#176 – Funding New/Manufacturing Old Projects - Radical Robotic Requisition

Chris Gammell: This is the M-Hour Podcast, recorded December 16th, 2013. Episode 176, Radical Robotic Requisition.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV Blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of the soon-to-be-launching Contextual Electronics.

Dave Jones: Ooh, soon-to-be-launching? You didn't tell me about this. Oh, yeah. You didn't give me a heads-up on this.

Chris Gammell: Yep. When? When? So, sign-ups start this week, and the course starts January 20th, 2014.

Dave Jones: As in paid sign-ups start this week.

Chris Gammell: That's all there is, David. Oh, yeah, I know. Well, you know. Right, right, yes.

Dave Jones: I just wanted to point that out, that it's a paid course.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's a thing.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah, so that's good. I hope you get filthy rich and famous. I don't want to get filthy rich and famous.

Chris Gammell: I just want to work on this stuff. It's just fun.

Dave Jones: Right, you just want to, yeah, yeah. But it'd be sweet if it turned into a full-time job.

Chris Gammell: You could stick it to the man like I did. That would be interesting. I don't know if that's going to happen or not. Right. How do you deal with, because I wonder about this for consultants, too. How do you deal with, like, the isolation factor? That's what I always wonder about. I mean, like, I think some people have mentioned to me before that, you know, they listen to podcasts all day to kind of feel like there's office chatter going on. But, you know, once you get over the, okay, I don't have someone yapping my ear off about the football game or something, you know, it's like, oh, I kind of wish there were people around, though.

Dave Jones: Well, see, I don't. Like, I've always been a, you know, solitary, nerdy engineer. I spent my entire life locked in my lab, you know. My entire childhood locked in my lab. I didn't have any friends. So it's just normal for me.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's bullshit. I'm sorry. I mean, you're at the forum all day, right? I mean, like, there's that, at least, right? Well, yeah, okay. It's just a different type of interaction, at least.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's a different type of interaction. Yeah, I do agree.

Chris Gammell: You are antisocial. You're kind of a troll.

Dave Jones: You hang out in the garbage room, stealing monitors.

Chris Gammell: Ah, you shall not take my monitor.

Dave Jones: It's not so much the human interaction for me. It's more like, oh, I don't get to work on stuff anymore because, you know, yeah. Yeah, that for me was the thing about, you know, having a real job was the fact that you got to work on, you know, higher end stuff than I'd ever do on my own. You know, I just don't have the time or inclination or money to, you know, do some huge ass project. Whereas at work, you know, that's what you do. You know, generally you work on, you know, pretty decent projects usually. You know, sometimes some projects suck, but, you know, in amongst the sucky ones are the real interesting ones that, you know, oh, shit, I can spend a couple hundred thousand or a million bucks on this project. And, you know, it's something you'd never get to, you know. Right, all that overhead is priced in. Buy that $50,000 bit of instrument. Exactly. Yeah, all that overhead is priced in.

Chris Gammell: When you have someone, like, brokering deals with government contracts or, you know, other large companies, that kind of thing. Yeah, that is a benefit for sure because trying to do that as a small company or a single person in a company, right, like a sole, what do you call it, sole traders? Sole trader, yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: One man band, midnight engineer.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you got to do it all then, right? You got to actually, and you don't want to sit in a meeting all day trying to, you know, wring stuff out of, you know, either specs or money. So that I could see that being difficult. Difficult.

Dave Jones: Although it varies. Like, you know, I know, you know, there's one man bands, I know, that work on real interesting shit, you know, because they've even got clients because they're doing consulting work, right? So they work on real interesting stuff because, you know, but that's the same really as having a, you know, a nine to five job. In fact, it can be better, you know, if you're a design consultant, for example, you can just, you know, work on different projects all the time. But that has its own challenges in terms of pressure and all that sort of jazz. But, yeah, when you're doing stuff like me, you don't have a defined project really to work on. It's not like, oh, I'm going to spend the next six months working on this product. Then I'm going to release it. You know, that's just not the business I'm in anymore. So you're probably asking the wrong guy.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's like you have a bountiful, you know, harvest of time, right? It's like the whole world stretches in front of you and then you have to try and decide. And that's almost as hard as someone handing you something and be like, here's some boundaries, now go optimize, right? That's like kind of what we like in the first place. Do you guys have stuff like, in the States we have SBIR grants. Have you ever heard of those? No. What does that stand for? I have no idea. I know SB is small business. I'm not sure. Maybe investigative research or something like that.

Dave Jones: I think we do have, yeah, we do have something like that here. You can get tax breaks or something. And you can get government grants for doing R&D type things. That's the idea. I think it's more paperwork than anything.

Chris Gammell: So I've talked to some people about it. My friend who works at NASA turned me on to it because, or he was like a contractor to NASA. And I think some of his stuff was SBIRs. And I met some people in the meantime who do that. And that's always like an interesting thing because there's like different stages as well. Like you'll have stage one is like really early research, two and three. And you have to kind of apply. It's like a grant application process. But I think that's probably the closest way to get actual like R&D type stuff as an actual like, you know, one man band or small design shop kind of thing. And there's stuff that's, I think the way that it was relayed to me when I asked, I asked someone who actually had an SBIR at the time out at Maker Faire a couple years ago. And he said, it's all about getting that first one. You know, you kind of help out on someone getting, while they're working on their SBIR and then you're kind of on the radar. And then you can go and apply for it. And since they know your name, they're kind of, you're actually in the running instead of just some random dude, you know, trying to vie for research.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So that'd be cool. But like you said, I mean, I'm sure there's a bunch of pressure there and deadlines and everything else. Yeah.

Dave Jones: All that sort of jazz, you know. Yeah. Like I would love to go, right. And for the, you know, I'm going to develop this, you know, big, interesting project. And well, you know, that's just, there goes my video blog, you know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Right. Right. Exactly. And there might be, there might be NDAs and stuff like that in there too. I remember the first time I was exposed to SBIRs was at the first conference I went to. I took a bus to Chicago and pretended I was in the media because I had a blog, which is a great idea, by the way, folks. Free entrance, at least it used to be. They kind of caught on to my game. But there was a presentation from a guy who was measuring the vibration of Apache helicopter's rotors with like, he harvested the energy from the rotors and then he measured the acceleration and the stress on the rotors and then he beamed it back wirelessly. It was like really cool. Awesome stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: That's a really interesting project. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But yeah, you wouldn't be doing a video blog if you were doing that, right? No, exactly.

Dave Jones: You know, it's, that's the advantage of having a nine to five job. You know, you've got that eight hours a day forced upon you to, you know, often do interesting shit with a, you know, big budget and a long lead time. You know, it's just, yeah, it's forced upon you.

Chris Gammell: Assuming it's interesting and assuming it's only eight hours. Yes, that would be great. Exactly. Then, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it's, I mean, definitely like a grass is greener kind of thing. I could see that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So I miss that more than the human interaction thing. I mean, that was always fun. You know, I enjoyed hanging out in the lab and just, you know, shooting the shit with the colleagues.

Chris Gammell: But I miss that now even, you know, like it's not that I just have a smaller team than I used to be on. But like being on a big team is just nice because you have a lot of people to bounce ideas off of. So that's, that's another nice thing. That's why I started doing meetups really because I'm, it's just like now I'm on a small enough team that it's like, well, I love all my team members and I love the work that I do. But it's just like, you know, when I'm trying to hash through an analog problem with a microcontroller guy, it's like, okay, well, let's start from the beginning. You know what? I'm just going to, I'm going to figure this out by myself. Right. And then when he wants to talk about code, it's like, you know, I'm worthless for that. So, yeah, it's tough on small teams. But meetups are good. I like meetups.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I, yeah, I've. You got to do it, man. I promised I'd start one. I know. I never did. Did I?

Chris Gammell: Your problem is you don't drink beer. That's the real problem because that's the real excuse here is that I go to just drink beer and the fact that fun people show up and talk about their projects. It's just nice. Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right. Maybe that'll be my New Year's resolution is to actually start a meetup thing and interact with real humans for a change.

Chris Gammell: That'd be good. Yeah, you should do that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I like that. We'll see. All right. All right.

Dave Jones: But there's already so many out there. I should just go. You know, I should just tune up.

Chris Gammell: You should get the hell out of your lab. The tough thing is that like a lot of your stuff, right? I mean, you're at the lab all day and then all the stuff's after work, but you want to go, you know, spend time with your son, which is good, and your wife.

Dave Jones: Well, exactly. You know, there's family stuff after hours. So it eats into, you know, I've got time pressures everywhere, even though.

Chris Gammell: Right. You know, I do this full time. Well, and meetups too. I think the meetups that, so the meetup I throw at least, I mean, there's some people that have kids, but most of them are like, well, I can come to like one every couple months. You know, I can't be there every time because they're. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's the same kind of thing. You know, it's just family stuff and stuff they want to be at and spend time with their kids, which is great. Yep. So trade-offs. You know, you know how it is. I know. I don't. Someday maybe. Right.

Dave Jones: Dude, I'm excited.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What about. Oh, I know. We've gone back to the moon. Oh, that. Oh, I thought you were going to talk about your thing.

Dave Jones: No, no, no. No, no.

Chris Gammell: No, no. The moon. The moon. Yes. The moon is cool. I like.

Dave Jones: Not as cool as Mars, but hey, I'll take it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, landing stuff anywhere in space is pretty cool. Yeah. It's just. I know. Exactly. And the Chinese have done it. Awesome. Yeah. Good job, China. I love it just because I think I've said this on the show once before, but it's not going to be quite the same as the Cold War, but I kind of hope that there's like a, oh, China's doing this. Oh, shoot. US should go back up too. You know, let's do some more stuff, guys. Come on. Pile it on. You know, like, I mean, I know that the undercurrent of, not even the undercurrent, but just like the basis of the whole space race to start with was actually the Cold War, but.

