 ask an engineer. Hey everybody, welcome to Ask Engineer. It's me Lady Aida as always with me Mr. Lady Aida. We're at the Adafruit Factory in downtown Manhattan. This is not fake. This is real. We are in the factory again. Not a simulation. Not a simulation. Well maybe we don't know that. I need to hear the alarms because we're sirens because it's New York City. Yeah. This is the factory where we manufacture all the goodies you love from Adafruit. All the electronics are designed and fabricated and kitted and tested and documented and shipped out of here. Right now the factory's resting. Everyone's home and that's why we're maskless in indoors. Phil and I are fully vaxxed and we live together. Pretty soon we won't have to have the disclaimer. I know it's a weird disclaimer. I remember you know last year we had to tell everyone they're like why are they so close next to each other? I know it's like in our apartment with like the laundry hanging out. We live together. We're at the office. Nobody else's here. But it's just us and you and we have about an hour's worth of news and updates and videos and projects and tutorials and it's not out yet. It's in all the other whatever good stuff that is coming your way from Adafruit. This is our hour to set you up with everything that's happened in the last week. So let's get right into it. We even have a code. Yeah we brought back the code. Bring it back. So in you gotta get that phone. Yeah in celebration of lots of rainbows. Talk about that throughout the show. And radiohead. And I did listen to some radiohead today. The code is in rainbows. 10% off in the Adafruit store all the way up until I remember to turn the code off tonight. At least one hour from now. That'll at least be one hour from now. Probably till 10 p.m. Eastern time. So start putting stuff in your cart in rainbows. Thank you for supporting a 100% woman-owned open source hardware company here in New York City. We're going to talk about some of our live shows including show and tell a little bit of a recap. Not all of them because we have a lot every single week so now we're just telling you to watch them over on YouTube. Some time travel around the world makers, hackers, artists, engineers, current events and more. Help Wanted we got a job from the Adafruit Jobs Ward. You can also visit it jobs.adafruit.com. Post your skills or if you're a company and you want to hire cool people post over there. We've got some New York City factory footage. We've got some 3D printing. We've got Digikey and Adafruit present. Ion MPI. It's new products. We've got some top secret. We're going to answer your questions but we do that where, oh yeah, discord. Adafruit.it slash discord where you can join all 29,000 of us. All that and more on you guessed it. Ask an engineer. So let's first just pay the bills in rainbows. Best of code and lots of reasons for that. 10% all the way up till 11.59 p.m. probably tonight. If you're on the store and you want to get free stuff all you have to do is start adding stuff to your cart. When you get by from Adafruit $99 or more you get a free permaprotor half size breadboard. Great for taking your projects making them permanent. If you spend $149 or more you'll get a free sensor with STEM at QT connectors. We also have QT pies in there and some other boards. We mix them up and you'll get a different one each time. If you make an account so we can track which ones we sent you. $199 or more you get free UPS ground shipping in the consents of the United States and $299 or more. You get a circuit playground express, express, express or own one development board. No sort of required lots of LEDs, button sensors, piezos, accelerometer switches so you can get started in code.org, CS discoveries, circuit python, Arduino, tiny go, list, rest, whatever. It's all supported in the circuit playground express. It's our favorite board. It's our giveaway. All right. We have our live shows. We just finished up show and tell. Lots of stuff. Like I mentioned before, the show and tells are jam packed now and so it's at the point where you should watch it on any of our video properties. It's got cyber punks. We've got Hadokens. We've got gigantic keycaps. You can also see some of the progress on some of the projects that our team is doing and then the entire community as well. So do check that out. On Sunday, we do desk of Lady Aida and then this week we showed a few things. Okay. What did I show? Oh, first off, yeah, I played around with making keycap molds using a UV nail lamp and I was pretty successful and so I showed off some of the keycaps I made. I also showed off some samples we got for GH60, 60% keyboards. I want to make a circuit python keyboard. So I wanted to find one that I could get a case for and the GH60 cases are plentiful. I can get aluminum ones and plastic ones. So now that I have a case, as I've always said, this is like one of the first things I told Phil when we met. You get the case first and then you design the electronics for the enclosure. And then we did the great search and that's where Lady Aida used all her powers of engineering for good and she goes to the Digi-key site and she finds stuff that you probably need. Yes, this week was diodes because I was looking at these keyboards and they all have key matrices that have diode protection so you can avoid key ghosting when you press multiple keys. And so I was like, well, I should show people, especially if you're making keyboards, it's one of the few components that you need to buy. So how do you find one and four, one for eight diodes in the glass bead type or in surface mount type? These are the two ones that I found most common in macro keypad and programmable mechanical keyboard kits. And then every Tuesday we do JP's product pick and still to this day, I think it's the only live electronics show that broadcasts from a product page. So we do it from within the page and you don't have to. And you get negative discounts. And you don't have to put in a code because it's just for that product. So let's do a little bit of recap from this week's. It is the Neo-key 2 feather wing and it is a feather wing for adding two mechanical key switches to a feather project and it has underlit Neo-pixels. I've got this feather, this is the RP 2040. Then I have a feather OLED. What you see here is when I press these, I am triggering a different illustration over here of this little bongo cat. This works as kind of a neat little macro key camera switcher right there. And I get my little bongo cat to pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink. That is my product pick of the week. It is the Neo-key 2 feather wing. It is a mechanical key switch feather wing with underlit Neo-pixels. So tomorrow you can tune into JP's workshop for the next one. And then part of JP's workshop is the Circuit Python Parsec. And here's a highlight from the latest one. You can also watch it live tomorrow starting at 4 p.m. Eastern time, JP's workshop. For the Circuit Python Parsec today, what I want to do is talk about pulse width modulation. So pulse width modulation is a way of faking an analog output where rather than smoothly sweeping through voltages, we make very fast little sort of steps that look analog to the eye. But the way they work is that we're essentially flicking a light switch on and off real fast. So the full on and full off, if we change the amount of time between those square steps, then we can average out to different voltages. So you can see here in my code what I have is I'm importing time so we can pause, importing board so we get pin definitions, and I'm importing the PWMIO library. Then I'm setting up this pin on the LED pin, which is a PWMIO output on one of the board's pins. And then we're setting a frequency as well as a duty cycle. Then we set the duty cycle to a particular value when it starts up, which is about half, which would approximate a one and a half volt being