 Live from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody, and welcome to Ask Engineer. Yet again, we are broadcasting live from the Downtown Manhattan Adafruit Factory. We do all our manufacturing and coding and shipping and tester design, all the good stuff that you love. It ships here from Adafruit in New York City, in New York strong, New York coming back. It's gonna be a great summer. Me, Lady Aida, with me, Mr. Lady Aida on camera control. Busy just keeping everything running behind the scenes. Well, I do the engineering. We've got an exciting show for you tonight. Got about an hour plus of all sorts of cool stuff. Lots of videos, lots of tutorials, lots of new products. It's jam-packed. We even have the coupon code. That's right, the coupon code is back. So why don't we get started because people want to know that coupon code. Yeah. On tonight's show, the code is keycaps, 10% off in the Adafruit store, all the way up to probably midnight. It's when I remember to turn it off. But you should probably put lots of stuff in your cart as we do the show and then check out at the very end because we have a lot of new products. Keycaps is the code 10% off in the Adafruit store on checkout. We're gonna talk about some of our live shows, things that are going on. We had our show on tell. We're gonna have some time travel, look around the world, makers, hackers, artists, engineers, news and more. Help wanted from the jobsboardjobs.adafruit.com. Some manufacturing, factory footage here in New York City from Adafruit. Some 3D printing. We got Ion MPI from DigiKey and Adafruit. We got new products. We got Top Secret. We got questions that you have and we're gonna answer them. I'll answer them. We'll do that on discordadafruit.it slash discord. Join all 29,000 of us. It's free. All that and more on tonight's show. It's Ask an Engineer. Yeah. I'm so excited. I'm like getting you back to the groove of doing it live for Adafruit again. That's right. It's cool. Let's talk about the free stuff. So you can put the code in keycaps but if you look closely when you add stuff to your cart, you might see that you get free stuff. Freebies. $99,000 more. You get a free promo-proto half-size breadboard, PCB. Great for. We see them in products all the time. People can make next durable prototypes. $149,000 more. You'll get an systemic QT board. We've got various sensors, accelerometers, temperature sensors, even QDPI and MCP221s, whatever you've got in stock. We've got a range of 20 different things. So if you make an account, we'll send you a different one each time. If you don't make an account, you'll just get a random one. But if we make an account, we can keep track of which ones you sent. As this is a half-size breadboard, you want to show that off? Yeah, we got this. Show that off. We got this. We got that. Free shipping, $199,000 more. And at $299,000 or more, you get a free circuit playground expressed with a SAMD21, our all-in-one development board. It's our favorite board. People love it. Just today, some people are saying, great for workshops, great for beginners. Write code in Arduino. Make code, CircuitPython. I think MicroPython is working on support too. TinyGo, Rust. TinyGo, Rust. You name it. We got it. Okay. We have a bunch of live shows. We just wrapped up Show and Tell. I'll talk about some of the stuff on the show and tell later, but there's so many people on Show and Tell each week, so don't forget to go to any of our social media places, any of our video places. A lot of people use YouTube and check out the latest show and tell. Highlight this week. Kyle, the CEO of iFixit, was on. And I'll talk about that a little bit later while I was on. And more. Other live shows that we have is we do Desk of Lady Aida and we do that every single Sunday. Desk of Lady Aida, what was on? Desk of Lady Aida, part one. Okay. So, first off, we got this TI-84 Python edition calculator, which we should do a teardown using the iFixit kit that Kyle showed off. And I also showed off, we've been working on the MacroPad. I'm actually about to send off like PCBs today. The MacroPad's been taking a while, but it's gonna be really good. I wanna make it like really a wonderful product with like really good art and like all the design and the speaker stuff. And then we're gonna do more MacroPads. The first one's always the toughest, so I showed that off. Also, the press agency that works with TI got back to me. They have the questions I sent over about this calculator because we wanted to know why did they use a fork of circuit Python and more things like that. So, thank you, everyone at TI and the group that's doing that there. And then we have the great search, which has themes. Where in the world is that part I need? Search with DJ. And this is when Lady Aida uses her powers of good engineering to go to the Digi-Key site and find things. So what did you look for this week? So in the keyboard theme, I'm working on the KB2040, which is a board that is going to have circuit Python support with the RP2040 for making mechanical keyboards. And it's the same shape and overall functionality as a ProMicro. And the ProMicro, the keyboard board that people use has a little fuse on it. And I wanna make sure that we have a similar spec fuse. So I show how to specify PTC fuses, a couple different sizes, some things to look for, the difference between hold and trip current, as well as other specifications that may be important, so that I can add a fuse to this board to make sure that keyboards are protected in case there's a short or something. It won't make your motherboard sad. Okay, and then every single Tuesday there is JP's product pick of the week. It's a show that's broadcast live from the product page itself. And during that time, there's a discount. You don't even need to use a code during that time. And this is a recap from this week. It is the Slider Trinkie. It can act as a MIDI device, a USB, HID keyboard, mouse. This is a little laptop of mine. And I have some DJ software running on here. This software I'm using is able to be configured to look at a MIDI input for moving that crossfader around. And what I can do is use the slider here to crossfade between, it is the Slider Trinkie. It is a fader on a USB stick and it has a couple of underlit NeoPixels as well as a capacitive touch button on it. And it runs circuit Python and Arduino on the Cortex M0 that is built right on there. And then there's also JP's workshop. That's tomorrow. But one thing to keep in mind next week, JP's off because he's on vacation. Well, deserved break. People are starting to go on vacation, which is wonderful. So he'll be back in a week. And during JP's shows, which will be one tomorrow, you'll be able to check out the circuit Python Parsec. Here is the one from the most recent show. For the circuit Python Parsec today, I wanna talk about debouncer. A debouncer is used to prevent mechanical buttons and switches from rapidly registering multiple clicks when you touch them. This blue switch on the left is using no debouncer. The microcontroller is gonna read whenever I click and it's going to advance this NeoPixel, this blue NeoPixel by one each time I click. And you'll notice I can't click it just once. This yellow button on the right, this one's using the debouncer. So that means I can very nicely and neatly and gently click one at a time through these NeoPixels. It's really hard to get this blue one where I want. If you look at the code here, you can see I'm importing the digital IO library as well as the debouncer library. The blue button is just a