#236 – Questioning Everyday Prototyping - Verrucose Vehicle Vitilitigation

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast, recorded February 10th, 2015. Episode 236, Vericose Vehicle Vetilitigation.

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: What's up, nerd?

Chris Gammell: Hello, nerd.

Dave Jones: Nothing. We've got nothing to talk about. That's the whole show, folks. All right. Thanks for joining us. Yep.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I'm sitting in my basement like usual, recording videos and freezing my ass off and working on a search engine and...

Dave Jones: Living the dream. Living the dream.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, living the dream, man.

Dave Jones: I'm living the dream, walking to work.

Chris Gammell: Yeah? Oh, yeah. Yes. So Dave is without vehicle.

Dave Jones: I am carless. Yes, yes. I'm transportless.

Chris Gammell: Before we get into that thing, I'd like to mention that I am consistently amazed when my car... I know that you're in a warm climate, but I have to just give a shout out to automotive engineers and the fact that cars turn on every time in the cold. I think probably battery engineers, those cold crank, the super... You're right. Just the fact that it works in the cold. I mean, I get some of the physics of it, but it's just like, damn, that is unbelievable. And when I'm that cold, I'm really thankful that it works. So thanks, guys.

Dave Jones: My car, a German Holden Vectra, came with a battery warmer cover. It's like, what the hell? Yeah, first thing I did when I bought the new car was rip off the battery warmer cover. It's like, what the hell?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, my car doesn't have... I know a lot of Alaskan... Like, people up in Alaska, they run to the store, they plug their car in to keep it warm, that kind of thing. Okay. But that's more for the oil, I think, just to keep the oil viscous enough so that it actually turns over. Wow. We shouldn't stray too far into the mechanical, Rob. No. We know how that's gone. We're going to get taken to task. Yeah. So, what's happening?

Dave Jones: Well, I took my car... You know, it's always been a heap of crap, right? And I'm basically driving it into the ground, right? That was my plan. Which is good. Yeah. Good, yep. And so, I was going up to the mountains on the weekend, right? Big trip, you know? So, I thought, oh, I better have the car serviced. Haven't had it serviced in a long time. So, I went to get it serviced, put it in, and they called me up and they went, dude, this thing's a death trap. You want to know what's wrong with it? Everything. So, the list is as long as my arm, you know? Oh, my God. The things that were wrong with it. Yeah. It's just... Yeah. Yes. It was unsaid.

Chris Gammell: The benefits of a short commute, it's a lower likelihood of...

Dave Jones: Of death, yes. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Statistics were on your side just simply because of time spent in car.

Dave Jones: So, it was ready to do a... Who's mobile? If you've seen the, you know, the end scene in the Blues Brothers where the car, you know, just falls apart. It was like that. Anyway. Anyway. Even if it was working, it was like a two grand car, you know, at best. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And just to get it safe again, let alone make it reliable, was like at least $1,000. So, you know, it's just pouring money down a hole, basically. So, yep. Yep. Yep. And the wife won't let me drive it. Yeah. So, I'm now, you know... It was great when we didn't know, you know. Ignorance was bliss. Ignorance was bliss. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. That's right.

Chris Gammell: So, I think the important question here, though, and the question everybody's asking or about to ask, what's next? We're talking a Tesla here, right? We're saying Tesla is the way to go. You're going to have one in your garage. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Hang on. I'll just pull out that spare $110,000. Yeah, here we go. There's the change. I've got it. I've got it.

Chris Gammell: There's a dollar.

Dave Jones: I just need... Maybe I can do a Kickstarter campaign to raise the $109,999.

Chris Gammell: There's bigger currency in coins these days out in Australia, huh? I only heard like a couple of coins there.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, I happen to have one coin in my pocket. So, I'm a dollar towards the $110,000 it costs for a Tesla here. Okay, well... Yep. Accepting donations now, folks.

Chris Gammell: Give till it hurts, folks. Dave needs a car to drive. Two minutes to work.

Dave Jones: But, yes, it will be an electric car. We have decided, we think, it will be an electric car. And, unfortunately, in this country, the only choice is the Mitsubishi MyEV, or Miev, however you want to pronounce it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, the one that you did... You got to ride one of those, right?

Dave Jones: Yep, yep. I got to ride one. And, yeah, it's like... And I thought, okay, look, I'll build my own. That'll make for some cool videos, right? It's a tax write-off. Yeah, exactly. It's a complete tax write-off, right? Yeah. Whereas buying a normal car isn't. Whereas building one would be, right? I check with my account. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, um... So, yeah, I... You know, but...

Chris Gammell: I think you should just soup up the C1, man. What about that?

Dave Jones: The C5. Yeah, the Sinclair C5. Oh, sorry. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, Sinclair C5. Sinclair C5. Yeah. If you get through with it, it'll be a C1. Anyway, anyway, it turns out...

Dave Jones: Plastic wheels. Yes. I talk to all the experts in building your own electric car, and they all say, buy a Mitsubishi MyEV. It's cheaper and better than anything you can build yourself. Because it's really expensive to build your own EV. Right, right. And to actually make it good, you know, to give it a real monster battery pack and make it, you know, really good.

Chris Gammell: Right, and there's the whole mechanical side, like we've mentioned at the top of the show, that's bad.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep. They all said, just go out and buy a five-year-old MyEV and just be done with it, you know. Oh, nice.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I mean, you'll still be able to do cool battery pack experiments, stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, things like that. You know, data logging and stuff like that. I've got, you know... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I always wonder about, like, the thing I always wonder about with, like, with the Prius and a lot of those cars out there. Like, I mean, battery packs do, they start to have issues over time, and it seems like that's such a huge chunk of the cost of a vehicle that, like, isn't that, like, kind of a risk?

Dave Jones: It is a risk, but from the people who've owned these things, I've been talking to owners, and they say, yeah, look, they've had one for five years, and they haven't noticed any range drop yet. Oh, okay. So, you know, apparently they do pretty well. Apparently they do pretty well.

Chris Gammell: Any word on the actual, what the range is, too? Because I know, I mean, you have a short commute now, too.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, the range is 150Ks max.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's not bad at all.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's okay, but it wouldn't get me up to a canyon and back. It wouldn't get me to the nearest canyon and back. So, it's of limited practical use there.

Chris Gammell: What about, like, around the country? Are there chargers around the country, or no?

Dave Jones: No, there's basically nothing here, but you can charge it from a regular PowerPoint, so all you've got to do is find a regular PowerPoint, right? Or it's slow, of course.

Chris Gammell: You know, it's slow. Right, but you guys are 240, so you get added benefit. I mean, I guess you have lower current on the limiting.

Dave Jones: Dude, it's the same amount of power. It's all about the power. Power transfer.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, it's all about the power, but then it's about the, I mean, the chargers as well, they have higher current drive as well, but.

Dave Jones: Well, they, it's, yeah, higher power delivery, so, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Hmm. Okay, well, that's, but you don't, so, but there's no charging stations around the country, anything like that?

Dave Jones: Yes, I think there's very few, like, not to make it, you know, worthwhile actually doing, you know, actually using them. So, yeah, it's, it's basically around the town type car, you know?

Chris Gammell: Okay. So. Yeah, that's, that's something still. I mean, that's interesting.

Dave Jones: The, the only annoying thing is, is that here in the EEV blog corporate towers, down in the underground, uh, basement car park, there's not a single PowerPoint. PowerPoint.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? Not a single PowerPoint, yeah. Run a line out from your, your, uh, your dungeon space, basically?

Dave Jones: Well, well, there is, at my bunker, my bunker is an underground thing, and there are power points there, so technically. Oh, it's a different building, though, right? Yeah, it's a different building, so technically I'd drive my car there, park it in somebody's spot if they're not there. You know, it's a bit rude. Yeah. Yeah, I could, um, in theory, do that, so. Mm. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, I, I'm very curious about this. I mean, I think that, I, I'm really glad that it is coming down to, like, the affordable range and stuff like that, that, you know, people can actually get these cars, because it's, I think it's just kind of an exposure thing.

Dave Jones: Well, it is a five-year-old secondhand car that I'm considering getting.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but I'm just saying that, like, the fact that there are five-year-old cars is necessary to have that in the market. Oh, true. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Over time, you know, not everyone's going to buy, be able to afford a new car, you know, just in terms of accessibility, right? You're doing it for economic reasons, but a lot of people just won't, won't be able to afford, you know, even like the Chevy Volt is like 35K, I think, you know, it's just like.

Dave Jones: Which is about 50,000 here. It's about 50. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I mean, it's, I think it's even smaller range than, than that, yeah, that you're talking about.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it's got the backup petrol engine. So, it's got unlimited range. That's the advantage of the Volt, the Holden Volt, so Chevy Volt. Gotcha. Yeah, I'd love to have one of those, but it's, you know, 50 grand, right?

