#491 – The Almighty Dollarydoo

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released May 3rd, 2020. Episode 491. Sponsored by Roden Schwartz. The almighty dollary-doo.

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

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

Chris Gammell: What's up, nerd? Hey, man. How's your move going? How's your move back to the lab?

Dave Jones: Well, it's actually starting to progress now. I did actually move a bench over. So yesterday, I'll get into that. But yesterday was Christmas time for me. Have you ever had one of those days where like everything turns up on the same day? Like a whole bunch of stuff you've ordered?

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. Like the UPS man shows up with like 20 boxes and you're like, yes. Yeah, yeah. Everything I needed.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Well, yesterday I got new multimeter stock that I've been waiting on. So I got that. So I got like seven boxes of multimeter.

Chris Gammell: That's just money. That's just street money. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: That's just, yeah. That's just, you know, regular. Profit in each meter. It's like bringing a bunch of cash to the door, you know, except I've got to do a lot of work to actually. Right.

Chris Gammell: Of course. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: It'd be much better if I could just get the cash.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, I'm just not smart enough businessman to do. I could do that.

Chris Gammell: I think if people ship you cash too, usually it's pretty shady. You know, it's like it's just boxes of cash showing up at your place. Like, yeah. Yeah. It's usually a money laundering operation. There's like a couple of TV shows out about that right now.

Dave Jones: Well, I was iron off a local laundromat I could buy or a nail salon. Oh, there we go. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's great for laundering money. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Who needs electronics? You could just, you know, be in the old cleaning business.

Dave Jones: Dave's nail care. Yeah. That's right. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, boy. So I was actually, I was wearing nail polish all last week because my, I think I showed you my thumb got all smashed up and I was like, well, I might as well just cover this up. It's still pretty ugly, but it, I had, I was, I was very emo. I had black nail polish on exactly one nail all week. So next time I'll go to Dave, the EEV blog nail salon in order to get my nail done.

Dave Jones: But I only accept cash. So, you know. Oh, right. Yep. And none of that funny money Yankee stuff either. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Got to switch to local. Aussie bucks. Aussie dollary dues. Yep. Thank you very much. Ah, boy. Anyway, so I got my multimeters. I got a new game board for my arcade, which I have to install, which is quite exciting. Yeah. Cause it's a jammer board. If you don't know, jammer is like a standard. It's like a, it's an interface connector standard thing. So that in theory, if you've got a jammer arcade console, jammer compatible, you can just plug in any jammer game board. It's, it stands for like Japanese manufacturers, you know, arcade manufacturers association or something like that. And it was a thing back in the eighties, you know, which was the golden era of arcade machines before it all totally collapsed. The whole industry collapsed. Before it went home, right?

Chris Gammell: Before it went in house. You kind of.

Dave Jones: Well, no, the entire industry collapsed. The entire arcade industry, it just totally collapsed. Go, go look up the golden age of arcades or something, you know, like that. I'm sure it's on YouTube.

Chris Gammell: But why did it collapse?

Dave Jones: Oh, because it was oversaturated. It was just like, there were so many companies entering, trying to capitalize on the new arcade craze that it just absolutely collapsed. I'm sure there's more behind it than that. But, you know, yeah. Yeah. The whole thing just went kaput.

Chris Gammell: God, I think it was because, you know, like Atari and Nintendo started popping up, stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Like, oh, no, no, no. They're the ones who went bust. Like, they're the ones who, who went tits up. So, yes. Anyway, there's documentaries galore on it, I'm sure. Anyway, the, yeah, the jammer. That was, that was the thing. Like, rather than, because there was so many, there were thousands of these different arcade machines. Right? So, and the manufacturers didn't want to have to keep designing a different, you know, console and, you know, whole, you know, either a cocktail one, which is the sit down one or the upright ones, you know, or the sit in ones or whatever. They didn't want to have to design a whole new architecture for each new game. So they come up with this jammer system where all you, if you want to change the game, you can just plug in the board. So that in theory, you know, people who owned all these arcades, right? You know, these arcade, you don't remember this, but anyway, like there was a local arcade center, right?

Chris Gammell: Well, I remember I used to go to the arcade, Dave. I mean, this is not like, I'm not, I'm not that young, you know, they were still around. They just weren't, it wasn't the same like hype culture. Right. Okay. And now they've, they've resurged as a, uh, barcade, barcades now, you know?

Dave Jones: Oh, really? Barcade. Okay. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hmm. Anyway. So rather than the owners of those having to buy new machines, they could simply just get a new like deckle thing and then plug in a new jammer board and they've got a completely new game. So they could like keep their games fresh and keep people coming in and stuff like that. So the latest game comes out, they can sort of upgrade with these jammer boards. Anyway, so that was the thing. So yeah, I got a new jammer board and, uh, yeah, it's got, um, lots of more goodness on it. So I got that. I got a new prototype multimeter, which I'm looking at selling. So that's exciting.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You can never sell too many. You can never say, you can never have too many multimeters and you can never sell too many multimeters.

Chris Gammell: So that's right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So I've got a prototype that that's actually interesting because like when they first told me about it, it's like, oh, you know, like they sent me the specs and everything. I went, yeah, yeah, it looks okay. You know, send me the prototype as soon as you got it. And it literally is a prototype. There's actually little deckle stickers on the front of the range switch to like change things because they, you know, yeah, yeah. So yeah. So it's like not finished silkscreen or anything yet. So anyway, so they sent me some initial. Yeah. Yeah. Trying out the form factor. Yeah. Form factor and everything else. So, and they sent me some spec, right. And it had a whole bunch of specs and I went, oh yeah, the specs look pretty good and things like that. And then they finally just last week, actually, before they sent it, sent me the final manual for it with like the full manual, which has like all the final specs that they've finally determined. It's interesting how the specs actually change. You know, when you develop a product.

Chris Gammell: Which direction do they go? Do they go get it better or worse?

Dave Jones: Oh, some got better. Some got worse. Okay. So, you know, not like isn't by a huge amount, but the fact that they change. Auto magnitude, right? Right. Right. Oh, not even auto magnitude. Less than auto magnitude. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, we're talking about small changes. Like, you know, from 0.003 to 0.005. Sorry, 0.03 to 0.05. You know, that kind of change.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's just interesting how they change. Like the designers had the idea in mind, right, we're going to try and meet this spec. And then they design their circuit around that. And then they thoroughly, then once you get all the prototypes back and then you thoroughly test them. And if you don't know, specifying multimeters is like a hard thing because it's not just like, you can't just test one prototype and go, oh yeah, it's within 0.05. Like you've got to test a whole batch of them and figure out the production spread of the specs and all sorts of stuff. It's almost like voodoo black magic kind of, you know.

Chris Gammell: Actually, I do know. Having worked at the test equipment company. Yeah. Keith Lee, of course. Right. So that's an interesting point, actually. I think, I think the, so like you set this back up front. I think the difference is probably the reason it changed is like, that's just a cost savings measure because. Oh yeah. Keith Lee days, it was like, they set a spec and then they like, no matter what, you're going to go for it. Right. You had to go, you had to get to that point. If you had to throw more money at components and all this other stuff. And like, that is a less great solution for like. A, G, a price conscious multimeter. Yeah, exactly. Well, and just in general too. I mean, like if you promise an eight and a half digit multimeter, like you're just, you're chasing that spec and you have to chase every single, you know, it's like a, it's asymptotic, right? You have to, you have to knock down every single error that's adding to that. Right. Yep. Yeah. So I think it's just a cost savings measure on the part of the spec, the multimeter that you're working with. Oh yeah. It's good enough. It's good enough. Totally.

Dave Jones: You know? Yeah. I think it's one of those ones where, oh look, we're aiming for 0.005%, you know, plus minus two counts. But if it comes out at 0.005% plus four counts, it's like, well, that's what it is. I mean, that's, you know, yeah. Because these specs, if you don't know, it's like these specs are what they guarantee. Yeah. So what they guarantee over temperature range and, and aging and, and component spread from the manufacturer and all sorts of stuff. So it's quite difficult. You can't just build a couple and then measure it and set your spec. It's, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Usually it's like an error budget. And then, and then you, and then you, and then, and you look at like the, like you're saying the audit data and you look at how it's, how it's actually doing with units. And by that point you heard, you're already pretty, pretty darn committed. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. And, and then you'll have historical data to back that up. Like you might've been using the same voltage reference chip for 10 years in 10 different products. Right. So you've got really good data on how, on what the spread of that particular temperature reference is, you know? So if you use a new part, you're effectively starting from scratch. You don't, you have no historical data on that. It's like, it's, it's like, it's like, it's like ironically multimeter calibration. Right. If you get your meter calibrated, right. You can send it away. You know, you pay your a hundred bucks or your thousand bucks for an eight and a half digit meter. You go get it calibrated and they send it back. Like that actually means nothing. Right. Because it's, well, you know, it has some value, but it's not like you cannot, once you get that meter getting back, you can't guarantee that it's still within spec. Right. It may have drifted out. It may have something may have, you know, the vibration on the truck on the way to you may have done something to it. Right. You just can't, you just don't know. A true proper traceable calibration is about the history of the instrument. Right. How reliable has this particular instrument been over all these years? And as the years go on, you build up more confidence and more history and more historical data that yes, that particular unit is super stable and it's been transported. Dozens of times, you know, for a traceable testing and calibration and stuff like that. And, and it's been rock solid, you know, so you build up confidence in that. Basically it's about confidence, measurement confidence.

