Welcome to the Lady Aida. Hey everybody, and welcome to my desk.  We moved the shows around last week, and then this week coming up, JP's gonna do show and tell. Last week, Noah Panger did, and then we moved Ask an Engineer from Wednesday to Thursday because Lady Aida with the mayor and the deputy mayor and a whole bunch of people in New York City, Aidaford was recognized for all their work during the pandemic. And this is a cool like glass award thing that we got. This is for our entire team, thank you. Everyone who works at Aidaford, the community, all y'all customers out there who supported us during all these times. Here is my blog post about it. We went to Gracie Mansion. Who knows if we'll ever get back there again or invited there again. Janelle Doris, commissioner of Small Business was there, here's Lady Aida, where the mayor lives. First up was Janelle Doris. And these are folks that we knew from the weekly advisory board that Lady Aida was on. We met Ramona from Selmar. She makes metal doors. Cheers, Cole. Another woman owned company. Melba was great. These are all people that we knew. A lot of these, if not most of them, were an ordinary woman owned businesses, like us. And then Philip Thompson was there, deputy mayor. I really like him a lot also. MIT professor, it's a little MIT theme here. And then the mayor was here, the video's there. And then there was a report supporting Small Business and NYC, Recovering and Growth. And for the folks out there that listened to mainstream news or whatever. So New York actually had a population increase, not decrease, so we're back in Boulder. 8.8 million, right? Yeah, 8.9. There's a lot. So that's there. So you could check all this out. And then, of course, you could take the Lady Aida out of the hacker scene, but you can't take the hacker scene out of the Lady Aida. So we explored the basement of Gracie Manchin. And we found a pay phone. Yay. So this pay phone doesn't work. We did make sure, we tried to operate it. It is completely disconnected, so I'm gonna send this photo off to 2,600 for their pay phone back cover thing. If you've ever seen 2,600, they have all these pay phone covers on the back of the magazine. And so anyways, there's that. That's my picture. And then we walked home and I took some pictures. I got some black and white photos. If you all are looking for art stuff now, I have my personal Twitter account and I use Twitter improperly. So if you wanna see art and some things behind the scenes from Aida Fruit and more, you could do that. I posted this over the weekend. This is an email to Lady Aida in 2006. I'm like, hey, that was a great night.  And then five years later, she was, so I put this on here. So I'm trying to document stuff and I got stuff from my sketchbook. And then some behind the scenes things at Aida Fruit and more. So if you wanna check that out, it's Twitter.com slash- Your drawings are so cool. The drawings are there. It looks soldering. It looks them when soldering. Ooh. That's my hand. So anyways, there's a bunch of stuff here. I have normal human bones, just so you all know. Yeah, how are your bones? Normal human and I have documentation to prove it. Good. So anyhow, that's what's going on here. And then this is Antonio, this friend of mine.  Here's more Gracie Mansion stuff. So when you have a black and white camera, you use it. So the other thing that's going on, Lady Aida, is we are releasing our NFT gallery this week. Yes. Okay, you guys, I know everyone here is watching has just been like, we know that Aida Fruit does NFTs and it's true, we have an NFT gallery. Yeah, we do. So show them. Just to be really clear, so we've never done NFTs and we never will. We don't do ETH and all that stuff. So here's our thing. So here's our statement. AidaFruit.com slash NFT. Can also go there by AidaFruit.com slash NFTs. Yeah. We're fine. We don't want AidaFruit about NFTs. We don't have any ETH. We've never purchased an NFT or ETH. We've never minted NFTs or nothing. We've been asked to participate. We've been asked to participate. We've always politely said no. And so we have a shirt that we work with the share zone to get stocked in our store. And it says, I don't collect NFTs unless you're talking about nice F and T shirts. And what we have here is the AidaFruit nice F and shirt gallery. So everyone at AidaFruit wears. They're great shirts. Amazing black shirts with skulls and comic book carriers usually. So we've wanted to do this for a while. And because our team has been stalked and harassed and people have been claiming we do NFT secretly and all that, Jason Scott. So I wanted to take photos of all this and have our gallery. And this wasn't planned. This is just one day. You just checked with