#321 – Monster Scale Production

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded October 27th, 2016. Episode 321. Monster Scale Production.

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: We're back.

Chris Gammell: Hey, buddy. Welcome back. Thank you very much. You missed Brent last week, but that turned out to be a good show.

Dave Jones: I did, because I wasn't there. No, no, no, no. Sorry. I didn't mean that. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: No, I meant it was just a good conversation.

Dave Jones: It was a good show in spite of me being there.

Chris Gammell: No. No. It was just a good guest, you know. So, if people missed it, I just always want to point people back. It's really interesting when I look at the... If people don't know, we actually do have a recommended guest thing. And that's always helpful when people add to the Google Doc there. But it's really funny when people are like, you should have Mike Harrison on or Jerry Ellsworth on. And it's like, look. We also have this thing where we can look at the back catalog of all the guests. Yeah. So, please look at those, too. But, yeah. So, I just want to remind people. That's a thing.

Dave Jones: Yes. Your favorite person may have already been on the Amp Hour.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Yeah.

Dave Jones: With our hundreds of episodes, it's likely.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Some of them multiple times. So, and more to come. We got lots of great ones lined up in the future. So, I'm excited about that.

Dave Jones: So, the reason why I wasn't on last week is because Chris changed it from Thursday to Friday at the last minute. And, yeah. And I already had plans for Friday. So, yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. These things happen. That's it. Got to reschedule meetings and such, right? This is like our, this is like an engineering meeting for us. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right. You've got news, apparently, which you refused to tell me before the show.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. Refused.

Dave Jones: Well, no. You said it's probably better if you don't tell me.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: And you tell me live.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. So, pure reaction from Dave.

Dave Jones: Am I going to be shocked?

Chris Gammell: No. No, I don't think so. So, I'm actually launching.

Dave Jones: Is it going to be a told you so?

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

Speaker ?: Oh.

Dave Jones: Well, where's the fun?

Chris Gammell: I don't know. Anyway. So, my new thing. So, I am announcing that I am going to start doing pro bono engineering work, actually. Oh. So, there's.

Dave Jones: For those. Please explain pro bono. Pro bono is often referred to in like. Is it Latin?

Chris Gammell: Yes. It means for the. Probably Latin. Good of humanity, I think. Greater good or something. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. But it's often referred to for like legal work or medical work, stuff like that. Yeah. And you don't really hear about it in engineering because obviously there's just a lot more. I mean, not legal and medical have this too, but you just don't hear about it as much. There are some institutions that do that, like engineering without borders, things like that. But mine is.

Dave Jones: I have not heard of engineering without borders. I've heard of doctors without borders, which is a great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, that's a great charity.

Dave Jones: Secular organization I support. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, I totally like those guys. So.

Dave Jones: Okay. I'm going to have to Google engineers without borders. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Engineers without borders. They'll do that. So, like I have some friends that used to do that in college. They'll go to like, you know, places and help design a well.

Speaker ?: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: Like, right. Physically. Okay. Yes. Actually, I know. Yeah. I've got friends who do some of that sort of thing. I didn't know there was an organization for it though.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yep. And so, this is much less altruistic. I mean, like I am very interested in helping people, but actually this is for me. This is for me to keep my skills up. People may, may not. That's a good idea. May not know. You know, I do a lot less. So, my main day job is actually product management. And so, I've been getting away from the hardware side of things. And, you know, I still do stuff for contextual electronics, but also I am interested in, you know, hearing what people are working on, helping them out. And so, that's what I'm going to do. So, there's a whole bunch of conditions and I have a post I'm going to be publishing. There are rules. Right. Exactly. But, so, basically it's going to be about five hours a week, probably on the weekends for me.

Dave Jones: Okay. So, you've devoted a number of hours.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. I mean, up to five hours.

Dave Jones: Rather than just to go, oh, this is the coolest thing ever and I'll work 20 hours a week on it.

Chris Gammell: Well, and it could, I mean, it could end up being like that, but like basically I have to, I have to limit myself because, you know, it's just, I don't want to over, over promise either. Right. So, and that's really what the conditions are. So, the main thing is people that need help would have to pay for parts, stuff like that. That's just common sense. But, it'll be in KiCad. I have to be able to talk about it on here, elsewhere. But, basically, there's an online form that I set up as well and I will definitely link that below. And, you know, and so, there's other things too. Oh, let's keep going. Some things I might tell you that you should be doing it yourself, depending on your background and stuff like that. And some things I will say that it's too intricate. So, there are definitely some things there, but I definitely want to help people out as well. So, if there's, you know, design reviews, stuff like that as well. Like, there's a range of things that I'm willing to help with. But, like I said, I'm doing this for myself. I'm offering my services to stay sharp and stuff like that. So, the form will have things like your links to your existing documentation, competitive analysis, whatever, you know, reason why you're doing what you're doing, that kind of stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh, you might be inundated. You might spend all your five hours just looking at entries.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, maybe. But, that's okay.

Dave Jones: You know? Yeah. Be careful. Did we talk about this on a previous show? I'm not sure, but I've seen it somewhere. And it was, there was this astro, like, she was like an astrophysicist or something. And she did this. She actually put on her blog, she opened that, hey, I will accept, you know, I'll, you know, if you've got an interesting idea or whatever, you know, come and talk to me and I'll give you my professional astrophysicist opinion for free. You know? And A, she got inundated. And B, almost all of them were all crackpot, you know, free energy type people. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, so, I trust the people in our audience, of course. And I think that the forum will have enough stuff on there that it'll be pretty easy to tell. That kind of stuff.

Dave Jones: Maybe you could have, like, a community voting system.

Chris Gammell: No, definitely not. Not? Not? That is a terrible idea. Yeah. No, no, no. This is all up to me. I am the judge and jury. And, you know, it's, I do want to address the point that, like, you know, people often talk about, well, should I be doing, you know, should I be giving work away for free? You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. and I think it's different when someone approaches you and say hey I really need your help but I can't pay you yeah that's different than someone saying I'm willing to do free I know it's probably a blurry line in the sand kind of thing but I think it's different I think that people should value their hours and I'm not absolutely I'm not able to you know you can't actually I think some people can write off pro bono stuff but it's not like I'm going to be writing off anything it's just but you know there is there is a tangible value to this kind of not tangible but I guess there is a value that I recognize with this so so yeah it is it's all up to me but I'd love to hear what people need help with and you know I so I'll have a form and I'll have more details I'm going to be publishing that on my blog and yeah I'm excited I don't know I think there's just a lot of I'm excited to help people right for sure especially if there's absolutely a project that's you know definitely need some some help um and excited to build out of their skills and stuff like that so hopefully it's mutually beneficial but that's yeah very cool yeah so I'm excited I would love to do

Dave Jones: that it's yeah it's simply a matter of yeah time as you said of course um one of my conditions would be the same as yours you mentioned it um in that you need to the ability to blog it I can't be yep exactly secret or whatever it's got to be you know open and yep right does it does it have to be

Chris Gammell: an open source thing no not necessarily open source but I mean obviously that's beneficial that's

Dave Jones: almost by definition because you're you know you are working on the requirement that um you have to be able to blog it so by that definition it's practically open yeah sort of but I mean if I did