Chris Gammell: So I did not know that at all. Actually.

Dave Jones: I, Oh, you didn't know what you come from a test equipment manufacturing. You don't know about measurement confidence. You need to watch my video.

Chris Gammell: Ask me how many times I ever moved meters, Dave. You know what I mean? Like I wasn't moving them.

Dave Jones: No, I think that's the thing.

Chris Gammell: It's like a, it's like a metropolis. It's like a metrology thing versus a building on the thing. So.

Dave Jones: It is a metrology thing. And I've got videos on that. I went to a quayside and well, it was agilent at the time, I think anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So I've got videos of them talking about measurement confidence and traceability and all that sort of jazz, which is really fascinating stuff when you get down to it. So. Yep. There you go. So yeah, the specs, the specs changed. It was like, this is kind of the argument I had with David too, when we were designing the new micro supply, right? The power supply thing. It's like, he's like, he's.

Chris Gammell: Let's say the mythical part of the micro supply.

Dave Jones: The mythical power supply. Yeah. So he's more of the engineer who must have a spec and stick to it. Me, I'm more loosey goosey, you know, it's like, but we need specs up front and we have to meet them. It needs to be this. And I'm going, eh, you know, it doesn't matter. You know, like if it, like it's a power supply. If it comes, if we design it and we build it and it, and we find that our, cause we rolled our own differential amplifier. Right. And, and the differential amplifier with op amps is determined by the feedback resistors. Right. So, so the accuracy of all the matching of matching and accuracy, all the feedback resistors matters. Right. So. Yeah. And if it comes back and it's like only half a percent accurate, I don't care that we were targeted 0.25%. If it's half a percent, you know, meh, you know, good enough for Australia. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think that's the thing. It's like, you didn't want to like, I think that's really where economics and, you know, like pure engineering. Well, not even, it would be more like pure science, right? That's where engineering is, right? It's between the economic balance point of like, oh yes, we could, yeah, we could get to that balance point, but no, why? Like no one cares.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, people weren't buying this thing because it was 0.25% accurate. They don't care whether it's 0.25% or 0.5%. They would be buying it because it's novel in some other way, you know, cause it's portable and it's, you know, and yeah, they're not buying it based on. Specs. Whereas if you're buying it, you know, an eight and a half digit multimeter for five, $10,000. Yeah. You're buying the specs, you know, totally different classes of.

Chris Gammell: You could just say it's like based on total price value, like, like price points, right? It's like less than $500. It's a very different thing than less than $5,000, right? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. My $5,000 scope doesn't work. I'm pissed. Yeah.

Dave Jones: What's the old magical, uh, uh, consumer, you know, um, impulse buy price point. Is it still $300? Cause it used to be like, if a product's under, like if a new Xbox or whatever, PlayStation is under 300 bucks, then people will just impulse buy it. Whereas if it's more than that certain limit, people go, Oh, I've got to think about, Oh geez, the wife might be happy if I buy that, you know, and kind of all that kind of stuff.

Chris Gammell: So yeah, that's not, that's not my price point. I'd say 99 bucks for me. 99 bucks. Okay. Right. I mean, I'm a cheapskate here, but like, yeah, I think that's, that's mine, you know, but I think everybody's got something different, you know?

Dave Jones: Oh, everyone's got something different. Yeah. It's why I've done videos on the price point of multimeters. I've done like the $50 shootout. I've done a hundred dollars shootout. My, my one 21 GW is a two, you know, in quote marks, a $200 class multimeter. Whereas this new prototype that I got, and I've got an EV blog forum thread on it. And the EVO forum thread is, is entitled the $150 class meter, you know, because that's where it fits in. Whereas my right. BM two, three, five is a 19 is a hundred dollar class meter. It's like.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, and that's where all the spec comparison is going to come down to. Right. It's like, Oh, of course. If you're going to. Yeah. Well, and it's like, you know, if the, the, the prototype one you got was fine, you know, it's probably because it's not that much worse than anything else in class, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Of course in class. Yeah. Exactly. And when people talk about best in class, they're talking about price class usually.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Although sometimes you might be talking about, Oh, best in four and a half digit meters, best in three and a half. But really at the, you know, economics is everything. Right. So, you know, usually people are talking about price. So yeah, it's fascinating. So how these little, how specs can change and things like that. And it's not always a big deal for those who are designed for those youngsters out there who are designing things and think they must meet their spec. Not always.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Be flexible. Because if you've got to spend an extra $10 in bomb costs, because you need to meet 0.005 because you set that as your goal and it comes in at 0.007. It's like, like, no, it's not. It may not be worth spending that extra $10 in bomb costs because that'll blow out your retail price by $25. You know, that two and a half times multiplier, roughly rule of thumb. Sure. Yep. Yeah. The $25 puts you in a different class of instrument and you don't sell as many. It's like, yeah. Or because you didn't want to budge on your mythical 0.05%. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: So don't be so stubborn that you. Well, I think that it like changes your engineering decisions too, right? It's like, if you're, if you're starting out in like a high, you know, like, how about this? When I used to work with people at Keith Lee and, you know, similar places where like you're designing equipment that has like a certain price expectation and you say, make it low cost. It's really, really tough to like, to refactor and rethink all the things that are in there because it's like, oh, well, it has to have this and this and this. It's like, okay. Yeah, maybe, but like, but, but you can't. And it just becomes this like this discussion point or, you know, like it, it just becomes an expectation difference. I don't know. I, uh, what was I reading about recently? It was, it was a test where like you give people, oh, that's what it was. You paid people a, uh, a small amount to, to do a task a certain way to solve a particular problem. It was like, basically solve a problem. There's like 40 different solutions to, to solve this problem. Right. But as soon as they find one, you pay them a small amount for it and you say, Hey, you can do it as much as you want to. And then I'm going to butcher this too. I'm sure. Uh, and then it was like, and then you bring, so then you, then you say, okay, that, that experiments over, you bring the same group back in that you've just paid to do that one thing the same way over and over again. And then you say, all right, now you have to find all 40 ways to do this thing. And they can't do it because they're so hyper-focused on that one thing. Like they're optimizing for that one thing. And whereas if you bring in a, a fresh group that didn't have that. A fresh group. Ah. Yeah. So like, like thinking about just like the design, I, when I was reading it, I was thinking about like the design constraints around like, if you are hyper-focused on this, you know, this one segment or this one type of, you know, like in this case, the one type of class of, of cost meter, um, it just becomes really hard to break outside of that. You know, maybe it might be easier to go upscale than it is downscale. Honestly, I just think that, you know, like when we've had guests on before that are like toy designers, like Todd Bailey and Jerry Ellsworth and who else is doing toys? I guess Alicia White has also done toys and stuff like that. They just talk about like these methods where I'm just like, Oh, why would, why would you do that?

Dave Jones: But it's like, you just have to do it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. You have to do it. And so, uh, yeah, it's, it's just, it's interesting how that, that kind of stuff really impacts and how people think about things and solve problems.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I've, I've been involved in that where cent one cent mattered. If I could save one cent on a part, we were manufacturing 300,000 of these things, 300,000 of these boards. We knew we were going to make through, we had a contract to make 300,000 of these boards. So if we shave one cent off the cost, do the math, you know, it's like, that's up. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Totally.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I can afford to spend X amount of hours shaving one cent off the cost because, you know, if you're going to save $10,000 on the, on the cost, I could literally afford to spend $10,000 in wages in my time to save that one cent.

Chris Gammell: Right. Cause that's probably calculated over a year of, of manufacturing and then you get that paid back. Yep. So it's a one year payback period. If you spend $10,000 worth of time year two, cha-ching, you know, like, but of course

Dave Jones: you can't spend too long because then you have production deadlines. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So this brings me to the, uh, what I was kind of leading towards here too, is like that kind of that thought pattern of like developing for low cost and maybe high volume and stuff like that. Uh, there was an interesting piece that we were going to talk about from Mark Andreessen, who's, uh, of Andreessen Horowitz fame and he, in frustration, it's very obviously in frustration.

