#178 – A 2013 Recap - Year-end Yarn Yakking

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast, recorded December 30th, 2013. Episode 178, Year End, Yarn, Yakking.

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

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Dave Jones: I don't know about you, Chris, but down here in Australia, it is the end of 2000 and... Well, he's at 13. Holy crap.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's getting there. It's getting around here, man. The clock is ticking. And I can tell the clock is ticking because I know a certain procrastinator who is... Racing his ass off before the clock strikes midnight.

Dave Jones: Well, it is now, as I look at my watch, it is 12.09pm on the 31st of December. And it's a Tuesday, so I wanted to shoot a teardown slash repair Tuesday. So I wanted to do that. And I usually do an end-of-the-year recap and things that have happened.

Chris Gammell: And you wrote this huge blog post and you're finishing your Kickstarter.

Dave Jones: And I just, yeah, got some more stuff today so I could assemble more boards if I wanted to. And, oh, man, it's all happening. I've run out of bloody time.

Chris Gammell: And we weren't even supposed to record a show this week. It was just kind of like, well...

Dave Jones: Well, whatever.

Chris Gammell: It seemed to work out, so why not?

Dave Jones: Whatever. So here we are. And, of all things, a Reddit has died on us. Because we usually keep... For those not aware, we usually keep our, you know, stuff we want to talk about, or at least, you know, a list of potential stuff to talk about on Reddit. And, well, Reddit's down. And, well, you know...

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Yeah. Man, you can't trust anything these days, huh?

Dave Jones: The nerds around the world are just... They don't know what to do with themselves. Yeah. Holy shit, I might have to actually go outside. I... The internet's down. I don't know. I'll just go edit a wiki page or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right. I'll go troll someone on a forum.

Dave Jones: Or be on a forum all morning, as I bloody have, because there's been a huge thread on the forum that's just exploded this morning about, should people on the forum, well, the EEV blog forum, be able to delete their own posts? You know, should they have the right? It's kind of meta. You know, it's very, you know, Orwellian kind of question.

Chris Gammell: Oh, like who owns the data?

Dave Jones: Yeah, who owns the data? And, you know, should your... Anything you put on the internet be there for all time? And, you know, you'd never be able to edit it.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right. And, yeah, I mean, you know, it's an interesting question. And I've always been of the opinion that, well, no, it's my forum, but... Well, I run the forum, but I don't own your information. Right. You know, I think that's just pretty shitty for me to claim that. And so, well, if you want to... You freely contribute the information, you're free to take it away. And, well... Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I've always had that. I've always had the ability to delete your own posts and edit your own posts and things like that. But, yeah, yeah, some things happened in the last couple of days where, well, it was actually... It turned out to be an issue, a technical issue. But, anyway, it affected other people's posts by someone deleting their posts. It affected other people's posts and deleted the thread. And so, I, as a trial, I disabled the option to delete your own posts. And, yeah, it's looking like it's probably... It all broke loose, yeah. Well, it's looking like it's probably... Well, some people agree with it. Others, you know, haven't. And I'm swaying back to the opinion that, well, no, I think they... I think it's a bad idea. I think people should be able to delete their own information that they put on the net. So, I know this isn't electronics related, but, you know...

Chris Gammell: No, it's interesting. I mean, I think a lot of people that listen to this have been, you know, at least either on the EEV blog forum or on other types of forums, right? Other forums, yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, Reddit's a forum as well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just a good place to capture information. That's an interesting question.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing, right? There's, you know, one, well, a couple of, maybe one or two, a handful of people who might think that, well, a forum is not meant as an information... Is meant as an historical record of, you know...

Chris Gammell: Ah, like written in stone kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Written in stone. Once you put... If you don't want it there for all time, don't put it there, you know, and you shouldn't modify it. You shouldn't be able to edit anything. Maybe after like 10 minutes just to fix your initial post. But after that, nah, it's there for all time. Even your mistakes are there. And if you want to correct your mistakes, well, put a new post.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, well, the counter-argument is that, well, like it or not, the forums aren't just an historical record. They're an information resource. Yeah. And, you know, what's better? Having a whole bunch of incorrect information on there that you can never edit or, you know, being able to go back and fix it.

Chris Gammell: Right, because then you end up having posts that are like, oh, this is a fix to that post. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Scattered a note rather than being able to, here's one master post that has all the correct up-to-date information. Yeah, that's tough. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's like the lab notebook idea too, right? I mean, like so old lab notebooks. Right, of course. You weren't allowed. You had to write in pen. Yep, that's right. You couldn't rip any pages out. You had to have everything notated. Yep. And I never, I mean, I never really, I never had to keep one. So I never really. Oh, right. I did it.

Dave Jones: Various companies I worked for being big military companies. Oh, yeah. It was the, it was the done thing. You saw everyone walk around with their little red notebook, you know? Yeah. And each page was dated and signed and yep, written in pen.

Chris Gammell: Right, because a lot of that matters for patents too, right? I mean, that was the first to invent, right? Yep. Because then you actually had, the burden of proof was on you. That's right. You had to say, I came up with this concept, you know, December 31st or December 30th at 6 a.m. and here's someone notating it and yada, yada, yada. But, um, yeah.

Dave Jones: Actually, in the end, at one point, they even made us, if you didn't fill the page, you were to scribble out all of the blank space on the page so that you couldn't go back and post edit later. Huh. So that you couldn't add stuff later to make it look like you did it on that day. Oh, yeah. They got that anal at one point, but in the end, I, you know, it was mostly relaxed that, you know, you didn't have to do that. But at one point, yeah, any blank space at all. On a page, you know, you had to put big lines through it, you know, big zigzag lines so

Chris Gammell: that, you know, it was obvious if you've edited stuff later. See, now, so I guess this kind of gets back to that. I actually don't like, I always thought, you know, it's great seeing these old lab notebooks on the shelf and we have a project coming up in 2014 that's going to be lab notebook related, which is very exciting. Yes, we do.

Dave Jones: We'll post a photo. We'll post a teaser photo.

Chris Gammell: Yes, teaser photo. But the thing that I don't like is so, like, they look great on the shelf, you know, like these old lab notebooks, like where I've worked and stuff like that. But when you actually go and look at them, then I don't like it because it's not useful. You know, it's not like useful information. You know, it's like, oh, well, I'm looking at December 15th and Dave said, you know, the output from this op amp should be three and a half volts. But then on December 18th, he said, no, no, that was wrong and I can't go back and delete it. Exactly. And it's like, so when does this record really happen? You know, you have to keep post-it notes that kind of say, this is the answer and kind of index it.

Dave Jones: Well, that comes back to the argument whether or not you want to use it as an information resource or an historical record. They're, you know, essentially two different arguments. Right. So I'd say a personal lab notebook falls under the historical record category rather than

Dave Jones: Okay. Yeah, information resource.

Chris Gammell: Like, you know, I... Well, like, so then what was the other one? So it's information resource versus what?

Dave Jones: Information resource versus... Historical record. And historical record. So the information resource is, oh, here's all the correct calculations. It's like a schematic, right? Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You always create the, you always keep the latest schematic with all the corrections on it, right? And usually you delete the ones that have mistakes, right? You usually don't keep them as historical records, do you? I mean, most people don't. Right, exactly. Unless it went into production, that's a different story.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a snowball of wax.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you can't, you know, like if you ship that to customers or you made some prototypes, you know, that are hanging around that may be used at a later date. Yeah, you still need to keep that schematic. You can't go back and, you know. Although, oh, I broke my own rule there with the microcurrent. Like I made a small change to the microcurrent board, right, for production. You know, the ones that you've seen, the prototype ones I've done, you've seen in the videos, the production one, slightly different. I changed the silkscreen around a little bit to put the label on, you know, better so it didn't cover stuff. And I shuffled the odd component, you know, 0.1 millimeter. I fixed up a little trace that somebody found for me where it didn't connect all the way through. So that was a marginal manufacturing tolerance issue. But I still called it the same version number. I didn't want to update the version number. Because...

