 Live from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody, and welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer, with me, Mr. Lady Aida, on camera control, and I'm married to me happily. Just saving teddy bears. Just, yeah, somebody's got to bake teddy ox. We're here at Aida Food. It all makes sense later. Yeah, this is our Aida Food factory. We do all our testing, shipping, coding, manufacturing, videoing, and more. All the electronic goodies you know and love to use in your projects and products and bear ventilators. We got a jam-packed show for you tonight, all sorts of news, videos, products, guides, cool retro stuff, Star Trek memorabilia, and more. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff coming up. Tell them what's on Tide's chair, Mr. Lady Aida. On tonight's show, the code is resistiveTSC. It'll all make sense very soon, just like the teddy bear video. It'll all make sense very soon. But this is a code, 10% off and native for Star, all the way up to 11.59 p.m. Eastern time, or when I remember to turn it off in the morning. We're gonna talk about our Aida Fruit live series shows, including show and tell. We had some people showing and sharing their projects. We do that every single week. Time travel, look around at world makers, hackers, artists, engineers, events, and more. Retro tech, a bunch of stuff this week. From the mail bag, a special one about Aida Fruit I.O. Main New York City factory footage. Look around here at Aida Fruit and all the stuff that we make. 3D printing, a bunch of cool projects. Ion and PI, and that's when all will be revealed. New products, top secret, we'll answer your questions. We're over on Discord, aidafruit.it slash discord, where there's about 33,000 of us. Almost at any time, you can get a few thousand people. One of the chat rooms, chat topics, and showing your projects, ask questions, join the community, and more. All that on Ask an Engineer this week. Okay, Lady Aida, well, let's pay some bills. Remember, the code is resistiveTSC. When people add stuff to their cart, they get one of three things or more. Yes, that's right. When you order from aidfruit.com, you'll get some freebies in your cart, and $99 or more. You'll get a permaprotohast-sized breadboard PCB. Perfect for taking your Sautilus Breadboard project. We have Sautilus Breadboard as a new product this week, too, and making it permanent. We've got 149 or more. We get a grab bag of different semi-QT board sensors and devices, and you'll get a different one each time if you make an account, and $199 or more. You get free UPS ground shipping. We're hoping in the next month or so we'll get Circuit Playground Expresses back in stock as you know there's a silicon shortage, and we'll get that back in as a freebie as well. Speaking of making accounts, you said if someone makes an account, and they already have one of these, we give them a different one, but there's also something else. We're gonna talk about this now. So please, please, please make an account and do two-factor authentication. And do it now. The reason is there's gonna be lots of stuff in our store that'll be hard to get, and right now that's one of the ways that we manage to make sure that people aren't being mean and unfair and using bots and automated tools to buy up all the stuff. So here's a little tweet that came out. We think this is the future. It's the present, too. Yeah. Folks noticed that another company had pies. They got bought up right away, and then they're just like, hey, look. Adafruit switched over the two-factor authentication so bots and people can't scalp them or sell them on eBay. And Pie Hut is gonna do it. They're gonna have, they're gonna block, cancel, bot, scalp orders. The other thing that came in, I don't know if scalp is a good term anymore. This is the bot that a lot of people follow, and this was from today. I actually got one this time. Wow, thank you. Finally got it. Got one. And then this is from a person. I was gonna put this in mail back, but I figured I would just show this here. Adafruit, lady, I love that you had a two-factor authentication and Raspberry Pi products. Love that two-factor authentication is becoming a requirement in general because it's just better for security for everyone. Great job to your old team. So I wanted to say thank you to the entire team here at Adafruit. All of our customers, our community, we're getting pies out to everyone in the most fair way and it's working out. And we just updated the guide with a video from us talking about this last week. And so the other thing that I wanted to mention is every time we do something new with our store or we have something like this or something that comes up, we'll always do a live video. We'll always have all the information. We'll have an FAQ. I think this is how a modern company has to operate now. Like there's going to be supply chain things. There's gonna be disruptions in shipping because of weather. There's going to be- And lockdowns. Conflicts around the world. There's going to be lockdowns. And I feel like the way that folks use to do business just isn't working. You have to be able to talk to people in a place like Discord or on video in all these different locations. Not everyone uses all these things. So you can use these tools to get the message out everywhere. Yeah. And anyone you know who wants our Raspberry Pi tell them to make an account and enable their two factor now because if you have to wait until the pie is going to stock to download Authy and set it up and log out and log in it's going to take you a couple of minutes and you could lose out because we have them in stock for only like 15, 20, 25 minutes at a time. So anyone you know who wants a Raspberry Pi have them sign up and enable two factor now. Do it now, not later. It's free and it's super easy to do. We do a bunch of live shows. We just did one. We're doing one right now. Yeah. We did show and tell. Yeah. So for our live shows we do show and tell every Wednesday 7.30 p.m. If it's not Lady and I it'll be JP or non Pedro or others on the show and tell. We had our normal cast of Adafruit folks and... Denizens. Yeah. And Mark did a really neat project that was a look back at different robots over the last couple of years from the pandemic and how it can blow out a candle. And so you gotta watch it. It's really good. Yes. It's a little bit of a comedy routine. Well, it reminds me of like the Rube Goldberg type things where you have a bunch of different things set up to have something happen and it's usually an enjoyable, entertaining video but this was a neat robotics project and has, you know, I thought the little robot looked kind of like Pixar. Yeah. And then Jaystop by from Digikey I'm gonna play the Digikey and Supply Frame sponsored Hackaday Prize shortly. And then other shows that we do on Sunday we had Desk of Lady Eta. Part one, Lady Eta, you showed that cool book. Yes, I showed off a couple revisions we worked on some sensors that I was checking out. This book about the history of computing. From 1969, the history of computer. Computer. There's only like one. There's like one computer. And then I used, I was thinking like what would it take to build core memory? And that was actually what we had as a topic for the great search. Yeah. And then for great search when Lady Eta uses her powers of engineering to help you find things on digikey.com what did you find this week? I found very small toroids. So, you know, ferromagnetic core memory uses these little rings that you can flip back and forth using two power wires that can either set it to like North or South and then use a sense wire to read the bit. And so you