#366 – Loopback

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released November 5th, 2017. Episode 366. Loop Back. Welcome to The Amp Hour. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. And this week, I am solo. Don't worry, I'm not going to impose my terrible monologue onto you. But I am going to give you a little bit of context on what we've got going on here. Me and Dave couldn't record this week. He's busy working on his Kickstarter video and getting that meter all finished up with David 2. And so I thought, well, we've done 365 shows now. So that's one day per, if you did one per day for a year, you could listen to all of The Amp Hour. And that seems like some kind of weird numerology type thing. It's not, you know, it's not anything more than 350 or 150 or whatever. But interesting note, someone mentioned that. So we thought that was kind of fun. And so I thought I would actually loop us back to episode one. Not to feel embarrassed, because I definitely do. But because, I don't know, it's been, we've come a long way. It's been seven plus years now. And so we've got new listeners since then. We've had a lot of stuff happen in our lives since then. I think both of Dave's kids have been born in that time. Dave's now self-employed as a YouTuber. I've changed jobs like three times, including once for myself. I moved cities. And then me and Dave finally met this year. So, you know, lots of stuff has happened. And hopefully, you know, we'll keep recording for many more years. But it's kind of, it's interesting to go back and kind of look at where we've been once in a while. I mean, obviously, we mentioned it on the show as well. When this was recorded, so this first episode, I think, was released August of 2010. So, yeah, that would be more than seven years ago. So back then, I was working at Keithley. Dave was still working at Altium. And the whole story, the whole origin story, the reason people, well, people ask us about this all the time. I had responded to a post on Reddit. That's how this whole thing started. I had responded to a post on Reddit. And someone asked if there was any audio podcasts. There were not. So I recorded one. And it was terrible. And I will not impose that one upon you. But instead, Dave actually heard it. And then he had always wanted to do a radio show. And so he called me up. And he said, why don't we try this together? And that is what you're about to listen to. You know, it's not great audio. It's not really great anything. But it's the first podcast. You'll notice some things, though, right? So some things are thematically very similar. You know, we've been accused of saying the same thing for the past seven years. And some of it you'll hear is very similar. So you don't have to listen to it, obviously. But I thought it'd be an interesting kind of retrospective after 365 shows. So yeah, seven plus years later. It's kind of crazy when you think about it. Yeah, I hope you enjoy it. If you have any thoughts on, you know, you can always post them on our subreddit, which is another thing that we've done since then. Obviously, we met on Reddit. So it seemed apropos to finally get onto Reddit. Some people may remember the ill-fated Hacker News-style server that we had. That would, you know, it would crash every two days or so. It was never really running. But yeah, so it mentioned, you know, if you want to leave a comment over on our subreddit, that's great. If you want to leave a comment in the comment section of this post, you can do that. If you want to go and look at the old themes, oh, man. Oh, the old website themes. Classic. The first one looked like an electronics bench. And the second one had like the Globe logo. And then we've had this one for a while. And that's about it, I guess. So here it is. Oh, and we had old music too. Sorry, I should mention that. Which was written by me. Written. We had older music. I won't oppose that on you either. So that's it, I suppose. On to the show. This is episode one of the Amp Hour. We'd love to hear what you think about it. And we're looking forward to future episodes.

Dave Jones: Hi, I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And with me is Chris Gammell from Chris Gammell's Analog Life. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris Gammell: Good, Dave. How are you doing?

Dave Jones: Fantastic. We've decided to do an off-the-cuff radio show. I'm not sure why, but here we are doing a live radio show. Well, it's not live, really. It's pre-recorded. But we are recording this as if it's a live show. And I am doing this from Sydney, Australia, here in my study. I'm not in the EEV blog lab. And Chris is in Cleveland, Ohio. Is that right, Chris?

Chris Gammell: That's right. Sitting in my basement. That's actually where I did my first podcast a couple weeks ago.

Dave Jones: That's right. You had some sort of podcast electronics learning type thing. How was that going?

Chris Gammell: It went pretty well. It was a little dry to start with. I ended up starting out real basic. And if you go all the way back to the beginning, it gets a little rough. And also, you've got a good forum with having video because you can explain things. So it's a little tougher with just audio. But I think our off-the-cuff talking about electronics and the real world kind of thing here might suit it a little better. So we'll see how this works out.

Dave Jones: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's an electronics radio show, by the way. Good point. Good point. Actually, yes. And it has no name at this stage. It's the no-name electronics show because we're just not creative enough to come up with a really catchy name. So, yeah, we'll open this up to people out there. If you've got a suggestion for the name of this electronics radio show, then by all means, send it in. Probably on the forum. Yeah, forum's good. So, yeah, we don't have a dedicated website set up. But the idea is we'll give this thing a try, see if people like an electronics radio show. And if they do, well, we'll continue to do it and we'll set up a proper website and we'll do all that. And we'll set up like an iTunes podcast as well.

Chris Gammell: Oh, is that how your readers get most of their info? Through the iTunes or through other stuff?

Dave Jones: Well, I've probably got about 1,500 people who subscribe to the podcast. And probably about 60-odd percent of those do it through iTunes. Wow, that's pretty good. Yeah, they download my video through iTunes. And it's quite large. The file sizes there are like 40 meg or something, 40, 50 meg for a 10, 15-minute show or something like that. So, it's quite large. But, yeah, I guess the idea with audio is that a lot of people just don't have the time to sit there and actually watch a video show. So, I know that my Drive Time rant is fairly popular. There's a lot of people that hate it. But, yeah, bugger them. As usual, there's some people that like it. So, I was thinking maybe that would be better suited to a co-hosted radio show. Instead of listening to me rant on, you can have at least two people rant on. That's right, yeah. So, here we go. We've got Chris who runs Chris Gammell's Analog Life blog website. If you haven't seen it, it's really quite good. And Chris is into analog-y type stuff. And I, of course, do the electronics engineering video blog, which is all pretty just random stuff. There's some analog stuff in there, digital, and there's rants and all sorts of things. But I'm sure most of you listening to that already know that. Let's hope so. Unless this show gets like wildly popular. I don't know about that one.

Chris Gammell: Ah, well, yeah. That's a good question, though. How big do you think the hobbyist market is? I always wonder about that kind of thing. The hobbyist or even the professional market. Who might even put this on during the day or in a car? I don't even know about that.

Dave Jones: Well, there's, of course, the hobbyist market was dying five, six, seven years ago. But now it's this hacker, maker slash market. Yeah, I love it. It's... When you have like 150,000 people turn up to that maker fair in the US or something like that.

