#504 – This Is Just A Tribute

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released August 9th, 2020. Episode 504. This is just a tribute.

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

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

Dave Jones: And if you can hear a hint of laughter in our voices, because we just recorded four minutes without pressing record. That's right.

Chris Gammell: I was so excited to talk about the new podcast that I forgot to hit record.

Dave Jones: And all our best stuff was in there. That's the best stuff we've ever done.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. This is just a tribute. Yeah.

Dave Jones: This is the greatest podcast. This is not the greatest podcast in the world. It's just a tribute.

Chris Gammell: This is just a tribute. That's right.

Dave Jones: Tribute, yeah. Maybe that could be the title of this episode.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: The greatest podcast in the world. Yes. Oh, well. Yeah. When you get bored, you create another podcast.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah. So, you know, all this free time, you know, working extra hours and my consulting stuff. And I'm like, you know, I should just do another podcast, too. And let's make it a little harder on myself, too, and we'll make it video. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's cool. We got three episodes out already. I wanted to do like three up front, mostly because other podcasts do that. And I'm like, I guess that's the thing. But yeah, I thought people here might be interested, too. It's, you know, it's electronics. It's and it's literally feels like Groundhog Day right now because I've already explained this once. But yeah. So like we had Mohammed on last week, who's like a 20, 25 year veteran and who does like really deep, like technical chip design stuff, right? Like open source chip design. And then but then there's people that are doing like mechanical stuff and like software stuff and like people kind of like outside the industry who have technical expertise in their own areas who might be using electronics, but actually to add like some some color to the, you know, like what actually why you'd want to use electronics, what, you know, give it context as you as it were. So, yeah. Staying on brand. That's right. That's right. Stay on brand. Got to stay on brand. And yeah, you know, so talk out talking to some new people and trying to get some new stories. And so the first episode was with Sophie Wong, who's a designer and mechanical electrical kind of stuff, like fashion. Second one is Stephen Hawes, who's doing like a mechanical like project, which is like a DIY pick in place. And then the third one is a former coworker of mine. We actually because it's visual, we did a design review of the board that I'm building right now. And from the he's a firmware engineer. And so he's fixed a lot of my schematics over the years. And yeah, I thought that was kind of interesting of like just going through all the stuff that I.

Dave Jones: How does a firmware engineer fix your schematics?

Chris Gammell: You know, like have you ever assigned a pin that shouldn't have been assigned?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I've done that a lot. And Eric is usually the one that helps fix it. And really, actually, he usually is like points it out. And then I go and bodge it. And he's like, yeah, this works now. And then the next rev, we fix it together. Yeah. So yeah, always, you know, work with your firmware engineer, folks. So I've learned that one the hard way over many, many years. So yeah. And Eric's Eric's been great for that kind of stuff. So we kind of just did that live and went over the ABC board that I've been building. And yeah, it was kind of cool. Like to have, we never really have visual, you know, I don't really have visual, but you know, might try it at some point, you know, we were just trying it out just here now. And you know, this, the site that I use for recording and the technology streaming

Dave Jones: technology is getting incredible. I couldn't believe like the, like we were actually running the video and the audio as separate, like using separate programs and listening and the lag between them is, you know, like, like it's there, you can hear it, but it's almost nothing. It's just incredible. So it's so different because we have toyed with video over the years with The Amp Hour and it just always sucked. You know? I mean, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Whenever we tried it, it was always like, well, we would record kind of like, like a Skype window or a Google Hangouts window and then we sync it up, but it's like, then it's doubling up, but this is, yeah, this is all kind of server side. So it's a little bit better. And like you said, the browser-based stuff is just amazing. That's how we do the recording now. So yes, we, yeah, we switched away from mumble to start a podcast. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah, there's so many startups now that are getting all these, you know, there's so many options. I'm like, I asked on Twitter like a month ago or something, a couple of months back, like what do people recommend for, you know, this and everyone's throwing me. You know, all these different, as I'm checking out all these different platforms and there was just so many of them available for doing, you know, streaming meetings and things like that. But only some of them are optimized for podcasts. Like if you don't know, we use a Zencaster for recording The Amp Hour and it's audio only, but it has all the, all the features. Like if, if we were, we've been doing this podcast for 10 years and if we were to do a, you know, like develop a web-based recording system, it'd work exactly like this.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know, exactly like the way it does. There's some weirdness sometimes, but like, yeah, it makes it way easier to do, to do what we do. And really for the guests. And that's really the whole, the whole reason we, we started doing it.

Dave Jones: So the whole thing about getting a quality podcast is doing local audio recording, uh, rather than recording and same with video, not recording the stream version, but recording it locally. And then you've got the highest quality audio and video content. And then you. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And then it comes down to how good your camera is, how good your lighting is everything. Yeah. I, uh, I have a bit of a, uh, a, uh, camera gear addiction, like on YouTube now I like watch every video review of my camera. Oh, you've been sucked into those. Yeah. Gear heads. It's, it's really, it's a bad.

Dave Jones: No, I've, I've given, I used to, I used to do that. No, I've given up. I've, I don't follow what the latest, you know, camcorder or SLR is or whatever. Yeah. I do.

Chris Gammell: I do. It's, it's very distracting. It's. Yeah. It's a sickness. It's expensive. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, it's like, I've, I've gotten to a point. It's almost like PCs now, right? PCs are like, I, I can't picture myself upgrading my PC. It's like, I, I know people who still run 10 year old PCs because like, it still does every like back in the old days, there used to be, oh yeah, you'd update every year or 18 months, two years or whatever. But now it's like, well, there's no point. They're not really getting any inherently faster that makes it useful for daily purposes. You know, they're, they're already more than fast enough. So I just, the same thing for my camera. Like it's already good enough.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's interesting too. I wonder if, well, like if it's tied back to the idea that like, you know, we're doing all this stuff on web technology, like even this recording and stuff like that. It's not like we're, and so much stuff is moving over the web that it's like a lot of that processing power needs is kind of, and everything's kind of made into like an app and kind of like a containerized type thing anyway. So maybe because of that, you know, the processing needs for a computer are low unless you're doing something like really, really heavy video editing or something like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But even then video editing is still like, yeah, I could upgrade my machine and my rendering might be, you know, 30% faster or something, but like, you know, it's already good enough. It's not leaps and bounds. Yeah. It's not, no, it's not leaps and bounds. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know when I last updated my PC, but I did that because purely for video editing, didn't do it for any other reasons. You know, I'm not some hardcore gamer or anything and it's just, yeah, it's good enough. So it just keeps on working and it's fine. Well, this is bound to happen. Let us know in the comments, what's, are you, how old is your PC that you're currently using or your camera that you're currently using? So yeah, I just gave up, you know, looking for updates. It's just, yeah. No, like every couple of years I might, oh, what are the new camcorders doing? I might have a quick squiz, but no, no, it doesn't matter. It's like, what am I going to do? Go to 8K? You know, it's like, it's just, it's just ridiculous. You know, so many YouTubers are going to 8K now. It's like, why?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's just insane when half your audience are watching on phones, like, you know.

Chris Gammell: Or like in a little embedded window or something like that.

Dave Jones: Something like that. It's just, yeah, it's silly. So I don't get it. I do do my teardowns in 4K though. So, you know, I am kind of, you know, kind of with it, you know, down and happening with the latest tech. You know, I do 4K.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think for things that need like a high super high resolution. Exactly, that warrant it.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, like when someone wants to like zoom in themselves, that kind of helps. Yes.

Dave Jones: And, but no, if you're just doing a talking head podcast, like you don't even need full HD. It's like 480p is fine or 720 at most, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I always tell people like if, if you're thinking you want to like get better video, like look at your lighting first, like watch a bunch of videos about lighting. Oh, yeah. That's what matters. Lighting's everything.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I get emails constantly, just the other day, another video, what, you know, another email, what camera do I use? And it's like, because your videos look so good. Dude, you could make the same quality with your phone. With your iPhone. You just need a crap ton of light. You know, it's, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, yeah. So I have a new podcast and yeah, it's video. So we'll see, I got some more people coming up. There's some, I got about six total in the can and we'll be released in a lot of time. I've got another design review coming up in episode six, where I actually have a interview with a FAE who was designed, who did a review of the design. I don't know if that's going to be interesting either, but it's kind of like stuff I've just never seen before. So I hopefully, hopefully people like that, you know, like, like film myself going out to lunch with an FAE, you know?

