 fruit would like to remind parents this Halloween to please carefully inspect your kid's candy. We found doom running inside this Milky Way bar. Remember, do not eat if it's Turing complete. Alive from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and happy Halloween-ish coming soon. It's me, Lady Ada, the engineer with me, Mr. Lady Ada. Camera control, audio control and more. We're here at the Ada Fruit factory in downtown Manhattan behind us. This is the factory. As you just saw some video, this is where we do the kidding and testing and manufacturing and coding and videoing and photoing and documentation and shipping. Oh, that's one of the goodies that keep us going. So if you like some of the ridiculous content we make, please pick up a kit or a component or a feather or more. We've got a packed show with a lot of guides and it's not out yet. There's some new products that folks are going to really like. They've been waiting for a while. I know. I'm trying to get to everything. All right, but let's kick it off, Mr. Lady Ada. Why don't you tell them what is on tonight's show. All right, on tonight's show, the code is Hypower, 10% off the native fruit store all the way up to 1159 p.m. Or when I remember to turn, go to 10% off the native fruit store for everything we have in stock. And you still get free stuff. Lady Ada will talk about that and more. We've got some live shows. Talk about our Adford live series of shows, including show and tell, which we just wrapped up a few moments ago. Time travel around the World Makers, Hackers, Artists, Engineers, see what's happening. We also have a really cool segment this week with RetroTech, looking back in the world of electronics and more. We have, from the mailbag, your letters to us. Some help wanted. It's from jobs.adaford.com. We also have some Made in New York City factory footage that you'll be able to check out. You're from Adafruit. 3D printing, some cool projects from Newen Pedro. We have IonMPI this week. It's from Epson. New products, lots of top secret this week. We answer your questions. We do that on discord.adafruit.it slash discord. We can join all 35,000 of us. There's a few thousand people online right now. Put your questions in the chat. We get to them at the end of the show, but lots of folks will help you out in between now and then as well. All that and more on... Yay! Ask an engineer. Okay, let's pay some bills. First up, use the code. And when you use the code, you'll notice there's things you can put in your cart and they're free. Yes, the new products of the week are 10% off. And you also get freebies when you order from the Adafruit shop, because we love our customers. We want to reward you. Order $99 or more. You get a free promo-proto, half-sized breadboard handy for making your projects permanent from a solderless breadboard. $1.49 or more. You get, it's still happening. The pink circuit board, PCB, KB2040. It's an RP2040 microcontroller board with eight megabytes of flash, buttons, STEMIQT, USB-C, cast-alated golden pads. It's great if you have a pro mini project or pro micro project and you want to RP2040 if buy it. With a lot more flash and RAM. We're on circuit python, micro-python and Arduino. $199 or more free UPS ground shipping for your entire order in the Continental United States. And $299 or more. We still have circuit playground, blue fruits, free with your order. It's got buttons. It's got LEDs. It's got buzzers and switches. And it's got a Bluetooth Cortex M4 processor that can run. You can do some make-code stuff on it. We got, I think, micro-python, circuit python, Arduino. People like Port of the West and other platforms to it. It's a great way to start your solder-free project. You can even make Liz's Bluetooth-controlled bat project she's posted and you can add BLE control to it. All right. We do bunch of live shows every single week, every week, every month, every year here at Adafruit. Our live shows, including the ones that we did today, we had Show and Tell. Lots of folks came by and you can see what their projects were. A couple of highlights. Phil B showed some of the makings of the Milky Way Doom bar. Chocolate Doom. Yeah. So carving the actual vessel for the electronics out of a candy bar, does it work? Or do you need to 3D print something? You can tune in and find out. That's on all of our places we post video, like YouTube and Twitch and all that. And we had DJ Devon stop by showing some cool API projects with Circuit Python. And then Mark had some really neat pumpkins, including a blanket pumpkin, which is super cute. So thanks for coming by. And eyes. Yeah, it was really neat. On Sunday, we do from the desk of Lady Aida. And this is where we have it. A show that we do in two parts. It's whatever is on the Moore's desk at that moment. It's almost like there's this social media app. It's like The Now or something. Oh, The Burial? I don't know how it works, but I always see funny shots. Yeah, it's like right now you have to do this. So whatever is going on. Oh, it's like the anti-Instagram. Yeah. You can't Photoshop it. No, you're just like whatever is happening right now, you just have to show you and you have to be honest about it. So what we do is we just turn the camera on and we're like, what's on your desk? Yeah, so this week, I was on a test. First off, I showed off. I tried to make a tester with these strip pogo pans and totally failed. So I showed that off because I thought other people would like to learn from my not complete functionality working projects. I also showed off the TPS60-1040 Boost Converter. We're going to get in the store. I showed off a STEM, a motor driver. And then the big project I showed off is we've had these Teen C3.6-based testers that we use for programming over my controller boards. Like sensors and little power breakouts we use in Arduino. But if we're running SWD or mass storage or USB, we have to do something more advanced. We used to use Raspberry Pis, but actually Raspberry Pis, they eventually have issues and they take a long time to boot. And so we've started using solid states in situ SWD programming. And we use a Teen C3.6, which was wonderful. Unfortunately, you can't get Teen C3.6's anymore because of the chip shortage. So we decided to redo our entire tester with an RP2040 Pico. And also, we made a couple other updates while we were at it to fix some things and add some more features. So we're going to have to pour our libraries over to the RP2040. But it's a chip that don't, there's not been any shortage issues with it. And the Pico's are inexpensive. So if they do get blown out because sometimes the tester gets damaged, it's very easy to swap out a RP2040 in exchange. So hopefully the PCBs will arrive, I'll put them together. And then I'll show off that tester in a week or two. Some people were really into this. We had a good feedback. People really liked seeing the behind the scenes, how the cook, what is the pan that the chef uses? Well, a lot of the folks who watch Desk of Lediator, they run their own little electronic companies or big electronic companies. And they want to keep up on how you can test electronics. There's