#203 – Tesla, Checklists and Bullies - Emerging External Eupsychics

Chris Gammell: This is the F-R Podcast, recorded June 16th, 2014. Episode 203, Emerging External Upsychics.

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

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

Dave Jones: On the road again. Can't wait to get on the road again.

Chris Gammell: Yes. I have the travel bug lately, Dave, and I don't know what to do about it.

Dave Jones: Not go home, that's what you're doing about.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you know, home still feels good. I mean, that's where the lab is and everything else. That's where my fancy new scope is and everything. But no, yeah, I'm on the road. I'm in San Diego. And yeah, it's interesting. You know, I see new parts of the country and everything. So, yeah, it's mostly travel for like the two weekends in a row is weddings. You know how that goes. Like there's like that certain time period in everyone's life when all their friends start getting married.

Dave Jones: Of course, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm looking for that, looking forward to that being over. I mean, I love my friends, but I just don't want to travel every weekend in the summer.

Dave Jones: Well, for me, that was about, actually, it was about your age, yes. That was about 10 odd years ago. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: That everyone was getting married. And yeah, we'll just go and every second weekend was a bloody wedding.

Chris Gammell: Right. And then it dies out.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, of course, totally. We haven't been to a wedding in years.

Chris Gammell: Right. You start going to second weddings eventually, right? That's right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, baby showers and everything else. Yeah, you know, the usual life patterns. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: It suddenly becomes babies instead of, you know, stupid christenings and crap like that. Yeah, right, right.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah, so I'm out in San Diego right now and I was in Arizona and I'm going to DC. But, you know, it's all personal stuff. So, but the interesting thing is I'm going to be working on the road as well. So, I have my, I have a lot of my gear with me and I don't have my full, my full portal lab with me, but I do have.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: You know, just carry on stuff, a lot of the CE stuff. Actually, contextual electronics ended yesterday.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. And how'd that go? That was the second round, was it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it was the second. Series or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, session 1B. And so, that was like we were building, we were building the stuff we designed in 1A. And we didn't get, we didn't get, you know, we got to like everything was proven out, everything was working, up and working. Right. And, but nothing was like refined or perfect, right? So, we're going to keep going and actually, you know, like all the people are going to keep, a lot of people are still kind of catching up and we'll also be designing, you know, the version 2. So, you know, actually having it move towards a better open source project, that's kind of the idea.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay, cool. And when does it become open source?

Chris Gammell: Well, right now. I mean, it's all on GitHub.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Oh, you can download it. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. All the Gerbers and every, Gerbers, KiCat files, everything's up there. So, you can go download it right now at github.com slash contextual electronics. So.

Dave Jones: Excellent.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Just like Tesla.

Chris Gammell: Just like.

Dave Jones: Not, not, not quite. Not quite. Not quite. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: They actually have something valuable, but that was awesome.

Dave Jones: That was freaking awesome. How awesome was that? Can you believe that?

Chris Gammell: Like.

Dave Jones: The audacity of, and it's a brilliant business move too. If, if you think he's doing it just for the, you know, the warm fuzzies, then no, you don't know Elon Musk. He's also doing it because, you know, he's trying to drive industry. He's trying to drive his competitors into doing something, which in the end helps his bottom line as well, you know, as well as achieving all his goals. Exactly. You know, the, that's a clever thing. It helps him achieve all his goals that he's had for 20 years of seeing a, you know, and a, a future free of, you know, fossil fuel, uh, you know, uh, you know, converting to all solar renewable stuff and electric cars and space exploration, the whole thing. And it, and it totally helps out. So for the, for those who haven't heard, do the rundown.

Chris Gammell: Well, so basically they, they said that they're going to open source all their patents and, you know, basically release them into the public domain as much as they can. You know, we talked last week about the, the, the logistics of a, of a open source, open sourcing, uh, commercial stuff, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's not quite that because by definition, a patent is open source. Well, it's open, right? It's open. You can go read it. Right. But you're not allowed to use the, if they use the information, you get sued. So what they're effectively, what he's effectively saying is you can use the information and we won't sue you. My personal guarantee. We won't sue you, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: So, yeah. And that's, that's fantastic. That's a big deal.

Chris Gammell: And, and, you know, and you mentioned that you said, you said, uh, you said, you know, it kind of drives competitors for it. It's a really good point because you think about the, the logistics and the supply chain side of things and you think about, okay, so one company, one company designs electric batteries. Obviously they're building their own capacity. Tesla's building their own, uh, electric battery or sorry, uh, high capacity battery factory.

Dave Jones: The world's biggest lithium battery factory. Yep.

Chris Gammell: But it's not just about that, right? That's kind of just the, that's just the, the, the important stuff that they know that they want to have control over. It's also about the, the remainder of, of the subsystems and everything else, right? When you start having components that everybody's using, right? The commoditized stuff that starts driving that to the floor. You don't have to worry about it anymore. You can just start concentrating on the hard problems like batteries, right? And you can start to have, have efficiencies in the things that you really care about and everything else just as commodity. And really when you open stuff up like that, everybody uses the same stuff, but nobody cares because it's commodity.

Dave Jones: Well, but yeah, the trick here is, is that nothing's open, right? Tesla aren't saying, oh, here's the, here's the schematics for our drive, our motor drive controllers, or, or here's the exact, here's exactly how we manufacture our battery packs and all that sort of stuff. No, this is all still proprietary information, but Tesla have the world's biggest, uh, lithium battery factory and a special type of super fast charging lithium batteries, right? They, they, they practically own that technology. That's why other electric cars on the market can't charge as fast as the Tesla can and can't get the same range and capacity because Tesla are world leaders in that. And now his, Elon's brilliant idea, right? It forces the, well, forces the customers, right? It forces the consumers to now put pressure on the other car makers to go, well, why can't you produce an, a similar car that's compatible with all these Tesla stations popping up, right? And can charge just as fast and can get the same range. And then the manufacturers will go, okay, well, all right, how do we do that? Oh, we have to buy Elon's batteries. Oh, right. Okay. Right. Right. And then he will force the standard for the fast charging system, right? There's already a standard out there and Tesla went completely against it because they had to, because the connectors would actually melt. The existing standard connectors out there would just like melt completely. If you try to charge at as high a current and power as you do with the Tesla, um, right. So, you know, so they had to use their own proprietary technology to do that. And, uh, other manufacturers will be forced to do the same and it sort of brings the whole game up. And that's the brilliant business move. I think is that, uh, yeah, it'll force the other manufacturers to adopt the Tesla standards to in, in order to compete and, you know, and yeah, it does bring competition in, but Elon makes money other in other ways. So, you know, it's brilliant.