Dave Jones: It was Cold War. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, maybe eventually someone's going to be like, oh, what if China's working on missiles? You know? They already have them, dude. I know. But still, what if the US is like, hey, let's go to the Mars. Let's go to Mars and take over. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Because the US should not go back to the moon. It's pointless. They've done it, you know, 40 years ago. It's just, you know, stupid to go back. Anyway, coincidentally, I'm reading Buzz Aldrin's new book, Mission to Mars. Oh, yeah? Which is really good. Yep. I haven't finished it yet. But yeah, I'm reading it. Because he is, you know, one of the leading proponents of going to Mars. And he's developed, you know, this fantastic shuttle orbital system, which just ferries things back and forth from Earth to Mars and Earth to the moon and things like that. He's using practically no energy at all. Just the gravity slingshots. Oh, cool. Because this guy's really smart. You know, it's not like he just walked on the moon. He has a PhD in lunar rendezvous. You know, they used to call him Dr. Rendezvous. And, you know, this guy's one of the leading experts on lunar, you know, in orbital mechanics and, you know, all that sort of jazz. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's cool.

Dave Jones: So he's been pushing for this for the last, well, since he came back from the moon, really.

Chris Gammell: That's really cool. Yeah. It's awesome. I can't say I follow that. I'll have to check out that book, though. That sounds like a good, something to put on the Christmas list.

Dave Jones: Mission to Mars by Buzz Aldrin. Huh.

Chris Gammell: Okay. I saw that there's been news about the, that new, I mean, I've seen stuff trickle out about this as well, but like that plasma rocket, they keep kind of, they kind of keep trickling that stuff out as well, you know, with like a, I forget what it is. It's like, there's like a, there's like a source and then there's like this high voltage net and basically they kind of crap stuff out the back.

Dave Jones: Are you talking about like an ion? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's the one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's a probe at the moment that uses one of those prototype ion engines. I think it's. But I keep seeing news releases about it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's going to get us there faster. My question about that is, because the whole basis of that is they like, they keep accelerating by keep, you know, they keep pushing stuff out the back, like a little bit at a time. Don't they have to slow down as well? They don't want to just like.

Dave Jones: Well, they don't. Well, they see, that's the thing with Buzz's plan. They don't, these things don't slow down. They just keep going. Oof. Shuttle in to and from, to and from. And then you have another one that, you know, races up to it and docks with it. And then, but it's still going real quick. So it's not, you know, so it's fully reusable. It just keeps shuttling back and forth and never stops.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's cool. That's like a. Using, using just the gravity.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Using, using practically no energy because it's just the gravity slingshots. You just have to, you know, do a few course corrections here and there occasionally. But, you know. So it's like free energy, right? Almost free energy. You just start at once. You know, start at once. And the energy, well, you know. And the. Free energy. All you need to do is like. And the energy of the planets. Take over.

Chris Gammell: Be a planet.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You've got to be a big ass, massy planet, you know. And have a shitload of mass. And, yep. Sweet. You can send shuttles back and forth between moon and earth and earth and mars. Yeah. For free.

Chris Gammell: I love like looking at like gravitational equations and being like, that's not all there is to it. Come on, guys. You know, gravitational constant and yada, yada. No. No. There's got to be other stuff in there. It's been a long while for me.

Dave Jones: I'm sure it's incredibly complex. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Anyway. Well, that's cool though. Yeah. Yeah. I'll have to check out that book. But China. That's. I saw they were doing. I mean, they said like putting people on the moon in 2025 or something like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Something like that. Had you heard about this lunar rover thing?

Chris Gammell: Like prior to them actually landing? Before it happened? Yeah. Before it happened. Not really. No. You?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Exactly. I, well, maybe an inkling like a year or two ago or something, but oh shit, they actually landed? What? It is kind of weird. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's the first I heard of it. Yeah. It's kind of weird because it's like, oh, Chinese media reports, right? You know, it's relatively closed and stuff like that in terms. I mean, they're reporting the results and stuff like that, but at the same time, it's like, yeah, I wish I would have known about that. I would have been cheering. You know, if they would have had a video feed like the JPL did for the Mars thing.

Dave Jones: The Mars Curiosity rover.

Chris Gammell: I could have watched it. You could have missed it, right? You could have been like, oh, I'm going to an event. Then you could have missed it. Rub it in. Oh, yep.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Yeah. And of course, we'll get the nutters coming out saying it's all faked, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I heard you already have that, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: People come out of the woodwork. Just ignore them. Don't feed the trolls. You know how it goes. Yep. Unless they're the trolls in the garbage room, then, you know. Right. Appease them with monitors and old broken copiers. Right. Goodness. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, have we got video from it yet? No, I haven't seen any video. I just...

Chris Gammell: The...

Dave Jones: Crude animation. Yeah. I just saw a couple of stills tied together of it coming, deploying from the ramps. Or something, but...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's tough, because there's not really anything there to film it, right? And then you've got to get all the power to beam it back and all that stuff. I mean...

Dave Jones: Yeah, because it's all faked, you know. It's really hard to fake that stuff. It's much easier to fake photos.

Chris Gammell: There you go. You're not helping, Dave. You're not helping at all.

Dave Jones: Well, I just... Coincidentally, I just watched Capricorn 1 the other night.

Chris Gammell: What's that?

Dave Jones: Have you ever seen Capricorn 1?

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: Oh, you've never seen Capricorn 1?

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: Oh, classic 1970s movie about faking the Mars landing. Huh. You know, the US go to Mars, but they fake it. You know, they pull them out at the last second, you know, from the capsule. And the whole idea is that the capsule just, you know, goes out there and they fake the transmissions and, you know, things like that. So, pretty bad movie, but I was compelled to watch it, you know.

Chris Gammell: So, you know, I was watching First Contact this weekend and I say, I was telling my wife, I'm like, you know, we should just name our first kid Zephrim. You know, whenever we have a kid, we should name him Zephrim. He's bound to find an alien civilization. So...

Dave Jones: Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Yep. I look at that. I look at that as, like, you know, like a, you know, just kind of, like, dreamscape. Obviously, like, people like Elon Musk are way, you know, way ahead of this kind of stuff, right? But, you know, I look at that kind of thing, right? In terms of, like, longevity of legacy, you know, like, that's the one. That's the one to shoot for right there. You know, finding the alien civilization. That's the one to shoot for.

Dave Jones: Yep. That's it. I know. I'm very disappointed that SETI hasn't actually produced any results. I'm sure it would have, you know, I was so sure it would have, you know, after, you know, what, 20 years of operation or something. I'm bitterly disappointed about that.

Chris Gammell: What, like the, what was it called, SETI? The one that you, like, sit on your computer and crunch data, like that kind of thing?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm talking about, SETI.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Yeah. Speaking of which, we should get Horowitz on. Oh. As in Horowitz and Hill. He's, he's one of the principal engineers for SETI. Oh, cool. Yeah. Hmm.

Chris Gammell: We should try and get him on. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So we can talk, so we can talk about the mythical new book and why they haven't found any signals yet. And I'm so sure they would have. I was so excited by that.

Dave Jones: What do they find first? What?

Chris Gammell: Aliens or third edition of Art of Electronics? Right. Which one comes first? I'm thinking aliens. Yeah, right. You just don't know. Possibly, Ron. You just don't know. Yep. Oh. Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah, that was cool. I remember I used to have, and those kind of all stopped too. I remember like, I think it was like when I started in college, like 2000, well, I started in 2001. So it must have been like 2002, 2003. There was all of these like, use up your spare cycles on your computer to crunch data for SETI, crunch data for pharmaceuticals, for like finding cures for cancer.

Dave Jones: Yay, so the big corporations can get rich. Yay.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. I think the focus was on the cure, not necessarily the money. I think it was. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But, you know, the money's a byproduct.

Chris Gammell: It's in there somewhere. Right. But yeah, I don't see that anymore. I mean, I'm sure it's still out there, but.

Dave Jones: Yeah, probably.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if it's just because there's like focus on power consumption or. I mean, everybody had desktops.

Dave Jones: Well, it's all bloody Bitcoin mining these days. People want to make a fortune Bitcoin mining. That's true. But it uses more. It costs more in energy than it does to profit to get it. Unless you can steal your energy from your neighbor or something like that.

Chris Gammell: Right. And there's still costs there.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I've been learning all about that stuff. Every time I see Martin Lorton, because he's, you know, he lives in Cleveland now. He comes to these meetups and we meet up some other times as well. But yeah, he's all into Bitcoin. I'm like, I had nothing about that. I don't know anything about it, but.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I've got a Bitcoin account. I set it up and people donated. I've got like 0.5 Bitcoins or something. Look at that. Yeah. I'm rich. Fancy pants rich man over here. And I can check my account forever. So I got no idea. But yeah, people can donate using Bitcoins.

Chris Gammell: Well, let's see. What other topics do we have to hit on the internet? In order to really get the full spectrum. We've got Alien, or Faking the Moon Landing. We've got Bitcoin. Well, nothing. Kickstarter. Should we do Kickstarter?

Dave Jones: Well, we can't have a show without Kickstarter. Right. We should probably do Kickstarter. So yeah, there's a new, another smartwatch. And they pulled it.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. That's right. It had like a metal band. It looked kind of bogus.

Dave Jones: Right. I haven't watched the video. The rock smartwatch. Yeah. It got to 40 grand of a 50 grand goal. And I don't know what the backstory is.

Chris Gammell: Basically, they asserted that it was like a, they, they, the prototype was just a ripoff of someone else. They just re-encased another watch in theirs.

Dave Jones: Right. That sounds like the guy who, um, who tried to, um, scam me, the lying bastard.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What happened there?

Dave Jones: I, I forget his name. Oh, he, there was a to-do on the forum. You know, he's, he's doing smartwatches like this, right? He was put, it was on Indiegogo or something. I think his one didn't get on Kickstarter. So he put it on Indiegogo and then he put it on some other site and, you know, people were all screaming, scam, scam, you know, on, on the forum because I've got, you know, that section of the forum. Oh, that's right. Yeah. There is a section of, yeah. The UVBrow forum. That's actually really- To discuss.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's better than us.