Chris Gammell: Don't remind me. You know, I'm actually... I got an event this week. There's actually the one up in Detroit this weekend. And, you know, I'm only a three-hour drive from Detroit, but I can't go. And I'm just so, so sad that I can't make it up there. It just seems like it's going to be such a great event, especially in Detroit. I don't know if you've read anything about that one. It's just... It looks amazing.

Dave Jones: No, I haven't. Is that like a standard maker fair? Does it go around the country? Does it?

Chris Gammell: You know, there's only a couple events. There's some smaller ones out in Providence. And I think there's some other ones out in California, different towns. But this is the first time in Detroit. And it looks like, you know, they're kind of targeting it. They're calling it from Motor City to Maker City. That's what they call it. Ah, neat. Nice. It looks like it's at the Henry Ford Museum. And so they got all the, you know, all the older innovation with automobiles and, you know, the 60s when it was really cranking around Detroit and stuff like that. And earlier, of course. But now the city's kind of dead. I mean, there's no really denying that. And so they're trying to bring the maker mentality to it. And there's a ton of uptake. That's the amazing thing. There's hacker spaces all over the place there. And actually a lot of, you know, with all the Michigan Tech and UMichigan and Michigan State, I believe. Forgive me. I don't really know a lot of colleges up there. But, you know, just such a huge, huge contingent of people that are already doing this kind of thing that it seemed it really fit.

Dave Jones: Excellent. I had no idea. I thought it was just based in, where is it? Silicon Valley. Where do they usually hold it?

Chris Gammell: Where's the big one? San Francisco is the main one.

Dave Jones: San Fran, yeah. Just outside of San Fran somewhere. But, yeah, they get huge crowds. So I don't know how many people are going to turn up to ones in other cities. But it's very popular. So I'm sure they'll get, you know, at least 10,000 people show up or something.

Chris Gammell: I've been telling everyone about it.

Dave Jones: I can't imagine doing anything like that here in Australia. I'd love to, you know, for there to be something like that. But we just don't have the mass of people here. It's, you know, I just can't see it working.

Chris Gammell: Well, the amazing thing is it's not just that it's like you need a mass of people. It's also that it promotes itself where, you know, you have this event and you promote it as like a family thing too because it really is. It's very family-based. And then you get all this exposure for children where, you know, they learn how to solder. They see all these awesome events. And then you have a whole new contingent. Like after this weekend, Detroit is going to have, say there are 10,000 people there and half of them are kids. You're going to have 5,000 kids that want to do engineering now. And I can't think of anything better that, you know, for engineering education or science education. You know, that's just, that's out of this world right there. You're not trying to. Absolutely.

Dave Jones: It's just incredible. Oh, yeah. We're dealing with this Skype thing. We've got a silly issue because we're both using Skype here at both ends. And if we both talk at the same time over each other, the Skype connection actually drops out. It just aborts for a second. And that's really disconcerting here in the headphones. So if you hear us do something retarded like that.

Chris Gammell: Or if you have any suggestions, that's also welcome. If you know any other programs that, you know, Skype's great because it's free. But if you know of any other programs, be sure to let us know.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. But, yeah, these hacker-maker fairs, they're just incredible. I'm not sure how many people actually do, you know, that sort of hacker-maker thing here in Australia. Maybe there's a whole, you know, secret society out there just begging for some maker show to, you know, somebody to put it on. The thought actually crossed my mind of me actually trying to run one or something. Just the other day, actually, I was thinking, geez, you know. But, yeah, I have no idea how to get something like that started. It requires contacts and a lot of money.

Chris Gammell: You know, I never knew it was actually the O'Reilly people that started all this. You know, I knew that Make was run by some larger corporation, but I didn't realize it was O'Reilly Publishing. You know, the guys that do, you know, like Linux in a handshell, all the in a handshell programming books.

Dave Jones: Oh, I didn't know about that at all. I have no idea who O'Reilly Publishing is. So, there you go. I guess it's a geeky thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, if you ever see, you ever seen any of those programming books with, like, the really well-looking, like, animals drawn on the cover? You know, there's, like, different animals for every book.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I think I may have crossed paths with one of those once. But, yeah, okay, so they're the ones who run Make.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think didn't make buyout, oh, it's on the tip of my tongue. They bought out one of the electronics magazines. Oh, I didn't know about that. No, sorry. That was Elektor being bought out by, no, I think Elektor magazine bought out Circuit Seller, I think. Oh. Sorry, that's what I'm thinking of. Yeah. Interesting. So, Circuit Seller hasn't changed as a result, but it ultimately might, because it was actually bought out by them.

Chris Gammell: You know, I was never exposed to Circuit Seller before. I went to ESC in Chicago, and I had never seen, I had heard of Circuit Seller, I'd never read it, though. And I didn't realize it's an embedded magazine. I always thought it was, you know, you hear Circuit Seller, you think, I always think, like, discrete kind of stuff on a board. But I was surprised it's an embedded magazine.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I think maybe that's how it possibly started out. Steve Sessira, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, it's rather convoluted, but he's the one who actually started it. And, yeah, I think possibly, I didn't read it way back in the day, because we didn't get that here in Australia back in the 80s. I think it started late 80s or something like that. And, yeah, but it, I guess, eventually merged into this embedded magazine. And it's really quite a good one. Yeah. And they have all sorts of design contests and things like that. Or they used to. I haven't seen a new design contest for quite some time, but they were famous for their design contests. Oh, really? Yeah, there's a few guys out there who have made full-on careers out of winning these design contests in Circuit Seller.

Chris Gammell: Wow, that's like the eating contest of the circuit world, huh?

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. How many hot dogs can you stuff down in a minute? Yeah, how many contests can you win? And, yeah, they were serious prizes, serious money, you know, $5,000, $10,000.

Chris Gammell: I saw that, actually, the Make Magazine guys, they're doing that too. They've been pairing up with other, I think, magazine people. I'm not sure who it was, like Design News or EE Times, EDM, one of those guys. So, I don't know. It's cool. I like them. I've never had the gumption to enter one, but maybe in the future, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think I saw one of their Make Design contests or something. They're only offering, like, $1,000 or $2,000. It's not a huge first prize. Maybe they're being a bit skint there. I don't know. You do it for the glory. Turnover and revenue. I suspect they're doing pretty darn well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, what are we going to talk about on this blog, Chris? Any idea?

Chris Gammell: Well, you told me not to tell you. I don't know. So, totally off the cuff.

