#367 – Not Reely An Issue

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released November 12th, 2017. Episode 367. Not really an issue.

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

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Dave Jones: What's happening, nerd?

Chris Gammell: I'm going to Supercon. You're running around here, aren't you? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Basically, you're moving back to your old job.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, I'm going back there. Actually, probably when this is released, I will be there or it'll be over. Right. I had a great time. It was great seeing everybody. Yeah. I'll talk about it in the future.

Dave Jones: After a month, you left them, you know? Well, I mean, everybody else, too.

Chris Gammell: Like, everybody else who shows up. So, yeah. It's not like I'm promoting the conference now because it's already over. Right. There you go. But, yeah, I'll talk about it in future weeks, I'm sure. Sweet. Prior to that, I'm excited. I don't know if you saw there was pictures released of the badge that Mike did. I think we mentioned it on the show at one point. I've seen the badge. Yep, yep. Yeah. That looks nice.

Dave Jones: Mike hacked something on it. He tweeted something. It looked like a function generator or something. Oh, jeez. He turned it into a function gen. I don't know. It had like a triangle wave and a sine wave on it on the LCD. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if you mentioned it. It's using a PIC32. And I've never done PIC32 stuff.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, Mike's a PIC32 master. Yeah. He's a PIC guy. He uses them for all these industrial-led projects.

Chris Gammell: Got it. Got it. Yeah. Have you ever used that platform?

Dave Jones: Yes. I've used the PIC32 and the PIC24.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Yes. My custom multimeter originally used a PIC24.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Okay. Cool.

Dave Jones: And then we swapped.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Speaking of which. Yeah. I have a beautiful segue for that.

Chris Gammell: Go for it.

Dave Jones: We're about to release the Kickstarter. Well, we're working on the Kickstarter for that meter. And, you know, I'm getting like 50 multimeters in which are going to patron supporters and stuff and things like that. So it's imminent. And then the dreaded supply frame, supply chain, supply chain issue rears its ugly head. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: It happens every time. Right.

Dave Jones: It's right. It's not going to stop me from getting these 50 units. And, but.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I was kind of under the impression that they're already built. No?

Dave Jones: Well, no. They're building 50 now. So that'll be fine. So early people outside of Kickstarter will get them. But then I said, right, because I'm doing the Kickstarter now and people, of course, want them before Christmas. Right. They want to know how, you know, can I have it before Christmas? Right.

Chris Gammell: Why? I don't know.

Dave Jones: It's just a thing. There's a load out of my tree. It's a thing. I need to measure it. I don't know. People just, you know, when it gets close to Christmas, people just want it before. Yeah. Consumers. Bloody hell. Anyway. Yeah. So I asked, so I asked the manufacturer, look, how many, you know, I've got, because I've got a promise up front, how many I can deliver, you know, by a certain date. Because in the Kickstarter, you've got to put the dates down and all that sort of jazz, you know. Oh, I see. I see. So like planning out. And the different tiers. Yeah. The different, you know, different rewards. Right.

Speaker ?: So you're forecasting at this point.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm forecasting. You know, the different reward tiers. And they said, oh, you know, I said, how many can you deliver before Christmas? Because then I can say, have the Kickstarter. Christmas is only like a month and a half away, man. Oh yeah. Yeah. But it'll be like a 15 day campaign. It'll be December and they'll be almost ready by the time, you know. Anyway, they said, yeah, we can deliver 500 before Christmas. And I went, okay. Okay. Fair enough. You know. But how many, what's the next date after that? And they said, oh, March. And then we can deliver another thousand or something. And I went, why? Like, why March? And they went, oh, oh, we didn't tell you. Yeah. We've got a supply problem. We've got a phone component supply problem. Whatever.

Chris Gammell: Just everything in your meter cannot be purchased. So what is it?

Dave Jones: It's the analog devices. I forget the part number. The true RMS converter.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Which is, you know, like you can't substitute this part. Right. It's a. Right. Yeah. It's got a special footprint. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's special functionality. There's no crosses.

Dave Jones: There's functionality in specs and everything. Right. Nobody makes an equivalent one. Right. Not ping compatible, you know. Right. So, yeah. And, you know, yeah, you can get like onesies and twosies in stock from various places, but that really doesn't help if the Kickstarter goes crazy, you know, because I don't want to promise like January and then go, oops, suddenly I got 2,000 orders.

Chris Gammell: It's always better to represent reality, I think.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So.

Chris Gammell: See, now, if you were a true marketer, Dave, you'd just say, you'd just put a date on it and say.

Dave Jones: I'd put a date on it and be done with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. But I'm too honest for my own good. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's your problem. Anyway, so they said, yeah, it was like 14 week lead time from the manufacturer. See, and that's not that bad, actually. It's not that bad. You know, we always joke about the classic 40 week lead time, which when I was a boy, that was, you know, 40 week lead time was the common thing.

Chris Gammell: Right. And if people don't know, and you know, what we always try and remind people here is like, that lead time represents, it's, they're starting with bare wafers.

Speaker ?: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Well, no.

Chris Gammell: This is a from scratch recipe, effectively.

Dave Jones: And it's just that they have so many chips to manufacture and it takes time to re-spin the line to change each one. And everyone wants their tin pot little op amp or something, you know. Oh, no.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like, I don't think there's much re-spinning the lines, though. I think it's just, uh.

Dave Jones: Oh, no. But, you know, like, you've got a.

Chris Gammell: Priority. Like, if you were, if you were Ford or if you were. Oh, no.

Dave Jones: If you were Apple or somebody, yeah. They're going to bump the line.

Chris Gammell: You are basically slotting in behind everything that's already scheduled and paid for. Exactly. And or with tier one customers. Yeah. You're, you're just, you're just there in the, in the queue. Right. So.

Dave Jones: That's it. So, you know, me and my little piddly true RMS converter. Right. Exactly. I was like right down the bottom of the.

Chris Gammell: Dave Jones says, don't you know who I am? And they say, well, even if we did, it doesn't matter. Money talks. Exactly. Yep. Oh, man.

Dave Jones: So, and then they, then, okay, we're dealing with that. And then they came along and said, oh, by the way, the STR micro we're using in there is also a bit hard to get.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, this is the thing though, right? I mean, like, and, and what's crazy is until you put that order in and even after you put that order, until you have the parts in your hands, you don't know what the true league time is, right? No, no, no. That's right. Yeah. You could always have a natural disaster. You could always have something happen. Totally.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And, and this is why you should quote stuff so early. I mean, like, you should just get, like, get that. Cause that's the number of people don't usually think about either. It's like, you know, you can, you can get a quote of like, oh, well there's, you know, maybe there's 800 in stock in distribution, but when you cross that threshold, 800 number 801 means you have to order from the manufacturer and then you are dealing with lead times and minimum order quantities and all that stuff. So.

Dave Jones: That's why it's always, we've always advised that you try and get stuff that's plentiful across all the different distributors, but that doesn't stop somebody else having a requirement and going to snap them all up like the minute before, like I've lost count of the number of times that I've gone to order something on DigiKey or Mouser or whatnot. And it was like, I checked the stock yesterday or last week and they had, you know, 5,000 of them and it wasn't a problem. Yet I go to order and there's zero.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I didn't tell you, I installed a key logger on your computer a couple of years ago. Right. I've been meaning to sell you all those parts that I've been snatching out from under you. Yeah. I just always, I forget that stuff. I'm like, oh yeah. Forgot to price gouge Dave this week.

Dave Jones: So you reckon there's going to be a new black market out there for people?

Chris Gammell: Just, just, just, it's a, it's a very custom, custom market just for you. Right. It's like Dave, parts Dave needs.com.

Dave Jones: Or parts Apple needs, you know? Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think they, I think they're going to be fine.

Dave Jones: I think they're covered with all their cash. They just, yeah. Buy. Yeah. They just buy the fabs worth. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So what about the, so what about the minimum order quantity? Cause that's the other game that you're playing. You're saying somewhere between, you know, a hundred, which is unlikely and a couple thousand, which is probably more likely.

Dave Jones: Minimum order quantity is not a problem.

Chris Gammell: Even for, even for like reels and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Oh, well they actually, they said something about analog devices will now put as many on a reel as you want. So it's not really an issue.

Chris Gammell: Really? I'll pay that. Not really. No, it's, yeah, it's pretty bad. Anyway.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. That's not really, that doesn't seem to be an issue.

Chris Gammell: Okay. That's good. That's nice. I guess. Yeah. And that's the thing, like as more, you know, as more companies go towards like these serving each tier of customer, right? This is kind of serving the SMB, the small and medium business customer. It's like, okay, now they're, they have these capabilities where it's not, you have to buy a reel or 10 reels or whatever. It's, you know, some more reasonable amount, which is nice. Which means you're probably also paying a lot per part, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Well, yeah, we can, there's some we can get in stock, but they're like 15 bucks US a chip. And it's like for this RMS converter and you get like, maybe if I'd already promised these Kickstarter units and I was so desperate, I would eat that. I would just, you know, I have no other choice but to bend over and, you know, take that one. Bend over and make it up in volume. Oh boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: How do you make money on free software?

