general-chat

[languid portal]

Yah Sorry for the little rant

[gleaming sand]

getting myself a FLIR C5 for work 🙂 to check fuseboxes for bad connections
https://www.flir.com/en-eu/products/c5/

dang, you in the ukraine or something?

im from the eu... but the safe part

[languid portal]

Oh boy, ps:
I saw on Ali some USB C cameras under 100 euros

[gleaming sand]

yeah i see... you might be able to interface one of those with linux. but you should check driver availability before ordering something 😛

https://www.reddit.com/r/Thermal/comments/1fcvduj/looking_for_thermal_camera_modules_for_linux/

[languid portal]

Uff the censure, I try one other time, otherwise I give off

[umbral phoenix]

This is not the server for political opinions. Please read the #code-of-conduct

[languid portal]

Sorry

[gleaming sand]

so yeah looking in the dark = not cheap

[ancient rivet]

@gleaming sand please do not try to work around the bot mods by using mis-spelling and screen caps

[gleaming sand]

sorry, i just thought the words where a bit childish

[ancient rivet]

@languid portal what @umbral phoenix said

[gleaming sand]

i mean everyone has to go to the toilet sometimes 😉

[languid portal]

I didn't do anything anymore? I just cancelled my previous comment

[gleaming sand]

gues i cant discuss modding my japanese toilet seat here either 😉

bugs are quite big, the resolution would be ..... manure

ah there we go that works 🙂

@languid portal there is some insect integration into electronics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFkoTVJMsdU

[languid portal]

I saw that once, but it's pretty nasty to say at least.
If they used some less usefull insects I wouldn't had feel that bad

[gleaming sand]

touché

dang i thought i had cought my test-subject/the mouse in my house as i just let it free outside... but it was a bloody new one! well good thing i still have a test subject i guess

dang it.... i can just use this with my own pad..
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-capacitive-touch-sensor-breakouts/overview?embeds=allow
pffff

hope it works with mice..

anyone here have XP with them? i would like to expend the sensor, do i just connect to gnd and this here?

asuming the sensor (copper-paper-copper) needs GND on one side and that connection on the other?

[ancient rivet]

yep, can connect to that pad for "custom" setups. it's just a single point connection though. not gnd. more info here:
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-capacitive-touch-sensor-breakouts/custom-touch-pads-1

[gleaming sand]

alright thanks, ordered me one. cant wait till wednesday so i can finaly catch this darn mouse 😛

https://tenor.com/view/tom-and-jerry-tom-and-jerry-cartoon-tom-jerry-cartoon-network-rolex-sir-gif-3649980575369996193

[ancient rivet]

what's your general idea for how you'll use that for detection?

[gleaming sand]

as a pad made with some coppertape at the end of a trap that wil trigger a tiny servo to set it off.
the little weighted pad at the end does not seem to work as the bait is gone in the morning but the trap is still open

got me a ninja mouse

[ancient rivet]

interesting. so it'd be a mod to that trap?

[gleaming sand]

yes exactly, attach a servo to the handle that triggers the door and the cap sensor as... wel the sensor to trigger it 😛

thought about a laser but someone sugested this and it sounded interesting

worth a try

[ancient rivet]

neat. other ideas to checkout for sensor - PIR and break beam

PIR:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/189

[gleaming sand]

yeah breakbeam is what i meant with laser. PIR might work as well.... also thought about ultrasoon but mice can probably hear that

imma start with the cap sensor as its already on its way 😛

[ancient rivet]

yah. neat idea. will be neat to see if it works.

depending on PIR sensors, mouse might be too small as well

[gleaming sand]

its not a big project, should be done in the weekend. ill post it when i have it done. thanks for the tips 🙂

thinking about it, this mouse got inside through my balcony door... maybe i should make like a tiny 20 cm high electric fence to keep them out....
Does ada have anything for that? 😉

guess it be like a high voltage pulser...

Guessing this flyback would be a bit to much...

[alpine onyx]

@ancient rivet when are you going to have more of the Adafruit Jam’s in the store? I just discovered it and I need one!

[broken plover]

this solder says it melts at 440F but its not melting when the tip touches

[hollow flint]

#general-chat message

[gleaming sand]

You sure you are not holding a bend out paperclip? 😉

[broken plover]

Lol nahhh I dont got paperclips in my room

[gleaming sand]

Then just crank up the heat till it does melt and leave a negative review;)

[stuck moth]

not sure. Make sure to sign up for email notifications

[gleaming sand]

have any plans with it? always curious to hear ideas 🙂

[alpine onyx]

I built an 8 foot pirate ship on a Gorilla cart base last year that had cannons that fired, lights that created an ambient mood around the edge, and played Yo, ho, a pirates life for me. I built it on a (at the time) brand new Pimoroni Pico2. This basically simplifies all of the IO into a much cleaner setup with everything on the board. I also want to explore if I can run the neopixel rings that make the cannons fire over USB instead of the current setup which is Stemma QT over Ethernet.

[stoic mesa]

** make the cannons fire over USB**
Had to re-read it twice. I was not sure if USB3.0 standard supports cannonballs...

But in all seriousness, that must be an epic project. Can you share some videos?

[fair summit]

assuming this is CircuitPython, consider using the secondary USB serial channel. usb_cdc.data to send info back and forth over USB

[hasty quarry]

Knowing a ton about something is kind of lonely sometimes

I just tried to explain something really interesting from signal processing to my friend, and I realized just how incredibly difficult it was to even begin explaining

And it’s annoying because I pride myself in my ability to explain things, I take it very seriously

But sometimes, wow. I just think “wow I know a lot about this, I can’t even begin to explain”

[alpine onyx]

Did I mention that it all runs on 18v Ryobi Drill batteries with 5V and 12v step downs? It was an insane labor of love that grew out of my dad’s love of wood working and a curiosity from me about microcontrollers and a shared love of projects.

[fair summit]

do you have a photo?

[alpine onyx]

I had a ground fault from one of the neopixel rings coming unsoldered 2 hrs before Halloween. So, I had to remove the neopixels from the cannons and refactor the code to launch the ship so to speak.

These fit perfectly in the ends of the cannon

It uses the stemma arcade button module for the inputs from the 4 buttons - left cannon, right cannon, Yo ho, and ambient lighting.

[fair summit]

this is some neat project! If you feel like writing it up somewhere, we'd certainly put it in the weekly newsletter.

[alpine onyx]

So I think the jam would simplify this rats nest

[fair summit]

https://adafruit-playground.com/

[alpine onyx]

Awesome!

Oh and I did most of the coding with chatGPT before vibe coding was a thing. I know python, but I couldn’t have written and debugged it in the time I had to make it work.

[alpine onyx]

I signed up for notifications, hopefully the jam gets back in the store soon!

[gleaming sand]

That's a pretty cool project! 😁

[dusty citrus]

Qualcom has bought arduino... let's see how long it takes before they kill it. that's unless there is wwiii or civil war

honestly I'd like to go elsewhere, but my generation is all about work, and pointless travel to see things, can't find anyone similar minded

I must not convert this to a rant place, so I leave at that

[gleaming sand]

Well that was a lot harder to get stable then I thought xD ended up with a piece of paper, covered on both sides with copper tape. Did have to connect one side to gnd with a cap and a resistor to make it not trip continuously.

Not fully sure why it works... But it does! :p

[alpine onyx]

There goes my free time! Ordered. Thank you! I saw this before I saw the email!

[night crescent]

Link to join to show and share your project! & watch it live or later! https://streamyard.com/3yw4e94z5v & https://youtu.be/4-vCTnIWrNo

[night crescent]

ASK AN ENGINEER 10/8/2025 LIVE! https://youtu.be/ido7qAsBEdw

10% off! Use code: qualcomm on checkout, expires 11:59PM ET! https://www.adafruit.com

[gleaming sand]

Anyone here have experience with these? As it does not seem to be as strait forward as I thought. It suppose to detect a change in cap but it .... Does more? Depending on how I connect it (it being the extended cap sensor/a wire to a copper plate) it can also react on magnetic fields? Like it turns on when it senses me getting close, even before I touch. Made a second side to my extended touch-plate, then wired that through a cap and a resistor to gnd and now it was works in a stable fashion... But why?

[late fulcrum]

@languid portal Yes and yes

[gleaming sand]

Here we go little mouse

'partialy made possible by adafruit!' 😛

[ancient rivet]

did you get that copper pad to work OK? looks like it took some extra effort? (cap to gnd)

[gleaming sand]

it seems to be working stable now 🙂 i just got lucky i guess...
Thing is when i first tried it and extended the touch sensor it would just "stay on". then tried just a back-shield connected to ground, stayed unstable, saw something in the datasheet about putting an extra cap in there, and for reason i decided to put a resistor in series as well.. that made a 'snubber' apparently, had not heard about that before xD but its all stable now! get to change the cap and resistor to change sensitivity. but all seems good for testing tonight 😄

[ancient rivet]

neat. good idea reading the datasheet. can't remember to what extent that touch sensor does auto-calibration, etc.

to toss out another idea for sensor reading - just use a large-ish resistor with the copper pad and use RC timing as base for touch sensing

wouldnt even use the touch sensor. just basic digital io on the arduino board.

[gleaming sand]

if this works i might explore electronic mouse traps further 🙂 at that point i will want to wiggle the electronics down as much as possible, then ill give that a go 🙂
the whole setup is a bit overkill atm but eh its fun! 😄 plus it looks cool....

[fair dragon]

Hello everyone, I am looking for a professional technology programmer, meaning he can program an application and its interface and launch the application or a website, meaning all programming matters, and he can create MVP Whoever can do this, contact me, my friends. Good luck and thank you.

[lunar urchin]

Hey All, just wondering if anybody knows if Adafruit has any plans to produce (make) a breakout for the Bosch BMV080 air quality sensor yet? It looks like a great little sensor, no moving parts like the current Plantower PM 2.5 (PMSA003I) air quality sensor. Here is a link for anyone interested: https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/environmental-sensors/particulate-matter-sensor/bmv080/. If Adafruit doesn't have any plans for this, or is unaware of this sensor yet, please consider this post as a formal request for an Adafruit BMV080 breakout board product in the near future! 🙂

Here is what I found when Googling this, but I'd rather buy an Adafruit! : https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-air-quality-pm1-pm2-5-pm10-sensor-bmv080-qwiic.html?qty=1

[fair summit]

Use this contact form for product suggestions: https://www.adafruit.com/contact_us. suggestions here are not necessarily read by the right people

[lunar urchin]

Thank You, and I will! 🙂

[crystal bronze]

I would like to share my tiny extension for VScode. I made it for myself a long time ago to simplify uploading CircuitPython code to a connected board. It simply uploads the opened .py file as code.py + helped me find and upload the library from the bundle. I do educational courses and work with many code examples, so it really saved me a lot of time personally. I decided to bring it into "production" with the help of Claude Code. I (we) improved it with additional features and polished. When uploading, it makes automatic backups, detects the correct drive with CP, can download the current bundle, detect imports in the code, and upload the libraries to the device - easily from the Command Palette. Its primary function is still to upload the currently opened py to the device—just press CTRL+ALT+U (upload). You can try it out a hopefully it will be useful for someone else as well. https://github.com/MakerClassCZ/circuitpython-uploader

[gleaming sand]

Darn it! For those interested. There is no more bait, and no mouse ... I might try to up the touch sensor so far it magnetically couples with what ever gets close to it... First off is putting a camera on it. Still have a pi3 with cam laying about somewhere... I want to see this little ninja at work... Might order a beam breaker just in case/for fun.

[fair summit]

invite for what?

[gleaming sand]

little basterd still got away... upped the sensitivity for tonight...
all cheeky checking out the equipment....

[spiral pebble]

I have an Esp32-S3 and would like to encrypt the ssid and password creds in the settings.toml file without having to store the aes key in my circuitpython code. Does anyone know of a secure way to store aes keys?

[ornate kernel]

MOUSE1 "I see three wires, yellow, red, and black."
MOUSE2 (offscreen) "Okay, you're gonna cut the black wire."

[gleaming sand]

HA HA technologia!

[rigid whale]

Nice work on the trap. Good on you for using a humane method.

[gleaming sand]

thanks, and it keeps them fresh longer till they go into the deep-fyrer...
No just kidding xD

[dusty citrus]

can we do like a secret channel for some off topic? it's really hard to make some friends lately 😓

[crystal bronze]

Simple - use nvm;more secure with extra hw https://docs.circuitpython.org/projects/atecc/en/latest/

[gleaming sand]

well this is general chat. or are you looking for like; friends to grow tomatoes with...

[spiral pebble]

I'll read more into this. TY!

[serene wasp]

hello how thier every one .

[dire bramble]

https://www.adafruit.com/product/5427 why is it so expensive?

used to be $70 iirc

oops, actually $89, but still

[hollow flint]

Probably the combination of tarrifs, inflation, and currency exchange rate fluctuations. It doesn't look to be much different when looking at other e-commerce stores. The list of them can be found by navigating to another webpage from here: https://banglejs.com/

[gleaming sand]

You can get a lilygo t-watch s3 for like 50.
With IR and a ESP32. Can use the arduino IDE. Apparently there is something called FlintESPJVM that lets you run java on a ESP32. No experience with it though... Colour touch display ...

But it's not really the same thing and won't get you 4 weeks of battery life :p

It is pretty cool looking at it. I might get me one this holiday. Seems to have a lot more sensors then my TTGO. Imma have to check this out :p

Looking at the details this is what I thought the TTGO would be...

[dire bramble]

i considered picking up an esp32 watch but was turned off by the poor power efficiency of the esp series

[gleaming sand]

It's a cool gadget but it won't last the day. And the little rotating wheel on the side... It's just a clicker xD rotating does not work...

I'mma try this ada watch out :p just for fun. Gotta spend that disposable income on something cool :p

[gleaming sand]

Now to find the best place to order one...

[gleaming sand]

@night crescent is there any sorts of discord discount so it's makes it more worth it to order the watch from the adafruit site? 😉

[hollow flint]

If you have access to a 3D printer and are okay with it lacking touchscreen functionality, there's a guide to make a similar device yourself here: https://learn.adafruit.com/clue-case

[somber spindle]

my observation is that they will post a 10% off coupon regularly (weekly or more) and a 15% off coupon on rare occasions.

[sturdy dawn]

Pixel 10 photographing the Mario clock variant font clock. It's camera is pretty impressive

[gleaming sand]

Oh men. Went to the library to get a book on amplifiers... The librarian asked me what volume I would like...

[orchid pendant]

hello

[hollow flint]

👋

[orchid pendant]

hru?

[rigid whale]

@night crescent did you see this yet? https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42589128/sale/AdaLovelaceDay2025

"The Farmer Was Replaced" is worth a peak. Looks fun.