traditional digital in out and I'm using with a pull up resistor. The yellow one, I set that input pin but then I use the debouncer to set up this button. Yellow is debouncer on that pin that we've set up the same way. The debouncer update, so button yellow.update right here checks the debouncer so it's polling to see if something happens. And then this is the condition for me pressing it. The value falls. So it goes from high voltage to low voltage. That means I've pressed it. It's a sort of discrete event. So it means we don't get that bouncing. We don't register multiple clicks and it doesn't matter how long I hold it. When the button goes back up from low to high, it is a separate event. So that means I can also record that. And so that is how you can use the Adafruit debouncer. And that is your Circuit Python Parsec. All right, and if you want to watch Deep Dive with Scott this Friday, you can't. Scott's on vacation too. So for the next two weeks, there's no Deep Dive. Just a reminder, Scott will be back and... But it's good. He's taking, again, another well-deserved break. People taking vacations, he's gonna come back and he's gonna go hard on this Bluetooth provisioning and coding implementation that's gonna be working on which people have been watching him work on during the Deep Dives. When he comes back, he's gonna fix a bunch of bugs. He's gonna make it even better than ever. It'll be cool, but you can be able to do over-the-air programming of Circuit Python and deploying files, which is gonna be really neat because it'll work from mobile as well as a desktop and from other Circuit Python boards. Amazing, mind blown, Blinka is so cool. All right, time travel, look around the world of makers, hackers, artists, engineers. I got a bunch of stuff this week, so I'm just gonna roll into it and more. So time travel, so I contacted all of the folks in the EU, the UK and Switzerland and let them know that we're currently not doing subscriptions to those locations because everything is quadruple, triple costs, there's new import, there's taxes, there's fees. We wouldn't be able to do the 8-a-box at the price that we said. So we said, hey, we're pausing this. Never gonna charge you again. That was your last 8-a-box. And we sent him a discount code. Most people weren't nice, two weren't. This way it goes. But we do have some good news with 8-a-boxes. That means we can open up more in the US. So we did. So we did. There's even a couple slots open right now. We are. And there'll be even more. So that's the good news, but unfortunately, we're not turning into the Federation of Planets. We're turning into little kingdoms around the world and it's getting harder and harder to send anything internationally. And it's mostly a cost. And 8-a-box is supposed to be low cost and not super expensive. So you could still get them if you're in Europe or the UK or Switzerland as standalone boxes, probably from places like Pimeroni. But that is the end of those four now. All right. Every single day Monday through Friday unless it's a holiday or something like that, we have one of the most popular video series already on our social media channels, lab notes with Colin. So here they are, back to back. They're a minute each. Take it away, Colin. You'll see most mechanical keyboards listed as having switches, which are Cherry MX compatible. This means they work with keycaps that have a cross-shape socket like this one. This standardized socket makes it easy to swap out your caps for another color or shape, also known as keycap profile. There are several common keycap profiles with varied characteristics, ranging from DSA or XDA with a low uniform height up to SA profile with tall caps of varying heights or something in between, like the more common Cherry profile. The differing heights per row make the caps easier to reach from a central hand position. It's more ergonomic, but it means you can't really rearrange your caps if you want to say try a Dvorak layout. A lot of boards like the Feather microcontroller here feature 0.1 inch spaced solderable holes that make breadboarding easy. Solder header pins on, plug it in, and you've got a strong connection. If you want to attach accessories to your board like this feather wing, solder socket headers to the feather instead. Solder pins to the feather wing and attach. What's that? You want to plug a microcontroller into a breadboard and attach an accessory? Well, you're in luck because stacking headers are a thing. There are combo of plug and socket headers. Essentially, socket headers with very long pins. Align them for soldering by plugging a matching daughter board into the sockets. Solder the base of each long pin to a pad. And now you're double stacking electronics. Nice. If you have development or breakout boards, you've probably already seen PCB solder jumpers. There are sections of copper on the PCB that can be used for post manufacturing configuration. For example, to change pin settings or I squared C addresses. This board has both default closed and default open jumpers. Closed have a tiny little copper trace connecting the two larger pads. And the ones below here have no connection. Adafruit boards use this triangular shape to indicate a default open jumper. To open a closed jumper, just use a blade or sharp screwdriver to remove the thin connecting trace. To close an open jumper, use a soldering iron to heat up one pad, melt on solder, and use your iron's tip to bridge solder over onto the other pad. To reopen it, just remove the solder with some solder wick. I squared C is a method for connecting devices and sensors to a microcontroller board or computer. It only has four pins, power, ground, clock and data. There are I squared C motion sensors or mometers, air quality sensors, OLEDs, GPS modules, a wide range of devices. But I squared C's special feature is its ability to connect multiple devices simultaneously. Stem-a-QT boards like these can easily chain together multiple devices with a cable. Just keep in mind that each device in an I squared C chain needs to have its own unique address. And devices with addresses that can't be changed can only be used once in a chain. If a board does have a fixed address, you'll usually see it printed on the back of the PCB. And if its address can be changed, you'll usually see a jumper or pin that'll let you do it. When starting out with electronics, it's common to forget about connecting grounds. When you have separate electronic circuits sharing signals like this data line here, even if they're using separate power supplies, the ground wires should almost always be connected. So here I've got an Arduino compatible powered from a 9 volt wall plug. I want to use it to control a long strip of Neopixels, which will use its own 5 volt power supply. So, even while using different supplies, the Neopixel ground needs to connect to the metro ground. Otherwise, the data won't transmit correctly. It's as if the signal is a little shy, and it'll only venture out into another circuit if it can see a clear way to get back home. Alright, that's all of the Collins Labs for this week. And next up, Philby made a very charming, nice video about Creative Computing Magazine. If you look really close, you could see a Digikey ad from decades ago. Creative Computing Magazine was published from 1974 through 85. It's always fun skimming through these old issues, especially the ads. Tons of printers and maybe three hard drives. 