#370 – Alternate Info Sources

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released December 3rd, 2017. Episode 370. Alternate Info Sources.

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

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

Dave Jones: I hate new computers.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man, you were going for a while there.

Dave Jones: I feel so unproductive and frustrated.

Chris Gammell: Well, so what motivated the new computer?

Dave Jones: It was like, there were like a few things that I wanted that were only on like Windows 10 and stuff like that. So my editing machine was on Windows 7. And then I was doing this thing where I was changing my video cards out and it all crashed and did all sorts of stuff. So I thought, ah, look, this will be the time to change to Windows 10. And I actually found I hadn't been able to update to Windows 10 before because it wasn't compatible with my Dual Z on motherboard. But I found a workaround for it. And I thought, okay, look, I'll give it another go. And it worked. Yeah, it was like a flawless upgrade to Windows 10. No worries whatsoever. And then, of course, it was a complete from scratch. Like, you know, if you're going to do it, just do it from scratch.

Speaker ?: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, start from scratch. Nice, clean machine actually feels nice. Right. But when you're, yeah. Like, and I installed all new, so all my handbrake scripts, which I use for my video transcoding, none of those work anymore. Well, that's because there's a, I guess I'm using the new version of Handbrake. I don't know. And all the command line options I had don't work anymore. So all my scripts are broken. And I downloaded a new version of Vegas, which is my video editing software. And it doesn't work. It's crashing all the time. And it's not compatible with my file formats.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: So I went back to my old version of Vegas 14. So here's the real question.

Chris Gammell: Did you keep the physical old computer? Or is this on that same computer?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. No, it's on the same computer. I just physically wiped the hard drive, nuked it. Got it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, man. I probably would have, I don't know if I would have updated the whole computer, but at least keep the hard drive by itself. You could always go back and plug it back in.

Dave Jones: Well, I've got a copy of the hard drive. Oh, okay. I could go back, but I'm too far down the rabbit hole now, I think, to go back to Windows 7. Yeah. So I think I have to persist in, you know.

Chris Gammell: I think I mentioned on the show before, but one of my old bosses used to talk about the best thing to do is to throw an entire laptop with the charger, with all the licenses on that computer in a drawer with the project files. Right. Preserve the whole damn thing, you know. Yep. Freeze it in carbonite, you know.

Dave Jones: That's it. And then just boot the computer up in 10 years' time when you need to.

Chris Gammell: Yep. If you can. Yep. That's the best case scenario. Yep.

Dave Jones: All right. Anyway. Oh, snow. Yeah, that's a hassle, man. Yeah. But I think once you're down the rabbit hole, you can't go back. Yep. You can't, like, you know, like Windows 7 is like, you know, well, like it's good, it always worked, but I had issues with it and I worked around them and, you know, stuff like that. And I don't know. I just, eh. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I was getting a little long in the tooth, right? I mean.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, I want to, like, all my other machines are Windows 10 and I've had no dramas whatsoever, you know. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think engineers specifically are very primed to be sensitive. Like, you know, like you've honed your workflow, right? This could be a CAD thing as much as it is a video thing. Yeah. And it's like, if you move out of that workflow, you're going to be upset, right? At the very least, because it's like you're less productive.

Dave Jones: Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of less productive, I'm obviously, my voice is less productive today. So, I apologize for my, yeah, gravel voice. You know, having nephews at a holiday. No, no, I was nephews at a holiday. I got sick. And then last night I was at a loud meetup and just kind of ran my voice ragged. So, it's the moneymaker, man. And yet another pub, huh? Yeah, exactly. Another pub.

Dave Jones: What's the moneymaker?

Chris Gammell: The voice. The voice is the moneymaker. Earning the big bucks on the amp hour. Oh, yeah. That's right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, really? Well, you do sound more of a radio voice. Oh, no. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm very, you know. Yep. I've got the face for it.

Dave Jones: I shot a video yesterday and I had the, I had the wind filter. Turned on on my camera. I'm with my shotgun mic. And I went to edit my video and like there's, there, there is no bass. You know, like I don't have. Right, right. Like my voice is high pitched enough as it is. And it's like, here it is just devoid of all bass. And it's just, I sound like a chipmunk. You know, it's terrible. Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway. Oh, man.

Chris Gammell: Oh. Well, how are things otherwise? What's new? You and I are pretty much on a pretty regular, like every other week. You've been so busy that like I've been doing the guest shows and then you and I get back together. We hang out. So, how goes the, how goes the, is the Kickstarter on path? Is that?

Dave Jones: The Kickstarter is there. All I got to do is push a button. It is approved. It was approved. It took like two or three days to get approved.

Chris Gammell: So, by the time people are listening, then they, they, they might actually be there. So, we, if it is, we will add a link. Well, it'll be Sunday. So, like it's Wednesday. We record Wednesday here. I usually record Sunday night. So, early Sunday night. So.

Dave Jones: But you want to know what happened, right? I saw, I was like, I was getting, I think we mentioned this last time, right? I was getting 50 multimeters, right? They were making like a, it's not really a pre-production. It's like early production run of 50 meters, right? And I sold those, right? I put those on, like they, they said, oh yeah, like they're, they're finished. We're about to put them on the truck. Like, you know, it was hours away from being on the truck or something. So, I thought, oh yeah, I'll, I'll sell them, right? So, I put them on my store and I released those to my backers and my patron supporters and stuff like that, which, and that crashed my website. Oh, that's nice, yeah. Yeah, everyone just piled onto the web. Like, cause I actually released it at a set time. Like I told them what time I was going to release it and here's the password. And like, everyone tried to log onto my server. Couldn't handle it. So.

Chris Gammell: Hottest ticket in town, folks.

Dave Jones: Yep. And you missed out.

Chris Gammell: Where can they sign up to be part of this group?

Dave Jones: And then freaking WooCommerce failed. WooCommerce, like I put like stock of 40 units on there, right? And it's like, so once stock reached zero, it's supposed to stop selling them. No, WooCommerce ended up selling 51 meters.

Chris Gammell: Oopsie.

Dave Jones: Oopsie. And then sure enough, if you go Google search the problem, oh yeah, that's a known issue on WooCommerce. Yeah, thanks for that. Bloody hell. You know, you can't, can't win. So that's going to take me hours. You are not a retailer, man. You're not a retailer. That's going to take me hours to sort that shit out, you know. Yeah. Go and see who's.

Chris Gammell: So the production's on.

Dave Jones: Anyway, so, and then I got the email, right? So I sold all those and I was about to release the Kickstarter and with dates promised. Like I actually promised delivery in December, right? For the first like 400 people or something, right? Yeah, right. Because the company's promised me. This is the holiday thing, right? Yeah, right. Yeah. Everyone wants it before Christmas. We discussed that two weeks ago, right? Yep. So they promised that they could deliver 500 units before Christmas. So to be on the safe side, I think I put 450 or something, 400 or something. And yeah. And so I promised a delivery deadline, but now they're still working on a last minute issue. They found a problem during calibration of the meters. They found that there was some mode that they could get into that caused it to go haywire or something. And they couldn't figure it out. So I think they were hoping to solve it and not tell me. Oh no. But then they had to own up that, well, look, we don't know what's going on. And we've had to go back to the chipset manufacturer, as in the multimeter chipset, the Hicon multimeter chip. And because we don't know what's going on inside the chip, like the modes, you know, are we setting up the registers right? All that sort of jazz, you know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, so this is like a, there's a chip just for multimetering?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. There's like three or four manufacturers of multimeter chipsets. And almost every multimeter on the market uses one of these multimeter chipsets.

Chris Gammell: So how do they differentiate then?

Dave Jones: Oh, features, you know. Yeah? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And this is for like the low end stuff? Or is it as you move up, you start to get more custom?

