 Live from New York. It's ask an engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to ask engineer. It's me lady. Ada the engineer with me Mr.. Lady Ada on camera control. We're here at the Interford factory right behind us not a green screen a real factory where we do our design Testing coding manufacturing shipping etc of the goodies that you know and love all the open source hardware that's manufactured here We've got a jam packed show for you one hour of all the latest news for Makers engineers hackers and artists. There's a lot going on a lot going on lots of new products lots of videos Lots of guides and more so let's kick it right off. Mr. Lady Ada What's on tonight's show on tonight's show the code is switch mode? Use the code switch mode on check out and get up to 10% off things that are in stock and that code expires Probably around 10, but maybe 11 all depends when I remember to turn it off after the show code switch mode Everything that's in stock use it. We'll talk about some of our Adafruit live series of shows Including show and tell we have our segment time travel look around the world Makers hackers artists engineers. I got big news Big news for people who care about open source help wanted Jobs at Adafruit comm has the skills But people have and it all sets of jobs that employers are posting up. We approve all of them They're not spammy and They're safe Main New York City factory footage and more 3d printing known Pedro We have everyone's favorite segment ion MPI with digikey and Adafruit got new products got some top secret We're gonna answer your questions. We do that over on discord Adafruit dot it slash discord where you can join all 29,000 of us over there Or we chat all the time, but we also answer your questions at the end of ask an engineer all that and more on yep You guessed it. We're watching ask an engineer. That's what you're watching. That's what we're doing Right now. Okay, so are you watching ask an engineer? That's that's what if you say what at where am I? What am I doing? When you use the code also, don't forget it switch mode, but when you use the code We have free stuff that goes to into your cart So it's first thing lady at a $9,000 more you get a free promo proto half-size breadboard a PCB that you can solder To that looks just like a breadboard, but it's permanent. That's the perma At 1 49 or more you get a free 7qt board. We have different sensors and controllers and devices We have a variety about 20 that are in stock right now make an order and you'll get a different one each time when you make an account So we can keep track of which we've sent you if we don't make a cat you just get a random one 199 or more you get free UPS ground shipping in the continental United States and 299 or more you get a free circuit playground express our favorite mic controller board featuring the samd 21 It's got 10 neopixels two buttons a switch a buzzer or microphone Accelerometer temperature sensor light sensor and lots of capacitive touch pads It's an awesome way to get started with mic controller programming because it supports Arduino circuit Python Make code code org CS discoveries rest less and more all right We do a series of live shows and The show that we just did was show and tell that's right Check it out. Yeah, lots of macro pad goodies lots of macro pad stuff from our team cool Tron Desk thing that was 3d printed the files just put on Prusa and then Stewart and his kid made this really neat teacher appreciation award. I thought that was really cool. So check that out it's all on our channels and Stop by every Wednesday some 30 we dropped a link and discord Okay, we do a show called desk of Lady Eda every week this week because it was 4th of July We only did the great search and this week on the great search Lady Eda. What did you show and share? Okay, so the great search in the shorty, but it's a good one. I actually had a lot of views on the gram I don't know if you know yeah you're looking for parts because there's a global parts shortage and I showed I showed you experience I had last week where we're out of I think max three one eight fifty sixes or sixty-fives We had a real on order with digi key because we go through about a real a year or so And so we ordered a real But the real hasn't shipped yet, but we ran out of parts And so the team was like look I know we have this real on order Maybe we can get some just to hold us over and that's when I realized that the tube parts were in stock at digi key Like, you know, even though we had this real on back order They had them available in a different packaging tube not real Is that okay? Yes, because we use a service our go see which I show off in The great search where you can order the tubes send it to them and they will tape the tube parts up for you For use in your pick-and-place your contract manufacturer will like you a little bit more When you send them tape and reel or cut tape instead of tubes tubes are not so fun To manufacture with if you have a pick-and-place machine my pick-and-place at least does not like them I don't really like them. They're kind of a mess. So check this out. It's a shorty, but goody We're doing with chip-shorted stuff day in day out. Are you looking for a part? Are you having trouble sourcing an alternative? Drop us a line in the discord at You know ate a fruit and we'll add it to the great search will help you out find alternatives for your parts at digi key I have so far been able to find alternatives for just about anything Yeah, I just don't know earl him for and I will put my magic fingers to work for you Yeah, we did is house of pancakes and chip service brought to you by digi key and a deferred. Okay JP's product pick of the week This is where we do a special broadcast inside a product page where the discount is automatically applied Here is a clip from this week's The 2.13 inch monochrome e-ink display breakout you can see here. This is a really gorgeous display It's nice and high resolution. So you're gonna see it's gonna do a little refresh There it kind of inverts the screen does black does white and then it displays it What I wanted to do is actually set this up as sort of a page a day calendar I'm gonna run a little Python script. It's now updated it with today's day and date and that's grabbing it from my computer Which is what that Python script does and so every hour both my Python script and the circuit Python script running on this Little micro controller will go and check essentially the computer will check and see hey What's today's date day and date and then it's gonna send that over serial on the USB over to the itsy-bitsy m4? Circuit Python software there is waiting for input and when it grabs that input it then displays it up there the monochrome 2.13 inch e-ink display breakout Okay, next up JP's workshop. So JP's workshop is tomorrow and I'm gonna show two things back to back which are a Recap of a project he showed last week and then a preview of what he's gonna show this week JP show portion of ask an engineer we have circuit Python parsec This is where JP does a really cool project or something and shows you some circuit Python ticket away JP For the circuit Python parsec today I wanted to show how you can read a rotary encoder inside of circuit Python This is really straightforward. Thanks to our rotary I O library I'm using one of our trinkets that's made for running a rotary encoder But you could plug a rotary encoder into most any micro controller what we do in circuit Python is we're importing the board So we have some pin definitions and we're importing rotary I O library then with that rotary I O library Imported we can do this the encoder. This is the encoder object Equals rotary I O dot incremental encoder and then we point to the two board pins in this case The board pins are named wrote a and wrote b which is super convenient I want to print out when it turns its position Then