Chris Gammell: never publish well we could get into that argument I suppose but I think there's there's always different lines about where is it like if you just talk about the process but you don't actually show that share the details sure someone could go back and you know reverse you know oh well Chris then did this and then did this you talked about this yeah but yeah more than likely I'm going to want to be able to show schematics show parts that are chosen stuff like that so um yeah I would say if someone's like no this needs to be super secret if you need it I mean and that's actually an interesting line too right if you need someone to sign an NDA or do something super secret anything like that well no it's it's like some people it's legitimate right maybe of course it could be legitimate but that's when you pay someone right because obviously you're doing that because you feel that there's a professional service exactly you feel that there's value in keeping it secret and if there's value tied to it then you should be willing to spend money on it and that is where you know like I have a I have a couple consultant friends and they they will review and sign NDAs they that's part of their their

Dave Jones: business you know and they won't talk about it so will you limit this to projects that are community of value to the community like can somebody come oh I've I'm working on this kickstarter and I need your help you know obviously that's a commercial interest for them oh that's

Chris Gammell: okay I mean like I think that I think that you know I'd like to work on stuff that has uh you know positive impact if it you know that there could be a commercial piece to it but everything will be taken one at a time kind of thing so I I don't know if there's gonna be maybe no one will sign we'll fill this out maybe no one so that's okay too I mean okay that's fine I don't know it's just an experiment and um all right I'm I'm trying something new so yeah gun for hire yeah gun for yeah they're free yeah gun for uh hire at a very very very low rate vanishingly small uh yeah although

Dave Jones: uh here's one here's an issue with this and we've talked about this a lot in the past is devoting you know just you're saying like five hours a week is the target how much value can you add yeah that's a good point working on it five hours a week because you know like for me to come back yeah yeah me to come back to a project and just spend five hours on it or an hour here you know people say oh why don't you just work on something an hour a day right it's incredibly unproductive

Chris Gammell: why don't you just do a half push-up every half hour and uh by the end of the day you'll have done

Dave Jones: 24 push-ups you know right not sure if that's a good analogy or not but anyway yeah it is it is a genuine issue how quickly can you come up to speed how productive can you be i mean you know five hours is okay if you sit down for those five continuous hours but if you're spending that if you're spreading those one hour a day over the week right it's gonna really peter out

Chris Gammell: the effectiveness of it no no i agree with that too so we'll see how it goes i mean there's no guarantees here there's you know but you get what you pay for so and we were just talking about that

Dave Jones: before the show and what spurred you to remind me we're going to talk about this as i was saying that i need to sometimes just i've encountered this recently just go forget about the blog forget about videos forget about content forget about the forum forget about everything else and just spend a couple of days working on my project yep or working on technical type whatever yeah i agree exactly i agree and otherwise it never ends yeah that's like uh me me doing this full time for five and a half years i can testify that nothing ever gets done if you don't devote a lot of time to it if you're just trying you know oh i think do oh i'll just think about it for an hour or two here

Chris Gammell: you just waste your time right really yeah that is that is very true and um you know that's kind of all the prod the uh the concept of flow right that's what that's kind of what you're talking about right yes it's like yeah especially like so like i think like layout is is a great example of flow oh yeah right where you're just in it you're like look up you're like oh it's dark outside yeah oh yeah so well yeah and and maybe that is you know that might be another part of the experiment is just to see if i can even do that maybe it would be you know bundle it more where i just take a whole weekend to do something or something i don't know yep sure we'll see yes so if you see less output

Dave Jones: from me yeah you know what i'm doing he's getting stuff done yeah getting stuff done it's the same thing with my email inbox it's like the reason i have so many unread emails is like i can read you know i've got gmail i can read from the subject you know it has quite you know like the first paragraph or whatever yeah in the you know so you can see without even opening it you can see what it's about you can see who it's from and you go oh okay yeah i'll reply to that tomorrow but you know because you know it's going to take 10 minutes or something right yep you know 20 minutes to do it and and you just keep delaying that and delaying that whereas if you go right i'm going to clear my inbox i'm going to spend the next three hours clear of my inbox then right shit gets done right

Chris Gammell: yeah i agree i agree uh but i yeah i i think i mentioned on the show before i use boomerang that's the thing that like sends email back to yourself so you could say like send it back in two days and i've had things that i've sent back to myself five times yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's

Dave Jones: good but it's you know it's also bad so yeah well that that's why i leave or sometimes i'll open an email and then i will read and go okay this is going to take me 10 20 minutes okay i you know i'm not going to do that now not motivated enough and so i'll mark it as unread again so it goes back into my unread list so it stays up the top because i've got all my emails sorted by the date and unread first yeah you know yeah yeah that's how i do too yep right and yep and that's kind of the same thing that's kind of like a boomerangy type yeah it is although yeah you know i can appreciate the boomerang thing because you action of course you can come in you're australian you know

Chris Gammell: you love boomerangs we think yeah everyone here has a boomerang right and boomerangs don't

Dave Jones: traditionally come back by the way yeah they're hunting tools right they're hunting sticks they're designed to fly straight and kill an animal like a you know a kangaroo at a distance yeah um it yeah very few i mean we got hundreds thousands of tribes across australia we did have and um you know it was only a very modern and limited um invention was the return in boomerang um yeah interesting

Chris Gammell: um aussie history infects the amp hour right uh let's do something fun how about uh did you see this post that was going around uh it was like a little bit more than a week ago what fifty dollars buys you at watch on bay did you see that post oh it's oh here we go okay i haven't gotten that far

Dave Jones: down yeah so what what does 50 bucks buy you and where's this market this is the one this is the one

Chris Gammell: uh the shenzhen the like the really big shenzhen market everybody takes videos of right i bet that

Dave Jones: is that a specific part or is that what it's real is that it's real location and but nobody calls it by

Chris Gammell: that they just call it the shenzhen market no they people call it watching bay so i think all right yeah there's like a there's like a bunch of which is one word by the way yeah um there's a bunch of videos on on youtube about it um so but this is uh jesse from keyboardio um and i've talked to jesse before about because he's he's been over there a while um sourcing stuff for the the if you haven't seen the keyboardio it's this really cool custom keyboard uh kind of looks like a butterfly but it's all wooden and it's it's very nice um and so he kind of goes through though and it basically offered a box of crap for 50 bucks and then he's kind of going through all the different things that are on there and it's so actually bought a box of well basically he he like had people pre yeah prepay and then say i will get you as much stuff as you can get oh for that and uh yeah you know it's just

Dave Jones: it's it's amazing because then he compares it all fan usb fan for 45 cents i mean right and it's and

Chris Gammell: it is it's just like all of these things that you don't even think about but the all you can almost see the the margin markup to amazon right and this is where you get it here it is here's an example a

Dave Jones: a light which plugs into a usb port right at which is 6.99 on amazon it's 11 cents right exactly right i mean like you can't make nobody's making money on that surely no maybe that is like that somebody's made a loss on that surely nobody's making those for a profit they made them hoping it's it's like excess inventory that's already been written off surely it can't they cannot manufacture that and sell it for a profit even at this market yeah i can't be done 11 cents come on uh it's got like it's a usb connector it's got lead lights on the end of it it's got this nice

Chris Gammell: molded it's like it could it could be like a secondary sale or you know like they're not

Dave Jones: selling kind of thing i suppose but yeah so that that is selling below manufacturing cost it's got to be i don't know man what's like no it's got to be come on seriously like i i don't know i know stuff's cheap there but it's not that cheap okay well let's go let's go to the one that so you you and i

Chris Gammell: both retweeted this from a while back as well so it was also jesse who who tweeted about the the smartwatch he had a picture of a smartwatch and then a picture of a starbucks breakfast he said both of these cost nine dollars and 75 cents yeah right in shenzhen one of them has a gsm card and can talk to the network network rather um so there's a highlighted point here right so six dollars um

