#186 – Someone is watching...we think - Horme Hostility Hypochondriac

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast, recorded February 25th, 2014. Episode 186, Horme Hostility Hypochondria.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. Who is not in the nerd cave today.

Chris Gammell: I'm on the road, man. I'm all over the place.

Dave Jones: Right. Barely a day went by before you would ditch your day job. Then you were, screw this, I'm on the road.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Well, I'm now in sunnier climates, you know, I get to get away from Cleveland. And you'd do the same if you lived in Cleveland, let's just say that.

Dave Jones: So you're in LA at the moment?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Sorry, Pasadena. Where is Pasadena?

Chris Gammell: It's north of LA? No, east? East of LA, yeah. Northeast? I don't know. I don't do... I'm not very good with geography. But yeah, I'm in Pasadena, yes.

Dave Jones: Well, look, let's just say that west of LA, you're going to be pretty wet. That's true, yeah.

Chris Gammell: If we're far enough west and you get to you, so...

Dave Jones: Well, no, you know, you've got to go south as well. Yeah, south as well, right, yeah. We're on the other side of the equator, dude.

Chris Gammell: Right, right, of course. Right, the toilet's flushing the other direction.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it goes down the other direction, yeah. You do really suck at geography.

Chris Gammell: It's all right. It's all right.

Dave Jones: Anyway, so that's why you're echoey today, because you're in some silly open plan office thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I'm in a big cavernous room, and hopefully I don't sound too much like... Well, from one cave to another, right? Right. To a corporate cave. Yep. Corporate cell.

Dave Jones: Yep, yep. Otherwise known as a cubicle. And I'm at home today because the internet in my office has died. Yeah. I don't know what's wrong there. I have visions of that being a nightmare to fix, so that's not good. That's not good.

Chris Gammell: It's probably the US government coming for you, right? That's probably it.

Dave Jones: That's it. I am, yes folks, on a US watch list.

Chris Gammell: Which we know.

Dave Jones: Or at least somebody called David Jones is.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, of course. So there you go.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Well, congratulations, man. Thank you. The prophecy has come true.

Dave Jones: It went viral, dude.

Chris Gammell: I know. It's everywhere. Both me and you are on Hackaday's front page right now. It's weird.

Dave Jones: What are you doing on Hackaday's front page?

Chris Gammell: Oh, so Mike, the editor of Hackaday, will be out here in Pasadena as well. And we're going to be getting beers and we're inviting people tomorrow. Okay. So if people watch, I think, the Hackaday Twitter account, we're going to actually announce where we'll be sometime tomorrow afternoon.

Dave Jones: Right. So that's news enough to make Hackaday. Chris Gemmell's drinking beer.

Chris Gammell: Apparently, yeah. I think Mike is in town. I think that's the real thing. And Chris will happen to be there. That's the real thing. So. Right. There you go. Yeah, if it was just Chris Gemmell's drinking beer, it would be more of an RSS feed, Twitter, constantly updated kind of thing.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: Maybe if there was a feed of when Chris isn't drinking beer, that would be a more sparsely populated kind of thing. Right.

Dave Jones: Anyway, let's get to the bottom of this watch list bullshit.

Chris Gammell: Watch list.

Dave Jones: Right? Element 14.

Chris Gammell: You know, you are the reason this got so much press coverage. You know, if you would have just not complained about it, I'm just saying, you know.

Dave Jones: Right. I shouldn't complain. Yeah, exactly. A UK company. A UK company. Right? Not a US company. A UK company selling parts in Australia that are already stocked in Australia. And they are not US parts.

Chris Gammell: They're not US parts. Okay.

Dave Jones: No. And I get flagged by a US. I get flagged on a US government watch list. Because a UK company is selling parts to an Australian in Australia that are already stocked in Australia. You've got to be shitting me.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that is kind of insane. Right. That is insane. How that chain of events happens. Yeah. I mean, so you said you wrote on somewhere that you actually got a response. Was it Twitter you wrote? You got a response?

Dave Jones: Yeah, I got. Yeah, it took them 24 hours or something. But they did respond. The managing director of Element 14, Australia responded. See, a lot of people said, oh, look, this can't be right. Right? This is so outrageous that it can't be right. They were pulling my leg. It was a joke or they're mistaken or something like that. But no, the managing director of Element 14, Australia, has come back and said, yes, sorry, we do this. It's a requirement under US law. Right? Even though they're a UK company. Yeah. It's a requirement, US trade law, that they check names against this US database.

Chris Gammell: So across their entire organization? Is that the idea? Because they sell in the US? Across their entire organization?

Dave Jones: Because, yeah, because they have trade deals with the US. Wow. They're obligated to extend that over the whole thing, the whole organization, regardless of where it is.

Chris Gammell: Never underestimate the power of American lawyers, apparently.

Dave Jones: Or the American fear factor, right? Yeah. It's a total fear factor, right? This is not written into law. This is not lawful. No, yeah, this is self-policing. You're totally right. Self-policing based on fear of the US government and losing their trade deal or whatever.

Chris Gammell: Well, I don't know about the US government. I would think it's more about the US market, right? Because it's like, okay, everybody has a choice. Of course. You know, it's self-policing. You have a choice whether or not you want to do this kind of policing. But the whole idea is that if they don't do it, then they can't participate in the US market. And that's the thing.

Dave Jones: That's the bottom line, right? And, of course, in the US, there are Newark, right? Oh, well, no, they're Element 14. Are they Element 14 still in? Yes, they are in the US. They're doing some kind of switchover.

Chris Gammell: But, yeah, they're doing both.

Dave Jones: Newark or whatever, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, this actually has a similar analog. I mean, it's kind of like with the Chinese censorship of the Internet, right? It's like you don't have to do anything you don't want to do, right? It's all self-policing, right? And Google pulled out of the Chinese market for that kind of reason where they said, we don't want to censor content. And because of that, they pulled out of the market because they couldn't get a license at that point. And it's like that's – I guess it's – I think in both cases it is stupid, right? But it's just kind of a choice to play. Totally stupid.

Dave Jones: And it even gets more stupid because they knew about it, of course, and they actually told me how to get around it. They gave me an official workaround. Like, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So what's the point? It's just ridiculous.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that does kind of beg the question.

Dave Jones: It is – I have since found out this is not a secret list and it is called the denied trade screening thing. It's actually on Wikipedia, right? And it's a – yeah, apparently this is a very common thing for organizations to have to do. And yeah, it's not a –

Chris Gammell: And it is keyed against your name. Is that right?

Dave Jones: It's keyed against name only apparently. So someone called David Jones is on the list. Apparently, if I use David L. Jones, right, I probably may not get flagged. But I'm just going to switch my name to Marty McFly unless people have a better idea.

Chris Gammell: What says that you have to use your legal name then? Is it just based on what you're using as a credit card or what?

Dave Jones: Well, I guess, yeah. Well, your account could be under any name. But if they ask you for ID for picking up your parts, I guess, well, I have to whip out my Marty McFly ID. Marty McFly, yeah. But they don't check – Commemorative ID. They don't check the ID anyway when you pick up parts. You just sign for it and say, hey. Well, and I guess you should mention this too.

Chris Gammell: So the reason this list exists is the same reason that there's like ITAR when you have to like check boxes for like – I know that when you download software from TI, they always make you check big boxes. Oh, do they? Right. Yeah, they said, oh, you won't use this for propagation of terrorist software. Nuclear weapons and – Yeah, and ITAR being international trade and regulation. So Tony Long, one of the guys who was on the show in the past talking about radar stuff, he actually had some problems getting his product up and going because it is something that's on that list. I mean when I was at Keithley, they had products that were on that list. There's lots of things where – it's usually something to do with nuclear proliferation type stuff. But it's like you can't sell to certain countries and because – I don't know all the rules, but I do know that if you – if basically if they trace it back to you through – and then you would check that box, at that point you're in deep doo-doo kind of thing. Yeah. And it's not like you want nuclear missiles to go to bad places, right? It's just like you just want your parts, just like the rest of us. Well, I wouldn't mind it. Okay. And why are you on this list again, Dave?

