 And we'll just let it everybody and welcome to another desk of Lady Ada. It's Sunday night at hacker o'clock And you know, I'm glad that we have the we design of the Intro logo for the desk lady Ada. That's all retro because we are all retro. We're gonna check out this Atari video machine Yeah, we had this whole thing planned a couple years ago and then You know COVID to happen and then we're like well We'll get to this retro stuff because the past is always there the past date doesn't change the past It's always gonna be the past. Yeah, so we're back to doing The future yes Some programming notes will be broadcasting All the shows during the week as usual We have JP's product picked on Tuesday. We have no Pedro doing a 3d hangouts on Wednesday show-and-tell Ask an engineer. We also have JP's workshop. And next this week is one of the last deep dives It's Scott for a little while. He's on leave and he'll be back But catch this and we're gonna have Tim foamy guy take over why Scott's out. So Desk of Lady Ada is here a little more What's on your desk this week? Well, do you have any news or updates or you want to know at the end of the show? We'll show our footage. We went to Washington Square Park today. It was a Demonstration for world peace All of us would like to live freely and not have our countries invaded. So today there was a Demonstration with folks from Ukraine around the world. So I'll show a little video from this is a few blocks from a different That's about it. Okay. Well, let's check out what's on my desk so I've been working on this pie camera that I started back in the fall and I just got super distracted a lot of part shortages But got getting parts back in and so I can revisit this So let's go to the overhead and I'll show this off So this is This uses a camera module camera modules. It's interesting a little bit like ink, you know They all kind of come with the same pinout It's interesting the tfts do not come with all the same pinout tfts all come up with different math pinouts Even OLEDs are totally different from all the model but cameras actually kind of came up with a nice standard for the OV 7670 OV 2640 OV 5640 like there's basically a series But they're all essentially the same size just really nice makes it even easy to Try different cameras at the same pinout and the way they work is There's a couple power pins. You just like 2.8 volt 1.5 volt power 3 volt power. It's a couple different rails There is an iSquad C control interface where you can set Settings like that, you know what mode you want to be in the exposure level special effects, whatever and then there's an 8-bit output interface that provides hsync vsync and 8-bit video signal on a bit clock So the the data that comes out can be in different formats. It can be an RGB format It can be jpeg format. You actually tell the camera like what format do you want and then you can just clock it out Bit by bit and you also get hsync and vsync out of it I mean you you know you provide you it gives you sorry It gives you the bit clock, but you can provide the master clock, which will affect the bit clock. So Musing the esp32 s2 here the war over module although I'm probably going to go to the mini module in my next version you really do want something with ps ram though because You want to buffer the whole image and While you can't dma into the ps ram There is code in Espresso and also our circuit Python core, which what you do is you dma from the camera into a buffer that's like, you know two or three K 4k and then when the buffers pull The dma signals and then you mem copy that into ps ram. So you can't dma into ram, but you can dma into ram and then when it's done every chunk you you mem copy it to ps ram and so You know, you do basically double buffer like ping pong buffer where while the camera is filling up one buffer and Dmaing it into normal memory. You're copying them on normal normal memory to ps ram. So that's how it works That's how you can get very large images also good for jpegs because the jpegs easily get up to a megabyte in size And if you want to Read the jpegs. It's best to buffer the whole thing into ps ram and then you can write it to the SD card At your convenience. So this is the camera. You can see I've got a little screen here Outputting it and this is in circuit Python. I'm doing a little bit of a trick here I'm using display IO to handle this text. So for example, you see here It says SD card. Okay, and I added a there's an SD card here and I added a dynamically removable SD card, you know, so you can see it now says no SD and then when I plug it back in It's like, okay, I'm gonna try to mount the SD card and it failed because I've been messing with it Okay, so This part is you can see that the resolution and the SD okay and normal that's display I also I'm like having the text handle through circuit Python, but the The tft area here like this little it's 240 by 176, which is like QQ QBGA or something That's like raw data being read from The camera and then I like write it directly to the tft buffer. So it's a little bit like Direct X but for microcontrollers because the RGB buffer that comes out of here ends up being the exact right 16-bit RGB buffers for the tft. It's like I'm just a nice coincidence So you can read the buffer in and then immediately blend it out like, you know in in out very easily Obviously, you can't connect these