#233 – Glass and Gongkai GSM - Unzymotic Ursidae Upbuilding

Chris Gammell: This is the Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded January 20th, 2015. Episode 233. Unzumonic. Ursidae. Upbuilding.

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

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

Dave Jones: I'm back from holidays.

Chris Gammell: Nice. How'd it go?

Dave Jones: It was alright. It's never long enough.

Chris Gammell: Of course. Of course.

Dave Jones: Had to get back to the real world, you know?

Chris Gammell: Well, you know, you go on holidays sometimes. Do you want... Can I sell you a camera? What? Yeah, I have a camera I can sell you. It's actually mounted on your face. I actually don't need it anymore.

Dave Jones: Oh, the Google Glass. What have they done? They've, like, cancelled production? What's the story there?

Chris Gammell: So, I... I don't know. I got some email from those. And there's been a bunch of stuff in the news about it, too. But basically, it's like... Apparently, they've been selling them this whole time. And they said, Well, we're not going to be selling it anymore. And they handed over the whole program to the guy they hired when they bought Nest. Tony... Is it Fidel? I don't know his last name. His last name rings to Bill. Yeah. But basically, the designer guy that ran started Nest. And they're basically like, Yep, we'll see you when we see you, kind of thing. And that's it. I mean, at least publicly. I mean, previously, they had talked about moving away from the TI chips they have in there. I think they had the... What was on the BeagleBone? The BeagleBone. I think it was something like... No, maybe not that one. Oh, yeah, the OMAP. The 3400. Yeah, the OMAP. Yeah, I think it was the OMAP. Yep. And they recently...

Dave Jones: Why are they moving away from the processor? What's that going to gain them?

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I think it was... I saw like a month or two ago that they had announced the move to Intel. And I think that they said because of the advantages of the low power stuff because they're on some new process. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: That would probably be the Intel Quark processor. Yeah, maybe. I would be guessing.

Chris Gammell: I don't remember. I'll try and... I'll find a thing for the show notes, but I don't remember why. So...

Dave Jones: Anyway, so like they're dropping like support, like actually developing new cool little apps for it and all that sort of stuff. It's all...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I mean, that's been slowing down anyways. It's just, you know, it's just... It's just done. So... Yep. No surprises. So there you go.

Dave Jones: That was one of the most hyped things ever.

Chris Gammell: No, please. Google freaking Glass. I'd say... So I... You know, I said from the beginning that I think it was kind of like Segway that it was like, you know, it's this new technology and it's going to have all these, you know, great uses and it definitely was hyped, but I don't think it was hyped as much. And... But it's just going to find these really niche uses that...

Dave Jones: It wasn't hyped much. They had people jumping out of freaking airplanes at the launch, you know, landing on the roof and then coming down. I mean... That's true.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's true.

Dave Jones: What do you freaking want? Just like a SpaceX launch or something? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: No, that's true. Yeah, and I guess they had that barge and everything. So... I don't know. I think... So personally, I think, you know, as a user, as a continuing owner, it's going to find commercial uses. Not commercial, sorry. Industrial uses. And I've been telling that to everyone I talk to about it. You know, it's just like... Got a guy going out to the field. You know, if you ruggedize this thing a bit more, send a guy out to the field, you know, get some standard operating procedures, stuff like that. Maybe build it into a hard hat instead of having it built, you know, actually just in glasses. That kind of thing. Right. Like, that's legit. You know, like, that's really legit. And that's the kind of stuff where there's a lot of money there, too. You think about, like, all of the oil fields that are up in North Dakota now, in the States. Like, there's just money hand over fist up there. It's just crazy. So, maybe less so with the oil prices dropping, but whatever. And, you know, other things like doctors. You know, there's a bunch of startups that are using it for doctors. One of my buddies has a doctor that has it as well. And he loves it for that kind of stuff just because there's a lot of... You know, if you're trying to be a human being and you have to stop and write stuff down or type stuff, it's just that user interaction stuff is really tough. Now, obviously, some people are probably sitting there laughing at me thinking, yeah, you're a human being with a computer on your face, but I'd say that's better than turning and, you know, typing it on the keyboard. So, it's kind of a balance there. And then, you know, play attendance, stuff like that.

Dave Jones: This reminds me, I tweeted this the other day. I'll have to find a link to it, but there's a... Yeah, you had another bloody Kickstarter campaign, right? It's a personal home robot. I can't remember the name. I'm currently scrolling through my Twitter list. Yeah, you saw it. Okay. Yeah, and, like, I'm looking at them going, oh, groan, you know? Yeah. Like, what does it do? Like, it's just going to be a useless toy that gets in the way. I can picture you, like, playing with it for a couple of days and then just kicking the bloody thing aside because it's so freaking annoying or whatever, or just getting in the way or just not refined enough or whatever, you know? They make it sound great, of course, in the marketing pitch video. Right? But I, you know, well, you're probably too young to remember this, but right back in the 80s, right, it was, you know, personal robots were, like, you know, going to be the future, right? That was the future. Everyone was going to have a personal robot. Yeah. And, you know, everyone thought, oh, yeah, that'd be fantastic. You have this home robot, you know, that wanders around, it brings you your beer and it, you know, it plays music. Well, back then, you know, we didn't have the internet. We didn't have the connected. Right, of course, of course. Nobody had thought about that sort of stuff, you know? Right. But it would, you know, it'd play your favourite music and, I don't know, it'd sweep and dust and do all sorts of, you know, weird and wonderful things and now I'm just thinking, like, I used to believe that was possible and now I'm thinking, it's just probably not. Yeah. Not for the foreseeable future. It's just, like, as, like, I'll whack a figure on, I'll say, in 20 years like I did with the chip printer, right? I'll whack a number on that and, like, it's just not going to happen. Well, I feel like all of those things are going to be too annoying.

Chris Gammell: Right, all of those things, all of those predictions are always, like, over the top, right? But eventually, things become much more subtle, right? You know, it's not like Oh, of course. We don't have, like, I think about, like, watching, like, sci-fi and stuff like that. There's always these big consoles and, you know, like, or if you, like, look at old Back to the Future 2 and stuff like that or I was re-watching, what's that Schwarzenegger movie where they're on Mars? Oh, right, yes. Total Recall, right? They have, like, pay phones that are video, right? And it's just, like, it doesn't really jive with, you know, they took what they have and then they made these predictions based on extensions of that. Like, oh, of course, you'd like to see someone's face. And the truth is, we have that. You know, I use it all the time now for, I use Skype and I use, you know, Google Hangouts, but it's just subtle. You know, it's built into my laptop, it's built into my phone. You know, I Skype with my nephew. Like, it's like, these things are, they're here, right? It's just, like, but it's not with Fanfare. It's not, like, a standout new thing. It's just, yeah, it's just here, you know? And I think the same thing for, like, robotics. Like, your car is going to be a robot or your car already is a robot, technically. And it's going to be robotic before you have a servant, you know, a robot butler, right? I think that that's ultimately what's going to end up happening. And it's just, oftentimes, I think even with glass, right, it's technology looking for a solution instead of, wait, is that how it goes? Yeah, yes. It's just wanting to use the technology and then trying to shoehorn it into problems that don't necessarily exist, right? Same thing here. Like, I think about glass and one of the things that, you know, they touted about it a lot was, like, life-logging. Well, there's actually a product out there called Narrative and if you look at it, it's, that's what it is. I mean, it's just, it sits on your shirt and I met, when I was out in San Francisco, I met Justin, this guy who had it, and it just sits on your shirt and I had glass on. He's like, yeah, well, I've been recording this whole time and no one even says anything because it's just a little square that sits on your shirt. It's not like, it's not in your face. It's subtle.

Dave Jones: Does it record audio

Chris Gammell: or video or what? So the way it works, it's like, it does, it's actually pretty smart. It's like, every 30 seconds, it just takes a quick shot just to kind of remind you where you are and then it backs it up to like, I think through your phone, it backs it up to a cloud server and then basically it's like, you know when like, you're at the end of the day, it's like, what the hell did I do today? You can just go back through and I'm like, I have a terrible memory. That's the kind of good thing it's good for and then if you like, tap and hold it, it'll do like a 30 second video or something like that. Oh, I got it. Right. You know, but it's just like, it's more subtle technology that makes more sense. I mean like, for that one thing, it makes a lot of sense.