Dave Jones: Unbelievable. Yeah. Unbelievable. It's just – yeah, it's just ridiculous. I can understand maybe if the parts were manufactured in the US and are being shipped out of the US, right? We've all been – you know, we're all familiar. Everyone in the industry is familiar with this bullshit of – well, anyone overseas is, right? You probably haven't encountered it all that much. But, you know, yeah, but overseas, you know, getting parts from DigiKey or anyone else, you know, or from the official providers, yeah, you've got to often sign waivers that say, you know, you're not going to use these in nuclear weapons, et cetera, et cetera.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, we've talked about it on the show a couple of times before. Yeah, I know. I remember that. And I saw your – that's why I saw your rant on your blog today. I'm like, oh, Dave's just complaining. He's said this stuff before. He just wanted to write a text post. I know it.

Dave Jones: So, but do you think I have a valid reason to complain? I think I do.

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: This is a UK company. Like, this has nothing to do with the US.

Chris Gammell: I know. I do agree with that. I think that that, you know – but again, it's all self-policing, right? Because you also have a choice to then go to a supplier that isn't, you know, that doesn't comply with this stuff because they don't want to or they don't operate in the US. You have that choice. And I think that –

Dave Jones: But it still doesn't make it right. Yeah, I have the choice but it still doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to complain that the whole system is fundamentally wrong.

Chris Gammell: You definitely have a right to complain. I have no argument with that. There you go. But I think what it comes down to is that, you know, it's in a market system. You have choices to go elsewhere and if it really does bug you, I think you should.

Dave Jones: I do, but it's still, you know, if nobody complains, then they don't fix the system.

Chris Gammell: Well, I guess what is the – I mean, you're saying though that like –

Dave Jones: The system – the US government overreaches everywhere, everywhere, outside their legal jurisdiction. But this isn't overreaching, Dave. This is – No, it is. It's totally overreaching.

Chris Gammell: This is just like China and the internet. I think this is the exact same thing as China and the internet because it's self-policing. Now, if they said that you cannot get that stuff, right, this is not the US government holding your parts and customs. This is Newark 1114 holding your stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah, for fear of losing their US trade deals or whatever it is, right? But that's self-policing again. Yeah, but it's the US putting these policies in place that often are not legal by any international standard, right? And companies being fearful of, you know, this thing. You can't not take blame away from the US government. You can't.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah, fine. I'll agree with that. As much as I'll agree with the censorship on Chinese internet, I think the same kind of thing about that, right? Yeah, it's overreach but people deal with it every day and you have a choice and yeah.

Dave Jones: Okay, let's stop talking about that. Here's another interesting one which I didn't put on the list but I just thought of because it came up last night. The companies involved shall remain nameless but I got an email from a legal staffer, one of the legal, you know, people at a company who shall remain nameless. And there is a Chinese company that is one of the manufacturers, right? There is a Chinese company that is using their intellectual property, right? Using their IP. Okay, fair enough. But what they requested… Wait, has that happened before? Yeah, I know. Go figure, right?

Chris Gammell: Whoa.

Dave Jones: But what they have requested is that, well, they've done a search and they've found references to this product. People have been discussing this Chinese product on the EEV blog forum. Huh. So they have actually, you know, requested if I could remove and continue to moderate the forum so that there is no mention of this Chinese product. Huh. It's like, are you shitting me? You've got to be kidding me.

Chris Gammell: That's a… Yeah, yeah. Like… So, what did you say, David?

Dave Jones: I politely said, no, I will not do this.

Chris Gammell: That was pretty polite, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You know, it's like how…

Chris Gammell: So were there veiled threats or anything like that or no?

Dave Jones: Oh, not real. No, no, no. It was quite civil. It was written in usual, you know, legalese to kind of, you know, or not quite scare you, but kind of, you know, give you the heebie-jeebies a bit about saying no.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know? But no, they sort of…

Dave Jones: No, it wasn't a demand. It wasn't a cease and desist. It was a request, you know? And they use the excuse that, oh, you know, look, it's bad reputation for your forum to have this information on here. And I had to reply, well, I'm sorry, but it would be…

Chris Gammell: I don't see you've never been on my forum before.

Dave Jones: A forum, no. It would be a thousand times, many orders of magnitude worse if I actually started to censor talk about a particular product. That's just, you know, like…

Chris Gammell: Well, I think it all comes down to the same point, though, right? In that case, they don't have any leverage over you, right? They didn't have leverage. That person did not have leverage over you in order to do that kind of thing. Maybe if they decided to take legal action and they had some kind of grounds or they wanted to drag you into a legal lawsuit. But I think in the case with the Chinese internet and with the U.S. watch list type stuff, the leverage is you want our business. And that's really what it comes down to. It's dollars and cents.

Dave Jones: Well, they can stick their business. I will happily tell this company to piss off forevermore if they take this further. I mean, you know… Right, right. Yeah. No, screw it. No, there's absolutely no legal basis for this. And they know it, of course. And they know it. Of course, yeah. You can tell that by them trying to use the excuse that, oh, it'll get a bad reputation for my forum. You know, it's like, oh, that's the only excuse they've got.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's interesting seeing how this stuff, I mean, kind of manifests itself across… I mean, because the internet really brings together a lot of different cultures and a lot of different, you know, just different legal frameworks and different stuff like that. I mean, like, it is… It really is a great unifier there.

Dave Jones: It opened up the whole international can of worms.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly, right?

Dave Jones: Before the internet, international law was pretty easy, I thought. Well, in comparison… Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: It's like, yeah, you don't agree with us? We don't let you into our borders and you can't do anything at that point. And now it's not like they stopped packets at the door, and if they do, well, that's going to be a much bigger issue.

Dave Jones: And they would. What if they could? That's why I'm fighting this shit, why I'm complaining, because if you let it get out of hand, that's what it ends up as. Right? They will be stopping freaking packets at the door, and it's just ridiculous.

Chris Gammell: I think part of you is being an idealist. I think the other part of you is just complaining, but yeah. That's just because I know you now, man. Come on.

Dave Jones: Right, right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I do agree that. So what is the ultimate thing then? So you just changed your name a little bit, and you got past this silliness?

Dave Jones: Oh, the Element 14 thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, I haven't done it yet, but yes, for future orders, I'll simply change my name. I'll use Marty McFly, you know, and see how it flies. It doesn't have no pun intended on a hoverboard.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I love it. Oh, that's great, man.

Dave Jones: Yeah, so I'll turn up and say, do you have an order for Marty McFly?

Chris Gammell: Did you see that they're talking about actually making the shoes now? Someone actually posted this on the forum.

Dave Jones: Yes, yes, yes, they are, apparently. Well, it's one designer at Nike said that it's in the planning stage. Whether or not it actually happens, I don't know. Got to get it, man. It's almost 2015.

Chris Gammell: Come on. I know. The future is now.

Dave Jones: Jeez, it's not that far away, is it? It's like 10 months away. Nine.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but I don't know what the date was in the movie.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, yeah, but 2015 is, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's on the way. It's on the way.

Dave Jones: No, I think people won't take the exact date. They'll just go, it's 2015. I want my freaking hoverboard.

Chris Gammell: I want my freaking hoverboard. That's right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, boy. Yeah, so speaking of time running down, I'm already in week six of contextual electronics. How's it going, dude? It's going good. Instead, you know, it's getting kind of crazy just in terms of like time required for people to do, you know, trying to get people to do layout and stuff and follow along with what I'm doing and then them doing. And, you know, just layout takes a while, right? I mean, especially when you're getting started. I don't know how.

