 The time is really, life in New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody, welcome to Ask an Engineer. The most fun you can have other than playing Dungeons and Dragons with Clear Dice or making your own talking clock. It's Ask an Engineer. We're gonna be talking about electronics, new products, 3D printing, videos, open source hardware. It's not out yet. It's one of our biggest shows ever. This is a jam-packed show. So we're gonna get right into it. Mr. Laviado, what's the code? Oh, okay, the code is MetroNXP. The reason is we're gonna debut this. This is a really cool board. 10% off the native food store all the way up to midnight, use it or lose it. Talk about some of our live show, show and tell just happened. Thank you, Liz, for hosting. Do a little bit of recap and desk lady it and including the great search and play a video from JP's product about pick of the week. Little reminder of some things that we do every single week during our time travel segment. We have a very special video mailbag, someone who makes electronics, shared a video. We're gonna play it. RetroTech, we have a cool, weird, clacky keyboard that happens to be in the Smithsonian. We have one too. Some New York City factory footage right here in New York. We got some 3D printing. We're gonna do IonMPI. That's brought to you by DigiKey. This week it's TE. And a lot of top secret. A lot of new products. We'll answer your questions. We do that over on Discord, atiford.it slash Discord, where we answer all of your questions and we'll answer all of them either throughout the show or at the end. Let's dive right in. Don't forget code is MetroNXP Ladyita. People get free stuff. What did they get? Yes, we still have freebies. We've got that new coaster, $99 or more. You get a beautiful PCB coaster with gold print design and rubber bumpers. Have you had more than one? Perfect. Now you have like a full set. $149 or more. We've got the KB2040 all-in-one dev board that is RP2040 based and pro micro pinout compatible. It's great for keyboards or any other kind of micro controller projects. We've got free UPS shipping back and any order over $199 or it's a $200. We got UPS back for now. So. And if you're not hitting the free tier, that's okay. Our UPS rates are better than they have been in three years because we negotiated and they matched the rates we were getting from Atherix. So good news for all of you. And Circuit Playground Expresses are still being given away orders over $299. That will end soon. So we're going to be switching it out with something else. But for now, you can get our all-in-one SOBL, wearable, hackable, Algetter Climable sensor board that runs code.org, CS Discoveries, MicroPython, CircuitPython, MakeCode, MicroLisp, Arduino. Yeah, so when someone gets all like, oh, there's the best programming language. Well, we make boards that pretty much runs them all. We don't even want to rest on this. They've got to build for the SAMD21. All right, we did a bunch of live shows. We've been publishing so much and so much has been going on. Special thanks to Liz, who hosted the Show and Tell. We were watching it from this side. You can see a ton of cool projects. Somebody came back to the Show and Tell. Yay! A cool repair mod on this recorder that's kind of neat. And then Make has a new cosplay episode. They're doing a stream about the new issue and there's going to be a streaming event. So you can check it out as a cosplay make. And I remember when I was at Make and I was always a little too ahead of what I thought should be on the covers and everything. And I was like, hey, we should do a cosplay thing. And I was like, what's that? So this is fantastic. And also to be honest, it's kind of a better time to cosplay anyways. And it's really hard to do electronics and wearables. And all the things that are kind of easy to do now. So I'm looking forward to that issue and see in the stream. We do just the lady at every single Sunday. What did you show this week? This week I was showing off some of these cool, weird displays. We're going to talk about those more round displays, square displays, bar displays. I've been designing a board that uses the ESP32S3 which has RGB TTL display output. And so I showed some mistakes I made, how I modified the board to make it work, and then some animation playback using Arduino GFX library. And I also showed one of the time consuming tasks of adding new displays is you have to take this init code and put it into the right format. And it's just like a lot of like hand editing. And so Mr. Lady, I had the idea of like, well, why don't you just chat to your PT for it? And I was like, there's no way that'll work. But I actually did, I gave it a C code and there's like a code analyzer function now on chat GPT version four. So you do have to have a paid account. But then I said, hey, take this, rewrite every C function for me, we format it and give it to me in this other format. And it did. And I even see like, there's something that didn't work quite well. So it's an iterative learning process but it does do a good job now. Now I know how to do it. I've got like a bunch of displays. And we have like our narrative that we talk about as well, it's like some, there's polarization about these tools like AI is gonna take all our jobs, gonna kill us all. It's the best thing ever. We're gonna have Star Trek Utopia. So we have an editorial section. I'll get into that as we do some other things on the show tonight. Where anytime we use any of these tools we disclose which one we use, we say here's the time date. So far we only use it with our stuff. And a specific example is we'll see our code everywhere in these AI tools. And that's interesting. But we also wanna be able to use it, like have it interact with our stuff. So like when I downloaded a dataset to look into my dataset. So anyways, right tool for right job sometimes. So we're exploring this. You could see how an engineer is using it for some physical hardware kind of cool stuff. And then we do the great search. So the great search is I'm waiting to hopefully find stuff on digikey.com. What did you help people find this week? This is a good one for retro people. So we had some folks email and say, hey, how do you find replacement capacitors for these old retro devices? The companies that made these capacitors don't exist or the markings are really confusing and unclear. And I found that Digikey has a really good tech forum post where they actually go through stuff I didn't know about how you determine what capacitor it is so you can like replace any bus of capacitors. Cause after like 10, 20 years, they start to dry out especially if they haven't been used for a long time. It's very common to open up an old device and find that the capacitors have been damaged or they're shorted tantalums as well. Maybe we'll need tantalums next time. So check out this video. I actually live show replacing a couple of different capacitors. And also I paced the thread where you can go through and you can play a little quiz game where you like look at the image and quickly like with your newfound knowledge figure out what can't capacitor it is the capacitance and the voltage code