 first asked engineer 2024. Happy new year everybody. It's us this engineer. Yeah, we're back asking near broadcasting live from downtown Manhattan. It's me, Lady A to the engineer with me, Mr. Lady on camera control. Another year break times over bitches. It's time to do electronics. The next hour you're going to hear ranting new product videos. Another way maybe. I'm your Uber driver. Get in. Wait, let me look for my dog. Tutorials, videos, and more. We're starting the year off a little bit slow, but still we're getting stuff going on. Even some, it's not out yet and a whole bunch of preview vids. So come on by. We're broadcasting on like Instagram, YouTube, Twitch. All the places and the best place. So if you want to ask questions or do stuff, we get to those at the end, but we also do some real time is in discord, adafruit.it slash discord, discord.gg slash adafruit. We'll go over that soon, but let's kick it off and tell you what's on tonight's show. On tonight's show, the code is TPS boost 10% off the native fruit star all the way up to 1159 p.m. Eastern time or when I remember to turn off the code that gets you 10% off anything in stock and we only ship the things that we have in stock. That's why when you order something from us, it ships. Usually within a few hours or the next morning. Use it or lose it. We've got a bunch of stuff in stock. Time travel. We're going to take a look around the makers, hackers, artists, engineers. We've got some news, some Adabox updates, and more. We're going to talk about the live shows, including show and tell, which we just did. A little bit of JP product pick of the week recap. We're going to be talking about some open source hardware news. We saw an interesting article about Arduino and counterfeits in clones and manufacturing around the world. We'll talk about that. And we'll also go over some of our open source hardware designs from the Adafruit learning system. And more. We got some New York City factory footage. We got a 3D printing recap from 2023. And we also have a speedup. We're going to do some Ion NPI that's brought to you by Digikey this week. It's a microchip. Thank you, Digikey, for making those possible. We've got a bunch of top secret this week. We've been doing a bunch. So you can watch some of the things that are about to go into the store, play those videos, and we also have a couple designs we'll share with you. We've got some new products. We'll answer your questions. We did that on Discord. Don't forget. I already have a question lined up that folks asked us, so I got that. But feel free to put them in there. And then you can also post them in all that. And you guessed it. That's going to do. Okay. Introduction to the code to be a smooth. We have free stuff later. What do we get? We still have our freebies. $99 or more. You get this beautiful PCB coaster with a gold Adafruit design on it and four little bumpers so it won't scratch desk. We also have still the KB 2040 a lovely pro micro micro pinout compatible microcontroller board with the RP 2040 chip, eight megabytes of flash memory, a STEM IQT port, two buttons, neopixel, and cast-related pads. We've also got free UPS ground shipping on orders $199 or more. And lastly, still $299 or more, you will get a circuit playground express or all the one microcontroller board with the SAMD 21. That's for microchip, which is IMPI sponsored this week. Lots of LED sensors, buttons, piezos, capacitive touch pads and more. Okay. Let's just kick it off time travel. Somebody just go over some news and stuff. Yeah. Move through time. Time traveling. Third time. Air of time. Can't unbrick it. Entropy. Air of time. Okay. Happy 2024 from Adafruit. We have a bunch of kind of recaps and more. Do check our site. But I guess the biggest news that we want to mention is we did it. We were able to ship some Adaboxes. Yes. Down to the wire at the end of 2023. So thank you, everyone who got back to us. We did a very limited run because we had to turn on this machinery from post chip shortage. Thousands of thousands of Adaboxes go out. We needed to make sure we can get the parts wrong. Lots of redesigns. You're up to like 600 plus redesigns already. And out of 630. Yeah. Really getting to the end. So what we did was the folks that subscribed to Adabox from the very beginning and have stayed with us, we contacted a group of those folks and we said, Hey, we have an Adabox for you. Just can you update your shipping and payment information? Also, here's a link to our Adabox information on our website because we understand all there is is like phishing attacks and everything and everyone pretends to be someone. It is rough until the world out there. So yeah. So we were able to get our limited number. And if you go to adabox.com, you can see where we have our updates. So we have our December 19th update. Good news. We're able to ship some of these. We have an updated video where we talk about this. You can still sign up for when we get through this next batch. We're able to ship more. We just have to of course get all these things together. Everyone's getting back from holiday break. We'll be shipping out a bunch. We can't tell you what place you are in the line. We want to not do that, but we will make sure you get an email and you can update your payment information. We hope to get through these as fast as possible and then we're on to the next Adabox and then we have a bunch of more subscription style things going. But this is a big year for us with getting started. So if you have any questions about it, you can always email supportedadafruit.com. The best thing to do if you're an Adabox subscriber is just log into your account when you can and just make sure your shipping address is current and your payment information is current because what we do is we don't charge until we ship these. So when we do, and even if we do have your Adabox come up and one of those things is not correct, like your shipping address is invalid now and maybe your payment information has expired, we'll still give you a chance of course to update it. But why go through the mirror and get ahead of it. Do now. So that is lost your teeth is yeah to all those things. Okay, next up we do a bunch of live shows. What's funny is we had