 Welcome to Desk of Lady Aida. Hey everybody, and welcome to Desk of Lady Aida. It's me, Lady Aida, with me, Mr. Lady Aida. We're here at Hacker O'Clock, here in the Ada Fruit Home Headquarters. That's right. Where we're doing some electronics and you're getting some stuff done in preparation for the week. Big week ahead, like every single week, we got a bunch of products coming out. And more this week, all our shows are in effect. The only difference this week is, I think JP's doing show and tell this week. Yes, he's up. All right, so Lady Aida, what is on your desk? Well, I've got a lot of new products. I thought I would just show them off because I got the testers done. So let's start with, let's go to the overhead and I can show off some of these testers. Nice and set up. So this is all of our TFTs. We have a lot of TFTs in the, okay. We have a lot of TFTs in the Ada Fruit Shop. And I've been trying to come up with a new way of connecting to TFTs that's a little bit like STEMI QT except for sort of I-squared seats for SPI. And I like DF-Robots, little flex connector. It's a good idea, because you can't do it with a JST, even an SAH connector. It's just the pitch isn't fine enough for all the pins because for stuff like E-Ink displays, you need like SPI and you need a bunch of chip selects. And for some screens, there's a touch screen and there's an I-squared seat touch and there's like a SPI touch. So it's like basically you need like 18, 16 to 18 GPIO to control any TFT display. And we do a lot of TFT displays. So this is the, I think I've shown off this kind of round we're at 1.47 inch TFT display before. So we made the breakout for it and we added, in addition to the SD card slot and the normal breakout, we also have the little I-Spy connector, which means we can flip this up to easily attach a flex connector so that people who want to have the screen separate from the board, you don't have to like wire or solder together a whole bunch of connections. And then it also makes testing really easy because we have like one tester and it's the same flex connector for each time because it's the flex connector is standardized. So there's this 1.47 inch one and then it's big sister, which is this 1.9 inch screen, same resolution actually pretty much, but a larger, physically larger screen. And this one, it has a flex connector too. So it's kind of, you know, kind of constrained where you could put the I-Spy contact. So I put it up on the side here. And this one, same basic idea, you know, it may not have the right SD card file on here. No, that's okay. Same idea, you know, it displays an image and then it pulses the backlight. So, you know, just test everything you've now tested the SPI port, you've tested the TFT, you've tested the SD card, you've tested sending data from the SD card to the FTFT and you're testing the backlight by pulsing it. So it's a very easy way to tell that the backlight PWM is working. So, you know, this is kind of fun because it's like, I think it's an easy, I think it's actually make testing a little easier because you don't have to hold down the screen. You can just, you just put this flip top connector. And I love these flip tops. They're so much easier and less likely to break than pull out style where it's top contact. So like bottom contact, FPCs as much as possible. So, you know, like having everything be bottom contact, I found less likelihood of the little ear snapping off, which is always kind of sad. All right, so that's those displays. Also, did a revision on, so this is a new time of flight sensor from ST that just got released. And I got a real, I want this lock. I used to lock, no, it doesn't lock. This is the VL53L4 CD. There's like the VL53L1, VL53L0. They did the VL53L5 and then they kind of backed it off and did the four. And the four is like the other time of flight sensors use the laser and it measures the picosecond to a fraction off of a target. For this one, it has less range instead of four meters. It only does like a meter and a quarter, but it can do much closer readings. So the other ones like to have at least 10 millimeters to do the readings. This one is actually happy to do as those one millimeter. So it's really good for like ultra close up ranges. Do you know why this isn't locking anymore? No. Okay, we'll get another one. I think maybe we can upgrade. It does and then it stops. Yeah. All right, so that's that. I think it might be time to upgrade the overhead setup anyways because the chips are getting smaller and our screens are getting bigger. I do like the new one. The new one's kind of nice. We use that on the Asken engineer setup. Yeah. Okay, well that's gonna be on our list of things to get. Okay, so that's these testers. And then the last tester I worked on this week is this is ESP32S2, but it's not. It's the Pico ESP32. So these PCBs are coming in. I had to fix a couple of little things and then it was Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year. So PCBs were really delayed, but they're coming in and so the Pico ESP32 is gonna get made and I'm using a Raspberry Pi to do the test procedure. I like using a Raspberry Pi for ESP32 because it can run ESP tool and we do have ESP tool on the microcontroller. Like I have written