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Welcome to The Bootloader. I'm Paul Cutler.

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And I'm Tod Kurt. If you want to learn more about this podcast, visit thebootloader.net

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for show notes and transcripts, and where you can also find our new newsletter.

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Paul, two weeks ago on 16th of August was CircuitPython Day. We were honored to be an

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official part of it with a special live video version of our podcast. You can check that

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out on YouTube, and we provide a link in the show notes. I just thought we'd like maybe

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talk a little bit about the experience of the entire CircuitPython Day in our live show.

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But first, I'd like to say thank you so much for organizing all of that.

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Oh, it was nothing.

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Like not all of CircuitPython Day, but like for our part of it was all organized by you.

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I just kind of showed up. So thank you so much.

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It was my pleasure.

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The format was we first talked about what CircuitPython had been doing for the last

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year in terms of like its features and updates and how it's in its relationship to MicroPython.

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We each talked about one project that each of us had done. It was really nice to hear

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your Song Matrix thing because it straddled so many different technologies because it

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was a network project that dealt with MQTT and the Shazam API. I don't do much internet

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stuff with my little electronic devices that run CircuitPython. So it was really cool to

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see all that and to see like real Python working in concert with CircuitPython.

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Yeah that's one of the really neat things about the project. I've got a couple of projects

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that do that, but actually writing real Python on a Raspberry Pi and then writing CircuitPython

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and having those talk to each other is just, that's what excites me about CircuitPython

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is that those physical devices that you can touch and feel. It's just something better

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than just seeing code on a screen.

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Totally. And it kind of reminds me of the synergy that a lot of web developers got when

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we were able to write JavaScript code that ran in the browser and also JavaScript code

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that ran on the backend using Node or something. So it's like we're getting that same level

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of like, "Oh I don't have to switch gears too much because I'm still writing Python."

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Just different flavors of it.

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And then my project, I made this like two weeks before CircuitPython Day, I made this

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like plan that I'm going to design and build and code a little playing card sized drum

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machine and it didn't quite turn out because I made some tiny mistakes. So I've got 10

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of these boards and I'm wondering, should I even like fix them up and put them in the

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store? But it was a fun experiment. I tried doing a similar thing a couple of years previous

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with CircuitPython Day and that worked out pretty well. So this was a good learning experience

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for me. And if anybody has seen this little drum machine playing card thing that I made,

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if anyone is interested in one, let me know and I'll see if I can send you one.

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And I think it's cool that the project didn't actually work out and you talked about it.

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So many projects are, "Look, I did this and it just all worked," but that's not how it

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is in real life, right? We all have challenges and things break and it's good to actually

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show that side of a project.

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Yep.

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Well, what's your first one this episode for us?

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All right. Synthesizers. Have you heard of them? So one of the things that I've been

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into is modular synthesis. So it's the kind of mad scientist synthesizers you might see

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with all the knobs and lights and all the cables that plug in. And the way this all

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works is that each little module does one specific part of the whole synthesis process.

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And so you have something that might make a noise and then you have something else that

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shapes that noise's loudness and another module that shapes that noise's frequency response,

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sort of a tone control. And then things that will produce different pitches that control

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the thing that makes noise. And so it can get really expensive really fast. And so people

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when I've talked about modular synthesis, they're like, "Oh, that sounds really cool.

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I want to get into it." It's like, well, it's really expensive to get into if you're not

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building the stuff yourself or if you've just decided to sort of like, "This is my hobby

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and I'm going to sink a couple hundred dollars into it every couple of months."