for it. Okay. JP's back and did a product pick of the week take it away at JP. Here's this week's highlight. It is the audio BFF. This is for Qtipi and JOW boards and it gives you both a micro SD card reader and an I2S 3 watt amplifier. So it is perfect for plugging in a small speaker and playing audio files with this just stuck right onto the belly side of a Qtipi. There's a little micro SD card there with a bunch of audio samples from the video game portal. Hello and again, welcome to the Aperture Science Computer Aided Enrichment Center. Wait now and take will be served immediately. What I can do is take that SD card out, grab a different SD card with different samples. I'm just gonna slide that in, reset the code and now I have totally different set of sound effects. It is the audio BFF for Qtipi and JOW. Okay, and don't forget JP's workshop is tomorrow. On Fridays, you might catch a deep dive with Tim or it'll be a deep dive with Scott. That's every single Friday at 2 p.m. Let's try one. There's a bunch of news that some of them are not going to say. I'm gonna probably talk about it next week. Just one mention though, Microsoft is gonna stop selling the Kinect and we have a long history with Kinect, Google Kinect. Adafrit, we did a bounty for people to hack the Kinect. It ignited an entire industry around using the Kinect for things it was used in like all sorts of like clinical medical settings. You name it, it was just used for absolutely everything. It was a low cost, amazing scatter sensor. We went to an art exhibit during Christmas, it was an art, like an LED art, Christmas holiday time exhibit down at the seaport and we went down there and like every other project was like, oh, that's a Kinect, that's a Kinect. And you know, you have a big impact on something when the tech sites are writing a post-mortem and like there was so many projects that Microsoft helped out with the Kinect. They were threatening to sue us at first. This is a very different Microsoft than it was 10 years ago. They were telling us that if we kept pushing for this to be reverse engineers or we're gonna sue. And so what did we do? We just raised a bounty. So eventually on Science Friday with Ira Flado, the head of whoever is at Microsoft is like, okay, we're not gonna go after those weirdos in New York. Downside is all the articles completely erased Adafrit's role in it. Like always, that's fine. We did good. It should be. Yeah. And so, you know, I kind of, there was an interview with Jack White from the White Stripes and they're like, how do you feel about, you know, your songs being used in anthems? And he's like, it's not mine anymore. It's like, you know, it's the communities. It's like, it's someone else's. It's, it's all over. Were you gonna cut 30,000 British dollars to sing your song? Well, I'm just like, you know, sometimes when you make something, if you really wanna succeed, you just have to let it go. And we did that. And anyways, I thought it was cool. So the Kinect is no longer for sale. And then if you look across our socials, every single day, almost, we do PCB of the day. These are from our TikTok. If you're interested in seeing the PCB that we recently redesigned because of chip shortage, you can catch that almost every day. We try to do these Monday through Friday and some little vignettes. Is that right? Yeah, vignettes. Vignettes of some of the work that we do and some of the applications these things have. I like how like the music is different every day or like the style and the music is different. Depending on your mood, you're like kind of like an 80s mood day. If you miss MTV, this is for you. And then... Letters, we get letters. We get tweets and we get emails. Okay, this is a very special mail bag. Normally, the mail bag is an email to us or sometimes a physical letter. Sometimes it's something else. This week though, Joey is doing manufacturing and this is a scene from the sensor watch light manufacturing at Make Augusta. And Joey says, Adafruit, this is a made in Augusta factory footage right down to the thumbs up when test pass. Everything I learned about making a tester I learned from y'all. So we did something super weird. We show how we test electronics and no one does that. And that's kind of the secret dark art of electronics. So Joey posted up a video. I wanted to play this. It's about a minute and a half and it's how they're making electronics. Here in the United States using the things that we shared and Joey implemented. The first thing we do is we get solder paste onto the PCB. Here we use a solder paste printer and it uses a squeegee to squeeze paste through its stencil onto the board. How neat is that? And then we take the board with the solder paste on it and we put it in the machine and we hit the go button. I'm right in there and then clipping all the edge rails. These are nice too because they're the exact right width for these mouse bites. So it gives you a nice clean clip. Sensor watch tester. Press red button to test a board. And we're good. Like I said, this show is packed this week. Retro this week. So we have a backlog of retro hardware. So we have like a mini like Adafruit retro hardware museum. We have a big collection of Clackity keyboards. So this one, I've been meeting the post for a while. This is a Clackity Clacky keyboard from Bloomberg. And as far as I can tell, this is the only mechanical Clacky keyboard. I'll get a cancel one that's in a museum. And this one happens to be and we have the same one coincidence. Didn't didn't know this until I did some fact checking and some more research. But this one's in the Smithsonian. This is Bill Gross's Bloomberg keyboard. And who's Bill Gross? Well, he has a bunch of money and he donated to the museum. So I think that's why I've been in. Yeah. No, really. So no, he did. Bill Gross uses Bloomberg keyboard in his work at Pacific Investment Management during the 1990s and 2000s. The Bloomberg keyboard is similar to other quarter keyboards and it's layout but replaces many of the generic functions with finance specific keys. So you can see it here. There's like Gove button and cancel button. And like it has like a microphone and headphones. I think it can mod this to turn it into like an MP3 player. There's some more. Yeah, it's a speaker. They're definitely interesting. Yeah. And if you want to see more information, it was made by Maxi Switching, Tucson, Arizona. Maxi Sound keyboard. So I wonder if it was like, you know, they made the Maxi Sound and then Bloomberg was like, okay, I want you to make a custom version that like you slap our logo on and like some of the keys are green. Yeah. It looks like return. It's like, when you click hit that return, you're like, I'm buying and selling. There goes a mortgage. You know, sorry everybody. So it's in the museum in natural history, permanent museum. You can check that out. So that is retro for the week this week. Python on hardware. This week is a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big milestone week. Congratulations, the entire community. Everyone who works on the newsletter. And most of all, congratulations and who heads up to newsletter. I used to do it and took it over. We