 Life in York. It's Ask an Engineer. Hi everybody and welcome to Ask Engineer. It's me Lady Aida with me on tonight's show on every show. Mr. Lady Aida on camera control and also roaring like a lion. We've got a fun filled show for you tonight with lots of Python news, new products, iNPI. It's not out yet and more videos, 3D prints. We have it. It's a lot. While we get right into it. Tell me what's the code on the show. Tonight code is 10% off in the Aida store all the way up to 1159 p.m. Eastern time. It gets 10% off in the store including any free stuff we have as you add to your card. We talked about some of our live shows that we do including Show and Tell. We just did Show and Tell just a few moments ago. That's where we're running a minute late. There was a lot of projects tonight. Desk of Lady Aida where Lady Aida talks about what's on her desk. We'll be going over what we did this week including the great search. We've got JP's product pick of the week. That's a live broadcast from the Aida fruit store inside of a product page. Discounts automatically applied. We'll show the highlight. We've got some Richard Tech. This is just a recap of a project that we did not too long ago. A really cool controller for the PlayStation. We got some advanced manufacturing, Main New York City factory footage. A little bit of a home prototype speed up too. This week we got some 3D printing videos. Really fun one with PropMaker. You know, Pedro did. We've got new product introduction. IonMPI. This week it is in SATA. We got some top secret. Some really cool stuff this week. We've been really busy with some new products. Speaking of, we got some coming soon new products. This week they're about to hit the store. We'll answer your questions. We do that on Discord. AidaFruit.it. We've got 37,000 people there. A few thousand people at any given time. Put your questions throughout the chat or just wait to the end and we'll get to them all. All that more on Ask Engineering. Bam. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Okay. So there's been a lot going on. Free stuff. You can get a certain playground express or a KB2040. Yeah. Or freebies coming soon. Freebies coming soon. Yeah. And then also probably tomorrow-ish. So this will be our new segment sort of. So there was going to be a UPS strike. There's not a UPS strike. Maybe there'll still be a strike. Who knows? But we needed to make sure we had all the forms of shipping available in case anything could happen because that's the only way you can live life now is have backups and backups and backups. So one of the things we had to do is pause battery shipments because all the different shipping systems handled it differently. But I think starting tomorrow, if you want to order anything with batteries, UPS is active again for that. And then we also have what? My name be active today. You could be watching this at any time. And then we have FedEx is the main shipping. We have postal service and we have DHL for International. However, we're working with these carriers to figure out how to get you the best rates because we can kind of turn off any of these now and have more volume on one. So we're trying to figure out how do we get the best possible shipping rates for you? We don't add anything to shipping. We do a pass-through. Some folks are like, shipping's expensive. Yeah. Planet Earth. It's how it is now. So we're going to just try to get the best shipping cost to you. I'll always suggest we're not the store to get the one thing. Put stuff in your cart. Get the multiple things. Get free stuff. Get free shipping after a certain tier. We're going to be adding that back as well. That's the best deal. If you want to one-off, you want one resistor, get it from Digikey. It's the best thing to do. Wow. You just covered everything. Yeah. We do live shows. We do. Like this one. Like this one and others. So for show and tell tonight, there was a lot. In the beginning, we talked about open source stuff with Scott. Yes. JP had a project where we're trying to jam as many waves as possible. Ambient technology. Maker Melissa. Making a gigantic display. No, he showed the prop maker. We make of the prop maker. Previously, it was the feather wing on a feather and four making a lightsaber, which is what the prop maker was originally like trying for. But it was very complicated. Now the project is very simplified, less expensive. And he also showed that what the prints look like. You got it from a service. So it's 30 bucks with shipping. Beautiful 3D printer. Yeah. We're at the point where a lot of people are like, Oh, I like your projects, but I'm a 3D printer. Man. And now it's like, no, here's a place you can send it to for 30 bucks. You get it. And there's in a week, there's lots of things. Some makerspaces are still around. There's 3D printers, but generally speaking, it's a pretty good deal. Your time is pretty valuable. So if you can get like the best print for 30 bucks, I'll be honest, like we have a 3D printer. And I was like, Oh, all 3D printing stuff. I don't have time to put together. Yeah. I know we have a very good one too. Yeah. It never seems to work when you need it. So we also had DJ Devon should have fit that thing. And then also, I'll say it's an officially endorsed Adafruit hat. And then Markstop, I was a lightning detector. Yeah. And it worked but this really neat resistor. Yeah, that was interesting because we're a generator. So you can do LED buttons. Sorry, you can do buttons, digital inputs, or that's normally like one pin per button. And you can have a matrix where you have like wheels and columns and you scan them and you can put a diode into your ghosting. Okay, that there's that way. But apparently, you can also do an analog digital matrix. So you use one analog pain and you can read multiple buttons in and there's a limit. You can't do more than like 12 buttons, but you can have up to 12 buttons in a grid with different resistors on the rows and columns. It's very interesting. I've never seen this type of input. But if you only have one GPIO pin available, you can get it done. Yeah. And then flying things had a really cool update from a cosplay project where they're pressing their hand and it has different sounds and then also different things on the display display. I think it was like a flexible OLED or something. Very cool. And then Rex had an amazing badge that you just have to see. And there's this really neat side there's a side effect of the of the the treatment of the PCB with the copper that you got to see. So check that out. I'm glad we were able to do show and tell because we rotate through the team. And so it was a full house to do check it out after this show, of course. From the desk of Lady Aida, every week Lady Aida shows a bunch of stuff. We've been so the part shortage has subsided a little bit. So after the 400 plus redesigns Lady Aida has been in new fakes. Has been doing a ton