#389 – Sipping Coulombs

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released April 22nd, 2018. Episode 389. Sipping Coulombs.

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

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. What's happening, nerd? Hey, nerd. I have a new project that I was going to talk about. Maybe not too much, but a little bit. Well, why not?

Dave Jones: We don't have anything else to talk about, really.

Chris Gammell: It's a slow week, I gotta say. Two weeks, I suppose. But yeah, you know, there's always stuff happening. But I was actually looking, as I told you before the show, I was even looking at like EE Times and like the old... The old...

Dave Jones: Dinosaur media.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, the well's dried up. I don't know. Maybe, I don't know. Maybe like the chip stuff isn't coming out as fast. Or I was looking through... Oh man, should I give our sources too? Oh, geez.

Dave Jones: Did we get this on our previous survey? Like what sites do people get their news from?

Chris Gammell: We asked about podcasts. We didn't ask about sites. That's probably a good question to ask about.

Dave Jones: It's not bad, yeah. Yeah. Like does anyone actually visit those things anymore? Does anyone know what's going on here? Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I mean like... I mostly use Twitter, but it just slides by, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't really actively target news websites. I'm not that interested, you know? If it's huge, it'll... Huge news, it'll eventually show up on my Twitter. Someone will copy me in, you know? Right. I do appreciate that. My Twitter followers who, you know, simply retweet and copy me in and stuff. It's the way I see things, so... Right, right.

Chris Gammell: So Dave can be controlled, folks. That's what we're hearing.

Dave Jones: I can be manipulated into my next video by... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yes, I don't really know. I mean, I use a lot of stuff. I use Woodstock Wire. That's the secret one. So that's an email. It's just a feed, so if you don't want to sort through it, you know? But yeah. And then, you know, I go on Hacker News and Reddit and a bunch of the sites. But like you said, we don't really go to the sites anymore. Like, I'm surprised people still go to EUVblog.com, but apparently they do, so...

Dave Jones: They do. They do.

Chris Gammell: Weird. Weird. I guess they go to the Amp Hour, too. We know that. We know that.

Speaker ?: We know that. We know that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So I guess there's some value in that stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh, dude. What I discovered last night, and I'm trying out at the moment, have you heard of Integromat?

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: Integromat.com. I'll send you a link. Here we go. This is... You, of course, know and use If This Then That, right? Uh-huh. Yep. Well, this is like If This Then That on steroids.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: And it's like a visually... It's like a flowchart-y kind of thing where you drag and drop all these different services. If you receive an email, then you can not only filter that email and do a text parser on it, then you can route that out to Facebook and Dropbox and WordPress and YouTube. And the amount of services it supports is ridiculous. And it's free.

Chris Gammell: It looks very... Well, they've got a free... Yeah, they get a free tier, and then they want a feature to pay. A free tier, and then they have a thing. Yeah, I mean, this is like Zapier as well. It seems like business intelligent type stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it's just like... But you go in there, and you look at the support of all the different apps and services that they support. I mean, it's just ridiculous. It's ridiculous, you know? And it's great to be able to automate. Yeah. You know? Even a dummy like me could potentially automate with no software experience, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no, that's really not... Actually, so I've talked to someone before for work, and it was basically like, you know, the person was asking about like an API thing, right? And so this is all... These are all basically these services, right? If This and That, Integra Mads, Zapier, everyone. They're all talking to APIs, and they're kind of like nice GUIs on top of them. And, you know, a lot of the times, like the standard thing is like, oh, well, you know, use Python to just access this API, and I'm like, no. I don't feel good with that. Or to be honest, too, like the API changes underneath, and you have to kind of keep up on it, so that's a more practical thing. Yeah, so that's right.

Dave Jones: There's someone, you know, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing that when we were, you know, I've got my own online shipping business, right? Okay. And a big part of that is the, most of the huge part of that is the shopping cart integration and the shipping automation and all that sort of stuff. And David said, oh, I can write that. I've kind of written my own one of that before. And, you know, let me do it. Let me do it. And I'm going, dude, no. Right? Because it's always changing. You'll be forever dicking around with it. You're better off just buying a service from the company whose sole job is to maintain, you know, like Australia Post and DHL integration and, you know, all that sort of stuff and make it all work. Yep. I agree. It's their job to keep up today.

Speaker ?: I think that's true, too.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like, of a lot of things, right? I mean, this is, that's why, I mean, like, you build a piece of hardware and have to maintain it over time, too, right? And not just the hardware sales and stuff, but also, like, all of the components that go into it, too. So, yeah. Yeah, that maintenance piece. You never really think of it up front, but.

Dave Jones: No, but it's, yeah. No, I'm totally, I'm way past the point of doing stuff myself. Like, I used to service my own car, right? And it's like, no. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: So, not only can Dave be, you know, focused on social media, folks, you can also sell him your SaaS services. Dave is a target. Nurture this lead.

Dave Jones: I will pay, yes. I will pay money. In my ripe old age, I've learned to actually spend money and, you know. Yeah, right, right.

Chris Gammell: The difference between frugal and cheap. Right.

Dave Jones: And stupid, yeah. Right, right. Yeah, you're time poor. Yeah. It's just so much easier to do that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it makes sense.

Dave Jones: Speaking of things being maintained and going under, the chip board, it's gone under. The end, you remember Chip? We covered this, you know, years ago, maybe back in 2015 or something like that. Yep. And apparently they've sort of not announced it, but there's all the signs that they've gone into.

Chris Gammell: Right, their store is no longer operating. Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: Right. And apparently their office is for rent. Like, people have, like, gone and researched them. And, like, they're gone scared. It's like, well, you'd sell a $9 computer and you eventually go bankrupt. Like, sorry, but I'm not surprised. Make it up in volume. How do you, yeah. How do you make money on free software?

Chris Gammell: Make it up in volume.

Dave Jones: Volume, yeah. Yeah, like, if you're in that business, I mean, that's just, sorry. That's just what's going to happen.

Chris Gammell: It's interesting, too, because this is, I think this is the MediaTek chipset. Is that what they're using? MediaTek?

Dave Jones: Oh, I can't remember the chipset they use. They were using, like, one of the really low-cost. Yeah, the low-cost ones that are used in, like, the orange pie and stuff where you can buy a $5. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Chris Gammell: I mean, and you talk about maintenance, though. Like, those chipsets churn a ton. Like, you know, I was just on, Oh, yeah. Olimex just announced a new board. I'll link in as well. I didn't actually post it. But Olimex is, like, you know, open hardware maker. And they just announced a new, like, Raspberry Pi-esque, you know, single board computer. Blah, blah, blah. But, like, I was, like, looking at this thing. I'm like, oh, my God. They've got, like, eras of different hardware based on these different MediaTek chipsets, right? Because they're just churning so fast. This is, like, powering all of the low-cost tablets that are out there. You know, you go on Amazon, you rip one of those things apart. And, you know, they're capable. Like, they are capable chips. It's surprising how much stuff they put in there.

Dave Jones: But you can't buy them anymore. You know, it's been on the market for two years, and the chip's gone.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, you can't buy the old ones. But, no, no, no, I'm just saying, like, the fact that they keep churning the new ones out. I mean, like, you know, that's powering a lot of the consumer electronics out there. So that's the idea, is that the MediaTek, or, sorry, the NextThinko and this chip was using that same thing. They were trying to basically kind of put a skin around these chipsets that are low-cost, high, you know, low-cost, but, you know, somewhat capable. And there's just a ton of maintenance there. And if you're not selling for a decent margin, then, yeah, it could be tough. So kudos to them for trying.

Dave Jones: Anyone who's thinking about going into that business, you know, oh, I've got new, my single-bore computer's going to be, my Arduino clone's going to be better than everyone else's. Like, no, just don't go into that business. I'm sorry. It's a tough one, for sure. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like, any, well, we're in the hardware business, right? I think I told you about that board I bought off AliExpress. It had, like, an ESP32. It had a LoRa chipset. A LoRa chipset. Yeah, it had a screen. Everything else. Yeah. It had a power, a battery charger and everything else, and it was 15 bucks. And it's like, what the hell are we doing here, man? It's my standard response. It's like, I mean, like, we are really benefiting. We are in the thick of the, you know, but, like, if you think you're just making money off hardware, that's where you're going to get into trouble, unless it's something super unique, and I don't really think that exists. I don't know about you.