the designing of, the manufacturing of, and then the testing of. Usually it's like separate departments, separate people. Lediator kind of does. Is this all in my head? A little bit of everything. Let me do the great search. And the great search is when ladies are powers of engineering to be fined the things on digikey.com. Thanks, Digikey. Yeah, so this week, because I was working on this tester, what I wanted to do is we used to hand assemble all these testers, they were all through a hole and that's okay, but the thing is, is that we're probably going to have to make these brain boards that then are used to control the device under test board, which is separate. We're gonna have to make like 50 of these because it's, you know, we're almost out of TC 3.6's and I'm probably gonna go back and redo some of the older testers with this new tester. And so I was like, you know what, let's just put it through the pick and place machine. So I wanted to find a surface mount. Everything else I could find surface mount, the SD card holder, the sockets, the connectors, the, you know, TFT, you know, FPC connector. The thing that was, I didn't have yet was a surface mount USB-A connector. Cause again, I've always traditionally used the through hole version. So in this great search, I find a couple of really good options for USB-A and I show you the differences between them. All right. And then we have JP's PradaPick of the week. We do that on Tuesday and then Thursdays we do a JP's. Workshop, but let's check out JP's PradaPick of the week this week. Is the new key five by six ortho snap apart PCB. This has socketed key switch receptacle. So you can take your key switches, you don't need to solder them in, you just place them into their little sort of spring loaded clips there and now it's ready to go. That is collecting the column and row presses and then sending key press and key release messages to the microcontroller. And then I'm also sending it neopixel color changes. So when I press one of the green ones, it turns pink. When I press one of the pink ones, it turns green. So that is kind of helpful feedback that you can use especially when you don't have printed key caps just to keep you oriented with what you're doing. Neo key snap apart ortho five by six PCB. And again, don't forget JP's show is tomorrow, Thursday, JP's workshop. And then Friday, we have deep dive with Tim, funny guy, a tip stop by and showed a really cool trivia game that you can build with Circuit Python and he'll be showing this off on Friday as well. Time travel. Let's look around world of makers, hackers, artists, engineers, all the things that are going on including some company news, things in the news and more. So first up, November 8th is voting day and at Adafruit, it's a paid day off. Yay. So let me do what I do every single year and I'll just mention it. I know. It's not too late everybody. I know this year is, you know, midterms and there's a lot of things going on. This is, you know, a US conversation. But next year, you know, 2023 and then 2024, every year when voting comes around, a lot of people get angry on Twitter and they're mean to each other and social media and they talk about change and they talk about which hashtag you're using or how you update your profile picture. Here's my suggestion. Ask your employer what to take to get paid day off for voting. Companies should allow folks to vote. Usually it's part of the rules and stuff like that but a lot of people don't. It's not convenient no matter what state or federal laws are and maybe their employers are not doing the right thing. But if we had it as a day off, a lot of people could volunteer as poll workers. They can get involved. They can be more civic minded. And so wherever you fall on the political spectrum, it seems like this is something that would be kind of good. We've been doing this for years and my suggestion is just ask your employer, just be like, hey, what would it take for us to have this as a day off? Because usually if you come in a different way and say, we demand to have this day off, that's one way to do it. But usually you can figure out a way to negotiate and say, like, hey, like what would it take? Like what, is there a metric that we'd have to do? Is there a way that we could do our schedules or something because this is an important thing. Like I said, maybe for some folks this year isn't that important, but pretty sure upcoming years will be pretty important. And there's a few companies that do this in the maker world. Every year I send out emails and I say, hey, would you consider doing this? Some have. So I would continue to do this. And this is separate than the legally mandated requirement. This is where you have the entire day. Full day off. So that way you don't have to come in at all. Full day off, a lot of people. And you can volunteer and you can do more than just vote. You can actually help other people vote. Yeah, well, we wanted to do this because some folks want to help out and make sure the elections are fair. And you need poll monitors and more. So we can talk about this and we can try to dunk or like say, you should do this. Or we could just set a good example. And so that's what we're trying to do. If little old data fruit can do it, here in New York City, you can do it too. Okay, next up, I wanted to mention that if you haven't seen our ready to play in the beginning of the show, we have the Candy of Doom, the Turing Complete. If it's Turing Complete, don't eat it. You can, it's made the rounds all over the internet. Philby did a great job with this project. Jepler and Philby collabed on this. Jepler did the code. Philby did the video and the mechanics. It was a great collaboration. So our promise to you, if it's something that can run Doom on it, we'll get Doom on it. So this is one of many projects that we hope to get out before, I guess, Doom is just in a pill. Yeah, and then check out the show and tell where Philby talks about shows off the making of and how it was done. It really is Doom. That's ESP32 S3 running, miniaturized Doom wand, but it does all fit into the four megabytes of flash and two megabytes of RAM. So good job. Again, Jepler on, I'm getting that going. Okay. And then tomorrow is Hack Pumpkin, live at 6.30 p.m. with Ali, Kevin and Jordan. This is our friends over at Digikey. These are the hosts. They do this every single year. I wanted to help get the word out. Happy Halloween and you know, go check it out. You'll see this on Twitter and all the places tomorrow. And then we'll probably be making our announcement next week. Like I've been saying over the last couple of weeks, most likely we are going to tell everyone that we did not get the 5,000 parts we wanted in in time for the latest eight of box we wanted to do before the end of the year. But that just means we can for sure do all the eight of boxes we want to do in 2023. So there's still a chance, but we'll let everyone know soon. You can always pause your subscription. We don't charge until it ships. So you could just let it ride. But if you want to bounce and then try to come back, you can. However, we have a few thousand