#391 – Only A Transmitter

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released May 6th, 2018. Episode 391. Only a transmitter.

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.

Dave Jones: You know what I hate?

Chris Gammell: I think you're about to tell me.

Dave Jones: Business.

Chris Gammell: Wait, I was going to say last time, usually it's computers. Yeah, computers, yeah. Manufacturing, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: Okay, shipping. Shipping's the other one. Yep, yep, yep. Oh, and I just figured out what you're going to talk about. Okay, go ahead.

Dave Jones: Oh, what? Okay.

Chris Gammell: It's about payments, right? Payments. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Business, just doing business. Like.

Chris Gammell: It does get in the way of the other stuff, huh?

Dave Jones: Oh, no. Well, it's not just the time and effort to do it. It's companies who piss me off.

Chris Gammell: Business ethics.

Dave Jones: And I'm going to name them.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah?

Dave Jones: Yes. Currency fair.

Chris Gammell: You already did that on Twitter. That's how I knew about it.

Dave Jones: Well, I'm probably going to shoot a video ranting or something.

Chris Gammell: Dave's like the angry uncle now.

Dave Jones: Unbelievable. Would you like to know what happened?

Chris Gammell: Yes, I would, actually.

Dave Jones: There's this act in Australia, like a government act, right? It's the AML, CTF Act, I believe it is. It's the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act of 2006.

Speaker ?: Right?

Dave Jones: And it covers the financial sector, gambling sector, bullion dealers, and other professional businesses that provide...

Chris Gammell: Bullion dealers. There you go. That's cute.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, covered by the act because there's a lot of money laundering in the gold and silver bullion business.

Chris Gammell: I did not know any of these things, but okay, go ahead.

Dave Jones: Right. Oh, there was a huge scam with the goods and services tax here in Australia. There was like all these bullion dealers, they were claiming GST. They would get their jewelry and they would get their gold bullion. Oh, I can't remember the order, but they'd then melt it down and then, but still claim the goods and services tax back. So they claim the 10% back and then melt it down and then resell it GST free as bullion.

Chris Gammell: Oh.

Dave Jones: So they would, you know, because you don't pay...

Chris Gammell: So they'd be scamming other people, basically?

Dave Jones: Well, they're scamming the government, basically. No, no, they're not scamming other people. They're buying your bullion.

Chris Gammell: I don't know how GST works. Oh, well, yeah. Is that like AMT or VAT, rather? It's VAT.

Dave Jones: It's our equivalent to VAT. So they buy the... We're telling people how to not launder money, but how to cheat the government here. Yeah, you buy something that's GST included, right? That you claim the GST from the people, from the person who sold it to you, right? So they pay the GST and then you claim that back from the government, but then you change the product. In this case, you melt it down from jury to bullion and bullion is GST free. So when you resell it...

Chris Gammell: Got it.

Dave Jones: Okay. You don't... You didn't have to pass the GST on. So you've pocketed that 10%, right?

Chris Gammell: Shady, shady, shady. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: And the government. All right.

Chris Gammell: Well, let's just cut right to how you're being shady, then.

Dave Jones: Right. How to be...

Chris Gammell: How to succeed in business in the electronics business, huh?

Dave Jones: By being a money launderer and a terrorism financer. Yes. Which is clearly what I am.

Chris Gammell: Yes, Dave the money launderer.

Dave Jones: Clearly what I am. And... Unbelievable. Anyway, there's this act, which I believe is what they're following. There's also the Austrac Act and other ones, which... Anyway, so they're required... So these types of... CurrencyFair, by the way, is a company that does currency exchange. Okay? They're a currency exchange company. So basically, I send money in Australian dollars from my bank to them. They've got their own bank in Ireland because it's a tax haven, right? So I've got to send the money to Ireland. And then I use their CurrencyFair platform to exchange the money on the market, right? From Australian to US dollars, right? Because they have very favorable market rates, right? That's why I use them. Never use a bank to do your money, by the way. Their rates are like 4% worse than... Like you're pissing away 4% or whatever if you use your bank. It's horrible. Anyway, so they've got very favorable market rate currency transfer rates, right? So I transfer my money inside CurrencyFair and then I send it from my CurrencyFair account to the supplier, right? Who I'm buying the multimeters or the parts from or whatever. Oh, I see. I see. Yeah. Like I could do it straight from my bank.

Chris Gammell: Paying your invoices. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I've, you know, invoiced them and well, I've given them a purchase order. I'm going to buy a thousand multimeters and then I pay for them, right? And obviously it's a lot of money, right? You know, especially the 121 GW multimeter is not cheap, right? And I've got to buy 2,500 of them or whatever, right? It's a lot of money, right? So we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here, right? Huge, huge amounts of money. U.S. Yankee bucks. And, right? So anyway-

Chris Gammell: I think we got it all the way through here. Yes, lots of money.

Dave Jones: So I use this company to do the currency transfer and everything. And they've got to, as one of these finance providers, they've got to follow this act and report and make sure that I am not laundering. I mean, you know, if they get the suspicion that I'm laundering, transferring large amounts of money and laundering money or financing terrorism, they're supposed to ask me for information. They're legally obligated to ask me for information to prove, you know, that A, I'm a legitimate business and B, even the source of the income, right? Which is bloody none of their business, really. Where, how my money, how my company made its money, right? Right? It's like, anyway, right? Anyway, it's part of the terms and conditions, right? You've got to, you know, if you're doing-

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I get all this stuff, Dave. Yeah. Let's get to the point. Okay. You got a point where you were wronged, I'm guessing? Or no?

Dave Jones: Well, they were- Well, I've proven to them many times that I'm- They've asked for this a few times, right? And I've continued to prove that I'm a legitimate business doing large transactions and I've even paid this supplier before, right? So they've already cleared this transaction, this company that I'm paying to before. Right? But no, they come along again and they ask, hey, no, we're stopping the transaction, right? From going through because, you know, look, prove where you got this money from, right?

Chris Gammell: So why don't you just stop using them? I don't get it.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, I know. I should, right? Anyway, it's bullshit. No, because I'll probably get caught by some other company, right? Doing the same, you know, overzealous because they want to, you know, I'm really- Well, I'm ranting about the company because I think they're doing it wrong.

Chris Gammell: Got it.

Dave Jones: But I'm also ranting about the government regulations that, you know, of course I'm sending money overseas. Jesus, what business-

Chris Gammell: Dave's growing up here, folks. He's getting older. He's ranting about government oversight. It's, yeah. Unbelievable. He is working his way into being a stereotypical, you know, you're moving into your, what, 50s soon? You're going to be like the 50s electrical engineer who wants to give you a piece of his mind? You're really- Right. You're hitting that demographic, Dave, real well.

Dave Jones: But surely you can appreciate if I get hassled every single time, every single train, that's ridiculous, right?

Chris Gammell: That's rough, right. There's no, like, shortcut to just be like, hey, here's all my stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And luckily in this case, I had a proof in the form of the Kickstarter campaign, even though they didn't know what Kickstarter was. Oh, is this some sort of financing? Has this company financed your company? Right, right. No. You want me to explain Kickstarter to you? Right. Anyway, yeah. Like, I had, like, that kind of proof. I could show the transaction coming into my account from this Kickstarter. But if I didn't, if I was just cashier funding this from cash from my own built up in my own business, how am I going to prove where the money came from? Have to supply my last two years tax returns?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know?

Dave Jones: Like, it's just ridiculous. What a bloody hindrance to just, like, legitimate operations.

Chris Gammell: Mostly legitimate commerce.

