Life in New York, it's Ask an Engineer and a Bear. Ask a Bear. Hi everybody, it's me Lady Aida with me, Mr. Lady Aida, and best friend, Teddy Rocks been here. A lot of fight hack bear. A lot of fight hack bear. We'll be chatting about. We did some hacks in today. We got an extension here with lots of content including hacking, circuit pods on new products, videos, guides, projects, retro, some cool retro, which I don't really recognize, but apparently anyone who's around my age does. And more including a discount code, Mr. Lady Aida, tell them what's on tonight's show. On tonight's show the code is Neo Driver 10% off in a different store all the way up to 159. Yeah. Talk about some each for live shows, including show and tell, Desk of Lady Aida, a little bit of a recap including the great search, two brief product pick of the week, a bunch of retro tech including my little hacker this week, some factory footage and three printing speed up. We got an API top secret new products and answer your questions. We do that on discord.different.it slash discord. So we answer your questions throughout the show. But for the good ones, about towards the end, we get all of them, all that and more on you guessed it. Ask an engineer. It is going to be a jam packed show. I see like there's six layers. Yeah. It's like a seven layer burrito of content. Code is Neo Driver. It's going to be because of our star product tonight. You'll have watched the show probably. We have free stuff. That's right. We still have freebies $99 or more. You get a free promo proto house size breadboard 149 or more. We're still giving away the KB 2040 RP 2040 dev board. That is pro micro pinout compatible has castley and pads semi QT and RP 2040. So it's great for lots of market control projects, including many of the ones that we cover on the show. And $199 or more. You get free ground shipping in the contest from the United States. Still waiting on a shipment of circuit playground expresses. And we'll bring back that movie as well. All right. A little bit of a recap on Sundays, we do from the desk of Lady Aida. Come to two parts. What was part one this week? OK, so part one was me not having finished this Teddy Rocksman hacking project. So you could see me in the middle, which is a little bit like, you know, I want to get this thing working. So I worked on trying to figure out how to reverse engineer fully the file format and we create new story files, binary story files to put on this animatronic bear. You know, at the time, I think I was heading towards the build route slash Ghidra versions project where I was trying to run a UC Lib C build Linux on an arm 32, which is like a Raspberry Pi to use that to run this decoder library so I can decode and encode the audio files. I didn't quite make progress with that, but I showed using Ghidra, which is a very cool reverse engineering tool. I've used X-rays IDA Pro for an earlier reverse engineering project. So I did I do want a license for it at the time Ghidra didn't exist. But I was like, you know, I need to use to like try Ghidra because I haven't I haven't tried it for decomposition and it's like really sweet. If you ever have to do any decomposition work or reverse engineering work or binary hot patching work, I'd like hot patch this binary to skip a test that was causing my program to fail because it's not running on the right processor. So I just like skip that step or something. And I did get the program to at least run, even though it didn't run correctly. It did it did do what it was supposed to. So that was kind of neat. I also never used build before.  Build route was pretty easy and had to ready to go. Config defines for the Raspberry Pi. And just, you know, there's always. Hey, I want to learn reverse engineering and like I want to understand like how this stuff works. To me, this seems like a class in it. When you look at what Lady Aida did from start to finish. And then the fact that you can kind of play along you know, one little pro tip as we kind of go through tonight's show is go to eBay and look for the 2017 Teddy Ruxpin. So they're eight dollars. So this is like cheaper than the motors would cost. They're eight dollars. There's one eight dollars.  You could rip the fur off of it, put a different thing on it. Now you have like a $250 advanced animatronic thing. And you'll be able to turn it into your own custom talking teddy bear or whatever other animal you want to you want to turn it into. So dollars, which are not bears according to Teddy Ruxpin. Yeah, this could be a cosplay thing. So anyways, and there's thousands of these out there because the company went out of business, the bears don't really do anything anymore. And this really brings it back to life. So anyways, so I was in the middle of it. I finished this morning, but you could watch me in the middle of the project. So for the great search, you did the chip that's inside the bear. What did I do? Oh, I did the, yes, the NRS 51 module. So this chip, this bear uses the Sonic's 16 bit processor, not a normal processor. Popular choice amongst toy makers. Toy makers, yes, use it because I used a different toy hacking project builds to to modify this this bear. So the Sonic's a 16 bit chipset that does a lot of it's built in amplifier and it's designed to like drive motors and it's like really good for low cost toys, but it doesn't have Bluetooth. It's not a Bluetooth cable chip. And this was back in 2017. So they didn't have or 2015s when this was 2015, probably was designed 2016 and then released 2017. And they didn't have an easy way to add Bluetooth. So they actually used NR 51 module, which we know that chip. We've used the Nordic NR 51 A 22 for like a decade. It's not a bad idea if you have a chip that you know and you love and you just want to add Bluetooth, it might be easier to paste a module in than like redesign your whole thing for for a Bluetooth capable chipset, especially one if you have to do the audio decoding and you have the firmware and either like in the app works with it and everything. So I show on DigiKey, there's actually a ton of options for NR 51 and 52 based modules that are FCC, CE, Telex certified senior product to market really fast, either use it as a co-processor that just does the Bluetooth. Or, you know, if your code can run on NR 52, which is what I think I picked in the end, it's a fairly big chip. You could probably have your entire application running on it and also get that Bluetooth capability. Yeah, I'm like, folks, we're putting in the chat. You could have your own dragon reading you stories with this modification. Cool idea. Like how does this stitch something that uses the mouth and movement? Yeah, one of the projects we're going to do is now that we can put our own audio on there, because I'm going to like make a story for our kid. Have an AI Morgan Freeman voice reader because it just sounds cool. And I don't even get the figment like the 3D print segment, like scale it up. Yeah, this is like a neat project. There's a lot of crafting that you can do. Also, it's a lot of electronic stuff. But before we move on, you know, as you also dive into this world, it's the toy world, which is very different than the electronics world. I thought they, you know, back in the day, at least Sherry. Yeah, like nobody's helping anybody. Back in the day, I was like, when I was at Make Magazine, I'm just like, oh, like I should totally go to Toy Fair as a journalist and just see what it's like. Because like these must be like makers and you're doing cool electronics. And it must be like a magical happy place where everyone loves each other. No. So Toy Fair, I went to Jacob Javits and Toy Fair, I think was the most stressful, like anxiety ridden. Everyone hated each other. It was like it was like knives out. Restraining orders. Some people can talk to each other. There was theft. There was stealing. I accidentally stumbled upon something. It was Scholastic that had this other sub-brand that took something from Evil Mad Scientist. And so then I was stuck like kind of negotiating like, hey, could you just give them credit? That's all they want. Because there was like the bristle bot thing that came up. You can Google it on and you'll find the controversy that was on Make. But it got resolved, got resolved. But anyways, it was like gnarly. Like this was like, and so the other thing about Toy Fair is no kids allowed because obviously you can't have kids running around in like Toy Fair because this is where business and stuff is going.  So anyways, the Toy Fair was intense. So that was my Toy Fair experience. JP's product pick of the week. Let's do the recap. It is the Feather RP2040 USB host. Rather than plugging in, let's say your mouse or your keyboard straight into a computer, you can use a microcontroller, this one right here, to intercept that incoming USB and do stuff with it. We have one core of the two and both of the PIOs doing all of the USB host duties. That leaves the second core for everything else. Take mouse information and apply some logarithmic filtering to it so that it actually slows down the cursor movement when you move the mouse quickly. Mouse slowly left and right. It's moving at kind of what I would consider a sort of normal mouse pace. But now if I move the mouse quickly, it actually slowing it down. It's actually making a little bit more accurate, which could be really useful as an assistive technology device. If you have a bumpy ride, you're on the train. It is the Feather RP2040 with USB host. And don't forget JP's workshop Thursdays and he died with Tim. Friday's 2 p.m. Pacific 5 p.m. Eastern. Let's do some retro. Okay, retro is going to be in two parts this week. First, we're just going to recap one of the things that we put on the socials.  Fun. Follow me on the blue sky. What are they called? Skeets. Skeet me. Yeah. And so this was this is in various social media places. You know, social media networks are really nice the first couple of weeks because everyone's nice to each other. And then, you know, then it's toy fair. Then it's toy fair. It's good.  So this is what we posted up. This is the three com laundry. We have one. And this was a brief period of time in the, I guess the dot com era. When, you know, cell phones weren't that great. So, but there was internet. So three com is like, okay, we've got this thing. We're going to do internet appliances. It's called the three com laundry. And it was on sale for a seven months. You know, there's dot com crash. It was released the year 2000. Wow. So October 17, 2000. Seven months later gone. But it's pretty advanced for what it was. Really interesting design. It's supposed to be a kitchen computer. So, you know, once you connected it up, you can browse the internet, receive email. It was able to sync with two palm devices. Kind of cool. You know, three com had their history. Oh, yeah. Because, you know, three com was the palm. It was named after Audrey Hepburn. Yeah, it's kind of cool. We want to see a magic capital that. Yeah. It used QNX's operating system. Kind of see, you know, a little bit more about it here. So they discontinued it in June of the next year. And then if you were a three com direct customer, you got to refund. But if you bought anywhere else, they didn't tell you about that. So some people are mad. But it's lived on with some hardware hacking. Yeah. Yeah. So it has a touch screen, it has a stylus. It was powered by a 200 megahertz geode. GX1 processor. Excuse me. 16 megabytes of flash ROM, 32 megabits of RAM. It's about four pounds. And like I said, the idea was for it to be in your kitchen. This is where you would browse the internet. No box art and everything. And then folks started hacking it.  