Chris Gammell: Right, yeah. So, interesting. Well, anyways, there was a, there was a video that I saw today that I posted on the subreddit. And it's called mPower. And, and like a smart grid, it kind of offloads. I mean, this, this idea has been around for a while. It offloads power and it can, you know, it can, it can basically, the whole, the whole promise of a smart grid basically pulling down power when it's cheap, pushing it back to the grid when it's expensive so that you can, you know, barter for that kind of thing. And then basically the, the grid is then paying you for, for storage, basically. Right. That's, that's the idea. And I think about that though. And I think about that with, you know, cars. I, I don't know. Like, I know it's, they, they, they even talk about it in the video of like, oh, well, we, you know, we watch your habits and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's like, if I showed up and my car wasn't fully charged, I would feel not great.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I get, I get neurotic about a cell phone. If it's my car, I feel, I, I, I obviously don't know, right? I don't have, I don't have a, uh, uh, you know, electric car, but yeah, I mean, that would really bug me.

Dave Jones: I, I expect it to be quite a paranoid feeling having this, you know, knowing that I can't just, you know, fill it up in five minutes. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: On every corner.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. It'd be interesting if like, eventually like, I don't know if you guys don't have like Auto Club or AAA maybe, or maybe it's called something different there probably. But like, if eventually they're just showing up with like a huge battery pack and it's just like juicing you up, you know, like that's, that's just weird.

Dave Jones: Well, I, I actually haven't looked into this or asked, but I wonder if it's possible to just to keep like a petrol generator in the back, like a 10 amp, you know, petrol power generator. Well, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Remember when Bob Simpson was on the show, he talked about, they were developing that. I mean, he was talking about it actually being built in. Right. Yeah. Remember he said he was talking about a new two stroke motor and it was basically to drive, it was a two stroke motor, but it was to drive a generator that charged the battery.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: So we might have, we might have to check in with him now, but you know, basically that was the idea is that it's an all electric, but then there is some kind of backup there because you're going to run into times where you can only get, you know, energy from good old hydrocarbon.

Dave Jones: So that's the price you pay for having an EV now, you know, I mean, the infrastructure

Chris Gammell: exceedingly convenient to have an explosive liquid that drives a, like just the power. I mean, there's the power density of gas. Like exactly. There is, you know, you don't, it's hard, man. You don't get away from that really easily. I know. Batteries are not even close. Yeah. So I don't know.

Dave Jones: But still, if you wanted to carry around like a full tank's worth like that, that's a lot, you know. Yeah. That's a lot of petrol. So yes, they are high power density, but your car, okay, might drive 500 kilometers, but it needs 50 liters of petrol to do it. 50 liters isn't a small amount.

Chris Gammell: Sorry. My brain is like, I can't handle it.

Dave Jones: I can't handle it. Anyway, you do, you do understand what I'm talking about, right?

Chris Gammell: You know, it's 3.8 liters to a gallon. Is that right?

Dave Jones: I have no idea. I never need to work in gallons ever.

Chris Gammell: I know. God, I hate my imperial brain. It sounds right. Darn you. Darn you, America.

Dave Jones: See, gallons is one of those imperial units. Yeah. We simply never, we have zero need for it. Because nobody else, you know, there's no need for it. Whereas, you know, feet, inches, you know, all that sort of, you know, miles. Yes, I can do that. I know the conversion off the top of my head. You know, pounds. Yes. You know, inches. Yes. Like, but not gallons.

Chris Gammell: You know, it's all about, I mean, it's all, for me at least, I mean, I have to do these conversions on the fly in my head. But like, it's all about, it's all about what I have seen on packaging and stuff. Like, it's always like, I have to picture the thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, so to do the distance conversion, I think, okay, I've run a 10K before. I know that's 6.2 miles. To do the weight conversion, I know that a five pound plate at the gym is 2.2 kilograms. Right. Right. For this, it's actually gallons of milk, right? And I think I've seen 3.8, and it's actually 3.785 liters in a gallon. So dumb.

Dave Jones: No, but that's.

Chris Gammell: Stupid brain. Stupid brain.

Dave Jones: No, that's the way it works.

Chris Gammell: I mean, that's fine.

Dave Jones: There's nothing wrong with that.

Chris Gammell: At all. I saw someone tweet about this during the Super Bowl, which just happened. And they said, I bet if football switched over to metric, people would be using metric by morning. Right. Oh, goodness. Oh, goddammit.

Dave Jones: Gallons, dammit.

Chris Gammell: I know, gallons.

Dave Jones: Anyway, you know what I'm saying. Like, it's not magic. It's not like plutonium, you know, that has, you know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, right, right, right. It's not like you're dropping a pebble into a, you know, a chamber. Yeah, yeah. It's not Mr. Fusion, right? No, it's not Mr. Fusion. Not yet. Yeah. I know.

Chris Gammell: And it's frustrating. And, like, there's another article I found about the technology review did one about just about battery technology, right? I mean, this is the limiting factor. We've talked about it here before. It's the same for grid storage. It's the same for transportation. And to be completely blunt, energy generation and storage, that's basically Iron Man's superpower, right? I know that's kind of going nerdy here.

Dave Jones: It is completely rocket science. I mean, that article is bang on, right? The article is basically saying that it's practically impossible for these startups, all these battery startups, to, you know, to actually succeed. Because it's big engineering. It's big science. It's big physics, you know? Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you need a lab with lots of smart people doing very controlled high energy experiments over time. And, you know, it's not like there's leaps and bounds. It's like...

Dave Jones: No, and that's what they said. Most of the progress... We're running into physics here, folks. Most of the progress in real battery technology, i.e. the stuff we're using today, has come from small incremental improvements in existing technology. So any company who comes along, a startup comes along and claims, we've got this fantastic new technology. Yeah, e-store, right? This fantastic new technology. You just go, well, yeah, bullshit. There's 99.9% chance you're going to fail. Because... We'll believe it when we see it. Yeah. It's... I hate to say it, but yeah, they're right. I mean, there's just no evidence that, oh, you know, there's tons, there's countless, you know, battery technology startups out there. And they've all failed. Because it's, you know... Oh, yeah, right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, and I think, I mean, ultimately, I think, you know, Tesla's doing it right. It's just like, they're just brute forcing. They're saying, here's the best we can do. Let's see what we can do with it. You know, they're sourcing lots of batteries. They're building a big plant. And they teamed up with Panasonic.

Dave Jones: They teamed up with the world leader in batteries, Panasonic, right? They didn't do it themselves. They didn't buy some startup and go, yay, we're going to put this whiz-bang technology in our Tesla. They would have failed, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Yeah, that is frustrating sometimes when you see that. You know, you see... You know, it's exciting, right? The idea of a startup is exciting. Of course. Because they can, you know, do some interesting things, think different ways, right? That is very exciting. But, like, certain things are done for a reason, right? I mean, like, with the hard science stuff like that, it's like, man...

Dave Jones: But, on the other hand... I still fully support all these startups trying to do this. But just be really... You know, if you're going to invest in it, just be realistic. That's all.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, if you're going to invest... Yeah, right. Yeah, well, and I think the claims as well, too. It's like, you know, don't believe one test in an isolated circumstance, right? You know? Because that's what this article linked to. Our dielectric constant is super high in our supercapacitor. Who gives a crap? Show me it's storing, you know, many, many kilowatt hours of power... Or of energy, rather. And, you know, delivering it consistently over an entire batch of stuff. Like, there's your proof, right?

Dave Jones: That's what this article was saying, right? Because they gave the example GM, right? They bought this battery startup thinking it'd make them the world leaders in, you know, battery EV technology, right? And then once they bought the company, they tried to recreate their technology and found, oh, we can't recreate it. It was a fluke, is the word they used.

Chris Gammell: Feels bad, man. Feels real bad. Sorry about that, guys. It worked in the lab. Yeah, can you imagine being the guy who, like, signed on the line? You know, like, the one who's like, yeah, okay, yeah, we're ready to pay all this money for you. Wait, what? What are the results? Oh, I'm retiring. I forgot to tell you.

Dave Jones: Oops. Oh, dear. Yeah, so they failed. So they're behind the eight ball again.

Chris Gammell: Now, you brought up an interesting thing. You told me about an interesting thing before the show, though. So we're talking about hard science. We're talking about, you know, don't try and fight the power. And yet. And yet. Dave brought up a very interesting thing.

Dave Jones: Somebody was able to do it. Somebody.

Chris Gammell: In a weird way, too.

