 And welcome to Lady Aida. Hey everybody, and welcome to my desk. It's me, Lady Aida, at my desk. Mr. Lady Aida on camera control, video control, and trying out a new setup, so the camera might look a little bit different. Yeah, it's better. With my assistant, Baby. Baby? Yeah. Yeah, we'd better green screening, better audio, better lighting, better everything. You know, they say a lot of things change when you have a kid. Your AV setup could get better. Usually it doesn't happen, but in our particular case it did. All right, well, do you have any news that you want me to just jump right in? Regular shows and everything all this week. We'll be doing show and tell and ask an engineer. We have a ton of content coming out, so keep the dial on the thing with dials. All right. Yeah, what'd you get going on this week? This is going to be the overhead. I'll show some of the hardware I'm working on. So I finally got around to writing test code to verify that the Pi Cowbell Adelogger that I designed a couple of months ago is working. So this is a Raspberry Pi Pico and one I make some accessories for it. So this is, let me have a look at this. This is a data logging, like add-on Cowbell that has a micro SD card, 12 millimeter coin battery holder, a real-time clock, the PCF 8523, which is like kind of one of my favorite real-time clocks because it works pretty well. It's very low cost, works for three or five volts and has battery backup capability and a STEMI QT port. So you can see it pretty much just exactly fits in this space, which is kind of sweet. And the SD card sticks out a little bit, makes it easier to grab. So the code example that I wrote writes the looks to see if you have a BME280 plugged in. And if so, it takes the temperature, humidity and pressure from that. If not, it just takes the voltage from the analog voltage ADC, which should be like, it should be five volts, it measures VSIS and the onboard temperature and the time and date and it logs it to a file and it logs it to a new file. So let's, you know, plug it. Oh, is it not focused? Oh, you're right, it's not. There you go, there you go. Sorry about that. Well, I haven't been learning how to use that. Now I'm using this other overhead. So when I plug it in, well, first off, I plug it in if I don't have the SD card inserted, it blanks because it's like, hey, you know, I need an SD card. When you insert the SD card, it then logs data every five seconds and then it flushes the data to the SD card that it writes and it writes a CSV and that's important because if you don't flush the data, you know, data is cached on the SD card and within the file system that Arduino uses. So it's important to write. And then when we write, we have the LED on so you can safely unplug it whenever the LED is off, which is, you know, 98% of the time. Just don't unplug it exactly when the LED is on. Okay, question. I have a BME 688, but it always seems to show 10 degrees too warm versus my wall thermoset. Any way to recalibrate it? Yeah, we actually have a guide on calibrating temperature sensors. The BME 280 has a heater inside of it, which is probably what is happening if you're using the gas sensor, it self heats. That's the whole point. It has to heat up the mox plate in order to perform the gas sensing. So the temperature sensor is actually on the BME 688 series is not super great for actually measuring ambient temperature. You'll want a different temperature sensor and keep them BME 688 or 688 for measuring gas and humidity and other environmental stuff. Okay, so now that we've logged data for a little bit, I'm gonna let it do one more and then I unplug it and then let's look at the SD card on my computers. Give me a second and I'll load it up and then I'll tell. Okay, so if you go to my computer, oh weird, that's not my computer. No, that's a screenshot of my computer. Do you wanna try to debug that real faster? I mean, it's kinda cool. Yeah, what is it? It's, I think it's frozen. Yeah, it's from before. That's the board I was designing, which is super cool. But, so basically, this is very similar to the data logging. No, it should be like a Windows desktop. That's a little bizarre. That is a little bit bizarre. We'll keep it shut. Okay, well, I actually show the layout, which is here, coincidentally, and the code that I'm running is the same code that is from the data logging shield for Arduino. So what it does is when it starts up, it looks for files called likeatalog00.csv and if that exists, it opens up 01.csv, et cetera, et cetera, up to 99.csv. It keeps bringing in just the same exact screenshot. That's very weird in the world. Yeah, I don't know. Huh. Well, keep going. Okay. Well, how about- Keep shut and because I'm going- Well, let me skip ahead and I'll go to the next thing because, and then