#470 – Just Add Salt

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released December 8th, 2019. Episode 470. Just Add Salt.

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

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

Dave Jones: What's up, nerd?

Chris Gammell: Not much, nerd. How are you doing?

Dave Jones: All right. Busy, busy. It's coming towards Christmas. I hate how everything sort of just starts to...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it just piles in. And then you always go on holiday, too. So you're ready to bounce out of town.

Dave Jones: Well, I'm in holiday in January. Yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: I just mean it goes on holiday, the actual Christmas holiday, and then you bounce out of town. So you've got a solid couple of weeks there where it's like you've got to get everything done beforehand.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. And I thought about like doing a couple of other, like arranging a couple of other site tour videos, but I went, oh, it's bloody, you know, what is it? Oh, the 6th of December now.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So it's like, yeah, no, by the time I organize those, people are like companies are shutting down and people are going on holidays.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Bugger it.

Chris Gammell: Well.

Dave Jones: It's a wonder how the world still functions, you know?

Chris Gammell: Well, some of us do a little, you know, but the U.S. doesn't really take many holidays.

Dave Jones: Right, okay.

Chris Gammell: But, yeah, I mean, it's tough, right? I mean, with vacations and things like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, here, like companies start shutting down like the mid-December, you know, like sort of towards Christmas. Oh, yeah. You know, people start taking holidays and stuff. So if you do want to, you know, like go to a company and like interview people and stuff like that, it's, you know, it's highly likely that they're on holidays. Yeah. And then there's a lot of companies that don't come back until like mid-January, something like that. So it's like some companies it's almost a month really that they're effectively winding down. Might have a skeleton crew, but yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm, yeah, I wonder about that too because last year, so last year, you know, was my first holiday of my consulting life and my January completely, everything dried up. I don't know if I talked about it on the show, but I just had, I had nothing to do. I mean, like I was like, I was really freaking out and I'm sure some of it was tied to like, well, you know, like I had like one project ending and then it was like everyone was on vacation or holiday and they're, you know, like you can't get stuff started at that point. And so this year I have a plan, which means it's almost guaranteed I will be busier than hell. But, you know, like actually like a product that I'll work on for myself.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. So it's your own products. So you're not reliant on client products.

Chris Gammell: You're not even, yeah. I mean, just from psychologically, you know, I'm just, you know, like I don't want to be like sitting there twiddling my thumbs being like, what do I do? What do I do?

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And I was just to have something to do. It's like, you know, psychologically pretty important for me to be like, oh, no, no, no, this is the project time that I'm working on it.

Dave Jones: So you do realize that you don't have to work on projects. You don't have to do electronics. Yeah. There's more to life than that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But I mean, when my income is dependent upon it, you know, I just get nervous, Dave. You know, I'm just kind of a worrier. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But income's not coming from your own product that you're working on. That's true. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I guess I could go home and relax and whatever, but I don't know. Yeah. You never know what happens.

Dave Jones: Well, true. The interesting thing about your own products is that, yeah, like, you know, you don't earn any income until that product's finished and shipping.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like, and even, you know, so you're like can sink like a year's worth of, you know, labor into something like, you know, into a decent project and nothing to show for it.

Chris Gammell: I would normally agree with you, but the thing that I'm planning on working on is going to be a, not necessarily like a product product, but it's like a reference design that I'm going to be working on. And then I can use that as marketing and, you know, maybe make some. Right.

Dave Jones: So guaranteed zero income.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, pretty much. But no, but I mean, reusable. So like, that's kind of the weird thing too. Like if I have a client that's like, hey, can you make this thing for me? It's like, yeah, sure. Of course. And I design the whole thing for them and whatever. And, and I, I can't reuse that work again, pretty much. You know, I can't, at least not in practice. And, and so if I have reference design though, that not only helps bring people to me, but then also I can use that as the basis for future, you know, products and stuff like that. So. Sure. I'm just, I'm just talking around and I, you're totally right. I'm not going to make any money from this. I'm just trying to just justify it to my own brain here, Dave.

Dave Jones: That's fine. Whatever gets you through the night.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. What would I do if I wasn't working electronics?

Dave Jones: Do you have any other hobbies? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I was thinking about that lately. I have not been playing the piano. I play the piano, but I haven't done it in a couple months now. It's yeah. So do you have other hobbies?

Dave Jones: Of course I do.

Chris Gammell: What are you, what are you, what are you going?

Dave Jones: I can go Kenyoning. Yeah. No. When's the last time you did that? I can go outdoors. Oh, March, I think.

Chris Gammell: So you basically have a little hobby like I have a hobby in that way.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, mine is a, well, that one there is a seasonal hobby.

Chris Gammell: Oh, true. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, and, and it's got, you know, I've got a family as well, you know, you go out with the family and play, you know, with the kids.

Chris Gammell: Not throwing shade. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. In fact, that takes up most of my time, you know. Totally. Most of my spare time is, yeah. Yeah. It's so much so that, you know, I'm trying to organize it. I want to organize a Kenyoning trip at the moment because it's, it's just turned summer, of course, here, winter over there for you weirdos.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: And because it's a summer sport. So I thought, oh yeah, I'm going to organize a Kenyoning trip with some friends. And it's like, well, I'm thinking about, well, when the hell can I do it? You know, like every Saturday is like, is like booked up, you know, you've got kids sports and you've got other family, you know, family commitments and stuff. It's like, well, I'll do a night Kenyoning trip.

Speaker ?: That'll be, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. I'll just, I'll just go at night. You know. Yeah. Yep. That's great. I guess that's the only time we can, you know, that everyone's sort of available, you know, everyone's finished work and nobody has any commitments on the, you know, they've all got commitments on the weekend and stuff like that. So yeah. Heck. Let's do a night trip, I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I feel the pull of it. I mean, obviously I'm not in the same scenario of you, but I, I see my friends also, you know, they've got kids and oh yeah, they're probably projects fall off. You know, the other projects fall off. It's just work and then family. It's, and which is great. I mean, the family part's great, but yeah, it's interesting. Like being like having a list of, of all these things I want to design. It's like, yeah, better, better hurry up there, Chris. I, uh, I do have a new project that I am going to be working on. Uh, uh, well, I, uh, I don't know if you saw my tweet, but I, I, I ended up, I bought the boat anchor Dave, I mentioned that two weeks ago and I, I didn't see that you actually

Dave Jones: I pulled the trigger. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Chris Gammell: So I got a HP 8753 a 8753, sorry, 8753 D. Uh, it was built before it was in high school. Um, I still paid thousands of dollars for it.

Dave Jones: Where's the photo? Where's the photo or a pic or it didn't happen?

Chris Gammell: Oh, it's on, it's on Twitter. Um, I will definitely share it in the show notes as well.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's got a stupid Instagram link or something. Has it, it's probably why it didn't automatically show up.

Chris Gammell: No, no, I don't do Instagram anymore. Um, okay.

Dave Jones: No, I didn't see a photo of a vintage scope pop up from you.

Chris Gammell: A VNA, not a scope, but.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, yeah, sorry.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but, uh, but yeah. Uh, and then what I've quickly learned is that, uh, I need to buy a bunch of other stuff too, of course, you know, got to buy a cow kit and got to buy converters and cables and of, you know, this is not a cheap hobby. So.

Dave Jones: You're really into this Irish stuff, aren't you?

Chris Gammell: Well, it's, you know, like, so I gave a talk about it again and I think I mentioned it last week too, but it's like the, having the piece of test equipment really, really opens. Whereas it was all theoretical and like hard to grasp, like having hands on with the test equipment and like seeing what happens as you change things and, you know, modify things. Something about that. I don't, I don't know. It just really changes your perspective on things. Um, when I realized it's like a really expensive, this is a really expensive piece of gear versus, you know, but you don't have to get the most expensive gear. Um, I just got it more expensive because of the, the frequency range I wanted to play in. And, uh, but just being able to like understand it because of that, you know, I've talked about the, the, um, SDRs in the past and how like seeing, seeing the, the spectrum come in and, you know, seeing waterfall plots and things like that. It's just in terms of like intuitive grasp of like how, and like mental models that you build, it's, there are, I can't believe how much that matters. And I wish, I wish it would have been part of my education sooner.

