#496 – Drab Olive

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released June 14th, 2020. Episode 496. Drab Olive.

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

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

Dave Jones: You had to go and start, didn't you? You had to ask, which is more important? Oh, the tweet. Which is the more important skill? Was it engineering in general or was it electronics?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it was engineering.

Dave Jones: Engineering in general. Which is the more important skill, folks? Chris's two options are intelligence or determination. That's all you gave us.

Chris Gammell: Some of this, Dave, is meant to be provocative. Actually, so there is a story behind it. So you were trolling? No. Well, no, there's a story.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. There's always context.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I was asking about, because it was for my nephews. And so I was talking with my mom. She's their grandmother, the kid's grandmother. And we were just talking about the role of, you know, like those studies that say you shouldn't tell a kid they're so smart. You should tell them that they try hard. They tried hard. Have you heard about that research?

Dave Jones: Not really. No.

Chris Gammell: Okay. I don't have any references to this because Dave popped this on me. I didn't know what he was going to say.

Chris Gammell: I did.

Dave Jones: Sorry.

Chris Gammell: But yeah, there are studies out there that, you know, basically say it becomes an identity thing of like, oh, I'm so smart. And it's not that it's an innate being thing. Like that I am a smart person. So then if you fail, I felt this myself. Like if you fail, then you feel like, oh, I am a dumb person. The better message is usually more along the lines of, you know, you didn't put in the time or you didn't try that hard on this test or whatever, you know, whatever the outcome was. And so there's some research around like encouraging kids through doing that. And so that was really the genesis of that question. And, you know, it was provocative and, you know, people over the internet didn't did or did not like that. But, and, uh, I fall on the, uh, you know, like everyone's like, why not both? And of course, both, you know, it's more of like a, you know, it was more like a, if you have both, which one is more important. And I think persistence is more important. Assuming you have both.

Dave Jones: Yes. But of course, yeah, no, you've got to have both. You can't just have, because my, my response to that was that.

Chris Gammell: Persistence alone is not it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Where you use the word determination. So yeah. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Oh, well, let's be official here. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think it was determination anyway. Right. So I went, if you just have determination that leads to U beam and solar roadways. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think that's true.

Dave Jones: And because you didn't have the intelligence to realize what you were doing or what, or the path you were going on was just dumb. You should, you know, like think about it. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, it's just not very practical.

Chris Gammell: Right. You dug this out of a while ago. I forget when it was, but there was someone who was talking about, there was like an, a really good analogy of like the determinations, like the gas in the car and intelligence is actually knowing where to drive it or something, something along those lines. Right. Okay. That kind of thing. And it is, it's important, right? You really, you know, if you are, if you, you know, and I think it's also comes down to like, you know, you could say intelligence versus, you know, earned wisdom. Right. And, uh, like innate intelligence is, you know, I always think about like, you know, IQ and stuff like that. And like, of course that alone doesn't, I mean, it'll get, you know, you're going to be bright. You're going to respond well. You might do well on testing, but does that mean that you're going to be as good at troubleshooting something on the bench where you really need to stick with it? Like that's, that's when I think the determination really kind of kicks in. Oh, of course. Yeah. But in the other direction, like you said, if you just stick with one thing, you just bang your head against the wall until you break through. It's like sometimes, you know, sometimes you needed to walk around the wall.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. You should have just walked around, you know, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So hence the provocative nature of the question.

Dave Jones: The question and yes. Okay. I had to bring it because it is interesting, you know, who, you know, who are the most, well, in engineering, right? In, in like, you know, science and physics, right? Intelligence is probably, you know, maybe like, like in pure research, for example, right? It might be intelligence. That's, you know, the majority decider. Whereas in applied physics, the difference between theoretical physics might be intelligent, mostly intelligence, but theory, but applied physics, for example, might be, you know, a more combination of both. If you've got to have the intelligence, but also you've got to have the determination to follow through on the practical, you know, thing and not, and not give up every time the result doesn't go your way, you know, and things like that.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Sure. I think some of it is like, I am not innately intelligent, but I like to think I'm determined in certain ways. So yeah. Right. I, I, I favor determination, you know?

Dave Jones: Yes. Well, I know. I was, what I was getting to is that engineering, right? When you, like you have, you know, theoretical, uh, science, then you have practical science and engineering is another apply. Engineering is an applied science, right? You have to apply it. Engineering, you know, you, you have to solve a problem. You have to build something. That's engineering. Engineering is not just coming up with a good idea. That is not engineering. Engineering's making it happen. So, you know, I think I went who, which one of the groups, you know, engineers make it happen was their slogan. You know, I think it was engineers Australia, maybe. I don't know. That's possibly where I got it from. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Anyway, it was like a, like a television campaign or something or what?

Dave Jones: It was like a, well, an online, you know, camp. Yeah. Media blitz kind of thing. Yeah. Engineers make it happen. And, uh, yeah. And that's, that's really what it is. So if you don't have any determination whatsoever, you're screwed, right? Yeah. You're really not going to be able to be an effective engineer. So, you know, you, you might make a good engineering manager, perhaps. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I don't know what makes good engineering manager. I think it's, uh, you know, uh, tolerance for pain.

Dave Jones: Well, we famously, I mentioned tolerance for pain. I famously mentioned this, uh, uh, many times before, and this will segue into another thing we've got on our Reddit list, by the way. Um, there's, you know, what, five universities here in Sydney that do engineering. Right. And one of them, which is like our most prestigious, you know, oldest sandstone building university here, which is the university of Sydney. Right. They, they have a big engineering course. Right. It's like, you know, a thousand people or something, you know, a thousand students or whatever. Flagship university of the. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a flagship, you know, it's, it's world, it's world renowned, you know, blah, blah. And they've got a huge engineering program, but I don't believe not once in my entire career. Have I ever met or interviewed or seen a resume of an engineer from the university of Sydney. They just, I don't know where all these engineers go. They, they, they, they all come from.

Chris Gammell: I bet I do. I know where they go. Okay. Tell me. This is, this is the thing. So for a long time, I didn't meet many like MIT engineers. I'm always like, where are they all going? And you know, the answer is, at least in the States is, uh, I've, I've, I've met them since, but like, I, I had the chance to go to MIT job fair, uh, when I was at Keithley and it was very, very interesting.

Dave Jones: Cause like seeing like who, you've, you've mentioned this before, I think. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: There were a ton of financial institutions there. And so they got locked up as quants and they made, they made a buttload of money, of course, you know, like, and I would have made the same decision probably. And yeah, we've, yeah, we've definitely talked about that before, but I'm sure that, you know, you know, maybe they're, they're just getting, you know, locked away into like really, you know, high-end jobs that you just don't meet them, you know?

Dave Jones: Yep. Please explain, uh, quants for though. That's a short, um, short hand. Yeah. What does it stand for?

Chris Gammell: It's, it's like financial.

Dave Jones: It's a quantitative and quantitative analysis person. Like somebody, you know, some like Uber smart geek who runs the numbers basically. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Or like creates algorithms for. Makes algorithms for stock trading and stuff like that. Yeah. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So what's the, uh, financial equivalent? Sorry. The insurance equivalent and.