Dave Jones: I think it's the place to be because, you know, you get people who know about this shit. Right. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, better than, better than you and me yapping on about it. So.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, there's, like on the forum, there's bound to be some expert in, you know, manual, you know, this aspect of manufacturing, you know, this particular product or this technology, you know, and, and, and they can just chime in and say, no, this is not possible. They can't do it. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: We're going to machine 400,000 pieces in like two or three days. So we're cool. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: And it's going to, they're going to cost a cent each. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And people just, you know, yeah. Yeah. Because you can't expect your average person who backs these things to know this stuff. No. So, you know, it's, so you can't blame them for getting scammed, you know, you, you know, people like us who have this manufacturing experience, we, we, we know that, you know. Right.

Chris Gammell: And anyway, this guy, there's different levels of scam too, right? I mean, it's like, oh, you'll have this in a month versus, yeah, maybe two years.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. There's a huge difference between a genuine scam from the get go that they just want to steal your money and not produce anything. And ones that are just clueless, you know, oh, I can manufacture this. And you know, no, you can't. You're a dickhead. You don't know what you're doing. And, you know, so yeah, that's, I mean, that's the problem with crowdfunding these days is you get these people who it's so easy to do the, you know, a render or something and come up with an idea and think you can manufacture it in China for, you just pay someone to do it and, you know. Nope. And it just all falls apart. So yeah, that's the issue. That's why I love how Kickstarter just stopped that crap where you, you know, you have to have a real prototype, you can't just put a render on there and, you know, things like that. So I really like that.

Chris Gammell: Well, I've seen, I've seen a really scammy Kickstarter and I don't know if you want to talk about this at all. Yeah. Well, let's go. It's the, what is it called? It's the microcurrent gold. Microcurrent. I believe that's the one.

Dave Jones: Is that the one, Dave? It's the one. It's about to start. I'll talk about that in a minute. I want to finish my smartwatch story.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: I didn't finish my story. Okay. Sorry. I like finishing my stories. I was just rushing so much to get to the. Yeah. The punchline. Oh boy. So anyway, yeah. Like, and the first time I saw this guy's smartwatch, I, you know, like, you know, I didn't, I didn't think it was scam, but I thought there's no, you know, he said it was all this thin, you know, it was so thin and, you know, I've got experience in, in, you know, researching manufacturing watches. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, um, and I, you know, I just instantly went, no way he can make it that thin. You know, I think that's bullshit. You know, he wanted it like five millimeters thin. And I just know, I like, you couldn't with the battery and all the stuff he was going to put in, you just couldn't do it.

Chris Gammell: Ah, battery alone is usually the killer right there, right?

Dave Jones: Exactly. Right. And there's all this other stuff you wanted in there. And, you know, I just said, no, you can't do it. And, um, anyway, this, you know, the whole thread, I didn't follow it after that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, uh, so this guy contacted me and, um, uh, you know, because people were saying, you know, not so good things about him on the, on the, uh, forum. Right. And he, you know, and he came to me, you know, he didn't ask me to, you know, take it down or anything, but he told his side of the story and it sounded all genuine and everything, you know, how, no, you know, people have got it wrong. And, you know, he sounded genuine enough and, you know, so I posted on the forum that, hey, you know, this guy's contacted me and, you know, he sounds genuine enough and, you know, give him a break kind of thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, um, yeah. And then it turns out that he created a fake account on the forum and, and posted a thing, you know, oh, my son bought one of these smartwatches, you know, and, and I think it's great. And, you know, and he, he completely lied his, you know. Yeah. And then I contacted him and said, hey, you know, what about this post on the forum? Can you explain this? And he goes, oh, no, I had nothing to do with it. I got evidence. The guy, it was him. The same IP address and everything. You know, they just lied his ass, ass off and, you know, bastard. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, the one thing that doesn't change in 2013, we're still basically the same as we were in 2013 BC, right? I mean, like. Humans are still the same.

Dave Jones: They still lie and cheat and, you know.

Chris Gammell: People are still people for good and for bad. I mean, it's not just the liars and the cheaters. It's also, there's, you know, there's good people out there. But, yeah. Yep. Yeah. Confidence scams are just as old as they ever were. So, speaking of confidence scams, let's hear about yours, Mr. Kickstarter man. Yeah, I've got one going.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I'll probably do it. As soon as this show ends, my Kickstarter campaign for the new microcurrent gold has been approved. Yay. It was going to take seven days or something like that to approve. Seven days. Yeah. Yeah. Long time. To approve these hardware ones, right? Because the hardware ones are subjected to more scrutiny than the regular ones. And, but no, they approved it in two days and it helps when the guy who approved it's a fan. So, it's good. Yeah. You know. That's nice. Hey. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. So, thank you very much for approving that. Yeah. And, yeah. So, I'll probably release it after this, after the show ends. I'm going to have a short campaign that will probably finish at the end of this year. So, it'll only run for the next two weeks and I'll see how it goes. You know. Yeah, man.

Chris Gammell: I'm excited. I mean, I think you made a really good point about, you know, you're always talking about Kickstarter and stuff like that. But, also, it's good to just have your hands in there to see the, see the system, even if it doesn't work out. That's, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. I'm always talking about it on the show. So, I figure, well, I may as well use it so I have some first-hand experience and I can, you know, talk with a bit of authority on the subject, I guess. Yeah. That I've actually run my own campaign.

Chris Gammell: That's great.

Dave Jones: You know. So, yeah. Because I wanted to support the Australian one possible again, you know. Yeah. But I thought, because, you know, I talk about Kickstarter all the time, I thought, ah, well, I'll give it a go. It'll probably blow up in my face.

Chris Gammell: It's good to think positive, right? In some way, shape, or form. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Good to think positive. Yeah. Shit always does. You know, Murphy gets me every time. So, anyway, I've got it ready to go. And the funny thing is, is that the, you know, the guy who approved it, you know, gave me all these recommendations for how to, you know, jazz it all up and all this sort of stuff. And it's like, eh. You know, look, I just wanted to slap my campaign on Kickstarter. You know. I just wanted to slap it up there and, you know, and get on with other things. You know. I guess they're so used to people, you know, putting months of effort into their campaigns. And, you know, I stressed enough over it, you know, let alone spend another month, you know, working out 20 different levels and stretch goals and bloody, you know. Oh, man. I just.

Chris Gammell: Well, there's bigger stakes, too, right? I mean, like, Jerry, when Jerry was talking about it, it's like, that was like, they needed to hit a certain level for. Oh, of course. Getting tooling for these chips. You know, like, that was a big deal.

Dave Jones: It's a different game. Yeah. It's a different game to what I'm doing.

Chris Gammell: Right. And so we were talking about it before the show, too, like how there was, you actually are charging more for the initial unit. Yes. Which I think is really a cool idea. I mean, that's different than usual, whereas, you know, like. It's different than usual.

Dave Jones: That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because people expect the early units to be, you know, beady units and there'll be something wrong with them. So, oh, they should pay less or you should encourage people, the early backers to get in. So that's the mentality. So there's two different mentalities there. Charge less for early units or charge more for early units. And, you know, I've decided to charge, you know, a token six bucks more or something. Yeah. Yeah. Or whatever. But a token amount more for early units, you're guaranteed to get them early because I've got the parts, you know. And, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right, which is another interesting point, too, from the supply chain stuff. You mentioned the.

Dave Jones: Supply chain's been a bitch.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, what about it?

Dave Jones: Because I'm using really expensive precision resistors in here that hardly anyone holds in stock. You know, so I've bought up, like, the world's supply of these precision resistors. You know, I've had to order them. I've had to put, I've had to, before the campaign, I've had to put, you know, quite a few thousand dollars down to buy parts in anticipation that I'm going to do this right. Yeah. Because otherwise, I don't want to be left holding the bag, right? Because the problem is, right, oh, okay, there might be a thousand on DigiKey or Mouser, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There might be a reel, right?

Dave Jones: They might have them in stock. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There might be one reel there if you're lucky, right? And there was, like, a few hundred of these, right, on Mouser, I think it was, right? Yeah, cut tape or something. They're the only ones who had stock, right? Yeah, they're on cut tape, right? Actually, they had that wrong. Oh, yeah? I complained to Mouser. They actually said they come on reels of a hundred, but they don't.

Chris Gammell: Reels of a hundred? I've never heard of that line before.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know. It was cut tape. But they, it's on their website. Yeah, reels, if you buy a hundred, it comes on a reel. And no, it doesn't. You dickhead. It'd be a tiny reel. With hindsight, I could have bought a Mouser reel, you know, which they take the cut tape and they charge you like seven or eight bucks. Yeah, to re-reel it. They re-reel it for you, yeah. Both Mouser and DigiKey have that. Anyway, right? See, you know, the risk is, right, even though they might have stock now, you know, a couple of months, if you run a couple of week or one month Kickstarter campaign, okay, it finishes. You've got the money. Oops. You go back and try and buy it and you find that somebody's snapped up those parts and now they're 12 weeks lead time.

Chris Gammell: Oh, and you know, I actually, I would buy them up and then I'd sell them to you at a 2X or 3X markup. I mean, that's the real business opportunity here, folks. Try and find out someone's key components. This kind of shady stuff does happen, you know? Oh, it does. Yeah, it's an intense game.

Dave Jones: Well, I found a local guy in Australia who claimed he could get stock of these switches that I had a hard time getting. Yeah. And he wanted to charge like three times the price for them.

Chris Gammell: Was he a broker?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. He's a broker here in Australia.

Chris Gammell: Brokers are like a level, one step above lawyer in my book. Right. And it's not much, you know? Like most brokers could probably be a lawyer. And lawyers do useful stuff sometimes, so I'm just saying, you know?

Dave Jones: Uh-huh. But you've got to build that. You've got to think about that stuff when you're doing a campaign like this. If you're waiting to the-

Chris Gammell: Well, in any production run, you know?