the people who are at AidaFruit and were like, let's take photos of them. And here you are in front of a NFT gallery in New York City, but they didn't have nice F and T shirts, but you did. So anyways, we're gonna be doing this. This is just like our Cats of Engineering page. If you- What if people have cool shirts that they wanna see? They can send it to socialmedia at AidaFruit.com. So they can submit their own NFTs. Yes, they can on the open sea. And if you like any of these photos of T shirts, you can just download them. Yeah. It's okay. It's okay. Anyhow, I forgot the URL. I think you just catch to it. So we did this a long time ago. You can add your cat- Oh, that's a nice gallery. Yeah, you can add your cat.  And this was another thing that people were like, oh, you know, all these people who say they have cats and they do electronics, they really don't. So then we started the Cats of Engineering gallery and this goes on and on and on and on and on. This is like a dopamine injection. And on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Oh, wait, that's a cute one. It goes on and on forever. That's a cute one too.  But this is like not doom scrolling. This is fuzzy scrolling. This is fun. So anyways, and there's MOSFET in here if you look where we put our cat. So that's our cat. I think we seeded the cats. That's where we started. So anyways, that's what's going on. Lydia, what's on your desk this week? Okay, so we did a whole bunch of prototypes. So first up, I got my cutie pie ESPs. Oh, I'm kind of gonna go with reverse order. So the cutie pie ESP32-S2 panel came in. Folks, remember I was working on this. I want to show some of the changes that I made from the prototype to the final version. We didn't learn lessons from what I got wrong. So I'm gonna go to the overhead. Yeah, let's go to the overhead. Oh, it does not. It was like, why are you doing this? Let's put this pink feather. By the way, we're making more pink feathers. We got pink feathers. I posted it up. They're coming soon. I posted them up on the Adafruit Twitter account over the weekend. We've been going crazy on social media. And the reason is sometimes people out there say, ah, you look like you're having too much fun over there. We're having too much fun. You look like you're bringing people together to do electronics and more. It looks like you're trying to make the world a better place to sign technology, engineering, art and mathematics. And I'm like, yeah, and here's some pictures to prove it. Okay. So these are the two prototypes that I showed off I think a couple of weeks ago. So I made one with a small antenna and one with a UFL. And I think the UFL was the great search. And these boards worked and I did a two layer board and the two layer board worked fine, but I was a little like, like a little anxious because ESP32 S2s use a ton of current and the ground and three volt planes, like they weren't, you know, it's two layer board, like, and there's a lot of signals too. You know, we did have a good chunk for the ground plane, but I think especially the three volt lines, I wanted them to be a little bit thicker and so I thought, you know, for a board this small, let's go with a four layer, you know, to get that ground and to get one, there's one full plane for ground and one full plane for three volts. And so the three volt power supply is nice and quiet on this board. Also did a nice silk screen, thanks to Phil B. Moved a couple of things around. One thing I did, I learned. So, you know, when I made this board, you can see that there's just like one tall part over here. I put one of the 080510 or 22 microfarad capacitors on the bottom, because I was like, oh, you know, there's a lot more space on the bottom of the top because the top, you know, some parts have to be on the top. Buttons have to be on the top. The QDPI connector has to be on the top. The USB-C has to be on the top. The LEDs have to be on the top. And you know, the regulator and the antenna, I kind of want them on the top too. And so I put the big capacitor on the bottom, but then, you know, I was, I didn't like that it was sticking out. I kind of wanted it to be much flatter. So I did move that capacitor out. I moved, there was a couple 0402s, I moved them to the back. And then, let me zoom in a little bit. Okay, man, it does not like me. Okay, I did move some 0402s to the back. And then I moved the three capacitors, there's three 22 microfarad capacitors. You can see one, two, three, and the neopixel on the top. So this is really like, I couldn't pack any more, even if I wanted to. And then the two buttons and the QT. But this one works fine. This is four layer board. And I was a little, not like nervous, but you know, when I got the