of new products. That's why we're completely out of our mind with caffeine and just like going a million miles an hour. And we have got a kid running around here too. She's almost walking. So that's going on. So it's been around the clock. But we have a ton of new hardware design. So what did you show this week? And I feel like every week it's like here's another big thing I'm starting. You know, like Scott, I was in a meeting once with Scott and he was like, baby's taking that. But I'm like, baby's nap and time to start a six month long hardware project. So this this week one of the things that I'm restarting is in 2020 I was working with these really nice high res TFT displays to create basically like the pie TFT but with a high resolution using a 3.9 inch 800 by 480 display that used for a phone. But like 2020 was just kind of a mess. Then 2021 was also really a mess. And then I couldn't get TFTs for 2021-22. But TFT prices are back down to like a reasonable cost now and they can get chips. And so I was going to revisit this project and like get it back running again. And I realized I can probably also get this ICN 6211 chip, which is a chip that can do DSI to TTL dot clock displays. And recently I've seen more companies, you know, like I think WaveShare and DF Robot they have displays that plug into just the DSI port and they use the ICN 6211 and they they configure it over I squared C. And of course, all that stuff is closed source and like they don't release any of the code or the Schemax or anything or how it's done. So I was like, okay, well, let's just redo it in open source waste. We can try all different types of screen. So not just 800 by 480 but square and round and like there's half round and there's like bar type displays. So I'm hiring local code ninja Timon who worked on some previous display work with us through Raspberry Pi to web library code for the ICN 6211 and also help with committing PRs to Raspberry Pi upstream to add support for all these different displays in an open source waste that other people can use them. Especially since they apparently the compute modules, they have two DSI ports, but not a lot of other GPIOs. So it's like if you want to have two displays on a compute module, you could do it. So basically we're going to have two gigantic eyeballs. Yeah. Lady it is being very diplomatic. I will be a little bit more direct. There are tons and tons and tons of people that buy stuff from lots of companies. They get it and it doesn't work. There's no form support. They're angry. One of them's wave share. Another one's DF robot. Sorry. They use our open source code. Totally fine. They often take our names off of it. Not cool. So instead of being angry about it and saying it's not fair, China, China, China or whatever, what we're going to do is just make sure there's open source code for all the displays out there. Yes, someone is going to copy it. They're going to do that anyways. But we're going to have something for people that will be updateable. So a lot of the stuff that a lot of the challenges that we've seen that customers have from other companies is when Raspberry Pi updates, the kernel modules don't update. So now you have something that doesn't work and you're forced to use an older version of Raspberry Pi or something. So we're just going to like fix all of that and you'll be able to use any display that you bought with the open source code from A to fruit. Even if you get it from someone else, fine. But if you bought it from us, that would be nice too. But we have, that's our big, it's a big effort for the year. So we're starting with, you know, 800 by 480. You know, because the DSI port is a little bit simple, it doesn't have like, I don't say smarts, I don't call it stupid. It does what does, but stuff like handling the backlight and handling touchscreen has to be done separately. So, you know, we're going to get to all of it, but we're just starting off with like just showing, configuring a simple, you know, five inch display. And then, you know, we ordering PCBs. So you'll see, you know, as my PCBs and TFTs come in, you'll see that we're going to start adding support for all these different displays. Yeah. So if you bought displays from all these other companies, because, you know, we didn't have one or whatever, don't worry, we'll have stuff that makes it all work. Make it work. And also, we're going to learn to see, because it's like, we'll have the code open, people can modify it and be like, hey, here's an improvement. That's what we're doing. Okay. And then you do the great search, that's when you go to digi.com and you help people find things they might need. What was the great search this week? Okay. So this week on the topic of displays, on my Raspberry Pi 4, I broke the connector on the camera display and I was like, oh, you know, you don't want to throw away the whole Raspberry Pi, just because the little clip broke off, you can just get a replacement connector and put the clip back on that's a rescuing your board. So people have somebody actually emailed and said, hey, what's the part number for this? Because the Raspberry Pi schematic doesn't have the part number. But I show on DigiKey how you can find a 50 cent replacement part. Alrighty. And if you need help finding something, or if you need a substitution part, or if you're like, I wonder how to find the right thing for the thing, you can get ahold of this easily in every form. And well, you do a great search for you. Okay. JP's product pick of the week this week, take it away JP. It is the i2s amplifier BFF. Here you can see I have the i2s amplifier BFF soldered to the backside of a QT Pi RP2040. And then I've just plugged in one of these nice little speakers that have the picoblade connector. So you can pull that right off depending on how your setup is meant to be put together. This is playing three wave files that I have actually all playing at the same time. And then I'm just changing their output levels in the mixer, in audio mixer, all happening inside of Circuit Python. And they're just looping sounds. And you can see this will work really well for projects that are maybe small props, little enclosures, costume things, sound players, toys, little synthesizers, and the like. So really nice, easy, basically plug and play. It is the i2s amplifier BFF for QT Pi and Jiao. Okay. And JP's workshop is tomorrow. On Friday, deep dive with Tim and special guest Scott. He's going camping, but he's like, I'm going to stop by. So check it out. Scott's back doing some deep dives. Tim will be there as well. If you want to learn about the inner workings of Circuit Python, this shows for you 5pm Eastern. Let's do some retro. All right. So this retro tech is a little different. We had used this in a project, and the photos that I wanted to get, I didn't time it right. So we did the project first, but now I got a chance to post these photos. What we're