Dave Jones: well i've got nine dollars 74 at the market right so basically the uh it's the h6 smartwatch i'm sure yeah but there's a ton of these things so he was still only 25 bucks at amazon yeah still only 25 bucks which is the regular margin i mean if you go if you're buying 2.5 yeah you're right who whoever is selling these on amazon has obviously bought them for this nine dollars 74 or close to 10 bucks right it's an efficient market it's going to it's going to be yeah yeah it's going to be a standard market because amazon take 18 you know it's like yeah right sure sure sure yeah um but the

Chris Gammell: crazy thing is okay so he he keeps working on them working on them working on them and then he uh gets to finding out how much the actual parts cost right six dollars so the highlight here is six dollars for a gsm chipset a cpu an lcd screen a battery a pcb a metal housing a molded silicone watch band a micro usb cable and a box and a labor to assemble and test all that i just read that verbatim right so all right that is pretty insane right i would challenge a lot of insane like that's immediate so i think it was a media tech chipset which is the thing that's in all the low-cost tablets and stuff like that um you know it runs some version of android kind of stuff it's you know it's this is like the shanzai phone that uh bunny wrote about a couple years ago as well same kind of thing it's always that media tech chipset that's the one that him and jobs are working on uh you know reverse engineering some of the uh the registers for and stuff too and but still six bucks man like

Dave Jones: that's but is it confirmed that this is something that you can go and order in quantity can i go and say i'll have a hundred thousand dollars a hundred thousand of these and i want you to produce them

Chris Gammell: and i'm only going to pay six dollars no no that was the bomb cost so he got it down to seven oh

Dave Jones: sorry yeah but sorry is it yeah is it nine dollars if i buy ten thousand of these and you don't get them from some back alley stock right you've got to actually go and engage the manufacturer and have

Chris Gammell: them made for my order i think i think so yeah i mean like he he talks about all this stuff about quoting and and actually larger markets or larger orders and stuff anyways it i i don't i don't i mean there's only way to one way to find out and i'm not willing to do that and i don't think you are either so so order a hundred thousand crappy yeah right exactly smart watches so um yeah so i'm guessing

Dave Jones: probably though um right okay i i i suspect it may not be that easy to and especially depending on the product i don't know man there's a lot of stuff here which is like surplus so it's possible but

Chris Gammell: i i wouldn't underestimate i mean these are some crazy costs it's not it's not like it's not like it's not like you're getting a you know a labeled chipset from a ti or microchip or something like that and then they're selling it underpriced like this is these are yep locally sourced parts with you know low cost and all that other stuff right these are but this is this is the kind of stuff that goes into toys and everything else right this is this is the ecosystem so it's others that aren't

Dave Jones: that well they're still ridiculously cheap but compared to amazon not that cheap like i'm looking at one of these little uh little drones you know one of those little palm size drones with the controller which is like five times bigger than the drone and it's nine dollars 74 for the drone plus the controller and everything else i like but and even but even then it's only 19 bucks at amazon

Chris Gammell: so you know it sure but okay so but then there's also people could be selling those at a loss as well right so sometimes people will not a little loss but at a thinner margin in order to try and sell add-ons or get the email address you know so like amazon now sends out like customer review stuff if you uh if you buy something from a store you know so there there are there's always going to be loss leaders and there's always gonna so like it's really hard to tell there's no visibility into these different um things so yep you're right uh that that is that is limiting but i i i'm really glad that jesse i mean this is a long article but it's really great that uh jesse wrote this up so it must have taken ages to compile this so hats off so very very cool um i'm just watching a video of a guy

Dave Jones: taping up a box you would swear it's in at twice the speed like it's set he's so efficient at doing this oh yeah yeah yeah oh it's so sorry it's um it's hilarious anyway ah yes yep so amazing what can

Chris Gammell: we say that's that's it go check it out uh i you know i was talking to what was i talking i think one of my uber drivers is from shanghai and i was talking to him about visiting and stuff and flights are getting cheaper like much cheaper so may you may see me there in the near future obviously i have a trip planned for april uh already to that side of the globe but maybe i'll sneak another trip in there somewhere so we'll see cool maybe i'll convince dave to go too yeah i'd love to go i'll work on mrs eev blog when i'm there and then i'll be like right you should really let dave go for a week and you know then we can meet up there or something the amp hour

Dave Jones: goes to shenzhen yeah boy a week's probably not enough you need to oh yeah well of course

Chris Gammell: yeah yeah and there are there are a lot of organizations that uh that send people um

Dave Jones: so you know it's incredible so this is like the new norm um and it's my in fact actually i don't know if there is there is a wired article uh sorry there's a wired documentary on the silicon valley of hardware shenzhen oh yeah and bunny's in that isn't he yes yeah he stars in that yep yeah it's like a four-parter watches yes i think they've got the whole thing up they've got like a one hour video up on their website oh cool okay yeah i saw i watched like

Chris Gammell: one or two of the pieces i'll need to go back and check that out yeah i haven't watched the whole

Dave Jones: thing i've just um bummed my way through it yeah yeah no wires been doing some great videos lately

Chris Gammell: there's a short one that i posted this week uh of them building a uh a nine a 747 rather in nine

Dave Jones: days i've seen that oh my god it's the efficiency in in production it goes to show how efficient you can make large-scale engineering production yeah when you devote the time and the money to it i mean they spent years and years right decades refining these sorts of production lines and uh to get an entire 74 747 you know what is it a 737 737 that's the that's the most common one in the world so that's what the single row three seats that's why i paid them yep exactly it it paid them to spend a couple of billion dollars probably setting up this production line yeah and the scale of these

Chris Gammell: floors too like the the production floors it's just nuts yeah so it's mine it's mind-blowing yeah

Dave Jones: yeah i've kind of sort of been in large-scale volume manufacture like that well no not that big i mean

Chris Gammell: the factory was like 180 meters long oh okay so like just like length yeah so like the thing about the the plane ones is just that there have to be so wide because the wingspan right yeah yeah yeah

Dave Jones: exactly ours was you know 180 meters uh long which is what 500 over 500 feet long one huge factory and we had multiple benches and you know products would you know worked on efficient systems to move them from one bench to the next uh-huh and stuff like that and you know so from one actual process to the next and right things like that and you know that was that was the key to getting the um to meeting the production target that we had yeah um and yeah it's you know it reminds me of the old um uh uh underwater um navy sonoboy that i worked on like we got this big production contract for i think it was 13 000 sonoboys which doesn't sound like a lot but when you know the engineering that goes into these very specific devices that that is a huge order um and you know designed to make these over five years but yeah we spent a ton of money um designing our own automated jigs for everything you know our own automated uh pcb handling and inspection jigs that had you know you'd put these um you'd put each individual amplifier pcb there was like 300 000 of them so we designed this jig where you uh with these custom uh trays that hold all these boards so you plug all the boards in and then you whack these trays in an automated piston like a piston comes out pushes the board out and then the better nails comes down it hooks up to the automated test jig which i worked on and then it puts them into a you know a past or a failed bin yeah right right you know so so you the end goal is that you push the button and it does everything all you need to do is load the boards into these um cartridge right type things and yeah yeah it's a lot of engineering went into that just that one jig right exactly and

Chris Gammell: and it's i mean it's all based around the idea that nothing's changing either right that's the oh yeah

