#360 – A Total 360

Chris Gammell: Hey everyone, quick announcement this week about the episode. We actually recorded this live with a stream going on. So if you'd like to, you could switch over to the live streaming. You can watch me and Dave. We actually incorporate some of the articles we go over. And it's just a new thing we're trying here. Also, because of that, we had a little bit of audio issues, but should be okay. But like I said, it's usually a little bit better if you do watch it. So you can go over to youtube.com slash user slash the amp hour. And also don't forget to subscribe. If you think you might like this kind of thing, we probably are going to try this again in the future. On to the show. This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released September 18th, 2017. Episode 360. A total 360.

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

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell, but we have not yet started.

Dave Jones: We haven't shown our faces. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: There we are. Hey. Hey. So we figured we'd be doing a total 360 here. That was so lame.

Dave Jones: That's very bad. It is episode number 360.

Chris Gammell: It is 360.

Dave Jones: And I now have the link and I'm going to tweet it out. And we are live.

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm. So we're live. We're doing the show live. And we're trying to... I mean, so the real reason, and the beneficial thing here, is that the reason we're doing this in the first place is because Dave now has NBN. NBN, man.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but my connection was good enough before.

Chris Gammell: I know. But it's just a way to celebrate it, right?

Dave Jones: Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: So should we explain the mechanism how we're doing this? We are using... The internet. The interwebs. Oh. This newfangled interwebs thing.

Chris Gammell: Hey, Dave, I hate to tell you here, buddy. I have not started recording on Audacity yet, did you?

Dave Jones: Neither have I. So let's start recording on Audacity. There you go. Thanks for reminding us. There we go. We're now recording on Audacity as a backup.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, we're... Yeah, we can cut into this now. Let's get that from the top. One more time, huh?

Dave Jones: No, no, no. Keep going. Come on. It's live.

Chris Gammell: So I'm going to play Dave's part in the radio drama at the end. No.

Dave Jones: It's all good. So what we're doing here, normally we use Mumble, which is like a gaming, streaming, audio thing, to hear each other. We don't normally see each other when we do the show, but we can hear each other live. It allows us to talk and allows us to stream guests, listen to guests, and record guests as well. And so we're not using Mumble today. We're using Skype, just like we did back in Ampower number one, didn't we? Yeah. We used Skype as... And it was horrible. The lag was just...

Chris Gammell: I mean, everything was bad then, though. I mean, like... Yeah. Well, people go listen to it. I mean, we've come into our own in terms of comfort and talking to each other, I suppose, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. But yeah, the tools have improved. And Skype seems to work just fine now. I don't... Although I can't watch myself. If I'm watching the Skype screen, but it's my feed being fed to Chris, which is then being fed back to me. So I've got to look at my XSplit screen. We're both using XSplit, and that's what Chris is streaming to our Ampower YouTube channel. Yes. And I'm using XSplit to feed the video from XSplit into...

Chris Gammell: Right. Dave doesn't need to be using XSplit, but he's doing it as a backup. No. So...

Dave Jones: But I'm doing... Oh, I haven't recorded locally.

Chris Gammell: Again, still.

Dave Jones: Here we go.

Chris Gammell: Well, this is the thing. So... And the great thing about Mumble... What we got into the... What people don't know behind the scenes is that we've... Our asses have been saved multiple times by having backups on backups on backups. And so we're going a little bit loosey-goosey here. I guess we have YouTube. If you can hear us on YouTube, then you can hear us, right? So...

Dave Jones: Right. So that's good. Well, I'm going to call it up now and see if we can get the chat. So I'm going to... Right.

Chris Gammell: And that's the different thing. So...

Dave Jones: So I'm going to mute it there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And I'm going to open up the chat. Is there anyone there? I can't see any messages at all. Oh, chat. No, there it is.

Chris Gammell: Three people are watching. Three whole people are watching, Dave.

Dave Jones: Three whole people. I'll do the pop-out chat. There we go. Yeah. So I've got the pop-out chat now. So... Oh, there we go. I can now...

Chris Gammell: There's some people now. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All right.

Dave Jones: Hello, world. There we go.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: We're chatting. What's up, nerds? From Mark Smith. Yeah. G'day. What we should do is actually put... We should have figured this out before. We should include the chat window on Skype.

Chris Gammell: No. No? Hell no.

Dave Jones: No?

Chris Gammell: What? Too hard? Or just... No, that's like... It's like just allowing people to type whatever they want. No, we don't... Oh, right. Okay. We don't need any...

Dave Jones: I've done that with live shows before, and it's...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay.

Dave Jones: It's been okay. But yeah, we could get ASCII penises or... Yes, right. Of course. ...something like that. You know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, so what we should say here, though, is that if you are... If you're listening or watching or whatever, and you're participating on the chat, we always ask for a question... We try to ask for questions on Twitter beforehand. But if you've got any questions, if you have any questions there, just let us know. Okay.

Dave Jones: Stefan says, the audio for Chris is nice and clear, but Dave, you're like having a cold. Well, I am still getting over.

Chris Gammell: That's actually Australian. That's actually... He's Australian. That's Australian. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I actually get really distracted. So I do some live streaming once in a while for contextual electronics, and I get so distracted because it's just like... I'm just like looking at the chat, and my face goes blank and whatever.

Dave Jones: Oh, here's a loaded question straight up.

Chris Gammell: No, do not read those. Let's try and keep on electronics, people.

Dave Jones: Electronics. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right. So it's weird watching the streaming coming. So I'm recording video locally. I'm recording audio locally using Audacity, recording video locally using XSplit. I'm streaming XSplit into Skype. You're streaming Skype to YouTube. I'm streaming YouTube back to me. So I'm seeing that delayed feed. It's just...

Chris Gammell: Wow. It's a lot. Yeah.

Dave Jones: There's a lot of stuff involved in just doing this. Right. It's not...

Chris Gammell: And what I think about it... So when I talked to Rick, the server farm person, Rick Alter, it was like we are just benefiting from just so much capacity, right? Like why are we streaming video from Australia to Chicago to God knows wherever the YouTube server is, right? I mean like this is just... Right. This is just abundance of technological ability. So... Yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You're very unprofessional there with your microphone covering your face. What are you hiding?

Chris Gammell: I got a lip job. Yeah. My mic doesn't go any lower, man. So... Oh, really? Okay.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, that's it. Yeah. Mine's just here. You can probably see the top of the... No. No, no. You can't because Skype actually crops the video.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: So it's just showing my head. Whereas my X split feed on feeding in is actually much larger than that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So anyways, that's enough about video. That's enough about setup. Yep. All right.

Dave Jones: This is live AMB.

Chris Gammell: And so what I can also... What I can't... I guess what I can show people here is that we always go off our subreddit, right? So we have our subreddit here. This is what we see. This is what we go off of each and every week. So... Well, kind of. Well, most... Yeah, that's true. I got some stuff that's actually not on here this week.

Dave Jones: Well, we start out with that and then we just go off on tangent. Yeah, right. You know. Right.

Chris Gammell: As we do. Yep. Yeah. And so, you know, this is always a good place if you... I don't think we'll switch over to doing too much visual stuff just because... Well... Yeah. Right. Screen capture stuff. Yeah. Well, none of that. I mean, like, if we start talking about stuff that's on screen, then people who are used to audio...

Dave Jones: Who are listening to the amp out. Well, all right. We've still got an audience for the amp, but we'll still export this as an audio stream. That's right. Yep. And send it to the amp out. We'll probably just do that from YouTube because we don't want to have to edit the thing. Right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. We don't want to have to edit. Wait. Wait. You. Wait. Now that we have video, I can... Yeah. We. We don't want to have to edit. Right, Dave. Right, Dave.

Dave Jones: For those who don't know, Chris is the... Chris is the one who does all the heavy lifting on the amp out. I just turn up at the last minute and press record. He's...

Chris Gammell: Dave's the talent. Dave's the talent.

Dave Jones: And I'm the talent. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, so what's going on with you, man? So what's new? I mean, electronics? Anything in your realm these days? You got your DMM going on?

Dave Jones: I got my DMM going on. I'm about to release. I'm getting 50 manufactured. I've just put in the purchase order to get 50.

Chris Gammell: Is that the early release you were talking about? Or is that some of us?

Dave Jones: That of the early release, yeah. So 50 people scramble to buy that first up. 25 will go to my patrons. And probably 25 to forum supporters, even though they're kind of sort of the same thing. So, yeah. Just, yeah. Early backers will get... Well, they're not backers because I'll probably just do it through my EV blog shop. Oh, okay. So just a straight purchase, yeah. Yeah. I'm finally about... Because I want meters in people's hands so that they can, you know, we can get feedback on that before we go and do the crowdfunder. I'll probably do the crowdfunder at the same time. But before we push the button on, like, making a couple of thousand of them, you know, I would like, you know, 50 people to have them in their hands and go, hey, you know, look, you know, something's wrong. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's user testing.

Dave Jones: Because it's impossible to test your own stuff.

Chris Gammell: Right. You're too close to it, right?

Dave Jones: Yes. It's so too close to it. So, you know, like, probably find that, you know, simple things are totally missing when we actually get them in people's hands. And hopefully, like, the hardware should be right. But, yeah. I mean, how many revs has there been? I've got, like, I haven't put them all together. There's got to be seven or eight at least.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah, and they sent me another one this week just because we changed one part on it. So they're going to ship another unit.