Dave Jones: Well, this is a product idea that I had years ago before all the, you know, before smartphones and everything else. It was like, yeah, I would, like it was a similar idea, right? It'd like, it'd sit on your shirt or it'd be like a little, little thing that, that sits in your pocket or something like that and I couldn't figure out how to do video. That was, you know, that was too hard back then but I thought it would record audio every day, 24 seven and it would compress everything, you know, super compress it, blah, blah, blah and then so you can actually, if you actually forgot, you know, what you said during the day, or you could just talk, you know, you could just like, oh, I've got to remember to do this and it would, you know, and it would actually capture that.

Chris Gammell: I'm predicting Dave was in a rough relationship at this point. Maybe he was getting caught up and saying things that he didn't, he doesn't remember saying. It sounds like that kind of, that kind of device. Oh,

Dave Jones: goodness.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I wanted it for like, just capturing ideas. Right. Because I, like I've got one of those, you know, note apps on my phone, you know, like supposedly, you know, like if you've got an idea, you can just put it down like a post-it note style thing. Yeah. And I never use it because it's just like, I just couldn't be bothered.

Chris Gammell: It's kind of the flow of your life. You know, it's not there. exactly.

Dave Jones: So I couldn't be bothered. Whereas if I can just say, oh yeah, that's a good idea. Like, and I, that's it. And it's captured. I know it's captured. I don't have to worry about it, you know? And yeah, that was sort of the idea. I don't know if anyone's ever done that, but then, you know, then it becomes an information sorting problem. Right. Yeah. Exactly. You can design the hardware to record it and compress it. No, no problems whatsoever and get a day's battery life out of that. You know, or even a week. That's, that's no problem. But yeah, how do you analyze the info? You know, that's like, yeah. Right. You'd have to have speech recognition and then that'd have to be, you know, it'd have to be auto uploaded to your PC and then it'd have to automatically process it because you could speech process inside the device and it'd take too much power, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know? And it's interesting these days too,

Chris Gammell: because just how the constraints have changed as well, right? Because these days, the constraints are not storage, right? Storage is super easy these days. And even moving to video, it's not easy, but it's easier with the amount of, you know, CCD sensors that are out there and stuff like that. It's just a mad, I think power and power is probably one of the biggest ones. Oh,

Dave Jones: power is everything. This is going to be the next resolution in the smartwatches, right? Smartwatches have failed. They've basically, everyone's tried them. Apple's tried them. Everyone's tried them. They're basically all failed, right? They're gimmicky because their battery life is shit. They're trying to do too much. And the reason is because they want to do everything in the watch. They want to process. So they've got big ass processors in there and they're doing everything. Well, that's the wrong way to go about it. The next generation of smartwatches, which maybe have a chance of succeeding, is a much longer battery life because there's basically bugger all processing in them. All they do is act as a terminal for your smartphone, right? So all it does, it doesn't process is anything. All it does is just, you know, it sends key presses back. It doesn't even process the key presses on there. It sends it back to your phone and all that sort of jazz. And it just acts as like a dumb terminal kind of thing. So no heavy duty processing on there. So it just acts as like a video screen and a terminal. You know, it's just like back in the seventies, right? You know, like terminals. Yeah, your phone is your mainframe. Yeah. Yeah. Your computers didn't do anything. They didn't do anything processing wise. And everyone's trying to do that. You know, they're trying to do all this heavy duty processing inside a freaking watch. It's just, it's just not possible.

Chris Gammell: Well, and it's interesting too, because I think, you know, that's one of the biggest shifts that I see. It's like, especially in terms of like thinking about developing products and thinking about, you know, where technology is going in the future. And, you know, it's all still, it's going to be based on the smartphone forever, right? I mean, not forever, but it's, it's like you have large battery pack with large processing power with unbelievable, you know, networking capabilities. It's like, okay.

Dave Jones: And phones are getting bigger. You know, everyone's getting these phablet things, right? These phone tablet, you know, bloody six inch phablet. No, I reckon my current one's too big. It doesn't fit in my bloody pocket. Yeah. You know, my, my four inch Nexus.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. You'll need to like wear a mini backpack to carry your phone.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's just, ah,

Chris Gammell: it's European carry. Is it,

Dave Jones: is it, is it almost like an unsolvable problem currently? Because like people want to do all this shit, but they don't want the inconvenience yet. They want the, yet they don't want to have to, you know, charge their battery twice a day. You know, you've got to at least get a, uh, you know, a full one day's battery life out of your smartphone. My, my wife's current's new one I bought has got two days full battery life out, like doing everything, you know,

Dave Jones: like,

Dave Jones: and yeah, they're going that way. You know, they, they're making them a bit thicker because they need to put bigger batteries in them. Well, yeah,

Chris Gammell: batteries aren't getting any better. Unfortunately, that's, that's kind of the, the lagging thing.

Dave Jones: I know. And yeah, you know, you can squeeze, you know, but even if they get like a, a 50% improvement in battery life, you know, it's still not staggering.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, and we're, you know, reaching the limits of how much processing power you can get for a given, uh, how much processing, yeah, power you can get for a given amount of power consumption. Right. And, uh, it's, you know, the curve is flattening out on these sorts of things. And I don't know, I just can't see any way, any magical way forward for these types of devices. Well,

Chris Gammell: my solution is have a spare battery, you know, sitting around,

Dave Jones: right.

Chris Gammell: Carry around 16,000 milliamp hours with me.

Dave Jones: I was going to do a debunking video. Someone pointed me to a Kickstarter, uh, campaign of like a, um, a watch like a, like it's like a band, you know, one of these bands, it's like a power band and it's got like a solar cell on it and it powers the internal rechargeable battery so that you can power up your phone, you know, it's like bullshit. It's just completely bullshit. You know, you can't get enough solar power in there to, you know, charge a, charge a piece of wet string, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: It's crazy. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: So speaking of, uh, speaking of phones, we have two things that I want to talk about. the first is a little selfish. Uh, I announced today what the actual project is going to be for, uh, contextual electronics. Cause that just started. Uh, people can sign up now, but actually,

Dave Jones: it's going to be a mobile phone.

Chris Gammell: It's actually not going to be a mobile phone. It's actually because I have too many mobile phones sitting around that are just like, I don't know about you. Do you have a graveyard? Yeah. Yeah. There's a graveyard. Yeah. So I have a graveyard and I also work remotely. And so what I'm doing is I'm like, well, I can't afford one of those telepresence robots, but I can make a little cart for mine. And so it's, it's a little, uh, a little robotic cart for a smartphone that the smartphone can also control. And, uh, so motor drivers and battery controllers and wireless. So it uses the U.S.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's wireless. Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. That's a, that's a fairly decent project. Are you going to develop it yourself? Or are you going to use existing libraries and things like that? Well, there's quite a few people who've, who've done those. Yeah, no,

Chris Gammell: of course, of course. No, the idea is to build, I mean, we're going to build on top of some stuff, but the big thing is, you know, design the battery charger circuit and lay out that board. And, and basically, you know, even if we were replicating some things, that's okay. It's about learning, right? Um, or I think the higher level stuff, the, the software side, obviously, uh, that'll be leaning on others. But, and, and so that's kind of the interesting thing too, is, is, uh, is looking at what, what's available in the marketplace and, and, and actually, uh, building around that, right? Cause that's what a lot of people do. We design around development boards and we design around a lot of the things like that. And, um, and just kind of balancing all those things. So, yeah, I'm excited and cool.

Dave Jones: That's interesting. Are you like, are you going to actually design it before you start or is it going to be, and as you go? No, no, it's as you go.