Dave Jones: Well, I don't know. I make decent margins on my microcurrent, for example. No one's bothered to come up and, you know, make their own version of it. That is surprising. And I sell out every time. I mean, I'm sure there's,

Chris Gammell: are there not clones? Are there no clones? Someone should clone that.

Dave Jones: There are clones. Well, no, there are clones. You can get the board, but I shut down projects who are using my name on it. I don't, I won't tolerate people using my name. You can make, you can make a microcurrent clone. Just don't call it the microcurrent and don't put the EV blog logo on it.

Chris Gammell: Sure.

Dave Jones: Because it's open source hardware, that's fine, but don't use my trademark name. Right,

Chris Gammell: and so that's the something extra that you're using, that you're selling, right? You're selling, I think, a pretty niche product too. It's not like, you know, generic. Oh yeah, no, it's totally niche. It's not like Linux thing, right? But it's also, I always, I always kind of balk at that when I see projects on like, like Hackaday or Hackster, you know, specifically around contests and stuff where they have the price in the name. Really, I guess they do that for advertising too, right?

Dave Jones: the $9, you know. Yeah,

Chris Gammell: the $9 microcontroller, the $35 development board. Yeah, yeah, obviously Raspberry Pi has succeeded way beyond whatever we've said when that was announced and coming out, right? You know, we, we were wrong. Well,

Dave Jones: I wonder how they're doing financially though. I mean, they're non-profit. But they're not, they're non-profit, exactly, but they still have to take out wages, right? Sure. Somebody's going to pay for that.

Chris Gammell: But they're non-profit, but I think also, well, no, I don't think that's actually true. I was going to say Broadcom might donate, but I don't think that's actually true. But I don't know.

Dave Jones: They probably get heavy discounts on the parts because they're Raspberry Pi, right? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm sure they do. Come on. If you couldn't negotiate that, you went trying.

Chris Gammell: I'm not going to guess because I've been along about that before. Okay. Yeah. Oh, hang them out there. Dave the foil. But like, but also the cost of hardware keeps dropping and they keep selling stuff and like they're, and like again, their brand is very good, right? I mean, that's another thing that they're selling and they have the educational piece and like they, so, you know, we love them there. They're doing good stuff. It's just like that, that is, that's something extra. If they were the, if they were just the $35 computer, that would have probably stopped short or, you know, I was thinking that scene, what was it? Oh, it was something about Mary where Ben Stoyer gets into the car and he's like, he's like, let me tell you about a new project. You know, eight minute ads, I came up with six minute ads.

Dave Jones: Six minute ads, yeah. Yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: That's like, that's like what it comes down to though. Yeah, totally. That's like the basis of like, of like price battles, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. And I'm saying, don't go into that business. Right. It's tough. I mean, there needs to be that business out there for people like us to take advantage of these, you know, low cost products.

Chris Gammell: So we can slap a brand on top of it, right? Right.

Dave Jones: But yeah, don't do it unless you live, live frugally in China or something like that. You know, it's just,

Chris Gammell: I mean, you're right. I'm not, I don't know how to do it. I think that is an interesting point too, because, you know, we see, we see this a lot at the chip maker level though too, right? I guess, I guess all winter, that was the other one I was thinking of, media tech, all winter, those are the chip makers. They're still making more chips. They make their money on chips, right? Obviously. But there's another one is expressive as well, right? Obviously they make the ESP 8266 and the 32, similar kind of market of like targeting low cost hardware, spun it out to do more connected device type hardware stuff.

Dave Jones: Are they the, are they the shovel suppliers of the new gold rush?

Chris Gammell: I think that's probably a better, yeah, that's probably a better way to think about it. I mean, yeah, exactly. Like,

Dave Jones: like we haven't heard about selling shovels, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Well, and like they'd set the margin then too, right? Now they obviously have competition in from the other low cost chip makers, but they seem to keep making new things. So that's great. Right. And, but I think at this point too, ES, you know, expressive wasn't, was not known before the 8266 was put on the market. You know, they were, they were known to local hardware makers, but they weren't known to, you know, broader audiences, but they are obviously very known now. So that's great. Right. It's, it's, it's that, that enables them to move forward and make the next chip and people pay attention and yada, yada, yada. Right.

Dave Jones: So exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You wouldn't know what I've been hit with. I've been, I've been hit from all sides. The, the, um, shovel of production limits. I'm being slapped over the head with.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: Um, it just like on both my multimeters, both the, um, my, uh, BM two, three, five and the, and well, and also the microcurrent as well. So actually three of my products, like we, we just can't make enough of them.

Chris Gammell: Is it because of the sourcing issues or what?

Dave Jones: I, I don't know. It's just, um,

Chris Gammell: do they not pass that information back to you?

Dave Jones: They don't pass the information back. No, it's like, you know, but,

Speaker ?: but,

Dave Jones: well, these are companies that have got other products, right? I am not priority number one. Got it.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So you're, you're sneaking in when the, when the line's free and that kind of thing.

Dave Jones: And well, they take the BM two, three, five meter that I rebadged from a Bryman, for example, right? I'm always running out of stock cause I'm just too dumb to, you know, have a tool that anticipates when I'm going to run out and then order more. Cause it's a two month lead time. Right. So I always forget about it. I always go, Oh yeah, I'll order more tomorrow. And then I forget about it. You know, like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So whatever it's just business.

Dave Jones: Right. My kids will eat some other time. Two month lead time, right. To get this from when you order to when you manufacture. And they're very strict about that. And I'm going to run out. And for the, like the third or fourth time, I'm now going to run out of stock again, by the looks of it before they can deliver new ones. I've just ordered another batch and I'm going, you know, and they give me a date. Yeah. Okay. It's going to be June 12th or something when the next batch comes through. Yep. And grow. Money on the table, buddy.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: And well, and I go back to them and say, look, Hey, you know, look, is there any volume that I can give you that will bump me up the priority list in terms of, and they basically go, no, Nope. It's two month lead time. Um, just plan, plan better next time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, of course. I mean, like, what do you expect in there though? Like, like, it's not like they're going out and they're, they're doing wafer starts, right? Wafer starts. So like, okay. So they need part ABC, right? From, from TI, right? That's going into your product. They're not going to buy it from DigiKey or Mouser.

Dave Jones: No,

Chris Gammell: but they're going to Texas instruments and they're getting,

Dave Jones: but, but they're common across a lot of their products, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: But, but they, they've done forecasting that you don't get to cut into. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, this is the whole idea of forecasting in the first place. It sucks, but it's, it's based on wafer starts. And,

Dave Jones: and they're obviously running some, just in time thing. They're obviously keeping. Cashflow is a thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Maybe you should just say, can I give you a hundred thousand dollars to sit in your bank account? Maybe then, you know,

Dave Jones: they will. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know,

Chris Gammell: or let them take on your ordering for you. Right. Well,

Dave Jones: what I've got to do is simply put in a massive order now. And then I, but then when I run out in six months instead of two months. What was the name of this service?

Chris Gammell: Integromat. Have it, when, when stock gets to 40, you know, or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. Automatically send them. No, email them. Don't email you. Email them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Speaker ?: Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: I can definitely do that. Yeah. You should.

Speaker ?: It can,

Dave Jones: it can, it can read into WooCommerce and look at my stock. Sure. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure there's tons of things you could do, but yeah. Take yourself out of the loop. It sounds like, yeah, that's a, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is, that is the downside of, of just in time. Right. And all the, what's that stuff? Like Toyota production method and all that stuff. The upside is money. I don't know what the, the laws are like in Korea, but like if you didn't do that and you just had a bunch of stock sitting around, you also have to pay, at least in the States, you have to pay taxes on your inventory. You have to tie up the cashflow. I mean like, this is just like businessy stuff, right?

Dave Jones: Yep. And the same thing with the one 21 GW as well. It's like, yeah, we can make, we can make maybe a thousand a month, you know, which, which, which sounds like a lot, but when you're got a back order of 2,200, you know, that goes,

Dave Jones: you know, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man. It's a pain. Well, that's a, that's a, I mean, all told it's a good problem to have, but you know, Oh yeah, no, of course. It sucks for people that are waiting for meters, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, it's like every day I get half a dozen emails. When, when can I buy it? When's it going to be available? It's like,

Chris Gammell: that's too bad.