5 megabytes was about $3,000. The old Microsoft heavy metal band logo. Shot the front door. Double-sided floppy disks. Oh, free Heathgate catalog. I'm sending that in. What distinguished it from later publications, there's a hint of it here on the cover. All these different systems. Also, all different programming languages. Pascal, Assembly, Basic, which they did not dismiss as baby talk programming for Potheds. Home computers were new, and there was just this broad enthusiasm for the whole thing. I think back on Creative Computing, whenever people get into heated debates about Arduino versus Python, or when they talk about the latest Arduino or Raspberry Pi killer, why the focus on killing? Today, we're in exciting times again. Maybe we could learn something from these old magazines. Okay, next up, we have Juneteenth coming up here at Adafruit. It's a holiday we do here at Adafruit. So it's Saturday, the 19th, but we do holidays so folks can take time off. A lot of people don't work on Saturdays, so they work on Fridays. Same as July 4th this year. July 4th is a company holiday, and we're doing the second and the fifth. So we may have a notice on our site that shipping may be delayed for those days. So FYI, next up. This was in the Maker News. Altium was like, hey, you got to give me $1 billion, so Autodesk tried to get Altium purchasing them. Well, they already own Eagle CAD. Yeah, and Tinker CAD. So it's interesting that they were like, they're trying to sweep together Altium into their popular CAD software. I got a blog post when I was talking about Siemens acquiring Hackaday, Tindi supply frame, and I started to put all the acquisitions. There's only like three or four companies, us included, that aren't acquired. Anyways, speaking of, my question is Siemens. Siemens bought supply frame, which owns Hackaday, Tindi. A million years ago I started Hackaday. That's the logo I made, and I haven't had anything to do with it for a while. And supply frame's been doing a good job with a lot of the things that I wanted to do with Hackaday. So now I had a question at the end. I was like, well, you know, maybe take good care of it. It wasn't a question. So I sent it over to them. I don't know if they're going to be able to get to Hackaday. They're good questions. There was no, you know, dunking or gotchas. There were just questions that I know the community had. We'll see what happens. I'll keep everybody updated every single week. I'll let you know it goes. HelpWantedJobs.AidaFruit.com is the board that we have. Not a PCB board, but a Jobs board. You post your skills, or if you're a company, you can find someone cool. We're looking for a sheet metal enclosure CAD work contract job. Connecticut is like land of sheet metal enclosure works. This is a good idea for that location to look for some help with CAD. Even machinery like Connecticut, they invented milling machines. Python on hardware news. We got a lot of stuff going on this week. There's so much stuff. We were just in our meeting. We do a remote team meeting with our shows. There's so much Python news, and that's what's been happening with the newsletter. This week, we're going to do a couple highlights and pick one thing out that I think is important. We have the CircuitPython 7 Alpha 3 releases, 630 stable releases. If you check it out, we got the new poster with the MicroPython snake and the CircuitPython Blinka along with the keyboard there. We talked about the Raspberry Pi chips. They're available for $1 in single units. We also stocked them. We have packs of 10 as well. Pi, RTOS for CircuitPython runs on the MetroM4. I'm going to be talking about the switch from our repositories to main shortly. We have a great interview with Armstrong, who is on our show Intel, and we have posted the interview, a text interview on our website. This is a Q&A programming with CircuitPython author, Armstrong. Really cool story. Check it out. Check out some of the videos, some of the news around the web, the PyCon videos have all been posted. If you didn't make it to PyCon, virtually, you can watch it now. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of keyboard-related things, the multi-pass which is on our show Intel, Minecraft controllers, you name it. It's happening with Python on hardware. Python in particular is becoming more and more popular. It'll probably end up being number one programming engine in the world as far as number of people using it. We cover that news and a bunch of other things. As you can tell, it's a never-ending story about all the things that are going on with Python. One of the best things about Python is the inclusive community. That's what I'm going to talk about this week. Happy Pride Month, everybody. If you look really close in the back here, we have our flag. We put this up every year. Last year we were broadcasting not from here. Last year, around this time, I would come in after our show and then we had our chemical suits that we were using to spray down for this thing. I think we're still doing that at night. Surface vectors for a virus attack was unknown. Let's make sure we sanitize everything all the time, always, forever. When anything gets sick, hopefully it worked out. This month is Pride Month, and I think it's a good time to reflect on some stuff, but most of all, if you're a technologist, there are some things you can do to be inclusive, to get rid of some old language that doesn't make sense anymore, and also to understand where other people are coming from. The thing that we worked on, and we've been doing this for a bit across different things, is there's an old term from Bitkeeper, master and slave for repos, repositories of software, and you can change it to main, and GitHub and Microsoft made a big announcement. We're going to make it easy for you, we're going to do this. Yes, it's actually like a one-click thing in GitHub as well. That's right. And that was something that's really important to us, important to our team, and if you're a technologist, you can do this, and if you're an open source community like we are, it reflects poorly if you ignore something that people really want. The neat thing that's happening is it's working. So, we're on main, there's a lot of other organizations on main, the day that we did our post about this, with all the resources on how to do it, on some of the other efforts, make posted up, most of you and me so, 140 years of wrong. So, make is changing the language for their magazine with these things as well, including what the pin stand for. There's lots of efforts, and Oshawa, and more, and then after we did our master of the main, that night, Sparkfun changed theirs, 1038, they went from master to main. Then, within a week, Arduino went from master to main. So, if you look at our post, there is a lot of organizations, and I just started finding some logos really quick. So, about 80% of the open source hardware now, when you add Adafruit and Sparkfun, have made that switch. The software conservatory, they do Git, and they have that as a default. Python Foundation is the ones that kind of got us all to, or one of the ones that said, hey, this is important, we can do this. Make is changing their language. The Linux kernel also changed it. Red Hat, going across all of the Linux stuff that they touch, and more. So, this is happening, and I really think that if you're someone who maintains repositories, it's something, yes, it's a little bit of work, but you can do it, and I know that there's this idea that, well, does it really matter, does it solve things? No, it's a drop, but get enough drops, you got a notion, that's the type of change that we can do as technologists. They also remind people that when they are naming