panel, and I was like, well, you know, you can't tell if it's four layer. Like it's not that you can see the layers because they're so thin. So I put together a quick demo with one of the, one of the boards I put together real fast. I'm trying to focus in on that a little bit. There we go. Yeah, so this has got the QT Pie board, a humidity sensor, and then, you know, an OLED. And the OLED is a very small text today. You can do it. So it's publishing data to Adafruit IO. And that's working just fine. And then the LED, if you want to the computer real fast, you've got a dashboard where the data is being transmitted. And also there's the button, you know, when I press the button, you see that. Reminder, everyone can do this for free, adafruit.io. We made an IoT service for makers. We're talking to lots of other companies and they're not doing free stuff. They're not having good privacy policies. And that's why we're going to continue to do adafruit.io. And then if you're like, well, I want to use it for like a lot of things.  You can do it adafruit.io plus account. And that concludes the thing I'm always supposed to say because I always assume folks know about, turns out they don't. So adafruit.io. What else you got? Yeah, okay. So next up, I'm gonna disconnect this, it's confusing. So prototype came out fine. I'm gonna get some of these boards famed. You know, it's an experiment, but I think, you know, this seems to work, a small board running adafruit.io seems to be, you know, it's doing a couple of demos and it seems to be working okay. I think I'm just gonna like kind of release it because it's a little bit of a, experiments the first time I'm using the raw ESP32 as two chips. But so far so good. I think the thing that I have to think about the most is just making sure the power supply is nice and stable because again, it's, the wifi uses a lot of power basically. Do you wanna answer a question? Yeah, sure. How do you do two passes on the pick and place?  They're held by the edges. So it's fine. It works okay. Just make sure whatever side you do second, you know, the second side has LEDs and other like very temperature sensitive parts. Whereas, you know, the first side is usually like the one that has capacitors and passives and stuff, non heavy connectors and so they don't fall or get loose or get damaged. Yeah. Okay. So that's that. Sorry, what do you know what do you wanna do here? Okay. So next up, I've got, yes, let's go to the overhead. So next up, I've got the feather ESP. Sorry, it's the feather, sorry. Did the CUNYPI ESP32S2, next up is the feather and for eight a longer. I think last week I talked about how I made a mistake in the power supply switching circuit. I used a high side PFIT, which works fine as long as the device attached to the port over here was drawing less than 20 milliamps. Anything more than that, you know, the, if you have more than a couple of components, turning it on would charge up the capacitors, drooping this power supply and putting it into brown out. So I've replaced the transistor with a regulator. I also changed a little bit of, like, well, I was there. I was like, well, you might as well like some of these capacitors bigger and stuff. But so far so good. And I'm testing this with the SD card on the bottom. So the SD card slot is also separately powered. Although that's not stressful because SD cards come up in a low power mode. So that is on a PFAT.  If you use QSPY flash, you can either have QSPY or SDIO. Kind of like, I would think that people would want both, but I found that like, while I really love the Sanity 51, the pinmux is a little irritating, especially if you're used to something like the ESP32, you know, family where it's like, it's a full crossbar pinmux. You can put any pin on anything, you know, and you have so many peripheral choices and you have a lot of pin choices as well, except of course the 80 season DACs. But you know, you want I2S on these pins, go for it. Whereas the Sanity 51 is very, very particular about what peripherals are on one pins. That said, so far so good.   It has like a five volt fan over here. I mean, it's definitely a lot. So testing out that switching capability and so far so good. I think this design is done. I'm gonna send out the feather and four and then right now I'm just testing SDI, so the SD cards on SPI ones. So if you want to look at the computer, I can just show the output. You know, I've got these, I've got some small SD cards. I'm just, you know, testing them and making sure they work. And I like the SDFAT library the most. I contributed to the original SD library and then SDFAT came along and I was like, it's way superior. So I'm gonna just test out a couple cards. I'm gonna do a quick data logging example where it goes into low power mode and then we might also tweak and work on the low power for the SAMD51.  