#249 – Wearables Might Have Limited Fashion Options - Lachrymogenic Lane Language

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded May 12th, 2015. Episode 249. Lacrimogenic. Lane. Language.

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: Who's back in the United States of America. America. After you went somewhere, where'd you go?

Chris Gammell: I was in Serbia. Serbia, Macedonia, New York City. So all over the place.

Dave Jones: And what were you doing over there?

Chris Gammell: I was hanging out with co-workers and got a chance to, you know, poke around and see different parts of the country. And I went down to Macedonia, which is the country below it. And yeah, it was a good time. I mean, it was good people, good food, good times.

Dave Jones: Is that what you saw over there? Because it's surrounded by, I mean, Serbia is surrounded by, you know, there's Romania, Hungary, all those, Croatia.

Chris Gammell: And all those sort of places.

Dave Jones: Did you get to them?

Chris Gammell: No, just the two. Oh. Sorry.

Dave Jones: Shame to fly all that way and just see bugger all. I've told you this before. You've got to make use of these company junkets.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, this was more just working, so. Yeah. I agree.

Dave Jones: It's still a company junket, okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Young whippersnappers, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Maybe next time. I'm sure I'll go back. I'm sure I'll go back.

Dave Jones: How long does it take to fly to Serbia and how do you get there from the US?

Chris Gammell: I flew from Chicago to, shoot, what's the country, or what's the city? It's in Switzerland, the big one in Switzerland.

Dave Jones: Hang on, so you've got to fly from?

Chris Gammell: Cleveland to Chicago.

Dave Jones: Cleveland to Chicago, then Chicago to Switzerland.

Chris Gammell: Switzerland. Whatever the big city is there. It's an L. Whatever. And then Switzerland to Serbia.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. So it's four hops.

Chris Gammell: Three. Three hops. Four cities. Oh, sorry. Yes. Yeah. Three hops. Yeah, it's not too bad. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, that's all right. It was like, it's... I thought it was going to be worse than it was, but...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Cleveland's not a major departure point for the world, so...

Dave Jones: Right, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Got to go other places first. It's no Sydney.

Dave Jones: Okay. I thought you would have flown out of JFK or something like that, because it's closer, technically.

Chris Gammell: I flew back to there. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, on the way back, I went to New York City for the TechCrunch Hackathon. Cool. That was fun. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Excellent.

Chris Gammell: So, we were there.

Dave Jones: Who'd you catch up with there?

Chris Gammell: Well, I was with the Hackaday crew, so that was fun. And then, got to meet some new people. Met Kenji Larson. So, Kenji's really big on the Hackaday, like, project site. Right. But also, he brought... So, they did a video with him, but I got to hang out with him all night, and he helped me, like, learn how to 3D print and stuff like that, because I'd never done that before. And, but, like, if you go watch the video of, like, the stuff he brought with him, it was just... It was amazing. Like, the suitcase of wonders kind of thing. It was just, you know, it was like a standard-sized suitcase, and it just had tons and tons and tons of stuff in there, including a 3D printer.

Dave Jones: Nice. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, we've talked about, you know, kind of the lack of viability of hardware at hackathons, right? You know, that's kind of the tough thing, and it is tough, you know, to get something useful out there and trying to make something interesting. But...

Dave Jones: That's what... Well, some people have asked, you know, like, when the electronics show here is in Melbourne, like, am I going to have a stand in Melbourne? Well, no. You know, it's just, like, too much work. You know, the transport stuff and things like that, so definitely not.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Is that the electronics? Yeah. The one you usually do?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That is a lot of stuff to drag around. I mean, yeah, it's not like it's just bringing a monitor or a projector or something like that. It's like, you've got to bring stuff, you know? Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: 3D printers. Yeah. Monitors, computers, and, you know. Yeah. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But it's not...

Chris Gammell: It is interesting. I think that... So, if people are... So, what I was really thinking about at the event, you know, it was, like, all night kind of thing. It was, like, a 24-hour type of thing. And all I could really think is, like, I know I'm not that old, but, like, I felt old because by... You're right. I don't pull all-nighters anymore. Yeah. And by the end, I was just, like, trashed. I was just, like, oh, I just can't think anymore.

Dave Jones: You couldn't keep up with the younger weeper snappers.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Exactly. And, well, that's what I was really thinking is, like, man, this would have been great when I was, like, instead of, like... Right. You know, early 30s, like, early 20s. You know, that's what it's for, is, like, people chugging Red Bull all night. Right. And, you know, maybe you know less at that point, but who cares, right? You're kind of just there to...

Dave Jones: Right. You have more fun. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, you can learn a lot, too. That's what's interesting. True. You can meet a lot of people there and learn from other people and stuff like that. So, it was a good time. I mean, I was, like, surprised. I was surprised that it was a good time. And I would probably do it again, like, a hackathon with maybe better hours. But it is interesting if people... I think that there's a real advantage. So, we were talking about, like, the rules of that specific one. It's, like, you can't come in with any code that you've written before. Oh, right. But they didn't say anything about any hardware you've built before or anything like that. So, you could bring in, you know, pre-assembled modules that you have at your house and kind of hook things together. And you can make something interesting, I think. Like, it's just a matter of planning and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Got it. Got it. So, you wouldn't have to build your Arduino from scratch. You could bring your Arduino and then hack it there and wire it up and... Yeah, or even, like, sensor boards and stuff like that. You know, like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You could bring some, you know, some perf board and stuff like that and just solder it together there. And, you know, based on what you need... Like, again, like Kenji's suitcase was crazy, but, you know, maybe you don't even need that much stuff. It's kind of just bring in what you already work with. I know Jeremy Blum had done that before. And he talked... He brought stuff as well to, like, hackathons. And, you know, it gets... You'll stand out, right? Because it's harder to do. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Dave Jones: So, was this a true portal lab?

Chris Gammell: No. But I did talk to him about this because, you know, and he had a lot of the, you know, the necessary stuff, you know, DMM, stuff like that. Yeah. But his was more like, it was just, like, packed to the brim. If it would have... It wouldn't have gone through security because it would have... Everything would have gotten trash from just getting bounced around. It didn't have any cushioning. But we did talk about it a little bit. Oh, okay. Got it.

Dave Jones: So, did he drive there, did he?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. He was in the area.

Dave Jones: That makes it easy. Ah, easy. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how you would... I think anything, if it was that packed, if you had that much stuff, you'd want to ship it anyways if you did. So, not quite a portal lab, but, you know, it's kind of edging towards that. You know, thinking about having a 3D printer with your stuff as well is kind of interesting as well. And so, maybe that's another consideration for a 3D printer or something. I don't know.

Dave Jones: And we've talked about this, mentioned this before, I'm sure, is that, you know, often when you go overseas, you know, on work trips and stuff like that, like, you don't bother taking your tools. You just buy them over there. You just go to the local Fry's and, you know, buy your soldering iron and take it back to the hotel and you buy your cutters and your multimeter and everything else. You just don't bother taking it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Might be a little harder. I'm not sure about the Serbia, but maybe. Oh, right. Okay.

Dave Jones: But, you know. Yeah. Yeah. If you know people in the area, you can borrow. I'm just flying from here to Silicon Valley. Like, I'm not going to be taking tools, you know. I'm just going to. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: Here's the company credit card, you know. Right. Let's catch a cap of fries and just buy everything we need.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Head on back to the hotel and start hacking.

Chris Gammell: Right. I think that's much more realistic.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: One of the things they had there at that hackathon, and I've seen other stuff about, like, more and more and more I see this. They had a bunch of those ESP8266 boards, or the chipset, but have you looked at that at all? What's the 8266? It's that little, it's like a little 32-pin QFN, like, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi all-inclusive module. Got it. Have you seen these things? I mean, like, have you... I have.

