#548 – The Last Line of Defense

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released July 5th, 2021. Episode 548, sponsored by InspectDAR. The Last Line of Defense.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm short on time.

Chris Gammell: And Chris Campbell from Contextual Electronics.

Dave Jones: Nice to meet you, short on time.

Chris Gammell: Yes, thank you. Yeah, we're going to have a slightly shorter episode today. And maybe we'll pad it out with 10 minutes of me singing the National Anthem or something. This is going to come out the day after, I think, U.S. Independence Day. Oh, is it? Oh, it's bloody July, isn't it? Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, a lot fewer fireworks showed this year, unfortunately. Because everything's... I don't know if you heard about the weather over here, but it's like...

Dave Jones: Oh, you heard it's just...

Chris Gammell: It's positively Australian.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: Seattle is the new outback.

Dave Jones: I heard like one in a thousand years heat wave.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's insane. Yeah, not where I am. It's been like 70 degrees here, 70 Fahrenheit. Right. So like 20, 22 C.

Dave Jones: Where's the worst of it?

Chris Gammell: I saw some stuff in British Columbia, which is actually up in Canada. But like the Pacific Northwest, it was hitting like 45 C.

Dave Jones: For those who don't know what the Pacific Northwest throws some cities at it.

Chris Gammell: That's Seattle. Seattle, right. Portland, like Whistler, British Columbia. Right. Just basically like the upper left corner of the upper left of the US or the lower left

Dave Jones: But that's not what you'd expect. Just due to the...

Speaker ?: Oh, totally.

Dave Jones: Elevate, like just due to the...

Chris Gammell: That's why it's so potentially dangerous too, because a lot of those places... You know, you go to Portland, it's like known for being like rainy and cold.

Dave Jones: Wet and miserable. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like Melbourne. There's a lot less air conditioning out there. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's actually a really... That's a really good comparison. Because it's, you know, it's got an artsy and it's, you know... Yeah, yeah. Of course.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And riots and... Yep. Yep. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, boy. Yep. Yeah. I love both cities. They're great. Yeah. But it's crazy. And so... Wow. Yeah. Lots of extreme weather events happening in the world. Yeah. It's nuts.

Dave Jones: Is that going to lead to power outages? Because I heard like Texas or... No, is it... Or is it bloody California again is warning people of...

Chris Gammell: California. Yep. Yep. Warning people of... All those places. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Rolling blackouts because, well, yeah, they don't know how to manage their grid.

Chris Gammell: You know, I've started thinking about this. So, like, you know, I'm moving to a new house, hoping to put solar on top of the house. Yep. But just kind of thinking about, like, going forward. I mean, not that I think it's a broad solution, but like, at least from like a... A localized solution of just battery backup type of... You know, like stuff that we've talked about on here before. You've talked about getting too. And it's just... I have. Kind of that...

Dave Jones: I can update you on that situation if you like.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that'd be great. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's like... Now, unfortunately, if you've seen my videos of my solar installations, I... The solar panels are not on an ideal roof. They're not... Like, it's not facing north here. South. Ah, got it. South for you yanks, right? Right. Which is the ideal, you know, place to put it. Right? And... It's... No, it's sort of like westy kind of, you know. So as the sun sets in the afternoon... So you get a lot of nighttime sun. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of the afternoon sun is where we get our peak sort of thing. And in... You know, I've expanded my system to an 8... Is it weight? 8 kilowatt? Yes. It's an 8 kilowatt system now. We've got 5.1 installed. I had an existing 3 kilowatt system. So 8.1. So you think, you know, that's a pretty decent size system. And... Yeah, that's a good peak system. In wintertime? No. No, it's not even close to covering our needs in winter. It's just piss poor. Because I moved my existing 3 kilowatt system onto an even less optimized east side. So it gets the morning sun kind of, sort of. But I'm... That's a 3 kilowatt system. The best I've seen out of that so far is like 1 kilowatt.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: It's like...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's pretty poor. Yeah, but it's still better than like... It's not costing or anything, right? Yeah, no, no, no.

Dave Jones: It just cost me a couple hundred bucks to move it to the other side in labor. Yeah, right, right. So not, you know. So it's fine. But like, it's just, you know, it just bugs me that I've got this 3 kilowatt system and it's 1 kilowatt. Now, in summer, of course, I expect this to be entirely different ballgame. But in wintertime, no. No, I've got nothing.

Chris Gammell: What's the 5 kilowatt panels getting? What are they getting?

Dave Jones: Oh, well, they cannot because I'm only using 290 watt inverters, 14 times 290 watts peak. The best I can get out of it peak is 4 kilowatts. I will never get 5 kilowatts out of it, even if the sun was directly on top of it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's because of the actual inversion.

Dave Jones: That's the inversion clipping. Yeah, 290 watt inverters on a 370 watt panel. And I've done a video explaining why that's the case and how, in theory, you don't lose a lot of energy overall. You notice I said the word energy and not power. Energy overall in terms of, because that's what you've got to look at. You've got to look at the energy equation over the whole year. You can't just look at, oh, I've got 370 watt panels and, you know, I want to get 370 watts out of it. Well, that's only for a brief part of the day do you get that, like, you know, half an hour or an hour or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: So you might lose that, well, you will lose that peak tip, but then you gain in the side lobes, if you know what I mean. You know, you gain in the side part of the curves where it's under. So anyway. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't meet our needs in wintertime. So there's, like, this is, and I'm talking, it doesn't even meet our needs without the car, without charging the car.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: So it's like when you include charging the car.

Chris Gammell: Have you, like, incremented the whole house too, or not incremented, but, like, measured everything? Like, do you know what are the big, is it like heating is the big one? Or what are the actual?

Dave Jones: Have it, well, broke it down. No, it's just that we, you know, we're, like, work from home now. It's kind of, you know, Nicole works from home and it's kind of, yep. And all of our needs are going during the day, which is good. Sure. Which is good because the sun's up and we're using it. It's just that in winter, we're not doing enough. You know, because in wintertime, she programs the air cons to come on in the morning for the kids, right? So that they're comfortable and the house is comfortable, you know.