someone who came by and they're like, oh my gosh, you're still doing show and tell. And I think the last time I saw them like 10 years ago, we've been doing this for a decade. So we do a live show and show and tell was this week, we kicked it off in the new year. Few folks came by Jeff Jeppler had resin keycaps and more we also I also talked briefly about some open source digital camera things the memento, but check out Jeff's resin keycaps as Jeff has explored building and making all these things. Mark D stopped by with a very neat project. I think the neatest thing isn't just project is just how you do it. So did you know you can design something with bunch of Legos and then you can find a place or a person where you can have those Legos sent you in the mail and then you assemble thing. Super cool. Yeah. So it's it's like 3d printing, but even better sometimes. BCG came by with keyboards. This was being able to remap devices, put your own firmware in it. It's called Vio, but I think in GitHub it's called like keyboard firmware. We have a link to it in discord, you can check that out. But if you're interested in making your own keyboard, this had circuit playground and the key or numpad. And so you can check that out. Once you have a keyboard, you're like, I'm gonna remap the heck out of it because you're like, oh, I want to skip key there and I'm like F1, but I don't want F5. And all these things allow you, including like the open source digital camera that we just made. We'll be able to ship it more of those soon. There's not like multiple key all over. You can make your own keyboard. You can make your own screen. You can make your own mouse. You can make your own. These are all things that it's a good learning experience because everything's kind of sealed up and like how does this work or one of the things I was, I'm not a fan of, but I get it. You get a really cool accessory for your computer, but it requires like this kind of bloated app that's always in your tray. Well, you don't need to do it this stuff. You can just have it, the firmware is on the device and you can take it anywhere it just shows up as a keyboard. Yeah. So anyways, and then Tony came by with some martial arts timers. So if you wanted to make your own timer, whether it be like for matches or scores or whatever you wanted to do, neat, neat first electronics project, showed the cool prototype, had all the different pieces, and then just up by with some 3D models and more, some vintage MakerBot, ABS plastic. It was really neat to see the models that were printed. This was like a really, one of them was like a beautiful aerial mermaid. Yeah. And they're like some like anime characters and stuff. Yeah. So come on by. We do the show and tell every single week. You could, if you're a time traveler and you want to know what we're doing on a Wednesday, we're very predictable. Yeah. Time travelers are welcome because they look exactly where we are, like every Wednesday. Yeah. For the time traveler, you could do, you could do a show and tell once a year. For us, it would be once a year for you. You could just do them all on our own. So show and show your projects. It can be richer stuff. It can be things that you discovered or found. It can be places you're going to that has something to do with making anything. It doesn't have to be it for itself most of the time. So do come on by and we'll see you on the show and tell next week. We have co-hosts sometimes. Sometimes it's GP, sometimes it's some of the folks from the Aid for Team. So come on by and say hello and show and share your stuff. Speaking of, we do a live show called JP's Workshop. And in JP's Workshop, there's product pick of the week. Here is this week's highlight, broadcast live from the product page. Discount automatically applied. Here is what JP showed off this week. Max 31-856 thermocouple amplifier. It is a universal thermocouple amplifier, so we can use all the different types of thermocouple probes. A Feather M4 here, and I've got this nice little display. My ambient temperature right now is 68.2 degrees Fahrenheit. I'll go ahead and plunge that in the icy ice water bath here, and we can see we're getting down to around 37.8 degrees or so. Take that out and that will rebound I think faster if you're not using the metal-ended probe, just because that's got some thermal mass to it. If I grab that with my fingers there, you can see I'm starting to raise that temperature pretty quickly. And then this was some water I boiled for tea earlier, so if I plunge that into there, you can see we're quickly getting up to around 120 degrees or so Fahrenheit. It is the Max 31-856 universal thermocouple amplifier. Okay, don't forget JP's Workshop is tomorrow. And then on Friday is a 2PM Pacific 5PM eastern time deep dive with Tim. Let's do some Python on hardware. Okay, this week is going to be a little differently, Dana. Why? Well, there's an intersection of open source hardware, open source hardware news, Python on hardware, all the stuff we're doing. And speaking of nostalgia, because we had folks who saw us 10 years ago doing show and tell, I've been covering open source hardware beat for a long time and there's new and interesting... She covers you at some point. It is. You're trapped in here with me. So in our newsletter, we were walking around and Lady8 is like, hey, did you see the newsletter? I'm like, yeah, I started looking at it. And one link that was in there that Anne put in there that was really neat. So besides MicroPython version 122 out, do check that out. Interferences sponsor both financially and with our code of MicroPython. We're very proud of that. Go to GitHub and you can sponsor them if you want. We do a yearly donation to keep MicroPython going. That's what we base CircuitPython off of. But the article was on TechCrunch, which is a little weird. TechCrunch used to cover hardware a little bit more. And this was a surprise for me to see it. I don't know anyone at TechCrunch anymore. Lamor spoke at CrunchFair. I don't know what's the name of that? What was the tech crunch event? You were on right before... The genius guys. The lyric genius and Bill Blasio. And he was like three hours late. He was really late. But he's really tall. TechCrunchExpo