#182 – Manufacturing By Wire And Skipping Testing - Calefacient Cuculine Cash

SPEAKER_00: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded January 27th, 2014. Episode 182. Califacient Cuckoo Line Cash.

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. Hey, dude. How's that going? You just started. Yeah, we're a weekend. It's overwhelming.

Dave Jones: Overwhelming, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: In what way?

Chris Gammell: It's just a lot of stuff. Like, a lot of stuff that I didn't think of. You know how it is on any project, right? I mean, it's like, oh, yeah, I've got a schedule. I've got a plan. I know what I'm going to be doing. And then, kaboom, it's Chinese New Year. Or kaboom, it's, you know, like your production facility closes its doors. You know, like... Yeah, yeah. It's nothing that extreme, of course. But it's, you know, it's just always the things that you don't plan for. Yep, exactly.

Dave Jones: But I thought you had, like, the videos done and stuff. What's the... What do you have to actually do?

Chris Gammell: Ah, well, yeah, a lot of them are done. But it's... Some of it is watching myself from four months ago and be like, Oh, no. That's stupid.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, why didn't I explain it that way?

Chris Gammell: You're an idiot four months ago, Chris. So, yeah. So, you know, it's redoing stuff. It's like any other project, you know. You've got to redo stuff. You've got to tear it back up and start over again. And, you know, it's just, you know, interact with people, too. It's just time. So... But it's... Overall, it's great. I mean, great crowd. A lot of Ampour listeners. Excellent. So, you've helped out by writing about it. So, thank you for that, too. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Last minute, like five hours left or something to sign up. Oops, sorry.

Chris Gammell: Better late than never. Better late than never.

Dave Jones: Oh, I think we got... I think I got, like, 20 people signed up or something. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, that's great. That's all right. And there will be another sign up in about four months or so once I, you know, recover.

Dave Jones: Take a holiday and recover.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, well, I've got to finish this first. And if I survive it, then I recover. Yeah. Right. So, I'm sure you guys will hear all about it throughout. I'll be, you know, ranting and raving as we go through it.

Dave Jones: And, of course, you'll be filthy rich and sitting on a throne of cash and you can tell the... No, don't think that's going to happen. You can tell the man to stick it and...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I don't know about the throne of cash. But I did mention it is Chinese New Year. In case anyone heard, did not hear about that, it is, what, three or four days now?

Dave Jones: When does it start? Oh, yeah, I don't know. I didn't know when it actually started.

Chris Gammell: I think it's the 30th. I think that's the official start date. Oh, right. Which would actually be the 20th. If you're hearing about it now and you didn't know, you're already screwed. So, just... Sorry. You're out of luck.

Dave Jones: And how long does it go for? I always forget.

Chris Gammell: I think it's officially a week, but it's, like, practically two weeks. Right. And then there's always very... You know, it's kind of like how Christmas is, at least around here in the States. You know, it's officially a couple days and there's a couple official days off. But then, you know, some people are gone for four weeks. You know, like that. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: So, the company opens, but they're in limited sort of mode. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, probably... I'd say things are probably going to get back to normal probably about, you know, mid-February over there. That's probably a safe bet.

Dave Jones: Right. I'm curious. How many days, holidays do Chinese workers get every year? I don't know. That is a good question. Here in Australia, it's four weeks.

Chris Gammell: Really? That's crazy.

Dave Jones: Well, last I worked full-time. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Right. It's four years. I don't know if it's gone up.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, your boss doesn't give you any time off now, right? You don't... Right. Yeah. Definitely don't just disappear on the amp hour. Yeah. I don't know. I know... So, I've talked to people about... So, I know some people in India. And in India, it's kind of weird because it's like they work a lot of the holidays... Or, sorry, they don't have like big stretches of time off, but they'll have a lot of like little holidays here and there. But like a higher number where it's like you wouldn't expect... It's like just like a Wednesday. No one's there. Yeah. Right. But I know this is a big time in China. And it's interesting too looking at that across, you know, like... You know, I'm always very self-centered. And it's like you're going to look up and be like, oh, yeah, of course there's other holidays. It's like, no, of course, Dave, you don't celebrate like July 4th. That's stupid. Why would you celebrate Independence Day? Exactly. That's dumb.

Dave Jones: No, our big holiday is at Christmas time. I mean, companies shut down. Some of them shut down for a month over Christmas time here in Australia. Yeah. And they force you. A lot of companies, a lot of big companies, they'll actually force you to use your annual leave during that period. You know, usually it might be, say, two weeks. You know, a big company might... That's not sort of, you know, service, public service oriented. You know, it doesn't just ship products every day or something like that. So some sort of engineering company. Yeah. We might, you know, common to take two weeks off over Christmas forced pretty much in quote marks. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: And like since 2009, that's kind of been the thing over here too, because they're like, oh, well. Right. It's a factory shutdown. So it's like, you can either not get paid or take your holiday.

Dave Jones: Or, yeah, you usually choose to, yeah, either take it unpaid or you can use your holidays up. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Exactly. Like my accountant, it just shuts down for all of January, you know? It's like from before Christmas. He's not back until February, you know? It's like...

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's a nice... That's a nice... That's like the European style where like all of August, like Germany's gone. I think. Right. I think that's the one. It's like, there's like a certain month where everybody in Europe just kind of goes to beaches and, you know. Okay. Right. Sounds nice. I like it. But no. Not around here. Ah, well. So, yeah, this is our first show back with just me and you for a while. It's been... Someone was on a holiday a couple weeks ago and then we had... Yeah. I'm on holidays.

Dave Jones: And I, yeah, I sat on a beach, literally. I tweeted a couple of photos of my pasty white legs sitting on a beach.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's good. You all relaxed.

Dave Jones: I posted a photo of the wife in the bikini too.

Chris Gammell: I...

Dave Jones: She didn't like that too much.

Chris Gammell: No, that's surprising. So, the guy that wrote a book on relationships, online dating, relationships. Yeah. That's... You're doing... Yep. You're batting a thousand there, buddy. How to easily get through a divorce online. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Howdy. Everyone's scrambling to Twitter now to see...

Chris Gammell: Oh, goodness. Delete it. Delete it, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right, yeah. Delete something on the internet, sure. Yeah, right. That's easy. It'll just go away. No. Well... Something that doesn't go away... Yeah? What's that? Is the bloody... Well, it's everything you do on the internet is now... Well, you don't even have to be on the internet. Oh, you're going to... Because the NSA is...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I wrote this comment to you, but, you know, we already talked about this when you were gone. Me and Mr... Sorry, Dr. Charvat. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But actually... Did you talk about the link that I put up? Oh, you haven't seen it. These are actual data sheets. These are data sheets for their spy products.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. We did talk about those a little bit, but, you know, I have to say, Greg didn't look at it beforehand, and I was expecting you to be there and to get some of your conspiracy craziness, so bring it on, man. What did you like about this? Because there is some fun little gear in there. I mean, it's pretty impressive stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh, some of it is, and some of it's, well, you know, like, meh. You know, it's pretty ordinary. Oh, well, you know, a little... Like, there's a little, like, homemade... Like, somebody in the NSA lab has just, like, hand-soldered this, and it looks like... I think I can send it out to a board house. Like, hand-soldered this PCB, right? Yeah. Right? They haven't even, like, refloaded it. It looks like somebody's just hand-soldered this and, like, hand-etched copper and, you know, this little miniature RF, you know, microphone spy transmitter thing, it looks like something I made when I was eight years old. You know, one of those FM bug things. Yeah, right. Except, well, this one's a bit more advanced. It doesn't just transmit on the FM band. It actually pulse width modulates a square wave, and then they fire a radar at it, and it, you know, and they get the modulated return. Right.

Chris Gammell: Which is why I thought Greg was going to be so into this, because Mike Osterman wrote into us about it, because it is radar-based. But, yeah, it's a cool little, you know, I don't know. It's a cool little thing. It's a little spy device.

