#565 – Here for a reason

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released November 7th, 2021. Episode 565. Here for a reason.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. Who's eating at the same time. The other week was PCBs. Now it's eating.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, well, you know, I'm a new parent. I have a lot of things going on, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right. How's all that going?

Chris Gammell: Oh, great. My daughter started eating like solid food. And it's just like messy food time all the time. Oh, yeah, of course. It's a lot of fun. A lot of photos that nobody cares about. Yeah, of course. A very cute baby, but covered in food. I think it's adorable. But everyone else is like, oh, that's gross, Chris.

Dave Jones: And as soon as the second one comes around, it's not adorable anymore. It's just annoying. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: It's just a thing, you know. I have more to clean up. Yep, yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's going good, you know.

Chris Gammell: Balance and stuff is tough.

Dave Jones: But I was going to say, has it changed your work lifestyle at all?

Chris Gammell: I think it's, you know, like it's, you stop working whenever you need to, and then you just come back and you just kind of work all the time anyways, right? So like, yeah. Yep. I think that actually is like, if I had a setup like yours where I had to go to an office and come home, go and come home, go, that would be really tough.

Dave Jones: Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: It's nice to be, you know, my lab is like down the hall from my bedroom, which is-

Dave Jones: Yes, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Has downsides as well, of course. But I think in this specific scenario during a pandemic, it's probably the best scenario I could have.

Dave Jones: Yep, totally. I agree. Unfortunately, my other half does not agree. Because we're actually in discussions at the moment about expanding the house. Yeah, about expanding the house upwards.

Chris Gammell: Oh, interesting.

Dave Jones: Because our kids are getting older now and you've been to our house. It's not huge. It's just a typical little small single level. I mean, it's a good size, I think. Oh, it's okay. After we added the back room, which you slept in, which, you know, whereas before that, that back room was not there, you know? Yeah. So back then we had practically nothing. Well, I'm not going to say nothing.

Chris Gammell: I think just as your kids get older and like, yeah, you have more loudness and attitude.

Dave Jones: And they have more friends over and, you know, they want their own space and stuff like that. So, yeah, so we're thinking about going up, of course, because we can't expand outwards. Our land's not big enough. The small amount of backyard that we actually have, we don't want to lose it.

Chris Gammell: Think of the solar panels, Dave. Think of the solar panels.

Dave Jones: They'll actually be better because they'll be mounted up higher. And then the bloody house on the high side of us won't be.

Chris Gammell: Closer to the sun, you know? Exactly. That's how it works, right? Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: That's how it works. I get the point. I'm sure you can calculate how much.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. 0.000% efficiency. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right. Actually, somebody asked me this on Twitter. It was a couple of years back, I think. I greatly doubt I could find it. But somebody asked, oh, your solar panels are still generating power under moonlight. And then I thought, oh, yeah, I wonder. Like, technically, they would be, right? And then I thought, oh, how much?

Chris Gammell: It's like dark current, you know, and out of like a diode almost.

Dave Jones: Right. It's, yeah. So I can't remember the exact details, but I went and did the calcs. I found some data. It wasn't easy to find, but you can find lunar insulation, not insulation, insulation. So if, oh, maybe I can do it. Oh, E-N-S-O-L? Yeah. Lunar. Oh.

Chris Gammell: I would just think, like, if you went to go and measure it, wouldn't that load it down? Like, at those levels, wouldn't that also, like, load it down even? Even with, like, a high impedance measurement?

Dave Jones: Well, the thing is, I couldn't. Like, my solar output, my solar monitoring system shows zero, 0.00, right? It's like, so it's not there. But I know they must be actually possibly producing something. So you just basically run the numbers based on the lunar insulation and then the, you know, the watts per square meter kind of thing, assuming it's linear right down at that lower end, et cetera, et cetera.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Because, like, when they're usually measuring solar cells, aren't they usually doing it by, like, loading them, like, trying to get, find the peak point and, like, actually loading them through the curve?

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. The peak power point. Yes. The maximum power point. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So that would be, like, really hard to find, I would think, for if you're basically not biased at all because you have no.

Dave Jones: I'm sure you wouldn't be able to do it, probably. You know? Yeah. I don't think it's possible. I just, like, in theory, what would the moon actually produce? And it was, like, microwatts or something. It was, like, even from a three kilowatt array, which I had at the time.

