#240 – Compare and Contrast Tech Entitlement - Worldly Working Wonks

Dave Jones: This is the Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded March 10, 2015. Episode 240. Worldly. Working. Wonks.

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: Just us this week?

Chris Gammell: Just us? Hey man, what's new?

Dave Jones: Nothing.

Chris Gammell: No?

Dave Jones: Nothing changes in my world.

Chris Gammell: No?

Dave Jones: You know this, yet you keep asking. For five years you've been asking the same question.

Chris Gammell: I guess. I don't know, I saw you climbing through canyons on Twitter and, you know, just the usual. Cool Aussie. Nice weather stuff. Yep. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Have them real estate prices there in Sydney. Right, yeah. Tell me about it. Right, yeah. Oh man. I saw, someone sent me a thing that said like, it was showing real estate prices in the States. And just, you know, just like rentals for a one bedroom type of thing. Right, yep. And it said the average in different parts of San Francisco was like $3,300 for a one bedroom rental. And it's just like, you know, you could. What, is that a month or what? That's a month, yeah, sorry. Right. And it's just like, you could, you know, you could just live remotely and fly in. And that's kind of what I do. Oh, right, okay. Got it.

Dave Jones: It's that bad, huh? Yeah. That you could just fly in every day. Yeah, you miss a lot of other things. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Commuting. Commuting via airplane.

Dave Jones: I actually did the math on this once. I've got some friends who wanted to live near, they work in the city, right? So they wanted to live near the city. And of course it gets in Sydney, like probably most cities, like, you know, major cities. The closer you get to the central business district, the more expensive it gets, right? You know, per square meter, right? So they, you know, they're paying huge, they want to pay, you know, huge dollars to live right near, so that they could be, you know, so they could actually have less hassle getting to work, right? Yeah. But it wasn't that easy, right? They still had to, you know, hop on a bus and take some, you know, 15, 20 minutes to get there and, you know. Anyway, so it's not that close, but they're paying this huge premium and they're going, oh no, we don't want to live out, you know, actually further out. In the boonies. Because it costs, you know, it takes longer to get there. I'm saying, yeah, it takes longer, but it's infinitely cheaper and you could actually hire a chauffeur to take you to work every day. And I actually did them and it was cheaper, like auto, not a cab, but to like get it, you know, like it was, it worked out actually cheaper over like 10, 10 years or something to get someone to chauffeur you to and from work or something. It was just.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Yeah. It was. That's an interesting implication because, you know, like the whole idea of like a self-driving car as well. I mean, that's effectively what it is. It's like a show, you know, a robotic chauffeur. Yeah, yeah. Right. And, you know, you still have the travel time, but then you could not pay attention and you could. You can do stuff. Unfortunately, you don't have to listen to podcasts. You could watch videos. Right. So you'll be okay. I guess you can watch contextual electronics and solder in your car and stuff like that. Right. Yeah. Dear Google, please add. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That solder's a real bitch when it slams on the brakes, you know. Yeah. Right. Those solder splashes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep. Exactly. 14 more people were injured today with severe burns. Yeah. Well, but still, I mean, that's kind of the idea, right? You could, you know, you could have. Right. Right. That should lessen the infrastructure needs, but there are still downsides to that stuff. Yep. Anyway. That's fun. Implications, though. That's fun. Hmm.

Dave Jones: Well, I did the same thing here. You know, I paid a lot extra for this lab because it was near home, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I could have got much bigger. Maybe not better. Like, I actually like this one. You know, it's a nice building. It's like, you know, nice convenient location to various things. But yeah, it's, you know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it drains on you. I mean, so I had a big commute at my old job and it can drain on you. Yeah. It's just, you know, at the end of the day when you're like ready to just get home and you got a 45 minute wait. It's like, you know, you got to be kind of attentive.

Dave Jones: That's what happened with Altium. I never thought I would work so far from home as I did without him, especially like in the first nine months to 12 months I was there because we were in the old building and that was like further. That was a nightmare to get to. And that would have taken, if I went in peak hour, that would have taken like two hours to get there. It would have been that bad, you know. So, but thankfully they, you know, allowed flexible hours. So, I'd, you know, go in after peak hour and, but it was still, it was still bad. You know, it was still like, yeah, that 45, you know, a good run would be 45 minutes each way. But, you know, if there was some hold up, it was at least an hour, you know, it was over an hour or more each way.

Chris Gammell: We should say hello to all of our listeners who are in the car. I know that's the main time I listen to podcasts is in the car. So, hello. Sorry about your drive.

Dave Jones: Sorry, your life has gotten to that point where you've had no other choice but to commute.

Chris Gammell: You're listening to these two idiots on the way to work.

Dave Jones: But I, you know, I hated my existing job so much and the Altium one sounded so good that I went, you know, look, hey, you know. Yeah, no, it can be worth it, right?

Dave Jones: Try it, yeah. And then it actually got better because I, you know, I was there for like nine months and then we moved buildings to, it wasn't that much further away, but just the way that the roads worked, I could be there in like 25 minutes. It was like halfway across Sydney. But if I, if I got, you know, it was like motorway all the way and, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if I went after peak hour, it was just like a dream run. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's interesting too because you see shifting in, not demographics, I guess, but just like, I mean, just in workspaces and, you know, like the, obviously not a lot of manufacturing is co-located anymore. Right. Unfortunately, that, I think that's actually a downside. But, but the upside to that is that you can have an office space in a, in a city versus, you know, like a lot of, like, I mean, Keith Lee was in the burbs out here where I live near there still. I mean, ABB was the burbs, you know, it's just like these, because it was manufacturing on site and you need space. And basically what would happen is you'd get like these local suburbs giving tax breaks to try and get jobs out there.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so that ends up. So they get these massive spaces for almost free, you know, they're like. Right. Exactly. Giving them away. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I mean, and I think that that ends up, that ends up sucking for when you're younger, right? Because like, you're like, oh, I want to like live in the city or, you know, live wherever. And then you got to commute out to the suburbs.

Dave Jones: Still living at my parents because it's, you know, it's convenient to work. Like you're right.

Chris Gammell: But then like, you know, like older, older engineers as well. Like if you're, you know, like, like all those other places, there were always, you know, suburbs around there and that's where, that's where a lot of them would live basically. And it's just kind of, the only thing that sucks then is if you need to change jobs and there is another stuff around. So then you got to work in your basement.

Dave Jones: Oh, goodness.

Chris Gammell: It's finally warming up in my basement. So I'm happy. Excellent. Excellent.

Dave Jones: Yeah. What is this? I've had massive delays in my microcurrent shipments and I've been talking to Australia Post about it and they're saying, yeah, like the, like half of the US is like all their airports are backlogged because they're all just snowed under and all the, you know, or the whole mail system is just like ground or halt. Is this common? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, you know, think about it like a network, man. It's just like the, that kind of, you know, you get one disruption in the system and it just ripples.

Dave Jones: It just, yeah, exactly. And they're saying, yeah, look for regular mail. Like, yeah, like it flies into this airport, right? You know, it flies into JFK and it just stays there. Oh, well, JFK, yeah. Yeah. Right. And it just stays there forever. And, and it's like, yeah, that's where my microcurrent. You know, so I'm getting all these yanks in the last month or so contacted me. Oh, my microcar, where does it normally take this long? Where is it? I don't know. And like, it's, I've been checking the tracking. It's just sitting somewhere. And I have to explain to yanks that, well, your country's going in. Country's snowy. It's in a gridlock. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's clearing up finally. Finally. Right. But, yeah. No, I mean, yeah, I mean, I, I, I, you know, obviously I, I'm, I'm at home and a lot of, a lot of my outside influence these days comes via UPS or USPS. Right, yeah. You know, it's just like, and I am consistently amazed at just the logistics side of things. It's.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, I know. It's absolutely incredible.

Chris Gammell: It's a terrible business that totally makes every dollar they own. You know, they, they charge you kind of thing. You know, it's just.

Dave Jones: But it's amazing how they can, you know, those efficient systems, you know, FedEx and Amazon and all the rest, you know, and it's just incredible how their systems work though. Oh, yeah. How they make them so, so efficient. Yeah, I mean. Things like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's the, that is, that is the future of automation. You know, we talk about the, the self-driving cars, but that's, that's only one piece of automation. It's just like a lot of automation is going to be software based and that kind of like business, business automation type stuff. And. Right. That's where the, that's where the money is. I think.

Dave Jones: Before the show, we were talking about the Adam and Adam, Jamie, Adam, Will and Norm podcast, right? Oh, tested. Podcast, right? I was just watching this before the show and they were talking about the death of ADA shack, right? So they're talking about, you know, so radio shack's died. Now, you know, they did a whole like podcast episode on it and yeah. And they were talking about how, you know, Amazon have now got this, you know, they'll, they'll keep the most popular things like in the most local hubs. Cause they've got all the data and they can ship it to you within the hour. Or something like that.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, that's in San Francisco. That's. Oh, is it? Right. Okay. And they're saying like.

Chris Gammell: That is not in Cleveland, Ohio yet. Right. Okay. Yes.

Dave Jones: But in the big cities, right. And there's, yeah, they'll like ship it to you within like an hour or two. And they're going, you know, like that's quicker than going down to your local store. Even if you live next door to DigiKey or, you know, like even if you lived a 30 minute try from DigiKey headquarters, right. It's just like, it's quicker.