this is the main loop of the program while true if encoder dot position is not the last position So encoder dot position that's all you have to ask for to find the value of what the encoder is doing as I turn this Little knob here. That's turning that rotary encoder shaft and that is being read by The little tricky there micro controller is noticing those changes on its two pins the rotary a and rotary b pin And then I'm printing out there that change So you can use this for things like volume controllers. You can use this for things like midi cc For mouse control for moving a mouse on one axis. It's a lot of ways to use it But it is dead simple to use and that is all it takes to read a rotary encoder inside of circuit Python Using the rotary I O library and that is your circuit Python parsec and then Friday Scott is doing a deep dive you could see the demo that Scott just did with some web web Bluetooth circuit Python stuff Scott Scott's the the brain behind The idea of having auto reload on save which is I think one of the coolest things about circuit Python I was not convinced at first, but Scott convinced me so when he said I wanted the same thing for wireless programming I was like all in do it up. I want to see how he transforms the Way we work with over-the-air programming for Bluetooth and circuit Python and then maybe even Wi-Fi we have USB drives that show up when you plug in a microcontroller now Yeah, it automatically restarts and runs your code. We got whipper snapper, which is in beta Yeah, and now we're working on this Bluetooth stuff. Yeah, one interesting because you said one thing you said was At first you didn't necessarily agree that that I don't know I was like that's weird. What do you mean reload on save that that goes against everything I know with make files and I'll say I'll say this as a a sort of engineering manager that that you know helps project Manage some stuff. It's always great to work with people that Are able to change their mind about things so when you're especially doing something that's cutting-edge or Yeah, you want to cut my mic. I'm sorry. Lady. It is like. Sorry. That's my foot. She's like I don't want to hear So yeah Yeah Okay, sorry continue, but when when folks who are dedicated to the craft looking out for the users and The community and want to make something good. They're they're able to separate maybe their first thought or instinct with good information and Then they're able to make a really smart decision I've seen this over and over and over again with really successful engineers Programmers is people in general want folks that are willing to change their mind about something once they get all the information Is I love having my mind changed because it means I've learned something new Like if I'm right that means I haven't learned anything and I'm probably wrong I know that I'm wrong a lot, but how would I know I'm wrong until someone proves me wrong? And I learned something I changed my mind. So I was really excited. So I'm gonna go excited for this Yeah, and I think there's a lot of things that seem counterintuitive and if you're used to a certain way like dev boards have always been expensive and big and closed source and there wasn't examples if you if you if you think in that mindset you're not and you're like Well, we've always done it this way. So why would we do anything different? It's really hard to get innovation that comes out So anyways, this is a really good example We'll post this up tomorrow, and it'll also probably be recap next week But Scott's gonna be on a podcast with Damien creator of micro python tomorrow and Details might be in the chat as well Next up time travel Let's look around the world makers hackers artists engineers and more the first thing that we have this week is a special video from Phil B Take it away Philly. A lot of gadgets are described as being the size of a credit card But in reality you turn them on their side and they're kind of chunky Check this out though 1984 Casio SL 800 calculator Literally the size and thickness of a credit card. I don't think that feats been repeated since Probably because it's fragile you put this in your wallet. You sit down and it breaks. Here's a broken one now We can look inside and see how they did this There's a cutout for the chip which is hung upside down You still see that on some devices today, and then the passives are these strange wafer thin bits very non-standard So in 37 years nothing comes to mind that replicated this credit card feet Nearest I can think are the SIM cards from cell phones Which by the way originally were the size of a whole credit card this little punch-out thing didn't happen till a couple years later All right next up some important eight box news We are gonna run out. So we're at the like 100 ish threshold That means we have a hundred slots open. That's after we've just added like a couple hundred more We're gonna be shipping them really soon. It's something that you're gonna want It's really hard to get a lot of things right now So this is the only and best way to really pre-order anything on a deferred, you know know what it is You probably guess but a box will be shipping. Please please please sign up good a box calm It also helps us Yeah, all right Every single week during the week unless it's a holiday, which we just had we have Collins lab nodes So we're gonna have Colin take it away. Here's the latest three episodes by Colin Polyamide aka captain tape even if you don't know the name you've likely seen it in use on multiple occasions For example on a lithium polymer battery 3d printer heads or even a USB jack Not chosen for its charming amber aesthetic Polyamide is best known for its ability to maintain composure through a wide range of temperatures From down around negative 100 degrees Fahrenheit all the way up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit It won't get brittle melt or spontaneously evaporate like you might expect from a thin film material It's great for attaching temperature sensors in hot environments and when you need to secure a component in place for soldering There's no better choice Plus it's resistant to chemicals tearing. It's pliable Translucent and it's also an excellent electrical insulator So yeah, watch your back duct tape If you're looking to maximize the lifespan of your rechargeable lithium battery Keep it as close as possible to room temperature and don't store it in the fridge or freezer When you do store them try to keep them about 50 percent charge to maintain functionality Over time leaving them in a fully depleted state can cause them to permanently lose capacity or just die altogether And as always avoid anything sharp that could puncture the lipo's casing and cause the internal chemicals to mix and leak and the battery to become puffy and Possibly catch fire or explode Yeah, a puffy lipo sounds kind of cute, but it's not a happy thing Switch mode power offers many advantages over the older technology used in linear power supplies Switch mode power supplies are smaller and lighter as they don't require the large heat sinks and bulky Transformers found in linear supplies. They're also more efficient linear supplies waste a lot of energy as heat topping off at around 30 to 40 percent efficiency in Contrast there are switching supplies out there boasting 96% efficiency Pretty much every wall supply you see nowadays uses switch mode power But there is a downside switching supplies can introduce noise into your circuit both conducted and radiated Proper RF shielding and output filters can do a lot to help reduce that switch mode noise But if your circuit is particularly sensitive to fluctuations, you're best off using linear power or the portable low noise option a battery All right, so tune in for more columns up every single Week here on Adafruit. Okay. Help wanted we're doing our best to grow the economy and We do that by providing a