Chris Gammell: Actuarial.

Dave Jones: Actuary. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those, those Uber smart math kids, you know.

Chris Gammell: Tables and stuff, right? Is it?

Dave Jones: Oh, I don't know. I don't know about this. Yeah. But I, well, anyway, similar kind of thing. So yeah, that's where they all stand up because it's just, I swear I've never met one.

Chris Gammell: Or they just, you know, like I'm sure they're out there. You know, I think that's the thing. I'm sure.

Dave Jones: I'm sure. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But I've just, it's, it's always fascinated me. Why?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, I think, yeah, a lot of that stuff comes down to recruiting too. Like, like that is big, not big business, but it's definitely, it's a large, um, it's an important thing for both the school and for the companies where they're like, yeah, you know, we own, like I talked to some companies, they're like, yeah, we only go to MIT or we only go, we, we go to these, these five schools and it's, you know, and then majority of the, you know, they're, they're able to pay the salaries that are, you know, are tied to that kind of level of, you know, uh, school and stuff. And, but that's where they get all their talent from. So.

Dave Jones: Yep. It's weird. I just expect like at least a few to sort of like dribble out into the community, but

Chris Gammell: I think the thing that's always interesting too, I, I'm sure we'd like, like we've been talking about, like, I think we've talked about some of this stuff before and like how I got to go to MIT, but I, I went to like university of Michigan as well, which is, you know, good engineering school. And, you know, I went to a couple other, I went to case obviously where it's my own matter. And it's always amazing to me, like the effect of brand on, on students, like literally just, just anecdotally looking at like the line, the length of the line in front of companies, you know? And so you'd have like, I was with Keith Lee, right? Not a lot of.

Dave Jones: Not, not a lot of people line it up. Oh yeah. I've heard of an oscilloscope, you know? Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Sorry. I've heard of a, but you know, I've used a multimeter.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Exactly. You may be, they had a multimeter, but maybe not with a source meter or whatever, but like, but all that stuff. But then like you go like, and you see the Apple line is, you know, around the block and it's just like, yeah.

Dave Jones: Or, uh, you know, SpaceX these days or Tesla. Oh sure. Something would, would, would have the line around the block, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right. And I think about, you know, young me and I've like, same thing. Like I didn't know. And like, I feel like there's, there's some kind of room for resource here of just like, you know, it obviously it's, it's on the student to go and, you know, research these things beforehand and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All the things that career services do, but it would be a boon for our listeners that are younger. To like, if, if you know of a company that's cool that hires students and, you know, like, especially hiring out of school, it's tough, right? It's in these days, it's, it's harder to get entry-level jobs than it used to be. So it does become, it comes down to recruiting and stuff. But, but like understanding where these jobs are is important for that kind of, you know, like where, where there's interesting problems that people that are accessible to cut rate talent like you and me, Dave.

Dave Jones: Exactly. But it also comes down to the, the type of student as well. Like if you've just got regular Joe blog student who, oh, I got them, I got the, you know, the SATs or the marks to get into engineering. So, oh yeah, you know, it's, I'll just go into engineering because I don't know, my mate went into engineering, whatever. My parents want me to do it, you know, and the, and the true hobbyists who, who know what they want, right. Because they will know who Keith Lee is. They'll know who, you know, Texas Instruments is. They'll know who National Sammy is or, or whoever.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And, and, and then when they show up and they're like, I've used a TI part at the TI booth, they're like, oh, hello.

Dave Jones: Hello, come on in.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. I've seen that happen. You know, there was, um, someone was posting, uh, I'll just see if I can find it. There was a student who posted on Reddit and someone had mentioned contextual electronics. And that's the only reason I knew about the post, but it was basically like, I can't, you know, there's obviously, you know, we're still dealing with COVID stuff. A lot of internships are canceled. Jobs are, are, you know, disappearing and stuff like that. And so this person was like asking about like, what should I do instead? And, you know, it was the, it was some good advice. It was, you know, build projects and reach out and work on open source if you can. And, but mostly build stuff yourself so that you can, when you do, you know, if you're not going to do an internship, build your own internship.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And especially because a lot of people are, at least in the U S are not traveling that much. It's like, yeah, use the time to, if you, if you can try and use the time to, to build something out and, and show it off later. Like we always talk about on here. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah, totally. So that brings us, that segues nicely into, yes, a news article that I put on the Reddit got a few thumbs up. And so yes, many of the, well, I'd say probably most of the universities here in Australia, they could lose $16 billion.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: Because international students are locked out by the coronavirus. Of course, our borders are locked, you know, you can't come in. And, and 16, that's 16 billion here in Australia. That's not Yankee bucks, right? That's, you know, 16, so 16 billion is a lot of money here in Australia. Right.

Chris Gammell: It's a lot of money everywhere I actually gave.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, yeah, pretty much. But yeah, like these, these universities, of course, I, I, it's probably similar in the U S but probably not to the same extent as it is here in Australia is the Australian universities have built their entire, you know, like physically built the universities, built all these fantastic whiz bang new buildings and everything else on the backs of like, there's been massive growth in the last 20 years of the universities here in Australia. And it's all based on the back of full fee paying international students. And most of them are from China. Like the majority of them are Chinese students. We've got over 400 where our entire country has a population of 25 million, right? We have over 400,000 international students. Yeah. Right. That is a massive percentage of our, that's a huge percentage of our population just in foreign students. And they're all full fee paying.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's the exact same thing here. Yeah. That is, there is, yeah, it's all full fee. And, um, you know, I, I know people that work in international offices and stuff and it's, it's a huge part of university businesses and universities themselves are, are huge businesses as well.

Dave Jones: So, oh, of course they're massive, you know, they get funding and, you know, that, that's what, if you want to be a, a professor or a lecturer at a university, half your time is going to be spent, you know, trying to win grants and stuff like that, you know, trying to win grant money. So it's, you know, it's a huge thing.

Chris Gammell: I agree. I just, I don't know, is that tied to the international thing though?

Dave Jones: Oh no, no. I'm just saying in general, you know, like, oh yeah, that's, that's a big, yeah.

Chris Gammell: If you, if you're, if you have a research focus for sure. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Half your time is spent finding money, let alone, and the other half is, you know, working on stuff. So yeah, just be prepared for that. I've heard that from many, um, people working. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: One of my buddies is a, is a researcher and, uh, you know, a professor and he said him and a bunch of other, uh, professors were all on the same grant. It was a thousand page grant. I was like, oh.

Dave Jones: Thousand page grant. Thousand pages. Wow.

Chris Gammell: Wow. It's crazy. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's insane. How long did it take? Yeah. It might've made them see it might've taken them six months of work to actually write that grant so that they can get that money so that they can spend the next six months working on it.

Chris Gammell: And then they've got to go through that whole process again. Yeah. It's another, another Ferris wheel to step onto, you know, it's crazy.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Chris Gammell: So the university thing is, is really interesting. So my friend Sophie had sent me a, uh, Scott Galloway is someone who's been writing about, about universities and about like the coming death of, of a lot of universities. Basically.