Chris Gammell: Okay, so these are, like, small, like, manufacturing tweaks? Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Just very, very small changes. Yeah. Only once have we, like, completely revised the whole thing when we changed the processor from a PIC 24F to an ST ARM micro.

Chris Gammell: You know, someone was, so one of my friends was, is a fan of yours. And he was, he was complaining the other day. He's like, he's like, yeah, man, I use the same processor that Dave's using in that meter and I can't find any in the world. And I'm like, that is, that is not why, that is not why that's happening, right? He was talking about indistribution though, right? And so it's like, it's like one of those things.

Dave Jones: I haven't looked.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, but what it really is, it's just that, I mean, I don't actually know which variant it is. I know it's an STM32. Oh, it's the Icarus off the top of my hand. Yeah, but whatever. Is it an F3, F4? Something. Probably F4.

Dave Jones: It's a bell. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's like a Cortex-A4. And like, those are nice. I mean, they're nice parts. They're cheap as hell. Like, they're great, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, but this one's a specific variant because it has the LCD driver built in that supports the big number of segments I need.

Chris Gammell: Right. And so that's, and that's ultimately, so it's like, it feels, it's like, it feels like it's this thing where it's like, oh, they're all gone because they're in this one thing I know about. But in reality, it's just in distribution. They just don't stock these things. Like, I would think if, if it really takes off because of that, right? So if people started designing it in more and more and more.

Chris Gammell: I doubt it because it's a specific part.

Chris Gammell: Right, exactly.

Dave Jones: Like, not everyone's going to need all that LCD stuff. If you don't need the LCD stuff.

Chris Gammell: Right, you got to pay extra for it too, right? I mean, like.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you pay extra and it's a larger pin count, one with higher pin density. You just don't want that.

Chris Gammell: Yep, yep. So. Right. And so that, and that's, and that's what I, I mean, he knew that too. He was just joking about it. But like, you know, it just, it's, it's like one of those, what's it called? Like an observation phenomenon type thing where like you, you know, you think, you think that you're looking at the same thing everybody else is looking at. But it's, in reality, it's just that those parts aren't available most of the time. You have to order them special from the factory either way, right? You probably had to put in, or your manufacturer had to put in a couple of real orders.

Dave Jones: I don't have any visibility in that they order it there in, there, there in Korea. So where's ST? ST is not a Korean company, so.

Chris Gammell: ST manufactures, I think at TSMC these days, but they are based out of the Netherlands. No, they're ST Micro. Well, they probably got multiple fads in different countries. Yeah, but south of France? Italy? I don't know. Whatever. Yeah, okay. Well, that's great. That's great. Cool. So yes, that's happening.

Dave Jones: And I am, I just took photos the other day. I am actually going to, I was going to do a crowdfunder. You've seen this like a year ago. It was my sleeve, my little ESD sleeve for storing components, you know, in the ring binder thing.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you remember? Yeah, I was going to do a crowdfunder for that, and it just, things just got in the way. And I never got around to doing it. And some people have asked, hey, why don't you just throw it on your store? So yeah, all right, I'm just going to put it on the store, you know. So I've done a second channel video. I've already done a video like announcing it, but I haven't put it on the store yet. So that'll probably happen today or tomorrow.

Chris Gammell: Titan of industry right here, folks. So, yeah. Oh, look at this. We got some useful feedback here too. Mark Smith says, ST Micro is a French Italian multinational headquartered in Geneva from Wikipedia. Look at this. We can have people with Wikipedia stuff for us, Dave. Yes. Yeah, yes. All right. Thank you, Mark. Our minions are doing our work for us. Yes, yes.

Dave Jones: Our Oompa Loompa listeners.

Chris Gammell: No. You could never call them that. No.

Dave Jones: I just saw you do the arms. I think we've got like a 30-second delay, 20-second delay on the YouTube stream.

Chris Gammell: Whatever. Oh, I'm sure we do, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Anyway. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Do we have electronics? So, yeah. I'm doing that. I'm stocking. I've got another pocket multimeter I'm reselling. Mm-hmm. So, I did a little like unboxing review of that. I put it on the second channel. Oh, I saw that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no. I saw that thing. Yep. It's just like a little cheapo, right?

Dave Jones: No, no, no, no. It's probably one of the most expensive pocket multimeters you can get.

Chris Gammell: Oh, oh.

Dave Jones: Buy it. Okay. Top of the line. The reason I decided to stock it is because you couldn't buy it outside of Japan. Oh, that's what it was. The Japanese one. I tried to get it from a pocket multimeter shootout. Yeah. And I was like, and I love this little thing. It's great. It's bloody expensive. Like the wholesale price from the manufacturer, the reason I'm going to sell it so high is because the high price from the wholesale price straight from the manufacturer, I'm buying it directly from them in large quantities and it's still pretty high.

Chris Gammell: Right. So, it's just a cash outlay and it's like a bunch of cash.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's, yeah. So, anyway. So, yeah. It's top of the line premium and you couldn't buy it anywhere else. So, I thought, yeah, I'll stock it.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Why not? If it doesn't sell, it doesn't sell. I don't, you know. It's just, I'm always looking for like stuff like that for my store. Stuff that's not easy to get elsewhere and it's sort of premium like because I don't want to go be selling a $10, $20 cheapo meter. You just can't compete with eBay and everything else. Right. It's just not worth it. Right. So, yeah. So, I thought, hey, that's a nice meter if you want a top of the line one.

Chris Gammell: Great.

Dave Jones: But it's now available outside of Japan.

Chris Gammell: Nice. That's great. I had a question for you. Here. I can actually show you my little screen. I started doing this map here. And so, like, I've been mapped. Idea. For concept. Yeah. So, like, okay. So, basically, this first build was actually first prototype. Right. So, we've talked about this in the past of like, so, you got an idea. You got a proof of concept. Right. And so, I said ideas like just, you know, system doc, whatever. Proof of concepts. Like when you're putting stuff together. One-off build. So, basically, what I was trying to do is map out the different YouTubers in this space. Right.

Dave Jones: See, I wouldn't do the one-off build. I would skip one-off build entirely there. The proof of concept is you've already breadboarded or veriborded the thing. Right. Like, so, that's it. I'd jump from that straight to the production PCB. Really.

Chris Gammell: I totally agree. And I do that as well. But what I'm saying is that some people do this. So, I was thinking about Great Scott, right? So, I was watching one of his videos. Okay. And so, like, he does those, like, one-off builds where they're really nice. They're usually some modules that are wired together. I was watching, like, one of the power supplies ones.

Dave Jones: How does he build his boards? Because I don't, I'm not a regular watcher of his stuff.

Chris Gammell: He does veribord with, with, with. Veribord. Yeah. Okay. With solder bridges. Okay. Right. Right. And so, that's the kind of thing where it's, like, these are, like, the different things. So, like, so, like, idea and proof of concept, I'd put that in, like, the Ben Krasnow area. Right. And then. Right. Somewhere between proof of concept and first prototype, I'd probably put you there. Maybe even higher than that because you also do some production.

Dave Jones: See, first prototype wouldn't be a milled PCB.

Chris Gammell: So, it could be also do a fast turn PCB or, you know, a cheapo PCB. Whatever it is. Right. I agree. But I'm just saying that, like, first prototype's that. Then probably, like, second prototype's, like, 3D printed or, you know, 3D printed case. And, you know, more integration. Maybe you pull modules onto the board then if you're, you know, if you're starting to use modules. And then start going to production level stuff. But I was just wondering about, like, if there's a better word for that one-off build thing. That was just what I came up with. I'm not sure if there's an actual name for that stage, you know.

Dave Jones: All right. I don't know. No.

Chris Gammell: Okay. No. Yeah. Maybe the audience will know. Really abusing that today. Yeah. So, I'm trying to just kind of map out the YouTube space, too. Because it's kind of interesting to me of, like, I mean, in full disclosure, I was thinking about, like, well, so my course is kind of more in the you're ready to finally make a PCB. But, like, most people shouldn't start there. Right? Like, most people should be doing proof of concept or one-off builds, that kind of thing of, like, you shouldn't usually skip that step unless you already know what you're doing. Right?

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: Right. So, like, someone like you, yeah, of course, you already know what you're going towards. You might be. Or if you've got a build that you've done in the past and you're updating it. Right? If you're going from a rev1 to a rev2, that's simple. Right? You already know generally the case size, all that stuff. But it's this early stuff that's kind of fuzzy.

Dave Jones: Although some things don't breadboard easily. They don't veriboard easily. If you need a high pin count. Yeah, you can get these breakout, you know, the BGA or high pin count QFP to dip packages and stuff like that. But sometimes it's just not worth it. Well, proof of concept could be. Like, sometimes it's just better off getting one of those cheap-ass PCBs and just, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's true.

Dave Jones: Doing it, maybe. It depends on the tech.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I mean, like, sometimes, yeah, you need to, like, when people are doing, like, those FPGA boards that then have the really high-speed, like, interconnects.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, yeah, right. And then you can build a daughter board for that. Yeah, but then you usually know what you're doing. Of course. But you usually know what you're doing. You know, if you're a jumpy, if that's your first project and you're doing high-speed differential pairs and whatnot, then you're, you know, you're doing pretty well.

Chris Gammell: No, yeah, I agree. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I was watching that Great Scott video, though, because I've been thinking about, and this kind of ties to your power supply project, but I've been thinking about doing, like, a portable power supply. That's what I'm kind of interested in. Now, I don't care if it plugs in the wall or not.