trying to do is have a virtual retro museum online of all of this cool old hardware game controllers and everything, and use them in projects. So this is, well actually, Lady, did you know what this is? It's some PlayStation controller. Yeah. So it's not what I thought it was at first. I thought it was like some type of color wheel that, you know, you would turn the wheel and it was a painting program. Yeah, or this calibrates your monitor. Nope. This is from Takara. This is the name of the company that made it, and it was for the Game of Life and some other weird games. This is from 2000. And it's a PlayStation controller, and you spin it. It's a spinner wheel. It's a spinner wheel. And definitely one of the weirder controllers. You can get these on eBay. And if you get these on eBay, you're probably going to say, well, what would I possibly do with this? And we have a guide that's available. It's the Game of Life controller, that controller for PlayStation. You can check out our learn system. It was released in 2003. It looks like a roulette wheel, and it came with Game of Life, the money battle. It's a spinnable central piece. And then it's basically a random number generator for multiple buttons where you can bet on specific numbers or ranges. We showed how to turn it into something else. So you can use a QT pie, RP2040, using a circuit Python. And then you can use that controller to use a USB HID keyboard, send in mouse commands, or make a USB MIDI controller, which is exactly the right thing to do with this. It's got a funky look, it's got the buttons, but then it's got this kind of color. I actually kind of like the look of it. Yeah, I think it's beautiful. I mean, all these old controllers of this like future we were promised, I mean, this is just neat. There's a lot of kerfing there. Yeah. Kind of like anything that has this. This is 2003, but I think it was originally introduced in the late 90s. Definitely has this like lawnmower man aesthetic. This is what Joe would use to suck in all the knowledge before he takes over the world's computers. Okay, that's this week's retro. Yeah. Don't watch the next one. Python hardware time. All right. The big news is every single year we do circuit Python day. So circuit Python day is this month, August 18th, 2023. It's a Friday. We have a full day of programming and more. We'll get the word out for folks to participate. You'll be able to pop into our shows. It'll just be a full day celebrating all things. Circuit Python, Python on hardware, join us. Our newsletter went out this week, Lady Eda. Yeah. And the newsletter has a bunch of projects. It's conference season. I'll get to that in a second. Circuit Python 821 was released. Anything super big with this one? Like, so it's a release and there's a lot of bug fixes and a couple of borne out of borne. It's got a release. But the really interesting thing is that we are getting started on what's going to be in Python 9. Yeah. And USB host is one of the things that, you know, it's not a secret. You see Scott working on it. Yeah. USB host is going to be in there. So it'll be kind of neat. Cool. We did a recap of the circuit Python hack chat. Also, Hackaday did a recap on their site. You can read that as well. We'll talk about some whipper snapper stuff soon. Circuit Python day. MicroPython added Laura's port. Tom's hardware interviews. Andrew Block founder, Josh Lowe. You can see a lot of cool circuit Python stuff. In that interview, tons of Python resources. But the thing I wanted to ask you this week, Lady Eda, because it is Def Con season. It is a bad season. We just saw badges on show and tell is why in the world would someone ever choose Python over other ways to do embedded development for conference badges? And the reason I ask is today, there was a blog post because there is a board hack 2023 NFC badges. And I did get a chance to talk to the developer this over email. And they said some really nice words. But I thought, huh, this would be a good time to ask Lady Eda. Like when people are thinking about making a badge, why would they choose something like MicroPython or Circuit Python versus other ways? Okay. Not saying anything's better. There's different strokes, different folks. But what would be the benefits of choosing a scripting language like Python for a conference badge? Well, one thing about conference badges is they're never done on time. They're always rushed, which is totally normal. They're a project. They use them for fun with friends. And you usually kind of rush around to get a 10 to couple hundred badges done before an event. And so speed of development is the most important. And what isn't important is not security isn't like, obviously it says at Def Con, people want to hack on stuff. But it's not like you have to keep all your code super private and compiled. And it's not like you have to make it difficult for people to work on. You want to make it really easy for people to work on. So one of the things about using embedded languages is, and I've covered this every time we do talks on MicroPython, Circuit Python, is the speed of iteration, especially for these big chips like the RP2040, big flash memories in the ESP32, which has like a very intense compilation process, is every time you want to do something, you're like compiling and updating and it's in its minutes. And I do it all the time. Even with like Platform.io, you're kind of like waiting around a little bit. With embedded Python, that speed is like, it's so instant, like you can try things and you're just like so, so fast, like seconds, like less than seconds. Especially with Circuit Python, we're on save, it restarts. And so if you're doing development on drivers or on LED animations or anything where you're like, look, it doesn't have to be like perfect polish. It just has to work good enough for me to go to this event. And the second big thing is the ease for which you can get other people involved. You know, it definitely always, you have usually your booth, booth, and you have... We were playing a word game. How many things have the word booth in it? And I did phone booth, voting booth, and then we did trade booth and then I was listening to this. Anyways, we played word game. He was very good at the booth one. I was not really on top of that one. He definitely won. He definitely won that word game. At your booth, you're giving away the badge that everyone's wearing them. People want to hang out and they're like, hang out with their laptops and they're like, oh, I want to change the animations or I want to change the message or I want to hack on it. I want to reverse engineer, debug something. And this is like an NFC chip over here. And you're like, you know, you want to read NFC tags and maybe emulate them. And you know, I love, I love embedded development, but it's definitely like now you're installing another version of Python. Now you have a new IDE. Oh, you've