free jobs board and Anyone can post their skills or if you're a company and you're looking higher someone and you're like oh like we do a bunch of Adafruit stuff we use Adafruit code or we do microcontrollers or do whatever You'll find some really good qualified folks. So this is the research technician full-time in Rockville, Maryland You could check out the job listing and more but basically they're looking for research Technician to work at their headquarters developing research instrumentation to study driver behavior for on-road and simulator studies Bunch more details check it out And if you have a job that come in because they're like really good job These are good jobs and they're for exactly the kind of people who read Adafruit site Like chances are if you're buying and making stuff with our electronics Or like following her guides or publishing stuff on our forums Then you're the kind of person who could be a research technician at this company. Yeah. Yeah, all right It's not time for Python on hardware All right, there is so much going on in the world of Python on hardware that we had to make a newsletter in this newsletter We're almost like 9,000 subscribers. I think it's the most subscribe to Python on hardware newsletter So this week on the newsletter We have a few things. Yeah The first thing we have is we were celebrating how many guides we had. Yeah, so it's 2,500 That's a big deal. Good up to 2,500 lots of guys And then in our newsletter We also point to our other newsletter which we do which is the if you're internet of things monthly that comes out every month We started to cover some things that I think will be interesting in the Python world But it'll probably be interesting in the legal world soon GitHub co-pilot. It's an AI coding assistant and The controversy I just think this is funny as hell I mean like everyone's angry, but I just think it's hilarious I think we're actually at a point where we're starting to laugh at lots of stuff versus just get angry. I think this is a healthy way I just think it's funny. So I was just like oh cool like This will be interesting. Yeah, and so the controversy is that this GitHub co-pilot thing was trained on all this GPL code and It then inserts code when you want it you still have to do stuff afterwards like compile it and everything But the debate is should GitHub Microsoft be able to use all that open-source code as a training set to produce code for people and the answer is Duna, I mean what's what did licensing doesn't specifically say whether or not you can train data on it a lot of code that people look a Lot of code like this example it comes from the API documentate, you know, it's like it's a little bit it reminds me a little bit of the The API discussion that just came up in that court in that supreme court case between Oracle and Google yeah Google about Java and everyone the judge said well It's like if you have a function that determines You know the max like the you know max int int and it returns an inch Whichever is larger gives you the larger the two ends There's really only like one way to write it like at some point there's when your API is high-level enough There's no real other way to write it. So Something that just copy and paste basically is a copy and paste smart snippet writer Is there a de minimis of code That is not licensible because it's it's such a small amount of code There's no no other way of writing it because the API only works one way Yeah, I mean like like yes, it's like it's like if it's trained it's not gonna write the entire program for you It's like it's only gonna make sense for small chunks of code because the longer your your markoff chain is right the less sense It makes so it works for small chunks and the question is what is the smallest number of lines of code? That is non licensible because it's so short Yeah, so I don't have an opinion on this yet because I'm still looking at all the arguments There's arguments that are like well if we were to stop we is a society in laws If we were to stop GitHub Microsoft from doing this a music company could use AI to come up with every song That hasn't been even every note of every song that hasn't been made yet And just every time a new song comes out just like well We already made that you can't do that anymore because we've already did that So there's a lot of like interesting thought experiments with this But we'll see because I think it's gonna be really interesting and I think it's gonna help people with their code I just know that all these lawyers are so excited This is a new flavor Another approach could be where you use this in like why don't you tell me if my code is definitely broken mode? Yeah, I mean those linters. I think an AI linter could be interesting too. Yeah Okay, next up the HP prime g2 calculator supports two types of Python that is right more calculators Python so it has a couple different things Next up Oshpark has six layer boards for folks that are really in Oshpark Do you check it out? They have pretty fast shipping and then we went over a lot of the things that you can expect in our newsletter But the highlight this week and the thing I'm going to talk about is Mark calendar eight six twenty twenty one. It's circuit Python day. It's happening. It's Friday the six. It's a sneaky day It looks like an eight. It looks like a six. These are all snake letters steak snake numbers So that'll be the day that we do Circuit Python day this year. So let us know what you want in the chat. We have a good idea We're gonna have interviews with people in the community projects kind of a whole smattering of things throughout the day Other people will do stuff around the world Pretty much up to them We like to have a hands-off we have a central hub and things and discord and stuff where we do things But everyone is free to do stuff and have a good cycle Python day and that is the Python on hardware news for this week Thank You Blinka That's right. Okay So I have open source hardware news. I got a few things really kind of a big week so last week I went over the Arduino close source libraries and To be fair and I think it's always good to be fair is this is something that the companies that make The silicon the actual hardware they tend not to want to do open source and they always find like sneaky ways Yeah, so really dress. So this this specifically this this article and I just wanted to get clarification And I'll just have to like, you know Gather around so let me tell you history So we have corresponded with the Arduino team many many times recently and all throughout the years and there's Co-founders of Arduino. There's people we know there's things that are set at events on stage. There's blog posts that they have there's emails between Companies when they're working on stuff So I wanted clarification because it was really unclear or closed source Libraries allowed in the Arduino library ID because they are the ones who say okay or not so Good news bad news most if not all of the or mostly our open source And there's a couple examples that are from companies so Intel has a closed source blob There's like you blocks Yeah, that's T blocks and then there's microchip and again, this is for their own hardware where They don't want to release like it drives. I hate this. It's like the thing I hate the most about companies It's like they wait again not that it's not even that much code But they're like so scared of somebody running that code on a different processor. Yeah, that's not theirs, right? So that's why I really love right and so they what they do is they They distribute a blob and then they're like there's a special license. You can only run the blob on there So microchip has this thing for their touchscreen and like whatever so there's a reverse engineer There's a reverse engineered open source version use that And so what we wanted was clarity because in the past it was not clear