#259 – No More Naming

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded July 21st, 2015. Episode 259. No more naming.

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

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

Dave Jones: Just us again. Did we have two guest episodes in a row?

Chris Gammell: Augmented alliteration. Alliteration. Auto-death.

Dave Jones: Auto-death. I wasn't alliterative there because, yeah, we've given that up, haven't we?

Chris Gammell: We're 256 episodes in and we are no more with the alliteration.

Dave Jones: We just decided, meh. It was sort of fun at the time.

Chris Gammell: It was. Yeah, no, it was. It was. I mean, I had a lot of fun with it. I learned a lot of new words.

Dave Jones: Yeah. If people don't know what we're talking about, it's where we put the title of the show. In fact, that was the only title of the show for a long time. We'd use these weird-ass words. Yeah. And, yeah. Always three.

Chris Gammell: In threes, right? It would be. In threes. All started with the same letter.

Dave Jones: All started with the same letter, hence the definition of the word. Yep. And, yeah, I don't know. It's just gotten meh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, it's it.

Dave Jones: And we always used to struggle about making them up, didn't we? After the show, we always used to argue, what should it be? Yeah, for a long time we did. Who can come up with the best word? And I just left it up to you and you just picked something random. Yeah. You know, meh.

Chris Gammell: I will. I will. Oh, man. This is a momentous day. I will reveal my sources finally, Dave.

Dave Jones: Oh, we're going to reveal our unusual word sources. Yes. Okay, go for it. It's not hard. Just Google unusual words.

Dave Jones: Well, not even that.

Chris Gammell: It's like if you just search for the words that were in our titles, it would be like, Yep. Oh, yeah. Those only exist one place. But it was frontistory.info. And I will post a link to that. It's actually, it's a wonderful site. You can find tons of weird and wonderful words there. Frontistory.info. And then the other one, what was the other one? It was a, it was like Luciferous. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Luciferous. Yep. Luciferous. Legolep. Legolepsey.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Legolepsey. Which means like the bringing light to words. Like that's like the idea. Really weird. Yep. But yeah. Both of those were our go-to. And now they are exposed to the world. So they are no, no longer valid for us.

Dave Jones: Oh, we might still use it occasionally if it, I don't know. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I think, like, honestly, if people want to learn like weird words, it's a cool place to learn about them. So, yeah. Speaking of.

Dave Jones: You've got to always wonder, were they actually genuine? Like, or were people just like adding, making shit up and just adding random words to, like, are these in any dictionaries anyway? We don't actually know. Well, a lot of the times. They're just these two.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so a lot of the times I would search for a word and then type definition afterwards. And like the only source would be this.

Dave Jones: This unusual word website. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: And then it would have like an old Norse definition or an old, like, you know, an old Latin definition, that kind of thing. So weird, you know, old words. But the thing I learned actually as a point of learning is, you know, you can just make up words. And a lot of people just go along with it. So, like, seriously, I'm not even close to comparing myself. But, like, a lot of the definitions, you'd be like, you go look up, you type it in, look it up, and be like, oh, yeah, William Shakespeare just kind of made up this word. He would just, like, make it up. Right. And so that's what we started doing, too. We're just like, hey, we just make up words. This is great. You know, you need a new tense. You just kind of follow the rules. And you're like, yeah, okay, well, it was this, and now it's this, and that's a new word.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Nothing wrong with that. That's it. Language is always evolving.

Chris Gammell: It is, but actually, even better on the web, it's just you need to be unique no matter what. So that's the real thing. Right, yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you can't buy a domain name with regular words these days, can you?

Chris Gammell: No, exactly. You know, yeah. You've got to have an unusual company name or something. Of weird things and weirdos, we also had the benefit of our weirdo audience giving us their weirdo opinions about our weirdo show. And I do want to publicly say thank you to everyone. It's cool. We had 600 plus people, almost 700, respond to us, and we really, really, really appreciate it. 679.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yep. That's awesome. 679. And, yep.

Chris Gammell: So we really appreciate that because, I mean, like, honestly, it helps us kind of understand our audience a little better and, you know, just kind of get some really good feedback. Actually, the most interesting thing about this is that this time we had an open form for what people work on. And, like, that, honestly, I don't know why I didn't do that before because we, like, hearing just about what people work on, it's like, wow, there's just such a cool variation in the different amount of things. Things that people are working on. And that's really encouraging.

Dave Jones: The engineering field is unlimited. People, you know, a lot of students, I say, oh, what field can I get into? Anything you could possibly imagine and then some.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know?

Chris Gammell: You could become a summer intern at an electric bike shop. Or a, I'm just reading this randomly now.

Dave Jones: Right. Right. It's just random.

Chris Gammell: You could work in pizza delivery, but you work on old game systems and electronics. Like, that's awesome. Right. Like, all these things. Like, let's see. There was some other. There was one that was like, hey, I'm the CEO of this huge web company. I'm like, what? Really? Like, yeah. Seriously. Like, it was like someone who's a hobbyist, but they're a CEO of like a huge, like literally a huge web company.

Dave Jones: That's great. It was weird. Or you can end up as an unemployed university graduate, as somebody's put here. Yeah. But I mean, but the fact that you're- I know.

Chris Gammell: But if that is your case, like, the fact that you're listening to this and you give a shit, like, you're not going to be unemployed long. Like, honestly, if you're building stuff, if you're listening to the electronics podcast and you're interested, like, that's going to get you really far, honestly.

Dave Jones: Here's a CTO at a software company. They don't say which software company, but a CTO at a software company. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: And now what I'm imagining is everybody bracing themselves. They're like, oh, I filled out the survey. Are they going to read my thing?

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Yeah. Well, no. It's just we haven't looked through it. Well, we have looked through it before, but I'm just scrolling through randomly now.

Chris Gammell: Me too.

Dave Jones: Somebody is in expresso parts sales. They sell parts for expresso machines. Nice. Nice. Like, oh, and their comment is we should have fewer guests.

Chris Gammell: You know, that's been an interesting mix. Okay. Okay. So, first off, that was also what informed partially, partially but not completely. The survey, you always get people that are like, I hate the three word names, blah, blah, blah. I think that's just focusing on the wrong thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah. Yeah. A lot of people, you know, like a lot of people said, oh, we want more guests. Some people said we want fewer guests. And so, it kind of bounced out. Yeah. And you get what you get, folks, you know. But, yeah, no, seriously, there's just so much, like, interesting stuff here. I really enjoy the – so, there's a question on what's your least favorite part of the show. I always love asking that because –

Dave Jones: Yeah, once again, they're as polarized answers as anything else. Yeah, mostly it's Dave. Almost everything we asked is –

Chris Gammell: Dave is the answer. No, I'm just kidding. So, a lot of it's Chris is whining a lot, too. But, like, honestly, it's just, like – like, it's interesting because everybody comes in with a different perspective. Yeah, totally. No one really holds back, which I appreciate as well. You know, engineers usually don't.

Dave Jones: By the way, people, the whining part, try doing, like, 256 episodes over five years and you'll whine, too. You'll eventually whine, too. Trust us. That's just the way it works. Yeah. Hey, we have a chief IC designer for a fabulous IC company.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's pretty cool. There you go.

Dave Jones: And they want Bill Mench and Fran Blanche as guests on the show. Yeah, we'll definitely have to get Fran on. Yeah, yeah. I mean, everyone. She's a good friend of ours.

Chris Gammell: That's another thing we did different this year is we asked for – so, we actually have a list, a running list of people that we ask for suggestions about potential guests and stuff like that. Never ceases to amaze me how many people suggest people that have already been on the show. And I don't think it's that they're actually suggesting that they be on again. I think it's just they don't – they haven't heard the old shows. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, I mean, you know, how many people have listened to every single episode? It would be an incredibly small percentage. God help the ones who do, you know? Yeah, exactly. But I'm surprised at the number of people who've said – well, not surprised at the number because I don't know the number, but they seem to stand out to me. They say, oh, I've watched every one of your videos, and I'm going, either you're very dedicated or you're bullshitting. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because, like, there's, like, over 800 videos or something. You know, you tell me you've watched every one.

Speaker ?: Yeah, that's a lot.

Dave Jones: It's a lot, yeah. Like, that's a lot, man. Anyways. I'm sure there are those that have done that. Yeah. But anyway. So, yeah. It's absolutely fascinating.

Chris Gammell: So, we really do appreciate this. And a lot of this stuff, we will use this for guests. We do have a running list of guests. So, if you didn't fill out the survey – I think the survey is still open if people are still interested. But if you didn't fill out the survey, there's always a running list of guests. You can see who have already been suggested there. We always love feedback.

Dave Jones: Can we make some of it public? I mean, because there's no confidential information on here, is there?

Chris Gammell: I don't think so, no. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. Sorry. People's emails are on here. Yeah, well, you don't have to put that in, though. Well, some people's emails are on here. Well, the survey is not public.

Chris Gammell: The results are not public. That's right. No, no. It's optional.

Dave Jones: But I wouldn't want to release this and then put people's email.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, we wouldn't do that.

Dave Jones: But can we? Can we make some of them public?

Chris Gammell: So, what we'll do is – so, what we've usually done in the past – No? There's a – No, why not?

Dave Jones: I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Well, there's a summary that you can get of the Google Forms. And just kind of how people listen and stuff like that. Actually, the surprising – not surprising. Well, maybe surprising. We used to have about 5% female listenership.

Dave Jones: Okay, so we'll release summary.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Does it draw graphs and things? Doesn't it draw –

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, now it's – there's only 10 female responders who actually – who said they were female. 10 out of 670-something. Right. That's not many.