sent to this LED and the resistor that's there to protect the LED from over current. Then in my main loop, all we're doing is stepping through, increasing and decreasing the spacing between these full on off square waves, which as those go in and out of speed between them, we get this approximation of a smooth voltage. So you can see here in the case of this little cutie pie, I've got a big fat LED on there and it looks like it is nice, softly, gently changing its values like you'd expect an analog output to do, except I'm not plugged into an analog output at all. I'm just using one of the regular digital pins and essentially triggering it on off real fast. And so that is how you can use PWM in circuit Python and that is your circuit Python parsec. But I want more. I want more circuit Python. Well, if you want more circuit Python, don't forget to tune in to Deep Dive with Scott. That's this Friday at 5 p.m. Eastern. We're doing a guy. And then after that two week break and then Scott will be back. So if you want to learn about all the things that go into circuit Python and more, tune in on Friday. Next up, time travel, look around world makers, hackers, artists, engineers, events and more. So first up, happy Pride month, everybody. Happy Pride month. So New York City is going to be just like it's banging already. Everyone is out. Everyone is vaccinated. Everyone's having a great time. Yeah. So one of the things I wanted to mention is for the last decade or so, we've celebrated the community together from changing the logo on our site to our team having events to just all the things that we do to be the most inclusive company because we think that the more people you have with different backgrounds and different life experiences and just different parts of life, the better you get. It's also fun to be gay and do crimes. And so. Or synthesizers. Or both. And so one of the things that we're noticing though is a lot of companies, you know, just for a couple of days a year, they'll just put up a little rainbow. And the rest of the year, they're donating to politicians that are trying to take rights away from people. So I guess I would just ask the community, make sure that you're telling the companies that do the work and that are helping to keep it up because it'll never end. The work is always there and the fight continues. This is just the one month where we get to celebrate some of the fighting that has happened all year round. We change our things on Discord and all of our social media platforms and we want everyone to know that this is a cool, safe place that everyone is welcome to. But I also know, and Lady Aida knows, that there's a lot of big company incorporations that they do this, I guess it'd be called rainbow washing. Okay, can I talk about the chase? It wasn't chasing. Was it Citibank? It was, so we're in New York and in Union Square. All the banks are like super rainbow-y and it's like they're just taking your money. Like yeah, they probably have gay pride and maybe they donate to causes, I hope. It's like they're just there to take your money. Yeah, so when you see some of like, hey look, this like military contractor company now just changed a rainbow for the month. I understand how folks say like, hey, that's just like performative and everything. But there are a lot of good companies and good people and good organizations that still and will always fight to bring everyone together and have rights for all in a quality. So throughout the month we'll be celebrating folks on our blog, check that out. And our team thanks you for supporting a cool company that has everybody and everything. And that's why you'll see the rainbows all year around, but this year in particular more so than ever it's important to celebrate and elevate each other. Next up, we did some demos with Microsoft and we have a, I guess it was a behind the scene. So it was the Loeb demo from the Microsoft keynote. Kevin Scott, the CTO, introduced Lamor. We had filmed something here in the factory. And even though it was edited and put together, we did the demo as one does, like you know, kind of in one take. And then when I got home, I said, oh, before I put all this stuff away, let me just show a video of it. So for the folks who didn't see that six minute long video, here's a less than one minute video on a project we did called Bakery that uses machine learning and AI and ML on the edge and TensorFlow for microcontrollers and TensorFlow Lite to do all this stuff. So take it away past us. Okay, Lady, what is this? Hey, I'm using Microsoft Loeb, which is an application running on this computer connected to this webcam. And I'm using that to train different baked goods. So for example, this is a cross bond. And then I can move the bagel underneath the camera. I've already trained these up, I've taken lots of images. And so you can do basic machine learning, vision recognition of different objects from cross bones. So this is a computer and we trained it. We trained it on baked goods. That's right. And then I took the TensorFlow Lite file, I exported the TensorFlow Lite file, found that computer, and I saved it onto this Raspberry Pi with a brain craft hat. And then it's connected to a Raspberry Pi camera. And it's also detecting items like this bagel or this cross bond. It's a really easy way to train machine learning models for TensorFlow Lite vision recognition, something that's normally really annoying to do. You're very easy on the computer. And then you can deploy it to the edge on your Raspberry Pi with your brain craft hat. Okay. And then the other thing I want to talk about is there's changes for Adabox folks that are in Europe and UK. I'll be sending out an email to our Europe and UK customers. So unless you were the two people who had gifts or subscriptions, your last Adabox was the most recent one we sent out. So you're not going to get charged for the next one. You're not going to get the next one. And we're not going to do anything with your email address or anything like that. We're not going to spam you. And if we do or when we do allow European or UK orders, we'll notify you. We'll get the word out. We'll get the word out. But I'm going to send the email. So the shipping costs change so much. And the VAT and the way it's collected and it just got really complicated. And everything went up. And what we didn't want to do is say, well, if you want to pay more, we can send it to you. And then here's a totally different price tier for Adabox in Europe. Especially since we have distributors in Europe that take care of all the stuff for you. So it's like people aren't getting their stuff held up in customs. We all have a good experience for people. Yeah. So I'll be sending out the notes to folks that are in Europe and the UK. And for the two folks that got gifts or subscriptions, we're just going to send them the remaining boxes because that's how we roll. All right. Oh, and if you are an Adabox subscriber in Europe and you're not getting one anymore, I'll probably toss in a discount code just for being nice. Thanks. So get that. All right. Every single week, Monday through Friday, unless it's holiday, you can expect Collins. Yeah, Monday was holiday. Collins lab notes. So take it away, Collins. These are all the things from Collins desk and lab and more. Brain. A lot of boards like the Feather microcontroller here feature 0.1 inch spaced solderable holes that make breadboarding easy solder header pins on plug it in and you've got a strong connection. If you want to attach accessories to your board like this feather wing, solder socket headers to the feather instead, solder pins to the feather wing and attach what's that? You want to plug a microcontroller into a breadboard and attach an accessory? Well, you're in luck because stacking headers are a thing. They're a combo of plug and socket headers, essentially socket headers with very long pins. Align them for