Dave Jones: He's a venture capitalist for those who don't know. He's a famous venture VC. That's right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Uh, yeah. And Andreessen Horowitz is like one of the larger VC firms that's out there and, uh, they've funded many, many of the, if you look at their portfolio, it's like a lot of the big winners in the past, I don't know, 20 years. And so he was very frustratedly writing about how we don't build things in this case in the U S and it struck me personally because it's someone who made, I snarkily posted about it. He's fortunate. Yeah. He made his fortunate software. They, they almost, almost exclusively fund software companies. Why don't we build anything? It was like, Oh, I don't know, Mark. Why don't we build anything? And it's like, look, I get that. I don't know a lot of what that guy knows. It's fine. But like, you know, we, Dave and I build hardware and like the anecdote I gave about it was like, just going from a hardware company to a software company and seeing the margin differences and what is capable of what you can pay for and how you can pay your people and how, like how all of the equations change.

Chris Gammell: It's like totally different ball game. Why the hell does anyone build hardware ever? That's what I'm really getting at.

Chris Gammell: And like, and this is like, and this is me working at places that are building high margin hardware, let alone, you know, like working in a factory that's building like PPE, you know, and this is what it's all come down to. Obviously this is a COVID thing, but like, but like, yeah, of course, you know, like there's just, it's a, it's a slog manufacturing sucks. I've written about that before. It sucks. It's low margin. It's high demands. You're getting called at two in the frig in the morning, you know, like there are lots of reasons that it hasn't gone that way. I'm not saying it shouldn't be, but like, but, but damn, like it just felt kind of like,

Dave Jones: I don't know, colorblind, like once people realized, uh, you know, the low overhead in the software business, this is why the.com boom happened. This is why.com boom and bust happened. Cause people realize we can make info. We don't have to produce anything. Software is free. Like, oh, well back then they were still distributing on CD and stuff like that, but still like your manufacturing cost was virtually nothing. Right. It was practically zero. Right. That's right. And, and then it became zero once we had the internet, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, and then I think with the internet thing too, is like, is it becomes like, this is exactly what VCs talk about. They're like, we want growth. All we care about is growth. And it's like, you know what? It's really hard to make a widget and grow that from one to a million. Like that is just, that is a, that is a machine that you were starting up to do that. And it's like, yeah. It is not fast. And they want fast. And they want fast. Right. They're, they're going to be, they're going to be funding fast. And it's like, and it becomes a game of that. Okay, fine. You know, and there's some people like we've had people that fund hardware on, on the show before. Right. Scott Miller is someone who's worked in the kind of area. We've had, who else did we have on that was a VC. Didn't we have, oh, we had, uh, Avidan Ross on as well. Right. Yes. Root VC as well. We had a Christie Meyer who also works at Root VC. Like they're funding hardware, but they understand a lot of the, the shit that goes into it. You know?

Dave Jones: And how long it takes and how you can. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Chris Gammell: And it's like, and it's even there, like they talk about like the, the growth doesn't come from selling another coffee machine. It's comes from selling the pods or the subscription service. So the data and all the other crap, because it's just after reading, I was just like, you know, okay. Would, would a GE start today? I don't think so. You know, like would a 3M start today? Like, I don't, I don't know. Like there's just so much, obviously there's a ton of technology in there, but like the amount of like investment and know-how.

Dave Jones: They don't start like companies like that. Don't start as with that in mind. They sort of, you know, start out and over 20, 30 years, they become this huge monolith. It's not like somebody's going to have a startup. They're not going to have a startup. Right. We're going to be this huge manufacturing company and we're going to manufacture it. You know, we're going to be dominant in this field, this field, this field, and this field. And it's like, and you start from nothing. Nobody thinks like that in the hardware space. It's just, you know, whereas you do in the software space, because you know that, you know, you can do it quickly. All you got to do is hire, you know, a whole bunch of nerdy programmers. And pizza and that's it. Right. Right. And throw them at it.

Chris Gammell: You know, we're going to respond to sweeping generalizations with our own sweeping generalizations, of course. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. But it's not half, you know, it's half true. Right. That's like software. You just hire a bunch of nerdy people. You know what, Dave?

Chris Gammell: It's at least half true. It's at least half true. Yeah. It's at least. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah. No. So that's why you'll never see, you know, a company like that, you know, startup. Yeah. It's like, yeah. But they just organically grow over the years. You know, they start up in one niche and then they expand and then they become this big monolith, you know, over 30, 40 years. So, yeah. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, and I think about the, you know, market segments too, right? So, like, so in his screed, he writes about, like, why aren't we building more things like Elon does? And don't get me started on that guy this week. But, like, again, like cars are a much higher, obviously there's the transportation cost thing, but there's also the margin, you know, not that cars are super high margin compared to other things you can build.

Dave Jones: Cars are a niche, right? Once again, this is the classic example. Tesla started out, they built a niche car, right? Cars are a niche, like it or not. They're, you know, they're huge industry, but it's still a niche. Like, it's one thing. It's one product type, right? And then once that was successful and they had the cash, oh, I'm really into rockets or I'm really into solar. I'm going to do, you know, I'm going to invest in a solar company and then I'm going to start up a, you know, a battery, a storage company. And then I'm going to, because that ties in with my other thing. It's not like something radically different, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're all tied in.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. I mean, I, I wish I had answers on all this stuff. Like, but, but I just, I think it's like a completely different echelon of like, you're talking about cars and like super highly skilled labor and automation, all that other stuff. And it's like, versus cotton swabs. And it's like, yeah, there is some cotton swab making that happens in the U S but it becomes like logistical issues. And like, you can throw as much automation as you want at it. But like, I don't know.

Dave Jones: It comes down to labor cost in the end, probably it's like.

Chris Gammell: Well, there's some of that, but then it's also just like, if it's a super low margin, like who's going to chase that opportunity. Right. I mean, it's just. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That low margin. It's a low margin business. Like it's just, there's nothing you can do about that.

Chris Gammell: And so you need so much volume that like scaling to that point becomes really, really difficult. So I guess there's, you know, different solutions for that, that veer into the political, which I don't think we need to discuss here, but like from that standpoint, maybe, maybe there's an argument from the article he's talking about. I mean, some of it was just, it just, like I said, it just read like frustration. And from that, I get it. Everybody's frustrated right now. It sucks.

Dave Jones: Has he ever invested in a hardware company?

Chris Gammell: I think they have. I was looking through their, what do they call it? Like portfolio. Yeah. But it was, there was not many of them. So. Right. Okay. Andreessen Horowitz portfolio. And like, and we should say they've been very, very successful.

Dave Jones: Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, but they've had a lot of flops too. You know? Yeah. They, they, they've had a lot of, they've had a handful of big winners. Like, didn't they invest in Google and, and Facebook? Well, here we go. Here we go.

Chris Gammell: So this is exit. They put exits up top, right? So exits are the ones where they sell. Yeah. Yeah. So like, so. So Facebook, Box. Yeah. Groupon, Lyft. Yeah. Right. Pinterest. And these are just the big ones. Zynga, Slack. Oh, these automatic, which is like WordPress. Yeah. Oh God. They're all, they all, they have invested in a lot. I thought they were all software. Local Motion is a, I think that was the car company, although they were a software company. Okay.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hardware. Onshape, I suppose, is a CAD company. Yeah. That's a software.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's the one you use, right? Yep. I don't know all these, but oh, Social Cam, you know, like again, they're all effectively software companies that are, you know, some of them might have some hardware in there, but I don't see any. Do I see any? Nope. That's right. No cotton swab companies. Right.

Dave Jones: No, no mask companies, no, you know, ventilator companies. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah.

Dave Jones: And you have to remember that, yeah, they got those handful, you know, they got a dozen huge winners, but there's literally thousands they invested in that flopped and lost a hundred percent of their money.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. They, they literally lost a hundred percent of their money on thousands of other investments. It's like, that's what they're in it for is for the couple of big winners, you know?

Chris Gammell: Oh, totally. Yeah. There's also an article, article from MIT, which is talking about, so like we've been posting these just because it's been interesting to read other people's takes on this stuff. Right. But there is an MIT technology review article about it as well. It says COVID-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation. There were some good comments about this in our subreddit, you know, like, yeah, Silicon Valley wasn't really expected in this case. And I get it. But, uh, I think it is, if anything, it's just to knock down the, like, oh, well, we can do anything with software and software is eating the world. Mark Hendrickson, uh, you know, like, and like, yeah, there are certain things that you just can't get around. And, you know, there are some people that are doing things that are, you know, building up, uh, large ventures that are, that Elon, I guess, again, is, uh, you know, and other people doing space stuff. Obviously that's very hardware focused.

