#523 – A Keyzermas Story

Jeff Kaiser: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released December 27, 2020. Episode 523. A Kaisermis story.

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. And this is Jeff Kaiser of Mighty Ohm. Let's do it, Chris. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. It is so great to be back.

Dave Jones: I still don't know why that's a thing. I still don't.

Chris Gammell: I think it's all in Chris's mind. Yeah, I think so. I play along. Yeah, it is.

Jeff Kaiser: I'm dreaming of a Kaisermis. I've been waiting all year for this, Jeff. All year. I know. As have I. As have I. You know, especially because last year, we got to hang out at conferences. And yeah, this year, of course, nothing, man. No Jeff on the Amp Hour. So I know. 2020 needed this desperately. Exactly. Exactly. This is what's going to cause 2020 to heal.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, I was just thinking that this means that we've made it. Right. I mean, we just. Oh, yeah. I don't want to jinx it. We still have a couple of weeks left, but we've basically made it. The asteroid could still be on the way, you know. That's right. Right. Yeah. Come right for us. Well, thanks for having me on the show again, guys. It is great to be here. Yeah. What's new? Oh, what is new? I don't know. Life has been different this year. Like, I mean, my life, just like everybody's.

Dave Jones: Well, start by telling us what you're. Where are you working now?

Chris Gammell: Where were you working last year? Are you still doing the same gig? I am. Last year, I was working for myself, and I am still doing the same thing now. So, yes. No change. And actually. Business is good. In a way, the whole pandemic has not been super disruptive to my everyday life because I was already working at home when this whole thing dropped. So, you know, when everybody started transitioning to working at home, I was already. I had a head start. You know, I've got the lab here. I have all the equipment I need at home. I've got a nice home office set up with a big printer and, you know, all the good internet and all the things that I needed. And so the big difference for us is that my wife also started working at home. And so normally I'd have the place to myself during the day, at least most days of the week. But now we've got both of us home all the time. And so it's been great. I mean, I think actually we see more of each other now than we did before. And so for us, it's been, I think, a positive change. But, you know, obviously this year has been a doozy for everybody and we are no exception. But yeah, I started doing freelance work more this year than I did last year. So I'm still doing the Geiger counter thing. I'm still selling hobby electronics kits. The Geiger counter business is still going. I just shipped off a big order to Elektor in the Netherlands. They're my distributor in Europe. And so hopefully those kits will be available, I think, beginning of next year. And then I also just shipped a bunch to Adafruit. And I guess actually the big thing that's different for me this time of year is I'm selling on Amazon now. Yes.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Which is a world of hurt for anyone who doesn't. Well, once it works, it works. But getting it to that point.

Chris Gammell: I totally agree with you. It was awful getting listed on the store. It took about, I think, six weeks, maybe two months.

Dave Jones: I was following your tweet. Yeah. Yeah. Agony.

Chris Gammell: It was awful. And it was really awful because I had to jump through a lot of hoops. As a small business that manufactures my own products, I was creating things which were not already part of the Amazon marketplace. They were new SKUs, new things that they didn't sell. And they make it quite challenging for somebody like me who has never sold on the store before to list new products. Because I think they're trying to block fraud and they're trying to block having 50 copies of the same product being sold by 50 different sellers. And so they try really hard to discourage people from listing new products. And so I had to jump through a bunch of hoops because I've been a seller on Amazon for a decade. I mean, I've sold used books and stuff like that, but I've never sold product. And so I already had the account, but I had to sort of jump through a lot of hoops in order to prove that I owned my own business, that I had a trademark. So they require you to have a trademark, which I coincidentally had already filed a couple years ago because this has been on my mind for a long time. And they also require you to have UPC codes, which is that's kind of the most irritating of the requirements. Because unlike trademarks, which you file once and then you have forever, UPC codes, you need to pay a consortium that exists, I think, primarily to collect money from businesses that want to sell products. But you have to pay them every year. Is that like the barcode and stuff like that? Really?

Jeff Kaiser: What is the UPC? Yes.

Dave Jones: No, I've got barcodes for all my products. I bought a block of like 20 barcodes like five years ago and I've never had to renew them.

Chris Gammell: I just bought- That is not kosher anymore. Oh, damn. Okay. And so actually, I think if you look around, you'll get a lot of mixed opinions about this. But the thought is that Amazon is kind of clamping down on the reuse because technically each manufacturer is supposed to have their own prefix code, which means that you can't resell barcodes. But people have been doing that for a very long time. And so I think a lot of sellers are-

Dave Jones: Yeah, I just bought them from like onlinebarcodes.com or some site like that.

Chris Gammell: And so those sites still exist, but the word on the street is that Amazon is going to stop allowing that. And so for new sellers, so if you've been doing this for a few years, you're grandfathered in, I don't think there's a big problem. But for a new seller, I had to prove that my business name matched my trademark, which matched the registrant for the UPC codes, which are actually, I think, GTIN codes. It's GS1 is the organization that sort of controls this. And this is like when you walk into a supermarket and you look on a box of crackers, there's a barcode. That's the barcode. And so now I own a very, very tiny block in the number space. I mean, I think I literally own a block of 10 barcodes. So it's infinitesimally small. But now I have to pay a yearly fee to sort of maintain that, which is super irritating. And so to kind of rewind to the beginning, I had this dream years ago that I was going to sell on Amazon because I realized that it's becoming a really important marketplace. And I mean, I don't know how it is in Australia, but at least in the United States, Amazon is a pretty big presence, especially now that the pandemic is upon us.

Dave Jones: It's just gotten big here this year, like literally this year. It's just gotten big. Whereas before that, it was like, meh, you know.

Chris Gammell: So I myself am sort of an Amazon fiend. And I looked up how many orders on Amazon I have placed in 2020. And I was shocked. That's never good. I was shocked to see the number. And it was about double what 2019 was. And so. Well, come on, man. You can't leave us hanging. What is the number?

Speaker ?: Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: Come on. This is engineering. We need a quantifiable.

Chris Gammell: As of today, 2020 was 333 orders. And I think 87 of those were within the past three months. Whoa. So. Yeah. I think I got to look now. I got to look. How do you look this up? Go to your order history and then it'll show you. And you can change the dropdown to change the time range. Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: That's a package. More than one a day.

Chris Gammell: Just under, actually. Oh, sorry.

Dave Jones: Sorry. 300. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I wish 2020 only had 333 days.

Jeff Kaiser: So is this because you're buying stuff for the business too? Is that like the problem?

Chris Gammell: I buy stuff for everything. Yeah. So a lot of it is for the business. A lot of it is, you know, like packaging supplies. Like shipping tapes and boxes and bubble wrap and all that stuff. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: We buy all of our microphones for guests on there. So I have 123 orders of which I'm guessing 20 of those are microphones. Oh, there you go. So I feel a little better, but you know, I also.

Dave Jones: I wouldn't have anything close to that. That being said, I do have a package turning up today, which is Saturday and tomorrow, which is Sunday. Yeah. So why they don't wait and combine them in the one shipment, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: But it gets worse, Dave. I mean, that's the thing. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I've, I thought that it would be interesting to sell product on there because it's a new marketplace. And especially with the fulfillment by Amazon, I ship product to their warehouse.

Dave Jones: Oh yes. I use that. But, but you pay about, I don't know what you pay, but I pay about 18% total because I get them to fulfill, do the fulfillment. If you don't do the fulfillment, it's about 11 or 12%.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That sounds about right. Yeah. And there's also storage costs too. So if you have a bunch of stuff in their warehouse, they charge you.

Dave Jones: They actually, yeah, calculate like shelf space and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Yep. So. Yep. And so the great thing though, is that as a seller, you know, I go to the post office it depends sometimes three times a week. If it's a busy time for me, usually once or twice a week just to mail parcels for my business. And, you know, I, I mail a lot of personal stuff too, but the reason I go is that I don't want to let a week go by and have an order come in and then somebody's just waiting. And so I go to the post office very often and I was interested in reducing the number of times by allowing Amazon to do some of the fulfillment. And I also thought that just by listing my product in a new marketplace, I would sort of pick up. It's sort of like advertising because there's people that stumble upon it. The thing that I, so, so having been selling on Amazon for a couple months now, I dramatically underestimated how much of a pain in the ass it was going to be to list products because as I tweeted through the process, it was awful. Uh, and now that I'm through it, you know, back to what you said, Dave, it's correct that once you get through all the hoops, it's actually not bad. You know, it's pretty hands-off replenishing inventory is easy. You know, it all works great.

Dave Jones: Oh, I just, I, I, I get the boxes in. They're already pre-printed with my barcode. So my multimeters, the boxes are already pre-printed with my custom barcode. And then I don't even open the boxes anymore. I just reship the boxes from here to the U S and, uh, the U S fulfillment center. It's so easy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's great. That's great. So what I found is that, you know, I was expecting to get a lot of new sales for being on kind of a new marketplace. And I found that that's true to an extent, like I've done okay. But one of the things I dramatically underestimated is that if you look at my products, they're not at the top of their category. And so be having visibility in the Amazon store is actually very hard. And, you know, if somebody is not looking for my kits, they're probably not going to find them. They're not going to stumble upon it. You know, if they enter Geiger counter, it's like, you know, page three. So it's probably not going to get much visibility. And so that, that's been, I think a little underwhelming, but I think that it's, I'm glad that I did it because it's been somewhat successful in terms of number of sales. Uh, I've definitely sold more kits on Amazon than I was expecting, which has been really good. But yeah, the whole, the, actually the, the hilarious thing with the barcodes is that, so you, in order to list on Amazon as a manufacturer of your own goods, you have to own a trademark, which is going to cost you a few hundred bucks to a thousand bucks in the United States to file a trademark application. And it takes about six months to get a trademark. So you can't just decide tomorrow you're going to be an Amazon seller. If you haven't already done that, uh, you have to have, uh, the, the barcodes, which you need to purchase a block in order to, you know, get your company prefix. Now, if you're grandfathered in like Dave is, you don't have to worry about that, but for a new seller, you need to, you need to do that. Uh, and now I, I totally forgot where I was going with that. And then, and then you list on Amazon and it's great. It sucks at the first, but then it stops. It sucks, but it stops. I think that for me, the, the, the hardest part was just convincing them that I was, I was real and that I should be able to sell my own products.

Dave Jones: I sell huge volumes of multimeters on Amazon. It's absolutely like, it's absolutely amazing. Um, and of course I mark up the price on there, but people, because of the 18% commission, it's a fulfillment by Amazon, but they're, they're always sending me, uh, they're always like, they will, uh, estimate how many you should be sending and stuff like that. Like in the time that they're saying, please send another 300 multimeters. It's like, Holy crap. That's my entire shipment. You know, it's like, because the volume is just, I, it, but it took years. I've been selling for quite a few years on there and it took a while for it to, you know, get up there in the search engine rankings. And now it's, but I'm doing a search now just for multimeter and mine's not showing up, but I just sell, like, I don't even advertise that it's on Amazon. And I just sell huge volumes of them. So it must be getting up there somewhere.

Chris Gammell: So the thing I was going to say that, that for me was the kind of most hilarious part of the process is that you have to go buy the barcodes, the UPC codes, you put those on your product, but then when you ship your product to an Amazon warehouse, depending on the type of product, you often have to put a manufacturer's barcode on the product, which is a lot of times when you buy stuff on Amazon, it'll come with a little barcode. That's got the name of the product. And then it's kind of a wide rectangular barcode. It doesn't look like a UPC, but it's an Amazon barcode. So they require you as a manufacturer to put that on your product so that it's not co-mingled with other products of the same name. So that's a whole tangent, but there's a lot of problems with fraud in Amazon because-

Jeff Kaiser: What I'm hearing here, Dave, is that if we can actually go and manufacture this instead of Jeff, we can just go and do his market.

