Desk of Ladyada - Piezo Booster & ESP32-S3 Metro
62This week at my desk we did a ton of revision work, but we also had a little time to design two new boards. one is a piezo booster: we're still working on a project to figure out how we can make an open source library for sonar distance measurement without using sonar modules. to get these to detect far-off items you need to bounce a loud sonar signal and that means driving the disc in the transponder at a high pp voltage. how to do that easily? well, we found the nifty PAM8904 ( https://www.digikey.com/short/p9bwzp2t ). Its a switched-cap piezo driver that has BTL output and up to 3x voltage multiplication thanks to a built in boosting circuit for up to 15Vpp. there's also a dc/dc boost version. next up we love making powerful metro-shaped boards and the draft ESP32-S3 metro design we banged out this week brings the chonk, with 16 MB of Flash and 8 MB of PSRAM - that's the max you can get in the WROOM module (https://www.digikey.com/short/p2zm3v0r). but we think it's worth it's weight in gold cause when we start messing around with the parallel TTL TFT (https://www.adafruit.com/product/1596) driver we're gonna need that space to buffer the full 16 bit 800x480 display... heck we could even double buffer the graphics at that point.
The Great Search - SMT Screw Terminal Blocks
https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/t/te-connectivity-amp/board-mount-reflow-terminal-blocks
This weeks' Great Search comes to us from social medial, where Jeremy S Cook asks: "Anyone know where I could find surface mount screw terminals?" (https://twitter.com/JeremySCook/status/1680208303870074880) We're glad you asked! This is something we've had to deal with, since we like to have solder-less designs but want to avoid using the selective solder machine or hand soldering for just 2 points. We've used Wago SMT terminal blocks on boards like the Bonsai Buckaroo (https://www.adafruit.com/product/4534) and STEMMA relay breakout (https://www.adafruit.com/product/4409) - the latter board we also wanted to avoid having contact terminals that were exposed in case folks were using mains power. However, these are push terminals, and they specifically want *screw-tightening* terminals. Does such a thing exist? Tune in to find out!
https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/01/27/eye-on-npi-te-board-mount-reflow-terminal-blocks-eyeonnpi-digikey-teconnectivity/
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