Dave Jones: You know? Yeah, it sucks.

Chris Gammell: I, I don't know what to tell you. Thank you. I think that's on you, buddy.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, it's, yeah, it's totally on me.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No,

Dave Jones: but I'm just saying, right. Those are to point out to other people who don't know, you know, they can, that's those sort of problems can come up and bite you on the ass. Yep. You know? Yep. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Ah, boy. You could, you could offer to do the purchasing for them. That'd be something. Right. No. That would be terrible. Yep.

Dave Jones: No, that's not going to happen.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Plus, I mean, they've got probably deals with like local distributors and stuff. Of course they do. No.

Dave Jones: And they source them locally and they've got their own, you know, parts houses that they get stuff from. this is always the thing. And they trust.

Chris Gammell: And I giggle out when I see like Kickstarters, when they're like, oh, well, we're going to, we're going to deliver it in a month. It's already in your warehouse then. You're done. You already bought it. You're lying to me that you need money for production. You just need money, right? Oh man. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'll tell you what I'm pissed off about, about, um, the, uh, where's the link? Hang on. I'll send it to you. If I've still got it, still got it somewhere. Here it is. Bloody Indiegogo campaigns, right? This is a thing now, right? You, you know, these, um, that probably doesn't surprise anyone, right? There's this, uh, Indiegogo campaign called V white. It's a mouth whitening, toothbrushy automated, stick it in your mouth. And it, you know, does magic, right?

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Anyway, some bullshit, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, uh, which is apparently, I think already like an off the shelf product. They're just buying from Ali express or something. It's, it's like, I think it's like a total scam.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow. So it looks real. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, anyway, there, if you scroll down, you'll see my logo on there.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. I've heard about it.

Dave Jones: as featured, you know, as featured in and featured on the hydraulic press channel, featured in, uh,

Chris Gammell: applied science as well.

Dave Jones: Right. Like it's just all this bullshit. And it turns out that, um, they just stole this image. If you do a Google reverse image search, they just stole this image from other projects, which then falsely put this shit on. So somebody created all this false shit to begin with. And then all these other, uh, Indiegogo campaigns just copy that, that featured in and just put it in there.

Chris Gammell: Dave, you've made it, man. You're part of, you're part of like the, you're like a stealable brand, you know? I know.

Dave Jones: So it's, so this, so this feature is just going to go, it's just going to multiply. You're like Louis,

Chris Gammell: Louis Vuitton. Louis Vuitton. No, no, Vuitton, but with a B. Vuitton? With a B. Louis Vuitton? Who's Louis Vuitton? Well, it's, it's the, it's the ripoff version of Louis Vuitton. Oh, right. Okay. Right. You know, like all of the, and you know, like all those, those consumer, like a, a Fook multimeter. Exactly. Exactly. F-U-K-E. The E-E-V flog. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Oh man. Yeah. Oh boy. Anyway, they just steal this and, and Indiegogo will not take it down. They will. I've, I've put in takedown requests and they just will not do a damn thing about it. You know? Well, the thing is money. Oh man. It's just, yeah, this, you know, they've raised $313,000, you know? Yeah. If they're $10,000 gold, you know?

Chris Gammell: You should instead, you should instead go to Indiegogo and be like, can I just have the list of people that are backing this thing? So I could talk to them and be like, what is motivating you to back this thing?

Dave Jones: I had, I had that.

Chris Gammell: What do you think's really going to happen here?

Dave Jones: I've, I've had that. I've had Kickstarter, Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects contact me. Cause I'm a Indiegogo, I fellow Indiegogo, you know, this Kickstarter person, right? So they get my contact from Kickstarter or whatever as a fellow, you know, project starter, right? You can say it, Dave,

Chris Gammell: you're, you're an innovator. You're an innovator. Whatever.

Dave Jones: And, and they offer to sell you their list of all their customers. Yeah. And I got this and I tweeted this as well from a local engineering show here. It's like, you know, heavy engineering or something, you know, like heavy, heavy mechanical engineering stuff or something like that. I forget the name of the, anyway, it's a local thing here in Australia and they have like, you know, their, their local trade show.

Chris Gammell: You're talking about, yeah,

Dave Jones: it's like a trade show, a conferencing trade show kind of thing, you know? And they offered to, they sent me an email, um, offering me to sell me their list, uh, their personal details of all the people who turned up to the last trade show,

Chris Gammell: you know?

Dave Jones: And it's like, screw you. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: These things happen. I don't know. Ah,

Dave Jones: just pisses me off. Yeah. Anyway. Yep. And, and I've had people approach me, you know, will you sell your list? Sell me, sell me your list, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right. Are you, are you, are you a shady marketer? Right. Yeah. It's like piss off.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Well, uh,

Chris Gammell: since we mentioned at the top, I should probably finally get to that thing I was going to talk about. No,

Dave Jones: no,

Chris Gammell: I, uh, I am, uh, I'm, I'm making a badge for Defcon. I'm not, I'm not sure why.

Dave Jones: 10 million badges.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I know. Hey, you were wrong, dude. Oh, I know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You're the one who told me that like, like, oh, everyone makes a buttload of money on these badges.

Chris Gammell: I didn't say everyone makes a buttload of money. I said that a lot of people buy badges. You didn't know that they were. a lot of people buy badges. I didn't say people made a buttload of money. I said that there was a lot of people buying badges, which is surprising. People just, you know,

Dave Jones: shut up and, you know, take my money, you know, right. That is actually very,

Chris Gammell: yeah. And that's very much a thing. Uh, specifically at Defcon.

Dave Jones: So if you can't make money on it, so if somebody can't make money on a badge, then it's their own fault. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I just know. So the history is, and so I, I was talking, uh, actually Zach from Kickstarter was here in town and I was talking to him about it. And he's like, well, what, what the, what the hell is the deal here? Like what, what is going on? So the, the, the deal is because, you know, you see a lot of this stuff online, um, people talking about badges. And, uh, if you listen to, uh, one of our friend podcast macro fab, then the, uh, and not X or folks are on there a lot. And, uh, and so there's people talking about badges and all this stuff. So, so the whole background of it is Defcon made badges. So Joe grand past guest of the show, Joe grand, uh, made badges for, uh, one of the earlier Defcons, I think 15 or 16,

Dave Jones: but it wasn't the official one.

Chris Gammell: It was the official one. That's the thing. It was the official.

Dave Jones: See here, here is where I didn't, the thing that I didn't know about this world existed. I thought, you know, if it shows like Defcon, there was the official badge and that's it. Right. Apparently no, there's, there's like stalls of, for my fellow Australians, it's like the, uh, Easter show bag hall.

Chris Gammell: Oh, right. We were talking about that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Where you go in and get your, you know, there's hundreds of different, you know, if you go to the show, you go, a big thing is to go to the, the show bag hall and you buy 10 different show bags. Right. Yep. And exactly.

Chris Gammell: So you were talking about that one. I was thinking about the Olympic village, right? A lot of people do like pin trading or pin buying.

Dave Jones: Oh, really?

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's like a huge thing in the Olympics. There's yeah. Like they, they have like, like, um, you can get pins made online too, but like these are specific for, you know,

Dave Jones: the event or you can only pick it up if you go there. Right. Is that,

Chris Gammell: uh, no, no, no, there's like a secondary market too. Like people like, it's like, it's like, it's like a, yeah, exactly. It's like a trading thing. People will buy and sell these things online. It's not like they're worth anything. It's just that, right. It's just a hobby that people have, you know? So, um, yeah. And, uh, that's kind of a thing at DEF CON too. I'm not sure why, but there's a lot of interesting stuff.

