 Life from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody, welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer with me, Mr. Lady Aida on camera control. Yeah, a great show for you tonight. About one hour of the latest news and happy making, crafting, 3D printing, soldering, risk fiving and more. Thanks to Liz who just did show and tell. Let's kick it off. Tell them what's the code and what's on the show. That's right. Tonight's show of the code is STEM Day because it is STEM Day in this part of the world and probably more 10% off in Native Fruit Store all the way up to a limit of $1,500 a year time. We'll be talking about some of our live shows, including show and tell. Thanks, Liz, for doing that. Our desk of Lady Aida highlights of the week, including The Great Search. JP's product pick of the week, a little bit of a recap and preview of what he's up to on JP's workshop, some advanced manufacturing, New York City factory footage, some 3D printing videos, speed up some more from Neal and Pedro. And we also have IonMPI, new product introduction this week. It is Beagle Board, Beagle Bode, RIS 5 Fun by DJ Key. Got some top secret, got a bunch of videos, got new product revisions. We cookin' up a bunch of stuff but we still have some stuff to share and show. We're gonna answer your questions if we're doing that over on Discord, we can ask all the questions throughout the show. But towards the end is when we look directly into the chat and answer your questions in real time. So stick around for that. All that and more on, you guessed it, ask an engineer. Now it is time to remind you of something very important. Over the past few weeks, we've reminded folks are watching our live show. It's a good idea to log into your Adafruit.com account, make sure you have two-factor authentication enabled, make sure you're ready to go because the way we do Raspberry Pi 5 sales is we've been doing these live on air and doing it for a few weeks. So maybe in a few moments, maybe in a few moments, not this second, but maybe in a few moments because we wanna give people time, we might have a few Raspberry Pis we're gonna put in stock and it might be the Raspberry Pi. A gigabyte, so I don't know what you're saying. We'll see, we'll see, we'll see. Right now nothing's in stock. So I don't know, I don't know what to say other than make sure you're logged in and have two-factor authentication on your account. So with that being said, you get free stuff. Freebies, when you order from the Adafruit shop, place stuff in your cart and check out and you will get some things, $99 or more you'll get a beautiful two millimeter thick PCB coaster with a gold logo on it, comes with some bumpers. Place more orders, get more coasters. Now you have a set of eight or four or six, whatever. One for a nine or more, you get a free KB2040. It's a pro micro-shaped and pinout compatible microcontroller board, but it comes with the RP2040. So it's even more powerful with eight megabytes of flash, USB-C and Neopixel buttons, STEMIQT. It's great for keyboard projects or any microcontroller project. Free shipping when you order $200 or more UPS ground. And last but not least, we're back to having the Circuit Playground Express for any order over $299. You'll get the CPX, which features the AtSAMD21, has buttons and sensors and LEDs, Neopixels. And it's a great board for learning microcontroller programming in Circuit Python, code.org, CS Discoveries, Arduino, Matecode, Lua, whatever, all sorts of West supports it now with all the hardware built in. You don't have to do any thought on it. Okay, we do bunch of live shows. Just to show and tell, thank you so much, Liz. We're gonna watch this right after Ask an Engineer. We do show and tell every single week, Wednesday, some 30 p.m. Eastern time. You can watch it later. You can participate on the show. We do it every single week on Wednesday. So come by, show and share your projects. It's a good time. I'm gonna mix up things a little bit this week because we're gonna do the JP workshop highlight and we're gonna do the product pick of the week. So Lady Aida has a moment to put in the Raspberry Pi that we talked about. Wow, you're telling people. Yeah, we're gonna do it right now. Oh, we're gonna do it. Yeah, we're gonna do it. Get your ball ready. We do JP's product pick of the week every single week. It's a live broadcast from the product page. This is this week's highlight. The Pi Gamer. So this is a really great handheld platform for game development as well as development of things that you wanna screen some inputs on. It runs Arduino. It runs Circuit Python and it's really great for make code arcade. To develop games, you kinda need this big framework with lots of stuff ready to go and Microsoft has really delivered on that to give you a really seamless experience setting up learning how to create games, getting them onto your handheld. So I'll go ahead and turn this on. You can see the little neopixels light up down there at the bottom and it made a nice little sound. This is a game that I found that was in one of the Microsoft game jams. Oh, it allows you to stop time and throw a throwing star. Oh, and that guy is good. He doesn't wanna get, all right. Hup, hup, hup. How about another one? Oh, I'm never gonna beat that guy. Ah, he got me. Let's let him beat me. It is the Pi Gamer. Okay, JP's workshop is on Thursdays and while they did is putting some things in the store. You can guess what they are. In fact, I'll bounce over here real fast. I'm gonna hit refresh on the page. We do have Raspberry Pi 5, 8 gigabytes. And so this is just for live viewers. So if you're watching later, sorry, but this is the best way to do it because all the back borders on all the sites aren't shipping for a while. We have a small number and we're doing it live. Doing it live, doing it live. So anyways, back to some video while we're putting some things in the store behind the scenes here. Here is a highlight from JP's workshop that you might enjoy. You can build a customized pokeball that plays back macros to your switch using a Raspberry Pi Pico and the GP2040CE firmware. Here you can see I've just used the thumb stick to manually spin. Now I'm gonna flip on the switch for the USB cable and as you can see the macro pokeball takes over and it'll spin indefinitely until we turn it off. Now this can be pretty much any button combo you can imagine, including things like turbo and precise timings. Check out the learn guide to learn more. Okay, so we do a show on Sunday it's called from the Descent Gladiator. It's a glimpse into the... It's a sick twisted mind in a world with the lady of the desk of torture. So we're doing hard work. So what did you show in part one? This is usually