[fair summit]

"The Farmer Was Replaced" is a game that apparently has you code in Python as part of the game play.

[fair summit]

https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/10/14/ada-lovelace-day-2025-ald25-findingada-ald25-findingada/ plus multiple posts related to this

[rigid whale]

Oh awesome. My bad for the spam.

[night crescent]

hi hi, i happen to look over and dude was spinning out

totally fine to spin out, not here tho

[serene wasp]

Hey is Thier a section were I can ask about board set up getting to be new to this part of my props and trying to make a 2inch x 2 .5 inch power bank made that can do 12 volts

[fair summit]

#help-with-projects and #help-with-hw-design (if you are building your own board or something. If CIrcuitPython-related, #help-with-circuitpython

[dusty citrus]

Has anyone ever considered opening a Canadian store in Montreal? It would be insanely good business. 🙂

I'd probably move in. lol

[fair summit]

we have multiple distributors in Canada. https://www.adafruit.com/distributors https://abra-electronics.com/ has a Montreal store and seems to have deep stock.

And we don't have any retail stores ourselves

[dusty citrus]

Oh my bad. I thought your headquarters was open to the public

[fair summit]

nope, sorry, no visitors, no order pickup, etc.

[hollow flint]

There's a certain category of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place in which Adafruit products (and similar products from other brands) are a common sight. Namely, a makerspace/hackerspace. I'm pretty sure a metro area as big as Greater Montreal is likely to have at least one, but likely more than one such organization.

[night crescent]

WE ARE LIVE in BROOKLYN! SHOW AND TELL! https://youtu.be/MxtYnNxkjIk

[night crescent]

ASK AN ENGINEER 10/15/2025 LIVE! https://youtu.be/F0Pv8LMWuvU

10% off! Use code: emulate on checkout, expires 11:59PM ET! https://www.adafruit.com & https://youtu.be/F0Pv8LMWuvU

[loud atlas]

are the tariffs the reason neopixels are so expensive or is that just normal pricing? I will say I've been quite happy with mine 😄

I ask because they're seemingly just WS2812B strips

[median viper]

Hey guys has anyone built an aggregator of Machine Learning competition prize money for audio/visual/congitive AI machines or Machine Learning comptitions? I want some side hustle, I got hired as a teacher, and I don't expect Adafruit to ever hire me because NYC rent is dangerous and expensive, and I live 2.5 hours out of town and these remote competitions are worth it.

here we go

https://mlcontests.com/

I won the cup in the 2023-2024 year I gotta get back in and compete some more I won the ONFIRE 2023 contest

[hollow flint]

AFAIK, the vast majority of WS2812B strips on the market are RGB, and thus have no separate white LED. The white light that results from all three colors being at maximum brightness has a significantly lower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index when compared to that of a separate white LED.

[fair summit]

They are mostly WS2812B strips from vetted suppliers, and we stand behind them and support them, including writing software, writing up projects, and helping folks. The price pays for and includes that support. The pricing has been mostly the same for a while, I think (I looked at an old order of mine and current price for a particular product.)

[sinful stratus]

hi. im trying to take bytes in 8-bit mono PCM form and play them on the 1-bit speaker. (basically like playing a wav file with audiopcmio but the wav file is streaming from serial concurrently) im using circuitpython on an rp2040. does this seem possible?

my code is all async but i dont think i can asyncify audiopwmio (which is C) and i cant use the other core from within circuitpython i think :<

[solar hamlet]

you can read some into a buffer, convert to 16-bit, and feed to the audiocore.RawSample, then play it in the background while preparing the next buffer

[sinful stratus]

ohh ok! i thought .play was blocking

should i keep the same sample or make new ones? i guess i have to make new ones because i need to keep emptying the buffer

[solar hamlet]

you can keep two buffers and alternate them

[sinful stratus]

do i need two separate RawSamples for each buffer ?

[solar hamlet]

not sure, probably

[sinful stratus]

can i create a circuitpython_typing.ReadableBuffer equivalent interface thats just an iterator?

so instead of giving RawSample an actual bytearray i give it an iterator that yields bytes?

creating the bytearrays and swapping seems tricky especially without creating seams because im sure the asyncio.sleep(n) and the playback of n*8000 samples long wont be synchronized perfectly

ohh what if i just keep loop=True, single_buffer=False , and then i keep seeking back to the beginning of the array and overwriting new bytes so when it loops around its at new data?

it doesnt look like io.BytesIO is a ReadableBuffer..

[fair summit]

the question is whether it's going to be able to keep up for every byte, given gc and other background tasks. The advantage of a buffer is that it can absorb intermittent latency.

[sinful stratus]

ohh that makes sense.

[sinful stratus]

i managed to make it work with a looping RawSample that i constantly modify!

im rlly running out of ram though on the pico

it seems like the RawSample allocates another length of bytes double the bytearray

[sinful stratus]

i cant seem to get it to stop clicking when i call audiopwmio.PWMAudioOut.play

[sinful stratus]

how do i stop the clicking sound when i call audiopwmio.PWMAudioOut.play? it doesnt seem to matter what i set the quiescent value to and it only happens when it starts

[sick adder]

@swift hatch did lars escape? https://social.afront.org/@[e-mail]/115398260461492911

https://social.afront.org/system/cache/media_attachments/files/115/398/260/301/899/253/original/1605948485c29ee9.jpg

[marble flax]

a business with no sign is a sign of no business

Also this electronics nerd at a protest 😉 from tsherrygeo on mastodon

[trim granite]

https://youtu.be/qMUjCZ7MMWQ?t=1095

I was watching this video and noticed that the 4k camera on the titan submersible that survived the implosion used an adafruit breakout board. The company that made them asked some chip and board information to be redacted but idk, this one was pretty easy to spot. The board with the USB connector also shouldn't be that difficult to find.

Seems like it's a teensy

[glossy juniper]

hello is io.adafruit.com down?

[hard estuary]

It looks up, you can always check at https://www.adafruitstatus.com

[fair summit]

There was a significant AWS outage overnight.

[viral spruce]

At 4:48am it was down due to an AWS outage. It is currently online.

[ashen zodiac]

I am working on a project that could really use a usb dual-role power chip to accept power to charge its lipo battery or when it's used as a peripheral for flashing, but also supply power to usb peripherals when operating for its intended purpose.

*. I haven't found an existing breakout board that does this. The usb-pd breakouts in the store uses the TPS61023 and HUSB238, which don't. The HUSB239 looks like it might be a future candidate for Adafruit, but its details seem obscure to me right now.
*. The chips I have found are exposed pad and I don't think they match the SMT Breakout PCBs I have seen in the store. As an example the TPS26750 is an exposed pad 32-VFQFN, but it looks like the contacts on the "SMT Breakout PCB for 32-QFN or 32-TQFP - 3 Pack" are not sufficient. TI seems to have some other possoble chips that are 30WQFN.
*. I honestly haven't designed my own pcb in a very long time (20-30 years ago, hand masked, and acid etched).
*. I've never done reflow.

I don't want this task to dominate my time on the project, so I would really appreciate some pointers in making this happen efficiently.

[fair summit]

First three search results here? https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=bq Do these meet your requirements?
https://www.adafruit.com/product/6091
https://www.adafruit.com/product/6106
https://www.adafruit.com/product/6092

also https://www.adafruit.com/product/259

[ashen zodiac]

I appreciate your input. The controller board I am using is configured as a usb power sink and can perform lipo charging. It looks like the usb port on these are statically configured as power sinks as well and can't be power sources. Frequently people solve this problem with a secondary power source that is removed when the device is used as a peripheral, but that isn't practical for this project. The problem I have can be solved by exposing 2 usb ports, one for use as a usb peripheral plugged into a power source or computer, and one for use as a usb host (usb-otg) that can power devices. However I'd much rather overload a single usb port to perform both functions the way that major manufacturers have been for many years with laptops and tablets. It's easier for users to understand and is a cleaner solution.

[sinful stratus]

is there any device that can output (headphone jack) audio from i2c ? (+ bonus points if its stemma qt)

[hard estuary]

This one has an I2C configuration, but I don't know of one with StemmaQT: https://www.adafruit.com/product/6421

[sinful stratus]

this can only actually get audio from an i2s stream though right? its just i2c configuration?

[hard estuary]

I'm not that familiar with it, sorry. You may want to ask in #help-with-audio, I know a few folks who hang out in there know a lot more than I do

[sinful stratus]

ty!!

[rich heath]

It was my birthday today :3

[gleaming sand]

In that case it not just was, it still is! Congratulations 🎉

Oh that was 12 hours ago... Maybe it was...

[rich heath]

Not my birthday anymore, but thanks anyway

[gleaming sand]

ah ok, i must have gotten confused when i read "It was my birthday today " 😉

[ancient rivet]

@dusty citrus please read the #code-of-conduct

[dusty citrus]

sorry I forgot about it

[ancient rivet]

thanks

[hollow flint]

@modest igloo, for future purchases, many EU (and some UK) distributors have reasonable shipping rates to other EU countries. The list of distributors that carry any given Adafruit product is at the bottom of each adafruit.com product page.

[round narwhal]

Not sure matters but in the 10/23 blog post abou the Fruit Jam NeoPixel light pipe the link that is supposed to take you to the fruit jam product page linksed to product 5900 - the ESP Feather V2 instead of product 6200 the Fruit Jam. There's no comments enabled so dropping it here in case someone cares to clean it up

[fresh swan]

If anyone is in the Los Angeles area (or willing to travel), Hackaday's Supercon is coming up next weekend (Oct 31-Nov 2).
I will be moderating the keynote, which features six iconic makers of the Star Trek Franchise. Everyone is very excited for this panel.
Friday is badge hacking day, Friday night is sci-fi themed halloween party. Saturday/Sunday are talks/workshops and more badge hacking!
Food and drinks are included. Check it out!
https://hackaday.com/2025/10/15/2025-hackaday-supercon-crafting-the-final-frontier-keynote-event/

[stuck moth]

Fixed! Thanks!

[split oar]

Where do you get a gift certification code?!?!💨

[fair summit]

there are discount codes given during various video broadcasts

[azure grove]

hi friends! how are you doing today?

[foggy solstice]

is adafruit going to make the i2c Si4732 board?

[fair summit]

You could send in a product suggestion: https://www.adafruit.com/contact_us

[foggy solstice]

That's the thing she showed that she's making one in one of the top secrets but haven't heard of any updates since then.

[fair summit]

I see: https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/05/26/desk-of-ladyada-stepper-spinner-led-booster-radio-receiver-deskofladyada-adafruit-adafruit/. There are always a lot of breakouts in the pipeline, and there is not necessarily a fixed schedule, so we can't really say when. You could use the contact form anyway and say you hope it is still being worked on. You could also ask about it in Ask an Engineer questions during the weekly show (which has not been weekly recently for various reasons).

[foggy solstice]

Thanks ill post my question in the question forum.

[fair summit]

also of interest, though kind of expensive: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/06/17/esp32-s3-development-board-integrates-si4732-am-fm-radio-receiver/

[raven thunder]

Was just wondering the same thing myself as it's now actually available, though looking at the datasheet I think Adafruit would likely need to design a little mini enclosure for it to at least cover the lens. The actual sensors are shipped sealed and once the seal is broken they're meant to have a lifespan of about a week in storage, which is when you're meant to apply an optical cover to it. I think that's why Sparkfun's one has a little enclosure.

As much as I'm low-key a Sensirion fanboy, I'm contemplating adding a PM sensor to my outdoor sensor (if I can work out an enclosure that needs to handle rain, but let air in, and be secured on an outside very high up windowsill via just gravity and not fly off..), and the BMV080 is interesting.

Especially as it looks like it's potentially quite a bit lower power than a SENx, though they don't seem to have perfectly comparable power numbers on their datasheets. Please Sensirion/Bosch, just give us total mAh at 3.3V for a single reading.

[lunar urchin]

I sent a product suggestion request here: https://www.adafruit.com/contact_us, in hopes that this might soon be another fine product we can buy from Adafruit! You might want to post there as well - squeaky wheel gets the grease! 😉

And again, Thanks to @danh for the suggestion! 🙂

Where should I ask questions regarding MQTT?

[fair summit]

if it's about IoT, probably #help-with-wippersnapper-and-adafruitio

[lunar urchin]

I am using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, a Raspberry Pico 2W, and a KB2040 in an attempt to cobble them together to publish to one topic on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, which is my MQTT server. I am using WiFi to connect the RPi and the Pico, and 2 RFM69HCW's to connect the RPi and the KB2040. it's definitely IoT, but not wippersnapper, not sure about adafruitio- maybe, since I'm running Circuit Python on the KB2040. I'm running Micro python on the Pico, and Raspberry Pi OS on the RPi - Frankenstein, to be sure. I have the RPi and Pico working to transmit and publish data, and the KB2040 connected to the RPi via the RFM69HCW's, just having problems with MQTT taking the data from the receiver RFM69HCW (on the RPi) and publishing it to the topic. So, Yeah, not sure where to post that.

[fair summit]

we have an MQTT client library for CircuitPython, and those libraries can be used to post to Adafruit IO, or to other MQTT servers. If it's MicroPython, you might want to ask over in their discord or in their GitHub discussions, or in the MicroPython MQTT library GitHub repo that you are using.

[lunar urchin]

I got the MP stuff working, Pico is connected to the RPi, sending/publishing data - no problems there.

The KB2040 appears to be connected to the RPi and transmitting data via the RFM69HCW's, it's just that the data is not getting published to the topic. Mosquitto "sees" the connection, but data is not being transferred.

Sadly, there is no Mosquitto MQTT Discord channel for me to ask.

[fair summit]

you'd want to see whether the requests are arriving on the RPi (maybe with wireshark), or whether they are not being sent from the Pi Pico. If the latter, then the issue is on that side, and it's not necessarily related to the Mosquitto server. could you switch to HTTP to see?

are you using https://pypi.org/project/micropython-umqtt.simple/

[lunar urchin]

Yes, I'm using https://pypi.org/project/micropython-umqtt.simple/ on the Pico, not the KB2040. As I said, the RPi and the Pico work good - that's not the problem.

[fair summit]

oh, i see, you're saying it's the RFM69 communications?

[lunar urchin]

I also have a radio connection from the KB2040 to the RPi, it's just that the data is not being sent from the radio on the RPI into the MQTT topic.

[fair summit]

in that case, ask in #help-with-radio . You'd want to show your code on both sides. I guess you're using the CIrcuitPython library on one side and a MicroPython library on the other. I don't know about compatibility issues there. You could run CircuitPython on the Pi Pico.

[fair summit]

you mean an RFM radio?