Chris Gammell: That's right. Make it up in volume. Volume. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, yeah, you'll, you'll know about this. When you're, you know, like, like you're desperate, you start searching for parts. So you go to your Octo part or your Fine Chips or whoever that was your former company. Who was it? Octo part. No, Fine Chips.

Chris Gammell: The stuff that I worked on was Fine Chips. Yeah. Fine Chips. That's it. It was Fine Chips.

Dave Jones: I don't know. They're all the bloody same. And, and, you know, and, and you get, oh, look, it's, you know, like six different suppliers have them. And curiously, they, half of them have the same number. And it's like, they're all, they don't hold stock. It's like that you place the order with them and they're buying it from Arrow or Arrow's buying from somebody else, you know? And it's like, no.

Chris Gammell: Well, Arrow has a couple of different brands too. And I mean, like a couple of them have different brands. It's like, so Avnet owns Farnell Element 14 now and Element 14 has a couple of regions. Yeah. And then Arrow also owns, what's that called?

Dave Jones: Yeah. So if you search Fine Chips and it shows that Avnet have the stock and also Farnell's have the stock or Element 14, right? They're the same. It's the same stock. Probably. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if they're listing the same yet, but, but there's.

Dave Jones: Well, the, the numbers are the same. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'd say if the numbers are the same, be very, very. Yeah. Cause that stuff like gets fed through.

Dave Jones: There's 303 in stock at both supplies. That means I can get 606 chips. Wah. Yeah. No. Not going to happen. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's dangerous. I mean, like, I think just in general, like if you, if you're over that certain amount, I mean, do you have an idea of how many you're going to sell or no?

Dave Jones: Well, I don't know. That's the, that's the problem. You know? Like, I'm sure I could sell. Or I'd be disappointed if I couldn't sell the 500 before Christmas, for example, like on the initial Kickstarter, like that'd be, that'd basically be a flop.

Chris Gammell: And you're saying you could, you can build those before Christmas.

Dave Jones: We can build those before Christmas. They're saying they can deliver those. And I've got, I've now got an account with the courier company, so I can ship them via DHL in a couple of days, um, you know, via courier and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: That's a pretty fast build. I gotta say. Yeah. Yeah. So you do a 15 day build. It's the eighth here.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Like if I start the Kickstarter, like next Monday, for example, and it runs for 15 days, then the Kickstarter ends at, you know, the end of the 1st of December, for example, um, then yeah, they can, oh, well, they'll start building before that. Cause we'll, we'll know generally every, cause I'll do a promo video. All the early backers will jump in cause there's a financial incentive for early backers. So we'll, you know, they'll just start making churn them out straight away. Right.

Chris Gammell: And you're going to, you would keep enough, you would buy 500, even if you're just going to put them in your store. Yeah. No. Yeah. Of course.

Dave Jones: I would. So basically you're, you're, you're buying. Right. Oh yeah. Even if the Kickstarter flops, I'd, I'd buy 500. Cause I'm buying 600, uh, BM two, three, five multimeters each batch. Right. I'm, I'm ponying up 600 up front. Yep. Um, yeah. And I've been doing that.

Chris Gammell: So that's just a forecasting thing that you're doing based on, yeah.

Dave Jones: Based on potential sales, but yeah, I don't know how popular it's, how, you know, whether or not the price point's going to appeal, whether or not the, you know, the, the, the video and you like the feature set appeals to people. You know, I just don't know. Yeah. The Kickstarter video growing. Hey, Kickstarter. Kickstarter. I've got to make sure to include where I'm not looking at the camera, you know, like I'm talking off camera. Right. Yeah. And the cheesy music in the background. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. You should do that, but then like zoom out and then just have David be like, yeah. Who are you talking to, man?

Dave Jones: That's a good idea. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I like that.

Chris Gammell: You're like, it's Kickstarter.

Dave Jones: I have to do it. That's pretty good. I'm going to steal that one.

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

Dave Jones: But it just adds time in the video. Yeah. It could be fun. I mean, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You're basically, again, you're using it like you already know pretty much the market, you know, pretty much. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm, I'm, I'm not going, I'm not going after the general market. So like, I don't even have to do a video. I could just go like, here's the meter, you know, and show a photo. Right. It's like, you know, it doesn't really matter. Right. So yeah. Cause most of the people who are going to buy it are going to come from my audience anyway, from my promotion of it. Yeah. Yep. You know, it's not.

Chris Gammell: A thousand true fans, man. Kevin Kelly.

Dave Jones: Thousand. All right. What's that? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You've probably got a thousand, right?

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. I'm sure I've got a dedicated.

Chris Gammell: We've surely mentioned that before. That's a. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Who'll buy anything, you know? You'd. Not buy anything, but they, they, they want to support you as a person. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They want to support you in getting something tangible as, is, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's double, double win. You get a, you get a good DMM. You get, yeah. Yeah. Get to help out Dave.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: All right. Well, it sounds like it's on, it's on, it's on the right path. You were also saying, uh, CAD tools you're having issues with or no?

Dave Jones: No, no. Or is that separate? No, that's a separate issue. But now that you bring it up, um, hopefully, um, soon there will be a review of CAD tools, um, on the channel. Uh, David too.

Chris Gammell: Oh man. He's, um, he. You guys are bought and paid for. What? What? Which kind of CAD tools? Are we talking mechanical CAD or ECAD?

Dave Jones: No, mechanical CAD tools.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Then that's fine.

Dave Jones: Otherwise I would have said ECAD.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: No, no, no. Sorry. I don't know. We say CAD. I say CAD. I think. Well, you can, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I would have said like, uh, PCB tool. Like I would have said. Got it. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. Because to me it's a PCB tool. Like, you know, doing a schematic is like, man, there's no point doing a schematic unless you've got a PCB tool. Shit. If you're doing it, if you're just doing a schematic, you may as well just do it by hand. You know, Dave. Right. Dave. Right. Right. So, yeah. Um.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. What's going on with that with the mechanical stuff? Yeah.

Dave Jones: No. Um, he was like, we're designing the new case for the micro supply, which I won't give details about. But, um, anyway. Um, and so we're, you know, we were using Onshape, which is a web-based thing because it was free, you know? And I, I don't want to like, like David's really good in, um, uh.

Chris Gammell: Solidworks.

Dave Jones: Solidworks. Yes, the expensive, but it's like a couple of thousand bucks, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. So, anyway, like a real expensive tool and I'm too tight ass to pony up for a business license for that. You know? So, I said, oh, let's just try this Onshape thing. You know, this web-based one. And he was struggling with it and, you know, it's not through lack of his skills. It was just the tool is very limiting in what it can do. Um, but it's free.

Chris Gammell: Like the free version or is there a paid version?

Dave Jones: Oh, no, there's also a paid version, but it's basically online storage is what you're paying for. The, the tool is actually all, you get all the features. Yeah. Um, but you get limited.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they raised like $60 million to make that tool too or something. Oh, really? I think it was like the former DeSoe Systems or something like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, the former founder or director of some other CAD tool. I think of Solidworks, yeah. Oh, of Solidworks, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so they came over and yeah. And, and we were talking to them at one stage, um, and they wanted us to promote it or something and, you know, so, so we were using that just because it was free and yeah, he was struggling with it. So, you know, we said, oh, can we find something else? And well, what, you know, we're looking at all the other alternatives and then, uh, Rhino, which he had used before, um, which he really loves. So we've actually switched to Rhino now.

Chris Gammell: Um, so now isn't Rhino like, uh, I thought that was like a, uh, more industrial design,

Dave Jones: like it is more, well, that's what, that's what we want it for. But you know, like, well, yeah, they had their pros and cons. So he's going to do a video like showing the differences between these and it's like a mid-level tool. It's like a thousand bucks, you know? Um, and yeah, so he's going to do like a video comparing like a couple of free tools like open SCAD and, and, and, which is horrible command line driven. I mean, some people love it for that alone, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Like, especially if you're doing simple shapes, but yeah.

Dave Jones: If that floats your boat, fine. Yeah. Go for it. Yeah. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. I had that one. So like, you know, I tweeted out, oh, what is, you know, I'm looking after it for like a CAD package for me. This was years ago. Everyone gets, everyone said, oh, I'll try it. I open SCADs. Great. So I, okay. I download it. Is it open SCAD as a command line one?

