 Hey everybody, welcome to my desk. We've got some fun stuff to show off, things I've been working on, some electronics, some crystals, some different kinds of crystals and minerals. First off, is there anything you want to mention? Yeah, stay tuned to the blog and socials this week. We're going to be moving some shows around. The show will be Wednesday. Ask an engineer is probably going to be Thursday. There's a lot of stuff going on in New York City, so we're going to have to do what's all exciting. We'll be able to share it more soon. And then we're going to do the show and then we're going to go out and we're going to immediately go see Total Lunar Eclipse. It is a blood moon, they call it. You can go to the NASA website and you can see when we're going to see it, which is tonight at midnight. That's when it's the maximum eclipse at 12.11 a.m. on May 15th. There's a path between the sun and the moon, blocking sunlight, casting a shadow on the lunar surface. The moon that looks like a, it's blushing because everybody's gawking at it all. So that's what this theoretically will look like in just a few hours. Yes, if you're on the eastern half of North America, or in South America, you'll be able to see a full lunar eclipse. If not, check out the NASA webpage, which has a map of what you can see and when. That's coming up in about three hours. So that's great. And then we went to New Jersey on Saturday, the New Jersey Mineral Fossil Gem and Jewelry Show. It was at the New Jersey Expo Center in Edison, New Jersey. And Lady Aida, do you want to show off some of the things that we got there? Yeah, we got a whole bunch of rocks. Most of it was for friends. We just got gifts. We got a lot of gifts for people. And so... I turned on the overhead. Yeah, here's a fossil tour and a crystal tour and a mineral tour. Okay, so first up is Kynite, and this is for a friend of ours that we're going to see on Tuesday. Jewelry is Kynite. And usually when you see, you know, Kynite crystals, like in most gem shops, they're kind of tiny. So it's cool. This is like a massive crystal with like three or four of these tubes. And then there's this other tube sticking out. Yeah, I found some literal gems. I went to the raw, kind of unprocessed areas where there's just like big bins of stuff, and this is where I found it. So that was a neat find. Yes, the blue is really a pretty blue. And then it's, you know, there's a shimmery effect. It kind of looks a little translucent. So it's kind of Kynite. All this stuff looks like what, you know, Superman's... Sorry, Kal-El's parents' apartment looked like before they had a kid, I think. You also got some obsidian knives. Yeah, you know, if you need to cut the hearts out of some human sacrifices, this is the knife for you. Also, it makes an excellent cheese knife. Yeah, also, I use this to gut people who take my code off of GitHub. I don't even move my name. Some guy did that. We had the email, and hopefully he'll update it. Or if not, you know, we got this. And then we've got... Yeah, can you show the other one? Because there's a skull. This one has a skull on it. A skull handle. Yeah. Okay. Yes, this is the GitHub knife. This is the cheese knife. Yes. Two knives. Okay, I'm going to put these on the table here so they don't fall off. Okay, next up, you got a piece of meteorite. Yeah. I think I'll leave it in there on time. Yeah, so it's a very heavy piece of nickel iron. Because this is apparently a massive meteorite, so you can get little chunks of it for pretty cheap. This is a little piece that was either cut off or fell off or molded off. I don't know exactly what. Yeah. But it's a little meteorite from Argentina. So we got one, and this was a gift to us from a friend. Space rock. Okay, what else? This is a Pyrite Sun. So a lot of people who get Pyrite, they pick up like a cube. The cubes are cool and everything, but I thought this was kind of neat and unique. And it has like a really neat shimmery effect. So these are called Pyrite Suns or Pyrite Discs. So it's still, you know, Fool's Gold Pyrite, but it's kind of got this shimmery-ness rather than just a cubic piece. This is some purple amethyst geochunk. I love amethysts. I love the glittering purple effect. And I love this kind of edge, you know, from the outside geodrock to white to purple. So I thought this was a great little piece. I like that it just fits in your hand. I know people have like those gigantic amethyst crystals, but I like that this one was... Like ones you can pick up a touch. You know, it's like, you know, 20 bucks and it's just like you get all the joy, but it's small and nice and colorful. Okay, so that's the... Yeah, and you clean this off. Thank you. So that's why it's so shiny. Yes. This one, I don't know. This one you picked up. Yeah, I forgot. It starts with a C. It's not turquoise, but I like... But I do like turquoise. It's a very nice shade of blue. Yeah, it's a cool blue-white color and it's just raw rock. Yeah, I