Chris Gammell: Just because you don't have any, you don't have any, uh, stakeholdering in that because you're just, you're just waiting, right. You can be doing other things. So it's worth a lot more. Oh, it's just, yeah. Well, and don't kid yourself. I mean, all of the distributors in, uh, electronics are looking at, at Amazon. Everybody, I mean, like I, eventually Amazon might get into it. I don't know if they actually will, but like, you know, like all of them strive to be like that. You know, it's just like in terms of the, the factory or sorry, the, uh, warehouse efficiency type stuff. I mean, that's why Amazon bought the robotics company they did, uh, just for. Right. Because that's how they're doing so much stuff. Did you ever see that? The, uh, what's it called?

Dave Jones: I haven't seen inside their factory. No, I know they bought, they're buying companies like that. Yeah. They bought several of them, are they, or something?

Chris Gammell: Oh, crap. What's their name? Kiva. Kiva Systems. Right. And, uh, if you look at the, if you look at the robots, they're, uh, they're, they're, it's a fantastic solution. It's like, so the robot's actually like a low to the floor, super high torque kind of thing. Mm. And it just goes underneath that entire shelf and it just spins, it rotates and that actually spins it up to, to increase the height, picks up the shelf and then it moves the entire shelf to the picker. And the whole picker just.

Dave Jones: So the picker doesn't have to move. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Right. That's crazy. And, and, and they, and they would have got the data on that. Like it takes, you know, X amount of seconds for an operator to walk from here to here, you know, I've, I've, I've done this in large factories, not to the same scale, but it's a similar thing. You know, we would stand there with a stopwatch watching the operators secretly. Cause then, you know, like if you did it while they're watching, it has a bias effect because they're, you know.

Chris Gammell: Schrodinger's operator. If you watch them, they change behavior or something.

Dave Jones: They change, yeah. Quantum, quantum workers. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And so, you know, so we stand there, you know, so we'd be peeping through the window off the stopwatch watching them, timing how long it takes on, on average, you know, and you'd have to do it, you know, I have to get a lot of data to get averages and across a lot of employees, but you get an average figure and you go, right. You know, it's quicker if we install like an, an automated thing that comes to them, you know? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You replace all the stupid parts, right? I mean, not saying that workers are stupid, I'm saying the, the walking just between shelves is stupid. And then you optimize for the, the intelligent parts, which in that case is, you know, human intelligence of recognizing an object and then pulling it off a shelf, putting it in a box. That is still the really, really hard part, which is what the work on next, basically. That's what, I mean, that's what they talk about is, is once you, once you have the system that it brings the shelves to a worker, the next thing you replace is the worker. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Exactly. It is what it is, right? That's it. But you know, it's a big deal.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Cause we had like 180 meter long factory and with, you know, like eight or 10 benches that were like 160 meters long and you couldn't duck under the benches. Right. So you, you had to, if you were halfway down a bench, like, you know, it took you, you know, X amount of seconds to walk, walk the hundred meters down all the way down. So you could walk to the neck, to the other side of the bench, to the other side of that same bench. You would have to walk like 300 meters to get to the other side of the same bench. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It was, you know, yeah, it's just, it was horribly inefficient, but then, but then you use, you know, but that was the working environment. So then you had to design your tools and your techniques to work around that, to make it the most efficient thing possible. And, uh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right. Yeah. The layout of the layout of factories is kind of sometimes unavoidable just from whatever it is, but.

Dave Jones: And, and then how the work flows from one process on one bench to the next bench. Cause we'd, you know, take the product, you know, you do a certain manufacturing step on one bench, then you roll it up, you'd take it to the next bench and we had automated winching machines and, you know, all sorts of jazz. So yeah, it was.

Chris Gammell: Right. And there's, and that's the crazy thing is like, there is, it's not like one of those things where it's like, well, this might make a, you know, a worker happier or might reduce, you know, you always try and reduce economic type stuff cause you don't want to have like eventual injuries, things like that. But it's like when you can time someone and then you can say, uh, yeah.

Dave Jones: I will save five hours of your life this month, you know, or I can save the next amount of money, right? Money.

Chris Gammell: It's always money. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, Ed, for us, it was, well, money, yeah, it always comes down to money, but in terms of us, it was a product throughput, you know, we could only make, you know, five of these things a day. Right. And, but if we could make six a day, if we could squeeze out an extra, you know, 5% here, 5% there and get six a day, right. That was a huge thing. Right. That was, you know, that was worth a lot of money. Right. So. Yep. Ah, those were the days working in production. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Making stuff.

Dave Jones: Terrific. Um, speaking of which, um, people should, um, get start making stuff because there's a new Hackaday prize.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Which you are a judge once again.

Dave Jones: Apparently I am. Yeah. I am listed on the website. I have not got any details about it, but I'm listed on the website. But I, I, I, I actually just found out what it's about just this morning because it's up on the website now. So I just didn't know the days when we run the 2015 Hackaday contest. You want to be a judge? Yeah. Why not? You know, glutton for punishment. And that's all, that's, that's, that's all I knew. So tell us about it. You, you would know more than me.

Chris Gammell: Uh, yeah, no, so it's, uh, so the, the basic idea is switching over to, to instead of open connected devices, still there's the idea of the open and, you know, being connected is good, but basically working more towards, uh, you know, kind of solving world problems. So farming, uh,

Dave Jones: Didn't element, element 14 did this, didn't they? They, they did a prize a couple of years back. Yeah. Yeah. They did. It was a big, it was a big thing to see. You know, the CEO of element 14 came out and oh, we're doing the world's biggest design contest. You have to design some eco thing. And it was a lot, I think it was a lot of money. It was like a hundred thousand bucks prize at the time, which was one of the biggest prizes ever, single prizes ever offered. I think at the time. And I don't remember who won and I don't think many people entered. I don't think it was a particularly hard contest to win, but yeah, somebody won. I can't remember. Sorry. I'll find details and link it in. Okay. Hmm. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Uh, so, uh, anyway. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Sorry. Did I mention it was like a save the earth kind of contest? Yeah. You said it was like an eco type thing. Yeah. That makes sense.

Chris Gammell: I mean, this could be a lot of things though. I mean, it doesn't have to be necessarily just like eco, like saving like the planet itself, but also, you know, helping populations. It could be medical stuff, things like that. Um, just kind of solve important problems. That's the idea. And, uh, and there was actually a, uh, there's a document that just recently came out that I sent those guys and I'm pretty sure they put it in here somewhere. But basically there was, there was actually a list. It was really, really interesting list. Uh, let me see if I could find it. Uh, bah, bah, bah, bah. Well, I don't know where it is, but basically there's, there was, there was a foundation that recently put out a list of, of 50 problems that actually need to be solved right now in order to kind of move, move the, the, the, the human race forward.

Dave Jones: And, uh, yeah, I can think of a few key ones.

Chris Gammell: Like what?

Dave Jones: They don't necessarily involve the environment. Oh no, yeah, exactly. I mean, it doesn't need to, right?

Chris Gammell: I mean, it could be education. It could be human health. I mean, there's, there's a lot of things like that. And, uh, I'm trying to remember where it is.

Dave Jones: Yeah, don't get me started because I have very strong opinions on ways to.

Chris Gammell: Right. Of course, of course, of course. Um, yeah.

Dave Jones: Uh, yes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, uh, I, uh, I guess I'd have to look up the email.

Dave Jones: Oh, I just bloody, hang on. I just sat on a, on a oscilloscope. It's on my chair. I don't know how it got here, but I sat on an, an oscilloscope, um, uh, low inductance, um, you know, spring tip probey thing. Those, you know, those little, you know, what are they called? Uh, you know, high frequency probe spring tip attachments.

Chris Gammell: A little, uh, yeah, I know what you're talking about. Yeah.

Dave Jones: A little, a little spring with a sharp, a sharp pointy out thing.

Chris Gammell: Like the one where it has like little fingers coming out, like the, like a logic probe?

Dave Jones: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is like, it's, it's like a coil of, of spring wire that goes over your ground tip. And then it, then there's a little sharp point which sticks out and it's a low inductance. Uh, probe tip for your scope probe. And it's just stabbed my foot on my chair.

Chris Gammell: I thought you said it was on your chair. I was thinking it stabbed somewhere else.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, no. Stabbed there. Cause I'm actually bare feet and I, I'm putting my foot up on the chair here and, ah. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: That's okay. That's okay. It's annoying.

Dave Jones: I should tweet a photo of it. Bastard. How God am I sharing here? I have no, no idea. I don't know. Anyway, sorry. Continue.

Chris Gammell: I'm still looking for this thing. Uh, yeah. But, uh, so basically the idea is you can, uh, you know, win a bunch of money. There's a new thing this year though, that, uh, you can also, if you, if you submit, instead of like last year where it was just documentation this year, if you submit, if you apply to the product side of things, if you submit three prototypes, three working prototypes and get judged on those, you can not only win the main prize, which is the 200 grand or the trip to space. Uh, you can also win another hundred grand and then six months in the hacker space, which I've actually seen the plans for their building right now. So, and it's, it's pretty, pretty slick space out in Pasadena. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But you've got to move to Pasadena.

Chris Gammell: Uh, yeah. I guess so.

Dave Jones: I don't see anyone really taking that up, but okay.

Chris Gammell: I don't know, man. Pasadena is pretty nice.

Dave Jones: Okay. Well, I haven't been there. All right. I'm talking out my ass. All right.

Chris Gammell: No, I mean, that is very nice, but I, yeah, I mean, from the cost perspective that, but I mean, if you've got a hundred grand, maybe that's, uh, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but I'd rather spend the hundred grand on getting my product out than moving to Pasadena and, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's, I, yeah, it'd be up to you, I guess.

Dave Jones: Unless they're paying for your accommodation for six months in, unless they're paying your expenses to live in Pasadena for six months, which I doubt.

Chris Gammell: Uh, I don't really know about that actually.

