#364 – The Endless Y2K

Chris Gammell: This is the Amp Hour Podcast. Released October 22nd, 2017. Episode 364. The Endless Y2K.

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. What's up, nerd? Not much, man. How's your... What's new? I don't even have any questions for you, do I?

Dave Jones: No, you don't.

Chris Gammell: We're getting started well here. How was that interview? I've been watching those pieces. Those are good interviews.

Dave Jones: They are good. And we will release the full two and a half hour interview as an Amp Hour episode.

Chris Gammell: Yes, that's right. So stay tuned. That was an interesting chat, though. Why was he in town? The HP guy?

Dave Jones: Yeah, no. He was here to see me. So there you go.

Chris Gammell: Just to see you?

Dave Jones: Well, he's a fan of the channel. And he was in Singapore, which is kind of, sort of, close.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, closer than New York to LA, probably, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. And he wanted to come to Australia and have a chat.

Chris Gammell: Cool. Nice.

Dave Jones: So I went, yep, cool.

Chris Gammell: You're like a spot on the map now. You were...

Dave Jones: Right. Yes. Yes, I am. Every man and his dogs turn it up.

Chris Gammell: Well, I was going to say, so what happens when people want to show up from our listener audience? Is there an application process?

Dave Jones: Ah, there's an extreme vetting. Yes. Right. It's like, you've got to fight like the underboss.

Chris Gammell: You've got to fight David too, and if you beat him, then you get to Dave. Right, okay, right. And then you get through the gatekeeper, right? That's right, right.

Dave Jones: That's good. Anyway, yes. That was fantastic. Cool. So we just, yeah, we just press record and two and a half hours later. Yeah. Magic comes out the other end.

Chris Gammell: Cool, man.

Dave Jones: I'm stunned at the amount of stuff we actually got through. Like I've got, you know, when I was editing the videos into five separate parts, there's still two more. One was released this morning. Four and five are still yet to be released. And like I'm writing, you know, like notes of, you know, what things were discussed in there. And it's just insane the amount of stuff we covered.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: In like, in each like 30 second episode, 30 minute episode, there's like, you know, 20 different things we talk about.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's absolutely amazing.

Chris Gammell: Wow. Yeah. I mean, I was, who was I talking to about this? I mean, like when you get together with other electronics people though too, right? It's like, there's so many things that you could talk about. I'm trying to recall this conversation I had. Someone was like, well, what happens when you talk to the electronics people? And it was a software person asking me this. And I think they were, oh, oh, oh, oh, no, that's, it wasn't a software person. It was a philosophy person. They were, they were saying, oh, well, like philosophy people like to get together and argue ideas. And they're like, don't you, don't you do that for electronics? And I'm like, ah, sort of. But it's like, but there's so many different things to talk about. But like, and there's so many varied experiences. Like, so you and I have very varied experiences. Obviously, our listeners have very varied experiences. You and John Kenny had very different experiences as well, right? And so it's almost just like the first step of people getting together. It's not like, it's not like, like philosophy people get together. They're like, what is the nature of existence? Oh, well, let's talk about that one question. It's more like, well, what's your favorite resistor? I don't know. That's a terrible example, but like, but there's, there's the first step is just kind of narrowing, you know, where the crossover even happens. And then like leveling of expectations because the, the topics are usually so, so varied and yet so deep in the same time.

Dave Jones: And tangents can happen. Like, as I said, like cover 20 different things in 30 minutes. Like, you know, tangents are happening in one or every one or two minutes.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly.

Dave Jones: On average. It's just nuts.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know, one thing leads to probably less so in philosophy chat, for example, because you know, you would have to discuss for 30 minutes or an hour. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure there's drilling down and stuff like that. But yeah, I, I don't, well, I've never had one of those philosophical chats before. Right. Yeah. No, it was, it was an interesting thing because they, they asked me that and I was like, well, I, I don't really argue about things because usually I'm, I'm most of the time I'm just like trying to figure out what they know so I can kind of claim that knowledge. Knowledge is my own, you know, got to have something to talk about on the show. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Well, that's great, man. That's great. I, I, I talked to someone else about a meetups the other day too, and they were, they were very nervous about electronics meetups. And I was like, well.

Dave Jones: Well, what actually hosting one or, or going to one?

Chris Gammell: Not hosting, but just kind of like, uh, I think probably in the same realm of like, yeah, going there and then not knowing anyone. Yeah. Yeah. You know, gave the standard advice of, well, just bring your, bring a product. Cause you can always point to something and be like, well, yeah, what do you think of this? And they're like, oh yeah.

Dave Jones: And, and I'm a big proponent of the name tag. I know they're dorky.

Chris Gammell: Uh, yep.

Dave Jones: But you know, if you've got the name tag, it's like, oh, I know you from the forum and you can like, you've, you've got an in to walk up to them and Hey, I know you from the four. I remember your post, you know, like you've got something to start off with. Right. Otherwise, like you can't just walk up to everyone and go, hi, who are you? You know, that's like daunting to even, that's like a salesperson social people. Right. Yeah. That's like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You've got to be a type, type a social.

Dave Jones: Right. You know, that is not us. Yeah. That is not us. No, that is almost, it rules out almost every engineering techie type person. Yep. So, whereas, you know, if you've got an in, that's different.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Well, and I was also, uh, I was talking to someone else about like meetups and stuff like that. And the thing I always try and do is like, so if you are feeling a little more comfortable, right, uh, introduce someone else. Like, so if someone comes up and they're showing you some hardware, I usually just pull the next person next to me. I'm like, have you seen this? Yeah, right. That usually sticks people together because then, you know, they explain it again too. Again, another, another, uh, another plus in the, uh, in the, uh, the realm of bringing hardware to meetups. Got to do it. You know?

Dave Jones: That reminds me, I've got to do a second one. You still haven't done a meetup? I've got to do a follow-up. No, I haven't done a second one yet.

Chris Gammell: Since April. Okay. Well.

Dave Jones: Is it really April? What is it now? Shit, it's October.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Dave Jones: Well, you know, every, like everyone said like every six months. That's eight. Well, okay. I'm a little bit over. People said like six months. That's true. That's true. People said like every month would be far too, every two months was probably too soon.

Chris Gammell: What Dave means to say is he needs someone who's in Australia, who's in Sydney who would help him co-organize. That's what Dave's trying to say right now. So that they-

Dave Jones: Oh, I don't need to co-organize. Yes, you do. I can do it. No, I don't.

Chris Gammell: You need someone just to like kick your butt and to be like-

Dave Jones: Well, that's what a co-organizer is. Someone who just says, freaking do it.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know, because for me, it's just a simple email to the guy who runs the place that we went to and choose a date, you know? Sure.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, EEV blog meetup coming up, hopefully before the next time I get back there. Yep. Hang on.

Dave Jones: Hang on. David.

Chris Gammell: Oh, there you go.

Dave Jones: Remind me. We'll make a thing and we'll make another meetup. Task me. Yeah, that guy's social. He'll do it. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Yep.

Chris Gammell: There we go. There you go. New EEV blog meetup. He'll hassle me. Yep.

Dave Jones: He'll hassle me until I do it.

Chris Gammell: Great. There you go. That's why you have employees. Yep. Cool, man. Well, what else is new? I don't know. Building hardware? Sorry.

Dave Jones: No, it's a, yeah. No, I'm very close to shipping, getting my first 50, 121 GW multimeters. Okay. And yep. Yeah. Yeah. There was a last minute software thing and they've now delayed something like this. It's just, it, it, it just never ends. It never, it, even after we ship these, there'll be so, you know, there'll be countless firmware problems. It's just impossible to do it. How is the firmware?

Chris Gammell: Does the firmware upload over Bluetooth?

Dave Jones: Uh, no, no. It's an SD card. So you put on the micro SD card and put it in. No, we, we, we originally wanted like to update over Bluetooth and they, you know, that was my original concept because I thought, well, obviously you've got Bluetooth. Why wouldn't you do firmware updating over Bluetooth? That'd be cool. And then they came back to me and said, look, we can do it, but it's a crap ton of work.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Um, to actually implement that and it's not reliable and it's like, you know, cause like the actual Bluetooth is not, not reliable at the best of times, let alone. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The way that I understand those. So, so we talked about OTA, that's OTA right over the air sort of kind of updates, right? Well. So we talked about that last week on the, uh, with Jen and Alvaro and the way I understand it at least is you need like at least another segment of memory or you need a separate memory space. So you could be like, here's firmware A, I just downloaded firmware B, I did a check sum on firmware B, I stored it into memory. I load firmware B where firmware was while still also holding onto firmware. Well, I don't load it in there. I don't overwrite it. I just load it up, see if it works. If it does work, then I can go and copy firmware B to where firmware A was and now firmware B slot is open for future firmware. Does that sound right? That's correct.