[lunar urchin]

Gotcha, Ill do that, TYVM, kind Sir! 🙂

Yea.

[fair summit]

which library are you running on the RPi for RFM?

[lunar urchin]

adafruit_rfm69

It seems to work, I have a connection I can see it in the MQTT (Mosquitto) logs.

[fair summit]

so the code on the RPi is receiving on the RFM, and calling the MQTT server locally on the RPi?

[lunar urchin]

Received PINGREQ from auto-D8280124-59A8-0A56-FD4F-8E9841FDD0A0
1761668311: Sending PINGRESP to auto-D8280124-59A8-0A56-FD4F-8E9841FDD0A0

Just not publishing, I think I need to import radio library to my receiving script on the RPI.

[fair summit]

maybe, someone would have to see the code. You can get rid of the MQTT publishing in a test program and just see whether the data is arriving on the RPi

[lunar urchin]

Yes, that is a good Idea. I'll try that.

And I'l move this over to #help-with-radio

[hollow flint]

Is there not a way to have a video appear under both "Videos" and "Shorts"? I think Adafruit should look into that, instead of uploading duplicate videos: https://youtu.be/7vfm1CUQnAo and https://youtu.be/X3XK24n08LE

[cinder jetty]

Is there a way to delete all tags from all front matter sections, from all notes?

Like a "do over" button

Wrong server

[idle iron]

https://www.onlineide.pro/playground/share/26619f89-56cb-45e0-bb5f-7f80151dfab9

fishing solunar + Japanese Clock, zodiac animals replaced with freshwater fish based on usual feeding times

Someday id like to make it for circuitpython

[hollow flint]

In reference to #adafruit-blog-feed message, hopefully my feedback was sent correctly: https://mastodon.social/@Supermath101/115463924395249297

Supermath101 (@[e-mail])

-# ↩ The CircuitPython Show
@circuitpythonshow I don't see the PR links that were promised to be shared in the Show Notes.

Mastodon · Oct 30, 2025, 3:54 PM

[lunar urchin]

Just wondering if anyone here has had problems with the PMSA003i PM25 sensor intermittently failing to read? Mine has been quite problematic with regard to failing reads on several different boards I have while connected via the StemmaQT I2C interface. It's especially bad when connected to my Raspberry Pico 2W's, not too bad (but still fails after about a day of steady running) on my KB2040 boards. It usually has a failure on startup, saying something about missing pull up resistors, with the SCL connected to GP5, and SDA connected to GP4 on the RPi's which have pull up resistors integrated on the RPi. On the KB2040, I'm using GP13 for SCL, and GP12 for SDA, which seems to work better, but still fails over time. I have tried reducing the bus speed to 50000, but it still is intermittently failing to read. Any help or suggestions on how to correct this would be greatly appreciated! 🙂

One other thing, I also noted that the problem is worse when I "daisy chain" the PMSA003i with other sensors on the StemmaQT I2C bus...

[hard estuary]

I replied - thanks for catching this

[idle iron]

Anyone use a.i. to code? I love it but for every 20 prompts I need like 7 just to fix the problems

[hollow flint]

Not me personally, but yes: #adafruit-blog-feed message

[lunar urchin]

I do, currently using GPT-OSS 20b model on my Open-WebUI server - it can be a time saver, but sometimes hallucinates BADLY...

And sometimes, it writes working code... 😉

Last night, it was hallucinating BADLY, and answering me in Spanish from English prompts, and telling me to download and install non-existent Adafruit hardware libraries to make the scripts it was generating work.

[stuck moth]

When it'll help me. Generally if I need to lay out a lot of boiler plate code (think new CP module) it can be a huge boost. You still need to test, debug and understand it all.

[lunar urchin]

Agreed. Definitely helps with boilerplate, and "some" debugging (for quick suggestions on what/where to look at), but not a solution to knowledge, experience, and skill gotten through actual learning.

Although, if you are paying attention, you can still learn something, mostly when fixing AI's mistakes! 😉

It's a fun and frustrating tool, all at the same time...

[strong dock]

Hi am strongly considering considering “upgrading”* a module. Any of my soldering irons are pre SMT days.

*likely with a Pi

[lapis anchor]

for any of us not at Supercon, they're streaming some of the talks
https://www.youtube.com/@hackaday/streams

[terse lava]

I think the only time I used AI to create CircuitPython code from scratch was when I needed code written in Arduino (which I don't know) converted. Then after that figured out where the glitches were. But I do use it a fair amount to figure out why bits of code may be doing something or not doing something where I can ask AI "Why is this code throwing an error or [...] and then I paste in the code.

But I really like it to help me learn new ways to rewrite code I already solved. Meaning I get something working but I know my code is not very compact or effecient. So I will write "Can this CircuitPython code be made more effecient or readable?" and then past in my working code. It is a great way to learn ways to do stuff I may not have thought of or even know that method existed.

[rigid whale]

daylight savings

🙁

[sturdy dawn]

I thought daylight savings would make my morph clock correct, but the value returned already accounts for daylight savings. I had it programmed an hour slow ahead of time

[fierce coral]

I need help someone please

I’ve been getting the same error for weeks i don’t know why

[umbral phoenix]

@fierce coral choose a channel that seems most relevant to your issue, and post the error, code, whatever is relevant

[weary fiber]

Man, I need to do another maker-y project again, college has really distracted me from that stuff

Time to do the ol' "browse the adafruit site for cool parts and come up with a project that uses 'em"

[hollow flint]

You should also browse the "What to Make with ___" series of blog posts: https://blog.adafruit.com/tag/adafruit-learning-technologies/

[rare gulch]

Is there any update (since spring) when Adaboxes will finally come back?

[hardy cradle]

I haven't seen anything either, unfortunately. I just sent them a hopefully encouraging note using the "Suggest an item we should stock" version of the contact us form 😉 Would be nice if they did resume.

[azure grove]

guys my yt algorithm is messed up, but nicely so...

this appeared yesterday, and i was like, hey i know her! thats ladyada!

[dim tinsel]

@rapid geode @stoic mesa @tardy badger

I saw you three had a convo going around Tindie last year or so.

I am new on Etsy (selling expressive shirts for makers). I knew starting out that Etsy is not really a maker destination (ugh, and the stats support that) and that I’d need to promote outside of Etsy,

I had also hoped to use Tindie (there are shirts there). But it's a pain to make a listing (I have many dedigns) and I've yet to get any reply from support. I think for the sellers, it seems still alive, but there seems to be no one driving it anymore.

How has Tindie or Etsy been for you this past year, for selling maker products?

[hollow flint]

Credit to Adafruit for sharing #adafruit-blog-feed message. They inspired me to make this (somewhat viral) Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1oq3m7s/python_foundation_goes_ride_or_dei_rejects/

[stoic mesa]

Tindie indeed seems to run on autopilot - it works, but no new features, and not much support. But it is working for me.

However, regardless of the platform (Etsy/Tindie), you need to promote your work yourself - hoping that someone will just find you by search on Tindie is not going to work. Many people use instagram/X/mastodon for that.

@astral basin can also share his experience, he sells on Tindie.

Note also that if you are selling on Tindie, it is your responsibility to collect sales tax - Tindie doens't do that (unlike many other platforms)

[dim tinsel]

Thanks for the perspective

I’m at the stage where the creative process and listing flow is good. Now need to ramp up the marketing and visibility.

[astral basin]

Actually, past tense. I have stopped selling. I have shifted to a philanthropy model.

Curating your own followers and self promotion is no small task. That said, to sell more than small numbers, you need to find a way to reach people who don't follow you directly. Instagram and TikTok tend to work in this regard as long as you can game the algorithms.

[raven lagoon]

regarding this: https://blog.adafruit.com/2017/05/03/psa-the-ws2812b-rgb-led-has-been-revised-will-require-code-tweak/ do you have a link to the specific datasheet revision referenced here?

https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/WS2812B.pdf is still the old one. (i don't want you to just drop the new one over that link though, i need a documentation trail that proves the datasheet changed)

[dim tinsel]

I’ve spent some time in media and marketing - so know all too well the effort needed.

The challenge is to be respectful, provide value, and not be shrill.

Insta and TikTok are platforms I am starting to put my attention to. But also exploring other avenues to get attention.

Let’s see.

Maybe my best proof of marketing success will be when you folks start talking about my designs haha.

Thanks for the insights!

[stoic mesa]

the most successful independent maker I know is Unexpected Maker in Australia.
he sells through his own store. but he also sells on Tindie, and Adafruit also carries some of his products

[astral basin]

I think UM is a different kind of company. They have private contracts in addition to reseller agreements. Their direct sales is a tiny fraction of their revenue stream.

[vagrant wraith]

I do, made a pretty large code base using ai over the past year (around 100k lines of code total)

From what I learned:
All those small models cant code at all,
If you want anything close to usable use gpt 5 codex medium.
You get insane amount of usage for 20 usd a month.

Qwen code cli is free and quite nice too but isnt good at debugging complex things

Note that knowing to code helps a lot with ai coding and directing it.
By itself ifs bad either way and can offen just straight up lie

It was also really struggling with writing stm32 firmware

[mild glade]

me I would much rather keep my skills artisan and intact since AI has a way of doing things I do not like at all
and plus it's just more gratifying and satisfying that way

[pale harbor]

Hello everyone. I am going to work on temperature collection from multiple T-type thermocouple used in TES. I read that for a single channel/or single thermocouple, MAX31856 is a cheap and reliable option. But I am looking for a single board which accepts multi channel thermocouple inputs not just one (I have about 6 T-type thermocouples so don't want 6 amplifiers). I would truly appreciate any suggestions:)

[vagrant wraith]

Thats fair
I use ai mostly for work or projects with a time contraint where its substantially faster.

And I still find it gratifying since I do still have to architect, approve and debug code myself.
And the hardware and phsyical testing is still all you

Also I alway hated the coding part of software development, even before ai

[stuck cobalt]

at what voltage would you consider Lithium Ion Battery - 3.7V 10050mAh (10 Ah) https://www.adafruit.com/product/5035 dead?

[terse lava]

Define "dead". Do you mean when you should recharge it again? If so, typically you see 3V-ish as about the normal level that you recharge. You might also test the battery's cut off voltage for the protection circuitry built in. Meaning if the board protection circuit shuts it off right at 3V, you might want to make sure you are indicating "dead battery" at 3.1 or 3.2 while your circuit is still able to indicate the battery is abot to shut off.

Also note it might depend on what you are going to use it for. For example, most MCU development boards use a basic buck LDO regulator meaning it does not boost voltage, only makes it lower or at best pass through if it is below a certain threshold. So with a typical 3.3V LDO regulator on your board, if that regulator shuts down when the input is below 3.3V, then there isn't much point allowing your battery to go lower than that and is when you should charge it up again.

[glad frost]

hey fellas

[hasty niche]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-On6bWFXuM8

This is foss and hides virtual machines

[azure grove]

hi friends! how are you doing?

[reef tinsel]

Anyone know a good alternative for this? https://www.adafruit.com/product/3634 It doesn't appear to be in-stock anywhere. The 60/m is, but not the 120.

[hollow flint]

I wonder whether rotating https://www.adafruit.com/product/2970 by 90° would suffice. 🤔

[stoic mesa]

AliExpress has a bunch of analogs, like this one:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256808690805908.html
As usual, ordering from AliExpress is somewhat risky - you never know who i the actual manufacturer and what quality control they have. In my experience, I'd say ordering from Ali worked well for me 95% of the time

[vale oxide]

Hey, I have been working in embedded software development for 5+ years and I have been working on the software designs which were made by my senior who has 15+ years of experience.I was mostly working on a specific feature or device driver development.
My question is
How to learn embedded software design? I didn't find any videos on YouTube based on embedded software design.Is there any good doc that I can refer to.Thanks

[reef tinsel]

I didn't even think to order from Aliexpres... I've been on such a kick trying to stick with us companies that it didn't come to mind, but yeah I've had a lot of success ordering from there.

In fact this looks pretty close: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805200135351.html

[fair summit]

how about some open courseware: https://ocw.ece.cornell.edu/ece-3140-course-details/
https://sites.gatech.edu/omscsopencourseware/ : CS 6291
https://www.edx.org/search?q=embedded systems
etc.

[stoic mesa]

in fact, afaik (Dahn can correct me if I am wrong) Adafruit doesn't manufacture most of its flexible neopixel strips - they resell strips ordered from manufacturers in China. But they do spend time on selecting the best products, testing them and writing documentation.

[fair summit]

that's right - they are selected, and in some cases I think we specify what we want (since we make big orders)

[versed bone]

Hi I’d like to make a voice activated infrared led that darkens welding lenses. I’m not super knowledgable with electronics but my brother is, any suggestions on where to start?

[bold field]

does anyone know if the sx1262 breakouts ever made it to market?

[fair summit]

not in the store yet

[bold field]

thanks, guess I'm going with the waveshare ones then :)

[raven thunder]

To be clear, is it that the lenses already have support for an infrared remote to control them? I guess my initial sense is being worried about a project where if you mess it up, it could potentially blind someone?

[versed bone]

Uh no it couldn’t damage the eyes unless you’ve never used a welding hood before.

[raven thunder]

waves in "never used a welding hood before"

[versed bone]

So they already have sensors that sense infrared it’s an override in case there is someone welding next to you or there is a strobe around

Among other things

[raven thunder]

to be clear, my possible concern is whether it was possible that a malfunctioning projct could lighten them at an unsafe moment

[versed bone]

It doesn’t work that way sometimes lenses break batteries go bad etc

You would have to not know it’s supposed to darken and keep welding

Like it’s not an immediate danger it’s more like you have to be wholly incompetent.

[raven thunder]

okay so how do they work then when it comes to infrared?

[versed bone]

They use infrared sensors to auto darken, you can use an ir led to trigger them manually instead

[raven thunder]

like a remote control? or a lot more infared than that?

what frequency?

[versed bone]

Remote control, you see it in youtube videos

[versed bone]

There is a range I don’t remember what it was but it’s not a big deal

[raven thunder]

do you have an existing voice control thing you want to use?

[versed bone]

Dfrobot’s voice recognition module

I would also like it to work with the nitecore hu60 light, which has a 2.4 ghz remote but I’m not sure how they differentiate between devices.

[sturdy dawn]

I finally got to see the rain icon in color, which for some reason doesn't work at night

I have night time colored icons for after 8:00 p.m. and before 6:00 a.m. but they just come up white

[hollow flint]

I just noticed that at least indirectly, both DigiKey and Mouser are an Adafruit "partner" in addition to being a distributor.
For DigiKey, they dedicate a blog category and webpage just for them: http://blog.adafruit.com/category/digikey/ and https://www.adafruit.com/buyfromdigikey
For Mouser, you have to merge the information from within both https://www.crowdsupply.com/announcements/crowd-supply-has-been-acquired and the screenshot I've attached.