things going forward, like, let's think about the language we use. Just because we've had a long history of using certain words, and they come up over and over again, the GitHub naming came from BitKeeper, and the BitKeeper guy said, oh, I got it from something else. It's a viral decision, and so if you break the chain now, we can keep people from using these same words over and over again, come up with better, more descriptive names that make more sense. And I'll just say this, because Lady and I get really crummy emails from people who don't like rainbows, don't like equality, you know, we're easy to get a hold of. And I think one of the things is, they themselves can't imagine why it's a big deal, but they don't work in a place with diversity, or they don't know other people that have different backgrounds. And so they can't imagine it, but it's a simple thing that you can do if you're a technologist. Part of a bigger amount of work that you do. This isn't the only thing you can do. Yeah, it's more than a hashtag. It's more than just, like, I care. It's something that we can all do. But you start with this. Yeah. We all have little things that we can do, and if you do something every day, eventually there could be good change. That is the Python 100W News this week. As I mentioned before, Kyle was on our show. Kyle is the CEO of iFixit. We posted up about this. Dear New York, it's time to speak out for your right to repair. What is this? Well, New York is very close to getting something that makes companies more like Adafruit. This bill that's going through, that's going to get voted on tomorrow, it is, and I'll just summarize, an act to amend general business law in relation to the sale of digital electronic equipment and providing diagnostic and repair information. Summary, it's a little bit of a translation. This bill requires original equipment manufacturers, OEMs, to make digital diagnostic and repair information for digital electronic parts and equipment available to independent repair providers and consumers if such parts and repair information are also available to OEM authorized repair providers. And this is such a low bar. They're not saying you have to release, they're saying if you have authorized groups that have access to this information, it should be legal for people who are not the officials to have, they're still not authorized, but they can at least look at the manual, which is how it used to be. I've repaired so many things by Googling for the manual, getting for the manual the repair manual for the ice maker or for the board loader or for an AC system, whatever, and using that to help repair it as an independent person. Or if you have it, take it to a repair shop, you take it with the manual and they would do it for you. I know how to solder and do bug stuff, but maybe you would go to a repair shop. That's the bar. If you have it, independent places should have it. That means more people can repair stuff. You know, if on other causes that we all care about or only a lot of us do, if you want to make things not show up in the trash heaps, you have to be able to repair them. To be able to repair them, you have to have some information. So this is a good step. I think people are going to make this happen and hopefully this will be something that... Check out their website. They make it real easy to notify your representative. Go to repair.org and put in your state and you can see how to get a hold of your representative. All right. Well, we are an open source hardware company as you may know, because we just talked about that a lot. But the proof is in the pudding. We have 2,400... What is it? What's actually in the pudding? I don't know. I hope that's not a phrase that you're not supposed to use anymore. So it's 2,490 guides. That's the first of 2,500 guides. We are. So I'm going to do these one little chunk at a time to talk about this week. What's the first round of guides? A very couple of updated guides, too. So we had the... Yeah. So the bottom... So the short memory display that we got updated and we just made a couple of page updates. The Discord and Slack connected smart plant from Dylan is just what you think. It's a Wi-Fi connected circuit Python board that will send you a Discord or Slack message when your plant needs watering. It's a great demo of using these APIs with IoT products. There's also an updated guide, the Touch Deck, the Square Pixel art display, the Feather RP2040. Circuit Python, the Arduino Nano RP40 is a new guide from Liz and the update guide is for the Rotary Trinky and the BME280. So those are not new. Those are just updated. But if you want to show them anyways... What? The little video? This? Yeah. I mean, it's fun. Let me go to the next step. Yeah, so these are just updated guides. We already talked about those. So these are the four new guides for this week. We have from Goolsbee, we've got an improved AMG8833 PyGamer thermal camera. So it's cool, but this guide is... It builds upon the previous thermal camera project and does a lot more graphic stuff, improves the display, and uses ULab, which is the NumPy-like library that we have with accelerated number manipulations and, like, you can do mathematical and matrix calculations much faster in Circuit Python. So it does bicubic interpolation to turn your 8x8 camera into something that looks more like 24x24 or 60x16 using bicubic interpolation. That's something in ULab and normally that would be really slow to do in Circuit Python, but by using ULab you can kind of, like, push through a lot of data and have it all done for you optimized, the same way NumPy does it optimized in Circuit Python. We've also got the Python edge speech recognition with voice to JSON. You sent me a link to this. Yeah, let's show the video. Tell me the time. The time is 2.30, 6.00 pm. Show a cat picture. Show an 8 of her picture. Set the left light to red. Set the middle light to yellow. Set the right light to green. Show a cat picture. All right, what else? All on the edge, which is cool. JP did a Deco theme two-key feather macro pad using the macro the two-key feather wing. They're like the Neo-Key feather wing. Plug into any feather. And then he showed playing some speed games. And then Liz Clark and Non Pedro did the FunHouse IoT fume extractor. So this is a kind of cool project showing how to use IoT and Circuit Python in the FunHouse to read air quality sensor data and then control a fan with it. So even this is kind of a little bit of an overkill project for fume extraction. It's a good demonstration of how to do this kind of IoT project under desktop. All right, those are the guides. Next up, Adafruit Factory footage. Take away Adafruit Factory. All right, and then we have some factory footage, but outside the window we have a couple tracks this week. This is Disney being built across the street. Looks like they're making it taller so they can make the building taller. And we also have some other footage. So they're making the crane. The crane is making a crane. Pretty soon all of the world would just be cranes. All right, 3D printing. Non Pedro, printing up storm. This week we're going to do two videos back to back. And then we have a fun speed-up. Take it away, Non Pedro. Wednesday 3D Hangouts, Non Pedro. This week's ION MPI is Milmax. Yes. First off, this logo is great. What does Milmax do? I think this is our first Milmax product. So Milmax, they're known for their connectors. And so when this popped up I was like, I know exactly what this is and what this is good for. This is the 3305 Sockets for mechanical keyboards. And