Dave Jones: But basically any handheld, almost any handheld multimeter will use one of these multimeter chipsets. Except for some of the real ultra high end ones, you know, like the $800 handheld multimeters. Yeah, so it's a cost thing, right? Yeah, yeah. Yes, exactly. So, and it's all built in. Like you don't have to design all that stuff because there's so much switching. Yeah, right. All the different modes, switches. All the range switching, the auto arranging, the ADCs, doing measuring capacitors, diode, continuity, resistance, voltage, current, all the, you know, like if you design that from scratch, that's a lot of.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. And that's what they used to put into the probably the bench meters too, right? It's just more space and everything.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So it's a world of hurt. And, of course, yeah. So somebody's done all the hard, not even done all the hard work, but you can buy the chip for like a dollar, you know. So it's like, why wouldn't you, you know? Right. And so.

Chris Gammell: That's a good point about differentiation though too, right? Should you, you know, it might be worth it to differentiate, but you have to make sure that that high end market's there. You obviously are trying to get, you know, a broad based market in the first place. So of course it makes sense for yours.

Dave Jones: Well, I'm trying to keep costs low. Of course. We weren't going to design, we weren't going to roll our own, you know, analog front end and, you know, with all the switch in and everything else. It's just madness to do it, you know? Yeah. So, yeah. So it uses the same chip used inside the, the Keysight, you know, U1280 meter, which costs, you know, 600 bucks or something. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: But they have higher end resistors and other things.

Dave Jones: They just use, yeah. They just use a better, better voltage. Actually, mine uses the same voltage reference. But yeah, they use, you know, laser trimmed hybrid resistors and, you know, stuff like that actually around. So the chip is the, you know, is the core of it. And then you put your more accurate components, more expensive components around the outside. And yeah.

Chris Gammell: Ah, yes. Test equipment differentiation. All to please people just like yourself.

Dave Jones: So I don't know whether or not to take a chance and just release the Kickstarter, push a button and actually release it and then hope they can still deliver in December or wait for them to come back and solve this problem. And, but it's, it, in theory, it should only be like a firmware issue. Right. But, but because it involves, but because it involves the calibration of the, like they found it during calibration. So it's like, you know, yeah, some obscure mode though. Someone was playing around with the buttons and I don't know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, is that, I guess that kind of, we had talked about OTA in the past too. So is that the kind of thing where it would not be updatable over OTA?

Speaker ?: OTA?

Chris Gammell: Sorry. Over the air updates or I guess, I guess it would be SD card for you.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, I've got a micro SD card. Oh, no, no. Any firmware issue I can fix with the soft, with the SD card update.

Chris Gammell: Huh. Except. So the only real risk is if it's hardware. Except inside the bootloader. Right. Yes. Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: The only risk is if it's in the hardware. Yes. That's right.

Chris Gammell: So if it's in the hardware, that's a true risk, but otherwise, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I think the bigger thing is more what you're getting at is just the expectation stuff. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's like, I don't want to promise a December delivery because that's tight. I mean, it's December like tomorrow, right here. It's November 30th.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: It's December tomorrow. Shit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's really tight, man.

Dave Jones: I know. I know. But they said that they can.

Chris Gammell: Where did you get that from in the first place? That's why I don't get.

Dave Jones: What? The date.

Chris Gammell: Do people really care about Christmas or no?

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Yeah. Apparently they do. I get messages all the time. Come on. Release it. I want it by Christmas. I want it because they're buying themselves a Christmas present. They just want it. People are in the consumer, you know, buying mode. And they just want.

Chris Gammell: Could you just give them a coupon that's good for a multimeter?

Dave Jones: Coupon. IOU. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: IOU on multimeter.

Dave Jones: You are buying an IOU. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Which is basically what a Kickstarter is. That's true. That's a good point. Yeah. You know. Pretty much all it is. Anyway. So, yeah. Yeah. Wow. I didn't bother polishing the Kickstarter. It's like the video is shit. No, but nobody expected that, Dave. Come on. Yeah. No. There's no spitting polish in this at all.

Chris Gammell: You're not going for outsiders. You're going for insiders.

Dave Jones: No. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And.

Chris Gammell: Really, at this point, you probably could have just sold it all on your site. They pre-sold it. I could have.

Dave Jones: Well, Mike from Mike's Electric Stuff took me to task about this on the forum. He said, look, effectively, paraphrasing, but, you know, why bother with Kickstarter when if you're not going for a, you know, the consumer, you know, audience. That's a great question, Mike. So, Dave, what did you say? It is. And it's because there are benefits.

Chris Gammell: Hubris. That is the answer. To doing this. Hubris is the answer. Dave wants to say, I've got another Kickstarter.

Dave Jones: Psychology is the answer.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Hubris was the right answer.

Dave Jones: We will have to have a psychologist on the show because. Oh, God, no. I've been following a lot of psychology stuff recently. I've been watching quite a few psychology videos and they're fascinating.

Chris Gammell: What about? Like human nature stuff?

Dave Jones: Oh, just various. Yeah. Human, you know, people's. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Tell me. Tell me more. I'm a student of human nature.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Anyway. There. Yeah. The psychology of crowdfunding campaigns is very, very different to just releasing it on the website. It's like, oh, releasing it on the website. There's no sense of urgency. There's no sense of, oh, I've got to have it. You know. Yeah. Because, oh, it's on the shop. Big deal. I can always buy it later. You know. Right. But now it's, you know, it's just not the same. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, that's true. And I've. It's not the same. I've read about that in the past too.

Dave Jones: And people love to follow what they've bought into. Right?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: People just love to follow it.

Chris Gammell: I think you're right about that. Where that people, like if they, like there's a lot of loss aversion, right? So if they think that they're going to miss out. And in this case, they are missing out.

Dave Jones: They're missing out on a pre-sale, you know, look. Right. Yeah. And like being the first to have it.

Chris Gammell: Not to mention you have a crowd that's already into.

Dave Jones: And at a cheaper price, of course. But it's not the same as putting it on your website at a sale price. Yeah. You know, because people say, oh, it'll just come on sale again in the future. I won't bother. You know, I don't need it now. But yeah. Crowdfunders are very different from that aspect. And also there's other advantages from the logistical side of things. The way it handles the way you get the information, the databases and things like that. So logistically, when you'll suddenly get, you know, 5,000 orders or something, it's much easier to manage if it's not on your shopping cart. Then, you know, because they give it to you as an Excel database. They get, you know, the names and addresses and everything else and the way you contact people. It's all managed logistically much better. And unless you've dealt with this sort of stuff before, it's hard to understand the advantages of that sort of thing. So, but you just have to say, trust me.

Chris Gammell: If you're making, yeah, exactly. If you're making the choice, it's all, it's up to you anyways, right?

Dave Jones: Or for 5%, right? Yeah. You can say, why do it? They charge 5%, right? But I'm happy to pay 5% for those advantages. You know, so, yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Cool. Yeah. That's the point. Good, good. Consider the matter closed.

Dave Jones: Matter closed. Yes. Anyway. Yeah. It could be a complete flop. I don't know. I've got no idea.

Chris Gammell: Cool.

Dave Jones: We'll find out. I guess you don't know until you. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. You just got to go prototype it, right?

Dave Jones: Anyway, should I take a chance? Should I just release it and if I don't meet the deadline, who cares? It's Kickstarter, right? No one meets their deadline.

Chris Gammell: I personally wouldn't, but whatever. Right. I also have another Kickstarter, so who cares? Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Because I'm proud of the fact that last time, my last Kickstarter, I shipped on the exact day the money came through.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Like, I reckon I'm the only one to ever do that. I'm claiming it now. Sure. You know. Yep. Anyway. Hmm. Yeah. I just don't like promising shit and not actually delivering. That sucks. Although I do it all the time. Oh, yeah. I'll review this scope, you know. Man. I never get around to it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Cool. Well, what's outside the Kickstarter realm? How about the electronics realm?