what was allowed and what wasn't allowed so we got to the bottom of that and The lesson that I learned is no matter what I was told in any format in the past I should check with The people that are in charge of open source at Arduino now because it might be different because things change and that brings Me up to my follow-up for this week This week's follow-up, which I Pointed to hinted to last week was what's up with the portenta because the portenta says something different than any other Arduino product Ever in their product history and I'll just zoom in on it and it said Study how the portenta h7 board works Using the following files and this was the first time we saw a Product that just had a schematic which can look at it's fine and a data sheet But there was no downloadable editable files So normally when you get an Arduino board one of the things you can expect is like oh There's eagle files somewhere So if I want to like make my own or like make an accessory or do things with it hi cat files You know hi cat files But the whole idea behind open source hardware is it doesn't matter the file format It can be key cat could be whatever but there's an edible downloadable file somewhere So the issue is that it's not there But the site says it's open source hardware on the thing and their about page says All of our boards are open source hardware So I sent a note and I said hey could you send some clarification just like before so I got a response Thank you. I'll hand you oh And basically what I did is I just said so here's the board We get asked about this and we always refer people to the Arduino page and the Arduino page says He's talking about we've asked some people is this open hardware They said oh oops I forgot to put the files up and they put the files up and it's like yeah Either way is fine. Yeah, and like there's those always gonna be like hardcore purists They're like well you you used windows to use key cad so it's it's not a really open so that we're not talking about that We're talking about like are there files in a lot that are licensed that people can use And so we would point people to the Arduino about page and it says all Arduino boards are completely open source and powering users to Build them independently and eventually adapt them to their particular needs So that was different with the portenta and that's why we're like hey There's this this thing. It's a ultium File viewer, but it's encrypted and you can't download the files right it's even like called like GPG. Yeah, which I didn't even bother I mean we do that encrypted and There isn't downloadable files for the portenta and their pro line look like so we asked so here is the information We got back the Arduino pro is a line of products for industrial control robotics and other professional applications It's described in a separate website Arduino dot cc sas pro They're sophisticated boards which are designed and manufactured to work in critical environments like to portenta h7 And they require a lot of technology in the manufacturing process at least for an initial period We want to prevent counterfeiters from blindly downloading and manufacturing it without any R&D effort or contribution to the community because the result Of that will be tens or hundreds of low quality clones Which do not nearly have the quality of ours and no benefit for the community This would confuse users and prevent these products from being successful because their value is not just in circuit design But also in their quality These are not boards that one can manufacture at home or in a makerspace. We'll get to that in a minute Other part this is why we chose them for the same approach as Raspberry Pi We published schematics so that anyone can learn from them and we keep the entire software stack completely open source But at least for now ultium files are only available upon request so that we can check whether someone can actually Manufacture them with the required quality We still wanted to publish an interactive web viewer from which design files can be viewed next up We strongly believe in open source hardware since our origins we sponsored the last Oshawa summit 2 and all the old and new products from our maker community are not only open source hardware But are fully compliant with the Oshawa definition because we love that idea and other people can improve Them or contribute ideas and even create new derived products in this case We're waiting a bit before making the CAD files available for download our approach is pretty open But we acknowledge this doesn't fully match the open source hardware definition written by Oshawa So to remove any confusion and we're making sure OSH open source hardware word is not included in the portenta page So that's totally okay Not a problem Just want a clarification Totally cool. So anyways, you people do not have to release everything is open-toed hardware. It's okay. Yeah, don't say I'm not don't I'm okay with that Why we do it, but we don't Raspberry Pi doesn't even publish full schematics. Yeah, others are like weird like sub schematics Yeah, they say that's what we're releasing. That's fine because that's what they say They're releasing if you do say a product is open source hardware Probably should make sure it meets the requirements especially since Arduino is a bit of a poster child for this stuff When people say open source hardware, they might refer to Arduino So if there's a change this pro line is not open source Well, while that's probably disappointing to some it's not a say proud a surprise at all If you just look at what's been going on with a lot of the Arduino products and were complicated They became the less open. They've been this is like what was the first one the The Wi-Fi Arduino that that's still not fully open source. Yeah, there's one that yeah and so it just seems to be Maybe it's a natural evolution of things like I've been writing about Arduino for 15 years And so I'll send this like link to the Arduino contacts. I have there Not a dunk not a dig It's just like hey we get asked and we don't know and when we want to stock certain things We want to make sure it's open source or not We just want to know and the murkiness is the thing that's hard or when we're told something Over email or in person or at a conference or an event or just like the thing that we had to stick to when we were Manufacturing arduinos if that's different. That's fine change is good. Yay. Just let everybody know So that's where that article came from and I'm pretty much done That's the book end of the two that I had was like how is it working with the library manager now and is the hard Is there a hardware change that we should be aware of? So that is that next up I have a mini follow-up. So last week was breaking news We always assumed ate a fruit would be the one to be in court first for a patent infringement because we had patent trolls That are very intimidating, but they did go away after we pushed back and said hey like you actually don't have a pattern like all these other things So spark fun. They posted up on their site Nate has a big giant post And it was basically about this PC. Do you know product that used an arm core and a 9 and So what I did is I'm just like that's interesting. Let me send some email. So I found out two things one one Spark fun is not the first open-source hardware company to have a patent filing case Go to court in some way. Yeah, true. It is true. It was bug labs. Wow. Remember a million years ago I'm out there. So bug bug labs They were the first one. You can look this up in pacer. You can look it up And it was similar which was like oh like these we make this microcontroller So I believe they brought in like TI and arm and stuff like that. So I thought oh, I know people in arm I should email them and say hey like arm. You're an IP Licenser, how could someone possibly get a patent suit of license or your licensed