Chris Gammell: Right. That's – yeah, it's quite now. I don't know what to do about that. I hope more females get into electronics or listen to the show or respond to the survey in the future.

Dave Jones: Well, it is what it is, I guess. I mean, you know, like, what do we do? Go out there campaigning for more female viewers? You know, like, it's –

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I don't know.

Dave Jones: You know.

Chris Gammell: I don't know what to do about the low female listenership. If people do have suggestions, we always have on the website. If people don't know, we always take feedback on the website. It's just feedback at theempire.com or there is a link on theempire.com. You can just go click on the little – the mail button in the upper right corner.

Dave Jones: And that automatically gets sent to both of us.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, or Twitter or wherever else. I mean, like, honestly, we take feedback a lot of different places. But, yeah, we would – I mean, like, we want – I mean, we want the diversity of gender and location and everything else, right? I mean, but we feel a little helpless against it. So, anyways, we'll try and post some of these interesting responses.

Dave Jones: All we can do is just continue to support, you know, females doing this sort of stuff. I mean, you know, there's no magical – there's no law that says, oh, the industry has to be 50-50. Every industry has to be 50-50 female-male. It's like – you know, it is what it is. As long as, you know, people are encouraged.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, I think support – you're right. And they have an equal opportunity and everything else, right? Right, right.

Dave Jones: And apart from that, then it is what it is, you know? I mean, certain industries just, you know, might be female-dominated. Others might be male-dominated for various reasons. As long as everyone has equal opportunity and there's no discrimination, that's it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right? And everyone has equal support, then, well, it turns out that it is what it is. So –

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And that's definitely the best start there. So looking at age, it looks like, you know, we've got a really – so with like 600-plus people, we have a nice solid distribution.

Dave Jones: You just popped that graph up. We're looking at this through Google spreadsheet-y thing, and Chris just did a – I presume you did – Histogram. A histogram of age, and it just automatically popped up on mine. Yeah. I love it. All this – yeah. We can edit the document at the same time. It works. It's fascinating. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So Histogram looks like about 30s or so. I mean, you know –

Dave Jones: About 30 is the peak. Yeah, it's the peak. But, you know, it's – And with the majority downside is above 30. Yeah. So it drops off very quickly below. Holy crap. We're getting up to – oh, come on. Who's 120? Who's 130 years old? That's what I put as the max.

Chris Gammell: So someone didn't – they didn't put an age in, and they saw the limit was from 0 to 120, and they put in 120. So – Snarky. Snarky folks. Yep. Anyways, that's enough survey. But, yeah, like I said, thank you very much for everyone who put into that. You can still do it. Please don't be too snarky. If you haven't done it yet, please be truthful. That's the most helpful thing we can get there, and we do like that.

Dave Jones: I don't mind people being snarky. It's funny when I read through.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, true.

Dave Jones: It's hilarious.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So what else is new? So we should mention from two episodes ago, Fabian, who was on the show, or Fabs, or Fabs, as Dave says, because he couldn't say Fabs. Eh, Fabs. Fabs. Fabs. Eh, Fabs, you're an Aussie now. Eh, Fabs. Just got funded, so that was great. So everybody – Awesome. Thanks to everyone who submitted that. That was good.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because she was like a fair bit behind, wasn't she?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I was really worried, actually. I had signed up, and I was like, I'm not getting a scarf, man. I'm going to have a cold neck this winter.

Dave Jones: So that's our – did we do that? No, I think it was – Did the Power of the Amp our audience?

Chris Gammell: No, I don't think – I think we contributed, but we did not – no, that was not us. Right. It was posted on Wolfram Alpha today, so I think that might have had a slightly bigger impact than –

Dave Jones: Wolfram Alpha? That's a – like, I didn't know that was like a blog thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, they have a blog. You know, like, a bunch of math nerds, you know?

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. Right, yeah. Got it. Yeah. Right, yeah, yeah. With disposable income, yeah. Yep, yep. Yeah, because they're all generally, like, yeah, single and nerds. Yeah, right. Oh, yeah, if I get this scarf, yeah, that'll really pull the cheeks. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, so I've been talking to Phobz on Twitter and, you know, some other friends, too, and obviously you've done a Kickstarter, and you and I were talking before the show, too, just about, man, Kickstarter? I know that, like you said before the show, it's just – Here we go. You know, it's a bingo topic, but it's – I don't know. It just doesn't seem worth it to me. Like, there's so many expectations there, and there's so much, like, crap going on there. I just – I don't –

Dave Jones: You would – yeah, you were mentioning this before your show, that it almost seemed like everyone you knew was getting funded.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, the funded part is the good part, though.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's the good part, but you were talking about reputation if you don't deliver and all that.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, exactly, exactly. You know? Like, that's the tough part, right? I mean, like, you could – I mean, like, obviously the people that I know and like, I want them to get funded. I mean, the ones that are – Of course. Like, part of accelerators and stuff like that, too. Like, obviously they have marketing that helps them along to get, like, super funded, but, like – I don't – like, it just seems like it's – like, a terrible process. I just – I don't know. I don't know what it is about it. Like, it's just – I don't know. I haven't done it.

Dave Jones: This is why – yeah. I don't – this is the thing I've always hated. This is why I hate taking other people's money. I don't like owing people something and having the pressure to actually deliver. I think that's what it is. Because to me, that is not freedom. Right, right. Right? Yeah, yeah. Some people thrive on that. I'll get the money and I'll – you know? Right. And then I'm tied in. I want the freedom. I have to do it. Yeah, I don't want to be tied down. Right. I want the freedom to be able to – you know, if I change my mind and go, I want to do something else, and, you know, I can go do something else, right? So – although, yes, I did do the Kickstarter and I had to deliver. But, hey, I still like – I'm still proud of the fact that I'm probably the only one I know of who actually shipped on the exact day that the money came into my account for my Kickstarter campaign. I got in the $116,000 or whatever it was, minus the 8% fee or whatever, and I shipped that exact day. Well, I didn't ship them all, but I at least shipped the, you know, the early backers on the exact day. I proudly walked down to the – I packed them, walked down to the post office and whacked them in the post box, you know? I was so proud of that.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Well, we should also mention that Andreas – Yeah, but no, I can't imagine getting the money.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Hang on. I can't imagine just getting the money and then, like, not – like, and then go, oh, yeah, I'll figure it all out later.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know? It's like, oh, no, I couldn't stand the pressure. Right. It's just – Right.

Chris Gammell: So Andreas, who was on the show as well from Parallela or Adaptiva, rather, talking about the Parallela, also just wrote an article for – actually, he kind of laid out some of the numbers. Yeah, on EE Times as well. So –

Dave Jones: Why I won't do another Kickstarter campaign.

Chris Gammell: Right. Which is a very strong title.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I haven't read it yet, but I know it's –

Chris Gammell: It's a clickbait, but it, you know, it's – I mean, it gets a lot of comments, right, because it's around this topic of –

Dave Jones: What is the bottom line? He actually lost money? I mean, that's the bottom line?

Chris Gammell: It's just that the stress and the money – The potential for money loss is just not –

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Not worth it, so. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Yet everyone is obsessed these days. Like, you know, everyone who comes out of college – University thinks, oh, I've got to do a Kickstarter. Remember when eBay came up? Shut up.

Chris Gammell: And, like, that was the way to make money?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. You would set up an eBay store. Yeah. That was – Ten years ago, that was the big thing. It feels like that, doesn't it? I mean, it's similar. It does. It's very –

Chris Gammell: It's just kind of like that fever pitch level of, like, oh, well, you could – My favorite line from Office Space, you could make a million bucks. The guy made a million bucks.

Dave Jones: But the thing is, you didn't get the money for that. You had to work your ass off. Yeah. Right? Unless you set up some drop shipping, you know – Right, of course, of course. Thing, right, you know. But, yeah, but generally you worked your ass off doing that. If you've ever – You know, like, I've got, like, 800 feedback on eBay or something. I've bought and sold – Like, I've sold a lot of stuff on eBay. Right. And I used to buy and sell test gear all the time and all sorts of stuff. And it's not easy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Even with the automated tools. I was selling so much on eBay, I used the automated tools to try – Even then it was a pain in the ass. Oh, groan. I've got to list this on eBay. Right. The steps you had to go through. And they changed it every month. They changed the rules every month of how it was done. And it was just – Oh, it was – It was awful. Yeah. To this day, I think I'm going to list another scope today on eBay. And I'm just going, oh, groan. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. It's just painful. Yeah. And, of course, that market went downhill because eBay kept raising their fees. You know, now it's like 10% plus PayPal. Oh, really? Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. And it's cutthroat. Yeah. It's absolutely cutthroat. So, you know, there's a lot of people who quit the eBay business. They just, you know, they were like power sellers with 50,000 feedback and they just quit. Right. You know, like they couldn't take it anymore.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, after a certain point, any kind of marketplace where it's like, okay, so now you have a marketplace and you reach saturation. You're like, okay, I have, you know, a million people who are selling things and I'm charging them, you know, 2%.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm making it raise the thin margins.

Chris Gammell: And you have two choices, right? You either get more people or you raise the price. On the people that are selling. It's like, okay, well. Yeah. I guess people have stopped signing up. So, what's the other thing I can do? Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: When I buy something cheap on eBay, I go, and I know the margin that they must be making. I'm going, why do they bother? Right, like that wristband you did. Thanks for sending it. Yeah. Like, yeah. Thanks for sending it to me. Yeah. A dollar. Delivered.

Chris Gammell: A dollar, right? I know.

Dave Jones: Delivered.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's ridiculous.

