#421 – The Legend of Keyzermas

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released December 23rd, 2018. Episode 421. The Legend of Kaisermis.

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

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

Jeff Kaiser: And this is Jeff Kaiser, a.k.a. Mighty Ohm. It's Kaisermis. Kaisermis. Kaisermis.

Dave Jones: I knew you'd say it. I didn't even bother chiming in.

Chris Gammell: Welcome back, Jeff. How you been?

Jeff Kaiser: Thank you. I'm great. Thanks for having me back again.

Chris Gammell: This is like one of my favorite holiday traditions around the Amp Hour.

Jeff Kaiser: The more things change, the more they stay the same. How many times have we done this?

Chris Gammell: Kaisermis, I think, is three times. And then obviously we had many, many more. So people are interested. Jeff has his own category tag on, or category on theamphour.com. So you can just go and just listen to Mighty Ohm appearances.

Jeff Kaiser: That's how I'll bookmark it.

Dave Jones: He was a de facto co-host. That's right, yeah. At one point.

Jeff Kaiser: I was sort of a default substitute.

Chris Gammell: Default substitute, but also you joined us a lot too, so yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Then you went and got a job. What are you doing, man?

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I got a job and another job. Yeah. It's, yeah. We've been doing this for a few years now. It's been, it's good, but it's good to be back. Thanks for having me back.

Chris Gammell: Good to talk to you, man. So what have you been up to? I remember, well, what did we talk about last year? Last year you were working on cars or you were doing other stuff?

Jeff Kaiser: Last year, last year I quit my job and I was taking some time off to sort of do my own thing for a bit. Find yourself. Be an artist.

Chris Gammell: The artist formerly known as Mighty Ohm. Is that what we're doing?

Jeff Kaiser: That's right. Yeah. It was, I guess I was sort of on like a sabbatical of sorts. But yeah, I had taken some time off and had gone back and was working on kits and working on a bunch of personal projects. And that's kind of how I wrapped up 2017. And let's see, over the past year, well, I'm working again. I spent the first half of the year sort of trying to figure out what I was going to do next. And then about midway through the year, I got approached by somebody that I'd worked with on a bunch of projects at Valve and started doing some contract work. And, you know, as things happen, you know, that small project that started out just kind of a few hours a week has turned into a big project. And I've been now working as a contractor at Valve since May. And I got to tell you, it's interesting to kind of be in that position where, you know, previously being a full-time and then coming back as a contractor, it's been interesting to go back. But working on some really interesting projects that obviously I can't talk about. Well, that's it. All right. Good show, folks. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Talk to you next year.

Chris Gammell: There's definitely electronics and we definitely can't talk about them. So, you know, whatever.

Dave Jones: Do people treat you differently now that you've come back as a contractor?

Jeff Kaiser: I'd say yes and no. So I think that everyone's different. And I have to say that a lot of the folks that I've worked with for years and years, you know, things are just sort of back the way that they always were. And it's really – there isn't really much of a shift. I'd say that, you know, as a contractor, you know, I don't get all the same benefits. And obviously, I've got to keep track of time and do all the things that are around billing and all that stuff. So there's some overhead now that I didn't have before. And that's something that I've done previously because I've done freelance work before in years past. And I was sort of – I had all that set up. So that wasn't that big of a challenge. But that is sort of this overhead that as a contractor you need to consider. And then there's also sort of the mechanics of money I think are one of the places where it's – there's the most friction around being a contractor. Because, you know, when you're a full-time employee, if you're lucky enough, you have a corporate card. Everything's already paid for it. Well, it's not – it's actually not so much that. It's like the business expenses. So the processes of creating POs and placing orders and having a company credit card that you can charge travel to or charge expenses to, I think that I sort of – well, I won't say that I took it for granted because I was always – always felt very fortunate to have a company card that I could charge expenses to. But that's probably one of the things I – Well, I'll say it's one of the things that I miss the most. Yeah. Because getting reimbursed for expenses and things like that is – that's a lot longer process. And, you know, as a contractor, I remember when I first started out, you know, one of my first freelance jobs that I had when I first started contracting – this is now 10 years ago when I first started this. I remember having to float the cost of an SMT build, and I basically spent every dollar that I owned. Like I emptied my bank account in order to float the cost.

Chris Gammell: And your credit, you're saying you actually paid cash?

Jeff Kaiser: I – when I started contracting, I did not have a credit card. That's how much of a newbie I was at that whole thing.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Jeff Kaiser: And so I had my debit card, and I was – you know, this was quite a long time ago. So I was paying things with a debit card. Do not recommend that. Don't do it. If you're contracting, don't even go there. But I was actually paying out of pocket for component and PCB assembly costs. And I remember going through a couple tough months where, you know, the bank balance was like heading negative. And it – that can be hard. And so, you know, going through kind of back in that business again and having learned a lot from having done this before, it really just means that it's – there's some overhead that's associated with spending money. And I think that's something that as a full-timer, I did take for granted. It was a lot easier to do that. And as a contractor, you sort of have to get approvals. And especially at a company like Valve that's a pretty flat organization, for the full-times, there's not a lot of overhead to doing things like that. And that's one of the greatest things about Valve is that they empower the individual engineers to be able to spend money and spin up projects and do all those things fairly independently and experiment and do all that great stuff. And I think as a contractor, you know, I'm used to that because that's kind of where I came from. But now I've got to sort of think more explicitly about how to sort of drive that process. And that's something that is definitely a change.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, that's good, man.

Dave Jones: How does contracting work in the U.S.? I know it probably varies, but are you – like do you do it through an agency or do you like invoice them through your own company or whatnot?

Jeff Kaiser: I've got my own company. And I'd say that I'm probably in the minority of folks. I was going to ask.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right. So most of them go through an agency, would they?

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, most folks do go through an agency because, you know, the agency helps you find work, deals with a lot of the overhead, in some cases may provide health insurance, you know, things like that. There's a lot of benefits to working through a larger agency.

Dave Jones: Even in our field? Even in our professional engineering field? People still go through agencies? Yes, absolutely. Mostly, you think?

Jeff Kaiser: At least in this area, in the Seattle area, it is very common. And actually, some companies will only work with agencies. I was going to say. I heard about that.

Chris Gammell: So I was talking to a big consulting – a small firm that got bought by a much bigger firm. And they said, yeah, because of the change, basically, this bigger firm that they got bought by will only deal with big companies – with a contracting house that basically has a stable of contractors. Because you think about having a roster of – now you have, instead of, you know, say, 100 contractors that would all have their own LLCs or businesses or whatever. Oh, yeah. That would be annoying. They would basically have one they deal with. And then – because sending out each new vendor is like a huge deal for a big company.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think that is the biggest reason that most large companies will very reluctantly – you know, if you're like an expert in your field, you know, if you're – Well, you're Jeff Kaiser. I mean, come on. No, do it for you.

Chris Gammell: If you were the man's home, I mean –

Jeff Kaiser: Say that you're – if you're the Henry Ott, you know, you're the EMC expert or you're the resident expert, then, you know, things are a little different. You're consulting at that point, right? That's kind of a different engagement. But I think contract engineering, you're absolutely right. It's mostly larger firms that are doing that. And, you know, I think there's advantages and disadvantages, obviously. There's tradeoffs. So I'm direct.

Chris Gammell: I've noticed you have not joined my consulting firm yet, though, Jeff. I mean, I'm a little miffed, I've got to say, you know.

Dave Jones: So how does this work? If it's like here, when I was contracting through an agency, you basically didn't know – like they charged the company extra, so you really didn't know what their cut was. It's like they – like you negotiate a salary. Like you would negotiate a salary with the – like a – sorry, a contracting rate with the company. It might be, you know, 50 bucks an hour or something. And then the agency would charge them $50 an hour plus whatever their thing was.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, 60 total an hour or whatever it is, right? I think that's very common. And I think that every agency is going to handle that a little bit differently. I've worked with a lot of contractors over the years. And I've seen the whole range. I've seen – I've worked with contractors that knew exactly what the breakdown was. I've worked with very small agencies that are very transparent about how that works. And I've also worked with big companies that were – it was sort of – it was hard to even know. Even as the guy who was approving those expenses on the company's side, like working with the contractors, I had no visibility into what the individuals were being paid. So I just knew what I was paying the contract company, but I didn't know how that was trickling down to the individuals. Interesting. So I think there's a whole range. You know, some agencies are not very transparent. And, you know, to be honest, sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn't. It really depends on the situation, and it depends on who you're working with. And, I mean, I think there's an expectation that by working with an agency, they sort of take care of a lot of that so that – And they're finding the next job too, right?

Chris Gammell: I mean, that's the other thing.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there are a lot of – there's a lot of advantages. But, yeah, I've also worked with agencies that were quite transparent about it, and I think it's just sort of – you know, it's going to vary.

Chris Gammell: Well, you can't talk about the projects you're working on, but where do you see – what's your state of technology, Jeff? What's 2018 been like for you? Are you excited about FPGAs? Are you excited about micros? Are you excited about RF?

Jeff Kaiser: What are you – what are you into these days? I am – I'm excited about signal integrity. Oh, interesting. That's an area that I –

Dave Jones: Oh, that's it. Valve, make the announcement now. Valve are coming out with a new signal integrity product. There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: They're making a –

Dave Jones: Clearly.

Chris Gammell: VNA product. Yeah, it's great. Well, so it's kind of interesting. It's a game that you play that where you're like – you find the – you find the – Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: The name of the game is going to be the signal. You're going to be – like you're going to fly down the transmission.

Jeff Kaiser: If that's not a game, it needs to be a game. Because I think – yeah. Yeah, like looking at reflections and discontinuities and moving transmission lines around, I mean, that's kind of what that field is about.

Chris Gammell: You could have a character just named Stubb, you know?

