live from New York. It's Ask an Engineer Zach Snyder cut now. I'll get you Batman. Hi everybody welcome to Ask Engineer. It's me Lady Aida with me Mr. Lady Aida broadcasting live from downtown Manhattan and we're ready to kick off another Ask Engineer. Right well I wanted to start off the show before we get into all the electronics everything. You know we do a live show every Wednesday and unfortunately there's tragedies that are happening all the time and we always have to process these real time as it happens. So we're terrified horrified of what's happened in Atlanta. Obviously our Asian-American Pacific Islander community our thoughts are with you because this is scary there's been more hate-fueled violence and more directed towards Asian-Americans. New York has happened recently and now it's in the rest of the country and we just want to let you know like this is our platform this is our voice that we're saying is like we all have opportunities to make things better even in the electronics community. There's a reason I want to thank our community moderators and our team because there's times where people say and do things where you can stand up and say that's not okay and that's one of the things that we try to do with our community is having an inclusive place where there isn't bigotry or racism or xenophobia. That's our part. Be excellent to one another. Yeah and like you know just straight up in the electronics world there is a little bit of a vibe of like oh in certain areas of the world that's cheap it's not as good you know you have to like we have to actually start thinking about the things that we say and definitely over the last year with people calling COVID locations it's from that's that's also that's dangerous eventually something happens. So anyways you know we as always we don't want to just be a hashtag and say like you know we're in together but I think the best thing is to just look around in your own life think about the ways that you can help. There's a website by the way especially in communities where they're trying to get an idea of what's happening it's stop aapihate.org. Someone can post it up in the chats and this is one place where people can have their voice heard and also report a hate incident hopefully we can continue to maybe work better together live together better because this is all we got. All right this is our planet. So that is it okay let's do ask an engineer. All right still tonight's show speaking of things that we're going to have to deal with we're still masking up stay and save our team thanks you by the way we've been able to ship your orders thank you for having those come in during this crisis and pandemic we're not done with it yet we're tossing in the mask as you all know our team pre-COVID photos thank you so much for placing orders all this time you've been keeping us busy keep us in business we're talking about show and tell people on the show and tell share their projects and more every single week no pager or the host lady it'll talk about who's on the show and tell we have some time travel a bunch of videos this week from many of the folks in the Adafruit world and a debut of a new series that we're doing it's a helpful on it by Thumbnail Hardware News in New York City 3d printing we got everyone's favorite segment digikey and Adafruit present ion mpi this week some from analog devices we got new products we got top secret we're going to answer your questions and we are going to do that and discard join up it's free yeah 20 000 people are there now new graphic Adafruit.it select discard all that and more on ask an engineer that's right okay doki uh let's um jump right to what's happening with freebies and more yeah because we give away stuff uh we're like day 60 into the hundred days of masking up yeah we're gonna hopefully by the time we're done maybe we'll this is this is what really turned it they'll they'll write about this you know this free that mask in those Adafruit orders that's what we turn the tide they're fashionable and got yeah that's right we're giving away a free mask if you order anything over a dollar you know we need to put in some number we couldn't put in zero because of the software so pretty much anything you order we'll toss in a free mask they're very goth when you order nine nine dollars or more you get a free permaporto half size breadboards think of the top left order one four nine or more you get a free uh stomach qt board we have a range of different boards we've got a qt pie we've got the mcp221 then the uh list 3dh and some other sensors and um when you place an order we'll give you a random one if you have an account we'll give you a different random one each time so you don't get the same random one although that would be a weird coincidence um free ups ground shipping on orders two 49 or more that's like 200 or more and two 99 or more you get a free circuit playground express for all the one development board no solder required people love them for learning how to code and make with all the hardware built in okay and uh we're going to be doing that until things change but you can always check adafruit.com slash free and see but these are going to be the ones uh the mask another 40 days probably and then these will probably have uh until further notice um so go get them all right show and tell people around the world showing and sharing their projects known Pedro we're hosting this week thank you know Pedro next week lady and i are back one more who is on the show until this week and what they share glad you asked um thank you know Pedro for hosting jp hosting i think last week uh kicked it off uh we were adding on order but uh kevin from digikey came by showed off uh this week's uh new release from digikey not sneezing uh that was just me that'd be cool though it's just like if you get sneezes now on cut tape uh no they have cut tape components if you get your parts on paper cut tape you'll have a printing on the back that'll have the part number and the value and your p.o. like all that detail like a little receipt very handy we talked about this on just gladiator just gladiator um check check out the video also i thought saw uh sean post up uh some images you'll see people start posting pictures pictures of this it's free uh you just get it whenever you order something with paper backed cut tape that's eight millimeters wide which is like resistors and capacitors and this is great for 0402 and 0201 because they're so small um there's no markings ever so like you know you really don't you're like what is this mythical tape like i have tape i'm like i don't know what this cut tape is but i'm scared to throw it out right that's that's what happens um rent came by and did a live whipper snapper demo i start cool no code add on to ate a food i o to let people plug and play our wi-fi boards and have them um automatically controlled through the website you can start like coding them and controlling them jeppler wrote a guide on circuit sculpture and came by and showed off some of circuit sculpture jp is working on a cool touch deck using the rp 2040 feather and a tft feather wing thanks to filmy guy for helping out scott went through the um open hardware summit goodie bag uh that you know if you were going to attend last year uh but you didn't obviously because it was canceled because there was a pandemic in new york city um you got your goodie bag now and they're gonna be sending out another goodie bag soon for you know the the upcoming um open source hardware event um the goodie bag has circuit python hardware in it it's got this osh osh watch i think it's called it's an open source hardware watch that uses the nr 52 840 uh so you can uh once upgrade your circuit python this is like a little year out of date but then you get the latest bluetooth apps and demos that we've got it's like a little time capsule of what we were doing last year and you can um use the watch you probably want to probably want to update it yeah um but the other thing is the open hardware summit is coming up soon and they're doing it virtual again and we have something in the goodie bag this year so if you're thinking about it that'll be in there soon freebies um i came by and worked on a birthday present for their sister it's a constellation light um it i guess uh the sister is a pisces and so the lights are are like the you know they're 16 lights and they show uh the pisces constellation and it's done in neopixels with a little hand soldered um they did a great job and that's the best kind of present i had lost a long time electronic heirlooms as it were um mark uh has a problem people keep driving past his house they don't see the house numbers so he's going to make them in neopixels light them up so people can see them michael's working on an iridium satellite messenger like text messengers or to show off that showed off some pictures and some tft revisions revisions that are being worked into the next version moheb is working on a tomatone hacking it's like this like cool slide whistle electronic slide whistle uh from japan uh they're super funny and they are in a lot of good memes um they also be hacked and connected to electronics so this is cool um there's like apparently multiple versions i did not know uh the genealogy of tomatones but i will look at that andrew uh made a geiger kit from ateafruit and then used it to test stuff around the house and found out that a lens first camera was like actually kind of radioactive and it's kind of scary uh and then liz is working on a sailor moon locket prop so everyone wants to be sailor moon okay dodge show and tell every single week 7 30 p.m the longest running show and tell online it's part of our ateafruit live series shows if you're watching this right now it's wednesday 8 p.m ask an engineer show and tell everyone say 7 30 p.m it's your time and it's part of our wednesday shows on sunday we do desk of lady aida lady aida this week on the desk of lady aida you showed that uh cut tape thing you talked about that you also showed this dv i gigantic ebb and heads yeah so you it's a cool video if uh folks are interested check it out because it had uh gigantic ebb and heads a preview of something that you're working on yeah um yeah i've been doing a lot of keycap stuff uh so i showed that off i showed off this dvi um breakout board for the pico um and one of the demos that it runs is this gigantic bouncing ebb and heads with raspberry pi logos um these are first feather that can uh do stuff like that yeah this is our you know what they this was the pico that i had because the they had a pre compiled version yeah but we have a feather the feather will be able to do absolutely as well and yeah you i was thinking actually one of the things i was chatting about was maybe making an and dvi feather wing yeah it would plug in and it would give you um dvi and itus audio and just just for the rp2040 because like nothing else can do this like ridiculous hacking um but then you could like play movies put your feather like very short movies well we so we say that now right that you know very short movies but i remember having an mp3 player and being able to play like three songs yeah like just think where is circuit python gonna be ten years from now right now we're joking about having video and the audio it'll be whatever whatever version of hd there is what's the name of those those mp3 players everybody had it's like nova blues there's some name of them yeah someone in the chattel something it was before the ipod and i remember that was like this can hold the entire album and i was like this is amazing yeah yeah i don't remember the name of them nomad nomads mp3 nomads yeah so i think those i remember the first ones and they were like so cool and we're talking about the first feather right now yeah march 17th 2021 that can do video and audio out like that yeah we'll be able to look back at the show a year from now and a year from now and a year from now when we have like the pico implants and like the wet wear like cyber well i think you know the the chips will be continued