people waiting to get on the eight of box list. So if you bounce off completely, you might have to wait to get back on. And part shortage changed some of our plans, obviously. A good example is, and I'm not saying this is the only reason, but if we were using microchip, SAMD, microcontrollers. We wouldn't get it until 2024. We wouldn't get it until 2024. So if we had any eight of box plans using those chips, maybe it would have been a good idea for us to use some of this time to redesign those eight of boxes using something that's more available. Like an ASP, expressive base chip, or. Whether it's the S3s are out. Yeah, or RP2040s. So you could probably guess, a lot of the eight of boxes we're going to do, we're going to make sure we're not stuck waiting forever for something that's going to be forever moved and the football pulled away from us at the last second. Okay. Mailbag. Oh, Kidoki, these are some of the emails or letters or something we get from y'all each week. This is this week's mailbag. I teach a second year college design class in electrical and computer engineering. And I want to give you kudos on your circuit Python ID and hardware kits. The well-supported design tools make it simple to build meaningful projects from the ground up without a huge time investment. Even though students are building challenging projects from the PCB level up, the success rate has been high. That's right. Imagine not being able to see your project work at all after spending months on it. Imagine not being able to. So my first internship, which I did at Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab, I literally spent three weeks just trying to make an LED blink on, it was a Phillips, sorry, it was an easy USB chip. And it was so frustrating. You learn the hard way. You cut your teeth on it. It was like two to three weeks. And I remember when I got the LED to finally blink. And it was like, this is a, cause there's a sampler and like, cause you did a compiler and the upload technique, it was just forever. And I just don't want anyone to have to list it again. I think there was a debate. I mean, it was amazing when it got working, but it was so painful. I think there was a debate about how, how or why that would be good or bad. On one hand, someone could say, well, because that was so hard, that's why you became the engineer you are. And that's why you wanted to make things easier for it. Cause that's why you, you pushed really hard to get all these skills to never have to do that again. The other side of this could be like, if you didn't have to waste your time with that, you got, you would've got so much more done. I would've, I would, I could just be out. We would, we would even be further along. Oh my God, it was such a pain. And I remember it cause he wanted me to use only, the advisor wanted me to only use open source tool chains, which is fine. But so I had no example code, no example compilation, no example uploading. So I had like, I had like three or four variables that I just couldn't, I couldn't control. But I think it worked eventually, but boy, it was not fun. So I think there is, there's a couple of ways you can look at it, you know, for you, you saw this as an opportunity to never do that again. And you spent, you spent the last 15 years making sure you never had, anyone had to do that again. It's been more than, that was more than 15 years ago. But I also hear people that are kind of cranky and they're just like, well, everyone should learn the hard way, but not everyone can and not everyone should. And not everyone has enough time. It wasn't really not. It was, I didn't, I didn't learn that much. I just was, I was just very frustrated. Okay. Richard time. Okay. So this week, not only do we have a piece of hardware from back in the day, but we have the commercial that came with it. Yeah. So here it is. We knew they were coming. Futuristic computer minds, advanced intelligence and electronic language of lights and sounds. But there's one thing we didn't know. How much fun they are. Touch me, three different games in one where your family challenges each other and an unpredictable computer. Touch me, farmland action for the whole family or just for one. Touch me, the pocket sized computer game from Atari. What will they think of next? Yeah, not a great name. But look at this design. So this was a physical representation of an Atari game for arcades. And, you know, Simon came along and I think they wanted to have, you know, some type of handheld game as well. Notice that they didn't have any, they only had red LEDs, otherwise they would have had yellow, green and blue, but the LEDs didn't exist yet. Yeah. I think they did have yellow and green, but they didn't have blue. Yeah. They didn't have the, the GAN in GAN. Very Simon like. And like Lady Ada said, when you don't have different color LEDs, you have to just put the LED on a colored square. But look at the Atari switches. You know, those are the, you know, remember from the Atari 2600, those mode switches, they are extremely satisfying and good looking. Yeah. And here's some of the packaging. You can see. Touch me. Yeah. Touch me. Three whole games in one. Three whole games. What are you gonna, what are you gonna do about it? It's like, is it Pong? Where they're like, we have tennis and hockey and it's like. We have three entire games. Look, 1978, the times are simpler. And you know, we scan in the manual and we have all this stuff. So we're, we're, we're trying to do our best to preserve some of the computing history. This is a very weird device that, not a lot of people heard about. Not a lot of people saw it. I never heard of this. Yeah. And that is this week's Richard. Okay. We have a, jobs for many of your jobs. A bunch of jobs are coming in. I'm just gonna keep focusing on just like one per week, but some other new ones came in. This is this week's, this is a STEM program instructor full time, White Mountain Science in Littleton, New Hampshire. If you want to be a STEM program instructor, check it out. You can look at the website, all the information about it. You can apply. We review all of these before we make them live, make sure there's not sketchy or scams or who knows. You can not only post your skills up if you're looking for a job, but if you're a company and you wanna find cool people like these folks are, you can post up the job, that you wanna meet some makers to apply for. It's jobs.eaterfruit.com. Okay. Python hardware time. Okay. This week, couple of bits of news and then we're gonna talk about some other stuff. Circuit Python, beta three. And we're gonna come out with beta four soon. A lot of bug fixes. ESP32C3, I think just got fixed in the latest, you know, more PicoW fixes. Thank you everybody who's been trying out the Wi-Fi and PicoW. It's been exciting to see it taking over. We'll be doing more projects as well. Eight, beta three, and then beta four is coming out soon. Yeah, we'll see. Before I talk about some of the other stuff, just a little bit of a reminder. So Lady Aida did a chat last week. Yeah. And I showed up Circuit Python. Yeah, Circuit Python for expressive devices. And all of