Dave Jones: The electronics realm, I have to get back to, we're working on the micro supply at the moment. I might do some videos very shortly about doing a custom LCD and things like that. And there's a lot of people who said they would like to see a video on that. So we might do that as a multi-part series because we haven't got the custom LCD yet, but we've actually designed it. So I might do like a part one video now. And it's like, here's what goes into spec in a custom LCD. Right. And then wait for part two to see if we get, you know, duds or, you know, whether or not the quality, you know, the LCDs we get back are shit or not.

Chris Gammell: Right. I had actually, I had, I had, I had known that you were doing that. And, and I threw your name into that Hackaday journal as a potential writer for that. Ah, right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm, yeah. But you don't want, you don't expect me to produce content for other people, do you?

Chris Gammell: No, of course not. But I still threw your name in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's an interesting idea. It's a, it's kind of like a, it's a new journal for people. It's Hackaday thing. They announced that at Supercom, but I don't think I mentioned it.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's kind of like, we actually never mentioned it here, but the POC or GTFO, that's actually a thing from Travis Goodspeed. Did I ever mention it here? No?

Dave Jones: I think, I think you have. It rings a bell.

Chris Gammell: Or maybe I mentioned it to you when I was talking about this other journal idea. But it's just basically like a journal. So like Mike Osterman's a contributor to that too, I think. And it's people doing research. It's kind of like these research journals for people that don't have research journals kind of thing. Right. So it's like for the security community and what it stands for is proof of concept or get the heck out. Right. In so many words. And yeah. And it's really cool too, because they, they just, people may have seen a version of it where they, they printed it to look like a Bible pretty much. And so back, back during DEFCON, it's a couple of people were reading from it, like, like up on a soapbox.

Dave Jones: Like sermons. Yeah. Sermons. Exactly. It was great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So that's a cool book. And it's like, and it's like people doing, you know, they're doing legitimate research, but maybe not for an institution. Right. And where do you put it then? You know, I, you know, you could post it to a blog, but like you, like you were saying, you know.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. Like, I'm like publishing stuff, right? And like, like I said, you don't expect me to actually publish for other people when I have my own publishing platform. You have a channel, but most people don't. I have a channel. Most people don't have a channel. And, and that got me thinking like what would, you know, in what, under what circumstances would I go to the effort to actually produce material for someone or something? And it would be, oh, probably for like a conference. Like if, you know, if I was giving a talk at a conference, like that would be, cause it's a different, uh, it's a different medium. Like I'm, I'm not just going to produce, go to the, all the work and effort to produce material to be published on someone else's text blog, for example. It's just like, yeah, I, I, I don't want to say text blogs are dead. They're certainly not, but like, it's not.

Chris Gammell: It's just the noise has gone up a lot.

Dave Jones: You know, and, and, and it, and it doesn't excite me, you know, like, whereas, you know, giving a presentation or something, Hey, that's interesting, you know, and it's something I could film and put on my channel and, you know, and stuff like that. So, you know, that's the thing. Would I like, cause I, I got my start writing articles for the electronics magazines, right?

Chris Gammell: Back, back when, yeah, you could, yeah, I mean, yes, but it's not like, that's not the same environment as it used to be, right? That used to be the only way to get info.

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

Chris Gammell: But now there's literally unlimited ways to get info about this stuff.

Dave Jones: Right. But I, I probably wouldn't write another magazine article again. Right. Because I don't, because I have.

Chris Gammell: Cause step one, who, who reads magazines?

Dave Jones: Well, there, there are better platforms. Yeah. Right. Yep. Including my own, of course, you know. Of course. Oh yeah. Well, no, I've, I've got to determine what to spend my time on. Sure. You know?

Chris Gammell: No, I think that, and that also points to it from the other side too, is like, how are people getting their info these days? Right. Because it's always tough to find out about new things. Like for instance, I, I was handed a board a couple of weeks ago. A board?

Dave Jones: Oh, a PCB.

Chris Gammell: PCB. Sorry. Yeah. With a new, with a ESP chip on it. Right. Yeah. And it was just a whole new platform. And I was so excited about it. And then I found it online. And then I posted it to our subreddit. It was out like a month. It was out back in August. You know? It's not like. Right. It was not new, but it was new to me. Yeah. And so it's kind of like, it's almost a question of what are people reading these days or checking out? Like Twitter flies by so quick and it's so noisy anyways.

Dave Jones: Oh, you can't. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: LinkedIn is a pile of crap and Facebook's a pile of crap. Yeah. And, you know, Reddit's good, but it's only so, you know, it's only so much stuff. Everything just slides past your feed these days. Yeah. So it's tough to, it's tough to keep up, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, you can't.

Chris Gammell: YouTube's great, actually. I mean, yeah. YouTube subscriptions is one of my favorites. But if I rely on people like you, well. Sucker. Yeah. Well, actually, so I didn't want to mention that ESP thing. So they have a new module. Where can I even find it? Um, cause I actually deleted that post.

Dave Jones: It's yet another flavor of their. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So it's an ESP 32. But the really interesting thing is that antenna. And I never seen this kind of antenna before. And I'm sure it's not new, but basically, you know how like there's a lot of PCB antennas with like the, the squiggly wifi. Yeah. You know, it looks like kind of like a maze back and forth, I guess. It's called a. It's an F. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It is a fractal and most likely a fractal antenna.

Chris Gammell: Right. And, um, and so this one though, it basically does that in metal, but then it folds it up and over. And so just the footprint is much, much smaller because of that.

Dave Jones: What do you mean folds it up and over? It's a physical antenna. It's a physical wire antenna.

Chris Gammell: It mounts into the board, but then it comes up in 3D space. So.

Dave Jones: It mounts into the, like a cutout in the board or is it like a surface mount part that.

Chris Gammell: Uh, no, it, it is, it mounts into the board. It's a, it's a, it's a physically separate thing that then mounts into the board. Um, yes. And I wish I would have posted this sooner, but anyways, I will find a post and send it to you. Um, and so basically what, what happens though is if you, if you're going to be doing, you know, a lot of people are doing modules, right? Modules are all the rage these days. Um, but if you're going to be doing it from scratch and just putting down the chipset and then certifying it later, you can basically shrink that footprint down significantly. Right. So the module is bigger because it has, you know, power regulation on there. It's got other stuff on there. I think an oscillator, stuff like that. But if you're going to do it yourself, you want to probably, you're probably doing it to minimize space anyways. So yeah. Yeah. So this antenna helps with that.

Dave Jones: Got it. I need a photo. I know.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say at this point, it might be easier for me to just go get the board and send you a picture, but yeah. Um, yeah. I'll find it. Yeah. All right. Yep. So it's cool though. Uh, yeah, I got to, uh, who was it? Uh, geez. So I got to hang out with Yeroon, who was, we've had on the show and then Angus as well. So Angus is another software engineer for, um, Espressif. So I got to hang out with them. A couple of weeks ago. And yeah, that stuff's everywhere, man. It's crazy. It's really crazy.

Dave Jones: You want to know what's crazy?

Chris Gammell: What's crazy?

Dave Jones: More, more layoffs.

Chris Gammell: More layoffs. Yeah. What's, what's going on with layoffs? I didn't think we had that many layoffs, but I suppose this is.

Dave Jones: Well, no, I don't know. I'm just trying to get out of those.

Chris Gammell: Just segwaying it. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: Getting into some relevant news. Sure. Autodesk. Bye-bye. 1150 employees. Yeah. Out of 9,000. Which is at least 10%, out of 9,000. So it's more than 10% of the, uh, company. But interestingly, they, they say this has got nothing to do with, uh, this is not a financial minimization. You know, this is not a cost cutting scheme. Sure. And our finance and where our earnings are great. You know, they're pleased with their earnings and it's like, well, okay, they're restructuring. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We're pleased with their earnings and that's why we're gonna get more of them by not having as many people working on software.

Dave Jones: And they, they say that they make the remarkable thing that they're moving towards, uh, cloud based stuff. I thought they had already. Yeah. Like cloud based licensing. And I thought they were already almost a hundred percent cloud based license company. Am I wrong?