Dave Jones: of course no if you change something down like oh you want different pcb test points oh shit you just start over okay well you're not quite but you know if you change the size of your board all all of your cartridge handling systems change you know right like yeah yeah it's um

Chris Gammell: it's troublesome yep yeah that's uh and that's that's a super critical piece too like i i think i think it is important to highlight the uh the numbers there right so like that uh that 300 000 is is a ton of of boards obviously um it's you know there is a certain point where that starts to make sense and i think a lot i'm not sure how many people get to that point right i mean like there there is i i think i saw something recently about like an open jig platform i i forget i'm trying to find it actually that's why i'm a little bit distracted it's called open jig yeah i think it was something like that but basically it was an idea of like standardizing you know laser cut files and pin headers stuff like that but um yeah uh it's it's a really important skill to have right to be able to to design a test for a higher volume thing but it's it's all about where you actually decide to pull

Dave Jones: the trigger and start doing it you know yeah so yeah no you've got to ensure that you mentioned it you're going to ensure your design is done and dusted right you know and we did you know we spent years working on on the design and then we get the production contract and then right okay we know it's a finished design there was very i don't think there was oh very little that changed after we built all that automated production stuff it was you know mainly just uh things change you know oh like a component might go obsolete or something or you know or something you know or we might you know tweak the performance of something but that didn't affect the production systems right well and then a lot

Chris Gammell: of people so like uh there was a there was a cool article here um from mind tribe uh jim wrote about uh you know some of the manufacturing tests right so that's kind of in line with this stuff and he kind of calls out like a lot of the functional testing but also visual x-ray uh flying probe stuff like that right and a lot of people like whenever i you know talk about this stuff sometimes will be like people will be like oh but what about like a flying probe machine like you should just use one of

Dave Jones: those right yeah it's like if people don't know a flying probe machine is pretty much you can put any board in there yeah and then you just program and these probes fly anywhere right so you know it's

Chris Gammell: it's pretty much a universal test it is but but the thing that i always make people pause with is like that thing takes a lot of programming too i mean like it's still worth it right and it's more reconfigurable but it's slower right because you actually have to it's kind of like a parallel process versus a serial process right like a flying probe you have to actually move the probe

Dave Jones: to two different spots run the test and it isn't and by that nature it isn't as fast you know whereas if you've got a bed of nails tester bam straight on all the probes connect at once it's like parallel

Chris Gammell: instead of like serial which is yep you know right so it is another way to do it and it's good especially good for like high mix kind of manufacturing environments but it's still like someone's got to do that and someone's got to write that test and uh it's not easy so no that that's

Dave Jones: why often when we were using like you know pcb subcontractors and stuff like that we'd design a production test jig and we would allocate you know if your contract was big enough with them they would allocate you a small corner of their factory where you could set up your own automated test jig you know your own bed of nails test center you know so that you know otherwise it would have had to use like the flying probe machine and they'll reconfigure it each time but you know if the order's big enough they'll allocate you and they've got the space they'll allocate you some space and yeah you have a permanent setup there just for your boards right right yeah that is that is super helpful you

Chris Gammell: can definitely oh i mean i mean because yeah it was much more efficient if you figure out in the first you know like what are the two options right one is you get a pilot run done you got 25 boards coming to you and then they come to your facility then you put them on your bench you're testing them whatever maybe you have you know better nails at your bench and then you're like nope that's got to go back like just like transit times even like you really start to save a lot of money and slow stuff down absolutely um so it's it's good yep testing huh i've set up many of those yes i was a

Dave Jones: production test engineer for a long time yeah yep that was my bread and butter yeah man no it's good

Chris Gammell: it's a lot of uh it's a lot of problems to be solved i'm sure they're right oh they're yeah it's

Dave Jones: constant so and then the maintenance and machines oh let's not get started anyway i'm really surprised

Chris Gammell: at how much those pins cost too those pogo pins like oh those little pogo pins well i'm sure if

Dave Jones: you went to the shenzhen market they're right yeah right a cent each you know you buy them from farnells they're ten dollars each yeah you can really get up there oh goodness the the other thing with the other unsung hero of the wired um sorry the doco on the you know building the plane in nine days right is the logistics behind that oh yeah and i am we and we have a segue here oh yeah um yes the logistics behind that i mean you can set up your production line but you have to have a warehouse as big or bigger than your production line just to store all the parts and an efficient means to a locate them restock them uh transport them just in time as they need them because you can't keep all this stock on your production floor right you can't keep you know like a hundred assembled you know wings wings or whatever you know like you've got a yeah i mean there's

Chris Gammell: it's almost like kidding it's like kidding for your for your own stuff for the yeah yeah exactly

Dave Jones: yeah i would love to know how they do that at the specific level do they kit the whole plane worth the parts i don't think so they would have to break it down to yeah sub-assembly process yeah because

Chris Gammell: you wouldn't want to like be digging back through bags of stuff right you'd want to like so like the guy because they have specialized people too right so the guy that's assembling some part of the engine he's responsible for that he's got people that help him source all his stuff make sure his stuff's ready to go but yeah i mean like that it's it's automation at its finest right when it works because when it doesn't work like you have a plane that's sitting there right and you're losing money

Dave Jones: it's crazy that's what i was going to say all it takes is one person not to do their job and that can stop the entire production line because it's a sequential process you know you can't physically move a plane forward unless the one in front is finished that particular process right these things shuffle through the factory yep and you can't go oh uh that's okay the one in front stuck we'll just move all our parts in our process back to the previous spot and work on it there right no no no no

Chris Gammell: right well that's part of the whole like the tps thing right the toyota production system there's like anybody on the line can pull the pull the chain to stop the line oh okay right yeah yeah no that's

Dave Jones: yeah yeah oh yeah all hell broke loose if you stop well no no that's that's actually praised you should be oh yes oh no you should if you know if you see something that's gonna yeah and that was you know i had the power to do that i had the you know when i was working in production and i had the power to go stop the production line you know and yeah and that was it you always had when you've got a production like this you always have standing orders as part of your job description production comes first right you know it doesn't matter often we were in meetings you know like really important meetings and you know something blows up on the production line usually we can hear it or see it something goes horribly wrong and we don't just sit there and finish the meeting no we go spend the rest of the day fixing that problem because every hour down was like i think it was fifty thousand dollars an

Chris Gammell: hour or something would be the down would you young whippersnappers with your fifty thousand dollars you want to talk about uh chip fabs i'm sorry no no sorry the customer would lose fifty thousand

Dave Jones: dollars an hour or something so that was you know anyway you want to talk about chip fabs i know

Chris Gammell: yeah yep it's i mean it's it's the exact same thing though and it's exactly it's and this and

Dave Jones: boeing would be the ultimate would it would it would be the ultimate extreme of this is there anything bigger bigger or higher margin than oh i don't know if it's all that high margin i know but no but not margin but just high cost i mean if that plane i mean each plane's worth hundreds of millions of dollars right it's worth like i don't know what's a boeing 737 worth i'm going to look

Chris Gammell: it up it's got to be at least tens of millions right oh it's it's it's a hundred million or something right it's you know i'd say the higher a higher cost thing would be like a unit cost 32

Dave Jones: million that's a bargain no wonder they're buying them right right right what a steal oh no it depends on the configuration it can go up to 101 million sorry yeah okay anywhere from 32 million up to 101 million per unit and they're doing what nine a week is it what is it yeah it was something it was

Chris Gammell: something like it was it was some crazy amount yeah yeah for something that big in just nine days but