Jeff Kaiser: He could be like the clippy – Yeah, exactly. The clippy character. He's your –

Chris Gammell: Your sidekick? Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Your sidekick, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The Terminator. The Terminator, yeah. Yes.

Jeff Kaiser: Gosh, we've got to get on this, guys. If only someone knew someone at a game studio. Yeah, right. I mean, geez. Oh, well.

Chris Gammell: I mean, you should call Zaktronics, man. That would be – if anyone would do it, it would be Zakt for Zaktronics. Oh, yeah, that would be terrific. You know? Former guest of the Amp Hour, if people don't know. Highly recommend his games.

Jeff Kaiser: So, Signal Integrity. Okay. I think that that's been a lot of my focus for the past few months. And it's an area that I think I've always been interested in. You know, being an RF guy, you kind of – you're nearby. Like, it's a similar area. People tend to specialize in one or the other.

Chris Gammell: You're talking about impedance either way, right?

Jeff Kaiser: You are. Yeah, you're talking about impedance. But, like, there's some differences.

Dave Jones: Well, just because you're an RF guy doesn't mean you instantly know all there is to know about transmission lines and termination. And, like, on the PCB and the digital, you know, threshold level and stuff like that.

Jeff Kaiser: I think that that is – it's – I agree and disagree with that. So, I think that all of the transmission line stuff that, as an RF designer, you're exposed to in your career, that's all super, super relevant. And I think that – Oh, absolutely. You know, if you're talking about, like, micro strip lines and transmission lines on boards, strip line and stuff like that, that stuff is the bread and butter of high-speed digital designers. And I think that – Indeed. That used to be the territory of RF guys. Like, if you looked at that, like, 20-plus years ago, that was what the RF guys were doing.

Chris Gammell: Well, if you're doing it wrong, usually you're emitting RF, right? I mean, like, there's that part.

Jeff Kaiser: No, these are connected. Yeah. But as high-speed digital has become more common, I think that it's made everybody that's in digital become – have to become more of an expert in transmission lines and high-speed signal propagation. And so, I think that that's an area where, when I was first starting my career in RF, people were talking about that and saying, well, analog RF is going away. It's going to be replaced by – everything's going to be digital. You know, even radios, they're going to be totally digital. They're not going to have any analog. They weren't wrong. And so, the writing was kind of on the wall at that time that digital was going to have a big role in – well, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, yes, there's still analog components, but, like, come on. It's a lot of –

Jeff Kaiser: It's becoming increasingly digital. You know, we've got software-defined radios now. We have all this stuff. But when you get bits onto a printed circuit board, there are electromagnetic effects that are the same as for RF systems. And so, there's a lot of commonality there. I will say that some of the lingo and some of the concepts are quite different, though. So, we've got transmission lines which are – come from the RF side and are now being applied to digital systems. But the concept of, like, jitter, that's something that you don't hear RF guys talking about. Like, at least RF guys that are on the analog side don't talk about jitter and the concept of jitter. And that's one of the core metrics of channel performance for signal integrity is how much jitter is there in your signal. And it's that area that, for me, is – I've been exposed to it in the past, but I would not call myself an expert. But I'm – sort of my job is requiring me to become more knowledgeable in that area. And I think that's been, for me, one of the most interesting things to explore in 2018 has been that side of signal integrity and then also leveraging the transmission line and termination and impedance matching and all that stuff.

Chris Gammell: So, what do your tools look like then? Is this like those eye diagrams that you see on, like, really fancy scopes and stuff like that? Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: That's right. Yep. That's right. So, you've got – eye diagrams are one of the tools to measure signal integrity. And so, some of the tools are the same as RF. So, a vector network analyzer is a tool that is very useful. In signal integrity, you'll use it in frequency domain, but you'll also use it for time domain measurements. You know, usually on the RF side, you don't care about time domain or care about it as much. But in the SI world, time domain response is much more important because you have edges that are bouncing around and you're looking at impedance discontinuities down the transmission line. And I won't say that TDR isn't useful in the RF space. I think I probably – if I were to go back to RF, I'd use it –

Jeff Kaiser: Sorry, Jeff. It's time domain reflectometry, which is basically taking – so, you can measure time domain in two ways. You can use a frequency domain instrument, like a vector network analyzer, which basically looks at reflections and transmissions of signals versus frequency. And you can actually do a Z transform to convert that to time domain. You hear that, students? So, you can basically –

Chris Gammell: There is a reason. There's a reason you learned it. You don't need to know it probably as much, but –

Jeff Kaiser: Hey, kids, pay attention in school. Yeah, that's right. It's all really important. Signals classes are very important. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That signals stuff that you're probably not paying as much attention as you should. You should really pay attention because it is important. So, that's one way. You convert frequency domain data to time domain. And that's that whole, like, Laplace transform, blah, blah, blah stuff. Sorry, Fourier transform. Blah, blah, blah. Converting frequency domain to time domain and vice versa. The other way you can do it is you can actually generate a very fast edge, and then you can actually launch that edge into your circuit and look at what comes back. And that's more of just pure time domain. And there are purpose-built TDRs that do that. But most of my experience is –

Chris Gammell: I always think about that as, like, you're, like, one of those demos at, like, a science museum where you have, like, a wave table. And then, you know, the first wave goes down. Yeah, same thing. And then it bounces back, and you see how the interference pattern happens, and you see what it looks like. Yeah. Those are cool.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, or, like, a wave going down a string, you know. Yeah, yeah. And then if it hits the other end, it reflects back. And transmission lines are like that. And there's a lot of great books on this stuff. I think Bogatine is one. Howard Johnson, the – what's the Black Magic? It's Bogatine. Yeah, the Black Magic book. It's Eric Bogatine. Sorry. Eric Bogatine. There's two parts to that, too.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. Which one? The Howard Johnson one?

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, a sequel to that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay. Okay, keep going, Jeff.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, sorry. Yeah, so there's a lot of good literature on how – On Henry Ott.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure you would probably be placed in that in there, right?

Jeff Kaiser: Henry Ott's EMC compliance book is one of my favorites. I think that's something that – it's maybe a little bit less signal integrity oriented. But, you know, one of the other areas that I work in and I still work in is EMC and regulatory compliance. And I think that for folks that consider EMC to be sort of black magic, that book will demystify a lot of it. And it's one of the books that I recommend to a lot of folks that are new to compliance and especially understanding why products have issues with compliance and then how to fix them. I think that book sort of breaks it down. And I think the title of the book is Introduction to Compliance Engineering. Hmm. I'd have to check. But it's Ott's latest book. I would also mention –

Chris Gammell: By the way, I think – I would also mention that both Eric and Henry have been on the show. We did not get Dr. Johnson. Wait, did we get – no, we didn't get him. No, he retired first. So we didn't get him.

Jeff Kaiser: I think Henry Ott just retired, actually. Oh, yeah? I took one of his classes about three or four years ago, and I think – I'm on a mailing list, and I think I heard that he just retired this year.

Chris Gammell: There you go. Wait. We didn't – sorry. We did interview Dr. Howard Johnson. Jesus. Yes. Holy crap. We've done a lot of shows, Dave. I literally forgot. No, I do remember that because he asked us to introduce him. That's what it was.

Dave Jones: That's right. I remember.

Chris Gammell: He's the only guest we've technically introduced other than Jeff just today.

Dave Jones: Yes. That's right.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, sorry. The book is Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering. Really, really good book. It's kind of – it's not a thin book, but it's totally – it's great. I highly recommend that one.

Chris Gammell: I thought we didn't interview Dr. Johnson.

Dave Jones: People often complain about the cost of these books. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like, seriously, the knowledge contained in them is worth its weight in gold.

Chris Gammell: Well, you could hire Jeff for, like, what, half an hour for the same cost? Yeah. You know? Like, pretty much that's what you would get. And maybe less time.

Dave Jones: Even if a textbook costs a couple of hundred bucks. Like, you know, that is cheap learning material.

Chris Gammell: I think it's, you know, it's natural for people to rail against the publishing companies. But at the end of the day, yeah, just, you know, swallow your pride and pay it. It's probably – or get it at the library if you can, you know? Like, university library lending and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: I mean, yeah, you can always borrow it from the local uni library. Sure.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's cool, man. It sounds like you're doing some interesting work, though, Jeff.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. It's been – it's exciting. I mean, it's – for me, it's a way to kind of get my hands dirty and work on circuits and work on boards. And I like getting into the lab. And it's been great to be back and work on some interesting new problems in an area that is new to me. Like, when I was – I worked at Intel back when I was in university. And I remember folks there who were probably much younger than I am now talking about signal integrity and talking about – at that time, RAM bus was sort of a big thing. I remember RAM bus.

Chris Gammell: I remember my first computer had RD RAM, and it was really expensive to ever upgrade, and I ever did.

Jeff Kaiser: And so I remember them struggling and using some of the same types of tools and techniques that I use now. And so it's interesting to kind of have that come back around, and now I'm the guy who's talking about all the same stuff that they were back then.

Dave Jones: What about the year? When you took your six months off – or was it six months? It was almost a year. It was almost a year. Your self-imposed sabbatical. Almost a year. Almost a year. How did Mrs. Mighty Ohm – because obviously, like, you had little, oh, honey, I'm just going to work on – you know, I'm just going to bum around in the lab and work on some kits and stuff.

Chris Gammell: Enjoy your day of work, honey. For the next year.

Dave Jones: Like, was she okay with that, or was it a –

Jeff Kaiser: She was very supportive of it, and I think that –

Chris Gammell: I will say, I've met both Mrs. Mighty Ohm and Mrs. Eve Vublock, and both are very, very awesome human beings. So I –

Jeff Kaiser: She was very, very supportive, and I think that for her, it was important – So I think, first of all, we have to take a step back and say that in that time, it wasn't like I was kicking back on the couch watching TV. Like, I think that my idea of not working full-time is very different because, really, I'm working full-time. It's just I'm doing different stuff. And I would say that I was pushing myself just as hard and working as many hours a week except, you know, when I work for myself –

Dave Jones: There's no money coming in, right?