Chris Gammell: I don't know a hundred percent, but I think it's, it's pretty close. I imagine, I imagine the, uh, the, you know, the firms that are using Autodesk still like your, sorry, AutoCAD, right. Being like, Hey, remember that software that you're using AutoCAD 2000 or whatever? It's in the cloud now. Okay.

Dave Jones: I got on my Twitter feed the other day, there was a blog post from Altium about, um, it was a poll or something. Do you prefer cloud based licenses or, uh, the perpetual licenses? So I didn't read the whole thing, but they're obviously, uh, I don't know. Are they fishing?

Chris Gammell: They all see it as a way to get more money and, you know, to, and to have better control and to push out more versions. And like, this is the new reality, right? People are going to get pushed back against it. But the answer to that survey, which is stupid to even ask is if people don't have a choice, they're going to do it. Right. That's what Adobe proved is like, there's no other choice for a lot of people. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They griped about it, but they did it. And Autodesk did the same thing and Altium will probably eventually do the same thing. Right. So, yeah. When you don't have a choice, it's, it's the choice. So. Wonderful. I don't know. I think it's, uh, I'm not a huge fan of it, but it's the choice.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And if it also allows things like Fusion 360, you know, people don't like Fusion 360 either, but you know what? It's the choice for me. So, whatever. Work on open source. Open source 3D CAD still sucks. Some people say on open source, ECAD sucks too. I get it, but whatever. Okay. He says while wearing his KiCAD hat. Yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: How's all that KiCAD? Not KiCAD. KiCAD.

Chris Gammell: KiCAD's going good, man. Yeah. It's going real good. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Are they still like, have they, are at the point where there's like one official point, one official download, like someone who's like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's called the stable bill. Yeah. Yeah. And people can do that. Um, you could do that if you ever actually, you know, wanted to transition. You're not going to do it though. We know that. So let's just, let's just skip that. Let's just skip that entirely. Um, yeah, it's good. I mean, uh, you know, I, I don't know if we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, uh, DigiKey started contributing, um, to, they have a, they have their own library. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They did a big library dump thing. Yeah. I think, I'm pretty sure we mentioned that, didn't we?

Chris Gammell: Uh, maybe. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Yeah. Huge library dump.

Chris Gammell: What was it? 15 days ago? Yeah. We probably mentioned it. Um, and that's great. I mean, like that kind of stuff is going to keep pushing it forwards. Um, you know, should you trust the DigiKey library any more than, I mean, I don't trust my own goddamn libraries these days, you know? Yeah. Right. Well. Switched it. I pin swapped. It's a starting point. You know? Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: It's like, like if you can pull that part in and you get a library for it, great. You know? But just, yeah. I mean, check it. You can either trust it implicitly or simply do a quick check, you know? Right. Or you can tweak it or whatnot. But at least, at least you get something. It's better than like having nothing at all. Right. Getting, getting zippity-doo-dah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly. And I think, I think that, um, really stuff like that, what that does is it, it kind of just opens up the possibility. Like a lot of people, so like people come into Eagle, right? A lot of the libraries are built in, which is great. But it's just like, once you then realize, like, so people using Eagle as well, they realize that they can go out and find other libraries and implement them. Right. And that's, that's, I think one of the strengths of Eagle is that they had a lot of community generated libraries. Right. Altium has that sort of, some of its vendor contributed, but really it's a lot of the, the built-in libraries are nice and, and managed and that's a lot of what you're paying for. So yeah, I think it's just more about realizing there's more out there and then kind of going out and selectively and having a, you know, people that are doing layout, you just need to be rigorous about it. You need to have like a way to go through and check stuff and check it against the data sheet. You're going to get burned either way. It's just kind of pick your poison. So make sure you check. I mean, hell, like I said, I got burned. I got burned myself the other day.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Oh, I was bitching about Twitter. I bet that on Twitter actually. And maybe you know this. Why? I think they answer on Twitter, but why do they do bottom view footprints?

Dave Jones: Who does bottom view footprints?

Chris Gammell: Well, apparently the SOT 523 vendor that I was using.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: I've seen on relays before as well. And so I've gotten burned every, every time it burns me.

Dave Jones: Oh, in the data sheet you're talking about.

Chris Gammell: So they do the pin out in the data sheet.

Dave Jones: That's very common for pin, like through hole pin parts. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yes. So why does that exist? I think I got the answer.

Dave Jones: That exists back to the old magazine days. We're talking about the magazines, right? If you go look at the, you know, the magazines from the 60s and the 70s, when, yeah, everything was through hole, of course. And it was like, they would give you like a little 3D drawing of the pins sticking out of the metal can, you know, the TO5 transistor can, right? And, and the pins sticking out, they give you that 3D pattern. So you're looking at the pins from the bottom effectively. And they would always do the bottom view. It's like, oh, it was practically an industry standard was bottom view pin outs for transit, for those type of packages. It was different for except dip, except dip packages. They were always top view. But anything where the pins actually stuck out the bottom, like transistor cans, it was always bottom view. If, if, if those pins were hidden, when you put the component on the board, then they'd show the bottom view.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Great.

Dave Jones: Footprint. And, and it just stems from, I reckon it's just a historical carryover from that.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Okay. So I've heard that one. I've heard because when you're doing transparencies for old layouts, that it was better to do it like that. I've heard it because, uh, when you're holding the pin in your hand, then you're, that's, that's the view you're looking at, right? It's bottom view. That's the view you're looking at. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's kind of what I'm talking about. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Um, what else was the answers? This is all, this is a great discussion on Twitter. This is why I love Twitter. People thrown in there. Yeah. Uh, so yeah. Doing transparencies for etching, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So now the real question though, and this is, this is what I'm really getting at.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: Is 2017. Why the hell are we doing bottom view for SOT 523? Like this is like, I could snort SOT 523. Not for a SOT package. SOT 523. Do you know how small that is? Like there is zero reason to do a bottom view. Or as I said online, why not just, just fine. You want to show a bottom view? Fine. There is no space constraints. Put the frigging top view right next to it. Like what the hell?

Dave Jones: For a component that has pins coming out the side that you can see from the top, there is no point.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Right. And yeah, I know I've been complaining about this everywhere. Right. Because it's, and it's my mistake. And I, you know, Requiem. Right. I get it. Like this is Chris's mistake and I've had to deal with it and it's fine. But, you know, as an honest discussion, why the hell does this exist? And do both. Do a 3D view. Like there's, there's no space constraint. There's no data books anymore. Just make your data sheet longer. I can, I can spare the extra kilobytes of download. You know what I mean? Great. Ways to get Chris worked up is, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So anyways, check your footprints. Yep. Same old story. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so to back to the original, uh, KiCad's going okay. I think, uh, there's a 5.0 version in the works for, and 5.0 will be like the schematic editor, uh, gets changed. And, you know, subsequently, like you said with your computer, people are going to be pissed.

Dave Jones: Oh, as in the look and feel, the GUI, everything. Oh, really? Major.

Chris Gammell: But for the, but for the right reasons. I mean like.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So they're switching under OpenGL and stuff like that. And I'm sure that's going to happen for the schematic stuff too. Right. And like, so like, I don't know how you do your library stuff for other, other, um.

Dave Jones: I don't. See, I don't do enough work to warrant.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: You know, like a comprehensive library, like keeping it anymore. It's just.

Chris Gammell: Got it.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah. I, so the thing that I, the thing that I pushed back against when it happened in the 4.0 version is that there's, um, well, and I guess it's kind of atomic, right? That's what the, the article from DigiKey is about. But basically, you know, each footprint. So like I saw 23 footprint is its, is its own file. Right. And it's in a directory and the directory is the library, quote unquote. And you can add a library or you could just drag and drop, um, you know, footprints individually. And I just, I really kind of like that. And that's not how they all do it. And even on the front end stuff for the schematic symbols, those are all just like a library listing. Yep. And so they're going to transition that, I believe, to atomic, like each footprint or sorry, each schematic symbol is now its own file. And then you can, you know, drag and drop. And, and, and so just from a file, a file standpoint, right? So thinking about like revision control, that makes a lot of sense, right?