together. This is 8-bit You know H6V sync out and this is SPIN. So you do have to like buffer it and then rewrite it But it's still very fast. You can see this is you know, it's fast enough that you're actually getting tearing on the the tft So things that I've implemented so far is You can take a picture so this little button when you press it it says snap and it takes a photo And then saves it to the SD card and then There's buttons on the back which are going through a GPIO expander for with the 80 tiny 817 which is like the seesaw chip that we use and this is for like navigating and changing settings and I need the expander because like By the time you have the tft and the camera you basically have almost no pins left over And the SD card like you know and anything that's built in that needs to be native you really have like no no GPIO left because the camera needs like a pin GPIO plus another four control pins and then the tft and the SD card need you know six or seven Because you also want to like control the backlight and stuff and then I have two analog outputs I squared C You know IRQ pin here and there so yeah, basically, you know for all the GPIO pads and the power pin for the camera I needed to To use an expander port, but that's okay because the GPIO on the the buttons is pretty slow so what I did is I added a Simply UI so when I press the left and right button you can see I can select the Yeah, I don't think it's gonna show but it's Changing the resolution. So you see now it's 640 it was 640 by 480 and now it's 1024 by 768 And then I can go up a little bit more and now it's 1600 by 1200 and then when I take a photo It takes a little bit longer to save because it's a big image and then down here It says normal, but I can change it into Negative so this is like a negative effect. The camera has that built-in But you basically there's some chroma and luma settings that you can like tweak and by just like really messing with the levels You can basically turn it into a inversion This is a grayscale, so it's just no color data reddish tint Greenish tint bluish tint Sepia which is like yellowish tint This is overexposed which I don't really it's a kind of a purplish tint don't really know what that setting is This is solar eyes. There's actually a cool effect. It's like very It's not quite negative. It's sort of like a weird exposure Effect, but it's like negative ish. It's like what people think negative is except negative doesn't look like negative and then That's called solar eyes and then back to normal. So taking photos and then sitting in the SD card and then There's a little speaker. I wanted to make a little clicky sound And then there's accelerometer, which I don't know if I'll use but I think you know as you rotate it You know you could have it move up and down. I thought this could be a good little open source Camera interface, I know people have done camera projects with The sp32 but the sp32 cam is like doesn't have any buttons and has it's really minimal and there's no there's often no display Or the display is really small like you can't you can't get a good image and there's no interface There's also of course Wi-Fi on this so you can Use this as like a simple webcam But you could do this you can use this to like say take a photo every three minutes You can make your own camera. You can make a webcam You can make something that like when it moves it wakes up and it takes a photo So or like something that gets you know PR sensor data in and that wakes it up and then it takes a photo So there's a couple of options for what to do here. I do like the OB 5640 I will say that these cameras like the documentation is really weird Basically, there's a data sheet and it has everything in it But like you can't really use the data sheet because there's like a five zillion registers So instead you have to find the app that when they basically say look, do you want to take a photo? Here's the big register list that you want to write to the camera And it's just like gigantic and messy and like You just kind of do what they say like you you don't really have the ability to tweak the register values too much although There it's there, but like again You basically just go with the app and out or like the Linux driver like nobody really looks into these cameras very much they're they're very like You know recipe controlled a little bit like ink displays where You know you you get you can adapt the waveforms, but pretty much the waveforms They give you or the waveforms you want to use or like the gamma tables for TFTs or the init instructions Like you could come up with your own, but you pretty much just follow what the data sheet says and you're good to go So It's my little camera Snap Maybe I'll show it on the computer in a bit. Okay, so Go hold on You see if it'll show up on the computer. Okay, so you can go to the computer There you go, that's the photo. Yeah, so not too bad. That's cool Yeah, the color is pretty good on these, you know if you if you use the overexposure settings Yeah, did they come up with? Okay, so next up So you got a Atari video music machine. Yes, we're experimenting with the idea of music visualization. There's a lot of Black rectangles in all of our living rooms that just sit there dormant And we're thinking about some ideas and more to turn those into pieces of art As usual Atari kind of thought about this almost 