#339 – Look at nature and meet nerds

Dave Jones: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded previously, but released March 12th, 2017. Episode 339. Look at nature and meet nerds.

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: Woo-hoo! It's less than a month before we meet, is it?

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Well, no, I was talking to people and I was like, you know, me and Dave really haven't talked about it yet. I really hope he's going to be there.

Dave Jones: Right. I may not be.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right, right. Oh, Chris is here. I'm so busy. I get so much stuff going on.

Dave Jones: It reminds me of the time that the Eric, oh, God, sorry, Eric Quinn, I think, oh, God, I'm going to be embarrassed if I forget. The Siglin CEO. Oh, yeah. It came out to meet me and I got this, I'm in my lab and I get this knock at the door and I had Sagan with me because I just picked him up from swimming or whatever. This was like school holidays or whatever. And this is the CEO, right? And this is the CEO of Siglin, yeah. And said, I've come all the way to Australia to meet you. Shit. Oops. Can you, like, go have a coffee or something while it takes Sagan home? Right. And I felt so embarrassed. And, yeah, anyway. Well, at least we're talking about it now. Well, someone else was supposed to be teeing up the video. Someone else was teeing up the meeting and they messaged me, but I didn't get it or something. So, yeah. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Well, I got you here now. I got a captive audience, right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hang on a second. I've got to go turn the air con on. It's because I just rode from the lab. Yeah, and it's getting really hot there, isn't it? I'll be back in a minute. Hold it forward.

Chris Gammell: Okay. No worries. Yeah, I saw the news articles. I think it's like 40 plus C there sometimes. So, I'm actually, I'm kind of hoping that when I'm there, it's, I think I'm coming. Let's see, Dave. I don't care. So, like, April in Sydney is a little cooler?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. No, it's fine. April's lovely.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Good.

Dave Jones: No, even, no, the fine, no.

Dave Jones: Weren't you guys on fire again? You guys were like good on fire again. No, no, no.

Dave Jones: It's been fine at the moment. No, it's actually good out there today. Okay. It's quite cool. Okay. It's overcast and rainy and crap. No, we had the hottest summer on record.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Good old climate change continuing to change. Yeah. Not in the right direction. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, man. Yep. Anyway, it was bad. No, it'll be lovely out here. Hopefully. I'll take you on some adventures.

Chris Gammell: All right. Awesome. Yeah. So, I think I'm going to be there. So, okay. So, I mentioned during last week's prelude to the show that I posted my schedule, but my real plan here is to do, I'm going to be in Auckland, Wellington, Queenstown, but I don't expect anyone to be down there, Gold Coast, Sydney, Melbourne. I would like to do, out of the five out of the six cities where there's actually people and nerds, I want to do a meetup in each one. So, you know, if people are listening, please get in touch. I put the email. I'll link it here again. But, you know, it's nothing fancy. Just, you know, show up, bring some electronics. It's the usual thing I do. Show up, bring electronics, drink beer, and hang out. It's great. It's so. And Dave will actually be at one as well because obviously- I will. If I step one up, he has to show up. I've got to show up.

Dave Jones: How many days are you in Sydney again, is it?

Chris Gammell: Nine days.

Dave Jones: Nine in Sydney?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. Is that too long?

Dave Jones: That's huge.

Chris Gammell: Yeah?

Dave Jones: Oh, no, no, no, no. It's good. It's good. It means you can go further afield and do stuff rather than, you know. Like, if you've only got two or three, it's hard to-

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's like what Jeff did, right? He was there for just a little short time.

Dave Jones: Yeah, he was only here for like two days or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, yeah. So, I don't know. I'm really bad as a tourist too. Like, all these people are like, oh, well, you should do all this adventure stuff in New Zealand and you should do this and that and museums. And I'm like, hey, I guess I want to like look at nature and meet nerds. I think that's like a summary of my trip is like- Right. Look at nature. Maybe that'll be the show title too. I can show you nature. Yeah. Look at nature and meet nerds. You know, like that's pretty much my goal. Excellent. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: I'll have a wetsuit handy for you. Oh, God. For the nice cold water.

Chris Gammell: Oh, gross.

Dave Jones: In April.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know if that's my thing, buddy. Yeah. I'm just not an adventure person. I don't know. Like-

Dave Jones: What did you just said that you want to see nature? See nature. Nature.

Chris Gammell: I don't want to be like- I don't want to like see it. I want to like walk through it. So, you want to go to a tourist lookout at the Blue Mountains and go- I want to like dive into it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Snap a photo and-

Chris Gammell: Oh, how boring. Well, that's the other thing. So, I don't know. Maybe this is a question for you, but like do I need a car? Because I haven't driven in six months and-

Dave Jones: Sydney sucks ass without a car.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I'll have Uber. I mean, you guys have Uber, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we have Uber. But to get anywhere in Sydney, Sydney's big. So, to get from the city to my place and my lab is, you know, halfway across Sydney. Right. You know, it's a long- If you took a cab, it's like 110 bucks or something.

Chris Gammell: It's crazy. Well, yeah, okay. I mean, so I've done the Uber. And like, honestly, it's usually cheaper for me, at least for my living situation, public transport, Uber, all that other stuff. But yeah. I guess it is a little-

Dave Jones: I mean, if you're just hanging around the city, yeah. No. Yeah. You don't have a car. I mean, driving through Sydney is a nightmare. Is it? Okay. You just don't want to- You avoid it if at all humanly possible.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like, I'm terrified of- Not driving in these days. Like, I haven't driven in six months, but then, you know, you guys are on the wrong side of the road and- Right.

Dave Jones: Have you actually driven on the wrong side of the road before?

Chris Gammell: I have not, no. I mean, I've only-

Dave Jones: Oh, well, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I've only been in London. That's the only city that had-

Dave Jones: It sharpens your senses. I actually enjoy it. I really enjoy driving on the other side of the road.

Chris Gammell: When you do the swap, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. It really heightens your senses, but the hard part is when you come back.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Right, right, right, right.

Dave Jones: Because your mind has been reprogrammed to- Right, right. Being hypersensitive to everything.

Chris Gammell: It's like when you're looking through a mirror to do some task, and then you undo it, right? Right. Yeah, that's weird. I don't know. Anyway. Yeah. Okay.

Dave Jones: Well- Anyway, we'll figure it out. Okay.

Chris Gammell: So, I have at least verified, yes, you will be there. You will hang out at some point.

Dave Jones: And I might have an interesting tech road trip lined up.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: I'll talk to you that, like, in the next couple of days.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: So, yes.

Chris Gammell: I did find out- I think you've- I talked to someone in Melbourne, and I think you've been down there at some- There's like a super collider or something like that.

Dave Jones: Yes, yes. Is there something down there? The super collider thing.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. And you mentioned that it'll be closed to operation because it'll be Easter weekend, but that means we might be able to get in there, which is like get in the tunnels and see all the fancy stuff. So, that's what I'm hoping.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Right. Do you- Right. You just speculated.

Chris Gammell: No, that's what he wrote to me.

Dave Jones: You don't actually know that they're going to have tech tours.

Chris Gammell: No, no. There are no tech tours. It's this person would be giving me a tour.

Dave Jones: Oh, they work there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Oh, okay. Sweet. Is it a collider? I don't remember. Sorry.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the- I've done a video on it.

Chris Gammell: I'm sorting through emails and trying to get back to people, but if Aussies or Kiwis write me an email, I will try and get back to you as fast as I can. So, yeah. Cool. Well, I'm excited. It's going to be- Awesome. It's going to be whirlwind and crazy, so. Yeah. Terrific.

Dave Jones: So, how many days in New Zealand?

Chris Gammell: So- Like three or something? Six or seven days in New Zealand.

Dave Jones: So, six or seven. That's pretty good.