[stuck cobalt]

The reason I asked is I am at 3.82V on my "Lithium Ion Battery - 3.7V 10050mAh (10 Ah)
Product ID: 5035" but my "Adafruit LC709203F LiPoly / LiIon Fuel Gauge and Battery Monitor - STEMMA JST PH & QT / Qwiic
Product ID: 4712" shows 53 percent. My understanding is a Lithium Ion Battery has only used about 15 percent of its life at 3.7V. So at 3.82V we should have 90 plus percent remaining.

[stoic mesa]

I think you are mistaken.
E.g. here is one of many voltage charts for LiPo batteries (taken from https://www.ufinebattery.com/blog/useful-overview-of-lipo-battery-voltage/)

on adafruit's page about lipo batteries, they have aa different but very similar voltage curve: https://learn.adafruit.com/li-ion-and-lipoly-batteries/voltages

[stuck cobalt]

But I don't have a LiPo I have Li-Ion battery

[stuck cobalt]

https://evreporter.com/understanding-charge-discharge-curves-of-li-ion-cells/

[stoic mesa]

Indeed, Li Ion have slighlty different curves than LiPo, my apologies. But the chart you gave can't be right, they certainly start at higher than 3.4v.
I'd trust this chart more:

https://www.richtek.com/Design Support/Technical Document/AN024

I am not sure which chart is hardcoded in firmware of LC709203F

looks like they use some proprietory algorithm https://www.onsemi.com/download/application-notes/pdf/and9985-d.pdf

[stuck cobalt]

That chart is more in line with the Fuel Gauge. That helps! Thank you

[dim tinsel]

Interesting.

But his manufacture puts him at a whole other level.

[astral basin]

Exactly. Their manufacturing line is “commercial” level.

[terse lava]

You already got some good answers but the bottom line is Li-ion batteries have a rather flat discharge curve so you can not simply do a linear voltage calculation to determine how much battery you have used or have left. And besides even if you tried to do a linear fit, if we say a full battery is 4.2V and a "dead" battery is 3V (just to pick a number) then your full-to-dead range is 1.2V meaning every 0.12V drop represents 10% (again it doesn't with li-ion but play along). Then at 3.82V you have dropped 0.38V which if you divide by 0.12 to see how many 10%s you have dropped the answer is 3.16 or 31.6%. You have about 68% remaining. The more realistic "fuel gauge" number of 53% is likely more correct but certainly saying '3.82V is 90% left' is not correct.

[stuck cobalt]

Yes the data that @stoic mesa https://www.richtek.com/Design Support/Technical Document/AN024 is quite a bit different than data I found elsewhere. Other googling results I found showed a more rapid decline from 4.2 to 3.7 then a very long stabilisation at 3.7.

[terse lava]

Yes this is why the "fuel gauge" chips and code do a better job since there initially is a rapid drop from 4.2 full charge down to the "nominal" 3.7V then a long period of only a little drop, then again another faster drop towards the end. You see the same thing with many cheap Li-Ion chargers. I had one for camera batteries that when you first plugged in a depleted battery for a second or so the LCD screen would show a low percentage then jump up to about 90% and sit there for the next 2 hours. So not really helpful as the battery voltage alone isn't really a good indictor usually.

[stable dove]

I'm brainstorming an idea, and want to know how viable it would be.

How complicated and expensive would it be to make a device that allows messaging similar to what Bit Chat does over Bluetooth?

[fair summit]

I hadn't heard of BitChat before. The source code is readily available on Android and Apple platforms but is highly platform dependent. Most of the work is in the protocols, not the transmission.

If you want to make a simple BLE chat app that's not secure, etc., then that might not be too hard. There are other examples if you do a websearch for ble message chat. You could probably do it with an nRF52840 and a keyboard

We have a simple chat project: https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-ble-wireless-morse-code-chat

[hollow flint]

One similar idea I came up with was to fork https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/mesh-algo/, and replace "Layer 0" with a group of fragmented packets sent directly over 802.15.4 (without making use of any of the layers specific to Thread/ZigBee). I haven't attempted any such implementation myself, but it does seem likely to be possible, without making too many drastic changes.

[stable bobcat]

hey hi there... how are you guys ?

[hollow flint]

👋

BTW, on the topic of your Discord "About Me" section, have you considered doing let's plays of any of the games developed specifically for the Adafruit Fruit Jam? In addition to the games (and retro emulator ports) listed within that link, there's also https://adafruit-playground.com/u/relic_se/pages/fruit-jam-fruitris-tetris, https://adafruit-playground.com/u/relic_se/pages/fruit-jam-ssspeed-dating, and https://adafruit-playground.com/u/Flobio/pages/pyboom-a-game-for-the-fruit-jam.

[cedar void]

@everyone Hello!!! I've been having some issues with Neopixels 4560, I am using a QT Py to scroll through RGB test pattern, but i'm having a few of these strands that scroll through RGB but they look like pastel colors, and some that just stay solid White... I've tried many things... has anybody had this issue? or think of any reasons why this is happening?

[fair summit]

some strands are RGBW, and they take four data values, instead of 3.

though if they are 4560, they should all be the same

if they are very long, you may need to power them at both ends, or perhaps the voltage is sagging because your power supply cannot supply enough current

[cedar void]

I cut 1 strand down to 6 nodes and it did the same thing

[fair summit]

is the spacing different on the good ones vs the "bad" ones?

probably best if you start a thread in https://forums.adafruit.com. Include which test program you are using (CircuitPython or Arduino), and which QT Py. Also sounds like you might not be using a level shifter from 3.3V tto 5V? Try power the short strand with the 3.3V pin and see if it makes any difference

[cedar void]

No, they are exactly the same

[fair summit]

let me know with a link if you make a forum thread

[stable bobcat]

oh sorry! lol so i am sooo new and no clue what i am doing ... who wanna be freinds? 😄

[cedar void]

Will do! It seems these lights are just bad.. they were not new and out of the box

[fair summit]

Did you buy them directly from us? Were they in a sealed bag?

I'm not sure what you mean.

[cedar void]

These were bought a long time ago, I was not with this company at the time of purchase

[fair summit]

I am thinking maybe they are not all 4560, but a mix of various things. We don't manufacture these: we specify and order them. So the other ones you have may just resemble them. Maybe someone bought a bunch of different samples, not necessarily from Adafruit. For instance, if some are just white, there are "white-only" addressable LED's: example https://www.adafruit.com/product/2376. Some could also be RGBW: you could specify that in the test program and see if it makes a difference. I think it may not be worth dealing with these if you are able to buy new ones.

[cedar void]

It seems we did have more of them I was unaware of, but that makes sense.. thank you so much for your help!!

[unkempt wasp]

I'm looking for a hall effect sensor - I2C would be nice - that is more than a simple digital on/off. Instead it would provide some sort of data based on proximity or orientation of the magnetic field. Any recommendations?

[thick wind]

Would a magnetometer be a better fit then? https://www.adafruit.com/product/4366 is a low-cost 3-axis magnetometer with an I2C interface to provide magnetic field strength in any direction. Suitable for proximity and orientation.

[night crescent]

next adabox adababy delivery deets and faqs

new products and new humans are getting launched in the next 24 hours. adabox 22 is packed, sealed, and queued for launch, landing right as we welcome our next biological tape out from the fab. before we hit send on the subscriber emails, let’s go over some frequently asked questions, as well as questions you may not have thought to ask (but we’ll answer anyway).

https://youtu.be/q0X1mmJkNBI

[tall pond]

double huzzah!!!!!! excited for the new adabox and upcoming adababy!!! congrats to lady ada and pt!

[grave crest]

Grab the Adabox asap -- they're going fast (I made sure to get mine). You need to manually buy it if you were previously a subscriber. Per the email: "no stored cards, so you’ll enter your info fresh when you check out."

...yay!

[night crescent]

👶📦 ladyada @adafruit about to bring a whole human into the world and relaunch adabox at the same time. a twofer. she gets a baby. you get an adabox. 🚀❤️

https://www.adafruit.com/adabox022

[ocean dock]

Hello! Is there anyone who speaks Spanish for a consultation?

[unkempt wasp]

Thanks. That looks good

[dusty citrus]

I wonder how will digital id will be implemented... required just for the majour platforms or what?

[sturdy dawn]

What was that code type for images again? Looking for the editor I found once. Blarg but not sure which type

Found it. X bitmap

[lapis anchor]

Just to confirm - even if it shows active subscription in our account, we still need to manually purchase? Just trying to make sure I don't double up on orders 🙂

[lapis anchor]

manually ordered just to cover my bacon, haha don't want to miss out

[grave crest]

That's my understanding!

[lapis anchor]

Well you ARE Mr Certainly, so I'll trust your judgement ;D Gracias!

[grave crest]

No problem, enjoy making awesome things 🙂

[sturdy dawn]

My basic animation cause I'm lazy at the moment. I wanna do snowflakes

[weary fiber]

After much agonizing, I've carefully planned my upcoming semester >>

[queen shale]

Hello 👋🏽

[weary fiber]

actually, put a pin in that-- two of them are conflicting... I wanna share when I'm done though, I'm getting close-ish to finishing my EE degree >>

[queen shale]

Wow you are and electrical engineer 👷‍♀️, me too

[weary fiber]

oooookay, seems like I'll be taking

• signals & systems 2 (smith chart & transmission-line stuff but harder)
• digital design 2 (CPU design with FPGAs)
• embedded system design (embedded development)

[ornate kernel]

Congrats on #2 and #022! +1 UP 🍄‍🟫

[vernal isle]

Hey everyone, would this area be the right place to ask if someone has done a something similar to something I am looking at making?

[stoic mesa]

either this or #help-with-projects

[violet fiber]

Without doing any research first (yeah, I know, stupid), I picked up a cheap remote controlled RGB LED strip light. Far as I can tell it's virtually the same board as the waterproof strips at adafruit (not waterproof, and only 5v instead of 12 but it is the same density, and has the resistors(?) in the same spots with same labels).

The strip is much longer than I need, and on the white setting the light is more blue than I would like, so, I'm wondering, could I cut off a couple segments and follow this tutorial https://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-strips/overview (after doing the math for the power needs) to try and get a color that is closer to what I'm after?

[fair summit]

the q is what protocol it's using, but you could certainly adjust the colors. Do you have a link to the product?

[violet fiber]

Sorry, I have the app installed and can't figure out how to get links from there

https://www.walmart.com/ip/5197617941?sid=e186b20e-7789-47f8-a0da-9615295509bf

Got it

[fair summit]

based on the pictures, this is an analog RGB strip (as explained here): https://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-strips

We have an adapter for that: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neorgb-stemma

https://www.adafruit.com/product/5888

[violet fiber]

Awesome, thank you! The adapter plus a microcontroller, right?

[fair summit]

yes. on your strip, is the USB plug connected directly via a wire to the strip, or there is a power supply box in between?

maybe take a picture

do you have a microcontroller board already?

[violet fiber]

The heat shrink is covering the connections for, and stabilizes the IR receiver for the remote control. I'm pretty sure there is also some sort of microcontroller on there because once plugged in it starts up with one of the preset patterns

[fair summit]

can you show a picture where it's attached to the strip?

[violet fiber]

I do not currently have a microcontroller (have several projects that need one planned, just never bought the supplies)

[fair summit]

the walmart picture shows +24V, it looks like:

do you have markings like that on the strip?

[fair summit]

if you can take a picture of part of the strip with similar markings, that would be great

do you have a multimeter?

[violet fiber]

Sorry, not clear, it's 5v max, 1amp total

[fair summit]

I think there may be a radio or IR chip in the lump between the black USB calbe and the multicolored bunch of wires. Is it IR or a radio remote?

[violet fiber]

The lump houses an IR receiver, yes

[fair summit]

you won't be able to use the remote control. You'll need to cut off the wires and run them to the https://www.adafruit.com/product/5888

This is an easy-to-use microcontroller for the project: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4900

You'll also need a stemma/qt cable, one of the "QT to QT" ones here: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4210

I don't know how well you'll succeed at getting the color you want. These strips can only display a single color on the whole strip. If you want different colors at each LED, animations, etc., you need to get a real NeoPixel strip.

you'd program it in CircuitPython or Arduino

[violet fiber]

Yeah, I was actually planning on cutting off from the non-plug in anyway (the strip is way longer than I need for the project I got it for, but it was the shortest they had and that's why I got this vs the better ones), so, losing the remote isn't a big deal

Cool, the RP2040 is what is needed for one of my other planned projecta

[fair summit]

https://www.adafruit.com/category/168

if you get real neopixels, you'd use a different widget to drive it

[violet fiber]

And, I just want a less blue white across the whole length (something close to what gets labeled as cool white or daylight, where they set white is definitely blue tinged)

[fair summit]

https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=white+led+strip

of various color temps

[violet fiber]

I'd still need the controller and adapter for those, right?

(I'm thinking the ultraflexible one)

https://www.adafruit.com/product/4612

[fair summit]

that is cool white I thought you wanted a warmer color temp

[violet fiber]

Cool white, just less blue than the onn one - it's obviously blue

[fair summit]

https://www.adafruit.com/product/4613

warm white

yes, you can use the same adapter, if you want to vary the intensity. But the color will not change

[violet fiber]

That is supposedly white. I run "cool white" or daylight (6000-6500k) in nearly all light bulbs in my home, this is bluer

[fair summit]

the white LED ones usually have a white phosphor

the RGB one is just mixing the R,G,B to your eyes

[violet fiber]

Oooooooo

And, yeah, I figured that was what it was doing

Which is why I wanted some way to have more control over the mixing

[jagged citrus]

My brother found this ender 3 in the garbage
Wondering if i can get it working
Although its missing some parts like the uh
The screen thing
Idk how its called ive never had one of these before

Still, 80%~90% of a 3d printer for free is crazy
I wouldnt be able to afford one of these unless i saved for a whole year since im just a student

Im gonna clean it up, take some photos and ask in #help-with-3dprinting later

[dense matrix]

does adafruit have a stepper motor driver that recieves PWM inputs

[fair summit]

https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=stepper+motor+driver

some take I2C some take PWM

[dense matrix]

Thanks! I only saw 1 driver but I will comb through all of them

[sturdy dawn]

Website down

Electro maker also down. Creepy

[hard estuary]

Cloudflare is down, internet is broken

[whole jacinth]

i’m seeing reports of a general Cloudflare outage

[sturdy dawn]

Oh yeah the proxy

[solar kindle]

Yeah, looks like it might need a control panel (about $25) and maybe a motherboard (about $40)

[jagged citrus]

Planning on running it with octoprint so i dont think ill need a control panel.
The original motherboard is still there and looks untouched. If it doesnt work ill go for a klipper compatible mobo.