Dave Jones: Any production run, yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So I've had to snap up some of these key parts. Otherwise, I knew I'd be left holding the bag because some of them are 12 weeks lead time.

Chris Gammell: Right. From the manufacturer. Or you've just got to plan on the 12-week lead time, right? And that's got its own pains associated because-

Dave Jones: Yeah, but that's a pain in the ass. No, it is. I don't like doing a Kickstarter campaign where, oh, I'm going to deliver in June. Right. You know? Like- Right, yeah. I mean- That sucks.

Chris Gammell: Well, and not only that, like, you know how it is, and I know how it is. Like, you get a 12-week lead time of part. By the time this part shows up, and you get it into a unit, and you get it tested, you've already got three or four more revs of the board done already, right? It's like you've got all these- Yeah, yeah, right. And then you've got all these- Well, you've changed your mind. The whole design's changed. You've got all these different levels of the design, and they're all, like, and just keeping track of that stuff is terrible. I know that people say you should lock down the design, but come on. We're hardware people. We know that there's still- You're still going to be prototyping new things, even when you have a quote-unquote lockdown design. You're going to be trying out new stuff. You're going to mess something up. Like, I mean, it's just- There's just-

Dave Jones: Well, that's what happened with me, right? I've got my panel, right? I ordered my production panel. I'm happy with the quality from this new PCB supplier, and, you know, and it all works. It's fine, but I'd like that hole 0.2 millimeters bigger, because maybe there's not enough margin in the connector, and that switch wobbles just a little bit. I'd like to tighten up that hole a little bit. I'd like to just move that silkscreen a couple of millimeters that way, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, there's always a tweak.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, and then you've got to retool, and there's costs. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Can I ask you about panel stuff? Because I've been thinking about this for other- Yeah, yeah. So what are the cost differences in panel- So, like, panelizing a board versus going to someone like a PCB cart, right? So say you go to a PCB cart to start with, right? Because you use them. I've used them.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: But I've never done panels with them. What would be the difference, like, or any vendor, really, where they actually cut out the boards and just send you, you know, a big wrapped-up pack of cut boards versus actually getting panelized stuff? Is that just for the assembly side? Is there any cost difference?

Dave Jones: Just for the assembly side, cost difference I've found not a huge amount, but it does vary based on the routine that that particular manufacturer, the algorithm, the cost algorithm that manufacturer uses to work out the cost on their online cart system. But ultimately, all things being equal, the cost should be the same, right? Because, like, because there's a large panel. What's the standard panel size? 16 inches by 12 by, forget the exact panel size, right? Yeah. But when they manufacture that board, regardless of whether or not it's a panel, like, you've given the panel file or whether it's an individually routed board, they will try and fit that on their larger panel. So even if you give them a panel like I do, which is five, but which is 10 boards, five by two rows, then, but that isn't the size of their panel. Their panel is bigger than that. So they'll try and fit maybe two or four of my panels onto their one big production panel.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: So, and you're paying for the production panel size, regardless of which way you go.

Chris Gammell: Gotcha. And tooling's based on that as well. But I found that the algorithm, right.

Dave Jones: And tooling, well, tooling, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, like, you're going to pay for tooling if you, so if you have to get four of your panels onto one of their panels, you're paying for one of their panels at least, right?

Dave Jones: Yes. But tooling is the same either way, really. You're going to pay your tooling cost pretty much either way. And there's two ways to do it, especially with PCB cart. As an example, right? When you go through the shopping cart for your PCB cart website, it asks you, do you want a single unit or do you want a panel? Now, you've got to be careful here because their panel option means they do the panelization. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah. They take your single board design and they will panelize it for you, right? And that's usually not what you want to do. Usually, you want control over what your panel is going to look like and how it's going to

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, like all the test points, like all that stuff you put in your panel, right? That's a great example. You're testing stuff, right? Exactly. Because you get all that tag type stuff out there and you can't do that if they're doing

Dave Jones: And your fiducials and your routing paths and where your breakout tabs are and all sorts of stuff. So, I never let them panelize it, right? So, when I'm putting even my panel through their shopping cart, I will select single unit, right? Individual board. So, as far as they're concerned, my panel is an individual board.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's an interesting tip. Okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Huh. So, that's the difference. But it does vary between manufacturers.

Chris Gammell: So, then you put in like an 18 by 12 or whatever the standard size is. You put that as your one board size, effectively?

Dave Jones: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. When you enter, yeah, I go, it's a single board and the board size is 400 millimeters by 300 millimeters. Oh, that's cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. That's a good idea.

Dave Jones: And then I can guarantee that they're going to manufacture that exactly how I want it. Yeah. Yeah. Take for an example, I just got my micro, I've got a thermal oven in, right? Oh, you got it in? Yes, it's here. I just shot some video. I'm going to shoot more after this. Oh, nice. And it comes from the PCB pool company who were one of the originators of the whole shared panel concept.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Right. And they started that 20 years ago, almost. You know, it's how you lower your costs by sharing the panel with everyone else. Yeah. You know, which is par for the course these days, but hey, they were one of the first to do it. Anyway, so I let, they gave me a sample board, right? And they wanted to give me my microcurrent as an example board so that, you know, to show their process and all that sort of thing. So I said, okay, and they didn't want to do my panel, so they just wanted to let them, so I just let them panelize it, right?

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: And they gave me a four panel arrangement, so it's actually two by two. And the breakout tabs are right on the sides of the board, like they weren't in the corners like I had it and where I want it. So my board, so those boards are going to look ugly because they've got the breakout tabs on the side.

Chris Gammell: Oh, so they have real rough edges and everything. Oh, because of the other three because you use it as the mechanical side of things as well. Yeah, I use it as the front panel. Exactly.

Dave Jones: So that's the, you know, little traps like that when you let the manufacturer panelize it for you. You know, you've got no control over that sort of stuff. So yeah, I'd never do that. That's just asking for trouble. Yeah. So, although if you don't care, right, if you don't want to waste time panelizing it yourself and you just go, ah, look, you know, I don't care if this board has 20 breakout tabs and what, you know, it's got rough edges and all that sort of stuff. Right. If you don't care, which sometimes you don't, right, you just want to get this board made.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Then you can just let them do it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And for a lot of prototype type stuff, it's just going to be sitting on your bench anyway. So yeah, well, exactly.

Dave Jones: Or even for, even for an actual production unit, right? If you just got mounting holes and the board's going in a box, you know, and you don't care that it's got rough edges of where the breakout tabs are and you don't care about, you know, anything else, just let them do it. You know, that's, you know, that's, that's fine sometimes. Although, as I've explained, you've got to talk to your assembly house because if your assembly house, if they do a big panel that doesn't fit through your assembler's pick and place machine, unlikely, but possible, then, you know, that can be a trap.

Chris Gammell: So yeah. So you didn't, you and I hadn't talked about it. Why did you end up getting an oven? Because I remember you were always so, I'll just have my.

Dave Jones: Oh, they wanted to send me one. So I said, okay, cool.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, they approach me. I've always wanted one. I've looked at them and, you know, how, how often will I use it? You know, and you've got to keep paste in the fridge and, you know, all that sort of stuff. You know, it's like, eh.

Chris Gammell: Well, in another break from tradition, I did watch your, your mailbag video. You did? I did. Why?

Dave Jones: You were bored shitless, were you?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I must have been.

Dave Jones: You're sick of doing your contextual videos.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Sick of watching myself. Right. But I saw that Tyco press that you, I actually got one of those too from Jonathan. Yeah.

Dave Jones: We talked about that on the show.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Those things are nice. I like them. So you'll be using them now.

Dave Jones: It's, you know, it's not as good as like a proper dispensing, you know, a vacuum pressure dispensing pump, you know, that, that you have a foot pedal and you go, and it squirts out. Right. Exactly. You know, an individual amount. This is just, you have to rely on your finger. But it's way cheaper. Human interaction.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. Oh, we did talk, I forgot we talked about it on the show though. So, already once.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. Yeah, we did. We talked about it a couple of months back and they sent me one and yeah. Cool. I'll try it out. I haven't tried it out with an actual syringe yet. But with this reflow oven, they gave me like a, a, a, pastes in a tub, you know, so you sort of scoop it out. You put it on and you use a squeegee. Yeah. You know, so they give you a free stainless steel stencil, you know, with the board. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Which is nice. Fancy, fancy. Look at you, man. Yeah. You're like a, you're like a cottage industry.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, so I plan, I've got a Kickstarter level where, you know, I'll hand, I'll hand produce the first 10 and they'll be done in my thermal oven. And if you want to pay more and you want to get them like right away, you know.

Chris Gammell: This board was personally sweared at by Dave Jones.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: This board was touched up with a soldering iron on Dave Jones' bench. Yep. Exactly. This board was tossed on the ground in frustration and stomped on with Dave's boot.

Dave Jones: That's funny. But I could, you know, and I had so many, like I asked on the forum and on Twitter, you know, what should, you know, what perks should I do for the Kickstarter campaign? And people come up with all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas and they weren't, you know, I see campaigns all the time with all these weird perks in them, you know, and 20 million different variations. And I just threw my hands up and went, oh God, it's just a bloody microcurrent board, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: So, yep, yep.

Chris Gammell: Well, you know what's next is you have to get a CNC routing machine, you know, for cutting your own boards. I don't know if those work in ovens. Cutting my own boards. Because you don't have the solder mask then.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but you've got to get a decent one, you know, and then it doesn't do nice plate through holes and it doesn't do solder mask and all that, you know. Like, it's just, no. I think they're a bit of a fail. They're okay for really quick in-house, you know, rough prototypes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, top side type stuff, big analog stuff. That's what I always used them for is, you know, it's actually great for that. You know, if you're doing like a, if you're doing a simple op amp circuit, you know, I can crank out a board in two hours, no problem. Exactly.

Dave Jones: If you're doing a one-off test jig for production or something, you know, you're only going to make one or two of them, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Brilliant.