IP? Yeah, so here's what I sent arm and I'm sure the legal team is gonna get back to me And it's gonna be great and they're gonna answer all these questions So I said hi Hi, I even wrote in uppercase Oh, that's nice of you. Yeah Has arm had a chance to look at the suit that was filed against spark fun And I linked to the spark fun post does all what does arm sorry does arm think this suit has any merit Has arm licensed this IP for use in their cores When companies license arm for the microcontroller or micro computer cores is arm identify the licensee against patent suits So I'll totally post these up as soon as arm gets back to me. I'm sure they will I'm interested to find out the answer if any And then some news I posted today There might be an executive order for farmers to gain their right to repair certain things So I'm one of my gold farmer and World of Warcraft. Can I also get that right? Yeah So, you know, I think there's like there's some debate. They're like, oh, they're just doing the special thing for farmers Whatever. No this like if we can keep going on this trend Let it start with farmers and John Deere and that like conflict between the two Yeah about like what they're allowed to modify or not or do things Also, John Deere gets a ton of ideas from farmers and they turn that into equipment and other things Yeah, so this is the world trying to be like software as a surprise or software as a service Yeah, it's like surprise You will us more money to run your tractor so We'll see how that goes, but I thought that was neat and in New York this past The didn't pass one of the two and how New York law works. I think not the state assembly or whatever So anyhow, we're still an open-source hardware company And we have two thousand two thousand five hundred and three guides to prove it Okay, one thing I'll just say so there's there's now There's a little bit of a debate on hacker news about why companies do open-source and one person in the comments said well People do open-source hardware because they don't have to do any documentation. They just put the files up and they're done It's like, okay I would like you to find me a company that makes similar hardware to ate a fruit that is closed source and Has better documentation. Yeah Fine, it would be great. I would like to do that too. Anyways, we did it show me it So I know what it looks like what's what's on the big board this week Okay, the two new guys who got this week JP did a guide He saw the video for the modal MIDI keyboard This is like the software upgrade to the hardware he made with the Raspberry Pi Pico custom keyboard and Philby did an epic guide how to make the ate a fruit macro patterns to released into a hop key device with up to 12 keys and then use the rotor encoder to change layouts. So I think this will be You know, I think Kevin Fujiki used this to make His custom Overlay key board thing. So I think if you just want to turn your macro pad into a hotkey Controller to send multiple key commands and have the LED light up and use the OLED screen then check out this guy It's very easy to make new overlays. Okay Next up, let's go to some main New York City factory footage take it away factory New York City factory footage without look how much they're building across the street now There's building building. It's more than holding your own now. They're getting to a grand level. Yeah, this is Disney's headquarters or something across street Okay, 3d printing Look at what's getting printed this week. We're gonna do these back-to-back This is the paw device I think you'll get a kiddie key palm echo pad and then a speed-up take away no major in this project We're gonna see if we can make a kiddie paw key cap into a key pad If you find squishing toe beans enjoyable, why not make the toe beans into buttons you can press? This four-button keypad can be customized to trigger keyboard shortcuts We really like musical instruments. So of course, we also made this into a MIDI controller We thought it'd be really funny to have party pair animated on the TFT display So each time a key is pressed the animation advances a frame. So it looks like it's dancing Based on the cutie pie RP 2040 this circuit Python dev board is perfect for those creative projects Featuring the RP 2040. It's pretty much the only chipset you're gonna get these days It has just enough pins for buttons sensors and even an SPI display like the one we have here Each toe binky cap is 3d printed and press fits over these kale box switches and honestly, they're really enjoyable to press The parts list is pretty minimal on this one Just a few switches the cutie pie and the color TFT the enclosure is all 3d printed with parts that snap fits together And no support material. You can of course get the fullest links are in the description The code for this project was made with circuit Python Liz Clark wrote the code as a good resource for projects with USB HAD MIDI and a display Liz made it really easy to switch between modes by setting it to either true or false Be sure to get the whole breakdown of the code by checking out Liz's code walkthrough The key codes and MIDI notes can be customized so you can make this do just about anything you want So if you're just getting started with programming electronics, Adafruit circuit Python is great if you want to quickly get up and running Project bundle makes it easy to download code from Adafruit's learn system Just click the button above the embed to get the code images and more importantly all of the libraries Unzip the download and simply drag and drop them onto your board's USB drive Thanks to the project bundler code has never been more accessible maybe even for cats The display and switches are mounted to a 3d printed key plate the key plate is press fitted into the frame with the key Caps installed over the switches The cutie pie is also press fitted it snaps into a built-in holder on the bottom cover The bottom cover is snap fitted under the frame and lines up with the USB port Lastly the top cover fits over the frame with a display cover fitted underneath Designing the enclosure allowed me to come up with a good recipe for making oddly shaped cases that need to snap fit Using 3d models of the components really helps speed up the designing process So I've made them available to download on our get hub repo so folks can use them too So there you have it a keypad in the shape of a kitty paw Who knew tow beans and kale switches would play so well with a party parrot All the stuff and more every Wednesday on 3d hangouts with no I'm paid this week's iron MPI is brought to you by digikinae deferred and Analog devices is iron MPI this weekly data. What is iron MPI this week? Okay? This week's iron MPI is the LT 39 60 Linear tech of course was purchased by analog devices says it's a kind of a co lab between the two But since it's a now by all devices they get the credit So this is an interesting chip that popped up in didgeridoo.com slash new and I'm gonna make a breakout for it So I picked up the eval board What's neat about this chip is it is a chip that converts I squared C Into a can bus physical layer for transport. What that means is as you see here on the left you have a Microcontroller and it's an I squared C controller or master and you want to connect to a sensor or a device That's controllable over I squared C I square C peripheral And you know normally I squared C is meant to be like intercircuit. That's what the I2 stands for interest or yeah Intercircuit communication and it's meant to be on like a single circuit board however Nowadays, there's so many sensors and devices that might be remote You might have a temperature sensor a humidity sensor or a magnetic sensor something in your robot or your automation And you might want it a little bit farther or connected by wires that are longer than a few inches or maybe even longer than a meter or Perhaps you have a lot of EMI