if we get the computer going, so can you go to the overhead and I'll show the, the Einstein hacker stuff? Okay, so the other thing I worked on is wanted to keep going on the hacking the baby toys. This is the baby Einstein play along tunes or take along play tunes. And so you remember, we removed the guts of this and it had like an epoxy blob chip. And I was, I kind of started like scanning stuff and designing and thinking like, okay, what? No, just it flickered, but I want to make sure I was okay. Sorry. So I designed, so I was going to design a new circuit board that uses the ESP32-S2 as a processor chip that would replace what was in here before. And nope, still. It's pretty amazing to somehow save that. Yeah, weird. Yeah, let's start, keep going. Yeah. Well, let me just check in the first one. Like, if it says it knows that there's a display. Yeah, it's like there's a display and duplicating. Yeah, I think so. I don't know. I don't know. You're going to figure this out. I guess. You have ideas to try flipping the USB-C the other way. So to prototype that this stuff will actually work because I actually haven't played audio files on an ESP32-S2 through I2-2S. And I had Jepler actually verify this, but like having someone verify and then I want to also verify. So this is a QDPI ESP32-S2 and the S2, like a lot of people are like, why don't we just use the S3? Isn't it better? Well, I find the S2 to be more stable for like almost all purposes. And the S3 like even over the weekend we had to debug a thing where the S3 doesn't boot out. Like some JTAG USB thing that causes it to not reset all the time. Nope, still. It permanently likes that. How does it? That's weird. You have more ideas. I will continue to regret this. Sure. So one thing I wanted to take advantage of is I have these pads on the top of the QDPIs, like all but the first one. So you can have battery input that is separate than it's diode protected from the USB. So if you want to do projects like this where you have like USB but you also have like a battery input, use those pads. And then I had actually JP try this when he did the C and say, and it turns out like even though like kind of sort of technically you could run all the circuitry off of the three volts coming out of this two battery pack, sometimes people use rechargeables and then it gets down to 2.5 volts and that's like really quite low. So even though this, if it was the freshest alkalines it would probably be good enough to run the circuitry. I used the TPS 61023 which is like a really cute five volt boost converter. I might actually change this to be a three volt boost converter later but the five volts does work pretty well. And that way you have a lot of headroom from the diode into the 3.3 volt regulator. So it's not a bad idea that way you don't feed into the three volt you feed to the regulator. It's not as power efficient, but that's okay. It's still the thing, huh? Yeah, sorry. I'm gonna keep trying things. Okay, so then you get the little boost converter the TPS 61023 and then here's the five volts going into here. And then this is the new board. So this is the I2S BFF. It's a little add on board for the back of a QE Pi. And I think I showed this off last week or two weeks ago that I designed it. It has a Max 98357 and whatever, a couple of passives and then a Molex picoblade connector. Oh, yay! I will never give up. Never give up. I will never give up. Never give in. Anything ever. This is like, it's a flaw. And it's... It's a blessing. Okay. All right, so we're gonna pop the stack. We'll get back to, we'll interrupt back in. All right, so this is that SD card from the data logger. Like I said, it creates a new file each time. So you see this one, 630 bytes because I ran it overnight. This one is the one that we just ran. And also like I had, yeah, I don't have a typo or I had the 8010 instead of 80 log. But let's open this. And so the demo code that I have right now basically just saves a CSV and you can see like this is just the data that it logged while we were hanging out pretty straightforward. But what I like is the temp, you know, the time, you see it was 903. This is a live show, now it's 912. It logged properly and it started up correctly with the right time. So basically that's my demo. Like, you know, if that works, and I run off of battery as well without plugging to USB. So now that this works, I'm ready to send out the board. And the last thing I do is I just do the silk screen and fill not only never gives up on AV staff but also gave me a wonderful logo. Never give up, never give in. A wonderful logo that is like the cowbell logo. So we're gonna have that on the back of boards. And then I'm reusing the ittle longer, the ittle longer logo. And then I'm just going to clean up this little text here. It