Chris Gammell: Right. And it's, I mean, and the other thing too, it's like, you know, like if you're starting to get into like serious, I mean, you're not getting too serious because you still have, you're not, you're not having like solder mask or anything like that and you can have leakage problems. But, you know, if you're getting into serious components, you're not going to get anything bigger than an SOIC. You know, you're not going to get the package type that you really need because first off, they just don't make them as much as they used to. And second off, you know, there's all the parasitic effects of, you know, like if you go to dip package, you get tons more lead inductance than everything else in there too. And so, uh, and cost and yada, yada, yada. So it's great for that kind of thing. I still haven't tried that on my CNC machine. I needed to do that, but, uh, yeah, another, another on the to-do list.

Dave Jones: Right. I, you know, I was just looking at my hand built, the one I've got in the Kickstarter video is the hand, my hand soldered prototype, right? And, you know, the soldering quality just looks shit, you know, compared, there's nothing beats a nice reflowed board. Yeah. You know, just the quality is, you know, I could really, you know, if I did it under the microscope and I really took my time and paid attention, yeah, I can get decent quality boards that approach the quality.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: of a, you know, reflowed board. But, you know, this one I just slapped together, you know, I didn't even do another microscope and, oh yeah, whack, you know, and I got my old 20-year-old dodgy solder and I, you know, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right, yeah, and you get the lumpy solder pads and everything else like that, whereas, uh, yeah, uh, you know, if you're using solder pads, you're going to get just the, not just the right amount, but, you know, the, close to the right amount.

Dave Jones: And you get little dags as you pull the solder and iron away, you know, you get little dags coming out, you know, and it's just, it's really ugly, you know. Yeah. And, um, so, yeah, I probably should, you know, do the reflow thing more often, you know. Well, yeah, just be with a oven.

Chris Gammell: You know, even if you, even if you do that, you could always just touch it up, put it back in the oven and have it, get it to the point of reflow, right? And, you know, douse it in flux or something. Right.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. But, you know, but always, you know, it's just, oh, no, look, I'll just hand solder this one, you know, because you're lazy. It's just one.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I need another. It's just two. Yeah, yeah, I'll just, yeah, exactly. Where is that in turn?

Dave Jones: Anyway, I hope it works and I'm going to use lead-free solder because they gave me a tub of lead-free solder paste, so, you know. Oh, fancy. Well, that's all good stuff. Yeah, it's going to be lead-free, so, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure that'll be good, good blog fodder, right? That'll be a... Yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. So, coming right up after this, so I could be swearing this afternoon. There you go, yeah. Yeah, yeah, because the bloody thing doesn't work. Right. Anyway, yeah, like, it's not a proper thermal oven. It's a toaster oven with a proper control, you know, a separate controller. Yeah. It actually looks pretty schmick, you know, the external controller looks pretty good.

Chris Gammell: Is it just like a PID control kind of thing, or what is it? It's a, yeah, it's a little... It's like a set point, and then it shows you what it actually is?

Dave Jones: PID controller box, yep. And it learns the oven, so you put the temperature sensor in there, and you can, you know, you can put it in any oven, and then it's got a learn button, so you press learn, and it learns the profile of the oven, and, you know, things like that. But, yeah, I mean, you know, it's not, you know, it's just a radiant oven. It's not a... I don't think it... It's a convection oven, so it doesn't circulate the hot air, you know? Right. So there's possibilities of getting hot spots and things like that on your board. So, you know, it's not a pro quality. But, hey, you go to eBay, and you pay 300 bucks for one of those, you know, cheap-ass Chinese reflow ovens, right, that claim to be a proper, you know, they've got, like, buttons and LCD on the front that draws the profile and all that. It's the same thing, right? It's just, you know, it's just a... They've got, you know, it's just a, you know, a couple of heater elements, and they get hot spots, and your boards, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Half your board doesn't work, and they're just pretty crusty, you know? So you get what you pay for either way, really.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, when you start getting into that bigger equipment stuff, it definitely does start to show pretty significantly.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, you know, it's more than good now. I'm sure this will work, you know, fairly well, and I've got a high level of confidence in it anyway. So, yeah. Give it a go.

Chris Gammell: Good stuff, man. What about robots? You seen any of these robots?

Dave Jones: Google are, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're going to control the world, right? They're going to start Skynetting. Yeah. Well, that's the...

Chris Gammell: I think that's the fear. Is that right? That's the overall fear. Right. But no, I don't think so. I mean, so they bought seven... They started out with seven companies, and then the big one was they bought Boston Dynamics, which is the one that does the big cat and Atlas and Pet Man and all those. The ones that actually are really creepy. Like, watching robots walk for me is just surreal and creepy. Yeah, it's just... Yep. Yep. So, yeah, they bought Boston Dynamics. I think it's going to be really interesting. I mean, I have a friend that works there, actually, and he didn't tell me anything, obviously, but, you know, just kind of thinking about... That's such a radical shift, because Boston Dynamics was like this... You know, we talked about SBIR grants, right? You know, they have a bunch of SBIR and DARPA grants and stuff like that, and going from that to being like a... You know, that's like going from being a dancing monkey to being like... That's like the monkey gets adopted by, you know, Daddy Warbucks, right? It's like... Which is... I guess that's probably not a bad... That might be a bad analogy, but...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. It'll be interesting to see what the Goog does with them.

Dave Jones: And how much... The Goog? The Goog. The Goob? Yeah, the Goog. The Google. The Goog. I haven't heard that before.

Chris Gammell: I just refer to them sometimes like that.

Dave Jones: Oh, so that's your term. Is it going to catch on?

Chris Gammell: I doubt it, no. The Goog. No.

Dave Jones: Right, okay. So, how much did they pay for it?

Chris Gammell: They were private, so I don't think it was... I don't think they had to tell anyone.

Dave Jones: Ah, right, so it's not publicly disclosed. But Google are a public company, so they have to disclose how much they paid for it.

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: Unless they hide it in some slush fund.

Chris Gammell: You don't have to... No, when you buy someone, you don't have to tell. It's only when you're...

Dave Jones: No, but it's got to go on the books, because Google are a public company. That's actually... I mean, they have to say, we spent X amount of dollars acquiring this company.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's got to come out eventually. That's true. At least that's... I'm pretty sure that's how it works here and over there. I mean...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I would know. I think you're right about that. That's actually... I didn't think about that. Because I always think about public companies getting acquired. They always kind of splash it all over the headlines.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: But...

Dave Jones: No, but they said... No, the Boston Dynamics are under no obligation to tell anyone how much they were bought for, but because they were bought by a public company, well... Yeah, maybe that comes out later. You can go in and audit their books, you know? Yeah, yeah. Once they ever... It'll probably come out in next year's financial thing, so you can't find out now, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they can bury that stuff sometimes, though, too. They can.

Dave Jones: There are ways to bury that. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Either way. I'm sure it was a hefty chunk. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They've got, like, $50 billion in cash or something, so I'm sure it's a drop in the bucket, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I don't know their financials, but... Right. Who cares? I mean, honestly, it's a good thing. It's interesting, you know, from a robotics perspective, because where do you really go with robotics, right? I mean, I was thinking about where all the markets are. I mean, military is one that DARPA works on and Boston Dynamics was working on. But then I think, like, industrial. But those weren't necessarily, like, the kind of robots that Boston Dynamics were working on. And it's not really what Google's known for. And then I think, like, farming. Like, that's a big one for, like, 3D robotics, like, DIY drones, Chris Anderson, all of them. They're big on farming because that actually is a very practical application, surveying, that kind of stuff. But, again, not the really wheelhouse. So, you know, I just wonder where do robotics go next? I mean, they could take over a lot of jobs, but it's just a matter of which ones do we want them to take over? Which ones make sense, really?

Dave Jones: Well, see, these are the more, you know, humanoid autonomous type robots rather than the, as you said, you know, like the car factory automation ones that have been around for 30 years. You know, I mean, they're just par for the course in any high-tech manufacturing plant, really.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, this would be like rescue operation. I mean, I still think of them as, it's hard to tell because, you know, you look at this as, like, it's hard to look beyond what already exists. You know, it's like, oh, well, they're like these humanoid type robots. Do they go and save people? Do they go and kill people? Like, you know?

Dave Jones: Well, see, the thing is, they're still not smart enough and good enough to do a lot of that stuff. I mean, you know, there's always, you know, there's the bomb disposal robots and ones you can send in power plants, but they're always human controlled via remote control. Right. You know, they're always sort of, you know, there's an operator behind it.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: But the fully autonomous ones that can, you know, make decisions on their own and do stuff like that, they're, you know, they're still not there, I don't think.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, yeah. And, I mean, honestly, when I think about Google and I think about robotics, the things that I'm most interested for Google and robotics are, you know, kind of the collision of data. And, you know, I guess when you look at a robot, it's really, you know, an intelligent machine control, right? The stuff that I'm most interested for Google for robotics is the autonomous car stuff. I mean, honestly, I couldn't give a crap if they stopped everything else and just worked on that. I mean, that would be the best thing, I think.

Dave Jones: That'd be cool. But, see, I don't see that going anywhere in the next 20 years in terms of fully autonomous cars. Really? I do. I think that's... No, but there'll be lots of augmentation of human control. Like, there'll be lots of collision avoidance stuff. You know, real-time camera, you know, it'll, you know, stop you veering off the road. It'll stop you doing head-on collisions and all, you know, it'll... If it knows you're about to have a, you know, head-on collision because you've fallen asleep at the wheel and you're merging into the other lane, then it'll, you know... Yeah. ...save you. That kind of stuff.

Chris Gammell: I do agree with that. But I think that they'll actually try and take it beyond that, too. I mean, I think that's...

Dave Jones: Oh, they will try, but there's just so many issues involved in it, it's just not going to be regulated in the next 20 years. I can't see there being approval for automated cars driving on the, you know, the motorways and stuff.