Dave Jones: Yeah, definitely. You're going to have to, uh, swap out that, uh, three and a half inch floppy for a, uh,

Chris Gammell: one of those new USB. No way, man. I'm going to, I'm going to have a, uh, cause it's vintage, you know, like some floppy drives.

Dave Jones: So you're actually going to get a USB three and a half inch drive for your computer and then just get some old disks and copy over the, um, the bitmap file. Cause none of this, uh, PNG rubbish didn't exist.

Chris Gammell: I'll be, I'll be like, uh, like in hackers when they're like, you know, passing disks back and forth between them. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. They're doing the, uh, hacking battle and all they had was the tools that fits on one floppy. That's right. That's right.

Chris Gammell: They're like holding it up to the camera and stuff. Oh man. Yep. Classic, classic movie. Love it.

Dave Jones: Crash override.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: It's the character. Yeah. Anyway. Ah, I love it. Yeah. Angelina Jolie is a hacker. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, uh, yeah. So this thing comes in, I think next Monday and I'll get to start playing around with it.

Dave Jones: Oh, you haven't even got it yet. No. It's shipping. Oh, so the photos from the, um, eBay ad, is it?

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Right. Got it. Yeah. Did you buy it from a dealer?

Chris Gammell: Yes, I did. Yep.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: 90 day warranty and that whole thing.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's, yeah. I was a little nervous about it. I mean, even though I know that like, it's going to be fine, you know, like this is, I was thinking about it, like this is actually the first time I've bought serious test gear in like ever, maybe since my first Rygol scope, which you could say is like not, you know, that serious test gear.

Dave Jones: It's not, it's not high end. Yeah. Yeah. It's not in the thousand dollar category. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't think I've paid a thousand dollars for test gear. Now I, I have been very, very lucky. You know, I worked at Keith Lee. I got to like repair and take home stuff. And then we've been very lucky that people have donated stuff to us. Um, you obviously more than me, but I still, you know, I still get some stuff and it's, it's been very, very useful and nice. Um, but yeah, I've just never, I've never done an outlay like this. I mean, you've done this for years, I'm guessing, right? I mean, not recently, but.

Dave Jones: Not personally, like the, ah, I can't remember the last time I paid four digits for a bit of test gear. Um, so yeah, it's no, I'm almost in the same camp really.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? Okay. That's interesting.

Dave Jones: For work, obviously, you know. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so I think about like, like Shari are, you know, like he, he buys a lot of broken stuff and fixes it, but I think it's still in that category. I think it's just this like upper echelon.

Dave Jones: I think, I think some of the stuff he buys broken is thousands of dollars broken. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right. It's like, don't think he's getting these for, you know, I don't think he's getting a $50,000 bit of kit for a hundred bucks broken. Right. Right. Exactly. I, I, I search for these on eBay myself so I can do repair videos. I can tell you they're, they're thousands of dollars for a broken one.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So it's like, yeah. Um, so unless he's getting at some other, you know, auction, you know, some other auction place, um, which in the U S is possible, like, you know, there's tons of auction places in the U S and you can get really good gear. Um, in fact, if you were following along on the forum, you probably could have got a VNA for cheaper perhaps at an auction, you know, cause they're always closing down there, but it's, you know, harder and you've got to arrange the shipping and you've got to, it's not verified and it's yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think that that, that is, I've never done. And you know, so all of our listeners out there who are doing this, like, you know, bravo to you. I mean, like there are some people that are like working on things that they need high end gear. And I think that's the other thing too, is like for a long time, I didn't, I didn't really need the high, it's arguable. I don't need this now, but like the higher end gear, like, you know, it's just, it's good to wait until you actually need it. You know, I always talk about like, I'm glad that the first guitar I ever bought was a piece of crap because then when I got a better guitar, I really appreciated it. I never, I never went to like the super high end guitar, but I sure as hell did not need it. Um, but some people start with like, you know, a $5,000 less Paul and it's like, and then they frustrated when it sounds bad. And the reason it sounds bad is because you're bad. Yeah. Everybody starts bad, you know, and, and, um, and it's better to start with the piece of crap, I think.

Dave Jones: Yep. Totally agree. That's why I've always done my like review video. Often my, my review videos are based or shootouts are based on a price point. You know, it's like, here's the best multimeter for 50 bucks or a hundred bucks. Here's the set of how to set up a lab for, you know, 300 bucks. It's, you know, because it's like, there's no need to spend, you know, oodles of money.

Chris Gammell: Right. For stuff like that. Well, and it all adds up to like, like thinking about like, so like the cow kit that I'm getting for this is like a used cow kit and it's still a few hundred bucks.

Chris Gammell: Yankee bucks. Yeah. $400 or so. And that's, that's used.

Dave Jones: I've seen them.

Chris Gammell: I've seen, I saw one on eBay that was like a cow, like a really high end calibrated one is $1,800. And it's like, holy crap. Yeah. You know, like that's, and I was thinking about, that's why they always come in wooden boxes. Yeah. Of course. If they just showed up in a baggie, you know, they showed up in like a baggie. Yeah.

Speaker ?: That's it.

Dave Jones: No, it doesn't instill confidence. No. No.

Chris Gammell: It's just, you need value. You need some kind of like indicator of value and it's no, it's a nice, nicely polished wooden box with nice foam cutouts inside and open it up.

Dave Jones: I was just looking like a couple of weeks back at standard capacitors. Cause I've got one here and I was just looking for how much they go for on eBay now. It's like one, one standard capacitor. That's literally 70 or no, 60 years old. Right. 60 year old capacitor. They, they sell for like, you know, 50, a hundred bucks a pop. And the, and the whole kit in the wooden box is thousands of dollars.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Dave Jones: You know, for, for, for these 60 year old capacitors, 50, 60 year old capacitors.

Chris Gammell: And that would be used on like a, like a LCR meter or something? Or what would you use that for?

Dave Jones: They're a standard, they're a transfer standard for LCR meter calibration. And yeah. Yeah. And, but they're 50 years old and they're still thousands of dollars. You know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's nuts. Anyway. Ah, test gear.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's a sickness. It is. You should join the test gear anonymous thread on the EV blog forum. It's like 500 pages long or something. And all they do is talk about their addiction to test gear.

Chris Gammell: Hello. My name is Chris and I have a problem.

Dave Jones: And I have a new VNA. It's a problem. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's good. There's actually, um, someone had turned me on to a mailing list, uh, for HP, just like old HP gear. And so you'll just get, um, so it's HP Agilent Keysight equipment at groups that I, I'll, I'll link that as well. But it's kind of cool. It's like, you see like a bunch of people that are trying to repair stuff and it's usually pretty, um, pretty out there, you know, it's out there in what way out there in that, like, it's like, Oh, well, Hey, you know, the capacitor 302 in my HP one, two, three, four

Dave Jones: is very specific.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, but like, you know, there's enough people that are just kind of lurking on there that are like, Oh, well I have an HP one, two, three, four. I can at least go measure it for you or, or something similar. And it's just very disparate. You know, it's not, it's not enough where it's like, Oh, this is just the 8753 owners or whatever, but this is just a lot of it's, yeah, it's, it's pretty intense. So, and it's, you know, a couple of emails a day. Interesting to see what comes through. Oh, so it's an email list. Yeah. It's an email list. Yeah. Do you, do you know, I remember you've talked about side at electronics.australia in the past, right. Or something like that.

Dave Jones: There's Psy Electronics Design and there's Oz Electronics. There are Usenet groups and they're not email lists. They're Usenet groups, which is different. Whereas Yahoo groups, I used to, I founded and ran the Oz Electronics Yahoo group. So that was, yeah, that was a thing, but it eventually died out when, you know, because Yahoo groups were huge at the time and I was on a canyon in Yahoo. Yeah, that makes sense. And you'd get data, you know, and it was a great way to operate. Because you would, you would read everyone's response to come in as an email and then you'd just simply reply to it. Right. And, you know, I was the number one poster on the Oz Canyon Forum, you know, 10,000 posts.