Chris Gammell: And then-

Dave Jones: You can see the entire South Island in six, seven days.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but I'm going to see the other stuff. I mean, I'm going to see North, too. So, I don't know. I'm still kind of figuring out the-

Speaker ?: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: Oh, North and South. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. But again, like with the South stuff, too, it's like that- Like, it seems like there's a lot of beautiful nature, but- Yep. Totally. You have to have a car to kind of- Or like, you need some way to get between like some glacier.

Dave Jones: New Zealand is the place to do a driving tour.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Exactly. And I'm definitely- My buddy did that in a- He said the biggest RV he could possibly rent. Yeah, right. He said he had like two or three centimeters on each side of the RV. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of the mountain roads. Oh, yeah. On the wrong side of the road for him. Oh, yeah. He said he was just like- He was on vacation. He was just like so stressed. He could barely walk after he got out of the car. Yeah, yeah. No, no. I don't want that. I hate driving too. I mean, I hate being in a car. So- Right. Okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, you'll love the canyons and stuff we go to then. You're stuck with me and in a car.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, we'll make videos and sing-alongs. Don't worry about that.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: And now a song about resistors.

Dave Jones: Weird Al Yankovic style. Right, right. We should try and get him to do-

Chris Gammell: A song about resistors, huh?

Dave Jones: Like an engineering song or something. You know, some sort of-

Chris Gammell: I guess.

Dave Jones: We'll- I'll just have my people talk to his people. Okay. That sounds good. Yeah. We'll make it happen. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You've got an agent now. Yeah. Well, so you said you're super busy. What's going on with you, man?

Dave Jones: Oh, I'm super busy. I just hacked the new Keysight 1000 X-Series scope. I'm quite chuffed.

Chris Gammell: I saw that video. So what did you do to it? No, no, no, no, no, no. That was part one.

Dave Jones: I just- I got in my hot little pocket, part two, which I just raced back from the lab to do this esteemed Amp Hour episode.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh. And edit video.

Dave Jones: Edit that later. And yes, it's- Well, I'm not going to say it's fully hacked, but I was able to double my bandwidth and change the sample rate. Oh, I see.

Chris Gammell: So you're trying to unlock firmware, that kind of thing. And that's- Yeah. Well, what a nice way to repay them for sponsoring your videos or sending you stuff. Yeah, congratulations. Yeah, right, right, right.

Dave Jones: I think secretly they want it to happen, you know. Oh, yeah. Because they don't lose- If anything, they gain. You know? Yeah. Like no manufacturer has ever complained about a hack to the scope because 95% of the people who buy it are, you know, professional and education customers. Yeah, right. Customers, and they don't do hacks. It's like, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right. I would never- Like, I had a Rigol scope at work once and I would never- Yeah, no. You would never hack it. I wouldn't do it just because it's not mine, you know. Like, that's my thing. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, but it's definitely a void-your-warranty type thing. Oh, yeah. But I was actually surprised at work because this is not license key hacking, right? Oh, interesting. Is it like a hardware? Which I won't publish, right? I won't publish license key hacks because they're breaking intellectual property kind of- Yeah, this is all gray area. Yeah, and we've talked about this before.

Chris Gammell: I remember when we talked about that tech one with the EEPROM, which- Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but that's just copying an EEPROM. Yeah. That's not avoiding a key. I mean, that's not like decrypting keys, encryption keys, which has a specific legal back into it. You know, you enter a different legal area when you actually defeat encryption. Oh, interesting.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes. But if you just enable features that are already there, it is not the same legally. So, in most, in probably the majority of countries, anyway, that I'm aware of. So, yep. Anyway, cool. I got, yeah, I was able to change the bandwidth and change the sample rate. And I got into an odd mode where I was able to up the sample rate above what the maximum they specify in any of their 1000X products. And it worked, but the memory-

Chris Gammell: Maybe not calibrated, but it's at least showing that it's higher or whatever.

Dave Jones: Well, it was capable of doing it, but the memory architecture wasn't right. So, there was, if you turn it down to a slow time base, then there's all this period of actually data that's corrupted at the start.

Chris Gammell: So, it's really quite funny. And how do you test this stuff? So, you test it like, so when you test bandwidth on a scope like that, are you just putting in a pure sine at like a one-volt level?

Dave Jones: Yeah, you're just putting in a pure sine wave, a one-volt peak-to-peak and measuring the 0.707 point. Gotcha. Right. Minus 3db point. You know, very basic stuff. I haven't done extensive testing. Right, right.

Chris Gammell: But you're just checking to see, if it's attenuating more, that means you're not on, it's, the bandwidth setting isn't right on the analog side, right? Yep. Yeah. Exactly. Interesting. Okay. I mean, that's a nice, quick, easy way to check, and that's a good tip for people listening. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: It's just, you know, definitely rough and ready. You haven't checked the pulse response or swept it over the whole range or whatever, you know, like haven't checked its actual analog performance.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I was a little confused by the, you know, I got a little confused by it. I was doing that on that analog discovery too. I was looking at the specs and just double checking it because it says it's 100 mega sample. You know, it's a lower-end thing, so it's fine, whatever. But it says it's 100 mega samples, but then I think they list the bandwidth at 30 megahertz, but then, that's pretty rough. I mean, like, that's only a third of the sample rate, right? Yeah, yeah. So usually you do a tenth.

Dave Jones: Well, you aren't going to alias, right? That's the main thing. Right. So, you know, it's not going to give you an incorrect frequency signal. Right. So that's a positive, but yeah, you're not going to get much signal fidelity. But the problem with that is if you're doing sine x on x interpolation, you only need 2.4 times. If you actually go through the theory, you can prove this mathematically that, yeah, you only need 2.4 times the bandwidth to reconstruct perfectly your input signal.

Chris Gammell: Is this Shannon information theory stuff?

Dave Jones: I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Is it?

Dave Jones: No. I don't know. My memory is shoddy on it. So I'm just finishing up that book that Jeff recommended. It's tied into it. It's tied into it, I think. Yeah. But yeah, anyway, you can prove it that, yeah, but only if you use sine x on x interpolation for certain waveform inputs, you can resequence, or almost any waveform input, I think. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So that's not too bad. Okay. So, yep.

Chris Gammell: Sorry. I started looking at the information theory page. That's all right. Yeah. Don't. Don't go there. It's a rabbit hole. That's a deep hole.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So I finished that book. But anyway. It's so good. Right. So good. You have to read it. I've been talking about it and stuff.

Dave Jones: Just like all the other books you told me I have to read. No, read that one first. I couldn't finish them because I was so boring.

Chris Gammell: You'll love it, man. It's so good. Oh. The idea factory it's called. Yes.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Anyway. All right. The idea factory. So you hacked a scope. That's good. Cool. Cool. Cool.

Dave Jones: It'll be very popular if it, if it, but I hacked the already 100 megahertz version, the already top of the line one. I've yet to verify it on the lower end one. So that's why I'm not saying it's completely done yet. But yeah, I was surprised that they would do this because they sell a license key option for 100 megahertz bandwidth. So I thought, oh, there's no way you can increase the bandwidth by just, you know, hacking the hardware. And it turns out you can. So very interesting.

Chris Gammell: Well, firmware is just usually flipping a bit and then it's controlling hardware, right?

Dave Jones: It's controlling hardware, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, there is a lot of value, like I never really did a lot of these kind of hacks and stuff like that, but, you know, having that low level control of a device like that, especially when like, you know, it's usually built for, you know, like a pro tool, like a scope is going to be different. But like, I finally found, I've got this script or sorry, this program for controlling webcams. And so you have like a fine role of like focus and light or exposure and zoom.

Dave Jones: Yes. I've seen that on you. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And it's just, it's, you know, like it's like a power, it's like a power user view and it's just so damn useful. You know, when you have that kind of low level control, it's almost like you can control every

Dave Jones: bit in the chipset. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's like you wish they would publish like an API or something like that. I mean, obviously this is like whatever I'm using is just some hack that someone built built for it. But yeah, it'd be nice if they, I understand why they don't, but it's, it's nice when they do expose that stuff. You can really, you know, interesting. Interesting.

