Hi welcome to Mailbag Monday and uh yes sorry I haven't been doing uh videos recently I Have been pretty sick with a virus for over a week now and uh, it's just starting to get better. but this is all the energy I can master I'm afraid. so uh, sorry about that I've been taking it uh, very slowly indeed. So anyway thought I'd do another mailbag I did a postcard one the other day and that went down like a lead weight.

So I uploaded the video and got all everyone. um well most people saying that they didn't like it. so I moved it to my alternate Zone channel. So if you want to check out the Postcards From the mailbag, go to my alternate Zone channel.

The link will be down below so this will be a regular mailbag minus those postcards. um I Just wanted to mention that I uh got this in the mail bag but it wasn't actually a mail bag mail bag. it was, uh, just sent to me regularly. It's the digilent, uh basis 2 if that's how you pronounce it.

it's a xyl linkx Fpga demo board and basically, uh, the same sort of price target market that sub $100 Market as the AL terabase Deo Nano from uh Terra Asic or terasic and uh, so I Now got both of these to do some Fpga videos with. so if you got ideas for like comparisons and stuff like that, I can uh do two of probably the most popular Uh boards on the market. So there you go. I've also got the pillo board as well somewhere.

So anyway, I could do a three-way comparison, but there they're probably the two main competing uh, Fpga demo. uh, you know, sort of beginner introduction. uh, boards in that sub hundred, uh, price category. So anyway, hopefully do some more videos on those.

But enough of that for today. it is mailbag. Well Thursday and there's my mailbag shelf. It's still sitting there.

sorry I haven't got around to all this stuff, but let's go through a few things. And yes, my voice is still awful. Sorry about that. Got down a few Sunry items here.

We'll check them out one by one. What do we got here? This one is from the Old Dart Royal Maale from Jerry Sweeny Good day Jerry He's from Rlip in England Fantastic. Uh, no idea. Let's have a look.

Oh, almost dropped it. Electronic resistor. An electronic resistor. Let's have a look.

What does he mean by electronic resistor? I Wonder that uh, you know, to me, electronic resistor is uh, either a DEC Well, it's not even a decade resistance box. It's like a E pot or something like that. No, it looks like it's a De. It is a decade resistance box with jumpers.

Taada. Here we go. Oh, it's heat sealed. Go.

Well, it could be worse. Could be in those, uh, horrible blister packets. There we go. It's a decade resistance box with some big thumping ass terminals on it.

that's for sure. Check those out. They're absolute monsters with little surface mount resistors on the bottom. Well, they're bigger than usual, but uh yeah, they're still not going to dissipate much power.

you know, half half watt jobs. something like that. So oh yeah, there we go. tells you on the front read the front Dave you idiot 500 M 1% 7 Decay program resistor from 1 ohm up to one Meg available from Jerry Sweeney Tocom Awesome And they're just jumpers.

That's it. Very easy. Very simple I Like it now I said I Wouldn't read out the Uh letters in the previous video, but uh I'll probably do it quickly if it has something relevant in it. Here we go: Um, it's got a YouTube video of uh Jerry explaining why he bothered to, uh, make these little boards apparently sold a bunch of them to some E folk and there is a threat about it on the EV blog.

Forum Beauty Now clearly he's got these uh configured in a Serial Arrangement that and there and you can see that on the solder mask I Hate black solder mask. One of the reasons why I hate it is that very difficult to see the tracks through there, but you can see the they've got the return path coming from the one Meg decade over there and then going into all the common pars and then that snaking off down through there like that and series all the way through now. I Did a similar board to this many, many years ago and it was actually a fully surface mount version where I didn't use. it was exactly the same configuration.

uh, you know the series configuration with the seven decades, but instead of the headers which Jerry's Used here I used uh, 10-way dip switches on here. there were um, surface mount dip switches and I had the surface mount resistors uh, under the dip switches I fitted them on there and it made for a very narrow, very compact. You know it was like probably the size of that or something. It was really, really tiny and a lot more fiddly than this one, but it was much smaller though.

so thanks. Jerry Head on over to Jerry Sweeny Tocom if you want one of these puppies. Well, it turns out I may have missed a postcard in the previous video from Romania Romania expediter is Angel Mii I sorry I cannot pronounce that whatsoever Dr P is that his form username Oh, there we go. Don't even have to get the knife out for that.

