#253 – Consolidate All The Things - Zonked Zelotic Zaitech

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast, recorded June 9th, 2015. Episode 253. Zonked, Zolotic, Zytec.

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

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

Dave Jones: Love it. Well done. Contextual Electronics going down the toilet, is it?

Chris Gammell: I just... So many things going on.

Dave Jones: You went old school, right? Flashback five years ago.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I wasn't... Oh my god. I was mentioning to someone today how I haven't written on that blog in like forever. How I just kind of...

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Somebody... It's still up, is it? You still pay the... Yeah, here and there.

Chris Gammell: Usually I notice when I'm like, you know, I haven't been getting emails from that email address in a while. And I go check it and it's like, no, that site's been down for a month.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah, I wouldn't notice if my original website is down for a month.

Chris Gammell: I finally put some tracking on it. So now it's like it sends me in... Someone like sends me an email if it pings. If it's down. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, goodness. How long has it been since you started Contextual Electronics?

Chris Gammell: It was May of 2013, so two years.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Chris Gammell: And 530 videos. I did... I looked at that the other day. I've made 530 videos.

Dave Jones: That's more than me.

Chris Gammell: No, it's not. That's more than me. You've made 700 something.

Dave Jones: Well, no, but in two years...

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, but yours are higher quality.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Mine are like, let's... Press record and no idea. Yeah, right, right, right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Still, that's an impressive number. So that's the important thing. Building is what I focus on. Right. Yeah. Got it? Yeah, man. You... I shouldn't be the one messing up here. You should be the one messing up here. You were yawning like you had never slept before because...

Dave Jones: Oh, gee. You had to... Hang on. Oh, there it goes. I had to mention it. You triggered me again.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Halfway through the show, I'll just be like, yawning.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I didn't get much sleep last night. Yeah, I'm married with two children.

Chris Gammell: Two children. Dave has another baby.

Dave Jones: Yay.

Chris Gammell: Congratulations. From the Empire audience... Thank you very much. ...to the Jones family, welcome to Huxley.

Dave Jones: Yes, Project Huxley.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: You guys going to stop or two? Is this it? Do you have any more? Oh, yeah. That's... Yeah. No, that's it. That's it, huh? Good. Okay. Yep. So you say. So you say.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. You'll be next, my friend. I know. You'll be next. Yep. You're... Yep. You're under the thumb.

Chris Gammell: I have no doubt.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Dave Jones: You know what the trigger is?

Chris Gammell: What's that?

Dave Jones: When she starts, like, re-Facebooking baby photos and stuff like that, or maybe she's with a friend and they take a photo of her holding up a baby and then that becomes her Facebook profile photo, that is the trigger to run for the hills, okay? Oh, I'm already there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, my... Right. We have a family member who just had a one-month-old and we've been taking care of her a little bit, so... Oh, yes. It's all over. All right. And, like, it's a bad thing. Come on. It's just, you know, it's good.

Dave Jones: There you go. The Amp Hour will end in nine months, folks. It'll be... I'll have to find another co-host. Oh, yeah. Right, right, right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What Dave really means is no one remind him that we have a show to record this week. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Why didn't you add any links to the subreddit? I don't get it. So, both forget about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like... Three weeks goes by and, huh? Yeah. Oh, right. Oh, yeah. That Amp Hour thing.

Chris Gammell: You know, maybe we could just sell the Amp Hour for, like, you want to sell the EEV blog. We could sell the Amp Hour, probably not for as much as you want to sell it for, but maybe, like, a couple billion instead of, like, a hundred billion.

Dave Jones: Yes, the EEV blog is for sale, by the way, folks. Yep. Genuinely up for sale. Yep. Just like Atmel and everyone else is up for sale at the moment. And, yes, I've set the price tentatively at a hundred billion dollars. So... That's... Yep. That's fair. Willing to negotiate.

Chris Gammell: No, that's a fair price. I mean... Or best offer.

Dave Jones: I think so. Or best offer. Yeah. Slightly used host. Yeah. Oh, man.

Chris Gammell: Just put it up on Craigslist. Oh, you guys don't have... Do you have Craigslist? You don't have Craigslist.

Dave Jones: No, we don't. We don't. Well, I think technically... Get something similar. No. I think technically we might, but I don't think anyone uses it. It's a very American thing. Yeah. No.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's getting crazy out there. I was surprised when I saw it. You just posted this before the show, but... Like, Atmel, I mean, you'd think they'd be doing okay, but maybe it's just kind of... Strike while the iron's hot and...

Dave Jones: Well, it seems like their CEO is leaving. Like, he's... Well, he's slash retiring or something. He's been there, like, forever. I don't know the story behind it or who the hell it even is, but... Yeah. Apparently, they're retiring, and that's the trigger.

Chris Gammell: That seems like a silly trigger, though, unless he owns the whole company.

Dave Jones: Oh, well. Yeah. Unless... Yeah. He's got a lot of sway and just... You know, maybe he's the one being holding back and, you know, the others want to... You know, the board and everyone else want to sell... Have done for years since, you know, the hostile takeover from OnSemi and... Microchip. So, you know...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sure. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, this is all happening. This is happening everywhere, right? But it's...

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, this was crazy, though. So, they shared some of the numbers here, too. And, you know, it's not like... This is like grocery store numbers, right? It's like... Grocery store numbers. They had $1.4 billion in annual revenue and their profit was $45 million. Right?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. That's... You're right.

Chris Gammell: Divided by 1410. That's... What's that in percentage? 3%. Yeah. So, you'd have a better time running a grocery store. Right. You get better margins. Yeah. You get better margins running a grocery store.

Dave Jones: You'd get better margins reselling Arduinos. Yeah, maybe. Right. I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. That's just nuts, though.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's stupid, isn't it? I mean, that's just... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, and...

Dave Jones: Yeah. It isn't worth the effort, right? If that's your...

Chris Gammell: Well, maybe it's that. But I think it's just, you know, that... I think a lot of these companies are exploring scale, right? That's what a lot of them talk about.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Is that that's kind of the only way to do it, right? So, we saw... Maybe last... I don't remember if it was last week or since the last time we talked two weeks ago. But... So, Avago bought Broadcom, which is huge. Broadcom is that people don't know. That's... That was the biggest semiconductor deal in history. Right. And Broadcom's the one who makes a lot of the mobile chips and also does what's on the Raspberry Pi and stuff like that. Avago is an optoelectronics and various other thing maker. I didn't actually read much about that deal, but I'm guessing they're probably leveraged up to their eyeballs. You know, it's...

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Or they've got other players behind the scenes. Yeah. You can still get cheap money or something.

Chris Gammell: Pretty cheap money to do this stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. True.

Chris Gammell: And then Intel, you know, they've always made a lot of money. They bought Altera or they are buying... They're buying Altera. Yep. So... And, you know, it's a lot of this stuff. It's like, you know, running a fab is not cheap and...

Dave Jones: But Broadcom got bought for, what, $40 billion? $43 billion or something?

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm. Yep. That's right.