Chris Gammell: You guys need the air conditioning in the winter. Yes. That's intense. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, like, this, this, like, might be my, like, I don't think it's going to be quite as bad where I'm moving, but, like, that, I don't have that.

Dave Jones: Well, we don't need it. Like, I don't need it, but she turns them on. Sure. Right. No, yeah, it's just a comfort level. I get it. It's fine. It's a comfort thing. Like, that's the thing, right? If we had, if we had storage and the power was out, right. And then our house was still up. Our house is still up and running because we had storage. Then we'd go into frugal mode. Right. You would go, okay, we're not programming the air cons to come on. We're not going to use the oven. You know, we're not going to like, you know. Right.

Chris Gammell: You would just cut back. Right. Yeah. I get it.

Dave Jones: You would absolutely cut back if the power fail. But the point I'm trying to make is we don't even have, with an eight kilowatt system, enough to power our basic needs, let alone, you know, charging the car, which is, you know, an additional need.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Even though it's only 2.2 kilowatts, you know, it's only. So, so in a summertime, yeah, our system will give over five kilowatts, you know, it might get up to six kilowatts, something like that. Power output, which will meet our, our, our peak demands go up to about eight kilowatts, depending on how many things are on at the same time. So, you know, if you've got the car, if you've got a couple of air cons, if you've got the dryer on, you know, if you've got the washing machine or the dishwasher on and all sorts of things that use, you know, those, those heaters to heat up stuff, then yeah.

Chris Gammell: I was actually thinking about this the other day of like historically, what is, what percentage of like power that has been generated of all time, right? If you like took all power and then you said, what percentage has been used specifically for powering embedded devices, right? Is it like 0.001%? Is it less than, you know, just thinking about like how, how like percentages like heating swamps out any kind of computing?

Dave Jones: Oh, it would totally. You'd be down in the sub, sub, sub 1%.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, like, especially if you like take out like Bitcoin. When you're talking industrial and heating and everything else. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Oh, even if you took out Bitcoin. Yeah. No, you're still down in the 0.1% because the, the energy is so low. They're embedded devices for goodness sake. That's, you know, they, they run on a coin sale, right?

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Well, I mean, you start to get more numbers maybe, but, but yeah.

Dave Jones: No, I don't think even the numbers can add up. I don't. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think the heating stuff just swamps out. I mean, heating, heating and cooling is just such a massive thing. And I guess now locomotion as well with cars, right?

Dave Jones: Well, exactly. Are you including the hundred, 200 microcontrollers in, in, inside the average car?

Chris Gammell: Like, yeah, but I figured that's a fraction of any car as well. Right. I mean, like what, what fraction of the power to run all the controls throughout an electric vehicle, even compared to the motor, it's gotta be.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: 0.1%, right?

Dave Jones: It's not a lot. Although my car will actually, you know, warn you that, Hey, you've got the accessories turned on, the radios turned on and you know, you're not driving or doing anything. It'll actually automatically shut you down to save that standby power because it doesn't just want to piss away the power. But, but you know, they're reasonably powerful computers on there to run all those graphical user interfaces and you know, stuff like that. Yeah. It isn't just running like a little Raspberry Pi or something, you know, it's running a decent processor. So it's fairly power hungry to run all that screen and everything else.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Sure. All the grumps. Raspberry Pi is not a small amount of power either. Doesn't have it. Yeah. Although I did get the CM4. I've saw, I've seen that the current on that, if you don't have like USB turned on, that's like the nice thing about it. It is the tricky thing about it too, is like when you plug in a compute module four, which is the newer one, it like doesn't have a lot of stuff turned on in like the device tree overlay, which enables a lot of peripherals. And USB is one of the ones that really sucks down a lot of the power that I didn't, I didn't realize. And that one is turned off by default.

Dave Jones: Okay. Interesting. I've never thought about a USB core and how much power it takes. Really. I've never, never had to do the equation on that. It's like, you know, like micro supply, you know, and, uh, other USB projects. It's like, you know, you've got to have USB. So the power is what it is. You just don't care what, you know, it's not something you can turn off because it's an essential part of the product, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I would figure that's also got like, that's like USB to serial versus like a, you know, a higher level integration of USB drivers and stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. If you're pumping out, you know, if you're pumping out huge amounts of data and stuff like that, then streaming, then I imagine it's, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So it was only like a three, you know, plugging in just straight off the shelf. It was like 300 million amps or so, which is, you know, not a small amount of current, but it's not terrible, you know? So, uh, less than I would have, than I guess, you know, having used other Raspberry Pis in the past and monitored on those five volt buses. And they're like, how about default of 800 million?

Dave Jones: Well, I stand at Raspberry Pi idols at about two Watts, just sitting there doing nothing. That's a fair bit. Two Watts. Jeez, you fly to the moon on that.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Sure. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's a fair bit of power.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Uh-huh.

Dave Jones: So, you know, if an average home had 10 Raspberry Pis running embedded stuff, you know, if you have your smart, stupid light bulbs sitting there waiting for your wifi to turn the stupid thing on, then, you know, all this stuff's going to add up.

Chris Gammell: It will. Yeah. It's a good reason to, uh, you know, embedded devices and the connectivity piece is what really gets you. I mean, like that, uh, I was just asking some people on my forum about this, about just like using our tosses and like where people start from when this stuff comes into play. And it really, uh, the, the place I put it at is like, if it's going to have networking, if it's going to try and talk to the internet, it's just like, you, you kind of start moving up the stack of like moving away from like bare metal or even just like, like I would normally do with like a, you know, NRF 52s SDK and just, you know, using the SDK and, and examples and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Hmm. No internet of things. That's the solution.

Chris Gammell: That, that is the other solution. Yeah. It's just to, to not, to not have anything connected, I suppose, but that seems less likely these days.

Dave Jones: No, come on. Resist. Resist.

Chris Gammell: Okay. All right. Join the resistance, Chris. Okay. All right. All right.

Dave Jones: All right. Bloody internet of things. No way. Why does it always end up at bloody embedded internet of things? This show.

Chris Gammell: This show? Because that's what I do for a living.