or something. Yeah, maybe. Or was it like CrunchFest? I don't know the name of it. Crunchy. It's like cereal. Crunchman. Crunchyman. So anyways, what are we talking about? Well, we're talking about TechCrunch. TechCrunch had an article. And the article was... And I saw this in our newsletter because Arduino has moved to doing more Python on hardware a million years ago when Arduino had a dispute between... There was two Arduinos at one point. We were helping the good guys manufacture Arduinos. And for us, this is very interesting. And then there's this question about what is a clone and counterfeit sale? Let me go to this. So the article is called... You can go to TechCrunch and search for it on Google, whatever web search you use. Arduino Exploring India Manufacturing to Limit Counterfeit Sales. Now, here is my gripe about this article. So this is a rant maybe? I don't know. I did promise a rant. This article... I don't think it was on purpose, but this always happens. So at this point, I'm going to say like... The article is basically somewhere saying there's counterfeit Arduinos and that's the problem with India. So the quote here is in India, there's 3.2 million downloads of the Arduino IDE, but in India, that's for Arduino sales, it's less than 1%. And the CEO now of Arduino says considers fake Arduino boards the key reason for this discrepancy. Now, the problem with saying this is it's open source hardware. Now, if it says Arduino and it's a counterfeit, it says Arduino, the Arduino branding, that's different than fake boards because then it goes on to say that there's compatibles, there's other Arduinos, and then there's knockoffs from China. The problem is it's kind of like, well, blame open source hardware or blame counterfeits or blame stuff. And Lady Aida may have a different or another opinion. So here's what's not going on in India. There's not full on identical counterfeit trademark infringing Arduinos that are flooding the market in India. It's like ESP32s and other hardware 3.2 million downloads. That's what it actually is. And to have an opinion, which is that the thing is that there's no way to know because there's no telemetry on what people are actually just flying. I don't think there should be telemetry. The other thing is Arduino changed a lot. They have venture capital and we don't know now, but I think the top contributor still to Arduino libraries, but we don't get information about the downloads. We don't get information about what boards are used. There used to be that, but I get it. Companies change. But the thing when you read this article, and I think this is where Arduino needs to make it really clear, please don't get open source hardware confused with counterfeits because, yeah, there's people using Arduino compatibles, but don't call those counterfeits. They're Arduino compatibles, open source hardware. And if you look at what people are actually using, they're not, they're not using, you know, Arduino shaped, you know, 15 year old Arduino designs. In India, they're using things like ESP32. They're downloading the ID for different reasons. It's not a trademark infringing Arduino. It's an Arduino compatible. And I think that, you know, just saying knock off some China, like it doesn't really help people want to get involved with hardware either. So the other part of this is they call them clones. So Arduino says that the company currently sells one original board for every five to six clones in the market. So this is where it gets confusing again. So a clone is different than a counterfeit. So now they're blaming clones or compatibles or compatibles. Yeah. And it says it's a challenge because we are an open source and make money from selling original hardware. Okay. So the clones and counterfeits are a big chunk of the market. So now the quote is clones and counterfeits. So this is now saying clones and counterfeits are equal. No, they're not a clone hardware. So Adafruit, at one point we even had the same, like trademark attorney is, as Arduino. So there's Adafruit clones. It's great. Tons. Yeah. It's fine. My boards are Adafruit clones. Please, please go and make Adafruit clones. We don't mean put the word Adafruit on the board. That would be an Adafruit counterfeit clones are fine. It's compatible clones. This is the point of doing hardware and getting it out there, especially to some markets that can't get it. Like Adafruit can't serve India. There's a lot of Arduino clones in India. I'm not expecting it to. And I think another thing is like I said, we don't have telemetry. We don't know what they're using. I actually have an opinion that I don't believe a lot of people are using at Mega328 compatible. Maybe there's some. But I think the vast majority are using WiIMOs, ESP32 and ESP80T66 boards because they're IoT and they're like $2. And like I think the challenge is that's what people are using and that's not a counterfeit or clone. It's something that works with the board package capability of the Arduino IDE. So normally I'd write an article, but I just wrote an article not too long ago about the changing faces of open source hardware. And this is the kind of thing I was talking about in my article, because it's like, you know, you're conflating things. Please don't do this. So here's the other quote. Arduino is looking to address problem of fake boards globally by making the hardware more sophisticated, which makes it more difficult to counterfeit. Okay. So there's reasons to add complexity and features, but it seems like if you're adding hardware to make it harder to copy, that's not the mission of education, open source. It's if you're purposely doing it like DRM chips and just like, let's make it so complicated, no one can make it. What's the point? The whole point about open source hardware is to make it so other people can also make it. So I mean, I think the innovating constantly is good, but like in using sophisticated parts, but I think that there's a little bit of like a miss, there's a mismatch between like, look, you know, make more advanced boards, we want to make more advanced boards, but like that is not, like believe me, any single mic controller board that Arduino or anybody can design, you can send to a reverse engineering company