Already bought replacements for the broken parts (extruder, y motor mount, one of the limit switches, also bought a new y level tensioner and a extruder knob)

Ive cleaned it up and aside from the broken parts its in surprisingly good condition, no dents, no water or humidity damage, no torn wires

Its likely the owner didnt use it much and sat there collecting dust, then one day broke it and instead of fixing it they decided to just throw it away

[errant geyser]

I've got an ender 3 and and ender 5 that are fully assembled and just collecting dust. They have all the modern upgrades you could do for their generations but they are just... so far behind now. It's sort of frustrating for me because it seems like the only path for me to get better output is to get a new rig, the ender 3 v1 / ender 5 v1 parts aren't really on anybody's priority list these days 🙁

[errant geyser]

just locked mine in. I'm so excited.

[jagged citrus]

i am aware enders are not as good as modern alternatives, but i got it for free soooo im not complaining

[errant geyser]

if you are near oklahoma

then maybe you can have another one 😉

[burnt tendon]

I mean, you can still do things with an Ender? Klipper-ify it, turn it into a Voron Enderwire or Ender-Trident, use it as a cocktail or coffee robot

Try that with your old HP inket?

[rich basin]

so finally after weeks of banging my head i got the usb host working on the rp2350 with c

the trick is to go down low level directly to the sdk, omit arduino (philower code) and platformio, it is cmake and plain latest pico sdk and things have started to work

not sure if you can run the host mode on the philower core, i got detection of device attachment with it but no signals

on tinyusb that is

i now can see mouse delta x and y and that finally

microcontroller coding on c level feels sort of a little bit like the wild west of coding

flakey toolchains, debugging support mediocre at best, documentation often not there or not enough and stacks which do not work well together

once you move out of the Arduino comfort zone... things get hard

platformio works well and is good, if your hardware is well supported which the picos are not

and once you lose those two options it is down to the bare metal of apis

i am glad tinyusb still works as abstraction layer though

excellent library btw

[jagged citrus]

Its gonna take me a while to swim there but sure

[dusty citrus]

cherimoyas are weird, taste like soap, but great tasting

[weary fiber]

I’ve still got my ender 3 from 6 years ago lmao

Every few months I regain a passion for 3d printing and tune the heck out of it

It always elephant-foots eventually though

[fathom flicker]

Got my adabox and it looks like the learn link 404s? Did I just get it too fast living in brooklyn or am I misstyping?

Also y'all really have the best packing tissue paper. I gotta save it to give christmas presents with

[hollow flint]

From what I've observed, Adafruit seems to have put a lot of effort into avoiding the leakage of spoilers. Due to that, my educated guess is that there's likely a requirement of being signed into the same Adafruit account when visiting the learn.adafruit.com website, as when you originally purchased it, but I could be wrong. 🤷

[fathom flicker]

I'm still signed in? It's all good. I can wait.

[jagged citrus]

I like how moddable the enders are
It was easy to find replacement parts and upgrades for mine

[hollow flint]

BTW, although there are some Adafruit employees in this Discord server, the AdaBox FAQ does mention a different method of contacting customer support: https://www.adafruit.com/adaboxfaq#questions

[hollow flint]

Another cool thing about Adafruit, which seems to be of a similar mindset as their open source hardware and FOSS efforts, is that they literally dedicated an entire YouTube video about it: https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/07/12/eye-on-npi-3m-cushion-lock-protective-wrap-and-dispenser-eyeonnpi-scotch-digikey-adafruit/

[idle lion]

The guide that accompanies the box is still in the works. It should be published soon.

[swift hatch]

Yes, thanks for asking about it @fathom flicker -- we're putting the finishing touches on the the guide and it should be ready within a few days!

[fathom flicker]

No worries. I found other resources on the learn site that I'm messing about with.

Trying to stay vauge to not spoil it 😆

[viral spruce]

@fathom flicker you got it early! Thank you for not spoiling it, I just peeked at the guide and it’ll be worth the next few days of waiting 🙂

[fathom flicker]

All good. I should finish some other projects with the 12v mini boosts that y'all send me a few days ago

[serene kettle]

Has anyone here taken applied statistics? Im rlly confused about something lol

[hollow flint]

Out of curiosity, is there any industry-specific terminology that people generally use to describe these phenomena?

• https://www.solder.party/docs/rp2040-stamp/round-carrier/ → https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/rp2040-stamp-round-carrier → https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/pimoroni-ltd/SP027/16892607
• https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-dev-kits/en/latest/esp32c6/esp32-c6-devkitc-1/index.html → https://www.adafruit.com/product/5672 → https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/adafruit-industries-llc/5672/18073177
  Also, is that last link equivalent to https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/espressif-systems/ESP32-C6-DEVKITC-1-N8/17728861 via any metric?

[hollow flint]

BTW, my reasoning for mentioning DigiKey was https://www.adafruit.com/buyfromdigikey, but I don't know whether those phenomena are exclusive to them.

[whole jacinth]

can you summarize what you mean what you mean, instead of asking us to figure it out by clicking through a lot of links without context?

[zealous oyster]

Well, I'm glad the arduino tos got updated before I did my BF shopping 😄 I'm a bit sad about all this, but I bet there's tons of great hardware out there, Adafruit make a few really cool boards! This entire situation will push me to stop being lazy and stop reaching for arduino out of convenience, but find cool alternatives.

[soft hound]

Wow, I won't spoil what in the new Adabox in case there's others out there who like the fun of a surprise but a second surprise was seeing just how good the default out-of-box stuff runs

[zealous oyster]

I need to come back to the boxes. I used to get them a few years ago

the current one is probably sold out?

[soft hound]

Not sure, they have it so you subscribe and if you subscribe it lets you add it to your cart

I got mine pretty quick

[hollow flint]

In the first example, a small open source hardware vendor, Solder Party, sent some of their products to be available at Pimoroni. Some time afterwards, Pimoroni started sending a subset of those products to be sold on DigiKey. However, the only mention of the Solder Party brand within DigiKey's product page, is the SP prefix that each Solder Party product number has on Pimoroni's website.
The second example is very similar, but Espressif Systems instead of Solder Party, Adafruit instead of Pimoroni, and ESP insstead of SP. The very last link looks to be a duplicate of the one just above it, but specifically not passing through Adafruit as an intermediary.

[zealous oyster]

It looks like I'm late for this box.

[hollow flint]

Although this idea is lacking an underlying theme, and has a stronger focus on software/firmware, compared to the average AdaBox that Adafruit has historically sold, you could just follow the suggestion from both #live-broadcast-chat message and the screenshot below:

[jovial rock]

re: arduino. well, I swear. I shall begin in Klingon, take a tour through Forth, and then dust off my rusty Esperanto and fortran. And I will use my 'inside' headvoice. disappointed, not surprised ... Okay, you might brainhear some 'dup' and 'pop' now and again. unserious

[crude wolf]

hey all! got my adabox 022 yesterday here in fast-shipping iowa (wave next time you fly over!) and the only spoiler that i'll drop is that my son and i assembled it, fired it up, and proceeded to completely lose track of time playing with it for the rest of the evening. cant put a price on that kind of experience. thanks, adafruit team! 🙂

[zealous oyster]

thank you!

[zealous oyster]

ha! So Fruit Jam looks really cool!

[woven lily]

Has anyone tried to take adafruit's schematics for some breakout boards and tried to print them with JCLPCB/PCBWAY/etc.? My understanding is adafruit won't manufacture boards on-demand for customers so you have to go through a 3rd party manufacturer sometimes?

[hollow flint]

Do you mean like taking an assembly that consists of multiple separate Adafruit breakout and/or dev boards, and combine them into a single PCB design? If so, I think they've published a slightly different guide, that should help you with that end-goal: https://learn.adafruit.com/making-pcbs-with-oshpark-and-eagle

[woven lily]

That seems to be a great resource, I am going to look into it. Thank you very much!

[hollow flint]

If your end-goal is to reduce the the unstructured tendencies that often arise when combining multiple independent PCBs, this might be a more convenient option overall: https://learn.adafruit.com/swirly-grid

[woven lily]

Mostly was just wondering about 1:1 copies of existing adafruit breakout boards, but printed with a 3rd party. But your first link you shared that describes how to combine different boards onto one PCB is actually more helpful to us. Thank you

[fair summit]

Is the issue that a board is out of stock? You can also check Digikey and other distributors.

[hollow flint]

In addition to what @fair summit said above, at least for all the first-party PCBs that I've looked at, Adafruit does offer a 10% discount when purchasing 10-99 units, with it being 20% when purchasing 100+ units, of any single SKU in one order. I don't know whether that's also true for https://www.adafruit.com/buyfromdigikey and others.

[woven lily]

Good point. Yes the BQ24074 was out recently, I see it's back in stock anyway on adafruit's website

[woven lily]

The first link you shared @hollow flint is still useful, we may end up following the steps outlined there to put a drv8833 and a bq24074 on the same pcb

[hollow flint]

Also, although more applicable if you're trying to exclusively shop for Adafruit's products at https://www.microcenter.com/site/stores/default.aspx or other brick-and-mortar stores, there are often multiple products that can serve the same purpose, especially if you're willing to do some soldering. https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-bq25185-usb-dc-solar-lithium-ion-polymer-charger/overview even contains instructions for how to combine https://www.adafruit.com/product/6091, https://www.adafruit.com/product/368, and https://www.adafruit.com/product/2788, to add a DC solar input connector.

[woven lily]

Tyvm, you folks are super helpful! Appreciate it.

Long story short our usecase is to build a fairly simple robot learning kit for some local schools and youth clubs around here. I talked to support over email and they told us it is OK to use adafruit products in it. We're using press-fit connectors at the moment since soldering isn't an option for some of the kiddos (the press-fit connectors still need adult supervision). In the future a printed PCB combining some of the breakout boards into one might be useful for us, so that's where the resources you shared are helpful

[hollow flint]

I'm curious, what was your reason for choosing to DIY, instead of selecting a product from one of the 124 different products that are normally stocked at DigiKey? https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/robotics-kits/942
I should clarify that some of them are split into multiple different kit variations, with a smaller number of actually distinct robots.

[woven lily]

For personal interest mostly. Also a lot of kits out there didn't seem to possess the horsepower out-of-box to do edge ML

Speaking of which, it would have been great is there was a Feather option with larger volumes of psram, something similar to the xiao esp32 s3 (8mb of psram). Mostly because if you want to do anything with tflite and image processing, you can hit ram limits quickly

[hollow flint]

If you can source a compatible PSRAM chip, https://www.adafruit.com/product/6000 has an unpopulated footprint for one. IIRC, the RP2350 has a 16 megabyte maximum for each chip-selected interface. Also, I've heard that the CS-pin subsystem does support PSRAM/Flash banking, by using more than one GPIO pin as CS, but I'm guessing that'll likely be very complicated to pull off.

[hollow flint]

If 8 MB is sufficient, https://www.adafruit.com/product/6399, https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-thing-plus-rp2350.html, and https://www.adafruit.com/product/6130 are all Feather(-compatible) boards with those capabilities.

[woven lily]

Excellent, thanks for the head’s up. I missed the rp2350 one

[spiral pebble]

Does adafruit have a qtpy breakout for a motor driver? Looking for something to control a parastaltic pump using i2c.

[rigid whale]

@spiral pebble These might be what your after. https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=i2c+motor+driver

[spiral pebble]

Ty

[zealous oyster]

ha! my matrix works again 😄
https://youtu.be/GJRR6IRDej4

[ebon totem]

Love this!

[crisp horizon]

strange question but if i am looking for an AR dev, what should i be looking for?

i.e skills

AR is so insanely foreign to me, no matter how many videos i watch, it is quite challenging to wrap my head around what it is actually doing

[jagged citrus]

I got the ender 3 from the garbage werking again

I maybe probably could print something tomorrow

[edgy apex]

I typically hate writing words but I sometimes make exceptions.

[woven lily]

Thank you for reminding me 2600 exists. I haven't looked into it in 10 years, It was a great resource, we have a local chapter here. Maybe time to revisit

also congrats on the acceptance!

[edgy apex]

yea, meetings are good, we have one here. I tell everyone to bring whatever they are working on or whatever they are into. Meshtastic is a good one because its easy to get into and everyone seems to like it. the meeting here is at my friends computer museum that runs on home assistant, past few months we got phones/payphone going/integrated into ha.

[jagged citrus]

I got the ender 3 from the garbage printing

[hard estuary]

nice work!

[jagged citrus]

i should have bought a spatula

[terse lava]

Or perhaps a little Elmer's glue stick to the plate before printing.

[jagged citrus]

I did put glue stick

Idk why its so stuck

[terse lava]

MORE glue stick then? 😆

[jagged citrus]

Mmmm.. maybe

[terse lava]

Well your first and last print looks great. 😁

[jagged citrus]

Oh come on 😭

Ok i finally took it out

Ill inform the results tomorrow on the 3d printing help channel

[edgy apex]

Happy Thanksgiving, gobble gobble til you wobble 🦃

[neon phoenix]

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Even if you're not in the US I hope you use today as an excuse to eat too much and remember what you're thankful for 🤣

[gritty cedar]

Hi! Just want to say hi and good evening from the UK! i am a builder and my current project is make a esp32 work with stuff such as l298N motor Driver to make a functional car! I hope i can settle in and glad to build with you!

[stoic mesa]

Welcome!
but I'd suggest trading L298N for something more modern and more efficient. There are plenty of better motor drivers nowadays

[slender bane]

Any Adafruit black friday sales announced for 2025? (Didn't see anything immediately on the site)

[quaint saddle]

looking at grabbing a thermal camera during the sales. Looking at a P2 Pro or a Thor002 can anyone recommend one

[hard estuary]

They had a 15% off sale last weekend, don't know if they're doing anything this weekend

[pastel steppe]

hi hello, idk if there is a good place to post this but curious if there is a way to make my n64/ps1 games run a little better on the pigrrl? I just notice on other people running retro pie that the n64/ps1 games SEEM to run pretty well and on the pigrrl they really struggle to run properly

wondering if this is just a matter of changing a few settings or if this is a hardware issue (using the pi3 on my project)

[rigid whale]

@pastel steppe Is it possible to overlock the pigrrl?

PS1 seems to work fine on my retropied pi400. N64 seems to struggle so it might be a specific emulator that does a better job.

I overlocked my pi400 and it did smooth things out for me.

[pastel steppe]

it seeeeems like it should be..... i just am not sure if this will overclock for every emu on the device or will this just allow the pi to use more power when it needs to?