Chris Gammell: I mean, you're only five months out from April Fool's joke. So, like, you could probably talk about how you found, you know? So just keep an eye out, folks. If you see something about, like, late March about Dave working on a new thing about the solar energy harvesting or lunar energy harvesting.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's good enough to power all your internet of things. Lunar energy harvesting. Bingo. To power all your internet of things. Widgets. Yep.

Chris Gammell: All you need is a boost circuit.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: What's the name of that boost circuit? That famous, like, single transistor boost circuit? The jewel thief? The jewel thief. Yes. Yes. Jewel thief. Yeah. I can somehow combine it with a jewel thief and, like, yeah, lunar. Lunar charging.

Chris Gammell: Except you need, like, a super jewel thief or, you know, like, jewel heist or something like that, you know?

Dave Jones: A lunar thief.

Chris Gammell: Lunar thief. Bingo.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Ah, trademark. Trademark. I could make serious coin on that. That's got Kickstarter written all over it. That's right.

Chris Gammell: He's also going to be starting a crypto coin based on this.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right. Anyway, geez, how did we get to lunar insulation?

Chris Gammell: Because you're going to move your house closer to the moon and get more insulation.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Roof. Because we were talking about house. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Talking about house expanding. And, like, so we've sort of come to the conclusion that we'd have, like, one gigantic great room up there or something because we don't need extra bedrooms or anything. Like, just one huge gigantic room the length of the house or something just to, I don't know, you know, do stuff in. And I went, oh, I can have a lab at one end. And, oh, the death glare. I go. Nope.

Chris Gammell: What I can do is I can bring all this craziness home.

Dave Jones: Home, yes.

Chris Gammell: I've got so many monitors now.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, that was a yeah, nah, as we say here in Australia. Yeah, nah. Straight away, that was vetoed. So, yeah, I get this question all the time. Oh, why don't I just work from home? You know, build a lab in the backyard. No, even a separate lab in the backyard, even if we had the room, the answer is no. I'm not allowed to build a lab in the backyard.

Chris Gammell: I mean, yeah, the isolation is or the separation is nice, I think, at certain points. But, you know, and my current season of life. Right.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, I do believe the reason is that once I'm home, I'm supposed to be home. I'm not supposed to lock myself away in my man cave and. Yeah. Yeah. You know, my man lab and do things. Yeah. I'm supposed to like spend time with the family. So that's like as soon as I'm home, I'm home. You know, that's the that's the idea. Otherwise, if I had a lab at home.

Chris Gammell: I'm supposed to bring everyone into the lab. You know, that's that's that's the counter argument. You can be like Mrs. EV blog. This is how it's got to be. Everybody could join me in the lab. Bingo.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Nah.

Chris Gammell: Or at least the kids.

Dave Jones: Not going to happen. Anyway. So there you go. Yeah. So I'm glad that you're once on board with that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Fight the good fight, my friend.

Dave Jones: It's not winnable. Anyway. What do we have on today's show? Is there anything? Not that we plan any of this shit beforehand.

Chris Gammell: Oh, there's some stuff.

Dave Jones: Speaking of efficiency.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Go ahead.

Dave Jones: In like conversion and stuff like that. I think we're going to the same place. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Great Scott did a great segue. Great Scott did a video on synchronous converters, of course, which are pretty much the duck's guts of converters. If you want the most efficient DC to DC converter, it's basically going to be a synchronous converter. And for those who don't know what it is, the TLDR is that basically it's like a regular, any regular, whatever your favorite DC to DC converter topology is. It's exactly the same, except those pesky power losing diodes replaced with a switch within intelligent FET. And then you don't get the losses. You don't get the same amount of losses as you do in diodes because diodes have to then start, they have to start conducting and they've got power loss and they've got, you know, pesky little things they are, but they're cheap and they're simple and they just work. Right. They don't need any intelligence behind it. They don't need any timing.

Chris Gammell: Control schemes. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And all that sort of stuff. Because you can come a gutsy. You can't just do a synchronous. Well, I'm not sure. I haven't watched the great Scott video. So I think he built one up on breadboard or something, but I'm not sure which controller chip he used or whether or not he tried to roll his own or what. I'm not sure. Have you watched it?

Chris Gammell: He did a matched. He did a matched FET pair for it with like a, or like a FET driver rather. And then he drove the whole thing with PWM out of a Teensy. And I think he was doing some measurement feedback and stuff too. Okay. So he's doing it himself.