Dave Jones: And, and, and the thing is like, you know, people understand when they do these hardware hacks, they void their warranty, you know, that's the price you pay, right? That the scope has a three year warranty. You want to avoid that and have a go? No, zero. Go for it. You know? Like, yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: So, you know, I think that's a fine trade-off.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, we, we should mention again, we are going to be giving away some of those at some point, right?

Dave Jones: How many scopes have we got? Yeah, we've got a couple of scopes.

Chris Gammell: I think we've got a couple. We'll probably do the same thing we did for the, for David Kronstein's episode where we asked people to share in creative ways and then email them to us. So we'll do that at some point. Maybe the next fun guest episode, we'll do that. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Then we'll pick a random winner and yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Great. Great. I believe Bob's your uncle is the phrase. Bob's your uncle, mate.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No worries.

Chris Gammell: You still building stuff, building stuff these days?

Dave Jones: I am trying to.

Chris Gammell: Yeah? What you building?

Dave Jones: I'm still, I'm trying to do the, finish off the clock, the mixy tube.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Clock.

Dave Jones: Oh, I got the footprint wrong.

Chris Gammell: You did? Oh, no. Which one? The other tube?

Dave Jones: Only one person pointed it out.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. You can't. Only one person. No. Yeah. You can't. You can't depend on that. I know. I know that one. People just take it as like, oh, of course it's right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. No, no. Of course, only one person bothered to check. And sure enough, I got the, yeah, it was a wide SO instead of a standard SO. And I did a standard, I chose a standard SO.

Chris Gammell: Wait, so are you going to do the fold under? You're just going to bodge it?

Dave Jones: I could. I could potentially just fold the pins back under. Yeah. I've done that before. Yeah. I've done that too. It's possible. It's like, I think there's only like three millimeters total width in it. It's not, you know, so yes, you can fold the pins under, but I think I'll relay it out just

Chris Gammell: for, I don't know. Oh, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. You're only going to do one board, right? I mean, like. Oh, yeah, exactly. Is it like a super critical? I think that's a good, that's a good bodge video too.

Dave Jones: There's 10 of them. There's 10 chips.

Chris Gammell: Oh, it's for the actual, the driver.

Dave Jones: It's for the driver chip. Yeah. No, if it was just the 7404 inverter.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Man, that is tricky. I wish there was a better way to do that too. Because I, what was I doing for that? I was just putting a board together the other day and it was the same thing where it's just like, you know, I kind of created like a mantra, just like, just check against the data sheet first. Right. But it's so easy to be like, oh, it's in my library. No big deal. Right. But it's sometimes it's like, in your case, it was just, you didn't look to see that it was a wide footprint. You probably have a wide footprint in your, in your library too. Yeah. But it's just that, that notation difference, you know? And man, so they don't have, they don't offer it in a different one.

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: Oh, it's only because of the voltage spacing, huh? Is that why?

Dave Jones: Well, maybe. Yeah. It's probably got large die on there because they need, you know, they need large, you know, high voltage transistors inside and stuff like that. Okay. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: That, that is, that is difficult.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But yeah, I thought, oh, maybe some other brand has them in a narrow, but no, it's no bummer.

Chris Gammell: Oh, well. That's full to wonder, man. No big deal. Just try one, I guess. I guess you try one and then redo the board. Right. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. So yeah, try and do that. Try and do other stuff. I did my survey. I saw that. 10,000. Over 10,000 people responded. That's nuts. That's nuts. And it was limited.

Chris Gammell: Do you think it's actually 10,000 individuals or no?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That was a long ass survey too.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. But it only took, you know, a few minutes. People didn't complain really. And it was only limited to people with Google accounts too.

Chris Gammell: Oh, it was? Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because I'm doing a contest, so I don't want multiple people to reply so that they can game. I started opening it first and then people were just creating multiple entries just to, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. People suck sometimes. So anything fun pop out of it or no? Yeah.

Dave Jones: I, where are the results?

Chris Gammell: You didn't post them yet, right?

Dave Jones: No, I haven't posted them, but I will. Yeah. Here's the results.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, people may recall, I've done lots of Amp Hour surveys in the past. Thank you to everyone who's ever taken an Amp Hour survey. They're great.

Dave Jones: They're very fascinating. Yeah, they really are. They are absolutely fascinating. Right. Yeah. And I think you found- 25% of my audience are Yanks. Oh.

Chris Gammell: That's- Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Dave Jones: 32% of people watch every single video I upload. That's kind of hard.

Chris Gammell: That's self-reported, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Of course. You know. Yes. But that's, you know, hey, it's dark.

Chris Gammell: I guess they say that they, yeah, they're at least very interested in watching. Yeah, that's good. 32%.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yep.

Chris Gammell: You got some diehard fans there, man. Yeah. Crazy. Crazy people.

Dave Jones: So what is I- People really didn't like interviews. They didn't like the interview- Right. ... videos I've done.

Chris Gammell: Well, you are experiencing something called the cult of personality.

Dave Jones: Right, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Where you are the personality. Exactly. And so when you bring other people in-

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: See? Like, whoever this is, you know. Frank.

Dave Jones: It's the sigling CEO to tell me-

Chris Gammell: I'm downstairs, yeah. Hello. Ah, good old Dave. Never forget- Never remembers to turn off his phone. Oh, he can hear it. It's Mrs. EEVblog, I think.

Dave Jones: Was a telemarketer.

Chris Gammell: It's Mrs. EEVblog as a telemarketer. You still have a landline in your office? How old are you? I still have a landline. Yep.

Dave Jones: Oh, man. I do. That's funny. Yep. It's like, hello? I should have actually put that up. I'm calling to enter your survey. I should have put it up to the mic, shouldn't I?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I don't know if that bled through or not. A little bit. It sounded like a female voice. That's why I thought it was Mrs. EEVblog. It was a female voice. And I was like, kids make a wish foundation. Oh, right.

Chris Gammell: Hanging up on kids that need help, Dave.

Dave Jones: No, we've got a professional show here. Oh, professional.

Chris Gammell: Yes, yes.

Dave Jones: I'm sure they get into it all the time. Yeah. You know. It would have been a polite, you know, thanks, but no thanks.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: You know.

Chris Gammell: Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Dave Jones: No, I hate cold call solicitation. Like, I give to charity. I give to these types of charities, you know. But like, the cold call thing. It's less like, oh.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. What you going to do, man? Yep.

Speaker ?: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, I've been built. I finally got that board back. You remember I mentioned the CE header a while ago?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Which my friend said I should change the name of, but I don't think I probably will.

Dave Jones: Meh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's fine. But yeah, it's a nice little breakout board. I did a little breakout for the Teensy, and I'm starting to make little sensor boards. So, excited about that. And that'll be the. One of the reasons. I didn't mention it last time, but actually, one of the main reasons is that the idea being that I can make a board, and then, so I'm using the Teensy 3.2 on this particular one, but if I want to switch to Wi-Fi, or if the Teensy 3.2 goes obsolete, and later I switch to something else, basically it doesn't matter. So, really for the course, that makes sense. So, yep.

Dave Jones: Coolio.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man. Should we switch to the list? We've.

Dave Jones: Oh, I've got one that's not on the list. Oh, what'd you got? Which is huge news, which came out, well, like, it's not our industry-specific news, but it's pretty freaking huge. Have you heard about the Vault 7 thing?

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's the CIA thing. Yeah, someone tweeted at us about that, too.

Dave Jones: Oh, man, that is, that's bigger than the Snowden thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I get it. Snowden leaks, you know. Yeah, I guess I.

Dave Jones: But they own everything.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it does make you wonder. It's like, I'm going to put more tape over all my cameras. Right, and all the mics.