Dave Jones: Altium went down that path of individual files for everything and it just didn't work.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? Why not? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Then they, they, they went back to database. It was just a mess.

Chris Gammell: It was just, yeah. Well, I really like it for the, um, for the revision control aspect, you know, using GitHub, seeing, oh, I, I added a new footprint and a new schematic symbol into my, my, my libraries. Uh, now I know it's there, right? That kind of stuff of like a tracking. I read, I rather like that because otherwise it, what it looks like is, you know, in GitHub, it shows, oh, well, your library file grew from, you know, 2000 characters to 2100 characters. And it's like, okay, well now I can go look at that code, blah, blah, blah. Instead of just seeing the file name changed. So yeah, I'm sure there's lots of arguments for and against, and I don't really care, but I like that on the footprint side. So I'm excited about the symbols.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Chris Gammell: Uh, good segue here. Actually, uh, FOSDEM is happening. So there's actually a CAD room and it's not just KiCAD. So FOSDEM is the free and open source development, blah, blah, blah. There's basically, it's a, uh, it's in Europe and it's a, uh, it is a conference for open source stuff and open hardware and they have a room for CAD and that's great. So there's going to be KiCAD people there. Usually all the developers go. So if people are interested, um, let's see where it is.

Dave Jones: I didn't know there was such a thing. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Uh, there you go. It is in February, February 3rd and 4th in Brussels. I think it was in Brussels last year as well. Will you be going? I will not be going. Maybe I'll go. I don't know. February is a good time to get to Brussels. I'm sure. Right. It's a good time to get the hell out of the Midwest. I'll tell you that. Right. Boy. Yeah, that's a good time. Uh, I think actually this does warrant other, um, discussions though. So I just signed up for tour camp. I'll be going to that. And, um, I started planning out my other stuff. I think I might be going to PyCon this year and I'll be going to CES in January. But I think the real thing to think about, I, I always forget. And then Alicia usually, Alicia and Chris usually mention on embedded. It's a good time to just start looking at, if you're like interested in going to conferences, it's almost like they're already starting to close call for proposals. And I think, like I think for PyCon, I think it's already closed. So, um, yeah. So it's a good time for people to start looking. Um, I was thinking about 2019 already. I was actually talking to Angus, the Espressif developer I mentioned, but I talked to him about maybe going to the, the Linux con down in Melbourne, uh, in 2019. Yeah. Cause it's too late for 2018. Well, it's too late for 2018. So, hey man, gotta come back and see you. You're sure as hell not coming to the States.

Dave Jones: If it's Melbourne, yeah, we'll meet up and yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hang out. And also it's a great time to go to, you know, Southern Hemisphere. Although I'm sure it's a little, is it warm? It's probably warm there, right? It's getting warm. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's warm. Of course it is. Summertime. It's summertime tomorrow. It's summer tomorrow.

Chris Gammell: Oh really? Yes. Is your time changing too or just the?

Dave Jones: No. No, our time's already changed. That was a month or two back. Okay. Yep. Cool. Yep. Summer tomorrow.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Woot.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Dave is disappearing in January for a vacation. So summer vacation. Yeah. Man.

Dave Jones: Let me have, let me have your opinion on this. I'm thinking about like, cause I, I suck at producing like pre-canned content that I release later. It's not how I work.

Chris Gammell: Oh, for like while you're on vacation. Yeah.

Dave Jones: While I'm on vacation and then release the videos while I'm away. I, I just kind of suck at it. And this is common on other YouTube channels is that, um, they will invite guest, uh, content producers on their channel.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. While the person's away. Yeah. The, uh, the five brothers do that a lot. And I've actually found out new channels like that.

Dave Jones: Many channels I watch do it. Yeah. It seems popular on all these other, uh, channels. And I always said that I wouldn't like have other people's content on my channel. Like I discussed it like, you know, way back, right at the start of the blog and like, oh, should I post? And it didn't seem like a good idea. And I still don't think it's a necessarily good idea, but it, but it seems popular.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. But I mean, you've had people on there too when you were on it, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, I, as in interviews and stuff. Yeah. Like interviews.

Chris Gammell: I've been on your channel, right? I mean, like.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. But that's kind of different. You know, it's not the same as somebody else's producing the content. Although I have been doing that recently. David has been producing some content and, uh, you know, so yeah, I, I think it's a good idea. Yeah. I might give it a try.

Chris Gammell: So you could also like pre-record a couple like snippets about what you want them to talk about and like have it play in a monitor, like max headroom style.

Dave Jones: No, is that not going to work? No. Okay.

Chris Gammell: No, I don't think that's going to work.

Dave Jones: Anyway. So you think that's not a bad idea?

Chris Gammell: I, I think it's actually great because, uh, it is, like I said, how I found out about a lot of other channels and you know, it's, it's, it shakes things up. I mean, some people are going to hate it, but who cares? Right. Yeah. Of course. Of course. And, uh, yeah, I think, uh, like I was just reading, uh, Colin Furze just did a, uh, AMA, uh, yesterday. Right. And he, he was talking about the other channels he's worked with and then he likes and yeah, I mean like it's just natural, right? YouTubers, you know, other YouTubers.

Speaker ?: So.

Dave Jones: Yep. Of course.

Chris Gammell: It's just, you're further away than most. Otherwise you would already, already hung out with, you know, other YouTubers. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll limit it to like smaller channels, like under like 10,000 subs or something, you know, something like that. Cause like, if you, there's no point highlighting like Mike from Mike's electric stuff or something, you know, everyone knows. Maybe it is, right? Have Mike do a thing.

Chris Gammell: You know, that's fun. Right. Have Mike put on his best Dave impression. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But like, but I can imagine like, cause there's a list on the EV blog forum of electronic bloggers. I've seen that. Yeah. Have you seen how big it is?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: There's hundreds of them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So imagine, and most of them are small, right? There's only like what wouldn't even be a dozen big ones. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So there's only so much.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: And so there are all these smaller channels, which is fantastic. And like, imagine if I put a call out, you know, and I suddenly get inundated with, you know, 20 or 30 different people who want to make a video on my channel. Like I can't have like 20 or 30. I've got to have like maybe three, two, you know, three.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Four.

Dave Jones: Maybe, you know, like not. How long are you going to be away, man? Yeah, exactly. And like, but no, I can't. Maybe I could have one per day, but that'd be like too much. Like it'd be.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, so like there's going to be a lot of disappointed people. So it's like. I'm not against it.

Chris Gammell: I think if you prompt people, you tell them about it, they're going to be fine.

Speaker ?: So.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. And that is a good list of, you know, people are looking for other content out there. There's a lot of people making good stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So that's why I want to limit it to the smaller players to give them a chance to, you know, advertise their channel and stuff, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So. Yeah. Cool. That's great, man. Yep.

Dave Jones: And they will split the huge advertising revenue. Oh, yeah. That we get from. Yeah. Right. Yeah. A hundred bucks, you know, I'll split it with you. Yep. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. The big bucks. Yes. Anyway. Okay. So that's good. Okay. I might, I might go ahead with that. I might do the announcement video and get people to send. Right.

Chris Gammell: And we'll have our usual shows around here too, I'm sure. Well, yeah.

Dave Jones: And, and the good thing is, is people will go to the effort to produce this content. Right. And I'll want to see the content before I choose. Right. Sure. So, but if I don't pick it, at least they can release the content on their channel.

Chris Gammell: I will post a link to that list too. Like I said, it's a good list.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's great. Because there's so many, you know, they're like, I just found another one the other night. Like people producing all this great content.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: It's absolutely amazing.