are now up to 250 Python on microcontroller newsletter editions. You can see it every single week. It covers everything Python hardware. It doesn't have to be circuit Python. It's MicroPython. It's regular Python. I'll just like throw like language stuff in there like this or, you know. Yeah. Python in Excel is a thing. There's a lot of Python in our lives when I was doing an article about open hardware certifications. Lots of Python happened to be used for the way I was getting data out. So you can check out all the stuff. There's events that are going on. It's projects that the community is up to. If you want to see what we think is the big trend that's going on in hardware scripting languages on microcontrollers, there is no better resource. So big ups to Ann. It's a lot of work every single week. Doesn't cost anything. There's no ads. We have a completely separate site called Aid for Daily that you can go to and separate because we don't want your customer information mixed up with newsletter stuff because people should sign in to a site to buy stuff and there should be another place for newsletters and more and you shouldn't get spammed. But part two of our Python hardware this week is some circuit Python news. We have, I think, one of the bigger things that's going to change microcontroller is for makers, which is being able to have all sorts of shapes and easy ways to get stuff on display. So Lady, you got a demo this week. Yes. What is going on? Because we've been publishing round displays, squared displays, bar displays. What's going on? What's going on with all these displays and why is it such a big deal? Okay. And why does a little expressive entity have a hat? What's going on? Always friendly. She's friendly. I don't know if it's here. It's friendly. Okay. So if you go to the overhead, I have a demo and this is actually GIF IO. So this is a GIF that is being drawn from the memory inside this one board, one board file. ESP 32 S3 board. And this is a, the S3 has a special peripheral that allows it to drive what are called like dot clock or RGB TTL displays. This display is 720 by 720 pixels. It has capacitive touch as well. Although we don't have that working just yet. We're going to do that next. This is the capacitive touch chip. And you know, basically when you're using displays like the ILI 9341 or ST7781, ST7789, those displays don't get any bigger than 320 by 240. But what if you want to drive like big displays or round displays or bar displays? Those tend to use this 40-pin RGB TTL interface. And not a lot of microcontrollers support them because you did a lot of memory. You have to buffer the entire image. And it's like, you know, getting into the two megabytes of video RAM required. But the ESP 32 S3 has, this one in particular has eight megabytes of PS RAM, which is plenty of PS RAM to have it drive this display. Now you're not going to get like, you know, they're not going to be able to play like, you know, full speed video and it uses almost all the pins. So it's definitely for, you know, if you have a project that's very display focused and you want to drive these large images, large image displays, it's not good for, okay, I want to have I2S also and I also want to have an SD card and I want this display and I want tons of sensors like there is a limitation but this is one of the few, few microcontrollers out there that can even drive these displays. So making it work with circuit Python will make it really, really easy because usually it's quite hard to wire these up and configure them and initialize them. So we're going to have example code for all of them. This is a square display, but, you know, as I mentioned and you'll see right on the show, we have round bar, half round displays, seven inches, you know, high density three inches. We have this gigantic round one that's like, you know, four inch diagonal. So it's like, you know, the size of a dinner plate. It's very interesting stuff because this is, I've had these displays for a while. Actually I had this in my bin for a couple of years waiting until there was a way for me to drive them. Okay. And so stay tuned to pretty much everywhere we publish because it's happening fast. Every day we're making more progress across all these different displays. We have cool new ideas. We have round displays that can do stuff with Wi-Fi. So that's pretty much unlocks everything. It's going to be neat. Yeah. And that is our Python on Hardware News for this week. Don't forget, once again, sign up for the newsletter, deliver it every single week. If you see Ann online, say good work, Ann. Awesome. 250. It's a lot. Yeah. All right. It's time to talk about some open source hardware. Before we go into our learn guides, we are an open source hardware company. I had published an article. It was the changing nature of open source hardware. Basically the article was about how there is companies that were known for doing open source hardware and they seem to be retreating from it, from scrubbing their website with open source to one requiring an NDA for the hardware and but calling it open source. And then there was Prusa, the 3D printing company that said, we're getting cloned, open source is getting eroded, and Ashwa, they should look into this. So I got an interview with just Prusa and did a bunch of research, article made the rounds. There's a pretty well known podcast that might have me on it, but I want to have the people that are experts on it. So that led me to do some research. So the next article just came out, this one is, and I'll just go to the, let's go to the thing. So this is 3D printing, open source, certifying hardware, Ashwa API, China, a way in head. So I got a quote from Ashwa. They said they're looking into it on their own timeline. They're going to be talking to Chinese makers and more there's a summit coming up. So maybe in 2024 we'll hear about that. They are a nonprofit. So they do post minute meetings and maybe some of the updates will appear there. I will check in down the road and see how they're doing. This is obviously something very interesting to everyone who does open source. The interesting thing is the tension or debate is China is ripping off all the open source 3D printers and selling them and not providing anything back. But the data says something different. So when you go to the Ashwa, sorry that's the API, when you go to the Ashwa site for certification, you can just search. And if you type China, there's eight projects and all of them are essentially 3D printers. And that one, the one is February 23. So the Elgo, the CR, the Ender, these are all really well known 3D printers. So it doesn't look like China's just ripping off designs and selling them as closed source commercial things. It looks like they're participating in open source hardware. And I remember, I said the most notable one I remember was Naomi got Creality to publish the source code. And she got and watched her video about how she was talking to them and what was important and how intellectual property is being used in really thoughtful, good ways. So I was like, well, let me really dig into the data here. So the API downloaded the JSON file and this is