#400 – Once Every Couple Months

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. At least July 22nd, 2018. Episode 400. Once every couple months.

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: Thought I'd make a token appearance.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, why not? Once every couple months, we'll have you back. And we'll have you here for number 400, man. You had to have you here for that.

Dave Jones: Thanks for inviting me on, Chris. You're welcome. Welcome back, Dave. How you been? Yes, sir.

Chris Gammell: I was just emailing with Mr. Kaiser.

Dave Jones: Oh, right.

Chris Gammell: He's a tiki enthusiast, and there's a bunch of tiki bars in Chicago. Tiki? We'll see. Yeah, like tiki, like Polypanesian. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, what's that like? I don't understand.

Chris Gammell: They're like campy drinks with little umbrellas in the drinks, those kind of things.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. Right. It's a themed bar, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: Fake grass, and yeah. Right, exactly. Right, okay.

Dave Jones: Right. Some sort of Polynesian. Sorry, Jeff.

Chris Gammell: I don't mean to be spilling all your secrets here, but maybe that'll actually... If you know about any good tiki bars, Jeff's your enthusiast.

Dave Jones: He's a tiki bar enthusiast. Mm-hmm.

Chris Gammell: And I got to see him a while ago. That was great. Obviously, since you've been on, geez, how many... It's been a couple shows, but I had a crap load of shows out in Seattle, so...

Dave Jones: Yes, I noticed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, it was kind of a captive community, wasn't it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. It was an island. They couldn't get off, you know? Yeah, yeah. So, he just went and shoved a microphone in their face. Yeah. And not just me. Alvaro, who's also been on the show before from the unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast, he did a couple shows, too. And then I found out about another podcast called The Darknet Diaries. Ooh. That is... It's kind of like a story of, like, hackers, like, what they're doing, I guess? I don't know.

Dave Jones: Right. It's kind of the same as our podcast, except they record in, like, hoodies and dark sunglasses. Is that the...

Chris Gammell: I think it's actually a little bit more story-focused. So, it's actually got, like, editing and story. Oh, editing. Jeez. Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah. So, yeah, it sounds cool, though. So, it's on my list. Excellent. Always on the lookout. But, yeah, lots of great interviews so far and more on the way, I'm sure. I'm hoping I'll be able to do that again at some point. The, like, sit at a conference and just talk to as many people as possible.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: We'll see.

Dave Jones: Cool. Yeah. How you been? Busy. Yeah? What have you been up to? Yeah, flat out with all sorts of crap. You know, life.

Chris Gammell: Yeah?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Like, what? You're supposed to explain that part? No.

Dave Jones: As an interviewer now. You know, I would have automatically jumped into shit. When I say that, it's like, well, don't ask me. Oh, that's the personal stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Got it, got it, got it. All right. You should go. You should do this. Well, I've seen some of the LCD stuff, though. That's been interesting. You got your custom LCDs back?

Dave Jones: We've actually had that for a while, but yeah, life got in the way. We got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and finally got around to doing a video, and it's, yeah, a hundred bucks. We finally got our massively expensive hundred buck custom LCD back.

Chris Gammell: A hundred each or a hundred for the total?

Dave Jones: No, a hundred bucks for the five, including tooling.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's not bad.

Dave Jones: What do you mean it's not bad? When I was a boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah?

Dave Jones: Come on. It's like, you know, it's insanely cheap. It's practically free.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. I thought you were going the other direction. I thought you were saying that was expensive, so that's what I was trying. Oh, God. No, no, no. Yeah, okay, yeah.

Dave Jones: Because the LCDs have not reached the point where, like, the PCB market, I mean, there's no, as far as I'm aware, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no LCD manufacturers that are falling over themselves to produce one-off prototype LCDs. Like, there's no, you know, proto-LCDonline.com, you know? Right, exactly. Like, it just doesn't exist. It's not a thing.

Chris Gammell: Well, the demand's not there, right? No, no, exactly.

Dave Jones: No one, not everyone needs a custom LCD, but everyone needs a custom PCB, right? So that's why the market sprung up for that. You know, it started with PCB cart, although technically they weren't the first, but they were kind of one of the, you know, one of the first online cheap ones where you just upload your files and it was all web-based. You know, before that, you had to, oh, email off your gerbers, you wait for the quote to come back via email, and then, you know, you manually PayPal them. And this was like, oh, you put your, you know, it was shopping cart, you know?

Chris Gammell: Hit upload, and yep, exactly.

Dave Jones: Yeah, hit upload, and here's your credit card, and boom, your PCB's magically come back, you know? Yeah. Yep. That was, yeah. Yeah, it just doesn't exist for LCDs yet, of course. You know, and there's no standard, you know, there's no, like, Gerber standard for upload and stuff like that. Although, you know, you can upload your drawing in, you know, AutoCAD format, which is usually what these companies are still using. Yeah, they're still using some, you know, ancient format.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but DXF is, that's what uses, that's like a lot of laser cutters take that too, right?

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: It is funny how that stuff just kind of propagates along through time. Yeah. DXF is pretty rough.

Dave Jones: But, it's interesting, but, you know, everyone made the argument, oh, why don't you just use a dot matrix LCD? Yeah, well, we could, you know, off the shelf one, but, you know, it was just fun to design your own, and your product looks more professional, you know, if it does that, and you're going to get a lower per unit cost, by far. You know, yeah, you can buy reasonably cheap dot matrix LCDs on AliExpress for two bucks, maybe, you know, two, three dollars, but a custom LCD will cost you half that, you know? And if you're making thousands, tens of thousands of things, you know, every dollar you can shave off your bum cost matters.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, definitely.

Dave Jones: But that wasn't the overriding concern, you know?

Chris Gammell: No, no, it's more the academic exercise of trying it out, showing how it works.

Dave Jones: Yeah, and I thought, yeah, it might make a good video series, and it has, so.

Chris Gammell: Definitely. Yeah. No, it's been good. It's been good. I was really surprised, like, I was like, oh, yeah, there's a lot of pins on there, but you actually drive, like, each segment by itself, right?

Dave Jones: We drive a lot of stuff. Well, no, it's a multiplex display. It uses eight commons and 32 segments. It's a huge multiplex. Oh, got it, got it, okay. I think there's, like, 160 segments or something on there. It's absolutely enormous. Like, it's got four separate, four-digit, seven-segment displays.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: Okay. Plus a bar graph. It's, you know, it's one of the more complex LCDs you can get. Got it. Yeah. Hmm. That's exciting.

Chris Gammell: How's the, how is, how is the, yeah, I saw that. How is the overall, how is the overall development going? Are you guys moving forward on the other stuff? Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. It's slow. Yeah. It's coming together. But no, we're not going to do videos on it until we're finished. Oh, yeah. We're not going to make the same mistake as last time, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Get that, show it when it's done. Yeah. Let people bitch about it then. Hmm.

Dave Jones: Hey, there's a question. One of the more common questions on the video was, why aren't I releasing the name of the LCD manufacturer?

Chris Gammell: Oh. Is it because you don't want to get emails from all the other ones?

Dave Jones: Right, no. It's because that's not their business. Like, I don't want people to get the impression that this company's business is like PCBs and, oh, you can just order your five proto LCDs for a hundred bucks and, you know. Oh, I see. And they'll be happy about it. That's not their business model.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. You know? Well, this is like a lot of manufacturers are giving you a, it's basically a sample, right? I mean, that's kind of.