and within a week, they'll send you a full schematic and we give you CAD files. And on the other hand, they released the CAD files for the non pro series. So it's like, it's a little bit like, you know, I think there's a lot of mix and match. Like for example, they talked about like the UNO R4, that's open source hardware, they released all the files. Yeah. So I feel like, you know, and when I wrote about how some companies that were doing open source hardware, they take funding, they stopped doing open source hardware, they eventually blame open source hardware. One example was Prusa, the 3d printing company, I just saw them on like hacker news and people are like, Oh, they're, you know, they're not doing open source hardware anymore because there's too many, you know, counterfeits. Well, no, it's that's not the problem. There's not Prusa counterfeits. There's 3d printing market is really tough. And I was, I managed to get some, some interview time with some of these companies. We're considered a competitor. So often no one wants to talk to me anymore about this stuff. Even though this is kind of the thing I wrote, but you know, here's an interesting comment. This at the end of this TechCrunch article. The person says, as your article observes, Arduino boards are open source. Let me, I made it big so I could see it. Let me show you here. Boop. There's a C, yeah. Minus key? There's a minus key. There's a minus key. There's a tiny keyboard here. There's a little, the smallest keyboard in the world. Yeah. So the person says, as your article observes, Arduino boards are all open source. All hardware and software designs documents are freely available. So calling alternative sources rip-offs is prejudicial. So that's how I feel is like maybe don't call, like you have to be careful with these words because I think people who are interested in doing hardware now are going to be like, I'm just going, they're just going to be counterfeits everywhere. It's different than clones. And then the other thing is, if you have a bunch of funding and your investors are saying make us money, and maybe it's hard to develop hardware now, you're like, well, all these counterfeits, got to blame the counterfeits. That's not really good for all of us. And purposely making the hardware more complex, do add features, do add new chips. But if you're making it more complex because you want to try to stop people from copy and pasting and that's from the article, that's not the mission that we all signed up for. And Arduino is built on open source hardware and open source software. So that's my like mini article that I'm not going to get a chance to write. This is important, I think, especially as all of us who do open source see our things now getting put into closed source stuff. So anyways, I hope that Arduino opens up a factory and does open source hardware in India. That's the best solution. They're talking about that. I don't necessarily think that making it more complex and conflating clones and counterfeits is good. This has been going on for years, by the way. And like, we've looked at our old shows, but please don't confuse people with this because one is trademark infringing. It's a counterfeit. It's using your name. It's pretending to be you. And one's a clone. And that just means it's compatible. Separate those two. And, you know, blaming seeing 3.2 million downloads is like lost revenue is not that's not that's not lost revenue. That's people downloading ID and they're just using other stuff because open source software. So that's the newsletter. And that's the open source hardware news. You can sign up for exciting newsletters like this that will make you think over on 8 for daily.com. That's where we deliver this. Okay, let's talk about our open source hardware designs, Lady, where we have thousands of them. And I don't think we have one new guy. Yeah. And let me give you this. Yeah. So we're, by the way, we're stuck doing open source hardware forever. Because we said we're going to do it in all these videos. Those standards do it. And someone would do a supercut of us saying we're doing it. And then, and then if we don't, they'll be like, look at look at this 20 hour compilation. So we're stuck. Okay, we did get a guide out for the eight of them mental bunch of folks are still out on a well deserved holiday break. We're making more mental cameras waiting for some camera models to show up. But if you have one, check out the guy JP's also writing some pages on it. We also have a guide on using the USB host feather wing in Arduino with the Max 3421. This is like a classic USB host chip, but it works very well. And we have TV USB support for it, which I think is really cool. Eventually one day we'll have circuit Python support for it. Not quite yet, but coming soon. And then the fader wave sent from JP and the meopacil shoelaces. I think those were like two weeks ago, but I don't remember if we talked about them. But another two projects and we're going to get, you know, people going to come back in about a week or two, you're going to see more guides after everyone comes back. Well, Weston, don't forget, we also have playground. So if you go to learn data for tech home, there's a little playground link. This is where you, anyone can post your guides and more. This is a really neat thing. This is a wave builder construct, Cynthia, a wave table from a list of oscillators. You can do a two-handed mouse. All the code is there. We love you to post the code. Here is an electric fireplace chair. Everyone wanted to try out the playground. So she like made a pretty big guide. So these are, we wanted a place online where anyone could view the guides that you make. You don't have to have a log in. I know a lot of other sites that they're advertising model, they make you log in or there's ads and stuff. We don't do any of that. We don't do tracking. And it's just a place to publish your projects free. All you have to do is go to learn and start publishing. Let's do some factory footage. Okay, 3d printing. We have a recap of 2023 that we're going to show. I don't know, Pedro did an amazing job on this. And then we're going to do a speed-up. So we'll see on the other side. It's about three, four minutes altogether. Take