Chris Gammell: Oh, you just do version 1? You don't do like 1.0 or 1.8?

Dave Jones: No, no, I just kept it as version 5. But I did put a different date on the board so I could differentiate it later. But the version... And the reason I didn't want to... I was reluctant to change the version number is because technically some people might get this old version, right? Right. Right. And it's be trackable. Yeah. And I don't want them to come back complaining, oh, what's the difference between version 5 and version 6? You know, like, oh, have I got the old version? You know, and no, everyone's got version because it's electrically the same. It's electrically identical.

Chris Gammell: So... Right. And that's the same kind of thing in other type of production environments where maybe you run out of a certain reel of components, right? You're using a LM324 from TI, right? And then you have a different vendor, the same part, same everything electrically. But you still, you know, if you're going to swap in a different vendor, a different manufacturing part number, even if it's the same electrically similar part, you should notate that in some way because then if there are lot differences, you know, you need to have that traceable. Yep. Which, that's a mess.

Dave Jones: Oh, that is a mess. I mean, your high-end CAD tools have the ability to, you know, put in alternative parts and stuff like that. So, you know, which that generally works okay once your system's down pat and you've actually approved those parts and you've manufactured and you know everything's hunky-dory. And so the purchasing people can chew, they're free to choose whichever part is available this week, you know. And then, yeah, but, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's even, it's even like, so say you were doing a fix in production, right? So you have version three, right? You're shipping out version three of your board. Yep. And then halfway through production, you know, you've sent out the first batch, the first half of your batch of version three. Mm. And then you realize that you should have, you know, a, you know, a larger voltage capacitor in there or something like that. Right, okay, got it. Or a bodge wire that you find. You know, you need to notate that somehow. Yeah, yeah. But it's still version three compared to what's in the field. You need to track that all the way back. Exactly.

Dave Jones: But electrically, the components are slightly different. Yeah. So the performance and specs could actually be slightly different. But it's still the same bomb. It's still the same, sorry, it's a different bomb, but it's still the same schematic. It's still the same PCB. It's still the same version number. Right. But your bomb has slightly changed.

Chris Gammell: Right. And that's tough. Well, yeah, that's a mess.

Dave Jones: That's why every company, you know, there's no one right or wrong way to do it. Every company has their own way. And generally, the right way is the way that you choose and stick with. That's it. You know, it doesn't really matter how you do it as long as you document it. You know.

Chris Gammell: Consistency, right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Consistency is key. So most companies I've worked at, that's how it works, you know. Why, you know, it seems silly. You come into a new company, you start the job and you go, why are you doing this? This is so inefficient. And the right answer is because that's the way we've always done it. And to change it is just stupider than trying to do it, you know, than changing and doing it right. Yeah. Or better. That's true. You know, it's just, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I like the, so I started, I forget who, I think it was someone on the show that mentioned it. It might have been Mike Osman or someone else who did KiCat stuff. Hmm. Or not KiCat, sorry, but GitHub stuff where they put their schematics and layout, their actual, and the bomb and everything onto GitHub. Right. And basically then anytime you have any change, your GitHub commit number, which is like a hash, is going to change. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so then you could put that as a sticker on there, right? And then you could go back through and see that history. I mean, it's basically the same thing as a lot of older systems do, but it's just more programmatic. So I like that idea. I think I'm going to do that going forwards, but I, and you know, you start with the base, the base commit number, right? So that's like your rev one, when it's release production, you're at commit number, yada, yada, yada, yada. It's on the silkscreen and then you can just put a sticker over it when it's different. So that's how I'm doing it from now on.

Dave Jones: I can see flaws in that too. I mean, what if, yeah. I mean, what if, uh, it's just a component issue because GitHub, you know, yeah, you might've put your bomb in there. Oh, okay. No, your bomb's in there, but I'm saying, what if halfway through the production run, oh, you can't get that part anymore. Right. And you, you've provided an alternative part to your assembler. Do you then update your GitHub thing, even though, you know, that's just a one-off, that's just a one-off thing and you're going to go back to using the original part once it becomes available again. This is only a temporary thing. How do you handle those temporary? I would do that then, yeah. Yeah?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, because then it would say, today's December 30th here, right? Okay. And it's December 30th. Chris switched over to, you know, this new manufacturing part number and then your commit number changes, right? So then you have this new sticker and then once you decide, okay, I don't want to use that part anymore, I go back. This is that, that same, this is the same discussion we had a couple of weeks ago where we were talking about, you know, do you, do you do your revision tracking in the CAD tool or do you do it in like an external tool? Right. And, and I came down on the CAD tool because then this would be trackable, right? You'd have these different commit numbers through time. They're not very, uh, nice to read, right? I mean, the commit numbers are monstrous character strings, but, um, there's other things you can do like tags or something like that. I don't know what that is. Okay. But yeah, it is possible. And I, I would, I would do that. I would, you know, once you, I think once, like you said, once you pick something, you have to kind of standardize on it. In that case, it would be, you know, if you're going to be updating in the, the CAD tool, you got to just always update in the CAD tool. Right. Regardless of production or anyone else. Cause.

Dave Jones: And then you've got a T in your assembler to ensure that they put the right labels on the right boards. Okay. We use this alternative reel on this one. So all these ones coming out now must get labeled. And, you know, a lot of the times that's not how they're doing things in assembly. They might apply labels right at the finished end after you've bunched all the boards together and you don't know which ones have had what part put on from which manufacturer.

Chris Gammell: So, you know, that's the ultimate. So what are you going to do?

Dave Jones: Stick the label on, on the still smoking hot board, you know? Right.

Chris Gammell: You could laser etch it in or something like that, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think that's the ultimate level though, is, you know, if you do ever do get to, not many assemblers do this because usually assembly operations, you know, aside from the, the, you know, because all the different software changes between the, the pick and place tools and, and like, you know, hand assembly, that kind of thing, stuff like that. But it's tough to track, you know, each reel, right? The best case scenario would be, okay, I'm using this type of part. I have a reel of, you know, these one and nine one fours, right? And I'm going to scan the barcode on it. And the barcode contains all of the date code information. It contains the manufacturing information has the lot numbers, right? Like all of that stuff's in there. And then every time it gets scanned through, then that data gets passed through to the final result as well. Because, I mean, if you want to look at like actual variation between lots, I mean, you know, one part, you can, you can some, I'm sure you've had this too, where you, you trace an actual production problem to, okay, we changed the, we changed the reel or we changed the part type. And then it was working before and it's not working now.

Dave Jones: Yep. It's happens all the time.

Dave Jones: It's a pain in the ass. It's a mess. Hey, guess what? What? I'm special. Oh? I got my, I, I got my own, did you, I got my own custom digi key part number.

Chris Gammell: Oh, so if I scan in a reel of parts, it might be EEVblog part numbers?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: What is the story here?

Dave Jones: Well, no, it's a, it's a special part number. I got, yeah, I, I'm assuming everyone can do this. Oh, well, no, it's a, well, it's a part. But I've been having lead time issues and with a critical part and the manufacturer stepped in and said, hey, we'll, you know, ensure that you get these parts and we'll fix it for you. And, you know, in the future you'll get special priority and, you know, all this sort of jazz. And they said, oh, we'll talk to digi key and get them to add a special part number into their system just for me. And it's been added for that specific part so that if, when I order that, they know it's a priority part and it gets, you know, handled differently. So if I order it then? And it comes from the supplier. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Then it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't come. If I order that part number, they'll say, no, you can't buy this. You're not Dave.

Dave Jones: I don't know how that works. I don't know how it works. It may.