Dave Jones: We're working on that again, by the way. Oh, you are?

Chris Gammell: Oh, great. Okay.

Dave Jones: We were going to brainstorm it today, but David's not in today.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, like, bring it to the camera, right? You can just come into the frame. Okay. And that's the micro supply, right? That's the micro supply. Right. Yep. Okay. Well, hey, I'm here to brainstorm, man, if you want to brainstorm. The thing I'm wondering about with this is, like, okay, so power envelope really matters quite a bit, it feels like. I was thinking, like, I was thinking about, like, what are the upper rails that I want there to be? So maybe, like, you know, 30 volts is pretty standard on a bench supply, but then getting...

Dave Jones: Yeah, but you don't need... You don't need to use them. Like, I'd be happy with 15. As long as it could go to 12, I'd be happy. As long as it could cover 12.

Chris Gammell: Okay. And so... That's pretty typical. Yeah. But you wanted... So then, like, what about incremental in between then? So, like, 0.1 volt steps, 0.01 volts...

Dave Jones: Well, isn't it a fully variable supply?

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I mean, I'm asking you about micro supply as well. I mean, like, so I...

Dave Jones: Oh, well, yeah, we haven't brainstormed. We're going to brainstorm from the start.

Chris Gammell: Oh, you're going to start over. I see, I see. Yeah, yeah. We're going to completely start over. The thing that I was thinking about with all this stuff is kind of looking at what I could get in the marketplace and stuff like that. And so that great Scott video, he actually did offline switcher to 12 volts. And I'll link that in, too.

Dave Jones: Oh, is it? So he's done a power supply... Yeah, it was just a simple one. And so... Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: And so it was a... I have to watch it. Offline to 12 volts. And then the 12 volts he put into LTC 3780, right? And so there's this breakout board you can buy off eBay for, like, 20 bucks. And it's, you know, so it's basically just huge inductor. It's a four transistor buck boost, you know, so it's just a controller from linear tech. May they rest in peace. And then so basically, and then it can do... I forget what it can do on the output. It can do a pretty significant swing, but then it's just programmable with a potentiometer, right? So basically, you can do current limiting, you can do...

Dave Jones: So how did he adjust... How did he digitally adjust the voltage? Did he put in a pot? No, he didn't digitally. Oh, okay. He actually used a real pot. Right.

Chris Gammell: He was using a real pot. He wired to the front panel. And I mean, it was a really nice build. It basically went into a project box.

Dave Jones: Well, there's nothing wrong with that. Like, the micro supply might even... It could even have that. It could have a real pot. But to get a large range, to get resolution on a large range, you really need a multi-turn pot. Oh, sure, sure.

Chris Gammell: No, I'm not worried about the pot. I mean, it's really more about... What I was wondering about with that kind of thing is thinking about, okay, so now... So you've got a DC to DC supply, right? The 12 volt is going to be rock solid, right? Those supplies... I mean, those offline switchers, those things can crank like 20 amps or something. Some significant amount in a pretty small package. Maybe 10 amps, but pretty small package. So the things that I think about are like high-frequency noise, of course. These are both... There's two switching supplies in line with no linear component to knock down noise. There's no filtering as well. Oh, okay, right. Excuse me. And then the load... I mean, it doesn't seem like there's a known load. So it seems like there would be a potential, like an unstable situation. Now, he talks about some...

Dave Jones: Not... Yeah, not really, because that's what the output capacitance... ...does is keeps it stable with no load.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Generally. So... No, no, no. These things will be stable with no load. That isn't a problem.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Yeah, that might be an issue. So that's not an issue then.

Dave Jones: Unless it's a really piss-poor converter. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, linear tech stuff I like, so I mean, that's fine. Yeah.

Dave Jones: The main problem with designing power supplies like this is how do you do the constant current stuff? That's the hard part. You can do... If you just want a voltage output supply, it's done like that.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh.

Dave Jones: You know? Right, right, right, right. It's just so easy.

Chris Gammell: So you're talking about putting a... Feeding that then into a current controller, basically, right?

Dave Jones: Yes, and then you've got to have current control. Then, yeah, and then it's got to seamlessly switch over with no overshoot and everything else from constant voltage to constant current mode when you go into that. And that's... I see. That's a big part of the problem. Right, right.

Chris Gammell: And that's what people are used to. Yeah, so it's more about... That's more about expectations of, like, I'm used to a bench supply that can do that with no problem, you're saying.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I see.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Whereas, yeah, and that's what a portable bench supply does. I mean, I wouldn't want to release one that's just a voltage output. Like, it's got to have programmable current limit. Otherwise, it's not really a... Like a bench supply. Well, this thing does have... I mean, it has a current limit.

Chris Gammell: I'm not sure if it...

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, it'll have an overload limit, but it's probably not adjustable. You're talking about the Great Scott one.

Chris Gammell: No, it is adjustable. So it's this LTC module. So that's what's interesting about it. I'm not sure how... It might have other circuitry on board, but this one specifically... So I have one in order. It's shown up tomorrow, so I'm going to try it out. What's the number? Is it the LTC 3780? It's a 3780... Yep, I think.

Dave Jones: I've got the data sheet up here.

Chris Gammell: Okay. And it does do current sense.

Dave Jones: It's got a 10 milliohm current sense resistor, but I don't see programmable...

Chris Gammell: So this is a module, though, as well.

Dave Jones: Okay, right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: So this thing is called... It's got a really weird name, too. It's the same on eBay.

Dave Jones: I said that you can buy them on eBay. There's, like, tons of them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And so this is not...

Dave Jones: Is that kind of the one he used?

Chris Gammell: So this is called... It's weird, too. So it's Automatic Pressure Lifting Power Constant Voltage Current. It's got this really weird name that doesn't make any sense to me. But it says high efficiency, blah, blah, blah. I mean, and the curve looks great as well. Send me a link. Let's see. So I'm going blind here. Oh, I'm... So this is the Amazon one.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Oh, it's Amazon. Okay. Let me have a look.

Chris Gammell: So just because I can get cheap shipping, that's the real reason. There's an eBay... There's a bunch of eBay ones, though, too.

Dave Jones: Oh, they're the same as the one I just saw on eBay. Yeah, yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: And so basically, input, you can do like 5 volts to 24 volts, something like that. And, you know, so it is a true buck boost. That's nice. Oh, okay. It's got a heatsink on the back. That's nice, too. But, yeah. So it's got... I think the middle part is the current limit. So I don't know. I'm going to rip this thing apart tomorrow. We'll see. Okay. Right. So what I was wondering about, though... So I was looking at a couple of things. One was... I was thinking about... Okay, so now...

Dave Jones: Have they got the circuit for this? Sorry. Have they got the...

Chris Gammell: I haven't seen it.

Dave Jones: Does anyone have the circuit for this? Because this is not... Is this a linear technology design module?

Chris Gammell: Or is it just somebody's... This is based off of the reference design. There's like six or seven reference designs in the data sheet. Oh, in the data sheet. Okay, right.

Dave Jones: Okay, I'll scroll down.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All right. And I can actually share with people here on the video chat as well. But, yeah. And so, I mean, it's... Well, not very good reviews, but... So...

Dave Jones: This might be a good chip right off the bat for... For our new brainstorming thing tomorrow. Oh, yeah. Because you kind of do need a buck boost.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Kind of thing. Because... So I was looking at that too. Like, so I was looking at, like, different, like, supplies that are out there. Yeah. You can... You know, it's easy to get... 12-volt supplies, 48-volt supplies. So, like, 48-volt supplies, I think, of, like, industrial. Right? So, like, industrial, you know, offline that are powering, you know, 24, 48, whatever. You can just plug that right in and go. 12-volt, you know, you can get it off a... You can get off a PC power supply if you really wanted to, right? I mean, and those things... At significant currents, too. That's what's crazy about it. So...

Dave Jones: Right. But...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Interesting. So, yeah. It's probably a good starting place. I was looking at... And that's the other thing, too. I was looking at the... So I was... Last night, I was searching through a bunch of different data sheets. And the current limits seem like they're pretty low as well. I was also searching for low noise, right? And so that's when they start to actually go through the linear region on the FETs and then give up some efficiency for less square wave, you know, bang, bang, turn on. And off kind of stuff, so...

Dave Jones: Yeah, but... Yeah. So you either have to filter the crap out of it. Is it a fixed frequency? Or is it one of these variable frequency jobbies?

Chris Gammell: It's variable frequency, yeah.

Dave Jones: Okay. Yeah, that makes it a little bit harder. Right. So...

Chris Gammell: But, yeah, you need to put, like, some huge L's and C's on the output.

Dave Jones: Or the only other way to do it is to have some sort of tracking regulator on the output. Sure, yeah. And then you give up efficiency for that. To go switching into the linear. But if it's a tracking one, then you can... Then you're only losing, like, you can use a low dropout regulator and you can only have the input, like, 500 millivolts above the output or something like that, you know. You can...

Chris Gammell: Oh, when you say tracking, you mean you have it floating on the power rail or something?

Dave Jones: No. So, by tracking, I mean the input to the linear regulator tracks a volt or two above the output of the linear regulator. I actually did this in one of my original micro supply designs. Interesting. It's just so that you limit... So, you gain the advantage of the... I could probably maybe pull up... Nah, too hard to pull up the schematic. The advantage of the low dropout... Sorry. The advantage of the low noise linear regulator. But you also get, like, decent efficiency. Because it's not like you've got to feed in 12 volts to the linear reg and get 3.3 volts out, you know. And you piss away all that power.

