 Tijiki and Adafruit, bring you... Okay, this week, it's worth it, huh? We have a new product introduction. IMPI. It is. From Worth Electric, Electronic, which sounds cool, if you say in German. This is kind of a low-tech NPI, but it is very cool and shiny. It's this Shield DIY product. And this is one of those things where if you don't know it exists and then you're like, you see it, you're like, that's a really good idea. So if you are an engineer and you're building products, especially products that have motors or magnetics or RF components, you know that eventually you get stuck with too much interference, either interference for your device or interference between your device. And so you need something like a Faraday cage, which is like... I saw this cool graphic from Wikipedia. And a Faraday cage is a metal enclosure that keeps the electrons on the inside on the inside and the electron on the outside on the outside, basically. And so it shields the outside and the inside from each other. It goes both ways. You don't have interference into your circuitry and you don't have interference to other circuitry being emitted. And you'll see this on electronics. For example, here's this close-up of the Raspberry Pi 4. If you look on the bottom right corner, there's this metal tin that soldered onto the Raspberry Pi and that's over the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth circuitry. You can see the antenna right to the northeast of it. And this shielding reduces electromagnetic interference. It makes it easier to embed the Raspberry Pi in products because the emitting section is shielded and also probably improves the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth because you don't have it getting interference from outside RF noise. So what's neat about this product is it's a DIY custom shielding cabinet kit. And it's kind of like cool. It's this metal sheet and it's kind of scored every five millimeters. And it comes in different sizes and shapes. And it's made out of nickel plated metal so you can solder to it as well, which is key because you'll eventually want to solder it onto a circuit board. And it's like 20 bucks and you can get it from Digikey. And it's one of those things where when you get to the product state, like productizing what you're doing, you can get custom tins made. But as you're doing your development, getting custom tins made is actually kind of annoying and making your own is kind of a process because it's hard to get the spacing perfect. But with these gridded sheets, it's really easy. You just cut it with tin snaps. It's like metal graph paper. So cool. Basically that's what it is. Basically you get a big sheet, you cut it, you put these notches in the corner and then you solder the corners to make it into a case and then you solder it onto the PCB and you can of course pick any size or rectangle you like. You can make uneven shapes if you want. How do you know it works though? What do you mean how it doesn't work? Why do you know it works? You sent me a video. Because we have a video. I was just like, I don't have to prove right now. Normally when you're doing this kind of testing, you do have a spectrum analyzer or you can watch this handy one minute clip. Let's watch this. We work on IMPI stuff. Lady Aida sends me all this information and I check it out and then we do the show and so this is the accompanying video to show that this actually does work. It's a clip of a longer video. The whole video is seven minutes long. But we got something like that. On our post that we do for IMPI, we'll link to the whole video, but here's a little snippet. I will open a new trace, signal generator off and I will change now this cabinet. This cabinet will be soldered here on this ground plane, completely around because just to not waste time, I have already something prepared. This is really the same inside the same strip line and I will connect now the 50 ohm termination connecting the signal generator. Put it in the fixture. We have here the same distance and signal generator on and maximum hold on. And now you can see the effectivity of this shielding cabinet for electrical field. So it works. And you have a little bit of a demo here. I just want to show the sheet off because I think it's worth seeing it. It comes as this kind of like electronic grid paper and it's scored so you can bend it. You can even kind of bend it to crack it, although I would also recommend picking up metal shears and using that if you want to cut it. So I cut out this shape and then I snipped out the corners and then you just use pliers to bend it carefully. And again, you saw if you bend it too many times, it does eventually crack. So you don't want to bend it like three or four times. Once or twice is plenty. And then you use the table. And then today you've got a wonderful little metal shape. So you can use it for enclosures. I think there might be some other uses for it as well. Definitely I've seen this issue where like during prototyping you want to try different shielding and you know getting a custom tin you kind of have to order. They're inexpensive. They're only like ten cents, but you have to order like a hundred thousand. And what's nice about this is that you just make it test your design and then you can order the custom tin based on how big you needed it. So that is this week's MPI. And you can get this on Digikey. Cost just a ten minute. The product number is 732-360002, Andy. Or you can use the short URL. I'm a super big fan of Digikey short URL. So digikey.com slash short. Z-R-T-M-V-B. And you can check out our blog post and more. And that is this week's eye on MPI. Eye on MPI.