Chris Gammell: You might have to test this out.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, that's right. Other people may be able to. Well, if you want to plonk down four or five grand on a reel, you're happy to try it out.

Chris Gammell: You've got to buy the whole reel, huh? Yeah.

Dave Jones: You've got to buy the whole reel.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, like I might, I might likely get, you know, special pricing and stuff like that as well. Huh. So, yeah, I don't know how common this is, but digi key, certainly it seemed to be part of their normal process. So I'm sure they have, I'm sure they've done this for a lot of people before. They seem to have no, no issue with it, but yeah, I've got a unique part number. So I don't know if then it pops up on the system or whether or not it's hidden and I've got it and only I know the part number. I think that might be the case. So.

Chris Gammell: You should ask them if instead of like a dash ND, which stands for no discount, you should see if they'll do a dash N-E-R-D. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Vanity part numbers. That'd be great. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that'd be fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, so, so you've started building. So people hopefully have seen your videos. I've, I've, I've enjoyed that watching a fast motion Dave picking. Yep. Dave picking place. The meat picking place, right? Yep. So how's all that going?

Dave Jones: Oh, it's all right. I've only built the 10, so I haven't built any more. I've still got another 30 to do by hand. And then I've got to start the production as well. That'll be sort of mid to late January, I think will be the volume production. So. Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Yep. And this is all in, in town kind of thing? Yep.

Dave Jones: So that'll, that'll all be here. Yes. Yeah. It'll be done. That's great. And it's looking like I'll probably have to make like 2,000 of them now. Cause I think I'm up to 1,200 backers or something. And some, and some of them want multiple units, right? I'm not sure exactly how many cause Kickstarter won't tell me shit like that yet. You know, it's crazy.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Actually the campaign will probably be finished cause it finishes at midnight tonight. So yeah, there's only like 12 hours left. So.

Chris Gammell: You know, I'm probably going to post this show right after we're done recording.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. And then I'll start getting an email. Oh, I missed the campaign.

Chris Gammell: So if you missed the campaign, uh, Dave will sell these late. Are you going to sell these later? You think? Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. They'll probably go through the dealers again, just like they always have. Yeah. Of course, people who bought on the campaign get the, get first dibs. So. Yeah. Of course. Well, people who bought the first 200 get first dibs.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I was thinking about buying one, but like, then I thought about it. I'm like, I don't really need this. No. It's a niche product. I've got some in there. Yeah. Well, no, it's like I have good stuff on my bench. Yeah, of course. This is an extender for, you know, a handheld. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: You've got Keithley meters, right? Which can measure. Right. You know, down that line. Six and a half. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's cool, man. That's great though, man. You got crossed a hundred, what do you got? A hundred and eleven thousand.

Dave Jones: A hundred and eleven thousand, something like that. Twelve hundred units. So anyway.

Speaker ?: Australian dollars.

Chris Gammell: Was that like thirty five American dollars or something like that?

Dave Jones: Right. It is plummeting. Jesus. The Australian dollar. Is it really? Yeah, this is killing me because like I did all my bombs. Does it affect you? Oh, yeah. Because I did all my bombs, right? I usually do my bombs in US dollars, right? Okay. Because, well, you know, that's kind of, that's usually what I buy them in unless I'm doing really bulk stuff and then there's all customs and everything involved. It's a bit tricky. Yeah. But anyway, because I know usually there's only like, it usually only varies like plus minus five percent, you know, the exchange rate. So, you know, you know, really, so I sort of just assume they're the same and everything else comes out in the wash. But now the Australian dollars dropped to like 90, sorry, 88 US cents or something like that. So it's like 12 percent, you know, under. And all of a sudden.

Chris Gammell: So that means you guys have a premium? Yeah.

Dave Jones: So my parts cost 12 percent more than what I anticipated on my bomb because my bomb was in US dollars. Yet I'm, you know, selling this thing in Australian dollars. So the profit, you know, so to work out the profit margin and all that, now it starts to, you know, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So does that mean? Yeah. So that's because the Australian dollar is stronger then? Is that the idea?

Dave Jones: No, the Australian dollar is weaker compared to the US. Australian dollar is weaker. So I'm paying more. So if it costs a dollar.

Chris Gammell: Because it hadn't been like that for a while, right?

Dave Jones: No, no. In fact, just six months ago, I think, six, nine months ago, the Australian dollar was more than the US dollar.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I remember you making fun of me about that. So my bomb was, yeah.

Dave Jones: So my bomb was cheaper, right? Yeah. So parts, I was getting parts cheaper because I was buying in US dollars and selling in Australian dollars. Now it's the opposite. Well, now I'm still doing that, but now the dollars flip the other way. And yeah, my profits suddenly dropped, you know. Huh. 12% or whatever it is depends on the, I don't know. Math is not my strong. Yeah. Right, right, right. Well, okay.

Chris Gammell: But that's, no, it's interesting that it affects you too. I mean, so would you even be able to buy this stuff locally? I mean, I guess that's another question that I would have.

Dave Jones: No, you can't really buy it locally. No. I've got to buy from mouse or digi-key and other. Oh, look, we do. But by the time you deal with it, it's just easier to deal through digi-key and mouse. So you know it's there. You know what the stock is. You don't have to talk to a human. You don't have to get a close. Yeah, I was going to say. You just order it, right? That they've got the delivery date, they've got the backorder delivery dates on there, which they screwed me with. Yeah, right. They changed it. Yeah. But anyway, at least it's there, right? Yeah. So, oh, you know.

Chris Gammell: See, now what, okay, so say this is going to be somewhere about 2,000 units, right? Yep. Now it becomes 10,000 units. Do you go local?

Dave Jones: 20,000 units. As in buying parts local?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess that would also depend if you're going to manufacture local at that point as well, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, I would still manufacture local, yes. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Chris Gammell: So would you buy local then too? Like parts?

Dave Jones: Maybe because you would generally, as a general rule, you'll get better price from your local dealer for multiple reels than you will if you buy the reels from DigiKey or Mouser. Gotcha. But, you know, just one reel. Like, I don't care about saving $50 on a $4,000 reel or a $1,000 reel.

Speaker ?: Right, right.

Dave Jones: The convenience is worth it at that point. Yeah, and the convenience is just worth it, right? Because virtually all of my parts are on DigiKey. So assuming that they have them in stock, I can just, you know, set up a bombing DigiKey, hit one button, and bingo, parts come to me. You know, I mean, it's... Yeah. So once you start going, oh, look, I've got to go to a different dealer for this brand of resistor and this one and this one, no.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right, right. Yeah, it's fine. Right, and then you have the variation issues again, right? Yeah. I mean, you might, you probably won't, but if you get the right spec components and everything, but then there's also labeling issues. You don't recognize part numbers and everything else. Yeah, it's not. That can affect you too.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's just not good. And then you've got to maintain all that in your bomb and the supplies and their contact details and their shipping status and their, you know, what stock you have. Oh, no, it's just, yeah, it's too hard. But, yeah, if it was 10,000, yes, I'd probably wouldn't be buying from DigiKey and Mouser, you know. In fact, some of the parts I haven't because I've had to scour the world. I've, like, bought up the world's stock of these switches that are used on the microcurrent. Like, you know.

Chris Gammell: Because no one uses those big switches anymore either.