Dave Jones: Oh no, that was, that was, that was always, oh my God. I can remember, yeah. Being caught up by the FAIs. Oh, can we do lunch? You know? I was like, no. Right.

Chris Gammell: And then they're trying to relate to you and like, oh, Chris, you like jazz. Tell me about that. Okay.

Dave Jones: These, these were the days before the internet, you know, and you can buy parts online, you know? So you had to, you know, build a relationship with your, in quote marks, with your, uh, you know, applications engineer or, you know, sales engineer.

Chris Gammell: So here's the thing. I will say, I love the applications engineers. If I could talk to anyone out of the crowd that comes, it's applications engineers. Yeah. Yeah. It's the, it's the sales engineer. Like I come from a family of sales engineers. I love, you know, my dad and my grandpa are both salespeople. Like I get it. Like, but yeah, a little harder to relate when it's like, tell me about jazz. Okay. Maybe we stick to electronics, you know? Uh, yeah. So I was talking to someone about that the other day too. And we were talking about like, ah, what was it? Oh, you know what it was? It was actually something I meant to bring up on the show. It was, um, it was one of my friends. He was telling me about, uh, so I, I talked to you about my, my PC. It was like, I don't know what it was. It was like, I don't know what it was. It was like, I don't know what it was. Um, but he had referred me to Euro circuits and Euro circuits. Oh my God. Have you ever used our tool before? Like just their upload?

Dave Jones: No, no, I haven't.

Chris Gammell: They have a fantastic DFM tool. So you go upload your Gerbers on there. And basically all the stuff that like a board house does, they basically digitize the output from that. And like, you know, so like four PCB has done this in advanced, advanced circuits has done this for a long time too. They have like a online DFM type of thing. And that's great. But like Euro circuits is like something different. I don't, I don't know. I had not seen anything like this and it has like a DFM thing. It's got a, it's got a visualizer. It's, you know, if you upload your bomb, all this stuff and it's like really advanced stuff. And, and my friend who told me about it, he's like, you know, they get my business just because I don't have to talk to a sales engineer. And I was like, oh yeah. Like I, I totally know that feeling. And like, and that is the modern thing. I think a lot of, a lot of electronics businesses are coming around to that just because of cost cutting and efficiencies and obviously remote stuff with COVID. But like, I, I personally, if, if I can get around talking to a human, I will go towards that every single time. Because like, like sometimes they're valuable. Sometimes they'll, you know, they'll have, you know, some insight, but most of the time it's just, it's just a gatekeeping, not in gatekeeping. It's a, it's a, it's a slowing down in order to serve the sales team more than anything else. Cause they want to get credit for the sale. And that, that's what bucks me. Yep. So I agree. So, yeah, I, I don't know. Like, and I think there's other, there's other tools that are doing this kind of, obviously, you know, like the online distributors are getting good at this stuff too. You don't have to talk to salespeople. I think that drives a lot of new business, but.

Dave Jones: And it's just time. It's just time wasting too. Like you just want, like you're, you're in the middle of your engineering and you just want to know, right, how much does this board cost? And you want the answer in a minute. You don't want to have to, you know, talk to a person, which will take 10 minutes by the

Chris Gammell: I could send it off for a quote. Of course I could. Right. I could send you a bomb. Like I could wait a day, but I don't need, I don't need that kind of precision that they're, they're thinking about. They're like, oh, well you want to get the best price. No, I want to get, I want to know if it's a thousand dollars or $500 or a hundred dollars, you know, like it's like. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. When I, I know when I need to get within five, 10% of pricing, then yeah, of course, you know, take a day, like look up all, give me all the best pricing, give me all the lead times, whatever. Like, but otherwise just give me a damn price. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So I would recommend Euro circuits too. It's, it's a, it's interesting looking tool and, and it definitely, it validated what I was going through. Oh boy. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Well, can we talk about that?

Chris Gammell: Sure. Sure. So, um, I was using JLC for the ABC board, like the, the board that I've been designing for, uh, contextual electronics. And I was asking you about it a little bit as well. Um, because you come a gutter, didn't you? I did. Yeah. I made, I made a booboo. Yep.

Dave Jones: Um, which is a classic one for like it's everyone does this sooner or later when you, when your designs get like small enough to the edge of the process limits, you're going to have the, you're going to encounter this problem.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so, so what happened was is I had this board, I took it all the way down to the, like I was really squeezing stuff in. Right. So this is, I'm out of space on this, this board. It's got, you know, Bluetooth chips on it. It's got an NRF 52. It's got the BG 95, which is a cell motive. It's got this, you know, mezzanine connector, which is like high density. So just getting everything up to there is only a four layer. Right. So I chose only four layer trying to keep costs down and things like that. And I just, I ran out of room, you know, like, so top sides, a North South traces, bottom sides, East West traces, you know, just trying to make things a little simpler like that as much as I could. And I ran out of room. And basically what happened was when I generated Gerber's, I sent it off and they said, I set everything at 3.5 mil or thou, uh, which is 0.0889 millimeters.

Dave Jones: Which was supposed to be their limit, right?

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Dave Jones: That's the, you actually checked. So you did the right thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It wasn't just like open loop, like whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And then basically they came back to me and they said, uh, we found a bunch of traces that are seven, sorry. Uh, yeah. 0.07 millimeters. So I'll say everything in millimeters because that's how we were corresponding. So first off, they said 0.09 millimeters is our limit, which is 3.54 mils or thou. Uh, and you did 3.5. I did a 3.5 because that's what the site says, but then they say 0.09 millimeters, right? I'm sorry, the numbers here, but it's just like the, it's a rounding error. Right. And so right there we're out of the gate. We're like, okay, so it's just a communication error or issue. And then I said, well, look, I hit all these things, but then I went and measured in my Gerber viewer. Right. And I went and measured and like, it wasn't what they were saying. They were saying there was like, you know, 0.07 instead of the 0.09 millimeters. And so I was just tearing my hair out. And of course I'm doing this on a 12 hour cycle. Right. It's like, right. Send it in at night and I've been going to bed earlier too. And so like, I only get one revision, right? I send it in, you know, they come in in the morning, they check it, they tell me it's wrong. I wake up to this. I don't have time to even go fix it because it's just like how the time zones go and how long everyone's working. And so it was like, okay, well now what? And so back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Finally, I talked to this friend, he mentioned Euro circuits and they also validated that I had it set at 0.089, right? It was, it's validated. There was one actual error from like a, a zone fill that was like 0.07, but they didn't point that out. You know, like basically there's only so many things they'll point out in the checks coming back from JLC. And so, okay, I finally found it. But even that, like they were saying that like, oh, it's not 0.09. You're not going to get it. So, so then I was looking at Gerber. I was like thinking like maybe it's the aperture of the Gerber files, right? Because it was actually like.

Dave Jones: Old school apertures when they were, when they did actually use wheels. Yeah, exactly. If you don't know, this is how they used to expose them. They used to have these aperture wheel, they were wheels, physical wheels with different size aperture holes in them. And you would choose, you know, if you wanted your trace to be 10 mil or 10 thou wide, they would have a 10 thou wide aperture. And then they'd shine the light through there and it'd go over and actually draw in the trace as an X, Y plotting thing. So they would actually plot.

Chris Gammell: It's like an Etch-a-Sketch. Yeah. An Etch-a-Sketch.

Dave Jones: So they would actually plot. And then they'd have to change wheels. So if you wanted to change trace widths, they had to change the aperture wheel. And like, that was like how they exposed the artwork, the positive or negative artwork for, for the PCB. But yeah, geez, that was long, long time ago.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Galaxy far, far away. Anyway, your problem, of course, is that you wanted, you asked me if you had done what you'd done wrong. And yep, it's the classic resolution problem. Well, it's, it's, it's, the problem is two folds. One is the Gerber resolution that you output. And the second is.

Chris Gammell: Although I did output it at 4.6 or 4. Mantis. So what's the, I don't remember the thing. Like what's the one before that?

Dave Jones: Well, well, the second one, the, uh, for, uh, colon five, it's usually like two colon five or something like that. Um, well, it depends on your program, but, but the second digit, that second digit, that five, that three, four or five or whatever, or six in your case is the resolution of mils. So a two colon five resolution, when you output your Gerbers, like in Altium, for example, it'll have this option two colon five. And that means it's a, has a resolution of 0.01 mils. Two colon four is 0.1 and two, three is one mil. So, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Cause it's in inches you're saying instead of in mil.