Jeff Kaiser: Well, that's not totally true. So one of the biggest things that happened to me in my non-valve life this year was that Elektor, the European electronics magazine, started carrying Mighty Ohm kits. And – There you go. That by itself was a big part of 2018 for me because it had been kind of a long time since I'd brought on a new distributor. And, you know, as happens, you sort of go into it with an idea about, okay, you know, maybe this is going to be a few kits here or there or whatever. And then pretty soon you're spending every waking hour building kits. And so that was sort of a big thing that happened in the middle of the year for me that was totally unexpected and was really great but also was definitely a big time commitment for me. That was – I spent a good portion of the year sort of ramping up because, you know, honestly, I've had the Geiger counter kits have been out for a few years now and things were slowing down a little bit. You know, you still – I still was getting orders but it was sort of slowing down. And then all of a sudden I found I was having to order, you know, larger quantities and sort of ramp things back up again and sort of dust off. It wasn't like it was dusty but it was like I was building at a certain rate and then I needed to sort of turn that around and start building at a much higher rate. And it's super exciting but it's also one of those things where when things go really well and you're working with a distributor, they kind of – if sales are going well, they want – they go from zero to 100% really fast. And I think it's hard as a small business to respond to that. And, you know, as a small business, you don't want to overestimate what the demand is going to be. You know, if you're building something like a kit and you get an order, it's tempting to say, well, you know, if this continues at this rate, I'm going to need to order X more and I should just – you know, there's a lot of economy of scale. And it's easy to kind of get lost in the, well, you know, if I buy 10,000 of this resistor, it's like a penny. You know, it's like 10 times cheaper than if I buy 100. And so managing that is hard. And as a small business sort of – I'm just a one-man operation. I don't have employees. I don't – you know, I farm out some of the components but I do a lot of it myself. So there's sort of a limit to what I can do in a given week. And I went from that being a very small portion of my time to at least for a while that being a very big portion of my time. And that was exciting but it was something that I was, you know, kind of unprepared for and that caught me by surprise this year. But I can say that I'm finally sort of on top of that and it's been great. So if you go to Elector's website, you'll see the Mighty Ohm Geiger counter on there. Nice.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Nice. Is there enough margin in there to make it worthwhile with the dealers and stuff like that, especially a large one like that?

Jeff Kaiser: I'm pretty happy with it. It's not a lot of money. I think that the distributors do take a cut. But for me, it's been enough to make me want to keep doing it. I will say that now that I've got a day job that sort of pays me by the hour, it makes me much more aware that if I have to miss a day that I could come to my sort of full-time job in order to deal with the kits and to do kits, that's not a great tradeoff. And that's something that I think is a big difference as a contractor versus a full-time. Because when I was a full-time employee, my income was not really proportional to the amount of hours per week. And I'll say, first of all, I'm the kind of guy that I work more than 40 hours a week. That's just sort of that I've always done that. And so I'm usually working more than sort of the minimum. But if I spent a few hours here or there doing kits, it was sort of—

Chris Gammell: 37 pieces of flair. That's how many he wears, folks.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, you don't want to work the minimum number of hours. Jessica, you don't want to— Yeah. 15. I'll say that Valve is a great company to work for, and they're not pushing you to put in more hours. This is entirely self-driven, wanting to do great things and be successful. But I'll say that as a contractor, if you're like, oh, well, so I need to ship whatever these kits this month, and I'm kind of running out of days, and so maybe I should just take some time off and deal with that. You quickly are like, oh, that's actually not a good tradeoff.

Dave Jones: That cost me X thousands of dollars.

Jeff Kaiser: Right, right. So that's a tough thing. But, I mean, I'll say that I've found sort of a balance there. Things have slowed down a bit since the summer. The summer was a little bit nuts. Things have slowed down a bit, and I've been able to manage it. And honestly, the kit business is tremendously rewarding. That's really something that I enjoy doing because it's entirely of my own creation. I control the entire, you know, not the supply chain, but I control a lot of the supply chain for those kits, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of it. And it also connects me with people sort of all around the world who buy something, and they like it. And I think that's something that is a different kind of a reward than I get from sort of my day job.

Dave Jones: I concur. That's why I've been in the kit business for 20-plus years.

Jeff Kaiser: When I was a boy.

Dave Jones: When I was a boy. Yeah, when I was a boy.

Jeff Kaiser: So, yeah.

Dave Jones: No, I can totally understand that reward side of it. That's why I still do it, too.

Chris Gammell: I'm not there yet, guys. I'm sorry.

Dave Jones: No, you're not. Start a kit business. Come on.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Jeff, it sounds like you're doing good stuff, man. You're back in it. I mean, was it tough transitioning back into the electronics world?

Jeff Kaiser: I mean, like you were kind of, I guess you weren't really out of it, out of it. I'm never, yeah, I am never not in the electronics world. I mean, I think that's one of the things. I have been working in electronics since I was in kindergarten. Like, I've been able to solder since I was a little kid.

Chris Gammell: Were you a child laborer? I mean, what?

Jeff Kaiser: No, I mean, I've been into hobby electronics my entire life since I could read. I was drawing schematics. And I think for me, that is the one common thread. I spend quite a lot of time during my, you know, quote, unquote, sabbatical working on other things. And I have to say that I always come back to electronics. I think that that's the one thing that, I don't know, I think it's, that's sort of, for me, that is what I was meant to do. And I think that I'm fortunate that I sort of have that calling. And it's an area, it's not like my calling is something obscure that would be challenging to find work in. It's, you know, there's a lot of opportunity for people in the electronics industry. And I think that right now, hardware is big. And in the Seattle area, hardware is big. There's a lot of opportunities in Seattle for hardware. And there's a lot of really interesting places to work right now.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you and I talked. So I got to visit Seattle back in June. And that was fun to hang out with you. And we were talking over lunch. And you guys were kind of mentioning, like, some of the, where you knew other people in Seattle. So what is the Seattle scene like right now?

Jeff Kaiser: I think that it is growing. Um, Seattle just has had a lot of sheer population growth over the past few years. Um, Seattle has gotten a bit more crowded, um, since I moved here in 2012. And now you're like a nimby.

Chris Gammell: You're like, yeah, darn kids, don't move here.

Jeff Kaiser: No, I think it's great. So, so Seattle historically, and I'm not a Seattle native. I've only lived here for six years now. Uh, but to my understanding, Seattle historically was rooted fairly heavily in the aerospace industry. Um, Boeing is kind of the famous example. Uh, but, but also has had, uh, companies like Microsoft have been here for a long time. And Microsoft has been building hardware here.

Chris Gammell: And they're known for the airplane as well. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, uh, take me there.

Jeff Kaiser: Uh, Tektronix is in Oregon. That's, uh, Beaverton. I actually drove by the Tektronix headquarters recently, and it's impressive. Um, Tektronix, I don't think was ever.

Chris Gammell: Sorry.

Jeff Kaiser: I love, I love Tektronix. I, I definitely wish them the best. Uh, I, I actually am fortunate to work with some former tech engineers and they're all great engineers. Uh, and I'm sure that there's still a lot of engineers that, that are still at tech, but yeah. I mean, tech has been through a lot of changes in the past decade. Um, and another company that's been through a lot of changes is Fluke. Um, Fluke is based in Everett and, uh, they've been there for, I think, quite a long time. And I don't actually know anyone at Fluke. Um, but I, I'm sure that there's still interesting things happening up in Everett. Uh, it's actually interesting that Seattle, that Everett area, which is about, uh, half an hour north of Seattle, I think because of Boeing and because of some of the aerospace stuff that's been there a long time, there are other companies that are in that area that are in sort of the technology industry.

Chris Gammell: Um, but, you know, as far as one person, you know, works at a big technology place, then they make some money and they decide to do their own thing. And then they open up shop down the street cause they already live there.

Jeff Kaiser: And, you know, just, I mean, that's, that's, that's one of the great things about recessions, right? Is that when, no, I mean, honestly, all about recessions. Honestly, I think that, so, so using Seattle as an example, you know, Seattle historically, you had Microsoft, we've had Amazon for quite a long time. You had Boeing, you had some other very established companies. I think, you know, if you compare Seattle with say the Bay area, I think Seattle, at least to my, my impression is that it was far more concentrated in far fewer large companies, right? Seattle historically had relatively few companies and, you know, we have had some very significant recessions. You know, Seattle has had a couple, uh, major downturns, you know, Boeing, there's kind of a famous one and I'm not sure the year, but it was seventies. I think Boeing had a big downturn and what happens is that people leave or people are let go and then they go off and they create other companies. And honestly, that is a great process for technology, uh, for an economy and an area and technology that kind of refactoring and people move around and they, they do new things and they do interesting things. I mean, I think the Bay area does that every time there's a recession, folks leave or they get let go and they go and they do something else and they create a new company and they do something new. So I think that that's a great way of diversifying a tech industry and Seattle is on, you know, it's what second or third or fourth iteration of that. And I think that there's still relatively few big players in Seattle. Amazon is huge and Amazon's doing hardware. Uh, lab one 26 is doing hardware and it's connected to Amazon. You know, they're in the Bay area, but they've also got, uh, I think lab one, one 26 has an office in Bellevue, uh, which is close to Seattle. That's actually where I am right now. Uh, Microsoft is obviously still big in hardware. Uh, and, and there's, uh, Google's up here, but I don't think they're building hardware. It's, it's primarily software. Um, but you've got, you know, there's a number of, of companies that are in this area. Facebook obviously is up here, uh, and is kind of a big force in both hardware and software. Um, and I think it's Seattle's still sort of growing. Um, I think there's a lot.

Dave Jones: What is Facebook doing in, in hardware? They bought Oculus, Dave.