Dave Jones: Well, it's totally off the cuff. We weren't going to tell each other what. We were just going to throw ideas into the hat and then we discuss them because we don't want some scripted, rehearsed blog. You know, that'll probably come across as just being a bit lame. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, actually, one thing I was going to ask you about because you mentioned iTunes before was just kind of – I don't know if you've ever talked about it on your video blog, just your take on Apple. I saw recently that they're, like, either the second biggest now or, like, one of the biggest chip buyers in the world and it's just like – I know people love talking about Apple. I don't really like talking about them from a software perspective but it's just interesting to me about where they've gone and I just want to know your take on it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, from the electronics design industry point of view, Apple is the number one customer that all the chip makers want. Well, it's a double-edged sword. They want to have their products in Apple because they're so popular but they're so demanding, I've heard. They will absolutely demand that you lock up your production lines just for them and the secrecy issues and all the other rigmarole which goes with dealing with Apple and Steve Jobs' personality. You know, it's – yeah. Yeah, a lot of the manufacturers, there's actually a shortage at the moment of some capacitors or some other issue and that's being blamed a lot on not necessarily Apple but these major customers who absolutely demand, you know, they'll have – they'll actually bring out a new product and then they'll demand that you give them all of your stock, you know, everything that comes off the production line. So, all the other customers just get, you know, booted down the line. So, I think I posted that on the forum somewhere or I think I tweeted that there's some shortage in capacitors again or something just like back in the 90s there was the famous tantalum capacitor shortage. I think it was the 90s. But, yeah, that can – those sort of things can happen, you know. One customer just soaking up, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Soaking up the whole lot. Well, that's crazy. I think it's a couple of things too. I don't think it's just the one customer thing. I think it's also the fact that there was a recession and it was like, what, September of 2009, something like that? Yeah. Whenever that – or no, it was 2008, I guess. And, you know, everybody started to slow down. They said, all right, we're not going to make any more products but sell everything in the backlog. So, they sold everything. They're not making anything new. And then when the economy picked back up, they all said, hey, we need new products. We need more of the old products even. And they said, sorry, we can't do anything. First off, we fired all the workers. Second off, we don't have any back stock. And third off, we can't start a fab back up that quick. We just shut down an entire fab. So, there's like these really macro things that, you know, affect a lot of people. Absolutely. And it's crazy how it really affected everyone. And it's still resonating back and forth. It's almost like a control – it's like a control loop really, you know. Like you cut out one thing and the whole thing starts to oscillate. And that's what's happening now. We'll probably have an oversupply in the near future and then back again. But like I said, I don't know how much we want to talk about industry and supply stuff. That gets a little boring, but it affects people.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it does. I've got a few industry news items here. And so, you want to get into some news items?

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Sure. Why not, man?

Dave Jones: All right. Well, let's hit it. I just get news emailed to me every day. And Freescale, who manufacture microcontrollers, among other things, they're $7.6 billion in debt. But that's not unusual in the industry. You'll find that most of the semiconductor makers are – even though the semiconductor industry is actually on a mini boom at the moment, most of them can't even keep up with sales and things like that. There's all these semiconductor companies in massive debt. And they only – Freescale only made a loss of $538 million this second quarter. Yay! Yay! A round of applause for Freescale. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's tough, man. Like, those things are getting so big. Like, the fabs and everything. I mean, one piece of equipment might cost you $50 million. And it's just to the point where – you know, like – actually, you mentioned Jerry Ellsworth before. Ellsworth, yeah. Yeah, and she made her own chips, right? I mean, she's made MOSFETs in her garage or wherever she made them.

Dave Jones: In her garage, yeah.

Chris Gammell: But it's just to the point where you can't make anything without tons of money. And so, it's reassuring to see people trying it. I mean, it really is. Especially for transistors and stuff that's so important. But, man. Just some of that – like $50 million for a single piece of equipment? That's outrageous. And then you've got to put hundreds of them in there and you start running up the bill pretty fast.

Dave Jones: Yeah, and that's why these companies are all in debt because they've, you know, they've lashed out on these fab plants before the financial crisis hit. And, you know, and they're just – or they're and or poorly managed or, you know, something like that. And, yeah, they're just in massive debt. So, I expect to maybe see some more consolidation in the market, more companies merging if that's possible. You know, there's just been so many mergers over the last five years or something like that. It's just crazy. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And they start getting so big too that it's just – it's almost untenable to like try and talk to these guys. Because then you have the apples talking to them and you're like, hey, can I get some parts? They're like, ah, sorry. They're all going to Apple.

Dave Jones: Yeah, bugger off. Thank you very much. Yeah, see you later. It's nuts. And there's companies that are still trying to go public as well, you know. There's a couple of semiconductor makers out there and they're trying to get shareholder, you know, investment return by going public. Well, good luck with that. It's just crazy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And other interesting news, I was reading the – Microchip, Microchip's the company. I was reading their financial statement for last year. I don't want to go into industry financials, but they actually itemized the number of development tools sold, which is really quite fascinating. Yeah. And it was 45,000 tools for the last quarter. So, there you go. It gives you an insight into how many development tools a company like that actually ship.

Chris Gammell: So, that's good. Then you can just tell everyone out there, you know, you've got a one in 45,000 chance of getting a kit. There you go. And hopefully – Exactly. Hopefully, you're part of the free slice. You know, hopefully, you're getting a free kit for some reason or another.

Dave Jones: Well, now, that raises the cynical part of me thinks that this new TI Launchpad development. Ah, yes. You've heard of that before. Yes, the $4.30. FedExed to your door. Development kit. If you haven't heard about that, TI are trying to corner the entry-level microcontroller market by offering a complete development tool, including, you know, free C compiler and third-party C compiler and everything else shipped to your door for $4.30.

Chris Gammell: It's a good deal. It's ridiculous. It is, but it's like, what are you going to do with it then, you know? Like, I've read about it and, you know, I've read about it comparing it to Arduino and compare it even to PIC and everything else. And it's, you know, it's kind of a hobbled – I mean, I think it was on your forum too. You know, like, it's kind of a hobbled processor and it's not compatible with Arduino. You know, and there's a lot of complaints about it, but still, it's like $4.00. You're going to get a lot of people just saying, well, I'll take it.