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And so if you wanted something else that was modular synthesis but was not as expensive,

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what were your options? It's like, well, there are some of these software programs out there

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like VCV Rack that will do the sort of virtual on your screen modular synth. And that's actually

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a really cool way to get started. But it's a thing on a screen. And one of the whole

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points of modular synthesizers and physical synthesizers and physical things in general

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is to get yourself away from screens. And there's also the other problem of if you're

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trying to build some of this stuff yourself, the things that you will be interacting with,

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like the jacks you plug cables into and the knobs you turn, those don't work well on a

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breadboard. There's always problems where you're like, as you're turning the knob, the

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potentiometer will come out of the breadboard because they're just really not made to be

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plugged in like that. And so what's the solution? And I've been seeing some noise about this

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thing called MICRORACK from this synth get-together, the synth conference called Super Booth a

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few months ago in Germany. And lately I've been inundated by Instagram ads for its Kickstarter

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campaign, which I'm like, man, Instagram has me targeted. And so MICRORACK is a collection

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of little PCB modules that plug into a breadboard, just like all these other things we might

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have that like Adafruit sells, except they are modular synthesis modules. So instead

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of being several hundred dollars for each little module, it's a little like each little

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module does the same functionality as these synth modules, but they just plug in and you

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wire them together, little jumper wires like you do on a breadboard. And so it's really

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nice. It's inexpensive. The way you interact with it is very much the way you interact

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with stuff on breadboards. So if you're used to doing stuff on breadboards, this is like,

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oh, this will fit right in. And they've got a pretty rich set of modules, it looks like.

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And they're using the Solaris breadboard mostly as a power distribution and a mounting platform,

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which is great. It's like, oh, here's this very common plastic thing with lots of holes.

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Let's use it as a mounting board, essentially. I've become a backer of it. I'm going to hopefully

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it'll be out. They've been making modules for like six months or a year, and they've

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been showing them off for several months now. And so I'm hoping it's a real thing. It looks

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pretty real. And if anything, it's going to be a nice way of solving some of these problems

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of how do I get the knobs to not move around when I'm prototyping something? Because I

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prototype my own little synthesizers on breadboards, and their modules, like some of their modules

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are just like little knobs that have outputs. I'm like, that's perfect.

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Like you were saying at the beginning, I looked into EuroRack a couple of years ago when I

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had some interest, and it was just so overwhelming. I had no idea where to start. And like you

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mentioned, the cost quickly went up and up. And I thought about just buying a couple of

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modules from just Winterbloom and starting there, but I still found it pretty overwhelming.

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But this is something I might check out. Do you remember how much it was roughly on Kickstarter?

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I think for like, they've got like a starter kit that's around like 80 bucks or whatever

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that contains like a good handful of modules. I think the most expensive thing you can get,

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which contains all their possible modules is like 300 or 400, which is the cost of one

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modular synth module if you go to a store that sells them. So in terms of I think modules

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per dollar, it's one of the highest that's out there. I'm mostly interested in it since

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I developed some of my own little music gizmos. I'm mostly interested in using it as little

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pieces of potential UI that I will have in my synthesizer. I'll just like use their knobs,

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use their jacks, that kind of stuff. There have been other similar, let's make some of

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this audio stuff more breadboard friendly little things that have been out there. I'll

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put some links to some previous ones in the show notes. One of those famous ones is called

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Breadboard Friends by Mutable Instruments, Emily Gillette. It's like two of the main

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problems with the synth stuff on when you're prototyping some stuff is how do you do jacks

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and knobs? The other one is how do you do power? Because the Eurorack standard is all

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the signals are plus minus 10 volts. And your breadboard, like everything you do on a breadboard

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is usually like three volts or five volts. So it's like one of the main things it solves

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is how do you make that work?

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Very cool. So how about you? What's your number one today?

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I've been talking about building a standup arcade for probably 20 years from when I first

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got a set of ROMs, the actual arcade games you load into an emulator to play. About five

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or six years ago, I finally started it. And living here in the Twin Cities, we have a

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local company called Paradise Arcade, who has a focus on the community around fighting

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sticks, fight stick controllers for fighting games. But they have a wide selection of arcade

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parts, including buttons, joysticks, and the hardware to hook them all up to a computer.

