#484 – Man Behind The Curtain

Chris Gammell: This is the Amp Hour Podcast. Released March 16th, 2020. Episode 484, sponsored by Screaming Circuits. The man behind the curtain.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. I'm betting that you wished you would finish that portable lab.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I always had that exact thought this morning. That thing was way too heavy, but I kind of modulated a little bit towards, you know, I take a lot of stuff with me.

Dave Jones: You did finish it though, didn't you? Technically, you were actually carrying it around for a few events, weren't you?

Chris Gammell: Rolling it around, actually, yeah.

Dave Jones: Rolling it around, yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it was in a very, very heavy Pelican case with foam and regal scope in there. So how much did that suck away? You know, I found, I tried to sell that Pelican case because it has since gone defunct. The case itself is about 25 pounds.

Dave Jones: Wow, I was going to say, those things are heavy. Like the genuine Pelicans, they are built like a tank.

Chris Gammell: The real constraint here is like the reason I had bought it, that the size I did, it's a 1610, is because that is within the shipping size. So if you want to check it through on luggage, you can do that. The problem is you start putting stuff in there and it's already at 25, 30 pounds. You only get...

Dave Jones: Which is 11 kilos.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Wow. That's insane.

Chris Gammell: I think you only get 22 kilos on checked baggage anyways.

Dave Jones: Maximum. Yeah, otherwise that becomes the like too heavy to bend, you know, you can't bend your knees anymore and pick it up. It becomes part of the safe handling thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, or they just charge you more too. So like in the US, so like if you like have like frequent flyer stuff or not even then, like some airlines are like 50 pounds, up to 50 pounds or 22 kilos, they'll let you check it in for free. And then past that, you got to pay like 75 bucks. And so that plus, yeah, it was just not a good solution. Right. So I've since moved away from that and moved to like just more portable stuff in general. Right. So like I'm still waiting on my micro supply. Yeah, sorry. That's okay. I use an analog discovery too. I have like a, what's that cheap red DMM that you recommend? I use a Japanese one.

Dave Jones: The 8008.

Chris Gammell: Who's the manufacturer?

Dave Jones: That's Aining.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's right. So that's the one I carry based on your recommendation.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Cause it's tiny and light and it's 20 bucks or whatever. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So those two together plus dev boards that I need. And if I'm doing traveling anyways, it's usually, I'm not like, you know, I don't need like a full lab thing. This is really more like, okay, I'm doing firmware, but I might need to troubleshoot something. And then I used to have a TS-100, but that broke and I haven't replaced it yet.

Dave Jones: So replace it with a TS-80. The TS-80 is just so much nicer.

Chris Gammell: Cue the TS-100 fanboys. Yeah, exactly. We're going to get back into that, but all that stuff together, that's kind of covers about, I'd say like 65 to 70% of use cases.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: I carry that most days. You know, that's most days in my backpack. You don't need to, but I'm sure if you traveled, you would, right?

Dave Jones: No, I'm just taking video gear. I'm not taking electronics. Well, you know, because you're visiting clients, right? You're visiting sites where you've got to demo your stuff. And if things go wrong, you need to, or if they want changes on the spot, you need to be able to sort of do that and demo it and things like that.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. You know, so I work in a shared workspace, if people don't know, and I have like a rolling cart because it's like, I can't leave my stuff out, which is a downside for sure. Like I used to have a lab, like not like Dave has, but a fixed lab like Dave has. And I don't have that anymore. And so now I have like a metal rolling cart that I can roll out. And I have all my gear, you know, like project box, like you do kind of stuff, but what I've been doing is actually, I have it down to like a, I have like a daily soldering kit, like a just a single box I really need to take out. And that thing is like my, my everyday go-to. It's got like hand tools. It's got, you know, solder. It's got the little gold solder remover thingy, you know, instead of wiping it on a sponge, a soldering iron and a sponge, you put it on there. Yep. And then, you know, flux and all that, all the stuff you need in there. So that has been really good for like compartmentalizing to like, what I need on a daily basis versus like the once in a while stuff. You know, how often do I need a replacement thermocouple on a, on a soldering iron, you know?

Dave Jones: No, it's, well, that's the thing. Yeah. Like a day-to-day needs, you don't actually need much. I mean, you need a tiny lab for day-to-day needs. It's like, you know, you can fit it in one square meter if you really had to.

Chris Gammell: Right. You know, it's like, well, 10 square feet or something. Yeah. It's actually one, it's one to 10. So yeah, that's right. Yep. And yeah, like, like, well, like you used to have in your lab, right? I mean, it's just, yeah, it's, it's always about the corner cases. Like when you get outside of that everyday needs, that's when it's, but at that point we're all talking about the coronavirus here. That's why, I don't know if we even mentioned, that's why we're talking about this. Yeah. That's why we're talking about it because. Yeah. Yeah. But in the event, like, so I have some builds coming up and I need to build them and like get everything done before I, so I can, I got tons of firmware to write for these boards, but I got to assemble them first. And like all the assembly stuff is at my workspace. I got to get that done all the testing. I want to, you know, like use my source meter, make sure I bring it up properly current controlled, you know, scopes and high-end stuff to, to do that kind of thing. But then once that's done, it's like, I can verify small things and like, you know, have like a logic analyzer breakout. And that is a lot of what I need to do then, you know? So it's kind of that when you need to do what, if I need to, I wouldn't go and build, I wouldn't go and build the full boards at home. Cause I just don't have the gear there.

Dave Jones: Well, and that's the thing that we probably wanted to, we should talk about is because almost certainly maybe even a majority of our audience are going to be hit by this in terms of being forced to work from home. So I've lost count of the number of people who have told me they're now working, their company's now making them work from home. And it's, it's almost inevitable that you'll be hit in some way by this and hundreds of universities all across the U S they've told everyone do not come back from spring break, right? Spring break at the moment. Is it?

Chris Gammell: It's variable depending on the school actually. So usually it's somewhere, somewhere around Easter, but not necessarily on Easter. I think Easter's later this year. So it's, I think, yeah, maybe it's happening now. Is that the end of spring break or the start? It literally depends on the school because some schools go longer too. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right. Okay. Well, that's interesting. Well, they're hundreds of universities are telling all their students don't come back from spring break.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like for a long time.

Chris Gammell: Well, like the rest of the semester, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: The rest of the semester. Like how long is the semester? Three months.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's basically January to May, at least for the school I went to.

Dave Jones: So yeah. So they're telling everyone not to come back until May or even June or something like that.

Chris Gammell: Well, and then, you know, that's really the end of the school year. So it's like basically come back next year, unless you're on campus for the summer. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So it's insane. Like everyone's lives will stick to the engineering side of things. So, you know, all these engineering students have been uprooted because most of them, especially in the US, had been dorms and they would rely on the university labs and things like that. But now they're telling them, bugger off.

Chris Gammell: I did see someone respond about that. They're like, so they asked a university official, I forget who it was, but they asked a university official, like, why are you doing this? And they're like, well, a dorm is basically a cruise ship.

Dave Jones: That's it.

Chris Gammell: I mean, that was a great response. You know, like that is very illustrative of what's going on here. So.

Dave Jones: Totally. I hope Jerry's okay. Sorry. A little side tangent. Jerry's currently on a cruise ship. Jerry Ellsworth.

Chris Gammell: Jerry Ellsworth went on the, yeah. The Coco cruise or something like that. Joko cruise. Yeah. Joko. That's right. Yeah. There's a, they always have a hacker badge that looks like a monkey. That's a pirate or something like that. I think it's like general nerdy stuff. Like I know Jerry does pinball and there's like a bunch of video game and movie stuff there.

Dave Jones: It's very game oriented and things like that. So.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it looks fun as hell. I mean, you know, cruises are fun, but like they're. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're a huge Petri dish of. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So anyway, back to. Well, I was just going to say like, that might actually lead. Like maybe we should talk more about like, okay, so, so if there's a student and they're looking to like work on stuff at home, first off, our heart goes out to you. That, that sucks. I mean, like you're going to be losing access to university gear and that's unfortunate. And you have to take online classes, which I'm, I'm not a fan of personally. I can't do them very well. Even though you do them. Most of them are like the theoretical ones that that's what I'm not a fan of. Like I would not be able to do a math one because there's no hands-on. And it's just like, oh, you know, that kind of thing. You're right. I have online classes for hardware, but there's the hardware component. So.