Dave Jones: It's in inches. Yes. It's in inches.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So I had it in six though. So it was, so first off.

Dave Jones: So you were in millimeter. So you were in millimeter resolution.

Chris Gammell: It should be even better though. Right. I mean like.

Dave Jones: Well, it should be, but you've got to look at it. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah.

Chris Gammell: Anyway. Yeah. So basically I was just thrashing. I mean like, you know, and like you get to this point where like, I was just like freaking out. Like I, I made all these changes. I, I, I feel like I was taking crazy pills because I was looking at it and I'm measuring it. Right. But I'm obviously using Kikad tools that are like built on the same thing. And you know, it generates Gerbers and all of my design rule checks are passing, of course. And so I'm like, what the hell is going on here? And so I don't know. I just kind of kept tweaking things. And eventually I think I, I changed the, uh, I moved up the clearance on the planes. That was one thing. And I turned off the X2. That's the other thing too, is I changed that when I say thrashing, usually what I mean is I'm changing so many things that I'm not sure what ended up. Which one did it? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I also turned off like the X2. So there's like a version two Gerbers, X2 Gerbers. And I turned that off because one board that I had sent in previously had worked with very similar kind of tolerances and the other one didn't. And I don't know. So, yeah. So it's, it's cargo cult, you know, Gerbers.

Dave Jones: You know, so the, the second problem is that not only the resolution, the minimum resolution that you had. So you've got a rounding error there. Then the fact that the manufacturer, they were obviously, because they were talking to you in millimeters, that was what they were. That was what all their manufacturing team are using millimeters. But you, but you took, but you designed your board in mills because that's also what they had on their site. So they had a rounding error on their site. What was the 0.09 millimeters?

Chris Gammell: 0.09 millimeters is 3.54 thou.

Dave Jones: 3.54, but they rounded it to 3.5. So you, so you use that 3.5, you took that as gospel and you laid out your entire board. But then when you can output it to, when you output the Gerber in metric, it's going to be under that point. Yeah. Oh, that 0.9, that 0.9 millimeters.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. So like, and don't get me wrong, like the JLC folks were very nice and very like, understanding with my thrashing and questions and everything else. And another thing they said is that they usually like to take up the, they usually like to actually, when they're doing cam, they'll widen the trace for you. And so, and that's for exposure, right? They basically want to expose a wider trace so that if it doesn't over-etch, then it's fine, right? It's not a big deal. But I, I was at the edge.

Dave Jones: Don't touch my Gerbers. Don't touch my Gerbers. Yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like, that's what it comes down to. And like, so basically at that point I was like, well, I guess I got to go to a different board house that can do three mil and, you know, so just all the usual silliness. And really at the end of the day, I probably was on the edge. I should have just, you know, added another layer or gone to blind buried.

Dave Jones: The problem is, is that, you know, you're, you're expecting to get all this professional attention and professional detail on like a $5, you know, shared panel board.

Chris Gammell: But yeah, yeah. Right. Shared panel, I think is fair. Yeah. And like, yeah. And so.

Dave Jones: It's just, you know, yeah. No, the, when you're paying for your own panel, like your full panel. Yeah. They will like bend over backwards and do it properly and they can, you know, take more care on that panel and stuff like that. But when they're mixing and matching, they don't want to dick around with your dick around in. So they, that, yeah, that didn't work. But yeah, they don't want to waste time with dicking around with just your design where they've got a hundred other designs on that same panel. Like they, they just don't want to do it. So. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's really where that kind of, uh, you know, so in this case, right, they have people in the loop, right? I think they'd be better served, honestly, moving towards like Euro circuits type thing. I think, you know, I'm sure they're working on tooling like this, but like that kind of thing, like if I can get that feedback, I'll just go fix it myself. I want, I want to fix it myself. I don't want to wait 12 hours. Like, like. Yep. Yeah. So anyways, I'm going to try Euro circuits just for damn, like that tool was a life's a brain saver really. But, uh, yeah, that was, that was a stressful bit of time there. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But yeah, everyone's going to encounter that. It's, it's very common once you try and push it. It's like, and seriously, don't push it. If your house, your design house says it's five, five. Well, don't use five, five unless you absolutely have to.

Chris Gammell: Right. I think that's a, and that's really something that, you know, like, you know, I was doing this stuff for contextual electronics too. And I did a little postmortem and I said like, look, I should have set this at 3.75 mil instead of 3.5. Right. That, and then squeeze it, squeeze it down when you need to. Because the other thing is when I went to go and like start changing it now. Right. So you go do a replace based on, you know, the. The existing size. Yeah. Yeah. The type of net it is and stuff like that. Yeah. And I had 850, you know, DRC errors and like, it's so locked up. You try and do a push and shove and it's so over constrained now. It's, it's unused. It's literally unusable. I would have had to go and reroute the entire board. Uh, and so, or go to six layers or this or that, you know, like there's. Right. Yeah. And so at that point, I'm just going to go, I had done all this stuff to stay on the, you know, the low cost side so that people could following along could also get a board kind of cheap. Right. You know, and if I was going to do it for anyone else, I would have just been like, okay, well, I'm going to go get blind and buried vias. And you know, that's what the, the recommended layout is. That's what we talked about last, last time you and I chatted. Right. You know, so yeah, I guess you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Right. So.

Dave Jones: Oh no, you're not going to be damned if you're just, yeah. If you're aware of this stuff.

Chris Gammell: Well, I just mean like, I would have literally run out of room though. Like, like that's very telling now that I would. You think? Okay. All right.

Dave Jones: Good, good, good PCB designer can make room.

Chris Gammell: Oh, good PCB designer can make room. So Dave is implicitly saying that Chris is not a good PCB designer.

Dave Jones: You're not in the right mindset.

Chris Gammell: All right. All right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So anyways, yeah, that was, that was a bit of a stress throughout the week, but got through it and yeah, boards out at Babs. So that's good to know. And now I'm in the, the world of RTOSs and firmware and lots of other stuff.

Dave Jones: So yeah. We'll leave that to another podcast.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's yeah.

Dave Jones: That's cool. Yep. Well, speaking of engineering mindsets. Yeah. I just released a video looking at how two engineers can produce. I'm not going to say exactly the same, but pretty close to the same design and get it published.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Have, have you ever encountered that?

Chris Gammell: I actually have. Uh, uh, when you've mentioned that on the show before. Did I? So you've mentioned that here, but you haven't made a video about it yet. Oh no. Yeah. Yeah. I've mentioned it before. I don't remember which episode it was, but yeah. Yeah. Right. I know. I mean, I guess there's always that like, you know, that timing kind of thing of like, Oh, you know, I was thinking about doing something like that. You know, you think that in the back of your mind, but no, I've not actually had it published at the same time. Right.

Dave Jones: Or, or you, or you, you know, you're on the dunny or whatever. And you think it come up with this great idea and you go, Oh, this is fantastic. And you search Google and, Oh, it's already been done.

Chris Gammell: You know, I think it's even better when there's like a, you know, a Kickstarter that was started three weeks ago or something, something like that, where it's like, literally it's so close in that it's like, Oh wow. It really was, it was kind of in the air, that kind of idea.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So was it something about the, I remember you'd mentioned, like I said, you mentioned it in here before, but was it something about the chipset that drove it? Cause it was a logic analyzer design, right?

Dave Jones: It was, it was a logic analyzer design where we're going way back to 1996, right? Back when FPGAs were like getting into FPGAs or programmable logic was thousands of dollars minimum. Right. It was like, yeah, like it was not, you don't take it for granted. Just the software alone was thousands of dollars.

Chris Gammell: Not a $50 dev board, huh? No, no, it's not. Open source tool chain.

Dave Jones: Yep. And then in 95, Lattice Semiconductor came out with this ISP starter kit, in circuit system programmable. So they were reprogrammable. That was novel, right? A reprogrammable logic device chip that didn't need like an external E-squared problem or anything, right? It was E-squared problem built in and you could just program it. And for 99 bucks, Yankee bucks, 150 bucks here in Australia, you could buy this development kit that allowed you to develop for these programmable logic devices. And that was just mind blowing. So everyone, it wasn't compatible with their main tools because they didn't want to step on their pro tools, which cost thousands of dollars minimum. Right. Right. So it was, so I've done a video on-

Chris Gammell: Cannibalizing our business, Dave. We can't do that. The sales team will not allow it.