Chris Gammell: Well, my standard response to that, Dave, is if they let some of these idiots that they let on the road now, I'll take a robot any friggin' day. Well, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll take...

Dave Jones: No, but see, no, but... Right, somebody's got to sign off on this shit. I know. Right? And nobody... Everyone wants to cover their ass, right? That's your problem. That is. Right there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's when technology encounters the real world, right? It's like... Yeah, exactly. It's a lot of things like that, right? I mean, like Google Glass seems like a great idea, but then it's like, well, what happens when you actually get humans involved? It's like, okay, well, it's just a collision of emotions and, you know, fear and everything else, too. Right. So, yeah, no, I do agree with that, but it's the one I want the most from Google. I don't know what this other stuff would be, though, like, especially the Boston Dynamics stuff. I mean, I don't think they're going to be... I don't think I'm going to see Big Dog trotting down the street at any time soon, you know? Right. And I don't think they're going to keep doing military contracts, either. I think they'll probably move on to other stuff. You think?

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think so.

Dave Jones: But there's always big money in military. They're not going to turn down the big money.

Chris Gammell: I guess so. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Although, I guess, now that they're owned by Google, they don't have to, because Google... Well, exactly. That's what I meant.

Chris Gammell: Like, the dancing monkey wants to... Right, right. You know, he needs the money, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From the crowd, or the... You know? But, like, this is... Now they're funded. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like they can... I mean, because that's the thing. Like, I look at, like, Boston Dynamics alone, right? That is a very, very concentrated group of talent. And if you look at how these... A lot of Silicon Valley companies do acquisitions, it's... Yes, it's for the technology, but more often, it's for the core talent. You know, finding people that are just really, really good. And I think that's probably what that was. So...

Dave Jones: Yep, possibly. And then it's like, well, what do you do next? Well, certainly.

Chris Gammell: So there must be something Bruin and Larry Page has had.

Dave Jones: Well, they'll probably just let them go and do what they've been doing, except now they have more money and more freedom, probably.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's the... I mean, that's the best you can hope for, really. I mean, that is... That's kind of the dream with Google. I think it's kind of changed a little bit from how they started out with, like, the 20% time stuff, but... Right. I mean, if it advances the field of robotics, if they're actually doing research, you know, in a practical context, that's a net positive for humanity, I think.

Dave Jones: Well, I've been speaking to some Google employees recently who will remain nameless, and they're pretty much, you know, all of them are saying the same thing. Google's not what it used to be. You know, it's not the fun place it used to be. Right. It's being bogged down in a lot of corporate BS now.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, well, they're getting big, you know, and that's kind of the problem that I have with a lot of, you know, like, okay, so Google bought a robotics company. That's cool. What did they start out as again? They started as a search company. You know, and it's like, and I even look at, like I said, Google Glass, right, like stuff like that. Anytime you just have big corporate conglomerate type of things, because that's really what Google is now, is they're a conglomerate. It's like you just lose focus on the things that you're really good at, for better and worse, right? I mean, like they do other cool things, but it's –

Dave Jones: But that's why Google are good at letting the companies they buy do their own thing. Right. Right? And that's a smart way to do it, because you know that, oh, look, if we try and direct what they're doing, we're just going to screw it up, because we have no idea about bloody robotics. We just bought them because we think they're cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Yeah, we see a future here, and we have enough cash to be able to do that kind of thing. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, we have to spend our cash somewhere. That is a best-case scenario. If that really – you know, if companies actually do that, I think, why wouldn't you? I mean, if you have a core of experts –

Dave Jones: It's always the best way to do it, yeah. And they're passionate, and they've got ideas. Just let them go with it. Just fund them and let them go. Right. Give them the freedom to do it.

Chris Gammell: Give them feedback, that kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. That is the best-case corporate structure. Yeah, I agree with that. I don't know if it's realistic, especially with public companies, but that would get a dream.

Dave Jones: I know. Well, like, you know, these things are all subsidized, right? It's going to be subsidized by Google's ad revenue. That's right. All these companies are, right? Right. Boston Dynamics isn't going to make a profit, right? No, yeah. They're a law center. Yeah, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What do you do? Well, you just – you hope that the accountants don't get to them before they come up. Right. I mean, honestly, that's what it comes down to, right? You look at big companies. Often, they're run by lawyers and accountants, and it's like, you know, again, for better or for worse, right? You know, they need to maintain profitability. They need to be able to make money on existing technology so they can build new technology. It's just kind of the reality of research or of companies. Yeah. So –

Dave Jones: And that's why you just hope Google keep making their ad money and so that they can, you know, pour money so they don't have to worry about the profitability of the companies that they buy. Right. Right? Of these, you know, other little niche-y fun companies they buy.

Chris Gammell: That's right, folks. That's why you shouldn't hit skip when you watch the ads before Dave's videos. Right, yes. If you do that, you're now hurting Boston Dynamics. Way to go, people. Come on. Yeah. Watch that dumb ad. Oh, advertising.

Dave Jones: Well, let's talk about that, you know, with the whole Google Plus YouTube fiasco, right? Yeah, right. Let's talk about, you know, boycotting Google and all this sort of stuff, you know? Yeah. Well, let's not go there. No.

Chris Gammell: No, definitely not.

Dave Jones: Can we go back to manufacturing? Yes. In this case, do-it-yourself home manufacturing because we have an example of possibly the worst soldering job you've ever seen, folks.

Chris Gammell: Oh, have you seen this one? Yeah, I have. And I felt bad for this. I mean, well, I don't feel bad for him, but I don't know if he's gotten a lot of ire already. But yeah, let's pile on, I guess. Go ahead. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well. The guy who's selling, like a ham radio guy, I think he is, he's selling these kits, right, to do some ham radio, ideomatic kit or something. Does some ham radio thing, I don't know, CW thing. Yeah. And some guy bought his kit, right, and then sent it back saying, it doesn't work. And I had an expert electrician check it and build it, and it was professionally built, and it doesn't work. And blah, you're a dick. I don't know. I didn't follow the exact story. But he complained that why this thing didn't work, and well, it's obvious why it didn't work. Oh, my God. Just look at the pictures. Oh, man. Guys, it's a shot. It's a dog's breakfast. Yeah. And that's why you read the directions, really.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like, watch a video on soldering. I mean, I got to be fair here. I mean, like, when I started out, I did not. My soldering was not pretty. Oh, sure.

Dave Jones: No, I think that this guy, the guy who runs, who sold it to him, he, you know, explains that he understands that some people, hey, if this is your first board, you know, I can understand that you're going to do a crap job. Right. Right. But this guy apparently got really aggro about it. Well, the customer, right, got really aggro about it in some way, shape, or form, and that's what he didn't like. Right. He didn't like the fact that it was a bodged job. Right. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, he validated the rule, be good to each other. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He was not very nice. So, yeah, that's.

Dave Jones: And this is one of the reasons why I got out of the kit business, right, is because you'd get shit like this.

Chris Gammell: That's exactly. When I was reading this, I was thinking about that, and this is why I'm not in the kit business. Yeah. And talking to Jeff about it, too. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you get people threatening to sue you, and I've had people threaten to sue me, and, well, I'm going to, you know, report you to Silicon Chip magazine because you're a fraud and a scammer, and, you know, your projects don't work, and you just don't give a shit, and, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like, go away, dude.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, and I've had, you know, people ship it back and say, you demand that you fix it, you know, under warranty, you know, and stuff like that. And you'll find that they've done, you know, I've checked everything, and it's your design is just shit and wrong. You know, I demand that you fix it and correct it. And you find that they've soldered the 5-volt regulator in backwards, right? And it's like, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's a tough, yeah, that's tough, man. I mean, it's like when the default response is anger, you know. Yeah, yeah. Because I'm like, okay, again, to be serious and to be, you know, to be, throw myself on the altar, you know, like, it's like, I found myself wanting to, you know, shout at vendors, being like, what's the matter with this piece of crap, you know, like that, and then, or no, I guess it's not even outside vendors, but I guess it's internal people, like, like, firmware, right? Like, when I develop a piece of hardware and someone comes to me and says, this doesn't work, and I'm like, oh, it's the firmware. Come on, it's someone else. It's like, that is a good chance to take a step back, take a deep breath, and then go check all of the voltages, and then go check all of the, make sure everything's in there right. Because nothing's worse, I mean, this is a little different, but nothing's worse than going to your firmware guy and being like, you broke this, and then him going off in two days later and being like, no, sorry, you're missing a cap there, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, it's good to have measured responses. So that's unfortunate that this happened.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I think this guy came out swinging, and that's why, you know, it just rubbed the kit guy up the wrong way, you know. And, yeah, you can't just come out swinging, especially when you've got, you know, when you're swinging with dog poo, you know, as this guy was. That's right, yeah. Right. Do not swing with dog poo. It's a proverbial pile of, you know, excrement. Yeah. Yeah. See, now, when I thought... And there's lies involved. The guy claims he lied his ass off, you know, as I talked about earlier in the show. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: See, now, I wonder about that, too. Like, I was thinking about this, you know, as the guy selling the kit. At a certain point, I know it's not profitable to do this in general, but at a certain point, when someone's asking you to manufacture something or to fix something for them, isn't it better to just be like, click refund and then send them a video of you setting their board on fire? I mean, like, I think about that with a lot of stuff, like, in terms of, like, the cost of repair a lot of times. Oh, I've totally done that.

Dave Jones: When I was doing this stuff, look, I'll give you your money back. Yeah, just go away.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, just go away. Yeah, if you want to try again later, try again, but you only get one more try.