Dave Jones: It's totally a sample. Yeah. That's what it is. And they're hoping for the bigger order. So, imagine if I did a video saying, hey, look at this. You can order your five LCDs for a hundred bucks from this company. Go for it. You know, they'd be flooded with like a thousand emails.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Like, and I'm probably not kidding, right? You know, I like it. Yeah, sure. Yeah. A thousand people going, oh, I want just two LCDs, please. Because I need to replace the LCD in my old clock that I loved or my old calculator. Can you design this for me? And they'd just be, you know, ah, it'd just ruin them. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's a tough business. I mean, that's why a lot of the custom ones are, you know, high cost. They got to make up their tooling, that kind of thing. Yep.

Dave Jones: This one was particularly low cost. You know, we got many quotes. We searched around a lot to find this company. And yeah, they, you know, range from this one, which was a hundred bucks up to, you know, five, $600, something like that. But it also depends on the quality of the documentation you give them, like the files, because not everyone's going to give them a finished thing, you know, because not everyone's good at actually designing, you know, segments, what they want. It isn't like a PCB, you know, like the artistry matters, right? In an LCD, right? You've got to draw the correct segments. You've got to know about the spacing. You've got to know, you know, like it's not as, you know, well honed as a PCB. Well, a PCB, you don't have to, as long as you meet the design rules, like the minimum track and space. Yeah. You can do whatever the hell you want. That can be as ugly as anything. It's still going to work. Right. Right, right, right. You know.

Chris Gammell: I was going to bring up too. So, Scotty from Strange Parts actually went and toured JLC PCB. Yep. Saw that. You saw that video? Yeah. It was cool. I had actually never. I haven't watched the whole thing. It was long, I think. I had never actually seen the inside of a PCB house before. I mean, and that scale is pretty big. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty nuts though.

Dave Jones: Well, they're like, they advertise themselves as what, China's largest prototype house or something? You know, or one of. Yeah. Yeah. So, they have to be huge. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. So, they're one of many out there. There's many. PCB shopper is the one we always point people to so they can go and. Check that out. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And get a wide range of quotes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. And I think it's like, basically the bigger you get, the more you're going to get standardization and. And well, like you're saying that you're kind of talking more about the design process. So, you're saying there's no like DRC for LCDs or anything like that. No, no, no. It's right. There's no infrastructure around it.

Dave Jones: No, no, no. They do it at their end. And they've got their own in-house tools and every manufacturer's probably got their own different in-house tool for their LCDs to do their design rule checking.

Chris Gammell: I was doing some panelization. I was trying to. I was really struggling. I ended up giving up and having my board house panelized for me.

Dave Jones: Oh, really? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, like the, so there's a tool in, there's an open source tool.

Dave Jones: You know, I've got a video on that, on how to panelize stuff.

Chris Gammell: Using what?

Dave Jones: Well, Altium, of course. But it's not, it's not how to use the tool. You know, it's like.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I, I, you're talking about the DFM tutorial?

Dave Jones: Yeah, but I've done another one. I've done, I did a follow-up to that, I'm sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no, I've, I mean, like the thing is I needed the actual tool. And so like, I'm not an Altium user and Kaikad like can do it, but it's not, I'm not a big fan of how it's done. And so I wanted to do it at the Gerber level, you know.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Well, no. Well, you can do it at, see, I do it at the PCB level, right? I don't do it. I never touch Gerbers. It's not like I have a Gerber editor and, you know, do that sort of stuff. Got it. So. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, so you can do it in Kaikad, you can do an append thing, but then.

Dave Jones: Okay. So it's got a, technically it's got a tool. Yes, it does. To do panelize, right. Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: It's just, it's just a little bit janky. And this design was so big. I mean, like, so this is a 500 component design with artwork, with, you know, like with actual like artwork, all this other stuff. So it got, my, my computer just went to molasses.

Dave Jones: See, well, I've, I've done it multiple ways in the past. I've actually used the panelization tool in Altium, which then wax down the panels, which copies a source file. Yeah. And stuff like that. Yeah. It actually, so it duplicates the PCBs, but then you manually draw in all the stuff around it, you know, your routing paths and your, and your tool, you know, your fiducials and your panel mounting holes and everything else. So you actually do it as a PCB file. Yeah. With, but the actual tracks and everything else aren't in that file. It just copies them from another one. So you can ensure you duplicate, but I've also done it manually and it works fine where you just copy the entire PCB. You know, you just select all PCB, control C and control V, you know, boom, boom, paste it into your thing. Although that's a bit, you know, there's more danger in doing that because you might accidentally forget to, you know, highlight something and doing a DRC on a panel is much more difficult. Right. Because like it doesn't, you know, you can't, you almost can't, you know, um, and you can do it like maybe at the Gerber stage and stuff like that. And that's what the manufacturers do. But yeah, once you're sort of, you know, it's a bit of a leap of faith. You've got to do a lot of manual checking to make sure it's right. So that's like, I, that's why I like the panelization tool. Cause you know, it's copying, you trust the tool and you know, it's copying all the layers on your PCB. Right. So.

Chris Gammell: Are you usually doing that with like square boards though too?

Dave Jones: Oh no, I've done it with all sorts of weird ass shapes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Works fine.

Chris Gammell: Definitely weird, weird shape. So.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yes. I've seen it.

Chris Gammell: Yes, you have. Uh, yeah. So, uh, I, I actually ended up winning, I went and downloaded, what was the tool? Uh, Fab 3000. Oh, okay. Hmm. It's, uh, it's like basically what a board house would buy. Right. And it's at the level where like, uh, it is a Gerber tool, but, uh, they don't quote the price on the website. So. Of course they don't. Yeah. That's a bad, that's a bad sign.

Dave Jones: Oh, and, and they've got a demo, do they? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. You can do like a 30 day kind of thing. Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. And it's fully functional. They don't plaster their name over your Gerbers or something?

Chris Gammell: Uh, no, no, it's actually pretty, I mean, it's pretty nice. I mean, it's, uh, it's nice looking software. It's, you know, it's old school. It looks like, it kind of looks like mentor does, you know, a lot of like command line type stuff. Right. Um, so it's that era of tools, but it looks like it's pretty full featured and it looks like what a fab house would actually be using. Right. Yeah. Um, yeah, there was a, there was another one too. That was, uh, that it's called, this is not rocket science. It's, uh, and it's, that's a nice little tool set as well. I think either because of the shape of my board or because it was like the last update I saw was from like, it's on GitHub with Python. Um, you know, you can actually download the source code and everything. And it was like, I saw like 2.4, 2.5 in Python when they're on 2.7, if you're in Python two, blah, blah, blah. Uh, so it, it, it was not working great for me. So I kind of gave up on that. Not saying it can't work. I'm just saying I, I couldn't get it to work. So that time. So.

Dave Jones: Got it. So you, you, I mean, so you need a panelization for the assembly. Is that why?

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, yes. For the assembly, but I'm going to be.

Dave Jones: Because your, your board's reasonably big. It's not like you'd fit, you know, 50 of them on a panel. You'd fit like four maybe. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Uh, my board is quite big and, uh, I'm going to be attempting the panel or the assembly myself using a Neodon 4.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. TBD. Are you filming this process for a.

Chris Gammell: I am. Yeah. All right. We'll see. We'll see how that goes.

Dave Jones: And this is at your local hackery space thing, right?

Chris Gammell: Uh, this is at M hub, right? I am. Yeah. M hub is, uh, it's like a, it's like a coworking space with hardware tools. Yep. So.

Dave Jones: Cool. But it's mostly all the same part. I mean, it's basically spoiler. It's a lot of LEDs. It's a lot of LEDs. It's micro with a lot of LEDs. Yeah. Yep. So, you know, that's the classic case for doing it yourself.