Chris Gammell: So, is that a special part, though? Or what is that?

Dave Jones: No, no, no, no. You can... There's ways to do it. You can... I did it with a transistor follower or something before the linear amp. I can't remember.

Chris Gammell: So, you just look up tracking linear power... Tracking linear... Tracking linear regulator. Yeah. Yeah, you'll probably... Okay. Yeah. If you search it on YouTube... Google Images. I think I did a specific video on that. Google Images, folks.

Dave Jones: I think one of my 15-part video series was doing the tracking pre-regulator.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Search YouTube right now for tracking pre-regulator. It's probably there. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Um... So... Uh... Okay. We've been ignoring our chat people.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sorry.

Dave Jones: This is supposed to be like a live interactive thing.

Chris Gammell: We're not very good at that stuff. I always forget. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Here we go. Okay. Well, let's... We pissed away half the show. So, let's... What do you mean? This is good.

Chris Gammell: Dave, we're talking about electronics.

Dave Jones: Come on, man. Mark's going already.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, yeah. He's got... Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: It's probably the best technical stuff we've had for a while. Will there be more videos for the micro supply? Ask Rob Morley. No. Until it's finished. Until it's done. And then I'll do after the fact.

Chris Gammell: Right. There's no way I'm going to... Me and Dave have commiserated about that before. Showing... Yes, we have. Showing how the sausage is made. People say that phrase about, you know, you don't want to see how it's made. Some people do want to see how it's made. But they also like telling you how it should be done better. Exactly. And it's just...

Dave Jones: I was just inundated. Yeah. I could not handle the amount of emails and comments and other things I got. I mean, that thing is different now too, though.

Chris Gammell: Right? So you also now have David to work with. Right? So that's like... Yeah. Before it was like, oh, well, let's do this as like a back and forth kind of thing. But instead of having one person to bounce an idea off, have you had... I don't know. How big is your form? 2,000 people at a time?

Dave Jones: I wasn't even doing that. It was just like, oh, here's my hobby project. And I thought I'd just shoot video as I went and did it. And hobby projects always change. You know, it's not like I was doing a professional design where I set the specifications and I rigidly follow it and, you know, all that sort of stuff. It was just me dicking around. And a lot of people didn't like that. They didn't understand, you know, why I was dicking around and changing my mind all the time. It's because that's just how I wanted to do it. I was just having fun. And a lot of people didn't understand that. So that didn't go down too well. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, you know, can't please them all. Yep.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Dave, any interest in doing a tutorial demo covering protection devices? PTCs, NTCs, MOVs, GDTs, crowbars? Oh, yeah, potentially. Yeah, we could. Yeah. I've been meaning to do one on input protection. So that would be PTCs and GDTs and other, you know. Right. PTC is positive temperature coefficient if people don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: PTCs, it's a misnomer because it's a varista, right? Right. Is its proper name. Right. But it's a varista with a positive temperature coefficient. So they just call them PTCs. And it actually has nothing to do with... It has nothing to do with the actual device.

Chris Gammell: It's just the behavior of how it does it, though, right? So it's instead of... Yes, it's the behavior of how it does it. It's when it's got too much power through it, then it turns on. Whereas an NTC...

Dave Jones: It increases resistance. No, it's always on. It increases resistance. So it's normally when it's cold and there's no current flowing through it, it's like a 1K or 2K.

Chris Gammell: Non-linear, right? How about that? Yeah. Right. But the thing to know is that you do PTC when you want it to protect from overloading at the, you know, later on. Whereas NTC, you do that if you want to make sure you don't have too much current at the beginning. Because then it's... Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Because you get a big current dump going into capacitors or something, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So anyway, yep. And so I've covered a few of the...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, crowbars, I remember you doing something on, right? No?

Dave Jones: I don't know. I did like a multimeter input protection video, which specifically just covered all the input protection devices for a meter, but not in general electronics. Because it changes depending on what you're trying to do. I did a teardown the other day, and it used TVS diodes, but specifically ones designed for the telecoms industry. They were a specific telecom part, you know? And if you're designing telecoms gear, like big incoming lines, they could have lightning strikes or people shorting crap out on at their home. You know, you don't want all that, you know? So they're specific devices. So it changes a lot. If you're just trying to protect against ESD, that's another requirement. Again, entirely. Yeah. It's just... There's so many variations.

Chris Gammell: There are. It's almost too hard to put in one video. It is. And it's... I think the hard thing is usually, like... So do you remember when I was there? And remember... Is it not Garrett? Was that... Who was showing us around the dinosaurs, the robots and dinosaurs? Gav. Gav. That's right. Gavin. Gav. Yeah. So remember, he was talking about... So he was showing... He talked about that system of, like, the visual storage. And what he was talking about... Yeah, yeah, yeah. He said the benefit of this is it's a visual profiler so that you can basically remember, oh, I have an M3 screw over here, right? And it's like, you have this inventory. I think about it the same thing there. It's like, you have to kind of learn how each of these things works individually so that when you encounter a new problem, you're like, oh, well, an MOV might be good here or a PTC might be good here.

Dave Jones: Yeah, part of your visual building block, your mental building block of parts, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and that's... Unfortunately, like, you just got to build it up over time. You know, like you're saying, each of these things probably... PTC, NTC could be its own video, right? Where you get Sharia to do, like, an hour-long experimentation. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Are there any materials? Rob asked, do I know general specs I'm looking for? No, we're just going to brainstorm it.

Chris Gammell: This is... Was he talking about the micro supply?

Dave Jones: He's talking about the micro supply, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Yeah, and I guess the other thing, too, is that, like, I wonder about the noise stuff, too. Like, I'm always surprised that some of these switching supplies are lower noise than I expect, but then you also have to track them over their load as well, right? Because sometimes... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it changes. Right, yeah, because the switches kick on more or less, so...

Dave Jones: And the higher your current, the less effective your output caps become and stuff like that. It's in combination with your inductors and in combination with the frequency, which might change with load as well. It's, like, it's all over the shop.

Chris Gammell: Right. So... So you think, though, 12-volt out... Oh, that's what I was going to ask you.

Dave Jones: I would be happy with 12 volts. But yours is completely decoupled, though. Supply.

Chris Gammell: That's the idea, right?

Dave Jones: Because this is not a bench supply, right? This is designed to be a portable little supply you just have on your desk or you take with you, you throw it in your backpack or whatever, right? And I'd be happy with 12 volts because most electronic stuff you're going to be dealing with, you don't need more than 12 volts. Yeah. Like, it just doesn't happen.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, if you do, you probably should be at a bench, right? I mean, that's kind of like...

Dave Jones: You probably should be at a bench and have a real supply, and you probably need three amps or something, you know? Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, and so that's the thing I was thinking about, too, is that, so, like, so this supply, what I started thinking about, and what I talked to former guest Jason about, right? So Jason Sorondolo, he does USB-C stuff, right? And I was always really jazzed on the idea of USB-C, if you could get that to kick out at the right... You know, if you had the proper supply, you could get 20 volts at 5 amps. I still haven't seen anything that uses that much. Remember, he did the Easy Bake Oven, right? Yep. Yep. That's right. Yep.

Dave Jones: I think we talked about that on the show, didn't we? We talked about maybe having a supply that connected. That was the original idea from my micro-supply when I first started it. Oh, was it before the EEV blog? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. Because I can remember I was working at Altium, and the editor of Silicon Chip magazine happened to be dropping by because he, you know, hangs out there occasionally.

Chris Gammell: Because what else is there to do in Australia with the electronics industry? Right.

Dave Jones: Well, he isn't far away, right? I know. They're both on the northern beaches, right? So he dropped by, and he knew I was working there, so he found my cubicle, and he dropped by and, you know, wanted to say hi. And I happened to have my little micro-supplier with me, and I showed it to him and said, oh, I'm thinking about, you know, maybe I'll actually, you know, submit this as an article in Silicon Chip. And he was, wow, yes, we need that. And it just never... For free. We don't want to pay you either. Then I changed the design again, and then, you know, it was... Yeah, but it was supposed to be USB powered. That was the original idea. Uh-huh. Is there... It's simply, you plugged in your USB port, and it gave you variable voltage, variable current display up to the limit of your USB port capability. And that was it.

Chris Gammell: I was thinking about this whole thing because of this thing, because of the analog discovery, right? So that's what I've been using a lot lately. And I wanted to build one for that, but basically extending... They only have plus or minus five volts, but I'd actually like to have that track up to maybe to 50 volts, but I don't know. That's probably too much. Oh, God. Maybe 25 volts, though.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's even too high.

Chris Gammell: I know, but I'm just saying that as an upper limit, but really it's about the power delivery stuff, right? So you actually can't... This thing can do, I think, two watts if you have it plugged in with the DC jack, but I never use that, right? Oh, right, but not with the USB. Yeah, because USB standards are only two and a half watts, right? So...

Dave Jones: But I don't still have anything that has a USB-C thing, like...

Chris Gammell: Oh, well, you don't have a MacBook Pro, Dave.

Dave Jones: No, I don't have a MacBook. Like, you know, so USB-C is like, yeah, in theory, it sounds great, but like, geez, if I don't have one, then, you know, I can't even use my own product.