Dave Jones: Whereas the Atmel is only up for sale at $4 billion. Bargain. Yeah. But with a 3% return, you're not even going to pay back your interest. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's just a scale thing, right? I mean, like, there's a lot more people making... Not that Atmel doesn't make... You know, they make more than 8-bit microcontrollers and stuff. You know, they make a lot of stuff, actually. But they're not making stuff for the mobile market, so they don't have as much volume. And volume kind of drives a lot of the stuff because you need to hit parity and stuff like that for your fabs if you're even running fabs. And if you're not running a fab, then you need to have enough sway because you're pushing enough volume through a TSMC or something like that.

Dave Jones: Right. And I read something the other day. I can't remember where it was, but why companies buy companies? It's all to do with accounting, right? Apparently, it's like... It's not because they want to expand, blah, blah, blah. They have to get a better return on their money. And buying a company, it's from an accounting... You know, I'm shit at accounting, but from accounting point of view, it doesn't go on the books as expenses for the company or something like that. You know, it's... So if you have the choice between buying a company or expanding your current company, it looks better on the books to the shareholders, the ones that matter, of course, to actually buy a company that does to expand your current company.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's just the way the finance, just the way the accounting is done. Yeah. It's the way they shuffle money around. That's it. It just looks better.

Chris Gammell: Well, there are... I mean, there are times when there's... Oh, there are other reasons. ...strategic stuff. But I'm saying, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But yeah, if you're looking for a way to improve your books, then buying a company is apparently a good way to do it.

Chris Gammell: Well, and that's a lot of the... You know, a lot of these are public companies too, right? So it's like, you know, this looks very positive for shareholders and things like that as well.

Dave Jones: The share price usually goes up on both companies when an announcement's made. Sure.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Yeah. So I do maintain my... So the Intel buying Altera, I think that's actually probably more interesting to me other than, you know, I guess Avago is kind of interesting as well, just because, you know, who really knows about it? I mean, Avago is huge, but it's, you know, it's more... It's because it borders on like the telecom space. So it's kind of outside of...

Dave Jones: Specialized stuff, which we're... Yeah. ...most of us general electronics engineers aren't that familiar with.

Chris Gammell: Right. And... But the Intel Altera stuff is interesting just because, you know, thinking about what could happen. I saw some people talking about, well, it could be because it's Intel trying to hold off the ARM market as well in the server space, things like that. That's interesting.

Dave Jones: That's more of a strategic play. Could be. The Intel Altera one, I think.

Chris Gammell: I mean, but I think... I think I'm interested just because Intel has the process technology and they have this, you know, strong processors, but then, you know, adding flexible stuff in there makes it very interesting.

Dave Jones: Well, they're already making chips for Altera. Right. So it kind of, you know... Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And it does go along with my theory, which I still maintain, that Intel will become... Will split off into a fab list and a foundry. I think that'll still happen. Especially if they keep getting bigger. I think it's the only option to... Again, with the accounting stuff.

Dave Jones: Who will get the name? A la Hewlett-Packard. A la Edgley.

Chris Gammell: I think the fabulous company would get the name because, you know, that would be the one that still goes on the chips. And even if, you know... Hmm. You know, I think that the other one would become like maybe Intel Services or something like that. But Intel is free to hire me in the future if they need help naming their new company. Same with HP, if they ever... Get their heads out of their asses and, you know... Give the name back to the rightful owners, which is the measurement groups. Right.

Dave Jones: I think we're a couple of company name changes too late there.

Chris Gammell: I think we are too. Yeah. That fight has already been won.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. I was looking at this article. So, I heard you mention the OnSemi and the microchip thing. I didn't realize that was... That seems like launched a hostile bid for the company.

Dave Jones: That was a hostile takeover bid. Yeah. And they withdrew. It's... I don't think... Well, Atmerell, like, weren't playing ball. So, that didn't help. That's why it's hostile. That's why it's hostile, yeah. But, yeah. I don't think it's... You know... I think OnSemi and microchip actually pulled out rather than fight to the death and just buy all the shares and actually do the hostile thing. Go through with the whole hostile play.

Chris Gammell: I could see OnSemi doing it, but not microchip. I mean, microchip and Atmel are kind of pretty much in the same space. So, I think...

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. It doesn't seem to... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Wouldn't really be complimentary. No. So, whatever. Big companies doing big things. It's not going to affect us too much. The only thing it'll do is if it reduces the amount of parts that we can buy, right? Honestly.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And if support... You know, if they're able to rest on their laurels because there's less players. You know, kind of like with the airline, that's probably the only one I could think of for... You know, in terms of competitions going down. So, it's like, you know, there's just less... There's fewer flags offered, right? You know, like that's... Right. That's what it comes down to. You know, there's less competition. There's less churn in the marketplace. So, that's the only way I see that people like you and me fail. I mean, like to be honest, I mean, like a lot of people are making arm chips and everything, anything.

Dave Jones: But the only way we get burned is if we've built it and built that chip into our bomb and it gets discontinued. Right, right.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: You know. It's the ultimate fear.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, and it's very real. I mean, especially because chips these days, it's not like you're designing in, you know, standard SOIC package and then it's like, oh, well, I can just swap it out with someone's compatible part. It's like, no, no, sorry. This is a custom pinout. This is a custom, you know...

Dave Jones: You usually have to re-spin your board.

Chris Gammell: Right. Or even worse, if it's like, you know, even if you say it's an ARM...

Dave Jones: Your tool chain has to change. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: If it's, even if it's ARM, you might still have to, you know, change your arch, your debugger, your tool chain, your compiler, that kind of stuff. So... Yep. It can get messy. But, I mean, that's... Oh, yeah. But also that can provide some of the interesting challenges, right? So some of the fun challenges I've had in the past have been replacing parts. You still have to spin a board, but maybe then you'll go drop an FPGA in there because you have to try and replicate the former ASIC. That's what I've had to do in the past. Or, you know... Right. Drop a new, you know, evaluate new processors. Matching old code isn't necessarily the most fun thing, but it can be an interesting challenge at least because you're very... You know, we've talked about boundary conditions before and that makes for great engineering problems when you have boundary conditions and working to an old, to what an older product does. It's like that is definitely a boundary condition. Right. So...

Dave Jones: Can we actually talk about changing electronics? I just did a video. Which one? This morning. Rare. It hasn't been released yet. It's currently rendering in the background. It's like 90% finished. And I did a retro teardown of the original Sony Walkman.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I saw your... This is the... Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, the mailbag was on the mailbag. Right. The TPS L2.

Chris Gammell: You talked about that thing for a while when you got that too. You could tell you were excited about that thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: So... Because I've been meaning to get one. Like, I've had one on my eBay watch list, you know, trying to get them. But they're, like, popular and they're a bit pricey, you know. Why are they popular?

Chris Gammell: So, like, hipsters are buying these and, like, wearing them around town?

Dave Jones: Well, apparently... Well, no. It was in some sci-fi movie I've never heard of. And everyone's going, oh, that's the Sony Walkman that was used in this movie. Blah, blah, blah. And it's like, that's why the prices are skyrocketing. I'm going, oh, I've bloody never heard of this sci-fi movie. So, anyway, yeah, apparently some sci-fi creature used one as a communicator. I don't know. Nerds! Nerds! Oh, man. No, they're geeks, not nerds.

Chris Gammell: Oh, right, right. Sure, whatever. All right. Yeah, let's go there. I don't think of movies. I don't think of the Walkman. What was the one that was in Home Alone, the Talkboy? Was that what it was? Do you remember that thing? No, I don't remember any gadgets from Home Alone. It was in the second one. It had, like, a microphone coming off of it. You could record into it directly.