Chris Gammell: And I kind of like that idea, like, you know, in the age of Slack and Discord and all these goddamn chat clients that are out there, I just can't keep track of any of them. Right. I'm always watching my email, you know, and it's just like.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, thinking about this kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Sometimes there's garbage that comes through. You know, there's people that are flaming. Of course. All the usual internet-y type stuff. But at the same time, like, I'm not, I do not want to be on chat client. Like, you know, so we've thought about it. We've thought about, oh, should we have like an amp hour Slack or Discord or something like that? Or we did have a IRC at one point. Right. And it's just like, man, it's just can't keep, you can't keep track of it.

Dave Jones: Well, we would have to go over there and hang out on that. Yeah. And I have no other reason to be out over there and hang out. Right. Apart from that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And like IRC will be around past, you know, it's in the cockroaches and Twinkies category of, you know, the internet. It's going to be around forever. But like, I just can't, I can't do it. Like I'm either all in or I can't, I can't, I can't switch my attention like that.

Dave Jones: I am on a couple of forums, like as in the original BBS type forums, of course, my own EEV blog forum, of course, primarily. But, you know, I'm on a couple of others, which I, you know, a couple I visit, you know, daily or every couple of days or something like that. I sort of like have a tab open and I'm a, I'm, you know, people always complain that I'll leave my tabs open. It's because, you know, it just allows me to go there easily. Yeah. Yeah. You're browsing at that point. And then I search for new posts, you know, it only takes me, you know, a few seconds. I go to the tab, hit the search for new posts and it lists all the new posts since I last checked, you know, and then I just scroll through the headers and go, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Oh yeah. That one sounds interesting. I'll go check that out. Right. That thread out, you know. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's just not part of my, like even, so I, you know, I love discourse, which is how I run the Kikad forum and then the, my contextual electronics forum. And I have to turn on mailing list mode or else I won't, I won't learn about anything. You know, I just. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, of course.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, uh, yeah, yeah. I find like discord and other ones that they're just not the same, but these don't operate. They just don't give me the flexibility to operate in the same way. Asynchronous. You know, a good forum does, you know, so.

Chris Gammell: I agree. Yeah. I guess we're just old Dave. We're just old.

Dave Jones: I don't know. All the kids in there, TikTok. Efficiency. And yeah, I just watched a video the other day about how huge TikTok is. I had no idea.

Chris Gammell: I mean.

Dave Jones: Holy crap.

Chris Gammell: I still sometimes watch, uh, what was that six second video site that was, uh, it used to be Vine. Oh, God. Vine.

Speaker ?: Oh, God.

Chris Gammell: Vine.

Chris Gammell: Vine. And like, it's a huge waste of time, but like, you know, people are humans and, you know, so I hear you, you young folks, you know.

Dave Jones: They want to be entertained. Yeah, that's right.

Dave Jones: By mindless drivel, you know. By one another.

Chris Gammell: And that's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm not against it. I just, you know, I just can't operate like that, unfortunately. I feel.

Dave Jones: I've got a segue. Yeah, yeah. Good segue.

Chris Gammell: Go for it.

Dave Jones: As from, uh, yeah. What is it? Seven seconds, you know, 20 seconds.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, 20 seconds on TikTok, I think. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Drivel to, um, the most highly produced content I've ever seen behind Captain Disillusion. I mean, this is Captain Disillusion level content production. Oh, oh.

Chris Gammell: Um. Okay. Keep going. I know what you're talking about now. Okay. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Um, this is, um, uh, YouTube channel. I don't know how long he's been. I think it's been going for a year or something. But anyway, um, Teddy is the guy who runs it. I won't say his last name because I don't know if he's, um, fully out yet in terms of his, you know, his last name and stuff. Um, anyway, uh, Teddy, um, for the channel, um, Branch Education on YouTube. We'll link it in down below. And he just did a video on how do PCBs work.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: And it's like, holy shit. Yeah. He, he actually emailed me about this. I've been talking to him and I said, you know, holy shit, this is fantastic. It's the most highly produced content I've ever seen in my life. And it's, uh, basically I'll explain what it is. Um, it's a 10 minute video explaining how PCBs work. He uses a mobile phone, a smartphone as an example. And he literally like, he, he takes it apart. He photographs it, animates it. He even desolded each individual component and animated those. And he x-rayed the boards and it's just, just this marvelous.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: 3d animated info thing of how PCBs are put together and how the traces, you know, and he, like the animation is just brilliant. Just, just go and watch it.

Chris Gammell: It's really good. And like, and like book market to send other people when they're, when like you're, you're at the Christmas holidays and your grandparents are like, wait, what did you do again? Just send him that video.

Dave Jones: And just send, just send them that, that video and say, I work on stuff like this. Yeah. This is what I do. I do PCBs. Yeah. Cause it's engaging too.

Chris Gammell: And it's interesting.

Dave Jones: And it's engaging and it's so highly polished content. And I told him that, um, I said, look, I'd, I'd be stunned if that, if this was less than 50 hours work, um, to actually produce this one 10 minute video. And he went, um, yeah, you're not wrong. It was 130 hours.

Chris Gammell: Oh my God.

Dave Jones: Of work to produce the one video.

Chris Gammell: That's crazy.

Dave Jones: Like it's just not, sorry, 100, 115 hours, 115. He's, his average video takes about 90 hours work to actually produce. Ooh. This is like, it's just phenomenal. Yeah. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Just, does he have kids?

Dave Jones: No, I don't know. I don't know, but oh wow. You know.

Chris Gammell: That's crazy. Well done, Teddy. That's great.

Dave Jones: Anyway, go and subscribe to Branch Engineering. Yeah. It's, yeah. Fantastic. He's like, he's got like how cameras work and stuff like that. And I was mentioning this the other day, like, you know, the young, you know, the kiddies out there, right? Um, what are they watching? TikTok. Well, last night with Sagan, I was watching this video. How do PCBs work? Sagan loved it. Oh really? You know, it's really, yeah, it's really educational. He's got the knack, Dave.

Chris Gammell: He's got the knack.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I know. Science. Yep. Yep. Yep. The little, you know, doctor's office, the knee tab. Yeah. Yep. Yep. He's got the knack.

Chris Gammell: I'm sorry, Mrs. Dilbert.

Dave Jones: And yeah, it's brilliant. And, um, he's other ones, like he's getting more, more polished as, as he goes. Cause he's ones from like a year ago, aren't quite as polished, still absolutely brilliant. But yeah, this, this new one has just stepped it up a level. Wow. To go to the effort to de-solder every single component and then x-ray and three, and then photograph them properly. And then a 3d animate them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Is just, just insane. Yep. Wow. Whereas me, my slap together videos, you know, you have been traveling.

Chris Gammell: Uh, you, I know you traveled previously, but you went to the, um, that airplane, uh, simulator. That thing was awesome.

Dave Jones: I, I, I jumped in my car and drove for 45 minutes. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I thought it was out of town. Okay.

Dave Jones: So it was just, it was just, no, no, no, no, no. It's on the other side of Sydney. And if you, you know, you've, you've, you've kind of driven from one side of Sydney to the other and it's not pleasant. Um, yeah. And it's not great getting from one side to the other. Yeah. It's big city stuff. Anyway, no, no. Chicago too. It's here in Sydney. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Okay. LA, you know, places like that. Yeah. Right. Right. It's sprawling.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, and if you go doing P and if you go during a peak hour, you are screwed.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yes. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's what, you know, I'm sure that some of our listeners right now are in their car honking their horns at, uh, at the traffic. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, no, that's great though. Like that. I mean, like there's the amount of connections that they're dealing with. I didn't, so I was skipping through a little bit of this simulator video and I do recommend there's a couple of videos too. So there's one EV discover video and then two simulator videos on the main channel.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One, one's just talking about the hardware, the IO hardware solution that he developed to interface with these, with the real 747R cockpit, all the controls and actuators. Yeah. You know, things on there.

Chris Gammell: I wish we, I wish you could have talked to, or wish we could talk to someone who's like at Boeing and like hearing like, cause I remember the one thing that, uh, the guy was talking about was like how the wiper blades have like special engineering and stuff like that. But just like understanding what the, uh, what the teams look like. Like, so how many people are on a team that do the windshield wipers for a aircraft like that?