Chris Gammell: The real thing I think about with all this stuff is my thinking about this is actually as a travel device, right? So, yeah, you're going to have to have some kind of, like, some realistic expectations. Yeah, it might be a little bit bulkier than you want it to be. It's not going to look like an Apple product, whatever, no big deal. But, like, if I could plug... If I could legitimately plug my charger in that I use for my MacBook, right, and that's 68 watts, and it could get all 68 watts into this power supply, and then it converts it properly, that'd be a best case scenario, I think, because you're never going to get stopped at an airport for a power supply for a computer, right? Right. So, but what I really think about, I remember with micro supply, you were talking about having a battery, like, switch battery thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah, battery, there'd be a battery thing, and yep, yep.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, bigger and bigger batteries, it's like, all right, well, that starts to look a little bit more and more shady, right? I mean, maybe, maybe not.

Dave Jones: But the whole idea with the battery one is that you can use it anywhere. Like, you don't have to plug it in. Like, if I'm working at my desk here, I often, you know, if I'm doing a PC-based project or whatever, working on the desk, I don't want... I'm running out of PowerPoints. I don't want to find a scramble under the desk, find another bloody PowerPoint for just a power supply, right? Right. It's just paying the ass, so... Yep. Yeah, no, I agree. That's going to be our focus.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yep.

Chris Gammell: So, Sebastian asked, would you be powering it with, like, something like an 18650, right? So, we had talked about the DIY Powerwall.

Dave Jones: The last design I did had an 18650. It's just one of them. Well, actually, I did two previous designs, which are on my YouTube channel. One used an 18650, another one used a square prismatic cell. Another battery, yeah. You know. Similar. Yeah, a little bit. I went for a little portable one that had, like, a little tiny custom. Got it. Got it. Square cell.

Chris Gammell: But still only, like, the 3.7 volt output kind of thing?

Dave Jones: No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: Or stacked.

Dave Jones: It would actually boost. It would boost. So, it would be a single cell. It would be a single 3.7 volt cell. And then it could boost up to 12 or whatever and go completely adjustable.

Chris Gammell: I see.

Dave Jones: I see. Yep.

Chris Gammell: And so, when you say adjustable, too, you mean to have it linearly, like, have a linear adjuster on the end? Or you would actually have it adjustable on the switcher?

Dave Jones: Depends on the topology being used.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, it doesn't necessarily need to use a switcher. Yeah. So. Interesting.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yep, yep, yep.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. No. I think my last design, I had a programmable boost converter that boosted it up. And then I had followed that with a tracking linear regulator.

Chris Gammell: To knock off those peaks. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And you just didn't worry about having buck and boost because if you wanted to, because it was only 3.7 volts. Got it. If you wanted to output 1.5 volts, for example, you just didn't worry about, you know, doing the negative, like a switcher, a buck switcher. You just didn't worry. You just missed away the extra power. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. You just simply bypassed it. Oh, that's a good idea. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Because if you switch the switcher off, then it's just a diode straight through. It's just a diode bypass.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, you know, you can physically switch the switcher off and then just feed it straight into the linear regulator if you want lower than your battery voltage.

Chris Gammell: Got it.

Dave Jones: That makes sense. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And then that would be a super clean signal then.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You could physically switch the switcher off. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's an interesting idea. And then it's just a capacity thing, right? How much current could you get out of the battery? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Okay. That's cool. That's a good idea.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Yeah. 18650s because they're the industry standard.

Chris Gammell: I mean, people pretty much should be using these for everything.

Dave Jones: Well, except for the fact that volumetrically, they're quite-

Chris Gammell: Awkward.

Dave Jones: Inefficient. Yeah. Because they're cylinders, right? So you can't pack the main.

Chris Gammell: Right. But I think the- I mean, but like those clips, you can now get like the clips that you can actually solder into your circuit board. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. My X-lid has stopped working. Oh no. Dave, did you not pay for a license? Whoa. Whoa. You should just- All right. Our first- Hang on. Our first thing here. Dave, you should just switch it in. You don't even use it. Just switch it in Skype. No? Hang on. Well, anyways, I was talking about projects where- I've seen a couple where the clips actually solder into the board. And so it's like, it's a super low-cost thing as well. You don't need to actually get like a plastic holder. I thought I remember seeing one where it was just metal clips soldered directly into the board that could actually hold and transfer charge from an 18650. So.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And Brian Benchoff says, hello, Brian Benchoff. Uh, he says, uh, great. We now just have Chris to look at. He's not wrong. All right. Dave's back.

Dave Jones: I'm back. Am I?

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: I'm back. All right. Sorry about that. It's still loading. I don't know. Oh, there we go. Yep. Yep. I'm back. I have no idea. Maybe it was because it was recorded at the same time. So I don't know. Anyway, I'm back.

Chris Gammell: I think we're doing pretty good for, from a tech perspective.

Dave Jones: Very first live show. This is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Pat on the back ass.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So that, that was not my connection. That was just X split doing, I don't know, my PC and I'm running windows seven with X. I don't know. Yeah. Yep. Who knows? So. Yep. Oh, and I lost my YouTube feed as well.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no big deal.

Dave Jones: So I have to get that back. Anyway. Oh no. There's the chat. Still there. Hello people.

Chris Gammell: Um, yeah. So should we switch the list or, uh, we're good on.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Maybe we should. Hey, I tell you what, I've got a peeve. I've got a peeve. Can we have the.

Chris Gammell: I was like, can't you hold it? 20 more minutes. 20 more.

Dave Jones: Can you pull up? Cause you're the one doing the feed. Pull up the, pull up a photo, pull up an image. Of the Rigol constant. Uh, Rigol.

Chris Gammell: I saw this on your Twitter feed. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Load.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Yes.

Dave Jones: The Rigol load. I can't see the number.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: The 3102 or something. 3012 or something. Hello. That's my Twitter feed.

Chris Gammell: There's your Twitter feed.

Dave Jones: Oh, there we go. Is this just about the fonts?

Chris Gammell: Is that the one?

Dave Jones: It's just like, can you zoom out the image? Can you? Yeah. Look at this.

Chris Gammell: Choose how, look at how many fonts are there. I think somebody counted five, four or five. Look at the reverse italics. Yeah. I saw that.

Chris Gammell: That was my favorite one that matches. So people that are just listening, Dave has a picture on his, on his, on his Twitter, which we'll link in, of course. But it's like, the button is like a parallelogram and it's, instead of the parallelograms shifting to the right and then the italics also shifting to the right like normal. Yeah. Well, yeah. Nope. Nope. We're going the other way.

Dave Jones: It shifts to the left and the italics is leaning to the left and it's like my mind just exploded and like, like, almost going to have a fit, you know, because, and then look at the function font. Like what the hell is going on there? Like, it's just, it's just nuts. Nuts.

Chris Gammell: Right. Like, absolutely nuts. Day of the typographers. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yes. Like, even I know that's bad. Like. Right. Right. That's, that's probably the best measure right there. I know nothing about. Right. So anyway, we can switch back now. That was pretty horrific. Yeah. So I should have done a first impressions video because I just took it out of the box. I was sitting on the floor playing with the damn thing and I was going, oh, it's, oh, it doesn't have this. Doesn't have this. Why doesn't it have this? Why? Why? Why? You know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like, anyway.

Chris Gammell: So, uh, this is, this is for testing like, like, like solar cells. It's a load. Yeah. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It's a load.

Chris Gammell: So if it's, it can actually do 150 at 40 amps, it can do 150 at what? An amp and a half or something.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: 200 watts.

Dave Jones: It's a completely adjustable load. So it can do. Right. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: I just mean like the envelope though. Right.

Dave Jones: So like the, oh, the power. Well, the power envelope is the total power. So it's a 200 watt. Okay. So as long as you keep with 200 watts. Right.

Chris Gammell: If you're 150, you only get one amp. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For example, 1.25 or something. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if it really matters here, Dave, but you are super laggy. So just so you know.

Dave Jones: I'm super laggy. Am I? Okay. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, anyway. All right.

Chris Gammell: We have your dulcet tones in our ears.

Dave Jones: But, but we could still hear each other. The audio is not laggy.

Chris Gammell: It's good now. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All right. Very good. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: Ah, have you been watching Keysight's YouTube series on oscilloscope front ends? Oh, no.

Chris Gammell: I have not. I have actually been watching, I've been actually, surprisingly, their Instagram channel. Like they, I've watched some of their videos. But like, yeah, their Instagram channel is like, not bad. I don't understand Instagram as like an electronics.

Dave Jones: I don't understand Instagram at all.

Chris Gammell: Well, you use it now though. I'm just saying that like, but as like reaching users though, like, I don't know, I guess we're on there, but it's maybe it's cheaper. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm on there. It's just, yeah. It's just because I figured like if I feed it through Instagram, then it'll automatically feed to my Twitter as well. Sure, sure. I get that. So I may as well create a, you know. Right. Yeah. I basically have it for free. It doesn't require any extra effort on my part. Mm-hmm. Um, so are keys like the ones that have been, are finally maybe getting a YouTube channel right? Perhaps? Because usually corporate YouTube channels suck ass.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, I love stuff like this. This is like, this is like technical content, right? So like, yeah, this is the stuff that I, I used to try and put out technical content for supply frame stuff. I used to, I mean like, and that's, I remember, um, Matt, the guy from analog devices. Do you remember? Did you ever watch any of his stuff? He was an analog, analog guy from analog devices.

Dave Jones: Matt. Um, what's his name? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't remember.

Dave Jones: Matt, Matt, Matt.

Chris Gammell: But it was like a whiteboard where he was writing backwards on a screen.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That stuff was great.