when we're going to, when you get a key, this is when we're gonna pop into slightly controversial land. I used OpenAI's code tool and I uploaded the JSON file and then I started asking it questions, which was kind of cool. You can press show your work and all that stuff and it'll do Python for you and did some check-in. Looks like it was spot on with the things that I was looking at. And I said, hey, can you analyze this? And it's like, sure, let's analyze this. Here's all the entries. Here's all the things. And the first question I asked is, what are the top 10 countries that certify and how many entries are there for each one? United States of America 1500, Germany 138, Croatia 109, Bulgaria 95, United Kingdom 48, India 47, Spain 36, Mexico 32, Canada 30, Sweden 21. That was interesting. Then it said, well, what are the, what are the categories? I want to know what are the top categories. A little bit of a surprise. I didn't think it was going to be this. Number one electronics knew that one, but 3D printing was number two with IoT being a close second. And then education and science after that. And this is just me asking questions to the data source. Kind of cool. Normally I would try to stumble through some Python and then ultimately ask them more, but I was able to do this. And then I said, oh, for the 175 entries related to printer 3D, what are the top 10 countries they come from? United States has 122 entries and China has eight. So the top two countries that certify open source hardware is US and China. And then I'm like, oh, I wonder what software license everyone's using. So out of the 2,407 entries, 1,348 use the MIT license, which makes sense. I recall folks trying to do research on open source hardware asking me these questions. And I'm like, well, like, I don't know. There's like an API. You can probably ask Browning and stuff. This is like a PhD in a box of masts. And then I'm just like, oh, let me try to be funny. And I said, okay, for the certification dates of the top 10 responsible parties who certify hardware, what's the most popular day of the week? It's Friday with 331 issued on that day. Last thing to do for the weekend. Yeah. And to be fair, that's when someone approves them. It's not when they're submitted. Yeah. And then for the certification dates, what's the most popular month? It's May, which is usually right after the summit. So people go to the open source, the open hardware summit. They go back and I'm like, I'm going to certify myself. And then lastly, look at this chart. You can see, I think this is probably the most interesting chart, which I believe and hope Oshawa will look into, which is, okay, Lullspot. They were a US 3D printing company. These are the top 10. These are the top 10 certifiers. The top 10. And it's like Lullspot. That's a 3D printing company. What happened after 2020? Because they didn't certify any hardware after that. They weren't a good on good flip. Yeah. And then Olamex, they're still doing stuff, kind of slowed down to 2021. They have a couple recently. And then just straight up, it looks like SparkFun had some early certifications. We did a bunch. They did a bunch. We did a bunch. They did a bunch. We did a bunch. And it is, you know, neck and neck, which is great. We have 600. They have slightly less than that. And then there's kind of a longer tail for the rest of the companies. That's healthy. And this is like all stuff that you can do. And for us, and I'll just go back to the original piece here, or the first thing is, so anytime we use AI tools, we'll disclose it. We'll say what version we're using. You can check our editorial standards. But you can also look at, I linked, here's a chart of the certifications and which countries there are. But I also clicked, you know, show your work. Little chat bot. And you can see it imported pandas. It went through this. It figured out the certification date for us. And it did like a linear chart of how soon we would get to a thousand certifications. So, you know, I kind of look at this as like an advanced spell check. I didn't do my work for me. It was the work that I was doing. And I published it and I disclosed it. And I think this is a good way to use these tools. We'll continue to use them this way. We've told our team, if you find these tools useful, just state what you're using and the models or, you know, the link to what it's coming from. And generally speaking, this is all data that's available out there. And we only use it on our data. But I understand that there's folks that have strong opinions about this. So that is the latest update. I might do an article later, I won't say. But the Oshua API is awesome for people that are into open source hardware, trends, where it's being made, certified, and what's important or not next up. So speaking of, we've got a bunch of open source hardware. Yes, we have a lot of guides. What's the big one, just a quick way to do that? This week, we've got a guide from Pete Warden reading QR codes with the teeny code reader. It's a new product that's being announced this or next week. It's a little sensor that has a camera and an iSquared C interface. And you can use it to read QR codes over iSquared C, which is kind of neat. And it uses machine learning, TensorFlow Lite for microcontrollers. And then, of course, knowing Pedro and Philby had this Talking D20 project. They built it many years ago with a Trinket and Arduino, and it was wonderful and everything. But it's much, much easier to build nowadays with a prop maker feather because the accelerometer, the speaker, the data storage for the wave files and all the playback stuff is all handled internally, as well as the battery charging and discharging and monitoring is all handled by a single board. So there's minimal amount of coding that you need to do this. It's a lot simpler and a lot smaller, and the build is really nice and uses magnets to close together. So if it sounds familiar, it's like, yes, we did do this project earlier as an Arduino, but now it's been remade in CircuitPython and it's awesome. And we have a little video later. Melissa went through and has updated the Adafruit Funhouse and other home assistant guides. Apparently there's some change in the home assistant API. So now our stuff continues to work. She also published a major guide that takes what was originally a Raspberry Pi message board and ported it to the Matrix Portal S3. And she was like, yeah, you can pretty much have a complicated message board project with animations and background graphics and alpha blending, all done in CircuitPython so you don't need to get a single board computer. You can use a Matrix Portal S3. And another rebuild that we did, Liz Clark, we made the talking eight o'clock. This is one of our favorite projects that we did. The original project used a wave shield and a data logger shield and Arduino and it was very complicated. It was a complicated build. I mean, at the time it was easier than not using Arduino. But now again, with the PropMaker, it's an all-in-one project, like almost no sudden required, and the audio quality is really good because it uses a digital I2S amplifier. And you can store all the different wave