 Welcome to my desk all sorts of hardware hacking here this weekend. Let's get right into it. Let's go to the overhead and I'll show off some hardware. So one thing is we finally got the Qalia ESP32 S3 released which means that if you want to do stuff with these cool weird displays like round displays bar square etc anything with an RGB 4666 40 pin connector we now have this available and we also merge in circuit circuit python support you can actually see the repel here on the screen so if I you can see the text show up there it's kind of blue it's so bright but this is a 480 by 480 display and we've tested up to 720 by 720 so the demo I've got running here is from before I had the project that would go to the internet you know get the geolocation IP address and then download a different phase of the moon and so here we've got a nice moon right now it's just showing the full moon but I'm going to have it auto detect what the phase is but the color looks much better now before it was a little bit greenish bluish because we were like using the wrong pins and like I didn't realize that and you know you can watch the previous videos also remove the neopixel because it was you know we actually didn't even have an extra pin for a neopixel and we did the silk screen and fixed this so that the the IO expander isquared c address does not conflict with a capacitive touch overlay turns out like oh x38 is used by everything um so if you go back to the computer I can show uh so this is uh the sketch so one of things that you have to do when you have these displays is each one has its own initialization code over spi um and the initialization has to be written over isquared c using the expander because we actually don't even have enough pins to have a separate spi port and so um the init code you know it looks very similar to uh like st7789 or iline 9341 it's just a bunch of like commands and data to set like the resolution and the gamma and it's all totally undocumented just kind of get this blob of text um you set up the IO expander um and uh one of the things we added is kind of native low level support for IO expanders and so um you can use them um like you can basically without needing a driver you set up this idea of a um IO expander and then you can like twiddle the bits directly so it's one of the few drivers that is built into um circuit python directly usually we have to like load a driver like the mcp23017 or mcp2308 or aw9513 um but in this case it's built in uh so that's why you're like hey where's like the driver it doesn't exist uh we just initialize it with um the we just tell it like hey there's the address and um initialize it and then uh you have to set the timings so one thing that's really nice is we move to idf5 5.1 um thanks to scott for doing the merch for that and ever since we did that the um resolution is much more stable like it used to be that we would actually if you set the frequency for the pin clock too high the uh ps ram couldn't clock out the data fast enough and eventually you'd get like this like weird shimmery effect or you'd get like chunks that were missing as a 5.1 it's a lot lot better much more stable like i mean pretty much rock solid um you know definitely if you're loading from disk the image will get uh flickering and staticky but um it doesn't happen for general use cases and then of course uh you know we want verified that wi-fi still works with everything just you know you never know like as we go to idf5 a lot of stuff can break but so far so good so it's it's kind of came together very nicely and this will be part of circuit python 9 um so if you go to um circuit python we like just merged these uh prs including one pr for these long bar displays and one thing that i've learned about these long bar displays is that they often have offset like over scans um the display thinks it's 960 by 600 but you know the memory is mapped oddly so you don't get that full amount visible so kind of weird um and you have to initialize it but you have to like write that much data you can't like change you can't send less data it needs at least certain number of pixels on the hsync for it to uh synchronize i guess i don't know i don't know what the deal is um and then uh you know we've been porting over all these these init sequences for all of these funky displays so thanks to scott and jebler who've been like working uh non-stop to get that added in um but it's getting added in um other news is uh 751s are back in stock ish kind of sort of we're getting there um we got a shipment of chips and so um the grand central's been in stock the feather m4 is going to be in stock soon and we're working on the hallowing m4 um the feather m4 uh the classic is in stock right now so if you've been waiting for these we finally have it like before we only got a couple hundred chips at time but this time we actually got a couple thousand so you're able to fabricate a big chunk of these feather m4s and they're in stock and we're going to see you try to get the monster mask and the hallowing m4 in stock hopefully before spooky season ends um so that's good and then um you know the big news this week is the raspberry pi 5 got announced no it's not released it's just announced um so you know people know about it but it's not actually going to be available for sale for uh i think until at least the end of october but it's pretty cool um you know much faster chip really interesting south bridge you know this io expander um that they designed um you know like i can tell that they probably tried to negotiate really hard with their usb hub and ethernet and you know whatever other io expander um suppliers but eventually you know for them cost is is kind of the most important thing and in order to get the cost down uh they designed them on silicon so um a pretty a pretty big deal and still has the two micro hdmi but adds a little uart connection which is kind of neat um and then there is an rtc and then a battery that they're going to be selling that goes with it uh and this allows it to even if you don't have ethernet or wi-fi to keep track of time you know we have pi rtc boards um that you can use as well you know if you want like uh you know ultra ultra low power like basically you know the whole thing can shut down i don't know what the sleep um current is for the the pi five but you can always use an external one but what's nice is apparently um it goes through the io controller and then it can wake up uh from sleep so it can actually handle the shutdown and then uh speaking of shutdown there is an on off switch just like kind of a cool thing press the button to turn on and off um and then because it's kind of a bigger chip there is a fan controller that they um have that they're selling with the case and the poe connector moved over here so it's kind of nice because it was a little bit in the way up here this way you can actually use um bonnets and they're nice and flat and then um the really cool thing is that they've added this pc ie slot over here so the camera and um display so they're now four lane mippy