got the wrong version of ARM GCC. And then like six hours later, maybe you can compile and upload. And now you need drivers and somebody's on a Mac and it's like x86 and it's M2 and they don't stop. They don't have it. It's not signed. None of that matters when you're dealing with embedded languages. You plug it in, it shows up as a disk drive, or you're using Thawney, or you're using, you know, VS code or whatever. And you can instantly start coding. The code is visible there. It's something people are like, what's, what code is on here? I don't even know. How do I edit it? Because you have to like just get back to what the default code is before you can even start modifying it. But if it's embedded interpretive language, the interpreted language script is right there and you can immediately work on it. You know, I've done workshops where it's like 45 minutes just to get people to install the right drivers, to install the IDE, to like plug in whatever, that's all gone with embedded interpretive languages, especially important at a place where like people are drunk, they're coming and going, they're going to a talk, they come back, they're like, shit, where was I? Wait, you know, we're, you know, setting this on fire. We're like pushing chiply into the fountain at the Alexis park. You don't have time to install the IDE. You want to get onto it. So that's why I think. Okay. Circuit Python. My little odds and ends to add to what you said is they show up as USB drives if you use something like Circuit Python. So that's super easy. A lot of people have laptops. The other thing is interpretive languages are great for strings. So like internet stuff. And that's where everything, that's where everything is heading. Like, you know, your version drinks and you get the strength and the data you want to parse bits and bytes and, and then shift things around. A lot of these things, if they're not maintainable, when you get home, you just toss it or just sits on a shelf forever. The way we set up Circuit Python, for example, when you go to circuitpython.org slash downloads, there's always a new firmware for whatever you have to. So you can use this badge. We know people have used badges with Circuit Python for years for other projects. So the developer of this particular one, I said, Hey, can I share this? And Thomas said, Yes, thank you. I really like Circuit Python for stuff like this. The low bear of entry with the decisions of mass storage and auto reload on save, I find it great, especially for people who aren't programmers or electronic engineers. Wow. Yeah. So, so yeah. And you know, we were on, yeah. And like, you know, good news, bad news. We were on hack a day recently. And there was some crummy comments. There's purists that say you should never have a scripting language on a microcontroller. But there were some people that had some insightful comments. And they said, look, expert gatekeeper jerk of paraphrasing. Some people want to get started. And yeah, they can get to that. But they've got to start somewhere. So don't be a jerk. Everyone was beginner once in their life. Not everyone is, you know, God yet. So this is a great way to get started. And you can always add more complexity and skills. But if you want to get started, especially when people haven't been doing embedded development for 60 years or 50 years or whatever, this is a way to get there. And I guess the only thing I'd say is, I think you get a more diverse, interesting group of people when you allow beginners in. And you have beginners and something for them. Then if it's just like, you're the expert that worked on AS 400. And there's like four of you left on planet Earth. Like, I think you want to meet new people too. So anyways, that's how we're, that's Python on hardware. You can get all of this exciting news and more Adafruit daily delivered every single week. We have some news. Adafruit IO has exciting updates. You may have seen that we have a thousand plus devices, including Whippersnapper. But wait, there's more. There's 20 development boards that work with Whippersnapper IO. Brett has been really busy with this. We also have been adding more folks on the team. There's a lot more devices coming. So the boards right now that if you want to start checking this out, anyone can add boards. But right now, the Raspberry Pi ECOW, the Feather Hazai SB32, the SB32 S2 Feather, the reverse TFT Feather, the TFT Feather, the Feather with no PSRAM, the two megabyte PSRAM, the TFT Feather, the S3 TFT Feather, the V2 Feather, the Hazai, like it just goes on and on and on and on. A lot of Adafruit's, but remember, if people want to submit their own boards, it's really easy. We don't have to support just our boards. We're very happy to support others. As long as it's within Platform IO, which I think, like, you know, anything that's ESP32 is definitely in there, please submit it. You know, check CircuitPython, we have a tutorial on how to do it. We would love to support other people's hardware. I just we're just so busy checking our own bugs. We haven't gone around. So this is much like what we did with CircuitPython. There is more non-Adafruit boards than Adafruit boards. So Whippersnapper, you know, there'll be Arduino boards in there. There'll be a lot of non-Adafruit boards. That's why we did that. If you look at the other IO or cloud services, you're locked to their hardware. We're not doing that because that's how we are. Okay, it's open source hardware news. Speaking of, we were a little behind with our certifications, but we're getting caught up. I think we have 590 plus Oshawa certify boards. We definitely have like, we're up to like 600. We have to like submit them. Yeah, we got caught just in a backlog. But they're happening. Yeah. So we're going to try to do it as we have new products come out. We're going to do certification then, not try to batch them out because I think that might work out. And again, like if you've been watching the show, the reason we do this is a lot of, I'm seeing a lot of people say how they, we love open source. We love users, but then everything's actually closed and hard to do. If you really like users, then you can send the signal, which is here's all the stuff in a way that you can use it without ever talking to us ever again. What's the phrase? If you love one set and free, if you love your users, free the files. So we have these guides, but I have one video talking about the guides we put up. Yeah, we have some guides this week. Liz wrote up a guide for the TSC 2046. It's an SPI who's the touch screen controller. We also have the TSC 2007, which is the I squared C version. We're going to be using these in some coming up boards. They are a replacement for the TMPE, STMPE 610 and 811, which discontinued over COVID, very sad. We also have this cool, like several prop maker build using the new prop maker RP2040, which makes this build much, much easier than