Dave Jones: Gotcha.

Chris Gammell: So I thought it'd be good to talk about like, what is a good setup for students for home? You know, like they just kind of like might be time for you to redo your.

Dave Jones: I was just thinking that a second ago. It, my mind was just racing going a Corona lab video. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's actually, that's a good idea. Yeah.

Speaker ?: Correct.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Cause there, there'd be some of my most popular videos, like how to set up a $300 lab, how to set up a, you know, this and that.

Chris Gammell: And yeah. I think it's good to have that anyway. So like one thing that I know now that I work in a shared workspace is just like, you can't really rely on the gear that's here. Like it's, you know, there, there are resources, but it's like, you know, it might be taken. It might be broken. Any, anyone who goes to a hacker space or a shared lab or anything like that, they, everybody knows this kind of everyone who's in that situation has experienced similar things. I'm sure.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And so having your hands on your own gear and knowing your own gear, I think even if it's low cost gear is a good backup and you always have access to it and it's good to know it really in depth. So personally, I would put the analog discovery on that list. I know it's a little bit pricey, but it's kind of a multi-tool.

Dave Jones: It's a good multi-tool in terms of that sort of thing, because it's got the signal capture generation, the login, the tree, you can do transfer functions and the software is very capable. Yeah. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And so there's also the ADALM 2000, which is like a more budget friendly one that analog devices offers, which, which actually is a, it's kind of weird. It's like the pinout is the same, but it's like a different instrument. Oh, I haven't seen that. Okay. And the software, I'm not as big a fan of the software. I've gotten really used to the waves software, which is what digital it uses. Yeah. And we've had Clint Cole on the show, the former president. I don't think he's the president anymore, but people go back and listen to him. And we jived, the three of us jived very well on the, I think you were on that show, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, I can't remember.

Chris Gammell: Maybe.

Dave Jones: It does. It does ring a bell.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It was years ago. It was. Yeah. And just Clint's view on engineering education, we jive with very well. So people will like that, I'm sure. But, but yeah, so the, so the ADL M 2000 is like a lower cost version, but I don't like the software as much.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: So, but you know, if you're cost constrained, that's something new there. I think it's like 160 versus 300 or so. And yeah, like the DMM that you, the Anang 8008, that one's good. There's, I'm sure there's other low cost ones, or you might make a new video about that.

Dave Jones: Nah, that's probably still the go-to one, I'd say.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Did I tell you I got a 121 GW?

Chris Gammell: No. I just went out and bought one. Yeah. It was, I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. It's a little, little upmarket for folks, but you know, that's what 220, I think shipped to here. Is it 200? I could have sent you one. Retail? Nah, come on, man. Support, support the EV blog.

Dave Jones: Oh, thank you very much.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, no, it's good. I like, I like the, I like the various, I haven't used all the functions yet, but you know, it's super fast on the connectivity tests and stuff like that. So yeah, I like it.

Dave Jones: Just make sure you have the latest firmware.

Chris Gammell: That's actually an interesting one.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. I don't think I've actually put it on the website yet. So yeah. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Another thing on the to-do list for Dave. Yeah. I think the other tough thing is having stuff at home, having access to gear when you need it, or having parts when you need it. That's really the problem, I think. You know, boards are super cheap these days. That's great. Obviously I'm going to promote KiCat as the low cost way to get your boards made. There's other options, of course, too, but you know, then you have to go and actually populate parts. So, you know, just keep an eye on your bomb costs and, you know, buy a couple extra, of course, but then soldering stuff, you know, TS 80, TS 100. I don't, I don't have a dog in the race. Dave cares, but I would actually probably recommend people go straight. If you're going to be staying at home, I would recommend you go straight to a combo pencil plus hot air gun. There's one they got around here for like 40 bucks on Alibaba.

Dave Jones: Yeah, there are quite a few on there, which are, yeah, dual soldering iron and, uh, and hot air station in the one thing.

Chris Gammell: Having, I mean, like try and get like a narrow, it feels like the ones that they ship with the hot air pencils are always like super, super wide. And that's good to have for like big parts, but like try and find one that's narrow so you can really direct your air. Yeah. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's like the, it's basically blowing. It's like a, it's like a mini hairdryer and then it kind of nozzles it down to different aperture sizes.

Dave Jones: They usually come with like a couple of different nozzle attachments though, don't they? Even the cheapies I'm sure do.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. But I just mean that even the smallest ones usually are too big for a lot of the things that I look at. So.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: But I think that's good to have too. Like if you're going to be at home, I think that's a great, a great thing to have too. And hand tools, you know, the cheap, you can get cheap hand tools to start with. I always like the, it was Adam Savage always talks about like buy the cheapest one at the beginning and use it until it wears out. And then buy the nicest one you can.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I like that. I like that as a, uh, as a methodology. What else? What else do people need?

Dave Jones: Well, the requirements are different. If you want like the smallest lab pod, do you want the smallest lab possible? Do you want the cheapest lab possible? Do you want a medium price lab where you've got reasonable amount of space on a big bench? Like it, you know, it does vary a lot.

Chris Gammell: So I was thinking just because of students, I was thinking cheapest, cheapest possible.

Dave Jones: Cheap as possible.

Chris Gammell: Generally is that, you know, hardware people are cheapskates. So there's also that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, of course. So yes, I will have to redo that video. Yeah, that'd be great.

Chris Gammell: That would be a great, that would be a great one just for travel and maybe the coronavirus

Dave Jones: update. Anyway, please leave it in the comments. If you've been hit, like as in their companies forcing you to work from home or if they haven't, I bet you they have plans in place.

Chris Gammell: Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. I've gotten a lot of those emails of like, here's what we're thinking about doing. Yep. Like, uh.

Dave Jones: That's the thing because the World Health Organization just yesterday declared it an official pandemic. And that's, I mentioned this in my live stream yesterday, that this is a trigger, like this is a threshold trigger level where companies and government departments and other things actually step up to another stage. My local school that Sagan and Huxley go to, for example, they already had plans in place. And as soon as the, who made the announcement, they sent out the email saying, right, who's made the announcement? It's pandemic. Therefore, we're officially in stage two. And, you know, stage three is like shut down the schools. So, and a lot of, you'll find a lot of companies and government, you know, facilities that includes universities and things like that will, they'll step up a level.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I found out that my work, that was actually one of my concerns too, is that my workspace might, they said they might, you know, shut down to like a lot of the members, but.

Dave Jones: And this is where it is all triggered from, right? Because on Twitter, you said, well, what stuff can I grab? You know, if they're booting us out. Yeah. You can't take your big boat anchor VNA, right? So.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, if I could, I just have to bring a truck, you know. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh man. Speaking of trucks or utes, are you going to buy that, that car that you posted?

Dave Jones: Oh, that butt ugly Mitsubishi Magna combined with a Holden Rodeo ute or whatever. Oh, geez.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So you should explain what this is.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's, I was looking for electric cars on the local car sales site. It just popped up and it's this like custom hybrid, but ugly. It's really ugly. Creature from the Black Lagoon kind of electric car. It's a hobby vehicle. How about that? It's a hobby vehicle. And they're charging a premium for it. It's like 27 grand. And it's only got like a, it's got a 20 kilowatt hour pack. And which isn't too bad. That's pretty good for a complete homemade do-it-yourself thing. But they've literally like welded two cars, like a car and a ute together. And it's, it's just the wow.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And a ute is a pickup truck. If people don't know what that is. A ute is a pickup truck. That's what they refer to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, there's a video and we'll link that in. It's real, it's real bad. It's, I mean, it's really fun to watch the guy explain it. And it's definitely like, you can tell it's a labor of love, but he's like, yeah. And I just found the front of this other car. And it's like, oh boy.

