 And welcome to Lady Aida. Hey everybody, and welcome to another Sunday night Desk of Lady Aida kicking off August. It's me, Lady Aida, with me Phil, on camera control and witty commentary in the background. Sometimes. Do we have a little show for you tonight? I could talk about some LEDs. If there are any news or updates we wanna tell people about. No, last week was the AidaBox unboxing on Wednesday. Thanks for joining us. It was epic. Amazing. Watched it on our video channels and a social network near you. This Wednesday, you and I are not doing show and tell. We are doing Ask an Engineer. That's right. And we have a full week of shows. And just so everybody knows, we're dealing with the same thing everyone else is as a company, as a city, as a state, as a nation. Now there's talk of doing required vaccinations for companies and more. And so this is changing by the day. And so far, most of our team is in a really good spot, but friends and family in all of our circles may or may not be vaccinated quite yet. So we're all just dealing with this. Yeah. Every day we'll publish anything that's helpful for other people who run companies or just so you know. And that's what's going on. It's an occupying thing. And it's all, of course, in the middle of a chip shortage. So we'll be talking about that tonight on the show. Okay. So last we checked in, we were talking about this RGB LED breakout that I finished designing and I ordered the PCVs. You can go to the overhead and I can show it off. I think I showed this up, I showed this up last week or week before. So it's got the IS-31, FL-37, 41, which can control 13 by nine RGB LEDs. Some of the LEDs are hand soldered and I didn't do a great job, so they don't come out. But you can see the basic idea here. They're mostly work. A couple of these here are a little sad, but most of them showed up. And it's got a STEMI QT connectors for chaining together. It's an iSquad C chip, which is really nice. It kind of does everything. You just need a few resistors. Honestly, I don't even know if you need those resistors. I think it's mostly for like safety and stuff. But one of the things that's neat is that this is one of the smallest and easiest ways to connect a lot of RGB LEDs over iSquad C. Usually if you want to connect this many RGB LEDs, you need to have like, you know, shift registers and column drivers and it can get very big. What's nice is that this only needs like a single chip and a few passives. It's much, much easier for controlling the large number of LEDs, which means that one of the projects that I'd wanted to do for a really long time, I was like, oh, we can finally do this. One is I snagged, these were chips that were not in stock anymore, but they were in stock before I snagged them because I can finally do a product I didn't mean to do, which is make LED, like Neopixel glasses. I always wanted to do Neopixel glasses. And the problem is that once you start adding up, you know, any number of Neopixels are about 10 cents a piece. So if you want, you know, 100 LEDs on your glasses, you know, you're talking about $10 in just raw LEDs. And so it becomes, you know, once you have the microcontroller and everything, it can get a little expensive. Also, it was really hard to do anything that beginners or just folks who don't want to spend days trying to figure out how to program these things. And so I feel like we're finally in a good spot now because it'll show up as a USB drive, you'll be able to drag and drop images or just change the text file. And I think that's where we want to be, where before it's like, all right, like just get ready to live in an ID forever. Yeah, so I can go to JLCPCB. Okay, so let's go to the computer and I can show some of the PCBs I've been ordering. So I ordered up the, let's see if it'll render. So this is the matrix breakout. What was that sound? It's like, hi, you should do things. Is that the website made that sound? Yeah, the website, boop boop, boop boop, yeah. So this is what the breakouts look like. They're penalized. So they're meant, you can put them side to side if you want, but I put mounting holes in the bottom. Even though I was like, oh, should I make them? So you can tile them top to bottom. And I was like, you know what, no, like it's too mechanically delicate. So I'd rather have mounting holes. So this is the 13 by nine RGB LEDs, which is, let's see, 13 by, oops. 117 LEDs. And again, what's nice about using raw RGB LEDs is that they're only like two or three cents a piece. So all of, you know, there's always some yield and some loss, but the overall cost is not going to be that much. So you can sell these at a reasonable price. And so after this was done, and I'm like, okay, cool. I feel good about this design. Also I want to like test out the RGB LED placement, you know, making sure that these are, the grid is okay. Like until you actually manufacture these, I'm not going to know, do I need the grid to be larger? I think these are a three millimeter grid and they're two millimeter LEDs, but you know, I might need to expand that a little bit. So this is a pretty tight packing, but hopefully these will be manufacturable. And then so what I started to do is I asked Phil B, like, okay, can you design what these glasses would look like? And this is kind of what he came up with. So we like the idea of having round neopixel like circles. That's kind of like what we wanted, but