Dave Jones: And oh, there'd be half a dozen people on a team that just do the windscreen wipers. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I mean, and like they're carrying years and years and years of, you know, technical load with them too. Right. That 747 has been made for, I don't know. They're not making any more. Right. They're, they're done making them, but.

Dave Jones: No, they're still, no, I think they're still, no, they're still making a, uh, variant of it. Okay. Yes, they are.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Um, but. Which is nuts.

Dave Jones: And it's still the same, basically the same airframe as the 1950s. Yeah. Late 60s. 50s? Or whatever. Yeah. That was later than that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But yeah, it's the, the queen of the skies or whatever the, I think United called it that. And it's just, yeah, it's just, it's amazingly, amazing longevity, but like, you know, there's been, you know, probably tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of engineers that are like worked on it over its lifespan, you know, cause there's also maintenance and maintaining engineering and stuff like that. And yeah, just, and now he's taken it on, try and like interface with all this stuff. It's like, Ooh, yeah. Powers teams, you know, like there's a lot of, a lot of money bundled in there too.

Dave Jones: Oh, there's a ton of money, ton of time. I mean, it takes years and years to develop something like this, you know, they've been working on for years and, and then they'll be refining it for years. Oh my God.

Chris Gammell: All the wire harnesses and like, Oh God. Yeah. Testing. And yeah. Just looking at that.

Dave Jones: That's just to interface it to the flight simulator software. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And then they have to get the flight simulator software guy who writes that to add all these functions, which it never had before. Yeah. You know, Oh, we, we need this, you know, windscreen wiper, uh, bulb to come on when we flip the, okay, he's, he's got to modify his flight simulator software to do that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. One, one bit of software difference, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. But still, you know, it has to be added.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it's just, yeah, it's nuts.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And he was telling me how I did it in the video too, how one guy has been writing this 747 simulator software for like 20 years. Yep. Yeah. It's just nuts.

Chris Gammell: That's a dedication to your craft, I'd say, you know? Oh, wow. Yeah. Amazing. Well, I've been in, uh, I've been in firmware mode lately and it's been a, uh, fun reintroduction into that space. Um, uh, yeah. Why?

Dave Jones: What's failed? Oh, just, um. My spidey sense tells me you've come a gutter.

Chris Gammell: Not a gutter, but like, uh, you know, I've, uh, you know, just been writing, I, you know, I, I've been doing a lot of like onesie, twosie type stuff in the past. And now this is like, no, no, no, I'm like writing drivers and, you know, sitting down and like writing firmware for days at a time is kind of new and different, not new, but different for me. I haven't done in a while. And, uh, you know, exploring new chipsets and like, you know, you know, when that like you really get to know a data sheet or a reference manual, I guess, uh, I'm kind of, I'm like halfway there. Got it.

Dave Jones: And it's all in plain vanilla C.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I mean, it's, uh, using the vendor tools as opposed to my video, my hour long video that I did with David. Did we talk about that last time?

Chris Gammell: I don't think we did. Yeah. That came out right after we had talked, I think. So that was, oh, okay. Yeah. Right. Cause we had talked about, we had talked about the great Scott video about the USB or maybe, maybe it was around the same time. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, we talked about USB power delivery, but we didn't talk about the actual video. Of us setting up the software development system.

Chris Gammell: Back and forth. Back and forth.

Dave Jones: It's an hour long video of, and the comments. Wow. Yeah. And the video got spread around to many different communities, like the software community and stuff like that, apparently. Oh yeah. And, um, everyone's just rolling their eyes and, you know, yep.

Chris Gammell: What about it?

Dave Jones: Some people understand the reasoning. Well, basically, right. It's an hour long video for those who haven't seen it. It's us setting up on Windows, on my Windows machine here, setting up all of the development tools required to write and to do the firmware, to compile the firmware for my new micro supply project. So it's a power supply, right? It's a power supply with a micro. Okay. It's got two micros and yes, it's got USB power delivery and all that sort of blah, blah. But really it's just an STR micro. That's it. Right. So ordinarily you would just, most people, including myself, would just download the STRm cube software. That's what they call their development software. And that's it. Right. That's all you need. And then you just use plain vanilla C and it comes with a GCC compiler already. Everything's just set up. You just install that and you start typing your C code and you compile and it works. Right. Yeah. Sometimes. Yeah. Sometimes. Well, you know, that's right. If the vendor tools don't do that, then you shouldn't be using their chips. Right. Quite frankly. Well, if their tools suck that bad, you probably shouldn't be using it.

Chris Gammell: I have like a discount factor for like, so yes, I agree. If you're doing it on Windows, yes, it should just install and work. If you're like, hey, I should use the IDE in Linux. I'll give you a couple extra hours. You know, is it their problem? Am I the problem? Well, here's the difference, right?

Dave Jones: Everyone else complained that all this shit that we did in an hour installing Ninja and Doxygen and all sorts of different things that we installed, right? To make this thing work. And Microsoft Visual Studio Code and all that shit that's right. And all the plugins for that. There were like half a dozen different things we had in store. Everyone said, oh, I could have done that in a minute on Linux.

Chris Gammell: I disagree with that. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. Anyway, that's what everyone's saying. Holy shit. It's Windows's problem. You know, it's a problem with Windows. But it's not just that, you know, there's no different, like, don't worry about the difference between Windows and Linux here. That's not what I'm getting at. What I'm getting at is the complexity of the software environment. Because David actually started using the ST Armcube software, but I think he changed because he was having, because he writes in C++, right? And he does everything like really high-end software. Even for a little power supply, he's going to do the software as if it's a... Let's just say he gills the lily. He gills the lily, right? And there's nothing wrong with that, right? Because this is a guy that writes game engines in his spare time, right? I mean, you know, he's a serious software dude, right? So that's just what he's used to doing. And so it's all written in C++ and it all uses the proper classes and everything else. So he's got this convoluted, which to me and to maybe a general firmware engineer out there is like a really convoluted software environment to get this thing working. I mean, not to any real firmware engineer, I guess, who probably has a similar system. But anyway, yeah, it just... And he was finding bugs in this GCC compiler and stuff like that because he was pushing it so far using all this exotic C++ stuff, right? That he was finding, you know, all these issues that he went, oh, bugger this. I'm going back to what I know, which is, you know, the proper, you know, GCC on its own, plus Microsoft Visual Studio Code, plus Ninja plugin and all these make plugins to generate all these make files and build all this, you know, this complex building environment and stuff like that. And that's what he's used to. So to him, it's trivial. But to someone else watching that video, it's like, oh, you know, you roll your eyes and go... I think that's a good point, though.

Chris Gammell: So like, even what you're just saying, like, you, you know, because of David's workflow, you guys moved outside of what like an ST expects and what I think a lot of the viewers expect. And like, at that point, you're kind of out in the wide open, you know, like you're, you're on your own, you know, like it and, and, and there are some benefits to that sometimes, but sometimes there's also pitfalls. And, uh...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's not like you can go on the ST arm forum and going, oh, look, it's failing, you know, help us, please. Right, right. It's like, no, they're going to throw their arms up when you're using your own, you know. Right.

Chris Gammell: So some of the stuff I've been, I've been doing, so I, when I was doing the, I guess I'm still kind of do a little bit, but the STM32 stuff I had been doing, um, the F0, I was being, just using, like, I, I was in a very similar mode to David, where I was like, I don't want to use just like the off the shelf stuff. I didn't want to use the IDE. I wanted to learn, you know, how to use GCC. I wanted to, you know, use, um, GDB and, uh, GDB server and stuff like that. And, and why, what, what was the drive behind that? So the drive behind that was one, I wanted to, you know, this, use this chip that I was using. But the other thing is like having some knowledge under the hood. A lot of people told me, oh, just use the IDE, use the IDE, which I totally agree is, is the right solution. And if I was doing it for work would be the solution. But I always call it like the 2am problem. What happens when it's 2am and something's not working? And I, and I'm like, okay, I'll just go look at the next level down under the hood. And like, and I'm just like, I have no idea what's going on here, you know, because when you, so then I started learning how GCC was working. You know, I was like, oh, okay, well, GCC is a program, you know, it's like basically like an executable, obviously it's not, but it's like, you know, it's basically I'm passing a file to this program and then it's using that to then parse all the software that I've written and links it all together. And then it creates an output file. And like, basically it's just seeing how everything's put together under the hood so that I, when I I then click a button in, uh, you know, visual studio code, you know what it's doing.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You know, it's running this command line. It's actually calling this up with all these parameter options. And I found that handy in the past, but it's, but often like, especially the problems David ran into, it's like way deeper than that. It's like bugs in GCC. But I'm not, I'm not going to assume that's normally the case, right? So that's not something you can fix. No, no, exactly.