Dave Jones: All the conspiracy theories were true, you know. Like, yeah, they can watch you, and, you know, it puts Samsung TVs in particular go into a fake standby mode.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I didn't, sorry, I didn't actually look at this, so this is all news to me.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, no, if you look into the detail. Yeah, yeah, so Samsung, they highlight Samsung TVs in particular. They leave your mic on and your camera. Oh, that's so creepy. Yeah, yeah. You think you turn your TV off, but they can infect it with this malware stuff that, yeah.

Chris Gammell: See, now, this is a market opportunity, people, right? This is a market opportunity. Yep, absolutely. Switch, you know, controllable switch, like, nice and easy control for the entire, at the wall, whatever. Right. Just to have it, like, as a timeout, even. Doesn't have to be even, like, you know, IoT or anything like that, right? Because then that could be infected at some point, too. It could just be a timeout, right? Maybe it's good for the kids that, you know, watch too much TV as well, right? But, I mean, it doesn't matter what it is, but, yeah, some kind of, like, kill switch. Internet kill switch, power kill switch, something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is creepy.

Dave Jones: One of the fascinating, one of the fascinating things is they have a department of memes, of meme generation.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. I've heard about that stuff.

Dave Jones: Like, they generate memes to manipulate society. Right. Like, this is weird.

Chris Gammell: The thing that gets me about it is, like, just kind of, so, like, I read Reddit a lot, obviously. And then, like, you know, I just kind of, like, wonder, like.

Dave Jones: Source of all credible information. No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying that, like, you start reading stuff and it's just, like, you know, this is a popularity-based system. Like, any system can be gamed, of course. But, like, are the popular opinions I'm reading actually popular? Are they, you know, and I take it as word that they are, but, you know, are they actually popular? Are they, these are just things that someone gamed the system that they wanted to be at the top? You know, like, I don't know. I, it's, it's, I wonder if the whole thing is just to make us question it in the first place. And if so, then they've succeeded. And, yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, it's fascinating stuff and there's tons more to come. I loved the password that, because they actually released this a different way. They sent everyone the file, right? You could download the file, but it was password encrypted and they were going to release the password on a certain date, which they did. And I love the password. I presume Julian Assange chose it. Splinter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds. That sounds like a secure password, I've got to say. It was incredibly secure, but it's actually a JFK quote. If you know your history, it's a JFK. Because JFK was totally against the CIA. He wanted to, and that's, those were his exact words a month before he was assassinated. I'm going to splinter the CIA, referring to the CIA. I'm going to splinter the CIA up and scatter it into the winds. And he was going to break them up. And, because he thought they were getting too, you know.

Chris Gammell: Strange times we're living in here, Dave.

Dave Jones: A world until themselves. Strange times. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Strange times.

Dave Jones: It's great. You just don't want to get into this stuff. I find it fascinating.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. I just, I don't, I honestly don't want to think about it most of the time. I'm like. That's great.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It just starts to get real, real deep, real fast.

Dave Jones: Sorry. I'm just excited. You know, I just found that fascinating because I'm reading a book on JFK at the moment.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Oh, cool. Okay. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. So. Anyway. Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: Not those crap recommendations you give me.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. But the labs that I got from Jeff. I'm more upset with myself. It took me two and a half months to finish a 300 page book. Right. You know.

Dave Jones: The, the odds say that you will, you know, you'll give me a winner eventually. Oh, yeah. So. Right. All I've got to do is keep reading them all. One of them would be a winner. And then you'll go, see, I told you so. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, one of the links I even put on the, the thing this, for this week is about Claude Shannon. Right. So the thing I mentioned earlier.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: He built a, what does it say? Uh. Flame throwing trumpets and rocket powered frisbees. He was like the original tinkerer. Not the original, but he was definitely a tinkerer. If you read about him, he's just like. Sweet. Yeah. He would, he built like a automaton to, to play chess against him and stuff like that. Like dude just, he just tinkered on everything. And even like information theory stuff. Once he did that, he didn't really do much else with it. Like he lectured on it. He got a lot of awards for it. But he just went back to his garage. And basically he had like carbox because it was such an important thing. You know, that basically they.

Dave Jones: Hang on. Hang on. Shannon built a chess automaton.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Is it in here? I don't even know if it's in here. Claude Shannon.

Dave Jones: Like, because Shannon's like, when was Shannon?

Chris Gammell: 48.

Dave Jones: I mean, um.

Chris Gammell: I mean, he was there 48 until like 80s, basically. I mean, he was.

Dave Jones: Oh, oh, okay. Oh, right. Okay. So fairly recent. Okay. Sorry. I thought he was. No.

Chris Gammell: I mean, Claude Shannon. Yeah. He was part of. He was part of the. The Bell Labs.

Dave Jones: Oh, he only died in 2001. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. He was part of the early enclave at Bell Labs.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The Chess Master. His homemade electric automaton built in 1949. It was all built with tubes and stuff, too. It's fascinating. Oh, sweet. Yeah. I will link that, too. So.

Dave Jones: Excellent.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There's like a whole site. Oh, yeah. There's lots of stuff. Yeah. It's just so many smart people there. And that's what's. Yeah. It was so many smart people. So, yeah. See? That's true. Now you want to read that book, don't you?

Dave Jones: No. Well. Yeah. No. I want to read his autobiography. He's got one.

Chris Gammell: True. True.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: No. I want to read about the man. I just don't want a couple of pages worth in your book.

Chris Gammell: True. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I want the whole thing. The whole shebang. Thank you very much.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Anyway. What else have we got this week?

Chris Gammell: Well. Lots of stuff.

Dave Jones: Radio Shack's gone bankrupt again, man. Who cares? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I never really expected them to ever come. They're not. I mean. If people think they're coming back. If they think that. Who's the one. Who's the kit company. Then people keep thinking it will come back. Oh. Heathkit. Heathkit. Heathkit. Heathkit's never coming back, folks. I'm sorry. It's not going to happen. Yeah. Radio Shack's dead. You know.

Dave Jones: And the interwebs went down. Amazon went down. If this, then that went down. The whole, you know, everyone's couldn't get into their smart freaking house. So, you're right. Oh, this is John's video. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's super house. Sucked in. You know.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It was. Why would you want your stuff reliant upon the internet? Sure. The stuff that you'd need to have reliant because it's part and parcel of it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's fine. But like.

Speaker ?: When.

Chris Gammell: Well, John points that out in this video, too. He's basically talking about like the distance. I mean, if you think about it. Like. So, I think the. The AWS East region went down. Which is like on the. I think Virginia. I think that's the. One of the big server areas.

Dave Jones: Okay. So, that only affected US. Unless you were like in Australia. And you connected. Exactly. Your service. Well, that's what he said. Chose to be on the US service. Right.

Chris Gammell: So, like a door lock would actually go and talk 10,000 miles over the fiber cable. Everything like that. Yeah. And like. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things that can go wrong between here and there. And like. Damn. Right. And like. Just even that. Like delays. I mean, you and I know. Like. You and I have at least.

Speaker ?: Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Crazy. I'm in California right now. And it's like at least a 150 millisecond on a best case scenario. You know, and so, but you got to go both ways. That's 300 milliseconds. And then you got any slowdown.

Dave Jones: We're so ridiculously dependent. Yeah. Upon the whole thing. I mean. Upon. If I wanted to. Fibers. If I wanted to. I could destroy the entire. With a pair of side cutters. Maybe I need a hacksaw or something. Right. I could bring down the entire internet for this whole country. Right. There's only like two or three fibers coming. Like two or three locations coming into this country.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, no. I probably couldn't get to the other one in time before they repaired it. But anyway. If you had like three people or something. You could take. Like you could isolate this entire country from the rest of the world.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh. Like. And you know where fiber was invented? Fiber optics? Bell Labs. Bell Labs. Sorry.