also maybe the ability to scroll some simple text. And for text, you need to have five character height. Like that's the minimum. You can't really go below that. And above that you can do two, but again, we wanted him one driver chip, which can do 139 LEDs. And so this was kind of an interesting, you know, you can see through it cause it's got these slots, but it isn't just like a plain slotted glasses design cause I wanted to just do something really, not like boring, but I wanted to do something a little more interesting. So we've got 24 LED rings. You know, there's 24 RGB LEDs in a ring. And then, you know, the way it's lined up is, you know, it's kind of grid happy. You know what I mean? If you scroll the text through the ring, it's spaced in a way, like it's spaced in a way that for these five rows, the ring is part of the text scrolling area, but you can also have this separate ring. So it's kind of like, how do you put a circle onto a planar XY grid? Well, this is how we're doing it. And then, you know, this is a vector diagram, but the best way to get it in is to actually raster it. And then I imported it as a raster into Eaglecast. You can see it's rastered all the way here. And then I draw over it. So every place that there is an LED, you can see a sort of like these squares. I dragged the RGB LED over it to sort of lay out to like kind of trace over the design. So that's where I'm at. I mean, it's like, you know, with, you know, it's like easily like a thousand or something 500 air wires or something ridiculous. So it's a little slow going. I did like half yesterday and I'm doing the other half today, but you know, so far so good. And then this is the driver chip here. And then what I'll probably do is I'll just have like a STEMI QT connector, you know, somewhere maybe here or something. And then you could wire it up to any microcontroller. So you can have like a Wi-Fi glasses or Bluetooth glasses or just like RP 2040. So are those two bottom slats empty? Yeah, these are empty. They're just decorative because you, this is how many, you know, you only have a certain number of LEDs. I know I can't put more LEDs on. Like this thing can only drive 139 LEDs, which is a lot, right? Only. Well, we actually, it's 138 because we did test divide by two to be symmetric. So it's 138 RGB LEDs, which is like, you know, it's a lot of RGB LEDs. Again, if you were doing this with dot stars or neopixels, it would like, that'd be really expensive. But I think it's just a good, yeah, I don't think like just cause you can have it like fully filled with LEDs. I think, you know, we could have had a different grid, but I think that this is a good, I don't think there's a lot of benefit to having more. Anyways, this is like kind of what I'm slowly. And you're still rocking out on Eaglecat, right? I'm still a little rounding. You know, you can see here, I have to route all the column lines. The row lines are easy, right? Cause they go across within the column lines. You have to hit each column. You have to snake around. And by the time the second side, I got a little, you can see it's a little more elegant looking than the left side, which is a little bit rougher. Cause I wasn't, I wasn't as sure of how the technique I was going to use by the time I went to the right side. I'm like, okay, I know the technique to use to, to get all these lines around. So they're, they're kind of nicely packed. I might we do the left side eventually, but you know, if it's way out of it, it's way out of it, right? Who cares? Plus the LED glasses that I'm working on. All right, any questions for we move on? No. Okay, cool. So the other thing that we covered was the, what I thought was really interesting is that I had booked some parts, some LSM9 DS1s. I don't know if this is going to be. What do you want to go to the blog? Well, I wanted the article that we wrote here. Yeah, there it is. So it's interesting because this is, you know, like many companies, it's like, okay, if I can't get parts, there's some signs I have that use parts. You can't get the parts, but maybe you can back order the parts, right? You put it in order, you put in a purchase order, and you say, look, schedule it out. I won't need these maybe for a year or two years, but I'm willing to know what I need so that I can kind of like have a place in line. And this is really common. We actually do this for parts all the time. Like we order, you know, raspberry pies, like a year in advance basically, we tell them here's about, here's the prop, you know, of course things can change, but here's approximately how many we're going to buy. It's, you know, not, it's like we can change the scheduling, but we're basically saying we're going to purchase these eventually. And we did this with this LSM9 DS1, which we use in a breakout. And this is the first time I've ever had this happen in like 15, you know, 20 years of buying electronics where I purchased something and after I purchased it, I'm told the price has changed dramatically and I can either take it at the new price or cancel my order. Like I've not, it was different. I've had, you know, oh, I'm about to buy something and the price changes or like I sign up to be notified I want to get notified the price changes. I've never had an existing purchase order changed like not underneath me when I was notified, but it was changed as the purchase order had been placed and was