Dave Jones: what's the actual throughput um at a rate of 42 per month yep there you go yeah so yeah so it's more than one a day so it's a hundred million dollar plane every day yeah that's maybe a hundred million dollars worth of sales every day yeah wow okay multiply that by and that would run 365 as well

Chris Gammell: yeah but that's on par with like car manufacturers can do that too i mean like that but it is the same kind of thing it's all about is it all bundled into one big thing or you know a bunch of smaller things like that right because you can take it all the way down to the chip level and then it's like you know one chip is three dollars but you've got however many in a in a carrier kind of thing so

Dave Jones: yeah or in the case of the high-end intel chips each chip can be a thousand dollars right exactly

Chris Gammell: yeah so it's all about balancing mass margin or dollars per minute right that's pretty much what it comes down to that's crazy oh man yeah did i say there was a segue you did yeah um was it the

Dave Jones: mauser thing yeah yes the mauser thing correct because you put this you've been watching lots of youtube videos lately and we've always seen this before but it never gets old yeah it doesn't it's the life of an order at mauser you know it shows them how they goes i'm surprised i'm looking at you know like a minute 25 into it and there's this woman there manually peeling off yeah the stickers and putting them on the boxes just like i do here you know i've got one of these thermal label printer oh yeah things you know specialist label and you you know and you whack them on the thing and i thought you know i thought they would have it's surprisingly manual oh i'm not surprised by that at all

Chris Gammell: more automation well maybe maybe at the shipping level but like the okay i don't know man this is like this is like one of the the most we talk about high mix earlier in the show right but like talk about high mix it's like you know every i mean how many parts does mauser have on their catalog does digican yeah exactly you know it's just like so many different things that it's if you tried to

Dave Jones: automate for that it just wouldn't make sense it wouldn't make sense whereas it makes sense for a production line because you know what you're building you know your you know what your order is right right but mauser have no clue what dave jones is going to order tomorrow you know like

Chris Gammell: does dave jones know what dave jones is going to order tomorrow no that's right it could be the

Dave Jones: magic could be on the magic i could i could order a hundred separate resistors of one one each quantity one they'll sell me one and they could be on on opposite parts of the factory and you know

Chris Gammell: like i wonder if that's the question is like is there like is it actually priced at that level right so you buy like one resistor if you tell them to snip one resist a one 10k resistor off the reel right from the reel yeah yeah it should cost the actual unit cost of producing that resistor is you know 0.00001 cent or less right but you'll end up paying at least 15 or 20 cents because of the overhead of someone actually going and clipping it putting in a bag whatever but even then i'm sure

Dave Jones: that doesn't actually pay for the cost at the individual component level they would average out

Chris Gammell: right exactly right so is there is there a number of resistors of single resistors that you could order that you put mauser out of business not that we don't want to do that i don't want don't do that

Dave Jones: but like you know they would probably have the data to do this and it'd be interesting i'm sure they will you know in big data if you analyzed all the data of all the orders and everything and where the location of the components in the warehouse but when you've fulfilled when you've put all your shopping cart all your components in your shopping cart it then goes away using the magic algorithm and the big data and calculates an additional picking cost based on how many people have to go in what directions oh yeah you know like the actual time you know they could get an average time oh that one's right in the back of the warehouse and you picked five parts that are in five geographically of the worst location so you're going to pay a warehouse uh geo location tax

Chris Gammell: yeah or maybe we're just super deluded and everything is a they make sure everything's a net positive uh covering covering their overhead which is probably the smart thing to do so oh yeah of course

Dave Jones: but you know yeah you probably get because that'd piss the customer off if you did that oh i'm getting paid i'm paying a tax because i chose because they put stuff in something yeah one place or versus another yeah so they would have to find a way to make money elsewhere they just mark up on average you know to cater for all this so but it'd be fascinating it'd be a data analyst dream oh yeah that kind of stuff is yeah that hmm yeah anyway i think it's it's it's definitely interesting because

Chris Gammell: you know like people talk about like the amazon they want what was the company they bought the robot company uh oh yeah i don't know i remember it was for 750 million dollars but i can't remember the name of the company uh but that was like because it actually moves the shelves right and maybe that's possible but even still uh that's higher slightly well maybe not higher margin i don't know it there there isn't that level of automation at the pick level yet and even amazon they don't have robots picking things because human dexterity is still better oh yeah it's still much better that kiva is the company kiva that's right yep yep yeah yeah and so it's that stuff is i mean and that's another that's another interesting job too like that that automation stuff and that is definitely not going away anytime soon so yeah uh yeah automation and stuff

Dave Jones: what else will they be replaced by robots no no as you said manual deck you know human dexterity is just you know orders of magnitude better yeah especially for ad hoc stuff like this you know where things go wrong and you know human has to decide right you know and yeah right and sometimes you can fake

Chris Gammell: things out right you can make it look like it's a robot but not always right and there's another thing on our list about faking it to look uh intelligent uh tell me tell me i i don't know oh this is the faux intelligent voice activated switch oh okay right it's just doing fake voice recognition right so this is an analog solution that uh dev ttys zero i don't know if i'm saying that right i forget his name sorry uh but basically it's it's like the clapper but it it uh it's not just a threshold detect like the clapper is this is actually a little bit more intelligent where it it kind of averages uh looking at the diagram well highly recommend that people watch the the video but there's amplification there's uh bandpass filtering triggering and then dynamic delay and it's all about the the delay that actually makes it kind of seem like it's intelligent and uh yeah so it's a it's a cool cool little circuit though uh yeah it's just using op amps and stuff like that but it's yep yep and triggering different mosfets and stuff for the relay driver so good circuit i dig it voice

Dave Jones: activation turn on light yeah but sorry just use a switch oh well right i know this is more of a fun

Chris Gammell: project than a oh no no of course no from this isn't like uh iot you know no this is not an internet of things right this is not going to attack your your network uh when you're when you're sleeping kind

Dave Jones: of thing right yeah bloody internet of things yeah which we should mention i guess i when we mentioned

Chris Gammell: last week but or whatever weeks ago uh there was another big attack this time on dns servers

Dave Jones: so like the and it knocked out come from the zombie internet of things devices again did it yeah

Chris Gammell: it did right yeah and so yeah it's like uh ip cameras and stuff like that right and um so i was talking to my dad about it actually he was like he was all concerned about he's like oh i i read that you should be changing your your router passwords and i hadn't really thought about how they're actually doing all this stuff but that kind of tipped me off so i think what they're doing is they're basically phishing people so that the people that are setting up these botnets they're phishing people and then they through your computer right so then basically you have something on your computer then it's on your ip address on your local network and then they can basically see what's on your local network like your router like your ip cameras whatever and then those have default logins so it's not like they're accessing these things necessarily externally but i think it's like they're getting onto your local network somehow through a phishing backdoor type thing oh yeah it's it's not

Dave Jones: hard to actually prevent this yes change your bloody router passwords not admin admin right yeah exactly which is what it is if you get out of the box you know it's just yeah right it isn't rocket