got a little mineral book. I forgot the name of it. This is an ammonite. This is a little sea creature guy who got fossilized. This is a fossilized shell. So you can see the shell is quite beautiful. And I like this one because it had so many swirls. And there was a nice color gradient to the swirls. So this was a nice ammonite. You know, kind of a large one too. That was cool. This is a chunk of bismuth. I thought that this was cool. It's like a rainbow. It's a neopixel rock. It's a mineral. It really wants to break. But it's got this cool striations, color effects. And I like this one. It has a nice gradient. I also wanted to find one that a vendor had a pretty large piece. This is larger compared to... Most are really tiny chunks. But I like this larger piece because I figure if it's going to break, then it'll break into smaller pieces later. And then I'll get smaller pieces. And this, I don't remember the official name of this. This is called a TV rock. And I had one of these as a kid and I loved it. And it's because... It's like I'm a magnifying glass rock. It's a magnifying glass. I have to find some good text. That's good. Oh, that's fine. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so you know what you... Well, it's not going to really show up here. But when you put it over text, there's these crystal tubules on the side. And it makes the text look like pixelated. It's kind of a neat effect. So we got a TV rock. Yeah, it's really good with newsprint. Yeah. And I remember having one as a kid and I really liked it. It has this cool, you know, magnification pixelation effect. So it's a fun little rock. And then finally you got a... Yeah, so this... I got a big bag of these... I think they're called Blackberry Amethyst. Oh wait, you got the... Oh yeah, there's a couple more. You got the... There's a black crystal. There's a smoky quartz crystal quartz. And then there's a fossil. Okay, this is the dark smoky quartz. Yeah. And then you also got a medium smoky quartz. This one is smoky. Yeah, that one looks like an ice cube and a whiskey glass. Yeah, this one's smoky. And then... We had a team member who asked me to try to find a lizard fossil. And I did find someone who could get me one, but it would be $8,000 and I'd have to come back on Sunday and meet in the parking lot. So instead I got this fish one. Yeah, this is a fish fossil imprint. So I thought this was kind of nice. Yeah. Like you can seal the bones. Yeah. And then these are all of the crystals I'm going to give away to our teams tomorrow. Yeah, these are called Brazilian Amethysts, spikes or something. Yeah, they look like dragon's teeth. Yeah, they're kind of simple raw crystals. They're natural crystals, but they're just... They're not super shiny. You have to polish them and finish them. Yeah, someone wanted to do that. But I like how they look like this. This is cool. They're kind of nice. So we're going to give them anybody who's... Anyone at the office tomorrow gets one. At the office tomorrow gets one. Yeah. 100 people. And I cleaned them all off and I did it. And there was incense and there was music and there's a blood moon tonight. So if you're into crystal stuff, you know, it doesn't get better than this. But they're also just fun. One of the things I like to think about is how engineers spend a lot of their time electrifying, manipulating and dealing with crystals. Yeah, we take quartz and we give it anxiety. It's super cool. And so it's kind of nice to see this. And I'm going to steal this bag back. Do you want this bag? Why? Because this was the bag for the other... No, I have two of them. Oh, you have two of them. Sorry, sorry, sorry. So put it back in there. Yeah. Okay. All right, I'm going to put everything back. So that's the crystal tour. Yeah. So that is the crystal tour. And, you know, if you're into electronics, it's always good to see some of the raw materials like we saw silicon and we saw quartz. We saw lots of the things of its raw and its raw state. I think it's important to always remember where the things come from, even when it's just rocks and things like that. I mean, everything came from stars blowing up and chunks of it being around on our planet, which is made of all that stuff. So it's always good just to know how it works and where it comes from. All right, I close it and I think it's okay. Okay. So I'm going to back to you. Okay, so crystals. Okay, so hopefully people like that little crystal showtime. Yeah, you put them in the box. Yeah, I'm going to put them in the box. I got to remember how you fit them in because they fit in a special way. Yeah, maybe. Because it's from a line of time. Okay. Yes. Boom. Okay, great. So that's the... That looks good. Take it. Yeah. All right, crystals. And then lastly, I got this pocket V&A I pulled out. I actually ordered this before COVID so I forgot about it. But this is a handy tool if you want to test antennas. This, I think, goes up to... There's only 1.5 and they've