Yes, it is a postcard, so sorry. I have a postcard on Oh, look at that. Oh lovely. Romanian Stately home.

Is it I like it? Let's what does it say. Syic: I can't even pronounce that. sorry hi Dave Bests from Romania and congrats on your effort on teaching Electronics To The World A good teacher is scarce, thank you very much Mi Oh, was reading the name backwards. one of those backward names.

again. there you go. Thank you very much Mihar I'm sure I'm pronouncing it incorrectly. this is Romania um saai Castel p I I'm hopeless I Give up thank you.

Next up we have Arthur Nski if I'm pronouncing that corre correctly from Dez Plaines Illinois in the United States of America Australia e should be an A, it's not Austria it's not Australia e. it's Australia A Anyway, let's open it up and feels kind of feels postcard actually sorry if it's another postcard, it probably is. Yeah, it's another postcard sorry I thought I'd nailed all the postcards but apparently I haven't Whoa. I I can't even pronounce that.

can't even pronounce that Florida at night? Brilliant. Well done. As it turns out, we do actually have some Electronics in here. Dave This is a very useful device.

Please find out more about it. Oh, he set the chip and development board and yes, there's a little. There's the Chip And there's a little development board. What it is is an Azot Tech I've never heard of them but it's a uh IQ switch prox sense.

Um so a proximity sensor device. There you go little uh, six pin job. and yeah it looks like you get what serial data out of it or something I don't know something. let's have a look.

W So here's the PC Mir Here we go: Prox Sense IC is a fully integr graded capacitive sensor device in three variants: Dual outputs Touch Button aha Touch button or proximity sensor incorporating a driven Shield or touch sensor proximity for metal overlays H Automatic antenna tuning implementation automatic adjustment for Optimal Performance Well, that's what you want. You want to just solder the bloody thing in and get it to detect your finger or or whatever you know you don't want to dick around with it. Internal capacitor implementation: Reference capacitor on the chip: Excellent. So that's why.

looks like this. two caps on the board but are they just uh, bypass caps I Guess have to have a look or are they no, they're they're leads. are they? I don't know, have to have a look at that and uh. low power um nominal 3.3 to well, 3 volts to uh 5.5 volt Supply neat Advanced on chip Digital Signal Processing Use: Selectable four power modes 13 microamps in standby not bad iio Sing Source Time out for stuck key blah blah blah blah minimum external components Touch 5 mm by 5 mm or larger.

There you go. I've never heard of Azote before. Well, I'm going to have to solder that chip on there and give this thing a burl. I Think can't wait and there's our little board.

There's a couple of uh bypass caps, lead dropper resistors, and a uh input uh protection resistor on the front end. But there you go. Why they didn't go to the effort to just solder the chip on there? I Don't know, but jeez. I'm going wire this thing up and uh, see how she goes.

The problem with these little mongrels is it can often be hard to see by eye where the Pin One marker is, but you can see it there on the bottom left, uh, corner. You can clearly see the circle once you get it to the right. uh, angle of light. I'm shooting this through my X 10 macro lens so it looks pretty obvious on here.

but uh, Trust Me by naked eye H it's not that easy. You definitely want to double check. and yes, I'll foolishly attempt to uh solder the this uh while I'm filming it as well because well, I'm a glutton for punishment so let's put a bit of flux on there, shall. We There We go from my flux pen and I hope you guys appreciate this because this is a pain in the ass to sold to stuff while the camera's in the way.

Trust me. and uh, there's our pin one marker up there by the looks of it and so we'll get our chip and place it on already, put our flux on there not doing the best job. There we go, that'll do and then we'll uh, tack a pin in place and then we'll be able to solder the rest. That's one.

Now we can just go in there and uh, wipe the other pins, drag them out and the solder mask takes care of that. and oh my solders on this side I Can't can't actually get around God I Wish I could show you the weird ass angles I'm on. but I'm actually doing this, holding this one backwards and uh, like the soldering irons actually facing towards my wrist I I can't show it. but jeez.