Dave Jones: But do you know where the pioneering research went on long. Where it was done on long haul stuff. Here in Australia. Oh, yeah. Oh, cool. Because we're so. We're so geographically isolated. All the long haul stuff. Wait. Were you the one telling me about that? Even between cities.

Chris Gammell: Wait. Yeah. You were telling me about like the. Like the. The rogue line. Someone was telling me about that recently.

Dave Jones: Where the hell was that? Yeah. I can't remember either. I.

Chris Gammell: They put down like a rogue line. And in order. And then basically.

Dave Jones: Where the hell.

Chris Gammell: I forget who that was now. Oh, no. It was in Wellington. Sorry. It was someone I was talking to in Wellington. Basically. They. They. They.

Speaker ?: They. They.

Chris Gammell: Installed. Fiber. At like the city level. Or something like that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And hooked into the grid. Without anyone knowing. Or something. It was. Or like they hooked on the power lines. And then they eventually. Hooked into the. So the. The. The. The. The.

Chris Gammell: The. Pacific cable. And then. So it was. It was something like that. I'll have to check with them. But it was. It was nuts. So yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway. That was all done here.

Chris Gammell: Really? So like. Like the data stuff? Or what? We had to. Or like. No.

Dave Jones: No. All the long haul fiber link stuff.

Chris Gammell: So like the actual physical laying of the cable?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh no. No. Not just that. But the electronics. And the repeaters. And all the technology. That goes behind long haul. Yeah. Fiber comms. Yeah. A lot of that was done here. Yeah. Y'all ain't close to anything. Because we. We simply needed to. Because in the US. Right. You can go. 10. 10 miles. Right. In Yankee talk. And you're in the next town. You're in the next city. Australia. You can't do that.

Chris Gammell: Oh you even mean within cities. Oh okay. I thought you meant like. Oh yeah. I thought you meant like. Across the ocean.

Speaker ?: No no no.

Chris Gammell: I'm talking. Yeah.

Dave Jones: To go from city to city. And across the ocean as well. Right. Of course.

Chris Gammell: Of course.

Dave Jones: We're so far from everyone. It's.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Well yeah. You get outside like 20 miles. You can't even do like. You can't even do microwave links. Because you have to do point of sight. Yeah. Yeah. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That pesky curvature of the earth.

Chris Gammell: Stupid earth. It's always. It's always bending downwards.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Flat it'd be much easier. Oh yeah. Right. I'm a flat earther. Because of convenience. I really just want to believe. Right. Life could be much easier.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I like that. I like that. Oh goodness. Oh man. Yep. Did you see these. These electronics. That they developed for Venus. Have you seen that stuff? Venus? Yes. They're sending. They're sending a new. Oh a probe. Lander. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're sending a new lander. Yeah. Because there's only been one lander. Yeah. On Venus. Right. And they got like. Two seconds of footage. Before the thing melted.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Exactly. So it's like. Yeah. The main day temperature is 460 degrees Celsius. Yeah. And like 9.4 megapascals. 93 times that of Earth. Like damn.

Dave Jones: How long do they think it can last on the surface?

Chris Gammell: I think they said. Definitely. I don't.

Dave Jones: What. So it's got a. A nuclear power source. I would imagine. Yeah. I think so.

Chris Gammell: But it's more about like the actual electronic surviving. And so it's all silicon carbide and stuff like that. And. But man. Wow. That is just some. That's some serious shit. You know.

Dave Jones: Is it going to rove around or is it just going to.

Chris Gammell: I think it's just going to. It's just going to sit there. Let's see. It says in 82. The Soviet Venera 13 cent image shown above before its instruments failed despite the blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Silicon start to. Yeah. So this is actually. So. And I was talking to someone about this too. Like basically. This is the same reason. Like when you. When you look at like. Max junction temperatures. On like a FETS data sheet. That's listed at like 225. Because you get above that. And it says 250. You start to have migration. You'll have. Migration of the. In there. Like the.

Dave Jones: So they're going to. Right. So they're going to actually run the electronics at the high temperature rather than try and insulate it and keep it.

Chris Gammell: I think they'll still. And so now. Like you just like dump. It's dump a PCB onto the surface of Mars or something.

Dave Jones: Right.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Don't worry. We. We build a sulfuric acid atmosphere. It's going to. So it should be fine. It should be fine. Yeah. We'll just give it a couple of. Yeah. Just a couple of squirts. You know. Sure. Whatever.

Chris Gammell: No big deal. Yeah. But no. No. No. No. I think it still will be. But it's like. You know. Even in a vessel. Then you have to. You know. The temperature is going to rise. Pretty quickly. So. Let's see. It says. A silicon carbide circuit lasts more than three weeks in a laboratory simulation. So. Damn. So. Acidic. And. Or corrosive rather. And the. 450. See. Yeah. Eat your heart out. Car electronics. Minus 40 is impressive to 125. But. All right. Can I drive my car? So. Well.

Dave Jones: They're going to do long. Long term. Long term. Atmospheric. Monitoring and stuff from there. Because if they can't rove around. They can't. Right. You know. Do anything like that. There's going to. You think it'll just be like a probe.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It'll be. Yep. Right.

Dave Jones: Because they've already got like surface photos. There's a couple of photos. You know. From the. Oh really? The Venera probe. Yeah. So you know much more about the space.

Chris Gammell: History than I do actually. Yeah. So that's. Surface. I can't even imagine what it would be like. And the. It's so. It's really weird to me to think about Venus.

Dave Jones: It's flat. Well. Where they landed last time. It's like. It's like a dry lake bed almost. It looks like a dry lake bed.

Chris Gammell: Like filled with like. Like. Ammonia. Or something.

Dave Jones: Oh well. It's a hard rocky type surface. Or. Exile. Like lava surface. Or whatever. So it's all like hard. Are we talking about Venus? So it's like. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. Venus.

Chris Gammell: I said Venus was all gaseous. Am I. Am I thinking of the wrong planet?

Dave Jones: No. Only the outer planets. Are that. Anything past Mars. Is a gas. Planet.

Chris Gammell: Uh huh. I thought Venus was too. Am I. Maybe I'm thinking of. The atmosphere is very like a greenhouse. Right.

Dave Jones: Didn't you learn this in high school? Yeah. I should have learned this stuff. All the other planets are rocky. The outer planets are gas.

Chris Gammell: Well. Venus. Venus. The first thing comes up of course is Venus.com. Which is. Right. Sexy styles for women's bathing suits. Not what I was looking for.

Dave Jones: But you'll go there anyway. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Except. I said Pluto of course is a real old ball. That was a massive surprise. That was. Pluto. That was so exciting. Poor Pluto. Pluto. Poor Pluto. Yep. Poor Pluto. Pluto's freaking awesome.

Chris Gammell: Sister planet. Because it's similar size. Mass proximity. Sun bulk composition. Okay. Yeah. I guess I always thought Venus. Maybe because I'm thinking of the outer atmosphere. Uh. Being really thick. I guess. I didn't.

Dave Jones: Venus is a twin to Earth. Basically. Huh. Like Mars is. But of course. But Venus is unhabitable. Right. I mean. Just because of the. It is the runaway greenhouse effect. Right.

Chris Gammell: Venus is shrouded by an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds. Of sulfuric acid. Right. And that's why it's so light when sun bounces off it. And you can see it in the sky. It's like one of the brighter ones. Right. Hmm. Interesting. I. I learned. I learned something today. I guess. Yes. There you go. About something I should have learned in second grade. I probably did. Right. Let's be honest. I probably did. Yeah. I've been.

Dave Jones: But it goes in.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: One ear out the other.

Chris Gammell: I've been drinking beer for a long time now. Long time folks.