Chris Gammell: The other interesting thing I think about with, with Tesla is that, okay, so say even, so say they really did open everything else up, right? This is kind of the interesting thing about open source and everything else, right? I mean, oftentimes the competitive advantage is not the knowledge contained within. Again, it's the, it's the, uh, the, the volume and the, the manufacturing efficiencies, how

Dave Jones: you do your business. Yeah, the efficiencies of scale, right? Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. And so that's even better where it's like, it's almost like a, it's almost like him winking and saying, yeah, come and get me bitches. You know, like that's kind of what I feel like it is.

Dave Jones: Oh, totally. Because, because Tesla have like one of the best factories in the world. You know, if you've said, you know, we've talked about that, uh, documentary before that takes you behind the scenes of the Tesla factory and it's like, holy shit, you know, it's, they've done it properly.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They've, they've done all those robots and everything else. I mean, it's crazy. Right.

Dave Jones: So big stamping machines for the entire chassis. Bang. Out it comes, you know, and like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. And yeah. Manufacturing.

Dave Jones: You know, like rightly they're going to keep like, as, as they've always said, their biggest secret is their battery technology. That is their biggest secret. How they manufacture those packs, how they keep them from exploding, how they can so massively fast charge them, you know, and the, and the cooling system keeps them cool. They've got a water cooling system to keep them cool and all that sort of jazz. And that's the, that's the killer. Because otherwise it's just a car, right? All the other car makers can make a car, right? You know, and that, that's what they do. Exactly. Right. It's, it's a chassis. It's got wheels and you know, it's no, but in this day and age, no, it's the battery pack and, and the control system, you know, Tesla's got that lovely touchscreen tablet and all the, you know, all that sort of jazz. Right. Yep. And the remote firmware uploading of your car and, you know, updating your car and all that jazz. So yeah, that's where the secret sauce is.

Chris Gammell: So what, uh, where from here though? I mean, like, do we expect this from other, other big electronics and car manufacturers? What do you, what do you think?

Dave Jones: Oh, I, I don't know. It's a pretty unique position. I mean, they, they haven't, well, you know, because they haven't opened, so they haven't given up any technical information that's not already out there. They've just said, Hey, you know, we're not going to sue you. So maybe that will, I, I think that might, that sentiment could flow on to other industries, but probably only if they, you know, but not the big corporate ones. It has to be the ones run by a single guy like this who can just, you know, because otherwise the suits always take over at the big companies and the lawyers and the lawyers will just say, no, don't do it. You know, look, you're, you know, can't just give away our patent portfolio. That's just ridiculous, you know? Um, and you know, but it, it, it, it's through the smaller parts of the industry. I don't see, I don't think the big players are going to suddenly, you know, Oh, we won't sue you for, you know, using our patents. No, that's, that's just not going to happen. That's just not in their DNA.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But just as a, as a general groundswell, you know, just as a general groundswell in this, Oh, you know, cause there's lots of anti-pattern stuff going around now, you know? And so there should be because the system is bloody a joke, but, uh, yeah. And, and that's going to help that. It's going to help reinforce all that. Yep. And of course it makes Elon out to be the, the, the, the, the coolest guy in history. You know, if he, if he wasn't already, right. If he wasn't already, right.

Chris Gammell: If he wasn't already Tony Stark, this will hopefully propel him to be that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. And this just lifts him up to another level of like, how awesome is this guy? You know? And, and, and that's all I seen from the comments in all the social media stuff and all the news and everything. It was just like, how cool is this guy? You know? This is great. Oh man. Yeah. He's awesome.

Chris Gammell: I love it. Yep. He probably will never, I feel like we should mention, he probably will never be on our show. I feel like, I feel like that's like such a high bar to set that we should just, we should just state that now.

Dave Jones: I think we have more chance of getting the was on the show. I think we have an order of magnitude more chance of that than getting Elon on. Yeah, I know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And hey, never know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Never say never.

Dave Jones: Well, you're out that way. Just lock up to the door and say, you know, hey, I'm here to do an interview with Elon. And they'll go, who are you? You know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Try and big, big note yourself. Don't you know who I am? I'm Chris Gammell from the Ambell.

Chris Gammell: I'm internet famous, damn it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Wear one of those shirts. I'm famous on the internet, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Oh boy. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Go on. So what's new with you, man? I've seen some of your videos lately. What have you been up to?

Dave Jones: Oh, me? I don't know. I fixed a TV. I was excited. Just uploaded that video this morning. Yeah, what's up with that? Why are you fixing TVs? I don't understand. It's my mum's TV. It's my mum's TV, you know? Oh, okay. I can't just go, oh, no. I can't even. I've got to go, oh, yeah, okay. I'll take a look at it, you know? Not with much hope, you know? But, oh, yeah, I'll take a look at it. And then, and I fixed it, you know, as always with engineering. You know, I fixed it, like, with, like, five minutes to spare before I had to leave to go pick her up to bring her over to a party we were having. And she was going to answer, well, I want my TV back.

Speaker ?: You know?

Dave Jones: And I literally just fixed it. Like, I walked out the door, grabbed it, put it under my arm and big smirk on my face. Yes, I fixed the bastard. You know? It was great.

Chris Gammell: Of course I fixed it. Yeah, of course. Right. You think you raised me not to fix this type of thing, right? Oh, man, that's funny.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but, like, you know, yeah, I probably could have eventually fixed it, but, you know, it's a time. Like, yeah, okay, if it was a dead processor board, okay, I could have ordered another processor board, you know, and wait a couple of weeks till it's delivered, you know? But, yeah, it's one of those things that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you're not going to, like, reflow the board.

Dave Jones: No, you know, well, you know, that would have been, like, a desperate last effort, you know? It could have been, oh, yeah, it might have been the BGA in there, like a dodgy joint. So, you know, if I got desperate, yeah, I would have taken the whole board out, whacked it in the reflow oven and reflowed it again. And, you know, maybe, you know, cross your fingers and hope that fixes it. But, yeah, you know, it's one of those stab in the dark things.