Dave Jones: Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, you can come a gutsy doing this. I'm not sure if he, if this is mentioned in the video, but you can get shoot through. If you're, if your FETs are all conducting at the same time, you can, you know, so you've got to have a little back off there. So that's why you've got to have intelligent delays in there and stuff like that. This is why you have dedicated synchronous converter chips and stuff like that. So you can absolutely piss away all of your power savings. If you don't, you know, if your transistors are all, all conducting at once or, or, you know, they, they're switching over at exactly the same time. And then you've got a tiny little, you know, period of time where they're both on and bam, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's the, the controller piece is that. So yeah. Yeah. Or the FET driver rather that, that has like a delay between the two. So even if you drive, so you drive with like a digital input, but then it controls it. So it's not just, you know, popping one on and off at the same time.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. And that's what a synchronous converter chip will do. Yeah. What efficiency did he achieve in the end? Did he say? Did he?

Chris Gammell: Spoilers. Come on, man. Oh, come on. All right. 92, 92, 92, even though 95 was the theoretical. Right. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Cool bananas. So they're, they're synchronous converters.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But generally they cost more and yeah.

Chris Gammell: I just met up with a friend last night who works on converters actually. And so we were talking all about it. I'm going to try and get him on here. I'm not sure how much he'll be able to talk about, but hearing about it. So he's at a chip company and hearing about it, like at the chip level, it was very interesting. Just hearing about like how they communicate with their customers and like just everything, everything. It was just very, very interesting hearing about how it all kind of fits together. And yeah, I hope to have one sometime soon. Cause I think, you know, like we, we've talked to people from the chip industry before and we, you know, we've talked to people in different parts of the chip industry, but like the, uh, the pure analog side of things, I guess we've talked to people like we've had Matt Duff on before and Hank Zumbel in. Uh, and we can, we'll try and link those in and that's kind of more on like the analog measurement side, but I'm not sure if we've had people on the power switching side. I don't, do you remember?

Dave Jones: I don't recall as such. No. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Might be, yeah.

Dave Jones: It's a good topic.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep. But I, like I said, I'll definitely link in Hank. And so Hank Zumbel in, I think he's still at analog. Actually Hank and Matt were both from analog devices. Uh, I guess we've had Mike Englehart on from linear LT spice. Yep. And, uh, yeah. So we'll see. We'll see.

Dave Jones: Cool.

Chris Gammell: But, uh, yeah, it's a, I don't really know how it all, I, you know, like for me and for you and for most people, I think it's just like buy the chip, do the app note, hope for

Dave Jones: the best, you know, you, you run the app note thing. Yeah. It's like, no, rarely do I have to delve into, have I in my entire career delved into the, you know, the hearts and bolts of it all. It's like, you know, rarely do you have to do that.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: So yeah, there's just so many chips out there, right? There's.

Chris Gammell: I think I'm here and I think elsewhere, but like, at least on the consulting forum, we talked about a little bit too, like in the time of part shortages, like, do you try and then maybe go and try and build your own synchronous, you know? So like great Scott was doing it for educational purposes. I don't think it was for, you know, actual like. Oh, no, you wouldn't.

Dave Jones: No, exactly.

Chris Gammell: But it, but like, yeah, I mean you, in theory, you could go back to transistor level designs and do that sort of thing. And I think we've mentioned that on here too, but it's just like, oh, I mean the maintenance and the overhead and like just so much is taken care of when you buy an off the shelf controller that.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I don't think I'd want to do that.

Dave Jones: Well, it depends on the requirements of your design. I mean, you know, if you're after like, if efficiency is a real big deal, then you're going to be, you know, cornered somewhere. Right. You're going to be stuck in a corner where, you know, you can't just whack in anything or you could actually design in a board solution. Right. So like a, a daughter board DC to DC converter. So if that changes, well, your main product doesn't change, but then you design, you just very quickly roll a new DC to DC converter board.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Test that it hits your specs and. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