before. The print is much easier to put together. There's a lot less soldering. It's only like three or four solder points. So it's much easier for beginners. I can say it's actually a beginner project now, worth before it kind of wasn't. Everything's integrated. And of course, the speakers, also digital speakers, the quality of the audio is much better. And the Kenny also wrote up a guide for the analog devices featherwing. It was an older product, but we never got a guide for it, even though we have guides for the individual sensors. Now we just have like one tutorial that covers both. And also Kenny wrapped up the ESP32 S2 reverse TFT feather guide. We didn't have the circuit path on essentials. Now we do. Okay, we have a video that I thought we would play. It's from the MIDI project. In this project, you'll build a MIDI controller that uses 16 rotary encoders to send MIDI control change messages. Inside the case is a feather RP2040 running circuit Python code. The rotary encoders are soldered to quad rotary encoder breakouts connected over I2C. The interrupt pins on the breakouts are being used so that the iSquared C port doesn't have to be constantly pulled to check for any rotary encoder movement. This makes reading the rotary encoders a lot faster. The MIDI featherwing lets you use a traditional DIN5 MIDI cable to connect to your music gear. A lot of music gear has MIDI functionality for controlling various parameters, like this guitar pedal. In this demo, the MIDI messages are changing the selected effect, which is otherwise controlled by one of the toggle switches. You can update the circuit Python code to use MIDI messages for your preferred effects pedal, synth, or noisemaker. To see how you can build your own, check out the learn guide at learn.adafruit.com. And rolling right into some manufacturing. That's factory footage this week. Let's do some 3D printing. We're going to roll right in to speed up IMPI after that, the new products, top secret. Resume in. Become a Jedi or Sith and build your own lightsaber with 3D printing and electronics from Adafruit. Powered by Adafruit's RP2040 prop maker feather, this iconic prop just got a whole lot better. The all-in-one dev board is engineered for making props with motion activated lights and sounds with better sounding digital audio and a lot less soldering. It's our easiest build yet. This new lightsaber features a color changing mode, so you can experience a new vibe whenever the mood strikes. The RP2040 prop maker feather is Adafruit's best dev board for your next prop build. Featuring the RP2040 chip, it's got a three watt digital I2S amp for excellent audio quality, NeoPixel driver, and USB-C for battery charging and programming. The hilt was redesigned to be more ergonomic and the parts screwed together for an easier assembly. The pommel can be unscrewed and the feather slides out of the hilt for reprogramming or charging the battery. The parts can be 3D printed without any supports using filament or you can 3D print them with a resin-based 3D printer. If you don't own a 3D printer, you can use an online 3D printing service. We had these parts printed on an SLA 3D printer using black resin. The service also sanded the parts for a smooth matte finish and the parts only cost us 30 US dollars. The CAD model is open source and parametric, so you can customize the design or use the models of electronics to create your own. Programmed in CircuitPython, the code, libraries, and audio files are all accessible, making it customizable on just about any computer. The onboard accelerometer is used to read movement and tap detection for the swings and hits. The button uses the debounce library so that a long or short press can be used for cycling between the different modes. Long press to go in and out of the color changing mode. The background audio lets you know when it's active and the RGB LED matches the color of the neopixels. Just plug in a USB-C cable to start charging and the feather shows up like a USB drive making programming much more accessible. We think CircuitPython is the best for making advanced props even if you're just getting started. To learn how to build your own, check out the guide at learn.aderfruit.com. We had a great time remaking this project and brought it to Star Wars Galaxy's Edge at Disney World. Being able to go from Jedi to Sith was super fun and the kids really enjoyed cosplaying with it. We hope this inspires you to check out the ARPY2040 Prop Maker Feather for your next project. This is a generic image, the one we've got actually triggers off of DC at a lower voltage, but Digikey carries a lot of relays. I kind of wanted the relay section, they have like 30,000 different options and relays look usually something like this. Crichton, since I don't have non-salt state relays that they only make those, but this is a mechanical relay and this image from the Digikey site shows on the right you have an electromagnet and when current goes through that copperish coil it turns into a magnet which then pulls the two flanges on the right together and make the contact bridge. They join together thus connecting the circuit. People have been using electromagnetic relays for a very, very long time and they're inexpensive and again there's hundreds of thousands of them available, different sizes, configurations, currents, etc. They can switch AC or DC, all's good, but there's one, there's actually two kind of big deal problems with mechanical relays. One is that, and this is the one that happens the most, is they have to be replaced after a while because the contact are only weighted for a certain amount of clanks, connections and disconnections. After a while, especially if you're switching high currents and high voltages, you'll get arcing on the contacts and the contacts, even if they're gold plated, will eventually start corroding. You see this is an image from Wikipedia on the right, on the middle left, that's what a clean contact set looks like on the middle right. That's what corroded contacts look like and so a lot of relays are designed to be plugged in, to unplug them basically and replace them when they've reached their life limit. So often you know when you're like, oh the local stop lights stop working, it's because the relays inside broke and they just have to be replaced. The other thing with mechanical relays is they're slow, like the electromagnetic has to turn on and then the magnet has to pull that flange of metal over from left to the right and so they're not fast. You can't for example use them to like PWM to dim lights or dim high power heaters or whatever. You can only use them to turn on and off, which is again fine but sometimes you want more control and that's where an SSR comes in. So there are a lot, there's many families from the, in sizes from Criedin, Sinsada. We're going to just talk about series one, but they have a couple different variations. Some of