Dave Jones: No, the only one I can, like, movie that rings a bell is, like, the Speak and Spell from E.T. Speak and Spell, right, right, of course. Right. Yeah. Yep. No, sorry. Completely wasted on me.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, so you're saying that older electronics are different because?

Dave Jones: Well, no, no, no. It's just, like, circle changes. There was an interesting, like, I got the service manual for this thing, right? And it's all discrete through whole, right? And it has a service manual, which is... And it has a real service manual, thank you very much, with, you know, exploded views of, you know, and every part is itemized, and even the screws and everything. And, you know, it's got exploded, transparent wiring diagrams of how it all goes together and how all the tape mechanism works, and, ah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Wow.

Dave Jones: Thing of beauty.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Yeah, in there, it's interesting that they've got two different versions of the schematic. Like, if it's less than, like, 100,000 serial number, which my one was. Mm-hmm. My one was, like, 65,000. It didn't have a front-end preamp on it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, interesting.

Dave Jones: Yet, if, you know, like, after a serial number, 106,000 or something, it, they added this discreet transistor front-end to it. And, and it was, I can, I can give you the part numbers, because I've got it, uh, right here, folks. It's all, it's all, it's all to hand. Hang on.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: I will, if I, yep, pulling up my things properly. Oh, hang on.

Chris Gammell: I actually used to have a, so one of my old analog pianos is the same way. I mean, it was, like, there was different models, and the older model didn't have the preamp either. So. Yep. Must have just been a replacement. Well, here it is.

Dave Jones: It used a TS, they bunged in a 2SC 2458, and I looked up the data sheet for this transistor, and it's a low noise audio amplifier application. So, this was coming directly from the head, right, from the, from the tape head, right? So, obviously, they must have had, like, some, you know, they discovered, oh, the first hundred thousand, oh, a little bit noisy, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. Feedback. So, yeah, let's. From the users.

Dave Jones: Or whatever. So, let's just whack in a, you know, let's just whack in an extra transistor on the front end there before it gets to the ASIC in quote marks. Well, I guess it isn't ASIC. It's probably just got, like, 12 transistors in it. It's one of those single-in-line packages. You remember those? Oh, yeah. I've seen those. Right? Yeah. Yeah, they're single-in-line IC, you know, custom ICs, and they have, like, you know, dozens of transistors. Yeah. Right. Dozens, not thousands. Dozens, right?

Chris Gammell: They asked it by dripping acid onto the board and the substrate and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Well, who the hell knows the PCT process? Anyway, yeah, let's not go there. And it's, like, yeah, it's just interesting changes like that between different models. And now we've got to worry about, oh, micro is going to be discontinued. Back then, it's like, oh, yeah, let's just re-spin our board. Let's optimize our noise and, you know, all that sort of jazz.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's not like anything's changed here. I mean, it still happens, but it's just...

Dave Jones: No. Oh, it still happens. Yeah, it does. Yeah. But, you know, it's... I just found it rather interesting how they changed their complete topology, and they went away from using an emitter follower on the output of the buffer amp. Anyway, you have to watch my video.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That'll be interesting.

Dave Jones: See this, and, you know...

Chris Gammell: I would be actually really interested, too, to hear about... I mean, this might be tough to find, but, like, just about the teams that are doing that stuff, right? I mean, because...

Dave Jones: Right, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know about your companies, but the companies I've worked at, you know, they just kept... While I was working in, you know, regular engineering companies, it was like, they just kept getting smaller, the teams. Smaller and smaller and smaller. And that's another trend that I keep seeing. It's like... So, that Walkman might have had, you know, 30 people on it, or 20 people on it, you know?

Dave Jones: Right, but then the next revision, it's down to five or something, because... I've found it's a common company trait. If somebody leaves, they usually don't replace them.

Chris Gammell: Oh.

Dave Jones: Because engineers will take up a slack, and they'll just go, oh, yeah, you know, we still... Like, management still see that their Gantt chart is progressing or whatever, you know? And they go, well, why do we need to hire someone to replace them? The rest seem to be taking up slack, because engineers are good at that. Yeah. And engineers just naturally sort of, you know, fill in the holes anywhere they can.

Chris Gammell: I agree with that, but I think that in the time that the Walkmans were being made, I think that engineering, especially engineering in Japan, was still really strong, you know what I mean? Like, it was still a big... Oh, yeah, they were number one. Right. So...

Dave Jones: What are you talking about, Doc? All the best stuff's made in Japan. Right. It's like, yeah, I mean, Japan were the dominant makers in the 1980s, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so I don't... Yeah. I don't know if that would have happened.

Dave Jones: Marty wasn't lying. All the best stuff was made there. Right. Yeah. So, you know, it was... But you look at it, and you go, well, it's not kind of the best stuff. It's built down to a price, and, you know, it's all, like, hand-wired and everything else, you know? There's not a... But, hey, they got it down to a small size, and they made it for a, you know, a reasonable price, and it worked. And they sold a crap load of them. I know. For a lot of money. For a lot of money.

Chris Gammell: How much did those things retail for back in the day? Yeah.

Dave Jones: 150 bucks, which is about $488 in today's money.

Chris Gammell: So that's like an iPhone, basically. Like, you know...

Dave Jones: That's basically like an iPhone, yeah. But, yeah, you can play your compact cassettes on it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's it.

Dave Jones: And you couldn't even record. Right. There was none of this recording rubbish. It was just playback.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: And everyone said it would fail, you know, because it doesn't have a record function. Right. So... But, yeah, because there wasn't much pre-recorded material, but once, you know, it was a chicken and egg kind of thing. But once the Walkman was out, it was like, yeah, all the, you know, all the record companies jumped on record companies. Remember those? Jumped on... Yeah, right. Well, they still call on that, don't they?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, the ones that still exist, sure.

Dave Jones: And they progressed from records to compact cassette, which still dominated by... Even 1990, cassette was still the dominant platform.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, until... Right?

Dave Jones: Even though CDs had been around since, like, 82 or 84 or something, CDs were still not the dominant platform.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, because the price wasn't down on it. Right. It's always price, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, and they were physically large. So, you know, yes, Sony had the Discman by then, you know, the Disc Walkman, right? But it was just bigger, right? The cassette was just more compact. And it doesn't skip and blah, blah, blah.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, right. It just, you know, and it could play all your old tapes, you know, because there were no CD burners back then, right? So, it's not like you had to re-buy everything. So, you know, the cassette was still dominating.

Chris Gammell: Right. And then you could get magazines on a cassette tape through a program. Yeah. Audiobooks and... Yeah. No, Dave. No, not audiobooks. Magazines. And that is why we all owe that douchebag a bunch of money, according to him, because he's a frigging patent troll saying that he invented podcasts in the late 80s by putting magazines on cassette tapes. Screw you, buddy. We don't owe you anything.

Chris Gammell: Kiss our ass. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We don't make any money anyways.

Chris Gammell: Ha, ha, ha.

Chris Gammell: Ha, ha, ha.

Dave Jones: Sue us. We win. Dumbass. We win by financial attrition. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Screw that guy.

Dave Jones: Anyway, yeah, like these, yeah, it's just fascinating looking through these...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: ...old retro devices and how they're designed.