I this is horrid. sorry I've just got to change the angle on that. Otherwise I can never get in here. I'd be soldering backwards with one hand tied behind my leg and up my backside.

It's uh, the camera in the way. It's a real. it's a real pain in the butt actually really is. but uh oh, there we go.

Got a short on one of the pins there that didn't go very smoothly soldering in front of the camera. I've said it before and I say it again. sucks ass. It drops my productivity by about 1,000% and makes me look like an absolute goose.

and there it is. Little bit ugly, but job done now. Uh I Probably solder the header pins on as well I got it wired up on the breadboard here. Let's give it a go.

5V Power supply. hopefully the Magic Smoke won't escape and uh, I've just got a sense wire here as well that we can use as the capacitive uh, sense and touch because it does both. So no lead action whatsoever. But let's hey hello There we go.

Look. Yep, it's detecting my little finger from any direction. Of course around there, try and sneak in through there. Oh oh, there we go.

We can get a bit closer in there, but and now let's see what happens when I touch it. Yep, works a treat. Beauty And according to the data shed, it claims to work through 6 mm of plastic. Well, I've got two uh sheets here and let's put those beside there.

No, it's just going to instantly. Maybe we have to repower calibrate it. Yep, there we go. And yeah, my finger's on the back side.

There we go. Putting my finger on the back side. That's more than 6 mm. Not a problem whatsoever.

Brilliant. Now it's supposed to have one wire data streaming as well, and that's supposed to come from the Uh Tea Out/ data pin. But our schematic up here shows T out is actually uh uh, actually connected to the lead and I've hooked it up to the scope here. and really, we don't uh, get anything except the lead output.

Let me re uh, trigger that. There we go and it's just the lead output. There's no one wire data there at all. now.

you can actually uh program this chip externally if you've got the Uh programmer and the software to do various modes and it's obviously not uh programmed to do that. Which is not surprising because they're using the the only two uh outputs on this thing to drive those two leads so that you can't have uh, both one wire data coming out of there and get the Uh pulse stretch on the Uh lead as well. So yeah, for this particular demo, that's how they've programmed it, but presumably if we had the program, we could just hook it up and reprogram that thing to get one wire data out. If that was useful to you, presumably um, the one wire data would give you the uh, the actual uh, you know raw data and tell you how close you actually work to the thing it would you know, give you a you know it would say oh, you're this close and you'd be able to interpret that data and do whatever you want with it and you'll notice.

Of course it all has to do with the capacitive coupling because if I bring my finger down from the top, I can get pretty close, almost touching before that thing will even detect that I'm within proximity let alone touching it. Obviously if I touch the bare metal there, it recognizes that. But if I come in from the side like this where there's a larger capacitive coupling between my finger. like the the more the lower my finger gets like that, the greater the capacitive coupl in there you go.

get that probe out of the way, the uh, more the capacitive coupl in. Look at that. see it's huge because we're in parallel like that and we've got the parallel uh bit of the wire plus my finger in parallel. If I come in like that, of course it's a little bit.

It's not as good as what it is when it's in parallel like that. And of course, you don't need a direct electrical connection to say it's actually contacted to. it's I I can just touch the insulation of that wire and uh, in fact, not even touch it. just get I think really, really close to it and I can make that switch on.

So obviously there's some threshold uh detection value there that gets set when you actually repower that. So if I repowered that, say let me repower that with my finger there. Okay, now it won't detect from this. it should have a different detection distance.

Oh okay, it's a yeah, it's a bit. it's a bit shorter. so thanks for that arter that was, uh, quite neat. The Azot capacitive touch sense controller and of course these are a dime a dozen these days.

Lots of companies do it of course and there a lot of this uh, capacitive touch Sense Technology is built into microcontrollers these days. Next up we have be Zenman from Uh Cambridge Massachusetts in the United States and H screwdriver set. Normally I'd be very excited, but for my birthday I just got a whole set of these weer German weer Precision drivers like I've got uh Phillips I've got um, nut drivers, hex drivers and uh TS a complete set of all of them. and uh yeah I hope they're not weird drivers, but so I'm but by the look and uh feel of this package, it seems like they could be some sort of precision screwdriver, so hopefully it's one that I don't have.