Dave Jones: Yes. Otherwise you can't live update, like you can't live. You can, but usually it works once. Well, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty hard.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: And, and whereas the alternative solution was practically already done for us because we're using an STR micro and, and ST have already written the, and all this has to exist in the bootloader. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Um, because that's the way you protect it and do everything else. Right. So the bootloader has got to be small, but then if you implement the Bluetooth thing, you've got to add all the Bluetooth crap to the, you know, to the, to the bootloader.

Chris Gammell: Oh, right.

Dave Jones: Whereas, whereas ST have already done this, right. ST already provide a library that reads an SD card. Right. So they've done that. And also, uh, they've already written the bootloader stuff for loading firmware.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: From SD cards. Like it was already written for us. So it was like, well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, and that makes sense too. Obvious decision made. And, and you don't upgrade firmware all the time. So having to, you know, take the battery cover off and take out the SD card is not really, you know, it's hardly a big deal.

Chris Gammell: Loading onto an SD card isn't tough either. It's not like you're going to some weird in-between format.

Chris Gammell: No, no. I think that's actually great. And I mean, would it be possible to upgrade it in the future too, if you had like a, you know, if, if version two of the firmware said, okay, now this enables Bluetooth or would you actually need to refactor the board too?

Dave Jones: Uh, no, we could do it, but you'd have to change the bootloader code.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Right. Right. That would be like the big dangerous one. It's like, do it your risk.

Dave Jones: But no, to, yeah. To change the bootloader code, you've got to have the ST arm development kit. And there is an internal header. You can do it. Right. There's a little, it isn't even 0.1 inch. It's a smaller, you know, pin pitch pin header inside and you can do it. Um, but yeah, you know. Right.

Chris Gammell: But that's the risky thing. Cause then if you flash that wrong or whatever, so you wouldn't be able to do it from the

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Your motor meter is bricked.

Dave Jones: And yeah, no, the whole idea of bootloaders is you want them to be as dumb and as simple as possible. So in this case, the bootloader has, uh, well, probably four things. It's got the, that it's got the code to read the SD card, obviously. Yep. Um, it's got the code to display stuff on the screen. So all, all the display routines are in the bootloader and it's got some simple code to read the, uh, the, uh, buttons, right? Because you have to press a button combination to when you turn the meter on to do the firmware update. But that's all it does. Up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: AB, AB start. Is that right?

Dave Jones: Something like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: What? Where does that come from?

Chris Gammell: That's the Konami code. You don't know the Konami code?

Dave Jones: No, what the hell's the Konami code?

Chris Gammell: You're too old, I think. Yeah. That was like the secret code that was on like tons and tons of video games.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. No.

Chris Gammell: Konami code. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I probably got it wrong too. I'm not going to, now I'm going to sound like total, total poser here, but yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, and that's all that's in it. Right. And that's all that should be in a bootloader. The more complicated you make it, the more you risk, you know, things going. And cause when you send a product out, you want the bootloader to be so simple that nothing can ever go wrong with it. And it's fully compatible, always in the future. Bulletproof. Yep. Etc. We, we did have to change it once during, only once during the development of this. And that was for the LCD contrast. Cause as I said, the LCD code was in there and the, they had an issue with, you know, they didn't set the registers right. And there was an LCD contrast issue. So to fix that, they had to upgrade the bootloader. Got it. Got it. But now that that's fixed, like we should never have to touch the bootloader again. Okay. That's great. That's the plan. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, I think that's, that's a, that's good too. I mean, like, I don't know if you're doing much like, are you talking to customers, I guess, through the forum kind of thing? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yep. No, everyone loves the firmware update via SD card. As far as I know, it's probably the only meter on the market that has an SD card firmware upgrade thing. Most of them are like through the serial port, you know, you got to have the serial port interface and do it that way. If you can do it at all. Most, most multimeters don't have firmware update. So.

Chris Gammell: Makes sense.

Dave Jones: Yep. Cause they're deemed to be a fixed like product, you know, they're deemed to be like a, a, a product that should not need, it should just work. It should not need firmware update.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, and sometimes they didn't want to make it public either. Right. They didn't want people to mess with it.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. But it's a binary. It's not like we're releasing source code. So if you want to go through and disassemble the whole, you know, binary code. You're not.

Chris Gammell: I thought you, I thought you were talking about doing open source at one point.

Dave Jones: Oh, we were. Yeah. That was the original plan. But in the end we decided not to. Got it.

Chris Gammell: For various reasons.

Dave Jones: Okay. So.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Cool. Well, I signed myself up for some, for some hardware pain the past couple of weeks. Do you tell? I, I designed in boards with 0402 parts and I'm going to be hand assembling. Fool. Why?

Dave Jones: Why?

Chris Gammell: I, I, I ran out of room. It was, uh, also to have, I was copying a design too. So, uh, this is for work, but I was copying a design and I was like, oh yeah, this is fine. And then I was like, look at the board yesterday. I'm like, what was I thinking? So.

Dave Jones: 0402s aren't a problem, but you really need magnification. Like I can do them without magnification, but it's pretty ugly. Well, it's going to be. So like, I say hand sample.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I mean hand place. Sorry. I'm going to be, I'm going to do reflow. I got a stencil. Like all that stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh, you're going to do reflow. Ah, wuss.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Get in there with your 0.35 millimeter solder and do each one by hand.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, I would do, I would do, uh, I would do assembly. If I was doing hand assembly like that. Yeah. Then I would definitely use a magnification for soldering, but, um, no. Yeah. We'll, we'll see how it goes.

Dave Jones: Hey, speaking of which we were cleaning up the lab the other day.

Chris Gammell: I was going to, I was going to bring that up by the way. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Never trust a person with a, uh, with a clean workbench. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently I have a floor. Who you, you know, right. It's what holds up all the stuff. The, the floor, if, if you don't know, is the workbench you always have. You know.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh. Like. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So you're standing on crap that you, yeah. Took off the workbench.

Dave Jones: Haven't, haven't you ever like soldered on the floor, you know, sitting down there doing assembly on the floor? You know. I can't say I have. Because you ran out of workbench space. That's, that's. That's, uh. Ah, you're obviously not working hard enough.

Chris Gammell: I guess so. Yeah. Or, or I keep my bench, you know, some modicum of cleanliness, you know.

Dave Jones: Right. Right. Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Well, anyways, you, you, you, uh, betrayed your, your profession and you cleaned your bench. Yeah. Go ahead.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Okay. It will not last long.

Chris Gammell: Right. I know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So anyway. Anyway. So we, of course, uh, discovered the pick and place kit. What? That we. You have a pick and place kit? We have a, we have a pick and place kit. It's the, what one is it, David? The vision. Oh, I don't know. Uh, the light placer. It's the light. I think it's the light placer.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Which one? L-I-T-E. Yeah, of course. Um, uh, I think. Yes. Yes. Yes. The light placer.com. Yep. Okay. The pick and place machine for your lab. And we've got to, you know, they very kindly sent through a kit, but like, it's like, Oh, it's, Oh, hang on. It's the website says it's accurate. It reliably places 0402 passives. Wow. Okay. I might have to test this. Um, and, and like, I thought, Oh, you know, like it's always been like a lot of like, it's going to take like a week to build this thing and, and just get it basically. I'm looking at it. It's a gantry, right?

Chris Gammell: So it's, it looks like it's a gantry with a, with a air suction, whatever. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and you've got to dedicate like a large section of a dedicated bench to do it. Like to build it. You can't just like, you know, sweep aside something on your bench.

Chris Gammell: There are like a bunch of plugs on there.

Dave Jones: It looks like it's, yeah. It just looks like a CNC mill, but it's actually a, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Like a, like a routing table. Right. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And, and of course it doesn't have feeders. So you've got to put down like you, you, you stick down the tape, you know, and then you've got to program the position of the tape and stuff like that. You know, so it's not nearly as good as any one.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure I'm going to be like, like lusting after something like this, after my assembly, uh, you know, activities in the next couple of weeks. But yeah. Maybe.

Dave Jones: But you might find it takes longer to program than it just does to sit. How many boards are you doing? One?

Chris Gammell: 50.

Dave Jones: Oh, 50. Okay. 50 is the, yeah. And how many parts on each board?

Chris Gammell: Uh, that's a good question. Uh, probably. Ballpark. Probably 20 unique SKUs. Ah, right. With like maybe, I mean, a lot of them are like, you know, passives and stuff. So probably 50 to 100 total parts.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Well, suck it up buttercup. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, not all of them are meant to be popular anyways. So. Right. This is the, so this is, I'll post a link of what I posted. 50 is the pain in the ass. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. 50 is the, you know, if you're doing that all the time, then you can probably make use of something like that. If you go into the hundreds of boards, you wouldn't bother. You would just like do, you know, send it and farm it out to somebody. That's, that's the narrow niche of these pick and place machines, which were done before. Anyway, we, we, we now have the space, um, to do this.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: So I'm thinking, you know, yeah. Like we, we don't actually have a need for this. Like we're, we're not going to use it, but it would make a cool.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's more like a science experiment, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It'd make a cool series of videos. Like, hey, you know, what are these, you know, how good are these? Do it yourself. Right.