Dave Jones: I've heard the name. What is, does he write a blog somewhere or?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So he's NYU professor, um, in the business school there. Yeah. And he also has a podcast, which is pretty good.

Dave Jones: That's probably where I've heard him from. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: He's, he's real, real sharp, sharp voice and very strong opinions. And, uh, and then basically what his argument is like, look, the high-end universities are their trophies, right? So you get a, uh, a degree from a high-end university, like a MIT or Stanford or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. You're, you're set of course, but like, basically they're so expensive and like, they're so exclusive that it's almost not the reality for a lot of people out there. And then it was basically though, that like so much money, like you're talking about with the Australian universities, so much money is propping up a ton of schools that are out there that a lot of the, you know, second and third tier schools just aren't going to make it. And then like thinking through the, the implications of that, especially with the U S debt, you know, student debt stuff. I'm sure some of our listeners have student debt, you know, it's just like such a huge, and I'm going to not do it justice, of course. So I do recommend people go on and read some of his stuff.

Dave Jones: It's a massive pro it's one of your biggest problems there, apart from health and, and social security welfare benefits. Right. It's like, it's like the third biggest.

Chris Gammell: It's, it's one of the largest. Yeah. One of the largest debt sources passed. I think it may have outstripped mortgages and credit card debt. Yeah. Yeah. Might've. Yeah. Yeah. It's huge.

Dave Jones: I read the number a couple of months back and it was like, wow. You know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Couldn't believe it. So Scott writes about all this stuff and just how the third, a lot of third tier schools aren't going to make it. And yeah, it's, it's pretty crazy to think about.

Dave Jones: Like what, what is the repercussion of them? Not, Oh, they'll shut down.

Chris Gammell: Like completely shut down. Yeah. He said, he said that the media, I think I forget the number. I think it was like the median endowment of the 4,500 schools that are out there. So like endowment being like the chunk of money they use to fund the rest of the school was something like it was in the tens of, it was, it was less than $10 million. So basically you, it was like $7 million or something like that. Not enough to pay anything. Yeah. You basically, you'd either spend it or, you know, but basically that means they're completely dependent upon people showing up.

Dave Jones: That's a really small school. If that's.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, and it's not, they weren't really small schools. So it was like, basically the cashflow at these schools is just going to be trash. So I'm, yeah, I'm really interested. Obviously, you know, I have weird views on education, but I don't think that, you know, as much as I talk about contextual electronics as like an educational thing, I don't actually understand what the world looks like without a lot of the universities that are out there. And so like, uh, I'm very interested to see where it all goes, you know, in a, you know, kind of morbid curiosity kind of way. I feel for everyone who's part of it though. It's like, you know, yeah, there's just a lot of, a lot of, a lot of shit going on right now. So. Yeah. So I do recommend people listen to the podcast and he has, he has a newsletter too. So.

Dave Jones: Cool. I have to check it out. There is, um, there's no talk here of universities going under like, cause we don't have that many, like, you know, we aren't as, as, uh, you know, populace as the U S so anyway, there's no talk of them going under, but there's talk that look, um, because apparently like half the international students come in or start their course at the second half of the year. Right. And we're bang where we're right on the second half of the year here. And we're not letting anyone in the country for obvious reasons. Right. So. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, so that, that then not, not only delays it by six months, but then apparently they're talking about it. It, it actually has flow on effects for several years. So just stopping six months of people coming in now has like three year flow on effects. So yeah. Sure. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, think about like research labs that are like, you know, expecting people to, to be like part of the, you know, the, the machine that is grad students and postdocs and everything else. Yeah. It's just crazy.

Dave Jones: And, and it's not just the stopping of full fee paying students, not just the sudden drop to zero of full fee paying international students. Although there's still some that are here, you know, the ones that appear already are going to keep going. But yeah, there's massive numbers, like hundreds of thousands who can't get here. And so it's not just that, but on top of that, then, then there's the whole COVID economy, you know, slow down thing. Right. So therefore, you know, like big companies are going to invest less, you know, governments might invest less and things like that in, you know, things like a pure research and, you know, other things. So yeah, there's just going to be cutbacks there. So it's a double whammy. So yeah, it's not looking good, please. If you're at a, you know, if you're in the know at these unis here in Australia or in the US or in your country, please let us know in the comments down below. Is it, you know, is there talk like are people, you know, really scared witless that, you know, their, their, their department or their project or their funding is going to vanish?

Chris Gammell: Well, hopefully not.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's a big deal, but I think it's, it, it is going to happen. Like, I don't think there's any way out of it. Things are going to have to, you know, some things are going to have to shut down. Hopefully not in entire schools, you know, because imagine if you were halfway through, you know, imagine if you're halfway through your course and then your universe, sorry, we just shut down. What the hell happens then? You know? Right. And you spend all that money. Maybe you could transfer perhaps. How is it over there? Can you, do you guys have like a national framework? We've kind of got like a national framework here where if you, you know, go in one, if you're at one school, you can actually transfer to a different school because they're all on the same framework.

Chris Gammell: No, that is definitely not the case here. Yeah, no, I've had some friends who tried to transfer and it's like, you have to like, you have to cross the courses and you have to like, you know, prove that it's this because you think about it from a financial perspective. Like you're going to a new school. The new school doesn't want to be like, oh yeah, don't take any classes here. Just, just, just get the name of the degree. You know? So no, that's not, I mean, they're a business, you know, like they're, a lot of them are private schools and like, they're a business and okay, fine. It's up to them. But like, yeah, there's no, I think the state schools are probably more likely to accept other state schools. Have something like that. Right. Okay. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. But it is, but it's like interstate system as well too. So like, you know, the equivalent of like, you know, New South Wales versus like Queensland or something like that. Yeah. Right. Gotcha. Gotcha. There's nothing. As far as I know, there's nothing national, but I, you know, I'm, I'm not that much in the know. So.

Dave Jones: Okay. Interesting.

Chris Gammell: You remind me of that.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But there are national, once you get your degree though, there are, I've done a video on this, which is, you know, how you can go overseas and then your degree, if it's under the Washington Accord or it's under the Sydney Accord, these are different national accord. Sorry. These are different global accord things. And most universities sign up to these Accords. And so if you've got your degree from one university in the U S you can come to Australia and it's officially recognized by the Institute here because it's under the Washington Court or something, you know? Yeah. Yep. So that's a weird business. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, like I wish there was a way to just prove that you actually knew the content instead of just, you know, it's so hard to like actually do that. It's like, Oh, we could have a test or we could do, you know, like, but at the end of the day, like I was, I was literally, you know, so I had a video thing over the weekend and I had to reset up my lab and I saw my college degree and I'm actually staring at it right now. And it says the trustees have admitted Christopher John Gamble to the degree of bachelor science and like, who the hell's a trust? Like, I don't care about them. You know, like literally it's like, you know, Oh, it's, you've been inducted into this. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: This secret society.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, like, I get it, but honestly, the, the name of the top is all I care about here, folks.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, we've mentioned this before. It's like the, once you graduate, you quickly realize, maybe, you know, it's going to vary from country to country, but certainly here in Australia, which courses, you know, you did in which university that goes to the very bottom of your resume. Nobody cares. It's like, it's like, can you do the job? They will test. They'll ask you questions. They'll, they'll get the vibe. Show me projects you've worked on. You know, what, what other companies, if you work for it, because it quickly becomes totally irrelevant.

