 from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody, it's me Lady Aida and I only have eyes for you. It's me, it's Lady Aida, the engineer, the new Mr. Lady Aida on camera control and baby Aida in the background. We've got a science show for you tonight, all sorts of new products and videos and it's not out yet, coming soon and updates for Circuit Python and more and more and more. So let's pick it, let's tell them the codes and let's get right onto it. On tonight's show, the code is ESPFriends. This is not for psychic powers, it's actually for the ESP32 S3. I'm gonna just break with the format a little bit. We have just a few in the store right now. This is our new product of the week. There'll be more tomorrow. There'll be more tomorrow. Will the code be there? Maybe, maybe not. But if you wanted to, right now, the second you put in ESPFriends, get one of those, you also get free stuff, we'll talk about that. That's the code for tonight, all the way up to 11.59 p.m. You would be supporting the only woman on open source hardware company on Planet Earth that I know of that has 600 open source hardware certifications for our designs. I'll talk about that soon. Your orders fuel us. We don't do venture capital or loans or any of that stuff. It's just all the orders that you place. So thanks for that. So we just did show and tell. Do a little bit of recap of it's 10 p.m. to know where engineers are. Just go to ADA. We do that on Sundays, including the green search. Time travel, we're gonna look around in the world of makers, hackers, artists, engineers, probably a little bit of a recap of stuff that we posted this week. We have a fund-manufacturing in your city video, a little bit of a surface action with our auto stenciler in this way. Some 3D printing videos. We're gonna do IMPI, brought to you by Digikey this week is Renaissance. We got some top secret. We got new products. We're gonna answer your questions. We do that on Discord because we're streaming on all sorts of places. Pay for dot it slash discord. Join us. All like 38,000 of us. All of that and more on, you guessed it. Asking engineer. Yay. So, PSP Friends is a code. You get free stuff later. What have you got? Yes, we have freebies. Again, we've mixed it up. Now, $99 or more, you get this beautiful, gold-plated coaster with eight of feet logo. One of the few things that are logo on it. That's right. I designed it in a full five minutes. Anything that had, no, I drew it in an illustrator. We also have the KB2040 free when you order $149 or more. We have UPS grab shipping. It's back. It rates. And since United States with better rates than ever, $200 or more and $299 or more, we still have Circuit Playground Express in stock, our all-in-one development board with LEDs, buttons, sensors and more. Great way to learn programming, great way to learn electronics. You can use it with Arduino, code.org, CS Discoveries, Circuit Python, MicroPython. Rust, you name it, it's supported. Check it out. Yeah, and a little bit of a note. Sometimes, I've had a week, it's only like Wednesday. But sometimes people get hung up on which programming language and they yell at each other and they're crummy. So, you know, it's kind of cool hardware that you can put anything you want on it. That's right. So... Hey, C++, yes. And when I say like hardware, I don't just mean computers. Computer, sometimes it's hard. You can't just throw any Linux you want on that new MacBook Pro M2. You can't just do anything else there. But on microcontroller is at least the ones that we're most interested in and the ones that we like to design for, you can put all sorts of different things on it. So if you like Rust, great. If you like C++, great. If you like Python, great. It's not... Assembler, go for it. It's not an or, it's an and. You can't do all these things. You know, we have which live shows. So we just show and tell. On show and tell this week, Liz stopped by and showed off the talking eight o'clock Superbowl project. If you want to make a talking clock with a bunch of files that you could call upon. The time is 5.17. We show how to do that before we was in our dream and I was circuit by thumb. And then Liz talked about the Docker project that was recently did. You guys? Yeah, we'll get to that later on in the show. It makes it really easy for you to do Linux-y stuff without kind of heading. Aaron showed the Figma project, taking a Teddy Ruxpin and turning it into a Figma, the dragon that has grandma's voice, grandpa's voice, aunt's voice. Yeah, it's really neat. Kind of a big epic project for the end result is like your kid have fun with this little amatronic, but it was really tough. And the guy stopped by with this really neat effects pedal. Maybe you can explain what this is because it's like USB host. It's a little bit of like everything. It's an HID remapper, but it can do like effects, like audio effects, but for HID. So it can loop, but it loops like HID commands. It's like your mouse or your keyboard, whatever you're typing. It'll loop it repeatedly. You can add noise or reverb or you can smooth things out. So it's kind of like a HID keyboard mouse filter. But it looks like a guitar pedal. Okay. And then we kind of randomly do this. It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your engineers are? And the idea behind this is usually the engineers who have a day job for fun, they're doing something at 10 o'clock at night. And I've noticed whatever engineers are doing at 10 o'clock at night, it's usually the next big thing. So I work related sometimes, but sometimes it is. And then in your case, you're usually putting Linux on something at this time at 10 p.m. You showed how to... Just TFT eyes. So I did a little bit of a, give them a five, six minute video. Talking about these large scale TFTs, how you can drive them and how I'm using a USB 32 S3 room eval board to try out. It comes with a square display, but I have these round displays. And so you get a display, you have to get the init code, you have to program in the init code. Here's how you wire it. Here's when you need it and when you don't. And then how I converted a bitmap from a BMP to a header file and then import it and draw it directly from the firmware buffer onto the display. And that's how I did the test. Cause like we had it like doing like some lines, but you're like, let's do something more fun. Also, you can tell the quality a little better when you have an image cause you're like, okay, I'm looking at this drawing. So, you know, it's a little bit longer. And of course we'll have more of a tutorial, but just kind of a peek at me. You know, I have this pile of funky displays we showed last week and each one of them is a different, it's all different, like just cause they look similar, even the round ones, you know, because they're both round or they're both square, doesn't mean that the way you bring up the displays is the same. So, getting a bunch of display stuff now that displays are reasonable price again. So, 2.1 inch and four inch