Dave Jones: Mostly legitimate. Yeah, I do some money laundering on the side, you know? Right, right. And some terrorism financing. It's a hobby. It's a hobby. Yeah, so I don't pay tax on that hobby. Right, right. You know what I mean? Yeah. Unbelievable. Anyway, that's, it just pisses me off, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's, I mean, anything like that where you're, you know, getting, I mean, like, that could have big impacts too, right? I mean, like, I think about all the supply chain, like, things that are happening these days anyways. Like, it just, it really, anything that gets in the way, I mean, I'm not as upset as you, but like, you know, I got hit by like, uh, the, what, the Chinese Labor Day. Did you know that's a thing? I didn't, I didn't actually know it was a thing. I learned that recently.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, I think so. Yeah, it happens. Yeah. What, then? How, how long do they take off?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it was just two days. But it was like, so I put in my order on a Saturday and I'm like, oh, yay, three day turn. And I was like, yeah, Saturday, Sunday, but also Monday, Tuesday. Right, right. I meant it, you know.

Dave Jones: So, so you copped the weekend, so you copped an extended long weekend.

Chris Gammell: It's on me. I didn't look, but, you know.

Dave Jones: Gosh, darn it. You didn't get your instant gratification in today's online commerce world.

Chris Gammell: I know, Dave. It's exactly, for like, especially for the prices I'm getting. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're right. It's real cheap too. It's, uh, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, like, like you're saying though, like, I mean, like that is another step in the, the, uh, the supply chain stuff that, I mean, we already learned, what, two weeks ago that you're, you're already usually a little, pretty little late with your, uh, your orders, right? Right. So, uh, yeah, that, that can, that can hurt you on supply chain stuff.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm not a happy camper.

Chris Gammell: Well, I'm sorry, man. You feel better now that you've raged a little bit? Yes, I have. Okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I may not feel better unless I like maybe do a blab video or something. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, then do what you, do what you gotta do, you know? Yeah. Are you, are you getting hit by, speaking of supply chain stuff, are you getting, are you getting hit by any of the supply chain things these days?

Dave Jones: You're talking about the capacitor, the great capacitor shortage of 2017, 2018. Right. Yep. Right. No, no, I'm not that I'm aware of. Okay. If I am, my, um, uh, supplier isn't telling me, you know?

Chris Gammell: Oh, oh, you mean, oh, at that, that side of things. Okay.

Dave Jones: They supply the parts to the new multimeter. Right, right.

Chris Gammell: I just meant if you were ordering parts or something, if you didn't already have parts on hand, that kind of thing.

Dave Jones: No, I haven't. Although I do have to order some more parts right now. Actually, that's probably today's stuff. That's on the list today, huh? Yeah. Yeah. More microcurrent parts. So I might, you know, but I'm getting from Mauser DigiKey and actually David exclaimed this the other day. My, my sidekick, he just turned around and shouted, did you know that DigiKey are completely out of capacitors? Yeah. Well, that's what I, yeah, that's what I was getting towards. Like it's. And I went, yeah, I've heard about the thing, but that can't be true. And he, it's true. I've been searching. And then I search and no, it's not true. It's not. Well, it's not true, but it's like, it's definitely. Yeah. Searching for a certain size and voltage, it may be true. Right. Yes, of course. Right. But in general, it's, you know.

Chris Gammell: Well, the other thing too, is just the noticing the prices, the prices are much higher. Like, you know, it's a market, fine, whatever. Yeah. But I think, I think the big thing is like, just in general, if you're searching for specific part numbers, you're going to have to do a little bit of reevaluation and find a new part.

Dave Jones: Is this the capacitor cartel? At play?

Chris Gammell: No, I don't think so. You mean like something like Bynum?

Dave Jones: Did we discuss that before?

Chris Gammell: I don't think so.

Dave Jones: A lot of, like five of the top major capacity manufacturers were all fined for being a cartel.

Chris Gammell: Oh, like they colluded with one another?

Dave Jones: They colluded to fix prices in the industry. That was fined hundreds of millions of dollars.

Chris Gammell: Was this recently or no?

Dave Jones: Oh, six months, six, nine months ago, maybe. I'm sure we covered it here on the Ampere.

Chris Gammell: Well, I've heard about that before because that happened. I know that happened in the DRAM industry back in the 80s. But I mean, like that's a common thing and they can prove it pretty easily. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And they proved it and they went, yeah, guilty. Yeah, we'll have to pay the money. Because we made more money from the cartel than we did in the fine to pay the fine. So, yeah. So, we've actually come out ahead.

Chris Gammell: How do you feel about that, Dave?

Dave Jones: We've actually come out ahead.

Chris Gammell: Are you?

Dave Jones: I don't care unless it affects me. Then I start caring.

Chris Gammell: The cartel stuff, you mean?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, you know, like it's not good.

Chris Gammell: But do you think they should have been fined or no?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Bloody hell.

Chris Gammell: See, you like government oversight. I'm just saying, right there. Of course I like government oversight. Right. Right, okay. Remember earlier in the show?

Dave Jones: Let's have no government oversight and see how the industry functions.

Speaker ?: I know, I know, I know.

Chris Gammell: I'm just saying.

Dave Jones: You know?

Chris Gammell: Just because, you know, as you ease your way into the role of cranky older engineer, you have to also have cognitive dissonance. This is things that I, you know, I worked in Ohio for a while, Dave. I mean, like I worked with some cranky, cranky middle-aged engineers. So, I'm a connoisseur.

Dave Jones: I mean, government oversight, there's a difference between useful government oversight and overzealous, you know, badly. Right.

Chris Gammell: So, capacitors, okay, but money laundering, not okay. Formed government oversight. Capacitor laundering. I'm sorry. I'm just, you know. Well, I'm sure they do wash them as a step.

Dave Jones: You know, I'm sure there's some sort of washing step in there. So, they. Right, right. Maybe they literally launder them.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. Laundering of capacitors. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is, so I thought this is an interesting article. So, Dwayne over at Screaming Circuits wrote about this. And he was writing about package sizes for components and passives specifically, right, because of this whole thing. And he said that as a result of all this, like, they're going to start cutting out some of the bigger parts too. Like 1206, 0805, even 0603, he says. And he said this has happened in the past, but I don't think I've ever noticed that. I was wondering if you've seen that in the past.

Dave Jones: What, because you can't get the bigger ones?

Chris Gammell: Well, like, when there is a break like this, when there's shortest problems, they're also switching the technologies at the vendor, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So, like, I think a couple shows. Because Apple have just ordered 20 zillion 0201 capacitors. Right, exactly.

Chris Gammell: So, like, why be tooled for something where only, like, onesie-twosies are going to buy them, right? Right. You know, same thing with just dip package. I mean, dip packages are still around. Yeah, but no, no, no, no.

Dave Jones: This is bullshit, right? Because everyone thinks, oh, the world's driven by the mobile phone market. Yeah, that might be a large driver, right? But not everything's going small. You still need your big industrial. People have no idea how big the regular industrial market is. And you need your big ass, you know, 1206 caps. Yeah, but I think a lot of that stuff's driven by this too, though. You know, you need your big high-voltage caps. Good luck getting a mains-rated cap in a bloody 0201 size package, right?

Chris Gammell: Right, right. It doesn't even mean to spacing and voltage-tolerance stuff. I get that. I'm just saying that I think this makes the argument it's just based on volumes in general, right? I mean, like, when you look at obsolescences and when companies decide to make something obsolete, usually it's based on, like, okay, well, we ran the numbers and the, you know, the projection of all of the part, all of the 1206 parts in this category don't make sense if they start to obsolete them. You know what I mean?