soldering by plugging a matching daughter board into the sockets side of the base of each long pin to a pad and now you're double stacking electronics. Nice. Many Adafruit boards like these feathers let you easily connect a rechargeable battery for portable projects. It's a helpful feature. Just look for the two pin socket usually labeled lipo or lipoly. Of course, Adafruit also sells a lipo battery with matching connector. It would be great if everyone followed the same standard. Unfortunately, there are vendors online that sell batteries that look very similar, but have the red and black wires swapped. For example, this one is correct with the red wire on the left when plugging it in, but this battery has power on the right and ground on the left. Reversing power and ground like that can damage the feather. So keep an eye out and mind your power connectors. Thank you. The shaft on a traditional pot can be rotated less than 300 degrees total, but a multi-term potentiometer can make multiple full rotations. They're useful in high precision applications where you need to find a very specific resistance value. These are both 10-turn wire wound pots and a quick look inside will show us how they get their name. The resistive element is coiled or wound along the inside of the cylinder with each end connected to one of the pot's exterior terminals. When the shaft is rotated, the attached wiper contact slides along the length of the coil, providing a varying resistance based on its position. It's basically the same mechanic as a regular pot, just extended, while maintaining a similarly sized footprint. Time for another teardown. This time we'll take a look inside the can of a classic NRF-51-822 Bluetooth low-energy module. Removal of the NRF-51's RF shielding will come courtesy of the quick 957DW Plus hot air rework station. And we're in. Things are fairly simple in here, thanks to the NRF-51-822 chip containing an M0 processor, RAM, and flash memory. Accompanied, of course, by its friend the timing crystal and a traffic jam of passive components along the path out to the chip antenna. All right, and next up, if you like Atari 2600, you're gonna like this video from Phil B. The Atari 2600 was not the first home game console, but its popularity makes it a nostalgia magnet. The process by which it generated graphics was kind of amazing. Consider a CRT of the era, scanning top to bottom left to right about 60 times a second. Nearly anything that came later had a frame buffer. The image on the screen corresponds to a bitmap in RAM, but 1970s RAM was so expensive the system only had 128 bytes of it. Not megs, not kilobytes, 128 bytes. So the CPU had to help generate the image one scan line at a time. LOGERY! Yeah, it really only held half a scan line. Those 20 bits could either be duplicated or flipped. Clever programs got around this symmetry by changing that data right in the middle of the scan line. This was called racing the beam because you can't back up, there's no do-overs. If you ever want to try this punishment, there's an in-browser development emulator at 8bitworkshop.com. Okay, some more time travel. For the folks who are following along, an interesting development in the electronic space, Siemens bought supply frame and supply frame owns Hackaday and Tindi. So what I decided to do is reach out to Siemens and say, hey, can I interview Siemens and someone from supply frame Hackaday Tindi? Because this is interesting and a little bit of a disclosure, I started Hackaday 17 years ago. Nothing to do with now, still my logo that I made, site mission is still spot on and supply frame's done a good job of taking care of them. And it is a trend in the industry right now as far as consolidation goes because I wanted to make sure as I was writing up the interview questions that hopefully they'll pass along to the management there and be able to talk about what they're going to do and not do with Hackaday, supply frame, Tindi. But there is a whole bunch of companies that if you don't live in this space, you don't know about the consolidation. And so that was one of the questions I asked. But just to read these off really fast, Altium acquired Octopart, Upverter and Cliva, Mauser owned by TTI, which is a Berkshire Hackaway company, acquired CrowdSupply, Avnet acquired Hackster I.O. and Dragon Innovation, Newark is element 14 and Avnet acquired Farnel, Newark, CPC element 14, Autodesk acquired Instructables, Upchain and Eagle and Tinkercad, Siemens acquired Avatar, which is a little while ago, supply frame Hackaday and Tindi and also Mentor Graphics back in 2016. Back in 2016 also, Atmel was acquired by Microchip and MicroSemi in 2019, Legup was also acquired by Microchip in 2000. Do we have the dialogue, Broadcom or? 20. That was in there. Well, yeah. Cypher Semi, I think. Yeah, there's a couple more. Cypher Semi bought some of Broadcom. There's a couple more I'm going to put in here. Yeah, God. It's, I mean, not even including the TTI bought Linear. Yeah, there's some that are in the smaller space that people are familiar with and then like, you know, I would say, you know, Hackster is a little bit different than, you know, Atmel. No, I know. But you're saying, like, STM is interesting. Yeah, so NVIDIA in late 2020 announced they're going to try to buy ARM from SoftBank for $40 billion, but looks like that stalled. We'll see how that goes. Back in 2017, ARM had some involvement with Arduino and it's a little unclear exactly if it was an investment or not. The people that are on the, that were on the board from ARM said it was, but Arduino said it wasn't, so I just linked to that. STM Micro Electronics is rumored to have an interest in Nordic semiconductor. That just came out in May. That doesn't surprise me because Nordic is just totally wrecking ST on wireless. I mean, Nordic just does such a good job. Then Arrow acquired United Technical Publishing and Division of Hearst Business Media back in 2015. It was unclear to me all the different media properties that were owned, but it's because Aspen Core is owned by Arrow, and Arrow has now things like EDN, embedded.com, techonline, datasheets.com, and that's part of Aspen Core, which is owned by Arrow. Then today, because folks probably have seen the news, Stack Overflow was bought for $1 billion. There is this consolidation, so I'll probably add a couple of the other chip companies, but basically, I think it's just Adafrit and Spark Fund that's not owned by a bigger company at this point. So I have my questions over to them, and we'll see. I did have very specific questions for Hackaday, and if they don't answer them, they can't. I'll publish them later and just say here's the questions I sent over, but I did close my questions with, hey, Hackaday was important to me personally because I started it, and Supply Frame has done a good job taking care of it, and I hope Siemens does that as well and takes good care of the community. Okay. Help Wanted. This week's job on jobs.adafruit.com is from Headspin. They're looking for a hardware engineer, and I looked up what they do. They have these really neat standalone appliances for testing, looks like huge amounts of mobile devices. So check it out. Go to jobs.adafruit.com and check out the job for Headspin. They are located in Toronto, Canada. Just check and see if it's a remote-only or an in-person only. Okay. Blink-a-blink-a-blink-a. Blink-a-time. Blink-a-time. It's time for Blink-a. There's so much going on in Circuit Python this week. There's too much going on in the world of Python and hardware. I don't even do much. Or not enough. Yeah, so I'm going to get to this Gartner thing in a bit. Yeah. But please do check out the latest newsletter. Go to AdafruitDaily.com. We don't spam. We don't do anything like that. It's a completely separate site, and you'll be able to check out all the different things. So there's new boards, including the MicroMod, I believe, is in there