Dave Jones: I thought you've already done the layout, though. I thought that was in one of the videos you gave them, or is it a?

Chris Gammell: So there was a small board that was part of like the getting to blinky board was like a little board. It was like a little test. And that's all done. I mean, that was a YouTube, just kind of like a sampler of the whole content. But then, no, the whole project has been like getting up through, you know, building this thing called the Bench Buddy and actually getting it up through. We've picked out parts and associated footprints and everything. And then now we're finally in the layout. And I know that's saying six weeks in getting into layout is kind of insane. But when you're trying to get a group of people doing it, it actually, you know, explaining everything along the way. Of course. It takes a while. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: And for an experienced designer, yeah, there might only be a couple of days working getting to the PCB layout stage, you know, your schematic and your bomb and your design. But, you know, getting, explaining it to a beginner. Yeah, I can totally understand how that takes six weeks.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I wrote a guest post for Octopart actually yesterday. And I was talking about it and I was saying, you know, what a significant portion of like design for me these days is just kind of figuring out what parts are in the market and like what actually will fit. And then kind of like just filtering out all the crap that I don't need, you know, like it really is. Like that is a significant portion, I think, of like electronics design these days is just trying to figure out what's actually out there and then what actually makes sense. You know, especially if you're jumping into something new, right, if it's like a whole new segment for you or something like that.

Dave Jones: The problem is there's too much choice, right? There's a chip out there for everything, right? All these 10 chips out there that do the job and you've got to decide between them. It was much easier 20 years ago when you, well, got to, well, I want to do this thing, okay, I'll use, you know, 57.4 series logic and I'll use off amps and I'll use, you know. Yeah. Like it was just, your decisions were actually easier back then.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Yeah. I talk to people about that all the time with like these, these analog, I mean like that, I keep coming back to that same chip that we talked about two weeks ago. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: The other chip that had everything. Yeah. But I mean, there's so.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. It's got everything in there, but it's, it's so specified for an industry. But even still now there's three different people trying, three different vendors trying to make something very specified for that industry. And then you have to compare them all and try to side by side and do pricing and all that other crap.

Dave Jones: And read the 200 page data sheet to make sure there's no gotcha in there.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Oh God. The gotchas. The gotchas are always buried deep within.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It's just so hard. And like, and sometimes you just don't have the time because, and take that risk. You know, you haven't read every page of that data sheet. You haven't identified every gotcha. You cross your fingers and hope, well, I think it'll be right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, it's. Yeah. I was, I was talking to some people about that too. And it's like, I think in, in, in this day and age with, with like, because there's so much choice and because there's just so much stuff out there that the default is, well, I'm doing kind of this application. Let me go see what Dave's doing. You know, like, and like that, I think that's very valid. You know, you go see what your friends are doing. You can see what people are in line are doing.

Dave Jones: Which chips are they using? Oh, it works for them. It'll, you know, I'm doing a similar thing. Yeah, exactly. You know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I think that there's, there's a lot of benefit in that. And like in finding, you know, good designers to follow like yourself, you know, like seeing what you're using, like, and, and then especially if there's background information about it, that that's a, that's a good entry point into a lot of, a lot of different components. So I think, I think we're going to see more of that in the future. We'll see. I mean. Yep.

Dave Jones: Totally agree. Hi.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Big news today in the test and test instrument world. Tektronix have released a new scope. Oh, is that today?

Chris Gammell: I thought their countdown still said 13 days.

Dave Jones: No, they got it wrong. They goofed up the timer. It's the 25th. Yeah. Yeah. They screwed up the timer. Yeah. Their code was totally wrong. Yeah. There's still talk about that on the forum.

Chris Gammell: Oh man. That's funny.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh boy. Well, didn't, so were you right? I mean, was it, did you, you didn't have like a fake document that we talked about a couple of weeks ago?

Dave Jones: Oh no, no, no, no. It's real. Okay. In fact, my, my, my unit is sitting here in customs here in Sydney. It got caught. Ooh. I warned them. I warned them. I did a conference call with them the other couple of weeks back and they were going to send me a unit. And I, you know, we spent 10 minutes talking about, look, you know, if it's over a thousand dollars, it's going to get flagged and it's going to get caught in customs. Right. If you mark the value over a thousand Australian dollars. Oh, and they were noting it down. Yeah. Yeah. We'll make sure it doesn't. We don't want it to be held up and sure enough. It gets held up in customs and I had to pay the customs fee and the GST. Oh no. Yeah. Yeah. And I still haven't heard back. So it's going to take another, at least another day or two to process it before it even gets on the truck to get to me. So, so much for having a video ready, you know, on the launch day.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's text fault. Ah, yes. Not mine. Plans are about as good as the paper they're written on, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, I mean, so yeah, you're right.

Dave Jones: So yeah, it's a, you know, I, the marketing have obviously, you know, gotten hold of it and it's a six in one scope in quote marks in my radio, six in one in my best radio voice, which I don't have. Yeah. And one of the six in one instruments is the protocol serial decoder. It's like nobody ever says that's an instrument. No, it's a feature. Yeah, exactly. It's just bullshit. Yeah. So, but anyway, yeah, it's got a spectrum analyzer built in. That's the thing that I, goes down to, that is built into even the base model hardware. So you buy the hundred megahertz dual channel version and it comes with the spectrum analyzer built in. And, uh.

Chris Gammell: Which is pretty cool.

Dave Jones: It's pretty cool, but there's two things with it. A, if you buy the hundred megahertz oscilloscope, your spectrum analyzer is software limited to a hundred megahertz.

Chris Gammell: Wah. Which is not very cool.

Dave Jones: Fail. Not very cool. It's still useful for like switch mode power supply stuff or, you know, something like that. But it's no good for its intent. It's advertised market, which is, you know, why everything's wifi, right? The reason that they're doing this, making a spectrum analyzer standard is that they've done the research, you know, they've proudly done the market research and said, you know, 40% of new designs have wireless in them. So all our new scopes are going to have, you know, a spectrum analyzer building. Well, okay. But, you know, you've just raised your bill of materials cost drastically. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: If I want to buy a 400 megahertz scope, a 500 megahertz scope, and I don't give a shit about that. I mean, like, okay, maybe I would use it for EMI testing, but I don't know about everything else.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. So unless you need, unless you know that you're going to need to upgrade to the three gig spectrum analyzer in the future, then the spectrum analyzer built in, having that hardware built in, raise their bill of materials cost so much that their entry level 100 megahertz dual channel scope is now 3,300 bucks or something. Right? It's like, right? No. They just can't compete at that low level.

Chris Gammell: So I guess we're going to Rangel, huh?

Dave Jones: You have to go somewhere else because, you know, like that is, if you're just after a scope, that is just, no. They've put themselves into a niche marketplace. And I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong that, you know, everyone's going to be, you know, needing a spectrum analyzer and stuff, but they really have painted themselves into a bit of a corner, a market corner, I think. A niche corner. Right.

Chris Gammell: It's the same, it's the same, it's the innovators dilemma all over again, right? I mean, you keep moving up market, you keep trying to get higher and higher margin stuff, which they've been doing for a long time. Yeah, of course. And rightly so, I mean, they're making, because they're trying to fund the really high end stuff too, which helps a lot of people, right?

Dave Jones: And if they want to abandon the low end market, well, that's fine. You know, I mean, that's a business decision if they want to do that. I wouldn't blame them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I don't think that's fine. I think that if you read the innovators dilemma, that is the end. If you, if you, if you dump the low end.