Dave Jones: Well, you know, there's 10 million different types of switches on the market, you know. You know, stock is, you know, they generally don't keep tens of thousands of stock of these things. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know what's interesting about, like, hard to find components like that, right? Because, I mean, we've probably all, a lot of our listeners have probably done this as well, where, you know, you design in something, you get attached to it. You know, maybe you have a mechanical part that's designed around it, that kind of thing as well. So, I've had this happen before, and maybe I've mentioned it on the show, I'm not sure. But I've had it happen before where I have a part that's very critical based on plastics and everything else. Sure. You know, like, this spacing. Yep. And it got to the point where I couldn't get it anymore. It was just, it was obsolete and I couldn't get it. And I found it on some shady ass Chinese website, you know. Yeah. It was like, one hung low corporation, we build anything, right? And it's true. Yeah, yeah. They could build anything, right? But it's the fact that I'm in Ohio, they're in Shenzhen somewhere, and the gap of a thousand miles, it's however many thousand miles. Yeah. Because I just, there was no way I was going to do it. Now, the situation ended up resolving itself anyways, but it got to the point where it was like, I was willing to pay a premium to a local company. A, you know, like a local, not even local, but like a national brand that could go, and I even sent them the webpage, and I'm like, you go deal with these guys. Right. You rebadge it with your label. You let me yell at you here in Cleveland, Ohio. Right. And that premium is worth it. Yep. Yep. Totally. Totally. Because you get into these situations where it's like, you know, you're so entrenched in these very specific parts that it's like, what else are you going to do? Right? I mean, it's a mess. Yes.

Dave Jones: We've mentioned this before, purchasing people probably don't get enough praise.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. And I have to hate them as much as I love them. I mean, like.

Dave Jones: Of course. Of course. That's a natural. I know they're right. Yeah, that's a right.

Chris Gammell: Like, of course I should design in a better part than the one I did. But it's like, sometimes you just can't. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you just don't want to.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I was working for a company who shall remain nameless, and we had a commercial product that, unfortunately, you know, we're expecting an obsolete. Part. Or, well, the part went obsolete. Right? And the manufacturer wasn't. There was no last buy. It was just, you know, it was gone. Right? And, you know, we had to buy up the world stock. And once that was gone, well, you know, we're committed to this because it was the, you know, it was the plug-in platform that we were using. Right? That we had standardized on. So it's not like we just go choose another one because then all the modules we'd ever built weren't compatible anymore. Oh, jeez. Right? Yeah, right. So we had to go find a manufacturer who was willing to copy that existing design and manufacture us a compatible one.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, and then that opens up a whole legal can of worms. We couldn't put the original manufacturer's name on it. Right? No, of course not. We had to be branded the one hung low company. Right? Or branded with our own company's part number. But then, hey, we've stolen their design. Right? Right. You know? And what do you do? You know, in the end, it's easier to seek forgiveness than it is to seek permission. So, you know. Right. Yeah, I think that's how it worked. That's tough. Oh, it is a tough position to be in. And then. And you know what there is? It's never an exact duplicate. Right? So, we had to fully re-characterize and re-test those connectors. And they were different. You know, we designed automated insertion testing jigs. So, it would make these connectors a thousand times at different angles. And we could see the result. You know, how much gold was it wearing off? How much, you know, how long would the thing last? And they're totally different. Even though it was as identical as you could possibly get. Just the subtle differences, you know, was a big deal.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's not always these one-hung-low companies either, right? I mean, it could just be local manufacturers, you know. Like, I've worked with local manufacturers before that are doing that kind of similar work. Where it's just kind of, we're in a bind. Can you tool up for this? And they say yes, right? Because they just want the business. And then they do. And then they get to charge a healthy premium over what you were paying. Because they're it. That's all there is. And then the switching costs to go, you know, you went from some huge vendor to this local, you know, blah, blah, blah shop, right? I mean, like, and but now, you know, you paid tooling already. It's already made. He's already making it. And it's like, I could go pay tooling somewhere else and deal with headaches again. Or I could just keep paying this premium. And it's like, you're going to pay the premium every time. Yeah, of course. And I think a lot of companies get started like that, to be honest. I think a lot of, you know, a lot of, especially connectors. It seems like connectors is a big game for that kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Well, because, you know, it's a physical thing. You know, it's a physical compatibility thing. So, yeah, that's why it's a big deal with connectors. But, hey, you know, you can easily change, you know, your resistor from an 0603 to an 0805, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Yeah, but you're not going to be switching your silicon, right? Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Or, as I said, you've standardized on a certain backplane connector, you know. It's not like you can, you know. Yeah. Or a test connector for production or something like that, you know. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's where you cross your fingers and hope no patent lawyers notice. And hope there's no patents out there, you know. Yeah, yeah. That willful ignorance of, oh, I didn't know that we were violating a patent, so you can't sue me for it. Which I think is a real thing, isn't it? Where it's like if you don't, you're not supposed to actually go look it up.

Dave Jones: No, ignorance is not a defense in the patent world. It's not a defense.

Chris Gammell: I thought it was. No, no.

Dave Jones: There was something like that where I thought there was, I forget what it was. No, the law makes no distinction. The law makes no distinction.

Chris Gammell: No, I know what you're talking about in general, but I'm saying like there's something specifically like don't go and look up a patent because if you didn't look it up, you can't, you're not willfully violating it. And there's some difference there.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's the old Chinese war method of development. I've worked on teams like that where they deliberately isolate our design group from seeing the competitor's product at all costs. Because we can't even get a hint of an idea even subconsciously from the competitor's product. Otherwise, we might subconsciously put it into our product and then we'll get sued. Whereas that's where the notebooks come in. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Because you can go back and even if by accident you, you know, actually produce something similar to what the competitor's done in some obscure, you know, patent area or whatever. You can go, but look, we developed this independently. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what you're talking about. And here's the proof. Yeah. Yeah. That's a mess. What a mess. But if you don't have that proof, I don't think you have a lead to stand on. Right.

Chris Gammell: Whereas if you do have it. So notebooks are important then, huh? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, they can be important. Yeah. But it's not a guarantee. You know. No, of course not. Once you get it, it comes down to how much money you've got and how good your lawyers are. The person with the most money and the best lawyers generally always wins. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, and it's interesting too because around here, I'm not sure if it was, I think it was like that already around there, but it just switched over first to file versus first to invent. Yep. So there is going to be less focus on that kind of thing. You know, there's less demand on notebooks, right? Because you don't need to prove a certain date when it was invented. You just need to go throw it onto a patent before anyone else can and get it granted. So I don't know if it's better or worse, but I'm sure there's lawyers, so it's got to be worse, right?

Dave Jones: Exactly. There's pros and cons both ways. Yeah. That's why I reckon just publish. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I do. I do like that one still. First to publish. That's good. Yep. First to publish. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's a T-shirt. That's a T-shirt right there. Reddit is back up.

Chris Gammell: Did you see that?

Dave Jones: Which one?

Chris Gammell: Reddit. The site where we keep all of our links. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: No, I hadn't. I wasn't sitting here continually pressing refresh. No, it's not working for me. Oh, yes, it is. It's up. It's up. Yeah. We're back in business.

Chris Gammell: Well, before we do that, though, we should mention we have a new website as well.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. You've revamped it. Chris can't help himself. Every six months, he gets the itch to change it, you know. This one's been coming for a while. And change webhose. And, you know, he's changed the name servers again. He's always dicking around. He's always dicking around.

Chris Gammell: Well, I was doing stuff for my other website, so it was kind of like, you know, once you're going to dig into that, once you're going to wade into the pile of crap, you might as well keep going, you know. Right. Yeah. You might as well dig your whole shit deeper. Yeah. If I've got the terminal open, I should, you know, keep rocking through it, you know. Make sure the job is done. So, yeah. We've got a new website, though. People can see the number of comments there are on articles. That's one thing that wasn't on the old page. You can actually see how many comments there are. So, you know, it's easier to join in a conversation. Yep. You can, it's real brief, so you can kind of scroll through a lot of different shows at once. And our beautiful logo is designed. And I finally released the name of who actually built this logo for us because we said we would hold off for a while and then I didn't really use her services anymore. So, figured we should share. Her name's Rachel Rivera. She does, her company's called Rad Castle.

Dave Jones: Have you provided a link?