Dave Jones: They're there everywhere.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually, I'm really intrigued by them. I haven't tried one yet. I need, I just ordered some today, actually, to try them. But, you know, just seeing more projects come out with them and stuff like that. And, you know, thinking about, like, a lot of the promise of IoT and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. You know, I was talking to some people over the past couple weeks about this and stuff as well, but, you know, it's probably not going to be, you know, like an Ant or 6W Lopan or whatever that is. You know, like... Right. Like, all of these other competing, these other competing wireless standards and stuff like that, it, like, they'll be, they'll be there and they'll be, you know, they'll be used for certain applications, but it's probably going to be Wi-Fi. I mean, like, as much as that may or may not work and, you know, it'll be kind of a cluster. Yeah, right. But in terms of accessibility and, you know, like, in terms of the maximum things that people... This is my opinion, of course. I could be totally wrong. But I think that this is really interesting because of that, because, you know, it's relatively low power. It's Wi-Fi. It's dead simple. It's super cheap.

Dave Jones: Well, not relatively low power.

Chris Gammell: What do you mean?

Dave Jones: Is it? It's not relatively low power.

Chris Gammell: Are you saying it's higher power or it is low? I would say it's relatively high power.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I would say it's relatively high power.

Chris Gammell: Wi-Fi in general is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that would, that's the relative part. Yeah. If you're comparing it to Bluetooth low energy, then it's high power, but relative to other Wi-Fi devices that are always on, it's low power. Yeah. It's, I mean, and that's really just because it's low bandwidth and, you know, it's, but I don't think that's really, I think the real thing is the cheapness. That's what's interesting to me. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Of course. And, you know, the simplicity of it as well, but I don't know. I just think it's, I think it's a really intriguing device, especially because everyone I've asked about it, I've looked online a little bit, but like, do they know where it's made? I mean, like, it's like this, it feels like this anomaly that came out of China and it's just like, it wasn't certified at first and that kind of thing. But, you know, it's not like they, it just, it just seems like an anomaly to me. I know, I know that this has been around for a while too. And it's not like, it's not like everybody listening is like, yeah, of course, Chris, it's been around, you know, like it's, you know.

Dave Jones: Because we haven't been following the game, you know, if you've been following the game, you know, you know all about it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Because if people don't know, these modules are seven bucks retail at Artifruit. I mean, you know, and they're basically just, what, a serial in and Wi-Fi out. That's basically it, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: Right. Yep. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Or is it IO? Is it serial or is it just bit banged IO? IO? Or is it anything you feed into it?

Chris Gammell: Well, there's, there's a couple that it has I2C, it has spy on it, it has serial. Oh, okay. But basically, yeah, you have to throw it like one command at a time. And like, actually they get it set up like that.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: So.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Uh.

Dave Jones: And how much power does it take? Have we got data on that?

Chris Gammell: I have no idea.

Dave Jones: Come on.

Chris Gammell: Sorry.

Dave Jones: This is an electronic show. We need to have like, we need to be Johnny on the spot with this stuff.

Chris Gammell: Uh, sure.

Dave Jones: Come on. I'm Googling it right now to make us look like, like we know everything. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Uh, okay. This is pathetic. Anyways, I, I, like I said, I don't know much about it, but I'm, I'm just very intrigued by it. So I'm, I'm going to be trying it out, um, personally, um, just to, just to see.

Dave Jones: Yep. That's cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Uh, and yeah. And I, I mean, other things that I saw, like I saw some projects today, like there was an MQTT. Uh, we had talked about that on, in the past, where that's like a, a protocol that kind of is like a broadcast protocol for, for, for small things. You know, just seeing all these projects out there, it's just, I don't know. It just peaks the interest. So, right. What are you working on? Got it. Got it. Hang on. Okay. Okay.

Dave Jones: 200 to 300 milliamps peak power. That's peak. And standby power is less than one milliwatt. So, you know, yeah, it goes into deep sleep and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. But yeah. Okay.

Chris Gammell: That's what I'd expect. Yeah. It's like, it's like a big pulse of power.

Dave Jones: Yep. Okay. Yep. That's the disadvantage. What that averages out to, I guess it depends on what data you send in and stuff like that, maybe, but yeah. Anyway, it can be high. So, you know, if you're power, if you're trying to attempt to power this thing from a couple of coin cells, you know, you're, you're going to be out of luck. You're just not going to have the peak power available to do it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But I don't even think about this for that kind of, I think about this for like actual, like even just wall wart connected type, you know, like the same things that like. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But yeah. But even if you're powering it from AA or AAA batteries, you know, that's a fair chunk of pulse power, you know? So. So.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's, it's more of an energy calculation than power, right?

Dave Jones: No. Well, it is. Yeah. But I'm just saying, you know, anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Of course. Yeah. And that's, and that's exactly what you said about the, the wifi as well. I mean, that's the, that's, that's the downside to wifi in the first place.

Dave Jones: And then of course you smooth it out with your, you know, some heavy bypass in it, you know, your peak energy comes from that instead of the, through the ESR in your batteries, for example. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's all up. Yep. All averages out in the end. Anyway, what have I been up to?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What have you been up to?

Dave Jones: No, I just released a, just released another video. Shock. Horror. As I do.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Solar roadways again. It's back.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Grown, grown, grown. But this is the thing that pisses me off. Right. So like the, this is the solar road one, right. The one in Amsterdam. Right.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: So this, this solar road, which I, I don't mind this mob. Right. Cause they're not the bruschaws. The bruschaws are just batshit crazy. Right. Whereas these, this, this, you know, this one over here is actually quite professional. They've done it quite professional, as I've said before, but it's, it's still not viable, but that's beside the point. Right. They're at least doing some reasonable engineering behind it. And, but they come out with this press release, right? This thing, this, they installed that 70 meter prototype solar cycle way. Right. It isn't a roadway. It's a cycle way. Okay. And it's been installed for six months now. So they finally released the data after six months. And great. So we have some decent, uh, data to work from. Anyway, they released this press release saying, oh, it's, it gave greater output than we expected. You know, woohoo. Fantastic. It's better than what we thought. And of course, everyone picked up on a popular mechanics and gadget, you know, all the big blogs. Right. And they continue. This has just come out. So all the blogs are continuing to pick it up. Right. Pick up this stupid press release from them. And of course the, and the headlines are now glowing, right? Oh, solar roadways are viable because, you know, they've got a bright future pun intended, you know, and all that sort of crap because they made the simple statement that it's more, it's, you know, the output is greater than what they expected. Right. So I thought, hmm, I'll verify that. Right. So I went and got, I went and actually got the data and it's basically not. It's basically exactly what they expected. The output. So it's like, yeah, it might've been like 1% more than they expected or 5% or even 10% more. Right. But I actually calculated it based on the available data. Yeah. It's about what they expected. So, you know, it's media, right. Running with these headlines. They'll just, because people want to believe in this thing. Right. That's the thing they want to believe. So they'll take any scrap of, you know, any scrap of headline available that, oh, it exceeds expectations. So therefore it's viable. And it's just, it's not. It doesn't change the game at all. And I went through the, and I actually, what I did, this is the interesting part, is that right in near Amsterdam, somewhere near Amsterdam, there, I forget the town, starts with K, I think, can't even pronounce it. And what I got right, that's where they installed this 70 meter solar railway. So I actually went to pvoutput.org where people like me who have home solar systems, right. They feed their data into this website. So I went and found three home solar installations within a couple of kilometers of where this thing is installed. And I actually got their data out. Okay. So I actually, so nobody can complain that, oh, I'm, I'm using the data on my rooftop here in Sydney. And, you know, the solar installation is different, blah, blah, blah. Right. I actually went and got data from three different solar installations within a couple of kilometers of the solar roadway and compared the data and solar roadways or this solar pathway produces at best, highlight that, at best, um, half of the power of a rooftop solar system per square meter. Like.

Chris Gammell: Why? Uh, because of the material stuff?