they'll continue to be more powerful and we'll be able to have um ate a fruit open source versions yeah of a lot of things that are like nearly impossible to do right now yeah i'll sort of want to redo that like you know the pico to zero converter that i did remember i did put that together i kind of want to do one now but obviously i couldn't use the pico anymore i have to use the watch it but it would have hd my output because like it has dvi output that'd be such a fun little hack all right and then we also did the great search for digikey this week it was um it's a replacement for our uh favorite but now completely utterly discontinued stmpe series resistive touch control panels resistive touch panel controllers um we use them on a lot of our boards uh you know we basically bought the last reel and we got enough to kind of like keep us going for a few months but you know this chip really is discontinued um so we have to find a replacement resistive touch controller for a resistive touch displays uh we wanted something that was either i-square to your spi ideally both and one that had linux kernel drivers so uh you can take a look and see what we came up with all right and uh the chat has spoken it was the creative no man creative no bad yes yes i'm still i'm still traumatized by the real player buffering so like all right uh every tuesday we have a show and this one is jp's product pic of the week where we broadcast live from the product page one day we'll be broadcasting live from the product page and and the whatever feather circuit python iteration there is maybe you'll be able to to watch it in you know after you mine enough coin for uh but jp's next one should be an nft for sure yeah so jp's product pic of the week uh here's the little uh set the one minute overview segment see on the other side it is the pc f 85 91 and it is an eight-bit adc and eight-bit deck on a board with stem a qt got a cyber deck plugged into the gpio pins of this raspberry pi 400 this raspberry pi is running a little python program that uses the circuit python library for this board it reads all four of the analog inputs what i'm doing is tracking the first knob here for the x position the vertical line here with this second knob third one we saw that's changing the hue and then the last one is brightness so you'll find i can get that pretty bright there or drop it drop it down way way low or all the way off it is the pc f 85 91 eight-bit adc and deck and stem a qt format all right and uh this Thursday tomorrow is jp's workshop and i'm gonna show the screen thing one more time because someone on um twitter was pretty nice they said oh they followed the tutorial uh for the rgb light and the reflective thing yeah and it didn't work at all and they were frustrated and uh you know i was reading this i'm like oh no we're going to get blamed for everything and they said oh there was protective coating on it yeah because it's like the microbeads yeah so public service announcement here remove the protection there is there's sometimes there's um protective coating on things you have no idea how many people email us and they're like my tft screen has is damaged and we're like what's the damage and they're like there's just like marking on it and i'm like yeah there's this protective plastic and that's the marking to let you know that there's a panel yeah panel panels i've probably answered a million emails about it they're like this doesn't look like the picture and it's like you have to peel off the thing i'm like sorry and sometimes it's full on anger and you know upsetness because when you're at a computer you don't think about who's on the other side and then sometimes people are just like oh like whoops sorry you know they're nice about it anyways so i wanted to show the video of this because i think this is going to continue to be a project that people make because a lot of people are streaming and doing stuff from home yeah and then uh i'll get to do a preview of something jp is going to show this week so i'm going to play this back to back okay time travel looking around the world of makers hackers arts engineers what's just going on reminders and more settle um we just updated more of our gift guides so gift guides became so popular um during certain times of the year where people give presents and stuff they're like well can you just do gift guides all the time yeah so so check out the gift guides that we're doing we're publishing new ones all the time you go to adafruit.com yeah and we have raspberry pi gift guide that we're gonna either publish or publishing shortly um adabox adabox.com you can sign up to be notified we um do a subscription service every three months or so you get one of these boxes um we'll probably be shipping out april may um there's uh openings probably after we charge credit cards and then sometimes there is you will get notified chances are if you sign up now you will get a chance to subscribe right as we're shipping because there are openings that people can't you know they cancel right after we are charged a card are they their credit card doesn't activate or whatever and so we have like you know 50 openings and then we notify everybody so uh do sign up um we absolutely do notify people when we have slots available for them in the plan after and I hope we continue to see signs of recovery is maybe add more uh in 2022 yeah we couldn't add more subscribers wait it was it was too much yeah and still right now there is logistical challenges from shipping to chips uh the world does not risk getting displays but you know we're we're moving around our adabox is to make sure that we can um we can fulfill them it's just it's it's a fun challenge um especially right now um there's a lot of things that are unavailable um you know anybody who's doing electronics or purchasing for engineering knows like you just can't get chips anymore sometimes you can't get displays or you can't get some sensors so um don't worry things are things are happening um we're just we're just surfing this wave of globalization shipping stuff all right other bits of time travel um got a video from uh paint your dragon about the feather silk and then um I have a video from our um air quality monitor that we had a guide and I finally got that out so we're gonna play those two and then we have a debut of some videos from Colin I'll talk about that right after the break so here's this board we brought from Eagle to Illustrator got some notes on the right hey it's the hot new chip rp2040 I've isolated certain silk from the eagle file and then I've brought in an earlier design from the feather m4 as a starting point text baselines and sizes are reset and then pin numbers are updated for the new chip and then lots and lots of shuffling and nudging and resizing this is about an hour's work here and then I remember oh yeah we get to use that official new logo for shuffling or nudging and here's what the final board will look like early data was this hey I'm testing out some code from Carter he made a co2 sensor this is a uh IR co2 sensor so it's a true co2 detector that detects parts per million and this is a matrix portal which is from our old aida box a couple months ago and an rgb matrix and it's showing off the ppm and telling you if there's enough ventilation in your room we thought this would be a cool project because we're seeing a lot of teachers and students they want to build something like for this like this for their classroom or their workspace so they can tell when it's time to open up the windows because they need more ventilation when there's enough ventilation and maybe they can close the windows a little bit so I'll try it out by breathing on it you'll see it goes up from 800 to pour over a thousand and uh when it gets up a little bit higher it'll even warn you hey you really have to open the window now so this is a cool all in one co2 detector all right a lot of folks are familiar with Collins lab um this is all the back in fact when I worked with con make and uh when Colin joined aida fruit we started and restarted um Collins lab pseudo random pseudo random and then the circuit playground series now during the pandemic and more um it obviously we decided well we're not going to film puppets and stuff together because it's like really you get really close we're just like we'll get to it eventually yeah um and so we we paused that but one of the things that we had started and now restarted is um and also time change um and the format's changed tiktok is now here so we also thought like you know the attention spans are short and that being said especially young people they want to learn things on some of these platforms so tiktok is like it's a story place you're telling yours you're showing something you make we're like on instagram it's like here's something I have twitter here's something I'm gonna complain about or say yeah and so what we decided to do is um make these column lab shorts these column lab notes yeah column lab snippets and um with these I'm gonna play let's see one two three of them there are a minute each three in a row and you'll be able to uh get an idea of a concept or how something works or what something is very fast take it away the tactile momentary switch it's the button backbone of pcb user interfaces available in a variety of form factors tactile switches are probably most recognizable as the ever-present reset switch on a microcontroller board but you probably don't realize how many of your devices actually use them as they're often hidden behind a front panel tactile switches are convenient but wiring them up can be confusing because it's easier to forget which pins are connected which way was it these two are connected to each other if you don't have a multimeter handy just solder to posts at opposite corners those will always be disconnected until the switch is pressed easy nearly as important as solder type is solder thickness if it's too thick you'll have trouble with tight spots and small devices if it's too thin you'll have to keep feeding solder into the joint heating the pads longer and possibly damaging the board or part so which size is right for the job delicate surface mount components are best soldered with thinner gauge generally around 0.02 or 0.015 inch it's like the angel hair pasta of solder except shiny and very toxic for through hole soldering 0.031 diameter will do the job well your soldering will go quickly and there's plenty of flux inside to give you good clean solder joints for large components you can go up to 0.062 inch but if you get thick solder just make sure it's the electronics type and not plumbing solder through hole resistors are so commonplace that you likely don't notice their unusual aesthetic so why are they the only component that displays its value using painted stripes in the early days of electronics printing tiny numbers on little cylinders was a relatively costly process to keep costs low manufacturers established the resistor color code and use simple stripes instead of characters capacitors got a similar treatment often using dots and resulting in a decidedly funky look but only resistors still use the color code today and that's because the system works so well the stripes can be read quickly from pretty much any angle and unlike a text label they can't be hidden by installing the resistor flat on a pcb and that is how the resistor got its stripes and kept them okay and stay tuned for more of these we have a bunch lined up they didn't call her working on them and uh and sending requests if there's something you want us to cover uh we do take be kind and uh post you know up in the comments of the instagram or on youtube you also have the tag hashtag colin's lab note yeah and then we will we will take those and add them to the big uh stew of ideas and then when we fish out a vegetable or chunk of meat we will maybe fish out your idea all right uh help wanted jobs at eaterfruit.com is something like i'm right along and uh there's really cool jobs that you can get and there's skills that you can post yours um we