Dave Jones: That isn't too hard to do. So. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Sure.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But I just think the, if you have tight specs, like you're talking about, and if you have, you know, if you have to hit all these marks, then you have to kind of just really monitor that. And then you start thinking about like a lot of the tolerances that are built in too, you know, whereas a lot of the tolerances that are happening at the fab and tested for the fab. And, you know, like as things come off the line, you're usually getting that. You get that for free when you pay for the chip and the IP and whatever. Right. But when you then buy, you know, random Joe blow transistors off, off of somewhere and they're not matched and you just don't really know much about them and they're not characterized. Then you start having parasitics everywhere that you don't know about. And it's like, Oh, okay. And then, so then you have to, that testing kind of gets pushed back at that module level like you're talking about. And then it's like, so if you don't catch it, then you might have some weird ass behavior. And okay, good luck. So it seems good in theory, but it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's not, not necessarily easy.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. One last thing on it. There was a talk back in the day, I think it was Werner. Uh, let's see if I can find it, but it was an HDDG talk back when I was doing those things. And he actually, uh, forget Werner's last name. He was basically going through and showing how to do this control scheme with like a, it was like an ant mega or something like that. And so he was doing like the actual control and feedback system and, you know, actually implementing like PID loops and stuff like that. So I'll try and link that in as well. Cause it is non-trivial. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Got it. That's another way that you can reduce your, um, like at the design stage, you can actually use your microcontroller as, you know, assuming that your product has a microcontroller, right? You can actually use your microcontroller as a, as part of your DC to DC converter solution. So then you, you aren't reliant upon yet another specific DC to DC converter chip. Then you're only reliant upon the external passive parts. Like, well, transistors are active parts, but you know what I mean? Yeah. You, you're only reliant on those, which you can find substitutes for with more, with a greater ease than you can if you're locked into a specific DC to DC converter chip. So, yeah. That's something you can implement at the design stage. I'm going to do a video on that, like how to design your products to minimize impact of component shortages and stuff like that. Oh, that's good.

Chris Gammell: That's, uh, it is topical. I got to say. Yes. Yeah, totally.

Dave Jones: So I should have done it six months ago or something, but yeah. Yeah. Anyway, better late than never. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, it's not, uh, it's not going to go away anytime soon, but, uh, I mean, the ship shortage is not, of course, but also the, the concept of, you know, designing for supply chain stability, I suppose, you know?

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. That's it. All right. Somebody who's, who's, who's the smart ass. Hang on. Hang on. Oh, is this the Aussie plus plus? Yes. Maybe Dave. Was that you? That was me. That was you. Oh, yeah. Totally. You're, you're the smart ass. I'm the smart ass. Yeah. Maybe Dave's reticence.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Like reluctance. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, why didn't you use the word reluctance?

Chris Gammell: So that, uh, people like you have to ask, why didn't you use the word reluctance?

Dave Jones: Bastard. Maybe Dave's reluctance to write code is just that he hasn't found the right language yet. Introducing Aussie plus plus. And sure enough, it, this is a real thing. You can actually do it. You can, oh, playground. I can actually go in there and I can actually type code.

Chris Gammell: And so it's actually, it's rust based. I believe. I think it's been around for a while. Yeah. It's, it's great. You can go in like, yeah, if you go to the playground, you can, uh, right.

Dave Jones: I can type around with it. No, I'm not going to do it. No, no, no, it's great. It's great.

Chris Gammell: So, so the delay, the delay is, oh, I reckon I'll have a walkabout until yeah, nah. And that's in the parentheses.

Dave Jones: It's great.

Chris Gammell: It's great. Aussie syntax.

Dave Jones: Somebody actually spent their time to write this and make it functional. Wow.

Chris Gammell: I think, you know, it was inspired by Reddit. So yeah. Bingo.

Dave Jones: What's random beer dot Aussie. Oh, okay. Oh, these are different examples. They've got the, the hard yakka for random beer, Fosters, Coopers, Pilsner, Flaminel, you beauty. Yeah. Done.

Chris Gammell: I think you should endorse this. You should lean into it. You should lean into it. Okay. You should be like, you should only say you're in a program in this. And then you could also say you've been doing rust, uh, which is, you know, it's, you know, every time you hear about rust as a programming language, you can be like, you know, which has a very, very strong, uh, group of fans. You can be like, well, I'm only into certain dialects of rust. Right. Okay.

Dave Jones: I'm into the Aussie dialect. Yeah. That's right. Aussie plus plus. Yep. All right. Yes. This is officially endorsed by the EEV blog.

Chris Gammell: All right. Aussie plus plus. Yep. Great.

Dave Jones: So, so can you actually compile for sources? I don't know. Or is it?

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, I don't know. I didn't get that far.