it away. And don't forget the code is TPS boost, 10% off native from the store. There's free stuff as well. Let's do some on API. On API brought to you by DigiKey. This week it is MicrochipLady8a. What is exciting and new from new product introductions this week? I'm glad you asked. This week our pick of the beginning of the year is going to be the pick kit from Microchip. They have a new pick kit 5. So it's a fifth generation. This is your pick. This is my pick. And you know, I've had a pick kit. So this is like I'm familiar with this device. You know, I bought one a very long time ago to program pick 16F84 microcontrollers. And they've improved it greatly since then. So this is the fifth generation available at DigiKey and it's in stock. So as you might expect, you know, it works with MPLAB, MPLAB X, which is against the 10th version. The fifth generation adds more and more support for chips. I don't know what generation they added support for AVRs. But one of the nice things is this is one of the few programmers that supports, you know, SWD, JTAG, PIC, AVRs, various styles and techniques, and different, you know, MIPS chips, etc. It's a very wide range tool. So let's take a look. So inside is a at SEM E70. So it's like a 300 megahertz Cortex M7 processor. So it's a pretty beefy device. It's got Bluetooth built in, which I'll talk about in a little bit probably a Groving Networks module. And it can communicate, it can power the target, it can be powered by the target. It's got an SD card and various buffers and analog scalers. And the thing that's cool about it is, like I mentioned, it isn't just like an old school PIC, you know, 16F or 24 or whatever, my controller, it's a programmer or DSPIC, it's also for the AVR series, the SAM series, and the CEC series. So, you know, ever since Microchip purchased Atmel, like almost 10 years ago, eight years ago, they've been solely integrating AVR and Atmel chip support into everything, and they have it here. So on the board, there is an 8-pin connector. And you see on the left hand side, like it says 8-pin SIL, that's like a single inline connection. And you kind of pick and choose which pins you're going to use for your debug interface. So you can see, like, if you're using UPDI, you're going to use Reset, VTarget, that's the power of the target, Ground and Data. Whereas, if you're using AVR JTAG, you're going to use almost all the pins because you have to have TDO, TCLOV, TDI and TMS. But also supports TPI, ISP, UPDI and debug wire, which is not a lot of programmer support. If you have like an old style Arduino compatible with an Atmega, I think the 328 and 324 had debug wire support, which I honestly never got using because I never had a debug wire debugger. So this is a programmer and debugger. I think this image was drawn in like the mid 90s and they've been using it since I've seen this drawing multiple times. So as expected, it supports all the PIC chips. It can generate high voltages. Some of them require like the Mclard pin to go up to 12 volts for high voltage programming. It can do it. It also, like I said, supports debug wire, which is a one wire debugging system. Again, I have not used it, although I wanted to. I believe it's supported at mega 328, whatever series. There's also TPI. TPI is used for small AT tiny chips. I've definitely used this. It only uses like two or three pins, data clock and reset. So like, you know, there's a six pin AT tiny 10s or whatever. There are enough pins for SPI. So you get away with the TPI interface. There's also high voltage AV, HV, SP and HVPP. Obviously, you don't usually need this as much unless you're like really messed up your mic controller or you have something like you're using a new PDI, programmable chips, which is like the latest AT tiniest. You can use the UPDI pin as a reset pin, but then you have to use high voltage programming mode in order to enable it. You need 12 volts. So yeah, and in this case, it'll generate that 12 volts for you, which is very nice because it's a total pain in the ass to generate and create that pulse if you don't have a program and it supports it. I would recommend, I did not purchase the adapter and I am purchasing the adapter now because you know, if you want to connect all these wires up to your dev board, especially if you have JTAG or SWD, there's standard cables and connectors and this is a little dongle that like plugs into the side of the picket five and then gives you all like all the cables and adapters. You can also just craft your own honestly, but it's handy. Okay, but then the best part about this, the thing that I think is the thing that makes it the pick of the year because we just started. So this is the best NPI of the year is the program to go ability, which I think is new and is really neat because a common thing that I've bumped into in my life is I need to, I want to give somebody a programmer. I'm like, okay, program all these boards and I don't want them to run MP lab on their computer. Maybe like, you know, I don't want to install it or there's like driver issues. I just want to be like, look plug this thing in and in the field, you press the button and it programs in the the flash and the fuses, whatever that you need. And once in a while you can get like, I think Seger has one for SWD, but it's really, really expensive. So this is like a hundred bucks. And it has a little micro SD slot on the back. You can see with an MP lab, you have to generate the program file. So you have to like in MP lab, like create the thing that tells it the chip and the code and the fuses. But once you have that program file, you put that on the SD card and then you slot it in. And then if it doesn't connect to USB, you just press the button. And there's like an LED strip that tells you what's going on and it will just program it in the field without a computer as many times as you want, super fast and repeatedly. So there is an LED strip and there's like, there is a little bit of like feedback of like, oh, like blinking purple means it's programming. And you know, it does work in the field without a display. However, I will say I would recommend they have an iOS and Android app that you can use and it will like give you more information like if it