moderate each one of these we make sure there's no scams or anything weird this week's job that was just posted makerspace manager in new york new york it's full-time position chickens fires yeah so check it out um jobs.eaterfruit.com all right let's do some python on hardware news okay blink up blink up blink up okay all right before we dive into the newsletter this is an item in the newsletter but i wanted to just read what the editor chief of tom's hardware said the eaterfruit feather rp2040 is the best rp2040 board you can get that's a review uh there's more offering a megabyte storage strong battery support for adc's and a huge ecosystem of add-on boards get it if you can find one in stock yeah that's the only problem right now i believe me if i can get these parts delivered to me i will make them i'm waiting on one or two more shipments yeah if it's funny if you don't have the part and you can't substitute another part like if you don't have the usb c connector nothing else will fit you gotta have that connector and uh hopefully soon just a you know another thing we decided not to do back orders because everyone especially in the electronics community in the chaser talking about this right now there is um some part delays part storages imagine if you take someone's money and then indefinitely you're holding it for maybe these parts so we do sign up so sign up we never do anything else with the email you only get one email when it's back in stock and then you place an order and that's been working out so that's what we do that's a sign up from and uh we're gonna make them as fast as we can correct so that's the that was the hardware portion of it and i think and this is i'm just gonna say this it's yes the hardware you did a good job oh thank you thank you additionally it's not just the hardware it's it's the it's the circuit python uh it's the community world it's the code in the community yeah this is code plus community but the hardware is really good and the the thing that people can code with is it fits the hardware well yeah so feather open does all these things ujiko system of hardware circuit python hundreds of libraries get you going really fast and you're doing the thing you want to do yeah so anyways never understood why these cutting boards had circles on them like what's what's the goal what are you doing there's probably some type of thing either um so that is um so that's that so the other thing we have our python on her with newsletter yes piper make a new chrome browser based fully browser way of doing block based programming and guess what underneath it's circuit python you load circuit python and then it basically turns the rebel into a block based like blocky programming system um there's even a library that they published which you've just add to the bundle today so you can even basically take your piper code and then make it like permanent you know living on the on the storage device so interesting um i think this is cool i mean with web serial now being a um standard um on it's by default on and chrome you don't have to enable it anymore um one of the things i always wanted to do is have a web rebel and i'm like they did it like there you go that's circuit python yeah and the neat thing is if anyone says well adafrit are you gonna make like a block based circuit python these guys did here you go and uh i don't have to yeah and so this is really neat and i think that you know if you like make code with circuit playground express try the pico if you have one with make that play piper dot com that's right anyways check it out yeah okay uh our discord server hit 28 thousand people right now we have about 4704 people online was nice yeah um circuit we're doing a bundle managing um and and library management we're gonna see some work being done with that we've you know hit 300 libraries uh so we want to um now write plugins for ide's to make it easier for you to manage your libraries um thankfully we all thought about this years ago and we said like like believe me we had a lot of discussions about the libraries if you look at how our libraries are done and distributed it was designed to be automated and turned into a fully um a fully automated way of publishing libraries and getting them into ide's and managing all the dependencies um we learned a lot from how arduino did it and we just wanted to skip to what arduino is doing now um and not have all the pieces in between so you know i know folks are you know you can always drag and drop the files of your libraries onto uh the circuit pi drive but it would be cool if maybe uh fawni or mu or vs code did that automatically so that's that's one of the things that we're starting to work on now so keep your eyes peeled and if you want to contribute uh if you want to help write a plugin for your favorite ide post up in the discord or join us on github post up an issue and uh we'd love to have you because there's a lot of ide's and we're we're gonna do some big ones but we might not do all of them yep uh by the time the next newsletter comes out there's a new update of mu i think we either got in there or it'll be in the next one it's a public beta yeah we mean we're stuff's in there but we have some improvements hopefully we'll get in uh before the last beta yep deep dive what's got this friday two p.m checking out lady to stuff spy sometime flash Henry talks about circuit vison um here is more of the round display yeah there we're seeing more round displays and um one of the things that folks do with circuit python and also all forms of coding on the pico is display things so you can see yeah so round displays um and it's cool because you can see the capabilities of circuit python which is managing your all these are objects you know what i mean so you don't have to redraw a second you don't have to deal about with dirty rectangle tracking sometime for you um you've got some kibos there those are running uh these are from yeah lots of keyboard stuff they run circuit python uh this is a cool demo uh somebody is showing hey look all these circuit python divide all these devices uh i squirt see devices and displays have circuit python libraries already isn't that wonderful uh game do we know um i love what they're doing they're using the eve chipset to add um like true hgmi i mean like the circuit the pico is doing this cool hack uh but this is true um hgmi output with full graphic support in circuit pythons you can like load sprites and play videos and like resize and and perform uh it's like a gpu basically for microcontrollers um they have a shield and i think like a feather wing and uh we're gonna hopefully stop it soon all right uh make a check out some more examples yeah um bill he was on the show and tell and showed the rp 2040 head mouse yeah so the standalone video can also check out last week's show and tell um like just like connecting hardware the hardware's making synthesizers yeah there's a lot of midi stuff going on because we have that for circuit python so people are using the pimeroni keyboard to then control mini stuff yeah this is a w this is jebler's wwbb clock uh tg techie's working on doing gooey stuff with circuit python display there's a lot of gooey stuff that's all you need to watch to do on off so like what do you what do you need more who needs to know the time yeah you just need to know are you on or are you off all right and so um so micro python projects yeah blinkers so you can check out all of this stuff and more and more um we also have a roundup dude this is a huge newsletter i'm ready yeah we also have a roundup of some of the things we released um and also the upcoming uh events up to i think 305 libraries let me check 300 and five yeah 305 libraries yes um and check out the events that are coming up there is open hardware summit pyohio is coming out geopython pycon europe python pyohio some of these are virtual some of these are going to be in person stay tuned to the newsletter for all the things python and uh that is this week's python on hardware okay lady aida we are an open source hardware company to prove it we post our files in our code we post the guides we post the videos all 2435 guides um so if you go to learn that fruit.com you look at the new guides unless we also have updated guides so some of these are not you're gonna be like hey wait a minute they've met your airlift that's not a new product hey wait a minute yeah but we update guides we want to tell people when they've been updated especially if it's more than like typos um so what we've done is all of our m4 airlift boards we really revived all the instructions on using the airlift um we now have a templating system and learn uh we use that to basically refactor um our airlift tutorial pages how to upgrade um airlift boards how to use them and it should be much much much easier now instead of having one shared page each product has its own wiring and code um so it's gonna be a lot easier for us to maintain a lot easier for people to use um our our learn system is a content management system and it's it's not trivial it's a pretty you know intense one um but we're always looking to improve we want to have a really good documentation i think we're i think we're like the leaders in good electronics documentation um making it powerful and and maintainable it that's that's the dual challenge right uh because you have good if you have a lot of documentation it's not maintainable uh things change i mean like arduino's constant changing circuit python's constant changing python's constant changing you know we have a lot of python too probably we gotta go back and like revise them for python 3 so i'm just letting you know why there's these airlift boards yeah here's one request i have for the community so you know a lot of hardware that's out there um just goes back to i think just being good to each other a lot of hardware that's out there it might be like um clones of ours or whatever um and then sometimes there's uh different versions of similar hardware that we have and the other companies will just take our code and take our names off it but sometimes they link to us here's my request is all eight when you buy a hardware from ate a fruit or if you're shopping around and you buy and you're not going to buy from somewhere else but it's because of the documentation and code let the other companies know just say hey like i was going to buy this product and yeah yours is maybe cheaper or maybe sometimes more usually because we have think we do a good job with pricing yeah sometimes there's things that are more expensive that don't have any documentation versus something that is lower cost and higher quality and has all this code and all the stuff um one of the things you can do and do do it lightly is just say hey like when i shop for electronics i like to buy from the places that publish the code under an open source license and then also have some type of documentation i think that's like if everyone started asking that everyone would do it and we would even get better at our documentation and our stuff because there'd be more the expectations would continue to go high i think we do a really good job but i think we need more people doing it we need more companies doing it yeah see that a lot all right so speaking of documentation the guys that are live this week that are new is melissa did um the 2.13 inch e-ink display breakout and feather wings we've pulled out all of those e-inks and they've given them their own guide page you've seen a lot of those being revised so that's part of it um a lot of e-ink displays are discontinued we have to update the products and so having the guide hopefully we'll try to make it as easy as possible to communicate which code you have to use because physically they all are all the same size um but the driver chips inside them is different this is unlike tft tft drivers don't chips don't change that often um we did upgrade the rgb led matrix with circuit python guide quite a bit we added um the pico and rp2040 support so if you want to use rgb matrices um with uh rp2040 feather or the