Dave Jones: Because of, well, it's obvious, right? That's exactly what you'd expect because A, it's not angled, it's flat. It's farther away from the sun. Right? It's flat. Right? So, so you lose like 20, 30% just from it being flat instead of angled. Right? And then you whack, yeah, and then you whack the heavy glass.

Chris Gammell: I mean, Dave, as, as a background here, I, I know very, I, I don't know much about solar. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but come on, engineering, common sense, right? If the solar panel is perpendicular to the sun, it's going to be perfect, right? It's going to have maximum output. You tilt it, make it flat, you know, unless, unless the sun's directly overhead. Right? Right. Um, which in Amsterdam it's not. Uh, so.

Chris Gammell: Oh, because of the, because of the latitude.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So, right. So then you've got to tilt the thing, right? So having it flat, you lose X, you know, you lose a couple of tens of percent there. And then you put the thick, heavy glass on the thing. There's going to be loss in that. Right. And then the fact that the, uh, the being in such a thing, there's no airflow under the back of it. Like you get on rooftop. So it's going to heat it up more. So they're going to be less efficient. And then you're going to get.

Chris Gammell: I did learn that from Martin. That if they get, they actually like colder, colder weather more than hot, right? Colder is better. Yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's why some people actually. Right. That's why some people in hot environments actually run sprinklers on their solar panels. I don't know if they call them sprinklers in the U S yeah, but they actually drip feed water over them to actually cool down the solar panels, makes them more efficient. So you can use part of the output of the solar panels to power a pump, to pump water up to the top. And then it's, you can actually get decent payback on that by actually cooling down the panels. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Interesting. I didn't know that.

Dave Jones: In certain environments, I'm sure it wouldn't apply to Cleveland, but you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, Martin said that because actually two of the things that work better for us is that direct sunlight always necessarily better. Like sometimes it's about like cloudy days can do just as good as sunny days. Yeah. No, definitely. And then the cooler weather also helps because of the, the efficiencies. Yep. I guess Martin's the one who I learned, Martin Lorton's who I learned everything from because he's got stuff for that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. He's really into solar power stuff. Anyway. So they, yeah. So they lose efficiency there and the fact that it gets scratched up and grime and all sorts of crap on the thing, you know, it's, yeah, it's not surprising. It only gives half the power output. And of course, unfortunately, you know, the solar roadways, the true believers, you know, they're going to take this as a positive, right? And go, but, but it's half as good. That's good enough. Imagine if you paved all of the roads and all the pathways on the planet. Right.

Chris Gammell: Oh, well, like, like cheap wifi chips, it'd be great if it was cheap, but it's not.

Dave Jones: It's not. It's just, but the fact remains, these things are massively more expensive than rooftop solar. Right. And the amount of energy which goes into producing all the concrete base for them and, you know, everything and the glass and everything else to actually make these things viable for half the amount of energy is just stupid. You know, it, it, it, it, it's just fundamentally not a viable, you know, uh, system to use. It's just, it's just ridiculous. And anyway, there's a video, very cool video, which we should link in, in South Korea. The South Koreans have done this, right? They have, there's like a drone footage, right? Of drones, of this drone with a camera flying over this new motorway in South Korea where they've installed, um, a cycle way, like a bicycle way in the center of the freeway and then covered that bicycle way with solar panels as in on top of, right? So it's above, it's not in the cycle way, it's above and they're angled properly. And it's brilliant. It looks brilliant. And, um.

Chris Gammell: And it keeps rain off the head, right? I mean, that's another.

Dave Jones: And it keeps rain off the head. It shades them, you know, shades the cyclists. Oh, that's really smart actually. Yeah. It's, it's so clever. So that's how you do solar roadways at, you know, much less cost, much more reliability, much longer lifetime, much higher output, at least double. So anyway, the data is in and yep, solar roadways is still a complete and utter waste of time.

Chris Gammell: Well, no, I like that idea though. I mean, I think that's, uh, the South Korea stuff. That's, that's a cool idea.

Dave Jones: No, it's great. And a lot of people are doing that. Like, you know, people say, oh, why don't you do car parks with these solar road? Yeah, I've seen that before. It's like, yeah, it's stupid. Why? Like there's people out there putting roofs on their car parks, you know, like, you know, outdoor car parks. Right, because you want, you want the shade anyways. You want the shade and, and it can protect your car from the sun and, you know, hail and rain and everything else. So, you know, like, ah, it's just fail. Continues to be a fail. Yeah. People will continue to believe in it and this will add fuel to the fire. I'm sure this press release. And as I said, the thing that pissed me off was that all the, all the major blogs out there, right? They all just run with it and, you know, they just take any scrap of data and just blow it out of proportion. Oh, look how wonderful it is because it exceeded expectations. When you exceed expectations by a couple of percent on a system that's inherently unviable does not make it viable. Right. Ticks me off.

Chris Gammell: Sorry.

Dave Jones: Hmm. Next.

Chris Gammell: Yep. No, that's good. Well, I think a lot of that solar stuff, I think, so there's other interesting stuff that's coming out with solar specifically, the Tesla, the thing that you mentioned with

Dave Jones: the Tesla power wall, which I want. If anyone knows who I have to sleep with at Tesla to get one of those things here in Australia, please let me know.

Chris Gammell: I actually am, I will be at the Tesla factory on Thursday. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that publicly, but I just did.

Dave Jones: Is this a regular tour or is this a super special tour?

Chris Gammell: No, it's a regular tour. It's, uh... Ah, right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Are you going to meet up with our good mate Vincent there?

Chris Gammell: Uh, you know, I didn't plan to, but maybe I'll give him a shout. You should. You should. Yeah. Yeah. This is just like the commercial tour. So it's like, I have some friends that have a Tesla. Ah, right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Because you're allowed to bring one friend, aren't you, or something?

Chris Gammell: Uh, two. Yeah. Two. Two friends. Okay. Right. Yeah. So I'm very blessed to have friends that are, that offered. So I'm, I'm very excited about it. I don't know what to expect. And I'm not allowed to talk about it once I see it. I know that, uh, Oh really?

Dave Jones: You aren't allowed to talk about it once you see it.

Chris Gammell: I think I have to sign an NDA, which I will.

Dave Jones: I was going to say, well, why don't you take a camera?

Chris Gammell: Like I'll do it in a heartbeat. I don't give a crap, you know? And I mean, it's like for the, honestly, for the most part, it's going to probably be, you know, like, Oh look, robots.

Dave Jones: Like, yeah. Well, it'd be crap footage compared to that documentary we've seen. Right. And with like, they've got like, that just highlights it perfectly. Yeah. So.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Uh, but yeah, I, I love these kinds of like, like tours. Like that too. So, uh, but that's not what we're talking. We're talking about the output from, and I think so Powerwall actually comes from the batteries that are being recycled. Right. Is that the idea?

Dave Jones: I know. I didn't know they were recycled. I thought they were recycling. No, I thought they were just using more of the, more of the plant capacity. Cause that, uh, factory is going to come online in the next, you know, few years.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: And they have to, yeah, the gigafactory. And they have to use all these batteries. Right. And another way to use them as another market.

Speaker ?: That's true.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Segment is in these Powerwalls. Creature-owned economies of scale. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, and the thing's not that big either. It's sort of, you know, they call it the Powerwall cause it like mounts on the side of your wall. It's like a, like a one, I think it's like a one meter square by one meter square module or something. It's not, it's not that huge. Um, and it can, you know, power your house and store your energy from your panels.

Chris Gammell: And it's, uh, was it 3.5 K?

Dave Jones: Oh, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which, which will translate to about $7,000 if, if it ever gets to Australia.

Chris Gammell: Oh, oh, I see. Well, maybe you can-

Dave Jones: Maybe 10 grand. It'll probably be 10 grand in Australia. You watch.

Chris Gammell: But you'll, you'll do it anyways though?