Dave Jones: If you take that as gospel, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. If you, if you dump the low end, basically you, you lose connection to tons. I mean, like think about how many people get started with, with tech scopes, right? Or, you know, even at Agilent scopes or even, let's say someday Rigol takes the same path, right? And they're, you know, they dump their low end stuff and, and by the end, then you, you know, you only have your high end stuff. Well, now think of all those people that grew up using a Rigol scope and eventually moved on to a higher level and then they dump the low end. Well, who's using new stuff, right? Well, now there's some, you know, South African country company or, you know, like Taiwanese. Someone will come up and take up. Yeah, someone else. Exactly. It's, it's the same, like the pattern just keeps repeating itself, which is why that book is so awesome.

Dave Jones: But then again, this is not designed as an entry level scope. I mean, it's, you know, priced for, you know, it's, it's not a sub thousand. It was never designed for the sub thousand dollar market.

Chris Gammell: Right. I mean, that's just, that's totally true.

Dave Jones: I mean, the, the, when we're talking about entry level scopes is always the sub thousand dollar kind of market, you know, that is always been, you know, I, I did that video when I looked through 20, 30 years worth of, um, electronics Australia magazines at the, at the test gear. And yeah, even over 30 years, the entry level price was, you know, around that seven, $800 figure. It always was, you know? Mm-hmm. And, uh, yeah, it's just. Yeah. And by design too.

Chris Gammell: I mean, they don't, they don't want to just cut their feet out from under them. Right. So, yeah. And people, you know, and, and of course people are going to be buying, you know, uh, uh, two 65s, right? Or is it two 65? Yeah. Yeah. The two 65 for like the next a hundred years. Right. And they'll keep fixing them.

Dave Jones: The tech four, six, five, four, six, five.

Chris Gammell: Thank you. Sorry. Uh, I was, I was looking, uh, no, I was thinking of my I have a four 25 at home and I was trying to do the math of which one I was doing. Yeah. Anyways. Oh dear. Whatever. Yeah. Whatever.

Dave Jones: Standard response when he fails at something you're supposed to be good at.

Chris Gammell: You'd be surprised how often I say whatever.

Dave Jones: And the other thing is, right? So, uh, you know, tech aren't wrong, right? There, you know, there is a need. There is a genuine need for spectrum analyzers building and all that mixed domain stuff. In fact, if you want that, if you want that, they're the only choice on the market. Right. And the, and the MDO 4000 is brilliant in that respect in that how it, uh. Minus startup time, right? That was the, the slow one. Oh, well, yeah. The response is quite slow, but if you're, what, if you want to do mixed domain, uh, you know, uh, debugging and capture and stuff, well, it's, you know, it's an absolutely brilliant tool. There's nothing else on the market like it. Um, unfortunately this MDO 3000, they've deliberately made the decision to save costs and you can't, and now you can't actually, even though it's called a mixed domain oscilloscope, you can't actually tie the two domains together and do synchronous sampling between them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You can't actually time correlate between the two like you can in the 4000 series. And well, you know, I, I think that's a fail. Yeah. It's kind of like, so in effect, it's just a spectrum analyzer whacked in the box. You know, I have yet to see how much tie in there is between them, but I have been told by them that, yeah, they've deliberately taken out this hardware to save cost. This hardware that mix it, that ties the two together. So, you know, I, eh, meh. And once again, that, that was a marketing decision, not only to lower the cost, but also that they told me that, um, the, uh, forget the exact words. So forgive me, but, uh, the customers at, you know, this sort of price point aren't really doing that cross domain, you know, and analysis type thing. They still need the spectrum analyzer, but they don't want to, you know, correlate that, oh, this little digital, uh, you know, uh, word that I sent to my microcontroller has suddenly caused a little blip on my wifi signal or something, right? They, they, they don't want to do that. If they want to do that, well, you know, we have a scope for you by the MBO 4000 instead.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: Um, so yeah, it's a deliberate, it's a deliberate decision. So whether or not they succeed, well, the market will decide, of course. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm sure it's a pretty good scope. I'm quite excited to try it out and, uh, it's stuck in customs.

Chris Gammell: So, uh, what, you're, you're going to punt this one then too, uh, next time you have a field day. Is that, uh, is that the plan? I was watching that video this morning.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I had 25 scopes in my boot at the, uh, 25.

Chris Gammell: Oh man. What, so, so you were, you were seriously, you were literally having a field day? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I was having a, well, I sold like nine of them in the end, you know, so.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's not too bad. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's not too bad.

Chris Gammell: How much are you getting per scope? Are you allowed to talk about that or no? Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: I was selling them for, well, it varied in price from 280 down to, I don't know, like 50 bucks was the, no, 30 was the cheapest one. One that was just, you know, cactus or something. But I gave that, I practically gave that one away. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So 280 for, for what kind of scope was it?

Dave Jones: Like a, well, it's a, they were all, uh, tech, uh, TDS 220s. Okay.

Chris Gammell: So that's not a bad scope. I mean, it's kind of an ugly display, but it's still, what is it? A hundred megahertz?

Dave Jones: It's a hundred megahertz dual channel. Yeah. It's only got the 2.5k memory and the mono screen and, and it's not that fast, but I, you know, it, it still works. It's still a useful.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's solid. It's, it's reliable. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's a useful little scope. So yeah, they'll sell them like hotcakes really. Um, I had huge crowds around my, uh, car was, yeah. It was, you know, sometimes I'll like three people deep, you know, like in a big arc around my, you know, step on up, step on up folks. Because people see all these scopes.

Chris Gammell: You found a new career here.

Dave Jones: Exactly.

Chris Gammell: You're hocking, hocking test equipment. Like we always knew you would someday on a street corner, right?

Dave Jones: I've been flogging test gear for a long time. Nothing new there. But yeah, like I, I guess people see like all these oscilloscopes all stacked up on the ground. Oh yeah. I'll go check that out, you know?

Chris Gammell: And, uh, well, yeah, it draws the eye. Yeah. Yeah. And I noticed that you, as you were walking around in my head, I had Greg Charvat, uh, whispering in my ear, uh, uh, tonnage like he did at, uh, he wasn't actually whispering in my ear, but that's what he always talked about when he walked around. The, the, the hamvention was tonnage, you know, you try and, you try and find the biggest, heaviest metal box you can because it's got old, it's got old HP test gear probably in it. Right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah, it was good. That's a good time. Yeah. It was good, but it was exactly the same as last year. Like the actual thing. So yeah, I didn't really feel much of it, but yep.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's what it comes down to. I mean, like any, any flea markets like that, eventually, you know, the good stuff gets picked over and then the rest is just the junk that's always there. So that's the, that's the downside.

Dave Jones: Bring it back next to you.

Chris Gammell: It's being picked over. Did you, uh, have you seen, have you happened to see my post about Beagle Bones? No.

Dave Jones: What about Beagle Bones?

Chris Gammell: You can't get one anywhere in the world right now. Beagle Bone Black, sorry. Ah, right. Okay. Why? I haven't been able to find out. So, uh, Octopart posted about just like, cause they track that kind of stuff. So they posted about it and I think, uh, Kreidner responded on Twitter and stuff like that. But I think it's just that they're that popular. Right. I think.

Dave Jones: I thought the Raspberry Pi was more popular, but they churn out, they got no supply problems cause they churn out like a million a month or something.

Chris Gammell: Crazy. Well, I think that's what it comes down to is like, so I know that Circuit Co down in Dallas is building these things and I think they're building, I mean, I'm guessing they're building them as fast as possible, but it's probably just more of a, you know, building a bunch continuously versus building up. Like I think the, I remember seeing the Raspberry Pi tour and that they, those guys were just like, that's all, I think that's all that facility built was that.

Dave Jones: And, uh, well, I don't think so, but they did dedicate a number of lines to it. That, that's how these factories usually work. If they, when they get big deals like this, they'll dedicate, you know, they, they might have 10 lines and they'll dedicate five lines to this.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. See, but the thing that's different, I think is like, so like people are, I mean, like, like a Ninja blocks, right? I mean, they started building on top of a BeagleBone, uh, but I mean, like there's other companies that are actually literally building on top of development platforms these days. Yeah. And so these actually become supply chain issues in themselves of buying, buying the finished goods board.