There's an updated web browser, MP3 player, photo frame. But Ethernet was just funny. Had Ethernet. There was other things called the eye opener, the version web player, the gateway touchpad. But it was a thing, a brief period of time when this was going to be our future.  Don't really see people centering their internet snacking. This is what they... There's always this dream of like the kitchen computer. Yeah. We, you know, it's like things that keep getting tried over and over and over again.   Tell it, tell you when you need to get it. What's funny is, of course, this is very similar to the Amazon show. Yeah. That you've got. Yeah. And so that is the Audrey. Okay.  It's Retro. So it's also kind of part of our toy, or my little hacker toy series. So I thought we would just show a little bit of the ups and downs and the challenges that Lady had had hacking this. So let's kick it off with a metal hacker segment. Okay. So I'm going to start with the good news. Here's a video of a happy child and a happy mom after it was working. That was today. And so I'll start with that. And then we'll work back from there. We'll go back to the tragedy. Yeah. Super fun. Okay. So Lady, how'd you get it? So you bought this Teddy Ruck's Bench. Well, this was released in 2017 and you bought one I think when it first came out. I bought it in 2019. And I'm like, I'm going to do something this one day. Yeah. And then it was on the shelf. One day. And then like a couple weeks ago, or two weeks ago, you brought it home because you were at the office and you're like, oh yeah, the Teddy Ruck's Bench. And you brought it home. You had it in the box. Yeah. And you brought it back. And I'm like, oh, that's cool. It has like these animatronic eyes and voice. And I was like, let's see, you know, what you can do with it.  I'm going to say that they borrowed the idea or were inspired by Philby's eyeball code. What is really easy is on the back, next to the battery port, there's this micro USB slot. And the micro USB slot is, when you plug it in, it shows up at files. But the way you're supposed to kind of use this is you download one of the apps. So I just took this, you know, screenshot. It has low ratings because it doesn't really work anymore. But there's a, there was a Google Play app for Android and there's an iOS app. And the app still kind of, you didn't eventually get it working after like, sort of kind of, it kind of sort of maybe. But the idea is that you would use the app and it would, you would connect to the teddy bear over Bluetooth. And then the story book would appear on the screen. There's like a video from Anymanga Plus. Anymanga Plus, which is the app developer. The toy was made by Wicked Cool Toys, but the app was done by Anymanga Plus. And when you connect, it syncs.  And it would like follow along as you like, you know, when you press the next button, it would go to the next page and all that good stuff. Okay, so you plug it in to USB and it shows up as a disk drive with a folder called books. And initially it only has a couple, this is the one I just plugged in, it has all the stories, but initially it actually had three stories, I think, and the idle and intro bin. Intro bin is that first thing when you turn it on, it says, hello, my name is Teddy Wexman, can you and I be friends? Idle is actually just the animation of the, when it's not doing anything, the eyes move back and forth or just like plays this idle animation. And then the stories each are about 15 minutes long or whatever, like five, 15 minutes long in their songs and they're pretty cool and everything, don't get me wrong. You know, you can get the songs in case you ever lose them, or maybe it did come with the songs, if you can get the songs from internet archives, somebody uploaded all of them, or maybe the app gave them to you, I don't remember the story, but basically you can get the binary files here and it has all the stories, all 15 stories. But you can't, like if you drag it off the SD card that's in the bear, the micro USB port, it doesn't like magically play them, you have to unlock them by paying through the app and that's what's going to be eventually not going to work. I mean, it works now, but I think eventually it's not going to run on, like we even saw on Android, you know, every few years they're like, we don't let you run old APKs anymore, you have to forgery compile them and who knows if this company is going to do it. And then if you actually look for the company that made the toy, the website doesn't exist, I think they were purchased by another company. Anyways, like that's gone. I mean, like it's kind of cool when the domain doesn't even really exist, like there's usually the SSL failure that happens when they don't renew their SSL certificate and then they went past that so that there's not even around anymore. Okay, but that's fine, you know, I keep googling and there was a talk at DEFCON on dissecting and worsening the smart pair and I'm like, oh perfect, like this is exactly what I want to do. I want to update the audio and the math movements and I want to make my own story files because like the stories that come with it are cool but like I want to make my own stories, I think that would be neat.  Nice case, it's going to be mostly me telling the story. Well, the thing is, so a lot of people have these. Yeah, they're still available. Like I said, if you want to, if you want to go in and get one right now because probably after we release all this stuff, you know, people will start to charge more in eBay, we can get them for eight bucks. But I think the- There's a lot though. I'm not, I think, do pick one if you want one. But yeah, the dream is to always have a animatronic toy that you can hack and mod. There's, oh, like there's so many things that you can do with it from it being an accessory for a cosplay thing to just wanting all of, it's so hard to do all of those things, whether you're trying to three print it and do motors and like whatever it is, putting that all together, the injection molding, the battery, having it even be safe. Yeah. You know. It just runs on like AA batteries. It's a very well made, and you can, you know, see the iFixit video or whatever. It's very well made. Okay, so this presentation, there's also a video. Those are the file format of the binary, and this is really useful because like this group of people, Xenifex and Exploitierus is a group, they figured out the, like by messing with bytes, they figured out what each byte does. And basically said like, hey, here's where the eyeball data lives, it's uncompressed, and here's where like the file format, and here's the audio data. Okay, cool. So, you know, I opened up the binaries that I've gotten. I'm like, yes, okay. It is the same format. That sounds cool. In the talk they mentioned releasing, you know, maybe some creation software at some point, but it was never released. So you're kind of starting from just whatever was in the documentation in the presentation, and we creating the extractor, and then once I have an extractor, like once I get the data out, of course I can put data back in. So I started writing some Python code, and it's like, you know, struct unpack, look for the magic bytes, bubble blothold, everything at ground, and getting the eyeball images out was pretty easy, because they're just 128 by 128, well, RGB 565, which I'm super familiar with because all of our TFTs are RGB 565, so it's like, oh yeah, this file format is like, I'm... Also an interesting study in eyeballs on LCD screens. Yeah. So, very nice. And I mean, the eyeballs also do this animation thing, which was not extracted, but I probably won't be creating the animations like they do like these hard sparkle things. Anyways, the good news is that I just, you know, you gave me like this Adafruit logo, 128 by 128, I used Pillow as Python image library and pasted that back into the eyeball code for the idle screen and like, boom, you know, that worked. So that was... That just showed like, okay, there's no like CRC, you can edit the file and put it back on, you can inject and change the data without any issue. Okay. So the next issue is, I want to do something with the audio. So the audio has this thing called the mark table at the beginning. So you see that there's like AU and that's like the, you know, the magic bytes and then there's a bunch of numbers that are like zeros and ones and that tells the bear, the chip running the bear, how to open the mouth for the audio file, like when does it open the mouth at what point? And that's with a timing table. And then after that, there's all these FS and then there's the beginning of the audio. So the audio is kind of two thirds down is the audio starting. And so I was like, okay, you know, is this uncompressed audio and open it up in audacity? And it's definitely not uncompressed. It's compressed audio, which doesn't surprise me too much because audio is really, really big. And some of these audio files are 15 megabytes and they probably were like, look, maybe we'll transfer it over Bluetooth. We should compress it in some way. So, you know, looking through the documentation and the DEF CON thing and also the chip itself is called the Sonics chip. This is called the Sonics Audio 32 format and it's for productors not only documented. I found a couple projects. The project on the top half of the screen is someone who was hacking some like Japanese toy that used the same Sonics chip set and Audio 32 file format. And they used QMU to run the ROM of the toy and use that to decode audio. Like it literally just used the toy ROM as a firmware as a way to encode sorry, to decode the audio or maybe encode it as well. The only thing is that you need to have the ROM of the toy to run it. So that was kind of like a no-go. And then at the bottom, you know, there was this other person, Zach, and they were like on the FFNPEG IRC channel and they're like also kind of trying to do the same thing. And they were kind of researching the Sonics codec. So I actually just followed along with this IRC chat.  