Dave Jones: Yeah, a fellow video blogger, Thunderfoot. I know a lot of people don't like Thunderfoot for his outspoken nature. Well, too bad. I do. I think he's awesome. And I do back him. Anyway, he's a fellow science. He's a fellow YouTuber. He does science, among other things, which we won't mention. But anyway, he does science videos and stuff. Right. And he's a PhD chemist. He's actually a quite highly renowned chemist. You know, he has like 100 papers published and stuff like that. Right. So he is actually a research chemist. But basically, his full-time gig these days is making YouTube videos. And anyway, a couple of years back, he did this YouTube video. The old, you know, thing, sodium explodes in water. Right. And as I believe the story went right, he just did that for some fun. Right. He thought, oh, yeah, that'd make a cool video. I've got this little high-speed, cheap-ass high-speed camera. Right. Let's just film some, you know, sodium blowing up in water. Everyone does that. Right. You've probably done it in your science class or whatever. It's one of those, you know, classic, you know, science demos. Right. It's fun. It's loud. Yeah, it's fun and loud. And it's not too dangerous.

Chris Gammell: It makes science intriguing. If not. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Not a lot of scientific method with dropping a thing into water. But, you know, it's fun to watch.

Dave Jones: So, and apparently, right, everyone knows, right, this has been a well-known phenomenon for, I don't know, 100 years or something. Right. Everyone knows why. Everyone knows the chemical reaction when sodium hits water, blah, blah, blah, and why it explodes. Right. It's a, you know, it's like it's a given that we know how this works in science. And anyway, so he filmed this thing in high speed with the camera. It was only a couple hundred frames per second, but he noticed something funny in there that it didn't quite match up. What he was seeing on the video didn't quite match up to the traditional theory of the chemical reaction and how, you know, the chemical, sodium hits water and it produces hydrogen, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. I'm not a, you know, I'm not into the science of that. But anyway. Right.

Chris Gammell: Something about bonds? I don't know. Anyway, yeah. There's a chemical reaction, right? High energy bonds.

Dave Jones: And that's what forms the explosion and that's what causes the explosion. It's a chemical reaction. And he went, well, that doesn't feel right. His gut feel, it just didn't look right. So he did some further investigation and he talked with, he did some more videos on it. And he, you know, look, I think something funny is happening here. It doesn't add up. And he went to talk to experts on this sort of thing, even though he's a chemist, still Winston. And they all said, no, no, it's well known. It's well proven. Blah, blah, blah. It's a chemical reaction. And he went, well, screw everyone. I think there's something to this. And he went to, he went overseas, I believe. I can't remember the country. Anyway, he formed a research team to actually investigate this. Right. And over the last two years, there's four years, I think it might have even been. Anyway, they've been investigating this. And finally, they've released their results and had it published, of course, in the top peer review journal. And bingo, it's not a chemical reaction. He's turned the entire field of chemistry on its head. It is a coulomic charge reaction, which means it's actually an electrical. Which is crazy. Yeah, I know. It's crazy. And it generates like a thousand times, in theory, like a thousand times more current than a bolt of lightning. It is the highest current in all of nature. And, you know, like these coulomic charges are known. It's not like he discovered, you know, these coulomic charges. But the fact that it's not a chemical reaction and it's an electrical coulomic charge reaction that's actually happening here. Anyway, this made huge headlines all around the world in all science blogs and everything else. You know, it made all major news stories that, yeah, scientists have discovered that, yes, they've turned it all on its head. And it's fantastic. And it started from a YouTube video. This is what I love about it.

Chris Gammell: I know that. And as I said before, I know that Dave wants to be like, dude, YouTubers changed the world. And it's true. It is true in this case. Yeah. What? I don't know. What is a coulomic charge reaction, though? What does that mean? Don't ask me either.

Dave Jones: Anyway, it's a... So we've got to watch the video. Yeah, you have to know the science. Look, I don't... I'll admit I don't know the science off the top of my head. Anyway, it's a charge reaction. It's like repulsive electron repulsion, you know. Yeah. Something like that. Okay. Yeah. I'm embarrassing myself here. I should have. Yeah. If I knew I was going to talk about it on here, I probably would have researched it better. But anyway, yeah, it's not a chemical reaction. That's the whole point. Right? And everyone thought it was. You know, that was like as fundamental as anything. You know, dropping sodium in water is, you know, a chemical reaction. Anyway, and also as a spinoff from this, right, he also discovered that if you put a tiny, like, 5 ppm part of hexachlorine or something. I don't know the actual chemical. Anyway, if you put, like, 5 ppm of this hexachlorine stuff in the water, it stops the reaction. It totally stops it. It actually, it doesn't allow the charges to take place and build up and cause the explosion. And the reason why this is important is because this is a huge industrial safety thing, right? There's lots of chemical and metal manufacturing plants, right? They have massive explosions that destroy their entire factories because some of the hot metal hit water, hit the cooling water tanks. And people die every year as a result of these sort of things. But they've discovered that, yeah, if you put, like, you know, just a tiny amount of this chemical in there, it actually stops the, it stops the charges from, you know, escalating and exploding. So, yeah, that's great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, the energy release. Yeah, that's really cool.

Dave Jones: And the reason he's able, was able to do this research full time is because people like me backed him. So, you know, so he had the financial thing to actually work on it.

Chris Gammell: Right, you said, and you said that he thanked all the backers in his nature paper.

Dave Jones: He thanked all the backers in his nature paper. I think it's the first time ever in a scientific paper somebody has thanked crowdfunding backers, you know. That's awesome. Hopefully not the last, though. No, that's awesome.

Chris Gammell: I don't think that's common because I think that a lot of the stuff that gets published normally in, you know, nature probably wouldn't be crowdfunded. Yeah, exactly. But that is interesting because of the educational aspect to it. Oh, totally. The video making. Yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And, of course, it could have. And it could have amounted to nothing, right? He could have, you know, like you could almost say he got lucky, right? But.

Chris Gammell: No, I could say that that's research, right? Well, it's research, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, it could have been a dead end. That's the thing, right? He could have thought, oh, yeah, something weird's going on here. And he could have done his two-year investigation and found, oh, no, it really is a chemical reaction. You know. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: I believe someone I know says, I hope your project doesn't work the first time. Exactly. And that's basically what that would be, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah. I think that that's – but that's what science is. Oh, of course. You're going and you're verifying and then peer – I mean, I think that the next step there, though, is peer reviewing, right? It has to be replicated by other people. It has to be accepted. Other people have to write about it, that kind of thing as well. Yeah. So. So. So. But it's awesome. Yeah. So it's not over yet, but it is very interesting.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I think it's not luck because, like, very early on in their research, I'm sure it would have been obvious, like, yeah, we're onto something here. You know, we're onto something. And they got, like, a $100,000 high-speed camera to actually shoot the charge, you know, to actually photograph it all and all that sort of jazz. Yeah. And they developed physical rigs to, you know, drop it in a controlled way and all that sort of stuff, you know, so that they could actually – yeah. And it's just terrific, right?

Chris Gammell: So that's not an usable charge, though, right? It's just a quick release of that charge. Yeah.

Dave Jones: A lot of people on the forum have been talking about this. Can you actually measure? Because it's the highest amount of current generated in all of nature, right? Right. So people, you know, suddenly started thinking, oh, can we harness this or can we actually at least measure it? If you whacked a coil around the tube, you know, could you actually measure the magnetic field from it, right? Right. And, you know, something like that, right? That would also be cool. And –

Chris Gammell: Biggest – the biggest shunt resistor ever.

Dave Jones: But that would be awesome, right? If you could actually measure the, you know, the magnetic field coming out of it. I don't know. Everyone's, like, with more, you know, chemical – more, you know, physics knowledge than me are talking about it on the forum, which isn't hard, by the way, to have more physics knowledge.

Chris Gammell: Interesting that, I mean, you have to have some kind of way to measure it to actually verify, right, to know what that is.

Dave Jones: But everyone's saying – I think the consensus at that moment is that, no, the charges would be in random directions so they'd cancel each other out. And they'd be so quick that you wouldn't be able to, you know, it'd be, you know, down at the femtosecond level or something. I don't know. Something like that. Yeah, right, right, right.

Chris Gammell: Well, the impulse – yeah, of the – I mean, it's delivering power so quickly that it's, like – Yeah. That's part of the explosion part. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, anyway. That's really cool, though. I mean, and to take that back to the battery thing, I mean, like, that's hopeful, right? I mean, like, the fact that there is – I mean, yeah. I mean, you're going to have to prove people wrong if – you're going to have to put the work in. Exactly. But you can prove other stuff that, you know, there are other ways of doing things or that other things are understood poorly, and that kind of usually causes breakthroughs. So, that's good.

Dave Jones: But you watch in six months' time will be embarrassed and have to admit, yep, a startup battery technology actually worked, you know?