Dave Jones: I assume these came from Edward Snowden. I don't know the source. I presume it is. Oh, yeah. I think you're right, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's got to be. But this is cool, because they're the actual data sheets, like, with top secret written on the top with the National Security Agency. And they even tell you the cost of them. You know, here's the data sheet from 24th of July, 2008. And, yep. Hey, what's that heavy breathing I can hear at the other end of the line? Heavy breathing?

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Is it someone sign on? Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think somebody's monitoring our transmission here.

SPEAKER_02: Oh, no.

Chris Gammell: And he's a creeper. Yep.

Dave Jones: We've been automatically flagged, and we have our own satellite by now, folks. That's right, yeah. If you've seen what the... What's that movie? With Will Smith and...

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Gene Hackman, right?

Dave Jones: Enemy of the State. Enemy of the State. I never get tired of watching that one. It's just a cool...

Chris Gammell: Well, because he's a cranky old man on that one. That's great. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's terrific. Oh, boy. Yeah, we've got our own satellite.

Chris Gammell: I would say, it's either someone listening or I'm getting a cold. That's one of the two, you know. Right.

Dave Jones: And, you know, interesting stuff, how they've hacked into, like, this monitor cable. So, they hack into the red line of the RGB monitor cable. Yeah. And then that, once again, it's a radar-based thing. It's not like it transmits something. They, you know, fire a radar at it and they get the modulator returned from that. Right. And then they just recover the dot clock and, you know, and bam. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. They can see what's on your monitor.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's what Greg was talking about, too, with the sensors that are the parking street sensors. Those things are pretty cool. Right. I forget. They're some kind of silly name. I don't know. I don't remember what it was.

Dave Jones: But that monitor cable is only $30. Yeah. I mean, we'd like to buy one, please. Oh, okay. Well, I don't know if you can do that. No, it's not much. It's a couple of resonators and coils and, you know, building. But, like, somebody's time. Somebody's hand-built these things, right? Somebody at the NSA is chopping open these VGA monitor cables and hand-building these. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but they're not probably selling it with too much overhead, right? I mean, they're just... Oh, no, no.

Dave Jones: That's just a part, you know. It's a nominal internal cost, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The guy that's doing that, he's already paid for it, so... Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Because they just bought, you know, some cable from Amazon.com and they hacked it. Yeah, why wouldn't you? So they're just passing on the Amazon cost, you know. Yeah. That's terrific. Yeah, it's cool tech.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's... I don't know. Some people got... I think some people got upset about this stuff, but it's like, you know, if you take all the other crap out, you know, all the political crap out of it, it's just like, it's just... It's toys, right? It's spy game stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. I mean... And there's nothing terribly surprising in there. In fact, I'm... You know...

Chris Gammell: What would you be surprised by these days, though? I mean, that's the thing. Like, I think about, like, okay, well, so much stuff's online these days. Why wouldn't they just grab packets when it gets on the network, you know?

Dave Jones: Like, I don't know. Oh, yeah, but no, there's some things that, you know, like, if your PC isn't hooked up to the internet because you're a drug dealer in some drug house or something, you know, and you're using your PC to, you know, your spreadsheet to launder all your drug money and everything.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, you mean something like Colorado or what? Right. You mean them boys at SparkFun? It's legal now, Dave. It's legal. Right.

SPEAKER_02: Okay.

Dave Jones: So, you've got to do it the old-fashioned way, you know? You have to, you know, get somebody in there on the inside. Oh, I'm here to repair your computer.

Chris Gammell: You know? Right. You know, the only thing that impresses me with this kind of stuff these days is, like, is, like, power-type stuff. You know, like, low power is interesting, right? You know, you're having to use a radar-type setup where you're actually pinging something and modulating it back, that kind of thing. That's interesting. Because, you know, it is low power on the actual device. But then, like, other things that are, like, super efficient or have really crazy schemes. I mean, there's just no way around. Like, if you have an RF device, there's no way around the amount of power you need for transmitting, right? You know, to get- Oh, yeah. Yeah. Just to get distance, you need a certain amount of power. So, things that are- that would be something that would surprise me is, like, oh, well, this could transmit, like, you know, 20 miles on a coin cell, right? It's like, okay, sure. You know? Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's why they're doing the radar modulation thing. Right. Because they can pump, you know, heavy-duty radar at you. And, of course, you're sitting there and you've got no idea that you're being, you know, pumped with a wad of radar or something, you know? And then it modulates back. Whereas if you had, as you said, you know, a little tiny transmitter in there, it has to run off a battery because, you know, some poor bastard had to go sneak in there and install it, you know? So, it's got to run for, you know, a certain period of time.

Chris Gammell: Can you imagine in a spy movie? Okay. So, they walk in, they install the little bug, and then it's running to, like, one of those big 12-volt AC to DC wall warts.

Dave Jones: Wall warts sitting on that, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You just see the little cord traveling over, getting thinner and thinner and thinner.

Dave Jones: As it disappears into the wall. Exactly. And the bug's hidden in the wall, but they just use the plug pack on the wall.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man. It sounds like something out of, like, a Leslie Nielsen movie or something, you know? Like, naked gun. Right.

Dave Jones: Naked gun, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man.

Dave Jones: So, this is why, you know, you hear about, like, years ago we heard about, you know, the, well, it wasn't that long ago, actually, like, you know, the bugs are permanently installed in the walls of embassies, you know? So, they put them in there when things were constructed. They're obviously, you know, not going to be powered devices. They're going to be passive devices, passive modulation devices, like these ones. We've been talking about that, you know, you hit, they only power up once you hit them with radar and then they modulate the, you know, audio back to you so you can hear what's going on. And, you know, somebody's sitting in that black van with the, you know, the unmarked plates, you know, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: With the transparent side, with the fiberglass sides on it so that they can get the radar through the side walls of the van. And they're sitting, you know, a few streets away just pointing the radar dish at you. Yeah. That's good stuff.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I almost, I sort of considered going for a job at ASIO once, which is our Australian version of the NSA. That's the Australian spy agency. They actually, you know, they advertised, this was pre the internet, right? So, there were no job ads on the internet. You know, this was when they'd put an ad in the paper. You know, the weekend paper is where you'd find all your jobs.

Chris Gammell: But it was really small and hidden in the back, right? Of course.

Speaker ?: Yeah. No.

Chris Gammell: You had to decode it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Secret code. You had to decode it first. And then that was your first intelligence test. And, you know, there it was, a big, you know, quarter page ad, you know, work for the, work for ASIO. You know, we require electronics, hardware, engineers, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what?

Chris Gammell: You never would have been able to talk about it on this show. So, how do we know you didn't actually do that? Hmm? Yeah. I could have. Yeah. Yeah. You never know. I mean, yeah. Same kind of thing here, though. I mean, like.

Dave Jones: We'll neither confirm nor deny.

Chris Gammell: Right. You have to rehearse that. Yeah. I mean, as I say, they have tons of engineers around here. It's kind of crazy. It's just the infrastructure that's needed for this kind of stuff. It's just.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's phenomenal. Levels of bureaucracy.

Dave Jones: I went to see a stand-up comedy show once of a guy who was ex-Azio. And it was great. And it was all his stories. Yeah. It was brilliant.

Chris Gammell: And then we shot him. Ha, ha. Ha, ha. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Ah, boy.

Chris Gammell: It's a different. It's different, though, right? I mean, like, it's like you think about, like, the. You know, I think James Bond type stuff, right? It's like not James Bond stuff. It's, you know, it's much more boring.

Dave Jones: I mean, this is pretty ordinary tech, right? It's not, you know, it's not bleeding edge, you know? They haven't got some supercomputer embedded in a pen.

Chris Gammell: You know, it's not. Arm 7s and Vertex 2s. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, and transistor modulators, you know? I mean, it's not rocket science.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: But they do have their own fab. They can actually fab their own chips. I love what they say. There's a word in one of these data sheets that says, where is it? Let me see if I can find it. Hang on. Hang on. All components are commercial off the shelf and so are non-attributable to the NSA. Just in case it gets found, you know? That's not mine.

Chris Gammell: That's not mine.