Dave Jones: Like dozens and dozens of these badges. Is it? Yeah. Like, like a big set of tables and you just set up a table and, and flog your badge. Is that the,

Chris Gammell: uh, some people do that. Um, last year there, I mean, like sometimes people do official like spots. They'll camp out somewhere sometimes. So like a lot of the things,

Dave Jones: sometimes it's a trench coat thing. They, they tweet, buddy, I'm in the alleyway, you know? Oh yeah,

Chris Gammell: yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's like, you know, you'll have secret sales places and stuff like that. And people come running and it's, it's very interesting. Uh, uh, but also like it's, it's used for the right things though too. Like, so like some groups will use it as fundraising for, you know, uh, for a, an event that they're doing or some, uh, some of the areas. So like the, uh, so last week we had, uh, the Makina guys on from, uh, that, that do like car hacking, right? There's a car hacking village. And so that village actually raised money, raises money for events and stuff by selling a badge, a significant amount of badges actually. So, uh, yeah. So it's, it's, it's, it's a really weird subcultury kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I had no idea it existed.

Chris Gammell: I thought there's one official badge and that's it. Right. And so you were talking about it too, because, uh, so Mike Harrison had done the super con badge last year, right? Was that the official badge? That was the official badge. So like for smaller conferences, usually it is that it's just, uh, it's just the one thing, right? And you'll see that for, uh, the toy makers crowd, uh, uh, Addy and Whisker would, they did the one for, I don't remember what it was called. I'll post a link to it. Um, but they did a really cool badge for, uh, a conference as well. Crypto con, crypto con, something like that. Cypher con. Um, but that's the thing. Like there's, there's always like badges and some people ignore them. Like, so like the first, I don't know, like I've, I've been to a bunch of conferences with electronics badges. I'm usually just like, what do I do with this thing? I don't know. You know, like, like even Mike's badge, like I was just like, it's so involved. It was so like, it had so much stuff on there. Like you could do, you could do the blinky, whatever stuff, but like, I couldn't like the amount of time that I had to, to go and like try and write firmware. I mean,

Dave Jones: who of us doesn't have 10 different bloody demo and boards and whatnot. Right. Exactly. It's just, you know, you have the intention to use it and then you never end up using it. Right.

Chris Gammell: But you do see like, so you'll see, like I'll see on Twitter sometimes that someone will actually take it and use it later on because that might have been their introduction to electronics. Right. And that's, that's frigging awesome. Right. And that's what actually is exciting about it is that there's people, you know, just there, they don't have much exposure to it, but that gets them into it. So. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Hey, is this like legal in terms of the, uh, the rules of the conference? Like, can you just like show up with your backpack full of boards and then just sell them from the corner of the auditorium or something? Like, can you just, can you do that? Or do you have to pay for an official store? Cause I, like if I went to the local, I'm sure if I went to the local Australian, um, trade show, right. Uh, yearly trade show. And I, I started selling stuff out of my backpack, just on the trade show floor. I, I, you know, they're pretty stickler for rules around there. I'm sure they'd, you know, I'd be escorted off the premises.

Chris Gammell: I'm, I'm sure you would. Um, but.

Dave Jones: It'd be fun. That'd make a great video. Dave evicted from electronics.

Chris Gammell: You're right. I'm just saying that like, I mean, this is DEFCON. So it's like, it's like a security kind of weird, weirdo hacker type. So I don't think that really matters that much. Right. I don't, I don't actually know that piece. Um, and I'm not far enough along for it to even matter. So, uh, but what I do know is I've been staying up till three in the morning for the past three weeks doing designs. Cause like, it's, you know how it is. Like you get into designs and it's just like, yeah, you're like deep into it, you know? And so that's what, uh, you see my tweets about ESP chipsets and arguments about, about that stuff. Uh, yeah, that's where all that stuff's coming from. So, uh, but yeah, that's what I was getting back to with the, uh, the expressive stuff too, is that like, so I've always had trouble. I've always had trouble with conference badges and like having like super embedded, like, you know, they're, they're, they're usually written in C for like low power to power saving type stuff. But I don't know.

Dave Jones: Why is C inherently low power?

Chris Gammell: I usually just being, having more low level control is usually.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, you don't think so?

Dave Jones: No, no. Sorry. If you're running like,

Chris Gammell: if you're running like a full Linux computer on your, on a, on, you know, something hanging around your chest, you know, it's like, uh, that's going to be a little bit higher power than if you're kidding. Well,

Dave Jones: that's a different ball game. All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, definitely. Uh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, you know, there's more to it than just writing it in C, you know? I mean, there's, yeah, if you're not turning on, if you're not turning on the low, like the capabilities of the chipset, and you can do that in almost any language, surely.

Chris Gammell: It's a good point.

Dave Jones: Sorry. I'm calling you out on that.

Chris Gammell: No, I mean, I was just, you're, you're, I think you're right. I've just, um, I'm thinking of another interaction I had recently too, where someone else said that too, because I said that about like, oh, well, like, you know, it's got like a real time operating system. He's like, well, what, what about that makes it low power? And I was like, yeah, yeah, no, it's a good point. Yeah. I guess if it's going into sleep mode, it's going to sleep mode. I guess I think about that stuff that like people lean on those is like crutches. Right. So like, right. So if you're running in Linux, you know, if you're running a full Linux distribution, usually you're just like, what battery, you know? Yep. So, yeah, that's a good point. I guess what I think about is like, if you are writing it in C, then it's, you're probably a little bit, closer to the hardware. And so you're probably doing that in the first place because you want to get down into the, the low level stuff and switch things off. But maybe that's not true. That's yeah.

Dave Jones: No, I don't think it is.

Chris Gammell: I'll, I'll pay that. I think that, isn't that the phrase? Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: We,

Chris Gammell: yeah. So, it's all about winning. Yeah, Dave, you, you, you got me, buddy. That chip printer is never going to happen either. No,

Dave Jones: it's not going to happen either.

Chris Gammell: Oh boy. Yeah. So, I mean, like, I don't know how much all that stuff matters, but yeah, we'll, I don't know how much I'll be talking about it here, but I am planning. I, so the things that are relevant, I guess, to us is that I, I am feeling relatively confident about circuit Python these days, or, and micro Python. Right. Like, I think, you know, a year ago I'd have been like, well, I got to like write it and see, I don't want to do that. You know, I didn't really feel like, or I guess I, I wouldn't feel comfortable. I'd have to use a chipset that's, you know, on the Arduino platform or something, you know, but I'm feeling pretty confident with the, I mean, not like super confident, but like more confident, uh, with, with the micro Python stuff. So yeah, bring it on. I'll actually write some code. Who knows? We'll see how it goes.

Dave Jones: Can I get into something else that's not going to happen? And I know you won't want to talk about it, but I'm just sick of seeing them.

Chris Gammell: Uh,

Dave Jones: I'm sure it's not going to happen. All this wireless charging bullshit.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Another one of those.

Dave Jones: There's so many variations of products for wireless. So, you know, we talked about you being before and there's energies and there's this new one that I'm probably going to have to do a debunking on, which uses infrared. Oh geez. You know, like, like pumping out a thousand watts of infrared or something to charge your phone. And it's like, and everyone thinks they've cracked it. Isn't that called an oven? Right. Everyone thinks they've cracked it.

Chris Gammell: A thousand watts of infrared. What? How does that even work? Is it literally not an oven? I mean, like.

Dave Jones: I said, no, well, they use high power infrared leads and they, and like steerable apparently. Cause you know, you can't just piss away the power by, you know, spreading 180 degree beam, you know.

Chris Gammell: I did not know about that. Uh, what's it called?

Dave Jones: Oh, I even forget the name and the link. I'm going to have to, hang on. I'll just Google it now. Okay. Uh, it's, it's just like, and it's, but there's just, we charge, we charge, we dash charge.com. And it's just like, Oh, it's just the wankiest Photoshopped, uh, marketing bullshit you've ever seen. and they apparently have a demo kit available. I've been thinking about maybe seeing if I can get a, uh, you know, a demo kit, like a, uh, like, but only available to potential partners, you know, and stuff like that to demonstrate their technology. Yeah. Why do you,

Chris Gammell: why do you even let this stuff get to you, man? Like, you know, it's not going to happen. Yeah, I know, but I'm just sick of seeing it. People like, pinging you on Twitter here? Is that the problem? Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, and it pisses me off. I just hate, like, bullshit like this. And that's why I do debunking videos. Why I'm one of the few people who do debunking videos.

Chris Gammell: Oh man. Yeah. Well, I guess so.

Dave Jones: Because it's just like, I'm just sick of, you know, all this bullshit in the market. Aren't you? Oh, that's right. I mean, doesn't, doesn't that offend you?