This was like from 2021. And I was like watching, you know, they didn't know that like what was going to happen with COVID or something. I don't know. And got to watch this person kind of going through this Audio 32 hacking. Also like looking up the datasheet and then Google the data sheet and Google files and blah blah blah. It's basically a lot of Googling and like GitHub searching, etc. And I found, you know, I'll document all this, you know, but in the end, I found this repo that had the SDK for this, the Sonics chipset and it included this libsnxaudio.so, length library file. It also had some code that you could run that would encode or decode audio. And I'm like, oh my God, this is it. Finally, it's like I've got the library file and I've got some code. I'll just compile it. Okay. But the only problem is that when you look at the file type for that libsnxaudio Audio 32, it's not x86. It's ARM. Okay. No, not a problem. I went to ARM. There's no x86 version. So I'm going to have to run it on like a Raspberry Pi. But I have Raspberry Pi. It's not a big deal. But then actually I ran on the Raspberry Pi to get a screenshot of it. But it doesn't work with G-Lib C. It needs UCLib C. And UCLib C is what's used on like embedded Linux setups that are minimal. Which makes sense. This could be like some product that uses the Sonics Audio stuff. And it's like a small device or a toy. It's not going to be running like a full-fledged Debian install. It's going to be running something like Buildroot. So I've always been wanting to learn how to use Buildroot. Buildroot lets you build these, automatically build these very simple, small Linux installations for embedded Linux. It's not like a full Debian install. It's very minimal. Lots of things are missing. Like WGIT. But worked my way around it. Got it running. And it's all on the Raspberry Pi ARM computer. Tried to compile this code. Piles and it doesn't run. It fails. And it says I can't, it's not succeeding in opening the codec. Okay, what does that mean? Try all these different things. I try every argument. Like I expand the argument list and it will absolutely not run. I'm like, there's something going on here that's causing it to fail. And then I'm like, well, you know what? If you go back to this, no, sorry, this one, you'll notice it's got debug info and it's not stripped. Cool. That means it's prime for Ghidra, which is the reverse engineering decompilation tool released by the NSA. Really good tool. And I actually did an amazing job. If you look at the code on the right, that is decompiled from the ARM assembly on the left. Like it's completely readable. Like it is like code. That's scary. It's really scary. Yeah, it's like, well... It's very good. And so you can actually see what's going on. It's opening Devman. You look up the Sysconf, it's memory mapping, one page worth of data. And then it's reading it and it's trying, it's reading something from the registers on the chip and it's checking it against a value F8. And I don't know what it is. And it's like, it's some register value. And I guess it's never used again. I don't know if it's like a security check or if it's like verifying around the right version. I don't know. But what's really cool is with Ghidra, you can hot patch. So that check where it returns zero, if it's not on the right chip set or if it doesn't get that right memory map value, I just change it from a not equal to an equal and then it just like totally ran. The only problem is that the audio that came out, you know, I tried encoding and decoding and the audio was not intelligible. Like I tried decoding the audio from the bear and it didn't come out right. I don't know why, but I was kind of after with it for a few hours and I was like, not really working out. And then I was like looking around and everyone keeps saying, oh, the audio 32 codec, it's just G7221. Everyone's like, it's just G7221. Okay, cool. Download some G7221 encoders, decoders, 0.1, 0.1NXC, non-NXC, not one. Try all of them. None of them were able to decode the audio. There's something, you know, it's somehow modified from G7221. Anyways, I was kind of like messing around. I was like, I'm not really getting anywhere. I can always go back to that decomplation code and try to recompile it for a processor I know or see what's different with G7721, audio codec. But I kind of was like, this isn't really going anywhere. Okay, so I kept looking around and then I found a different library called Live Audio 32 Encoder. And then I found PDJ Stone, who is the hero in this story. This is the hero's story, like the standard archetype of the hero. Yeah. At the darkest corner, an angel comes down and gives the hero a symmetrical beast. Hanging on the edge of the clouds. Yeah, tell them, here's the sword you need to defeat the dragon. And you're saved by some outside Deus Ex Machina. Anyways, this is PDJ Stone. Great, thank you. I wrote this Cloudpets toy encoder so you could play audio on this Cloudpets toy. It's a unicorn that doesn't have a moving mouth but uses the same Sonics toolchain and chip. And you send the audio over Bluetooth. So he uses a web Bluetooth thing to send the audio over. You don't drag it over on a microSD card. Instead, you do this Live Audio 32. And here's what he's actually very smart. This person was quite smart. They took the APK for Android. And it's a zip, so you unzip it and he grabbed the library from inside that. So he didn't realize he could do. So cool. I looked, and yes, in fact, in the APK that he's got and the APK from the Android app for the Teddy Ruxman is the same thing, Live Audio 32 encoder and decoder.SL. It's also available in a zip and one of those SDK things. And I'm like, okay, and you can even see the AU file header thing and the sample rate. Okay, everything's matching up. This looks like it's the right file format. It's named Audio 32. And it's got that correct header. But then the only...  I didn't send you the next... Oh no, I didn't send you 23 and 24. Oh, I must have forgotten. Or maybe you can check. So I forget the images. Oh, they're gone. Oh no, I didn't. Okay, no, because this is where we stop. So this is kind of where I was this morning. So the good news is that this... His code actually does run, but it only runs on... I did it was like, okay, I'm gonna run Android on a Raspberry Pi, installed Android on a Raspberry Pi computer because again, I need an ARM 32. Try to run it. And it said you can't use anything with API 23 or higher because the linked library uses relocatable text. You can go to Ascus. Oh yeah? Yes. You don't want to just leave it on the screen for a moment? Well, I mean, I want to read this code, but I have my Nexus 7. So to try running the Python code on Raspberry Pi, it said you can't be using APK 23 or higher, APK 22 or lower is Android 5.1. So I need a device that can run Android 5.1. And that's when I grabbed my Nexus 7. Everyone has a Nexus 7. They were given out for free basically in 2022. And it even says like, hi, you're running Android 5.1. So I pulled this out, wiped it, cleaned it up, charged it, which takes overnight. Don't forget to charge. And you know, it basically was at a battery of like 25 bits. And run Termax and actually within like 20 minutes, I was able to encode the audio. This was like, it only took me like 30 hours to get to this point. One of 23 hours, but I did get there. So now unfortunately, the only way I've got right now to do the audio encoding and decoding is if you've got something running, ARM 32 based Android 5.1. But I think now that I've got it working, I have this golden path because like it can change the audio. I'm gonna go back and I think I can probably get that Android. Yeah, there's a 64 bit app. There's a 64 bit app which may have libraries so at least you'll need 32 bit. And it might be, maybe it's recompiled with non relocatable texts. I didn't think to even look into it. And I was like, oh, maybe there's a different, like I was like, oh, maybe there's a 64 bit and there's an app and it's like never mentioned anywhere. It's on the YouTube for the any manga because I was looking at the any manga that YouTube and they mentioned like, oh yeah, we released a 64 bit version of this app like two years ago. So I just got that and hopefully with that we'll be able to run the code on a modern operating system so you can generate the audio. Yeah, and we'll do a question here because I asked the same question. Did you consider using Android VM? Wow, did I try? Yes, there's a reason it didn't work though. It doesn't work. So if you're using the Android, well, you can't use an Android VM on your desktop which I tried. I skipped that because it was like such a failure. First time I couldn't even get Android 5.  It doesn't even boot. But even if it did, I don't think that MMU is compiled for 32 bit and the x86 library won't work. It was kind of like, there's a lot of pieces that would have to fit. Like, remember, it's not just, you have to be running Android, you have to be running Android 5.1 and it has to be 32 bit and it has to be on an ARM core. And Jepler tried QEMU to run Android and he said, actually, he tried, you know, he got to the point where you run the code and it dies with the CPU off exception. So it's like, there's something in this file that's just totally horrible and that QEMU doesn't even support. So it is like, not a thing. This is like a software version of my visit to the Toy Fair.  Like, let's travel back in time to 2017 in this landscape of all these things. But the good news, I know it's went on for like 20 minutes, but the good news is, now that I've got a golden path, like the way I reverse into years, I get the final thing and then now that I've got it working from beginning to end, I can like make it easier. Like I'll, I'll attack it from both sides and then a lot of toys use this chipset. So it might be handy for reverse engineering a variety of toys. So it's happening. It's just like, I only got it like working and like this morning at 11. Yeah. Such a long time ago. My little Hacker, my little Hacker building with you is magical. My little Hacker, wants to build and show. Okay. So we're going to continue to do a lot of toy hacking, but you know, it's not just like, but also a baby. Yeah. Well, a lot of this stuff is really useful, especially if you're doing electronics. Yeah. So it's not time to do some newsletter chatter. We have the native fruit IO newsletter it's really good. We haven't really promoted it as much as the other newsletters because it's one of the newer newsletters, but I thought I would just remind everyone we have one. Same thing as all the other things. We don't spam we don't do anything, you know, that every other newsletter seems to. Here's a sample. This is from April. Star fragments, fish farms and more. We cover all IoT things and including projects from Adafruit. But if you want to make things talk on the internet for interested in ideas, this is for you. And as always, it's on Adafruit Daily, get it once a month and sign up for daily. Check it out and help this be, you know, a good example of a newsletter