Chris Gammell: Great, great. And I hope they get rich as hell, you know? Yeah. Fine, whatever. Absolutely. I think because it's the thing. Like, a lot of these problems, too, it's like – prove us wrong. Great. That's – like, I hope, hope, hope, hope. Absolutely. I wanted that for EE Store or any other ones. It's like, you know, it's just like this is really necessary for grid parity stuff or, you know, for getting – for storage power for, you know, electronics for cars for transportation in general. You know, thinking about airplanes and trains and larger vehicles, you know, you're not doing that on lithium ion right now just because of the weight ratio, the weight to power ratio. So, got to have something else.

Dave Jones: I'm always happy to be proven wrong.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: Which is great.

Chris Gammell: And you always love proving others wrong, too.

Dave Jones: Well, as practical engineers, right, that's our job. When people come along with bullshit, right, things that don't, you know, match up to practical reality, it's our job to call it out, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: And, you know – But I think that, yes, someone may be getting a little grumpier and jumping to conclusion-ier over the years.

Dave Jones: Me? No. You? Come on, chip printer. Prove me wrong. Go on.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. Yeah? Well, no, you're right. You're right. That's a prove over time thing, yeah? Yeah. One of the things that is not close but is printing-wise that Volterra, we talked about two shows ago. That is now on Kickstarter. It won that hardware battlefield thing at CES. Right. But, yeah, so it's doing well on Kickstarter. That's good. Doing well.

Dave Jones: Within 24 hours, it's – their goal was 70,000. It's now up to 184. That was within 24 hours.

Chris Gammell: Only 184, Dave.

Dave Jones: Only – sorry, no, it's up to – no, I just refreshed and it's 185,900. And it's got 29 days to go. And, see, this is the thing. Go ahead. Right. The thing is – See, we had a little debate about this on Twitter, right? I think this is fantastic, right? I fully support them. They're a startup. They've been working on this for a couple of years. And it's great. Okay? But – It's cool. I mean, like, especially – Yeah, it's cool, right?

Chris Gammell: I really like the two types of ink. That's a cool idea. Like, that's very cool.

Dave Jones: It's cool. And I think that they've implemented it really well. But it's a solution in need of a problem.

Chris Gammell: Probably. Right. Maybe not. Maybe not.

Dave Jones: But it's like – it's like the, you know, the do-it-yourself pick-and-place machine. It is such a niche field of need that, you know, like, people want to believe that they have this problem that this thing is going to solve. But unfortunately, it's not. Right? Right? And they claim in the video, right, just press print. Right? And, yeah, that's technically correct. Just feed your Gerber files in and press print. That's technically correct. What they don't tell you, though, okay, is that you have to redesign your board to fit the technology. It's not like you come up with your new product, right, and it's going to fit in this case. Here you go. You've laid out your double-sided board. It's fantastic. And you can just go press print on this machine. No, it doesn't work. You have to understand the limitations of this thing and actually design your board in a special way to print on this thing to build your prototype. Oh, true. Yeah. Right? And then you have to go relay out the whole thing. Nothing like that. No. And the way they do it, you can't – they say you can do double-sided boards, but you can't put components on the other side. You can't lay it out like you would a normal board.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. It's going to be a single board, but you can cross – You can cross traces. Basically, I was looking at the video. You can cross traces. Which is great. That's the big thing. Right? Yeah, that actually does help.

Dave Jones: Which is fantastic, right? And so technically, yes, it's double-sided, but you can't take your existing design and just print it out on this thing. That's not how it works. I'm sorry. Right.

Chris Gammell: But I don't know if that's really the problem either, though, because I think if people are in a pinch, right, if you're in a pinch, you're going to design for this, right? You are going to design for the tools you have. That makes sense.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but – yeah, but – yeah, but – yeah, but – yeah, but – yeah, but – if you're in a pinch, you are not going to go lay out a board and fiddle around printing it on this thing. You're just going to go build it. You're going to build it on some prototype boards. Right.

Chris Gammell: That's the ultimate question, right, is now this becomes an intermediate stage because you do have to redesign it for a different process, right? Maybe they'll have a conversion tool, you know, take a different type.

Dave Jones: I wouldn't put in stock in that.

Chris Gammell: No, I know. I'm just – that's total conjecture. But what I'm saying is that, yeah, that is a different – it is a different workflow. But again, all of these things are valid, right? If you're in a pinch, it's very realistic that you might need something like this, right? You might, yeah. But – but –

Dave Jones: I – like everything I do, everything I've ever done, I can't see where I would bother. Even if I had the thing sitting here, right? I can't see why I would bother.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's what it comes down to is when you're in a pinch, it's how much pain you have, right? Because one of the things they talk about in the video is, yes, you have to wait two weeks, but if you have that much pain, you could also pay extra to have an overnight process, stuff like that. So –

Dave Jones: Or you can just prototype it dead bug style or whatever your preferred method is, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: So ultimately, I think that that's one of the things that they're selling against is that idea of instant stuff and simple iterations, just things like that. And that is valid, but it's just a matter of, you know, the trade-offs with, you know, the different process, the, you know, the cost of materials, the, you know, all of those things. They're just different trade-offs. Yeah. So it seems like so far that people are interested in that. So that's good. That's ultimately what's going to be interesting to see is are we seeing quick turnarounds on ideas? And –

Dave Jones: Yeah. But look, I'll say, right, this is, I think, the best one we've seen, right? If you do need or you are after something like this, I think this is one of the best ones we've seen, right? It's great. Right? Yeah. No, it's very nice. Assuming it works and it meets their, you know, assuming it's actually going to happen.

Chris Gammell: I'm still curious about the – I did a little bit of math on the current flow of the traces, and it seemed like it was still 40x of copper. Right. I haven't looked at the figures. 40x.

Dave Jones: What are the figures? Yeah, I was just doing some – What are the –

Chris Gammell: Oh, here it is. Back of the envelope. Yeah. And so I was just comparing it against the, you know, a trace calculator online. Oh, right. And it seemed like it was 40x the – now, but a lot of the times that doesn't matter, right? Especially if you're doing digital stuff, you know, just – Oh, yeah, right. Simpler stuff, so. Yep. Hmm. So, I mean, so what I think about – I honestly think about my past experiences as well. Right. So I was kind of going through a similar thing when I was prototyping mechanical stuff, right? Obviously, it was terribly drawn. It was in SketchUp, mind you. And I ended up sending it out to just a – you know, I was going through, like, the numbers of, oh, well, you know, I should just buy this decent, you know, $10,000 3D printer, right? Right. And then what it came down to was, like, I needed that print. I needed that one print, and I was thinking about that, and I was extrapolating that. But literally after that, I mean, on the project I was on, I was iterating – once that was figured out, it sat there forever, right? I mean, like, especially for that mechanical thing, that just sat there. And so the printer would have sat there as well, and that would have – that specifically, in my situation, that would have been looking for a solution then. And maybe that drives other innovation, right? Because that's, you know, kind of a surplus of, you know, you don't really know what you're going to do with something until it is sitting around waiting to be used kind of thing. But in my case, it would have been, you know, in terms of the cost balance of even paying extra to have it shipped to me quickly, that prototyping tool wasn't useful past the first stage. Right. Similarly with electronics, like, I had probably, you know, on that exact same project, once the mechanical stuff was figured out, I sent out maybe, you know, three or four revs of a board. Right. But I was doing so because I was also building and, you know, I was revising stuff. But while I was revising stuff, I was also testing on my current prototypes with, you know, the bodge wires and everything else. And that's, you know, that was just kind of built to the project of, yes, I had to wait, but I had so much other crap to do that, like, that iteration wasn't really there for me. Now, that could just be my style, but that's kind of what I think about.

Dave Jones: I don't, yeah. I think you're right. I mean, how many, just think about it, how many quick turn prototypes can you buy for the $1,400? Or the, what's the price of this thing?

Chris Gammell: I think it's $1,800 for the normal version. Right. So.

Dave Jones: See that, you know, if you're in a pinch, right, you get a 24 or 48 hour board spun. If you really need a board. Right?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Otherwise, like, you know, like they're just showing like fairly simple circuits that you can build up in a few hours on any Vera board or any other, you know, prototyping board. Right? I mean, it's, and then, but if you're building something complex, well, would you bother doing it on this? Like, you know, because if it's complex, then it's going to take you days to lay out the board. Right? So it's going to take you a day out.

Chris Gammell: Right. And then you might want four layer, you might want six layer, eight layer kind of stuff as well.

Dave Jones: It's like, ah, it's just. Right.

Chris Gammell: So that's, it becomes this, this corner case and that's okay though. Like, but the thing that I think that this is great for and the same thing for a lot of the other prototyping tools out there is the learning aspect. You know, seeing something come to life that quickly is very, very powerful for the turnaround. So like if you had this in a classroom or, you know, even like a, you know, a Fab Lab or a Makerspace or, you know, anything like that. Seeing that turnaround is extremely important because.

