 And welcome to Descalady Aida. Hey everybody, and welcome to Descalady Aida. We are doing a Saturday evening broadcast as of a Sunday, because tomorrow evening we're booked for some stuff. So we thought we would do a late night check-in tonight, see what's going on on my desk. We've got all sorts of news and updates. I have news and updates. Do you want to give them the news and updates and I'll do the electronics? I do. Here is what we're doing. I have an update. Well, first let me say, what would we do this week? On Tuesday, I think we mentioned that we were going to do some food bank stuff. So we volunteered at Feeding NYC. We have some stuff for our YouTube page and more. If you're interested in FeedingNYC.org, I did turkeys and box demolition. There was 8,500 turkeys, I think, all together. So those goes to all the homeless shelters around New York City. And then on Thursday, before we had some Thanksgiving dinner, Lady Aida and I went to see a team member who was recovering from surgery in the hospital. And this is the basket the team made. Here's Lady Aida outside the place. And here is Roxanne. Roxanne's been with us for almost like 10 years. And we went and visited Roxanne. And our entire team sent their love and well wishes and more. So we did that. And then if you notice on the right-hand side. Trader Joe snacks. Notice on the right-hand side here, we have a PowerBook 180. So archive.org fixed the issue with a Prince floppy. There was a naming issue. So for the folks who tuned in last week, this is fixed. So you can go to archive.org and just search for Prince floppy. And you'll be able to see this disk that we recovered the data off of. And you'll dash had one. And this is when Prince changed the name to the artist formerly known as Prince. And you have this cool symbol on it. There's a tiff, a real neat story behind it and more. So that's the news for this week. And then today, I got a chance to work with the team. And we got a bunch of orders out. Thank you, everyone. Aida Fruit was pretty quiet for some of the manufacturing. We were still doing lots of stuff. Big rounds of receiving and pallets came in. Puppets there to help. And here's my just got finished shipping, running around selfie. That's mandatory nowadays. So take it away, Aida. What's going on this week? OK, it's this week. We, yeah, it's been, well, a short week and a long week. Short week because, of course, we were closed on Thursday. And yesterday, a lot of people took the day off. That also meant I got some time to release it down and work on some prototypes that I've been meaning to wrap up. So I worked on the ESP32 S2 QT pie. Just go to the overhead and I can show it off. All right, I'm going to get it over overhead mode. So we've got, historically, the SAMD21 version and the RP2040, these are both based off of the Seed Shal pinout. They made this board called the Shal with the SAMD21. And I thought it was really cute, but it was just missing a STEMI QT connector that would let it plug into many sensors and displays and other I2C devices. We just love these little plug-and-play cables that SparkFun came up with. So this is actually kind of interesting. It's like a merging of a Seed board design and a SparkFun standard for I2C sensors. But we see good ideas and we're like, let's use them. That's my policy. So having done a SAMD21, which is good, and then when the RP2040 came out, we made a double-sided version that's nice and powerful with the new RP2040. I thought it'd be cool to make a version with the ESP32 S2, which is the ESP32 chip that has native USB and Wi-Fi. So it's, you know, it would be a nice little upgrade. It's like, you know, Cortex-M0, like dual-core Cortex-M0, like High Speed, Circuit Python, one's really well on this one. And then the ESP32 S2 would make a great board. And then, of course, the S3, when they have chips available, all we spin this design for the S3 as well. So the S2, what I was waiting for is this particular chip, which actually ended up de-soldering from a module, is the ESP32 S2R4N2, or maybe it's the N4R2. It's one or the other. And it's the version that has built-in four megabytes of flash and two megabytes of PSRAM. And you really want that PSRAM, like I designed this board before the PSRAM version chip was available. And I didn't release it because it's like, you know, until you have PSRAM, it's like this chip is not, Circuit Python, it's not that usable. Like you can do some things, but it's really, really hard because the internal memory is only like 300 or 400K or 500K, and that's a lot of RAM. But like the minute you do SSL and you're like getting JSON data from the internet, you run through it very quickly. And so thankfully, there's now this version, like I said, which has, you know, this chip has the flash and RAM into it. It's a package that's bonded inside. So that's really neat. I really like this process. I did that because it means that, you know, I can make this design here, which is double-sided, yes. Because again, I really want to have that semi-QT connector in the two buttons. And then before you know it, there's really no space for a chip on the top. So I'd rather just do double-sided. So there's the ESP32 S2, L402 capacitors and resistors and the crystal and all that stuff. And then you can see this little opened up area. This is where the antenna comes out on the other side through the board to make the antenna launch antenna. And we actually covered this antenna on the great search a few months ago. It's a 2.4 gigahertz mini antenna. We use this on the circuit playground boot fruit. It's a perfectly fine antenna and it works nicely enough. And