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I drove down to their shop, which is more of a warehouse and not a retail shop, which

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I didn't know at the time. But they were pretty awesome and helped me out. From there, I bought

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plans on the internet to actually build the cabinets and then bought the MDF to do it.

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But I've never done woodworking. So this has all been in fits and starts over the last

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couple of years. I haven't worked on it in a year or two, though I plan to pick it up

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again in the next few weeks as I have that itch again.

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The point of the story is, if I had to do it all over again, there's a solution that

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looks to be a lot easier. Pimoroni is taking pre-orders for the PiCade Max, a bar top arcade,

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not a stand up, that sits on top of a desk or a bar, hence the name. It includes everything

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you need to build it, just add a Raspberry Pi 5. The kit includes 6mm powder coated MDF,

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two player controls, and a 19 inch screen and 5/4 aspect ratio, just like original arcade

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monitors.

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What's really innovative about the PiCade Max are the add-on boards that come with it.

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There's the PiCade Max Power Hat, which powers both the Pi and the screen at 5V and 12V.

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The PiCade Max USB controller board supports up to 24 buttons and two 4-way joysticks that

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connect via USB-C. This itself is a deal, as the wiring harness I bought for mine was

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about $100 just by itself.

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And then lastly, there's the PiCade Max USB audio board, which has two screw terminals

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for a pair of speakers and is an I2S audio DAC with a 3W amplifier and volume control

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via a separate encoder board. What's really innovative is that these last two boards are

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powered by the RP2040 and connect via USB-C to the Raspberry Pi 5. Pimoroni mentioned

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in an interview with Les Pounder at Tom's Hardware that they'll be selling these two

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standalone boards in the future, and I know I want to check out the audio board for sure.

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The PiCade Max kit retails for £495, or about $650 with the current exchange rate. That's

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really not that much compared to how much it would cost to build it yourself and take

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it from me. And it's about 50% lighter and not nearly as heavy as using normal MDF to

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build the cabinet. Of course, I don't want to know what shipping would cost across the

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pond for that. I'll link to a couple articles from Tom's Hardware with their coverage, as

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well as the PiCast show on YouTube, where host Les Pounder had Paul and Phil from Pimoroni

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on to talk all about it.

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That's really cool. There have been a few retro arcade using a Raspberry Pi things over

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the years, but they've always been sort of, "Oh, if you can find these random parts that

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I happen to have in my garage, if you can find the exact clones, you can use my plans."

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But having something like this PiCade Max could make it really easy just to, "I'm going

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to build it this weekend."

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Yep. And you do need to set aside time. Paul from Pimoroni joked on the stream that they

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did that his speed run of doing a complete installation was like two hours. And that's

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someone who knows what they're doing and has probably done it before. So you need to put

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a good chunk of time to do it. But then again, it's taking me years and years to work on

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mine. So this sounds like it would probably be a lot faster.

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No kidding. Yeah. And I'd love to get the link to the place in your area where you actually

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got some real arcade hardware. Because I used to be really into that. I used to have a couple

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of stand-up arcade machines. They were old Atari Vector things that were always dying

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because that was kind of their normal state of things. They were in, once these old games

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get past a certain age, they're kind of always failing, it seems like.

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Yeah. And it's really neat. They have everything from PCBs for a couple of games to mounting

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hardware to they custom make some PCBs. And then they've got the whole fighting stick

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stuff. But I'll make sure to link to Paradise Arcade in the show notes too, because they

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ship internationally.

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Yeah. And the cool thing about the PiCade Max being separate boards is you can take some

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of the Pimoroni stuff and use it with an existing sort of arcade platform that you've already

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partially built. If you are kind of stuck on the wiring harness problem of how do you

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get these joysticks and buttons and speakers hooked up to whatever you want.

