and you want it does. So I'm going to put this in the chats now, adabox.com and please consider signing up. Because we'll be out. And then people are like, I wish you weren't out. Okay. Next up. We have some call-in-loves videos. Usually every day Monday through Friday, Colin has some videos of showing and sharing some tips, electronics. Cool things you didn't know about and more. Take it away, Colin. Though you may consider them a tool for mechanical engineers, calipers are surprisingly versatile for makers of all types. By gently closing the larger set of jaws, one can measure an object's outer diameter. Just make sure the flat sides are flush against the object's surface. For a more careful adjustment, you can move the jaws around the object using the thumb wheel. Similarly, fully spreading the smaller set of jaws within an opening lets you measure inner diameter. And you can measure depth by holding the flat end of the calipers against a surface and rolling the thumb wheel to extend this metal post down into the bottom of a cavity. Most digital calipers even let you choose between measuring in inches or millimeters. Personally, I enjoy millimeters. There are a lot of different types of capacitors out there and no shortage of variables to consider when picking one out. For example, ceramic, the very classic and most common capacitor. Ceramics are non-polarized, cheap to produce and available in values from pico ferrads up to about 10 micro ferrads and occasionally 100 micro ferrads, but they get pretty pricey at that point. Ceramics are great for high-frequency filtering and decoupling. Electrolytic capacitors can have massive values and they're super cheap. They're often polarized, so they must be connected correctly and their capacitance is most effective at signals below 100 kilohertz. On top of that preference for low frequency, they can also dry out over time and malfunction. Good to know. All right, next up, some main New York City factory footage. A sunrise or sunset right outside our windows. The cranes, there's more cranes outside. And as you can tell, Disney's growing. All of the, if you watched Black Widow over the weekend. That's where your $29 point went. That's where it went. All right, 3D printing. We're gonna play these back-to-back. We have a video from Nome Pedro and a speed-up from Nome Pedro. Very timely for the speed-up if you're into the Marvel Universe. Hey, what's up folks? In this video, we're taking a look at the Adafruit Macro Pad RP2040. This is for folks looking to make a custom macro pad with mechanical key switches. It's designed to be super customizable and easy to use with both Arduino and circuit python. Based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040, this has an OLED rotary encoder, 12 key switches with NeoPixels and eight megabytes of flash. The starter kit comes with Kalebox switches, clear key caps and key plates for making an enclosure. We designed a stand that features a print-in-place hinge for making an articulating kickstand. This elevates the keys so they're easier to press and a bit more ergonomic. It's pretty minimal and can be 3D printed without any support material. To assemble your macro pad, start by just adding a few switches to the key plate. Then, line up the pins with the sockets and then carefully press them into place. Now you can proceed to install more switches, being very careful not to bend any of the pins. The switches are oriented with the LED slot lined up with the onboard NeoPixels. Be sure to check all of the switches are fully seated so they're installed correctly. The bottom plate is reversible and features silkscreen artwork by Phil B, Painter Dragon. To secure the bottom plate, line up the mounting holes and fasten the M3 screws. The key caps are easily installed by press fitting them onto the stem of the key switches. If you'd like to customize your macro pad, you can use a key cap polar to swap out the switches and key caps. To power up the macro pad, just connect it to your computer with the USB-C cable. CircuitPython makes it easy to create keyboard projects with the new macro pad library. To install CircuitPython, head over to CircuitPython.org and look for the macro pad RP2040. Choose your preferred language from the dropdown and click on the download you have to button. To get into bootloader mode, you'll need to use the boot and reset buttons together. Start by pressing down on the rotary encoder. While holding it down, press and release the reset button on the side of the board. Keep holding down on the rotary encoder until the USB drive shows up. When it does, you can release it. Now you can drag and drop a file to flash the firmware. It'll automatically restart the board and load as a CircuitPython USB drive. Check out the Hotkeys Learn Guide to get your macro pad set up with your favorite keyboard shortcuts. Click on Download Project Bundle to get the code and all the libraries and dependencies. To upload, simply drag and drop the code file and libraries onto the board's USB drive. The demo code handles all the heavy lifting so you can easily create your own macros. Just modify the existing file or create your own using this as a template. You can switch between different macro configurations using the rotary encoder. And there you have it, a quick look at the macro pad RP2040. We hope you're inspired to check out CircuitPython for your