Chris Gammell: Pretty narrow set of characteristics that actually would have been the case then, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. But you pretty much can narrow it down to a board, you know, or it's the panel, you know? True. Is it the power supply? No, you check that. Okay, is it the processor board? Well, no, you know it's not that, really. And that's where I ended my first video. And everyone keeps bitching and moaning, oh, why didn't I fix it in the first video? It's because I ran out of time. Right, yeah. And, you know, that's how I do things. You know, well, you must be new to my blog. As soon as I shoot a video, I upload it. I'm not like some other bloggers out there. Yeah, they might work for a month repairing something, and then they'll put up the polished repair video at the end of it. And, well, okay, that's how they do it, but that's not how I work, you know? I shoot a bit of info, and I upload it, even if it's incomplete, you know? So, yeah, but that just brings in the whinges.

Chris Gammell: Well, you know, it's tough. So, obviously, I have a lot of – now I have a lot of experience with this as well. And it's tough when you're trying to – you know, when you're trying to explain to someone else, like, what the steps are to get through to, you know, from beginning to end. It's like you want to show people the struggle of, you know – That's right. Well, what do I look at next? But then, on the other hand, it's like you don't want three hours of video where it's just, you know, oh, it wasn't that up, it wasn't that. You know, it becomes a difficult problem. And so –

Dave Jones: Yeah, see, I wouldn't have done that. I wouldn't have, you know, put five hours' worth of material out there of me fixing it. But in the end, I did, like, 45 minutes' worth of material of me fixing it. And that's, you know, that's almost real time, you know, of what it took me to solve that problem. Maybe not quite. You know, I edited out a few little things. But generally, you know, it's almost real time of what it actually took me to fix the thing and the steps I actually went through to fix it. So, yeah, you know, I think that's important to show. But, yeah, it gets to a point where it's too many steps, you know, and you have to make a choice, you know.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think ultimately it becomes a larger discussion about, like, you know, online education in general, right? Do you have a very concise explanation of things or do you have – Right, right.

Dave Jones: Do you have the five-minute video? Do you have the five-minute polished video? Or do you have the ten-part series of one-hour-long videos each, you know? I mean, that's –

Chris Gammell: Right, because different people are going to get different things from each one. Obviously, you and I are both in kind of the same space on this one. You know, it's tough to straddle that gap there. But it can be important for, you know, for some people – for the people that are – that do learn in real time like that. It's like, yeah, yeah, it's important for those folks. But the ones who want the concise stuff, it's – and that ultimately comes down to, like, you have to offer both. You have to show the concise version. You have to show the long-term version and hope that everybody kind of gets what they need.

Dave Jones: If you want both audiences.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Only if you want both audiences. I mean, me, I – like, you know, what's the point in having, like, a – you know, one of those, you know, two-minute videos of what a capacitor is? You know, like – Yeah. You know, I just – like, there's only so – you know, there's not much you can learn in a couple of minutes, really. Right, right, right, right. You know, and this is a complex technical field that we're in. You know, it's not – it's not a 50-second, you know, hack from Kip K. You know, it's –

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right? It's just a totally different field.

Chris Gammell: So, that kind of brings up the thing I want to talk about this week was the – so, Udacity just came out with a thing called Nanodegrees. Did you hear about this? I actually – I just posted – Who's – Udacity? Who's that? So, Udacity is the online course site. It's kind of like – it's kind of like Khan Academy but more commercial. So, they have, like, paid and unpaid. Okay. And so, what they started doing, though, is they want to be able to actually certify people, right? Because that's ultimately the thing in online degrees. There's no certification, really. It's like, yeah, I took the class. Yeah, I passed it. Yeah, of course. But there's no real, like, regulated version that says I finished stuff. Now, with my stuff, I say if you build the board and it works, that's ultimately your pass or fail. Like, I don't care how you got there.

Dave Jones: And you can take that along to your job interview.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Right. Yeah, and that's the point. But, like, a lot of this stuff, like, you know, a lot of these other software subjects, it's like, yeah, you need that. You need some kind of centralized board. And so – but Nanodegrees are this new thing. So, Udacity is like Khan Academy. It has this stuff. It's an online course thing. It's Sebastian Thrun, one of the guys from Google X. And so now they have – they're basically going to start certifying people. You know, you go through their courses. You can become – there's four listed here. Data analyst, front-end web, back-end web developer, and then iOS developer. And I wonder if this is actually a thing that – I mean, like, you know, like, this is a big deal going into the 21st century, you know, with high costs and everything like that too. If this is a realistic thing for electronics, if it actually could work. And I don't know. I don't know if it would ever –

Dave Jones: Well, it's going to work in some respects and it won't work in others. It's just like anything, you know. There'll be – well, ultimately, by work, what do you mean? As a qualification to get into the industry and get a job, that's pretty much ultimately what it means.

Chris Gammell: Right, yeah. I mean, I guess – yeah, I think about that.

Dave Jones: Is that the final bar? Like, that's the – you know.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, I guess you could have a sham degree no matter where you are, right? If people just said – if they just rubber stamped you and said, yeah, you understand electronics now and they rubber stamped the degree. But ultimately, yeah, it matters, you know, will you get hired is the ultimate goal, is the ultimate measurement. So I guess that would be the one I would be interested in.

Dave Jones: Well, for some people, it's – some people the bar is can you get certification by the industry body, you know, the Institute of Engineers or the IEEE or the Institute of Engineers Australia or whoever. But for some people, that is the ultimate bar. If you can't get accredited by them, then that's it. You're useless. You don't have a – you know, you don't – you are not qualified. End of story.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: You know? Well, yeah. And in some countries, that's – legally, that's the case as well. In some countries, I'm aware of that you can't work in the industry unless you're qualified through those, you know, agencies.

Chris Gammell: Huh. So it's like almost like a – well, I guess we have the PE here, but that's – I don't really count that for anything.

Dave Jones: Right, no. No, here it doesn't matter a rat's ass. No.

Chris Gammell: But I mean like – so like in like civil engineering, that matters a lot, right? Like that's –

Dave Jones: Oh, totally. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And like even commercial, you know, lighting and power stuff, that matters a lot as well.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Totally. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: For microcontrollers, yeah, it doesn't matter.

Dave Jones: Oh, if you're here for mains wiring, you know, if you want to wire up a PowerPoint, then well, yeah. You know, you have to be certified. End of story. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, there aren't other options there, huh?