Chris Gammell: The measure will be actually, if you use it after the fact, right? So like the project thing, so this is like a 3d printer, right? Building it's fun as hell. Right. But it's really about like, do you use it as a 3d printer? Like, do you actually need to, like I was thinking today, I haven't printed anything in quite a long time.

Dave Jones: We, we, we printed something a month ago. Um, you know, but yeah, no, it doesn't, we don't use it all the time, but we do use it so much so that we moved it into the office here.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: Um, it's, it's just sitting right in front of me and we did use it to print some prototype parts before we got the machine. Um, just so we could get like a look and feel kind of, you know, thing. Um, so yeah, but yeah, this thing, like we, we simply wouldn't use it. We're, we're just not in the, you know, we're not regularly assembling dozens of boards. Like if you want to assemble one board, just do it by hand.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's always that question of like, where's that line? Right. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like you can just use the manual tweezers.

Chris Gammell: It's not, you know, the hard part for me, like stencils for me, stencils are like a thousand times. Yes. Right. Stencils are so cheap these days. Right. And that's like, that's a huge hassle for me because, because not only do you, is it slow on the, the, um, the application piece, right. You know, doing the dots, even having like a little, um, you know, pneumatic application thing with the foot pedal, whatever. But it's just about the, you know, then, and then you put too much down though. And then it's the rework piece. Right. At least with the stencil, if I get the right part in the right place, it's almost guaranteed to work. Yep. You know, asterix, but right. Right. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: It's fairly tolerant. Fairly tolerant. Yeah. By doing that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Cause it'll just suck it into place. Right.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. It'll just, you know, like you just need to be near enough and the surface tension will just go and center it. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. It, it really isn't a big deal. Um, so yeah, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I know I shouldn't go into a project like this, no, like assuming the outcome. Right. What's the assumption? Well, well, the assumption is, is that I, it's not going to be useful for me.

Chris Gammell: Oh, oh, like that. I see. I see.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's like, I, I just know it based on my experience and, you know, some basic facts and, and, and they're not for everyone. Um, but you know, if you're doing boards like, uh, Mike, you know, from Mike's electric stuff, he was always doing lead boards, which includes like tons of placements and thousands of leads. Right. Yep. And, and he's doing short runs like, you know, that's the way he has.

Chris Gammell: Like low part variability. Right. But lots of placements.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But lots of them. And that's why he has his own pick and, like a real pick and place machine with real feeders and everything else in his home lab. Yep. Because that's the business he's in making short, you know, he, he, he doesn't do thousands of boards. He does dozens or a hundred. Right. You know, kind of thing. And they've got hundreds of the same part on them. Right. They're all, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But talking to Mike too, he, he's just as quick. He, he knows, he knows his capability too. So he'll just turn it around. If he knows that it's not for him, that he'll, he has people on staff that he can, not on staff, but like on call he can just. On call. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. No, he'll, he'll happily farm it out. But, but he, but he knows if it's, oh, I've got to make 20 of these boards and they've got 500 leads each. Well, I just, you know, whack in, whack them into the machine and boom, you know, it's going to spit them out. So, um, that's often less hassle than trying to, you know, organize with someone and organize a date to have it done where, you know, you can just have it done in a day.

Chris Gammell: Right. Or two. So the same argument, I don't know if I mentioned on the show, but, uh, there's someone around here in Chicago, uh, Jamie, and he does, uh, Chicago robotics it's called, but he, he has a Neoden 4 and, uh, I just referred a friend to him just cause he's got a really nice software interface to it. And like a secondary, not, not using just the vendor software, but also tying into it. And so that's that, you know, the, it was the TM245 and the same company then made the, the Neoden 4.

Dave Jones: Oh, really? Is that the new one? I'm only aware of the, the older one.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The older one. And like the older one didn't have, I think it had up vision only, but not down vision and stuff like that. The new one actually, it's like, it's like pretty decent. I mean, so I went and saw it and I, you know, like, again, you and I talk about this a lot on here. It's not like to the, you know, it's, it was like 10 or 15 grand for this thing. So not like cheap, but also not like 60 grand, like the man corpse are or whatever. I don't even know the next, you know, the next stage up or whatever. But, um, so I went and saw this thing and the really interesting thing is that it actually has a board feeder on it. Right. So like the, the, the, I don't know what it's called, like the trolley that the, the boards get fed into, you know, if you have a panelized, they, it could do multiple machines. Right. And it's a weird format, but the thinking was like, so in a best case scenario, if you had one of those machines, you know, idle all the time with all the common parts on it, that's really the dream. Right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: You know, and if you had six of those machines with all the common parts on it, it's even better. But, uh, with, with, uh, you know, with the, again, the asterisk of like, okay, but how are you going to pay for that? You know, like you're going to pay for that by doing other people's boards and that sucks.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And it doesn't matter which way you try and spin this, you know, do it yourself, pick and place thing. It's always going to be an extremely narrow niche where there is, right. Right. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, there's just no magic bullet here. It's, it's never, I'm, I'm calling it right. It's never going to happen.

Chris Gammell: You say you were trying to keep an open mind too though.

Dave Jones: But I'm a bloody realist. Right. I, I, I just like these things. There are, there are inherent complexities of pick and place machines and logistical complexities of pick and place machines that will, you know, like essentially never been solved. Like the, like the feeders are like, there's a few ideas floating around about feeders where Hey, you could just, you know, pull them off the tape, right. You know, you don't have to have the complex tape. Feeders just pull them off the tape, put them in a bin. And then the, you know, yeah, you have like a vibrator just like that. And it, and it, and your whole have a hundred percent vision. So eventually you'll flip one up the right way. And then the vision automatically finds it and, you know, stuff like that. Yeah. That can add some improvements and things like that. Right. But, you know, it's just.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, the best thing to do is just make a lot of boards.

Dave Jones: The assembly as a service thing has basically, you know, killed the dream of that. Right. Well, and that's actually. Because it's so easy to.

Chris Gammell: We've got some news about that too. Macrofab. We do have some news, don't we? Yeah. Macrofab just announced they're, they're doing so many, so many of these things that they're actually, they're expanding too. So that's cool. Congrats to them. They're, they're, they're going to Mexico. Viva la Mexico. So they're going to have a new spot, I guess, you know, so they've been prototyping focused and now they're getting enough questions, I guess, to, to be like, well, you know, just transition it to a production level kind of thing. So it's no, it's not five boards. It's now 500 boards or whatever. So that makes sense. Yeah. So, yeah. And it'll be slower. Right. I mean, they even show on their, their little screenshot that it's 40 days. Right.

Dave Jones: So that's, that's a long time. That's a lot. That's an agonizingly.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. Long time. But if it's cheaper, right? I mean, that's.

Dave Jones: Oh, no, no, of course.

Chris Gammell: That's where, that's where it really starts to pay off. You know, if you can, if you could start to push towards, and not only that, like, so they're also showing 5,000 units, right? At a certain point, you're going to, you know, you could have the fastest assembler in the world, but you, you got to order production quantity parts. Yeah. Well, that's right. You got six to eight weekly times no matter what. Right. So.

Dave Jones: Well, it depends if you saw some more from Mouser and DigiKey, you know, you saw some more from the supply, from the stockists. Sure.

Chris Gammell: Sure. But that's assuming that they have been stocked too, and you know what I mean? Like, that you buy them all right when you're ready to go. You know, you know, the same problems we've talked about, like your resistor stuff. Yep. Yeah. Yep. So, it's, yeah, it's not, this is, this is not a panacea, because there is no panacea for assembly, but this is an, this is a nice step. So, I think, I think what this really is, is just like, if people are used to a certain type of flow, that's what it really is, right? So, you know, it's like a brand.

Dave Jones: I don't know why anyone, this is the other thing we pick and place machines. Why would anyone want to make their own boards in volume? Or in any, like, it is just like the worst, like, it is the dregs of the electronics industry. Assembling boards is like the, you know, like, it's such just. I think, you know, yeah, that's a good question. I think there's a lot of. It's messy, dirty, logistically and physically.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it seems like a lot of fun problems to solve. Like, oh, well, what if we bundle these things? And what if we. I know. Optimize this cost here.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's nice. It pushes all your engineering buttons. Yeah, especially for software people. Because there's a lot more. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So we've had Jonathan on. We've had Jonathan on the show or no? I think so. PCBNG? Yeah. I think, yeah. And, well, Macrofab we've had on the show. Andrew from Circuit Hub. Yeah, so, like, a bunch of these services. We've had a bunch of them on the show. But they're all software people, right? Right. Right. And so it sounds like a great problem to solve.

Dave Jones: It sounds glamorous. And there are great problems to solve. But then when you've got your arms, you know, when you're up to your armpits in freaking solder paste and fumes and freaking broken down and dicky feeders and stuff like that, you're just, like, just, no.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Give it to some other poor schmuck who, you know, who actually morbidly likes doing this sort of stuff.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well.