next keyboard project. And don't forget every single Wednesday you can learn how to make all this stuff and more with Noam Pedro. All right, ladies, it's time. Yes. We are on NPI. New product introduction. This week it's Stewart. That's right, brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit. It's been a very long day. Yeah. Okay, but. It's technically, it is, it is new because it's NPI. It is new. Yeah. But I'm, yeah. We're gonna do new products today. Okay, so new products today is from Stewart Connector which is like a subset of Bell. And it's simple but effective. We've got some IP67 USB cable adapters from Stewart. So these are the type A cable assemblies. I'm assuming they'll have the type B and type C coming out shortly. They've got them in a bunch of different configurations. And what I like about this is, a lot of times when you're making a product or a design, eventually you have to recognize it or weatherproof it. But it's really hard to get individual components that are weatherproof or recognized. Like for example, if you wanna include your Raspberry Pi computer into a product and you wanna have it be outdoors or like a part of the signage, you've got these USB ports, but these USB ports are not rated for anything. They're incredibly delicate. It's a totally exposed computer. And that's what makes it really inexpensive, right? I mean you can get recognized computers but they're gonna be a lot more pricey because they have all the enclosure stuff built in. But if you wanna use common off the shelf hardware like Raspberry Pi or Arduino or Beaglebone, you can grab that and you'll see everything's exposed. It's not weatherproof. And then you can get parts that are rated for weatherproofness and ruggedness. And to do that, you check out the IP rating, the ingress protection ratings, not related to TCP IP, totally different. And by looking at the dust and water ingress, and you can see on the left and the right here, the left is the dust rating and it goes from zero, no dust protection all the way up to six, which is dust tight. And then on the right, it goes from no water protection all to like jets of water and like dunking in water and long-term immersion water and then finally like high temperature water. Like it's more detailed. And for these cables, they are IP67. So that means that they are dust-proof and you can dunk them in water, but you don't want to have them in water for a very long time. Like they're not meant for pools or aquariums where it's like long-term water dunking. But if they get wet and they go into a puddle or something or somebody accidentally spills water on them, they're okay. And that's important because if it doesn't have an IP rating, you can't guarantee, there's no testing, there's no guarantee, you don't know if it looks like it's gonna survive outdoors, doesn't mean anything. You need to have it be rated. So you have these come in a couple different configurations. This is like the panel mount socket and this you can see there's the blue inside. That means it's USB 3.0. And then there's this, which is USB 2, that's like the white plastic on the inside. And this is the part that plugs into that socket. And then they have like this, which is an extension cable style. And you can see it has a nice cover as well. So they have like six or seven different cable configurations. Pick the one that you need for your project. You'll panel mount it. The panel mounting goes into an enclosure that is weatherproof. And then once the two cables are plugged together and assembled, it's IP67. So there's all these different parts. Check them out. Like I said, there's 2.0, 3.0. There is the socket and plug type and there's three foot and six foot alternatives. Each one comes with a very nice detailed specification sheets with all the cutouts and shapes and lengths and pinouts and all that good stuff. And yeah, this is another one, another cable example. Available on Digikey. Yes. And I'll show it over on the overhead as well. Again, there's a couple different versions. I just picked one to show off here. So let's go to the overhead and I'll show you. So this is a combo. Here, I'll show you this in one second. So when you unscrew this part, this plugs into here. So this would be what you connect on the other side of your single board computer like your Raspberry Pi and this could be data or power or whatever. You plug it in and then there's an O-ring here and then you just have to screw this in and it gives you not only, again, that water and dust protection, but it's of course also strain relief because it's like so strong and ruggedized. And then I like that little details, like they have it say USB here. So you know what it is because once it's in this, of course, you can't tell. And there's like epoxy on the back and all together like a very nice cable kit which just makes it really easy. You want to make your project ruggedized. You don't have to, you can use off-the-shelf components and then toss these cables in and you're good to go. All right, you can check out the short URL here. It's also in the chat and you'll have a recap of this on our blog with all the information and more in the next day or so. And that is this week's IonMPI. IonMPI. All right, lady, before we do new products, go to read me, do it. Also, don't forget, 80 Box. Code doesn't count for that. Good native box. After I announce