So thank you Merit very much be in advance although you can never have too many screwdrivers I can uh, always take them home and a bugger. Oh here we got look, pull tab to open. Go! score for the gifted for those who've seen Far Side oh goodness no hey, they're not. No, they're Swiss tool a oh no, not that horrible.

ah garbage I hate these padded envelopes, cushion mail going to need this to cushion the ass of the person I'm going to kick who bloody invent ented these things Now it's all over my bloody bench and it's another postcard would you believe it? Jeez, and um, this one is from yes, it's from Cambridge Massachusetts looks like it's from a group hi Dave some of us really enjoying your Vlog As a token of our appreciation, we send you the screwdriver set which we make bigger ones. Awesome Cheers! Thank you very much! Uh shall Rame remain nameless but fantastic from MIT of course. And that's one of their Uh campuses there. There you go! opened in 2002 Sydney Pacific Graduate Residence provides spacious accommodation and Community facility for 700 students at MIT Fantastic! Thanks guys! and these are top quality! Uh Swiss Tools Fantastic! 100% made in Switzerland All my Swiss views are getting very excited now.

Individual serial numbers on the shafts and hand rubbed by nude virgins in Utopia land. Oh Fantastic! I've got a size zero and what have I got? Let's have a look sorry I got a cough I'm sick. There we go a 3X two flat a. 4X 2.5 flat and uh Phillips 0 and Phillips Z fantastic thank you very much.

Oh I Love Swiss Tools M Impromptu Tool Shootout the made in Germany We Phillips o against Swiss Tools Phillips Dou o Both got screw um the spinny caps on the top. No problem. this one is shorter. um, you can get them.

you can buy them in different lengths on the We tools. I'm not sure about the Uh Swiss tools though. the Swiss tools are individually serial numbered down in there, whereas the We ones are not. but uh, um I Kind of like the look of the weel ones better, but jeez yeah! I'm not a F.

not a huge fan of like the seethrough the translucent um handle on the Swiss tools really, but uh, feeling wise going down like that? I Got to say I'm getting a bit more purchase on the on the wheel I think oh no no cuz this is a slightly longer handle on the Swiss I Do like the fact that it does have a bit of a stop on the end there manufactur. Str in quality. it's got a little bit of a bur in there. look at that.

that's the uh, that's the molding point or something like that and uh, but the weer has instead of the uh that B that uh bulge on the end has little flutes in there to get a bit more purchase on that. but oh jeez. I don't know, not much you know I think the we feels a little bit better to me but uh I don't know. Let's have a look at the tips.

Now here's where you can really see the difference in the uh uh, construction and finish of the two tools. The Swiss tools one here on the bottom has just standard looks like standard polished, uh, spring, you know, hardened spring steel of course and absolute finest quality. and uh, they've obviously put some sort of uh coating or something on the end. I'm not sure, sorry haven't looked up uh, any of the advanced details on that.

maybe extra hardened or something like, but almost looks like it's got a bit of uh, surface corrosion or something like there. I Know you're supposed to like, uh, you know, rub these and polish them with oil and all sorts of funky stuff like that. you can see the difference with the weel on the top. with that Chrome plated uh, finish all the way down the uh shaft and onto the tip.

There totally different uh construction methods for the two screwdrivers there. So I don't know, um, any Metallurgy uh experts out there. Is there a word for a metallurgist for you know, a metal expert? is that the word? I don't know, but uh, if they are, please let us know which one you think is the best out of these two puppies. And the We does seem to have a slightly wider uh, you know, triangle uh protrusion there on the bottom for want of a better uh term.

But there you go. I mean these are probably two of the best, the finest quality Precision screwdrivers on the market, but there you go if you got any good ideas about which one's better. lots of Fanboy fights will start I'm sure, but that's weird tools versus Swiss tools and just to match Jerry's decade resistance board, we've got a decade capacitance board. People love these things from Jebber Molton from Aworth in Uh Ga Georgia I think I might have got that wrong crack this one open.