Dave Jones: Oh, space is big now. Cause it's trendy. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. New space.

Chris Gammell: New space is a big thing.

Dave Jones: When, when it's trendy, it's easier to get money. That's what I'm getting at.

Chris Gammell: I think that's a, yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point.

Dave Jones: It really matters.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. It's like when, when Uber became a thing, it was like, yeah. Okay. If you're doing an Uber competitor, it's probably very easy to get money. Right. Yeah. Because it was trendy. People knew, you know, it was the new it thing.

Chris Gammell: So here at the amp hour, we focus on learning. We also choose advertisers that have a similar mindset like Roger Schwartz. They have a new product meant for education. The 2000 series of oscilloscope is a new entry into the market. The bundles features together that normally would be charged per add-on. This means that engineers or people that are working towards becoming an engineer get a much higher value for the money they spend. And Roger Schwartz doesn't skimp on features. Friend of the show and YouTuber, Shariar from The Signal Path, said this about the RTB 2004.

Dave Jones: So here I have the output of the generator from the Roden Shores directly connected to the input of my EXA signal analyzer. And this would allow us to measure the THD performance of the instrument. Now I have set also the Roden Shores to 25 MHz, which is the highest sinusoid signal it supports. And the amplitude is 500 mV peak to peak into 50 ohms. Now we can go ahead and increase the amplitude one step at a time and see how the THD behavior changes. So right now with half a volt peak to peak, the THD is 0.5%, which is minus 46 dBc, which is very, very good. For smaller signals, the THD is absolutely excellent. So I have no doubt that this would be a useful generator, particularly because we do have the ability of creating arbitrary functions. And for little experiments, projects here and there, this would be very useful.

Chris Gammell: Shariar is well known for his interesting experiments, and we always recommend people subscribe to his channel. In this particular video, he demonstrates how the protocol analyzer works on the scope and showcases the problematic serial bus on an Arduino, which he troubleshoots live on screen. Of interest to me on this scope is the web interface that completely replicates the front panel for remote troubleshooting. Check out Shariar's video for a more in-depth review of the device. And if you want to see other reviews and opinions from fellow engineers, check out askanengineer.us. You can see all the devices that are good value for your bench, which includes other oscilloscopes, signal generators, RF equipment, and more. That's askanengineer.us to find out more about your next piece of test gear. And now, back to the show.

Dave Jones: This reminds me of an article many years ago. Well, this was from Robert X. Cringely, one of my favorite bloggers. I think he's almost semi-retired now. Anyway, this was back when Alibaba went public or whatever, and they were worth squillions of dollars. And a lot of people don't know Yahoo funded Alibaba, right? So Yahoo, I can't remember what percentage they own, but they own a huge percentage of Alibaba, right? So Yahoo, of course, has gone the way of the dodo in almost every market segment. You know, they used to be the market darling, right? Yahoo was the it thing back in the 2000s or something, right? You know, one of the richest companies in the world. And now they're like, you know, nothing really. Who uses Yahoo services, right? No one.

Chris Gammell: They sold a bunch of their stuff to Verizon and then they got hacked. Oh, yeah. Is that what I remember?

Dave Jones: Oh, I don't know. But anyway, the reason that they're still going is because they had like $50 billion cash in the bank because they, you know, due to the floating of Alibaba, right? Yahoo was suddenly worth like $50 billion in cash and they had no debt. And he wrote this article about, well, what should they do with this $50 billion in cash? Because they've got, I could be wrong on the figure, but it was enormous like that. And of course, you know, Yahoo's like a dead brand. Like nobody, you know, you couldn't really do that. So he said what they should do is invest literally in every single company, every single startup company that get to the, what was it? Round B. What is the, you know, what are the investment rounds? Seed. Seed. Seed.

Chris Gammell: Seed. Seed. Series A. Series B. Yeah. Series C on the word. Yep.

Dave Jones: Series B. He said, invest literally in every B round company and you cannot lose because you, you know, once they get to that point, 20% of them will win. Right. Like, you know, as, as they go up in the stages, the odds of them becoming profitable and winning increases. Right. When you started like the angel investing round, like it's like a one chance in a thousand that they'll be successful. Right. When you go up to the next, you know, seed level or whatever it is, I'm butchering the terminology. Once you go up to the next level, oh, it's a 1% chance. And then it's a 10% chance. And then it's, so he said, if you invest in every single company in those rounds, like literally everything, it doesn't matter what it is. Don't even look at it. Invest in every single company. You're guaranteed to win.

Chris Gammell: It's like the index fund idea for, uh, yeah, it's the index fund idea for, for corporate

Dave Jones: investing.

Chris Gammell: That's a terrible idea. I don't like that.

Dave Jones: But it would literally work. It's actually guaranteed by the laws of statistics to work.

Chris Gammell: I mean, that's assuming. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Seriously. You can run the numbers on it and it's guaranteed to work. So anyway, that just reminded me of that. I thought it was fascinating. So when you got that much cash to spread around, you know, sure.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Yeah. Well, we're not there yet. That's for sure.

Dave Jones: No, we're not. No. I'd say, you know, if you want your, you know, I, I get approached by people. Oh, do you want to, you know, invest, you know, does the EV blog want to invest in my, you know, startup and things like that? It's like, well, I'm, I'm not that cashed up. Sorry, dude.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Right. Do you take payment in multimeters?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Right. Yep. Masks, you know, right. Right. Right. I'll take payment. Oh boy. Nah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, I would love to make manufacturing easier. I mean, like that's really what it comes down to is like manufacturing blows. It's still hard. I don't know. I don't, I don't know how to make it easier though. Like I, I'm still struggling with it. I don't know about you, but like.

Dave Jones: Oh no, it's, it's, I don't think there's a magic bullet there. A lot of people, some people have tried, like they've tried to make it, you know, they've tried various, you know, techniques to sort of like have everything streamlined and optimized and stuff like that. And, um, in our space, like, you know, there's the, uh, there's the assemblers who have all the, who have the component libraries, right? It's like you, you know, their component libraries. And if you use these component libraries, we have these parts in our pick and place machine that we can, you can just press a button and it magically comes to you, you know? And yeah, it works in theory, but in practice it never, you know, it never does the business. Modular hardware design is another thing, you know, that was the LTM vision, you know, everything would be modular. Like nobody has to design a custom circuit anymore because there'll be, you know, 10, you'll be able to buy little circuit blocks like on, uh, you know, mouse or in DigiKey, you'll be able to buy these, like instead of parts, you'll be able to buy these modular circuit blocks and you just buy the blocks you need and which come with little PCB layouts, even little, you don't have to lay out boards anymore, right? They'll actually come, you know, you buy a power supply, it comes with its own little PCB layout. You drop that into your design and magically all these little blocks and you in finally end up with your, uh, your, your finished PCB design and there's your finished product. Ta-da! Magic, right? And unfortunately in the real world.

Chris Gammell: I had to, I had to defend myself the other day, actually. So, uh, I've been talking about developing a dev board just for like, just for something I want to do. And so my partner, uh, Angie talks, she turns to me and she goes, why, why don't people just use those? Why do they need people like you?

Dave Jones: I'm like, oh man, I guess. Oh, burn. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: And it's like, well, I mean, it's a good question. I mean, but it's like taken to a smaller and smaller level, right? That's kind of what you're talking about. Right. It's like basically a small PCB block is basically a tiny dev board. Right. And it's like, so I think some of the, some of the problems are like, uh, form factor, right? It's like stacking things. You're still laughing about me getting, getting my, uh, getting, uh, getting, uh, getting asked that, huh? Yeah. Yeah. It's great. And, uh, but like some of it's form factors, right? Some of it is, uh, not being optimized for the situation that you're in. Right. And, uh, like, like, uh, power, power usage and some more things. And, uh, some of it is, uh, the cost, right? Adding, adding connectors adds, adds cost. And we were just talking about how much, how much, how expensive it gets when you do that kind of thing. And it's like, so from a prototyping perspective, it almost always makes sense to have some kind of modular thing, right? That's like a Arduino or a raspberry pie or anything like that is technically modular because it plugs together with a known header. Right. And, um, and, but is, is that a good idea for production? Yeah, probably not. Uh, especially when, you know, it depends on your product.

Dave Jones: If you've got a high margin, high value product in a niche market, it doesn't matter that you've got a raspberry pie in there.