Chris Gammell: Pull out the old, uh, XKCD, someone, somebody's wrong in the internet.

Dave Jones: Right. I can't come to bed.

Chris Gammell: Somebody's wrong in the internet.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but don't, don't you think this is a blight on the industry that, that actually has consequences. This takes investment money away from people who have really good, otherwise good ideas, right?

Chris Gammell: Uh, nope, I don't think so. I think this, this takes investment money away from,

Dave Jones: you think they should just give it to anyone who's got any bullshit marketing that looks good. You think anyone does it?

Chris Gammell: I think anyone who gives money to something that, uh, flagrant. Right. Right. Deserves to lose their money.

Dave Jones: So even if it's like pension fund money,

Chris Gammell: that they should, they should be, they should be prosecuted for investing punch pension fund money into something that risky. Right. If that's part of your risk profile, it's like, Oh, okay, well, good luck with that. I mean, like, that's the thing, like you could, you know, you could put something into a 0% chance thing like that, or you could put it into something that's a 20% chance, like a normal startup. If it, you know, that's being genuine, generous,

Dave Jones: generous. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. And it's like, both are risky, but one's just guaranteed risky. One,

Dave Jones: one's just stupid. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, um, if it's a pension, then yeah, then that's a different, that's a different argument. So no, it doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother me.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Fine. I just usually say the same thing I said for a lot of them. I would love to be proven wrong. So, so, okay. Please prove me wrong.

Dave Jones: Would you rather that nobody talks up about this? Nobody debunks these things? Do you think I'm wasting my time doing debunkings of this sort of stuff? I mean,

Chris Gammell: if you want to, my honest opinion, I don't, I don't watch your debunking videos, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: I watch a lot of your videos. Like I don't, I don't watch your debunking videos.

Dave Jones: Okay. Can you at least appreciate that some people might, and then learn. no doubt. I mean, then people will, will learn the mental tool sets to identify bullshit like this. I think that the higher level. To actually prevent them being scammed on Kickstarter or something.

Chris Gammell: Eh, I mean, maybe, but I think the people that really need it aren't watching those things anyways. You know what I mean? Like it's like a self-selecting audience. Yeah,

Dave Jones: but it's, yeah, but it's like, then people, like the people who do watch it can then educate their friends kind of thing. I guess so. I'm not saying anything about the.

Dave Jones: right? When their Facebook friends post the latest bullshit Kickstarter idea, right? Then somebody can go, Hey, no, I've seen this EV blog debunking video. Look, it's bullshit. Right. It's like, and then it spreads, right?

Chris Gammell: I guess that's very possible. Can you see value in that? I, I, I don't see any personal value, but I, that's what I was going to say too, is that like some people find entertainment value. Some people just like, you know, following along. So yeah, that's great. I'm just, that was my personal opinion. I, okay. I make, I make no judgments on you doing debunking videos.

Dave Jones: I'm just surprised. I'm surprised that you don't see value in it really.

Chris Gammell: I mean, if there was something very flagrant, then yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, they're all flagrant. They're, they're all obviously bullshit.

Chris Gammell: Nah, but like some are different than others. You know what I mean? Like,

Dave Jones: right. Like the Rayton solo one, maybe with Bill Nye.

Chris Gammell: I don't actually know that one.

Dave Jones: You don't know. I'm sure we talked about it on here. I'm sure we did.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But I'll have to, I'll have to link it in or yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, all right. All right. Fine. I'm still going to do my debunking video. I know you are.

Chris Gammell: That's fine. I'm still not going to watch them. Like that's, I was just being honest, you know, we've known each other a long time, Dave. All right. Pushing eight, eight years, you know? Yep. If you can't say that to a friend of eight years, who can you say it to?

Dave Jones: I'm not offended at all. I'm just, yeah, surprised. Just like I wasn't offended by,

Chris Gammell: you know, you, you questioning my, my thing about the C, right?

Dave Jones: The what? Oh, the C, right? Yeah, right. Of course. Of course. Well,

Chris Gammell: we were going to talk more about low power, if you don't mind getting back to that. I like low power. I know. that's what I was, so I was going to get back to.

Dave Jones: I am not a high power guy.

Chris Gammell: You were not a high power guy.

Speaker ?: people go,

Chris Gammell: oh,

Dave Jones: why don't you do work on, you know, I, I, I'm not an RF guy and B, I'm not a high power guy.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Anything over 12 volts DC scares the shit out of me.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yep.

Dave Jones: You know, like I just, it's just not me. Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I, I, yeah, some of the auto, but I was looking at some of that automotive stuff last week, uh, when the guys were on and, uh, and I was like, oh, 24 volts, huh?

Dave Jones: Like power over ethernet. Zappy, zappy, right.

Chris Gammell: And then there's the, then there's the old blindsmen who are like, you know, yeah, yeah. Licking their fingers and be like, oh, it just tickles. It's one 20. It just tickles. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yep. Uh, anyway, so that sort of shit keeps me up at night. It really does. Hmm.

Chris Gammell: What does? Yep. One 20.

Dave Jones: Just thinking about mains power, you know, touching mains power, it keeps me up at night. Got it.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. And some people just do it like that, like it's nothing. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, you normalize everything, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm just a wuss. So low power stuff. Uh, what are, what is, so if you were going to go, Oh, and that's what we were going to talk about too. So I was actually approached a couple of days ago about someone who was saying like, they want something low power. They want something that's going to last for many, many days. Um, what they were asking for probably.

Dave Jones: Please quantify. Let's let, let's be engineering like here on the amp air and actually quantify, not many days. Well, I'm trying to do this to, with David at the moment. He says, Oh, it's, it's not going to take long or it's not going to take much current. Right. And I go quantify. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: It's like, you know, well, because this was, okay. So this would be like a product meeting, right? This would be like a product that someone was like asking for. Right. Okay. So, so they're going to say something like brainstorming. Yeah. I want to, so like the, the user story would be like, uh, the user story would be like,

Dave Jones: who's, who's, sorry. I just get in my head here. Who's doing what here? Who's doing.

Chris Gammell: Okay. I'll be the product marketer and you be the design engineer. Right. Right. So I talked to the, I talked to the customer. Damn it. I'm a people person.

Dave Jones: Smekowski. Sorry. I didn't get that reference.

Chris Gammell: Really? Oh, that was supposed to be the, the, the guy who gets fired in office space. No.

Dave Jones: Oh, who? What's, what's the name?

Chris Gammell: Tom Smekowski, the guy who gets fired. What is it? You say.

Dave Jones: Oh, sorry. Yeah. I just didn't remember his name. Oh, what does it say? You do here.

Chris Gammell: So he said that I would have got the references to it. So, so, so Tom Smekowski was a product marketer. If you don't know, that's, that's what his job was. He took, he takes the requirements from the customer and he gives it to the engineer. Right. We're going to replay some of the, some of, some of the office space here.

Dave Jones: The office space. Right.

Chris Gammell: And so then the bobs were asking him, why, why are you necessary? Right. Why couldn't you just have the, the customer talk to the engineer? And he says, well, because they're not people persons. Right. So Dave, you're not a people person. I'm a people person. Anyways. Sorry. Yeah. All right. A little, a little slide back there. Now I can't help visualizing office space.

Speaker ?: People are really like,

Chris Gammell: oh shit, they really don't have stuff to talk about this week, do they?

Dave Jones: And if you have not seen office space, my God, do yourself a favor.

Chris Gammell: You're about 25, 30 years behind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was definitely not that old. Nineties. It's not that old. Late nineties. Surely. 20, 20 years old. Really? Surely.

Dave Jones: Get out of here. Yeah. Wow.

Chris Gammell: Anyways. Okay. So I'm going to be, I'm going to be the product marketer here. 99, it came out. So I was talking to someone and he said to me, I want to have a device that I can press a button and it talks over Bluetooth to my phone. And that's it. That's really simple. Right.

Dave Jones: And I would say that product already exists.

Chris Gammell: I know, but that's not always what you do when you're talking to a customer, Dave.

Dave Jones: Who wants to give you money to actually develop something. The thing is money. Stupid me. You know, I'll never make it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'll never be a businessman. Right. Or you're going to add something different or whatever. Right. So like the idea was like, it has to last for like two weeks. It's got a button.