Chris Gammell: I have on that post and I will in the show notes here as well. There you go. So, she's got some cool stuff. She's very artsy. So, I like it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, it's great. So, we've ditched the globe thing. The globe thing's officially gone.

Chris Gammell: It's around still, but yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Our Rockstar logo is the new one. Cool. And this is easy to view on mobile, too. I mean, it's not going to be perfect. A lot of people commented on when I announced this. It's not going to be perfect on every device, but it should be a lot better than the last one.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And then you can see up at the top as well, there's a suggest link as well. So, a lot of people sometimes post guest suggestions on the subreddit or if they want to find the subreddit. All that stuff is there. Also, you know, Workbench of the Week. We haven't done that in a long time, but there is a link for that, too.

Dave Jones: Brilliant. So, any other changes? In the new year? For the show? I don't think so.

Chris Gammell: We have a web store as well. A store for our t-shirt.

Dave Jones: Oh, for these shirts. Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, we didn't have that before. We only did the Teespring campaigns. Yeah. And then we gave away shirts. But now you can go and buy t-shirts if you want. I turned off any kind of profit that we're getting from it, so it's just so people can get t-shirts in their hands. Yep. Because, you know, single-run prints are pretty expensive in the first place, so we didn't. We'll be okay.

Dave Jones: But the Teespring would still be cheaper, though, wouldn't it, if we ran it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, Teespring would be cheaper. Yeah, anytime you do it like a bulk campaign. It's a way.

Dave Jones: Anytime you do the crowdsourcing, it's cheaper. Yeah. Right. Exactly. That's a double benefit. It's cheaper for you, and we get a fairly healthy margin on the Teespring stuff. Right, exactly. Which helps us pay for our services. Yeah, we might do some more of those in the new year.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I really like the bone-colored one that I got.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, the white one? Yeah, that's actually the cheapest one.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's not actually white. It's like bone. It's like a bone color. It's not just a, you know, in-your-face kind of white, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, no. Right, exactly, yeah. Yeah. Because all T-shirts end up that color anyways, right? So why not start there?

Dave Jones: Right. Especially nerd T-shirts, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Oh, man, you spill a bunch of coffee on it. You know, you get some flux on your shirt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Eventually, the whole thing turns yellowish. Right. Chain smoking in the lab, you know, everything turns yellow.

SPEAKER_01: Oh, goodness.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, that's about it for the website. Hope people like it. Well, I'll keep updating it throughout the year, but... Of course. Hopefully, it's easy to keep in touch through that and everything, so...

Dave Jones: But we don't plan any changes. We'll just rock up each Tuesday, well, Monday your time, and we do the show.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Well, we've got guests scheduled out through March. You're going to be out for the next show, so we're going to have to rework some of that stuff. But, yeah, we've got guests scheduled all the way through March right now. We've got a bunch of great ones coming up, so... Fantastic. That's going to be awesome.

Dave Jones: I couldn't get the was. Sorry, he's in Sydney at the moment.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's okay. Yeah. It's a holiday. I'm sure that's what it is, right?

Dave Jones: Although, I could stalk him, because he does his update, you know, he does his location update. Oh, yes. You know, I could probably go out and stalk him.

Speaker ?: Yeah, he's four square.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, just go to, like, hang out in the IHOP where he's at or whatever it is. Right. That'd be kind of creepy. Yeah. Kind of creepy.

Dave Jones: I'm sure he gets people like that, you know, following up. Yeah. You wouldn't do that unless you wanted people to find you, right? There's...

Chris Gammell: I guess so.

Dave Jones: Yeah, there's no logical reason to post up by the hour your current location unless you wanted, you know, the odd person to track you down and say hi. You know, I'm sure that's...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, that must be part of it.

Speaker ?: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Nothing's changing here, folks. What's that? Nothing's changing here. Oh, no. No, we're... How many years have we been doing this gig? Well, maybe like five years, right?

Chris Gammell: Right. Five years in, we'll start to make some small changes, right? What's it been? Three years? Dave will be replaced by an Android, you know?

Dave Jones: Right, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Aussie. Aussie Android. Did you see... I just posted this one today, but someone pointed it out to me on Twitter. It's a really cool idea, though. I don't know how to say it. It's Ruckingenur 2? Ruckingenur. Yeah. So, it's actually a really cool idea. It's like a... It's a desktop game. But, so, you know, it's like... It's based on like... What does it say? .NET 2 or something like that. And so, you know, it just looks like a regular computer game on your computer, whatever. But then, it's a game that teaches you how to reverse engineer stuff. Yeah. It's really... I was really shocked at how cool this thing... I mean, like, it's really fun, and I'm still woefully unprepared for it. Right. But, basically, you know, you have three different multimeters. You have a pulse input. You have a debug interface. You have a serial interface. And then, you have an ability to look up data sheets for parts right in the game. Right. It's really not a data sheet. Right.

Dave Jones: And it gives you some simulated product that you've got to reverse engineer. Is that... Exactly.

Chris Gammell: So, like, the first one is like... It's a nine-digit keypad, and then it's going to some kind of keypad control chip, right? It's a 7-4C-922. And then, basically, then it goes to some no-name chip, right? So, it's great for, like, stuff where, you know, like, you do teardowns all the time. Sometimes you have the black blob with just a piece of silicon underneath, or it's got a weird label. So, basically, you know, if you want to go and reverse engineer that, you could intercept the serial stream. You could try and spoof the serial stream. And then, in this case, you know, they're trying to just undo a lock, right? Right. So, from a security standpoint, you're trying to spoof stuff. You're trying to enable stuff. I don't know. It's just really cool. I never thought anyone would make a game out of it, but I really like it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's a neat idea. It's fairly niche, but, you know, I mean...

Chris Gammell: Oh, of course it is, yeah. Yeah, but it's a great way to learn, and they've got, like, these, like, corny videos.

Dave Jones: How many people would get frustrated with it, though? You know, because usually reverse engineering is not easy. You need a lot of dedication. You know, usually you're not going to crack it in the first five minutes, right?

Chris Gammell: No, definitely not. Yeah, someone's been working on electronics for 10 years. This is, like, a whole other skill set, right? I mean, it's, like, at first I'm, like... At first I had to figure out what I was looking at, even. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. You know, like, there are a lot of methods where, you know, like, a lot of people will plug into JTAG chains and try and probe like that and figure out bit streams and get talkback from chips and stuff like that. And, yeah, so it's a whole other skill set from just soldering and debugging and that kind of thing. This is a whole other skill set, but as far as I can tell, this is a, you know, it's a cool instance of it, you know? Yep.

Dave Jones: But it requires patience, which I don't have much of, you know? So that's why I don't do reverse engineering for fun. You know, some people find it fun, you know? They love the thrill of the, you know, the hunt and they spend a month reverse engineering something that, well, you know, didn't really need to be a reverse engineer, but they just did it because it's a fun challenge. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Why did you climb that mountain? Because it's there. Because it's there. Exactly.

Dave Jones: And, well, no, I just don't have the, you know, I don't find, you know, I find it okay, you know, and I enjoy the thrill when I actually find something, but, you know, no, there's more interesting things for me to do than that. Unless I have to. Unless there's a, you know, unless there's a real compelling reason to do it. I just, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and I think like, like anything else, you know, you need that end goal to start with, right? Yeah. A lot of these people are, they're starting out as security, you know, IT security, like Mike does that kind of stuff, and Joe Grand teaches classes like this at like Black Hat and stuff like that. And so, yeah, they have end goals in mind, either securing systems or breaking into systems in order to secure them, that kind of thing, or just breaking into systems. Yeah. And so, but you always need that, right? I mean, if you don't have that context, you don't care. Exactly. Yeah. So you need it up front, and I think you just haven't found the killer app yet, right? That's the main thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, I just.