Dave Jones: Yeah, of course.

Chris Gammell: You know, in order to integrate it into another assembly, it's kind of, it's kind of crazy. I mean, that, that's kind of like an, I don't think it's new by any stretch of the imagination, right? There's been PC one, four boards and everything else for years, but going on for decades. But I don't, what about the scale though? I think the scale is kind of, it seems different and maybe, maybe I'm wrong about that. I mean, it's just because it's, you know, it's not just like one company buying from one other company. It's like lots and lots of people buying from one company. Yeah. That's why it seems different.

Dave Jones: And they don't, and they don't, you know, cater for these kind of issues. You know, I'm being caught short with not enough microcurrents, you know, I mean. Already? Yeah. It's just, you know, I need more microcurrents. It's like.

Chris Gammell: Didn't you build 800 extra or something? Did you already sell those?

Dave Jones: Oh yeah, no, but I haven't, haven't built those and got them yet. So I've only built 200. Oh. 40 so far or something, you know. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: No, it happens all the time. These companies just don't, because nobody wants to manufacture, you know, a buttload more than what they're, you know, what they think is going to sell. So they're going to operate lean, you know. They're not going to manufacture 10,000 if they think they're only going to sell 1,000. So.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think the question though is, is should, should we start seeing like, you know, like all of these things like the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone Black and like, like your products as well, they all have these, these list prices, right? But should we start seeing surge prices on them, right? I mean, should we see people bidding them up on eBay and stuff like that? Yeah. I don't know about gouging, but I think it's just a market condition.

Dave Jones: That's always going to be a one-off, right? That's always going to be a one-off thing. It's not like somebody's out there got a secret stash of 10,000 of them and they're going to go, now's my chance. I'm going to sell them at double the price to the market. You know, it's like.

Chris Gammell: You never know though. They might, right? Well, they might. There's people that. Sure. They do that for chips. You know, they'll sit on chips and stockpile them. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, not even surplus, but any, any chip, you know, and they will, oh, you want these, do you? Well, I noticed that the whole world has sold out and I'm the only supplier and I'm going to charge you 10 bucks instead of $1. And well. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's the basis of part brokers, right? I mean, I figure that's how I'm going to retire is buy some, some very unique and awesome component and sit on a couple of reels of them and sell them back to the market and move to Fiji. I don't know. I think it's all about just knowing which part it is, you know, and taking that leap and maybe BeagleBone Black is the one. It's probably not, but. No.

Dave Jones: Somebody could have guessed this, maybe, you know, somebody could have taken a chance, but I don't think there's any bulk prices on these. Like I think if you, I think the price is the same, whether or not you buy one or whether or not you buy a thousand. So maybe.

Chris Gammell: I'd imagine so. Yeah. I mean, cause really it's, it's meant to be a platform for, you know, like.

Dave Jones: A one-off platform. Obviously selling. It's.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, it's for selling, you know, it's promoting TI, but it's also being an open source platform. So that's good. I mean, I was talking to someone about it though. And, and he, you know, he mentioned, he's like, you know, for 45 bucks, you get a bunch of headers, you get a, you know, a Linux platform, you get a dual core arm. It's like, why wouldn't you start with that? I mean, like from that perspective, we should, I mean, it's not like we're seeing any, any reduction in the amount of platforms that are out there, but maybe in the amount of, you know, in the costs that are out there. And in terms of the platform, you have selling the, selling the platform as an actual starting point for a design versus, versus, you know, just selling a development platform in order to go design something in the future. It seems like we might see more of that.

Dave Jones: I'd totally do that. I mean, if I had a design that required, you know, that amount of grunt and that sort of, you know, running on Linux and doing, you know, driving HDMI displays or, you know, something like that, that required all that processing. Yeah. I wouldn't roll my own. I'd just base it on, you know, the Raspberry Pi or the BeagleBone. Yeah, of course.

Chris Gammell: Right. Totally. I mean, it's, it's already proven, you know, there's community out there that'll support you.

Dave Jones: As long as it met the form factor requirements, you know, but even if it didn't, right, these are open source, right? Even if it didn't, these are open source. I'd take the design and put it in the form factor I needed, you know, and hopefully it should just work straight off the bat. Just load the firmware in and away you go. That's the whole idea of it.

Chris Gammell: Do you, so if you did that, I'm just kind of thinking out loud now, if you did that, and so a lot of these will only give you Gerbers. I'm not sure if the BeagleBone. Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't know the details, whether or not they're, how fully open they are.

Chris Gammell: Here's a bigger question though. So if you, if you only have the Gerbers, could you in theory take just the Gerbers and just drop those into you, into a layout and then do a secondary page and tack into that Gerber setup?

Dave Jones: No, it doesn't work like that and it gets real messy. Nah. Okay.

Chris Gammell: I've just never thought of doing that, but it would, this kind of situation seems like it would.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's no, it's, you, you could in theory. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you would have to do like an overlay layer to connect it, right? In practice that doesn't work. You're just better off spending a day or two reverse engineering the thing. Yeah. Nah. Yeah. It's just nasty. It doesn't work. You know. Okay. In theory, you might be able to hack it in, but it's really ugly. Nah, you just spend a day or two. You would redraw it from the schematic because if you got the schematic and just redraw it and you know, Bob's your uncle.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Which is the basis of a lot of the arguments for like, you know, closed source versus open source tools in, in, uh, in open source program and open source hardware, right? It's like, you're probably going to do that for a lot of projects, right? You're not going to necessarily just grab someone's, uh, entire project. You're going to, you're going to go redraw it or redo it and re-engineer it.

Dave Jones: Yep. This brings up a, a recent, uh, debate on the EV blog forum at the moment that is raging. Somebody complained how, you know, the, the original poster, I forget who they are, but they complained. So I'm sick of all these companies calling themselves open hardware, but they won't give you the, uh, the actual, uh, the actual CAD file. All they give you is a PDF of the schematic and that's it. And that's it. That's not open, you know? And well, no Gerbers. Well, you know, even if they gave you the Gerbers, you know, they still, you know, well, no, usually no. I think he was complaining that no, they don't give you the Gerbers. All they do is give you the schematic and say it's open. Right. And well, is it open? And, uh, I made the argument that, well, it's not closed. Okay. So if it's not closed, therefore it is a, yeah, right. It is a, a, an electronic product by definition.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. If, if you don't get the schematic by definition and electronics product is closed. Right. But if they give you the schematic, then it's, it's open in some form. Okay. It doesn't meet the open source hardware definition. It's not closed. Right. It doesn't meet the open source hardware definition and you can't use the logo. Right. You can't use the logo, but it's still open. It's still open because the whole industry, yeah. Right. The whole industry works on levels of openness. Right. Yeah. Even. Right. Yeah. This is the basis of dev boards. Right. Exactly. I made the example, even, you know, the Holy grail of, uh, open source hardware, right. The Arduino, for example, right. They don't go and give you the, their full, they're not entirely open. Right. They don't go and give you their full bill of materials with all their costumes on it and all of their suppliers and all of their contacts and all that sort of jazz. Right. Yeah. They don't give you that. Right. So at some point they're drawing the line. So, you know, I mean. Yeah. Eh. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We've talked about that before with the, the different lines and.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And it's just a different line.

