Podcasts about gpio

This week's EYE ON NPI is another onsemi device - this week we're looking at the NIV3071 4-Channel eFuse Solution (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/o/on-semi/niv3071-4-channel-efuse-solution) a power distribution manager that can lets you manage a product with a lot of power domains and supplies using just a couple GPIO pins. This week's product is an upgrade from the covered-earlier NIS5420 (https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/09/09/eye-on-npi-onsemi-efuse-porfolio-eyeonnpi-digikey-onsemi-digikey-adafruit/) - with a higher 8~60V input range, and 4 independently-controlled channels. When people first meet fuses, they usually see and think of classic 'wire' fuses (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/bel-fuse-inc/5ST-200-R/1009012) with ceramic or glass or thermoplastic bodies, and a thin wire inside. When too much current goes through the fuse wire, it gets hotter and hotter and eventually melts, cutting off the load from the source voltage. These kinds of fuses are super cheap, very-very-low resistance, easy to find at any hardware store, and there's lots of suppliers with various current limits. However, they're one-shot usage only and only good for over-current, can't act as switches/sequencers. You need to have a way for customers to access the fuse in order to replace it. For those reasons, a lot of engineers prefer going with 'poly fuses' - fuses that are easy to mount into a circuit that auto-reset after a time (usually minutes) so that a temporary overload doesn't make the device a brick so quickly. For example, we have a chunky 24V 5A hold / 10 A trip polyfuse (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/littelfuse-inc/2016L260-24MR/6347052) on the Sparkle Motion board design (https://www.adafruit.com/product/6100), designed to protect folks who accidentally have a short in the output LED strings, and want to avoid damaging the power supply or main board. Poly-fuses are a great step-up from plain wire fuses: they're fairly inexpensive, available from lots of suppliers with various current limits, and best of all the fuse auto-resets after cooling down. However, like wire fuses, they're good for over-current, can't be reset, and have some variation depending on ambient temperature: you may trip 50% higher if its cold, or lower if its hot. Thus the next generation of fuses: eFuses (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/o/on-semi/efuse-automotive-circuit-protection)! As you could imagine, these are pure-silicon fuses, with a chunky N-FET that acts as the cut-off switch, and current limiting managed as an analog feedback loop that will cut the FET when too high. We get the resetability of a polyfuse, with additional control like sequence-able enable pins and under-voltage lockout. Note that some eFuses also can do over-voltage clamps and negative voltage protection, but the NIV3071 (https://www.digikey.com/short/3v0thr1p) doesn't contain these protections, so you may want to implement those protections separately. Especially designed for automotive power systems, which tend to be 12V/24V/36V/48V multiples, the NIV3071 (https://www.digikey.com/short/3v0thr1p) is AEC−Q100 qualified and PPAP capable (https://www.onsemi.com/pub/collateral/tnd6284-d.pdf). The use of eFuses is becoming popular as cars have become more computerized and electrified, with each 'zone' in a car (https://www.onsemi.com/solutions/automotive/zonal-architecture) - such as entertainment, communication, lighting, charging and sensors - all needing separate power management. If you don't need automotive qualifications, the functionally-compatible NIS3071 (https://www.digikey.com/short/9v2dmvhf) is a couple of cents cheaper. This family of eFuses is good for up to 60V and 2.5A per channel, but if you need more per channel you can just double or triple them up to add 2.5A per. If you want less per channel, to protect low-power devices from overheating or accidental shorts, the current limit can be reduced with an external resistor. And of course, you can turn on/off each channel with a GPIO enable pin: great for sequencing your power chain to reduce stress on the power supply from inrush current, or to allow each section to stabilize and go through self-test. For your next power supply design, the onsemi NIV3071 (https://www.digikey.com/short/3v0thr1p) and NIS3071 (https://www.digikey.com/short/9v2dmvhf) offer high-voltage, high-current control in a small package and a great price. Both are in stock right now at DigiKey for immediate shipment, so you can book today and start integration by tomorrow afternoon.

This week's EYE ON NPI is Pretty Sweet Of Course! It's the Infineon Technologies PSOC Control C3 Microcontroller Line (https://www.digikey.com/short/8cw3wpp8) a souped-up microcontroller that is a perfect choice for engineers who need to do some motor control while also managing buttons, LEDs, displays, and other product requirements all on one chip. With a the high-speed ADCs on board, you can manage your BLDC motors and handle the feedback loop in firmware for dynamic tuning without the expense of a specialized co-processor. The PSOC Control C3 series comes in two flavors, the Entry and Main line chips (https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/microcontroller/32-bit-psoc-arm-cortex-microcontroller/32-bit-psoc-control-arm-cortex-m33-mcu/psoc-control-c3m/). Both are based on the Arm Cortex M33 which means you know that your CMSIS-based code will be an easy compile and you can use existing pre-compiled libraries. The M33 line is an upgrade to the M3 and M4, giving you the same or better clock speeds and FPU/DSP commands you get with the M4 plus TrustZone and better power efficiency. The Entry line runs at 100MHz, with max 256k Flash 64K SRAM, 10-bit DAC, a 6 MSPS 12-bit ADC, 16 x 16-bit + 4 x 32-bit TCPWMs and a "CORDIC math coprocessor". The Main line can run at 180MHz, same Flash/SRAM and TCPWMs, and has a 12 MSPS ADC plus 4-channel HRPWM with less than 100ps resolution. Both come in 48 and 64 pin TQFP/QFN varieties, the Main line also has an 80-pin version. (There will also apparently be a Performance line, so far un-announced, which may offer more memory / higher frequency). Both have FPU/DSP support, so you'll be able to process the 6 or 12-MSPS ADC data quickly. And the CORDIC processor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORDIC) optimizes trig functions like sin/cos/tan/ln so you don't need lookup tables for performing these floating point calculations. These are particularly useful when handling motor motion calculations since they are often sinusoidal and we need to convert to-and-from the ADC measurements to the precision PWM timers. There's a huge selection of Arm processors out there, but the PSOC Control C3 has the best peripherals for motor control: it's rare to see 12MSPS 12-Bit ADC plus so many 16-bit and 32-bit timers with high-speed PWM. The CORDIC co-processor especially will make managing BLDC or Stepper motors a breeze. Plus you still get all the peripherals you would expect of a microcontroller: I2C, UART, SPI, CAN bus, DAC, IRQs, and lots of GPIO. That means you can handle all the other stuff your product has to do while also managing the motor in the background, saving you lots of space and money in BOM costs and fewer integration woes when trying to communicate between a main processor and a motor-control co-processor. The KITPSC3M5EVK eval board (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/infineon-technologies/KITPSC3M5EVK/25880112) is in stock right now if you want a ready-to-go kit at a good price. It comes with 'Arduino shield compatible" pinouts plus a USB / debug interface, and MikroBus connector for expansion. You can also pick up just the bare chip - for example the PSC3M5FDS2ACQ1AQSA1 (https://www.digikey.com/short/8cw3wpp8) is a fancy version with 256K of flash, the 12 Msps ADC, and hall encoder in a TQFP-64 package. It's in stock now at DigiKey for immediate shipment! Order today and you can have a powerful microcontroller with excellent motor feedback control in your hands by tomorrow morning.

For this week's EYE ON NPI, we'll Hazard a guess that you'll be excited to see the Raspberry Pi RP2350 chip available for purchase at Digi-Key for integration into your next design. We've been working with this chip for a few months and it's quickly becoming our favorite Arm Cortex chip, with fun peripherals and a well-supported toolchain. It also is one of the first mass-produced RISC-V chips: one that you can buy and start using for trying out RISC-V development without the 'risc' of worrying you may have picked the wrong core. Available in two chip sizes and with a boost in performance and peripherals, the RP2350 (https://www.digikey.com/short/mzpjhptm) represents a big upgrade to the RP2040 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC0914-13/14306010) that you've seen take over the microcontroller world over the last 4 years. Raspberry Pi is famous for their single board computers (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/single-board-computers-sbcs/933) so much so that they created a full market for sub-$100 all-in-one PCs. The big disruption we feel they brought to the market was the creation of a hackable and open-source ecosystem with good main-line OS and driver support. With well-written documentation and up-to-date Linux software, purchasing a Pi meant you got to join in with a community that was having fun, not struggling with compiling out-of-tree kernel modules and closed-source firmware. So in 2021 when they announced the RP2040, folks were interested: could a SBC maker design low power silicon? Turns out, yes! The RP2040 was a fun dual-core 133 MHz Cortex-M0+ processor, with 264K of SRAM, with a satisfying collection of peripherals: USB, ADC, UART/SPI/I2C, PWM, DMA and timers plus the nifty PIO state machine (https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/what-is-pio/). The killer feature, though, was the price: at $1 a chip, and tons of availability with an on-going chip shortage, the RP2040 won our hearts and soldering stations! Three years later, Raspberry Pi is back with a sequel: The RP2350A (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/microcontrollers/685?s=N4IgTCBcDaIE4AcwGYCsAGAgiAugXyA) and RP2350B (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/microcontrollers/685?s=N4IgTCBcDaIE4AcwGYCsAGAQiAugXyA) two variants of an upgrade chip that keeps what was great about the '2040 but with some boosts. First up, the core was upgraded from dual Cortex-M0's to the M33: this means you get an FPU and better low-power performance, plus TrustZone security. The core is spec'd for 150MHz but we've overclocked it to 264MHz without too much complaint. You also have the option to get dual RISC-V cores (https://riscv.org/) instead. SRAM was also bumped: from 264K to 520KB. This is great for running interpreted languages like MicroPython (https://micropython.org/) or CircuitPython (https://circuitpython.org/). Like the original, the RP2350 does not have any built in FLASH memory. Instead, you will need to wire it to a QSPI flash memory chip (https://www.digikey.com/short/80t4zt5t). This way you can pick from 1 MBytes to 16 MBytes whatever your code size needs. This new chip adds the ability to wire in PSRAM (https://www.digikey.com/short/d8033bfw) to the same QSPI bus plus an extra chip select. This is not going to be nearly as fast as on-chip SRAM, but it's great when you want large working memory that the chip will manage for you: by configuring it in the CMakefile, you 'magically' get a huge area you can malloc. Another improvement is in the number of PIO blocks: the original had 2, the RP2350 has 3. The two biggest new features we found are the new HSTX peripheral and the 80-QFN RP2350B (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/microcontrollers/685?s=N4IgTCBcDaIE4AcwGYCsAGAQiAugXyA) variant. HSTX stands for High Speed Transmission and its a high-speed peripheral that can drive 8 output lines - note that it's output only! There's a few possible use cases, but the core reasoning is that this lets you control a DVI display directly from the chip using just the DMA and internal memory without requiring overclocking, PIO, or an extra core. Note that the built in SRAM limits the size of the display if you want to have a video buffer: you can do 320x240 @16bpp or 640x480 @8bpp but, still! Second, if you found the original QFN-60 a bit constraining in terms of GPIO, the QFN-80 'B' version has 20 extra GPIO available for just 10 cents more. If you've been doing grabby-hands in hopes of getting a reel of RP2350 chips into your next design: today is your lucky day! Digi-Key has these chips in stock RIGHT NOW for immediate shipment. You can get a reel of either A or B type chips, with cut tape individual components coming shortly. Both types are great, but recently we've been having a lot of fun with the roomy B type (https://www.digikey.com/short/mzpjhptm), with the extra GPIO. Order today and you can start integrating the trendiest new silicon into your new PCB assembly by tomorrow afternoon.

We're testing out an I2C-to-solenoid driver today. It uses an MCP23017 expander. We like this particular chip for this usage because it has push-pull outputs, making it ideal for driving our N-channel FETs and flyback diodes. The A port connects to the 8 drivers, while the B port remains available for other GPIO purposes. For this demo, whenever we 'touch' a pin on port B to ground, the corresponding solenoid triggers provide an easy way to check speed and power usage. Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #electronics #robot #solenoid

We used to stock a PiCam Module (https://www.adafruit.com/product/5247) that would plug into a Pi CM4 or CM5 - recently we went to restock it, but the vendor hasn't replied to our emails for many months. So, it could be a good time for us to design something that works similarly but with more capabilities. So we tasked Timon (https://github.com/timonsku) with designing something for us - we just said, "Make the best thing ya can," and he delivered! Check this board out that plugs onto the compute module and provides many great accessories: USB connection for bootloading/USB gadget, USB 3.0 host type A for CM5, micro HDMI, micro SD card for data storage on 'Lite modules, camera connection, and mount, two DSI connectors, fan connect, Stemma QT / Qwiic connection, and RTC battery. There's one shutdown button for CM5 and two GPIO buttons plus one LED. Timon's gonna try to add an EYESPI connector for our next rendering so we can get some I2C/SPI/PWM outputs easily. What do you think? We wanted to keep it compact and not too pricey (aiming for under $30 cost. We'll see if we can get it there) but were able to craft fairly complex projects in a small space. Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #raspberrypi #camera #tech

We're starting to stock a lot of chips that can do digital I2S out, which makes for great-quality audio playback. That's great when you have enough processing power to decode WAVs or MP3s in real-time. However, we could really use some better DACs in the shop. We like the UDA1334A (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3678), but that's technically discontinued - it's great because it doesn't require an MCLK that some boards like the Raspberry Pi don't have and doesn't need I2C configuration either. The PCM510x is a good family, too; it ranges from the inexpensive PCM5100 (https://www.digikey.com/short/z50cnp0h) to the PCM5102 (https://www.digikey.com/short/80z2nh3h) which has high quality output at a higher cost. This breakout could use any of the family chips & gives you all the GPIO needed with a 3.5mm headphone jack for line-level output. We're testing it out with some cool tunes from the adafruit soundcloud, check it out! (https://soundcloud.com/adafruit). Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #tech #technews #music