Chris Gammell: Did you do any power stuff with it or no? Did you do any, like, power measuring on that? Like, on how fast... No, no, I didn't. Okay.

Dave Jones: That would be interesting. No, no, no. What, how fast it runs through the batteries?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Yep.

Dave Jones: Dude, it's specified in the user manual for alkalines, which were, you know, alkalines were mega expensive back in the, you know, back in 1979. Holy crap, to buy an alkaline. Um, you got eight hours. You got eight hours use. That's a lot of playback.

Chris Gammell: Is it? I... That's the thing. Like, by these days, I don't have any... All I remember is that my Game Boys used to die after, like, two hours.

Dave Jones: Well, your bloody smartphone barely gets eight hours.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but...

Dave Jones: A modern smartphone...

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: ...barely gets a day's use. Let alone play an MP3s or playback video or whatever.

Chris Gammell: I'll give you video. Audio's not too bad, but... Yeah. But, yeah, you're right.

Dave Jones: Anyway, but still, it's not too different to a smartphone. But, hey, if you whack, um... You know, if you whacked heavy-duty, the Ever Ready 1215 heavy-duties in there, right? These weren't alkaline. These were, you know, the zinc-carbon heavy-duty ones. You'd get three and a half. Or if you whack, they're really shit. No name, you know? Right. Or cheapos in there. You get two and a half.

Chris Gammell: So alkaline was the good... That's the thing. I don't know the old battery tech... Not old, but I don't know battery technologies either. So...

Dave Jones: Well, alkaline is, you know, like, the standard one these days. Yeah. Like, nobody uses zinc-carbon anymore. Oh, okay, okay. Well, you can buy them, but, you know... Right. Like, alkaline is so cheap that nobody bothers you. Right. Yep.

Chris Gammell: That's interesting.

Dave Jones: So...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, what about this other thing? So you had another video about the battery booster thingy. Did this actually... No. Did you find this on the subreddit? Was that where you found it? Or was it other places?

Dave Jones: No. I got inundated with tweets and emails. Yeah. People... Yeah. No, I found it. I think... No, I didn't even know it was on the subreddit, I don't think, at the time. And, yeah, people had done that. Oh, hang on. Hang on. Hang on. One second. My video has stopped rendering. Okay. My video is finished, so I'll just... This will be an interesting live test here, folks, live test, to see if using all 12 cores on my Dual Xeon machine actually kills our podcast. Shall we risk it?

Chris Gammell: Sure. Yeah, why not?

Dave Jones: Yeah, why not?

Chris Gammell: It's been killed for dumber reasons before, that's for sure.

Speaker ?: Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: So here it is. If you want to know, it's 4 gig worth, 4 gig file size for 27 minutes. That's not rendered raw, by the way. Anyway, here we go. I'm going to drop it into my handbrake, and it's rendering. Do I sound the same?

Chris Gammell: You sound whiny and Australian. Is that what we're going for? Oh, right. Well, that's normal. All right. We got it. We're cool. There we go.

Dave Jones: I'm using all 12 cores at like 95% or something.

Chris Gammell: That's nuts.

Dave Jones: So these newfangled machines, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: Go figure. And handbrake's rendering at 100 frames per second.

Chris Gammell: Thank you, Intel. Soon to be enhanced by Altera, right?

Dave Jones: Altera technology. Man. Altera inside. Right, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Man. I mean, that's the thing. It's so commonplace, right? It's just like, it's so commonplace that we were like, oh, yeah, 12 cores. No big deal. I mean, granted, it's not actually 12 cores. It's probably hyper-threading and all other stuff. But like, all this stuff, like, it's just so common. You know what I mean?

Dave Jones: Like, well, yeah, but it's new to me. Like, I grew up, you know, machines. Like, for probably the majority of my life, processors have been single core. You know, there was no such thing as a dual core processor.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know? Right, right, right. It just didn't exist. Or it's some weird-ass niche application somewhere.

Chris Gammell: Right, yeah, like the military satellite or something, right? Yeah, or something like that, right. Yeah. Right. Well, I just mean, like, all this stuff. Like, it's just eventually over time, you know? Oh, dual core? Yeah. Oh, it's only dual core now. Oh, it's only quad core, right? Oh, you know, Dave has 12 core in it. But I mean, like, even like this, so like the robot stuff that we've been seeing. I don't know if you watched any of the, did you watch the DARPA robotics thing?

Chris Gammell: No.

Chris Gammell: So.

Chris Gammell: I haven't watched it.

Chris Gammell: It's still really kind of quirky. So first off, I don't know the history of the specific challenge. I've seen some of these robots before because one of them was built by, like, Boston Dynamics, the Atlas robot. But that's the one that has like, it has a battery pack on the, it looks like a backpack now, which is full of batteries.

Dave Jones: I'm watching. Yeah. I'm watching one try and walk through a door, walking out of a door or through a door.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: It's like a biped, you know? Yeah. So they all are.

Chris Gammell: And basically the idea behind the contest was it had to like navigate. So all without any controller input, basically it had to recognize a door, it had to walk through a door, it had to open a, like a water valve. It had to take a saw, it had to saw through a drywall. It had to walk over on an even ground. Like really, really difficult robotics things when you really think about it.

Dave Jones: And you couldn't like go there beforehand and then pre-program it to recognize the environment.

Chris Gammell: They had some promptings on what the challenges would be, but no specifics on what it would, and there was one special thing. I don't remember what the, there was like a surprise thing. So yeah. And, but like the thing about it is like, you know, like seeing these things walk now, right? Just the fact that they're completely autonomous robots walking and they're, you know, the humanoid-esque, right? Yeah. And it's just like, it's, it's not normal, but at some point it's going to be, you know what I mean? And it's like, and, and the crazy thing about it is that when you, when you really look at it, it's like the mechanics are almost all there. It's software stuff. Like this is, we're into the realm where it's like, okay, now we start optimizing software. And like, I understand that reverse kinematics are really, really difficult. And that's a lot of that stuff.

Dave Jones: That's what I'm looking at. I'm looking at the video and I'm going, this thing is the slowest robot I've ever seen in my life. Right.

Chris Gammell: But you've seen robots that are attached to computers with, with people monitoring it, with tethers, you know, like with, with known tasks, right? This is real world stuff here. And that's, what's crazy about it. And it's like, eventually this, this, this is going to be the acceleration point, right? Now there's robots in the, in the space and it's just, okay, we can just keep throwing vision experts at it and control systems experts at it and all these other things. And, you know, better operating systems, better feedback, all that kind of stuff. And it's just, it's going to be normal. And it's like, and then, and then they're going to start saving people. And then I won't say what hopefully doesn't come after that, you know, like, but, you know, and it's just, it's just nuts. Also, it's really fun. I'm going to send you a link, Dave, and I'll, of course, post a link for everyone. While we can do so, I highly encourage everyone to watch the video where you can watch a compilation of them just falling over.

Dave Jones: I was about to say that if like, if there was a robot uprising, I'd simply run around and like sweep the feet out of every one of them, you know, like sweep the leg, sweep the leg.

Chris Gammell: Yes, sensei. Yeah, right. And, oh my God. It's so much fun to watch you see. They got like this, you know, they've got.

Dave Jones: Robot fails. Just one, one leg goes up there. Right.