Chris Gammell: Because the big thing, the big change is that, so the big thing is, is, is really like, we're only going to pick one thing to work on it to start with. And, and so like, that's probably going to be the battery circuit to start with because that's kind of a definable problem and we can test it once the board gets back in, stuff like that. And then as the board goes out for fab, we can also start working on another module. That's the kind of the idea. So it's all parallel development, just like any other electronics design. Like basically that's the difference between the old contextual electronics and the new one. Um, got it. To be completely honest, I've never talked about this before. So, I forget why I w I was thinking about like, I was thinking about telepresence solutions, right? Because I work remotely, right? I work out in California a lot of the time now and I'm on, I'm on video conferences all the time. And like, it's annoying, right? I mean, it's just like, it's just stuff that people have to deal with in telecommuting age. And, and I was thinking about like interesting things. One idea was like a, like a, a blimp, like making like a blimp and maybe trying to make like really light electronics with like a projector. And I saw that actually Samsung did that at a show, but the real problem there is that you need helium and that's expensive. And, you know, the balloon dies over time.

Chris Gammell: so that's tough. Uh, you know, quadcopters are too noisy, stuff like that. And so this is just kind of a, this is just a, uh, compromise really just to have something to build that could be, you know, a testing ground. Cause if you build a platform, you can build on top of it. But one of the things that I, I couldn't stop laughing. I'm even laughing already. It's going to be funny folks. I'm sure. No, it was stupid. It was so stupid. So I was looking at these smartphones. I'm like, okay, I can do something with this. I can definitely have like a Skype into a phone, whatever. But I imagined walking into a meeting and then being like, Oh, is everybody here? And like, Oh no, no, no, no. Bob's coming in and he's bringing Chris with him. Right. And you know, thinking like, Oh, he's going to bring this, this little cart in with a phone on it. But instead building the phone into like a stuffed animal, like a bear and like being in a meeting where your face is on, is on a bear and like having these serious business conversations. And then having, they have to respond to the bear. I just, I know I sound like, like an insane person right now, but like, just,

Dave Jones: this is, this is not a new idea. You had this idea a year ago. You told me about it. Yeah. Oh, you told me about it. Did I talk about the show? Squirrel thing. We were going to, no, no, no, no, no, no,

Dave Jones: no. That's right.

Chris Gammell: We were talking. That's right. Yeah. So you and I were talking, Oh, cats out of the bag. Sorry, Dave.

Dave Jones: No, no, yeah, I know. No, that's right.

Chris Gammell: We were going to do that for an April fool's joke.

Dave Jones: That's right. Okay. Let's let, Oh yeah. Yeah. We were going to do like a kickstart campaign,

Chris Gammell: weren't we? Yeah. We ran out of time. That's what it was. Okay.

Dave Jones: And who did we contact? We tried, we tried to contact, who did we try and contact and we couldn't get them to be involved in time.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I don't remember.

Dave Jones: We wanted to make it.

Chris Gammell: Maybe it was Kickstarter. I don't know. Or maybe IndieGo. I don't know.

Dave Jones: It was Kickstarter or was the Australian Possible or something like that. Oh, that's right. It was Possible. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It was the Possible website. So we tried to contact the CEO. I forgot where that came from. Yeah. And so that's,

Chris Gammell: that's actually, so a year ago, that's what kicked off this idea thinking about. That's right. Thinking about teleporting stuff. Yeah. And now it's actually taken form as a, as a real thing. Now, of course I could try and build a bear over top of a robotic cart. Right. And it would move around.

Chris Gammell: um.

Dave Jones: Didn't, didn't you order a bear? Didn't you order a bear on Amazon? Because like, it was so close to April Fool's and we were going to do it like in like 48 hours or something. Yeah. We were going to do this mock-up and it was just an impossible schedule.

Chris Gammell: No, I didn't order a bear because I actually, I had, I had a stuffed animal here that my dog chews on. I was just going to use that.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: But yeah. Yeah. We were, we were cracking up thinking about, Hey, Kickstarter. Today we're here to announce the, what was it? We had a stupid name for it too. Yeah.

Dave Jones: We had a stupid name, didn't we? Yeah. This was the, was it last year or the year before?

Chris Gammell: No, it was last year. Yeah. All right. This is all just like inside joke now. It's stupid, but I don't know. I know. Every time I start thinking about like walking to a conference room and like, it really, like even better, like you walk in and be like, Oh, well the boss is on the, is on the video conference. And then like someone like turns the chair around, you know, it's just embarrassing.

Dave Jones: It's the bear with the phone with the,

Chris Gammell: with the face. It's got to have a face, right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Everything about that makes me laugh.

Dave Jones: I know. I know. It's great. I thought it was a great idea at the time and I thought, yeah, let's do it. You know, we had 48 hours. Can we do it? Can we mock up something? You know? Yeah. I can rush to the toy store and buy a bear and I've got an old phone and we can, you know, yeah. And yeah.

Chris Gammell: So the idea though, so for at least for contextual electronics, it's like, uh, even if, even if the, the cart doesn't work out or if the phone can't properly connect, stuff like that. The idea is, you know, it's all module based now. So, you know, the battery stuff can be reused. Motor stuff can be reused. Uh, micro stuff can be reused, all that stuff. Right. And that's kind of, that's how, just how we operate. So, you know, like people reuse their, their, their pieces all the time and, and it's good. You can just kind of build up this library of this. It's like a stable of, of, uh, of sub projects that you can reuse on other stuff. So, so that's kind of the new method. Got it. So yeah.

Dave Jones: So that was the one thing. Speaking of Kickstarter campaigns, oh, this is brilliant. I, is it, is it new? No, it's, it's been out for a while, November 18th. Right. Um, the, there's a new crowdfunding site folks. It's called work harder.

Chris Gammell: Instead of Kickstarter, it's work harder. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Work harder. And just watch the video. It's just,

Chris Gammell: yeah,

Dave Jones: it's brilliant. Yeah. It's got like Reggie Watts.

Chris Gammell: Can we tell them the premise or should we let them? No, no, no. Just let them all do it. It's a spoof. It's a good spoof though. I liked it. Watch it folks.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's great. Anyway,

Chris Gammell: the other thing I want to mention about phones, uh, cause I, I said, there's two things about phones. One was, one was my thing. The other was, um, I looked back on the list. This is about like 21 days ago now. Uh, but, but the talk that Bunny and Zobs did at, at, uh, the chaos communication Congress, uh, it was about the, the, the Gankai phone. And I just wanted to call out how brilliant, uh, this, this was, this post. Obviously we've had Bunny on the show before, you know, brilliant guy. Me and Dave were talking about before. We're like, we're like, what, what drive, like what drives these guys? That's ultimately what I was thinking too. It's just like, holy crap. Like if you look at like the, the, the ROM dumps they're doing.

Dave Jones: They get so much done in the amount of time that they do. It's just, you know, they must not have lies outside of doing this.

Chris Gammell: It's a multi-year project right now, but, but, but basically, you know, they, it's, it's, it's, it's such a well-written and, and, uh, interesting post. I highly, highly recommend it. Um, but, but the basic premise is they, uh, one of the chips out there, the MediaTek 2620, I think it was. I'm struggling to find the link now. Um, but basically over in China, uh, you know, you can get, you can get schematics and all this information for, for phones. And that's how they build like a wide variety of, of interesting low cost phones is basically it's like a, it's like a starter pack with a, with all this, you know, quote unquote, illegal information that's out there. And I say quote unquote, because I don't know. Uh, and, uh, and, but basically they started taking that and then, and then trying to reverse engineer it because there is a decent enough amount of information out there. They took it and then tried to start, uh, finding a way to access this, this, this low cost chipset. Cause then that could produce a lot of interesting things. Um, so, so they,

Dave Jones: so they're basically trying to steal. Well, steal is the wrong word, but well, you know, open up a closed design from a Chinese chip maker. It's kind of ironic.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if meat is media tech Chinese. I don't know if they are, but it's, it's definitely low. Whatever it is. It's low cost. Right. So he talks about it's a 62, M2,

Speaker ?: M2,

Chris Gammell: M2 6220. He says 364 megahertz, arm seven, eight mega, mega bits, no megabytes of Ram. And then spy, I2C, LCD controller. All the chips. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And they can buy three bucks in single quantities.