Dave Jones: Two weeks. I'd say that's bullshit. I can make it last two years.

Chris Gammell: Boy, you really are sounding like an engineer here.

Dave Jones: Two weeks for a Bluetooth connected thing. I know. Bullshit. He said two weeks. Okay. Well, let's get into nitty gritty details. How long does it, how, how small does it have to be? Cause that determines the battery solution, which then determines the thing. That's a great thing. But even with a tiny CR2032 battery, you're still going to get a year's life. If you use Bluetooth BLE, but then if you use Bluetooth BLE, you've got connection issues. So Bluetooth is much better in that regard.

Chris Gammell: Right. So at that point, you'd have to know about like, how often is he going to be pushing the button? How often are you going to be pushing? How often does it have to ping? How fast does it need to respond? Right. Can it store and forward?

Dave Jones: Does it need to automatically reconnect to your phone? You know, things like that. Right. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: It doesn't need to detect that it's in a pocket and not to hit the button when it's in your pocket, that kind of thing. Right. So I'm going to make up stuff here. Cause I actually don't know any of these things. Let's say he's going to push the button. Yep. Maximum 10 times per day. Right. Um, and it has to fit on a key chain.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: So if it's on a key chain, we're talking a CR 2032 solution. Therefore we're forced into BLE just based on the battery solution.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Unless you do want to charge it every two weeks and then, well, that's a different story. Well, I think that's another thing though too, right?

Chris Gammell: It's like, do you want to, do you want to have a charge circuit on it? Right. Do you put on a cheaper USB charger? Does it need to be waterproof? That's another question. Yep. Exactly. Because if you're charging, well, unless you do, unless you do wireless IR charging, Dave, you know, you could pass on a thousand Watts, uh, with an IR LED.

Dave Jones: You can put in a tiny Chi charger or something. Yeah. You could do that. Right. Yeah. You know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That is getting more common. Uh, okay. So, but the, the thing that I wanted to get to is like, what are some of the considerations? So let's change this all around then. So let's say it does have to last for five years, right? Cause then it actually is kind of problematic, right? So it's going to last for five years. It needs to be waterproof. That's why it's five years. Cause it's just the throwaway thing. Um, so you said it's going to be BLE, right?

Dave Jones: It'd have to be BLE for that length of time. Yes. Got it. Or some other Zigbee, some other solution like Zigbee or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I will mention there's, uh, so, uh, my friend Jackson was on embedded FM talking about BLE with Alicia and Chris. So I will refer people to that as well, because, well, you don't want us talking about, uh, uh, embed, or sorry, the, uh, right. BLE stuff, but,

Dave Jones: but this is up front. Now I can tell you that you will get five years battery life. If you use something bigger than a CR 2032. So you use a CR, you know, 30, 40 or something like a thicker version of that coin cell, which has like four times the capacity. Then you'll, then you should be able to get your five years. No problem. Got it.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: So I'm going to tell you that your product is doable. Tell the customer your product is doable.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So I was wondering though about the, the code side of things. So we were talking about like how to actually, yeah, you're right. I mean, a lot of this does come down to the actual design of a thing, right? Yeah. It's more systematic. Then it is just about like optimizing the code. Right. But, but we were talking about like some of the consider before the show, we were talking about some of the considerations of like, like what are some of the checklists that you'll go through? Is it more like, do you need to keep time and for this, like an art on board RTC, real time clock? Like what, what are the considerations there? Like specifically, Dave, tell me about a time that you had to design a low power product. And what's some of the things you had to do when you were going through and actually designing it?

Dave Jones: Well, the real time clock is not going to add much because they run on the sniff of an oily rag. So literally, like you can literally take the RTC out of the equation. Got it. Right. In, in terms of power consumption, because it's going to be insignificant. Sipping coulombs. It's, yeah, yeah, it's like, yeah, you're counting coulombs. Yeah. Right. So it's, well, A, you start with your battery, right? What's your battery solution, right? You've got to start with that. Because without starting there, you're just, you know, flapping in the breeze. Right. So you go, okay, I can, you know, it has to be this big.

Chris Gammell: So you're just saying from capacity or you're saying technology as well?

Dave Jones: From the capacity.

Chris Gammell: Got it.

Dave Jones: You don't necessarily care about the technology, but if it's a one-time use throwaway thing with a five-year shelf life, you're not going to be using alkaline, right? Because the alkalines will freaking leak by the time you do that. So you use a lithium coin cell solution that has a 10-year shelf life, right? I mean, you can do other,

Chris Gammell: other like lipo type stuff these days, right? Like those little. No, no, no,

Dave Jones: no, you wouldn't. No, you'd be using a lithium primary solution.

Chris Gammell: Oh, interesting.

Dave Jones: A lithium primary battery. Oh,

Chris Gammell: because it's a throwaway you're saying? Because of cost and stuff like that?

Dave Jones: Well, because no, well, just based on the, based on that, if you're searching, if you're looking for something that gets a year or more's battery life, just as a rough benchmark, a year or more's battery life, you're looking at a disposable primary battery solution. There's just no point having a charging solution in there. No point having a lithium ion, you know, a rechargeable solution because A, they've got higher self, self discharge. They've got much higher self discharge, right?

Chris Gammell: Self discharge. I mean, you mean like internal resistance of the battery and stuff like that?

Dave Jones: The, the internal leakage of the battery, right? So, so you're not going to use your, you might be able to squeeze out a year, right? Like, for example, the Senyo, any loops, for example, right? You can charge them up and they'll still have 70% of their capacity after a year or something. Right? So the same thing, same thing with the lithium ion batteries, right? They will, you know, there is a length of time that they can retain their charge. But if you're talking, you know, a year plus two years, then you're going to be going to a primary battery, primary non rechargeable battery solution. It's just, it's just the way it is. Got it. Cause they've got lower self discharge. You'll get higher capacity in a smaller volume with a lower.

Chris Gammell: That's what the primary means is the, I'd actually never heard the primary.

Dave Jones: There's primary and secondary. Yeah. The, a, a, a primary battery is a non rechargeable battery. That's the industry term.

Chris Gammell: Secondary is rechargeable. Is that the idea?

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Well, they call them rechargeables basically, but a primary, if you hear the term primary cell, primary battery, it's non rechargeable. Okay. So your alkaline batteries, you buy in the supermarket, your double A's, your triple A's and your lithium coin cells. Got it. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Right. So you'd be looking at that. So where was I? Battery. Yes. So you're, you're, you're talking to, three years, right? Yeah. So you start with your, you absolutely start with your, the physical solution of your product, right? How big is it? What, what volumetric envelope do you have? You know, what's the size and form factor? You said key chain, right? So of course the classic key chain, you're going to be shooting for a coin cell battery.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. That's just, or, you know, you can get, you can actually get custom square, uh, prismatic ones. As they're called are primary lithium batteries. You can get those. They're specialized. Right.

Chris Gammell: But then that also affects your cost. So that's another thing. Yeah. That can affect your car. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's probably just easier to just base it on a coin cell. I certainly would. Uh, cause there's just, you know, they're so readily available. They're so low cost. Right. And if you're prototyping too,

Chris Gammell: you'd probably want to have, if you could get like an off the shelf, uh, case as well to start with, that'll save you money over. Oh yeah. Totally. It'll look nicer than a 3D printed solution. Yeah. Although eventually you might want to.

Dave Jones: There's lots of battery holder solutions. Yeah. And, and it depends whether or not you want to make that user replaceable. Right. And like in two years time, does your product have screws on the back that you can access? And, and the user, right. Like a watch, right. My, my, my watch gets, you know, three years battery life or whatever, but I can change the battery in it.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right. That's good for troubleshooting. Yeah. And it's, well, it's not a disposable product. Right. So I can still change it. So once you've determined that, then you know your typical capacity, right? So you'll get your capacity discharge curves based on the nominal average current, right? If you've got something like BLE, well, then you can get like spikes of current when it trends. Transmits and stuff like that. But that's what your filter caps are for, right? Your filter caps can average out a lot of those spikes. Store it right there. And yep. Right. Yeah, exactly. And it takes, it takes the gulp. Cause your typical CR2032 coin cell has got a 20 ohm series resistance, right?