when you're like, here's something just right now. Okay, so I've been working. Okay, so I worked on the Pi camera a little bit. I got the two plates in the front plate, which is an LED, a NeoFixel ring and also a back plate that's protective. I think, oh yeah, Melissa wrote a touchscreen controller for the 2.1 inch TFT which uses a slightly different chip set than I thought. I thought it was a focal tech but actually it's a CST826 or whatever. She wrote an Arduino circuit problem I remember you think of you, Melissa. I showed a revision of the 3.5 inch TFT feather wing. We are slowly getting through two years worth of revisions and updates with the 500 revisions total. Some of these are bigger than others. So I show off the big revisions. The Metro S3 got revised. We're putting in that in today and the 3.5 inch TFT feather wing is also being revised, so. Okay. It's happening. We also do the great search. This is where Ladiators with Power of Engineering to help you find new things on digikey.com. It's a lot more fun now because part shortage isn't over but it's not as bad as it was peak part shortage. So what did you help people find this week on digikey.com? Okay, this week we had someone who tweeted about this interesting material, which is, oh shoot, what's it called? Thermal pad. It's thermal pad graphite, graphene graphite thermal pads. And they talked about this branded version and they were like, oh, I wanna find something equivalent on digikey. And I was like, okay, I'll find it out. And so showed off, there's a lot of thermal pads available on digikey, different thicknesses, different settings. I looked for the most thermally conductive one with the lowest resistance. And there's a couple different options available and you can definitely get a really big sheet for the same price as a little teeny square that you would get on Amazon. And there's no specs for the Amazon one so I can't prove that this is better but also there's no specs on Amazon so I can prove that this one at least, the one that I picked is at least the best one you can get on digikey, which is pretty good. Yeah. And then we did the JP's workshop stuff. So I wanna go over and talk about the pies that we just put in. So there's- Are they still in stock? Yeah, they are. We're doing okay. There's still some Raspberry Pi 5, 8GB twin stock. Real quick, lady, if someone is wondering, like if they have a four gigabyte one, do they really need a gigabyte one? Do they really need it? Well, look, I mean, I can't, I'm not gonna tell you whether you need it or not. I do know that if you're doing kernel compilations, if you're doing website hosting, if you're doing machine learning, definitely machine learning where you want to have a lot of stuff in memory, I mean, 8GB is a significant chunk. If you're just using as a day-to-day like, like hardware hacking thing and you're not doing computationally intensive stuff, you may not, but if you're like, oh, I wanna run a Lama model, or do you don't do vision recognition, or- If you're just- If you're doing video or like media streaming. Streaming, yeah, you'd want more RAM. Basically, video is very RAM heavy, AI is very RAM heavy. If you're actually using it as like a desktop computer where you want browser windows and you're doing email checking and you're do-do-do-do, yes, more RAM is going to help you. But if you're just like, oh, I want something that like plays an MP3 and blinks some LEDs when a sensor goes off and it sends like a message to Adafruit IL, but you can probably get one before. Some good news. It looks like the automated bots that look at sites and see if things are in stock. It looks like one of them might be down right now. Normally, even when we're doing these live on the show, they go pretty fast because like, Twitter gets formed, but Twitter now called X is not as popular as it used to be too. And I think we are releasing these off hours. So if there is an issue with some of these bots that look at sites, usually the folks are driving home from their day job and stuff like that. So- More for you, more chances. More chances. One more. Don't get more of it. Get one. Yeah, there was a couple of people in the last times we've done this where they were tuning in a little late and they're just like, oh, I just missed it. You know, they weren't mad or anything. It just wasn't there. So let's see if we still have. Yeah, it's looking good. It's still good. Okay, great. So we'll bounce over throughout the show, but these are the ones that everyone wants, five gigabyte, go for it. Have fun. On Fridays, we have Deep Dive with Tim at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. This is when you can learn about the innards of CircuitPython and more and speaking of CircuitPython. We're gonna do our Python on Hardware newsletter. Highlights and more. Well, this week, you know, it's all Python on hardware. And so we have a few different things we're gonna talk about. I'm gonna save this for part two of our little chatter here because someone in the chat said, how do you feel about ARM? And he thought it's about ARM investing in Raspberry Pis. That was in our newsletter this week. We have kind of an industry newsletter, I think, now. If it's anything to do with things that Python runs on, we also cover it. Of course, the Raspberry Pi. It's relevant, definitely. Super relevant, yeah. So if you follow the chip news, you know, ARM acquired a minority stake in Raspberry Pi. That was announced last week. Strategic Investment in Raspberry Pi Limited. The ARM are the Raspberry Pi responsible for the new Raspberry Pi 5 and past Raspberry Pi 5 products. So if you think about it, it's kind of interesting. So Sony is involved with Raspberry Pi. Yes, they already have a minority stake. Yes, they do the manufacturing at Wales. ARM is involved. And then the quote says, here, this is kind of interesting. The investment financial terms of which has not been made public comes a month after Upton spoke of interest floating. The firm of London Stock Exchange in a $500 million valuation in seven months after Sony, which runs the world's production facility, which makes many of the Raspberry Pi boards made its own minority investment in Raspberry Pi. And this is another one where, you know, you can see we linked to this if you want to see what stuff we got there. So, you know, Lady Edda, what do you think about this? Well, you're not an analyst, but you would be considered one if you started to go on like mad money. Yeah. How do you feel about this? Somebody said- Some buttons. Yeah, Raspberry Pi, but- Yeah, that'd be cool. You know, at first off, it's smart of ARM, right? I mean, you know, I think, you know, Evan did an interview and he said, you know, the RP-1 chip