Dave Jones: Well, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I know for a fact that they manufactured at least 10,000 of them in the first run. Wow. So, you know, I'm sure they will do more than 45,000 of those to match microchip. Now, as I was saying, the cynical person in me might think that they did this just as a stunt so that they could put that sort of sales figures for development tools into their financial returns. Yeah. But that's just being a bit – no, surely not. They wouldn't do that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no, no. Who wouldn't – no one would ever lie on a balance sheet. Never, ever, ever.

Dave Jones: No, no, it's all about supporting the hobbyist and getting your chips out there. That's right. Yeah. It is a brilliant marketing ploy. I mean, they're practically giving it away. And I – even to Australia, I ordered three of them and I just got them just last week. And they FedExed three of them to my door for $12. You know, it's just unbelievable. That's pretty good.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's kind of the – have you ever heard of that – the guy that wrote The Long Tail, Chris Anderson, have you ever heard of that book? It's called Free. I believe it's called Free. No, I haven't. You know, I keep going back to it and it is a book basically about the free economy it's called, you know, like the economy, free economy. And how that's the new model because of the internet, people expect to be free – things to be free. They say, give me things first. They're used to the Googles of the world that have been giving them these unbelievable apps for nothing. They're used to the – well, not iPhones, but like the – you know, a lot of the app markets getting certain things for free or hardware even getting things for free. And how that's an actual like recognized business model now. Give it to them first and then hopefully they'll come back and they'll like what you have and they'll develop with it and all that other stuff. And it's – I haven't read the book yet but it's on my list of things to get in there. And it's just an amazing model because how do you go pitch that if you're trying to sell this as a business? What we're going to do is give everything away first.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Well, yeah, there's actually nothing really new in that concept. In the electronics industry, you know, companies have been giving away data books back in the old day. You know, they would – some of these data books will cost like, you know, $50 or $100 to print or something. They're so massive. They were like, you know, 1,500 pages and they would give those away for free. And I think some companies still do, you know. They give away data sheets and they're – you know, so I guess the concept's not new. But, yeah, with the new apples of the world – sorry, the other companies, Google and ones like that. They're just giving everything away and it's just – yeah, it's, you know, the old carrot and stick. Kind of, you know, that, well, you can catch the carrot but, you know, it's a very small carrot and I hope you're going to come in and reel you in and buy some more of those carrots.

Chris Gammell: So have you tried out your board yet?

Dave Jones: No, I haven't. I haven't fired it up yet. I was going to do an unboxing on the EAV blog because I know people hate unboxings and I hate them myself. So I was going to do one just to – I was going to do a rather unusual unboxing of it. So there you go.

Chris Gammell: So you can have like one of those – like a peanut can where the snake pops out and –

Dave Jones: The snake pops out.

Chris Gammell: Oh, and it's empty. $4 and it's empty. Sorry.

Dave Jones: 30 cents and all you get is a cardboard box. Oh, goodness. Other news, I got a new computer at work. Oh, yeah. And Windows – yeah, my first time using Windows 7. But the amazing thing was it's a brand new Dell. It's like a Dell Precision 3500 or something. Real whiz bang.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Super fast Zenon processor machine or something. I don't know. Yeah. I'm just not Linux penguin geeky enough to keep up with that sort of thing these days. But the amazing thing was is that it came with not only a serial port, believe it or not, but a parallel port.

Chris Gammell: This is a desktop or a –

Dave Jones: This is a desktop. This is a desktop. I was absolutely shocked. I didn't know that – I thought they dropped at least a parallel port many years ago. I thought it was – You know, you virtually couldn't buy a new main board that had a parallel port on it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's – Well, I mean, you're not using it for printing or anything, though.

Dave Jones: No, no, exactly. The old parallel port projects – Because I used to be really big into parallel port projects and things like that. But I haven't used one for years. But the serial port on a machine is still very handy. Yeah. Oh, definitely. There's a lot of – There's a lot of development tools out there and things that will only work with serial ports.

Chris Gammell: How about hyperterminal? How long has that been around? I mean, that must have been with Windows 3.1. And that's still the output, the standard output for a lot of micro boards, you know?

Dave Jones: Absolutely. Absolutely. Everyone's still using the, you know, the ANSI 9600, you know, 8N1 sort of interface into hyperterminal.

Chris Gammell: That stuff sticks around, you know? And, like, you love talking about test equipment. I worked in test – I work in test equipment. Talking about, like, GPIB. I mean, how is that still around? I don't –

Dave Jones: Oh, I know. It's just incredible that you can still buy a new gear, you know, for the likes of Agilent. It's still got GPIB on it. It's just unbelievable. So, yeah. Does anyone still use GPIB? I guess they do, you know?

Chris Gammell: Industry, yeah, but –

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I – well, in my last job, we were still using GPIB in Windows 3.1, and that was only three years ago, you know? Yeah. Yeah, it sticks around. Well, that's the thing. Well, the thing with Windows 3.1 is that it boots on a modern machine. It boots practically instantly. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Within, you know, a second. So, if you've got a bit of – you know, we had gear which we'd roll out on trolleys on industrial computers out into the production line, and these things had to boot – well, it would be an advantage to boot real quick. Yeah. And Windows 3.1 still did it, and the good thing was is it didn't have big swap files and things, so you could just switch the machine off without shutting it down, you know, going through that silly Windows shutdown process. So, you could just switch the machine off. And you didn't corrupt your hard drive or your files, and, you know, it just suited the task really perfectly. So, I'm sure there's still other people out there using Windows 3.1.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I've written about that kind of thing before, too. You don't really always think about it, but, you know, even the MSP430s of today, you know, that kind of thing goes into like a thermostat or something like that. But that's going to be around – that might be around in 15 years, and how do you really design for that kind of thing? I actually – I had an article up on here. Bob Peace, you know, Bob Peace, one of the analog gurus formerly from National. Absolutely. And he's written about long-term stability, you know, and he actually is talking about how it's not that important for him because, you know, a lot of the – it's really on the big products that they spec it out. You know, so if you have an op amp, they don't care how much it drifts over time. Over time, over 10 years, yeah. Right. But that actually affects a lot of things because, you know, we have a very throwaway culture, but in industry, you know, like real industrial environments, that kind of stuff matters. So, if you're using a 3.1 computer, you know, Windows 3.1, you might care that your op amp has drifted, you know, 5,000 ppm, something like that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, absolutely. I mean, I've had issues not so much on the drift side of things, but just on the supply side of things, getting customers – because I've been involved in designing projects for the military and things like that. And really, you have to guarantee 10, 15-year lifespans on actually supporting these products. So, you've actually got to try and get written, you know, statements from the suppliers saying, yes, we will still support this chip in 10 or 15 years' time. And it's like extracting teeth. Oh, yeah. It's just –

Chris Gammell: You know, the interesting thing is –

Dave Jones: But you can eventually do it.