Chris Gammell: I didn't know that.

Dave Jones: you know, you can't draw much current from them. You know, pulse current.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Kind of thing.

Chris Gammell: Right. But you could store, yeah, you could have like a cap there and store it up.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Definitely. Well that, yeah, that's what you do. So all your pulse current comes from your local bypass, your local bypassing. So you've got that. So then you can determine, so then you base your, you work out your, or you measure based on your prototype or whatever, you measure your average current that you're going to take over that period of time. And then you can get the, the discharge curve for the battery is going to change based on the average discharge current. So the capacity of the battery is not just one figure. The capacity of the battery is different depending on your average discharge current. Right.

Chris Gammell: So if you've got an average would be like area on the curve, under the curve type thing. Right. So it'd be like, it's an area. Total capacity is like, if you tracked the spike and that how much area is underneath that part. And then the averaging over time, it's how much under that, that flat line kind of stuff.

Dave Jones: That's correct. I've done a video on that. And then you've got to know your battery cutoff, your product battery cutoff voltage.

Chris Gammell: Oh, like when it, when it just kind of craps out.

Dave Jones: When it, when it craps out, what, what can your product work down to? Cause you may be eating into the capacity of your battery. You know, it's not always possible to work down to write the minimum where the battery voltage drops off. Right. So, so you might be pissing away some of the capacity in your coin cell. So you take that into account. So anyway, most good data sheets for these coin cells, it will give you different capacity curves for different currents. So, you know, and then you, it's just simple, uh, maths to work out how long on average your product's going to buy it based last based on that average current and your dropout voltage. And then, you know, if you're in the ballpark for your product design or whether or not you need a bigger battery.

Chris Gammell: I mean, this is before even, I guess at that point though, you could also go and you could start to try and optimize for, well, like average, average resting current. Right. So that would be like sleep modes and stuff like that. Right.

Dave Jones: You can also, yeah, that's the other thing. And before I said that, Oh, based on your prototype measurements, well, you might not have any measurements yet. You may know, you may be an entirely requirements driven product design. Right. Right. So, so you're going, okay, it needs to be this big and I need to get two years battery life. Right. And then you can,

Dave Jones: I, this is the biggest battery I can fit in there.

Chris Gammell: This is napkin stage. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, it's, well, it's working. It's, it's top level. It's top down.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's, it's product. It's basic product viability, right? Right. If you go, well, the product has to be this big, it can't be any bigger and it has to last for two years.

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones: And then, and you work out.

Chris Gammell: If you can't fit the battery in there. Right.

Dave Jones: This is the absolute biggest battery I can do. And then you work out, then you do the reverse calculations, work out what the maximum current draw is. And then you go out searching for solutions to see if you can meet that current draw. Right. And if there's nothing on the market, you go, well, shit, this is not a viable product. Or, or maybe you're close, you know, maybe you're, you know, like a, you know, 10 microamps over or something like that. Then you go, well, okay, well, let's try a real prototype and see what we get, see what we actually measure. Can we, can we run it at three volts? Instead of 3.3 volts, for example, or, you know, or our micro, can we operate it at 0.1 volts lower, you know, because then, then we'll get an extra 5% capacity out of our battery or something like that. That's when you start massaging the design to try and fit your current requirement.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I guess you could do power budget type stuff then too, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's, it's all basic power envelope design, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Nothing. So, innovative here. So,

Chris Gammell: I didn't, I didn't, I didn't expect that. Come on, man. You didn't expect that, that level of my response or you didn't expect? No, I didn't expect anything innovative. Oh, right. Okay. Right. It's not like I'm asking like, Dave, how would you implement cold fusion?

Dave Jones: Well, no, if you want innovative, then you go, well, look, there's no off the shelf solution that does this. I'm going to have to roll my own. Right. Right. That's, you know, that's when you like start getting really serious engineering.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. Yeah. Okay. But I, I was thinking more along the lines of like, uh, I guess you're,

Dave Jones: you're talking like before I lose my train of thought here, which would be a classic case for someone like a Casio calculator, for example. Right. That's when they go, look, there's no solution available that meets our power budget. We're designing our own custom ASICs to do this. Oh, got it. Right. And then that feeds the,

Chris Gammell: that feeds the ASIC requirements, stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. I guess,

Chris Gammell: I guess that's the same kind of thing would make sense here. Right. Right. Um, uh, I guess, I guess the thing I was thinking of is like, yeah, you're talking about these like high level design things like the, and it makes a lot of sense. I was thinking more like the low level, like optimization stuff, but I guess that's not even necessary until you get to a further point.

Dave Jones: I've got a great example here.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Right. I've got a great example. I don't necessarily like to use this, but Hey, I'll, I'll, even though I've debunked them, I'll tip my hat to them. Right. Batterizer. Right. The batteroo, the batterizer, right. There was, they came up with, you know, this ultimately stupid eye and fruitless idea of, of, you know, having a DC to DC converter inside, like a sleeve that fits over the top of the battery. Right. Anyway, it's a completely like lame ass idea and it's never going to be practical, but okay. But it's an interesting exercise, right? They, they went through, looked at all the off the shelf DC to DC converter chips off the market and found, Hey, we cannot find one that starts up at 0.6 volts. Right. Which is like the absolute minimum dropout voltage of the cell. They were trying to do and boosted it up to 1.5. Right. They went like, they like talk to every manufacturer on the planet and they went, nobody has a chip for this. Right. We have to do our own. So they actually went and did their own ASIC. And it turns out like it's a fruitless product, but Hey, that's what they had to do. Cause there was no other solution available. So they actually partnered up with, I can't remember who we think we know who, um, because he used to work at, uh, at TI or something. Um, no, one of the, um, DC to DC converter manufacturers, the CEO of, uh, bad Arisa. Anyway, he had contacts, right? And they, they spun their own AC, right? They spun their own DC to DC converter chip. Cause there was nothing else on the market that met those requirements. Some things came close, but close wasn't good enough.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. Right. Right. Cause it's about how much you're going to sell against it. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No. So, so to make that product, the, the only way you could possibly make that product is by developing your own, actually rolling your own solution. Otherwise it's just not possible. So that's what they did. They went and did their own AC, you know, hats off to them. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I guess so. I mean like,

Dave Jones: right.

Chris Gammell: I don't, that's not a classic example. That's not a common thing though. That's what,

Dave Jones: no, no, no, it's not common, but sometimes more fruitful would have been to go back.

Chris Gammell: And I guess you're saying that in that case, the form factors fixed the, the low cost nature of batteries, basically they thought their, their thesis was that there was efficiencies to be gained from these are already low cost things.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. Their, their fundamental idea was just fundamentally like their idea was fundamentally flawed, but that's beside the, but the technology wasn't necessarily the, yeah, but the technology wasn't available to do it. And they, the only way to make a viable product, a viable company out of it was to develop, roll their own chip and that's it. And you can buy the chip. They now actually have a data sheet. I'm not sure. Well, I think if you had enough volume, they'd sell it to you.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, probably. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. So, yeah. And, and, and it's actually a neat little chip. Like it, it, it has its own little niche market, right? It does this thing that no other chip on the market does.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right. There's not much call for it, but if you need that, well,

Chris Gammell: that's the difference too, between like a commercial, a commercial market versus like a B2B type of like, you know, selling to other people who might be using it. That could make sense. That's right. Right.

Dave Jones: Well, what's that other one that I debunked from the university of, was it Cambridge or some UK university? I can't remember which, right? They, they developed this ultra low power, uh, wake up chip, um, that, you know, ran on like 10 femto amps or something, you know, something ridiculous. And I actually debunked that because they had these huge marketing claims for it and it was all bullshit. And, um, I called them out on it. Um, so we can link in that video down below, but once again, they developed their own custom ASIC and you can buy it. You can buy this little energy, you know, this super zero power energy chip. I can't remember what the, what the hell. I can't, I guess,

Chris Gammell: I can't remember my own video. I guess debunking is useful, Dave.

Dave Jones: It is useful. It stops bullshit marketing. I guess it's useful in that you,

Chris Gammell: you learned about chips like this.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, like it's a real, it's an interesting chip. Here it is. I'll send you the link. And it's like, it's a zero, like, you know, but they claimed, you know, zero power.