Chris Gammell: We can either. That's what I'll say. So that is a big problem. Is that, yeah. So somebody could start making Geiger counters that are Mighty Ohm Geiger counters and ship a whole bunch to Amazon, and then they get thrown into the same box, and pretty soon customers are buying those instead. Well, so you can't actually do that because I apply a manufacturer's barcode, which assigns that product to me as a specific seller. And the hilarious thing about it is that Amazon only allows one barcode to be visible on the product. So I paid a bunch of money to get a UPC code. I put it on the product, and then I literally put another label with a barcode on top of that barcode. And that was like peak despair for me. That was when I threw up my arms and was like, you've got to be freaking kidding me. Like, this is totally insane. It's just the, I think it's a great metaphor for sort of the bureaucracy and just the, I don't know, irritating way that Amazon makes sellers sort of jump through hoops and order to list.

Dave Jones: But you can understand why they're doing it though, can't you? It's like the scale is so enormous and the fraud is so enormous. And there's all those ones that reship. Have you have anyone reship your products? It's like they will, there's automated software you can buy, right? They're not scammers. They're just, well, you know, they're resellers. Opportunists, how about that? There's a word for it. Anyway, these are predatory resellers. There's automated software you can buy somewhere in the market that you can just pick like categories of products that are popular. And it'll search for popular products on Amazon and then it will automatically relist them on your eBay account at an inflated price. And then once it gets the order, it handles everything. Someone orders on eBay, the system automatically takes that order, orders it from Amazon and ships it direct to that person's address, redirects it to that address. So they order on eBay and then it turns up in an Amazon box and they go, what? I ordered this from eBay.

Jeff Kaiser: Why do they do that though? Is it just because it's just some people are only looking on eBay?

Dave Jones: They make a commission on each sale and it's hands off. You don't have to do anything.

Chris Gammell: It's like arbitrage, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It's like an arbitrage type thing, but with real products. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: But the idea is that people don't know that it's actually cheaper elsewhere. Is that the thought? That's right.

Dave Jones: Because people search on eBay and they don't know it's cheaper on Amazon and then you rely on that fact.

Chris Gammell: And I think that's one of the reasons why I choose to sell my products on eBay and Amazon and on my website and through distributors is that these marketplaces are, sometimes they feel like they're little isolated spheres. And I think one thing that feeds into that is that each one of them has their own sort of currency. Like eBay, you can get credits when you buy products and then you can only spend those eBay bucks on eBay. And so you sort of do have these incentives.

Dave Jones: Oh, we don't have that here. Oh, interesting.

Chris Gammell: That's existed in the US for quite a while. Right. So you have these captive currencies.

Dave Jones: I've got a thousand feedback on eBay and I've got like three different eBay accounts for various things and I've been selling them there for a decade. Well, you don't get it for selling things.

Chris Gammell: You only get it for buying things when you buy things on eBay.

Dave Jones: I buy a lot of stuff on eBay, but I've never seen any credits. Maybe my account is sitting on a ton of credits.

Jeff Kaiser: Jeff, you're saying as a buyer, right? So you're saying like, so I know Amazon does that too, because it's like you buy something there and they're like, hey, here's five bucks towards a book or some digital product that's like, that has no margin difference for them. It's basically they're giving you the advertising budget to come back and buy something else. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So on eBay, if you buy enough product you get, and it's some infinitesimally small percent, but you get some percent of the purchase price credited to you as a, as a gift certificate that expires. And that's one of the kind of irritating things about the way eBay does it is that if you don't spend it within the quarter, you lose it. But as a result, you know, I think this is one of the reasons to, to want to list your product as a seller on a marketplace like eBay, because maybe there's somebody there who does a whole bunch of purchasing for their job. Or for whatever reason, they have a ton of credit, that credit only exists on eBay. And so they may be willing to spend more money on eBay because for them, it's kind of free, you know, like they might be getting that credit for some other reason. And it's likewise for Amazon. It's kind of have, it has its own thing. People get gift certificates for Amazon that are only good at Amazon. And so one of the things I wanted to do as a seller was to just make sure that, you know, any marketplace that's on there, you know, I'm on Tindy, I'm on as many as, as I can find, just because you kind of do pick up a little bit of sales here or there.

Dave Jones: All right. Wow. That sounds a little bit different to what we've got here. But anyway, yeah, we are just coming to the, like, I think only, was it, no, it was 2019? No, 20, late 2018, we actually got Australian Amazon warehouses. So before that, we never had them and never had them. You had to order from Amazon US. It's like, we've always been able to order the books, but it's only fairly recently that they've got into selling some products here, here to Australia, like allowing shipment of some products.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I remember because we, we started looking for like mics for guests that were in Australia, I think at some point. And it actually popped up at one point.

Dave Jones: And it just won't let you ship a bunch of stuff here.

Chris Gammell: Well, so I worked for, you know, a well-known game company and we had a product that was sold on Amazon. And one of the things that was interesting for me is that you would be selling that product on Amazon US and all of a sudden people in other countries would be getting the product. And it turns out that at least at that time, and probably still today, if you live in another country, say Australia, New Zealand, you can order product from amazon.com and they will ship it to you in your country. Which is interesting from a hardware manufacturing point of view, because that product, you might have a different SKU that was supposed to be used in Australia, New Zealand, but instead people are getting the US SKU, which creates a bunch of complexity. And I found that interesting. Amazon has sort of an interesting approach. I think they sort of turn a blind eye to a lot of that and just sort of let it happen. You know, if someone's willing to pay the shipping.

Dave Jones: There are certain categories of products though, that they will ship to Australia. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's very, there's certain limited categories that you can get shipped here. Some, you know, entire categories are just blanket banned from. Oh, interesting.

Jeff Kaiser: So Jeff, this is, so this is kind of tied to your other stuff you've been doing too. So like, do you know in that, in that scenario, is it possible that like some of those SKUs would actually only be certified, like FCC certified versus Australia FCC equivalent certified?

Chris Gammell: Is that kind of the thought there? What was, it's really up to the manufacturer. So, you know, the manufacturer that I worked for, we tried to certify as many countries as possible under a single SKU because that's much easier. You know, you don't have to track. The worst thing as a manufacturer is that you sell out of one SKU and now no one from that region can buy your product. And meanwhile, you could have a warehouse full of the ones for, you know, Ireland or something, right? Like, and so now you have this big problem because your customers are angry and you have all this product, but it's just not the right product for the country that you're trying to sell it to. So, you know, we tried to do as much as possible to have a single SKU for all regions, but that's not typical. I think most manufacturers, especially high volume manufacturers will have separate SKUs for different kind of major regions. And the reason they do that is that hardware certification is complex enough that not only are the certifications often slightly different, but the timing is often very different. Like you may not get your China certification for six months to a year after you start selling in the U.S. just because of how slowly that certification. And I actually don't know if China is the worst one, but there are countries that are particularly difficult. Like I think India is very challenging. South America, there's some countries like Brazil is kind of notoriously difficult. But there's some countries where it takes a long time to certify. So if you want to launch your product in 2020, you might not be certified in a certain country until midway through 2021. And so why wait? You know, you can't wait. You have to create another SKU. And the other thing is that a lot of times products are localized. You know, like it's not a great customer user experience if you buy a product in Zimbabwe and you open it and it has an English quick start guide or a French quick start guide or something like that's not great.

Dave Jones: But I find a lot of products will have like they will come with the plug pack, but the plug pack will have all these interchangeable mains pins on it. So you slide in the Australian one and you get these, you know, you end up with a tub full of, you know, these useless slide on adapters.

Chris Gammell: I've worked on a mains powered product and it is a huge pain in the ass, not only because the plugs are different, but because the cords are sometimes different. And even just researching what cord, like the safety rating of the power cord, as well as the end that plugs into the wall, you would think that that would be very easy to figure out. But no, it's actually not because some countries have multiple standards. And I mean, I'm not even including different voltages and frequencies too. I mean, with switching power supplies, it's gotten a lot easier. But yeah, that's when you see that where you end up with a bucket of adapters, that's because that manufacturer is trying to reduce overhead by just having a single skew for all regions, which to me is smart engineering. Negative externalities, right?

Jeff Kaiser: Because you can't charge for the... I mean, it's effectively just like shipping plastic you don't need. It's just going to get thrown out. That's right. But like there's no penalty for doing that. And so that's like, yeah, that's just the environmental cost is what the brunt of that thing. And they're like, all right, whatever. No big deal.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Well, if you're a hoarder like me, you keep those adapters. And just in case someday you might need them. Just in case.

Dave Jones: Even though you can't get them back off, they're really like a one-way clip-on thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they probably were not cycle tested. Yeah. Yeah. They're not... If you're traveling between the UK and US on a weekly basis, they probably didn't take that into account.

Jeff Kaiser: No. Yeah. Oh. So Jeff, you've been doing some of this testing stuff, right? I mean, you've been doing some testing for clients and getting products ready for...

Chris Gammell: I did a couple... Yep. I did a couple projects this year in which I worked on regulatory compliance and sort of as an advisor trying to make recommendations. I haven't spent any time in the lab this year, which is good for me because I've not wanted to do that. I'm actually not sure how EMC labs have been handling this whole thing because that's a very in-person, in the same room, in typically small, enclosed spaces with questionable ventilation. So that's... My heart goes out to those guys.

Jeff Kaiser: I had one thing go through UL and it was literally like a clandestine, like drop it off the dock on like a Friday afternoon sort of thing. And it was just like... And then like two months later, they're like, yeah, you're fine. And I was like, oh, okay. Okay. That's... We'll see how that plays out. But it was also like an early test. It wasn't like the full testing. It was just like early testing. So...

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Jeff Kaiser: Not great is the answer in my experience so far. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I feel for those guys. But I mean, that's work that needs to continue. So I have no doubt that all the EMC labs in this area are still open because, you know, people are still designing and shipping products. Microsoft hasn't just stopped designing new products because of this. But yeah, I've been doing some consulting on EMC and product safety, which is kind of... It's a side area for me. It's something that I've done work in for kind of a long time now. And...

Jeff Kaiser: Can you define both of those areas for people that don't know what they are?

Chris Gammell: Oh, so EMC is electromagnetic compatibility, which is making sure that your product doesn't radiate harmful interference that can cause other products to stop working, like airplanes. You don't want airplanes to stop working around you. And it's also to make sure that your product... They do that on their own.

Jeff Kaiser: Thank you very much.

Chris Gammell: Max 737 will stop working on its own. I heard Ryanair just bought a bunch of those. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Deep discount. Yeah. Almost certainly. Not sure. And it's also to make sure that your product is not interfered with from... It doesn't receive interference from other products so that, you know, you don't have a widget that resets itself when you open your garage door and stuff like that. So that's EMC. And ESD, you know, it's a lot of stuff like that. And that's making sure that when you don't scuff your feet on the carpet and touch a product from across the room, it doesn't reset or even worse, you know, stop working permanently. So that's all part of EMC, which is some of which is required in the US. Actually, surprisingly, little is required in the US. But Europe is really good about requiring quite a lot. And it's sort of the global benchmark for what products should do. And actually, a lot of products in the US are probably better off for it because those products are also shipped into Europe, which has higher, better, in my opinion, more restrictive standards. So EMC is sort of one big category. And a lot of times you'll have companies like big companies will have EMC engineers and, you know, people that specialize in finding and fixing and also dealing with all of the bureaucratic. You know, there's a lot of documentation and paperwork and things like that, that, you know, labeling and marks that need to go on products. The other thing, if you sort of take a step back and an entirely separate but related area is product safety, which is not, I guess it is like, is a product a choking hazard? Although it sort of depends on the product.