they look like this. And you're like, okay, it's like a little round yellow thing. How do you use that? Well, this is a kind of cool thing. So what you do is it's a really nice rendered image. You can see on the left there's a mechanical key that's about to plug into a PCB. And normally these mechanical keys are soldered into the circuit boards. And that's how they are held in place with the two contacts. Well, this fair role, as you see the three things on the bottom, what they do is they get slipped into what would normally be the through-hole, the plated through-hole in the circuit board that you would plug the mechanical key switch into. Instead, when these get soldered in, the switch becomes removable because there's little grippies. You see kind of in the middle there on the second switch, there's little grippies inside that will grab onto the rectangular tabs of the switch and hold them mechanically in place but still allow you to remove them. These are designed to be used with Cherry MX and compatible switches, which you can also get at Digi-Key. What's really nice about Cherry MX compatible switches is they all have this kind of thing going on the bottom. You see there's like a big circular mechanical placement knob, and then there's two rectangular pins, and those pins are what are the switch. They're normally opened and the switch is pressed. They're closed. They're closed together in contact. So this is the circuit board layout for Cherry MX switches, and you can see there's LEDs and stuff. Basically, you've got the two pins, you've got the hole, and if you have those, you can use these MX switches. And these have been used for decades. These are very old switches. They've been used for a very, very long time, and so traditionally, when you get a keyboard or a macro pad or something that uses a control surface, they're soldered in. So this is what it looks like on the bottom. This is like a Neo-Key trinky. This is one of the few boards you have where you would solder the key indirectly, and you see that center hole again where the switch goes through and the two pads where the mechanical switch is soldered into. So this doesn't work great. People have been soldering in these switches into mechanical key slots for a very long time. I've got keyboards with Cherry MXes that again, historically, decades of use. However, there's now like dozens and dozens of different types of Cherry MX compatible switches available, and it could be that you have a circuit board that's designed for Cherry MX, but you want to use Gaterons or Kales or you know, Milks or Jades or whatever you want. And it could be also that you want to be able to change out what switches you use, because for example on my keyboard I have linear red keys, but some people really want tactile browns or they want clicky blues. Well, what would you do? Well, if you were using a chip you would use a socket like this, right? This is a dip socket, and we've talked about these before. You solder these in and they mechanically go into the same holes that a dip switch or dip chip go into. But what's nice is that then you can fairly easily remove a chip and you can easily replace it if it gets damaged or burnt out or if you want to try a different chip or whatnot. So what do you do for Cherry MX's? Well, you know, in the last few years there's been this invention of the Cherry MX socket, and these this is a Kale socket, Gateron also makes sockets that are compatible and these get soldered onto the bottom of a PCB and you can't use the same layout, right? It's a different layout for these big SMT pads, as you can see the four sockets in the middle there but if you have a modified layout for these sockets, then you can see the two holes you can plug in the Cherry MX into the holes and they're mechanically held in place. So again, you need to have a new layout. So this is like a layout showing there's no through holes played through holes instead there's two SMT pads where the socket pick in places on and then creates the two holes that the switch goes into. So if you're making a new design and you have the space, using these pick and placeable Kale sockets is great for mechanical keyboards but like I said, there are some cases where you have a board that already has it's already been designed, you can't change the layout or you're reworking an existing board, you want to change the switches out. In that case, that's where you would use these sockets because they're actually so thin that they can be put into the PCB that has already been designed with the standard Cherry MX through hole played through holes pads and this gets soldered in it's so skinny that it can go in and you still have enough clearance to let you plug in the socket there's a lot of S's here so they come in different lengths they're open bottom so the switch, even if you have switches with different length pins, they're not like closed bottom where it could bottom out, it goes straight through and you can see inside there's two little grippies, there are a couple different grippies that will grip onto the rectangular tab of the switch so there's been previous versions of this, I think 0305s and 7305s but these ones are a little bit better quality, they're getting better at the top of the fairing is thinner these are gold plated, they're brilliant copper, they're very good quality sockets so they're quite nice they'll last a very long time they're good for any high end or just hobbyist desires for replaceable switch sockets another thing that I thought was kind of nice is although the ones I got came loose, you can get these pick and placeable so you could pick and place them into your design and then with a little bit of solder paste on the pads you could have it be soldered in place automatically by your pick and place line or you can do it by hand either way so I thought I would, you want to show the part number and then we'll see you around so it's on Digikey because INMPI is brought to you by Digikey and you can go there there's a giant product ID you want to use a short URL or just search for Milmax330 which is easy to find get you what you want and so we have two things, we can do the overhead and then you also have a video yes I have a great little demo that I can show, okay great so this is the NeoKey Trinky so again this is one of our only designs that you would solder in the switch and the reason you had to solder in the switch is because it's just so packed there literally wasn't enough space to put in a socket because the sockets are quite large they wouldn't fit on the bottom of this PCB with all the other circuitry and so so for this you would solder it in now normally you would solder it and it would be permanently connected but with this one I have soldered in the Milmax3305 and so you can barely see it but there's this very slight bump that's the top of the ferrule and then it goes through to the bottom and you can see here there's a little bit of solder in and then it works very well you know you plug it in it's mechanically secure but then when you give it a yank it can come out and you can switch out your Cherry MX switch now you're probably like look Lady Aida I'm not obsessed with keyboards the way you are right now so what is this good for if I'm not into that this is good for anything so even though I'm using this for Cherry MX switches you can make custom sockets with my sensors that are not on a .1 inch grid or really anything that has you know through a whole parts but you don't want to solder it in because it's expensive or because it gets damaged or because