Chris Gammell: I think that that's a special case. I don't think that that's not even why I was doing it. Like, I just wanted to do this as a learning thing because, because like, I'm on my, I mean, I like at the end of the day, I'm on my own, you know, like that's really what it comes down to. Like I have, I have online.

Dave Jones: But you can actually see that stuff, right? You can actually see that stuff. Usually it's in the build window in, uh, well, I haven't used the STM cube software, but in the other, uh, but in the other, yeah, there's a console stuff where you can see it actually running the command line, it calls up GCC and then it had includes all of these dash parameters. It's like flags. After it. No, totally. Yeah. You're totally right. Yeah. Yeah. But, but. So it's there. So that's really, I, I don't think you actually need to go and install and build all these things separately to get that benefit of peeping under the hood, so to speak.

Chris Gammell: I totally agree. It might not be good for other people, but for, for me, it was very beneficial and it was, it was a confident thing too. You know, it was like, I want to know how this happens. So that then, you know, so like what I always think about too, with like IDEs is specifically, um, specifically Eclipse. When I think about like the, you know, you right click on a project, you go to properties and then it's just like tabs on tabs on tabs of like, oh yeah, GCC compiler. Let's look at all the options. And then it's like 16 more tabs. And it's like, what the hell is all this stuff? You know? And like just getting a little bit of, you know, I'm not going to know what everything does and I don't need to know what everything does. Usually the default's fine, but I would be watching these, these tutorial videos. It was on YouTube and like, they would sometimes even speed it up and they'd just be like, oh yeah, I'm just going to like change the studies. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. What did you just do? Like if I have one thing wrong, it's not going to work. You know? Like I need, so I'm like slowing it down to like, you know, four frames a second to try and, try and watch this thing, you know? And it's like, That's great. And so like having that, again, a little bit of that confidence, it really helped me. It might not, there was a lot of struggle in there too, but, but now I kind of, I don't know. It, it, it helped a lot. I'll actually, I'll do a callback too. So when Jason Kreidner and Robert Nelson were on the show, the Beagleboard guys, Robert's at DigiKey, but he works on a lot of the compilation stuff. But you can actually hear me mid episode, kind of like the light bulb comes on. Cause like, and this is not like a long time ago. This is like three or four years ago, you know? And it was just something about like, I had never really understood how compilers were working and how Linux was built and like a lot of that stuff. And so I, I don't know, like something, something I remember specifically recording with them and just being like, holy crap, I don't get any of this stuff. And that kind of started me down this, this path. And like, you know, it's important to know, you need to know what's going on. And, you know, like, you know, and you and I have gone back and forth too. You know, we've talked about like, oh, do you need to know all of the computer architecture that's happening underneath the hood? Well, maybe not all of it, but you know, I've come more back towards the knowing some of it sure as hell helps. You know, you don't need to know how an ALU works on every single instruction cycle, but you know, knowing that there is an ALU and knowing what memory is and how it's all put together. Like, yeah, that stuff that has been impacting me every single day since I've been doing firmware stuff. And it's, and it's part of my job now, you know, so that's, it's important. It's important stuff. And, you know, I can't, like, I don't know, like I said before, I don't have anyone I can go to otherwise. Like I can pay someone else or I can, you know, beg and steal and borrow. And, you know, there's some very, from very nice people on, you know, the forums and the Twitter and similar stuff. And I'm very appreciative to all of them. And, but when it's 2am and everyone's asleep, what do I do? You know, like, and I need, so I need to be self-reliant, I guess, at least in most places.

Dave Jones: Murphy's going to ensure that.

Chris Gammell: Exactly.

Dave Jones: That the fault that you're going to have is just beyond your knowledge base.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Regardless of how much you delve under the hood. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I talked about it, I think on here before, but I'm a thrasher, right? So like I, when something goes wrong, I'm like, I'll teach everything. And I, you know, I'm not very, I'm trying to get better at this, but like, you know, getting, being like measured and using GitHub and like, you know, tracking changes, running small experiments. Like this is all stuff that I'm trying to get better at.

Dave Jones: Um, just because I will thrash like if, you know, I've had compiler issues in the past and I will literally just like, I'll rewrite things until it works. Yeah. You know, until I avoid that issue and I go, right, I'm not going to investigate why it failed. Cause quite frankly, I don't have the time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, I just got to get on with it.

Chris Gammell: You just got to try stuff, right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm just going to try stuff until it works.

Chris Gammell: Almost never the right option. Right. But it happens.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But it's, but I've found it's actually very productive way to go. Cause in most instances I've been able to get around the problem. I've been able to get around it and get back onto work and get back onto finishing the project.

Chris Gammell: I mean.

Dave Jones: And sometimes if you're on a time constrained project, you can't have, you can't spend the time to understand the problem.

Chris Gammell: No. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. You're right.

Dave Jones: I'm not saying it's a good thing, but sometimes you just, you know, you just do not have the time to understand it properly. You just need a workaround.

Chris Gammell: Yes. No, I agree with that. Get on with the job. I'm saying that most of the times when I do, and this might be that your experience has allowed you to, to thrash a little bit more effectively than me, but like when I'm thrashing, I break stuff. You know what I mean? Like.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. No, I, I usually don't. I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm re rewriting it in a different way or I'm, you know, I, I know I, I suspect that this thing may be, you know, and, and sometimes it's obvious, like you'll, you'll add some routine or something like that. And then all of a sudden nothing, something doesn't work. Yeah. And you go, well, geez. Okay. Well, I don't, I don't know why. Yeah. So I'll write it a different way and it just, you know, and it just magically works. So.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Okay. That's not what thrashing in my mind. Thrashing in my mind is like, Oh, I'll change this variable. Nope. Didn't work. I'll change this variable. Nope. Didn't work. And I didn't change the last variable back.

Dave Jones: Are you talking at the register level when you're trying to get some peripheral on a micro working or something? Oh God, no, no, no. Just read the data sheet. No, it's, you know, that, that, that's where you do thrash. That's where you go into the data sheet and you read, but sometimes the data sheet's wrong.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. We talked about it last time. It's bloody wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, and. Again, that is the exception.

Dave Jones: And you've got to figure that out.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That is.

Dave Jones: Right. No, I, I have encountered that, oh, half a dozen times probably. Out of, out of how many total times? Where the data sheet's been wrong.

Chris Gammell: What is a, give me a percentage. That's the.

Dave Jones: Oh, no, it'd be small percentage. It'd be, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: One percent.

Dave Jones: It'd only be, it'd be one percent. Yeah. It'd be a small amount of time.

Chris Gammell: That's, I think that's, that's the other problem is that like, so, you know, I crowdsource a lot of help and, you know, people that are suggestions and advice and, you know, you got to be careful with that, of course, but people are very generous with their time and their suggestions and stuff like that. And sometimes it's like, you got to, like, sometimes people go to the most complicated thing, right? Oh, well, maybe it's, you know, just to use the example, I'm not saying this is normally, but like, maybe it's the compiler. It's probably not the compiler. You better check off every single thing on your list. You know, pebcac, pebcac, pebcac, pebcac. And then like a hundred down the list, maybe it's the compiler, you know?

Dave Jones: And that's it. Did we talk about it? David did a video on that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Like he, he did a video saying, I found another GCC compiler bug. Oh, yes. We did talk about that. And then within minutes of the upload, you know, dozens of people said, nope, it's your code. Yeah. No, I think that's natural though too.

