 The great search every single week brought to you by digikey and interfere thank you digikey Adafruit and digikey team up to Show you Lady Aida's superpower, which is find the stuff on digikey This week. What are you showing? Okay, this week. I'm gonna show how I found the eval board so I realized I'm getting eval boards It's a lot better these days than it used to be But you do have to do a couple little there's a couple of tricks that I have when searching for eval boards Let's go to your head real fast. I'll show you what I got. I'm gonna go backwards. I'm gonna show you what I got and then how I got there So this is the dev board. I just showed my prototyping. I'm getting this design together So let me remove this. So this is the eval board that I picked so this is the 80 tiny 817 explained and I'll show you what I like about it and then I'll show you how I found it So one of the things I like about first of I didn't come with these socket headers. It just came with this board Number one thing to look for about an eval board. It seems silly, but it's really important getting eval board That has the programmer built in a lot of chips these days You need to program them and if you don't have a programmer now you need a second thing now sometimes low cost of alboards will come with a SWD or JTAG port there's nothing wrong with those if you happen to already have a J-link, but a lot of times, you know, especially for a new chipset. I didn't have the program I don't have a special programmer for this so you'll often see that there's another chip Which in this case is bigger that happens, which is the debug interface. So, you know, that's just something to look for Second I'm a big fan of less is war with eval boards You know, I used to have an STK 500 of those two people who are the STK 500 this thing was a beast It was like a hundred bucks and it had like everything it had like seven segments and it had Sockets and it had like an LCD and it was like so much so much so much so much. I Really like, you know again the same kind of sockets it was Unsoddered it had a lot of all the everything was broken out It was ready to get wired up. It has, you know, just one button one LED These are the only two things that are built in to it this this LED is built in this is a user controllable and this is a Button that's user controllable But other than that there's and then there's like two capacitive touch pads if you want to use capacity touch. That's it I love it. I don't I don't like eval boards that are over over the top. I mean, they're they have a place but I'd rather get two or three under twenty dollar debt boards than one 60 to 80 dollar debt boards because I'll tell you another thing debt boards break That's their goal right your goal is you use them so much that they they give up their blue smoke monsters That's another thing get get to always eval boards whenever you want. Okay, so let's go to the computer No, I've I'm going backwards talk about the eval board So this is the chip that I was going to use the 816 or the 806 we we covered this in a previous great search So I want to find an eval board for it But you may notice that there isn't an eval board linked from here, you know, sometimes there's An eval board that's linked directly But there isn't and if I type in 80 tiny 816 You'll see I go straight to embedded Microcontrollers if I type in 80 tiny ones. I shouldn't I didn't type this in but what if I type in eval? No results. Okay, so are you gonna are you gonna cry? No, you're not gonna cry You're gonna use your great searching power. So most Chip companies do not have an eval board for every chip that they make and that's really common because They have to focus on like, you know, one device in the family. So in this case as we Have shown this chip is part of a family a group of chips where And this had STM is 32 to also famous for this, right? There's like of F5, you know, F01 threes and there's like characters and it's a company pins and how much RAM and how much black It's all super configurable. So you will not necessarily be able to find each configuration of that chip family Available as an eval board. So in this case what you want to do is First off, you can just search for You can search It the microchip site that you go to the site of the company that makes the chip. So if I type in AT tiny 816 and val here It'll actually pop up AT tiny 817 Development tools and so that again, that's not unusual. You'll often be able to get The higher level the 817 is a is a better version of that chip and has more flash more RAM So that that's what you're gonna find you're gonna find like usually near the top because they want to show up all the capability So for example, I like the samd 51 the samd 51 doesn't actually have a nice Val board or at least at the time it didn't have a nice eval board from microchip instead. They had the samd 54 which has or the sam e 54 which has ethernet and can but it's otherwise Almost completely identical right has some extra stuff So in this case There are two eval boards available. So let's go back to did you key? So now that we know what to look for nothing you can do, you know is my trick is Whatever chip you're looking for so like I want the 816 eval board you just take Number or two off this doesn't always work Because depending on how the company's structure their part numbers, but in this case You can search for like 80 tiny eight eval and then Under here you can see that there's some evaluation boards. So of course there's There's evaluation boards that might use this in this case, none of these are available because they're actually q-touch Which happened to use the 80 tiny 88 Under under this eval board, you'll see that Okay, sorry under 80 tiny eight From within here Right, so you'll see that there is this is interesting so within of course If you want to search from within a category, don't forget like I just I forgot to mention before you can search from within results I don't usually use this But if I'm looking if I know I want an eval board and then I want one that uses a chip You go to this section and then you search for within this result So now I can see that there's only 10 options. There's of course The trinket yay. It's like my design with the 80 tiny 85 And then you'll see the the ones that we saw before the 817 eval board Olimax has a 80 tiny 85, but yeah, basically there's two Two boards you can get so let's open up both So there's nothing wrong with picking either of these but Tell you what I like so again, this was the 80 tiny 817 eval board. It's got the debug interface here I always look for that the main chip and then a lot of breakouts, but you know very a very simple design and Then over here is the pro so this is deceptive because you're probably like oh, this doesn't have the debug interface You don't see anything. It's actually a double-sided board. So what you know, this has breakouts, but they're header pin type and This has a little bit more measurement. It has a little bit more pins Yes, it's the pro version if you actually want to see what's on the board itself you need to go to The Data sheet for the eval board and then I guess it isn't like the most Amazingly great eval board data sheet because I wish they just had a photo of the bottom But if you go near Go here, you can see this is coming a diagram on the top They do have a diagram of the bottom and they show that yeah, there is this like Debug interface here and like all this circuitry and it probably does like high voltage reprogramming and all that all that stuff so That said given the choice between the two. I kind of like this one more because it's simpler but if you want I Think this has like more high voltage. It has the current Measurement disconnect so it's a little bit more You know, this is called the pro and the other one's called the mini If you're doing like low power stuff or you're doing something which where you need the high voltage programmer I'd probably go with the pro, but it is 40 bucks compared to this one, which is like 14 bucks 12 bucks So this is my winner. This is the one I liked so again Get to and then once you've done your development again, I've said this before If you're designing with a microcontroller or any chip you pick the highest Pin count highest flash highest RAM build your application your prototype within it and then you can Tick down and pick the one that will fit so the 817 has you know, the slightly nicer chip than the 807 it has more pins than the 806 But it's easy for you to develop on this and then in your compiler Just select the smaller chip when you're ready to go to production and like see how small you can get You're compiled to compile for and that's the chip you can actually use in production And of course, it's um, you know people forget you can always rework this chip You can remove this chip off of here and solder on a smaller Less flash less RAM version if you need to it takes a little bit of skill But that's a you know one thing that I do when I'm getting near to completion of my prototype And I'm like well, I really before I order PCBs before I go into a more intense design Order some chips hot air this off Hot air my replacement on and then I can actually develop with like, you know a fresh chip in The exact package in size and capabilities that I'm going to target for production Valboards it is so I got two of these and they're quite nice creature