Dave Jones: That's what I do. That's what you do for a living. It's on your brain. I know. I knew the answer. It was retarded. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's, it's, it's, yeah. It's not easy. You know, that stuff. Trying to learn more. Oh boy. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's all right. You have to feed the kid. It's okay.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Yeah. She's screaming in the background. I don't know if you can hear it there. Yeah, I could just hear it.

Dave Jones: I'm not sure if you can hear it at home, but if I can hear it on headphones, probably. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You probably hear a little bit. She's, she gets grumpy about IOT stuff too. Yeah. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Oh boy. Yep. So you're still in Chicago, are you? You haven't moved?

Chris Gammell: Yep. Still here until August. Right. Starting to line up all the logistics of that stuff. Lining up the, you know, I haven't even thought, you know, we talked a little bit last time about like lab stuff and getting set up in a lab and, or setting up a lab rather. And, uh, I, I can't even wrap my brain around that yet. You know, it's just like everything else is still so up in the air. So we'll, I'm sure we'll, we could dedicate a whole episode to that sort of thing.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: But you know, Greenfield lab, what do you do then? Right. I mean, we could, I guess we could talk about it now, but like when you have a, just a blank room, I guess you've already done this a couple of times.

Dave Jones: When you have a blank room and then start. Yeah. Yeah. Like I've never really, well, like at home, I've never really had that. Cause I've sort of, you know, it's always been cobbled together from the lab before, you know, I, I, I reuse the existing benches. I read, you know, every time I move lab or even, you know, home in here and all sorts of, even, even around home, you know, back when I was a kid, you know, my old, you know, I used to have a, I posted a photo on Twitter of one of the photos of my shed that was in the backyard, you know, that I had as a kid. And I eventually moved out of, you know, the shed. I don't know why I just moved it into my bedroom and then, you know, moved it into a back room of the house. Once my sister moved out and it was kind of, you know, just, and, and then I moved it into the pool room and then like, it's, it's, it's, it's been all over the shop. Right. That's right. And, uh, yeah, it's just, and, and it's always cobbled together with, you know, stuff I've had existing. Right. Especially as a kid too. Right.

Chris Gammell: It's like you get whatever you can get your hands on.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's, it's, it's very rare at a work situation that, you know, they've gone, you know, I've walked into a company and there's nothing there and they've got a radio kid set it up, you know, here's your budget.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: I've, I've, I've, I've had that where I've joined a new department and they've said, okay, you're the only electronics person here. We don't have anything by gear, gear you need. And I've had to set up, you know, labs from scratch, but not like blank room kind of stuff. You just sort of make, make, make the benches is really the big thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The layout and stuff like that. So yeah, I don't know. It, it, it depends on your, you know, needs. It like, depends on what kind of stuff you're working on.

Chris Gammell: Well, the other thing too, is I worry, I worry about like having the infinite, you know, the infinite workbench space, right? If you, if I could have a room that was infinite workbench space, it's just all going to spread out. You know, you know, this problem. Oh, of course.

Dave Jones: No, I'd, I'd have a bloody bench for every project and every project would sit on its own little bench, you know? Right. Have like one of those carousels where the bench just folds down for the next thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If I had, you know, if I was rich, yeah, I would have, I'd build, you know, like a thousand square meter lab, you know, like just because, right?

Chris Gammell: Buy your own house. And just that, that one house is just. No, right.

Dave Jones: Just the entire house is the lab, which, which, which I'm sure we've talked about in here before. I have thought about.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. You have mentioned that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Unfortunately, prices have just like gone up. Bananas. Yeah. 70% here in like a year. So yeah, there goes that idea. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Buying a house nearby and converting it to a lab.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, the things I think about are like having a lot of vertical space is important to me. Like, so like I like to have, you know, like the. The equipment up a little bit and then, but then like lighting is the one that always gets me. It's just like, how do I get the most lighting as possible without it being like in the way to, because it's like, you almost need like passive lighting. Cause I think about my, my setup. I just took down here. I had like one, I had like a video light and, but it was like one big light, which was great. It was super bright up until I lean over the board. Yeah. It's just like my head shadowing, you know? So it's like, you need as much, like you need a lot of light, but it needs to be like passive light. So like the whole room is kind of glowing.

Dave Jones: That's why I just put a, an entire strip right along my ceiling. So it's like, if I turn on the lights to actually work or shoot video, all the lights go on and it's a giant strip. So no matter where I walk along my, cause my, I've got one big, like, you know, seven, eight meter long bench. Right. And it doesn't matter where I walk along that it's all lit up. Cause I've got a light strip going all the way, the length of the bench on the ceiling. And it's like, you know, so yeah. So I don't really get that shadowing kind of effect. That's nice. Yeah. Which is really annoying. So yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's the plan. I mean, I honestly haven't even been in the room that much that I'm going to be in. So we'll see how that goes. I'll have to probably be there first and then, then buy furniture and then, and then, you know,

Dave Jones: but you do have a dedicated room, right?

Chris Gammell: I do. Yeah.

Dave Jones: How big is the room? How, how big we talking?

Chris Gammell: Good question. Probably if I had to guess, probably like four by three meters.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, not small.

Dave Jones: I mean, it's a good size. Okay. 12 square meters. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So it's definitely workable. I mean, it's, it's, yeah, it's more than enough room, but it's just how you lay it out then. Right. And just, yeah. Standing versus sitting and just all that. All that usual silly stuff like that, you know, just kind of figuring out how to, how to make that work.

Dave Jones: You just know that you're going to go with the traditional bench with the racks in the back of it for the, the instrument racks and stuff. You're not going to invent something novel. I don't, yeah, I don't, I don't think I have time to honestly. Okay. You just want to set up and go. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I got to get, got to get working.

Dave Jones: Well, that's another thing. Sometimes you don't have time to think about it because you've got to just get done. So you just, you know, borrow some tables from somewhere, you know, I've, I've done that at work places. It's gone, right. I need to set up a, you know, and we need to turn this into a lab and it's like, well, you just cobble together any tables you can find lying around the company, you know?