Chris Gammell: So I haven't talked about it much on here because like, I honestly don't know if this thing's going to get out or work or anything like that, but I have been working on a badge, like a non-official badge for Defcon. And I think I'm, I did mention that at one point, but like, it's at the point where it's like, okay, it's kind of like do or die at this point of, uh, if it's going to get out and, uh, and we'll see. I'm excited.

Dave Jones: What's the backup plan? Just race off to a, uh, and, and assembly house saying, sorry, I tried to do it myself and I just couldn't.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. The backup plan is hopefully the art is nice enough that the PCB on its own is like, they're like, oh, look how pretty this is. Here's your blank PCB badge. Here's your blank PCB. Yeah. Right, right, right. Isn't, isn't that, isn't that great? Uh, I think I can get a couple to work. That's the main thing. Uh, I can get a couple to.

Dave Jones: It's like a, uh, deconstruct, it's like one of those deconstructed meals, you know? Oh, this is a deconstructed badge. Right, exactly. Right.

Chris Gammell: First you'll have the beef by itself. Then you'll have the tomato and the lettuce by itself. Yes.

Dave Jones: Here's a bag of parts. It's a kit. It's a kit. There we go.

Chris Gammell: Oh, Dave, you solved it.

Dave Jones: Oh, bag of parts. Yeah. Yeah. There you go.

Chris Gammell: I will actually, so, uh, speaking of kit, I actually will have a different thing as a kit. Um, just a little blinker, but, uh, I'm going to be doing a, uh, a kikehead workshop. I saw that. At, uh, the hardware hacking village. So, yeah, we'll see how that goes. It's, uh, more people, but did one at that conference. I was at a tour camp and that went okay.

Dave Jones: Are these available online? Did you film these or did someone film them?

Chris Gammell: No, no. Uh, they filmed them, but like, I don't know, like workshop filming is terrible. I don't know. Like there's, yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah, no, it's not easy to do. You know, you've got to set it up. You've got to either do it properly or it's going to be half-assed.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think that, uh, if you want to see it online, there's just, it's just, I honestly, it's just the getting to Blinky that I've done in the past. So, um, that's how you get started. Yep. So anyways, uh, same, same thing, but I am looking forward to, uh, a DEF CON that's coming up in, oh God, like two weeks, three weeks. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think it's going to be a kit folks.

Chris Gammell: It's going to be, yeah. Dave might be calling this one properly. So yeah, it's three weeks, three weeks or three weeks from tomorrow is, uh, the first day of DEF CON. So we'll see how that goes. But I mean, like, even if it doesn't work for that stuff or for the actual, uh, you know, a functional badge, uh, I am, I'm, I'm, I'm very interested in learning the Neo Dun 4 just for other prototyping stuff in the future. So it's been really good learning experience. Cool bananas. Yeah. Um, so looking forward to that.

Dave Jones: All right. Should we get onto our segments?

Chris Gammell: Sure.

Dave Jones: Sure. I don't know. We don't know. What are our segments? I don't know. I'm just looking at a teardown video at the moment.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Which is a Scientology e-meter.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I haven't looked at that one yet. It's like one of the newer ones.

Dave Jones: Oh, is it? Oh, yes. Yes. That's right. Yes. It is one of the newer models. Someone promised to send me one once and they never did. Oh, geez. It's more complicated inside than I thought.

Chris Gammell: Geez.

Dave Jones: Geez. That's, oh man, look at all the 10 turn trimmers. Oh, I'm spoiling it for you, but.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Geez. I, no, I expect, and green PCB. No, I expected like just point to point wiring and, and shit. I'm, I'm surprised it actually uses modern PCBs. I'm just, you know.

Chris Gammell: I'm surprised you're capable of getting one without like, uh, getting sued. So.

Dave Jones: Oh, no, the suing comes afterwards.

Chris Gammell: Oh, right, right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So I don't know who's doing this. Um, what's the, uh, what's the YouTube channel? Play with junk. Oh, I'm not aware of play with junk. Oh, nice. There you go. And the, the first comment on the video. So this device measures midichlorians. Nice. Oh, it's got a microcontroller and everything.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: Wow. I'm like, oh, that's so different. Like I've, I've actually looked at the, uh, pattern before and this one uses a pick micro and yeah. I've.

Chris Gammell: One of our listeners could have designed that thing.

Dave Jones: Right. Somebody got the contract. Oh, man. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'll, I'll take your money. Here you go. It flicks the needle, you know. Right. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Flicks the needle in random ways based on.

Chris Gammell: And anyone who doesn't know what we're actually talking about here, just. Go, go look it up, uh, on Wikipedia or some reputable source. And. Yeah. We don't need to talk about it here. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Then watch the documentary, documentary going clear.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's good. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And, uh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Not so. Uh, yeah. So actually because it, just to step back one, because it's tied to that workshop, uh, KiCad 5 is on the way. Uh, I've said in the past, I'll say it again. Uh, wait until stable's out. Uh, I know.

Dave Jones: I've had so many people email me. Oh, the new KiCad's been released. Can you try it? I wouldn't know. It hasn't.

Chris Gammell: Right. It technically is not. And people yelled at me for posting it early. Uh, I, I get, I watched the mailing list. So it's a little bit, uh, I jumped the gun a little bit. So, um, yeah, it's, it's should be good. You know, the thing that, uh, someone was asking about the other day, uh, is Eagle files are natively accepted now. So that's kind of interesting. That, that's, oh, oh, sorry.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So I didn't, right.

Chris Gammell: Because of the, uh, that open Eagle format. So a lot more things will kind of be accessible now. I don't know if you can export back out to that, but, um, yeah, the Eagle files are pretty easy to pull in now. So I think maybe even on four, you might be able to, but I think it's gotten better in five.

Dave Jones: Can it pull Altium files in or is that asking too much?

Chris Gammell: That's asking too much. Cause the format's locked down.

Dave Jones: It's not technically documented. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's unfortunate. I really wish there was a, um, what's that, that OBD format? There's like an in-between format thingy.

Dave Jones: You know what I'm talking about?

Chris Gammell: No. It's like an open board.

Dave Jones: Oh, the, um, the, the official, um, XML format. I think that's the one you're talking about. The XML Eagle supports that natively.

Chris Gammell: That's what, yeah, that's what Eagle does. No, I'm talking about an OB, I thought it was an OBD something. I thought it was OBD plus plus. No, not that I'm aware of. No.

Dave Jones: Okay. Doesn't ring a bell.

Chris Gammell: Uh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Hey, speaking of Altium.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're busted.

Chris Gammell: What? Busted for what?

Dave Jones: They're busted, dude. They're busted crippling their products.

Chris Gammell: Oh. Uh, is this surprising or what's?

Dave Jones: Well, I, not really. I'm trying. What? I'm, I'm calling them out anyway. Um.

Chris Gammell: What, what, so explain what's going on here.

Dave Jones: Okay, I have a source that, um, a very reliable source that, um, says that, uh, Altium, the circuit maker I'm talking about, right? Not Altium designer because they don't cripple Altium design.

Chris Gammell: Circuit maker is the one that's the free one?

Dave Jones: There's the free one. The free cloudy thing. Okay. Right? Circuit maker. Um, from day one, um, they have crippled the software with a, uh, random sleep, uh, for want of a better term, a random sleep timer so that it, uh, kills the performance and makes it, it makes the performance really shitty, um, of circuit makers. So it doesn't eat into their other, uh, so it makes it less productive, so to speak. Right? Huh. Like, it, it makes it annoying to use so that you don't want to use this tool on a daily basis. Right? So it won't compete with their paid tools, Altium designer. Right?

Chris Gammell: Well, that seems like a bad policy, but, uh.