Dave Jones: Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: I did find, Dave has waffled long enough though that I was able to find this document. Uh, and actually. No, it's a really interesting thing too, because it's the, uh, so it's the 50 breakthrough reports, basically the 50 breakthroughs that are necessary to kind of move the whole world forward thing.

Dave Jones: Are these breakthroughs being worked on currently, or are they pie in the sky, you know?

Chris Gammell: No, it's not like, it's not like you, you have to have like, you know, space age technology for these things. A lot of them are more like, like low cost improvements, right? So like low cost refrigeration for, um, vaccine treatments, stuff like that. Right. Okay. Like things that are legit problems right now.

Dave Jones: And it's from the well-known LIGT group, the Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies at the Lawrence Berkeley National League. Never heard of them. Yeah. There you go. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: That's the report I was trying to download. Right. Let me see if I can actually get this thing open. Here we go.

Dave Jones: The list of 50 breakthroughs. Ah, they've got summarized in a PDF. How nice on their main page. Very nice. Yeah. Somebody was thinking. All right. Good on you. Sachua Boulashua. Sachua. One of the main authors. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Oh, here we go. Okay. So, and they, and they actually have like a grid as well. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I see the grid from simple, feasible, complex, challenging, and extremely challenging. How about bloody impossible, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Yep. I love it. So let's see. Desalination, vaccination, electronic textbooks. Obviously I have a strong feeling about that one from last time. Yeah. Uh, biometric ID systems, affordable smartphones with full-fledged internet services. Uh.

Dave Jones: What? Doesn't every single person on the planet have a phone before they have flushing toilets?

Chris Gammell: Uh, yeah, but it's probably getting to that last. I mean, even, I think there's what, three and a, I mean, there's seven billion people on the planet. I think that there's, uh, probably not all of them have a smartphone, but basically using that as the, as the balance point for. For a lot of this stuff. So.

Dave Jones: Anyway, as far as I'm aware, it's like, like people have a phone before they have a flushing toilet. I kid you not. Yeah. That's, you know, that's, that's the priority in many countries. Well, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I mean, they're being used for payment systems and they're being used for information and communication. Right. I mean, a lot of the times that is the easiest and you can hand someone a phone. You can't hand them a fully, you know, desalinated and, and safe toilet system. So. Did you see that video with, uh, Bill Gates from the Gates Foundation when they had the, uh, the, uh, toilet or rather the, uh, the water purification?

Dave Jones: No, I haven't seen that.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So basically like they were, I forget who the, the inventor was, but basically like they, they did like a, a waste. You basically dump in raw sewage and then it does like an evaporative system and then it like dries out the, the waste. And the waste basically gets recycled as like a, as like a feedstock for buildings, I think. Because it's all.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Buildings.

Chris Gammell: And it like, it also like they, I think they, they burn it off basically to heat the, the water then. And then the water gets evaporated and then condensed. And then basically that's how they extract water back out of it. And so they put, they showed putting sewage in and then five minutes later, Bill Gates taps water off of it and then takes a sip. Yep. Yep. It was intense.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's entirely psychological. It's entirely psychological that.

Chris Gammell: What do you, what do you mean by that?

Dave Jones: It's like, if you give people, they've, they've actually done this because they, they try to put recycled sewage waters, drinking water into some communities here, here in Australia. And my wife's been involved in this and yeah. And like when, yeah, and they've gone out and, and, you know, ask people to drink. You know, this water that they bottled from recycled sewage. And some people just refuse to do it. They will, it's a psychological thing. They go, no, it comes from sewage. There must be something wrong with it.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Damn the science. I'm, I'm not drinking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Dave Jones: And, you know, and that's what we're doing in some of the communities here. They've actually put in recycled sewage drinking water. Right. That's just, you know, the way it is. And then, and then people will go apeshit once they find out about it. They go, I've been drinking recycled sewage. Are you, you know, and they go feral. Well, technically we all are. Right. I mean, that's kind of the main thing. Yeah. It's one of those, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's entirely psychological. So.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. No, I totally believe that. I mean, most of the time, I mean, like, even if you think about like just the treatment plants, just the traditional ones, it's like, what do you think those are doing? You know, they're not doing evaporative, but they're doing, you know, they're doing separation and like they're doing water treatment and stuff like that. So.

Dave Jones: I'm, I'm, I'm not sure about other countries, but at least here in Australia, we go to great efforts to supply potable water for everything. I, you know, drinking glass water for everything, even for flushing our toilets, you know, it's like, yeah, it's, it, it is, you know, it's stupid.

Chris Gammell: I guess we do here too. I mean, like, I don't know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think quite a, quite a lot of, most countries do. Yeah. It's all common supply. Like versus gray water type stuff. Yeah. Whereas, but here, here in Australia, we actually, in some, in some newer communities that they've built, they've installed separate lines, you know. So there's like recycled water and there's the regular potable supply, but even the, even the recycled stuff is actually drinking quality.

Chris Gammell: Huh.

Dave Jones: And, and, you know, and people don't realize it costs like 15 times more to produce that recycled water at, at that level than it does regular water. Anyway, this is getting way off topic.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right, right, right.

Dave Jones: So I, I just hear a lot about this cause the wife used to work for Sydney water and. Oh, right, right. Of course. Right. Yeah. She was a water, she's a water scientist. So, you know, she's an expert on these things. So I hear about it all the time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That, that makes, makes dinner table conversation. Like. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Maybe I'll have a beer. Oh yeah. We're always talking about sewage, you know, like seriously. Like. It's yeah.

Chris Gammell: Sad. So Dave, what did you and the wife talk about? Yeah. You know, usual shit. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, oh, oh.

Chris Gammell: Anyways. Yeah. So this list is good. I mean, like, and honestly, a lot of this stuff, there, there are some like very legit, like electronics problems in here, which is kind of. Oh, okay. The main. The main thing.

Dave Jones: List, list, list the ones that like our audience are most likely to sort of work on. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So affordable construction material home. So things that, that could be like one of those 3D printer, you know, I don't know if you've seen the 3D prints at homes, that kind of thing. Utility in a box is one. So number 10 is utility in a box for basically all in one solution for renewable energies type stuff. Let's see.

Dave Jones: Can you expand on that? What's. I don't get that.

Chris Gammell: So like doing like a mini grid and you're like, so basically doing like a battery storage, like a solar cell input battery storage in a low cost system with minimum. Got it. Yeah. Minimum cost, minimum. Yep. Hey.

Dave Jones: Got it. That reminds me, whatever happened to that. Was it Google? Who? Google or Intel, one of the, like one of the huge big companies. They, they, there was a contest to develop a, like the world's smallest and most efficient inverter or something. It was, you remember we talked about the time? Like it was like, like, you know, it was like 500 Watts in like two square inches or something ridiculous. You know, it was like, and, and there was big, huge prize money, like a quarter of a million bucks or something. Wasn't there? What happened to that?

Chris Gammell: I don't, I don't know what happened to that. I didn't keep track, but that's, I mean, that's what happens sometimes with these.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Contests. Well, I think it was a long-term contest too. I think it went for like a year. So who knows? Oh, like an X prize almost. It was like an X prize kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll have to check on that. Yeah. Get an update because that's like right up our alley, you know?

Chris Gammell: So, hmm. Another one was a long lasting or sorry, a non-chemical mosquito repellent basically for like malaria type stuff like that. So I don't know if you ever saw, there was actually a cover of Make where they showed off that box that had lasers that actually like detected and shot, and shot mosquitoes out of the sky. I don't know if you ever saw that. Oh, sweet. I think that might've been Mirvold, Nathan Mirvold. Yeah. Who I'm not a huge fan of, but if he wants to spend his money like that, that's fine. Yep.

Dave Jones: Oh, here we go. I found it. It's the Google. They're offering a million bucks. And it was a year ago. It was, yeah, May. It was May 19th, 2014. So it was almost a year ago, coming on to a year.

Chris Gammell: So no one did it yet?

Dave Jones: I'm having a look. I'm having a look. I'm having a look. What is it? Details. It doesn't look like, looks like it's still going according to their front page.

Chris Gammell: The little box challenge.

Dave Jones: The little box challenge.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, I'll keep going with views.

Dave Jones: Oh, here we go. So the last update was January, 2016. The grand prize winner will be announced sometime in January, 2016. Okay. So the next, right, July, 2015 is registered teams must submit a technical approach and testing application by July 22nd. So you can still get into this, folks. You can still get into it. Still win a million bucks of Google money. And then October, they'll choose 18 finalists. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Cool. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They are required to bring your invention in person to the testing facility in the United States. So can you imagine if someone from like North Korea or something entered and they're like, I want to bring my power solution to the United States. Why not, man? Okay. Awesome.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, all these other ones. I mean, like, so the thing is, like, a lot of these solutions, at least on this list, a lot of it is, like, the big focus is, like, low cost. Okay.

Dave Jones: Right. Right. Because low cost, because these things are needed for the developed world. Right. The developing world.

Chris Gammell: Yep, exactly. And a lot of it's also chemical and medical and stuff like that. So there are going to be some restrictions on that stuff. But it's a great, I mean, honestly, it's a great list. Like, everything that's in here, you can definitely see, you know, having really wide-reaching effects. A lot of it's still, you know, the human aspect of getting this stuff distributed and, you know, like, the whole international aid type stuff kind of sucks.

Dave Jones: It's pretty much all humanitarian focused, isn't it? Like, I'd say, like, 90% of them are sort of, you know, humanitarian kind of.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. And you look at, like, I mean, like, Gates Foundation is a great example. Underline cause, yeah. They fix, I mean, they were working on so many things, but, like, the things that they're doing, I mean, they have some research going on, but it's not like, it's not like a ton of, like, deep science research. Right. It's more like, you know, distribution of different things. It's, you know, basically rolling out low-cost solutions to a wide swath of people because they want to affect as much change as they can overall, right? Yep. But that's the hard part is just the distribution side of things. Logistics again, right?

