NeoPixel is an efforts brand for individually addressable RGB color pixels and strips based on the WS2812, WS2811 and SK6800 and 12 LED drivers using a single wire control protocol. 70% vaccinated is Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody, welcome to Ask an Engineer. We're fully vaccinated and we're here at the Adafruit headquarters. It's exciting times for New York City as you saw. We are starting to release some of the restrictions that have been keeping us safe for the last, what, 500 days? 470 days? Yeah. It's just another day here in the city. Me, Lady Aida, with me, Mr. Lady Aida, on camera control, we are walking out in the Adafruit headquarters here in downtown Manhattan. We are doing all the manufacturing and testing and shipping of electronic goodies. But for the next hour or so, we've got Ask an Engineer, our show that we do every Wednesday at 8 p.m. That's what you're watching. That's right. So let's kick it off. So the code is BT Clock. We'll talk about why it's BT Clock later. But the code is BT Clock, temper set off in the Adafruit store, everything in stock all the way up to probably like 10 p.m. or so. So just make sure you put everything in your cart before 10. And that's how you know you'll get discounts. We'll talk about some of our Adafruit live series of shows, including show and tell. We got some time travel, some Adafruit jobs board, New York City factory footage, 3D printing, INFPI, new products, top secret. We're going to answer your questions. We do that over on Discord, Adafruit.id slash Discord, where you can join all 29,000 of us. All that and more on this exciting episode of, you guessed it, Ask an Engineer. Yay! Okay, so let's first pay some bills, Lady Aida. Yes. Code is BT Clock. But as people put things in their cart, what do they get? They get free stuff, $99 or more. You get a Promo Proto half-side breadboard. Great for making your projects permanent on a Promo Proto. $149 or more. You get a Stemic UT board. We have a range of about 20 different ones, whether they're in stock or not. You'll get a different one each time if you make an account. Otherwise, it's random or arbitrary. $199 or more. You get UPS ground shipping in the Contemporary United States. It's nice. It's trackable. It comes in a brown truck. Everyone loves it. UPS ground. And then at $299 or more, you get a free Circuit Playground Express, our all-in-one development board that you can run with code.org, CS Discoveries, Arduino, Circuit Python, MakeCode, Go, TNGO, TinyList, what have you. It's got all the sensors and buttons and piezos and switches built in. So it's super easy to get started with making hardware without any software. All right. We just did some live shows today. We had Nam Pedro's 3D Hangouts. We just did Show and Tell. Make sure you watch it on YouTube or on Twitch or on LinkedIn or on Facebook or on Periscope or on, that's maybe all I'm right now. And you can check out all the folks that were on this week. The Show and Tells go pretty long now. We're jam-packed. So we're not going to do recaps during these shows. On Sunday, we do Discovalladiata. Part one of Discovalladiata was what you're working on. What are you working on? Okay, I'm working on porting the CESA library that was in ARMGCC over to Arduino IDE, which can then use, of course, any compiler. In this case, it's going to be AVRGCC because I'm porting it to the AT Tiny817, which is like a chip that I could find in stock and does a good job. So I just showed off. I've got Neopixel working and long input and digital input and output and interrupts and all that stuff. So I'm working on that peripheral library. And I'm going to redo all the designs that I designed with the SAMD09 because I don't think I'll be able to get the SAMD09 for about two years. And then for great search, which we do with Digikey and Ladyata, where Ladyata uses her powers of engineering for good to find things on digikey.com. What did you look for this week? This week, I was doing development using this dev board. I'm actually targeting the AT Tiny816. And so I showed how to get the eval board that I used, how to find the eval board for chips and some tips because you can't always get the eval board you want. You'll always get the eval board you need, what to look for and how to find the eval board for the chip you're using. Because chip companies have certain common tricks and techniques they use to decide what chips that they pick for their eval kits. And I also showed what I liked about this eval board. It might be handy when you have multiple options available. JP's product pick of the week was off this week, so tune in next week where we broadcast live from the product page. It'll be well-westened. You'll get a discount built in. And JP's off tomorrow. So you will not see a JP show tomorrow, but we do have last week's circuit Python parsec. So we're going to play that now. Take it away JP. Sometimes you will receive an input or have numbers coming at you from somewhere that are in a certain range. If I want to use those numbers in a different range, you can use this simple math library called map range, which allows you to take an input minimum and maximum and then set an output minimum and maximum. And it does all the rest for you. I have this potentiometer I'm turning in. It goes from about zero to 65,520. And you can see on the right side there, I am remapping that to a range of zero to 127. If you check out how I'm doing this in the code, the key thing is that I'm importing this simple math import map range. And then I am using this variable called remap value, followed by I want an integer. So I set int. And then this is the map range here, map range. And then I'm reading a sensor. And then I'm taking its minimum of zero, maximum of 65,520. And then I'm setting it to a new minimum and a new maximum. If we look at these variables here, they'll start out at zero and 127. So now you can see after changing the new minimum to 32, when I turn this knob, it'll go down to 32 and still up to 127. And we can set those to anything we want. My software there has a filter value in the middle that's now going from instead of zero, it's going from 32. If you see that little bump moving along there for this filter frequency notch, it goes not all the way to the bottom, which you usually stop hearing things when the cutoff value goes down to zero. And so that is how you can take a range of values and map them to a different range of values, all using the map range inside of simple math. And that is your Circuit Python parsec. OK. And Scott's show will be back, I think it's next week. Next week. He's off this week. That's right. Also, well rested. Break will be returning superpowered and ready to dive into more Bluetooth low energy transfer protocol. Ooh, fun. All right. Time travel. We're going to look around in the world of Makers, Hackers, Artists, Engineers and more. This week, as we started off the show, New York is celebrating right now, 70% of adults in New York state are vaccinated. Where'd you get this animation from? From the state government, so I think I'm allowed to. Yeah. And this was the big news. Last night, we went and we saw fireworks by the water because that's what you did. They were ready for it, it seems. All the newspaper says it's over. It's over. This is unfortunately what the newspapers look like right before, like the 12 Monkeys thing. It's like it's over and then it's like no turns out we're getting it. But hopefully this is over. This has been terrible. New York got hit first, worse, and we're now, I think, lowest positivity in the country right now. Yes. So. Still people, they're not over. There's still people getting sick. Well, yeah. But the numbers are going down every day. Yeah, we're all tired and damaged. So cut us some slack until we recover. It's been tough. So be good to each other. This is going to take a while to process. I was just talking to someone today and I said, you know, the weird thing, because I'm just starting to like not have to, like the behind the scenes of Datafrid is like, you know, we have 130 plus people and there was a lot of like, let's keep everyone safe. So I was just on call for like 24 seven, late eight to two for the last year and like, you know, three months. And I said, you know, the thing that I noticed that's been missing up until like recently is, you know, once in a while you get a, if you do things like art and what's considered creative or whatever, sometimes, you know, I'd get this melody in my head. I'm like, oh, I'm going to use that for a song that I want to do for an eight a box or a circuit playground video or, you know, a project that I have in mind and the melody stopped and they're just starting to come back now. And it's interesting that you, you don't realize what's missing for so long when you go through a crisis as long as New York and all of us did. And it's odd. It's like, huh, like there's a little bit of music coming back and I don't know if it's the same for everyone. What's the song that's playing? Well, we have a next eight a box. Oh yeah, yeah. And there's like certain instruments sometimes I want to use for things that like has a certain feel and working with Tom who does music together. And it's just like, that was just gone. It was, or it was like really hard to get. Yeah. It was like always turned down, but now it's back a little. Okay. So anyways, so that's what's going on. It's happening. And the other thing is for Friday. So Saturday is Juneteenth. Friday, eight of fruit. So what we do with holidays, if the holiday ends up on a weekend, we'll do either a Friday or a Monday. So the team has it off because right now we're not working weekends. A lot of people don't work weekends. And I don't think that would be fair. Yeah. So Juneteenth is a holiday in New York state now. And I think it passed the house and now it goes to the Senate. Yeah. So it's a holiday in a lot of states. And one of the things that I think that was helpful for eight of fruit is, you know, our team says, Hey, this is something important to us. So we started doing this last year. And it's one of the holidays we wanted to add. And I was asked in the past, how do you, if I work for a company and they're not, they're not, they're not interested in some holidays yet. One of the ways you can do it is send an email and say, Hey, there's this manufacturing company, eight of fruit. And they're doing Juneteenth or. All the other holidays that we do. And just ask like, what would it take for us to be able to do that too? Because I think that one of the hard things now is people don't know how to talk to each other anymore. And so that's the approach I would say. And you say, Hey, what