Dave Jones: No. That's it. So, you know, depends on your goal. I mean, it's – there's so many bars for so many people and, you know, it's never going to be a be-all end-all. Right. It can't be. Right. It's impossible. So, yeah. But, hey, there's a niche – well, there could be a huge field out there for it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man. Definitely.

Dave Jones: Or are we going towards the argument that, well, you know, everyone will be a contractor. Everyone will be a resource. You know, people won't work for big companies anymore. You know, big companies will just be hiring, you know, a talent pool and then it's for a job. And then, boom, as soon as that job's finished, they'll, you know. Yeah, I don't know. You know, are we headed towards that? Not really. You know, I mean, the world's pretty much going to stay the same. Yeah. As a general rule. It doesn't change much.

Chris Gammell: I've been doing these Google help outs and they've been interesting. But, you know, they're not – you know, it's not a lot of volume. And I don't think there's just enough work and enough, like, small chunks of things that need to get done, right? You think about the start-to-finish process of an electronics design, you know, so all-inclusive these days. Maybe it won't always be like this, but it's so all-inclusive. It's like, man, if you don't have knowledge from the beginning, then you're really not serving the purpose properly, in my opinion. I don't know how you feel about it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, nah, that's the side.

Chris Gammell: So, what else is new? I saw Toby Rob on – so, I have Facebook friends with him and also he's a Reddit guy and a Twitter guy as well. He's been doing MQTT stuff and I've been kind of curious about this. You know, we've talked about this.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Is that his latest video? Because he's a mate of mine. He just lives up the mountains here.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so, he's been doing stuff with the Freetronics LED screen and, you know, it's this fun, you know, scrolling marquee type of screen. But basically, he's been interfacing it to MQTT servers. And I'm telling you, man, I think there's something here. I don't know. I've yet to do it yet, but I think this is on my list of things to do.

Dave Jones: What's this MTTQ server? MQTT.

Chris Gammell: No, this is what we talked about not last week, but I think the week before when I got back from SolidCon. That's that real lightweight protocol. It's the one that Facebook uses for their message or for their notifications. But it's really good for like low overhead device-to-device communication. Right. And so, that's what he's doing where he'll help broadcast, you know, like you can basically have a temperature sensor broadcast my temperatures, you know, 18C or 23C or whatever it is. And then it'll just keep doing it. And then you could subscribe with other devices like a display or something like that.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: There's quite a few solutions out there for that.

Chris Gammell: Like for the subscribing type of thing?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Like, yeah, I used to upload the temperature from the lab here to some service I can't remember the name of. Okay. Yeah. And it did graphs and it plotted graphs automatically for me and allowed users to, you know, interact with the graphs of my data that was uploaded and all that sort of jazz. And it just worked. Cool. Yeah. I just plugged it all in. It didn't have to write any code. It just all worked.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's nice. Magic. Yeah. Yeah. I like the magic stuff.

Dave Jones: Especially for this internet business.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know, man. I've been setting up this new forum about KiCat. And it's really cool. But it's...

Dave Jones: Where's this forum?

Chris Gammell: It's not live yet. So I can't tell you. I'm sorry. Oh. Oh. Yeah.

Dave Jones: KiCatForum.com.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Not quite. But it'll be there. Near there. Yeah. Right. But yeah. So it's called Discourse. Have you heard of Discourse?

Dave Jones: No. Not really.

Chris Gammell: It's by Jeff Atwood, the guy coding horror. But basically, there's this standardized forum now. It's great. But basically, it's the same kind of thing where it's like, you know, it's this great solution. And it's, you know, when it works, it's great. But I just, I fear, already I fear, you know, when it stops working, I'm just totally screwed. You know, I'm just...

Dave Jones: What? So it's a forum-y software, is it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's like a new type of forum. Oh, okay. I see it. Right. Yeah. Like Wayne and Lane uses them. That's who I... I heard about it from Adam Wolf. And, you know, there's a lot of people that have started using it as well. It's a little top heavy, but it's pretty interesting. You know, it's...

Dave Jones: Okay. Right. Now, I'm a, you know, I'm a diehard here. I like the old-fashioned BBS style forums. Yeah, I know. I know.

Chris Gammell: And that's good, too. Yeah. I mean, that's not bad.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. What is it, you know, what is a combination? It's probably a cross-combination of Reddit and Stack Exchange or something like that, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's a good way to compare it.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and it's, you know, it's nothing groundbreaking, but it's just meant to be kind of all-inclusive. But the forum software isn't the point. I mean, the point is that I'm, you know, jumping in, you know, or like any web software for, you know, dum-dums like us, where it's just like, you jump in and you kind of hope that there's either going to be someone there to help you or that it's just going to be like a, you know, patch fix. Same kind of thing for MQTT, you know, like, you know, some people are going to be able to dive in and jump down and actually get to the driver level and start writing drivers for, you know, low-level devices. Other people are going to, or not even low-level stuff, but the high-level interfacing and display stuff. And, you know, people like us won't necessarily be able to do that stuff.

Dave Jones: No, no, totally. It's like my forum, you know. If it's not available as a plug-in, I can't do it, right?

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right.

Dave Jones: You know, yeah, if it's available as a plug-in, okay, I can do it. I can install it for you. But anything above that, nope. Right. You know, I'd have to learn the, you know, the language and, you know, yeah, I could do it eventually. But, geez, there's so much work to come up to speed on how to modify that sort of stuff. Yeah, so that's why my forum is pretty much a bog-standard, you know, install. Right, right, exactly. There's a few tweaks in there, but, yeah, it's basically a, yep, that's right. But it's all about traction. It's all about, you know, getting as many people to use it as possible. And if, you know, if people like that format, they'll use it. If not, well, it would just be one of the millions of dead forums, you know. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And so speaking of, so National Instruments, or sorry, TI Now, formerly National Instruments, they have the tool Webbench, right? You used Webbench before?

Dave Jones: Right, yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so, like, you know, it's a pretty interesting tool. I mean, it's web-based. It's not as full of features as I thought it was going to be the first time I saw it. But, you know, it's got some...

