 Live from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody, it's me Lady Aida with me, Mr. Lady Aida. We're broadcasting live from downtown Manhattan. This is the Adafruit factory behind us in high demand. Everyone loves this factory. It's where we do all of our engineering, manufacturing, testing, shipping, kidding, videoing and more. Right now it's nice and quiet, it's just us too because everyone else has gone home. So we're gonna kick it off with one hour of the latest in the Maker Hacker Engineer Nuzosphere. Can I say that, Nuzosphere? I don't even know that's a word. All sorts of good stuff coming your way. Mr. Lady Aida, why don't you tell them what's on tonight's show? On tonight's show, the code is Matrix Driver. 10% off an agent for store all the way until 11.59 PM or whenever you want to turn it off. Matrix Driver is a code, we'll tell you why in a little bit. Talk about our Adafruit Live series of shows include show and tell. We just had the show and tell us a few minutes ago. Time travel, look around the world, Maker Hackers, ours, engineers and more. Help Wanted, jobs from our jobs board and people posting their skills and companies looking for people to join their organizations. Many York City factory footage, 3D printing, INMPI, new products, we got some top secret and we're gonna answer your questions at the end in Discord, Adafruit.it slash Discord. We can join all 30,000 of us. That's right, we got a bunch of folks there for a 24-7 hacker space that's family friendly I guess. I don't even know if the right term is family, family or just like, it's just friendly. Friendly, friendly robots. All that and more on, you guessed it. Asking engineer. All right, so first up, let me just do the COVID news because we've been given everyone updates because we're a business in New York City and New York is probably a little further ahead the different areas of the country or even the world because we got hit hard last year, first, worst. And so what's going on in New York City is you can show your vaccination card, you can use a couple different apps, but when you go to a restaurant or if you go to a gym or any place really inside where there's people, you will need to, and this is Shake Shack, you will need to show your proof of vaccination. It took a second to do it. All the restaurants around here are doing it. All of the indoor places are doing it. And here's how we're doing in New York. We got a new governor, probably heard. So that means these charts are updated and more, but you can see. More gradients. More gradients, they're now looking at the hospitalization. So in the U.S., it's 100,000 right now, which is terrible. That's where we already were. So we're not really going forward. Seems like we're going backwards. Then in New York, you can see we're starting to pop up a little bit. So it's not going away, but I'll say this as an employer in New York with, you know, got over a hundred people. The folks that are vaccinated, even if they've had a breakthrough positive case, they're fine. The folks that aren't vaccinated in New York are the ones that are getting severely ill. So that's real info from the street. And we're still seeing people get ill. I mean, like it's happening in New York City. Right, but more so if someone is vaccinated in our experience so far, they've always been fine. The ones that haven't been are the ones that have had some severe illnesses. And you're starting to see it really accelerate around the country. So in case you're wondering if proof of vaccination is something like, oh, this is going to be inconvenient. It's hard. We use either our card. We also have a New York City app. And all it does, it's a camera app. All it does is take a photo of it, doesn't connect to a server, doesn't do anything. I actually like it though, because I open up the app, I don't have to search for my camera roll or what am I actually showing them the wrong photo? And it's accepted everywhere. Yes, people could fake it. Yes, there's all sorts of things, but you're allowed to use this. And so this is what we're using right now just to show it. And it's been working out. So that is what's going on here. It hasn't been an inconvenience. They flipped the switch on checking. Is this only for indoor, if you're eating outdoor, you don't require it. If you're doing pickup, you don't require it. Some places do. Some places still do. They're just like, we're just fine. Well, it's optional. It's not a mandate. So we'll see. And then basically it looks like September 27th is where most, if not all of New York, that can have a mandate will. So we'll see. We're part of the, the lady is part of the small business council. They're talking to many types of businesses. We'll see if that's something that we want to do. Well, we would have to. But our team is pretty much vaccinated. So far, so good. We're just going to keep going. But that is the latest and greatest in case you're wondering what's going on. All right. Lady Aida, in addition to that great discount code we have. Temps it off. We have free stuff. That's right. We still have our free beat. Pardon me. $99 or more. You get a free permaporto house size breadboard. Great for making your projects permanent from a subtle spread board. One 49 or more. You'll get a free STEM at QT board. All sorts of different sensors and devices. We're actually starting to get some things back in stock, which is good stuff. We ordered back in January is coming in now. So we still have a wide selection of QT boards. You know, if you make account, we'll send you a different one each time. Otherwise you get a random one. $199 and more. You get free UPS ground shipping in the content of the United States. And $299 and more. You get a free Circuit Playground Express, which is a great way to add circuitry and electronics to your project. Even if you're a beginner, if you've never coded before, it's a no solder way to have sensors, LEDs, buttons and more. All programmed with make code, drag and drop programming circuit pythons. It's embedded Python on hardware, which we'll talk about shortly. Arduino or code.org CS discoveries, which is a classroom based way to learn how to code. All right, we just finished up some live shows. We have a bunch of live shows that we do every single week. We just finished show and tell. We do that at 730 every single week. It was jam packed. I think we had 10 plus people. New people, all new people. So check it out. Any of our places that people watch videos, a lot of people watch videos on our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Adafruit. And on weekends, and I'm saying weekends, because sometimes we do Desk of Ladiator at different times. So this weekend, or sorry, last weekend, we did it on Saturday. Yes, there was a storm on Sunday, and so we wanted to be safe and doing it. Yeah, we're at the point where we know, it's like, oh, like there's a hurricane, and we're getting text that there's gonna be a power outage. Instead of like going through that scenario, why don't we just get it done early, and then they'll worry about it. So anyways, this is part one of Desk of Ladiator. What did you show? Okay, so it looks like I showed off the new LED matrix as a new product for this week. I also showed off the assembled glasses prototype, and a STEMIQT board I designed on like Wednesday or Thursday afternoon at MCP 23017, 16 pin breakout. And we also do the great search, it's brought to you by Digikey. And Ladiator uses powers of engineering and using the Digikey site for over a decade. Yeah, 15 years. To find the parts you need. So what was this week's part? Okay, boy, what was this week's part? Oh, this week's part was I request somebody asked