Dave Jones: Anyway. That's. That's very cool. I love. Like. You know. Because I have some background in that. Yeah. Like extreme electronics. Right. Yeah. Extreme electronics at the bottom of the ocean. Yeah. Right. You know. To get stuff to survive two kilometers underwater at that sort of pressure is really hard.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So. Did your stuff. Did it have like a coat? I mean. Was it like encapsulated? Or was it cold? It was super cold.

Speaker ?: No.

Dave Jones: You basically rely on the outer cylinder to keep it.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: You know. Dry. So.

Chris Gammell: Keep it dry. Keep it. Keep it.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Not compressed.

Dave Jones: Well. You didn't have to keep it warm. Because. You know. It's down there at zero degrees. Which is fine. Right. It's easy to get electronics to run at zero.

Chris Gammell: Oh. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Right. So. So. So. So. It wasn't a problem with the temperature. Except when it went from extreme temperatures on the back deck of a boat. Which can get to 60 degrees. Uh huh. And then you throw it in the ocean and it goes to zero. Right.

Chris Gammell: But you can put it in like a bath to kind of bring it to temp and slowly cool it down.

Chris Gammell: You can. Yeah. Anyway. If you want it. You could. Right.

Dave Jones: That's a real bitch for your. You know. Really accurate clocks and things like that. Uh huh. I see. Right. Big temperature extremes like that. Yeah. So. Anyway. Um. Yeah. So. Yeah. You know. Highly machined. Highly engineered. Uh. Pressure vessels to. You know. Have these things survive. So. So what's next? I don't know. Is there some crap about cosmic rays in here? Whoop-dee-doo. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Error rates. You know. Nothing new. I want something fun. This is fun.

Chris Gammell: Uh. So Alicia and Chris are from embedded FM are doing a March Madness. I don't know if you know what March Madness is.

Dave Jones: Uh. I've heard. It's a sale thing.

Chris Gammell: Is it? No. It's a basketball tournament. Actually. It's a college basketball tournament in the US. And basically. So it's like this elimination thing. And so they decided to do that. Uh. For processors. I don't know how. I don't know. What they're going to be doing. I think it's like they fill it out. People can fill it out. And then. So this is like a thing that they do a lot in the US. Where people fill it out. And it's basically like a betting thing. You just kind of guess which teams are going to win. For the real thing.

Dave Jones: Ah. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And so I don't know how they're going to actually pick. How. Which wins here. But it's. It's kind of an interesting look. Just an interesting look at all the different ones that are out there. Right. So.

Dave Jones: Highest performance per watt or something. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Right. Right. So the four categories are single board computers. Embedded powerhouses. Internet of things. And small but mighty. And a lot of the small but mighty. Right. I don't even. Know what those are. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Got to be smaller than a postage stamp.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. One of them is the basic stamp.

Dave Jones: I never used that part. Did you ever use that part? I think once many. Like a decade ago. Yeah. That was one of the first. You know. Of that breed of new age. New age. Yeah. In quote marks. You know. Development boards for Joe Average.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Because sort of before the basic stamp came along. It was. It was like. You know. All the demo boards were from the manufacturers. They were all professional. Yeah. They all cost 500 bucks. They're all. You know. You had to be a professional. You even buy one or something. You know. Like. You know. Like. Yeah. And the basic stamp came along. And it was. Yeah. A basic interpreter. You know. On a little board. Right.

Speaker ?: So.

Dave Jones: You know. Anyone. Any idiot. Who knew basic. Can come along. And actually program a micro. To toggle a pin. And flash a lead. Right. You know.

Chris Gammell: I'm always just amazed. I think it was one of the first. Yeah. I'm always just amazed. That like. Chip and Ken. Who run Parallax. That they actually went and. I think they built that micro. Right. I mean. They. They designed the silicon. Well. It was.

Dave Jones: It was. It was. It was just a pre-programmed pick. Or something. It was just a.

Chris Gammell: I always thought it was a.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I can't remember what chip it was.

Chris Gammell: The propeller. The propeller then. Went to a custom silicon. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yes. You're thinking about. Oh yeah. You're right. He's showing it here. The propeller. The Parallax basic stamp. Was just a pre-programmed pick. Oh. Interesting. One of the. Like. Like it came out pre. When. Pre. Flash memory or something. Uh huh.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Interesting. Okay. So the idea though. Was just to make it more accessible. Kind of like an Arduino. Like where. The programming's easier. That's not really the. The focus anymore. It's just to get. No. Get to the point of making. A thing.

Dave Jones: And. Yeah. And the interface. You didn't need a program. You just hooked it up to a serial port. So you programmed it through. I think a serial port or whatever. You know. So it was easily.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know. Yep.

Dave Jones: Easily accessible. And it had an interpreter in there. And you couldn't do much with it. Because you didn't have much memory space. Because you know. A. The PIC micros they were using at the time. Didn't have much. You know. Only had like 2K. Or 4K. Or something. And by the time you put the basic interpreter there. And you only had. You know. 200 bytes of. Of program memory or something. You know. So you couldn't do a huge amount.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: You know. Back then. I don't know what the modern ones do. I'm sure they do a ton more.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Back then. But. You know. It was enough to do.

Chris Gammell: Wait. There's some.

Dave Jones: Flash alert. And read some stamps. They're still making it.

Chris Gammell: Is that what you're saying?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well. Well. They've still. They've got the basic stamp too. They're still making it. Oh. 50 bucks. Jeez. That's pretty pricey. Wow. Hmm. Hmm. Anyway. Yeah. Basic interpreter on the chip.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And now they've. Of course. The Arduino went in the different direction. It doesn't have an interpreter on board. People think it does. But it doesn't. It just. It's just a C compiler.

Chris Gammell: And then. Yeah. It does in the background basically. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's just a C compiler. Yeah. So it kind of looks like it does. It's got a serial bootloader in there. That. You know. Does that stuff. So the interface is easy. Just like the basic stamp. But it actually downloads real code. So. Yeah. You know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No. No. That's. And there's. And there's.

Speaker ?: And there's.

Chris Gammell: And there's more tools like that. They kind of come. Coming out. Like. Not the. Not like Arduino. But just like. Like. Program interpreter type stuff. Right. So I've talked about the. The MicroPython. We've had Tony on. Talking about MicroPython stuff in the past. That's interesting. Yep. Alvaro. He did a talk. At those meetups that I do. About. Building out for one of the. The NXP boards. It's like an STM 30. Or sorry. Not an NXP. The STM 32 boards. And then it's just like a Python interpreter effectively. To just control the hardware. And then you could drop that chip on something. Talk to it with Python. And I think it just compiles for that. I think. So.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: You know. And then there's. You know. Then you can always move up the chain too. Right. You can move to like a. You know. You could write something in Python on Linux. Or in. In like Raspbian or something. Where you're actually. Operating on the. Raspberry Pi. Or you can do the same thing in BeagleBone. You write stuff in Node. And blah blah blah. There's a lot of options these days. Just. So many options.

Dave Jones: Oh. I love this. Which one? I love this.

Chris Gammell: A different link.

Dave Jones: The Internet of Things teddy bear. Oh God. Internet of Things teddy bear. Leaked. Two million. Parent and kid message recordings.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's creepy. Oh my God. That's just. Creepy. Jesus.

Dave Jones: Pretty cute looking Ted. But yeah. Cloud pets. Uh huh. I want off this rock. Please. Um. Has Elon done the. You know. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yes.

Dave Jones: Has he figured that out yet? I. Yeah. I'm on the first ship out of here. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well you're just being like why. Why would they even bother in the first place?

Dave Jones: Uh. It's just. I think it's just. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Like I think it's just so easy to do. That there's just. It's just a feature creep type thing. Right. Where it's like. Oh. Of course. Why wouldn't people want to. Be able to see their kid from the internet. Yep. Not thinking that other people might want to see their kid from the internet too. So. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh. I don't know. It's so bad. Hey.