Dave Jones: Somebody hasn't wasted that much of their life on it yet. This is great. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, the rust, I mean, the rust crowd is interesting too, because like, oh, okay. So this is its own thing layered on top of that. But like the rust crowd is very into, you know, memory protection and stuff like that. So basically, so you can't, you can't have multiple pointers kind of overwriting memory space.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: It's like very safe in that way. And you know, it's like any programming language. I not, it's not like any program. It's, it's like many programming languages where, you know, it's just like, you got to get into it. You got to learn the lingo. Like when the, I think when you are doing something unsafe, it like actually has that, like it actually, you have to like type unsafe or something like that. So that it's very clear that you're doing something that's like memory unsafe. And so, yeah. I don't have video about it.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like, you know, it's saving us from ourselves. So that sort of thing. The thing that I'm against with it, you know, is the same thing that I'm usually against is just like, there's not enough stuff out there about it yet. So like, as it continues to grow, I am a very late adopter when it comes to programming languages because I'm, I don't have the time and or inclination to go and write a bunch of new drivers and do a bunch of stuff. Like some people are just like capable of spinning that stuff up and power to them. But I, I, I am more like, how about, how about something I could start from that's a very well covered in lots of languages and, and C is still that for me. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Chris Gammell: So I will not be using Aussie plus plus, but you are welcome to.

Dave Jones: The protection thing reminds me of, you know, oh, you're doing something stupid. I think I did an example of this in my thousand and 24th video where I showed some old pick code that I wrote that actually compiled into a thousand and 24 words of memory, not, not bytes, words of memory, 1024 program steps. And like, and I wanted to see if I could recompile it 20 years later. And I did like it worked first go. Like I imported this old assembly language stuff, but it came up with these error messages saying, you know, are you sure you something along the lines of, you know, are you sure you know what you're doing with these banks? You know, it's like, yeah, I'm sure. Yep. I do know what I'm doing with these banks. Thank you. This bank switching. Thank you very much. I've read the data sheet. I don't know what I'm doing. And, you know, but it warned you that, you know, you may be potentially doing something really dumb here, but there's reasons you would want to do it. And back in the days when, you know, you were optimizing your code to fit in a thousand and 24 words of memory. Yeah. Right. Totally. It was. Yep. Yeah. But yeah, it worked. So good stuff. What is stop motion assembly? I must watch this.

Chris Gammell: Oh, stop motion is like a, that's like a style of. Yes. I know. Like animation basically.

Dave Jones: Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yes. I know what stop. The thing of stop motion is I want to go, I want to see what they're building and what it looks like.

Chris Gammell: Oh, got it. Got it. Yeah. It's like a Raspberry Pi based radio. Right. Which is pretty cool. And it's, and it's just like, so this artist does these, these renderings. And so she kind of put it all together and it's amazing. Cause like, it looks like she spent a whole day setting this thing up. And then the, you know, the animation that it produces is like 10 seconds. It's like, Oh wow. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Oh yeah. No, it's a huge amount of work. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. It's really cool though. The output. So.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of Raspberry Pi, there is a new one in the world. The Raspberry Pi zero version two. How are they, how are they naming this thing?

Dave Jones: Oh.

Chris Gammell: Pi zero two. W. Do we care anymore?

Dave Jones: Like, do we care anymore?

Chris Gammell: Well, I like the form factor. I think the form factor is, you know, interesting. I've always been curious about how it, you know, it has a host and a device, a USB port on it, micro device or micro USB port on it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but I haven't even used my Raspberry Pi zero that I got.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if you are the target audience here. I know.

Dave Jones: Oh, bloody hell.

Chris Gammell: I see a lot of people using these and things like, uh, like, uh, print servers, like, uh, what do they call it? Yeah. Right. Octoprint. And I think that's really what it comes down to is just, it's a readily accessible, obviously very cheap Linux computer. And it's just a good example of that over and over again. Right. Anytime you see one of these out in the wild, it's like, oh, someone wants to, you know, you usually don't see them as much, I think on the GPIO side of things so much as just, oh, I need something to have HDMI and control. Maybe, maybe it has a little board on it, but I think it's really just kind of having computing in the wild. And that is, I think very, very useful, especially if it's lower power. Right. So this one, you know, this, the, uh, article that we linked, couldn't remember the word for some reason. Uh, the article that we linked, uh, is from Hackaday and it was just most efficient. Yeah. I mean, like, so getting, getting low power Linux computing is, is better than high power.

Dave Jones: Yeah. This is a lot low power. They deem it to be under two Watts. Do they, or something? I think.