Dave Jones: That's a pretty bad policy. Um, it's pretty much as dumb as you can get. I can understand wanting to cripple the tool in some way because, you know, if it was just as easy to use and just as fast as Altium, then, you know, why would anyone pay for Altium and then the company would go broke. Right? Um, but you've got to do it in different ways.

Chris Gammell: Not, uh. Do it the, do it the old fashioned way, folks. Come on.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And anyway, Altium's official, uh, they haven't replied officially, but Altium's, um, uh, well, no, they kind of did. Um, but, uh, apparently this has been known for quite so. Altium have actually admitted this way back, but in a roundabout sort of way, they said, look, if it gets over 5,000 parts or something or 5,000, 5,000 connections. So I guess 5,000 nets. Right? Then it will slow down. But apparently, no, that's not the case. This like does it all the time. Oh, okay. And it does weird shit like things disappear. Yeah. You know, you're dragging parts around and they suddenly disappear or they appear somewhere else and do other stuff. So apparently this random sleep function for want of a better term has, um, had side effects in the way the program operates and just what appear to be bugs. Aren't there a side effect of this actual deliberate routine put into there? So I, I think that's just incredibly stupid because the whole goal of circuit maker. Right. So last later, right? Yeah. It's to have a free tool that people get used to and go, Oh, I'm using this free, but now I'm a professional. I'm doing more professional boards. What am I going to use? Altium designer. Cause I'm already familiar with circuit maker. Right. But if circuit maker is so bad that it pisses you off, you're just going to go somewhere else.

Chris Gammell: I agree.

Dave Jones: Right. That's, it's just totally retarded.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Dumb.

Chris Gammell: Silly, silly. Well, that might bite them in the butts. Anyway.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Um, there you go. Ridiculous. Um, speaking of which, uh, circuit maker is no longer a thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I was going to say, I was wondering if you're going to be a thing. Yeah. No, cause they bought up. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They bought up. Upverter. And what's happening is that up. Upverter. They're going to continue with the up. Upverter brand and circuit maker will become up. It will be renamed up. Upverter desktop desktop. Cause up. Upverter for those who don't know is an online web based PCB tool. So, you know, it works via the web. There is no program on your computer. Right. It's a web based thing.

Chris Gammell: But are they going to be different though? Yeah.

Dave Jones: What do you mean? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. They're going to have upverter online, which is the, which is a standard upverter. And then they're going to have upverter desktop, which you can run without an internet connection. And that, and that's going to be a rebadged circuit maker. So, yeah. Cause a circuit maker does operate offline, by the way. Yeah. Right. Right. Like it's, it's, it's cloud based, but it's not a web based program. It just uses the web. It needs the web, you know, but you can use it without it. You can like disconnect and work locally.

Chris Gammell: It's like a check in. It's like a call.

Dave Jones: A check in phone home kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's not going to be called that anymore. So yeah. Anyway. And I've heard that the upverter folk know about this and they're fighting hard to get this shit, shit removed from the desktop version. Great. Yep. Awesome. Anyway, there you go. Breaking news. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know what else is breaking news? What? Uh, KiCad's free and open source, so, uh, bring it on. What? Okay. That's not, that's not breaking news at all. I'm just saying that like all this stuff that you described, um, it's unnecessary.

Dave Jones: Yeah. KiCad's three. We were just talking about five.

Chris Gammell: I said free, free and open source. Oh, free.

Dave Jones: I thought you said five. Oh, three. Three. I thought you said three. Right, right, right.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. Well, speaking of three, uh, CircuitPython three was released.

Dave Jones: But it can't do penalization. Hey.

Chris Gammell: Oh, right, right. Yeah. Um, yeah, so CircuitPython three is out.

Dave Jones: Um, what's CircuitPython three? I don't.

Chris Gammell: So CircuitPython was the, uh, so we've talked about that a little bit on here before. MicroPython was a Python-based, uh, thing that goes onto microcontrollers. And then, uh, Adafruit took that and then specifically for the, the Atmel, SamD family started compiling it for that. It changed the name. It was a little bit more hardware focused. And, um.

Dave Jones: Right. So it's just Python that runs on their platform or whatever, is it?

Chris Gammell: Uh, it's kind of like more, it's more specific to the chipset. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it's not Python. See, when you said that, I thought, oh, Python for doing circuits. Like for doing, like. Oh, I see. I see. Because we're talking about that.

Chris Gammell: Because we're talking about, uh, board level stuff.

Dave Jones: So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Hmm.

Chris Gammell: So, uh, but they're supporting the, uh, but supporting, uh, NRF 52. So that's kind of, kind of a big deal. Cool. So that's great. Yeah. Uh, code stuff. Meh. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. I'm, I'm, uh, I'm working on a new board with, uh, with, uh, MicroPython on an STM 32. So. It's exciting. Uh, what else did I see on here? Uh, oh, well, I guess, I guess we haven't really talked about this yet. Um, there's, uh, there's some tariff stuff going on. Uh, there's a lot of.

Dave Jones: I, I have not followed that at all. I have no idea what's. Well, give us the TLDR.

Chris Gammell: TLDR. TLDR thing. Yeah. Too long, didn't read. Or, I guess. Yeah. Actually, in this case, it would be TLDL. Because it would be too long, didn't listen. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Basically, um, the Trump administration decided to put 25% tariff on a budget. A bunch of electronic components and manufacturing equipment and other stuff. And, um.

Dave Jones: Did they deliberately target those? Or were they just swept up in a bigger glow, in a bigger.

Chris Gammell: There, there is other stuff in there. But, uh, electronics is definitely one of the big, the big focal points. Oh, okay. So. There's also like a lot of construction equipment. Things like that. Um. Um. I think the electronics stuff. So, there's a story about. That I actually did not know about. Uh. All right. Where did it go? There was a story about. Um. This. The theft of IP. From. Micron. Micron?

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm going to find it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Which is. Uh. Are they an American? Technically an American?

Chris Gammell: Uh. Yeah. They're based out of. Semiconductor. Boise, Idaho. Right. Maybe not Boise. But it's definitely Idaho. Yep. Um. And I think they. Maybe in Oregon as well. Hmm. But they are a DRAM. A DRAM. Yep. A manufacturer. And basically there was a. A huge. Uh. Here we go. Inside the heist. Of American chip designs. As China bids for power. There's a New York Times article that we'll link. Link in there. And so this is. Part of it. But. I think some of it is just generally. Trade deficit stuff. Oh sorry. Right. Did I say. Did I say Micron? Or did I say something else? I said Micron right? Yes. You said Micron. Right. Uh. And so. And they were big on like new process technologies. Things like that as well. I mean like a lot of the DRAM.

Dave Jones: They've been leading.

Chris Gammell: DRAM makers. Flash makers. You have to kind of lead the edge. Because that's all you really have. You know like the. Yeah. Some of the circuit stuff changes. But it's not like. You know it's basically your bulk storage. So the better you are at process. The more you can move ahead. And kind of. And it's about like an investment. And where you're doing. Uh. Where you're. Adding your money. So if you. Right. If you lose some of your IP. It can be dangerous from a. Investment standpoint. Anywho. So. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Where. So the takeaway. The actual TLDR. Mm-hmm. Is that. The government's. Has put 25% on components. And. Is it actual finished products. Or is it just parts?

Chris Gammell: Uh. It's. Some of it is finished goods. Right. But like. Things like. Like manufacturing equipment. So that would be more. Targeted towards. Um. So like that Neoden IV. That I talked about. Right. Right. That's a pick and place machine. Uh. And I. I had a friend who. Said he was buying one. Because he had been. Looking at one. And then he basically saved 2500 bucks. By ordering it before the July 6th date. So. And obviously.