Chris Gammell: Just a different line. That's a, yeah, that's a good way to say it. That's, that's very. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But I think it's still open. I think the definition of an open, of using the word open is that for an electronic product is that you, you know, you at least give the schematic and the, you know, and not, and, and the source code, of course, if there's any micros at, at that level. And then the rest is just manufacturing. Right. Because a PCB is just manufacturing. Right. It has nothing to do with the actual, you know, you, you, you, you can still learn from the schematic how it works. You can still duplicate it. You can put the effort in yourself and completely duplicate their board. Right. All the information's there. It's just a bit harder for you.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Exactly. It's just, it's like, it's like locks don't, uh, it's, it's like, it's like having the key to a deadbolt, right? Locks don't keep thieves out. It just slows them down. Right. Like not giving, not giving the schematic to someone in China, right. That's going to copy your product. Right. It just slows them down. You know, like that's, they're going to copy your product if they want to copy your product. So yeah, that's, that's, that's a, that's a good point. Now you bring up, uh, uh, giving away source code as well. Uh, I actually asked this question on, on the subreddit this week. Uh, do you choose parts based on whether there are code libraries available?

Dave Jones: Uh, yes, always. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: If I have to do something, if I, if I have to do something like, you know, talk, talk to a HDMI display or something and I'm going to damn well check before I choose that part is a library. I don't want to write my own freaking HDMI driver library. I don't want to write my own VGA display driver. I don't want to write my own I squared C interface driver, which I've done before. Screw that. Right. Of course I'm going to choose a part if it doesn't have a library.

Chris Gammell: See, now I was, see, when I asked this question, I was actually thinking that, you know, I'm always thinking about analog stuff. So it's like, I was thinking about like the spy driver to talk to an analog digital converter. Right.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, and those are all, they're getting increasingly difficult and, you know, having more and more registers and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Oh, you're right. That's what you're talking about. Right. You're talking about chip support. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. And it's like, I totally get like with drivers and stuff, like I don't even know where I'd start with that, you know, but with, you know, like display driver stuff, but with, with, with analog stuff, you know, because you're going to be doing so many different things anyways.

Chris Gammell: Yep. It might be just as much time to write your own driver.

Dave Jones: I generally, no, I'm, I'm happy to choose a chip that doesn't have a library in that particular case. In fact, I've, I've always done that. Okay. I go, oh, well, I've got to write my own library. And generally you want to do your own thing anyway, when you're talking to a chip, you know, you generally like, you want to have like a lot, one team, which does, you know, X amount and stuff. It's just, yeah, it's not easy to write a library for a generic library for like an analog chip that has, you know, 20 million registers and stuff like that. It's just, well, the info is there in the data sheet. As, as long as, as long as it's a standard interface, I'm more concerned about the interface rather than the actual protocol of the chip.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Because once I've got the interface, it's just gone, oh, send a byte, you know, like it's a spy bus. Okay. This is the code I've got to spend. Okay. I've got my SPI library. Fine. I just send the byte. And, you know, so it's not, you know, it's trivial really. Yeah. So in that case.

Chris Gammell: So we actually, so there's a lot of good, good discussion about this on, on the, on the subreddit as well. And so Adam brings up about being bitten as well. I mean, I think sometimes that, that, that's what I think about as well. Once you, once you get, you know, you can, you can use a library, but it's all going to be about trust level, right? Because.

Dave Jones: I've, I've been bitten. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You have? What, what happened there?

Dave Jones: I've, I can't remember the exact details way, way back. I found a library on the internet for driving. I think it was an ABC.

Chris Gammell: And yeah. First problem.

Dave Jones: I found a library on the internet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, you know.

Chris Gammell: I found a sandwich lying on the ground. It looked like a good sandwich, so I just ate it. I didn't feel well the next day.

Dave Jones: And yeah, it just didn't work. Right. And I spent a lot of it and I ended up just ditching it. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, you know, and time wasted, you know, how many day or two did I waste, you know, dicking around with this thing?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And right. Yeah. So, a lot of people wrote about that too. So, like, like, you know, like people mentioned like the Adafruit, the CC3000 written, there's like a library by Adafruit and people mentioned using that, right? Like Adafruit has well-checked libraries and that's a trust level, right? You know, you use stuff and use forum support and that kind of thing. And I think, I think the same kind of thing goes with, you know, even any, any kind of, not even third party like Adafruit is, but like vendor libraries and stuff like that. But it's like, if you, you know, you can look at it and you can see if it's written sloppily, like I've seen some sloppy written libraries before that I've decided to forego and write my own.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, it's just about, I guess, I think it's just a trust level for me at least. Oh, totally.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's just about how you really assess that that matters.

Dave Jones: Well, you know, if it's on a popular, you know, website like Adafruit, you know, there's probably people out there who've tried it and used it. And if it didn't work, you know, generally it would filter back to them and they'd fix it, you know? So, you know, yeah, that, that trust, trust level's higher there than you found it on, you know, Joe Blog's website because he did a project 10 years ago and here's the code he dumped on the website, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's the nice thing about like, you know, if you're, if you, if you get in the GitHub flow too, because then if you're pulling in libraries dynamically, you can always get them updated and stuff like that. And, and, you know, as they update, you can, well, you can see what it breaks in your project as well. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. People are, people, when I asked, when I first asked on Twitter, people thought I was talking about, uh, uh, footprint libraries and, and like, uh, schematic symbol libraries. And like, if I'd only use parts that had that. And, uh, I think, you know, maybe when I was getting started, that would have been the case. I would have only done that, but that, that is like, you know, you can, you can update your code on GitHub and you can pull that code back in. You don't get to do that with hardware. That's a one way road folks. It's check, check your footprints, check your footprints.

Dave Jones: Would you buy, would you only buy chips that have, that are guaranteed to be genuine? DARPA wants you to.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Well, for, for my projects or for, I mean, usually that's what it comes down to that, that knob that I'm turning there, you know, if I'm turning the cost knob all the way down and a lot of that genuine, you know, you, you, you start to lose confidence that it's going to be a hundred percent confidence that it's going to be a genuine part, you know?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: And, but, so what's DARPA want to do?

Dave Jones: DARPA, they want to, they've got a program. It's like, is it a contest or a, they, they want somebody to develop a, a foolproof way to embed some sort of something with, within electronic components. Okay. Oof. To identify them and tag them as genuine, right? And it'd be encrypted and everything else. In fact, they give you the specs, right? They, here I go. The DARPA Supply Chain Hardware Integrity for Electronics Defense, and it has an acronym, SHIELD. Yay. Program.

Chris Gammell: Strategic Homeland in a, what is that one on the Avengers movie?

Dave Jones: This program seeks proposals to develop a small 100 micron by 100 micron component or dilate? Dilate? What's a dilate? I guess it's a die.

Chris Gammell: Oh, die. Yeah. Like a second die.

Dave Jones: That you can put on a multi-chip. Right. That authenticates the provenance of electronic components. Ooh.

Chris Gammell: I have to say, before we go any further, I know that you're usually the crazy conspiracy theorist one, but with all this NSA crap that's going on, why the hell would anyone do this? Couldn't you wait like a couple more months? Like, let the NSA stuff blow over. We've been talking about this for the past couple of weeks. This is a terrible idea. I mean, it's a good idea, but it's a terrible idea.

Dave Jones: It's a solution to a problem that need not exist. It's a problem that exists only if you let it. The solution is easy. You buy the parts directly from the freaking manufacturer.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's not rocket science. And yeah, the US military have been bitten by this before, right? Counterfeit ships have ended up in F-15s and stuff like that, right? Well, tighten up your purchasing thing. Oh, man. Don't buy from bloody brokers and everything else.

Chris Gammell: That's a tall order. You know what the real problem there, I'm guessing, is an F-15 was designed in the 80s, and they're still buying parts from the 80s, and then their brokers go out. Yeah, their brokers go out, and they go and buy from that guy who stockpiled parts 15 years ago, expected to make a ton of money, and guess what? He did.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Oh, boy. And the other problem there, too, is that, you know, like, so they have these, you know, they're buying these older parts, and they can, so all US-based military contractors can only buy from within the US. And I mean, you talk about a small supply chain. You know, it's just, it's tough. It's really tough. They did hamstring themselves there in that regard because of just how, what they would have been better doing is investing in keeping the supply chain in the States. Right. You know, just like more, you know, like lowering costs because the fact that all of the packaging technology is now in, you know, Malaysia and China and stuff, it's like, you try and find a part that hasn't been over to Asia first, right? And it's just, it's damn near impossible, especially for advanced components, like where they want, you know, they want the highest end FPGAs, and they want really reliable mil-spec parts. It's tough. It's tough to do. So, uh.