Chris Gammell: Exactly.

Dave Jones: It's like, yeah. Yeah. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I remember, uh, one of my jobs, we just had like, they had like these like old workstations that were like leftover and they're like, yeah, we'll just shove those in the lab. And so they were like these big metal desks that had, you know, cabinets and all the stuff you normally want to have, but they were just kind of shoved in there. And so they weren't like particularly useful in that way. Well, that's enough about, I mean, we don't have, uh, until I get into the space anyways, and we can keep conjecturing, I suppose, but, uh, we should move on to other things, I suppose.

Dave Jones: Well, you're going to post a photo when it's done, right?

Chris Gammell: Of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it's going to look exactly like it's going to be a bench with some racks in the background. It's just going to be, yep. It's, it's not going to be some super, you know, curved custom space age thing where he just, you know, square room with square benches. And he's got all these different, you know, yeah. Oh boy. And do you watch, do you watch him on, uh, the YouTubes, the 8-bit guy?

Chris Gammell: I know who it is, but I don't regularly, I don't subscribe. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, he does, um, I forget his name. Anyway, he did this, right? He built his own, and he documented building his own lab and workshop in the, uh, background. And he just released his, uh, latest video. Let me see if I can find it here on the YouTubes. And he was, yeah, and he had, like, he had this curved table because I think he had it, you know, like, he, uh, stands up in his shot. Like he, when he does his talking head shots, he, he does like tear downs of vintage computers and repairs and builds of vintage computers and stuff like that. Right. Really good channel. So highly recommended. If you're into that sort of thing, even if you're not still fascinating.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, yeah, he, he did the, he was the one who did like the tear downs of like old storage mediums. That's the one I think I've seen. I think we've linked on here before too.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes. I think so.

Chris Gammell: Like floppy disks or something like that. Or I remember something with storage medium.

Dave Jones: Most likely. Yep. Anyway, here's his, uh, here's his final construction video part three. And he's got this like curved bench and it's like, and he, everyone in the comments chipped in and like, you know, chimed in and said, Oh, you goofed up all the colors. And everyone went, yeah, it's a great layout, but you screwed up the colors. You know, everyone hates the colors of like, it's, it's, it's.

Chris Gammell: Pure bike shedding right there. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's like this, uh, bright white marble bench, which looks really funky, but then when you put it on cat and, and really dark felt tile background. So it's this bright bench with a, you know, like really dark blue and gray colored tile. So he's trying to go fancy with all these tiles in the background on the wall. So, you know, part of it's acoustic to, you know, actually treat the room and stuff. And everyone's just going, no, you've got the colors completely backwards. The bed should be darker and the wall should be lighter. So it just, yeah, completely screws it all up. Apparently damn, I feel, I feel a bit sorry for him. And he went to, you know, he, he actually built a dedicated small house in his backyard.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's like a set.

Dave Jones: And then, yeah. So, and it's, it's, it's really great. Except that, yeah, everyone complained. He goofed up the colors. So be careful if you, well, they're the additional requirements. You know, if you're like, well, us, I guess you're, you're part of our group. I'm, I'm part of us. You're part of us. One of us, one of us.

Chris Gammell: One of us. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You shoot video, right? So, although not, not, you know, stage studio kind of stuff like others do, but, you know, still that's, that's something that you have to consider. You've got to consider the color temperature of the lights you use and, you know, stuff like that and exposure and angles of light and reflections and all that kind of jazz. So, yeah. So anyway, fascinating. LinkedIn down below. Great. See, I would like to do that. A lot of people have asked, you know, why don't you build a thing in your back, you know, your own studio in the backyard? Well, you know, I'd love to, but our land's not that big.

Chris Gammell: I'm going to say your yard's not that big, right? I've been there, folks. I've seen it. I've seen it.

Dave Jones: You've seen it. Technically it is. We've got, our land is 756 square meters. I think it is. So it's not, you know, it's like, it's average size and our house isn't that big. You know, it's only a little, you know, it's a regular four story, four story, four bedroom, you know, single level, you know, suburban house kind of thing with the double garage. But it's an odd shaped land. You know, it's got all useless, you know, triangly bits out the front, which you can't use for Jack. And, you know, it's got, and we've got five neighbors, you know, cause it's an unusual shaped block. And it's like, you know, it's just really annoying. Yeah. We just don't have enough. And it does slopes as well, you know? So it's like, eh, we just, yep. Don't have the room. And then you've got to have room for the kids to run around, you know? Of course. We've barely got enough room for that. Yeah. And well, barely got enough room for that. So.

Chris Gammell: And they'd call the kids flat face. And you can't have that.

Dave Jones: What? Flat face? What?

Chris Gammell: If they ran into the shed, they'd be, all the other kids would call them flat face. Because they ran into a shed with their face. Anyways.

Dave Jones: Okay. Sure, Chris. You'd mentioned a Jack.

Chris Gammell: And one of the things I've been working on is actually waterproofing. So I'm trying to do like a, not a completely waterproof, not like IP67, but like a, dustproof, water resistant kind of case. That's what I've been working on lately. And I'm curious about your, your experience doing, you know, you've done waterproofing in the past. Yep. I thought maybe we could talk through some of that sort of thing. And like, you know, so I like have like glands that I've, you know, like that. I was. Right. Cable glands.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Cable glands.

Chris Gammell: I always misstated as bladders. I'm always like, you know, it's like a bladder. I'm like, no, it's not a bladder.

Dave Jones: No, it's just a rubber seal that compresses around the cable.

Chris Gammell: I'm like, it's named after a body part.

Dave Jones: For those who don't know, these sort of like in quote marks, waterproof, cable glands or not waterproof. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: They're like through, they're like through, through elements in a plastic housing normally. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's, it's like a rubber seal kind of thing, which is usually, usually has some sort of length to it. It's not just an O-ring. Like there's a strip of, you know, like a 10 mil long strip of rubber and it clamps down when, when you screw it. Yeah. When you screw it in, then that rubber clamps down on the outer sheath of your cable and that forms a weatherproof seal, not waterproof.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think that's the right way to say it. It's not like, yeah. And there are IP67 rated like glands you can get and whatever, but like, yeah, you're not, you're not dunking this thing into the water. You know, like if you've got a cable going through your, through the wall of your box, it's probably not particularly, there is going to be some water ingress. You better, you better plan, plan to have a little bit of that. So, yeah. Right. When, when you've done it in the past, I mean, was it just like straight to potting? You're just like, well, if it needs to be waterproof, we're just potting the whole damn thing.