Speaker ?: Oh.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Right. We are behind the curve here. Right. So we're recording on the 18th here. Yeah. So we're at least two weeks past. Uh. Where that happened.

Dave Jones: Right. So it's. So it's. So it's in force now. So yeah. So everything just got 25% more expensive. If you're. If you're importing it.

Chris Gammell: Not everything. There's weird stuff on like. Oh. Well. You know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But let's just say. Right. Sure. Yeah. Everything. Right. Well.

Chris Gammell: And what I will do is. I'll point people at. Uh. Macrofab. So. Chris Church from Macrofab. Um. He. Wrote an article about it. And he also went on episode 127. Of the Macrofab engineering. Podcast. Mm-hmm. And talked about it more. And. Uh. Had a good kind of discussion. Around some of the stuff that is or isn't hit. And you know. Basically his thing is. It's not everything. So you should really get your bomb. Quoted again. And then he walks through some of the. The things that are. Hitting it. Obviously if you're outside the country. It doesn't really matter that much. I'm not sure though. Well.

Dave Jones: I was going to say. Yeah. What's. What's the standard workaround for this? Do you physically fly to Shenzhen. Uh. Shenzhen with an empty bag. Fill up your bag with reels or parts. And come back. Is that the. Is that the workaround?

Chris Gammell: I don't think that's a workaround. I think that's called. Uh. Smuggling. Right. But. You get to make like all these like cool. Like Han Solo references. I guess. You know.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: Do you have your hairy friend come with you? He's like. Yeah. But.

Dave Jones: Wouldn't this just. Like. If it's just parts. Wouldn't this. And not so much finished goods. Wouldn't this just. Accelerate. The. Thing. To get them all manufactured in China. And have your. And import it as a finished. Product.

Chris Gammell: That is an excellent point. And also one that Bunny made. So Bunny Huang. Uh. Past guest of the Amp Hour. Yep. Uh. Wrote an article basically about how this will. Promote offshoring. Yeah. I was going to say. I agree with that. Because just.

Dave Jones: Just when onshoring is happening. Onshoring is a thing. It's been cheap. Because China's getting more expensive. People don't know. Right. Of course. This is a trend. Of what's called onshoring. Where. Companies. We're talking basically US here. But. Other companies. Sure. Countries it's happening. Where they're now. You know. They used to. Ten years ago. They moved everything to China. Because it was dirt cheap. To get it made. Now. Wages are going up in China. So they're going. Oh. We can actually get it made cheaper. And control. Well. For the same price. And control the quality better. And everything else. If we bring it back. And control the IP. And control. Yeah. Everything else. And they're faster. Turn around. And we can just walk next door. To the factory. You know. Yeah. So they've been onshoring. They've been bringing all their manufacturing. Back to the US. And now. That may reverse again. Because of this. Right.

Chris Gammell: I am very much not a fan of this. I personally haven't seen. What the ultimate impact will be. I mean like. Right. So I'm actually. Working on a manufacturing project. Right now. And I will be. Hopefully making some content. Around that too though. Like actually getting quotes. And trying to do. Apples to apples comparison. It's tough. Right. Like because like. The comparisons are really tough too. Especially if you're not. You know. If you're not making thousands of units. Right. You might have. Just the. The added costs of. Of low volume.

Dave Jones: Does this mean that. Mouser and DigiKey. US.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Catalog suppliers. They're instantly 25% more expensive. Because they get. Most of their parts from China.

Chris Gammell: Right. That's the thing. I am not sure about. And Parker. On. So on the Macrofib Engineering Podcast.

Dave Jones: If it's not. Then what's the point. Like you know. Then people just go to DigiKey and Mouser. As they always have. For their. Hundred off volume.

Chris Gammell: Right. You know. Well. And it's. I think it's a question of like. I'm guessing the formulas will change. But it's a matter of how much they'll change. Like will they eat some of it or not. You know. Some of that stuff is loss leader anyways. Right. So some of it's their overhead of. Yeah. Someone walking up. Cutting a piece. Cutting some off the reel. And putting it in a baggie. Of course. Yeah. But like. Yeah. But their. Their base level costs. Which they buy in the. Hundreds of thousands. Probably at a time. Right. Multiple. Boxes of reels. Right. So it's. It's. Yeah. I think. Yeah. I think it's going to be really going to be people that are doing. Full scale manufacturing. Specifically in the US. Are going to be hit the hardest. I think.

Dave Jones: Right. But margins aren't. As high as you might think on some of those parts. Because. I've. You know. I'm. When I'm buying reels of parts. Often I go. Straight to the manufacturer. Like straight to the manufacturer's website. The chip manufacturer's website. Right. I want a reel of 5,000 parts. It's going to cost me. Say. $5,000. I go to DigiKey. It's practically the same cost.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Well they have like. Distribution agreements. But. So. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. So like. Yeah. Let's talk about that. Right. So. You have a reel of 5,000 parts from like microchip. Because they do a lot of microchip direct. Right. Right. So you go in there. And you buy in a reel of like. I don't know. Op amps. If you buy it from microchip direct. Basically. They're eating that margin difference too. Because they want to offer it at the same. They want to make. Right. Everybody wants to inch the prices up as much as they can. DigiKey included. Yeah. Yeah. And microchip direct included. Right. They want. They're trying to price match as high as they can. Because they all want to make margin where they. You know. You take it where you can get it basically. So I think that's really where that comes from.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But the fact is. You can't get it any cheaper often than DigiKey or Mouser. Like. Oh. Oh. As hard as you might. You physically can't get it any cheaper. Regardless of where you go. Unless you go to some. You know. Dodgy market stall in Shenzhen. And they might have an old reel somewhere. Which could be dodgy as hell. You know. But. So.

Chris Gammell: I'm not quite sure what you're saying though. Like. So. Are you saying. Well.

Dave Jones: What I'm saying is that if DigiKey and Mouser aren't increasing their prices. Then. Then what's. What's the problem. Really. Because often.

Dave Jones: I don't know if they are. What I'm saying is that you can't get them cheaper.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. I think that. I think they. I think they will. I mean honestly. I think they will. Okay. And I think that. They'll only raise them as much as the market will bear. Right. I think that. Yeah. There's enough volume in the marketplace. That people. That. That the companies are pretty. Pretty well balanced.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And would they do it by stealth? It's not like they're going to make this huge press announcement. Oh. Yeah. Because of the. Unless they want to make a political point. You know. Yeah.

Speaker ?: Like.

Dave Jones: We have to increase our prices 20% now. Right. They blame Trump. You know. Like.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. All that. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. So. That's what I'm saying. Like. I am not ordering parts on a regular enough basis to actually see the effect of this. And so I'm. Right. I'm. Weirdly looking forward to it. Like. I just want to kind of see it like. And do a comparison. Like. You know. You kind of need like a historical charting of. Of pricing. But the other thing too is like. There's a lot of other things in there. Right. So. So. Caps. So. Caps alone have been going up like crazy. And commodities. Level components have been going up just because of shortage issues. So. Is it a shortage thing? Or is it the tariff thing? Those are actually. So. Caps actually are being. Imposed the tariffs on. No.

Dave Jones: But that shortage thing has been going on for a long time.