you want to try different versions what's nice about this is it doesn't stick up you know there's a very very very slight bump but you pretty much get to have it sit flat and again as long as the hole is I think .06 it goes in the hole but you can also solder into it so you can have a mix and match design or you can have it be socketed or you can solder it directly but without that height change of the dip socket so I thought this is a very interesting and useful part not just for keyboards but for other mechanical uses where you want to swap out expensive sensors or components and Milmax made a video we're going to play it as a product design engineer it's not a system of any product you design it is not the place to take shortcuts and a good connector can help avoid costly repairs and recalls down the road when you design your next product consider the Milmax receptacle first the quality and reliability of our two piece construction delivers maximum performance and durability in every application including challenging or rugged environments our receptacles are precision machine for ultimate reliability of critical components across a wide range of industries including aerospace military, medical just about anywhere product failure is not an option the Milmax two piece receptacle design allows for the widest mating pin acceptance range the largest variety of shapes, sizes and materials and multiple contact points to ensure a dependable connection every time pin receptacles are typically the backbone of any interconnect system so why settle for anything less than the maximum in performance reliability and flexibility the predictable quality of a Milmax interconnect can play a fundamental role in determining your product's performance with almost 45 years of experience working with suppliers all over the world consider specifying Milmax receptacles into your design sooner rather than later and ensure the optimal solution for the unique requirements of your application this week's IonMPI okay so before we get into space-time let's check it out yep first up it's space-time it's a grid of space-time that bends with gravity get it space-time because we also have a space-related thing so it's a grid of paper this is actually a sample that I got for an ATA box a couple of years ago and I got a packet of 10 of these maybe put it into the ATA box a gridded line notebook but I actually really really liked these gridded sticky notes they're pretty expensive like a buck for 80 sheets and they're exactly what you think they are they are gridded sticky notes so here you go so you get 80 sheets of sticky notes each one each one has a grid which I think is really handy you're like drawing circuitry and you're like well I really want to make very beautiful op-amp diagrams and stuff and like you want your transistors to look great whatever you can also do it for like kanji or hanji or if you're doing pixel art or whatever and of course it's sticky so you put it on and you stick it off it doesn't leave any residue they're fun you're an engineer you need these those things that I was just like I kinda need to have these in store because I couldn't find them anywhere else next up we have these little silicone inserts it's kind of dusty because there's construction happening next door I don't know if you saw the Disney construction so these are little silicone nubules that are designed to fit RJ45 ethernet or some phone systems these RJ45 they plug in but they're easy to remove they're nice silicone squishy and they come in a pack of 10 so even if you have a whole hub of 6 or 8 ports you've got plenty next up we have an assembled version of the music maker feather wing this features the VS1053 it's Agvorvis AC MP3 of course like VMA MIDI player we have these feather wings for sale unassembled but we had some leftover we found these were actually in an 8 box a while ago we have a couple dozen of these let's put them in a shop for people who don't want to assemble them they want to just plug and play them onto your feather works just like the other feather wing and they have an amplifier built into I think a stereo 2 watt amp left and right so you can use 4 or 8 ohm speakers and get your music playing super fast next up next up we have agorvision for the 1.54 inch ink display I believe this is now using the ssd1681 chipset or it's 1680 and it used to be something else the ink chipsets have been changing around we have drivers for all the different chipsets these are the same look and size as before but if you have programmed these with firmware you'll need to update the firmware on your mic control or driver for ssd1681 it's a very good chipset other than that it's just that the previous version of the chip driver was discontinued and this is the new version so that's an updated product keycaps keycaps keycaps keycaps okay so now we're getting into let me just click through each set right here well I mean these are some clear ones and some black ones but basically we have a large number of dsa or xda I don't know if you saw Collins video we had earlier explaining about profiles of keycaps so these are symmetric low profile dsa sometimes called xda chip keycap sets that's the best way to show them okay so yeah I grabbed like candy they're very colorful so this is not all of them because we also actually have the black and the smoke and the gray and the white and then the translucent the translucent red and blue but these are many of the colors so we've got clear, red, orange dark yellow, neon green mint green light blue, blue dark purple, light purple pink, no lavender and pink these are the colorful and these are opaque this one as you can tell is of course translucent which means if you have a backlit LED you'll see through it we also have other translucent keys which you can see quite nicely here how they are translucent it's a smoke translucent blue translucent red translucent gray not translucent opaque white opaque and black opaque so many colors that come in a pack of 10 so you can pick and choose of course they don't have any markings on top of them and they're completely symmetric so like the you know they fit any Cherry MX key and they're symmetric no matter which way you put them they don't have a tilt to them which makes them I think personally really great for macropads because you want to have them all be kind of flat to have a good look for the ortho linear design you got going on here so those are the different color pack of keycaps we have so many that we're going to show them all at once here but they're all really wonderful colors next up coming soon this will be in the store shortly this is the circuit python space explorer sticker holographic it's hologram like it's holographic like so it's a beautiful sticker and we're doing a lot of space theme stuff so if you want to get this we're going to make a round and that's going to be it these are circuit python space explorer and circuit python is actually in space it's used on those little small sets micro mini cats yes and now tonight the star of the show besides you lady our community our customers and our aid fruit team is that's right it's time for the rp2040 qt trinky thank you uh bongo cat yeah so this is uh a new trinky and this is this trinky has a lot of different purposes uh so first up it plugs into your usb a port of course is extra thick so it fits snugly inside and it has inside of it an rp2040 you look at the beautiful photography with the raspberry pi logo it's got eight megabytes of flash on the left there it's got a reset and boot button so you can reset