Dave Jones: Not, not necessarily. No, we've done ocean bottom stuff that is not potted. So, well, we've done both where we've done ocean bottom stuff, which, but then if you've got a, you know, we've had a giant steel canister, right. Or aluminium canister, right. Giant big machine, you know, thing, which, which can survive the crush pressure. So it doesn't deform under the, under the water pressure. Cause that's part of it. You know, if your seal starts to deform under water pressure, you know, anyway, those, if you machine, if you engineer them properly, you can get away without needing to pot anything. You just need your double O rings. If you're serious about waterproofing double O rings and grease, never rely on one O ring and never, and never, there's nothing, nothing is waterproof. Doesn't even matter if it has an O ring. If you don't grease it up, it must have grease.

Chris Gammell: Got it. Just so that, cause that like gets the final cracks.

Dave Jones: It gets all the cracks and everything else. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: And there's, you know, an art in actually designing the compression ratios for O rings. That's an art in itself. You have to get that right. So, yep. And, uh, and, and you can't nick them. Like you can't have any little burrs on any machined parts, for example, that leave like little burrs and things that can cut through your O rings and, you know, stuff like that. But yeah, generally, you know, you have to decide, like if it's going to be waterproof, it's going to be submerged. Then that's a different level to just, you know, it's out in the rain has got to survive.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's, that's closer to what I'm doing is the out in the rain kind of thing, or really just like industrial environments are pretty common. And that's, that's really the thing that I'm thinking about. There was one, this is a slightly different topic, but it is in the water space. This was the talk that I helped run back in 2017. It was Nick Bingham about pressure tolerance. So this is basically like now it's underwater and it's getting crushed by lots of pressure like Dave's talking about. So there's, I'll, I'll link that into if people are interested in that. That was a great talk. Just like stuff. I think I mentioned on the show before, like stuff I didn't consider, like how a capacitor deforms when it's being under pressure and stuff like that. It's just crazy. So.

Dave Jones: Yep. I know.

Chris Gammell: Not doing anything like that here, but just the water.

Dave Jones: So it's just going outside, is it? And you just need it to be.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Dustproof, dustproof and water resistant. Yeah. That's the main thing.

Dave Jones: Weather, Wayne resistant. Cause people don't know that those IP standards, like they aren't designed for like serious immersion. Like there's IP 68 and 69 and stuff like that, but that's only for like one meter water, water immersion rating, you know, it's not, you know, so your IP ratings just go out the window when you're designing stuff for diving and things like that. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'll be doing other things too. Like I'm, I'm not going to, even though it is, you know, trying to keep water out, trying to keep dust out. I'm still going to like conformal coat the board and make sure, you know, do testing around it. Okay.

Dave Jones: You're going for the conformal coat. That's okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Basically the conformal coat is like, if your conformal coat is designed to stop water ingress, if water gets in, if water gets in, you're screwed. Right. So the conformal coating is more moisture and stuff like that. You know, moisture because generally if you've got something outside, then it's going from temperature, it's going through temperature extremes and you get moisture build up and in inside and condensation and stuff like that. Right. Right. So your, so your conformal coating is more for that kind of thing. It's not designed to, oh, if water gets into my box, then the conformal coating will stop it. Right. It's the last line of defense. If water gets in, you're screwed. Right. Right. Yep. So, but yeah, yeah. Conformal coating standard in the military environment, just because, you know, they have to survive the temperature extremes and stuff like that. Yeah. Potting is good. And then you've got, you know, oh, what type of potting do I choose? Do you choose solid? Do you choose re-enterable potting compound? They're fun. I like those because you can get in there and you can still. Dig it out. Just pots. No, no, no. You can, you know, you can actually have trimmer pots on your board and still pot it. And you can use like a, like a transparent silicon gel and you can like shove your screwdriver through and actually trim your pot, pull it back out and it like reseals itself. It's really cool stuff. Oh, interesting.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Like self-healing almost. Yep. Yeah. Yep. So in versus like the, the black potting goop versus the black one, which everyone's

Dave Jones: used to seeing, you know, your chips are blobbed in black epoxy potting compound. Yep. And things like that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I was working on a, the lighter on my grill or barbecue or whatever you say in Australia. Yep. I was looking at it the other day. Cause like I had a spark jumping across from one of the, one of the outputs to the other. And then I was like looking at it, I was like, oh, this is actually potting compound back here. But of course it is. Right. It's like, you know, it's generating a spark. It's like, yeah, you just want the spark to go where it goes, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Don't expect to see potting.

Dave Jones: Anyway, generally, generally speaking, if you just want outdoor box weatherproofing, you don't need to pot anything. That's just, you know, that's sort of extreme kind of.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, it's also for like low cost, right? I mean, that's the way to like get it super low costs.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. No, it's an extra step, right? Yeah. That's a huge extra cost in production. You've got the time to pot it and then you're going to have to put them aside and you've got to wait for them to cure. You've got the time and, you know, you've got to chew up bench space or shelf space where these things are sitting, just waiting to cure. And then you've got the vapors and everything else. And, you know, like, it's like, oh, I have a case of the vapors. And it's, yeah, it's, you don't want to pot if you don't have to say, same with conformal coating. That's messy business. You've got to have like a spray booth. Yeah. And like, it's just, oh. Actually. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The stuff that's, uh, I think I mentioned on here before, but I have like, I have a hand hand spray can just for like local localized stuff. And just, you know, like when it's at home versus having like one of those CNC machines.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. Yeah. No, no, it's fine. But no, if you're making, but you're talking about production or small scale production, right? Yeah. Exactly. Yep. Yep. No, just, just go for your weatherproof box. You know, you can get boxes with O-ring seals around the top, you know, just get one of those. Yeah. Just put your waterproof glands. Do you have to have any controls and switches on it? Or is it just a like, and power in and, and antenna out or something? Cause I know it's bloody wireless. I know it. I know it's bloody wireless, right? It's not wireless.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's also, it's not just wireless. Yeah. Power in and then ethernet in. And so like the, that's one of the, so like one of the, I was looking, I was on my digi key page and the, I've been looking through like the various, you know, they've got basically O-rings on the outside of the.