Dave Jones: Especially if they're giving me aggro, right? I mean, you know, normally, yeah, I'll, you know, fix up some more, you know, genuine issues and stuff like that if the people are friendly. But if they're giving me aggro, I'll just refund their money and tell them to piss off.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Well, I think about it even in, like, you know, like, there's a certain point you have to cross in order to make it viable to repair something, right? I think about, like, stuff that has, like, a bomb cost of, like, 50 bucks, 100 bucks. You know, try and find a technician that can, unless you have enough returns where you already have the problem classified, try and find a technician that can, you know, find the problem and fix the problem in a shorter amount of time in terms of dollars, right? If he charges 50 bucks an hour for repair, try and find someone who can repair it fast enough in order to make it worthwhile. At a certain point, you just say, screw this. You know, this thing isn't expensive enough. And you either just replace it with another unit or, you know.

Dave Jones: Or you refund it and tell them to, sorry.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, like. If you want to buy another one, buy another one. You need to have a high enough margin product to actually have repair built into it. And, yeah. It's a tough problem.

Dave Jones: Well, and that's the thing with any, you know, when you've got any hardware company like this, you have to be willing to simply replace product, right? Especially, you know, if there's a shipping issue and they claim they don't get it, right? That, you know, a small percentage of people might be lying to you, you know? Oh, I didn't get it. Right. Right? And you just have to be willing to eat that, right? Look. 10% off the top. Don't bother. Yeah. It's not worth spending your time arguing on email. You just ship them another one. Right. Sorry, you know. And that's why you price it in to the beginning, right? You also price it in. 10%. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You got to do that kind of stuff. I always think about that in terms of, like, you know, like really high scale manufacturing, right? Like cell phones and stuff like that. They must, you know, if you have an actual fallout on the line, you're not going to fix any of that stuff. That's going right in the trash bin, you know? And you just got to eat that cost. You got to keep manufacturing more phones in order to get the, you know, to make up for the yield you lost. You know, there is a very defined point before you actually start fixing stuff. And it's, you know, it's consumer products is not it. Those go right in the hopefully recycling, probably the landfill, you know? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: That's why Six Sigma exists. Right. Yes. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. If people don't know, explain Six Sigma. What's that? If people don't know about Six Sigma, please explain it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, so basically it's like you, oh, I had green belt training too. And now you're asking me to define it. You're a green belt. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, dude.

Chris Gammell: It's Six Sigma. It's been a while.

Dave Jones: It's one in a million. Yeah. Basically, yeah. Your fire that comes off production is one in a million. Six standard deviations away from the mean. Six standard deviations.

Chris Gammell: So if you have a voltage regulator coming off your chip manufacturing line, it's supposed to be five volts, and your standard deviation is 0.1 volts, then you only have one. Actually, that's not it, is it? I guess it would be only like so many units that are outside of the sixth standard deviation because you're going to have a normal distribution. Oh, God. We're talking statistics here. But you're going to have a normal distribution, and you'd be out, you know, the outliers that are outside the sixth standard deviations. I hope that's right.

Dave Jones: What it basically comes down to is that there's a very, very extremely low likelihood that you're going to ship out failed units.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. And you do everything to try and reduce that. Minimize. Yeah. I can remember, you know, I'm not a green belt, but I've done, you know, courses on this. Well, I'm obviously not either, Dave. Right. Obviously. And, you know, and they said, you know, I went to one course, and they said, Six Sigma is bullshit. It's impossible, you know, to meet Six Sigma quoting. And I put my hand up and said, sorry, no, it's not. If you do 100% testing, you can guarantee Six Sigma or better, you know? Yeah. And he just went, oh, you know, and it's just, you know, it's, you know, people think it's impossible to, you know, you're always going to get failures in production. Not if you 100% test every aspect of it before it goes out the door.

Chris Gammell: Well, you'll have fallouts earlier if you do more testing too. That helps as well.

Dave Jones: Well, of course. But no, this guy tried to claim that there's no way you can ship, guarantee that, you know, you can ship 100% working product.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Bullshit. No, of course you can.

Chris Gammell: The thing that Six Sigma training taught me actually is, so the actual training, like, I never, I mean, so I did this when I was at Samsung, right? Because that's high volume manufacturing stuff. And the actual benefit from it actually is that I learned, that's when I actually learned statistics. When I actually finally learned, like, the, honestly, the practical applications of, you know, seeing. Of course. Yeah. Because the thing that, it was always hard for me with statistics, you know, you know about normal distributions, you know about sample size, all the other stuff. And I've been working on this.

Dave Jones: But you didn't know why. You didn't know why. You didn't know what it was useful for.

Chris Gammell: And you didn't know about the variation between stuff. But, but like when you have a tangible example, right, it's like, I'm measuring how big this etched hole is on this silicon wafer, right? And then you measure it. Right. And you're measuring however many, and then you can tell, you know, your sample size versus your whole population and everything. And it actually does start to fall into place. And that's kind of cool. That's like a very contextual example. Oh, sorry. But yeah, I mean, that, that, that is when I finally, finally learned statistics. Yep.

Dave Jones: And same here. Same here. I'm no different in any, if you work in any production oriented company, you'll hit this stuff. If you're an engineer, you always, you know, eventually come across this stuff. Yeah. Yep. Did you see? And it is interesting. I love working on this sort of stuff. I don't really like it. As I said, I'm a data guy. I love collecting data and plotting it. And, you know, yep.

Chris Gammell: I'm more of a bullshitter, you know, I mean, I didn't dislike it. I just didn't like, I didn't like the focus on rigor, you know, like that, you know what I mean? Like, I'd rather play around, see what does and doesn't work, but there's no, in production, there's no, there's no room for that. I don't, I didn't like that. Especially in semiconductors.

Dave Jones: Especially in semiconductors. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's, that's, that's the downside. Um, you can't just go and.

Dave Jones: And it depends on what, you know, all this Six Sigma stuff totally depends on what aspect of production you're in, what stage of production you're in, you know, as I mean, obviously with wafers, you're always going to get a, you know, a, a certain yield, you know, you're going to get a certain amount of phase. You can't a hundred percent, you know, you, you can't get Six Sigma at the wafer level. Right. You know, it's just, it's just impossible. Right. Right. Due to the process geometries and the, all that other thing.

Chris Gammell: Well, and just, I think just randomness in the universe, you know, like eventually someone's going to sneeze on a wafer. Yeah. Right. Exactly. That's a thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so there was actually, I, I actually was talking a little bit on Reddit this week about, uh, fabs and stuff like that, because I've been thinking about my, my old days at, at Samsung and just fabs in general. Um, but I always wonder like, why the hell do they put fabs where they do, you know?

Dave Jones: Like it, it, don't they always locate them near a source of water? See, that's what I was thinking.

Chris Gammell: Because they need a shitload of water. That's what I was thinking. And I'm like, well, Cleveland's got a lot of water, right? We got the Great Lakes here. We have the, the 20% of the world's clean water or fresh water is within like a, you know, a hundred mile radius or something like that, something ridiculous like that. I'm not good at geography, so don't hold me to that. Uh, but there is a lot of fresh water here.

Dave Jones: Where is Australia, dude? Is Australia, can you locate Australia on a map?

Chris Gammell: I, yeah, it's the, it's the one hanging out by itself. WTF, mate?

Dave Jones: Okay, so you're the, you're the 1% of Americans who can. Oh, 1%, that's it? Oh, no, I'm sure it's higher than that. Sorry. It's probably 2 or 3%.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, yeah, I, I always thought water was a really big deal, but then I was thinking about it and I'm thinking about where other fabs are, right? Right. And, uh, Texas, that's where I was. Right. Right. You know? So I was in Austin. There's a crapload in Dallas.

Dave Jones: I wouldn't think there's much water, I wouldn't think there's much water in Texas.

Chris Gammell: No, there's not. There's very little actually. Right. I mean, the water levels on Lake Mead are super, not Lake Mead, uh, Travis. Lake Travis are super low. Uh, there's stuff in Dallas. Dallas has, you know, all of TI's stuff's up there and there's a couple others. Right. Um, and I think microchip and, uh, Intel and national were all out in Arizona, right? It's not like Arizona is a desert.

Dave Jones: Well, I'll, I think I'll tell you why they started up in these locations. You know, obviously it's not the water's not the primary concern. Obviously they start up where they started the company. That's part of it. I think. They want to build it local. I think that's a large part of it.

Chris Gammell: That is, that is a big part to start, but then it's, I think it's two things. And I wrote this in the Reddit post too. I think it's talent because, because of the, the people living there. Right. Yeah. And the other thing is, uh, tax breaks. I think those are the two big ones.

Dave Jones: Uh, uh, state. Yeah. You yanks are big on state-based tax. Yeah, exactly. Right. Well, yeah. How many fabs are there in Australia, Dave? Right. Yeah. Bugger all one. Yeah. There's one.

Chris Gammell: I mean, and then, yeah, cause I look at the other ones too. Like then up you look, uh, Portland or like the, uh, up in, uh, uh, Oregon, there's a bunch up there, like Intel's up there and, uh, Maxim. Right. And then, so, so basically I went and looked for this and there actually is a map. It's actually a really cool map. Uh, it's, yeah. And it's all of, it's not just the USA. There's all over the world. It's kind of a crappy format, but you can actually zoom in and you can see, uh, all like not all, but a lot of the different fabs in the areas. There's a bunch in Colorado. There's some in Salt Lake city, uh, Arizona. Why don't they just do that as Google map data and have it as a Google map overlay? This looks older, so I'm not sure.

Dave Jones: Right. But you know, there's a bunch in California. Someone should take all that data and stick it on Google maps and have a, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's a good idea.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Fab, fablocator.com, you know, and just have a page that has a Google map link with the data.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: XML data on it.

Chris Gammell: So yeah, it's, uh, you know, there's, oh, look, there's no one in Australia. Are there any in Australia? Do you know of any?

Dave Jones: There, there is one fab here in Australia. Which one? Niche. It's a Silicon on Sapphire. Oh, okay. Uh, one here in Sydney. See, now that's, yeah, it does niche RF chips.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. See, now that stuff doesn't count though, in my opinion. Because honestly, like at that, when you get to that level, like there's, there's a fab in Cleveland too.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Right. Of course.

Chris Gammell: It's in an industrial park. Like it's like two guys in a CBD machine.