Chris Gammell: Personally, I've never, I've never really, you know, I've always been interested in quadcopters and, you know, like a lot of the UAV type stuff that's out there, but I never really appreciated it until I get this stupid little RC like helicopter toy from my folks for Christmas. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. And like, it is hard. It is hard to pilot these things on their own. I did not really, I think that's why a lot of people got into the, to the programming side of things, because, you know, you program in like a hover function, right? So it actually. Right, yep, yep. It senses where it is, and that makes things so much easier. Of course. I, I, I never, but the thing is, I never knew that, right? No one ever, you know, it's not like everybody starts a video about UAVs, like, and the reason that I like this is because the hover function in the autopilot, right? Like, no one ever tells you that unless you go and dig into it. And so you need that first spark of, you know, crashing your helicopter and, and I broke it. Luckily it was a $20 toy, but I mean that, but, but honestly, as I was flying and actually getting it working, I'm like, oh, I get it now. This is why people enjoy this. You know, it was, it was cool when I got it to work. So I could, I could see at that point. So you just need that for security stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah, of course.

Chris Gammell: You know, once they put a digital lock on the, the door to the, the garbage room at your office, then you'll get into hacking.

Dave Jones: I'd be spending a whole week hacking the thing. Exactly. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. All right. What else we got on this, uh, thing we can, uh, scream through? Cause I only got 15 minutes left. We've pissed away 45 minutes and we said we wouldn't go over on today's show.

Chris Gammell: Oh, we did say that. We'll see if we, uh, if we hold true. Uh, this is something my friend sent me actually, the Moshi meter. Moshi meter.

Dave Jones: Oh, they sent me this before it was, yeah. I knew about this before it was, became public. Yeah. And it's like, okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I, I like it because you know why I like it, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, because it's a remote interface. It hooks up to a tablet. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's a, it's a headless unit. This is like what I've always been talking about. But yeah, I mean the actual thing, it's like, it looks like it's two chips on board and then there's like, you know, some, uh, it's yeah, it's, it's got a bunch of isolation.

Dave Jones: There's nothing new here. You know, there's nothing hugely new, you know, it's, it's just once again, it's a niche kind of thing, you know? It is.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And it looks like it's like a, probably like a Bluetooth chip and then, you know, an analog front end, right?

Dave Jones: That's kind of the, the, that's a lot of, and it is designed to be rugged, right? It's designed to be sort of, I'm not sure if it's fully potted or not, but I think the case is waterproof or something or, you know, environment proof or something like that. I'm not entirely sure.

Chris Gammell: Well, it looks like it's 3d printed right now, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, it is a good idea. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It is a good idea.

Dave Jones: And, um, it, it, it's a remote digital multimedal logger thingo for your phone slash tablet. Yep. Right. So it's got volts, ohms, amps, input, and, and a, and a Bluetoothy in a type interface.

Chris Gammell: Right. It looks like they're, they're tracking over time though too. So it's like a, you know, pseudo oscilloscope.

Dave Jones: You can log, so you can use it as a low bandwidth oscilloscope. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, so they're trying to be all things, you know, they're trying to sort of do a lot of stuff. Yeah. Which is okay, but generally a, you know, master, you know, master of none kind of thing.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Yep. So I didn't see when they're actually, oh, it's coming out in 2014. So that's cool. Uh, so it might be on Kickstarter or something, but it looks like a, you know, cool idea. We'll have to see pricing too.

Dave Jones: It starts on Kickstarter like in mid January or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So if it's going to be like 500 bucks, it might not be worth it, but you know, I'm guessing it's probably going to be less than that. So cool. Uh, yep.

Dave Jones: There's another, speaking of which, there's another Kickstarter project.

Chris Gammell: Kickstarter. I've heard of this.

Dave Jones: Yes. It's a 10 gigahertz USB oscilloscope for what? 300 bucks or something. Um, but don't, don't get excited folks. It's a, obviously a sampling scope. Um, right.

Chris Gammell: So that means it's going to capture all of the waveforms and then process them and send them back to you. Right. I mean, that's the, it's not like real time.

Dave Jones: You need a repetitive waveform. I mean, it's bandwidth is like, you know, a couple of kilohertz or something. It's, it's a real time bandwidth is a couple of kilohertz.

Chris Gammell: So unless you have a really fast pulses, but not, not many of them.

Dave Jones: No, no, it can't. It can't capture fast pulses unless they're repetitive.

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right. But if, so if it's a really low duty cycle though, right? So if it's like a, it's like a two gigahertz rise time on the edge, it can catch that.

Dave Jones: It can catch that, but as long as it's repetitive and the trigger point is repetitive, that's fine.

Chris Gammell: You can do that. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Right. If it's a single pulse, you're screwed.

Dave Jones: If it's a single pulse, you're screwed. You can't do it. It's useless. Right. Right. Right. So, yeah. And this is all how most of the real high bandwidth, you know, $50,000 scopes from Agilent and the rest, um, have worked in the past and they still do these days. Although there's a lot of really high real time bandwidth ones now, but you know, um, you know, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The real time ones actually capture at that level, right?

Dave Jones: I mean, they capture it, you know, 100 gig samples per second. Yeah. With a 50 gigahertz bandwidth. Yeah. Um, but no, you know, up until very, very recently, um, you know, the 30 gigahertz bandwidth scope from Agilent samples at 10 kilohertz, you know? I mean, it's, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, isn't it the same thing with like spectrum analyzers too, where you'd have like the spectrum analyzers where it would take this huge chunk of, chunk of data and then it would do a bunch of FFTs on it and you'd see that. And then you do another huge chunk of data and you'd see that versus now there's like real time spectrum analyzers as well.

Dave Jones: It's yeah. That's kind of a similar thing.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Similar. And it's just about how fast you're chunking through that data, right? If you're streaming it through, right. Where you're streaming it through like a, you know, a processing algorithm versus this is a good example of what we talked about a couple of weeks ago with the FPGAs versus micros, right? If you're streaming through an FPGA, you can do a lot more samples in a shorter amount of time versus having to take a big chunk of data and then iterate on it.

Dave Jones: And then post-process it. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Then you're screwed. Yep.

Dave Jones: And the interesting thing is, is that it just uses a regular PIC microcontroller as the ADC, right? Really? Yeah. This is the remarkable thing, right? Because in a, you know, for a sampling scope, the bandwidth is all about the sample and hold, right? The input sample and hold. That's it, right? You capture it. You've got that 10 picosecond window. Boom. You've captured your signal. You hold it there. And then you can just use a 10 cent ADC in your bloody PIC, in your 30 cent PIC to do the conversion, right? It doesn't matter because you do it as slow as a wet week, right? It's all about the sample, the front end sampling system. And you can get that, you know, 10 gigahertz bandwidth on your front end and use a PIC microcontroller to do the ADC. It doesn't make sense unless you know how sampling scopes work. Yeah. And, yeah. And it's, eh. But, you know, it's, yeah, it's, there is no front end on this, right? It's not like it has a, you know, an attenuator on the front end. You know, it's 50 ohm input, you know, SMA connectors, 50 ohm only. And, well, if you want to probe a high impedance source, well, you've, you know, your $300 10 gigahertz oscilloscope is useless because you need a $5,000 probe, active vent probe to.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. To catch that edge, right? Yeah. So it doesn't round it off. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. So it's very niche limited use to very low impedance matched systems.

Chris Gammell: So what would, what would you, if you were going to use this kind of thing, what would you use it for?

Dave Jones: You'd probably use it for characterizing, you know, 50 ohm differential signals or something like that. I mean, you, you, for these sort of things, you can roll your own probes, right? You can, you know, you can get some SMD resistors and you can make a, you know, you know, you can bodge up your own probe, you know, in Howard Johnson's book, there's all details on how to do this, you know, and it's, it's not a bad industry way, industry standard way to do it. To, you know, bodge up your own probes.