Chris Gammell: The what? You remember Oculus? The Oculus Rift? Oh, right. They bought them for $2 billion. Follow, yeah. So now they're in hardware.

Dave Jones: Okay. Right.

Jeff Kaiser: I think Facebook was actually building hardware before. Oh, yeah. Facebook has been building servers. Yeah. That stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. I'm sure they're doing that sort of stuff. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think any, you know, at a company of sufficient size, they just like, it starts to actually make sense at a certain point, even if it's, you know, weird stuff or it turns out to be a flop. I think, I think.

Dave Jones: Oh, when you're that huge of quite, it's, you know, it's a foregone conclusion that you're going to end up making your own, you know, stuff.

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's just a, it becomes like a vertical integration thing almost.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: I went on the Boeing tour recently. Boeing has a great tour of their, where they build 747s, which, by the way, they're still building 747s. I was going to say, I thought they shut that down. Nope. They are still. But they actually still make the 747s. They are still making 747s. They're cargo planes. Oh. So they still build cargo planes. They also build 777s, 787s, 737s. And I'll say that going to that factory, you can get a tour. You get to see the assembly line. You sort of, you have that moment of like, ah, this is, this is what vertical manufacturing is all about. But I will say that even Boeing, they're doing this program now where they assemble aircraft from components that are built all over the world. Like the wings will be built in one country and the tail is built in another country and then they bring it all together. So I think even Boeing is a lot less vertically integrated than they used to be. But it's still, to go to that factory and to see that, it's a really impressive sight, you know, to see the amount of machinery and, you know, all of the sub-assemblies that are built into aircraft. It's really amazing to see.

Chris Gammell: I tell you, I don't care where the wing or the tail or anything is. I just care that the QA is really frigging good.

Jeff Kaiser: I imagine that quite a lot of effort is put into that. Like not a small amount of effort is put into that. That's good.

Chris Gammell: That's good.

Dave Jones: I am just looking, I've got to tell you this. I am just looking at Google Maps. I'm just, you know, to get my bearings. And I'm looking at Fluke Headquarters. It's got a helipad.

Chris Gammell: Oh my God. Seriously?

Dave Jones: Fluke Headquarters has a helipad.

Chris Gammell: Dave, that's got to be a fluke.

Dave Jones: Sorry, I just had to mention that.

Chris Gammell: It's for the Danaher folks to fly in, you know? Right.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. Makes sense, obviously.

Chris Gammell: So I was wondering, what do you guys think? I mean, we're running up on the end of the year here. What do you think about talking about a year in review as part of Kaisermis? Hmm. I mean, like, what did we, just like, things we've seen in the year, this year's tech, things that we think will happen in next year's tech, stuff like that. Because right after the holidays...

Jeff Kaiser: God, don't spring this on us at all. Well, sorry, man. Is this our chance to make wildly inaccurate predictions about the future?

Chris Gammell: Well, Jeff, actually, that's our chance to do that every single time we record the amp hour. But yes, now that you're here, it's also your chance to do that. Oh, wow.

Jeff Kaiser: It's my chance to embarrass myself with completely wrong predictions.

Chris Gammell: I've never been embarrassed. I just, you know, I believe these things in my heart. So they must be true to me in my heart.

Dave Jones: Well, what things haven't happened? What things have gone the way of the... Yeah, do we have... That was all the latest boom, and then they went, oh, like, VR is like all this augmented reality, virtual reality. It's like, meh, you know.

Chris Gammell: You know, Jeff's employer might think otherwise, but...

Dave Jones: Jeff's employer might be a bit... No, but like, everyone said, oh, you know, it was imminent, and it's the future, and everyone's going to be playing... I think it's slower.

Chris Gammell: It's definitely slower than that stuff. And like, AR as well. I mean, that stuff has been...

Dave Jones: 3D printing just died in the ass, you know? Like, it was going to be the next big thing.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, I do not agree with that at all. I'm actually sitting... I can see from where I'm sitting here a room that is completely full of 3D printers.

Dave Jones: No, but the home automation, come on. The home automation, like the home thing. Everyone was going to have a 3D printer in the home, and it was going to... You wouldn't have to have it buy a... Go down to the hardware store and buy a doorknob anymore. You're talking about the dreams of Brie Pettis.

Chris Gammell: That's what you're talking about, right? The prognostications of a... Yeah. Less than...

Dave Jones: That failed, Misra. That died in the ass completely.

Jeff Kaiser: I mean, I think that... Well, yeah. I mean, I think they were shooting for the moon, and they got somewhere that was in low-Earth orbit, and it's still really impressive. It just wasn't the moon, right? I think it's gotten commoditized. I think it's deorbited. I think it's deorbited. No, I think it's gotten commoditized. No way.

Chris Gammell: It's just not... Maybe that promise that you're talking about is, you know, my grandmother doesn't have a 3D printer, but...

Dave Jones: Exactly. It just... And nobody does, because it just...

Chris Gammell: Oh, I don't agree with that.

Jeff Kaiser: No, that's definitely not true.

Dave Jones: And it was... They're still...

Jeff Kaiser: Come on. I think that we take 3D printers for granted now. I think that I would challenge you to find a single consumer product that's designed today that doesn't make heavy use of 3D printing in the product development process. I would be...

Dave Jones: Sure, I'm not talking about product development. I'm talking about Joe Average in their home... Yeah, that's true. ...with little Joe Average... Yeah, printing the mecha bots or whatever it is, right? ...and little Joe Average is not printing out his toys with 3D printers. I agree with that. That's what I'm talking about.

Jeff Kaiser: I mean, I think that there's still... There's a lot of 3D printers that are out there. To me, 3D printers are not rare. I mean, it's... You're right. People that are not technologically minded are maybe not pursuing 3D printers as much as was predicted.

Chris Gammell: You don't see them in Best Buy as much as you did during that hype. That's right. Top of that hype thing. I agree with that. That's true. But I... Jeff, I agree with Jeff that I've 3D printed more things in the past four months of consulting than I had in the past five years of having a 3D printer. So it's just... I think some of it is focused.

Dave Jones: I have no doubt. That's not the argument. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah. Sure. For sure.

Jeff Kaiser: Do we have a list of predictions from last year that we can go and laugh at?

Speaker ?: I don't know.

Dave Jones: Driverless cars, you know? Like...

Jeff Kaiser: Ah, yeah. Self-driving cars. That one...

Dave Jones: Self-driving cars.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, I'll say that every time I see a Tesla on the road, I feel like we're a little closer to that.

Dave Jones: But then again, then you get the likes of Steve Wozniak coming out and bashing the Tesla Roadster and the Tesla. He says he's got one. And he was so, you know, waiting for the... You know, like he thought it'd be so fantastic. He goes, no, it's basically not what they promised. It just, you know, it's kind of sort of neat. It's a neat toy, but it's not the driverless car that was promised.

Jeff Kaiser: I don't know. They can parallel park themselves. That's the one.

Dave Jones: Well, you could have parallel... They have parallel parking cars in the 40s.

Chris Gammell: That's true. You mean when the wheels turn sideways and then they just pulled into the spot? Is that the thing? That's right.

Jeff Kaiser: I wouldn't have wanted to park in front or behind one of those self-driving cars in the 40s. Yeah. I mean, I think that maybe the common thread we're seeing is that each of these have had an intense amount of hype involved. And then you sort of get to the plateau where, yeah, they exist and they're increasingly a part of our lives, but it doesn't have that upward trajectory anymore. It's not the revolution. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: I don't know. I think give it time. It's probably... We're on a plateau, but then somebody's going to do something to elevate it again. And, you know, I suspect that there are quite a few engineers that are working on solving those problems. Oh, for sure. So I think we're going to see a lot more self-driving stuff and we're going to see it work better. And whether 2019 is going to be the year where that becomes mainstream, I don't know. I feel like the auto industry moves a bit slowly. I'm telling you it won't be.

Dave Jones: I guarantee you. Nah. Won't be. I'm hanging my balls out there on the chopping block, making the prediction. Don't need to do that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, there we go. I was trying to find...

Dave Jones: Just like that chip... Just like the chip printer I put my... Put my head on the chopping block a decade ago.

Chris Gammell: A decade ago. It wasn't a decade.

Dave Jones: And we're halfway there to the 20 years, Chris. You do realize this.

Chris Gammell: We're not a decade, Dave. It's been... We've only recorded the show for eight years.

Speaker ?: Oh, we're pretty close.

Chris Gammell: What, nine years? Eight years.

Dave Jones: Eight years? Eight and a half? Come on. I'm rounding up. Okay. You know. We're pretty much halfway there.

Chris Gammell: So I'm going back and I'm looking at the past episodes of... I'm just ignoring Dave like I normally do when that comes up. Of course. So I... And we actually have... This is a tradition. This is actually number five, I think. So 229, 279, 328, 365. Last year you were... You had just gone on that tour of the thing... What's that?

Jeff Kaiser: The Hanford site. Yeah, the Hanford site. Yeah. Oh, that's right. And then the year before that you had just seen Dave.

Chris Gammell: And that was when we had the picture of you grabbing the Sydney Harbor Bridge bolts and nuts. Nuts, yep. Before that was you selling... I think you were talking about your working on the... That was when we... The video had just come out of the Steam controller. So we talked about that.

Jeff Kaiser: I think we missed a year, though. There was the Idea Factory year.

Chris Gammell: No, no. That's in here, too. That's...

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, really? Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that was the... Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: That was the year that I went to Bell Labs.

Chris Gammell: That was the Sydney. Yeah. So that was the Sydney one. We talked about that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Hmm. Yeah. So I don't think we have any other predictions here. Two years ago, we had the... The batteries will start shipping soon. Did that ever happen?

Dave Jones: Yeah, they shipped.

Chris Gammell: Okay, great. So...