would it take to do this together? Now it might be a federal holiday eventually. Some states recognize some holidays, some don't. And, you know, we've always tried to have the most inclusive holidays for all of our team. But I also know not every company is caught up yet. But I think we can lead by example. But anyways, if you work at a company, that's a strategy. If you ever need to hand with stuff like this, let me know. Sometimes employers, because we have August coming up and there's no public holiday, but we want to do one. So we're going to make up a holiday. That's right. But what we do is we tell the team, we can make this work, but here's how we can make it work together. And that's been really helpful. And I think that's an approach. Anyways, other things on the time travel. Philby did a really neat speaking spell. And... Speak away. Speaking spell video. Take it away, Philby. Speaking spell, 1978, Texas Instruments. We can laugh at it now, but at the time, this was magic when speaking toys typically had a tape or small phonograph record. It had a distinct accent, and you might think that's a product of an algorithmic voice or of phoneme tables where phrases are built from fragments of speech, but it's neither. Each word and phrase is a recording of Mitch Carr, a radio announcer from Dallas. With limited storage at the time, this couldn't be done with PCM recording where Waveform represents the physical position of a speaker. It used something called LPC-10 encoding. This turned sound into math and back. Think of it like the great-grandfather of MP3, but rather than hundreds of kilobits per second, this was limited to about 1,100 bits per second. And that's the other reason for its accent. Okay, next week we're going to have the follow-up video on that as well. So for Eight of Box, if you're in the USA, you can sign up for Eight of Box if you should. Canada also. Canada also. One of the things that we did was we told the UK and EU and Switzerland folks that we're pausing Eight of Box subscriptions. So they know that now. Yes. We sent them a nice discount code. Thanks. Thank you. It's just impossible to ship Eight of Box and have it for a price that makes sense. We will when we can. So we'll have standalone boxes with our European resellers and more, but we'll also try to have something again. Y'all know besides Amazon, which is not exactly, I think, the way that most people want to run business, Amazon makes it seem like there's free shipping, but there really isn't. The money comes from somewhere. The shipping is paid for somehow, some way by someone. So we don't put anything on top of shipping. It's a pass-through. But for Eight of Box, we have to come up with a price. And the price was 60 bucks a box. So we're working on figuring out a way to do that worldwide and more. We can do it for the USA and Canada for now. So next up, Collins Lab. We do a video on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And here is the latest Collins Labs. All in a row. Of the week. Hot glue is a great way to burn your fingers, but also very handy for adding simple strain relief to electronics wiring. It works well for those stranded wire connections. Battery cases, PCB wiring, really any wiring that needs to stand up to some movement during usage. Before applying, make sure you've got a good solder joint first. Then test to ensure the glue will stick well to the PCB and wire insulation. Add a healthy ring of glue around the base of the joint. Alternatively, you can lay the wire flat and glue it down to protect the solder joint even more. If you need to remove it, use some rubbing alcohol to release the adhesion. Just turn off your glue gun first. The three most common types of capacitors you're likely to use are ceramic, electrolytic, and tantalum. Ceramic capacitors are non-polarized, so you can place them in the PCB either way. Electrolytic caps are usually polarized. Their negative lead needs to connect to a lower voltage than the positive lead. That negative lead is labeled with minus signs. It's usually connected to ground. Tantalum capacitors are also polarized, but they have their positive side marked. Yes, that's opposite from electrolytic. Tantalum caps are also a lot more sensitive to incorrect installation. If you plug an electrolytic in backwards, it usually just won't work as well, but reverse the polarity and tantalums throw a tantrum. Please do not try this at home, but please do mind your caps' polarity. One important characteristic to consider when choosing an op amp is its rail-to-rail capability. Each voltage level supplied to the op amp is called a rail, so a typical 5 volt powered project has two rails, one ground at 0 volts and one at positive 5 volts. With this supply, a rail-to-rail op amp could output a signal ranging all the way from 0 on up to a full 5 volts. This common LM-358 op amp is wired up as a buffer. It'll try to output a copy of its input signal. So, if I feed it a sine wave measuring 3 volts peak-to-peak and centered at 2.5 volts, it reproduces a nice clean copy of the wave at its output. But when I increase the wave's amplitude to 5 volts peak-to-peak, the output is clipped. The chip only has 1.5 volts of headroom. Can't quite reach that top rail. If only we had something... Okay, where were we? Right. Rail-to-rail op amps can output signals with the full voltage range of their power supply, which might not sound like a big deal until you build a buffer circuit with an older design and you only see part of your signal at the output. We can get the full picture by swapping it out for a newer design like the TLV2462. Ah, there's our 5 volt sine wave. And we didn't have to increase the power supply voltage to get it. Thank you, TLV2462. In addition to rail-to-rail output, this chip is also a low power design. So with chips like these available, why are old op amp designs still being manufactured? Well, not every application needs a wide output voltage swing, and the LM358 goes for about 1-6th the price of a TLV2462. That'll do. Before sending your PCB design out for manufacturing, it's always a good idea to print out a 1-to-1 scale copy of it on actual paper. Yeah. It takes almost no effort, and it gives you a physical preview of your board before committing to copper. It's surprisingly easy to overlook certain details while your design is still stuck on a screen. So place chips and connectors on the paper and make sure all the outlines and pin counts are correct. With a sheet of foam placed beneath the paper, you can even simulate mounting components. Check for any necessary slots or mounting holes and that you don't have two objects trying to occupy the same physical space. That's a good general rule. If your board has them, try using any buttons, knobs, or displays. You can patch up any ergonomic oversights now instead of having to wait for a revision, too. Okey-dokey. That is ConLabs. This week, stay tuned for next week from our ConLabs lab. Okay. You love it. So we got jobs.adaford.com. This is where you can post your skills if you want a cool job. Or you can hire people. Those are volunteer options. All sorts of things. So this week's job is exhibit fabricator, I think level three. Science Museum of Minnesota. St. Paul, Minnesota. Full time. Check it out. These are fun. And they're tougher than you think to make a really good, durable exhibition. But if you think about it, if you wanted to hire people who could do this, it's a different community. It's super fun. A lot of museums just use Adafruit stuff. I know people who do this for a living, and it's quite a living, and it's very enjoyable, and you get to see kids really have fun with your stuff and break it. Yeah. All right, next up. It's Python on hardware time. Yay, Blinka. All right. Okay. There's a lot going on. I know. And I'm going to just go through what we're going to do this week. So this week, and I'm going to mention this, then we're going to go to it. Tom's Hardware Best, our P2040 boards of 2021. Oh, yeah? We've got a lot of exciting news with Adafruit. How many are ours? Well, we'll get to that at the end. Oh, great. GitHub repository used from within Visual Studio Code. This, I got this to Ann, who does Newsletter, because I thought this was a good thing that will really help people. Microsoft software, Microsoft, GitHub, working together. Yeah. You can use GitHub from within Visual Studio. I kind of try using, I use Adam, and I use Moo and Arduino. I kind of start using Visual Studio. Yeah. Article about how this year became Windows, a year of being a first-class Python development environment. That always wasn't true, but it's getting closer and closer and better and better now. As far as the type of things that you can see around the web, we have the Make Boards Guide, Adafruit Neo Trinky. There's a review there. MagTag keeps. Get a top post from Reddit, World News using Reddit's API and displaying Adafruit MagTag. Oh, fun. I know the Reddit API is really easy to use. I use the four-in-environment MagTag projects. Here's a really neat RP2040 powered circuit keyboard with Circuit Python. That's also on Tom's hardware. Pymerone, you got BlinkWork again on Circuit Python and Seat Studio. Here's a really neat wearable that uses Python. Here is the M4 Circuit Python 7 Beta with Airlift getting at MPY Library from Bundle and Community Bundle to HDMI output from the GameDevino 3x Dazzler. Here's some cute keycaps because we're doing a ton of keycap stuff. A lot of keyboards. A lot of keyboards. A lot of keyboards. A lot of keyboards. A lot of keyboards. A lot of keyboards. But what I wanted to do this week, oh, I guess one other thing. Shout out to MicroPython. They're part of the movement. I think most are all open source to get better language. They're replacing Master Slave with Controller Peripheral for SPI. You can check that out. And then you can check out the roundup of all of the companies from Microsoft to GitHub, to Adafruit, to Linux, to Red Hat that have started making these changes in better, more updated modern language for some of these outdated terms. So for this week's thing, there's so much Python news all the time. There is too much. There is too much. But that means it's all working and we're all working together. Actually, let me just do one last thing before I get to the piece. If you're looking to speed up Python, this is the founder, Guido, and they're looking to hire Microsoft's hiring two people on their team to speed up standard Python, see Python. So that's kind of cool, neat job. Is he a Microsoft? Might be. Or at least talking to him and helping him out. Well, it's a first class. It's a first class developer right now. So Tom's hard, we're best RP20 boards of 2021. And I