Dave Jones: Yeah, but look, I think you're doing it wrong. If you're designing, if you're choosing your package based on what might happen once every blue moon with a capacitor shortage, I think you're doing it wrong. You choose the right part for the right process technology for the right reasons for your product and you just, you know, like, you just can't worry about that sort of stuff. If you go, oh, I'm going to move all my process technology to, you know, 0201 resistors and capacitors just because I want to avoid these shortages in the future, you're an idiot because you've just changed the whole assembly process technology, right? Yeah, I mean, you're going to have lower yield, you're going to have, you know, all sorts of problems. You have to probably move to a new supplier. They're going to, you know, like, a new assembler, sorry.

Chris Gammell: I think some of that stuff I agree with, but like the, so like specifically in this case, right, I was just doing a design and I had 0805 capacitors and resistors on the back and I went and did a price comparison because the 0805s were just harder to find and the capacitor prices were significantly lower for 0603 versus 0805 just because of availability.

Dave Jones: Well, then why don't, why aren't you regularly using 0603? There's nothing, see, 0603 is what any regular assembly house can do. Once you go below 0603, you pretty much need more specialized assembly equipment.

Chris Gammell: So I did, I was doing 0805 because on resistor side, I've just got packs and packs of, you know, resistors that are 805. And so that's where I started from. And then, and then I was like, oh, well, this is, this is actually counterproductive for this thing I'm working on. And then you get the benefits of more space and everything else too.

Dave Jones: Right. Oh, well that's, that, you know, there can be legitimate reasons to, you know, if you're still using 1206 just because you like them because they're nice and big and all that sort of stuff and you're going into a production environment, there's no need to use 1206s, go to 0603s. But don't jump to 0402 for example. Right. No, no, no. Right.

Chris Gammell: Unless, unless you have a need for it.

Dave Jones: Unless you have a need for it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Unless you're building some ultra dense product or something like that.

Chris Gammell: Right. But I think that even eventually, like I think that the, and I think what this article is trying to point out is that eventually, much like today, you can still buy tip packages and a lot of things, but usually you're paying a premium for it. So it's almost like you're kind of, you know, yes, you're right. We're not going to be doing, you know, anything I design at least is not leading edge.

Dave Jones: Process technology, that's an assembly process technology thing in the opposite direction. Right. You're, you're going back to a through hole, whereas all of your assembly houses are optimized for a surface mount. Right. So you're, you're practically going, you know, old school, um, in the opposite direction. You know, it's, it's, it's not like surface going from one size surface mount to another because look, if, if somebody's pick and place machine can, can do 0603, they can do 1206. Right. It's not like, you know, oh, they need a different machine to do those big old fashioned, you know, large parts. No, it doesn't work like that. You know, so it's kind of, yeah, the opposite argument. That's, that's, you know, dumb decision on a different, in the opposite direction.

Chris Gammell: I would never, I would never recommend people do that, but I'm saying people still do and they definitely pay a premium for it. And usually they're not, usually by the time they get to like the, and now I want to make this automated manufacturing wise. It's like, okay, good luck.

Dave Jones: I, I assembled a dip TTL computer. Oh yeah, I saw that. Yeah. How'd that go? I didn't see how it turned out. Yeah. Yeah. It worked first go. I was very disappointed. I was hoping to

Chris Gammell: have something to troubleshoot, you know, what was the, what was the, uh, the, did someone

Dave Jones: just send it to you or what? Yes. It's the gigatron.io. Keep going. I don't know what that is. Okay. It's, it's just the name of an TTL, you know, a custom TTL, uh, eight bit risk, um, do it yourself computer. Oh, that's fun. And it's, yeah, it uses all seven four series logic. So it uses all seven four series logic, um, with a, with some RAM, with some SRAM and a ROM and it's literally an, a risk computer and it can generate graphics and do all, you know,

Chris Gammell: and play games on it. Yeah. Nice. That's fun. Oh yeah. I'm looking at the images right now.

Dave Jones: Well, that's cool. All right. Yeah. Well, I'm about to upload the review of it and while it's cool, like, um, yeah, it was a fun kit to assemble, but unfortunately they, it's kind of like the opposite problem with the through hole technology we just talked about, right? Going in the opposite direction too far in the opposite direction. This one, right? You've assembled your computer, but you can't really do anything with it because you can't hook it up to a keyboard, right? You can hook it up to a monitor, but you can't hook it up to a keyboard and it doesn't have the interpreter. Well, I say, you know, you can't just turn it on, hook up a keyboard and, you know, type in your basic program or whatever, which is kind of like, you know, the minimum requirement you'd expect from a personal computer. So it's not very personal. This is the conclusion I come to in the video,

Chris Gammell: in the review video. Got it. Got it. Yeah. So how do you interface with it? Is it just a serial port?

Dave Jones: Well, you can either redo the ROM, right? So you can either recompile it and flash, not flash, but actually burn the EEPROM and then put it in with your new programs or whatever, or you can actually go through the joystick port. You can hook the joystick port up to an Arduino, which then bit bangs in serial stuff and they've got an old school loader built into the ROM. So it's like the, oh, you wouldn't remember, but I'm sure lots of our listeners out there will. Right. Back in the day, right? Computers couldn't, you know, they didn't have any hard, hard storage was tape, right? Was the actual cassette tape, right? So you'd, you know, you'd load the program in on the cassette tape and then you'd type it and then you'd do the load command and it's basically the same sort of thing. So you'd load the program and it comes in and a bit bangs it from the Arduino through the joystick port of all things. And then you can load your program in, but once you remove the, but there's no way to store it because it's just stored in the SRAM. So once you remove it, it's gone. So every time you turn your computer back on, you've got to load your program back in from the tape, you know? So it's like, it's kind of like gone too far in the old school direction. Right. Like to the point of it being like, nobody wants to use that anymore. You know, nobody wants to use that system, you know? Yeah. It's like, yeah. Which is a shame because otherwise it was a fun kit. Well, I mean, so what do you think would be better if you had, well, if it had a basic interpreter built in and you can look it up to a PS2 keyboard, you know?

Chris Gammell: Well, why, why didn't you just do that from like just a USB to serial converter? Like a, like one of those little plug in $5 jobbies from eBay. Well, you know, you don't even know. Well,

Dave Jones: yeah, like that's, you can still buy those PS2 keyboards and, and there, and with the PS2 plug and they've got an I squared C interface, right? And, and that's easy to interface to a computer like this, right? You don't, none of this USB rubbish, right? Just buy a PS2 keyboard and hook

Chris Gammell: it up. Well, I just mean that like, so if, if it's a serial interface, why not just go from a terminal, right? Like, so you have a terminal program that's going through USB to serial and then just talking to a serial port directly. So you like the Arduino doesn't really seem necessary.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, this thing, well, kind of the Arduino can be used as like an interface bridge to it, but it's like, no, like if I, if I just built my computer, can I hook a keyboard up and just type in some basic commands and run some programs? Yeah. You know, I mean, yeah, unfortunately it couldn't do that. So I was a bit bummed. That's too bad. Anyway, it was fun to build.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, that's the nice thing is like the, you know, it's a live, live quality soldering time,

Dave Jones: right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Therapeutic, you know? Yep. Exactly. That's good. Yeah. I've,

Chris Gammell: I've been pointing people to a former guest of the show, uh, Sar from Boldport. I've been, uh, pointing him, pointing to his stuff often. He's got new kits always coming out. So. Right.