[rigid whale]

That should be global for the whole system.

[pastel steppe]

oh actually by poking around I see some people talking about best overclock settings

I think i will experiement a bit and I'll come back with my findings

[solid vale]

Anyone know which channel would be best to ask a question about batteries and LED’s? Nothing adafruit related

[hard estuary]

#help-with-projects

[sick apex]

i just modded my oscilloscope, apparently the manufacturer wanted to save a buck; they sell the same scope but with a signal generator for an extra £50 except it must not cost them very much to put the right components on the board because mine has the signal gen components so i just updated the firmware and now my scope has a signal gen that can do 25MHz sine waves and 10MHz square waves which i think its pretty cool

[golden minnow]

I did that same thing about a decade ago with a tv.
Not exactly sure how I stumbled into it.
I had a tv that was locked at 720p. I saw that there was the same model in 1080p.
I searched and found that from what I could tell, it was the exact same tv hardware. So that means it was purely a software lock.

I dug around and found the support site, found the firmware and software (before Google TV) for the 1080p model.
Flashed to USB and installed it on tv.

Boom. Saved over $300 if I would’ve bought the 1080p.

Now with 8k TVs and everyone having 4k, that seems dumb. But back then. It was really cool.

[sick apex]

I mean it's really cool anyway

someone also wrote doom for it so I might try that haha

[golden minnow]

Unlocking features that were put behind a paywall is always fun.

[dusty citrus]

it's out of topic, but any idea of where I can find this part? can't find anything out of aliexpress

[weary fiber]

Without a sense of scale, I'd give my default answer of "seek in mcmaster-carr and ye shall find"

[dusty citrus]

there is none in europe, it's a AR-15 Fire control group pin

[weary fiber]

lmao I was JUST gonna say, looks like a pin from a rifle

[dusty citrus]

likely I could machine it, but it has some weird coating
not mentioning it's expensive to machine it

[weary fiber]

Even though it's literally just a pin, I'm gonna assume the admins of this chat probably want zero discussion of "attaining firearms parts" haha

[dusty citrus]

ah sorry

if you want, you can dm me

[weary fiber]

More specific to tech maker stuff: I just finished my hardest programming assignment ever I think?

We had to make our own memory allocator that's at least 70% as good as malloc()

Weighted average of average/max space efficiency & throughput

We were taught the basic ideas of blocking and free lists and whatnot, but I was unprepared for how much nuance there is in balancing efficiency & avoiding slow syscalls

[golden abyss]

I’m working on a project using a Raspberry Pi and the Adafruit Python library to control an Adafruit PCA9685 servo driver, running 12 digital servos. Everything works well most of the time, but occasionally all 12 servos suddenly snap hard to what looks like their maximum (or minimum) angle at the exact same moment. They move very fast and aggressively, then stay locked in position, and I can’t get them to go limp no matter what I try. It sometimes happens when I exit the program or call the deinit function, but not always. Does anyone know why the PCA9685 would do this, or how to debug it? And is there any way to force servos into a “limp” or unpowered state through the PCA9685? Any insight would be hugely appreciated.

[hasty wedge]

Tri-tone melody with flashing LED on a 2 cents MCU

[languid oak]

Qualcomm/Arduino.cc: after reading several posts of Adafruit's BLOG of end November 2025 and after viewing EEVblog 1721 - RIP Arduino (New T&C Deep Dive), I canceled my paid subscription of Arduino Cloud, next I deleted my Arduino Cloud account because I don't accept Qualcomm/Arduino.cc's new T&C.

[hasty wedge]

Awesome!

I never purchased a single authentic Arduino in my life

And I certainly will not in the future thanks to the Qualcomm acquisition

(no, all my 100+ Adafruit devices are 100% authentic)

(also, there are so many rip-off Adafruit devices on Amazon and Ali)

[opal stag]

Are the changes limited to their cloud product? I generally stay away from cloud solutions (for personal projects) for reasons like this, but could this also affect the hardware and IDE?

[burnt tendon]

There is a long and storied history of companies deciding that they were going to re-license an entire codebase all of the sudden.

[edgy apex]

those idiots are gonna be wondering why no one wants to use their stuff and its because they arent part of the community anymore. Open source now, open source tomorrow, open source forever!

They didn't even like try and see where open source could get them they just threw money and flipped a switch.

[fair thunder]

Quick question about shipping, if I'm in NYC would my order get to me faster or the same speed with something like UPS ground vs USPS ground?

[fair summit]

I am in eastern MA and I normally get UPS ground the next day from Adafruit in NYC.

[hasty wedge]

New EVB for MHS762 tri-tone melody chip

[polar plinth]

gonna make a linux distro for the adafruit metro esp32-s3

[weary fiber]

Finals coming up...

I will rejoice when I never have to look at this table again

[polar plinth]

oops

i guess dont use the espressif toolchain

i am gonna try crosstool-ng

[arctic gyro]

Hello, I need some help learning how I can accomplish smooth servo motor movements on my Raspberry Pi 5 using the Adafruit ServoKit Library.

I already have everything wired up, I've tried googling how to get smooth servo motor movement on a raspberry pi, but I've found nothing in regards to using the ServoKit Library and the PWM Controller.

I'm interested in Animatronics and Robots, so learning how to implement smooth servo motor movements will be very useful to me.

[ancient rivet]

by "smooth" do you mean the ability to control speed?

[arctic gyro]

Yep! I don't want servos to snap between positions

[ancient rivet]

unfortunately thats tricky with these simple hobby servos

they dont have any native speed control

they simply move as fast as possible from A to B

so to control speed, you have to programmatically send out a series of positions

that can be a simple loop, but the general issue will be dealing with blocking behavior of such an approach

but you can start with that to see if it'll work

[arctic gyro]

I'd like to start that

[ancient rivet]

is the setup currently working in general? can move servo, etc.?

[arctic gyro]

Yes, the servo works perfectly fine

[ancient rivet]

START_ANGLE = 0
FINISH_ANGLE = 180 
DELTA_ANGLE = 0.5
DELTA_SPEED = 0.1  # larger = slower

angle = START_ANGLE
while angle <= FINISH_ANGLE:
    kit.servo[0].angle = angle
    angle += DELTA_ANGLE
    time.sleep(DELTA_SPEED)

[arctic gyro]

All that did was make the servo snap to the position on the far left, and sort of shake a little

[ancient rivet]

play with the value

[arctic gyro]

Which Value?

My apologies, I just wanna be sure what I should be editing

[ancient rivet]

START_ANGLE = 30
FINISH_ANGLE = 60 
DELTA_ANGLE = 1
DELTA_SPEED = 1  # larger = slower

angle = START_ANGLE
while angle <= FINISH_ANGLE:
    print("moving to:", angle)
    kit.servo[0].angle = angle
    angle += DELTA_ANGLE
    time.sleep(DELTA_SPEED)

[arctic gyro]

Oh, angle = {value}, right?

Ooh I figured it out, it's moving super slowly rn

A higher sleep value will make it go faster, right?

[ancient rivet]

lower

DELTA_ANGLE and DELTA_SPEED will both affect the apparent "smoothness" as well as the resulting speed

so just play with them to get the desired effect

[arctic gyro]

For Delta Angle, will a lower or higher number make it smoother?

[ancient rivet]

lower

smoother, but also slower

[arctic gyro]

This is working great! Now I have another question, I want my servo to loop between 2 positions, the servo should go to the first position slowly, but to the last position quickly.

How would I code that?

[ancient rivet]

another loop

put that code snippet above into a function

then call that function

[arctic gyro]

How do I make a function? My apologies, I'm quite new to using Python and Raspberry Pi GPIO

[ancient rivet]

def servo_move(START_ANGLE, FINISH_ANGLE, DELTA_ANGLE, DELTA_SPEED):
    angle = START_ANGLE
    while angle <= FINISH_ANGLE:
        print("moving to:", angle)
        kit.servo[0].angle = angle
        angle += DELTA_ANGLE
        time.sleep(DELTA_SPEED)

POS_A = 30
POS_B = 75

while True:
    servo_move(POS_A, POS_B, 1, 1)   # slower move
    servo_move(POS_B, POS_A, 1, 0.1) # faster move

[arctic gyro]

Like this?

[ancient rivet]

yep. dont need these anymore though.

[arctic gyro]

It's working, but it's snapping between positions. Like after it's loop is done, it snaps to position A

[ancient rivet]

the loop is infinite

maybe the last line in loop moving from B to A is too fast?

oh wait. code is too simple. doesnt allow negative moves 🙁

def servo_move(START_ANGLE, FINISH_ANGLE, DELTA_ANGLE, DELTA_SPEED):
    angle = START_ANGLE
    if FINISH_ANGLE < START_ANGLE:
         while angle >= FINISH_ANGLE:
            print("moving to:", angle)
            kit.servo[0].angle = angle
            angle -= DELTA_ANGLE
            time.sleep(DELTA_SPEED)       
    else:
        while angle <= FINISH_ANGLE:
            print("moving to:", angle)
            kit.servo[0].angle = angle
            angle += DELTA_ANGLE
            time.sleep(DELTA_SPEED)

[arctic gyro]

I was able to capture what was happening

I gotta walk my dogs, when I get back inside, I'll show you my completed code! :3

[arctic gyro]

@ancient rivet This is my finalized code! I cant thank you enough for helping understand how to control my Servo's speed! ^w^

If there's anything I should fix or edit, please let me know! :3

[ancient rivet]

that looks OK for a basic demo of what is needed to simulate speed control

[opal stag]

Is there a long waitlist for the adabox subscription? I'm just curious because I added my email a couple of weeks ago and haven't received anything regarding it. I thought it might be either due to a lot of demand or emails only going out at certain times. Or maybe I did something wrong.

[fair summit]

please email [e-mail]

[stoic topaz]

hello can someone help me with my connecting my adafruit power relay featherwing to a particle argon

[ancient rivet]

the argon is a feather form factor? one of these?
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3997

[ancient rivet]

there's a guide for the relay wing here:
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-power-relay-featherwing/overview

[jolly terrace]

How do I contact someone about this?

I just want to get sweet fruit sent to my college building (in nyc)

[fair summit]

Write to [e-mail]

[jolly terrace]

thanks!

[dusty citrus]

Bah at this point I guess that I don't care anymore, also cause of wwiii, every accusation is a confession...
I managed to make a diy functional printer head, but not a paper trail as stuff keeps getting stuck.
you can use either thick film resistor to push liquid in or soft robotics.
for the structure/heads, you can use uv liquid/uv printers, by "pulsing" individual pixels (actually it works like a mask but you get the point), you can get even smaller details, but it depends on the uv liquid, so it's lots trial and error

so if anyone wanna retry / use it as inspirantion go on

[stable dove]

where is the circuitpython code to make a Circuitplayground advertise over bluetooth? (ble)

i just want the bluefruit to send out a signal, and be read by another bluefruit

[cinder jetty]

is there a way to open the obsidian mobile app, from a different app?
my own app?

wrong chat again

why do i keep mixing this one and obsidian

[sturdy dawn]

Making a dominos logo for the LED matrix so the pizza guy knows exactly where to go

Just tilt it up at a 45° angle 🤣

Their logo is basic enough to work on a low res display

Actually I made it upsidedown so I gotta go -135°

[golden igloo]

Which would be the best channel to get some help with a raspberry pi and sending data to Adafruit IO?

[fair summit]

#help-with-wippersnapper-and-adafruitio

[golden igloo]

Thank you

[hasty wedge]

How does anyone actually solder this?

[rigid whale]

Set oven to 350 and bake for 10-20 minutes. /s

I would think a heat gun but that might blow the part off center.

[hasty wedge]

I don't have an oven

Well, heading to Costco right now for a counter top one

[daring goblet]

Imagine I've got a 4kiB (32kib) I2C EEPROM and a USB-capable microcontroller (STM32, Pico, etc).
What would be involved in getting it to appear as a UF2 drive that I can drag a 4kiB .uf2 file onto and program that onto the EEPROM? The microcontroller does not boot off the EEPROM.

[fair thunder]

Aside from Micro Center (the one closest to me is sold out), does anyone know anywhere else I can get Ferric Chloride for etching PCBS ASAP? Preferably in Manhattan.

[stoic mesa]

Amazon has some with prime delivery on Tuesday.

[fair thunder]

Yeah, I want to make my boards tomorrow and I just realized today I'm low on ferric chloride, I may have to go to the Micro Center in Flushing.

[polar plinth]

You make boards at home?

[placid crescent]

hi guys
so i was laid off recently as a fresher
offcampus embedded firmware jobs are very difficult
everyone is asking for experience
Any seniors here kindly tell me any tips please.What can i do to hired please tell me.i worked in a startup for a year for free during my clg but that experience is not counted

[fair thunder]

Yep, it's pretty easy.

[stable dove]

What's the name of those things that feel muscle movements and can trigger a circuit?

I'm trying to make a bionic arm for a young woman who was born without her lower arm from a bit above the wrist

Her parents can't afford those big fancy ones. And she's fine with not having a full set of fingers on the bionic arm

[polar plinth]

Do you do it outside or do you have a fumehood

[fair thunder]

I have a fume hood I use which vents to outside.

[rigid whale]

@stable dove capacitive touch sensors?

[stable dove]

Is that what they're called? I'm talking about the things that you can put on a muscle and it will trigger it. Aren't those the things that are behind touch screens?

[stoic mesa]

I believe there was a whole open source project on creating prosthetic arms for people with disabilities. I do not remember the details, but it would make sense to find it and see what the already have

[fair summit]

https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=myoware

[stable dove]

Yeah I found those on Google but they Don't use electronics

[fair summit]

a touch sensor is different than a muscle sensor

[stable dove]

Emg electrodes

That looks like the thing

[fair summit]

https://myoware.com/

[stable dove]

The arm I'm going to make here is going to be more Mega man-like a normal arm

[fair summit]

https://www.sparkfun.com/myoware-2-muscle-sensor.html

[stable dove]

I think this is what I'm looking for

[fair summit]

but it's on backorder!

[stable dove]

Shucks

Do you think mouser would have it?

[fair summit]

various places have the myoware accessory boards in stock, but not the actual sensor. Seems like it's out of stock everywhere.

[stable dove]

Looks like digikey has it

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/sparkfun-electronics/19719/16511099

[fair summit]

This product is no longer manufactured.

[stable dove]

Is there a new one coming in stock sometime?