had, like, apparently three more versions since then. But this is a couple hundred dollars and it's a USB simple version of a V&A that would normally have a screen and be a couple thousand dollars, 10,000 dollars. We had one a long time ago and we gave it to one of our engineers when they went to a different job. And we're like, oh, I can just keep the V&A. So I got this mini one and I wanted to use it to test antennas. So this goes up to, I think, five gigahertz or four gigahertz, which means it's perfect for, like, this two gigahertz antenna. And then if you can switch to the computer. So you do have to calibrate it and I had calibrated it already. So what I did is, you know, you basically... You know, it's for scan range and you have a short, an open, and a perfect 50 ohm load and you put it in. And so, you know, the electronics itself has its own resonance and it's not perfectly linear. So if you go through the calibration, I don't know if you can see the calibration. No, they don't let you look at it, but basically it's like, it's not perfectly even, but after you've calibrated it, then you can get a good response. And then, you know, this was a calibration from 2.2 to 2.6 gigahertz, which is, you know, a fair range. I also have two to three gigahertz. Let me do two to three, yeah. So two to three is good because it'll give, you know, you'll be able to see, like, I found that 2.2 to 2.6 was a little bit too narrow of a range. And then I've connected up the antenna to port one, which is the calibrated port. And when I click scan, it'll go through and you can see pinkish phase and green is magnitude. And then I want it to unwrap the phase. And you'll see that, you know, it likes to resonate down at about 2.4 gigahertz. And then after 2.4 gigahertz, it goes back up. So it has this, like, it's actually not heated up. So I think it's shifted down a little bit because when I did it before, it really was around 2.4 gigahertz. But you'll see, like, you know, you've got this nice lowered peak around 2.4. That's where you're going to get the best performance for radiating electromagnetic spectrum. So you'll see, like, it's not perfect. You don't get a flat line exactly. This is 0 dB. You'll see, like, you know, there's a little bit of resonance over here at 2.9 as well. But again, it's just a little bit... One thing I noticed is you have to let this heat up and I just plugged it in. So it's a little bit shifted. So if I wait and I do this later tonight after it's warmed up a bit, it'll probably shift over. So good for testing antennas. I also want to use this to try to tune my QDPI antennas. The only thing is that this was, like, the one class that I didn't take in school, which was, like, antenna modeling and... What are the colors made out of the graph? Pink is phase and green is amplitude. So phase... As long as the phase is linear, you know, you don't have to worry about it, as long as it's not freaking out. For the most part, you know, you only really look at amplitude, which is, you know, you want to see the amplitude be lowest at where your transmitting signal over, because you want it to... You want it to, like, you know, you want it to activate at those frequencies, but not at others. So it'll only receive signal at that frequency and it'll only do a good job transmitting at that frequency. So I'm going to try to find some tutorials online on how to use this to do... And, you know, antenna characterization is pretty easy, but if you want to do, like, something in circuit, I have to kind of look up how to do that as well. So that's the pocket of me in there. Okay. Anything else before we move? No. All right. What do you want to do now? Chip? Sure. Is green SWR? It is not exactly SWR. However, you can use it to calculate SWR. Okay. I think it's in... dB. You can do it in... Oh, you can do it in Ohm. Maybe impedance. Yeah. I mean, I don't know exactly. I have to learn how to use this. Well, I'm not... I'm not an expert at this right now. Anyways. But, um... Oh, yeah. You can put... But it doesn't really show anything. So... Oh, because you know what it's like? It ranges from, like, zero to, like, two. So you have to, like, zoom in forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever. Yeah, I don't know. I have to... I have to learn how to do the range. So you can do it, but, like, I don't know how to use the UI. I just, like, opened this, like, yesterday. Okay. Let's... We're gonna do a special edition of Chip Shortage, and then we're gonna do... Great search. Ready? Yes. Here we go. Chip Shortage. It's a Chip Shortage every day and every way, lady. What is the chip that we can't get this week? Okay, so this is kind of a special Chip Shortage because most of the chips that we've ordered and haven't been able to get are chips that are made and we've placed orders for them and, you know, it's just taking a really long time to get an order. This chip is a chip that we've been selling for a very long time and then had