 This week's IonMPI is brought to you by Digikey.com and Analog Devices is IonMPI this week, Lady Ada. What is IonMPI this week? Okay. This week's IonMPI is the LT3960 linear tech, of course, is purchased by Analog Devices. So this is kind of a co-lab between the two, but since it's now in by Analog Devices, they get the credit. So this is an interesting chip that popped up in digikey.com. And I'm going to make a breakout for it. So I picked up the eval board. What's neat about this chip is it is a chip that converts I squared C into a CAN bus physical layer for transport. What that means is as you see here on the left, you have a microcontroller and it's an I squared C controller or master. And you want to connect to a sensor or device that's controllable over I squared C peripheral. And normally, I squared C is meant to be like intercircuit. That's what the I2 stands for, intercircuit communication. And it's meant to be on a single circuit board. However, nowadays, there's so many sensors and devices that might be remote. You might have a temperature sensor, a humidity sensor, or a magnetic sensor, something in your robot or your automation. And you might want it a little bit farther or connected by wires that are longer than a few inches or maybe even longer than a meter. Or perhaps you have a lot of EMI because it's in a robot or something. There's motors everywhere. And I squared C is a single-ended physical protocol. You have a ground. You have a clock line and a data line. It's non-differential. It's designed to be simple because, again, it's meant to be on a circuit. But we're engineers. We like to push the limits. So what if you want to have your I squared C peripherals far away? Well, that's where this chip comes in. So sometimes, or normally, what you would do is you'd get a separate microcontroller and have that be on a CAN bus. And then it leaves the sensor data and transfers it over CAN bus messages. It gives us a CAN bus to I squared C conversion. This doesn't turn your I squared C device into a CAN bus device. But what it does do is basically transmit the clock and data as if it was like CAN bus physical compatible, which allows it to go very far distances. So if you look inside, there's no microcontroller. It's really just like a logic level differential signaling system. It's just designed very, very well. So this is the block diagram for one side. And each side can either be a controller or a peripheral. You can configure it either way. And then this is how it works. So at the top, you can see the clock and data. You see the clock going up and down and the data going up and down. And then kind of in the middle, you can see it's converting each one and zero into a differential or non-differential signal. So when the two clock lines or the two data lines are far apart voltage, six to 10 volts apart, that's a one. And when they're the same voltage, that's a zero. So this is just a much more EMI and physical distance and capacitive insensitive way of transmitting data. Again, you can't share this on a CAN bus, but you can share multiple I squared C devices on this bus using this transceiver. So here's an example of a multi-drop. So on the other side of this, you'd have the controller. But you can have multiple I squared C peripherals either on one transceiver converter or multiple transceiver converters on your, as you can see, terminated. The 120 ohm is the terminated CAN bus physical interface. They call it I2 CAN bus, whatever, I2 CAN. And then you can see you can go quite fast. So this is, I think, you know, 400 megahertz is pretty common, but, you know, depending on how long this is in the cable, as you see the bus length, there's a calculation, you know, depending on your twisted pair and the capacitance, it'll depend on it. But I think up to, you know, if you're doing 100 kilohertz, you can either get into 100 meters easily. This is 400 kilohertz, and it's happily running at up to 15 meters. And that's assuming, you know, you don't even do any special tuning or anything. And perhaps even you could do five volts, a differential set of three volts, and that would get you even better distances. So there's an eval board that's available. I'll say that at the time of this viewing, filming, the chip itself is an MPI. It's not in stock, but sign up and get notified. There's an eval board, and I also got a separate eval board that is two, like, end points that you could connect together. This one has a lighting controller. So you can use this to kind of test the cabling in distance and then they have some Arduino code in the Arduino library as well. So I thought this would be really good for is if you have, you know, a sensor network, like you're doing agriculture or you're doing robotics, and you have your sensors spread out over a building or a very large machine. And instead of having individual CAN bus nodes, which, again, is totally fine. You can do that if you'd like. But, you know, before you know it, now you need a special CAN bus-enabled light controller, and like, CAN bus light controllers are expensive and maybe you've already written your code for AVR or a SAMD or, you know, whatever light controller that you've already decided on and you really like for the pricing and other peripherals. You don't have a CAN bus peripheral in it, so now you have to get an external CAN bus peripheral. Before you know it, your bill of materials for every node is like $5 to $10. Instead, you can take one of these chips, the LT3960, and just like stick it on to the end of this. And then, you know, you can use CAT5, for example, and here's the CAT5 to, you know, wiring converter, and then use some long CAT5 cable. Another thing that was kind of neat about this adapter chip is not only does it do that physical transference from I squared C to CAN physical, but it also has it up to like a 40 or 60 volt input LDO. And so you could actually, you know, if you have extra wires on your CAT5, not only can it pass the CAN data, the differential CAN data and the ground data, you can also pass a high voltage data power signal, right, 40 to 60 volts. And so that will easily survive any like really long distance wire that will cause a voltage drop. And you wouldn't be able to have three volts go over your long cable because it would drop down a volt by the end. And then, you know, now you have too much noise and you're not able to power your peripherals. But if you pass 20 volts or 24 volts and then linearly regulated down the other end, you could have a really nice clean signal to power your end nodes. So I thought that was kind of a cool add-on. It's kind of a freebie you get with this chip. So I have a quick demo to show. Hold on, let me get my demo going here. Hold on. So what I've got here is a QT Pi. So this is a SAMD 21, which just has an iSquartZ connection. And I'm going to... I've clipped it onto this eval board from analog, featuring the LT... featuring the LT3960. So, sorry, this is the micontroller. So the micontroller goes here into the LT3960. And then over here, we have a really long six-conductor cable. I'm just not using the six-conductor. And these two are electrically separated. They're mechanically connected, but they're electrically separated. And over here, we've got an OLED screen and then risky to do this live demo. But I think I can pull this off. Super risky. I'm going to just power... This isn't data. This is just powering it from a LiPo battery over here. Just because of the power I'm not passing through the cable. And then I reset this circuit, and voila! The micontroller is sending iSquartZ data at 400 kHz over this cable through this long cable, which, believe me, you cannot do iSquartZ 400 kHz over this long-ass cable, to the other transceiver, which is peripheral to the OLED display. So you can do very long-distance iSquartZ. And even if I had motors or even a longer cable, this would work just fine. It's a great way to have iSquartZ, a very popular peripheral controller protocol, but make it go super long like Canvas. It's like the best in both worlds. All right. Available at Digi-Key. And we have the information here for you. You can look at the part number or the short URL. And that is... LTE 3960. And that is this week's sign-up, if you like.