because it's in a robot or something with motors everywhere and I squared C is a single-ended Physical protocol you have a ground you have a clock line and a data line. It's non differential It's designed to be simple because again, it's meant to be in a circuit But you know we're engineers. We like to push the limits. So what if you want to have your I squared C peripherals far away? Well, that's where this chip comes in So sometimes or normally what you do is you'd get a separate microcontroller and have that be on a can bus and then it Leads the sensor data and transfers it over can bus messages gives us a can bus to I squared C conversion This doesn't turn your I squared C device into a can bus device But what it does do is basically transmit the clock and data as if it was like can bus physical Compatible which allows it to go very far distances So if you look inside, there's no microcontroller. It's really just like a logic level differential Signaling system. It's just designed very very well This is the block diagram for one side and each side can either be a controller or a peripheral You can configure it either way And then this is how it works so at the top you can see the clock and data you see the clock going up and down and the data going up and down and then Kind of in the middle you can see it's converting each one and zero into a differential or non-differential signal so when the two Clock lines or the two data lines are far apart voltage, you know six to ten volts apart That's a one and when they're the same voltage. That's a zero This is just a much more EMI and physical distance and capacitive insensitive way of transmitting data again You can't share this on a can bus, but you can share multiple I squared C devices on this bus using this transceiver So here's an example of a multi-drop So, you know on the other side of this you'd have the controller But you can have multiple I squared C peripherals either on one transceiver converter or multiple transceiver converters On your as you can see terminated the 120 ohm is the the terminated Can bus physical interface they call it I to can bus whatever I too can And then you can see you can go quite fast. So this is I think good, you know 400 megahertz is pretty common But you know depending on how long this isn't your cable as you see the bus length There's a calculation, you know depending on your twisted pair and the capacitance It'll it'll depend on it, but I think up to you know, if you're doing a hundred kilohertz You can either get into a hundred meters easily. This is 400 kilohertz And it's happily running at up to 15 meters And that's assuming, you know, you don't even do any special tuning or anything and perhaps even you could do five volts Differential set of three volts and that would get you even better distances So there's an eval board that's available. I'll say that at the time of this viewing filming the cheap itself is an NPI It's not in stock, but sign up and get notified There's an eval board and I also got a separate eval board that is to like endpoints. You can connect together This one has a lighting controller She can use this to kind of test the cabling in distance and then they have some Arduino code and Arduino library as well So I thought this would be really good for is if you have, you know a sensor network Like you're doing agriculture or you're doing robotics and you have your sensors Spread out over a building or a very large machine And instead of having individual canvas nodes, which again is totally fine You can do that if you'd like But you know before you know it now you need a special canvas enabled light controller and like canvas my controllers are expensive and not maybe you've already written your code for AVR or a samd or you know Whatever my controller that you've already decided on and you really like for the pricing and other peripherals You don't have a canvas peripheral in it So now you have to get an external canvas peripheral before you know it your bill materials for every node is like five to ten dollars instead You can take one of these chips the LT 3960 and just like stick it on to the end of this and then You know you can use cat five for example. Here's a cat five to you know wiring converter And then use some long cat five cable another thing that was kind of neat about this Adaptive chip is not only does it do that physical? transference from I squared C to can physical But it also has it up to like a 40 or 60 volt input LDL And so you could actually you know if you have extra wires on your cat five Not only can it pass the can data the differential can data and the ground data. You can also pass a high voltage data power signal right 40 to 60 volts and so that will easily survive any like Really long distance wire that'll cause a voltage drop But you wouldn't be able to have three volts go over your long cable because it would drop down a bolt by the end and then you know Now you're you have too much noise and You're not able to power your peripherals, but if you pass 20 volts or 24 volts and then linearly Regulated down the other end. You could have a really nice clean signal To power your end nodes, so I thought that was kind of a cool Add-on there's kind of a freebie you get with this chip So I have a quick demo to show hold on. Let me get my My demo going here So what I've got here is a QT pie, so this is a samdi 21 which just has a I squared C Connection and I'm going to I've clipped it on to this eval board from analog featuring the LT Featuring the LT 3960 so sorry This is the my controller the my controller goes here into the LT 3960 and then over here. We have a really long Five can six conductor cable. I'm just not using the six conductor and these two are Electrically separate they're mechanically connected, but they're electrically separated and over here. We've got an OLED screen and then Risky to do this live demo, but I think I can super risky I'm going to just power. This isn't data. This is just a powering it from a lipo battery over here Just because that power I'm not passing through the cable and then I reset this circuit and voila The microcontroller is sending I squared C data 400 kilohertz over this cable through this long cable Which believe me you cannot do I squared C 400 kilohertz over this long-ass cable to the other Transceiver which is peripheral to the OLED display so you can do very long distance I squared C and even if I had motors or even a longer cable This would work just fine. It's a great way to have I squared C a very popular peripheral controller Protocol, but make it go super long like canvas. It's like the best in both worlds All right available at digikey and we have the information here for you You can look at the part number or the short URL LT 3960 and that is this week sign up if I Okay, let's remind folks of the code and let's kick it off with some new products All right first up on new there is a coming soon it is We like this so much that we're gonna stock it did you key innovation handbook? We featured this last week on the API and we liked it so much We're like we'd like to stock it. He said yes, so it's in coming soon. Of course you can pick it up Yeah, did you key sign up so we know how many get to but yeah next up. All right next up Yeah, actually, this is a funky thing. I got these motors From Carvex They contacted us and said hey, we've got all these extra motors. Would you like them? We'll sell them to you at cost. I was like, yeah, sure, you know, I'll take some off your hands So these are NEMA 23s. These are nice chunky big motors. These are 2.8 amps and like maybe three ounce inches of torque I don't remember exactly check the check the data sheet that we have linked from the product page These are chunky stepper motors designed for CNC's. These are gonna be great for Controlling something That's either CNC or you just want like a lot of torque. They come with