pending. And I think I would place this purchase order like, you know, months ago too. It's the nuisance. It doesn't like, oh, we ordered a day ago and like, you know, the price change underneath. So, you know, it's interesting about this chip is this used to be $3 or $4 a piece, you know, maybe $4 retail, $3 if you negotiated and now it's 20 bucks. And this is from an official distribution, right? Again, that's different. I have, I've definitely seen gray market prices be ridiculous. I've been quoted, you know, nutty prices. This is, we booked in order at a certain price from the official distributor. And then they're just like, you know how you booked it at a certain price? We're going to go ahead and make it 20 times. This is very, very, very unusual. And so the reason I'm making a big deal out of this is like, why am I making a big deal? It's not a punishment. I'm not trying to like call anybody out. What I'm trying to tell is for people who are do, who do like crowdfunding campaigns or pre-orders or budgeting, you can no longer depend on the budgeted price to be the price that you actually get the product at. That's never not been true. This is the first time that I've seen that it hasn't been true, that you order something and you don't get it at that price. Usually when you order parts, the price that you buy it at, even if it ships later. And the price it ships at. Yeah, this is new and unusual. Yes. And it, you know, if we're experiencing this, that means everyone else is too. And we're going to start carrying on it. And this is probably not the only part. This is just the only part I know of because it's the only part. I mean, like, it happened with a couple of the parts, but this one was like extremely, extreme price change, right? Basically eight times more expensive than originally. And so I think if you're, even if you're back ordering parts, you can no longer guarantee that when that back order is filled, it will be filled at the price that you pursue. And we only use a breakout, that chip for a breakout, but. But if you use this in a design and it was like you're just paying, you know, you bought everything else waiting for the design, just. Or if you have, I mean, there's some popular electronics out there in the maker world that uses the Arduino Nano does. Yeah, the Nano Connect I think uses the LSM9DS1. So, yeah, it's here. It's happening. So let's, let's move into the great search. Cause we'll. Okay, problem solution. Here we go. The great search brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit where Lady D uses all our powers of engineering and searching for parts to help you find that part that you need, especially when the rug gets yanked out underneath you and your bump cost goes up 1000%. Yeah, not, well, not 1000, but you know, a bunch. So we just, we were just chatting about the LSM9DS1. I thought this was interesting. We wrote about it. The price, the official price of this chip, not only is it, you can't buy this chip, but the official price went from about $4 to about $20. And one of our back orders, you know, not from Digikey, but from another distributor that we had placed months ago, basically got canceled cause it was like, well, we're not gonna sell it to you at the original price. You have to replace it with this new price. And so I thought if there's people who are using this chip, look, I like the LSM9DS1. It's, it's one, I've used it. It's wonderful. I use the LSM9DSO. I love all the ST jars, accelerometers, IMUs. But if you have a board and you are speccing this part at about $3 to $4, and now it's coming back to you at $20, that can really, really mess your bill of materials, right? If you're selling, you know, a gaming thing and it had accelerometer in it, you know, motion sensor, and suddenly the bill of materials costs just went up $15, that could easily double the cost of your product. And so I thought, you know, I think eventually the price will come back down because I don't think this is competitive at this price. However, until that happens, let's see, you know, some alternatives for nine DOF sensors. I wanted to show people, because I had actually had somebody ask me, like, what would you use instead? And I was like, that's a good idea for the great search. However, I'm not gonna make that name public. So that's why there's no quote. So I'm behind the scenes. Okay, so one of the nice things about the LSM9DS1 is, it's a nine axis. It's accelerometer, gyromagnetometer. It also says temperature, which technically would mean 10 DOF, but like temperature is really easy to get. So, you know, we're looking at a nine DOF sensor, which means you get three degree magnetometer, three degree accelerometer, three degree gyro. When you're speccing nine DOF sensors, and you're almost always speccing nine DOF sensors because you wanna do an orientation IMU type thing, there's basically like two kinds of systems, chips that you wanna use. First off, there's not like one, it's not one chip inside. It's actually gonna be like two or three chips that are kind of tied together, all on I squared C or with SPI. So in the LSM9DS1, I don't remember exactly the two parts, but it's basically, I think it's like an LSM303 plus something else. It's basically either an accelerometer plus gyro, and then a separate magnetometer, I think maybe say an LSM2MDL or 3MDL, tied with an LSM330 or something. It's two chips inside, and they're just