it and the boot button is also a user button so you have like one input button if you need there's a little pixel uh for status or you know you want to RGB led and then on uh the right yeah the buttons are on the side and the reason for that is because the shape of it is one inch the body is one inch by point seven inches which is the same as like the majority of our stem acute sensors which means that you can if you have some m2.5 machine screws now on screws recommended um so you don't short anything out you can attach it on top you can still get the buttons even though something's attached on top so you can make a customized usb to iSquared C connector and um so here for example what's interesting about this is that you can have circuit python running on this board which i think in this case is what's going on here you program it over iSquared C you program it over usb circuit python running on the rp2040 and then stay connected to this iSquared C OLED or what you can do is you can drag and drop this special firmware called u2if which i know sounds a lot like uf2 or u2f but it's not it's this intermediary format that does usb to iSquared C and then you could use cpython on your computer to send data to the rp2040 sort of like a little bridge usb to iSquared C device so you can use it to program any of your um stem acute enabled devices OLEDs or displays or sensors or fan controllers or what have you and the rp2040 is powerful enough has enough RAM and there's enough storage on board that you can basically have every single Raspberry Pi driver on there and it's definitely fast enough to drive and have enough memory to drive any of our sensors and devices so you know we went with the rp2040 because it's inexpensive powerful and it's a great usb trinky friend for connected to any iSquared C device so i think i could show it on the overhead but honestly the images we have the images are quite large and good so rp2040 qt trinky lots of fun i think we've even put some in the shop already that's all of our new products for this week we did it fancy let's go back to that this is what we make this is what we do it's what we do this is what we do so don't forget the code keycaps 10% off until i turn it off let's do some top secret and then folks have some questions already lined up put them in discord put your questions in now and i'll get to them after top secret so top secret let's kick it off this week i'm just going to play these videos and i'll see you on the other side what is this hey we're back at the ate a food factory making prototypes my stencils didn't come in yet so i'm hand pasting these prototypes for my rp2040 keyboard with OLED and rotary encoder and the way i do this is i actually have solder paste and this little dispenser and i've got a nice fine tip on it and then i very carefully squeeze into the pads i try to get it as clean as possible i'm going to have to clean this up later with my soldering iron but i just want to get it good enough so that the components sit in the right place and then i'm going to use this collection of all my raw components and place them on and then the best part is it goes to the oven which saves me the most time so this is going to be very fast once i pick and place all of these on my hands alright lady what is this this is where my macro pad with all those leds and buttons and the OLED socket and everything and then i got home and it's time to actually put it to the test so this is some Arduino code running on it that you can see reacts to when key presses are pressed press them all there you go there's also the rotary encoder which you can see as i turn it it goes the right direction and when i press it it also knows it was pressed you can see scan with the stem IQT sensor so you can see here when i have it plugged in it says there's something detected when i remove it it's like there's nothing detected so this is my little hardware bring up test but so far so good i have a couple tweaks to do like you know it's a little embarrassing but i actually had to add a couple of 10 micro faric capacitors i needed more capacitance but i think it's almost done alright lady what is this okay so i'm still working on the bring up micro pad boards and i just finished doing the Arduino core so this is Arduino code here you can see it's rotating and like keys are being pressed all that and then on the other one i got two prototypes i've got this with circuit python money because there's a blink of friend so this one i just had to do a little bit of like a patch to the core to fix like a type of bug for the sh1106 oh let driver because like the columns and rows were mixed but i did that and then my driver is like working great now and this code is kind of similar when you press the keys they light up and you get the rotary encoder and the rotary button press working as well so it's good it means i've got the hardware working on Arduino and circuit python which means it's time to write to macro pad code hey i'm trying out a sample i got of these lamp keys these are interesting keys they actually showed up on JP's video he's been loving these lamp keys you see it's an opaque black plastic key within this clear window that like you have neopixel LED go through then it's kind of cool like modern cyberpunk 80s look to them which i really dig so after i asked JP what they were called i found a supplier they're not super cheap but they have a great look to them and you can see the clear window here and then the neopixel shining through and then this is the clear cast rp2040 key that i made with my resin kit over last weekend i'll probably be doing more resin stuff this weekend but these keys look pretty cool i mean like they're just i don't know there's a super cyberpunk so i think these are good we'll put them in the store hey we are looking at some mechanical keys today and so folks are pretty familiar with these these are like the cherry and mech style switches this is actually kale switches and there's this one with a keycap but you can't be like man these are so chunky i mean they're great but they're they're a little tall i mean like look at this board it's kind of sticking out what if you want something slimmer well there's the chalk series and the chocolate series from kale are super slim so you got some samples and this is the one with a keycap like compare this to this it's like so much slimmer and then there's one here's a really nice clear keycap only thing is the keycaps are totally incompatible and the bottoms also you know i have to get special sockets the socket bottoms the sorry that pin bottoms are also totally incompatible as you can see here so it's kind of a whole different system but they're super small and skinny this one's a clicky one too sounds good all right lady what is this oh i got some cool samples in today so this is a custom etched keycap it's a translucent plastic with like a black plastic that is then etched through so you can see it's got the Adafruit logo in cool glow through design so looking great on this macro pad whatever the color of the Neopixel underneath is what it goes through i also got the OLED working with the offset everything in circuit pythons that's good news and then when i press this button bam opens a beta fruit i just programmed the macro pad really easy to make it do anything on your computer so i just made it open up a browser window it's very cool custom keycaps coming soon ta ta ta ta ta ta what am i singing yeah all right so we have one right here yeah i have one i can hear you i don't have this plugged in and of course it's not