just want to point out, you know... It's a community. It's really good. It's not just us. It's not just us. And you know, awards and listings are nice. Okay, well obviously the Pico. The Pico's number one. Well, I mean like... Well, it's low cost, small size, easy use, built in ADC, no ACPC. But it is like the board. Yeah, only three pins. But what's the first one besides that one? Oh my god. Oh my goodness. We didn't read a speech. It's the feather, the Adafruit feather. It's weird. I'm going to try to move this window around here. Now this window doesn't want to go. I'm going to try to go this way. That is weird. I'm going to try to get these websites these days. So anyways, the first one besides Pico is Adafruit feather. Feather. Then we have the Cytron maker Pico. I'm going to get this to stock because it is a nice board. Then we've got... Look, another Adafruit board. Adafruit QT Pi RP2040. No GPF pins because it's QT Pi. And then the Pimeroni Tiny 2040. And then Pimeroni Pico LiPo. And then you've got the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. Yes. Now that's for CircuitPython. That's right. Then you've got... Oh look, an Adafruit Itzy Bitsy RP2040. And then Pimeroni Qibo. Qibo. Run CircuitPython. And the Spark Phone Pro. The Pro Micro. So that is cool. Thank you, Tom's Hardware for checking out our boards and more. And that's a nice top ten list. So if you're looking to buy some of these, this is a good list. Good work. And that is Python 1004 News this week. Blinka, blinka, blinka. Blinka, blinka, blinka. All right. So let's do some... Oh boy, it's time. Let's do some open source news. Oh goodness. So here's the thing. All right, let me get comfortable. Just get ready. You get comfy. Well, this isn't just going to be a small discussion. Very short. Small. But... Short. Each week we try to cover a topic that's going on. And sometimes, for us and our team, it's just like, oh, look at what's going on in this open source community. Is there anything we can learn from it? So this was on the NixOS repo. Yeah. And it has something to do with Home Assistant. And the creator of a library... Who is also a developer of Home Assistant. Also a developer said, hey, as the author of this package that is being repackaged here, I'm against it being repacked into here. While licensing, why is I cannot stop you? I do hope you honor my request. Thank you for considering and respecting the author's wishes. Well, as we all know, that doesn't really work anymore. Because people will do open source. And if it's under an open source license, some people will say, well, it's open source. That's legal.  And you can. And you can. But I'm quoting some people that I respect in this industry. They said, just because something is legal, and it doesn't make it right. And if you're doing stuff only because it's like this legal letter of the law for these things, you might be a sociopath. So I understand that point of view too. So this is an interesting thing. What happens when you do open source and your package is put into something, but they're using really outdated code. Really old packages. Yeah. Which is what this person was worried about. It was like the packages don't get up to date and people are going to bug me with bug reports. So this is the thing. This is the biggest problem. And they're not using the latest code. Yeah. So the biggest problem is with open source right now when you release something for free, you're basically agreeing to get almost unending support, free support that you're going to provide. Yes. That's what you're signing up for. Yes. And no money almost. I mean sometimes you get donations, but it's fair. Sure. And one of the problems is it's not fair to the users because they get outdated software that's put up into these packages. They're trying to report a bug. I've never done it before. Yeah. They don't know what's going on. And then you tell them, hey, you have outdated software. They're like, no, I don't have the latest. I have the latest Debian release. Next off. So what have you got? This happened to JWZ. JWZ, a lot of people know, one of the people who made Netscape, said I would like Debian to stop sharing my screensaver. And then JWZ said, look, it's the old one. It's a security issue. Don't do it. So you put a message in there. And then the way it worked is like they took the message out. You can always fork the code. But it was kind of messed up. So everything is... It was bad for... Nobody was happy. Yeah. He's even said that he's like, absolutely nobody's happy. Everyone's miserable. Everyone's miserable. So here's the thing that I think we should all think about with open sources. There's... You publish open source because you want it out there to get used, and you also have these tools that we're using like GitHub. And until recently, it was really hard to manage stuff on GitHub. Anyone can get into our inbox. Anyone can... Anyone basically can harass you. Now, there's good issues, good bug reports, good things, but that's not how it always works. And what's happening is people are saying, please don't put it in this thing because they don't want to deal with the support thing. So I hope we can get away from should people do open source or not and get into like, can we make these tools better? Because the issues are handled better. And also, if the communities can work better together, I think that's the other solution where it's like, hey, like instead of distributing this older chunk of code, can't you do the following? Yeah. I think this was interesting because it does... You know, this doesn't come up that often, but it does come up once in a while. You know, we also had someone in the circuit Python community who was taking MIT license code and re-licensing it as GPL. Can you do that? Legally, yes. But it's like, really lame to do that. It's like, you should really respect what the author of the code intended, which was that it should be licensed under MIT and not re-licensed. Yeah. Without any changes to the code, it was just like, re-distributed under a different license. So I think it's a challenge, right? Because again, nobody's happy this is the biggest issue for developers, right? I can be annoyed that... You know, sometimes I upgrade software and some dependency, I'm using changes, and that's annoying, but I can solve that. It's like, oh, I just have to update my code, or I pin to a version. This happens all the time. Like, click updates constantly, or like, pilot changes, or like, I'm using Arduino and something changes in one core versus the other, but like, you can if-def around that, but then when you have people, and in this case, there's two people who have two valid but conflicting ideas. One person who says, I don't want my package to be installed as part of your dependency bundle. And the other person who's like, well, why did you publish it to PyPI if you don't want people to add it as a dependency for code? Yeah. I think that we don't yet have a good language for folks to express what they want done with their software, and I think when people express that, I think right now, everyone's sort of trying to guess what folks are trying to do. Well, there's also a monetary thing now. They're like, I want to do open source, but please don't sell it as a software as a service. So you have these cloud licenses, like, use it for this but. Yeah, which is, of course- And then is that really open source? No. Which comes up. Maybe.  I see both sides, that, you know, whatever the database developers are like, we don't like that Amazon is commercializing our software without supporting us as much as they should and we're doing support for their customers. On the other hand, Amazon is like, well, why did you release this open source? Like, we'll just fork it and take over maintenance of it. I think, you know, it's not easy, right? I don't know the answers to it. No one does. No, that's what I want to talk about it. Because I think- And we do this too. Like, we had things that we wanted, like, deep, deep changes that we wanted to have made to MicroPython and we chatted with MicroPython team and they didn't want to do it and we said, okay, well, this is such a deep change that it requires support. We'll make sure it's clear that this is something different and you're not going to have to deal with the support. And we are clear. It's a different name. Different name, different everything. And we take on most of the support, even like some MicroPython support because people have questions about stuff. Well, we did. We actually did a lot of- a lot of the early trials of MicroPython we did unlearn. So, yeah, it's- I think it's interesting because it shows- it, you know, it's a security vulnerability. It's a social vulnerability. It's one of the things that I think as open source communities, we do some things very well together. This is one of the things that we don't quite know how to do that. Yeah.  Red Hat charges for consultation and support in their open source. There's a lot of ways to get to this, but I think the number one thing is people who do open source didn't feel punished for doing open source. And I think that's just like one of the- one of the core things. So, one thing- That's definitely a thing. Yeah. So, one of the ideas that we had is- and maybe we'll share this with GitHub is it'd be good to maybe have- yes, you can label an issue for feature request or enhancement, but it might be nice to just be very clear that issues are only issues and have a separate tab that is feature request because at least that would- And tech support. So, like- so, like half of my weekend is deleting or applying to issues that are not issues. They're people asking for tech support help. And I'm like, this isn't the right place to do it. And I feel bad because it's like- they are- I can tell that this is their first thing they didn't get. They made a GitHub account specifically to open up an issue. And tech support- I don't do tech support in GitHub issues. It's not the place for it. It should go- it's not like a bug report, but people saying, I don't know how to install this on Arduino.  We have templates. It doesn't- it doesn't make any difference. And one of the things that- it's unfortunate that this happens a lot. I'm not going to dwell on it because I don't want to- I don't want people to kind of see what our weekends and evenings are like sometimes because it's a big, wide open internet. Is someone- first time of opening up an issue, it's a feature request and Lamor will say, hey, this is a feature request. I'm going to close this issue.  