that. So it's like you can use a microcontroller to program an ESP32. The problem though is it doesn't use the, I didn't port over the stub loader, which is like this compressed way of compressing the firmware before uploading. And so even though it's like, it's slow to use a Raspberry Pi than a microcontroller, it's faster because if the code you're uploading is big enough and I don't compress it. And especially with this where you're limited, it's like the flash white speed is limited by like the boundary a little bit. Turns out that using a Raspberry Pi works quite well. So this fits in here and then, you know, it's got a whole thing, it's just press the button. Yeah, we're gonna have a video of this. Yeah, video, but it uploads the test code and you can see kind of the bottom here. It's uploading to, and then it tests all the pins and then it tests the Wi-Fi signal to make sure that the Wi-Fi signal's good and if it passes, you get this green text. So 17 seconds for tests, that's pretty good. And then when it's done, the program I load also does a little rainbow swirl and it does a Wi-Fi scan. So it's like a nice little like ready to go off out of the box test for the ESP32 QT Pi. So that'll be cool. And I love that this chip has PSRM as well as eight megabytes of flash. It's like, it's gonna be like the smallest but most powerful ESP32. And I think, you know, it's like I showed you can do on it but I think you can do a lot of other stuff too. Great for IoT. All right, so I think on the previous thing you showed, what's the precision of it? For the distance sensor. I don't remember, it's like one millimeter or something. That's good. Okay, cool. And then lastly, so it's the stuff I've been working on. I got a couple more things. Oh, I've got this camera module. So I'm doing some getting back to some camera stuff and there's these off the shelf camera breakups. I wanted one for my own because I wanted to experiment with different cameras but also I didn't, there's a couple things about off the shelf camera boards that I didn't super like. They look like, they look like this. Do you want to answer your question about the QT Pi ESP32 now or after this? No, it's fine. Okay. Will the QT Pi ESP32 have a GPIO pin to turn off quick for sleep, ultra low power? It can do ultra low power, but you can disconnect everything. And I think I got down to like 55 micro amperes. I do have a graph that I measured but you can turn off the neopixel and go into deep sleep and that's as deep as it's gonna get. Okay, cool. All right, so camera boards. So one thing I don't like about the camera boards is they always come soldered with straight headers and so like you can't do right angles. That was a little annoying. And second, there are some cameras that have autofocus but you need to connect to pin two and like on these boards they don't break out pin two. So I was like, fuck it, I'm just gonna design my own. And I also made it so you can plug it into a brand board which is another like nitpick for me. I was, this is the, people remember I was working on the autofocus cameras. This is an autofocus camera. So this will work with any like OV module including the autofocus type. Pin out, thankfully, like E-Inx is totally standardized and to test it, I'm actually, can you get the computer, I'm running this demo that is, it's quite nice. It actually comes with the ESP32 it's called camera web server. And what's nice is it like auto detects what camera chipset, whether it's the OV2640 or 5640 or whatever, like there's OV766 or something. And it will, so this is a live stream web server. And you can also go maybe a little bit bigger. I'll be a little slower. So you can see I'm like testing, you know, if I can like point it like Phil, hey, behind the scenes, you can point at me, hi. So it's a really good way of quickly testing that everything works and the quality of the camera and there's no weird color artifacts or jitter so I know that I'm good to go. So this board also got sent out. Oh, I also have an external clock generator and I put like big holes on the back for heat sinking because these camera chips actually get a little bit warm especially as you're streaming a lot of data very quickly and you can do other effects so you can change the exposure to all the way down to all the way up so it's like really overexposed and then you can do sepia, tint, negative. It's kind of cool. Or negative land. So good stuff for testing this camera module. So the camera module breakouts ready to go. So that's cool. Just doing that and unplug this. And then finally, we did pretty much everything we're going to do with floppy stuff on the Shugart drives. So we got like max stuff working. We got five and a quarter inch drives working, three and a half inch drives. We got the floppy drive from the laptops working. So like kind of everything like, you know, you can spend forever trying everything but we pretty much did proof of concept and then Jepler also did like streaming modes. We can like stream data directly from disk. So all good things. So the next step is we want to extend it so you now support Apple to disk drives. So I got this Apple to drive and I put it into clear case. So maybe I can go to the overhead a little fast. So this is, this