Chris Gammell: Like, you know, like once you have this error, then you think it's, you know, like we all have these libraries of like debugging and troubleshooting and it's like, oh, well, like this one time I moved the cable and the cable was, you know, it was something, you know, like that was shorting out or something, but it's like, you know, you got to go through your mental like library of everything that's gone wrong. And you, like you suspected that I know that's at least how I operate. And sometimes that can give you, throw some red herrings, you know?

Dave Jones: See, see for me, like I've never, I don't think I've ever encountered a compiler bug. I don't think. I wouldn't even know it would look.

Chris Gammell: So that's, that's the main thing.

Dave Jones: No. So like, that's not something that I would even consider because I haven't, you know, like, as you said, like, it's almost certainly not the compiler because hundreds of thousands of other people use it. Yeah. Right. So the fact that you found something that, you know, somebody else like.

Chris Gammell: I am not special. I am. Yep. I am the all singing, all dancing crap of the world, you know, or whatever that is from Fight Club. You know.

Dave Jones: But I've encountered this in, in tons of stuff, you know, not only data sheets and things like that, but, you know, shipping cart software I've talked about before, you know? And, and I found, well, why doesn't it work with this country that I'm trying to send, you know, ship to? It's because there's a bug in, well, not a bug in the system, but they haven't added support for that country yet. Oh, yeah. You know, it's like, I'm the first one who's encountered this because I'm the first one who's shipped to the Solomon Islands or something, you know? It's like, it's ridiculous. But, you know, sometimes that, that does happen.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Actually, there was a tweet that I saw last week. It says, note to self, try a different USB-C cable before spending hours looking for why the board doesn't enumerate. That was Conrad Beckman. Like, same kind of thing. You know, like, it's probably, you know, the cable is a very common thing. The power not being on very common, you know, like, and it's hard to, like, you and I have talked about, like, lists and similar things like that before. Even having a list, like a perfect checklist, it's, you know, it's just some of it, you can't, you know, you can't list every potential issue. Or if you did, it would take hours and hours to.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's not, it's just not possible. There's so many permutations.

Chris Gammell: AI, Dave, that's what we need. We need AI.

Dave Jones: Oh, God. No, and we don't. Well, I don't know. Quite a few people have emailed me about this. I know where you're segwaying to.

Chris Gammell: Oh, about the.

Dave Jones: Did you intend to segway?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, soft, soft intention.

Dave Jones: Soft segway. There's a new deep learning artificial intelligence, wank wank, PCB routing AI software, which, well, is nothing new because people have been talking about, oh, our new thing does AI and all that sort of stuff 30 years ago. And, yeah, I don't know, you upload, I think it only supports key CAD, does it? Yeah, that's right. I'm not sure what file format it supports. So it uses. What's the name of it?

Chris Gammell: DeepPCB.

Dave Jones: DeepPCB.com, is it? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: .ai. .ai, of course. DeepPCB.ai, yeah.

Dave Jones: And you can upload your key CAD file and it'll magically auto-router for you. Yeah, well, everyone's been saying that for 30 years. Right.

Chris Gammell: I think it's more like, you know, three layout engineers in a trench coat kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Right. So you think secretly behind there.

Chris Gammell: I mean, this is not just my, no, I was, I was suggested. But of course, like, why wouldn't you just have it? First off, it says 24 hours, right? If you're going to have a layout tool, it's not going to take 24 hours to do this kind of thing. So it's just, this is probably just someone who's floating an idea and, oh, yeah, people like this, I'll go develop it when it's done.

Dave Jones: Look, I've used auto-routers in the professional field.

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Dave Jones: Actually in Anger and they have been useful. But in my experience and the experience of most people who have used them is that like in on a complex board where it's worth using them on, as you said, like just a regular board, you can lay it out in a day. So what's the point uploading it to a, you know, a thing, right? Any, any decent, simple Arduino-y size board you can lay out in a day. It's not a problem or hours, right?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: So, you know, it's not, and then you're going to have to tweak it anyway. Right. Yeah. But you're going to have to tweak things anyway. It's not like it's just going to be magically done.

Chris Gammell: Like if you go up in complexity, you should either be doing it yourself or, you know, maybe hiring someone else that might do it.

Dave Jones: But when you go up in complexity, this is where auto-routers become really useful. But you have to, it takes more time to set up and constrain the auto-router. You can't just go auto-route the entire board. I've got this 10-layer motherboard. Yeah, right. Right? This 10-layer PC motherboard or 12, you know, 15-layer motherboard or whatever, 16. And you can't just go bam and it's done, right? This is ridiculous. This is not how auto-routers work. They're designed for specific, you spend more time setting it up than actually running the auto-rout.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, so last week, I should mention, last week we had Craig on and Craig works on auto-routers. And, you know, so like he was a very good and strong case, I think, for him. And the thing that he talked about in the future, which I am totally into, is like, you know, a kind of joint model where you're going to run a simulation, you might tweak a little bit or you run an auto-route, you tweak the parameters. It's more interactive and kind of iterative, really, I think. Like, someone else had brought this up and they're like, yeah, well, the same, I think it was in person, too. I forget who it was. But they said, you know, people were saying this 20, 30 years ago about compilers, too. Oh, I can always write, I can write assembly better than the compiler can do. So I'm just going to use assembly forever. Well, they were wrong. And, of course, you know, like, I, you know, I sell a t-shirt to never trust the auto-routers. I'm going to trust an auto-routers at some point. Like, I just, it's on the way. It's just not there yet. And it's, you know, maybe this AI type thing is part of it, but probably more like what Craig was talking about. And, you know, the iterative and generative design type stuff is what we're going to start playing with. And as soon as it's in KiCad, I might try it out.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I was going to, I might try and do a video trying it out, you know. I'll get some advanced board, you know, I'll pull some open source board from somewhere. Shuffle it up. Shuffle it up and, you know, upload.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, see what happens. Yep. Yeah. See what happens. That's great. I mean, like, I'm not closed off to it, but I don't think this is it. Yep. I don't think this is the answer, but there's probably a similar answer to the future.

Dave Jones: Everyone claims their one's the best and it's magic. And, like, you know, I've been hearing this shit for 30 years. Like, don't, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Like, and everyone, you know, but this is a new marketing thing to some people. Some people have not, oh, there's now an auto-router that uses artificial intelligence. Oh, my goodness. It's going to work magically. Like, no.

Chris Gammell: The new AI auto-router just adds salt. You add salt liberally to all opinions about it. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Speaking of opinions. Well, you don't have any of those. No. Yeah. No. What's up? I'm about to give one. After this, I'm going to start recording a video. A often requested video. It's not going to be as broad as because it can't possibly be as some people are hoping for. But it will be a textbook review. Oh, interesting. In electronics textbook review. So I'm going to do a shootout between four different electronics textbooks. That's a great idea. And give my opinion. Yeah. The problem is, is that there is, everyone keeps, every week I get an email from a beginner, which textbook do you recommend? Which one's the best? It's like, there's no such thing. There is no such thing.

Chris Gammell: But I have a one that I've stopped recommending. And I usually try and go against it. Oh, why would you recommend one and then stop? I don't think the Art of Electronics is the right starting textbook.

Dave Jones: No, no, no. It is not. No, of course not. No. You've always been in error if you've been recommending that as a starting textbook. Yeah. It's a reference textbook. In fact, I just last night, I read the intro to the Art of Electronics Edition 3. And they say, no, it's not a textbook. And no, it's not a reference manual. But it's both.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's something in between.

Dave Jones: So it's kind of, yeah, it's quasi in between. And in my hot little hands right now, I have the new X Chapters. Oh, yeah. It's unreleased. I actually have. I actually have it.

Chris Gammell: Nice.

Dave Jones: It's got publishing date 2020. And it's not 2020 yet, but I have one.

Chris Gammell: It's not in Australia. It's always 2020 there sooner.

Dave Jones: It does pay to know people. Yeah, I've got it. And yeah, the X Chapters, it is real. It does exist. So you can pre-order on Amazon. What's the difference?

Chris Gammell: I don't know what the X Chapters are.

Dave Jones: Oh, the X Chapters is more advanced stuff that they couldn't put in, more in-depth, practical stuff that they couldn't fit into the already 1,200-page art of electronics. Oh, so it's not the workbook.

Chris Gammell: It's actually like added chapters. Oh, no, no, no, no.