50 years ago and There is a really neat Atari visualizer. They're very hard to find I finally got my eBay sniping going on and I managed to get one and now we're just making sure we Understand how it works The schematic is part of the manual that it came which was really rad. Yeah, and Lady Eda is making it so we can use it. So do you want to show this thing off? Yeah, I mean, it's not it's it's you know What's next about this? Hello is um All right, so that's what we're here We'll take that Okay, let me know when you're set. Yeah, okay. So this is the inside of the Atari video music machines, so this is the controls which are like Light brown brown and dark brown which is very 70s shade And this is inside so it's pretty much all driven by this very custom chip that does all the video generation and What's the need is that these jumpers just coincidentally happen to be the ground luma chroma and sync Um, so this guy on twitter posted this really nice little circuit where you're like, okay, just combine them with You know a big resistor divider um to get the the sync chroma luma combined into into ntsc and so that little circuit board here uh, I just turned into a RCA connector into this little baby hdmi adapter. Um This here actually normally the You know, you can see all the um video is coming into here and um This is an h uh, sorry a rf tuner So what looks like here it looks like oh looks like there's a rca. That's an rca. That's rf So, you know transmits on channel three or four and we you know you you can get rf tuners, but it's like usually don't get as good as signals if you just like tap into um the signal directly so what's cool is you know, I just have I have my iTunes going and it's just uh um, this is the kind of effects you're gonna get and this is it Um, don't hold on of course my music just paused There you go. Um, it's you know going through all these different effects and and like color Like cycles it's kind of like an interesting thing and I can turn up the gain a little bit Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's just kind of cool. Just to have this like running at all times like I think folks who just have like ambient music going on in the background This would be like a neat thing just to have like on the wall Yeah That uh just displays like these cool pixelated This is such a thing. I can imagine being advertised in like playboy and like The earliest late 70s early 80s. It's like are you a sophisticated man with a stereo system? You need the Atari video music machine. Um, this is cool. So we got um uh NTSC out, um, but one thing that's nice is because the the The signals are separated the ground luma chroma and sync are all separated We join them together at the NTSC the NTSC looks it looks very good Although the signals it's not quite the levels aren't quite like to standard I'll say like the um You know the blanking signals a little bit lower than it should be and so it's interesting is when I plug this Into the rca directly into this Monitor it didn't like this. It didn't like the signal levels. Um, but this adapter doesn't mind that the signal levels are a little bit wonky it isn't like It's supposed to be like 0.78 volts and it's not it's like 1.5. Um, but what we can do is Instead of combining all the signals together into NTSC we can keep the chroma and the luma separate and Turn those into an s video signal So s video is a standard that came after um NTSC but before hdmi where the the signal was split which would improve the quality a little bit because instead of using one big you know one waveform to try to combine um The hue of the color or the hue of the every pixel plus the um brightness of every Pixel the brightness and the color are separated. So it's like sometimes it's called um Like component video or like separated video So what I want to do is this works so I know this is you know, thankfully I don't have to repair anything on this video music machine What I want to do is uh change this into s video and uh what I want to do specifically is I want to get a little um S video connector that I'll go here. So this is where The rf. This was the rf cable and the rf cable was connected and there was a little um A uh, what's called plastic Not gusset, but like a Holder thingy that kept the cable in place So I removed it and I want something that's like s video that'll that'll sit here Which is basically s video sized and then I can plug an s video cable in Uh very cleanly and I don't have to you know, worry as much about NTSC to hdmi conversion. I'll get a nice clean signal Oh, and then this is the uh audio input by the way, even though this Is yellow and white. That's just because my cables messed up. This is a not video. This is left and right audio Okay, so that's the atari video. Okay, so My quest to find this s video connector that'll fit Uh perfectly. Um I will Go and try to find the connector and I will find it on digikey In the way search Every single week lady user power of engineering to help you find things on the digikey site digikey.com Thank you so much. Did you key for helping out with disc of lady aida lady aida? What is a great search this week? All right this week? I have got my atari video music player and uh Watch this video where this person did a mod to uh, this version has ntsc out But I want s video out and there's this hole here Which I want which right now I have this like