a cable Here as you can see this is the X-Carve cable. So they come with a cable ready to go You can plug it into here. So you don't have to worry about Getting the connector for this nice big Wide-pitch cables very white pitch. It's bipolar shows four wires Nice big mounting plate a GT2. I think it's a two millimeter pitch Pully already attached to it so you can you don't have to worry about If you want to kick this up to your CNC or something Yeah, it's designed for X-Carve, but you can use it for anything you like and I thought these were just really nice strong inexpensive motors Next up. Okay. Next up. We've got our adorable custom woven cables This is a USB-C on one end a wonderful reversible USB-C. On the other hand USB a I just I'm constantly using these kinds of cables. I want a cable that looks good It there wasn't just black because everything down is black. I like a touch of color So I got these purple and pink woven cables with really beautiful over molding These are my favorite cables and that in the store. Next up. All right. We've got more touch pads Do you like a couple months ago? You said let's get some like touch pads Yeah, probably people making like like I don't know you need these like pie 400 if a computer can be anything You still need a way to interact with the computer Well, I like these panel not so all these panel mount things is cuz like a lot of people are building projects with a Raspberry Pi And they want to have some sort of touch or mousing control And it's really hard like a keyboard, you know, we have a panel about keyboard will show in a moment Keyboards usually stay still but mice are kind of like annoying because you have to have a surface for them So these are all panel not this from like a some laptop But you know it's adaptive you can just plug into USB Shows up as a mouse has three buttons It just works with any operating system. It's just a touch pad. It's even got the little scrolling thing on the side So this is a panel mountable touch pads basically left over from some laptop thing But it works great with any computer. Yeah, next up. Okay, you got this glowing track ball I kind of like track balls track balls are kind of big. We needed at least one track ball Yes, so let me see if I can grab this. Maybe I'll plug it in to show the glow Hold on. I've got this over here Okay, so it glows the glowing doesn't is not affected by the rolling. It's like it glows more or less It's panel mountable if you open it up There's LEDs inside and like if you really wanted to you could change the color, but it close like a bluish white color But it's just like you're kind of standard video game or you know controller track ball works pretty well And again, I really like anything that has panel mounts anything that you can like screw this down attach it permanently to your surface We have the combination of something you might need Yeah, so this is a full-sized keyboard. So it's it's big. It's a big keyboard But it's again. It's panel mountable. You can attach it to something permanent and it's got that handy track pad on the side With the two buttons. It's simple but effective. I mean, you know You want a keyboard? You want a track pad? We have them, but they're really small and they're like wireless is the wired version That can be attached permanently and it's full-sized. So it's nice and comfortable. Yeah, I think it's gonna be good You know these people are always making Products or like kiosks with our hardware with a raspberry pi or a beagle bone And this would make a great accessory to let people control it with a mouse attached next up, okay This is something I personally wanted. It's a stem-a-qt cable right so plugs into any of our stem-a-qt your quick boards And on the end it's got these micro clips, right and these is a good idea. These are great these hooks They're not the ultra high-end super expensive ones that you get on your three hundred dollar logic analyzer These are the ones you get on your like twenty five dollar logic analyzer that said they work perfectly fine You can attach to dips you can attach to as you can see a breakout boards wires headers SOICs Not TQFPs or obviously anything water, you know that is ledless, but SOPs or SOICs Yes, so even something on like a motherboard you can like if you can attach just some points You can maybe get into that I squared C there. Let me show this. I was doing this on my IMPI demo So maybe I can zoom in and show how and I was like tight all this together I was like put this in stock because I need this for the demo tonight So this is the hook and You can see it's got this little Little like little hooky hooky that can grab in so you can grab on to like all sorts of stuff and another nice thing I like about it compared to Alligator clips is once it's clipped on it doesn't have a big exposure like there isn't a big space Like alligator clips are so chunky. They're good But like there's a lot of like oops like they're touching this out, you know it really hides the hook hides into the body quite well and then You know like this and then Look, I got these With a little bit of epoxy glue on them so that they are mechanically more secure I got a little bit extra to get those so worth it love this wonderful Grabby grabby all right grabby hook next up the stars show tonight besides you lady to the community our customers our team here at It is More semi-qt boards. Okay, so we're getting back on the stem of qt train this week. This is what actually from a before March of last year and it was one of those things sort of fell off the New products train, but we're getting back to some of these oldies the goodies. So this is a 24c 32 eeprom it's a 32 kilobit eeprom which is four kilobytes Data in eeprom format. I like eeprom because one it's I squared C So it's really easy to connect supported by you know any my controller my computer You know four kilobytes is not a lot, but it's enough to store your configuration data, you know a key Mac address calibration username, you know display Settings what have you over I squared C and again these eeproms are so common They're used by like a lot we actually usually stock these because we use this part in our Raspberry Pi hats Because they are used to you know configure the device to overlay But this is very handy if you ever want to add eeprom to any of your Products a lot of my controllers that are like simpler like the AVRs and pigs have built-in eeprom But a lot of the cortexes of noticing don't But if you still need a little bit of eeprom data to sort of configuration You just put this in you know and and there you go. So it's it's a standard 24 C or 24 LC. It's a totally standard way of using eeprom You can connect it to eight on the single bus because you can configure the address using jumpers on the bottom and we've got Arduino library and A circuit path on library coming out shortly that'll let you easily address them another nice thing about the eeprom You can write one byte at a time. You don't do page erase or page rights or caching or buffering Each bite, you know takes a millisecond to write but you can write them one at a time and those new products All right while we're doing a little bit of top secret go over to discord I lined up a bunch of questions. So we're just gonna do top secret right away and Show off some stuff. So first up on top secret is So we got these clear bricks and we put these you know They're called wireless LEDs wireless LEDs But this is what that looks like and I got some close-up photos, and I want to be super clear It says nothing to do with Lego, and I have a little video I have a little video and that makes it clear too, but I wanted to show how these work These are in no way associated with Lego. These are in no way associated with Lego These are in no way associated with Lego Super cool, and then you have this Yeah, I'm getting into Designing some hardware. I got a re-dual my C cell