Dave Jones: No, not at 10 grand. I'd like, I would buy one today if it was like five grand. I would, I would go out and buy one definitely.

Chris Gammell: So what is, what is the, uh, what is the, I mean, I, I can understand that like being off grid type of things, but like, is there other reasons or no?

Dave Jones: Well, for me, if you've watched my, you probably haven't, but I've got a update video on my solar installation, right? Of the payback period and all that sort of stuff. No, I did.

Chris Gammell: I did watch that one. I just saw some of that. You were going through numbers and stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Well, the numbers are, is that because here in Sydney, I get such a shitty feed-in tariff, right? I'm getting six cents per kilowatt hour if I don't use the energy. So during the day, if I'm not home and I'm not using that energy, I'm only getting six cents per kilowatt hour. Whereas if I had a battery pack, right? Any sort of battery pack, whether a Tesla Powerwall or some other system, then I could store that energy that I'm not excess energy. I'm not using during the day and then reuse it at night when I'm paying 25 cents per kilowatt hour. Right? So I'm effectively getting 25 cents per kilowatt hour for all of my energy. You know? 25 cents. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Holy crap. You have expensive power there.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. So, yeah. So that's the advantage. I'm, yeah, I'm pissing out. But still, even with the pissy feeding tariff I get here in Australia, it's still a five year payback for me on my solar installation. Wow.

Chris Gammell: And that's without like all the other like subsidies that they were doing for a long time, right?

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep. That's with, no, because it was subsidized a bit. So the cost of my installation was government subsidized a bit. Yeah. I think. But, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and yeah, I miss the boat because if I had installed it a few years before, I would have got 60 cents, 10 times more feed-in tariff. I would have got 60 cents per kilowatt hour feed-in tariff.

Chris Gammell: Huh.

Dave Jones: That's like, you know, a license to print money. Yeah. You know? Wow. That's crazy. I would have installed a $30,000 system, cover my entire roof and backyard and everything with solar panels if I was getting 60 cents per kilowatt hour. Wearing solar clothes. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. I just went over to the site and it says there's a, comes in 10 kilowatt hour weekly cycle and 7 kilowatt hour daily cycle models. Right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Interesting.

Dave Jones: Hmm. Yeah, because 7 kilowatt hours is about what the average house would, average small house would use in a day, I think. So, something like that.

Chris Gammell: And it says $3,000 for the 7 kilowatt hour and the 3,500 for the 10 kilowatt hour. Yep. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. I would only need like the three, I would only need the $3,000 one because, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Because I, you know, we do use one third of our energy during the day while the sun's out. Yeah. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I think the end, I think that's in it, like, it's not like the, the chargers and the, you know, like the inverters and stuff like that. That's, that's always, that's been around for a long time. It's just been the battery packs, right? That's kind of the big, obviously it's the same thing here.

Dave Jones: No, there is nothing new here at all. Tesla have, haven't really invented everything, anything. No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: I mean like, but like being hands off, that's what I really meant. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, no, no, there's still nothing really new here. And what I compare it to, this Tesla Powerwall is like the Apple iPhone of phones. You know, it's like, it's just the glitzy solution that just works that, you know, sort of, you know, as opposed to, you know, using some, you know, old school hacky Android phone where you've got to build it all yourself and compile your own operating system or something, you know? Like, yeah, it's like, I can go out right now and buy the equivalent to a Tesla Powerwall, right? There are companies that will provide me, but they're all sort of like custom solutions. You know, they'll use whatever battery pack technology they have available and they'll use their own custom, you know, they'll use an off the shelf inverter from here and they'll slap it all together in some custom case. And, you know, like, yeah, it's, so it's sort of all sort of doing itself at the moment.

Chris Gammell: So it's more like, it's like, it's like building a, building your own PC versus buying like a

Dave Jones: Building your own PC versus buying a sleek Apple Mac. Yeah, like a Mac. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's, that's the basic difference. Okay.

Chris Gammell: That makes sense.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. But, but still it needs something. The industry needs this to ignite people's imagination. Like nobody at the moment wants to go out and install their own battery solution, right? Cause it's not sexy. It's like, oh, I don't like.

Chris Gammell: Well, they were doing, it's a lot of like lead acid, like deep charge cycle type stuff, right?

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep. Yep. It's those deep cycle batteries and they, and the systems look ugly and they have to be custom designed for your installation. It's in the basement always. It's in the basement. It's like, no, this Tesla Power War is sexy. You know, you sit it on the wall and there it is. It just does its magic thing and it's Tesla and it's got a, you know, and, you know, an aura of, you know, the sort of, you know, the cult of Tesla aura around it, just like the cult of Mac, right? Or the cult of Apple. Yeah. Right? It's, yeah, it's sexy and the market needs that. Definitely.

Chris Gammell: You know, speaking of.

Dave Jones: And of course it's supposed to just work as well. Well, that's nice as well. Things like that.

Chris Gammell: Like you don't even need, you just need an installer and you don't need any maintenance or anything. Yeah. And you can like look at it on your phone and all that crap.

Dave Jones: See, but here's, here's the thing that Tesla, I don't believe it can do it. And why it doesn't, it was either a conscious decision on their part or a bad oversight, that the Tesla car, right? Why? It can't be used as a storage medium to feed energy back into your house. Right? Because there's a new, there's a, the electric DeLorean, right? You can buy an electric DeLorean. And it can do this. Really? Yeah. Yeah. It, it can, you, it can work just like a Tesla Powerwall. It can store your energy. You can use your car as the, the battery packing your car as the storage medium for your home solar installation.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, I think that's interesting, but I think that's probably not all that useful because most people have the cars out and about during the day. They use the car. Exactly.

Dave Jones: But for, yeah, so I can probably understand why it's likely a conscious decision that they decide not to include the ability to export the energy from the Tesla battery. So.

Chris Gammell: No, no. Cause other people have talked about that too. It's like, no, I think it's a, is a grid storage kind of thing. Like if you had, if everybody was plugged in at work and you could, you know, use that as a buffer.

Dave Jones: Then you could steal the energy from work and take it home and power your house. You know, right? Right, right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Your power must be really expensive. Like that, that's, that's kind of a shocking difference. I mean, I know that we have cheap because of like natural gas and coal and crap like that here.

Dave Jones: We've got a whole shitload of coal. We've got, we export more coal than any other country. I think we're one of the world leading coal exporters.

Chris Gammell: Oh.

Dave Jones: We've got coal for the next 500 years.

Chris Gammell: So why is your power so expensive?

Dave Jones: It's Australia. We pay the, I don't know, everything's, you know, just.

Chris Gammell: Cause ours is like eight or nine cents a kilowatt hour, I think.

Dave Jones: Right. Yep. Yep. No, we just, you know, it's politics, it's taxes, it's all sorts of, you know, it's. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I wouldn't even try and explain it.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think that's, if that drives people to get more solar installed, that's, that's a good thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

Chris Gammell: So you were mentioning.

Dave Jones: I mean, if you're, if you're power, if you're paying, you know, eight or nine cents per kilowatt hour for your horrible fossil coal energy, then what's the, you know, if, unless you're an environmentalist and you care about the planet, what's the, what's the point of getting a solar installation. That's what drives it here in Australia. That's why like greater than 13% of homes in Australia have solar, solar roof tops.

Chris Gammell: 13. Wow.

Dave Jones: Right. At least. Last I looked, and that was data from a couple of years ago, it might be like 15% or something now.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Dave Jones: Um, yeah, it just went, it went crazy. It helped when they gave that crazy feed in tariff of 60 cents. Right. Cause it was a license to print money. Um, so people just went ballistic and they had to shut down the program because it was way too popular. But now it's even still popular now that that system's gone. And here in New South Wales, you're only getting six cents per kilowatt hour. It's, it's still, you know, you can still get a payback in five years as I've shown in my video. So why not? Why wouldn't these things last for about 20 years? The panels do and the inverters maybe for 10, you know, why not? Yeah. It makes economic sense. And that's the reason people are doing it. People aren't really doing it to save the planet. That helps, you know, people, you know, a lot of people like being green and all that sort of stuff, but.