for a low quiescent current boost converter for an IoT project, and I found a couple options, I also showed them what to look for. It's actually kind of a hard, low quiescent current boost converter is a weird thing to try to find. I kind of go through why, but instead of giving them what they asked for, I give them what they wanted, which is a different thing. And I think we found a couple good options and also a chip that I was like, maybe I'll make a breakout for this board. Okay. Then JP's product pick of the week was this week. We just had a little note, we were celebrating 200 episodes of JP's workshop. Take. But JP's product pick of the week is one of the newer shows. I just wanted to give JP some kudos here because he always ups his thumbnail game. And I don't know if he knows that I noticed, but I do. Here's his latest, this was... I'm impressed that he Photoshopped himself as every character. This is the way to go. And so this is a tribute, I think, to Blade Runner 2040 because we were talking about the Raspberry Pi. Yeah. Pico 2040. Looks great. So anyways, I thought you did a really good job of this. So here is this week's product pick of the week. It is the Itsy Bitsy RP2040, a powerful little board. We've got lots of flash on there, lots of GPIO pins, can do Circuit Python on there all day long. And I'll show you a little project that I put together because you may ask yourself, well, what kind of project would I want lots and lots of GPIO pins for in a small form factor? So you can see I've got my little Itsy Bitsy plugged into a small breadboard there. And then I'm breadboarding these wires into key bed that I pulled out of an old synthesizer. It's an eight column and eight row diode matrix. So that means I need 16 pins plugged into my Itsy Bitsy. And I have some leftover pins that I decided to plug in a little NeoPixel strip. Using our keypad library, I can read the diode matrix and know which keys I'm pressing. I decided to have it send off MIDI commands and at the same time send commands to my NeoPixels to light up. It's the Itsy Bitsy RP2040. And we also have GPIO's workshop that's on Thursday. And like I was saying, congrats to JP. That was last week's news. But we also do a circuit Python segment called circuit Python Parsec. Here's the latest one. The circuit Python. For the circuit Python Parsec, what I wanted to do was show you how to constrain range of numbers to a minimum and a maximum that's useful to you. What I have here is a circuit playground express with a potentiometer hooked up as an analog input. So it's being read on pin A2 here and it's got power and ground. Basically acts as a voltage divider. If you look at the code, I'm importing the things that matter here, the board. So I get pin definitions and analog IO. Actually don't need time in there. I was using that earlier. I'm not now. What I do is I set up that analog pin, pin A2 to be an analog input that I can read with the phrase analog in, that's a variable name, equals analog IO.analoginboard.a2. Then inside of my main loop, what I'm doing is creating a variable called knob, which is using this key phrase, min max analog in value, my minimum number, I want it to have a minimum of 20,000 and my maximum, I want it to have a maximum of 50,000. So if you watch here when I turn this knob, it's got a little bit of a dead zone at the beginning. And then it grabs it at that 20,000 mark and it goes up to, it hits 50,000 and stops there. So what this allows me to do is ignore some of that sort of little sloppy beginning and end zone there, which can vary from potentiometer to potentiometer. And instead I use the nice meaty center where it's predictable. And so that is how you can constrain a set of values using min max inside of circuit Python. And that is your circuit Python Persec. Okay, I wanted to just, before I go to the deep dive with Scott, I wanted to shout out to James in the chat who is volunteering as an election worker, again, out in California, California has a lot of stuff going on. Oh yeah, that's a reflection. Yeah, when we were trying to help get the word out about how and where people could volunteer for elections, James did it, James is doing it again. And the reason why I think it's okay for me to put this here, there's always civic minded as well. So I thought he would appreciate this. So thank you, James for doing that. We all could make whatever criticism we have in our system, participation is probably better than not. So thank you, James. So speaking of deep dive with Scott Fridays, 2 p.m. Scott will be there, deep diving into all the innards of circuit Python. All right, so back to time traveling. That's what you can do when you have a time travel segment, you can travel back and forth on the timeline. You can do it, just like Spider-Man. Okay. I'm Dr. Octopus. Yeah, Dr. Strange lives right down the street from here. That's true, he does. We walk by, we walk by Bleecker Street all the time. So let's take a walk down memory lane and take a look at a project that Philby did. Okay, next up, just a little bit of a reminder, the Halloween Aida box, we'll be shipping and we're about to send a preview to our friends at Digi-Key because they get a little bit of a heads up because they're usually a partner with Aida box. It will be completely sold out and you won't be able to get the products or products that are associated with it. Just letting you know, goodaidabox.com, sign up now, I think we have like 100 or so slots and those will be gone very soon. This is your reminder. Okay. And we're not going to make more, like we're not opening up more slots. We've already opened up extra slots the last time and we're backs down. Yep, all right. Every single Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Collins lab notes is in effect. So I'm going to play, let's see which one, I have all of them lined up. I'm gonna play yesterday's and then we're just gonna keep going, but do check out all of them in the playlist and all of your social media platforms. Almost every day. And it's also, I'll say this, what's interesting is we're meeting a lot of new people because of TikTok. So we don't make money on TikTok, we're not influencers, we don't have any, there's no money. Oh, I forgot, I have this disclaimer, disclosure, disclaimer. Don't blame me, don't tweet at me. But it's, we're meeting the people because they're coming into our chats and saying, hey, I found you through TikTok. Oh, cool. They're like, I like watching how-to stuff on TikTok. That's how I found you. Yes. And then I got an excellent spam. There's a PCB company that would absolutely love for us to show their PCBs on our TikTok and they'd pay us money. Not gonna do that. Not gonna respond, would decline, putting it in the archive, but it's interesting that the, people are finding us via TikTok. So you know when the spammers and the scammers get you, you know you have something going on. So anyways. We have followers. Yeah. It's easy to run out of microcontroller pins once a project really gets going, but you don't have to replace the board to get more. You can simply add a port expander. This MCP 23017 port expander chip uses I squared C to add 16 general purpose input or output pins to your board. Each pin has an internal pull up resistor you can enable in software and the chip's I squared C address can be set by tying a combination of its address pins to ground. Setting one of these chips up on a breadboard is fast. Just connect power, I squared C clock and data, tie the reset pin to positive voltage and ground the three hardware address pins. Reading and writing to the IO pins is simple thanks to the software library. Up to eight MCP 23017s can be chained