Dave Jones: Didn't work. Well, it worked, but it was exactly as... As we all predicted. As expected. Okay. Its performance sucked. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Funny how engineering works like that, isn't it? How you can actually predict stuff.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. Um... I don't know. So I think the coming year, I think the... I think the rise of the open source FPGA toolchain stuff is very, very exciting. I don't know about you guys. You've been watching that stuff, but I think that's... That's a bigger and bigger deal. And I think that that ties into like the... I think that that's getting a lot of traction because of the slowing of Moore's Law, sloring slash stopping of Moore's Law in the first place. That more people are actually interested in optimizing custom logic and things like that. Maybe, maybe not.

Dave Jones: But with the advent of faster and faster, higher speed and cheaper processors, like where is the magic market? You know, where's the killer app going to come for the FPGA evolution, so to speak? I mean, you know, this was Altium's dream.

Chris Gammell: Sure, sure, sure.

Dave Jones: Right? Altium spent 10 years developing this and it never happened. And I don't see it. I don't see anything that's changed.

Chris Gammell: We might get a taste of this. That changes that, really. I had sent... I shipped four microphones and my H6N recorder to Peter Esdentemski to take to Chaos Communication Congress. And so we will have a foreign correspondent in the coming days, hopefully. And he's going to record with former guest Clifford and former guest Clifford Wolf and Tim Ansell. And they're going to talk about FPGA stuff in Germany. So we'll see. We may get a inside look at the forefront of that stuff. So I'm excited about it, though. Yeah. I don't know if you guys are... Jeff, are you doing the FPGA stuff or is that not...

Jeff Kaiser: No, not... Not... No, I haven't. I've played a little bit with some of the dev kits that have come out over the years. And I know that the... What is it? The tiny FPGA is really big right now. Luke Valenti. Yep. But yeah, I unfortunately haven't not had a chance to play with that stuff. I'd like to.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I have a tiny FPGA in hand. And it's like the other pile of... I've got dev kits that I keep saying like, oh, well, Christmas time is the right time to pull that stuff out. I'm sure I'll... Yeah. I've got that one. I've got the Laura board. I've got the, you know, a couple of other things. I've got the PSOC 5. I've never actually done any PSOC stuff before. So I was going to try that one out.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, yeah. I have. Yeah. They're cool. They do... Yeah. They're neat. They've got some interesting peripherals. That's one of those things that I feel like a lot of undergrads use that in their projects because they do that analog and digital in the same part kind of thing. Yeah. Those are cool parts.

Chris Gammell: Well, Dave, come on, man. You're the prognosticator here. Tell us what isn't going to happen or is going to happen. You actually know. You're only allowed to say what is going to happen.

Jeff Kaiser: I'm the only one who's stuck my neck out and said, this isn't going to happen. No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: You only are allowed to say things that are going to happen because you always love saying... That are going to happen. I love saying things that are not going to happen, and that's fine.

Dave Jones: Because it's obvious to see that. I mean, it's much harder to predict what's going to be big. I don't know. You've sprung this on me. All right. Well, we can talk about something else then. I don't see anything. I don't know. I can't... Nothing comes to mind that's going to be the revolution in 2019.

Jeff Kaiser: I think that 2019 is going to be the year that USB Type-C becomes more common than micro USB, right? I think that's been in the works for a while, but it seems like things are moving in that direction.

Dave Jones: My new product, just my new micro supply, we've decided only USB-C. Oh, wow. Okay. Because it's just easier. Because you can buy and you can ship with it a little USB-C to micro USB adapter if you want to. And that's actually just as cheap to include that little adapter than it is to put the micro USB on your board, really. I mean, it's almost as cheap, but it gives the customer like an extra little doodad. Oh, look, I got a little adapter. Isn't that nice? You know, like, yeah. So, you know, we originally, the original concept was to have USB-C, actually all three. You know, let's just satisfy everyone. And, you know, and then we, in the end, we just went, oh, no, this is, you know, it's getting a bit silly. Let's just go with USB-C and if people want, we can supply an adapter with it and Bob's your uncle. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, are you guys seeing that? I totally agree with that. So, I haven't done any USB-C stuff yet. Is it pretty much throw down a chip and it kind of takes care of everything or you need to call up Dr. Kaiser here to get some signal-integra advice?

Dave Jones: Well, we're only doing it from a charging point of view. We're not doing it from like a high-speed data point of view. We are doing like a serial interface. So, we've got a USB chip on the primary side of the transformer that does some serial and outputs. And then we go over via regular serial UART opto couplers over to the secondary side. You know, so it's really like, you know, low-speed kind of stuff. Just for, you know, actually remote controlling the thing via the SCPI commands and, you know, stuff like that. So, yeah. Nothing fancy.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Type-C is backwards compatible with USB 2 in a lot of ways. So, if you just want to change to the new connector, there's not a whole lot that you have to do.

Chris Gammell: So, Jeff, and you've been excited about it too. You've been doing some of that higher-speed stuff, the actual connections and things.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, I've been working a bit with Type-C. And it is interesting. You know, most of my experience previously had been at the lower speeds. But, obviously, things get a lot more complicated when you want to move data, you know, gigabits a second. So, if you really want to use USB-C and you want to go fast, it is definitely not trivial. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's not your first layout in KiCad or something like that.

Dave Jones: Well, even from the charging aspect, it's very difficult. There's so many options and permutations of, you know, charging standards and things like that. It's just a complete pain in the ass.

Jeff Kaiser: I think, really. USB is one of those standards that has evolved over time. And I think as time has gone by, it is sort of collected. Like, a lot of stuff has come and kind of stuck onto it. And I think that it's one of the challenges that it's USB 2 is so ubiquitous that you have to sort of support all the legacy USB 2 stuff. And then you also want to support all the fancy USB 3 stuff. And then Type-C sort of adds another dimension. And I think one of the things that I think is a challenge for USB is that over time, it's sort of gotten more and more complicated because they've added alternate modes and they've added all these different things to it.

Dave Jones: I've got a good example of that. But if you don't make the right choices, it can really limit your product or even kill your product potentially. One is the – I forget the company's name, but the Chinese company who make the TS-100 and the TS-80 soldering iron, a little portable handheld thing. Yeah, TS-80 is the USB-C one. Like, the TS-80 is the USB-C one. It's a really nice little iron. It's fantastic. But it only works with quick charge 3 compatible supplies. So the vast majority of people, your battery pack – you know, everyone's got like a battery bank, right? One of those battery banks you carry it around. I guarantee 90% of them don't have quick charge 3, 95%. So it's like, you know, that's automatically limited and it's not compatible with anything else. Even at a lower power mode, it's like quick charge 3 or bust for that product.

Jeff Kaiser: That's one of the things. USB power delivery is a particularly complicated part of the standard. And they made some interesting choices in the voltage and power brackets. And like, for example, there's a 5-volt rail and then there's a 9-volt rail and then there's a 15-volt rail. And if you look at –

Dave Jones: And then there's a variable version and there's where you can vary it.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, the thing that's odd is that desktop PCs forever, you know, since the 80s have had 5 volts and 12 volts. But 12 volts is not a rail that's available in power delivery. So they made some kind of weird choices in how they spec'd PD. And I suspect that if you cornered one of the USB guys and you got them to kind of spill the beans, there's probably a long story to how this came about. Oh, I'm sure. But what I've noticed is that some battery packs and some devices that support PD will support 12 volts, even though that's not part of the standard. Because you can – as long as you support the minimum, you can also support other voltages. And so that's where I think things start getting messy. Because if 12 volts becomes common, then all of a sudden you'll see devices which are not spec compliant, which only work with 12 volts.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's an absolute quagmire of, you know, various standards and options and stuff like that. Yeah, that is a lot of options, yeah. It's, you know, it's crazy. But yeah, it jumps from 5 volts to 20 volts. It's just like, meh, you know. Because I think a lot of that may have actually come from the requirement of laptop computers. Yeah. Because they're all around that 19.5, 20 volt mark, right? Yeah, like the standard barrel jack and extra type ones. Yeah. Maybe that's, you know, where the history of that came from.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, I think one of the holy grail of Type-C is that it supports charging of a laptop. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that was a factor. But even then, it's – the waters are kind of muddy there. Because if you buy a Dell laptop and you buy a Dell dock, it charges at 130 watts. But USB Type-C only guarantees 100 watts. And so it feels like it's going to take some time for that to sort of work itself out. Like kind of like how when Bluetooth first came out, I think Bluetooth was around for probably almost a decade before it sort of became somewhat standardized. You could get high-quality audio and stuff over Bluetooth. I suspect that –

Dave Jones: Is it destined to be just like the XKCD comic? Like we have 13 standards. You know, we have 12 standards. So let's make a standard, a new standard that standardizes everything. Bingo, we have 13.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, I guess we'll see. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, what about standards on the RF side of things? I mean, are we seeing – what do you guys think about the state of RF communications these days? Like there's more – there are more standards than ever. Are there any that are winning or losing or things that you're interested in? I mean, that you're seeing on commercial products or personal products or anything like that?

Jeff Kaiser: Ooh, that's a complicated answer. Sure. I think that there's – obviously things are moving to higher frequencies and higher bandwidths. There's some new 802.11 standards that are allowing for really large bandwidths. I think a lot of times there's a tradeoff in range, though. So you have that kind of age-old problem with wireless routers, for example, where you can get great bandwidth if you're, you know, three feet from the router. But if you move further away, you lose a lot of it. And I think that continues to be a challenge. There's work happening at higher frequencies now. Like there's new bands that are – you know, 60 gigahertz is a thing now.

Speaker ?: Oh, really?

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Jeff Kaiser: We haven't really seen much on the market. But that's the kind of thing where every year at CES there's things at 60 gigs now. I think – who knows? Maybe 2019 will be the year when 60 gigs finally starts getting traction. I think that would be very interesting.

Chris Gammell: It's like an open band.

Dave Jones: But they're not – but just going to 60 gigs isn't some, you know, magic bullet that's going to fix everything, right?