for the RP2040. Oh, for RP... Oh, yeah, we've done a whole bunch of updates. We added like six different boards. Lots of boards. Lots of corrections on boards. ESP3-2 has two boards, RP2040 boards. Consistentboard.led to both boards and a timing fix. So check that out. Also, worth noting, is the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect now supports Circuit Python. Thanks to Liz from PR. If you want to look at where Python is now, in addition to the regular old Python on hardware news, we have kind of bigger picture Python. Well, I mean, it's part of a community. So check that out. Python is swapping positions with Java for now the second most popular language. It's kind of cool. So if you're thinking about what programming language to use, look at some of the trends. Later on, I'll have more information about our TI interview that I think we're going to be able to do. TI is using a fork of Circuit Python and I got ahold of them and they're going to send the questions I sent over and I'm going to ask, okay, why did you choose Python in general, by the way, but also, you know, why do you have this cool fork of Circuit Python you're putting on your calculators. A little bit of recap from the deep dive with Scott, the Circuit Python parsec with JP, some of the guides and more that we've had here, and then tons and tons and tons and tons of USB-related stuff. Keyboards and encoders and LEDs and buttons and Circuit Python. People are, they're really getting into it. There's so much good example code. So do check it out. It's at the point where there's so much news that I now pick one important thing for newsletter to go over because there's too much. Right. There's too much. And that's a good sign. It's almost, okay. So what's the thing? Okay. So the thing this week is, so Gartner has always been a big deal. If something's in the Gartner report, like, it's like, okay, this is, this is it. And this is their hype cycle for embedded software systems 2020. Now this is just came out not too long ago. And if you go to the Arduino site, because I got through the newsletter, you just sign up, you put your information in, and then they give you access to the report. There's a couple pieces that I thought was really neat. So previously, Python on hardware wasn't really there. In fact, it was in a different location. So they give them terms in here. So the trough of disillusionment is where Arduino, IoT, Edge architecture, one M2M. And then you could see where the slope of enlightenment is. And that's where she's getting used by people. It's not only people who can use it are using it. So not only is it getting used, but if you, if you read the little summary that's in the newsletter and also on our site, using Python on hardware. I feel like sensor fusion is like on the slope. We've been using sensor fusion for 20 years. It's in everything, folks. Yeah. I don't know about this. So the interesting thing micro Python, circuit Python, Python, and we're, we're named in this report is it's so fast to do development that you now see it in this area of like, if you want to do Bluetooth, low cost development, do prototyping really fast, it's now taking off faster than some of the previous solutions, even like Arduino, which is also a very fast way to prototype and more. Yeah. So it's one to watch. And when like, I mean, it's cool that it's even in this. I mean, like people are paying attention to it. Yeah. It's like, what's, you know, on Twitter, you see people snark on each other like, Oh, the normies know about this now. You know, it's like when someone says, Oh, they're, you know, I like that band before everyone liked them. Well, this is kind of like that. So as soon as it starts getting these syndicate research reports, that means it really, really, really is getting an industry a lot. And that's what we're seeing, but it's nice to see this report. So check it out. Links to all that and more in the Python hardware newsletter. Sweet. Thank you, Blinka. I leave the newsletter top to bottom every week it comes out. All right. Open source hardware. We are an open source hardware company. We have 2485 guides. Lady, what's on the big board this week? All right. So we got some new guides. New guides are the Rotary Trinky Guide that Katyn wrote up. Thank you. We also got from Dylan a project to keep track of your plants using circuit Python. And I think either Raspberry Pi Pico or RP2040 Feather and Erle Featherwing. And it'll send you a Discord or Slack message when your plant needs watering. Now, obviously, you can always still look at your plant, but it's a really good project to demonstrate how to automate sending things to third party platforms like Discord and Slack. We've got the Funhouse Parking Assistance. This is a really common project people like to build with electronics. Using a ultrasonic sensor in the Funhouse and circuit Python, you can light up a gigantic strip of LEDs or the onboard LEDs on the Funhouse to let you know when you're about to hit a pole. It uses the ultrasonic to tell you when the distance is less than a certain amount. And the ultrasonic sensors are like perfect for this project because they're good up to about three meters. And then we've got a couple update guides. The PyGamer Thumbel Camera Library Guide. Jen's going to actually probably update that guide. I added a fact to the Neotrolis Guide. Melissa updated the tutorial for the E-Ink Event Calendar because Google changed their interface. And then from last week, we've got Carter's Guide for using U2IF with RP2040 and Katnig with the Neo-Key Tricky Guide. Yeah. I want to say that Eric has a very good headline that I feel like I've now missed out on. Circuit Python slithers its way up the slope of enlightenment. Man, I can't believe I missed that one. It's okay. You can't get every, you know, that's a really good headline. All right. So, anyway, move right along. We have our factory footage right here from Adafruit and more. Take it away. Factory away. Adafruit factory. Radio Shack sign. So there's a rumor we bought Radio Shack because we had, well, someone gifted us this. But we did get a Radio Shack sign. I bought a Radio Shack sign. So this is on the back of my desk. It just says hack R right now. And I'm going to do a post because I think Radio Shack should rebrand as hack. Hacker. And you would buy gaming stuff, keyboards, all the things that a lot of people are doing. And this would be a neat way to revitalize that brand, I think. But anyhow, other factory footage wouldn't be complete without a time lapse from Disney Across Street. They have this big flag that's been added over there. And a member and I was talking about rainbows. This was right outside our window here in Adafruit. Oh no, I missed it. When was this? Empire State Building. I believe it was on Friday when it was raining. Wow, beautiful. Yeah. So that's why we, of course, have to code in rainbows. Yeah. Because there's all sorts of things going on. All right. 10% off rainbows. All right. 