Dave Jones: Do it yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Learn to solve it. You ever done one of those kits? The, uh,

Chris Gammell: Boldports. Yeah. Those are nice. So yeah, I've been, uh, I've been, I've been dealing with, uh, I've been dealing with some serial port stuff and it's just, uh, it's still, you know, like platform on a, on a windows computer. I was on. Okay. Yeah. And it was like telling me to the,

Dave Jones: the people. Oh yeah. I got an Alexa too. Did you hear that? Yeah. I heard a female voice in the

Chris Gammell: background. I thought. Right. Right. It's been creeping me out. So actually that happened last week when I was editing the show. Yeah. I, I, I say something about a computer, you stupid piece of crap. Nope. Didn't work that time. See, it doesn't work. Uh, that's my keyword is not,

Dave Jones: is not Alexa. What do you want one of those things for? If it annoys you, cause it's always listening.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's just for the, it's, it's, yeah, I know. I, I, I like the music thing.

Dave Jones: Why, why can't they add like a big button on top where you walk up to it, push the, oh, you do, and you can push the big button and then it active and then it listens. Oh, well, they'll,

Chris Gammell: they'll have a, they have a mute button on top. So you could do that. And then, oh, well, no, you can always have it on mute, you know? Right. And then that would, you know, you press it to unmute, I suppose. Yeah. Anywho. Uh, yeah. I was on a, uh, on, on a, uh, device, a computing device. I'm just looking to see if the light, the ring's lighting up now. Uh, and, uh, yeah, I was, oh God, it was about TerraTerm. Uh, oh yes. Yeah. I use TerraTerm. Oh my God. What a terrible interface. Just like 1990s, like style. Yeah. Well, there's probably only

Dave Jones: a couple of them. I use TerraTerm and, uh, Termite. I think of the two. I don't know. Oh, Termite. I've never tried that one. Yeah. There's Termite. Okay. Um, is another one.

Chris Gammell: I've used, I've used CoolTerm as well. Right. There's a few of them out there. There's not many out there, really. Yeah. There's, there's, actually there's one, there's a couple of people here in town that were working on one that was like very webby. Uh, it's called Baud,

Dave Jones: B-A-U-D. Right. And that was nice. Yeah. David wrote his own one cause he was, oh, none of them do exactly what I want. So I'm going to write. Everyone writes their bloody own. Right. Right. Exactly. So there's no one that is the obvious one everyone uses. It's like, right. You know, of course everyone would go, oh, now I can write that. I can write the one that everyone will use. Yeah. Right. Good luck. Right. Yep. There's 50 of them out there. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, there's a bunch, uh, anyway, whatever works honestly, but this is not, this is not working for me. So I was trying to troubleshoot some stuff. Yeah. But yeah, but yeah, but the

Dave Jones: program works, it must've been being something else wrong. I think it was. Yeah. No, I think,

Chris Gammell: I mean, I think it was just when you're not sure if it's, you know, if, if it's Pebcac or whatever it's going on, you know, like I'm, I'm sure it was Pebcac and, you know, it was

Dave Jones: probably me. Sure. You had, you know, the thing I find that's mostly wrong is I've chosen the wrong port, you know, if I've got other things on there that are, you know, anyway, I've got a PC that has a built-in serial port, you know, it's got a real one on the motherboard, you know, it's got a D9 connector on the back. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Yep. Hook right into those

Chris Gammell: pins, huh? Yep. That's it. That's good. Yeah. So, I mean like, and that's, I mean, honestly, that's usually my go-to advice too, is like, if you have access to it, like stick a scope or something else external on there just to see if it's pumping anything out. Cause you know,

Dave Jones: when you're not getting anything back. But generally I find it works cause those programs work like everything's default. Everything's like 8N1, right? Right. So it's like eight bits, no parody, one stop bit, right? Like it's, it's all the default. All you got to choose is the right board rate and the right port. I mean, it's not, you know, it's not rocket science. Oh no,

Chris Gammell: I think in this case it's, I'm just, yeah, I was more complaining about the, the 1990s UI on it, but the, yeah. I'm, I'm guessing that the board I was talking to is not playing nice.

Dave Jones: What I would like my ideal utopian UART program to do is like simply like auto sniff. Like, is there any data at all coming in on this port? Tell me which ports have data coming in on them and then auto detect the rate, or at least tell me that I'm wrong rather than just let the cursor just sits there and blinks at you and you get nothing. Right. So it's either all or nothing. Right. Yeah. Like I'd love it if it's somehow auto detected. Oh, look, you've chosen, like something's coming in, but it's all garbage. So it changed or at least, you know, tell you

Chris Gammell: that it's just show that it's garbage. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that, you know, it's basically, this is garbage. Yeah. You're usually looking at nothing here.

Dave Jones: So then you can just go through and choose all the different board rates until you hit one that works,

Chris Gammell: you know? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like a translator that just tries every language.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Right. Then have you ever been fooled by the old, um, uh, microcontroller RC oscillator UART trap for young players? No. No. Oh, well, let me tell you about that young sunny boy. See, look, old engineer here. Old engineer. Yeah. Um, you know how microcontrollers have built

Chris Gammell: in RC oscillators, right? Right. They're usually like two to 5%.

Dave Jones: 4 megahertz or something like that. Yeah. And they usually like, but back in the old day, right? Usually they're pretty accurate these days. They're like 1% or something, right? They've learned to control the tolerances and 1% is good enough for the UART specs for, for, for the hardware UARTs to actually capture the data. Right. But there's, but once you get to like.

Chris Gammell: Just because of like jitter and making sure the time is right on the signal and everything.

Dave Jones: And the time is right. Yeah. So once you're, uh, because they only look for a certain amount of time, you know, they, they get the edge and then they look for a certain amount of time. And if there's, you know, anyway. Um, so if you're, once, once you start getting, I won't, don't quote me, but once you start getting like three, 4% out, then it starts becoming really marginal whether or not your UARTs actually going to receive that data or not. Or whether, you know, whether it's going to Yeah. You start to get a couple of them, but not all of them. Yeah. And a couple of them, not all of them, or you might not get any, you know, because it's all, cause the oscillator is running right hard on one side and it's just outside the spec and you don't get anything, you know? And, um, yeah. Or you might get the occasional random garbage data or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, you know, yeah. So that could be a real pain. And that was a problem back in the day and spent, and it varied with temperature, of course. Um, you know, I was just thinking about

Chris Gammell: a thing I was helping someone troubleshoot and I asked, I asked for a scope plot and they showed me it and it was like super clean edges, everything like that. But honestly, I didn't even think to check like the, the actual frequency. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's a, that's a good point. So that, that used to be.

Dave Jones: Well, cause that's the last thing you check because you've got to get in there and you've got to use your cursors. You've got to measure it precisely. And then you've got to check against the spec. It's just time consuming, pain in the ass.

Chris Gammell: Well, I really like those things where, um, like if you're using a logic, like a salier or the analog discovery or something like that, where it actually just does the translation. So you're like, Oh, I think I sent, you know, FF or no, that's a bad example. Like eight F, you know, and it's like, yeah, there it is. You know, at least you have that. If it gets translated one at a time, I don't know. I've trouble, trouble shot enough, like garbage outputs where I'm like just chasing ghosts for hours, you know?

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. No, if you just setting up your scope slash logic analyzer protocol decoder is an art in itself. If you get that wrong, then you can be chasing a red herring down a rabbit hole because you think, Oh my, there's something wrong with my, the, the project that I'm actually debugging. It's sending the wrong data, but it's not. It's because you've chosen the wrong board rate or you've chosen whatever, you know, cause your logic analyzer scope could start showing you garbage just because you chose the wrong setting. You didn't get the parody right or you didn't get the board rate or you didn't get the inversion right or you didn't

Chris Gammell: get the, you know? Yeah. Yeah. What we need Dave is we need artificial intelligence for electronics. Right. It's called the amp hour, artificial intelligence about electronics.