Chris Gammell: No, no. I think you're getting that from the title. It's the two W zero two W two is in version two W as in it's wireless. Wireless. Oh God. Okay. Here I am. It does look like two. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Boy. I, well, I actually, I would presume it'd take around about that two watt mark. Doesn't it? Oh no. The, yeah. The, the, the, the original Raspberry Pi, I think idols around about two Watts. Cause you can just run it on a 500 milliamp five volt USB port. I think just if memory serves me correctly. So that's about two and a half Watts.

Chris Gammell: I've not done that in a long time. Usually I have to have a extra spicy power supply. Right. Yeah. No, I've had, I've had many Raspberry Pis brown on me before. They are, they're not, not forgiving.

Dave Jones: No idle. Idle. Here it is. The, the Raspberry Pi two zero idols at about two 75 milliamps. And when you stress the poor little sucker, it's about almost 600, almost 600 milliamps. Yeah. The, the, the zero two actually consumes more.

Chris Gammell: No, this is the, the chart says less than a hundred.

Dave Jones: Well, no. I've got. Okay. I've got another Tom's hardware review has a graph of, yeah. Idle the Raspberry Pi zero two W. There's yeah. The zero two at idle is a bit more than the zero than the zero. So it's actually consumes a bit more power.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Probably because of the wifi and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: So don't know where you're getting hundreds. They're, they're saying that they saw 260 milliamps idle. So there you go.

Chris Gammell: It doesn't really matter to me. I mean, like, I don't know. Like, yeah, I think, I think, no, it does matter. It does matter. But I'm saying that I'm not sure it matters in the context of like, it's still a lot, you know, if it's less or more than the zero original.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. It isn't a microcontroller. You know, if you're using one of these things just to, you know, flash some leads or something, then you're really, you know, the, the power's just being pissed away. So yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I think that continues to be the case for, you know, Linux, Linux machines out in the wild. It's like, you just still need to have a good wall supply or huge battery. You know, I see people that are trying to do, you know, and you can do like solar back charging. And I've seen that sort of thing too, where people put a pie with a big solar bank and with a big battery. And it's just like, you know, maybe with a controller that shuts the pie down and like kills the trail or something.

Dave Jones: You know, that's, that's pretty niche. You've got to have some outdoor application and, you know, it's like,

Chris Gammell: I think the thing when I see that sort of stuff, it's usually like, oh, I want to do like, you know, some kind of like vision model. You know, do you have a camera, like a trail camera or something like that? Right. That, which you're right. That is a very niche thing. Yeah. But if you had a trail camera, you wanted to detect things, you wake up, take a photo, go back to sleep. That sort of thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Usually you need some kind of co-processing. Actually, I just, I just had a call. Someone just randomly like reached out to me about an internship. And so I had a call with him and I'm, I don't have anything for him, but we were kind of talking through, you know, so it just turned into like this ad hoc mentoring session.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I had asked, what have you done before? And all this other stuff. And he's like, well, you know, I've done some C stuff and I've done some low level embedded things. And I was just kind of like encouraging him to like try and have a bunch of things in his tool belt. Right. So like knowing how to use a Raspberry Pi or, you know, CM4 or whatever, like some kind of Linux computing platform that is very useful. I think, oh, he was saying that his robotics team is using a Pi for doing, you know, I think vision processing, things like that for the, for the robot. But then I was like, well, how are you going to control the wheels and, you know, like the low level functions. And so you need to have the fast, you know, you need to have all these different things. And like you've talked about before too, is like, you know, I think it's good to kind of find your favorite, right? It's good to have, or like, like Mike Harrison always does is like, you just have that one tool that you always go to is pick 32. It just keeps going back to it. Right. Yeah. Like you did pick what, 24 for a long time or 16. I mean, both. Yeah. And just being able to like have that thing. It's not a bad thing to go and, you know, reuse this over and over again. I think it's actually very efficient. And I think the, the, the tough thing then for a younger person coming into electronics is you just got to go out and find that. Right. And maybe do a survey of everything that's out there and see, see what works for you. Right. So like you might figure out that like, oh, an ESP 32 is great for this application, but it still has really high idle current. So I need to go and do something super sleepy, you know, and just get like a tiny little microcontroller that'll maybe just do the same thing and wake up and kill its rail and to the, to the Raspberry Pi or the ESP 32 or whatever.

Dave Jones: One of the things that would bother me if I was, you know, if I was looking through someone's resume, oh yeah, I've got experience in arm. Right. They try and like, it's like, yeah, that's pretty broad brush.