So yeah, it's like, it's 10 times larger, but I'm not even trying yet. I think, you know, I might be able to get down to 300 microamps. I haven't tried turning on the 32 kilohertz crystal and seeing if I can switch over to that. I haven't looked at turning on the DC-DC boost converter, sorry, the buck converter. I put the inductor on there because, you know, it's 10 cents and who cares?  So I'm going to experiment with that to see how low I can get it. Cause I wanna make, you know, this ultra low power data logger and if I can turn off I squared C and if I can turn off the neopixel, you know, it can really run for a very long time. So that's good. So that's the, if I have any questions about that? Nope, keep going.  If you are changing your design from a CP-2104 to a CP-2102N, like me, and you are like, wow, how do I program the LEDs? Because SILabs sold this chip to Cypress. The documentation is still on SILabs, but it's a kind of scattered, there's like a DLL and the DLL wasn't updated for the N and it's unclear and there's a compiled executable, but it only runs on like X86 Linux. Anyways, we did a video that you can check on the blog and I found a fork of a fork and in the issue of the fork of the fork of the CP-2100X configuration app on GitHub, somebody made a version that has the correct E-prom setup for the CP-2102N so you can set it up for the LEDs to blink because I really like the RX and TX LEDs. I think that's a kind of a nice feature. Maybe I'll plug it in real fast and I can show it off. So I'll just pop over my XCTU. So when I send data over, you see the red LED blinks. Which I like, is I feel like it's data going through and then if I jump for RX and TX. If you have an LED and you're doing data transfer and it's not blinking, missed opportunity. So that's red and green and it looks yellowish, but both LEDs are blinking. So you know when data's coming in and out. So that's good. You know, like I thought I couldn't get CP-2104s, now I can, but they're not for six months. The good news is if you design something for the 2102N 24QFN version and you add a 10 microfarad cap on like, I think pin 16, which is normally not used and you just like leave that pad there. You can have a design that can use either the CP-2104 or the CP-2102N and I think that's what I'm just gonna do going forward is if I can't get one or you know, whatever, you can swap them and to be honest, the VAD PAD is the same. You know, as far as software knows, you can't really tell the difference. The CP-2102N just has reprogrammed EEPROM and I think it can go up to three megabod and this can only go up to two. So this goes two and this goes three megabod. But like, you know, for most purposes, I wouldn't tell people to go about one anyways, one megabod. So yay, you know, if find whatever chips you can get and use them. Okay, I think that's it. Do you have any questions before we go on to- No, let's go to the great search, ready? Yes. I'm gonna play the video. Yeah. Wait! Great search bar to you by Adafrin Digikey. Thank you Digikey. This is when Lady Ada shows you how she uses what I think is the best online component store in the world, digikey.com because they stock a lot of EEPR stuff. They talk a lot of stuff in general, including the part we're gonna talk about tonight which is always great. So the hard part is, how do you find all this stuff? And Lady Ada shows you every single week with the great search. Lady Ada, what is the great search this week? Okay, this week's great search is where you're gonna learn from my mistakes because I ordered the wrong part and it was fine because Digikey has a very generous return policy, so it's not a big deal. But wouldn't it be great to get the right part when you want to book it? And so in this case, I was looking for the ESP32S2 chip for my new QDPI design. So let's go to the overhead, I'll show my design. So this design uses a ESP32S2 chip and the chip I want is, and this is the thing about expressive chips, especially if you're using the modules and chips, they have versions that have built-in flash and RAM but they look the same because it's just bonded inside the chip and you can't necessarily know unless you buy the right part. And another thing is the part marking may not be very clear. You really want to use express as part selector and the data sheet. Just make sure you're ordering the right thing. So in this case, this chip is the, let me get the right part number when I say it. ESP32- Maybe a computer, do you want me to understand that? No, no, no, you can stay here I'll show it. So this is the ESP32-S2-FN4-R2. FN4 means four