Jeff Kaiser: There's tradeoffs. Yeah, I mean, I think it's – the rules of physics cannot be changed. But we can find more and more creative ways to sort of work around them. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, what is the 60 gigahertz band? I actually have not heard anything about that, so.

Jeff Kaiser: I don't know off the top of my head. It's got a lot of bandwidth. I mean, the advantage is that up there –

Dave Jones: Yeah, because no one's using it. Well, no, it's not. It's because it's the window.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, to be clear, you have two advantages. Number one is that you're the only transmitter. And then number two, it's that the channel capacity is huge because they allocate this large chunk of bandwidth. So, you know, what Shannon's Law, like you just get – you have a lot more bandwidth to put information, to send information through. And I think that's really the – that's the promise of 60 gigs is that you've got this large potential bandwidth that you can make use of. But, you know, 60 gigahertz is a high frequency for CMOS. Like, CMOS is getting better and better. But I think silicon historically has struggled to get those kinds of frequencies. And I think that that's something that's definitely – you know, the transistors that make up these RF circuits are getting faster and faster. And you don't need to buy exotic semiconductors like you used to. You know, it used to be that you had to use gallium arsenide or get indium phosphide to be able to produce. And automotive radar, I think, is in the 60 gigahertz band as well. And it's been around for quite a long time. Like, Mercedes and other car makers have been building radars. But I think that back years ago, they were using very expensive transceivers to do that. And I suspect that a lot of that stuff is in RFCMOS now on silicon and can be made much cheaper. And, you know, that commoditization of, like, vehicle avoidance radar, and that kind of gets back to self-driving cars too. That technology is becoming much more commoditized. And now it's actually hard to buy a car that doesn't have an automotive radar. And I think all of that stuff is pretty high-frequency microwaves. I think there's some standard bands. I think 60 gigs is one. There might be some others. But, you know, tens of gigahertz and above kind of frequencies for that stuff. And so I'm not sure that there's technology from the automotive industry that's being leveraged for consumer, you know, 60 gig Wi-Fi. But I wouldn't be surprised if those industries are sort of helping each other. And I think that is one of the big promises of moving to the higher frequencies is that you can sort of get around some of the bandwidth limitations of the existing 802.11 standards. And, you know, everyone's always trying to cut the cable and be able to have wired-type performance over wireless networks. So maybe 2019 will be the year that we start to see more of that. I really don't know.

Dave Jones: But is it going to improve the latency for shows like this? It's probably still going to suck ass, right?

Chris Gammell: Well, we still have the speed of light going on, you know. We still have that problem.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: I mean, with your connection, it's just pretty close to the actual server.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it's all those pesky protocols that get in the way, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess so.

Dave Jones: Shuffling packets around, you know.

Jeff Kaiser: Do you remember satellite internet? That used to be a thing. And there were like, it was like seconds of delay to get packets up to geosynchronous orbit and back again. I mean, that's a lot of miles away. And light can only travel so fast. Electromagnetic radiation can only travel so fast.

Chris Gammell: There actually was a link in our show notes this week. I should be true to myself here. It's a friend I know who works there. But this new company called Hyper. And basically they're doing NATO satellites for like global coverage. And it's like high frequency band coverage for. So instead of like cellular communication, it's actually satellite communication for low power devices. So I was pretty interested in it. I'm not exactly sure how it works yet.

Dave Jones: So they're going to put thousands and thousands of little cubes up there, aren't they?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and I think that's the same thing that. I think SpaceX was talking about that too. It was basically just increasing coverage. Oh, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: So that's actually another Seattle. SpaceX has an office in Redmond, which is in the Seattle area. That's the office that's building the satellite internet network. And I think that that's scheduled to launch in 2019. So that's exciting.

Chris Gammell: I don't quite get how that works. Because doesn't that have the same problem that you're talking about? I mean, I know it's going to be like lower Earth orbit and stuff like that. But it's just a longer.

Dave Jones: Well, when you're in lower Earth orbit, they're not geosynchronous orbit. So it's not directly above you. You have to like catch a flying satellite over. Whereas if you're geosynchronous orbit where you've got the fixed thing, it's got to be way, it's much, much further out.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's got to be a long way out. That's why it takes that long.

Jeff Kaiser: A quick Google tells me that geosynchronous orbit is about 26,000 miles up, whereas low Earth orbit is just a couple hundred miles. So it's a huge difference. Big difference. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But yeah, and both have their pros and cons. You know, the geosynchronous, yes, it's got continuous coverage always because it's just sitting on the one spot right above your head. But it's so far away that the latency is just insane.

Jeff Kaiser: That's right. So I think that's why the fleets of – you need a fleet of satellites because a single satellite would only remain in your field of view in the sky for a very short amount of time. Yeah. Like minutes. Yeah, exactly. So you need a lot of them to have continuous coverage. And you'd have to know where they are though, right?

Chris Gammell: Or would they just be beaming down?

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: No, you would need to know where they are. And then you've got to have the handover protocols and stuff like that. Right. So there's all sorts of overhead and delays involved with that.

Chris Gammell: So now it's like the cell phone network is like going around you instead of you going through the cell phone network kind of thing?

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's interesting. That's right. And I think that's the problem that SpaceX – and I think Google had a project to do this as well. But the SpaceX project I think is based here in Seattle. And I mean that's – so that's something that in 2019 could be pretty significant. If you can get high speed – and I actually don't know what kind of bandwidth they're targeting. But if you can get internet of any capability that's reasonably fast anywhere in the world, that's pretty significant.

Chris Gammell: I mean then you start to get to do like the Star Trek communicator type stuff, you know?

Jeff Kaiser: That's right.

Dave Jones: But the other thing is that who's going to buy it, right? It's all great to have this. Yes, every person on the planet can have access to it. But probably 80% of the world's population can't afford to buy it.

Chris Gammell: Right, especially the people in the most remote areas.

Dave Jones: So it's – yeah, it's one of those things. So yeah. So Dave's going to buy it for everyone. That's what he's saying. Unless you want to give it to the world for free, then yeah. I mean ultimately someone's going to buy it.

Jeff Kaiser: I guess governments could – you say China pays for this. There's probably a good portion of China that does not have great high speed internet. I suspect that's changing very fast.

Dave Jones: Do they want them to have high speed internet?

Chris Gammell: Well, they also could control the media and control the pathway as well. So that's beneficial.

Jeff Kaiser: I think that is – and I think I've read an article to that extent a couple years ago that I think that is one of the challenges of these internet satellite clusters is that if you go over a country that has specific regulations about what kind of content their citizens can access, like how do you even deal with that? Because a satellite can see users in multiple countries at one time, right? It's a couple hundred miles up. And I think that is one of the challenges. You know, you fly over North Korea and if you want to serve North Korea, you may need to have a different set of filters. So it's like you need to know where the user is located to and then apply some kind of fence to their location. And I seem to remember reading a story – it might have been about the Google Project Loon or whatever a couple years ago that was sort of along those lines. But I think that is going to be a challenge for the SpaceX network and any satellite internet network.

Chris Gammell: Well, that could be a nice change, though. I mean, remote access is pretty cool. Mm-hmm. Okay. So Jeff says 2019, ubiquitous internet for all. Dave's going to flip the bill. That's great. We're making good progress here, guys. You're welcome, humanity.

Dave Jones: By the way, the band we're talking about there, the 60 gig band is the V-band for those. It's the IEEE V-band, which is from 40 to 75 gig for those.

Jeff Kaiser: V for very high frequency. Very fast, yeah. We already have very high frequency. Right. Very, very high frequency.

Chris Gammell: Voluminous data amounts.

Jeff Kaiser: Capital V.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right. Yeah. So I was looking at the Gartner hype cycle for 2018 because we... What's that? The hype cycle, it's that thing where they show where different technologies are.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes, that curve that has the little lump on it. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Here, I'll share it with you guys. There's a bunch of crap on here.

Dave Jones: Is that the one that includes the Valley of Death?

Chris Gammell: Yes, the trough of disillusionment, I believe. Yes, the trough of disillusionment. The peak of inflated expectations, the slope of enlightenment. Oh, yes.

Dave Jones: Augmented reality. Augmented reality is currently in the trough of disillusionment. As of August 2018, augmented reality is there. It's the only one in the trough of disillusionment.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, so I see SmartDust over there. SmartDust, I think, has been in that location on the graph for 20 years. It has, definitely. I think.

Dave Jones: What, recap SmartDust for me?

Jeff Kaiser: I think it's extremely low-power embedded systems that you can sort of just distribute. You know, like you think of your little spy network where you just blow particles into somewhere and you've got a bunch of autonomous sensors that are collecting data. I remember there was a bunch of work at Berkeley, I think, back in around 2000. And harvesting energy, I'm sure. Well, yeah, I mean, how else are they going to get? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they need to get energy somehow.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: I'm excited. Quantum computing? I'm still excited about the...

Dave Jones: 4D printing. Jesus, 3D printing hasn't even hit the bloody mainstream public yet. What is 4D printing? 4D printing. 4D printing.

Chris Gammell: It's the one where it prints and then you like stick it in water and it like unfolds and it makes a different shape. Oh.

Jeff Kaiser: I thought it was like 3D printing, but you have to wait a long time. I mean, that's all 3D printing is like that. That's already 3D printing.

Dave Jones: What the hell is neuromorphic hardware?

Chris Gammell: That would be like hardware that changes itself, I believe.

Speaker ?: Hmm.

Dave Jones: All right. Human augmentation. Yeah. You know, a friend of mine's got a RFID thing in his hand. It's gross. Yeah. You know? Yeah, body modders are weird folks.

Chris Gammell: I mean, everybody's free to do what they want with their body, but I just, I can't look at it because my stomach gets queasy. So that's my only thing.