Chris Gammell: Duffy. Duff. Duff. I think. Yeah. Matt Duff. Yeah. I think that's it.

Chris Gammell: But that kind of stuff is just, I mean like.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. He did some good videos.

Chris Gammell: That's great. And if, and if there's people listening to their FAEs and stuff like that, like that kind of stuff, I mean this, this Keysight stuff is great because, because it's basically it's like having an FAE, but in YouTube, you know what I mean? Like it's like, this is the kind of stuff that they would come in and do seminars for, but I don't get that anymore. Dave doesn't get that anymore. You know?

Dave Jones: Is that the trend? No. But is that the, I mean, YouTube is called YouTube, right? It's about you. It's about the individual.

Chris Gammell: Is that right? Guy who makes his living? You tube.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You. It's me. Yeah. But I mean, I think. People watch my YouTube channel for me. I don't think so.

Chris Gammell: I think it's, I think it's a distribution channel like any other social media thing. I don't think.

Dave Jones: No, no, no, no, no, no. That's for you. Just do your general searches. But for people who subscribe and watch religiously, they watch because of the person. And that's why these corporate YouTube channels, no matter how good they are, not just in our industry, but any industry, they get zero traction. Zero. No matter how good they are. And people just don't seem to want to follow a corporate YouTube channel. I guess so. It just.

Chris Gammell: I follow the DigiKey one because they do, they do like, they're really, they're not very good. They're like product releases, but it's really just, it's really like a feed. It's like a feed of like what's new because if they're making a video about it, they're probably getting money to talk about it, whatever.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but yeah, but no one goes, Oh, Keysight or DigiKey's released a new video. I've got to watch.

Chris Gammell: I missed the latest one. Yeah, I know. Right. I'm going to sit down with my cup of cocoa. No, people. No, it's YouTube for a reason. Sorry. I get all that. You're right. You're right about that. But at the same time, if you're already there, you know, and it's similar content, I don't really care, you know. Well, you know. I might or might not follow it. I don't know. I'm very fickle, Dave. I'm very fickle. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Any other questions? Come on, fire it at us. It'll take 10 seconds to come through, I'm sure. But yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, we'll keep doing that stuff. Because we've got like 10 minutes left or something. I know. I know. But this has been a good experiment so far.

Dave Jones: Yeah. This has been good. Well, we'll get feedback. How many viewers have we got?

Chris Gammell: We were up to like 24, I thought. 25.

Dave Jones: Watching now? Yeah. Six thumbs up. All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, we don't have many followers on a YouTube channel either. No. We'll put a link in the notes as well. We do have show notes.

Dave Jones: So we both tweeted it. Yeah. We both tweeted it. But you know, like.

Chris Gammell: People wouldn't get the message about it unless they were subscribed to the YouTube channel.

Dave Jones: Unless they're, yeah, yeah. Exactly. I don't know, Dave. It's YouTube.

Chris Gammell: YouTube, Dave.

Dave Jones: It's YouTube. No, that's. Yeah. I can't believe you don't subscribe to that viewpoint. That YouTube is all about the person, the personality of the channel.

Chris Gammell: I don't disagree with that. I'm obviously talking to a large personality. Yes. A bit of bluster. Seriously.

Dave Jones: Tell me a corporate YouTube channel in any field.

Chris Gammell: Oh, we have an example. That has a massive number of followers. That we used to cite all the time and then it flopped on them. Remember NI's old channel?

Dave Jones: Yeah, but no. People didn't even care that that was National Immigrants. People watched it for him. What's his name? Sorry, I forget his name.

Chris Gammell: I don't remember either. That was like six years ago now. It was a long time ago.

Dave Jones: That was six, seven years ago. It was, he, like the channel died like a year after I started my channel. He was like, I looked up to that going, wow. Imagine if I could get as many viewers as he got, you know. Yeah. And he just, yeah, left the company and gave it up. Because NI owned, what was the name of it?

Chris Gammell: Engineering something. Was that engineer the title?

Dave Jones: Engineering Mind.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So NI owned the name. Yeah. So he just stopped doing it. Yep. Yep. So yeah, he was like the biggest thing back eight years ago or whatever. And it was, it was, no, but people watched it. But that was early days though. Did not watch it because it was National Instruments. In fact, it wasn't the National Instruments channel. It was on the Engineering Mind channel.

Chris Gammell: That's a good point. Yep.

Dave Jones: They set up there. No one would have watched it if it was on the National Instruments channel.

Chris Gammell: Well, regardless, I think this stuff is, like solid technical content like this. I think it's, it's good that they're filming it. I just, I hope they get a really clear shot of the whiteboard and really good audio. That's all I ask. Just audio. Just, just get it all, everything else wrong. Just give me the audio.

Dave Jones: Everyone's talking Bob Pease. Yeah. See, National Instruments used to have Bob Pease. That's a good point. They used to have a show.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But even that, I think would not be hugely successful. As entertaining as Bob Pease, as awesome as he is. It was. If it, if it has the, if it has the corporate feel and it's on the corporate YouTube channel, it just puts people off.

Chris Gammell: I, I, I will agree with him on that. I will concede.

Dave Jones: Thank you.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: What, what do we think of Diode magazine? I think it's, it's, I'm, I'm amazed. I've, I've done a video on it. Yeah. I'm amazed that I thought I'd never see another new electronics magazine. Especially in Australia.

Chris Gammell: What's the actual output of it? Like, is that any good? Right.

Dave Jones: Ah, it's, it's very well produced. Cause the guy who produces it, um, is a, his day job is, um, still, uh, he runs a graphic design company. Right. So that, that's his day job. And he's an engineering hobbyist. Right. So he's got the electronics hobby. Yeah. It's kind of like, yeah, it's not his full-time job. Got it. Um, yeah, I'm maybe he's hoping it will turn into that, but I don't think so. Like, it's a tough, it's a tough gig. Yeah. He's got some new news on that. Actually. He's, he just emailed me the other day. Um, he's, uh, getting a better price for overseas subscriptions and stuff like that. Oh, great.

Chris Gammell: So maybe get some distribution over here.

Dave Jones: Anyway, it's very well, very well produced. It's not very technical. Um, but you know, it's fine.

Chris Gammell: I think it's more nostalgic at this point. I mean, like you can get tons of, you can get tons of technical content online. You can get literally an unlimited amount online. So it's not like it's going to be that one source, right? It's not like diode is coming to Dave and be like, Oh, please only publish with us. He's not going to do that anymore. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, no, it's, but I, I think I said this in my video. I think the, the place still for the magazine is to put on your resume, right? It's like, they, they should be very selective about the projects that they publish and cause it only comes out once a month. That's pretty infrequent. Sure. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Um, there's still something about being like a primary source, right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's like, they can be the standard. It's like, if you get your project published in there, you've made it right. You can put it on your resume and you're, it's a big deal.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah, as it was back in the day, I still think there's something to that. These days, you know, it's, um, yeah. Cool. So I think there's still a future there. Do the math on U-Beam. I know Chris hates U-Beam.

Chris Gammell: I do.

Dave Jones: I love Brian Benchoff though.

Chris Gammell: And, uh, you gotta read the rest of this though.

Dave Jones: Oh, Hey, Hey, Brian. Didn't realize it was Brian. Do the math on U-Beam, but instead of ultrasonics, it's an insane stereo system in a 96 Honda Civic.

Chris Gammell: This is, this is why we can't do a live show. Brian Benchoff is why we can't do a live show. If you don't, people don't know Hackaday, Brian Benchoff. Brian Benchoff. Friend of mine. Your former colleague. Yes. He's, uh, he's a, he's the Hunter S Thompson of, of Hackaday. That's what I, that's what I call him.

Dave Jones: Is he stalking you? He's stalking you.

Chris Gammell: I'm pretty sure he's, he's been a troll on our site more than once. I'm sure.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: What would be a good way to reduce the switching noise when buying a module like the one you were showing? Measure its frequency first, put a scope on it, measure its switching frequency under different loads and see if it's a fixed or a variable frequency first. If it's a fixed frequency, then you can tune an LC filter to do that at, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right. And most of the stuff people are doing, it's probably going to be pretty, you know, you could probably, well, it's probably a more of a question of can it handle an LC on the output, right? Because like we talked about at the top, it, if it's balanced and it's got, it's got a good, um, you know, it's got the capacity, right? So you, yeah. So if you start to mess with that, you potentially could.

Dave Jones: But that's the whole point of it. Yeah. Well, and modules are different to bench supplies. Bench supplies are supposed to be handle any load you can throw at it. Of course. So, but modules might be much more picky, right? Yep. So, yeah. But, um, usually an LC filter, like it's not going to hurt it. And then you could just do like a real higher frequency one that just takes off the, just, just the high frequency stuff. Like it depends how low you want to get it. Like you're never going to get it as low as a linear reg, right? It's just, you know, really. Right.

Chris Gammell: You want, you want low noise, burns the power. It's a high order.

Dave Jones: Get it? Yeah. High order, high order filter. Yeah. Start it.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Let's go to the list real quick because I wanted to call out this frigging fantastic article. Uh, it was a national geographics article, but it's about the Netherlands and, uh, showing their, like, so you got to scroll down to the second picture, right? At first I'm like, am I looking at solar panels? Oh, I actually, I could show it here in the screen, but am I, is this solar panels? You can see it on my screen if you want to, too. That is actually greenhouses. That's what's crazy about this thing.