Dave Jones: I agree.

Chris Gammell: As someone who teaches a course on layout and building electronics, it's frustrating as shit to get, be like, all right, well, we're doing all this stuff, but don't forget to think about this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this. And then, you know, eventually you'll get your board back and it'll still have something messed up because that's electronics. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah. Okay. You know. But I think the problem is people are buying it, think it's going to solve a problem for them. And I think in most cases it's not. Yeah. I think it's going to be a cool toy for them to play. Like I would love one, right? I'd love to have a play with one. Of course. Me too, man. Right? You know, it's cool. And the other thing is, right, the other interesting thing is, is that it can do solder paste dispensing as well.

Chris Gammell: And reflow.

Dave Jones: Well, how does it do reflow? Has it got a heated bed in it? Has it? It does. Or do you put. Right. So it's got a heated bed.

Chris Gammell: So it's got, it's got special glass plates. Yeah, but it's not.

Dave Jones: But it's an open, it's an open machine. So you're saying it heats up the bottom of the.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a hot plate. I mean, it's effectively just a hot plate. Right. But, you know, it's controlled and. Right. That works for a lot of stuff. And I mean, they're, they're tempered for their, the, the ink that's on board too. Right. Because you want to melt the solder, but not the ink that they're putting laying down.

Dave Jones: Right. But I see, I thought maybe, oh, they've, they've got like a, a hot air reflow attachment for it. So it goes around and actually selectively hot air reflows. Oh, that'd be interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's what immediately jumped to my mind was that. Um, so yeah. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: It seems like it's the, the, in terms of the dispensers, it's mostly like just a mechanic. It's just like turning the gear in order to dispense. You know, they've got like a holder for the, for the paste. They got a holder for the ink. Oh, right. So yeah. And it's just turning it because they even talked about in either one of the Reddit threads or somewhere else that, you know, people have been asking about, uh, drills for doing, you know, just for through hole components. Right. And they said, no, we don't have that right now. And probably be because that, that gear that there's no spindle mechanism yet. Right. Maybe in the future. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But, uh, once again, they've got to be careful not to fall into that trap of trying to be all things to all people. You know, that's of course. Yeah. That is the death call for any product really when it tries to do all things.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I, I was, I was pretty, uh, I was pretty sour on the idea to start with, but as I seen more, seen more stuff with it, I think it's actually, it's a nicely designed product from what I've seen.

Dave Jones: So it looks very nicely designed. Oh yeah. I've got no, I got no beef with it at all. Um, yeah. My, my only beef with this, and it's not just this, it's all of them. Right. Is that. Yeah. I mean, the usage case is like, uh, people think like they're, they're advertising. That's the thing, right? They're not admitting that they're advertising. They think this is really a replacement for getting your PCB prototyped. It's not, it's not.

Chris Gammell: For some people it might be.

Dave Jones: Uh, yeah. But, you know, yeah.

Chris Gammell: But it's not us.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. I just don't think they've lived in the real world enough. You know, they're, they're, they're so caught up with the idea that they think every, you know, it applies to everything, you know, and I'm sorry, it doesn't, you know, that's,

Chris Gammell: that's just the way I see it. Well, that's okay, man. They'll be able to, like we said earlier in the show, they'll just have to prove you wrong.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, that's great. Well, and other people. Well, and that's the thing, right? They will prove, they will effectively prove me wrong by having a really successful Kickstarter. I'm sure it will be really successful and people really will buy this thing, but it doesn't mean people are actually using it, you know, like actually, actually fulfilling that dream of using it as, you know, as a replacement for PCBs. It's like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You're right. You're right. Right. Right. Yeah. If you see, if you see three new projects in a row that say prototyped with this thing, I mean, not even that much, but even if you just hear about other things being prototyped with it, then like, that's kind of the measure of success.

Dave Jones: That could be the vindication. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Well, other people can go and start a different hardware startup and prove you wrong in other ways if you'd like. Like, I don't know if you saw Bolt. Bolt and Y Combinator have teamed up. Right. So that's some big news.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Hardware startups are flavor of the month. They really are. And this thing will do well. This thing will do really well.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, the Bolt team's great too. I mean, I know Chris and Ben and Kate and they're just really bright people. I met some of the, actually, when I was in Boston for the hardware startup meetup, or not the hardware startup meetup, sorry, the open source hardware convention. That was, we got to go visit there. And I mean, they're all doing really cool things, actually. Right. So that's good. I think that's, you know, it's a lot more stuff. And basically, they're going to have a West Coast presence now. What I wonder about is, so like, you know, now that there is more focus on it, right, there's lots of interest in hardware. We keep hearing about that stuff. I can't help but think on the downside, you know, like, when hardware goes cold again, that's actually what I'm worried about. But I guess we'll just, we'll get there. I think we still have some, I think there's still some, a lot more interest to be had. So ride that wave while we can.

Dave Jones: Apparently, Voltira got 25K seed funding from Hackcelerator. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: They're over in ChenGen. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. There you go. Cool. Cool, cool. Anyway, good on them. Sorry, guys, if you're listening and you think I'm a downer, it's just, it's because it's the practical engineer in me. And I think I'm right.

Chris Gammell: And just never, don't design a product for Dave, though. That's a big mistake. I mean, that's the thing. Like, if you're designing for the general, like, a more broad audience, you're going to have a bigger marketplace to sell to. So that's good. Right. So even if it fits, you know, less, you know, if they don't, if they can't chase down experts like you, that's, that's sometimes that's okay. You know, that's making power user tools is risky.

Dave Jones: The problem, the thing, you know, I would tell them something they don't want to hear. Right. These people don't want to hear that there's not a huge market for this thing. Right. They, they, that they don't want to hear that. They think it's going to change the world. And well, good luck to them. You know? Um, but personally, I can't think of anything more annoying than having to lay out a board specially for this machine just so that I can get a prototype done. I'm just going to not bother. I, I, you know, that's, that's me. Maybe some people, some other people are different, but yep.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think, uh, one thing I would do, uh, have you seen, have you seen the new macro fab site? Uh, macro fab. No. Dot net.

Dave Jones: Who are macro fab?

Chris Gammell: So Mac. So, uh, we've had Andrew on the show before, uh, from, from circuit hub. This is a, uh, kind of similar service. It's a little bit different in terms of, uh, execution, but, but basically it's a, you upload a project. It can do two sided boards. I think for now I tried a four layer board. It didn't, it didn't like that, but basically you can upload and then, um, you go through the whole thing and you go, you go source parts and basically they'll go and order parts for you. But the cool thing is the different steps again, you know, if you go actually click through and everything like that, basically you upload your Gerbers, you upload your bomb, you verify the parts are right. And then the, the final step that's cool is you, you actually verify placement of components using part outlines onto the Gerbers. So basically they're kind of like mechanical Turk. We talked about mechanical Turk last night or last week. This is kind of the same thing, except you are the mechanical Turk now where you're basically verifying placement. And then I, I think, but I am not sure that all of the, the orders get bundled together like an Osh Park does where you actually have them all on a single panel. Right. And then basically because the placement data is verified, you also bundle that with the design that's on part of that larger panel. And then basically that drops the overall cost of manufacturing. I'm not sure about the loaders and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Right. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But the costs tricky are, are very reasonable. Right. So there's a demo. If you clicked, uh, if you go to the PCB assembly and then demo, you can actually see, uh, one of the projects, then they actually have all of the different steps you can go through. Um, they even allow firmware programming, stuff like that. And so let's see. So single board, this one is the, the demo that they do is a, a parallax propeller board. Um, and for a single board with parts, material and parts, PCB and labor, $57 assembled in 15 days, 15 business days.

Dave Jones: Very nice.

Chris Gammell: That's, that's pretty crazy.

Dave Jones: I mean, like that's insane. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's, that's, I mean, that's, that's low. That's a low cost. I mean, so, and I mean like, that's just crazy.

Dave Jones: So like, yeah, it's still, it's still not as low as just getting your $5 Osh Park board and, and buying the chips and soldering it yourself.

Chris Gammell: Uh, yeah. For a single board, I think it's about how it scales in, right? So if you put in 10, uh, it's still the same price per board effectively. And you know, like, so that doesn't really scale as linearly and to get something that actually places properly and is programmed.

Dave Jones: But, but you're limited to available parts, right?

Chris Gammell: Correct. And the other interesting thing that they do is they actually have, they have house components, they call them. Yeah. And so if you pick, if you pick a house component, like a resistor or a, you know, capacitor, stuff like that, it's actually no charge just because it's. Because it's. Yeah. Or sorry, no, it's not no charge. It's the, the placement fee is waived probably because they already have it on. Sorry. I misspoke there, but the placement fee is waived. Got it. Whereas if you, if you bring in an outside part, there's a placement fee. So.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So if you, if you optimize for the parts they have in line or have in house, then. Yeah. So you're limited. You know.