files in any voice. And it's a fun clock just to make a talking clock. Both of us thought it would be great for accessibility. As a simple thing, you press the button. It speaks the time. You can of course change the language or the voice. Also might be good for kids or other people who can't read a clock. So what time is it? You just press the button and it tells you if you can't read digital analog clocks, this will do the job. And then I think, do you want to look cool fast if there's any other guides? I don't think so. Yeah, a couple updates. And the Metro S3 guide went live as well. But also we added Whippersnapper, Tithe Epidemic Whippersnapper support for these, the BME680388 and LPS3. So we've been cranking through those as well. We'll have a Whippersnapper update I think next week. And here's a quick little one minute video about the talking clock. Please. Not sure what time it is. Never quite got the hang of reading an analog clock. The time is 9 o'clock a.m. Ask Adibot by building this talking clock project. Inside is an RP2040 prop maker feather running circuit Python code. The code uses a DS3231 real-time clock breakout connected over I squared C. Whenever you press the button on the top of Adibot's head, he'll announce the current time for you through the speaker. If this project sounds familiar, that's because it's a remake of the fantastic WaveShield talking clock by Phil B. With the release of the RP2040 prop maker feather, it felt like a great time to revisit this idea. Adibot's head is a remix of, well, Adibot's head from the Adibot toy robot friend project. The time is 1.44 p.m. To accommodate the clock electronics, Adibot's head was lengthened and a few mounting holes were added. To see how you can build your own friendly talking robot clock, check out the learn guide at learn.adifruit.com. Time for some factory footage. That's factory footage. Let's do some 3D printing. We're going to play these back to back. This is the now famous electronic talking D20 video and then a speed up with some toes that poke out of crocs. This is the only show that does this. You can roll your own D20 and talking D20 with 3D printing and circuit Python. This is a remake of our classic Arduino project that we respond as a much easier build using the Adafruit RP2040 prop maker feather. The two halves are 3D printed and house the all in one dev board along with a mini speaker, slide switch, and rechargeable battery. The built-in accelerometer detects when it's been rolled and plays an audio file of the number it's landed on. The RP2040 prop maker feather is secured to one half of the D20 and the two snap fit together with neodymium magnets. Phillip Berges, aka Paint Your Dragon, ported his original Arduino code to circuit Python. The face vectors have been remapped to fit the new orientation and features free fall detection using the LIS3DH accelerometer. To learn how to build your own, check out the guide at learn.adafruit.com. The USB-C port is accessible when the D20 is open. Phil B included a nifty feature that tells you when the battery is low so you know when it's time to recharge. Battery is about to die. You can 3D print the halves yourself or have a 3D printing service make them for you. The electronics are mounted to one half so we opted to include a spot for adding a counterweight to balance out the die. We had a lot of fun working on this and hope it inspires folks to give this unique project a roll. IonMPI, brought to you by Digi-Key and Adafruit. This week it is TE Lady Aida. What is IonMPI this week? This week's IonMPI is the TE Limbas LTE GNSS Cellular Modem. Looks like this little doohickey. This is a handy little device that you can use to add cellular data connectivity and geolocation to a single board computer or it's like a desktop computer. Anything that has a USB port. Lembas as you will know because you're a fantasy fan is the elvish way bread that you only need to have a little bite to fill your stomach and is used by the hobbits as they travel through the forest. And so this is like Lembas this cellular modem will help you find your way because it's a geolocation device. It's also very filling. Okay so what is this? It's a USB modem and if folks remember old style modems that would connect through your RS232 port on your computer or your serial port and would tie into the phone line and then you could use it to dial up and get internet access. This is just like that but there's no phone line it uses a cellular modem inside and the access to the data comes through USB. So you just plug into a USB port and it shows up as a serial device that then your operating system dials through and you need to have SIM cards you do need to have a SIM card with data access it does come with one that you can activate and then you can get LTE speeds which are actually pretty fast and this is designed specifically for use with single board computers like the Raspberry Pi the O-DRAW and the Aces Tinker and NVIDIA Jets and Nano those are like for the very popular single board computers but you can use kind of anything with Debian or Ubuntu and of course it also does work with Mac or Windows or like non-Wazbian style mix development systems. So we opened one up and inside is a Quarktel EC25 and this is a this is the cellular and GNSS module so you know we've covered Quarktel before they're experts at this they make the modules they get them certified set their legit to use on the network and their FCC and PTCRB and all that good stuff don't worry about the EMI that's this is not going to be valid very soon this is the LTE CAT4 modem so you know you can get a fairly good data transfer up to 150 megabits per second down 50 megabits up so maybe not for like streaming a lot of video but definitely good enough for data transfer IoT projects sending images back and forth data chunks and you know if you have you know general purpose internet access that you need for your device you know you're used to Wi-Fi or ethernet you can now unplug and go anywhere without having to connect a hat or solder anything up to your Raspberry Pi there's a couple different modules in this family the reason you might want to know the module is because you want to use the AT command set directly you can download it from the Quarktel website not that this is the AFXD data only version it just might be handy and this does come with GNSS inside so GPS, GLONASS, Baidu, Galileo and QZSS those are the different constellations available for tracking location around the world using you know the GPS satellite system and you know even though again this is marketed towards single board computers absolutely great for that it'll also work with general purpose Windows, Linux or Mac on the other side of the module when you open it up there is you know you see the USB-C connector on the right and then there's this power supply chip there is a SIM card it comes with a SIM card that you can activate it's data only and of course you'll have to pay because it's you know it's a monthly subscription service for a SIM card while the SIM card does come with it it is removable it's just a micro SD micro SIM and so if you want to use your own SIM or you know you're going