You name it, it starts happening because someone told them no. And there probably needs to be more education on like how to file a good issue, bug requests, there's templates and all that stuff, but if it could be feature request as a tab, I think that might be something. So anyways, just some ideas. We'll continue to talk about it. Other open source hardware news. Congratulations Mark, who did his first ever open source hardware and he actually sent it to us. This is as seen on show and tell featherwing. Check this out. Yes. And he sent this to us and it was a thank you for the year of doing show and tell during this unfortunate pandemic. And one thing I learned is we have to retire the phrase, avoid it like plague because we did not avoid it like a plague. Yeah, we ran right into the place. So congratulations Mark. People wanted to get your open source hardware. And I think this is, you know, just to bolt these on each other. This is a community, Mark saw this and said, oh, I wanted open source my hardware because I see the value in doing open source. Also, I learned from an open source company and more. So I think all these things can work together better. Anyways, we're an open source hardware company, 2,491 guides, almost up to 2,500. Lady, what was on the big board this week? Okay. Well, we had a couple of guide updates. We had some new guides. Melissa didn't update to this, the circuit python on the Linux and Raspberry Pi guide. She added a whole page on how to customize the chip select pins when you're using the hardware SPI, which is highly desired. Also updated the Pi TFT guide to match. And we have one new guide, the Adafruit Slider Trinky Guide. More guides coming. People have been doing a lot of code lately. And we also updated the guide on contributing to circuit python with Git and GitHub. I think we had a couple things that changed with how we do our linting and pre-commit and cat and I updated that guide. So a lot of good updates this week. Okay. Alrighty, next up, we have some main New York City factory footage take away Adafruit factory. And it wouldn't be main New York City factory footage without some Disney building across the street time lapse. And then we have a really nice sunrise crane view. Pink, pink, pink. Wake up New York. Wake up a little crane. You're vaccinated. Time to crane. Yeah. Alright, 3D printing. Now, Pedro, we have two videos. We're going to play them back to back. And then we shall see you on the other side. Take it away now, Pedro. Hey, what's up, folks? In this project, we're building a smart fume extractor with circuit python and the Adafruit Funhouse. This uses a PC fan and an air quality sensor to make a fume extractor that can change speed based on the quality of the air. The fan is controlled with PWM using an EMC-21-1 fan controller. A mini fan in the center helps direct fumes to a SPG-30 air quality sensor. The speed of the fan is mapped to the sensor so it will automatically adjust when it senses any solder fumes. The sensor values and fan speed are displayed on the Funhouse's 1.5-inch TFT display. With Circuit Python and the DisplayIO library, you can use custom fonts and bitmap images. There's a carbon-activated filter fitted over the PWM fan so it can absorb any solder smoke. All of the electronics are secured in a 3D printed enclosure with parts that snap-fit together. The idea and code behind this circuit python project is from Liz Clark of Blitzini DIY. The main program takes readings from the sensor and maps it to the fan's RPM. On boot-up, you can decide to connect to Wi-Fi and log data to a feed using Adafruit I-O. Text objects are updated on the display and values are printed in the serial console. Be sure to check out the code walkthrough by Liz on the Adafruit Learn system. With Adafruit I-O, you can create a visual dashboard of the sensor data and fan speed. Using a line chart, we can plot our sensor data and see it change over time by setting up our feeds. In the code, we can set how frequently to send data to a feed in Adafruit I-O. With your fumes in the cloud, you can use your mobile device to access your dashboard anywhere remotely. The wiring and assembly for this build is documented in our Learn Guide. There, you can get the circuit diagram, demo code, and instructions on getting set up with CircuitPython. Our enclosure design in Fusion 360 features 3D models of the electronics with parts from GrabCAD and McMasterCar. The challenge in this project led to designing a cover for the mini-fan to make better airflow. An opening just behind the sensor allows the fumes to exit through the back of the mount. The Adafruit FunHouse has lots of built-ins that make these types of projects great for folks who are just getting started. We hope this project inspires you to check out CircuitPython and Adafruit I-O. And don't forget, now I'm Pedro at 3D Hangouts every single Wednesday. All right, lady. It's time. It's that time. Eye on MPI. This week's Eye on MPI is from Nordic, one of our favorite companies. Lady Aida, what is the Eye on MPI brought to you by Digikey... This week. This week. All right. So I'm wearing my Nordic shirt because last time I did it in Nordic. We've done a couple of Nordic. Mr. Ruhls, we wear the shirts. And they were like, hey, can you wear a Nordic... I'm wearing a particle shirt because particle uses Nordic, but they were like... They send us shirts. No, I'm gonna say look. We got a shirt. Okay. So this week's Eye on MPI is from Nordic. They emailed me, actually, and let me know about this new product they're coming out with. And I was like, okay, this is pretty cool. So this is the NPM1100. So you probably know Nordic for their wireless stuff. They're Bluetooth though energy and their short hop mesh wireless networks. Of course, we use the NRF 52840 and the Circuit Playground Blue Fruit. If you use a micro bit or other Bluetooth boards, you've seen us use the NRF 51, the NRF 52832, the NRF 8001, ancient Bluetooth though energy chip, but was, you know, at the time a great thing because it was SPI to Bluetooth. And if we check out, this is from iFixit, the air tag from Apple. It uses, if you see on the left there, if you zoom in, it has an NRF 52832. So obviously, you know, they're very well known for their wireless Bluetooth chips. That's also now cellular. They're doing some cellular. And one of the things that you notice quite quickly when you are dealing with Bluetooth and the NRF series is that folks that are using these chips need them to be very low power. Like low power usage is something that's really important to people because your chances are you're doing cellular, so it's battery powered. You're doing BLE, so it's, you know, battery powered. And a lot of these things, especially like this air tag, they send data once in a while, not often, and then they go to sleep in between. So, you know, power management is something that's very important. And I think, considering that their last product that they sold was, that we featured was the power profiler 2, it's clear that there's a lot of customers that are using Nordic chipsets and are having difficulty with like getting the performance and battery power that they're expecting, right? They read the specifications.  Heck, I'm not getting that in Nordic as a sort of reply and say, well, you know, you have to measure all of your power usage and you have to go to sleep mode and you have to, you know, use this kind of converter and your quiescence being lost here and there. Obviously, the PPK2 was a tool that they were using in-house and also their customers were using to try and analyze, you know, what are the power uses of their circuits. And I got this from their presentation on the NPM 1100 when they're saying, look, it sounds, it might seem a little unusual that we're doing a power management chip. That's what the PM 1100 is, but actually isn't because we are a power management IC company. A lot of the stuff we do is power management. Yes, of course we do Bluetooth and we do Wi-Fi or we do cellular and we do ARM course. But inside of those, we have power management systems because again, we have to have such deep sleep modes be able to wake up, do a measurement, advertise Bluetooth and go back to sleep and last for a very long time on a coin cell. So the NPM 1100 it's kind of a three in one power management chip. So the NPM is for Nordic power management 1100. I don't know. It's the first one. It's really the first one and revision 00. So inside starting from the left, there's a USB to battery charger. So it takes USB power and USB-C or USB micro-B or whatever and it can charge a battery. You can change, here it has a 400 milliamp battery charger but it's actually adjustable. It's up to 400 milliamps which is a fairly chunky battery. Most people use 100 or 50 to 100 to 200. You can of course tune it down but it can do linear battery charging. And then on the top right it can give you unregulated power out from the USB or battery. So that's good for powering like your radio or like some LEDs or whatever high power stuff that you need where the higher voltage is better. And then at the bottom there's a buck DC DC converter that'll give you 150 milliamps out. So not a ton, but enough to run your wireless in a couple of accessories. Maybe they'll display some buttons and OLED, what have you, a couple of sensors. And it's also adjustable 1.8 to 3.0 volts, 3.0 volts out.  They have a couple of designs where they're like, here copy the design for usage. So one thing to note for this chip is that everything is pinstrapped. So you'll note on the left there's like ICHG pin and V-term. Those are the two pins that you use to select whether it's a 4.2 or 4.1 voltage LiPo battery and the charge current as well and on the right you see some LED outputs. But everything is basically pinstrapped. So you don't use I-squared C to program it. You use resistors and NGPIO pins if you want to configure it. Top left you can see there's the D plus D minus pins or like what's up with that. That's used so it can detect whether, you know, what current the charger can supply because, you know, Apple uses the D plus and D minus pins and that's a standard to indicate how much current can be drawn. So it will respect that current if you connect those pins up. Basically to 3.0.1 you've got your, you know, USB input, regulated output DC-DC, unregulated output and battery charger. It's really small, right? It's all in one and so instead of having maybe two chips or three chips you have one chip and here it is showing with the, basically the capacitors, a couple of 4.0.2 resistors to set the charge current and such. Most of the pins are just strapped and then there's an inductor for the buck converter. And so, you know, they did a case study in the presentation. They showed, look, you know, if you go from a buck converter usually is bigger and more expensive and as we kind of combo it with your LiPo charger you kind of get a 2 for 1 it's the same price as just having one or the other but with the DC-DC even though it's bigger, right, you see the bottom right there, the solution is 23 millimeter squared instead of, you know, a simpler low dropout regulator which is 12 millimeter because it doesn't need the inductor. However, your battery life is double because you can squeeze more current out especially if you're going to buck down like 2 volts, 2.2 volts. You know, the Nordic chips can run very nicely at those voltages.  