the videos are now out. You can check out Espressive's first ever DevCon 2022. And they did a fantastic job. Kudos to the entire team over there who managed to put together a great virtual event with tons of stuff. I was watching lots of different sessions and more. So next up, Python 3.1.1 got released. Some people have been, you know, keeping an eye on this. There's some performance increases and more. You know, so he's good. Did our normal roundup of like, which languages are popular right now? Usually neck-to-neck with JavaScript and Python. And then it's Halloween time. So if you look in the newsletter this week and you're looking for some, well, there's still time. So I don't know if it would be last minute, but if you want to put some eyeballs on something, you can look at some of the videos from show and tell. You can look at some of the guides that we have. You can just type Halloween. You could also just like type eyeball. We have a lot. And then the Pimeroni Wireless Kit, easy to program. It comes with this like neat glass skull. And you can- Oh really? It comes with the skull. Yeah, you can order it with or without. Oh. Skull, yeah. And then here's a cool Raspberry Pi Pico Micro-Python animated skull. Lots of skulls. More skulls. And, you know, if you go through the rest of the newsletter, you can get all the things that you might need for Halloween or more. And then I wanted to show one last thing. Yeah, go up. For Pete Warden. Introduced a people detector. Yeah, this was actually kind of neat. So, Pete Warden, who worked on TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers at Google and is now in, I believe in academia, has been working on taking some of the ideas and concepts from the sorry, TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers. I just remember TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers book and making it reality. So, he always had this idea of having a person sensor that was extremely low power and low cost. And so, he actually released a, you know, it's a $10 sensor. It has like a high max camera on it. And it has iSquared C and a mic controller. And it's running TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers and then sends that data over iSquared C. So, in this example, he shows how to use CircuitPython running on a RP2040 Trinky to communicate with this like all-in-one sensor to detect when a person gets close to a computer screen. And one of the neat things is this is not connected to the internet. Everything is on the edge. There's no personally identifiable information that's getting transmitted anywhere. It's a person detector without taking you and putting it into the cloud where it never goes away and one day it'll hurt you. So, this is a neat trend and it's neat to see folks putting this type of power in a microcontroller and then using all the open-source hardware and software from Adafruit to make it all work together. I think if you're concerned about AI and you want to be someone who builds things instead of uses things only as a consumer, this is a neat one to consider. People detector and then you can have all the smarts with CircuitPython to have it do stuff. If it sees a person then here's much things you could do. Okay, that's our Python on hardware newsletter for the week this week. Please sign up. You do that over at AdafruitDaily.com. We deliver the newsletter every single week to your inbox and over on AdafruitDaily you can sign up for this newsletter and other ones that's not connected to your store account at all in any way and that's how you know you're never gonna spam from us. Little bit of a reminder, don't forget, could type our 10% off Adafruit Store. We are an open-source hardware company speaking of, open-source things you can build. We have 2,756 lines. We got over 2,750 which is a big deal. Yeah, that is a big deal. So on the big board this week, lay data. Okay, if we know in Pedro we'll show the video soon. They showed how to make these custom Halloween neon LED signs. There's the Grim Reaper, there's Hipster Ghost and there's Werewolf Moon. They're showing how to use the LED Animations Library and Circuit Python to create pretty advanced animations that can run concurrently, which is really cool. I think they're running on an RP2040. But it looks like neon, but it acts like a neopixel. It's kind of like the best of both worlds and it's great for making signs. We see a lot of restaurants and cafes have neon signs that are made out of the flexible LED neon because it's inexpensive and it's durable, people can't break it as easily. But they're not animated, so let me check out this guide. From Peli over at Microsoft Research Labs, there's a new feature for MakeCode, well it's like MakeCode-ish, but for MicroBit V2 you can use MicroCode, which is like a block drag and drop system. It just came out, so I honestly haven't actually gotten to check it out, I just read the guide. But it's really neat, they're trying to figure out easier and easier ways to get people introduced to computing, so. If you have a MicroBit V2, check out that guide, follow along and if you haven't find any bugs or issues, let them know because they just released this. More guides. More guides, Catney finished a guide for the LTR329 and LTR303 light sensors. There we had Arduino and circuit Python code, but we have a guide that talks about all the pinouts and details on how to use them. Both sensors are basically the same core, they have a visible and a visible plus IR diode, so you can read both channels. The LTR303 also has an interrupt pin, a threshold interrupt pin. So it's a little bit more advanced because you can like set the interrupt, whereas the 321 is a lot simpler. We thought there could be uses for both. We're personally gonna probably use the 329 for a future project, whereas the 303 I think is what a lot of makers would want in a breakout board. JP did a project on the TCA8418, which is the new keypad matrix driver that we put into the shop recently. The matrix driver lets you do eight by 10 keys, but what he thought would be interesting is, a lot of people wanna make split keyboards, but you end up having to do this weird RXTX thing where you have two microtrollers that communicate with each other. And he's like, well, with this matrix expander, there's two addresses you can pick for them. Sorry, no, you can't pick two addresses, but the RP2040 has two I squared C buses. So you can have two connected and you can have them separated, but connected with just a basic STEMIQT cable, a lot simpler than this, like, bidirectional communication. He just shows how to use our five by six, snap apart ortho keypads to make a DIY ortho keyboard with that split and has the cable in between. But it's also a good example of like how to use two devices on different I squared C buses on one RP2040 board and how to make your own keyboard with a plastic case. And then Carter wrote a really handy guide. This was in our Blinka Raspberry Pi guide, but it was like kind of hidden and people didn't see it as much. There's still a lot of chips that we use that require I squared C clock stretching. I3C has removed clock