[fair summit]

we don't make this - we stocked the one made for Myoware by Sparkfun

I started webseraching EMG sensor and got some interesting hits, but haven't seen any prices yet

https://core-electronics.com.au/guides/getting-started-with-emg-muscle-sensors-measure-muscle-flexing/

(Australia)

https://www.engineersgarage.com/arduino-based-emg-monitor-ad8226/ uses an AD8226 module

multi-chip project: https://www.instructables.com/Muscle-EMG-Sensor-for-a-Microcontroller/

Ali Express has various EMG sensor results, hard to tell if any good, look like Ad8226 boards

https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-emg-sensor.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.search.0

ebay has similar listings. Amazon listings are more random

[stoic mesa]

digikey has this, by Seeed studio:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/seeed-technology-co-ltd/101020058/5482548?gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20243136172&gbraid=0AAAAADrbLliOibal_wzZSkVnkcFl1SJoq&gclid=Cj0KCQiA6NTJBhDEARIsAB7QHD0KMlbzFeLKUTG9n6EZgRHiUZneomHF0yfKA7t5uWjYYyf3VmIX32kaAq7xEALw_wcB

Seeed studio is a well-known brand; while it is not as trustworthy as Adafruit, it is certainly more reliable than random aliexpress listing

here is their wiki page on this sensor:
https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Grove-EMG_Detector/

[polar plinth]

My adafroot metro esp32-s3 just arrived

[orchid karma]

I'm not sure which chat is the best place for this, but I have an idea that is a bit beyond my skill level, but I think it might be worth pursuing by anyone who thinks it's worthy 😉

Bradán Lane came up with this: https://gitlab.com/bradanlane/telnet2serial/ and it's the first example I know of someone getting serial anything through to an iOS device. One of the requests we always get at my company is "can I use iPads", and the answer has always been no.

We use a website/Chrome and webserial, much like https://code.circuitpython.org/ to talk to a RPi Pico, but webserial isn't available on iOS.

If you start with Bradán's work, and add a Websocket Secure server on the RP2040 (or maybe convert this to an ESP32-S3?), and then, on the UART output, use a USB-CDC Host, like a CH55x or another RP2040 configured as a USBCDC host, I think it could work. For the secure part of the Websocket server, you'd need a certificate, and I came across this service that should work: https://local-ip.co/

Anyway, I'd love to get this going myself, but it's just out of reach for me technically, and admittedly, time-wise.

[polar plinth]

I love that Adafruit made an accompanying video with the docker Linux tutorial

[polar plinth]

i found the pdf online but didnt know it had an accompanying video, which was pleasant surprise
https://learn.adafruit.com/docker-esp32-s3-linux

it also helps me learn a bit about docker itself

[polar plinth]

i did some research on the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 because of a claim ladyada made that they dont have an MMU which is featured on this particular product and the data sheet says it uses the Xtensa®
dual-core 32-bit LX7 microprocessor, so i looked at that datasheet, and it seems its possible to add a MMU, im assuming the WROOM doesnt?

[fair summit]

https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32s3/api-reference/system/mm.html. The capabilities are built into the chip. It is a rather simple address space remapping. I see no mention of TLB, and the HW reference manual doesn't mention it either. It is not the sort of page-level MMU that an OS usually wants.

The xtensa features may be optional for the CPU design, and Espressif did not license and include them

some discussion in the comments here: https://hackaday.com/2023/08/19/linux-running-on-not-a-lot/

[somber spindle]

Linux port for xtensa architecture. None of these branches are stable.

love it

[crisp lantern]

Cool! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDDfcamgyTw I want to build one

[polar plinth]

I've been trying to make maintainable distro for Xtensa

[edgy apex]

you folks haven't seen any museum progress in a couple years at least so expect me to share some of it in the next few weeks

[shut night]

@umbral phoenix you helped me with a silly project i was panicking on about a month ago, designing some main boards for an interactive installation some friends were putting up in the denver zoo - they're up and i've finally got some public video of them in this reel here https://www.instagram.com/p/DSGimgciSeI/

dark.moon.designs

The Drum Circle Installation is back up and running, its new brains are kicking it into gear at @denverzoo Zoo Lights! We are so happy to bring this fun interactive back and clear off the dust. We overhauled all the inner workings and have everything networked and talking to each other. This is the very beginning of reintroducing interactivity i...

Instagram

after you pinpointed the weird stuff everything was great and the integration went flawlessly

[umbral phoenix]

@shut night Wow, that's impressive!. If you wish, you could post in #show-and-tell with a description of how it's done.

[shut night]

oh thanks for the nudge, i skimmed the channels and missed that one

[slim blaze]

I’ve been on the advisory board for this trans centered hackerspace and today they’ve officially opened the fundraiser! Plz help and share!

https://phxbeyondbinary.com/contribute

[warm oasis]

Anyone here into 3d printed racks and home lab stuff. Working on a 3d printed rack that has a sci fi cyber theme to it

[night crescent]

“computation does not need to make objects colder. when used thoughtfully, it makes them more alive” 🖤

http://adafruit.com/n-e-r-v-o-u-s

a cool gift idea and a write up i did, enjoy - pt

[sick apex]

can anyone suggest some good batteries with charge boards / batteries and charge boards separately, i need some but i've never used batteries in a project before

[stoic mesa]

can you provide more detail?
"batteries" can mean anything from coin batteries for watches to monster size batteries for Tesla

so, what voltage and current does your project need? how long do you need the battery to last?

[sick apex]

5v, for an esp32 like a few weeks maybe a month

[sick apex]

i might just use a bunch of disposable vape batteries

they're everywhere

and free haha

[stoic mesa]

a few weeks is a lot to ask.
esp32, when active. consumes maybe 50mA.
So one day of its work would be 1200mAh.
Typical large LiPo battery is maybe 3000mAh - less than 3 days.
(Actually, if it is a 2cell LiPo, it gives 7.4v, so with efficient conversion 3000mAh at 7.4 v can give 5000mAh at 3.3v).

But it is nowhere close to several weeks you need.

To get that, you would need to put esp32 in deep sleep most of the time. only waking it up occasionally. There are some tutorials for these kind of setups. but I am not an expert, so hopefully other people in this chat can comment.

[sick apex]

i mean i can throw a mini solar cell on it

actually, i'll throw a solar cell on it; only just thought of that

it'll be on my house's roof anyway

[sick apex]

managed to get my thing working on an ESP-01S

probably not the best thing to do since i'm doing I2C over pins that shouldn't really have I2C on them but who cares

[valid rune]

does anyone know if the esp32s3 can act as a usb hid, host and device at the same time?

i know i can link two esp32s3's together, one acting as a host and the other as a device but i'd rather not do that.

[fair summit]

The ESP32-S3 only has one USB peripheral, which can act as either a USB host or as a USB device

you can use an external chip, like the MAX3421E (which we have support for) to act as a USB host, and use the native one as a USB device.

[fair summit]

we also have other solutions for RP2xxx boards

[valid rune]

thanks, i'm kind of new to this stuff. i've had a look at the MAX3421E chip and it looks like what i need. 👍

[loud storm]

Does anyone have a driver board for a 480x272 monitor?

[tawdry wagon]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSIUQt8gv2G/?igsh=MTd3dzZvaW02NzlzMA==

saw this semi viral trumpet video and yelled “macropad!” But surprised by all the comments asking “what is this”.

edhogbenmusic

shedding some standards to try and get the hang of this beast 😭

#jazz #trumpet #midi

Likes

22192

Instagram

[sturdy dawn]

Buying a weather thingy for the house would have been less time consuming but this is just cool

Now I don't have to pull out my phone to check the temp.

And plus a huge learning experience. I was starting to forget the basics of coding that I tried to learn back in 2012 with the XNA framework that Xbox offered

C++ and Arduino much better place to start than c#

[orchid pendant]

hello

[hollow flint]

I find it a little amusing that the PSRAM variant of the Adafruit Feather RP2350 has more customer reviews, than both its non-PSRAM variant and the Flipper Zero, combined. Specifically on Micro Center's website (they're a chain of brick-and-mortar retail stores, for those that're unaware). Yes, I know that the sample size of one review means that the entire thought experiment is completely irrelevant.

[sturdy dawn]

I got bored again

And I screwed the color rotation up on the lights when saving the .gif 🥴

[sick apex]

i did that and now i'm writing a usb vendor thing

and it was a horrible idea

[urban arrow]

You've probly been there ha ha. Last night I was struggling with an error in Micropython using Thonny, and kept editing code and retrying with no joy. I finally saw (did I mention I'm dumb?) that I was working with the offending code file ON MY PC, not the board. Would have been OK if I thought to upload to the board each time which I do know how to do of course... Live & learn from your mistakes..

[feral stag]

Hello

I hope and think the people in this server are all from ece background

[stoic mesa]

I am sure there are people with all kinds of backgrounds here. I, for one, do not have an ece background.

but we do have lots of people from EE and from CS and other engineering fields

[hollow flint]

I wonder what educational/professional background @small inlet had, for them to be described as Adafruit's "resident mermaid", at least according to the description of https://www.adafruit.com/product/6160

[sick apex]

well, i'm trying to do it properly so i'm using the Pico SDK

and implementing my own vendor class from tusb

the issue isn't really the implementation, it's writing a tool to test it

i ended up using pyusb so i can basically just smash the data down the cable to the pico and hope it works

not the best code i've ever written but it works

[stoic mesa]

@analog belfry also has interesting background

[hard estuary]

Erin has worked professionally as a mermaid

[sick apex]

christ

usb vendor is so weird

i send a bulk out command, it works

50% of the time it does what it's supposed to and queues the data for reading

the other 50% of the time it returns it as it's mf response code

wait a second,

OMFG IM AN IDIOT

it's not returning it as it's response code, my python script is expecting a response code and it's reading the data (which it shouldn't be returning) as a response code

right, i'll make it return a response code; you don't typically do that with bulk out read commands but it's fine it'll fix a bug in my test software

6 minute compile times for my pico firmware love to see it

https://tenor.com/view/logic-engineer-helicopter-chopper-upsidedown-gif-5027455

[hollow flint]

TIL about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mermaiding#Professional_mermaids

[sick apex]

right, okay for some reason it was sending a nullbyte at the end as if it was a string (it was not)

which meant the next out commands would fail because there was data to be read and the command was still loaded to retain data

[burnt tendon]

I've met a bunch of mermaids. Hanging out with them is always ... quite a tail.

The best part is where you are around mermaids or fairies and you get smacked by a fluke or a tail or a wing and there's this moment where you are like ... wait, humans don't have tails, but I just got smacked by my friend's tail.

[sturdy dawn]

Tweaked it. Deleted the extra redundant details and doubled resolution

[fast acorn]

Is there a spot where you can see what are popular/community recommended Adafruit kits?

I personally haven't used Adafruit since college (aka 10+ years ago lol)

I'm trying to see one to get for my nephew to help him start his journey and see if he will want to be a EE (like he currently says), so I'd prefer to pick a kit/project that has enough positive experience (i know for most, Adafruit in general is positive, but I'd like to get more specific with what options I'll consider)

[stuck moth]

There are gift guides: https://www.adafruit.com/explore/holiday-gift-guide-2025

[fast acorn]

Much appreciated, but I'm trying to see how people actually feel about it (effectively reviews through some explicit comms from people, and that's why I like to check reddit threads, discord, etc)

[stuck moth]

I thought you could see how many folks have saved different guides but I didn't see it when I just looked.

[astral portal]

I’m not really sure where else to put this… the description of https://adafru.it/5607 says 30mm flange and 23mm thread but i measure 28mm flange and 21mm thread, the page labeled Socket Diagram also matches this

[stuck moth]

You can email [e-mail] or post on the forum.

[raven tree]

found this at the dollar tree, would anyone know what I can use to identify the chip?

[daring goblet]

is it completely blank, or can you see markings on it under a certain angle of light?

[solar kindle]

Could be a custom chip, or it could be a microcontroller. It looks like VCC is on pin 3 or 4 and GND on pin 6, and the lack of any external components (other than the decoupling capacitor and the LEDs) indicates an internal clock. I'm not aware of any microcontrollers that fits all those parameters, so probably a custom chip. The board layout looks like a sound-and-light memory game (similar to Simon). Something like that is fairly easy to reproduce using a cheap microcontroller, if that's what you're interested in doing.

[fast acorn]

Good point, let me try that on my computer. That actually doesn't show easily on my phone haha. I know Adafruit also has a subscription thing, so I'm thinking of trying that for a bit separately so that if my nephew likes the gift, then I have more gifts set up.

And if he doesn't care for it, then I'll just use them for fun

Thanks @stuck moth 🙂

[dim agate]

Does anybody have any helpful tips for the Adafruit Fruit Jam? Also, I am wondering how to get Fruit Jam OS onto it.

Also, what size of display should I get for it?

[covert oracle]

I got the official raspberry pi screen about 6-8 months ago and I've been very happy with it

it runs on usb power and it's a nice size and quality ( ~15" diagonal and 1920x1080 )

[dim agate]

Is it this? https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-touch-display/

[shy magnet]

Hello, could someone tell me what the current rating of the switch in this battery holder is? I was not able to find this information anywhere. I know the connector/cable should be 2A rated but I am more worried about the switch overheating.

[summer furnace]

hello all, what is the most appropriate way to connect an octopus PIR sensor brick to a raspberry pi 5. I have found the connector is a Molex SL 0050579403, how do I make the wires individually connect to the gpio pins without soldering them (Using Dupont 1x1 connectors?) the other end of the cable that came with the PIR sensor is a 3pin dupont connector (female)

[jaunty hollow]

It's not a bad idea to get a Dupont crimping tool that comes with a selection of connectors if this is more than a one off job - they're quite useful

[stuck moth]

what is the existing connector on the end you want to change? Getting precrimped dupont wires can be really handy and then you just slip them into the housing you want.

[hollow flint]

I'm curious, who would be the target market for ordering a third-party Steam Deck Docking Station from Mouser?

[hollow flint]

Does Mouser (a competitor) even sell any PC gaming handhelds?

[urban arrow]

Hi all. Am I going nuts? All of a sudden, I CANNOT views ANY .py code files on Github. I do not have a sign-in, and have never pushed anything to Github, but I download stuff all the time. When I click on a code file, there is no error, but the text is just completely blank.
Example: https://github.com/troublegum/micropyserver/blob/master/micropyserver.py

[hollow flint]

I've had that happen when disabling JavaScript. If this first step is applicable, try updating the filter lists on whatever equivalent of uBlock Origin you use. Then, try clearing all browser cache.

[urban arrow]

Thanks. OK am I dumb. I had my Github page display percentage too high. Never happened to me before. If I increase above 100%, the code display portion of the Github page disappears...
This may be only due to my (relatively) not-very-wide monitor...