Jeff Kaiser: It's just imagining Jeff just sitting there trying to put circuit boards in his mouth. He's like, yeah, I'm testing. I'm testing here.

Dave Jones: I think small fuses, you can't have a pack of spare fuses in there. The kiddies will eat them.

Jeff Kaiser: You just got to put a hole in the middle, like Lifesavers or Cheerios, you know?

Chris Gammell: I have not. I think that is actually a thing. I haven't worked on a product that was classified a toy in that way. But I think there is actually a model windpipe. Like there is a defined clearance that products need to not get stuck in, in order to avoid children choking on them. But product safety includes other stuff too, like making sure the product doesn't catch on fire or burn somebody's house down, making sure that it's not too hot to touch, making sure that if it's caught on fire by something else, like sparks dropping down from something else, that it then does not catch on fire. And in the US, UL is a very well-known lab that focuses on product safety. And so there's all these requirements that are specifically pertaining to product safety. And again, Europe kind of has their act together much better than the US. And Europe actually combines EMC and product safety into what's called CE. And you see CE on a lot of things. Like most consumer products these days are CE marked so that they can be sold in Europe. And actually, the rest of the world follows suit. Like most of the rest of the world is harmonized to CE, such that if you pass the requirements for the EU, most likely you're going to be able to sell anywhere. Well, it's not guaranteed, but it's a good start. Some countries still require in-country testing.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, generally. And so, Jeff, when you're doing the EMC side of things, I mean, we've had people, I mean, we've had Dr. Howard Johnson on the show before. We've had Henry Ott on the show. And I've seen you on the show and other people. I'm trying to think of them all. Sorry. But anyways, what are you usually doing when you are approaching the actual tests versus just, you know, so like Dave's done videos about, you know, having like a loop tester on the end of a probe. And like that's good for testing. Yeah, that's great. Is that the same kind of testing you're doing in the lab or actually for the compliance piece?

Chris Gammell: No, you're usually only doing that when things go wrong. So those are debugging tools that are, you can do those in the lab, but you're paying a lot because you're usually paying the lab by the hour to stay open for you. No, actually, most of the tests, well, there's quite a number of tests and they're all different. But the tests that you think of that I think to me are sort of the, probably the ones that you do first are the like radiated emissions tests, which are done in an EMC chamber. So it's a big room that's shielded. So a big shield box that has anti-reflective material like cones on usually four sides, maybe five sides. I'd have to look at that, but often the walls, but not the floor, which is actually significant because that can create reflections. That's, that's kind of another story. But anyway, it's this big box that has anti-reflective cones inside and it has a big antenna at one end or in one corner. And then you put your product on a table that's at the other end of the room and the product is on a turntable. So it actually rotates and that antenna moves up and down and can rotate polarization. And so it records the received signal in a variety of orientations to look for whatever the worst case is. And they run it through sort of this automated sweep, which takes, you know, some number of minutes depending on the settings of the test. And, and that's sort of, I think, what is the most, I don't know, most people that see an EMC lab are going to see that part. There's actually quite a lot of other things too, that are done in different rooms with different equipment, but that's, that's usually the place that you start, or that's one of the most important tests for a new product. And so, yeah, they, it's not done, it's, it's an attempt to measure the far field. So, you know, when you're using those little loop probes, you're measuring near field because you're very close to the product. You're, you're less than a wavelength away. And so you're typically like right on top of the product, trying to figure out what thing is emanating a particular type of interference. But the EMC chamber is trying to operate in the far field. And it's actually a little bit tricky because some chambers are quite small, such that actually at lower frequencies, because they're typically tested from 30 megahertz to some number of gigahertz. At the low end, the chamber might not be big enough. And there's these correction factors that are applied. And people argue about how accurate that stuff is at the low end. But anyway, it's, you know, the antenna is receiving the signal that's essentially being inadvertently transmitted from your product.

Dave Jones: And for those who don't know, I've done a video on this. The difference between near field and far field is near field. The electromagnetic wave is actually is separate. You have the magnetic field, which is the H field and the E field, the electric field. They're actually separate and then only at a certain distance, which is lambda on. Help me out here, Jeff. It's lambda on four or something. Anyway, yeah, it's a factor. So a certain distance out from the product, like a meter or two meters or something like that, the magnetic field and the electric field actually start to combine to become your electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic wave that you're more familiar with. But up close to the product, they're actually separate. That's why that little coil probe you hook onto your oscilloscope and hook up to a little amplifier. That's actually a magnetic field probe, which is different. You can get an E field probe and a H field probe. They're actually very different things when they're near field to the product. So, but the far field in quote marks is when they combine.

Chris Gammell: The other thing about the near field is that if you put something in the near field, it's easy to become a part of the antenna. Yeah. You can dramatically influence the pattern of the antenna by putting a conductor within the near field, whereas in the far field, that's less true. Yes.

Dave Jones: Chris, got it? Got it. Thank you. He's ready. He's pumped up to get his next little widget. EMC tested. Yep.

Jeff Kaiser: So, I mean, Jeff, is that usually where things are going awry when you're doing testing and stuff as well? I mean, is it more on the product safety side? Like, what are some of the things you've seen?

Chris Gammell: I've seen a lot of different things. It depends. I think it depends on the type of product. So, handheld products that don't have cords, like are not plugged into the wall, are, in my experience, pretty easy to get to pass radiated emissions because there's no antenna. Like, the product is physically small. The things that cause the most trouble are cables. And so if your product doesn't have cables, like it's a handheld device that runs on batteries and it doesn't connect to anything, those are usually pretty easy to get to pass electromagnetic compatibility. Even ESD is actually much easier for a handheld product that doesn't have a cable because there's no ground return path. So, if you have a product which operates in wired or wireless mode, the wireless mode is typically the easier one because there just isn't as much going on. There's not as much cabling connected to the product. But as soon as you need to connect that to the wall or to ground or to another piece of equipment, now you are going to have more problems on the electromagnetic compatibility side because not only is ESD much more difficult because now your product has a path to ground, but also those cables are probably antennas at some frequency. And so it really depends on the product. Product safety is much more complicated and it depends on the flammability rating of components, how much energy, anything with a battery, particularly a rechargeable battery, particularly a lithium battery, is going to be more challenging on the product safety side. And one of the complicating factors is that just this year, the standards are changing. And I think actually the product safety standard just changed, like this month. I'll have to go and see if that's been delayed again. But the standard that had been in place for a long time was being obsoleted in favor of a new standard that actually uses a different methodology for evaluating hazards. And this is part of CE or some other body? Well, so there's an international standards body that sort of defines these and then these become a part of CE. So CE will require you to comply with these. Is this like IEC then? Is this like IEC 6? That's right.

Jeff Kaiser: Whatever, whatever, whatever.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So 6950 was the one that was true for quite a long time. And I'm blanking on the number of the new standard. But 6950 just, I believe, got obsoleted. I have to go check that. But the UL and other safety organizations within the U.S. also test to those standards. But they're like the U.S. version of those standards, which are 99% the same with some small differences.

Jeff Kaiser: Is it 62368?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: I just typed in 69. It's 60950, by the way. That's always a confusing thing. 60950 is the old one. And then the new one is 62368.

Chris Gammell: Oh, and it looks like December 30th is the date. Which is three days after this will be published. So you got some time, folks. Yeah, there goes your Christmas break. I mean, one of the tricky things is that this 62368 has been coming for a long time, but it hasn't been required until now. And so anybody that's designed a product in the last year, certainly they know that this is a thing. But one of the tricky things about Europe is that, you know, 62368, if you have product on the marketplace, I'm not 100% sure if this is true for this particular standard. But most of the standards, you need to make sure that the product that's on the marketplace complies with the new standard, which means that if you made a bunch of product two years ago, you actually need to go back and recertify that product if you want to continue selling it in Europe, even if you're not manufacturing anymore. If it's just sitting in a warehouse, it needs to be recertified, which is a huge pain in the ass as a manufacturer, because it means you constantly need to be spending time and money dealing with certification as new standards come about.

Dave Jones: The timing is too coincidental. I'm sorry. It's got to be the lizard people globalist agenda at play here. It's got to be. It's all.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, Dave, two shows in a row where you're spouting. Yeah, it's fun.

Dave Jones: 2020 is so much fun. Come on.

Jeff Kaiser: 2021 is the year that Dave goes around the bend, folks.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's good.

Jeff Kaiser: It's good fun. He's revving the engines and he's going around the bend in 2021. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Can we go back to something Jeff said at the start that he's now working from home, right? And I found that my wife's also working from home as well. And that's now going to be on like practically a permanent basis pretty much. They've told everyone she works for a government agency and they've told everyone that even though, you know, the COVID is not really a thing here anymore and everything's back to normal, they're telling everyone, yeah, you can work from home. You know, if you choose to. And Jeff, any plans to like, as you said, like you had it by yourself before and now the wife's at home. And well, it's both of you. You ever thought about getting like a commercial office or something like that? Like actually a commercial lab like I do here?

Chris Gammell: I've thought about it. But I think I'm at a point where I'd rather. It is Seattle, so it's pretty expensive. That's right. It is actually quite expensive. But I think actually, I mean, the saving grace is that when I moved into the house I live in now, I already had a lab. And so I sort of was sure to have a space for it. So, yeah, I mean, I have a small business. It's not like I make a ton of money. And so it's nice to be able to just cut costs and sort of try to do as much out of the house as possible. And I think that's probably true for a lot of small businesses. I've dreamed of having more space somewhere else. I mean, particularly with better environmental control. Right. Because if you think about it, I've got all this electronic test equipment, but I live in a hundred year old house. And so it's not ideal from an electrical standpoint. It's not ideal because it's hot in the summer and it's cold in the winter. Right. You know, the calibrations on those multimeters are probably being stressed by just the temperature cycling. But the reality is I don't have any plans to move out. You know, even with the kit business, I've always been able to keep it at home. And I've got a basement that I can store inventory and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: So is there any like commercial property like actually near you? Is there any like commercial industrial business parks? That's kind of like we have here. Like I'm just five minutes away from home and we have a large industrial business park.

Chris Gammell: There are. There's a range of stuff. And actually right now there's probably quite a lot of space. Right. I'd say, yeah, you might be able to get a good deal on that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the challenges is Seattle, I think like a lot of cities in the United States, is pushing industry out. And it's sad to see that in a way. Oh, yeah. It makes it a nice place to live. But it's also, as a manufacturer, it's a bit stressful to me to see so many other manufacturing businesses being displaced and, you know, those buildings being turned into condos. Yeah. Seattle is at the forefront of that, has really been pushing that for probably 20 years now. And so a lot of manufacturing space. In fact, South Lake Union, which is where Amazon is headquartered, Amazon has some ungodly amount of square footage of real estate in big high rises in South Lake Union. And just 10, 15 years ago, that was all low rise, single and two story light and maybe not even so light manufacturing. And so it's, you know, I mean, I think, yeah, it's great for the city. It improves, reduces pollution, improves people's quality of life to have kind of higher end condos there rather than small manufacturers. But I was actually surprised. I was looking for a plating shop recently because I had some automotive parts that I wanted to get zinc plated. And there is still a plating shop in South Lake Union, which is sort of shocked me. I mean, actually, there's a plating shop in another residential neighborhood in Seattle called Fremont that also is shocking to me that this exists because it's totally grandfathered in. I mean, plating shops are like the worst in terms of the number of nasty chemicals that are there. Well, we got a really good spot by the creek and, you know, that's where all the junk goes. I mean, that's, you know, that is, you say that and that is almost certainly why some of these places are where they are. I mean, I grew up in New Jersey. You know, it's a, there's a problem. Everything is legal in Jersey. This has been a big problem. Well, that's not true. But there's certainly a legacy.