Chris Gammell: Right. So. It's got nothing else in the tariff. But prices keep creeping up because people buy. They've been buying. Yeah. Exactly. They're buying up all the stock though. So. I'm just saying it's. Like. Like. From me as an individual. It's difficult for me to decode these things right now. Right. Because I'm also not buying in volume all the time. So. Like. What I'm saying is that I think our listening audience. Unless they're doing manufacturing at a high volume. And working with buyers internally in their company. Yeah. And they happen to be a US company. Right. And it's chips and everything else that they're doing. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like. All of these things. I think it's ultimately going to be a negative thing. But hopefully by the time it becomes a negative thing for me. The tariffs go away. I don't. I don't know. But that's what I'm hoping. And I will be investigating for myself. I'm curious though. Like. So like Parker was talking about. You know. You have to actually figure out where the parts come from. You have to buy the reel. And look on the reel. And see what the country of origin is. Yep. I always wondered. Like all the chip packaging is like. In China or Philippines. Or you know what I mean? Like there's stuff all over the place.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. It's like. Yeah. Often the dye. You know. The dye is made in. You know. Sure. Taiwan. I used to make silicon in Austin. And it would.

Chris Gammell: It would literally fly to China. Get packaged. Fly back to Austin. Yeah. Sometimes. Sometimes not. Sometimes we go to China. Sometimes we go. You know what I mean? It's just like. It's nuts. Yeah. Yeah. Global supply. And honestly. That is why I am very much against this. It's just because. Putting more crap. In the way of global trade. Is a bad thing for me. I think that's a. Like there is no way to avoid global trade. In my opinion. And. I. So. That's my tiny political statement for today. I'm curious for you though too. Because like. People like you. And people who are in Canada. And even Europe. Right. They're all buying from DigiKey and Mauser. And like these big distributor houses. Who are in the US. So then. Then what? You know.

Dave Jones: I know. Yeah. I would. I don't know. If the prices suddenly went up 20%. I'd be ordering from. Well then. Like. The problem is. A lot of these companies are technically US companies. If I order from Microchip Direct for example. Right. They're a US company. Right. Even though the stock might come from Asia. Right. It might be made in Asia. It might never go through the US. Right. Might never. You know. Land on US soil. Yet. We might still get charged a 20% tariff. Because. They're a US company.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly. And I think that at the end of the day. That's why. It's just like. This is a whole bunch of BS. And it's like. It's just. Everything's getting more expensive. And that sucks. And I don't like that. So.

Dave Jones: I would. What I would love to see. Is for the companies like DigiKey and Mauser. To come out. And say. This is a tariff affected item.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh. That's a good point.

Dave Jones: And you're paying 20% more. So you know.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know. In fact. I think it's probably in their best interest. You know. To do that. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Even on an individual part basis. If they could do it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Maybe. You know.

Dave Jones: Like. Like. In the. In the result. When you search for your parts. On DigiKey. Right. It'll have a little.

Chris Gammell: Little flag.

Dave Jones: You know. A little. Trump face or something. You know. That's it. You know. Like. You know. Tariff. Right. You know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. Or whatever.

Dave Jones: Because. Because then it reflects badly on them. Because you suddenly see all these DigiKey and Mauser prices going up. Oh. DigiKey used to be cheap. And now it's like. And you don't know why. You know. Joe Average. Was not following the politics on this shit.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right. So. They just see the bottom line.

Chris Gammell: I'm on a capacitor page. I'll link you to it. But I'm on a DigiKey capacitor page. Pretty common Murata. 100 puff cap. Right. Yeah. 25 volt. And CGOG. It said. You know. It's 0.1 cents. For one. Right. Right. But like. But like I said. One is a lot different than buying 500. Or a thousand. Or 5,000. Or multiple reels. Right. So. I really think that a lot of that's going to come at. Well. Actually. The real point. Right. So. At a 5,000. Or maybe the real is 10,000. Here we go. So. Here's a real price. So. This is a real 15,000. Because it's a. Oh. It's an 0201. $33. For an 0201. 15,000 real. Thing. Right. I'm not usually buying 0201. So. This is a bad example. But at the top. It says. Current market demand for these products. Have resulted in fluctuating. And extending lead times. Right. Right. So that's the. That is more of the shortage thing.

Chris Gammell: But that's not tariff. That's not. That's not tariff. Right.

Dave Jones: It's got nothing to do with it.

Chris Gammell: So I'd say like. You know. For people listening. Like expect some. Except expect some shit right now. Right. It's. It's bad. It's. So.

Chris Gammell: So. I. Well. How much. And again. Like this is what. Chris and Parker. And Stephen. Were talking about. At the end of the day. It's like. Will your. End product go up 25%. They said probably not. Right. But. It's probably going up. And I think that's ultimately. That's. Really what people should expect. Is like. Prices are going up. And so.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. I don't. I do. And if there's any supply chain managers. Listening right now. I don't envy you. You. I've never envied you actually. But. That's real tough. That's real tough. So. Yeah. Good luck. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. World on America. Well. Yeah. Right. Right. Yep. Um.

Dave Jones: All right. What else we got.

Chris Gammell: How about something happier. This is actually. Um. Really fun. I don't know how new or old this is. Um. But the NAND game. And uh. So it's like the. Tenth link on my reddit. Right now. NAND game. Basically you. Um. You start with NAND. NAND gates. Yeah. And you have to build up. Everything else. Right. Uh. So you have to build up an inverter. And then a NAND gate. And then an OR gate. And an XOR. Half OR. Half adder. Full adder. Like all the way down.

Chris Gammell: And basically it's just a click and drag. And you just hook things together.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: It's really cool. I mean like this is. I think this is a great learning tool. I mean. We've talked in the past about like understanding. Like. I think this is more. Uh. This is a little bit more. Interactive. Than instead of just looking at a. You know. A. Individual. Right. Like. Like I remember. I remember. Remember saying like. Why does someone need to build that huge. That huge CPU. You remember that one. The guy that built that. Yes.

Dave Jones: Of course. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And. Because it's fun. It was cool. We knew it was cool. But like. But like. Do people need to understand this stuff. But I think that some of this stuff is. This is almost at the silicon level. Or I was just full of crap before anyways. I don't know. No. It's not. It's at the gate level. I like this thing. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Which is a very different thing. Like. A NAND gate is like. Four to six transistors. You know. It's not.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Well. Yeah. And most. I mean. Most. Most logic is built up from NAND gates. Right. So this is kind of just showing how. Well. How you piece these things together.

Dave Jones: No. Technically NAND. You can do it with. NOR as well.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Right. I'm just saying. This exact game. These days.

Dave Jones: It could be done as. As the NOR game.

Chris Gammell: It could be the NOR game. Right. And maybe. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe there's another version here somewhere. I'm just saying that. Most of the time. These days. It is NAND based. Right.

Dave Jones: I wouldn't say that.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: I thought it was. I wouldn't say that. No. No.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Then I'm wrong. I don't know. Okay. So. Either way. This is a good. This is a good one to. You know. It's just like basically building up. Building up logic. And. Things like that. Actually. I saw it today as well. This is a little bit off. Off tangent. But. Zach Tronics. Former guest Zach. What's Zach's. Last name.

Dave Jones: How you can.

Chris Gammell: Zach. No. Zach Barth. Of Zach Tronics. So. He was on the show. Back on episode 332. I'll link that in. Basically. Zach Tronics. Is moving up the stack. And they have a new game. That came out today. It's. It's like basically. You have to go. And hack. There's still a lot of like. A lot of. Like. Logic level. Puzzles and stuff. But there's. Right. It's called. Exapunks. And. What is. What is the tagline? Read zines. Write viruses. Hack everything.

Dave Jones: They're. They're. They're. They're killing that niche. They're killing it. They really are. Yeah. It is.

Chris Gammell: Super niche too. It's crazy. It's great. Yeah. Love it. So yeah. There's a new game. If you're into. If you're. If you're a Steam person. And you. I think it's. I think it was just announced actually. I don't think it's out yet. Oh.