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And I've been worried about sound because just doing the 3.5 millimeter out from a Raspberry

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Pi isn't, you know, it's still a little tinny. But yeah, I'm excited about that because I

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really want to check out the audio board. It's got the two pairs of speaker terminals

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so you can use a real pair of speakers with it, not just some cheap computer speakers.

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Totally. Yeah.

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What's your next one for us?

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So yeah, well, OK. So at the beginning of August, on August 8th, Raspberry Pi introduced

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a new microcontroller board, a successor to their popular RP2040 Pico. It's the Pico 2

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and a new chip that powers the RP2350, which is a great chip. It's like they've improved

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it in almost every manner. Like it's it's got a like a twice as fast dual core set of

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CPUs in it. It's got extra PIO if you're doing that sort of weird protocol stuff. It's got

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twice the memory. Just oh, it's a lower power. You know, even though it's twice as fast,

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it's lower power. So it's just all around a really good update. And I've been really

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excited as I've been slowly getting some of these RP2350 based boards in to test. Since

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it's twice as fast and almost all the stuff I do with the chip is in CircuitPython or

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synthesizer stuff, both of which are really compute intensive. Having a chip that's twice

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as fast means I can do essentially twice as much, twice as many synth voices or something

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or twice as fast response time. And as I was testing it out, I learned that the capacitive

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touch library in CircuitPython called TouchIO wasn't working with it. And I looked, started

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looking into it, found a bug on the CircuitPython GitHub. As I was looking at it with my oscilloscope,

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I discovered that there's this errata that was in the data sheet called E9 that is a

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problem with the actual hardware, where if you're using a GPIO pin on this chip in a

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certain way, mostly as an input, it will latch up and stay at 2.2 volts instead of like high

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or low. And so the way the capacitive touch sensing works in CircuitPython and a lot of

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other systems is you have a pin and it drives that pin high for like 10 microseconds. And

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then it turns that GPIO pin into an input and watches how long it takes for that pin

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to go low. And that time that it takes is basically it's discharging the capacitance

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of whatever the line is connected to, like a little capacitive pad. And when you human

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touch that pad, that changes that capacitance. And so the time it takes to go from high to

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low changes. And so with that, you can get a really good sense of like, oh, was something,

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has something touched the capacitive pad or not. But because of this pin is sort of like

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staying high or not staying high, staying at 2.2 volts, which is kind of not quite high,

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but it's definitely not low. It means that touch I/O doesn't work. It also means that

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certain kinds of button inputs won't work either that have like certain low or certain

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high of resistance pulldown resistors, or if you've configured internal pulldowns in

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the chip. And so I'm at this point, I'm not recommending people use the Pico 2 or the

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RP 2350 if they're newbies, because it's got this weird input problem where you don't

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know is it not working because of my wiring or is it not working because you're tickling

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this weird input bug on the chip. And thankfully, Dan Halbert has looked at, Dan Halbert, who's

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a core CircuitPython developer, he looked into it in much more detail than I, and he's

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created a bunch of really good test cases that he's opened issues up on the Raspberry

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Pi GitHub and on the MicroPython GitHub. And so there's a bunch of good data and the relevant

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people have been notified. So hopefully there'll be a fix. I don't know if there'll ever be

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a software fix. We might have to wait for the next version of the Pico 2 chip to come

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out. But if you want to read more about this, Haxter wrote an article about it that talks

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a bit, I think they downplay the problem a bit, because I think the problem is actually

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more of an issue than some people say, "Oh, it only happens if you have internal pulldowns

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enabled, da da da." But no, I think it's a problem any time you're doing any kind of

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input with high resistance pulldowns on the output, which if you're doing low power work,

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if you're doing certain kind of bit bang protocols like I2C, if you're doing those by hand, would

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that require an external pulldown resistor? So yeah, just be warned, there'll be lots

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of links in the show notes about all this if you want to look into it more.

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Yeah, it's disappointing to hear on such a popular chip, right at the beginning to run

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into a showstopper bug like that. Does it occur on all the pins, all the GPIOs?