Dave Jones: That's probably why they give it that deliberate home brew look, right? Oh, this is a hand-etched PCB and tack soldered, you know, by someone with some plumber's iron. And, you know, oh, this couldn't possibly be the NSA. They're high-tech, you know?

SPEAKER_02: It's the IT guy.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Oh, boy. I love it. So that's in several of the data sheets. So we'll have to link in some of these data sheets because they're great. Yeah, there's a big thread. And it will be on the radar.

Chris Gammell: On the EV blog forum. Yeah, you guys are marked. If the EV blog forum disappears tomorrow, Dave either didn't pay his hosting bill or he was paid a visit. One of the two. Right. I love it. So anyway. How is the Kickstarter going? I meant to ask you about that. It's been a while. Have you started shipping them all out?

Dave Jones: It has been a while because I've shipped all of the early backers. So I did Promise January and I shipped in January.

Chris Gammell: Is that like 40 or so? How many was that? 30. 30. Okay. That's good. And that was all hand-placed?

Dave Jones: That was all hand-built in my SMD. Yeah, baked in my SMD oven and tested. Yep. And all the rest of the parts are at the assemblers. But they're probably being assembled as we speak. Nice. So, yeah. Yeah. So they'll be back. So I promised 200. You know, the next level up was 200. And I promised those for February. And it looks like, you know, sure enough, I'll get them. Well, they'll be finished assembly in by the end of January. So I'm ahead of schedule.

Chris Gammell: Whoa. Look at that. Dave doesn't need no manager. He is the manager.

Dave Jones: In fact, I proudly tweeted. I proudly tweeted that I shipped the first units on the same day that the money came through to my bank account. The exact same day. I reckon I'm probably, nobody's giving me another example. I reckon I'm probably the only hardware Kickstarter campaign that's ever done that.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, maybe not hardware. Like if there's like an e-book that was already written or something like that. Oh, yeah. No, yeah. But hardware, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Hardware is a different story. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: See, it's a little different though. I mean, you already had this thing designed though too. I think a lot of the Kickstarter ones are like, okay, well, we're mostly designed and now we're going into design for manufacturing. Whereas yours was like, you know, this is a.

Dave Jones: Well, I was going ahead with it anyway, regardless of whether or not I got the Kickstarter money. You know, so that's why I already bought the parts up front and all, some of them, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it would be interesting if that becomes a new model though of like, you know, depending on where you do. You do it in the process, right? Because or when you really need the money. You were using it mostly as like a marketing kind of way to get the word out.

Dave Jones: It was more as a marketing tool, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Easy way to get like, you know, the payments taken care of and everything like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, marketing pre-orders and getting everything nicely into a spreadsheet and all that sort of jazz, you know. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Any surprises while you were doing your reflow? I mean, how's that process been going for you?

Dave Jones: Oh, that worked okay. I had the odd one that, you know, didn't take. It's not easy to, you know, because you want to set your oven so that, you know, a minimal amount of heat possible to do the job, right? Because you don't want to cook your parts, right? That's always the fear of the homemaker.

Chris Gammell: Especially when the board is part of the case, right? You can't just hide it by putting it inside the entire enclosure.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Oh, look, the Saldamasqua's now a burnt green color.

Chris Gammell: Although then it would be like a collector's edition, right? It's like, oh, who cares if they signed it? He burnt this one. This is the most rare of the rare.

Dave Jones: By the way, it's not very easy to sign cases, by the way. No, what's hard about it? Oh, because it's like a tiny case and sort of you've got to sign it in free air kind of thing. It's not like you can rest your hand like you can do on paper, you know, and stuff. It's kind of just like awkward.

Chris Gammell: You need like an autograph fixture.

Dave Jones: Right, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Cut it out of like plastic or something.

Dave Jones: I can actually get a factory silkscreen on, you know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, like scanning your signature? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but then it loses something, you know.

Dave Jones: It does lose something. So, yeah, every signature is unique, folks. Not that I ever sign my name the same way twice anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, why would you? That's so boring. So what about pushing into production then? Is that process pretty solid for you by now? I mean, I guess you've been using the same guy for a while.

Dave Jones: Well, no, no, I'm using a new assembler who's actually a backer of the project.

Chris Gammell: Really? How'd that go down?

Dave Jones: Just gave you a shout?

Chris Gammell: He's like, hey, I built stuff.

Dave Jones: He originally approached me at my stand at the trade show two years back and said, hey, you know, he's a fan. He watches the blog. I'd love to, you know, I run an assembly house up the coast and I'd love to, you know, make your boards from now on. And I felt bad, so I didn't get in touch with him. You know, it took me so long to finally get another batch of, you know, microcurrents done. Because the previous ones, I just stuck with my previous assembler because everything was in place, you know, and everything was running smoothly.

Chris Gammell: I think that's most production, right? I mean, if you're, it's like, ain't broke, don't fix it. That kind of mentality. Oh, yeah. Because it's a big, moving stuff in production is tough. Even for smaller projects, it can still just be, you know, like there's always that tribal knowledge. An assembler knows, okay, well, yeah, you know, this diode, it is the right footprint, but it sometimes slides in reflow or something like that. You know, and they know to do an offset or something from the placement file.

Dave Jones: So, yes, you can't beat, you know, previous experience of assembling that product. Anyway, I'm trying the new guy and we'll see how it goes. But because he's a backer of the project and he's really keen to get into the whole open source hardware thing, you know, I figure he's going to do a, well, he's certainly going to do his best anyway.

Chris Gammell: All these people start sweating, they're like, oh, shit, I'm in that group. Double check your boards, open. That first thing you do with an EEV blog product is you take it apart, right? Right. You should include a little instruction piece or an instruction sheet that says, step one, take apart. Cut, yeah. Oh, because you need to put the battery in anyways, right? You got to take it apart to do that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it comes unassembled anyway. You've got to, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you've got to restore the battery. So, I figured, well, there's no point screwing the screws in because, well, you just have to take them back out.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, speaking of assembly and speaking of earlier about shows where you didn't decide to show up, our former guest, Andy Seddon, Andrew Seddon, of CircuitHub. Do you remember CircuitHub? Yes. So, I think we talked about it after the fact where, so CircuitHub was doing the thing where they had a centralized repository where you could go and, like, select a footprint, and then you could download it to Dropbox, and then you could just sync your library right to that kind of thing. So, it would be like a marketplace of footprints. Well, they finally announced their, I've been working with them on some of the beta, the alpha stuff, I guess it is, because they're kind of in beta now. But they just announced their beta, and I'm super, super, super, super excited about this. Okay, so here's how it goes. Tell us. If you have the footprints already in your system, that's going to make things better, but it's not required. The thing that's really cool, okay, so...

Dave Jones: Eagle or... Oh, no, this is their own tool, isn't it? This is their own tool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so they have, like, a centralized tool that's, like, a generic database, and then it'll sync to your Dropbox in whatever tool you're using. So, you can use KiCad, Eagle, or Altium.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. I think you had to use their PCB schematic tool.

Chris Gammell: No, no, that's Upverter. Upverter has, like, all online.

Dave Jones: Oh, sorry, I'm thinking Upverter. Right, right, right.

Chris Gammell: So, CircuitHub has the centralized database, which is just kind of, like, information about the parts, right? You know, this is the pad sizes. Here's where the pads go. And then it basically downloads it to whatever the actual CAD program wants to see, you know, the specific CAD format. But like I said, you don't actually need to use those footprints anymore, although it will help you later. So, what you can do now, so you have KiCad, Eagle, or Altium. Right. You put it into your project folder on Dropbox, into their, there's, like, a specific folder for them. And then you go to their website, and you click Sync, and it pulls all the files that it needs from your folder. It ignores all the stuff that it doesn't need. So, in KiCad, at least, right, it'll pull all of your specific schematic sheets. It'll pull, it'll pull your libraries, your library files. Right. And then it'll pull the actual layout, the KiCad-PCB file, which is the layout file. All of that stuff. It'll generate Gerbers online, which is, other tools do that. But then it sucks in all of the data. It syncs it up to Octopart. It lets you select which parts you do or don't want populated, and or if you want them to be, like, placed off to the side in, like, a kit. And then you can basically have a little slider bar saying, I want one, or I want a hundred. And then it'll send it off for fabrication. It's killer.