Chris Gammell: Right. But there's, there's limits to wallets, right? They're doing it to save money. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Cause they have to, you know, cause they're expensive here in Sydney, you know, all these big castles, you know, they've built all these big castles with their big, you know, air con systems running 24 seven and their electricity bills are like, you know, I know people that are getting charged $1,500 a quarter.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Dave Jones: Right. $1,500 a quarter. Yeah. That's a lot. Electricity. In comparison, mine's about $300.

Chris Gammell: Without, without solar you're saying.

Dave Jones: That's without solar. Yeah. That's about, that's about what mine is. $350 or $400. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But I have a tiny, we, we, I think we have a similar size house. We're, you know, not huge houses. So that, that, that is a big difference, right? Yep. Yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, people with these modern huge houses. Cost a fortune to heat and cool.

Chris Gammell: I call them tumor houses cause they have like always like great, great rooms. And so they, it looks like as you're like driving by, it looks like, you know, the, the ceiling kind of puffs out the roof and looks like a tumor. Got it.

Dave Jones: Oh goodness.

Chris Gammell: So you had, you had mentioned, uh, you know, you were comparing, uh, Tesla to Apple and that kind of thing. And like the, you know.

Dave Jones: It's sexy. Yeah. It's sexy. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And, and I was talking to a coworker who, who, who got the Apple watch and it. Oh yeah. I, I don't want to validate him by, cause if, in case he listens, but, uh, his assertion was that the Apple watch has, has already obviated as in, uh, made, uh, obsolete all other wearable technologies.

Dave Jones: I heard the, I thought the Apple watch was pretty shit.

Chris Gammell: I, I don't know. I've, I've, I've, I've yet to see it in person, but, um, it's an interesting concept. Like, I think there's a lot of focus on it because obviously it's Apple and there's a lot of money.

Dave Jones: That's the reason there's focus on it. It's not, it's no better than any other wearable. Well, yeah. It's got the same shit battery life and everything else. Right. It's got apps.

Chris Gammell: Whoop-dee-doo. No, I think the, the thing that's interesting about it though is it, and it's kind of the same thing as like the iPhone. Right. And like, so we've, we've talked in the past about Bunny talking about the, the sensors that are available on the iPhone and that drove a lot of innovations because of the cost dropping and that kind of stuff. And there's new sensors types on the watch. And I think that would be kind of the, uh, it's got like a heart rate. What do you do? In turn, uh, sensor. It's not like any phones have heart rate sensors on them.

Dave Jones: Who the hell needs to monitor their heart rate? What a gimmick.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But you could have said the same thing about accelerometers, right? Like when, like when, when smartphones came out, why, you know, like when you, when you think about a cell phone pre-smartphone era or pre-iPhone, even if you want to say that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but I'm not going to compare the two.

Chris Gammell: But that's, I think that's the same level. That's what I mean.

Dave Jones: But no, one is very specific to a type of biofeedback on your body. And the other is a general purpose addition to the user interface. You know, you can tilt the thing and that can have user interface advantages, auto rotating images, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But no, what I'm saying is that, is that accelerometers are used in a lot of ways that weren't initially intended just because they're, they're now cheap and available and stuff like that. Like people use them for like, like my friend, my friend uses it for like, uh, my friend works on Parkinson's research and he just, I think, I think he just has them like balance an iPad. Like he just uses off the shelf hardware. He has them balanced with an iPad. He measures like balance and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. You're right.

Chris Gammell: And that you like that. Yeah. No, of course. You never would have thought that like accelerometers used to be used for airplanes. Okay.

Dave Jones: So you're saying the same thing with this heartbeat thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Like, so like you can monitor your, your heartbeats raising. So it'll give you a, you know, here's a cat video to cheer you up. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That kind of stuff. Yeah. All the inferences around sensors, right? It's not, it's not the direct measurement, like just the direct acceleration of something isn't what's interesting. It's, it's what you imply from that. It's what you do with it. Right. Yeah, exactly. So that's, that's why, that's why I was kind of, I was kind of took a pause when my, my coworker said that. I'm not sure what all the sensors are on there, but it is interesting. I mean, like, again, you know, volume is, that, that plays a big part. Right. So I'm probably not going to get it.

Dave Jones: I think there'll be a lot of tossed out iWatches in a couple of years.

Chris Gammell: I, I, I said a similar thing, right? I said, what I literally, what I actually said to him was, uh, well, my Google Glass is sitting in my bedside, uh, nightstand. We'll see how many iWatches are sitting in bedside nightstands in a couple months. Right. That's ultimately, that's what.

Dave Jones: When people realize that they have to charge another freaking gadget every day.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: What a pain in the ass.

Chris Gammell: But people said that about iPhones too. So again.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but no, but, but the phone is the central thing that runs people's lives these days. They take it everywhere, but they don't. Okay. So they need one device. We've got it. It's the smartphone. Do they need another device that they have to remember to charge?

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I don't know. That's what I'm, and that's what I'm wondering about. Um, but, but then again, okay, so then, then the argument there is, do you need any of the other wearable things that are out there? Right? So wearables are interesting.

Dave Jones: They're, they're, they're always going to be a niche thing.

Chris Gammell: Maybe.

Dave Jones: Everyone's not going to be wearing around freaking necklaces and wearable bloody eyewear and watches. Did you see that?

Chris Gammell: Intel Curie, is it called? Did we talk about that when it came out?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: We did. Okay.

Dave Jones: So, oh, sorry. No, I thought you were talking about the new, uh, Samsung one. No.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no, no, no. I'll send you a link real quick. Uh, it's like, it's basically Intel's play into wearables and stuff like that. And I mean, like in terms of what's in there, it's, it's pretty, pretty beefy. It's got Bluetooth energy type stuff. But I mean, like, again, it's, it's about available technology and what you can do with it. And I think that, yeah, I, I don't know, like.

Dave Jones: But I, I, I can't help but get away from the fact that wearables and portable technology, smartwatches and phones and everything else, it all comes down to the annoyance of charging the things.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: We, we, we, we use our, we put up with our phones without, you know, one day charge on our phones because they're so useful, right? We need it to survive in our modern, you know, to, well, we don't need it to survive, but you know, that's how our modern world operates, right? Everyone's got a smoke phone, right? It's the device you must have. Everything else I regard as, you know, optional. It's, it's just going to piss people off if they have to charge these things. I think that's going to ultimately limit the success of wearables and smartwatches.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, you could very well be right. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I think, you know, if people start wearing watches just because of this, like just to have that kind of thing, then maybe it's different. But maybe it'll just end up with a lot of.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but as I said, yeah, they'll wear them for three months and then go, oh, this is too annoying. I'll just, I'll just leave it off for a day because I forgot to charge it. And then they get used to not wearing it. And then it goes into the bedroom drawer, the bedside drawer, right? And bingo. That's anyway, that's my prediction for bloody wearables. Okay. I'm, I'm not against them. I just think that they're not going to be as successful as people make it. They might be initially successful because, you know, oh, I want to buy an Apple watch because it's, you know, people are gadget freaks, right? People love their gadgets. All right. So they'll buy it. Yeah. Yeah. So they'll be initially successful. But will they be, you know, will everyone be wearing it in a couple of years time like they are carrying smartphones? I don't think so. I suspect not.

Chris Gammell: Welcome to the Amp Hour fashion blog with Dave Jones. This year's accessory is not the smart watch. It's the smart, it's the smart soldering iron holster belt. Are you at a buying in a foreign country and you've just bought a soldering iron from the fries down the street? Strap it in with your holster belt.