can store a very small amount of data. And this is how we stored memory inductively before we stored it the way we do now which is capacitively. But, you know, you can still make it. So I found some paid sub guys like here's how you make like one bit of core memory. And I also showed how you can find very small toroid cores on digikey. There's all sorts of cores there for any kind of inductor or filter need. But I tried to find the smallest ones. Okay. Next up, every single Tuesday we do JP's product pick of the week. You should watch it because it's a live show and we broadcast from the product page and the discount is applied automatically. Take it away JP. Ah, there it is. Yes. That's one whole meter of it. Our alligator clip NeoPixel strips. And we have two versions of them. You can see one of them is quite long. That is one meter and that is the 30 NeoPixel per meter. This one is the half meter and that's 60 NeoPixels per meter. So these are perfect for things like our circuit playground express and circuit playground blue fruit boards as well as micro bit because they have these nice alligator clip friendly pads on them. What we have are a ground, a power which is good for anywhere from three to five volts and a data pin. And then we can power that off of directly off of a lipo if we want. Mount that inside of your cool cyber hoodie hood alligator clip NeoPixel strips in both the one meter and half meter length both with 30 pixels. So two different densities. And then on JP's workshop, every single Thursday tomorrow we do circuit Python Parsec. And here's this week's highlight. That's circuit Python. What I wanted to do on the circuit Python Parsec today is start to introduce Vector IO. Vector IO is a lightweight 2D shape generation library that works side by side with display IO. Now we can already create shapes using display IO but these are designed to run faster, take up less memory and they also are a little more efficient in that in the case of this circle it really only refreshes the pixels where the circle are rather than a sort of rectangular bitmap of where the circle exists. So I'm importing here the display IO library and then Vector IO. I'm setting up a couple of palettes because I want to use two different colors. Now I'm setting up a variable called ball rad that's the ball radius. Right now it's set to 13. How about we update this? I'll make this a radius of 20. And then here's how I create it. Right now we have sort of three things we can use inside of Vector IO. We have the circle with a rectangle and we have a polygon. Today I'm just going to look at circle and rectangle. So for creating the circle I do Vector IO dot circle and then I tell it which color to use the radius and then an X and a Y position. Then I'm doing a similar thing to create a paddle as if we're doing a little breakout type of game. And that's a rectangle again with a color, a width, a height and an X and a Y position. I'm driving those from the positions of the ball. Then if I append those to the main group of display IO and hit save here, it's gonna refresh in a second it's gonna redraw and now it's gonna have this new larger radius. Now to show that these actually run pretty nice and fast I am using a little bit of code that Todd bought provided and this is a sort of bouncing, a little bouncing ball algorithm that reverses or inverses the X and Y position whenever we reach one of the extents of the screen or the top of the paddle in this case. That is the basics of how you can use Vector IO to create a circle and a rectangle inside of Circuit Python. And that is your Circuit Python Parsec. Next up, Fridays. Tim Fomegai is doing deep dive and they're comprehensive. Yeah, and what I did this week is I downloaded the video and I watched it of course. And then I did a speed up because I wanted to just show like, there's a lot that goes on. So there's all things, there's all the code. Here's all the questions that are getting in the video and the discords to live. So if you ever wanted to do like care programming or like have like real time mentor or instructor that's showing you not only like what code can do, but what a project is. I think that's one of the hardest part. So I think with physical hardware it's easier, but anyways, some really good tips, projects. Okay, time travel. We're gonna look around World Makers Hackers Arts Engineers. So this week's time travel, we say goodbye to March and Women's History Month. Thank you everyone on the Adafruit team who did like just about a post every single day for Women's History Month 2022. Amazing Makers and women. Yeah, sorry. Oh, someone says they can't hear me. Yeah, but our thing is there. No, no, no. Did you hit a mute thing? No. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Well, everything seems to be working here. Well, Women's History Month, well. Well, or it could be them. I think it's working. I think it's working, sorry. Yeah, could have been a YouTube glitch. Anyways. Sorry, we're saying March, the month. Yeah, something happened. So Women's History Month is over. Yes. So do check out all the posts and more on our site. And April, lots of stuff ahead. Yeah. You name it, there's a lot of things going on in the month of April and we'll have them on our site. Okay. Yeah, weird. Audio died for a second. Okay. Anyways, next up, Eight of Box. Just a little bit of a reminder. Please, please, please go databox.com. You'll see any updates. We are doing seasonal and seasonal is now turning into winter-ish, spring-ish. Now, technically it is still kind of winter here in New York. It is, it was like 11 degrees out. It's probably, it's gonna be spring. It's, look, this is, we're just dealing with supply, we're also doing the supply chain issues tour like Jack White. But we're gonna, you know, we're trying really hard to get everything in. It's just, it's gotten really tough to get some stuff. And I don't know what to tell you. But sign up and when we ship Eight of Box we'll give people a little bit of warning as well in case people want to change their address or cancel. Well, I think I know what happened. Yeah. The, the speed up had some audio stuck on it. And I think it muted out our video, our audio. Okay. That's cool. Cool. That's probably what happened. All right. Okay. Next up, time travel. It's the Hackaday Prize. Oh! So, Hackaday's, yeah, Hackaday Prize is out this year. And this year is Sustainability Resiliency and Circularity. I don't know what circularity is. And it is sponsored by Digikey and Supply Frame. And they may- Yeah, our best friends. And Jay was on our show and tell representing Digikey and Jay's a judge. So Jay cannot enter Jay's robots. You cannot win. And win, but you can impress the judges probably with a cool robot project. So I thought we're not connected to this at all. I just, other than I started Hackaday a long time ago but I've nothing to do with this. And I've been a judge a couple of times. Yeah. I've been neither. I haven't been a... Well, you're definitely, you have to recuse. It's not fair. Yeah. I have to recuse myself. If I were, if I were a supreme judge for the Hackaday court judge, I would recuse myself cause it wouldn't be fair. Right. Thread the needle here. That's a terrible, terrible court. I am going to play the Charler video now. Hey everyone. It's Magenta Stronghart here at Supply Frames Design Lab in Pasadena, California. And I'm so excited to tell you all about the 2022 Hackaday Prize which launches today, March 29th. The Hackaday Prize is global, but it all starts here with an idea, a maker and the tools needed to bring that vision to life. This year's themes are all around sustainability, circularity