Dave Jones: No, but it does some useful stuff, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's got some interesting behaviors and some, you know, like once you click around a little bit, you can see how a switcher might react to different loads. And when you switch out components and stuff like that, they call it simulation, but I think it's not quite simulation. Right. But basically, they started pushing their layouts then straight out to, like, Altium or CAD or Eagle. And basically, you can, you know, once you find a circuit you like in their system, you can then hit export. Right. And it'll push out, you know, Gerber's and everything else. Yeah, actually, I don't even know if it's Gerber's. It might just be the layout stuff. But it's interesting because, you know, we were talking about the, you know, the critical mass type of thing. You know, so I had asked them when I saw this news release, I asked them, I'm like, oh, so what about CAD, right? Obviously, I'm very interested in CAD. And they're like, what's CAD? Yeah, right. I'm like, oh, man, Texas Instruments doesn't know what CAD is. This is not good. Wow. No, that's not fair. It's not like Texas Instruments doesn't know. It's like the group at Texas Instruments didn't know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I know. Yeah, that is pretty bad. I hope it changes. So. Oh, goodness. So it could be interesting, though, seeing this thing, you know, pop out these switcher circuits. And switchers especially because they can be finicky for high-frequency noise stuff. You know, having the layout suggestions can be very helpful for that kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Switchers are probably, you know, one of the, still one of the trickiest, you know, building block circuits out there.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, man. Pretty much. I think that keeps analog guys in business, to be honest. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Power supplies. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. The guys that really know, you don't even analog, but just like the switching regulator guys. I hear that a lot where people will say, you know, there's that one guy at our company, you know. Yeah, yeah. He knows where to put his finger in order to make it work.

Dave Jones: That's it.

Chris Gammell: And once he does, it starts working. Oh, dear.

Dave Jones: That's great. Speaking of routing and all that sort of jazz.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Here we go. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Come on. Can we bitch about this? We have to bitch about this. This is huge.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if it's as huge as we think it is, but yeah, let's talk about it.

Dave Jones: No, no, no. It's interesting to start with. Yeah. No, it's bullshit. Anyway, there's a free router out there that we've probably mentioned before. On the show somewhere along the line? Free routing.net. It's a web-based router. It's an open source, you know, router. Right.

Chris Gammell: People that use KiCad will recognize the name. It's actually usually FreeRoute is the name of the tool itself, I believe. But yeah, this is the one you can download and it'll link in the KiCad and it'll act as your auto router.

Dave Jones: And it links into Eagle and other packages too, I think. I think it links into pretty much anything. Yeah, I think it does.

Chris Gammell: Right, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. And yes, Zucan, one of the big players in the PCB field, they're sort of like a competitor to Altium kind of level.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, a similar sort of, you know.

Chris Gammell: Are they German? Is that right? They're like one of the big German companies? Oh, I think so. Something like that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. One of those European countries. Anyway, sorry to all our German listeners. I should know this.

Chris Gammell: Oh. Yeah. Yeah, you should for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I'm off the hook.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Yeah, Zucan, they've gone, oh no, we want you to ruin. They've sent a, well, I'm not sure if it's a cease and desist. Anyway, the Zucan lawyers have gotten onto this guy and said, uh-uh, wave the finger. We won't, you can't do this. We can't, we claim copyright on this software. Right. Because as it turns out, the guy used to work for Zucan. Right. Like 15 years ago, we're talking like, you know, 10 years before he started on this thing. Right. But they, they, they, they're, they're claiming copyright over it in some way, shape or form. Right.

Chris Gammell: And it's kind of hard to follow the thread about this stuff. I mean, you guys have a thread over the EV blog forum. But, but like, so, so, so the, the, the, the free router guy, basically he states that like at some point that he used some part of the code. And so.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: That. Apparently. That gets a little bit shady then, right?

Dave Jones: Although he did develop it in his own time, I think. Yeah. Something like that. There's something, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Anyway, like, oh, like he's been, he's been developing this software for like seven years, I think. Right. And, and he was last at the company 15 years ago. And all of a sudden Zucan have come out of the woodwork and they've said, nah. You know. Right. Right. Right. Right. You can't do this. We're going to sue your ass. And so he's. Well.

Chris Gammell: Just threaten him. Right. I mean, really. Yeah.

Dave Jones: He's generally, they've generally threatened him in some way, shape or form. I, I, I, I haven't been able to read the letter because it's not in English. So I haven't, I don't have a translated version of the letter, which he's scanned in and it's on his forum. And, but basically he's not going to fight it. He said, look, I'm too old. I'm, I'm retired. I'm, you know, look, he stopped working on this software a couple of years ago and he put it into the public domain. It's, you know, under the G and new license. It's, you know, open source. And so he hasn't worked on it for a couple of years and he just said, look, I'm, I'm not going to try and fight this. I'm just, you know, I've, I've lost interest in this product, so to speak. And, and I'm, and I'm retired. I just want to enjoy my retirement. So, but, but he will help anyone who has the means to fight Zookin. So, right, right.

Chris Gammell: Well, and, and I mean, I think it brings up broader questions, you know, especially in light of what, you know, like, you know, a big company like Tesla releasing all their patents to the public domain as well. You know, what is the true, you know, even, even in the, the, the letter of the law type of stuff, right? You know, when you talk about what is the actual, you know, like, I guess a copyright is a better example where, you know, there are defined time limits and stuff like that. I guess patents have that too, but, but like even in a practical sense, right? I mean, like, does Zookin or anyone else, you know, if you or I worked on widgets today and then 10, 10 years later, we work on widgets in the public domain, does that mean that we're at threat of that, right? I mean, like.

Dave Jones: I, like, there's a huge difference, a massive difference. So people need to understand this between what lawyers claim and what is actually enforceable in law. There's a massive, anyone, this is something everyone needs to understand. Anyone at any time can sue you for absolutely anything, regardless if it's valid. If they've got the money and they've got the spite, they can sue you for anything, right? Anything, even how ridiculous it is. They can take you to court. They can waste the court's time and the court will ultimately decide you're a bunch of dickheads and this is not valid, but, hey, you'll go bankrupt in the meantime. And that is the, you know, that is always the, always the fear here. Is that, you know?

Chris Gammell: And in some situations, there will be, there will be repercussions for people that sue without, without any standing for it, right? I mean, they, some, some jurisdictions actually, you know, when you sue people like.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, some jurisdictions. Yeah. Yeah. They don't take a, you know, sometimes it won't even get to court, right? The judge will do a pre-hearing or something and they'll just throw it out, right? But if you've got clever lawyers and a lot of money behind you, you can tie up someone for years and bankrupt them. You know, it's, it's pretty easy to do. Right.