Chris Gammell: But, and it just like, it looks like my friend sent me this video and he's just like, he's like on the bright, what did he say? He said, my favorite is the second one. Apparently robots are just like humans after a night of drinking. And that's kind of what it looks like. But like, you know, humans don't get to upgrade software and then become undrunk, right? So it's, yeah, it's, it's just a weird time to be alive, man.

Dave Jones: One of them, you said how I tried to turn the valve. There was one of them thought he was about like his robot hand comes out. He thought he was turning the valve and he was like two feet away from the valve. So he just felt, turned it and then just fell over because he wasn't holding onto the valve. Right.

Chris Gammell: Like wheel. Right. But like, these are the things that are, are tough. God, I just saw that one too.

Dave Jones: Oh, this is embarrassing. It's embarrassing to look at. It's like.

Chris Gammell: It's fun to watch though. But like, think about, there's so many complex systems here, right? I mean, just like the walking and the balancing alone is so tough. Oh, they have to drive a car too.

Dave Jones: But why are they so slow? Is there such, like, I thought processor technology was so like bleeding edge and generic these days that they'd be like super quick at this. And if they fail, well, they fail. But why do they have to like take 30 seconds to decide to move their foot one step? Like.

Chris Gammell: Oh, they're deliberate. I mean, and also they're, they're, they're scanning, you know, they don't have as much. Yeah. But. So there's no.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But, yeah, but, yeah, but. Okay. Here's another thing. Like we have 20 zillion core bloody Intel processors. Sure, sure. But. These things don't, these things don't have to run off the smell of an oily rag. They've got, you know, thousand watt hours of battery in them probably.

Chris Gammell: I think, I think you're. So what, you know? I think you're looking at the wrong problems here though. I think. Yeah. Well. So like, so here's an example, right? So, so like we've marveled before, you know, those videos of quadcopters that are like in formation. Yeah. And, and then they do all those fancy tricks and all that other stuff. Well, the thing that some people didn't realize about that is that they have external vision, right? You have a third perspective. Right. And now a robot only has a single, you know, it can have dual cameras or whatever. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But then it has to interpolate. Like, I mean, like, and, and just even taking on the human, the humanoid form is like, that's, that's, that's constraining it pretty heavily. You know, you, okay. You expect that the eyes are going to be on the head portion. Right. You know, it's like, that's not necessarily how a robot would do it, but that's what everybody's doing. So I don't know.

Dave Jones: Humans have such finesse.

Chris Gammell: We really, you know, we've had a lot of, uh, we've had a lot of software revisions over the years. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Can't beat Darwin.

Chris Gammell: I suppose. The runner up for Dave's, uh, the son's name, probably. Engineer of the year. Darwin. Charles Darwin. Engineer of the year. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, man. Yeah. So. That's funny video. It's funny.

Chris Gammell: It's funny to watch, but it's, you know, it's, it's interesting. I mean, and I'm, I'm really glad that it's also, uh, that there's focus on it, that people are watching it. All these things are good.

Dave Jones: Can we go to the bottom end of the processing scale? Sure. Which is the $9 chip computer. Apparently someone else is going to beat that or they've come out with a competing one.

Chris Gammell: For the $9 computer? No. Uh, no.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: Where? I don't, I don't see what, like, you're talking about. Olimex? Is that what you're talking about?

Dave Jones: Olimex. They're the ones. No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: So Olimex wrote about basically how this is unrealistic. And basically, so Olimex is a hardware maker. Uh, yep. And basically they wrote a, they make cheap boards and stuff. Right. And so basically they went out and they got quotes and they were talking to everyone and basically saying there's zero chance that this is actually possible. And then they, they quoted an email, you know, and we have to take the email. Right. You know, at the word. But they said that the, the, the chip company that's selling them, all winners, the chip maker saying that the, the board is actually going to be $39 after the fact. Wow. Will that or won't that be the case? I don't know. I, you know, that's, that's what they heard from, you know, that's what Olimex wrote. That's what they heard from the people. That's what they said, you know, Olimex wrote about it. Um, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, that's, that's his summary at the end. So they're saying, sorry guys to break your dreams, but the one, but a one gigahertz system on chip that costs a dollar is just not possible. Maybe in the future, but yeah. Yeah. At the moment, it's just not going to happen. Right. So.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Right. And, and, you know, someone had commented in our, in our comment section, we brought this up two weeks ago too. It's like, I had said that there's a $9 computer and, and they rightfully point out, it's not actually a, uh, it's not a thing yet. Right. It doesn't exist in the marketplace. It's, it's still, it's still.

Dave Jones: And they haven't, and they haven't proved that they actually make a profit. Like I can, Hey, I can go out and sell a $1 computer tomorrow. Right. I can make the world headlines, sell a dollar computer. But if I, if I don't tell anyone I'm not making any money from it, I'm a genius. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Because I'm manufacturing a $1 computer.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right. But I, I could do it. I just have to lose money on it. Right.

Chris Gammell: And not tell anyone. Well, and I think on all this stuff, it's always about the, you know, it's about trying to get a big enough, uh, base of people that are interested in it. And I think increasingly as, you know, as chip costs continue to drop, you know, and more boards come out, then it, it is become a different, more, uh, you know, even more difficult thing. I think the, you know, Raspberry Pi also has the education piece around it as well. So there's, you know, interesting things there. You know, they obviously started with, that was the, the banner headline to start with is the $35 computer. And that's what a lot of people focused on. But then they, you know, they turn around and said, look, this is actually about education too, which is, and you know, and then there was the broad comm special pricing for those parts. So, um, yeah, I mean, chips are still expensive, right? It's not like these are, these little pieces of silicon are not free. And, uh, so. That's right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, I'm, I'm, I'm going through that right now, optimizing the product for hopeful production, um, product that I'm working on behind the scenes. And yeah, it's like chips cost money. You want that feature in your product? Well, that's going to cost you, you know, five bucks for that chip. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know, there's just no way around.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. That, that can be really frustrating too. I remember, uh, one of my former coworkers did a, he did this really nice, like, you know, you could select basically, I think it was for talking in the marketing group, you know, because it's like, well, we need it to be cheaper. Okay. What do you want to remove? Well, we don't want to remove anything. And so eventually he got so frustrated. Right.