You're drawing less current out of the battery and you can go to much lower voltages. So, you know, yes, it's designed to be used with the Nordic chips. Obviously they're promoting it for use with the NRF series chips, the 91s, the 53s, the 52s. However, I'll say this chip is not just for use with those dev, with their chipsets. You could, of course, use it with any chipset. It is agnostic to the wireless. Just, you know, they're branching out into a new thing. It's meant as a sister product to their existing lines. But I don't think any way you should think, oh, I can only use the Nordic. No, you can use this with any project you want that, you know, may need adjustable voltage output, has a LiPo battery that it's charging and you want to kind of have, oh, another thing that's very nice about this is it has a chip mode, so it can go into ultra-low quiescent current. The quiescent current is usually about, like, 800 nanoamperes typical, which is quite low, but it can go to half of that in chip mode. So, when you ship out a product to somebody, you don't want it running, but you also probably don't have it on-off switch because it's not very common to have anymore. In this case, you can use a button or a GPIO to get out of chip mode to wake up the regulator and don't drain your battery out completely. So, when people get the product, it's basically ready to use the moment you get it. So, it's the bottom buttons there. All right, not only is this efficiently, it is efficient, but did you can get this to you efficiently? And it's in stock, right? I'm trying to do the NPIs that are available in stock and this one is in stock. So, you can pick this up, the NPM 1100 and then CAA, there's also an eval board, which we showed the photo of here. Overhead, fast. So, that's it. This is the solution. So, maybe I'll use the zoomer. There you go. So, this is the full solution. This is the chip. You need some input and output capacitors, obviously, because you want to have capacitors on the battery charging, on the input to the buck converter. This is the inductor. It's a little chip scale inductor and capacitor on the output. But that's it. It's a small CSP scale chip and then you can use, zoom out, more zoom in. Down here, there's little flippy switches you can use to select. So, it's a very nice little eval board. I'll note that this battery, I believe, is the reverse wired from how 80-foot batteries are wired. Just looking for the ground pin. So, just watch out for that. Check the documentation before you plug in one of our batteries. All right. That's my own PI this week. All right. On an MPI. Okay. Before we get on an MPI, don't forget the code is btclock. We'll do new products. New, new, new, new, new. All right. What's new? New. All right. We've got, I see this in little toys and stuff. It's a double CR2032 battery holder, but it's like a pancake style. It's top to bottom. We have one that's side to side style and I thought it would be one of this. I'll just show it on the overhead real fast because I want to show how it's put together. Okay. So, oh my goodness. This is out here. So, I have it here. I'm just showing you. It's powering this LED. It has a nice on-off switch. This pops open and then you can see it holds two coin cell batteries. So, again, it's like if you want something that's pancake style, this works quite well. It's a very pokey-outy switch. So, you can't miss it. I see this a lot in little toys and games and stuff. It just comes with bare wires. I soldered them onto this LED. But handy if you want a very small coin cell battery holder that can power your six-volt project. Next. All right. More of these. Next up, more of these. So, these are adorable little silicone nubules that stick into your ports to keep them dust-free. We have construction going on. So, actually, my ports are getting dusty. So, we have them in USB-A and here is USB-C. So, these fit into the ports. So, USB-A, USB-C goes into the ports. So, it's shown here. And then, HDMI. So, if you have a computer with HDMI or maybe you have a Raspberry Pi with HDMI, swap them in. They come in packs of 10 each. They're soft silicone rubbery. They work quite well. I'm kind of into them, so. Yeah. First, I'm just like, am I going a little too far? And then, it turns out, I wasn't going far enough. Okay. Next up. All right. Next up, we've got some terminal block breakouts for the Raspberry Pi Pico. If you have a Pico, you're probably like, hey, why won't you use this for industrial uses? You don't want to connect this up to a DIN rail. So, we've got two terminal block setups. This one is kind of like the narrow, thin version. Let me grab it, and I'll show it off. Because there's stuff on the sides here. Okay. So, Raspberry Pi Pico, of course, plugs in like so. Focus lock. You can see the USB over here. And then, if you wanted to solder in the headers for the debug port, you can do that as well. And then, it comes, this PCB comes fully assembled. And then, every terminal block has a nice label showing you. It's one by one, right? So, it's like, each pin matches up with the pin on the Pico. So, there's a lot of grounds. And then, you've got all the power pins over here. More GPIO over there. Everything nicely labeled. And then, you can mount this onto a DIN rail or onto an enclosure. Because it's got this nice kind of DIN rail. It's DIN rail looking, but it's actually not, it doesn't have the sliders for DIN rail. But you could probably get the sliders and add it on. Or you can just mount it using these two little ears over here. Next up? Okay. Next up, similar, but not quite the same. This one is a terminal block breakout, but it's like side to side mode instead of like long mode. I don't know how to say this. But these are much bigger terminal blocks. Pico still plugs in onto the top here. And then, you've got these 45 degree terminal blocks. The wires go in from the side. And you screw them down. Everything is again labeled one by one. This would be better for thicker wires, I think. It's, you know, it's a bigger construction. It doesn't come with the nice plastic bottom, right? So this is for direct usage. There are some mounting holes. But, you know, people are always like, hey, I just want to plug it in and terminal block connect something for a robot or industrial use. These two do the job quite nicely. Okay. Next up is a Bluetooth clock. That's why the code was BT Clock. Yes. Bluetooth Clock. Let's go to the overhead. So maybe it'll change over while I'm talking about it. Yep. Okay. So this is a Bluetooth E-ink clock. It is not like a full pixel display. It's a segmented display. So in case you're like, can I have a display anything? I won't hack it. No. You're not going to have a display anything more than what you see here. It has a temperature that updates once a minute. So hopefully in the next few seconds it'll update. And it also has humidity. So here is the humidity and percentage and temperature. It's in centigrade right now but you can change it to Celsius. This little happy face just says, hey, you know, that it's good humidity, good temperature for humans. I don't know it's a happy human face. The reason we're stalking this is that even though you can't do it in two segments and then if we wait another minute it will update the whole display. So if it's cool we'll hang out here. Inside it is emitting the time I think. Definitely the humidity and temperature over Bluetooth as like data signals. And so a lot of people who have an ESP32 using home assistant or even using our code with Blinka or Circuit Playground you can read the temperature and humidity as on your Bluetooth controller. So this acts as a peripheral and it's like it's not an advertisement you would connect to it and you can read the data. But it's a very nice like all in one not only like a clock that runs for quite a long time but as a sensor node. So we have the little mini sensor nodes that we stopped. Now we just have the larger one that's also a nice clock. I'll say the clock too. And then when it does an hour it actually does the full screen clean. So you saw that. To set the time you have to use the computer. There's an app but the app only runs in China and then if you put your app in China mode if you if you set your region to China then the time zone is wrong. Basically we link to a web Bluetooth application that you can set the time through your browser. You only have to do it once. Okay. The clock. It's got a little magnet bomb. Okay. This is a it's just two double-sided foam pieces. We include these in a lot of kits and once in a while people are like I need more of these foams or I didn't get the foams or I lost my foams we now just have the Mizzatupok a foam. Okay. And last of the stars show customers. I dropped I dropped things. Yeah.  