Chris Gammell: The interesting thing is, like, there's actually businesses built upon that. Have you ever heard of, like, Rochester Electronics? You ever heard of them?

Dave Jones: Oh, yes, yes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they actually – they make a business out of that. They'll take a chip and they'll replicate it for you because it's not made anymore. And so, it's either that or you take your chances with the China market. And, you know, you're probably – you know, 75% of the time, you're getting these counterfeit parts that just say – you know, if you're looking for an LM741, assuming that everyone obsolete probably won't. But you're just getting a chip now that says LM741 and it's actually inside. It's some – you know, it's LM317 and you're getting a power regulator and you're up a creek.

Dave Jones: Exactly. There's a lot of that gray market stuff going around and that's the risk of buying on the components on the gray market from these huge Hong Kong, you know, one-stop shop, one-hung-low shops. Yeah. Yeah, that's a real advantage. So, you know, that's it. Well, that's the advantage of buying from, you know, Mauser, DigiKey and Farnells and, you know, authorized distributors and stuff like that. You're pretty much guaranteed.

Chris Gammell: Have you ever gotten any Chinese counterfeit parts?

Dave Jones: Oh, not for a very long time, no. We had transistors back in the early 90s. We had some fake power transistors. But, no, I really haven't been caught out by that. I try and avoid the gray market if possible. It's really... Usually, a lot of the products I design, sorry, you know, cost isn't really an issue because we're not manufacturing, you know, 100,000 or a million of these items. We're going to manufacture, you know, 500 or something like that. So, you know, it's sort of a different market.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. It's just interesting to me that, I mean, there's such a need for certain parts that people will go to that extent. And sometimes, you know, like, I don't know about how the power transistor worked out for you, but, you know, you get a part that doesn't have any silicon inside it. You just have a TO220 package and you might have a little fire on your hands.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, with the power transistor thing, that's interesting because they were actually genuine silicon in there, but they were undersized. So, you know, and that's important for a power transistor because you buy a power transistor expecting it to dissipate, you know, 50 watts or something. And they put these tiny little dies in there and they can only handle 5 watts. So, you put them in your product and they might work for a week, but then they fail when your product gets out in the field. So, the cost isn't just the cost of that part and fitting it. It's cost of going out to the field and actually repairing it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Which is a major thing, really.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it really is because then you hurt your reputation and everything, too.

Dave Jones: Oh, your reputation dies and the service cost is just, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's just through the roof. So, yeah, you know, use gray market components at your own risk.

Chris Gammell: Have you ever looked at the inside of a power transistor, like the layout of one before?

Dave Jones: Yeah, they're just a really big-ass die with, oh, I haven't looked at the actual die, you know, I haven't looked under a microscope. But, you know, you saw the top can off it and you can actually see the huge die in there with the big bond wires. I have nice big thick ones in these power transistors.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I had never looked inside one, but I had taken a seminar at one point. And I think it was International Rectifier or someone like that. They had a sheet about it. And I didn't realize that power transistors aren't actually – I always thought it was like one huge transistor, you know, like really large features or whatever like that. But it's actually more often it's a lot of transistors sitting in parallel and they play a lot of really cool games with that stuff. So I don't know how many of the people that usually watch your show are doing like silicon design. But that stuff is just – I mean the tricks they play to get more work out of the same kind of process topologies, like the same silicon levels and everything. It's just amazing what they do with that stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh, absolutely. I am – you know, I have no real idea about the silicon level manufacturing industry. That's, you know, not something we have here in Australia and I've never really been involved in that. But, yeah, some of the stuff they do, my hat's off to them. It's just amazing what they can do on silicon. It's just a whole different ballgame to just the macro level electronics design. You know, it's totally different.

Chris Gammell: So what about your design in general? Are you doing a lot of – I mean when you're doing designs these days, are you doing a lot of transistor-based – not obviously on a chip, but are you doing more discrete stuff or more bigger stuff? Like I don't want to ask you too much about your work, but, you know, even when you're doing hobby projects, you know, are you doing a lot of Arduino kind of stuff? Are you doing more, you know, building like a transistor output stage, that kind of thing?

Dave Jones: Oh, no, I'm rarely doing just like a raw analog discrete thing. It usually always involves a micro and a bunch of other specialized devices and things like that. So, yeah, I don't do much discrete work, you know. Just building up an audio amp or something doesn't really do it for me anymore. So I love all these specialized chips that come out now. I know it's a bit of a cop-out to do something with a specialized chip, but, you know, they're just – oh, they're so tempting. You know, you get like a – you might get some, you know, a power monitor chip for a dollar or something. And, oh, it's just – whereas to do that before required a whole board of circuitry, you know. It's just – oh.

Chris Gammell: I saw on the day that it had a preamp actually integrated into it. It was like a preamp early stage, you know, and had all the transistors, all these really nicely biased bipolar transistors like in a preamp – or before an op-amp. And then it actually went right to an op-amp, and then it could drive this output stage. And so, yeah, I mean, I agree with you. Most of the time, unfortunately for analog-type people, which, you know, sometimes is a lot more fun to play around the transistors, the – you know, some of those chips are just – they're unbelievable. And they're tested however many cycles out and heat-tested and temperature – you know, like everything kind of tested you'd ever need and every data point you'd ever need on a data sheet. So I understand the temptation. And it just –