stretching and we totally understand why because it's really hard to implement very well. The Raspberry Pi computers do not implement clock stretching and so there's a lot of times people are getting weird data, sensors don't quite work, they start flaking out. There's a couple of ways to fix it. One is at tweaking the GPIO speed and we show some examples of how, you know, you can figure out what GPIO speed works. You can also use BitBang I squared C. The BitBang GPIO I squared C driver for the Raspberry Pi, it's a kernel overlay. And that will definitely fix the problem because it is a software-based I squared C. But there's trade-offs for that because I don't, I think you can't use it with hardware drivers and then you have to wait till it boots. Trade-offs, whatever, check it out. This could solve your issues with clock stretching devices on I squared C on the Raspberry Pi. And then finally Liz did a fun no soldering project for Halloween. No video. Oh, we're gonna watch the video with a flapping Halloween bat. Originally the code was a circuit python and then today she added a make code page as well. Looking for a quick no soldering project for Halloween? Have no fear. This project gets you from zero to a flapping vampire bat in no time. You can build this animatronic bat with a circuit playground express and two servo motors. The servos have alligator clips that can clip to the circuit playground pads. The bat's wings attach to the servo motors. Circuit python code running on the circuit playground removes the servo motors in a flapping motion. The code also utilizes the LED animation library to animate the circuit playground's neopics. To get flapping, power up the bat with either USB power or a JST battery pack. To see how you can build your own vampire bat just in time for Halloween, check out the learn guide at learn.adafruit.com. All right, time for some factory footage. It's time for some 3D printing. So we're gonna play two videos back to back and then we'll see on the other side. The first one's gonna be this LED, Halloween decoration signs, and then a 3D printed jack-o'-lantern. That has a surprise if you're a Disney fan. This Halloween season, you can 3D print your own LED neon signs. Bring these signs to life with LED animations using Adafruit's circuit python. Use multiple neopixel strips to create elements with spooky animated features. Print a hipster ghost wearing shades. A grim reaper holding a scythe. Or a werewolf howling at the moon. Powered by Adafruit's Cutie Pie, RP2040, this little devil packs lots of treats with features that are short of fright. This 3D printed coffin snap fits together and houses a small permaprotoboard. Perfect for letting your dev board slumber in peace when it's time to lay to rest. With circuit python, you can program your own LED animations and build custom sequences. Use the animation group helper to synchronize groups of animations and multiple pixel objects to create specific features. Get the spells and acquire the ingredients to build your own by traversing the Adafruit learning system. We hope this inspires you to bring your DIY frights to life with Adafruit's circuit python. And don't forget, you can learn how to make all the stuff and more on 3D Hangouts every Wednesday with Neon and Pedro. Okay, before we go over to IonMPI, don't forget, go to side power. 10% off Adafruit store. Ladies and gentlemen, let's do IonMPI. IonMPI. All right, this week's IonMPI, brought to you by DigiKey and Adafruit is from Epson. Yes, this one is right on time. I don't have a lot of clock and time jokes because it's a precision RTC set from Epson. These RTCs, you know, what's interesting is I don't think of Epson necessarily as making chips and RTCs, but they are really famous for their crystals. We use Epson crystals all the time in our devices. And so it makes sense that they take something, this is basically a 3.2 by 2.5 millimeter crystal. And they're like, we're already really good at the crystal part. Let's shove an RTC chip in there. And they did. So we're gonna feature the RX 8901 CE, but there's also the 4901, which is the SPI version. And basically this is, you know, Epson's really good at crystals and temperature compensation for crystals. Now they've added a microcontroller, I'm actually a silicon chip inside that acts as a real-time clock and is temperature compensated, which is really important because this is something that people ask us about all the time, is how can you have precision timekeeping? You know, I think I was even looking, you know, Jepler, who's one of our engineers, is like, I'm a time nerd. If you're a time nerd, you know it. You wanna have the best, most accurate time possible. Turns out that's actually pretty hard to do. You know, a lot of people have used chips like this, temperature compensated RTCs from Maxim. And I do love these chips, but I do wanna mention that this is basically, you know, another option. So if you aren't able to get these chips because they've been really strongly affected by the chip shortage, or you wanna try, you know, another vendor or something that's a little more affordable, this chip is a really good option. So, you know, as I was kind of, you know, looking into this, I was like, well, why, you know, why is it so hard to do really accurate time? And I think one of the issues is that people have, they have not misinterpretations, but they have experiences with clocks and timers around them that influence how they think time works with electronics. And there's actually a lot of work behind the scenes to make time very accurate that you're like, you're not even aware of. So, you know, even, you know, historically, if you had an alarm clock or a wall clock, it plugs into the wall. It actually uses the 60 hertz frequency of the mains in order to, you know, because it goes 60 hertz here or 50 hertz in Europe, and it uses that to power a timer, you know, a flip-flop and a clock divider, and then that's how it gets one hertz. And what's interesting is like, you know, the 60 hertz is actually really good enough that you can have extremely accurate timekeeping because that frequency is generated by, you know, the power plant in your town or outside your town, and they can synchronize it to make it like a perfect 60 hertz. And, you know, if you look at this website, LeapSecond, they actually did analysis. So during peak hours, when there's a lot of power, actually the frequency kind of goes up and down a little bit, but at the end of the day, when the power usage is lower, the power plant will actually adjust the frequency back. Like they'll kind of like give you some extra cycles or remove some cycles or kind of tweak the frequency so that on average, it really is like extremely precise 60 hertz. Problem is that a lot of people don't plug into mains voltage anymore. Oftentimes you're using a switching power supply or USB, and so you don't have access to this like pre-calibrated 60 hertz signal that will give you like really accurate timekeeping. So a couple options that people have used historically are, you know, a WWVB NIST radio receiver kit. So this is a radio transmitter that's I think