Dave Jones: It's on Steam. Is it? It's one of those. Right. That's a. I have no idea about that.

Chris Gammell: Well Steam's just like the marketplace hunt for Valve. Yeah. I know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But isn't it a company specific. It's Valve. Right. It is Valve. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. But this is a game now where you're. Writing code.

Dave Jones: Oh. Right. So. So Steam. So you can put your own game on Steam. Can you? Yes. Yes. Exactly. Right. Okay. Right. So it's like.

Chris Gammell: It's like an indie market. Well. It's a big company marketplace and an indie marketplace. Got it. Got it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So yeah. It looks like you're controlling robots though. And you're like. You have a bunch of like logic. And like. Code that you're writing. To control robots. I don't quite get it. I didn't. I didn't quite get Shenzhen IO. You and I actually ended up playing Shenzhen IO eventually. I don't know how much you played. How much did you play of that?

Dave Jones: Oh. Not. Not much. Yeah. Yeah. But it's. It's just so cool though.

Chris Gammell: It was. It was fun. I was very worried. I think I told Zach I was. I get addicted to video games. I don't really play them very often. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well. That was the fear for me. You know. I didn't want to. Right. Right. Be wasting the day away. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Playing this game. Yep. Right. You play that. You play that. You play that. You play that forum game instead. Yeah. I do.

Dave Jones: At least it's. At least it's. Productive to my business. Right.

Chris Gammell: At least there's content coming out of it. Yep. Yeah. Oh man. That's funny.

Dave Jones: I wasted many a year playing games. Oh yeah. What was your game back in the day? Oh. You'd. You'd. You'd play the original. You know. Duke Nukem. I'm talking like the platform. Duke Nukem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know. And then Duke Nukem 3D. And then. You know. You'd play the original. Castle. Castle Wolfenstein. And then. Yep. You know. And before that it was all DOS based games. BBS based games. You know. You'd dial in. To play other people. You know. Right. Back then. It was the only way to play with other people.

Chris Gammell: Right. You know.

Dave Jones: There was no internet. You dialed into a BBS. And you played BBS games.

Chris Gammell: Is that like Zork? Or what?

Dave Jones: Oh. There were. No. There were. No. It wasn't Zork. Oh God.

Chris Gammell: I guess Zork was on like the. Directly on the computer. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It was. Yeah. No.

Dave Jones: It wasn't a BBS. As far as I know. There was no BBS version of that. God. I can't remember now. They were like. You know. Adventure based. You know. Turn based adventure games. Yeah. Oh. Okay. Like D&D. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Got it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And that's how you played other people. You know. And. Yep. Yeah. You played the four other people that were logged into the BBS. You know. Like. Right. Yeah. Because the guy only had four phone lines coming into his house. You know. So. Right. Right. Right. And then they'd boot you off after half an hour. Because. You know. To give everyone a fair go. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. It's great. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: It's great man. Those were the days. Cool. So what else is. Oh man. We have like a lot of. I'm trying to like go back and see. When's the last time we talked. So we talked like. Four or five weeks ago.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Something like that.

Chris Gammell: More than that probably even. I guess that was it. The last one was. 396.

Dave Jones: Meh. Who cares. Does it matter? What's your point? No. No.

Chris Gammell: Sorry. It doesn't matter. I'm just trying to see. There's other links here that we didn't cover yet. Right. I think a lot of this stuff we probably have covered at some point. PCB mode. I haven't heard that one in a while. That's. SAR. SAR from. Boldport.

Dave Jones: What's this? Why I can't yet. Teach engineering in ASL. What's that?

Chris Gammell: Ah. That's Mel. So Mel Chua is a friend of a friend. And she is an engineering professor who is also deaf. And basically it was about. It was actually a really interesting conversation. Her and I really jive on engineering education stuff. But Mel brought up this great point about like. Um. You know. Kind of like shared. Shared. Uh. Vocabulary around. Like electronics. Right. And so. I think about that like. Well if you don't know. Kind of like that whole idea of like. If you don't know what to Google for. You're kind of in a hard spot. And she's like. Well it actually goes deeper than that though. If you don't. So like. So. She signs. Right. ASL is American Sign Language. Oh okay. Right. There just aren't words in that language. Right. So like. When they developed ASL. Why would they have words about resistors. And all those other things.

Chris Gammell: No. And so. So she writes about that a lot. And it's really interesting. Because. So it's kind of like. When you're trying to. Make electronics more.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But she can't teach in sign language anyway.

Chris Gammell: Uh. Yes she can. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But. How does your average student understand sign language?

Chris Gammell: Well they're deaf Dave. I mean like they're.

Dave Jones: Oh. Oh there you are. Right. So she's only teaching deaf students. Oh sorry. So she's teaching engineering to deaf students. Right. Right. I didn't know. Okay. Right. Yeah. That's very different.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Of course. Right. But like that's the idea too. Of like. So if you think about making electronics more accessible in general. Or just engineering more accessible. You need to have the right vocabulary for it. And so she really. She writes about a lot of that stuff of. You know. How do you explain something to someone. When you don't have words for things. Right. So we've been talking.

Dave Jones: You didn't know what I'd do. I just figured I'd know what I'd do. In that case.

Chris Gammell: Well Dave just decided.

Dave Jones: Dave just solved the problem in five seconds. Here we go. Obviously I just solved the problem. Okay. You know. I would. I would have physical. Like. Parts and hold them up. Or I'd have like cardboard cutouts of parts. And go. You know. And just. Hold them up. Or you know. There'd be some. Or I'd have some app. Which showed. A photo of the part. So everyone knows what you're talking about. This capacitor here. And then capacitor would show up. Or you know.

Chris Gammell: Right. I don't know. Okay. So. How do you explain like. Current. Like how do you explain. Voltage and current. When there are no words for voltage and current. Yeah. I know. Those terms on their own are difficult. Right. So people that are listening. And that's why. I just think it's so. Like. That's why like. I love talking to Mel about this stuff. And it's just so. Unfortunately we can't have her on the show. Because she. We can't. You know. Do the. Yeah. So. Maybe if I can do it in video at some point. We can. You know. She can read lips. And. She's a great teacher though. And. And so it's just this kind of. Like discussion around. And I really. I really. Suggest people. Subscribe to her blog. She's a great writer too. Well. It's just like that idea of like. Education and. Well. Hang on. Pedagogy. And what she. She later told me. Teaching adults is. Andragogy. I think I actually mentioned that on the show. That was Mel. So.

Dave Jones: But hang on. Doesn't it come down to the same. Problem as. Regular words. Like. How would you say. Pencil. For example. Like. Like. You know. Isn't it the same. Thing. Like. How do you explain. Other concepts. It's not just engineering. Sure. Of course. How do you explain. The flow of water. How do you explain. You know. Like. Isn't it the same. So. Wouldn't the solution. For those. Be the same as for engineering.

Chris Gammell: I think so. I mean. Like. I agree with that. But I think what. The idea there is that. The amount of. The amount of time it takes. To get to that same point. Is. Is. Significantly. Of course. It's massive. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I can imagine. But the solution. Would obviously be the. Same. So. So. If you fight. If you crack the solution. For this. You crack the solution. For a greater. For almost everything. To do with. Deaf sign. Language learning. Right.

Chris Gammell: Um. Maybe. But I think it's. Well. I'm not sure. I honestly. I. I highly recommend people. Read Mel's blog. She's thinking about that a lot.