Dave Jones: They are greenhouses. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's like doing what? It's a sea of greenhouses. So basically Netherlands is doing all of this high tech agriculture basically and doing hot house, you know, growth for every type of, every type of vegetable, stuff like that. Nothing new in that regard, but just in terms of the amount of tech that they're doing. But the really crazy thing is that this is a family farm that, that shit blows my mind.

Chris Gammell: And like, so it's just like, how far does that extend?

Chris Gammell: I know it just keeps going. I want to see the, how do you build that?

Chris Gammell: That's tens of millions of dollars to build all that. At least.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I'm guessing you build it in, in, in batches, but like in batches and they're talking like family farms are doing this kind of stuff because like in terms of like,

Chris Gammell: uh, having stuff out there, but like, how is it high tech?

Chris Gammell: How does it so like, so keep, well, you keep scrolling down. You see like, so all the stuff is led controlled, right? So everything's led controlled, right? They've got, they're going off.

Dave Jones: So they're the grow lamps. Are they, is that what they are?

Chris Gammell: Yep. Right. Jeez. Imagine the power. Exactly. Right. But then you also start pulling in renewable stuff and then you start talking about some of the monitoring that they do. They do stack. Oh, look inside. I mean like this, these are gorgeous photos too. And they're tall too. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: You need a ladder to get up to the top levels.

Chris Gammell: Right. And so like this stuff is, is legitimately high tech stuff. Um, oh, these are actually, this is, this is chicken. Sorry. This is, this is a incubator here, but, but just like all of these pictures, I mean, it's national geographic, so it's, they've still got amazing stuff. There's some, there's some, um, uh, video interviews with all of the, um, the master students that are working out there as well. Um, and so like, but all the monitoring they're doing all that stuff we had actually, we had a listener write in, um, about this. So there's also stuff about cow milking and stuff like that too. There was actually a fully automated farm. I think we're able to share it. Um, but it was a fully automated farm up in, uh, like the Northern Midwest. And like, so the cow walks in, maybe we talked about this. Did we talk about this or no? Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think we, I, it does ring a bell.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So yeah, it's just, I, I think, I think ag, ag tech stuff, I'm super excited about it. Like my new job might be a little bit of ag tech stuff, but I think, I think it's super exciting from the perspective of like what, what it makes possible in terms of, you know, better, better food production. Obviously, you know, there's distribution issues and stuff like that too, but you know, they're, they do a ton of geothermal stuff too. Oh man. It's just like so much cool stuff. I'm very excited about it. And, and so I think, yeah. Go to the Netherlands. Yeah. And I think that there's, I think that there's a lot of opportunity for people that are, um, you know, in the electronic space too, for, you know, that some of it is the, the, you know, you gotta get sensors, you gotta get all that stuff going and, and doing that nicely. But like, um, I just think there's a lot of projects that could be really benefit there. So yeah. Cool. Great. Great article.

Dave Jones: Uh, right. Another article, which I wanted to, um, do is, uh, Edward Snowden. Oh yeah. Um, and, uh, our good mate, buddy. Yep. Huang. Um, they teamed up and they've written this paper and actually published this very extensive paper. We'll just link it in. And it is ridiculous about the security of mobile phones and stuff. And, uh, they've gone in and they've hacked phones to test security. And I haven't read the whole thing yet. Cause it is very extensive. Um, and it's just, yeah, it's great. Yeah. Um, right.

Chris Gammell: So anyway, if you're checking, they're checking to see if you're, if you were getting monitored. So they have an external monitoring on iPhones, basically. I think that's kind of the, the, uh, the basis of it all. So, so are you, are you being watched? You need some kind of external monitor to do that. So pretty neat stuff.

Dave Jones: That's very cool.

Chris Gammell: Again, buddy wanted to talk about it. He was not able to talk about when he was on the show last, I think he had, he had finished the work with Snowden, but they had not published it yet, I guess. So, right. Yep.

Dave Jones: So there's a lot of efforts gone into publishing this. Yeah. So, wow. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Uh, I wanted to call out this one. Have you seen this video? The, uh, this is actually a great one. The, uh, this is from, I forget his name. Crud. Strange parts. Um, basically. Oh, yes. He added, he added a jack back. Yes.

Dave Jones: Added a jack. It took him a couple of months or whatever through China, but he managed to, and he designed his own flex board. Right. And. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And it kind of showed his progress in terms of, uh, soldering as well. I think his name, Scott, I forget his name. Sorry.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. I did. I did. Strange parts is his YouTube channel. He's only got two videos up. One, one where he made his own iPhone in China. Right. From scratch. 10 million years. And one where he added the headphone jack. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Very cool. I've, I've actually subscribed to his channel now. Yeah. Yeah. So I hope he publishes more stuff. He, uh, yeah. Um. It's very cool. Watch it. Just. Yeah. It's fascinating. It's a fascinating insight into, uh, Shenzhen and getting stuff done and things like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep. What else is on here? We're running out of time. We are running out of time.

Dave Jones: We are over time, I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Um. It's, uh. Oh, this is interesting. So, so I get this newsletter regularly. Uh, PCH has a newsletter around. Who's PCH? PCH does manufacturing. So that's Liam Casey. And, uh, they were based out of Ireland, but then they also have, uh, Highway One. That's their, um, that's one of the accelerators or startup thingies in San Francisco. But then they've also got a bunch of manufacturing overseas. Uh, anyway. So this is, this is a newsletter that I get. It's called Hardware Weekly. Um. And so it's just a lot of good, uh, a lot of good stories around the, I mean, this is where I source some of the stories around, uh, for the Amp Hour and stuff like that. But the interesting thing here is kind of, if you look at the, uh, the funding news, right? So I don't really put too much, you know, credence into what I'm reading here, but it's just kind of interesting to see this week to week to week, right? So what they do is they track, they track what hardware companies are actually raising money and how much, right? And so like the one that surprised me on the list this week was John Deere purchased smart robotics company, Blue River Technology for 300 million. Like I hadn't heard about that at all. Right.

Dave Jones: If people don't know, John Deere is a, uh, farm tractor company. Right. They make, uh, tractors. That's right.

Chris Gammell: And John Deere tractors. And so. That murders weeds with iron. Yeah. John Deere spent 300 million on a company that murders weeds with AI. Right. And so it's like, but, and so, well, the argument against John Deere these days is John Deere gets a lot of crap because they, they're, they're the ones where they, uh, locked down their firmware. They say, you don't, you don't own these tractors. You don't even own your tractor. $400,000 though. Right. I mean, that's the crazy thing because the, they want to make sure.

Dave Jones: Probably why they're worth billion dollars or whatever. And they can afford to spend 300 million dollars buying a company. Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is a big business. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Exactly. I mean, that's, and that's the thing about farming. That's interesting too. That's why that farming, the, the Netherlands thing was interesting to me is because if it actually is possible to get that automation at a smaller level, then smaller farmers can start to compete with these, you know, multinationals because that's the way that agriculture is going. So, anywho. Cool. Um, so there's other, but yeah, there's other things that are getting funded. There's, there's always stuff in here about robotics, um, drone vision analysis, autonomous drones, home service robots, like, like, and all these things, like these things I've never heard of. Rubo, a Chinese maker of home service robots rolled out a $53 million series B like, okay. You know, like there's, there's all this stuff that's just under the surface and, and unfortunately VC like news is one of the few ways to get, um, is to get visibility into it or like this.

Dave Jones: There's so much money just floating around. It's just insane.

Chris Gammell: Well, you can, uh, you know, you could get 120 million and flush it on a toilet. Yes. A moment of silence, Dave.

Dave Jones: Flush it down your juicer. That's right.

Chris Gammell: A moment of silence for Juicero. Oh, they just died in the ass and it was inevitable.

Dave Jones: It was inevitable. You could have bet your life that that company was going to fold.

Chris Gammell: I was talking to some today. How many juices, maybe AVA talked about this because he did that great tear down of it too. Yeah. The Weefy, uh, um, how many juices could you have bought for 120 million at 12 bucks? You could have bought a hundred. Yeah, I know. But you could have bought 10 million of them, right? So if you paid $12 per juice, 10 million juices for people.

Dave Jones: I tweeted that the Juicero, because they're going to have to scrap all these, right? All the ones they got in stock, presumably. I was going to say that, uh, the, I tweeted that the Juicero was the, will be the 2040s equivalent of the ET game cartridge. Um, you know, fine. It was like, people will be digging these things up in like 30 years time. Oh, that'd be too sad. Geez, remember this Juicero? Look, we found them.

Chris Gammell: The machine, man, it was so nice though. I mean, like.

Dave Jones: It was like, it's insane. It was insane. So that'll be interesting to see how they get rid of that. How are they disposed of that company? Um, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right. Like what's the shutdown?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Because presumably they've got a, they've got all these manufacturers sitting in a warehouse somewhere and.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was dumb. Uh, let's see. So we've got a couple more questions. Uh, Stefan asked, uh, what happened to my portable lab? It is currently sitting in my closet. Uh, it is, uh, yeah. Well, we talked about it before. He abandoned it.

Dave Jones: He realized it wasn't that practical.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's definitely not practical from like a traveling perspective. I mean, like that was an extra suitcase. I used to have two rolling suitcases and now what I've switched over to is the, the analog discovery for, for like in a pinch kind of things. But yeah, you know, it's yeah. Portable lab in terms of like having like a structured thing. That was, that was the false assumption that it needed to have this, this fixed setup. Whereas it's like, yeah, you're probably just going to throw it in a bag anyway. So that's what I really should have done.

