 New products new new new new new new new it's time for new products. That's Christmas Day Day Edition I here at my desk a lady Ada look at the couple of the new products that we've put in over the last week or two So let's kick it off First up. We've got an updated product. This is the IS 31 FL 37 31 PWM LED Matrix drivers. This is our Charlie Plex driver. It can drive 9 by 16 LED's because it Charlie Plex is them We saw the grids as well like LED grids with SMT LEDs This is the driver board also handy if you're just driving like a gigantic LED matrix This is a very inexpensive way to drive all those LEDs We've updated it by adding stem and cuticle connectors because it's all I squared C controllable So it's otherwise the same pinouts on the top and the left We just had a little spot on the right added those I squared C ports and we also updated the silk screen next up Next up another updated product. This is the chrono dot from mace tech This is kind of famous. This is a really early product. We used to sell it's a product number 255 which is many many many years ago And this used to come with a DS 3231 which due to the silicon shortage has been totally unavailable And so you can see here in this image and that comes with a max three one Two eight, sorry three one three two eight We actually covered a three one three two eight three one three two nine on IMPI a couple months ago if you remember what's interesting about this chip is it's also an ultra precise RTC from Maxim but what's extra interesting is it is pin. Sorry. It's not pin compatible. It is For more compatible with the DS 3231 RTC library And so if you were using the DS 3231 and you want to update to this new 31 328 This board is pretty much drop in compatible. You can use your old existing code I think it basically has the same precision The one thing that didn't get added To the update chip the three one three two eight is an e-prom which is why there's if you see at the bottom there There's a separate iSquadce e-prom chip, but it's on the same iSquadce bus So it's like a nice little update and most important. It's available and you can actually buy it unlike the s3 to 30 ones Which are tough to get Next up we have two new products of the same family the PC a 9546 is a four-channel iSquadce Expander, so this is really handy when you have say for You know say DS 3231s RTCs or Humanity sensors or accelerometers or other devices on the iSquadce bus that use the same iSquadce address And so you're limited you can only you know use one per bus, but you want to say control four of them This is pretty common people have like you know motor driver. Maybe or they want multiple accelerometers or multiple gyros You know or multiple Humanity or pressure sensors because you want to measure pressure in different locations So this chip will take one iSquadce you port in and allow you to select Four different outputs by writing the address to the app You know the port number you want to route your signal to I think on to address 70 and the chip itself also has three address pins So you can change that if you're like trying to address you know chips that use address 70 Of course you can change it to be you know 71 to 77 And that way you can address multiple chips on the same port. We carry the TCA 95 48 Which is the eight channel version of this chip, but maybe you don't need as big a version I don't need as many ports. You'll need eight usually four Go for it. We also have this chip in a stem IQt format So solder free if you have our stem IQt or quick boards Plug and play and again it gives you four channel iSquadce multiplexing This board also in addition to multiplexing has a three-volt level shifter because you know Maybe you have an Arduino UNO on one side That's five volt logic and power and you want to address iSquadce devices that use three volt logic and power So it'll it'll allow you if you go to the back the one with the quarter That image if you see on the back of the V out Jumper by default it uses the same voltage as the input to the V plus But if you'd like you can cut and adjust that trace to use three volts And so it'll do a lot three volt logic level shift down again This is the four-channel version of the eight channel iSquadce multiplexer We put in a while ago So choose which one either the breadboard version or the stem IQt version as you need she's wisely she's wisely Next up more Stem IQt accessories this one is going to be very handy for people who want to Connect to five volt power or five volt logic iSquadce devices on the most common three volt power and logic Microcontrollers and microcomputers are available now. So if you have you know old-style Arduino UNO and you want to connect to You know for example the Sen 55 or there's some you know, maybe GPO expanders or RTCs or other sensors that use five volt power five volt logic You're good to go but nowadays a lot of people are using rp2040 pico's or esp32's or Raspberry Pi computers Or even you know nr52 or other modern Arduino compatible or microcontroller boards They have three volt power three volt logic and it's not it's pretty common to see down shifters But up shifters are a little more rare. So this is an up shifter you give it three to five volt power and logic in and there's a Switch cap charge pump converter that'll give you 100 milliamp continuous or 250 milliamp peak It's the AP 32 sorry AP 3602 a drive a datasheet attached and it'll boost up that power from three to five volts and it'll shift up the iSquadce logic from three to five volts as well. So again handy. There's a couple sensors and devices. We've seen where You know, they they want five volts. There's a motor in the sensor or there's You know, it's an old-style chip and so it uses five volts not three volt logic And you want to connect to that with your modern three volt microcontroller There's also if you go to the quarter shot On the back, you'll see there's the iSquadce jumper If you want to have power be five volt but the logic level be three volt you can cut and set that jumper To use