Chris Gammell: Which is like the RCA story all over again, right? I mean, that was like the whole thing with like your RCA company and I forget the guy's name. But basically, you know, when, when he invented television, he fought RCA for lots and lots and lots of years and then eventually just ran out of money and ran out of time.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, it's a, it's a similar thing, right? At a former company who shall remain nameless, they tried to, they, you know, when I was employed, we've talked about this on the show before, similar vein. When I was employed there and signed my contract, right? Part of the contract said, we own every project you've ever worked on.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Right. And unless, and there was an, and there was an unless in there, unless you document all of that, all of those projects and tell us before you, you know, and include it as an addendum in the thing. So I went, wow, screw it. Like, yeah, I knew it totally wasn't valid. There's no law that they, you know, they would never win that, but I wasn't taking any chances. Right. So I put together this like 20 page package of all of the projects I've ever worked on. And here it is, here's all the information and here's all the ideas I've ever had before I started working in a company. So I went through some of my old notebooks, every idea for every project I could, even ones I hadn't started off yet. I was just thinking up shit. Right. Right. And I, and I was including all of these ideas into this addendum and I walked in and said to here, you know, here's my signed employment contract plus here's the addendum. And they, they go, what's this addendum? Oh, look, read it. It's part of the, what you ask for. Nobody's ever done this. Well, I am. Damn it. And they said, oh, okay, we don't know what quite to do. So I got them to sign it and, you know, give me a copy and well, that's it. Right. It's, there's a lot of bullshit stuff like that in, in this corporate world. And it's, you know, a lot of it's not valid. So who knows if Zoo can have a league to stand on. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, the downside to all of that is that, that it takes it until it goes to court in order to, you know, to tell if people are full of crap. Right. I mean, that's, that's the, exactly.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: And that's the thing. That's what these big companies do. They, they, they know they're going to put fear into the little guy. And it worked this time. This guy's taken down his free routing software off his websites. Right. There's a big red message there that says, sorry, you know, I'm, I'm not going to fight this thing. I'm just taking it down. Even though he's open sourced it. So I'm not sure what the deal is here because he's already released his GNU software. Presumably it's out there on the web. You can find it. You can download the source code. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think, I think worst case scenario, they would have to, they'd have to chase everyone who uses the code anywhere, which is totally impractical. Right. But I think, you know, it's just crazy. And that's really what it is, it stops the process, the progress of a part of a, you know, a program. Right. That's, yeah. That's ultimately what, what stops a lot of people is that it's like, if it's like, oh, there's no, you know how it is. If there's no compiled sources or anything like that, you know, then people are a lot less likely to use it and starts just kind of falling out of favor. Yeah, that's right. It stops momentum. That's, that's ultimately what happens. Yeah. So.

Dave Jones: Anyway, Zookin, bunch of bastards.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Keep an eye on it. And honestly, I'd never heard of them before. I mean, like, I know that I probably should have, but.

Dave Jones: Who, Zookin or the freerad? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, Zookin. I've heard of freeradding. Yeah. I just, I mean, just because I, why would I use.

Dave Jones: No, it's not a common package in the U.S. Oh, no, no. I think it's got a quite a decent market in the U.S. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's actually never come across it. So.

Dave Jones: Certainly not here. I don't know anyone in Australia uses Zookin.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Yeah. No one's going to use them now because they're a bunch of dickheads.

Chris Gammell: And you shouldn't be Zookin. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Come and sue me, you idiots.

Chris Gammell: Avoid at all costs. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think, I think we're protected under journalism laws or something else.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Like.

Dave Jones: We're allowed our, yes.

Chris Gammell: Is that allowed? I don't know. Like the libel laws or whatever they are.

Dave Jones: Hey. Hey, I'm just stating facts. I'm not allowed to, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: This is a fact. This has happened. Here it is. And my journalistic opinion of them is they're a bunch of dickheads. So, yeah. Yeah. Screw Zookin. Anyway. That's just, that's just dumb. I mean, there was no threat to them at all. Right. I mean, it's free routing software that, that the guy had already given up anyway. It was just sitting there. You know, he wasn't selling it, wasn't actively developing it. And it's just, it's just bullshit. Yeah. God. Sick of it. Yay, Elon. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, what's about this, this, this capacitor vultures dependency video that you made? What, what prompted this? And what? Oh, what? Actually, so you made, you made a comment. Oh, right. Oh, yeah. Actually, no. I changed my mind. I don't want to ask you about this. No, fuck. I wanted to, I wanted to mention to you. So, so the, for the first time, I'd forgotten about this. For the first time ever, to me, personally, I've sitting, so I was at a wedding this past weekend and I was talking to this guy, sitting next to me at the, at dinner. And we start talking to him. He's like, oh, yeah, you know, I'm rolling to like RC stuff. So, we start talking electronics and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: And he's like, and then eventually he comes around and he's like, he's like, oh, KiCad? He's like, I've watched your videos before. And I'm like, yeah, I bet you've watched more of my co-host before. He's like, yeah, I've watched that crazy Aussie dude all the time. That's the first time it's ever happened to me in like real life. Really? It was, yeah, man.

Dave Jones: That was, it was weird. It was weird. Yep, I'm famous on the internet, dude.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah, you get the t-shirt. Yeah. So, yeah, what's up with this ceramic capacitor thing? What drove, what drove the ultimate reason to make this video? I mean, I watched the video. It was a good video. I liked it.

Dave Jones: Oh, I, no, it's one of the ones that's been on my list forever.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, it's, it's, yeah, I just got around. I don't know. I just, a whim one day and I went, oh yeah, I'll do that. I remember that. Yeah. I had an idea to do that video and I just get in the mindset of wanting to do it and I just did it. So, no, nothing prompted it as such. It just, you know, pops in there. Yeah. I was kind of overdue for a fundamental Friday, you know, so, yeah. And I thought it's, the reason it was on my list is because it's one of those more obscure topics that not many people know about, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: And, um, yeah, you know, it is a fundamental thing, but yeah, a lot of people don't know about it. And then somebody, I don't know, you know, I shouldn't complain about the individual comments on YouTube, but somebody complained, well, a bit sick of these fundamental Friday videos. You never do one. I'm paraphrasing, never do one that I, that doesn't, that, that doesn't surprise me. I know everything in these fundamental videos and I'm going, well, yeah. Like they're fundamental. I know, it's right. It's in the title, you know, Fundamental Friday and, you know. Right, right, right. And, and this one's about as sort of obscure as you can get for a fundamental thing, I think. I mean, there's not too many, you know, fundamental things out there that you're, you know, your educated engineer wouldn't know. And this might be one of them. Um, I know there's a lot of people out there, even experienced engineers who don't know that, that a, that a, a capacitor value in, in capacitance can change with voltage. So, you know, I'm sorry, but that's the best I can do. No, yeah, that's good, man.