Dave Jones: It's just, no. Like, I do enjoy pick and play. Like, I do enjoy hand placing and hand assembling a board.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? You want to do mine? You want to do mine?

Dave Jones: It's quite therapeutic. No, I'm not dumb enough to do your 50 boards, you schmuck.

Chris Gammell: No schmuck here, huh? Yeah. No schmuck quotient. You know?

Dave Jones: Yeah. I enjoy it. It's, you know, it's actually therapeutic. It's like, you know, laying out a board or doing, you know, something else.

Chris Gammell: I like the occasional soldering. But, yeah. Laying out a board, I will give you. So that's something else I was going to bring up. I did get pretty deep into it. I looked up on Saturday night and I was like, I've been doing this for a long time. I should probably stop. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But, yeah, I've been, so I have something to announce about KiCad. I did almost the entire board in OpenGL mode, which is something different for me. What's that? So that's like the newer, so basically it's like closer to like what you're used to with Altium stuff. But basically that's like the rendering. Please explain. Yeah, it's a rendering engine. So it's a rendering engine for, there's the canvas, the default canvas, and then there's OpenGL and then there's Cairo. Those are the three ones.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but what's the physical, what's the...

Chris Gammell: What's the reason for it? Why I have three?

Dave Jones: What's the difference? What's the usability difference between these?

Chris Gammell: The usability difference is if you want to do like matched impedances, if you want to do like click and follow or push and shove, like all the different routing types and stuff like that. That's all...

Dave Jones: Right, so it's more advanced. So you're saying that KiCad has two versions at the moment. One is like the year one we're used to and one is some new fancy, fancy beta OpenGL thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I wouldn't say beta, but like it's the future. But the main thing is like all of my videos in the past, I've never done stuff with OpenGL. So like that was the big thing. And I didn't even think... Like it's one of those things where it was like until you're forced into it, right? It's just like learning a CAD package as well. Until you're forced into it, you won't discover all the things because you're like, how the hell do I move a wire here? You know what I mean? Right, right.

Dave Jones: So it's vastly different? It's more annoyingly different, is it?

Chris Gammell: No, I wouldn't say it. It's not out of the normal. And in fact, some things were like very pleasing in terms of just... So like polygons are a big problem in KiCad. Right. And so like I've always switched to OpenGL. As soon as OpenGL mode was available, I switched to that for like reforming the plane outline.

Dave Jones: So you can chop and change between these modes, can you?

Chris Gammell: Yes, you can. Yeah. F9, F10, 11.

Dave Jones: Well, like if it's so good, why isn't just the new version OpenGL only? I mean... It will be in the future. That's... Right. That's why I'm saying it's effectively a beta thing now.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, that's true.

Dave Jones: Do they officially recommend it if you go to the de facto official KiCad site?

Chris Gammell: Official is such a soft term with KiCad, you know?

Dave Jones: See, and that's the problem I still have with it.

Chris Gammell: I think... No, that is a problem.

Dave Jones: Somebody's got to take it by the horns and say, this is the one you freaking download. This is the one everyone supports on the forum.

Chris Gammell: Maybe you're talking to them, Dave. Maybe you're talking to them. Right. No. I think there's lots of options just because there's a lot of people working on it. It's an open source project, right? That's how it goes. I know. But it can't be that forever. Somebody's got to... You're saying like an Altium or similar things. It's like, here's the new way, right? Exactly. Right. Get on the train or stop. Somebody's got to go, yeah. Yeah, piss or get off the pod kind of thing, right? Or whatever.

Speaker ?: Right?

Dave Jones: This is the one that we're going to support on the support forums. You know, here's the one you should be downloading. Here's the one you should be using. Here's the one you should be asking questions about. If you're asking questions about the sub-older or alternative version, then well, you know, that's your problem. But don't expect us to... Tough beans, right? Yeah. No, I get it. No, yeah.

Chris Gammell: That makes sense. Yeah. So, well, Chris Gammell is officially supporting OpenGL, so... Well, it's true. Yeah, well, yeah. But no, it was actually... It was like, once I did get into it, it was actually quite pleasant. The push and shove, you know, you never really... Like, I read about that a lot, and obviously I saw it and tried it and stuff like that. But like, until you do a dense board layout, you don't really know.

Dave Jones: You've got to use it in anger. There's no point. Yeah, that's a good one to say. You cannot trial PCB packages just by dicking around.

Chris Gammell: I totally agree with that. You've got to do it in anger. You've got to get a project. Yeah, we always talk about that. You need a project. And like, you know, so I have Getting to Blinky, and that's something. But it's even better. It's like, no, no, no. It's like, you need something that's important to you personally, right? Yep. Some project that will fix a problem in your life. That's kind of the hard part sometimes, so... Mm-hmm. Yep. So, yeah. I can. There you go. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Somebody emailed me the other day pleading for me to take another... I don't want to look at KeyCad because it's so much better now. They'll probably talk about the OpenGL thing. Ah, probably. Because they were talking about push and shove, I think, and stuff like that. Don't bother, folks. Come on.

Chris Gammell: What do we say here? It's religion. You don't try and change someone's religion. Yeah. No.

Dave Jones: It's like, I have a license. Like, you know, like, seriously. Like, I've got a license for Altium Designer. Why would I, you know, want to use KeyCad apart from making videos?

Chris Gammell: Dave will learn it when he is... Like, this is predicting... If there is ever a future where Dave learns KeyCad, it is in anger because something in Altium pissed him off. Yeah, right. Pretty much. Exactly. Right. And, yeah. Not worth it otherwise. Right. Cool.

Dave Jones: I was talking to David, too, about this the other day. Mm-hmm. And, um...

Chris Gammell: The Amp Hour. Chris and Dave rehashed conversations that they don't really remember.

Dave Jones: And, no, we were talking about this. It's like, what package would you use if, like, you couldn't afford Altium Designer, which is, like, the de facto industry standard, you know, $5,000 type package, right, in that order? You know, what package are you going to buy under $1,000? You know, like, there's the free version. If you're going for free, you're going for KeyCad, right? I don't think there's probably a question there. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. We're doing, like, a live matrix comparison table here, right? Right.

Dave Jones: And it's like, well...

Chris Gammell: And I would... I mean, to be fair, I would say that maybe even if you're not looking for free. I think it's competitive with some of the other tools out there, but...

Dave Jones: Oh, sure. No. No. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But if you must have free, then 100%. Yes.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Don't do it. Don't do Circuit Maker. I think... Sorry. I don't like Circuit Maker.

Dave Jones: Oh, no. I think Circuit Maker's dead.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think Circuit Maker's dead because Altium bought... Altium bought Upverter. Right. Right. Right. And it's clear they're going to discontinue Circuit Maker. Right.

Chris Gammell: And, like, Eagle free, it's, you know, it's not bad. I actually like a lot of the changes that are coming to Eagle. But, you know, there's restrictions. So, you're going to... No, I would rather use Altium... That's kind of kicking the can down the road. So... Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, I'd rather use Altium Mass Circuit Studio than...

Chris Gammell: So, that's, like, the paid. But, again, I was just saying free. Right? So, free compares Eagle versus Kaikad.

Dave Jones: Well, the argument we were having the other day is, which package would I actually use if I wanted to pay, you know, buy a proper commercial package, but I didn't want to spend, you know, $5,000 or $10,000 for Altium? Then I came to the conclusion it'd probably be Circuit Studio.

Chris Gammell: Maybe. Yeah, I saw Jerry asking about that the other day, too. Yeah. She was asking on Twitter about that. Yeah, yeah, I saw that. Maybe. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Well, which one would you pick?

Chris Gammell: Well, so, actually, my friend went through this. Yeah. And I think it depends on your application, right? So, it depends. Yeah. But he's a consultant, right? And so, you know what he ended up doing? What? He paid for designer. He called and negotiated, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you call and negotiate. Okay, yeah. Yeah, right. And it's going to be expensive. But in that case, you know, you basically pass the cost along to your clients or whatever, right? Of course. Yeah. Up your rate, folks.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's right.

Chris Gammell: And yeah, so designer is kind of the de facto standard for consulting and a bunch of stuff that's out there. Unless you're at a company where, you know, if you're consulting for like an Intel, then you need to learn, what is it, mentor they use or something?

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, that's the thing. When I was talking to John from Keysight, Keysight don't use Altium, right? Yeah. They use, yeah, mentor or whatever. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right? And so, like, it's really going to be like, what is your, what's your end goal there? So, removing all that stuff, if you were going to start a company tomorrow and you wanted to spend...

Dave Jones: Are you talking to me?

Chris Gammell: No, I'm just saying, you, you know, the general you. The audience, you. The royal you. Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm going to say Kiket again. I mean, I'm going to say Kiket instead of Kiket too. I don't see, like, honestly, at that point, I don't think that the $1,000, maybe, you know, I'm wrong about that, but I'm very biased, right? So, if you're not going to pay for the high-end stuff, I think there's no reason not to do Kiket. So, sorry. Right. This is a terrible question to ask me. Why are you even asking me? What did David say? What did you and David say?