Dave Jones: Exactly. Exactly. How do you get it there? How do you get it cheap? How do you power it? You know, like, I see in the list here they're asking for, you know, solar-powered medical thingamabobs. I've lost it. Solar-powered medical devices. Like a refrigeration? Like a... I don't know. Something like that. Anyway, because why? Because, well, you have to take these into the remote communities that may not have power, you know, so to actually run all these things. So, yeah, they've got to be, like, self-contained. And, yeah, interesting.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I forget what the... I don't know if it's... If it was Gibson or someone else. I mean, there was some technology sci-fi type writer who basically talks about... He's like, the future already exists. It's just not widely available to people. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker ?: I'm bad.

Chris Gammell: That's paraphrased. But, like, you know, like, of course. Like, this stuff is, like, you know, like, talking about a lot of these things. It's, you know, a 100-watt solar panel can make a huge difference in, you know, rural Africa.

Chris Gammell: Oh, absolutely. And then you have, like, scale differences, like stuff that is interesting to us, you know, like, widely available Bluetooth, right? Like, that's ridiculous. Like, all these stupid gadgets that we have, a lot of them are just not necessary. But it's the hard stuff is the low-cost, widely distributed stuff that needs to get out there. And then motivating, you know, there's not a lot of profit motive there either. So, that's another big thing.

Dave Jones: Oh, here we go. Number 38. Low-cost, under $50, wearable or otherwise easily concealable camera with automatic geocoding and timestamps capable of SOS data preservation. What via satellite? What?

Chris Gammell: That's, I mean, probably for, like, remote monitoring of, like, war areas, stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: You know, if you can capture.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Yeah, capture crimes. It's taking, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Like, crimes against humanity type of thing. Right. I mean, this is, like, some real stuff, right? This is really real.

Dave Jones: Ah, yeah. That's exactly what they're talking about. It will likely lead to greater levels of documentation of human rights violations. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Because, you know, if you're in the middle of, you know, Iraq or something and you see something bad going down, you can't whip out your digital SLR and, you know, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, right? Right. Because, you know, somebody's going to shoot you. And then transmit it in time. Yeah. Right. Right. So, yeah. So, that's interesting. See? This is what.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, and honestly, the hardest part about a lot of this stuff is just, like, is scale, right? So, even if you take out the distribution piece, you know, they're talking about sub-$50. You don't get to that when you're buying a $10 chip, you know, you have to.

Dave Jones: There's a few sub-$50 items in here. When they talk about low cost, you know. Right. Yeah. They've mentioned that a few times.

Chris Gammell: And I think some of that's just going to be novel solution, right? You know, like, doing more with less is always kind of the interesting thing. But there are limits to that, too. Just you have to get scale sometimes to get the low cost.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You're not going to. You're probably not going to do this by just, you know, surfing the DigiKey website and going, I'll choose that chip, that chip, and that chip. And bang. There's your solution. You know, it's like, otherwise someone would have already done it. Right. It needs some. Yep. Novel. Right. Left field thinking.

Chris Gammell: Even just from, you know, the perspective of using an off-the-shelf solution, it's probably not going to be it either. Just because it's going to be, you have to have some kind of fundamental change in how you detect something or act upon something. And usually, if it's off the shelf, it already would have been done, you know. Yep. That's always the downside. Exactly.

Dave Jones: So, give up hope, people. Don't enter. There's everything that's been invented has already been invented, right?

Chris Gammell: No, I think that's actually the opposite of the point, Dave. Yeah, I know. It's try harder, find new things.

Dave Jones: No, I'm doing the old patent joke. The turn of the 19th century, turn of the 20th century patent joke when the head of the U.S. Patent Office said, everything that has been invented, will be, can be invented, has been invented. Right. Right. The patent office will go out of business.

Chris Gammell: Right. Oops.

Dave Jones: Hmm. All right. Speaking of reinvention.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of reinvention. I can't wait to hear what you say about this.

Dave Jones: There, there's a new USB standard in town. Look out. Woohoo. Finger twirl.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think this actually could have quite a big impact.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Maybe. I don't know. I, I tweeted that we needed another, uh, USB. We needed another connector standard. Like we need another religion, you know, like it's just, no, we don't. Well, maybe another set of cables for sure. Right.

Chris Gammell: That's, I mean, that's, that's the big thing I saw. Like, you know, they were talking about, so this is all coming from, you know, an Apple announcement about using the USB. Apple announcement. Yeah. And, uh, and they were talking about how, how like environmentally friendly their new laptop is. And then someone tweeted a picture of the big pile of cables they have to throw out.

Dave Jones: It's just like, well, this is the thing that rubbed me the wrong way. Like the first time I really heard about this was, yeah, just this morning with this Apple thing, right. Cause somebody tweeted some Apple shit or something. Right. But anyway, there's all these new stories about, yeah, Apple's new notebook uses the USB C connector it's called, uh, which is the new USB 3.1 something standard. Right. Right. And yeah. And we'll go into technical details in a minute possibly, but yeah, I think that just pissed me off was that like, I, it's trying to do everything right in the one connector as we'll talk about. And B it's the only connector on the entire Apple MacBook. Is it not? Like, and they've got one of them. They've got one of them. So their whole plan is because this connector is so wonderful and could do everything, including, you know, wash your dishes and everything else. It's, you know, oh, you can just have an adapter for it. You know? So you're going to have to carry around like 50 different freaking adapter cables to plug in all your things. Cause they've only decided to put one port on there. Like, you know, like, oh, yeah. Oh, fail. Right. I don't know, man. Yeah. So it wasn't, it wasn't necessarily the USB connector new standard itself. It was more the fact that they only put one on the entire notebook thinking, well, you know, cause that's all you need, surely. Cause the connector can do everything. What does it do? It charges up to a hundred Watts. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So it's like that. 20 volts to five amps. Yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So that's an order of magnitude increase from the 10 Watts on the USB three, the new USB three power standard. Right. So it's 10 times more and it can do a Thunderbolt type speed. So what is it? Five gig, 10 gig bits per second, but Apple are limiting it to five or something. Maybe there's some practical limitations there. Yeah. You can't just buy your dodgy cables off eBay and expect them to get five gig bits per second, folks. Let me tell you. Right. And, uh, what else does it do?

Chris Gammell: That would actually be quite a big problem is if you had, if you had, uh, you know, poorly matched cables or something, it wouldn't be like, it wouldn't be like your data slows down. It's like, you don't have data. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, it's just like the USB three. It's not just the new physical connector itself. It is the protocols behind it. Like the multi-tier protocols, as you said, like it, I don't think it just drops. It's okay. It can't talk at five gigabits per second. It doesn't just then drop down to 10 meg bits USB two, one, you know, like, like if there are like many tiers in there and it's all, you know, super intelligent and all that sort

Chris Gammell: Yeah, because they all have to be backwards compatible and stuff like that too, right?

Dave Jones: I mean, it's got to be, yeah, crazy. Apparently, yes. It's backward compatible to USB, all the previous USB standards.

Chris Gammell: I don't know why you're mad about this though, Dave.

Dave Jones: If you've got the adapter cable, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I just, I think, no, I think honestly, here's, okay. I actually am very excited about this one because of the high power, right? That's.

Dave Jones: I'm, that quite excites me. Yeah. That, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I mean, the speed of the, the speed of the thing, I obviously I'm not going to utilize Oh yeah, no. For my personal stuff.

Dave Jones: No, but I know I can see, I can get it from a technical point of view. Totally. Totally. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The, the, the, the bi-directional, excuse me, the brokering between stuff, like once that's integrated between phones, that means that, okay, here's, here's the crazy thing about this, right? So we've been working on, we've been working on, you know, the system side of things and, and contextual electronics and stuff like that, talking between a device and a phone and stuff like that. And there's only so many ways you can talk to these days. But once, once a phone has this and once a computer has this and once, you know, devices on board have this, it's game over. Everything. I mean, not, not practically. I get that not practically everything can talk to everything, but everything has the potential of talking to everything without needing a connector difference. And, and from a, from a part buying perspective, right? You know, we should probably talk about electronics at some point from a part buying perspective. Good Lord. I mean, like if there's only USB type C connectors from now on, like, Oh yeah. Yeah. I know. Yeah. Praise the Lord. Like that is the worst. It's the Holy Grail, right?

Dave Jones: But they've tried the Holy Grail before, right? They've tried the Holy Grail before and. With what? It just creates another standard. You know, there's the XKCD comic, the famous XKCD comic about, you know, the N plus one, the N plus one connector. Have you seen that?

Chris Gammell: No, I don't think so.

Dave Jones: I'll, I'll link it. Hang on. I'll, I'll get it. I'll get it. It's here. Somebody tweeted it to me.

Chris Gammell: And, uh, but I mean, it's, but you're saying that, that this, I mean, okay. So I get, I mean, I think that we're converging. That's, that's what I ultimately come down to. Right. I mean, like even, even just from when we started seeing integration and, and honestly, this is what excites me about this is that it's, it's part of a large scale commercial product, right? Obviously Apple is, um, for better or for worse, it is a large scale commercial product. So that means it's going to be widely adopted. So they are a driver of, yes. Exactly.

Dave Jones: They are a driver of adoption.

Chris Gammell: Just, just like, I mean, so in the past, like when, so Europe actually instituted the, the mandate for USB micro on phones as the only chargers allowed. That was a huge thing as well.

Dave Jones: Yes. And then Apple said, well, you know, flip the bird and said, screw you.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah. That was crappy, but, uh, right.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Um, I don't know, I actually know how they got away with that, but, but everybody else went to micro. Right. And then like micro was it for, for a couple of years. Right. I mean, like my mini still around, but I think a lot of that's kind of just dragged along.