and climate crisis resiliency. Topics that affect us all on this planet, we call home. With five challenges and over $150,000 on the line, there are plenty of opportunities to win big while making an impact. So the time is now. We're challenging you all, our amazing community of engineers, designers and hackers to continue to raise the bar on what's possible with open source hardware. Prizes range from $500 to our grand prize of $50,000. You all have changed the world before and now we're asking you to help save it. Thanks to the generous support of our sponsors, Supply Frame and DigiKey, we've been able to move the needle on what's possible with open source hardware innovation. So grab your tools, grab your team and grab your ideas and show us how you are changing the world. Okay, let's do some mailbag. Hello, Packet. So this week's mailbag is a little different because we're doing different stuff all the time. Why just read an email that someone sends in when we can talk about something that we did that was kind of neat. So we do this free service called Adafruit IO, adafruit.io. We have a page here. Talk about that in a little bit. But there was an educator and the educator is like tweeting at us, saying a shout out to Adafruit and Adafruit IO just for being so awesome. More info on that later. It's kind of nice. That's pretty nice. Right, that's super nice. I'm a little suspicious because it's so nice. A little suspicious, but this was an educator and the educator has a website and the website was on GitHub and this educator has criteria for which IoT service to recommend to students. And took a little screenshot here of the thing, but here's the, yeah, so Adafruit came out tops. Tops. And the reason is expand. Which IoT cloud platform should my students use? And the winner is Adafruit IO. And there's other ones. Talk about them, because that'd be weird. This is, they picked us. Do check out the other ones, like Arduino cloud and stuff like that. So here's an image of my criteria for my students. My student develop IoT platform criteria. Three free devices about need for a credit card. That's right, we don't require that. No credit card required. And you have, I think you have up to 10 devices. Yeah, easy to set up MQTT connectivity for multiple devices and platforms. Bam, built in. Easy to set up HTTPS connectivity for multiple devices and platforms. That's right, we really suggest SSL, recommend it. Easy to set up WebSocket MQTT connectivity for multiple devices and platforms. Not sure what that is, but we have MQTT and we have WebSockets. Sensible free limited data storage, say 10 megabytes, you know, plus or minus. I think we store nearly infinite data, but it's like, you can only have N feeds and you can't upload data more than, I think on the free tier, more than like 30 times a minute. There's something very reasonable, basically to keep people from like slamming our storage. And I think we store, you know, 10,000 plus data points. So we spent a lot of time on this. We want the software as a service to be supported by our hardware. We do have a pro account if you go over and some people do. Please support if you can. Yeah, but you don't need to and this is why it's really good for students. No credit card needed. Nope, we don't even like take the credit card and say like, we're not going to charge you. We don't even, we don't want it. Do not stop giving us your credit card. We don't want it. Believe us. But we really want students to learn this stuff. And we also have an IOT Bill of Rights. We think that's important. And it's us. So you can always get ahold of us. We're always able to help you out. We have forums, we have the discord chats for Adafruit IO. And this educator wanted a feature. We happened to already have it and they were really nice and had this for their students. And so we very much appreciate it. There's lots of choices, obviously. And we came out on top. So thank you so much. One thing they don't even mention, we support every device. Roxetta Jeremy Ellis. Okay, next up. That led me to the next thing that I wanted to do. It's in our time travel section. Sort of, we have a new part of Adafruit IO. It's called whippersnapper. So first off, Lady Aida, what is whippersnapper? Whippersnapper is a no code way to make internet of things devices where you don't have to write any code. You don't have to program any Python. There's no Arduino. There's no IDE. We support right now a selection of Adafruit hardware and also a couple of non Adafruit boards. More people can add board support through our GitHub repository. And basically you download the whippersnapper firmware onto our boards without, again, no compilers needed, usually drag and drop a file on. And it'll show up magically in Adafruit IO and you can dynamically add sensors, buttons and LEDs and create a remotely controlled user interface for your hardware, again, without any code. So it's a little similar to like a program called Blink, except Blink is Bluetooth and this is, you know, Wi-Fi specific and it is on top of Adafruit IO so you can also take advantage of all the dashboards we have, we've got a components that we're adding and including I squared C devices, which is kind of a unique capability. There's also, you know, home assistant, Hasmoda, but those are kind of meant to be in a closed ecosystem. And this is designed to be, you know, used through Adafruit IO and then you can send that data through a webhook to another service if you'd like or use, if this and that, or... We just updated our guide, so you can use ESP32 S2 feather with whippersnapper. Yeah, we have a starter, we have starter pages for a lot of our hardware. So we had a guide, but a lot of people didn't know about the guide. So what we did is now we're going into all of the boards that support whippersnapper and again we support about 12 different boards right now. And we're adding a page on QuickStart, how to quickly get started with whippersnapper, how to get it set up, you have to tell it your SSID and password of course and your Adafruit IO username and key. But once you've done that, you know, it shows up in Adafruit IO, you can completely control the device and program and configure it dynamically over Adafruit IO either on mobile or on a laptop or on desktop. So a lot of people, they just want to do a project where they're like, hey, I want to log temperature data every 15 minutes and save it to the cloud. That would normally be like, okay, download Arduino, download these libraries. And I don't want to spend more than a half an hour, 15 minutes actually getting, I just want to know if it works. Yeah, you can basically do it instantaneously. It's the hello world of IoT perhaps is what... We definitely made it too easy for the folks who like hard things and terrible things, this might not be for you. Okay, so next up, retro. And I'm just going to say that the first part of the retro news this week ain't good, but I think it's important that we talk about it. So this week's retro news, I was just going to have photos of some old electronics, some videos, which I'm still going to have, but this is kind of sad news. So there is a retro museum in Maripole, Ukraine, and it's been destroyed, gone forever. This is Dimitri, that's a Commodore that Dimitri has. He's looking cool. He's okay, but if you all read the news, this is on CNN right now, maybe you don't read CNN, but pretty much everyone agrees that this happened today. Russian assault on Maripole is devastating. This is the satellite images. So somewhere there's a completely shelled retro museum that used to exist, somewhere there. This is some of the captions from the news. Russia