Chris Gammell: We just want to cheap. He made a spreadsheet where he's like, basically, here's the breakout of each cost. You could just go and pick which one you want and we can set it up. And then you're going to know the exact price based on all of the quotes we've gotten and reality. And at the end it was, there was a price at the bottom and it's like, can you live with that or not? No. Okay. Go back and remove another feature. Right. And that's, that is actually really smart. That's a way that you can have a conversation about that because people just banging their fist on the table and saying, no, it has to be cheaper with all the same features. It's like, trade offs. Hello. Trade, trade offs. So, yeah, it's, it's. Nobody's listening. Right. It's, it's a tough thing. And it's even tougher, I think, when you, you being you, Dave, you know, you, you know that, right? You're on both sides there where you're, you're just trying to get as much out of it as you can. I think, I think the way to, the, a lot of people do that these days is basically you reduce your chip count and try and get more and more into a single chip. Right. So if you can get everything onto a single micro with an ADC and, you know, spy port and, you know, all the stuff you need on a single micro, you start to really reduce your costs. And, uh.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, you just look at every aspect of the design. You might go, well, I can, might be able to save a buck by changing the case, you know, or, you know, changing some other aspect of the design that makes it more cleverer. More cleverer. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Evolving the English language here on the NPL. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Not just in our titles either. Which I do make up words sometimes. Yeah. And, and it's, I mean, you have to do that. And, and in a best case scenario, you know, you, you know, if you're, it depends, I guess, if you're, if you're trying to differentiate yourself, differentiate yourself in a marketplace, sometimes you get stuff for free where it's like, okay, well, I chose this chipset because it was cheap and by the way, it also happens to have X and now that's in there. Uh, but that's not, I don't think that's common. Maybe, maybe it is. Right. But I think that, you know, my experience has been with analog stuff, you know, especially that because every time you have, you know, if you have three packages on a board versus an integrated chip, usually the three, the three packages at the same spec as a single integrated chip, like these new analog front end chips that I've talked about in the past. Yep. That's right. They're just, they're just cheaper because the cost is, is consolidated onto the silicon and it makes for boring or boring or designs. Right. Uh, but also better, better costs. So.

Dave Jones: And sometimes you've got to look at your assumptions because the product I'm working on at the moment, I actually thought about it and I asked as well, um, some people and I'm going, you know, like I needed this, you know, $5 chip or whatever it is. Right. Well, I thought I did. Right. And you just look at your assumptions. Well, do I actually need the, like I can still get the functionality, but this chip gives higher performance. Right. So do I actually need that higher performance?

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. And that, and that's the question of, are they, are they willing to pay for it? Right. Or is that.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. Right. And can I trade this off? Right. Because it's going to be a lower cost product. If I can trade off this performance aspect of the product and I'm looking, I'm going, well, this actual performance aspect, which is common on a lot of similar products out there. In fact, it's generically common. Um, I guess that's the definition of the word common. Generic.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. You know what I mean? And like, and I'm thinking, well, where did that requirement come from? Does anyone actually use that?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: And it turns out probably not. It comes from like a real old school requirement and the game has changed since then. Yet all companies that make these devices, they've all just carried this sort of spec over. Now everybody's trying to guess what you're making. It's just the way it's always been done. That's what we're all doing right now.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: What is Dave making? Hmm.

Dave Jones: My supporters know all of those. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, yeah, they've had some input on it and yeah, they're, they're, they're saying they came to the same conclusion. I did that. Yeah. It's probably not that big a deal. You know, it's like, like I've never really needed this requirement. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right. I think in that case. Sacrifice the performance for the price. It's fine. Right. And it's, uh, it's, as long as it becomes like some of that becomes a PR thing. I think it's because if people are just like, well, it doesn't have a blank and then you

Dave Jones: have to be like, well, it doesn't have that performance. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay. But you don't need it. And then you have to prove that. And then it all becomes about that where instead it's like, you have to just be like, but it has all these other things that you really care about. And that's.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's it. That's it. Yeah. It all comes down to marketing like that stupid battery thing. Yeah. Debunked.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh man. Yeah. And there's another still, I keep like now I'm getting inundated with requests to debunk everything. Now that I've done another debunking video, you know, so it's like another one, you know, powering things from wifi is back.

Chris Gammell: He wants to bunk things, not debunk them. Yeah. I did see this, the wifi thing. And there was a.

Dave Jones: Yeah. The wifi charge. You whoop dee doo. I've done a video on it like four or five years ago. Yeah. It works, but no, it's just stupid. You're never going to be able to charge a phone from it. So just like, stop repeating it. Media people. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: There was a wired article from a physicist about that as well from Rhett Elaine. Was there? Yeah. Okay. Right.

Dave Jones: What?

Chris Gammell: Somebody's calling it. Yeah. It's called. Yeah. It was basically, he's a physicist that writes for wired a bunch and it says wifi charging works, but you can't really power your phone. Basically the same thing that we already knew. Right. And as soon as I saw that, that the article, I mean, basically, if people don't know, it was basically saying, oh, well, we use the wifi and across a significant distance. We were able to power.

Dave Jones: Well, it was four feet or something. It was like.

Chris Gammell: Significant distance. Right. I mean.

Dave Jones: Okay. It's, it's.

Chris Gammell: You're not going to charge your phone. You know, you're not, it's not like it's on a pad right next to it. And.

Dave Jones: No, no, it's right.

Chris Gammell: And.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And they said, well, we were able to power a device that was a camera.

Dave Jones: A camera. Right. That took one photo every 35 minutes. Right.

Chris Gammell: Exactly.

Dave Jones: Or something. Half an hour. Right.

Chris Gammell: And then people know that. Yeah. I mean, people know when you, if you, if you've worked on that stuff before, it's like, okay, well, they charged a cab for that long. And then. Yep. Exactly. They did a very low power process, you know, probably non-mechanical. It was just a capture on a CMOS sensor. And it. What was it?

Dave Jones: Working at 32 kilohertz or something. And as soon as it's processed at 32 kilohertz, boom, they transmit it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And it's like, okay, cool.

Dave Jones: And then they wait another 30 minutes for the captor recharge. Right. And so it's a, it's a constraint thing again, right? It's a constraint. Yeah. Totally.

Chris Gammell: Do you need, do you need to charge something or do you need to take a picture every 30 minutes? It's like.

Dave Jones: And then the secret sauce is that they couldn't do that with normal wifi. You can't just go up to any wifi router. They have to get a special wifi router that had special firmware that was modified to always continuously transmit it the full one watt power.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really?

Dave Jones: You know. Oh. Like, yeah, yeah. Oh, that, that was the secret sauce that made this possible. Absolutely. You know, so, but people forget the details when they read the big, big ass headline that, Oh, you can power all your gadgets. Goodbye wires. They're all gone. Power your gadgets from bloody wireless signal. It reminds me of that stupid ultrasound.

Chris Gammell: No, nope. You know. Nope. Not talking about that. Oh, man.

Dave Jones: Haven't heard from that. Have we?

Chris Gammell: I don't care. I don't care. Oh, man.

Dave Jones: Yep. No. And the media just run with these stupid headlines. That's what this chip, you know, this batterizer thing. Yep. You know, everyone, oh, eight times, you know, eight times increase in your alkaline batteries because you whack this boost converter on there. Oh, fuck. Yeah. Jeez. Anyone with any rudimentary electronics knowledge and that of battery capacity, just like within seconds can instantly go bullshit. You know, like it's not right. Like without even doing the numbers, it instantly just goes into your head. Bullshit. Right. Like, you know, and sure enough, you go do the numbers. Yep. Bullshit. You know, like unbelievable. Yeah. Oh, man. It's just, yep. Anyway, I'll be buying one. Seriously, I'll be buying one. You know, because they've got this.

Chris Gammell: That's the burden now. You've got to keep buying all these bogus devices, huh? Sitting around.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, no, you know, it does a job, right? It's just not even like an order of magnitude as efficient as they claim. Right. Right. So, you know, but they've got some interesting miniaturization tech in there, which I want to check out. So, you know. Yep.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Well, let that be a lesson to you. Just like market on your, like they still would have had a successful campaign. They still will have a successful campaign. I don't know, man. They just told the truth.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if they would.