the logic that keep the iSquadce at the same logic level. Don't shift that up We've seen that a couple devices as well where again the power is five volts But the logic level is three so you can use this board either way It's also breadboard compatible if you're not using stem acuity at all Just you know solder in the header and use it on your favorite breadboard All right in the stars show time besides you lady our team our customers our community Everybody who's been helping us out especially why we took a little bit of time off to bring kiddo into the world is Scorpio kiddo is a Scorpio. So this is I Wanted to make this get this board out before the end of the year didn't quite get it out for Scorpio season But that's okay. It was it was pretty close And I want to get this up for the end of the year so this the RP 2040 Scorpio board is Finally out and available. It's gonna be in the shop this week. So this is an RP 2040 And this board is feather shaped It has all the feather pins that you know and love but on the end there There's another two by eight header one woe is ground the other is eight contiguous pins connected to the PIO State machine inside and they're contiguous and so they're really good for driving lots of neopixels especially since the RP 2040 has 164k of RAM so there's a ton of RAM it's got the PIO state machine which is excellent for driving neopixels It's a you know dual core So of course you can have all your in addition to having all your neopixels DMA You could have two cores if you want to do extra computation on one core and then Blit in the other one and maybe get Wi-Fi data or something and and use that to calculate or adjust what the Graphics being shown on your neopixels are But the RP 2040 makes for a perfect neopixel driver And so this board is basically designed specifically for you want to feather You want RP 2040 you want to drive a ton of neopixels And we've got Arduino and circuit Python code that does that again all with DMA So you don't have to sit there and like toggle each pin and you know hold your processor hostage The RP IO peripheral goes off and does it and you can you know check when it's done And then you can compute the next frame of data. So it's got usb-c. It's got battery And the important part is on the right hand side of the board Let's go Yeah, on the right hand side of the board so on the left hand side you get like that, you know The business end usb-c battery the reset button Regulator battery charging middle is the RP 2040 chip There's a small neopixel on D4 if you want to have on board Notification to tell you what the status is There's eight megabytes of flashed memory so you can use that for your program storage or of course Both an Arduino and circuit Python you can put a file system on it if you want to have images, you know configuration data What have you stored on that flash memory? There's tons of flashed memory There's a boot pin boot button for entering into boot mode. That's also available as a user button I think it's on GPIO 7 So you can once the RP 2040 is booted that button becomes a user input button There's a vertical stem IQ t-pan and then below that you see a chip and some resistor packs That is the logic level shifter So even though a lot of modern neopixel strips are happy with three-volt logic Not all them are especially if you're giving them 5.5 volts of power and so there's an on-board logic level shifter that'll take those eight signal pens And shift them up. I think it's pins 16 to 23 So those GPIOs get shifted up from three volts to five volts whatever is on the USB port and then there's 100 ohm resistors just to kind of reduce any ringing effect, especially with long wires going into your neopixels and then on the back if you look at a quarter shot there is If you happen to want to configure it on the back You can change the V logic the logic level output from five volts to three volts say you don't want to drive five volts signal into something you're driving Non-neopixels or something that requires a lower level voltage and also you can change the direction of that shifter. It's nominally only output but if you want to turn this into say a logic analyzer you can Change the direction to be inputs and it's five volts safe because it's using a five volts safe level shifter and then That signal could come in and you could turn this into say like an eight-channel logic analyzer and use some open-source software to do so but we really think this would be great for people making LED art because You know there's we've seen a lot of art projects in New York and online where people have you know massive displays of Neopixels Oftentimes using unfortunately chips and microcontrollers are no longer available or they're very hard to get right now But the RP2040 is really easy to get So we think using the Neopixel 8 library that we've got or you can even Because this chip has enough RAM and it's pretty fast. You can use the Neopixel 8 HDR library and that adds dithering Some pixel subsampling which basically means that not only do you get that eight bits per color? 24 bits per pixel color, but you also get another two by do some doing some temporal dithering Very good for when you're doing gamma correction or you have low brightness LEDs A lot of people notice that because the LED brightness is linearly PWM'd but our eyes, you know kind of a logarithmic LEDs that are at the lower Brightness level the brightness shifts change more dramatically than at the higher level with dithering you you know you get an extra couple bits It smooths that out and makes it a little bit You know more of an elegant distribution at the lower brightness levels Alright, and That's new products. It's a very happy scorpion. All right, we'll see everybody Throughout the week. We have a lot of new videos and more plan We have multiple setups as we do tons of videos not only for the last week of The year but as 2023 Approaches so buckle up. There's gonna be a lot of hardware everybody. That's right. Thanks for coming by the new Here at my desk