Dave Jones: No, we do not have a general purpose production lab. No.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. I mean, there's university ones all over the place too. Like Case, my alma mater, uh, has one on campus and I know like.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Uh, Rochester Institute of Technology has like a huge one. They have a huge lab actually.

Dave Jones: The National Security Agency have their own fab. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: They do. They fab their own chips.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Now the surprising thing for me, and it shouldn't really be that surprising, but if you look at Japan on this map, so this is on 10stripe.com, uh, Japan is absolutely littered with fabs. I don't know why that's surprising to me, but, uh, they, they, there's just a ton. I mean, in terms of geographic area, probably because it's a lot of different companies as well. Like if you look at like TSMC, right? TSMC is huge, but they're all, you know, in Taiwan, right?

Dave Jones: It's like Japan is where everyone went in the eighties, right? Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's a lot of built up. Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Chris Gammell: And so then there's a lot of different ones.

Dave Jones: From Japan to Taiwan. And then now it's Taiwan. They shifted to China. And now there's, but you know, in terms of, well, in terms of manufacturing technology. Right. But, uh, fabs seem to have always sort of just sort of stayed the same around the world. They're, you know, they haven't sort of discontinued all the fabs in the U S or. Right.

Chris Gammell: And again, I think that's, I think that part is really talent, right? Why wouldn't you like, like also like Albany, right?

Dave Jones: Well, talent and you invest so much. Yeah, of course. You're stuck, right? But when you invest $5 billion or I think it's now 10 billion to build a decent fab. Yeah. Right. You're going to operate that thing for a long time. You're in it for the long haul. You're in it to win it. You don't just close it on a whim. Right. Right. You make it work. You find a way to make it work.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, you know, no.

Chris Gammell: No, that's great though. I mean, so. Can't shut them down. So it's, it's, um, you know, and, and that is good. You know, like it's, that's why there's stuff in Albany, right? I mean, Albany has the tax breaks and like who would have thought Albany, right? But yeah, whatever.

Dave Jones: And also the, also the economy is a scale once, you know, you've paid off that fab 10 times over. So the chips just get cheaper and cheaper. So you keep running this fab for 20, 30 years and the chips just get cheaper.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, and then even all the, uh, auxiliary, uh, servicing, right? I mean, you think about chemical companies that would spring, like fabs are incredibly chemical dependent, right? Like Jensen talked about. All the local suppliers. Yeah. Right. And so a lot of that stuff's, you know, builds up around it as well. So it's, uh, yeah, it is kind of interesting though. You know, like it's, I guess I expected it to be more spread out and I also expected it to be more concentrated. So. Right. Uh, definitely a cool map though. Definitely worth looking at and seeing where everybody is. Uh, there's color coding and stuff like that. And this isn't everything. I mean, it's, there's a lot in there, but it's not everything.

Dave Jones: Right. And speaking of big ass fabs, Xilinx have come out with their new 20 nanometer, um, ultra scale. So this is chip of the week. We'll finish off the show with this cause we're going way over.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, and it's not really Xilinx. I mean, this is TSMC. Let's be honest here.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, yeah. Okay. Right. Right. Xilinx. Does Xilinx have any of their own fabs?

Chris Gammell: Not that I know of. I'm pretty sure they're all TSMC. They might have an ultra.

Dave Jones: Anyway, they're running 20. And these, this chip just like, man, come on. This is just pornographic.

Chris Gammell: This is getting ridiculous, folks.

Dave Jones: Right. It uses second generation 3D IC technology at 20 nanometers. It's got 4.4 million logic cells. It's got integrated 100 gigabit ethernet max. Ah, man. It's got 30, 33 gig transceivers, right? For chip to chip and chip to optic stuff.

Chris Gammell: The key here is to not look at the price.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no. Right.

Chris Gammell: If you have to, yeah. If you're a PCB engineer, don't look at the layout on the, what's the pin? Exactly. I see the I.O. I don't see the package type on this thing. It's got 1,450 I.O. pins.

Dave Jones: Well, the smallest one, the little baby of the range is 520 pins. Yeah. The biggest one's 1,456 pins.

Chris Gammell: See, now there's something you don't get to do anymore, right? You're not going to be building. Exactly. You know, like your own. Why would you do that? I mean, unless you're going to be paying $1,000 a chip. No, exactly. You don't have the corporate mandate behind you, so.

Dave Jones: Exactly. I was doing that all the time. I was laying out 1,000 pin PGA's before breakfast. You know, that was. That's awesome. Just, you know, right? But no, I have no reason to do that anymore, right?

Chris Gammell: No, definitely not. Yeah. No. Getting rusty on that, huh?

Dave Jones: Like, you know, and they've got 1 volt I.O. voltages. Oh, man. And there's something to do with 16 nanometer. Yeah. Fin fit process. It doesn't even matter to me anymore.

Chris Gammell: Like, this is so far out of my league. This is the NSA buying these chips, right? Right. You know, and that's it. Like, there's a lot of military tech in here. There's a lot of high end. Like, I think of these kind of guys, at least locally around here. I know a lot of the, there's like cell towers, like the, like of Verizon's over in Pittsburgh. They'll, you know, buy these huge ass things and they'll have just racks and racks and racks of these, these, you know. Yeah. They're just cranking your cell phone data through them. It's awesome. It's crazy. Absolutely awesome.

Dave Jones: And they use them for chip simulation and stuff like that. I think people were talking about this on the forum recently. You know, they have just these farms of FPGAs that are used to simulate in hardware, simulate ASIC designs. Right. Your latest chip designs, like your Cadence. Cadence make a box that has a whole grid of these high end FPGAs in it. And they use them to simulate ASICs. Huh.

Chris Gammell: Well, I know that the Zinc, when that came out, there's another Xilinx part that, that, when I first saw that, it was actually six other FPGAs on a dev board. Right. And they were like, oh, this is our new platform. So, yeah, it's the same kind of thing there. But that wasn't, that was a quasi ASIC, you know, half ASIC, half FPGA. Yeah, this stuff's ridiculous. I mean, I look at this, right? And I think, you know, I think, you know, I see people asking, oh, how do I get started in FPGAs? And, you know, you always have that good point about, you know, starting with existing projects. Where do you even friggin', you don't start with these, right? But like. No, no, no. Yeah, like this is just so massive.

Dave Jones: Because you can't even afford it. Because the development boards for them are thousands of dollars. Oh, yeah. Unless you want to plong, you know, you can't get one of these for, you know, 50 bucks at Artifruit. Right. You know, it's just not going to happen.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, I assume a lot of this stuff, too, is like, you know, generated code, that kind of thing. Like, I've used in the past, it was many years ago now, but it was like, you know, it was like a MATLAB program that generated FPGA code, right? And that was cool, but it was not efficient. It was, but it didn't need to be efficient. You just paid enough that it could just, well, this thing's going to crunch on this for a while. It's going to stick in an FPGA and you're going to have really fast, awesome hardware. Sure. That's done. Okay. Cool. I'll go do some more equations.

Dave Jones: These things and the tools that go with them are not trivial to use and develop for. You know, you can spend six months just getting your project up and running with one of these beasts. Yes. You know, I mean, it's just crazy.

Chris Gammell: At which point they tell you to upgrade to the next ISC level. Right. Burn.

Dave Jones: Silence burn. Anyway, is that chip of the week? Oh, yeah. That thing's killer.

Chris Gammell: That's killer, man.

Dave Jones: All right. There you go. Dude, we're an hour and 22 minutes. We're way over. I guess so.

Chris Gammell: Well, you've got to go make Kickstarter magic now, don't you?

Dave Jones: I've got to go reflow some stuff and Kickstarter. Yeah. I'll probably just release it. I'm sick of agonizing over it. I'll just go, ah, whatever. Who cares if I lose money on it? I'll just press go. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Don't put any pizza in your oven, though. Be sure not to mix that up.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Flex pizza is not that good. Awesome. All right.

Speaker ?: That's it.

Chris Gammell: All right. So we are not sure what we're going to do in the next two weeks. It's obviously coming up in the holidays.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Christmas crap. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So we may have an episode. We may not. If not, have a good New Year.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But hopefully we'll find something to do. Happy holidays. You know.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Dave Jones: You guys don't take many holidays over Christmas, right? Whereas Australia, the Christmas holiday is the big break. Oh, I'm thinking like a week and a half, man. Because you guys have it in the middle of the year. All right. Well. But that's out of the ordinary, right? Like here, companies shut down from way before Christmas to way after New Year's. Sometimes they'll shut down for a couple of weeks. Oh. It's like, you know. And they'll force you to take holidays. It's like, not companies shutting down. You know.

Chris Gammell: I've heard some do that, but usually it's only like a week shutdown kind of thing. It's not like a.

Dave Jones: Right. No. Here it's, yeah. It's not uncommon for companies to shut down for two or three weeks.

Chris Gammell: I guess we should also mention that don't forget your holidays don't matter, nor does your New Year's. The Chinese New Year is coming up in February. It's early this year. So be sure to plan for that now. What date is it? I think it's like the last day of January, I think. I think that's the one. Right.

Dave Jones: Good thing that I'm doing hardly anything with China. See? Local manufacturing. That's my project. Bonus. Well, but my local, like, it's not like I can get them manufactured next week, because everyone, the fab houses here are probably shut down. What are you talking about? You can do it in your lab right now. You've got a toaster. I can do it.

Chris Gammell: I've got my oven. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Local.

Dave Jones: Next up. 24-7 baking. Yeah. Chip machine. With hand pick and place. Next up.

Chris Gammell: Chip machine. Now you know the benefits.

Dave Jones: Well, I wouldn't mind a pick and place, you know.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I've got nowhere to put it, but hey, you know, I could spend a month learning how to use it, and then it'd be, yeah, churn out my own boards.

Chris Gammell: There you go. That'd be fun. Yeah. All right, man. Well, we will debate that either next week or in the new year. Sweet. See you then. Bye. Bye.

Chris Gammell: Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you.