pico check out this guide we have wiring diagrams jeff epler also did a guide on the very first your very first circuit sculpture um this is a way of making electronics by soldering very thin brass wires uh so this is a very you know very basic early project you make a capacitive touch heart uh we also did some updates to the a different i o guide again i think we just cleaned up a bunch of stuff and the amg 8833 guide uh got updated because it's now a stomach qt sensor all right we're going to head let's do some factory footage here is a time lapse of us you can see we're wearing masks stay in distant staying the same and this is on top of the oven and over there the windows are open that's why yeah they're kind of uh the blinder yeah our building was built uh after the the previous pandemic so there's uh windows and radiators uh surrounding all the this is testing halloween force this is what it's like glowy skulls who doesn't love a glowy skull we're looking in place running and factory or something what these are the wheels so the cut tape you know uh the sorry that the tape and wheel as as the day goes on the the feeders and the cover start kind of uh growing like hairs trace traps this is how uh you should package trays ask us how we learned that you shouldn't use overbands use these straps uh we've got some gps's that fell off of the uh cut tape we have but um they're 10 bucks a piece so we don't want to toss them so we laser cut a little tray um and we uh you know put the 20 or 30 modules we had and we recycled them checking out these cool reverse mount leds now look at how they are in the tape they're upside down yes that took quite a bit of convincing to get uh but what's cool is that these will be reverse mount leds we're going to use these in some of our keycap breakouts all right and with factory footage we have some photos this one if you look really close you can see freedom tower there yeah this is right down the street from it yeah from us um this is the disney building across the street never stopping no and uh this time they're moving around some gravel yeah okay and it wouldn't be looks like they have some concrete down yeah it wouldn't be an ate a fruit factory footage segment without a sunrise or a sunset okay 3d printing on paedra printing up storm plus liz this week yeah we've got two videos um we're going to do the pico project and then we're going to do a speed up of your uh github repo yeah it's kind of cool which is scary it's scary you're all it's all green yeah you can kind of tell it's like the weekends overly you know there's some people you can see there's this beautiful green stripe and it's like sardis and sundays obviously yeah for me sardis and sunday is actually a little bit greener but i was doing so much stuff in github i don't do a thing where i'm like every day i don't care about the every day but there's there's many there are as many greens green adults you could exact you could tell the exact day uh i had to stop all the things i like doing yeah and work on all the things that had to get done um last year right when the pandemic started that's when i stopped being able to do a lot of stuff i was doing a github from our newsletters to to more i was very active there um but anyways so we'll show that speed up too so uh now paedra take it away okay see you in the shed hey what's folks in this project we're making a midi controller with arcade buttons this uses the raspberry pi pico to make a usb midi controller that features 16 led arcade buttons the raspberry pi pico is a low-cost microcontroller with a powerful new chip the rp20 40 it features tons of gpio and it has circuit python support the aw 95 23 is an i2c gpio expander and an led driver that features 16 i o pins this lets us drive all of the leds so we won't run out of pins on the raspberry pi pico as a native usb midi device it can work with both hardware and software that have midi support the electronics are housed in a 3d printed case and it features a handle that doubles as a kickstand we design the case in three parts that snap fits together so it's easy to pop it open and close it up we think it looks a bit like a lunchbox what makes this different from other midi controllers is the ability to change and save midi notes directly on the device it features an OLED display and a joystick so you can quickly remap midi notes which is great if you're crafting your own setup the buttons are shown as circles with numbers that represent the midi notes you can use the joystick to select a button it works just like a d-pad from a game controller you can press the center of the joystick and select the button to edit the midi note in edit mode the button will blink letting you know that it's been activated you can then change and update a note to go higher or lower using the joystick while in edit mode you can also press the buttons to compare the midi notes the handle is 3d printed as a single part and it features two built-in hinges it's a print-in-place part that doesn't need any support material the hinges are able to freely rotate and it features mounting holes for attaching to the case you can get the parts to build this project links are in the description let us know in the comments if you'd like to see this available as a kit the parts can be 3d printed without any support material using pla filament we designed the case in fusion 360 and use 3d models of the electronics and components it's a parametric design that features user parameters so it's easy to make adjustments we've open sourced the design so folks can modify remix and customize it the code for this project was written by liz clark you can check out her projects on her youtube channel blitz city diy this uses the midi library for circuit python and it features lots of comments so it's great for folks who are just getting started with programming the code walkthrough by liz is very well documented and it breaks down all the features so you can learn how to customize it we hope this inspires more folks to get into programming electronics with circuit python be sure to check out our learn guide for a full step-by-step tutorial on building the project the learn guide has the code wiring diagrams and CAD files so you can follow along and make your own thanks so much for watching and don't forget subscribe for more projects from aida fruit and tune in everyone's there for 3d hangouts new impedro hi hello it's time it's time did you key and a fruit present this week's iron mpi is from analog devices i don't know what's possible aida what is the iron mpi for this week brought to you by aida fruit did you key okay yes this week's iron pi is the ad 5413 this is a spi DAC chip and when i check this out like i normally don't use these kinds of chips but i can immediately tell what a great design this chip was and so the people who are watching who do industrial automation or anything you know with architecture or building management or plcs or you know mechatronics all that stuff if you need a DAC this chip is a really really nice DAC you know i've used spi DAC for basic audio projects and so when i saw the capabilities of this digital to analog converter i was like really impressed with the care that i could tell adi put into this so it is you know a DAC chip you set it onto your pcb it's you know got one output it's a single output the output can be either current or voltage you clock in data to set that voltage or current simple right but there's a lot more going on so the first thing that i noticed about it that was really neat you can read all the specs about it is it's got a very wide voltage range for the output so the you know the power of the chip i think is like you know four or five volts or so but the output voltage right you know usually that swings between zero and vdd whether it's three point three or five volts but in this case it goes to between plus or minus 10 or 12 volts so you know you basically can give it a split supply input and it will give you a full sweep range output so you can actually even see you know the op amp there and the the current buffer as well it's a 14 bit DAC so it's it's pretty good quality DAC you get plenty of bits it's not like an eight bit or even a 12 bit which is what i've used but 14 bit which is really nice it's got an archer ladder inside which you don't see here and then it will automatically do all the the op amp you know gain management and offset tweaking that you can do you can even set offsets inside memory if you need to to calibrate the output and you know beyond just the fact that you can set the output voltage between negative 10 and plus 10 or negative 12 and plus 12 if it's you know you go over there's a little bit of over voltage setting it's got a lot of like extra details and built-ins that kind of fill it out and they basically make this in my opinion if you've got something that you need to have an analog output to you don't really need any other chips like everything is super integrated so this is perfect for people who are like hey i'm a hardware or a firmware developer and i don't want to like learn analog i just want to get this voltage output to to bias something or control something um or you know to to interface with some analog input circuitry or current input circuitry and i just don't want to deal with all the messy stuff in between and with this you don't have to it's like you're pretty much like maybe you need a resistor capacitor to it's pretty much ready to go as is um so the input is a 32 bit spi data um you know unlike most decks where you have just like you basically just write the data to the r2r ladder and that's it um this has kind of a structured input so the first bit is just like a start bit basically uh to let it know like hey yeah you know start listening um the two bits d30 and d20 down in the address this i thought was interesting so kind of like i scored c you can have four of these devices on one spi bus with the same chip select line um and each one of them um can be addressed separately so you can set like the spi address i haven't really seen this being used with spi i've seen this more than i squared c but it's the same idea right you can have four of them on the same bus you know i'm not sure exactly you know why you'd want that versus having multiple s cs lines of course you can always have multiple cs lines as well then there's the register address that's five bits um and there's a register so you can actually send it multiple commands and read data from the device as well and then you've got the 16 bits of data the bottom two bits aren't used because it's a 14 bit deck and then there's a crc which is really nice you know you don't have to worry about like what if i'm in a high noise situation or um you know maybe my uh signal lines you know are flaky or connector gets connected disconnected um you know the data comes in corrupted and there's some chance of accidentally sending setting the deck to the wrong value which could like mess up your robot or mess up your plc in this case you have a crc so you have this extra level of uh qa redundancy on on every command that you send um and i think that that was again it's a nice little add-on right because i don't see that often on spi devices and definitely not on writing i usually see that on reading like when you read data from a sensor i rarely see it on writing commands so a nice little extra there um and these are all the registers they have stuff like a chip id which i thought was nice and uh you know device id um you can read all of these there's not a lot of them mostly configurations and then you can see the the deck output register itself um but basically you can treat these sort of like i squared c sm bus registers um and you read to the data sheet and they have um you know some registers are you know they're shadowed and you can write to them read to them and one command they actually has all this in great detail so i'll leave it to them for how to interface um so this is uh what's interesting is you know it's it's pretty well specced it can drive up to um a one