Dave Jones: But if, if anyone's, but if you're like me, every project you do uses parts that you've never used before, you know, it's just.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, that's, that's a bigger question. You know, are you, are you using parts that are, you know, what kind of projects are you making? Are you making stuff that's trying out new parts? Are you, are you making stuff that's kind of a small variations on open source hardware projects, stuff like that? Right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Everyone has their needs. I work in analogs. So it's always, yeah, it's always different for me too. It's a.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Chris Gammell: Ah, goodness. But the, I think, I think this, you know, I like CircuitHub as well. CircuitHub uses, I think the Worthington assembly. So for the actual assembly side of things, this one, I think Macrofab uses an in-house thing down in Texas, they said. So, you know. Right. In terms of options, things are like, it's looking up for, for us, right? I mean, in terms of all these things.

Dave Jones: We live in a different world. Oh yeah, man.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like.

Dave Jones: Options aren't just looking up. It's an entirely different world.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. And I think, I think the hard part now is just coming up with enough projects in order to, I feel guilty not, you know, like not churning through some of this stuff, you know, it's like.

Dave Jones: There's almost too much choice for this. Like, you know, if I wanted to develop a product, you know, like do something like this, right? I'd go, oh, geez, who, what service am I going to use? Like there's so many. I don't even know, am I missing out on the best service? I have to go ask, ask the community, which is the best way to do this? And they'll come and say, oh, use this new service and this one and this one.

Chris Gammell: It's electronics FOMO. Fear of missing out. Right.

Dave Jones: Fear of doing it inefficiently or yeah. Yeah. More expensive than what you need to. And, you know, I don't know. From the prototype, I'll tell you what, from the PCB prototype side of things, I still reckon that the milling machine, the FR4 milling machine is still the way to go. If you want quick protos, still think it's the way to go. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Uh, depends how quick we talk. I mean, talk about how quick and, you know, what kind of parts you're using.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, it's probably just as quick as this. Well, no, it's probably a bit slower than the silver printer thing, the Volterra thing, maybe, but still. Yeah. But you can do real layouts on it. Get real copper, you know, using your real layout. And you can do double-sided boards. You know, if you get two single, if you route two single-sided ones, you can flip them and just actually paste them together. What do you mean it blows?

Chris Gammell: Have you done that before? It's terrible.

Dave Jones: In what way is it terrible?

Chris Gammell: So, okay. So let's talk about the idea of a via, right? Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have to do your own vias. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You've got to do your own vias. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I drive tons of vias when I'm doing stuff. I'm like, I don't know.

Dave Jones: True.

Chris Gammell: I know.

Dave Jones: But if you do need it then and there, right? If you do need it then and there, and you're not willing to wait the one or two days for a quick turn board, you know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think I'm working too slow. That's my problem. Right. If it's not working fast enough, I don't need this stuff, but that's fine. That's fine. I'm a relic of the past.

Dave Jones: Goodness. Anyway, enough of that. What else have we got? Oh, I was going to talk about the speech recognition product. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Your new video. You just released a video right before we started recording. I did. That's pretty cool.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So back to breadboards.

Dave Jones: Back to breadboards. Yep. The traditional way of doing things. Yes. And I was actually, you know, it's not a huge breadboard layout, but it took time. You know? I was surprised how long it took. Right. Oh, shit. I need a 5K6 resistor. Got to go over to the parts drawer and get it and pull one out and actually check it and then trim the leads off because you don't want the gunk on the ends of them from the bandolier. You know? So you've got to trim the ends off, right? Because that's a trap for young players. You know, if you would pull one of the, for those who don't know, if you pull one, a through hole resistor off one of those bandolier strips that they come in, right? They're held in there with glue. Okay? So you. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So you end up with glue stuck on the end of your leads. And then if you take that resistor and then go stick it straight in your breadboard, congratulations. You've got a layer of bloody glue on your pin. And it may not make contact.

Chris Gammell: You're a small capacitor. Right. Dielectric constant of goo.

Dave Jones: Big, big trap for young players. So actually, that's just giving me an interesting video idea. Hmm. Let me note that down. Let me note that down. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I find that I keep coming back to breadboards just because they're convenient. But I don't know. Like, dead bug, man. Dead bug all the way.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Like, I don't like soldering if I don't have to. You know, I really like my breadboard.

Chris Gammell: That's therapeutic. I don't know.

Dave Jones: It is, but, you know, yeah. I'm so over-soldering, you know. I've been doing it my whole life. Soldering is so 10 years ago.

Chris Gammell: So what is this thing? So this is a chip, the VCP 200. Yes. You had actually asked on Twitter for a data sheet, and I was the one who found it.

Dave Jones: You were the one who found it because I was too lazy to go and search for 68HC04 instead of 6804.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yep. And then I saw that other people did find you in 6804 on an archive site somewhere. Oh, right. Okay. I haven't looked. Yeah. That can be hard when you don't know the part number. Like, that's honestly one of the hardest things when you're like, I know it's a, you know, Cortex something, but you don't know what NXP or whoever. Right. You know, TI or, you know, that's like, what is the actual prefix? Because if you even have like the prefix letters and then a couple of the numbers, you can usually get there too. But, yeah, that's tough.

Dave Jones: Anyway, yeah, the interesting thing about this, I thought it was always an ASIC chip. Right. I was always of the understanding that this Voice Control Product Inc. is the company, Voice Control Products Inc., which I actually looked. I think they're still a registered company in some way, shape, or form. And so their address is on LinkedIn. So I found them on LinkedIn and then I looked up the address and it's a laundromat.

Chris Gammell: Some dude.

Dave Jones: It's a laundromat. So I think they might have like an apartment above the laundromat or something. Anyway, it was really weird. So they might still exist.

Chris Gammell: It's going to be a sweet tax write-off over 20 years.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: 27 years. So this chip is 27 years old. Yeah, I got it from Tandy slash Radio Shack back in 1988. It was it. So the chip dates from 1988. Yeah. They might be bought by Amazon. Amazon might move into their stores. Anyway. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a bit of news. Anyway. Yeah. I wanted to see if this 27-year-old chip would still work. And yes. Spoiler. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Oh. Spoiler. Yes. Spoiler. Go back and beep that out. And so it happens.

Dave Jones: Beep.

Chris Gammell: And.

Dave Jones: Oh, goodness. Anyway. Yes, it did work. And which is cool. And yes, it did understand my strine. My strine exit. Oh, good. Good. Good. Yep. Yeah. And yeah. And because this is anyway, it's a speaker independent voice recognition system as opposed to a speaker trained or whatever the term is, you know, like you train it for your voice.

Chris Gammell: Or you have like a dragon, what's that called? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Dragon speak or whatever. Yeah. It's one of those. Yeah. It learns your voice, you know, which is much more accurate. I mean, this. So this thing's only got like five commands, right? You know, like go, stop, forward, back. Right. And that sort of thing. So that's how it's able to do speaker independent.

Dave Jones: But yeah. Right. It basically works. You know, it's very crude. Like it can't handle normal speech. So if it was sitting here listening to us just talk now, it'd be flashing its lights and going, yeah, you just said the word go, even though you didn't. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: And I said, no, no. Go, go, go. Go.

Dave Jones: Go. Go.

Chris Gammell: So, but you said that this is, so this is, this is an off the shelf 6804.

Dave Jones: It's a mask ROM. I always thought for the last 27 years, I thought this was an ASIC, but it's not. It's an off the shelf 6804.

Chris Gammell: So explain, explain a mask ROM. What does that mean?

Dave Jones: It's, it's, it's a microcontroller with the ROM built in just like you used to now, you know, with the flash micros these days. Right. But mask ROM being that they actually.

Chris Gammell: It's these days and they're flash. Spoiled. Right.

Dave Jones: But these days.

Chris Gammell: With your page duration, your 20, 20 volt rails and your, sorry.

Dave Jones: 25 volt. Who remembers? Hands up if you remember the 25 volt VPP EEPROM programming voltage. Yes. There you go. Thank you very much.