it, we have like 20% less than we had before so get on it. Here we go with new products. Okay. All right, first up, this is coming soon. Okay. These adorable pastel-y, like tropical pina colada, alligator clips are from Liborg. They made a big run of them and they had some extras. We picked them up. They're coming soon in the shop. Cool independent maker that does all sorts of neat things. We saw these and we're like, let's get them. I love that they're just like, it's not just normal red, orange, yellow, green, blue. It's got like pastel pink and like, I don't know, cyan or magenta. I don't know, beautiful colors, lime green, make your DIY projects stand out with some colorful alligator clips. So coming soon. Next up. Another, this is not coming soon. This is an updated product. We've stocked these re-legendable key caps, but then I found a supplier that was half the price. And so I now send you instead of five in a pack, you get 10 in a pack. It's the same exact re-legendable key caps that you take them apart. You can put whatever you want inside, snap them back together. Twice as much for half the price. Well, the same price twice as much or half the prices. Yeah, you know what I mean. Yeah. You get 10 instead of five. Yeah. So great for your macro pad projects or key pad projects where you want to have custom key caps and there, you know, you can go through them a little bit. All right. Next up. Okay. We've also got, this is a rotary encoder knob, but it's like a slim knob. We like the skirted style knobs, but I also got these as samples. And I thought they were quite nice. So I picked them up. So let's go to the overhead and I can show and compare the two. So this is what we normally stock. This is skirted. So you can see there is like this little bit of like a overhang here. This one is much slimmer. It doesn't cover like the body of the rotary encoder, but maybe you don't want that. Maybe if you have a bank of these and you want a really slim type knob, these are like the slimmest knobs I could find. So you can see. Very svelte. Okay. Next up. We've also got, if you want to make custom kitty key pads, this silicone mold lets you make six kitty cap key pads for your Cherry MX keys. You don't have to make all six at a time. You just, you get six slots cause whatever one gets ripped or something you're, you're good to go. Or you can make six at a time. I do recommend, we have a couple of these types of key pad molds coming out. I definitely recommend using UV resin, not two part resin. I tried two part resin. It's like kind of a nightmare to use. Yeah, you can do it, but it's required a lot of patience. UV is nice. And you have to be the exact right temperature and the humidity and blah, blah, blah. Get the UV stuff. It's a little bit more expensive. But when you use it, you just use a UV LED lamp and it cured in like a minute and a half and it looked great. So I recommend it. It's because of these are so small you can use UV curing resin and make custom key caps and you can design them. You can have colored resin. You can like put glitter in them. And of course they can be translucent cause resin is transparent by default. All right. And then we've got these cables. We're just going to go through these like really fast, right? These are, yeah, JSTPH like pigtails and you get the plug and the socket both sides. So it's great for making like little harnesses. These are JSTPH compatible. People know that we love these cables. Now we just have them. If you want to use the type of cable, but it's like, you know, cable to cable connector. Each order you get one of each and we have them in three, four, five and six pin configurations. Yeah, we have all the configurations you're going to need. We have a page that has them all in separate pages for each product. Yes. And of course you can use these with the JSTPH cables you already have. They're compatible. But I do like them as like, you know, these inline cable contacts when you want. You know, we have these for PicoBlade compatible. These are going to carry more current. I think they're 26 gauge. All right. Next up. All right. So if you're going to make 60% keyboards we've got a couple different plastic and metal shells for you. So after you make the PCB you want to put an enclosure and the enclosure's kind of like the annoying part because it like has to fit it very nicely and you want to be nice and sturdy and it's hard to 3D print something this large. I mean, you can, but why not just get a shell? And so we've got a variety of shells and these are all for, you know, the GH60 style mounting, sometimes like called Geekhack 60. And so we've got them in translucent smoke. We've got them in a opaque lavender pink-purple and we've got them in a translucent clear. There's three plastic ones and we also have one anodized aluminum, you know, milled one that's really, really nice and elegant. It's going to be more expensive but it's also going to be heavier and flatter and more stable. If you're just starting out making keyboards the plastic ones are going to be a lot cheaper and easy. And of course, if you want translucent they're a great starter shell. 