them can do AC, some of them do DC, some of them do have back-to-back SCRs and some of them have thyristors and you know they have documentation showing all the differences between why you might want one or the other and these are often used in you know robotics, automotive, automation where you're switching huge amounts of current. For example you know we had our oven serviced only about a month ago so you have to open up the oven and you can see on the bottom there those blue things, if we zoom in, those are the controllers for the heating elements which are you know like up to 100 amps total across all of the different heating zones. So these are like you know easily 20, 40 amps at 200 plus volts. You can see the you know hoppy puck style relay down there, each blue one wired up to each set of heaters, multiple heaters for top and bottom. So not surprising that these SSRs, you want something that's reliable that can switch a huge amount of current and won't fail on you, especially you don't want an oven to fail and the contact sticks and then it like stays on, that's no good. This latest family from Crydom has a couple you know nice nice these added basically improving thermal performances and making you know cables the internal connection thicker. So inside this hockey puck design is a circuit board that has you know an opto isolator and circuitry that will switch on and off the AC current output. So you know the inside of it is not that complicated so you want something, you basically want to make sure that you have one that's easy to heat sink, has good accessories, fits well, is designed safely. Some things I like is that you know the top left they have anti-rotation barriers on the terminal blocks and on the back they have a really nice flat area for the heat sink to connect, we'll talk about. So if you look for the this family of SSRs at Digikey, there's about 3000 options. Again we're only going to talk about like one in particular but all of them have very similar setups. You know you want to make sure that you're it's rated for your voltage input and output and particularly some of them only do AC, some of them can do DC as well. You'll see here like the wiring diagram that shows the inside of it and then you can have the load on either side but they are opto isolated which is kind of nice and a lot of them you can drive from little as three volts DC. You tend to be able to drive them from DC or AC but the output sometimes you can only drive AC depending on what's inside. For example this one that we know the one I picked can do up to 280 volts AC up to 90 amps and can be controlled from three to 32 volts. There's two output types there's the zero cross and instantaneous. It is easier on everybody if you only switch current on or off on the zero crossing or at least you know switch off on the zero crossing switch on the zero crossing because then you don't have as much in-wash current. However there are sometimes where you might want to turn on or off in the middle of the cycle and so some are kind of set up to do one or the other it's another one the configurations that's often set up. All these have the same kind of chassis mount and they have different current ratings you're going to pay more for bigger current ratings so they start at 10 amps they go up to 125 amps but each one of them has basically the same forward voltage and that's the thing you have to watch out for when using SSRs. One thing that's nice about relays is besides just being inexpensive and plentiful is they don't need heat sinking because the contact resistance is nearly negligible there's no circuitry inside so you don't have a forward voltage drop you don't want to drop across it whereas these if you see kind of on the top area middle they save a maximum on state voltage drop at rated current 1.15 so that's 1.15 ohms which means that as you are at volts which means as your current goes up you have 10 amps now your peak dissipation is 11.5 watts up to 100 amps now you're talking about 100 and sorry 115 watts that you might have to dissipate and these come up to 90 amps so yeah we're talking about 100 watt dissipation and the circuitry inside definitely definitely cannot handle dissipating that much current through the past transistors on the output so what you definitely need to do is have heat sinking for them and that's a very common issue with SSRs is you know you're like how come I can't control the current that I think I can it's because you're not dissipating the current off of it you're not dissipating the power off of the the body of the SSRs so crydom has some documentation showing here's how you do the calculation you basically treat it like it you know it's a transistor which is very mechanically large maybe I'll show it on the overhead real fast because I happen to have this so this is the really I just got the you know it's only I think 25 25 amps out maximum the 1225 low voltage input high up only up to 100 yeah so the 12 here is 120 volt AC and 25 amps so this is kind of the least expensive most common for basic American or Japanese power and then on the back you see you use these to bolt onto here and this is your nice flat heat sink surface so don't forget to also pick up a heat sink and they come in different sizes for the different amount of degrees per watt you'll need to dissipate do the math right you don't you can get away with looks like the HS 172 if you're only just paying 10 watts but if you're doing you know 100 watts maybe I'll have to check out that HS 20 201 dr the gigantic thing in the middle there they're gonna be more expensive the bigger they are so and of course they'll take up more mechanical space I have so far not seen any actively cooled SSRs I think that they're not done because it's just another thing that could possibly go wrong with your setup okay next up they also have covers yes I actually got one this is quite nice cheap SSRs don't come with covers some of these you know the SSRs actually come with them already attached in but I really like it it's a nice clear safety cover protect you from the SSR it's high voltage and protect the SSR from you you don't want your oily fingers getting all over the contacts and possibly loosening them that's no good so this is the one I picked you know but there's a gigantic family of them but this is the 25 watts that's our 25 amp 120 volt AC version what I particularly liked about it is you can control it from as little as three volts DC we have a video that they post showing how to test it which is a common thing I've seen from people they're like I understand there's no I'm doing oh you know I'm doing a contact measurement using an oh meter on the output when I switch it and I'm not getting a beep why not because it's solid state it's not mechanical uh so let's check out the video yeah longest video um for this segment but we think it's worth it really good so watch it welcome to this