Dave Jones: Well, it's almost unbelievable.

Chris Gammell: It's almost unbelievable. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like, as in, it can't possibly work for a complicated project. Like, I'm thinking, okay, it's going to work for a little Arduino shield, you know, LED flashing with LM324s and, you know.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: And that is, that's going to be the ultimate test. Like I said, it's still in beta. But, so, I've done it for the getting to Blinky, the KiCad tutorial I did. So, I did it for that. That's super simple, right? Two-layer board. Of course. It's, like, maybe 12 components. Super simple. But we were just doing that as, like, testing stuff for Alpha. And now, I'm actually pushing what my early version of the Contextual Electronics Project, I'm pushing that up there now, too. And it's gotten faster and it's pulling all the data in. And it does, like, it gives, it, like, pulls in spares when it needs spares and everything. And I'm telling you, man, if, this is, like, the dream, right? Because.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but you've got to set it up, right? You've got to tell it, this part is this octo, is this digi-key part number.

Chris Gammell: No. Oh, so, well, here's the thing. So, this is where it came back to, like, using their part library, right? If you're using their part library to start with.

Speaker ?: Oh, right.

Dave Jones: So, you've got to use their part library, right?

Chris Gammell: No, you don't. You don't. But I'm saying, if you do use their part library to start with, then it's already synced. It has, like, a circuit hub number. And that's synced out to a specific manufacturer part number. But on my stuff, I just put in the manufacturer part number. And then it'll pull in the manufacturer part number. And then eventually, as they get more and more data, it's going to suggest alternates. And then it's going to also try and bumble orders. And it's going to try and reduce cost for... So, like... So, the really, really, really, really killer thing is, like... So, say you're using LM324 and I'm using LM324. Someone else is using just a generic or a different generic op amp, right? But because you and I are ordering it and we're building boards with it, you know, Jeff Kaiser is using something else, right? And he... Right. It basically goes to him then and says, hey, these other orders are using the LM324. Why don't you guys all... Or if you use this, then you'll get this better... You'll get this better low-quantity price. And that's going to be super killer. So, I am over the moon about this thing.

Dave Jones: And they supply a fully assembled board.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, basically, you can check all your Gerber's...

Dave Jones: They will order your PCB and they will get your PCB manufactured and they'll ship it off to the assembly, buy all the parts, and ship your fully assembled board.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Wow. Who's doing this? I mean, because, like, if you order one board, like, they're not going to... Or ten boards. They're not going to bother doing a pick-and-place machine, right? Somebody's hand assembling these.

Chris Gammell: Ah. So, that's the other thing. They're talking about... So, now, imagine now there's a standard set of... I might have to double-check it with how much I'm allowed to say about this stuff. But, like, imagine, like, now you and I and eight other people are building not the same boards but similar boards. Well, then you start getting other bundling effects. Like, you already have reels preloaded into a machine, right? So, you think about a lot of low-quantity projects that are using an Atmega 328, right? Not every project has it, but if you have these reels that are already loaded and you just snap them on a machine, your setup costs drop. Yep. You can actually start bundling panels. Like, they can start bundling panels then, too, like Oshpark does. I mean, like, a lot of this is still in the works, but, like, it's early days and I think it's...

Dave Jones: It'd be awesome if you could live see what parts are already mounted in the machine.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah, exactly. Right. If you had that knowledge of, like...

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: You ever seen those bars that do that now? They do it, like, a marketplace. So, you go to... I know you don't drink beer, but, like, so you go to a bar and it's, like, if you and 10 of your friends all order the same beer, because you get volume discounts then, basically. And they have this, like, leaderboard. And so, it's like a stock market almost where, like, if a bunch of people are drinking the beer, then, like, I think it goes down in price. Got it. And so, it's, like, surge pricing on beer, effectively, whatever the opposite of surge pricing is.

Dave Jones: Crowdsoul is the same kind of thing, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's like, oh, well, this, you know, this next month, maybe, you know, a certain part's going to be more popular than another, right? Everybody's using CC2541s now, that TI Bluetooth chip, right? So, maybe you get a discount on that. But, again, that's Dave and I prospecting there. But the main thing that I'm excited about is, like, how much time did you spend on a bomb for your microcurrent? Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: Tons. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's the crappy part about...

Dave Jones: But I have to, because almost every part on there is unique, right? Nobody, you know, I can guarantee you nobody's ever used it in any open source hardware project, right?

Chris Gammell: No, yeah, that's true. But this isn't just meant for open source hardware stuff.

Dave Jones: You know, brand new.

SPEAKER_02: So, hmm.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, I know that. But anyway, this is interesting. If they support Altium, then that's interesting. I can...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. I can do that. I mean, so, yeah, the big three. And I think, so I talked to Andy the other day. He said Eagle is the smoothest process right now. I've used KiCad. It's working for KiCad. I think Altium is pretty well built in for this kind of stuff, too. So, I'm sure that's working, too. But, yeah, it might be worth, you know, uploading the board, the microcurrent board and just seeing how it is. So, and it's a cool little interface, too, you know, just kind of going through and clicking. Because, you know, it's going to pull in all your stuff, right? The only thing that I kind of complain about with it is, like, it'll pull in, like, my silkscreen because that's a footprint in KiCad, right? So, it'll pull in a custom silkscreen that I make. So, you just have to go in and say, okay, that's not a part. You know, that's either a, you know, physical component versus a whatever, an electrical component.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, I get really excited talking about it.

Dave Jones: Right. But is it, you know, it's good for those small-scale projects. But when I'm, say, manufacturing 2,000 microcurrents, you know, it's always, you know, almost certainly going to be better to do it myself. To deal directly with the fab house, buy the parts directly, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. Well, it depends, though, right? It's most likely going to be cheaper. It'll probably be cheaper, but I think it'll end up coming down to, like, if it's, so, if you had a company with you, right? So, say you had, you know, five or six people and you're all, you know, able to handle this stuff, deal with a lot of the buying and all that other stuff. It's like, yeah, okay, then you're going to find some efficiencies there, I think. But I think the case there is going to be, okay, you just, you made a prototype, you made 10 of a prototype and you uploaded it through here. And then you put it on Kickstarter and you sold 2,000, right? Yep. That's the real case where it's like, okay, that's where it probably makes sense. You know, scalable as a solopreneur kind of person, to use a terrible term.

Dave Jones: Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah, like, ooh, crap, my Kickstarter went gangbusters and now I've got to make 2,000. How do I do it? Well, I just push a button, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right, right, yeah. And that's the goal. I mean, yeah, and you're going to pay for that kind of thing, right? So, I don't know how much. But it'll be some percentage of it.

Dave Jones: Where are their boards made and assembled?

Chris Gammell: Or don't they tell you it was that super secret? They told me, but I don't know if that's actually final or I'm allowed to say. Right. Okay. But it was reputable, you know, board house and PCB manufacturer. So, I was not concerned at all if that helps.

Dave Jones: In China or U.S.?

Chris Gammell: U.S. right now.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: Cool. So, yeah. Yeah. No Australia branch yet, I don't think. Ah, well, not to worry. So, the only thing I would say is if people are interested, just, it's a beta still. So, you know, if they get 1,000 people that do it at one time, it might be kind of rough. Right, right. And Andy said I could tell people, so. I told him, I'm like, I don't know, man. I'm pretty excited about this. I think a lot of people will be.

Dave Jones: Oh, goodness.

Chris Gammell: We'll see if he's crying tomorrow. Interesting. Yeah. All right. So, what else is new?

Dave Jones: I don't know. We've just rattled on VARF now about bloody...

Chris Gammell: Circular. Yeah. So, well, I saw another Kickstarter on, at least on our list, that I was surprised to see show up in your video there, too.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. I'm the first backer, yes.

Chris Gammell: How does that work? Did they start shipping it before it's done?