Jeff Kaiser: That's the line from Hamilton, sorry. That's the, I listen to the Hamilton soundtrack too often. My bad. Oh.

Chris Gammell: There's a legacy of pollution because of, of industry. And that's true in Seattle as well. The Duwamish waterway, which is down South where all the 737 Maxes are being, well, for a time they were being stored down by Boeing Field, which is South of Seattle. The Duwamish waterways are kind of famously contaminated with everything you could possibly think of because of a hundred years of industry. Man, don't talk to me about pollution. I lived in Cleveland. But didn't Cleveland have a river that caught on fire?

Jeff Kaiser: Three different times, as recently as a couple years ago. Really? Oh, wow. The first two times were actually what, I'm sure I've said this in the show before, but the first two times are what inspired Richard Nixon's administration to create the EPA. Oh, that's right. And the Superfund stuff came out of that, right?

Chris Gammell: So is it the first Superfund site in the country then? I'm not sure.

Jeff Kaiser: But the Cuyahoga is doing a lot better. That's the Cuyahoga River. Cuyahoga sometimes. And yeah.

Chris Gammell: I was surprised to learn. Oh, go ahead, Dave.

Dave Jones: Oh, you mentioned that Seattle was pushing businesses out. And of course, that's been famously happening in California.

Jeff Kaiser: It's not pushing people out. It is economics. Seattle is pushing manufacturing businesses out. Economics is pushing people out. Right. Sure.

Dave Jones: Well, that's famously, of course, having California with the California exodus. And can we go around the table here and ask, was 2020 the end of Silicon Valley dominance? Oh, no. That's loaded. Has anyone got any experience with companies? Because Musk, of course, Elon Musk has famously come out and said, I am the last auto manufacturer in California and I am the last space business in California. It's like, and even I'm getting out. It's like.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. That's totally decoupled from Silicon Valley. I mean, like, yeah, yeah. People point to that as like a point of innovation, but like Silicon Valley has morphed into like, you know, Facebook, Google, all those other things there. Like, so Silicon Valley is still Silicon Valley.

Dave Jones: But there's lots of big companies moving out. A lot of those. Some have moved to Seattle, actually. So.

Jeff Kaiser: Here's the here's the thing. I'll answer your question with a question. How many job listings have you seen for? I was just talking to someone about this. How many job listings have you guys seen that say remote, remote first? Right. So everybody's talking about remote. We're in the middle of a pandemic. A lot of people working remote. How many job listings do you see that say, yeah, you can work from anywhere?

Dave Jones: Well, I personally haven't been looking, but.

Jeff Kaiser: So I keep an eye on them. Right. And like it's interesting, but like and some of the software companies are starting to do that. But it's when it comes down to it, you know, the ones that are like recruiting, some of them are saying it. But especially hardware companies are not saying it. And so it's like, OK, so does that actually. So like, you know, people are looking forward to 2021 and the vaccines here and like all this stuff. It's like, OK, well, I don't think things are going to change that much. And, you know, like when you really think about like what's going to happen. Yeah. You know, there's people moving headquarters, perhaps. Right. You know, and Elon Musk, Space Karen is moving his headquarters. But like.

Dave Jones: That's that's basically what I'm talking about, because I keep hearing about companies moving out of California.

Jeff Kaiser: Like, yeah, I mean, there's going to there's going to be there's going to be some. But I just think that like I. That happens that happened every day before the the pandemic as well. And like I don't think it's going to have as lasting of an impact. You know, there's all these like think pieces that are like, oh, it's the end of cities as well. Everybody's moving out. Like, yeah, that's great until everything comes roaring back and people want to be around other people and like cultural events. And like, you know, I don't live in downtown Chicago because I want to work near industry. I live down here because I want to be near everything else. And like, I don't think that's changing at all. So and I think then what happens is, is the industry ends up forming around the people that end up wanting to live there. It becomes this like centralization problem. And so, yeah, I don't expect, you know, I don't expect a, you know, a loft building in downtown Chicago to have a manufacturing company anytime soon. But I do expect that there's going to still be manufacturing out in the outskirts because that's where the cheap space is. So it's I don't know. I I think the the demise of cities and and in California is greatly exaggerated. Jeff. Yeah, I agree. I mean, Jeff lives in like a place that keeps getting more expensive year over year. I mean, what's the expense growth in Seattle? Thanks to, you know, Microsoft and Amazon and Valve and everybody else that's up there. It's just crazy, right?

Chris Gammell: It has been accelerating. Actually, there's a lot of interesting dynamics here. And I have to admit, I don't follow it too closely. There's a lot of drama locally. Bellevue, which is where Valve is located and a number of other high tech companies. Microsoft has a presence in Bellevue, has been growing alarmingly fast. In my opinion, the Bellevue of today looks very little like the Bellevue that was there when I moved to Seattle in 2012. It's interesting. Seattle City, there was this big controversy about a head tax. So Seattle was going to put. Yeah. So Seattle was going to put a tax on big companies based on the number of employees that they had working in Seattle. And I think this was really aimed at Amazon and Amazon took offense. What was the reasoning behind this? Oh, I should know the answer to that. I mean, to gain revenue for the city.

Jeff Kaiser: I think it's probably based on like square footage versus actual number of employees there. So if you have higher density, right, you would be encouraged to have a high density location versus the number of people that are there.

Chris Gammell: Right. So I thought it was to help build affordable housing. And I mean, it was a revenue generation scheme. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Why did we have the head tax? Yeah. So the city was intending to get money from companies that had a large presence in the city. And specifically Amazon, because Amazon had so many workers in South Lake Union and Seattle in general. And so Amazon said, OK, fine, and moved a whole bunch of people to Bellevue. And so Bellevue has been growing very quickly since then. This happened in 2018, I think. And since then, you know, Facebook has a huge building that they're working on in Bellevue. REI had moved their headquarters to Bellevue. Although I heard, I think that they are not going to be occupying the huge campus that they built and that they're going to be going to a remote plan. So, you know, maybe if you go work at REI, Chris, it'll be remote first. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. No, I always want to buy my, you know, my camping gear without trying it.

Jeff Kaiser: And also, you know.

Chris Gammell: So Seattle's been growing quite quickly as a region. I mean, the Pacific Northwest, the kind of greater Seattle area like King County and surrounding areas have been growing very quickly. But I still think that if you looked at venture capital and sort of number of small tech startups in particular, that the Bay Area would still be like 10 times bigger.

Jeff Kaiser: Dave, why do you ask about all this? I'm curious. I mean, like, what is the.

Dave Jones: Oh, I just keep that's all I'm being bombarded with is the California exodus. And and, you know, it's just yeah, I just see it in. So you're just like news articles. News stories. Yeah. I think that's the thing.

Jeff Kaiser: I think it's a it's a sexy thing to write about. I think there is some of it. Sounds good.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: I mean, I think it's definitely fits the narrative.

Dave Jones: What what effect it's having is the question. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We spent a lot of this year with I think most of the U.S. thinking that the Pacific Northwest was a war zone. And there's been a lot of news about Portland and civil unrest in Portland and also in Seattle. There was a movement earlier in the year that there was an occupation of a park in a part of downtown city of Seattle. The Chaz. The Chaz. Yeah. And the Chop. And what's funny is that I would talk to people, particularly people out of state, like somebody in Utah or the Midwest. I was on the phone with and was saying, you know, are you guys OK? And I think it's again, the news has kind of run crazy with this. I live, I think, literally two point something miles from where the Chaz was and the Chop. And my life was impacted, not at all. And so it's it's all vastly, vastly overstated. So to everyone, Seattle's fine. We're doing fine. Everything's normal.

Jeff Kaiser: So I think, yeah, that is that is why it's an interesting question. I think that if I think ultimately it comes down to like I know a ton of people that are not in California right now where their jobs are. I don't think that they're necessarily planning to go back right now, but I think that as things as things return to whatever normality is, I think it's just gravitationally it's going to happen. Right. I mean, like, yeah, listen, I worked I worked remote for five years and it is friggin tough. Like you want to talk about tough to get someone's attention when you're just a chat message, you know, like way different than walking up to someone. And this is the basis of our ridiculous telepresence conversations in the past on this show. It's it's just tough to do. I mean, even telepresence, telepresence, obviously, it sucks.

Chris Gammell: But so I think that there's been this big leveling factor this year where everybody is on the same playing field because everybody needs to be remote, you know, except for essential workers. It's tough. It's easy to forget that actually there's a lot of people for whom this pandemic has not affected their day to day jobs at all, like people that work at grocery stores. Now they have to wear a mask.

Dave Jones: Oh, no, it's like I've seen numbers like fairly common around the world, like 40 percent of the population work in some sort of essential business where they're not working. You know, they're out every day, even during the massive lockdowns. There's like 40 percent of the population.

Jeff Kaiser: I think that number is way different for people in our industry, though, right? Technology.

Dave Jones: Our industry is totally not representative.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. White collar software industry, hardware industry on the design side.

Jeff Kaiser: Software more than hardware, too, right? Like manufacturing, you know, bits versus atoms, right? You know, bits is you can do from a lot of places.

Chris Gammell: Right. So what I was saying is that there's this big normalizing factor this year where everybody's being affected relatively equally by this pandemic. But I think that as soon as that's not true anymore, you're going to go back to the the old problems, which are that for people who choose to work together in an office, they are going to have an advantage in terms of visibility that affects a lot of aspects of their jobs. I do think there's going to be more tolerance of remote. You know, there's companies that I've worked for in the past that had a essentially zero remote policy. Like no one could work outside of the office because it was so core to their identity that everyone would be in the same room. And I've seen companies like that be embracing having a lot more people work remotely. But I I'm with Chris. I think that once this is, quote unquote, over, which can't come soon enough, in my opinion, I think you're going to see people kind of maybe slowly, maybe quickly revert back to kind of the old way. And I think maybe how that happens is going to be related to what happens over the next year in terms of the vaccine and in terms of herd immunity and sort of high risk, how many people are still high risk and sort of how that plays out.

Jeff Kaiser: I heard an interesting thing about about like how this is on the Pivot podcast, which is Scott Galloway, who I mentioned here on a bunch and Kara Swisher. And I've really been enjoying that lately. And they were talking about like how like it was a like who's going to get promoted. Right. And like who's going to get promoted in a job is probably going to be the person that is on site. Right. I mean, yeah, it's like visibility. It's just a number of touch points in a day sort of thing. And then if you think about that, like multiple, you know, micro generations within a company cycle down the line. Right. If the people are there, they get promoted. And they're like, I got promoted because I'm here. I'm going to promote people that I'm here. And you can just see it like all brushing back to how it was. Now, I hope it's not that case, but I think that that actually is a hot take on it. You know, like, yeah.