Dave Jones: Micro. I, I love everything that Stan dies with micro. I, I, that's my buying decision. Does your product have micro USB charging? Right. That is, I've, I've standardized on practically everything. Right.

Chris Gammell: When you're in a, when you're in a shitty situation, you need to borrow it. Like that's nothing worse than like, oh, I don't have that, that connector and you know, yada, yada, yada. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's just like, so everything, I think everything about this is good except for the fact that, you know, like the fact that Apple takes their position. Yeah, exactly. Well, they, they often take their, if it gets traction and, and they, they, they bastardize it for profit. Right. That's the downside to it. Right. Right. But from the scale side of it.

Dave Jones: Will they put in their phones? That's the interesting question. I don't know. Because they will have to, well, they may not have to abandon, but they'll have to abandon their, their Apple connector. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The lightning, lightning connector. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Is it? Honestly. Is that what it's called? I don't know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't, I don't, honestly, like how does this stuff happen? Right. Like thinking about like all of the, the protocols that are out there and even this XKCD thing. Yeah. It's always going to be, there's, there's always going to be people that stand up and say, I'm the new standard. Right. But in this case, at least it's tied to the USB standard. Hopefully it doesn't get bastardized too bad. And hopefully the adoption rolls out to the point where it can start to converge a little bit more. Right. It's kind of just steps. Obviously you're always going to have stuff dragged along. Right. I mean, there's still stuff that uses. Okay.

Dave Jones: Well, let's, well, this is the thing, right? Let's, let's say Apple make the bold move and they, they knew the next iPhone that comes out will just have this connector on it. Right. As it should do if they're taking it seriously. Right. Yes. And then, well, okay. What do the other phone manufacturers do? Right. Cause they're only manufacturing phones, right? They don't have like an ecosystem of products like Apple, right? The new Mac books. Samsung probably does, but. Oh, well, okay. Maybe. Maybe. Right. Yeah. They got tablet-y things. Okay. Well, whatever. Right. But let's take the phone manufacturers, right? They've just standardized on the micro USB. Everyone's got micro USB for charging their mobile phone and they want to change it again. Are they going to change?

Chris Gammell: Right. It's going to piss a lot of people off. And there's always that lag factor, right? Right? Yeah. I mean, that's always the lag factor that ends up hurting.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: For that kind of thing.

Dave Jones: And I, I, I know that would piss me off. Cause if I had to go buy a new phone, I go, oh, it's got the new USB-C standard, but I've, I'm totally invested in everything USB, everything micro USB. Why should I have to change? I mean, I'll tell you why I would do it.

Chris Gammell: It's a hundred watts, man. Like, that's killer. Oh yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: I totally agree. There's some very compelling reasons, but there's also compelling reasons not to move

Chris Gammell: to it. You start to get limited by how fast your battery can even charge at that point. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I know. It's a heat problem. It's like. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's it. I know. It's your, your phone can't charge that fast because yeah, the battery technology isn't there.

Chris Gammell: Just like the amount of power that it can hold even. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And that, and that may, and that may be another technical reason why some phone manufacturers won't switch to it because it's pointless, right? Because A, it pisses everyone off who's just standardized on the USB. Pointless for now. On the micro USB. Yeah. Okay. But hey, that's the, if you want this thing to be adopted, everyone has to change, right? So, so yeah. So they're at a point. Well, well, well, well, the extra power in this connector is useless because this phone cannot physically charge any faster. The battery in this phone, the technology is not there. It's going to heat up too much. It's going to, you know, like it's just not possible. It's good, I mean. It's good, I mean. It's good inside this. Yeah. It's always going to get you. And so that they might go, well, there's no other compelling reason to change. So we're going to stick with USB 2. We're going to stick with the micro USB. Right? And, and that's the problem here is that it's physically not a compatible connector. That's it. Like if it was physically compatible, like, like the USB 3 was, right? Physically backward compatible, you can just plug it in. Right? Then it's, yeah, it's a given, right? Everyone would have it. But. Yep. I don't know, man. Yeah. I agree. Technically it's fantastic. I would love everything to have this.

Chris Gammell: It should bring up the, like, the obvious one as well, that it can't go in backwards. That's the other nice thing. Yes, it can go in. It's bi-directional. Because it brokers lines that it, yeah. That's really the least of my issues.

Dave Jones: How do they do that? I haven't physically looked at the, the, the construction inside it yet. I haven't.

Chris Gammell: I think the construction is simple, but the, it's just like a signaling and, you know, basically tugging on lines type of thing.

Dave Jones: How many pins in it? And is it like multi-stacked? Like, are there pins behind pins and all that sort of jazz?

Chris Gammell: So looking at, it looks like 12 pairs just from this breakout board that I'm looking at. 12 pairs.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Okay. And, and it's tiny. This thing is tiny. It's the size of a micro USB, but it's, it's, you know, it can do a hundred watts.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, this is small pitch. This is definitely small pitch.

Dave Jones: So there's got to be some big ass, there's got to be some big ass copper contacts in there for that power. So they, what, are they behind the signal lines? Where are they?

Chris Gammell: You're asking the wrong guy. Where are they physically?

Dave Jones: Because like, you're not going to get a hundred watts through 10 twisted pairs, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: You're not going to do the shell at, you're not going to do the shell at that much current as well. Because it's, what, five, 20 volts at five amps. The 20 volts is actually the impressive thing because they're just spacing needs. I mean, I guess it's not that much spacing.

Dave Jones: That's how they're getting the power, right? They couldn't do this at five volts. You wouldn't physically be able to get the current through the connector.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Just because of resistance. You'd have to use like superconductor connectors.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's why they've had to, yeah. That's why they've had to go to a higher voltage because, well, higher, you know, Ohm's law. Higher voltage, less current. So, five amps. You know, five amps is pushing it in a connector of this size, right? That's really pushing the boundaries, right? Yeah. So, I would actually love to see the current stats after the, apparently this thing's rated for 10,000 cycles, so they claim. But I would love to see it still transfer five amps after 10,000 cycles.

Chris Gammell: I would. Oh, you think just because if there's like gold rubbing and stuff like that?

Dave Jones: Yeah, I have lots of experience in multiple thousand wipe contacts and that's a big part of the industry I come from and actually testing that and building automated test jigs to measure this sort of stuff. I've done that. And, dude, gold wears off, you know, like after, right? Every time you cycle that thing, it's 30 micron gold. 30 micron inches.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: 30 micron. Even, you know, really expensive 30 micron or 50 micron gold plated stuff is, it wears out. I mean, it just does. It's, you know.

Chris Gammell: It's not, it's micro inches actually. It's not micron.

Dave Jones: Micro, whatever. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Micron is not much. Micro inches isn't much either, but yeah. Usually it goes gold flash, which is like two or three micro inches. It's 10 and then 30.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think. Whatever. Anyway. I did a lot of 30. Connector research back in the day. Yep. So. So, yeah. No, but yeah, you're totally right. I mean, like, and you have to get like the highest end in order to get reliably that, that high, high count stuff, high count insertions. You need to get up in the 30 micro inches. So that, that ups the cost and everything too. So.

Dave Jones: Right. Hmm. So what, what's the bottom line for me? It's yeah, of course. I think it's technically awesome and I'd love it if every single product on the market used it instantly and we just all change over and everything. Superior of adoption. That's going to be painful. I just, yeah, I can, it wouldn't surprise me if it died out. That's, that's what I'm saying. It wouldn't surprise me. I, I, I, I don't think it will. I think Dave's hedging his bets now. I think it will eventually catch on. Yeah, no, I think it'll eventually catch on, but I think it's going to be extremely painful.

Chris Gammell: Maybe. I don't know, man. Don't, don't underestimate the, the power of, of marketplace with that kind of thing because if they do push it into everything.

Dave Jones: People who buy, who buy a new phone every nine months. Right. I'm just a Luddite who buys a new phone every three or four years. Right.

Chris Gammell: If you're going to be that guy that, that follows trends that, or not follows trends, but like is a late adopter, you're going to, you're going to save money, but you're going to, yeah, you're going to have less of, less of this kind of stuff. Just like the people on the front edge of, front edge of it pay a lot more and have a lot more problems, but then they get the benefits when it does start to stabilize. So.

Dave Jones: Now, taking bets. Now.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Will Apple abandon their lightning connector or whatever you call it that they've so religiously clung to in the face of world opinion? You know, they've got, screw you. We're going to keep this connector for all time. It's the world's greatest freaking connector. Are they going to suddenly go, nope. USB 3C and every single Apple product is only going to use that.

Chris Gammell: I have to say, I don't care.

Dave Jones: I mean, like that doesn't affect me at all because that's, no, no, no.

Chris Gammell: And what I'm saying is, is I don't care because it doesn't affect me. Yes. I don't like, that's never going to get adopted, right? It can't because they won't allow it to.

Dave Jones: We're industry commentators. Come on. We're wonks.

Chris Gammell: We're, yeah.

Dave Jones: We're wonks? What are wonks? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Wonks are like, like I always hear it referred to like policy wonks or like politics, but like people who are like, like analysts and stuff like that. Okay. I think that's the term.

Dave Jones: Not a term I've heard before. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Type in wonks into Google and it says, did you mean Wonka?

Dave Jones: Wonka. Willy Wonka.

Chris Gammell: Person who knows a lot about the details of a particular field and often talks a lot about that subject. Except for that whole knows a lot about it. We do talk about it a lot, Dave.