cable coming out of but what I want to do is find a panel mount s video connector that will fit Into that hole and um, you know, I want to do it without modifying it. So the whole circuit right now I didn't do any soldering. I just took some wires in and I twisted them around Um some some contacts that the wire jumper. So there's no soldering been done to it. So it's like totally pristine Condition it can always be restored to its original state, which I really like If I'm if I'm playing with hardware, I feel like I should go to I should be on expert level where I don't Mess with the hardware. Yeah, I like things where it's a parasitic upgrade that doesn't damage the original hardware And this is nice because it kind of just like taps into what's currently there and it doesn't Damage the original in any way. So this is like kind of like the perfect mod. I actually like this and Um People really like these like pixelated visualizations. So this is just good timing. Yeah as well. So cool project So, uh, we got ntsc working But we want to use is s video because s video gives a split chroma Color and luma brightness And when you do that, it's you know, it's a little bit easier to get Better-looking video out because you don't have like the the chroma and the luma can affect each other a little bit Um, it also depends on your decoder, but if they're split usually you get a better video quality It's also a little bit less noisy. I found so Um, I want to get that panel mount s video connector that'll fit in And I don't want to do any drilling or gluing or whatever. So let's go to The digi-key side. I was looking at inclinometers. So um s video is kind of interesting. It's uh s video uses a Uh din connector. So let's go to this video din so, um, it uses din and and din connectors are You know, they're not quite dinosaurs. Um, but they're definitely rarer like, you know, anyone who's had old max Or even a computer with a ps2 interface or like, oh, I remember these kind of connectors Um, these characters are round. They're all pretty much like the same size and they have different number of pins But usually it was like four to eight pins Um, and also these these cables are a little bit cursed because You know, you'd always put it in not quite right and you'd force it Maybe or somebody would force it bend the pin the pin would break and now the connector and the whole device is pretty much useless So it's you know, this is why people don't really use din anymore Um, that said it's the standard for s video. Um, so s video is a four pin Mini din connector So we were fine. So let's go to Digi key and let's go to mini din To find a mini din connector Uh, so this is a circular connector You also get cables if you wanted to get an s video cable Like I said, we wanted to get a connector. Um, and already things are looking good. Yes, we can see this has Uh, eight pins and this one has five pins This one has six pins. This is like a just good party here And they're all totally slightly different You can see a number of pins. So um, first up, you know, uh, of course, we want to go with active And we want to go with four I don't know what p is but we'll go with four Uh positions In the connector. So let's apply And let's look down here and make sure that we're down to four. Okay. Yeah, so this looks right This looks just like that wikipedia. So there's a couple types, you know, there's this kind of panel now And there's pcb mount But again, we want panel mount. Usually I have not been going for panel mount stuff, but I want to be panel mount for sure so, um Let's find where panel mount is mounting types free hanging inline Panel mount through hole through hole right angle. So I think I don't exactly know what through hole right angle is. I definitely want surface. Definitely don't want free hanging Or surface mount. I don't know what dash is. So let's let's check those out Okay, so we have a couple options here. So, um This kind of panel mounts. These are all like, you know, it's interesting. There's actually quite a few options available here, uh, so this is the That must be the uh through hole right angle panel mount. So it's like it goes into a pcb um But all of these actually look really good. So they all have, you know, you can see there's a little this kind of bulkhead style Um, there's a kind of big chunky style Um, all of these are good. Uh, I don't know if I really care about any other Size those shell shell size. I think that actually oh, so some of these are xl. These are not mini dins So I actually do want to make sure that they're mini din sized Right mini din mini xlr. So let's go back and make sure that I'm actually getting because din just means like it's a It's the connector style. It doesn't necessarily mean the size So let's go with mini din All right, so now there's only eight remaining Okay, so these are all really good. So, um, there's this style and this has like two ears You can see, hold on. There's two ears How come it's always In the center, hold on Yeah Okay There you go. Um So there's this style which is uh has like two ears here Um And you can like screw them in you do have to drill two holes in And then let's see There's this style also has two little ears. This is kind of a metal plate This is probably the most stylistically close to uh that era um But the one that I ended up finding was this one and what was nice about this connector