Chris Gammell: A 10 gigahertz, I mean, you're going to have parasitics that like you're blowing out of the water though, aren't you?

Dave Jones: Yeah, you've got to know what you're doing. You've got to know what you're doing, but you can do it. And, you know, in some cases you have to, in fact, in some cases that's the best way to do it because you want to match the load. You know, you want your sampling scope to be the load, you know, and that's where this comes in handy. You know, whereas if you, if you're trying to probe a signal, like if you're trying to probe a USB, you know, 3.0 bus, for example, you know, you, you, you don't, and you want to do it in situ, you don't want to disturb that bus. So you want to, you know, you're going to have to buy that $5,000 differential probe. You know, you can't just whack this thing on it. Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. You know, it just doesn't work. So yeah, it, it has limited use. So if people are thinking that they can get a 10 gigahertz bandwidth scope for 300 bucks, it's just, you know, sorry, it doesn't really work like that. Yeah. Yeah. Or, or a scope as, as you know it, you know, so.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. You know, because most people are scopes they're used to, okay, I've got a vertical attenuator on the front end, you know, I can dial up how much gain, you know, my, my attenuation slash gain, you know, on the front end. And, you know, and just people take for, take it for granted that, you know, you, you've got a, you know, a high impedance DC probe. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. You got a nice, a nice amplifier up there or something, right?

Dave Jones: I mean, this thing, no, it's straight in, you know, it's bang, 50 ohm system, straight in, no attenuator, no nothing. As far as I know, it doesn't look like it has anything else. I haven't, like, I don't think they're releasing schematics or anything like that, that show you exactly what it's, uh, anyway. Yep. So, yeah, you know, it's, it's good for like RF stuff where you're generally dealing with loads and things like that anyway, you know, match loads and all that sort of jazz. So, you know, this thing is useful if you want a cheap way to view your, you know, your carrier signal or whatever, because your carrier signal is repetitive, you know. Yeah. Then this, you know, this can do it.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Your 10 gigahertz carrier signal. Is that right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. But it all comes down to, um, the stability of the trigger system on these sampling scopes. Right?

Chris Gammell: Right. There's no point having that. If you get dizzered and you're screwed, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. You can have a $50,000 fantastic front end on the, you know, on a 50 gig scope. But if your trigger system's got, you know, jitter from here to Timbuktu, then you ain't going to be able to do anything. It's useless.

Chris Gammell: Well, you'll catch it once in a while, right? Right. You know, I like, I like stuff like this though too, because this is like a really good example of like the, the whole, you know, you get what you pay for kind of thing. And like the reason to actually go and look at good, good quality, um, you know, test equipment or any, any kind of situation like this where you, you realize that there are limitations and you know, like it, it's, it stinks if you're on a budget, but if you're on a budget, you're probably not playing with these things that often anyways. Yeah. Or you have to be really, you know, have a lot of ingenuity in order to actually capture those signals reliable. Right. I mean like, it's, it's, it just, it just, it's, uh, it makes for a interesting engineering problem.

Dave Jones: Right. Next.

Chris Gammell: Uh, well, if you were going to build your own probes, you could have watched, uh, Alan, our buddy, Alan, uh, Wolke. Uh, he's got another good video about the, uh, the variety of, of, uh, prototyping techniques. Um, you know, up through, you know, Manhattan, uh, technique and bread, well, breadboarding to start with, of course, but, uh, yeah, he goes all the way through them. So it's a good video.

Dave Jones: I haven't seen that video yet. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's good stuff. Um, Alan's always, he keeps cranking those out, man. Yeah, I know. It's awesome.

Dave Jones: I like it.

Chris Gammell: Uh, I'm running out of things here, man.

Dave Jones: Uh, well, we're running out of time. We only got four minutes left.

Chris Gammell: Four minutes left.

Dave Jones: And then the whole year, it's just gone. Another year.

Chris Gammell: I know. It's over.

Dave Jones: Over. We don't care about Intel wafer pricing.

Chris Gammell: No. No.

Dave Jones: We don't care about elimination of laptop charger bricks. I'm just going through the list here. The rise and fall of electronic kits. Oh, God. Do we have another hour? Um.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's kind of a generic article basically pointing out how, yeah, kits have come back. Raspberry Pi, Arduino, everything else. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. You know, I see, uh, someone, someone posted.

Dave Jones: But they aren't kits. They aren't kits.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm sorry. Nobody builds an Arduino kit.

Chris Gammell: Eh, some people do. You know, there's hackerspaces that have soldering classes.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. But, you know, it's very niche. Uh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's definitely not the main, the main case.

Dave Jones: The, the, the Arduino is essentially not a kit. It is essentially a, yeah, there are some kit versions. But, you know, my mate John from, uh, John, um, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Free, Free Tronics. Right. Um. Yeah. He used to sell an Arduino kit and, and they, they just didn't sell. Nobody wanted it. Right. So, I think he's left with a bunch of old stock. You know, because nobody, you know, they, they just buy it, build up.

Chris Gammell: Well, crap, man. If no one wants to build electronics, I'm screwed. Right. I know. Sign up for Contextual Electronics, folks. I'll teach you how to. No.

Dave Jones: See, everyone says that, oh, can you have a kit? And then, well, you do a kit and you find that hard, there's hardly any demand for it. That's why I don't produce kits anymore. Right. You know, essentially. You know, there, there is still some, you know, case scenarios where, where it's still okay to do that sort of thing. You know, if it's really simple, for example, then, you know, it's probably not worth getting a contract manufacturer. You know, if it's a board with five parts or something, maybe it's, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's all through whole. It's very, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Maybe it is just easier and simpler to give it as a kit. But, you know, not some complex kit. You know, it's just, yeah. It's not worth the effort.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you know, I wonder about it too, because someone had told me about, oh, like, Heath Kit is having some, you know, how Heath Kit got bought. We talked about that earlier in the year. Yeah. And they're having some launch event or something. And I'm just like, I still don't know who these people are. And it's like, okay, well, I'll see it when I see it, you know. And so, and that, I guess that would be the real interesting thing would be, you know, is there actually that demand for kits anyways? I mean, I think, you know, if we talked to like the likes of Adafruit and SparkFun, I think there is interest in kits. But I guess.

Dave Jones: I bet you though, the majority of their income comes from pre-built gadgets. It's, I guarantee it. Yeah, you think like breakout boards and stuff like that. Yeah, I guarantee it. Yep. Yep. Yeah, they may have sold 10,000 mini, minty boost kits or whatever, you know, and other kits. But nah, trust me, I reckon I'd be shocked if the majority of their income comes from kits. Yeah, that's interesting too, because. That may be where they started. Yeah, right. But that's not where they're ending up.

Chris Gammell: Right, because you get so many efficiencies from a pick and place, right? I mean, that's effectively robot labor versus, you know.

Dave Jones: And this is why, yeah, and this is why kits aren't really popular anymore. Whereas they, you know, back in the heyday, you know, the 70s, for example, and the 80s of kits, it's because the manufacturing industry didn't exist for small scale players like this. Right? The automaton, it did not exist. Right? Unless you were a huge corporation, you could not access these manufacturing houses. Nobody wanted to build anything for you. Right? It was much harder. That's why the kits made sense. And because everything was through-hole, they were easy to handle, though. Now it's all bloody surface mount. Try and kit up a surface mount kit and then try and compare the value of that compared to only a couple of bucks it costs you to get a board assembled at a local manufacturing house. A couple of bucks, you know, to have a board pick and place assembled. It's not worth a couple of bucks of your time to kit up the components, put them in bags, label them. It costs you more. It's cheaper to get it assembled. That's why I sell my microcurrent assembled.