Dave Jones: You can get weatherproof ethernet interfaces. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: You can get them. And it, it makes sense from a, you know, like ethernet is galvanically isolated. So like you could seal off that. Yeah. Right. You don't have to worry about even what.

Dave Jones: Oh no. You said there's power in. It's not power over ethernet. Why don't you run power over ethernet?

Chris Gammell: No infrastructure for that. So that'll just be powers going through one of the glands. Right. So like a wiring setup. So yeah, it's a, it's interesting, interesting problem. Usually I kind of step into situations where they've already figured out the, the water stuff and the, you know, just, you know, the cases are usually not super greenfield for me. I'm usually walking into situations where it's like retrofits or similar. And so it's like, oh, okay, that's already taken care of. And then I just have to work within that constraint. But then, you know, you've done this before too, where it's like, you, okay, so now you can have, you know, it shouldn't be too big. It shouldn't be too expensive. It's, you know, there's just like these soft requirements other than like, don't let water in. Don't make it too big. Don't make it too expensive. It's like, okay, well that's a lot of things actually.

Dave Jones: Well, that rules out one of those custom 200, not custom, but one of those, uh, you know, a $200 waterproof ethernet connectors, you know, one of those military jobs, you know, in the drab olive, the drab olive colored, you know, yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. We've got a show called drab olive, I think. Yes, we have. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I've used a waterproof USB-C recently as well. And that was not waterproof. I think it was water resistant, but it was, yeah, it was definitely like, you know, the O-ring around the edge and stuff like that. So, you know, there's definitely a class of products out there like that, but then it just, you got to do more 3d modeling to make sure everything lines up properly. And you know, then, then the actual assembly can be more troublesome. I think.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: I like to have a lot of wiggle room on the connectors, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, of course. Sometimes you can't do that. Jeez.

Chris Gammell: No. Yeah. I mean, sometimes tolerances are tight. You just got to work with what you got.

Dave Jones: Try designing a product where the connector has to actually, where, where, where the connector joins the product together. And then the product is towed by the connector.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: The product is actually like, you know, like you towed kilometers long, many kilometers long and the, all the strain is on the connector. Like, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, I don't think I'll do that anytime soon.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But I do think in, in that situation, it would be, uh, there'd be a couple more mechanical engineers on the product.

Dave Jones: There's a few more mechanical engineers than us electronics engineers. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, that's the thing. Like, so I use Fusion 360. Right. And I'm like capable enough. I can, you know, bring in STLs. I can bring in step files. You can bring in an STL. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You just know enough to be dangerous. Yeah. Same here. I can bring in an STL and I can line it up and overlay it with the, with the model on the PCB and, you know, stuff like that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Step exports real easy out of KiCad and then like, okay, I can make these things kind of align and make sure everything's to scale. And then it's like, I can pretty much figure that out.

Dave Jones: But you're not at the point where like, oh, I've got to design my own custom connector. Let me start the 3D CAD model on that, doing that. You know.

Chris Gammell: I don't think I'll be doing that ever again. I did that once. Well, I wasn't doing it. I was in a project that was doing it once. So it was not me. Okay. And that was a bad, bad idea. So.

Dave Jones: It was a bad idea to do a custom connector on that product or it was just like not, not easy. It was just not easy.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it was like, you know, I don't know if there was, you know, like in retrospect, you kind of look back at this kind of projects too. And you're like, well, was there actually any other solution there? And it's like, yes, but only if you would have made that decision six months prior, because it was like, all right, we had already made the case. We had already made all these assumptions about what we could do. And then we were basically trying to kind of squeeze in a custom connector where we were replacing another connector that was off the shelf. And it's like, okay. But then at that point, you're basically, you have, you're so constrained that it's like, you just got to work with what you got. That makes it difficult. Here in the Amp Hour, we look for sponsors who help our audience learn. Today, our sponsor, Inspect Hour, is not only helping people learn during the show, but the tool also helps users learn more about their electronic devices on their bench. I talked to Liam from the Inspector team about how they combine augmented reality and electronics to create a useful tool. But more importantly, I was curious about how our listeners could get started using the tool quickly.

Chris Gammell: We have a library of what we call sponsored projects. Those are PCBs that we've been able to go and calibrate ourself or have some touch with the creator to make sure they want this to be published more openly. And then what you can do is just use your smartphone. Take any PCB that you may have bought from SparkFun or a couple other open source projects. And you can view the overlays directly on top of the PCB and see how things are connected. If you're new coming into electronics, it actually is pretty interesting to see people make those connections of like, oh, okay, this is how it had to be routed so that we could get the connections onto the bottom side of the board versus the top side of the board.

Chris Gammell: I also wondered how Inspector is being used by professional electronics designers and their manufacturing partners.

Chris Gammell: The first use case of Inspector is to save time and avoid mistakes while you're working on a PCB with your hands. So anytime you're kind of manipulating a PCB to do some testing or debugging or validation in the lab, you can use Inspector to save time and avoid mistakes while you're doing that. Our software makes the correspondence between the physical PCB, which you have a camera pointing at using Inspector and your 2D layout that you designed while you were making the PCB. And so because we're there making that correspondence 30 times a second, you save a lot of time looking up like where a component is because we can just tell you that immediately.

Chris Gammell: As a consultant, many of my clients are remote. So I could see how this could be really valuable for collaborating with customers from afar. I was surprised to learn this is one of the main uses of Inspector these days, since I first experienced it as a mobile app for viewing traces.