Dave Jones: That's pretty like, yeah, that's not really a useful skill in its own right. But if you go, oh yeah, I'm, I'm familiar with the STM 32, uh, chain or where they insert other specific, you know, F0, L0, something like that. I know how to get the job done using this tool chain just because, oh yeah, I know how to program microcontrollers or I know how to program arm or I know how to program, you know, something or other doesn't, you know, doesn't really impress me much because that implies that, oh yeah, you can, you can probably figure it out if you had enough time. Right. Sure. Okay. Right. Great. Okay. That's a base level skill, but it's not a specifically efficient practical skill that can be put to you straight away, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Whereas if you've got a skill, a skill with a specific tool chain, for example, then yes, that's much more value because you can hit the ground running and boom, actually make something straight away.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, I think that actually is a good way to, to frame it too. It's like, so like we've said many times in the show, showing up with a project and this is what I told this person to is yeah, show up with the project. That's good. But then I think the next level down from that is yeah. Yeah. And here's the tool chain I use. Right. And so this is what I could deploy quickly and with, with a little bit of knowledge towards it. I think like not overselling it too, and just being like, yeah, I've used it. I don't know everything about it, but someone who says they know everything about it, they better have 20 years on their, on the resume for it or equivalent. So, but I think, yeah, that's where humility comes in. And then, and then, you know, and then you could talk about it. I think then you, you set, you frame the conversation. It's great. So. Yep. Yep. Same old, same old answer from us on that one. Yeah. The hard part is just, is the learning, right. And putting in the, and putting in the, uh, doing the, doing the engineering dark in the dark, the dark dungeons at night. Right. Exactly. Like we talked about two weeks ago and then you, uh, you, you did another video about recently. Did I?

Dave Jones: I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. About the flux and, uh, you extended on the, uh, flux. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: Yes. About working on your own in your, in your silo, as they call it is the wank word.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep. Engineers are much more efficient in their silos. Thank you very much. Just leave them alone and they'll produce miracles. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: There's, uh, that might be a little bit of a stretch, but, uh, yeah, I think, uh, the leaving alone is, is fine. Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right. Ah, what else we got? I think we're running a bit skimp this week, aren't we?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, I could talk about, uh, I'm, I'm on the hunt for a new, uh, engineering laptop. Uh, does that, does that, uh, no, I don't give a rat's ass at all.

Dave Jones: No, I think it's interesting because of, uh, what's the difference between a normal laptop and an engineering laptop that I use one for work?

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: Right. I mean, right off the bat, care factor zero, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for me, it's like being able to drive, drive a 4k screen these days. And like, just, that's pretty much the big thing, you know, like just being able to handle, you know, a CAD program while also in a Slack channel while also, you know, having 40 data sheets open while also, you know, and just like, just kind of the load of that sort of thing. And yeah, it's.

Dave Jones: In that same recent video, we just talked about that. I did, that was a live show. Uh, I talked about the, um, I looked at the, uh, framework laptop, which is the new, uh, modular. Oh yeah. The Linux.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't think it's open source. Is it open source?

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: I think, yeah, it comes with schematic. I think you can get the schematics for it. I don't know if it's like fully open or whatever, but yeah, apparently the framework, uh, laptop and apparently, uh, Linus from Linus, uh, tech tips, he invested money in it or something. Oh, cool. Cool. And, uh, yeah, it's this modular laptop thing. And it's like, eh, I don't know. It's like, it's got these four ports on the side that you can actually replace with either a USB-C port, a HDMI port, a Firewire port, you know, a Firewire. Sorry. What's the new one? I don't know. Fire something.

Chris Gammell: Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt.

Dave Jones: Thunderbolt is what I'm thinking of.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But that's like usually built on top of USB-C. So it's like. Oh, right. That's like the. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Anyway, you can modually put in all these things. I'm like, and I'm having a look at this and I'm going, well, they didn't even like, and yet you have to power the laptop through one of these, uh, USB-C port, one of these modular USB-C ports. And I thought, well, you've just pissed away one of your four ports already, because that has to be a dedicated power port. Right. You know, you have to power this bloody thing. Right. That's absolutely essential.