Chris Gammell: The user side as well. I mean, then the user has the guarantee of it working. Of it working. You know, tested working. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Or a short-form kit. Short-form kits are, you know, still okay. Where, okay, you've, like, all the hard SMD stuff, you know, is done. And, you know, you might have to hook up some battery connectors or something. You know, that's kind of, you know, some manual wiring or something like that. That might be a different. But, yeah, as a kit supplier, a kit producer, for me, it just doesn't pay to provide a kit. Because it's so cheap to get it locally contract manufactured.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And that's the thing. I almost got tempted again because people keep pointing me to it. The, you know, the $5,000 Chinese pick-and-place machine, you know. Oh, man. Which everyone thinks is only a couple of grand. But, no, if you actually go price it and include postage and conversion. It's about six grand here in Australia, right? Yeah. For me to get one of these machines. And everyone assures me that it's actually quite useful and actually works reasonably well. So, I'd like to get, you know, I wouldn't mind getting one. It'd be novel. But six grand buys me an awful lot of assembly time on a professional pick-and-place machine.

Chris Gammell: Right. Which then you can sell the product of to buy more time, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Exactly. It's, you know. So, yeah, they're nice, novel little machines. But can you justify the cost, you know? Yeah, it's about pricing your time, really, at that point. Pricing your time and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. But who knows? Maybe in the new year I'll get sucked into getting one just because it might make for some interesting videos or something like that, you know. I could see that. I mean, I don't know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it would be better than hand-placing everything, right? Oh, of course. If that was going to be your bag, then for sure.

Dave Jones: Well, if I was going to get into sort of, you know, really niche kits that, you know, I'm not going to sell 1,000 of them. You know, I might sell 100. Then, well, you know, the assembly house isn't really going to, you know, be that, you know, keen for my business for 100 boards, right? Right, right. Which is only like 10 panels or something like that, maybe. Or if you've got a smaller board and there's 50 boards per panel, then, well, they're not going to set up a machine to run one panel through. Yeah. You know, so. Yeah. In those sort of cases, it might make sense to have your own machine. So, I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, it's a tough balance point. I think I need some more convincing. But it is about six grand Australian landed. So. Oh, like shipped and everything. Yeah, shipped and everything. Yeah, there's like four or 500 bucks shipping or something. Yeah. Because it weighs like 50 kilos or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeesh. That's a lot. Right. It's huge. Anyway. Any other lab upgrades for the new year?

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes, actually. I am in talks with a manufacturer who looks like they're going to get me a visual, a high definition visual inspection video system. So. But unfortunately, because it hooks up to a PC, right, I've got a sort of, you know, if I want to permanently have this thing on my bench as a place to do, you know, shoot videos, you know, high def videos, you know, have like a foot pedal. I can zoom in and out and all that sort of jazz. Oh, wow. Okay. But then I need a PC permanently dedicated to that because it streams it in full HD, you know, full HD at 60 frames per second. I need a pretty powerful PC to capture it. Right. And then I've got to permanently set up a proper mic onto it. And, you know, so I'm probably, if I'm going to do that properly.

Chris Gammell: Not a junk room special, huh?

Dave Jones: No, exactly. So, you know, this is a real expensive video system. So I want to do it justice, you know. Right, yeah. And to make it useful, you have to have everything set up there, ready to turn on the computer, push a button and go. Right. You don't want to go.

Chris Gammell: Like you were doing inspection, final inspection for a gadget that's being produced in a manufacturing environment.

Dave Jones: Yes, exactly. So, yeah, that's what these things are actually designed for, you know, visual inspection and stuff like that. You know, so if I have to drag my good notebook that I'm using now in my little office cubicle here, if I have to drag that out and hook it up and dick around. Yeah, I'll never use it. I'll never use it, right? So I would have to dedicate some bench space to it. I've got to dedicate. I'd have to buy a specific machine that's hooked up to it. I've got to, you know, put monitors in the right place. Maybe it tucked under the bench. I have to build custom shelves, you know, all that sort of stuff. But, yeah, that's something I definitely will do because, you know, this thing, if I get it, is a real kick-ass unit. I think it's justified in doing that. And then I want to set up, because at the moment the lab's a brothel, you know. It's just, sorry to all you clean brothels out there. I'm just using the generic term. That means mess, you know. Everything's strut all over the floor.

Chris Gammell: Different meaning here, buddy. Right, okay.

Dave Jones: And I want to set up a photography bench permanently, right? Oh, yeah, right. That has a proper anti-static mat on it. That's also, you know, the consistent color. So I get a consistent color background. I have the light soft boxes, which I've got. I want to dedicate, you know, a permanent bench to that. And once again, it's all that sort of, you know, it really pays dividends when you have your processes streamlined, you know. It might be a lot of paying the ass up front. Getting there sucks. Getting there sucks, you know. But once you have it all in place, you go, oh, that's so worth it, you know. And considering that I'm churning out videos, you know, every second day, you know, and doing product teardowns and stuff like that, I really should invest more money and space and effort into, you know, having really nice dedicated benches for doing stuff. Yeah. And that kind of was the intention, you know. Like I've got my, you know, when I set up the office to begin with, the lab here, I had, you know, one bench dedicated. Well, that's my working bench, you know. That's where my irons are and my main test kit. That's where all the crap goes, yes. That's right, yeah. And that's where all the crap builds up, yep. And so I don't shoot many videos there. But then I have my main teardown bench, which is where I test things, do product reviews and teardowns. Yeah, right. And that's sort of working okay. Then I've had another third bench, which was supposed to be for stuff like this, you know. It was supposed to have a MakerBot on it, you know. It was supposed to have like a permanent video, you know, microscope and things on it. So I can do all my microscope work there and stuff like that. So, yeah, they're the plans. Oh, I don't have to do my video now. There we go. That was going to be my update video for this year. Yeah, just refer everyone here. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right. Go to about one hour in and Dave will talk about the future.

Dave Jones: We went over.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, we suck.

Dave Jones: We suck, don't we? We just talk too much. We do.

Chris Gammell: All right, well, you know, have a good New Year. I guess I'll talk to you in two weeks or so, 2014.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Chris Gammell: All right, man.

Dave Jones: Awesome. Thanks to everyone for listening. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, has our audience increased this year? Have you checked like stats or anything like that? Have we... Do we still... I have not checked. ...goes up linearly?

Chris Gammell: No, I think we're pretty consistent these days. So if people are listening, you know, we do love you telling your friends.

Dave Jones: So we're not actually... We're a bit stagnant, are we? We're not gaining new audience. Yeah, if much.

Chris Gammell: If you want to go like... If you're not growing, you're dying, then I guess we're dying. But I think we're pretty consistent, so...

Dave Jones: The amp hour is dying. There you go. There's a headline.

Chris Gammell: Headline, yeah. That'll be on the top. No, it's... No, we're... I mean, we've got about... We've got a solid group of listeners. And I think hopefully with the new site and everything, you know, keeping people engaged and being able to talk to one another, that's kind of the goal for the new site.

Dave Jones: Well, see, because that's the thing, because we're not being the, you know, a radio slash podcast medium. We get listened to differently. We get viewed, I guess, differently to, you know, other forms of, you know, text blogs and video blogs and things like that. Yeah. So there's not much interaction there. So it's hard for us to know that people care, you know? So, you know, if we stopped, you know, going, oh, we don't think many people will listen to this, who would care? We'd probably, you know, there'd be people with pitchforks on the, you know, on our front door steps. But we go, whoa, whoa, whoa, we didn't know, you know, because they're just, you know, they get automatic... Yeah, it's automatically downloaded into their phone each week and they listen to it.

Chris Gammell: That's how I do it too, yeah. So it's... Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, but yeah, tell your friends for the 2014. That can be your New Year's resolution, you know. Right. Everybody out there, share your favorite podcast. Hopefully it's this one. Yeah. All right, man. Talk to you next year. Later.

Dave Jones: See you, everyone.

SPEAKER_01: I'm bound to thank you for it I don't reviews