round displays so far have been successfully implemented. We'll do the square and bar displays next. And the engineers that are kind of watching this, they're like, oh, like we just got this nice comment. I was going to put in a mail bag which started that time. And they're like, hey, this is really neat because the engineers who work with me, they like seeing the stuff on how you're bringing up these things and then someone who was like- There's no documentation on how to use these displays. You're completely like- You are. On your own. Yeah. And one of the things that's hard for folks, they buy these round displays on like Amazon or Taobao or WaveShare or Aliexpress and they don't work and they kind of get soured on electronics in general and it doesn't have to be that way. So we think we're going to have a pretty compelling offering with all the different shapes and sizes. Someone had asked, is there a triangle display? No, not that we're aware of them. Hexagon, we haven't seen any yet. Yeah. You know, these round displays are very new. They didn't exist. I mean, they existed, but they were very expensive and now they're much more available and on the market. So I think we're going to see more cool display shapes. I think like, you know, now it used to be displays were only from like cell phones, mobile phones, but now people are making all sorts of wearable and portable and home devices that need cool shapes. I think hexagonal or octagonal would be like suit and need. Hopefully that's next. All right. On Sunday, we do from DiscoLadiated, it's in two parts. We did a recap on CircuitPythonLand and then you were talking about some screens that you were testing and bringing up. Yeah, I had other screens, other screens. So I did show off gears, you know, those round displays. I don't think, yeah, I did not get them working yet at this DiscoLadiated. I only got like the, you know, the demo that came with the eval board. So you had purchased the eval board the previous day and so I got that booted and then over the weekend, sorry, over the week is when I got the round displays going. So instead I showed off, I finally finished the rev H of the 2.8 inch TFT shield. It's been revised multiple times. It's now like ready to go. So I've ordered the PCBs for their vision. We'll get that back in the store. It's one of the things that didn't make through the chip shortage. And then I also found when we were clearing out Adafruit, we found like three bins of these really nice capacitive touch 3.5 inch displays. And it's like a little, I'm a little embarrassed. It's like, I now remember that I had ordered, I got them working, I ordered them. And then something went wrong with like finishing the project. And so I was like, you know what, let's finish it. Cause then, you know, it's like $10,000 with the TFTs, it's a little money. And I'd rather get them in the store than keep holding on to them. So you see, I got the multi-touch working with the... Yeah, it's neat because it can do three. Yeah, I had four fingers and you can see like, I swipe and it's like red, yellow, green, blue. Then we do, we're in the world is a part I need, otherwise known as the Great Search Digikey. Use your powers of engineering to help people find things on digikey.com. Thanks, Digikey. What did you try to find this week? Okay, so this week somebody sent us a toot or a zoot, whatever they're called. And said, hey, somebody found this really cool dip clip, chip, dip, chip, clip to let you probe onto a, I think it's a 14 or 16 pin dip chip. And they're like, hey, you know, also SOICC chips for always like, I want to clip onto them without disordering them and dump firmware or reprogram the firmware out the memory. So how can I get these clips? And so I showed both SOIC and dip style including what to watch out for if you're using wide SOICs for flash and most flash chips are wide and the cheapest clip is not the one that supports it. You have to go to the other one. So check it out if you ever want to clip onto stuff and just probe directly. I have a bunch of these in my debugging that I use them all the time to trace out whether the data I'm sending back and forth matches what I think I'm sending back and forth. And if you want, tag us on the socials if you want to either look for a part substitution or it's like, Hey, I'm thinking of doing this. Where would I find it? Yeah, I think it's general like capacitor because I guess some people emailed also were like, Hey, I'm fixing up this old device and I need to find a capacitor. How do I read the markings and find a matching cap? And it's not true. It's not obvious how you do it. So we'll probably cover that in a week or two. Yeah. Sometimes folks are just like, how do I use all the options on like the digi-key search to find the same one before? So just tag us, emailing to, it's fine. We get to all of them. JP's a little bit under the weather so there was not a product pick and there might not be a workshop. On Fridays, we have deep dive with Tim. Sometimes Scott stops by. A lot of people on vacation are a little sick this week. We're gonna call 5-2-0. We're gonna call 5-2-1. We're gonna call 5-2-1. Time travel. I mentioned this in some previous shows. We're doing this like PCB of the day thing because we're on a tear. We're gonna have a post about 420 new redesigns and then everyone makes one of them 420. So we're gonna have like maybe funny graph or something but we're putting up like a preview of the stuff that's going on each day. This was last week's like top secret but it's also was PCB of the day. CSP, 32S3, RGB. That's like X2 for the... Yeah, for all these different screens. So that was, so the way a lot of these just to give everyone an idea we're trying to show all of our work all the time. That's an open source hardware company is we might have a, what is the engineer doing at 10 p.m? We might have a desk of lady A. We might have a like, hey lady, what's that? We might have a top secret and then you'll start to see, well then here's the PCB and then after the PCB comes in, here's us with the tester and after that, here's us doing the manufacturing of it with some of our manufacturing videos and then here's some amazing beautiful photos and demos of how it works and then here's the code on GitHub, here's the files published and then here's the open source hardware certification and then here's a discount code to buy it. So that's kind of like, we're showing all these different pieces. So that's why our PCB of the day idea came around this like, oh, let's show you the more. I found on hardware time, like, yeah. We do a newsletter every single week. I got two things I want to talk to you about. Yes. First up, we have the recap from Circuit Python day. I know, it was a big success. Yeah, and I think one of the things that's really hard to do is an event in general and you probably always need to do like a virtual hybrid now and have the recordings in a place. In-person's a little bit harder now, especially like whatever natural