Welcome back to The Factory this week we have Pico's in some new flavors, and we also have a bunch of new PiicoDev modules to show off we've had a pretty major upgrade to our programming and test jig this is the old one which is kind of mechanically complex, but I think we can do better, let's get into it.

First up the Raspberry Pi Pico we've been soldering headers onto Raspberry Pi Pico's for about as long as Pico's have been available, I think a lot of people appreciate just being able to get Pico's With headers straight up, so they can get on with their projects you may have noticed added to the lineup is Pico's with female headers pre-soldered, and you know that when you think about it that's basically the same soldering job it's just flipped upside down so we kind of get like two Picos with headers for the same soldering configuration on the soldering robot, and we thought while we're at it let's set up Pico's with stackable headers that's what Brenton and Bryce are commissioning behind me at the moment and we know this might seem like it's the same thing all over again but actually tuning the machine to get the perfect amount of solder on these pins without any kind of smearing or wicking has proved quite a challenge, but I think we're just about there.

So pretty soon there'll be Pico's with headers in three different flavors. This little guy made an appearance in the last episode while we were talking about the Makerverse nano power timer shield for Raspberry Pi Pico so this can now be enabled by just plugging it straight in. You might recall when we were talking about this shield and also this battery charger we basically put these together because we already have the parts used in other projects, and we just thought that the community might really like this kind of hardware now if you took all the parts that you've got in your catalog and thought of all the things you could make with it, you'd end up with a list as long as your arm and making something isn't actually that is hard but documenting it takes a lot of time.

So these new pieces of hardware are appearing under our new Makerverse labs brand. Makerverse labs is all about being able to explore experiments like these really quickly and bring them to makers that might want to use them, ofcourse the experimental nature means they may not be very popular, and they may not be around forever, so things like this are aimed at probably more experienced makers who are just happy reading specifications and maybe a schematic and some basic examples. Experimenting with these ideas is really enabled by the new layout of the Core Electronics website here's the nano power timer shield for instance and thanks to the new website we can embed a lot more information into the page in a way that's really easy to sort through, so now our pages can have like tabs for technical information some example code additional resources if this was all on a single flat page it would be kind of intimidating but by grouping it in this way it really enables the Makerverse labs experience. So a more experienced maker can basically come to this page and just get everything they need out of it.

G'day, I've been working on three new additions to the PiicoDev range the PiicoDev slider potentiometer the PiicoDev rotary potentiometer, and the PiicoDev button. We'll start with the rotary potentiometer. The rotary potentiometer is a smart module that's got address selectable on the back using four dip switches which is a new addition to the smart module range before we used a couple of dip switches and then some solder jumpers, and now we've gone for completely dip switch so no soldering or cutting required. Both of these potentiometers are addressable using I2C and they will give you a number between 0 and 100, and will offer some other scaling tricks as well that you might be able to use on your projects now the great thing about these devices is the firmware is going to be identical for each one because they're both potentiometers of the same value.

Okay we've also got this I2C PiicoDev button, and it's going to have a few little features in the firmware where you can poll it to find out what the state of the button is, and also there'll be a counter on board that counts how many times you press it, so you don't have to poll it at a very, very high frequency you can just get an update every 10 seconds or something like that. Similarly to our other smart modules we've got four dip switches on the back to do our addressing. These devices being smart modules have got microcontrollers on them that need to be programmed and for that we're going to need some sort of jig.

We've been programming smart modules for a little while and this was really the solution that I came up with first which was okay it's this sliding mechanical assembly that we've seen in a couple of videos before where a module can be placed in and then locked in place by a sliding carriage and this has worked really Well for parts where the components are facing up, and the programming header is on the bottom side these are kind of the same except here we have the programming header on the same side as the surface mount components. So this jig simply isn't going to cut it because there's stuff sticking out the back and into it, so we're really going to need an upgrade to this kind of workflow. Peter's whipped up this new programming jig which has this pattern of five pogo pins that have just sprung onto that programming header so we can place our module on and get not only power and ground and the programming signal, but we get the I2C connection that can be driven by the Pico to run the test.

So in one fell swoop, we can hold this on the jig program it and then run a test program on the Pico to make sure everything works so that's our mechanical fixturing for the square unit and of course for the slide pot being a two-unit module we just have another rectangular module so that can be mounted easily as well. And this is really neat I think this is going to be as much as possible our new standard for smart module program and test. I had a couple of runs at developing like a program and test points on the back of smart modules before, and it was kind of problematic I started off with all five pins just like Peter has so that we don't need the connector in the mix, but I laid them out in a row and everything was just too close to work with. The next time around I minimized it to just a single programming pin and that meant that power and data had to come through the PiicoDev connector which meant that sliding mechanical jig, it meant that you needed this kind of arrangement to power and communicate with the thing.

But I think Peter's nailed it with this layout, so I think we might stick with that. Now the PiicoDev family has had a touch input module for quite some time, so the button might seem a little less relevant because this is a three-channel touch module, but you know a clicky button I think will always have its place it's a lot more accessible. That tactile click and that audio feedback really is irreplaceable, so I think that that can be a really friendly experience for a lot of people. And that's all we have for this week if you have any suggestions about something you'd like to see in Makerverse or PiicoDev let us know in the comments and until next time thanks for watching!