Chris Gammell: So I had an interesting experience last night. So I was at a meetup. Obviously, that's how I lost my voice. And I met, sorry, I remet someone that I had met already. Who was really bright. Doing a startup near, here in Chicago. And, and he said something. He didn't know who I was. And that's fine. That's great. Yeah. But then he figured out that, you know, I'm half of the amp hour. He said, he said the following to me, Dave. He said.

Dave Jones: Am I, am I going to like this?

Chris Gammell: I don't think so. He said, I listened to the amp hour and EEV blog growing up.

Dave Jones: Growing up. I'm like, how old are you? Oh, that's great.

Chris Gammell: That's great. Oh, I'm sure.

Dave Jones: Well, it's, it's been eight and a half years.

Chris Gammell: It was, it was, yeah, eight and a half for you, seven for the amp hour. I mean, yeah, exactly. Right. So some people that started listening in the beginning, if they were, you know, like, that's great. That's freaking killer. I love it. But it made me feel a little old too.

Dave Jones: It'll be like, it'll, before I know it, it'll be like a decade.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like, you know, that's, that's serious business.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You're getting old, man.

Dave Jones: No kidding.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. There's another contest.

Chris Gammell: Yes. This is a fun one. We, we, here on the amp hour.

Dave Jones: I might enter this. We were just talking about this before. I, you know.

Chris Gammell: Well, it is another constraint based, constraint based contest.

Dave Jones: They're, they're, they're always the best. They're always the best. You can't beat those.

Chris Gammell: Right. So this is a coin cell challenge. Hackaday's doing this one. They also did the square, one square inch contest or something. Yeah. They're still pretty open. Right. But. Right. Yep. But I like the constraints, the blinking light competition, blinking light prize. That's going to happen again in 2018. I saw. So.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Cool. Who, who, who won that? I didn't follow up.

Chris Gammell: I actually didn't see. That's the point though. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's all in the fun videos. Right. And those videos are super fun. So. Okay. We've talked about that before, but it's, it's great to go check that out. 2017 blinking, blinking light prize. I think they won a total of 200 pounds.

Dave Jones: Right. Oh yes. That's right. It was like a trivial prize. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But that's not the point.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Right. Exactly. And like, you know, engineers love.

Dave Jones: Isn't always fortune and glory. Sometimes it's only, only the glory.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. No fortune. Yeah. So yeah, this is a good one. I think this is good. And you, well, I can't give away what you might do, but.

Dave Jones: Oh no. Yeah. That was just the first thing. Cause like, as soon as I saw it, I went, oh, that's the first thing that popped into my head was. And I told you about that before the show. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think we might enter.

Chris Gammell: Cool. Get some, some rapid prototyping going on, huh? Hmm. Yeah. It's tough. It's tough. Rapid prototyping. Getting those. What is the prize? Uh, I didn't even see that. Prizes. Top 20 prizes. Get a $100 credit to the Tindy store and 500 bucks for the top, for a lifetime. For the actual full winners, right? So.

Dave Jones: Come on, Hackaday. They got more money than that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They gave it all away already. Uh, yeah. Cool. Groovy. Well, uh, speaking of, uh, people with lots of money, uh, so Amazon, uh, so Amazon's big in the IoT space, right? So they're like getting, really getting into that stuff and they have some really compelling product stuff. Um, uh, my friend, uh, told me about Greengrass is like a edge computing thing and, um, they've got their whole IoT stack.

Dave Jones: What's an edge computing thing?

Chris Gammell: So it'd be like, uh, say you didn't want to sell, say, say you didn't want to like, say you wanted to stream, uh, data from a sensor, but you needed to do some signal processing or you, sorry, you didn't want to stream all the data, right?

Dave Jones: So you have a temperature sensor that's saying, um, 78, 78, 78, 78, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You only want to know when it changes. So you do some computing, you say, oh, well, it's gone up by one degree. You just send back the, it's gone up by one degree. And then on the server side, you already know that it was at 78, now it's 79, that kind of thing.

Dave Jones: So it's called temporal compression.

Chris Gammell: Ooh. Well, but not necessarily. It's basically the idea is that you, you could do temporal compression, but you also do signal processing on it otherwise. Right. So you're right. That's the idea is just pushing it out. So you don't transmit as much data. Exactly. So that's one of the things they do, but they also have like their whole, you know, they can set up servers and honestly, I don't get any of it. I'm really slacking on that. I still don't get all this IOT crap, Dave. I know I'm supposed to work on it now, but, uh, but, uh, the, the interesting thing that they just announced that might be of interest to our listeners is they have their own flavor of art, free RTOS. So, uh.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I don't get this. Like, is it a fork? Cause free RTOS is an open source.

Chris Gammell: It's in the name, right? Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it's like, so have they forked it or are they just putting money behind it? Like a key cad kind of like money and resources behind it, like a key cad kind of thing or what's like.

Chris Gammell: So if I had to guess, and I don't really know, I mean, I don't think they're changing it that much, but if they have a branded version, it'd probably be like a, a red hat to a Debian type thing. Right. Or sorry, is that even right? Right.

Dave Jones: It's their, right. Their own flavor.

Chris Gammell: So you have the support behind it. You have all the developers internally that are working on it, but then they also contribute back to the, the open source nature.

Dave Jones: And to the community, to the kernel, so to speak.

Chris Gammell: Amazon free RTOS extends the free RTOS kernel, a popular blah, blah, blah, with libraries enable local and cloud connectivity. So basically they're taking an open source project. And the benefit to the community is, you know, this happens a lot of places.

Dave Jones: They're, they're integrating support for their Amazon web services into the kernel. That's basically what they're doing.

Chris Gammell: And so the benefit to the general public is you gotta, you know, get more people working on it. The downside is if you're a competitor, well, sorry.

Dave Jones: You're screwed.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So I've been saying that for years. It's like, you will not.

Chris Gammell: Right. So free RTOS has been around for a while. You know, it's really interesting if you read, so like, I remember Jack, Jack Gansel does, who's been on the show. Yeah. He always did surveys of people in the embedded world. And like, it was always shocking to me. And I think Michael Barr does this too. Always shocking to me. How many people do custom RTOSs? And it's like, again, the word hubris comes to mind of like, is it because you just, you don't want to pay for it or you think you can do it better? Or I don't know, but it was a significant chunk, like 40 to 50% were homegrown.

Dave Jones: David was just saying that the other day. It was like, you know, I'll make my own. Yeah. He was complaining about the first firmware in the multimeter. It's because they're not running an RTOS. And it's like, we can just create a thing with threads and, you know, blah, blah. It's like.