Chris Gammell: science right but most people don't i mean you know right why i mean 90 percent 95 99 person that are buying these things right i mean like it's just of course they don't even know it's an issue right i mean it's not always like negligence well it's not always uh deliberate negligence it's just negligence it's not like they're like oh i'll change it tomorrow it's like they don't even know that that's a thing you know so right yeah uh but there was another interesting article about this so like uh recode wrote about it like should we be i think maybe we've mentioned that on here before too of like should we be should it be on the company right so like why are there even default passwords in the first place right this is kind of the downside to increasing uh increasingly powerful chips at at low cost right i mean like just because you can have a linux stack doesn't mean you should have a linux stack right or like you know what i mean like it's like you all of these devices are you know they're running linux they're they've got enough juice to do that kind of thing they they have these stacks for um getting ip packets on the network and stuff but then they leave the rest off and it's like oh well

Dave Jones: uh so is it on them or is it on the user i mean like what what really happens it's ultimately got to be well these things must have a default password because you need to hardware reset these things yeah right yeah you know occasionally when they lock up or or do whatever right and then you've got to either have no password or some default password so you know no password's the same as a default password right there's there's no real difference there um so they must have that so the you know well not saying the owner should be on the manufacturer but the manufacturer can solve this by only allowing you know well actually a lot of them do this you you get a router out of the box um i had this the other day right i got a new router here for my new office and it came with a setup cd right but my machine doesn't have a cd drive right and or it's not hooked up all right right so i was using the sata for something else whatever right so i got oh and that automated i looked at the automated checklist and yes i think it forces you to change the password when you set the thing up but i just plugged it in and got it working and then i really you know right then i know because i know but i'm technical i know that i should change the password so i went in to the admin you know the actual router setup which the average user doesn't get into you know some install application handles it for them um and i set the security up myself uh-huh okay but yeah um a lot of the time yeah you need to force the user into this security setup you know look you can't install this thing it will not work unless you give it a decent password and you can even force them to use a decent password you know it's got to be x characters long in a mix of blah blah blah blah blah yeah all right um so yep i love the is it an xkcd about password strength uh probably i mean like

Chris Gammell: at this point it's like yeah probably i i don't know hang on i'll find it okay what what about it

Dave Jones: though it's just about like yeah x yes here it is password strength i'll send it to you um this is good

Chris Gammell: it's how we should just we should just do a thing where you say i'll send it to you and then we just

Dave Jones: sit here laughing for the next two minutes right anyway it's about um how you know a lot of these systems will force you you know oh you must choose a new password and they'll force you oh it must be a mix of other and lowercase numbers and a symbol you know like some you know and and um it's 936

Chris Gammell: if people are wondering as well it's the yes that's the 936 number yep yep yep and uh he went

Dave Jones: through and this is actually you know experts have confirmed this that it's actually more secure to choose a just normal words or lowercase yep but like put four words string like four words together and have it's stronger to have ordinary words that are in a dictionary so you might think oh no dictionary attack but the longer you make it in this case it was four words with like 16 characters or something um and it's more secure to use that longer password with easily remembered words than it is to have the you know the 12 digit mixed upper lowercase symbol thing and there's actually math to go through and you can actually prove it that is actually more secure um which is really cool yeah and uh so i think they force you and i hate it when they force you why you know to choose some really obscure upper lowercase mix symbol mix you know like ah it's frustrating right anyway i'm really hoping i think

Chris Gammell: i've mentioned this on the show before but i i really hope that we move towards the uh ready player one version of the world so that's the book that's that book about uh vr set in the 80s kind of like willie wonka meets vr it's it's a great book and steven spielberg's making a movie right now and i all right i love that book so much and everybody should go read it uh but because it's a vr system right they they have to they put on these headsets and then they have to speak their password to get onto this network and so what they do is they they have past phrases which it it's in the same vein where it's like um you know it's going to be multiple words and uh yeah uh the the main character quotes that they might be giant song one of my favorite uh lines from the book i mean it's not from the book but it's no one in the world gets what they want and that is beautiful that's that's his

Dave Jones: password and that's his password yeah it's just so great massively secure right exactly right i mean like it contains so many bits the entropy is so large on that it's you know like yeah so what i'm

Chris Gammell: really trying to say is go read ready player one it's so good i think i'll watch the movie

Dave Jones: dude read it first it's such a good book it's so many books to read oh come on have i have i stood you

Chris Gammell: wrong have i stood you wrong i finished seven eaves too by the way i mentioned that on the show before

Dave Jones: man that was often steered me wrong on books which one rave about them did you finish them yeah well actually that was so crap that was some of them i didn't finish are these fiction or non-fiction i i don't take any credit for non-fiction uh no these were these were fiction anyway yep no you're not running a good ratio which one oh you know well the the oh what's the bloody name of it the one you rave about with the um the the innovator's dilemma innovator's dilemma that's

Chris Gammell: non-fiction that's non-fiction yeah i said fiction or non-fiction i haven't stood wrong with fiction

Dave Jones: yet have i oh a fiction well sorry no while i'm talking non-fiction is yeah oh yeah non-fiction yeah i i know sorry man you raved about for years you raved about it i still rave about it what

Chris Gammell: are you talking about i know what's what's the problem with it ah it gets things right let's talk about china right so innovators the innovator's dilemma talks about like bottom up uh uh basically low-end companies working their way up and each company at the top at like the high margin companies saying oh we'll deal with that later we'll deal with that later man this is just china in a nutshell this is going to loop us back to china did you see that article on the list about uh china factories in shenzhen can uh copy products at breakneck speed i mean like what was it nine nine days or something uh yeah i don't know what it was it doesn't matter but it was like no if they're watching kickstarter videos and they're just doing it because they can it's like all right what

Dave Jones: are you gonna do you know yeah somebody if you don't know oh we might be able to find the link to it somebody on did a kickstarter or an indiegogo or whatever for a battery a mobile phone battery case no no this was a selfie stick oh yeah it was yeah it was a selfie stick built into a bat a mobile phone case right right so you know it was like embedded in the back and you pulled out you know it was like constantine of this selfie stick out and had this kickstarter and before the kickstarter was even finished you could buy you know it was like 30 day kickstarter you could buy the finished product on em on uh alibaba you know for you know for like one tenth the cost of what he was going to sell it for a one fifth or something and it was and you could actually buy it they had actually manufactured it before the campaign was even finished and they even they stole all these photos not only did they steal the idea they stole the photos i don't know man it looked exactly and they caught and one of them even stole the name that he well sure yeah i mean and it's like i don't know i don't know how

Chris Gammell: to feel about this like part of me it just loves that this could be done so much faster right but i'm

Dave Jones: practically but also in the fact that this can be done like i'm i'm applauding and amazed there are

Chris Gammell: there are real uh there are real considerations here right i mean obviously if it was a unique idea which i don't know if it actually was they said that there were other ideas or other things

Dave Jones: that were already out there like this in the past yeah but yeah but they in this particular case they stole it like identically so so it's not a variation of yeah sure um i don't know though i don't know

Chris Gammell: like it's like uh i think what it comes down to so from like the electronic side it's like you're never going to be able to protect your product fully right no no you can't and i think what that comes down to is like that's why you see so many things that are that have like market back ends that are that you just can't you know if you can control which devices can go onto a marketplace right like a like a app store or something like that that's why investors love that kind of stuff because then they can say oh well you have to verify to get on this marketplace right yep some kind of verification step that again it's going to it's going to be broken in some way but that what a lot of people like because i mean it's there are a few platforms like that

Dave Jones: example where it's possible to protect your investment your idea right um but in the hardware space it's not really and it's it's like free speech i mean there should be almost no limits to it um and like you should not protect people in this respect from you know like in terms of free speech you should not protect people from from hearing things they don't want to hear or in this particular case to bring it to hardware you should not protect people's hardware just because it can be get ripped off in china if it can get ripped off in china in record time well that's a practical reality of the world we live in and you've got to deal with it well i think that's what it comes down to