Dave Jones: I think they would. I think they would.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I think that a lot of this stuff, like a lot of this is some, not a lot of this, but some of this is driven by the fact that it is hard to get noticed for even, you know, things that are impressive, right? But.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure that some of that drives it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but you know, you put it on Kickstarter, Indigo, and it just goes gangbusters because there's people on Indigo going on Kickstarter. That is wrong. They just hand over their money for anything.

Chris Gammell: That is wrong. I do not agree with that. Did you track how many people on your Kickstarter came from your audience versus elsewhere?

Dave Jones: Yeah, but mine was such a ridiculously niche product. It's not general. This is general public stuff. And it's only a couple of bucks, right? That's the thing. The price point is too compelling. People don't give a shit. They'll just, you know, a couple of bucks, right?

Chris Gammell: I don't know if I agree with that, man. I just.

Dave Jones: No, it's going to be a total. No, when you've got mass market appeal, a ridiculously low price and promises of, you know, the world.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but that can make the difference between like, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but I'm saying they've still got two out of three, even if they don't promise the world, right? They've still got the mass market appeal and the dream of getting something for nothing, right? And the low buy-in price, it's still going to be a winner, even if they didn't claim eight times.

Chris Gammell: I guess so. I bet you. I don't know. I don't. I don't.

Dave Jones: I think that. Who agrees with Miss here? Who agrees with me? Who agrees with Chris? Leave it in the comments. Yeah, right. That always works out well. Getting our audience to interact. Right, right, right. They probably aren't even listening to this on a computer, you know.

Chris Gammell: A what?

Dave Jones: Where they can instantly go, oh, I'm going on there. I'm going on there. I'm going to leave a comment. Oh, Dave's a dickhead. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Hey, we have a mobile. Oh, I'm with Chris. I'm a Chris fanboy.

Chris Gammell: We have a mobile-friendly site.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Vote now, folks.

Dave Jones: Hopefully, I'll have a mobile-friendly site, too. I'm working on a new website or somebody else is for me. Oh, nice. So, hopefully, I'll get a revamped website. Very cool. Eventually.

Chris Gammell: Ah, yeah. All that software stuff. It's tough. Don't you mind? It continues to be tough. Yeah. I don't know. Did you see this? Speaking of software, everybody's kind of trying to get in on it right now of, like, being the OS for Internet of Things devices.

Dave Jones: Oh, God, no.

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right, right. Well.

Dave Jones: Oh, the show's just gone down.

Chris Gammell: No, I mean, I think this is legit, though. Like, so these are, this is kind of, so this was, you know, Google had their IO event. And Apple's talked about this stuff, too, right? If Apple just, you know, open source or Swift project and all those other things. And I think the thing that's interesting to me is that, like, so I was watching this, and I forget what they're calling it. Like, there's some name for it. Brillo. Ugh, what a terrible name. Brillo. And basically, you know, they're talking about, oh, well, everything you have is going to be running this OS, and it'll talk to Weave and all these blah, blah, blah. But what I wonder about is, I mean, in the future, all these low-level devices are, at this point, they're saying that everything needs to have an OS on it and be running, like, a high-level stack.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Chris Gammell: And I don't think that's the case. I mean, like, all of the pictures they're showing, at least, none of them are battery-powered. And I don't get how the battery-powered stuff will work. It's not like batteries are getting better. And so everybody wants to be in this space, right? Google wants to, you know, they want Android-type things on every device. Apple wants to be, you know, on the Watch and everywhere else, too. But, like, the battery life sucks, and I don't understand. No one's doing anything about it. They're just like, well, it'll just work. It'll just, you know, we're the biggest. You have to, you know. And I don't get how that's going to work. I would love to hear from people on how they think it's going to work. But as far as I see it, you know, low-level C programming, everything else, is still, you know, for battery-sensitive devices, you still need to be able to shut down and have low-power processes and stuff like that. And I don't think running, you know, low-level, even low-level Android on everything is the future.

Dave Jones: No, it's, well, yeah. Yeah, like, what, you're saying people aren't optimizing their processing platforms anymore? They're just throwing in the generic OS, because that's the easiest thing to do?

Chris Gammell: And it's the shortest development cycle, blah, blah, blah. Well, I think that would be a reason they do that. But I think that that's what Google wants, and that's what all these people want. Everybody wants to be the platform.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But I don't see how that's going to work from a practical perspective, right?

Dave Jones: No, like, you're not going to run, like, running Android on a watch is just freaking stupid, you know? Like, just any high-level, like, who wants a day's battery life on their watch? It's just stupid.

Chris Gammell: Well, some people do.

Chris Gammell: People even want seven days.

Dave Jones: Like, no, they're, well, they're idiots.

Chris Gammell: Some people do. They'd love to tell you all about it.

Chris Gammell: Unbelievable. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm going to develop a, call a smart, develop a smartwatch. It gets 10 years battery life. And the smartest thing it does is tell the freaking time. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yes, Dave is an eagle.

Dave Jones: Unbelievable. Yeah. Yep. I can get a scientific calculator watch that gets 10 years battery life. Not a problem.

Chris Gammell: Is that yours? Yours gets 10 years battery life?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: I could get 10 years battery life.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: Out of a calculator watch. Yeah, if I really wanted to, yeah. Of course I could.

Chris Gammell: Doing what?

Dave Jones: Telling the time and doing calculations occasionally.

Chris Gammell: You just mean, like, going into sleep modes and stuff like that because it's almost always off?

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: And so, you know, it wakes up once per second and whoop. Updates the screen, you know. It's not rocket science.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think that's part of the problem, I guess, is that everything wants to be, like, awake all the time. Well, not all the time, but it has to always be, like, wake up. Is there a message for me? Go back to sleep. Wake up. Is there a message? And even that is still pretty power intensive, right? Even on Bluetooth low energy, that's still, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because you're putting bloody RF links and everything else in there.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: Goodness gracious.

Chris Gammell: What you need to do is run a wire from your phone to your watch. Right, yeah. You could pass power. You could pass a serial signal. You should just have, like, the Apple wire implant that goes from your leg up to your arm. Anyways.

Dave Jones: I went off this planet.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I think you got a little while on that one as well. Oh, but that's what I meant to tell you. I said at the beginning of the show that I have something to tell you. I get to go towards SpaceX tomorrow.

Chris Gammell: Ah, Boston.

Chris Gammell: I'm excited. So, I will report back. How did you score that? Who did you have to sleep with? No one. One of the listeners of the show, actually, gave me a shout and offered a tour. And then one of my former co-workers also works there. So, I didn't realize there's 4,000 people working there. It's nuts.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Chris Gammell: I didn't think it was that many. Yeah, man. Wow. Yeah. Wow, that's huge. Yeah, it should be a good time. I'm looking forward to it. I am in California right now.

Dave Jones: I'd love to see a breakdown data on those 4,000 people. How many working on what?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Love to see a breakdown.

Chris Gammell: I don't think they're going to give that to me. Right.

Dave Jones: They've got four people sweeping floors. Yeah. They've got 40 who work in the canteen to feed the 4,000. They've got, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Wow. I don't know, man. Well, a lot of it's just, you know, they're just manufacturing, right? I mean, I don't know if you saw. There was a tour that they had on YouTube a while back. But it's just like.