Dave Jones: It'd be cool if it was like a little thin thing like this that just sat underneath your notebook or whatever, something like that. It'd be cool.

Chris Gammell: You know, it's such a niche market, not a one you, but like a, you're talking about like rack mount kind of thing that could fit. But the thing is, that's not very practical from a, um, from a carrying perspective, right? Maybe if it, well, if it matched the out, you're saying if it matched the outline of

Dave Jones: the, of the, the notebook or whatever. Yeah. And it was just, you know, a centimeter thick or something like that.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, it had everything built in. Right. So kind of like that NI digital bench thing, like, cause that's a nice piece of gear. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Oh, that's a nice bit. Yeah. But it's large and it's, oh, that's for the bottom of the range model. You know, is it really?

Chris Gammell: Oh, geez. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I think it goes up to like six or eight grand depending on the bandwidth. Right.

Chris Gammell: And so basically the, the thing that I got to is that most of the time I'm not going to be soldering in the road. Most of the time I don't need a full scope or anything else. And definitely doesn't need all of the, if you just throw it in a bag, you don't need to have all the padding because you're, you have it in your possession. Right. So.

Dave Jones: Well, if you're on the road, you're probably already got an existing project you want to work on and you just want, maybe want to power it up and just write code for it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think the port, the portal lab idea should have been replaced by like a go, like a port, like a electronics go bag. Right. That's kind of really the thing. And that's what I have now. It's like just a couple boxes of, you know, you know, parts and extra modules and whatever I need. So.

Dave Jones: Right. But you're in a different position because you're, you know, your job or part of your job is to do electronics tutorials. Sure. And you're always on the road. So, you know, you have a fairly unique need for that sort of thing. Sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Most of the time.

Dave Jones: Technically, I've got that now with my Microsoft Surface tablet, right? With the pen based drawer. And if I'm on holidays or whatever, and I decide, oh, I want to, you know, or I need to, you know, do a video, I can just do a 10 pen based tutorial or something like that. Cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know? And yeah. So I can churn those out on the beach, you know, it's like. Right. I can be sitting on a beach. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Alvin has TS100. I'm not sure what that refers to. I have no idea what a TS100 is. And then Rob Morley asked about the, our opinions on the iPhone. We are the wrong people to ask about that. I have no idea what an iPhone even is. The things that I paid attention to. Really?

Dave Jones: I'd say, like, like I've never had, I'm going to have to actually buy one because.

Chris Gammell: Oh, for the DM.

Dave Jones: Maybe not a new one. Because we're developing the app. Right. The 121 GW multimeter app. And you need an iPhone to test it on and do the software development. And you need a Macintosh as well.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow. So. Yeah. You're in for a bit of a bill going to the Cupertino.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm just going to buy like a secondhand six or something. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Whatever. So, so the thing that, that we always talk about with this is the thing to pay attention to is what Bunny talks about. Right. So when Bunny was on the first time and stuff he's talking about in the past, the reason you look at this is because whatever's in these phones, the sensors that are in these phones specifically, that's the stuff that's going to be like, give it two, three years. Those sensors are way cheaper because they're sourcing. People are working on it. They're getting more out in the market. And then you can use that in for further products because they'll become more available. And so I think there was like a new camera, like an interesting, like a dot matrix camera mapping thing that they're using for, of course, emojis. What? Yep. Thank God. Finally. Right. So. Just what I've always wanted. Yeah. Well, you know, it's 2017, Dave. So yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't even know what emojis are. Like. Don't, don't worry about it. I'm aware of like on my forum, we've got smileys. Right. But when people started talking about these emojis, I went, what the freak are emojis? My phone doesn't even have emojis. What are you, are they, is it only an Apple thing? I don't know. Like, I don't, I have no clue.

Chris Gammell: So I think the other interesting thing is that. So, and again, like, so the charging stuff. So they're doing wireless over Qi, right? So that's the QI. It's Qi.

Dave Jones: Oh, are they? They, they're actually using Qi. They made the announcement, have they?

Chris Gammell: Yes. And.

Dave Jones: Oh, it was Qi. Cause there was a lot of speculation that the new iPhone, they'd had wireless charging, but they thought it'd be a proprietary Apple thing. So they actually went with Qi.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Actually, the thing that I was, the thing that I was expecting that I did not see here is I thought they were going to switch to USB-C. Oh, and they didn't.

Dave Jones: What the hell? No, they still got the, what's the Apple connector called?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The lightning connector.

Dave Jones: Lightning. Lightning. Man.

Chris Gammell: I was really looking forward to that. Cause if they switch over to the USB-C, then it's like, that's it then. That's all you need. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All this other stuff is, who cares? Right. I mean, sure. The new chip is interesting, whatever, blah, blah, blah.

Dave Jones: A lot of people put too much focus on the iPhone. You've got to remember the iPhone is not the dominant smartphone on the market. It's got like 15, 20% market share or something like that. Last time I looked, it is not. People think that the iPhone is the only phone, smartphone that exists. It's the industry leader. It's not.

Chris Gammell: I think about it simply from a, from a, they usually lead in terms of cost and in terms of new integrations. Right. So they were the first.

Dave Jones: They lead in terms of hype. No. I don't.

Chris Gammell: They did Bluetooth low energy first. They did Bluetooth five first. I think.

Dave Jones: Maybe they did the IPS screen first. I don't know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So I'm just saying that like, it's usually like a, like, it's just interesting to pay. The only reason to pay attention in my opinion is because you got to check out.

Dave Jones: Oh, no, pay attention for sure, but don't think it's the be all end all.

Chris Gammell: Oh, sure. No. Right.

Dave Jones: That's their market share is still small.

Chris Gammell: I don't agree with, I don't know if I agree with that, but it doesn't matter to me. So like I said, just pay attention to the sensors, stuff like that. That's interesting. The other thing that I paid attention to given my change in employment, the Apple watch now has a SIM, not a SIM card. It has a, it is now cell connected. So you can now straight Dick Tracy it with an Apple watch. So I think that's personally interesting. I don't know if it changes anything, but. Okay.

Dave Jones: Here we go. Oh, no, that's 2010. Sorry. Yeah. Way out of date.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Sorry. I'm trying to look for.

Chris Gammell: Oh, you're looking for the stats on the, on the phone.

Dave Jones: I'm looking for the stats on the iPhone market share. I could be.

Chris Gammell: Well, while Dave's doing that, I will also mention that a user wrote to me about a meetup that they're having, and this is actually a meetup that they're just doing electronics meetup. They're also going to be doing a KiCad night. Here we go. It's just a generally electronics meetup one second. And I would love if people posted about them just so people can find others in their area. So this one is in Hamilton, Ontario. But if you've got, if you're starting a meetup, like Dave has a meetup. I have a meetup. I forget. I forget his name, Mark, maybe. But there's a meetup there. So if you have a meetup, feel free to post it to the subreddit. We'll help promote it. I think that's really great because nerds getting together, sharing projects, drinking beer, whatever. I think that's really awesome.

Dave Jones: Yep. Oh, I think I'm going to have another meetup soon. Oh, great. Yep. 14.7% market share for the Apple. Wow.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Samsung have 23%. It's still a lot of... Which is Android. And then Hawaii and Oppo and Vivo, whoever the hell they are. Anyway, like, you know. Yeah. Yeah. People think that they own the market. They don't. Not even close. Not even close. So, yep. Although that figure could be wrong. But hey, I got it from somewhere. It's on the internet. Can't be wrong. Must be right.

Chris Gammell: Where are Wikipedia fact checkers? Come on, man.

Dave Jones: Oh, dear. Anyway. 2017.

Chris Gammell: All right. Last question from our audience. Elias asks, how many times have you actually used it to look something up? Right.

Dave Jones: I saw that.

Chris Gammell: This is not my main copy anymore. I've got the gold one. So, yeah. I've got two. Who's got one copy? Please. What am I, an amateur? That's just the one with the good notes in it. I pull that down when I need it. That's the venerated copy. So, all right. You still looking at stats?

Dave Jones: I'm still looking at stats. I don't know. It's all too hard. It's all too hard.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure people can look that up. Well, we would love. So, this video is going to be online. And people can watch it. If you like this. I mean, like Dave was saying. Maybe we could do this again. I don't know. It's nice to have a little bit of feedback.

Dave Jones: Maybe it would be a regular thing for this Amp Hour. Let us know if you want it to be the thing. Yeah. And we'll just pull the audio stream out of the YouTube video. And then just upload that as the show. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Because it's probably foolish just to edit. We didn't have. Yeah. We didn't have any like big. We've had some blips in the past. But yeah. I mean. Anyway. I'm surprised it held up. I'm going to. Yeah. The main thing would be about. Whether it makes sense. If you're interested in participating. Like we might not read the questions every time. I don't know. I don't really personally watch. Like I subscribe to a bunch of podcasts. That are not. That have video that I don't care about. So. Yeah. Whatever. Right. So yeah. Cool. Let us know. Yes. We pulled a 360. Wait. The 360 is the same thing. Right. You go all the way around. It's the same thing. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. All right. Did a 180. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Anyway. That's it. That's our show.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well.

Dave Jones: Thanks for joining us all. 20. Is it gone? Have we hit 30? 30 people. Yeah. 30 people watching. Woo. Maybe more in the future. All right. Thanks everyone. See ya. Outro Music