Chris Gammell: There's that one and there's free CAD. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Free CAD. Anyway, whichever one has the freaking command line. So I downloaded it and read it and I'm staring at a flashing cursor.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. What do I do? What do I do? What?

Dave Jones: Where's my, how do I draw a circle and do a cylinder?

Chris Gammell: It's a Unix system. I know this.

Dave Jones: So I went, Joshua, you know. Sorry. That's ball games. Right. For those who don't know. Yep. Anyway. Yeah. That was just, you know, give me a break.

Chris Gammell: Well, if they, if they would have known Dave's stuff, right?

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. But like, you know, you can't recommend a command line tool to someone who's asking that question. Like, oh, which CAD package? That's just, no.

Chris Gammell: Sure you can.

Dave Jones: No, that's ridiculous.

Chris Gammell: You just got to know your audience, man. You got to know your audience. I would never have suggested that to you. Right. Yeah. Well, that'll, yeah, no, that's interesting. So are you, are you guys going to do injection molding?

Dave Jones: Uh, yes.

Chris Gammell: I'm more interested in hearing your perspective on that. Cause that.

Dave Jones: I can, I can, I can show you maybe some photos later. Oh, I get to see it, huh? Okay. Yeah. You get to see it. Cool. No one else gets to see it.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Finally paying off. Otherwise, otherwise it's too much. Seven years in, Chris gets some secrets.

Dave Jones: Yes. It is literally that old. This project.

Chris Gammell: What? Seven years old?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: I'm not kidding. I did my first micro supply project. I remember I was still working at Altium and I can remember showing actually my second prototype. I showed my second prototype to Leo Simpson at Silicon Chip who happened to drop by Altium one day, one day and walked by my, uh, I think you'd mentioned that on my office. Yeah. Yeah. And I said, Hey, check it out. I'm thinking about publishing this one. And he loved it. And you know, that was like seven years ago at least.

Chris Gammell: That's some time, man. Yeah. Dave Jones plays the long game folks.

Dave Jones: Longest, longest unfinished project. Who can beat it? Come on. Right. Come on. I think it's eight years or something. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Uh, but no, I'm, I'm just curious about the, if you guys go the injection molding, molding path, because you know, there's just a lot of. That'll be part of it. There was a lot of pitfalls. Yeah. There's right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Like would David want to do the mold design too? I mean, or would you outsource that?

Dave Jones: Oh no. We just throw it to some sort of manufacturer, but no, no, no, but he knows.

Chris Gammell: I'll just hit the auto ride button. It'll be fine.

Dave Jones: He knows all about like, like the pulling processes and stuff like that. He knows like not to include this on the part because that will work. That won't work with the pulling process when they get. Has he, has he done it before? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Several times. So he knows what he's done.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: And he's just wandered in. All right.

Chris Gammell: I can hear that. You know, it's time to grease the, grease the door hinge on your door.

Chris Gammell: Grease the door hinge. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway. So. Cool.

Chris Gammell: No, that'll be, that'll be interesting process to follow along with. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Isn't it David? We're working on the, the video reviewing the CAD packages. Yeah. Which one? Rhino?

Mike: Yeah. Rhino, Solidworks, Onshape, and maybe Inventor.

Dave Jones: Maybe Inventor.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, no Fusion 360. That's the one.

Dave Jones: No, no Fusion 360. Chris Gammel.

Mike: I probably should, but it's like, maybe I should do Fusion 360 versus Onshape versus, because then they're in the same kind of. Yeah.

Dave Jones: If he does it by tiers, that would be good. Yeah. Yeah. They're in the same tier. Yeah. Maybe we can release several videos. There you go. Because they do seem, yeah.

Mike: If I do.

Chris Gammell: We'll try not to talk to David too much over, you know, this is like when your mom's talking on a cell phone. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Tell him to get his ass to work earlier. Slime.

Dave Jones: In Sydney. Are you kidding?

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Is it a late city there? No. Is it like it? Yeah.

Dave Jones: You just don't drive during peak hour if you can humanly avoid it.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Suicidal.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, that's cool, man. Sounds like you guys have got some, you are turning into a proper design agency over there. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, that's what he's here for.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, who do we call if people want to hire you out for a design? Right.

Dave Jones: I got, I don't know if I should tell this story. Should I? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. You tell me, man. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Well, I won't mention who it is, but I've had somebody contact me. You know, they've seen my videos. I won't say what the product is, but, you know, they've, yeah, they wanted to, you know, they've got this company and they want me to design this widget for them. Right. And, you know, it's like a leading edge widget. You know, anyway, like it's, yeah, like really high performance.

Chris Gammell: High performance, big brand name too, or no?

Dave Jones: Sorry?

Chris Gammell: Big brand name as well, or no?

Dave Jones: Big brand. No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: Okay. What?

Dave Jones: No. No. Anyway, he's runs, oh, and there's a contract with NASA and there's, you know, so like, first of all, I said, no, I don't do contract design work anymore. You know, I just don't have the time to do it. Right, right, right. I don't have the time nor inclination to do it anymore. I used to, but no, you know, I've got my own business now. And yeah, fine. Then he came back and said, oh, but look, you know, would X amount of dollars change your mind? And it was quite a substantial number of Xs, right? Right, right, right. And I go, no, look, I just, you know, I'm not, no, I'm not interested, you know? Right.

Chris Gammell: That's a tough thing from a consulting standpoint too. Like sometimes like you can set your price to like the point where you say, oh, well, I'll do it for. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And then you go, oh shit, I didn't really want that job.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's tough.

Dave Jones: And it's, yeah, I just don't have the time to do it.

Chris Gammell: No, of course.

Dave Jones: You know, and nor the inclination to work on other people's stuff anymore, you know?

Chris Gammell: Well, I think, yeah, that's a more baseline thing, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. And it'd have to be something interesting. Like I'm not going to do it for the money, you know? Yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: You do something because it fits your channel or fits your.

Dave Jones: Yeah. If I could do videos on it or if it's a community thing, maybe, you know, like, you know, there's got to be some other incentive rather than money. Sure. But anyway, so, you know, like, will this do it? And I said, no, no. And he, you know, and then he just like went away from me.

Chris Gammell: See, in my case, when I get that, usually I start throwing names at them instead, right? Right. Yeah. Well, that's what he asked for. That's one of my best references that I have because like, honestly, that's the only way you're going to get out of that.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he did ask for that, you know, do you know anyone else who can do it, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Who's into this sort of stuff?

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I'm always wary about like people that lead with money too.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, I'm wary with people that lead with promises as well. Oh, yeah. And would it change your mind if I got you to build the thing so that, you know, so he's appealing to my business? Look, I'll contract you to build it as well. Right. So you can, and it's, we're going to make, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But your business isn't building things.

Dave Jones: Millions of these things. It's like.

Chris Gammell: Your business is showing things, right? Yeah. Exactly. And then sometimes those things are also, yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Selling little niche products and stuff like that. Right. Right. And. That's good though. That's mature, man.

Chris Gammell: That's like, that's knowing thyself, right?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And then they try to appeal to your ego. Oh, but, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Don't you want to be, you know. They say, you're the best. You're the best. You know, I've never seen anyone better. I know you can do it. You know, and like.

Chris Gammell: That's just lazy too, man. If you're the best, that's just. They're not watching enough YouTube channels. Yeah. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Like, yeah, there's many people out there who can do this. But yeah, it's just. Anyway. So, they came back a third time and like, yeah. Yep. Trying to be polite, as polite as possible.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway. People with promises. Because I've been burned. Of course. So many times before. You know, I've taken on jobs on the promise that there's going to be, you know, that I would either supply the thing or there'd be more work or whatnot. And they all fail. You know, they never come through. Yeah. You know. It's crazy. So, yeah, you've got to assume as a contractor, you have to assume that the deal is going to fall through. You know, like if they're promising work or they're promising, you know, X number of units and you'll be a commission on each one, you've got to assume that that is not going to work out.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Totally. Like.

Chris Gammell: Work starts when you get half the contract money in your bank account. Right. And the rest is paid upon completion. Yep. That's it. Yep. Yeah. Consulting. Ooh, don't miss that.

Dave Jones: I don't miss it at all. That's why I just turn them. And I get, yeah, I get a constant, you know, influx in my inbox of, yeah, people wanted me to do design work because they've seen my videos or whatnot. Right. And, yep. No, I have to turn them all down.

Chris Gammell: Well. Anyway. Well, what about, I really don't know what to say past that other than, how about that iPhone?

Dave Jones: Oh, this is an interesting thing. Yes. New iPhone X. Right. Right. Who cares? Yeah. Who cares about the iPhone X? Yeah. I don't really care about the final product.

Speaker ?: No.

Dave Jones: But man. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't mind looking inside this thing. It's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. There's some cool engineering going inside. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But did you know?