Dave Jones: Great car. Unbelievable. Yeah. What? You know. Ah. Boggles of mine. Ah, yeah. I can't help feel sorry for them every time I buy something on there. I go, yeah, thanks for making it available so cheaply to me, but I feel sorry for you. Yeah. Right, right. Yes. Oh, goodness. So, yes. So, stop it, people. Stop getting funded. It's annoying us. Damn you. I think it's going to be the same thing.

Chris Gammell: It's going to be the same story where it's just like, oh, well, okay, this channel's tapped out, you know.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, there was this, I tweeted this thing earlier this morning. There's this phone on Kickstarter. I don't want to talk too much about it, right? They put this phone on Kickstarter, right? This open, kind of open-y source kind of phone. Not really open source, but, you know, their idea is, like smartphone, and their idea is that, oh, yeah, we will shape the product based on all your feedback. Pass. And I'm going, that's going to fail. That has got fail written. That concept has got fail written all over it. They just, they have no idea the shitstorm that is coming towards them. Right. You know, when they get a different opinion. I want it to be purple. I want it to be purple. Oh. With racing stripes on it. Right, exactly. Like, every single one of their backers will have a different opinion of what they want. And, like, and you won't be able to please any of them. It'll just, like, anyway. Yeah. Meh.

Chris Gammell: No, no. I agree.

Dave Jones: But that's their whole concept for their business. Apparently, like, I think the odds of them actually, they claim to have the phone actually ready for production as soon as they get the funding. So they'll push the button and the phone will get funded. And then the idea is the next phone will be based on all people's user feedback. So that's their sustaining business model. And that will fail. So they're, I think they might initially deliver a phone. But then after that, their business model is based on, yeah, shaping the phone, based on user feedback. Yeah. Crowd for, yeah. Can you imagine anything worse?

Chris Gammell: I could, actually. Can you imagine if they did that at the chip level? Like, I mean, that kind of happens, right? I mean, like, so I'm sure that you've had people come in and be like, well. And this is why your chip printer thing won't work, dude.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Nice dig. No. So, like, you know, you have people come in and they're like, oh, but, like, that's the reason you hire, like, a product marketing person in the first place in a chip company. Where, like, you go into a place and you say, okay, well, what do you need for your design? And someone says, well, I need something that has, you know, two femto amps of bias current and it operates at 20 gigahertz and, you know, like, all these, like, ridiculous things. But then you have to make the balance point somewhere. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So I imagine that if you do that on a community level, you would actually, you would tear your hair out because you'd have all these people that are like, oh, I need this thing. And it's like, well, at a certain point, yeah, people need the thing, but they don't actually, they won't pay for it. You know what I mean? Like, that's the difference.

Dave Jones: That's it. No, I worked in that exact field, the seismic industry, where there were a couple of, there were, like, two major companies who would make specific Delta Sigma front-end converters specifically for the size, specifically for our seismic market. Yeah. Right? So there were two manufacturers of these chips, basically, and they're Cirrus Logic and analog devices. And they were, yeah, and there were, like, maybe a handful of companies in the world, like, you know, five or six companies, of which I was one at CirCell slash Tally's at the time. And, you know, we were driving the requirements. So you've got half a dozen companies driving the requirements for these front-end chips. And, of course, you know, yeah. And it's profitable because-

Chris Gammell: They had to sort of balance it. Right. Well, they know how many chips they're going to make, right? They do the math, right? Where it's like, okay, it's going to cost us a million dollars for the mask and, you know, another million for the engineering and marketing work and everything else. So we need to make four million on all these customers and they're going to buy 20,000 chips.

Dave Jones: On these half a dozen customers. Right.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. And so 20,000 chips-

Dave Jones: Well, see, but that was no problems, yeah. Because, like, just one of our towed array sonars behind a boat would be, like, up to 10,000 channels, right? So we had to buy 10,000 chips just for one system. Oh, yeah, right.

Dave Jones: On one survey boat. Well, yeah. And the chips were, like, 100 bucks each. 100 bucks US each. They weren't cheap.

Chris Gammell: But that's how they set the price. That's what I'm saying. Like, they set the price based on- Oh, yeah, of course. They set the price, yeah. If you guys were only buying 10 per tow behind the boat, then the chip would cost $10,000 each, right? Yeah, that's right. That is basically a fixed cost. They knew how many chips they were going to sell. They knew how much their costs were. They're going to make a margin on that. That's how they were setting their prices, basically. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But even then, they had to compromise because each company would have slightly different requirements, you know? And then they go, well, you know, we have to sort of balance out all customers and, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Yeah, it was tough for them. The only time you get in trouble is when you get, like, strong personalities where it's like, no, no, no. We have to have this one company's requirements in here. And that's going to end up upset the entire development of the rest of the product, right? So now then you, as someone buying 10,000 of a chip for a single unit that has, you know, $100 each, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But now it has a thing that's totally unused by you. But that's because of the personality that ended up designing that in. That's just, it's nuts.

Dave Jones: Ah, it was, yep. And didn't they go feral? Didn't the manufacturer go feral when you didn't choose their chip? Oh. Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Man. Well, and I wonder, like, does this, I mean, like, I think it still happens in a lot of the industrial and probably military and, you know, super scientific stuff like the seismic stuff. But, like, you know, so I was watching the Espressif Twitter account, right? This is how, obviously, how I get my information these days. Right. You know, like, on the consumer level then, you know, like, how those decisions are made is just kind of like, it seems like, oh, well, these are, you know, these decisions are made on kind of covering the broadest base, right? That's kind of the opposite side of it. It's not, it's not how much can we charge? You know, we have a set of fixed costs. How much can we charge? It's how many of the pain points in the marketplace can we hit? And then, and then hopefully, hopefully there's enough uptake because there's no way to predict it because there's no way to have knowledge of the entire marketplace. Right. So, Espressif is the one, they're the ones who make the ESP8266. And then they're talking about this new chip and they tweeted about, what was it, 500 DMIPS, 500 KB RAM, BTLE, I assume Wi-Fi as well. You know, like. Right. Oh, yeah, it does say Wi-Fi, duh. But, like, and it's like, oh, and then 500 microamps. Like, honestly, I have no idea if this is actually going to come through. Obviously, I've seen the 8266. I'm impressed with that. But, like, they're just kind of guessing and then throwing it at the marketplace because the cost of development is low enough that it's like, well, we'll just try it and see. Because otherwise. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Why else would the 8266 be out in the marketplace? Like, that shouldn't exist.

Dave Jones: If you tried to cater for everyone's, no. Yeah. They're the ones driving the requirements. We think the market might want this. So, let's go. Right, right, right, right, right.

Chris Gammell: And us as the consumers of making products with it, it's like, well, we think we need what you have, but it's really based on cost. It's like, if it's cheap enough, hell, yeah, I'll take that. You know, like, hell, yeah, I'll deal with the pain of using AT commands and, you know, like, low speed, low power, whatever, whatever. Because, yeah, it's good enough, right? I mean, like, that's like the balance point is an interesting difference, you know, kind of looking across the entire, like, industrial versus commercial versus, not even commercial, but, like, consumer. Like, just comparing those two, it's like such a drastically different set of how things are marketed, right? It's almost like, yeah, go ahead.

Dave Jones: This is Wi-Fi and Bluetooth? Low energy?

Chris Gammell: Okay, so this is, like, honestly, we should be very upfront here. This is a tweet. This is a tweet with a handwritten note above it. Like, honestly, like, this could be complete crap.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it shows a board. It shows a board with a chip.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but it shows a board with a chip. It's like, okay, well, yeah, it looks like a, I mean, like, come on, Dave.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but they're asking for beta testers. They're asking for beta testers. Okay, sure, sure.

Chris Gammell: Hey, Dave, I have a chip printer chip, and I'm ready to have beta testers for it. And I have a picture of that chip, and it happens to look like every other chip that's out there. But, like, honestly, there's no way to know until, I mean, like, maybe the biggest thing is that they're asking for beta testers, but, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but they're claiming very specific things. It's a Wi-Fi part, 500 DMits, 500 kilobytes of RAM, with Bluetooth low energy. Five microamps deep sleep. Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, sure, sure, sure. And they're asking people to name it, too.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, uh-huh. Call it the widget. But what I'm saying is, if it didn't exist yet, and it doesn't, apparently, or it's in process now, like, that's really good marketing, if it is. You know what I mean? Well, we're talking about it on a podcast with 10,000 listeners, so, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's good marketing. Count my attention, you know, like, but, like, but I don't think that's really the point. I think the point is that they don't necessarily need that. I mean, there might be input behind the scenes, but really it's just, like, kind of the march of technology. Like, oh, well, things expect to have Bluetooth, and things expect to have Wi-Fi, and it's just these things that we start to take for granted. Like, even, so I've been doing a lot of stuff with switchers lately, and, like, so, you know, I've been teaching switchers and, you know, bucks and boosts and buck boosts and stuff like that. And, like, kind of talk to the contextual electronics folks, and I'm just, like, you know, when you're starting out especially, it's all avoided because it's not easy to start with, right? Obviously, switching regulators are not super easy, but now, like, you know, like, I opened up my Game Boy, my old Game Boy, and, like, that thing's got a linear regulator in there. It's got four double A's, but it's also got a linear regulator. It's burning a shitload of power because it was low cost and easy, and that's what the technology available at the time was in their, you know, late 80s, early 90s kind of thing. Like, and it's just what they put in there, and now it's, like, oh, of course, of course it's got a lithium ion charger slash, you know, boost, buck boost converter slash blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, why wouldn't it have that? And we just take it for granted, you know? It's just, like, and it just kind of marches on down the line where each of these technologies kind of get folded into the expected thing that's going to be in every new product. So, yeah. So much a point. Technology becomes commoditized. I mean, that's honestly what it is. It's, like, it's commoditization of each new technology. Like, when switching converters, like, they're not new, but it's all about the cost balance against those existing technologies, right? I mean, like, even new technologies, like, what's, I don't know how to say it. It's C-U-K, but the C's got a little accent mark on it. I think it's Chuk, Chuk converter. It's a type of switching converter. Never heard of it. You know what I'm talking about?