Dave Jones: And if you call within the next 24 hours, you'll get a free Arduino.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Extension cable not included. Oh, man. In 12 easy payments. Yeah. Oh, dear. Can we get on to something industry relevant? Microchip. Hey, more consolidation. Microchip are buying Microl.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't really... I always just see Microl or Microl. I always just see them as like linear regulators. I didn't really ever use them for anything else. Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: They make nice little linear... They're one of my go-to manufacturers for linear regs and things, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm not sure because I can't read the stupid Wall Street article because you've got to log in. No, no, no. Here's what?

Chris Gammell: Here's a tip from Chris Gammell in case you want to get around to... In case you need to get a Wall Street Journal paywall, most people just go somewhere else. Copy the article title, put it into Google, look at the first result on Google News, and they let Google through. So, just click through from Google and you can read the whole article because they want Google to read the whole article. But they don't want us to read the whole article.

Dave Jones: I'm trying it now. Oh, you're right. That works. Oh, you...

Chris Gammell: It works for everyone. Yeah. Wow. There you go. Yeah, good old Googlebot. Saves the day. Awesome. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, this article's crap. It's just a press release. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Should have just posted it.

Dave Jones: Anyway, there looks like they... Have they signed it? Yes. Has signed a deal. Yes. Cash in... You know, cash and stock deal valued at $839 million. $840 million.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It didn't seem like much. But again, I really don't know what else McGrawl was buying or selling. No.

Dave Jones: I mean, that's more consolidation in the semiconductor industry as predicted. Everyone has predicted this and that's where it's going. And it's like every month we could probably do a... Yeah. You know, who's buying who this week?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Eventually, they'll run out of companies to buy. Right. Eventually. It'll be interesting if...

Dave Jones: It'd be interesting to know how many there are out there. It's probably more than you think. You know? There's... Well, I see a lot of them, Dave.

Chris Gammell: To be honest.

Dave Jones: If you go to DigiKey and like list of manufacturers... Parts IO. Yeah. Parts IO. Yeah. Parts IO. Right. Parts IO.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Plugging your... Yeah.

Dave Jones: Plugging your... No, but there are a lot.

Chris Gammell: There are a lot. And there's a lot... Yeah. Especially the small, super... Like if you get into like the RF stuff... Oh, yeah. That is...

Chris Gammell: Like you'll see stuff that you never have seen before. Yeah. But... Yeah. And, you know, same with... You know, there's a lot of passive manufacturers, stuff like that. Things that aren't as difficult to actually make.

Dave Jones: One thing is... We don't say... One thing, I just realized this. We don't seem to be seeing any acquisitions of these, you know, no-name Chinese semiconductor companies.

Chris Gammell: That is institutional.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: You cannot buy Chinese companies unless you're Chinese.

Dave Jones: You can't buy Chinese companies unless you're Chinese. Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: You have to have... Even if you own a company, you actually have to have... This is how I understand it. I very... You know, people can correct me. But as I understand it, you have to have a Chinese national citizen actually own the company. You cannot own... Right.

Dave Jones: If you were... Oh, right.

Chris Gammell: You, Australian, me, American, cannot go and buy a company in China. But there are...

Dave Jones: Yeah, they can... Chinese, they can come in here and they buy every one of our companies.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: We're so stupid. We are so stupid.

Chris Gammell: There... Eh. Money. There is something called a WUFI, which is called a wholly owned foreign entity. I only know that because I remember when I was at Keithley, they were in the process of doing that. Then they got bought out. Okay. And they said WUFI a lot. And I kept thinking of Chewbacca for some reason. I don't know. Yeah. Oh, Wookie. Wookie versus WUFI. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, that's why. But a lot of them, too. Like, they're small. I mean, like, they're... There's... There's just fewer and fewer companies here, you know? Like, like... How about this one? Like, ST, they just announced the top thing on the subreddit. They just announced they're not even gonna... So, ST's gonna be around, right? They make a lot of parts. Yep. STM32, stuff like that. But they're not gonna be making stuff anymore. They're going straight. What? They're going fabless.

Dave Jones: Oh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Who are they gonna sell their fabs to?

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: Because I think most of their fabs are in Europe, aren't they?

Chris Gammell: ST's fabs are European, mostly? I think they might have one over here, but... Right. I think most of it's... Yeah, like the... I think about their, like, Swiss and...

Dave Jones: Something like that. Yeah. But, yeah, it's... Sorry for all you European people that we don't know. Yeah. Where everything comes from over there. There's so many bloody countries in Europe. That's the problem.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, Europe's becoming more like the States in terms of just, like... Like, the EU is, like, more US-like. You know, like all the countries... It's a bigger language barrier, but...

Dave Jones: Well, except if you're in Greece, who's...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, let's not go there.

Dave Jones: You're about to go belly up and leave the EU, aren't they? Let's not go there. Yeah. That's quite all our Greek views. Yeah. Sorry for your woes. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But, I mean, I think that this is actually... I mean, this is what we've been talking about on the show before in that, you know, it's not easy. And this is going to be the model where, like, I continue to predict that Intel will spin off their fab model as... They're going to go to the fabless plus foundry model, but they'll own the foundry at first. But that's my prediction. I just think it's an inevitability just because of, you know, economies of scale at the super low, super low geometry, super high cost to, you know, like, it's like 10... I think Samsung just put in a $10 billion fab. We talked about that a couple weeks ago. You know, they're just... It's nuts, the cost to do this. So, we saw IBM do their spinoff. They just paid global foundries a bunch of money to take their fabs off their hands. So, it's significant. So, what that comes out of with all this stuff, with all this consolidation is, eventually, it's like, do you buy the chip? Like, you know, I don't want to buy chip A. I want to buy chip B. Oh, I bought chip B last month. So, I guess I'll buy chip A. So, it's... Yeah, I don't know where it goes. There's not a lot of room for startups. So, I'll tell you that much.

Dave Jones: Speaking of startups...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Another... Yet another startup failure. Wattage. Oh, yeah. Which I don't think I've heard of. Anyway, somebody linked it in to... Was it you who linked it in to...

Speaker ?: It was me.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Do you know the story behind this? Anyway, they've got a comprehensive page.

Speaker ?: Oh, no.

Dave Jones: Luke did. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Oh, well, anyway. A company called Wattage. Yep. Is it? Yeah. Wattage Inc. They have some startup. I don't know what they're doing. But they...

Chris Gammell: If you scroll down this page on Medium, you'll see it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's really... They've actually been honest and said, yep, we have run out of cash after a year of development and we're shutting down. And here's all the data and here's why. And I'm going after this show, I'm going to go through and read it. And they've got lots of nice infographics and stuff of why they failed, I guess.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, and so this one was interesting. So, I had posted something to Wattage in the past. It was basically about... It was kind of like a platform for building custom gadgets. You know, like... And basically, they're like, oh, well, we have these modular blocks and we can make gadgets. But the problem there is that really there's only so many things you can...

Dave Jones: So, what are they? A hardware company?

Chris Gammell: They're basically like...

Dave Jones: Or are they just a website that enables something?

Chris Gammell: No, no. So, they were like a website plus hardware on the back end that basically allowed you to... So, if you went to Wattage... I think it... I don't know if it's still active. Wattage.io. But basically, you could go there and design a thing. You could design a... It goes back to this article. You could design like a thing, right? So, in this case, they're showing a speaker with a little screen and a knob. I see that, yep. And basically, then you could go program it.

Dave Jones: One of those desktop radio things, yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's the whole idea of like... It's not the hardware. It's the... You know, you just want to get to the software point and saying that there doesn't need to be any differentiation. But, you know, there was some customization available, but it wasn't enough. And I think. I think that's what it was. But I just... You know, and they talk about this stuff. They... You know, it's not... It's just not as big a market as they thought. And...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: You know, you'd have to... I don't know. Like, if you had four different companies designing slightly different things and they're all going through your service, it's like, okay, well, they're going to pay you for that. But... And you've removed some of the design woes there of, you know, making completely custom things each time. But at the same time, the customness of hardware is also what, in theory, locks other people out. Because then...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Your product actually is differentiated. So...