Chris Gammell: Well, GSM is the big one. I think, I think GSM is probably the most important thing. So, but yeah, three bucks, right. That's how they had the $12 phone that they wrote about a long time ago. So, and we talked about that on the show a while ago, but yeah, I mean, that's crazy, right? If you have that, that becomes, if you, if that chip ever did become opened up, right? Why do you need other chips? Right. I mean, that's kind of what it comes down to and that's why they're doing it. So, it's, it's, it's very interesting. And, and the other really interesting thing about, about this is obviously Bunny did the hacking the Xbox as well, but it's kind of like, you know, they kind of do this legal jujitsu. I was saying kind of like, well, because of this and this and this precedence. And, and it was kind of, I get kind of see Bunny sitting there like, don't sue us. Don't sue us. Don't sue us. Don't sue us. Because they're publishing some stuff that obviously they didn't, they don't want media tech doesn't want publishing. Because it's not. Yep. Public. And you have to sign on these NDAs and stuff. But at the same time, it's like.

Dave Jones: And he's saying here in the article that you can basically only get it if you buy or speak Chinese. Right. And that's, you know, pretty much it. So, yeah. It basically is limited to the Chinese market. Yeah. Pretty much.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And, I mean, that enables a lot of things over there, right? Like, I mean, if you look at the availability of low-cost phones and stuff like that, but it's, it's kind of crazy. one thing he does call out at the end of the article and there's also a talk that we can post in there and I think we posted that on the forum when that was up there, it's also known as Fernvale I think that's the actual project name but Seed Studio has a GSM plugin now, I think it's a shield that goes on the Arduino actually I got to see that when I was out

Dave Jones: A few people have done these, Jonathan Oxler from Freetronics, he did a GSM Arduino phone as well which I showed at the previous Maker Faire or something how much does it cost? I think that's the main thing it wasn't designed to be low cost none of these Arduino things are particularly like really ultra low cost, they're all sort of just a fun thing to buy and hack around with so I don't know, it might cost you know 40 or 50 bucks or something

Chris Gammell: I don't think, I think the well no that's the thing, this new one the Seed one is, it's using the MediaTek as well so it's like, it's got like all the same stuff

Dave Jones: well how much does it cost?

Chris Gammell: I'm trying to find it now

Dave Jones: right, well Seed Studio usually still sell stuff reasonably cheap

Chris Gammell: yeah, yeah, yeah I mean yeah, Seed's kind of like the I think about them as kind of like the maker window into the east kind of thing, you know, it's like they take a lot of this technology they make it friendlier they help to manufacture it they help to procure it, that kind of thing and maybe you can't buy it I don't know I can't seem to find it but it does have a MediaTek thing on it so and I mean, that's a good service and it's worth paying that to see, you know, they do good stuff there so yeah, can't seem to find the dollar dollar amount so but yeah, Bunny does mention that one as well so that kind of helps to open up that you know, it's like basically it's like you you know, they have like an abstracted interface then you can found it oh?

Dave Jones: 60 US dollars

Chris Gammell: oh, well I guess I was wrong

Dave Jones: oh sorry, no, that's GPRS shield oh, dull

Chris Gammell: next week on The Empire Dave and Chris Google for stuff

Dave Jones: no, it's a GSM yeah, it's a GSM shield

Chris Gammell: let's see I don't know if someone you're talking to I'm just going to read the wiki page here open source, high performance for wearables and IoT it's based on the MediaTek 2502

Dave Jones: no, I don't know if this is based on the media

Chris Gammell: with high performance Wi-Fi MT5931 and GPS chipsets MT3332 so yeah, it's got a bunch of crap on there right so interesting

Dave Jones: yeah, sure it's not the right one anyway

Chris Gammell: oh, wait he's found it? oh, it's 80 oh my god yeah, it's 80 bucks

Dave Jones: 80 bucks, there you go like, I told you it wouldn't be cheap none of these things are like, they're not just, you know rock bottom they're designed as just, you know fun things which people hack around with so they're not dirt cheap right?

Chris Gammell: yeah yeah, it's interesting too because I I really didn't have much exposure to the whole like the whole GSM network thing like like CMA was what I started with and so I didn't really ever use SIM cards or anything like that and it's interesting to me too because I just never really thought about the fact that you could just get a card and make a device that has you know

Dave Jones: I've developed GSM cards before oh you have? really? yeah, yeah yeah, Altium we did GSM Shield you know similar sort of thing right? they weren't called Shield so what you know right, right, right but like the PC104 type stuff or no, it was the custom Altium you know oh, are we talking Nanoboard? is it Nanoboard? Nanoboard, yes it's a plug-in the most useful

Chris Gammell: $4,000 kit you could ever buy

Dave Jones: yeah exactly and we did a GSM Shield for that, right I laid you know I designed a GSM thing for it and geez, went through like six revisions or something it was ridiculous what was the

Chris Gammell: what was the hard part about it?

Dave Jones: oh, it's ah, well the hard part was getting antennas are matching and stuff like that getting information on the chipset and stuff like that you know with all the NDA bullshit and all that sort of oh, interesting jazz, you know and then oh, they'd be too expensive and then you know they'd oh, they'd they would they'd discontinue that model, right we'd go oh yeah this one we can get this it's a reasonable price you know module and no they've just discontinued it oops okay, let's redesign the whole bloody thing we have to go to another manufacturer because they completely changed it

Chris Gammell: oh, oh yeah I guess

Dave Jones: we'd have to get them to customise it for us because they customised the firmware in it because it didn't allow us to access it the way we wanted to access it or something I can't remember the exact details now but yeah they wrote some custom firmware for us and it was buggy and it was just it was just it was a development nightmare it really was

Chris Gammell: yeah, I guess it is probably a pretty small subset of people that are using those chipsets because they're so tightly controlled in the first place and I think we've talked about on the show before too about like there is that what you claim to be made up but the statistic I saw where it was like 60 or 80% of phone designs are just straight from the reference design type of thing I mean just the importance of reference designs and that could obviously fit into this as well because just how difficult it is to

Dave Jones: yep

Chris Gammell: man their turn times have to be crazy too like six month design cycle type things and

Dave Jones: yep

Chris Gammell: and ultimately

Dave Jones: we did get a demo a public demo going we displayed it at the one of the trade shows I went to in the US where we had a stand but we didn't actually release it because it was we just had too many you know supply chain hiccups you know firmware sourcing you know data issues and bugs and also it was just it was just a pain in the ass it really was

Chris Gammell: well you know hardware right yeah

Dave Jones: anyway we did get it working so we had it on the stand there's probably photos out there of the stand you know we set up this demo where you can you know we put big you know this huge stand where the board was on there and you can send an SMS send an SMS to our you know NB2000 you know like and you know and it'll pop up on the LCD and here's all the code which does it and blah blah blah look how easy it is to develop for GSM and

Chris Gammell: right yeah

Dave Jones: that was the idea

Chris Gammell: that's another good example right it's like that's like a technology looking for a solution type of thing where like these days they're like yeah just like tweet to us and we'll show it on our LCD at this show right it's like right

Dave Jones: yeah yeah I mean like obviously it's smart this was yeah

Chris Gammell: it's not like yeah this was like

Dave Jones: six years ago maybe now yeah it would have been quite a while back now

Chris Gammell: yeah interesting

Dave Jones: well I've been working here three I haven't worked at Altium for three and a half years so and then it would have and now I worked at Altium for four years and it was at the early stages of that so yeah it would have been yeah it would have been six odd years ago you know so yeah back then it was hard I guess now it's easy right every man and his dog's doing a bloody GSM Arduino shield

Chris Gammell: well I don't think it's easy still but I mean maybe more prevalent anyway

Dave Jones: it's done well it's done right you can just go out and buy it and there it is you know basically anyone can just send an SMS to their Arduino and it pops up on an LCD with ten lines of code right

Chris Gammell: yeah right yeah I mean that's still I mean it's still hard to get all that stuff connected but there's definitely more resources than there were it's always the the people that start you know that's always the hardest thing the ones that are blazing the trail