This week on EYE ON NPI we're eatin' our Wheaties (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvyInWTLM8s) - it's the Analog Devices MAX96714 Single GMSL2/GMSL1 to CSI-2 Deserializer (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/base-product/analog-devices-inc-maxim-integrated/175/MAX96714/737256) a way to send high resolution digital video over a co-ax wire without losing quality. These advanced serial-deserial sets - we'll call them SerDes for short - let you minimize cabling, for reduced weight and complexity when passing high speed video from cameras or to displays over single flexible RG coax. It's easier than ever these days to add high quality video or camera sensing to your products: boards like the Raspberry Pi can do dual 4K HDMI and up to two DSI / CSI ports on the Compute Modules (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/single-board-computers-sbcs/933?s=N4IgTCBcDaIMYHsC2AHArgFwKYAIkIBM0AbLEAXQF8g) but the cables that they come with tend to be short, maxing out at 500mm long. (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC1130/21658263) That's because the MIPI protocol used for data transfer is designed for ultra high speeds over low cost flex PCBs, from say a laptop motherboard to the laptop monitor or webcam. Now, we do sell looooong cables (https://www.adafruit.com/product/2144) that are 2 meters long but with the caveat that they are well outside the expected spec. They do work! But we wouldn't put it in a product that goes to customers. So what do you do if you have a car, where the seats and dashboard have monitors but the main processor is probably in the back of the car, far from the hot engine? That's where Analog Devices got inspired from the Cable TV of our youth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television) that would let kids of the 90's watch dozens of channels using...only one cable! The cable, in this case, is a coaxial cable: one copper wire surrounded by a plastic dielectric, then a braided metal ground return. Coax cables are flexible but rugged, and DigiKey stocks thousands of different types (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/coaxial-cables-rf/475) by the foot or reel. So they make an excellent physical transport layer for video in aggressive environments because they are shielded yet flexible. With GMSL you need two chips: a serializer like the MAX96717 (https://www.digikey.com/short/3pcv09pn) and a de-serializer like the MAX96714 (https://www.digikey.com/short/3jqw8tj8). Between the two, connect said coax, then configure both sides for the data format you want and boom, you have a transparent video link! The serializer will take the digital data, then turn it into a serialized-packetized-data-packet on a single wire. That thin wire can fit into spaces that would normally be a challenge such as cars / aerospace where weight is at a premium, robotics where the shielding will protect the signal integrity, and medical where high rez cameras have to fit in tiny spaces. GMSL even supports 'power over coax' where a DC signal can be used as a carrier for the high frequency data - so you really can have one thin cable for everything. Depending on which generation of GMSL you choose, you will get either 3 Gbps or 6. A small portion of that is 'upstream' communication, thats used for IRQs, video/camera control and extra I2C or GPIO. If you need stereo or quad camera/video , you can use a quad deserializer: you will still get 4 coax cables in but it'll be smaller and perhaps better synchronized than having four separate deserializers. To get started, we recommend picking up the MAX96714-BAK-EVK eval board (https://www.digikey.com/short/nh82vrbc), which is not inexpensive but does have everything you need to get started with the MAX96714 (https://www.digikey.com/short/3jqw8tj8). Note you'll also need the serializer! One thing that's nice is that if you want to get set up with a Raspberry Pi to start, you can order the Pi Cam Eval board (https://wiki.analog.com/resources/eval/user-guides/ad-gmslcamrpi-adp) which is an adapter for the eval to use off-the-shelf Pi camera modules, pick up at DigiKey (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/analog-devices-inc/AD-GMSLCAMRPI-ADP/21678785). Then to set up the configuration you can use the Linux driver to have automatic setup (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/media/i2c/max96714.c) without a separate configuration program. If you'd like to try out GSML for your next long-distance video product, you can pick up the Analog Devices MAX96714 Single GMSL2/GMSL1 to CSI-2 Deserializer (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/base-product/analog-devices-inc-maxim-integrated/175/MAX96714/737256) today from DigiKey because it's in stock for immediate shipment! Book now and you can be zipping along MIPI CSI data at 6Gbps by tomorrow afternoon.

This week's EYE ON NPI is a Texas-two-steppin' motion controller that takes your 2-axis motion control to the next level: it's ADI/Maxim/Trinamic's TMC5272 Dual-Axis Stepper Motor Controller and Driver IC. We've been checking out many of Trinamic's great stepper motor driver chips lately and this one is the latest generation, with 2 drivers, plus motion control, for advanced usage even on boards that don't need real-time GPIO toggling for steps. Trinamic is definitely not a group that 'rests on their laurels': every year they are coming out with even more improvements to their awesome stepper motor drivers. This chip has 250 pages of datasheet and each page details yet another improvement or setting that will make your mechatronics fast, silent, and efficient. What sets the TMC5272 (https://www.digikey.com/short/0mq250r7) apart? Well, the first big thing is you get double the fun with two full stepper drivers for X and Y axis support. The voltage range is 2-20V, so good for low to medium voltage motors. The tradeoff is you can only get 1.5A max peak current, 1.1A sine wave, but for most users that don't have massive steppers that is perfectly fine. There's also a lot more 'smarts' in this stepper than the ones even from a couple years ago: 8-point motion control, no-loss/no-sense-resistor current management, 2D trajectory management over two axes, encoder or reference switch inputs, sensorless standstill motion detection. Of course all the fixin's you expect from the previous generations are there: silent stepping, UART and SPI and step/dir interface, stallguard, 1 to 256 microstepping, and diagnostic output But, it's in a 3x3mm WLCSP package: this means you'll need at least a 4 layer board and plugged vias. It also means heat dissipation might be more challenging than the drivers with the big ground pads. However, a nice tradeoff is that there is internal 'lossless' current sensing, so no chunky resistors are required. The upside of a WLCSP is that we have lots more pins for tons of interfaces. Each driver can run one bipolar stepper motor, and has multiple interfaces for control. As usual there's the STEP/DIR interface. This is great for usage with older designs that expect to toggle GPIO on each step. However, the S/D pins are shared with some of the cool sensors/encoders/switches. Plus all the really cool things the chip can do are too complex to adjust with just a few GPIO, so to really get the most use you'll need to use one of the packetized interfaces: UART or SPI. UART is great if you happen to only have USB for your computer: you can always just use a USB-serial converter, and the controller can be daisy-chained for multiple drivers per UART. If you have extra GPIO and/or a dedicated SPI port, we would recommend that since it's much faster and you can easily add more chips with one chip-select per. Some of the cool things you can do via the interface include a 8-point ramp controller: instead of stepping each motor and dynamically adjusting the micro-steps for speed/precision, the TMC5272 can do it all on its own. It can also handle knowing 'where' it is on an axis bar, by using the built in homing support. Homing can be done either by using the sensorless 'StallGuard' (https://www.analog.com/en/lp/001/building-better-stepper-motor-system.html) or with reference switches. You can wire the switches directly to the TMC5272 - good if you want to have slow motion homing since you don't have to whack into the end of the axis - and then let the chip manage where it is. Then you can tell it you want to move and when you want to get there, and the TMC will take care of the rest. For ultra-accurate motion control, you can connect an external optical or magnetic encoder to the motor shaft that will tell you exactly when a step has occurred. There's also a neat back-EMF sensor that can tell when the motor has moved while 'disabled' - good to know when you will need to do another homing step after re-enabling the motor. There's also an TMC5272-EVAL-KIT eval board that you can plug-n-play for instant stepper motor usage (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/analog-devices-inc-maxim-integrated/TMC5272-EVAL-KIT/22107596), it works instantly with the TMCL IDE for trying out the various programmable settings (https://www.analog.com/en/resources/evaluation-hardware-and-software/motor-motion-control-software/tmcl-ide.html) and turn the motor via the TMCL IDE which sends UART/SPI commands over their USB driver board, so it's perfect for verifying the performance with your desired motors. If you want double the pleasure, double the fun of double-motor driving, you can pick up the ADI/Maxim/Trinamic's TMC5272 Dual-Axis Stepper Motor Controller and Driver IC (https://www.digikey.com/short/0mq250r7) from DigiKey today - it's in stock & ready to ship immediately! Place your order now & by tomorrow morning you can be step-step-stepping to the most advanced 2-axis motor controller design you've ever seen.

We got the 'big' Sparkle Motion boards (https://www.adafruit.com/product/6100) out to the PCB fab house and now are turning to the mini version. This one doesn't have USB PD or 24V support, but it is very compact and has many niceties that WLED users will enjoy...like built-in ICS-43434 microphone (https://www.adafruit.com/product/6049), however during testing, we discovered that GPIO 9 and 10 were not available because the ESP32-Mini module (https://www.espressif.com/en/module/esp32-mini-1-en) we're using has slightly different pin availability! No biggie with open source firmware: we just forked and fixed and PR'd the changes here https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED/pull/4450 Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #wled #opensource #adafruit

Since the latest release of 'piolib' we can do things like drive NeoPixels on any pin on the Raspberry Pi 5 (https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-on-raspberrypi-linux/using-neopixels-on-the-pi-5) which rocks, and means we can tackle the next, more complex, project: driving HUB75 RGB Matrix displays (https://www.adafruit.com/product/5362) these require even MORE timing freakiness: using 10 pins, and 'manual' PWM means we have to constantly blit out the color dithering. Historically this was done with mmap'd memory to the GPIO controller bitbanging, which required a full core and could jitter depending on load. But now we can use the PIO peripheral! We can drive massive display arrays at high speeds and color depths using just about any pins. The future is looking bright

This week's EYE ON NPI is an EYE ON A PI - it's the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/r/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-compute-module-5), the latest update to the easily embeddable mini modules that make industrial developers happy by giving them all the power of a Pi 5 in a ready-to-go pluggable solution. The Raspberry Pi computer launched with the goal of bringing low cost computing to the education market (https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2011/05/a_15_computer_to_inspire_young.html) and through the Pi Foundation (https://www.raspberrypi.org/) they still have that charitable goal (https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFoundationStrategy2025.pdf) while also spinning off the manufacturing/sales company into the Trading Company which went public this year (https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/what-would-an-ipo-mean-for-the-raspberry-pi-foundation/). The first few Raspberry Pi computers were 'all in one' style (https://www.adafruit.com/product/1344), with power, GPIO, Video and Audio output, USB, Ethernet, and Micro SD card storage (https://raspi.tv/2018/new-raspberry-pi-family-photo-including-pi3a-plus-zero-wh). Eventually enough folks asked for an enclosure-friendly version that would allow an "I/O" board to be designed with the ports in a different arrangement - the big-sized-Pis have them arrayed over 3 sides. To solve this conundrum, and to satisfy the growing industrial/commercial market, the Pi engineers designed the Compute Module 1 which is still available (https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-1/). This clever SODIMM packaged board has all the GPIO and peripheral pins on a plug-in connector so you can slot it into an existing design securely and easily - SODIMM sockets (https://www.digikey.com/short/rz9cdjrn) come both vertical and horizontal. This was later updated to the CM3 and CM3+ (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC0149/9866293) which was on par with the Pi 3 instead of the Pi 1, with significantly higher computational power. However, perhaps because they wanted a more compact module, or to support high-frequency signals better, the next generation of Compute Module 4's (https://www.digikey.com/short/wffzdn0b) came in a flat rectangular shape with dual 100-pin Hirose contacts. (https://www.digikey.com/short/5m8djf0t) Another nice thing that happened with the CM4 is it became available in dozens of configurations: 1/2/4/8 GB RAM, SD or 8/16/32GB MMC, and with or without WiFi/BLE/BT. This allowed commercial users to go with the 'lowest cost option' needed to fulfill their requirements - whereas the Pi 4 comes in only 3 or 4 RAM options (https://www.digikey.com/short/4pn5vw24). The ready-to-go software - no kernel compiling or OpenWRT configuration required! Long-term hardware support and low prices pushed the CM4 into more and more designs. Which brings us to the NPI of the week, the Compute Module 5 (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/r/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-compute-module-5)! The CM5 is a big upgrade, with quad A76s at 2.4GHz for a 2x computing upgrade, increased RAM options of up to 16G, increased MMC option of 64GB, USB 3.0 ports, PCIe and RP1 hardware interfacing with PIO support (https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/piolib-a-userspace-library-for-pio-control/). If you have an existing CM4 design, you can easily upgrade or update to the new hotness. If you're new to integrating Raspberry pi, then while you may think of the Pi as a hobby/school computer, that isn't necessarily true anymore with 72% of Pi computers sold going into commercial/industrial use (https://investors.raspberrypi.com/ipo/documents/1). That means you can be confident that you'll get consistent pricing and availability for a long time so that you can work on designing the rest of your product for the CM series to plug into. And like the CM4, the CM5 is available in a variety of configurations and prices, from $45 to $135. Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5's are currently only available for pre-order (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/r/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-compute-module-5) , with estimated ship times in Q1 of 2025 to DigiKey - and the moment DigiKey gets some in stock, they'll ship your pre-order instantly so you can get integrating with the Pi ecosystem the very next day. Don't wait till release day because they'll sell out instantly! Instead, when you pre-order from DigiKey, your order goes into a queue and you'll get first-come-first-served prioritization. See more on DigiKey https://www.digikey.com/short/47t12drj

This week we got our Metro RP2350 boards (https://blog.adafruit.com/2024/11/11/metro-rp2350-now-with-bigger-better-rp2350b/) back and after fixing the pin direction and rerouting (https://www.instagram.com/adafruit/p/DC2U7mdyf9W) the whole thing, it came up and pretty much works perfectly! Just one component needed a swap - we were able to test all GPIO, analog inputs, MicroSD slot, PSRAM, LEDs & NeoPixel, user button, I2C/SPI/UART, aaand power supplies. The 5V supply is great, we got a nice clean 5V out at 2A+ from 12V DC in. The last thing to check is the HSTX port, which gives us DVI access, and it works, thanks to this festive turtle demo! (https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-turtle-graphics) We're aiming to get this into the shop before the end of the year, wouldn't that be smashing? Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #metro #rp2350 #adafruit

We've been testing the Trinamic/Maxim/Analog/WeylandYutani TMC2209 (https://www.digikey.com/short/8r5m38h8) breakout we designed, and it's working great - the step/dir interface plus the micro-step select allows a microcontroller to control a stepper with just GPIO and true-to-its-name it is a very silent stepper driver, much quieter than the A4988 (https://www.digikey.com/short/tfjt88dd)! There are a few different I/O pins on the TMC: Index tells you when a full step is completed, which is handy to know when you want to change stepper modes on the fly. Diag lets you know when a power or motor failure has occurred. It can also tell when the motor has stalled if it's configured to. Finally, and most interestingly, is the UART interface: this unidirectional pin lets you read and write configuration registers, set 1-128 microsteps, change current limiting, and detect stalls for 'auto homing'. So far, everything works; we're just going to swap the direction of the potentiometer so it twists clockwise to increase the current limit and book PCBs! Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #tmc2209 #steppermotordriver #silentdriver

Ladyada tasked Jepler with exploring the new libPIO for Raspberry Pi 5 computers: this gives us access to the RP1 chip so that we can run custom PIO state machines on the GPIO pins. A common use case is NeoPixels, because of the tight timing requirements of the WS281x LEDs. Here is our first light test that shows it is possible... Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #raspberrypi #adafruit #pio

Necessity truly is the mother of invention. So, when Jim Gray and Alex Hartman needed to gain remote control of some late-model CD players, they developed “Babelfish.” The Babelfish Ecosystem is a solution for logic integration amongst systems that typically are unable to communicate with each other. Whether it's a 40 year old on-air light system that only speaks in relays or a new IP based system that only communicates virtually, the Babelfish Ecosystem allows unlike systems to communicate as one. Babelfish, speak any language for GPIO control. Alex and Jim join us to explain the necessity, the solution, and the tech behind these useful tools. Show Notes:BabelFish web page at Optimized Media Guests:Alex Hartman - Partner at Optimized Media GroupJim Gray - Managing Partner at Optimized Media Group Host:Kirk Harnack - Telos Alliance, Delta Radio, Star94.3, Akamai Broadcasting, & South Seas BroadcastingFollow TWiRT on Twitter and on FacebookTWiRT is brought to you by:Broadcasters General Store, with outstanding service, saving, and support. Online at BGS.cc. Broadcast Bionics - making radio smarter with Bionic Studio, visual radio, and social media tools at Bionic.radio.Angry Audio and the new Rave analog audio mixing console. The new MaxxKonnect Broadcast U.192 MPX USB Soundcard - The first purpose-built broadcast-quality USB sound card with native MPX output. Subscribe to Audio:iTunesRSSStitcherTuneInSubscribe to Video:iTunesRSSYouTube

Necessity truly is the mother of invention. So, when Jim Gray and Alex Hartman needed to gain remote control of some late-model CD players, they developed “Babelfish.” The Babelfish Ecosystem is a solution for logic integration amongst systems that typically are unable to communicate with each other. Whether it's a 40 year old on-air light system that only speaks in relays or a new IP based system that only communicates virtually, the Babelfish Ecosystem allows unlike systems to communicate as one. Babelfish, speak any language for GPIO control. Alex and Jim join us to explain the necessity, the solution, and the tech behind these useful tools.