Dave Jones: Yeah, we do talk about it a lot. I personally don't see Apple hedging their bets and putting both connectors on their next iPhone. That's very un-Apple-like in its simplicity, you know, in its elegance. Right? So I reckon they're even going to stick to their Apple connector on the phones or they're going to change. One way.

Chris Gammell: I have to say, I hate, I hate, I'm not going to bet on that stuff. I mean, I'd probably agree with you if anything. I hate that I watched, I watched the event. I watched the entire event. The whole Apple event. I hate that it is an event.

Dave Jones: So you just watched it and then punched yourself in the face afterwards. Is that what you, you know?

Chris Gammell: I don't know why I did. I'm not excited about the stupid watch. I think that's stupid. I just, I just did. I just, I just turned it on and I did. It was dumb. I mean, like there was some interesting stuff there, right? They talked about like the construction of the new MacBook. That was cool. Like it looked like they're using Altium and they shrunk the board. And stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's, that's totally fascinating stuff to us. You know, that's. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, from, yeah, from a manufacturing perspective, they, they, and they, I guess they, and the watch, they talked about machining of the cases. Like that was cool. But like, I don't care about the end products, you know, they're just, it's like cars. I don't care about cars, you know? Right. Yeah. Whatever's cheapest and will run the longest, you know, that'll take one of those. That's it. That's it.

Dave Jones: Here's the interesting thing about Apple though, right? There are, I think they're like a $700 billion company. Is it at the moment? Seven, $800 billion. I don't know. Like they're, they're, they're approaching a trillion dollars. They're like, they're on their way. I'm sure that's their goal is to become the world's first trillion dollar company or something. You know, I don't think it's happened before. I could be wrong. I'm sure someone will correct me. No, that has not happened before. Anyway. Right. So they're, they're getting there. Right. And they cannot do that continuing to sell. Well, they've never sold low cost products. Right. But continuing to sell like even, even sort of medium to high end price products. They have to go for the luxury market. They have to, because somebody I read did the math on this. You would need for them to, to them to make any significant inroads on top of the significant improvement on their current income stream. Right. Which is so huge. They would need every single middle class person in America and other countries to buy their new $1,500 widget. Even if they release a $1,500 product, they need every single person of buying age in the country to actually buy it. Right. To make any significant improvement. That's how big this company is and why it's totally pointless for Apple to make either a low cost or a medium or even a high price product. So that's why they're moving into like, that's why they're selling a $10,000 watch. And they're talking about selling, you know, a $5,000 TV or something. I don't know the price, but they're looking, moving into like luxury TVs. They're looking at moving into cars. Right. There's all this rumor that Apple are, you know, imminent, you know, they're, they're working on the Apple car. Right. Because it's a luxury item, just like a Tesla. Right. Is a, is, is a luxury item. It's, it's for basically people who are rich. Right. And, and that's the only way Apple can continue to grow is by.

Chris Gammell: This is like the exact opposite of what we were talking about with that list of 50 things that need to happen. I know. This is like, this is a good, this is a good contrast. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It is totally opposite. Worlds apart. I hate it. That can be our, that can be the title of our, I'm sure our title of the show can be something like that.

Chris Gammell: Worldly wonks. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Apple is worlds apart from the humanitarian need or something. I don't know. I mean, yeah. Yeah, of course it is. And that's the only way they can grow. And it's, this company's that big. That's, that's their only future. That's their only future.

Chris Gammell: And in the past, I mean, we've talked, it's like, like, like Bunny's written about how he's followed iPhone trends just for finding cheap components. And like. Right. And I've talked to, I mean, I know I've not, I've talked about, but I've seen articles and they, you know, we've talked about like how they just buy up entire fabs worth of stuff. And it's just. Yeah. Unfortunately, it drives the industry. Right. I mean, like it, for better or worse, it does. I mean, it's just because, because of scale. And.

Dave Jones: And, and they have to, we've explained this on the blog before, but for people who have missed it, Apple have so much cash. They have so much cash. They, they can't invest enough of it to, you know, they can't invest in nothing. So what they do is they, as Chris just said, they, they buy up fabs, like worth of chips. They buy up like five year stocks worth of chips. And they pay.

Chris Gammell: Stuff that hasn't been made yet.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Like, and yeah. And they just buy up all the inventory because that is actually a greater return on their investment. It gives them like a 15, 20% return on their investment. Right. If you buy it because you're buying so much stock, you can get it at such a cheap price that nobody other, no other, uh, even like the Samsungs of the world can't match. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, what do you think they're buying from? You know?

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. Okay. Right. But you know what I mean. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So even, because every company will take, they'll take cash today over, you know, over cash tomorrow.

Dave Jones: Of course they will. So they will take cash. You know, so somebody like, uh, you know, maximal national semiconductor, right? They will fall over themselves to practically, oh, whatever. Right. To, to, to practically give away their chips to Apple if they, if Apple give them all this cash now, you know? So that's a way for Apple to invest their cash and actually get, because they're getting like a 15, 20% discount or whatever. They're effectively earning 15, 20% on their cash.

Chris Gammell: They're like the PD lenders of the electronics industry.

Dave Jones: They are. Yeah. Exactly. So that, that's better than sticking their money in the stock market, which might, you know, go up 10% a year. It's actually, you know, or investing in other things. It's, that's how they invest their money is by just buying stock. And it's, well, that's why they own the market. It's good to be king. It's good to be king. That's right. I'm still waiting for that throne of cash that you've said you'll sit on, you know? Yep. Maybe it can be made out of gold bricks from Apple watches, you know, disused Apple watches when they, yeah, break in five years time.

Chris Gammell: I think we need to talk about something else or I'll start getting angry. Anyway. Like I said, I mean like.

Dave Jones: I'm on my stuff. All right. Let's talk about something else.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like, like, like I said, there's, there's a lot of stuff that comes out of it that isn't irrelevant to, to us. But. You're still talking about it? Still talking about it? Yeah. Sorry. What else is on our list?

Dave Jones: Nothing. Because we're out of time.

Chris Gammell: We're not out of time.

Dave Jones: I went just blowing a whole hour talking about fricking Apple and saving the world. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That can be the title. How Apple won't save the world.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, this is a big one, actually. Speaking of big companies and big things happening. We didn't, we didn't catch it last week, but NXP and Freescale, NXP bought Freescale. Oh, yes.

Dave Jones: Of course. Well, they're, they're, they're entering into negotiations. They've announced it. I don't think it has money changed hands yet. I haven't followed since the initial.

Chris Gammell: No, that stuff never happened right away, but, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Okay. Yeah. So I, I don't have it to hand. What is it? It's, um.

Chris Gammell: So they say it's a $40 billion merger, but really it's like. $40 billion merger. It's like. Oh, no. It's a buyout.

Dave Jones: It's not a merger. They always say merger. It's bullshit. Right. NXP. Sorry. Freescale bought. No. NXP bought Freescale.

Chris Gammell: Right. For like $13 billion. In cash. Yeah. In cash or something.

Dave Jones: Wasn't it all script? Was it cash or script?

Chris Gammell: I don't know. It doesn't matter. I know. But, but they're buying, you know, so Freescale does have chip fabs and stuff like that. And NXP does as well. Hmm. But yeah, it's, I mean, like this is watching, this is a consolidation, right? Obviously this is more consolidation in the industry. This is, Freescale is going away, folks. I mean, like that's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they're going to say, you know, there's always like the, oh, well, we'll maintain. But it's just never, unless they change the name to something else. But then technically Freescale and NXP are going away. NXP used to be Philips, you know, so it's not like this is a new thing. Yeah, right. No. No.

Dave Jones: There's a very interesting commentary on this from Hinson Himpey, who we've had on the show before. And of course he's ex-ST, MicroSand. Like he's been involved in the semiconductor industry. So he's, you know, really up on it. He put a great post on the EEV blog forum. We'll have to try and find the link for it somewhere. And he explains how, yeah, this is why he left the semiconductor. I mean, he got a good job at Tesla. But yeah, this is the reason he left. Because they're in their death throes, right? These companies, these semiconductor giants we're so used to just cannot survive without doing this, without merging it. Like they just can't compete with the large scale fabs like the TSMCs and stuff like that. They just can't do it.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And that's the big thing is the, you know, the fabless model versus the foundry model. That's the, those are the two things. TSMC is a foundry. That's right. Other ones are, well, I guess Intel is a foundry. So that's my prediction. That's always been my prediction is that I think eventually Intel will end up splitting off into a foundry specifically just because they're so far ahead of the process side of things. Okay. That I think they'll become a foundry eventually and maybe call it something else, but still keep their fabless. So that's, I don't make predictions often, not as often as Dave does, but that's, that's definitely, that's, that's what I see happening in the future. So yeah.

Dave Jones: He used the example of, which was an excellent example, I think from memory, I'm going from here about like, you know, chipsets for mobile phones and stuff, you know, like integrated wifi, you know, like every, you know how modern phones have everything integrated into the one chip, right? And that needs like bleeding edge process technology, right? And that's actually something that the established foundry companies can't do like your NXPs and your freeskiles, right? To operate their own fabs. They can't invest enough money. They're dragging along using their older fabs, even though they're still pretty awesome fabs, right? But then in terms of the pace of modern innovation, so it's easier for a startup fabless company to come along by, you know, spend a couple of million bucks on their cadence design tools, design the chip, and then bang, get it made by TSMC. And they dominate the market for that integrated chip. And so they can, this is how, you know, a couple of million dollar startup can come and beat, you know, the freeskiles and the NXPs of the world.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, that's, I think, yeah. And I think he referenced that, that wifi chip that's kind of everywhere. Is it ESP something? It's like a serial to wifi kind of chip that's out there. Right. And I think he was referencing that, basically. You know, even though it's not full scale yet, it's just like, yeah, you know, it's just, it'll get there.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And it won't come.