Chris Gammell: Oh, well, I saw you tweet about it. I know what you're about to say, but yeah. What?

Dave Jones: Oh. Yeah, probably.

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: They did that tear down literally within walking distance down the street from me.

Chris Gammell: See, okay. I believe you. And yet, everybody in those videos has an American accent. They do. Do you have like an enclave of Americans or what?

Dave Jones: No. It's because the time zone, dummy. You should know about time zones, right? Australia gets the product first, right? So, what they do is they fly out here to Sydney because Sydney's the easternmost, you know, well, they could have. You say Auckland? Yeah, the easternmost. Well, they probably could have gone to New Zealand, right? Yeah. But anyway, they chose to come to Sydney. And yeah, so they're standing in line at the local Castle Hill Shopping Centre here at the Apple Store there. They get one of the first units and then they drive 10 minutes down the road just to-

Chris Gammell: Pop that sucker open, yeah.

Dave Jones: And they've got, there's a huge contract manufacturer just within spitting distance of my lab. And they've got all the, you know, the blowing, like the hot air tools to get, you know, these two boards have to be separated with a massive hot air system. And they've got all the tools. So, what they do is they fly in. They fly a team in from the US, like days before, with all their tools, all their video equipment, all their tools to disassemble their, you know, cameras and everything else and their studio lights and they set up in the office, in the boardroom of this local assembly company. And they, you know-

Chris Gammell: And tear that shit apart.

Dave Jones: And they tear that shit apart. And they've apparently got 16 hours to do it before it goes on sale in the US. So, they've got 16 hours to tear it down, photograph it, do all the stuff and then upload the content before it's released in the US. And that's how they do it.

Chris Gammell: That is a weird job. I will say that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, if I knew that, I would have like done a behind the scenes thing of watching them do it, you know. Or I could simply beat them to it. I don't think they would have liked that.

Chris Gammell: You would have been like, I'm just going to post this before you guys. You cool? We're cool? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, yeah, right. Yeah. All right. All right. All right. We were like joking that, hey, maybe we should just beat them to it next time, you know. It'd be funny if we're like, I'll stand in line with them and then, you know, like, yeah. Yeah. Let's see who can release the content first. I don't think you care that much. I don't think you care that much. Content first.

Chris Gammell: No, I don't care that much. Right. Oh, man. Well, if people haven't seen it, so it's a great teardown. It's surprising. So, I mean, so why should we care, right? From a consumer perspective, I don't personally care. I'm not anywhere near buying one of these things. It's $1,200 for a phone. It's, you know, but there's some interesting stuff. Like, so first off, I always think it's really interesting the amount of battery space, right? So, basically, this whole thing is single layer, right? The whole phone is basically, it's like a screen layer and then it's got a layer of stuff. And then within that layer of stuff, what, 60% of it is battery? Yeah. Maybe. Maybe more. I don't know. Well, it has to be because, you know. Right, right, right, right. So, then of the remaining percentage-wise, it's probably 30% circuit boards and then probably 10% is like camera modules that are like flex boards. Flex, what is that called? Like mixed media or whatever. So, it's like rigid flex where it's like some parts are circuit boards, some parts are flex.

Dave Jones: Have they got two batteries in there? Looks like there's two separate.

Chris Gammell: There are multiple components, yeah. So, like they're different cells packed in there. Oh, okay. I think they're used separately, though.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. She uses one big pack. Right. Interesting.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'd love to know how many layers this board is because there is no routing room on the top. That's exactly what I want to talk about. It's like they're dropping down every via.

Chris Gammell: Right. Every single one is just going. And the really crazy thing is the outside of it. So, they did RF shielding. I think what they did is they sandwiched this thing with like, it's like a castle wall, kind of like if we're trying to talk about visualizing it. Right. So, they basically built up the walls, I think by adding extra layers of PCB material. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're actually fiberglass. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And then they drilled down through them. Yeah. Right. Well, they drilled down through them, right, as vias. And then they filled the vias with solder. And then the lid, yeah, like you're saying, is soldered on.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, that's why they needed this big hot air machine to do it. Like, you can't do it with a regular hot air machine. You need like this huge, massive, wide nozzle that goes over the whole thing. Right. And then boom, pop the whole thing off. Right. So.

Chris Gammell: And then there's just a whole bunch of, I mean, like, then there's just a bunch of chips. And then, I guess that's a crazy thing too, is that within each of these chips, then there's, you know, smaller subsystems and smaller subsystems, right? These are, some of them are SIPs, some of them are SOMs or whatever the hell the acronyms are. So, it's just layer on layer on layer. I mean, so really it's like big packages and then capacitors. That's about it. And connectors. So. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's absolutely amazing. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Did you see the one, the one big, the one in the big red box? This is a tweet that someone had sent out. So, it's the Wi-Fi Bluetooth module, Apple and Murata. And someone, someone sent it out, sent out a tweet about it and they said, only at Apple do you get to put a cutout in the actual package. There's like a capacitor where they, they basically formed the, the shield for this thing around, around the capacitor. Like they needed a large scale. Right. Ceramic cap. So. Yeah. It's crazy.

Dave Jones: Speaking of which, I just released a video just before. I saw that. I was going to ask you about that. Before we went through it. Yeah. I have ceramic capacitor cracking. Yeah. And many different ways to avoid it. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: How would I avoid it, Dave?

Dave Jones: How would you avoid it? I'm glad you asked. There are several methods. One is to simply stop. If people don't know, when, when you flex a PCB, right, it can be, it can be a subtle flex when you plug in a connector onto a PCB and, you know, and it flexes a little bit because the standoffs are some way away from the, you know, from the actual connector. When you install the board, you might have to flex it when you break it out from your panel, when you get it assembled, when you break it out. If you've got V scoring and you...

Chris Gammell: And the material itself isn't super rigid, right? I mean, that's another thing to state. No, no, no. It's flexible. So it's like epoxy resin and fiberglass, right? Yeah, it's flexible. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, there's some give.

Dave Jones: Anyway, so it flexes. And when you do that, if you've got some multi-layer ceramic capacitors on there, when the board flexes, if you flex it enough, ceramic is, of course, completely brittle. So it just, it breaks. And...

Chris Gammell: Well, so you could crack the solder connection as well, but usually the... You could, yeah. The capacitor will crack before the solder will, right?

Dave Jones: The capacitor will crack. The ceramic will crack before the solder does, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you've got a good...

Chris Gammell: The preview image you have here is really good. So it's showing like the circuit board is like an arc pretty much. And yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. And yeah. And so you get these micro cracks in there. And generally, they can fail short. So the capacitor is a short circuit. So if you've got it across a power supply that can deliver a lot of energy in there, poof, the magic smoke escapes, flames escape, and it ruins your day, right?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: And I've now done two videos on two different products where they've caught a light because these capacitors have failed, you know? So anyway, it's a big problem, huge problem in the industry. Everyone loves their multi-layer ceramic capacitors, right? Because their volumetric density is huge and everything else, right? And they're low cost and they're surface mount and, you know, they're cheap as chips, whatnot. Horrible temperature coefficient, of course. But anyway. So everyone loves their multi-layer ceramic capacitors, but they're susceptible to these cracking in board flexing in the manufacturing stage, in the product stage. If you drop your product, if you've got weight on your board, boom, you get a little bit of flex. And if you drop it 10 times because it's a kid's toy or something, then, you know, this is a real problem. So you can get these cracks. So how do you avoid it? One is to stop it flexing in the first place, right? By putting extra standoffs on your board and things like that. Another is simply reorienting the capacitor along, because they actually break along the longitudinal axes, right? The flex, so if you simply rotate your component 90 degrees to the flexion point, that can often fix the problem, right? Or eliminate it entirely, right? Or reduce the effect, et cetera. Another one is to put mechanical stress isolation slots around your mounting posts and or around the components. It's little slot cutouts routed out. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it stops the flexion, you know?

Chris Gammell: So this is something you would do. You wouldn't do that at the beginning. Would you do that when you were like at the beginning of a design cycle? Or you would do that if you were trying to remedy it after the fact? Because you'd seen-

Dave Jones: Oh, you would. If it was a rugged product, yeah, you would do it into the design cycle.

Chris Gammell: Interesting. And like, this is for every cap or just a cap of a certain size?

Dave Jones: Any multi-layer ceramic capacitor. But of course, the higher capacitance you go, the more layers they have to get in there, the finer between the layers, the more that the layers have to go towards the edges. There's a whole, you know, whole slew of things in there.

Chris Gammell: Sure, sure. I'm just thinking like a board that looks like Swiss cheese, though, because you've got so many cutouts. Oh, well, no. Because caps are just so common.

Dave Jones: No, you generally wouldn't. You wouldn't engineer slots around capacitors. That's like extreme case. Okay, okay. If you had to do that, you're doing something else wrong.