Dave Jones: Right. He actually makes the news here a lot because he's actually, he embedded the, like we've got a local, you know, card for traveling on the trains and buses and stuff, right? The Opal card. He actually took the RFID chip out of that and embedded it in his skin. And so he goes and scans his arm over the thing and he's actually not been arrested by the police over it, but he's been questioned, like he's been fined for not carrying his card with him. And he goes, but I do. It's in my, it's embedded in my hand. And, you know, so it's made the six o'clock news and, you know.

Chris Gammell: Gross.

Dave Jones: All that sort of stuff. So, yeah, there's a lot of things to overcome there. Um, controversial AI platform. This is great. We can, we can make a whole nother show out of this. Controversial AI platform.

Chris Gammell: If you don't remember, I mean, I know I completely gapped on having a guest on the show early on. But we've definitely talked about this before. There's a lot of crap on here.

Dave Jones: Self-healing system technology. This is, oh, this is the way, this is a wank fest.

Chris Gammell: This is like basically a bunch of Gartner people charged about 500 bucks an hour to go read research papers. Yeah. You know, for things that could be implemented someday.

Dave Jones: 2,000 an hour. Oh, come on. Yeah, that's true. Volumetric displays. What are volumetric displays?

Chris Gammell: I assume that's like holographic style things.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, right. Yes.

Dave Jones: Right. Yep. Deep neural network ASICs. Smart robots. What the hell's a smart robot?

Jeff Kaiser: Hmm. It's a robot that goes to college. Like a Roomba, but smarter.

Chris Gammell: You know, so how about this? I had a Roomba and a 3D printer and a dishwasher going in my house the other day. And I did think for a second, I was like, feels kind of like the future guys, you know? Yeah. Robot vacuum, robot replicator. I don't have a replicator, but you know, like, it's, you know, George Jetson. Here I come. Very Jetsons, you think.

Dave Jones: Meet George Jetson. What's a smart workspace?

Chris Gammell: I think that would be like, do you remember, I guess there was a talk at HDDG about this, but who's the guy that does, Brett Victor. He does, he has a presentation about like contextual troubleshooting. It was actually a really cool idea. So John Barry, who is one of the particle folks, he did a talk about this and he was trying to make, and I'll try and link that in. There was, it was like a presentation about what if you actually made a smart workspace? And the idea would be like, imagine holding like a screen. So say you basically, you know, we're sitting around troubleshooting. So Jeff's troubleshooting a high speed interface, right? And basically you hold a screen over it and that basically picks up all of the information about it. And you have like contextual information around like, oh, well the devices, you know, the IR signature is this.

Dave Jones: So it's an augmented reality almost. It's got to include augmented reality. But also like it has RFID. So you mix augmented reality with minority report. Yeah, I think that's probably the easy.

Chris Gammell: Minority report is probably the, you know, the porn version of that, right?

Dave Jones: Right. With, you've got the gloves with the projectors on them and you just, yeah, in your fingertips and you can project overlay on the board you're working on.

Chris Gammell: Yes, exactly right. Right. So you see, so imagine like, imagine like having an overlay for a PCB where you basically have the spice simulation and you can see all of the voltages as it's actually operating. That kind of idea. Like it is a very cool idea. It's, it's probably overkill for what we need it for, but you know.

Dave Jones: And it's never going to happen in a general purpose setting. It has to be so specifically engineered that it's almost pointless for anyone else to use for anything else.

Chris Gammell: It would be really good at raising money, you know, if you were trying to raise money for a startup.

Dave Jones: Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. Especially if you can include some crypto in it or something and then it's. Blockchain.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Blockchain. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Blockchain. Sorry. A little lost for that one. Biochips. Like they just like put in these generic wank terms. Like biochips is currently on the peak of inflated expectations.

Chris Gammell: Where it needs to be if you're going to have wank terms.

Dave Jones: And what's a digital twin? Is it like.

Chris Gammell: I think that's basically like you have.

Dave Jones: We're in the technology sector. What's a digital twin?

Chris Gammell: I'm sure we could Google it, but my guess is you would have a online persona that matches your, your in-person persona, right? So you could transact in multiple worlds.

Dave Jones: Does it include a social credit score as well? Maybe.

Jeff Kaiser: I noticed that graphene is conspicuously missing, although carbon nanotube is on here.

Dave Jones: Oh, graphene was the.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Carbon nanotubes are there. So maybe, you know, you could lump them under the same banner almost, you know? Yep. Yep. Oh, poor Internet of Things platformers headed. Well, is it? Oh, is it? Is that its new wank term now? Is it not just Internet of Things? It's Internet of Things platform.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it can't stand that zone. It has to have a platform, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right. Virtual assistants. Give me a break. That died with Microsoft Bob. With Microsoft paperclip. That annoying paperclip. Silicon anode batteries. Oh, there's blockchain. There's blockchain. No, blockchain's on the way down. Yeah. Yeah, it's fallen fast, but it'll pick up because it is the future.

Jeff Kaiser: I always get a kick out of seeing what technology CES seems to be centered around. Like, every year, CES usually has sort of a thing. Like, three years ago, I think it was drones. Drones. Right. Drones. Every booth was a drone company. Right. And I think, no, two years ago, it was like healthcare, like baby monitors and stuff like that. Yeah. I think maybe four years ago, it might have been connected home. Yeah. Like IoT. I think that IoT was probably about four years ago. So, it'll be interesting to see what this year's theme is because it's not necessarily that that's going to be the next big thing, but that's what the industry thinks the next big thing is going to be. Yeah, that's it. Are you going to see, Jeff? That by itself is interesting.

Dave Jones: That's where all the dumb investment money's going, right?

Jeff Kaiser: I will be.

Dave Jones: Or the hopeful, sorry, the hopeful investment money.

Jeff Kaiser: I will be at CES this year. At least, if all goes according to plan, hopefully I will be able to make it there this year. I missed it last year, but it is a pretty fascinating conference.

Chris Gammell: I was there last year. It was something. Definitely got...

Dave Jones: And there we have Connected Home.

Chris Gammell: Where we're at, man. Falling with a bullet. Yeah. It's there. I mean, I think we're there for a lot of stuff. It's just, you know.

Jeff Kaiser: It's so incredibly fragmented. Yeah, it's still as pointless as it ever was. Connected. Well, so I think Connected Home is a great concept. I think there's a lot of good stuff that's coming out of it, but there's still so much fragmentation. Like, which smart outlet you buy determines which app you need to use to control it.

Dave Jones: Oh, I've done this as well. I bought into the Vera Home Automation System, right? Not for my home, but for another place. And all it is is a motion sensor and a temperature sensor and a humidity sensor. That's right, folks.

Chris Gammell: One of you lucky listeners, Dave, has snuck into your home and he put the Vera Smart Hub in there and you are being listened to and watched right now by Dave Jones. Congratulations.

Dave Jones: That's it. And it was one of the leading ones, yet it's its own ecosystem. Like, you can't, you know, yeah, like lots of different manufacturers support the Vera standard. So you can buy all these sensors, but, and the system, like you can get in it through the web, but I can't even log the temperature. Like, and you know, it's got all the, like, and I actually asked him, I went online and asked the Vera people like, you know, how can I like do something simple? Like I've got my temperature sensor. How can I, like you're one of the world's most advanced automated home systems. And so how do I get a graph of the temperature? And they go, oh, you've got to install this graphing package. So I installed that and that didn't work. And then it wouldn't automatically update. Then they had said, oh, you have to write these scripts to then interface with the, and I'm going, geez, I just want.

Chris Gammell: I think the interoperability is, you know, a simple log of temperature. I mean, honestly, that's on the software side too. And that's.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. But, but they're all different. Like I, I, I had to choose when I was looking at these systems, I had to choose which, which, you know, platform I'm going to invest in. Right. So to speak, you know, and then you're locked into that platform.

Jeff Kaiser: Definitely.

Dave Jones: Yep. So, and.

Jeff Kaiser: I think that, and that is absolutely.

Dave Jones: There was no clear winner.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I, I agree. It's still, I think that that is the thing that is limiting. I mean, that, and also the cost of every node. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a big one. Seems like it's limiting, you know, it still costs like.

Dave Jones: They weren't cheap. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: They weren't cheap. 30 bucks or whatever to get a smart outlet. And I think it's, you hit on one of them that is an annoyance of mine, which is that there isn't a great, like the kind of data analysis tools that are available very wildly by manufacturer. And I'd say they're all pretty terrible. Like there's not really one that's great. I've, I've, I've been meaning to go and try to find, you know, the open source project that does it right and try to figure out how to integrate that with the sensors that I've got. But I think that that's, you know, you need a manufacturer that sort of is willing to invest in a standard and realizes that if they put everything out there, sort of the, what's the expression? Like the, the, like, um, what it'll, it'll elevate everyone if they can just make a common standard. Rising tide lifts all boats. Is that what you mean? That's exactly it. Yeah. The rising tide lifts all boats.

Dave Jones: Then it comes back to the XKCD thing again. Oh, the number of standards. It's going to get another standard to rule them all. Yeah. I have no thoughts about mixed, mixed, mixed reality. What is mixed reality? It's, um, this is the second last one on the list. Mixed reality. Come on, Jeff, you work at a virtual reality augmented, well, previously augmented reality company.

Jeff Kaiser: I'm afraid you got me there. I don't, I don't know that one.

Chris Gammell: It's when you, when you have augmented virtual and just reality reality. Mixed reality.

Jeff Kaiser: They've got to, surely they've got to, I want the full report of this Gartner thing where they actually explain what each one of them is. You really don't when you see the price tag, Dave.

Chris Gammell: You really don't. Yeah. Maybe ask your viewers, you know, maybe one of them has one. They can slip it to you. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, Wikipedia says that mixed reality, sometimes referred to as hybrid reality, is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects coexist and interact in real time.

Dave Jones: Oh, sorry. I'm just, I was too busy wanking there. Give me a break.

Chris Gammell: I don't know how that's different than like augmented reality though.