together for a total of 128 pins, which is a lot. Okay. Help wanted. Enter a job's work. So you can go to jobs.adoford.com and look for a cool gig. There's a lot or you can post up your skills and people can find you. We look at all of them, moderate them, check them out, make sure they're not sketchy or scammy. This one for the week is the exhibit maintenance technician full-time Discovery World in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Check it out. Jobs.adoford.com and you can find it right there. All right. It's Python on hardware time lady, Ada. Okay. Blinka, Blinka, Blinka me up. Yeah, it's Python on hardware. And as usual, they're gonna go over the newsletter then gonna have a discussion about things. Little talk, little chit chat. This week, CirclePython 7.0 beta released. We're in a beta. All right. So some of the big things since the 6.30. Support for CirclePython development workflow over BLE. Camera support on ESP 32 S2. Curio QR decoding. Keypad scanning module. Real-time customization of USB devices. That one's coming. Merging in of the MicroPython fixes and enhancements of MicroPython as of 1.16. The great merge. Hence the poster. Two Blinkus. Two snakes. One Blinka. Yeah, I don't think the orange snake has a name. And they don't use any more. Yeah, the nameless snake. But a Blink has a name. Next up. Simplification for the RGB status and LED codes. Anything else like Unicone file name support I think is a good one. I think that's still being worked on and it depends. Yeah, couple modules, but Yeah, there's a lot. Big things are camera support, BLE one-time keypad, one-time USB and updating MicroPython. The West is a little bit kind of behind the scenes stuff. Oh, yeah, Jeffler was asking, is it pronounced curio? So curio, I did a blog post about, I worked on these Sony robots a million years ago. And then we decided to do a product because Sony abandoned everything. And curio was a specific word that I always wanted to use even before Sony. And I think that's how it's pronounced curio. Curio. Curio. Yeah, curio. Or curio. That's what I, well, this isn't related to that robot. This is a curio. No, but it's both the same. Yeah. But if folks want to see non-Boston Dynamics robots doing stuff, check out, just do a search on our blog and look for curio. They were dancing robots. They'd read stories of kids. And I tried to smuggle one of them out, but Sony stopped me. Anyways, so you can look at the rest of the newsletter. More stuff on Whippersnapper. That's our beta. It says, you can do it on Discord. We have a little bit of a recap of the latest HackSpace magazine. So make music with Pico and CircuitPython. There is a bunch of stuff going on in the world of keyboards and CircuitPython because that's one of the things it does. A lot of people are doing things like make a 3D printed, like Jepler did from Show and Tell, 3D printed keyboards. Keycaps, yeah. Keycaps, you name it, because now we have a MicroPad. So that is the news in the newsletter. Do subscribe. We're getting really close to 9,000 subscribers. So if like 10 of you subscribe, we'll probably hit it next week. More keyboards. Here's the NumPad 4000 mechanical key switch data entry device. Yeah, you got it. That was by John Park. But the topic of the week, and I think this is maybe some of the biggest news, but there is no such thing as independent press in electronics anymore. So no one really gonna write about stuff because everyone's owned by someone else. So we try to cover the things that we think are interesting. So Arduino is doing Python. That's right. And you're probably saying... Well, they have for a bit, but now they're doing more Python. Well, first up, are those little feather boards? No, do they look kinda like feathers? Yes. And is that Python? Yeah, so what's the destination with a lot of microcontroller efforts? It's scripting languages on feather-shaped things. And I think this is a big deal because we were like, hey Arduino, we're going this direction, we're going this direction. Not only from our form factor, but also going to a scripting language Python. This is with OpenMV. Yeah, so this is interesting because it's micro-Python. And it's interesting because Arduino's kind of going similar to the route that they had with the Arduino IDE and Arduino Hardware where you don't have to use any particular IDE with CircuitPython or MicroPython. You can use basically any IDE, although Thonny's pretty popular because it has file management, but it's a REPL and it's a file uploading system through the REPL. And so the IDE doesn't matter that much, but having an IDE that is controllable lets them have add-ons and other capabilities that they want to add. One of the things about the Arduino IDE is it's not a very complicated IDE, but it has a couple of add-ons that make it suitable for use with Arduino boards. And so sort of similar to Arduino Hardware and Arduino IDE where there are two pieces of the same development tooling, they're going the same way with the MicroPython and Python on hardware support. Specialized tooling, specialized IDE, even though it isn't required, I think they're kind of pushing people towards that. So we always said like, oh, will Arduino IDE ever support Python? And the answer is no, but what they did do is they're using OpenMV's IDE, which is a very lovely IDE that you can use to do open machine vision stuff, but it's also a fairly good MicroPython IDE to begin with. And I don't know if they're using the OpenMV fork of MicroPython or the core, but I think these are the NRF 52A40 boards and NRF 52A40 has good MicroPython support, it has BLE support, and of course, the circuit Python we have support as well. So in addition to the portenda now there, and the RP2040, which of course has first class MicroPython support. Now they're going back and saying, okay, here's earlier boards that we're going to bring in. So now I think they have maybe five boards total that are given Python hardware native support. So it's, you know, and going forward, the hardware coming out from now on almost certainly will as well because only can get more powerful, more RAM, more capability. Yeah, so it's one of those things where it's like, interpretive languages are on microcontrollers, they're here to stay. And I think some people get caught up, like what's the differences between? Start off with the project you want to do, and there might be an easier, better, faster way to do it, and what's the value of your time and what things do you want to get done? And there's some programming languages that are just like more net native than others. So anyways, I'm excited about this because I wrote the, why Arduino won, why it's here to stay, a million years ago I wrote this article on Make. And so far, Harry Seldin's style, you know, the foundation, like the whole big movement of things is still the same. Something might not be called Arduino in the future, but as you can tell, it's like things are moving towards a certain type of form factor and certain type of programming languages, and it's making things better and easier. And some people don't like it. I'm a fan of the same word. Some people don't like it. Yeah, that's fine. Some people want, remember back in the day, I don't know, like a decade ago or less, when you would get a dev board, it was like $500 and it had like this lockdown IDE. You couldn't do anything with it. Everything was like complicated and hard and expensive. Some people really liked that way. We don't. I think that the market has spoken. This is what the market wants. Yeah, okay. And that is our Python 1001 News. Oh, the week. Okay, all right, we're on the long. Yeah, Made in New York City factory footage, take