Dave Jones: So yeah, he was using whatever he had to hand, you know, and he had some old Nissan Leaf battery cells, you know, so the secondhand Nissan Leaf cells and things like that. So yeah, cause I've been, you know, for the last like year, I've been thinking about getting a fully electric car, right? Pretty much the only one you can get here. The only sensible choice is the Leaf.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: But to buy a new one, it's like $55,000. Ooh, damn. Right? Aussie. That's.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. My buddy just got a Chevy Bolt. So there was a Chevy Volt.

Dave Jones: They used to sell that here, but you can't buy it anymore. That's, it's actually discontinued.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, they stopped making it here too.

Chris Gammell: And that was a, that was like a short range that only had like, I think like 30 to 50 miles.

Chris Gammell: 30 to 50 Ks or something. Yeah. It was, it was hopeless. But then it had a two stroke that charged the battery. So that's like how that worked, which is kind of interesting as like a hybrid kind of thing. The new one though, the Chevy Bolt is. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. That, that would have worked for my use usage scenarios. Cause I basically don't, you know, the furthest I go is like driving to school and kids to school and stuff like that. So 30 to 50 Ks per day, that would have done me if I, if I charged it every day, you know, so that's enough, but yeah, fully electric car. I'd love to get a leaf, but it's like, you know, the only, only one affordable is like a 2016, 2015 model. You know, it was like, it's already like five years old now. And it's like, you know, right.

Chris Gammell: Right. And then, yeah. And you worry about batteries. Right. Totally. Totally.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, and I don't, you know, it's a shame because it'll be a boat. It's guaranteed to be a boat anchor in like four years time.

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: If you don't, well, pretty much right. That battery pack will go down to pretty useless stuff. Like, I mean, it's the problem is right. A, a 2015 leaf can't even get me to the blue mountains and back.

Chris Gammell: Got it. Okay. So, so let me talk about this one though. So I just, I just, I just found out. Yeah. That's like when you guys vacation. Uh, Oh yeah. I went up there too. That's right. The Chevy bolt though is coming to Australia. It said. So, uh, but it's got, it's got like a, it's got like a 400 K range. It's crazy.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But it'll, that'll be $70,000 here.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's yeah. You guys are way off. Why is it so expensive? It just imports or what?

Dave Jones: Well, the Australian dollar is not doing that great. It's, you know, it's not good, but we don't have any subsidies here, of course. And then the reason that the Teslas are so expensive is because they get hit with the luxury car tax. I mean, a Tesla here is like $170,000, right? For the high end, like the S model or whatever it is.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Which is like a 70% premium on what it would be. Well, no, no, no. Yeah. I guess the conversion rate. That would be.

Dave Jones: Even with the conversion. Cause we don't have subsidies. You guys have subsidies, right? So it's cheap. So everyone's got a bloody Tesla over there. It's not cheap. The S model is not cheap. Well, but still, you know, actually the, the model three is reasonable, isn't it? And isn't it like 30 K us or something?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's, that is the cheap, cheaper one. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But that actually translates to $70,000 here. If you buy it on the road, it's like 70 K plus that that's luxury car price category here.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's outside my price range personally. So maybe you and your fancy EV blog.

Dave Jones: I can drive. I drive a Toyota Corolla. You've been in it, right? My little second Toyota Corolla. And it's like that brand new is like 25,000. So the nearest EV I can buy is double the price of a petrol car, of an internal combustion engine car. It's just, yeah. So people don't realize how expensive these things are. There's only one thing to do. What's that?

Chris Gammell: Start your own electric car company.

Dave Jones: Right. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Just like I start my own power. People keep every, like probably once a week I get an email, oh, why don't you build your own home storage battery thing? You can weld all the cells together. I was like, oh God, no, no thanks. It's like, it's the last thing I want to do is, you know, try and salvage all these second hand batteries from everywhere and design all the custom welding brackets to, you know,

Chris Gammell: like. So like we've had, uh, Paul Kenna, Paul Kenna has written in a couple of times and we had, we've highlighted, uh, was it Jorge? I forget the one guy's show or YouTube channel as well, but there's a couple of like YouTube channels about this kind of thing too. Yeah. They're dedicated to it. And like, yeah, they're, they're really giving them, but it seems like it takes time and it's like, you know, it seems like they're being safe about it.

Dave Jones: Like it's a year's worth of work before they got it all finished and installed. It's like, you know, okay, well, great. And yeah, it's an excellent hobby, but it's not for me. You know, I just don't have the time to devote to a project like that, even though, yeah, I could do videos on it, but you know, it's, yeah, it's going to keep dropping. Yep. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: This is the problem with being a cheapskate, you know, like we're not going to be leading, not leading edge, Dave.

Dave Jones: Well, see, that's the problem. I'd love to get an electric car so that I can do blogs about owning an electric car. Right.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's a business expense then, you know?

Dave Jones: Well, no. Yeah. I can write it off in business. Is anything under, well, no, they just changed it overnight. Literally overnight, they just changed the rules here because we have a huge stimulus package here in Australia, like $2 billion stimulus package or whatever. It used to be that you could write off business expenses under $30,000. In fact, it used to be 20. So originally like eight years ago or something, they brought in the law that any expense under $20,000, you can instantly write it off on your tax. You don't have to depreciate it. And then two years back or something, they changed. Rule 179 in the States is like that too. Okay. That's the equivalent, is it? Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So that was 20 grand. That was generous. Then they increased it to 30 grand. And when the 20 grand one came in, all of a sudden, car yards started selling all these utes for $19,999. Right? Magically. Right? Yeah. That happened. Yeah. Oh, you want wheels with that, sir? Okay. We can, you know, you just give us, you know, $500 for wheels. Yep. And another $1,000 for wheels and we'll invoice you for $19,999.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah. Anyway, so 30 grand, but overnight, breaking news, they've raised it to a hundred.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. This is breaking news for many people.

Dave Jones: $150,000.

Chris Gammell: Well, there you go. Now it's time to, you know, upgrade the lab. You can get new, uh, you buy that fancy VNA you're looking at. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like everything you need, Dave. That's specifically what they said. It's like, you can outfit your new office, you know, because office outfits will cost, you know, $50,000, $100,000.

Chris Gammell: Spend local too.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep. So that's what they're, yeah, that's what they're encouraging. $150,000. But of course, once again, for those who don't know, and a lot of, I'm stunned at the number of people who don't realize this. So I have to keep reiterating it. Just because you get a tax write-off on something doesn't mean you get it for free.

Chris Gammell: That's right. That's right. You save about 20 to 30%. That's a nice discount. But yeah, you're still spending that money that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's a nice discount, but it's still money out of your pocket. So if I went out and bought that $70,000 Tesla, it's still going to cost me like $50,000. Well, no, it's still not. It literally is $70,000 out of my operational income. You know? Yeah. Right. Because I would have been able to write it off anyway. It's just that I would have written it off over a longer period of time. And by writing it off, all that means is that, well, you don't pay tax on that money. So it's like that profit that you would have made that would have been profit in your cash in your pocket. But yeah. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: I think what you really got to do though. So my buddy actually drives a Tesla and it's a company car and he has a wrap on it though with the company logo.

Dave Jones: A wrap? Oh, right. Like a deckle stickle.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, no, like the whole car is wrapped though. So it's all like, so it's a white Tesla, white Tesla that's wrapped in a black wrap with the company logo on it.

Dave Jones: Why?

Chris Gammell: Because it looks cooler. I mean, like the, the mirrors are yellow and like it, like it looks like the logo is kind of silly, but like the Tesla itself, I mean, like it looks, it looks awesome. You know, it's like, it's a way to customize with a painting basically. I got it. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But it's got the company logo on it and it's a company car. And so, yeah, it's, it's great. It's great for him.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Chris Gammell: Jeez.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So I would love an electric car for those saying I would love it. But cause I've mentioned before, I'm scaling back my lab. I'm going back to my smaller lab. Have actually advertised my current lab. So if anyone wants a hundred square meter lab in a Norwest Business Park or in Sydney, nice one. You can.

Chris Gammell: We'll add a link in the show notes, I guess.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Please come and take over my lease. Please come and take over my lease.