is an Apple to drive. You can see, but we removed the metal case and replaced it with this clear case. Which is kind of neat because you can actually see that. So this is a diskette here. So this is the slot. You can see the diskette coming in here. And what's interesting about Apple to drives is they're actually the same shoe guard mechanism as five and a quarter disk. This is five and a quarter disk but they basically removed a lot of the stuff that basically took a move to reduce cost. So like some things like on the shoe guard drive the interface lets you set the direction and then step in and out. And there's also like, you know, so there's like a stepper motor controller. On the Apple too, you do that by hand. You actually have to like manually control the four phases of the stepper motor to move the head back and forth through the tracks. And that's also can be used for like some hacky things like you can, you can write while moving. So like in on the shoe guard drive, you can't, I don't believe you can step while writing. I think like once you're writing, you're like writing and like the drive will not, will not do anything else while it's writing. But on the Apple too, since you have control of the stepper motors, you can like start writing data, those flux pulses and you can like spiral the track out if you so wished. Just kind of interesting and neat. The good news is that like other than the stepper motor stuff and lack of an index pulse, the concept is still the same. You've got these flux pulses. You read them, you write them. They're GCR like similar to the Mac 400 and 800K. You know, there's the, there's very similar signals. There's just this new analog board that does some different stuff and the power supply is a little different. And so that's actually going to be the great search. All right. Is there any questions for me? Yeah, well, let's do a couple of questions and then we'll bounce over. Some folks want to know about some button box tutorials. I said, check out learn.eatafruit.com, same thing with robotics. What is this small monitor that you use? Does it house the Pi also? Oh, that's the Pi TFT. Okay. Yeah, we sell that. That's the. All right, someone was watching a YouTuber the other day and the person says, why doesn't CircuitPython support email? It's Python, it does. You could add email. I mean, we have, the reason we don't do, there's no email clients. Email has changed a lot in how you send and receive it. Like it used to be, you could just like tell that to a port 25 and send. And now there's a lot more to reduce spam. It's just a little more complicated. So we don't, we don't really have a built in mail client or writer. Yeah. Because it doesn't know how it used to be. It used to be really easy. Yeah, let me ask. I have an old Apple, I have an old Arduino demo that used to do it. You just connect to port 25, say hello. Yeah. You know, send mail, but you can't, you can't really do that anymore. Just like you can't really red box anymore. Yeah, yeah, you can kind of find some libraries out there and probably port them over, but. Yeah. Hang out in our Discord and let us know what you would do with it. And also to post up in our forums because it'd be interesting to see maybe there's something we do with Adafruit.io to help out with some of the stuff. You have to like authenticate. It's just, it's going to be very complicated. Twitter used to be very simple to you. You could just like search. You can't do it anymore. You can't do it. You have to authenticate. Oh, often it's like. Camera question. Do you plan on making a board with the camera to plug in to the headers and then a micro controller and other pins. So plug and play. Yeah, I think so. I mean like there's also the Kaluga board that I showed you that has a lot of boards that can do camera, have a little camera port and there's a standardized pin out. Okay, we're going to get a side push button like the reset button on the D1 mini compatible with key cad. I don't even know what the D1 mini is. Yeah. Okay. We've done some great searches on where I go. Let's do the great search. Okay. Every single weekly to use the power of engineering to help you find what you're looking for or things that you don't even know you're looking for yet on digikey.com. What is the great search of the week this week? Okay. So this week I'm going to be interfacing to this Apple 2 disk drive which is in a beautiful clear enclosure. That's cool. And the Apple 2 disk drive has a slightly different control mechanism for how you control the drive and read and write from it. And it has this analog board. And the analog board has, hold on. I guess you won't go to my computer. So I can choose the schematic. This is the schematic for the analog board. The disk interface. And you'll see it has a negative 12 volt power supply. So it has plus 12. There's VCC which is five volts and negative 12. And that's a little unusual. I mean, at the time it wasn't unusual because transformer based power supply is really easy to split the tap and then you can generate a negative voltage. But with digital electronics we don't tend to have negative power supply rails really as much. So the good news is that, most disk drives that I'm used to working with, so