Dave Jones: No. Is it some brand, or is it some new switching topology?

Chris Gammell: It's a switching topology, and you can, oh, yeah, it's pronounced Chuk, and I'm looking up on Wikipedia right now. The C's got a little accent on the C.

Dave Jones: So it's like a puck.

Chris Gammell: I think it's, I think someone mentioned it to me, too, because, yes, it's Slobodan Chuk. And so I think he's actually, I think it was when I was in Serbia someone mentioned it to me.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, Chuk. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no, it is. It is Serbia. Yeah, so someone from Serbia.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but they aren't new either.

Chris Gammell: They're not new either, but they're also not widely available. And why is that? Because that technology is not, and it's not like it's a hard technology either. It's just not a standardized technology. It's not a commoditized technology. And once it is, and once there's knowledge about it, including all of the training materials around it, that's when it gets integrated. And it's like, oh, well, now what are the choices? Well, we have a buck. We have a buck boost. We have a boost. We have a Chuk. We have a blah, blah, blah.

Dave Jones: We have a SIPC.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: And it's just... Well, doesn't the Chuk have to share magnetics?

Chris Gammell: Honestly, I think. Yeah, I know nothing about it, Dave.

Dave Jones: From memory, it's got... I think, you know, so that's why, you know, there's probably a reason why it's not implemented typically, because it's more of a niche kind of thing. Yeah, but you could say that about Bluetooth too, right?

Chris Gammell: Bluetooth, when it started, it was like, oh, well, you need this stack, and you need this... I mean, maybe it's different because of software versus hardware.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but that can be a chip solution in silicon. Converters are still... They still need magnetics. They still need output caps. Sure, sure, sure, sure. They still need, you know, right? And if your converter topology, like the Chuk... Chuk. Chuk. Chuk. Chuk. Chuk. Chuk. Like the Chuk, which I think, from memory, I'm probably going to embarrass myself here, but I think it's...

Chris Gammell: It's essentially a boost converter followed by a buck converter with a capacitor to couple any energy. That's what it says. Right. That's Wikipedia. Thank you, Wikipedia.

Dave Jones: But yeah, there's probably a reason why it's not popular, and that's probably because of the logistics involved in the magnetics, perhaps, or something else.

Chris Gammell: No, I always... No, sorry. I'm going to disagree with you there. I think it's always because of cost. Cost is the driver of literally everything electronics. Right. And if not because of cost to the consumer, but just because of availability, right? Once you start... As you keep lowering costs down and down and down, more people into the market, and then it basically just broadens all of your choices, and then eventually, then around that, then the only point of competition is, oh, well, who has better technical content? Oh, well, we all... You know, oh, well, we have a true converter now. We have a true converter now. We have a... Oh, well, we have a true converter, but we also have a technical training module where you can learn about it, right? And then, like... But, like, that's just... It's just an arms race. Every single new feature is an arms race in the electronics community because how else are you going to differentiate? I mean, like, looking at just, like, TI, right? How many switching converter designers are there at TI? It's got to be hundreds, like, literally hundreds, and that's just within one company. Now, imagine that broadened across the entire industry, Analog, Linear, all of these other, like, companies that are... Diode Zinc, like, I could just keep going, like Mike Krell. Like, everybody... Because there's... Because that technology is out there and because that is the broad basis of the market, like, that's where you're going to really make money, and then that's where the competition is. Right. I don't know where we're going with this, but... Sorry, I don't know where you're going. You're just rambling on. I'm just, like, ranting about switching converters, Dave. So, we were talking about Espressif and the fact that the marketing is not based around, like, very specific, targeted customers. It's around broad customer base, you know, like, multiple customers, not just five targeted customers, but hundreds, thousands of customers. And then you just kind of have to take a best guess, do a survey of the marketplace and say, well, we're going to put Bluetooth in it. It might cost a little bit more, but it'll probably be more popular that way. You know, and then, like, you got to test it against that. It's a long cycle, but it's... I think, ultimately, that's what benefits us. Like, even just the ESP8266. I mean, like, what, four bucks for a Wi-Fi chip? Even if it's a shitty Wi-Fi chip, who cares?

Dave Jones: Three bucks. Like, it's like $2.50 or three bucks for an assembled board, an assembled module. It's not just a chip. The chip's cheaper than that. Right. But the issue is, I don't think they've sorted out all the problems with that chip. Right? Yeah, everyone's raving about it. Yeah, it's, you know, the new de facto standard chip. But if you go read the forums and stuff, I believe everyone, like, bitches about it because, like, there's so many different implementations and things, and it's got bugs in this and that and all sorts of...

Chris Gammell: But that's what I'm saying about the cost thing. Like, yeah, you could say that. You can have people complain, like, oh, well, if I buy this photon with the CC2600 or whatever it's got on there and, like, all these other things. Like, I'm used to all this great service, but is it $4? You know what I mean? Right. Like, cost will win every single time. And if that wasn't true, we wouldn't see it. Right? We'd be like, oh, well, there goes the cost. It's up to $30. No, no, no. Let's go to $40. If this bulb was $15. It's $60. There it goes. It keeps going. $30. $40. You know, like... Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, it's only popular because it's cheap, of course. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But that's what drives everything, right? I mean, like, if you read any of, like, the Clay Christensen stuff, right? Like, all of the stuff about... So, like, the Innovator's Dilemma is the original book.

Dave Jones: Oh, God, not the bloody Innovator's Dilemma again.

Chris Gammell: I mean, you...

Dave Jones: You worship that book.

Speaker ?: No.

Chris Gammell: Actually, there's a lot of faults with it. But there's some key points in there about the, you know, just the cost stuff, right? I mean, like... I mean, even you, Dave, you were bitching last time. You were bitching last time. But when we had Alicia and Chris on the show, right? I paid... Yeah. I paid $150 for this watch. I expected to have out-of-the-box experience. I know you didn't pay for it. The out-of-box experience to be... I did pay for it. You did pay for it. What did you pay for it?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. $180 or something. $180. You paid $180 for... Yeah. ...absolutely perfect out-of-the-box experience for something that should have cost $1,000, right? What? Seriously, like an Apple... No. Okay, so what's... How about even just against an Apple Watch, right? An Apple Watch is $350 minimum versus, you know, onwards up to $10,000.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but no, no, no, no, no, no.

Chris Gammell: But they have a great...

Dave Jones: No, you're missing the entire point. That's what I'm saying, Dave. They do... No, they do not have a great out-of-box experience. People say the Apple Watch is just as crap out-of-the-boxes as the Pebble.

Chris Gammell: Okay, so that's a bad example. But what I'm saying is you're not willing to pay for the additional... No! ...the software and everything else... Rubbish! Really? No! You're willing to pay $500?

Dave Jones: Dude, it's got nothing to do with it. It's got nothing to do with it whatsoever. The price of that watch has nothing to do with the fact that it did absolutely nothing out of the box. That adds zero cost.

Chris Gammell: Right? Zero cost. You're saying nothing out of the box, really? So packaging and programming and everything else? None of that has any cost to it? It was their decision. It was their time, supply chain, all these things.

Dave Jones: Not bullshit. It was their deliberate decision for this thing not to do anything out of the box. Right, right. Do absolutely nothing.

Chris Gammell: So what is the... It was their deliberate decision.

Dave Jones: It's not based on cost. If this watch costs $1,000, it'll still do exactly the same thing.

Chris Gammell: What does the microcurrent do out of the box?

Dave Jones: Exactly what it says!

Chris Gammell: Okay, okay. Okay, so... No! Come on! Give me a break. I think we got a little off track here, but maybe you're right about this stuff.

Dave Jones: You're completely off track. You're missing the entire point. What I'm saying is... If what I was talking about, just like most of the people who watch my video, you just don't get it.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Aside from that, I was just trying to take a dig at you there. Aside from that, you're saying that low cost...

Dave Jones: Well, you can't take a dig if it's incorrect, if it's not justified.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I can take a dig if it's incorrect. If you're fundamentally wrong. Yeah. So, but what I'm saying, what I'm talking about was low cost driving innovation, right? And the reason I was talking about that was because of how that drives new technology. And I was talking about that in The Innovator's Dilemma when you started talking about, oh, Clay Christensen, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what that ultimately comes down to in The Innovator's Dilemma... Have you ever read it or no? You still haven't read it? Oh, I tried to. I didn't like it. No. I don't know. I was crap. So what he... It's so painful to read. So what he talks about in there, and if you remember, or maybe Bob talked about it when he was on back with Dave Vandenbout. So Bob Davidson, who's been on the show twice now, he actually was interviewed, or he's part of the group that was interviewed for that thing, but basically about the effect of bottom up versus top down type of stuff where basically new entrants in the market start with this low cost thing. Because low cost ends up driving everything, right? So basically, no matter what, like, how about in your example, right? Tell that to Tesla. How about... No. Let's use an example from your situation, right? Right. Why is Regal doing so well versus a Tektronix or an Agilent? Not better than, right? They're not better than because obviously Tektronix is Agilent still doing very well. But why do they even exist? And it's because...