says peak cowbell. And I'm gonna, this is non-render text. And then, oh, sorry. And then this is the top silk again, which you saw before, but now it's, wait, I'm disappeared. Yeah, you're fine. Okay. Oh, they don't see me. Sorry, nevermind. I'm learning this AVs. I'm, yes, top right is what they see. So it's pretty much good to go. I added a pull up on the CS line. One thing that I did look at really briefly just because I know something's gonna ask is like, hey, can you do SDIO on that card? And the answer is like not really kind of because the pins that for SPI that are the default pins of Arduino, which is what I want to use, aren't in the correct order to allow me to add more pins to make it SDIO. So for now I'm just gonna have this be only SPI mode for the memory card. And then we'll go back and do SDIO maybe later or we'll do a special edition because it won't use the default SPI pins. And I feel like I'd rather make it easy for people to get going with SPI than make things complicated for like the five people who would use SDIO. And for data logging anyways, SDIO is not that beneficial because your speed is dictated by the flash erase speed, not the end-to-write speed, not the read speed. So SDIO is most useful for fast playback, not recording. Okay, so then so that's done. I'm gonna actually send off those boards. We'll get that into the shop soon. Oh yeah, so I added some mounting holes. They're not in the same place that the Pico has mounting holes because they don't really fit but allow me to do the testing easier. Okay, what's the- No question. Because I had to do an AVD tour. Yeah. So two questions. Yes? Yeah, just hold on. There's a bunch. Well, there's a bunch of scrolling because I have to go back. Never give in. Some of the form was asking about an adapter used Feather Wings with QDPI and I was thinking that it could take the form of Feather Doubler or Tripler with the QDPI slot connecting to CSPI, UART, and some pins maybe with jumpers. Okay, that's not a question of the statement but you probably have a comment on that. It's tough. I think the boards, you could adapt them but it's never quite. Okay. You know, easy. Next up, do you have a favorite microcontroller? And then the other one was, what's the difference between SPI and SDIO? Favorite microcontroller here is the RP2040 because I'm learning right now. The one you can get. And then, well, I don't have like favorite favorites. I kind of like that a lot. And so, what's the difference? The difference between SDIO and SDIO is a, a just faster protocol that uses way more pins but they have to be consecutive. It's like a four bit bidirectional protocol whereas SPI is, you know, each pin has only one direction and it's kind of more universal. So, SDIO, not all. I mean, there is RP2040 support but it's not with PIO, but it's not excellent. Well, let's go to the overhead because I have to go back, finish the thing I started and then we'll go to great search because it'll be perfect for timing. So, right. So then I've got, I didn't leave this plugged in so I don't know if it's gonna work but then, right. So I have the I2S, so I plug this in and then the speaker, this is the original speaker that came with the board. So like, you know, I'm just kind of playing around with would this drive the speaker and what does it sound like? Let's see if this works. The only thing is I was messing with this. So let me, oh, right. I have to press the button. So I made it so when you press the button it plays the audio file. So that's the chicken dance song which I think JP wrote. I actually don't know who wrote this song. We use it as a demo for all of our audio clips. So it sounds really good. And this is with half volume because actually full volume was too loud and I didn't blow out the speaker but it sounded a little crackly which sort of, you know, it's overdrive the speaker and also it was a little tough on the batteries or some voltage dipping which caused a brown out. So the good news is that wave playback works and playing the waves actually off of the onboard flash. You know, there's about a megabyte of space which is, you know, for a kid's toy there's plenty of wave file and it sounds really good and I2S doesn't have any clipping or ticks from under over buffer flows. So this is good. So this combination, you know, the TPS, the QDPI, the I2S to the speaker is a good combo. So, you know, I already started designing the hardware but I wanted to verify it before I kept going with the design in case like wave or I2S playback to work on the S2 but it works just fine. Any last questions before you go to great search? Nope. Okay. Every single week, Lady Eater's a power of engineering to help you, yes, you find all the things you want online at digikey.com, Lady Eater. What are you looking