Dave Jones: Oh, well, no. I said I would probably use Circuit Studio.

Chris Gammell: Right. Price is good on that.

Dave Jones: Because you still get the professional support. Right, right. Right? And it's got almost all of the functionality of Circuit, the Altium Designer, except the productivity enhancement stuff. Yeah, whatever that means. You know, so it's almost got, you know, it's got most of the power. Sure. And, you know, I. Sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I mean, it's not a bad product, but it's just a bad question to ask me, right? Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: No, no, no, of course. Because you've made the, you've made the commitment switch. Sure. To Kiket.

Chris Gammell: Right. I think the other thing, too, is that like, so I've talked a lot in the past about, oh, this is something I actually did want to bring up, too. So Dave Vanabout, we've had in the show twice now. He is, he is a Python master. I did not realize this. So, so there's a lot of the workflow stuff. You mentioned workflow and Altium stuff, right? So like all the manufacturing stuff, that's always been terrible for Kiket. Yep. And so he has two, Kiket Field and Kiket Cost. And they're like these Python plugins. And at first I was a little bit, I was like, oh, oh, Python, watch out. But no, it's great. So basically it's like you can extract it, work from a spreadsheet and then put it back in, basically. Exactly. So for your costing, for your part list, for your modification, anything like that. So I fell in love with that stuff. Where was I going with that? Oh, oh. So the reason that I say this is I've always talked about the schematic as a control document. Have I said it on the show before? I've talked about it elsewhere. Yes, you have. Okay, yeah. So like this, that basically allowed it. And I think that that's an argument against, so if people took that same mindset as like the schematic as a control document, putting it into revision control, tracking that document as the source of truth, then I think Kiket wins again. Surprise, Chris. I think it wins again because then when someone else needs to access it, even though it'll be wonky and they won't know how to necessarily do it, they can at least open it without paying for it, right? And I know that there's viewers and stuff like that, but like I imagine if you, so say you start with a one-person company and you pay $1,000, it makes sense, right? But then you have a thousand-person company at Someday, hopefully, right? And then it's like everybody has to have that license, kind of same thing, right? So that's really where that argument comes from.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it's a floating license. So it's like as long as only one person's using it at a time, you're fine.

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right.

Dave Jones: So it's not, yeah, and gone are the days where you, you know, have to have a seat for each person and it's node locked to the hard drive on that computer.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. You know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, sure.

Chris Gammell: But that's kind of just my argument there. Now, I will say, like I said, I think the Eagle stuff, I think the stuff they're doing, I know a lot of people were mad at them, but I think a lot of the stuff they're doing is interesting. You know, you and I both know Matt, who's running the group there, and I think they're doing some pretty interesting stuff, actually, like the reusable block stuff and the, you know, the integration with Fusion, that's still kind of working through that, like the 3D versus the 3D CAD versus the circuit stuff. Interesting. They announced a simulation, which CatCat also has, and I think Altium has. Yep. Personally, I think that feature across all platforms is kind of bogus. Like, LT Spice for everything, and then you put it into a program. Like, don't mix the two. Yeah. So. But yeah, I, sure. You're not converting my religion either, Dave.

Dave Jones: We, this was a nothing discussion. Right, right, exactly. There's no conclusion from this.

Chris Gammell: Well, all right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Whatever. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Next. Well, oh, speaking of design stuff, if people didn't see, Mike Harrison is doing the badge design for the Superconverse that I'll be in. Oh, man. That thing is beautiful. I got to talk to Mike about it beforehand, but yeah, he built a little camera in there, and oh, it's super cool. So. If people are going, I'm going to be hacking on that. It's going to be, there's directions on hacking it, so.

Dave Jones: Ah, right. Thank you.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: If there's directions on hacking it, that's not hacking.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. Sorry. There's directions on what the pinout is of the header so that you can bring boards, you can make boards now. Right. And bring them with you.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: So if you want to, if you want to really show off, show off with a, show up with a board that's already ready to plug in there. And it's like, and then you're just writing, like you won't have access. I mean, you could write code on a pick 32 beforehand, but you wouldn't have access to the thing before that, but like.

Dave Jones: So you can just wander up to person and say, hey, let me shove this in your badge. That sounds terrible. I thought it might.

Chris Gammell: Sure. But yes, you could say that. Right. It would be interesting too. So Mike specifically, he did the same thing as you with the SD card instead of having like a connected option and stuff like that. So this board.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. So he's done a little bootloader in the firmware.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly. SD card. Right. Okay. And so probably for similar reasons. Also keep costs down. And that's actually. So the board that I'm doing.

Dave Jones: And STR micro as well?

Chris Gammell: No, he's using a pick 32. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: Okay. Yes. Cause he's a pick 32 fan boy.

Chris Gammell: Right. So I'm actually, the board that I'm building is actually meant to be interfaced with this badge too. I guess that's kind of tying it all together. So it, you know, it's just a serial to a cell modem. Surprising. Yeah. But what was it? Shit. What was I going to say? Oh, oh, oh. I was assuming someone was going to put Wi-Fi in this thing. However, watch out if you're doing Wi-Fi. Right. So. Right. Yeah. There's been a kind of, kind of an important thing.

Dave Jones: There has. Yeah. We were about to update the firmware for our router here, but like, it's not a big, like, it's not like someone's going to suddenly hack me right now.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Right. Well, this, they're listening. It's in the past. So. Right. Dave will have certainly updated by then. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. This is kind of a big one. Crack. K-R-A-C-K. Right. I mean, again, by the time this show goes out, it'll be Sunday. If you haven't heard of it by now, you're a little behind the game. But yeah, there was a huge WPA2 vulnerability.

Dave Jones: Which is used on every router. So every Wi-Fi router.

Chris Gammell: Right. And every IoT device that's Wi-Fi pretty much, right?

Dave Jones: How long has this been around for? Surely this has been in the community for a long time.

Chris Gammell: This has been in the NSA playbook for a while, I'm sure. Yes.

Dave Jones: The NSA are probably going, oh, damn, now it's out of the bag.

Chris Gammell: Lost another one. Yep. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Lost another exploit. Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: That was the easy one, folks. There's others out there. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't know if they have. I'm sure we're going to hear more and more about this. But I saw someone quoted about it. I think it was on the Hackaday. I was on Ben Shoff's article on Hackaday. It was someone quoted like, we're going to be seeing this thing for 20 years. Right? Because you think about like, this is kind of the reality of like everything we do these days. It's like, when's the last time you updated the firmware on, I mean, well, you weren't even able to before, but did you ever update the firmware on your thermostat? It's like, okay, now your Wi-Fi, your thermostat has Wi-Fi. But like. I know. Yeah. It's just. And then like, yeah, people sequester devices intentionally. And then if they get lazy about it, they forget about it. Right? So it's like, ooh, okay.

Dave Jones: Well, somebody, it was the internet of shit who posted this. Right. Of course.

Chris Gammell: Our favorite Twitter account.

Dave Jones: The source of all good tweets. That's right. You know, they tweeted that, or retweeted or something, that Tesla, the Tesla Powerwall needs a permanent internet connection, essentially. Apparently there are workarounds, people said, but it basically needs a permanent internet connection so that it can auto-update. It's firmware. And it's like, holy shit.

Chris Gammell: I don't understand why Tesla thought requiring internet on a giant effing battery glued to your wall was a good idea. Yeah.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man.

Dave Jones: It's because that's their model for everything.

Chris Gammell: I do wonder about this too. Like, so how much of this is like, well, we need it to be connected from a business standpoint, or how much of it is we're designing this for the software engineers we have in-house? Like, again, apologies to all software engineers that are listening. But like, there are so many more people. So I had this argument with my coworker. He's like, he loves JavaScript. And I'm like, and so we were talking about the Tesla today. And I'm just like, look, I know the Tesla team. They're very nice people. But like, that was not a great product. I don't think. And maybe I'm putting a line in the sand here. I thought that's really ridiculous to have a JavaScript-based hardware thing. I still think that. But is it like, we're designing these things so that it's always updatable? I mean, Jen and Alvaro talked about that too, of like, well, the product's never finished. You have to keep updating it. Is it that? Or is it something else?

Dave Jones: This is the thing. Like, why can't you just, like, stick an SD card slot on the side? If you want, okay, I can understand being able to upgrade the firmware. Right?

Chris Gammell: We have a name for this show. The SD card slot show. Right?

Dave Jones: I'm freaking serious.

Chris Gammell: How about hack my SD card slot, bitches?