Dave Jones: I've actually done a video trying to extract the original files I did like in 1995 and import them into the modern tools. And I discovered that, no, it wasn't compatible. They stripped down their software and deliberately made it not compatible with their main tools so that it didn't, you know, so that you bought your 150 bucks and you can have a play around and you could program these chips, but you couldn't then step up to the bigger tools and import your designs over. They couldn't even import the design. You know, it was entirely separate tools. That was annoying. But anyway, so this enabled, you know, relatively cheap in-system programmable logic devices, not FPGAs. Programmable logic devices have essentially a fundamentally different fabric to FPGAs.

Chris Gammell: Is it like they, do they program at the boot time too? Is that like how they have to get programmed every time?

Dave Jones: No, no, no. It's inherent. It boots up instantly because it's, the E-squared prom cells are part of the, the E-squared prom fuses actually join the logic together. So it's not like a separate E-squared prom that has to be loaded in.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no, like bitstream type of stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, no. There's none of this bitstream rubbish. It's instant on, which is great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's, that's really nice.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So this enabled, so I guess around the same time in 1995, both myself and another guy, Laurent Lamesh. We went, wow, what's a hard project to do that we can use this cool new low-cost PLD for? A logic analyzer. And then we like, and then you go down the rabbit hole analyzing the two designs and we, you can see that we almost did it identically the way we implemented everything.

Chris Gammell: Was there like a reference design you were starting from too?

Dave Jones: No, no, no, no. This was completely from scratch. No, no. It's just that we happened to choose the same chip. And then the, of course, the chips only had a certain number of pins. So that dictated how many channels you could have per chip. And then you, then it's fairly obvious that you want to then delineate your design into having a control chip. And then you have a separate trigger chip. And then there's only certain way, well, there's different ways you can implement trigger, but we decided to do it identical ways internally, essentially. We, we, if you look at the two trigger chips, they're essentially identical designs, but it was driven by all these logical decisions that once you had decided you're going to make a logic analyzer from that chip, these, you know, it, it sort of goes down a funnel and there's only sort of, you know, it constrains your choices of how you do things. And we both ended up with near similar designs.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, no, it is interesting that like when you have like a system design that there, you know, there's only so many parts out there that'll fit the, fit the bill. And it's like, you could go, you know, I guess the choice is like, you could use an integrated chip that's, you know, that other people might be using, or you could do it all custom, but why would you do it custom? Right. I mean, like, you know, like that's what, there are infinite ways to do it, of course, but some of the ways just make a lot more sense. And so that, yeah, I think that leads towards a common, common output.

Dave Jones: Yes, it does. And it's just remarkable. I mean, well, it's not, you know, it's, it's just interesting to see how those, uh, you know, there's only so many sort of logical ways you can end up doing a certain thing. And yeah, it's probably unsurprising that two engineers that, you know, different back then there was no internet. So we couldn't like, you know, there was no, no sharing ideas and things like that.

Chris Gammell: You're starting from the same forum post.

Dave Jones: No, no, exactly. It's a, you know, totally different world. And yeah, we just ended up with essentially the same design. So, and we both published it in the same year, you know, that's crazy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Months apart.

Chris Gammell: So have you ever, have you ever corresponded with, with the person?

Dave Jones: No, no, I've no, I know. I don't know. See, now that's what you got to do.

Chris Gammell: You got to call that guy up and like, right. And like, no, seriously, like get, get the backstory. That would be interesting. I think there's a podcast, Dave. You think so? Go do it. All right. Yep. You're going to, you're going to meet this guy. It's going to be a meet cute.

Dave Jones: Well, I did meet, there was another guy who also got a logic analog design published years later in electronics Australia magazine. And it used, he used also, he used an Altera. It wasn't FPGA. It was a programmable logic device as well. I did meet him though. Oh, cool.

Chris Gammell: Like randomly or like, like.

Dave Jones: Randomly. Yes. Yes. I think we ran into each other somewhere. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's great.

Dave Jones: Yep. And then I ended up going to his place for today and we, you know, talking about old designs and, you know.

Chris Gammell: That's cool, man.

Dave Jones: Industry and stuff. Yeah. That was great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Me being social.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I know. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Novel. I have a bad experience and never again. Is that what you said? You said never again. I'll never meet again.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Yeah. It's fascinating. So please leave it in the comments. If you know of, you know, if you've had like a similar design, like somebody like just independently, the two of you have come up with multiple people have come up with nearly the same design. Yeah. And why? So. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I've seen, I mean, I've seen like, you know, architectures inside of like test equipment that looks similar, but like, that's also because people go between companies and they open up old. Right. Yeah, exactly. There's like, yeah. The architecture kind of converges. Technology transfer.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Technology. A nice way to say.

Dave Jones: That is the technical term, by the way. Oh yeah. Technology transfer. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Unintentional on the company's part, but yeah, it does propagate, I suppose.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Which happens a lot, you know, like, yeah, the, you know, the head, you know, oscilloscope designer from Tektronix will leave and go to, you know, HP or. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Why not? Why not?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Well, speaking of people leaving, there was a thing about, there's been some Intel stuff lately. You know, it doesn't really impact us that much, right? Because it's, you know, leading edge and whatever. I think it's interesting just because it is, well, I guess because also we've talked about it here, but someone got canned, the chief engineer got canned because.

Dave Jones: Got canned from Intel.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Because, well, because of, you know, like they basically are falling behind. There's a couple of articles I've been seeing about this. And basically that they're, you know, so Intel is on the process side too, is starting to falter. They're not sending out everything, but they are sending some stuff to TSMC, which just feels weird. You know, it feels like, you know, these two giants and like, one's like, well, nah, you get this, you know, you, you take it. It's fine.

Dave Jones: I know it's that's, that's not the old Intel, right? The old Intel led the industry. Like you went to Intel it's flipped. It's like, if you wanted some, you know, leading edge fab, you went to Intel.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: And now it's like, no Intel are going to someone else. It's.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure there are things that are so far outside my pay grade that I haven't. Oh, for sure. We'll never know. But like. Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, it just, I don't know. This always bugs me when I see the stuff like this too. Like, so like analog devices stop doing fab stuff. We talked about on the show back when it happened. That was probably four or five years ago, maybe more. And like, you know, when you give up process technology, you just, it's like moving away from manufacturing too. Like manufacturing sucks. We all know it sucks. It's a terrible, terrible thing. However, like you, like you have, you have, and I think the real problem is that it's, it really sucks on the financial side. Right. I mean, like low margin, it's, you know, high people counted, everything about it's just a mess.

Dave Jones: Cutthroat business.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. And like, and yet, you know, you, when you give it up, you give up a ton of like tribal knowledge. You give up a bunch of innovations that come from just being on the shop floor and seeing things. And like, I don't know. I, I think I have a very particular visceral reaction to this because, you know, I was there when Keith Lee did that and I was very frustrated by that and I've seen other companies do it. And it's like, I don't know. I, there, there is some, there is some magic that has given up. So maybe, maybe it's overblown in my head and by people that are around there that are maybe losing their jobs and they speak against it as well. But like, I don't know. I feel like, I feel like that's a, that's a losing move in the longterm.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I possibly know why this has happened.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: It's in his name. It's in the chief engineering officer's name. Murphy. I, maybe I'm not pronouncing that properly, but that's his name. Murphy Rendo, Rendo Chintala.

Chris Gammell: I think it's probably Murthy.

Dave Jones: Maybe Murthy. But no, that's, that's, I know that's not how you spell Murphy. Like it's T H instead of P H, but like I just, you know, that's, that's, that's too close. That's too close for comfort. Like I would, I would be getting the heebie jeebies if my chief tech, chief engineering officer was called Murphy.

Chris Gammell: I can't, I mean, I just can't imagine being in charge of something that big too. Like, so they're talking about like, you know, someone else coming in and Anne Kelleher is doing the development of the five and seven nanometer. Like, like, like you're in charge of getting down to five nanometers. Like, oh, okay. Yeah, sure. Oh yeah, sure. I'll just, yeah. I have it, have it done by the weekend. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Oh, so just a half, half the, half the transistor with the 12, 18 months I've got. Oh, okay. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks Gordon. Thanks for that wonderful law, Gordon, founder of our company. Maybe we can get Murphy on the show.