Chris Gammell: like so i think there's i think the difference for me is like the line that i draw is okay so say this guy wasn't crowdfunding right so basically crowdfunding is like a unspoken social contract that's saying here's my idea uh this thing isn't in the world and i think it's a good idea to put it in the world i need help funding it right if you if it really was profit-driven kind of stuff then maybe you should keep it secret right i mean i know you shouldn't have no it's yeah it's the

Dave Jones: part of the risk you take by publicizing your information and that's what you do when you do a kickstarter here's my idea i haven't got the money yet to make it but here's the idea you can't blame

Chris Gammell: somebody else for ripping off that idea you can blame them but there probably just isn't much you can do about it you know like well there's not because the same thing happens with patents right i mean patents are basically putting that idea out there right someone could go and rip that off as well but it basically gives you the right to block importing into whatever country where you have the

Dave Jones: patent once you once the patent is granted etc yeah and if it is actually right to sue them etc yeah

Chris Gammell: yeah and like and so that is that is kind of the trade-off and it it's not great i mean it's not it's not like i don't feel for the guy right obviously he spent time designing it and and doing nice marketing around it and all that other stuff so um i think the best i think the best option when i saw people talking about this is like well go hire those factories like they've already figured it out right yeah i mean like that's that's honestly what it comes down to and it's like man that is

Dave Jones: so weird and yet at a certain point it's like the work's done i know i if i was this guy i probably would have gone okay i lose they ripped off my good idea and hey and that's a validation that it was a good idea right because these people aren't going to copy something that's a shit idea and they know there's no market for right i agree right they ripped it off because it was a bloody good idea and they knew they could flow and sell units right so he will immediately should have whoever it is immediately i don't know if it's an individual or a whole company that i think it was i think it was a figureheader in a company though right okay anyway they should have just went well well you know that's validated our idea let's go buy right i'll up your orders right and because

Chris Gammell: yeah the cost was way lower and it is i think it's just weird like ship them and then ship them to

Dave Jones: the backers yeah and then i think there is a uh but then the backers might go well you just bought this from a once you know you would have to be transparent but who cares i mean like i mean if

Chris Gammell: your users actually cared about that at the end of the day right they're backing your idea so i don't

Dave Jones: know i think no but they're also backing you they're not necessarily just backing your idea you don't know that a lot of them might think oh you you know you might have a sob story behind your you know campaign i've got to feed my kids or you know i'm dying with cancer or something i don't know right and you

Chris Gammell: i don't think that i mean that's sad but it's not a valid reason to you know that's bad analogy right

Dave Jones: but right they could a lot of them might back it because they like you uh right well then necessarily

Chris Gammell: because they like the idea unless unless there's like an you know an unspoken that's part of it as well cold contract to like uh you know i want to see how you're doing all of this stuff then i think i don't know i i just don't think that's how that's not how i use kickstarter how about that uh that's all that's all i can say with confidence is like usually when i'm backing something it's because i want it uh yeah right maybe it's usually it's different yeah it's probably 90 of the reason

Dave Jones: yeah yeah but then you might also say well i'm going to get these manufactured in the u.s and if you say that well then you can't just go out and sure yeah get it made in china you know right something but it may be maybe you haven't promised between you and your customers you know if people knew you were going to get it made in china anyway you know what's the difference you know sure yeah in fact you deliver on time and early you know like because it's already done

Chris Gammell: right it's like well and i just think that people i mean usually they're backing the i want that thing and right uh if they've already i mean i guess they could ask for the money like maybe they'll say oh it's uh i could go buy it myself like a lot of people say that but it's like yeah but then if the if the guy that's running the campaign goes and verifies it and says i verify this is that really any different than going to find a a manufacturer i don't know maybe this is all just justification

Dave Jones: you've vetted and you know because people don't know what they're buying if they see this one on like it might look good because they stole his photo or his render or whatever right right but you don't know what actual quality you're getting but if you're the campaign owner and you go to the factory and buy one of these things and vet it and go yeah i actually approve of this it's as good as what i wanted yep then you know that that's a justification because that's what some people

Chris Gammell: do anyways right they'll put something on kickstarter right they have an idea that maybe they have a prototype and then they're going to go to it maybe it's not a individual factory but maybe they go to like a jbill or uh flexronics or whatever like turnkey one of those turnkey yeah turnkey and that's what they do and then there's engineers that are taking these prototypes and right ruggedizing them and and making the manufacturable dfm all that stuff like sometimes that is what you're doing and then but the idea is that you have spec this thing out and then you are the final say and then it's like that that contract that you said okay this is the thing i i don't know i think there there is a lot of i i still feel it too like where i'm like oh that's my idea and then i'm like well my ideas are stupid right right my ideas have all been done before and same for you and same for a lot of people right there are very few new ideas but i think there's still that oh well but uh the way i did it is important it's like yeah maybe that's where we need to start shifting away from that you know i don't know maybe i'll change my tune on that maybe i'm talking out of my ass i don't know that's the point of the empire i think we need to follow up

Dave Jones: i think we need to follow that one up and see what happened with that i'm not sure because it's like several weeks back now and yeah the person i did they do a blog post or something the campaign

Chris Gammell: owner or something like that somebody did well yeah i'll have to go check on that i maybe i'll do a boomerang maybe i'll send you an email in a year how about that awesome right

Dave Jones: but anyway yeah that's an interesting one and ultimately yeah you've got a yeah okay feel pissed off right that's fine that's natural but you've got to deal with the practical reality of

Chris Gammell: the world you live in and right yeah yeah you can rage all you want but i bet you're not going to

Dave Jones: be able to sue for any money in china no and the more you try and push back against this more you are going to lose right it's almost like lean into it and it goes oh this is i'm going to sue them and like i think they were actually trying to take them down they were trying to like submit claims like and i think they even mentioned oh it's like playing whack-a-mole you know they'll try and like oh the new seller of this thing popped up oh whack whack whack right you know you're you're going to lose yep and you're going to spend all your time and energy doing that and you're guaranteed to lose so i would have embraced it um and go well yeah okay i'll give up i'll go and maybe you can buy it from them and or maybe do a special order from them you know oh we want a nicer color a nicer powder coat finish or or something you know like yeah there's something to differentiate it from the one that you buy just on alibaba right so yeah i i would have taken i would have embraced that instantly um as well as being you know a bit pissed off at the same time but sure yeah yeah so anyway i think that's the only way you can win that there's there's

Chris Gammell: no you cannot oh i think yeah i think that's a good point actually like i think products these days are going to differentiate based on you know marketing right uh yeah that that customization sure yeah and then the you know if there if it is some kind of connected thing then having a marketplace having some kind of verification basically controlling the flow somewhere but people might not like that as well like there are downsides to that too so and it's like um yeah it's

Dave Jones: like i resell a multimeter right and i'm gonna potentially resell other products in the future i i think i need to value add sure you know something yeah i only value added in small ways like i helped a little bit in the design of this thing i vetted it i got the i i think i think you should

Chris Gammell: skip over that vetting it though i mean like that is what people are buying right there that's a big

Dave Jones: thing yeah yeah and and then i you know deliberately um ordered the high quality pros with it i'm going to order a customized i've ordered a customized case for it which i'll be um selling soon i sort of added it you know i took the manual and added stuff to it so i improved the manual um you know things like