here's the five volt supply. You know, the five volt supply and the 10 volt supply are used for logic and there's a stepper motor. Probably that's the 12 volt. And then there's a spinning motor. Probably either 12 volts or five volts. So 12 volt and five volt supplies are high current. They're going to be like an amp or two because you're going to drive a motor with them and a lot of these logic chips. The negative 12 volt supply, however, let me find it, is used for a bias. Hold on. I have like 500 images and they're all blurry. Okay. So this is where the negative 12 volt supply is. It's right here. And it's used as part of this analog circuitry which filters the pulses or like biases the read head. I'm actually not 100% sure. I have to look up at the MC 3470 does. But this is the only place that the negative 12 volt appears. So, you know, the potentiometer R28 and, you know, I looked on this board's look at R28. And R28, it's not, it looks like, you know, you tweak and adjust it to set the, it looks like the jitter, it adjusts the jitter for the analog board. So here, this is the tech instructions for this board. And they say, okay, you know, look at this trigger pulse. I guess this is maybe the bias for the trigger where like, you know, it, there's some timer and then it like reads the timer and it uses the pulses to like generate the pulse train or synchronize with the pulse train that comes out of the diskette. So there's a potential that you have to adjust. So you do need to give it that negative 12 volts, especially, you know, you'll get weird results. If not, maybe you'll not get some, some good reading results. You might get errors on right. So you do want to have a negative voltage and you want to have that voltage at least be consistent. So we have to generate a negative 12 volts. And again, digital electronics, you know, we've done boost converters we've done linear regulator so you can like kind of move up and you can move down and you can use buck converters. But now I want to inverter. And I'm extremely lazy about this inverter because it's not a power supply. It's like a bias supply. I don't need an amp of negative 12 volts. If I did, I would actually probably get a custom power supply to do that or put in a big, you know, boost converter buck converter that does inversion. If I only need, you know, a couple of milliamps because it's a 10 K potentiometer, I'm going to look for a charge pump inverter. And charge pump inverters, the reason I'm a fan of them is because if you remember your max 232, you know, this is kind of a famous part, not used as much anymore, but was famous for if you had an RS232 interface, which all electronics used to, you would use this and it would convert your 5 volt logic or there's a version for 3 volt logic and it would do this neat thing where it was like, hey, since it's not a power supply that you need negative 10 and plus 10, but you just need it for biasing, for signaling, not for powering, there was a built-in charge cap. You would put some, you know, one microfarad caps on the outside, it would convert the 5 volt to 10 volt and then do an inverter to get you 10 volt to negative volt. So one, I could probably get away with using a max 232, but I kind of want to not cheat and use a chip that isn't designed for it. And second, I might actually need negative 12. I want it to maybe be perfectly balanced. So, so this was actually kind of interesting because I wasn't actually sure how to find this because you know, it's a weird part, but I think I searched for, it's under regulators. So it's considered a DC-DC switching regulator and it's actually called ratio metric, which makes sense because you're not regulating it, you're just flipping it over. So let's look for active ratio metric or inverted because you can also get inductor based converters. We want only one output and we want to make sure it can give you negative, hold on. Positive or negative? Well, I'll just say positive and negative and voltage input max. Wait, I messed something up. Let me start over. This was very confusing. So I want, right, so I want negative. I'm gonna have to go back from the part that I found and then go backwards. So positive or negative, one output, voltage input max. Okay, so for voltage input max, because I want to generate 12 volts, I need it to be able to take at least 12 volts. So I'm going to select all of these and let's see what I get. And then I don't care about it, just we're fixed because I can tweak that. And yeah, I got a bunch of these parts and then I did surface mount only because it turns out those are a lot of two whole parts and a lot of things were out of stock. So the first thing I found was there is this very popular part that's been used for a very long time called the ISL or ICL 766X and there were quite a few of these and these are ancient. These have been made since the beginning of time. So you can use this part most likely and there comes in a lot of different manufacturers. It's kind of a jelly bean part. So if you search for, let me open up a new page. You look for ICL 766 to get all the alternatives under the switching regulators. Yeah, you'll see. So this was made by like analog Maxim, by Harris, by Renaissance. So lots of different options came in dip and also SMT. So this is one version. There's also the 7662. So there was this whole family. However, I wanted another alternative because this was a little bit of an older chip and there were a couple available but it's sort of, I was a little anxious about it. So the other one I found actually was the TC1044 and this actually, there's also the TC1054. One second. 