Chris Gammell: Did you hear about. If you want to go to Mars Dave. I'm just saying that eventually they're going to have a teddy bear that's on Mars. You can talk to your family back in the. On Earth. Right. Yeah. Right. So you've got a familiar face to look at. Exactly. Yeah. Talk to your teddy bear. Right. Your telepresence teddy bear. Remember that thing? Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: The telepresence teddy bear we're going to do. Oh my God.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Did you hear that. They could potentially make Mars. Almost habitable within like years or decades. By doing the. Doing a magnetic field around Mars.

Chris Gammell: I did. Apparently. I did have. I did have. Visions of Arnold dancing in my head. Yeah. With his eyes bugged out from total recall. With his eyes bugged out. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And. Like. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't read about it.

Chris Gammell: So what does it actually mean? Like I don't get it.

Dave Jones: Well. They've run the. Some. You know. Climate. Some. Planetary climate scientist or whoever. Sorry. Ran the numbers. And said that. Yeah. If you could put a like one or two Tesla. Magnetic field around Mars. It would change the climate in a matter of years. Not. Hundreds of years. Years. Right. So. You know. So that made the big headlines everywhere. We're going to terraform Mars in a couple of years. And it's like. Has anyone actually figured out how to generate. That's a lot of. If you put a. All you've got to do is put a magnetic dipole somewhere or something. You know. And it. It'll just take care of.

Chris Gammell: Like a big U magnet. Like somewhere. I know. We're done now. Exactly. We're cool. Yeah. Why didn't we think of this sooner? Yeah. Exactly. Acme.

Dave Jones: It's big Acme magnets. Exactly right.

Chris Gammell: That is exactly what I have in my head. Yes.

Dave Jones: But. Yeah. But. But it's fascinating. I don't know why any. I believe that's the first time. Well. It's the first time I've heard of it anyway. I don't know if anyone's been talking about it before.

Chris Gammell: All they got. All they got to do now Dave. Science the shit out of it.

Dave Jones: Science the shit out of it. Right. Because like it's these order of magnitude. Like several orders of magnitude. Different. You know. That. Ideas that make several orders of magnitude difference in the results. You know. Because like regular terraforming. You know. It takes hundreds of years. Right. I never understood that. Previous theories and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: I mean like my idea of terraforming is from. No. It's real. Is from. What's it called? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Total Recall.

Chris Gammell: No. Not Total Recall. Firefly. Firefly. May it rest in peace.

Dave Jones: Oh. Okay. I haven't watched. Oh my God. Firefly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The best nerdy sci-fi series to never make it out of.

Dave Jones: Is it about Mars?

Chris Gammell: It's about Space Cowboys. Is that.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So good. Okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. So that. Yeah. Like this. But this offer has the promise of several orders of magnitude quicker. Right. Interesting. Over previous techniques. Which is interesting. But you know. So everyone ran with the headlight. And my comment on Twitter was. Well. Okay. Sounds great. How do you make. How do we actually generate. That magnetic field around Mars. And everyone just goes. Right. Right. Right. Like.

Chris Gammell: With science saved.

Dave Jones: With science. Yeah. Duh.

Chris Gammell: Just turn up the science. Great. Awesome.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Get on it scientists. I know. Sprinkle magic fairy dust around. Right. Iron filing dust around Mars. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Just like Wooly Willie. What? Wooly Willie. You never. You never seen that. That's. No. What's Wooly Willie? That was a game used to. It was like a toy. A children's toy. Where it's like. You had a drawing of like a. A completely bald person. And then you had. No. Iron filings under like a piece of plastic. And then you had a little pen. That had a magnet on it. You could draw. You could drag the magnetic filings. Ah. Right. Yeah. Okay. A beard and hair. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: You missed out Dave. I'm just saying.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Wooly Willie. No I played with magnetic filings when I was a kid. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: It's okay. But you probably did it directly.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Sorry. I didn't have a Wooly Willie.

Chris Gammell: You could inhale them. Right. Instead of like having them underneath plastic. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So how real children did it. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: As opposed to the new generation who have internet connected freaking teddy bears. Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Ah. That's pathetic. It's pathetic. Yeah. What else have we got to. You know. Well speaking of science.

Chris Gammell: Sciencing the shit out of something. This is. Someone else posted this. But at first I was like. Ah. I can't believe they're doing this. But The Martian. Which is that. Where that line's from. They released a classroom version. And so basically it's like a sanitized version of the novel. Because if people don't know. Another great book to read by the way. Absolutely. Yeah. He swears like a pirate. I mean like. He swears like an engineer stuck on a planet. How about that. That's probably the best way to say it.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. And you know. And rightfully so. But basically. Like a lot of teachers saying. Well we can't. We want to use. We want to use this as curriculum actually. Which is really interesting. Right. And so like. Yeah. Of course. They're doing like. So like. Right. Sanitized version. Burning hexane. To create water. Yeah.

Dave Jones: To generate. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And. And. You know. And hopefully not blowing up. Right. And. Yeah. So just using it as like a curriculum thing. And as a way to keep kids in the age. And my comment about it was like. I don't really think that you should dumb things down for kids. But at first off. They're talking about like middle school kids. And then it's like. You know. If you tell a kid they can't read something. They're going to go out and find that version anyway. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: It gets more kids reading. Right. So.

Dave Jones: Oh no. I'm all for. Like. Like. Just take out the swear. Well. I have no problem with that. I mean. You know. Like. As long as.

Chris Gammell: Dave's softening up in his old age. I like this.

Dave Jones: Oh no. Yeah. I mean.

Chris Gammell: Whatever it is. Whatever it gets to pass through the school board. Exactly. That's basically. Like. Who cares. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Exactly. Yeah. So. Yeah. Who cares.

Dave Jones: No. I'm not in favor of dumbing it down. No. No. No. No. Yeah. You know. In terms of the. You know. His. You know. Angry. His. You know. Engineering attitude.

Chris Gammell: Right. That's true. To things. You know. Like. Got to survive. Got to be. Got to be. Sciencey. Got to figure stuff out man. That's like the best part of that book. The only thing. I don't know if we talked about it on here. I didn't like the part about the. The drill. I don't know if you remember that.

Dave Jones: Oh. The drill. Oh.

Dave Jones: Oh. God. What was it about the drill? So. He was using.

Chris Gammell: He was using like a drill. And then he tapped. Yeah. He tapped off like the windings in the drill. And then he used that to power. Something. But it was like a lower voltage than. He needed. And it's just like. And then I put some resistors in line. And I'm like. No. That's. Right. I don't know. That's not. I know I shouldn't be nitpicky. It's fine. I still love the book. Don't get me wrong. But like.

Dave Jones: It's pretty nitpicky. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But that was the only one that really. That I understood enough probably. To. To be nitpicky about.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Because all the space stuff. I don't freaking know. No. And. Yeah. Yeah. But another great book. That's on the Empire reading list as well. I suppose. Definitely. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Did they ever release like an extended DVD. Like an extended cut of that.

Chris Gammell: Of the movie.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Because I don't have the Blu-ray.

Chris Gammell: Version.

Dave Jones: Was there an extended cut.

Chris Gammell: I didn't see it. Yeah. Because there was. They left a lot out of the movie too. Unfortunately.

Dave Jones: But I don't know if they actually shot it. Yeah. Whether or not they shot extra material or not. Or whether or not it was just. You know. Like the actual script was cut. Oh yeah. Because they left out tons of stuff.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know.

Dave Jones: I'll have to get the Blu-ray.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah man. Party. Cool. Yeah. So what else is on here. We got a lot of links on here. I didn't read this one. Nothing. Because we're almost out of time. The almost six times higher than actual energy consumption. The energy meters. Did you see that one?

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. The energy meters. A lot of people. Probably asking you about that. Yeah. To that. Yeah. Yeah. I. Yeah. Because of the piss poor power factor of modern electronic products. And they don't have any power factor correction in them. You know. Oh.