This week's EYE ON NPI is another great step forward in Bluetooth Low Energy development, it's Nordic's new nRF54 series (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/n/nordic-semi/nrf54l15-multiprotocol-soc) and nRF54L15 Wireless SoC Development Kit (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/n/nordic-semi/nrf54l15-wireless-soc-development-kit). This is the heir-apparent to the popular nRF52840 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/nordic-semiconductor-asa/NRF52840-CKAA-R/15929796) series chip which we know and love so much. The nRF54 series comes in L and H variants, for 'low' and 'high' power, but even the L series is a step up, with Cortex M33 running at 128MHz, and up to 1.5MB ReRAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_random-access_memory) / 256KB SRAM. The H series is a whole new ball-game with dual M33 running at 320MHz, 2MB of ReRAM and 1MB of SRAM plus upgraded peripherals. Wow, the nRF series has come such a long way from the baby-steps of the SPI-peripheral nRF8001 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/nordic-semiconductor-asa/NRF8001-R2Q32-T/4626390) to the early ARM Cortex M0 plus BLE combo chip, the nRF51 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/nordic-semiconductor-asa/NRF51822-QFAB-R7/4626396). We still use that nRF51 in many of our Bluetooth LE boards like the Feather 32u4 and M0 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/adafruit-industries-llc/2995/5823444), also as a SPI-peripheral-to-BLE converter. The next big upgrade was the nRF52832 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/nordic-semiconductor-asa/NRF52832-QFAB-R/6051565) which bumped the processor from an M0 to an M4, but didn't do a huge bump to the Flash or SRAM compared the nRF51. The big leap after that was the nRF52840 which is still an amazing chip: USB peripheral means you can use this chip as the main processor, and it can do all your processing, user interface, sensor reading and wireless communication with only a few passives to support it. There was an nRF5340 released about two years ago (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/nordic-semiconductor-asa/NRF5340-CLAA-R/14323741) but much like Windows releases, we tend to skip every other chip. We happened to check digikey.com/new yesterday and saw the nRF54L (https://www.digikey.com/short/zf8pz0cr) series pop up, which is exciting as it was pre-announced about a year ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG8bRNaNHrg) and is now shipping to customers! The nRF54L (https://www.digikey.com/short/zf8pz0cr) comes in three variants, which is not surprising because we've seen earlier chips come in 'lite' versions that cut pricing by having less flash or RAM. All variants have a 128MHz Cortex M33 with a RISC-V co-processor, and a BLE stack. One interesting thing we noted, is that instead of flash memory, which is big and expensive and hard to do with modern fab processes, the nRF54 uses ReRAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_random-access_memory) which is non-volatile and uses memristor technology, which is pretty cool! The nRF54 series supports BLE 6, one new capability is channel sounding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_sounding) which will improve the ability of phones to locate 'find my' tags that have become such a popular usage for the nRF chipset. Traditionally, the nRF52 chips in these tags use RSSI to measure approximate distance. There's been some improvements on the technology such as Angle-of-Attack that was introduced in BLE 5.1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EosGQtGioiY) but now with a broad-sprectrum burst it's looking like some of the lessons from UWB (https://blog.adafruit.com/2024/03/15/sera-nx040-ultra-wide-band-and-bluetooth-combo-module-eyeonnpi-digikey-digikey-lairdconnect-adafruit/) are being integrated to the BLE specification to improve item location. The nRF54L series is launching with the L15 variant (https://www.digikey.com/short/rd9fr19f), that's the one with the most memory, so it's a good start: once you have your design settled you can transition to the smallest chip you can get away with. They're coming into stock shortly so sign up at DigiKey to get notified when the package you're looking for arrives. While you wait, you can order up one of the nRF54L15-DK (https://www.digikey.com/short/qvhqv85q) dev kits, which are only $39 and in stock right now for immediate shipment. Order today and you'll get everything you need to start developing the nRF54 (https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Development-hardware/nRF54L15-DK) - a built in debugger, power management chip, broken out GPIO, user buttons and LEDs. While you wait for your dev kit to arrive, you can start thinking about the nRF54H series (https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/nRF54H20) which is the high-end chip with dual M33 running at 320 MHz, 1 MB of SRAM, 2MB of ReRAM , high speed USB and I3C support (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC4zkvdVag4)!

Today on Elixir Wizards, Bryan Green shares how he transformed a vintage 1930s rotary phone into a fully functional cell phone using Elixir, Nerves, and a mix of hardware components. Bryan shares the highs and lows of his project, from decoding rotary dial clicks to troubleshooting hardware issues with LED outputs. He explains why Nerves was the perfect fit for this project, offering SSH access, over-the-air updates, and remote debugging. You'll also hear how Elixir's concurrency model helped him manage hardware inputs and outputs efficiently using GenStateMachine and Genservers. Elixir and Nerves really shine when modeling real-world systems. Bryan dives into how he used a finite state machine to track the phone's states and handled inputs from the rotary dial and hook switch via GPIO. For hardware enthusiasts, Bryan's advice is to embrace this “golden age” of DIY electronics. Whether you're experienced with embedded systems or just curious on where to start, Bryan's VintageCell can inspire you to tinker with a hardware engineering project. Key topics discussed in this episode: Advantages of functional programming and immutability in Elixir Building hardware projects using Adafruit components Why Nerves was the best choice for the VintageCell project Interpreting rotary dial clicks using GPIO and circuits.gpio Troubleshooting hardware issues with LED diagnostics Challenges in optimizing wiring and PCB design Benefits of Nerves: SSH access, OTA updates, and remote debugging Modeling real-world systems with Elixir and Nerves Implementing a finite state machine with GenStateMachine Managing input with Genservers for rotary dial and hook switch Leveraging community resources like Discord, Elixir Slack, and forums Practical advice for keeping hardware projects on track Potential applications from SMS servers to home automation Links mentioned: Vintage Cellphone: Bridging the Past and Future with Elixir (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4hetzVpjmo) Seven Languages in Seven Weeks https://pragprog.com/titles/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-weeks/ Seven More Languages https://pragprog.com/titles/7lang/seven-more-languages-in-seven-weeks/ Node.js https://github.com/nodejs https://nerves-project.org/ https://www.arduino.cc/ Adafruit Circuit Playground https://www.adafruit.com/category/965 Adafruit 3D Printed Star Trek Communicator https://learn.adafruit.com/3d-printed-star-trek-communicator Adafruit FONA 3G Cellular + GPS Breakout https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-fona-3g-cellular-gps-breakout/overview https://github.com/elixir-circuits/circuitsgpio Nerves SSH https://hex.pm/packages/nervesssh OTA (over-the-air) Updates with NervesHub https://www.nerves-hub.org/ https://github.com/kicad Waveshare 4G Hat for Raspberry Pi https://www.waveshare.com/sim7600e-h-4g-hat.htm https://hexdocs.pm/genstatemachine/GenStateMachine.html https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/GenServer.html https://www.sparkfun.com/ https://www.digikey.com/ USB-C Gadget Mode with Nerves https://github.com/nerves-project/nervessystemrpi4/issues/18 https://livebook.dev/ https://codestorm.me/ https://github.com/codestorm1/vintage_cell/ Special Guest: Bryan Green.

We had a customer request for an I2C to 1-Wire converter: handy for when you don't have a spare GPIO, or maybe you can't do fast pin toggling, or maybe you have a single board computer or desktop that you want to connect to 1-Wire devices like the DS18B20. so we spun up a prototype board with the DS2484 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/analog-devices-inc-maxim-integrated/DS2484R-T/5020823) the latest version from Analog Devices. here i'm testing out my code: with multiple DS18B20's, some TO-92's (https://www.adafruit.com/product/374) and a wired sensor (https://www.adafruit.com/product/381) that i can dunk in a teacup to verify it reports the temperature right. Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #adafruit #DS2484 #gpio

We just wrapped up our breakout board design for the DS2484 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/analog-devices-inc-maxim-integrated/DS2484R-T/5020823)an I2C to 1-Wire device, and we had someone ask "what is 1-Wire, and when should I use it?" We'll quickly run through the history of 1-Wire and iButton devices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Wire) then search on DigiKey to find some of the 1-Wire chips that are most common, such as EEPROMs (https://www.digikey.com/short/z58jzbmf), GPIO expanders (https://www.digikey.com/short/zzt3c33m) and - of course - temperature sensors (https://www.digikey.com/short/5985cd9t)! See the chosen part on DigiKey https://www.digikey.com/short/5985cd9t Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ -----------------------------------------

CNLohr returns to The Amp Hour to talk about LoRa and implementing a solution using harmonics coming out of a standard microcontroller's GPIO

This week's EYE ON NPI will take you to Infinity and Beyond, with Infineon PSoC™ 4000T Microcontrollers (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/i/infineon/psoc-4000t-microcontrollers) and the CY8CPROTO-040T eval board (https://www.digikey.com/short/qhfjbt39) specifically designed to get you started with the 4000t series microcontrollers and using the Infineon-neé-Cypress CapSense technology for capacitive touch buttons and slider. The Infineon PSoC™ 4000T series of microcontrollers are based around the classic Arm Cortex M0+ core, running at 48 MHz and with 64K flash, 8K of SRAM. So, a great microcontroller for simple products/white goods that don't need USB or a graphical display, like headphones, rice cookers, tea kettles or electric toothbrushes. The chip is optimized for capacitive touch sensing, with timers and lots of capsense inputs, but not a ton of other peripherals: there's only two serial blocks that can be configured as I2C/UART/SPI, and no ADC/DAC or USB or CAN. As long as your product is intended to be low-cost, and simple, that's probably just fine! The real star of the show on these chips is the CapSense peripheral (https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/microcontroller/sensing-controller/capsense-controllers/capsense/), which has up to 16 inputs - out of 21 GPIO! These can be configured as "CSD-type" self-capacitance sigma-delta buttons or sliders, or as "CSX-type" mutual-capacitance X-Y grids (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOOZII8cvT4). Capacitive sensing is great when you want products that react to touch without needing large and breakable tactile switches. For example, touch sensors on headphones can determine when they are inserted into the ear and when a finger is touching the body to pause or adjust volume (https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-The_touch_sensing_HMI_in_wearable_and_IoT_devices-Whitepaper-v01_00-EN.pdf?fileId=8ac78c8c8a44f57b018a5f0711243a0f). Unlike buttons or encoders, there's no risk of eventual mechanical failure, rending a product useless: with a smooth clean surface you can still provide a full UI with low cost and maintenance. The Infineon PSoC™ 4000T series comes with the 5th generation of CapSense, which features autonomous DMA function in deep sleep, great responsivity, and moisture resistance. One downside of classic capacitive touch solutions is false 'ghost' triggering or sluggish 'touch blindness' when the touch surface is wet. This is a common issue with products that end up being used in a kitchen, bathroom, laundry room, while exercising or outside. That's because droplets of water have capacitance on the order of the human finger and so each droplet looks like a touch. Most capacitive sense implementations have a slow self-zeroing drift calibration procedure, but they don't handle sudden water sprays. CapSense 5th gen, by comparison, will maintain the same raw capacitive count even when there's spray, mist or droplets! Another neat feature is the autonomous sensing block, which allows ultra low deep sleep current of 6uA with touch-to-wake. Instead of powering up the whole core to do the capacitive touch reading and averaging in the main process thread, readings are done in a zombie mode so that we only wake up when touches are detected. If your next product design needs a reliable capacitive touch interface, the CapSense 5th gen-powered Infineon PSoC™ 4000T series (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/infineon-technologies/CY8CPROTO-040T/22158824) is an excellent low-power Cortex M0+ chip that can act as the main processor of your product with high integration for a tiny BOM at an attractive price. You can get started fast by picking up a CY8CPROTO-040T eval board (https://www.digikey.com/short/j5hfb704) that has a programming/debug interface as well as button, slider and proximity sensing CapSense element. Order today and your CY8CPROTO will ship immediately, so that you can get started with your development by tomorrow afternoon!