Dave Jones: This is ridiculous. They're requiring always on internet connection. Like, it's not like, oh, the firmware's suddenly out of date. Therefore, somebody's power's going to turn off. Right? It's bullshit. It's like, okay, here's some, like, we found a few bugs or whatnot, or we're adding a new feature, or we're doing whatever. Okay? You can, as the owner, you can choose whether or not you want to upgrade. And here's the file on our website, you know? You can email them and say, hey, we've got a new firmware. It's up to you if you want to, you know, then you can download it. You can install it.

Chris Gammell: And they've done that for years too. I mean, well, I guess you could even say this about computers. Like, Windows used to allow you to, like, accept stuff, and now you can't. You can't opt out of, like, security updates these days. So, it's the same thing. And some of them, I get it, right? Some of them are, like, secure, like, true security. Like, it's like herd immunity type things, right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: They have dug themselves into a hole where there's no escape in this.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right? But that's of their own choosing. Yeah. That's of their own product design choosing. They have chosen. Once you choose to have that internet connection, this is the rabbit hole you find yourself in.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right? Right? It's like, it's because, like, you know, the company's just so used to this. They're seeing all the benefits they get out of having the Tesla car, you know, hooked up, you know, having internet downloading and all that sort of jazz, right? Right. And they go, well, let's extend this to the Tesla power wall without giving any thought to whether and to what type of product it actually is and its intended function.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: It's just, oh, it's just dumb.

Chris Gammell: So I was at a charity event last night and it was for, I was just checking it out with a friend. I'm not a part of this, but I think it's actually a good idea. It's in Chicago and it's for people who are coming from underserved communities. This sounds like a non sequitur. I'm getting there. Don't worry. Coming from underserved communities who basically do apprenticeships and then can get jobs and, like, well, good paying jobs, stuff like that. So, of course, I love it, right? I love apprenticeship ideas. But one of the things, one of the apprenticeships they offer is cybersecurity. And I was like, hell yes. Talk about an industry that is going to do better and better over the years. It's going to be great, right? I mean, like, look at this stuff. We're literally, like, we're just a band. Like, what was it? Internet of Shit has another one. Hey, so I thought about this nightmare some more and it's kind of scary the sheer amount of abandoned IoT stuff that could leak forever. It's like, yeah, that's true. Like, there's going to be someone's job just patching for stuff that's the stuff that never got patched, right? It's like...

Dave Jones: It's an... Here you go. The Internet of Things is an endless Y2K.

Chris Gammell: Endless Y2K?

Dave Jones: It's an endless... There's a quote, right? Endless Y2K. It's an endless... I'm going to tweet this. Oh, okay. The Internet of Things is the endless Y2K problem.

Chris Gammell: This is how Dave, you know, stakes a claim. He's going to do it now. He's going to do it right now.

Dave Jones: I'm going to do it now. I'm going to do it now. Well, at least I'm going to start the tweet. Yeah, okay. And then I'll polish it later. Yeah, so he doesn't forget. Okay. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Is the... Y2K... Is the endless Y2K.

Chris Gammell: Enthralling radio, folks. Whatever. Right. How do we patch Dave tweeting things? Oh, man. Yeah, well...

Dave Jones: Well, we could if we had a video version. But that's essentially what it is, right? It's the Y2K, which was...

Chris Gammell: I guess batteries running out will help with, you know, things not spewing bad traffic.

Dave Jones: For those who are too young, for those millennials out there who forget...

Chris Gammell: People who were born in 2000 who are now... I know. ...17 going on 18, yeah.

Dave Jones: They're born after... Jesus. But it was for those who were working in the industry at the time, don't realize how big this was. I was tasked... There's a documentary about it, though. Is there? Yeah, it's called Office Space. Oh, right. And within our company at the time, I was tasked with... I was the C2K... I was the Y2K guy. Right? I was the one who had to go around and ensure that all of our products, every single nitpicky freaking thing... When Dave's your IT guy. ...was Y2K compliant.

Chris Gammell: There's my endless Y2K. When Dave is your IT guy.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, it's not... You know, but it involved every bit of electronics. Even if the product didn't have a real-time clock in it, I had to still certify that product was Y2K compliant. I had to document...

Chris Gammell: That was a good way to burn some time. You're like, oh, yeah, got to go certify those water fountains. I'm serious.

Dave Jones: I had to write a document for like an amplifier I designed and to certify that it's, you know... An amplifier? ...Y2K compliant. Yeah, like I'm using that, yeah, like a charge amplifier.

Chris Gammell: Without any microcontroller on board. Exactly. Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: But they still... That was the blanket company rule.

Chris Gammell: Every bit of electronics... No COBOL code to be seen, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Every bit of electronics had to be certified year 2000 compliant.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, to their credit, it didn't... Nothing happened. Nothing happened, right? No. Oh, my God. That was half my life ago, Dave. Exactly. Oh, my God. Jesus. Oh, man. I didn't even think about that. That's depressing. Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: More than half your life. You're not that old yet. I'm 34. I was...

Dave Jones: It's 18 years ago, so yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I was 17 when... I just remember being... I was 17 when that happened, so...

Dave Jones: Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: 16, maybe. I don't know. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. That was a long time ago. Yep. I do remember feeling... I do remember the fear, I have to say. Right. I do remember the fear.

Dave Jones: Mm-hmm. Countless doomsday books. Yes. Anyway, speaking of this sort of, you know, internet of things always connected, like, you know, how, you know, like a simple product like a battery, you know, how far do you go? Well, I've got an example of the product we're working on at the moment. We're back on the micro supply.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Cool. Right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, like, you know, we've been arguing, you know, endlessly, like, you know, what should it have? Sure. Right? Should it have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth-y connection just because it's so cheap to add?

Chris Gammell: What if you had Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but you had a tiny explosive device in there that you could just trigger, you know, I guess that's a battery.

Dave Jones: We could short it out. Right. We'll put a huge MOSFET, a grunty MOSFET straight across the battery, and then we can turn it on and under software control.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say maybe you could just have the battery, like, burn out a trace somewhere or something. You know what I mean? Like, are there things like that where you, like, burn out, like, a resistor and then, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I've done that. You know, you used to talk about the scuttling, right? Wasn't that the scuttling device? Yes.

Dave Jones: Yeah. The scuttling of the product. Yes. You used to burn a resistor, pass current through a resistor, which burnt the flotation bag. Oh, the flotation bag.

Chris Gammell: Got it.

Dave Jones: The flotation bag, which kept our solar boys afloat. So we'd scuttle them to the bottom of the ocean.

Chris Gammell: Got it. Okay. So it was, so we need some kind of, like, modern.

Dave Jones: So the Russian subs couldn't come around and pick them up.

Chris Gammell: Right. We need some kind of modern IoT scuttling device. That's what we need. Right. Or, like, a circuit that would do that. Right. So it, like, burns the, I don't know. It burns the Wi-Fi antenna or something else.

Dave Jones: So you nuke it after a certain, like, if this product is going to not be used anymore and it's going to be a vulnerability, let's nuke it.

Chris Gammell: Like, could we do something where it, like, self, it has a circuit in there that just injects noise into the Wi-Fi antenna or something?

Dave Jones: Dude, it is the Snake Plissken triple six option. What? Okay. Go ahead. You haven't seen Snake Plissken. You haven't seen Escape from L.A.

Chris Gammell: Oh, my God. I've seen the cover and I've never worked up the gumption to watch it. It's a Kurt Russell movie, right? Yeah, yeah. It's a Kurt Russell.

Dave Jones: This is the follow-up. It's the doomsday device and the code is triple six. And it basically puts the entire planet back to the Stone Age.

Chris Gammell: You know, I think this was on at a bar where I was eating dinner once and it just reaffirmed that I don't want to watch it. It looked really bad. I mean, Kurt Russell movies usually are, but...

Dave Jones: Oh, come on. The original Escape from New York is a classic.

Chris Gammell: Okay, right.

Dave Jones: Escape from L.A. is fun.

Chris Gammell: Is it? Okay. Anyway, yeah. So that's what... So we have a name, right? We can co-opt that name.

Dave Jones: The triple six option.

Chris Gammell: I think the real thing, though, is, like, no, it needs to actually have, like, a fusing element, right? So, like, it cuts the serial line to the Wi-Fi module or something like that, right? I don't know.

Dave Jones: That reminds me of the triple five contest entry that I was going to enter into your triple five contest. Oh, talk about throwback.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, 2011.

Dave Jones: Yeah, talking about throwback. I actually built this up. I can't... I've lost the circuit now, but I actually built this up and tried it. Oh, we made you a judge.

Chris Gammell: That's probably why you didn't do it.

Dave Jones: Right, probably. Yeah. Yeah, but I was going to end it just for, you know, kicks. Like, I was going to rule myself out of the, you know, the thing or whatever. Sure, sure. Yeah. But, yeah, that was to get... I actually developed a triple five circuit that would kill itself.

Chris Gammell: Oh, nice.

Dave Jones: Yeah. There you go. Just throw that in. Like, it was literally a single shot.