Dave Jones: the ones that pioneer yep

Chris Gammell: definitely

Dave Jones: yep you want to know what's hard

Chris Gammell: what is hard

Dave Jones: landing a spacecraft on Mars that's hard

Chris Gammell: that is hard you know I got to see that live once when you thought you were seeing it live at some fancy party

Dave Jones: yeah yeah rub it in

Chris Gammell: rub it in never gonna let you live that one down

Dave Jones: oh I'm doing a fancy party you only get to watch it on the internet oh and it was like delayed by 15 minutes I know

Dave Jones: it was great anyway

Dave Jones: you know what else is hard

Chris Gammell: is landing a rocket on a flotilla or a floating ship or whatever it is a drone ship did you see that thing

Dave Jones: yeah didn't it what well it made a hard land it didn't blow up did it I don't know

Chris Gammell: I just saw the vine there was a vine like you know one of those moving moving twitter thingies where it's it was just like a short video and it's just oh right yeah yeah you didn't see that

Dave Jones: no no I haven't seen I'm looking at a thing there seems to be lots of explosiony type things happening yeah if you go to the

Chris Gammell: spacex tweeted and said like better luck next time or something like that and basically like you see this light coming in and then it's like holy crap that's a rocket you know it was just coming in it was coming in diagonally basically I think it ran out of hydraulic fluid or something like that but it was just it was

Dave Jones: right oh yeah I'm actually watching the thing you talked about now oh yeah there it is oh yeah smack boom

Chris Gammell: yep

Dave Jones: yeah alright so it tried to it almost got there it almost got there it just landed at an angle yeah I mean it's progress right I mean like it's you know yeah totally it's either that or it burns up the atmosphere that is not a fail right that is that is not like a rocket blowing up on the launch pad right you know that's like a different kind of fail that's a successful fail almost right

Chris Gammell: yeah it's a it's a move of progress it's getting there yeah yeah yeah

Dave Jones: and I think they know exactly what went wrong and you know

Chris Gammell: yeah yep yep yep anyway so Mars though you said something about Mars

Dave Jones: Mars is hard yes back in 2004 they landed the Beagle 2 which was the European space agencies probed to try and search for life and um and it um famously crashed they just didn't hear from it they don't know what happened uh you never called to it it was part of the Mars Express mission yeah you never never phone you never visit you know

Dave Jones: I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry thank you ma'am

Dave Jones: waves of guilt

Dave Jones: are rapidly flowing over me right now

Speaker ?: so

Dave Jones: so it was part of the Mars Express mission it had this little lander the Beagle 2 it was called and it was supposed to search for signs of life hence the name um you know Darwin Beagle yeah

Dave Jones: the ship

Dave Jones: anyway um yep the ship and uh yeah it was like and they it was coming through the atmosphere and they just never heard from it again um because you know after it landed it was supposed to you know lift up its antenna and talk you know and phone home and um yeah I mean if it's easy for ET to do it I mean you know

Chris Gammell: it should be seriously you know using a speaking spell and a that's a that's it umbrella was there an umbrella involved

Dave Jones: yeah umbrella that's it oh classic oh man I remember watching that as a kid and I'm going oh that was so shit and like even you know even when I was 10 years old I just knew that was garbage yeah right 83 yeah I was about 10 years old or something watching ET and yeah nah yeah it really scared the crap out of me scared the crap out of you

Chris Gammell: yeah I was weird I was afraid of weird things as a kid so

Dave Jones: that's weird

Chris Gammell: yeah sorry

Dave Jones: we all got

Chris Gammell: things man we all got things

Dave Jones: yeah so they tried anyway they tried to land this beagle too and you know it went through the atmosphere and everything was looking good and they just never heard from it never phoned home and they just I don't think they um I don't think they ever came to a real conclusive um you know conclusion about what actually happened you know whether or not they had a decent theory that was backed up with any sort of live telemetry or anything like that I don't know I'd have to go back and read the rely on memory here but yeah anyway they found it 10 years later the um the Mars um the high-rise um camera on the Mars um the Mars reconnaissance orbiter that's still there taking that's the best camera we've got but there's just it's been and mapped the planet like 50 times or something it just keeps remapping it and it's got this high-res camera on it um and they they found the thing on the surface and they thought it had like like crashed into a million pieces or like the you know the parachute failed to open or something like that and it just slammed into the you know and no but they found it and it looks like it actually soft landed properly and it deployed four of its five solar panels so one of the solar panels it looks like one of the solar panels got stuck and what was under that solar panel or the the panel that didn't open it was the antenna that was designed to pop up and then phone home so it was like oh oh yeah that's

Chris Gammell: pretty that's pretty close right one out of five

Dave Jones: exactly and you know Murphy says oh it had to be that one you know that that had the antenna of course you know and oh space is hard man I know I know and somebody on twitter said some poor guy at the European Space Agency copped a lot of flack for the failure on that thing and apparently it worked and it was something else simple that failed or something and you know and yeah I was ready there ready to phone home and yeah I landed but no the antenna was bloody covered by a metal shield or something

Chris Gammell: deflected he was phoning Jupiter instead yeah

Dave Jones: poor little beagle

Chris Gammell: anyway

Dave Jones: so yeah that's fascinating that they actually found it 10 years later that's great I love it

Chris Gammell: definitely there's been a lot of good space stuff lately I don't know I keep seeing this thing from you know Elon Musk right there's a rocket thing and obviously we talk about him a lot on here as well and no he's never coming on the show come on let's be honest folks yep let's be honest yeah we're nobody but yeah the internet solution funding Mars right so basically they're talking about like satellite internet basically and using that as a way to fund the Mars mission I thought that was pretty amazing right I don't know if you saw that thing but I haven't seen it ultimately I come away from that is like we should just kind of wait for him to figure out the next big problem he's like oh well you know hunger oh yeah he'll take that one on next or

Dave Jones: right yeah kind of important ones yeah yeah

Chris Gammell: right so

Dave Jones: I don't

Chris Gammell: understand like how the like we talk about power on here too right so like I don't understand how the power for something like that would work right like even if you have low earth orbit and stuff like that I always think about like satellite phones and everything else it always seems like those things need massive batteries in order to get transmit

Dave Jones: these the satellites you're talking about

Chris Gammell: well I think no I was thinking satellite phones right so the satellite themselves I'm sure they could have you know solar panels stuff like that but I don't understand

Dave Jones: they have oh god what's the acronym they have the nuclear the nuclear energy decay right and they use that to warm up a thing and that generate and then that warms up a healthier device apparently like effectively and you can generate like 50 watts or something so these are satellites and space probes they all use these what's the god I should know this um yep it'll hit me in a minute yeah that's fine yeah the end of the show Dave will be like flabber flabber nuclear energy probe I'm googling it um yeah well anyways the thing that I I don't really care about radio isotope thermo radio isotope thermoelectric generator yes that's it first google hit

Chris Gammell: what is the what is the acronym

Dave Jones: um it's a um it's an RTG RTG radio isotope thermoelectric generator so it uses um you know the radioactive decay of some element with a seabec effect um uh you know just the regular seabec effect

Dave Jones: just to get a device yeah just generating from heat right yep

Dave Jones: yeah just because like cold space so you've got warm inside the spacecraft because you've got the radioactive decay right so you get warmth from the radioactive decay and of course the vacuum of space is very very cold so that's exactly what you want for the seabec effect to work hot on one side cold on the other you get heat transfer boom they can generate about 50 odd watts I think um like for like 30 years or something with you know two grams of you know um you know weapons grade plutonium or something you know plutonium yeah I don't know do you think a pellet here it is a pellet of uh it provides initial output is 62 watts which I guess um decays with time anyway yeah I mean that's not too bad

Chris Gammell: I don't know about yeah anyway that's a

Dave Jones: very awesome way yeah it's an awesome way to do it because like you know you don't need much weight at all it's bugger all weight right it's you know like tens of grams or a kilo or something you know it's not much um and it just continues producing heat for like 30 years yeah so well no that's not