that they put on every Raspberry Pi, every Pi-5, you know, they spent, I think he said $15 million in development is a custom chip and the RP-2040 also acquired, you know, it's a custom chip manufacturing that uses ARM core and I'm assuming the RP-1 also, of course, is ARM core. And so they went from, you know, basically giving the money to a chip vendor to giving it to a chip licensing vendor. So it's smart for ARM to come in and say, hey, you know, I want you to, I want to own a piece of this because they are a driver of the technology. Raspberry Pi computers and, you know, compute modules are used heavily in industry and they are kind of the best at the market. I don't really see, yes, there are, there might be Raspberry Pi killers that are faster and cheaper, but none of them are overall as good of an experience. You know, and the Raspberry Pi is solid, it's consistent, it survived a part shortage, it's still in high demand, just why we'll clean the man. As we speak. And I think, you know, I don't know, you know, usually, I don't want to speak, I'm not speaking for Raspberry Pi, but if I was Raspberry Pi, I would say, look, ARM you can invest in us, but that doesn't restrict us from using different chip set, instruction sets in the future. And I would think that would be wise of even though ARM, of course, is a British, I don't know if it's a British company anymore, it was owned by SoftBank, I think, but it was started in, you know, England and so, or in Cambridge and so he's probably near and dear to his heart. But, you know, they, they might also be interested in looking into the future. There are other chips that can be interesting that said ARM has money and they have incentive to have the RP 2040 succeed, having the RP 160, now they have, they have incentive to provide good licensing terms, to provide support since now Raspberry Pi is a Silicon vendor. I think it's wise. I mean, I would, you know, do the same, if I was a chip licensee and a licensor was doing quite well, I would, you know, this way they're both investing in each other's success. Okay. And then other news, because we're gonna balance around it. So, you know, our newsletter has a little bit of everything. I'm gonna go to the risk five stuff in a second because it was an interesting post that's a follow up to the Beaglebone coming out. But check out the rest of the newsletter. It's spam free. We have a separate site. You don't have to worry about anyone sending you other things or sales stuff in the mail. We don't, this isn't tied to your shopping account or anything, it's eight for daily, completely separate site because we hate spam, probably even more than you do. But one thing that's interesting is we made some badges a long time ago. Girl Scout has maker badges. They teamed up with Black Decker and there's neat ones for folks who want to show that they've made something in the maker world and they happen to be in Girl Scouts. The official Raspberry Pi beginner guide, fifth edition is out and you can just check out all of the different things that's going on in the world of Raspberry Pi. We have projects of the week. We've got all the things that you can do with our stuff. We've got all the things you can do with our partners and resellers that we have like Pimeroni. There's a little bit of everything. Anything that you can possibly imagine to build lots of signs and displays, lots of ways to get internet of things devices going. It is unending. Doom scrolling is the thing, but this is joy scrolling. It's all fun and good stuff. GitHub Universe happened today. Apparently you won an award. We're going to find out more about that. Congratulations, lady. Yeah, thanks. But the other part that we wanted to talk about, because we have our Ion and PI tonight and it's the Beaglebone 5 fire. Yeah. Beaglebone V. No, it's a Beagle 5 fire. Beagle 5, okay. Yeah, because it's risk five. Risk five. Okay. So there's a new single board, a computer module on the block. It's the Beaglebone. And interesting enough, Bunny, who's kind of our, you know, like Avataro, most of like the open source. He's Angel Scott. The open source. I can source him in like a panda outfit and he's got the sign and he's like, risk five, risk five, risk five. Yeah, well, I think he has his book. He was the bunny character. Yeah. Bunny. Sorry to grab it. Yeah, not a panda. Sorry, Bunny. So Bunny has an open letter because there seems to be some proposals from US lawmakers to restrict Americans working on risk five. And the reason is because they don't want China to have dominance in that ecosystem. Yeah. Well, I was researching the polar flag because I was wondering, you know, like, what, you know, what does this come from? So, you know, ARM, I'll say a lot of this is gossip and so it's unsourced and I'm going by, I'm repeating gossip of gossip, is that traditionally, you know, risk, sorry, ARM has charged $1 to $2 per chip. Oh, sorry, 1 to 2% of the cost of a chip as licensing fees. So, you know, which is a reasonable amount, but they're starting, you know, they own my soft bank and they're kind of, I'm sort of interested like, well, we shouldn't be making more money. You know, our chips are powering Apple and Qualcomm and the biggest Marvell and MediaTek and the biggest chip manufacturers and they're making billions and we're not making billions and why aren't we making billions? And so they are kind of trying to up their prices and they actually went to some of the Chinese chip manufacturing companies and said, hey, how do you guys feel about upping the prices and their companies are like, well, we're not into that at all actually. And I was like, wait, but I thought you'd be into giving us more money, why aren't you not? And so there's kind of a little bit of argument right now because I think a lot of these companies signed in for a certain percentage and now like ARM wants a higher percentage or they want a percentage of the full device, not just the chip, I don't know that of course it's all under NDA. So nobody knows the exact details what they're asking but the upshot is that this is kind of pushing more Chinese silicon vendors towards like, well, for this much money, why don't we just retool and use risk five? And you're seeing more risk five development happening. Like Espresso has moved, their latest chips are moved from the C6 for example has moved from 10 silica to risk five. And we're seeing also like, well should this polar fire chip is what normally would be at an arm core, a powerful arm core on the previous BeagleBone, BeagleBoard and BeagleBoard and BeagleBoard's double buck. There were all ARM Cortex A8s and now they're maybe moving to risk five. So I think that there's like a combo here of ARM is trying to push for