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's bang per buck.

Chris Gammell: Right, exactly. They entered the market with a DS-1052Z, or what was that? What was it? Yep. Zed. Yeah, Zed. Sorry. Well, it's USC. Well, I've got to get that right. But the reason that, I mean, the reason they were able to survive, they weren't just crushed immediately is because they came in at the low end, right? That's what it always comes from. It's always the low end because that's the only entrant point. You can't just come in and be like, well, I have, you know, there's the CC2600, it's Wi-Fi chip, blah, blah, blah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but no, that's just in, okay, a lot of my, in probably the majority cases, that's true. Right. Take Tesla, for example. No, they came at the high end. You're saying Tesla's not a success? There's no comparison there. A success?

Chris Gammell: Where's the comparison in the EV market? What? I mean, they're not competing against, they weren't competing against other- They are. What? They weren't competing against established EV market. They were competing against a completely different market. There were EVs out there. No.

Dave Jones: There were EVs out there, and Tesla, there were. Who?

Chris Gammell: Name them.

Dave Jones: Bloody, Nissan. Mitsubishi. Oh, really? These all had EVs.

Chris Gammell: No, no, they were not competing against Nissan and Mitsubishi. No, the IMF.

Dave Jones: No, of course they weren't, because they deliberately chose the top down, to deliberately start at the high price end.

Chris Gammell: The reason they had succeeded was not because they were competing against the IMF and the Leaf. It's because they were competing against a Mercedes S-Class and a Mercedes everything else, right? It's, that's a different, that's a different thing completely. So that, that, I believe you would call a straw man, I believe. Ah! Ah! Anyways, the idea is that with all this stuff, with all this stuff in electronics is the, uh, the reason the Espresso, the Espressif, not the Espresso, uh, is doing so well is because even with all the complaints on a forum, right? You can get a million complaints on a forum.

Dave Jones: I know, it's caught, like it's price, I know.

Chris Gammell: Every single time, right?

Dave Jones: I totally agree.

Chris Gammell: Right, because that's how you and I search, right? When we search for components, it's like, oh, okay, well it has all these, these, these absolute must-have features on the parametrics and it's like, click, search by price, search by price. Okay, like. Oh, who is this? I don't know. Eh, it's cheap, I'll try it.

Dave Jones: Okay, after all this rabble, we've come to the stunning conclusion that cheap shit sells.

Chris Gammell: That's right, yeah.

Dave Jones: Thank you, Mr. Genius. Like, I'm stunned. Geez, I, I don't see where all this is going. Well, you were the one arguing with me.

Chris Gammell: I don't know, man.

Dave Jones: What? No, you were the one doing all the talking. You were the one slagging me off because I was talking about the pebble. You were fundamentally wrong there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Unbelievable.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Can we move on to something else?

Chris Gammell: Sure. What do you want to talk about?

Dave Jones: I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I tried to do another live show yesterday. We've had three shows without just me and you arguing. That's what it is. This is just a build-up. This is a build-up.

Dave Jones: This is why our show works. If we were both just agreeing all the time, it'd be boring as bad shit.

Chris Gammell: That's right, that's right. So you said you had a live show yesterday and you were building a CNC machine. Tell me about it.

Dave Jones: I was. Well, nothing to tell. We tried to build it and we haven't finished it yet. So I tried to watch the stream this morning. Sorry, it takes more than an hour and a half to build. We did an hour and a half live show. It took us an hour and a half to get ready for the hour and a half live show. Oh, okay. Because, yeah, live shows aren't as easy as people think. You know, we tried using XSplit, right? You know, we wanted to go live on YouTube, right? Want to use XSplit. Whoa, we had no ender problems. With all sorts of audio looping. It was so bad, somebody actually came up with a T-shirt on the spot and put it on Teespring for all the audio issues we were having. Really? It was that bad. It was hilarious, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Dave Jones: It was all sorts of weird popping and motorboating and repeating audio. Boom, boom, boom. And we came to the conclusion that somehow XSplit just did not work. It just did not work. It had some fundamental problem with it.

Chris Gammell: Pebcack.

Dave Jones: Pebcack. Going YouTube low. You know, and then we tried open broadcaster software. It didn't work either. It had similar sort of audio issues and it's got a horrible user interface. Hey, it didn't work either. Right? So we're dicking around. An hour and a half later, I just go, oh, look, I'll go back to what worked for me before, which was the one recommended by YouTube, which is the Wirecast software. And bang, with a single click, it just worked.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Yeah. So that was incredibly painful. So, yep. Anyway. So, yeah. No, it makes me realize that, which I've always realized, but it made it reinforce it again, that if you're going to have a tool for the job, you've got to have a dedicated tool for the job set up and don't touch it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I agree with that.

Dave Jones: If you're doing live shows, have a dedicated computer all set up, the mics, the cameras, everything, or software, all the protocols, all the setup, everything else, all set up, ready to go. Do not use that rig for anything else.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. We used to have that problem at Keithley. We would have test setups just like on our bench type of thing. Yeah. Right. And like, you know, we had a bounty of test equipment, but even still, you know, like you can always use more. And if someone would come by and be like, oh, can I borrow that DMM? It would just, it would blow everything apart. You know, it would just be like, you need, like if you have a production environment type of thing, even if it's not in production environment, but it's just like a standardized setup, any kind of disruption to that. And it's just, it's all over.

Dave Jones: You do. I came from a production environment and the, you know, the cardinal sin in a production environment is you steal gear from a production test jig. Like that is like, that just upsets the, you know, that just, that can waste the company millions of dollars. Right. Exactly. Exactly. I'm not kidding. Right. And I usually not touch those rigs.

Chris Gammell: You get something that's like, like a not gauge R&R or something like that. And it's like, well, this one just started this new meter. We swapped it out with a different meter, but the new meter was, you know, off by a couple of microvolts or something. And now everything looks like it's failing and we threw everything away.

Dave Jones: And that's why even five, you know, when I left there, you know, what was it? Is it seven years ago or now? I don't know. But even then we were still running Windows 3.11. Oh, wow. Right. And LabVIEW 2 or something, you know, like we were still running all that hardware because it worked. You just do not touch it. Yep. You get that production jig working and you just maintain it. That's it. You know, like.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I've had, I saw, I saw, I knew some of the test engineers that would go out and go on eBay and buy computers that were like. Oh, yeah. I'm sure we've talked about this before.

Dave Jones: You would buy an old Windows 3 computer. Yeah. Right, right. I encountered this the other day, right? I just bought and I just shelled out going, oh, look, screw this. I need a proper, dedicated industrial thermal printer for printing my labels, right? So I got one of these Zebra printers, right? They're like the de facto industry standard label printer, right? You know, I'm sick of using freaking laser printers and ink jets that just break down and it just, you know, never work. Right? Pain in the ass. So I got this proper Zebra printer. Cost me like 500 bucks or something. And it comes with a parallel port, right? Right? This is like their brand new model, right? It does not even have Ethernet in it. You can buy one with Ethernet in it. It's like 300 bucks more or something. Right? But it comes with Centronics parallel port and a USB port as well. But why does a brand new product come with a Centronics printer port?

Chris Gammell: I can tell you the exact reason for that.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Right? No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: It was actually what we were talking about earlier in the show where you have five customers and the five customers are telling you that they all have parallel ports and that they better have parallel ports on a new machine. That they just get. So, yeah, that's exactly why.

Dave Jones: It's backward compatibility with old, in this case, old production test systems. People, you know, there's big warehouses everywhere that they don't want to change their system. They don't want to change their drivers because they just bought their printer, broke down, and they want to buy a new one. Yep. Right? The new model must be backward compatible.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Must have that Centronics parallel port on it.

Chris Gammell: Crazy.

Dave Jones: You know?

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's, you know, that's what those industries, that's how those industries continue to work.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: Anyway, live show is a pain in the ass. So, anyway, that's the plan. Set up a dedicated machine and just stick with it. Nice. Don't touch it. It just works.

Chris Gammell: Nice. Yeah. So, I've been thinking about this stuff, not for, I've got my recording setup. You've got your rake. Set up. No problem there. But I've been thinking about this actually for kind of just like the stability of a setup over time and thinking about, like, especially if you're, like, making the same board over and over again and having a set of components and stuff like that. I know you've talked about project boxes in the past, right? That's kind of how you do it. Like, when you're, like, per project you'll have a box just for the parts for.

Dave Jones: Oh, hey, right. A box is just for the parts for that project. Right. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yes. So, one of my students started doing, and I've actually seen this once or twice before online, but I had actually never seen it with the specific thing. But postcard holders, have you ever seen that? So, like, binder based? Postcard holders. Postcards. So, like, they're actually, like, so, like, you can get, like, like, collection, like, if you're, like, if you collect postcards or, I don't know, like, four by six, like, photos, I guess. Right.

Dave Jones: So, they're little, so they're almost like a photo albums you're talking about.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, almost like photo albums inside a three ring binder. And so, he posted about this, about, like, for component storage, and then he started doing the same thing with, like, if you got, like, a label printer as well. And I was just like, oh, man, why? Like, honestly, like, I have, I've been doing, like, kind of, like, the project box type thing, but kind of ad hoc. Where it's, like, every time DigiKey sends me a box, I just kind of maintain that box. And, ugh.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: So, I'm...

Dave Jones: Yep. I've actually got plans in this area. I won't say too much more, but, yeah, plans are afoot. Okay. Yep. Okay. In this area.