in Colorado, in the United States, maybe a couple other locations. And if you have, you know, this radio module, you can receive that signal and it'll give you extremely accurate time because the transmitter is, you know, atomic clock accuracy. It's like it is the NIST timekeeper. The problem is that, honestly, all the way on the East Coast here in New York, we never got this working really well. We just had a lot of difficulty, especially inside of an apartment. You really have to have the antenna either outside or pointing in the direction of Colorado or whatever in order to get good signal. Look, I bet if you're in Nebraska, you're gonna get amazing signal. We had a lot of trouble here in New York City. And of course, again, you can't have it be indoors. It has to be kind of outdoors-ish or near a window. Another way that people get accurate time is with GPS. GPS also gives you, you know, atomic clock precision. You have to face the sky with the antenna, but, you know, once you get signal from there, you're, you get the absolute accurate time. But again, it's kind of expensive. Use a lot of power. You need to synchronize with these satellites. And then, you know, finally, if you have network capability, if you could use NTP again, also, this is a atomic clock synchronized timekeeping service. But all of these things, you know, the 60 Hertz mains is inexpensive, but a lot of people don't connect to mains anymore. So you're gonna get through a switching power supply. But the radio, the GPS, and NTP are all very power hungry. Like you need to have internet or you need to have a receiver or a radio. And so while those are really good ways to keep your project synchronized really well, a lot of people want something that's standalone. And so when you use something like a real-time clock, you're going to connect it to a crystal. And usually it's a 32 kilohertz, 32.768 kilohertz crystal, which means that, you know, one out of, one to the, sorry, two to the 15th power times divider of the clock frequency, three, two, seven, six, eight is one Hertz. And then that's your one second timer. And the circuitry that does a dividing is perfect, right? Like it's very easy to make something that divides by three, two, seven, six, eight, because again, it's a power of two. The problem is that the crystal itself has some variability. Even the highest quality crystals are going to have some variability of about 10 to 20 ppm, depending on the temperature, especially with temperature, but also just natural variability because crystals aren't, you know, they don't oscillate perfectly on time. You know, atomic clocks do, but they're again, extremely expensive. So, you know, you get these crystals, they're 20 ppm, you do the math, 20 parts per million, ends up being, you know, you calculate, there's 86 something something thousand seconds per day and you multiply that by the 20 over one million. And basically it turns out to be two seconds a day of plus or minus loss. And over a month that adds up to, you know, almost a minute. So, so it's like two seconds, you know, 2.8, 1.8 seconds a day, but it can also be a little bit more depending on aging and if the temperature gets very extreme. So basically, you know, you're losing up to a minute a day, a minute a month, and that can be quite a lot. It's a very annoying, it means you're constantly at, you know, you have to synchronize your clock with again, one of these atomic clocks, or you can go with a temperature compensated crystal oscillator with Epson has. And what that does is it'll be able to cut it down from, you know, maybe 20 PPM to like three or even, you know, two PPM depending on if it's commercial versus industrial temperature range. It's a little bit more expensive. You're adding a dollar or two, but it's not as expensive as a GPS. It's not very power hungry. The circuit is, you know, does little tweaks here and there to get the, the oscillation to be much closer to 32.768. Or it'll add or remove pulses to even it out. So you basically end up getting closer to true 32 kilohertz signal. So this is the, you know, this is what we've got here. It's a temperature compensated crystal with a real time clock in it. There's two versions, I squared C SPI. There's also two pin options, pin A and pin B. I think one has frequency out. The other one has more event in inputs. But the interesting thing is the frequency tolerance, that's what you want to look at. So for the XS series, you get, you know, as little as plus or minus three PPM, which basically means plus or minus eight seconds. It's about, you know, one tenth, one, you know, one eighth of as much variation in frequency over minus 40 C to 85 C. And then for very hot temperatures, you know, it is going to be a little bit more than that. So above 85 C, which again is very hot. It's not 85 F, 85 C plus or minus five. So this could be very good in hot environments where you want to get a better timing rate. And then there's an I squared C SPI version. There's also, you know, all the RTC stuff you'd expect. The calibrated, the temperature calibrated frequency output event input pin. So you can like timestamp stuff without having to wake up, separate battery and V out. Power supply can be, you know, 1.6 to 5.5 volts. So really nice wide range, wide temperature range, you know, auto switch from V out to V bat. Everything you want in your RTC and it's temperature compensated. And the price is really good compared to many other temperature compensated RTCs. You know, it's kind of like half the price. It's quite, quite nice. Available on Digikey and it's in stock. Yes, that's the best part. There's a lot of them in stock, both the I squared C and the SPI version. And, you know, usually sometimes the companies have, you know, little sales videos and stuff like this. This is a little different. Epson has a really beautiful video that goes along with it. This was so relaxing. I get felt like so much better after watching the video. So this is really, really good. We rarely play, you know, just like here's the sales and marketing video. It's actually really nice. Epson did a really good job. So we are going to play it. It's been three months. It's been six months since we started playing it. It's the same as before. We're always excited about it every time. We're working on it. The material is going to be available at the time of release, so when you make good material, it's going to be an advantage for the device. To make good material, you need to have the right amount, the right amount of salt, the right amount of flour, and the right amount of people. You can't use anything. The product is alive. Isn't that cool? I promised I wouldn't cry during an Ion API, but... No, I just like, I was like so like peaceful, like this crystal is so beautiful. I've been doing this biz with you for a while. I've never seen a video where they go through and show the process of growing crystals like this. I know, actually, I didn't realize that they, I also thought they were mind. I, for some reason, I was like, I didn't think like, oh yes, of course they'd be ground. You could grow them. But they're beautiful. I mean, like