higher licensing fees and risk five is getting much more mature. So risk five is becoming a more aggressive and delectable target for chip silicon vendors. So Bunny has a blog post. You can just search for Bunny blog, B-U-N-N-I blog bunnystudios.com and it's the first post. And Bunny has a letter that he wrote to the Gov and has a little bit about Bunny, why risk five is important, why maybe we shouldn't restrict Americans working on it and maybe we can do something else which is make some of these chips here. If it's a technology that's so critical to lots of things ahead, you can invest in making chips. So we'll see how it goes. It's interesting, there's a lot of intersection between geopolitical stuff right now and technology. So we're watching. It's another thing that runs Python in some way. We've got this Beaglebone that we're talking about from newsletter this week. So it is here, it is interesting. This is probably the most interesting time to be doing electronics ever. And tonight on INMPI, we're gonna be talking about the new... Bullet fire, yes, interesting. Check this out. So that is this week's Python on hardware news. You can get the newsletter delivered every single week. Go over to aidaforddaily.com, don't forget. You can just look at it as a blog post. You can get an RSS feed. You can look it on GitHub. We may get super easy to access the information the way you want it at all times. It was interesting. I just wanna follow up because we chatted about some people like, well, what does this have to do with Python on hardware? But as we saw with the RP2040, it was an ARM Core chip. A lot of it was designed for running Python on hardware. Like a lot of the choices that were made were, okay, if you're gonna be using a interpreted language like Python, make sure it has a lot of RAM, make sure that you have stuff like PIO that can do very timing critical stuff that is easily configurable and can change around. Make sure that everything is well documented and doesn't require assembly code. You can use a higher level language to access it. And I think that's part of, as we're seeing maybe ARM chips translate to RISC-5. If you were using ARM-specific libraries instruction sets, that sucks, because now you have to port it to RISC-5 using Simpsys, but if you're using Python on hardware, you may not need to do that much work at all because the code is going to be identical because it's one level higher than the RTOS even. Yeah. I answered one kind of thing because some folks are like, oh, I have to jump through a lot of hipster to order a pie. These are the only pies available right now, I think, on the internet. Does it less the work than getting Taylor Swift tickets? Well, the other thing is, there's a lot of sites that require a huge amount of different things you need to do because there's bad folks out there just to cut to the chase. They buy up all the Raspberry Pies and they sell them on eBay. There's bots that did this over and over and over again. This is why there was a shortage. Makers didn't get them. So all we do is say, so verify the account with two factor authentication and you can do it. Lots of happy people. It's a way to have folks you're watching live. You're going to definitely get one if you order right now. Yeah. Anyone who's watching live, you've had 20 minutes. It looks like the bots are down tonight that just do the notifications. I know. This is pretty rare. I think we timed it right. Like I said, usually during business hours, the people who run all these different sites or inventory watchers, they're around. I think it just happens to be, they're probably eating dinner with the kids and they're not looking at their website scrapers. Bots are asleep. Bipies. Yeah. Okay. So let's continue on. Let's do a little bit of open source hardware. Speaking of open source hardware, we've got a ton of guides, lady. We've done a ton of open source hardware. Yes. This week. Okay. So we've got some guides. I will admit, I did not do as many, there's even more guides that have been updated. I have to get to, but thanks JP for being patient. We finally got his power wash simulator, nozzle control. I feel like you're power washing for real with a proper power washing nozzle. You can fit it out with some electronics. And as you wave it back and forth, you will power wash your van and your cat and your garage and whatever else you want to power wash the game. Brant has also been doing a massive rewrite of the eight foot IO basic guides. Thanks also to Tyeth who's helping out. They're updating it in nap covers, Whip or Snapper. It has new screenshots. It's better and ever. Those guides are like easily a decade old. They were written by three generation ago. People who worked on IO Todd. And you did great, but it's time for a refresh. So we've been refreshed. And it also got a new guide over there. The Pokemon macro ball. I think we have a video. We play the video already. Thank you. From JP. Just choosing, I think it was like JP, GP2X or something. It's a firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico that allows it to turn into like a keyboard macro converter, which is awesome. You don't have to do any coding. You don't have to open up an ID. It's all web programmed. And if you use the Pico H, which we stock, to turn on the trigger, you just put a wire. You don't have to do any breadboarding or anything. Even a simple wire can be used to create a macro. This is a macro that spins you around so you can hatch eggs in Pokemon silver. And if you look on our, on our learn system, there's a new link called playground. And I have it here. You'll recognize some folks from the community, DJ Devon, C-Griver. There's a lot of guides that we wanted to get out there from the community using the authoring tool that we have. And having all the things that people love, which is no ads, no weird tracking. You can look at all the guides without having to log in. And you can see them full page. And there's no shenanigans. Don't sell your data. We're not using this to market. We don't make you sign up for, there's no, I think that pops up and says, sign up for a newsletter now. And so, you know, there's, there's sites out there that do contest sites and they have an ad model and sponsorship. We have our set needs. Yeah. And so we're just going a different way, buy some hardware from us that keeps us going. But this is kind of our, you know, another, you know, we think, put more value into the world. So just a couple of highlights is kind of neat. This is, I think DJ Devan's in the chat too. You can check out this guide. You can. Epic. And we're going to be adding more and more. I mean, we're, we start out really slow. Like we didn't even allow Google to index these