Chris Gammell: Right. So it's better to take a look at like how your user might be handling this. Like the best case is you don't have someone handling a circuit board in the first place, right? Yeah, that's right. Or you have like standard operating procedures for your manufacturer that says, must insert like A, B, and C. But if all else fails, sometimes there's still issues, right? Right.

Dave Jones: There's still issues. Or if you drop the product, it's like you just put more standoffs in there and things like that.

Chris Gammell: So you're saying if something is like in an application that's likely to be dropped, not like... Yes. Right. Okay. Right. Okay. So this is like almost like a DFM type or it's like a designing for ruggedness kind of thing. Yeah, totally.

Dave Jones: And anyway, so there is a standard for this, which is the automotive standard. It stems from the automotive industry. And there's a standard for testing the flex of the PCB and testing, you know, at what displacement the capacitors crack, right? And companies have... Or... So the other way to fix it is you can buy capacitors immune to this sort of problem, right? So there's four different technologies, basically. There's four different ways to solve this, at least, at a manufacturing point of view. And I can send you a good link if you like. It's in the notes so that you have it in front of you. Hang on. My interwebs is slow. This is terrible, isn't it? This is terrible radio. Anyway, the manufacturer... This is such a problem that the manufacturers have many different ways to actually solve this. So if you have a look...

Chris Gammell: It's like a GUI... It's like a... You can't just use like flexible solder?

Dave Jones: Well, no. Flexible terminations is one. They have the flexible end terminations. So that link I sent you, if you go down... Probably... Oh, anyway. These are the four different solutions that a manufacturer actually offers.

Chris Gammell: There's like resin layers and stuff like that. Soft termination. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They put these resin layers, these conductive resins in the end cap. So they're flexible. So when the board flexes, the ceramic substrate is not rigidly connected to the end caps of the capacitor.

Chris Gammell: So tell me about this then. Have you experienced the fire shorting kind of problems here?

Dave Jones: I have experienced it, yes. Really? What would happen there?

Chris Gammell: So what was the failure mode?

Dave Jones: Oh, the failure mode was drops.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And poof. So, you know, it's... Yeah. Because I used to be in the rugged marine industry. You know? Right. Yeah. And this sort of crap would happen. So, yes, you learn very quickly. And also vibration as well, causing cracks. I've had stuff on the production line, for example, that gets wheeled around on trolleys. Oh, yeah. And when you're wheeling around things all day, there's a lot of vibration coupled into your, you know, rack mount bit of test gear that... Right.

Chris Gammell: And if a little bit of vibration, like that amount of vibration does it, then, yeah, being out in the field will definitely do it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, you know, like I've never had anything actually, like, completely catch on fire that you have to have a fire extinguisher, but I've had stuff failed. And then I open it up, and sure enough, there's the black flame marks, you know? Yeah. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. So, the fire hasn't caught on and burnt your whole rack and, you know, like, yeah. So, the fire's been localized, but you can see all the black score marks from the flames from the capacitor. You know it happened, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know this capacitor caught a light. You can see the story, right. Yeah, it didn't just explode, right, because of overvoltage or something else. No, it actually caught a light. And, yeah, it's a big problem. So, there's, yes, there's those ways, so there's the flexible end terminations. There's also the way they internally do the structures inside the capacitor so that they can do effectively two capacitors in series, which is another way to solve it. If you've got a critical component where a short might be an issue on your board. Oh, yeah, another one does a blocking capacitor then. Yeah, you put another one as a blocking capacitor, put them in series. Oh, that's a cool idea. And you can actually do that inside the capacitor itself. So, you can buy a capacitor, multi-layer ceramic cap, that's effectively two capacitors in series built inside it. Huh. It's just the structure of the plate.

Chris Gammell: Just capacitors all the way down, huh?

Dave Jones: In comparison. That's it. Right. And turtles, really. Right, right. I like turtles. Anyway, and the fourth one is you can get ones that are designed to fail open. So, the cracks always happen at the end of the termination, like, you know, near the end caps. So, if you pull back your plates inside the capacitor from the end caps, then you can, yeah, the capacitor can crack, but it's not going to crack short. It's not going to short. It's going to crack open. So, yeah. And they're called fail open capacitors. So, yeah, there's different methods, and all these manufacturers offer these things.

Chris Gammell: So, what would, if you were going to tell someone that when they should start considering this stuff, it would be, like, rugged situations.

Dave Jones: Rugged. Anything involving vibration. Temperature as well. Thermal. This can not only happen through flexing. It can happen through thermal as well.

Chris Gammell: So, you say something like this, right? And then a beginner hears that, and they're like, oh, my God, I have to worry about capacitor cracking. It's like, well, not really.

Dave Jones: Well, you know, millions of products get away with it just fine, but. Right. It's something to consider. Sure, of course. Yeah, it's something to consider. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: I just mean that, like, it's tougher. So, like, I encounter beginners who are like, oh, well, there's all these things to think about. And it's like, sometimes you've got to just, like, simplify this feature set, right? Yeah, right. Well, let's get you working to the point where you understand R's and C's first, and then we'll worry about all this other stuff. Then we'll worry about sourceability.

Dave Jones: Otherwise, you'd end up, like, fusing every capacitor. You know, you'd get so paranoid you'd end up putting a fusing series with every single cap, you know.

Chris Gammell: So, I just started making my own capacitors, man, because that's the only way it was going to work.

Dave Jones: Right. Or you can simply choose one that's not susceptible. You can choose a film cap or something like that, you know.

Chris Gammell: But then your costs are way high, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Cost and board space and everything else. Yeah, exactly. There's a reason people use multi-layer ceramic caps. Yeah. They're the duck's guts these days. Oh, man. Well, they're not the duck's guts, but they're super popular because...

Chris Gammell: I designed in some... So, that board that I was working on, which I have updates on, there was a tantalum cap on there. And I was borrowing a design from someone else. And I was like, why the hell is this a tantalum? I just don't really see tantalum capacitors. Then when I went to go look at the price of tantalum capacitors, I'm like, oh, my God. It was like a $1.50, $2 cap or something like that. And I'm like, so I had no... So, obviously, I talked to the designer, and he had done all the testing on it and made a lot of sense. Basically, it was like really high... It needed high availability of current for, you know, doing cell phone transmission type stuff and a lot of capacitance. Because, you know, it just tugs on the line so hard for power supply and stuff like that. And it's such a small design. So, like, all that stuff added up to the idea of, yeah, it needed a tantalum capacitor. And I looked, and there was nothing else out there. My God. Those are... Yeah. Yeah. They're not cheap. They are not cheap. Yeah. And it's like, sometimes I long for the days of electrolytic caps. I know there's... That wouldn't solve the problem, right? Because that has ESR internally, stuff, everything. There's other... But just like from a simple and cheap kind of perspective, sometimes it's like, oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: I remember the days.

Dave Jones: But, like, you know, all this ceramic business has not changed. You know, you can... There's still a market for your tantalum caps. Still a market for your...

Chris Gammell: Sure, sure.

Dave Jones: Electrolytic caps. There are film caps. They're all still... They all still have their niches, you know? Yes, yes. There's no one magic technology that's come along and gone, well, that's the obvious one to use, you know?

Chris Gammell: The one that I've seen... So, I was talking to someone about that because, like, the one that I've seen is that a lot of the former electrolytic caps are getting replaced with the aluminum electrolytic simply because surface mount, you know, being able to pick and place them still is, like... That's one of the bigger constraints, right? So, being able to avoid the through-hole process is important.

Dave Jones: And now there's solid ones as well. Oh, I don't have a chance. So, they're used on computer. Motherboards are almost exclusively using solid caps. Oh, interesting. So, the dielectric can't dry out. It isn't a traditional liquid, right? Yeah, because if you watch... Computers get hot, right? Right. Like, you know, you've got processors in there, you know, that are, you know, spewing out 100 watts, right? Right, right.

Chris Gammell: Well, if you watch any, like, repair video on, like, people doing anything with tubes, too, the first thing they do is they go in and they... Oh, change all the caps. Yeah, replace the caps. They've all dried out. Yep, exactly. Some of it's aged, but also it's just, yeah, heat and all that other stuff. Right, yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that makes sense. Good old wet electrolyte, you know.

Chris Gammell: Just fill it back up, right? Just have a little fill port on the top. Yeah, fill it back.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I feel like, yeah, I should have a little port, yeah. Pour your electrolyte back in.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: She'll be all right.

Chris Gammell: Right, just a little Gatorade. That's what they are internally. Right. But yeah, so this board, it's my comeuppance is trying to go too fast. I had the old pin swap, Dave. Oh, on what? On a SOT 523.

Dave Jones: What component is it?

Chris Gammell: It was just a FET. I mean, it was...