Dave Jones: They did, yes. Mine is a beta unit. They approached me and they said, hey, you know, we're some cool guys. We're doing this cool little robot arm. Would you like one? And I went, oh, you know, I don't know. I thought, you know, I don't know. It's a bit of a toy, you know. And they said, oh, you know, look, we'll ship, you know, you can be the first backer and we'll, you know, sell it to you at cost. And, you know, okay. You know, seems like a cool sort of thing. And, yeah, they shipped me the first unit. But, so, I'm not actually a backer. I'm not actually in the system as a backer. But, you know, I actually bought it. Right, okay.

Chris Gammell: That's what makes more sense. And they shipped it to me early. Okay. Well, that's a good way to do it. Yeah. Is this your first robot? I was going to ask you about that. Because, I mean, that's a big milestone for people, you know, big first robot. Yes.

Dave Jones: This is my first robot, yeah. It's a four-axis robotic arm, you know. It's an Arduino-based thing. And I haven't actually physically hooked it up to the PC yet. I haven't downloaded the software and actually made it do something useful yet. Yeah. You know, and, you know, it's essentially pretty much a toy. I mean, you probably can find some sort of niche, you know, industrial application for it, I'm sure. You know, if you were creative enough. Somebody asked on the EEV blog forum, actually, you know, what use is it? What can you use it for? And the first thing that popped into my mind, oh, you could do life testing of switches or life testing of connectors or something like that. You know, so you can have it here with a, you know, you put an artificial finger on the end of it and you can get the thing to poke your switch at all different angles. You know, like just sit there 24-7, just poke, poke, poke, poke, poke and see how long it lasts.

Chris Gammell: Or like annoy someone, right? You could just have them poke someone in the shoulder all day long.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Tap someone on the shoulder.

Dave Jones: Yeah, so I, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do with it. It's not like, you know, it's not good enough to do, say, you know, component pick and place and have your own like little, you know, people have talked about that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you would do the four axis anyways.

Dave Jones: No, well, you could. In theory, you could do it. But, you know, it's just not precise enough. It isn't repeatable enough, I don't think. You know, I can almost guarantee it just by looking at it. I know that, you know, it's not going to be repeatable enough for anything but, you know, really massive components kind of thing. So, but, you know, it's there. It's got a little suction cup and it can, you know, under software control, it can suck up parts and, you know, move things around. I was thinking like Lego sorter.

Chris Gammell: That's what I was thinking of is like a potential application.

Dave Jones: Right, well, then you'd have to, you know, have visual ID and, you know, you'd have to have a camera and, you know, all that sort of jazz. Yeah, that's true. Then you'd have to do, yep. But no, it's certainly possible. You use it as a base for more complicated projects. I guess that's the idea of it. You know, in itself, it's just, you know, a bit of a toy. But if you, you know, yeah, you might want to attach a vision camera to it and do real-time vision processing and then it can identify, you know, objects and stuff like that. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: This isn't your first robot. I was just thinking about that. That's not your first robot. You had a MakerBot. I mean, like, that's technically a robot.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. Right. Okay. Fair enough.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I think, I don't know, what makes a robot? I think like, you know, stepper motors.

Dave Jones: Anything with stepper motors that moves, yeah, I guess. Although this thing doesn't have stepper motors. That's a disadvantage of it. It's got DC servos. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I saw you mention that in the video too. And so it doesn't have any kind of feedback mechanism for like-

Dave Jones: No. No. It's just a, no.

Chris Gammell: So what does it do? Just by timing? It just like drives a servo by timing then or?

Dave Jones: I guess so. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. I assume so. Anyway, I'm not sure of the exact details yet. I haven't actually looked into it. So we'll see.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, it's a fun little thing. I'm sure Sagan will love it. You know, hook it up to the PC. Oh, yeah. He moves the mouse around and watch the arm move. And, you know, he loves the MakerBot. Yeah. He loves being, you know, he knows how to go through the menu on the MakerBot. You know, insert the SD card and call out the menu. And he can- Yeah. He can start prints on his own.

Chris Gammell: Oh, jeez.

Dave Jones: I know.

Chris Gammell: That's crazy.

Dave Jones: That's scary. Yeah. Oh.

Chris Gammell: That's crazy. Get that kid of soldering iron, man. Right. Free labor. Exactly. Board assembly house? I know. It's in-house now. Oh, boy. Paid in apple juice.

Dave Jones: We didn't finish talking about my microcurrent things. Actually, there's testing to be done as well. Oh, yeah. What's going on with that? You know, well, you know how I designed in like a card edge connector on the side of the panel? Yeah. Right? To, you know, test 10 boards at once kind of thing. And I, you know, I had the idea that I might, you know, decide to do like an automated jig that's sort of plugged up and, you know, and actually automatically measured the output and had a bunch of leads and, you know, pass-fail and all that sort of jazz. And in the end, I decided, no, it's probably not worth the effort. You know, I don't really have the volume to warrant, you know, spending a couple of weeks designing that and, you know, dick it around and getting it troubleshooting, getting it right and perfect. Right. You know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, because if you're shipping that up north too, then you'd have to either go up there or have troubleshooting guides and everything else, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, well, I'm probably, like, I'm going to have a testing system. I'll probably get them to test like the 1,000 units. I'll test the 200 that are going to come back, you know, next week or something.

SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay. Okay.

Dave Jones: But, you know, then I've got 1,000. So I'm probably not going to test 1,000 myself, right? But I, so I'm going to end up using the card edge connector just to apply power to all the boards. And then I'm just going to have some dedicated, you know, because it's got three different ranges. So I'm probably going to make just three different little battery powered boxes, just one-offs hand built that sort of just, you know, plug in and you flick the switch and it gives you a pass fail. You know, and then you go and then you do that step from, you know, board one, board two, board three, and it takes, you know, two seconds for each one or something. Yeah, right. Yeah. So I figured that was probably the best trade-off in terms of, you know, amount of effort and time expended to design a test system and versus, you know, payback. Well, and labor saved.

Chris Gammell: I mean, thinking about your design too, that's an interesting, you know, a design question too because it's like a design for test, design for manufacturing. You're paying more for those nice resistors in there. And that's really, I mean, in terms of sense elements, there's a diminishing number of things that can go wrong. Like if the power is on and you get any semblance of readings, you know, okay.

Dave Jones: I'm pretty much guaranteed.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's 80% of your test right there because otherwise it means you've got bad resistors out of tolerance, which is a huge problem. Or you have an op amp that has bad input bias current, which means that's out of spec too then, right? Exactly. And it's like at that point you've got so many problems that you don't need to care about test fixture.

Dave Jones: Exactly, exactly. So it's, you know, I could do that, right? That's another thing that people don't, you know. You can just not even test the product or you can do some basic thing. Oh, yeah, the power comes on and, you know, yeah, power on or something like that. And you can ship that and then you can go, well, I'm not going to bother testing because I know my phone, you know, I can do just do sample testing. Like one in every hundred I can test just to make sure that they haven't put the wrong parts on the real, you know, on the machine or something like that, right? And then you just wear the cost of any returned units, you know, that are foldy. Right. And you hope for goodwill.

Chris Gammell: You hope for goodwill for your customers, right?

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And that could be cheaper than fully testing each one. Definitely.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think that's an increasingly large amount of manufacturing these days just because of the dropping cost of electronics in the first place, right? I mean, it's just why wouldn't you just –

Dave Jones: It's not worth testing them.

Chris Gammell: Right. I mean, you work over time to try and reduce your – to up your yield, right, and lower your waste. But, yeah, it's the amount of time it takes for a technician to open the case and take it out and troubleshoot it. And they only have – you know, there's always – when you have a technician like that, they usually only have half an hour or an hour to figure it out. If they don't get it, then it's trash anyways. And so it's like if you don't have enough margin priced into your product, then you can't – you literally cannot have a technician fix it unless it's like something super rare and then you should have margin priced in anyways. So, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it's tough. But in the case of the microcurrent, for example, it's a precision instrument. And actually, technically, it should not meet its spec, right? On paper, any manufactured unit may not meet its spec, you know, because I – You just mean because of stack-ups or what? Well, yeah, yeah. The actual tolerance stack-up. I test or I claim a tighter spec than what is theoretically the worst case, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: So you're going by typical versus max on your components.