has continued. Damage on Maripole is devastating. Pentagon says even the Red Cross building there got bombed. So we did a blog post about this. There's information about Dimitri, information that he's been able to get out, what's gonna happen next, ways to support him. His message that he posted, well that's all. The computer museum of Maripole is no more. All that remains in my collection, I've been collecting for 15 years, just fragments of memories on the Facebook page, the website, and the radio station of the museum. I will try to continue to support retro bit website and radio, but life will now completely have different priorities. There is neither my museum nor my home, and it hurts, but I'll definitely survive and find a new home. And you could go to the website. It's this. It 8-bit. It 8-bit club. And the collector website and the data sheets are still up there. And there's a bit of a follow-up that Dimitri put up there. People were like, well why were you stuck around? He said we did not leave on the first days of the war, hoping that Maripole would stand and not be occupied, but we were greatly mistaken and underestimated the scale and brutality of the Russian invasion. And then, I guess maybe on a more positive note, because there's always brave people that have resilience. This is what Dimitri sent as an update. But I still have my family, my ideas and my desire to succeed. And I believe that I will start over and be able to find my new home. And perhaps when a child wakes up in my soul again, I will collect a new collection and open a new museum. So we're gonna try to figure out if there's anything we could do for Dimitri. One of the things that we decided to do was we have a section on our website, Adafruit.com slash Russia. And the reason we're putting it there is there's a message from Arnold Schwarzenegger directly for the people in Russia saying here's what's really going on. Here's what the people that are in your government are doing in the military. We also have links to downloadable copies of Wikipedia. The number one downloader of the downloadable copies of Wikipedia right now is Russia, because it seems like a lot of access is getting cut off for things like Wikipedia or the news or you name it. And we also have tour mirrors and ways to get around the government censorship in Russia right now. If this is gonna end, it might take the Russian people to say enough's enough. The population there that we're in contact with, the ones that are in tech and IT and education, they know what's going on and they're devastated. They don't want to see this either. So anyways, that's a bit of the retro news. I had to put it in there, but I do want to say that our thoughts are with everyone over there. This is terrible. I wanted to have something that maybe people could relate to. This is a retro museum. There's ones all over the world and many of us visit them and then this stuff is hard to get back and lives are even harder to get back. So maybe this can end soon. Okay, switching gears. Jeff posted a really cool video. This is that copy protection thing with disk. So we're gonna play this and then we're gonna show some photos. Jeff here, loading up some software in an Apple II emulator. So in the Apple world, if you have a non-copy protected disk, you can store it in a DSK file. But if you have a protected disk, like PowZap, Kerplunk, the comic book maker, you need to store it in a WAS file. So I have an open pull request to Flux Engine to add support for the A2R Flux format, which you can then convert to WAS format using the open source passport.py program. And this is the first disk that I have, successfully copies using this method. And so that's about it. You're gonna load it up. You can get to the main menu. You can watch the Starship Enterprise go by and maybe just maybe you can make a comic. Talk to you next time. Was that the Enterprise MFI? Next up, speaking of Star Trek, so you could see how this is all coming together here. In 1996, you could get a USS Deep Space Nine Defiant CD player, a portable CD player. And it came with special issues Starfleet headphones. This is the outside of the box. This is the bottom of the unit. When you play a CD, the back of it lights up based on the music. What do you play inside of this? Well, the theme song to Deep Space Nine, of course. Here's the back of it. Here's the back of the box. If you zoom into this later, you can see someone is driving around in a Miata with their portable Star Trek displayer. They're on the beach. And the person- With their portable displayer? And then the person at the bottom is looking up things, not on the internet, because the internet wasn't around as much, but they have a Star Trek encyclopedia and they're listening to music as they're looking at their computer because computers didn't have like as much musical capabilities. And it's got this elk car thing going on. Yeah, here's the front. And then here's my friend Dave. Dave's wearing it. He modeled these and you can see. And he's the biggest Star Trek fan we know. We talk a lot about Deep Space Nine. Both of our favorite captain is Cisco. And then, you know, here it is. They just don't make them like this anymore, folks. I mean, probably never will, yeah. I love that there's like this extra like greebles in this LED backlit. It is true that when you saw the Defiant, it's like, you know what? That could be a CD player. Yeah, I mean, there was like what the Enterprise Pizza Cutter. Yeah. Yeah, you know, Paramount was licensing a lot of stuff out at the time. Yeah. Okay, let's forget. Yeah, so here is a continuation of our series. This is the Mattel Horoscope Computer. And you can see it's beautiful. Here's the box with, if you remember, KB Toys. I remember KB Toys. That's what they recommend, alkaline batteries. And we did a blog post about this. We compared this to the Coleco one. And if you're interested in horoscopes, now it has a little bit of a Y2K problem as in like it never got to the year 2000. So you have to do a little bit of math if you still want to use it. And then here's a little video that we made that has the dates that you could put in. And it'll calculate a horoscope. Very stargate looking. And we have a nice little rotating photo set. And then the other one that we have, you know, RadioShack right now is doing like weird crypto stuff. So one of the things that we like doing is showing like kind of the RadioShack pass. So this is Robbie the robot. And Robbie eats coins, real coins, not bitcoins. And a lot of people had these. We put this up in social media and they're like, I had one of those, I had one of those. Look at that cinematography. Yeah. And then last up, I thought this counts as retro. So Tim Hunkin did a great series called The Secret Life of Machines. And he has a new series coming out. And Lady Aida, I think you'll like this. You haven't seen this yet, so I'm gonna play this for you. Here is a trailer of the upcoming Tim Hunkin series. I'm delighted to announce series two of The Secret Life of Components. I was delighted by the reception of the first series and completely amazed by the generosity of some of the donations. So I just had to keep going. I haven't had quite so much time this winter as my arcades have reopened and life has returned to normal. But there are still five new episodes. I'm launching the first one, The Secret Life of Sensors, this Thursday, March 31st. And the others on subsequent Thursdays. I hope you enjoy them. So if you like electronics, you'll probably like this show. And if you know Tim's work, it is awesome and amazing and new episodes every single Thursday. It's Python on Harvard time, Lady