disaster, weather thing, sickness, something's going on always. So I think we figured out a way to keep Circuit Python day going while we figure out like, what type of in-person thing would we do? Would we bolt onto an event? So check out all of the videos that we have from our shows that we did, 3D Hangouts, Keeps and Boops, Game Jam, excuse me, the Biportals message project, Circuit Python day chat. And you can also watch some of the stuff with Scott, some of the really deep innards of Circuit Python. We do have a 8.23 release, that's a dot update. So if you're really interested in things, there's RGB matrix timing on the SAMX5 access and these. Yeah, we've been doing a lot of hacking and then the matrices, some of the ones that we have in stock now are a little bit that pickier about timing. So we just got that going. Lots of projects. One that I wanted to just mention is, so I saw that movie Interstellar, I liked the graphics with the, especially the black hole. I was like, oh, you know, they're pretty good. I think it was around that time when we were getting the images of a black hole the first time it was like, it was neat to kind of see that. But the robot, the Tars robot, I thought that was like a really cool idea, this robot companion that it was AI and it's there to help you and stuff. And when I saw, maybe it was open-sauce, someone had tagged us because they made a, they made a bot and they used Smethaford stuff. And that was really neat. So that's in the newsletter. I think this is a cute robot because it's like, it was a very different design. It's this walking robot that has these blocks. It wasn't like a humanoid. It was meant to, clearly it's a robot. It's not just something that looks like a human. Like I am human, I'm data. Data's fine, I'm data. But for this little segment, I wanted to ask you about merging. The urge to merge. The urge to merge. What's going on when we do a merge and more? Well, one of the big, one of the big products that we're doing right now is prepping for circuit Python nine, right? Like we're already at like eight, two, three. We've been supporting Expressif very well lately. So time to think about nine. And one of the things that we like to do is when we do a major release, that's a good time for us to do an upstream merge from MicroPython because we love MicroPython, but they kinda like to make API changes, especially MPY file changes. And they've got good reason to do it. They're doing this cool like load from file system stuff. But we don't like to have breaking changes unless it's a major version. And so we kind of waited until, you know, we're kind of settled with eight. We're ready to do nine. Nine is gonna be USB host as well as maybe some Bluetooth stuff, we'll see. And- Is that the theme you think for nine USB host? I think USB host is gonna be the theme. Yeah, because like we're basically getting- Gotta work on a new poster. Yeah, get a new poster. You'll be like a little, like a hostess. Yeah, it could be like- Don't put the USB logo in there because I think you have to license to- You're not gonna know. And like who knows what is the right logo anymore because there's like a billion like USB variants. And you can be like the blink of tail with the- It could be blink of serving up, serving up- Max keyboard, mini. So we're getting that going. But we're also doing this upstream merge from 119 and 120, just have an MPY change. We're also had just a lot of changes, which is good. I mean, we are the biggest or one of the biggest sponsors of MicroPython. Yeah. We didn't trash money. I guess we should mention it because you know, you don't get credit and there's people that try to dunk on you. So we give money to, we specifically sponsor MicroPython and we increase that every single year. I think we're the largest one but someone can correct me if I'm wrong. We also help fundraise every year on the GitHub sponsors. So you can go to the MicroPython GitHub repo and you can see the sponsors. We also did that there because we wanted to show like, hey, like we can do it because organizations could do it. But then they're getting closer to reaching their goals and then they're able to hire more people, do more things. All these things work together. So MicroPython is an open source core that we base sort of Python off of. And then we do upstream changes. They do changes and we do stuff. And then you get a really nice ecosystem that allows hardware support across lots of different ports. MicroPython is going to support this stuff. We're going to be able to support like all 400 plus boards that we want to support. Other people can make boards. So when we're doing upstream changes, what's the thing that we have to do to make it work each time for people? We have such as that, we've done to the core. And you know, it's a little bit like a, I think last week you mentioned it was like a Linux distro. You have the same kernel, but the distribution, what's enabled in the modules and like any changes like Raspbian is based heavily on Linux. But they do make changes to the kernel and they make changes to the way they package things in the file system. It's very simple. The kernel functionality is the same between MicroPython and CircuitPython, like the parser and like, you know, whether we support async or F strings, that all comes from MicroPython. And then CircuitPython adds API changes on top of it. And sometimes there's a little bit more conflict in like the changes affect the same file. And so doing the merge where we pull in all the changes from, you know, MicroPython. And of course we also send stuff upstream as well. Like we send bug fixes and changes and updates to them. But getting it to sync up, right. It's non-trivial. People who've done merges, they know. It's like it can be hundreds and hundreds of files that are edited and it's like you have to make sure that you stick them together perfectly. So. I think Scott's probably gonna end up doing a video or something about this or maybe Dan. Well, yeah. So Scott and Dan and Jeff are all worked on this merge. But it's compiling and it's passing CI. So it's now on to test. And we're also gonna update ESP5, the IDF5. That's also coming up next. We want to do the merge first. Could we figure that was tough for everybody to do that. And then we're gonna do ESP5 because it's gonna come in with a lot of fixes and updates. And we'll let us support more expressive chips, which is 18. All right. Well, if you want to keep up on all these and more, we deliver this newsletter. Every single week, go to aidaforddaily.com, separate site because we don't want your customer information mixed in with newsletter stuff. So that's why I made another site. Well, aidaforddaily, we don't spam. We don't share the information. We hate spam and all of that just as much as you do. Maybe even more. Aida, we're an open source hardware company. How would you know that? Yeah. Yeah, I know. How do we know that? So, yay, we are up to 600 Oshawa certified designs and more. Which is interesting. Because