doesn't spam to then harvest your information. We don't have any sponsors for it. We're just showing stuff that we think is really cool and speaking of it's Python on hardware time. Lady, we got our Python hardware newsletter this week. Minor update just we should mention two new circuit Python versions were released. So this is a to beta and 8 1 0 that remains unchanged from the release candidate last week, but beta has a couple new features continued in chance with the Cynthia and the RP 2040 alarm dot to sleep underscore memory. So if you want to check it out, check out our blog post. You can see more and then we get into our usual news. There's a lot of Python IoT stuff going on this week. There is Microsoft device. Oh, that's really cool. Carving microcontroller. Let me like port a type script like it's like micro Python, but type script. Yeah, that's cool. They like type script over there. This is like a well, I mean, I'm just going to get out and checked it. Check this out. But it's device script and it supports ESP 32 script for tiny IoT devices as to S3 and C3, I think, and also the RP 2040. Yeah, it's cool. They've been working for a while. I've been watching their their GitHub. So that's kind of cool. You can check out the certification courses data science from Python IBM. Just on a side note, IBM and little types. I think it was called did it like a big server computer for children. And it was $2,600. And it's this thing that they were selling like daycares. I can't find it anymore. Anyways, sending data between multiple Raspberry Pi Pico W is and of course all the streams that we're doing this week. Dan was last week on the Circuit Python show. And then next week is Martin Tan author of the micro bits projects with Python and simple board computers. Do check that out. And then there's some lower projects. So like the IoT newsletter, it's like, hey, here's IoT stuff that you can do that you own that you can make yourself. And then with our Circuit Python newsletter, it's really expanded out to kind of all things. Python boards and stuff. Yeah. Grab a phone. It's kind of cool. Yeah. So, you know, once again, same thing. You know the drill. Get it once a week. Eight for daily. I love stuff. It's the only way to keep up. I have to keep up. We are curating because there is too much going on. Open Source Hardware, I'll tell a little bit of the story. Speaking of, it's hard to keep up on things. When I was writing at Make Magazine and I think I had first met you or like maybe right before I met you, I was writing about Open Source Hardware and there was nine projects. That was it. Yeah. All nine. I did a gift guide. Yeah, you did a gift guide. I did a gift guide. And that's it. I did a gift guide. Top nine things you can get during the holidays. It's Open Source Hardware. It's like chumby. You know, it was like, there is a very small number. The MP3 player that Raphael made. Yeah, he made the gift. He got it every every year. That was it.  I can only, I can probably do like a listing. So eventually there was like 50, harder to deal with. And then eventually there was so many where it was like, well, I'll do different things like music, Open Source Hardware, sensor, Open Source Hardware. And then just like, the whole industry exploded. And I remember every Friday I would write up a blog post on Make about all the stuff that Sparkfun was. This is about 20 years ago. The Sparkfun was up too. Maybe like 15 years ago, 16, 17 years ago. And speaking of this week, Sparkfun just released a two and a half minute video of they're celebrating their 20 years in biz. And Sparkfun's an open source hardware company. In fact, out of all the companies that certify Open Source Hardware made for the Sparkfun are the top two. And then there's like a really long tail of their machines. Yeah. So do you check it out? We like to celebrate and elevate all the open source hardware companies out there. But I remember they were like one of the few that was doing open source hardware. So I tried to get the word out the best they could make. Let's do some factory footage. And that was our factory footage. Let's do some 3D print. We have a speed up. We're going to do this and then we'll do some IPI on the other side. See you soon. I brought you by Digikey and Adafruit. Thank you. Digikey. This is when we look at all the cool new products that are being introduced. Oh, my Digikey. This is Nixperia. They need to work. It is Nixperia. Nixperia is a new name for the NXP family of chips. I think they kind of tweaked their name a little bit. And also tweaked their logo. So caught me unawares. But this week's IMPI is the NEH 2000 BY available in a QFN16. And you can see that fancy new logo on the top of the chip render. This is an MPPT, a low cost, no inductor MPPT controller for solar panels to charge batteries for wearables or other small devices out in the field. It's an energy harvesting PMIC. But it really is designed best for photovoltaic, otherwise known as solar cells. So it's really cute about this chip is it's very inexpensive and it's very small. But it still has NX PowerPoint tracking for solar cells. You can use pretty much a three volt solar cell so a good place to start. And it's used for charging batteries. You can go on electronics off of it. It's just designed to be very small and very low cost, very simple to use. But with the power and efficiency of max PowerPoint tracking. So this sun, this is a photo from NASA, very cool solar flare image. You know what gets power from the sun? Superman and the NEH 2000 PY. So you want to have a product that is powered by the sun or perhaps something that can charge you over USB. But you want to, you know, it's outside because it's agricultural to wearable, or it's some sort of environmental monitor. It already has sunlight access. And so adding a low cost solar cell, I mean solar cells are very cheap. They're on the order of like, you know, pennies or a couple dozens of cents. And you add this chip it's about a dollar.  So the issue with solar cells, I've used this image, it's a great picture from Wikipedia, is that solar cells have, you know, this is, each cell has about 0.5 volts of open circuit voltage. That's the second the, where all the colorful lines drop off 0.5. And depending on how bright it is, the amount of current you can draw until you hit that cliff varies. So this is, you know, a one cell that can provide up to, you know, 40 milliamps max to this 0.04 amps max that's the red line. But once you hit that 0.4 voltage and you see it kind of ranges at the lower, at the lower current outputs like dimmer send, you get maybe 0.35 volts before the cliff. And then as it gets brighter get closer to maybe 4.45 volts before you hit the cliff. But that, trying to find the maximum point, that point right before the voltage collapses and trying to keep your charger operating at that rate is very difficult because things that plug into the wall usually don't, you know, you will hit a certain limit but you'll get a much more gradual voltage drop and so it's a lot easier to stay within the functioning range but also at light changes throughout the day that voltage point will vary as well. So you have to constantly be adjusting. So it's another video and they're showing like, you know, the traditional solution is you just set a fixed voltage and say, okay, 0.3 volts that's what I'm assuming when you get from the sunlight but you don't get the maximum amount of power if you want to get another 10, 20% or more you really need a max power point solution. So that's what this does and it's very simple. VIN is just connected to your solar cell and you get the MPT controller and then you just connect the battery output. You have a couple GPIO. VRF is for the charge boost which I'll discuss in a moment. Disable turns it off which is very useful if you're doing overvoltage or overcurrent protection you want to quickly turn it off and CIS ray just lets you know whether you have there's enough power to run whatever device you want to have triple charged off of the NEH 2000 BY. This is the typical application. So you'll notice we've covered other MPPT chargers and a lot of them use inductors for buck or boost conversion. This one doesn't. They don't really mention what is inside of it but they sort of mention it's like a doubler so it's probably a charge cap a switch cap converter. So the input voltage from the cell is doubled and then regulated out to VBAT sorry not regulated out to VBAT so you may have to do some regulation on VBAT if you have to keep it under a certain voltage. There's a bit of math and the datasheet show won't go through but basically you want to make sure because it's even though it's boosting two times it's still a linear converter in a sense. So you want to make sure that you're you have enough solar cells in series to be high enough to have a little bit of voltage drop over the battery voltage because if you are say charging up a light poly battery it is usually about 3.7 volts but it'll go up to 4.2 that means you need to have 4.5 volts on the VBAT output so you can have like a little headroom maybe for a voltage regulator or charge controller reduce the doubler reduce the inefficiencies etc basically your VOC of your solar cell should be about 0.7 times the maximum VBAT so turns out if your VBAT is 4.2 volts your VOC is going to be 3 volts which is a very common low-cost solar cell it's about 6 cells in a row but the trade-off is that there's no protection on the output it will just charge the battery and the VBAT will sink a little bit as it's charging but eventually your battery will be full you want to make sure that that VBAT doesn't keep going it doesn't try to charge the battery past 4.2 volts into 4.5 volts in which case again you might want to either use some sort of regulator or charge controller or you can use a low-cost overvoltage protector when the VDD, the VBAT hits 4.2 volts or whatever it turns off the disable pin and it shuts off and it will turn back on once the VBAT drops below 4.2 or 4.1 or whatever so you'll have some hysteresis you'll keep your battery charged but it won't overcharge it OVP charge controller it's up to you you probably have a charge controller already in your design you might feed this through a diode into your charge controller and they can share the charging state and protection with the USB charger you've got it's in stock lots of them and you'll note basically the trade-off of having an inductorless design is it's a lot smaller less noisy and less prone to vibration issues because you don't have to worry about the inductor breaking it's also a lot cheaper easier to manufacture because it's a QFM all right we'll get a video and then on the other side we'll do some new products that's ambient this week energy harvesting allows ambient energy generated by light or movement to be captured so it can be used to power devices Nexperia energy harvesting takes this a step further by