pages. And we like kept them, you know, we only highlighted the ones from the people that we knew. And now we're letting more people, you know, get highlighted. And we use this for our team too. So this is our own tools that we like to use as well. So anyways, we thought this was fun and interesting. And, you know, we support do not track on the site. So, you know, you have to click through for a YouTube video. This is kind of the place. It's kind of like back in the day, the way the web used to be. So, you know, I think, oh, breaking news. The pie five just hit RPI locator. So it's going to go in a second. Yeah, go, go, go, go, go. So, you know, one of the things that we like to say is like, if it's a good cause in a good business and the feedback you get sometimes, well, you can't do both. And I think when people say you can't do both, they're kind of, I don't mean this in a mean way, but they're kind of the problem because you can do both. You can just it's maybe it's easier to go another way. But that's why we're doing this. We think this is a good thing for the community where they can just know that it's going to be here. It's around. There's not ads. There's nothing weird about it. You don't, it's not trapping people in. And it gets the information out there. It celebrates open source and it comes from us and, you know, get ahold of us or, you know, we're around. So it's not like who, where does it, who owns this? What is this? It's us. Who is really in charge? Yeah. And so anyways, we thought this is something that folks would do. So far so good. Yes. So please check it out. All right. Let's go to some New York City factory footage. And that's our factory footage for the week this week. Let's do some 3d printing. We're going to play these back to back. We have a, you know, the day after Halloween, the holiday decorations go up. So we get some holiday projects and a speed up. We're going to play that right now. Build a light up 3d printer tree with led noodles, LED driver. This features eight helical spokes that spiral and taper to form a tree. Each led noodle fades sequentially, creating a subtle effect. Powered by an Adafruit QT Pi RP2040, this tiny dev board connects to an AW9523 LED driver with STEMAQT. Adorned atop the tree is an elegant topper with the Adafruit logo as its star. Wires are cleverly strung down the center of the tree concealed under heat shrink tubing. The tree stands at 11 and a half inches tall, making a festive addition to any holiday decor. Circuit Python support for the AW9523 LED driver lets you control leds with PWM. The demo code features gamma correction for controlling the brightness of each led. We think this is a good resource for led projects where you want smooth fading. The dev board and led driver reside in a mount that secured to the base of the tree with screws. A cover fits over the base and features an engraved symbol of a snowflake. We hope this inspires you to check out led noodles and Circuit Python for your festive projects. Okie dokie, don't forget every Wednesday there is 3D Hangouts. You can learn how to make all those things more the longest running and only live 3D printing show on Planet Earth. Don't forget to go to STEM Day. Does not apply to Raspberry Pi units as a reminder. You all know that but got to say it. We're still doing some Pi stuff right now. There is only 62 left. Let's go check it out just to see if that's still fresh. 61. There is 61 Raspberry Pi. These will go fast. You can get these now. Just make sure you have two factor authentication in your accounts verified that keeps the bots and the people buying them over and over and over and trying to sell those in eBay. Bad human. But there are things we can do to make it better. Let's do some light up here. Light up here. Light up here. Light up here. Light up here. I brought you by Digikey and Adafruit. Every single week we have something cool. That's new. This week from Beagleboard.org. Yes. The open source hardware provider. One of your favorite small board computers. I think it's one of the only true open source hardware single board computers. Yeah. They have a lot of credit for that. They have a board that just got released this week. It's perfect timing. It's not Digikey. It is the Beagle Fire 5. Beagle Fire 5. Sorry. This is fire. It's called that because it features a Polar Fire processor. It looks like the Beagle Bone Black. They also have the Beagle Bone Green. Multiple versions. Beagle 5 ahead. It's called Polar Fire. Which comes with lots of hardware accessories. The same pinout compatibility. Works with accessories that have already been created for the Beagle Bone Black and Green. But it has a new processor quarrel. Just look at the back real fast. It's got this new Sizzigizi Connector. Which is kind of neat. Micro SD. And lots of passive components. The top is what the exciting part is. It's got a Polar Fire SOC FPGA from Microchip. And that's where the fire comes from. The five is because it has Wisk 5 core. And the fire is from Polar Fire. So what it's got on the inside is a core. This is interesting. I thought it was like oh there's a processor and there's a separate FPGA. But it's actually like a yes it's a FPGA slash processor but it's combined actually. It's in one chip. And I will admit I should have written down the exact part number. It's in the text that goes with this video. But the Polar Fire family and inside are five processor cores four of which are fast enough to run Linux. And one of them is like a monitor core. So like it's a lower power micro controller core that could probably be used for monitoring the system and doing a low power sleep mode type stuff when you want to shut down the main core. And this is very interesting because originally the Beaglebone was ARM Cortex A8 and Family and now they're moving more to Wisk 5. And as we know Wisk architecture is going to change everything. Wisk is good. Wisk is good. So the Wisk 5 core processor inside like I said there's a quad core is based on the Wisk 5 specification so it does not have an ARM core instead. And this is not implemented on the FPGA. These are actually separate and on the same like die or whatever same package as the FPGA. But these are you're not emulating the Wisk 5 the Wisk 5 is like there it's in silicon whatever it's not emulated and are implemented within the FPGA and it follows specifications and it's a core that they have even ported Linux to so you it does like most Beaglebones boot into Linux Ubuntu. And it's interesting because you know a lot of people are you know as I mentioned ARM has been looking to maybe update their pricing for core or device you know royalties you're interested in designing you know custom silicon normally you would