dsi csi this is the same i believe uh pitch as the pi zero so you'll have to use a pi zero adapter cable it's not like the big chunky connector that we actually covered on the great search a little bit ago and uh the pc ie is interesting because it allows you to use like disk drives cellular modems uh uh uh ai like coral the coral card which lets you add more um machine learning computation um like graphics cards just like accessories i think that comes with pc ie for your laptop or your computer is also available so um we don't do pre-orders because adafruit never does pre-orders we we ship you the thing we want to charge you when we have it available because you know you never know um but you can sign up and then as soon as they come in we will notify you and you'll get a shop to order it uh it's going to be of course one um order per customer um and then you'll need two factor uh as well but it's a good time set up your account get everything ready make sure your paypal and credit cards all up to date shipping address so that when they come back into stock you can check out immediately and i think that's that so let's get on to the great search a great search brought to you by digikey and adafruit thank you digikey every week ladies and gentlemen power of engineering help you guess you find the things that you're looking for on digikey.com adafruit what are you looking for on digikey.com this week well uh in celebration of the raspberry pi 5 release um there is this new thing the pc ie connector slot and there's going to be an m2 hat that comes out this has been announced from you know raspberry pi training company uh so you can plug in you know anything that has an m2 uh connection which i don't have an m2 card here i don't think i don't know i do let's go quickly to the overhead i'll just show it off because i happen to i happen to have one so this is my this is what uh m2 looks like this is a long this is a 2280 m2 and we covered m2 connectors before but this is kind of you know a thin pcb and it plugs into it snaps into um you know these m2 connectors the notch has to line up and then you could add you know very common thing is adding disk storage but also cellular modules are pretty common like security tokens you know whatever uh accelerators and uh other configurations so m2 is the physical format pcie is the um standard of connectivity so let's go back to the computer and i'll i'll show that because it was kind of mixed up in my mind i was like oh is is m2 and pcie the same thing no but oh there's sometimes you can use m2 shapes with pcie wiring um so pcie comes in um a couple different sizes there's up here four 16 and one and the one four and 16 is how many lanes of differential data they carry in this case on the raspberry pi five if i'm not mistaken it's a single lane which is still plenty you know like it's it's a lot there's other lanes but apparently they're used for other tasks maybe to control communicate with the southbridge or whatever so um however you know this is just an electrical stand this is a mechanical shape so if you come down here and there's another pcie you can see um a single slot let's see go down okay so they say like okay here's here's how many um pins you get let me just zoom out here so if you have one lane you only have like this 18 pin times two sides um so 36 pins total configuration and then if it's four lanes it keeps going you have like another set of pins and it goes up to 64 and then if you keep going up to eight pins it's 49 so you know 98 and then all the way you know 16 full lanes which is like some massive video card you'd get 82 pins or 164 total so what we want to do is we want to get a pcie connector we can make a little adapter from the flex cable on the raspberry pi to pcie one x so let's go to doki and do that so good news is that if you just type in pcie it'll actually come up with a bunch of edge board connectors which is what we're looking for so um just take a look yeah these look good so one thing is i do want to have it stick up not to the side because some cards have like the other meant to plug into you know motherboard and so they're they're slotted and they can be a little wide i don't want something that requires right angle connection um unless you know the pcb is cut over i i prefer to have it just be vertical and be done with it because that way you can plug it in and you know it's nice is that you can get a foo hole as well as surface mount but i'm going to be looking for surface mount so let's start looking we're going to look for active and uh let's just start with that so it's active and then like normally stocking and no marketplace so we can just narrow it down all ready to 320 so the next thing is we need to know the card thickness so it looks like there's like slim cards actually let's do the positions so as we looked over oh sorry okay as we looked over here for 1x it's 36 pins so let's do 36 pins and then card thickness yeah that's right you know there's uh it's basically one pcb thick it's just card edge connect and then we can decide how we want it to to be connected do we want through hole like this or surface mount i want to go with surface mount so let's go to surface mount although there is through hole as well and then um let's see what we got here we got a couple options um what i like about this one is it even comes with a pick in place uh connector but you can see uh it's got a nice um solder retention the big tabs on the side uh to make it sit in place this one doesn't look quite right this one looks good looks like there's actually quite a few options which is kind of nice um i don't really care if it's well i guess we can get in tape and reel to start uh not tray because you know if we want to pick in place and i want to make sure that it comes in the right uh in tape it'll be a very thick tape uh yeah these all say pick in place so that's good contact material i don't really know if that makes a difference and then let's just look at uh you know pricing let's see what's available so this one i think is some odd thing but this looks right 36 pin position you know two dollars let's look at the 360 of it let's see if i'm loaded up yeah looks nice right like oh there's even a little board guide big solder tabs and then solder connections so you don't have to tell people like don't yank back and forth just slot it down uh but this connector would look really good and could uh would make for a nice adapter so then all we need to do is make a pcb that takes the fpc connector that's used on the pi five and just follow the pin out wire directly to the pcie slot because it's just a mechanical change and we'll go then so this is my pick from amphenol the pc i mini express smt module and that's great church okay that's our sheriff Lewis we we kept it 20 minutes we're trying to get you in and out on the weekends because we know you got a lot to do this week we want to recap make sure we got the great search tons of stuff ahead this week thank you so much everyone for joining us we will see you throughout the week bye everybody