60% keyboards are a great starter size for DIY keyed making if you're making your own keyboards. These have a lot of space and again that standard mounting. So you can start with plastic and then upgrade to metal. And they all come with some sort of hardware and slip grip things that keep it from sliding around your desk. All right, next up. All right, next up from Citron. We've got two products. They've got the, this is kind of like an RP2040 board. It's called the MakerPie RP2040. It's got a lot of growth connectors and it's got motor controllers. It's kind of a nice all-in-one, do all sorts of things, RP2040 board. The RP2040 is on the board itself. It's not like a Pico breakout but you see there's motor drivers on the kind of top right, servo, growth. So it's like robotics and automation projects I think would be a great pick and it's like super cheap. So check it out. You can use, if you want to use our StemicUT boards we have a groove to StemicUT cable that would fit very nicely where this board comes with all this asserted hardware. Next up. Next up we've got the, from the same company this is the Citron Maker Pico. So you plug in your Raspberry Pi Pico onto it and it's kind of the same thing. It gives you like a buzzer and switches and buttons and you all put SD card and growth connectors. So it's like a nice inexpensive add-on that kind of gives you like a bento box of like every sort of little, you know hardware you might want to attach comes with a nice insert as well. I just thought like a great accessory. You'll have to solder headers onto your Raspberry Pi Pico but after you've done that you just plug in your Pico and you're ready to rock. Okay, next up. Okay. For people who've been doing a lot of stuff with Stemic and StemicUT and QuickBoards these are plug and play, iSquared C sensors and devices and people love them because it's fun to plug and play. However, iSquared C was not designed to be plug and play. It's actually meant to be on a circuit board where things don't get disconnected or like moved or shifted or unplugged and replugged. That said, you know, once you make something pluggable people are gonna plug it, right? I get that. So you can do that but it's a little risky. Whenever you hot plug something like iSquared C that's not designed for hot plugging there is a risk that you kind of destabilize the iSquared C connection. You can sometimes have an extra SCL pulse or maybe like, you know, you have a little bit of jitter or like the capacitance to charge up the peripheral kind of, you know, messes up the open drain connectors. It's because, again, it wasn't meant to be a plug and play system, we're kind of hacking that but you can turn it into a plug and play system by using this, the TCA4307 which is a plug and play hot swap buffer for iSquared C. It's designed specifically for people like you and me who love to use and abuse and misuse the iSquared C protocol stack. You plug the inside into your controller. On the outside you can plug whatever the heck you want and it will never, it will keep the two apart until it's safe and it has this cool thing called stuck bus recovery so if it notices that the SCL or the SDA line is being held low it'll disconnect the peripheral and it'll try to clock it out to try to kind of like bring it back to life. I thought it was a kind of a neat chip. If you have this problem, this chip will solve it. If you don't have this problem, you're probably not misusing iSquared C so keep doing that because that's kind of the way to go. But if you do want that, this is an excellent little add-on and of course no firmware required, you just plug it in between your hardware and you're ready to rock. All right, in the start of the show tonight, besides you, Lady Aida, our community, our team and our customers is? The ortho snap apart NEO key, five by six pad, I don't know, this has so many descriptors. This is neat because it's like the NEO key breakout that we've got that people really like but people are like, well, what if I want to make a matrix of them, like wouldn't it be cool if they were matrixed already for you? This is a pre-matrixed NEO key setup and it's basically designed for anybody who wants to make ortho linear or ortho basically gridded, right? It's an X, Y grid, it isn't like offset, like most keyboards, they can use for macro pads, you can use it for keyboards, it's five by six, so it's kind of like not a full keyboard but it's not so many that you're buying this huge thing you don't know what to do with. So it's 30 keys, it's kind of nice in between number, arrange five by six and it's snap apart but in between the snap apart bits there's little traces that I put between them so that it's all matrixed out but you can snap it apart as you wish. So let's go to the overhead because this is kind of a complicated product but if you've done keyboard stuff I think it's kind of self-explanatory. So let me get out here and focus, okay. So this is what it looks like and you can see through here the table you can see like my hand. So there's a little snap apart things with holes, there's actually small holes you can't even see. So with a pair of pliers you can snap this out from five by six to any grid you want. You can do two by four, you can do like one by six, you can do four by five, four by three, whatever you like. I recommend rectangular but you don't have to do rectangular it's just gonna be annoying to wire if it's not and there's six columns and five rows and so you only have to connect to one of the five rows and one of the six columns because it's connected again the rows and columns are connected through