Chris Gammell: You still need, you still need high, high voltages to a race. They just put boost circuits on board.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So it runs off your regular 3.3 volt rail and you don't realize. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Where was I? Before you distracted me. Mask ROMs. Mask ROMs. Sorry. Yeah. What the, yeah. The, this is why they used to do it back in the old days. Right. The factory could actually, the manufacturer could factory program the ROM information for you. You know, you'd, you'd have to order a minimum number. Right. But then they would factory program in and it's hence masks. They would do like a mask for you. And somehow it's part of the chip manufacturing process. They would boop. Right. Yeah. Something like that. I don't know the exact. With lasers or something. Or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, they have some sort of UV on the bare die and they go through a mask and pull and it, and it sets bits permanently or something. I don't know. Something like that. And yeah. So you, so it's a really cheap way to get your micro controllers back then. Otherwise, you know, micro controllers, they didn't have erasable memories in them. Right. Like, who remembers the first microchip PIC-16C84, right? Which is one of the first ones, right? It was non-erasable. They didn't have eSquared PROM technology then, or let alone flash technology. Right. So it was an, it was an OTP part, a one-time programmable part. So it sort of goes mask, OTP, EEPROM, and then flash. They're kind of like the different levels of technology progression in microcontroller programming kind of thing. Or before that.

Chris Gammell: You could also have that, you could have that separate and then do the little window thing where you did the UV erasable.

Dave Jones: You could do the UV erasable window. Right. Right. So, or before that, you know, or you use a microprocessor, which then uses an external EEPROM. Yeah. Right. But yeah, anyway, so this was a micro. It's a 1988 vintage micro, the 6804. And it's got 1K of memory or it, so I'm not sure exactly which one they use. There's, there's two variants. One has 1K of memory. One has 1.5K of memory. But either way, it's a pissing amount of memory. Right. And they figured out how to do speaker independent voice recognition inside, you know, like a K or a K and a half of memory. It's, it's unbelievable. And they make claims that, you know, oh, it does spectral analysis and all this sort of stuff and bins them and then compares them. Right. It's obviously not doing that in one, one or one and a half K of memories. Right. So they've done all that research on the side and they've produced tables, right? Which are then programmed into the thing. And then I think it's just some sort of state machine that just operates like a state machine and it compares. So it operates like a, so it, so it takes, takes the pulse width modulated input because it doesn't have an analog to digital converter. It actually, so you actually square up your voice signal that it generates a square wave which then feeds into the micro. And then. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and then obviously they've got some whiz bang algorithms that match up that to your keywords and then it, then it says, you said go, I'm going to light this output, you know, boom. And that's it. It's an incredibly simple device, but I'm sure there's lots of research that went into the algorithms behind it and everything else.

Chris Gammell: Wait, so, so the analog down to a PWM output, uh, so it's just.

Dave Jones: Sorry, a PWM is not the correct term. It's a squared up version of the analog signal. So what it's got is what it's got.

Chris Gammell: So it's just got a timing circuit then and it's basically just.

Dave Jones: No, no, no. It's just got the microphone. There's a high gain amp like times 500 and then there's a comparator to square it up. So your voice gets converted into a square wave that's fed into the micro. And then the micro, how that actually then compares it to the tables and everything else we don't know. That's so weird. Yeah, I know. Yeah. But, but they were able to do that. It's just, I think it's remarkable. I think it's incredible.

Chris Gammell: That's still very cool. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, that's very cool. Yeah. Um.

Dave Jones: It brings back memories of me trying to squeeze into 1k of memory. I, uh, video overlay, uh, project I did and got published. Um, and that was, I think I squeezed that into one. I think it was 1k of memory and it was all hand coded assembler. And I had hookup tables for the text, you know, and for the, you know, so it could put any text and it would actually talk to a keyboard, right? So you'd hook up a PC keyboard to it and talk to the PC keyboard and talk to the special video overlay chip, which overlaid, uh, text onto the power video. And, uh, yeah, but that was all in like 1k of memory. You know, it was all hand code assembly. I think I had like two bytes spare or something in the end.

Chris Gammell: Right. It has been a while since we mentioned on here, but of course people are expecting us to say that someday we will have that 1k code contest. Oh yes.

Dave Jones: I still would love to do that. I think that'd be neat.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: The problem is getting, yeah, get it. Well, no, every, every manufacturer makes a, still makes a tiny micro with 1k. Oh yeah. You know? I mean, you could, you could artificially limit it too. You just have to check it against the code. Right. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. That's, that is really cool though. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's not, uh, you know, that didn't go to any project, product, projects or products rather. Um, I'm sure, but, or if it did, they're probably, they, they didn't make it to today, but these are the humble beginnings of talking to your smartphone. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: And if we did have that project, you know, that, uh, contest, you know, this would have won it. Right. If, if you, you know, if you could do speaker independent voice recognition in 1k memory, holy shit, you win, you know, congratulations. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Totally. You know? Um, so yeah, it needs some, you know, uh, sort of out of the box thinking like that. Yeah. So anyway, I think it's very cool.

Chris Gammell: So you mentioned, uh, erasing chips. I think we should probably bring up the, uh, the interesting, but not really as dramatic as the internet put it, uh, the, the Raspberry Pi 2 being camera shy. I think a lot of people have seen this already, but, uh, I think it's interesting just because, uh, from the packaging side of things, you know, basically it's, if you have a Xenon flash, you, you're impacting the switcher somehow.

Dave Jones: You're generating a lot of photons. Soft reset. If people don't know, somebody discovered that the new Raspberry Pi 2, he took a photo of it with an old fashioned flash camera, you know, like with a, right.

Chris Gammell: We'd only get one of those.

Dave Jones: And then it, it reset and he, you know, he didn't think of anything at the time and he slowly narrowed it down. Yeah. The flash was, you know, causing this board to lock up. Right. And I, I, I don't think it reset. I think it actually locked up or something. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And it turns out that it was a switch mode controller chip on there. I don't know what brand, um, switch mode controller chip, but, uh, anyway, they, they put it on there, I believe as a bare die. Like I think it was a flip chip, you know, bare die or something like that. Right. So it was inherently light sensitive because if it was an encapsulated chip, it wouldn't have happened. Right. The light wouldn't have been able to get through the black encapsulation. I mean, this is a very well-known effect, right? Photons affect semiconductors, you know, this is not new. Right. So, um, of course, if you put a bare die there, even, even if it's upside down, right, then the light can get under and boom. Right. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's no surprise. What's the people seem shocked by this. It's like, nope.

Chris Gammell: There've been other interesting, uh, like I remember, uh, I remember, uh, there's some tales from the cubes and a couple other things like that where it's like, you know, where, like we mentioned with the EEPROM, the UV erasable EEPROM, like the tape wasn't on that well enough or the tape wasn't very good. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Or they used a, uh, yeah. Or they used a, uh, white label, you know, a white paper label, which actually lets light through. Right. Right. And they wonder why their EEPROM gets erased and their product fails after six months.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Oops. I've had, I've had problems on the bench before where I had like a, you know, a fluorescent lamp above and I was doing a real sensitive high impedance input circuit. Yeah. And I don't know what, what the actual effect was, but basically, you know, like you put your hand over the circuit and the 60 Hertz noise coming from the light basically goes away. Uh, it's like, oh, okay, something's going on here. So, uh, that wouldn't have been a lot. I don't know what it was, man, but it basically, it was something, something super sensitive on the input and, uh.

Dave Jones: All that analog shit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Hmm. I, I don't remember this. I just remember covering it up into being like, uh, okay, well that's different. So.

Dave Jones: Goodness. Yeah. Anyway, and a lot of people ask, well, I should do a video on this and I'm going, well, what's there to show? Yeah, it does it and yeah, it's due to light. This is not, this is a well-known industry thing. I mean, it's not a, you know, I could do it. Yeah. It's like, it's a trap for young players. Photoelectric effect. It's obvious. Yeah. Like this type thing. Yeah. Everyone's like, yeah, okay. Well, you know, maybe I, but everyone's done a video on it proving that's the issue, you know? So I, I don't see what value I have to add there. I, I, I, I thought about it, you know, I'd rush out and buy a Raspberry Pi too and I do. And then I looked well every, you know, and like 10 people had already done a video on it, you know? So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sorry, folks. It's, yeah. You can always, you have to basically cause some other part to fail with some kind of high energy signal. Leave that to, leave that to Mike with his x-ray machine, right?

Dave Jones: Right. Right. Yep. And you can do it with a laser as well. A laser will do it too, apparently. Ah, okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's what, uh, Shariar could do. Cause he just, uh, did you see his crazy frigging video?

Dave Jones: Yes. It, LaCroix invited him to their main headquarters where they design and manufacture and, uh, the, their, um, top of the range, hundred gig scopes. And yeah, he, um, scored an interview with one of the head designers there. Um, yep. And, uh, yeah. So he.

Chris Gammell: And a tour and a tear down and. Yeah. It was awesome.

Dave Jones: A tear down of the thing. And yeah, it's awesome. Um, so yeah, apparently it's within driving distance of his home or something. So he just drove there and went. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I wish. I wish. Ah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's what you get for being in the backwater here in Australia, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: Lack of cool content like that. It's just. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: They gotta, they gotta, they gotta ship that stuff, uh, overseas. That's. Yep. A little less likely with those million dollar scopes. So. Yeah. But, uh.