3D printing with no page. We have two things. We have the Trinky case and then we got a giant MX switch. So we're going to play those back and we shall see you on the other side. Hey, what's up, folks? In this video, we're checking out the Neo Trinky. This features a SanD21 with four Neo pixels and two capacitive touchpads fitted into a USB key that can run circuit python or Arduino. We designed a 3D printed case with a large key ring and used transduced filament to diffuse the Neo pixels. In this demo, we're using the Neo Trinky as a remote shutter button for a mobile camera phone using the HID library for circuit python. It can also work as a media controller for your computer or laptop. You can use the cap touch pads to adjust the volume in the Neo pixels for visual feedback. You can 3D print a USB shell for the USB Trinky boards to give them a tighter fitting. It features a thin wall that wedges into the USB port, giving it a secured connection. It's a quick 3D print that doesn't require any support material, so you can make one for each of your USB Trinkies. Using conductive PLA filament, you can create capacitive touchpads with custom shapes that can wrap around, making it easier to touch. To install circuit python, we'll go to circuitpython.org and search for the Neo Trinky. You'll want to select your preferred language from the dropdown and click the download button. Double press the reset button on the board to get into the bootloader mode. You'll know it's ready to install when the Neo pixels turn green. Then just drag and drop the uf2 file onto the USB drive. You can get the files to print your own case from the learn guide. Start by inserting the Neo Trinky into the case and fitting the pin from the cover through the slot. The two are snapfitted together. Use conductive PLA filament for the button add-ons and press fit them over the touchpads. The case features a large ring so you can easily remove it from any USB port or USB hub. We found translucent natural PLA worked the best for diffusing the Neo pixels. The cover has a built-in button actuator for the reset switch so you can still access it when you need to. So if you're just getting started with programming electronics, we hope you're inspired to check out the Adafruit Neo Trinky and circuit python. It's juicy! The RP-2040! It's delicious! Yes, finally! We've actually been waiting for this to drop and we've been anticipating the RP-2040 on IPI from Raspberry Pi. It's their first microcontroller chip and we've featured Maxim and ST and Analog and Atmel and Microchip and all those people and they're wonderful. We love them but we also want to give some love to Raspberry Pi because they have finally released the chip that is in the Pico and so many development boards that we can call the RP-2040 development board series. You can now get that chip so you the viewer can make your own RP-2040 boards. So this is what it looks like. This is called the RP-2040 and this is the same chip. Right now there's only one chip and it's the same chip that you can find in the Raspberry Pi Pico so you can see the center there. I mean I think part of me believes that like half of the reason they made this chip is just because they wanted to see their logo on a microcontroller because like that's freaking... wouldn't that be cool to have like an Adafruit logo on a microcontroller? Maybe one day. All right it's also in our Feather RP-2040 which by the way we open source the design so if you're looking for like a core that you can use that's like a you know the Raspberry Pi foundation actually looked at it and it kind of like fixed all the little mistakes I had so if you want like a design that's ready to go that you can copy the schematic or layout even for a known working RP-2040 design check out the Feather RP-2040 and of course you can fit on very small boards like the QDPI 2040 here as well and best of all it's one dollar which is a great deal it's a good price for a microcontroller as powerful as this one. So it's a dual cortex M0 and it's running really fast it's 130 megahertz it's got a ton of RAM but it doesn't have any flash we'll talk about in a little minute. One thing to note and just because you know people who are wanting to use it in their designs this is a 0.4 millimeter pitch QFN 56 I think it's I haven't had a lot of problems with bridging but it is a fine pitch chip so definitely this is not an easy hand solderable chip you kind of can hand solder especially with some hot air and some flux and some paste really you know you definitely need to have a custom PC before it so it's something to watch out for. This isn't a dip chip or even like a large SOIC that you can like use as your first microcontroller hopefully eventually they'll design a version that has bigger pads maybe or you know it's fewer pins and larger pads but at this time right now it's only available in one package the QFN 56 with 0.4 millimeter pitch spacing. The name is it designates what's inside of it which I think is interesting because it sort of implies that there might be other configurations so the two is a number of cores remember it's a dual core the zero is the M0 core which is you know it's a very popular ARM Cortex 32-bit core we've seen it in the SAMD 21 of course STM 32F 1x series is the Cortex M0 Nordic makes a bunch of the NRF 51 series is the Cortex M0. Cortex M0 is very very popular it's a very easy to use chip ARM GCC has great support for it it doesn't have DSP or floating point support if that's something you need they do have some helper functions in the ROM for floating points it's not like as slow as doing it in pure software however it just doesn't have SIMD it doesn't have you know floating point doesn't have DSP if that's important to you and it's not going to have to do in software this chip isn't for you. Next up is the RAM so this is where it's interesting so there's a ton of RAM this has a 264k of RAM which is a lot of RAM for a Cortex M0 usually these kinds of chips have like 16k maybe 32k this has a ton which is great if you need to like buffer you know a camera or a full display or a TFT or whatever you need a lot of RAM this chip has got you and it's all contiguous as well and then finally how much flash is in it and like I said these have zero flash on board which means you're going to have to add another chip externally to add flash um here's one of the things built in so uh you have the full dual Cortex the SRAM the multifunction GPIO we'll show you the the pin map uh six pins are required for the execute and place external flash memory um there's built-in hardware for the most peripherals you're used to and there's four ADCs and there are a lot of ADCs it's the only thing that's kind of like a little anemic compared to some chips but of course you can always connect an SPI or iSQUIRT-C expander and it is 12 bits so you get good quality and of course team USB support with host and device um for the peripherals this is kind of repeated there's DMA and all that good stuff from PLLs um the peripherals there's two hardware UARTs two hardware SPIs two hardware iSQUIRT-Cs 16 PWM channels and they're split across all of the GPIO now one thing you might notice is like well where's the i2s where's the PDM where's you know there's a lot of stuff that's usually in the peripheral like rotary encoder management maybe motor timing control whatever IRDA support all that would actually be handled by the PIO state machine I'm not going to get the whole thing but basically it's a mini programmable state machine that you can use to make complicated bit bang patterns so you can do stuff like bit bang dvi or bit bang ethernet but you're not actually bit bang it because you have this tool that's doing it for you it's great for neopixels for example because neopixels are a very simple protocol but you have to get the timing perfect they're great at simple patterns of data that just have to have perfect timing and this is the internal structure you can dma everything back and forth it's kind of kind of a standard cortex M0 structure there's a little bit of on on chip cache for the execute in place because again flash memory is on external chip that's accessed by these are all the GPIO I'm not going to go into all the GPIO and what they all do of course is a debug port there's crystal um every pin can be uart spi or isquared c but it's not fully crossbarred it just means like every other pin is a uart rx every other pin is an isquared c sdsl you're not going to have like complete free control to assign anything to anything but you're always going to be able to there's like five options for every pin so you always have some configuration that's going to work out for what you want to do for external memory just factor that into your cost you know you're going to have to have any size you want but i like this eight megabit q-spy flash