 Hi, on NPI. OK, I on NBI is brought to you by Digi-Key and Adafruit. Every week, we look at the latest, newest stuff from Digi-Key and more. Lady, what is this week's I on NPI? This week's I on NPI is a Raltron crystal oscillator kit that I saw pop up on digikey.com slash new. They got a cool logo, Raltron. Apparently, they're in Miami, Florida. So it's cool to have really great weather there. It's like Tron's uncle. Raltron. Yeah, and they've also got great crystals. So why not? It's a Rami technology company. I guess they're somebody. But they're small business. And they do manufacturing. And they're here in the US. So let's check out this week's new product. OK, so the new product is the crystal resonator design kit. So chances are, you've used. This is like the best trapper keeper ever. It's basically a trapper keeper. Crystals, if you've never used crystals in your electronics, they're not necessarily the bedazzli type crystals. Instead, they're the kind of crystals that come in a metal tin. Usually, you have to have two capacitors with them to stabilize the oscillator. And inside the crystal actually is a little piece of piezo-resistant material. It's a crystal. It's not like a amethyst type crystal or like a quartz crystal. But it is a crystal material. And when voltage is applied across it, it vibrates. And it will oscillate back at a certain frequency. And so by setting up in a feedback loop and you kick it once, you can get quite precise oscillations out of it. So what these are used for is creating a timing signal for microcontrollers and other chips that need to have a precise measurement of time. Because you can make an RC oscillator, but RC oscillators, they're not very precise. They have plus or minus, maybe 5% or 10%. Maybe you can sometimes tune them to get 1%. But a crystal oscillator is going to work much, much better. You're going to get maybe 20 to 50 PPM. That's pulses per million, or parts per million error rate, which is pretty good for a timing oscillator. And so oftentimes, your microcontroller will use a crystal also as a source for a multiplier, like a PLL, to multiply that frequency. But we'll get to that. So the most common crystal used in any electronics is the 32.768 kilohertz crystal. The reason it's an odd number like why 32.768 kilohertz? Well, because that is a 2 to the 15 number. And so if you have a binary counter in your microcontroller, and binary counters are very inexpensive, as it counts from 0 up to 32.767, when it gets to 768, it will flip over. And that overflow will let you know that one second has passed. So it's a very easy way to count one second. So it's used for timing. So in this case, this board that is shown here has a real-time clock. So it's something that keeps time. It runs for years on a coin cell battery. And it can do that because 32 kilohertz is quite slow. It's a common crystal value, but it's slow enough that you're not running very fast electronics. It sips power, like microamps or less. So there's a lot of different values. So this kit, and I'll open up the kit, of course, and show you the pages inside, it has the most 32 kilohertz crystals. It has all sorts of different sizes and packages and also the load capacitors. Now, yes, oftentimes you have to pick the load capacitors that go with your crystal. Like, if you look here on this Arduino board on the left, you see there's kind of the metal tin. And then above it, there's two little yellow dots. Those are the load capacitors. Sometimes you pick them. But actually, sometimes I've noticed certain chips or devices. They actually have the load capacitor, like a tunable number inside the micro. Or you kind of have to pick a certain loading value. And so that's why they have multiple, even though I tend to use a 12.5 picofarad for 32 kilohertz, and maybe I use 18 picofarad for 12 or whatever, they do give you a full range with multiple sizes and also load capacitances. So I showed you the 32, I call them 32 kilohertz, but they're 32.768. They also have a lot of microcontroller, common microcontroller values. If you have a USB microcontroller, you're going to have 6, 12, or 24 megahertz because USB is a 12 megahertz protocol. And so you're going to have something that's like a multiple or a divisor of 12. A lot of microcontrollers also like to run at like 8 or 16 or 20 or 40 megahertz, those are pretty common values. The microcontroller sometimes runs at that value. But again, it's pretty common for inside the microcontroller there's a phase lock loop. And so there's a non-precise higher speed oscillator that they then tune against the precise lower speed oscillator. And that way you can, a lot of my controllers these days you may have noticed you can actually change the clock speed, sometimes even on the fly. So original AVR microcontrollers, I think you could maybe clock divide only, but in the SAMD 21, you can clock up and you can even overclock if you'd like. So the SAMD 51 you overclock it to 200 megahertz, even though it only has I think a 16 megahertz crystal on it. But it's important, especially if you're doing radio frequency stuff, you want to have really good precise crystals. Next up, there are a couple of weird values in here too like 27.12 megahertz. You're probably like, okay, that's an odd value and it's not even like a multiple of two. What is up with that? This is a RFID board. So this is a PN532 and it's an RFID transceiver board and RFID for like NTAG and my fair chips is 32, sorry, 13.56 megahertz. That's the frequency. And so multiply that by two, you get 27.12. So that's another thing. If you have certain RF work you're doing, you'll need to really get that crystal to be the exact multiple. Also, if you're doing video stuff, old NTSC video, you had to have the color burst crystal and it was like 3.96 megahertz. The crystal actually does matter. You don't round up or down. You wanna get the exact value and again, you wanna have the loading capacitors match because that'll get your value as close as possible to the stated. So inside the binder are all these pages and I think that these are like, I'll show them also in the overhead but I think they're pages that are used for like baseball cards or something. Yeah, this was clever. So each inside there's five, there's a five piece tape of each crystal and they're in the little clear pockets and behind it is a printed out piece of paper that goes that, you know, is behind the clear part and it has the part number, the frequency, the stability, the load capacitance, the ESR operating mode, operating temperature and size. And then there's also a short URL that you can go to to get the data sheet and also a QR code. One nice thing about the short URL, they got their own URL shortener. Big ups for that because it would have been really easy to like use the Google one or Bitly. They actually got their own, which is very smart. Don't rely on other people for your URL shortening. What are the chances of like a giant global network going down and no one being able to communicate? I know. Probably not. Okay. Unlucky. Well, it's available on Digikey. That's right. So you can pick this up. Digikey also has capacitor kits and resistor kits. I always recommend having a resistor kit and capacitor kit. I use them all the time. We sell some, you know, in the shop but Digikey also has them. Nothing beats having a resistor capacitor kit. You never know, you need some weird value. Sure, you're all here. And a crystal kit also really useful because sometimes you don't realize you're laying at your board, you get all the parts, you don't realize, oh shoot, like the crystal I need is the wrong size or I need a slightly different frequency. I misread it. I thought it was 20, it's 24. Crystals are using everything, right? So it's not a bad idea, just like you have your kit of regulators, your kit of resistors, your kit of connectors, get a crystal kit as well. Great. Want to show this book? Yes. All right, I'll show this book and then we'll... Okay, so design kits for crystal resonators. Thank you. So there's all instructions on how to use it and then basically this is how it works. So you see that there's these clear pages and they're used for like baseball cards or whatever. And then underneath it, there is for each one a description. So these are like super tiny 1.2 by 1 millimeter, 32 kilohertz crystals. And then moving up there is 3.2 by 1.5 and then they've got 32 megahertz. They've got 25 megahertz, 27.12, 27, not the one too, 32, 37, 0.4, 30, 0.4, 40, 48, 16, 20, 24, 25. They have a couple different frequencies in different sizes, but they kind of cover them all. These are all the kind of the most common frequencies I've seen. And of course, once you've used these in your production and you're happy with the package and the size and the stability, you can of course use that part number type indigiki and then purchase it by the real, your heart's content. So you got 66 different values and then 55, sorry, five pieces of each value. So multiply that out. Okay, and that is this week's IonMPI. Tick tock. IonMPI.