go straight to either 8051 or you would go to ARM but now there's kind of like you know a third party has entered the chat Wisk 5 and this chip you know I mean an interesting way for folks who want to take advantage of using the you know open and unlicensed Wisk 5 architecture but also want to create additional hardware interfaces that may not require you to necessarily come up with your own silicon right you get the benefit of custom fast hardware interfacing without the silicon because the Wisk 5 core parts take care of for you and you do the FPGA part for the extra and at no point do you pay ARM anything which is you know and it's benefit this is the part number it's the NPF S025T so this is you know the the polar fire core that again is the system on chip slash FPGA that is the heart and runs Linux on the Beagle fire it's got the hard CPU and the FPGA edition the FPGA fabric you know I've got the specs down here 23,000 logic elements for input Lutz 68 math blocks 2.7 gigabit per second serdes lanes and separately if you see the microprocessor sub system there's also 164 bit Wisk 5 64 iMac monitor boot core and for Wisk 4 Wisk 5 GC application cores and that's what's running your operating system and talks to the FPGA and then there's also RAM controllers and other peripheral accessories that are needed to get your Linux or whatever operating system you want up and booted some more specifications so the core has it has onboard memory which I thought was sorry this is the specs for the Beagle 5 itself so in addition to that FPGA SOC core which has your microcontroller microprocessor and your FPGA it also has it's a SD SDIO slot quad SPI has NV RAM which I think you could probably use for storing like you know FPGA configuration so it looks like eProm NVM maybe SRAM NVM it's got 2 gigabyte of LPDDR4 memory 16 gigabyte of onboard MMC so you know you want to use SD card but you don't have to you can boot directly from the built-in MMC memory and SPI flash I bet the SPI flash is for the FPGA configuration and all the hardware that is you know standard I mean they packed a lot more hardware than usual you know now comes with M.2 key so you can do PCIe SDIO has a CSI connector has Ethernet gigabit USB-C high speed and of course the it has tag connect for JTAG debugging and it has those like 2x20 headers for connecting capes and other accessories that would be designed for the Beaglebum I put this here just because there's like a lot of details about the Polar Fire SoC I've never worked with one of these processors but I think you know I think what's interesting here is you get the benefit of you know if you don't want to you want FPGA for you know hardware interfacing drive specialty machinery, robotics motor controllers LED displays TFTs whatever you do that on the FPGA side but you know the part that you don't have to worry about the Linux kernel device drivers memory management that's in hardware and taking care of for you but you have a very tight connection between the two because they're on the shame on the same chip package the chip itself is 75 bucks so if you're just buying this just as a dev board for the Polar Fire it's actually a pretty good deal because you get you know the whole thing 450 and you get all those other accessories and it's fully assembled and tested compared to most FPGA dev boards this is a really good deal most FPGA dev boards are like in the couple hundred dollar range this one has everything and like I said you turn it on and it really boots into a bun too quite nice all the accessories built in one nice thing I noticed that they have screw terminal power which would be nice for industrial applications and robotics they do have a JTAG TAG Connect they've got the Cape header built in memory built in flash camera connectivity the PCIe camera and Cape headers do go through the FPGA so that's where you would if you're going to program that hardware interfacing that's where they would come into LEDs on off button built in Ethernet driver and notice that there's no Wi-Fi or wireless but I think what they're expecting is people would use this with if you're using one gigabit Ethernet you need high data transfer bandwidth and so you wouldn't necessarily use Wi-Fi on the back this is a good connector it's interesting I was like is this a standard it's not only came up with but it's basically like you have m.2 this is like another m.2 like thing where you have a bunch of fast lanes if you need to you know connect to some hardware that requires a very fast differential signaling and you know as I mentioned one of the nice things is because it's the same size as the BeagleBone Black you can use stuff like our case which is in stock at DigiKey thank you Jason Kredner who you know mentioned this that they were in event they just used our case which has a nice clear top and pops the BeagleFire in and it fits just fine because it's exactly the same physical layout as it was before and it does have CAPE compatibility so you know you can plug in existing hardware that you've designed for previous versions of the BeagleBone and I think we still stock our prototyping CAPE so you can use that as well for talking to the FPGA so obviously you know the WISC5 part you put the Linux image you burn it in over USB or whatever or you have it on SD card you're good to go if you want to program the FPGA you're going to have to use Libero it looks like a lot of people want to use Yo-Yo Assist but it's not available again I don't know a ton about the different open source tool chains but they do provide tool chain and it looks like when you register the device with Libero you enter the MAC address for the BeagleBoard Fire and you get a floating license so you don't have to I don't believe you have to pay for a separate IDE for the FPGA and they're providing the gateway that will interface with you know MIPCSI so they have like the basics to get you communicating over that as well as M.2 so you know that's when you're doing the FPGA you're like what is the hardware I'm interfacing with those are your hardware interfaces for the custom FPGA work that you might want to do and like I said this is one of the few truly open source hardware single board computers the files are up on their own git repository not on git hub they have their own private git repo they've posted the files I love the schematics are there the board files are there grubbers are there you could run your own board if you wanted to available on digit keys yes you're actually in stock as of like today so I wasn't going to feature I was going to feature something else last minute these came into stock so check it out you can pick one of these up I think you know for the price if you want to do Polifier development