abroad or whatever and you want to use a different SIM card or like a SIM swapping system you can just open it up once you open it the warranty is void but like I'm a hacker so I like to know like you know is it possible to change it it's not an eSIM it's just a removable one and what's interesting is in the top right there that chip the TE chip is sorry the TI chip is a USB hub and that's interesting because inside it's actually two USB devices we'll get to that in a moment so on the front so some fun design decisions that they made so I'd like to point them up once the activity LEDs make up a TE logo and it looks like really cool there's a little light pipes that go through so you know the activity and the connectivity and power comes through these light pipes that you know it's like oh there's like a logo but it's actually not it's an indicator second if you go back one this you can kind of see it's a little shiny it's conformally coated which is which is nice it's not you know waterproof or even weatherproof but if you have to you know have it outside and there's some humidity you don't have to worry about it's oxidizing as quickly I did notice a nice conformal coat so they they spent a little bit extra effort to make sure that this board is protected for when you use it say for digital signage that might have some exposure to the elements okay and then get down when we did this one um so when you plug it in you know of course you can use it on your Raspberry Pi but I thought it'd be more informative to have it plugged in on my Windows computer it does come up with three ports there's the AT port which is where you can send AT command sets if you're used to cellular modems or pretty much any modem you know that use AT commands to send or receive data so if you want to do direct control of the module you can do it that way the NMEA port is as you expect the GPS module and that kind of pipes out NMEA sentences and then the D import is for data transfer I think that's for the high-speed data transfer when you're trying to get that 150 megabits per second you wouldn't necessarily use the AT command port the other interesting thing that they did is as I mentioned that there is a USB hub chip in there so that USB hub chip is used to allow you to connect to both the cellular modem cellular module modem which gives you those three comports and there's separately a USB key inside it's like a disk storage and this actually solves a very annoying problem of oh wow I want to put my device on the internet but I can't put my device on the internet because the drivers were querying to download them from the internet so how do I get them if you remember that from like Wi-Fi modules like before the drivers came with every operating system but for cellular modules especially for Raspberry Pi the instructions for how to set them up are not built in so this way instead of you having to type in all these commands and you know and like memorize them the SD card sorry the SD card the USB key that comes inside the module as part of that like second hub connected USB key has the code and instructions and shell scripts for you to install them the modem directly on an arm chip like you know NVIDIA Odoid or Raspberry Pi so it's like you pop it in and you're like it mounts automatically you just run install teinstall.sh and it does everything for you and you're like ready to go in under two minutes very fast as mentioned there is a built-in SIM card you can provision the SIM by going to their SIM provider and then of course here's the instructions for that USB modem again I was like what do you mean it just auto mounts and then I realized oh it's a USB key inside so that's kind of nice and great for asset tracking especially because it's got both cellular and it can drop down to gprs or gsm but has cat category for LTE which is you know pretty much has almost complete coverage in the united states the gps is really good quality so you can use that to locate devices and send their location to bricellular or you can use it if you're like you know let's say you have a bunch of like not tracks things are moving but machines that you're tracking and you want them to report who they are sometimes it's like you don't necessarily they don't necessarily go out with the firmware that tells them hey this is your unique identifier you can use the location instead so for example you know that you have a client you know in august to georgia you don't necessarily know like if they moved around the gnss will tell you hey this is where your client is located you can use that to identify the data instead of just relying on like the EMI or like a unique username or password so I think useful for a lot of different products where you don't want to have to rely on wi-fi access because wi-fi passwords change all the time okay and it is in stock at and did you get that's right you can actually get them which is pretty sweet and the price is you know less expensive than if you try to like roll your own using the module so you get the same you get the casing you get the usb key storage usb hub power supply everything's ready to go in this like adorable little case good okay um and then we're going to play this video and then we'll see on the other side for new products get reliable speeds with te connectivity's lembas lte gnss usb modem ran on an lte cat4 network with gps tracking capabilities from consumer products industrial automation engineering education and maker projects the lembas lte gnss modem prioritizes your next big iot project the lembas is designed for use on a wide array of single board computers utilizing arm chipsets and linux os the lembas also includes plug and play operations making lte and gps connections ready after plugging in and a single command on terminal for easy installation the lembas has a built-in pod group sim card which can be activated using the pod group's website enabling connection to the atnt network getting data connection subscription you can rely on the device also functions as a portable usb drive allowing for extra storage capabilities and convenient installation get a wide array of project design choices with flexible connection options and small device footprint capabilities giving you the freedom of placement without obstructing adjacent usb ports te's lembas lte gnss modem is your convenient all-in-one package for your next big iot project the only limit is your imagination it's ready to connect your world don't forget to code just make sure nxp we're gonna roll right in these are coming soon screens yes so all these cool screens that we've been showing off squares and rounds and high density and capacitive touch people are like when can i set up when can i get them well we're going to have them in the shop so we just wanted to get that ready since there's quite a few so they're being photographed and there's little placeholders in the store so yeah I know they'll go fast and you'll get notified when we do get them in stock and then we'll of course have the driver board as well next up we've got the tiny code reader this is from Pete Warden we have a guide that goes with it thankfully he wrote it for the learning system and