packaged into one little chip, which is quite nice, it's very nicely and compact. These chips, they have things like filters and 5-files. However, they're going to give you raw accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer data, and then you're sort of expected to take an AHRS, fusion algorithm, you take that data and you combine, I think ST probably even gives you libraries, to combine that data to give you orientation in like quaternions or something. And there are also chips out there on the market, like the B&O055, B&O085, and those chips are nine-doll sensors, but they also have a little fusion chip inside of them that does that calculation. So why would you care, like which one you use? Well, first off, there's price. So if you're getting a B&O055, well, now it's gonna be about the same price as the LSM90S1, but in general, if you have a chip that's doing the fusion algorithm for you, you're gonna pay a little bit more because there's this second chip that takes the sensor data and fuses it together to pipe out quaternion orientation data. There's a little microcontroller in there? Yeah, there's a little Lugia Cortex M0. I think the B&O055 and 085, there's actually two different companies, although the partner was very similar. One's Hillcrest, Siva, and one is something else I don't remember, and those have a SAMD21 actually inside. Also, so there's like actually like now three chips inside tied together. It's like our TI calculator that runs Python at a SAMD. They're at a SAMD. So you can get, look, here's the thing, you can't get those chips right now anyways, but yeah, so they're gonna be more expensive. The B&Os are also like totally unavailable. In fact, I think if you search on Digikey for the B&O, I think they're like, we don't even have a time in which these might be available. Yeah, like you can't even accept that. I've never seen that, there's not even an estimate. Wow. Yeah, which is really cool. Well, due to temporary constraints applied, Digikey is unable to accept back orders at the time. Not only are there no back orders, but there's no time it's gonna be back, no prices. We're just gonna pretend this never happened. Yeah, this is basically, they don't even have the price. Again, they don't even know. They don't wanna say, they never want anyone to say, hey, look, why did the price change? I don't know, I don't know why they did it. I think that they really do not know when it's going to be a time. I wouldn't keep the price on it and I wouldn't put any time or date right now because everyone's familiar. I think they're like, we don't even want to accept the order to carry the risk of what's gonna happen. Who knows, maybe this, it could be many years and they don't wanna hold that order. It's a ghost town. So those chips are, they're very specialty and those go faster. There's also sometimes you can get external chips that are like fusion chips and they'll do the work for you, but yeah, so the B&Os are kind of famous for like they do all the work for you and running this algorithm. You know, again, you can write, you can code the algorithm and we have a tutorial here on how to run AHS on a microcontroller, but you do have to have a microcontroller kind of constantly pulling data and you can't, you know, you can't miss any data, right? You have to be very consistent because you'll start to skew a little bit. You'll start to get y'all from missing data. So you have to be like, you know, every 50 hertz or whatever on the dot, you have to get the data. So if you can't get these, you know, again, you can always do it yourself by combining accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope. Of those, you want a pretty good magnetometer, but honestly, there's a lot of good magnetometers as long as it's got, you know, a good, you know, it's got range and it isn't affected too much by external magnetic fields. Magnetometer, I'm not too worried about. Magnetometer is what we're pretty good at. Accelerometer is also, we really figured out men's accelerometers, like everyone's got accelerometer now. We're pretty good at it. You know, you can use it to do tilt and motion. The part that's really going to dictate whether you get good sensor data out is gonna be the gyroscope. The gyroscope is what has drift. You don't have drift in anything else. The gyroscope is the only thing that like, it'll have offset that will add accumulate error on your algorithm. So we do have an article check out comparing gyroscope data sheets and you can look at some of the gyroscopes. NXP has really great gyroscopes as well. I think they've just continued them now. I mean, like it's one of those things where it's like, here's a great sensor, no longer available. Here's another great sensor, no longer available. But you can piece together, if you can't get one of these, you can piece together an accelerometer, gyroscope. Those are usually sold in a set, you know, and then separately a magnetometer. They do not have to be from the same company. They can be separate companies or whatever, distributors, and then you convert them to SI units and then plug them into the AHRS algorithm to get orientation data. That said, let's look, you know, there's really only one option, but let's look at what we can get. Now, nothing's in stock, but I can show you what I would recommend. There's only one option. Is that technically an option or is that, how do you