it adds 420 redesigns and 600 total designs. So I know how many more redesigns have been added 180 more. Oshawa has certification. It uses open source hardware definition. You gotta post your file somewhere. You have to have the code under open source license. You can't have an NDA for stuff. You can't have closed source. You can't say I'll release it later. Should be published somewhere. Kind of essentially it. And at the time of this broadcast, we were up to 600. And we are currently the number one certified organization. We were the first to get to 500. And now we're the first to get to 600. If you look at the number of projects, 600. Yay. The total number of designs certified are 2,000. That's exactly one quarter. Yeah. 24.9% is Adafruit. So what I thought I would do is see, because I got a little ping while we were here. So this is Adafruit. This is 600. I'm gonna hit refresh and see if anything's changed. No. So it's still 600. Okay, but... Let's go back to the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. So... It didn't go down. No, I got a ping that another thing got certified. So it was gonna be like... Yeah, you have to show through first. 601. I don't know what to do. No fast. Okay. That was cute. I thought I was gonna go one more. Anyways, we'll see how soon we get to the next tier. Now, here's the... 666. Yeah. Ooh. We'll make a little... Sentai. Little red board. So I guess one thing I'll say in the mini rant section is, it would be great for Ashwood to mention one day that we have open source hardware that we survive. I think there's a little bit of conflict of interest on how Ashwood works. And there's other companies that get in the spotlight. I think it's kind of cool that the number one company is a certified woman owned minority business, lady ate a fruit and that's kind of cool. But yeah. So on the other hand, it's kind of cool to be completely ignored by the organization that you have the most certification. And that's kind of cool, like, you know. But here's the good news. Notice me, Senpai, that's a good news. There are 75% more open hardware designs from other people. Yeah. It's not just us. My thing is like, if you're a special... I don't know, we used to be 50% of the certifications now, weren't we? Yeah. My thing is like, if you're an organization, you are what you celebrate. And if you've decided to ignore 25% of the designs because of like weird, personal reasons or something, you're not really serving the community. That's my opinion. So, anyways, that's my thing. Okay. Also, to prove we're an open source to a hardware company lady, we have a bunch of guides. Yes. So... It's a great guide. It's a great guide to speak on the big board. So, the three big guides, as we've got the Erin Teddy-Worksbin rebuild, she reprogrammed a modern Teddy-Worksbin with custom audio files and the movements that match, and she did a tutorial on it. And you can follow a lot of people, email, doesn't say, hey, when you posted the video of your Shawshank Redemption Bear. People are like, I want to do that, I guess. So, more family. I don't know if anyone wanted more family. They're Shawshank for great redemption. It's a cool pigment outfit. And then... Morgan Freeman as a teddy bear has been thinking about that for years. It's a good... I mean, it's right down there. And then Liz did a guide on using Docker to compile UC Linux for the ESP32-S3. It's a no-MMU version of Liz Kirtle with Busybox. It's build root. It's really minimal. I mean, like it fits in eight megabytes or 16 megabytes of flash and eight megabytes of PSRM. But, you know, you want to do it? You can do it. And Docker is a great way to do it because it's, believe me, it's a big project to compile because you did compile the cross tool and then you need versions of like auto, Conf that are, you know, everything special. You can do it under WSL, but it's a PMS. So Docker is a great way to do it. And Liz also added how to update the configuration for the expressive chip. So if you want more flash, more memories, that there's modules that have even more, how to configure it, and also how to tweak the build root settings so you can change like the host name. We're not going to do much more with this because I feel like, you know, with 30 bucks, you can just get a Raspberry Pi, but this should get people started because I think just getting the build going is some of the tougher part. And then knowing Pedro did this very cool project where they picked up, like Ahsoka is actually like on Disney Plus, like tonight or something, they've released him. She's got, the character has these cool dual wielded light saber blade things. I don't know like what the particular type is called, but her lightsabers are white and there's a toy that you can get off the shelf. But it's not as good as if you build it yourself like the sound effects aren't as good and the speaker maybe not as loud and the LEDs are definitely not as bright as neopixels like dual strip neopixels with a cool light effect. And so this is a kind of a rebuild where it shows like, hey, you can use the body of the toy, put in a prop maker feather and you can like totally customize it and take advantage of the injection molding, but with much better quality electronics on the inside. Okay. And Aaron did an amazing video for the Teddy Ruxpin rebuild with Figment. So it's three minutes, but it's a Super Zen. So I'm just going to watch it as this teddy bear gets taken apart, put back together and turned into something very wholesome and nice. So any other side. Hi, my name is Teddy Ruxpin. Can you and I be friends? Teddy Ruxpin. Hello, Billy. Hello, Daisy. Would you like to hear a story? Hello, Billy. Hello, Daisy. Would you like to hear a story? Hello, Daisy. Would you like to hear a story? Me and Daisy. It's your grandma's grandma Bonnie and grandma Lucy. I'm going to read you some fun stories. And before we go off to the next segment, don't forget ESP friends. We probably have a couple more of these left that gets you a discount. Let's do some advanced manufacturing. Factory footage. Okay, guess what? We're just going to roll right into 3D printing. We have the video you alluded to with the new Star Wars series and a speed up takeaway. You know, Pedro and Younglings. And Younglings, yeah. You can turn your toy lightsaber into a high quality build with 80 RP2040 prop maker feather and circuit python. This toy lightsaber features a detachable blade that we were able to upgrade with a strip of Neopixels. We gutted the toys electronics and added the RP2040 prop maker feather. We really like the injection molded parts so there's no 3D printing in this project. The original blade only has around 20 LEDs so we swapped them out for a strip of Neopixels for getting better animations that can be set to any color. The stock blade has white LEDs that show noticeable dark spots when compared to our Neopixel blade. The circuit python code has customizable settings for colors and you can adjust the sensitivity of the swings so you can make it