Dave Jones: But I like there has there has been a will be some permanent change. It's like companies have realized, oh, we can have some people remote work or even most remote work. I think the economic still worked fine, you know, because they were forced to. They never would have done it.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I think the economic piece is really is really going to be a big piece of it of like, oh, we could we could save money. When you start saying that, it's like, oh, yeah, all bets are off the table, you know.

Dave Jones: Well, as I've been saying before here here in Sydney and it's I'm sure it's similar in other countries. The number of businesses I personally know just in my surrounding buildings here that are downsizing is incredible. And they're downsizing because they have a greater percentage of people working from home. You know, like like if it's a real estate agent or something, OK, they've got like, you know, a third of people working from home now. So they don't need this office. All their lease comes up. They don't need, you know, 200 square meters. So they're downsized to 100 square meters. You know, it's just the number of businesses I know doing that. So there's going to be at least a couple of year lag on that because they're signing new smaller leases for smaller places. And then usually, you know, a commercial lease, you might sign a two, three year lease or something like that with with an extension option. So, you know, a lot of businesses will be locked into that because of this change. So if everyone does go back to working from the office, you'll see changes actually come about because of that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So it'll it'll take a several year lag for it to recover.

Chris Gammell: I think particularly if the recovery is messy, like if there are setbacks, then companies will become a lot more gun shy. I think I think most folks are probably still hoping that this is going to be like over at some point.

Dave Jones: But if it's not, we'll be playing whack-a-mole forever.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So if it stretches out, it's just a matter of how much people care. It's just a matter of how much it makes the news cycle. Unfortunately, that's what drives it. Yeah. It's like, yeah. Yeah. So no.

Jeff Kaiser: All right. Let's get into a different topic here. Jeff wanted to talk about Altium.

Chris Gammell: Well, so I, I have been working in Altium again this year and I took kind of a break, like, especially in terms of software revisions of Altium. Like most of the work that I did on the Steam controller was in Altium 12 and I think 14. Yeah. Maybe six. No, 16 would have been after it was out. So yeah, 12 and 14. And I was, I was very hesitant to upgrade because, you know, as most people that have worked with Altium know, it was a bit rocky there. Maybe it still is. But it was a bit rocky there for a while where new versions of the tool had regressions and were actually quite unstable for a while. I think 14 in particular had a bad rollout. And I remember it was, it was buggy. And so I made the decision and I'm actually curious if other manufacturers do this as well. So back in the semiconductor industry, it is very common for groups, or at least it was when I worked in that industry 15 years ago, it was very common for people to lock down versions of tools. Oh yeah. And versions of design rules and things like that through a project. So, you know, say that you're working on a chip for like a year or longer, you don't upgrade your tools during that year. And this went for like cadence and other big tools like Spectre and stuff that you would say, okay, we're going to be on version blah for the duration of this project. Well, I did that for the controller because the last thing I needed was to have our schedule be disrupted by a bug in CAD. And so on the Altium side, I said, okay, we're going to settle on Altium 12 for, you know, 99% of this project. And I think maybe at the very, very end, I sort of started going into 14 for like maintenance releases and stuff like that. But anyway, as a result, I worked with Altium, you know, eight hours a day, every day of the week for a period of years. And I was, you know, for all practical purposes, kind of an expert or approaching an expert in Altium. And then I took a break. Like I worked on other programs and Altium 17 or 18 came out where they did that big UI change.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's a different experience. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I resisted. They went to the dark mode and they sort of moved things around and I resisted those changes. And I actually stayed on Altium 16 for kind of a long time. Like I refused to upgrade because I was like, I don't like this new dark UI. I'm going to ignore it. Well, so over the past year, I have forced myself to get back into using Altium 19 and now Altium 20. And I'm sure anybody that uses Altium knows they really messed with the UI between Altium 16 and the Altium versions of today. Like there are a lot of menu items which do not exist anymore. They sort of there's this whole interface paradigm. And the reason I bring it up is I I'm not sure if anyone else has experienced this, but there is there are a few things that are more soul crushing and kind of humiliating than being an expert in a tool. And then going to use that tool a couple versions later and not knowing how to use the tool and being clueless and being ineffective and slow and useless. And I feel this for version six of KiCad just so we're clear. Yeah. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Oh, it's totally different. I mean, like there's just so many new things. So, yeah. So Altium, I'm kind of curious about what happened inside the company, you know, Altium that sort of led to this. But I'm kind of curious because I haven't, you know, obviously I'm quite isolated now compared to how I was before the pandemic. But I'm curious how other designers that work with Altium, how this affected them. Because for me, particularly with sort of the product life cycles I was in, it was really brutal. It was super difficult to adapt to the new change. And I'll say that I'm still not as efficient at Altium now. Like occasionally I still have a crutch. Like I'll load up Altium 14 or 16 and be like, wait, how did I do that again? Or maybe I'll even do a board in an old version of Altium, which is actually becoming more difficult to do now because stuff is starting to break. Like the supplier search and manufacturing parameters stuff is not working because DigiKey and others change their APIs. And so that's not supported in old versions of Altium. But anyway, it has been really difficult. And Altium, I think historically was always very good about maintaining shortcut keys and commands. I mean, they were the same even, what was it before it was Altium? It was like...

Dave Jones: Oh, it's the same since 1985 DOS version. I am not kidding. I've been using it since... Protel. The 80s. Protel. Protel. So I never used Protel.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But I heard about Protel and I know that Altium was heavily based on Protel. I kind of... It's this question of like, is it okay for a CAD tool to do something like that? Like if you think about... No, I think it's ridiculous. The ethics of a CAD tool changing. I mean, there's this sort of these competing priorities, right? Because I mean, one of the complaints that I've heard about Altium and a lot of other CAD tools is that they're trapped because they need to retain compatibility and shortcut keys and all that with software of 20 years ago. Because that's what layout PCB designers are expecting. And I guess I'm now in that camp because it was really traumatic for me the way that they changed it. And frankly, a lot of the change seemed unnecessary. Like it seems like they moved stuff around and it's not clear to me that it's actually better. So I'm actually curious if there's anybody that listens to the show that's like screaming into their speakers right now that it's better the way that it is now. Because I sort of wonder how many hours of productivity were lost because of people like me and other designers who got completely screwed by these changes that came along. Because it wasn't incremental. It was like... I mean, don't they have like a way to... Don't they have a way to like remap though?

Jeff Kaiser: I mean, like is that not a custom? No.

Chris Gammell: Oh. No, no. They changed things. They... Plus one Kaikad. Eliminated... Well, yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't believe in Kaikad. You can turn on old fart mode and, you know, it just works the way it did in 1985.

Jeff Kaiser: I mean, seriously, there's no way to customize your keys or anything like that? Nope. Nope. Nope. They moved around functionality. So that would be like the first thing I would recommend then, right? Is just like make it customizable and then all of your problems go away. That would be great. But nope.

Chris Gammell: No, they did things. So they created this properties panel, which incorporates what used to be several other dialogues and they moved a lot of commands around. And so you have to sort of look for things. And, you know, it's gotten easier as I've used the tool more, but it's sort of in terms of UI design, it was such a significant departure for what they had done before that I found it very jarring.

Dave Jones: It shows a disconnect between those who write and develop the software and those who use it. I mean, that's why one of the reasons I was specifically hired at Altium and the hardware team, which I was part of, is not only for actually, you know, developing hardware products, but the hardware development boards and things like that, but also to give actual real world user feedback and have that in-house. Dog fooding. So like, yeah, we're real hardware designers and we're using it and we were forced to use each new daily build. Right? So that was like, as we were developing real products, we were forced to use every daily change.

Chris Gammell: Well, if it's interesting to contrast it. So, so I think that's great because that's dog fooding. Right. And that to me sounds super important to a company that makes that kind of software. It's interesting to compare Altium with SolidWorks. So I also spent a lot of time this year learning SolidWorks and I got my SolidWorks certification and kind of took the classes and took the tests and everything and have been spending a lot of time using the tool. SolidWorks is a tool which has not changed in quite a long time. Like you sort of the fundamental user interface has gotten better, in my opinion, over the past few releases. There's probably people that disagree, but the fundamental way that you interact with SolidWorks has not really changed in a very, very long time. So I think in my opinion, Altium could afford to learn something from the SolidWorks guys and keep the UI the same. And I agree with you guys, you know, make it so that you can revert back if you are, you know, an old guy or somebody that's been using the tool for kind of a long time, just because I think people need to be able to be effective in these design tools. And you can't afford to have somebody who takes, probably literally is less effective for a period of months. Like it's not, I mean, it takes about a year, I would say, to become proficient at Altium if you come from scratch, right? Yeah. Having done a little bit of PCB design, but actually really becoming really good at the tool probably takes about a year of fairly intensive use. And I'd say the same for SolidWorks. So, you know, that's not something to be taken lightly if you're trying to make a living doing PCB design, right? You can't just afford to take a year out.

Dave Jones: This is worse than not changing names. Like Mentor is now going to become Siemens EDA. That's on our news list. Yeah. And Eagle, of course, is not Eagle. Well, it's still technically Eagle, is it? But now it's Fusion 360 or whatever. It's confusing.

Jeff Kaiser: That's what it is. It's Fusion Electronics, I believe. Oh, Fusion Electronics. Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: That's even changed, hasn't it? I thought it was part of the Fusion.

Jeff Kaiser: So Eagle is still around, but it's like, yeah, they're definitely pushing people.

Dave Jones: It's like a sub brand now. It's like, oh, by the way, you remember, this was Eagle, you know, it's kind of, they just keep it around.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, sort of.

Dave Jones: Yeah. They will drop it. They'll eventually drop it.

Chris Gammell: I had to use the Fusion version of Eagle this year, and I was very surprised at how little Eagle has changed in over a decade. Like, I'd say Eagle has changed very, very little in over 15 years, because I got into the latest version of the tool, and I own a seat of V5, like, way back in 2010 timeframe. I bought a seat of V5. I was able to use the latest version, and it's basically the same tool. Like, nothing has really changed, just the way that you launch it and the name has changed. So, and I'm actually not sure if that's a good thing for Eagle to have not changed, because there's still things about Eagle that are extremely awkward to do. Like, changing pad, annular ring sizes on, like, a per-component basis is still a nightmare in Eagle. So, there's things that Eagle is still very poor at doing, even in 2020.

Dave Jones: So, there are changes in these sorts of tools that, like, major changes that can be made that most users would agree on is a good move.

Chris Gammell: I think that if it fixes kind of fundamental problems with the tool without changing usability, yeah. And I think that's, to your point, Dave, that's where the CAD groups need to be in touch with the users, right? Because anybody that's using the tool on a daily basis probably has opinions, and they're probably, you know, very informative, very important feedback, right? And I think it's important for the tools company to listen to those guys.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's what, you know, the software developers would get an actual request, say it came from a forum user or some valuable user or something like that. They'd get, like, a feature request. And the software guys would start, you know, working, you know, hacking the code, trying to, you know, trying to see if it's, you know, possible to do this sort of thing and stuff like that. Then they'd come and show us, and they'd come and ask us, i.e. the hardware team, hey, guys, what do you think of this change? And they'd show the change, and we'd use it for a bit, and we'd give feedback, and we'd go, no, that's not really, you know, that's not really working. That's not how we would expect to do it and things like that. So they go back and, you know, they might make some changes and things like that. Or it might just go, oh, no, this is too hard of a problem. We'll put that in the too hard basket, and we won't add that feature. Because it's, you know, it's too fundamentally difficult to add that to the tool, for example. So without, you know, changing the entire database structure or something, you know, like some things are just very difficult to add.