Chris Gammell: Right when the pandemic hit the tele-engineering aspect of it, people being able to screen share over Zoom, which was kind of going viral at that same time, and effectively interact with the board just like they were standing over someone that was accelerated a lot by the pandemic. And then I would say something else as well would be creating documentation and markups. When we started building this tool, we had no idea how much time engineers were actually spending in tools like paint and PowerPoint, you know, taking a picture of a PCB that they had captured on their smartphone, and then sort of drawing traces back over it retroactively. And so that's something our tool was already doing. So we built a little drawing tool inside of it so you can just make those kind of markups directly.

Chris Gammell: Doing drawing markups and change drawings was something I used to do in my sustaining engineering role, and I could see how that could save a lot of time.

Chris Gammell: I asked about what other workflow tools they see in the future. Just the ability to associate step-by-step instructions with your PCB design information and play that back to someone with augmented reality. And so, you know, the world we've seen built by COVID, kind of everything is happening remotely, and because of that, a lot of times things happen asynchronously. So, you know, out of order. Whereas when people were in the lab together, everything was kind of synchronous and happening all at once. But now you can just take, you know, instructions you might have for work you want done on your board, and if you're not there physically, there's going to be a way where you can just have those step-by-step instructions and associate PCB design information with them so that someone who's not familiar with your design as a designer, like say a technician or an intern you may have working for you, can go and kind of have your perspective when they go and do work on the board and not just be like guessing based on their instinct or best practices to try and do things right.

Chris Gammell: And now, back to the show.

Dave Jones: I'm staring at a product right now that I was going to do a video on. It's my first digital camera. So, spoiler alert, I was going to do a video where, like I found my own, my first digital camera, which is a Kodak DX 3600, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, what's the vintage on that? Like 90s? 2001. 2001. 2001.

Dave Jones: So, you know, it wasn't the first, you know, it's not the first digital camera, but it's only two megapixels, right? And it's got two times optical zoom and it's, you know, and it's like, it's, it's got no live view monitor. You've got to look through the little optical viewfinder, you know? Yeah. Yeah. But it was, it was great in its day, but you know, it was like one of the cheap point and shoot. Well, it wasn't that cheap. It was 800 bucks or something back in the day. Oh, it was like, you know, this is crusty to make it. And I was going to do that, like comparing the image quality of this to like a modern camera, like a 20 years later. Right. I thought that'd be interesting to see if I could, you know, totally compare it to like,

Chris Gammell: like the thermal cameras. Cause I think they're like starting to approach that, that level already too. You know?

Dave Jones: Oh, not really. No, no, no, it's optical. Come on. Not thermal. That's not a comparison. That's just dicking around for the sake of dicking around.

Chris Gammell: I mean, that's kind of like your channel sometimes.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Fair point. Anyway, I'm staring at the bloody thing and it's like, okay, it's got a compact flash card slot, you know, because SD cards were invented then. Right. Classic. And compared to A, I don't have a compact. Well, maybe I've got one somewhere buried in the bunker somewhere. So I've got to find that. But I'm staring at the USB port on this thing as a little like pissant custom tiny thing on the side. And it's like, there's no way I've still got that cable. It's like, you know, nobody used bloody standard connectors. And then on the bottom, it's got it like, it was designed to plug into a dock, you know? So it had like a docking station, which then plugged into a standard USB on the side.

Chris Gammell: Like a 40 pin connector or something like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's got this little slidey door on the bottom and then, then it just, you know, plugs into the dock and things like that. And it worked at, you know, and for so many, like, you know, for most cameras these days probably won't do it. But please correct me if I'm wrong. I think the novelty of custom USB connectors has worn off. Has it? Because every camera had a different freaking, I've got another Samsung here, which uses this weird, it looks like a bloody HDMI connector, but it's actually a USB multi shoe interface connector. Because the designers go, oh no, we don't use separate connectors. We can use one and we can share USB and we can share the video output and we can share the audio output and we can like, oh God's sake.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. This is the downside to vertical integration. When you get to that level, it's like, okay, well.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's just, yeah. It's just a pain in the ass. It's just designing a new connector for the sake of designing a new connector. You know, they don't put a standard HDMI on there. They don't put a standard USB on there. It's just, come on.

Chris Gammell: What year was that Samsung though? That's the other thing too. I mean, I feel like a standard became more standard, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, that'd be eight and nine years old. Ten? Nine, ten?

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, yeah. Ten. Ten probably. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: I was looking at one of my old, my old, like, I think my first LTE phone and it had like a micro HDMI out. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't see that much anymore, huh?

Dave Jones: Well, no, no. You still see those on cameras and stuff, on your little compact sports cameras. Oh, no, no. On phones.

Chris Gammell: Not on phones. Yeah, yeah. That's what I was talking about.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. No, you don't see a phone with a HDMI output.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: What? To drive an external monitor?

Chris Gammell: That's right. Wow.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's rare as hen's teeth. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Jeez, but custom freaking connectors. Pain in the ass. Yeah. So, at the moment, I've got no way to actually get the images out of this bastard. Well, and that's the other thing too.

Chris Gammell: I feel like some of it was like workflow too, right? Like people like had a digital camera and it's like, came back, you uploaded, you uploaded your computer and then you-

Dave Jones: You plugged it into the dock and it was just, you know, and it appear as a drive and then you- And now it's like-

Chris Gammell: And now basically, you know, most cameras are in phones anyways, right? Right. So, you have that. And then the other ones are all connected, right? They all have connectivity- And they're all Wi-Fi connected. And that's much better, right?

Dave Jones: They're backing up to iCloud or whatever, you know. Bloody-

Chris Gammell: And that's better, right?

Dave Jones: Is that a question or a-

Chris Gammell: I may be laying a trap here, folks. I know. It's better. Let's be honest. It's better.

Dave Jones: I like being able to plug in something. I like being unplugged in, especially as a backup, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, sure. Sure. I know. Right? I was just trying to get you to say that connectivity was important. Yeah, I get it. Don't worry. Don't worry about me. Okay.

Dave Jones: Oh, man. Mr. Internet of Things, sure. Yep. Yep. Boy. Anyway, pain in the ass. Yeah. Speaking of pains in the ass- I think that's over with. Yep. Who's a pain in the ass or what's a pain in the ass? Is it a who or a what?