megabytes of internal flash. R2 means two megabytes of PS RAM. But the thing is, if you look at the chip, which I don't think I'll be able to have it be too legible but if you look at the chip marking, the R2 doesn't appear. I don't know if you can see it. I mean, I can barely see these before putting under camera. But the marking on it is ESP32-S2-F. And I don't see that, oh, actually I do see the N4-R2, yeah, okay, sorry. So the top part says ESP32-S2-F and then on the next line below it below it, like two lines down, it says N4-R2. So that's where you would see the flash and RAM markings. However, when I went to order the chip, I ordered the wrong ones. And if you, sorry, also as a note, if you look at this module, because I actually had to pull apart this module to get the chip, you'll see up here, it says ESP32-S2 mini one. And then the part that says N4-R2 is at the bottom here. So it's not necessarily, like the part number is gonna be split in two and any of the bonded in flash and RAM are gonna be in a separate line. Okay, so you've learned that lesson from me. The next lesson is how do you know which one you wanna get? And so let's go to the computer, because I wanna show you. Yeah, how do you know which one you wanna get? Okay, so one thing is that there's a lot of expressive chips and the information in the chip, especially when there is internally bonded flash and RAM, it may not be in the Digi-Key search, especially for new chips. So this, the S2-FN4-R2, again, four megabytes of flash, two megabytes of PS RAM. But if you look down here, the memory size shows the non-bonded flash and RAM. This is the stuff that's actually on chip, which is 120K RAM, 320 kilobyte S-RAM. So that's the memory that's in the chip, not on the wire bonded system and package data. So what you wanna do is I actually recommend going to the expressive website and then under the chip, because they have so many variations now of every chip and the ESP32-S2 doesn't have nearly as many variations as they just play ESP32, which has like a bazillion, or they'll have every combo of flash, RAM, temperature, rating, but if you go to the product selector, you can check the family. So in this case, I want to check the ESP32-S2 and then I think that this is not, yeah, sorry, my computer is too low resolution, just really big. So down here is all the ESP32-S2 variations and then let's say I want memory. So you can see here, it's like some chips have no flash and no PS-RAM, but let's say I'm like, look, I want four megabytes of flash and I want two megabytes of PS-RAM. And then when I go down here, I can find that this is the chip that I want to get, which is the, let's see, okay, here you go, you can see it. So down here you can see for the non-module version of the chip, the SOC version, it's in mass production, the part number is ESP32-S2-FN4-R2. Now if I wanted a mini module or like a room module, you scroll down on your computer, you'll be able to, oh wait, I can scroll. You can see mini solo were over. Let's say I didn't want any PS-RAM, so I turned the PS-RAM to zero and then you can see that there's a different version and this is the version I bought by accident. The ESP32-S2-FH4. So, you know, there's two versions basically, but each one is kind of called the ESP32-SF, S2-F series. You know, I think as long as you're aware of these, it's fine, so this is the ESP32-S2-FN4 with flash and PS-RAM and if you search for ESP32-S2-FH, you'll see that there's the FH2, two megabytes of flash, no PS-RAM. The FH4, four megabytes of flash, also no PS-RAM and then the chip I wanted, the FN4-R2, which I haven't stocked, which is actually kind of impressive. So if you want to make a design with built-in Wi-Fi and flash and PS-RAM, it's pretty cheap. These are like $1.75 and they're in stock and they're great for just picking place and the component counts necessary to get this running is really minimal. You just need a couple of passives, 40 megahertz crystal antenna and a good power supply. If you could for the folks that are just getting started their engineering career, what's PS-RAM? Oh, PS-RAM is I think pseudo-static RAM. It's basically, you have RAM on chip usually and that's most of the time, whatever your McTrollers has built-in RAM, like the ATMEGA 328 using the Arduino Uno has 2K. The SAMD 51 has 192K. But if you want a massive amount of RAM, like two megabytes, there's sometimes a peripheral on the chip and this is usually on high-end chips only where you can attach an external SPI flash or Q-SPY flash chip, an 8-pin chip that'll give you slow but large amounts of RAM that the internal chip can address and it thinks that it's like native, very handy for IoT. Is this like back in the day when hard drives