Aida. Okay. All right, so we have a newsletter that we do. It's on Adaford Daily. You can sign up, adaforddaily.com. We deliver it to you every single week and we have lots of news. But there's only one bit of news this week that I think that we're gonna talk about. So it's jam-packed, lots of stuff. But I wanted to say welcome to the world. Ari and we have these special baby Blinka graphics. So as you all know, Scott's our lead on Circuit Python and he brought a kid into the world, Ari. That's right. Welcome to the world, Ari. I hope one day you can look at this video and say, wow, my dad is making me work on Circuit Python version 5,000. And this is maybe one of the starts of it. Hug report for joining us here on Planet Earth. I'm sorry that it's not in the best possible shape. We're trying to do a good job, but I'm looking forward to all the things that you do, Ari, to make this a good place for one another, work together. I hope that you'll find some beautiful, amazing things in the world. There's a good chance they'll learn Python. So this is a good kickstart, but they also may not be interested in computers at all. You never know what a person's gonna be like. Yeah, and I just also wanted to have these baby Blink graphics for a while and we were waiting and welcome to life, Ari. And Scott will be back on, attorney leave, we'll be back soon. We'll be back and then gone again. And that is this week's Python on Hardware. Okay, we're an open source hardware company to prove it. We have 2,648 guides laid out. What is on the big board this week? Okay, we had a lot of guides and guide updates. For the HD20 and this Feather ESP32 guide, we added whipper snapper pages. So again, getting started with whipper snapper, trying to kind of expose more people to it now that it's kind of out of beta, we're getting people using it. So having quick start pages on the sensors and devices that are supported. We also had a couple guide updates for the ESP32 S2 Feather. We revised that hardware, so we want to update the notes on that. And the ESP32 Feather V2, we added a micro Python page for people who want to use this board with micro Python. Then Pedro did the 3D printed book sleeve. We'll show the video for that. And Melissa did two color TFT display breakouts using our new template system. So it's a lot faster and easier for her to do so. We now have example code for Arduino, Python and circuit Python for all of our displays. They'll be really easy, we'll get started with them. Liz. Leave that to the last, because we're gonna show a video. Brent worked on the quick start for whipper snapper. Again, a lot of us was refactoring it, taking the tutorials out of the quick start page and sending people to the product in specific. Because we used to only support like one board and now we support like a dozen. Then there's our other TFT display that Melissa did. Kitty Young who did the Kitty flowers, the Bluetooth broaches that we stock in the shop. She wrote up a guy with a lot of projects, how to program them like a really good set of tutorials. Really in depth on how to grab these wearable broaches and make them do stuff. And then finally Liz Clark, I basically assigned her like, hey make a video synth with a Raspberry Pi using processing and figure out how to send data from CircuitPython Blinka to processing because you don't wanna write a driver in processing because it's kind of a pain. And we have all these drivers written in CircuitPython and she forgot how to did it and she made three different video synths and a one minute video to demo it out. So we're gonna play the one minute video and then I'm gonna play the video of the synth doing stuff. So take it away Liz. You can build a video synthesizer with a Raspberry Pi. The animations are coded using processing and the hardware is controlled using Blinka, the CircuitPython compatibility library for single board computers. This build uses STEM aborts to talk to the Pi over I squared C. A rotary encoder lets you switch through the four included animations. Three Neo sliders and a time of flight sensor let you control the animations in real time. Learn how you can build your own video synthesizer by checking out the learn guide at learn.adafruit.com And check out all those and more at learn.adafruit.com. Thousands of guides, PDF downloads of them if you wanna print them out. Open source code. So many projects. Hardware. It's all available for you to make anytime. And it's free. Main York City factory footage. Take it away, Ada Fruit factory. And it wouldn't be Main York City factory footage unless you saw the Disney headquarters being built across the street. This is our view now. Yes. The sky is owned by Disney. We have to pay $29 a month to see the sky. Sky plus. All right, 3D printing. So we have a couple of things that we're gonna show this week. The first one is the 3D printed book covers for graphic novels and books and more. You'll be able to mix these and remix them and make your own for other graphic novels. And then there's these little tweezer things that Pedro made. I think they'd be great for Cheetos because of all the cheese dust. So I think when you're eating something that has cheese dust on it. I had Cheetos for the first time in a decade this last weekend and it was amazing. I forgot, wow, Cheetos are so tasty. There's a scientist somewhere that's like, how can we make you want to eat these? I know, there's like, I can't buy them because I couldn't stop myself. I was like, these are so good. Yeah, all right, so we're gonna play these back to back. See you on the other side. Hey, what's up, folks? In this project we're 3D printing custom book sleeves. Book sleeves can help protect the binding of a book and illustrate detailed hints about the subject. These detachable covers are usually made out of paper. Our 3D printed sleeves are rigid and help keep the spine of the book in shape. The added dimension can really help show off the artwork and it just looks great displayed on your shelf. You can edit the dimensions along with any creative details to really customize your books. This is printed with supports to handle the overhangs on the text and the eye opening. Make sure to check out the learn guide for full list of print settings. We designed a sleeve for the watchman so that it lines up with the graphics on the cover. The red drop of blood is extruded separately to add depth to the artwork. The drop of blood was separately printed in red PLA so that we could avoid having to paint the sleeve. Additional parts can be layered on top with adhesives or double-sided tape. And that's it, we think it's a really fun way to customize and protect your books. So which of your favorite books should have custom sleeves? Let us know on Discord and share your projects with us on our weekly show and tell. Thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe for more projects from Adafruit. The best way to eat cheesy poofs. This is definitely a thing. So every single Wednesday, 3D Hangouts, learn how to make all this stuff and more. This morning I was watching this video and I saw that the person who made the video had this 3D app, scanner app on their home screen and so I looked it up and I'm like, I want that app. So I scanned my face with my phone and I exported the video and this is what it looked like. It's kinda cool. And the name of the app for those of y'all who have an iPhone or an iPad it does it, it's EM3D. And it works better than the other ones I've tried and it also has a cool 3D printed thing that you can get that'll put two phones next to each other. So it has mirror mode. So you can scan something and then see what you're, you have to be able