it away factory. Okay, and it wouldn't be Adafruit factory footage unless you could see Disney headquarters across the street from Adafruit still being built. Okay, they're putting down some metal sheeting now. Yeah. This is, look at all these people. There's like a couple hundred people there. Flooring, getting put together. Will Mickey Mouse go out of copyright or not? In a couple of years, that's what we all want to know. We should totally do carget and metal versus famous mouse. All right, 3D printing. Zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip. Don Pedro, 3D printing. We're going to do things a little different this week. First up, congratulations Don Pedro. They've been doing stuff with Adafruit for eight years. Eight years. Eight years, eight years, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, years. That's a lot of 3D printers they've gone through. Yeah, many. Yeah, and I want to say, we met them, believe it was a show and tell, and they were showing off some projects, and we really hit it off, and it's been fantastic. If you look at the video quantity and quality that Noia and Pedro do every single week, it's helped so many people do the type of projects they want to do. From zero to make her hero in a matter of shows. Their skills have really improved. Yeah, they've gotten, they've skilled up and the entire community and the world's skilled up. And I feel like a lot of people saved a lot of anxiety and pain with which 3D printer to get. Yeah, I think also when we started it was like, well, okay, 3D printer, what are you going to make with it? And we're like, enclosures maybe, but how? And like what? But now they, you know, they actually have a wide range of things that you can do with 3D printing. You're an engineer, it can be a very useful tool. I like how it is a tool now and it's not just like 3D printed Yoda head. It is things that you can, it's a part of a process that you're making stuff with. Yes, people don't just make, they make trinkets but they quickly start making things that are useful. And I think that was the missing thing, because it's the only, and I think the long, well, it's the longest running 3D printing show, but I think it's like now the only live one. And I think that was one of the problems that 3D printing ran into when it first really got big was there wasn't people combining things you can do. Like at some point you have to get over the fact that you're 3D printing and do something useful with it. Yeah. Like, yes, it's cool, but you have to do something with it. Yes, and they're doing stuff. And that's the whole thing. It's like, oh, we're going to do like the electronics or the project was always part of it. It wasn't just like, here's the latest 3D printer. Because a lot of it turned into, which Kickstarter am I going to back for that $100 3D printer that I'm never going to get? Yeah. So I'm glad we have an alternative for folks. So we're going to do the speed up and then we're just going to play the first, I don't know, like 30 seconds of the wood cap. Because it's a nine minute long video. It's better to watch in one sitting, not part of another show, which is ours. So let's do the speed up and then I'll go back to this in a sec. Okay, and then next up, I'm just going to play the very beginning of the wood keycap video. Yes, it's long. It's on our- Watch the whole thing on YouTube. Yeah, it's on YouTube and other places. Hey, what's up, folks? In this video, we're CNC milling some keycaps. These DSA profile keycaps are fully symmetrical and feature a slightly concave top surface. In this video, I'll show you how to machine these keycaps in different types of wood. Infusion three. Okay, so you can watch how do you make that. All right, lady, are you ready? Yes. There we go. All right, on MPI. This week's Ion MPI is from ST. Every single week we do Ion MPI brought to you by DigiKey and Adafruit. This is where we look at new product introductions, MPI, and the place that we like. Ion it. Yeah, the place that we like and we think has the most MPIs is digikey.com. So, lady. Well, they got lots of new products all the time. So, go to digikey.com slash new and that's how I find what I'm going to cover in Ion MPI. Yeah. It's not a secret. We, back in the day, when our website was a lot smaller and there was people trying to do bad stuff to our website, we noticed that some of our competitors at the time, every morning they would look at adafruit.com slash new. I would, too. And that's how they would figure out what they wanted to try to do next because we were always coming up with really good stuff. Yeah. And that's what you kind of do, too. I do the same thing. I am. So, you go to digikey.com slash new to ST. I go to everybody's site slash new, but digikey.com slash new is where you'll get all the latest component MPIs. So, this week the newest, latest, hottest MSD. Yes. So, this week from ST, we've got the ST25 DV. I actually really liked when I saw this pop up because I was like, hey, I know this chip. I even made a breakout for this chip. So, I know a lot about it and I know what it can do. So, I thought this would be a really good MPI because I can really talk to you in depth. There's also a lot of good information from ST about this chip. So, this chip is a dynamic NFC RFID tag. I see with 416 or 64 kilobit EEPROM, fast transfer mode capability and optimized I-squared C. Comes in a bunch of different packages. You can see it comes in four different packages there. And it's an NFC chip. And this is an interesting chip because when a lot of people talk about RFID or NFC, they think about RFID tags that look like this. And if you see, you know, there's the card and the sticker and the circular tag. But if you look at the clear tag or the clear key fob, you see that there is an antenna made of coil wire. It's kind of like a magnet wire, so it's reddish or orange-ish. And in the center, there's like the silvery blob with only two pads on it. And that's an RFID chip that is fully powered and takes data over the RF link created when energy enters the coil. That is, you know, the data and power transfer. RFID and NFC, NFC is kind of a, it's a near field communication. So, it's a larger scale thing than RFID, which is a very specific thing just for identification. So I'll just kind of refer to NFC, but a lot of people use the two terms kind of back and forth. So these tags, they have memory built in and you can read, write, or authenticate through them. So oftentimes they're used as, you know, public transport identification or you have RFID and NFC in your credit card. They're very inexpensive and they're great if you want to just transmit a small amount of data without needing a battery. However, they're not smart. You can't run code or like have the data inside the tag change on the fly. Like whatever you write to it is what you read from it next time. It's just, it's just a little piece of memory that is powered and has data over RFID. So this, which is, this is the breakout we have. This chip is interesting because it has that same coil antenna you see at the top, the coil antenna that's built into the circuit board. You could of course use an external antenna, but it's convenient to have it printed onto the PCB. It's inexpensive. Oh, it's a little bit large. And over I squared C, you can communicate to it. So you can read or write data over I squared C or through RFID. And so that gives it a kind of a dynamic ability to act as a bridge between NFC communication and microcontrollers that don't have NFC. It's quite rare for a microcontroller to have NFC built into it. But this chip, which is very inexpensive lets you bridge that data and do it, it's useful for a