then on the top, we have a neopixel boot and reset and then a semi-QT connector. So this is actually set up to be a demo with Adafruit IO. Let's see if we can get this demo up and running. So you've got here, you know, an I-squirt C OLED. It's connecting to Adafruit IO and it's writing temperature and humidity data. And then if I go to the computer, I've got here the dashboard that, you know, showing the data being sent. And then if I hit this button, you can see here this, you know, this reacts to the button press. So that's how I know it. It's working nicely. Here any temperature data, transmitting just fine. So this is a good demo because it's like, it's Wi-Fi, it's SSL, you know, it's sending data very quickly. So it's a good test. You know, yeah, the antenna is not super powerful, but I'll show, I have another option for those who want it. So the next thing that we have to do is do the silkscreen design. And Phil B does our silkscreen design. So this is kind of what he came up with. He exports the Gerbers and then draws an illustrator. He has a one minute video that he's done on the process and then he posted this. And the top is sort of standard. It's very similar to the other ones. In the bottom, it's mostly like a game of like, what can you fit where? Oh, this version, because I figured some people might want to run this off the battery, I put a little battery input pads on the bottom. So trying to stick with that, you know, shall pin out, but not, but still add more capability. And then we chatted and we were like, okay, let's just change the Adafruit logo a little bit. But then, you know, I'm basically gonna take the silkscreen, import the bitmap and take Eagle CAD and then export it to the Gerber files to send off. And what's interesting about this design is I'm going with a four layer design, which I've never done before. Usually I would do a two layer. And if I'm using something like a module, like an ESP32 module, I will do a four two layer design because the module itself has a ground plane. But because I'm using the chip here, and the prototype is a two layer, but because it's a chip and there's no, you know, the ground plane is really cut up by all the components. Like even if you have ground on both sides, it's never quite enough. And you know, there's not a lot of capacitance on the board because it can only fit like two or three big caps on the 3.3 volt line. And you really need a lot of capacitance to deal with the wifi signal. I actually designed this as a four layer board. And I try not to do four layer boards because they're more expensive and they take longer. They're just more risk with them, but this board is really small. So I don't think the cost is gonna be very much. And I don't think it's gonna increase the time it's gonna take to make PCBs. Like maybe I'll take a week instead of three days or whatever, which is still fine. And I think it's worth it because again, it's a chip, not a module. And the module has its own ground plane and the chip of course is just a chip. So you have to provide your own. So layer two is ground, layer three is 3.3 volts and I have signal on top and bottom. And there's still a little bit of a, you know, ground plane, but, you know, as much as possible I punch through into the, into the inner layer. So it's gonna be really exciting because I've never done a four layer board order, but like, I think this is a good one to deal with. All right. Any, any questions? No, I would just say that folks were wondering how the double sided would be. So quite dense. And then Lisa did the new cutie pie. Yeah, it's dense, but you know, I like to, you know, I kind of like to fit everything that makes sense to fit in. And I think, you know, having the two buttons and the USB-C and the STEMIQT connector, especially is quite large. I mean, it's a very small connector, but it's, it's large compared to a lot of components. So it's double sided, but you know, I find that you first off, you could always, you know, have a cut out if you're doing cast-related pads, but a lot of people aren't using the cast-related pads to be honest. A lot of people are, they're happy to solder it in with headers. And of course there's header pads. So the only thing is, you know, yeah, the antenna is kind of small. So I made an alternate version. Let's go back to the overhead. Sure. And this version has a UFL connector. And so we stock in the shop, these little UFL to Wi-Fi antenna thingies. And let's see if I can unplug this. I have other questions. Yeah, go for questions. Okay, I can do this one. Does this have to be FCC certified? No, because it's a prototyping board, but if you need to use it in something, you should make sure you work with an expert who will talk to you about certification. Yes, if you put in a product, you have to certify it. This is a development board. I probably will try to get this FCC certified eventually, but it's not going to be cashed. We do have some certifications. You can look at some of our boards. Next up, how much, if any, do you use auto-router? I'd not use the auto-router for this. I always, I always wear it by hand. I don't even know if there's an auto-router in Eaglecat anymore anyways. I don't know either. Yeah. You got anything else? I'm now focusing on the lucky board. Okay, great. What's next? Okay, so just showing, if we go to the overhead, sorry, the computer, I can show that, you know, with the antenna, I can see, if it's the local, I'll move this to the side. You know, I'm getting, you know, 50, negative 50, the smaller the number, sorry, the larger the number, negative, the better. And so, you know, in my spectrum, Wi-Fi, I