Dave Jones: That might be interesting.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm sure that they are moving on to some other very important place as well. So.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. But they might, they might be twiddling their thumbs at the moment, you know. Yeah. True. True. From Intel. Maybe that'd be fascinating. Yeah. Maybe we can reach out.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: We'll have to ask him. Excellent. Oh, well. Yeah. Intel.

Chris Gammell: Oops.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: What else we got? Oh yeah. So the reason about that is, so I, I had always, so I guess I was a little disappointed in my prediction. I always thought they were going to like split out the, the fab, you know, like I, that's what I've always said on the show here is that I always figured they would split out the process side. But as I posted it on Twitter too, someone said like, well, you would never be able to support just the cost, the high capital costs of a fab without all the, you know, the smooshy IP side of things, you know, because that's where, that's where the money is. Right. And like having like brand dominance and IP that nobody else has. And speaking of IP, NVIDIA reportedly in advanced talks to require ARM.

Dave Jones: Well, everyone, apparently everyone's taking a look at them, you know, everyone's like inspecting their books and going, oh, will we buy them or not? You know, even, even Apple had a go apparently. Yeah. Apple just went, nah, it's a bit on the nose.

Chris Gammell: We won't touch it. Yeah. Right. We can, I mean, that's the thing. Like it's interesting from seeing like seeing who's actually interested. Like, I wouldn't think that they would stop selling. Like, I don't think that, you know, Samsung's going to come in and buy ARM and be like, see you later, Apple. You know, but. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No. Yep.

Chris Gammell: That would be. Yeah. I could imagine this would get a lot of hackles up though. And so, yeah, there was another article about like, I think, who was it? TSMC's looking at it. Foxconn. And basically people that have like a interest, a vested interest in ARM going well. The thing that I look at this and think is like, okay, ARM's for sale. You know, people are playing hot potato with it, whatever. Who turns around and says, oh, RISC-5. Okay. You know, like maybe that'll, you know, if there's, you know, if there's enough churn, some of them might just turn around and be like, well, I guess we'll just do it ourselves. Whatever. All right. Open source. Cool. Time will tell. Yep.

Dave Jones: It's interesting because just the other month we were talking about, you know, ARM was like, you know, Apple's, you know, going over to ARM and everything else. And it's like, yeah. And now it's like, well, ARM's for sale and Apple turned it down. And like, I don't know, a couple of other companies have turned it down. And like, what the hell is that? You know, is there something wrong with ARM? Like.

Chris Gammell: I don't. Yeah. Maybe.

Dave Jones: Maybe there is. Like actually on the books kind of, you know, side of things.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Who knows? So anyway, apparently a lot of, a lot of companies are looking, having a sniff around.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's not like 38 billion is a small amount. So, you know.

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: Gotta, gotta, gotta have some, gotta have some chips.

Dave Jones: Is that what they know? That's what they bought it for. That's what SoftBank bought it for. That's not what it is.

Chris Gammell: They bought it for 32. Oh, 32. NVIDIA's looking at buying it for 38, I think.

Dave Jones: Oh, are they? Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: There you go.

Chris Gammell: It's gotta go up, you know. It's gotta go up. No.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's not much of a margin on you. You know. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: Don't worry. SoftBank is used to losing lots and lots of money.

Dave Jones: Yes. We work. We work. How many billions did they pour into WeWork? Oh boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Good luck with that, guys.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I did notice, so I was on, so I've been using SEGUR Embedded Studio, which is like a IDE that Nordic uses. Yeah. And I was interested to see that they have a version of it. There's a whole different version. There's an ARM version and there's a RISC-V version. And it's like, I know that there's like tooling out there for RISC-V and like GCC for RISC-V and all this other stuff, but like, I'm still surprised to see it, I guess. Like, my brain is so like locked into ARM being like the default these days. Yeah. But like, when I see other stuff, I'm like, oh yeah, there's other things out there. Other things exist. Yeah. Yeah. Right. There's, oh, there's a compiler that's different. Like I used a, you know, 8051 compiler a while back too. I was like, oh yeah, it's not ARM. So. Right. Or like a TI part. I was using MSP430 part. It's like, oh yeah, not ARM. These are different things. Yeah. Okay. So just got to keep remembering that. Firmware.

Dave Jones: Speaking of, yeah, can we go back to the previous one? Speaking of dodgy, you know, sales that have fallen through. Arrow, Arrow almost. Oh, geez, we've been doing a lot of news this week. Arrow walked away from a, only 40 million. You know, that just shows you how pittance this sort of industry is.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: A $40 million deal to buy IEEE's Global Spec and Global Spec own the EE Times, you know, brand. And, you know, do they still make a physical magazine or is it just a website?

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. So Arrow owns EE Times.

Dave Jones: Oh, sorry. Arrow owns EE Times.

Chris Gammell: So Arrow owns a bunch of media properties that are all but defunct. I mean, they're out there, fine, whatever. But like, yeah. Right. It's a mess. And, you know, when's the last time we read EE Times, right? Oh, that's right.

Dave Jones: Arrow bought EE Times in 2016. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. So Global Spec's like a, it's like in the component business a little bit. I had a little bit of exposure to it when I was just a platform. It's component sourcing.

Dave Jones: It's like, that's what they do, right? It's like a fine chips kind of, you know, an octopart kind of thing, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: I guess.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Kind of something like that. I don't know. I haven't looked at it for donkey. But you're right.

Chris Gammell: Like compared to like the billions we were just talking about. Yeah. 40 million is not much.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Lousy. And they passed. So they passed on Arrow. I went, eh, nah. No thanks. So, yeah. You can be left with like dead brands like this. Like they just die off. Like who reads EE Times? Like does anyone? Hands up in the comments. Does anyone read EE Times? I mean, like.

Chris Gammell: I mean, we've, and we have lamented it here because we used to love it, right? I mean, like EDN, EE Times. Yep. What was that like?

Dave Jones: It used to be one of the go-to, you know, things that you'd check out.

Chris Gammell: I used to love getting actual magazines and stuff too. Like paper. Remember paper, Dave? Yep. Remember like paper, like sitting in an office with other people reading paper?

Dave Jones: And reading the Bob Peet, you know, what's all this stuff anyhow?

Chris Gammell: Back of the episode. Yeah. Back of the.

Dave Jones: Electronic Design Magazine. Who owned Electronic Design Magazine?

Chris Gammell: So that was, well, that was a different. Yeah. They all merged together. So it doesn't matter. Right. Okay. They're all dead.

Dave Jones: Yeah. They're all dead. Yeah. You can't, you know, I used to get, you know, it was free. You would get even, even Australia here. They would send you your copy of Electronic Design Magazine. Yeah. You know, for free. It was like, yeah. I can't remember that. That was like 20 years ago. Like that was like, geez. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, it was the same time as the, you know, the sales. It was basically when print media had enough money to actually have salespeople too. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: And then it's, yeah. It died out. It's kind of, it's kind of sad. Like, um, like, you know, magazines like Silicon Chip and Diode, uh, here in Australia are still going, of course, but like. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Those aren't hobby magazines really.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hobby magazines. But when you look at the numbers, it's like, well, you know, if you overlay the, the growth charts of both of them, you know, my one, like theirs is plummeting and mine sort of overtook sort of, I can remember the point when I was talking with, uh, the editor of Silicon Chip, Leo, uh, Simpson, I was, um, you know, we're at a trade show and having a chat and we'll compare in numbers. And that's the point I realized, oh, I'm bigger than I have a bigger audience than Silicon Chip magazine. Yeah. It's like, you know, yeah. And it's like their, their numbers were falling. Mine were growing. And it's like, holy shit.

Chris Gammell: And they ship atoms, man. I mean, that's the, that's, that's the.

Dave Jones: And, and I almost went into that business because I, before the blog and before the podcast, my first idea was the podcast, the amp hour podcast. And then I went, now I'll go to.

Chris Gammell: Not called the amp hour then.

Dave Jones: But no, no, it wasn't called the amp hour. It was just like, oh, I'll do a podcast. But you know, anyway. Right. So I put that. And so I ended up canning that because who wants to just listen to just me on my own. So I thought, oh, video is better for that. So I started the V blog. But before that, I really considered doing a startup electronics magazine. And yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. And it was, oh, I dodged a bullet there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, not dodged a bullet. Maybe it would have been bought at some point, you know? Yeah. Oh, no.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. But it would have been bought for a pittance, you know, like you could put years worth in work into that and, you know, you're not going to sell it for millions of dollars.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. It's not the hottest startup, huh?