describe when there's one? It's not a choice. Maybe it is an option because the option is either bite or don't. Yeah, so if you search for, for example, in stock IMU chips, which I think is anything with at least one accelerometer and gyroscope, there's really slim pickings and the prices are quite, quite high. I think just the demand is really high right now, but a lot of these are modules, and they get very expensive very quickly because they are, you know, you get into like these industrial IMUs. Like a car, I mean, like, you know, bill of material and cost of cars. I mean, these are used in robot, the problem is that they're used in like Wii's and like Switch game controls, and they're used in like industrial robotics and automotive, right? These are sensors that are, they're so popular that every, like everyone's competing because everyone wants this thing. In the beginning of the pandemic, no one was saying, hey, when this is, a year later we're gonna have a chip shortage. Like that wasn't one of the things, you know, it was like quick stock up on toilet paper. Yeah. So let's not look at stuff in stock because, you know, we're just gonna be disappointed. However, let's look at surface mount components and let's look at active. So at least, you know, when they do, you know, it will likely come back into stock. And then if you're one of the, if you want something that's a more close size comparison to the LSM9DS1, you want nine axis, so let's pick, I don't know why it says gyroscope nine axis, but I'll click it anyways. But we definitely want gyro and magnetometer and accelerometer. So let's see what's available. And today you can see the B&L 085. Oh, these you could at least maybe back order. Again, these are the ones that have, the B&L 080 and 085, which are almost identical. There's one is a little bit, the one fixes a little bit of an SPI bug. Those are available. Then there's the LSM9DS1 that we referred to. And then after that, there's a lot of modules. So these are like, you know, you can tell this is, it's not a true nine-doff sensor. It's like five sensors, you know, put together. It's like someone on their magnetometer gyroscope put together on a board. But if you want it all in one, I would actually recommend going with the ICM 2948. This sensor also can do its own fusion algorithm inside. I believe it's under NDA, you might have a site NDA, or you might have to download a binary blob and then compile it in. But I'm not 100% sure, but I know that InvenSense, which is now a TDK, they made very good nine-doff sensors. They were used in Nintendo and Apple products and before Nintendo and Apple both, I think changed over to ST, which means InvenSense got half their business taken away. But it doesn't mean that they're not good sensors. They're very, very good sensors. They're just, you know, they didn't win in a gigantic fight between elephants, right? Which is how it goes with your small company. Good news though is the price isn't bad, right? Like once you get to 100 pieces or 500 pieces, the price is down to $4, 450. So it's much, much closer to where the LSM90S1 was. You can actually get it at a price that's comparable. If you design the LSM90S1 into something and you're like, I just need something that's about the same size, same functionality, I squared C can give me nine-doff IMU data out. Whether or not you use this motion plus fusion thing, this would be a good alternative. It's not pin compatible and definitely not firmware compatible. But it's I-squared T and you give it some power. I think it might be 1.8 volt, but you know, maybe you could put a level shifter on there and I would recommend this chip. I use it, we have a breakout for it. And it's quite easy to use and it's pretty reliable. You can use our libraries to get your design kick started as well. And while I don't know 100% that this is true, it does say that there's gonna be at least a thousand in stock. Oops, in September, if you type in a quantity, says estimate September. So you have a shot of actually getting these. So that's what we're at as engineers, just praying. Hoping. You know, I would have guessed that we'd run out of certain elements on the planet. Like, hey, we're out of lithium everybody. We're gonna have to deal with that. We're not there yet, but this is reminding me of all the futures that we're gonna have. Yeah. Oh, cool. Pandemic dystopia, what's the end result? Well, you're out of chips. All right, that's the great tip. All right, check it out. The ICI. We're gonna send us your request as a part you can't get, want us to find the best option. We can... Yeah, we'll always be able to help out if you're... Do the best we can. So send us, you can do it on Twitter and you can do it in other things, send me an email, whatever, all those things on which part you'd like to have a great search segment about. We always have one every week, but we also like to do ones that people send us. Okay, well, thanks everybody. That's it for DiscoVladiator this week. We will, yeah. Yeah, it wasn't meant to be a downer message. It's just like, this is what it is now. It's like... Well, we're half, you know, this part search could be two years long. It's kind of devastating. Yeah, it is teaching us to continue to diversify our product offering and be nimble. So this is how companies are forged. That's what they are. All right, thanks everybody. We'll see everybody next week. Bye.