Chris Gammell: Innovation comes from the bottom up, right? It's just like. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it will not come from, that's the thing, it will not come from freescale, NXP, et cetera, because they don't have the fabs to do it.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Well, even, so even freescale, I, I knew things were in trouble. So I, I, I know the guy, I know the local rep guy here and he was so excited when, uh, when they started making arm stuff. And I looked at him like, I'm like, dude, like, I know it's exciting. I know you're making new things, but you can't survive. You can't, you can't, you can't, you can't normalize. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to sell more chips, but like if you normalize with the rest of the industry, you commoditize yourself. You know, before they had, you know, these other lines, they had the core IQ. I mean, they still have those things, but then like cold fire stuff like that, which were like industry standard, like industrial rather industrial chips that a lot of people standardized on. And it's like, you know, if, if you're okay doing that for a long time, and obviously I don't know their financials, but if you do that for a long time and you have a steady, you know, steady revenue stream, like, yeah, you could just keep going. But if you, if you, you know, if you're forced to grow a couple of times and you know, if you have this forced growth like that, which I think they did because they got bought and sold once or twice to private capital, like, yeah, you're, you lose everything. That's once you normalize everyone else, you, you're competing on price and well, good luck with that. You know, it's just like, unless you're the biggest and you define the price, you're screwed, you know?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So that's a drag. Cause I don't want to see free scale go away. I mean, they make good parts. They make good stuff. I know. Yep. You could say, you'd say they're not going away, but come on.

Dave Jones: No, it's a buyout. It's not a merger. It's a buyout. They'll be gone.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Right. Well, yeah. And what that ultimately means is like, you know, same thing happened. Like, even though when TI bought like national semiconductor too, it's like, yes, I, I get that like you're going to have, you know, you're a bigger company now. You still need a certain number of engineers, but you don't need double of everyone. I'm sorry. You just don't. I know. You could say that you're going to keep everyone for as long as you want to, but eventually some, you know, you know, starry eyed MBA graduate comes out and says, no, found some fat to trim. And then see you later. You know, like it's just, and because they should, right? It's business. I mean, that's the, that's what they're there for.

Dave Jones: Of course. That's what they're there for. No. It's business. Businesses are not charities. They're there to make a bottom line for the shareholders. That's it. End of story.

Chris Gammell: Full stop.

Dave Jones: You know? Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So that, and all I can really think about that is just, you know, okay, well, that sucks that there's less, you know, well, I, I, I guess what it ultimately comes down to. So actually, you know, I always ask for questions on Twitter. We always forget to answer them. We had covered some of them this week, but Jen asked, what do we see five, 10 years? You know, just kind of like, what's the, you know, five, 10, 20 years? What do we see? And, and when you look at trends like this, it's like, well, I guess you'll have like research labs and like, you know, you'll have ARM continuing to push out, you know, fabulous design, stuff like that. And the people will buy them and stuff like that. And that'll, that'll drive technology forward. And, but there's not going to be as much competition, you know, like it's, I don't, I don't see it happening when, when you have these huge companies and what does that end up meaning? I mean, it's just.

Dave Jones: It's a very open question too. Like you can't. Of course. But I'm just saying like. You've got to get into specifics.

Chris Gammell: Right. But, but if before there was, you know, maybe 20 choices for a chip and then in the future, it's just like you go to that one place for the chip and then is there as much, is there as much incentive for the companies to change that one chip when they're making money on that one chip, right? That's always. It feels like it's always the one end game is like when there's one winner, when they win, it's what happens then. Then all there is, is the, the starry eyed MBA is just optimizing for costs. And you know, like that's, that's all that's left.

Dave Jones: Well, see, but that's never going to, I can't see that ever happening because we're moving to the fabulous model, right? Which was, as we said, right? Any startup can come along and develop a world beating chip to that becomes the world standard in something.

Chris Gammell: Name one, you know, name one, name one that's done that so far.

Dave Jones: Oh, come on.

Chris Gammell: Name the newest FPGA you've heard about. You know, like it's just like, I mean like, and I, I'm sure that like, you know, they, they could be working on it in China or in other places and labs that I don't know about, but I'm just saying it hasn't happened yet. So we can plan for it, but.

Dave Jones: Well, they're, they're usually companies you've never heard of because they're going into these consumer things. You know, you open up these modern mobile phones and they're using chips that you've from companies you've never bloody well heard of.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know, like. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Shenzhen Semiconductor number four, right? Exactly.

Dave Jones: Happy go lucky chip co, you know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, but what, I mean, I come from an industrial background that doesn't work for me, you know, like.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. No, totally. We're, we're, we're both from the industrial background. So we're. Right.

Chris Gammell: The focus on consumer is. We have totally different needs. Yeah. It's fun, but it's like, you can't shoehorn everything into that. Right. I mean, like maybe, or maybe you can, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, maybe GE's, you know, whole like, you know, 50 trillion devices each with an ethernet port as a, you know, like that's the future they see. And it's like, maybe that's the answer. And maybe those are all consumer level. You just throw them out when they're done and they self-destruct or something. But. I don't know.

Dave Jones: And what have, has electronics changed over the last 30 years? I don't see that. Yes. I'm still doing the same. Well, yeah, but overall.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Overall. Overall, yes.

Dave Jones: We're still doing very similar things in a similar way to what we did before.

Chris Gammell: Ah, come on, Dave. What?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Using a lot of, using a lot of tape to tape out your PCBs these days or your chips?

Dave Jones: Oh, no, but come on. But we're still, hey, we're still using humans to lay out boards just like we used to. Yeah, the technology's changed. We're still soldering parts on the. You're still designing a lot of BJT device devices. No, come on. Seriously, right?

Chris Gammell: You're doing a lot of ECL?

Dave Jones: Come on. You have to agree with me on this, right? If you let me explain it. We are still, you know, we're still laying out boards. We're still manufacturing FR4 bloody, you know, fiberglass PCBs. We're soldering components onto them, right? They're chips. Yeah, like the packages have gotten smaller, all that sort of jazz. We're still using passive parts. We're still carbon-based lay forms. We're still, exactly. Everything's still the same. We're still buying catalogue parts at the, you know, we've still got the distributors that we're dealing with. We've still got this. We've still got, well, nothing's inherently changed. Just the components have got its smaller, you know, greater capability, blah, blah, blah. But ultimately, we're still making products in the electronics industry exactly the same way we always have.

Chris Gammell: You know, I'd expect something different from a guy who does teardowns every week. But...

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, they're the same teardown every week, you know, like...

Chris Gammell: If you zoom out far enough, yeah, I guess so. Exactly. I don't think I'm going to agree with you on this one, Dave. But what is ultimately the... What is the point you're getting to? You're saying that it's not that different, there's always been consolidation, like that kind of idea?

Dave Jones: Oh, well, no. Well, it comes back to the question, who was it asked on Twitter, right? But, you know, what things are going to change in the next, you know, 15, 20 years? Probably nothing. We'll still be making things the same way. Yeah, technology's going to get better. But we'll still be soldering parts onto our boards and buying from DigiKey or whoever's the next catalog distributor and getting parts from the distributors and, like, you know, using our CAD tools to lay out boards and, like... You know?

Chris Gammell: Maybe, yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, it's not like we're going to move to organic bloody PCBs and... Printed circuits. And neural-based circuits that, you know, work with, you know, synapses and all that. Like, it's just going to stay the same. It's just going to get trickier.

Chris Gammell: Well, folks, tune in again next week to see if electronics has changed significantly in the next week. Because Dave says 20 years from now, not so much.

Dave Jones: Well, just look. In that Apple, you know, the photos of that Apple notebook you've done. Well, what's different? It's got a PCB. It's got the new USB connectors soldered, you know, center mass on the edge of the PCB, which pokes out the side of the case. Nothing's bloody changed. I was doing that 30 years ago.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, dude. But that entire laptop is batteries. That's the difference. I mean, like, maybe batteries haven't changed in 30 years.

Dave Jones: Yeah, they have. Right? But I'm saying the technology, we're still, as engineers, we're still doing basically the same job we always have.

Chris Gammell: Okay, so I'm trying, I'm not agreeing with you still, but I'm trying to wrap my head around what you're saying. You're saying that if I woke up, so basically because our job as electronic designers is pick part, hook part together with other parts, manufacture with said part. Test. Get into production.

Dave Jones: Do the bill of materials. Do the whole, yep, yep. All that job. And we'll still be doing that in 15, 20 years' time. Of course we will be. I don't see it changing. Come on, you can, the only way it's going to change is if we have freaking chip printers. Or we move to, as I said, organics or board printers or something like that. And, or, you know, auto routers just suddenly magically work and we can just wave our hands.

Chris Gammell: You shut your mouth, sir. I got my new t-shirt from, that's Star made. Right. She made a new revision of the Never Trust the Auto Router. It's great. Cool. I haven't seen it. Oh, no, I'll post a picture. I post it on Twitter, but, yeah. Is it available for sale yet? It was on Teespring, but it could probably recycle. They're right. They're probably, you know, refire, that kind of thing. You're right. It's pretty good.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Huh.

Dave Jones: Anyway, so, there you go.

Chris Gammell: Okay, so Dave predicts, 20 years from now, we will all still be buying parts and soldering them down. Yeah, I mean, I guess I wouldn't know. I've only been in it 10 years, so.

Dave Jones: Right. I've been in it a tad longer.

Chris Gammell: I just, I don't think so, Dave. Sorry, man. I mean, like. Right.

Dave Jones: Well, what do you think is going to change? Come on.

Chris Gammell: I mean, yes, you're right that the basic, that's like saying, that's like saying, what's a good analogy here?