Chris Gammell: that so yeah i right and i mean like i this is how a lot of product stuff has been done for a long time white labeling uh value adding stuff uh you know at the risk of sounding i i think i i think i hear myself and i'm like i think me from five years ago might have been mad at that maybe like oh well you should focus on the manufacturing there's interesting stuff there and it's like no look there is interesting stuff there but i think the reality is especially in consumer markets like it's a cost driven thing right if you want to do a super super high quality thing then maybe go over there and you take what they started with you find their suppliers and you ruggedize that supply chain you ruggedize whatever they're working on right you do the dfm kind of stuff but saying you need to do the whole thing uh well if people just care about cost then you're going to lose right and i think unfortunately a lot of a lot of industries fall into that because people do care about cost and it's tough speaking of

Dave Jones: which probably the last thing because we're like eight minutes over um i'll link you i just love this one um this one comes from paul reynolds who we've mentioned on here before he was the former vice president of engineering at ubeam which is a company you don't like to talk about because you're a pussy um and and their ridiculous crap product anyway that doesn't exist um and will never exist because it's impractical anyway um he's got this blog uh called lies damn lies and startup pr and he talks about this uh we'll link it in it's a um it's a juicer right it's it's a startup company that manufactured a juicer yep yeah just like you put fruit in and it juices it and creates juice i think

Chris Gammell: the juicer is actually a very uh it's a misnomer here right i don't think it's actually juicing anything

Dave Jones: oh no no it takes actually pre-packaged it we'll we'll get into that um surely but yeah they basically raised 120 million dollars of vc funding uh for this juicer that's going to sell for 700 bucks and it's wi-fi connected and they've got and they've gone like the uh canon inkjet uh consumable model right if you want this thing to work you've got to buy our uh pre-coded barcode coded um packets of fruit you know for like i don't know 10 bucks a pop or so yes they're 10 dollars a pop for these you know it's all organic-y fruit or whatever you know and so there's 10 buck and your juicer will not work unless it talks back to the website scans the barcode of the juice packet and verifies that you bought it from them it's a genuine one and only then will it process your juice and come out all for 700 bucks right and and you might think how can anyone any vc person with any you know a sound mind and reasoning skills actually think this thing would sell and he actually goes through and lists in industrial design market penetration the supply chain the impulse to buy the founder and uh and what the vc was actually looking at to convince themselves to invest in this dog right of an idea and and and he thought it was ridiculous until he sat down and thought about it and yes they ticked every single box that these vcs wanted to hear they ticked every single one of them and i'll actually list them quickly these these tick marks are the founder is a dedicated and true believer right you've got to have that oh yeah and it's got a simple tagline easy to understand tick it's got a comparison business model that shows billions in revenue i.e there's a competing product out there that's already has billions in revenue you're gonna yeah so like the keurig right that's that's what they're comparing yeah the keurig which is what a coffee maker is it or something

Chris Gammell: yeah it's like the pods like the and the actually the drm 2 the 2.0 is the one that people rebelled

Dave Jones: against because it had right drm in it so oh right in the packets of in the coffee or whatever or however it works right okay yeah so they it had a comparison business model that they could show and it had profit on the product ongoing revenue from the consumables right because they locked in that design the uh the gillette model the king gillette yes yes you or the uh canon model yeah we'll give away the printer it's practically you know 20 bucks for the printer but we'll charge 50 bucks for the inkjet right or give away the razor sell the blades yeah yeah and sell the blades yeah and uh so it's got that and it's got the hockey stick revenue curve you know so they yeah but every every presentation has that for every present but it's got to have it right so it had it and and they could kind of sort of back it up with some bullshit and and there was no risk in any new technology it was just and how how they executed it right so there was no risk in you know oh we're using some whiz bang new tech no it's just existing tech with a executed in a smart way right so tick it ticked that box low low risk for them and there was the ability to lock out third party suppliers tick you know using that drm model and a first mover advantage i can't remember what

Chris Gammell: so like they're the first juicer on the market that's the first well the first juicer on the

Dave Jones: market that a has wi-fi so that has this crap things thing and then has pre-packaged um yeah fruit that's all drm encoded so i think this this is such a dumb idea but but this is how he explains how these you know these professional vc investors actually put money into this thing okay so here's my thing obvious from the outside is obvious but they actually because it ticked all the boxes and they go through their methodical they go through and tick the boxes and go well yep i'm gonna invest

Chris Gammell: okay so here's the thing uh we have plans to have a vc on soon to talk about a lot of this stuff who's one of the good ones i really like them uh and so we will definitely return to this but i think definitely it's good exactly not judge a product or an idea based on how much money it raises uh that's that is actually a downfall to tech crunch because that's all they really that's not all they write about that is one of the main things they write about is like oh blank and blank wrote rose all that raised all this money or like you know you being raised all this money it's like that is almost solely a measure of of that the personal stuff right like it's totally it makes no

Dave Jones: difference of whether or not the idea is viable right no it always comes down to is the idea viable viable no and this is going to be a you know a hundred million dollar turkey i think uh the the

Chris Gammell: lesson for our listeners is if you if you want to go big like this you want to go big with uh distribution and all that other stuff you want to you want to start a company like this be ready to try and raise that money and try and be that person right you have to it's you have that is your job is raising money and it's raising money that's terrible yeah it's terrible yeah it's a terrible way to do

Dave Jones: it no you should be able to raise your money based on the validity of your concept and idea only but unfortunately that's a hard slog right definitely you can do it you can do it but we should say it's

Chris Gammell: it is no it's a skill set too i mean like for for real like it is um yeah people that can do that are like are they're going to go far but yeah it's it's a i don't want to ever get near that

Dave Jones: yeah that'd be yeah yeah i've i've always thought like if i won you know a hundred million buck lotto or something 50 million buck lotto you know i'd probably like i well i'd need to invest it in some way and would i you know be would i become like or at least use part of it to become like a vc funding thing and how would i go about you know actually vetting projects like that it's an interesting yeah i i just like i would totally follow my nose i i think i've got a reasonably you know decent bullshit detecting nose um so i could rule out you know some dogs but

Chris Gammell: yeah uh buddy i yeah step one win the lottery then we'll talk about that right okay well no it's just a fun thing to think about right no that sounds like a terrible fate to me i can't imagine like having enough money to do whatever i want and sitting around listening to pitches all day that sounds like that sounds like going to hell like honestly yeah it it could be yes i totally agree

Dave Jones: yeah whether or not i would do it i you know yeah yeah all right we should save our listeners uh future i i i think i wouldn't be pitched to i would simply like if i if i and no one would get through your email right if i saw a a good idea i'd actually approach them and go hey you know i i really think

Chris Gammell: your ideas you know got some legs um i think you're you're full of it and you're wrong and uh and i'll end on that fine okay if you have a great idea and you'd like to tell us about it uh you could write into feedback at the empire.com or post it on our subreddit where we hide hide this is where we show all of our links throughout the week we are up front about what we're going to be talking about throughout the week and you could post your own stuff there if you have an idea and you need some

Dave Jones: help with your design i chris is not offering money he's offering his time and offering time that's

Chris Gammell: all i have expertise and not much of that either so right not much of the expertise either but uh

Dave Jones: there's links for that all right and his vast audience that he can actually actually promote

Chris Gammell: it to as well yeah yeah thank once again thank you to our patreon sponsors you guys make that possible if you're interested go to patreon.com slash the amp hour you can support us there absolutely

Dave Jones: anything else dave catch you next time see ya you

Speaker ?: you you you