Chris Gammell: This is how hardware people hear firmware people, folks. If you're a firmware person listening. And he's going, it's not hard. It's not hard. We can roll one. You sound like the mom in Charlie Brown. Like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. RTOS.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And it's, that's how it ends up. Like people just end up rolling their own, you know. Right. And that works great at the beginning. And David just go, well, look, this is easy. I'm going to do it. And then three months down the rabbit hole there. Right. You know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And it's like, yeah, it's not, it's not the beginning that's hard. It's the continuing support four years down the line. That's the hard part. Right. Or integrating, you know, each new thing is not a, you know, is not using someone else's code. It's now you have to go and figure out how to integrate it into your code base. And, you know. Right. With all apologies to, I don't know, nothing of which I speak. But you know what I mean? Like, it's just, you don't have as much other people helping you. Because you're now, you're in the wild west. You're doing your own thing. So. Got it. Good luck. So, yeah. Interesting. You know, a lot of times I see these kind of like, these kind of like sponsored solutions like this. And the things they always push is like, oh, well, we've got, you know, TI on board, ST on board. There's a bunch of boards that are existing. And that's great. Right. So, if you're using that thing, especially for like a proof of concept, it's awesome. However, you know, now if you want to go, if you've got a now custom board, you've got to do something else outside of this, you're almost in, you know, you're almost in a green field space anyways. Right. You got to go then figure out how the Amazon RTOS is different. And you got to integrate it. Like, the whole benefit of any of these things is usually if you're using a pre-selected solution, it's killer. Right. You've got a head start. You've, it's using a dev kit. It's using anything like that. Yep. If you don't, if you want to, if you want to, you know, integrate your one special thing or use that really unique processor, well, good luck. It just sucks. Right. I mean, it's, it's, it's tough. Right. So like they list like the, so predefined NXP is the LPC 54018 IoT module. Right. If you want to use the 54017, I don't know if that even exists. Right. You might have a bad day. Right. Right. It's, it's a better starting place than, you know, you know, some vendor that's not supported at all, but it's all these different levels of, it's like a, it's almost like a false sense of security and, and it's really problematic. So I don't know about if you've had this before, but like, you know, so you're doing a proof of concept, you buy a development board or you're given one or whatever. It looks great. You show it to your boss. They're like, awesome. Go forwards. Right. And then either the buyer comes back and says, too expensive. You have to use this part. Right. Or one of your other people says, well, no, no, no. I really need, you know, that extended memory. And now it's a totally different part. And it's like, well, can I go show that to the boss? Cause I need an extra six months now. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, so this is great. Just be careful folks. You know, if you're going to, if you're going to buy in, buy all the way in. Right. Yeah. But also the other thing to keep an eye out for as, you know, as the resident cheapskate here, although I think Dave's a cheapskate too, probably. Yeah. Totally. As all hardware people are, is, you know, like, even if you do go all the way through, you use their full solution, they're going to charge you on the backend. They're going to get you somehow. There's a reason they made this thing. So just, you know, they want you to use the data, whatever, you know, it's just, that's how it works.

Dave Jones: Well, that, that's their entire business. Of course. Yeah. They want you to pay.

Chris Gammell: They don't care about the hardware. They want you to pay for the servers for the next 10 years. Right.

Dave Jones: Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Or not. Right. So, well, we have a, what was, what was that? There was a link here. Where'd it go? Yeah. An internet of things flop means that, or did we talk about that last week? No, we didn't talk about it. Internet of things flop means some connected lights won't work anymore. So another, you know, another failure, uh, I heard macro fab is, is poaching from our list again. Parker, I see you out there. I see you. Uh, no, I told him he could. Uh, so basically, uh, this was also discussed on the macro fab podcast. Uh, but basically this was a Kickstarter did really well. $350,000 worth of stuff, 300,000. And, uh, now they're all dead. Womp womp.

Dave Jones: Womp womp womp womp. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's, we talked about this two weeks ago with the, uh, you know, MQTT internally versus externally stuff. But yeah, this is just another, another device that's bricked because, uh, we could just have, we could have a, uh, you know, a segment of the show that does this.

Dave Jones: Stop it, people. Just stop it. Yeah, stop.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. Yeah. Oh, well. Uh, so yeah.

Dave Jones: We're too addicted to this stuff. Like, I, it's just, I tweeted this yesterday. Was it? Was it? It's that, I think I'm the only person at my gym who doesn't take a mobile phone.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I hate mobile phones. In there with them. I know, they're so heavy. And they, they put them on their arm and they think they're like, and then like you get sweat all over them and.

Dave Jones: And they're, and they're in there doing like a, a, a class. They're in there with a group class. And like during the changes in the tracks, they're checking their phone. Like, Jesus. Can't you just leave it down in the locker for an hour?

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right, right. I mean. What are you really going to miss? If they need to get you. They're calling the gym. Right. Exactly.

Dave Jones: You know, if you, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's true. It's just. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Unbelievable.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, that's okay, Dave. We can be, you know, we, we know that you're somewhat of a Luddite. And I obviously, you know, I, I have a job now that's kind of connected, but like, you know. Right. Yeah. I get it. Yeah. Oh, goodness. Let's see. What else is on our list? Silicon is unforgiving. Have you heard about this? Silicon is unforgiving. No. You didn't see this link? Oh, it's great. It's like the, the, the head of the VP was a VP, no chief, the chip chief, Johnny Sruji. Sorry about your name. Basically, he's saying that like, yeah, if you mess up Silicon, you're really screwed. But everybody's doing it anyways, right? Yeah. Right. Right. Well, that's what I said. I was like, oh, duh. Right. But like, yeah. So basically though, it's like, you know, Apple has, everything's moving on chip. Right. But, but it's, it's for multiple reasons, you know, like for optimizing for power and everything else. But I think he's basically saying, uh, watch out, watch out for the pitfalls, but what are you going to do?

Dave Jones: Imagine the people, imagine being the person who screws up the latest, you know, iPhone chipset. $10 million iPhone chipset.

Chris Gammell: I can't even, I can't even imagine doing it. Not for Apple. You imagine doing it for anyone. Like, oh, we need to revise that, uh, you know, that mask set.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: You know, we confused NPN with PNPs, like the reason those are modern things, but, uh, yeah.

Dave Jones: We're a week away from product launch and I, it doesn't work. Nothing works. Quite well. Yeah. Man. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Let's see what else on the list. Uh, oh. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how much people care about this stuff. AI chips. Nothing. Nothing. No, we don't. You know, that, I guess that, that adheres to the rule on here of until you can buy it in DigiKey, it doesn't exist. Right. Yep. Yep. Uh, there's the new Tesla electric semi-truck. Again. No. If Digi, if there's DigiKey for trucks, call us when it exists.

Dave Jones: I, I potentially want to look into this because I, my Spidey sense tells me this is a bit of more, it might be a dog and pony show. Um, well. Smoke and mirrors kind of thing.

Chris Gammell: Literally, the event is a dog and pony show, right? Yeah, right. Well, it is. Up on stage and like. Yeah, yeah. True. And now introducing the truck and wait, there's one more thing and screw you, man.

Dave Jones: Because I believe they have deliberately left out or like, like the charging solutions and like any detailed discussion of that sort of stuff.

Chris Gammell: I totally think about that too. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Because like just the sheer, like the range and the weight of these things and the batteries have to weigh more than a previous truck, right? To get the job done and then charging them and put it like, you need like a megawatt hour react. Right. You know, you need freaking. I thought about that too.

Chris Gammell: So, so the power transfer, right? So we've talked about that before. Yeah, yeah. Because I think we talked about it when we were, they were talking about like a many, many car charging, supercharging station, right?

Dave Jones: It's bad enough with like small cars, like the Model S and the Model 3, right? Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: And now you're just dumping. Yeah. So they say like, like you get 80% recharge in 30 minutes or something like that. So if you just do the math on how big the battery capacity is to get a 500 mile range, right? And then it's like how much power you have to dump back into it. And then obviously the connectors would have to be super, super, super, super, super low in P or low resistance.

Dave Jones: It's got to be super high voltage to avoid, to, to deliver like, you know, it's still going to be like 500 amps or something, but it's going to have to be like 10 kilovolts or something. Yeah. It's going to.

Chris Gammell: But then you look at the power and that's the main thing is like, you pretty much can have to have like a substation at each of the rechargers. Because if you have, if you have more than one truck there, you start to get some serious draw, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. I don't, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: I, I'm like, I'm all for electric cars and renewable technology, but I am against impractical, you know, bullshit, right? Well, it's not bullshit. It's just that if this turns out to be impractical.

Chris Gammell: It's a logistical nightmare. How about that?

Dave Jones: It's a logistical, impractical nightmare. Like I haven't run the numbers. I'll, I'll be honest, but my spidey sense tells me that it's not going to be pretty.

Chris Gammell: And I would, I would agree with your, your, your, your tingle. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So that might make an interesting video just to run some, surely somebody's done it. I'm, yeah. Somebody out there's a lot of focus on this stuff. And it's not just, not just Tesla's doing this either. Right.

Chris Gammell: So, I mean, it's, there's other people doing it, but I think, you know, the things that are compelling about it are the cost, right? The, you know, if you actually, you know, so first off, you know, there's this fancy schmancy looking truck cab, which is not, not hitting your target market correctly, but whatever. Uh, you know, but if you have a fancy schmancy truck cab, it doesn't matter.