Chris Gammell: And I would say, having looked at a lot of resumes as well, like, even though it's, it's, it's somewhat transparent. I think that, so, okay. So say a young person is listening, like they're in college. They're like, oh man, I'm leaving school. I don't know what I'm going to do, you know, and, or just that person who was taking advice online. Right. They're struggling. They want to build something. I would say it's actually better to build a thing for yourself. Maybe you're going to do that anyways. Right. You're going to build a thing to yourself. I think it's better to make up a name for your company and then say you're building it for your company and then listed under work experience.

Dave Jones: Now it can be, you could, uh, and there's nothing and, and you wouldn't be a line.

Chris Gammell: So I think you should be transparent about it. It's like, no, that's my company. I was building it for me or, you know, for this purpose or whatever it was, you should be very transparent about it. Maybe even make your company be, you know, your name dot anchor, not ink. That's actually illegal. Uh, but like, you know, your name industries or something, you know, Chris Gammell industries or something like that. And like, so, but be very transparent about that, but show it as work experience because it is, you know, assuming you're regulated about it. And, um, I just think that that's better than being like, oh, and I built, you know, it's not a hobby. It's like a thing that you're building because you aren't, should be building.

Dave Jones: And even then like sell, sell five of them. And then, you know, you can say, yes, it was, it was, it literally is a commercial product.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. It is interesting. Like those, those small things that like push you over the edge. And it's like, oh, actually I am a business. Okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Just because you sold five of them on fricking Tinder or somewhere. Right. That's great. It doesn't matter. It's a commercial product. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: I mean, people are making a living on there too. So like, it's not like, you know, it's more of a question of scale at that point, but yeah, I think it's, you know, you're building a thing.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Let me tell you about a thing I'm building, Dave. Ladies. How I was a bit put off today. So I've been, you know, this is actually the thing I've talked about on the show before. I'm building a thing for contextual electronics and it's got an NRF 52, 840. And wouldn't you know it, there has been a, it's not a bugger. It's like a disclosure. I guess it's a disclosure, but basically someone announced recently that they can completely bypass all firmware protection on the NRF 52, 840. Nice.

Dave Jones: Does this actually impact you though?

Chris Gammell: Not really. Well, that's a, that's a good question. Right. So, you know, this is a, you know, it's a board I'm building for the course and for myself and there's a development platform. And I think at a certain point, yes, of course it does. Right. I'm designing a thing that it could go out in the world. It's, you know, if it's a development platform, that means that I have to redevelop it later. But like, it comes down to like, what is the, if it's a first spin, it's a first spin, right? I'm trying to get something out anyway. So I'm just going to keep going. But you know, it's like the, when do you, when do you make that decision? Do you, you know, do you throw away all the work you've done or do you keep going with it? And, and then you say, well, I'm going to change it later. You know, I'm going to, it's something that.

Dave Jones: Well, if it's a project critic, if it's a product critical feature, then obviously you have to take some action. If it's not, you go, meh. So what? You know? Like, if it's just like a dev board or something, it's like, well, doesn't matter. Right. It's like, yes, you have to make, make people aware who are you going to use this dev board that yes, this silicon has this, you know, issue.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. And, and, you know, if so, if it's a security, uh, uh, security forward application where it's like, oh, well, I need this to be a secure product. That's probably not the right dev board for you. It's probably not the right part for you.

Dave Jones: Oh yes. If you, if you're using that part for like a, uh, some sort of crypto hardware wallet, you know, it's like, yeah, you're going to come a gutter. So.

Chris Gammell: But you might know how to put Bluetooth on it in the first place then. Oh, right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Of course. What, so what, what, what is the mechanism? Is it like a side channel? Is it a power, power rail side channel attack? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Side channel. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Side channel.

Chris Gammell: And so, you know, I was talking to Colin O'Flynn actually the other day and, um, who

Dave Jones: has developed the, um, he's been on the show before and yeah, he does the chip whisperer

Chris Gammell: and the chip whisperer and the chip shouter and stuff like that. I still don't quite understand how it works to be completely honest. I kind of get it. I have one of them. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's, um, it allows you to do, um, uh, methodical side channel, how it's so power, you can, you know, monitor the power and going in and out and you can, you know, modulate things and you can.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I think there's some fuzzing here as well, but basically at the end of the day, what happens is you can then go and dump all you get, basically you get debugger control on this chip using these methods that.

Dave Jones: And then once you've got debugger control, you've got, you can dump out all the code.

Chris Gammell: You could even, you could do more than just dump it though. I think if you have debugger. Oh, really? So. Okay.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. No, of course. Well, a debugger is a debugger. You can change registers on the fly. You can, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Do all sorts of jazz. So yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. So yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting from a, well, I mean, it's not like I'm, I'm not the problem here. Right. This is like, you know, the NRF 52, 840 is like, it's out in the world, man. There, there are a lot of products. This is not a, this is not a small part. So.

Dave Jones: So how did you find this? How did you, did somebody tweet it to you? Oh, right. How can you, all right. Okay. Yep. And you went, oh, I'm, I'm using that. Oops. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, well, it's just an interesting, you know, it's a, there's always the, uh, there's always the, the voyeur-ness of like seeing a, you know, seeing an interesting hack. Right. That's always interesting. Yeah. Um, but it just happened to be the chip that I was using. Yeah. So it's not like I got like an email from.

Dave Jones: But it's like shoulder shrug these days. It's, oh yeah. There's another chip that you can bypass with side channel attack. It's like, if, if that thing really matters for your product, you're going to be, you're, you're going to spend a month doing your research on which is the best device to choose. You know, it's like, and, and for reasons, you know, it, it might have physical hardware protection in there that prevents side channel attack. It's got a physical hardware protection in there over the die that actually prevents, uh, D capping and then laser, you know, reading out of the ROM contents and, you know, all that sort of jazz. So yeah, it's like, you're like, if you're using, like, if you want to ultra secure device, you probably wouldn't be using something with, as you said. It would probably have security in the name or something like that. With a Bluetooth interface. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you're right. You're right. You're right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. No, there are specific devices on the market.

Chris Gammell: I just thought it was interesting because I am, you know, mid design. Like I, I don't think, I don't know. Have you ever had that where you had like a design and it like went obsolete or anything like that too? Like I've just never had, I've actually one thing where the connector went obsolete.

Dave Jones: I haven't worked on consumery enough products for it to be a problem. Let's put it that way. We have got, yeah, we have gone into production for knowing that part is obsolete. Right. Right. And we, and we couldn't be bothered changing it because we're only going to manufacture a

Chris Gammell: hundred of these things, a thousand, you know, like you buy, you buy, you buy a tray or two and you're good to go. You're saying.