for this week? Okay, this week, so let's go to the overhead and I'll show what I was just showing which is hacking this electronic kids toy and I'm plugging in an I2S amplifier into my ESP32 board to get a nice quality audio, which I'll demo again. Okay, so the I2S audio sounds really good. The speaker sounds really good. It runs off of a charger batteries because I'm using a boost converter. Everything's great and the connector that I'm using on this board is a Molex Pico blade and I realized I hand covered Molex Pico blades before on the show and I wanted to show them off and so let me demo why you'd wanna use a Pico blade. So this is my, hold on a second. Let me grab, I've got like, okay, so we've got like a Funhouse board here. So this Funhouse board has JST three pin connectors on the side and it also has a STEMI QT. So the STEMI QT is JST SH, which is not a bad character but a very common connector you're gonna see in the real world is the 1.25 millimeter pitch Molex Pico blade and what's nice about it is the Pico is a fine word to use for it and you can see how thin it is compared to this JST pH. It's a very skinny connector, but it's nice and solid. It's from Molex and they make really good stuff. The blade is because the contacts actually, if you look carefully, they're kind of bladed. You know, they're not pins, they're flats and that actually makes them also much more durable, especially if you have like a lot of cycles connected and disconnect, they don't bend. I never had a Pico blade bend or crack on me. I have had pins on other connectors, that if you don't get it quite right, something catches, they'll bend inside the contact. These don't seem to, another thing I really like is that there's this little cut out here so you can see that the contacts are there and straight so you can, you know, before you connect something. And then this is the contacts, which is the sockets which go into, in this case, the speaker. So let's go to the computer. So like I said, they're called Molex Pico blade. Now, one thing I noticed while searching is that there's actually, well, first off, did you change their front page? So check that out, new products is kind of nice. That's what I use for INFPI. So Molex Pico blade. Okay, so there's a lot because there's gonna be cable assemblies and there's gonna be connectors. So we want to go to header mail pins because that's what goes on the PCB. And, you know, let's say we want two positions active and surface mount right angle because that goes up the end. And let's just say in stock. So yeah, these are some of the contacts that you use. What I like is that it's like, you only get three and the three are all slightly different. So this is the series, the 53261. This is the, this is what I tend to use. This is the tint version. You're feeling fancy, you want gold, gold plated contacts, they're more expensive but they will resist oxidization more and then there's also a nice 360. And they did a really good job getting a lot of photos of this so you can really see all the contacts. I can see like nice thick contacts here, that blade. Again, a lot of mechanical stability over here and then I really like, hold on the detail here. Let's zoom in. A lot of mechanical stability. Again, I've never had these fail or pull off. They're really, really solid connectors. So this is the part I recommend using, I mean, you can use the gold plated one or you can use the silver or the tin plate one. However, you probably also want matching cables to go with it, which you can also get. So if you click on the series, that'll take you to like everything in that series. You're like, oh, I want like five pins or six pins. They'll give you everything in that series. And then you could also go to Molex Pico blade and search for cable assemblies, which I always recommend. So you can get, let me show you one more thing, sorry. In addition to, you can click on that. If you go down to the bottom here, you can find, oh, under featured product, if they featured it, what's really nice is they have like this kind of descriptive text that tells you about it, not all products have this, but like most series, large series of products do. So in this case, it kind of tells you, what's used for one amp of current, which is a lot. Again, that's compared to JCSH, which I think is like 340 milliamps. So it's quite a lot of current which is why I really like it for speakers. You can get contacts, connectors, housings, and then crimpers. If you are going to do your own cable assemblies, get the official crimper or get like a really nice like engineer crimper, don't use a pair of pliers because otherwise you're gonna be sad. You're not gonna have a good time if you don't have a good crimper. But if you don't wanna crimp, I do always recommend getting