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, it's all about time to market, isn't it? I mean, if you're designing a product that is ultimately going to be taken to market, which is different from just dicking around with hobby stuff, you know, then, you know, it's – to use these off-the-shelf chips that are already proven and characterized, you know, over temperature. It's just – yeah, there really isn't any contest. It's – in the end, it just all comes down to can you buy the chip in quantity? Oh, yeah. You know, that's the main – you know, you might be able to get it, you know. They might have five in stock at Mouser or something, but, you know, that doesn't help you when you want to build 10,000 of them and there's a 40-week lead time, sir. Thank you very much. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That happens a lot these days. It's actually kind of interesting with the hobbyist, like where the hobbyist meets the industry side of things because I never realized – you know, I went basically straight into industry and I do a little bit of hobbyist stuff on the side, but nothing that I can speak of to, you know, like enough projects to really get a good feel for it. Yeah. And, you know, some of the op amps I use – I saw you at a Twitter tweet – sorry, tweet the other day? Tweet, yes. About having an op amp be the most expensive piece of your design. Well, I have op amps that I'm using all the time that are $5 and sometimes that's the raw cost of an entire design that hobbyists are using and I'm just blown away with some of the things that they're able to do, like even the Arduino kits and stuff like that. Yep. But keeping the cost in mind is really tough and either you've got deep pockets or you're really being innovative about what kind of parts you use in your hobby designs to really get a lot out of them, get a lot of mileage.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. I'm working on a design at the moment. You could say it's a hobby design, but I do plan to take it into sale. It's going to be an open source hardware thing. Nice. I won't say what it is. Probably a few people on the forum might have heard me mention it before. But, yeah, it's all about cost optimization and choosing the right parts that are A, available and B, the lowest cost and it changes your design. You know, you go, right, oh, I love that chip. It's only $0.10, but I can't get it. So, I'm going to have to use the $0.50 chip and then that flows on and changes the rest of your design. And the number of times I've rehashed this design to try and shave, you know, $0.20 off the cost is just, you know, it's just absolutely phenomenal.

Chris Gammell: Affuriating, really.

Dave Jones: Well, because, yeah, ultimately that's going to come out of my pocket. Because if I manufacture a thousand of these and I can save a dollar per unit, that's a thousand dollars, you know, in my pocket. Oh, yeah. You know, essentially. So, yeah, it's, you know, so shaving cents off here and there and come out with innovative ways to avoid using a part and minimizing the number of parts and using a PCB as a front panel. And, you know, just doing all sorts of other little tricks in your design, you can bring the cost down a lot. But the hobbyist sort of, you know, those Arduinos, they're really cheap because you don't have to worry about an external case or anything like that. You just manufacture the board and snap them off the panel, you know. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, you know, but if you want to make a product look good and things like that, then, you know. And, yeah, at the moment, the most expensive part in my design is a little quad op amp. And it's a bottom of the range op amp.

Chris Gammell: Well, at least you get four of them. That's good.

Dave Jones: Well, you get four for your $1.50, yeah. But, you know, it's, you know, it's a rail-to-rail precision op amp. And, yeah, you've just, ah, it's crazy. Well, no, I lie. There is one more expensive thing, which is going to be the punched box. The box is actually only $1 for it. But to get, you know, three holes punched in it is another $2.70, sir.

Chris Gammell: Thank you very much. Like, ah, that's a lot. Those are some expensive holes right there.

Dave Jones: Exactly. I'm thinking about actually building up a punch machine myself and actually just punching the damn holes out of the box because it is so expensive. Wow. So, it's just, yeah, it's crazy.

Chris Gammell: You know, it's an interesting point. You said about the trade-offs and stuff, and, you know, you always see people asking about that kind of thing on forums and everywhere. Like, hey, I'm a student, and I'm really trying to get into engineering. And, you know, what are the things I need to know or what do I have to look forward to? And, you know, that's one of the things that I always think about engineering is it's all about trade-offs. So, sometimes you're going to have someone shouting in your ear, but you really got to kind of try and balance, well, if it needs more power, it's going to get hotter. But if it needs less power, I need a more expensive chip. And so that kind of balancing is kind of one of those, like, skills that you don't ever really hear about in school because it's always – I mean, well, sometimes it's project-based. But if it's lab-based, it's more like, well, here you have to do this, this, and this, and this. But if it's project-based, or when you get into more project-based kind of things like how you're designing that item, you really have to start playing around and optimizing things. And that's a big deal, you know?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. That's a huge aspect of engineering, which, you know, all these beginners coming out of university and whatnot, they just have no actual clue about. And, you know, there's a famous saying in engineering. It's engineering is the art of building something with stuff you can get, you know? And it's –

Chris Gammell: I've never heard that one.

Dave Jones: And it's – yeah. And it's – but it's not only stuff you can get. It's stuff you can get at the right price, you know? Yeah. And there's a whole art in just – you know, you'd be amazed at the amount of work that goes into producing just an Arduino board or something like that that's, you know, optimized down in cost. Oh, yeah. You know?

Chris Gammell: Like, say, you can get a 10K resistor for $0.02, but you can get a 5K resistor for $0.05, right? Well, if you put two 10Ks in parallel, you have a 5K resistor, but now you just saved a cent. And if you're making a million of them, that's, what, $10,000? So maybe you want to do that.

Dave Jones: Exactly. And there's another aspect of electronics design is BOM optimization, parts optimization. Like, if you need – say, your design uses, you know, 10 2N22222 transistors or something like that, and then you need one diode in your design, it's actually better to wire one of those transistors as a diode to, you know, so that you're not – so you don't have to buy a whole reel of diodes, you know, 5,000 diodes on a reel, and then take up another slot in your SMD, you know, in the SMD machine. Because if you, you know, if you've got, you know, 30 different parts, then you need a machine that has 30 different reels on the SMD line to manufacture it efficiently. So, you know, there's all these trade-offs which flow down there, and BOM optimization is just going around. And as you say, you know, if you've got a 5K – you need a 5K resistor, but you use, you know, 110Ks in your design, it's just much easier to put those two 10Ks in parallel.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, yeah. And it's amazing, too, about the – you know, you talked about, like, having a fab, and I don't think a lot of hobbyists out there would have their own kind of fabrication facilities, but you're probably making lower volume kind of things, and you need to have all these parts, and you think about – so, like, pretend now that you're a hobbyist, and you say, okay, I've got this great product, and I want to try and sell it. Well, that's great, but if you want to sell 100 of them, and each one costs 100 bucks, and costs you 100 bucks to make, then this $10,000 you've got to plop down on the table just to get your money – just to get your product out the door. And how do you do that? And then if you start cutting down to, you know, I've only built five boards, well, then you have to deal with delays, and, well, maybe more people want them. So, it's really an interesting trade-off of – you know, I'm not on the business side of things that much, but that kind of stuff is a big deal.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, I've done my own kits before, you know, I've sold kits, and I'm thinking about getting back into it. As I said, I've got this new design, which hopefully will come out. It'll be open source. And I, you know, I think I can sell, you know, many, many thousands of these.

Chris Gammell: If only you had some kind of forum to sell these from.

Dave Jones: If only I had some sort of forum and ready market to – there you go.

Chris Gammell: We'll figure it out. Don't worry.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I've only got 5,000 viewers on the e-blog, so there you go.