Dave Jones: And you're good to go. You're good to go. Because like we're in that business, we would have a five-year contract for a project to supply the military or some other company. Right. And then you just buy the parts up front. Bingo. I've got my entire, you're, you're, you're contracted to produce 10,000 of these widgets. You buy 10,000 of the chips and you're sweet. You know, it's like, who cares if it went obsolete? It doesn't matter. Buy insurance. You actually cover that down the road. Well, you can deal with that down the road. And we've discussed, you know, component obsolescence and you've done that in your job, haven't you? Component obsolescence engineer. You know? Yeah. And yeah. So, so you would deal with that down the road. You would, you often there'd be like a pin compatible part. You'd drop it in and you'd recompile or something or, you know, some other thing. Um, and worst case you would have to relay out your board. Um, you know, if you didn't want to touch the board, you wanted to modify existing products, you would do a mod board. I've done videos on how to do mod boards and things like that.

Chris Gammell: Um, yeah, that was relatively recent, right? That was like a flex PCB or something.

Dave Jones: Wasn't. Oh, that, that was, that was a flex PCB one, but I've done other videos as well on, uh, actual mod boards of making mod boards, which if, if you don't know what, yeah, if you don't know what, if those who don't know what a mod board is, I'll quickly go over it. It's where you've got an existing product, you know, you've shipped, you know, or you've got, you've already got, you know, 10,000 blank boards, right? And they're really expensive boards. They're like, you know, 10 layer and they cost, you know, a hundred bucks a board or something. And they're giant things. And, and, and you don't want to, you're right. You've already made the investment in those boards. You don't want to re-spin them, right? Cause it's really expensive. It's going to come as a shock to people, but not everyone makes little Arduino size, you know, four layer boards that cost, you know, a couple of bucks, right?

Chris Gammell: I mean, you're making a four layer board for Arduino, Dave, come on. Don't be too fancy here.

Dave Jones: Oh, too fancy, fancy. Right. No, you know, some boards cost hundreds or a thousand dollars a pop, right? For a one-off blank board, right? Because they're 16 layers and they've got micro vias and they're, you know, got-

Chris Gammell: Just the amount of time and the process that was put into-

Dave Jones: And they're physically large.

Chris Gammell: Slapping that thing together, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they, you know, they got so many, you know, and they got Rogers, you know, controlled impedance material and they got, you know, everything else, right? Really expensive stuff. So you don't want to re-spin that. You can't re-spin those boards. You can't dump them. Well, you can. Well, you can, but it's expensive, right? It's just, no. So you decide, no, it's cheaper. You know, you've got a thousand of these things. It's cheaper to make a little adapter mod boards, a little adapter board that basically goes over the existing footprint. It depends on the physical implementation of the thing you're trying to say. So you've got a, you know, a quad flat pack chip or something, right? That you want to actually replace. Then you would get a board that actually fits that footprint. So that, and then it would have a half moon castellated edges on the side of the board, right? That would actually line up with the pads. And then you'd put another chip on top of that, for example, and that's a mod board where it'll, it'll solder in. You might have to hand solder it, for example, but hey, you know. But you're only making a hundred. Yeah, yeah. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Right? So then you solder that board in to actually physically replace the chip that you want to do. And then you can get more fancy using flex circuits. If you need to connect this point of the circuit over here to somewhere over the board, you can make this big flex, you know, overlay kind of thing that joins up the two things. So you don't have to do mod wires and stuff like that. It's just neater. But anyway, that's a, yeah. And that's a thing you'll often have to do in the engineering world is a mod board. Very common. So.

Chris Gammell: And very annoying. Very annoying.

Dave Jones: Oh no, I actually enjoy. I really, oh, you want me to do a mod? Oh, I've got to do a mod board. It's really nice to be able to figure out how to actually do it nicely. You know, I actually enjoy the process. Call me a, you know, sick puppy, but I actually rather enjoy it. Yay. I've got to build a mod board rather than just relay. I don't want to rip up the board. I'd rather have the engineering challenge of making a mod board. I really enjoy it. All right. Well. Yes, I'm weird.

Chris Gammell: You do you, buddy. You do you.

Dave Jones: Anyway. That's that. What else do we want to get on? Oh, oh yeah. I, I just, I, I retweeted this one cause this is an art of fruit post and this is interesting. Yeah. A type C USB. Cause you know, USB is always bloody changing, isn't it? And you know, once.

Chris Gammell: I do wonder past this.

Dave Jones: What type C. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, USB type C. USB type C is a, you know, how it's got all these new power, power delivery stuff. You know, it's got these two lines in there. It's got the CC line, CC one and CC two lines. There are extra lines on the USB connector that allow you, you know, I squared C type lines that allow you to, to actually communicate between the, you know, the host and the, and the device, how much power you need. So if you plug in a power, you know, if you plug in one of those, you know, portable battery packs and, and, and, and you want to fast charge it. Right. It, it needs to send data to the, to the charger to say, Hey, I'm a smart device. I can handle, please give me. Give me all your volts at five amps. Please give me a hundred watts. Right. Yeah. And, um, which I think is close to the maximum for us. That is the maximum. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Close enough. Yeah. Five volts. And so you can change the voltage. So USB-C is capable of chain the US, you know, the power delivery standard is capable of, it's not just five volts. It's capable of going up to other voltages. Right. And, and, and current. So you've got to negotiate that, um, smartly. And some products, like I said, a USB power bank or something. Right. Or some other, you know, thing that you just want to, you just want the power. That's it. You're using the USB-C connector just for the power. That's it. You don't need to send data. Yep. Give me the juice, but you still need to negotiate that. So rather than using a pain in the ass, a regular USB-C connector that has all, how many pins on a regular USB-C connector and how tiny a pitch are they? They're just a pain.

Chris Gammell: 20 plus, I think. Yeah. Yeah. 24, 24 pins. Yep.

Dave Jones: Absolute nightmare. Right. Really mongrel parts, you know, pain in the ass thing of the week, right? Pain in the ass component of the week. Is that, is that an acronym? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: Anyway. No. Anyway. So rather than do that, CUI, who's a connector manufacturer, they've just released one, which is the, well, for those playing along at home, the UJC HP3 SMT. It's the connector of the week. And it only has the power pins and the two CC lines. I think it's got six pins and a one millimeter ping pitch. Beauty.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Jeez. One, one, one millimeter. Jeez. You could, you know, drive a truck through one, one millimeter. Unbelievable. So yeah. Nice. It's just a connector dedicated to just that. So I think it's fantastic. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, it's better than some of these other connectors you posted about on Twitter. What about these other?

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. I forgot about those.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're, um, yes, I, I did put those on the Reddit, didn't I?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think I did. Advanced orthogonal interconnects and, and similar out of this world, military style connectors.

Dave Jones: That one actually got the, almost the most thumbs up. I think the, yes, people were. So let's, let's talk about that. People wanted to talk about these, uh, these connectors. Phone F O O N on Twitter posted these. So I retweeted those. And, um, yeah, advanced orthogonal interconnect is a pin grid array right angle.

Chris Gammell: I've never seen anything like this.

Dave Jones: So you haven't. Oh yeah. No, these are.

Chris Gammell: It's kind of hard to explain, but what is this even for?

Dave Jones: So yeah, it looks like, uh, what it's for is for, if you've got your existing, you're designing your product and it's got this advanced processor on it. Right. Which is a big pin grid array thing. Not, not this ball, not this BGA rubbish. Right. Like it looks like a pin grid array.