Dave Jones: I'm going by typical versus max.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's a dangerous game to play, man.

Dave Jones: I know, it's a dangerous game to play.

Chris Gammell: Oh, it looks fine today. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Let me tell you about that when you go back to the manufacturing and you're like – Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So I heard you had really low – really low offset voltage on this op-amp typically. And they're like, yep, we do typically. That one doesn't. Typically. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. See you later.

Dave Jones: And that's worked okay for me in the past and I think it'll work okay again. But once again, say these 30 hand-assembled units, right? Yeah. Not very controlled assembly because it's in my, you know, dodgy do-it-yourself thermal baking oven, right? Right. And they all met the tight spec that I put in there. Well, which – Some of them just made it. Yeah. You know.

Chris Gammell: What you have to claim there, Dave, is they're pre-aged, right? You're just getting them through the bathtub curve. Exactly. And yes, a radius equation, yada, yada, yada. Yep.

Dave Jones: So it's just interesting because a lot of products don't, you know, that, you know, it doesn't matter a rat's ass. Yeah. You know, but for things like this, it's, yeah. Yeah, it's a different ballgame.

Chris Gammell: It makes a difference.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So you are going to do it though. You're going to have some lots of testing for –

Dave Jones: Oh, there will be an automated – there will be a pass-fail test, yes. Oh, okay. That actually – well, it's, you know, it's not like over the full range. It's like a spot value. Right. It's a verify. On each. It's a verify. Yeah. It's a verify that, you know. Yeah, exactly. That it meets the spec, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, calibrations are terrible. Yep. I mean, they're nice. They help you optimize for nonlinearities and all that other stuff and precision things. But, oh, God, that's just a headache waiting to happen. I know. Yeah. So shake your calibration technician's hand the next time you see him because he or she has a tough life. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And as I've showed in a previous video and we've talked about a long time ago, yeah, I got shipped a bad batch of resistors once. They were 1% tolerance instead of 0.1%, you know. And I was testing these things and I was wondering why I was getting, you know, a 50% foliarate, you know. Yeah. And I measured the things on the room. Yeah, 5% you might just write it off and 50% you will notice. Yep. Right. Yes, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. So, yeah, I expect there to be, you know, several failed units out of this. And if there are, well, you know, I'll get them back and I can either hand replace the resistors or I can sell them as a looser spec, you know, thing.

Chris Gammell: Right. Which is how chip companies do it. So why not, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. That's right.

Chris Gammell: This one has been audience binned. Right. Kickstarter tested. Yep. What you should do.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I forgot to tell, I'm going to write a blog post on this, but you know how I was, you know, I'm trialing Kickstarter. Yes. Because I wanted to see how it worked, right? Right. And I'd heard all these horror stories about the survey in quote marks that you have to send out to get people's right. And there's all these third party companies that have sprung up, right? And of course, they all spammed me, right? Multiple times when I had my Kickstarter campaign running. Oh, for, you know, one or two percent, a lousy one or two percent of your Kickstarter, you know, money, we will handle all of your surveys for you and take away all the headaches and all the dramas because Kickstarter is shit. You know? Yeah. And I thought, oh, God, what am I, you know? And I've had other people who've run Kickstarters before and they've said, oh, yeah, this survey system's a nightmare. And like, but I was surprised. It's good. I liked it. Apart from the fact that you can only run it once, right? Yeah. Right. So if you goof it up and or somebody sent you the wrong address, they can't just update it. And then you can download the latest database. It doesn't work like that. It's a one-off. But that's the only bad thing about it. Apart from that, I was really impressed. It worked well. Well, that's good. I can download all my data in a totally usable and what I expected Excel, you know, CSV format. You know, file, load into my spreadsheet. It's all there. I printed out my labels. Everything's sweet. I like it. And I can even download that multiple times in different and sorted in different ones. I'll like who has already shipped and I can categorize and the different perk levels, different databases. It actually works well. That's about the only thing of Kickstarter that I've been impressed about.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, so you think this Kickstarter thing, it has legs, huh?

Dave Jones: No. No. I'd rather use plausible. No. Kickstarter is, no. As I said, it's the only saving grace for Kickstarter is the fact that the survey system actually works well. Right. Okay. Yep. And they do pay on time. They promised to pay exactly two weeks after and sure enough, they did. Precisely two weeks after, the money turned up in my account. So, minus 8.3%.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, you're not going to get all of it. Yeah. Yeah. No. That's right. Government's coming next, man.

Dave Jones: Coming to get your money. Yeah, that's right. Government.

Chris Gammell: Government. Government. Government. Government. Government. Oh, boy. So, you know what you should do next time that you- What's that? Instead of this crazy little precision device, you should build a $200 thermostat.

Dave Jones: I should. Because then I can get bought out by Google. Ridiculous.

Chris Gammell: What is that?

Dave Jones: $3.2 billion. $3.2 billion.

Chris Gammell: Yes. That's right. $3.2 billion.

Dave Jones: Can I actually swear? Am I allowed to swear on this blog? This brand new show?

Chris Gammell: You can, but then I've got to-

Dave Jones: I usually don't like to drop the F-bomb, but yeah, what the F? Okay, I won't say it. Like, okay, right? This is- Surely people have already seen this by now.

Chris Gammell: Of course, yeah, this is two weeks ago now, but we have to rant on it a little bit, right?

Dave Jones: Of course, right? It's a company that nest, they- Were they a Kickstarter or no? They were sort of a- No, no, no, no. This is like- No, they were a startup, though. Like Angel Fundy. They were a startup.

Chris Gammell: They were only three years old. They started in 2010 when they got bought.

Dave Jones: Anyway, what they've got is just a networked, smart, cloudy, wanky thermostat for your home, right? Plus, they've got a wanky, networked, cloudy, talks to you and, you know, makes your coffee smoke alarm.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: This is what they got. So they got a thermostat and a smoke alarm. That's all they got. And they got bought out for $3.2 billion.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. So, yeah, there was a lot of conversation about this kind of thing. It's not just- Yeah, we say it like that, of course, right? It's like, okay, I can buy a smoke detector for five bucks. And a thermostat for 10. But it's not like they were the same, exact same thing, you know?

Dave Jones: No, they're not the same thing. But there's other companies doing networked thermostats. Google could have done it themselves. In fact, Google had their own department that did networked power monitoring and stuff like that. Oh, yeah, they did.

Chris Gammell: They shut that down, though, didn't they?

Dave Jones: I thought we talked about that shutting down.

Speaker ?: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: They did shut it down, yeah. But the fact is, right, let's say Google threw $32 million, right? Which is what? Three orders of magnitude less than what they paid for Nest? Is it? Three, 20, 32? Yeah. Yeah. No, two orders of magnitude. Two orders, yep. Two orders of magnitude less than what they paid for Nest, right? And $32 million would have bought you a bunch of talented hardware engineers, and they would have developed encoders and everything else, you know, does all the cloud crap and embedded software engineers. And they could have developed this product, right? Yeah, so you get... So if it's the product they wanted, they could have...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, for three years. So if you estimate $200,000 an engineer, which is probably a little low in the Bay Area. So say $250,000 an engineer.

Dave Jones: A little low?

Chris Gammell: Really? Yeah, dude. Really? Okay. Assuming... No, so they get paid about... So Bay Area pays from anywhere like from $100 to $140,000, depending on experience. I guess $80,000 up to $140,000.

Dave Jones: Oh, like $100,000 to maybe $150,000 is what I was expecting.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but when you do calculation for that kind of stuff, you also have to roll in like benefits are included in the States. Usually you have to pay for benefits, and then overhead. Usually you have to charge in overhead, too. So the estimate I've always heard is $200,000 per engineer, $250,000 if they're paid more. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: That's the company cost, right? That's not what they're paying the engineer.

Chris Gammell: Fair call. If someone gives you a million dollars, you either get four or five engineers for a year. Yeah, of course. And so let's give them the benefit of the doubt, right? These guys are paid really well. So you get four engineers for a year. So that's 32 million times four engineers a year. Four. So that's 128 engineers a year.