Chris Gammell: It's a little bit of both. It's a patent troll. This is-

Dave Jones: Oh, a patent troll. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Nathan Seidel from SparkFun. And he gives a great rundown on getting a wide variety of different, basically extortion attempts from patent trolls. And yeah, they're annoying and not relevant to the actual work that he's doing. So he actually shows some of the patent that they claim as being infringed upon with a product they no longer sell, which even the stuff that they were being sold, that they were saying was being infringed upon. It was just like-

Dave Jones: They no longer sell it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They had done a free text search, basically, on the word media. And then they searched for something like SRAM. Oh, and then it popped up. Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Oh, bastards.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, my God. Particularly insidious. As all patent trolls. Maybe not all patent trolls. Some are a little closer to the truth than others, but yeah. Damn, you know?

Dave Jones: Semantic patents. What? Northern Tool and Equipment Company. What?

Chris Gammell: You're reading from the article there? Is that right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: No. Well, I'm reading from their letter. I'm reading from their corporate letter, like the letter they got from the patent troll. Yeah. Like, what the hell?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Computer-implemented lexical searching for products based upon semantic attributes. What the hell? What the hell product were they making that they claim- What is the actual product that they made?

Chris Gammell: The SparkFun one or the other one? Yeah, yeah. The SparkFun one that was being claimed was the PC Duino, which they don't even make. They sold-

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. That's old now. Is that even still a thing?

Chris Gammell: I have someone in our comments said, uh, 221 units over the entire time we carry the PC Duino. Yep. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yes. It's-

Dave Jones: Oh, my God.

Chris Gammell: And it's the thing. Like, when you get up a certain size, though, like-

Dave Jones: And it's not even theirs, is it? It's not even theirs. They're just a distributor.

Chris Gammell: That's right, yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, for God's sake. Like, come on.

Chris Gammell: There's a great episode of Silicon Valley about Patent Trolls as well. It was, like, the one guy who was- Right. He was suing based on, like, a song he had written- Or bought, rather. He bought rights to. And then he basically- Anything that came close to it, he was suing for it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I still have to watch that series. I've only watched, like, the first couple episodes.

Chris Gammell: That's probably a good one. It's much further than the series, but it definitely is, like, it's in the weeds.

Dave Jones: Is it still going? How many seasons did they get through? I think they got six or seven seasons. Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: I liked the end. A lot of people didn't like the ending of the series, but I thought it was funny as hell. And, yeah, no, it's definitely worth watching. It's- Okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Jeez, that's ridiculous when you go after a-

Chris Gammell: Open source manufacturer.

Dave Jones: A distributor. Is the PC- Oh, yes, the PC Duino is open source, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: I believe so, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I think it is. Yeah, like, that's just- That's insane. Yep. And which processor? Did that use, like, an Intel thing? Did it-

Chris Gammell: I don't remember the PC Duino specifically.

Dave Jones: Used, like, an Atom processor or something, didn't it? Or something like that? Yeah. It looks Intelli, kind of. I don't know. But, yep. Oh, boy. That's- No. So, what's the conclusion? Did they tell them to F off? What did they do?

Chris Gammell: Yes, that is the latest. Is it settled? There's no settled. Oh, okay. Basically, come and get it, kind of thing, yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Right.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Dave Jones: Right. There. Right. So, this article is just going, well, we're calling your bluff, Dickens. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and this is the court of public opinion, I suppose.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Not that a patent troll would have any shame, but-

Dave Jones: No, no, no, they wouldn't. But I've actually made a company back down, threatening them with exposure like that. Okay. I had a trademark troll. Yep. Yep. Well, yeah, I had a trademark, Moto Group, Motor, Motor. M-O-T-A. Who's a drone, Motor, M-O-T-A. Yeah. I actually just tweeted out the video just the other day because I found in my archives, I actually did a video of it ready to release, right? And I actually sent them the link, you know? And like, so their legal counsel, it was that drone, that drone that failed, you know, that epically failed and went bust. Anyway, it was the company who bought the IP rights to this failed drone company, right? And I had done this news article, you know, this news video about the news that they'd failed. And it was all big, huge tech news at the time that this company went under. Anyway, they bought the rights to it. And then they tried to get one of my videos taken down on a trademark claim because I mentioned the word, because I mentioned their trade, which they now own the trademark to the name of the product. I couldn't even say the name of the product in a video.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's bonkers.

Dave Jones: And well, according to them, right? So I sent an email to their CEO and their head of their legal counsel and said, hey, guys, yeah, you guys are going to get absolutely destroyed on this. It's going to destroy. Trust me, don't piss me off because I'm going to destroy your reputation publicly. And they backed down and they just went, yeah, we have. And they had no case, right? They had absolutely no legal precedence. I showed them the legal precedences and every, you know, I actually found the court cases that set the legal precedences for why you can't sue somebody for this, for this trademark infringement, et cetera, et cetera. It's called normative fair use. Normative fair use is the legal definition. I threatened them with, yeah, public humiliation and they, yeah, back down within hours and released my, my, uh, the claim on my video and several other people's who's, who also they targeted as well.

Chris Gammell: Well, we get to, we get to let Dave win on a, on a, and then a high note here. Cause I, I gotta go, man. This is a two. You're going to go. All right. Two minutes left. Any, any last, last minute, uh, happy news? Anything like that? No, no, not really.

Dave Jones: It's kind of, it's kind of depressing here at the moment.

Chris Gammell: Electronics, everybody in the U S happy, happy independence day in the U S, uh, go build some stuff over the weekend. Or I guess this is post weekend. Hope you built stuff over the weekend that didn't blow up. So.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Dave Jones: All right. And if you've set up a lab, leave it down below. That's great. Yeah. Chris wants to know. And then.

Chris Gammell: I do. I need tips.

Dave Jones: Ignore everyone's advice and then just put in and insist in just put in a normal bench in Iraq.

Chris Gammell: All right. We'll see you next week.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time.

Chris Gammell: x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

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

Chris Gammell: Thank you.