match your preference. You can also swap out the audio files to make it super custom. To learn how to upgrade your toy lightsaber, go to learn.aderfruit.com. Get the parts to build this project. Links are in the description. Start by removing the pommel, then remove the screw from the battery cover. The two halves are held together with just a few screws so it's easy to take apart. Carefully unplug the connectors from the main board and desolder the wires from the various components. You can splice wires to extend the cable from the pogo pin connector. Attach a two-pin JST cable to the terminals on the battery holder so we can plug it into the feather. The wires from the button can be attached to the prop maker's screw block terminals. You'll need to cut the trace on the back of the feather to disable lipo charging so we can safely use alkaline batteries. Add another JST cable for the power switch and insulate the exposed pins with some capped-on tape to avoid shorting. Then we can plug everything together and close it back up. Take apart the blade by removing the screws from the pogo pin connector, then remove the plastic pin from the tube. Carefully slide out the diffuser and take out the LED PCB while keeping the cover and diffuser inside the tube. Now we can solder the wires from the pogo pin connector to our strip of neopixels. Then we can fit it into the diffuser sleeve and slide it back into the tube. Place the covers of the pogo pin connector back onto the blade and secure it using the screws. We think this makes our toy lightsaber so much better and really like how we were able to use most of the electronics. We hope this inspires you to upgrade your toy props with Circuit Python and the ARPY2040 prop maker feather. There's a lot of printing. And we also were like, oh no, did I mess up the music? Yeah, so that's, we have an extended version of line of PM music. So speaking of, let's just roll right in. MPI brought you by DigiKey, thank you DigiKey this week. It is a Renaissance. That's right. What is the MPI? New product introduction of the week this week. Okay, so this is a Renaissance sensor conditioning chip which I actually have on my list for a while and it's in stock now. So I'm glad to finally be able to feature it. Okay, this is the ZSSC 3241. The SSC is sensor signal conditioning. And Z is, you know, when I saw all this stuff starts with Z, the rest of the numbers don't know what they mean, but this chip is pretty cool. You know, when I look at the stuff to do for IMPI, there's a lot of like, here's another MOSFET, here's another, you know, Bunkboost converter, here's in the connector. And so, you know, I try not to just cover the same types of things. I like it when there's like a new unique chip. And this is definitely like unique. I've never seen a chip like this, specifically designed for interfacing with resistive and resistor bridge sensors without having to kind of DIY it all yourself using off amps and 24 bit ADCs. So this is a chip and it's got like, you know, every time you look at it, like, there's like more stuff that you discover and you're like, that's kind of cool. It's a chip that's designed again to read bridge, half bridge or resistive sensors. I can actually also do, I think, voltage source sensors. And I'll talk about some of those. And like some of the details, like it can do SPI or I squared C or one wire, but it has analog output. It can set up the resistive style or voltage style sensor in any kind of configuration. And there's like dozens and dozens of knobs and adjustments that you can do to make it perfect for connecting to a sensor. And you probably don't need any other analog circuitry. You just plug this in and you get, you know, the ADC, the gain, the calibration, the NBM, everything for the same prices in ADC. So a lot of people when they start electronics, they'll make the first sensor project after a button is usually a light sensor like this one. This is a CVS cell, a cadmium sulfide cell. And these are, this is a beautiful diagram for my Philby. They're made with a material that as more light hits it, the resistance changes. And so you can basically use it as a light sensor. Look, a lot of people like, oh, this is a temperature sensor, humidity sensor. But when you actually like look at how the sensor works, it's not that you're measuring humidity, you're measuring a capacitor that is affected by humidity or in this case, you're not really measuring light, you're measuring resistance that changes with light. And so for these sensors, the CVS cells, they're pretty easy to wire up and that's why they're good for beginners. It's a really good, you know, first analog input sensing project because you have your LDR, your light dependent resistor and then you have a fixed 10K resistor, you turn them into a voltage divider and then you read the analog voltage into your micro controller pin, like in Arduino or, you know, Renaissance RA4M, you know, Wi-Fi Minima, you know, you can also use those, anything with an ADC. And it's really easy because voltage reading is done just by every micro controller. They don't have resistor readers, they actually only have voltage divider. So it's another layer, you know, not only are you not measuring light, you're measuring resistance that changes with light, you're not even measuring resistance, you're measuring voltage that will change with the resistance that will change with light. And CDSLs, the resistance changes a lot. So depending on whether it's dark or light, you're gonna get, you know, three plus boards of magnitude difference from what is dark, 300 ohms to, sorry, when it's bright, you know, 100 or 200, 300 ohms all the way down to 600 kiloohms when it's dim or dark. So there's such a wide range that that resistor divider, you'll get like zero to three volts pretty easily. It's very easy, even if you have an eight bit or 10 bit microcontroller or ADC, you're gonna be able to read that difference. But other resistor sensors, especially as you become, you know, a more skilled engineer, other resistive sensors are a little tougher to use. This is a PT100, this is a piece of platinum that is calibrated to be 100 ohms or one kilo ohm in room temperature, 25.0 degrees C. And as the temperature changes, the resistance changes. In this case, it has three wires for calibration reasons, but really it's a resistor, that only the red, the two red wires are used. Sorry, the only one of the red and one of the white wires are used. So this is, for example, from the datasheet for an RTD from Honeywell. And you'll see, you know, the resistance changes very, very slightly, but it does have a wide range from negative 100 to 600 ohms. And, you know, it'll go down one quarter or up by 20% depending on the temperature. So if there is a little bit of variation, but it's not gonna be the three order of magnitude variation of the CVSL, it's gonna be a much smaller amount. And a lot of people use PT100 or 1000s because they're very good precision. So you can get, you know, 0.1 degree