to see it because it's the 3D camera, the LiDAR type thing is on the front side. And so I scanned my face and if you pay for the app, you can export STLs and other things or videos without watermark. So I thought that was kinda cool. So that's me scanned. It begins. Okay, Lady Aida, let's do an MPI, ready? That's right. MPI on MPI. All right, this week's Ion MPI is from Sincereon Lady Aida. What is this week's Ion MPI? That's right. I'm kind of a sucker for Sincereon sensors because they're always really good and I really like sensors. So I wanna show you the kind of the newest, most interesting things. And this sensor is interesting. It's a low pressure flow meter. It's kind of intended for medical uses but I actually think it could be useful for a lot of robotic or industrial uses where you wanna measure air flow but you want to be able to handle low flow rates because a lot of sensors that we've got are intended either for water or for high flow rates because they create some pressure. This one is designed for medical uses such as like a CPAP or a ventilator but even if you're not doing medical grade stuff, I think this is an interesting sensor. So this is the SFM, sorry. SFM P119. It's a low flow air or gas, the non-cruisive air or gas sensor. And it's meant for non-liquidismans for gases. It's tuned for either air or oxygen but you could probably tweak it for and calibrate it for other sensors. What's nice about it is it's low cost. It's really simple and it's kind of all in one. It's got a flow rate range. I can't remember, maybe you can go to this so I can actually read the text. Oh yeah? Yes. I can do that. You can go up to 240 SLM which is standard liters per minute. And yeah, the design of it is very modular. Like a lot of sensors we've seen that are for this are kind of designed for like one customer. This is kind of designed for anybody to use as long as you can just connect to either side. It's small. It's plastic. There's an inlet and outlet. It's monodirectional so gas is only supposed to go one way but it looks like it can handle some negative flow measurements. Perhaps not precisely. There's O-rings on either side. You can see the directional knob and there's a little module on top. It's quite small. It's only maybe two inches by one inches by two inches or so. And this is what our liquid flow rate sensors are like. This is a kind of a low cost turbine sensor and so you can see that there's a little turbine in it but if we go to the overhead real fast I can show that this sensor doesn't have a turbine. I actually don't know how it works. I didn't do a ton of research. I didn't want to take this apart because I had this working but it could be some sort of capacitive sensor or something. It's a little bit mysterious but you can see there's no turbine so the gas or air flows through without anything impeding it which can be very good for low flow rates. Another thing that I really like about this is a lot of flow rate sensors use a Hall Effect sensor on the turbine or something and you have to count and you have to calibrate it and it's not quite linear whereas this sensor has a standard I-squared C interface. You just power it with three to five volts. You get clock data ground. It's on a two millimeter pitch connector. It's a standard connector. I just used a two millimeter pitch wire connector that I had handy and plugged it in to get it working and it just works and you can query it and get data and it's all ready to go. It's all pre-formatted temperature and flow rate data. There's also like check sums which I always like means that the data you're reading you can verify especially if you are using this for medical uses or important uses like making sure that there's enough oxygen or air flow in an area. It's good to make sure that the data you're getting is verified so having a check sum is handy. But the good news is you don't have to do any of the coding yourself because they've actually released libraries. This is just one of the libraries, the Arduino library but they have a Python library. They've got embedded C library. I think they have one for a couple different. They didn't have like four or five different libraries in different languages that are ready to go with an example code that you can read temperature and flow rate. So actually I was able to wire up the sensor and have this demo. I got it up and running in like less than 25 minutes. You know, it could be easily integrated almost immediately. So that I always like that because I feel like you get a sensor and especially low cost ones that are not calibrated. You don't trust them. Like you have to do a lot of setup. You have to test them in all these situations. I like that this one just gives you digital data. You don't have to do the linearization or modeling of the sensor at all. There's lots of documents. There's step files for the 3D model. There's handling information. There's different calibration details of how they calibrated it for oxygen versus air or a mix I think of oxygen and air. But pretty much it was just like really, really fast to get going. So I can show a demo real fast and then we can finish the test or so. So this is the sensor. So I just had two millimeter pitch connector and I wired it up. You see that there's a little filter here to keep dirt and dust out, but it's a very fine filter. So it's not, it's not in the way. And then this arrow shows you which way air flow goes. So right now there's no air flow. You're just reading the temperature. It's a little warm here under the lights. But if I blow into the sensor. Yes, the flow sensor. I don't have an O-ring. I'm not putting my mouth on it because I'd be kind of gross. But just blowing through the sensor, it detects my air coming out of my mouth and it responds very quickly. It does have a, you know, a low pass filter built in that you can, I think it's enabled by default, but you can disable it. But it's probably a good idea because I think air flow especially can be very buffety and you want to have, you know, a couple readings in a row that are averaged out. And it does that for you as well. Available on Digikey. Shortly. So when I purchased it and it was in stock and then as I was writing an MPI, I looked back and it sold out. However, they're gonna get another shipment. It's rare. Usually they don't sell out, but this is a pretty cool sensor. Very handy. And the price is quite good for a sensor of this grade and usability, only like about 120 bucks. So it'll be in stock in about two months. Also, contact Digikey if you need them immediately and they can hook you up with samples from Sinceria. And it's usually, it's an unusual situation, but high demand. You know, there's videos that a lot of sensor makers have and some of them are okay. I like this one a lot. That intro from the show will all make sense now. I will say that this video is for the SFM series. They talk about other sensors that are in the family, not just this one. So it'll look a little different, but it's about how these sensors in general work. So it's still a very good video to get an idea of what it does. They do a good job. So we're gonna play the whole thing. And there's a teddy bear. It's about two and a half minutes. The teddy bear lives. Hi, and welcome to the Sincerion Flow Sensor Video Series. I'm Grisha, a contact partner for our valued medical customers. This video in our Flow Sensor Series is all about proximal flow measurements. I'll go through a few of the challenges in this field and show you our sensor solutions. Proximal flow measurements have the big advantage that they are unaffected by leagues in the tubing system. Sensor readings offer direct