they're, you know, they're enormous and they're perfectly clear. And yeah, I mean, it's like they grow them for three to six months. So it's like, you have to have perfect cleanliness. Everything has to be temperature, you know, everything has to be set up to make these gorgeous, perfect crystals every single time. And they've been doing this for like, I mean, probably a hundred years. Yeah, can we get a crystal growing machine around here? I kind of want one now. I mean, like that thing is cool. Yeah, can we get some of that government money to do a crystal fab? I don't know, they're beautiful. I mean, it's, I mean, it's, and it's cool how you can tell, like if they get one big crystal on that, that turns into millions of little crystal oscillators that you guys use in your circuit. So a little bit of every microcontroller board that you've ever made. This is why we like doing an MPI because we learned something new every single week. I really didn't know how crystals were grown. I had no idea. And that's this week's Ion MPI. Ion MPI. Okay. So don't forget the code is high power and we're going to go off and do some new products. That's right. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This week we have a bunch of it's not out yet top secret, so we're going to do one new product and then we're going to go and do a bunch of stuff. So the stars show this week, besides you, Lady at Our Community, our customers, everybody who runs Adafruit, our employees, our staff, our friends, our partners is this very high power infrared LED emitter. We were seeing a lot of people trying to build their own TVB gone type projects or IR controllers. And one thing that is, I've learned about infrared transmitters is you really want to like drive them really strong to get good range and you want to hit the IR receiver, even if it's not pointed exactly directly at it, 10 meters away, 15 meters away. To do that, you have to have a bunch of IR LEDs and you really want to drive them very strongly with a transistor. And so, you know, we have circuits showing how to do that, but it's always like people have to get the FET and the pull down and the resistor. So that let's make a little stem of board. You connect your JST, PH cable on one end. I'll show that. Give it power, ground and a signal and then it'll just blast that to infrared LEDs. I picked nice and bright ones. We chatted about that on The Great Search a couple of weeks ago. I think these are 90 lumens or I don't remember that. They're as bright as the five millimeter LEDs that we sell. You can drive them at 100 milliamp standard, one amp peak. On this board, if you give it three volts, you're going to get 100 milliamps per LED. If you drive at five volts, you'll get 200 and I think that's really good because that way if people leave the LED on you won't damage it and overheat it. But it's really simple to use. So I thought I just showed on the overhead real fast. And what's nice is that this overhead doesn't have, I mean it has some IR cut filter but not a huge one. So the board comes like this. There is a breakout area if you want to solder to it but I really just recommend using one of our Stemma two millimeter pitch JST cables. You get a on LED which tells you that the board is powered. And then this signal LED will tell you when there's signal coming in on the signal line. The red and black are power again, three to five volts works great. When I touch this to three volt, you see the signal line which is human visible. So I can see that red LED. These are not human visible but they do come through on the camera because that's how cameras work. And they're really nice and bright. You get two, one edge and one upright. And then if you happen to want another LED or you want an external LED, we give you one more spot. You can just wire up a standard infrared five millimeter LED. In this case it's a white LED. But then where you get one more blaster. And then you can always disable the on LED or the signal LED if you want it to be stealth mode. But just a little easy inexpensive board with mounting holes just to get people's IR blaster projects going very quickly and very easily. And that is new products this week. New, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new. New, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new. Okay, a little reminder don't forget high powers of code. You can get all this free stuff. Please start putting your questions up in Discord. I already have some lined up but this is where we answer the questions. Let's jump right in the top secret. Okay, we have a couple top secret. Did a preview on the socials today. These are the boards that we showed off and the names are on some of them so you can see them. Scorpio is the name of the board. We have a cute little RGB glowy scorpion. And then we also have a feather floppy wing and this is our rabbit friend that has floppies. I had a rabbit named floppy when I was a kid. And then this is the official logo of the floppy wing. But what, Lady Aida, are these boards? What do they do? Show them off. All right, well starting with the Scorpio. So this is an RP2040 board and it actually has, it does dual duty. There's two things that you might want to do with this. One, it's your standard feather with USB-C and this is your prototype. It's not going to be green in the end but prototypes always come out not black necessarily because it takes a longer and more expensive to get black prototypes. And at the edge where normally we would have like an SD card slot or something we have eight IO pins that are going through a level shifter and this level shifter takes the USB input and gives you five volts to the level shifter so it shifts eight of the GPIO in the consecutive order to the output. And the idea here is you could use the Neopixelate library or any other time you want to like bang out eight bits at a time in parallel and especially if you want to have them level shifted up to eight volts, good for Neopixels but there's probably many other use cases as well. And there's also a little STEMIQT port up here if you want to connect sensors. And then the rest of these IO pins you can just use as a plain feather. So it's also a, you know, an everyday feather. And on the back, the direction and the voltage I didn't label them but one is you can change the voltage output from five volts to three volts and the other one is you can change the direction and the reason you might want to do that is you could also use this not just as eight pin output but eight pin input. So if you want to use this as a logic sampler you can do that as well using PIO because again these are going to be these are eight pins that are in consecutive order so you can use PIO to read eight bits in a row. So, you know, for, you know people do a logic analyzer project or if you're doing data capture, you know, you can use this and then it has a buffer so even if you have five volt signal in it would level shift it down to three volts for you. Scorpion. Okay. It's like a happy little scorpion. Yeah, all right. Next up, what do you want to show? Next up I can show the floppy feather wings. I finally did