Chris Gammell: It's like an energy harvesting type of chip.

Dave Jones: It's kind of a, yeah. Um, yeah. Energy harvesting signals and then dries an open drain output. Right. You know, whatnot. But, and, and it's cool little niche chip. It's just that, yeah, it was marketed too far, but another example of where there was nothing else on the market like it. And you had to develop your own. So anyway, that's another custom basic thing. Okay. Anyway, our button. Yes.

Chris Gammell: The button product. Okay. So if the battery size properly, then you'd have to go and, well, I guess at that point though, then it's also about the, the step you skip there would be, uh, having like a, a chip set and, uh, you know, that current, that power budget would be driven by the needs of the project and stuff like that. Or, you know, it could be,

Dave Jones: or as I said, it can go either way. You can drive it from, I need to use this chip set. So therefore I need this size battery. That's a good point. No, I need this size battery. Therefore I have to find a chip set that does what I want.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And you know, that's a, that's a, um, a common thing. Like when you ask people, like, why did you use that chip? Yeah. The, the most common answer I've ever heard is because I used it last time. You know? Because I used it last time. Yeah, exactly. Right. And, and, and then,

Dave Jones: then when you ask for most general design, right? Right. Right. But then if you ask going to the low power space, right, you, you enter a different world. Well, I think,

Chris Gammell: I think like you're saying though too, is that if, if you then ask them, well, why did you end up changing to this new part for this new design? It would probably be very much along the lines of what you're talking about, right? Of, Oh yeah. Cost or power consumption. I couldn't do what I needed to do it. Couldn't do it. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, of course. Yep. And, and that's what, that's a lot of people who don't appreciate that. Cause a lot of people will just, you know, use their, you know, their at mail processor for every project they've ever done. And that's fine. Right. But until you hit a unique requirement project, you go, Oh shit. Right. You know, that's not the best things in sliced bread.

Chris Gammell: It's an efficiency thing. Well, and I always felt bad for like, so like, you know, I've had, I wasn't designing the, you know, I wasn't doing the firmware stuff, so I didn't really give a crap about which part was used, but you know, like these vendors would come in and talk to me about like this new part and Oh, isn't this great. And it's like, yeah, but the switching cost is just so high. And not even for me, like, even if I made that decision, right. I'm going to get a bunch of crap from my firmware person.

Dave Jones: Which company, which company are you talking about here? Keith Lee?

Chris Gammell: This was at ABB, you know? Oh, right. ABB. Yep. I mean, it just, it was a bunch of companies that too. Like anytime you come in and it's like, you know, it's like, I think even the vendors know, like if you're like, if you're like a, you know, a free scale house or an at mile help now microchip house, if you're, you know, if you're in the pick family, you know, selling people on these new chip sets, it's like, you're, you're not, you're, you're pushing them into new tool chains. You're pushing them into new, uh, you know, register sets and new ways of doing things. Sometimes you're pushing them in a new Indian this, you know, like all of these things that are like very disruptive, not the good kind of disruptive, the bad kind of disruptive. Uh, yeah.

Dave Jones: But if there's a vantage like, or, or a need that you have to, well, that that's the pain you've got to go through. Right.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Yep. Uh, that's a good point. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So did we just, did we just start a startup, Dave? What? For developing custom basics? Single, single button device.com. Yeah. No.

Dave Jones: It reminds me of the don't push this button. What's that? What's that video? You know, it's been done by several people. It's faint. Like they have these people in a room. They tell them, don't push the button. Oh,

Chris Gammell: there was a movie about that. Right.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, yeah. It's like, I can't remember.

Chris Gammell: There was also a Reddit, a Reddit thing about it where it was the button. Right. And it was like, nobody was supposed to push it, but everyone ended up doing it. It's like a human game theory thing. Yeah, that's a human, yeah, psychology thing. Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right. All right, well,

Chris Gammell: I don't know if we've had.

Dave Jones: I think I'm sick of staring at this WeCharge.

Chris Gammell: Just turn it off, man.

Dave Jones: Animated thing. I'm just going to have to go debunk this shit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Another one bites the dust.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So much debunking, so little time.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Okay, well, I guess that's it for us, huh?

Dave Jones: Hey, what can I do with my 13,000 subscribers I've got on my- On your dumpster channel? Channel. Dumpster channel. Dumpster hack channel.

Chris Gammell: You know what you should do? You should set up a live feed. And just stream it live.

Dave Jones: Stream the dumpster live. Just the dumpster, yeah, right. And get evicted from my building. And charge. I mean,

Chris Gammell: you don't have to have it on for like the whole time. I'm just saying like, do it for like two hours. Have, that is the only video, right? Walk into frame once, you know?

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Or I can mount it so that there's absolutely no way I can catch people's faces or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to like, like, uh,

Dave Jones: yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hurt people's privacy, but like, you know, just the dumpster doesn't have, uh, you know, feelings. So you could just film the dumpster.

Dave Jones: The 24 hour dumpster channel coming to you live from the, Oh boy. I like, I, I so would do that. I totally would do that if I had permission to do it. You know,

Chris Gammell: I don't understand permission in this case,

Dave Jones: but yeah. Well, you know, well, this is a private corporate building, although I, I, I am on the strata committee. So there you go. Technically I could put in a vote, you know, please let Dave, you know, I don't have a vested interest. I'll, I'll, I'll refrain from voting. Please let Dave install a camera for,

Chris Gammell: I think this is like selling stuff at trade shows, Dave. I mean, it's only if you get caught. That's only a problem. It's only if you get caught. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Better to seek forgiveness than it is to seek permission. I guess so. Unless you're going to get arrested or fined. Yeah. Which, which I probably would. Right. You know, seriously, I've set up a public camera in a private dumpster room. It's not public.

Chris Gammell: There's only 13,000 subscribers.

Dave Jones: Only 13,000 subs. You know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Just put a, put a note next to it.

Dave Jones: Right. Oh boy. Well, anyway, if people have got ideas, what I can do with my dumpster hack channel. Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Cool, man. Well, thanks for the, thank you for the low power lesson here. No problem. That was good.

Dave Jones: Anytime.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't do enough of this shit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, we can, if people like that, I guess we could try and do more of that, but I don't know what, it's tough when it's, you know, audio, I think.

Dave Jones: I see. I, I like answering live questions like that. Cause I, I didn't know what you were going to ask, you know?

Chris Gammell: Got it.

Dave Jones: So I, you know, I think I should have like a weekly live show. I don't think you're. Ask, ask Dave.

Chris Gammell: Dave is someone who's known you for eight years. I don't think you're going to do it, but. No, I'm not. That was not a bad idea. Uh, we could do another call in show. If people are interested in that, we haven't done that in a long time. Uh, we said we weren't going to do that. That's been a couple of years now. It's surprisingly. So, uh, yeah, let us know if you want to do a call in show. Leave a comment. We have comments.

Dave Jones: Yeah. The good thing about, well, calling show is that, you know, the, yeah, you could get someone to come on and yeah. It's like, it's live. Whereas if you do a live questions, like you can just ignore the question that comes up on the chat. Oh, I see. You can just kind of, yeah. Right. But watching you,

Chris Gammell: watching you read chat stuff again, not, not my, not my jam. Not a cup of tea. No, no, a little more interactive.

Dave Jones: There's a bunch, bunch of aficionados out there.

Chris Gammell: Yes. I'm sure. I'm sure that there is for everything you do.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: No,

Dave Jones: but if I did that, I would have to go, look, okay, this is not a normal live show where I just shoot the chat. It's like questions only. Like, it's like you come to me with technical questions and I'll try and, you know, shoot off the top of my head.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Responses. You know, I guess like other live shows I've done are just, oh, it's just hanging out and just, you know, like talking about just, you know, anything. Yep. really. It's not really rigidly structured.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Anyway, let's, we'll hook it up, I guess. Cool, man. You're not going to be here next week, but I will be, and I will have a special interview. So I'm excited about it. Special.

Dave Jones: Are you going to tell me who? Nope.

Chris Gammell: I'll tell you, but not, not here. Oh, right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Gee, thanks. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like not on the show. I'll tell you, but not everybody else.

Chris Gammell: All right, man. Talk to you in a couple of weeks. Catch you next time. Bye.