Dave Jones: Let's have that. Let's say they've got 50 engineers, right? That's plenty to do products like this. Probably too many if it's hardware.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a lot for hardware.

Dave Jones: Well, and for the software side of things, you only need a couple of talented, you know, this isn't freaking designing a new operating system, right? This is, you know, this is just a cloud-connected internet device. You know, it's not.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I think the company wasn't, it was about 50 people, I think. So, and then you've got to figure prototype costs, all that, you know, like fast-turn prototypes, stuff like that. So, yeah, you could definitely do this in three years and $50 million, right? I mean, like, you could build a good group of people. Yeah. Yeah, so their return on investment is very high. They made a lot of money. And, you know, people talk about buying, like, talent or they were buying the, you know, the brand name, all that other crap. It's like, they were blowing money. Bullshit.

Dave Jones: No, they were, like, because a lot of the talk was that they were buying the guy who founded it. Because this guy was the guy who originally designed the iPod. It's like, whoop-dee-freaking-do. I'm spinning my finger around in the air here, right? Whoop-dee-freaking-do. Yeah. Right? He designed it, whoop-dee-do. Right. They didn't, Apple didn't invent the portable audio device, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right. The Zen. Remember that thing? That thing was like a hard drive wrapped in, like, a... Spongy plastic.

Dave Jones: It's like... Three and a half inch. It's ridiculous.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right? So, yeah, okay. Like, for me, right? $32 million would have been, hey, they did really well, right? If they were bought out for $32 million. I'd say, yeah, they did really well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right? $320 million would have been crazy, right? Even that figure would have raised eyebrows and went, holy shit, you know? Yeah. That's a lot of money. $3.2 billion. This is like the second biggest acquisition Google have ever done, right? And Google have acquired a lot of companies. There's a wiki page with the companies Google's acquired, right? There's hundreds of them.

Chris Gammell: Okay. I'll have to look that up.

Dave Jones: This, apart from YouTube, I think, right?

Chris Gammell: Right. Which is not...

Dave Jones: No, actually, no. No, it's cheaper. They paid less for YouTube. Yeah. It was cheaper. It was only like a billion dollars.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right? So, Google put that in perspective. They paid a billion dollars for YouTube, right? You know, it owns the video market, right? And yet they pay $3.2 billion for 50 hardware engineers with a thermostat and a freaking smoke alarm.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's...

Dave Jones: I just... No. Hang on. I'm going to bang my head on the desk, can't I?

Chris Gammell: Okay. You do that. I'm looking up numbers. So, I had calculated... I had calculated the numbers. Oh, that hurts. Because... Okay. So, say let's... So, okay. If we ignore... If we ignore the costs of, you know, Goodwill, which is like, you know, brand name and the cost of this dude...

Dave Jones: It's worth a bit. That's why I was saying $32 million. Right. No, I know. But even past that then, right?

Chris Gammell: So, you have to... So, when companies get bought, like, they're also buying future potential, right? They're buying... Of course. You know, it's not like they're selling...

SPEAKER_02: Make-a-bot style, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They're not selling what they're selling today. They're not, you know, make-a-bot selling, what, 22,000 printers by the time they get bought. You know, Nest has sold a lot, but they haven't sold all that they're going to sell. Exactly. So, what did I do? I did the calculation at one point here, and it was... Oh, here we go. So, a 60% margin on a $200 product, right? Right. That requires 250 million products sold at $200 a piece to equal 3.2 billion. And that's what that means that they're effectively buying. You know, if anyone's a Warren Buffett fan, you know, you're buying future value, right? That's what it is. Right. And it's like, that means that over their lifetime that they have to sell 250 million products at that. That means that your grandma has to buy, you know, you have to have that many people paying that much for a friggin' smoke alarm. And it's like... I know. It's not going to happen. I don't think so.

Dave Jones: It's a niche product. Yeah. No, it's bullshit. It's a niche product. Just like all these fancy network-connected light bulbs, which are all the bloody rage, right? It's a niche product. Always will be.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right? Because most people don't give a shit. They just want to turn it off and on. Same with their smoke alarm. They don't want it to talk to you. You know? Right. They just want it to go beep when the bloody... When your house is on fire.

Chris Gammell: Right. And hopefully not when it's... When you're sleeping, right? That would be the ultimate thing. But I think people are even like...

Dave Jones: That's the idea. When you're sleeping.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean like... Because if your house is on fire when you're not asleep, you're pretty much going to know. What is that big orange Bernie thing over there? Why is my son running down the hallway screaming fire?

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Something's wrong here. So what this really means is that Google probably thinks that say they don't sell 250 million products in the future. They sell 50 million over the course of how long this exists.

Dave Jones: No, that means that... Google don't care. They don't care. They're not buying this company to sell products. There's something else going on. Well, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and that's what I was getting at though is that Google doesn't value people at... You know, so a 60% margin on a $200 product would be... Yeah. Would it be what? Like 140 bucks? No, that's not right. No, that's... Yeah. Yeah. Nope. Nope. I've got it all figured out. Okay.

Dave Jones: This is one huge, big corporate money laundering scheme and we're not in on it.

Chris Gammell: I've thought that before actually.

Dave Jones: It's got to be. It has got to be. There is no sensible... I knocked the microphone. I'm so angry. There is no sensible reason why you would pay even $320 million for a company like this, let alone $3.2 billion.

SPEAKER_02: Right.

Dave Jones: Right? Right. Some nasty shit is going down here and we're not in on it and I am angry because I want my cut, damn it.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, you need to be a venture capitalist, Dave. You need to dump in about it. I know. Well, and that's what I thought about before too is like, you know, you think about venture capitalists. Okay. You know, they're investing. They want to get a good return, whatever. But the thing I think about is like, why? Like, okay, so we're... This money just gets funneled from Google then to these guys who are making 100 times their initial investment.

Dave Jones: Because they're probably drinking buddies down at the local bloody watering hole in Silicon Valley, right? Right. Yeah. That's my theory is that Google's bloody CEO or board is drinking buddies with, you know, somebody who... A venture capital firm who invested in this nest mob and it's just a way to shuffle money around.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And pay each other off.

Chris Gammell: And like... It does feel like that. Yeah. I mean, I... It does. I will never understand that world and that's fine. I don't really want to. I don't want to be near VCs or anything like that. But it's crazy. It's crazy. Unbelievable. I... It's not like we don't have any... So like, yeah, we sound like conspiracy nuts right now, right? But then it's like...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Okay. But then look at this job thing, right? So this is another story that's on our list this week. It's basically a bunch of CEOs at these tech companies colluded to say, well, we won't hire your talent away so we don't have to pay them more. Which is insane. You know? Because, you know, Silicon Valley starts... Like we talked about it. They get paid a lot already just because of the area and everything like that. Right. And now, basically, Apple and Google and who else? Like Adobe and a couple others. They're all getting sued now because the CEO said to their recruiters, do not try and hire good talent away from the other companies because then they'll try and hire our talent away. And basically, they...

Dave Jones: And it inflates the market.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It would inflate the market if you kept incentivizing.

Dave Jones: And the companies end up paying more.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right. So the companies have colluded together. Or so the claim is that they're all colluded together to lower the wages.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly. Because they said that, you know, if you didn't... Like if it was a true market condition, then it would be like, you know, engineer A gets hired away from Google, from Apple for $180,000 versus $150,000 or whatever. And so then, you know, Apple has that extra $30,000 for no particular reason other than they wanted that engineer. And it's like, well, okay. It's insane though. The fact that these salaries are that much in the first place is insane to me, but whatever.

Dave Jones: Have they actually got proof of this or is it just like PSA?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, they have like... I don't know how they're doing it, but there's... There's like... They got emails and stuff like that. Maybe there's affidavits or... I don't know how loyal stuff works, but...

Dave Jones: Well, affidavits aren't worth the paper they're written on.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What's it called? Like a warrant where you can like go and see that stuff? I don't know. My wife watches cop shows. I don't watch cop shows.