Dave Jones: Oh, right, you had the source and drain swapped or something. Yep, the gate and the source, yep. The gate and the source. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And it was because the stupid data sheet, you know, like...

Dave Jones: Blind data sheet, yay, yay, yay.

Chris Gammell: I know, it wasn't the... It was all me, I get it. But like... Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the thing is, like, I went and like... So once I realized a mistake, right? I went and like... Right. I was like, oh, well, maybe I could source one. You know, maybe there was one in the marketplace that was swapped. So I went through and looked at all these other data sheets. And I tell you, having a 3D view of a component with, like, the gate source drain type thing on there, unambiguous at that point. Right, right. There's no, like... Yep, yep. So my real thing was that I was looking at it, again, on me, 100%. I was looking at it bottom view. It was a bottom view footprint, which always gets me. Like, I've done that for relays before, and I'm not sure... I'm sure there's reasons why that they do that, but I don't get it. And so that's where the source of that swap was. And when I saw... But a lot of the data sheets now have switched over to doing that 3D view on the data sheet. Yeah. And you just can't mess it up at that point. Yeah, it's great. So I like that a lot better.

Dave Jones: Well, you can. Yeah. Don't underestimate... Hold my beer. If you're willing to screw up.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no. So that was... You know, and it's just like, I've been doing this a long time. And it's like, that's just embarrassing. It still happens, but damn, you know, like... For some reason, too, like, Kaiket doesn't have a SAT 523. It was actually because I made the footprint for it. You know, the footprint was the right size and everything. It was just the pins were swapped. So, yeah. Hold on. Yep. Yep. So, yeah, I'll have a couple working. But it'll... They're not... I'm not using that board as the intended purpose for a workshop. Right. So, yep. Yep. Good old... You know, the other thing, too, is that, like... So I used, like, a nice PCB vendor. I don't know if you saw the pictures I tweeted. Like, they look nice, right? And it's like the... It's like that false... That false equivalency of, like, a nice-looking PCB. Right. It was still a prototype, you know? Yeah. You know, like... And so it was still a Rev1. And... But so, like, because of that expectation, it's like, oh, this looks like a finished PCB.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it looks like... Yeah, exactly. You know?

Chris Gammell: That hurts, so... But I... Some things went well. 0402. That went really well, actually, surprisingly.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Did you do them by eye or did you use magnification?

Chris Gammell: I did them by eye, actually. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Because, like we've talked about on here before, right? So I forget what the mag thing that you have.

Dave Jones: You did reflow, didn't you? So that's easier than...

Chris Gammell: Yes, I did that by eye.

Dave Jones: Going there and individually soldering with actual, you know, 0.3mm solder each one.

Chris Gammell: Right. But I was talking about the actual magnification. So I forget what the thing you have is, like the heads-up, like, magnifier thing.

Dave Jones: That is the Mantis.

Chris Gammell: The Mantis, right. So, like, it's all about that distance from... So, like, having enough room to get a soldering iron in there. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. So I didn't have that with... I was just using older, like, you know, bifocal magnification, you know, glass magnification. Yeah, right. But it was not enough room to solder in there. Because, you know, I was doing that for repairs and stuff. The thing that I did, though, and that I will definitely be doing for future stuff, is that... So, one, I switched to stainless stencils, which was fantastic, because I was doing, like, you know, multiple boards.

Dave Jones: Well, they're cheapest chips now, aren't they?

Chris Gammell: They're super cheap. I think I paid, like, 50 bucks for two of them.

Dave Jones: Jeez, I think it might have got ripped off.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so that was for single ones. You're right. I mean, like, you can get them cheaper. I think the... It's crazy now. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, big, sore laser cut, you know, they just churn them out like they're nothing.

Chris Gammell: Right. So, the thing that I did, though, that I had not done before, is I used a laser cutter to make a work holder for it. So, I took the board, the edge cuts file, and then I transferred that as a DXF, and then I cut it out of just wood. And then I made, like, a jig for doing this. You know, in the past, I had... It's not like this is anything, you know, groundbreaking, but it's... Yeah. In the past, I had used basically just, like, rulers, like, our stencil sends you... Oh, yeah, yes. Like, right-angle rulers that you can kind of tape into, but in terms of repeatability, it's not really there. In this case, the board was, like, literally, like, custom fit into this thing. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, if you got a couple hundred, you would, right? You'd go to that. If you got 10, you just wouldn't bother, right?

Chris Gammell: Maybe. I mean, I don't know. Like, this is for... So, these were already cut out, too. So, this wasn't, like, a... This wasn't a panel. This was actually a cut-out board with rounded edges and stuff.

Dave Jones: I've had no problem with just the right-angle ruler thing, and you just put some tape on the stencil and flap it over, and Bob's your uncle.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, I've... Yeah. I've had mixed success with that in the past. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's doable, but I think with the smaller stuff, too, this really helped line it up and made it repeatable. So... Cool. Plus, I got a laser cutter working for the... Like, I... Those things are pieces of shit, man. Like, they're printer drivers. They're Windows printer drivers. Like... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm not the first person to complain about these, but man...

Dave Jones: It's all in the software, right? It's all in the software.

Chris Gammell: I guess so. Maybe it's because this is, like, a really low-cost one.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. It's one of those, you know, $1,000 laser cutters, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: But it's like... So, first off, it uses... So, you know, back to David's review thing. Like, it uses AutoCAD, which it's like, okay, I've never used AutoCAD before. Uh... And then it's like... The requirements are... It has to... Like, the way that it determines what's a cutout versus, like, a etch versus whatever, it's like the color of the line and the thickness of the line and whatever, whatever. And it's just... It's painful. It's really painful, yeah. So...

Dave Jones: Yep. You get what you pay for.

Chris Gammell: SVGs and DXFs and whatever, whatever the hell... PDFs sometimes and then the scaling. It's like... It's like a... Oh, that's a DXFs or unitless, right? So, you just have to, like... You have to say, oh, well, by the way, that's millimeters.

Dave Jones: It's like... It's practically a universal rule. If you buy something, like, you know, some no-name cheap thing, the software is never, ever

Chris Gammell: good. Right, right. Right? Never.

Dave Jones: I can't remember one case where I've gone, jeez, that's nice software. Shame about the hardware. You know, like...

Chris Gammell: I find, too, that, like... So, a lot of, like, companies that are focused on building the hardware, like, the software is just... It's an afterthought. Like, sometimes it gets better. Yeah, yeah, of course. But, like, most of the time it does not. Like, I don't... Yeah. Right. You know, I don't want to disparage our own here, but, like, yeah. Hardware makers are not usually, like, thinking, like, oh, what a great, like... User interface is important. Yeah, exactly. It's a great UI. The flow is really nice. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard that the other mill, whatever the hell they're calling that these days, that that's well thought out, more, like, from a software mindset. But, I don't know. Oh, and actually, maybe it's more... Maybe it's, like, the modern... Maybe it's just more modern tools. Because, so, Sharyar, he did a review of the... Yes, yes. Of that Nomad as well. Yep. And that's... So, and I've met Robert before, the guy that does whatever the CAM program is there. Art Cam or whatever it is that's tied to the Nomad. That's a nice program. So...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Software. The bane of our existence.

Dave Jones: Is that, like, just tied to that unit or is that, like, universal software?

Chris Gammell: It's universal, but then it's, like...

Chris Gammell: Basically, the unit was built after the software, which is an interesting model, so...

Dave Jones: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's a nice unit. I mean, like... I mean, the Sharyar, of course, does a great review. We'll link it. But, yeah. It's...

Dave Jones: Cool.

Chris Gammell: You know, it's still... Like we've talked about many times on the show in the past, it's still milling. Good luck.

Dave Jones: There's a drill bit coming down, it spins, and it cuts copper. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, what else is on our list? We got other stuff on our list.

Dave Jones: We're not talking about the 3mm TSLC fab. That's just... No. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Did you see the survey of $1 microcontrollers? This was actually... This is a nice...

Dave Jones: Oh, that's brilliant.

Chris Gammell: Nice document. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That was actually on the EV... That started on the EV blog forum. Oh, really? The guy who did that. Sorry, I don't know his name. I don't have the link here. Jay Carlson. Right. And, yeah, started on the EV blog forum. He asked, which micros should I actually review? And he did, like, what, 20 of them?

Chris Gammell: 20-something, yeah.

Dave Jones: 20-something micros. And not only... Like, he had to download and install the development tool for each one. Then he benchmarked each one. He recompiled the same software, you know, benchmarking software for each one. And then has, like, a table of all their compile speeds and their execution speeds and their clock cycles. And, wow.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I can't imagine the amount of work that went into that.