Dave Jones: And then not only UARTs, but things like spy bus, you know, if you don't get your auto time out, you know, if you don't, if you've only got the, if you don't have the one with the, um, the, you know, the third wire or whatever, you know, you've only got, uh, if you're not doing it in hardware, software timeout, you know, you've got to set your software time out right. Otherwise it doesn't decode your data properly. And it's like, Oh man. So you really got to know, know what you're doing. It's not just easy. Oh, I just hooked my protocol analyzer up and it'll tell me, eh, no. Yeah. Right. You know, no. I mean, I think it helps, but yeah, it's not, it's not, it's not the be all end off. You've got to know how to drive it. You know, if you're, if you don't know what you're doing with a protocol analyzer, then, you know, it's, it's not going to help you. Right. Right. Hopefully you're starting

Chris Gammell: from a good place though. Yeah. Right. Well, speaking of things that are flipping around quickly, did you see this, uh, this new Osmo FL2K? No, no, this is the new SDR thing.

Dave Jones: So Osmo.com is a, I'm so into the software defined radio community that I'm always up to date.

Chris Gammell: So you probably know about the RTL SDR, right? No, no. It's a, okay. So that's like, that's like, all right, well, that's okay. Uh, so the RTL SDR is, uh, based on a TV tuner chip. Right. Oh, yes. Right. Yes. So it's a cheap, cheap, cheap. Yep. Uh, I don't even know if it's HDMI or if it's, it might be just USB, but basically it can, it can receive signals, uh, receive terrestrial TV signals, right. Including digital modes, all that other crap. But like, but basically they reverse engineers the firmware and then there's a driver for that. And you can use that for like things like, like SDR sharp, or you can put it into, um, GNU radio, stuff like

Dave Jones: that. So if you, the de facto standard, um, low cost SDR hardware. Right, right, right. Uh,

Chris Gammell: and so, I mean, and so we've also, we've obviously talked to a lot of people about SDR on here before. There's lots of episodes we've done with Mike Osman and Dimitri and, uh, Derek Kozell and I'm sure I'm missing names, but, um, but there's, uh, I'll, I'll link some, some, uh, some past shows about SDR stuff. Oh, Matt Eddis, uh, who started Eddis Research. Um, SDR guests, gotta write that down. Sorry. Uh,

Dave Jones: so that's the background there. Do we have a category on the, do we have categories on the end?

Chris Gammell: We don't have a category. We just, I'll just link the actual guest shows. Um, but this is a new one. We should have categories. We should. Yes, Dave, we should. We'll, we'll, we'll put our heads together about how to better organize our website. Yeah. Well, I'll, I'll, I'll, you know, try and hold yourself back from organizing too much, too much. Okay. Continue. Yes. Uh, so this is a new one that the Osmocom folks figured out that it's a VGA to USB converter, uh, USB three, right? So like pretty fast signal stuff. And I think what it, I think what they, what they video capture doodad, it's a video capture doodad. The chipset is the, I think the FL 2000 and that's what it's named on like Osmo FL 2K. Uh, I lost my link here. Yeah. Uh, but the idea is basically using, using the harmonics of that, right? You get, you get incremental harmonics, right? So if it's like, if the, I'm going to say this wrong, right? But if it like the, if the base frequency is at 1.8, then you're also going to have a harmonic at 3.6 megahertz. And then, you know, hang on, hang on.

Dave Jones: Let's, let's, let's step back a bit. A VGA to USB converter is basically some high, three high speed ADCs, right? Cause it's got to measure the RGB, which are analog signal levels on the VGA, on the RGB pins, right? Right. Right. So it's got, so three ADCs. So it's, you're telling me it's using these ADCs as an SDR. Right. They've hacked it. Uh, yes. And I'm trying to find the other stuff about this now. Uh, is it, is it like a three channel SDR? I don't, actually, yeah, you could feed, it'd only go up to a couple hundred megahertz, right? Uh, yes. Yes. Because here's the other link.

Chris Gammell: Sorry. It's on Osmo.com too. Sorry. So, uh, so, where is it? Where is it? Where is it? So they're advertised with a maximum of 2048 by 1152 maximum resolution for, uh, blah, blah, blah.

Dave Jones: Yes. Which, which claim transmit, which translates into a dot clock of X amount. And that's what they spec the sample rate of the ADCs for. Right. Am I correct? Right. But this thing can also,

Chris Gammell: it's not just ADCs. I'm missing the part about there's, there's DAX as well. Right. Um, Oh, this is an output. What? It's an output and it's a trans, it's a transceiver, right? So it can output and input. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's, what's crazy about it because what they, if you look at the original article, they spoof, they spoofed, uh, uh, GSM signals. Yeah. So they said spoofed FM, DAB, DVB-T, GSM, UMTS, and GPS signals. So that's. So it can generate that. Wow. Right. It can generate pretty, pretty heavy duty stuff. Hang on. How can it generate

Dave Jones: I'm going to get so far. GSM signals where we're talking near a gigahertz here?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, that's the, um, you're right. Cause it's 165 megahertz for this. Um, that's the, that's the DAC itself, right? But then it's. So this is the harmonics you're talking. But it's using the harmonics, right? So that's the idea is that you have harmonics.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. So it's generating a, a sub multiple of the GSM carrier frequency. Right. Right. And it's, and it's just pumping out a square wave and then hoping that.

Chris Gammell: Right. So it's towards the bottom of this initial article, the raw unfiltered DAC output contains lots of harmonics at multiples of the base frequency. This is what creative is creatively used. If you use Osmo FL2K to generate a signal much higher than you could normally achieve with 165 megahertz DAC without up conversion. Right. So that's the idea here is that if you did shift this thing around, you could, in theory, you know, you could multiply it by a, by a up convert, you could up convert it to a different frequency band and then, you know, have more bandwidth within it. Um, bandwidth. Were you here for that show? I don't think you were here for that show.

Dave Jones: I don't know. But anyway, you can have.

Chris Gammell: But like where my mind was blown, I'm like, bandwidth. You know, like, right. It was, I forget what I was talking about at this point now, but it was basically showing, it was showing the width of the bands as like, that's where it clicked in for me. You know, that, and it was many, many years past where I should have learned that for real. Uh, yeah, but that's the hard, right? When you're learning, when you're learning RF stuff, it's just so nebulous and things like, and I think it was the show with, uh, Derek Kozell where we were talking about the, about, um, SDR stuff. SDR is software defined radio. If we didn't already say that, sorry. I'm really trying here. I don't know if you've noticed. I've been trying to say last names and explain. Yeah. Uh, I noticed the last show that I've been saying stuff a lot lately. So I need to get a, I need to get a buzzer every time I say stuff. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry for all that stuff. Uh, um, anywho, uh, this is a cool project. And so I've got one of these things. It was like 15 bucks on Amazon. Um, and I haven't tried out the, I have not tried out the actual plugin yet, but the idea is that, but this is another plug. So, so the Osmo com stuff, what they've done is as far as I understand it is that they started creating tool sets that create drivers for this hardware, right? So they do the same thing for the, the, uh, the chipset that's in that RTL SDR, uh, the great Scott gadgets folks, uh, Mike Osman and, and, uh, uh, all them, sorry. Uh, they also have a driver. The lime SDR folks have a driver. The blade RF folks have a driver. And the idea is that you can drive it from a generic interface, like a GNU radio. And so you can start doing interesting things like spoofing GSM, which again, you know, much like money laundering, we do not recommend, uh, you will, if you get caught, you will get in a lot of trouble. Uh, but you know, if you're doing interesting things, uh, if you're doing research, I think sometimes you get away with it, especially if you're doing it within a Faraday cage. Uh, that's the best place to do these things.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Cause that's pretty crude. Like pumping out the, yeah, crap. The harmonic stuff. Yep.