Dave Jones: You can get a federal warrant and you could go in and confiscate the paperwork. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. So, yeah, they have some kind of proof here. But it'll be interesting to see how this shapes up. I mean, like, honestly, I live in Ohio. It's like... Right. Ain't nobody's trying to hire me or I live around. Yeah. Ohio wages are not through the roof because it's Ohio. But, yeah. I mean, if you do have these concentrated areas, it is the thing. You know, like they don't want to... They don't want to get these bidding wars over the top town. Because, like a lot of people know here, right? It's... You know, you get called by stupid LinkedIn profiles, right? You get... Right. You put on your LinkedIn profile, okay, I'm a senior electrical engineer. And then a recruiter will call your office and they'll ask for your name and no one will know it's a recruiter and they'll patch you through. And then they say, oh, I wanted to talk to you about a new opportunity I have today. And they're doing that because they're getting paid a $30,000 referral for if they find someone. It's a crazy game. It's insane.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Do you still have people trying to call you or no? They finally wise up.

Dave Jones: It happens occasionally. It happens occasionally. Yeah. And I haven't given them my resume since, you know, 1994, you know. And they'll still call me. You know, I'm still on their database. And, you know, they type in their keywords and, you know, my name pops up on the list because I've, you know, I've worked on that thing. Yeah, right. Exactly. Which pops up in their keyword search.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. Yeah, the database is a real thing for sure. Is it like your old, do you still have the same number though? Is that why they can reach you?

Dave Jones: They, my old email still works. Ah, right, right, right. My old email still works.

SPEAKER_02: Yep. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's funny because, you know, when you start out, you know, like you throw your resume everywhere as you're like, you know, like young engineers are just trying to get any job. And then eventually you do get in the system and then it's just like, I always tell young engineers who ask me about it. I'm like, you know, you just need to get a job somewhere. Because then you're on the radar as if you're, if you're out of the zero years experience into the two to five years experience, that is the sweet spot. That's where you see the most growth percentage wise in salary, I think. And then, you know, you get to 1520 and then they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you probably don't want to be working here anymore, right? And then the ageism kicks in and yada, yada, yada.

Dave Jones: There was a Dilbert cartoon. I just read it the other night, which was about this. It was like the, oh, yes, I'll have to get it.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Anyway, we'll, we'll, we'll, I won't spoil it. We'll post it in. I think it's relevant.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's a, it's a weird, it's a weird world we're living in here. I mean, it's, it's from the engineer side, it's, it's good that salaries are still going up, right? I mean, obviously they're, they're trying to fix that out in the Bay Area, but I think in general, engineer salaries are, I don't know. I, I, I have such limited perspective on this stuff that it's like, things seem okay for me. Oh, goodness.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Why are we not in on this money laundering scheme?

Chris Gammell: I mean, I think you have to, I think, uh, the rich get richer. I think that's how they say it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You've got to have money first, right? Right. It's one of those chicken and egg things. Yes. Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: I know. So another thing I was going to mention about the, then, uh, I guess we're kind of going back to Nest here. Uh, interesting thing about the, how it actually hooks to your network though. So I think, I think I was reading about this, right? Um, it has an internal, it has a self-hosted wifi network that you have to connect to in order to first configure it, which is kind of weird to me. Right. So you're thinking like, oh, how do you get it on your house wifi network? It doesn't have any kind of interface. So first it acts as a wifi host and then it turns around and then it jumps onto your house wifi once you give it the, you know, the router password or whatever. Oh, okay. Right. So it's like, that's, but that's, uh, that's a problem that a lot of things are dealing with these days. You know, how do you get devices to talk to one another? That's how they got that to work. Um, there's a spectrum article about this with the look and link basically, but it's like, basically you need, you need new ways for devices to start talking to one another because out of the box, you don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How to get it all hooked up, especially if there's no kind of interface. You don't want like a little keyboard where you have to, you know, one, one, one, two, three, three. Right. You know, doing like an old, uh, an old cell phone with the texting messaging. Yeah. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Hey, hey, do you think there's, um, NSA, um, spy, NSA backdoors built into this Nest stuff?

Chris Gammell: It's gotta be. Oh, maybe not yet. Maybe it will be. Who knows? Yeah. Bastards. Uh, yeah. Watch your, uh, Internet of Things devices, folks. We know you're all fans. We know you're Internet of Things fans. Oh, yeah, I'm a huge fan. Yeah, huge fan. I don't know. Some of our listeners could be out there make, if anyone's on the Nest team, I, I, I'm, I'm happy you made a lot of money, but, uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love you all. Anything else going on this week? I don't know. We had so much, so many links between back then and now. It's like.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I know. There's tons. I don't know. We're already well over our, uh, amp hour capacity.

Chris Gammell: We are. Uh, okay. Okay. Well, people can always check, uh, our subreddit, which is reddit.com slash r slash the amp hour. And you can see all of the stories that didn't make it on the show today. Uh, and then you can also, you can link through to there. If you just go to the amp hour.com, you'll, you'll also be able to get through to the, to the reddit page. There's some good ones on here. Right? You know.

Dave Jones: Have you seen the, uh, Jobs movie? The Steve Jobs movie?

Chris Gammell: I have not, but I saw Woz's comment for it.

Dave Jones: Right, yeah. I saw Woz's comment on that, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Did you, did you see it?

Dave Jones: I have to, no, no, I haven't seen it yet. I'll have to, but apparently it's, it's shit. Like, you know, well, it's not badly acted, but it's, you know, historically it's, it's all wrong as the Woz said. You know, and, uh, yeah, yeah, it's a little, and his, his, his reason for not, uh, trying to fix it up for them is that he was sent the script, but because it was already scripted and written, he didn't want to, you know, uh, rock it. Yeah. Well, he, he didn't want to impinge on their creative thing. Right. It's, they're the creator of this thing. And well, you know, he wasn't. So he just didn't want to, whereas he's working on another movie apparently.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Where he gets to write the script or co-write it or, you know, work with them on the script from the beginning. So that's a different creative endeavor.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So he, he just didn't want to step on the toes of the creative people who created the script. He didn't want to come in and say, oh, this is all wrong, wrong, wrong. You got to change all the script. It's all shit. You know, he, he just didn't. Right.

Chris Gammell: That's why you send your lawyers to do that. Right. That's right. I get really tired of the whole Steve, I think, okay, Steve Jobs, yada, yada. Okay. Whatever. I get so tired of the hero worship stuff though. I don't know. I just, I can't. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. I'll just go back and watch Pirates.

Chris Gammell: There you go. That's the way to do it.

Dave Jones: Pirates. Surely you've seen Pirates of Silicon Valley.

Chris Gammell: I've seen Pirates of Silicon Valley. I haven't seen the whole thing.

Dave Jones: Oh, you got to watch the whole thing. The, the book, the book is, it's not called Pirates of Silicon Valley. Yeah. It's called something else, right? It's Fire in the Valley. Fire in the Valley. I can't remember his name, but I read it donkey years ago. I've got a copy somewhere. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's nothing to do with it. It's dramatized, you know, but it's, it's reasonably accurate. And the Woz says he kind of likes it. You know, it's a, it's, it's not a bad movie. Yeah. So that one sort of gets the Woz thumbs up and Jobs gets the Woz thumbs down.

Chris Gammell: Good enough for me, man.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Absolutely. If I'm going to hero worship anyone, it's going to be Woz.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah, of course.

Chris Gammell: All right, man. Well, I got to go defrost my house and my, my, go work on contextual electronics some more. So. Sweet. Oh, next week we'll have Scott Driscoll of CuriousInventor.com. He'll be on the show. Cool. Yep. Looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_02: Bye.

Dave Jones: Well, our fridge hasn't failed. Sorry. The door fell off.

Chris Gammell: Yes, it does, right? I mean, it's a normal fail mode of a, of a fridge.

Dave Jones: Yeah. There's only two things a fridge does. That's keep things cold and keeps it shut. Oh.

Chris Gammell: I'm going to go.

Chris Gammell: I'm going to go.

Speaker ?: I'm going to go. I'm going to go. I'm going to go. I'm going to go. I'm going to go.