Dave Jones: Speaking of which, was it, did Jerry's technical illusions thing, did that fold in 2018 or was it 2017?

Chris Gammell: I think 2017.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Well, anyway, I don't think we've had you on since, Jeff. Have you got any commentary on that? What happened to augmented reality? Jerry's thing? And she's working on a new one. I don't know anything about it. I don't know if you do.

Jeff Kaiser: I don't either. No, I don't. Right. I don't.

Dave Jones: So do you have any thoughts on the augmented reality versus virtual reality thing? But I guess you can't comment.

Chris Gammell: Touching a little too close to work there, Dave. Come on, man.

Dave Jones: It's. Possibly.

Jeff Kaiser: I don't have sage wisdom. I'm not like a fountain of VR. An oracle. An oracle. Yeah. An oracle of VR wisdom. I honestly don't know. I think both are interesting and very different. I think it still feels like we're at the early stages. Augmented reality. I mean, HoloLens is out there. And I think there's some other AR platforms that have been out. Yeah. It still feels like. Magic Leap came out finally. That's right.

Dave Jones: Virtual reality is not on this list. Augmented reality is there. Virtual reality is not there.

Chris Gammell: Virtual reality was on the 2017 list in the.

Dave Jones: So is that merged into mixed reality?

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. Oh, perhaps. The 2017 chart had virtual reality on the slope of enlightenment. So I believe virtual reality is now the plateau of productivity.

Dave Jones: There's nothing on the slope of enlightenment now.

Chris Gammell: Bad year. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And there's nothing on the plateau of productivity. So the whole industry is just ground to a hole. That was 2018.

Chris Gammell: I think past this thing, Dave. It's just ground. Nothing's productive. I think past this thing, there's actually people actually making money with the company. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, they're way off the chart.

Jeff Kaiser: I kind of wish that each one of these little things was clickable. You know what I mean?

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know. That'd be.

Jeff Kaiser: You probably have to pay for that version. The clickable.

Dave Jones: I'm sure you have to pay.

Jeff Kaiser: Maybe you can just put a little, you can choose to invest. Like, there's a little text box near each one. You can put a number in. You get to invest, you know, accordingly.

Chris Gammell: Well, outside of this chart, Jeff, I mean, you had given, actually, I just got this book back. I had lent it to someone, but you had told me, told us two years ago about that Inside the Idea Factory book. Do you have any other books that you recommend, since that one was a pretty big winner for me?

Jeff Kaiser: I, since reading that book, I did read The HP Way. I read Bill and Dave, which are the two books about HP. And I also read, there's a book that I think is long out of print, but it's the history of Tektronix. It's sort of like an autobiography of Tektronix. I thought that book was interesting. It's long. It has a lot of pictures, though, and it shows early factory lines. And, you know, they built CRTs in-house. And I think, kind of back to vertical manufacturing, Tektronix was really, I mean, man, they had the whole stack. And I think you can really see it in every piece of Tektronix equipment from that era. You can sort of see all the layers, you know, everything from like back when they had those ceramic terminal strips that they did with this. They give you the silver solder that they included in the box or in the instrument. I think that the Tektronix book is, I think, an interesting read, particularly it touches a bit into the more technical details. I think one of the things that is often a disappointment for me when I read these kind of books is that the corporate histories, like they don't really go into a lot of detail about the engineering and the kind of personal stories. Because if you think about it, you know, there's engineers that kind of created all this stuff. And if you think about, you know, in your day-to-day life and the kind of challenges you solve, you know, these guys were doing similar things back in the 50s, 60s, 70s. I don't, there isn't really a lot of that kind of history that's recorded. And when you think about it, you know, some of the instruments that were produced by both HP and Tektronix in yesteryear, you know, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, a lot of those are amazing, amazing pieces of engineering. And it's not like they don't still make that kind of stuff today. But I think that it may be a little more accessible. You know, test equipment was simpler back then. And when I open up a Tektronix oscilloscope from the 60s or 70s, you almost can kind of feel, for a moment, you can appreciate what the engineers that were designing that equipment and not just the engineers, but the assembly technicians and the people that were doing manufacturing and all of the parts of the process. That's a thing that's not, at least to my eye, is not really captured in these corporate histories. I think the Tektronix book touches on that a bit. The HP way, and Bill and Dave, I was disappointed because I think the Idea Factory actually did a pretty good job of sort of making you aware of the specific technological advances and the engineering triumphs that occurred during the span of Bell Labs. And it sort of really gives you a sense of the kinds of engineering challenges that were overcome to make the first transistor and to build vacuum tubes that used, what's it called, electron optics and things like that. And it actually was pretty, it went pretty deep technically. The other books that I've got, you have to sort of fill in the blanks on your own. You sort of have to know, like, Tektronix, you know, if you talk about oscilloscopes, there's some scopes that everybody knows the numbers of that are sort of the iconic Tektronix scopes. And there's a history there. Like, the evolution of oscilloscopes at Tektronix is kind of a fascinating story. I don't know if anyone's ever done a really good job of telling that story. But, you know, I think those for me, and I'll be honest, I didn't read those books this year. I think last year, I read the Tektronix book, and maybe a little bit before that on the HP.

Chris Gammell: Completely validated. I'm sorry, Jeff. You'll have to answer a new one.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, sorry, guys. So it's only books that I've read this year. Hmm. We're getting very, very specific. Yeah. Maybe my takeaway is don't read a book. Buy a Tektronix 465 and take it apart. And that's kind of an interesting story just right there. Like, they made their own CRTs. Like, come on. That's incredible.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that is crazy. It's incredible.

Dave Jones: I've got a Tektronix 475 open on my bench here right now.

Chris Gammell: Nice.

Dave Jones: Cool. It's beautiful. You can just look at the craftsmanship in it. Like, just, you know, the assembly way everything's assembled and constructed. Yeah. As you said, you can almost visualize the people, you know, actually making these things.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's like, like, it's too sterile these days. Like, yeah, there's this huge integrated, you know, PCB assembled by machines. It's like, you know, hasn't got the same earthly feel to it.

Jeff Kaiser: Or the smell of old burning dust. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I had a book. I, uh, this is the last thing I'll mention before I wrap up at least. The, uh, I had a book that I mentioned, meant to mention a while ago on here. It's called, uh, Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks. Everything you know about cooling electronics is wrong.

Jeff Kaiser: I've got that one. You're the one who told me. You didn't tell me about that one. I think Colin. Oh, I'm not sure.

Chris Gammell: I think Colin O'Flynn told me about that one. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, that's a fun.

Jeff Kaiser: There's actually a sequel. There's a sequel to that one, too. I can't remember the title. But there's two books in that series. Was it More Hot Air? It might be like, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I have to get it. Sounds good. It's a really interesting writing style. Maybe it was you, Jeff, who told me about it. It was either you or Colin. And, um, I like it, though. It's like this, like, very storytelling kind of method. I like it. Yep.

Jeff Kaiser: Yep. Yep. And it's a pretty boring topic, too. You know? Uh, one thing that I did recently. Um, so, MIT, uh, was one of the pioneers of radar. So, in World War II, there was a laboratory at MIT called the MIT Rad Lab. And they worked. So, the Magnetron, of course, came from the United Kingdom. Uh, I don't know the history of the Magnetron. But it came from the UK. It was brought over to the US. But MIT did a lot of the pioneering work on building radar, which is sort of one of the reasons why the Allies won World War II was the, the availability of radar. Well, so, after the war, uh, you had this lab that was at MIT with a lot of brilliant scientists. You know, all the ones that were not at the Manhattan Project, right? They were, they were building radar. And they stayed on for some additional time. I think it might have been, like, 1948 by the time this was completed. But they wrote, uh, books. And those books are, of course, long out of print. But I think there's 28 volumes. Whoa. And they cover sort of every topic that you could imagine that you'd need to know to build radar. So, everything from how to build cathode ray tubes to vacuum tube amplifiers to, uh, microwave, uh, transmitters and detectors. And, of course, all of this is 1940s technology. Uh, and I recently bought, uh, the entire set. Uh, I found somebody that was selling these books. And I was like, oh, this looks kind of cool. Uh, and it's, those are the kind of books that are fun to have the physical book because you can leaf through them. And, of course, you know, they're from the 40s. And they've got, you know, beautiful, uh, uh, quality printing and the covers and everything. But the neat thing is that they are all available as PDFs. So, you don't have to buy the books. And I can send you a link to them. Um, but the books are on all sorts of topics. And some of them are super interesting. Like, there's a book about how to make analog or, sorry, not analog, but mechanical computers. So, how to build computers out of linkages and, you know, presumably for making bomb sites and things like that that you'd need to, to make in conjunction with radar systems. Uh, and the illustrations are beautiful because they're all hand illustrated, of course. Um, and so they're, they're kind of a fun read. And so I've been sort of leafing through these. And I think there's probably some good project ideas that are lurking in these books. Uh, and there's a lot of material, like 28 volumes times however many pages. It's just, it's a lot. So, so that's probably on my reading list for 2019. Is to read, uh, well, all 28 volumes, I don't know, but to read a couple volumes of, uh, the MIT Rad Lab series. Nice.

Dave Jones: Sweet.

Chris Gammell: All right, guys. Well, it's been another good Kaiser Miss. Merry Kaiser Miss. Uh, yes, sir.

Jeff Kaiser: Yes, sir.

Dave Jones: Thank you very much for joining us, Jeff. Yet again.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, thanks for, for, uh, having me back for the, uh, what number is it?

Chris Gammell: The, this is the fifth.

Jeff Kaiser: Fifth time. Yeah, fifth Kaiser Miss. Lucky number five. Well, yeah, happy holidays.

Chris Gammell: We'll talk to you soon, Jeff.

Jeff Kaiser: All right, thanks for having me on the show. Catch you next time. Okay, bye-bye.

Jeff Kaiser: Bye-bye.

Speaker ?: Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.