Dave Jones: This is like expanded chapters. So like chapter one is real-world passive components. Right? So they talk about PCB trace resistance, current carrying capacity, capacitance, transmission line impedance, cable configuration, skin effect of cables, temperature coefficients of resistors and how self-inductance, self-capacitance of resistors, all that practical stuff. Yeah. So that's a great example.

Chris Gammell: So like skin effect, right? That is a super important topic to talk about. But man, when do you bring it up? You know what I mean? Like you wouldn't tell that to a beginner. You'd be like, and again, I know that that is not targeted at a beginner. But like everything, like everything that's in every textbook, it's so hard to think about where you actually start. And even, so like definitely not the art of electronics because it's more of a compendium and it's like trying to review all these different things. But like.

Dave Jones: It's a nice reference book. Sure. Like anyone who's into electronics design should have the art of electronics.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Yes, I totally agree.

Dave Jones: But it is not a beginning text. Right.

Chris Gammell: But the other problem is that the textbooks then, right? So not the art of electronics, but then the textbooks and they're like, let's talk about Ohm's law. And it's like, okay. Yeah. But then it's math. Let's talk about math. We definitely want to do lots and lots of math because the people that are writing textbooks are professors. And it's like, all right, all right, kind of fine. But like, then it's dryness and it's about resistors for a chapter. Dave, there's got to be a better way, man. Like, I don't know what it is.

Dave Jones: Well, this is the interesting thing, right? The four books that I'm reviewing are like, you know, thousand page textbooks, right? The industry standard textbooks, you know, popular textbooks that are in university classes and stuff like that. But none of them have anything about resistors, capacitors and stuff like that. That's assumed knowledge. These are basically textbooks, which I'll cop a lot of flack over this because, you know, and there, but there is no, I'm not going to say there is no, but like, there's nothing that covers everything as far as I'm aware. Like every aspect. There's nothing that covers the whole blinking lot from go to woe. There's not, these ones just focus on actual devices. So diodes and above. So diodes, transistors, op amps, filters, you know, all the practical circuit elements, but they completely skip all of your passive, like, you know, they don't tell you what voltage is. They don't tell you what current is. Yeah. They don't tell you resistors and capacitors. They might have like a couple of pages right at the start for tokenism. Right. But it's not, it's not that. It's not going to tell you about, you know, DC superposition theorem. It's not going to talk about, you know, you know, complex numbers and AC impedance. And, you know, it's not going to go into all that sort of stuff. Right. It's, you know, it's not going to go into all your AC theory and all that sort of stuff. It's certainly not going to go into control theory and things like that.

Chris Gammell: So like even a KCL, KVL, like that's skipping those two.

Dave Jones: No, no, I don't, I don't even think they're in there.

Chris Gammell: Really? What level of books are these? Yeah. These are like graduate books?

Dave Jones: These are university reference textbooks. I'm talking Floyd, Malvino, Smith, right? All of the, you know, the major books you'd get in almost any university electronics course. It's because they have a focus. They have a focus on just the components and circuit topology. And that's it. Right. You want something else. You go buy another book if you want to learn, you know, doing mesh analysis and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. That's the kind of books that I start. I started with mesh analysis and oh, no.

Dave Jones: It's, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I love that. It's good fun. I've done a video on that.

Chris Gammell: It's not a bad topic, but it's a bad topic to start with. That's really what I get to. Right. Yeah, yeah, of course. And so like usually when I tell people, I think like the make guide to electronics is like a great place to start. That's usually where I tell people like that kind of thing, forest mims, something project-based, something where it's like get hands on with – no one is surprised by this response from me. Yes, no. Get hands on with a resistor and like – but like – okay, say you only have paper. You only have paper and you definitely are going to be learning in an academic context. Show what a pull-up resistor is before you show what a transistor is. You know what I mean? Like there's some more practical examples that could be in there that show math and like explain why you need these things. And it just feels like a lot of these books don't do it. And I know somebody's going to say, oh, Chris, you should write them. I'm not writing a book. No, no. No, no, no. Dave will write a book first. No, thanks. But like I don't know. It's just – it's really – it's a hard thing to do. So all of you listening who are beginners, we love you. Keep fighting the good fight. Like Dave and I still learn a lot too. It sucks to start somewhere, but just start somewhere, you know. LEDs are usually the place I tell people to start.

Dave Jones: Well, that may – that's going to have to be a separate video because this is a video between – a shootout between four university circuit textbooks.

Chris Gammell: How did you source these? Did you get suggestions?

Dave Jones: Oh, well, no. Like I'm a Floyd man, right? So I learned on Floyd, right? So Floyd's one of the obvious ones and Smith and Serrata is another one and Malvino, you know. I don't know any of these by name. But I've never used my – okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: So like that's another thing. I think there's a lot of regionalism and stuff like that too.

Dave Jones: So which one did you use?

Chris Gammell: Dave, I couldn't tell you if it paid me $100 right now. Really? I have no idea. Yeah. I mean I know the look of it. You don't recommend it? I know the look of it, but I couldn't remember the name. Right.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: I know a lot of people do Sedra and Smith, but that's on the actual – that's the transistor level, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's the one I'm doing, Sedra and Smith.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I think you said a different Smith. Okay. No, no, no. I think you said Smith and someone else. Okay, okay. Yeah, Sedra and Smith is – I know that one. That's – yeah. You're Floyd, man. Well, I think that's a great topic. It sounds a little drier at first, but I think that like –

Dave Jones: Oh, it's going to be a completely dry and boring video, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean but I think that like talking about like what is first, you know, like – because it's hard like when you're a beginner too, you know, thinking about like what you're presented with. You know, you're coming to this field that is everything from iPhones to a 5 millimeter LED that you're holding in your hand, you know, and it's like –

Dave Jones: Oh, it's insanely expensive. Yeah. I've been doing it for 40 plus years and like there's more things I don't know than things I do know.

Chris Gammell: Right, yep, yep.

Dave Jones: I've been doing it for 40 years, damn. That I just haven't encountered before, you know, that I might have heard of in passing, but I don't know jack about.

Chris Gammell: 40 years, really? It's like – That means you've got 25 years on me. That's crazy. I mean because I didn't do any electronics as a kid, you know. Right, right. Damn. Yep. That explains some of it, folks, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I mean I was a boy.

Chris Gammell: That's right, yeah.

Dave Jones: Right? Yeah, it's a long time. And there's still – you know, people think, oh, they do the university course and they're going to know everything. Bullshit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Man, not even close. Yeah. Not even close. So anyway, yeah, textbook shootout. But this is not for beginners, so I'm going to cop a lot of flack for that. Yeah, well. Tough titties. It is what it is.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I mean you can always go – collect all the beginner books and then, you know, like ask people for their recommendations.

Dave Jones: I will have to collect – I'll have to ask specifically, look, what are the beginner books? Because I don't think you're going to get one that goes from complete beginner, like practical stuff that you're talking about and then covers all the stuff that a Smith and Sedgwick or a Floyd covers as well. It's already, you know, 1,200, 1,000 pages. Each one of these is 1,000 pages and it just covers diodes, transistors, op amps, filters, you know, and other circuit topology stuff. And it's 1,000 pages just covering these components, right? It's nuts. Right? So you can't – and these are all important stuff, right? I should say that too. Everything in there is an important aspect of electronics.

Chris Gammell: I'm always like very like – you know, it sounds like I'm very anti-math, but I'm just anti-math at the beginning, you know? And some people like starting with math. You know, they like – they think like that. They think in equations, that kind of thing. And like that's just not me and that's fine, whatever. But like damn, it is so necessary, you know, to have a grasp on that and to have, you know, to understand the math from the actual ability to calculate things and stuff like that. But I always like it from the mental models too, you know, like being able to understand derivative relationships and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: No, like you won't find – in these textbooks, you will not find Maxwell's equations and all that advanced stuff, right? Same as art of electronics. You will not find anything beyond basic math in art of electronics and in these books as well, right? There are no integrals. There's no differential calculus, right? There's none of that stuff, right, especially – and there's no, you know, advanced physics and, you know, Maxwell type theory, right? It doesn't go into that. This is just, you know, basic circuit level stuff, you know, circuit design level, sort of like abstract circuit design component level and above. They're not going to go into detail of – there might be like a page or two of like, you know, how, you know, diodes are – you know, transistors are, you know, the physical constructions. You know, the PNP doping and all that sort of stuff, right? Right. All that sort of – you know, but they don't – but you can get entire textbooks on that. Right. Just that aspect if you want.