Chris Gammell: All right. That's good. Yeah, it's amazing watching, like, the – you know, I was watching the numbers and, like, the Spark Funds and the Adafruits and all those guys. Their sales are going through the roof, and you think – you know, I know that college campuses are getting these kind of kits now, too. And it's just like, you know, some of these are very viable businesses. People are making a living at it, and it's awesome, you know?

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. I mean, well, Spark Fund are pulling in. I saw a – there's a sort of a short doco thing on Adafruits' website. How now – all of these, you know, startup open source hardware companies. And Spark Fund, I think, are pulling in over $10 million a year now. It's unbelievable. That's a lot of dollars. Actually, oh, and Adafruits, almost a million dollars a year now. Wow. Just a two-person business, you know, out of a rented shopping somewhere. It's just, you know, a million dollars just selling little open source hobbyist boards. And there's all these other examples. There's about a dozen companies that have broken this million dollar mark just selling, you know, open source hobby kits.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But it's not easy. I don't think it's easy. Oh, no. I think that's an important thing to point out, that it's like, whoa, they are moving a lot of product. And they're working their – I'm sure you know about that too, you know. They're just probably working their butts off to get this out.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's all about volume and, you know.

Chris Gammell: Oof. No, thanks. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Dave Jones: really quite frustrating so um anyway i'm a glutton for punishment so i'm going to go back into that uh sort of market i think i've got a little winning uh product which i might bring back to market and um yeah we'll uh see what happens but um yeah i mean anyone out there can actually give it a go you know they can if they come up with a good idea for a good product they could sell you know a thousand ten thousand of them yeah um you know it's it's not that hard at all but it it does require a good product a good idea lots of luck being first and things like

Chris Gammell: that and and i think the thing to point out is to definitely not go to those people that say hey do you have an idea come to us and we'll sell it for you those people those people are not your friends

Dave Jones: do not go to them i i don't know if you have that in the u.s but um a couple of years back here in um here in uh sydney on the radio all the time you'd have these ads you know if you've got an invention come to us and we'll you know invent help we'll yeah market your invention and ah give me a break all they do is um make you sign up for ridiculous expensive patents and they they take a huge cut out of it and uh slap you on the back and take your money and off you go yep exactly yeah so just

Chris Gammell: a caution to people out there don't don't uh well first off if you have a really good idea don't don't give it away and and second off don't don't trust people don't if someone's asking for your money and they're not actually going to give you something in return like a awesome kit in the near future like dave might uh be sure be sure to to be to be wary oh absolutely just just go

Dave Jones: in and do it yourself i mean you know these days you can actually manufacture you know just 50 up front or something like that it's you know it's it's surprisingly inexpensive or inexpensive to um you know actually get a kit but you know obviously if you know if your kit of parts you know each one costs a hundred dollars as as you said before then that's you know that requires significant outlay but my new kit is like you know 15 in parts or even you know 10 in volume and things like that so yeah you know it's not that so i can go out and you know i can put the money up and get a couple hundred manufactured up front with very little risk well that's good yeah you know i i was wondering

Chris Gammell: about the uh have you heard about like the local kind of movement and how i mean that's that's kind of that kind of feeds into it like uh i know a lot of people are talking about well everything's still available these days and eventually it'll move to the point where everything will be manufactured locally what do you think about that do you think that'll ever happen i don't know

Dave Jones: oh manufactured locally no that's you know that's that's a that's a pipe dream you know china you still can't beat china for price and things like that um you know r&d yes and small scale production yeah like my previous kits i've actually had them hand built um here in australia a guy hand solders them you know i didn't bother with getting reels of components and mass assembling so i used a guy you know yeah he works reasonably cheap and hand solders them and yeah so you can do that but ultimately once you go to volume and things like that you know it's impossible to beat china unfortunately and uh and then there's india up and coming which will be the next china and and so on

Chris Gammell: and so forth it's amazing too because the china's there i mean like the the people in china are actually doing the same thing they're actually hand soldering it's just the the the labor costs are so low and and they're so efficient at it that it just it pushes right through it's it's it's sad but i mean that's just kind of how it is right now unfortunately yeah that's just the way it is yeah

Dave Jones: there are still a lot of products out there they're still um you know hand assembled surprisingly but um they they are now getting you know every good boards that are well designed will be mass you know yeah that's assembled by machine and yeah um those sort of things so yeah they're just so you know i've i've been over there and been to their factories and they're just you know they're just so efficient and you know oh it's just and and the parts of course they've got the ready-made gray market over there so you know if your design uses generic parts then you know there's um there's one famous um supplier of blank pcbs who will actually give you free parts um you know if you've got yeah they will i can't remember their name off the top my head i'm sure it'll come to me but um yeah if if if you actually buy a bare board from them get a board manufacturer they'll give you free connectors free resistors i think there's a couple of ic's they'll give you for free and yeah they'll effectively give you all the parts and they'll assemble it for free as well whoa so yeah which is which is crazy i can't believe i can't remember their name but um that's okay that's that's free that's free

Chris Gammell: advertising they don't need i'm sure yeah that's free advertising but yeah but i've i've gone to

Dave Jones: them for uh quotes and they're not yeah they you know it's okay for like a one-off or something like that but if you try and get a hundred made from them they're not particularly cheap and in some cases they they did an itemized bomb for me of cost of my parts and some of them were more expensive than digi key it was crazy i'm like what you know you're obviously you know some parts were you know free they were dirt cheap but others they god knows what markup they were making on them because yeah i can get them cheaper from digi key or farnells here in australia it was crazy so yeah i was gonna

Chris Gammell: ask you about that is there like a big discrepancy i mean i don't know how much exposure you had to the australia market versus the u.s market i didn't i didn't really know how much uh how much the differences there you got the digi keys there and the the mousers but are there are there suppliers there that you have that u.s people wouldn't know about i don't even know um no farnell and rs are