edition of Crydom Tech Lab one of the most common questions we received through Crydom Tech support is how does one perform a simple operational on-off test on a solid state relay we will demonstrate such a test here today unlike electromechanical relays that can be giving a basic test with a continuity checker or oh meter solid state relays SSRs require a minimum amount of load current to switch testing with a meter does not present enough of a load on the SSR to allow it to turn on and there is no mechanical contact closure within to show continuity on the meter additionally since an SSR is by definition a relay with no moving parts there is no audible click to provide confirmation that the input is actuating the output all of that being said the basic setup and operational bench testing of an SSR is quite simple note that line voltage will be present during this test on various terminals so be careful for this demonstration we'll be testing a crydom d2450 this is a dc input 240 volt 50 amp ac output ssr since this particular relay output is usable on ac line voltages from 24 to 280 volts ac and requires only a minimum load current of 40 milliamps using a standard 25 watt lamp and a 120 volt source is perfectly adequate the wiring is quite simple here are the connections one side of the 120 volt ac line goes to one of the ssr output terminals it doesn't matter which either number one or number two the other side of the solid state relay goes to one side of the load and the other side of the load comes back to the other remaining ac line connection for testing purposes there is no particular attention needed for hot or neutral connections a solid state relay will switch either leg the last item needed is the input power signal with a 3 to 32 volt dc input ssr such as the crydom d2450 a single good 9 volt battery is a convenient input source just be sure to observe the polarity the plus of the 9 volt battery needs to go to the plus terminal number three of the relay input if the ssr to be tested is an ac input type rather than a dc input as this is the input signal would of course need to be the appropriate voltage the first test step is to simply apply the line voltage while observing the lamp with the d2450 being a normally open relay the lamp should remain off when power is first applied if the lamp is on at this step then the output of the ssr is shorted and therefore bad if the lamp is off the next step is to see if the output will switch on when the input is applied by touching the 9 volt battery terminals to the input terminals of the relay the lamp should come on if the ssr is good removing and applying the battery should correspondingly flash the lamp on and off as seen here this solid state relay passes the basic operational tests there are many more detailed tests that are performed on ssr's at the factory during production but a simple bench test perform as shown provides a quick indication of ssr operation we hope this has been helpful thanks for watching this edition of crydom tech lab okay resuming resuming we have a couple of they're not out yet they're coming soon but i wanted to fill them off um one is i've got this pc joystick to c-cell converter so if you have one of these old school joysticks and you want to click to i squared c uh you'll be able to do it with this breakout board that has an at tiny that acts as a c-cell converter so you do the analog grades for the joystick and the buttons as well it's also irq and it's like fully assembled and you just plug in your joystick so it's coming soon next week we'll have a death this would have been the star we'll have them in shortly but this is hot off the press yes these also came in and uh this equals a little nutty so i didn't get to make the tester yet but coming soon is the metro rp 2040 uh it's got your rp 2040 chip it's got two ways of doing debug either the pico probe or the swd port it's got the arduino shape usb type c for programming and upload of all the arduino pins plus um spi i squared c uh dc inputs uh six to twelve volts micro sd card um we're also wiring up for sd i o for people want to do sd i o configuration stuff uh neopixel onboard um i mentioned 16 megabytes of flash the buttons are on the edges and a funky thing because um i wanted to make sure that you could either use the metro with um a numeric pin order zero one two three four five six seven through 13 or logical pin order where the first two pins usually d zero and d one are the hardware serial um there's a little switch so you can slide and switch the orientation of them um also an on off switch for the dc jack so you know basically you want to upgrade your um metro designs you have something that's you need the arduino shape you want to use a shield with it but you want the power and flexibility of the rp 2040 with all those pios this would be great so coming next week jump right in the top secret then we're gonna do some questions then we're outy we're gonna play two quick videos lady is gonna talk about what's on the other side you're gonna like this one here we go related to what is this it's 10 o'clock at night do you know where your hardware is will you will when you have this rtk board this is a precision gps uh and real-time kinematics location shield that we've designed here um so i got two of them i don't even talk about how expensive these are so it's really stressful when i first plugged in the usb and i was like i really hope it enumerates um but this actually has native usb and i've got it connected here i soldered on a or yeah sorry an sma connector and this is going to a u blocks antenna that's out the window thankfully windows are too far away from my desk and you can see i've even got pulse per second rtk signal and then um what's interesting is that this just shows up as like a comport and then over here i've got the u blocks u center and you can see it's seeing satellites and data so a really good start um next up i have to figure out how to connect you know one of these a base station to one of these as a rover and communicate between the two um i might use our new metro s3 as the transport layer so you know solder this on top and then um use this either esp now perhaps or wi-fi or bluetooth low energy to transport the rtk data between the two and then um they can tell exactly how far apart they are so uh just started like five minutes ago just put this in but thankfully um we're off to a good start early data was this this is a uh five h 800 by 480 display and it's connected up to an icn 6211 this is a very interesting chip it's not very well documented but what it does is it takes dsi so mippy signal and converts them to rgbtl so it's got like eight bit red a bit green a bit blue v-sync h-sync data navel on off all that good stuff pixel clock so normally you know if we were going to drive a display like this from a raspberry pi you either connect to the hgmi port which means you need