couldn't connect or there was a failure in verification. And you can also select which file you want to upload to your device. So if you have like multiple programs and multiple different chips, you're like, oh, this is for the ABR or this is for the UPDI, whatever, you select it and then you press program and go. So basically you have like, you know, you can't compile on the, on through the app, but you can select which program file you want to upload via Bluetooth. And this is iOS, but there's also Android as well available in stock. You can actually buy it. I can't even imagine how much they had to delay this because the Sammy 70 being Cortex and seven, I'm sure was like very limited during the chip shortage. But we're seeing all sorts of hardware we appear. So this just popped up in the digikey slash new. Yeah, I'm pretty, I was pretty sore about microchip because it was really difficult dealing with them. The humans who were just being a little shifty during the park shortage. So but it's all, but you know, all is forgiven. It was a crazy night. I know. What do you like, you know, happy to have them on here. It was tequila. It was not enough sims. And you know, it was desperate times and we all did something. We did get the chips eventually. We did get the chips eventually. It was just, it was, it was desperate. It was, it was, it was now that you can get chips. It was grim. It's a perfect time to pick. So everything's fine now. Love me some microchip. Let's put this is cheaper than the ABR ice or at no ice. So it's like cheaper than most programmers. You get the bluetooth on the go programming and it supports the entire family of chips. What I'm saying is it's all fine. And if you live through the chip shortage, we got hit so bad. And even us were like, you know what, it's totally fine microchip sending you a Christmas car. You're back on the nice list. Okay. Um, it's true. Let's see a video about it. Let's see a video and then that'll be okay. The pick kit five can also program targets without the need for a host computer using the tools programmer to go feature. This allows one of several pre-programmed program images to be selected and read from a fat 32 formatted micro SDHC card inserted into the tool. The memory card can be programmed from the MP lab X IDE in the project properties dialogue. Go to the pick it five category then the programmer to go option category to set up the programming details. Next select the programmer to go menu item from the make and program button. Alternatively use the IP application into advanced mode. Then choose the required hex file. Select the settings tab. Adjust the programming settings as required. Then click the programmer to go button to commence programming the card. When using programmer to go in the field, power for the pick it five can often be obtained from the target hardware. So typically only a connection from the tool to the target is required. Remote programming is initiated by pressing the button under the pick it logo. Press and hold this same button to reset the pick it five in case of error or after inserting a new memory card. Okay, we're going to jump right into new products after we do the code. Yep. Yes, boost user or lose it. Okay, Lady, let's do it. That works. This engineering thing doesn't work out. There's always your singing career Lady to what the baby loves my singing. What is the new products? Okay, we got the tiniest LEDs known to man. They're coming to pack a 50 because they are so small. It's just one millimeter by one millimeter neopixel LEDs. But a photographer is great at macro photography. Look at this like beautiful photo. You can see the little bonded LED in the green, red and blue dyes. There are neopixels. So on the bottom, there's four pads. And you provide power ground did in, did out, you can chain them. They're extremely tiny. They're fairly bright. They draw five milliamps per. I will say, you know, having used these, if you're going to place a ton of them, like dozens on a PCB, you do have to provide some heat sinking somehow. So like the back should be a copper ground plane that, you know, tries to dissipate some of that heat away because you know, if you're first, especially if you're powering them from five volts, you're drawing, you know, five volts and 15 milliamps for all the LEDs. And before you know it, you know, the density makes them heat up quite a bit, but they're tiny and they're cute. And we have them in a strip, pet tape strip of 50 pieces. Not hand solderable. I would use either a hot plate or hot air, but even hot air is tough because again, they're so small, they'll blow away. Next up, a little handy USB switch. We were going to use this for a project. You have one USB port and you have two devices and you want to switch between two different devices, like what would connect to the USB port as the peripheral you want to max. So this is what it is. So if you go to the first photo. So on the top and the bottom of the USB host connection, so it's ground D minus D plus and five volts. And there's a USB-C port with the 5.1K resistors required to kind of make it a standard USB 2.0 port. And then by default, port one is connected. But then if you flip, I think S is pulled low by default to be pulled high, port two is connected. And then if you pull it low, port one is going to be flipped back and forth as much as you want. There's a switch inside, a little chip in the middle that is designed for USB 2, 480 mega bit per second speed. So it can be used with video devices and high speed USB devices. It doesn't cut power, which is a pro or con, just something to watch out for. That's a great feature. This is not what I want. Yeah, it depends. If you want to cut the power, this is not it. It will switch only the data lines, which means your devices stay powered, but they have to know that they're being re enumerated. And I will say that some micro controllers, depending on the USB stack, will not re enumerate. So if you are, you know, I sound like, you know, I switched like a FTDI chip and the USB stick, like a key data key, those worked fine because you recognize, Oh, the data lines went away and then they came back and they were enumerated and came on. But like, you know, I think I had like