 Hi, on NPI. This week, a return favorite. Molex, Lady Aida, what is the I on NPI? This week, brought to you by Digikey. OK, this week, we're featuring Molex, again, known for great cables, great connectors. And they have put together a first robotic competition cable kit specifically for people doing first robotics. But, hey, secret between you, me, and the rest of the internet. This is actually a pretty good deal on a whole bunch of cables that can be used for any kind of robotics, or mechatronics, or sensor, or sensing, or interfacing projects. It doesn't have to, you can buy it even if you're not in first. But if you're in first, I think it's going to be very handy. So I thought this was a nice partnership in a good way from Molex to help out kids doing first robotics. So this is the SL Modular Connectors and Cables Kit. It's a box that is full of 20 different cables that are kind of common SL Modular, easy plug, 2.54 millimeter pitch, 0.1 inch pitch connectors. I'll show the cable kit, but there's sockets and plugs. And what I thought was nice about this was Molex also sponsors a bunch of first robotics teams. And they have resources available. So check it out. They sponsor like seven teams. And they have documentation on how to use these cables and connectors. And for the robots that I've built and worked on, and I didn't work on first robotics. I'm a little too old for that. But at school, we did have a mini robotics club. And one thing I learned really quickly is that you can have the best code and the most machined hardware and the strongest motors. But if you have one misconnected cable, your entire robot doesn't work. And the vibration and motion and twisting of robotics is really tough on cables. And so you don't want to have really solid, well-connected sensors, motors, power supplies, batteries, et cetera, so that you don't end up in competition and then everything breaks because something came loose. So they're using the SL Modular kit, which I like. It has this little latching connector option. The current capability of the connector is 3 amps, which is great. The pitch is 0.1 inch, which is also really great. It's very easy to use. You can quickly prototype with headers and off-the-shelf cables and then upgrade to these finished cables with latches when you're done. So good for signal and some low power. And we do have a video on crimping. And so traditionally, if people were going to make custom cables, at least when I grew up, I was like, oh, well, you get a crimper and you get some wire and you make your own cables and you just buy like 100 connectors and you just sit down and you crimp them. But the problem is that, as I'm kind of older, it's like I want to crimp less because crimping is actually really, really hard. Crimping with needle-nose pliers is kind of the first thing people do. And it's like maybe one out of five end up working really well. And then if you get the proper hand crimp tool, that'll get you farther. But you're still going to probably only have two thirds of your crimps work out correctly. And if you don't get it right the first time, you can't like re-crimp. You have to kind of start over. And sometimes you have to even re-cut and re-strip the wire. Re-crippin. That's the worst of re-crippin. So buying pre-crimped cables is the way to go. In fact, here at Adafruit, we have not for the SL Molex kits, but we have some basic premium header kits where you get pre-crimped raw wires and you get housings that you plug the wires into. And that's what you've got in this Molex kit as well. Now, some cables that they pre-made, they have a bunch of different lengths. Each one's documented in the datasheet. Let's check it out. There's different lengths and they're all wired with these nice zip tie bindings. There's just a bunch of different items. I mean, you can see here there's like 20 different items in the kit. So they have like a little bit of everything. But altogether it's enough to get a small robot going. Like you might need two or three boxes for a larger robot. But for like a small Lego-ish desktop bot, the size of like a small cat or something, this is an official robot size. This kit will work great. And it's in stock at DigiKey. And as it goes into chat, crimp and eight easy. So do check it out in DigiKey. And we have a little video we're gonna show. We're gonna video and they can also show, the video is quite long. So we're just gonna show like a minute and a half and then I'll show what's in the box after. Let's jump in and get started talking about the first robotics programs, the products that we work with to try to help students. So here at Molex, we wanted to find a way that we could make it easier for teams to use our connectors and build their robots, not only prototype, but learn more about how to use our connector systems and do it efficiently and faster. And we started, so what we did was we talked to a lot of different teams out there. And we said, what are the challenges that you run into when trying to build cable assemblies? And what we were told is most teams are trying to use a hand tool to cut raw wire, crimp and poke those cable assemblies into the housings and then it's still a connection system. And so we started talking to teams about what are the most common connectors they use and one of them that they selected was the XL connector system. And that's the one that we decided to use for our kits that we offer. Alan, could you tell me a little bit about how, why so popular for teams to use the SL connector system? So the SL connector system uses 2.54 millimeter pitch and that complies with the first robotics guidelines. In addition, one of the more common gauges for the wires is 22 gauge and it can go as small as 30 gauge. So this is one of those rare connector systems that has a very wide range of gauges. And when I say gauge, I'm talking about the American wire gauge standard AWG. Okay, and you wanted to show this off? Yes, let's go to the overhead. Okay, so this is what you get, SL Modular Concern Cable Kit, First Robotics branded, and then you go to the website, more info. And I did open the bags, so like these all came in bags that I have opened, so they don't actually come loose. This is like a cooking show. We did some preparation before the show. So you've got some nice three pin extender cables here. You've got also, like I said, some raw cables. These have sockets and plugs and these are like really nice, these are like really nice cramps. Like I can just kind of tell by feeling them. Like these are solid, crimpy pieces, and then these are the SL Modular housings that you can plug the cables into. They do give you some crimp ends if you wanted to go down that path, which I don't recommend. A bunch of these extender cables. So I think it's like, you know, once you've got your cable going, if you need to extend it a bunch. Extender is another longer raw version, another raw version, so like two shorter ones and one longer one. A bunch of just like power cable and then some more housings and then one like cut wire. So there's like, oh sorry, now this is a very short extender cable. So a bunch of different options. And here, don't forget, you can cut and solder these wires. Like it's easier to cut and solder and then heat shrink cables than trying to read crimp wire. So that's what I recommend. But this is like a good little like sensor servo extender kit. Nice durable wires, nice thick gauges. And they all have this nice zip tie keeping the cables together. But you can always cut it if you want to like spread the wires out. All right. And that is this week's IonMPI. IonMPI.