Dave Jones: It'd be the same. For mechanical engineering. It'd be the same. For science. How do you. Sure. How do you describe. Molecule. How do you describe. Atom. How do you describe. Sure. Oh no. No. I totally agree with that piece. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think that.

Chris Gammell: All right. I mean like I've. Aside from Mel. I don't know many engineers. Who are you know. Hearing impaired or deaf. So like. And I think that's a lot. No.

Dave Jones: The only ones I know. Are the ones who learned. Before they became. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Became an accessibility issue. After the fact. Right. Yeah. Right. No. I totally agree. So. So I. I mean like. I think it's a very interesting. Problem space. And I think Mel's very smart. That's seriously. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hard not to crack. I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No. I think. But like. Even just the discussion around. The education piece. Kind of. That tickles my brain. Because I. Like. How do you teach people remotely. It's like one of the ones I do. Right.

Dave Jones: Wouldn't this be the classic. Example of the best way to do it. Is from top down. It's like. Wire things up. And show that the lead turns on. Right. And then. Right. Whoa. Hey. Look. Lead turns on. And their minds going. Light turns on. You know. Like. How does this. And then you. I don't know. Wave your hand around the circuit. And go. Comes this way. And that way. And a bit. Like. To teach it from the bottom up. Here's an electron. Oh. Let's explain. Like. It'd be. Like. You just. I don't think you'd be able to do it.

Chris Gammell: That's a great. Yeah. That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. Whereas you can do it. We'll take it back to my. So my. My plan for. And I think I might have mentioned this. At one point. But my plan for. The. I actually had a lot of trouble. When I taught. When I was teaching KaiCad. At. At the. The tour camp. It didn't. It did not go well.

Dave Jones: Why? Because everyone was drunk. Instead of deaf.

Chris Gammell: No. No. It's because. You know. There's just so much stuff there. Like. So some people. I was asked like. Does some people. You know. Does everybody do electronics? Some. Some people said no. And so it's like. Oh right. Okay. So we're doing this thing.

Dave Jones: So they just wandered by. Right. Right. And decided to sit down. And listen to you. Exactly. And then you've got this massively wide. Right. So aside from the fact.

Chris Gammell: That the software. Is not the friendliest in the first place. And difficult to install. And all these other things. Yeah. No. So my. My. My solution. And actually. Pietra. Was helping me. Peter. From. Black Magic Probe. And. One Bitsy. And. Former guest. So what we're going to do though. We're going to do it again. And we're going to go backwards. And so. The idea is going to be. We're going to start from a PCB. And so I'll have. They'll have a PCB. And they're not going to be able to. The side. There will be a soldering area outside. But the first thing you do. Is you solder up. A board. Right. And make it blink. Yeah. And then the next thing you do. Is you take. An unconnected board. Right. A board with. With parts. That are already populated. And it's just got rat's nest. And you just. Connect all the pins. Right. And then the next thing you do. Is you go. And you then import the pin. Sorry. Import all the parts. From the already footprints. That are there. And then the next thing you do. Is you know what I mean. Like so going backwards. Instead of going forwards. Because. Because it's. I mean it's tough. Right. So people listening. Are probably like. Yeah. I've. You know. Like it's. When there's. When there's not like. That level of. When you don't have the background. Everything kind of looks like a problem. Right. Right. And you don't know. That you should be doing. A, B, and C. In order to move forward. Everything just looks like. Oh crap. What do I do. And so instead. You kind of. Just deconstruct it. Like you're talking about. Top down. And you start from the end. And you make. One thing work. Right. So like you make one thing work. And then you kind of dig under the hood. And you make the next thing work. And then you dig under the hood. Next. Right. So. We'll see if that works. I don't know. Groovy. Yeah. Learning. Learning.

Dave Jones: After all these years. Yeah. All right. All right. We're almost out of time. Yeah. Last things. New.

Chris Gammell: That. Let's see. There's stuff on here about. ESP 32. There's a new DARPA thing. I don't know. I didn't read enough about that. Meh. Yeah. Some Laura stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Op amps. Oh. Super conference is coming up. So. If people are interested in going. The. So that's the one that I go to in LA. That I helped start. A couple years ago. The Hackaday super conference. Is November 2nd and 3rd. There's a call for proposal. So I'll definitely be at that. If people are interested in going. So that didn't. Didn't. Collapse into a heap. Didn't die without me. It turns out I'm not very special. So that's good. You weren't needed. Hey man. That's great. That's good. I knew. I knew the other people were doing a lot more work than me. Yeah. Yep. Kubernetes. What about this smear site? Do you see this thing? No. So Arm had a. Anti-Risk-V smear site.

Dave Jones: What?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So. I don't understand. It was called riskv-basics.com. And. They basically was registered by Arm. And they. They talked about why. There's better choices over. Over. Over the RISC-V. Or RISC-V. I guess. So that's the new. That's the new. Format. Processor. That's out there. And I'm guessing. They see it as competition. And so they kind of put out some. Some. It's really about the instruction set. Right. It's not actually. A full architecture. It's just the instruction set. But there are. Now. Processors. That are being developed. Around that. Instruction set. That are not Arm based. And they're not x86 based. They're.

Dave Jones: Right. Who does RISC-V?

Chris Gammell: So one of the ones is. Sci-5. Is one of the ones. But there's a lot of others. So former guest. Clifford Wolf. Has designed one as well. Right. So there's like. You know. It runs a gamut from tiny one. To Sci-5. Has like a really big one. Oh.

Dave Jones: Because it's a free. It's an open. It's an open license.

Chris Gammell: So it's. Yeah. It's an open instruction set. And then they all kind of. Right. Work within that. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Because Arm. The problem with Arm. Is that they don't make their own chips. They make their money. They're an IP house. Right. Exactly. They're an IP house. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. So it'll be. I mean. So we heard about. We. When we first heard about. We actually had no idea. What we were talking about. Something different folks. And. We were since corrected. And then I got to see. Some of that stuff. At. Those guys were at. The Sci-5. Folks were doing announcement. At that Brussels conference. I was at. And so. I mean. I think there. It's going to be very interesting. Over the next couple of years. To see what people are doing. And I'm guessing. Eventually. Arm will jump into this too. It's just in terms of. Existing IP. And lock-in.

Dave Jones: What do you mean. Jumping this into. Like an open. Right. So. I think. Architecture.

Chris Gammell: I think that eventually. Companies. You know. They. They eventually jump into. Open. Yeah. Architectures. Right. So like. Right. Like. Microsoft is now. Supporting Unix based stuff. Which is like. Crazy. But it took them. Many many many years. But they're starting to do that stuff. Because it's.

Dave Jones: Well it's like Altium coming out with a free version. You know. Exactly. Right. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. So. Eventually it's a. It's a marketing tool. But I think it actually does turn the tide. So. We'll see if Arm eventually goes towards it as well. But I think they like being in charge. Right. Arm is monstrous.

Dave Jones: Oh. Of course.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So. Some. I guess for now. That was just a little bit of. Silliness. Right. It shows. It shows that. I think what it shows is that. They feel threatened. So. Of course. That's an interesting start. Yeah. Cool. Well. We'll be back next week. I don't know who we'll have on the show next week. But I'm going to start preparing interviews for when I'm gone. Because I'll be at DEF CON and then on vacation. So. Cool. We'll have stuff coming up.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Because you know I'm hopeless. You know. Doing that shit. I wouldn't say hopeless. I'd say just. It's not going to happen. I'd say distracted. How about that? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well it's good catching up with you buddy. It's been. It's been real.

Dave Jones: It's been real for the last. Nine years or something hasn't it? Eight years. Yeah. Eight years. Eight. Next month. Eight years. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: All right. Talk to you soon.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time.