would have like a RAM disk? And it's like, oh, we're gonna use your hard drive because we don't have enough RAM? Yeah, it's a little bit like a swap file, but it's not really, you're not using flash. It is RAM. It's real RAM. It's just off-chip. It's just a RAM, it's SPI, right? It's a way to get to this other storage memory with SPI. It's basically if you just want, it's because it's handle, look, it's address, look, historically you'd have eight mega, eight bit or 16-bit address to RAM, all chips did because there's no internal RAM. And this is weird because it's like, there's internal RAM and there's external RAM and the PS RAM is just massive and slow. And so it's good for, it's not good for like your running variables because in interrupts, for example, on the ESP, you can't use PS RAM. You have to use data that's kept on chip, but if you are like reading a JSON file from the internet and you want to parse it and the JSON file is like 400K, no chip has 400K of RAM. So you toss it over there. You put on the PS RAM. And that's why we like it because circuit Python, we're putting all sorts of data on there. We got images, we got. Yeah, it's great for internet stuff because you can just slurp down the entire XML file and parse it. And because the internet's not designed for microcontrollers, people just stuff so much data in there, JSON and XML files.  You want to get stats for GitHub. You have to download like a massive file. It can be like 30K. And on a computer, that's not massive. What's funny is like- But that's not that massive. Yeah, what's funny is like 30K is massive for microcontrolls and like for computers, when you go- They consider it light. For computers, you go to like any web page now when it's like 300 megabytes because all this JavaScript is loaded. Yeah, that's like the index, you know. Yeah, like here comes a new framework. So yeah, so that's why I like the built-in PS RAM. And thankfully it's now available. So I just picked some up. Okay. And you should too. And that's a great search. All right, good questions. Thank you so much, everybody. I hope you enjoyed Desk of Ladiator. Don't forget we have our shows during the week. Tuesday is JP's product pick, live broadcast from product page. Wednesday is a 3D hangout, so no Pedro. And then show and tell, that's gonna be JP hosting. We're gonna be doing Ask an Engineer on Wednesday. Thursday, JP's workshop on Friday, deep dive with Scott. And once again, thank you so much everybody for supporting us. And, you know, it's not just the waters and it's not just, you know, stopping by the chats and everything. There was a lot of really nice people that- said some thoughtful emails. People stopped by on different shows and they were really rooting for us to get through the last 18 months. And the city noticed and we helped. We made face shields and we did medical devices for lots of different things that were needed early on in the pandemic. And it was really nice to meet a lot of other business owners. And, you know, mutual shared grief, but also joy that we have a shot. And New York is the toughest, grittiest place. I know it's not for everyone, but it's definitely for us. And I just wanted to say thank you to everyone out there because we did disqualify it all that time too. We did. And that's kind of why we kicked it. We started it. Because we were like- Yeah, we wanted to restart it. And then there was people who said, you know, I got a lot going on. I lost family, whatever. But every single week I've watched these shows and they mean a lot to me. So I'm like, we can't stop doing this. We gotta do them every week. We're doing them. Okay everybody, that's it. We'll see you during the week. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye.


One of Nigeria's opposition party has called on the nation's government to declare a state of emergency over the current cash and fuels cash they've been witnessing across the country. The presidential candidate of Nigeria's Akod party, Kristova Imomole, made this call during a state-of-the-nation address in the nation's capital, Abuja, describing the move as a step in reducing the current hardship being faced by citizens. The add that the currency swap by Nigeria's Apes Bank is an attempt to ensure that the upcoming elections does not hold. The situation has now foiled speculations that the general election originally fixed for February 25th and March 11th this year might be postponed as unconfirmed reports claimed that there are clandestine plots to use this uncertainty to foster by the ongoing crisis to truncate the election. If the government of today do not declare a national emergency to quickly look at the problem of cash and fuel scarcity, the nation might be set ablaze.