couple different things. So because we already have this breakout in the store, here's an example. When this phone goes over the tag, it's been pre-programmed with a URL. You could see that it's the product URL. And we program that in the factory, but what's interesting is of course, if you had a microcontroller attached to it, you could change what tag, what the data is read from the tag on the fly based on whatever data you'd like. So you can use it as a way of advertising data sort of the way Bluetooth does, but without any batteries. So inside, it itself is not a program on microcontroller. It is only I squared C or RFID, but it's got a couple of cool things going for it. One is it uses ISO 1593, which is not what most people think of as classic My Fair or My Fair Desire or My Fair Light or whatever. It is a different protocol. So it doesn't necessarily work with our PN532 breakouts, but it does have support from like pretty much every modern phone, iOS and Android phones. If they have NFC support, they'll support this chip. Inside is both a dynamic RAM buffer and an EEPROM buffer. The dynamic buffer is just faster to write. The EEPROM buffer, as I expect, you write it and it is maintained over 100,000 cycles or more. It also has this cool energy harvesting capability, which I think is neat. I'll show you a little demo of that in a bit, not demo from me from ST. So one thing that is nice about this ISO format is compared to most, it can actually go much farther. I will say that the distance is dependent a lot about whether how good the antenna is. So at the bottom where you see it's like a couple of feet up to a meter, that's for a, not a phone, it's for my dynamic reader with a good antenna. Speaking of which, one thing that I thought was really cool is ST has an e-design website where you can dynamically design the antenna you need based on, in the data sheet, it tells you what the, you know, based on the frequency and the built-in capacitance, you can tune what inductance you want and then you can use this tool. You can say how physically large you want the antenna to be and it'll tell you the trace width and the number of turns and the inductance. So it kind of does, like this method is a total pain to do by hand. So I used this tool when I designed the antenna for the NFC breakout. It does have energy harvesting built in. This is also kind of neat because a lot of people like the idea of energy harvesting. It has some use cases where not only would the ST25DV be powered over the energy harvesting from the NFC electromagnetic waves, but also you could have an external circuit connected and so there's even an LDO built-in CC that won't go above 2.7 volts. But you can get up to, I think 2.7 volts, yeah. You can get up to 1.1 milliamps to seven milliamps based on the field strength and the voltage that you want out of it and you're willing to drive from it. You know, once you're getting into four milliamps you can drive, a low-power microcontroller can run off of it for a short amount of time. So, you know, if you want to do some data transfer from microcontroller or from a sensor, using NFC could be preferable to something like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi where you need a battery. I'm using a coin cell here because this is a common low-power battery source, but, you know, there's a big gulf between having no battery or having a totally energy harvesting solution and having a battery. Once you have a battery, suddenly you have to deal with replacing the battery, having it be replaceable so you have to reopen the case and move it. You have to make sure the battery doesn't get damaged or there's like chemical corrosion. If it's in there too long, if it's rechargeable batteries to recharge it, you know, batteries, it's like, it's not just the cost of the battery. There's a lot of support circuitry and design required for it. So, you know, you can get away with not having a battery. I think that can be interesting. Here's a design for a E-ink tag that is completely, data is transmitted and reprogrammed over NFC. Now you're gonna have to hold that NFC tag fairly close so it can go through the update cycle, which takes 20 seconds, but you don't have a battery. Maybe you prefer that, maybe from a meter away. This is useful enough. There is a library for the ST-25DV. This is the I squared C side, of course. From the NFC side, you know, you just use it according to any API you've got for iOS or Android. It acts as a normal tag. The mobile device does not know the difference between it and any other ISO, whatever, 15, 9, 63 tag. There's also the K and the KC version. I'll say, I looked for a little bit and I believe the big difference is, there's a couple of little details, but you can change the I squared C address of the KC family. Otherwise, it seems like they're pin-to-pin compatible and functionally very, very similar. So you can pretty much use either. I've used the K because the KC was an app. I'm gonna check the details of this more. And best of all, they're in stock. That's right, they'll hold on, did you key? When the IMPI is in stock. So pick it up. You can use our open source design if you want to get started, those sort of valve boards from ST, but I think it's an interesting way. You want to transmit data to and from a mobile device, not have to deal with deployment, not have to deal with Bluetooth or pairing or batteries. This could really be a good solution, you know, there's a couple of presentations on the ST website with demonstrations of what they think it could be good for, so. All right, and we have a video. Do you want to play it? Yeah, let's play the video. This is from ST showing their sensor tag, which is another product that uses this chip. And a mic controller to data log and then transmit that data log data to a mobile device. Okay, it's two minutes. See you on the other side. Hi, I'm Jim Barlow with ST's NFC RFID Marketing. We're here at Sensors Expo in San Jose and we're introducing our new low power NFC sensor tag reference design. It highlights many of our low power sensors for your design such as the low power accelerometer, barometer pressure sensor, humidity and temperature sensor, and our low power Cortex M0. What the sensor tag allows you to do is completely, this entire board can be read through an NFC field from your phone, for instance, and can be completely powered through the energy harvesting capability of the NFC IC on here, the ST25DV NFC Dynamic Tag. You can completely power up this microprocessor and the sensors and read that data. But we've designed this reference design to allow you to enable in your designs the ability to data log. So you can design, you can test. Like for instance, you could test if something stays cold during shipments, if it encounters vibrations or maybe heat during the shipment. And then when you come in range of a near field communications, you can take that data log information out and make intelligent decisions. Like for instance, if you had a case of wine shipped to you at your home and you're wondering why it tastes bad, you can detect that it was stored at too high of a temperature. So this new reference design is now available on ST.com and we look forward to you designing and being very successful with your projects. Thank you. All right, and that is a thing, Sensor Expo. This is one, by the way, that's one of the places. Oh, this is, yeah. This is one of the places we want to go to. Sensor Expo. We went to a couple of shows that I can't wait until we can do it again when we got our pick and places. We went to, there's giant commercial shows that have all the stuff and Sensor Expo is one of them for that. So that is that