Chris Gammell: No, see, I said stuff right there. Uh, well done. Yeah. Um, there was another thing about this though, too. It was, I think the idea was that because this is so low cost, it was something about they, they stored all of the, all of the stuff, all of the data in, uh, in, in Ram on the computer. So like, like the, like the hack RF does, it's, it's actually a streaming solution, right? So it's not storing anything on the device itself. The device is acting as a conduit from computer to air. And in this case, I believe this is also acting as a conduit from a DMA memory source, you know, source of, shut up Alexa. Jesus. Uh, sorry. Uh, it's, it's, it's basically allowing a pathway from your memory all the way out to an antenna type solution.

Dave Jones: Hang on. I'm looking at this doodad dongle thing and, and, and it's only a VGA display driver. So it's only a DAC. I don't see where it does capture with an ADC.

Chris Gammell: Is it only transmit? I thought it was, I thought it was receive and transmit, but maybe not.

Dave Jones: Well, I, I clicked on, I'm looking at the article, I'm clicking on the Amazon link they give, and I'm looking at this and it is a VGA, USB three to VGA external display adapter. So surely it's only got a DAC. It doesn't read anything back. It doesn't read those RGB signals back. It's, it's not, it's not a VGA capture doodad. Hmm. So I don't know how it can be an SDR in that case.

Chris Gammell: I don't get it. Well, SDR is software defined radio, right? So transmitters are radios. Uh, I thought it was, I thought it was a receiver as well, but I must be wrong about that.

Dave Jones: I don't think it is. I'm pretty sure it's not. I'm calling it. I'm calling them out.

Chris Gammell: RT. Oh, maybe. Yeah. Maybe, maybe you have to use something like an SDR, like an RTL SDR. Maybe that's why. Okay. In this, in the second one that we have, so the setting up and testing Osmo FL2K, there's a second one. You've got to use both. So this is just the DAC. Okay. Right. But still, so the RTL SDR did not have a transmitter though. That's good because most people

Dave Jones: should not be transmitting. Well, it has a DAC, right? It's got a DAC, which is a, you know,

Chris Gammell: if you hook it on a long wire, it's a transmitter. No, no. The original RTL SDR was a, was a TV receiver. Yes. Yeah. Yes. It's a TV receiver. Now this is basically creating a low cost transmitter, I guess. I thought this was a transceiver. I thought this was both ways. I'm sorry. No,

Dave Jones: it's not. Okay. That's what confused me. All right. So this is, so these are now companion devices. They've, you know, the, this hobbyist community has got their magically cheap SDR.

Chris Gammell: Oh, it says right here. It's very complimentary to the RTL SDR. Sorry. I should have, I should have read that piece first, but research, research. I think the, I think the idea is that the receive was never, receive was already taken care of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you could buy

Dave Jones: this cheap TV receiver and now they figured out how to got a cheap transmitter, you know, like 30 bucks to make a transceiver. Repurposing this consumer hardware. This is pretty crude. Like I, I can appreciate the technical novelty of it, but I, I don't like the idea of everyone spewing out. Oh no, no, no. You know, square ways with the harmonics over the whole spectrum. That's like, no good's going to come from that. No, no. I think they need to find another. I have,

Chris Gammell: I have strong words for how much I hate Ajit Pai, uh, the FCC chairman, but, uh, I, I don't disagree with the charter of the FCC. Like, no, I also, I like all of my other devices working. Like I, I, I think I've had this problem at home. Really? Yeah. I, my Bluetooth stuff's been pretty messed up

Dave Jones: lately. Like one of my local TV, I tweeted this one of my local TV stations, which the kids watch, cause it's got the kids channel on it. Right. Is like, is playing up right. Digital. Like we, it was almost unwatchable and I'm looking at the signal, you know, and these newfangled digital TVs, you can go in and you can check the signal level and the signal. Oh really? Right. Yeah. You can even get like technical details of the QSPR coding used and all that sort of jazz or, or whatever it is. I'm sure I'm wrong there. Um, anyway, um, so like, I, like I had near a hundred percent signal level, like 80% signal level or something, you know, really high. Right. So I'm getting lots of signal coming into my box, but the quality, but the signal quality was zero. And that's why it was all breaking up. Oh, interesting. And it was like, do they, does it tell you what

Chris Gammell: this, the quality actually refers to in that case? It's not like, no, it doesn't, but I tweeted

Dave Jones: everyone says, yeah, it's like, yeah, people threw some industry terms at me, you know, some weird ass, you know, in RF encoding, digital encoding terms, you know, and yeah, okay. I kind of know what they

Chris Gammell: mean, but I don't know how they actually relate to that. We're pretty, we're pretty outmatched with all the RF and the code and pretty much, pretty much we're, we're narrowing our focus, Dave. We're, you know, you and me, we can talk about capacitors sometimes. So I, I, I understand what the acronyms

Dave Jones: mean, but I don't, you know, know how, you know, like, and, and symbol rate and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. I did learn that stuff once, but you know, it was so long ago, I completely forget.

Chris Gammell: Well, and at that point too, like, what are you really going to do about it too? Right. I mean, like this is a commercial thing. You're not going to.

Dave Jones: Well, here it is, right. So this is what the problem is, is basically a signal to noise ratio thing, right? So if, if some other appliance like this thing is pumping out wide band noise, right? Right. That's called a jammer. Right. It's called a jammer. And that, if it hits the same frequency as the, as the station you're trying to receive, yeah, it's going to swamp it with that crap. And you may have all the signal level in the world. You may be right next to the transmitter, but you're still going to, you know, it's, you're not going to receive dick. It's a data corruption thing. It's a data corruption thing. Yeah. It can't re-extract, the code because all the digital stuff is all coded, you know, so it can't extract that when you've got all this crap noise, which is swamping it. So it must be something. And then it's just magically cleared up, you know, a day, a few days later. Maybe it was, uh, uh, what's it called?

Chris Gammell: Somebody switching on something. Sunspots? Not sunspots. Yeah. Solar flares. Maybe it was

Dave Jones: solar flares. You're right. Solar flares. I'll blame those. Yeah. Well, yeah. Every time I operate

Chris Gammell: the wall door to our garage. I was going to say like people that are listening that are ham radio, people are just like screaming and squirming in their seats right now. We're sorry, but not really. Care back to zero. Leave us comments. We love comments. We have a subreddit. Teach us and others,

Dave Jones: you know. All correspondence must be on the back of a postcard. Send a $20 bill. What was that

Chris Gammell: what they used to say on Car Talk? Send your conscience entry on the back of a $20 bill.