Dave Jones: No, no. It's like $100,000 will buy your rights, you know? Right. You know? Yeah. So, yeah. But I really seriously investigated the possibility, even sort of started a few things and, yep, doing my own electronics magazine. And, you know, because back then, like the electronics magazines here in Australia, they were going down the toilet. You know, it was the end of the Electronics Australia era. They'll go on reviewing all the consumer gadgets and everything else.

Chris Gammell: And you're like, I want a piece of that. You're like, I really...

Chris Gammell: I got to get out of that before it's too late.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. And again, leave it in the comments if you dodged a bullet. When you thought you'd get into an industry that died like a year later or so, or a couple of years later, that just like petered out or whatever. And it's like, yeah, glad I didn't do that. Oh, boy. Imagine if you started to start at a TikTok channel, for example. Oh, I can make a full-time living on TikTok.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That would have been poorly timed. It would have been a job retraining real fast.

Dave Jones: Well, it's only been like huge for like a year or something. So it's like, it hasn't been like huge for like 10 years. It's only been huge in the last year. So it's like literally everyone who decided who jumped on the TikTok bandwagon is now because it's going to be banned everywhere.

Chris Gammell: I don't think you and I have any risk of being trendy, Dave. So I wouldn't worry about that.

Dave Jones: No, no. I don't think we're going to be doing 30-second engineering videos of, you know. Yeah, that's right. Like dancing with a multimeter or something, you know. Oh, God. Oh, God.

Chris Gammell: You should post one of those. In the realm of job retraining, that was my attempt at a segue. Right, okay. Yes. This is interesting that, so Google and also Verizon, I think someone posted on Twitter as well. But Google is offering their own six months for $300. They'll train you to be a Google engineer.

Dave Jones: Six months for $300. It's an online course, obviously.

Chris Gammell: It's an online course, yep. And basically they're using it as like a seed program. It's called grow.google. And there's like a bunch of, right now there's like an IT support certificate. But basically there's going to be career certificates for project manager, UX designer, and data analysts. And basically they're going to try and juice their job market prospects by training them themselves. And so basically, yeah, six months and like a bunch of Coursera courses. And like that is very interesting. I mean, like.

Dave Jones: It's very interesting. But why? I thought they had people falling over themselves to work for Google. Or is that so last decade?

Chris Gammell: I think it's because they're not going to pay as much.

Dave Jones: Ah, right. They want to pay like internee wages. And yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: Well, not intern wages, but they actually have the numbers on here. They say, so like 66,000 is the medium annual wage for data analysts. And 93 is for 93K for project managers and 75 for UX.

Dave Jones: 93K for project manager at Google?

Chris Gammell: I don't, I don't believe that. That's the median annual wage, right?

Dave Jones: So that's just the median. Oh, median industry wage, right?

Chris Gammell: That's right. And so, but the thing is, I think what they're trying to do is they're not going to hire people necessarily. They're going to cherry pick the top, right? So you go and you start now with a hundred thousand people that are like 300 bucks from Google. Okay, sure. Why not? Six months. You get 4% of that, right? That's now 4,000 people. And that's still pretty great, right? They want to hire a hundred people out of there. You can get the creme de la creme out of that. And like, and it costs them nothing. Like literally they make the course once and it's done. Like, so this is, so obviously I have some interest in this from my own educational aspirations and stuff like that. Right. But like, that's pretty crazy. And I'm guessing they're also like probably hoping that, you know, people have other education of some type, some kind of like bona fides and work experience, whatever. But at the end of the game, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Right. There's no, I don't think there's any guarantee that you get hired. And it's brilliant. It's basically the zero marginal costs of online education. And then basically having a big enough name that they're like, all right, well, you want in 300 bucks. And basically the 300 bucks is probably like just covering, you know, costs and getting skin in the game.

Dave Jones: There's a reason it's 300 bucks is because they've done studies, not Google, but the studies have been done. And that's the impulse purchase threshold for most people. For most. Right.

Chris Gammell: But why wouldn't you put it at zero? You know, that's what I'm saying. It's like skin in the game. You want to have some skin in the game. Oh, no.

Dave Jones: You've got to have, otherwise everyone would be doing. No. You want, you want the only, only the serious ones. Right. Exactly. So you can't make it 20 bucks, right? 30 bucks.

Chris Gammell: I mean, you could. And when they say that they have, they have.

Dave Jones: You're going to get more tire kickers than not, you know, whereas 300, you know, you've got to be semi-serious, I guess. Right. Only up 300 bucks. But, but it's not 3000, right? 3000 go, Ooh, you know, and there's a lot, there's a lot of people out there who won't even have $3,000.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, instead of doing scholarships and grants and like, that's great. Probably, you know, make it more diverse, you know, like get people like pulling up the ladder and like, that's awesome. Right. But yeah, I, I think the key thing is that it's not, the difference here is that it's in, from my perspective, you know, cause I keep an eye on this kind of industry a little bit too, is that there's no, there's nothing in the backend, right? There's no like, well, you have to get a job at the backend. And by the way, that's how we make our money. So like, if you look at like, uh, like Lambda school is one that I actually went through their whole process just to see what it's like. And they make you do quizzes and all this other stuff. And like, and basically, you know, they guarantee quote unquote guarantee a job, but then they get, I think like 10 or 20% of your salary for the first year. And like, and like, they're a consulting company.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Then that's what, uh, that's what, that's what recruitment slash consulting companies do. They, they, they take a percentage, you know, 10, 20% of your first year salary, which, which doesn't come out of your pocket, by the way, the company has to pay that.

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

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Because it's hard. And that's the end of the day. It's hard to hire people. I think even, you know, you said like Google is not short on hiring people, but I think if, if you reduce that friction point, the same thing happens too. Right. So like, you've been part of hiring, I'm sure with, with, uh, with companies and stuff like that. It's like the hardest part is getting the people in the door at the beginning and filtering them down. Right. So like filtering for the weirdos. Yeah, exactly. And then, and then, and then you get to that point, you start to filter and then like, you know, so, and if it takes long enough and there's a lot of man hours to do that kind of thing. And then at the end, you're down to like five candidates and you interview all five and four of them are good. One drops out because they got another job because it took so long. And it's just like, and then all this thing. And then at the end you give an offer and they, they don't want it. Yeah. It's like, Oh my God, we have to start over. And like, so like, yeah. And so there are so many things here. So if you make that top of the funnel much, much bigger, which I think they are, then yeah, it's great. I mean, like, and so I will call back to, I've been taught, I've been listening to this podcast. I really like it. Prof Jeep show. I really, really like it. Uh, so I do recommend that I'll put that in the notes again. Uh, he talks all about this stuff, Scott Galloway. And he's like been talking about how he thinks that a tech giant was going to pair up with, with an educational thing. So he had said like, Oh, like a Harvard will pair up with a Google or an Apple or something like that. And they'll offer something like this. It's interesting that Google's actually pairing up with Coursera because they're like, Google's like, we, we don't want to do this business. But I think there's, you know, Scott talks about like, Oh, there's going to be more of this. But at the, at the brand level of like MIT or Google or whatever, you know, MIT has MITx and edX and all this other stuff, but to actually get hired, hired people, that's where it gets interesting. I think so.

Dave Jones: I'd be interested to know whose idea it was. Was it Google's idea and they approached Coursera or did Coursera go to some smart cookie at Coursera go, Ooh, we've got this idea. And if they approach Google.

Chris Gammell: I mean, we are in the middle of some weird times, man. And like, especially like, yeah. Like I said, go listen to that. The Prof G podcast, he talks all about it, but like, you know, like people are going back to school already. And like, yeah, like the numbers were just mind boggling too. He said like one of the schools, it was like, you know, the tuition's like 50 grand and they have, you know, some of them have like 20,000 students. Yeah. And so like, that's, that's like half a billion dollars. Was that half a billion dollars? No, that's whatever the, whatever the math is. Like it was, it was a significant amount of money, you know? And like, no, it was a 10,000 times $50,000, whatever. But it's just like the cash flows at universities is so crazy high. And, and, and yet that is like the thing that all of these, at the end of the day, it's all to get hired. You know, I didn't go to school because I wanted to like just learn and find myself. I wanted to get a job, you know? And like, if people can shortcut that, like that's something big, you know? Like I, so I think that especially with like big companies like Google, I think it's actually, it'll be more interesting when it starts to filter down to smaller companies when they say, oh, well, if you have the Google certificate, then, then you're fine. Or if you have a contextual electronics certificate, then you're fine, you know? But I don't, yeah, we'll see how it goes in the future.