Chris Gammell: So it's like, you know, if you can actually plug like the old motor connectors you're talking about, like the, the ones where the pins are on the edges and stuff like that. And they plug, they plug into like a huge socket or something.

Dave Jones: No way. Uh, uh, like, like, like the old school, uh, 486 processes that they actually came with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those, right. Yeah. So those, right. So, so if you've, if you've designed your board, you've laid out your board and then you want to troubleshoot it, this is like advanced, you know, high-end tools, you know, you want to put your logic analyzer around there, your debug, your debugger and all that sort of stuff for this advanced processor or FPGA or something. Right. And you want to probe it in, in real time. And then you get one of these adapters, you either plug it in or solder it into your board. And then it brings out all the pins at right angles via controlled impedance traces. Right. And, um, you know, so it's all, these things probably, you know, these things are really expensive. I don't know how much this one would cost, but you know, you can, you can pay hundreds of dollars, start at a hundred, hundreds of dollars for one of these, one of these, um, one of these adapters orthogonal interconnects. Sorry. And yeah, they just bring out all the pins so that you can put, plug your chip into the outside and then you can probe, you know, you get access to probing pins. Although this one's a bit, this one's a bit weird. It's got like large copper internal things in some triangular wedge shape thing. So it's really, this one's a bit bizarre, but, but the general concept is, is you're breaking out. It's basically a breakout board.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay. Okay. So it's not actually like a practice and like, like people, like we said, it's, it's tough to say it in words. Obviously we'll have links, links to Foon's, uh, uh, Twitter account and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Although technically this one, I think it is physically a connector. I think it is a connector. It's a right angle connector effectively. I think it is. That's what those large copper, you've got to see the photo, those large copper flat pads in the middle, in the X shape in the middle are. I think they're large power pins. And then all the others on the, and the other pins on the outside are, you know, like just regular pins. Right. Mind you, they're controlled impedance because it looks like controlled impedance traces. I can see that they've got the little, uh, squiggles in there. So they're matching the length, right? They're matching the length of the traces there. So yeah. So it's high speed, obviously. But, um, yeah, this, uh, so anyway, this, so I got sidetracked there. This one's probably a, some sort of weird ass right angle PCB connector. I think rather than a breakout, which was what I was talking about, but I've seen these identical things.

Chris Gammell: The whole thread is just, it's just like, it's weird, you know, mechanicalness and probably military connectors. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I've see this was not, this was the industry I was in.

Chris Gammell: Right. I was going to ask about that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. We, we needed, right. The example of this one that has all these ethernet, it's got a two, four, six, eight ethernet pairs in the one military connector. You can tell it's like military type because they all have the same drab or, uh, olive. I think it, I think it's fish officially called drab olive, um, or semi-officially called drab olive. Uh, finish it like, you know, actual color. It's the, it's a similar, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's a military fatigue style. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Kind of thing. If you've ever seen the military stuff, they're all this same drab olive color. Anyway. So, uh, rather than, you know, you could have just used ethernet connectors. You could have just used eight regular ethernet interconnects, but then I, you've got eight separate cables, right? So you've got to plug them in and you can plug them in the wrong way. This is designed for like aircraft and, and, and tanks and vehicles and other, and, and other industrial machinery where you have to disconnect stuff for maintenance and testing and replacement and things like that. And plug them back together and get the, the plane or whatever back in the sky. Right. But you don't want to have any, run any risk of plugging the wrong thing in to the wrong place when you reconnect it back in. Right. It's, it's, it's not just the robust nature of these military connectors. It's also for the fact that you can't goof it up.

Chris Gammell: Right. I was just, I was just thinking as I'm like scrolling down this list and I'm like thinking, you know, these connectors are terrible to look at, but you know what? You should see that. Oh, they're gorgeous. What do you mean? No, you should, you should see the frigging cable diagram for these things. You know, just like the amount of, at least some of these things have hundreds of pins attached to them. And it's like, yeah, you gotta, you gotta have a drawing for each and every pin, you know? Like, yeah. Okay. Ethernet. Yeah. You get it. It's like a bunch of pairs, but like, you know, when it's a hundred individual pins and you gotta, they gotta go somewhere.

Dave Jones: Dude, try soldering connectors like this. I've spent countless hundreds of hours soldering connectors like these. And when you, when you're, you know, it'd take you an hour or two hours to terminate one of these connectors. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I believe it.

Dave Jones: And right. And then hours to terminate. And then just before you put in the last one, you realize, oh, I'm using the wrong diagram. No, well, yeah. A, you forgot the heat shrink or B, you're using the mirrored diagram. You're using the front face diagram instead of the rear face diagram. Oh my God. Like I, this happens so many times in our business. We, we, we had to come up with. Why do we even have this? Why is this? Why is the other, why is the other drawing even a thing? We would have to have like large color coded fonts in like 200 point font on there, you know, permanent marker saying back side diagram, you know, like it had to be in your face. Otherwise you'd accidentally, if it was just down in the info box in the bottom corner, right? You would always, you'd get the wrong one. Oh yeah. Right. And then you spent waste hours just soldering in them all mirror image. And then you've got to desolder them all and you've got to start again. You have no many, no idea how many times this happened. It's just.

Chris Gammell: Well, intelligence versus perseverance.

Dave Jones: Sometimes you're just having a bad day and Murphy's going to get. Exactly. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Sometimes you're having a bad day and you know what? You screwed it up. You got to do it again. No amount of saying how smart you were allows you to just swap the connector around.

Speaker ?: Exactly.

Dave Jones: No, no amount of. Yeah. Anyway. So also, so these connectors are very common. These custom, you know, like we'd have ones with mixed twisted pairs. We'd have ones like that had twisted pairs, power, optical in the same connector, you know, giant, like everything all in the optical and mechanical and pins all mixed in the same connector.

Chris Gammell: How would that work? Would you have to like crimp the optical first or something? Or how would you actually?

Dave Jones: You would terminate. The opticals usually went in last. You'd terminate the, you'd terminate the others and then you slip in, you'd leave room to slip in the opticals, but you had to, yeah, you, you had to polish the optical connectors and then they'd, yeah, you'd have to terminate the optical connectors and there's special machines to terminate those.

Chris Gammell: And would the termination like be built into the connector though, or would it be like, and then like, or you do it externally and then plug it in?

Dave Jones: The, you do it externally and then plug it in. So you would, and, and, and the, the connector would be physically designed so that when you plug it in, there's like a latching thing and keep it at the right distance. And usually they're spring loaded. So when the, the optical things are spring loaded so that when the, when, when the two connectors join and you screw them together, the, you know, they actually touch before it gets to the end stop. And then when you tighten it up, it applies a little bit of pressure to the two optical ferrules and then they, they line up, you know, otherwise you can't just, you can't just rely on the fact that they're just going to mate, you know, like half a millimeter, like, no, no, you want the springiness to anyway, companies like Amphenol, for example, they're, they're one of the biggest in the industry. They, they have entire departments dedicated to designing these custom connectors for you. So you, so you go to them and say like, you know, they will make any connector you want to any specifications. Absolutely amazing what these companies can do.