1554, what is this under linear regulators? Hold on, let me look at my history. This was, sorry, the LT1054. Okay, so the LT1054 was a different charge pump inverter. So this was available from TI and analog and the good news is this one was a little bit less expensive but it came in a 16 SOIC. So it's much, much larger but it's a much more modern chip and the pricing was pretty good. It's basically $1.50 or so and it can do either doubling or negative. So it's kind of got this weird voltage output, negative V in or two V in but the good news is that it could take up to 15 volts input. So this was actually what I ended up picking for what I think I'm gonna use. I'm gonna get some of the samples of the ICL7660 but one thing that's interesting about that part is it's so old that it actually started getting more expensive than the modern part. Like usually you'd think like, oh, an old part like, you know, TL074 or something, some op amp. If it's like a couple of decades old it'll be really inexpensive, it's made so much. One thing I noticed is like during the silicon shortage sometimes there's this like weird, there's like a dip where it's like very new parts are very expensive because you can't get them and very, very old parts are very expensive too because they're like not really made anymore and so the people who need them are like desperate to not, like, you know, you have some like mill spec design and you're not gonna change this component. You absolutely need to use this component for the rest of human history. So you're desperate to get it. So there's like this nice middle ground where you're actually gonna get better pricing on parts that are like about five to 10 years old. So even though this is a more modern part it actually ended up being less expensive than the ICL which was like for some reason like $5, you know, for this like multi-decade old component. So the ICL probably works really, really well but I think I'm probably going to go with the LT1054 and I also learned a little bit about product history and pricing I think along the way but what's actually kind of fascinating is there's a lot of boost converter like the charge pump inverters for five volts but once you get to 12 volts it's actually kind of a little, it's a little rare but this one should absolutely do the job quite nicely and I'll pick it up and it's a bit chunky at 16SOIC but sizing is not as important. There's also a max in part that I saw that goes up to plus or minus 40 volts and a TDFN much more expensive but if you need to generate like a negative 60 volt bias the max in part will do the job as well. And that is the Great Church. Okay, so a couple of questions then we'll bounce. Yeah. Literally. With all the fabulous STEM QT stuff going on any plans to re-spin the Circuit Playground Express or Blue Fruit with a STEM QT connector? I'm not planning to re-spin it. I'm sure there's really no room on that board and I'm having enough difficulty getting parts. However, it's really easy to connect STEM QT with our alligator clip plugs. You know, I think another thing about the STEM QT connector is I'll say it's for very young kids. I feel like it's a little too small for them. I think there could be a chance that they'd break it. I think that'd be such a bummer. So I'll just walk in by using Alliator Clip. Alliator Clip to STEMA adapter cable and that way, you know, there's no risk of breaking the connector on the board. Maybe you should make that a stacky on the product page or just do a guide specifically about that adding STEMA. Yeah. Maybe we'll do that, because I forgot about it too. Yeah. No, I have like every combo cable purpose. Yeah. Okay. That's it for... I want to see my beautiful clear Apple II disc somewhere. Yeah. That's nice. All right. And then we did this like a parody thing. So this is a QR code that's like the DVD bouncing. And the reason we did that, there was a Super Bowl commercial that was doing this too. This is takes you to Adafruit.com but just a little bit of like a security thing. So, you know, if this Super Bowl is going to mark the beginning of everyone just taking out their phones, scanning your code and just kind of doing stuff, just be really careful. Especially with folks who aren't so savvy with this stuff. It's kind of an interesting security flaw that I don't think anyone's thought of is what happens if a Super Bowl commercial is only a QR code. So on one hand, you know, we get dunked on for even talking about anything ever. But I also think we're here to educate and help. And so while this is funny and this says, you know, Adafruit.com and it's safe and Adafruit.com is safe, you know, maybe other things aren't. So just be careful with this stuff, especially when you're enticed to give a lot of personal information for, you know, 25 not real dollars. Okay, that's it. We'll see everybody next week. Thanks everybody.