Chris Gammell: So that's what it came down to. Was the power factor. I'm sure.

Dave Jones: Well. I haven't read it. But I'm sure that's what it is. Right. I can guarantee you. That's what it is. Right. Yeah. Because most.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Most. Most. Energy meters usually. Expect like super clean power. And then if you start getting like the. Yeah. The clipping. No.

Dave Jones: But you. You know. If you see my teardowns of scopes. And I hook them up to a power meter. And the power factor is. You know. 0.2 or something. You know. Yes. Like it's horrible. Especially in standby. Like if you're. If you're gears in standby. The power factor is dreadful. It's like 0.1 or something. 0.2.

Chris Gammell: Why. Like it's hopeless. And when you switch it on. Is that the.

Dave Jones: It's. Yeah. It's just chopping the damn thing up. To buggery. Yeah. And to get the. You know. To get the standby.

Chris Gammell: To just kind of bleed off a little bit. Yeah. And so you're not taking all the power. You just do a little bit. It isn't optimized. Right.

Dave Jones: So. Yeah. Whereas you turn it on. Yeah. And you might get. You know. Power factor of 0.6 or something. You know.

Chris Gammell: Oh. Interesting. Okay.

Dave Jones: So it's better. You know. But still. Yeah. Pretty horrible. So. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So this isn't really news then.

Dave Jones: Ah. Well. I didn't know it would be that bad. Like I expected. You know. Yeah. 5% error or something. You know. Because. Because modern chips handle this sort of stuff. Like I've done teardowns of smart meters like this. Smart energy meters like this before. And. You know. They use purpose designed chipsets for these sort of things. And they're supposed to be designed to handle high power factor I thought.

Chris Gammell: Mm.

Dave Jones: So. I. I don't know where the issue is creeping in. Uh. Whether they're just. You know. Cheap ass. One hung low brand. Um. Meters. Although I suspect you wouldn't be able to get into that market if you were. You know. Cheap ass. One hung low. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Right. Um. Yeah. Because you need type approvals and you know. All sorts of things to be. You know. Stored in people's houses. So. It's not something you can just sell to your. You know. Joe average consumer on eBay. Mm. Mm. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Uh. Okay. So I have one last discussion point. Uh. Maybe. Maybe good for us here. Because since we're kind of talking about industrial stuff too. Like talking about power. Power monitoring. Stuff like that. I saw. Uh. I saw a. A breakout. On Tindy. Today. Uh. It was just screw terminal breakouts. For raspberry pi. And. Um. And I thought. It was interesting. Because it's just like. Literally like. You could hook. It. It almost looked like misleading. Because it's like. You see. I see. I see. Um. Terminal blocks. And I'm like. Oh. Like. It's probably higher power. I can do more current. Whatever. But it just hooked it directly. To the pins. The breakout pins. Of the 40 pin header. Yeah. And then.

Dave Jones: And.

Chris Gammell: Which goes straight to the Broadcom chip. Which basically means you're hanging. You know. A. Somewhat sensitive. 3.3 volt. Pin. To the rest of the world. And I always think it's. Worthwhile to talk about like. Well. You know. So the main thing I see is like. I have students. And I also have. You know. Just.

Dave Jones: What's new here? I'm sorry. I like. This is everyone. Every man his dog does this.

Chris Gammell: Don't. Don't do this. This is. That's a bad thing. Yeah. I know. Right. Okay. Well put. Right. So the discussion.

Dave Jones: If you're going to make a breakout board. At least put. Yeah. Silk screen on there. That tells you that warning. Will Robinson. No. No. This is a 3.3 volt.

Chris Gammell: No. My discussion here. Point was going to be like. How. How would we change things. In terms of like. If you're going to hang something in the world. Right. Like. So I would. Usually end up.

Dave Jones: Well you get one of those. Get a separate.

Chris Gammell: Rugged Duinos or whatever. Right.

Dave Jones: There's like. Ruggedized industrial versions of the Arduino. For example.

Chris Gammell: Well I always tell people. I'm like. Look. Just. put it on a different power domain put a follower out there if you're going to do an output say it's only an output put a FET between your Broadcom or whatever it is your Raspberry Pi in the world and then put it on a separate power domain so that you blow the FET or you blow the power you know you fuse the power there so you don't blow up whatever the board is maybe people don't care because it's like a $35 board but I don't know I just think that there's more and more people getting into kind of like quasi pseudo industrial applications and not a lot of people think about that stuff they just kind of hang microcontrollers out into the world and scary you can go through a lot of boards I'm always amazed when someone's like oh I blew up another microcontroller I'm like how I don't know no is this not this is not

Dave Jones: noteworthy in any way shape or form I don't know why you're bringing it up at all I'm sorry

Chris Gammell: I just think it's a discussion point for like what else you can do to protect your circuits but I guess Dave already knows all this stuff

Dave Jones: if you want to discuss specific protection measures then that's a you know that's an interesting topic but people can blow up their micros by hooking shit straight up to the pin yeah yeah yeah yeah

Chris Gammell: that's not news I'm just saying that like no no it's more about like what do you do about it then you know like that's the kind of thing of like right so

Dave Jones: or you're just sick of seeing so many breakout boards with zero protection on them is that yeah I mean I finally got to you it's not that I'm snapping Dave

Chris Gammell: it's that it's I know that a lot of our listeners are getting started right and just you and I usually glaze over this stuff and that's what I'm really saying is like you know we have to

Dave Jones: well yeah I think

Chris Gammell: how do you learn that stuff

Dave Jones: it's almost as if people have to learn the hard way well yeah like I really hope you learn the hard way I hope you blow the ass out of your Arduino and then you'll figure out why and you'll learn from it because if we tell you right if we tell you to you know they can blow up like it'll just probably just go over your head yeah yeah yeah yeah it's only when it actually happens to you do you really learn

Chris Gammell: it's true

Dave Jones: so you know I yeah okay hope your stupid Arduino blows up in your face while you're connecting to your internet and devices thing

Chris Gammell: one less IOT thing in the world is that what you're saying yeah

Dave Jones: teddy bears going up in flames that's what I want to see gotcha can that be like the icon photo of this episode teddy bears in flames man like

Chris Gammell: yeah

Dave Jones: yeah a burning teddy bear or something

Chris Gammell: yeah sure sure

Dave Jones: sweet just google that yeah flaming teddy bear

Chris Gammell: uh okay well anything else on here or no nah

Dave Jones: I'm done

Chris Gammell: you're done

Dave Jones: I'm a busy man oh yeah I gotta go

Chris Gammell: right

Dave Jones: okay

Chris Gammell: well links on our subreddit you can always check it out there thanks to our patreon people and if you are an Aussie or a Kiwi and you'd like to meet up in those cities that I listed please take a look at the link that I'll put in the show notes I'd love to hear from you love to drink a beer with you show you some projects and see what you're working on so

Dave Jones: sweet and I'll think of some horrible places to take you that scare the crap out of you

Chris Gammell: yay

Dave Jones: maybe like a snake pit from Indiana Jones because you hate snakes and spiders and stuff don't you

Chris Gammell: definitely hate spiders snakes I don't really know I haven't been around enough of them but probably yeah let's just skip all that stuff if we're cool if we're I'm good I'm good yeah do you guys really have snake pits do you have like snake pits that seems like a really weird attraction

Dave Jones: I've been in a pit with a snake yes

Chris Gammell: weird hobbies you have there David

Dave Jones: yeah I've been in a water pit with a there's nothing in there but a snake and me like and the snake's swimming and it's looking for something to get on

Chris Gammell: hard pass yep I'm gonna say hard pass yeah

Dave Jones: been there done okay

Chris Gammell: cool all right well I don't want to do that but we'll talk soon about other things

Dave Jones: catch you next time you

Speaker ?: you