Chris Gammell: what I was thinking though either I mean I was thinking more on the transmit side yeah if I want a cell phone

Dave Jones: technical

Chris Gammell: maybe it wouldn't be for a cell phone but you know like if I wanted a cell phone that that was going to have connectivity up to a satellite it would be a lot of power to do that right I mean that's what I was getting at

Dave Jones: oh well satellite phones are a dime a dozen um

Chris Gammell: yeah but they got those huge ass antennas and they got like big battery packs I mean like I don't know maybe maybe with the trend I don't

Dave Jones: know the battery life of one of those satellite phones because they're normally designed for like single use for like single emergency kind of use yeah right right right yeah it's not like you're making you know like you have to phone home to your mom yeah I'll be I don't know

Chris Gammell: so obviously people long time listeners know we know very little about I know very little about space Dave likes talking about space but we don't know tons about it but the one thing that I actually I love that I learned in school is that when you're learning about like like the concept of ground and uh and one of my professors was like okay so you call it ground that's cool what do you do when you're what do you do when you're a satellite oh

Dave Jones: floating

Dave Jones: ground floating ground so yeah I don't know I thought that was

Dave Jones: no it's a falling ground falling

Dave Jones: yeah that's right yeah falling at the bigger

Dave Jones: space probes don't float they fall that's right

Dave Jones: they just fall at the

Dave Jones: same rate as the earth happens to be rotating under them

Dave Jones: yep yep

Chris Gammell: yeah I don't know it's always it's always a tough concept when you're learning though like the whole earth earth and ground

Dave Jones: yeah but that comes down to system engineering right I mean technically the earth is just a floating is a you know hate to use that word floating but right it's an isolated system as well right

Dave Jones: yeah right

Dave Jones: if you look at it from the scale of a planet right right

Dave Jones: right right yeah would you call it Mars ground

Dave Jones: if you had a giant system you know this is like a standard engineering exam thing calculate right right let's do a ground tree between calculate the calculate the capacitance between the earth and the moon you know it's a standard like engineering exam trick question you know well really it

Dave Jones: isn't a trick question

Speaker ?: I never

Dave Jones: had that one you set it up as

Chris Gammell: like parallel plates you assume that like

Dave Jones: yeah well no you set it up as a sphere so you there's formulas for the capacitance between two spheres !

Chris Gammell: oh this would have been a physics class not electronics

Dave Jones: probably right yeah physicists love that crap

Chris Gammell: yep exactly imagine the entire universe is a perfect sphere

Dave Jones: right

Dave Jones: yeah

Dave Jones: just for the equations to work

Dave Jones: oh I'm going to have to link in oh oh you've just reminded me of a video Lawrence Krauss I think Lawrence Krauss former former spherical chicken yeah right yes former alumni of your of my alma mater I'm going to search for spherical chicken hang on I'm going to I'm going to YouTube search um is that about the joke spherical chicken

Chris Gammell: there's a joke about uh perfect it's a like something about a cow and then it a physicist tells it with the uh you know imagine the cow is a perfect sphere with milk going in all directions or something like that

Dave Jones: yeah yeah yeah trust me I I actually um uh I actually tweeted this um talk a couple of months oh yeah trust me it's brilliant watch it here we go the secret life of physicists so it's not I was wrong on the search term for spherical chicken yeah but uh here we go so you will love this trust me it is worth it goes for an hour sorry but it's worth one hour of your time and he explained Lawrence Krauss explains how physicists they how how they actually come up with ideas and think of things and how actually thinking of things like like you know a cow that joke and he uses that joke of the cow well the cow you know and the you know an engineer and a physicist walking to a bar and one you know or whatever and right no an engineer and a physicist go to a farm and the the cow hasn't been producing milk you know and the you know and he asks the farmer asks an engineer to solve the problem and a physicist to solve the problem and the physicist of course you know starts and the joke is well imagine the cow is a spherical you know a perfect sphere yeah a perfect sphere right and he goes on to explain how that and he goes on through the whole lecture to then come to the conclusion how thinking about a cow as a sphere is actually a useful tool that can be used to actually determine how old the universe is or something like that and he actually goes through the entire thinking and and this is how physicists actually come up with their theories they don't sit there and do all the math they use you know these abstract you know yeah the universe is a sphere okay or the you know or the you know or a galaxy is a sphere yeah brilliant watch it folks trust me the best hour of your life you'll ever spend

Chris Gammell: that might be that might be kind of a stretch but okay yeah definitely maybe physics related maybe we can constrain it to that system design Dave let's set the constraints

Dave Jones: I don't know about you like

Chris Gammell: one of the things I learned when I was at Keithley actually the guys there and maybe this is part of the physicist thing but like the mantras did we ever talk about that on the show the mantra what yeah so like so like we'd be kind of talking mantra yeah mantra is like so like that's a term about like a phrase that you repeat to yourself to kind of get in a meditative state right that's a mantra

Dave Jones: mantra mantra is how it's how it's pronounced here mantra sure yeah okay that's why I didn't tweak to that mantra

Chris Gammell: never mind how the Buddhist monks talk about it it's a mantra exactly no no right yeah it's like a bow plot you know maccas maccas yeah no worries but a mantra is a is but basically we'd be talking about things and these guys would be talking through it and this is how I would learn from them as well right and we'd be talking about kind of concepts and like oh well what happens when there's an impulse at the input to the circuit right well because oh well V equals LDIDT and because of that blah blah blah blah blah right and basically using formulas as a mantra and like kind of using these first principles right I mean like obviously there's a lot of these things right you know you could say oh because V equals IR you know you know you could say that but that's kind of ingrained as well but like these mantras of like using that to then explain a concept and then like oh well you know because there's inductance and because there's a change in current this will happen to the voltage right it's going to go up or down in this amount of time right you know like fast or slow it's these very soft and squishy concepts but then like when I think about how that helped me learn more about like just kind of this intuitive sense about electronics that was one of the main things that I point to because because you start repeating in your own head right you know what's coming next they're going to say oh well you know V equals LDIDT right and then oh blah blah blah blah blah and then you start to kind of formulate these relationships in your mind especially the time based ones I think that's particularly helpful so I don't know if there's any part of the physics thing but I thought I'd bring that up in case I've never mentioned it here it's my formative years I don't know it's hard to get that intuitive sense though right I mean like obviously I'm thinking more about education right now but you know it's especially thinking about you know trying to explain electronics to people that are getting started or you know intermediate stuff like that it's like man so many of these things I forget how much it confused me you know like

Dave Jones: yeah yeah totally unless you have that intuitive feel for things that's what you know makes a good engineer appear to be magical because they can just like you know like pull numbers off the top of their head or they can go oh yeah that'll work or that won't and they can instantly realize that because they they have an intuitive feel for it you know and I've done a video on like it all comes down to orders of magnitude like in engineering right you know for ballpark stuff we all deal with orders of magnitude you know like if there's a new Kickstarter campaign that comes up and they go we can you know get charge a battery with this solar panel and I'm going no you can't look at the size of it it's just bullshit right I don't even have to do the calculations off the top of my head so I've got an intuitive feel for how much per square area and how much density is in a battery and blah blah blah you know and yeah right off the top of your head you can just feel that whereas if you don't have any intuitive feel for that you go oh I don't know it sounds okay and you've got to go down do all that you know through the exhaustive calculations to figure out whether or not it's bullshit right

Chris Gammell: right and that's good I mean that's a good thing to do especially right you know especially once you have that intuitive sense it's even better to confirm it but I think you know doing

Speaker ?: that up front

Chris Gammell: is good too so but yeah I remember I mean like yeah even thinking about that like kind of like the back of the envelope type of things you know like that was another like culture shock when I kind of started to experience that it's this it's this thing that you see across engineers though too right it's it and it's because it's you know it's verifying assumptions right that's kind of the engineering side of things so yeah it's and it's it's something you win over time I was having a discussion oh