from giga device i like this chip but you know wing bond makes chips a desto makes chips tons of people make chips it is required you you really can't use a chip without having external flash memory and also an external 12 megahertz crystal for firmware there's a lot options there's micro python there's pico sdk there's lots of examples and see there's circuit python there's arduino so to start don't forget we have circuit python support people are adding their boards you can go into the board's directory under ports raspberry pi honestly copy and paste something exists and fill out your pin structure and how much flash memory you've got and it'll probably just work we've got for arduino there's two ports available i actually kind of like the this philhauer port it's got a lot of functionality and it works very solidly and it's it's a low level pico sdk so it's you can still use all the pico sdk stuff that you know and love inside the arduino core so check out this for arduino support it's beta but i've been using it with success and of course arduino like very recently also released um rp20 40 support using embed as an underlying core um i've used it a little bit but not as much uh however it's exciting and they said that they would be willing to take poor quests as well for boards so very exciting to have two possibilities there it's available in gg that's right you can pick it up for one dollar it's one dollar yeah q i'll buy that for a dollar buy that for a dollar and then you uh set me a little bit of a video i was going to play okay so this video it's because you can read all about the rp20 40 but this video shows the capabilities of pio to do um like decoding of data driving an hdmi display natively like there's no encoder in between you just connect the pins directly to the hdmi cable and it can or dvi cable and it can actually uh or vga cable with some resistors and you can mimic a bbc micro computer which is amazing for a dual core cortex m0 i think they overclock it a little bit but not that much um there's a lot of performance and capability you can squeeze out of this by using the pio so i just thought this is a cool cool demo so short URL there product ID there get it on digikey and yeah they're selling in reels of 500 or 3400 there's two real sizes seven inch and 13 inch they're currently out of stock because everyone has them out of stock however sign up and you'll be notified i know that the pi foundation is pushing more into inventory as much as possible so sign up you'll be notified and then you can use our designs as your base design your own rp20 40 board okay so before we do new products which we'll start in a few seconds don't forget to load up your car and get ready in rainbows ten percent off ten percent off get that discount so uh first off coming soon i'll take care of this one uh circuit python seven is on its way it's the great merge with micro python and circuit python and they're best friends and keyboards lots of keyboard hid usb stuff that's that's it for this is a poster sign up we'll be making a few um and uh you can always download it as well okay next up all right uh we've got some updates so this is the three and five millimeter uh infrared break beam sensors you have one transmitter at the top and then the bottom is the receiver uh a transistor receiver these are great for break beams you want to see if somebody has like put their hand or something or some devices between the two leds they work about like a foot or two away um three millimeter and five meters so the update is uh they now come with these nice premium wire and so you can you can solder them if you want but they're great for breadboards now before they were bare wires now we spent a little bit more got them with premium wires we had this in our um eight a box the last one we just shipped and i love them so much i was like i want them for the store as well so we've updated this product and then there's the other one uh this is the five millimeter same deal more led more bright premium okay next up all right next up we've got a whole plethora like really a menagerie of um 2.4 millimeter 2.4 2.54 millimeter or 0.1 inch pitch uh jumper cable so these are like kind of standard like burg or molex whatever you want to call them jumper cables that have two sockets on either end and yeah so i'll show i'll show there's so many i start off with one and then it was like oh no we're just gonna we're just gonna show all of them yeah there's just a lot because there's too many to show okay one after the other after the other so yeah i'm gonna show them all once so so basically we have um you know and we have individual like jumper jerky like the pullable ones but these are in one piece and there are a lot of times where i'm like i really do want them to be in one solid piece so i can jumper two things together um you don't have to worry about like accidentally flipping one or i'm coming loose so we have them you know in like up to i think 20 in a row we have like 8 12 16 5 we've actually already carried six one thing i'll note is uh there's no guarantee of the colors um because they're just like jumpers that you'll they'll definitely be like you know symmetric so yellow like pin one is pin one and then pin five has been five right they're gonna be in order but the colors may vary although i'll notice that once you get to the longer ones you know they tend to start with with black and then white and then back to brown that said you now have you know these about eight inches long and all sorts of lengths they're just really handy um and they make for very clean wiring and because they're point one inch they work with just about anything like everything you that would normally use a breadboard or headers um you can now easily jumper them and of course we also have the individual jumpers but what i like about these is that you don't have to worry about these coming apart or coming loose they're just like one solid strip so i think they're very handy okay next up okay luxury key puller this is like the wire whisk style this is the nice kind of wire key puller so if you're doing keyboard stuff and you have to pull keycaps off um this is actually kind of the tool to use like really it's the only thing that works really well like with your fingernails you're just going to break them this has like these two strong metal prong kind of whiskey looking things and they slide over the key cap as you saw in the image and then they can just pull it right off they work really great um they're not as cheap as the plastic fingering ones but those don't work very well these can get in even if it's like in the middle of the keyboard you can pull out individual keys anywhere on the keyboard which makes them i think a wonderful right next up this is an update also an update but leading into another product for this magnetic uh read sensor that's built it is a door sensor a window sensor you all see these in security systems um these also now have premium wire ends on them so they're easier to use with a breadboard or perf board or plugging them into cables or whatever i i just love these and we did it for the ate a box and now they're in the store speaking of if you missed out on this last eight a box because we sold out we basically have a starter kit that has everything that was in the box except for the year subscription to Adafruit IO which was of course only for subscribers um but this pack has all the sensors that you need to follow along with all the eight a box projects so you can do the mail slot detector as shown here using brake beam um we've got uh this is a door alert sensor that sends you email when a door has been opened using as you can see the magnetic door sensor we've got the um parking detector molested a bunch of home assistant projects there was that uh water cat bulls sensor to see if your cat needs more water um so you've got the water sensor the window or door