feedback on how much air the patient is inhaling and exhaling, which is very useful. Even so, harsh operating conditions can put accuracy and reliability at risk. Changing temperature and humidity levels are common, especially in an emergency and transport setting. In addition to that, proximal flow sensors are in contact with pathogens exhaled by the patient. Thankfully, there is an answer to these challenges. The Sincerion SFM 3300 and 3400 series. The flow sensors are designed for use with adults and infants alike and are available in two versions, reusable and disposable. The former can complete up to 30 autoclaving cycles, while the latter offers the same measurement performance at a lower cost. For ease of use among medical personnel, we have fitted all of our proximal flow sensors with grooves for a clip-on connector cap. Connecting them to breathing circuits with their standard medical cones is easy too. Want your proximal flow meter to be heated to prevent rain out in humid environments? No problem. We've made sure to equip them with a small heater. The digital sensor output is factory calibrated and compensated for temperature variations. If you want to perform first tests, look no further than our evaluation cable, which you can order from our distribution partners. And to visualize and log data recorded by the sensor, we provide free readout software. Our website and info line are waiting for you. Thanks for your interest in our flow sensors. See you again in the next Sincerion video. And this is my homage to Teddy. This is the Teddy bear homage. So that's this week's Sinon MPI. MPI. Okay, so don't forget the code is resistiveTSC Lady Aida, kick it. All right, it's new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new. All right, first up, we have other sizes of the t-shirt. I don't collect NFTs unless you're talking about nice F and T shirts. And here's Lady Aida in front of a real NFT gallery. We don't do NFTs, we get accused of it. We don't do it. It comes with a special pack of stickers and more. From the share zone. But there's now- And for friends. Yeah, there's now more sizes of the shirt. We have the women's smaller. And once again, we don't do NFTs. Okay. Next up, we have a revision for the PCF 8523. It looked like this. Now it looks like this. It used to look like this. And now it looks like this. Basically, we can't get the SOIC version of the RTC. So you might get a version with the HVSON version. It's the same size. It's the same shape. It's the same pinout. It works the same. But it might be just a little bit looking different. But that's because we want to keep stuff in stock. And to do that, we have to be flexible with the parts available during the silicon shortage. Yeah. All right. Another revision. Next up, P5000, which is the ESP32S2 Feather. This one is without the BME 280 sensor on top. I released this. It was cool. I learned that I made a mistake with a low-power circuitry. I have corrected the low-power circuitry. The board is now re-released. Functionality is the same, but I now have an LDO on the STEMI QT port. I also turn off the pull-up resistors so it doesn't have like this current leakage thing. Basically, I'm getting better at doing low-power design and this is a new revision that you can pick up. If you do, make sure you're running the very latest expressive, sorry, the very latest circuit Python release code and check the Arduino code because we changed the polarity of the power pin to be from low on to high on. But we have a little step of code that no matter whether you have the B version or the C version, it'll work. So if your I-squared C isn't working, just go check out the code snippet I've got, put that in there, and it'll activate the I-squared C port whether you have this version or the previous one. Next up. Next up, we get these kind of cool, weird, like upside-down yoga-doing buttons. These are tactile switches. There's like the standard six by six millimeter and like from the top, they look normal. But from the side, you're like, whoa, the pins are going the wrong direction. They're pointing up. So these are reverse mount buttons. What are they good for? Well, I guess you would like, mount them, pick and place it onto the back of a PCB. There's a hole in the front of the PCB and the button knob goes through or the knob goes through and then you can press it without having, like with a really flush front. I just kind of found these fascinating and I think other people will probably have a use for them and maybe I'll have a use for them. But I always like reverse mount stuff because there's always times where you're like, ah, I need something on one side but I don't want to pick and place it on that side. I want a flush front. This will do the job for you. Next up. Next up, we've stocked the PY board, the MicroPython PY board, which is the STM32F405 based PY board. Unfortunately, you can't get STM32F405s right now due to silicon shortage, which you've heard so much about. So we tried with the MicroPython folks. They said, well, we do have the PYB lights. These are STM32F11 based boards. They're still quite fast. They're still very powerful. It's pin compatible for the most part with the F405 but it's just a slightly less powerful microcontroller and it's less expensive. That said, if you want to support MicroPython and you want to get a PY board, this will probably do the job for you and we'll keep stocking it for a while and hopefully we'll eventually get the original PY boards in stock as well. Just to rewind for a second. Taoba has named these, I agree. These are the raised roof buttons. Yes. Just had to be said, okay. Party on. We now have the socket plug. I don't know. The opposite polarity of these Molex, Bergmolex connector that is often used for floppy disks and floppy drives and for hard drives. We're doing a lot of floppy stuff and sometimes you have to kind of like power your floppy drive. And I was like, oh, I wish I had the connector instead of like hooking my little alligator clips on. So this will plug into your CU-ROM drive, your hard drive, your laser disk drive, whatever. And you can provide it five volts, 12 volts and ground. So it's not what plugs into the power supply. It's the thing that provides the power. Next up. Next up, we have a handy Raspberry Pi Pico breadboard from Monk Makes. Simon Monk makes some really useful stuff. So this is a breadboard, it's a solderless breadboard just like you expect, but it has a twist. On the sides, it has the in blue and black and red. It has the markings that are the pin numbers like the pin names for the GPIO of a Raspberry Pi Pico. So if you have this like $4 board, one thing that you might have found that's a little annoying is that the pin markings are on the bottom and if it's on a breadboard, you can't read them. Well now when you plug them in, you can see the pin markings right there makes it very easy to align your wiring. What a brilliant, brilliant invention. Definitely I am chuffed. I think that's the right word. I think you can say that. I am chuffed. All right, it started the show tonight besides you, Lady Aida, our staff, our team, our community, our customers, and everybody watching is. This is a new STEM at QT board. This is the TSC 2007. You can't get the STMP-E 610 or 811 anymore. Gotta find a replacement. And this is a really good I squared C resistive touch controller board. It's dead easy to use. There's like only like two registers. You send a command. The code for this is trivial. It's supported by Linux. I wrote an Arduino driver. I wrote a circuit Python and Python driver. You don't need any ADCs. It just gives you the latest touch. There's an interrupt