running but it's a translucent etched keycap it's one of the few things we'll put our logo on which is really cool so it's actually a translucent plastic you can see there's a thin black layer which means we can get custom etched keycaps we already have some goth keycaps on the way we got some stuff going on and then last up we got to read the room here so we're doing an e-ing trinky so do you want squid friend or do you want panda friend squid friend or panda friend squid friend i'm not going to tell you which to pick but you should pick panda squid friend or panda friend and with that is top secret for the week okay we're going to do the questions i haven't lined up we're going to go through them fast so speed round lady okay questions people like squid people just like squid because they're like we'll say it okay questions i'm going to answer this one with all the chip shortages are you going to be shipping a box in the next one July yes July okay i'm a digital artist can you sell the macropad pre-soldered it will be soldered it's going to be fully soldered all you have to do is plug in the keys so no soldering will be required for the macropad as is because we've got these kale sockets that make it easy but you'll customize it however you want we'll have a key kit that you can use but if you want to use like your milk jade milkshake cherry blossom keys you can go ahead and do that okay that's a real key type i think can the selective solder machine be used to bridge PCB jumpers so a knife is not needed to open the jumper it's not a good idea although you can use solder paste to do it i actually prefer having the knife blade openable once because you can use a screwdriver or something else sharp i don't recommend using the tip of a soldering iron but you can do that too okay next up let's see well so that socket was it designed for future compatibility it's amazing that it's transparent um not sure which socket i think it was for iNMPI well yes it's designed for cherry mechs can compatible switches again a massive family of hundreds of different switches so this means you can use older designed PCBs and they can upgrade them to be socketed without needing to change the PCB layout okay next up um could the Milmax be added to a neokey as an aftermarket part i'm gonna look into it i did not think of it because of course at the time i didn't know about these how many insertion removals are on those Milmax rated at you know i don't remember i don't remember seeing it but i'm gonna guess like a dozen you're not supposed to constantly be removing them and replacing them it could be 30 or so but eventually the springs will start to get either dirty or they won't be as springy so i keep it a couple dozen can they be used with rotary encoders like the neokey trinket you check the specifications of the width i only tried them on this because it's exactly what they're designed for but anything that has that size hole and those size pins will work many things can use them with resistors again if it's the hole in the width of the wire yet you can use anything but it's not only for cherry and mech switches it's just that's what they're selling them as would we stock them i'll look into it but for now you can buy them at digikey and they're cheap at digikey why do some boards use dot stars and other use neopixels it depends on historically if you wanted a very tiny LED like on a trinket or a gemma only dot stars came in that size but then neopixels started coming in that size and there's also some chips that are their friendlier to use dot stars way like the fun house it's an esp32 and then neopixels code for the esp32 still has a couple like bugs that we're figuring out so to be safe i use dot stars for that because again they're the same size and i had that extra pin so that's why some i use some with raspberry pi for the brain craft had again you can use neopixels but you're better off using dot stars you're going to get more reliability so much clearance do you need between cap touch pads on a pcb there's actually a number for this and i believe it's 10 millimeters okay whoops next up i know circuit python doesn't handle irqs those are here in all the c-code can it be done in inline assembler i'm looking at some instructions of lower lib i don't believe we've turned on the inline assembler we should have esp32 versus arm core and there's a different arm core so we don't have that you can post up an issue asking for advice on how to solve your problem because we do have some things like asynchronous or there could be some existing helper code that could get you what you want doing concurrency interrupts in python doesn't work even if we had it turned on it isn't the way it works it's the way you can see which is why you don't have it turned on it doesn't you have a state machine a virtual machine so interrupts interrupt the entire virtual machine not inside the virtual machine it sounds easy to handle so there could be other ways to solve your problem so post it in the thread we have of asking people how you want to use interrupts or threads and we might have a solution for you there might be something that exists those modular component boxes that were in the macro pad video we have them in the shop they are called modular component boxes do the ferrules need to be oriented prior to soldering no they're fully symmetric they're round they have multiple little grabby arms so they're not oriented let's see question for the show how difficult would it be to make a trinky that has apple lightning connector it's a myfi program I'd rather give the extra money than apple for usb connection no way but they're really usbc anyways yesterday someone was panda now today they're squid panda friend squids are winning any ideas where to learn about designing and manufacturing mems check out analog devices I think they have a bunch of resources on how they design their mems sensors are they sold are they pre-etched they're pre-etched and no I cannot get keys that are etchable I believe I'm looking into it and it's not and also you can't use a laser cutter you have to have a very specific type of tool to do it international peeps on my next visit to New York City Death Factory Tours nope but we do lots of videos so do check out all our factory tour videos because we would not be able to do tours for everyone we wouldn't be able to make electronics we'd just be doing tours that's kind of nice and then did we decide using the panda or other characters for that one thing no we're trying to figure out we're asking you is the eink trinky going to be squid or panda this is not a menu these aren't I mean we can eat one of them maybe oh no don't and I think that might be it stop eating our mascots folks I think that is we can have a cicada mascot or something those are the questions for the night alright thanks everybody so just a little bit of reminder there's a code keycaps including the codes that keycaps we have in stock by the way hope everyone enjoyed the show I want to say a special thanks to Jesse May working behind the scenes thank you Jesse May doing all sorts of stuff and more and special thanks to our community out there our customers all the agent for team members we'll see everybody next week thank you so much for everything and don't forget there's something that all of us can do as makers, as technologists every day to make the world a little bit better I hope we showed you some things to give you some ideas about how to do that and more we'll see everybody next week here's your moment of zener thanks everybody have a great week