Chris Gammell: I just mean that there are other constraints and like, so, okay. So you're going to have connectors on your board then to hook things together. And it's like, that's just suboptimal, I think, because you have vibration and you have other, it might, it might be the right solution. Like you're saying from a cost perspective, for sure. It is not the best electronics. It might just be the best system design.

Dave Jones: Right. Yes. But yeah, it doesn't produce the best finished product because most finished products have to be like a polished product. It's got to be in a, you know, like a custom designed case. It's, you know, it's got a, the look and feel is everything. So you can't just, you know, make it a big square project box with a, you know, if you want to enter the professional product market, you know, it can't be just this big clunky thing. It's got to be custom. And when you go custom design, once you make that decision, okay, I need a custom case. It needs to be this size because it's got to fit in. If you want a handheld product, you know, it's not like you can whack a, a raspberry pie board in a handheld product. That's kind of like, you know, it's just not going to work from a physical point of view. So you've got no choice, but to bite the bullet and go, well, everything's custom.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. There is always that balance point, right. Of like when, what is custom? How? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, we, we did that with the micro supply, right? It's like, okay, we wanted this little handheld pocket thing. It's like, well, okay, we have to go to a custom LCD. We have to go to a custom transformer. We have to go to a custom case. We have to go to a custom keypad. We have to go to a custom plastic moldings. We have to go. Everything has to be custom.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It kind of makes you wonder, like, it's like a monkey with typewriter kind of thing. It's like, if all of the things were out there and it was, if it was a success or an acceptable market solution, right. To like build a thing that was like clunky and plugged together or whatever. And it was like cost wise, it made sense. Like when it already be for sale.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. That's right. Because it's simple to do. Like, right.

Chris Gammell: We're not like coming up with like crazy ideas here. You know, it's not like, we're like, oh, this is the most innovative thing ever. And it's like, no. Yep. We're like piecing Lego blocks together in different ways, but we're just putting them all the same circuit board and, you know.

Dave Jones: Yep. It's fine if you're doing some widget and you're only ever going to sell 10 of them. You know, it's like, yeah, just whack them in a square box, you know, and like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think, well, and I think there's, there may be other constraints too, because, you know, I have systems that I've put together that are like that, that are, you know, kind of, I call them Lego block prototypes too. When there are, you know, I make a small dev board that might plug into like a, or a small like a header board that might plug into like a Adafruit feather style thing or something like that. But it's like, like you're saying, it's a, you know, it's low volume. It's not, not the right solution forever, but it's the right solution for the time. But sometimes there are just other design constraints. Like, you know, there might be more vibration. There might be, you know, water or like moisture in the systems. You shouldn't have exposed pins and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: That was my life for a decade. You know, it was designing production test equipment. Right. And yes, I'm going to make 10 or 20 of them, you know, like a big thing. Oh, I'm making 20 this time. Oh, wow. You know, I can, I can, I can really spend the engineering on this one. You know, we're making 20 of them. Yay. It's fantastic. Yeah. And then, but no, it's still, it still had to be waterproof. You know, it had to be oil proof because it was in a production environment that oil, you know, that's going to get spilled all over it. How do you make it oil?

Chris Gammell: Is it just like potting or you do like conformal?

Dave Jones: You have to choose the right plastics and stuff that are immune to oil and things like that. You have to choose the right O-rings and, and you know, other.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. So you're still keeping the board dry, but it's, but it's then it's the case.

Dave Jones: Dry. Yes. It's the case and everything else that goes around it and the connectors and the wiring and everything else, you know, that has to survive that kind of stuff. So yeah, it comes down to a material science thing. So yeah, it's a big deal.

Chris Gammell: I've been doing more custom cabling stuff. So I told you about my, some of my trials and tribulations with custom cabling and, you know, it worked out pretty well. Found a vendor in China that worked out. Okay. I got a couple of samples in there. They were very responsive, very nice, very easy to deal with. And what then popped up was like, uh, starting to do like panel mount connectors. I'm sure that's what brought, brought, brought to me thinking about it. Cause you're talking about like water ingress. Yeah. Like IP 67 stuff.

Dave Jones: Like first off, Holy crap.

Chris Gammell: That gets expensive real fast.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know? And then it's like, now I'm like, Oh, but what if they were custom? You know? Like, Oh boy.

Dave Jones: I come from an industry where, you know, $200 us connectors are the norm. Right. Oh yeah. Each per unit. Yeah. Yeah. It's nothing. It's nothing.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure I brought it up once, but I actually did when I used to work in one of my first co-ops, we worked on like military stuff and the connector was $900. Yeah. It was like a specced by the Navy, you know, like, you know, the only one company made them. It was like all metal and like had like pins and ridiculousness.

Dave Jones: Oh, and they're, yeah. But they're so good quality. Ah, that one wasn't.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? You know, it was just, yeah. It was like, I mean, it was good. It was just, wasn't like the best, you know, it was like, it was just really custom for what they wanted, you know? And it had a spec doc as long as your, long as your leg, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. Those, those were the days people. Yeah. If you haven't worked in those sorts of industries, it really is an eye opener when you, you know, you go work for a military company and you spend two weeks specifying a screw, you know, specifying the correct screw. It's like that, that was two weeks of your professional life spent specifying a screw. Yeah. And yeah, that's, that's just the way it is.

Chris Gammell: And it makes you like feel not like an engineer too. Cause you're like, should I be designing stuff? And it's like, but at the same time, you're, you're just, you're getting the job done. Right. Which is totally what an engineer has to do. And it's like, but it, it just feels terrible. You know, it's just like, you're having to deal with like purchasing and yeah, just all the, all the crap that you get, you're swimming through a river of crap. It sucks.

Dave Jones: I'm surprised I spent as long there as I did, you know, it's like, yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: The thing about jobs is they pay you.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. And it's company. Yeah. It's cushy. Yeah. Yeah. Boy. Because they have those lucrative contracts, you know? Oh, well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So speaking of modular and connectors and stuff like this, I'd seen this bandied about before and I was always like, what the hell is that thing? But this is the Syzygy. Is that how you say it? Syzygy.

Dave Jones: I don't even, I don't even know if you're speaking English there.

Chris Gammell: That's right. It's S-Y-Z-Y-G-Y. And I'm sure it's for some terrible, terrible acronym, but basically it's a new, not new. It's a standard for pinouts, you know, kind of like PMOD is like a thing for FPGA. Oh yeah. Flexible pinheader kind of thing for designing add-ons, which is always kind of crazy. So Peter, as in Tempski, we've had on the show a bunch, he did a stream, actually. We shared it on the subreddit this week. He was in a stream where he was making a PMOD that actually hooks into like a Nintendo, Super Nintendo controller. Super cool. A lot of fun just to watch that happen, right? But PMODs themselves are so, I don't get it. Like it's like, it basically is like a, I think it's a 10 pin, oh, I should probably look it up, but it's like a 10 pin connector. And it's like one's power, one's ground, everything else is whatever the hell you want it to be. You know, basically like, why is this even a standard? You know, it's just like, oh, just tell me where the power and ground is, I guess, you know, but so that's what PMOD is. And I think that was Digilent. I know that Digilent sells a lot of stuff with PMOD connectors on it, but because of a lot of FPGA things, you can always, you know, make it super flexible, whatever.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: Syzygy is now with a transceiver standard, or so there's like a standard, there's a transceiver type. There's a, I don't know, there's a bunch of different things, but basically I've been starting to see these on more dev boards for, for FPGA things because it's again, it's like flexible fabric, you can always route stuff out to it. And then when, then you want to build a transceiver or do you want to build like a camera board that plugs into a bunch of different dev boards, you can use the standard, I guess. So I've not used it, obviously, because I don't know what I'm talking about, but also, and also like it's a Samtech connector. So it's like the 0.5 millimeter pitch connector. So be prepared. I love Samtech. They're great company. Super custom stuff.

Speaker ?: Oh, they're great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, Samtech's the bottom. Holy crap. They're expensive.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. They're not the cheapest things, but I used to specify Samtech into everything. Cause it was just like the go-to place for like, sort of like board to board connectors and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Super low profile. Like, like, like, like I said, they've got everything. Great company. And their sample service was second to none. I don't know if it's still the same now. I've been out of that business for a while now, but, oh geez, their sample service was brilliant. You know, they send you samples for Nix and that was, that was great.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. But you know what? Uh, that's what everybody else is paying for.

Dave Jones: It's that everyone else is paying for it. And you're paying for the, you're paying for it too, because you know, it's like, yeah,

Chris Gammell: you know, I guess they're getting out of the backend.