Dave Jones: So they do everything in the one location? They manufacture, design, do the whole works? They do a lot. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's very vertically integrated type stuff. You know, a lot of machining, a lot of electronics assembly, stuff like that. So it'll be. I mean, I'm only going to see probably the stuff on the floor, but that's more than enough. I mean.

Dave Jones: Interesting to see if they've got this. So they do their own in-house boards, do they? I think so. Completely in-house pick and place and all that sort of jazz. It makes sense. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure it's always, you know, it's usually a mix, that kind of thing. So we'll see. I'm very lucky to have people that offer me these things. So I appreciate it. If anyone else wants to give you a tour of an awesome place, I will be happy to do so.

Dave Jones: Sure, I'd be getting those offers too, except I'm not in the US so that I bother.

Chris Gammell: Right. If you want to give Dave a tour, just give me a call and I'll go to the tour for him. I'll tell him all about it. Right. Thanks, buddy. Yeah, no problem, man. You got the kids to think of. I got to, you know, I got to get this in while I can. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, so I don't know. There was also an article about the fact that I didn't realize that Google bought a part of SpaceX as well. Oh, did they? Yeah. So they're going to be building, so they said 10% of SpaceX was sold to Google and Fidelity.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: But basically.

Dave Jones: Why? Why would they sell 10%?

Chris Gammell: Because they want the money to make satellites for building internet access. So basically they're going to try and become an internet provider from space. I don't know how that's going to work. I don't know. I don't get it. But if I can get a better, I'm not on Wi-Fi right now because the Wi-Fi is here so terrible. I'm on a cell network right now, actually. And so we're recording this.

Dave Jones: Have you got an unlimited data plan? Because even audio choose to be.

Chris Gammell: If I cut out, you'll know it happened.

Dave Jones: No, you'll just end up with a bill for a day. No, the phone companies will never cut you off. Oh, they do.

Chris Gammell: I do prepaid, buddy. Oh, right. Okay. I'm not an idiot. I know how I work. Yeah. So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see. Obviously, I don't have any details about any of this stuff. I'm just going to see rockets. Right. Yeah. So we'll see. We'll see what's happening. SpaceX and big. I mean, because the other thing is like, you know, like, I don't know about you. Do you ever watch machining videos on YouTube or anything like that?

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: Like, some of them.

Dave Jones: I'm not sad like you.

Chris Gammell: It's not sad, man. It's so.

Dave Jones: Sitting there. Oh, look at that spindle.

Chris Gammell: Dude, it's so awesome. It's like. I know. It's like. It's like watching like. I don't even know. Like. But just like. Porn. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like mechanical porn, but it's like. It's like. It's like watching a transfer. It's like watching magic. I mean, it's like. It's like transforming from one thing to another. It's like. Or like art. Right. It's like watching. Watching someone sculpt something. You know. It's just like. From amorphous shape to thing that's useful and beautiful. Right. Maybe art isn't necessarily useful, but it's beautiful. And you know. It's just like. It's artwork. It's. It's just. Getting to see that happen is so. Awesome. Especially at high speed. Right. So like watching like the. Right. The Mori Seikis. And five axis machines. Stuff like that. And it's just like. It's like a symphony of motion.

Chris Gammell: So yeah. Highly recommend if people are. If you're bored. Or if you like machining. There's tons of good videos on YouTube for. Like there was one.

Dave Jones: Dude. If you get excited over that. Just. Wait until the point where you can actually pull like a live human. Out of another human. That's. I guess so. Pretty cool. Been there. Done that twice.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure. I'm sure it's beautiful. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Dave Jones: I'm sending a snippet of that to your wife.

Chris Gammell: Thanks. So. What else do we have to talk about? Nothing here. Nothing. We're done. We're not done. Come on.

Chris Gammell: We're done.

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: We might be able to keep it to an hour for a change.

Chris Gammell: I have two things that I wanted to bring up then. Three things I wanted to bring up then. There has been some.

Dave Jones: Because I groaned. You went from two to three.

Dave Jones: That's right. That's your punishment. I'll piss this guy off.

Chris Gammell: So first off, there was a great interview with Paul Horowitz. Horowitz. The Art of Electronics. I really enjoyed that. Some people didn't like it, but I really liked it. Just watching Paul interact. He looks like the friendliest guy ever. He's just like so bouncy.

Dave Jones: Oh, you're talking about the Art of Free one. Yeah. A little more. There's also a text interview on Element 14 as well.

Dave Jones: Exactly.

Chris Gammell: And it's just like, it's awesome. It's like watching your heroes. It's great. Okay. That was one. Where was the next one? Oh, they announced the Open Hardware Summit. That will be in Philadelphia on 7-19. I think I posted that wrong.

Chris Gammell: How are you going? Because you've been the last couple of years, haven't you?

Chris Gammell: I have, I don't know if I'll be going. I posted this wrong. So I posted it at 7-19. It's actually 9-19, September 19th in Philadelphia. I might go just because I have family out there. Okay. So, and I think that probably lines, no, it's on a Saturday. I was going to say it probably lines up with Maker Faire in New York, but that doesn't actually make sense. So Philadelphia in September. So that's cool. And then the last thing is we have the black Ampower T-shirts for sale once again. The Teespring thing. Sweet. Flipped over. So if you want that, I think you could still get that solder jockey. I know a lot of people named Dave didn't like it. Solder jockey.

Dave Jones: No, thanks.

Chris Gammell: No, you're not going to get it. Yeah. So that one's, oh, it's available until tomorrow. So probably not the case. So, so yeah. Yeah. So, but the black, the black Ampower T-shirt is available and it's posted on the website. So you can see that. Got it.

Chris Gammell: Sweet.

Chris Gammell: Is that all? I mean, I can keep going, man. If you want to keep going. Oh, I'm also going to be at Solid in two weeks giving a talk on data and finding parts and stuff like that. So people are going to be there. Look me up. Say hi. Woohoo. I'll be there. I'll have a booth as well. So it's easy to find me. Should be a good conference.

Dave Jones: Once again, prizes for the most forlorn, pathetic look of a photo of Chris Gammell possible.

Chris Gammell: This is an interesting conference though because it's a really cool mix of people. So I'm pretty, I usually get pretty excited about this because it's just people I never would meet otherwise. Right. Hardest and, you know, software people and stuff like that. Hardware people. So. All right. Yeah. I guess we'll, I'll talk to you next week.

Chris Gammell: Now we're done. What are we? We're almost up to our 255th, aren't we?

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I should probably figure that out.

Chris Gammell: We're like in, in the 250s somewhere. I think.

Chris Gammell: This is 253. We're on right now.

Dave Jones: Oh, geez. Almost going to flip a bit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Unbelievable.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man. And in August we're at the five year mark. So.

Chris Gammell: Holy shit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Chris Gammell: That's scary.

Dave Jones: So when, when are you coming out here?

Chris Gammell: Uh, maybe this. Because you know I ain't going nowhere. Yeah, maybe in the winter. I don't know. Probably when it's crappy weather here.

Chris Gammell: Oh, sometime.

Chris Gammell: Sometime. Sometime soon.

Chris Gammell: Right. So summer. So in another six months I'll see you here.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. When is the, when is the low spider season?

Dave Jones: There is no low spider season.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I can't, I, you know, I, I just remembered I can't make it. I can't make it. Right. All right, man. Talk to you next week. See ya. Bye.

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