I just threw it off. It is the Adafruit keycap. Custom keycap. Limited edition we're not going to probably do these forever. Coming soon. It's coming soon. Sign up. We don't put our logo on anything. It's just one of the things that we decided to do when we do put it on something. Yeah. We put on the circuit and we're going to put this keycap on their computer and they'll set it up to go to the Adafruit site or maybe our YouTube channel or whatever. So let's take a look at the world premiere of the Adafruit keycap. Okay. All right. So yes, I found a service that will make a custom keycap and the way this works is actually if you look it's a translucent plastic keycap and then it has a thin opaque black coating that's then keys don't have the LEDs in the center. Although we're looking at trying to find a key that does have an LED that can emit through the center. In general, they emit from the top. North side or south side. Whatever. They're from the side. So it's just something to watch for. We etched these come in R4 styling. So they're kind of used for like escape keys or like if you want to have a fully lit. You can see it's a little shadowed but it still looks really good. And also I didn't want to have it only in the top because sometimes people have south keys and some people on east or west. So basically you know you don't work okay even if it's you know on the opposite side of the LED. It just won't glow as much but it still it still definitely glows through. So we are starting with a custom because they work great with our Neo keys. I have it here on a Neo key trinkie because it's just an easy way to have one key glow. But of course this works on any keyboard with a Cherry MX cross. So it's a very very very common key type chances are if you have a mechanical keyboard pop one of the keys off of the hazard cross section then you can answer some questions I have some lined up. I'm going to press the A to key. Yeah the A to key you can go over to Discord start putting them in but let's do a little bit of top secret. Okay I did do a lot of we did a lot of videos we did a lot of videos I'm only going to show two and then I'm going to show an upcoming thing that we're doing. Okay. You ready? Yes. Hey lady what is this? All right I'm finally starting my project I've been putting C in and then can read a rotary encoder so it's like our little I squared C to anything converter we use it for a lot of stuff you can drive Neopixels and long digital converters etc we use the SAM-D09 which has been working great I love the SAM-D09 but I can't get it anymore so I'm thinking of porting the code over to the 80 tiny 8XY series which is a low cost 3 or 5 volt mic controller it's not as powerful but I can seem to get it so I'm using this core from Spence Conde and this is the this is the pinout that they have for the Arduino core that runs on the 80 tiny X17 so that's what I'm trying to port with so far I've got some blinking going Hey lady what is this? Okay I'm still working on my 80 tiny 817 port of the seesaw code which was SAM-D09 but I can't get so I'm porting the I squared C to GPIO or analog code that we written a couple of years ago for the SAM-D09 to this chip I did digilio in the last video and this one I'm working with analog input so if you see on the computer I've got it reading the analog voltage and this is all going through I squared C so over here you can actually see the debug from the 80 tiny 817 it's getting the request sending the data and then the compatible is actually reading the analog through the I squared C and outputting it to the serial monitor but so far so good so digital and analog looking so far and here's a preview of the RP the QDRP2040 Trinkie friend it's like an alligator and the teeth are kind of like USB and the tail is a stem so that's a little bit of a preview all right question time and I've got some questions lined up later okay well let's get to them we're going to do this okay here we go okay all right let's hit these right away for the APX192 it's useful to let's say power down a screen or GPS etc. Adafruit can you shut down power on one of the pins of the Nordic chip power chip you know I actually don't know if you want to me so check the data sheet there could be like an enable pin or you might be able to use one of those GPIO pins and toggle them that's going to be a good thing to post in the Nordic app developer form because they haven't released all the examples for that power chip and I think if you have a situation they'll probably tell you how to do it with that chip okay next next question are there libraries ever wanted to patent an item curious how it works in open source hardware okay the answer is we did try to get a patent for like LED stuff and the reason we got it is can we make an open source patent so anyone who wants to use it they can use it and if they get attacked by patent trolls maybe we can build a patent moat so if the patent troll comes after one of the people out of ours and so that's that's one way it could work generally though we don't patent anything and we do and I will be able to talk about this eventually we're four for four we've had four patent trolls come after us and we did not have to go to court we were very smart and they went away but we know it's a thing and it's not cheap but we didn't they didn't troll us the way they wanted to we're going to go to www.runningadaffruit.com Trinkey's one of the names that we use for things but that's the cool thing we can work together and we can figure something out just like lots of people make feathers next up what has been the most rewarding aspect of building and running Ada Fruit both of us I'll just go easy I think once in a while in life you are given a chance to help you just have the gift of being able to help a lot of folks so you get to see the results of that once in a while whether it be someone using your stuff for accessibility or that 10 year old that you met 10 years ago now they're an engineer helping others I think that's the most rewarding thing yeah it's like it's wonderful to see the journeys people that we employ here people in the community they're growing up this is my way of sharing with people how much I enjoy making electronics and building stuff yeah oh and I have an update that goes along this question I've given the chance to buy hackaday Phil because I started it would you the Siemens PR team got back to me they said they're going to answer the questions which is kind of cool we'll see also TI got back to me they're going to send those questions over about the work of circuit python they did for TI calculators for those who don't know Siemens bought supply frame hackaday got purchased by supply frame I started hackaday 16 years ago nothing to do with it now besides being a reader so the answer to the question is if it meant preserving hackaday if it was going to get closed I would purchase it and do something good with it probably just continue doing it in some way I would like work with some of the same authors but if it was no reason other than they just put a high price tag on it Adafruit site and blog gets more traffic than hackaday now we're not we don't have to sell ads so I think it's kind of we're not yeah it's like it exists and we exist I don't need to own it I got we already have a commuter but I would make sure if it was going to close if I had the opportunity to keep it going or to preserve it the best way possible do you have any experience with the Latte Panda from DFrobot I know this is an interesting question but I would like want to know your opinion I haven't actually and send it over because I actually don't own one of those maybe you can get Blinker running on it is this happening now yes is this something live now yes can I put my question here yes how do I calculate the equivalent voltage of multiple voltage sources with different V in parallel not in series you cannot connect multiple voltages in parallel they'll destroy each other so that's that's not possible voltages can only be connected in series current sources can be collected in parallel and then you just add them together but voltage sources you do not want to connect mismatch voltage sources in parallel can this run reverse black with white text no it's been very uncustomizable the thing I like about it is it's a sensor node it's not a hacking platform but you may open one up and I was kind of like looking at it it's just like it's not it's not quite hackable I think it's running like a dialogue Bluetooth chipset okay I'm gonna just do one last little round of checking for the questions I do not see any we got to the mall additional questions I think we got to the mall we did oh there's one more oh wait doctor you got one more I'm gonna start to prepare the goodbye as you type in no pressure who's in the chat tonight in the chat I'm gonna say thank you to Takara thank you Takara thank you Takara we work behind the scenes here at Adafruit also Takara is a very good author all of our authors are really good Takara has a lot of good posts top blogs so if you go to the blog and read some of the posts from Takara you will enjoy it she learned from the best well I think we're all on each other's shoulders okay alright well okay I'm doing an Iron Man cosplay and I'm planning to do lights and sound all over what do you think about having independent power for each hand the arc reactor helmet and power control it depends on how you want your thing to fail if you have distributed power then you can control them a little bit easier maybe but you risk having the wires break as you know as you move around so you have to do a really good job with mechanical stuff if you have independent power you don't have to worry as much about the mechanical stuff because it's not going to run wires everywhere but you're more likely to have your batteries die unexpectedly so there's more battery management so you kind of have to pick which frustrating thing you want to deal with alright that's our show tonight thank you everybody alright thanks everybody don't forget the code is B.T. clock 10% off at your store until I turn it off very soon probably within an hour or so thank you everyone we'll see everybody next week please be good to each other stay safe and all those things thanks for being with us and supporting this open source hardware company in New York City manufacturing stuff in the USA we will see everybody next week here comes your moment of Xena thanks everybody


Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015, brought to you by HP. And now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for HP Discover 2015. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest, CUBE alum. It's got Weller, SVP, General Manager of Technology, Support Services, they get that right again. I mean, it's the same group, TES, TC, welcome back. Great to see you. Good to see you guys. It's a tradition every year to have you on and talk about all the, because we've been chronicling the evolution of your group for years. And so it's great to get the update because services are still hot. It's always the same thing. Hybrid cloud, four pillars. I mean, the new messaging at HP is laid out for you. It's all solutions, it's not products. So what's your take on that and how does that integrate into the execution plan? Well, I think that, first of all, this event is interesting for us because there's, for me, a real charge in the air with us separating and it's just very exciting, right? It feels a little bit like a startup environment. And I would say that this articulation of our strategy has a level of clarity that maybe we didn't have in the past. So I think the way we're able to, as a whole company rally behind these transformation areas is a really good thing. And some of the announcements we've made recently, like you say, just play right into that. Yeah, I mean, it's a guiding principle. You got essentially a song sheet everyone can sing to and know what to navigate to. But I found it interesting that it was very solution-driven and that the customers that we've talked to over the years on other cubes is we need to cross this bridge in this modern era. And some people, the IDC calls it platform three, whatever we want to call it, we call essentially cloud, right? Cloud Mobile Social. What are you guys seeing in that area with support services? What's some of the things you're seeing in customers and what's the new stuff you guys have? Give us an update. Yeah. So I think one of the things that gets lost sometimes is that companies don't so much transition from one product to the other or even from one architecture to the other. What they're really doing is moving from one IT experience to another IT experience. And of course sometimes that does involve tech or architectures, but more often than not these days it's about processes, even paradigm shifts. You know, look at the whole dev ops thing. So what we're focused on and we've sort of pivoted a little bit now is not at all to forget about the operation professional and their needs and so on. As you guys know, that's what we're all about and we have been for forever. But we also recognize that there's these two other constituencies, the developers, right? And also the CFOs in these companies are looking for specific things out of the IT experience that we didn't really work toward in the past. And so we're really focused on making sure that all three constituencies get a great IT experience starting with the data center but also moving into hybrid IT. So maybe we can follow up on that. I mean, maybe start going to go around the horn on the four pillars. So we've been talking about whatever you want to call a private cloud, hybrid cloud for a long time that seems to have gone full circle. I remember there was a paper that came out above the clouds. Berkeley wrote a paper that essentially said the public cloud is the cloud. Everything else is non-cloud. And the industry, the enterprise industry, HP and others said, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. No, this is like two trillion dollars a year spent on IT and we're going to transform that. And so the industry put forth a vision of this hybrid cloud. Now it's taken a good five, six years to achieve that but it feels like we're finally there. What's happened to bring us here and what is the state of the customer with regard to hybrid cloud specifically? Well, I think that every tech trend and you guys are really experts in this too is that there's a maturity curve from early adoption to really legitimizing it as business ready, as commercially ready. And so I think all the elements have finally kind of come together. And on top of that, I would say that this DevOps movement in particular, this whole paradigm shift around infrastructure as code has created a way to harmonize experiences across hybrid because the reality is, as we've gone through this journey in the industry, if you wanted to have a hybrid deployment, it meant really a lot more complexity. You had to know the public provider. You had to know the private side of the equation.  It was a huge burden to actually realize the value of hybrid. Now there's a lot more services, a lot more products in that space and a lot more expertise that you can rely on to get there. Yeah, I mean, the hybrid cloud brings up this whole notion of new way, kind of the modern era we talked about but what we talked yesterday at the Convert Systems folks, I really love this composable infrastructure vision. It's basically DevOps. So how do you guys bring that to your customer base because what's also interesting about this show is the embrace of the HP customer infrastructure, some say legacy, what not, but they're there. But now you got a DevOps mindset in Convert Systems and then that's what customers want but they need a partner. So that's coming out of the oven right now, it's being baked out. What does that mean for a customer and HP? How do you guys rationalize that? So in my business we're all about supporting the data center which includes legacy products, traditional products, multi-vendor products and these newer products offered to find and now composable, the fluid resource pools exposed through a unified API. This is just cool stuff and not only that. It's awesome. When you think about it in a DevOps context, I mean you can do DevOps on traditional gear, right? There's nothing that prevents that but if what you're trying to achieve and realize is all the values of DevOps, the agility, the instantaneous nature of things, continuous delivery, everything about that, it just gets better and better and when you have a technology underneath all of that that's composable, now you have like the perfect environment, now you're going to get the ultimate in agility, right? And that's what we're trying to drive for our customers is make sure, because ultimately customer, all of this as you guys know has come about because the fact is you can't rely on long cycle punctuated delivery of classic IT. You need that continuous delivery in order to have the agile business that can innovate at the speed of the market and create these market-eating customer experience. And the developers are curious, the software developers are very critical because now the customer, your customer base as well as others are investing more in app developers who want tunable infrastructure. That's infrastructure as code. Yes, well exactly and you know what's interesting is developers have always cared about IT but they've moved a lot closer to the business now and after all they're the ones who translate requirements and they make stuff, right? So they're a lot closer to the business. That means they're having conversations like, I could get this to market faster if we did XYZ and IT, right? And so there is a huge momentum now building up around what developers say and what they want out of IT. They're actually setting the agenda in many cases. So like you said, things like composable, things like infrastructure as code, these are really essential and the industry is responding and we certainly have responded in data center care. So when you think about infrastructure as code, obviously the benefit of reducing the elapsed time to get stuff done but it also eliminates a lot of the heavy lifting. And your teams are in the center of all that. We always talk about the 30, 70, 30, 70% keeping the lights on 30% growing the business or innovation, who knows if that's the right number but nobody seems to argue with it. Some say it's maybe even higher, 80, 20. But so I'm curious as to what you've seen over the last several years in terms of how your teams are spending time, presumably they're doing less time helping your customers do this non-differentiated heavy lifting and more time doing more strategic things. I wonder if you could get specific on that. Have you seen that shift? What are those things that you're now doing up the value chain? Well that's an interesting question for us because in fact as customers make that shift, we've always talked about 70, 30, or 80, 20 and it's been backwards, right? And but it's been really more a discussion that's a financial discussion. How can I stop spending over here so I can spend over there? Now it's different. Now it's about how do I spend my time in areas that develop capacity for innovation? How do I get more ability to experiment? So it's not like cost is not a concern anymore of course it is, but it's different things. You know the CFOs for example have always cared about IT spend on an ROI basis, but now it's really about how do I avoid capital outlays? How do I make sure that we've got the capacity to experiment all these kinds of things? So what happens to us and my business is we end up taking a lot of the burden and complexity away, that's the business we're in. So what we're finding within our business is we're doing more of those things, not less so that the customer doesn't have to do them. You know we talk a lot about bubbles and I think about the last bubble and I think about Y2K and it feels like we're finally, I can't really put my finger up, but my gut is telling me and I wonder if you have any data on this or you have an opinion, is that in the last bubble it coincided with Y2K and people would spend money on Y2K to fix this problem which nobody really knew if it was going to blow up the world and they would sort of justify these other sort of incremental business benefits which may or may not have ever transpired and many of them, most of them probably didn't. Today it seems like we've gone through a decade plus of do more with less, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And now there's this flip whether it's big data, cloud, the digital economy, there seems to be this awareness, sensitivity to we have to act, we have to deliver business value. If we're saving money over here we have to actually invest it over here. Are you seeing that flip? And it just feels like it's more sustainable than the Y2K bubble, I wonder if you could comment. Yeah, I think it's, I see exactly what you're saying and I think it's different though because what's happened is there's not any let up in terms of IT has to be efficient. But what's different is that I think IT over the last few years is being recognized as the core differentiator for business. As the value we create is more and more in absent data we're all hyper reliant on agile IT. So now instead of IT being kind of in the back room like turning the crank on things and making reports and running ERP and so on, this is like the lifeblood of business and so this is where I think we're just starting to see the investments being very targeted not like you can spend without care but it's really about investing in the thing that makes your business create value. So on that thread, I'm just looking at the Twitter stream you got some good buzz from the keynote yesterday you did. The title was learn how to make your data center attractive to developers and the CFO. Some highlights I want to get your commentary. Making data center attractive to the CFO. Time to value is enemy number one, so Scott Weller. That's quoted. What do you mean by that? I mean, time to value is the KPI and that's a problem or is it an opportunity? We'll see what that means. I think that's exactly right. There's a lot of ways to sort of figure out what the core issue is but frankly, if the majority of the value you're creating is in apps and data and you've got, most companies aren't sort of starving for good ideas the problem is can I get that into the market before somebody else does? So if you're dealing with an IT engine that's really kind of driven by these long cycles, you're just not going to get into the market