Chris Gammell: Right. And technically Dave, if you have enough money, a lot of companies will do whatever you want.

Dave Jones: Do whatever you want. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Give us enough time and, and a good enough spec sheet. We'll try and build it for you as you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: I guess you can go to them and say, okay, I need 200 of these special connectors, right. Which have 50 pins and optical and, and ethernets and everything in there. Right. And all these in a high speed and all these, you know, cause they've got all these different technologies that they can wham into the one connector and they can, you can mix and match anything.

Chris Gammell: I'm just remembering back to like previous shows where you say, oh, we have to make everything custom. You know, you were talking about the micro supply, everything has to be custom. And I was thinking about these kinds of exact conversations where someone says we have to be custom. And then you start talking about 50 connectors at a time. It's just like, man, it's, it's a sickness. It's like, it's. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But no, but, but sometimes you have legitimate reasons. Some have requirements.

Chris Gammell: I get it.

Dave Jones: But so, so these companies where you can go to them and say, I want 200 of these connectors and they'll happily make it for you. And they'll charge you 500 bucks per connector. You know, there's no problem at minimum. Right. But, but it solves, you know, it solves a niche problem that you need and you're, you just pass that cost onto the customer. It's, you know, when you're in that sort of industry where one product costs, you know, $50,000, it doesn't matter that you use a $200 connector on it. Right. Right. Absolutely. You know, it's, it's, if, if it does, if it does the job you need. Right.

Chris Gammell: Or if it's going to save, you know, save water damage down the road or whatever. Yeah. Sometimes you just got to have it.

Dave Jones: Oh, waterproof connectors. There's an, cause I was in the Marine seismic business. Yes. Waterproof connectors on top of this, on top of this, we'd have waterproof as well. You know, it's a absolute double O ring, by the way, you know, and they have to be greased up by the way. If you don't grease up your O rings, it's not waterproof.

Chris Gammell: You got to grease up your O rings folks.

Dave Jones: Yep. And you got to get the right pressure. There's all, all the mechanical out engineers out there are salivating at the thought of actually designing an O ring properly. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Everybody is a fan of this design until they have to spend, you know, 200 hours analyzing, you know, if any water has ingressed into anything. You know, in a, what a submersion tank or whatever.

Dave Jones: I've also, I also have a fascinating video that touches on this, uh, Rodney, uh, Redwood from simulator solutions. I've done those seven 47 flight simulator videos and he takes us through a seven 47 cockpit and shows us some of these custom connectors. And a lot of them, even though they're identical, identical connectors, you can actually get them keyed differently so that literally you can, even though they're the same connector, they're keyed, they're keyed around the outside. So you cannot plug in the wrong one into the wrong thing, you know? Yeah. So, yep. Which is good. Pretty important in an aircraft if you're, you know, cause these aircraft have to be checked and maintained and, you know, repaired and, you know, on a regular basis. You can't just, you know, use the same connector for everything without keying. It's like, geez, no.

Chris Gammell: Well, you can at your own detriment, I think.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Yeah. Custom connectors. I love, love custom connectors. They're great. Anyway, very exciting. I've a large part of my, uh, large part of my career is involved custom connectors. So, yep. And, uh, testing them, you know, when you get the connectors, then, then you'd have to design and build a jig, which, um, you know, in, and insertion jig, you know, so that you can physically mate them and insert them, you know, and the, the, the, uh, screw on ones are different. Sometimes you'd just have to, well, got to do it by hand. So, you know, you've got to do your thousand, you know, thousand insertions.

Chris Gammell: No strong forearms, you know?

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So anyway, um, yeah, great stuff. Love it.

Chris Gammell: Well, what else on the list? Uh, let's see. Uh, Alan, former guest of the show, Alan did a, uh, uh, a wonder, this was a really great video. I wish I would have had this before I bought my VNA.

Dave Jones: And it's going to be a series. I think, I think he's, he's mentioned that it's going to be a series.

Chris Gammell: So, uh, yeah, he's going to be doing a lot of basics. If he's listening, I, I, I kind of hope it's not because of me, but if it is, you know, that's yeah, I probably could have used this, but he's, so anyways, the, the really cool thing about it. So the thing that I didn't quite understand, I understood kind of the basics of it, but I really liked that he shows how a VNA works in theory. And basically he's passing a signal out, you know, what a VNA is effectively is you're passing an AC signal out or, you know, a sine wave effectively at different frequencies. And then you're seeing how it bounces back, just like reflections on, you know, a PCB trace or any other, you know, matched impedance type of thing. And that's what you're basically testing. And so he puts in.

Dave Jones: That's because everything's a transmission line folks.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah. And so he, he shows how it actually reflects and then how the, how the actual wave shows up on a scope then. So he's looking in the time domain, of course, but, but yeah, it's, it's just really, really good. So.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. And then you have to get into ports. You've got to get into multi-ports and things like that. That's, you know, and then you have to get into your S, you have to get into your S parameters and your, you know, all sorts of other stuff. Of joyful stuff, which I really, that's not my field.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm trying to make it my field. It's, it's been, it's been a challenge. I have to say, I've really been, so I've been, like I mentioned two weeks ago, I've been, you know, working, working on mine and Mr. Jeff Kaiser has been helping with some stuff. And what it really comes down to is just like, there's no way to know like the reference point of like, what's good, you know? Like, so, especially because I'm a beginner and like, and, uh, and you know, like you have a calibration kit and you have to like understand if it's right and, and anything will like, anything will show as it's, it's being calibrated. Right. So you put these, you know, you put an open and you put a short and you put a load on there, 50 unload. And then basically it, you know, calculates all these coefficients and it does all the math to make it look like a flat line when it's, you know, when it's open and when it's, uh, on a Smith charge, it's like right in the middle, it's 50 ohms and everything looks great. But then like lately I've been like looking at, I'm like, I put like, I put a cable on that and it's like, oh, this cable is emitting RF energy somehow. It's like, nope, that's, that's not right. That's not how that works. So, um, yeah, it's just, you know, knowing, you know, kind of like these, uh, it's not really mantras, but it's just like these, uh, kind of higher level ideas of what can and can't happen, you know, like on a Smith chart, right? You can't be outside a Smith chart or else you're usually emitting energy and stuff like that. And, uh, it's been, it's been very, very enlightening and frustrating together.

Dave Jones: And that, that reminds me of, uh, speaking about V and A's and calibration and connectors tie them all together. Oh, wow.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Dave Jones: Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Um, is that, um, yeah, that reminds me of the, when I went to the Keysight Cal Lab and I've done videos on this and they were talking about, uh, you know, when, when you're talking about like high calibrating, you know, high frequency RF stuff, right. Yeah. The talk, the talk on the connector matters, right. You, you, you have to, you have to use a talking tool on these connectors. And if you don't get the right talk, you're, you're, you're, your calibration is not valid because you're going to be out by a dB or two, you know, because you, because you talked it wrong. Right. When, when you're talking about a, a, a 10 gigahertz being a specialized, you know, SMA connector or something, right. Working at 10 gig on some scope or 20 gig.