is um It had panel mail, but it was slim And then you know, you could pretty easily connect to the the four pads on the back and the ground So I actually did get these because I was working on this project last week So let's go to the overhead and I'll show them So this is the uh metal type with metal ears This one is actually what I thought I'd end up using with the plastic ears And I thought like oh, maybe I'll just glue it in what is when what is nice about this is a little pigtail Which is quite handy. Um, so like, you know, this has a it's kind of an elegant for wiring to a board But this one I got the uh The one with two plastic rings. What's nice is you can mount it either way There's two plastic wings you can mount from the back or from the front And uh, you can solder, you know wires to the back pads and then let's go to the bigger music device um when I got to Checking out this mod this fit in like pretty much I have to line up the little there's a little like notch and the notch has to line up with the oh, sorry It goes this way This fits in perfectly and then you can Clunk You can screw it in from the back And I can get to these pads And this is nice and solid on the back here. Um, but very easy to uh plug it in as a video connector So this was actually a perfect perfect fit Which is pretty sweet back to my desk Where I clunk anything else so The md40 cv Which is actually in stock right now is uh, my great search find and it was the perfect part So if you're looking for a panel mount as video connector Especially one that's like being used in a you know, looks like about one centimeter diameter hole Yeah, this totally locks and if you want the actual mounting Okay, you go to the computer again the datasheet It has the um Yeah, it's a little bit more than uh, you know one millimeter. It's a 14 uh millimeter a little bit more than one centimeter, but um all the specs are here and uh very easy to cut a hole if you need to Um, or if you have an existing hole and it's around the size, you know Also, the lip gives you a little bit of leeway. So, you know, it's not quite, you know It's a little bit loose, but that's all right because um, you just use the locking that and you just like really Torque it down and solid it's not going to go anywhere All right, that's a great search Okay, um, we had a question just general and I came in so I wanted to save it to the end Yeah, I laid it out a little bit of fruit and always geek out when thinking of projects to create But I'm not sure how to start. I saw eight a box, but how do you suggest I go about learning coding electronics and more? Um, a good idea is to pick up one of our circuit playgrounds um, we have uh some circuit playground 4h boards and kits in store. We also have the uh Basic kit to get started the basic kit we have to get started but the circuit playground express is like 20 25 bucks And um, it has everything you need. You just need a usb cable, which you probably have already and then all the software online Like make code is free You can use it with circuit python you can use it with arduino and it has like everything built in So you don't have to do any soldering. You don't need any extra tools If you want to buy soldering tools later, you can but you get started with electronics and programming and hardware Um for basically the cost of like, you know, a couple burritos of chipotle. Yeah Next and not just like it's not just burritos and a drink. It's basically 20 bucks. Yeah, the other thing is um You can get started really fast and not have that like Oh, no, I need to learn all of computer science is to make something blink start out with make code Then um with circuit playground express you can pop it into circuit Python mode later on arduino mode if you want um with circuit python You plug it in your computer it shows up as usb drive and you're only Using a text file And unless you want to use something else to just change things and you're instantly making projects Um next question. Yeah, I was wondering if it was going to make an fpc breakout board for your iSpy displays I am actually did design one, but I wanted to get a couple more iSpy displays out before I um You know released a breakout. Um, but that's the goal is to have feather wing and um, like it's But you know breadboard breakout, but um Allow this was because you know phil keeps saying like when we're gonna have these cool circular displays And I was like the problem with the circular display is How do you you know, how do you? Panel mount it in a way or like use it in a board without like a lot of cables and wires and so having an fpc cable is You know that's can we chatted and we ended up deciding that was the the way uh Connected to use so we're adding it to all of our existing tfts And then hopefully we'll get back to some of the older tfts to re-add it because I think it's it's a very nice little elegant Um fpc cable connector It also carries a lot of signals on it So it can be used for other stuff as well like uh, you know some e-ink displays when I revise them Um because e-inks are constantly Changing um, I'll add an iSpy connector onto those as well Okay, that's our show for tonight. Okay I'm gonna close out with a video from uh, washington square park today and in the words of a very famous Son of ukrainian immigrants lennard neemoy who played mr. Spock. I hope everyone lives long And prospers He did