Chris Gammell: I took a semiconductor engineering class and it was – Yeah. Yeah. The physics of semiconductors or something like that, it was – yeah, it was – Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, what is the doping depth level that, you know, as you inject boron into it and blah, blah, blah. It's oh, jeez. Yeah, yeah, all that sort of stuff.

Dave Jones: And what you're talking about, the practical, you know, the real beginner stuff, here's the pull-up resistors and here's, you know, blinker lead and all that sort of stuff. You can have a 500-page book just doing that and you still won't even get into stuff that's covered in these 1,000-page books that I'm going to review here. Yep. Right? It's just crazy. You can start – you can do a 500-page Arduino book.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh. If you really wanted to. Nice, nice.

Dave Jones: Just doing all the basics.

Chris Gammell: Former guest Jeremy. Jeremy Blum.

Dave Jones: Jeremy Blum, hasn't he got a new version of it or something? He does, he does. And it's been re-released or something? And I don't know how big it is. I don't think it's – it's not 500 pages.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's like 18, 20 projects or something like that. So probably 300, 400 pages. Yeah, yeah, something like that.

Dave Jones: It takes you through projects and, you know.

Chris Gammell: And there's a jacket quote from yours truly on there, so. Oh, is there? Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. Didn't know that. Yep. All right. Me and Brie Pettis. I didn't know that. I just looked at it.

Dave Jones: So the three of us, is it? I have got quotes on the back.

Chris Gammell: You do not have a quote on there. No, it's me. Oh, oh, sorry. So I said yours truly. You know, that's yours. Oh, sorry. Yours truly. I thought you were referring. Yes. For me and Alicia Gibb, who's – yeah. Right. Yeah. And then Brie Pettis.

Dave Jones: Got it. Yeah. That's why I don't remember doing a quote. That's right, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, that's all we've got time for this week.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, everything else, people can sign up for our mailing list or IRC channel or Discord. Or Discourse or Slack or – what else we got? BB.

Dave Jones: Are we going to do something analyzing the results from our survey?

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. I sent those. I'll send those to you again. But, yes, we do have – we have some –

Dave Jones: Well, I've got the survey results, but there's no, like, graphs.

Chris Gammell: Oh, there's graphs if you click on a button. Yeah. Yeah. There's some great – it's actually – actually, no, this is an interesting one real quick. Let me send you the link. So what's interesting about it this year is I asked a different question, which was, how long have you been working on electronics? And then how long have you worked on them professionally? I think that's what the question was. Right. That was a new question this year. That is a good one. Yep. Basically, what – and there was a selection on professionally where it was, I have never made any money from electronics. So what that does is that shows how many people are true hobbyists, even though some of them

Dave Jones: have been – Right.

Chris Gammell: I haven't diced up all the data yet. But if you look at that, you can basically see who's a hobbyist and, you know, has never made any money. But some of them have been working on electronics for, like, 35, 40 years, which is awesome. Yeah, yeah, of course. You know, and let me see if I can send this to Dave real quick. I don't know if that's going to work. But yeah, we'll post all the results. We have a lot of people. Let's see. So who started listening to Amp Hour in –

Dave Jones: Link doesn't work. It does not work. Resource unavailable. Okay. Oh, well, it doesn't matter.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So some of you in 2010, 7.4% of you started listening in 2010. So that's pretty good. And so we track age groups. We track where you live, interest in electronics, working on electronics, where you listen to the electronics. 38% of you are in the car right now. 21% of you are walking. 8.6% of you are in the lab.

Dave Jones: One thing that – one question that wasn't in there, and this was brought up on the forum, is what's your favorite episode?

Chris Gammell: Oh, that is a good question. Damn.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Oh, well.

Dave Jones: Yep. Didn't put it in. Oh, well. Yep. We'll do this again in 2020. I thought it was an excellent question, too.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that is definitely – that's a great question to put in there.

Dave Jones: To see if it gravitates – like, see if there's, like, a top five or something, you

Chris Gammell: know? Right, right. What is your favorite episode? The next one? Oh.

Dave Jones: I did enjoy Chuck Pedal.

Chris Gammell: Chuck Pedal, yeah. That would be on my list. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: That's, you know –

Chris Gammell: It was a solo interview, but Tom Lee – Tom Lee – and it's very recent, too. Tom is one of my – definitely one of my recent favorites. We have so many – we have said so many great guests. And if people are looking to recommend the show to other people, I usually tell them to recommend the guest episodes first. You know, it's fun to listen to me and Dave banter about books for 20 minutes. But, yeah, I think that that's – like, send your favorite guests. If you're going to send someone an Amp Hour episode you think they might be interested, send them the Chuck Pedal episode. Send them the Tom Lee episode. Send them, you know, the Jerry Ellsworth talking about.

Dave Jones: Although, the one that's been shared a lot is the – myself and Shari are talking about 5G stuff. That's a lot. That's been shared a lot. That's right, yeah. People go, wow, you know, because that's really topical stuff. It is, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, like, what the hell is 5G in the first place? And, like, yeah, you guys go back and forth. Exactly. Yeah, that one was great, too. It's always great for me, too, because I get to listen to it as, like, a listener, you know?

Dave Jones: Right, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I guess –

Dave Jones: Whereas the other ones, you know, Chuck Pedal, like, you know, it's great if you're a vintage computer fan, but if you're not, it's, like, yawn-worthy, probably. Well, maybe. Yeah, I don't know. Like, you know, not everyone's going to like the same stuff, you know? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. You can't just say, oh, yeah, it's a great episode. I would always say people should give it a shot, though.

Chris Gammell: You never know what you might learn from someone in vintage days as, you know, someone who's doing FPGA stuff.

Dave Jones: But, you know, but you can't expect everyone's going to like it. Oh, 100%.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I know that one. Yeah. Yeah. So, David, did you get the link I sent?

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it doesn't work.

Chris Gammell: Oh, it still doesn't work. Okay. Yeah. Probably because I –

Dave Jones: Oh, is there a second link? Yeah. Oh, yeah, got it. Okay. No, it's the actual form.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. It's the form itself. All right. Well, I'll have to send it to you later.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it doesn't work. It doesn't matter. I'm looking at the survey results now.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, thank you to everyone who does that. I will be sending out the winner's gifts before the end of the year. So that'll be some of my things calming down at the end of the year. So I'll be sending out Amp Hour notebooks and EV blog. That can be your hobby. There you go. Yeah, shipping stuff is my hobby. It's very rewarding, you know. Me and the USPS guy are tight, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right. That brown shirt really does it for you. That's UPS. That's UPS, Dave. Oh, that's UPS.

Chris Gammell: USPS is blue and – light blue and blue and dark blue. Oh, right. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. If people – again, thank you for everyone who did the survey. We've always forget to ask about iTunes reviews. We haven't asked for that in a while. If you're feeling generous, head on over there.

Dave Jones: iTunes is still a thing?

Chris Gammell: It's still a thing. Yeah, and apparently it helps – it still helps keep in the ratings. Oh, okay. I don't know if we actually are, but –

Dave Jones: I don't have any of these fruity gadgets, so –

Chris Gammell: Well, iTunes is still the main repository for all podcasts, which is, you know, like it or hate it. It's true. We love iTunes reviews because of that.

Dave Jones: But we've got every episode on our server.

Chris Gammell: It's true. Yeah, it's on Libsyn, but iTunes is the pointer to all other servers, right? So like – and because iTunes is like the first repository – because the most people use it, it becomes the de facto. And so same thing with like reviews. Because it's the biggest center for all podcasts, then the reviews that are on there, you know, are going to – if you move up in the charts there, then it reaches the most new people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that's insider baseball crap, you know.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: All right. Well, that's all from us. Thanks again to everyone who did the survey, though. It's great stuff. And we'll catch you next week. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time.

Chris Gammell: See you. We'll see you next time.