Chris Gammell: You owe us a real estate commission, Dave. Right.

Dave Jones: I owe myself and we'll split it down the middle. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. That's great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, yeah. But I suspect with, you know, like so many people are in, are going to be in financial shock over this whole thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I mean, it's, it's going to be bigger than the coronavirus itself will be the financial impact, the financial fallout from this.

Chris Gammell: And I don't know if I'd make that prediction, but.

Dave Jones: Well, you know, yeah, it's not if you die from it. It'll be significant.

Chris Gammell: It'll be significant. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Anyway, no, it's going to be huge. Um, a worldwide recession is guaranteed. A worldwide depression is a possibility. So. So sunshine and happiness here on the Amp Hour. It is. Practical reality, unfortunately. So yeah, I don't like my chance. So I think I'm stuck here paying now, technically paying for both places until October, end of October. So that's not good. So yeah, I'm trying to go into, you know, cash saving mode. So I don't know, but yeah, I'd love to have an electric car. It'd be, it'd be fun, but yeah. They're like limited range. Can't even get me up the mountains.

Chris Gammell: I take a, I take a light electric vehicle to work every single day. Did you know that? Yeah. Train, right? A train. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: We've got a driverless train here now.

Chris Gammell: Oh, fancy.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Just outside. Yeah. Yeah. In the business park here now. We've got a new station that wasn't here when you were here. When you visited. I think they were doing construction when I was there. Yeah. They were doing construction. Yeah. Yeah. But no, the Sydney is.

Chris Gammell: Is it like a tram or it's actually.

Dave Jones: It's actually, no, it's actually a train. It's, it's a fully, you know, it's a fully, you know, most of it's underground. It's the longest tunnel in Australia. It's a 30 kilometer long, 35 kilometer long tunnel or something. And geez, it's super quick. You know, in fact, it's these pesky humans that are the problem, which actually limits the speed. It limits acceleration speed because all the platforms have these barriers on them. Right. So you can't. So the trains can actually come into the station faster because they don't have to worry about idiots falling onto the tracks.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah. Once you've got those barriers up, right. You can zoom in and then slam on the brakes and then load people on zoom back out. Right. So it's very, it's much more efficient system that way. But the, the limit is, is us pesky humans trying to stand up in the train. You can't, they can't make it any faster. Otherwise we'd simply all fall over.

Chris Gammell: Those G's. Yeah. You got to watch.

Dave Jones: So they should have put seats in where we're all just, you know, strap in and yeah.

Chris Gammell: Put, suspend people in some kind of gel.

Dave Jones: Gel or something. Yeah. It just, yes. It can't go anywhere. And yeah. But yeah. Limits on, on technology because, you know, us humans have a requirement to survive. Yeah. Yeah. Very pesky. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And it's fully electric, fully autonomous. So maybe I can get like a tour of the, how it all works and stuff like that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That'd be cool.

Dave Jones: Maybe the company who developed it or something, all the controls and things like that. Because you can go to the front and the kids love every time you go on it, the kids want to go to the front where there's a window. Cause there's, there's no driver there. Right. So you can literally sit like right at the front window as it's whizzing through the tunnel. And yes. Like sometimes I go, Oh, it just accelerated. Why did it do that? That's, is it programmed to do that? Or is it making the decisions on its own? Is it like, because it's like behind, Oh, I'm 30 seconds behind time. Accelerate. Um, and it's like, Whoa, you know, it feels a bit uneasy that it's doing this, you know, it feels a bit weird. So anyway, trust in the technology.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's nice for you though, to get access, access to downtown.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. It's great now. Yeah. I can just hop on and yep. Yeah. Absolutely. Fantastic.

Chris Gammell: You may be used to podcast advertising random products. Let's be honest. Online mattress sales are kind of a snooze. So here at the Amp Hour, we're selecting advertisers that work on things that are interesting to our audience and they offer learning resources and information that adds value. That's why we're pairing up with Screaming Circuits, an online friendly assembly service. Once again, here's Dwayne Benson talking about some of the common issues they see for boards being submitted to be manufactured by them.

Chris Gammell: Well, we find a lot of footprint problems and that is someone using a footprint from their CAD library that's close, but not exact. Again, with bigger components, you can often get away with that. But when you're talking fractions of a millimeter, you really need to be exact. And we will find a lot of components where the footprint doesn't match the part, where the footprint is odd shaped or the component is odd shaped and the footprint is a conventional shape. We find a lot of issues with the marking, with polarity. And between our software systems, our visual inspectors and our automated inspection systems, we spend a lot of time making sure that we catch all of those things before they get out the door.

Chris Gammell: But Dwayne's not just in charge of marketing. He also uses the service and has challenged himself to use some really tiny components he talked about last time.

Chris Gammell: Component was 0.62 millimeters by 0.62 millimeters with three copper pads underneath, two of one side and a third of a different size. And yeah, everything is a precision. Everything is important at that point. Despite the fact that I know better, I made the footprint wrong and that led to a little bit of an issue. It's still stuck on there, but it's tilted a little bit because I made one copper pad smaller than I should have been.

Chris Gammell: So I asked Dwayne to summarize his experience with footprints and what advice he might have for the listeners of the Amp Hour.

Chris Gammell: Always double check your footprints and make sure you're clear marking the polarities of diodes, especially LEDs. Never put an open via in a pad. If you put an open via in a pad or even close to a pad without solder mask between the via and the pad, what happens is capillary action will cause the solder paste to suck down into the via and you won't get enough solder for a good solid joint with your component. Sometimes you'll even get solder splash on the backside of the board. It can cause shorts or similar issues to that.

Chris Gammell: Talking about footprints via in pad and proper setup for your design is something that Dwayne has written about extensively. We'll link some of his posts to the Screaming Circuit blog in the show notes. And go to screamingcircuits.com slash the Amp Hour to learn more about getting your boards assembled in a high quality facility on a fast timeline. That's screamingcircuits.com slash the Amp Hour. And now back to the show.

Dave Jones: What should we talk about? Oh, our company's going bust. You know, boosted boards went bust. Oh, yeah, that was interesting. Well, did they go bust or were they? Well, no, they haven't.

Chris Gammell: They raised funding. The thing I was interested in with this is they raised funding. There's a couple articles about that, but this is actually written by Phil from Adafruit. And then he also writes about. So basically, one of the reasons they quoted for laying a bunch of people off was basically tariffs in the US, the 25% that we've talked about on here. And they use that. I think that may have been a bit of a dodge on their part. I'm sure that impacted profits, no doubt, but like laying off almost everyone. It's like, OK, either your selling price is way wrong or you were looking for a reason to get rid of everyone, which, you know, the conspiratorial side of me says it's more like that. I don't have any dog in the race. I don't know otherwise. But because of that, Phil also wrote about how the tariffs have been impacting Adafruit, which is also interesting and how they had asked for an exemption. They didn't get it, basically, but they're still operating and that kind of thing. And then how basically how the coronavirus is also impacting them.

Dave Jones: So hasn't the US just banned all imports from the EU? Oh, I don't know about imports.

Chris Gammell: I know travel. I didn't.

Dave Jones: I heard it included transport as well.

Chris Gammell: You mean merchandise and stuff like? Yeah. Like tariffs? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Couriers and stuff. Like, I could be wrong on that. So maybe I should check.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, you should check just because I might be, you know, missing some shipments or something, you know? Right. But yeah. So basically, you know, Phil wrote about how they were already prepping because of the Chinese New Year. Personally, like I said, I have three builds this week. I've seen all of the board capabilities come back of all the fabs that I work with. So in terms of like the supply disruption, it seems like that has been less of a disruption than I thought it would be.