Dave Jones: I haven't watched the whole video yet, but I love the ending where, um, uh, Sharia, um, said, and, and if you, you know, he was there standing next to the, um, you know, the head, head guy at LaCroix or whatever. And, and if you want a demo of this, you know, send them an email and they'll send you a demo unit. And the guy's face just went, no, no. It's a million dollar machine. We're not going to send you a demo. It was hilarious. It was hilarious. Yeah. So this like is a $1 million oscilloscope. Oh yeah. It costs a million dollars. And.

Dave Jones: Cause they're making like. It's, it's bleeding.

Chris Gammell: That's what happens when you're, when you make a tools for super experts, right? They are made to order.

Dave Jones: I mean, they don't have these things in stock. If you order one, they will go, okay, we'll start building one, you know? Yeah. Right. So yeah. It's just, yeah. It's amazing. So yeah. And they test them all in, in house. And it was interesting how they tested their, uh, their scopes, but they're, you know, they're very expensive high-end scopes, right? They don't sell cheap shit. Well, if they do, they just rebadge it from Siglin or, you know, whoever. But, you know, when you pay 20,000. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The focus of the research is, is on, is on the high-end stuff. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's on the high-end stuff. So they can do it all, all in, in house. They don't have to go to China. It makes more sense for them to do it locally in house, you know, because there's no, you

Speaker ?: know.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's how I used to be here in Keefley too. Oh, right. Yeah. You know, if you're selling a $50,000, $100,000 scope, you know, there's no advantage to going to China. It's just stupid, really. So, anyway, that's, yeah, it's fantastic. Just, just, just the test systems to actually test and calibrate and qualify a one gig scope are in themselves.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. A hundred gig, Dave.

Dave Jones: Sorry, a hundred gig scopes are like bleeding edge, you know, custom developed products. Even, even more so interesting than the scope itself, perhaps.

Chris Gammell: Right? So. Uh, sometimes, you know, a lot of that stuff too, though, like it's a lot of, uh, you know, when people, when you're in school and you're kind of like, well, what the hell am I going to use statistics for? Right. Like in terms of like, like test and measurement. Oh, yeah. Especially like in the, in the calibration side of things. Oh, yeah. Tons of stats. Yeah. Just like real world applied statistics. And it's really cool. I mean, like, and you know, you have to do testing. You have to do, you have to make sure your test stands are okay. Like, like gauge R&Rs that you make sure you're, you're, you know, if you have more than one stand, what happens if your stand goes out of cal? Yep. Like you have to do regular calibrations. It's all tied back to a single.

Dave Jones: So you've gone over all this stuff before, but I come from a production oriented. Exactly. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's, it's, it's very interesting. It's very tedious and it's, uh, and like, you got to know your stats.

Dave Jones: So that's absolutely. Oh, no, it's good stuff. I love it. So yeah, it's an excellent video. Check it out. Oh, and yeah. And he gets it. Yeah. So they do, no, it's like three videos in one. It's like a, um, it's a theory thing by the head, one of the head designers there. Then it's a tear down of the hundred gig scope. And then it's a factory tour explaining from one of the, the head of the engineering factory engineering there. So, yep. Very cool.

Chris Gammell: Uh, other links, we're running out of time. Uh, other links I would call out this week. Uh, the robotics course, Berkeley's got a robotics course on, uh, on edX. So that's pretty cool. Uh, if you're.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but that's news. What is, why is that newsworthy? Uh, everyone's into robots these days. Of course there's robot courses. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's free. It's from Berkeley. I don't know. It's good. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. Cool. Uh, what were the other ones? Uh, yeah. Yeah. The, uh, the chips that we mentioned last week, the RISC-V cores. Uh, we, we had talked, we had, when we talked about the cores stuff, the open source cores, uh, someone did, did point out that the, the, uh, the RISC-V cores have been taped out. So. Right. That's cool. Okay.

Dave Jones: Very cool.

Chris Gammell: Uh, what was the other one? There was one other one. Sorry. I'm missing it. I can't find it now.

Dave Jones: Schematic tattoos.

Speaker ?: Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You posted this on Twitter, I think. Yeah. I found this. I, cause I was, I can't remember what I was searching for, but it popped up. It like, I was searching, I was searching through, through the images, right? I was searching, um, Google images, you know, and I, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what I was searching. And, and this just popped up. People who've had schematics tattooed onto them. So we'll link it in. And it's like, well, you know, I was looking at, it looked like the tattoos are mostly

Chris Gammell: like, uh, people that are into like tube amps and, you know, like, uh, these are like class A, you know, for rocker types. Well, maybe not rockers. They don't look that rocking, but, uh, yep. Yeah. They're cool. They're cool tattoos though, for sure.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, yeah. You would want it to be. If you're into that sort of thing. Yeah. You would want it to be a kick-ass circle. Like you wouldn't want it just to be some, you know. Right.

Chris Gammell: Seven, four, one.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Ah, maybe. I don't know. Something iconic, I guess. I don't know. Tattoos look like they hurt though. That's the main thing.

Dave Jones: Oh, it looks, yeah. Ah, screw that. Yeah. And it's permanent. Like, screw that. Also. Yeah. Like, you know, no. Right. No thanks.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, make sure your schematics right. I remember the last thing. It's actually not on the list. I was looking for it, but, uh, so Analog Aficionados is a dinner that happens once a year in Silicon Valley. I'll be out there. It's actually the 22nd of February. Yeah. And, uh, we did post a link about it, but we never talked about it. So that is in, not next Sunday, but the Sunday after. Cool. And so that's a good chance to go and meet people interested in Analog and people that have been in the industry a long time. So if you're interested, there is a link I'll post as well.

Dave Jones: I wonder if the old timers there think, oh, if you were all these bloody new young whippersnappers, this was supposed to be just for us, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I wonder that too. And I don't know. We'll find out. All right. I'll be on the hunt for guests. Let's be completely serious. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. I thought you had been there before.

Chris Gammell: No, I, I've talked about it on the show before, but I've actually never gone out there. Remember actually, uh, on Saturday, it's the one year anniversary of me leaving my, my full time job. Wow. There you go. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Time flies, dude. I told you. I told you. It feels like it's been like four years. Who are we kidding here, man?

Chris Gammell: It feels like it's been forever. So, uh, yeah.

Dave Jones: So you're going to hunt for guests.

Chris Gammell: Oh, hell yeah.

Dave Jones: So I am going to rub it in, right? That you met Mr. LaCroix. Speaking of LaCroix. Oh yeah. And you didn't think to ask him on the show?

Chris Gammell: Uh, yeah. You know, so Walter, it's Walter, I think. Right? Walter LaCroix. Uh, it was very brief. I mean, it was basically like a photo op. Ah, photo op. Okay. Who's, uh. All right. Who's in charge of PR there. She's, she's awesome. And, uh, she, she's like, do you want to meet him? I'm like, yeah, I want to meet him. And then I'm like, hi, I'm Chris. You know? Right. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: I can't afford your 100 gigahertz scope. I mean, like, I don't know. It's like, yeah, that's great. Like, but I would have, I, I would have said the same thing to Joe Keithley if I would have met, I'm like, I met Joe Keithley's son, but you know, like, what do you say? You know, like.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Fair, cool. All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I did meet Eric, uh, Bogutin and, uh, hopefully he'll be on the show in the future. So. Okay. Nice. That'll be, that'll be fun.

Dave Jones: I'm just saying you could have gone the extra mile there. That's all I'm saying.

Chris Gammell: Oh, right, right, right. Yes. Let's, let's look at the, uh, let's look at the guest booking, uh, uh, scoreboard here, folks. Yeah. Yeah. Rub it in. Dave's good friend, uh, Doug Ford still hasn't been asked on the show. Uh, let's see. Uh, yeah. Chris does all the booking for every, I think, I think we're, yeah. All right. All right. I think, I think, I think, I think the issue is closed. Uh, next week on the show. Touche. We will have, uh, Mark and Joe from Salier. Uh, so Salier went, they actually had to put it off two weeks because they were still, they wrote that, that interesting letter about the manufacturing, but they're, they're going to come on and talk about it, which is great because we're really interested in that. They, they basically jumped into manufacturing on site and, and they've been, you know, fighting through that and that's good. Uh, I actually, I got, I finally got a logic four. So I'll, I'll have tried that out by then too. So, and I know you've, you've got one.

Dave Jones: So I've got, I've got one of the old ones. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Yeah. I got the one with the analog on it. So yeah. Cool. That's it. Good, good, good. It's a wrap. Talk to you next week. Say it. Good luck with your car. Good luck with your car.