this week's IonMPI. IonMPI. Okay, before we get over to new products, Matrix Driver's Code, 2% off in age for store, probably till 1.59 p.m. tonight. Mix driver, mix driver, mix driver. All right, Lady Aida, it's time. No, no, no, no, no. You ready? All right, we have some fun stuff this week. Yes. All right. Okay. First up. Got some more keyboard cases. We have the 60% keyboard shells, but let's say you like arrow keys, you want a bigger shell. You know, like these are called the K68s or JKDK68s. I don't have CAD files for them. I'm gonna try to get them, but you could just measure the mounting holes and use these for designing a PCB foot keyboard. I always like to have the enclosure first before I design stuff. So that's why we're carrying a lot of keyboard shells before we make any keyboard PCBs. I just think it's better to get all the cases nailed down because that's something that's very hard to do after the fact. It's easier to adapt a PCB for a case than the other way around. Okay, next up. This is fun. This is like the best alarm clock for an engineer. Yeah, you sent this to me. I think this was on the social media. I just thought this was hilarious. So it's a, and it's actually, it's one of those things that's like, ha ha, so funny, but then you use it and you're like, actually this is kind of good. It's a multimeter that's also a Bluetooth speaker and also an alarm clock and also has built-in batteries that can be recharged, so it's portable. And it's a good bench top multimeter. Like it's actually kind of nice. I think, I wouldn't replace my handheld multimeter, but I think if you're gonna do, if you're going to have something that's a bench top speaker slash alarm, you might as well toss a multimeter in and it works great, it comes with probes and it's not too expensive. It kind of does everything you want and I like the nice big display. So yeah, it does it all. It's a dessert topping and a floor wax and a multimeter and an alarm and a Bluetooth speaker and does continuity and current and frequency and all that good stuff. Great for dorm rooms. Yeah, I think actually this would be really useful for, to be honest, what would be really useful for is a maker space or workshop because it's portable. I do like that you don't have to have it plugged in. You can charge over USB, but then you can pick it up and move it anywhere and that I think does make it useful. So straight up, if you're gonna get an alarm clock for the nightstand, get this because you know your multimeter's gonna break one day and you're gonna be like, oh no, it's late at night. What am I gonna do, what am I gonna do? Yeah. Just grab your alarm clock. All right, next up. All right, next up we've got two sets of YC-8s. These are aeronautical style quick connects, you know, sometimes called limo connectors, which we covered. Those are usually quite expensive in their military specification and they're actually used in aeronautics. This is aeronautics style. I would not use this in an actual aeronautics project. They're not specified for that. Don't use this in your F14. However, if you are making projects that want that kind of connector, a quick release connector that's very reliable and durable, these are really good quality connectors. Usually this stuff is out of the financial range for most projects, which is why you don't see them as usually the connectors are $50 a piece. These are like under, you know, they're $7 or $8 a piece. So they're a much more affordable version. I've seen these used a lot in keyboard, DIY quick connect USB cables, which you can use them for and maybe we'll do a project on that, but they're good for other uses as well. You know, when we were doing wearables, we used these for quick connects to connect different elements of the wearable system because you want to be able to quickly remove them, but you want them to stay durable. These are extremely durable if you use the right diameter cable, which is the thing about them. You really need to use the exact right diameter cable because the inside of the connectors has like a little metal spring piece. It's here if you go here. You see it in the middle there, it's sort of like a crown shaped piece. So that grips on to the outer cover of your cable and it really needs to be like within a millimeter. So, you know, there's some people who are like, well you can use thinner cable and then put heat shrink on it. I just, whatever you do, you really do, you know, this is the thing that's hardest to use about it. The soldering isn't too tough. The assembly isn't too tough, but having the right diameter cable is what makes it challenging. So I'd say just for that, that's the one thing to watch out for. Otherwise the strain relief won't work. You can use a thinner cable and then maybe stuff some hot glue in there. That's an alternative. I think it'll work just fine. But if you want to use it the way it was meant to, there is this press fit part that needs to be kind of perfectly sized. Next up. Next up, we have a all-in-one, sort of like Tablity HMI kit from Expressif. I do like the ESP32 S2 and I do like that they packed this full of hardware. I will say it doesn't have circuit python support. I don't even think it has Arduino support. You're supposed to use this Expressif IDF and even then, it's probably not gonna have full support for a little bit. They do take some time to get support out. When you plug it in, it doesn't do anything. So it doesn't come with a demo even, but it does have a beautiful four inch capacitive touch screen with a 16 bit parallel port connection. There's all these at the bottom, looks like JSTSH connectors for like Semicut, but also SPI and UR. It's got the ESP32 S2 Wirover. So it's got Wi-Fi and native USB. It's got another USB port for the debug console and programming, so it's kind of good for that. Got capacitive touch, a couple sensors. I think there's an infrared thing. There's battery management. There's this, particularly one, they don't ship it with a battery, but you can grab a iPhone 5 battery off the shelf and apparently just plugs in. They, to make shipping easy, it doesn't ship with a battery. Micro SD card slot. So it's one of those things where I got this, not because we support it, but because I think this is a good hardware setup that I would like to support one day in CircuitPython because it kind of covers everything. So maybe we'll go to the overhead real fast and I'll just point out because there's some depth here. So it comes with this like 3D printed or I don't know, injection molded. I don't know exactly case, but this is kind of a divot here. This is where that iPhone 5 battery would go. All the different pieces. This case has slots here for all the connectors. Two USB-C's. There's a speaker that's built into this kind of piece here. This is nice gold copper. You know, all the pin connections are etched into copper. You can go here to download the software, but it's kind of got a little bit of everything which I thought was kind of neat. And particularly having something that has the capacitive touch screen, clearly it's like from a phone or something that is being recycled. And a nice beveled case with a light sensor and humidity sensor and SD card and everything. So a good collection of everything you want and it features our favorite new chip, the ESP32 S2. All right, and start of the show tonight. Besides you, Lydia, to our community, our customers, our team is... The IS31FL3741, RGB matrix driver. We've been working on this breakout for a bit and I was a little scared of putting this together because there's so many RGB LEDs, 117 of them. In fact, it's a nine by 13 grid of RGB LEDs matrix through I squared C using this cool