think that's our local Wi-Fi hotspot. That's 55. This is pretty good, you know. I think, you know, if you always use a bigger antenna if you really want better signal, but I think this is okay. And I get, I think also, again, when I update this to be a four layer, that might help a little bit too. But, you know, I can always revise it. So I'm gonna send out these PCBs, but I thought I would do the great search because I thought, actually, people won't be interested in your cell characters. All right, the great search brought to you by DigiKin. Every single week, lady, it uses all of her powers of engineering to show you how to search for things on digikey.com. Think of Digikey. What is the great search this week, Lady Aida? Okay, so this week, we're doing a UFL connector. So let's go to the overhead real fast and I'll show it off because it's small. So for this design, you know, I have a version that has a little mini 2.4 gigahertz antenna and it's a very small antenna. And it's, you know, it's okay. Like these are really cute little antennas from Johansson. But if you want a bigger antenna, you can always go with the UFL connector. Now, there's not space for both, but I can make two versions of the board one of each. So this version has a UFL connector. And UFL connectors are, or, you know, I think technically they're micro-FL, I think U is micro, but I call them UFLs. So these are a standard connector type. This is what the bottom looks like. And then on the top, it's got this little ring and inside is the center. And these are really good for, I think up to six gigahertz. They're extremely small. They're extremely common. They're good for like, maybe like 50, up to 50, like 10 to 50 reconnections. Now you're not meant to like unplug and plug them, but you can do like 50 reconnects with them. And then you can get, like this is a little antenna that has a UFL connector already on it. There's also UFL to SMA connectors. Maybe I'll try to find this as well. But these are really common and they're well understood. Like when you see these people like, oh, I know what that is. That's an ORF connector. So you'll see these a lot on dev boards. We use them a lot on dev boards, but you'll also see them on other dev boards. And also sometimes you'll see modules that have UFL connectors. That said, they don't have strain relief. So, you know, one of the things you have to watch out for is if you do use them on like SMA where there's like a screw type things in and you know, you can keep it from yanking out. There's really, these parts you can snap the antenna in and it is a little bit, you know, it's a little bit solid and it can twist, but they pop out pretty easily too. So just keep that in mind that if you want to have something with UFL, like it can rip off fairly easily, you know, it's not a through-hole connector, it's purely SMT. Okay. So let's go to, I'll show you, there's a lot of options available. So yeah, they're called UFL. So small UFL connector and they're going to be under RF connectors. Oh, you know what? I think you have to do U.FL. That's the technical name for them. I, again, I usually leave the dot out, but usually you normally would. So you can see there's connectors and cable assemblies. Let's just check out cable assemblies really fast. You can see, you know, you can get UFL to like anything adapters. So that's another thing. Oftentimes you don't have space for like MMCX or SMA or whatever, but you can get, you know, connectors of adapters of all sorts. So you see these are very standard. You see pigtails. You can connect your own things, UFL to UFL. So quite nice. I guess they're sometimes called UMCC as well. That's another name for them. So if you do want to make it, get an adapter, check out here and then you can pick, you know, BNC, you know, if you want for the other side. Okay, great. So that said, back at connectors, we can see that, you know, these are actually kind of like immediately it pops up. So I don't think this is, yeah, I guess this is a through-hole version, which I've never seen before, but you want, you know, UFL series. So let's look for active, you know, UFL. These all look fine. I think, you know, gigahertz, you know, we want three to nine gigahertz. I will say, oh, something changed for the GQ search, by the way. If you select things now, it will, if it's not, if it changes what's available, you'll see like, because I selected through-hole, a lot of the options are no longer available. So it shows you what else got filtered out. This is new because this wasn't here like last week because I use the GQ search like every week, but it is nice to see like, without having to filter, you can quickly see like, what are you gonna lose out of? So if you have multiple things that you're searching for, that can help. So let's do the surface mount and yeah, lots of options. So, you know, you can sort by price. These are, you know, their pennies pretty much. The first one that came up that looked fine to me was this from TE activity. They make good connectors. They have, you know, 150,000 in stock. So you don't have to worry about not being able to get these, not affected by a silicon shortage, but there are also other vendors available. The only thing I'll make a note of, the last thing to mention with UFL connectors before we get back to questions is there isn't a photo of the bottom, but let me see. I think we took a photo of the bottom. No, we didn't. So on the bottom, there's two contacts, but only one of them actually feeds through. And just remember when you do your footprint for that to make sure you don't accidentally get the part rotated because it