magnetic sensor the ultrasonic sensor the pyr sensor so you can detect a person uh the brake beam sensor cables the back plate and uh the yellow brick mounting stand next up all right next up uh you got these skinny neopixel strips that are rgbw uh we have rgbw led strips but they're kind of chunky these are very slim and so i thought these could be handy for some people and they're beautiful so inside each um neopixel it's not just rgb you can see kind of it's split in half the top half has rgb and then the bottom half has yellow and it's separated so if you want to have like true white color phosphor led light you're going to get that with the sensor whereas normally if you try to mix rgb it never quite comes out white it's like white's kind of funky you really want like this full spectrum color so we've got these in two versions one is the warm white as shown here and then this one which has the same rgb and then when it goes to the white it's a cool white so two versions warm white and cool white was kind of skip neutral and then i can um i can show real fast on the overhead as well so as normal uh each one comes with uh jst um sm connector three pins with data power and ground and then uh you can see it does the rainbow it's very good at the rainbow red green blue and then a warm white and it's a really nice white color so for that architectural or accenting lighting where you want it to be a true like incandescent white or a daylight white um this is going to look much much much better than trying to color mix the rgb segments just remember you need to have a new pixel library that has rgb w support almost all of them do but just make sure you follow that step because it has four leds in it not three otherwise your data will come up all funky and then we have the stars show tonight besides you lady at our community and our team here at eight fruit it's the rp 2040 they come in one and ten that's right coming soon uh we also don't have any spares right now as seen on yeah because we're using them for these things on the feather rp 2040 on the cutie pie uh on the itsy bitsy on the key 2040 i'm designing um this chip i've been using it it's been great i love it and the raspberry pie foundation um as of monday is sort of letting people sell them individually um so right now sign up and we'll have them in singles or packs of 10 as of right now the price is again a dollar a piece it's a great price um and then of course user open source design to kickstart your design and then make your own make your own whatever you want it's it's a great it's a great price for a chip so powerful dual cortex m0 with tons of ram uh runs micro python runs circuit python runs arduino runs embed um you know anything that needs a lot of ram needs fast bit bang um io support using the pio clusters that are into this chip i love it for circuit python because there's so much ram and circuit python requires a lot of ram but i've just been having fun with it um using td usb to make um mechanical keyboards that are reprogrammel the rp 2040 of course does an excellent excellent job at it so uh check out the rp 2040 um it's going to be in the shop soon you can sign up and then don't forget you'll also need spi flash with it which we also stock okay well um you can use this code on checkout and get 10% off that like key puller yeah it's a pretty sweet key okay we're going to answer some questions over on discord i got like a couple loaded up uh a different size discord um we're going to do some top secret okay let's get out of the vault what's involved this week so from the vault this week um you you previewed this oh i sent out the panel it showed up do you want to talk about any of this well i've got the the keyb rp 24 in the top right so that's my like it's an rp 2040 board that's for mechanical keyboards and i put some things in it i think to make it especially friendly for mechanical keyboards um it's got i got the eink trinky which uses kind of suggestions like that's a good idea um i've got the new stem of friend with rp 2040 and then you can see there's two there's the the the macro pad i've been working on for a couple weeks now and then um the key plate in the bottom plate so there's two p3s i have no traces because they're just like mechanical and then i think i have some like g payo breakout thing okay and then here is a preview this is a mock-up that's not real yet of glider it's the way that we hope you could transfer files any type of file from device to device and this will work with pi leap which is an editor for mobile devices for circuit python so this is what trevor's been working on and turning is working on the pieces with scott and trevor now this is a team effort i'm loving it everyone's everyone's like yeah together so um we were talking about this in our other meeting um so this isn't you know an app it's a mock-up of it and it's not real yet this is probably what it's gonna be but just you know get the feeling for it yeah okay and that's top secret for this week get back on the ball more hardware to come okay so we're gonna go to questions they're over this is also a good nose puller and the questions uh okay so uh let me go to this first one which was uh how many product ideas have you had and how many have made it in development and how many have actually become products i think about half of the ideas i have actually make the products but if i if i've developed it there's a 95 chance it'll make into the store yeah only very rarely do things get designed and then don't make it and usually it's for some tactical reason or like it's in i didn't feel good about releasing it because it wasn't reliable enough but let's do do these um strands work with the uh funhouse um the plugs that go in no it's a different plug i mean you can use the plugs that are on the funhouse and then just use put little wires in between them to match them up okay um question for the show you had featured um the nina west uh blues clues video uh just curious if you've previously followed nina earned your recent or a new discovery well from ruPaul's show i think where that's everyone knows nina west from at least a lot of us do um but uh there's a really cool video with blues clues uh check it out on our blog and i think uh a lot of folks are talking about it right now question for asking an engineer i'm wondering if there were ways to execute code that would somehow be embedded in jason format i like the simplicity of jason but it seems to only be real use for storing variables i like the idea of being able to remotely update code that would be embedded in jason i'm wondering if there's something that like that's been already been done i'll try to give it a shot but like no before trying to reinvent the wheel thanks you i appreciate you all um in python you can you can just send over i mean it's it's i mean it's not terrible lighter and play piley you know i mean it just in python in general like if you if you send over a text file you can evaluate that text file or import that text file and it will run like that's interpret language can do that non interpretive languages you're gonna have a much much bigger challenge um you can do some hacks but really this is where interpretive languages um work out the only thing is that of course then you have to worry about code protection right because it's like if you're gonna execute anything that somebody sends over you want to make sure that it's it's trustworthy code that you're executing what circuit python library should i use for fun house display um well we have a library for the fun house um that canals all of it but the chip itself is a st 7789 so any st 7789 tft driver will display it okay uh next up trevor's works makes me makes me want to get an ios device i will try to remember this in this driver that's high praise he should get commission from apple um i do ios work i feel like i probably make it i could do it easier than