pre-made cable assemblies. They're not that expensive, especially considering you get them the next day. And then of course when you go into production, you can either use the pre-made assemblies or like contact your cable house and they'll make you picoblade connectors with any combo. But what's nice is that like, any number of circuits, almost any length. So say we want a two pin cable and let's see what's available here. 450 millimeters, 150, 100, little extendos. Very handy to have these little extenders, 450 millimeters. And then just pigtails if you need them and socket pigtails and plug pigtails. Is there any other interesting thing about picoblade is some cable systems, again, like the JSTSH, I don't believe it. I've never seen JSTSH free hanging. But what I like about Molex picoblade is that they have PCB mount, vertical right angle, and then cable connects and then they have free hanging connects as well. So again, you can do the extenders or you can just have like, if you want these for free hang. I really like that this cable series for that reason. And again, like compared to the JST, PhDs are much smaller, but they can carry a lot of current. Good for wearables, LEDs, speakers, like AD stuff. Then while this whole series is my, you know, my pic, this particular product would be my choice for the great search. And that's a great search. Okay, a couple more questions that came and is it common for color options to be random? I've noticed many other products with JSK connectors have a notice the connector color may vary. Yeah, sometimes we, you know, we hit black ones. I'm gonna get 10 ones. Those are the only two colors though. Yeah. And then we were asked a question and I answered it in the chat, but I'll also mention in here. Yeah. Folks love the Cal Bell logo. Can they use in their open source designs? The answer is yes. It's emailpt at Adafruit.com. I will set you up with everything. Yeah, we'll publish that as well. Okay, next step. What could it or does Lady of the Year should I stick with key cat earlier? Eagle, I know Eagle is considered more professional, but it's worth the cost-free plan limitation. Totally doesn't matter. Use whatever you want. All of them have same similar functionality. And what a code editor do you use? I use Xemax, but sometimes I use Adam if I'm doing Python. So a little bit of maker history. I'll just continue. I've mentioned this on our other shows and more. Back in the day, there was a meeting that Lady of the Year and I did along with Wendell and Lenore from Evil Mad Scientist. We met with Eagle Cat folks before it was acquired by Autodesk and we convinced them to have XML export. So one of the reasons you can still move things around between a key cat and Eagle Cat is because we convinced them that this was a good way to grow a big community of people doing electronics. They did it. It really parsed XML, like the Penguin, the font stuff that we do for all of our boards. Philby wrote that in Python and it just uses the raw XML. Like it creates a package with raw XML and just like shoves it into the file. It's pretty neat. As far as we're concerned, because we're the number one certified open source hardware company. If you look at the numbers, so does it matter what tool you use? Absolutely not. We're gonna be the ones to always say that. And I know there's purists who say, no, you have to use all of the entire open source tool chain. Well, guess what? That's still not gonna be good enough for people because maybe you use Windows. Maybe you use an elevator to get to your office and the firmware in the elevator is not open. Someone said that Adafruit will never be open source because Lady Aida takes an elevator to her desk and that elevator is not open source. I shit you not, folks. This is a purity test that you gotta stay away from. So the only thing that matters is you publish the files in the format that you made. So there's open source with Altium. There's open source with Keycat. There's open source with Eagle. It's all about sharing whatever tool you use. I said one link to Ann, somebody who was published, people just published her schematics and ASCII in how-to files. It's totally okay. That's fine. And the folks who get hung up on this, they're not the ones that are publishing stuff anyways. They just wanna be like jerks. So don't ever worry about that at all. Use the one that you wanna use and use the one that you use the most often and get the most out of it. All right. And that is our show tonight. Thanks, everyone, for hanging in there. I'm pushing the limits of USB-C. What was it? I think computers just get confused when you have this many video things going on. And it just, it decided to save that screen shot. It worked. All right, see you everybody during the week. Bye, everybody.