pin that you can monitor that tells you when a touch has been pressed. There's also a little LED that'll light up. You can kind of barely see it down there, the red LED that'll light up. And this is a demo showing on a resistive touch screen it'll work with any four-pin resistive touch screen. It gives you a number from zero to 4,095 because it's 12-bit readings of X and Y. And then it's your job to remap that to, calibrate and remap it to whatever X and Y coordinates you'd like. It's semi-QT so it's plug and play. And we also, a lot of resistive touch panels will just plug right into the connector we have at the top there. It's a standard one millimeter pitch FPC and it's double-sided. So whether you want to do it upgrade or the other way it'll work if you have to like flip the X and Y. Okay, and did you want to show it off or anything? Or do you want to? Yeah, I can show. Or is this video good enough? The video's good but I still, oh no, this is stuck now. Uh-oh. Oh yeah? Okay, wait. I can do a quick demo. Hold on. Go to the overhead. Yeah, I just did. Let me plug this in. Hopefully it'll work. Okay, so yeah, I've got it plugged in. This is just a friction fit one millimeter plug. Almost every resistive touch screen we've ever seen uses this size and type of plug. It's kind of standard. And then this is, you know, you know, it's got the X and Y. And again, it's 12-bit. It doesn't know the size of the screen so it just gives you, you know, low 100s up to, you know, almost 4,000 in this corner. And you can also see little red LED blinking when it detects a touch. Hi, being touched. Okay, great. Very easy to use though. I squirt C, Super Trivial. And again, it works with Linux and works with Arduino, works with Circuit Python and more. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, now you know why the code was resistive TSC. You also figured out why we were playing this weird Teddy bear video. I feel like we've learned so much. Yeah. And so don't forget, use the code. We're going to do questions over on Discord. That's where we do all the questions. So please, that's where we can see them all. Etford.it, last discord. And let's do some top secret while folks line up some questions. Get your questions in. All right, top secret. We have a video that we're gonna play and then we're gonna bounce right to questions and then we're gonna bounce home. We're gonna go to sleep and then rinse and repeat. All right, take it away, us. Lady, what is this? This is me writing a Circuit Python Python driver for this resistive touch controller chip called the TSC 2007, which was featured on the great search a while ago because it's a replacement for the STMP 610-811 chip, which is discontinued. As we've got hooked up here to my Feather M4 with an OLED and I've got it. So when I'm touching the screen, the touch points are showing up on the OLED. So it detects the touch, it detects the pressure and then it prints out the X and Y. So resistive touch screens, they always have like pretty much four wires. They're basically two potentiometers and you don't technically need a chip to do it. Like you could read it with just the analog inputs on a microcontroller, but these chips do all the filtering for you and like they can detect pressure and it's all the math and like it's all done for you. So it's an easy I-squared C STEMI QT board coming into the store soon. It's question time. Are you ready? Yes. All right, I'm gonna bounce around a little bit. This one's from Dexter ad radio button UI to Adafruit IO. Dexter email me ptadafruit.com Actually, no, put an issue in the GitHub IO issues. Right, but just email me and just say what you'd use it for and then I'll send you a link back on where to put it in the issues and everything. That way you can put an example of, you know, I think it'd be kind of cool to know. No, that's fine. Yeah. Next up, will the touch controllers on the TFT wings be updated to the new chip at some point? Yeah, we'll have to because I can't get the old chip anymore. I was able to and then the chip shortage killed it. So I have to redesign all those boards to use this new touch controller but the touch controllers you saw works quite well. Is there a quick reference to which Adafruit products are not in stock? I guess you could search for the letter A and then click the only not in stock button, but no, I mean, what's in stock changes on a daily basis? It moves really fast. Basically we don't have Raspberry Pis for sure and micro bits, but other stuff comes in and out of stock. We do get Raspberry Pis in, just make sure you have a two factor account so you can get them and things move really fast. The other thing that you could possibly do is every day we publish our RSS feed, it's the product feed and those things have the stock quantity or if it's in stock or not. Okay. Next up, this was a comment that someone said that I thought was really nice. It says, thanks to all of you so much and open sourcing all your boards. I'm building a batch for DEF CON this year and I wouldn't have been able to do it if I didn't have those resources. I sent my first rev for print on Monday. Yay. Okay. Let's see, clear that, clear that. Let me go over here. Next up, I think, oh question, on the various I-squared C capable devices boards that have solder pads to change the address of the I-squared C, could those pads be made to fit 0.65 millimeter or 1.27 millimeter or 2.54 millimeter pitch so that we can have solder SMD jumper block or SMD switches to the pads. Can this be done when you do the PCB layouts? I realize there might be some space constraints on the small sensor boards. It's pretty much not going to happen because I have to fit the jumpers wherever I can and it's never on a grid. Okay. Still plans to do an itsy-bitsy 30, itsy-bitsy ESP 32 ESP, itsy-bitsy ESP 32, looking for a smaller Wi-Fi board. Yeah, we still have lots of plans. We have a QT Pi also in stock in the way but there's just no ETAs. Yeah, a little bit of a tongue twister. Let's see. Oh, from the other chat, someone wanted to know the code. I'll put the code in all the chats right now. 10% discount code, use it or lose it. It is here, pink. And I think we just got to all of the questions. Yay. Going twice. No questions, just shout out to the Rear's Brothers for their Pi HQ camera. I finally got around to building mine this week and it's beautiful. Yay. Yay. All right, thanks everybody. I think I put it twice in chat. I'm gonna go to sleep. Is our show for the week this week. Thank you everyone. Thank you to Kara who's behind the scenes doing stuff in our Aid for It Slack. Thank you so much. Thank you to all the Aid for It team members for helping out and keeping this Lady ETA engineering as much as possible. You put the pad tie in and the electronics come out. I did have pad tie as well. And you do need to, yeah then she takes a nap and then she makes more electronics and then we all get to live in this house of ETA. I mean there was like seven revision the last two weeks so it was like it's been a party cause revisions are not easy to do. Cause I can't mess anything up. I can't make it worse, it's the problem. Very good to see everybody. Please be good to one another if you're getting frustrated with the world and how things are kind of tough sometimes. You know, you can start with yourself and all the people around you and it could spread and things could be better. So that's one of the things that I try to think about and do every day as well. Everyone likes to make things. Thank you for joining us this week. This has been an Eta Fruit production. Here is your mom and a zener. We'll see you everybody next week. Good night. Bye bye.