Dave Jones: So this is just like, this is a design by committee solution. Oh. Solution. It really is.

Chris Gammell: I wonder if this is, if this is how they're going to try and get around having to have stuff built in the US. That would actually make more sense.

Dave Jones: Ah, right. Okay. Because it's, you know, verified from the manufacturer in Malaysia or wherever.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I bet, I bet that's what it is. That's, uh, that, that, that kind of changes the prospect of it, but I don't know. Couldn't people just copy this thing too? I mean, I know there's an encryption engine, but if, if there's enough money in it, someone's going to do it. So.

Dave Jones: Well, they, well, they don't claim that's the case. You know, they claim it's for make sure it's not, they're not recycled components. Make sure they're not unlicensed over productions. Make sure they're not test rejects. Make sure they're not, you know, clones and copies and all that sort of jazz. It's like. Dude.

Chris Gammell: That's a lot of bureaucracy just to make sure your parts are good. I mean, like. I guess this would only go on things that are important to them.

Dave Jones: And then they're talking about embedding them in, like, even passive stuff. They're talking about, you know, embedding them in resistors and shit like that.

Chris Gammell: Why is my resistor $25? Because it contains shield. Oh, God. 5% resister. Oh, man. That's silly. That's really silly.

Dave Jones: It's just, it's fail, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Totally. So, speaking of shipping things out, how goes your, how goes your, your, the progress of your Kickstarter? I saw that you're a licensed agent now. You're basically, you're basically UPS now, right?

Dave Jones: I'm a mailing house, dude. I'm my own mailing house. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, no, I finally got, I finally shipped my first international orders yesterday using the, using the e-parcel system. Finally got it working. And apparently, I am the only one in Australia using this e-parcel system who has realized that their import, their import, when you import your database, right? Your import, your address database. It needs to be in a certain, it only accepts a certain character set format. You know how there's Unicode 8 and there's, you know, ISO format character sets that encode all of the, apparently I'm the only one who's realized and complained that their, that their import engine only accepts this one specific format. And if it's not in that character set format, well, it screws up all your international address characters. You know, it converts, you know, I don't know how to say the character names, but, you know, those international characters with the dots above them. Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. And it converts them into a queen.

Chris Gammell: That's what that is.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. And they convert them into question marks or something, you know, or some other weird, you know, lines that don't make sense. And it's lucky I noticed this.

Chris Gammell: Right, so that stuff definitely won't get there. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Well, it might, right? But, you know, based on the postcode or something, but, you know, hey, who wants to risk that? You know, you've got the address wrong. It's just, it's just crazy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you're at the whims of a nice postal carrier.

Dave Jones: Of a nice postal character being able to decode it and go, oh, I think they really mean this, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. And, yeah, it's not, like, they've got like a 60-page document detail in the import, the import requirements for this CSS. CSV file, right? How to format your CSV file for importing into their database, right? It's like 60%. And not once in there do they mention the character set format that they actually expect. And it's like, oh, man, I had to figure this out on my own. They couldn't help me.

Chris Gammell: I know. This is just this silliness. I mean, this is why people pay for logistics stuff, obviously. Yeah, of course.

Dave Jones: Because they've already figured it out. Well, maybe, you know.

Chris Gammell: Maybe, right. Yeah. Maybe they go in and manually edit it.

Dave Jones: Or they just don't care and they just take your money and ship the shit out and import it in their database. If it's wrong format, ah, who cares?

Chris Gammell: It'll get there when it gets there.

Dave Jones: Because when I export the data from Kickstarter, it's in the Unicode 8 format, which is, you know, a standard format for international characters. And it loads into Excel and everything just fine because that's the default import into OpenOffice. Well, I use OpenOffice, right? And that's the default import into that and import into Google Spreadsheet and everything else. It works fine. But then when you say, if you try and import it into the Australia Post system, nah, wah, fail. So it's lucky I caught that.

Chris Gammell: It is, yeah.

Dave Jones: You're right. Because that's a nasty issue. Anyway, there's all that sort of jazz to deal with. And, like, I'm going to have to write my own program to actually pass the data and insert all of these fields that are required by there. Like, I've done 200 manually, but now I've got to do, you know, 1,200. So, like, no. Watch out, folks.

Chris Gammell: Dave's about to start coding.

Dave Jones: I'm going to code. Stand back, everyone.

Chris Gammell: I'm going to use scripting.

Dave Jones: Like, no, I'm going to use probably Visual Basic or something to, you know. Okay. Import the CSV file and, yep. Yeah. And then, yeah, like, I'll write a proper program that actually, you know, I can fill in the fields and everything and it populates it. Then it outputs, exports the correct CSV file and everything. But it's very detailed, you know. You've got to have it in the exact format. So, I can now appreciate why the mailing houses charge, like, a couple of hundred bucks set up, you know, database set up fee. Because they've got to process your database, which could be in any hickety-pickety format, right, and import into their system and make sure it's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: What's wrong with hickety-pickety?

Chris Gammell: No, I like that term. I do. It reminds me of, like, I think they said that in Sword in the Stone or something. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Right. Anyway, that's what they charged me last time. You know, I got charged, like, you know, $300, $400, you know, database set up fee, you know. Yeah. Last time. And now I can appreciate the amount of effort that some poor schmuck's got to go to to import databases.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: There you go. It's not easy. It's not easy at all. But this is really good. So, I've spent, like, a month or a month and a half setting up this system, getting it approved, going through all the processes, all the paperwork, and now all this online. Crap, trying to sort it out. I think I've finally nailed it. And, oh, it feels quite satisfied.

Chris Gammell: Well, good. Yeah. It should.

Dave Jones: And ironically, it's now the same price to send overseas as it is to send within Australia. Go figure. How does that work? What?

Chris Gammell: How much does it cost you? Is it that expensive in Australia or is it just cheap to go overseas?

Dave Jones: No, it's – well, it's – no, it's just the way the system works in Australia. The parcel – there's, like, a base fee for sending in Australia. Then you pay per weight. And, you know, overseas is just base per weight or something. Oh, I see. Or there's a smaller base fee or something. And, you know, it's not for all items. But for the items I'm sending, yeah, it's now the same price for overseas as it is for Australia. Because in Australia, I'm getting charged for cubic weight. So regardless – so even though my product's only 150 grams, right, my microcurrent packed, I'm getting charged like 400, 500 gram price because I'm getting charged the cubic weight in Australia. That's just part of the contract. So, you know, that's why it's more expensive. So unfortunately. But I don't get charged cubic weight for international shipments. So there you go. There's tons of stuff to this mailing business.

Chris Gammell: Imperial, like, cubic hands, weight, stones per fortnight.

Dave Jones: My package is .002 furlongs long. Yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: That's cubed furlongs, Dave. Yeah. Oh, man.

Dave Jones: I had a friend at work once who used to sneak dimensions into, you know, official company documents as the joke. And he put units in, you know, furlongs per fortnight. Nice. Yeah, stuff like that. It was great. And no one ever noticed.

Chris Gammell: It was fun. Of course not. Yeah. He wouldn't until you, like, compare it against something else. You're like, oh, what the hell.

Dave Jones: Terrific. Oh, I love it. So I have a. What do you have?

Chris Gammell: No, no. I have a project we need to work on.

Dave Jones: A project? We? What?

Chris Gammell: Well, we. You're talking about we? The Empire community. I want to get a film made. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: Did you see this post? Yeah?