Chris Gammell: Nice. Yeah, so I'm definitely, I'm definitely going to be switching over to binders, because, like, you know, the other thing is, like, especially, so I used to do, I think I've talked about on the show before, I used to do file folders, where, and that was, like, for, like, I would, you know, I'd have reels of resistors and baggies type of thing, or reels of, you know, like, you know, LM317s or tubes of 317s, that kind of thing. And then I would just throw them in a file folder in, like, the little dangly folders that kind of hang in a file cabinet type of thing. And that worked okay. Right. But I, that still was, like, you still had to kind of sift through it, and it wasn't labeled. And, but I just really like this binder idea. I know that binders, like, again, binders are not new, but, but something about it just kind of struck a chord with me, where it was like, yes.

Dave Jones: You can buy these on eBay, you can buy, like, you know, the resistor and cap packs on eBay, and they actually come in binders. Yes. Some of them come in binders.

Chris Gammell: Right, and I've seen those, and those are for, like, the cut tape, but they're, like, a very limited length and width and stuff like that. I wanted to, like, you know, because I always buy, like, 100 or 250 at a time, and they're already all rolled up, and I wanted a place to store those. And that's kind of the real thing there, so. So, uh.

Dave Jones: Right, right, so you need more of a pouch that you can put the digikey bag. Exactly. Anesthetic bag into. That's what you're talking about. Exactly right.

Chris Gammell: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. So, so that's kind of coming for me. Uh, I, I don't know. We'll see how that all works out, because, I don't know about you, but, like, when I was, like, in school, I used to, like, rebel against three ring binders. And. Right, okay. So we'll see, we'll see how that actually works against, uh. Yep. Reality. But I think it's, I think it's a really good solution, so. I don't know. Yep. We'll see.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Yeah. And we'll see what plans I have afoot in this area. Oh, yes. Right, Dave also. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Has something going on there. Uh. Yep.

Dave Jones: Well, along with quite a few things, I've got something going on. Dave is a. Yeah, well, you know, they might eventually pop out the end. Right, right. Somewhere. Yep. Well, they may just, yeah, go on my dead projects pile.

Chris Gammell: That's okay. Hmm.

Dave Jones: We'll see. Yep. Not enough hours in the day.

Chris Gammell: Uh. Uh. What should we talk about next? We've talked about some of this stuff.

Dave Jones: People, people want a chip of the week. People want a chip of the week. Oh yeah, they did mention that. Yeah. We've got so many people wanting chip of the week.

Chris Gammell: So you have one.

Dave Jones: I will give you a chip of the week.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: It is the, um. Uh. Uh. Little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little. Here we go. It is the AD8232. The analog devices AD8232. Tell us about it. It's a specialized. It's a specialized chip, which I love these specialized chips. It's an ECG heart rate monitor front end. And I am working on something at the moment that requires this little puppy. And, um. Yeah. Instead of like rolling your own front end with your instrumentation amp and everything. Right. This, this does it. And it gives you an audio output. Right. That you can just feed into, you know, any, any sort of ADC type or any system that can, you know, a sample audio. Um. For your ECG heart rate. So it takes care. It's, it's the three wire system that takes care of, you know, measuring your ECG heart rate signal.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. That's really nice. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's all just taken care of.

Chris Gammell: Well, because I think the real, the key thing with a lot of these, uh, these ECG and similar body, body signal systems is, is actually not necessarily the, the instrumentation amp I think is really well characterized. It's actually the, uh, it's the, the driver circuit, right? So you're driving current. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Against, against the, the ground loop type of thing. Right. I mean, that's kind of the idea. Yep. So, and, and the price on this one actually looks really good too. I mean, like really good, like two bucks, three bucks type of thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You can buy like a fully assembled, um, board from, um, SparkFun for like 20 bucks or something. Oh, that's even better. Yeah. Like a board, which is populated, it has all the labels and you can just wire it up. And yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm just looking at like single quantity price, like.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Three bucks. Fairly good. Five bucks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a, that's a nice.

Dave Jones: For a specialized application like this, that's, that's a good price.

Chris Gammell: Well, cause I've seen similar chips before that are like, oh yeah, $25 per chip.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: I don't think so.

Dave Jones: But sometimes you have no choice, right? Because that, that chip is, is the key to your product. Yeah. That's right. Right. Yeah. So, you know, sometimes you just got to pony up. Right.

Chris Gammell: Sometimes. Yes. Yes. Wow, Dave. What? No, that was just like really good radio. That was really good radio. Thank you. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Making pony.

Chris Gammell: Impressions. Oh my God. Yeah. So that's, that's good. And, and like people, like you said, people are asking about the chip of the week. Uh, so we will try to get more of that in there. They also asked. They also asked. To do a chip of the week. They also asked about like, so I asked about in the survey about, uh, what's your favorite part of the amp power? And people are like, there's parts? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yes. There's parts. Just. Oops. Sorry. Uh, but anyways, yeah. Uh, yeah. I don't know what I'm saying now, but yeah, there are parts. Damn it. Uh, damn you. Don't understand our show. Listeners. Yeah. Seriously. We have structure here somewhere. We'll find it someday. Uh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Cause we kind of like, cause that's how we started the show. I mean, you know, like we, we started it cause that's like, we thought how you had to do a show like this or whatever. We thought that was the best way. And we, you know, like we tried to have those different segments and in the end it just, I don't know what, within a dozen episodes, it sort of fell into. Yeah. You know, just a rabble. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Just a free for all. We used to do a history. We used to do history as well.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes. That's right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Actually, there were some, I put some history on here about Einstein the other day. Oh, where was it? It was something about Einstein. Basically it was like a hundred. I think it was when, oh, I think it was an Alicia and Chris Heron. It was the, uh, Einstein. It was 110th anniversary of, of the theory of relativity, of general relativity being, or maybe special. Yep. But being submitted to the patent office.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Right. That was 1905. Or did he submit it in 04?

Chris Gammell: No, no. I think it was submitted in 05 but accepted in 06 type of thing. But like all that stuff. It's like, like all of these things are like base five, base 10, like totally arbitrary. Like, okay, maybe a hundred.

Chris Gammell: Right. But even still, like, yeah, it's a long time in the past. You know what I mean? Like, like, is it really history just because it's the same day? I don't, I don't know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, I'd rather talk about current stuff anyways. Right. One thing that I did want to mention that was from a long time, not a long, two weeks ago. Did you see the link I posted about optically clear aluminum provides bulletproof protection? Did you see that article that I posted?

Dave Jones: I did. I saw you posted it but I didn't click through.

Chris Gammell: Do you know why?

Dave Jones: Transparent aluminum.

Chris Gammell: Do you know why I was so excited about that?

Dave Jones: Well, it was in the Star Trek episode four. That's right. Star Trek four.

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right. Where he goes, you know where they traded it for, like, plexiglass? Yeah, yeah. And then Scotty's talking to the computer. He's like, computer. Computer? Computer? Computer.

Dave Jones: Oh, a keyboard. Just use a keyboard. A keyboard? How quite. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, you know. And, you know, and he just uses the Macintosh.

Chris Gammell: And then he's typing away with one finger at a time. Oh, man.

Dave Jones: Yeah, even though the Macintosh can't do shit with keyboard only, can it? I don't know. Yeah, right. Yeah, you know. Yeah, it's just, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I know. And these are, like, the silly, like, some of this is, like, this could actually be really cool, but, you know, it's, like, one of those, like, what's that one? Fizorg.com or Fiz.org or whatever. I forget what it is. But, like, you know, it's always, like, these, oh, nanowire is doing crazy thing. And it's, like, well, we could talk about this, but the chance of this actually happening, it's, like, this is research. Research.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right, right. Yeah, it's titling.

Chris Gammell: Like we talked about earlier in the show, right? It's, like, okay, even if you get it to the point where it's commercially viable, where you have five customers buying it, right? Like Dave's former company buying it for $100 a pop type of thing at $10,000 at a time. That's great. But that's not, that's not, like, wide adoption. You know, wide adoption is the...

Dave Jones: No, as we always... Yeah. ...is you can buy it on DigiKey. We always say that here.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Call us when you can buy it on DigiKey. Yep, exactly. That's exactly right. I mean, like, honestly, like... Yeah. And to be honest about that, too, we should be honest about that, too. By the time you can buy it on DigiKey, it's almost commodity. It's not quite commodity because they have a lot of parts and stuff like that. But, like, come on. Like, if you can buy it, it's not specialized. There's nothing special. There's not... It's not that it's not special. It's that you're not doing anything in the supply chain where there's any risk associated with it because, you know, you're not, like, going to them and be like, okay, well, I'm the one buying this or I'm one of five companies buying this. You don't have anything that, like, someone else couldn't just go and design, right? Like, what are you going to do? Oh, well, I put a different value resistor on there. Yeah, well, Dave just ripped apart your damn product and he can see what the value is. He can measure it. You know, like, that's the difference. Like, there is no mystique there unless you're moving it onto chip type of thing. So, by the time you can buy it at DigiKey these days, it's almost commodity. Granted, you know, there's such a wide spread that it's not really commodity. But, you know, like, that's a thing, you know. Like, if anyone can buy it, then anyone can do what you're doing. You know, like, there has to be some secret sauce in every product. And if it's on DigiKey, it's reliable. It might be reliable, but it's also not secret sauce. That's the corollary to Dave's, if you can buy it, you know, if you can buy it on DigiKey thing. So, I don't know.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Yeah. So, what's the, yeah. So, transparent aluminum is like, yeah, so they made it in a lab somewhere. I think that would be, if you can buy it on McMaster, right?

Chris Gammell: That's the difference.