Chris Gammell: That's good. I mean, you're right. I mean, it's always that, it's always that, that struggle between, you know, what people, what the broad market knows, what, what the experts know, right? I mean, or what the experienced people know. Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: You know.

Chris Gammell: I, uh, I had an experience last week, right? So I was, so I've been working on this ADC, right? So part of the BenchBuddy, the thing I've been working on.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And I've been doing a lot of this stuff live. And I tell you, I, you know, like I've had, I've had some struggles with digital parts before, you know, throwing spy commands. So it's, it's a spy based ADC. It's two channel. It's actually a pretty nice little part. It's a two channel. It's on the BenchBuddy. It's two channel ADC. So it's two separate ADCs. Um, yep. It could do 64 kilo samples. It can do 24 bit. It's actually meant for the power market.

Dave Jones: Have they each got their own spy bus?

Chris Gammell: No, no. Same spy bus. Right. So share. But you can stream. You can go. So you can actually do block reads from like, so you do six bytes at a time. You do three bytes from the first ADC, three bytes from the second. So you can stream pretty quickly actually. And, um, and so, you know, like going through all this stuff and trying, trying to ping it with spy, spy bus stuff. And I'm obviously very shitty at this stuff. Yeah. And, uh, and so like, honestly, I made like probably six or seven videos of me trying all these different things and everything else like that.

Dave Jones: Ah, right.

Chris Gammell: You know, just, and it finally, I ended up putting on my, my, my scope that has the, the new scope that has the, the digital input as well with the, the bus readout and all the fancy stuff. And I'm like, I have to try it.

Dave Jones: So it took you seven videos to dick around to get to that point where you use the tool you should have used to start with. Well, yeah, but you know, like, but there's value in look.

Chris Gammell: I was using a low end tool, right? As well.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: You know, and so there's a lot of learning in there, right? Kind of going back to that thing we were talking about earlier about do you show everything or do you show the results?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: And so I put it on this fancy tool and it still didn't work. Right. So it's still. Right. Was crap. So basically I was throwing, I was throwing the, the, you know, the address command at it. You know, usually there's like a control register or stuff like that. You said, send the address and what to do there, read or write kind of thing. And I could see that. And then nothing afterwards, nothing coming back. Right. And I'm like, what is going on here? I must've, you know, I had a lot of soldering problems with it as well. Cause I had put the wrong footprint down, as I mentioned last week. Like, and so one night I, I had made like three videos and I gave up and I went upstairs and I was talking to my wife about it and she, and she, you know, I don't remember what, I honestly don't remember what she said about it. And I just had one of those like, it was like snap moments. And I'm like, holy crap, the reset's been on the whole time.

Dave Jones: Oh my God. The, the, the pin, the reset pin.

Chris Gammell: The reset pin was, was, was held high the whole time. Cause it was actually, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't initialize properly. Cause it's, you know, an active low reset and you know, like the same shit that happens every single time, every time a part that doesn't work right. It's always the same thing.

Dave Jones: It's an active low reset. Active low reset. So what's the problem?

Chris Gammell: Uh, or no, sorry. It was low. I'm sorry. Yeah. It was the, the uninitialized was low. That's what it was. Yeah. So it was, it was active low reset and it was uninitialized low. And so that's what it was. And I went and read it and I'm just like, and so I like, I've, I've talked to my wife and I went back downstairs and I like raced back downstairs and I read it and I'm like, I'm going to bed. You know, it's just one of those. Everybody's had these, right? Where you're just like that one thing. Of course, of course. You keep throwing everything you have at it and it's just.

Dave Jones: And you spend days and days and days and it's something, you know, ridiculously simple. It's so dumb. That if you methodically went through the checklist, you would have found it, but you don't, you know, because, well. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I guess so.

Dave Jones: It just doesn't occur to you at the time that it could be so simple.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right. It's, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I, I have to say though, I, I, and I always say this too, like I'd rather have, you know, even though I wasted probably, you know, a solid eight to 10 hours on that kind of thing. Yeah. It really was.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's always a better mistake than like, it's always better than like, oh, you ended up grounding your, your five volt power rail or something like that. You know, like when you actually have those, those much harder to fix problems that, that gets much worse, but.

Dave Jones: And, and you were convinced it must be a protocol issue, right? Exactly. You were convinced that the chip, oh, I've got my protocol wrong. And, and that's why the chip's not talking back to me.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know, there's data going in, but there's nothing coming out. So that's why, that's what it must be.

Chris Gammell: Well, no, I was convinced it was a soldering issue because I had so much trouble with the soldering and, and I replaced the part twice and, you know, like everything like that. Okay. But yeah, man. Yeah. But you're right. Like that, the mindset of like you, you convince yourself, right? You convince yourself it's gotta be this, it's gotta be this thing that's wrong, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then when it's, when you test it and then you try, you know, it's this, this, you know, hypothesis that you prove or disprove. And once you disprove all the hypotheses, you know, what's, what's the Sherlock saying? It's a, once you remove all things, the only logical thing is the impossible or whatever it is. I don't remember what the saying was. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. You know.

Dave Jones: And, and, and often like, you know, sometimes you're too clever for your own good because you can think if you're an experienced engineer, you can think of all of these things that could possibly be and you just go deeper down that rabbit hole of, you know, and rather than if you were, you know, if you weren't experienced at this, you might come along and go, oh, check the reset pin, you know? And like, bang. Or check all the pins, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you're, you know, and, and it's fixed in a minute. There's no issue. But yeah, sometimes you can be too clever for your own good, too experienced for your own good.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Totally. I lost count the number of times that's happened.

Chris Gammell: I know. I know.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I've been meaning to make that. You know, I asked you, I asked you about that at one point. I remember on the show asking about checklists and I really do need to make a checklist about that kind of thing because there are, there is that standard set of things that need to get done, you know, that standard.

Dave Jones: You're right.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I thought it.

Dave Jones: There's an infinite number of.

Chris Gammell: Well, of course.