this is a very simple sensor I mean simple it's complicated but it seems simple it has an rp2040 on the back and a camera module on the front and then a jst sh connector that can be used with quick or stemma boards and what it does is if you're good we lost photo when it sees a qr code it will automatically read it and will give you back that data over i-squared c and it's very fast and very good and a lot less expensive than most qr readers because it has a general purpose mic controller programmed with TensorFlow light for mic controllers that does the image recognition so I think I'm going to skip doing a demo because it's very there is a there is a video you want to play the oh yeah let's do the video it's a nice live demo yeah all right so check it out really good pricing I think it's like seven dollars for the sensor that does a lot and you know secretly you could probably hack it to do some other stuff too so check out TensorFlow light for mic controllers and a lot of other Pete Warden's smart sensor technology next up next up this is something that we're using for internal hacking but I thought I would make a dev board for it so other people could hack with it it's a piezo driver using the Pam 8904 this is a chip that's specifically designed for driving piezo disks and it what's interesting is that it seems like the audio amplifier can go up to 300 kilohertz which is not something you can do with it's 100 kilohertz I can't remember but it's like more than 20 kilohertz of piezo disks so it's good for ultrasonic and like other like non audio based piezo driving needs sometimes you have to like vibrate something or you want to like bounce ultrasonic waves off of something a piezo will do that whereas a speaker will be too slow so this is a driver that takes in three to five volts or two and a half to three to five volts and it will use two internal switch cap converters to give you up to three times gain on the voltage and then it uses differential output so if you have 3.3 volts in and you have 3.3 times gain it'll give you 10 volts output and then differentially because it's like plus or minus you'll get 20 volts across the piezo so much stronger drives especially we needed this for doing ultrasonic experimentation where you can't just drive it from my controller pan and get you know three volts 20 milliamps output you want something much stronger there's a little gain setting at the top both are off it's you know if both are set to off then the sensors in sleep mode or the drivers in sleep mode one game two game both right is three gain only thing to watch out for is don't set it to three gain if you're using four volts or higher because the output really doesn't want to be more than 10 volts peak to peak and while I wish they wouldn't let you purposefully destroy the sensor and you're not going to destroy it instantly it's not good for the sensor to be strained so if you're at five volts you know keep it to one or two gain so you don't go above 10 volts all right and then the start of the shoots and I replace you later our customers our community the entire food stuff and more is yay it's the nxp digikey ate a food collab that we started in late late 2019 finally here in the shop we've got a metro shaped board with the IMX RT 1011 we have an existing board that's very similar that's Wi-Fi this one has microSD so it's very affordable so it's under 20 bucks and you get a 500 megahertz IMX nxp processor this is a cortex m7 this is like an incredibly powerful changed and it's less expensive than many AVR 8 bit micro controller boards like the silk screen design yeah the silk screen very beautiful thanks to Phil B for it it's got a micro SD card slot so you can use that for data storage or retrieval USB type C has native USB you can power it from a DC jack again this very powerful 500 megahertz processor with 120 kilobytes of RAM and for storage both disk storage internal disk storage and firmware storage eight megabytes of Q-Spy flash so it's very speedy so great for data logging or if you want to stream data off of the micro SD and process it very quickly because we don't have anything fast in the cortex m7 for microcontroller a lot of accessories on it as well not just you've got all of the Arduino compatible headers so you can use shields with it Stena QT port as well NeoPixel built in that micro SD card on-off switch a JTAG SWD port so if you want to do step debugging you can connect this up to your J-Link and use it with MCU Expresso which is an xpced ID you can do step debugging with their programming system and we'll mention though even though it is Arduino shaped it does not actually run the Arduino ID instead we have circuit python support which I think is great because you can get up and running really fast and we support i2s and the SD card reading and your digital in-out PWM analog all the stuff you expect or you can use nxp's IDE which of course is going to be the most powerful and they've got IDE with tech support and all of the ARM cortex simsys core required to use all the peripherals on the m7 so you want to get started really quickly go with circuit python you want like power and control over every register and every byte and all the caches use nxp's tools but either way this is the partnership that we're doing because we wanted to show people that even though this is a 500 megabit processor we can make it as easy to use as an 8-bit microcontroller all right and somewhat collectible of war too I think this might be the first circuit board with the new digital logo yes that is new products for the week this week all right everybody there's some questions lined up we're going to get to those while we're getting to those and lining them up we're going to place top secret and then we'll see on the other side don't forget to code as metro nxp and then we're going to bounce because we're right at the line so let's do some top secret early data what is this this is me testing out the mjpeg player available in the menoronation arduino gfx library this is a 2.1 inch round tft display and have it show this cool animation yeah i'll be your samantha carter if you be my tilt i don't know what that means but that sounds romantic there was a good episode where they make a very small stargate yeah and um and this could be a pocket stargate ooh how cool i don't know what you'd transport to another planet but it wouldn't be all of you all my arduino code uh so this is being driven by an esp32 s3 and a oh that's a dial and this is a parallel tft so this is 16 sorry 18-bit color sorry it's an 8-bit color display being driven with 16-bit color and then the mjpegs are stored on this um spi micro sd card so it's um looking really fun and great and this is perfect for like i want simple animations playing you don't want to have like a full linux computer um mjpegs look pretty good and for pocket stargate what is this uh this is me playing an mjpeg on one of these bar displays so i've got these displays i love this shape we've got the round and the square but these bar displays are so good for cyberdecks cyberdeck in or um you know something that goes in your tower and your five and a quarter or a three and a half inch