the little brick apart tabs so you can have a matrixed keypad you actually need 11 GPIO pins for this and then each neokey has a diode you can kind of barely see it so it's ghost free you don't have to worry about ghosting because each one is diode protected and then each one also has a through hole, sorry a reverse mount neopixel so this little neopixel is reverse mounted so it shines out the top and that's controlled by a single neopixel input line and the neopixel input line snakes its way around through the entire grid and using a resistor to kind of do a feed through thing if you snap it apart, like if I snapped this out it would still work because it would just shunt down this way instead of going all the way around just trust me it works only need one neopixel input and you can control any part of the rectangular grid that you design if you want to have it be non rectangular like if you want like a triangle you can do that just be aware that you're gonna have a lot of like weird like row heat like the row and column math they're gonna have to figure it out and the neopixels you might have to kind of do a couple jumper wires so I recommend doing rectilinear and then of course it's a rotatable so you know in this case because I have a north facing LED button sorry it's a go through button you know you'd want to be upside down it doesn't matter because it's fully symmetric either way the only thing that's directional is the neopixel input you want it to be at the there's little arrows on the back so you want it to be at the input of the arrows you can see little arrows that snake through just go into the input and you can make like your own custom macro pad or ortho keypad ortho keypad or split keyboard of whatever size and design you'd like and just use any matrix keypad library code for this we've got Arduino library and of course circuit python has support as well that's new products okay cool so don't forget if it's in stock use code read me get 10% off you get all that free stuff as you fill up your cart and then if you haven't got nato box we have 20 or 30 less than we did when we started the show so please consider going nato box dot com we do so load up your questions already have some uh... ready to go we're gonna do a little bit of top secret then we're gonna answer those questions alright from the ball from the ball we're gonna do the web balee video and then i'm gonna talk about squids okay let's show how you can use web bluetooth to wirelessly program circuit playground boards with nrf 52 840 native which is so press reset and then press again when it's blinking to put into bluetooth mode and then quest the device parrot and now that we're connected you see the repel here it's the same repel here as i type in this repel this one echoes so i can stuff and it appears on the display it says completely wirelessly uh... connected i can even uh... printing and then you can also do file management as well so it's pretty neat this is all completely wireless using web bluetooth uh... you can use with the latest version of circuit python using your nrf 52 840 native bluetooth boards here is my ongoing my ongoing quest i have to finish the hardware for this so these are the trinkets and i don't know which one we're gonna do it's either gonna be a squid or an octopus we had a different version of squid and then folks are like it has to have two longer arms and like you're right and then they're like it kind of looks like a pope hat and like you're right and so this is where we ended up with the squid and then here's the orca i like the orca here's a panda i think like orcas don't care if they're kind of bloodthirsty killers so they often get a bad rap but i think they're cool they're beautiful we're gonna figure that out but anyways back in the uh... back in the bin for you oh gido g question time i got a bunch lined up ask me some questions and we're gonna jam through them alright uh... let me just grab these before i start going through all of them first one is there a project idea that you're too intimidated to try to start no i just i just need time to get them all done i'll tell you i think things that um... things that are medical related or things that like people consume those are a little intimidating because there's so many other things like certifications and and safety and stuff we don't do those but i'm saying those are the ones i'd be intimidated by um... things with like lenses and optics i think i'd be a little intimidated by that okay um... is there advantage or disadvantage of having the ashua logo on devices i've seen some things that have it and some don't um... i would say do it you can register your hardware it does give you a symbol of the intention of the designer and i think that's really the whole point so when in doubt if you want people know it's open source hardware i love seeing it on boards i think it's a really good way of of signaling your intent of signaling the design and it's not like it's going to make it more likely or less likely that your board's gonna be like cloned or whatever it it's just you if you have pride that you did open source hardware showed off so someone said octopanda but i feel like if i do that the github folks won't like us anymore because that'll be too close to octocat i think pandas yeah okay uh... have you ever thought about looked at using chemistry and projects be