[gilded elm]

I just got my 3d model in a vid : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLbsKS9YUI8 🙂

[solar kindle]

Probably the most over-engineered breadboard ever. 🤣
https://www.crowdsupply.com/architeuthis-flux/jumperless-v5

[stuck moth]

I just ordered one! I'm very lazy when it comes to breadboarding

[hollow flint]

@brittle rampart beat you to it: #crowd-supply message

[brittle rampart]

When it gets there, we can figure out what we need to do to get the micropython interpreter working with Circuitpython.

[brittle rampart]

I do the engineering so you don't have to!

[stuck moth]

UPS thinks it'll come tomorrow but we'll see

[brittle rampart]

Watching the circuit python stream yesterday has convinced me that the dev team knows what's up and it'll be cleaner in the long run to start slowly switching over from micropython

[hollow flint]

With a skillset like yours, porting CircuitPython to a new RP2350 board is very trivial. There are instructions here: https://learn.adafruit.com/how-to-add-a-new-board-to-circuitpython
The tricky part would be porting the existing Jumperless V5 libraries to CircuitPython. IIUC, they're currently written in C++. I haven't looked into interop between C++ and CircuitPython myself, so I cannot speak to its difficulty, or potential lack thereof.

[hollow flint]

There's even a good chance that https://circuitpython.org/board/pimoroni_pga2350/ would work as-is, if your code uses the RP2350B GPIO numbering directly.

[brittle rampart]

Oh sick, thanks for the link! This is gonna be interesting starting from a working micropython port. Like it'll either be surprisingly easy or surprisingly hard

[brittle rampart]

At least how it works with micropython is you just give it C functions for any thing you want it to do and the python stuff does all the type nonsense and then calls them. It's kinda weird looking under the hood and seeing it's all just a bunch of C internally.

[stuck moth]

This is true for CP as well. We have the Python -> C layer split out from the C implementation in the appropriate "bindings" location. This allows us to swap C impls when we want.

[hollow flint]

Is MicroPython's approach more similar to Java Native Access or Java Native Interface?

[hollow flint]

The former allows you to, without writing any C glue code, use structs and call C functions directly from Java. The latter requires glue code written in C, for it to have any capabilities.

[brittle rampart]

I guess it would be more like the latter, but really it's more like (IIUC) the whole python implementation is written in C to start with

[hollow flint]

True. I guess the distinction only really matters when it's running on an OS with dynamically-linked libraries, that utilize a C ABI. Otherwise, you'd be compiling the C libraries from source, irrespective of whichever approach is taken.

[sick apex]

saw this on zack friedman's channel the other day xD

[azure grove]

hi friends! happy holidays from me and Callie^^

[marble flax]

Use up all those slightly empty AAs https://www.dfrobot.com/product-991.html

[summer furnace]

Thank you so much! I ordered a dupont crimping tool, and a set of extra jumper cables. I've managed to connect it to the pi, so now it is just figuring out radicale - a cal dav server, magicmirror and hopefully a pir module

[livid wind]

Me and my friend are making our senior year project and we need IO+, are there any giveaways by any chance?🙏

[hasty wedge]

Today I learned a super cool intellectual property protection method

By using one wire security chip packaged in SOT23-3 package, you can store key credentials inside, or even use an internal counter to count the power up. Once the number is reached the chip self destructs, making the product no longer working

The chip can also be labelled like generic transistors like S8050, making spotting them even harder

It works even better when used with other IP protection methods like ic label removal

[woven lily]

Merry Christmas everyone

[dim agate]

Merry Christmas!

[sinful stratus]

can anyone explain the difference between the attine 816/817/1616 seesaw boards ? i want to use one to provide UART over i2c

[fair summit]

None of them provide UART over I2C. What is the controlling microcontroller or other device you are using?

[stoic mesa]

you can write your own code to do uart to i2c translation and then upload it to one of seesaw boards

[fair summit]

what is your use case for UART over i2C? Have you run out of pins?

[queen kraken]

I could see providing i2c over UART 😄

[sinful stratus]

looks like they do as a beta (except the samd09)

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-seesaw-atsamd09-breakout/uart
read_sercom_data: https://adafruit.github.io/Adafruit_Python_seesaw/classAdafruit__Seesaw_1_1seesaw_1_1Seesaw.html#a2422132215a00ea0933c26a1fa538c06

[fair summit]

I can't even find the code for this, and it would be at least six years old. What is your use case?

[sinful stratus]

sorry, yep :> im trying to attach a UART peripheral to the STEMMA QT potr of the MacroPad RP2040. i was just using the scl/sda pins as rx/tx, which worked fine, but now i want to mix in other i2c peripherals together

[fair summit]

We were working on a breakout for this (non-seesaw): https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/05/10/the-sc16is74x-is-an-i2c-to-uart-converter/ . But I don't know what state it's in right now.

I don't see anyone else selling such a breakout, though someone designed one: https://github.com/rickkas7/SC16IS740RK

there is no timeline I can give you on this, but there was an initial design done. You could write to [e-mail] and say you're interested in seeing this product get done

[sinful stratus]

oh that does seem like exactly what i want!!!

[dim agate]

My Fruit Jam is saving what is on the CIRCUITPY drive every time I install CircuitPython. Does anyone know the fix for this?

[hollow flint]

That sounds somewhat analogous to how a YubiKey mitigates brute-force attacks of its PIN:

• To re-attempt to enter the PIN after you have entered an incorrect PIN three times in succession, power-cycle the FIDO2 application.
• Once a FIDO2 PIN is set, it can be changed but removal of a FIDO2 PIN requires a FIDO2 reset.
• If the PIN is entered incorrectly eight times in succession, the FIDO2 application locks and FIDO2 authentication is no longer possible. To unlock the FIDO2 application, a FIDO2 reset is required.

– https://docs.yubico.com/hardware/yubikey/yk-tech-manual/yk5-apps.html#locking-fido2-credentials

[hollow flint]

Particularly the last bullet point. BTW, the middle bullet point is only tangentially related to this specific subject-matter.

[hasty wedge]

Oh wow

Thats very clever

I currently use a Yubikey 5 clone based on RP2350

Definitely not as secure as the real deal

[hollow flint]

Is it a YubiKey 5 clone or a Security Key Series by Yubico clone? The latter only has support for FIDO2 and FIDO U2F.

[hollow flint]

If it's the former, then I'm surprised on how quickly support has been added for OTP, OATH, OpenPGP, PIV/Smart Card, FIDO U2F, and FIDO2.

[hasty wedge]

It's a custom board that lets the 2350 report itself as a Yubikey 5

I only tested FIDO2

The only reason that thing exists is because some web services my organization uses requires mandatory 2fa

[rare gulch]

I just noticed the November Adabox notice. has anyone received one yet?

[hollow flint]

I've seen plenty of people here mention that they've received the AdaBox 022 in the mail recently.

[hasty wedge]

And I am too lazy for that §h║╦

[rare gulch]

does it require a response to an email or is a subscription enough?

I didn't see the email yet (doesn't mean I didn't get it)

[hollow flint]

Can you use the Passkey capabilities of some password managers, such as https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide#_passkeys?

[hasty wedge]

I don't know that they have such capability

Because they do support OTP

I think I will try out keeppassxc

[hollow flint]

https://www.adafruit.com/adaboxfaq should answer most of your questions, including how to properly contact Adafruit's customer support (we're currently on their community Discord server, with it having a limited number of Adafruit employees in it).

[hasty wedge]

I don't see a pricing page, how much is the sync service?

[hollow flint]

KeePassXC is unique in that it'll work with any standard file syncing service.

[hasty wedge]

Like google drive?

[hollow flint]

Yep. Or any competing service.

[hasty wedge]

Thank you!

I am enough of that stupid 2350 Yubikey clone anyway

That thing doesn't even have secure boot enabled

[hollow flint]

As for a pricing page, it's FOSS, but they do accept donations: https://keepassxc.org/donate/

[hollow flint]

A good portion of other password managers also have similar passkey capabilities, if KeePassXC doesn't work out for one reason or another.

[urban arrow]

The (generic) ESP32-VROOM board. This is a "sort of" micropython-related post, although you can (I guess) upload an Adafruit UF2 to it - I might someday. Here goes:
Tried half a day to get a COM port to come up, so I could load Micropython. I finally found a page that said it needed Windows driver CP210x. Once I got it installed, I got a beautiful "Silicon Labs CP210x USB to UART Bridge (COM84)". YAY! After programming with ESPTool (address 1000!), on my way testing Micropython stuff.

https://www.silabs.com/software-and-tools/usb-to-uart-bridge-vcp-drivers?tab=downloads

[fair summit]

You can't upload a UF2, but you can upload a .bin. We don't have a generic ESP32 build but the builds for Espressif dev boards come close, and there are some simple boards that break out all the pins and would be fine.

[urban arrow]

Thanks Dan. My mistake, no UF2's... I looked at the Dev Kit Expressif V4-VROOM bin which "may" work if I do that in the future. Right now, I'm using micropython. I've been using the MPY Generic ESP32 bin. And, I didn't know about the USB-to-UART thing until today... Got lotsa Ada boards, and never needed it...
And, you are the coolest helping everybody out all the time! 👍

[valid glen]

Excuse me guys I'm new here and I just need some product advice for a cosplay please.

I have all of these in my cart so far. But I need the battery packs and wires that I can plug in and out of. Also, I've been watching Kamui cosplay's tutorials on LED strips and I just need the right ones for what I want.

This is the cosplay I'll be doing, Athena from Epic the musical. I just need some lights for the spear with a small enough switch the flexible silicone light is for her sheild. And tiny lights for her tiara please. What do you reccommend? I don't mind having to copy a code for the strips.

And I'm very sorry but I need these questions answered ASAP because Katsucon is coming soon and I need to work on it quickly to avoid a bad crunch.

[hollow flint]

I'd recommend basing your design off of an existing light-up dress project, such as https://learn.adafruit.com/water-drip-dress-with-oozemaster-3000
You'll definitely have to modify the design of the clothes to match the specifics of the character in question, but it's a great starting point.

[valid glen]

Well I plan to make the glowing parts on the bodice out of diffusing EVA foam I can give you a drawing later for the plan.

Also the back of Athena's bodice will be EVA foam covered in spandex.

[hollow flint]

Actually, the project above makes use of Arduino, which is less beginner friendly. I'd recommend basing your code off of the example code from https://learn.adafruit.com/holiday-tree-with-scorpio, even if your hardware layout takes more inspiration from the water drip dress project that I linked earlier.

[valid glen]

But I want it to be blue and not drip. I just want it to turn on.

Or at least use what kamui used in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5RCWPbXorM&t=211s

I just want it to be blue.

Because the code in this tutorial is what I want to use for the bodice. Again I just want to glue the LEDS in between layers of light diffusing foam. Put the wire in a hole that attaches to the back part of Athena's bodice and be able to plug it in and out of the battery pack so I can take it off and on.

The legs and arms I'll just use paint.

[hollow flint]

After the prerequisite CircuitPython installation is fully configured, https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-feather-rp2040-scorpio/using-adafruit_neopxl8 describes how to customize the animations, including just having a single solid color, if you so choose.

[valid glen]

Okay thank you, but in addition I just need wire and product recommendations for switches and plugs.

You know so I can take the bodice off.

[hollow flint]

A lot of Feather boards, including the Feather RP2040 SCORPIO, have a single programmable button on-board, and it's labeled BOOTSEL or BOOT on the Feather RP2040 SCORPIO in particular.

[valid glen]

Where is this in the ada fruit store?

Wait I'm completely confused where are the battery packs and switches?

https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=BOOTSEL

This is what I'm getting

[hollow flint]

I apologize for the miscommunication. There is no separate product called BOOTSEL. It's just a label next to an input button, physically integrated onto some Feather boards.

[valid glen]

Oh yeah I think that was on Kamui's video on one hand but on the other hand what about the battery and switches needed to turn it on and off?

And being able to plug and unplug it when it's not in use.

Especially because I need to be able to take the bodice off.

[hollow flint]

The BOOTSEL button on https://www.adafruit.com/product/5650 can be programmed to turn off (or back on) the LEDs. Here's a list of the Lithium-ion batteries that Adafruit sells: https://www.adafruit.com/category/574

[valid glen]

I'm so confused is the first thing a switch?

[hollow flint]

It's an entire board, but it contains something that's directly equivalent to what a switch can normally do, if programmed correctly.

[valid glen]

Sorry I'm jsut so confused because I'm such a nooblet and the only light experience I have is installing fairy lights into a sword prop.

Except how would I operate the switch when I can't reach it from inside my costume?

[hollow flint]

The idea is to always keep the prop powered on, but "set the brightness to zero" whenever you want it to be "powered off".

[valid glen]

Would there be some phone app I would need to use to turn it on?

I'd be happy to provide a drawing based on my plan so I can show you.

[hollow flint]

You can add an extra button, with it being physically reachable from the exterior. Here's one example of the buttons and wires that would be necessary to do that: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4431

[valid glen]

Good good.

As for the neo pixel chip would I need something else to solder it to like Kamui did in her video?

I've got the iorn.

[hollow flint]

I'd recommend reading through https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide beforehand, but to answer that specific question, if you purchase a full length reel of a NeoPixel strip, it'll already have a connector on it. Then you'll just need an adapter cable to connect it to the Feather RP2040 SCORPIO.

[valid glen]

Okay good idea. I'll send you a drawing later about my plans.

This way it shows a clearer picture.

And thankfully the flexibly silicone lights in my cart don't need any programming. I just need them to light up easy peasy.

Those will be used for the shield's medusa head and the back bodice.

[hollow flint]

If your cosplay project has a fixed arrangement of colors, then you could consider getting a selection of https://learn.adafruit.com/noods-uberguide
No coding would be required, with that route.

[valid glen]

But I can't cut the noods.

I want to be able to cut my strips.

[hollow flint]

https://learn.adafruit.com/noods-uberguide/tips-tricks describes a few different workarounds for that limitation.

[valid glen]

Still, those will come in handy for my Mira cosplay prop.

As for Athena I truly want to experiment in strip cutting and soldering but simple ones.

If that makes sense.

What else can I say I'm a perfectionist in some of my work.

[hollow flint]

If at all practical, I'd strongly advise against trying to learn to code, when in your self-described cosplay prop project time crunch.

[valid glen]

I'd rather just copy what kamui used since in her tutorial it actually is what I want.

That's all I need.

In terms of coding that is.

It's more so of the construction non coding parts and products I need to put it together.

My appologies if it came off a bit rude but it's my fault for not making it clearer.

[hollow flint]

Unless you choose to use an unsupported version of CircuitPython, there are likely a few incompatible changes when migrating from CircuitPython 8.2.9 (as she had used in her video) to CircuitPython 10.0.3 (the latest stable version).

[valid glen]

What does this mean for non computer speak people?