Dave Jones: They weren't hideously expensive, but, but then a lot of the Chinese companies would, would, would copy you. You could get clones of the Samtech connectors or you could send them their data or send them the data sheet of the Samtech connector you wanted. And they'd just copy it for you. You know, it's like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Guiltily, guiltily sliding it across the table. That kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can you copy this please? I don't want to put this us company out of business, but you know, I've, I've got to meet this, my boss's pressure room to meet this price target and you know, right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, you talk about another thing that like drives business to like low cost places. It's like, yeah, I mean, everybody's cost conscious. Again, this is going back to the manufacturing conversation. It's like, like if, if you're judged based on like how much money you can save, you ha you literally have to go. If you were like, no, well, I'm going to just buy the Samtech parts. Your boss can be like, no, no, you're not. And then you say, yes, I am. And he's going to go, you're fired. Like, that's how it goes. Exactly. I know.

Dave Jones: That's how it goes. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And so like in a world of just economics, you have to be the lowest cost. And that means that like, well, obviously there's some shady stuff that happens there too. Right. Obviously like, you know, it's just copying data. Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: And then you end up with gray market parts and you end up getting a bit on the ass because you know, oh, you left it up to your purchasing department and they ordered these gray market parts, which are either fake or whatever, you know? And it's like, yeah, you've come a gutzer, but, but it sounds good at the time because your, your market, your purchasing people said, oh, oh yeah, this $1 connector, we found a source for 10 cents. Trust us, you know? And then you go, okay. And then it comes back to bite you on the ass.

Chris Gammell: Send me some samples. Then you have to give a, you have to give a courier number.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's just, oh geez. Anyway. Yep. Ah, manufacturing. We always end up talking about manufacturing, don't we?

Chris Gammell: Well, it's kind of a big deal, Dave.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah, I know it's kind of a big deal, but you know, can we get back to my last item on my, on my list yesterday that came in yesterday? Yeah. Let's talk about what the stuff I got yesterday.

Chris Gammell: How about, how about stuff? Dave, did you get it for a good, a good price? Oh, it was pretty reasonable.

Chris Gammell: See, that's what I'm talking about.

Dave Jones: But I didn't care. I would have paid anything for it. I would have paid anything. It didn't matter. Price was no object.

Chris Gammell: What did you get? Is this, is this the panels?

Dave Jones: New lead lighting panels, right? Lighting's important. Lighting's important in your lab.

Chris Gammell: I watched the video before. So Dave just put up a video about this. We'll link it.

Dave Jones: I just released it before we came up.

Chris Gammell: I agree that lighting is important in your video, but not from above, Dave. You're going to have cat eyes. What do you mean cat eyes? Like when you're, you're basically your eyebrows create shadows in your eyes then, you know, like that's why you need the other fill lights that you're talking about.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. No, of course. But I, the bulk of the light that what I shoot in comes from my ceiling led, my ceiling led panel lights.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I was, I was very impressed with those lights. They look very nice.

Dave Jones: Yeah. They're, they're very nice. Anyway, I've been spending like six months looking for these bastards. Oh wow. And yeah, because I, it is, it is already quite difficult. Go out and try and find a lead ceiling panel light, like in a standard size, like for the drop ceilings, which are either 1200 by 300 millimeters. None of that inches rubbish or 600 by 600, right? They're standard drop ceiling sizes. Yeah. And right. So try and find one like that. That's actually 5,000 Kelvin color temperature, right? Cause all my other lights are 5,000.

Chris Gammell: Why did you do that? I don't get that.

Dave Jones: Well, because all my, cause my other lights are 5,000 K and it's like, and I've always shot in 5,000 K and 5,000 K is a videography kind of de facto-y kind of standard, right? It's kind of, no, if, if you go to any like photography studio or anything like that, they're using 5,000 K, right? But because these are like regular ceiling office panel lights, they don't care about color temperature, right? Yeah. They either come in 4,000 or 6,000.

Chris Gammell: They care about cost, Dave. Yeah. They're, they're, they're, yeah. LED, actually LED panels. So obviously I bought some LED panels myself, um, just for general lighting and like, man, that is a race to the bottom. I actually had a repair. I repaired one the other day too. Oh yeah. I actually had the one that you showed in your video, the aperture, whatever the, it started with an A. Oh yeah. I have the exact same light. They're not cheap though. They're not cheap. They're not. They're 300 bucks, but like, you know, they're pretty, you know, they're like, there isn't a ton of stuff in there, but like, man, it's all the LEDs. Like that's what, that's where all the cost is. It's just like, you know, it's, it's like a array of, I don't know, probably what? Like 200 by 300 LEDs or something like that. Yeah. It's crazy. Oh, totally. Probably not 200 by 200.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Yeah. No, they're, they're, they're very expensive. And the reason they're expensive is because I, they're the correct color temperature, right? Or in the case of the apertures, they're actually adjustable color temperature. They actually mix different color LEDs in there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But those are super narrow, right?

Dave Jones: Well, no, well, no, no, no. The reason they're expensive is because they're bin, they're properly binned for, CRI or color rendering index, right? That's what you pay top dollar for is a high CRI light. If you don't know, color rendering index is an index from zero to a hundred in the, if you look at the spectrum of the light, you know, the color spectrum with a spectrometer of the light that a, that a lead actually, actually produces like a cheap ass white, white lead actually has a very poor color spectrum. You know, whereas a, and a, and a, where's an old filament light bulb, right? Actually has quite a perfect spectrum, right? I.e. It has all the different colors over the spectrum kind of evenly. And that's what you're aiming for. And whereas, whereas cheap white leads, uh, they, they will like, they'll peak at certain color temperatures and they'll, and then they'll have an absence of blue or something. You know, they'll have an absence of all these colors.

Chris Gammell: Well, you showed, you showed like a CFL as like having 50 as a CRI. I thought that was a good example too. 50. Yeah, exactly. Peak super hard and greens. Like that's why when you fly over cities, you can always tell who's, who's got a CFL light in their front yard. Who's got like an incandescent, who's got led. Cause it goes like orange, green, or blue, you know, because there's an absence of these

Dave Jones: colors because in the case of the, uh, the fluorescent tube, it's the, it's the fluorescent material on the outside coating of the tube that actually fluoresces and actually produces light. And that just produces a poor quality light, um, in terms of the color spectrum. So when you're using it for videography, you're like, you're shooting a product. You want that product to show up exactly as it looks to your eyes, right? You want it to have all the colors.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Best would be like sunlight, right? You're trying to get as close as sunlight.

Dave Jones: Light is very good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Which has, you know, the broad spectrum and anyway, poor quality lights and fluorescent lights, cheap fluorescent, you can get good quality fluorescent lights too, right? With the highest CRI, but you pay more. And so anyway, so not only do I have to have 5,000 Kelvin color temperature, right? So, which is already hard enough to get you, you can actually buy them. I've bought them before, right? But then you want a high CRI as well. In terms of CRI, anything like 80, your regular lead panels are 80. CRI, right? Which is meh. You know, it's missing certain colors or it's very low in certain colors. It's pretty poor. But your good quality ones will have 90 plus. And they're the panels that I got, 90 plus CRI. The, those aperture ones you're talking about, the reason they're so expensive is because they're 95 plus, right? They're greater than 95. All right. So all those leads are individually chosen and binned. Please, if anyone knows from a manufacturing point of view, do they have to manufacture them differently or do they have to, or do they just bin them? I don't know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure binning is a huge, is a huge portion of it, but yeah. They test it and then they say, this is good. This is bad. This is good. This is bad.

Dave Jones: That's what we're talking about when we're talking about binning. We're talking about, they simply test everyone that comes off the line and all the good ones. It's like Intel manufacturing processes, all the, all the highest spec, they test all the processes and the highest spec ones that pass. They rebrand those as a higher spec unit and sell it for double the price. Right. That's just the way it, you know, that's just the way it works. So, and, uh, what you're laughing?

Chris Gammell: No, I was just not paying attention to be honest. Sorry. I was, I was, I was looking at a Twitter post. I, I, sorry. I should have, I should have been paying attention. Dave, you caught me.

Chris Gammell: That's right. You caught me. This is like sleeping.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no, I sleep at it. This is the closest I would get to sleeping on a zoom call. You know, like this is. Sorry. I was looking through Twitter to see what else we should be talking about in the last of the show. I just wanted to make sure we covered everything.

Chris Gammell: All right. Then I, there was shiny lights and. This was unprofessional podcasting on my part. I should have let me slide. I know a lot about CRI. You know, I do some video stuff too. I'm just saying. So I know it now.

Dave Jones: Yeah. All right. Teaching the audience. We're talking to the audience. We're not talking to each other. I know. I know. I'm fine.