Chris Gammell: So, how did it kill itself? That's the secret. That's the secret. Right, well, yeah. I mean, you're going to put it in the new product now. I'll redo the circuit. Yeah, right, right, right. I mean, that is an interesting idea. Like, should these devices... Okay, so maybe that's a real question these days is should connected devices have a real timeline on them? I don't know. I don't know. Like, maybe you could go in and remove the jumper, but if you don't know about it, right, it just kills itself. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Well, you just turn off the power at that point, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Anyway. Interesting. Let us know in the comments. We don't really hear much in the comments anymore. That's okay. I don't know. Yeah. But I would be interested to know, like, this is... You know, we got a lot of... I saw some pushback when there was the things about, like, killing devices that were on networks that were, like, spewing code, right? So there was that... There was someone who went out and when there was... I forget which vulnerability it was, but basically it was one of the IP cameras that they... The default thing got hacked and a botnet was loaded onto it. And then someone went out and basically found these cameras and figured out a way for them to basically kill themselves, right? And people said, oh, you shouldn't do that. That's their property, right? But at a certain time... Like, this is, like, kind of like a tragedy of the commons kind of thing, right? It's like there's a finite amount of bandwidth on the internet. And if these devices that are zombied out there, it's like, the greater good. Right. The greater good. What, you don't get my movie reference now? Come on, Dave. No? Hot Fuzz?

Dave Jones: No. No? No. No, I haven't seen Hot Fuzz. Oh, man. Oh, yeah. Actually, I have, but I don't remember. Oh, God. I don't. That's an amazing one. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, yeah. I'd love to hear from people about this. Back to batteries, though, because you were talking about batteries.

Dave Jones: Yes. Well, no. Back to... Back to... I hadn't finished.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. I hadn't finished talking about product design. Right, right, right. That's what I meant. That's what I meant by batteries.

Dave Jones: Oh, right, yes. Back to the real product design. The microcarat. Like, should it have, you know, like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth-y connectivity was one thing. True. And the other was like, well, you know, it's a freaking power supply. So what sort of user interface should it have?

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh, yeah.

Dave Jones: And we're debating, like, should it have a dot matrix screen or should it have like a proper custom... Vacuum tube. ...Leds. Yeah. These were all considered. Okay. And it's like, and now we're erring towards like a custom LCD.

Chris Gammell: Oh, interesting. Yeah, because I guess the default...

Dave Jones: Like a custom seven-segment LCD.

Chris Gammell: Right, the default these days is headless, right? It's headless and then Bluetooth to a phone, right?

Dave Jones: Well, no, no, no. The default these days would be a dot matrix OLED.

Chris Gammell: No, I mean, sorry. I meant like default for product. You're right. Not for test equipment, but just...

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, no. We're not talking about products. We're talking about test gear.

Chris Gammell: You said product design. I'm just saying. If you're going to say it, you have to say test gear design then. It's like a separate... Test gear design. It's like a subset, you know? Anyways, yeah, you're right. You're right. The... Oh, no.

Dave Jones: It wouldn't be headless. You would put in a dot matrix screen. Okay. In any modern product.

Chris Gammell: Did you consider headless or no?

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it's dumb.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, no. It's dumb. It's a power supply. You want a freaking voltage and current readout on it.

Chris Gammell: I mean, if you have a big red button, then you're fine.

Dave Jones: It's totally retarded.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Go ahead. Fine. Yeah. You're the test equipment guy. I just worked at a test equipment company. You know, what do I know? With vacuum tubes. Really?

Dave Jones: You would design a headless power supply?

Chris Gammell: I don't know, actually. It depends on the application. I'm just saying that because we were talking about general product stuff. So, keep going. Sorry.

Dave Jones: All right. Anyway, yes, we, you know, like, we think we're going back old school when we're going to do a custom LCD. Yes, it doesn't have the flexibility of a dot matrix LCD, but it has improved contrast, potentially lower cost, because, you know, once you get rid of the tool in charge, you know, once that one-off tool in charge, then they, you know, they're very cheap.

Chris Gammell: Sure.

Dave Jones: And it's got just what you want. You know, nothing more. Right.

Chris Gammell: Literally, you probably have to do a custom, right? I mean, not have to, but...

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, no, no. It's worth it to do a custom, yeah. Yeah, yeah, no. You can't really use an off-the-shelf one. It doesn't work.

Chris Gammell: So, you actually spec out, like, the different character displays, stuff like that, right?

Dave Jones: They're different digits. David, right in front of me now, has got an editing screen open, and he's changing the fonts on this custom LCD.

Chris Gammell: When engineers start doing fonts, it usually does not end up looking too good, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, it's...

Chris Gammell: Anyway, where... Please pass along. And I have faith in him that he's a young and capable engineer, I'm sure, but...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: But if it looks ugly, he's got an out. He's like, what, I'm an engineer?

Dave Jones: Well, wait, wait, we're going to put it on the forum for opinion very short.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh, uh-huh, good. So, yeah. Cool. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a big cost adder. All those things are. Like, I mean, I guess even talking to Mike...

Dave Jones: What is the big cost adder?

Chris Gammell: Of just displays in general, right? I mean, like... Oh, right, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, knobs are expensive.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right, exactly. Right, knobs. Yep. Bloody hell.

Dave Jones: Yep. You know, chunk of plastic, you know, with a nice rubber coating on it's bloody expensive.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: That plastic ain't going to injection well itself, man. Yes. Right, and especially if you want to differentiate too, right? And like having that look and feel. And especially in your case, because you're doing... I mean, you're talking pretty low volume, right? I mean, hopefully high volume, but low volume to start with.

Dave Jones: But no, we're talking thousands, you know. Right. We're not talking 100,000.

Chris Gammell: And if it's in the realm of the microcurrent too, like you have kind of a built-in expectation of costs and stuff like that based on your products. Yep. So. Yep. Yes. Dave's moving up the value chain right now with the 121 GW meter.

Speaker ?: So.

Chris Gammell: Yes, I am. He'll get his customers primed for paying more money. Then he hits them with the power supply. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Anyway, so that'll be on the forum shortly for comment. And endless debate, I'm sure. Cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's great.

Dave Jones: Because, you know, because some people go, oh, but the dot matrix screen, they're so cheap anyway, and it gives you all the flexibility, then you can hack it, and then you can have graphs, and you can have... Yeah. The hack it thing.

Chris Gammell: That's an interesting one. I would say the... If you want to say hack it, right, put an extension header on it, expansion header rather, because if people aren't willing to do that, then they're not willing to do anything. And I...

Dave Jones: Most people love the idea of hackability. 99.9999% of them will do jackal.

Chris Gammell: Right. Because there's other things to do, right? Or they want to build their own thing or whatever.

Dave Jones: Or they just want a product that freaking works. Right. Exactly. You know, they don't want to hack it.

Chris Gammell: Right. I agree with that. I think the expansion header is good, though. Like, especially if there's room, right?

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: But... Whatever. You know.

Dave Jones: Well, I can't talk about the form factor and other features at this point.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yes. That's right. Secret squirrel.

Dave Jones: Secret squirrel.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's good. We're getting bits and pieces here, folks.

Dave Jones: But we are going to hang our balls on the chopping block and put up the LCD for comment. Yeah. That's okay. So, you know. Are you willing to state...

Speaker ?: No.

Dave Jones: David's balls are on the chopping block. Okay. So, yeah. Yeah. Not mine. So, yeah. He just wanted to make that clear. Got it.

Chris Gammell: Got it. Right. You hired him, man. You know, management is all about taking...

Dave Jones: Taking responsibility. That's right. Yeah. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Any thoughts about custom plastics or no?

Dave Jones: Once again, that would... Yes, it has been considered.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Interesting. But no, I can tell you now without giving much away, we have found a suitable off-the-shelf case. Okay.

Chris Gammell: So, we'll probably be using that. Because that's a big thing, right? I mean, that's like really getting out there, I think, in product design.

Dave Jones: You know, because David's like a 3D modeling guy, right? Sure, sure. So, he gets all moist about being able to design a case. Right.

Chris Gammell: But modeling is way different than... It's like the manufacturability piece. And really just the overhead. You've done that before, right? I just... You've done that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, I've done that. And I just like... Because I'm holding it in... I've got it in my hand right now. Like I bought it, right? I've got the case. Here it is. And it's anodized. And it's all done. And it cost me, you know, 15 bucks one off. Right. Right. Yep. And here it is. Done. So, why not design around that?

Chris Gammell: That is... I think that's the problem is that most people don't go to that step first, right? They don't search hard enough. And they say, oh, we have to do custom. And it's like, man, that... Especially if you're just making a box at the end, right? It's like... Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, the other problem with custom is that there's too much flexibility. I love when all the design constraints are given to me. Here's the case. So, we have to design it around this. Yep. We have to choose the LCD that fits the buttons that fit the knobs that fit the terminals that fit everything else, right? The heat sinks. Like, you know...