We designed this CH552-based QT Py to play around with this '40 cent' USB-capable chip, and it's been super fun! now the hardware is complete and assembled, its time to test it so it can go into the shop. we wrote a test sketch in Arduino (https://github.com/DeqingSun/ch55xduino) board support package to verify the GPIO are working right on the pogo bed. the test output goes to the USB serial port which is then read by a python script. to program it, we use the raspberry pi and ch552tool (https://github.com/MarsTechHAN/ch552tool), we can enumerate, test and program the final neopixel swirl in about 10 seconds. Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #adafruit #CH552 #arduino

This week's EYE ON NPI will take you for a SPIN around the block - it's STMicroelectronics' STSPIN32G0 Three-Phase BLDC Controller (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/s/stmicroelectronics/stspin32g0-three-phase-bldc-controller) series of chips, featuring 250 or 600 V three-phase BLDC FET controllers with integrated embedded STM32 MCU! These chips are an 'all in one' solution to advanced motor control when you want to have sensors and tight integration, or a super tiny footprint. As budding robotics hobbyists, we've designed and stocked many products - like this Motor Shield (https://www.adafruit.com/product/1438) - to support a variety of small DC motors. Some well known varieties are: Hobby Servos, DC brushed motors, and steppers. Hobby servos are actually just DC brushed motors with a feedback circuit, so we'll ignore those. DC brushed motors are simple: apply a positive DC voltage to the two wires, and the rotor spins one way. Apply a negative voltage, they spin the other way. As you can expect from the name, inside are brushes, that connect from the rotating center to the two permanent magnets on the outer diameter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushed_DC_electric_motor). This makes them inexpensive, and very easy to use: simply PWM the voltage to change the speed, invert the voltage to change direction. Nothing more complex than an H-bridge is required. But the brushes do eventually wear out, or oxidize, or splinter. Which means the motors will eventually 'die' and need replacement. Fine for toys and simple products that have low usage, but not appropriate for white goods or automotive or anything where life-time and reliability are essential! Stepper motors are a tad more complex: in order to have precise movement, they use a bank of 4 electromagnetic coils to 'step' the axle around a little bit at a time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepper_motor). No brushes to replace! But they don't rotate fast: the point is they have small accurate steps, and they're kinda expensive. What if we could combine DC brushed motors and steppers to create... Brushless DC Motors? Wow, so smart! That's exactly what a BLDC is, a DC motor that has no brushes, but does have multiple windings that have to be synchronized right to rotate. They're a little more expensive than brushed motors, but not significantly. The biggest cost increase is in the driver complexity because you need to drive and sequence three branches, whereas the commutator/brushes on a brushed motor handles that for you. Normally folks will use their favorite microcontroller, then wire it up to a BLDC driver (https://www.digikey.com/short/3bf72p89), like the L6235Q (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronics/L6235QTR/2772201) which can push 2.5A per-bridge at up to 52V. But, wouldn't it be nifty if you didn't have to do any wiring, so that even for small designs, you can have a fully integrated motor controller with your main microcontroller. Or, you could use the microcontroller as an I2C or SPI peripheral that integrates the temperature/current/voltage/torque monitoring that you would normally have to manage as a interrupt-run thread on a main core. That's what we've got here with the STSPIN32G0 Three-Phase BLDC Controller (https://www.digikey.com/short/977t8ftv) series of chips. It's a ARM Cortex M0 STM32G031C8 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronics/STM32G031C8U6/10300273) running at 64MHz and 64K flash / 8K SRAM, with standard peripherals, debug, and even some 5V-friendly GPIO. Inside, the STM is bonded to the control circuitry so that 3 sides are used for microcontroller interfacing, and the fourth side is high-voltage friendly with separated pads. Program it just like any other STM32G031C8, and just define the motor control pins to the bonded wires. And then you'll need to connect the 6 power IGBT/FETs to create the 3 driving half-bridges such as STGD6M65DF2 (https://www.digikey.com/short/7dwq7zw2) Are you ready to have a super-integrated BLDC driver board that comes with a top-notch Cortex-M0 and all the power-driving experience ST has to offer? You're in luck because the STSPIN32G0 Three-Phase BLDC Controller (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/s/stmicroelectronics/stspin32g0-three-phase-bldc-controller) is in stock right now at DigiKey for immediate shipment. Check out the all-in-one EVSPIN32G06Q1S1 eval board (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronics/EVSPIN32G06Q1S1/22470459) if you want to immediately start testing out the STSPIN32G0. Then place your order today so you can start putting your own spin on motor driving by tomorrow afternoon.

ATMakers emailed and asked if we'd make a Trinkey (https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=trinkey) with a TRRS jack (https://www.adafruit.com/product/5764) on the end, for making customizable HID devices that use simple 3.5mm audio jack connectors. ideally something that will make AT - Accessibility Technology - projects EZ to build and maintain. here's our take on it, what's interesting is each pin of the jack - including the two switches for tip and ring1 - connect to GPIO / analog inputs on the SAMD21. there's no pre-defined VCC or GND because different switch and joystick makers have different configurations and we might want to change around what pins are power, ground, pullups, etc! this board will be great for use with CircuitPython to make any sort of AT switch or potentiometer interface super fast, to demo it we've written up a quick CPy sketch that will listen for two switches, and when they're pressed, blink the NeoPixel and emit keypresses as if its a keyboard. code is in the PR for this board (https://github.com/adafruit/circuitpython/pull/9190#issuecomment-2067764251) since we have great HID support it could also be a mouse or joystick device and it will work with any computer/tablet/console with a USB port. Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #adafruit #atmakers #accessibility

#circuitpythonparsec You can use chip GPIO pin names in your code with the 'microcontroller' library in CircuitPython. Learn about CircuitPython: https://circuitpython.org Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ -----------------------------------------

Psst...this week's EYE ON NPI is no secret, and despite having the word "Pseudo" in the name, it's the Real Deal: This week it's ISSI's Serial and Quad PSRAM chips (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/i/issi/serial-ram-and-quad-ram-solutions), an excellent addition to your next microcontroller board to quickly boost your RAM stack to megabyte proportions! Microcontrollers have come a long way since 8-bit chips like the ATmega328 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/123). What used to be a luxurious 32 KB of flash memory and 2 KB of SRAM is now nowhere-near-enough storage for handling the big computation requirements we're trying to squeeze into embedded products. It used to be enough to handle some buttons, blink a few LEDs, maybe at best read a sensor and control a motor. Now we need internet connectivity, full graphics support, and machine learning algorithms running on large sensor data sets! As we've seen, microcontrollers have evolved from 8-bit AVR to Cortex M0 to Cortex M4 and even M7 - or if you're a fan of Espressif chips, Tensilica/RISC-V 240 MHz processors. But what you are paying for in a microcontroller is often related to the density and size of the die, and on many processors, the RAM and FLASH can start to take up a dominant amount of die real-estate. SRAM and Flash may also require larger nm 'processes' that are harder to book. As a result, we're seeing chips like the RP2040 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC0914-13/14306010) that have on-chip SRAM but no longer have on-chip Flash memory. Instead, you're expected to pick up a QSPI flash chip and wire it up to the 6-pin interface. By clever usage of on-chip instruction cache, you can get close to on-board FLASH speeds but with the flexibility and size of external memory: it's hard to find a chip with more than 1 MB of internal FLASH but you can easily get 16 MB of external memory like the ISSI IS25WP128 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/issi-integrated-silicon-solution-inc/IS25WP128-JBLE/5431600) for only a couple bucks! OK now you've got plenty of space for your code, but what about RAM? That's where you'll be buffering graphics, storing data to process, or for IoT products, storing large packets of data that may need to be encrypted before sending/receiving. SRAM is also big and kinda expensive, so it's no surprise that many advanced processors these days also support external RAM chips. Now, most folks aware that microprocessors (as opposed to microcontrollers) have required external RAM for quite a long time - but often those used large DRAM chips with 8, 16 or 32-bit parallel interfaces like the IS42 series (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/issi-integrated-silicon-solution-inc/IS42S16400J-7TL/2708623). These of course are not going to work when you only have 32-ish GPIO available. That's where 8-pin PSRAM chips come in - and we're starting to see lots of 'low pin count' microcontrollers support these. For example the iMX RT1062 (https://www.digikey.com/short/0fhbdwv0) used in the Teensy 4.1 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/4622) supports PSRAM - check the SOIC-8 footprint on the bottom. Likewise the ESP32 series has wide support for PSRAM, their modules come with 8-SOIC 2MB chips very often. The extra PSRAM comes in handy when doing large IoT projects where you have to buffer an entire image, or JSON structure. Especially over TLS connections that require a lot of RAM to process! Note that while you could use the ISSI PSRAM chips with any processor, thanks to the generic SPI or QSPI interface, you really do want a chip to have 'native' PSRAM support so that the compiler and core will automatically map the PSRAM out so it is accessed transparently to your code. You'll likely need to enable PSRAM support in your toolchain and of course wire it up to the supported QSPI interface pins. Also, sometimes you need to be careful about where some memory goes, like volatile or interrupt-accessed addresses. Sometimes you also have to tell the compiler what ID code or command-set to use, since things like enabling the QEN bit can vary from chip to chip. With a universal pinout and speedy 100MHz clock rate, PSRAM is a fast and easy way to make your micro roomier. If you're not sure which to pick, maybe start with the IS66WVS2M8BLL (https://www.digikey.com/short/29b1dzqf) a 2 MByte / 16 MBit 3.3V-logic SOIC-8 PSRAM chip. If you're ready to add encyclopedic memory in your next design, you are in luck, because the ISSI Serial and Quad PSRAM chips (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/i/issi/serial-ram-and-quad-ram-solutions) are in stock right now for immediate shipment! Order today and you'll get your chips in hand by tomorrow afternoon.

This week's EYE ON NPI will make you say "Yeee-haww", to the buckin'-and-boostin' bronco known as the Richtek RT6160A Buck-Boost Converter with I²C Interface (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/r/richtek/rt6160a-buck-boost-converter). The RT6160A is a high-efficiency, single-inductor, synchronous buck-boost converter that can provide up to 3 Amps of current to a dynamically-configurable voltage from 2.025V to 5.2V. With an amazing 2uA quiescent current, this chip lets you add an advanced power supply for the price of an LDO that will let you design with the smallest possible battery. We're big fans of Richtek for low quiescent power supply chips - our favorite 3.3V LDO is the RT9080-33 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/richtek-usa-inc/RT9080-33GJ5/6161634) which can provide up to 600mA with a 0.5V dropout, and a really nice 4uA quiescent current. This is great for deep-sleep wireless projects where you've got a chip with ultra-low power snooze modes, like the ESP32 - we were able to get down to 10.5 uA in deep sleep thanks to the RT9080! (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-itsybitsy-esp32/low-power-use). Compare that to the AP2112K which we used to use, has a quiescent current of 55uA. However, the RT9080 is a LDO fixed at 3.3V@600mA - and of course, LDOs have that dropout which translates to power lost. If you want to sip every last Coulomb out of the battery on hand, you'll need a DC/DC converter. Usually we see a buck converter - since you are converting from a Lithium Polymer battery, you'll have 3.7V nominal, 4.2V peak voltage and maybe you'll buck that down to 3V. If you want to really get the best possible range of performance, you can go with a buck boost (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck%E2%80%93boost_converter). That way you can buck down from 3.4-4.2V and then as the battery starts drooping, the chip switches into a boost mode to cover the 2.7V~3.2V range. The RT6160A is a Buck-Boost converter that seems well designed for battery-powered projects, with an input and output range of about 2 to 5V. The default output is 3.3V and you can 'select' between two voltages by toggling a GPIO pin. This makes it easy to adjust the desired voltage and then swap from 'high' to 'low' voltages without an I2C command. Why would you want two voltages? Well, you could use 3.3V or greater for when you want the best performance from a radio, then drop down to 2.5V when the radio isn't on and you want to reduce both the conversion current and also reduce your chip quiescent current: most microcontrollers will use lower current at lower voltages since they are not pushing around as much current onto the internal logic FETs. Combine this with a microcontroller's dynamic clock frequency configuration and you've got a simple system to squeeze more current out of your battery. And usually you have to 'spend' a lot of current to run the DC/DC converter, but this chip has an amazing 2uA quiescent current - lower than most LDOs we've used, and amazing for an up-to-3A output device. If you want to have the lowest quiescent, highest-flexibility power management chip in your next design, the Richtek RT6160A Buck-Boost Converter with I²C Interface (https://www.digikey.com/short/hv7fm4nt) is an excellent choice: Richtek really know their power supplies and they keep it nice and simple so you can get to integration instantly. Best of all, DigiKey has the RT6160A (https://www.digikey.com/short/hv7fm4nt) in stock right now, for immediate shipment, and $1.32 by the reel! All you need is some ceramic caps and an inductor. For fast testing in your application, there are also some EVB_RT6160AWSC (https://www.digikey.com/short/0p80hqvj) eval boards in stock. Order today and you can be waving your cowboy hat in celebration by tomorrow afternoon.

The ESP32-C6 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/5672) is Espressif's first Wi-Fi 6 SoC integrating 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 (LE) and the 802.15.4 protocol. It brings the goodness you know from the low-cost C3 series (https://www.adafruit.com/product/5337) and improves it with Zigbee/802.15.4 at 2.4Ghz. That means it could make for great Matter (https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/) development hardware! We took our Feather ESP32-S2 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/5000) and swapped out the 'S2 for a C6. Plus some re-routing and here's what we've got: a C6 Feather with lots of GPIO, lipoly charging and monitoring with the MAX17048, (https://www.adafruit.com/product/5580) NeoPixel, I2C Stemma QT port, and a second low-quiescent LDO for disabling the I2C and NeoPixel when we want ultra-low power usage. We also tossed a BME280 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/2652) on there, so you could use it immediately as a low power temp/hum/pressure sensor. Now it's time to do the bringup - we like to blink LEDs, toggle pins, and also check that NeoPixels glow up. Good news: so far everything works! We're going to keep at it and see if we can maybe get a simple Matter demo going before we book the PCBs #adafruit #feather #esp32c6 #featherboard #wifi6 #bluetooth5 #zigbee #matteriot #lowpower #iotdevelopment #tempmonitoring #pcbdesign Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ -----------------------------------------

This week's EYE ON NPI has us pitter-pattering on our tippy-toes, it's the newest and bestest stepper motor driver we've seen, the Analog Devices' TMC5240 Stepper Motor Controller and Driver IC (https://www.digikey.com/short/rt0zpt4v) from the Trinamic division at ADI! Trinamic is famous for their stepper motor driver chips, which we see often in 3D printers (https://www.analog.com/en/design-center/evaluation-hardware-and-software/evaluation-boards-kits/trams.html), XY gantries and other robots that need fast motion control. Stepper motors are commonly used when we need continuous rotation for linear movement through a rack and pinion. We've got huge steppers in our pick and place machine, and most makers are going to be familiar with them in CNC devices like laser cutters, 3D printers or milling machines (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/b/bantam-tools/desktop-pcb-milling-machine) - servos will be controlling the X, Y and Z axes as well as any extruder. And if you have one of these devices you know they can be loud and slow: in order to get good precision from a stepper we need to micro-step, so that instead of a standard 200 steps per rotation, we get 16*200 or 256*200 (https://www.analog.com/en/products/landing-pages/001/optimizing-stepper-motors-microstepping.html). Microstepping gets us that beautiful precision, but adds a ton of noise because now there's a PWM signal that is vibrating the motor (https://www.analog.com/en/products/landing-pages/001/secret-silent-stepper-motor-control.html). That's where Trinamic's StealthChop2 secret sauce comes in: The StealthChop chopper modulates the current based on the PWM duty cycle, resulting in a perfect current sinewave with straight crossing of the zero-current level. The constant PWM frequency minimizes current ripple and, by extension, any Eddy current that may be found in the stator, reducing power loss, and increasing efficiency. The StealthChop chopper also removes variations of the chopper frequency, or frequency jitter, so that only the commanded variations remain. Thus, at a 50% PWM duty cycle, the current is actually zero. The result of all this is silent stepper motor operation at a standstill and at low to moderate speeds. We've covered Trinamic's TMC2226 stepper driver before on EYE ON NPI (https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/06/18/eye-on-npi-tmc2226-sa-ultra-silent-stepper-motor-driver-eyeonnpi-digikey-adafruit-digikey-adafruit-trinamic_mc/) and that chip mimic'd the common configuration for stepper motor drivers: set the microsteps with GPIO and then use a DIRection and STEP pin. That makes it easy for integration with any hardware, you just need some GPIO pins, but it means that you have to do the motion control yourself. And, once you have 2 or 3 motors, motion control code can get really complicated: you have to tune and configure ramp ups from idle to fast run, and back down so there isn't any jerky motion. What's really cool is that the TMC5240 has built-in motion-control! You set some configurations and then can tell it what position or velocity to achieve, and the microstepping is done for you. It even handles encoder reading, mechanical stall detection, and end-stop switch interrupts for you so you don't slam into the side of the machine by accident. To do this, the TMC5240 has a full register and command set, that can be controlled with SPI or UART - with UART there is node addressing required, but perhaps this is easier to integrate with low-pin microcomputers. For both, commands are sent for configuring everything from stall current, to motion control, to individual steps to temperature reads. Speaking of which: the TMC5240 come in two packages: QFN and TSSOP. TSSOP has a big thermal pad at the bottom for better dissipation, QFN is smaller. With either, use plenty of vias, a 4-layer design with dedicated 2 oz copper ground planes to keep the motor driver cool: these can handle 5-36V at up to 2A per leg, so they are throwing a lot of current around. You can pick up bare TMC5240 chips (https://www.digikey.com/short/vhvtnjbw), basic breakout boards (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/analog-devices-inc-maxim-integrated/TMC5240-BOB/21292888) and eval boards (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/analog-devices-inc-maxim-integrated/TMC5240-EVAL/17878664). Since you have to use the SPI/UART protocol to communicate, we recommend checkout out the pyTrinamic library (https://github.com/trinamic/PyTrinamic) which has added support to the TMC5240 (https://github.com/trinamic/PyTrinamic/blob/master/pytrinamic/ic/TMC5240.py) so you can hit the ground running / stepping. Order up some of these silent stepper drivers today and you'll get them in hand by tomorrow afternoon, you'll save tons of time on your next robotic or mechatronic project thanks to the tons of built-in capabilities on the TMC5240!