Jeff Kaiser: If only there was a solution, guys, for, you know, software that's free and open source.

Dave Jones: That keeps changing on you, Chris, as you keep complaining about it.

Jeff Kaiser: Actually, I'm a little worried about it. So the V6 is, it's going to be a big shift. It's like, it's a one, it's a one, it's a one way street. So once you upgrade, you can't downgrade your files. So that is. Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: Why is the reason behind that? That just seems insane.

Jeff Kaiser: Because the entire library structure on the schematic side of things is changing. And it's a, it's a important and big chain. So like there's a, there's a video we've, I think, linked before where I did like a conversation with a lot of the developers and they went over a lot of the features, which are very, very exciting. But the biggest thing I think is the schematic side of things. Like right now, if you, each schematic symbol is like tied into a library. So like a library file is like all of the resistor symbols are like in the resistor library. And now it's moving to a, every resistor symbol is a file in a folder. Kind of, that's kind of style.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. See, that's, that's the huge difference between KeyCat and Altium. See Altium have always for the last, you know, 30, 40 years, they have always prided themselves on the fact that they don't break their file format and things like that. So you can load in even a new version. I don't know if it's still true, but it was for decades that you could even load a, like a version 20 file into a version 16 and it'll still read it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you can, you can still do that. That's, yeah. That's impressive.

Dave Jones: It's like, how do they do that? Right? It's magic. It's coding magic.

Chris Gammell: SolidWorks does not do that. SolidWorks breaks that every year. Right. But yeah, I, I think you can load 2020 files. Yeah. So it'll, it'll warn you. It'll say this file was created with a later version of Altium, but yeah, it's easy to take stuff like that for granted, but that's really handy when you're-

Dave Jones: Yeah, Altium's always had that. That's probably been one of its strongest points.

Jeff Kaiser: Sure. Yeah. I think that is a very strong point, but I think it also is kind of obviated. Like if you're not like, so like that's really necessary with Altium because people are buying that one version and if Jeff sends you a file and you're on 12 and he's on 16, then you're going to get pissed that it doesn't work. Right? Right. If it's free, it doesn't matter anymore. No, it doesn't.

Dave Jones: If it's free, it changes the coding mindset.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That is true.

Jeff Kaiser: There are definitely downsides. The thing I'm excited about that is like now for revision control and like library management, like I can just go and like be like, oh, look, I added a new file and it's just like in Git, it just shows like, oh, resistor 45 is a new type of resistor schematic. That's how it's been for footprints. And it's really, really helpful. So that and, you know, let's just catch it up on other things. What was the other thing we were, oh, we were going to ask Jeff about RF stuff. We need to do that before we, before we.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Bugger off. I guess we still can't remember exactly what the question was from a couple episodes ago, do we?

Jeff Kaiser: We, we, we have to ask Jeff something.

Dave Jones: It was to do with the door. Jeff, tell us about RF. No, it was, come on. We, we, we, surely we can remember this. Surely we can jog this out of our memory. It's to do with the power transistor. So this is a couple episodes ago.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, we were talking about the airplane, the airplane transmitter. Yeah. And it was about the frequency maybe.

Dave Jones: I got it. Yes. I remember there's this transistor. I don't have the link here. Maybe it's in our previous show. It's not. Chris, you might be able to send it through to the, sorry.

Jeff Kaiser: It's not there. It's not there.

Dave Jones: The data sheet link. No. Anyway, there was this specific transistor that when I tore this thing apart, it was an RF power transistor. You know, it was, you know, like a ceramic bolt down kind of package with the four tabs, you know?

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yep.

Dave Jones: It was. Yeah. So RF power transistor, but the data sheet said this is a specific RF power transistor for this specific frequency. It was for what, a thousand and 30 megahertz, which is the transmit frequency for the transponder or a thousand and 90, um, thousand and 30s receive. Anyway, they said it's optimized for this specific frequency. And I'm going, well, why? Like how bad would that work if you used it at 500 megahertz? You know? Like, yeah. Do you know, would you have any clue?

Jeff Kaiser: So what, what actually makes that? Yeah, you're right. That's, that's what it was. Cause we were talking about like, oh, maybe it's doping or some kind of crazy stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. It's probably because the package is internally matched. So a lot of times what they do, and this is more common with small signal transistors. And this has been a thing for a long time is that you'll have a device which contains internal matching components. So that could be bond wires that are a specific length, or there could even be passives either external to the die or integrated onto the die. Like there might be a capacitor that's on the die that helps provide a pre-matching. And these are so that these components are easier to use. They require less design work external to the package in order to match them to the surrounding circuit. And it also reduces BOM cost and BOM complexity because you don't need to have external components. So that's, that's one reason. And I've seen that done on the die. Uh, I've seen that done external to the die. Like the multi-chip modules that I worked on earlier in my career would actually have passives like chip components on a substrate along with the power amplifier die. Uh, and yeah, it's because RF devices are challenging to match. Like, you know, back in the old days, if you wanted to make like a gigahertz level low noise amplifier, you would buy a transistor and it was in a package because bear die was only for really high frequency stuff. But if it was like a couple of gigahertz, you'd buy a transistor that was in a package with leads. You would get a, uh, data sheet and a table of S parameters from the manufacturer. And then they would be like, all right, good luck. Go, you know, have fun. And it's actually not, not trivial to do that and have the device be stable. And so I think what manufacturers learned is that a lot of people don't have much of an appetite. Like they don't have the test equipment and they don't have the time and the skill to match devices themselves. And so they started shipping internally matched devices, which are essentially 50 ohms in and out. And those are so simple that you can just stick them on a board and they work. Like you get 50 ohms line.

Dave Jones: They're not going to oscillate or they're not going to play up on you. They're going to be, you know, linear at that point, you know, and they're going to be.

Chris Gammell: They're going to have the right noise figure. They're going to have the right everything. Now for power devices, you can't do that because it's hard to make a very broadband, uh, power device. And that's because the output impedance of a power transistor is for like a watt level device is going to be around an ohm. And so matching from one ohms to 50 ohms, uh, unless you have a very fancy. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you have a very fancy matching network, it's going to be fairly narrow band.

Dave Jones: And we're, and we're talking about 50 to a hundred watts here. So yeah.

Chris Gammell: So that's going to be, well, it depends on the power supply voltage.

Jeff Kaiser: Okay. So this is a power transistor and it's, it's really optimized for this one region. So in this case, we're saying it's like the 1090 megahertz. Yep. So it's an ohm at the 1090 or, or nearby it, but then it's much, much more for somewhere

Chris Gammell: else.

Jeff Kaiser: Is that the idea?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It'll be an ohm. Well, it'll probably have a lot of reactants or it'll, it won't be resistive. So it'll look like some weird impedance at some other frequency and it may not even be stable. And so the reason, so, so the, the short answer is that they make the transistor for a specific band. If you use it at that band, it's fairly easy to integrate it into the circuit. The long answer is that a lot of times you can actually pull those devices away from where they were supposed to be matched. And the ham radio guys have been doing this for a long time where they, they will take a device that's matched for 500 megahertz and they'll use it at 440 megahertz because it's close enough, you know, as long as it's within like 10, 20%, it's it, you can usually tune around it. It may not be as efficient. It may not work quite the way it was supposed to, but a lot of times there's some latitude to sort of pull things around. One of the complicating factors is that big power devices typically have a lot of Miller capacitance because between the input and the output. So like the gate and the drain or the base and the collector, there's a lot of capacitance that's tying those together. And that means that as you match one side of the device, the other side changes. And so before we had nice software to do these things and good models, you were, this is why a lot of RF engineering was called cut and try. And I am a veteran of cut and try engineering because I spent hours and hours and hours when I was first starting my career, trying things and tuning and trying things. And you end up working on the output side and then that changes the input. And then you work on the input side and that changes the output. And you go back and forth and back and forth. And for big power devices, it's a real problem. So yeah, that's why. Makes it easier. Makes it easier. Sweet. We have our answer.

Jeff Kaiser: Yep. That makes absolute sense. So we had, we had couched this whole thing in like Jeff designed power amplifiers for preamps rather. Nope. I did power amplifiers.

Chris Gammell: I'm a, I was a PA designer. Yeah. Power amplifier designer.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, I thought that was preamp. It's power amplifier. Okay. No, you can see where I'm confused. Okay. So what was, I'm sure we've talked, we must've talked about that on the show before, but give us a little reminder of what that actually meant at the silicon level. Like, so you were designing stuff like this, like the big, I was not a silicon designer.

Chris Gammell: I was a gallium arsenide designer. So silicon is not, so even, even today, even today, like 15 years later, CMOS silicon is, or even silicon germanium is not used for some high power applications. I think CMOS, RF CMOS silicon has made significant inroads. And I just saw a picture of a, of a Agilent or Keysight device recently that I'm pretty sure was a silicon device. But for a very long time, gallium arsenide was king for power amplifiers. And even like iPhones and consumer electronics devices use gallium arsenide and not silicon for the final power stage, both in terms of the RF power amplifier, as well as the antenna switch. And you know, I haven't designed in that industry for a little while and things may have changed in the last 10 years, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's still largely the same because that stuff moves pretty slowly.

Dave Jones: Well, there's lots of exotic stuff like silicon on sapphire, isn't there? A lot of like mobile phone RF stuff is done on silicon on sapphire.

Chris Gammell: That's right. You can make really good switches with SOS. Yeah. Silicon on sapphire. There's also gallium nitride, which is the newcomer silicon carbide.

Jeff Kaiser: And we should also call out the Adrian Tang, who was on the show, I think this year, maybe last year. He did. He was an early silicon CMOS. Sorry, a CMOS RF designer. Like he did some of the early stuff with that. And that was. Well, if you want to hear me being completely confused during that episode, holy crap, like he was so and so he was saying, so I still don't like I still literally feel like I blacked out during that episode because he said so many things I don't understand. Highly recommend it, though. This is very fun.

Chris Gammell: So so to answer your question, what was it like being a power amplifier silicon designer? Well, I wasn't. I was a gallium arsenide designer. But the way that that way that that worked is that we were making power amplifiers for initially wireless LAN. And then I worked on WiMAX. Do you guys remember WiMAX? That was supposed to be. I remember hearing about it. But I never knew what it was. Never, never really caught on. That was in the three gigahertz band. It was around three and a half gigahertz. And that was going to be cell like cellular, I think, was going to merge with WiMAX. And that didn't really work out. And then eventually I ended up working on cell phone parts. So like GSM, CDMA, stuff like that. So anyway, yeah, you've got this dye, which is made of gallium arsenide, which is a compound semiconductor. It uses elements from columns three and columns five of the periodic table. And the reason that you do that is that it has unique material properties and electrical properties compared to silicon. So there's tradeoffs, though. So gallium arsenide doesn't have complementary devices. So like, you know, all computers are made of logic gates, which require CMOS pull up and pull down transistors. You can have N channel and P channel devices.

Dave Jones: Hence the name CMOS complementary metal oxide semiconductor.