Chris Gammell: Right. Especially with the heat stuff, too. Because you have to calculate, you know, not only how much power is burning, but then also how much, you know, the case can get out and all that stuff. And when you start like being like, oh, well, we could just put in extra vent slots here and we could put in fins there and blah, blah, blah. It's like, whoa, yeah, that could go forever, right? It's like...

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's an iterative...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, artificial intelligence can design my heat sink. And it's like, oh, well, good luck with manufacturing that. So, yeah. No, I... Anyway. I'm on board there. I think that's good.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So, cool, man.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, anyway, we did consider it. You know, we're having discussions over whether or not we should go custom. And then we found one. Yeah, right. We found one and we both agreed, oh, yeah, that's pretty nice. Let's socially run with that.

Chris Gammell: Well, and I think early days too, you know, that's... Yeah, you can always do a custom later.

Dave Jones: And then we might customize it slightly by taking the manufacturer's existing drawings, sorry, manufacturer, and we'll, you know, modify it and maybe, you know, make a few changes. But it gives us something to work around. Right.

Chris Gammell: But that's... You know? Honestly, unless you need something really custom. I mean, that's how a lot of like white labeling works anyway. It's where you start with a prototype. Who's talking... I think Akiba was talking about that, where you kind of show up to a... A showroom. And then you, you know, you pick out a thing and then you say, can you do this and that? And they say, oh, yeah, we can do this. We can't do that.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah, yeah. That's right.

Chris Gammell: So that's... So... You're doing it right, man. Well, you're doing it. Yep. That's what really matters, right?

Dave Jones: That's the more important thing. Right, right. It doesn't matter whether you're doing it right or not.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: I wanted to bring up one thing because I... Yeah, this is two weeks ago. So we didn't get a chance to talk about it. I'm just so incredibly happy about this. I don't know how real it is. I haven't tried it. But Google built the Babelfish, man. Did you read about that? No. Yeah. So this was like part of like their... Part of their Pixel 2 release. I know this is totally switching gears, but we're kind of running the time. The phone thing. Yeah. Right. But it's... So the idea is, you know, it's using Google Translate, so you do need to be connected. But the idea is you're wearing these earbuds that are tied to your phone and then it translates what you're hearing directly in your ear. And like... Right.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: As I posted...

Dave Jones: With a slight delay, which could be...

Chris Gammell: Sure. I don't know. That's tough. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. But I did wonder if it will understand what you're trying to say, but at the same time, I just think this is like... There's so much shitty stuff happening in 2017. Like this just really made... Like it made my day. It was a really... I think this might have been the day of Las Vegas stuff. And like... Right. This really made my day. So I don't know. Sometimes it hits you. You know, we are living in the future, folks. It's kind of cool. You're not excited about this? Is nobody excited?

Dave Jones: Come on! Oh, yeah. No, it's fine. Oh, yeah. It's great.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Come on, man. Got the Babelfish. We've got the Hitchhiker's Guide, effectively.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All right. Well...

Dave Jones: It's cool. No. I'll just go back over here. But like, it's just like... Well, like it's not such an... You're right. Like, I've expected this for 10 years. Like, you know, it's not like... Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's so easy now, right now.

Dave Jones: Like, it's just like, of course.

Chris Gammell: I think if there's an argument against it, it's that it doesn't really change much more than like holding your phone. Like, people already do this in markets in China and stuff.

Dave Jones: You've got apps that do this. And you hold it up to the person. And the person speaks. Right. And I haven't used it, but you can get them. And the person speaks. And then it translates. Right, right. Like, you know, just because it does it in real time. I know. That's like, well, of course.

Chris Gammell: But it's just in your ear that's so cool. That's like Star Trek and Hitchhiker's Guide.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sometimes he's got to nerd out. Yeah. I guess. What else on our list? We need anything else? Oh, WazU.

Dave Jones: I assume U stands for university.

Chris Gammell: It does. Yeah. I'm actually very curious to what he's going to do here.

Dave Jones: I didn't quite get it. Like, I read it. I can't remember the details now. But there wasn't like, there didn't seem to be a defined thing of what they're actually doing.

Chris Gammell: It's going to be like a Udacity for electronics, maybe, whatever. I don't know. Oh, it says, oh, it's a center around computer support specialists, software developers, data science, mobile applications, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah. Yeah. Obviously, these kind of things catch my eye because I'm like, I'm waiting for someone like Waz to be like, and electronics. And I'll be like, yay, sort of. But.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Like, I didn't see anything like what's different. This is like Udemy already exists. Like. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. And maybe it's just his version. I don't know. Maybe it'll. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Maybe it's like a foundational thing or whatever.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Maybe he just wanted to have Waz you. Right. Yeah. Fine. Is the Waz in Oz? Is that. Did that end up happening or no?

Dave Jones: He's not here as far as I know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I thought he was moving there. I thought he was one of the.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Oh, God. That was ages ago. Yeah. Right. That was years ago. Donkeys years ago.

Chris Gammell: Right. No? Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No.

Chris Gammell: Okay. I will say one other thing is the. So, there was. Adafruit has been working on the CircuitPython. And I got to talk to Tony, who's been on the show. Before and Scott. And I'm. Again, I'm. You know, this. This is creeping up on us. Right. So, like. So, like. You know, just the cheapness of. Armed devices. Stuff like that. And, like. I think this is the big thing. I know. I know that I've talked about it since. And I haven't used it all that much. In. You know. In my projects. Because I haven't been doing many projects. But. I don't know. I think that it's worth checking out.

Speaker ?: The.

Chris Gammell: So, CircuitPython is a variant on. MicroPython. Which is what Tony talked about. When he was on the show. So, people should check it out. Just like that. I guess. This kind of. Contradicts my whole thing about JavaScript on hardware. And I do realize that.

Dave Jones: But. Like. Sorry. But for me. This is just like the 50th. 50th different. Development platform. To come along in the last five years.

Chris Gammell: You know.

Speaker ?: Like.

Chris Gammell: Maybe.

Dave Jones: It's just.

Chris Gammell: I think Python is an educational tool. It's pretty strong. Like. Here's. Here's my reasoning.

Dave Jones: I can't help but get. Like. There's just seems to be so many of them. Sure.

Chris Gammell: There's a ton. You're. You're totally right. And I think that. I saw there was a question on the ECE subreddit yesterday. It was about like. Is C still relevant? Of course. That question gets asked what. Every six months. Right. And it's like. Yes. Of course. It's still relevant. And the only thing that's changed is that there's. More and more and more variants of other things. Right. Other languages come and go. It's always interesting to watch that. That trend graph of like. You know. What are the most popular languages and stuff. But yeah. C still runs a lot of the hardware out there. I mean. C. Hell. C runs MicroPython. Right. So.

Dave Jones: Oh. It's got to be running. C's got to. Come on. Let's get serious. C's got to be running. 99% of. In. In. Industrial type. Commercial. MicroController type products out there. It's got to be. If it's not 99%. I'll. I'll be a monkey's uncle.

Chris Gammell: You'll eat your hat. Do you wear hats? I'll eat my hat. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'll eat my tinfoil hat. Right.

Chris Gammell: There you go. Yeah. I'm. I'm sure that it's. Yeah. It's very prevalent out there. I think the thing is. It's just. It's. What's changing is just the stacks on top of that. Right. How much. How fast are those things. How much power is behind them. And then. You know. Can something like. Like a. Like a language like this. Then enable people to. Do more on top of it. Right. Or make it easier for newcomers. Those things should be encouraged. Right. Those. Again. Even the Tesla. Like I was talking about. Like Tesla was. You know. An interpreter. That was running on a thing. That eventually. You know. You got down into the. Into the. The depths of it. You know. Eventually there was. Sea drivers. You know. On that. What was a media tech processor. Something like that. So yeah. I mean like. So it's just about how. How. How many stacks are. How close you are to the hardware. Like you're saying. I mean. A lot of it. Yeah. You got C in there. You got. Assembly. You got machine code. All that stuff's in there. So. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Okay. Fine.

Chris Gammell: I will. I will link the. The C language. Discussion. I did not join in.

Dave Jones: And I'll just. Yored and. Yeah. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Anyways. This. Well. I like Tony. I like Scott. They're both great. So yeah. It was a. Good. Good conversation at open hardware. So.

Dave Jones: All right. Cool.

Chris Gammell: Cool.

Dave Jones: We've got to be done. Surely.

Chris Gammell: Yes. I think so.

Dave Jones: We're way over. If not.

Chris Gammell: People can always read it to us on our subreddit. And. And thank you to the ongoing support of our Patreons.

Dave Jones: Yes. Thank you very much. They're great.

Chris Gammell: We'll be sending out a microphone I'm sure to some guests in the future.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Cool man. Well good luck on your product development. Tell David too. I said hello.

Dave Jones: Thank you very much. Chris says hello.

Chris Gammell: Oh. I guess. Hello. There he is in the back. Frigging Taurus. He's just. He's just along for the ride. All right. Cool. Talk to you next week. Catch you next time.

Chris Gammell: Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you.