using a unique ultra-fast maximum power point tracking or MPPT to maximize power extraction under changing conditions what makes energy harvesting difficult is that we do not control the power source as such the power input is frequently changing imagine a solar powered smartwatch on your wrist if you move your hand the light exposure to the solar panel changes in order to collect as much energy as possible the power management IC or PMIC designed for low power devices needs to continuously adapt to these changes in traditional power management the peak efficiency is the most important aspect with energy harvesting the average efficiency throughout the day is key this is determined by how well the chip can adapt to its changing environment traditional solutions are unable to adapt to a changing environment the advantage of Nexperia's MPPT is that our energy harvesting PMIC measures its own power outputs every second it checks all possible options instantly finding the best setting that will maximize the amount of power collected when more energy is collected this means fewer batteries will be needed for low power IoT making Nexperia energy harvesting an environmentally friendly solution that can contribute to a sustainable future for electronics Nexperia Efficiency wins New product time We're going to just jump right in Yeah Okay coming soon it's not out yet but a lot of people have been asking about it so I wanted to get it in the store for signups is the new prop maker Feather this will be out in a week or two hopefully but you can sign up now and it'll be notified when it's in stock it's the latest in our series of RP2040 Feather designs but this one is designed specifically to make it really easy to make props and electronics and toys without having to do any soldering it's got an i2s amplifier so it kind of improves on the the prop maker Feather wing by having digital audio as a little servo port so you can connect small hobby servos it's got a button input it's got a list 3DH triple axis accelerometer and a neopixel driver as well as of course all the Feather pins and all the GPIO that you would normally want to use you've got the 4AVCs and like 21 GPIOs battery usbc for debug and charging and there you can even disable the lipo charger we'll show how to do that later if you want to run this off of double A's because we're doing some prop projects and we're like oh what if we want to reuse existing double A battery pack you can probably do that so terminal blocks pre-assembled make it easy to screwed terminal anything you want on it'll be coming to the 8 fruit shop soon but I want to just preview it now we have an update for the 8 fruit Feather ESP32S2 like many of our other Feathers that use the LC709203 battery monitor that battery monitor has been discontinued so we're now revising them all to use the MAX17048 this has the MAX17048 it's otherwise identical has a TFT screen and buttons a semi-QT port ESP32S2 battery and all that good stuff but the battery monitors just change from the LC to the MAX type and we have libraries for Arduino and circuit python on both okay next up we have a new product from our friends across the pond at Pin Moroni this is an inventor hat mini it's interesting it uses a very seesaw-like thing going on there there's a chip from Neuroton that is pre-programmed with firmware that handles all the timing for servos and motors so that you don't have to do that on the Raspberry Pi or have separate iSquared C chip our cricket hats much more complicated but it's kind of the same idea but this is less expensive and smaller so it can drive eight servos sorry about that everything looks black and gold I know it's got a semi-QT port and a user button it's got two motor controllers with a DRV8833 which you can get again on an i2s amplifier everyone loves this MAX 98357 and it uses also ports you can use with encoder motors so you can have something that has encoder motors for more precise motor control hence a fully assembled mini hat bonnet that you can plug right into your Raspberry Pi computer all right and the story of the show besides you Lady Aida our team or customers or community has a little bit of a story yes so we actually got this email a week ago they'd seen the video but they were like this is what it's used for and I'm like it is so this is a captain of a first team so it's a robotics team and they have a board that they're required to use and if you want to do something funky with it that isn't part of like the first ecosystem it's very difficult so they want to use NeoPixels because they want to light up the robot but nobody's written a NeoPixel driving library for this chipset but they do have access to iSport C so now you they could use this to control NeoPixels which is a very common request this is it so this is a bunch of NeoPixels but this is the board so the way the board works is it also has a little helper chip on there and let me show it on the overhead because it's not lit up but I can show how it works okay so let's sit again so let's say you have a microcontroller or a board in this case I'm using an RP2040 because but it which does have NeoPixels of corporate maybe all the PIOs are used on your RP2040 and so you want to control some NeoPixels or maybe you're using some exotic chip that again nobody's ported a NeoPixel driver for but you still want to control NeoPixels you need that specific timing it's very hard to do so this chip on here the ATtiny1616 will take messages from I2C over here from the RP2040 and then convert you know it'll say light up this pixel that color and then when it's done it says please show the pixels and it will write the data out to the terminal ports so in the back there are five terminals one thing to know you will need separate five volt power the NeoPixels need about 20 to 40 milliamps per LED and so if you're driving in any NeoPixels you're not going to be able to power them over this little thin wire here you'll need a chunky power supply and chunky wires and either connect them to this terminal block which then goes through and powers the NeoPixels or you can do something like this where you have a five volt power supply and you just power it directly to the red and black wires of your NeoPixel but then they signal wires the white and gray wires here are signal and ground this data will come out of this chip and so you just have to send the I2C commands and most chips you know do support I2C first easily and we've documented the commands so if you're not using Circuit Python Blinka or you're not using an Arduino compatible chip we have libraries for those but if you're using something else you could of course port it to that platform you can drive up to I think 512 pixels but I will note you're driving the pixels over I2C so it's not going to be very fast you can run this at 1 MHz I2C and that'll do much better you know the default is 100 kHz on many platforms I would bump it up to 400, 800, 1 MHz clock rate and you should light up as few pixels let's start you should write as few pixels as possible before you write show the entire strip because every time you change a pixel color it has to send a message back and forth to say hey this is what the pixel color should be so that will slow it down and you're never going to be as fast as native NeoPixel driving but if you have no other way of driving NeoPixels it does work just as you get to like 200 pixels it can slow down a bit but for you know about 100 pixels writing the data had 800 kHz or 1 MHz you'll get almost equivalent to native NeoPixel driving speeds so this could be a really easy way for you to add NeoPixel support to a chip set that you've got as long as it's got I2C 3V or 5V I2C it'll work with and it even has a little switch cap converter here so if you're running this off of 3V it'll generate a 5V signal for a nice clean NeoPixel driver and you can change the I2C address if you want with these jumpers all right I have some questions lined up so we're going to get to top secret and then we'll just jump right in the questions and then we shall bounce all right first up on top secret Jepler Hey Jepler what are you working on? So I've been working on creating a self-contained retro computer using Adafruit Feathers so here we have a CPM emulator called Run CPM and I can for instance go to my B Drive and run the famous game of Zork but basically it's a fully featured CPM machine like some folks would have used in the 1980s and it's independent of like a laptop computer with a feather that has the USB host controller SD card reader which is where the software lives and the feather with digital video output so this is also running the CPU emulator and this converts the USB keystrokes into serial and sends them over here and as a result you've got a whole computer made out of some feathers from Adafruit All right what's this? This is an update to the SGP-40 which is a popular gas sensor that we've stopped from since Syrian the SGP-40 does air quality this one adds NOx so like nitrogen oxides I guess is the how you pronounce it sensing and it's pin compatible so I spun up a quick board for this okay you don't say did this this is the SHT-41 we stock the SHT-40 and the 45 the 41 is kind of like in between it doesn't have as good as 45 SHT-45 precision but it doesn't but it has kind of the pricing of the SHT-40 so it's kind of like not too hot not too cold wait in the middle okay that's our top secret three moving right along we've been listening to them up that's been playing a lot there's a really good one when Rolf the dog is trying to console Kermit for like he's having big problems and he's like uh go home I hang out by myself drink some beers take myself for a walk look at this it's it's funny very funny yeah anyways because he's a dog okay so I'm going to combine these two power boost thousand C it's probably out of stock because a lot of chips are still hard to get not a lot of them but some of them semi-fifty ones are hard to get and I think the power boost one thousand C is uses the TPS chip also hard to get the good news is that when it does come back we'll make more yeah is there any substitute or no we just gotta wait that wasn't I actually talked to TI and they're like uh we don't really have a substitute that does exactly this does okay uh so we will do it at some point well oh yeah since I can get chips I just don't have chips again yeah will there ever be a stomach to team motor server driver there will be probably both there'll be a little motor driver but it's just like not sure exactly what chip yet maybe the DRV 8830 which I did design a board for that I couldn't get chips the last couple years but I did remake the prototype so I might try and get that working here okay this one's a longer one some people answer just like how do you deal with scope creep you're designing something and all of a sudden you got feather wings stem QT and you're adding a bunch of features into a single product the person