Jeez, they're not easy to get aart. what a pain. But anyway, we have a note and we have more importantly, the board in a static shielding bag. Oh, there's a bit of height in that.

Oh they? there we go? Yeah. I I think yeah, he sent them before, hasn't he I remember I've got the exactly the same one but the decade resistance one I think he sent last time. It's exactly the same look and feel as last time. Let me see if I can dig it up and there it is Tada I knew it was familiar Atlanta Robotics.com with a hyphen in there.

So this is the Uh Six Decade Resistance Box from 0 to 1 Mig and this one is from looks like two puff up to 100 mik. Quite a usable range I really really like it and uh, there's nothing on the uh bottom. of course there are they're actually uh, reverse Mount rotary wer switches in there quite neat and all. uh, surface mount caps on the top and it looks like even the high value ones right up there there we go.

25 mik, 33 mik, 50 mik, and 100 mik. Woohoo! Look at those puppies. Now the thing I'm uh always concerned about of of course one of the biggest specs of a Uh Decade capacitance box like this is of course the voltage spec I mean for resistors you kind of, you know, take it for granted. It's a fairly large and for most capacitors, you know, regular ones.

all the low value stuff they're going to be you know, 50 volt Caps or something like that. so you know for almost most uses it's not going to be a problem. but these higher values right up in here. Like the 100 mik for example, they could be as low as you know, 6 volts or something like that.

so you got to be very careful. So I want to find out exactly what the maximum rate of voltage of this thing is And as it turns out, it comes with a comprehensive uh, sort of you know data sheet I guess you could call it and uh, dial one. It tells you exactly what uh, caps and what values and how many in uh, parallel and stuff like that. Really quite neat.

Then we got a graph of the measured capacitance versus Target capacitance. Fantastic Look at that. so each one is individually measured I guess. And there's the schematic of course.

very simple for these decade capacitors boxes. and aha, Here we go. uh, looks like what we yeah uh, offset applied from capacitance adjustment measured offset at 100 measured in 100 khz. But here we go Mousa Aha bill of materials so we should be able to find the Uh 100 mik? There we go.

6.3 volts. There we go. I was right because these multi-layer um caps. of course, the reason that you can get when I was a boy or even, you know, not that long ago.

Actually, you couldn't even. it was an absolute you know, fantasy to get 100 microfarad in one of these multi-layered ceramic capacitors. But the Te manufacturing technology is so phenomenal these days. I mean it's even an X5r for goodness sake, That one's not too bad at all.

The dialectric: but because the layers are so incredibly thin in these things only 6.5 Vols maximum so you got to be careful there and then on the 10vt uh uh, 10 volts for the ones that use the 10 microfarad caps and then 16 and go up. So it would have been nice if the top level data sheet here just mentioned uh, the maximum voltage range that uh could be used on each of the Decades So thanks Jeb from Atlanta Rob Robotics.com with a hyphen and yeah, he's sure RF Engineers might laugh at the capacitance uh PCB but I find it useful for a variety of things: Triple 5 timer, delaying, clock edges, one shots. Absolutely. I've used uh I built my first decade uh, resistance capacitance box sorry along with my first decade resistance box when I was oh jeez, I don't know 10 or something like that.

very very young and um, I've uh, lost it over the years and I've never reacquired a decade capacitance box never built another one. but uh, so this one will come in very handy thank you very much. And of course, there are wiring configuration differences between the Uh Decade Resistance Box and Decade Capacitance boxes. In general, the capacitors boxes are usually a parallel configuration so you can actually U you know, parallel up, uh, multiple things so you can you know, set this to 10 microfarads over here and then tweak it with a smaller value in parallel like that.

and uh, the DECA resistance boxes are usually wired in series so that you have to, you know you can do the same thing. You can set it to 100K over here and then tweak it by 1 ohm increments over here. but that to do that? of course you have to be in series configuration. and next up we have a circuit board from yes, they're having a third suck of the S I think uh schmart board.

they're the ones who make little adapter uh so mount adapter SL soldering uh tutorial boards or whatever which I've shown before so looks like we have a letter. good day Dave Enclosed is our newest Masterpiece Ooh it is a lowc cost yet powerful development board. Ah, a full on to the L board. There you go for the Cyprus Psoc 3 and 5.