or 0.5 degree precision and accuracy over a wide temperature range, but only if you can read that resistance at the accuracy that you want, right? If your ADC has 5% error, it doesn't matter how good your sensor is, you're gonna have the error that comes in from temperature variation or from the resistor variation. Another common resistive type cell is the strain gauge. These come with four wires because they're actually usually pre-wired up in a Wheatstone bridge. Not gonna cover Wheatstone bridge, don't have time to talk about how that works. But it's a way of, it's a slightly better way than just a resistor divider way of measuring resistance changes. This is made by micro printing a conducted material that as it gets bent or twisted or torqued or whatever, the resistance changes and it really is a very, very small amount. Like if you thought the PT100 was a small variation, this is even less. Like to read a strain gauge, you really need a 24-bit ADC. So what this chip does, so like this is, you can't really use a resistor divider. By the time you get to the PT100 or PT1000 or the strain gauges, you can't really use a microcontroller ADC if you want to get any reasonable precision. Because with the light sensor, maybe you just want to know is it light or dark? Like those are often used for automatically turning on outdoor lights. You just need to know it's a darker light out. They don't care how many lux. But with temperature and weight, you often need to have very good accuracy. If you're using that temperature sensor in a chemical reaction container, you need to have it be calibrated and perfectly kept at the temperature for as long as you need for the chemical reaction to occur. For the load cell, if you're going to the store and you're buying a pound of meat or veggies, you don't want to be charged more and you don't want to get less. It has to be within 1% or 0.1% accuracy and precision. You want really good quality output. So what you can often do is, maybe you have a better quality resistor, maybe you have some code that does some calibration, maybe use an op amp. But it can get very complicated. You end up with a lot of potentiometers that you're tweaking to try to optimize the output to get it to be the same because each strain gauge has slight variations too. PT-100 are usually pre-calibrated for you, but still sometimes there's a little bit of offset to your sensor. This chip, the SEC 34, well, I forgot the last few digits, the ZSSE, what it does is everything you need. It's got the PGA, the programmable gain stage. It's got 24 to 12 to 24 bit ADC. And it's got a mass section that can do offset calculations for you. And we'll go through it. And then the output again can, they can output in three different ways. You can get the output as SPI, I squared C data, or analog output, which I think is very interesting. So you can get the value in, perform all these mathematical calculations on it, and then you pipe the voltage that you want scaled to the A-out pin. Okay, so here are some application examples. They show it with a bridge, we still bridge setup. They show, again, a PT-100 or PT-1000 is very popular, or a PTC resistor divider, or you've got a strain gauge. They have one wire output, which I think is kind of fascinating. That's very rare to see something that is programmable with one wire, but it does let you use it in setups. You've got like some Dallas 18B20s. You wanna have some other kind of sensor with only one wire output. You can set it up with this. You do have to pre-configure it, but at least then you can read the data back out, although one wire is a little slow. There's, like I said, bazillion knobs. There is, for example, ADC. You can go all the way up to 24-bit ADC if you need that precision, but it's going to be much slower. You're only gonna get, looks like it takes 4.7 milliseconds per conversion. Whereas 12-bit, you're gonna get it be like 40 times faster. So you have a trade-off of ADC resolution and speed. There's also internally a programmable gain stage. Very handy, especially for those strain gauges where the changes in resistance are so, so small. You might want to have multiple, both the 1.8 second gain stage and the 300 times first stage, but when you're dealing with something like a light resistor or a temperature, a positive temperature coefficient resistor, maybe you don't need as much gain. You don't wanna blow out your analog digital input, but this saves you all that op-amp configuration. There's also how you can configure it. You saw in the application diagram, you can set up as a resistor divider, you can add it, set up with what resistor you want. It'll handle the internal resistor for you or you can set up as a bridge. There's also interrupt outputs. You can tell it, hey, I want IRQ based on this threshold change above or below. And they've got examples for all of that. And then I think I don't have it here, but you can have it in continuous, you can set it up for continuous readings or you can do one-shots. So if you want continuous, that's when you would have the analog output or use whenever the data's ready, you read it from I-Sports, your SPI. There's also non-volatile memory built in. So this would be great for where you put your calibration settings. So each sensor does have slight change. When you get a sensor that, oh, this humidity sensor has 1% or 2% humidity, why, how can they get that when most humidity sensors are three to 5%? It's just because they're calibrated. It's not like they build them any better. The sensor itself, the way the sensor is built to be natively have some inaccuracies, but you can calibrate them and non-volatile memory is where you store that calibration. So you calibrate it in the factory, you send it up to the user and each one's gonna have slightly different settings in here for voltage offsets, for temperature coefficients, like there's all these settings that you can use the non-volatile memory for. There's also a diagnostic check command. So it'll tell you like, hey, your sensor is gonna disconnect it or it's shorted or I think I'm putting this much current in, but I'm actually, this much is what's coming out. So you can make sure that when you're dealing with these simple resistive sensors, it's very easy for them to get disconnected and suddenly like your temperature you think it is is shooting up or shooting down because it's actually measuring an open circuit. And I also recommend there is evaluaborns available, particularly because this sensor has so many knobs and settings. What's nice about getting the evaluaborn is that you plug it into your computer and run the software and you can tweak each one of those settings and see the output. So you don't have to like write the whole drive or if you're, what is it gonna, with your particular sensor, what's the configuration values you're gonna need? You set it all up in the evaluaborn software and then you can, they have an output that tells you what ischeword C or SPI commands it was sent. You can then import that into your firmware and you use this example showing all the different places you can configure it. And it is in stock. The SZSSC 3241 available. And again, the pricing, it's not the same price as a 24 bit ADC. So instead of just getting an ADC that might work only over I squared C or SPI, get this and you get the ADC and the programmable gain and the configuration and the NVM internal temperature sensors, continuous mode, forever and ever and ever. And you can use it with like pretty much any kind of resistive sensor. And that's our MPI. Okay, we're gonna do your new products. We have one and it's, You just wanna bet your own deal box. Yeah, it's a really good one. So here we go. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. Okay, the start of today tonight is like the lady at our community, our customer is the entirety of her team who makes this go is. Yeah, the Metro ESP32 S3 is finally in the shop. We had this as a coming soon for a bit. Thanks to everybody who signed up. We will notify you if you signed up. I wanna make sure that we had some for people watching the show live. It's chock full of stuff. So let's, we can even go to the overhead and go to the next AMN show. Okay, so you got your ESP32 S3 room module that's in the middle there. It's pre-certified with FCC and C certifications for the emitter. It's got 16 megabytes of flash memory built in and eight megabytes of octal PS RAM, which means it can drive these cool TFT displays. It can drive a little major series. It's got so much RAM and so much flash. It'll fit like pretty much every project you can. And they do make versions that have even more like they have 16 and 16 or 32 and 16. But I wanted to strike a balance. I thought this was a good amount. Like you can definitely drive TFT displays, but you also aren't paying as much as the higher prices of the modules. I think this is a very roomy module. It's got USB-C. So if that's power and programming and debugging, there's also the debug port. So if you want to connect an external USB to serial converter for debugging on the hardware you are, that's available. I also put out the JTAG connector. I'll be honest, I'd never really used the JTAG connector on the ESP32 S3, but they do have support for step debugging with open OCB. You can check out their tutorials on doing that. And the connector is there, ready to go. You've got the boot button and the reset button. So you can put it to bootloader mode and reset it. You have the Arduino compatible pinout. And I did my best to make the pin number match the native GPIO of the ESP while also matching the Arduino numbering. Only thing that didn't make it is zero and one are actually 40 and 41, the RX and TX because pin zero is actually not available. It's used for the bootloader. So I figured, I'll just name them RX and TX. And then next to the RX and TX is also a battery charging and monitoring circuit. So you want to plug in a LiPo battery. You can get, especially if you cut the trace for the NeoPixel, you get down to about 100 and 120 microamps so it can get fairly low power. The NeoPixel does draw like half a milliamps. So you do have to cut that trace if you want to get to the lowest power usage. But it's still a fairly good low power performance. That was good as the feather because it's optimized but still quite good. Stem IQT pinout for connecting sensors, plug and play. Even a spot for micro SD card. So great for data logging while reading circuit Python or file storage. And that's connected to the hardware SPI pins on off switch and you can plug it into a DC jack, six to 12 volts DC. So if you want to power big motors and you want like one 12 volt power supply, this will have a built-in regulator to give you five and three volts. While you can still, I use it for powering your motors or your 12 volt LED strip. And fully assembled and you just can use it with circuit Python, you can use it with Arduino. It's like super chunky and great for developing with basically the latest expressive chip, very powerful Wi-Fi and Bluetooth low energy capable Arduino circuit Python, micro Python. Everyone loves this chip. And that's a Metro format. It's super nice. Oh, kidoki. So if there's any left, try to get it, USB friends. We're going to just have a secret and if there's any questions, we'll light night tonight. We were doing some in the chat earlier. So maybe we got to them, but do put the questions up in Discord, Adafruit.it slash discord. Let's do top secret. Yeah. Okay. So for top secret, we're going to show three videos, see on the other side and then we'll do a couple of questions and then get out of here. All right, Ada, what is this? Well, usually I'm showing off a tester that has Pogo pins, but in this case, I'm going to show how I'm building a tester for this revision of the TFT touch shield for the micro SD card. I want to test that as a display and as a touch driver. So I have to test all that stuff too and all these connectors. So in this case, I'm actually going to use a Metro RP 2040. We just put these in the shop and they're very low cost and I don't have to worry about, the U of two boot loaders built in. So they're a lot more reliable. And in this case, it's got a little code that's looking for an SD card. And when I insert the SD card, it looks for an image called Wolf. And then I can test the type screen. And so this is a great way for me to give the test prep folks at Ada Fruit a quick way to test all the functionality for the shield so we can get into the shop very quickly. So this just needs to get taped down and I can see the tape on the back, put it on there, bam, new product. Really, Ada, what is this? I'm testing out some displays that I found in some bands. I don't know these a long time ago. These are 3.5 inch capacitive touch displays. I made a breakout board with an iSpy connector and you see I made a little mistake, but I fixed it with some blue wire hacks. And then I've got it wired up here to an iSpy BFF on a QT Pi and just testing out the capacitive touch display. Something interesting about this display is actually it's multi-touch capable. So I can put three fingers down and you can see it detects the three touches and draws them with different colors. I'm kind of neat. Actually it has like five multi-touchs. You can see it's got four or five fingers all can touch at the same time. This chip doesn't actually support gestures. You'd have to do that on the microcontroller. It's an unfortunate side effect, but otherwise it works pretty nicely. So I'm gonna wrap up, fix that little mistake and then we'll get these nice 480 by 320 displays into the shop. Early, Ada, what is this? This is me testing out a 2.1 inch capacitive touch IPS display that uses RGB TTL. It's a 18-bit color display, 480 by 480. So it's actually like a high resolution display which means it doesn't use SPI. It uses parallel RGB. And usually that's really hard to do on my controller, but the ESP32S3 can do it. I'm gonna use the 3.2. If it's got enough PSRAM. And then this board, this