Chris Gammell: So with gallium arsenide, there is no complementary. It is all N channel and NPN transistors. They're all the bottoms. And for pull ups. And that PNP rubbish. Yep. You don't get PNPs. You get resistors or you get stacked NPN transistors. Like you don't get it. And so as a result, you're in a process which is very good at RF, but only has N channel or NPN devices. Would that mean it's a lot of power wasted? If you were making like a digital circuit, yeah, digital circuits are not good. That's a disadvantage of gas. And so most modern RF modules will actually have a CMOS die, which does all of the control. And then you'll have a gallium arsenide RF device that's in the same package. And it's because you're sort of taking the best of both worlds. You take your CMOS controller. You combine that with a gallium arsenide switch or a gallium nitride power device. And you sort of get everything. But of course, you pay more because you have multiple die in the same package. But anyway, we would design these amplifiers in CAD using modeling tools like ADS, Advanced Design System, which is an HP Agilent Keysight product. It used to be ESOF way, way back. And then you would fabricate them on multi-project wafers, which are like the Osh Park of gallium arsenide wafers, but usually done at very few fabs. It's not like CMOS where there's fabs around the world. Gas is much more specialized. And one of the companies I worked for actually had a fab in-house in California. And then you'd make wafers and you'd put them in packages and you would test them. And testing was a huge part of it because modeling was always a few steps behind where we wanted it to be. And so we always did a tremendous amount of hands-on testing. And you'd be on a test bench with a spectrum analyzer and a signal generator, and you would be measuring the linearity of the devices, the output power, whether they oscillated. I made some good oscillators in my day that were supposed to be amplifiers. Does the device blow up when it has a lot of reflected power? One of the reasons that gas has been so successful in cell phones is that it has a very high... There's this product of the bandwidth of the device times the breakdown voltage. And it's sort of a figure of merit for an RF device. And so that product sort of tells you how good a particular technology is. And CMOS is sort of in one side of that chart. And then gallium arsenide is in a completely different spot because it has a very high RF performance in terms of its ability to amplify at high frequencies. But then it also is very rugged because it has a high breakdown voltage. And so what that means is that if you take your phone and you set it down on a table, like a metal table, and all that energy from the antenna reflects back into the power amplifier, it doesn't blow up. And CMOS has made big strides. And almost certainly in the last few years, since I've been following that industry, has probably continued to make inroads into mobile phone type products because they've sort of worked around those limitations in a lot of ways. But for a very long time, and probably still to a certain extent today, gallium arsenide is king. But the models have always been somewhat challenging. And so there's always been a big emphasis on what we called cut and try engineering, which is build it and test it. And RF has always been a pretty hands-on field. But in particular, power amplifier design was always considered kind of a black magic. You know, one of the more black magic-y corners of RF design. And as such, there was a lot of emphasis on actually testing physical hardware. And I think that's kind of where, that's why that appealed to me. You know, I enjoyed that a lot. It was frustrating that the models were often not great. But I also enjoyed being in the lab and testing stuff. And I was really good at eking out the last tenth of a percent of efficiency. So I don't know if that answered your question. That's what it was like. That's a day in the life of a power amplifier designer. Yeah. I mean, that's a good rundown, I think. I mean, yeah, that's great.

Dave Jones: No, it's fantastic. We found out. Yep. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And that's kind of what we expected. Yeah. It's specifically matched at the die level for that frequency. And there's various ways to do that. So, yeah. Yeah. Yep. Cool. Cool bananas.

Jeff Kaiser: What else did we need to talk about? Oh, I wanted to talk about one last thing was past guests of the show and sometimes host during Christmas time and during Chaos Communication Congress, Peter Ezentemski. He is launching a new Kickstarter in 2021 or sooner, maybe. Maybe even this next week. But it's going to be the Glasgow Interface Explorer, which is like an FPGA-based serial terminal thingy. It looks really cool. It's basically like a bus pirate on crack times a thousand.

Chris Gammell: It reminded me of the bus pirate, actually. That was my first thought.

Jeff Kaiser: It's like the most flexible bus pirate ever, you know? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So you can define like any interface you need to talk to with it and then have really fast interface into it through scripting and computers and stuff like that and through like Python. So pretty cool. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Excellent. All right, Chris, this one's up your alley. Can we talk about this briefly?

Jeff Kaiser: Sure. Sure.

Dave Jones: Because it made a bit of to do. This is Mark Rober. You might be familiar. He's a NASA ex-Apple engineer who now does, you know, YouTube videos. He's got like 20 zillion subscribers or something. So he's absolutely huge. So he's an engineer like us, one of us, one of us. But he's released a paid engineering course. And it's on some monthly.com, which I've never heard of before. But it's like a Udemy kind of thing, you know, where you pay, except you pay for individual.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. So like Teachable is like that, where it's like you could buy a course from someone.

Dave Jones: You pay for an individual course instead of an all you can eat. You know, you pay one fee and you get access to everything. This one, you just buy his course. Anyway, nobody, I don't think anyone has any problem with the course. Like everyone seems popular. Everyone wants it. But the scandal in quote marks, all he to do about it seems to be about the price, which is 299 Yankee bucks. Normally 499, but it's now too, well, you know, it's, I don't think it'll ever be that. But it's, yeah, it's $299 for the course.

Jeff Kaiser: And 249, but it's not that big a deal. Oh, sorry. 50 bucks difference. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Sorry. So yeah, it's 250 bucks. And I think, well, the market will, that's fine. The market will decide. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I think, I think I was on, on what you were talking about too. It's like, yeah, he has a big, you had said on Twitter, like it's a, he has a big enough audience. If only 50 people sign up, it's still worth it or whatever that number was. And it's like, yeah, that's, that's great. I think, you know, I think the downside is that a lot of people are hungry to take courses from someone like Mark and Mark makes, I mean, his videos are fantastic. And, and, you know, he's talking about like making the, you know, talking about how to tell the story too, which is something that I think is not talked about. A lot. I think it's something I could even learn from. Um, and you know, like that it's like, that's valuable information. So I, I see why people are disappointed by it, but.

Dave Jones: And it should be mentioned that he spent a year on this apparently, which doesn't surprise me at all. It's a, if you want to complain about, you know, course it go and make your own course and see how much work it is. So. So forgive me guys.

Chris Gammell: What is the subject matter of the course?

Dave Jones: It's like how to do engineering kind of thing. It's like. Well, sort of. It's like how to build projects. I think you build three projects and he helps you along the way. And.

Jeff Kaiser: But they're, they're projects of your own making. So it's also like ideation and like how to. So I think that's the, that's probably the, the thing that I would be most concerned about is it's like, there's not as much guide. It's, you know, it's like soft instruction in that way. It's not like do step a, do step B. It's more like come up with step a for yourself.

Dave Jones: Encouragement. Review with your.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It really sounds like he's consulting. I mean, if you think about it from a.

Dave Jones: It's the community thing. It's basically you join the community and you get feedback from the community and maybe him, he, he might jump in occasionally, but he's saying, don't expect me to jump in personally for everyone's project kind of thing.

Jeff Kaiser: So what are the videos about? So it's about like, so basically him explaining his process. So like how he does ideation, how he thinks through how he'll source. So he's showing his own projects there. Right. So that's a lot of what's out there. And that's something that that's like how I operate as well. When I do contextual electronics, it's like me just showing, I'm basically showing how I do it. I expect people are going to follow along and do what I'm doing. But in, you know, people could try and abstract that away and say, you know, I could turn around and say, okay, now go and come up with your own circuit idea you want to do. I think that's unfortunately is one of the harder things to do. I think if he does it well, that's just very impressive in that way, but it's, it's tough.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's just showing a pro it's showing his particular process. Like, you know, here's how I come up with the idea. Here's how I do the specifications. Here's how I plan out what it's going to look like and how it's going to work. And, you know, here's how I executed his, you know, some example suppliers. He's my go-to tools, you know, all that sort of jazz.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I think it's, I think it's closer. And so like when I saw it, I was like, oh, that's kind of like, so like masterclasses and other ones out there. That's like very famous people teaching something about their method. Right. And basically that's like, you get 10 videos and you're going to watch how Hans Zimmer does composition for his thing. Right. That's really, you're just watching. You're not doing anything. This is closer to like more like a Udemy or dare I say a contextual electronics where you're building a thing, but it's, you know, that it's still that you're watching, you know, it's kind of this soft thing, you know, it's like a soft, uh, requirements. You know, it's, let's come up with all these things together. Let's do some feedback. Let's have group building. Now, I think if they actually build the social piece in there, that's actually really important, right. To be able to like have people interact with that is super motivating, I think. So it sounds like an MBA program, right?

Chris Gammell: It's exactly like an, that is exactly, it's exactly it. Like class projects and you've got to find your partners that you're going to work with. And then you sort of have this timeframe and this overarching curriculum and this reason to be focusing at this moment together with other people. But it's sort of, it's less like a class. Well, it's in between a class and a workshop. It's sort of something different.

Dave Jones: It's a mix. So the, so the controversy here is the price. People think, oh, he's taken advantage of his viewers at 250 bucks a course. And I think, well, no, he's put a metric crap ton of work into this. And only a certain.

Jeff Kaiser: He's got to eat. Well, yeah, I think, I think people look at it and they say like, oh, well, he's making so much money on YouTube and it's like, I feel like that's just, that's, that's a, is that a straw man argument though? Like, I mean, like that is completely like, it's, this is about a value proposition. And like, I'm very much, I didn't think there was an argument to put this at all. Like, you know, people don't like the price. That's understandable.

Dave Jones: I was defending it from day one. I thought, you know, and, and if it fails, it fails. If nobody's interested, but people seem to think that because he's a successful YouTuber, but he owes it to me, he owes it to his fans who've made him to make it affordable to them. Right. So they seem upset that they want, they, everyone wants to watch it, but they don't want to pay 250 bucks. And then when I asked people on Twitter, well, how much would you pay for it? They go, and they don't give an answer. Yeah, exactly.

Jeff Kaiser: Yep.

Dave Jones: It's like, they, they expect because he's, you know, he earns millions. It probably earns, you know, I'm sure he's earning millions of dollars a year on YouTube.

Jeff Kaiser: Right. And yeah, and he's a production team, I think now too. And like, yeah, he's, he's doing just fine. And like, he could just do what he wants to.

Dave Jones: But he spent a year of his life working on this. Right. It's like, if, if you spend a year writing a book, would you, even if you're a successful author who want, you know, would you expect people to give it, would you expect them to give it to you for nothing? Like, you know, just here's the PDF. You can go over it. You know, no. Yeah. Right. Right. Thanks.

Jeff Kaiser: Thanks, Stephen King. Hope this next one's as good as the last one. The last one was free and I didn't really like it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't, I don't see the argument here, but quite a lot of his fans got irate that it

Jeff Kaiser: was, you know, I think it comes down to social contract. Right. I mean, like in this case, it's like, so like the social contract of YouTube is I watch a thing. Maybe I watch some ads. Maybe I skip some ads, but I'm willing to do that because it's free. You know, it's free interaction. This is now a different social contract. I think, cause this is, you know, this is moving towards true education and it's like, that is just a different thing. It's a different caliber of delivery. It's a different method of delivery. There's different overhead. And the delivery method is like, yeah, it's just, there's more cost to it.