Chris Gammell: I'm just saying, you know, I'm cool. If I gap it for a minute. All right.

Dave Jones: Five, five thousand K color temperature. High CRI. And I also wanted low glare. Right. For those who don't know, there's this thing called UGR, which is the unified. Some of this stuff.

Chris Gammell: They just got to go watch the video. I think you're overselling it because it was a good video. I will. I will. Because you're saying all the things you said in the video. They should. You know, save some for the video.

Dave Jones: People don't watch my videos. People just listen to the podcast. Oh, come on. They don't even know I have a video channel. You know?

Chris Gammell: Oh, please. It's the other way around. And you know it. Oh, come on.

Dave Jones: No. Anyway. Anyway. You, come on. For those who couldn't be asked watching my, you know, 10 minute video on lead panels. All right. How about this? Right.

Chris Gammell: In depth. Usually Amp Hour has the depth, the depth of education is what you're trying to say. Is that people here, our listeners. Yes. Correct. They get dialed in. And if you're listening right now, you're better than an EEV blog watcher. You're just an Amp Hour listener.

Dave Jones: That's it. That's it. You're more educated. You're more edudicated. That's right. Can I explain UGR, please? Unified glare rating.

Chris Gammell: Go for it. Yes.

Dave Jones: UGA. Unified glare rating. It's basically how harsh are these things going to be on your eyes? It's like there is a standard for it. There's an international commission on illumination. Illumination, you know, it sounds like the Illuminati or something. That's right.

Chris Gammell: That's going to be a wild, wild yearly conference.

Dave Jones: Oh, that'd be a, yeah.

Chris Gammell: That'd be a bunch of old graybeards sitting around in a bar talking about how bad the lighting is in there, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Pitching about the, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, really they should use a RN41 on the, you know, that, that up there is just, you know, that, let me get out my spectrometer here, you know, double check. There's a color temperature in this bar. It's just, oh, it's just really not great.

Dave Jones: They didn't account for the logarithmic. Okay. Anyway, the UGR is a complex formula. It's basically eight log, blah, blah, the sum of the common, the sum of the luminance and all sorts of stuff, right? This complex formula, it pops out with a number, UGR, and basically anything, you know, like 30 plus would be, anything about 30 or above would be like really, like really glary light. You might use them, you know, some, you know, hardware store or something like that, where you don't really care, you know, something like that, right? Really. Or some sort of like where you just want to deliberately piss people off with how much glary the lights are, you know?

Chris Gammell: Oh, the DMV where you get your driver's license. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You just want to make people as uncomfortable as possible. Yeah. Like, or some in, in, in interrogation room or something, you know, really glary lights

Chris Gammell: that could have that like sodium halide, like that, that, uh, that, like that sound.

Dave Jones: Oh boy. Anyway, but anything lower than 19, which is what I got, anything under that is like deemed to be like really low glare panel. Yeah. Right. So, yeah. So I, so I got that. Those were my three requirements that I have. And I finally found a supplier that had all those three. And of course I bought panels before that I thought were good. And then I test them and they're like, they're advertised to 5,000 K and I measured them and they're like 6,800 K. It's like, you can shit me. I've been, you know, diddled. Right.

Chris Gammell: I, uh, I don't have a light meter. I actually did. I did an led project for a client and then I had to use their light meter. But like, is that something that you use often for lighting or other stuff or no?

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. No, you can use your camcorder for this. Any like good quality camcorder will actually be able to measure the color temperature for it. So you have a white balance cart. Like I've got one of these professional white balance carts, which is a proper white, you know?

Chris Gammell: No, I get that. I, sorry. I was, I was talking about the intensity and stuff like that. So like lumens and all that. Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: I've, I've, I've got a luminance, you know, that tells me how many lumens. So I put it on the bench and I go, okay, I'm getting a thousand plus lumens on the bench. If you don't know anything over a thousand lumens on a bench is pretty good, right? Anything under, I think the office standard here in Australia, you must have at least 300 lumens on every desk. Otherwise it doesn't meet the occupational health and safety requirements. You know, you can like sue your company cause they didn't give you enough light or whatever.

Chris Gammell: Yep. I squint so hard.

Dave Jones: I pulled something, you know, but, but for a lab, like I've, I found that I needed a thousand plus on the bench. So even more than that.

Chris Gammell: So I just found that like, so I was, I was designing with like, you know, like specs off the data sheet and you know, it's like millicandelas per millicandelas at 20 milliamps or no, it's millicandelas at 20 milliamps. It's like the, at least that's what's on DigiKey. And it's just like such a, and then it's like based on like, oh, the distance you're away and like Lux versus lumens. And like, oh man, there's so many different things.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's a complex topic. I've got a couple of tutorials with Doug Ford on that. So I might have to link you.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I'll look that up.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Okay. Anyway. Yeah. So I, yeah, the panel, it's a shit business. As you said, it's a race to the bottom who can produce the cheapest panels and, and you just, and they advertise them and they don't even, not even close to meeting their specs, you know, 5,000 K. Oh, right. You know, it's like, yeah, it's just because they don't care. You know, they just sell so many millions of these things to government contracts to, you know, we've got government, I don't know if you guys have government incentives to put, you know, they'll come and install, they'll come and replace your compact fluorescent ones with lead panels, higher efficiency lead panels. And all they care about is the efficiency, right? They don't care about that. They flicker. They don't care that they're the wrong, that a poor color temperature. They don't care about how much glare they have. All they care about, Oh, they're more efficient. Therefore saving power, therefore good, you know, and, and the taxpayers paying for it.

Chris Gammell: I, I had ordered a bunch of like, you know, I'm trying, I'm trying to do this on my own. I'm not like government, whatever. We don't have any, I don't, I don't know of any system or any programs here, but I like, or, you know, just it's smart to order LEDs these days. It'll last long, whatever. And I ordered some and I, I didn't realize the color temperature I bought. I bought 2,700 and I got them back and I was like, wow, these are like.

Chris Gammell: Like really red, like orange. It's like orange. Orange, orange. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And then, and then I, you know, and then I like just barely touched the dimmer and it just, they started flipping. I'm like, Oh no, these are going back. Cause it's the same thing. I was shopping for price, right? I bought from God knows where, you know, like it's just super cheap, super low quality, super Amazon.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Dave Jones: That reminds me before we go, there's a thing which I encountered, which it turns out as some people are pointing me to video, Electro Boom has done a video on this and someone else has done a video on this. I saw someone else's video on this first, but yeah, these, you know, you buy your regular Edison screwed lead bulbs, right? That you, you know, screw into your, you know, ceiling. And like some of them will always stay on. There'll be a dim glow in them. Even when you switch, like you've got a physical switch on your wall and you switch it off. These things continue to glow constantly. And a lot of people will say, Oh, it's the after it's the residual glow of the, uh, of the fluorescent material in the, in, in the bowl.

Chris Gammell: It's actually, it's actually spooky action at a distance, Dave.

Dave Jones: That's a spooky action at a distance. Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Anyway. It's the spin. It's the spin of the electrons flipping.

Dave Jones: It's, it's the cable capacitance, the wiring in your house. If it's, you know, if you've got like really long cable runs and it has to be configured in a certain way, the capacitance of the cable, because you've got AC in your house, right? 50 or 60 Hertz for you. Weird, weird yanks, right?

Chris Gammell: And not just the yanks, but yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Combined with the capacitance combined with the low power consumption of these lead bulbs, you know, they can light up with, you know, sniff of an oily rag combined with the particular design of the DC to DC converter in them can lead to some bulbs. Actually, even that little sniff of capacitance, they still get enough current. They still get enough turn on voltage for the DC to DC. And they just light up a little bit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That doesn't make sense to me though. Cause it's not like a boost topology. Usually they're like, they're like flybacks usually, aren't they?

Chris Gammell: Like flybacks and bucks. They're usually like a flyback or a non isolated because it's all contained within the bulb. As you say, usually they're cheap as hell, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. They're cheap as hell. Right. So they like got a, uh, they've just got a, like the really cheap ones will just have a capacitor voltage dropper and a bridge rectifier and that's it. And then that will go into your constant little five pins, SOT, uh, 23 constant current chip, which then dries the lead. So any capacitance. Yeah. So literally that's what's inside those really, you know, compact fluorescent bulbs. They don't have room for a flyback isolation transformer. Why do you need isolation inside a thing which no one can touch right inside? They can't touch the circuitry. So yeah, it's literally open it up and you'll find a capacitor and, and maybe, maybe one diode, right? Because you've got a half, half wave bridge rectifier. Right. And like, that's it. And, and a current regulation chip. So.