Dave Jones: You're playing with the big boys, Chris.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah, Dave. I'm really, I'm really on top of things. Yeah. I did have an idea about it at one point where I was going to like, one thought I had was like, you know, I have a lot of consulting work right now and like basically hiring students for contextual electronics.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Gotcha. And like, you know, if I'm training them, then like basically I'm training them to be me at some point. Yeah. And there's like value in that. And then the idea was like filtering from just like people just normally taking the course and then the ones that want to go on, they would eventually become consultants. And like, I don't know. I thought that was kind of an interesting idea.

Dave Jones: Well, it seems obvious really. If you're in that business, if you're, if you personally need actual consulting design engineers and you're, and you happen to have a course training them, it's like, well, hello, McFly.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's just a lot of overhead to do that though. Like that's, that's the hard part. Of course. Yeah. And then I think the thing that's really stopped me about it is that like to keep that, that engine running over time is that then someone has to go and actually like find enough work for all those people that you're bringing up through the ranks.

Dave Jones: That's the problem. It's like, yeah, like you can't give everyone a shot. Like, you know, it's once you find a good, someone who's good, you want to, you know, your vested interest is to stick with them. Right. Not, you know, go out and try somebody new just because you want to give them a go.

Chris Gammell: So you're saying I should make it more like survivor instead of, there can only be one assistant to Chris. Yeah. Right. Right. But you receive a rose made out of solder. Oh boy. Yeah. So honestly, I've thought about that too. Like, you know, I've, I've hired subcontractors, contractors before and like, you know, farmed work out to them. And I think there's like this delicate balance too. I'm sure you've dealt with this too. If like at a certain point you had to like, if you want to keep doing design, you have to keep yourself smaller. I think because as soon as you get bigger, you either have to, or you have to go hire a business manager basically because otherwise I'd have to go out and like source all this work. And then I never get to work on it. Like the interesting problems that I like doing, you know, and that's like kind of the whole reason I'm here in the first place, you know, I want to do the technical stuff. So yeah, you can't just make a business.

Dave Jones: Destined to be small fry. The, uh, well, that's okay.

Chris Gammell: I'm enjoying small fry status.

Dave Jones: Curse of every decent engineer is, you know, destined to make it big. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think the best you can do is like have a, you know, get your design jollies and, you know, hopefully have a little financial security and.

Dave Jones: Jeez. We're so non entrepreneurial. I know. We're so depressive, aren't we? It's like, you know, when we just.

Chris Gammell: Every time we read about entrepreneurial stuff that it's like, oh, you know, like the most important skill you have. I was listening to Brad Feld was on the Tim Ferriss podcast, you know, and I'd listen to the Tim Ferriss podcast once in a while. Usually it's a little. Right. Over the top for me. Usually a little too much advertising mushroom tea to be like, oh, okay. Yeah. I'm going to listen to this all the time. And, uh, but Brad Feld is like a long time. So he does like the, um, he's, he writes a lot. He's a VC and you know, he's very well-spoken and, but, uh, you know, he's talking about like the most important role of anyone who starts a company as being a storyteller. You just got to be able to tell the same story over and over and over again. I'm like, hell no, no, thank you. I will go solder something over and over again. I would not like to tell the same story over and over again, as much as you and I have the same conversations, you know, for the past 10 years. Like, yeah.

Dave Jones: What's, what's funny, Chris, is that, you know, you're really into this sort of, you know, you read or you listen to all these entrepreneurial podcasts and you read all these entrepreneurial books, you know, you're infamous for it almost. And you're still not sold. And you're still not sold on that whole content. Yeah. It sucks, man.

Chris Gammell: Well, I'm like, this is like, I've worked as startups. It's like, it's a slog. It is like, you know, you like, like the, okay. Yeah. You're a CEO. Great. You got the title. You're, Oh, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg. I'm CEO, bitch. I've got it on my, my, uh, my business card. You know what CEO is not doing? He's not, he's not writing any code anymore. He's doing, he's managing people and like all the gross people stuff that happens. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Like it's, it's taken him, it's taken him a decade to figure it out. Folks.

Chris Gammell: Well, me. Yeah. No, I'd known this. Whatever. You took you a decade.

Speaker ?: What?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: How many times have you plugged entrepreneurial books and podcasts on this show?

Chris Gammell: I still think it's worthwhile to know it. I mean, like, that's the thing. I think it's an informed decision. It's not like I was like, not like, I looked at it and I was like, no, that's not for me.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think it's worth the, and I think the other thing that's important to know about that stuff is, okay. So I don't work at a startup anymore, but I sure as hell work for a lot of startups, you know, like that is, they run consultants pretty heavily. Oh yeah. And if you don't know how a CEO has to go and talk to their board, like, oh my God. Yeah. It's tough. I mean, like it's, I feel for him. I really do, but it's, it's, you know, and like you need to like hold back some information sometimes. And you have to like give them stuff that like, give them a win that they can give, have in front of the board. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And like the timing really matters. And like, there, there's like just really, it's like human nature stuff. I don't know. Like it's just, you have to.

Dave Jones: And they often don't know what they want. So they have to, they're, they're reliant upon what you give them. And if you have the knowledge to go, oh, look, I think this will look good for your board. Trust me. Yeah. You know, and, and, and it works then. Yeah. You'll be, you know, flavor of the month.

Chris Gammell: Well, and I think that's the other thing too, is like understanding, like, you know, in like startups with like cashflow and like understanding how, especially hardware startups. Oh my God. Like the cash is just so important. And if they're basically presenting to the board and the board says, nope, we don't like that. We're changing how much, you know, like, you know, you can't go raise another round of funding. You have to go and do this other thing that will literally blow up an entire business model because they're dependent on funding until you're self-sufficient. And it's like, okay, well, you got to know that stuff. So I don't know, Dave, I think I'm doing fine. Reading my books. Okay. Maybe, maybe read a book or two, you know? All right. What do you read? You'll get no argument from me. I got, I got some good books. If you want to hear about my books. Tell us about your books. Let's see. So I am. Uh, ah, there's a Steven. Okay. These are also sci-fi. Come on. Uh, I've got, uh, uh, uh, one is called destination space. No, that one. I forgot the title. I read it at night. So I forgot that one. I'm reading the Baroque series by Neil Stevenson right now. That one is fantastic. Actually, that's, you would actually like this one. Cause it's like historical fiction and it's all about the time of like new Newton and Leibniz and like all these, all these characters. Like it's all, it's all, you know, made up, but it's, you know, historically relevant. Relevant. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, but like, you know, so like the main character's roommate is like Isaac Newton at like boarding school and stuff like that. Cool. And like just hearing about it. Yeah. It's, it's actually really good. Uh, it was a little slow start, but really good. And that's like a three book series. It's called revelation space. That's the other, that's the sci-fi one. And then let's see any self-helpy books. I gave up on a couple of self-help books that I was listening to. Didn't like those.

Dave Jones: And, uh, yeah, I've, I've like tried some of them and they're just, you know, I, I've, I've, I've got the, uh, blink thing. Uh, what is it? Blinkist or whatever. Oh yeah. It's an app, which is, um, summary of, you know, they, they record these audio summaries of books. So you don't have to read the whole book. So it's like, everyone's like 15 minutes. Right. So you get a 15 minute summary of what that book's about. And, you know, so you can get a good idea from that. If you want to go read the whole thing, you know, you go, Oh no, that sounds Jesus. That's bloody obvious. I don't want to read a, you know, 400 page book about that one obvious thing, you know? Yeah. So yeah, it's a good high, high level overview.

Chris Gammell: So any business book can usually be a two page blog post. That's what they say. Right. Yes. Yes. That's it. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's it. That's why. Yeah. I don't find a lot of time for those books because there's just, I just don't get the value from them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I think there's, there's very few that actually do have like, like, I think the measure of a good book like that is actionable, like items. Right. So things that you could go and like do with it. If it's just like, Oh, here's a study. Here's another study. And it's like, okay, that's actually one of the books I was, that I don't like. Uh, I'm trying to remember the name of it. Range by David Epstein. I thought it was going to be this great book. Like why generalist triumph in a specialized world. I was like, Oh yeah, that's like that. Oh yeah. Of course. That's, that's totally engineering. That is totally like a self, self-fulfilling prophecy type of thing. Right. It's, it's, it's not great, but like ultra learning, ultra learning by Scott Young. I just finally pulled up my book list. Ultra learning by Scott Young. Awesome book. Very actionable. How to go and like improve your, how fast you learn. I really like that. Right. Um, yeah. And I just bought a new one suggested by Philip from embedded artistry, which is, uh, our toss something, something. I'll probably talk more about that next time. Like you said. Yeah. Yeah. So.