Dave Jones: I am amazed at how quickly China got back into almost full production. I'm not going to say full production because there's still a ton of people working from home and tons of other things. But I'm amazed at how quickly they've gotten back into assembly of boards and those other because there's tons of talk about this on the forum. It's yeah, it's very impressive. Yeah. Yeah. Because like some people who are in China on the forum actually live there. They are residents. And they're saying about, yeah, there is some sort of app or something is tied in your social credit score or whatever. And if you're and there's some barcode. And if you're scanned as green, then you're free to travel anywhere. But if you're not, then you're locked down. But yeah, I'm amazed at the companies that are back.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Pros and cons, you know, the pros being that they got back to work and, you know, they were able to travel again. The cons being everything else about that system. Yeah, I know. Well, let's, you know, that's a separate argument. But I mean, from being able to react to stuff, I mean, like the 10 day hospital build, that was amazing. There was, who did a video about, someone did a video about that, about like the, how fast it was built and everything like, and it was just unbelievable. The logistics. Yeah. It's amazing.

Dave Jones: But anyway, so yeah, a lot of people are saying, oh yeah, I'm ordering my assembled boards and they're coming in from JLC or, you know, whoever. Yeah. PCBWay, whoever. You happen to be, yeah. Whoever you happen to be using. And yeah, they just, not, not a hundred percent back, but geez, they're, they're really going, pulling out all the stops to try and get things back in business. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm sure that they have, you know, the imperative is, you know, if it's an export based country, like that's how, where all the money comes from. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of other China assemblers, this is an interesting thing. So people may remember, we talked about this kind of when it came out. So seed was one of the first ones. I think the first, they started the open parts library, which was basically like a list of, I think it's 650 components that were like, the idea was you have these, you know, you have these kind of generic, generic sized components. You're saying like, I need a 1k resistor. That's 5%. Yeah. I don't care what the part number is. And I totally agree with everything about that. Like, I don't, I do not care. I don't want to put that in my parts list. I'd love to have like a generic part number outside.

Dave Jones: You're not going to Mars. It's like, you, you know, it's like, yeah, you just don't care.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Or even if you are going to Mars and you're like 5%, it's a 5% resistor. If you, if you put a 5% resistor down, you don't care about that resistor.

Dave Jones: No, no. Trust me. You do. If you're going to Mars, you care.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You're probably not speculating 5% resistors then. That's what I'm saying.

Dave Jones: No, no, no, no, no. But no, but it's not 5%. It's about knowing, having the known brand.

Chris Gammell: Oh, true. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. Supply chain. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's not about that. It's about that exact part is proven and, and qualified, either flight qualified or space qualified or military qualified or whatever. You know, you can't just substitute, even though it's a 5% carbon resistor, you cannot substitute.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You're saying you want to have knowledge of your full supply chain at that point.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Yeah. That makes sense.

Dave Jones: No. Yeah. It's not just knowledge of the supply chain that you can get it and stuff like that. It's the fact that it has been qualified because it could have a different Temco. It could have different failure modes or that manufacturer is just simply not trusted to have a consistent production quality. For example, that's why parts are qualified and things like that. And yeah.

Chris Gammell: And that's why you have component engineers and all that other stuff. That's, that's a good point.

Dave Jones: If you're anyone who's worked on any large company, military or space or yeah, no, no, no, you aren't. So you don't care. And most, probably most of us, unless you've been there, but I've been in that industry where yeah, every item on the bomb must have three different, three different fully qualified parts. And you specify the part number down to the nth number on the thing. And then that's what the buyers then go out and buy. It must be that part. And it must be from this.

Chris Gammell: It's no deal. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's, it's no deal. Yeah. They simply cannot get it.

Chris Gammell: So. So, oh, and then it's just, the numbers went up on mine. So 850, it looks like instead of 650, I don't know where it went up when I clicked it. But anyway, so this was an idea that they started a long time ago. Octopart went and took it and they went to, they called it the common parts library and they did a similar thing as well. And I really liked this idea. I think it's, you know, I think it's a great idea. And there's a lot of part, you know, once you, especially if you're in passive jelly bean kind of stuff, you know, you're two N3904s, uh, you know, you're, you're, they even went into like Bluetooth, uh, modules and stuff like that, which I had a little bit less, uh, agree with, but whatever. It doesn't matter. I would say recently, but I just missed this when this happened. Seed started taking this idea and they, they twisted a little bit. I don't quite agree with like what they, they call it because it's not really, they call it the Shenzhen's Shenzhen OPL, but it's, it's more like they're just putting 25,000 parts from the Chinese supply chain that would not otherwise be out there. They're putting them in their site and that has value, but I wouldn't call that the open parts list. It's basically a Shenzhen's parts list, which is fantastic on its own. So once I've separated the two things as being very different, this is access to a whole boatload of other parts that I had not seen before. And like, sometimes they're very, very hard to get access to.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Especially like things that are like really, really expensive. If you're on a DigiCare Mouser, sometimes they're just super cheap, like the connectors.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Cause you can pay dollars for a single connector. You know, if you get it for a DigiCare Mouser, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, totally. And this is, you know, a 10th the price, the 20th the price. And it's like, you know, of course, like you were saying, you know, the quality could be very different. You know, you need to qualify it. But like when people like send a board over to a JLC or a seed or anyone else like that, they're, they're usually going to try and replace it anyways. Cause they want the margin and you know, you usually want a lower cost board. And so you're like, yeah, I don't care about that, that, and that. Oh, my, my 0.1 inch headers aren't, aren't exactly what I thought they were. It's like, okay, I'm not doing, I'm not doing 2000 insertion cycles. I don't care about that 30 mil of gold. I don't even care if there is gold, you know? So it's like, yeah, so definitely double check your parts. But like, this is an interesting, you know, I I've had a couple of parts where they've been recommended to me from a, a overseas supplier. And I look up, I Google the part and I just can't find it. It's like, okay. You know, and it's a legitimate part. I know it is. I trust the people that I'm working with, but it's like, there's no data in from, there's no information online. And now this, some of this stuff is, and I noticed that it's actually, there's actually no product pages for each individual piece. And a lot of the part names and categories are in Chinese.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So I'm looking at it now and it's like, yeah, you know, like. So some of that's tough.

Chris Gammell: And some of it actually, I did find one of the parts that I had been recommended by my supplier that was actually on here. But when I say there's no product page, it would be like an individual resistor. Like I was being recommended. It doesn't have a page that Google can find and can look for. This is all based on JavaScript. This search engine is basically pulling from a.

Dave Jones: And they don't have data sheet links. There's a thing like a lot of, like I'm, I'm actually, some of them do, but some don't. Oh, okay. They just, I cannot click on some of them.

Chris Gammell: Some of the ones I'm looking at right now. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So hit or miss on some of these things, but like, even just the fact that they're in there and what's interesting to me is like, I have not experienced parts that are just in Chinese. Right. And it's like, okay, maybe that's why part of my searching is, you know, I can't type Chinese characters. Maybe if I search based on those characters, I could find it. But as of right now, I don't, I got nothing. You know?

Dave Jones: No, that's, that's why in the hardware group at Altium, we specifically had a Chinese engineer there.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: Specifically because of his, you know, language skills. You know? Yeah. He was good at, you know, but yeah. So that he could like find these things and interface and talk to suppliers and things like that. That was important. Oh, by the way, and, and update. No, that ban, the U S ban does not, it applies to people, not goods. Apparently there was a lot of confusion around it. You know, who had to come out and tweet that and actually clarify that it was, yes, it's people, not goods. Cause a lot of people were going, holy shit, you're banning everything, including goods.

Chris Gammell: Right. That would, that would be a huge trade hit. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And apparently that was a lot of what the stock futures, why they tumbled. Got it. That among other things. Yeah. Yeah. So they had to, it's going to be bargains out there folks.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's right. Yep. Save your pennies. Yep. So anyways, this is a interesting insight into the, you know, we've also, you know, we've said for LCSC as well, that's another way to find a lot of interesting parts you might have access to. Otherwise this one's a little more raw because like I said, a lot of it is in Chinese. But Google translates the thing and, you know, figure it out, you know, so it might be a way to find some alternate parts and at least ask your supplier about it. So it's interesting. I'm still curious about like how the fabs work over there too. Like, like I assume that some of these are like, you know, old designs or replicated designs and similar things like where the data sheets, sorry, where the actual like part designs are coming from. Like making a 2N35904 transistor is not hard at this point. Right. But well, it's hard for me and not hard for them. But like, but a lot of, you know, there's some higher level chips that are also getting made. And I don't know if they're like a replicate replicated versions of existing chips or if they're homespun or, you know, like I just, I literally don't have a genuine, like, yeah.