Dave Jones: It's still a valid point.

Chris Gammell: That's like saying the guy that drove a carriage is the same thing as a guy that's driving an Uber today, right? And it's like, yeah. It is. It is. They're both driving.

Dave Jones: Because we don't have self-driving cars, right? That would be a game changer.

Chris Gammell: But I bet you, you know, dollars to donuts that the guy in the carriage would have given anything for a suspension system and a radio. And an iPhone.

Dave Jones: If you use the car analogy, right? It's this Google model where nobody, like, we all have self-driving cars and we don't own them anymore. Right? That would be a complete change. That would be the upset. Yeah. Right, right, right. Okay. What's the equivalent in electronics?

Chris Gammell: I think the equivalent would be everybody buys a Uni device, right? It would be like the same device with a huge... No, I get what I'm saying right now. But I'm just saying that would be the thing. Would be like this board. What's his name? Steve, who's been on the show, posted about this zinc board. I think he's at Zilinx now. So the Z-Turn board, right? It's like, you know, it's got a zinc processor on it which has a dual A9 and it's got 28,000 logic cells and a crap load of memory and a bunch of stuff for $99. And it's like, you just buy that thing and you just go code and then only the code, you know, between the firmware and the software that you write on top of that, that's what makes the product different. You know, the case and the design. And that concept works so well at Altium. No, I get what you're saying, but that would be the long term. That would be the analogy. I don't agree with it. I mean, I don't.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Then, well, okay. Then you agree with me. Things aren't going to change much, right?

Chris Gammell: No. I think things are going to change a crap load. They're just not going to change like that. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Well, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. The technology is going to get jazzier. Packaging is going to get jazzier. Everything else is going to get jazzier. But there's no fundamental changes on the horizon. I don't see it.

Chris Gammell: I don't want to get into it, but, you know, I was driving in the car the other day and you know what I did? I hit the steering wheel. I was at a stop sign. I hit the steering wheel. I said, damn it, there might be a chip printer someday. I know we don't want to talk about this, but, like, honestly, you get to that point, that dystopian future of, like, you know, there's one chip vendor, right? And what choice do you have? I mean, even if you, like, downgrade, I mean, it's not going to be a chip printer. Of course not. But it's going to be a...

Dave Jones: Hey, he admits it. He admits it.

Chris Gammell: Hey, we still got the bet. The bet's still going. But whatever it is, I mean, like, once you run out of solutions like that, you know, people are going to find some other way around it. I don't know what it's going to look like, but... What I'm trying to say, Dave, is you're an old codger, and you're going to be wrong at some point.

Dave Jones: Maybe. Maybe. But I don't see it in the next... What was she talking about on Twitter? She has 5, 10, 20 years. 5, 10, 20. Even 20 years out, I don't see it.

Chris Gammell: 20 years from now, we're still going to be buying parts and soldering them down.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I don't see any other solution. I mean, I think... Exactly. The more likely thing would be there'd be so few places to go on the, you know, because of the lead inductance on parts and stuff like that, eventually you move to the point where the only thing that is possible is silicon design, right? That's the only place you can really innovate in the first place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there's so few... You need such scale that you have to basically... Again, you know, you buy some kind of module-based system like that, and then everybody kind of goes off that. I don't think that's going to happen either, but I think in terms of...

Speaker ?: No, no.

Dave Jones: That modular thing has been the dream... I know, I know. ...since the dawn of time, and it's never happened, never will. Courses for courses, you need the... You know, the right tool for the job is always going to be better than some universal tool. No, I totally agree with that.

Chris Gammell: I'm just... I have trouble seeing what the ultimate would be otherwise, right? And I think that in terms of like product differentiation... So do I.

Dave Jones: That's why I'm calling it now. That's why I'm calling it. Yeah, you always like calling it. I still see things the same in 20 years time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an old man's game. This is the I told you so game. Well, of course, Dave's so much healthier than me. He's probably going to live a good 50 years past where I will, but... But still, the point is... Yeah, I don't know, man.

Dave Jones: The point is you're going to agree with me eventually, like you always do. My memory's going. My memory's going.

Chris Gammell: I think that the point is that like, you know, you run out of... And this is a trend we've seen, is that you run out of places to innovate in the hardware differentiation, and the only place you can differentiate is in the silicon, right? So... Right, but then it's still silicon, you know? Right. Well, yeah. And I mean, then we all just become... I mean, maybe the... I mean, I've always said that I'm more of a pro shopper than a pro designer, right? It's about finding the right part. Right, yeah, yeah. You know, and then integrating that, you know, mixed with other stuff.

Dave Jones: But we're not... It's rare that we have to design everything with discrete transistors, you know? It's not like you're, you know, like an actual designer from that aspect of, you know, oh, yeah, I'm going to do this new, you know, 100-watt RF transmitter. I'm going to do it with all discrete bloody transistors. And they're going to be all NPN.

Chris Gammell: Just because I'm matching everything else, and size, and packaging, and the lead inductance, and all that other crap that you have to do when you have packaging, right? I mean, that was just there because that was the only choice. And now the choice is, well, you know, you can integrate it, and you can buy... Right. You can buy an ARM core, you know? Like, you can just go sign a dream with ARM and get a design.

Dave Jones: I was actually having... We have to finish the show, but I was just having an interesting email chat with... Hopefully, something I'm getting in the mailbag eventually, but it was motor drive controllers, right? Humble motor drive controllers, right? Okay. They're incredibly advanced these days. And the guy was showing... He works at a company I won't name, but anyway, they make these really advanced motor controls, and the technology that goes in to the manufacture of the hybrids that goes into these things...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: ...is phenomenal. And I said... And the thermal, you know, the thermal performance of... And they gunk everything up, and they do everything else, and they bond-wise. And I go, well, why didn't you just design... Like, they actually, this huge corporation buys the modules from somebody else. And I go, well, why didn't you just make the discrete transistors... You know, put in the discrete transistors yourself, and, you know, thermally bond them, and do your own heatsink solution, and blah, blah, blah, all the rest, right? Why didn't you do it yourself? And he said, because these things have to be done... These modules have to be done in a clean room environment. It's how they get the performance out of them, and the silicon matching, and then they've got to gunk them all, and the bond-wise, and it was like... Yeah, repeatability and testing, and all that other stuff. Yeah, and repeatability and all that sort of stuff.

Chris Gammell: And never underestimate the value of paying someone so you could yell at them later, too.

Dave Jones: Ah, right, yes, exactly. But he said, yeah, but they just can't match the technology that goes into these motor drive hybrid modules. They just can't match it with discrete parts. It's just the technology in them so advanced. And the actual, like, the physical manufacturing technology is so advanced. That's how they get the performance. You know, I'm talking, you know, megawatts, you know, in, like, you know, square inches kind of thing. You know, they're driving these megawatt motors, and the loss is, you know, 0.001% or something, you know. Yeah, like, you know, really crazy sort of, you know, high-end stuff like that. Yeah, that's awesome. And, yeah, he said, yeah, we just can't do it with discrete parts. It just doesn't work. So, anyway, I thought that was interesting. Oh, that's really cool. So, hopefully I can get some teardowns and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I look at, like, the, I mean, when you really look at it, right, in terms of, like, eh, startups, not so much. But just, like, even, like, companies, right? What companies are going to be around in 5, 10, 20 years kind of thing. Like, the ones that are solving the big, like, heavy problems. Like, obviously, I love industrial stuff, right? And I'm interested in motors and things like that. But, like, there is some low-hanging fruit there and, like, they're hard problems, but they're still hard problems, you know. And I think that that is just, like, that's where the juicy stuff is, right? I mean, you think about robotics and autos.

Dave Jones: Just like that million-dollar Google prize for the, like, it's just a bloody power inverter, right? Right. But they want it.

Chris Gammell: But it's getting that last squeeze out of it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, they want it in, like, 10 square inches or something, you know. And that's the magic, right?

Chris Gammell: And even if that part's not manufacturable, you drive the technology forward to then make other stuff a little bit smaller and a little bit smaller.

Dave Jones: So, you have a go at it and you go, oh, I couldn't get 10 square inches, but we got 20 square inches, which is twice as good as the next competitor. You know, hey, progress, right? Yeah, you still don't win the million dollars, but probably get a contract for something.

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yep. Anyway, there you go. We have to call it quits. Dude, this is an hour and a half. Oh, come on, man. Regular bullshit shows don't go this long.

Speaker ?: Come on.

Chris Gammell: All right. Well, there's other good links on the subreddit. Obviously, we talked about stupid crap for a while, but we got into some good stuff. We didn't get onto a lot of stuff.

Dave Jones: And by the way, we are seeking donations on our Patreon page.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, if you made it this far, you might as well throw it on the dollar.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you might as well. All right. So, yes, thanks everyone who donates on the Patreon page. Anyway. Link down below. That's right. Awesome. And there's Ampower t-shirts somewhere, too. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And thank you for listening while you, you know, if you have a 45-minute drive, hopefully we got you there and back.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: All right. Well, I won't. I may not see you next week. You may not be here next week.

Chris Gammell: I may not. I'm going to a ECE Department Heads Association Conference, which I'm excited about. Oh, a bunch of funsters. I'm going to hang out. Yeah, I'm going to hang out with everybody's professors. So, we'll see how that goes. All right.

Dave Jones: And so, I will hopefully have a super excited guest. That's right. We still have to confirm. But anyway, if not, well, I don't know. We might just skip it or I'll just anchor the show myself. That'll be fun. All right.

Chris Gammell: Dave talking for an hour. 20 minutes.

Dave Jones: Is there nothing worse? All right.

Chris Gammell: All right. See you, man. Catch you next time. Bye.

Chris Gammell: Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye. Bye.