kilo ohm load in parallel with two microfarads so like you can really abuse this and another thing i thought was really neat is um you can compensate it so you don't have to worry about um having overshoots uh you can also do slew limiting on the output so again you know if you have very long transmission lines um you don't have to worry about like can can i drive this capacitive load without worrying about having overshoots or ringing it is something that's built into this chip that can manage it for you so again if you're not a hardware analog person a lot of the stuff that normally you'd have to you know deal with in the field have like trimmer pots and like maybe adjust values depending on like the cabling and um enclosure it's all done in firmware for you so it'll save you a lot of time and money um and field we work um there's also a ton of fault outputs on the right is the fault table um you can see all the different things that it will warn you went wrong you know unlike very simple DAX that cost a dollar or you know you write data and it doesn't tell you anything it's like you know the data's out you know output good luck you know you'll have to do any feedback management or air management it's it's all it does all of it for you um and can give you warnings um the fault management covers like pretty much everything including i thought was nifty is there's a built-in temperature monitor as well it's not like a temperature sensor but you can tell it like hey you know if the temperature of the die goes above this set the fault so you you know it can self monitor its own temperature again like little details like this that i'm like wow yeah if i'm doing something in robotics or automation or you know something industrial that's outdoors or in a car or in a you know train safety is very important reliability is very important i need to know when something has gone wrong um think of all the things that you would have to keep track of that can go wrong that you would require external circuitry temperature sensors um or you know feedback op amps or like compensation loops or you know whatever you don't have to do it again it's all built in um those are just kind of neat they have an internal oscillator diagnostics the internal you know processor inside has a uh one megahertz clock rate um and uh it will automatically like update a counter inside you can read that counter and it will that will let you know if you know due to temperature or maybe physical stress uh the the oscillators out of sync so i thought that was like kind of neat also you can send like this cool oh seven dead code so interesting um another nice thing i noticed is uh if you want to do like a software reset you don't just like write a random value to register because of course you could accidentally set it you have to be very specific there's like multiple commands you have to send in specific order uh in order to do a software reset so if you're writing the firmware it's really easy but you don't have to worry about you know your code jumping to the wrong location data actually getting corrupted a loose connector accidentally sending a software reset in the whole system you know flies back to the original location possibly damaging itself if it's connected to like some gigantic servo motor and uh finally there's an eval board um i picked one up but it pretty much looks like this there's like this connector on the side looks like there's a development kit that it can plug into but it breaks out all the the pads and connectors and then the power supplies go onto the top uh so i think yeah you know if i think this chip is great if you're an electrical engineer you do not want to mess with analog you don't want to have the risk of getting have something going wrong with the analog section and you want to sort of depend on the people who know what they're doing analog devices it's pretty clear that they've seen every possible failure and added a fault mode or like a feedback register um or or at some self-monitoring hardware um like you know everything that i saw was like oh yeah that could happen that could happen but if you're an engineer you may not think of all these things that could happen to your hardware if you go to the data sheet just do everything they can recommend uh you're going to be way ahead when it comes to reliability testing of your hardware so like at some point an FAQ can eventually become silicon yes no every time they had a customer say like your thing broke and they're like well what happened oh turns out the die well the oscillator got you know so the chip got hit uh you know it got vibrated and the oscillator got out of sync and you know now it's not working quite right um that would have been caught by you know the oscillator monitor i've never seen an oscillator monitor before but it must be there for a reason so like if you use this chip add that test right that we every watchdog cycle check the die temperature check the what you know the the oscillator monitor check the feedback monitor all these things that they have put that in i also like that every time you read data from a register the fault bit is the top bit like you they force you to look at it they're like look at these errors look at this thing that could have gone wrong right that you can't just give it must be fun to make something that lights it all up like everything just fell and no it's like it tells you when something's gone wrong so you know high reliability electronics i love seeing it um you know i deal with a lot of my electronics are to be honest they're not high reliability they're not designed for it uh they're kind of meant for uh consumer electronics so taking a dive taking a look at this kind of electronics and you're not paying military prices it's still consumer prices um but you get good industry reliability in this chip all right it's available on digikey go to digikey's site short URL is digikey.com for such art for such p b q z c h and r or you can just search for ad 5 4 1 3 b c p z that's right we're ad 50 54 1 3 and then as this week's on impi okay let's uh jump right into new products okay right at nine o'clock okay first up we have this super skinny thermistor we've actually stocked thermistors for quite a bit as the 10 k n t c thermistor it's just like really skinny uh and really small so it's perfect for if you have to like measure the temperature something where you can't fit a d s 18 v 20 you can't fit an mcp 9808 whatever this thing is so slim maybe i'll show in the overhead how slim it is yeah do it okay so this is the overhead and this is so skinny i mean it's like i think i in the specs i think it's like a half a millimeter or something um very very something there's a little bit of a bump where the sensors but it's very slim uh so if you measure this with a multimeter it's going to be 10 kilo ohms at room temperature and then as it gets warmer i think the resistance goes down it goes up i can never remember um you know check uh our tutorial we have on uh thermistors we have a tutorial on using these kinds of thermistors you'll want a one k sorry a 10 k one percent resistor to go with it as a resistor divider um and then you measure the resistance uh you measure the voltage made by the divider uh the voltage goes up and down um based on the temperature and then we have some arduino code that you can use to convert that back into temperature okay next up okay next up we've got this really cool uh lincoln bin's case and and here's but you know there's like we have so many raspberry pi four cases you're like what is great about this the great thing about this case is it brings all the ports out to one side so so you'll see if you look at this you're like oh yeah there's like the raspberry pi ethernet usb ports they're like wait a minute the power in hdmi right next to it how is it doing that i'm glad you asked so um what they do is they include this little like adapter thingy um green board at the top and when you plug that into your pi four it turns it into all the ports in a row so i thought i would show this on the overhead it's a good idea yeah this is kind of this was like the killer wait you didn't do so much wait you didn't zoom in so much okay so this is the adapter this is my pi four right so it's under this metal case which is this metal thing is is like a little protector thingy uh so when you slide it in um and you can see here um these are the hdmi and usb and then there's over here so that it all comes out one end and then this slides in nicely into uh the enclosure the enclosure and metal the ends are plastic wide so that the wi-fi can get out so this is this is a cool pi four case okay i just love that all the ports are on one side that's going to be very useful for somebody maybe me yeah all right next up um okay we've got more compute modules we're slowly trickling in this is the compute module four for the raspberry pi um this one has 16 gigabytes of on board m m c flash so you don't need an sd card with it so you save you know 10 bucks don't need an sd card has two megabytes of ram and it has wi-fi and it plugs in nicely into the whoa there's too much stuff on here that compute uh board so this is the compute io board sold separately as they say in advertisements um it gives you the hdmi port the ethernet the usb sd card pc i e gpio multiple camera and um display ports and like power supply and all that good stuff is a good development environment and this is the module itself which i'm going to delicately remove it's got the here we'll see connectors on the bottom they plug into here um here's the wi-fi port here's the wi-fi chipset underneath power supplies over here kind of like a cool little like domino look um this is the the ram is on top this is the flash memory and this is the uh power monitors even what is this the bcm i don't remember what that chip is i thought it was ethernet maybe it's a power monitor it's a controller or something um but yeah this is the um full raspberry pi compute module so um the ones we had already did not have wi-fi what's nice is that there's a built-in antenna we also sell the antenna kit you plug in the ufl and you get the pre-certified antenna so that will speed up your um certification process and then yeah start development on the compute module i o board has everything and then when you're ready to go to manufacture you just you know design your board take away all the things you don't need keep the things you do need all right next up okay finally we have in stock um the high five inventor kit yay so if you are interested in risk five chips you want this uh happy hand that's dr who themed it has multiple rgb leds on the front it comes with um connectors and this case and a speaker usb battery and everything um there's an online uh teaching system so we've actually previewed this and if you see our other video you know for this product you can um just see it live but uh we finally have them in stock there's an online system for programming it i believe is also maybe micro python available for it um and also if you want to do low-level development there's sc sdk so you know you like high five risk five chips you want a development board that has everything built in can be used by kids and adults here you go okay and last up to start this show tonight besides you lady of the our community our team our customers is um the raspberry pi pico pen reference yay we ordered this uh they finally came in um so we're going to uh probably pack these in with some of our raspberry pi pikas when we get more which we don't know when that is um but uh when we do have them we'll probably you know maybe we'll include them in some orders um this has a quick start guide on the back how to get started with circuit python including some circuit python cuts you're like how do i blink the on board led and print to the serial monitor um you know quick start guide on the back uh for circuit python on the front it is a uh life size uh life size pinout diagram uh so the the pico has the raspberry pi aesthetic which means it does not have gpios labeled so i