Dave Jones: Re-engineered clones like, or re-engineered equivalents or are they clone ripoffs, you know, kind of thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Or not even, or even like just a new design. Right. So if it's like a RS-232 transceiver, right. Is it the, the, is it a copy of the Max 232? Is it a matching the replica, the functionality of the Max 232 as best they can with a different design? Or is it even, like, I have so little knowledge of this. Like, is it even like a, you know, it's still the RS-232 standard, but it's not, but like, it's just a different spec too. It's not trying to match any existing parts. It's just like, here's a new part for you. You know, like, so those are kind of the three levels it could be. And I don't know there. So I'm, if anyone has knowledge of this, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Dave Jones: Well, the, the answer is there are three options. Like it varies. You can get all of them.

Chris Gammell: The answer is probably yes. Yeah. Yes.

Dave Jones: Yes to all of them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But I would be interested too, of like, are there, are there different fabs that are doing different things, you know, or some, like, and which ones are which, you know, like, so if, if, and when we're going to dip a toe into this new world of, of parts opened up to us, I'd love to see a, a name of a fab and be like, oh, I know that fab. They, they make good custom parts. Right. Or, or they make good clones or they make, you know, bad clones, you know, that kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah. These traditionally Chinese market only companies might have very good reps in China. For example, they may, they may be like the equivalent to TI or somebody here. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, I guess at the end of the day, I, I don't have a whole lot of brand loyalty. And if I'm being completely honest, a lot of the chip makers are eating one another. There's, there's fewer and fewer. So like if the Chinese companies are going to be, you know, it's usually bottom up innovation anyways. Right. So usually it starts in more of a cloning replica, you know, not cloning chips, but like maybe, you know, making second sources and some other things, but then they move up the value chain. So I'd love to know that sooner than later and actually get to know the companies. So yeah. I don't know.

Dave Jones: If, if anyone knows like, or if anyone wants to compile, if anyone's an expert in, you know, in China about these things, you know, is there like a compiled list or can you compile a list of like known reputable manufacturers in China? For example, like, you know, here you would list off your, you know, your Texas instruments and all your, you know, all your regular names that we used to.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. When, when you buy from them, you can be guaranteed that they're good. So. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be nice. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So it's interesting. Interesting. Look into that, that world.

Dave Jones: Right. So can we continue on with our coronavirus impact video? Because it's, it's huge. We, we're going to be talking about this for a long time. The open hardware, like everything's, I joked on Twitter that the half jokingly that the next EEV blog meetup will be at the opera house because they'll be so desperate, the Sydney opera house, because they'll be so desperate for business that, that we'll be able to get it cheap. Like, it's like, seriously, every event's being canceled. It's nuts. Including the open hardware summit. Well, it's not canceled. They've gone virtual.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, yeah. The in-person stuff's all canceled, which I, we should say here too. Like I'm actually for this. I think, you know, it's, they talk about flattening the curve.

Dave Jones: I think that's a really good thing. I'm not against it, but it's just, it's a fact that it's happening, you know, whether or not, whether or not you agree with it, whether or not you agree with it, you still have to deal with it. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes no difference.

Chris Gammell: So, so the virtual one is, so we're recording this on Thursday. This shows you got on Sunday, uh, the summits tomorrow. So unfortunately people are here. Yeah. So they won't be able to watch it live, but what that means is they're probably going to put more focus on, you know, one thing that I've noticed at conferences is like, yeah, there's recording. It's not like huge. It's like, yeah, we want to capture this, but it's not like the main thing that's happening. And what'll be interesting to me is if like the quality of interactions and, and video and other things, you know, like, like one thing that always happens at conferences is people in the audience, you know, shout out their questions, you know, that kind of thing happens. Yeah. Of course. Like chaos camp chaos or say chaos Congress in, in Germany and, uh, in the winter and like Christmas time, they're always very good. Like they make people stand at the mics. That's the only way you can ask questions. It's yeah. Sure. Questions. That's more formal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're super dialed in on that stuff and it's really, really good. And what that means is then you can hear the questions being asked and like, and so like at Kicon, we, we actually just pretty much skip questions because like, if you, we couldn't do that, you know, we just didn't have the overhead for it. Sure. And, uh, and so when it's an all online conference, it might get better, you know? Yeah, it could. So that's good. It could, could be a silver lining.

Dave Jones: By the way, I got an invite to do a keynote address at a, um, hacker conference. Um, it's here, here in Australia. It's up in, uh, Brisbane actually. But yeah, I, I don't think I'll do it. I can't see the, the, the time invest. Well, one of the things is they said, we, we don't allow recording of any, anything. And it's like, uh, really? What am I going to spend like, or like a week of my time? Like I've got to, you know, some think of a keynote thing, write it, you know, rehearse it or whatever.

Chris Gammell: And yeah, some of the hacker conferences are, are very, uh, are very privacy.

Dave Jones: They're very privacy thing. And it's like, I can't get any content out of it. It's like, well, there's no value in it for me. Unfortunately. That's, that's, yeah, I would, I would like to do it, but I can't afford to like go and spend a week of my life, given a keynote at some hacker conference to, you know, a hundred people. My business has to stop to do that. Right. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, speaking of travel in general too, I think that like that, you know, this kind of like just modulates travel schedules in general. Like I, I, people ask me about Kaicon already. That's going to happen in Switzerland. Apparently Switzerland said everything's canceled through the end of the year. We'll see. We'll see if that's, uh. Oh, when, when was the conference? It's supposed to be the September 11th of 13th.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. September's still a far way off, but okay. So Switzerland have come out and said.

Chris Gammell: I, I heard that. I didn't, I have not verified anything about it yet. So, so as, as of right now it's on, but I, I don't know, you know, but I think in general, like, I think a lot of the, you know, the, the usual times when I want to go and see people and the reason to be at these conferences anyways, it's just to. Is to meet up. Yeah. Yeah. And interact and stuff like that. And so, um, yeah, it's going to, maybe we'll have to do some virtual meetups or something like that. I don't know. I don't know how that would work, but yeah. Yeah. I guess this is, this is what my weekly virtual meetup, right?

Dave Jones: Right. Well, podcasts are going to explode, aren't they? All these remote interview podcasts. Yeah, maybe. We're on the right ticket, you know, cause no one wants to meet in person anymore. It's like. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Well, cause I, we were just discussing this before the show. Like I've had like things planned where I'm going to visit places and stuff like that. It's like, well, do I hold off? I know I shouldn't be, you know, fearful of doing stuff like that, but like some of these companies may.

Chris Gammell: It feels responsible. It feels responsible. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It feels irresponsible. You know, I'm getting the feeling that, oh, that's kind of irresponsible if I go and go visit places and things like that. When we're being advised. Yeah. When we're being advised not to do this sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Totally. Totally.

Dave Jones: And, and it's not going to get any better in the, like, you know, in the coming, in the next month or two. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think it's only going to get more serious. So I don't know. So all these plans I had to like go out and do onsite stuff, maybe, maybe delayed yet again.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Got to stay in the lab, I guess. Oh yeah. Gosh darn it. Yeah. Oh man. Reclusive engineer has to stay in lab. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's, it's hardly a punishment. It's all remains the same. It's not a punishment to an engineer. Like you'll stay home in your lab. Okay.

Speaker ?: Woo.

Dave Jones: Thank you very much. Yeah. Anyway, what else we got?

Chris Gammell: Well, I guess one thing that is different or sorry, one thing that's kind of tied to the open hardware summit, the new CERN licenses out. So that's an open hardware license. That's.

Dave Jones: Can we have a TLDR? What's the, what's the changes? Why do we care about an updated license? Are there major structural changes?

Chris Gammell: There are variants now for collaborative models and that's about as far as I got. So.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. Collaborative models.

Chris Gammell: I mean, some of the folks like Javier who works on some, he's a big proponent of KiCad within CERN as well, worked on this with as well as other people. And so, yeah, it's interesting. It's another model. I still don't really get licensing every time it comes up. My eyes kind of glaze over in general, but I think it's good for people to know about it and they can go and read about it.