quickly enough and the other thing is software is run like designing bridges which is a strong engineering and science mind. Software development is still the art of incremental testing, try, innovate, experiment. QA, tons of QA. And so basically it's a different kind of process and if you don't have the enablement for that, if you think creating value is I come up with an idea and for sure six months later it's in the market, that's just not how it works. So this is where IT is so crucial and that's why we're saying maybe it's provocative to say it's the enemy one, but it's clear that change really, unfortunately change is one of those bad words, right? And what we need to do is get into a mode where change happens so often that it's not feared, that it's just commonplace. So you said another quote you just hit on, more value we create comes out of the apps and data. So tying back down to time to value. So time to value is the objective, right? Lower, fast, fast time to value, that's the goal. The enemy is you mean if you don't do it, that's the enemy. That's what Meg was kind of pointing out about the Uber example on Airbnb and our idea economy, which I thought was a great metaphor to talk about what you could be, carnage or the innovator, right? So I was just, you're riding the wave or you're driftwood. Take your choice. The Uber example is so interesting on so many levels, but it just points to the fact that you can't afford to wait, you can't wonder if this thing is real that's coming at you, it's real, right? We have to be in a position where we can address these changes in the market and it's not just about features, it's about business models, right? And IT again, because so much of the value is coming out of IT enablement, we've got to have IT that's the fastest, that's the most capable to experiment and be able to try and create value. Dave and I were arguing yesterday, well debating. This is where I want to go, about the idea economy. The idea economy. And Scott just said it, he's helping you understand. I don't know. Ideas are the raw material for the digital economy, right? I said it's all about execution. Did you get it? Yeah, okay. But nailing jello against the wall is hard to do. I love the idea economy. Love the, it's kind of gimmicky, but I want to ask you a question, make it tangible for me. I mean, I get the Uber example, that's just a metaphor or so, and you could be the disruptor, but it's in the execution. So give an example in your group where you guys have had taken that idea economy concept with the time to value and explain what it means for the customer. So it's not just some fantasy Kool-Aid injection? Yeah. Well, I mean, this isn't going to be an example that most of the audience will relate to in terms of their developing value, but this pivot that I talked about where we've been in the business of really creating the best possible experience for the operations professional, and here we are nine months later talking about creating the best experience for developers and the CFO. That's just a very different, I mean, you don't expect that kind of thing out of a business like this one. So within the group, we've had to go through a lot of different thought processes. We'd have to implement things. I mean, my business had never taken a call from a developer before. We didn't know how to do that. So that's an example of how we're having to drive and go fast and our IT capability is part of doing that, frankly. We've been talking to a number of executives at HP about the whole developer outreach. And we haven't talked to them this year, but Robert Young-Johns and John and I talked extensively about sort of the need to reach out. And it seems like there's a great awareness of that and there are pockets of outreach. We do the Vertica conference in August. We've talked to other sort of initiatives that are going on. How do you see that coming together? There's so much activity going on inside of HP it's such a large company. Do you see that actually coming together in a way that you can really start to substantively service that community? So our software group has been all over this for many years, right? But I think what's happened is when you see things like the composable infrastructure story, we're now, we're creating the enablement all the way down into the metal for this. So that's just one example of how both the market and also HP's response to it is really coalescing. So it's not like we just woke up and realized DevOps is important, but across the company now, there's all kinds of initiatives in every group like the composable, like what we're doing to create a very different kind of experience with data center care. All of that stuff is coming together at the same time. And inside the company, we've got communities of professionals that are working on this together. We're coordinating to have a unified vision on what does DevOps mean, not just for HP of going into the market, but what does it mean broadly, right? What are the key points? What are the kind of decisions that you make strategically on partnering, ecosystem, tools, technology, all of that stuff. Scott, you tend not to be a big buzzword guy. So I'm going to ask you about software defined, which is a big buzzword. Do customers talk to you in those terms or do they speak to you in different terms? Like you're speaking with DevOps and developer productivity. What's the language, the language with Franca in your customer base in regard to that whole software defined meme? Yeah, software defined can be clear, right? But the problem is that different companies have picked up the term and kind of repurposed it for their own use. And I won't talk about who they are, but you guys know who they are. And so to me, the ultimate embodiment of software defined is what we've done with Composable. That's what software defined is. Fluid resource pools exposed through an API. That's what it is. But other companies want you to believe that it has to do with a decision around what particular layer of technology is important, right? Or how you should orient your IT processes and so on. So that's what's different, but software defined is the future. More and more of the IP in IT is going into software. It's very clear. There's also, I wanted to ask you about the cultural shift that's going on within IT. I mean, things like open source, things about being comfortable, coming up with an idea on Monday and shipping a product 10 days later, the whole cycle time, new skill sets, and specifically as it relates to open source, what are you seeing in your customer base and how is that affecting your team? So I think we're going to see kind of waves here and open source is not new, it's played out for many years. I think right now there's so much great technology that's coming out through open source that big companies are adopting in without maybe a legitimizing influence of a commercial version of that, right? With the full support and the backward compatibility and all these kinds of things. I think over time, companies will have to make a choice about what part of their business they will bet on pure open source versus the commercialized versions of them, but I think it's, this is sort of here to stay. We're not going to lose this momentum. I think it's just going to be a matter of deciding which part of your business is running on kind of unsupported versus supported and the rest of it is I think a way of life for us. And open stack specifically is an interesting example because you're in the business of supporting stuff that's happening today that's installed in the customer base and open stack is the future. Are you starting to see any increased pull through from the traditional customer base in terms of open stack? Well, I mean we support HP's open stack as soon as HP made the decision that they were going to have a commercial distribution. We got behind it and so we're doing that in the market today. That was another big change for us. We've never supported kind of an open source based product but we got through that. So I think again, companies are looking at all these different options and again, it's here to stay. I don't see that changing. Scott was reviewing some of our tweets from last year and we've stored obviously in our CrowdChat platform and you made a comment from when you started this group zero in revenue, billions was kind of I threw that I don't know if you said it or I said it. Either way, I was talking about good growth. It sounds good. It's good growth. I mean, that's a very relevant good success. Yes, great. So I want to ask you the final question as we break the segment is with the new messaging which is really in your wheelhouse. What's next? What do you see the path looking like for your group and the customers that you're serving? So I think we're, it's probably too early to talk about what's next after this because this is such a major shift for us, right? For us too, and you made a comment about culture. You know, when you've spent your entire career history on enabling operations professionals and now you're trying to embrace a broader community and give them a great experience and also do it not just in a data center but across hybrid, that's a major initiative, right? And so you'll see us focusing on that for several years. And then within that, of course, there's all the, our ability to take data, data from these engagements, data from the products themselves and actually use that to create a better experience, to improve uptime, to make IT more and more available, to make it faster and faster. Those are the kinds of refinements that we're still working on. So operations as a service could be a product in the future? For sure, absolutely. Why not? Why not? DevOps as a service, why not? Well, I mean, the operationalizing of cloud, I mean, it's kind of, I mean, it's a shift, it's a natural extension. I mean, connecting the dots. Yeah, exactly. Putting words around like, yes. Well, great, I mean, I think it's going to be great. I mean, I think the challenge is operationalizing cloud. What do you, how do you do that? Yeah. On top of IT. Yeah, yeah. And that's why with data center care, we're really focused on harmonizing the experience because the developer and operations person shouldn't have to care where the IT actually sits and who's running it and so on. It ought to be very seamless. If you're, if you're really focused on time to value, that's what you would do. All right, Scott Weller, SVP, technical support services at HP, doing a great job. Again, more and more services, customers journeys just beginning. That's the cue, we're sharing that data with you. We'll be right back after this short break.