Dave Jones: yeah it takes

Chris Gammell: time yeah on Twitter today right so so I posted a thing about this new electronics program which looks great it's it's called pirate electronics it's like you know it's kind of like the web friendliness of code academy with you know beginner breadboarding type stuff I mean like it's beginner stuff I think there's some Arduino stuff in there too and it's like you know it's beginner content but it's it's good to have that because a lot of the times it's about you know encouraging people up to the point where they kind of self-motivate and get get over that hump you know it's like you need to kind of get some of that stuff but the discussion today was well you know you're not going to learn real engineering from that and it's like well no of course I mean like you're not going to learn real engineering you're not going to learn real software engineering from code academy either though you know like or right those you know those boot camps that they do it's like all even contextual electronics you know you're not going to learn everything it's about getting equipped with the tools even college you know you're not going to be learning real you learn real engineering on the job you know that's what I think at least you know you have to totally and and and so but I I like this new program I mean it's all about kind of getting stepping stones and and pushing people forwards to the point where they feel confident enough to dig in and then spend the year or two years doing what bunny and zobs did you know like like like that's like the ultimate thing right

Dave Jones: or confident enough to be sitting in a design review meeting yeah with Dave and a company and just yeah like me I was famous for it right I just go bullshit you know not not gonna work not gonna work you know like yeah somebody brings up something and I'll instantly know it's not gonna work right because of the intuitive nature you've built up right over decades you just oh that's not what I was thinking I was thinking get to the point where you feel

Chris Gammell: confident enough to sit in a room where Dave is saying bullshit to you that's the hard part you know that's what you build up to to get to the you know the cranky guy on the other side of the table well you know that's that's its own thing

Dave Jones: I hate it when they go prove it and I go do I really have to prove it it's obviously bullshit don't you have any intuition about this sort of stuff you know

Chris Gammell: that's healthy I mean that's healthy though because if you're always just the guy that calls BS right then then it's easy that's a that's a reflex response I think it's good to you know once in a while do that as well right and you do that you do that with the videos you do you do back the envelope calculation and stuff like that

Dave Jones: I don't even do that a lot of my stuff is just off the cuff and I'll just come out with it like you know I won't do any calculations to prove whether or not I'm talking crap I'll just usually say it and that's why sometimes I'm wrong you know sometimes I get it wrong yeah so yeah I don't care yeah that's just this that's just

Chris Gammell: my style uh so speaking of uh things that you think are crap style yep did you see the the internet folks uh all of the internet is Dave's is Dave's spitting ground uh did you see this uh circoid circoid circoid circoid circoid it's kind

Dave Jones: of pronounce it correctly man is

Chris Gammell: that not how you say it I don't know it's a it's a

Dave Jones: oh I don't even know what you're talking about it's

Chris Gammell: a pcb it's a pcb milling machine uh plus solder paste dispenser plus pick and place I don't know it's I

Dave Jones: uh did we do this couple of weeks ago didn't we do one a couple of them

Chris Gammell: um so there's

Dave Jones: there's actually every man his dog's doing one they're like the 3d printers you

Chris Gammell: know yeah no that's that's totally true someone else someone mentioned that is that like does this is kind of the year for that it's like there's there's a lot of these there's the the printer machines there's the um what's it called the one that won the the hardware battlefield was that uh volterra and then uh this circoid is actually like a copper clad milling and okay

Dave Jones: have I might be getting a copper clad milling kit

Chris Gammell: oh yeah which one

Dave Jones: um it's not released yet so I better not say anything um too late have you got a link have you got a link to well

Chris Gammell: c-i-r-q-u-o-i-d right c-i-r-c-i-r-q-u-o !

Dave Jones: there we go yeah yeah yeah yeah anyway yeah I might be getting a PCB milling machine it's not well it's a new model anyway it's a new model that has been released yet

Speaker ?: have you used

Dave Jones: those in the past

Chris Gammell: I mean I think I mentioned that on the show in the

Dave Jones: past but no I've seen I've had demos of them you know the companies that come in and demo them at work and we go yeah you know yeah I've used one I used

Chris Gammell: one when I was a key flea and no that was the only time but I used it a bunch right and it's it's great when you have it it's fantastic when you're screwed and when you're when you're when you're in when you're in a website doesn't work oh really circle it I might have spelled it

Dave Jones: wrong oh yeah yeah if you're in a real rough spot and you need something there's no you

Chris Gammell: sorry there's no you in there c-i-r-q-o-i-d who doesn't put a you after a q come on

Dave Jones: folks um no I well I googled it and it's um it's not coming up c-i-r-q-o-i-d

Dave Jones: dot com

Dave Jones: looks like the websites yeah I

Chris Gammell: can see it anyways

Dave Jones: oh right oh you goofed it okay yeah right I was I was actually hitting your link gotcha uh it's so it's you know it's

Chris Gammell: it's useful to have right so like so I was using it for like mostly soic parts you know like basically right a lot of the stuff I was doing was like you know op amp type

Dave Jones: circuits web pages dead resistors yeah they're good for like rf you know stuff or just yeah like basic surface mount stuff rf stuff

Chris Gammell: why rf stuff like

Dave Jones: well because you're gonna leave the ground plane then oh you can leave the ground plane there

Chris Gammell: well you can always do that with like dead bug manhattan style I mean you can do that you can

Dave Jones: but yeah it's nice

Chris Gammell: I mean yeah just just because there's a big copper ground plane that's the reason it's good for

Dave Jones: rf okay well you know it's like you

Chris Gammell: know who likes you know who likes copper ground planes rf designers because

Dave Jones: you leave like because these things don't usually you don't etch away all the dead copper right you just leave it floating otherwise it's wasting time I don't need to you know so you leave all this floating copper there right yeah yeah you just do the outline of the trace yeah yeah yeah so

Chris Gammell: I mean so this is a this is a nice I mean like it is it's a nice machine it's it's like 2500 no 2000 euro for this thing so it's it's

Dave Jones: it's it's a bit

Chris Gammell: pricey a bit pricey I think the only I mean it looks really industrial too it looks like someone you know built a nice looking CNC machine and and wrote some decent enough software for it and then you know there's there's I've used I've tried milling on my machine I broke all the bits but I yeah I was able to generate gcode no problem I mean there's there's stuff out there for that kind of thing Linux scripts stuff like that so yeah you know it's it's good it's good yeah but ultimately it's like I think the thing is you're with this one you're paying for the other stuff too right the the solder paste and the placement stuff and it's just like I don't know I think that's not really worth it because

Dave Jones: yeah no it's it's trying to be a jack of all trades and that's never gonna work it's

Chris Gammell: never gonna I think that the main like the solder paste could work that that would be fine with me if you know if the tool change was easy easy enough but like the placement thing it's like I'm only if I'm milling a board it's one board you know I'm not gonna make more

Dave Jones: than I know I'm gonna hand assemble it and it's usually not gonna have that many parts on it you know so right right like yeah it's yeah and solder paste is nice but then you

Chris Gammell: still even when you reflow you don't have you don't have the the solder mask then to kind of help guide it along you know you basically just relying on the flux of the of the you've got to have the

Dave Jones: right tool for the job you know and here it is you know let's change it to a you know you put the syringe and then it goes down that dispenses a bit of solder paste on there it's like no like why just give me my board and I'll hand solder it you know by the time you set up the machine to do the solder paste you could have hand sold the board all right

Chris Gammell: yeah and that's that's ultimately what it comes down I mean I think but I do think that that like the the resolution on this thing is very good like the control looks great it looks

Dave Jones: like a good action piece of the mill machine and that's and that's fine yeah yeah so I think the one I'm gonna get like cost yeah I think one I'm gonna get's maybe like twelve hundred or something or a thousand or you can buy it as a kit for like okay six hundred or something like that yeah well there's I mean

Chris Gammell: and there's other solutions out there like LPKF is out there but like you could spend ten grand easy on that kind of thing they're ten grand plus yeah yeah laser they do laser cut I think as well so something like

Dave Jones: that yeah yep yeah they can do laser holes and plated holes and all sorts of fancy stuff and uh yep but okay well yeah no that's a machine that's ultimately doomed to fail because it's just trying to do too many things it's not gonna be