to have again the stability of having a well maintained Linux distribution of onto and then you have your robotics platform running on top of it this is definitely going to be well way more well integrated than taking a single board computer buying a separate FPGA and then like trying to push them together like just going to say yeah if you're the type of person who likes buying dev boards like to experimenting please buy one of these and I'll tell you why this is the most important thing I think what beaglebone.org continues to do open source hardware not everybody does they do they do a really good job and this is you could say it you could say you like it you could say all those things by a board and they are very very few I don't I don't believe there's any other and you know their origins came from Texas Instruments this is really cool so pick one up that's this week's I don't know if you can okay new products going to be short this week we have a revision and we're going to go into some top secrets and questions and get you out of your lady yes let's jump right in okay the new product of the week this week is revision there's a revision but it's a pretty big revision Webby of the ESP32 S3 Metro I messed up Reve it's a very exciting way in which I messed it up I accidentally used the octal psram pins on the SPI port and it passed test because when I was doing my testing I tested the psram and then later tested the SPI and I was like oh everything seems to be working and if I had done that in the opposite direction I probably would have caught this error but now it's fixed so Webby is fixed moved a bunch of pins around so just be aware if you have a Web A very unlikely you do because we didn't sell that many before this was caught just email and we'll send you out a Webby in exchange and you'll have to update the latest version of Arduino and circuit python if you want to get those SPI pins and the NeoPixel updated because all those had to move around but other than that most of the pins didn't change it's still I think a really great board and I'm glad it's out a really good development platform for the ESP32 S3 with 8 megabytes of PSRAM 16 megabytes of flash and lots of add-ons like you could go off of 9 or 12 volt power the RX and TX hardware interface is exposed microSD card slot the USB type C 7QT battery power it has fairly good low power support on off switch it's a nice dev board for ESP32 S3 configuration all right and with that this new products of the week this week okay so let up your questions over on discord some folks already have discord.tg we're going to do some top secret right now play four videos and then we're going to bounce with questions and load them up in the discord chat here is some top secret all right ladies what is this this is a 2.1 inch 480x480 display we've showed this off with our QALIA ESP32 RGB666 driver this is a raw TTL display but what's new is that we now have a driver for the capacitive touch yay thank you Melissa for writing the driver normally these displays use a focal tack chip but this one actually uses like a CST that allows some other manufacture for the capacitive touch but she did a great job doing Arduino and circuit python libraries next up we're going to get the capacitive touch working for big birthday here this is the 4 inch diagonal screen really beautiful large covered with fingerprints bezel capacitive touch this one has a separate little tail for the cap touch but we'll make a little breakout for it and hopefully get this one up and running soon lots of round touches really dude what's this this is me testing out my new web of the 3.5 inch 480x320 TFT feather wing historically this used an STMP 610 or 811 discontinued and end of line so now it's a TSC 2007 which is also iSquared 2 which is nice has a STEMI QT port still has the SD card we set on off oops forgot to pull up resistor new boost converter for the backlight and running this demo and the way the demo works is want to test as much hardware as possible it draws on the screen it loads an image from the SD card and then it turns on this little touchscreen paint demo so I can verify that the iSquared C works the TSC works the IRQ works the SD card the backlight and the display and this hardware is good going to add this resistor and send out some PCBs alright Lady what is this well I had a bunch of time yesterday thanks to having a day off 8 of fruit would give everybody the day off which means I could work on some hardware this ICN 6211 it's a DSI 2 RGB TTL converter so on the other side here I've got this beautiful 4 inch 720x720 screen but I'm going to get it working with these round displays and I've got capacitive touch bar displays I've got here my Pi 5 I've got the cable adapter I'm using my Pico probe to do the console debugging for the kernel hacking I've got a mouse here and then this is going through the DSI connector to the TTL display and it's like a full speed display and I can use my mouse and click things and I can open up a web browser and right now what I'm working on is configuring the ICN 6211 automatically using this AT Tiny 1616 and then what I've got here is wait I've got here is my little CP 2104 to UPDI converter so there's a ton of stuff going on here let me restore my graphics but what's really nice about using DSI is it's like full color 24 bit beautiful high speed much better than SPI TFT displays so it's happening coming soon this is a Raspberry Pi Pico probe and you see here that there's a little U and here there's a D this is the debug port for SWD Debug and this is your port and this exposes a serial COM port that you can use to debug things like a Raspberry Pi 5 so if you want to set up your Raspberry Pi 5 and you don't want SSH in and you want the debug output you can connect to the little U-art port here it's a JST SH3 using the Pico probe and the cable that comes with it so it's $12 and it even comes with the cable that you need to plug it right in so there's no sort of required and then it shows up like here it shows up as a serial port not the Silobs one, this one COM 8 and then I just use putty and I'm in and I can edit my device overlay stuff what I'm working on is trying to get these cool displays working so you need to be able to log into the Pi 5 and debug some kernel stuff and this is a cool handy trick if you have one of these alright and live to the top secret oh sorry this is the top secret view here I just wanted to show because this is kind of fun I've been working on this this is the Pi 5 and what's needed is it actually has two display ports I'll be able to have two of these displays at once and I'll just focus it in so this is one of our nice 4 inch square 720 by 720 displays and we also got like