The new Raspberry 5 has a new UART port, which is great because the first 4 Pi's used the hardware serial as a UART - which made debugging hard when using something like a GPS. However, unlike the GPIO header UART, this connector is SMT, and much smaller than 0.1" pitch. While we can always contact the Pi folks for a part number, let's figure out what connector it is just using a pair of calipers - then find a cable that will plug in that we can use to get that tasty RX/TX data out! See the chosen part on DigiKey https://www.digikey.com/short/bf8r7j8j

Jeff Geerling, Owner of Midwestern Mac, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the importance of storytelling, problem-solving, and community in the world of cloud. Jeff shares how and why he creates content that can appeal to anybody, rather than focusing solely on the technical qualifications of his audience, and how that strategy has paid off for him. Corey and Jeff also discuss the impact of leading with storytelling as opposed to features in product launches, and what's been going on in the Raspberry Pi space recently. Jeff also expresses the impact that community has on open-source companies, and reveals his take on the latest moves from Red Hat and Hashicorp. About JeffJeff is a father, author, developer, and maker. He is sometimes called "an inflammatory enigma".Links Referenced:Personal webpage: https://jeffgeerling.com/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A bit off the beaten path of the usual cloud-focused content on this show, today I'm speaking with Jeff Geerling, YouTuber, author, content creator, enigma, and oh, so much more. Jeff, thanks for joining me.Jeff: Thanks for having me, Corey.Corey: So, it's hard to figure out where you start versus where you stop, but I do know that as I've been exploring a lot of building up my own home lab stuff, suddenly you are right at the top of every Google search that I wind up conducting. I was building my own Kubernete on top of a Turing Pi 2, and sure enough, your teardown was the first thing that I found that, to be direct, was well-documented, and made it understandable. And that's not the first time this year that that's happened to me. What do you do exactly?Jeff: I mean, I do everything. And I started off doing web design and then I figured that design is very, I don't know, once it started transitioning to everything being JavaScript, that was not my cup of tea. So, I got into back-end work, databases, and then I realized to make that stuff work well, you got to know the infrastructure. So, I got into that stuff. And then I realized, like, my home lab is a great place to experiment on this, so I got into Raspberry Pis, low-power computing efficiency, building your own home lab, all that kind of stuff.So, all along the way, with everything I do, I always, like, document everything like crazy. That's something my dad taught me. He's an engineer in radio. And he actually hired me for my first job, he had me write an IT operations manual for the Radio Group in St. Louis. And from that point forward, that's—I always start with documentation. So, I think that was probably what really triggered that whole series. It happens to me too; I search for something, I find my old articles or my own old projects on GitHub or blog posts because I just put everything out there.Corey: I was about to ask, years ago, I was advised by Scott Hanselman to—the third time I find myself explaining something, write a blog post about it because it's easier to refer people back to that thing than it is for me to try and reconstruct it on the fly, and I'll drop things here and there. And the trick is, of course, making sure it doesn't sound dismissive and like, “Oh, I wrote a thing. Go read.” Instead of having a conversation with people. But as a result, I'll be Googling how to do things from time to time and come up with my own content as a result.It's at least a half-step up from looking at forums and the rest, where I realized halfway through that I was the one asking the question. Like, “Oh, well, at least this is useful for someone.” And I, for better or worse, at least have a pattern of going back and answering how I solved a thing after I get there, just because otherwise, it's someone asked the question ten years ago and never returns, like, how did you solve it? What did you do? It's good to close that loop.Jeff: Yeah, and I think over 50% of what I do, I've done before. When you're setting up a Kubernetes cluster, there's certain parts of it that you're going to do every time. So, whatever's not automated or the tricky bits, I always document those things. Anything that is not in the readme, is not in the first few steps, because that will help me and will help others. I think that sometimes that's the best success I've found on YouTube is also just sharing an experience.And I think that's what separates some of the content that really drives growth on a YouTube channel or whatever, or for an organization doing it because you bring the experience, like, I'm a new person to this Home Assistant, for instance, which I use to automate things at my house. I had problems with it and I just shared those problems in my video, and that video has, you know, hundreds of thousands of views. Whereas these other people who know way more than I could ever know about Home Assistant, they're pulling in fewer views because they just get into a tutorial and don't have that perspective of a beginner or somebody that runs into an issue and how do you solve that issue.So, like I said, I mean, I just always share that stuff. Every time that I have an issue with anything technological, I put it on GitHub somewhere. And then eventually, if it's something that I can really formulate into an outline of what I did, I put a blog post up on my blog. I still, even though I write I don't know how many words per week that goes into my YouTube videos or into my books or anything, I still write two or three blog posts a week that are often pretty heavy into technical detail.Corey: One of the challenges I've always had is figuring out who exactly I'm storytelling for when I'm putting something out there. Because there's a plethora, at least in cloud, of beginner content of, here's how to think about cloud, here's what the service does, here's why you should use it et cetera, et cetera. And that's all well and good, but often the things that I'm focusing on presuppose a certain baseline level of knowledge that you should have going into this. If you're trying to figure out the best way to get some service configured, I probably shouldn't have to spend the first half of the article talking about what AWS is, as a for instance. And I think that inherently limits the size of the potential audience that would be interested in the content, but it's also the kind of stuff that I wish was out there.Jeff: Yeah. There's two sides to that, too. One is, you can make content that appeals to anybody, even if they have no clue what you're talking about, or you can make content that appeals to the narrow audience that knows the base level of understanding you need. So, a lot of times with—especially on my YouTube channel, I'll put things in that is just irrelevant to 99% of the population, but I get so many comments, like, “I have no clue what you said or what you're doing, but this looks really cool.” Like, “This is fun or interesting.” Just because, again, it's bringing that story into it.Because really, I think on a base level, a lot of programmers especially don't understand—and infrastructure engineers are off the deep end on this—they don't understand the interpersonal nature of what makes something good or not, what makes something relatable. And trying to bring that into technical documentation a lot of times is what differentiates a project. So, one of the products I love and use and recommend everywhere and have a book on—a best-selling book—is Ansible. And one of the things that brought me into it and has brought so many people is the documentation started—it's gotten a little bit more complex over the years—but it started out as, “Here's some problems. Here's how you solve them.”Here's, you know, things that we all run into, like how do you connect to 12 servers at the same time? How do you have groups of servers? Like, it showed you all these little examples. And then if you wanted to go deeper, there was more documentation linked out of that. But it was giving you real-world scenarios and doing it in a simple way. And it used some little easter eggs and fun things that made it more interesting, but I think that that's missing from a lot of technical discussion and a lot of technical documentation out there is that playfulness, that human side, the get from Point A to Point B and here's why and here's how, but here's a little interesting way to do it instead of just here's how it's done.Corey: In that same era, I was one of the very early developers behind SaltStack, and I think one of the reasons that Ansible won in the market was that when you started looking into SaltStack, it got wrapped around its own axle talking about how it uses ZeroMQ for a full mesh between all of the systems there, as long—sorry [unintelligible 00:07:39] mesh network that all routes—not really a mesh network at all—it talks through a single controller that then talks to all of its subordinate nodes. Great. That's awesome. How do I use this to install a web server, is the question that people had. And it was so in love with its own cleverness in some ways. Ansible was always much more approachable in that respect and I can't understate just how valuable that was for someone who just wants to get the problem solved.Jeff: Yeah. I also looked at something like NixOS. It's kind of like the arch of distributions of—Corey: You must be at least this smart to use it in some respects—Jeff: Yeah, it's—Corey: —has been the every documentation I've had with that.Jeff: [laugh]. There's, like, this level of pride in what it does, that doesn't get to ‘and it solves this problem.' You can get there, but you have to work through the barrier of, like, we're so much better, or—I don't know what—it's not that. Like, it's just it doesn't feel like, “You're new to this and here's how you can solve a problem today, right now.” It's more like, “We have this golden architecture and we want you to come up to it.” And it's like, well, but I'm not ready for that. I'm just this random developer trying to solve the problem.Corey: Right. Like, they should have someone hanging out in their IRC channel and just watch for a week of who comes in and what questions do they have when they're just getting started and address those. Oh, you want to wind up just building a Nix box EC2 for development? Great, here's how you do that, and here's how to think about your workflow as you go. Instead, I found that I had to piece it together from a bunch of different blog posts and the rest and each one supposed that I had different knowledge coming into it than the others. And I felt like I was getting tangled up very easily.Jeff: Yeah, and I think it's telling that a lot of people pick up new technology through blog posts and Substack and Medium and whatever [Tedium 00:09:19], all these different platforms because it's somebody that's solving a problem and relating that problem, and then you have the same problem. A lot of times in the documentation, they don't take that approach. They're more like, here's all our features and here's how to use each feature, but they don't take a problem-based approach. And again, I'm harping on Ansible here with how good the documentation was, but it took that approach is you have a bunch of servers, you want to manage them, you want to install stuff on them, and all the examples flowed from that. And then you could get deeper into the direct documentation of how things worked.As a polar opposite of that, in a community that I'm very much involved in still—well, not as much as I used to be—is Drupal. Their documentation was great for developers but not so great for beginners and that was always—it still is a difficulty in that community. And I think it's a difficulty in many, especially open-source communities where you're trying to build the community, get more people interested because that's where the great stuff comes from. It doesn't come from one corporation that controls it, it comes from the community of users who are passionate about it. And it's also tough because for something like Drupal, it gets more complex over time and the complexity kind of kills off the initial ability to think, like, wow, this is a great little thing and I can get into it and start using it.And a similar thing is happening with Ansible, I think. We were at when I got started, there were a couple hundred modules. Now there's, like, 4000 modules, or I don't know how many modules, and there's all these collections, and there's namespaces now, all these things that feel like Java overhead type things leaking into it. And that diminishes that ability for me to see, like, oh, this is my simple tool that solving these problems.Corey: I think that that is a lost art in the storytelling side of even cloud marketing, where they're so wrapped around how they do what they do that they forget, customers don't care. Customers care very much about their problem that they're trying to solve. If you have an answer for solving that problem, they're very interested. Otherwise, they do not care. That seems to be a missing gap.Jeff: I think, like, especially for AWS, Google, Azure cloud platforms, when they build their new services, sometimes you're, like, “And that's for who?” For some things, it's so specialized, like, Snowmobile from Amazon, like, there's only a couple customers on the planet in a given year that needs something like that. But it's a cool story, so it's great to put that into your presentation. But some other things, like, especially nowadays with AI, seems like everybody's throwing tons of AI stuff—spaghetti—at the wall, seeing what will stick and then that's how they're doing it. But that really muddies up everything.If you have a clear vision, like with Apple, they just had their presentation on the new iPhone and the new neural engine and stuff, they talk about, “We see your heart patterns and we tell you when your heart is having problems.” They don't talk about their AI features or anything. I think that leading with that story and saying, like, here's how we use this, here's how customers can build off of it, those stories are the ones that are impactful and make people remember, like, oh Apple is the company that saves people's lives by making watches that track their heart. People don't think that about Google, even though they might have the same feature. Google says we have all these 75 sensors in our thing and we have this great platform and Android and all that. But they don't lead with the story.And that's something where I think corporate Apple is better than some of the other organizations, no matter what the technology is. But I get that feeling a lot when I'm watching launches from Amazon and Google and all their big presentations. It seems like they're tech-heavy and they're driven by, like, “What could we do with this? What could you do with this new platform that we're building,” but not, “And this is what we did with this other platform,” kind of building up through that route.Corey: Something I've been meaning to ask someone who knows for a while, and you are very clearly one of those people, I spend a lot of time focusing on controlling cloud costs and I used to think that Managed NAT Gateways were very expensive. And then I saw the current going rates for Raspberries Pi. And that has been a whole new level of wild. I mean, you mentioned a few minutes ago that you use Home Assistant. I do too.But I was contrasting the price between a late model, Raspberry Pi 4—late model; it's three years old if this point of memory serves, maybe four—versus a used small form factor PC from HP, and the second was less expensive and far more capable. Yeah it drags a bit more power and it's a little bit larger on the shelf, but it was basically no contest. What has been going on in that space?Jeff: I think one of the big things is we're at a generational improvement with those small form-factor little, like, tiny-size almost [nook-sized 00:13:59] PCs that were used all over the place in corporate environments. I still—like every doctor's office you go to, every hospital, they have, like, a thousand of these things. So, every two or three or four years, however long it is on their contract, they just pop all those out the door and then you get an E-waste company that picks up a thousand of these boxes and they got to offload them. So, the nice thing is that it seems like a year or two ago, that really started accelerating to the point where the price was driven down below 100 bucks for a fully built-out little x86 Mini PC. Sure, it's, you know, like you said, a few generations old and it pulls a little bit more power, usually six to eight watts at least, versus a Raspberry Pi at two to three watts, but especially for those of us in the US, electricity is not that expensive so adding two or three watts to your budget for a home lab computer is not that bad.The other part of that is, for the past two-and-a-half years because of the global chip shortages and because of the decisions that Raspberry Pi made, there were so few Raspberry Pis available that their prices shot up through the roof if you wanted to get one in any timely fashion. So, that finally is clearing up, although I went to the Micro Center near me yesterday, and they said that they have not had stock of Raspberry Pi 4s for, like, two months now. So, they're coming, but they're not distributed evenly everywhere. And still, the best answer, especially if you're going to run a lot of things on it, is probably to buy one of those little mini PCs if you're starting out a home lab.Or there's some other content creators who build little Kubernetes clusters with multiple mini PCs. Three of those stack up pretty nicely and they're still super quiet. I think they're great for home labs. I have two of them over on my shelf that I'm using for testing and one of them is actually in my rack. And I have another one on my desk here that I'm trying to set up for a five gigabit home router since I finally got fiber internet after years with cable and I'm still stuck on my old gigabit router.Corey: Yeah, I wound up switching to a Protectli, I think is what it's called for—it's one of those things I've installed pfSense on. Which, I'm an old FreeBSD hand and I haven't kept up with it, but that's okay. It feels like going back in time ten years, in some respects—Jeff: [laugh].Corey: —so all right. And I have a few others here and there for various things that I want locally. But invariably, I've had the WiFi controller; I've migrated that off. That lives on an EC2 box in Ohio now. And I do wind up embracing cloud services when I don't want it to go down and be consistently available, but for small stuff locally, I mean, I have an antenna on the roof doing an ADS-B receiver dance that's plugged into a Pi Zero.I have some backlogged stuff on this, but they've gotten expensive as alternatives have dropped in price significantly. But what I'm finding as I'm getting more into 3D printing and a lot of hobbyist maker tools out there, everything is built with the Raspberry Pi in mind; it has the mindshare. And yeah, I can get something with similar specs that are equivalent, but then I've got to do a whole bunch of other stuff as soon as it gets into controlling hardware via GPIO pins or whatnot. And I have to think about it very differently.Jeff: Yeah, and that's the tough thing. And that's the reason why Raspberry Pis, even though they're three years old, even though they're hard to get, they still are fetching—on the used market—way more than the original MSRP. It's just crazy. But the reason for that is the Raspberry Pi organization. And there's two: there's the Raspberry Pi Foundation that's goals are to increase educational computing and accessibility for computers for kids and learning and all that, then there's the Raspberry Pi trading company that makes the Raspberry Pis.The Trading Company has engineers who sit there 24/7 working on the software, working on the kernel drivers, working on hardware bugs, listening to people on the forums and in GitHub and everywhere, and they're all English-speaking people there—they're over in the UK—and they manufacture their own boards. So, there's a lot of things on top of that, even though they're using some silicons of Broadcom chips that are a little bit locked down and not completely open-source like some other chips might be, they're a phone number you could call if you need the support or there's a forum that has activity that you can get help in and their software that's supported. And there's a newer Linux kernel and the kernel is updated all the time. So, all those advantages mean you get a little package that will work, it'll sip two watts of power, sitting 24/7. It's reliable hardware.There's so many people that use it that it's so well tested that almost any problem you could ever run into, someone else has and there's a blog post or a forum post talking about it. And even though the hardware is not super powerful—it's three years old—you can add on a Coral TPU and do face recognition and object recognition. And throw in Frigate for Home Assistant to get notifications on your phone when your mom walks up to the door. There's so many things you can do with them and they're so flexible that they're still so valuable. I think that they really knocked it out of the park with that model, the Raspberry Pi 4, and the compute module 4, which is still impossible to get. I have not been able to buy one for two years now. Luckily, I bought 12 two-and-a-half years ago [laugh] otherwise I would be running out for all my projects that I do.Corey: Yeah. I got two at the moment and two empty slots in the Turing Pi 2, which I'll care more about if I can actually get the thing up and booted. But it presupposes you have a Windows computer or otherwise, ehh, watch this space; more coming. Great. Like, do I build a virtual machine on top of something else? It leads down the path super quickly of places I thought I'd escaped from.Jeff: Yeah, you know, outside of the Pi realm, that's the state of the communities. It's a lot of, like, figuring out your own things. I did a project—I don't know if you've heard of Mr. Beast—but we did a project for him that involves a hundred single-board computers. We couldn't find Raspberry Pi's so we had to use a different single-board computer that was available.And so, I bought an older one thinking, oh, this is, like, three or four years old—it's older than the Pi 4—and there must be enough support now. But still, there's, like, little rough edges everywhere I went and we ended up making them work, but it took us probably an extra 30 to 40 hours of development work to get those things running the same way as a Raspberry Pi. And that's just the way of things. There's so much opportunity.If one of these Chinese manufacturers that makes most of these things, if one of them decided, you know what? We're going to throw tons of money into building support for these things, get some English-speaking members of these forums to build up the community, all that stuff, I think that they could have a shot at Raspberry Pi's giant portion of the market. But so far, I haven't really seen that happen. So far, they're spamming hardware. And it's like, the hardware is awesome. These chips are great if you know how to deal with them and how to get the software running and how to deal with Linux issues, but if you don't, then they're not great because you might not even get the thing to boot.Corey: I want to harken back to something you said a minute ago, where there's value in having a community around something, where you can see everyone else has already encountered a problem like this. I think that folks who weren't around for the rise of cloud have no real insight into how difficult it used to be just getting servers into racks and everything up, and okay, they're identical, and seven of them are working, but that eighth one isn't for some strange reason. And you spend four hours troubleshooting what turns out to be a bad cable or something not seated properly and it's awful. Cloud got away from a lot of that nonsense. But it's important—at least to me—to not be Captain Edgecase, where if you pick some new cloud provider and Google for how to set up a load balancer and no one's done it before you, that's not great. Whereas if I'm googling now in the AWS realm and no one has done, the thing I'm trying to do, that should be something of a cautionary flag of maybe this isn't how most people go about approaching production. Really think twice about this.Jeff: Yep. Yeah, we ran into that on a project I was working on was using Magento—which I don't know if anybody listening uses Magento, but it's not fun—and we ran into some things where it's like, “We're doing this, and it says that they do this on their official supported platform, but I don't know how they are because the code just doesn't exist here.” So, we ran into some weird edge cases on AWS with some massive infrastructure for the databases, and I ran into scaling issues. But even there, there were forum posts in AWS here and there that had little nuggets that helped us to figure out a way to get around it. And like you say, that is a massive advantage for AWS.And we ran into an issue with, we were one of the first customers trying out the new Lambda functions for RDS—or I don't remember exactly what it was called initially—but we ended up not using that. But we ran into some of these issues and figured out we were the first customer running into this weird scaling thing when we had a certain size of database trying to use it with these Lambda calls. And eventually, they got those things solved, but with AWS, they've seen so many things and some other cloud providers haven't seen these things. So, when you have certain types of applications that need to scale in certain ways, that is so valuable and the community of users, the ability to pull from that community when you need to hire somebody in an emergency, like, we need somebody to help us get this project done and we're having this issue, you can find somebody that is, like, okay, I know how to get you from Point A to Point B and get this project out the door. You can't do that on certain platforms.And open-source projects, too. We've always had that problem in Drupal. The amount of developers who are deep into Drupal to help with the hard problems is not vast, so the ones who can do that stuff, they're all hired off and paid a handsome sum. And if you have those kinds of problems you realize, I either going to need to pay a ton of money or we're just going to have to not do that thing that we wanted to do. And that's tough.Corey: What I've found, sort of across the board, has been that there's a lot of, I guess, open-source community ethos that has bled into a lot of this space and I wanted to make sure that we have time to talk about this because I was incensed a while back when Red Hat decided, “Oh, you know that whole ten-year commitment on CentOS? That project that we acquired and are now basically stabbing in the face?”—disclosure. I used to be part of the CentOS project years ago when I was on network staff for the Freenode IRC network—then it was, “Oh yeah, we're just going to basically undermine our commitments to you and now you can pay us if you want to get that support there.” And that really set me off. Was nice to see you were right there as well in almost lockstep with me, pointing out that this is terrible, just as far as breaking promises you've made to customers. Has your anger cooled any? Because mine hasn't.Jeff: It has not. My temper has cooled. My anger has not. I don't think that they get it. After all the backlash that they got after that, I don't think that the VP-level folks at Red Hat understand that this is already impacting them and will impact them much more in the future because people like me and you, people who help other people build infrastructure and people who recommend operating systems and people who recommend patterns and things, we're just going to drop off using CentOS because it doesn't exist. It does exist and some other people are saying, “Oh, it's actually better to use this new CentOS, you know, Stream. Stream is amazing.” It's not. It's not the same thing. It's different. And—Corey: I used to work at a bank. That was not an option. I mean, granted at the bank for the production systems it was always [REL 00:25:18], but being able to spin up a pre-production environment without having to pay license fees on every VM. Yeah.Jeff: Yeah. And not only that, they did this announcement and framed it a certain way, and the community immediately saw. You know, I think that they're just angry about something, and whether it was a NASA contract with Rocky Linux, or whether it was something Oracle did, who knows, but it seems petty in retrospect, especially in comparison to the amount of backlash that came out of it. And I really don't think that they understand the thing that they had with that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not a massive growth opportunity for Red Hat. It's, in some ways, a dying product in terms of compared to using cloud stuff, it doesn't matter.You could use CoreOS, you could use NixOS, and you could use anything, it doesn't really matter. For people like you and me, we just want to deploy our software. And if it's containers, it really doesn't matter. It's just the people in government or in certain organizations that have these roles that you have to use whatever FIPS and all that kind of stuff. So, it's not like it's a hyper-growth opportunity for them.CentOS was, like, the only reason why all the software, especially on the open-source side, was compatible with Red Hat because we could use CentOS and it was easy and simple. They took that—well, they tried to take that away and everybody's like, “That's—what are you doing?” Like, I posted my blog post and I think that sparked off quite a bit of consternation, to the point where there was a lot of personal stuff going on. I basically said, “I'm not supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux for any of my work anymore.” Like, “From this point forward, it's not supported.”I'll support OpenELA, I'll support Rocky Linux or Oracle Linux or whatever because I can get free versions that I don't have to sign into a portal and get a license and download the license and integrate it with my CI work. I'm an open-source developer. I'm not going to pay for stuff or use 16 free licenses. Or I was reached out to and they said, “We'll give you more licenses. We'll give you extra.” And it's like, that's not how this works. Like, I don't have to call Debian and Ubuntu and [laugh] I don't even have to call Oracle to get licenses. I can just download their software and run it.So, you know, I don't think they understood the fact that they had that. And the bigger problem for me was the two-layer approach to destroying all the trust that the community had. First was in, I think it was 2019 when they said—we're in the middle of CentOS 8's release cycle—they said, “We're dropping CentOS 8. It's going to be Stream now.” And everybody was up in arms.And then Rocky Linux and [unintelligible 00:27:52] climbed in and gave us what we wanted: basically, CentOS. So, we're all happy and we had a status quo, and Rocky Linux 9 and [unintelligible 00:28:00] Linux nine came out after Red Hat 9, and the world was a happy place. And then they just dumped this thing on us and it's like, two major release cycles in a row, they did it again. Like, I don't know what this guy's thinking, but in one of the interviews, one of the Red Hat representatives said, “Well, we wanted to do this early in Red Hat 9's release cycle because people haven't started migrating.” It's like, well, I already did all my automation upgrades for CI to get all my stuff working in Rocky Linux 9 which was compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. Am I not one of the people that's important to you?Like, who's important to you? Is it only the people who pay you money or is it also the people that empower your operating system to be a premier Enterprise Linux operating system? So, I don't know. You can tell. My anger has not died down. The amount of temper that I have about it has definitely diminished because I realize I'm talking at a wall a lot of times, when I'm having conversations on Twitter, private conversations and email, things like that.Corey: People come to argue; they don't come to actually have a discussion.Jeff: Yeah. I think that they just, they don't see the community aspect of it. They just see the business aspect. And the business aspect, if they want to figure out ways that they can get more people to pay them for their software, then maybe they should provide more value and not just cut off value streams. It doesn't make sense to me from a long-term business perspective.From a short term, maybe there were some clients who said, “Oh, shoot. We need this thing stable. We're going to pay for some more licenses.” But the engineers that those places are going to start making plans of, like, how do we make this not happen again. And the way to not make that happen, again is to use, maybe Ubuntu or maybe [unintelligible 00:29:38] or something. Who knows? But it's not going to be increasing our spend with Red Hat.Corey: That's what I think a lot of companies are missing when it comes to community as well, where it's not just a place to go to get support for whatever it is you're doing and it's not a place [where 00:29:57] these companies view prospective customers. There's more to it than that. There has to be a social undercurrent on this. I look at the communities I spend time in and in some of them dating back long enough, I've made lifelong significant friendships out of those places, just through talking about our lives, in addition to whatever the community is built around. You have to make space for that, and companies don't seem to fully understand that.Jeff: Yeah, I think that there's this thing that a community has to provide value and monetizable value, but I don't think that you get open-source if you think that that's what it is. I think some people in corporate open-source think that corporate open-source is a value stream opportunity. It's a funnel, it's something that is going to bring you more customers—like you say—but they don't realize that it's a community. It's like a group of people. It's friends, it's people who want to make the world a better place, it's people who want to support your company by wearing your t-shirt to conferences, people want to put on your red fedora because it's cool. Like, it's all of that. And when you lose some of that, you lose what makes your product differentiated from all the other ones on the market.Corey: That's what gets missed. I think that there's a goodwill aspect of it. People who have used the technology and understand its pitfalls are likelier to adopt it. I mean, if you tell me to get a website up and running, I am going to build an architecture that resembles what I've run before on providers that I've run on before because I know what the failure modes look like; I know how to get things up and running. If I'm in a hurry, trying to get something out the door, I'm going to choose the devil that I know, on some level.Don't piss me off as a community member and incentivize me to change that estimation the next time I've got something to build. Well, that doesn't show up on this quarter's numbers. Well, we have so little visibility into how decisions get made many companies that you'll never know that you have a detractor who's still salty about something you did five years ago and that's the reason the bank decided not to because that person called in their political favors to torpedo that deal and have a sweetheart offer from your competitor, et cetera and so on and so forth. It's hard to calculate the actual cost of alienating goodwill. But—Jeff: Yeah.Corey: I wish companies had a longer memory for these things.Jeff: Yeah. I mean, and thinking about that, like, there was also the HashiCorp incident where they kind of torpedoed all developer goodwill with their Terraform and other—Terraform especially, but also other products. Like, I probably, through my book and through my blog posts and my GitHub examples have brought in a lot of people into the HashiCorp ecosystem through Vagrant use, and through Packer and things like that. At this point, because of the way that they treated the open-source community with the license change, a guy like me is not going to be enthusiastic about it anymore and I'm going to—I already had started looking at alternatives for Vagrant because it doesn't mesh with modern infrastructure practices for local development as much, but now it's like that enthusiasm is completely gone. Like I had that goodwill, like you said earlier, and now I don't have that goodwill and I'm not going to spread that, I'm not going to advocate for them, I'm not going to wear their t-shirt [laugh], you know when I go out and about because it just doesn't feel as clean and cool and awesome to me as it did a month ago.And I don't know what the deal is. It's partly the economy, money's drying up, things like that, but I don't understand how the people at the top can't see these things. Maybe it's just their organization isn't set up to show the benefits from the engineers underneath, who I know some of these engineers are, like, “Yeah, I'm sorry. This was dumb. I still work here because I get a paycheck, but you know, I can't say anything on social media, but thank you for saying what you did on Twitter.” Or X.Corey: Yeah. It's nice being independent where you don't really have to fear the, well if I say this thing online, people might get mad at me and stop doing business with me or fire me. It's well, yeah, I mean, I would have to say something pretty controversial to drive away every client and every sponsor I've got at this point. And I don't generally have that type of failure mode when I get it wrong. I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Jeff: Old school, my personal website, jeffgeerling.com. I link to everything from there, I have an About page with a link to every profile I've ever had, so check that out. It links to my books, my YouTube, all that kind of stuff.Corey: There's something to be said for picking a place to contact you that will last the rest of your career as opposed to, back in the olden days, my first email address was the one that my ISP gave me 25 years ago. I don't use that one anymore.Jeff: Yep.Corey: And having to tell everyone I corresponded with that it was changing was a pain in the butt. We'll definitely put a link to that one in the [show notes 00:34:44]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Jeff: Yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for having me.Corey: Jeff Geerling, YouTuber, author, content creator, and oh so very much more. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that we will, of course, read [in action 00:35:13], just as soon as your payment of compute modules for Raspberries Pi show up in a small unmarked bag.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