Dave Jones: the two uh big ones here in australia there's a few others but they just you know they're really just small time players farnell and rs are the two big which everyone's heard of uh rs is a uk company and fun and well farnell's a uk they're both uk companies actually um yeah and um yeah they're the two big ones here and their prices used to be astronomical compared to mouser and digi key but um now there's so much competition um funnels now actually um i believe in singapore i think it is they've got a whole team of people at funnels working on going through the digi key catalog and matching price on all their products so they're slowly doing it so all these components like yeah all these components on funnels you'll see that are actually coming through they'll actually match digi key price and they'll do it live so they'll you know if digi key change their price funnels will change their price and that's their um that's what they're actually trying to do and then rs are trying to now compete with because funnels did that rs competing with them and then and now funnels offer free free delivery in australia for any volume any uh cost so you can order one one single one cent part and they'll courier it to your door for free and so you just do that for fun to mess with them huh you just i just do that for fun yeah i actually tweeted yes i actually uh tweeted that the other day that uh funnell didn't ship me my part and i went i went feral on them and they they actually went crazy they they it went all the way to funnell uk to top management over there and they phoned somebody here at 10 o'clock at night saying dave jones wants his part in the morning and sure enough i had it he's got a show watch out he's got a show yes i've got an audience and um yeah so the they really fixed that quick smart and there was a problem with their system they couldn't i paid by credit card and they couldn't um uh they couldn't deliver because my company hadn't paid the account for that month or something so they shut us out and yeah now didn't you say that rs is the one that

Chris Gammell: didn't they just start that new design spark was that the one you started design spark yeah if you

Dave Jones: haven't heard of it um rs design spark you know dot com or whatever just google it and um they've got free pcb design software now which um is competing with um eagle and that's online too isn't it yes yes it's and um like an online design tool i think um oh no it's it's downloadable they might i don't know if they have a online version it's you know download but you've got to sign up you've got to sign up to their website to get it for free or something so they want that database of people you know that's the trap you know you've got a course yeah you've got to sign up to their website and then they'll give you the license to use the software for free and it's um um you know and it's not um and there's no limits to it there's no limit to the size of the board or number of components i believe as opposed to um eagle which is eagles you know the the de facto standard in the open source hardware industry because they've had a free version available for a long time but it's limited in size one one schematic sheet you know yeah tiny a small size of the board double sided and um yeah new rs design spark software um there's no limits so hopefully that will um push um farnells who now own eagle because farnell bought out eagle which i think is a german company that's right and um yeah and hopefully that will push them to um up their free version so you know um i don't think rs design spark really stands a chance of unseating google uh google eagle neither neither google nor eagle no um i don't think they stand a chance of unseating them from that de facto standard position everyone's just so entrenched with um eagle as far as um the hobbyist you know open source market goes but um yeah it could um spur them on to um hopefully um give everyone a better version for free so um only good can come from this i guess yeah and i saw on uh this i was on

Chris Gammell: design spark the other day i hadn't really heard of it much but uh you know i think it just started back in march or something like that but i saw they're actually looking for bloggers right now and i'm always looking for new people to read you know stuff that people are writing so some maybe people out there want to start blogging for them or blogging for themselves too and and i'll i'll read anything really so

Dave Jones: yeah um but yeah i'm i'm actually um constantly approached by um with the high profile of my blog now i'm actually approached by the likes of design i won't name names but the likes of these companies that uh that have all these um uh you know uh online communities and things like that and they're looking for content they're fishing around for content so yeah they're all contacting me hey you know can you write for us etc etc and well i won't go into the details but um yeah they're um yes they are fishing around for content so anyone who wants a um an audience i'm not sure how large it really is you know with those websites you know farnell's element 14 and yeah you know it doesn't

Chris Gammell: really matter for me i just want to see more people out there writing about stuff and and don't get me wrong there's a lot of people out there writing about it i love it i mean i the people that i read like i read the you know even the places that like the make magazines are pulling like the make blog that's pulling from and like the the aida fruit blogs pulling from they're just all the blogs out there are pulling from uh yeah i love reading that stuff so you know if if you're out there and you're listening and and you have an inkling to write shoot me an email shoot dave an email let us know about it if we do another radio show we can talk about it that was another thing that i wanted to do is highlight awesome awesome writing out there awesome projects that are out there

Dave Jones: absolutely yeah yeah i've got no problems we can give a shout out to you know new uh new uh people out there who are starting up you know they've got a new blog or something like that by all means as long as it's not a video blog because i don't want any competition right thank you very much i've i've cornered that engineering video market and i don't want to name names but i've heard of some other ones i don't want to name names so you know there are a couple out there who try and compete

Chris Gammell: but yeah i'm number one thank you very much no contest no tooting of horns around here no tooting

Dave Jones: of horns and yes i don't have tickets on myself no but i you know but that's the thing you know i started out with you know i didn't think anyone would listen to me i yeah i mean well watch me sorry and you know i started out i just put it on the oz electronics forum upload to youtube and 10 people watched it oh yeah great i've got 10 people woohoo you know and um i thought ah you know i'd be stoked if i had a hundred people but you know now i've got 5 000 regular viewers and and but it doesn't come instantly if you're a new blogger out there and you start up you know you've just got to stick to it you've just got to work at it and uh because audiences don't just come you know overnight like

Chris Gammell: that you know i always hated that term i hate the term blogger i really do i avoided it at all costs i say writer i don't know about you but i well you can't i guess you'd be videographer

Dave Jones: well it's vlogger which i hate oh that's even not not blogger it's video yes vlogger i really hate that term blogger's not too bad because it is a buzzword and everyone knows it so you get a bit more credibility if you're a well these days you know if you're a blogger i guess um you know as opposed to a writer it's a bit old-fashioned but yeah i can i can definitely see where you're coming

Chris Gammell: from there yeah well hopefully we'll see some people stepping into the spotlight soon enough and pushing us out that that'd be great that's what i'm that's what i'm looking for yeah absolutely

Dave Jones: so if you've got anything else you want to throw into the hat on this episode how long we've been going for there you go it's been going for an hour already yes good timing i don't know maybe we

Chris Gammell: should just cut it off here and save the rest for next time i don't know uh yeah we probably should

Dave Jones: i think because probably an hour show is you know good enough i i don't think we can do much in well we can do a lot in half hour but um i i anticipate the shows would probably be an hour each so yeah and plus you got to get to work so well exactly yeah i've got to get to work soon so um yeah i do have to pay the bills and um yeah all right well let's call it quits and um that's our first show which without a name the no name electronics show so if you've got good ideas for the name please um jump on the eev blog forum and um i'll set up a separate um area on there where people can uh talk about the show and if people like it and it's successful we'll um get a you know a name for it a website its own dedicated itunes and podcast and we'll go from there and hope even if people don't

Chris Gammell: like it and it's successful then we'll you know if people just want to rail against it that's good too you

Dave Jones: know well even yeah even if people don't like it we might just still do it because well it's fun for us yeah i get to piss people off you know yeah well we're certainly not going to make any money from it so you know it's all done for the love of it that's right yeah absolutely well thanks chris all right thanks steve yeah it's and we'll uh yeah and we'll catch everyone next time see ya bye bye