LP The version uh that is enclosed is is with a with a bootloader. The most powerful Psoc available. Sell it in this configuration for only 35 bucks. Sounds cheap.

I'm not sure if youve used psoc before um I have dabbled in them I've dabbled with a few development boards way way back, um gez I don't know how long. that was probably at least eight years ago now. I think long way back. Uh, but those who use it swear by it.

It is much more versatile than other embedded Solutions because you define its full functionality, Because we offer it bootloader, the program is not necessary, giving you the convenience of the Arduino Oo there you go I Thought Schart boards only did smart boards, but they're not. They're into development boards now. Uh, there's also Dip package layout blah blah blah 30 Iio, blah blah blah blah blah you can eh. I'll put the link in, you can read about it can be found at O at can be found at where's the link? I'll find a link and put it in.

but let's have a look at this little puppy which they flog for 35 bucks which seems quite reasonable. Let you know. Arduino price and uh, who look at that? There you go. They've obviously used their own um, Schmartboard uh, soldering technique there.

let's have a closer look. Yeah, they've used those uh, big long, uh, embedded trench solder trenches there. so they're uh, uh, you know, um, eating their own dog food here by doing that I really like that? Um, got a tiny little uh, not standard Uh1 in header down here. presumably that's the Uh programming interface for it I don't know, haven't read the documentation I'm winging this and uh got some other headers and jumpers and stuff which I'm sure if you read the manual you can do it and we've got the Uh USB interface which hooks up I mean for me to test this I'd have to load up the full psoc, uh, software and everything else.

but there you go. That looks like a neat little board if you're into the uh Psoc stuff. and it's got a boost converter on board and uh, that's about all she wrote there. But and it's uh, dip um format so you can just plug it directly into your breadboard I Like it.

Now the thing about the PSO chips, of course, is that they are, uh, pretty. I Think they were probably the industry's first art programmable analog solution. so you've heard of, you know, Fpga, fuel, programmable gateways, microcontrollers that now contain analog, uh peripherals like analog to digital, uh, converters and stuff like that. Well, um, these Pso's go one step further ahead and have uh, reconfigurable analog elements on them, Things like opamps and Adcs and stuff like that.

You can actually reconfigure analog stuff in there. And in the case of the PSO Version 3 core, it's basically an Um 8051 uh core. So it's you know, the old school 8051 architecture, but a high performance version of it. And this one actually has a dozen or so 20bit Delta Sigma analog converters in it, as well as some PL logic as well.

So these are really funky devices and I should probably take a new look at them. So um, if you want me to, uh, you know, have a play around with this thing and uh, get the software fired up and uh, maybe do a video on the Psoc technology. Then let me know cuz this looks like a really neat little board to do it for 35 bucks? Of course you wouldn't want to, you know, start soldering these pain in the ass pack packages yourself. Even when you buy a Smartboard you might as well just buy it.

you know, pre-done plug it into your breadboard. Bob's your uncle? Last and perhaps least we'll find out it's from Digi Key You know I like uh, Digi key except when they sent me that stupid million page catalog in the big postage Satchel Oh man, think I'm going to have to re-watch that video memories and this feels like um, well I don't know what's in here so it's not quite a a uh, it's not quite a catalog or a book or anything like that. I don't know. Let's oh, what is it a diary? What is it? No, what is it Digi Key: It's a Digi key pad.

Thank greetings from Digi Key: keeping tabs on the global electronic blah blah blah. thank you very much. It's a diary and is it that wanky projection Digi key pen that we had last time. No, it's not.

It's just a Digi key. no pen. No, how do you even? you got to screw the end? Oh that. Pen's a bit of a big fat chunky pen, but um, yeah, thanks.

Digi Key: Hang on, it's a USB stick. Woohoo!.