would like to get into PCB design and use multiple boards but they're struggling to bridge the gap of knowing when to stop on adding um well definitely when you integrate you know it seems like you're adding a lot but when you actually make a final PCB it won't be as many parts I'd say publish early and often you know one thing I've learned as I've been doing this toy hacking project is it's like people tend not to publish anything until they're done but the problem is that you're never done and so they never publish and that's that's a challenge so I would recommend even if you're like hey this isn't finished here's what I've got if somebody had done that for some of this toy hacking I would have saved me a lot of time once you just in two is give yourself constraints like it can only be an inch by an inch or it has to be less or it has to be has to be five dollars yeah because all of a sudden you know those constraints will make you be very creative or no solder wired yeah is there a dvi library like pico dvi in the works for circuit python there is dvi support for the dvi feather and for the pimeroni dvi board if there's a circuit python building it like the rebel and display just goes to the dvi it's not it uses a lot of memory but it does work is there any good resources on learning ble we have a bunch of guides on the learning system about ble so getting started bluetooth hardware design easy to use chipsets I mean the Nordic stuff Nordic stuff's good um they're also they have a lot of resources online like you're and they have forums and yeah real people next up what are all the temperature sensor boards it's ht 41 have a cut on them as avoid being affected by on-board temperature variations yeah it's best if you're using a temperature sensor it's best to have a cut out to isolate them and so it's measuring the air and not the circuit board yeah which is what most people want they want the the air measured I think that's it okay yeah well we're wrapped up that's it thank you for taking uh so I'm I'll try to pull the scarf and yeah publish more but I mean like how about shit or perish generally speaking my so over time there's an archive the questions that we've been asked people ask like but there's an intersection so sometimes like how do I run my business and like I want to make sure that like how do I innovate how do I do stuff and like sometimes I'll get questions sometimes lady it'll get questions so like like what sensors do I use how do I do this stuff the answer is starting to become publish often because once you start doing a publishing schedule you get more done you document your mistakes you document your successes and you get used to releasing something it's kind of why we do this show every week because like no matter what like it'd be weird not to have anything to talk about in the show so it kind of forces us to do it last up the i-squirt scene new pixel board just shown is a possible to do a repeating pattern with that board send the code to the main cou to focus on other code now I mean the new pixel protocol is pretty speedy I wanted to keep it simple you really just say I want you to write this pixel to this color it's it's meant to be simple not optimized because people could always optimize it later but it's open source you can you can modify if you like okay them is our shows thank you so much everybody thanks everybody for joining us this week we very much appreciate it we'll have more for a long time yeah we'll have more toy hacking and stuff start the documentation of this so this will be a guide my name is Leviata and you and I the hackers yeah so we got a lot going on with this someone posted a video of the teddy rucks been this one without the fur on it it's the perfect thing to put other things on it it's like it was made to do that you can and you can definitely turn this into a different toy it's just it's just stuffed inside so that can be fun we'll make you might do a project like that okay we'll see everybody next week custom special thanks to the aid for team that's in slack I don't have slack open so I do not know thank you and this has been an aid for production this is your moment of zener bye


Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Kevin, Paul Teeson, and Ali Sanjabi. Coming up on DTNS, is it bad that algorithms train on public images? What about when they're your public images? And Patrick Norton helps us understand the new chip war between AMD and Intel. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 27th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Somewhere in St. Louis, I'm Patrick Norton. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We are gonna have a thumb war or a chip war, one of the two, possibly both. But let's start with a few tech things you should know. iRobot makes the Roomba line, which are robots that vacuum. iRobot also makes robots that mop and actually has one version that does both, but even the company says doesn't do it very well. Now, the company's announced the Roomba Combo J7 Plus. It offers proper two-in-one mopping and vacuuming in one unit. So to mop an arm lowers a pad to the floor and then lifts up and lays flush on the top of the robot for safe storage. It can distinguish carpeting and rugs from hardware or tile or linoleum, stuff that you want mopped, but you don't want vacuumed or vice versa. The Roomba Combo J7 Plus goes up for pre-order today for $1,099 and ships October 4th. Chinese augmented reality company NReal, that's the letter N, R-E-A-L, is launching its NReal air glasses in the U.S. Glasses were released in Asian markets last year and you can find them now on Amazon for $379. They are compatible with Android or if you buy a $59 dongle, $59 dongle also with iPhone. The air is intended to be a personal theater. So it's basically a big monitor. You would stream your TV service, your games. It's the equivalent of having a 130-inch screen three meters in front of your face or a 201-inch screen six meters away from your face.  So these are things where you can still see the room around you. NReal air glasses are the less expensive alternative to the $599 NReal light that launched in the U.S. last year. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman wrote in his Power On newsletter that it is unlikely Apple will do its usual October product announcement event next month. If that's true, Apple would reportedly still release new products but announce them by press release instead of with a big old fancy live stream where everybody looks like they're jumping through hoops at Apple's. Death Star. Gurman expects Apple to launch M2-powered 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pros, new 14-inch and 16-inch M2 MacBook Pros, an M2 and M2 Pro Mac Minis, and possibly an Apple TV with an A14 chip. That's the one I want. Apple only held one autumn event in 2019 and in 2017. So not unprecedented, but slightly unusual. Yeah, yeah. I'll be happy if we don't have to sit there for 90 minutes listening to them. Just give me the press release. Tell me what it is. But you love the sitting. I do love sitting sometimes. Won't argue with that. There's another foldable phone on the market, folks. The Vivo X Fold Plus. It's an upgrade to the Vivo X Fold that was launched earlier this year. Has a faster and more stable Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 processor. Ultrasonic fingerprint readers. A bigger battery, faster charging. The 6.53-inch OLED cover display has full HD Plus resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. And then when you unfold it, you get an 8.3-inch screen with HDR10+. Also has a 16-megapixel selfie camera, both inside and outside. You can buy it in China for $9,999 yuan. That's about $1,415 U.S. And cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4. But it doesn't have all the features that the Z Fold 4 has. And it will also not be available outside of China. Axios reports that on Friday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved a long-delayed proposal to crack down on spam texts. Spam texts can include various tricks designed to steal money or personal information. And their volume now exceeds robocalls. If anything, they're quite a nuisance. The proposal passed on a 4-2-0 vote, now seeking comment from cell phone companies to explain how they plan to block text from numbers known to be illegal or fraudulent. Alright, we are dedicated here to making you the smartest in the room on the unfolding AI ethics text-to-image generation space. So I wanted to call attention to a motherboard article up today called AI is probably using your images and it's not easy to opt out. It does a good job of laying out what images are referred to in the data sets that are used to train algorithms, especially for text-to-image generators like stable diffusion, mid-journey, those kinds of things. I think for a lot of folks who listen to DTNS, it won't surprise you to hear that if an image is available publicly on the internet for anybody with a browser to look at, it can also be scraped and used in a data set. I know, I know. We should all should be clear though what this all means. Here's how it works for Laon, L-A-I-O-N, or the Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network, that's a nonprofit organization making large-scale machine learning models, data sets, and related code available to the general public. First of all, the image files themselves are not stored in the data set. Laon accesses the images in order to compute a similarity score between pictures and alt text, but it doesn't actually store the images. So the data set includes links, descriptions, and scores, but not those image files. Yeah, I think, even myself, when I think of this, I think of a big database of images, and that's not what it is. When an organization like Stable Diffusion or DeepMind or anybody that's using the Laon data set uses it, if it wants to access the images, it's going to have to redownload them from the address, from the URL. And if it needs more than links, descriptions, and scores, that's all on it. It's not in the data set. If the images are no longer at that link, then they won't get an image. So there's control on the part of the host of the image of whether that image is still available to the data set user. There are things on the internet that you may not realize are available, though. Motherboard notes a couple of examples of medical images being referenced in the data set. And in some cases, the patients and even the doctors that took the images were unaware that they had been posted publicly. Now, one possible reason for that could be the doctor used it in a journal with consent without really thinking about the fact that journals are posted online and sometimes images are posted and publicly available from those journals. Another possibility could be that there was a medical website that didn't properly protect images from being indexed by a crawler. Nothing necessarily even nefarious has to happen for that to be the case if it's just an improperly created robots.txt file or something.  