Dave Jones: And yeah, every time we operate the, uh, roller door, it just generates so much. Yeah. Every, like every time we come in and out of the garage, it's like, uh, yeah, the, all of our digital stations, all of them just completely collapse, you know, and I've, I've tried filtering, you know, I've tried filtering on the mains. Nothing helps. Yeah. Nothing helps. It just swamps it. It's just that bloody

Chris Gammell: motor is just, you know, I was going to say, have you ever brought a, uh, spectrum analyzer home and done it and tried it? No, no, I haven't. Cause that would be interesting to see if it, what it looks

Dave Jones: like. Right. Yeah. But is it conducted mode noise? Is it, you know, um, what is it going along the cables? Is it, is it going along, is it over air? You know, is it like, you know, oh, you're saying

Chris Gammell: maybe it's actually affecting the power line of the TV and then that's noise feeding it through there

Dave Jones: or something? Yep. Hmm. Could be. Yeah. Or is it just pumping up noise to the end? Like, yeah, is it radiated noise to the antenna and then it's affecting the symbol rate and it's just crapping out that way? Yep. Yep. I don't know. Is it affecting next, next door's TVs? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Right. You know? Yeah. Well, speaking of the FCC, uh, on the, uh, my friend sent me this yesterday, uh, yesterday, um, or no today, I think actually, uh, but FCC, you know, that's the, that's the regulatory body here in the, in the States. Uh, and I'm, what's it called there? I don't

Dave Jones: actually know. Uh, the Australian communications, uh, ACMA or something, Australian communications

Chris Gammell: and monitoring agency. Got it. So yeah. And they're in every country as they should be, right. They determine the, you know, what bands are used for what and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, but getting regulatory approval for like part 15, uh, non, non intentional emitters, a lot of things have to go through that. A lot of devices that sell on the market. And so my friend sent me this and it's just as really creepy, like, uh, what is it? The hello Barbie. It's, uh, the filings for the hello Barbie. And this is, you know, you think, you think the echo is bad. This is a, this is a, a Barbie doll that has a battery and, uh, and a push to talk and it's listening to your, uh, your child play with it. Uh, as my friend said, at least it's a push to talk, but yeah, no, like you can see a tear down of it. There's like a Marvell chipset. There's a, so there's a Marvell chipset on the receiver side. Then there's a little, what I assume is a wifi module, um, to, for the doll to talk back to the base station. There's a charging thing for that too. And, uh, yeah. So lots of, lots of creepiness there, but, but the FCC, uh, site is really cool to look at. I mean, you can find a lot of, um, devices and product pictures and teardowns and

Dave Jones: stuff like that. That's how a lot of the Apple fanboys get their pre-information is because you have to submit it to the FCC for compliance before you put it on sale. And, you know, there's all these nerds just, you know, trawling the FCC website for, you know, the latest Apple news, you know?

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Sad.

Chris Gammell: I, yeah. I think it's, it's an interesting look at, you know, this is from a couple of years ago, I think at this point, but it's also interesting just to see, this is something I would never tear down and I'm guessing you would never tear down. And so low cost kind of operation stuff as well.

Dave Jones: Well, this is, this is big Clive's, uh, territory. Got it. Got it. Yep. Yep. This is what he's famous for. Barbies? Tearing down cheap Chinese things. Oh, right. He said a Barbie doll a light once or so and it went viral or something, didn't he? It wasn't a Barbie doll. Was it a sex doll or something? I don't know. Anyway. Very different things, Dave. Yeah, it's great. Oh, I don't know, are they?

Chris Gammell: Yes. That's very different. Uh, yeah. Other teardowns we had on our, uh, on our list this week was the, the mil spec teardown. Now this is going the exact opposite direction. So this is from a Apache, Apache helicopter, Apache data entry panel for a helicopter. And this is just like connector, like the heaven. Porn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and you know, all the, all the interface boards, everything there. I thought there was more pictures in this. I thought I remember seeing more pictures, but it's an older, it's an older, uh, style, construction style, but very, very nice internals. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yes. I used to work on mil spec stuff. And really, did you have the, the, the, the, Oh, come on. I spent, I spent 15 years working in military companies. Was that like the underwater

Chris Gammell: stuff that was military? Yeah. Oh, okay. That's, that's okay. So, yep. Hmm. Yeah. It's, it's nice, nice stuff. It'll get you, it'll, uh, you gotta be.

Dave Jones: I've torn down quite a lot of military. Right. I've seen some of your, I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Do you have that goal, all gold board? Was that Mike Harrison? I remember one where it was like the really heavy duty, like Motorola based board. Yeah, no, that wasn't me. No. Yeah. Okay. No. That's not Mike.

Dave Jones: So, yep. I think it was.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Hmm. What else?

Chris Gammell: What else we got going on?

Dave Jones: Hey, I retweeted this last night. I, I missed it at the time.

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones: Your favorite, uh, your favorite person, Elon Musk.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Um, it tweeted, you know, your, you know, you think.

Speaker ?: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: This was a while ago, right? Yeah. The, ah, the robots are going to take our jobs, you know, all this sort of stuff. Right. It's like, he famously, now famously tweeted, which I'm sure will be repeated ad nauseum over the years, is that, um, sorry, but I, oh, I can't remember the exact thing.

Chris Gammell: It says excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.

Dave Jones: Humans are underrated. Yep. Right. Yep. Uh, yes. And of course, as, as, as Tesla death, death spirals into bankruptcy. Um, I think they're doing a little bit better today, buddy. I hate to burst your bubble.

Chris Gammell: They, uh, they beat expectations. If you're watching the, the stock news.

Dave Jones: Oh, that just came through, did it? Yeah, it just came through. Because they were supposed to release something on May 2nd.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I think they're shuffling the books there to make it.

Chris Gammell: And this, this, this made all the comparisons to like the Ford CEO, yada, yada, yada. Right. Uh, I don't know if this, I mean, like, yes, he, he did admit it's a mistake, but I don't know. It was a gamble either way.

Dave Jones: And, and, yeah, but it, no, it was like, he was so sure that that was the future vision is that automation was everything and worked out, no, humans are more versatile than what you think, you know, like all this automation is not magic, you know, sometimes humans are just better.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know how to respond here. I, I mean, like the, the things that he's, so this is all in response to the Model 3 and like the production slowdowns and all that stuff. Yeah. Right. All of the, all of the things that he was, that they were taking a lot of heat for because they're missing their deadlines and that people aren't happy with it.

Dave Jones: Well, look, it's, it's not that they can't make the Model 3. It's just that they can't make enough. Right. Fast enough. That's the problem.

Chris Gammell: Right. And so I think what he's really is what, well, it's not that they can't make well, I don't, I don't have any, you know, answer key, but when you're tooling up, yeah, you got to like try a lot of things. And if you're tooling up for a precise process that automation, I think, I think the, the whole idea of, of reconfigurable robots is still not there, especially in the large scale manufacturing space, right? These, these huge KUKA arms and, and all of those, they.

Dave Jones: They're not the universal panacea for everything.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Exactly. And. Uh, and I'm guessing that implemented or impacted things, but I don't, I don't know. Uh, so excessive automation was a mistake. Right. I, I, I doubt it was because they didn't want to hire people or cost wise, you know, robots are probably more expensive than humans, but, uh, well, so what do you, what do you, what do you, what are you getting out with all this? You, you didn't like it either. Are you, no, this is a.

Dave Jones: I am, I am not surprised. Oh. It's like, well, yeah, duh. You know, humans are underrated, duh. Right. You know, I like, I, yeah, like all these visions of our, every single job is going to be taken by robots. It's bullshit.

Chris Gammell: Ah, I see, I see. Right, right. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, automation, it's like, you work up to that.

Dave Jones: It's like the whole autonomous car thing. Oh, every car's going to be autonomous in five years. Bullshit.

Chris Gammell: There we go. It's not going to happen. So this is Dave wanting to be, this is the Dave being right.

Dave Jones: Of course it's the Dave being right, because I'm usually right. Okay. I'm, I'm right more often than I'm wrong, I think.

Chris Gammell: I, I don't, uh, I don't keep track. Uh, maybe I should.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, you should.

Chris Gammell: No, that's not my job. That's your job.

Dave Jones: I don't care, but I don't like it. So I'm going to call it as I see it. And it's blatantly obvious. And now everyone's shocked. It's like, you mean, you mean you were wrong? Yeah, of course he was wrong. Or he wasn't as right as he thought he was. You know, it's not like he's wrong. It's not like automation is shit. Jeez. You know, the amount of automation that's happened in, in, since the days of Henry Ford in automobile manufacturers is remarkable. Yeah. Right. But yeah, I mean, it's not, you know, some magic. You can't just start up a car company for nothing and go, Hey, we're not going to have any workers. We're going to have this automated factory. Metal goes in one end and cars come out the other. Like, you know, it's bullshit.