an end of life. And the end of life happened during, you know, COVID and lockdowns and shortages and then all that stuff. And so we put in a, you know, order right before... You usually have to... You can do one last order before the chip is totally discontinued and you can get those chips and that way you're, you know, you can order enough to last you like a year or so or two. So even if you're dependent on this chip, you can still get it and it's kind of an important part of the chip life cycle is because you don't get usually a lot of warning when chips have discontinued. They just get discontinued. And so having that, you know, end of life order or last order date is really important. So we booked, you know, over 10,000 of this chip. Yeah. Which one? The MMA8451 Q. I don't know if the Q is important. Which is used in our breakout and a lot of people have been using this breakout to 14-bit accelerometer. Now, I think there are, you know, other accelerometers, especially from NXP, we carry the NXP 9DOF board, which is a really a great 9DOF kit and, you know, they also make other accelerometers, but there's still a lot of people who are using this one. Maybe it's built into their products or their designs. And so we want to make sure that we can fulfill our back orders. So we booked these, you know, over a year ago and we, you know, the date has just not ever been set and keeps getting pushed out. So what I would really like is we booked an order well before the end date and please ship us some of these chips. What would be ideal? How many do you want? We need 10,000 to fill. Okay, 10,000. We need 10,000 chips to fulfill all the back orders and people who have been waiting for this chip. So please send them to us. We put in that last back order, I think, in, you know, I think October or something, 20, no, sorry, in May 2021. So it's been a year. Please, please do send them. Please, please don't push the date out again until 2023. Okay, so we're going to drop in at 10 XP. Please, please, please. Please, please, please. Send us these chips. We really want to fulfill all these orders that we have. People have been asking us. And that is this week's trip shortage. Okay, well, that was stuff that we can't get. But, you know, maybe we could do some great searching and find some things you could get. Yes. Let's do the great search and we're going to find parts that are available. The great search we're going to do by Digikey.nated for you. Digikey.nated uses our powers of engineering and smarts to find the things that you need on digikey.com. Digikey.nated, what is this week's great search? Okay, this week's great search is for a kit maker who contacted us and they're picking out parts for the kit and they wanted some advice just to make sure that they picked out the right part. So I'm going to double check their work for them and that's something that I do for people in the community who are making kits. They're just like, I think this is a good part. And this kit maker was looking for a speaker and they had a couple specifications that were important. First, it's an 8-ohm speaker because the audio driver that they have for this kit can only drive 8-ohms, quarter watt, so it can be quarter watt or higher but it can't be less or the speaker could get blown out. The speaker has to be about two inches diameter and round. It doesn't have to be panel mount and the kit you're going to hand solder to it so it's okay if it's not PCPIN. They didn't really care too much what the material the speaker was made out of but they did want to make sure that the audio frequency was responsive around 600 to 1,000 hertz because they're making these audio effects and that's the main frequency that the sounds are coming out. So they sent me a couple options and I was like, well, I'll do a great search and I'll just verify that what you're looking for is a good kit. Also, of course, this is a low-cost kit. Not low-cost, but they want to keep it affordable and so they basically want the least expensive good quality speaker. You can spend a huge amount of money on speakers and speaker systems but what can they get that's going to be in stock available and affordable? So let's go to the computer. This is about that lunar eclipse. Check that out and then this is if you're interested in the New Jersey jewelry show, that's that too. Oh, so let's go to... Hold on. I'm using Chrome now. I'm trying to move over from Firefox to Chrome so I'm still learning the browser. Okay, so we're going to look for a speaker and there's a whole category for speakers. That's great. Digi-key stocks about 3,000 speakers so there's a lot but not so many that I don't think we're going to be able to get them. As usual, because we're not looking for a replacement part we're looking for a kit. We want to make sure that the part is active and available. We're also going to go for normally stocking. So, you know, parts that are usually available even if it's not available today