when i tried before uh next up uh why are the analog ports on fun house five volts well there you can change the power to be three volts the reason they're five volts is because a lot of times you want to connect to um like neopixels or a servo or something that really does need five volts um the input pin is voltage protected so you can have inputs that are like if they go up to five they'll just get cut off at three point three we found that this is like a good in between state where it's like people want to drive things that need is a given amount of power you don't want to overload the three point three volt regulator but you can always cut the trace and solder the three point three volt jumper if you need to all right i have a project using the fun house that downloads an album out from you from youtube for current playing music i have lost my code in all my libraries a few times because the fun house has to be in read only mode to download the images is there a way to do this uh in memory using bytes i over as file object okay there's there's another one for you to for current playing music i've lost my code and we're like oh well first off just back up your code um it has to be in read write mode to download the images um if the image is small enough i mean so the fun house has a ton of ps ram if the image is small enough you can you can store the bitmap in memory and then maybe you could use that to display it i agree it's not like the way our display is designed is um you don't it's not like arduino where you can like blip to it but i think i think your best bet is to load it like a sprite in in memory and then try and display it as like a palleted image and see how far you get with that but yeah it's going to be tough because there's the fun house doesn't have external storage for it um and i don't think we have like the ability we don't have the ability to do a ram disk or anything so yeah i think that's kind of you that's kind of the only thing i can think of for you to do or just be really careful don't um use one of the switches to detect whether it's in read mode or write mode and only allow one or the other right so if if the button is pressed when it boots up you can write to the disk but the computer the circuit python can't and when you don't have it then circuit python can't and you can't so like get rid of the like two things or possibly write the file system at the same time which is what is corrupting your file system okay next up uh any higher amperage power supply that runs on lithium ions um well we've got the power boost 1000 if that's what you're talking about and i'll give you up to two amps or so right someone wants to dig around play and build stuff in the warehouse room you're in yeah um do some tutorials online apply for a job later and uh the folks who work here get free stuff so that's uh one of the perks i always forget to mention it because i always assume that folks know it but when we have new people who start i'm like oh by the way don't forget it like you get free stuff free stuff um next up which one that's sort of sd card yeah maybe we'll have another version there was no um there's no flash there's no pins left for i said believe me the original version of sd card and if you look every single pin is taken and so there was no there's no spot for an sd card and so that was like that the sacrifice that we made all about constraints um the gardener report got a shout out you know sometimes these reports are a little boring um but now they're getting exciting so this one got a shout out the slope of my enlightenment circuit python slithers way up slithers its way up the slope of enlightenment all right let's see if you have any other questions i think uh that is it some folks are helping each other out try to find an online api they could take the lmar to url and create a small bit map might be easier to keep memory yeah i know there's it's on the the pie portal we we use the external sd card i think i think your best bit is actually just to to use one of the buttons to avoid corrupting the file system i think that because it'll work fine as long as you are not wearing the file system while it's writing the file system all right and i think that is it some shout outs for the blues clues video that we have on there uh i've got an image that's a follow up folks are helping each other thanks for helping each other for those working this is not everything is designed for those working at the ate a fruit headquarter what are the hours scheduled like well i'm one of the people who works here uh i want you to i clock in and clock out just like uh most folks here so depending on you're in the clock right now yes uh depending on which department you're in so our receiving department's a little bit earlier um but we do eight hour shifts um we also make sure people get paid lunch breaks paid breaks all that stuff you don't have to time clock in and time clock out for that stuff um lots of paid time off we have break areas and the schedules uh that a lot of folks keep are up to them which is one of the things that we really like is having flexible schedules so there's folks who uh maybe they have kids or maybe they have other stuff going on um some folks are here as early as seven and they would probably leave by three and then folks are eleven seven uh usually there is in some departments for instance shipping uh i do a stand-up meeting with our team um we call it a stretch it mostly turns into stark rectivia and of the day in fact the last one we talked about snorks uh snorks yeah and uh i didn't think you're talking about yeah it's one of those things where we uh for people's schedules we really like to empower people like if we can get the work done let's figure out schedules that work for everyone we don't really want to do weekends anymore um but if we need to some people uh do weekend schedules and we don't do anything overnight or at night um turns out a lot of folks like to come in do a great job and then leave and miss it and want to come back the next day so with that i think uh is oh can people post tutorials uh on instructable like instructables on the learn guide section no we usually curate because we have a lot of code that we're responsible for but if someone writes a really good guide we usually suggest to put on haxter or instructables and then let us know hack may i l and then we do have guide writers that we usually like to see some guides they've written before because there's so many places for user guides that we we we think it's good for them you know like that's that's covered there's a lot of places so um post your projects there and we'll we'll blog them all right uh do you let people work 100 hours if they want no no not really um in fact so employers usually try to get away with not paying people over time we would love to pay people over time if they want to but we also know the live work balance is way more important so i really want people to uh you know do 40 hours um and please be here for the long term we have a lot of folks that have been with us you know seven eight years that's basically the length of time it if it's been around and we enjoy that because they don't get burnt out so i think that was the last question okay thanks everybody i think i got it all all right thanks lady and i could work everyone that is it for this week don't forget the code is in rainbows look at these rainbow LEDs we got all sorts of rainbows from eight a box rainbows rainbow to happy pride month rainbows rainbow to double rainbows double rainbow to all the rainbows on all the wires like i said rainbows lots of rainbows this week we'll see everybody next week thanks so much to car who's running select behind the scenes thank you all of our teams that are out there and community and customers that's been keeping us going we'll see everybody next week thank you so much everyone here is your mom of zener rainbow