Chris Gammell: Uh, I'm not sure that's what they were saying, but I agree.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but they were counting on that. They were counting on that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, like for forecasting numbers.

Dave Jones: For forecasting production numbers. And it's bit them on the ass. Right. And well, you know,

Chris Gammell: tough titties, lesson learned. I agree. I think, I think if, if, you know, if there wasn't so much writing on the, the valuation of the stock, you know, it's like public companies. Oh yeah,

Dave Jones: of course. Public, once you're a public company, you're screwed. Yep. Yep. Anyway, I thought that

Chris Gammell: was funny. Yeah. Yeah. It's not bad. Not bad. It's hilarious. Any last, I mean, we're getting up to the end here. Uh, let's see what else on the list. Uh, we've got Espressif releases a mesh protocol. I'm curious about this. I don't know if that's going

Dave Jones: to be, uh, yet another one. Is it like, you know, how many are there? I don't know. I've,

Chris Gammell: I know open thread is the one that, uh, particle said they're using for their mesh devices. Um, this is a new one. I think I don't actually know how meshes work. This is another, this is another

Dave Jones: you art program thing. Everyone thinks they can do it better and become the de facto standard, you know, like, and yeah. And then we just end up with a lot of benefits to becoming the standard. So isn't there the deal, but is it the deal, but no, no, no. XKCD. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Comic about setting the standards, you know, we're going to set another standard

Chris Gammell: to become the new standard. I think, yeah, they talk about 14 going to 15 or something like that. I think that's probably how many times we've referenced that cartoon. It's a, it's a common one here at the amp hour. It's, but it's like, you're right. I mean, it's totally, that's what happens. And I think the thing that's interesting is that's what happened with spy protocol and I square C protocol too, but we don't really talk about that anymore. Right. I don't remember which was which one was a Motorola, right? Uh, I square C was Phillips. Phillips.

Dave Jones: Okay. They still hold the trademark over it. Uh, yep. So if you were to use the I squared C logo, you're going to pay Phillips and Dosh, you know? Yeah. So, but that's how it often

Chris Gammell: happens. And I mean, that's the same response that I have for like, when people are like, oh, well, you know, like, like a lot of people are talking about Laura. Well, I talk about Laura a lot, but like Laura is like, yes, Semtech owns it. But at the same time, they're probably going to only find success if other people are making the chip and they license it out. And eventually, you know, it becomes like this trademark, this soft trademark type thing like Kleenex, right? Right. Where they, they don't lose trademark, but if they, they don't definitely enforce it because there's benefits to having a wider net. Got it. Well, that's

Dave Jones: why everyone started calling I squared C, like they didn't use the name. They just called it two wire. Oh really? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's why. Yeah. I know the Dallas one wire, right? Two wire protocol. Yeah. Dallas one wire protocol is one wire protocol anywhere else.

Chris Gammell: That's a, that's a lame name. Yeah. Yep. So yeah, the, we'll see how this works out with the mesh thing. The, I had a weird realization about the ESP and not even ESP, I suppose other stuff, the other, the other wireless things that are out there. Like, it's like I was looking at the ESP 32 module and I was like, oh, that has a single antenna. And then I thought that's a 2.4 gigahertz. It's 2.4 gig for both of them, isn't it? I mean, I know that wifi now has five gigahertz as well, but it's the same antenna. I didn't, I didn't even think about

Dave Jones: that. I think it, I, yeah, I think it is. Yeah. Don't, don't quote me on that, but I,

Chris Gammell: and they might have like a chip antenna on those well, but like to, to go between the two,

Dave Jones: but, um, I was just thinking. It might be doing multiple fractally things. Yeah. Fractally things.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Outside of our realm, outside of our RF knowledge. Oh, I have not seen this documentary on Madman months. Uh, what's this? Oh, this is another thing on the list? Yes. Yes. It's

Dave Jones: on, it's on the list. It's way down the list. Number 22 on the list, 23 on the list.

Chris Gammell: Madman months. He sold cars. Who's months? Explain that again.

Dave Jones: Months in months in. Is that where you knock the capacitors off? Is that the one? Yep. That's a time-honored, time-honored tradition of once you've got your product, you start removing components randomly until it stops working. Then you put the last component back in and then you ship it, you know? Yeah. That's the months technique. Got it. Whether or not it's, it's, it's in time, you know, I'm sure it's blown out of proportion, but, uh, yes. Um, yeah, the story goes Madman months, you know, used to sell TVs, used to be an ex car salesman. And then he got into TVs back when TVs were a thing. And, uh, and walked, he used to walk around the factory, used to walk around the R and D floor with a pair of side cutters in his pocket. And, and, and, and, and, and anytime both, one of their engineers would boast something's ready to ship, he'd get out his side cutters and go in snipping capacitors until it stopped working. And then he went, well, when we say just saved a couple of cents and, and he was, he became the master of these low cost TVs and that's how he

Chris Gammell: did it. So the, the original hardware cheapskate, huh? Yeah. Yeah. And well, it's it back then.

Dave Jones: Parts were expensive, you know, like if, if, if you could say like he would save it, it was not just snipping out components. It was like, well, it kind of was, it was leaving out entire valves, right? Cause valve, you know, you'd have a, like a seven valve TV, right? Required seven valves. Valves were expensive. So he would actually, tubes in this case, tubes, tubes, tubes, tubes. So he would, so he would, uh, him or, and, or his engineers would go, oh, well, we don't quite need this local oscillator to be that stable, do we? And because, and, and yeah, so he would, so they'd take out a tube, right? For the stability part of it or whatever, for the local oscillator, for the recovery or whatever, and for the signal recovery. And, um, and the TV set would only work if you had a high signal level and you live close to the TV station. But he, but he figured that, uh, you know, most of his sales would be, you know, in cities which are near the transmitters. So his TVs would work just fine with one or two less valves than the competition. Cause he didn't need that, you know, auto gain circuit to, you know, to gain up the low, low signal level. So his TVs only work close and he sold a buttload of them, you know, cause they were cheaper. Cause they use less tubes. I mean, price still wins. I mean, yeah, yeah. Price, price still wins. And people thought they were right. Speaking of expensive, right? Yeah, yeah, right. And you know, so that was, yeah, that was not proper engineering. That was, you know, that was Clayton's engineering. That was, you know, yeah. Businessing,

Chris Gammell: businessing, business, we start and end the show on business. Yep. Getting the job done. That's right. Actually, we're not going to end the show on business. I, I have to call out again because, uh, the guest last week, Sam taught, I'm sorry, you didn't get to talk with him, but, uh, that kid was just, and he published, I didn't realize you were linking me to his published post about the IC, the 66 steps. I had not seen the published

Dave Jones: post. Yes. Right. I'd heard about him doing the thing, but I hadn't seen the, the post.

Chris Gammell: It was right when it came out. So I didn't realize it'd come out. So, uh, if people listened to the show last week and are listening still, uh, uh, Sam, uh, published about the IC, a lot of stuff we talked about as well. Yeah. So, so what you're saying is that, that, that kid's going places. That kid is. Yeah. Yes. It was a, it was a good show. Excellent. All right, man. Well, uh, we're going to go off and not be high schoolers who can make chips in a garage. I don't even have a garage anymore. Do you have a garage? You have a garage. I

Dave Jones: have a garage, but it's going to be turned into something. Yeah. It's going to be turned

Chris Gammell: into something else shortly. Oh no. Okay. Yeah. Dave's getting a day spot in his house. Right. All right, man. Well, we'll talk to you soon. Cool. Catch you next time. Bye.