it might be fine because they're still designing the kit maybe by the time they're ready to purchase all the parts it'll be there. I mentioned again the impedance. So, you know, they said 8 ohms I think usually, you know, you can go from about 6 to 12 ohms so I'm going to use the ranging selector. I mean, most speakers are going to be around 8 ohms if I pick those values but, you know, in case there's some good options a little bit around 8 ohms. Next up, I want it to be round but it's okay if it's in a frame so I'm going to just say round plus frame I don't want square, oval, or octagon. For the size, they wanted it to be about 2 inches in diameter so if we go down to size and dimension you know, it's, you know, plus or minus a little bit so I'm going to say maybe 1.7 up to about 2.5 inch diameter and then, you know, I can see what's available. So already we've really done a good job of reducing the number from, you know, whatever 3,000 it was down to about 85. Next up is the power rating so again, the audio output circuit for their kit is about a quarter watt. You know, of course you can always connect a bigger speaker but you're not going to be able to drive it very well so it's not going to sound great so I think I'm going to go for about 1 watt to about a quarter watt. I'm not going to blow the rating because then you could blow out the speaker so it's always okay to be a little bit higher same with impedance it's like you can drive a circuit for 8 ohm speakers with 16 ohms, it just won't be as loud what you can't do is connect a 4 ohm speaker to an 8 ohm speaker circuit because it'll damage or blow out the driver because it'll be trying to drive the speaker and it won't be able to drive it into the impedance so there's some protection but it's still pretty risky. Okay, so now we're down to about 40 options all of them looking pretty good I think what I'm going to do is first off they did want something affordable so I'm going to look at prices at around 250 pieces because that's about how many kits they're going to I tend to make about 250 kits at a time they're probably going to start with about that number because that's where you can get good pricing so there's a couple of good options paper speakers, plastic speakers all these are good these speakers this one, I think, can look at the data sheet it's got a bit of a lip which could make it easy to mount into a PCB and then it's got this nice big horn on it let's go back you know one thing is that the speakers that are going to be less than $2 you're not going to get great frequency response so these go about 450 to 4 kHz so they can do, you know, simple audio effects some simple music you're not going to get high fidelity but it's like if you just want a little higher type circuit there that's fine she did want something that was having the lower frequency range available so these 500s might be a little bit too high and this 600 is definitely too high so I think these first few aren't too bad what I would do is, and one I always recommend when I had to do projects with speakers because there's specification but until you really hear it you don't know how your audio clips are going to be affected by the speaker size and make and the sound pressure level I would actually just get one of each of these because they're all in stock and they all have plenty of availability so I'd probably get like the first five from this list in price and then just connect them all to the circuit and then maybe A-B test them really quickly have two going and then switch them power switch the speaker from one to the other and then you can really quickly tell this one just has a better sound there's really no other way I've found to really be able to test speakers once you get the basic specifications that's what I recommend so there's two here both are 8 ohms one is a quarter watt and one is a half watt but all these are well within range so I think this one would be what I would start with try this one first and see if it sounds good enough and just buy one of each get a sample set and then maybe have two alternatives already in case one isn't available if you can make your cut out so you can fit one or the other if you're settling on one size and 100mm slash 2 inches is pretty common so this speaker would be a good one to start with for this kit design that's a great church and just a reminder the total lunar eclipse is going to be starting in just a few you can watch it live on a variety of just like you're watching on these you know internets right now but we're going to go outside and try to catch it see how it goes alright thanks everybody thanks everybody thanks so much for spending time with us we very much appreciate it thanks for keeping us going through all these ups and downs there's waves but we're going to surf them and build better boards I want to hold up a crystal but you took all my crystals I took all the crystals I'm putting them in a safe place bye bye everybody