Chris Gammell: Wait, how do they actually knock it down though? Don't they need some kind of transformer to knock it down from like 220 where you are?

Dave Jones: No, that's what the capacitor is for. So that's sorry. They'll have an extra series resistor in there. So the, so the 50 Hertz of the capacitor has a certain impedance, right? It's a capacitor voltage dropper. So it's basically just a, it's basically just a voltage divider. That's it. It's a capacitor resistor.

Chris Gammell: I've never seen it.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. Yeah. I put one up. It's a capacitor resistor voltage divider and it's like, and that's it.

Chris Gammell: I have gotten burned by, uh, by a boost converters before where I'm like, I'm like the whole system's off. Why is that led still? It's like, you know, a little boost converter, just like, oh, half a volt. I can do something with that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I can, I can. I've, I've, I've done, I've done a video. We'll have to link it in. It's real. I thought it was really cool. Right.

Chris Gammell: Was it like a jewel, jewel thief or something?

Dave Jones: No, no, no. I, I, uh, got, I can't remember where I got it. Somebody sent it in the mailbag. I think it was a lumen counter, right? It was, sorry. It was a photon counter, right? It was, which are these in, in industrial brick things with a, you know, a real expensive photo sensor in it and they count photons. So you'll get like a pulse out for each. Yeah. It's like a photo multiplier tube. Yeah. Yeah. It's a photo multiplier.

Chris Gammell: And then it creates like a little cascading effect, right? Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. So it was, so I, I, you know, so I figured out, uh, so I figured, I wonder if I can actually, how low a current can I turn down a lead to and, and can I count the individual photons coming out? And, and I actually could, I, I got the graph and I got the graph and it's, it's, it's fascinating. It's fascinating. You know, I think I can't remember the, like the figure, but like the, the, the lead was still emitting photons down at, you know, like one microamp or something and, and visible. Yeah. And yeah. But it even went down to nano amps, I think, or something like that, like tens of nano amps or something. And it was still emitting photons, but you couldn't see them. I think you had to get up to like a couple of microamps before you, you know, if you, you know, got in a dark room, you could actually see the lead and it was lit up, you know, at, at a couple of microamps. It was, it's just incredible.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's always, it's always tough to like, try and like teach people who are new to electronics about like LEDs as like a current device. They're a current device. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Well, they're current device, but like maybe showing that like, Hey, look, even at these super, super low currents where the voltage is not going to be that much across it and that kind of thing. It's just, it's a really hard concept to switch around to, you know what I mean? Like switching from like thinking everything's voltage to, I always tell people like, like once you start thinking about circuits in terms of current, I think that is just like such an important, important switch. At least it was for me.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. It's a, it's a big hurdle for a complete beginner who knows nothing about electronics at all. Oh, who's built up a couple of hundred in one kits and they start teaching you about, you know, like, like you learn about current, but you don't learn about current driven devices.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, I think some of the problem as well is, is from looking at schematics, that is one of the biggest problems because the mental leap to like, see like a ground and like, like, I think like learning current and the importance of currents and current and devices rather would be easier if we didn't use ground symbols. You know what I mean? If we actually had to draw everything. Yeah. Cause if you're drawing everything, going back to the source, you're like, Hey, here's the loop. Here's the loop. And yeah, I know it's a mess, but we're going to do it anyways.

Dave Jones: I'm not sure that makes a huge difference. I'm not sure that makes a huge difference. The difference is in, is in the components themselves. People are, and because the, the, the source of power for your problem, product is a battery, which has voltage. Right. And so people think everything's voltage driven. It's measurable. Sure. You know, and, and people don't, you know, so that's a big step for going to current voltage driven to current driven devices. But of course you can't teach a current source to a beginner because they don't work. What's a current source. I don't, I can't buy a battery. I can't buy a current source battery, you know, that actually produces 50 milliamps constant. Like it's, you can't buy one. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Chris Gammell: It's like. Right.

Chris Gammell: It got really hot. It was really, really warm.

Dave Jones: So yeah. That's a. 200 volt battery. Interesting hurdle. Yeah. Maybe there's a video in that. Maybe there's a real ultra beginner video in that somehow. The difference between voltage driven versus current.

Chris Gammell: If you're out there and you're listening to our crazy stuff here and you don't understand it yet, try and think of things in terms of current and, and it'll help. Let us know in the comments too. That'd be interesting to know.

Dave Jones: Not always. Some things aren't current driven devices. Leads, bipolar transistors are current driven devices, but FETs aren't. FETs are voltage.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but you could think about it in terms of current driving into like in charging up the gate. And then that develops a field, which I guess is a voltage. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh my. Yeah. But yeah, I'm starting to twitch, you know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But that's what I'm saying. Like thinking about where the electrons are going, where the current's going. Right. It's like, I think that's really important. And then, and then even knowing that like, so with the FET, right. You have current flowing into a, into a gate, right. It does charge up the gate that does enable, you know, the field creates the current flow from the drain to the source, whatever. Yeah. But I think that's important too, because let me finish because the, because the thought then is like, it doesn't get through. Right. That is an important thing. Right. Understanding that, yes, there is current. You need current to drive that, to drive it up to a certain voltage, but it doesn't actually go through there. I mean.

Dave Jones: No, because it's a capacitor and well, unless you're talking about displacement current, let's not go there. Anyway. Right. Well, I've done a video. Yeah. A trolling video on that. That was fun. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But I would teach, if I was teaching FETs up front, I would say, yeah, look, you, you feed in three volts to the gate or whatever. And it, and it turns on as a switch. You know, I, I wouldn't teach that. Oh, it charges up the capacitance of the gate in it. Like that would be like, yeah. Okay. That's how it works at the physics level, but that's not necessarily how I I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I guess it's tough. It's right. Like once you get to a certain point, like my, my mental model is way different than someone starting electronics. You know what I mean? Like, it's just totally different. Like I've been crunching on this stuff for a long time. And I think about it different than someone who's getting started. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I'm not even sure if it's right. I don't know a lot of the time, but I think about it different.

Dave Jones: But, but it gets the job done. Right.

Chris Gammell: It does get the job done. Yeah. That's right.

Dave Jones: Right. That, that was one of the arguments in my video about does current flow through a capacitor. Right. It's, it's like, if you think that it does it, you can get the job done. Right. Yeah. The, the actual electrons know they build up on the plate and then they flow back in the other direction and they don't actually go through, you know, the, the, the air gap. Right. They don't actually go through the air gap, but from a circuit design point of view, it's, it's very convenient to think about current flowing through a capacitor. Right. It's just, it's just how, you know, circuit design works. Like it's just, you know, in a sort of circuit design in general is just

Chris Gammell: mental models built on top of one another. Yeah. We're just building on top of physics, building on top of whatever. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So anyway, so that was, yeah, we've, we've completely blown our budget, dude.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: We have completely. Yep. We do. We do try to stick to an hour these days, but you know. We, yeah. Well, we were just, we were feeling it, man. You know, like that was. Yeah, I know. We just got carried away. No. Calm down. Deep breath in. Out. Close out the show, Chris. Close out the show. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Let's, let's end today with a little self meditation and thinking, thinking about current flow through ourselves. And don't do that because that's called electrifying, electrocuting yourself.

Chris Gammell: Don't, don't electrocute yourself. Oh boy. Yep.

Chris Gammell: We have a couple of links on the subreddit. People can always submit stuff on the subreddit. You can also comment. There's some really great comments.

Dave Jones: We didn't talk about anything on the subreddit, did we? That's okay. We didn't get there.

Chris Gammell: There's some great KiCat plugins that were on there. I've been very excited about KiCat plugins lately. We'll talk about that some other time.

Dave Jones: Oh dude, I just want to buy that EMC test chamber. It's $200,000, but God damn it. I want it. I'm doing a GoFundMe. Oh, I see. I want it. It's top of the list. It's top of the list.

Chris Gammell: Oh, this is a tweet. Okay. I see. I didn't see it. Oh, it's just badass looking.

Dave Jones: I just want it in the lab because it just looks badass. Imagine having that in the lab.

Chris Gammell: It looks like, it's like a Stargate for RF. Anyways, we'll leave that as a teaser.

Dave Jones: It's like a Stargate for RF. Yep.

Chris Gammell: We'll leave that as a teaser for all of our listeners. Oh, can that be the photo?

Dave Jones: Can that be the photo? Do we have a photo? We don't own it.

Chris Gammell: We don't own it. So there's that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, come on. We'll share the tweet. How about that? Okay. Anyways, we'll talk to you next week, Dave. Yeah? Catch you next time.

Speaker ?: Bye.