Chris Gammell: This would be, like... This is, like, the wire cutter. This is, like, wire cutter for, like, micros, right? This would be an amazing service, but the problem is just there's not enough people that would need it, you know? Like, we love it, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. This is very nice. So, hats off, Jay. I'm sure you're getting lots of good feedback, but... Yep. The amp hour loves it. Wow. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's a ridiculous amount of work. I can't... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And it's interesting, too, because he's kind of... He's in different, like, fields as well. So, he's got STM32. I think they're kind of, like, lower cost, right? Yeah. There's PIC32.

Dave Jones: And there's, like, you know, your lower ones, like, you know, your lesser known ones, like, you know, Holtec and things like that, which you find in your One Hung Low products, but nobody ever talks about, you know? Try and go find a forum thread on Holtec. Right. Oh, I'm using my Holtec processor. Like, no. Right? It's used in China in, you know, farting novelty toys, and that's it. Right? Right. And, yeah. So, he's done all that. He's compared those ones.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and it looks like nothing's above, like, so, like, I think the... I'm not sure it's... Yeah. So, they're all, like, Cortex M0 and below, it looks like. Right. Yeah. I'm sure he mentions this somewhere in here, so... I'm sure there's some requirements. You know, it's not, like, super, super powerful, right? Because then you start getting into, like, crazy feature sets and, you know, lots of processing power, and... Yeah. So, this is... I'm sure it was based on his needs.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, the micro has had to cost under $1 in volume from the regular suppliers. Got it. Yeah. You know, so... That makes sense.

Chris Gammell: That's in the title. Yeah. Yeah, and that's the F0 family.

Dave Jones: It's kind of apples and, you know, but it... You know, like, you look at that and you go, well, that's apples and oranges, you know? And... But, at the end of the day, they all do cost a dollar, you know, in volume. And it's, like, so... Yeah. It's fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.

Chris Gammell: Wait, why is it apples and oranges?

Dave Jones: Oh, because sometimes, like, oh, okay, you're comparing a 32-bit ARM core, right, to a little 8051 Holtec... Oh, I see.

Chris Gammell: It's just the scale differences like that. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah, the scale differences are huge, right? But they're still in the same price range. So, technically, if that's your... If that's your benchmark as the $1 physical chip, then, well, you know, so be it. Mm-hmm. Right? It's just weird of what parts fall into that category.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, this... What span of them is just incredible. We're heading in this direction with more things. Like, I'm actually... I mean, like, I'd say in the next couple of years, too, we're going to start seeing that, you know, Cortex-M3, more power in there, stuff like that, right?

Dave Jones: Well, I've got an STR micro in my new 121 GW multimeter, and it's, like, part of me just thinks that's ridiculous, you know? And, like, sacrilege. Why does a freaking multimeter need a powerful 32-bit ARM micro? You know?

Chris Gammell: Because math, Dave. Come on.

Dave Jones: Because it's got a bloody SD card in it, and, you know, it writes to the fat file system, and... Oh, that's true. Yeah. You get that out of the box, right? Right, right. Yeah. That's nice. And it's got a bootloader, you know, firmware bootloader that loads your firmware from the SD card, you know? It's all kind of...

Chris Gammell: Well, also, you don't want to be writing... I mean, like, that's the other thing, too, though. Like, you don't want to be writing assembly, right? You know? No, no, that's right. Yeah. So you can... Borrow...

Dave Jones: Or you don't want to be writing your own SD card driver or bootloader... Right, yeah. ...driver for, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: A dollar. I just want it to work. A dollar. Anyways, yes, people should definitely check this one out. That is a great link, so...

Dave Jones: Wow.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There is someone... Speaking of auditing different solutions, someone that... Josh.com... Josh.com, really? Wow. He goes over the, you know, auto-routing and what's going on with that these days. And basically, Josh is... Assuming this person's name is Josh. Basically, the assertion is that if a computer can beat the best Go player on Earth, surely he can route a mess of traces better than an idiot like me. No. That's his words. I totally disagree with that premise, actually. So, like, from the gates, that's a different premise because... And this is always the argument, right? Mm-hmm. Go has a very specific set of rules. Yes, there's billions of outcomes. But it's a hard set of rules, whereas, like, you move a chip, you know, a couple millimeters to the right and you've got a whole new set of rules, right? So, yeah.

Dave Jones: And try and get it to do placement, too, right? If you're going to argue about auto-routing, then you must include placement.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right? Go for it.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: See how shitty it is. Right. Like, you know, as shitty as you think auto-routers might be in a lot of cases, they are. A lot of cases, they're very good. But, yeah, auto-placement. Like, you...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's just nuts.

Chris Gammell: And so... And this is always an interesting exercise either way, right? Like, so this is basically throwing computing at it. And I'm sure that over time, it'll get better and better and better, right? Especially if, like, you started to take... So, if you looked at other designs and saw how chips were relatively placed, or if you took a reference design and, you know, used that as, like, a feed-in to, you know, some kind of machine learning something something, Chris doesn't know what he's talking about. But, like, the idea is that, like, you know, it's learning basically by averaging other designs, right? If you can do that kind of stuff, then, yeah, maybe it starts moving towards, like, the placement. And I'm sure that that's stuff over time, but people probably aren't going to do that anytime soon. So, yeah. Interesting, you know, it's just, like, a state-of-the-art kind of... It's a quick survey of what's going on these days. You know, my t-shirt still holds.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay, different ones, did he? Oh, yeah, he's actually comparing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, free route, and then dip trays. I think these are some of the free ones. Connect, I don't know what that is. So, Rimex. Rimex. Rimex. Yeah. Yeah, some, I mean, like, it's interesting, too, just to see how they, you know, perform against one another. Like you said, he's not... You know, some of them do perform well. Like, you know, the high-paid tools have a pretty good start on a lot of that stuff. But, yeah. Yeah. So, this is a... Yeah, it's a, you know, it's just a look at... It's a survey of what's going on these days, especially free tools. So, cool. Cool. All right. Yep. What else? We're going on down the list. I lost my list. Oh, the sound of dial-up. That was fun. I'm sure that you knew some of this stuff. I didn't know any of that stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, no. You young whippersnappers don't know this. I know what it sounds like.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I was using it, but I just never developed with it, so...

Dave Jones: A video is on my... A to-do. It's on my to-do list, which is... Should I spoil it? Anyway, it involves dial-up. Oh, okay. It involves dial-up. Cool. Yep. Anyway. Yep.

Speaker ?: Okay.

Dave Jones: The good old days.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Nice.

Dave Jones: Yeah, they're just analyzing the modem sex sound, you know?

Chris Gammell: The modem sex sound? Oh, is they talk to one another and they... They talk to one another. They mate. Yeah. Yes. Right. Okay. Yep. Makes sense. Another link that I like that apparently... It's always interesting to see these things that I love and then nobody else gives a shit about on Reddit, which is what Reddit's great for, right? But since we run the show, we get to pull out the ones we care about anyways. So, Chris Quintero from Bolt. I love what Chris and Ben and Kate, they all write for the Bolt blog. But basically, they do like a once-a-year state of hardware funding. So, it's just kind of interesting taking a look at what's getting money, right? Obviously, there's a lot of... You know, another company shut down, Dave. I don't know if you saw that really expensive tea maker.

Dave Jones: Tea maker? No? Yeah. Oh, God. Is another fail?

Chris Gammell: Oh, so bad. It was like...

Dave Jones: How much money did they get?

Chris Gammell: Like 40 million or something like that. It wasn't quite Juicero level, but it was like a significant amount. And then you look at it as like...

Dave Jones: That's a significant amount of stupid. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Like, what does it do? And it's like, oh, well, it sells packets of tea that then you put into this machine.

Dave Jones: Oh, God.

Chris Gammell: So, it's like an electric kettle? Like, and then like a tea subscription service. Are they barcoded? Yeah, right. Exactly. They totally are. Yeah, exactly. And it looked beautiful. Sure. I get that. But, wow. I mean, talk about a problem that does not need to be solved. Yeah. So, you know. Was it Pearl? No. Pearl?

Dave Jones: Don't they... I mentioned this on the forum, I think it was. Like, don't these... Like, you know, these venture capital firms are in charge of investing money for their clients. Uh-huh. Yep. Right? So, okay. If they're choosing, but surely don't the clients check what they've invested in on their behalf? Or do they really not give a shit?

Chris Gammell: You mean like, so Dave, the rich guy, gives money to Chris's hardware fund. Is that what you're saying? Right. That's like a $100 million fund. And then Chris goes out and gives $10 million in funding per year. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And like, surely you'd want to know where... Like, yeah, that's right. We're talking about Ubeam, right? And they're looking for funding at the moment. I know you don't like to talk about it. I don't know why.