floppy drive so i'm playing an mjpeg animation off of a micro sd card this is wired up to my esp32 s3 and i'm seeing a couple things well first it just crashed so let me set it that's part of the part of the fun of picking up hardware is there's a little bit of a tearing effect you can see like these lines that cut through here and there that's because i'm using the the code that i'm using only has one single buffer and so when it draws the jpeg it decodes it onto the main frame that's also being displayed and so you're going to get as the animation goes you're going to see this flickering effect double buffering will help there i also think there's a little bit of destabilization in the v-sync and h-sync pulses so i'm going to talk to the factory and see if they have any other suggestions for clock rate h-sync pulse or back or front porch settings but yeah thank you demo it's your time all right lady it is where's that thing that's time that you put that thing here it is it's a floppy disk image this square it's in a floppy disk it's a floppy drive so this is a 720 by 720 square display and it does have a touch screen on it so you can draw i'm just doing dots but of course you could have it draw lines and stuff and it happens to be like almost exactly the same size as a floppy disk because it's kind of fun somebody had the idea of like oh you could have like a smart floppy it'll show it's being emulated or something that's kind of fun and then this is being driven by an esp32 s3 which um you know fun fact for people who are watching this video all the way to the end circuit python support is coming for these displays real soon now jebler just got the first demo working but this demo is in arduino and it's just drawing a jpeg that is being stored on this sd card onto the 720 by 720 square display coming soon okay we're gonna place them round doom round doom lots of neat stuff we got our hackers 4k dvd so of course we had to do a screen and then we're playing around with some keyboard ideas with these round displays we're like oh maybe we'll have a round display with a key 2040 and then of course afterwards we're like well you know someone's gonna be like king your end doom and then and we're calling it room i think top ups with that and that's our top seat for the week there's a lot a lot there's even more things to get to let's get the questions and then bounce around are you ready yeah lady you're gonna speed around me and off here we go for the this board yes 3.3 volt yes it's a three volt three volt my controller so you'll use that for analog inputs digital inputs and outputs but the board itself has a five volt power supply okay dokey next up is the m7 as powerful as a pie or is there any other eight of boards that could replace a pie is the closest to a pie like a pie zero is 700 megahertz a seven processor I think this is an m4 sorry an m7 which is not the processor itself isn't as powerful but it's getting it's getting closer to it I mean you probably could run a very minimal version of linux on this chip if somebody ported linux to this chip it's a metro imx kipple of usb host I believe it is all the imx series can do usb host however you would lose the main usb interface and so I didn't set it up because I personally feel like for circuit python or arduino whatever usage you don't want to lose your main port because otherwise it's very hard to upload new code so you would have to use the swd interface to do that it's kind of for advanced uses when will the lembas drivers be available for microcontrollers with usb host I mean I think it's just cdc so it might actually work right now like you plug it in it might appear as an interface but you know usb host is is not going to be very fast and honestly I would recommend just not going through usb and get a cellular module and just use a hardware you are instead of going through like three layers of interpretation next one I can answer this one is there a selector matrix for boards where you can filter by gpo account logic voltage if you do have a frequency it could be really useful I ask make magazine and I'll tell you why because if we did a board matrix guide it would just have our boards make covers all of them and they work with digikey and they have a board guide and they're very receptive to these type of suggestions and not only would you see Adafruit boards but you would get everyone else's board too and we're pretty confident comfortable with having our stuff compared because we're not going to make every board for every reason we might not have something that fits your exact needs that's okay there might be someone else and it'd be nice to have one resource that's maintained I think that's a editorial mission for make to kind of have all these in one spot and do a board guide every year so please please please ask make magazine because I think they'll do it any plans to make a pi four level eight board not going to compete with the Raspberry Pi four and you can get Raspberry Pi fours we actually had a bunch in stock today for many many hours so there's no need I think that they do a great job and you know I don't only want to design single board Linux computers okay let's see since we received over the octal PSF ram issue doesn't mean recent metro ESP32 S3 will only work in Q-Spy mode I'm going to revise the board to have it work with the octal PSRM so only a couple got sent out and we'll probably just replace this for the board guide if it's on GitHub or other I'd be happy to contribute that's another make that's another thing I'd ask make if they would consider putting the board guide on GitHub because they'd get more contributions that way and it could be like a yearly community thing I think you'd have to make sure that like one company doesn't just stuff all their boards in every single year we get asked to contribute to their board guide and it's usually a spreadsheet and we put in all the information my opinion it would be nice to have it out in the open where it just gets updated every year because then you'd have it forever and I think that's it yeah I think that is everything going speed around it it oh how do you how do you deal without bound shipping during disaster like hurricane so usually what we do is we inform the customers if there's a place that we know that has the shipping outage we also have it in our terms of service we're like hey there's going to be natural disaster sometimes I mean there's winter yeah there's yeah we we're stuck with winter every year usually but usually it's just notifying customers if they're in an area that their shipments may be delayed usually they're trying to take care of business and themselves and family and not worried about their packages but so far with all the natural disasters each year we manage to get everybody their goods and if they don't make it we do refunds or replacements because that is how we roll I think that is our show for tonight yeah I just got through all these thank you very much everyone this has been an aid for production don't forget the code is MetroNXP we will see everybody next week here is your moment of Xenar we got this entire show now this is a monster show bye everybody bye