chip, the IS31FL3741, as mentioned. It can drive like 351 LEDs or 117 RGB LEDs. It's designed so you can tell them side by side and of course each LED, it's not neopixels or dot stars or just analog LEDs that are PWM that eight bit per channel. So you get 24 bit color, basically. And I squared C makes it really easy to use. You can use it with Python or circuit Python or Arduino. If you want a lot of LEDs, we recommend going up to our RGB Hub 75 matrices. Those, of course, you'll get 32 by 64, 16 by 32, like tons and tons of LEDs, but you do need a lot of pins. Whereas what's nice about this is it's all over I squared C. So it's really easy and it's low power and it looks really good. And honestly, I'd show this on the overhead, but this kind of looks better although you can see it. But nice and bright. This looks good too. I'll say this, I wish that anyone who does electronics would show videos of things working or even just do like a quick phone video because you never get to see this stuff actually working. Yeah, there's actually, I'm surprised that the color came through. It looked great, yeah. But yeah, it's very easy to use and we designed it so you could tile them side by side. An earlier version of the prototype didn't have this bottom edge, but we thought people would rather have mounting holes because again, if you want a lot of LEDs, you should just get our Hub 75 matrices. Honestly, they're gonna do a way better job than this. So, this is cute, we're gonna make more of these. We're gonna go through a lot of LEDs. I actually order like a couple of hundred thousands of LEDs because it adds up fast. We don't have anything else that has this many RGB LEDs in them. So you know what I normally would think of as a lot, like a reel of 6,000. Nope, that was gone in about like two minutes. Thankfully our pick and place has a lot of heads. Yeah, 10 years ago, I said it'll take a little while but we'll get there. We'll eventually be able to make a jacket that plays Blade Runner, the movie. So we're getting there. It is on that long list of things. We can have Pixel. Like scripting languages for microcontrollers, also wearable TVs. Okay. Yeah, anyways, more on that later. And that's new products. Yay, little colorful. Okay, well, don't forget, Codes makes a driver. And we're gonna do questions, so please post them over on discord, aderford.it, slash discord. We're gonna do some top secret while you're loading up some questions over there. Yeah, and the vault. Open the vault. Yeah. Seek the vault. Okay, what do we have? That's right. So first up, well, I mean, it's your show. What is this? Okay, so I put together, I'll show this on Descalade 8. It's an MCP 23017. This is a 16 channel I expanded for iSquad C. You know, it comes in DIP, so you'd think like, what's really the point of having a breakout? But a lot of people were like, no, I really want to have something that's Stemma, plug and play. We get a couple of requests for this more than I was expecting. And so by the third or fourth request, I was like, okay, maybe I'll whip together something to make it even easier to use this very popular chip that we have drivers for already. All right, so this is, when I filmed this with Top Secret, but now we have the product. So you'll just get a view. This is like a little time traveling. Yeah. Behind the scenes. Yeah. Okay, lady, what is this? Hey, we're putting it together. Some new boards. This is the IS31FL3741. It's a PWM LED RGB driver that can do a lot of LEDs. This is cool because it's much cheaper than individual dot stars or near pixels. So this is the prototype which I hand assembled and it's a little wobbly. And this is the nice ones. It just came off the pick and place or a little toasty even. So let's try out our test code, plug into our Metro mini and moment. There you go. You can see a nice demo showing text and color gradients. We're also testing two RGB LEDs. These LEDs are only a penny a piece, but there's a slight variation to one's a little brighter than the other. We're getting this ready to put in the shop. It's a cute little RGB LED matrix that's all powered and controlled over I squared C. Stemic UT. And then I have this demo. This is, if you saw the show and tell them what Trevor was working on, this is basically that video. And this is our new app. It's in beta. It's in test flight. And it's called Pi Leap. And the idea is we'll make putting code on a Bluetooth device as easy as we've had. Putting code on a circuit Python device where it just shows up as USB drive drag and drop. But this is even easier where all you do is turn on your Bluetooth device, load this app, you pair it. And then what we have is a code that's on our learning system. And you just choose what you want to do right now. We're doing this in rainbow's demo. It takes the code from the learning system, downloads it to the phone. Do you have the latest code? And then it sends it right over to the device. And so that's how quick it is to get code on without a computer. And that's this week's top secret. Okay, get back in that vault. All right, we're doing questions right away. It's question time. Because I have some. Put your questions in the chat. Preferably the Discord chat. Yeah, we're just doing Discord questions. Discord questions. All right. Okay, so I'm gonna go here starting at 857, or sorry, no, the 857 mark. Does Adabot have any Simlings? Well, Adabot's a robot, so I would say by the current definition now. Yeah, all right. Next up. Does it have friends? Yeah, it can have robot friends, but next up. Any chance of Python, circuit, Python support coming to the Adafruit st25dk16k, I screwed the RFID eProm breakout. I'm trying to integrate it into RPI-4 project so the current Arduino library won't work for me. That's a good thing to ask ST to do. I know other companies trying to write Python code. The library is complicated enough that I wouldn't attempt a port, but I think ST would if you asked them to. So go check with them. They're actually very responsive when people ask them for example, code in Python. And I wanna push them to do that. Okay, the MP, well, also if they hear that, they'll be like, oh wow, all these lots of folks are working on it. Yeah, they don't even know that people want it. You gotta tell them that you want it. The MCP 23017 preview of the breakout for the inputs, will you be able to connect two wires out of a button directly to the board? Yeah. And then two, with the library written, can you read an entire bank at a time? I think we do have bank support. Okay. Y'all ever consider an LED matrix or flex, semi-flex backing so you can get wrapped around curved objects? We do have a bunch of LED matrices that are flexible, both the Hub 75 and the, like NeoPixel, I'll say they're still delicate. None of these are designed to be flexed multiple times, but around a fairly large round object, yes, they are flexible. Okay. Oh, I meant siblings are made by the same creator and similar fashion, yeah. Well, the same puppeteer made the puppets. Myself, Bruce, and then Annie made these. So I would say like they're all in the same family. Next up, thank you, Skr for grabbing this one, because this was one that was way back. Does it seem like memory chips are starting to come back faster than others? I recently had a long lead for SBI flash that just got fulfilled yesterday. Yeah, I think I am, you know, I did get a bunch of shipments of stuff that we ordered back in January. It's hard to tell really what's going on. I can't tell if companies are just being pessimistic or they don't want to promise lead times that they can't fulfill or what's going on. But I think, look, if you need something, put an order in. Right, this