Dave Jones: So, you can buy it at Bunnings, local hardware store. Right. Yeah, he's my transparent aluminum sheet. Right, right, right, right, right. You know. Yeah. It does the same thing as, you know, 10 inches, but only does it in one inch thick. Yeah. That's from the movie. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So. How do we know he didn't invent the thing? Yeah, exactly. We're changing the future.

Chris Gammell: So, speaking of teardowns, so we did, you know, I mentioned teardowns, like you always do them, but I was actually interested to see as well, this one, the coin card. Have you seen, did you see the coin when that came out? The coin? I have no idea what the coin is. So, the coin was supposed to be like a, I'm not sure actually how it happened. I think you might enter the credit card info online, I think. But basically, the idea is that you would have, you somehow collect all of your credit card info into a single source, and then you just carry this one source around with you, and then that can do RFID type of authentication. But also, I think it could do swipe authentication as well, where it could emulate, it could emulate your swipe, the swipe magnetics of your normal card.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And basically, it could kind of do everything.

Dave Jones: Who the hell swipes anymore? Like, seriously, in this country, we don't swipe.

Chris Gammell: Right. You guys do chip and pen.

Dave Jones: We all have smart, we have all smart cards, so we just plug the, like, if we tap it. Yeah. Like, so, if it's under 100 bucks, we tap it. If it's over 100 bucks, we have to plug it in, and the chip.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and then you do the pin number thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and actually, that's just started coming to the States, actually. We're way behind on that, because I know that Australia and Europe. Yeah, yeah, totally. When I was in Europe, that was the same thing. But yeah, so this, and maybe that's the downfall of this device, but, you know, it's interesting just from the technology side, because when you have to emulate that magnetic strip as it goes through a reader.

Dave Jones: I'm looking inside the teardown here, yeah, they've got some, got two big coils, like long strips, long coils in there to emulate the magnetic.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and that's kind of cool. And I mean, like, it could be also used for nefarious purposes.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but that's got redundant written all over it. Like, you know, because, yeah, like, the magnetic strips go on the way of the Dodo,

Chris Gammell: or it has here, so. You, like, you can't even do it there anymore? Like, they won't do it?

Dave Jones: Oh, well, you can. You can, but nobody, well, I think you can. I can't remember the last time I did it. I can't remember the last time I actually magnetically swiped. There might be a few old readers around, which I've done it, but, you know, they're, most all are, you know, the chip and pin.

Chris Gammell: Interesting. No, no, no, I mean, that's interesting from a market fit type perspective, where it's like, well, we have this technology now. Anyone? Right. Right. Yeah, so, I don't know, I just thought it was interesting, because this person did a tear down. I don't know, I mean. This is actually, it wasn't a Kickstarter, but it was a pre-purchase type thing, and maybe the pre-purchase, like, they took a while to deliver as well, so maybe they just waited too long. I don't know. I mean, obviously this is because this one broke, but.

Dave Jones: So what's the idea here? You replace every card in your wallet with this one card. Is that the idea?

Chris Gammell: That's the idea. Yep, yep, yep.

Dave Jones: Right, so you only have to carry one card. Well, how does it do it for chip and pin?

Chris Gammell: I have no idea. Like, literally, I have no idea.

Dave Jones: I don't even think it does.

Chris Gammell: I don't think you could, because you'd have to have some, I mean, because the chip and pin has, like, authentication, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, it's got authentication. So this would be useless here in Australia. If you could copy it, then it ruins the whole chip and pin system.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Right?

Dave Jones: It just, yeah, right. So, yeah, I don't know how that can be of any use here at all. I don't either.

Chris Gammell: Like, honestly, I have no idea. But. The coin card. Yeah. No, no, it was, it was, it was very highly anticipated around here, and then it took a while to deliver. Right. And then, and then obviously this guy did a teardown, so. The teardown, I mean, but teardowns are, like, I think you'll agree that teardowns are interesting, right? Yeah. I hope so. Oh, yeah, no, no, no, time.

Dave Jones: I'm having a look at the photos now.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, absolutely fascinating, right? Yeah, I just. I can't tell what the, oh, it says it's the Nordic 5182, 822. Yeah, so the Bluetooth, yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, I, I, I like the concept of being able to hold all your magnetic swipes on the one thing and then be able to swipe. So, it's only for swiping, right? So, it doesn't do, like, pay pass or anything like that.

Chris Gammell: No, no, I think it's got RFID on board, I think. So, I think. Oh, it's got RFID. I think that's what the square is, yeah.

Dave Jones: I thought that was, like, a secure system. And if you could copy that all into the one card, you would, the system would be broken, right? So, I don't. Yeah, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: It's getting into the realm of, like, hashes and all the security of the crypto crap. Right. And I just don't get that, so. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No. I thought the idea of the chip and pin is that it is secure and you can't, somebody can't duplicate your card.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's right, because there's some kind of, like, talk back type of thing, like, where it's, you know, it does a handshake. Some single-way hash or something. I don't know.

Dave Jones: We're talking about our security assholes.

Chris Gammell: I'm talking about my hash right now. Yep.

Dave Jones: Right. I do like how they've integrated the coil in there to emulate the magnetic field for the thing. I think that's quite normal. Yeah, that's very cool. As I said here, that's, like, yeah, it's pretty much useless here. Yeah. So. Interesting. I mean, you backward yanks.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right, right. We're the backwaters of the world here, Dave.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of magnetics, did you see the upgrade from Tesla?

Dave Jones: They, yeah, isn't it? Yeah. Some. Ludicrous speed. I read some detail on that. Ludicrous speed. That's it. Yep. Ludicrous speed. It's like they've got some. Now, it's all to do with the fusing, apparently. That's correct. Of the battery pack. Smart fusing. They upgrade your fusing. Smart fusing. So they ups and they can give you, like, an extra 20% peak current or something. Right.

Chris Gammell: And what that really, yeah.

Dave Jones: Is the outflow and the fuse.

Chris Gammell: So the big thing you get with ludicrous speed is basically the acceleration. And if you think about that. Yeah. If you talk about, like, a motor there, it's, like, about the current dump into the motor in an instantaneous way. And the reason there's fusing there is because if you do too much, flames come out.

Dave Jones: Fusing's always a balance. It's like you want to protect your battery pack, which can explode, but you want to give enough current to your circuit for peak stuff. So fusing is always a big, in a lot of product design, is a big trade-off. Oh, see, now, I thought the fuse was... You want to be as safe as possible.

Chris Gammell: I thought the fuse was in line with the motor, not the... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's for the battery. I thought it was in the pack. Yeah, no, I think you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's in the pack. Yeah, they upgrade the thing in your pack. Because you want it, you know, a big part of the Tesla, like, you know, you've basically got a bomb there, right? This is almost what certainly brought down the seven, you know, that MH17.

Chris Gammell: Oh, the flight? Or whatever it is, that plane that's still missing, right?

Dave Jones: The flight that's still missing, right? It was there. Yeah, everyone says, you know, most likely, yeah, it was the two tons of lithium-ion batteries on there, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right, and they have had fires with that kind of stuff, too, in the airlines.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they've had fires, right? And, yeah, so this is, like, one big fire bomb thing waiting to happen in Tesla, and a core part of their technology is safe, right?

Chris Gammell: Okay, so the idea here is actually that the limiting factor was the battery pack. I see now, I thought it was against...

Dave Jones: Yes, yes.

Chris Gammell: ...when you limited what was coming into the motor, but it's actually what's limiting what's going out of the battery. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yes, because, as I said, it's a big trade-off between safety. You want to protect your product. You want it to be safe and not catch on fire and explode. Right. But you want to deliver peak currents. I mean, it's, you know...

Chris Gammell: Right, right, because the battery is also the naturally limiting thing, because there's internal resistance and that kind of thing, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Exactly.

Dave Jones: I think, you know, the motor's just copper wire, right? It'll take as much... You know, as long as you cool the thing, it'll take as much power as you can dump in there.

Chris Gammell: See, that's what I was thinking about, though, is that because it would take as much as you give, that's why you would limit it, but it actually makes more sense on the battery side. No.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's the batteries. And the interconnects and everything, you know, they've got these huge ass interconnects and everything else, right? Yeah. So, yeah, so they're getting that down. So you can put your Tesla in for an upgrade for this ludicrous speed option, I think. Dave, I don't know, man.

Chris Gammell: You're like 10 years my senior. I think that you're closer to getting a Tesla than I... I know that there's, like, all the import crap, but, like, I think you need to get one first.

Dave Jones: There are $150,000 here. But it's Australian dollars. It's basically fun money. Because our Australian dollar is shit, right? At the moment, it's like 74 US cents or something, right? Is it really that low? Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's going lower, right? It's trending lower. Wait, does that mean if I go there that I'll get showered in gold?

Chris Gammell: Is that, like, the idea?

Dave Jones: Yes, you can live like a king here. Yeah, you can...

Chris Gammell: Going to Australia, guys.

Dave Jones: You can buy one of our overpriced Sydney houses for a reasonable price.

Chris Gammell: Well, I should probably rent one for a couple days, but, yeah, that works, too.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you know. You can, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I can, like, eat a kangaroo for, like, less than normal kangaroo prices.

Dave Jones: Yep. Your Yankee buck goes a long way in it. Get some, what do you guys call it? It's gone as low as 50. Skippy. Right. Skippy, yeah. You can eat Skippy. It's gone as low as 50 cents before. It won't go that low again. Oof. I don't think, but, you know, all the talk is it's trending towards 65.

Chris Gammell: Good Lord.