have one of these cards on my desk and i use it every day it has um you know all the gpios and the peripherals like is an i squared c pan or or uh you can you mux it with the ur and which pwm output uh which ones are the power pens and what power output so this has everything on it um you know it's it's life size so i can show on the overhead it's yeah you put the the pico on top and focus there you go and you can zoom in uh so this is the pico goes on top of here uh and then you can see all the labels so gpio labels and uh all the capabilities spi i squared c etc and then um you got some notes here about what the power supplies do and then a color code as well and that's my favorite new product all right okay that's new products okay so now let's um let's do some questions i have some lined up but we're gonna do top secret okay yeah i'm gonna get my top secret yeah all right this week's top secret okay i've been working on um keycap breakout so i'm doing like mechanical keyboard type stuff so this is a little breakout board for this is a kale box switch so a little mechanical keyboard switch and they used uh sockets um i got the led backwards there's a little bit of wiring here um but it's gonna have an led that sticks out and can like underlight um the the keycap and uh it's got a socket so um other than the fact that i hot glued this in you can move it and swap out whatever key you'd like and then i have a little demo so yeah so i have this little like cute adorable uh kitten paw keypad and it's got um silicone nubbins like little toe beans um and what's cool is that of course the um led the neopixel underneath which is controllable uh shines through the toe beans quite well so you can get it let's see glowy beans there you go this is what everybody wants this is what i want i just want like glowy toe beans all right all right that's the top secret for tonight that's top secret that's top secret okay i'm back on the ball i'm gonna read off these questions uh we do this over on discord 80 fruit dot it's t slash discord china's on 28 000 all right i'm gonna start reading these off let me get the latest one okay you ready yes okay we'll speed oh my god there's so many questions oh for the uh the bundle manager or the library manager uh could we support the circuit python community yeah it'll support both okay uh any chance that the package manager can optimize the order of import for lowest memory usage it might not be possible would be nice i guess sort by you can't because it's just installing it it's not writing your code for you but we could add a thing that tells you how big the npy file is and then you could use that it's not exactly the same but it could give you a hint all right um someone's asking about the i-squared c-skinner tool yeah that's not yet it's called stuff yeah i got a break from that i'll get back to it though don't worry there's other good stuff coming uh folks like to see the colin's lab notes uh different types of pcb okay as a request yeah sure okay uh has a raspberry pie foundation so anything when they expect more rp2040 i have zero idea i i don't know anything you don't know that's right um what can i use to have a logo i created light up on a bracelet activated why the when the bracelet's put on um check out this circuit sculpture project that jebler just posted because you could probably make the bracelet out of wire and use that as the capacitive touch and when you wear it um you know the neopixel school that's pretty much the project he did he made a pendant but you would just make it into a bracelet okay uh someone wants to use a 64 by 32 rgb panels they want to use it on a school bus displaying route numbers they want to get the gps and then automatically switch the numbers from the location of the bus and he helped yeah that's a lot of math i mean you can do it i think um i think you're just gonna have to do you know you're probably gonna wire it up to the gps and then you know use that to take data you know while the bus is on the route you'll have to take the data of what the route is and then save that to a file and then what you'll do is you know it can when it's running and then says like am i within like you know 20 meters of one of these points and if so yeah you can do it circuit python you can do it it's just yeah you have to collect all the data and then compare yeah you're making a data log or saving it the file and reading reading it and you have predetermined places where you know like you know geofencing yeah okay all right next up um question was so later if i remember correctly adafruit contributed to the amplitude shift keying radiohead arduino library two part question do you plan on reusing the code for raspberry pi pico and the other part of the question is how hard is it to get a working arduino library like the rh underscore asked to the raspberry pi pico yeah i did write radiohead i didn't actually add anything to that library i just made it compile and i put on github uh you need to talk to the radiohead library writer if you want to add pi pico support because that's totally beyond my capabilities would be the decks that we show work to replace digital pots in a virtual joystick you could especially if you wanted to you know there's more code you'd have to write the code for it um it's not easy um but if you did you would have a very reliable deck system okay several weeks ago you pointed someone to a mcp 23 008 portix manner thank you again how do we remember how do you remember all the chip names any tips you just you just use them a lot i don't know yeah all right um next up will there be a card for like the feather a printable card i don't know that i'll need a card i'll tell you why because the red the pipe the feather has the pins labeled on it so you don't really need a card because you can just look at it the pico doesn't have the pins labeled so you kind of need a card um yeah and that if if you know people really need a card i i i feel like a lot of times these cards get tossed out so i you know i unless i think they're really needed um we don't make them uh instead we have really good documentation online but again the the pins are labeled okay uh any other upcoming boards rp 2040 we have ditzy bitsy cutie pie yep that's that's all i had so far yeah in the design queue they also want to know would there be an esp 32 cutie pie yeah there's a esp 32 s2 cutie pie right okay what's the best way to clean a solder stencil that contains very small holes you know you've compressed air and soaking it with uh isopropyl alcohol okay um i'll answer a couple of these uh yeah items are out of stock are they going to be in stocks and yeah well obviously we believe me i would love to i can't i i just got a quote today for one of our gyro chips that i normally buy for like a dollar fifty and then broker came back with 23 bucks like i can't buy a chip for 23 dollars like it's just it's not available till december so like that gyro we're not going to have in stock until i can get them yep all right um and then i guess a general question um because it'll apply to either microcosm or sarcopython um can you protect your code with like a encryption or something or no the code itself you can't really protect um i mean you could do a lot of effort and maybe add encryption layered but it's kind of not worth it you know you there's with with c code you there are some chip protections you know if you're writing a hex file but part of the trade-off of having an a interpreted language is the interpreted language has to be in text so yeah you kind of can't have both um that said you know if you have a a raspberry pi computer you can't protect the code on that either really you know the code the code's running on it and it's a disk drive you can just pop the sd card into a computer so figure out other ways to protect your code or intellectual property all right next up uh do we sell shirts now we don't do shirts i think we had a couple shirts yeah sometimes sometimes and uh let's see um bill sent catney the feather diagram the feather pin out for the rc2040 so we have that use that all right and then do you guys have a break up board to put neopixel addressable or gps now you're on your own okay i just thought they were cool okay all right and i think with that we got through uh is buying from melzard did you key still encourage you guys if you say for donors yeah it's good i you know please support our distributors um we always appreciate folks who buy direct as well if we happen to matter it doesn't matter because but all of the large electronic suppliers they buy lots of our stuff and we like to do partnerships with them and then when they see demand there um they order more stuff more their customers i heard from some of the larger companies that it was something like one out of five orders had a different stuff in it it was like a really big number yeah it was good to say in here all right thank you everybody that's our show for this week um especially we'll do more questions next week yeah well we got to them um we just finished them make sure yeah we got to them okay great special thanks to tukara who's buying the scenes and slack special thanks to all of our a for team members all over eight for customers don't forget we're shipping stuff smart and safe please place an order on a to fruit dot com support public source hardware and more and we'll see everybody next week here is your moment of zener


This paper proposes a novel deep learning architecture for semantic segmentation of aerial images. The proposed model uses deconvolutional layers and recycled early layers to convert intensity and range data into a pixel level classification at full resolution. The authors show that an ensemble of multiple models can achieve excellent results on the ISPRS Semantic Labeling Benchmark dataset, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach. This article was authored by D. Marmani's, J. D. Wagner, S. Galliani, and others.


This is Think Tech Hawaii, the Unity Matters here. Okay, welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Community Matters at the 3 o'clock block, 3 o'clock rock. Okay, we have special guests, Panels Providuros, PhD at the University of Hawaii School of Engineering, but he is the chair, professor and chair of civil engineering at the School of Engineering. Not the College of Engineering. The College of Engineering, C-O-E. Yeah. Holmes Hall. Holmes Hall, you got it. Yeah. Welcome to the show, Panels. Glad to be here. Great to have you. You're a public figure for sure. Sometimes. You were a big figure in rail, and still are, and you ran for mayor, and that was a very interesting election and campaign. And then you're involved in other important issues. I mean, just two of them to come to mind, which I would like to talk with you today. One is TMT, the 30-meter telescope in Manakea, and the other, which is related in some ways conceptually, and that is, gee, I'm blocking on it. That is, oh yeah, the ferry. The super ferry. Yes. The super ferry. Because there's a parallel. There are parallels, yes. So tell us the status of TMT now. Where is it now? You know, after a while, if you keep hearing news about a given subject, and I do not exclude national politics here, you get tired of it, and you don't follow it as closely as you should have, could have, would have. So let's catch up. What is going on? Well, the way I understand it is that there was a contested case of the state of Hawaii approvals for TMT on top of Manakea. The case was heard over weeks and months by Judge May Amano in Hilo, lots and lots of testimony, and then she took a lot of time to go through them, and she rendered her opinion that the TMT should go forward. So now it's up to the state mostly, and perhaps in small part of the county, Big Island, to grant the permits and make it a legal project to construct. Because this is what, you know, the whatever opposition is there, opposing not so much the cancer, but the construction at the top of Manakea. So now it has to become a construction project, a legal project to build. Oh, so many, so