that revision. Hop on by. So we've actually done a bunch of work to make a floppy interfaces for Arduino and circuit and I thought I just got super distracted with a lot of part shortage stuff. So getting back to this, so this is what's really neat is a two by 17 headers exactly one feather wing wide. So this is for your standard floppy IDC connector. I also give you five volts from the USB if you happen to, you guys recommended to power a floppy drive from USB actually needs more power than a USB provides but you know, you might be able to do with some low power floppy disks. And then on the bottom, we have the level shifters because floppy disks are five volts input output. And so this would do the level shifting from the three volt floppy, from the three volt floppy focus, focus, focus. Hold on, it's a little bit too high up or too low down. Beautiful. Two level shifters that will take the three volts from the floppy convert it to five volts and back and then there's also a little five volt little mini boost converter that will let you take the three volt logic level to make sure you have a really good clean five volt logic. And then the right enable pin with the right protect pin we have a switch on it. So if you are doing floppy archiving you want to make sure you absolutely never even accidentally right to the floppy drive you can simply short the right enable pin high permanently or low whichever one I can't remember off the top of my head by setting the no right versus the right okay direction. So that'll be good for floppy reading and archiving. So we have the code for this at Arduino and circuit Python already. This is just a... Yeah, and you're probably wondering like why in the world would you want to do anything with floppy disks in that old tech? Well, one of our friends, Neil had the original prints floppy which is a piece of history. This is when Prince stage is named formally or as known as Prince stage is a symbol. Here's an article on Hackaday, but you could see this we had to figure out a way to get this off and we had an original power book but that's not going to last forever either. And so there's a lot of things that we want to archive and put somewhere in this is our history of computing for the last, you know it'll soon be like 20, 30 years. So we wanted to have something for people to be able to read and write floppy disks from all types of computing and hopefully put it in a more permanent place or more people can share and access it. Okay, and then last up lady, what's your last... Okay, so last up I've got... We had all these people making cute little boards with five by five new pixels. And I thought, you know, I'd make a little add-on that you can just kind of attach the back of your cutie pie board and you know this, I'm gonna try to do this just by like press and holding it. Yeah. Yeah. You did it. Yay, so yeah, you can solder it directly. Yeah. And then yeah, it doesn't like, yeah, there you go. So if I tilt it, so you get, you know five by five new pixels so you can have a little messages or animations displaying and then you can use it with your ESP32-C2 or S2 or S3 or this cutie pie or an RP2040 or whatever or a seed shower board, it's a little add-on you just plug it to the back and now you can make a little glowy rainbowy friend. Okay, and that is this week's top secret. Lots this week. Okay, we're gonna jump right on to the questions. Are you ready? Yeah. Okay, I've bunch lined up. Cool. Ready? Yes. Here we go. First up, would you consider making a five-volt three amp power bank breakout board? I know I want to make my own power bank to replace my three amp one and be perfect. This is the person who asked this question like a week or two ago. The answer is still we don't have one. Really, if you want to replace the existing power bank you just give them the power bank. Okay. In the Python newsletter you showed a third-party camera by useful sensors. Do you plan on carrying that camera sensor? I see they have an apparent collaboration with ESP. I mean that's just wondering if you also get the board since you sell the microcontroller featured. Well, they just came out and we are chatting with Pete Warden about it. Right now they're having a little difficulty getting more made. I don't know if you knew about this part shortage. So we can't stock them quite yet but we're chatting and we're giving them some suggestions and hopefully they'll be able to get some. Once we're able to, you should assume yes and we'll have a pack that comes with a Trinkie or other things and maybe we can do a discount when you buy them together. I'm really excited about this because Pete was at Google and now he's able to run an electronics company and I think he's going to be able to do a lot of stuff that he wanted to do at Google but now get it out maybe faster, sooner and more open because it's academia, academia. Next up, have you done long distance testing with the IR sensors at one amp? No, because I wanted to drive them at 100 or maybe 200 milliamps for this board because I'm expecting people to not be as careful because you can just connect it up to anything but it should be able to hit a couple meters, 10 meters. Okay, I know it's too late for this season but any thoughts about re-releasing Halloween boards with round screens that damage my Xbox Halloween display seems, yeah. Sure. Yeah, what we want to do is continue to write out this part shortage and then we have a bunch of ideas for all different shapes and sizes of a lot of the boards that you like, different shape and sizes for MagTags, different shape and sizes for Halloween. Yeah, eyeball projects with round eyes. You name it, we want to do it. Any idea of when we will have more magnetic USB cables in stock? They're on order but I don't know exactly when they're coming in. Okay. You have a few GPIO expansion QuickBoard, thoughts on a GPIO Pro version, this one having many, I guess that's... Motsfets. Motsfets for each GPIO channel. Use's idea would be automated lights to music with coding sequences, timing, Christmas lights, et cetera. That's a good idea. Maybe probably not for this Halloween or Christmas but maybe next year. Okay. Question, what has been the primary limiting factor in the production of the BN0085 boards? There's no BN0085s. Ah, the essential ingredients. The essential ingredient. So we do have BN0055s in stock right now. I would really recommend using those, they're almost completely identical. For most usages. Let's see, I think I got most, if not all the questions. Yep, there is still a part shortage going on. Those are the questions, lady. Okay. Good job. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us this week. Special thanks to Jesse May, who's running things behind the scenes in the Aid for It's Like. Thank you, Jesse May. Thank you. Helping out our customers and our team and more. We'll see everybody next week, same time, same place. We thank you so much. Please consider using the code, saving a buck or two on the way out. You get the free stuff. This has been an Aid for It production. We'll see everybody next week. Here is your moment of zener. Thanks, everybody. Bye.