Chris Gammell: No, don't do SMA for 10 gig. That's bad.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, you know, right. Well, no.

Chris Gammell: Whatever the special, how about, so APC seven, which I've learned is a connector because that's when my DNA showed up and I'm like, what is this connector on the front? I don't know how to actually interface with this. It's, it's a very, very annoying.

Dave Jones: And that's where you can buy 500 bucks for a connector.

Chris Gammell: A connect. Yeah. Or a converter. Yeah. That's what I did. Yeah. I paid.

Dave Jones: For a converter. Right. Because it's got the.

Chris Gammell: APC seven to 3.5 millimeter is a, yeah. The $500 worth of metal. It's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a hell of an industry day. Let me tell you.

Dave Jones: 500 bucks for a 50 ohm Terminator. You know, thank you very much. A thousand dollars for a 50 ohm Terminator. Right. And this, and yeah. And you can literally ruin them if you don't talk them up properly. And these high end scopes, you know, if you're talking, you know, your 20 gig, your 50 gig, your a hundred gig scopes, um, those connectors, they, you, if, you abuse those, you've just screwed your scope. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you've screwed up your 200,000. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure you could get them refurbed for a couple thousand, you know, you'd probably.

Dave Jones: Just anyway. Send them in for service. So I've done videos on that. If those want to know about the, uh, you know, the intricacies of RF connectors and stuff like that. It's absolutely fascinating. How, you know, like most engineers probably would never care about that sort of, you would never know nor care about that sort of thing, you know, because you're working on your digitally Arduino, you know, raspberry pi.

Chris Gammell: Thing that's less than 10 megahertz and you're happy, you know, I used to be there, Dave. I used to be less than a gigahertz. Those were the days.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, I'm, I'm, I'm just not, and RF's not my thing.

Chris Gammell: It's interesting. I mean, like I would, I mean, if you're, if you're open, it's, you know, I think it's tough for you because like, you know, you're often learning in public and that's tough because you have a big presence with that and it's like, but it, it has been, uh, boy, it has been a re-education. It has been a humbling experience. Like just like how many things I don't know about it. Like, and obviously there's a lot of people that like, this is their life and their job. And like, I really respect it. Like the, you know, that kind of knowledge. And that's why, you know, some RF consultants charge 400 bucks an hour, of course. Of course.

Dave Jones: Like there's, there's no way I could go out and use a VNA without a refresher course like this, I just wouldn't be able to do it. You can give me a DSA. Like I'm used to using a dynamic signal analyzer, which, you know, is like, uh, like 20 kilohertz was high frequency, you know?

Chris Gammell: Oh, right. So it's like a network analyzer for like, like an audio circuit or something.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, but yeah, it's totally, it's a similar sort of thing, you know? It is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: We used to use that for control loops at Keefley. Like to test like how it's proper through, you know, like if you've got an oscillation or something. It's great.

Dave Jones: So I could tell you all about coherence and, you know, signal coherence. Pro coherence on, on, on DSAs and stuff like that. You know, that was my, that was my bread and butter, but put me in front of a VNA and go, well, okay. You know, measure this, uh, measure this connector and transmission line. I'm going to go, oh, geez, no, I, you know, I could bumble around and, you know, maybe get something up, but I really wouldn't, you know, really wouldn't know the intricacies of it. That's stuff that I just never been into.

Chris Gammell: Well, if you need someone to call, I can, I can refer you. So yes, sir. So, uh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, this will be a great series. Yeah. VNA series.

Chris Gammell: So if you have questions like Dave and you want to ask us something, probably not about VNAs. Dave, who can they, who can they call? Who can they? Ghostbusters. Who can they? Jason Reitman. No. No, come on. It's us, Dave.

Dave Jones: All right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: They can call us. So we are going to do a call-in show, uh, for the 500th episode of the Amp Hour. We're going to take some questions at least. We're probably going to talk about other stuff too.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. But that is. Probably. Yep.

Chris Gammell: This is 496. We are racing towards it. So.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep. Early July. So we'll do that. Um, so we, we still haven't decided what, but probably like email, like you can always email in your, um, your, uh, MP3 with your question. Say, hi, I'm such and such from such and such. If, if you want to, you don't have to identify yourself. You can just ask, ask your question, you know? Sure. But, um, it has to be in voice for.

Chris Gammell: It's a lot easier if we can mention, you know, at least a, at least a screen name, you know, like, and so, you know, scope lover one, two, three is called in about blah, blah, blah. Yeah. I mean like, yeah.

Dave Jones: Got it. Ah, the interwebs. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's great. So yes, yes. We'll try and do that. We, uh, we have had a call in show. We did try it like donkeys years ago. Didn't we? We did.

Chris Gammell: We did multiple. We did multiple. We did like four or five call in shows.

Dave Jones: Oh, really? Okay.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, we stopped doing it because, uh, people stopped calling.

Dave Jones: The novelty wore off.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think some of it's that. I think, I think some people are like, listen, so this is going to be a couple of shows out. So you need to get us a thing by July 6th. So you need to get your questions to us by July 6th. We will have a link to what was the online? Oh, here it is. Online dash video voice dash recorder.com. Basically, if you don't have any other way to record a voice, use that, download it, send it to us or send us a link to it on Dropbox or drive or whatever.

Dave Jones: Oh, it'll be a small file. Anyway, it'll be tiny.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. If it's, if we come up with something better, it would be, yeah, we'll tell you about in the future. But yeah, if you're interested in asking us a question, we'd love to try and answer it on air. There will be, if you are in the U S time zone, we can maybe, you know, let us know if you're interested in maybe, uh, if the timing syncs up, we'll maybe have one or two live calls on here, but probably not. That's kind of tricky. Yeah. That kind of, yeah. But yeah, the easiest way to do it, of course, is to send us a voice question. So we'll, I'll have links about it. I'll have, I'll have details in the show notes.

Dave Jones: How many people can you have join a Zencaster thing? How many, how many?

Chris Gammell: I had five so far.

Dave Jones: Five. Okay. All right.

Chris Gammell: So we can maybe do that.

Dave Jones: Yep. So we could have several people join. We could have multiple people join and then we can mute them until we're ready to ask a question. Can't we?

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yep. Yep. And they would be able to hear everything, but.

Dave Jones: They, they would be able to hear the, hear the show live. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Just like the real radio, Dave. It's like the real radio.

Dave Jones: Woo.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: 1960s technology. Here we come.

Dave Jones: Yep. But you've got to have real buttons. You've got to have like buttons on a desk. Yeah. All this mouse rubbish.

Chris Gammell: Uh, uh, next, next caller. Next caller. Hello, you're on the air.

Dave Jones: You're talking to Dr. Phil. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Click and clack might've been a little bit more, you know. Fun and nerdy, but yeah. I don't even think click and clack actually did it live. So whatever.

Dave Jones: So tell us about your problems with your oscilloscope and how it relates to your mother. Yeah. And, and, and your childhood drama, you know.

Chris Gammell: The, the amp hour after dark.

Dave Jones: Oh boy. Anyway. Yep. Our amp hours up, dude. It totally is. Let's get out of here.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time. Bye.

Speaker ?: !