many obstacles, so many. It's been a long time. I mean, even in the best of it, even if no contested case, no political opposition, it would take a long time. There are so many permits to do anything in Hawaii. We have to be number one in ridiculous obstructionist permits in this state. It is true that we have among the most prolonged and most complicated environmental laws. I know that's not so much of the TMT, but other things that the state DOT is trying to do. For example, on Maui, there is water coming over the highway, and, you know, a half a million dollar wall can do it, but we cannot do that because of so many environmental issues, so we have to build a 50 million dollar bypass. So how you go from half a million to 50 million, and how you go from solving the problem in three months to needing three years of study, two years of permits, and maybe something will start five years from now. Meanwhile, all the folks from Kahului, they need to go work at the hotels in Lahaina, and, you know, 10% of the time, the highway is flooded. Same thing with TMT, a lot of obstructionists. Yeah, really? And, of course, the subject to that you mentioned, the super ferry, that they took an expeditions route to approve it, and then it came back and beat them because, hey, that shortcut really killed the project. Yeah. So the shortcut got the blessing of Linda Lingo? It did, you're right. She said, Lehman Brothers wants a shortcut approach, so I'm going to make it happen for you guys, but she couldn't make it happen, and somebody bit her, namely environmental groups bit her. And opposing politicians. So it was a whole thing. And all of that, you know, it's amazing how some big projects fail. It was only for the dock, the floating dock at Honolulu Harbour. That was a trigger. That dock wasn't fully environmentally tested via reports and what have you. That took the whole project down. I hope that TMT is not going to go that way because now they need to, you know, dot the I's and cross the T's very carefully. So yeah, there can be protests. The protests can be on the side. Police and other forces will have to do what they need to do. And you know, construction has to resume in a normal schedule. It's not a very large project. I mean, they try to put it out there to look how magnificent it is. Thirty metres is not a big deal. It's a hundred feet. It's a hundred feet. But in the drawings, they make it look like so beautiful and so big that then quite a few people are there, culturally sensitive, they say, oh, this is a monstrosity. No, it's not. No. Again, thirty metres is a hundred feet. I mean, really, Mauna Kea is very big for a hundred feet. If we are talking geometry now, it's not like they're going to take a quarter mile of the mountain or, you know, hectares or whatever. When it's finished, it's not going to be a giant building. A lot of the projections, again, they really brought forward the architectural and the science and they wanted to make it a crown jewel of the crown and the top of Mauna Kea, top for science. They overdid that part. The architectural part, again, thirty metres, which is really the big disk and then there is the surrounding shell. Ninety feet, that's all it is. Yes. You don't want to make them too big because when you make them too big, they differentially start expanding with the sun or the cold side and then they start distorting. So there is limits of how big you want to make them. Again, let's stop arguing about a hundred feet. Yeah, really, it's not so much for the gods at the top of Mauna Kea. It's a little jewel there. When it's built, it's not going to be anywhere near a monstrosity or a huge thing. They've been trying to get permission to build this thing since, I want to say 2008 or 2007, right in there somewhere. We're closing in on ten years here. Yeah, and since that, I mean, at the time, my understanding was that it was the frontier of technology on this kind of telescope. However, since that time, I think the technology has probably moved ahead, moved beyond them. Well, it would have moved, and it's always moving. And of course, that's the advantage, because actually, the mirror doesn't change. Nobody else has built another mirror like that. So it's not like all of a sudden we have competition from Chile. It's either here or in Chile, or the Canary Islands, whatever the three options are. Since those guys didn't go, it's the same group focused on Hawaii, because they want to bring it on American soil, good services, reliable. It's a big investment. They want it to be nice, protected. The scientists can come in and out and say to me. Attract the scientists. This is an attraction to the scientists. Yeah, and transportation means you fly safely to Honolulu. You fly safely to Hilo. You have proper road network to go up. All of these safes are top of the line from Japan, Canada, Europe, the US. They want safety. I mean, these are all top scientists that they have fine jobs at the Princeton, at the Berglings, at the University of Hawaii. They don't want risks in whatever islands and in whatever Chile. Too cold roads are too mountainous, too dangerous. It's not good for science. They want to do the work comfortably and safely. It's wonderful for the university to have this. Oh, definitely. So as to school, ocean, or science, technology is world-known for this kind of examination of the phenomenon around the Earth, and especially here in the oceans and the mountains and the sky. And it's only natural. And every astronomer will tell you it's only natural that the telescope be here and nowhere else. And yet, and if we can do that, it helps build our reputation, consolidate our position, corner the science, if you will. And this is what many times, like Wall Street, Mauna Kea is the Wall Street in a good sense of astronomy because there is the center of astronomy. You have the astronomers fertilizing each other, putting all the ideas and getting the most of the discoveries. If you diffuse them, part in Greece, part in Chile, part in the Canary, there is no critical mass. We have achieved critical mass in Hawaii, thanks to Mauna Kea. Big thumbs up to Mauna Kea. And yes, indeed, as the governor said, and we can talk about the governor a little bit, but the governor says he will ask for the decommission of the field. Good. Some of them really are there for pretty much training purposes, for purposes that they are marginally obsolete already. OK. One new one, maybe one, two, or three decommission, a win-win. Yeah, yeah. So let's go to the beginning. Let's go to the time when, I guess, when they first got their permit. They got a permit. They actually got a permit from DLNR. And at that point, the protests began because there had been very subtle protests up to that point. And the protests began, and David E. Gay appeared on the scene. Can you talk about that? Well, David came into the start of the game. David has been a cover for only two years. This project started with essentially helicopter. People went to see Senator Inou. Senator Inou died in 2012. So this project, as you said, started in 2007. President of the university, if you remember, was Marcy Greenwood.  And internally, they had to create a critical mass to start pushing it. Eventually, after Abercrombie, E. Gay came to the head because the work that Abercrombie had done had some environmental weaknesses. It wasn't really a quick path. They have done the environmental work. Unfortunately, for some reason, the dissemination wasn't sufficient. It reminds you of rail and movie. Yeah, sounds like that, doesn't it? Try to do it quick, yeah? But on the up and up, the environmental studies had been done. But then the community settled all of a sudden. They woke up, like now with the construction of the rail, and they said, where is the environmental about that? So they look at the environmental, and they start finding hope. Obviously, if you don't engage the community vigorously throughout the environmental process, then they read what you did. And they say, well, but you haven't done that, and you haven't done that, and you haven't done that. Suppose I suggest to you, the whole environmental issue is really not the point. It's the point that anyone who has opposed this, it has not really been on environmental issues. That's a bit of a ruse. In fact, what is driving this is cultural understanding or misunderstanding of what the mountain means, yeah? Well, then the EIS has a chapter on culture. That's what I meant, environmental. So it's not really pollution, sewage, et cetera. But it's the cultural identity and everything that is included in the EIS. It's not about traffic, minor impacts about construction. Those things were addressed, but then the bigger cultural picture was not really addressed. It took it for granted. Like, you know, we have X telescopes, we add one more. What's the big deal? I didn't understand that. You've got 12 telescopes up there. This would be number 13. Not to say if that's a lucky or unlucky number. Yeah, right. And all of a sudden there's a big tumult about cultural issue. 12 was okay, but the one more is sort of broke the camel's back, I guess. And all this controversy comes out of the woodwork. Yeah, that was not right. And it was not really, there was no science behind it. I would have agreed with them if there was a duplication. Like, you know, we had the Subaru phase one and now we need the Subaru phase two. No, this is a completely different type of thing. So scientifically, it's very well founded. So it's needed there. It doesn't duplicate work. And as I said, it's part of the deal now that one or two or maybe three will be decommissioned. So we're gonna drop back to 10 or 11. Again, a win-win. So, you know, from the beginning, when I saw it, when I understood the impact on science, what it does for jobs, what it does for construction, what it does for permanent jobs, for the University of Hawaii, Hilo, I know. And why are we opposing that? I mean, Hawaiian guys would be proud to have that diamond on top of it. It's really not desecrating, it's beautifying. It's something we can be proud of, really proud. That's right. So, okay, David E. Gay gets involved. And this is really precious. He gets involved early on. I think it was when the protests started, which would have been after the permit, you know, was originally granted. And he arrives on the scene. He's just been elected, just takes office. And he makes some statements. And I wanna do a cliffhanger, if you don't mind, Panos. I wanna take a break now. Okay. And when we come back from this break, we're gonna talk about what David E. Gay said and how it affected the project and how that has all cast a shadow on things subsequent. That's Panos Premaduros. He is professor and chair of civil engineering at the University of Hawaii College of Engineering. And we're talking about TMT. Still a very important issue and one not without controversy. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, Raising Public Awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. They walk. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate, empower and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4pm and we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. Okay, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Community Matters. And we're talking with Panos Premaduros, who is professor and chair of civil engineering at the College of Engineering at UH Manoa. And we're talking about TMT, which is an issue that needs further discussion because it is still in controversy. Okay, so David E. Gay comes. He makes some statements. What does he say? Why does he say that? And what effect does it have? Well, he actually said that we need to be very sensitive about what we are doing here. It was an opportunity to actually push for the project. I was hoping that, you know, he will try to not sell it. Try to represent it because that's what it is. A gigantic step forward for science, a gigantic step forward for the UAE and a very big step forward for the state of Hawaii. Overall, and the county, the island of the big island, because of the jobs and other economic opportunities. If they didn't care about the science, there were positives for their community. PS, PS, I'd like to add that I have been to the big island. I know people on the big island in that area and around that area, and I have talked to them and most of the people I have talked to support the project. It's only a handful of protesters. The rest of the people that you talk to are universally in favor of the project. Yeah, so people have common sense. They know what a good thing, when a good thing is that they want it. But, again, unfortunately, it was the early days it's part of his character. He was quite soft about it. And he opened the avenue for a contested case. Yeah, let me add too that there was following his remarks and the report made about that in the local paper and I guess a star advertiser at the time. The New York Times wrote an editorial about David E. Gaye and they criticized him for being amorphous about it. They criticized, and they said, will he please take a position on this one way or the other? Because not taking a position, and this is so in the case of Donald Trump and the issue in Charlottesville, not taking a position leaves a vacuum. And then people fill the vacuum with whatever they want and it's usually bad. Yes, and that's what happened.  So, well, the governor is not for it. Well, he's okay. He didn't say he's opposed, but he's not for it. Therefore, there is a clear case for us to be against it. And we may even convince him to be against it. So he actually created something out of nothing. And, you know, a group of 50 became 250 and it's still clearly under a thousand people and the big island has over 100,000 people. So as you said, it's a very small minority. They're quite vocal. They're vocal of the media and the Facebook and what have you, but at some point, and now it's a good point, Judge May Amano said, enough already. I heard everything and this is something that should be called. Well, it went to the Supreme Court. Yes. Right around the time that David E. Gay spoke. Yeah, that's right. It went to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court said, no, you know, you can't issue the permit before the contested case hearing is resolved. You can't run parallel tracks. You have to do one for the other. I thought that was pretty technical myself and that they could have ruled the other way just as well, but they chose to stop it. Just the way they chose to stop the super ferry on two separate occasions. And anyway, okay, so now Ricky May Amano is appointed and she serves as a, what, an arbitrator, was it? Did you determine this by agreement? Did you determine this issue? What happens? Well, now there are some undercurrents that they say that she may have had conflict. So they may be building a case for further delays to essentially partially or fully invalidate her opinion. So it's not a clear cut. This is another point in time that you should step in and say, enough is enough. We have had months of hearings and all. The conflict, whatever it exists, is minuscule. Everybody has a conflict in Hawaii where a state of 1.2 million people, we pretty much know everybody. Directly, I have nothing to do with TMT, but I've been employed by the US for 27 years. Automatically, I have a conflict. Whatever I'm saying now here is conflicted, right? Indirectly, I already bought the thing with TMT. Come on, therefore I'm incapable to testify anywhere because I have 27 years of years to buy it. So you never get anything done that way. Anything done. Clearly, I mean, how can we find people in the hooey of engineers, lawyers, and all that they don't have any conflict? It's like, you know, we never lived in Hawaii. It's impossible. She's born and raised in Hilo. I mean, obviously she has all the conflict in the world. She's tried to support her island the way she... So let me stop that. Was she a good pick though? She was a reasonable pick. I didn't have a big, you know, a lot of this matter is legal so I try to not step into that. I don't have a clear understanding of things. She gave it a lot of time, a lot of attention. She listened to, I don't know, hundreds of witnesses who repeated themselves ad nauseam, saying the same things. Same thing, yeah. And it was all rhetoric. It was not really evidence anyway. But was she too patient? Well, it's good that she was too patient because nobody can accuse her now that she took a shortcut. Not being patient enough, yeah. No more shortcut. There was no shortcut. Nobody was muzzled. Well, the other legal strata, if there are any, they shouldn't be finding any evidence that there was any wrongdoing. So clear the path already. I think coming, well, next year is only four months away but we should be going and issue them the permits so 2018 would be a good year for them because I believe that if we don't make any clear decisions by the end of the year, the consortium may decide to jump. It's been, there is so much that Hawaii can do, being so obstinate and delay tactics and everything. Enough already, I mean. So status is that she has ruled after a long, long, long hearing process and as I recall, it was a long decision to which she really thought it through and dealt with all of the possible appeal points that might have come out of it. And so now it's been, now the problem raised by the Supreme Court has been resolved that the parties or rather the TMT consortium is ready to go ahead and they have to do the next thing. The next thing is to get all the permits. That's right, because they have the money. They are not dependent on any of our money, which is very significant. What about the Azores or every other venue they were considering? They entered into an agreement a few months ago and they have, I wouldn't say threatened but the word on the street has been for a long time that they were gonna go somewhere else. What's their present thinking? I think that they have already started pre-planning at one or two sites because they need to have a plan B at this point. Plan A is not so secure for them. And obviously, we know that business cannot trust Hawaii. And this is like, they approach it like a business. They have the investment, they need to do it. Another black eye for us. It's another black eye. So it's, yes, it's necessary when you try to do something in Hawaii you have to have a plan B. So now the TMT group has to go and get a number of permits. It's not so easy because permits take a long time. It puts further stress on the timeline for TMT and there's other options. But the opposition continues. They don't necessarily abide by Ricky May's decision. Right.  Find problems with the permit applications for the construction. And then I think some of the problems will be down at the street. I think the permits will be issued again. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the structure. The structure is relatively simple. It's not meant, it's not a hotel that's gonna have a lot of people. It's 20, 30 people that there will be regularly taking turns to occupy minimum environmental impact. The foot, the size of the property is reasonable. Constructability is reasonable. So a lot of these things can happen once they start moving. So what are they gonna do is blockage. They'll try to do the blockage because everything is important. Still, even now? Well, they tried on Maui too, for the repairs on Halei Hala. So anything goes, we should expect that. I was happy to see that they protested, but also the police took the line they should and they removed the protesters. It strikes me that the protesters never give up. That when the law is decided, the decision is made, it's settled as a matter of law. They still protest, they never stop. It's essentially conduct and becoming because we had tens of thousands of protesters against the rail, none of us chained ourselves to go stop the bulldozers or out there. I mean, you have to realize, it's a civilized society, right? We're supposed to act like that. We're supposed to respect institutions. Respect decisions and institutions. So I mean, they do disrespect to their own culture and heritage. Okay, so what happens now? We're in the circuit, making the circuit for permits and the permits hopefully will be granted and that would permit construction to go forward.  Yes, I should hope that DLNR is not gonna request an updated EIS or the updated EIS has been happening and it's ready for final signature because if for some reason now the EEG government begins to ask for things I knew that could be a significant delay because you cannot come up with an EIS within a couple of months, six months plus. Sure, lots of delay. So I mean, what I inherited, what you said is that he has not yet bought into this, he has not yet come out and said, yes, I support the project, our respective decisions that have been made, I think it should go forward. Not said that? Probably he doesn't wanna step into the DLNR territory because right now the DLNR has to make the final determinations and brief him. It should be a decision, should be coming up fairly quickly. And it doesn't have to be from the top because then it doesn't look good. It looks like an executive decision. No, we have to follow process. That's why I'm saying that hopefully we don't have to repeat process and whatever the EIS is, quick updates with some lessons learned, put a new date on it and sign it. Well, I think this is, we're at an important point because yes, we've lost ground, we've had another black eye, but we could redeem ourselves on this. What do you think will happen and flip side, what will happen if we somehow bollocks this project up again?  I mean, the scientific world knows what is going on. And if we manage after all the steps we took to completely botch at one time, particularly after the May Amana decision, all these months of hearings, the judge prefers an opinion that says TMT should move forward and we found ways, political, cultural or whatever you wanna call it to stop it and essentially raise enough obstacles to make it so unproductive and undesirable that they moved elsewhere. Yeah. What's your message? There's camera, there's camera two, four. I know there's a camera out there somewhere. Well, DLNR, Mayor Harry Kim, very respectable gentleman, I think he's in favor. And the governor, DLNR, mayor and governor, get together, get it done. Facilitate the permits. The public wants it. The contested case is power ready. Supreme Court says have the contested case. So we did that. Let's pull out the stops now and get it done. It's a small project. Remember folks, 30 meter telescope is 100 feet. Really on a giant mountain that has other telescopes, some of which may be decommissioned. So actually the net impact would be positive for the mountain. It's a win-win. Yeah. Okay, well, I sure hope we do it. I hope we won't have another contested case with the necessity of appointing a judge like Ricky May yet again, because that would take a lot of time. But is it possible that we will? Is it possible that this will all be transmuted into yet another contested case hearing? Every time before, immediately after the signature of the revised EIS, the window opens to contest it. That's always the path. That's all. You have to accept an EIS, meaning the governor. Or the department has to accept an EIS for you and I or anybody to sue. That's why, for example, during the rail, we had a time that beyond before this, we can't sue because not, but once you accept something, you sue for it. So one last question, Panos. And that is, you ran for mayor. You ran on a rail issue there. You've been a citizen journalist and a spokesman. You have many community ideas and positions to advance. Why are you, as an engineer and chair and professor in the College of Engineering, why are you interested in this? Because it's scientific infrastructure. It's my baby too. Engineers build all these scientific babies. So I wanna see that one. It's a nice jewel of infrastructure and we wanna have a part in it. Okay, I do too. Thank you, Panos. You're very welcome. Panos Previduros, aloha. Thank you.