stuff in the AT tiny 807 or 816 or 817 Family and so I made a little breakout that actually came in so I'm gonna put it together tonight Yeah, and that is the top secret for the week. All right questions. I'm gonna load these up lady. Do we got a bunch? People want to know if that was associated with Lego now All right, so first up a question for ladies are a project that you've had an idea for and really want to do But it's too cost-prohibited or something that else prevents you from making it happen Well, I do want to make this a atomic trinket that Phil came up with which is an atomic clock trinket But those are those like chip scale atomic clocks are like three or four thousand dollars Yes, so I have to wait till I somehow get one of these for free We're gonna make an atomic trinket the most accurate timekeeping trinket ever next up I would love to see a lady Digi-key search on fans. I'm using an ender 3 pro 24 will power supply unit and looking for replacement for the 24 Will fan for mother board and hot end. All right, maybe I'll do that next great search Can you summarize in one shortest statement why Adafruit is all in on open source? I? Hate replication of effort It just drives me crazy that to see people writing the same thing and design the same thing over and over and over again I feel like we don't get very far as a species or as a engineering discipline if everyone's constantly we doing the same thing I mean, yes, it's good to redo stuff because you want to redo stuff, but I feel like we should be building on stuff instead of Having it be like constantly reinvented because of licensing restrictions. I see is such a waste. Yeah my short sentence would be It's good to share information with other humans And the active sharing much like lighting another candle doesn't diminish The the candles flame you get to share something and They get to share it and they get to share and they get to share it And that's how societies and civilization and good people can all come together So that's why we're all in on open source next up Is there an SPI version of the Thing that you showed I'm not that I know of although There there might be But I didn't see it immediately So like you Google for like a differential ice SPI converter or or a differential Just like logic controller, I'll say SPI tends to be very fast So you wouldn't be able to do it as quickly one of the nice things about I squared C is it's not that fast Right one megahertz is like considered crazy fast in I squared C land before SPI. That's considered kind of slow Okay, I know automobiles use can but is there any that use I squared C? Sorry, why I know automobiles use can but are there any that use I squared C? They do on the inside right, but that's not exposed to you pro cons of I to can versus differential I Squared C via nxp's PC a 9615. I think probably similar The details of like which one can drive faster or like longer or be more EMI You know like it's not as affected by EMI you'll have to compare the data sheet specs, okay Does this I squared C over can adapter enable communication with can that works such as in a car? No, it's not actually can it's like the physical layer can't so you can't put on a can bus It's not a converter. It's just like a logic level converter. All right What is the popularity of the RP 2040 compared to other microcontrollers and shop these days Well the samd processor, especially the M zero still have their place in the future I'm still using a designing with samd and like you saw the at tiny and STM's I just can't get any right now Whereas I can get RP 2040s and so I'll say this I can design stuff with it All things being equal if we can get unlimited amounts of each chips. I do believe that we would see The strongest sales with the RP 2040 because it's running a scripting language something like circuit Python You could do a lot with it. We have a lot of guides tutorials resources people are building a lot of things around it So You know obviously the sales are more now because we have more of those chips But if it was a Equal 100 of this 100 of that I think people would be going to the RP 2040, okay How do I squared C? address Select jumpers work the chip Has a pin that you can set higher low to change the address when it first starts up So just check the data sheet to see what pins if any there are some have none and some have like eight You know it just really depends on the chip and whether the design of the chip Exposes any address jumpers. Okay Going back to the Arduino stuff that was going over before does this affect a to fruit in any way? I'll straight up say we're probably going to sell more hardware because I don't agree with What Arduino was saying? Which was like, oh, this is for people who are in the robotics. So they don't need open source No, that's the people who need open source. So I think the customer type is Very different than it was 15 years ago when Arduino started So the expectation now is if you're buying hardware and electronics it needs to be open source So I think people are going to look at one of our boards and look at one of our dream of boards And they're gonna say well I get all these tutorials these guides these videos the open source code and if I want to go to manufacturing. I don't have to Ask Arduino for like some Altium file or something if I wanted to put it into a design So I then again it seems the customers don't care the customers don't care let them decide I think the customers do care. I think well late. They have to say something that I'm not the customer Yeah, no, I think the customers do care and like in our community and everything I think they value open source and I think they value open source hardware and I that's what I think So I think it's gonna actually long term. It's gonna increase our sales for things like feather Sure, if you have a choice of portenta verse feather Which one would you get there's a whole menagerie and ecosystem of wings and stuff because we publish how to do that We give out the files. That's what I'm saying. Okay Let's see do do do robotics needs open source is our is it is Arduino support In the works for the itsy-bitsy RP2040 It is supported through the fill out core. We have a guide on using the fill out core Try it out. It should work. Okay. It's beta, but it's Seems functional Okay, the cricket board it must be paired with a microcontroller all together is about 50 bucks Now that the seesaw chip on board the cricket is more expensive than the RP2040 have you consider making an update In a great updated integrated board. Oh and all in one cricket The cost is not really the microcontroller my controllers very little compared to the assembly costs and the size of the board and all the The the soldering that has to be done for it. It's the cost is not the chip It wouldn't save that much. I'd save maybe 25 cents. It's not worth it. Yeah, all right Looks like we got to all of them. Hey, all right everybody. That is the question We did okay, and thank you so much everyone for supporting us and open source hardware company in New York City Special thanks to Jesse may behind the scenes Doing things behind the scenes and our a to fruit slack chat all the people in the Discords the different chats. Thank you so much for joining us and being part of this adventure We'll continue to be I think we're one of the few independent voices for electronic news and publishing We're not owned by anyone we can talk about patent stuff We could talk about open source hardware we could talk about trends in the world we could talk about chips We are not beholden to anyone other than you the customer. That's right and our team. That's it So that's our community as the people that we we you're our bosses So keep supporting us and we'll keep doing this. Thank you so much everybody. We will see you next week Thanks, everybody. This has been an a to fruit production here is your moment of Xenar