an hgmi to ttl converter and that's like the rtd 2662 and friends or like a tfp 401 but what's nice about this chip is it doesn't use any of the gpio like they're not connected it doesn't use the hgmi um and you still get a really good quality video and it's just only two bucks so um this is a fun little demo coming soon to the aid of free shop okay so uh this is a photo from us but this is the the board why is this a big deal uh this is cool because um you know historically if you wanted to connect displays to a compute module board or as we pie you'd have to use either all the dpi pens all the gpio to connect to dpi display or hgmi which requires like a high power hgmi to ttl converter um there are existing projects that use this icn 6211 to convert dsi to ttl but like none of them are open source and documented none of them are going to make it easy for you to add your own screen i want to get easy so i'm going to open source everything in publish and document it um i don't know if i'm going to release this particular deck board i might just to be like hey for folks who really want to experiment you'll need to connect all the pens and ports together as you desire explore board but explore maybe some of the icn explorer board but um this is for standard ttl and then i also have a version for um the other 40-pin uh version which um requires an onboard microcontroller to um set the spi commands to turn the display on it's like two standards apparently so well i'm learning a lot isn't this there's a lot of like this is so terrible for everyone how could they do this to human beings wait we could maybe fix this yeah and soon that's yeah it's happening okay questions they're lined up we're gonna do this okay question question question yeah here we go um what's a normal lifespan of a good relay i think it's like a hundred thousand maybe ten thousand clicks i don't know but it's gonna be in the datasheet for sure okay it's like the mean time between failure you were working on some updates to the my little hacker board what's the latest of these getting into the store the latest of these is um scott is wrapping up usb host and then we're gonna work on the wi-fi workflow i want to get that a little bit better um the board is like pretty much done um the only thing is like you know some people are like oh i had to you know we had bill smith had yeah he's like oh i had to cut some of the plastic and so my thing is like should i try to redesign it to move the wi-fi modules you don't have to cut this little piece of plastic or just say like hey you got a cut a piece of plastic i don't know but we're sign up i want to give you updates when um it's close software and hardware okay um for the aideford io ssl cert stuff so the airlift what do they need to do they need to get another cert yes so the root certificate changed this year which was not expected we didn't know that was going to happen um normally the certificate does not change only the main ssl certificate changes but nobody notices uh because you have the root certificate and so you have the chain of trust but the root cert changed it happens every 10 15 years this was the year it happened so you'll need to update uh if you're um running an airlift and you want to use aideford io you'll need to update the nina firmware but there's a guide on how to do it and i think we just did a release of 176 um so follow that tutorial to update the esp 32 and you'll be good for another 10 years okay and then i saw that jenny may was asking about um a uh music playing and an audio jack thing with uh reservoir reservoir looks like they got help in the chat but if there's any follow-ups jenny um let us know in the chat you can also you know stop by on the forums or whatever but it looks like someone had to answer your question already um next up will we be interested or open to designing and manufacturing the official defcon badge in the future maybe it's one of those things where like we don't do contract manufacturing but we're always interested in something maybe if it's super weird or it's using like an advanced chip just yeah let us know we'll be i started it's an electronic badge this year we guess we'll find i don't know what the official badge is yeah um but i'll give you one example so the open source folks they did an event they contact us like a couple weeks right before the event they're like would you do a badge and it's like there's just no time to it wouldn't be fair to our team and it wouldn't be fair to them so grand starts the year the when defcon ends he starts finding the next year's badge but i feel like at this point with the supply chain that's a little bit more reliable i think you know if if you start now the answer is closer to yes than if you ask us in june um and then any updates on the titty rex pin hacking guide yeah um we have a bunch going on i know dale is working on the dale smith is working on his guide and arin is working on her guide which is actually ticking the innards of the titty rex pin and putting it into a different toy um but yeah that's got the guides are actually being written like right now this should be on a couple weeks yeah i did see someone on the socials they i think they're using our stuff to mod the eyes and also the voice and it had like a pulsating uh like red eyes the the code is in github it's called s and x rom it's in it's in our github if you just search for s and x rom you can mess with it now and you can totally mess with it but we don't have step-by-step instructions yet okay okay all the questions okay best of folks what a day it's been it yeah if i told y'all what was also going on just like regular running on a business and then all the stuff that's happening in the world and then sometimes we get asked to to help out in some pretty gnarly situations and we do some i was telling a ruin meeting before the uh show started and uh i dated myself because i'm like do you ever see quantum leap and like scott macula would like jump into this body in the past and try to make all the wrongs in history right sometimes i feel like that and it's terrible because there's a lot of wrongs and um we try to fix them and everything but man um it's uh not great to see people be terrible to each other but i'm i'm glad uh we're able to help when we can um sometimes it's a technology solution sometimes it's mediating a dispute sometimes it's saying hey like you got to be better to one another and i guess uh i guess it's it's they mean something different when it comes from army i don't know we're gonna stop doing what we do i guess that we're doing but boy it's been a week already so we'll see everybody yeah we'll be uh we'll be back we'll be back uh we'll see everybody next week this has been a native fruit production all i want is wing stop wing stop no uh we'll see everybody name squid in the yeah i will yeah weed yeah and uh here's the moment is here we get to each other