looks like it's symmetric, but it's actually not. On the bottom, there's only one pad that feeds into the antenna input. And if you get that wrong, as I have before, you have to rework all your boards because the antenna isn't going in. So if you do use these, one of the tests you might wanna do is when you're doing the assembly test because it's again, visually you can't tell that it's wrong. Have someone plug in an antenna and check the RSSI, the signal strength to make sure that they didn't flip it around 180. That's a tip for you from someone who's made this mistake before. I am. Yeah. All right, and the... That's a great search. Let's do questions. So let me roll the outro. All right, so here's some questions. Will this support, this is a board you showed before, BLE and CircuitPython and Arduino? This will support Arduino and CircuitPython and it does already. It doesn't have BLE because the chip doesn't have BLE but the S3 chip, which is like slowly coming out, might be a drop-in replacement. So when that's available and it has PSRAM, that does have BLE support. Okay, I'm talking about, it says, yay. You fell on Aid Fruit Board. I really liked a particle feather boards for my longer range Wi-Fi Bluetooth stuff because of the external antenna capabilities. Yes, exactly. And then next up, what's the nominal range for the non-UFL? It's hard to tell because it depends on what's on the other side but I think it should still be like at least 50 feet from the access point. I mean, I have to compare it with the other, the feather with a built-in antenna to check the RSSI, which it's affected by a lot of things. But this thing doesn't seem too bad. It seems about what I would get with maybe it's half as much as a PCB trace end. But it's much, much smaller, right? That's the thing, very small antenna. Okay. And I think that is going to be it. Okay. All right, great. We got to do everything. All right, we'll have a quick- Oh, right before the finish line. Any idea of the power drawn deep sleep? It's gonna be about 100 microamps, which is kind of what the ESP32 S2 does in sleep. It's 70, 80, 100. One more question. You know what, I have to remember, we're supposed to do things like tell people like to buy stuff. Oh yeah. What's a- It's a sale. Well, you know, if they want to. How's the NRF 52, 840 availability going forward? Do you know? I mean, Nordic only has one job and that's to make sure that there's NRF 52, 840s. I know that their chips are used in like Apple AirTags and watches and stuff. So there is, there's a lot of demand but I think it seems to be okay. Like we've been able to get NRF 52, 840s. It's the, it's SAMDs and STMs that are like really challenging right now. All right. And then any plans for a tricolor mag tag? Can I use a three color screen on mine? Yeah, you can swap it out. Yeah, you can swap it out. We don't have a plan. We don't have a plan, but the reason why, it's a good reason, it takes a lot longer to refresh tricolor and so your battery is on the entire time and we didn't want to, we thought it would reduce the lifetime because people want to have it on for a long time. So we decided to go with grayscale because it refreshes in like a second. Yeah. Okay. Reasons. I think that is it. Okay, great. Oh, someone said, what's the voice behind the camera? That's me. It's us. Hello. That's the voice behind the camera. Okay. That's the first one I'm gonna, also the person who did the shipping today. Did some shipping and then I did a bunch of stuff for you and then I did a bunch of stuff for a bunch of different departments because I am here to serve and help. That's my job. That's the desk of Lady Aida. We'll be here all week during the week. We've got shows on, I think, starting back up on. We have Wednesday. For sure, Wednesday is show and tell and ask an engineer and then Thursday, no, and Pedro, I believe we're back and then. I think Scott's back too. Scott's back and then also JP I think is back towards the end of the week. People are gonna be back and then they're gonna go again and they'll be back again. So have a happy, safe, rest holiday and thank you everyone. Oh, can you go to Adafruit.com? Lamar, I gotta remember. Yeah. Whoops. So we have a sale going on right now and basically it's fun to put stuff in your cart because you can get free stuff. Now we only have a few more pink feathers left. So do you wanna go to slash free? Adafruit.com slash free. Hold on, there's so much stuff going on. Yeah, that's free. Okay. So you get a pink feather. But we're running out. We're running out like this. We were only going to go for Friday and we had enough to kind of get us through Saturday. I have more PCBs in order but it's like they're taking forever to get you. So we're gonna give away a black feather. Black feather. Like a crow. Go to Adafruit.com and check out the sale. Use the code ADATY, thank you. You get 15% all items in stock and you get all the freebies and a bunch of other stuff. Except gift certificates. Except gift certificates and whatever things. And software. Well, of course, that's, you know. But pretty much everything, like 99.9% of it. And we don't do back orders. So anything you order will arrive. We actually have it. We do not take back orders. If it says it's in stock, it is literally in stock. Like it's on a shelf in New York City. All right, thank you so much, Jess. So I'm gonna put a funny man behind the curtain. Wizard of Oz saying yeah, maybe it's the one. There is a green screen, so yeah. There is a green screen. This is the Emerald City. All right, well thank you everybody. We'll see everybody next week. That is Dessalateda. Bye everybody.