is from Mark. This isn't a question, but it's very nice. I'm constantly impressed by the high quality of stuff coming out of VEDA for including this video series, so we had more time to hang out. Thank you, Mark, we try. But one thing- Well, we're here every week. One thing I'll say, over the last decade plus-ish, there was a lot of people that were always like, you should have a different camera, you should do this, you should do that, you don't have a pick-and-place machine, you shouldn't do surface mount stuff. Like, all these things that people kept saying that we shouldn't do, and we didn't listen to them, we just went ahead and we did the best we could with everything we have. Now we have high quality cameras, we have industrial pick-and-places, and we wouldn't have gotten here if we listened to those people. And where are they now? Who knows? Probably dead, because they were old mean guys. But that being said, it's important because I think a lot of folks get worried about like, oh, I don't have the best website and I'm starting a store, or like, oh, I don't wanna do videos because I have a good camera. There's people I know that work at places that I'm just like, why aren't you doing videos? And they're like, oh yeah, my manager says like, I need your good camera and it won't look good. It's like, he's being mean, he doesn't know he's talking about, just publish, publish, publish. And I think that's something that if what we're doing now looks good, it's because we got here one step at a time and it wasn't great when we first started. It was as good as we could do, but it wasn't, it doesn't arrive like this. So anyways, thank you, Mark. Next step. Step by step. Yeah, do you think the power product integrated circuits will take the longest to recover? I have no idea. Okay. Thoughts on a board like ESP8266 or ESP32 with a built-in FCP expander, all in one? No, I don't know. I think expander's are something that really, they're meant for the purposes they're meant. They're not universal. All right. Next step. How do y'all try to balance having a full-time job and other responsibilities by trying to create content and not give up sleep? Well, I mean, we try, I mean like, we're very focused I mean, you have to get sleep to do what you do. Yeah. And so like, we try not to give that up, but there's other things like we don't... Only you can make up this decision. I can't tell you how to run your life. No, they were saying like, how do you do all these things? I know, but when people ask that, they're asking, how do I do it? Yeah. They're asking me how to do it. They don't care how I do it. They're asking how they can do it. Yeah, I think we sacrifice a lot of like normal people stuff, but we like doing this. And I actually think that that's why some folks don't quite understand data for it. Like we actually like doing this and we're having fun with it. And I understand that sometimes when people see people having fun, their only reaction is to be jerks, but we really like doing this. And so I think that's one of the things that helped. Next up, could the ST25DVs in conjunction with the key charger to replace a data cable? It's not key compatible. It's NFC, totally different protocol. Okay. Oh, there was an earlier question. When do we ship packages? So we ship. Monday through Friday, right? Monday through Friday. They don't have to do weekends right now. We do sometimes. Depends. Right now we are, because we're trying to keep up with the demand. So usually orders are being shipped as early as 6.30 or seven and as late as like five or six. And then on weekends, it just really depends when it was just me doing shipping when we were different version of Adafruit. I would do shipping. So 5 a.m. was to pick up postal bins outside. And then I would get back, make sure I had the postal bins. I would put out the packages and I would start doing some shipping from eight to 10 hanging out with you. And then I would ship from, I do customer support stuff and then from like noon to five or six. And then we would go like go for a walk or something. That was my shipping schedule. And then at night I would do it and that's how we started doing Ask an Engineer. Cause that was someone's like, we had a webcam and they're like, if I order something, we ship it. And I'm like, yeah. And here's our show. All right. And then last ones. Yeah. Any chance of stocking expressive ESP 32A1S audio board? It's neat. A lot of these boards are really, they're very IDF specific. And I think I'm not going to, I'm not going to carry every single ESP dev board. There's a lot. Okay. Is there an alternative to a key charger that has data transfer? I don't think so. I think he's, I think really it's only power. I don't know that they're ever going to add data. It's very high power inductive charging standard. All right. And here's a nice comment from Skur. I just want to thank Adafruit for keeping things open source. It really helped me with my first TFT design last weekend. Yeah. That's another thing. We don't get this question anymore and we don't get this like statements like, if you do open source, everyone's just going to clone you. Yeah. It's like, no, like who cares what we were working on 10 years ago. We've released it, we've opened sources and we've continued to move forward. And everyone got to learn along the way. Yeah. Turns out that's a good strategy. I just buy all the chips before I make a design because I have to have the parts and even if you clone it, you can't make it. That's what you do? Ha, ha, ha. You buy all the chips on the planet? Yeah, that's what you do. But it's definitely a thing. It's tougher to clone now if you can't get the parts. Ooh. All right. It's a secondary effect. Ooh. Catch us if you can. Yeah. But anyways, we'll always do open source. Yeah. You know what's funny is, folks, there's so much video over the last decade of us doing this show because I was thinking about it. The people were talking about the shows today. And we can't really go back on it. Yeah. Everyone else kind of does, but we don't and we can't because someone would do a supercut of me saying we're open source. And I wouldn't want to watch that. Yeah. So for the most part, we're just going to always do open source. I see no reason not to. It has nothing to do with how the business is run. Yeah. It's totally independent. Yeah, okay. I think that is it. That's all the questions for tonight. Okay. Well, at least those are the ones that are in here. Okay. That is it for tonight. It's amazing. Don't forget, Matrix Driver is a code. We'll see everybody next week, special thanks to Jesse May behind the scenes, all of the folks running the chats and more, special thanks to some of the Discord mods. Oh, I guess there was one. Sorry, there was one more. I'm building a custom key with the new key ortho snap apart. And we'll have a couple of different sections. Would there be a performance difference between say having letter keys and numpad keys on a separate matrix versus all being on one matrix? Also, I snapped my orthos up by forgetting that the zig-zags in my layout have to do with some rows going in the same direction. Can I just reverse those rows in neopixel part of the matrix? There is no performance difference. Just do whichever. It's not gonna, that's not gonna be what causes the poor for the issues. And yes, you can flip and rotate them any way you like, as long as all the rows are connected together and the columns are connected together. Okay. That is really for sure the show for the night. Bye everybody. We'll do the code one more dimension driver. We'll see everybody next week. Thank you so much. Here is your moment of Xenor. Bye everybody. Bye bye.