Dave Jones: Maybe.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Like, you know, the most, you know, the most, you know, the most pessimistic person is saying 60, you know, kind of. But it has gone as low as 50 before. And, yeah, so you're, if you came to Australia, your Yankee dollar would instantly buy twice as much here. And... Nice. And that was a big deal. We actually had a lot of American investment when it was that low, you know? Yeah. A lot of Americans would come here and set up businesses and they'd buy property and houses and businesses and all sorts of stuff. And then when it went back, we were, and then it went back to $1.10.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Where our dollar was actually stronger than your dollar. Right. It was worth more.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: And then it's, yeah, it's flipped around again and, eh, bloody currency. Yeah. Currency's a pain in the ass.

Chris Gammell: So, like, if it drops low enough, I can get, like, the office space next to yours and I could just, like, install a speaker there and be, like...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: So I'd be, like, the virtual office mate, you know? Like, I'd be, like...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Playing music at all hours of the day type of thing. Streaming audio. Oh, dear. Dear, dear. Anyway, yes, perfect time to come here for a holiday, dude. Okay. Okay. I'm thinking about it. I've had some people... Yeah. I've talked to some people about it. Obviously, I've talked to you about it before. Yep. But, yeah, I've talked about it. Just gotta... I think I would go there when it's freezing cold here.

Dave Jones: I was gonna say, summer's... Summer will be here before you know it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Owl, summer.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I like that. Hmm. Maybe. Yep. We'll get there. Someday, folks. Me and Dave shall meet in person. We'll shake hands.

Dave Jones: Because I'm not getting to the U.S.

Chris Gammell: And then probably get in a fight. Right.

Dave Jones: Drunken pub rule. Right. If you drank, then definitely. The chip printer's never gonna work. Take this, you bastard. Right. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Oh, man. Ah, dear. So, let's see. We've talked about a lot of stuff. The only thing I haven't talked about... So, I've been doing hot plate stuff, finally. You know, all these years later. Just like how we haven't met all these years later.

Dave Jones: I haven't done hot plate stuff. Yeah, but you're doing it lame. Haven't you, like, upgraded to, like, a toaster oven?

Chris Gammell: I have a toaster oven. I've been afraid to turn it on, to be honest. So, I bought, like, a $20, you know, just a skillet, actually. Skillet from, like, Walmart with just a big hunk of aluminum in the middle. It's like a heat spreader. It just worked okay. Really, it's about... I've been too lazy to get stencils. But everything else is... I mean, like, obviously, this is nothing. Like, literally nothing.

Dave Jones: So, how do you apply your paste? Do you go around and individually syringe?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I got... So, I got the Pico, which I think we've talked about on here before.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The little syringe thing.

Dave Jones: And people think that's a dumb way. It's not. If you've got a smallish board, it's just easy to get there with a syringe and just go squirt, squirt, squirt on each pad. It doesn't... Right. In fact, you know, with, like, you don't even... With, like, you know, if you've got a quad flat pack chip, you know, a 44 pin or whatever. Yeah. Even a huge one. Like, it's not like you go around and you have to dab paste on each one. You just do a line. Right. You just do a line across. And the solder mask takes care of it. Like, the surface tension and the solder mask take care of everything. You don't end up with shorts.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, the key there is just not too... Like, my big problem is, like, I'm like, oh, well, I should use a ton of solder paste. And it's like, that's the big problem. You should use... Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you should probably err on the left side. You know, you could always solder Wicked off later. But, yeah, like, it doesn't take that long to get the hang of, like, how much you should probably put on. And it's like... But you should put less than you think. Right.

Chris Gammell: A couple of Osh Spark boards later and I'm like, oh, like, as long as I don't burn myself, I'm doing okay now, basically.

Dave Jones: So, yeah. So, you don't need stencils. Like, you know, if you've got, like, a lot of passives and stuff like that, yeah, it's a pain, right? You've got to go around and squirt every pad, right? But if you've got, like, a lot of chips, then you don't need a stencil. Just, you know, just a line on all four sides. Or if you've got an SO package, two lines of paste done in half a second.

Chris Gammell: I think the hard part is just... Like, in the past, I've been doing a lot of double-sided boards. And it's really... I mean, you can do double-sided and just do the top side as reflow. But, like, even then...

Dave Jones: Well, that's... If you're doing double-sided, this is where you'd use your heat gun instead of the skillet. So, you do one side, right? And then you'd put your paste on the other side and your chips on the other side. Then you'd just go around with the heat gun and that would instantly... Right. And I've been mixing those two as well. Rather than using an oven.

Chris Gammell: And that's how I was watching your video as well about just, like, stenciling and stuff like that. And, like... So, the real thing about it is, like, honestly, what it's come down to is I... So, I've been searching for parts recently. And it's just getting to the point where it's, like, probably half the parts, you know, depending on what you're going with. Like, just all of the silicon processes that are going on. And then because they want to reduce inductance and capacitance off to the chip type, like, everything's just getting smaller and smaller by necessity. And it's really starting to limit me. I mean, like, I can't even get some certain parts where I'm like, oh, well, that's a DFN. I don't want to do that with, you know, I don't want to hand side of that. It's like, Chris, you can't limit yourself there. You know, like, you're literally cutting out half of the parts in the ecosystem now. And it's just not realistic anymore. So, yeah. I don't know.

Dave Jones: They're still paying the ass parts of that, like. I still sometimes just refuse to use them.

Chris Gammell: I still haven't done BGA with just a stencil or anything like that. I'm sure I'll get there eventually. I have done stencils. Stencils are interesting. I've done ush stencil. That was a good experience so far. But, yeah. I don't know. Not there yet. So, it's worth trying. For sure.

Dave Jones: Totally. Yeah. I'm going to do more soldering videos, I think. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. I want to do, like, a summary video. I want to do. This is the plan. I'll tell you the plan. Like, because my soldering video is very popular. Like, half a million views, right? But they're, like, 40 minutes long or something. Crazy. Lots of babble. I was going to do, like, you know, top five tips in five minutes. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of, right. Like, a real just, yeah. Dumbass five-minute summary. You know? Yeah. Really quick and, you know.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. I think that kind of stuff's good, though. I mean, like, that's the kind of quick hit stuff that a lot of people like. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, that's the plan.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Cool. I like it. All right. Wait, why are you over time? We are. We are.

Chris Gammell: I should announce. I'm going to be in Boston starting tomorrow. Well, it's probably today if I'm going to be posting this episode tomorrow. But I'll be there through Friday. There is a Hackaday event that I'll be at. And everybody's welcome to attend at Artisan's Asylum on Thursday night the 23rd. So, come on out to that. There will be beer and pizza, I think, and stuff like that. So, and talks and blah, blah, blah. So, we'll try and televise it, too.

Speaker ?: So.

Dave Jones: Awesome. Awesome.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Also, Sydney Maker Faire. Yeah. In, like, three weeks or something. I think it's, like, the 15th, the weekend of the 15th of August.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Am I right? I'll just have a quick, yeah, the 15th and the 16th.

Chris Gammell: And you will be talking. Of August, I believe it is. You'll have a booth or just doing a project or what are you doing there?

Dave Jones: No, I'll be there. There's no plans to give a talk or anything. Okay. Or, no, unlike last. Like, if they ask me, then I might give a talk. I haven't got any plans. I'll just be there. I'll be there for the two days, I believe. Okay. Great. I haven't talked about the wife. I haven't talked to the wife yet, but I assume I can get both days. And I'll be roaming around, so I'm not hard to find. I'm the guy carrying all sorts of camera gear. He's the loud one.

Chris Gammell: He's the loud one, folks.

Dave Jones: Yeah. The loud one. And hopefully I'll have a little project to show off. But anyway, that's.

Chris Gammell: Do you guys do, like, meetups while you're there or anything like that or no? I mean, like, do you have, like, a pub meetup afterwards or anything?

Dave Jones: Well, I thought about that last year and it just all didn't come together. I'm telling you, man.

Chris Gammell: Just, like, find a local pub and just be like, we're meeting here at this time and that's all you need. Like, literally, that's all you need for meetings. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Buy your own drinks. You know, like, that's.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep. Yeah. No, no, no. Totally. I was going to. Yeah. I might organize something this year. Yeah. Yep. Totally. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, if so, we will definitely post that to the Amp Hour subreddit and people should definitely check. There's actually a bunch of other links that we didn't get to today. A lot of cool stuff on there. Mostly because we didn't. We've had three guest shows in a row. But, you know, that was awesome having all those guests on. So, definitely check out the subreddit. That's always a good time. And there's some cool stuff on there. So, cool.

Dave Jones: And I'll also mention I've got t-shirts available. Again, I've got my Flux Capacitor one. Nice. Which I don't make available all the time. It's for like for another five days. Okay. With the Back to the Future, the October 21st deadline coming up, you want to have a t-shirt to wear on the day. Yep. And this is the one. So. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So, one more thing about this. I was looking at my phone today and I have an AccuWeather app and it has a minute cast. And I was looking at it today because I was going out to walk my dogs and it was raining. And then I saw it was like, it had like the thing to the minute where it's like, it'll stop raining in 15 minutes. And it did. And I'm like, this is like Doc Brown when he goes back into the future. You know what I mean? Like 2015. I'm like. It's the future.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's not hard. You just watch the radar. I can do that. They have radar. I'm going to go. Yeah. But it has a minute cast, Dave. That's what I'm saying.

Chris Gammell: It's like it tells you the rain will stop in one minute. Like. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's so great. Nice.

Chris Gammell: All right. So. All right. I'll talk to you next week. We have a surprise guest already scheduled and everything. So. It may be an Aussie.

Dave Jones: Woohoo. Woo. I know who it is for a change. Yeah. See you then. Catch you next time. Bye. Bye.

Dave Jones: Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye.