G'day, welcome back to the factory. This week I've got some new hardware to show you and also a few manufacturing tricks. Let's get started.

The first update I have for you is the new PiicoDev laser distance sensor prototype. This has been constructed and we're now working on the firmware library for this. There's two windows here, one to emit and one to receive laser pulses. This is capable of millimetre precision over a couple of meters, which is pretty incredible. You won't really be able to use them outdoors because they get blasted by infrared and UV radiation from the sun, but indoors really precise, really accurate.

Here's a quick demo to show what I mean. I've got the data streaming into the console and if I remain as still as I can, I can hold that millimetre reading at about 170 millimetres and then this bottoms out pretty close to the sensor, so you can measure some very near distances with this sensor. 15 millimeters, 10 millimeters, getting down to five before we're getting a bit of noise. It seems like a practical minimum is about five millimetres where you start to lose some accuracy.

To drive this sensor, I'm leveraging an existing open source project, the OpenNV or Open Machine Vision project. They have a MicroPython library that is pretty perfect for most makers' needs. There's a big block at the start which just has a bunch of binary data that's for the default configuration. Taking a dive through this list, there's some useful hints in the comments about interrupt configurations and also something called the region of interest. This laser sensor has an array of pixels on the sensor and you can choose which region of the sensor is of interest for these distance readings. As far as I understand,That's very useful for narrowing the focus so you can narrow the region of interest and make a tighter cone that you want to measure distance over. That can be useful if you put something like this in a long narrow tube and you don't want to pick up spurious readings from the sidewall of the tube. You can see that parameter is modifiable here in the setup.

Moving on to packaging now for the PiicoDev modules, if you purchase a PiicoDev module, this is how it's going to arrive. You'll have a static dissipative bag but inside is the bit that I'm more excited about. These labels we're able to make in-house pretty quickly and effectively using just our colour printer and laser cutter. We can actually print this label on both sides. We can do a big sheet of them all at once and then we use our laser cutter that we use for Pioneers platforms, all the cases that we do for Raspberry Pi, Arduino. We can use that same laser cutter to do the edge cut for this label. We just need to align it to the right pattern and then we let the laser cutter go and before you know it, we've got a bunch of beautiful custom-sized labels to fit our product.

The whole point here is that we remove our dependencies on other services. If we can do as much as possible in this space, we can very quickly iterate art designs, we can add links, change barcodes. We can iterate extremely quickly and get these onto our product. We're less reliant on other services that have some lead time. We looked into other services that could make these small labels and it's actually not a very common thing. So being able to make your own custom-sized label to suit whatever product you're making, that's really powerful.

In other PiicoDev news, PiicoDev has come for RaspberryPi. I am just about to start the assembly of these PiicoDev adapters for Raspberry Pi. You can see I've done my dry placement and everything looks good. I'm going to paste these panels now and get cracking.

So development on the laser distance sensor is full steam ahead. We're also working on more sensors as well. I think the next project is going to be an inertial measurement unit. I'm leaning towards the MPU6050. Real, real modern hero kind of IMU. Very available, very well understood. So that's what I'm leaning towards for now.

If you have any good ideas about what sensors you'd like to see in the PiicoDev line, what we should work on next, or if you have any questions about anything you've seen on the factory, open a thread on the Core Electronics forums.

Thanks for watching.