Dave Jones: Sweet. All right. Yeah. That's the books of the week.

Chris Gammell: Books of the books of the month. Probably. I don't read that fast. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right. What are our times up? What else we got? Any, any last minute things?

Chris Gammell: Uh, Shari had a great teardown this week and repair. I like that one.

Dave Jones: Yes. His teardowns are always great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They're really good. He's yeah. And if, if you're, if you, if you're new to electronics and you want to really watch, like, you know, obviously watch Dave too. Like Dave does good teardowns and all that stuff, but like Shari does a lot of like RF stuff.

Dave Jones: So that's like, it's mostly high end. I don't like, I don't think I've ever seen him do a really low end one.

Chris Gammell: Right. And then he always does like the experiments too. And I think that that helps to like kind of showcase, like, you know, he drives, he kind of dives through. Like one of the things that I've been learning as I get into the RF space is like kind of the, the really block diagrammy way that RF stuff works. It's like, you know, you do this one thing and then it moves to the next section. And because it's got to be also isolated, it's really nicely laid out in that way too. It's like, does this thing does a gain stage does a multiply state, you know, it does all these things and then they're all in line. And so like, what's great then is when he's troubleshooting it, he's like kind of works backwards and like, he can see like how a signal is supposed to do. And like, because it's so, I don't know, I guess that happens in a lot of test equipment in general, but Shari is awesome. We know that.

Dave Jones: I know. Yeah. I can't possibly hope to get that sort of gear here. You know, the stuff that here appears like it's just unobtainium here. Oh, you mean in Australia? I see. Yeah. Like you just can't get it.

Chris Gammell: You have to ship it. You have to ship it overseas. Oh, you can't. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You simply can't get it. So I don't know where he gets his stuff from, but Jesus.

Chris Gammell: Well, he's in the US, so that helps.

Dave Jones: Pays a lot of coin for it. I can guarantee you he pays a lot of coin for this gear. Like, you know, he'll get a 20 gig spectrum analyzer and he'll repair it. He didn't get that for a hundred bucks on eBay. No. Yeah, no. He paid like, you know, like thousands for that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: A busted thing for thousands of dollars.

Dave Jones: A busted thing for thousands of dollars. Yeah, exactly. So, yes. It is not cheap to do his hobby. I can assure you.

Speaker ?: That's right.

Chris Gammell: Or his professional work either, to be honest. Not all his professional work. Yeah. There's another resource, another book for people that I just found. I forget. I was on a Reddit thread or I don't know. Oh, no. It was a Hacker News thread. UltimateElectronicsBook.com.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. I saw that.

Chris Gammell: Have you seen? I've never seen it before, but it's basically.

Dave Jones: Well, I haven't seen it before. This is the first time I've seen it. It's like. It's an online thing. I don't even think you can download as a PDF. Can you? I think it's just purely.

Chris Gammell: I don't think so. But it's got simulations in with the actual text, which is kind of cool. Yeah. So I got to dig into this more too. But yeah, that's a cool idea. I mean, like it's. I don't think it's like, you know, like Jupyter Notebooks. I don't think it's like that.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. Jupyter Notebooks. Those are like when you have like a document, you would put, you could put Python, right? Like chunks of Python code right in line. Oh, okay. And like it actually, it actually like, it's really cool. And it basically, you could go and like show how a little thing works in Python and then move to the next section and then like show like a bigger chunk of the code. And then like it all works right in the browser. So that's.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, he opens up CircuitLab. So he gives hot links to CircuitLab. Ah, there he is. It doesn't run in the browser. Well, from what I see. Well, CircuitLab is, but. Oh, yeah. CircuitLab is browser-based, but it's not on his website. He just, he's already saved these in an online, which is a great concept. You know, use these online browser things. You can just hyperlink over and, you know, start, you know, do it straight away.

Chris Gammell: I finally found them what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's actually a really nice. So you can, yeah, hit the simulate button, jumps to CircuitLab and it's, it's, it's already loaded up and you can hit simulate straight away and then bam. Yeah. You know, and he's put like notes on there, click to open, you know, click to whatever. It's yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. So. Very. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We'll have to talk to this, talk to this person, Michael F. Robbins and something. We'll have to ping him at some point. So. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I wonder what the motivation is behind that, but yeah. Yeah. Cause that's a metric crap ton of work. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's like. Yeah. People ask me why, oh, why don't I write an electronics textbook? Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Right. Books. Okay. Yep. Yep. I did actually, there's some really old school ones that I like and I would love to, you can't buy it anymore, but I'd love to see it republished, but I cannot find the author. I cannot contact the author. I've been trying to stalk the author. See, you should do this, Dave. This is what you should do. See if he's even still alive.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, but I mean, you should call the publisher and be like, hey, I want to republish this book. I did. I did.

Dave Jones: And they went, sorry, we don't know anything. Cause like, this is a textbook from the 80s, right? This is a, no, they don't have the rights, right? Sorry, you have to contact the author and we, even if we did have contacted the author, we're not going to give it to you. I don't actually think they have it. I think it's, it's, it's from, you know, 30 years ago. And, but of course the books are still relevant.

Chris Gammell: Actually, the 80s are, 1980 was like 40 years ago.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a long time ago. That's when the book was, yeah. That's when the book was written.

Chris Gammell: What do you like about it?

Dave Jones: Oh, I just, I like it. It's, it's not bogged down with any heavy maths at all. It's, you know, it's quite simple. Introduction to DC and AC Circuit.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's good. Yeah. So it's just like the style of writing and the.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's not a Floyd or a Boylstead or something like that. It's not that comprehensive, but it's, you know, just DC, you know, so we never, you know, Thevenin's Theorem, Norton's Theorem and basic DC and circuit and DC and AC circuit analysis and stuff. And I thought, wow, if I could get the rights to republish that, I thought that'd be cool, but I cannot find the damn author. So, yep. Yep. I don't even know if he's still alive. At, at, at one point I thought, oh, I found his daughter. I found his daughter and I can, you know, contact her. And it turns out, no, it wasn't. They just had the same last name or what, you know? And yeah, no, I couldn't. Oh, it's bugging me. Yeah. Because I'd love to actually republish that.

Chris Gammell: You've got to go hire a private eye, Dave, and like have them like hunt him down.

Dave Jones: Have him, yeah. Track him down if he's still around. So, yeah. I don't, I assume that, you know, if you die, what, your family get the rights to the book or is it?

Chris Gammell: Usually. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, and then the copyright's like the, because of, because of Disney, it's like 90 years or something crazy like that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Of course. And it's like, yeah. And I'd happily like, yeah, I would like publish it. You know, I would republish. I would literally republish this thing. I would pay to have it republished and give them a commission or whatever. And, but I just can't find, can't find the author. Anyway. Yep.

Chris Gammell: All right. Well. I'm going to work on it again. Dave's going to start a magazine and a book publishing company. Right.

Dave Jones: Magic magazine. These cutting edge new, new industries. Yeah. I'm going to get in.

Chris Gammell: Paper is the future. Michael Scott approves.

Dave Jones: Who's Michael Scott?

Chris Gammell: Oh God. Jesus. What? The office. You never watch The Office?

Dave Jones: No. No, I don't. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Oh, geez. No.

Dave Jones: Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Oh, Dave, you have, you have a mission. You have to go watch all sides, all nine seasons of The Office.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: I do know of it and I've like watched like 10, 15 minutes of it here and there. And it's like, yeah, I'd probably like it, but you know. Yep.

Chris Gammell: All right. Well, well folks, Dave and I aren't friends anymore. So.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: And I've, I've watched Office Space. I love Office. I've got the stapler. I've right behind me here. I can touch it. I've got the red stapler. I've seen it on the shelf. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I've seen it on the shelf. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Thank you very much. All right. So, you know, give me a break.

Chris Gammell: Okay. All right.

Dave Jones: I'm, I'm with it.

Chris Gammell: Dave's off to watch The Office folks.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time.

Dave Jones: Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye. Bye. Bye. We'll see you next time.