Dave Jones: What do you mean in terms of licensing?

Chris Gammell: Like what, what, what makes my eyes glaze over?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Everything. That's right. I don't know. Like the differences between the different ones that are out. I, I, first off, it's a little confusing. And then, you know, the, the details that are out there, like the software licenses that are out there too, of like Apache and copyleft and all the, all the different things that are, you know, MIT license. Like I don't get it, but I don't really.

Dave Jones: You, you're more like don't care rather than don't.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I didn't want to say it, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Sort of don't. Yeah. You don't care first. And then.

Chris Gammell: But I think the thing is like anything I'm working on that's, you know, quote unquote open source that I'm, you know, saying is open source. It's not for sale, right? These are companies and organizations and people with legal teams that care about this stuff. So that's why it matters.

Dave Jones: You're not picky about your license. You go like, you shrug your shoulders and go, I don't know. It's just open. Yeah. You know, like copy it. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Whatever. Right. It's probably not worthwhile enough yet. Whereas, you know, yeah, someone who's selling a commercial product, they probably care a lot more about what you can and can't do with it. If it ends up impacting future, you know, hardware, stuff like that. So.

Dave Jones: Do you have any idea about the registration system for open, you know, how the open, the, the open hardware group. Yeah. They had, you know, this register. Yeah. Is that, is that still a thing? Are people like registering their products in there? Did it. Yep. Yeah. That's still going. Yep. Definitely. Still going.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So that's like a certification process.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. I can't say I've really seen it around much. I've seen it in there. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I haven't seen it a ton, but it is definitely still going.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Yeah. Do they use the CERN open hardware license as a, as a base? Are they going to adopt this 2.0?

Chris Gammell: I couldn't tell you, Dave. That's, that's something to watch the videos for. Christopher J. Gamble. Javier, Javier is one of the people giving a talk. I know at the open hardware summit. So he was supposed to travel for it. Obviously he's going to do it remote now. So that would be a good link for that. Excellent. Yeah. Yeah. So I blew up a board this week. Woo! It was, yeah, it was pretty bad. The reason I brought up the analog discovery too, is because I, I was not able to replace one of the boards that was on there. And it was basically like taking analog signals in and pushing analog signals out. And one of the things I was pretty proud of myself with, I was able to replace the board. I was able to simulate the board with scripting, which was pretty cool.

Dave Jones: Whoa.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So basically like I'm, I'm pushing this board control voltages and then it's doing a thing and then it's returning control voltages. Yeah. So basically I just like wrote like a transfer function effectively in script. And then I also added some noise to make it look more realistic. And it was like, it was pretty cool.

Dave Jones: Standard smoke and mirrors demo. You like, you didn't even have to develop the hardware.

Chris Gammell: You just, I was thinking about that. I was thinking about like, yeah, like the, I was the man behind the curtain this week.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Nice. And, uh, oh, that could be the name of our episode. Man behind the curtain.

Chris Gammell: Man behind the curtain. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Engineer behind the curtain.

Chris Gammell: There you go. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Or man behind it. Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's great. Yeah. That's today's title. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But I was trying to think of like other, other scenarios where like, so one thing that kind of like brought up, it was a very high stress situation and I was glad I got it working, but I was thinking like, why don't I do this more often?

Dave Jones: You know, in terms of like, what smoke and mirrors demos. Not smoke, not smoke.

Chris Gammell: No, I was saying that like, this is like a, it's like a, I called it like a process simulator and that's kind of what it was. You know, basically when there's analog control signals like this anyways, this is not, that's not new to me, but I've never actually thought to like have like a, you know, it's effectively a perfect, a perfect interface. And like doing that same kind of thing would be actually really useful for, so like if I'm making a control board that is sending control voltages and measuring control voltages and all the other things, I've been working with the real board that I'm trying to control, but it would have been smart for me to make this thing, you know, six months ago.

Dave Jones: And yeah, exactly. You're saying you should do more simulation of, of modules. Yeah. Well, it's like simulation, but it's also, it's really, it's like, I don't know, there's

Chris Gammell: a better word for it though.

Dave Jones: Emulation. It's not simulation. It's more like hardware emulation kind of thing. You're emulating what the thing does.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if you've ever done anything like that, but it seems like I've literally never thought to do something like this. So.

Dave Jones: No, sometimes we do because we, we've got like a large project is always going to be like modular base. So we like, oh, we haven't finished, you know, some. Team or some or whoever hasn't finished that particular module yet, but we still need to sort of test how systems interact. So yes, we've had to emulate things before.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I mean, yeah. And I mean, like this was an analog version, but it just as easily could have been like, you know, taken I squared C signal, spit I squared C signal back out, you know, like that. And I've just, I've just, I'm sure the software people out there listening are like, yeah, idiot. This is how we test things. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: But, but yeah, I never thought that like, and I thought about simulating and, you know, test driven development and all that other stuff that's out there, but I never thought to do it. Like this is like a real world version of it. And I thought that was kind of neat. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'll do it again in the future. Hopefully I won't blow up stuff like this in the future, but it was a nice little, nice little add on from that. Well done. I was very proud of myself for actually writing scripts. Like it was like, I wrote, I wrote a script, Dave.

Dave Jones: In what? What? How did you write? What language?

Chris Gammell: The default in the wave software is JavaScript because that's what the whole program is written in. Got it. I'd probably choose Python normally, but I didn't want to, I didn't have time to do that. But I did talk to some people that use this and similar devices like it for like test stands. And, you know, this is kind of like a test stand. It's kind of like test stands are similar kind of idea.

Dave Jones: And if people don't know why it's so embarrassing for Chris, it's because it was in front of a client. So no, it wasn't. I didn't say that. Well, you said it was, yeah, no, it was for the show.

Chris Gammell: You said you were there for a client. Okay. It was for a client the day before. It was the last. Right.

Dave Jones: It was the day before. Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: That was, that was the embarrassing part. Yes. Thank you for, thank you for explaining the embarrassing part. I was definitely not leaving that out for a reason, but I recovered and it was not a big deal because it was not the reason I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't replace the board because I didn't design that board. And so that's why I wrote.

Dave Jones: And you can't spin it in 24 hours, really, you know, unless you already had all the parts and everything else.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, I actually blew up two boards, but one of them was my own. And so, and so the second board, I was able to replace the other board, you know, and that was the board that I made. And that was kind of the point, but I couldn't, I literally just couldn't get to the board in time.

Dave Jones: So did you tell the client that this is an emulated thing or did you just like.

Chris Gammell: I would definitely be in front of it then.

Dave Jones: Right. So you didn't make the actual board blinks and lights and stuff like that and then pretend it's doing that. No.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And it wasn't really consequential to the thing that I was showing. So like, that's not a huge deal.

Dave Jones: Right. But that's all right then.

Chris Gammell: I felt real dumb. Let me tell you that. I felt dumb at the beginning. And then once I calmed down, like the person I'm working with, calm me down and it was great.

Dave Jones: They calmed you down. They're sitting you in a corner with a. Sorry. I just visualized. And yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: There was like a blanket around my shoulders. Like you just brought it back and forth.

Dave Jones: There, there. It'll be okay. I mean, yeah. I mean, yeah. I don't know. It was like a high stress scenario.

Chris Gammell: And so my, my, my, you know, my partner on this was a very helpful and, and, and then, and then, you know, problem solving cake mode kicked in. So that was, it was a, it was, you know, an engineering challenge that I bested. So I was proud of that. Excellent.

Dave Jones: Well done. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Thank you. Thank you.

Dave Jones: Virtual pat on the back.

Chris Gammell: Thank you. Thank you. In terms of programming, there was a great, really old looking webpage from Stanford. That was just about, I was doing some C code last week. I think I, someone linked in and read it or something like that, but there's like this whole old Stanford webpage about how to handle bit twiddling. So like, like ending and oring and stuff like that. And I had a lot of trouble with this when I was getting started with, with firmware stuff. And so I think that, and, and, you know, this is talking about like, how do you divide by eight? Well, you can just shift by three, you know, that's three bits.