it for trying to create batteries or accomplish some goal that can't be done electrically or mechanically we had a kid's video on how to make a lemon battery yeah check that out it's about as far as we'll go with that uh... does adafruit make PCBs in-house or have the made elsewhere and ship in for assembly we have them made somewhere else you check out our resource page we use companies like advanced circuits dk red from digikey is also available for short run as a watchpark but making pcb's is a chemical process you don't want to do it is it okay to use uh... arduino for feather hardware and software in something that you sell is there anything uh... to need to do a dispersion now we make all the libraries as long as the library i mean just be aware of the code that you're putting in is is not licensable for sale just make sure of that just at arduino is the language of using arduino libraries uh... you'll just want to make sure that those libraries that's a good plan with being used in a commercial product and ninety nine percent of them are but yeah it's worth it using a different libraries are fine just put it cut to the chase uh... okay question for the show the tca three oh seven hot swap i squared c buffer is it possible with arduino code to query if the device is in fact attached to i squared c wiring the reason would be to code to check for wiring before use uh... error message yes there's actually a ready-pin and it will tell you you can query that it'll tell you if there's the thing is connected on the other side and if it's valid uh... what's your prediction of the chip shortage is going forward i think it's still going to be bad for at least six months but i think after six months it'll start to hopefully okay chill out although i'm starting to see some parts come back but within totally bonkers pricing and not and through official disney which is like a little disappointing it's like i know how much it's part costs you guys basically not you know they used to selling it for ten times the cost to official distributor kind of and not cool but it's what it is that we'd be getting any more of the name of twenty three motors and or the history that we have some uh... oh do you have a favorite magazine cover that you've been on no i like this one is good yeah we had we put these in the background today because we had uh... we're doing some filming yeah i'd like the what so there's an article and i don't have a copy of it and it was a was when you first started your business you were in like the the free magazine that they used to put in the remember that rival yeah it was like called a rival and it was the answer the official magazine of amtrak yeah and that was like your first they're just like woman makes kids at home yeah it's like a big story like tech review but i think i think that's when you know i arrived that's yeah i'd like i'd like those was it like like northwest yeah something like that okay uh... i think that is uh... yeah we cannot long forbidden is a good one to be is that again or is that it is yeah is that it was that in a i think that was made like you can tell you are yeah we can't give any eight a box since but i don't think you'll like it i think you might i think a lot of folks are you know it's a big hit it's a little tracks that one circuit python that's a good hint right let me just see if it's all of them well tracks yeah uh... is there any way to program uh... for example in arduino without a pc little hard yeah i don't think working on how to program with uh... circuit python for mobile devices then you can use you need a computer in a mac or or windows or length computer it's really hard without alright uh... is if we're going to finish looking at the python so for circuit python like micro python does it and will she look at visuals studio code in circuit python is that an environment yeah okay here's a thing about ideas in circuit python you can use any idea and just have your working directory be the drive it just works it it you do not need to do anything special and then you can have a serial monitor another window it does not have to be integrated the idea is it is designed specifically so no special idea is needed i use xe max i think we're all day i think about damage role damage thinking that like you have to do something special or sign in the air download this special thing you can just use it is but we also have a guide that we're coming out with that'll help you out as well right and then last one uh... any plans work with the e-s p thirty two c two now that modules available currently out of stock and did you uh... i'm not really looked at it to be honest we're quite busy uh... with existing stuff but let's uh... that are a lot of questions for this week alright buddy thank you so much for joining us this week special thanks to the car behind scenes and the slacks and more don't forget the code is read me ten percent off in the store all the way up to when i turn it off which is going to be probably about an hour so eight a box dot com go there now sign up for eight a box trust me like it uh... it'll be a lot of fun and i don't like some other all good all good boxes and uh... we'll see everybody next week thank you so much for making this a great hour together thanks for tuning into our shows and more this has been an eight a fruit production here's your moment of zener bye buddy