Dave Jones: I like the truck cab.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's nice, but I mean, you're dealing with a demographic that is like prides itself on like gruff and, you know, like they, you know, they wear belt buckles with Mac on it. You know what I mean? Like, um, so I'm just saying it, it misses the mark from the actual user, but like, who cares if you're going to save that much money? You know, they'd ride around in like, you know, they'd ride on a merry-go-round, right?

Dave Jones: I'm sure they're not going to be complaining though. I think once they did a trip in this, they wouldn't be complaining. No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: I'm saying that if it's actually hits these costs that they're talking about, then everything else falls apart, right? If they actually hit those costs and they can actually deliver the vehicles, then yeah. Yeah. And, and that's really, that's the story to me, but like you, the power stuff is, that's the huge, huge question mark.

Dave Jones: It's a showstopper. Like it could be a potential showstopper. It may not be, it may not be doable.

Chris Gammell: Can you imagine pulling up next to a semi-truck though? And then like at a light, and then you just like, there's no sound as it gets up. Yeah, exactly. You expect, yeah. That would be insane. That would be freaky. Yeah. Because that's where all the noise comes from is like when it's low gear, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Thunderfoot did a video on this just the other day. Not on this, but he was debunking the new battery. Like the guy, I forget the guy's name, but the guy who invented the lithium ion battery, right? He's basically come out and made some bold claims that I've invented this new tech. Oh, we talked about that.

Chris Gammell: The solid, the solid sodium battery, right?

Dave Jones: Is it? Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Anyway, it's 10 times the energy density. Yeah. And he basically went through the basic chemistry of, you know, how much energy density is inside, you know, fuel and all that sort of stuff. And it's basically where we're pretty much at the limit of what you can kind of do in battery tech. Like, you know, we might, you know, there's no way you're going to get an order of magnitude increase in energy density inside batteries.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, yeah, it's linear growth for batteries, although it's doing well. I mean, like the growth, the growth of batteries is doing well.

Dave Jones: It has, but it's, but there comes a point due to, you know, chemistry and, you know, no, it's, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's like about crowding of the anodes and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: And anyway, I'm not a chemistry, you know. Me neither. Right? I won't pretend to understand the chemistry, but I think his points were valid in that, you know, look, this is bullshit. You're not going to get this order of magnitude increase. And I think that's like this stuff, like stuff like the Tesla truck may potentially be impractical because of the limits of the inherent limits in battery technology.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. One of my, one of my college buddies just went back and he's getting a master's or PhD in battery stuff. And you might be able to introduce me to people. Okay. If people are interested in getting, getting battery experts or people know battery experts, I mean, I, there sure as hell not going away anytime soon. So we'd love to hear from you. I can ask, I can ask my buddy too and try and get someone on here. So I think there's a lot of secrecy around that field though. Cause like when you really think about it, there is, but there's no like firmware. There's not like, all you really have is the chemistry and the manufacturing of it. So it's not like someone from the gigafactory is going to come on here, the Tesla gigafactory.

Dave Jones: But no one's doing leaps and bounds. Like there is not, there's just, it's just not happening.

Chris Gammell: Right. And so this Thunderfoot video, I think it's about the 94 year old inventor guy. Right. So he was like at UT Austin.

Dave Jones: Oh, is he, is he that old?

Chris Gammell: He's really old. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: So I think his name's on the paper though. And like, but then he, so, I mean, I think he had a part of it too.

Dave Jones: He didn't, right. But I mean, he's 94. They might be using his name. Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: That's conjecture for me. And I'm to be yelled at if that's the case.

Dave Jones: And of course, but, and of course everyone took it as gospel, right? Oh, it's the inventor of the lithium ion battery.

Chris Gammell: It must be true. Dude. No, this guy is, he's legit. Right. Totally. Totally. But it's an academic thing of like first author, second author type stuff too. Right. Of like, you lead with the big name. No matter what. Of course you do.

Dave Jones: Of course you do. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, but no, every idea stands on its merit there. You know, it's, science is a merit-based, you know, proof-based system. Right. It's, it's not, no, there's no, your, your expert credentials only get you so far.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Eventually. It doesn't make it practical. It can get you pretty far, pretty long, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. They can get you funding for a long time, but it's not going to get you something that works. Right. If your idea is inherently flawed. That's right. Yep. So, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So this is actually, this is John, really? That's his name? John? Who? John Goodenough? Is that real?

Dave Jones: John Goodenough. Yes. That's it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's his name. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I don't want to make fun of his name, but.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Come on.

Dave Jones: It's a great engineering name. I know. Goodenough is freaking awesome. He's an engineer. It's practically the definition of. Exactly. It's the definition of. Well, no, he's a, I think he's a physicist or something. Oh, okay. Isn't he a chemical, physical chemistry or something?

Chris Gammell: No, they do credit. They credit the senior research fellow, Maria Helena Braga. So maybe she would be the one we talked to. All solid state battery. Okay. So we will try to get someone on here. All right. And I'm sure that's what Thunderfart was talking about.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I suspect it's bullshit. Yeah. I don't think we're going to see a tenfold increase in battery tech. In terms of energy density and stuff like that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's a, that's a, that's a bold ass claim. Especially like manufacturable in scale. Right. I mean, look, look how long it's taken just to get scale manufacturing of, you know, lithium ion stuff. Yeah. So, and it was sodium, right?

Dave Jones: What is lithium ion today? What is it? 20% better than what it was a decade ago? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Like, you know, it's not like, it's not like, it's not silicon better. Right. That's, and that's, that's what we're used to in the technology world. That's right. Yeah. So, it says sodium, sodium, lithium, or potassium as the alkali metal anode. And I did, I did ask my buddy Mark about this too. He was, he had some questions about it. So, but Hey, whatever. Let's bring it on. I want, I want better batteries, batteries, you know, energy storage is like. Of course.

Dave Jones: No, I totally want this truck thing to work.

Chris Gammell: Right. But that would, you know, and so like we talked about with the, you know, having a, having a substation at a truck stop also would work is a large battery bank. Right. So then you charge it slowly over time and then you discharge it quickly into a big truck, which is another battery. Right. And so that's another way you could do it, but still a shitload of power. So. Whew.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Anyway. Cool. Anything else on the list? No. We're done. AI guy that launched his rocket. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Some dude's made his own rocket and he's going to prove the earth is flat. Good idea. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I did like this, this interview. The, the, the, the, the title thing was it's, it sure would be great to have three LEDs in this thing, but they're two cents each. So we have to take one out. It's an interview with a, with a toy designer. Right. Yeah. We've had Todd on the show before and Alicia's a toy designer and. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's great. Jerry.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, Jerry too. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just, it's a whole other world that you and I have no idea about. Yeah. I know.

Dave Jones: Oh, I, I, I can imagine.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's. I don't think I'd, I, I know the challenges there, but the output is just like so plasticky and weird, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yep.

Chris Gammell: That's a hell of a constraint. I will say that.

Dave Jones: That, that, that's where you need John Goodenough.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Or someone last name Goodenough. I think you'd be perfect. It just has to be Goodenough. John Perfect.

Chris Gammell: Oh, oh, you mean like that. I see. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Because you can't, you can't do engineering perfect in a consumer toy product. I was going to say.

Chris Gammell: So John Goodenough is the QA person. John Goodenough is okay with a 10% fall off. Right. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Love it.

Chris Gammell: Cool, man. That's it. Yeah. Well, I look forward to seeing other people's content on your channel for holidays. Cool. I'm sure we'll be back next week with another interview. And then I think we'll sneak one more in with Dave before, before the end of the year.

Dave Jones: Groovy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time.

Chris Gammell: See ya.

Chris Gammell: See ya.

Speaker ?: See ya. See ya. See ya. See ya. We'll see you next time.