a trinket and it didn't. So what you want to do is if you have a micro controller and you're running your own USB stack, either add code to detect that you lost USB connection and re enumerate, or you'll want to also connect that like the S pin or whatever that's controlling the S pin, also reset the micro controller to tell it, Hey, I want you to kick again, start over and try re enumerating USB because a lot of them, you know, only will they try the USB connection at the beginning. Again, for my controllers, for a lot of like, your mice, keyboard, you know, USB serial adapter, they'll even be fine because they're all using hard coded USB interfaces that will reconnect when the data reset. So maybe handy. It's not a hub. It's a switch, one or the other. Okay. And the strategy besides you, Lady data, our team, our customers, our community, everyone who does open source hardware and share things, it is this QTPS 61040 booster. I use this chip in a lot of our OLED and TFT displays when I have to generate a 12 volt signal or even higher. It's adjustable. The chip is adjustable. This breakout is not. Again, it's for OLEDs. Sometimes if I have, you know, a lot of LEDs in a row, it's not a very powerful booster. You're only going to get like 40, 50 milliamps, maybe a little bit more if you give it five volts and you only give it three, like 2.8, whatever to six volts input, it'll boost up to 12 volts. And sorry, the input is two to six volts output is 12 volts. Again, you know, 40 to 80 milliamps or so. Not very powerful, but it's inexpensive and small and simple. And, you know, again, when you don't need a lot of current, for example, I talked about high voltage programming microcontrollers earlier, sometimes you just need a 12 volt signal on the reset line to tell it, hey, you know, I'm putting you into this high voltage programming mode. I want you to kick out of whatever, you know, set up your end and permit me to do high voltage programming or your programming e-prom and you need to power it from 12 volts, but you don't need more than 50 milliamps. This will work just fine. It's a lot easier than getting your own separate 12 volt power supply. So a little handy mini booster. Again, I use this chip a lot to replace the fan 5331, which is no longer made. I think we chatted about this on a great search because I need to find a replacement. So I'm going to use this all the time because I'm always like, I need 12 volts or something and this board will supply. Now there's new products. All right, you can use that code. Now it all makes sense to PS Boost. There's also the free stuff there. You can post up your questions. I got a bunch lined up over on Discord. However, we're going to show the top secret why you're doing that. And then we're going to answer your questions. Then we're going to bounce. Here we go to top secret. All right, lady, what is this? Hey, happy new year. This is a design that actually I did a while ago and I made a mistake. I accidentally placed a like 100 ohm resistor instead of 100K resistor. So these were remade, repaired. So this is a TPS 61040, which is a little boost converter I use for OLED boards to generate the 12 volts bias. And I thought it would be nice as a little breakout board so you can just give it like two to six volts and it'll give you 12 volts at like, you know, 40, 50 milliamps or so. So not enough to like drive a ton of LEDs, but enough just to kind of like, oh, you know, I have a 3.3 volt logic thing. I need 12 volts. So this is the tester. I've got a little load switch, 120 ohms and a resistor divider. And I just use this Arduino code to test it and it's passing. So we're going to get this into the shop real soon. All right, what is this? This is the 3.5 inch 480 by 320 TFT capacitive touch feather wing. And last we checked, I had to revise this to see this bar PCB. It's in the way because it's squishing the capacitive touch chip. So revision B came out and then I pulled this down a bit. So now you see there's plenty of clearance. This just goes, this is what just came down basically like a tenth of an inch. But now this is good to go. And I wrote the final test for this, which reads from the SD card. And then you can do a little touch check here and it's multi-touch. So you see you can have up to five fingers at the same time. So a little bit more gap here, but otherwise this is good to go. So I'm going to book this board and then you can plug in any feather and get like a really beautiful capacitive touch display with 480 by 320 pixels. So coming soon. Early data was this. This is a tester for the TS USB 30 breakout I made. So this is at one to two mucks. So basically you have USB host here or here, you know, breakout or USB-C. And then you can select with the S-pin whether you're connected to port two or port one. So you can basically have one hardware connector and then two electrical connections. So you can swap between two devices on, you know, one USB connection. It's on a hub. It's a switch. So you do one or the other. And here's a little tester. So what I did is I have this is like a FTDI cable. And then I also have like a metro with a different FTDI chip. And then this is the USB port connection that goes to here. And this is an RP2040, which we have native USB host support. So when you plug it in, it does an enumeration check and it, you know, verifies. You can even see it's resetting the board. But this works. So you can switch between the two. And so it's going to be in the store real soon. All right, Lady, what was this? This is a tester that I made, the new one for the Max 3421E. We actually had a tester I showed off earlier, which uses a ESP32 S2TFT. But now, you know, I like using a metro style testers. This is M0 because I need something that's teeny USB support. And then what I do is I plug in this FTDI cable. So this will enumerate as an FTDI device. And then I plug it in and I reset the board and it will check that enumeration completed. And it finds the FTDI chip. And that means the USB works and all the pins work. You can also see I'm testing five volt on and off selection. This is good. So it's just an easier tester than the display based one. So it's a little bit more automated. So this is ready to be updated. And I can