Chris Gammell: commercial success but some people will find

Dave Jones: success in it you know like well some people might like it but yeah no just have a milling machine that's you know do it really good there's still I reckon there's still a market out there for the kick-ass milling machine right oh definitely it used to be milling machine you know that has the software down pat and it's just so easy to use and it's and it's quick and blah blah blah you know I think a lot of

Chris Gammell: that like other mill other mill has that you know a lot of those things right they have they have good support for eagle they have good support for gerbers they you know it's a smaller bed but but I think they're kind of focusing on that that one market you know they say they can do other things like they can do brass and other things but you know really their design their spindles designed for milling PCBs and I've seen them before they're great do that yeah

Dave Jones: and if it's a reasonable price then yeah I reckon you can corner a decent market exactly um yep you know yeah if you make it cheap enough I mean yeah it's I don't know but if it's too cheap it's it's like the 3d printer right it's like that $300 3d printer myth right you can't really build a decent 3d printer for 300 bucks right yeah or you guys yeah you can hand build your own one right but you know like a commercial one it's just you know it's going to be small it's going to be you there's got to be compromises in there right and yeah

Chris Gammell: hmm yeah man same thing here

Dave Jones: probably we should we should

Chris Gammell: end the show today on the ultimate no wait one more thing first did you see this key sweeper thing this was killer too I know this is this is the the obviously we've had Mike Osmond on about a couple times before and this this is like the IT the security side of things like the I forget what they call it but this was just a killer project he basically put as you know a keyboard sniffer the Bluetooth sniffer inside a wall wart and it's just really nice really well done you know he goes through all of the the packet sniffing and stuff like that and all of the looking at looking at the different headers that are coming off of this specific keyboard because it's pretty common but just like so it's

Dave Jones: designed as a spy device that hence why it's a hence why it's a plug pack right because you can walk into somebody's house plug in a plug pack into a wall secretly and they'll think nothing of it because it looks like a plug pack yeah right

Chris Gammell: and actually so this actually uses the Adafruit GSM shield that's that's another reference I saw to GSM shields recently Adafruit has one as well and so it basically can talk I mean you could put it in there it has it runs power right because it's plugged in the wall so it's got a switcher doing offline so that powers everything you don't have to worry about it mostly heat is gonna be the main thing there but then it's just about getting everything in there he's got a Bluetooth sniffer I think it's the Nordic the Nordic chipset and then just an Arduino for like a TNC for control and and then that GSM shield it's just like it's terrifying it's terrifying really I mean like I know that he did it not to he did it to show off his skills and everything like that but it's just like right yep this is super legit you know like this could happen anywhere like it's just the accessibility is like really crazy so I don't know

Dave Jones: yeah it's cool that's very that's he's gone to a lot of work there yeah and yeah and it sniffs like the the proprietary protocols like used on the used on the keyboards and you know those sorts because they they don't use they don't use Bluetooth they use their own proprietary you know low power protocol thing yeah that's how they can get two years battery life yeah that's how they can get you know two years battery life on a keyboard yeah right on a wireless keyboard yeah um which is crazy

Chris Gammell: well yeah sleep mode until you hit a key and then it's like nope I'm up yeah yeah it's uh it's it's pretty cool though um yeah very nice

Dave Jones: awesome and in other news radio shack

Chris Gammell: went bust well that's what we have for today it's about to and now the news

Dave Jones: and now the news a corporation has been around for 40 years we all know to grew in love it's just yeah they're there down the toilet bye-bye yeah it's

Chris Gammell: uh but not really I mean come on this is not this is not news uh but the thing I wanted to call out that uh someone posted the uh the the eulogy on SB nation there's oh you posted this oh

Dave Jones: yes yeah that was good oh my god that was so good yeah that was great yeah

Chris Gammell: we have to link that in I mean like like a lot of it's like just the the hiring and working practices they had there but but like that alone this is someone who

Dave Jones: used to work at radio shack and their experience of working in the retail store and it's just oh man it's like

Chris Gammell: yeah when you have a company that's treating their employees like that it's like you know you know they don't give a crap about their products you know they don't care about what they stock in their store they're just bottom line right bottom line is everything and it's

Dave Jones: like yeah and even then they aren't smart bottom line like your former employer

Chris Gammell: right which one Danaher Danaher right with their Danaher

Dave Jones: system right they yeah that's true that yeah I mean actually they're a really successful company right they really know how to do business they're ruthless as all hell but they know it but they if you want to buy good shares right you buy them because they they know how to extract every last cent from a business right yep and um yeah but radio shack just don't have a clue right they're just not only are they bastards but they're hopeless yeah so it's like well

Chris Gammell: I mean there's other confluence of factors there too it's like you know retail in general it's like okay well we just mentioned adafruit right and it's like think about where people go to buy electronics these days it's not a radio shack right it's it's online it's adafruit spark fund dig key mauser everywhere everywhere online you can buy stuff from anywhere it's just you know radio shack when when you're when you're part of your business is based upon being the you know the last resort uh right yeah right yeah might be time

Dave Jones: might be time folks i'm desperate i'll go see if rat shack's got it yeah i don't

Chris Gammell: know i i mentioned before on the show like micro center in uh ohio and around the midwest that's they're they're kind of they've taken over they have a lot they stock a lot of the kits from the online folks too so that's nice okay right last minute fries fries out in california has it a lot of that stuff too you guys have dick smith still right and some of that stuff no no no no dick

Dave Jones: smith sell toasters oh i thought you had

Chris Gammell: don't you have any kind of well we have

Dave Jones: j car and oh electronics as well okay

Chris Gammell: yeah j car is probably who i was thinking

Dave Jones: of j car is the go-to store yeah okay

Chris Gammell: yep so i mean there's still some stuff but it's still pretty much like the if you don't know what you're already looking for and you're kind of just browsing into that section or if you're kind of hard up for a component you can go buy the blister pack i did i did find did i tell you i i found the blister pack it has a it has a place of honor

Dave Jones: 99 cents a five with the five resistors

Chris Gammell: for 99 it was five uh two diodes one one and nine one fours uh i think it was four

Dave Jones: or five for a dollar yeah yep yep but seriously like i can remember doing electronics back in the 70s right i was doing electronics back in the 70s okay that's how old i am and yeah we know yeah you're old man there wasn't much option right there wasn't much option if you wanted your you know your 4001 ic if you or if you wanted your couple of one in nine one four diodes you went to your local tandy store here as it was and you bought them in the blister pack yep right yeah like where else would you get it from you know credit cards weren't invented online e-commerce wasn't you know

Chris Gammell: right yeah catalog would take you know three weeks or four weeks if you if you got it in time right

Dave Jones: right it's just no this was the late 70s right yep and yep that's all you could do

Chris Gammell: i don't know if you saw uh forest actually so forest mims obviously legendary in the electronics legendary 70s figure yes yes uh uh former guest of the show as well uh he actually wrote about the uh the 8080 altair 8080 over on make and the make uh oh did he yeah i'm gonna have to read that okay i didn't notice it first i'm like oh cool like an article about this and i look at the byline i'm like all right it's forest it's forest yeah cool so yeah it's i'm gonna look at that it's good history so it's uh he's got good stuff there and he writes for them once in a while too so always good always good hearing from him yep all right well uh i think that's it for this week uh i will be in california next week if anyone's out at uh i'll be in santa clara at design con showing off parts io open to the public next week uh dave can finally have fun stop complaining uh but yeah i think the the expo tickets are free so if you want to stop by and see me i'll have t-shirts and stuff yeah i think they are cool cool

Dave Jones: man and remember though i think there'll be a prize for uh somebody who gets the most forlorn photo that's right on the

Chris Gammell: stand yep just exhausted and no setup

Dave Jones: photos i want real like telephoto lens

Chris Gammell: right right shit right right like one of those life catchers like we talked about right you just walk by right yeah

Dave Jones: yeah and he doesn't even realize it

Chris Gammell: yeah yeah or you get a video and just do that thing where like you freeze you freeze frame and then i'm kind of like feeling like the derp face like derp right yeah yeah exactly

Dave Jones: oh i love it cool man talk to you then catch you next time

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