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Yeah.

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Oh, okay.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think maybe the ADC pins in some cases, it doesn't affect

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them because the analog buffer gets turned on instead of the digital GPIO buffer. But

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all the digital pins, definitely. Yeah, pretty frustrating. I think most people won't see

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a problem, but I've seen a problem with buttons and I've seen a problem with the cap touch.

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Which is one of your favorite things to do.

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Yeah. No, it's like, I was like, "Oh, I'm going to just use this as a drop-in replacement

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for some of my existing boards on Tindy," and nope.

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Just kidding.

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Yeah, lol. So yeah, what's your number two this week?

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I've mentioned a couple of times on the show that I have a 3D printer from Bambu Lab and

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they're back in the news again after Stratasys has sued them for patent infringement. Stratasys

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created 3D printing back in the late 80s and through that and their acquisition of MakerBot

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just over 10 years ago, hold most of the patents related to 3D printing today. I've linked

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to two articles from Ars Technica and Tom's Hardware that have really good coverage in

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the show notes that go into far more detail than I will. In question are 10 patents and

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two jumped out at me, the heated build platforms in Purge Towers. Both of these are pretty

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standard in 3D printers, which raises the question, are their patents still valid or

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is there prior art that may invalidate the patents? Phil Torrone of Adafruit asked this

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question a few weeks ago when this hit the news. He suggested that someone like the Open

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Source Hardware Association should start a database to catalog prior art to see if the

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patents could be invalidated. I'm wondering if it actually needs to be a database or could

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prior art be tracked in something simpler, similar to an awesome list and simple markdown

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on a GitHub page, for example. I'm half tempted to start a list myself, but I don't think

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I have the context in the industry to get the list right. This isn't the first time

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a prior art search has been done against Stratasys' patents either. Doing some search engine queries

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prepping for the show, there were calls just over 10 years ago for prior art to fight some

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of these patents, but I couldn't tell if anything ever came out of it. I'll link to the articles

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that I mentioned with coverage of the story in a Reddit thread with some speculation about

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why Stratasys is going after Bambu Lab and not other companies. Again, it's just speculation.

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I'm not going to say they're conspiracy theories, they're just theories. It probably just comes

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down to the fact that Bambu Lab has had a large amount of success in a very short amount

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of time. They're afraid of losing market share of their large commercial 3D printers to an

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upstart consumer 3D printing company. I've heard so many patent issues with Stratasys.

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One of the things I think that started the whole consumer 3D printing revolution back

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in 2006 or 2007 was that one of the key patents that was about the, "Oh, I'm going to melt

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plastic and squirt it out using a CNC-controlled nozzle," that went out of patent in the mid-2000s

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or something. Thus, we got RepRap and then we got MakerBot and Prusa and all these others.

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Every 3D printer is because of this patent being finally expired. I remember hearing

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one of the reasons why a lot of these consumer 3D printers don't have heated build chambers

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is because Stratasys still had the patent on heated build chambers, and so everyone

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just had heated platforms. Then, people would say, "Well, you know, if you put your heated

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platform 3D printer in a small box from Ikea, your prints would be much better."

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Right. Stratasys' headquarters is about 15 minutes from my house here in the Twin Cities,

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and I'm just half tempted to drive over there, knock on the door and go, "What the hell

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are you doing?"

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"What?"

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But obviously, they look at this as defending their patents and their revenue streams, so

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I see both sides of it. It's still very frustrating for things that are very common today to still

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have patents against them.

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Yeah, super frustrating, especially for things that seem pretty obvious, but this is the

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world we have to play inside of, I guess.

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And I did look. A number of those patents don't expire until the mid-2030s, so there's

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still over 10 years to go on some of them, which is quite a long time.

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Yeah. I'm on the crossfingers that we'll find a way.

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Well, that's our show. Thank you for listening. Visit TheBootloader.net for detailed show

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