Dave Jones: So how much money did they... Did the investors lose in the end? How much was this... Oh, they raised a quarter of a million bucks from family and friends. And they... Hang on. They tried to get a $2 million seed around. Yeah. Did they end up getting that? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: No, usually not.

Dave Jones: Right. Anyway, they failed.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, they're not the only ones. I mean... No, no.

Dave Jones: Like, in a couple of years, right, because it's so hot now, right? These investors who invest in all... You know, the startup culture has just exploded. Right? And... Yeah. Man, it's so easy to get money. God, they'll give it to... You know, you set up a company that's, you know, two flies up a wall and they'll give you a couple of million bucks. Right?

Chris Gammell: And...

Dave Jones: If you can pitch it well enough, right? I mean, how many, like, programs are there to go in and learn how to pitch and all that? Like, there's, like... Even in Australia, there's a couple of them, right? It's just crazy now. Yeah. Right? Let alone in the US.

Chris Gammell: I have been listening to the Startup Podcast, which I recommend. Yeah. And there's also that Silicon Valley show.

Dave Jones: It's the thing to do. If you don't have a startup and if you're not pitching to VCs, you're uncool. You know? That's just, like, the thing to do. Like, everyone who finishes their uni course now, instead of going out and getting the job, hey, let's go out and pitch us some stupid idea to a VC and see if we can milk some money. You know? Anyway, there's so many of them now. And when you get the money, hey, you can operate for a couple of years. You know? You're wasting somebody else's couple of million bucks. And that's fine and dandy. So, because it's just exploded in the last couple of years, it'll be another year or two. And we'll see a train wreck of all these failed companies in another year or two. Right. Because they run out of money exactly like this. You know? Right. And there'll just be so many of them. We could have, you know, failure of the week on The Amp Hour. And we could have 52 a year, I'm sure. Oh, yeah. Without fail.

Chris Gammell: Well, so here's the point I was trying to make. So, there was also Ninja Blocks, right? So, we know we had Marcus on the show. He was part of Ninja's Blocks. He's no longer part of that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but he got out. He sold his share in Ninja Blocks. Right. And they've failed.

Chris Gammell: They did another Kickstarter around this thing called The Sphere. And then basically, they're having trouble shipping it as well.

Dave Jones: Right. I haven't looked at the details. Why are they having trouble shipping? Did it not work as expected? Or it costs more than expected than they've run out of money?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, just a cost thing. Here we go.

Dave Jones: Here's the takeaway. Ninja Blocks is out of money. We can no longer keep developing Sphere. We're going dark so we can continue to keep the cloud services running. So, yeah. Here's another thing, right? If you signed into this Ninja Blocks cloud service internet of things thing, here's another one that's going down the toilet, right? And you're left high and dry with your cloud service. Right? Too bad, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but that's more about the hardware, I think. I mean, they're actually preventing against going dark on the cloud stuff. So, that's what they're saying there. They're saying we're keeping enough money to keep running.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but how long is it? Come on. Realistically, how long is it going to continue to run this cloud service? Yeah. If they're out of money to produce these, I mean, come on. Sure, yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, I think that is an interesting idea. Maybe there will be a secondary market for software like subscription services, that kind of thing in the future.

Dave Jones: And everything's been open. Yeah. And everything's been open source, but that's not going to save it, right?

Chris Gammell: Sure, sure. So, you know. But here's the thing. Like, companies fail every single day, right? Yeah. That's right. That's the thing. Like, but now, because people are putting money in for pre-sales or they're backing them on Kickstarter, crowdfunding, blah, blah, blah.

Dave Jones: Taking the public's money instead of VC. Exactly. No one cares if VCs lose their money, right? Exactly. That's how I think they do.

Chris Gammell: Most VCs don't even care that much. No, right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's on average, right? They just want that one winner, right? They want that one big winner that gets bought by Google, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Yeah. But now, it's so much more visible because it's like, hey, we, you know. And I think that, you know, both of these companies here, like, they're doing, like, some people could have just closed up shop and said, you know.

Dave Jones: Oh, of course. No. Never talk again, right? No, they have done it the right way. They've admitted their failure. They've said, like, here are some lessons. You can learn from it. You know. Right. Great. You know.

Chris Gammell: And I think that, and ultimately, this is what the actual, the risks are of backing crowdfunded projects. But that doesn't help you if you've put in $300 and you expect to get a widget back, you know. Yeah. So, I think that.

Dave Jones: And that's the thing, too, is, like, you get so many people investing relatively so little, right? If everyone was putting in $10,000, right? You know, like, you would.

Chris Gammell: You'd have a class action lawsuit on hand, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You'd be a class action lawsuit. People with pitchforks, right? Out, you know, ready to stab you to death, right? Right. But because people put in, you know, $50, $100, $200, right? It's like they get, you know, whatever. There's been a few attempts at, you know, the class action lawsuits and things like that, but I've never heard of one going ahead or being successful yet. Yeah. So, maybe there has been. If anyone has one, link it in. But, yeah. And, you know, so, yeah. You can fail and, you know, and really, everyone just walks away and shrugs their shoulders and goes, eh, all right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: You know, there are no repercussions for failing. That's the thing, you know?

Chris Gammell: Well, I think it's an interesting piece. So, someone else, I forget, I just saw it a little while ago, but someone brought it up as well, actually, on the compiler side, right? So, I guess it's a question of, you know, if you're buying a project, if you're buying a product like this, right, or if you're buying, you know, if you're working with internet connected stuff or even if you were just working with hardware, how much do you hedge your bet on the downside, right? Do you make a buying decision based on backup options, right? So, in this case of NinjaBlocks, do you make a buying decision? If you were deciding between, like, a SmartThings and a NinjaBlocks, do you not decide based just on likelihood of success, but longevity, a longevity calculation in terms of likelihood of success? So, not only will I be able to get my NinjaBlocks sphere, but will it be, will the service, the backend service be viable for the entire time? Or will there be, will there be an open source alternative that is actually supported by the community, right? Like, these are, like, interesting new things. And the thing that I saw was that someone, someone was mentioning about, about micros, they're saying, well, you know, do you want to go with an IDE or should you go with more like a GCC tool chain because you know that it's always going to be there kind of thing, even if there's more pain up front in learning it? And... You want to know what the interesting thing here is, is that it doesn't matter about the

Dave Jones: scale of the company, right? A lot... Can you explain that one? Yeah. Google, for example, right? They've got all these Google services, right? You know, you can Google Mail, Google Maps, Google everything, right? And they've had, you know, they've got dozens and dozens of them, right? They've shut down quite a few of them, right? Yeah, Google's getting... People bought into this, right? People...

Chris Gammell: I'm getting sick of Google doing that. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Google Reader. How about that?

Dave Jones: Google Reader. Everything, right? Yeah. Google Glass. Everything, right? Yeah. Google Wave. People invested, right? People invested in this by choosing it as a standard. Oh, it's Google. It'll always be there. Wah. Sorry. You know?

Chris Gammell: And a lot of the times, it's just... They're just natural life cycle things. You know? The teams fall apart. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, the money runs out or the shift in priorities. Like, all of these things are totally natural. But you're right. You know, people buy in and they base their workflows around. It's like... It's disruptive when it's... Yep. Yeah. I don't know.

Dave Jones: So, there's no real solution to it. You just have to, you know... Yep. You have to gamble.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man. I'm actually... So, that micro... I'm actually making that decision now. I'm still in the throes of deciding on microcontroller platforms.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And it is that decision between, you know, do I go with an IDE with a lot of examples? Or do I take the shot of paint up front and set up tool chain, you know, like GCC tool chains and set up the debugging and that kind of thing? Right. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how to... Like, it's just...