You didn't necessarily think about all of the uses that it might have way down the road. And as we've discussed before, it's arguably fair use since the photos aren't stored and the use made by the algorithm is clearly transformative. But the public perception may be that, well, that's unfair, since when I posted that picture on my blog, I didn't intend for it to be used to train an algorithm at all. That's just some photo of me being happy on a beach somewhere. Even further, if a doctor took a picture of somebody's rash, neither party may have expected it to be publicly available. And I'm using rash very, it could be a lot of things. But is there actual harm in these uses? And if so, what is that harm? And if there is harm, who's on the hook for this? Is it the websites? Is it the government, the algorithm makers, the algorithm users or some combo of all? Yeah, because again, I think it's worth reminding us because my head goes there. We're not talking about the picture of your rash being shown to everyone who uses the AI, right?  Keeping all of that in mind, though, I think it still rubs people the wrong way. Patrick, where's your head at on this? Oh, goodness. Part of me is like anything to make AI smarter is good. And part of me is like anything to make AI smarter is bad because, you know, I've seen the movies because I love science fiction. Mostly, I feel like this is one of those things where in 20 years, it's either going to be incredibly benign and it was incredibly important to advance, you know, AI and image recognition and processing, or there's going to be some horrible dog leg in the technology or the people using it or the events happening. And none of it's going to be particularly predictable at this point. And I also think it comes back to anything you don't want on the internet or anything you don't want people to find, you should not post on the internet. And... Yeah, and I think it's fair to say there's a separate issue of, well, wait, why did those medical images get out there? I don't think that happens as commonly as maybe this motherboard article might imply. I don't think that's the bigger problem. I think the bigger problem is, hey, I put these up on my blog because only my friends see my blog and now they're being indexed in a data set. Like that's creepy. But again, they're not in the data set. They're just being used to train the data set. And so they were public. So it's not a violation of your consent, but they also didn't ask, Sarah, how do you feel about that? I am not very up in arms about this. Do the rest of you, or have I ever mentioned that Twitter account, this person, does not exist? It's basically an algorithmic picture of a person who does not exist. And then they kind of have cheeky, like so-and-so lives in Vietnam and relationship status is undecided, you know, kind of thing. The whole idea is that you look at it and you go, it really looks like a human. That human does not exist. Somebody might look kind of like this person that was generated by AI in the world and they could kind of go, huh, it looks a little bit like me. But if something that is an image of any part of me or something that I've taken becomes a well-informed AI version of something else, I find it hard to get too upset about it. If I was really upset about it, boy would I have to take a lot of photos off the Internet that I have willingly put up over the years. And I don't really want to do that either. If it got to the point where I thought, you know, this could be really harmful to me, then I would. But I don't think we're there yet. I think there's probably not nearly as much harm as people are jumping to the conclusion because this is very transformative. It is quite unlikely unless you're famous and your image is already out there that these text image generators are going to generate you based on you being in the dataset. That said, I am also very much in favor of people being in control of their own data. So a standard that would put a robot's TXT style control on images to say if someone hasn't set the flag to yes, you can scrape it for AI, then don't scrape it, would be a good standard. I don't know that I would go so far as to say that should be the law, but just for ethics and for good human relations, I think that would be a good standard to put in place. I feel like somebody in the EU right now is starting to manifest the core of the idea you just described, right? Yeah, but as a law. First of all, we don't exist here, which is this person does not exist on Twitter. Sarah, you've just probably destroyed my afternoon because I'm going to be digging into this. I'm fascinated and horrified by this one. It's a good one. We don't exist here on Twitter. I am just fascinated, number one. And number two, it's really interesting because I think you may end up at some point where people will want to opt out or will refuse on political grounds or religious grounds or personal beliefs or whatever it is that they really don't want to be part of training AI, which is an interesting concept and maybe a big deal for reasons we cannot extrapolate at this time or may just be people being people because people do that. But it's very weird the idea that something's out there, looking at your images, looking at stuff you've created, learning from that, but then again. They're not looking at it. That's the thing, right? It's no different than the browser. The browser that goes to your web page and gets the images doing the exact same thing that this data set is doing, which is downloading it, processing it, and then discarding it. It's not keeping it. And there's no person looking at it. Yeah. I don't know. I think we've leapt into the metaphysical part of the conversation. But I am very curious to see where it goes. I'm very curious to see where it evolves because it seems like one of those things. I think, Sarah, now that either nobody's going to care or it will become a very big deal. And probably both. That's different points. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. The next time I see my image on this person does not exist. Trust you, me. I will be upset. You'll be like, wait, I exist. Yeah. Hold on a second. This algorithm is getting weird. Or I just look like that many other people. Okay. So we're going to talk about Intel's Raptor Lake announcement in just a couple of minutes. But before we do, and because we have Patrick Norton here, let's get Patrick's take on the third party reviews of AMD's Ryzen Zen 4 CPUs. That's the recently announced Ryzen 7000 series, which launched on Monday. Flagship is the Ryzen 9 7950X at 5.7 gigahertz for $699. Competitive price, still kind of on the high end. The Verge was impressed by its performance though on creator apps. Less so by gaming use cases. The Verge also found some sleep issues with the new AM5 motherboard. Patrick, what have you gleaned from the reviews out there thus far? Oh my goodness. So it's been a really kind of crazy couple of months for hardware. We've had GPUs getting affordable. EVGA has walked away from the business. And right now Ryzen is dropping so many cores and they're running so much faster. Right? The 7950X 16 cores, 32 threads. The 7900X 12 cores, 2400 threads. Both of these are well over 5 gigahertz and max boost motor and their turbo mode. And that's crazy because that's, you know, this is a huge jump in clock performance, which is making them much more competitive with the Intel processors. They also dropped in like one megabyte of cash, L2 cash per core. And that alone can give a serious boost in performance. And architectural changes in Ryzen is adding something like 13% more instructions per clock cycle. So between that and the boost to the huge boost in AMD's clock speeds, you've got this tremendous performance boost. So benchmarks, most of the benchmarks out there are contesting them against Intel's Core i9-12900KS. That came out at $900. It's selling for $730. I love Puget Systems productivity benchmarks. It's PugetSystems.com. If you're rendering an Unreal engine, which is really all about the cores, the 7900X and the 7950X stomp the Core i9 flagship. Photoshop, there's big gains for the Ryzen chips, like as much as 25% to 30%, depending on which aspect of Photoshop you're benchmarking. So they're now in parity with that $900 Intel CPU. Premiere Pro, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve Studio. It's really all about the codecs you're using. And you should go to PugetSystems.com to learn more about that. Gaming is really all over the map, right? Linus Tech's tips got really deep. And they have a review that AMD is in trouble, right? That's the Ryzen 7000 full review. They did a tremendous amount of benchmarking. So the 7600X, AMD said the Ryzen 5 7600X, a $300 CPU, will outperform Intel's Core i9-12900K in gaming at less than half, or like less than half the price. They didn't quite beat the 1200K, but Linus Tech's tips found it within 3% overall, which is a big deal. It's impressive. Less impressive. The flagship 750X is maybe 5% faster than the 1200KS, right? So you have this relatively inexpensive processor that has this huge performance boost, but if you spend twice as much on a Ryzen processor, you're not getting twice as much gaming performance. So the high-end Ryzen 7000 CPUs, really competing with Intel's last-gen flagship, but in many cases, they're actually slower or a percentage point or two faster, just that little bit faster than the $420 Ryzen 7500X3D, which is a last-generation Ryzen processor, which also uses DDR4 and AM4 motherboards that are cheap, cheap, cheap. All the new 7000 series processors are using DDR5, which is like twice as expensive as DDR4. They also include integrated GPUs in case you can't find a GPU, which I think would have been more important four months ago than it is now. Technically, AMD says it's not for games, but it'll play older titles just fine for now. It's a good bump, but the big question is what's going to happen when the 13-gen Intel CPUs actually ship or given the hand of testers, and we see what Intel's 13th-gen performance is against the Ryzen 7000 series. Indeed. And in fact, Intel conveniently decided to announce details on that just a day after AMD shipped their new 7000 series chips. We're going to get to that in a second. Real quick, if you want to email us, you have a thought about something on the show, send us an email. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Intel announced those details about the 13th-gen Core chips, aka Raptor Lake. The flagship is the Core i9-13900K with 24 cores. So eight Golden Cove performance cores, the P-Cores are now Golden Cove, and 16 Efficiency Cores. That's up to 5.8 gigahertz max turbo frequency. Eight more eCores than the 12900K, and Intel says the 13900K should be 15% faster than the 12900K at single threaded tasks and 41% faster on multi-threaded tasks, things like video encoding and 3D rendering. Now, Patrick, what did you get out of Intel's? I thought very efficient announcement of these new chips. You know, if I'm AMD, I'm going rock-roll. You know, it'll be very, very, very, very interesting to see what the real-world performance is in the Core i9-13900K, because if it is 41% faster at multi-threaded tasks, that is a huge deal and is going to be enormously difficult for AMD to compete with. There were rumors that there were going to be price jumps on these, but it seems like the majority of the Intel processors are priced similarly. I think the Core i5s get like a 10% or 15% bump. There's a lot going on here, right? Intel 7-Process, 3rd Gen Superfin Transistors. Intel did not make any comparisons to the AMD 7000 series. They did say they expect to hit 6 gigahertz in 2023. These are super power-sucking chips. I don't know how else to say it, right? You know, it's, I think, up to 253 watt max in turbo mode, which to me seems like a huge number. So if your power supply is a little sketchy, you might want to upgrade that. I'm also kind of crazy. I always find it kind of maddening. Intel has dropped 22 processors in the 13-Gen lineup. They are always dropping a tremendous amount. PCI-Gen 5 up to 16 lanes. DDR5 is 5600, DDR5 is 5200. Mothermore manufacturers will be able to offer DDR4. That's important given the expensive DDR5 right now. But I think it's going to be interesting to see what the performance looks like, especially on fairly heavy-duty apps like Premiere or Unreal rendering, because Intel does split those cores into performance cores or PCORs and efficiency cores or efficient cores. Not all cores are equal for monster, multi-threaded, incredibly taxing applications. I'm very, very curious to see how these work out. I'm also very curious to see if anybody does benchmarking on the 600-series motherboards, which will still support 13-Gen chips. The new Z790 motherboards, they're offering like eight more PCI-4.0 lanes, more USB 3.2, Gen2 by 2. So Intel was comparing a little bit between the 1300K, both beating and losing to AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which loses to the Ryzen 7000 series flagship chips in applications, in sort of high-end creative applications, but is not much faster in terms of gaming. So short answer. Man, there's a lot of processors. Man, there's a lot of prospects. And man, I'm very, very curious to see what the flagship performance looks like when you're looking at things like Premiere or Unreal or some of the other creative applications. And with gaming, I suspect there's going to be a pretty hefty bump in gaming performance from Intel, all of which is speculative. Now, we're getting boxed versions of these processors October 20th, $589 for the 1300K, $319 for the 1300K, the i5. They'll start appearing in systems too. Alienware's Aurora R15 was mentioned. They are keeping the prices the same, which is a bit of a surprise, except for the Core K series. The Core i3 1300K is the only chip to get a price increase to $319. And the speculation I read on Tom's hardware was that Intel is betting that AMD isn't as competitive head-to-head with that chip. And so it can make its cash there because they sell a lot of that mid-range chip. I'm curious to see this. I thought it was the Core i5 that were getting the bump, but I will trust your sources on this one. I don't know. Again, I'm very, very curious to see what this looks like because Intel has just gotten so aggressive and the performance. I'm really curious if they're delivering a 15% boost in single Core and what, 41% multi-threaded applications, I think the whole Ryzen Intel relationship is going to shift radically October 20th. Yeah. Do you think it does shift radically? Or do you think we see just sort of a nudge ahead? Right? Do you think we see AMD suffer in this? I feel like people get very hyped up and start to overstate things for small differences sometimes. These are more significant differences than I think we usually see, but how significant are they? Okay, so my first thought is that one, you're absolutely correct as a CPU enthusiast and a longtime Ryzen purchaser for the last few years. I am very curious. I don't have a lot of skin in the game, but I'm still very curious to see what performance looks like. As you pointed out earlier, Intel absolutely dropped this announcement just to be cruel, I think, to AMD's release. Oh, they would never. Oh, they would. I like Pat Gelsinger, but I wouldn't want to get into a knife fight with him. But the fact that they were like, hey, we're going to compare it to this CPU, which is actually this previous generation Ryzen CPU, which is actually outperforming or performing very, very close within like 3% or 5% of the two most expensive current generation Ryzen CPUs. I smell a lot of gamesmanship here. I smell a lot of internal information passed maybe around from partners for both companies. And off the top of my head, I'm guessing it's not going to be a significant jump. That said, 41% multi-threaded performance sounds like it could be significant in some of the applications where AMD currently has the lead, primarily because they have so many of what Intel would call performance cores, right? I wouldn't be surprised to see evaluations in three months' time that are, AMD is good for this, let's say gaming, Intel is good for this, let's say, you know, video rendering, and those are my guesses. But something along those lines, rather than one is better than the other, more of a differentiation, because it seems like that may be what Intel's going for here. Well, yeah, but right now, right, when you look at the performance analysis of the 7000 series chips, the productivity apps or the creativity apps or some of them, especially like Unreal Engine, because of all those cores, that's where AMD has this huge advantage. If there's a 41% boost in performance of the 12900K, that starts to really eat away and where AMD has some really strong, compelling reasons to buy them, at least in workstations. With gaming, I think it's much more of a wash at this point. And 15% for the same price, I'd be looking at Intel at that point if it's legit. And 41% of the same price, we'll see. I always find it interesting to see what numbers a company actually uses to generate their...  A couple other notes here. A new thread director baked directly into Windows 11 2H22 update that just came out is targeting the Raptor hybrid architecture, so that's worth knowing about. Also, Intel announced the Arc A770 GPU, 65% faster, they say, than the competition in ray tracing. That'll be available October 12th at $329. And Intel also announced an app called Unison for Windows on Intel machines. It offers the ability to get text calls and share files between a PC and either an Android or an iOS phone. There's support for VPNs, firewalls, and IT management. Microsoft's, your phone does some of that, but it only works with Android, and it doesn't do all of it. Unison will work on some 12th gen EVO PCs, from HP, Acer and Lenovo. That'll start this autumn, and then it'll come to the 13th gen EVO systems sometime next year. Patrick was like, huh. Huh. It's such an Apple thing for Intel to do. I also desperately wish it would go back to older generation Intel powered PCs, because it seems like if it actually works, it could be incredibly useful. Yeah, indeed. Alright, let's check out the mailbag. Alright, this one comes from Mike. I just had to mention the Australian data breach of the Telco Optus. It's been on the news here ever since it broke last week. I've had dozens of emails from institutions promising to be on the lookout for fraud and scams with Optus promising credit monitoring which brings back memories of the Equifax breach. Mike says the main twist today is that the threat actor has had a change of heart and has revoked the ransom and has promised to delete the data. I'm sure you've heard about it, but I just thought I'd give some info from somebody here on the ground. It is everywhere. News, politics, even my mom asked me about it. I'm still getting emails and notifications from my banks and crypto exchanges to be on the lookout for related scams. Seems all the fuss may have changed that threat actor's mind. Mike says I'm a long-time listener, supporter, and pacemaker recipient, and it hasn't been hacked yet. I'm glad to hear that your pacemakers have been hacked. And thanks for putting a flag on this for us. Bleeping Computer had a good article today about that person feeling the heat from law enforcement and saying I've deleted the only copy of it. I give up my ransom. I'm not going to do anything. Please don't come and arrest me. Good luck with that. It's been a terrible mistake. I'm just going to go back into the bushes. And it is one of those attacks where the stuff that was leaked out was emails, addresses, driver's license. They're going to have to reset some people's driver's licenses to give them new numbers. But no payment information. So this is the kind of stuff that will be used for phishing scams to try to trick you. So yeah, if you are in Australia and a customer of anything related to telcooptis, be aware of that. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mike. And thanks to everybody who writes in with really good intel for us. If you have some questions, comments, we'll just take all of it. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We will also take Patrick Norton be on the show whenever he so desires. Patrick, it's been great as always. Let folks know where to keep up with your work. Oh my goodness. AVXL.com has kind of been on a temporary hiatus. I started a new job, a place called CTI Technologies or Conference Technologies. And if you need AV integrated solutions, well, that's an ad, so we'll stop right there. But AVXL is the place to find me and Robert Herron talking about audio and home theater and headphones and all that good stuff. Please look for it on your favorite podcast. Well, and congrats on the new gig as well. Thank you. Health insurance. Oh, man. It's good stuff. You don't want to not have health insurance. Take it from your girl over here. Special thanks to Brian LeCrette, who's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Our top lifetime supporters always get a round of applause. And today, Brian, it goes to you. Thank you for your support. You can do what Brian did and continue to support us at a high level for a long time and we're very appreciative of that. Or you can be brand new and just start supporting us now. And we'll be very appreciative of that and mention you on the show tomorrow, patreon.com. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet or GDI, which rolls right in after DTNS wraps up. But if you want to catch DTNS live, you can. We record live Monday through Friday at 2,800 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Don't mess it. Talk to you soon.