This week's EYE ON NPI stands alone as a fantastic new solution for high power charging of large battery packs and also power boosting from battery to system: it's ADI/Maxim's MAX77789 Standalone 3.15A Charger (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/a/analog-devices/max77789-standalone-3-15a-charger), an all-in-one power management IC that lets you ditch DC power plugs and simplifies your BOM, at an excellent price. We'll also be covering the MAX77787 (https://www.digikey.com/short/wzv7095b) which is the fraternal-twin-sister product: using I2C instead of resistor settings for configuration. We've been covering USB Type C PD sinks and supplies for about a year here on EYE ON NPI & The Great Search, they're an excellent way to ditch those DC barrel jack power supplies (https://learn.adafruit.com/usb-pd-hacks/) and allow folks to use a single connector and standard power supply (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C90UnNAlCFQ) for various voltages, from 5V-20V at up to 5A. There's plenty of chips that will connect to a PD source and negotiate that voltage for you (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQea9IEmf28) but now we can start to take advantage of USB PD for battery charging as well! This week's dynamic duo does pretty much everything for battery management. As devices get more complex, and battery cost goes down, the packs included in products are getting bigger. If you're trying to charge a 5Ah battery at standard 5V/1A rates, it will take at least 5-8 hours to do so, when folks really want 1-2 hour charge rates. The MAX77789 and MAX77787 have a buck converter that will deliver up to 3A to the battery for 3x faster charging. But, if you try to draw 3A from a USB 5V power cable, that built-in resistance will cause a voltage droop - remember we need at least 4.5V to have the headroom for charging up to 4.2V or 4.35V Lithium batteries. Thus, these chips use USB PD (https://learn.adafruit.com/understanding-usb-type-c-cable-types-pitfalls-and-more) to request higher voltages when available: 9V or 12V means that we can draw less current to get the same amount of power, which means less resistance loss over the cabling. For pre-C chargers, such as Samsung or Apple or Quick Charge (https://learn.adafruit.com/understanding-usb-type-c-cable-types-pitfalls-and-more) the USB D+/D- pins are used. In such cases where you want to have the data pins available for USB data/sync, you'll need something like the MAX20334 (https://www.digikey.com/short/p8b23vf3) data line switch to flip the pins back to your MCU. The MAX77789 uses resistors on the IFAST, ISET and INLIM lines to set the charge rate, timeout, and pack float voltage, the MAX77787 uses I2C. Both have a couple configuration pins, and LEDs for status monitoring. Both have the ability to also be turned into a boost converter - you can't use both charging and boosting at the same time, but since you can use the SYS voltage when connected to USB, you'll have at least 5V either way. The booster is fixed to 5.1V output. On the '89 the boost is enabled by GPIO, the '87 enables it over I2C. Both chips are available in 0.4mm pitch BGA - which means pad-in-via and multi-layer boards in order to pass the inner configuration traces out. Many of the traces are tripled-or-quadrupled to provide the current carrying capability of 3A charge and 6A peak discharge. An eval board is also available (https://www.digikey.com/short/4dc80hwz) which makes quick verification easy. For the I2C configuration version there's also desktop software to try out various settings - the standalone version has jumpers so you can attach any resistor value. Both the ADI/Maxim MAX77789 (https://www.digikey.com/short/j7zhtj4h) and MAX77787 (https://www.digikey.com/short/wzv7095b) Standalone/I2C 3.15A Chargers are in stock right now at DigiKey for immediate shipment. It's great to see forward momentum in chip design releases now that the shortages have abated: only a year ago we were scrambling for diodes and op-amps and now we have a wealth of great new products to choose from! Order one of these powerful Lithium battery management chips today and you'll have it shipped immediately so that you can start integrating it into your new design by tomorrow afternoon.

This Mini TV demo https://github.com/moononournation/MiniTV by moononournation is perfectly themed for Star Trek day, playing the TOS and STNG intros at 480x480 12fps MJpeg and 22KHz I2S MP3 audio. We'll try Cinepak next, but this was an easy first start, and it looks and sounds great. There's a little tearing effect due to the low frame rate and the display being single, not double-buffered, but considering this is a $4 microcontroller module running Arduino, it's very impressive! This may be the first time we've seen reasonable size-and-quality video+audio playback! This was our last 'test' for the ESP32-S3 TFT Experimenter board. All functionality has been tested, and it's ready to go out for manufacture - only one blue-wire fix is needed to change the default I2C address of the GPIO expander :) Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- @EspressifSystems @StarTrekOfficial @Arduino #StarTrekDay #espressif #esp32 #adafruit #espfriends #ESP32S3 #arduino #startrekfan #minitv #techdemo #audiovisual #innovation #diyprojects #microcontroller #videoplayback #trekkie #engineeringmagic

Whew, it has been a JOURNEY to revise this 2.8" TFT shield https://www.adafruit.com/product/1651, but we finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. By setting up the TSC2007 through a secondary LDO connected to the power-reset chip, we've eliminated the annoying I2C latch-up. So now we have to design a tester. In this case, we will use a Metro RP2040 https://www.adafruit.com/product/5786, quickly becoming my go-to Metro for test jigs since it has many GPIO, a built-in ROM bootloader, and fast peripherals. Here the chip looks for an SD card plugged into a shield, then displays the image with a touch paint interface for testing all functionality fast! We will order these PCBs tonight and finally put this revision behind us. Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #adafruit #electronics #opensource #opensourcehardware #arduino #tft #TSC2007 #metro #rp2040 #raspberrypi #shieldrevision #techjourney #engineeringbreakthrough #pcbdesign #testerdevelopment #innovation #shieldupgrade #electronicsdiy #testingmadeeasy #hardwareprogress

Coming soon - this is a quick sketch we did of an RGB TTL driver PCB to help us try out all our funky-shaped displays. We reused most of the Matrix Portal S3 PCB, but instead of the RGB matrix connector, we popped on a 40-pin FPC. 16 GPIO go to the RGB pins, then there are 4 control pins for HSYNC, VSYNC, DE, and PIXCLK. Three more pins for touch screen I2C and IRQ. Then a NeoPixel, two buttons, and 3 SPI pins for configuring the screen controller, and we're almost out of pins! An I2C GPIO expander could save us a couple pins at the expense of more complex drivers, but for now, we will make it easy to get the displays running, and we can play silly pin games later. Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #espressif #esp32 #espfriends #display #round #raspberrypi #ICN6211 #TFT #RGB #tftdisplays #innovation #screendesign #technews #devboard #uniquedesign #screentech #gadgetlove #electronics #futuretech #pcbdesign #rgbdriver #esp32s3 #ttldisplay #electronicsengineering #prototype #neopixel #pinmanagement #i2cinterface #screencontroller

Expand your project possibilities, with the Adafruit PCF8575 GPIO Expander Breakout - an affordable 16 channel I2C expander. GPIO expanders work like this: you have a board with some number of GPIO but not enough for your project - maybe you need more buttons or LEDs. Connect it over I2C and then you can send/receive I2C commands to control the GPIO pins to write and read them. It's going to be slower than direct GPIO access, but maybe that doesn't matter if it takes a millisecond instead of a microsecond. You only need the two I2C pins, and you can even share the I2C port with other sensors and devices. Heck, you can even add more expanders for massive I/O control! https://www.adafruit.com/product/5611 Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #adafruit #opensource #opensourcehardware #PCF8575 #timelapse electronicsengineering #prototypebuild #gpioexpander #i2c #stemmaqt #diyprojects #makersgonnamake #hardwarehacks #affordabletech #expandableio

Interoperability - what does that mean? After this 1-hour conversation with Robbie Green and Chris Tarr, I would say it means “controlling or checking on one device by using another device or system”. Scaled up intelligently, it implies having control and understanding of complex systems from a single location, or doing so automatically. So, rather than separately checking on an automation system, an audio processor, an audio router, a satellite receiver, a transmitter, or a security system, these individual systems can connect meaningfully to a central monitoring and control (“M&C”) system and/or to each other as appropriate. GPIO is a low-bar baseline for interoperability. Serial control, RS-422, and CanBUSS moved us forward, but a variety of TCP/IP protocols, including SNMP, have brought us to a good level of general interoperability if we’re willing to do the work and research to implement them. These ideas have motivated Robbie Green and Chris Tarr to implement interoperabilities that make broadcast operations more reliable, stable, and convenient. Show Notes:Robbie mentioned the LANTRONIX UDS2100 as a good Serial Device ServerWe mentioned live, on-line demos of some Inovonics devices, which are also interoperableConnect SNMP to other protocols with these...https://www.controlbyweb.com/x600m/Robbie’s example of vMix TCP integration - https://www.vmix.com/help26/TCPAPI.htmlMessaging on various display platforms, like Paravel's WallTime Guest:Robbie Green - Product Manager, Communication Products at Telos Alliance Hosts:Chris Tarr - Group Director of Engineering at Magnum.MediaKirk Harnack, The Telos Alliance, Delta Radio, Star94.3, & South Seas BroadcastingFollow TWiRT on Twitter and on FacebookTWiRT is brought to you by:Nautel brings you Transmission Talk Tuesday Discussions. Easy, free registration is here.Broadcasters General Store, with outstanding service, saving, and support. Online at BGS.cc. Broadcast Bionics - making radio smarter with Bionic Studio, visual radio, and social media tools at Bionic.radio.Angry Audio - with StudioHub cables and adapters. Audio problems disappear when you get Angry at AngryAudio.com. And MaxxKonnectWireless - Prioritized High Speed Internet Service designed for Transmitter Sites and Remote Broadcasts. Subscribe to Audio:iTunesRSSStitcherTuneInSubscribe to Video:iTunesRSSYouTube

We are gettin' really really close to putting the new Matrix Portal S3 https://www.adafruit.com/product/5778 into the shop, here's a tester we use to burn in the self-test code. The RP2040 brains https://github.com/adafruit/RP2040-Based-Tester-Brains-PCB resets the S3 into the ROM bootloader, the sends over compressed binaries via USB. when the self-test starts up it notices that it's in the test jig and performs a self test of the GPIO and voltages. once done, it turns into a demo board that has a basic matrix display output for users to verify functionality. This way we only have to program the board once! #adafruit #electronics #Espressif Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ -----------------------------------------

This week's EYE ON NPI is going to Matter a lot to you if you're interested in integrating with the world of IoT devices and sensors that is converting on us, inside the home and out in the world...It's the Silicon Labs MG24 Series of development boards (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/s/silicon-laboratories/mg24-development-kit) - featuring the Silicon Labs EFR32MG24 series of chips (https://www.digikey.com/short/00892bvf), designed for use with Matter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)) an open-source connectivity standard for smart home and Internet of Things devices from the Connectivity Standards Alliance (https://csa-iot.org/) formally the ZigBee Alliance. The EFR32MG24 chips (https://www.digikey.com/short/f8z8rbvn) are fully featured Cortex M33's with tons of peripherals, timers, and of course, a 2.4GHz radio that can be programmed to operate as a ZigBee device. That makes it perfect for use in designing low cost, low power, home automation devices that don't need the power and complexity of WiFi. These transports live on the lower 'levels' of the 7 Layer OSI Model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model) Each family of home devices comes with their own transport, and often they come up with their own custom application layer as well. This means that you can't use something made for Alexa with HomeKit unless the developer programmed both. It's caused fragmentation and utter frustration when someone buys a smart light bulb or HVAC controller just to find out that its walled off from the rest of their devices. The goal of Matter is to unify the upper layers (https://developers.home.google.com/matter/primer) so that devices can be discovered and controlled by any kind of hub: from a DIY Raspberry Pi to an official device from Apple, Google/Nest, Meta, or other - much like you can use your Windows desktop or Android phone to view a website designed on a Mac, and hosted on Linux. The biggest companies in this space, Amazon, Apple and Google, have already signed on to make sure that their products adhere to Matter's API (https://csa-iot.org/members/). You, the engineer tasked with creating the next new product line for your company, should be interested in whether or not this "Matters" to you. The good news is that joining an ecosystem means you can make a small device that competes in a 'big playground' of sensors, voice agents, automation tools, and gateways. (https://pages.silabs.com/rs/634-SLU-379/images/Matter_Certification_The_Value_it_Brings_to_IoT%20Devices.pdf) But need to play nicely with the others - not scream in kids' ears, errr... overwhelm the share spectrum resource. We also have to let every device have a turn at commands, and not interfere with their behavior. Thus, Matter certification! Silicon Labs has a white paper on Understanding The Path to Certifying Your Matter Devices (https://www.silabs.com/whitepapers/how-to-certify-matter-devices) Moreover you can get started immediately by picking up one or two of Silicon Labs' MG24 development kits (https://www.digikey.com/short/0rc3n5f7) for less than $40 and you can begin immediately with developing on the EFR32MG24 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/base-product/silicon-labs/336/EFR32MG24A010/629647) a well-documented, low-power friendly chip with built in 2.4 GHz radio. Inside is a Cortex M33 running at 78 MHz, with 1.0 to 1.5MB of flash and 128 to 256KB of SRAM (https://www.digikey.com/short/f8z8rbvn) so it's got plenty of room to handle multiple protocol stacks, security layers and any RTOS or Matter layers. SiLabs has been making radio-inclusive chips for many many years, so you know that there will be great support and documentation. We also have the beginnings of a CircuitPython port for this chip (https://circuitpython.org/board/sparkfun_thing_plus_matter_mgm240p/) although at the time of this writing there is not Matter support built in, it would still be very helpful for bringing up a development board and verifying hardware. Want to take Matter into your own hands? DigiKey has you covered here: the XG24-EK2703A Explorer Kit (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/silicon-labs/XG24-EK2703A/17051436) is a great starting point with USB, mikroBus-compatible GPIO headers, debug port, and Qwiic/QT port. (https://www.digikey.com/en/videos/s/silicon-labs/mg24-development-kit-datasheet-preview) For final integration, you can also pick up raw chips such as the Silicon Labs EFR32MG24A010F1536IM48 (https://www.digikey.com/short/07qww54q) or integrated modules (https://www.digikey.com/short/3n4rp9dt) that have passives and antenna wired up for quick usage. All are in stock for immediate shipment - order today and DigiKey will deliver to you Matter on a silver platter by tomorrow afternoon! Follow it up by watching the DigiKey + Silicon Labs webinar on Matter development and certification (https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/4241172/CE3FB2F9DB2D54D5A47A124701A93047) to get your product out the door ASAP.