is actually in a valve board called the LCD EV. And this originally came with a square display, but one fun fact is almost all these 40-pin displays are the same pinouts. So I had to update the init code and the capacitive touch driver is a little bit different too, but I got it working at Arduino library and then CircuitPython is coming up next. So this is looking great, getting those cool displays working one at a time. Okay, live from the nature sector. Okay, so that's the eyeball. Eyeball. And we're working on this and then this was the intro. So anything to add before we wanna show this real fast, hold it up. No, I mean, I can just show it on the overhead. I think that the video was pretty good. So this is a four-inch display. I'm gonna also get a version of this that has capacitive touch. This one does not have touch, so you can poke yourself in the eyeball all you want. But I mean, it's so cool and weird. Great for Halloween. Maybe we'll have it just in time. So there's an Arduino library that can support these. And I just have to program in the init code and then Jephler has been working on CircuitPython support. You do need to have something like this Metro ESP32 S3, which has eight megabytes of PS RAM because these displays, unlike the 3.5 or 2.8 or 1.2-inch displays, the small ones, those have built-in memory. This does not. You have to draw the screen constantly. So while it looks like nothing is happening, actually a lot is happening. It's constantly redrawing, like every second. Sorry, every point, every 50 hertz, whatever, 60 hertz. It's redrawing the display, which means that you get very fast redraws, but you have to have the memory for the display buffered inside of here and it's constantly outputting it. So the only thing I don't know is if it's doing this kind of display output, is that happening on one core and you can do Wi-Fi on the other core and how does this work with the octal PS RAM because can you do stuff during the v-sync or does it buffer? I don't actually understand how it works, but I'll definitely be learning more about it as we're pushing the limits because it would be cool to make like a round pipe portal, like literally it's a portal and you can show stuff from the internet but it's round. So yeah, I wanted to ask you like, which ones should I do? And you said the round ones. So I did the round ones. Yeah, nothing illustrates what we're up to other than giant eyeballs. Okay. That's a secret this week. Meep. Okay. I see two questions lined up in the chat. There's another one, we'll get to it and then we shall bounce. Are you ready? Okay. I'll answer this one. Any updates on the past ESP32 board with the camera? Just curious if it's still a future product. Yeah. Yeah, still working on it. Oops, gotta put us here. Oh, yeah. Sorry. So yeah, one of the things working out in the open, it's a little tough sometimes because we'll show something and it seems like it might be released tomorrow but we have to get parts. There's testing, there's a lot of code, there's a lot of software, but we still want to show you everything. Yeah, like the, what's funny is about the display I showed in that one minute video, like I got those displays in 2015. Like at the socks, how long it's been. I'm wondering how I control these VTS-TVPV0 levels on RQ from Regina thinking about some stack ziners plus analog like the NGU211 with some shucky diodes. Analog switches are a good way to handle high voltage. You can also use multiple transistors or you can make a little transistor ladder that's the other way to do it. Oh, that's a good question. Because a lot of people have like dead laptops and they're like, whoa, I wish I could use a screen. You've done a lot of work in displays. Just curious, what would it take to drive a laptop display, even if it's a lower resolution, it's possible to do that with a chip like ESP3D2S3. Yes, those are LVDS displays. And so they need, they basically need an LVDS driver usually RTD2602662. You can use, but you also need like the cable that goes to the laptop and they're not always the same. It's kind of like annoying. It's very custom made for each laptop maker. So the best thing you can do is like, honestly, if you can Google, see if other people have done it, what they use in the configurations. It's not as easy. These displays are not used on laptops. They're used in products, not laptops. Yeah, and then last up, since those are all the questions, this one is more of a general one. We've written about this a little bit. We've talked about it. This is a question, looking for a project problem to solve a PCB design. Where do you look for inspiration? How do you come up with designs? Well, this community is a great one. There's often something that someone wants to do, like I want to connect to this to that. I want to have this keyboard work with this retro thing. So there's always people that are looking to do something. The other thing that I've noticed the way you work is, you have all of these people in your head and you have empathy for these users and these beginners. And it's like, well, what would be the easiest, best thing possible that's also low cost and powerful open source? And so it's almost like imagining yourself and someone else's shoes and like, well, what would be the best thing for this? Like when we did Cricut, which is a robotics platform, or Circuit Playground Express, we talked to educators. Like all these macro pads, like there isn't one that just has a little bit of everything and is programmable and like easy to use. But definitely like there's communities online where people chat and like, you know, get inspiration for what other people are doing. Look at what other people are doing that's open source. I have 600 designs. Go grab one of them and tweak it. The other thing, and this is just like, oh, so that's the nice like inspirational, like yay wholesome answer. There is another answer too, which is sometimes people do close source stuff. It's predatory. They make you sign in DAs for the software. There's all these things. There may be they'll, they copy a design that was open source and they close source it. So if you're inspired, remake their design, make it open source and make it better. Yeah. Like reverse engineer stuff. Or there's a profit that they have to discontinue. Reverse engineer or something that's not approachable by makers and make it easy and approachable. We've had to do that before there's companies that like we have this like blob of software and you can't ever do anything with it and it makes, you know, touch screens. We're like, okay. Yeah. So that's an answer. Okay. Them's are questions for the night. It was so much everyone, especially thanks to Kara who's behind the scenes. Thanks Kara. And they have fruits like and helping out folks that are contacting us if needed. We will see everybody every week in some way, shape or form either, someone tell or ask an engineer our shoes. Threadday has been needed for production. Here's my designer, everybody. Good night.