Dave Jones: It's pretty... Like, it's pretty safe, right? If you go with PIC. If you go with, you know, AVR. If you go with ARM. Or, you know, any flavor of ARM. You can... Even if they cancel the chip which you're using, it's not a huge pain to go to another one. Right?

Chris Gammell: Maybe. I don't know. Freescale kind of dumped the whole Coldfire platform. I don't know if you knew about that. I know that was a while ago. Oh, right. Well... Yeah. I guess it's more of a, you know, big shift in priorities.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but there's examples out there, you know. Like, you know, microchip's not going to, you know, just completely kill the entire PIC platform. What if they get bought? Okay. Well, like, it's...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right?

Dave Jones: No, it's too big a business for them. You know, things like Coldfire, right? That was small fry, right? Compared to, for example, PIC.

Chris Gammell: Right? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Compared to CrossFit. Right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're going to keep it going. Right? They're going to keep it going.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, maybe.

Dave Jones: Practical about it.

Chris Gammell: How about, so...

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's possible. But...

Chris Gammell: NXP buying Freescale, right? That's... I'm sure I brought this up already on the show once, but that's still a concern. You know, like, how do I...

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. No, of course.

Chris Gammell: You know, like, maybe that won't stick around when there's actually competing products there. So, I'm just saying that, like, how much... It's like, it's all a calculation of risk, right? It's now just outside of the hardware itself because it's not just a board redesign. It's also a code, you know, code and workflow and all that other stuff.

Dave Jones: Tool chain, the whole works, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Hmm. I know. Sucker, why are we in this industry? It's just too hard. Why don't you go out and do something else?

Chris Gammell: I am here to bring balance to the force, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right, by saying everyone should move to marketing.

Chris Gammell: It's not marketing. Screw you. It's tools and services.

Dave Jones: Tools and services. There we go, folks. That's what you need to get into. Tools and services is the future. Picks and shovels. You heard it here on the...

Chris Gammell: Picks and shovels.

Dave Jones: Chris Campbell can't be wrong. It's good enough for him. It's good enough for you.

Chris Gammell: It is. I am frequently wrong. You think? So one... Yeah. One thing I'm... Another thing I'm doing with micros, actually, is it's getting so cheap. So I'm doing all these different boards and stuff like that. I've been designing. I've probably got like, I think, three boards done. I'm working on the fourth now. But something I'm considering, and I'm not sure if it's going to actually happen, but maybe you've done this in your projects before. Putting a micro on every board. Have you ever done that kind of thing? Like distributed control?

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes. I have done that. Yeah. Every plug-in module has its own process, you mean?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. I've done that before. You have. Okay. And I mean, like, was that a cost or...? It just...

Dave Jones: Delinear. No, it wasn't a cost thing. Okay. It just... It's a development and separation of tasks, you know? So I'll have one processor, for example, running a little measurement module, right? Yeah. And so I can test and develop that on its own and I can show progress, right? As, you know, when I work for the man, right? You know, you've got to show progress. And if you've got just one processor and it does everything, you sort of, you know, it's hard to show... It's harder to show progress. Whereas, you know, if you modulize it and have its own little process, look, you can demonstrate the whole module working and I talk to that module via serial interface and look, here it is. I'm sending serial commands. It gives back the right thing and boom. Tick. Oh, true.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And test... Yeah, I guess design for test as well, right? I mean, that's another thing. That's good.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It's all... Yep.

Chris Gammell: Actually, I was thinking about when Nadia was on the show. That's... I mean, that's part of what I was thinking about. You know, she did a lot of that with like the... If you remember the robot she was working on where they had like all the modular CNC stuff that they were doing. So I was thinking about that. And I'm sure that this is a common thing, but also the other thing is like, I mean, like total solution cost these days, it's like an extra dollar to add it to a board. It's like dollar... Oh, yeah. I know. No. And then the board space.

Dave Jones: It's bugger all. There's more cost in getting the thing programmed or something than there is buying it. You know, like...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right, right, right, right. Maybe not, but you know what I'm talking about, right? It's... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, I agree. I mean, that's another overhead type of thing, right? Yeah. And I guess there's communication overhead as well, but like if you're doing low power, low speed bus type stuff, it's nothing fancy, so...

Dave Jones: Don't be afraid to have 10 processors in your next widget, really. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there can be pros and cons. You've got to weigh it up, but there's no... You know, there can be very good reasons for doing it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The biggest con I've come up with is delivery of like firmware updates. So like...

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, of course. Oh, yeah, that's... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So like you could plug into each individual board, but ultimately what you'd want to do is you'd want to pass firmware packages over your... Whatever bus you're on. Yeah. And that can be annoying and bad. But it's challenging, you know, good challenging stuff like that. So, yeah. So I'd be interested in hearing about other people who've done... I mean, like, obviously this is not like, oh, Chris, you came up with something interesting or new. But it's... I'm just... I'm interested in hearing about other people who've done this in their projects, you know, because, you know, even just having these micros all have these peripherals now too. Like, I really hadn't looked at like kind of the span of what was out there in terms of like all the ARM stuff and, you know, like the peripheral sets that are on there. But, you know, everything's got an ADC now. Everything's got a DAC. Everything's got PWM. Everything's got digital output. It's just like, okay, that's kind of cool. Like, none of it's particularly awesome.

Dave Jones: They're complete system solutions. That's the big thing about micros, you know, in the last 15 years. They went from having nothing. Yeah. They went from having nothing in the 90s, right? You know, to now, you know, you can do everything.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. And they're low power. Buddy a toast. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. Brilliant. That's what I've been doing. That and bringing balance to the force. Force. Through.

Dave Jones: And on that note. Tool making. And another. Oh, we're done. Oh. We're done.

Chris Gammell: Is there anything else?

Dave Jones: We're eight minutes over. Nope.

Chris Gammell: Nope. I like the. What about the.

Dave Jones: Nope.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, people can go and check out the subreddit. There's a lot of good stuff on there. Like Dave Vandenboud's post and about the chip. That $9 computer.

Dave Jones: Or, here's another thing, which we never. You can, if you're on Twitter, you can follow the Amp Hour. And we get all of our subreddit things automatically posted.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: To our Amp Hour feed. So, it's a way to get news and info. It's like, you know, it's a nice little portal. And we don't, basically don't do anything else on there. Apart from announce each episode.

Chris Gammell: I retweet people who talk about the Amp Hour. Oh, right. Well, okay.

Dave Jones: But, yeah. Basically, it's a good news repository. It pops up with, you know, all the latest things that people have posted to the Reddit feed. So, you know, if a company's been bought, someone will post it in there and boom. It auto feeds to the Amp Hour. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That is, that's a very, very good reminder. And that actually runs off of IFTTT. If this, then that. You ever use that? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome.

Dave Jones: It's nice.

Chris Gammell: And I think that's going to be.

Dave Jones: How long will that service keep going before they run out of money?

Chris Gammell: Interesting question. Yeah. Yeah. I think that especially because.

Dave Jones: I guess we'll find out. There's hardware ties-ins. Yeah. There you know. Oh, dearie. Yep.

Chris Gammell: All right. Cool, man. Well, I will be. I will be at Maker Faire over the weekend. If anyone's out there, there's a bunch of events going on. Shoot me a tweet or an email. And.

Dave Jones: This is the Maker Faire in.

Chris Gammell: San Francisco, San Mateo. Sanford. This is the big one. Bay Area. Yep. This is the big one. So bring a hack dinner and a bunch of other events. So. Awesome. I'll be out there. With a brand new t-shirt too. But Dave's not going to mention what it is.

Dave Jones: I've seen it. Yeah. I think it's a bit.

Chris Gammell: A little off. He thinks it's a little off. So. Maybe everybody else will like it.

Dave Jones: It's a little wrong. We'll see. It's a little wrong. We'll see. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: All right. All right. Cool, man. Talk to you next week. Catch you next time.

Speaker ?: Bye. Bye. administered administered administered