the round displays and the rectangular displays hopefully working soon and this is going through our the ICN 6211 dev board adds me a couple changes to this board so it's not quite ready yet but it connects through the TTL to this chip that then converts it to be able to take DSI data from the Raspberry Pi and you know what's nice about the DSI interface is how fast it is so there's no tearing it's like instantaneously fast it has the hardware acceleration update so basically it uses the same core as HDMI and I don't think this has internet because I think it was using Ethernet but let me see I can open up a browser and you know if this was working I could go to the internet oh yeah the internet is like I'm not working oh yeah I don't have to put in the password but coming soon and my goal is to make it so you can connect any screen and configure it without having to compile any kernels or do any like complicated device tree stuff that you can be able to plug in anything with the same connector just like we did for the ESP32 S3 but now doing it for the Raspberry Pi so coming soon and not that yet don't ask that's not a secret we're going to do the questions now we have a bunch of lined up okay so first up a little shout out thanks Melissa for the quality updates just starting to play with now yes she's up she's actually constantly working on it so more chips more displays coming soon and then this one so I want to know how to use a stomach QT display with the feather ESP32 v2 the folks suggested discord and OLED yeah our OLED display we don't have any TFTs at our iSquad C but we have OLEDs at our iSquad C you can plug it in and we have Arduino code and we have circuit python code okay someone asked if it supports 5 volt IO metro M7 5 volt IO compatible can you use 5 volt shields no it can't but honestly so many metros and arduinos are 3 volt only that most don't require 5 volts anymore they use the IO ref pin and so you can use you know 3 or 5 volts so I don't know specifically what you're talking about you can get 5 volt power but the logic level is going to be 3.3 I think only like the new Uno R4 is a fast 5 volt compatible shield board it's very rare to see faster chips these days that are 5 volt logic and have us be okay someone noticed it was going around on the socials looks like JLCPCB is going to do UV printing on circuit boards that'll be a lot of fun people will be able to do a lot of cool artwork we'll experiment with it as soon as it comes out looking forward to it as well will the hardware light mods still be required a new revision of the 3.5 inch TFT feather wing like it did in the original version for the PWM backlight yeah it does not have the backlight automatically connected because it's easy to solder a wire and I wanted to save pins okay is it difficult or costly to make a Wi-Fi board with both chip antenna and UFL it's not trivial because you have to have a switch that will switch between two if you want to not have like a stab um so it's non-trivial and that's why you don't really see it so much I'm trying to think if there's any dev boards I know of that have both I don't I think usually you have one or the other um you could design it just most people don't want to spend the extra dollar to um mix up is usp see power delivery enough to run a Pi 5 or do you need to get one of the official power supplies you can absolutely use any usb power delivery 5 3 amp power supply you just won't get as much current to the usb port you know is it enough I mean you have to just you know add up that your power budget um I think as long as you're not trying to drive a gigantic screen off of it or you're not at usb people are saying they're doing fine what's that yeah I think if you're like if you plug in like a hard drive and you're like okay I want to run that from usb you probably find out yes you'll find out well ground and find out um and then this is a really good question we'll probably end up with this tonight do you ever plan on getting into the cat cats of engineering so we had a cat mosfail probably remember also amazing cat still think about mosfet every day um and great cat you know ran a different with us from you know tiny apartment men to all the way she was there for our first for everything everything yeah and um you know we have a kid now and so we don't have any pets and um one of the things that we're noticing as our kid likes dogs and you know that's cool so there might be a doggo of engineering um maybe a cat a dog person but she really likes but what I thought we would do is wait until she can talk and say sentences and then listen to what she wants to do because I feel like if we're going to get a pet it buys us some time yeah so yes the answer is yes at some point absolutely um for a cat you know the name that we had already picked out was Gerber's and we called it so don't do it you can't don't even think about David your cat Gerber's yeah because we called dibs Gerber's the cat and Xenia the cat's also taken by evil mad scientists you can't call it cat Xenia you can actually nobody stopping you okay go for it those are questions thanks everybody yeah so don't forget the code is stemday and we very much appreciate you hanging out with us we of course ran out of runs of replies I hit zero just a while ago great um a couple people were a little mean they sent some nasty emails by the way I checked um they're a little mean um you know what they you know they just didn't get them in time and they were angry about that but we do it every week it's the most fair but then there was so many people are like thanks for trying to make everything fair and doing such a good job so it's okay um this just happens it wasn't it wasn't like it used to be which is really bad yeah I wasn't like a bazillion emails yeah so um I just want to say thanks to everyone who when you have context you see what we do every week and try to make everything fair for everyone um but if you're watching and you're frustrated don't worry make an account get to factor authentication when we have high units that is the best way there's all sorts of notifications that we do um you'll get an email when we have enough there's the shows that we do live do our best that we can and I'm thankful for the folks who who told us hey good job you know I got one nice and I and I do this for a living right I've seen this in the communities or I've seen this in the electronics world and you're doing a good job with this so we appreciate that um that is our show this week we will see you next week this has been an Adafruit production a special thanks to Zay behind the scenes our entire community our customers our team who makes this thing go we will see you later here is your moment of the year