Dave Jones: Permutations of the whole thing. So. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's interesting reading about like, so I've been on a lot of planes, you know, since I've been traveling and stuff. You know, you read about like pilots and maintenance and a lot of stuff for, for these safety critical things. They all talk about it. You know, as much as we think that, you know, not even just experts, but we're intermediate people or, you know, we think we know what we're doing.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Even the experts, right. The, the best, the, the seven 87 pilots and airplanes, they still use checklists because it's that important.

Dave Jones: Exactly. No. Otherwise, yeah, they'd fall into the same trap we do. Oh yeah. I mean, you'd mentally think, yeah, I've totally checked that the landing gear is down. You know, and they'd more whack.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know. Right.

Chris Gammell: What's that scraping sound, Dave?

Dave Jones: What's that fireball coming out the back? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Totally. Oh man. No, you have to. It's a, you know, it's like the, um, submarines, you know, as anyone, you know, if you're a submariner, if you've been in the Navy, you'll, you know, that's why they repeat every command twice.

Chris Gammell: Oh really? I didn't know that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. They repeat every command twice or, you know, audible, you know, you know, all of, you know, all ahead full, you know, and I'll repeat all ahead full. Okay. You know, and it's like, so that, you know.

Chris Gammell: The one guy in the back, like what? What'd you say? What? Yeah. No. I said all ahead fall. We're like, we're going with fall, the fall line of clothing, right? All ahead fall.

Dave Jones: And, you know, and apparently you're trained, I don't know, I've never been in the military, but apparently if, you know, you're trained to always listen for this stuff. And if you don't hear the command repeated, then you, you know, I don't know, you tell someone, right? Hey, you know, something's wrong. Somebody didn't, didn't repeat the command or whatever, you know, it's because, yeah, any, because any failure at that, you know, when you're under the water like that, you're dead. Oh yeah. Safety critical stuff. So yeah, exactly. Yeah. Everything's repeated. Same with it, you know, same with the pilots, as you said, they always go through the checklist. Otherwise they're, they're human. They're going to forget something. Their mind, their subconscious is going to think that they've done something, but they haven't. Right. And, you know, crash. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know, that's the only way it works. So I don't know if you heard, I don't know, do you listen to the embedded.fm, the Alicia's podcast? So, so Jack was on recently, Jack Ansel was on there recently and he had this great bit about, about, you know, embedded engineering growing up. And, and he, you know, he talks about this a lot now actually about becoming more of a science than an art kind of thing, you know, and standardizing practice. Obviously because he writes, he writes and he speaks a lot about, about that kind of stuff. But there was a, there was a interview with him as well. He kind of wrote about it as well. You know, and it's that same kind of thing where it's like you move away from the, the, the more hacker, you know, kind of tinkerer mentality into the professional side of things. And, you know, I wonder about that with electronics too. I think a lot of people do have that. It's baked into a lot of, a lot of company cultures as well. But, you know, I find myself falling back into the, you know, the less disciplined side of things. And it's always that balance point of trying to figure out, you know, where does it lie? Can I, can I make sure that I'm, I'm doing all the important stuff? And, and, you know, it's like, you know, when you have the rigor at every single level, right? It's like, I don't need to check every, every single thing, right? I know the 1k resistors are supposed to be 1k resistors, but, you know, do I double check my Gerbers? Do I double check all the important things? You know, having the checklist where it counts, that's when it, that's when it, you know, you're, you're kind of, you kind of go pro at that point, right? That's kind of the idea. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, you know, most of the time you don't need the checklist, but it's these occasions, you know, that it'll save your bacon.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Exactly. Well, I think, I think even when you think you don't need the checklist, you still need the checklist, you know, like, and that's the crappy thing about it, right? It's like, it slows you down, but it slows you down for a reason.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Yeah. But, you know, in our industry where, you know, you can argue that it's not really needed, you know, yeah, you might waste a bit of time or a bit of money because you didn't check your PCB before, you know, you might have re-spin your board or something, but the world's not going to end.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: So, you know, people aren't going to die.

Chris Gammell: Right. And the guys over at, you know, like, there's always like the hard stuff and the soft stuff as well, like the soft stuff, like the upvirted guys did a schematic style guide, right? So style on a schematic is a soft thing, right? It's not going to change the world, but it'll make your schematics more readable. And this is actually, you know, it's a nice little style guide, right? You know, they talk about standard naming conventions and, you know, refdes type of stuff and, you know, just trying to get things up and running. They're doing it as a service for their users as well. So, you know, it's a nice little document about that kind of thing. It's the same kind of thing. That's the softer side of things. But then the harder side of things was, did you check, did you check that the reference designators all match and that you don't have, you know, a BT part that isn't a battery, right? Or something like that. Yeah. You know, that would be the hard check at that point, you know, assuming that you formalize these things. And I think it changes as well over time as, you know, so you think about, I think about like someone like you, Dave, who has, you know, it's just you, right? And you can do it however you want to, right? But then as you, if you, if you, you know, if you hired someone or you hired four people or 10 people, whatever, like that, as you grow in size, that, that standardization also changes. You need to start expanding out as well. And it starts to change, you know, it starts to become more, more required in order to make a uniform across, across the stuff, across the company or whatever.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Totally agree. You have some interesting stuff. Where are you headed? You're headed somewhere tonight. We're actually going to end a little bit earlier tonight, which is... Yeah.

Dave Jones: We're going to finish our thing on time. On time. Okay. Okay. Yep. I've got to bugger off. Well, it's, whoa, my timer just kicked over on the one hour record mark, but I'm not sure if the show will be exactly right. No, I've got to cut some crap out of here.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Got to cut out the fat. Where are you going? Tell everybody where you're going.

Dave Jones: No, no, no. I'm just headed. No. Oh, no? I'm headed out.

Chris Gammell: Nothing fancy? Okay. I thought you were going somewhere fancy. Okay. Well, yeah. I'm going to go explore San Diego more. Cool. Yeah. All right. Have fun. Glad we got our recording in, of course, as always.

Dave Jones: Don't go to SeaWorld. It's lame.

Chris Gammell: Okay. I'm going to go to the zoo instead. The zoo's awesome. Oh, okay. Yeah, I've heard the zoo's good. Yeah. Cool. All right, man. Cool. Well, it's good talking to you. Have fun. And next week, we'll have Noah Feehan on from the New York Times Innovation Lab. So, we'll get questions for him as well. All right. All right, man.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time.

Chris Gammell: See you. See you.

Speaker ?: See you.

Chris Gammell: Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diego, which, of course, in German means a whale's vagina.