Dave Jones: I know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'd never really, I mean, I'm sure this is in books and stuff like that, but I thought it was great link. So we'll include that in the show notes. Do you know any, do you have any favorite, favorite, favorite hacks there?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Masking, bit masking and stuff like that. You can do lots of cool operations with the bit masking and you can, and you can change stuff directly on the ports. You know, if you're talking about micros and things like that, this is more like hard, like architecture specific and stuff like that. But you don't actually have to read the data back from the IO port. You can just like mask it right on the port and things like that. So like, normally you would like read the status of the port and then do your operations on it and then write it back to the port. Whereas, you know, you can do operations directly on ports and things like that, which is kind of cool without having to bring them into the accumulator of the processor and then put them back out and things like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I feel like, I feel like some of this too, like the people that are, again, the programmers out there are going to be like, okay, Chris. Uh, but especially the ones who are doing like, uh, like assembly and stuff like that. Like, it's just, this is, this is the name of the game for people that are writing assembly.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's totally bread and butter because you want any, like, you know, uh, David, for example, would be like, you know, he'd, he'd come racing in one day and went, I, I, I just doubled the speed of this IO right algorithm by doing this. It's like, okay. You know, like, yay, pat on the back. Were we hurting on speed? They get, yeah, no, we weren't, we weren't caring about speed, but you know, he was excited that he just doubled the speed of the algorithm. But now we doubled it, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's got to be more better.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, you're right. And the optimizers out there are very good at that kind of thing, you know?

Dave Jones: And then you usually can't read the code, you know, usually the code doesn't make sense to anyone else, you know, because you've done something unusual with, you know, bit shifting and flipping and all sorts of, you know, stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a good example of one of the ones that's on here. If people need a reason to go read this round up to the next highest power of two by float casting. So basically you take the number. Oh yes.

Dave Jones: I know about that. Yeah. I think David, David's boasted about that in the past.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Maybe he was just reading this page and just dribbling them out to you, Dave.

Dave Jones: No, it's just, yeah, this is bread and butter to all these software nerds. You know, it's, it's just bread and butter stuff. Yeah. Yeah. They just get totally turned on by this.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, they, they, they do it just because they can. Like often you don't, you know, usually you don't have to do this unless you're absolutely desperate for every cycle. Right. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly.

Dave Jones: You know, but they do it anyway because they can, you know, because it's just fun to figure out the most optimized way of doing things. You know, I used to have contests like that when I was more into programming, when I was younger, you know, and me and a friend of mine would have, you know, who could write the Titus algorithm to do this particular thing. I was a big fan of recursion. I was a big recursion fan boy. So I, I, I, uh, routine that core that passes data to itself and calls itself. And then, you know, it's escaping from a recursive routine as an art in itself. Do you have any of this code online anywhere? Oh, no, no, probably not.

Chris Gammell: I thought maybe like an old zone or something like that. Maybe it was, I don't know.

Dave Jones: Maybe. No, no, I know. It's not, I don't think, no, I don't think it's code I ever published. Okay. I probably still got it somewhere, but yeah, I, I, I wrote a formula solver algorithm that was completely recursive. It'd solve any length formula in one routine, right? It'd just like, it'd keep calling itself every time there's nested parentheses, for example, and it'd just keep calling itself and solve it and solve it and solve it all the way down.

Chris Gammell: Stop, stop calling yourself. Stop calling yourself. Stop calling yourself.

Dave Jones: Actually, I think I may have, yeah, I think that actually did make it into a product that I sold. I used to sell an engineering calculator program way, way back in the day. And I think it was in there. I think my, my recursive formula solver algorithm was in that. So, you know, yeah. Anyway, if you read the code, it's like, how does this thing work? It's like, yeah, trust me, it works. But you know, you don't have to understand it. Like it's not easy to understand even, even with the comments and stuff, you know? So, yeah. It's all about how, you know, you've got to keep that whole architecture of how it works in your head. You know, it's really hard to describe. Just be careful if you do that, kiddies.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Recursion is.

Dave Jones: But the good thing about it is job security. Job security.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's what we should be promoting here. Obscurity means security.

Dave Jones: Yes. Obscurity is job security. Yeah. T-shirt. Yeah. That's just, I'm looking at this webpage now. And yeah, there's just tons of these, you know, sign extension from variable bit width in three operations, you know, and determining if an integer is a power of two, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I will say one thing that I, is on my to-do list is like, like when I look at like a decompiled code and stuff like that, and like what is actually happening when, you know, like it's actually stepping through, I, I'm pretty, pretty lost on that kind of thing, but it's like, it feels like once you get far enough. I used to be able to do it.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But like, once you get far enough, if you're really, you know, like the 2am problem I talk about, like if you're really in the soup at 2am and you need to fix a thing, that's when it's really good to know that kind of thing. So at some point that is on my list of things to learn.

Dave Jones: Unfortunately, you use it so infrequently that you forget it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's true. Yeah. I was kind of hoping it would be like one of those, you know, you can read it, but maybe you wouldn't write it. You know, that one of those things, you know, like people who can hear a foreign language and kind of understand what's going on, but they don't, they couldn't, they couldn't write poetry in that language or.

Dave Jones: Or they can't write sheet music, but they can play Mozart. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of the level I'm going for. Right. Cool. Yeah. One last thing I want to mention from the comments or from the subreddit, there is an amazing graphic from a different subreddit actually called data is beautiful, but it's basically, it was from a couple of weeks ago, six months ago, rather. Uh, it, they more, they graph Moore's law and it's so much fun to watch because they actually, you know, they, they take Gordon Moore's prediction, which is doubling every six months or two or 18 months, whatever it was.

Dave Jones: 18 months. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Uh, and then they chart the, the transistor count of different processors and run into the released and it tracks, like it basically is like, it goes ahead a little bit and then it tracks back and it goes ahead and back and back and forth. And it's like, it's super fun to watch. So, um, we'll, we'll link that in as well. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right, man. Well, stay safe out there.

Speaker ?: That's it.

Dave Jones: Our amp hour's up. Yep. And, uh, bunker down.

Chris Gammell: Wash your hands, you know.

Dave Jones: Bunker down. Stay in cash. Stay liquid, folks.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Bring your lab with you. Bring your lab with you, you know.

Dave Jones: All right. And, and we rarely mention it, but, uh, thank you to our patrons. Please support the amp hour on Patreon.

Chris Gammell: We, we love our Patreon supporters for sure. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And because that, that helps pay for mics. Cause we send microphones out to every guest we have on and they get to keep them. And you know, it's, it's not like we get them back and yep. And, and we've got an editor now for those who don't know, or if you haven't realized, you may or may not have noticed, but yeah, we do have an editor who edits our episode for us now. So that allows us to focus on other stuff. So no. Yeah. And for those who don't know, we're back to using Zencaster. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: They don't care about that.

Dave Jones: Oh, but come on. Some people care about, we're engineer, nerdy engineers. They care about the mechanics of the show, how it's made.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Jeez.

Dave Jones: I think you underestimate our, uh, the, the nerdiness of our audience. Anyway, we were using that mumble to do our remote talking to each other and, and to do the recording, but yeah, we're back to using Zencaster and it's working pretty well. It's Zencast is better for guests having guests on for those who want to start their

Chris Gammell: own podcast. And one thing that Dave brought up is that there may be more podcasts, uh, out in the world now. And we always suggest that people start them. We love listening to them and stuff like that too. So that is actually a good way to get started. It's like, there's a free tier to get started. So if you're starting an engineering podcast, it's a good way to, to do it. And we like it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Cause it allows, yeah. Just to send a link to a guest, for example, just send them a link and boom, bingo. It all, it automatically records them and does everything else. So yeah, it's really terrific. Whereas it was quite cumbersome before, you know, we'd have to spend half an hour with the guests before the show to try and dick around with their setup to try and get it working. That was, that was pretty painful. It's all good now.

Chris Gammell: It's definitely better. And we'll have more guests in the future. And, um, yeah, like Dave said, stay safe out there. Catch you next time. Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you.