Dave Jones: It doesn't fall under the existing social contract. I don't think.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But maybe cause we're, we're invested in it, Chris, like, you know, I've thought about doing a course that I have like a video course of, you know, some tutorial video course, but actually put a shit ton of work into it, cover every aspect and make it, make them all the same. And, you know, it'd take me like a year to make these videos or something, but once I do, I could release it as a set course. And it's like, well, am I going to give that away for free on my channel? It's like, no, I'm going to, right. I'm going to charge for that. Of course it would be a paid, you know, thing. It'd be a paid content thing.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I think this is where it's, it's tough. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but like, I often go to like, you know, a YouTube to try and learn something. And there is a lot of great content out there. Like personally, I, I, I have learned things from you, Dave, you know, I've learned from other users making videos and stuff like that. Like, I think there is a lot of knowledge there, but it's not like, it's not super focused knowledge, right? It's not like I want to get from point A to point B. And there are in certain fields, right? Like you could maybe go and say like, how do I change the, you know, the, the ball valve on, you know, this pipe or something like that. Like I've done that before. Right. And there is that like piece thing. But if you're trying to say, how do I plumb my entire house? There are so many like iterations or permutations that are out there. Like that you were basically paying for someone to say, here is the way that I think is best to do this thing. And that's a really, that's valuable information. That's something you might go and pay a plumber for that sort of thing. And it's not just replacing a ball valve. It's designing in every single pipe that's in your house. And it's like, okay, well, I either pay a plumber. I pay for this knowledge. And the plumber is a guaranteed thing. That's not guaranteed, but it's, you know, it's much more highly likely that it's going to work. It's going to be more expensive. This is kind of that in between doing those things. And then maybe there's also, I could just go and try and figure out from just the ball valve videos and try and figure it all out myself. But somewhere in between all those things, there's, there's some amount of money for value transfer. I think.

Dave Jones: Jeff, as a non-content producer, essentially, what's, what's your take on that?

Chris Gammell: I just had a thought. And that is that if I paid 300 bucks for a course, I'd probably be much more likely to participate and stay involved. So I wonder if that's not also an important ingredient that if he's trying to create something where there's a community and where people are working together and helping each other, I think that having the price be, you know, some significant number is going to be likely to keep people motivated because they're going to be highly incented to try to get their value back out again. So I think for a workshop environment, I, that actually seems like kind of a good deal. And, you know, I, I don't know specifically much about the class, but 300 bucks or 250 bucks does not seem unreasonable for a class. I mean, I've, I've spent more than that on my own dime, as well as the company's dime to take, you know, I took Henry Ott's EMC class a while back and that was not a participatory thing. It was, you know, you just go and sit in lectures. And I thought that was super valuable. And I also took, uh, Tufti's, um, visualizing information class a year ago or two years ago in Seattle. And I also thought that was great. So, yeah, I mean, I, I think that, you know, if somebody has put together a workshop where there's going to be a lot of engagement between participants that having a price of a couple hundred dollars seems like that seems totally fine to me.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I think skin in the game is a very important thing. And I think, like I said, I think the social contract piece is, it's especially shocking, right? Because it goes from zero, like the, like, I think I mentioned on Twitter.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It goes from zero to two 50. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, the chasm, like, like Chris Anderson writes about in free, right? So like we've had Chris on the show before, but he wrote that great book about free back in the day and you know, the chasm between free and one cent or sub cent or whatever is like huge going from absolutely free to paying one cent is like this huge gap you have to get past. And like, so most people won't cross that. And it's like, okay, so now getting from like one cent to like $10. Yeah. You're still going to have some people in there, but it's, you know, it's going to fall off as well. So then going from $0 to $250, it's like, this is a different, you're in the wrong stadium, buddy. You know, like, you know, so that's, that's where that I think also runs into problems.

Chris Gammell: I think that there is also an advantage to kind of keeping the riffraff out to like signal to noise ratio. You know, if you're in a forum where there's 3000 other participants who have no skin in the game, like you said, Chris, I think it's a totally different.

Jeff Kaiser: That's what a massive online open courseware thing is. Right. And it's like, and then by the end you get, you know, three, 4% success rate and, you know, and so, yeah, I think, I think you're right that there will be, whether or not it was the intent, I think that having, having a skin in the game element to it. And like, I, I think I said elsewhere too, like it's, some people can't afford that. Like that is just legit a problem. And so like, I always hope that there's, you know, sponsorship opportunities, whatever, but I think there still has to be something.

Dave Jones: But there's tons of free options. You can do it the entire MIT engineering degree for free. Every single lecture of every single course, every single subject is available online for free.

Jeff Kaiser: Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones: So I, you know, like there's no shortage of stuff out there.

Jeff Kaiser: Yep.

Dave Jones: It's just, yeah, I don't, I don't get the hate for this one. It's like, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't get it.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, I mean, I hope he does well. I mean, like, I, I think that that's. Yeah, I hope it goes well. Maybe the next one would be cheaper. Who knows? Like, but I, I think that it's a, it's an exciting thing. Hmm. So.

Dave Jones: Oh, and by the way, I think the, the company approached him to do this. Oh, totally. And he's probably getting paid regard. Like he's probably getting paid an upfront thing. I don't know that for sure, but I'd be very surprised if that's not the case. Um. I mean. Interesting. Why would you go and spend that much time on it? He still spent a year of his life on this. It's not like he's, you know, this is just some throwaway thing for him. You know? Yeah. He's, you know, he's put a metric shit ton of effort into this. And, uh, and, uh, but not just effort, but, uh, passion as well. He seems very passionate about it and. You know? Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Dave Jones: And, and if you can't afford it, well, sorry, it's not for you. You know? I mean, just go find something free or lower cost.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: I do think there's a lot of interesting things around, you know, I'm obviously very interested in like, how do people move towards like a thing that they really want to be doing? Right. So they want to go build a project like, like Mark builds or building circuit boards or anything like that. I think there it's tough because like, uh, the, you know, there's just so much, like I said, there's so many permutations of how to like learn a thing that I was actually just, I just had a call with a, you know, I'm on like an alumni list for my university and a kid just called me. He was a freshman, like super driven, super smart kid really had fun talking to him. But the thing I kept coming back to is just like, have that one thing you care about, you know, like have that one thing you want to build because that like focal point is so important to like figuring out what you need to learn next. You know, like one of the hardest things I think is figuring out like, what do I even need to, you know, like, so Jeff, you went and took this visualizing information class. I'm not sure what that was for, but like, you know, maybe you'd have to go and take something like that. And you didn't even know that six months ago, you didn't know that that course existed, but you can go and find it then. And I feel like having that project or that end goal is almost as important. So I pointed to like Joe Bernard, who's like the BPS space, you know, he's doing the model rocket thing. Like you look at all the things that Joe has built and learn. It's like crazy because of all of the different fields he's had to learn in order to just to get those rockets off the ground. And like, but that's been the focal point has been the rockets and all of the knowledge has come because of that.

Chris Gammell: I like to balance it. Like I, I am a person who is naturally very curious and enjoys learning things as a, a pastime, like a hobby, like things that are even outside of electronics, like outside of the scope of the amp hour, especially during the pandemic, you know, like everybody, I was baking bread and learning how to sharpen knives and doing all the things that people decided were important in 2020. But I think that you're a hundred percent right. To me, that's where learning becomes work though. You know, there's learning for fun, like sitting in front of the fireplace and reading a book about some random subject, because that's a fun way to pass time. But I think there's also the being prepared to fail. You know, it's the, as soon as you actually start a real project, you are going to fail. And to me, psychologically, that is much more significant. Like that is now work and it's good work. It's important work. It's necessary. And to be honest, I think it is much more efficient. Like, you know, if I want to learn how to TIG weld, for example, it's great if I've got a reason, like it, it, you're only going to learn so much if you just TIG weld scrap metal together in the garage. Look at all this crap I made. Scrap plus scrap equals scrap. Yeah. If you try to build a car, all of a sudden you're going to be like, oh, there is so much that I don't understand about TIG welding because I didn't actually have an application. And I think electronics is the same way. And even CAD, like Altium, I had noodled around with the new interface and I was like, oh yeah, this is super different and weird. And no, you can't do it. You got to lay out a real board. And, and then you start a board and you're like, oh man, like this is awful because I can't, I can't be effective. Just want to do that one thing there.

Dave Jones: And you can't realize that unless you start that real project.

Chris Gammell: Right. I think, I think it is, you know, you learn, I learn a lot personally through failing. And I think that by having a specific project, you have a objective, you have a reason to be learning. But I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I actually think that for my own mental health and my enjoyment of my hobbies, I need to balance it. I like to learn about things just for the sake of learning them. And I do intend to often apply that knowledge later, but I think a lot of times there's this more fun side, which is let's just learn about this fun thing just for the sake of learning. And maybe there are some potential applications. And I think it's good to have a balance and to do both. But I agree with you that the learning with a real thing is a more effective way of forcing yourself to learn something, especially quickly.

Dave Jones: And that'll be the thing with Mark's course. If you go in it with a project in mind that you want to do, you'll get vastly more out of it than you will if you just go in. Oh, I like Mark, Mark, and I'm cashed up. I've got 250 bucks. I'll, I'll take this course.

Jeff Kaiser: And it's like, man, I think they're, they're going to do, I think that's some of the ideation piece and they're going to try and help people find that. But yeah, if you have like some areas that you're more interested in too. Oh yeah. You're way ahead. Helpful. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's, yeah, that's the right take. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Cool bananas.

Jeff Kaiser: Is Kaiser Miss over guys?

Dave Jones: Oh God. It's an hour and 47 minutes. I think we're, we're getting close to being over.

Chris Gammell: I'd like you guys to know that the entire time we've been recording, I've had Nick Offerman's Yule log on one of my monitors here and he's sitting in front of the fire.

Dave Jones: I have no idea what you guys are talking about.

Jeff Kaiser: Jeff and I were discussing the fact that he just got a fancy new chair delivered for in front of his fire and that we were talking about, not from Amazon, but like also scotch and like, you know, the idea of hygge, which is, am I saying that right, Jeff? Hygge? Oh. H-Y-G-G-E. It's like a Danish, Danish thing. It's like coziness.

Chris Gammell: Coziness. Coziness. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: And we were talking about scotch and stuff like that. And so I told Jeff about this thing, Nick Offerman is the guy on Parks and Recreation who plays Ron Swanson and he's a comedian. American TV show. Okay. Got it. And anyways, he's sitting there just like literally just holding and sipping a glass of scotch in front of a fire for like many hours. And it's just like, that's the entire video. It's, it's, it's, it's very relaxing to watch. It's very relaxing.

Dave Jones: So there's no, he, he just sits there. He doesn't talk or anything.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Just. I'll send it to you. Oh yeah. I just posted a link to the chat.

Dave Jones: And I'm sure it's got like a million views and a million thumbs up or something. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's great.

Jeff Kaiser: Fantastic.

Chris Gammell: I'm, I'm partial to the Darth Vader Yule log. Have you guys seen that one? I've not. That one's a classic. I'll post a link to that one as well. Yep. Oh, it's like the first YouTube hit. Yeah. No, you'll, you'll see. I got to see it. All right.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, Jeff, I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful 2021. I'm sure we'll talk. I'm sure we'll have another Kaiser Miss going here.

Chris Gammell: Well, thank you. Thanks so much for having me on the show. It was great.

Dave Jones: No worries, Mike. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Good to have you back. Talk to you next year.

Dave Jones: That's it. Wait on. Catch you next time. All right. Bye guys.

Jeff Kaiser: Kaiser Miss happens, but once per year. But the warm, fuzzy feelings and tidings of Kaiser Miss joy happen all year long. Thanks to our patrons. Join the giving spirit of our patrons at patreon.com slash the amp hour. You'll get a discount on amp hour merch that you can use for the next Kaiser Miss or the intervening high holidays like Dabawali, Graz Noean, or the sighting of the Easter Bunny Huang. A special thanks today to our corporate sponsor, Bean Go.