recycle that old tester for something else. All right, Lady, what was this? This is a Feather NRF52840 jam packed with sensors. We've got RGB and light and humidity and temperature in a neopixel and gyro and accelerometer and magnetometer and PDM microphone. And I don't know, all sorts of stuff. It's some SPI flash here. And then, you know, of course, a blue fruit chip that can run Arduino or circuit Python. So this is the Feather Sands, which has been out of stock for like many years due to part shortages. But I just redesigned it to use all parts I can get. And then I'm also updating the tester. So we can get these back in stock. So the tester has been Picoified. So used to be with the TIN-C36, but the TIN-C36 is unavailable because the chip is no longer being manufactured. So it's got updated to use the NRF52840, sorry, the RP2040. It does program over SWD. It does take a while because it's a really big demo program that like tests all the sensors. But then, hold on, I have to, yeah, there you go. Tester complete. In about 22 seconds, it tests all the sensors and it's ready to go. So we'll get this back into the shop real soon. All right, Leida, what is this? You might say, hey, you should get a clue, but you should get two clues. And this is actually a revision. So this one, you see here, it's got this square LSM6DS33 that got discontinued. So this is the LSM6DS3TR, which is very similar, but not quite identical gyro accelerometer. So I revised this board to now use this part. And pretty much all the other components are the same as I think the flash chip also changed. And then I updated the test software. So this is the old test program. This is the original clue that's in the store. Passes tests. Good to go. And then this is the new version with the updated code that now looks for the LSMDS3TR. Also passes tests. So both are good. This revision, I'm going to order it and we'll get it into the store. It's been out of stock quite a while. So I'm very excited to see this product back in stock. We were clueless? No, we're not. Yes. All right. And then here's a couple of designs that you were showing me. This is, well, it's just one design, just two windings, but this is like a QDPI VFF, but it's for DC power. So it's a DC, a 2.1 millimeter barrel jack or terminal blocks. And there's an MPM 36110, which we have a breakout for. It's a really nice little buck converter. So up to 20 volts input, it'll buck it down to five volts, like one amp. It's a perfect little converter. And honestly, about a wheel of them, I gotta get through them. So this is the board that'll let me get through those shifts. That's absolutely great. Okay, we have a bunch of questions lined up. We are going to zoom on through these. Yeah. Okay. First up, have you seen the MicroPython web library framework from the creator of Flask, micro.dot.readedocs.io? It doesn't run circuit Python yet, but it's something that we're going to look at, although if you're interested in doing that work, a lot of people have, sorry, nobody has offered to do it yet. There might be some porting required to get it running, but I'm sure it's possible and you know, you could have it running on a wide variety of hardware. Next up, is a robot kit that you would recommend for a kid 89 age. Yeah. So check out. So iRobot, they had an education group and it's still there. Even though I think iRobot is known by Amazon or whatever, and there's like some things like that. But the education group has this thing called Root. It was a company that iRobot acquired and it's a really neat whiteboard drawing robot that teaches coding and everything. I'd start off with that then check out Spirit of Stuff and then see like how much of the physical stuff robots, like there's so much that have to go into just to get it to move, that getting the programming down and being able to do something first just really builds that momentum for skills. So check it out. It's one of the ones that we like quite a bit. On the USB switch, what are the hostpad core? Those are if you don't want to use the USB connection because it's like embedded inside a case and you have some other USB port. This one I know is meant to be funny, but I'll ask anyways. Can we PWM the S-PIN to rapidly switch between USB devices? You can, but your host controller won't be very sad. Someone wants to know if our products are available in the Philippines. Yeah, go to the distributor page and then not only... We have a Philippine distributor. And you can also go to our distributors. We like DigiKey. DigiKey Shipstance Philippines? Of course. Can you briefly explain how an array works? Well, an array and like see your Python or something is... It should pick Python. Python. Well, so an array is a wave of having a group of multiple numbers or objects and they're one after the other. So it's like an array because it's like, array means one, two, three, four, infinity. And arrays are really handy because you can usually perform one action all the data at once. Like for example, an image is an array of all the pixels and then there's all the pixels across, all the pixels down. So it's like width times height times pixels is all the data in an image. And that's how like image recognition and transfers done. Okay, if someone wanted to learn about soldering, what are some of the good guides, resources and more out there? We have the Collins Guide to Soldering, which is really good. NASA, believe it or not, has an excellent free resource. We've linked to it many, many times on our blog. And more, I would say also search data for blog because we catalog all the resources and links. You can never have too many songs. Yes. And with that, I think we got through a lot of them. Timing just on time. Right on dot. So that is our show this week. Thank you, everyone, for joining us on this first Ask an Engineer of 2024. We very much appreciate it. The code is TPS Boost. We'll be here next week unless something comes up. But we're here for over like 10 plus years now. 10 years ago, I know where I was. Yeah, we know exactly where we were. 10 years ago. Yeah. Probably have more gray hair. Yeah. So thank you so much, everyone. This has been an Adafruit production. Here is your moment, Zena. Goodnight, everybody. Happy new year.