Build a Magikoopa Wand with Adafruit's New RP2040 PropMaker Feather. Guide: https://learn.adafruit.com/mario-magic-wand We designed and 3D printed a magic wand inspired by the Super Mario Brothers movie. It's got motion activated lights and sound with a spinning crystal gem. This new Feather is an all-in-one dev board that features an I2S amp, accelerometer, NeoPixel driver, Servo Header Pins, STEMMA QT and screw block terminals. It's got the RP2040 chip with 8MB of SPI flash, 21 GPIO pins, and lipo battery charging over USB-C. With CircuitPython, the board acts like a USB drive so you can easily customize the code with just about any computer. You can modify the code to fit your project, just change the values such as the NeoPixel color, speed or the accelerometer threshold. Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting 3D Printing Projects Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOWD2dJNRIN46uhMCWvNOlbG 3D Hangout Show Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVgpmWevin2slopw_A3-A8Y Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVsMp6nKnpjsXSQ45nxfORb Timelapse Tuesday Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVagy3CktXsAAs4b153xpp_ Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media: Noe's Twitter / Instagram: @ecken Pedro's Twitter / Instagram: @videopixil ----------------------------------------- Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe Adafruit Monthly Deals & FREE Specials https://www.adafruit.com/free?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Join our weekly Show & Tell on G+ Hangouts On Air: http://adafru.it/showtell Watch our latest project videos: http://adafru.it/latest?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting 3DThursday Posts: https://blog.adafruit.com/category/3d-printing?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Music by Bartlebeats https://soundcloud.com/adafruit -----------------------------------------

Build a Magikoopa Wand with Adafruit's New RP2040 PropMaker Feather. Guide: https://learn.adafruit.com/mario-magic-wand We designed and 3D printed a magic wand inspired by the Super Mario Brothers movie. It's got motion activated lights and sound with a spinning crystal gem. This new Feather is an all-in-one dev board that features an I2S amp, accelerometer, NeoPixel driver, Servo Header Pins, STEMMA QT and screw block terminals. It's got the RP2040 chip with 8MB of SPI flash, 21 GPIO pins, and lipo battery charging over USB-C. With CircuitPython, the board acts like a USB drive so you can easily customize the code with just about any computer. You can modify the code to fit your project, just change the values such as the NeoPixel color, speed or the accelerometer threshold. Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting 3D Printing Projects Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOWD2dJNRIN46uhMCWvNOlbG 3D Hangout Show Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVgpmWevin2slopw_A3-A8Y Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVsMp6nKnpjsXSQ45nxfORb Timelapse Tuesday Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVagy3CktXsAAs4b153xpp_ Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media: Noe's Twitter / Instagram: @ecken Pedro's Twitter / Instagram: @videopixil ----------------------------------------- Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe Adafruit Monthly Deals & FREE Specials https://www.adafruit.com/free?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Join our weekly Show & Tell on G+ Hangouts On Air: http://adafru.it/showtell Watch our latest project videos: http://adafru.it/latest?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting 3DThursday Posts: https://blog.adafruit.com/category/3d-printing?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Music by Bartlebeats https://soundcloud.com/adafruit -----------------------------------------

We're testing out prototypes of a new Metro https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=metro RP2040 https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=rp2040 , while the 'classic Arduino shape' is not as popular these days with dev boards as it used to be, we like the roomy layout, with lots of socket headers, and plenty of space for accessories like a MicroSD card socket with both SPI and SDIO pinout, SWD debug port, Stemma QT, and 12V DC power port. our last test is always to plug in our 2.8" captouch TFT shield https://www.adafruit.com/product/1947 because it tests both SPI and I2C. this passes and since all the GPIO are accounted for, we just have to wrap up the silk and it's off to fabrication! Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- @raspberrypi @Arduino

we're always plugging stuff into our raspberry pi to make little demos and we finally decided to make an open-source hardware quick-connecting accessory for any Pi or single board linux computer with pi-compatible 2x20 header. this slim board adds two tactile buttons on gpio 5 and 6, a slide switch on gpio 13, and both EYESPI https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=eyespi and Stemma QT ports https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-adafruit-stemma-qt for attaching displays, E-Inks, or I2C devices with no soldering required. here we have a 2.0" ST7789 display https://www.adafruit.com/product/4311 connected up and running our GIF player demo https://learn.adafruit.com/pitft-linux-python-animated-gif-player this board will probably live on our Pi full time for fast prototyping goodness, and of course, once we're done testing all the GPIO we'll also put it into the shop. Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ ----------------------------------------- #adafruit #raspberrypi #OpenSource #EyeSpi #HardwareHacking #opensource #opensourcehardware #linux @raspberrypi

In this episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk through an introduction to electronics that you can do in your own home with microcontrollers. Show Notes 00:08 Welcome 00:52 What we're talking about Arduino - Home ESP32 – The best products with free shipping | only on AliExpress 02:15 Airtag Sidebar 04:05 Projects We've Worked On 06:34 How do you run software on the microcontroller 08:50 Microcontrollers are extendable 12:05 Fixing a dryer 14:06 Sprinkler system 15:48 Microcontrollers 20:28 AC and DC Voltage 25:45 Amperage and watts 28:19 Extension cords ideally would have fuses 31:18 What's the risk of not having enough power? 32:09 GPIO 35:45 Resistance How Resistors Work - Unravel the Mysteries of How Resistors Work! 41:12 Capacitors 42:02 Sensors 5/1pcs HLK LD2410C 24G mmWave FMCW Millimeter Wave 5M Human Presence Status Radar Sensor Motion Detection Modul High Sensitivity 46:47 Relays 48:33 Coding microcontrollers Web Serial API ESPHome — ESPHome Johnny-Five: The JavaScript Robotics & IoT Platform Espruino - JavaScript for Microcontrollers Introduction - The Rust on ESP Book Welcome to Quick.js! - quick.js 52:32 A note on Soldering 53:12 Projects for kids 54:31 SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: Razor blade Wes: ESP32 – The best products with free shipping | only on AliExpress Shameless Plugs Scott: Syntax Discord Wes: Wes' Instagram Tweet us your tasty treats Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets Wes Bos on Bluesky Scott on Bluesky Syntax on Bluesky

Audio-over-IP now a 20-year-old technology, and we’re witnessed many dozens of AoIP networked devices brought to the broadcast marketplace. Now, Pippin Technical Service, a Canadian broadcast equipment supplier and engineering firm, is adding AoIP network devices to its PTS Gear product line. Designed in-house, the PTS Gear lineup includes PTSBeacon, an warning light that gets its signaling directly from virtual GPIO signals on a packet network. PTSAurora is another device driven by the virtual GPIO signals found on Livewire networks. Both devices are PoE powered, meaning they work with just one Ethernet connection for signaling, control, power, and configuration. We broadcast engineers welcome this kind of innovation for making our studios easier to build and more functional for on-air talent. Show Notes:PTSGear website, linking to all the PTS Gear offeringsPTSBeacon - the warning light we discussed in some detail Guest:Tyler Everitt - President/CEO, Pippin Technical Service Ltd Host:Kirk Harnack, The Telos Alliance, Delta Radio, Star94.3, & South Seas BroadcastingFollow TWiRT on Twitter and on FacebookTWiRT is brought to you by:Nautel brings you Transmission Talk Tuesday Discussions. Easy, free registration is here.Broadcasters General Store, with outstanding service, saving, and support. Online at BGS.cc. Broadcast Bionics - making radio smarter with Bionic Studio, visual radio, and social media tools at Bionic.radio.Angry Audio - with StudioHub cables and adapters. Audio problems disappear when you get Angry at AngryAudio.com. And MaxxKonnectWireless - Prioritized High Speed Internet Service designed for Transmitter Sites and Remote Broadcasts. Subscribe to Audio:iTunesRSSStitcherTuneInSubscribe to Video:iTunesRSSYouTube

This week's EYE ON NPI is Big In Japan, it's the Renesas RA Microcontroller Series (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/r/renesas/ra-mcus) available at DigiKey in a wide range of sizes and configurations. With the chip shortage easing up, it's a great time to look at what chips to use for your next design. And while we have covered a ton of Arm Cortex microcontrollers on EYE ON NPI (https://blog.adafruit.com/?s=eye+on+npi+cortex), we haven't yet taken a look at Renesas' RA offerings. Renesas is a company created by the merging of the silicon design groups from Hitachi, NEC and Mitsubishi Electric (https://www.youtube.com/@RenesasPresents), so not surprisingly it's very Japanese-focused and used a lot in Japanese electronics companies but not as often in the USA. However, it's always good to have more competition and with the Arm Cortex standard, it's easy to move from one chip vendor to another without having to do a lot of re-targeting. So let's take a look! We saw Renesas highlighted over on DigiKey (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/r/renesas/ra-mcus) and the same day also received our new Early Access Arduino UNO R4 Minima (https://store.arduino.cc/pages/unor4) for us to use in making sure all our libraries work. The UNO R4 is the long-awaited upgrade to the popular R3 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/arduino/A000073/3476357) which came with an 8-bit, 16 MHz, 16 KB Flash, 2KB SRAM chip. While Arduino has come out with many other dev boards since then, the UNO hadn't got an update to 32-bit in a while. The challenge? Finding an affordable 32-bit chip with native USB, Cortex M3 or M4, good software SDK and 5V compatibility. That last part is the hardest, for example there's no ATSAM chip that has both USB and 5V compliance. An acquaintance just came back from a holiday in Japan and she mentioned that "everything is just...a little better there than here in the US!" and that's how we felt when looking at the RA4M1 datasheet (https://www.renesas.com/us/en/document/dst/renesas-ra4m1-group-datasheet) The RA4M1 series is a great pick for an 8-bit upgrade. The core is a Cortex M4 which means you're going to get good speedy computation with built in floating point and DSP instructions. For flash memory, 256 KB stores your code and there's a separate 8KB "EEPROM" like section. For RAM, 32 KB is available. It's got all the peripherals you expect such as timers, DMA, ADCs, USB full-speed, I2C, SPI, and UART as well as some upgrades you can't get on 8-bit chips. For example, the ADC is 14 bits, and there's also a 12-bit DAC. There's 4 internal op-amps and 8 total timers! There's two I2Cs, SPIs and UARTs and also CAN bus. A built in RTC is a true real time clock, with battery backup. There's also capacitive touch sensing and a segment LCD controller - our friend Joey Castillo will love that! (https://www.joeycastillo.com/objects/lcdwing/). In addition - we also saw some really beautiful silkscreen board designs for the Renesas Gadget Series (https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/gadget-renesas) as well as an online code editor for compiling for the chip series. (https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/gadget-renesas/boards/gr-sakura/project-sketch-on-web-compiler) We're hoping some of that work gets revitalized with the many makers folks who will be hacking with the R4. If you can't wait to try the Renesas RA4M1 (https://www.digikey.com/short/wt4b872q) chip out, Digikey has an affordable RA4M1 dev board in stock (https://www.digikey.com/short/3qzr0bbw) which comes with a J-Link on-board debugger with separate USB port, a few onboard peripherals, current sensing jumpers, and tons of GPIO so you can prototype your design quickly. Once you've got your design sorted out, chips are available for immediate shipment in TQFP (https://www.digikey.com/short/f3m2pffz) and QFN (https://www.digikey.com/short/fn2m9bbm). Order these from DigiKey and you will say "Konnichi wa" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konnichiwa) to a new family of microcontrollers by tomorrow morning.

Zener diodes (https://blog.adafruit.com/2013/07/17/your-moment-of-zener/) really are amazing little devices, useful for a dozen different circuits. (https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2012/basics-introduction-to-zener-diodes/) We like to use a Zener clamp (https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/chapter%208.pdf) as a basic method of protecting analog inputs on some of our dev boards so you can plug 5V in by accident and nothing bad will happen to the chip GPIO. They're available in just about every voltage setting - let's check out some tips on using Zeners, (https://www.onsemi.com/pub/Collateral/HBD854-D.PDF) what to watch out for when specifying them and all the different packages available at DigiKey. Also, we'll check out DigiKey's new branding, released this week! https://www.digikey.com/short/q0nb98jq Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/

NeoPixel LEDs (a.k.a WS2812 / SK6812 family) are a super-easy way to add addressable RGB lighting with only one GPIO. they're ubiquitous on microcontrollers, but some chips or SBC's dont have neopixel support due to the precision timing required to send data. we often get folks asking how to get NeoPixels working on some OrangeBananaOnionRockchipAllWinner Pi type board, given we have our Blinka library that provides support for CircuitPython libraries. but if theres no neopixel_write implementation written for that platform, it just wont work. a quick solution is this seesaw-based NeoDriver board: send it the NeoPixel data you want to write over I2C and it will blit out the perfect pixel timing on the other side. we're using an attiny1616 so we have enough RAM to buffer a 512-pixel long strand. now, to be fair - its not super fast because we have to write each pixel over I2C https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-seesaw-atsamd09-breakout/neopixel, but with 1MHz clock and as long as you're not writing the whole strip at once, its not so bad! we add a 5V charge-pump so even on 3V boards, you'll get a clean 5V signal. pre-soldered terminal blocks and Stemma QT plugs make this a no-solder solution for adding NeoPixels easily to any device with I2C. Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ -----------------------------------------

Most of our testers use pretty simple gpio toggling to verify everything's connected - but for our Radio Feathers https://lnkd.in/gsrgRF9C we want to also verify that the radio signal is connected through properly. so we use a separate radio to ping pong a message and check the RSSI. traditionally we did this with separate radio feathers but that got a little annoying to manage since they'd get lost or the battery would be dead just as we were about to get on with some testing. since our new fancy Tester Brains https://lnkd.in/eGCQmvnt got an upgrade from teensy to pico, we also revised to add an EYE-SPI connector which brings plenty of GPIO and SPI over. now we have the second RFM module connected to the tester itself so it's all-in-one. a lot easier to manage! Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ -----------------------------------------