Dave Jones: Yeah, totally. About the traitorous eight.

Chris Gammell: I want to get a film made about that. I don't know how we do it, though.

Dave Jones: Well, you've got to have a filmmaker.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I am in California. I'm near Hollywood. I should just go down there and I could probably just, like, write a script and hand it to someone important, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. I do know a filmmaker. Granted, he's been working on the Australian documentary. I was going to say, it's not.

Chris Gammell: That doesn't count.

Dave Jones: For, like, three, four years now. But he is a world-class. He is a world-class documentary maker. So, you know. It's just that these hobby projects take a long time, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm sure he's watching.

Chris Gammell: So, anyways, I want to get a film made of the traitorous eight, which is the story of how Fairchild started. And I'm sure we've mentioned on the show before. But basically, they left. Oh, what was it? It was. I always get this confused. It wasn't. It wasn't. I always get Shockley and Schottky confused. It was Shockley Semiconductor, right? Yeah. William Shockley.

Dave Jones: William Shockley. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. One of the fathers of the semiconductor. And so, he had this company. He was this hard-ass. And basically, eight of them got together, including Gordon Moore. Was it Gordon Moore? And then a couple others. Yeah. But I think just think it would be a really cool, like, story. I don't know. It would be like the social network meets, you know.

Dave Jones: But is there any juice in there? You know? Is there any...

Chris Gammell: Of course there is. You just make it up, man. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: Just make it up. Like, hi, Ryan. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know, what we could do is we could have the Winklevoss twins go back in time and sue the Intel founders and, you know. Right. I think it would be good. I think it would be good. But apparently, there was... You know, someone referenced the Silicon Valley documentary that we actually did mention on the show a long time ago when it came out about the starting of Silicon Valley. And there was a large part of that in there. So, I don't know. I just think it would be cool.

Dave Jones: I think you could, like, mix up... Look, I know how to do it. I know how to do it.

Chris Gammell: How?

Dave Jones: Dude.

Chris Gammell: Don't say crowdfunding.

Dave Jones: Just do a Kickstarter. Just do a Kickstarter. Who cares if you don't have the skills to pull it off? You'll get the money and then you can buy the skills to pull it off.

Chris Gammell: Then we can hire Kristen Bell and Zach Braff and, yeah, right? All you need is a good intro video, right, Dave?

Dave Jones: That's it. That's all you need. Speaking of which, the most ironic Kickstarter project in history.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no. So, just a video? Is that all it is?

Dave Jones: This was great. Have you seen this?

Chris Gammell: I did see this. And it's not the first one. I will mention. I've seen one of these. Right, right. I've seen one of these similarly fail before.

Dave Jones: Anyway, some dude who obviously had a successful... I haven't got any details, but obviously had a successful Kickstarter project. So, he knows all about how to produce a successful Kickstarter project. So, he did another Kickstarter project on writing a book on how to be successful at making Kickstarter projects. And, you guessed it, it failed to reach its target of a measly 4,800 pounds.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Like, failed. You know, I looked at this and I think it's actually kind of reassuring because as much as we snicker when there's, you know, people getting taken in by, you know, free energy projects and Kickstarter and stuff like that. Like, there is some BS detecting, I think, that goes on there still. And so, this is reassuring. You know, this is... It's really just about what do people actually want. I think that's what it really comes down to.

Dave Jones: You want a book about how to be successful at Kickstarter, obviously. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: It's not a mass market thing, whereas, you know, his other products probably were. Yeah, exactly. And even the free energy scams that get...

Dave Jones: Yeah, he realized...

Chris Gammell: You know, they get funded. They also don't... You know, that's what people want. They want to believe that it's possible. Of course. They're clueless, but, you know...

Dave Jones: So, that's why it ends up being successful. But, this guy obviously failed to realize that, well, he's successful before. Or, doesn't necessarily extrapolate over to, you know, a book. Right. Yeah. Success is not absolute. No. So, anyway, I thought that was hilarious. I had a good chuckle.

Chris Gammell: So, next time Osman sits on the show, we shouldn't tell him to start a Kickstarter book. How to succeed in Kickstarter without even trying.

Dave Jones: That's it. Oh, goodness. I love it.

Chris Gammell: People would much rather buy RF products than books about stuff.

Dave Jones: That's it. Yep. So, there you go. That's it. Show's over.

Chris Gammell: Is that all we got this week?

Dave Jones: That's all we got this week. Well, that's all the time I can afford. I'm busy, dude. Yeah, I know.

Chris Gammell: We're kind of late this week. This is kind of an odd thing. Yeah, we're recording this on a Wednesday. Yeah. Yeah. Your Wednesday, my Tuesday. Yeah. So, this should hopefully post in the same day as it was recorded. I guess the other two links I wanted to just mention, we don't have to talk about them. Actually, three links because I think they are pretty good, actually. So, one of the EV blog members posted some really nice pictures of the pictures of the 2002, which I've had my hands in before. So, that's really nice. And then, I don't know if you saw Project Tango, the thing from Google where they're going to be like 3D mapping the world with a cell phone. Oh, right. That's also definitely worth checking out. Yeah. Yeah. It was from a couple of days ago. So, I think it's pretty well explained on the web. But it's also pretty cool.

Dave Jones: But we're going to end up with – the problem with that is we're probably going to end up with a lot of shit quality content, though.

Chris Gammell: Like the mapping, you mean?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Like someone with shaky hands?

Dave Jones: Well, what does it use? People's cell phone camera, right?

Chris Gammell: It uses the camera and the GPS and I think probably the compass and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: But, you know, cell phones are just shit. They really are. The cameras in them are just shit. It's not going to be the same as –

Chris Gammell: No, the cameras aren't bad. It's all about the calibration of the sensors if my cell phone has anything to say about it.

Dave Jones: Well, if it's in good light, yeah. Well, you know. Eh. I don't know. I might have been skeptical about it.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. I guess we'll have to wait and see on that. I think it's the spectral data, though. I don't think it's actually doing just straight up pictures pictures. I think it's like positional data.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Watch the video. You'll see what it is.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but still, it's using the cell phone camera, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but then it's like doing a bunch of math on the actual output of the camera, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, but garbage in, garbage out, dude.

Chris Gammell: I guess so. You think it needs to be like in focus or something? I mean, you set the focus at infinity and then you just kind of scan it around. I don't know. Software people will figure that out, right? Yeah, it's fine. Oh, man. And then the last one, the Kickstarter or the Hackaday Projects thing. That looks pretty cool, too. I got an invite to this. I don't know if you did, but... No. So Hackaday Projects, they're starting up like a shared workspace kind of thing there. So we'll see where that goes as well with, you know, like they're starting to actually develop projects like in a community kind of thing. So I think it's going to be pretty cool. Awesome. Yeah. All right. All right, man. I guess we'll... Oh, next week we have Alicia White from the Embedded.fm podcast. Oh. So we'll talk to her. She's... I think... I don't know if she's allowed to talk about it, but I think she's worked on a bunch of like... She's done a lot of the firmware on like... What are they called? Like a Fitbit type thing. I don't know if it's actually... I don't think it was actually the Fitbit, but like those kind of things, like personal tracker type stuff. Those... Right, gadgets. Low-level firmware and that kind of stuff. Yeah, a lot of consumer-level firmware. And she wrote a book, Making Embedded Systems, from O'Reilly as well. Cool. And she has a great podcast that I really enjoy. So... Podcast Plus Plus next week.

Dave Jones: Awesome.

Chris Gammell: All right, man. We'll talk to you then.

Dave Jones: If I haven't been... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, taken.

Dave Jones: Yeah, taken by the black van that's currently sitting out the front.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, good luck.

Dave Jones: See ya.

Chris Gammell: See ya. See you forever.

Dave Jones: Oh, dear.

Chris Gammell: No more Dave.