Chris Gammell: No, no. I just mean it keeps coming up. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's just a ridiculous idea, right? Sure. And like, all you've got to do is type Ubeam into Google or YouTube and you're going to find my video. You're going to find Paul's blog on how ridiculous this idea is. So, surely the investors would see that and go, oh, this sounds a bit dodgy. I don't think... I think that's the thing though. Can you put my money into something else?

Chris Gammell: So, investors are basically paying to not think about it, right? Or they just...

Dave Jones: They are, but jeez. Wouldn't you at least...

Chris Gammell: Like, you are a different type of investor than...

Dave Jones: I know. But wouldn't you at least have some curiosity in...

Chris Gammell: I think that the other thing too is that there's layers of institutional stuff, right? So, like, sometimes these risky, you know, startup funds, right, are invested in by even larger funds, right? So, it's like funds of funds of funds and it's...

Dave Jones: Right, funds of funds of funds of pension money. Right. Exactly. So... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Got it. Yeah. That's probably...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Because I got like... Surely, if you were just some rich bastard...

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: ...you know, and you had a hundred million and you're giving it to a VC fund, surely you're going to do some Googling. You know, just like... Yeah. Yeah. Sure. You know, you would think so, right? Maybe. You've got nothing better to do with your time. You're worth a billion dollars. I don't know, man. Mo' money, mo' problems, you know? Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, as the great philosophers say... I would...

Dave Jones: Oh, greatly have their problems. Thank you very much.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, that T startup I mentioned was T-phoria and it was a thousand dollars to buy it. They only raised $12 million. So, anyways...

Dave Jones: Oh, so they got individuals. They sucked in individuals. Just like the... No, no, no, no.

Chris Gammell: That's how much it costs to buy the device. That's how much...

Dave Jones: Oh, what?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: A thousand dollars.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: For a machine that makes tea.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh. The tea industry is a massive one, according to TechCrunch. Yeah, well, we know because people like it because it's cheap and tea is delicious and is not required with a thousand dollar machine.

Dave Jones: I totally disagree with that. I don't understand tea at all. I don't...

Chris Gammell: Well, it's okay.

Dave Jones: You don't like coffee either, so...

Speaker ?: I don't understand flavored hot...

Dave Jones: I don't understand flavored hot water. I don't get it.

Chris Gammell: You also don't like caffeine, so like... No, I don't. All of these things conspire against you. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Anyway. Hmm. Oh. You and I haven't talked in a while, have we? What? There is a great YouTube channel. Who was that who linked me to this? Oh, the Vintage Tech Museum. Have we mentioned that on this channel before? I don't think so. So, we had talked to... Oh, we didn't talk to him. Sorry. It was in that book about Bell Labs, right? So, and I think maybe... So, I think maybe Jeff Kaiser, when he was on the show, he mentioned it. But basically, like, early satellites, right? So, like, the early... Mm-hmm. But AT&T sent up, basically. Telstar. And basically, this is a video about it from the Vintage Tech Museum. And it's just fantastic, right? So, like, just history of, you know, just like 1960s people in the lab working on satellites that looks like a Death Star kind of thing. So...

Dave Jones: I love how they produced videos back in the old days. They got the intro title and they've got the...

Chris Gammell: And, like, the orchestral music, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. The orchestra. The production values were phenomenal. Well, they had to be.

Chris Gammell: You couldn't do this on your computer, man. I know. You and me, we would not be in this business, you know?

Dave Jones: It's just amazing the effort they put into these videos.

Chris Gammell: Well, the other thing is they made a lot of money. That was the other thing. You know, Tektronix is making a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, that's great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. When is the last time we were talking? Was it... I guess we... I talked to Jeff two weeks ago. And then last week, I posted the... Oh, well, our one year's worth of amp hour, right? So... Right. Yep. So, I guess it's been three weeks at least. Anything else on here? Oh, I was on the MacroFab podcast right after our last episode you and I recorded. So... Right. People want to hear me talk more about that design that flopped.

Dave Jones: Speaking of YouTube channels, did you hear about Cody's Lab?

Chris Gammell: I did, yeah. I think I saw your stuff about it, yeah. Yeah. He's back now. And then AVE reposted the... Yep. Yeah. I had actually... Never heard of that channel before.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. He's a science channel.

Chris Gammell: Right. A lot of outdoor videos, it looks like.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. It does. Yeah, it does lots of exploding things and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. Two strikes and he was barred from uploading for two weeks. Yep. But it got fixed after like three days, two or three days or something because, you know, everyone protested. But... Right. That's just... It's just ridiculous. Something's got to change.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's...

Dave Jones: You can't have established channels with a million subscribers. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: You know, you can't have just... You know, like two people could go out and flag two separate videos as inappropriate and bam, you cannot upload another video.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: If you want to pee in Dave's pool, that's how you know how to do it now, folks. Right.

Dave Jones: It's just ridiculous. Right. Right. You know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, if they adhere to the number one internet rule, right, don't be a dick, then... Right. Yeah. But unfortunately, being the internet... Their automated bot is inherently a dick. Right. Right. Right. It's just... Yep. Crazy. One last one. There is a $500 LED. Did you see that video that it was posted?

Dave Jones: Oh, another one of those big stupid Chinese LEDs, is it? I had never seen these before. Or it could be a good quality brand. Oh, yeah. No, I've had companies offer to send me those big things.

Chris Gammell: Who uses these things?

Dave Jones: That's what I don't understand. Oh, man. They're like work sites and stuff like that. Factories who want to hang them from the... Usually, they're designed to be hung from the ceiling or whatnot and actually light up a factory. What not? And stuff like that. What?

Chris Gammell: What not? What not? Sorry. I don't get it. Like watts? Like 500 watts?

Dave Jones: Oh, God.

Chris Gammell: Sorry. That was terrible.

Dave Jones: That's pretty bad, yeah. That wasn't the least bit humorous. I'm sorry. Maybe I'm just... I'm laughing. I'm grouched today. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. Designed to hang from this... I've got a couple of them, actually. I think I did a teardown of one. It wasn't quite 500. I think it was 100 watts or something. Okay. And yeah, they're designed to hang from the ceiling. I actually installed them in my bunker because it's got high... Like you can't put them on like regular height roofs. They're designed to go on high factory roofs and things like that.

Chris Gammell: So if you're like in a Walmart or something like the ones that they use, the sodium...

Speaker ?: Totally.

Chris Gammell: A hardware store.

Dave Jones: Yeah, the sodium lights and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. These are designed to be replacements for those.

Chris Gammell: Interesting. Okay. So that's where it comes from. So I didn't really get the... Because he was showing it like outside as like a focused beam kind of thing as well.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Usually they're not focused. Well, you can get different ones, but usually they're designed to be like broad dispersion factory type lighting. Right. So yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess just like the point source kind of thing. But anyways, it's just interesting seeing this large of an LED. It's big. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's like 500 watts. It's like LEDs are only like 30, 20, 30% efficient. Right. Yeah. So if you're, you know, that's a lot of power you've got to get rid of and you can't have fans on them. Right. So you've got... Well, this one does.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's got a fan on the back of the unit.

Chris Gammell: So it's got a fan. So it's got a radiator basically. So it's got a bunch of copper heat tubes off the back. Heat pipes. Thank you. Heat tubes. Yep. And then into like a radiator. And then the radiator has a fan attached. Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: So that's... Yeah. The ones I've seen are all sort of passive.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah. Maybe that's 100 watts versus 500, right? The 500, right. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Yeah. Because 500, like, you know, it's 20, 30% efficient. It's got to light up. You know, it's got to dissipate a lot of heat.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: So yeah, they have to be big, bulky heat sinks. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Cool. Interesting. Anything else? No.

Speaker ?: Okay.

Dave Jones: We're way over.

Chris Gammell: People can, you know, always check our subreddit. So.

Dave Jones: Of course. It's the place to be. Be there or be square. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And thank you to our Patreon supporters. We always appreciate that. We actually, I, I, I picking, picking and choosing which ones I actually charge for in terms of. Ah, in terms of content. Yeah. Like last week when I reposted that one. Yeah. I didn't. I didn't. Right. That's not worth it. Right. So.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, we appreciate it. If we. Yes. Thank you very much. We have not hit our $200. We have a $200 goal on there, but we, you know, there's no rush for that, but that's a, for people are hoping for transcripts. So that's our, that's our goal. We'll see if we ever hit it.

Dave Jones: And if you're wondering, we use it to pay for the server cost because we have the Libsyn server that hosts all the audio and also to send out mics to guests. Yep. And that's pretty much our only expense, isn't it? Yep. There's the website, but that's not much.

Chris Gammell: And then meet up sometimes, you know. You're right. Oh, did you do a meet up yet?

Dave Jones: No, but it's coming.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh. Sure. All right. Yeah. Don't hold your breath, folks. You won't, you won't, you won't survive it. Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: All right. Cool. Talk to you next week. Catch you next time.