Chris Gammell: When the battery was, when it was on battery. Oh, maybe. When the battery. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But, oh, I don't. Yeah. I don't know how they do the, the card edge thing. I don't know what, what the interface is for the, for the board, for the module. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how, you know, how actual reliably, reliable that is, but it's got to be some board to board interconnect. It's got to be high speed as well. Right. It's got to be one of those high speed board to board interconnects. I don't know how much they're going to, and actual, you know, how they're going to hold up to like, you know, hundreds of insertions and removals and stuff like that. But I just thought right, right off the bat, I thought that was dumb because you've got to have a USB-C port permanently attached for charging. So I thought, why piss away one of your modular things for that? And then I realized why they did it is because they, they decided that they wanted the screen to fold back completely on itself. That means the hinge has to be on the backside of the case. This is all a product design trade-off, right? It's got to be on the backside. Therefore, you can't have any connectors on the back of the computer. So you've only got the side or the front left. Yep. Right. Or maybe you could have, if you're clever, you could have under, and then you could have like a little sneaky cutout where the cable sort of goes, you know, in or something weird like that. But yeah, nah.

Chris Gammell: Bunny and Zobs, they did, they did that one with, with their laptop. They had an open source laptop as well. Okay, right. And they had like a, I think it was like a plug-in port, but their whole thing kind of like popped open. It was like a, basically like an exposed chassis. Yes.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Didn't it have like a hinge lid or something?

Chris Gammell: It did, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right. Yeah, I remember that. I don't know. It's like, yeah. They try and be a jack of all trade, master of none kind of, you know. Yeah. This modular concept.

Chris Gammell: I think, I think it's just, where, where is it all going to go? You know, like, I, I, I don't know. I would, like, I want to support stuff like that, but I just, I, I, I need a company behind it, honestly. Like, that's just one thing in my world where I just need someone to like be able to send me replacement parts. And just, I need that as a tool. And that's not where I'm, I'm not willing to tinker on a laptop because it's just like my everyday thing, you know?

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. I can, I can see where you're coming from.

Chris Gammell: If it was like a secondary, then maybe, you know, if you had like a desktop and you're like, oh, and then I have this, this laptop for trying stuff out and like doing experiments and whatever. Or it's on the bench maybe. And like, that's kind of okay. But yeah, not, not for me.

Dave Jones: You just want something that works out of the box and, you know, is being engineered to work out of the box. And that's it.

Chris Gammell: I just need horsepower and reliability. And yeah.

Dave Jones: And then you, and then right up front, you choose the one that has your feature set that you want. You know, you don't want to, like, I, I can't see that people's requirements are so constantly changing that you need this modular thing. You know?

Chris Gammell: I think that is, I think that's right. I think a lot of the times when you do see modular, people are like over, overdoing it in terms of like the, the percentage of time that people will actually need it. And then the percentage of total people that actually need that for, you know, as a, you know, like, so, okay, maybe 5% of your audience, maybe 20% of your audience says they need it.

Dave Jones: But then of that 20% only 5% of that 20% really, really need it.

Chris Gammell: Right. And then it's like, they're an everyday user. They're going to switch out a module every single day. You know, this is always my thing of like the whole interoperability between mechanical CAD and electrical CAD. It's like, yeah, when you need it, that is just like the coolest frigging option ever.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Of course.

Chris Gammell: But like, how often do you need that? I, I, I, exactly. You know, like I need a box and then the box, I design stuff for the box and like, that's how I work. But I'm not working on something like super high end. And so, okay, you know, like, so then the people that need that feature are just vanished, not vanished, really small, just not me. I know it's not me. And so I, I count myself out in those scenarios. I actually have, this is something I brought up last week and we didn't, you ended up saying, no, no, no, I don't want to talk about, I wanted to talk about this other thing.

Dave Jones: Oh, really? Okay. It's okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So it was, no, you were, you were trying to finish a point. It's fine.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: So I had brought up that I had just gotten micro mod and I think this is another, I, I bought it. I had, we talked about it when it came out. This is a SparkFun thing and they use M.2, which is a type, right? Yep. Yeah. And they don't use the standard though. They just use the connector. Yeah. So I think it's an E type.

Dave Jones: We, we, we, I'm sure we talked about this months ago.

Chris Gammell: We did. Yeah. I don't know. We did. I, but we talked about having it and then I got it. I was like, I'll never do that. And then I got it. I was like, okay. Got it. So, you know, and it's, I mean, first off, it is very cool. I just, I love the M.2 connector. I think that is just like the coolest little thing. And like, this is like a tiny little board. Yep. And some, you know, I just, it's, I like it. I think it's, I think it's interesting. And I don't know. I, I like that part, but I don't think most people need this sort of thing. Right. Like I don't think. That's right.

Dave Jones: Most people don't need it.

Chris Gammell: I am never going to put an M.2 connector for this purpose onto a board to switch in micromod boards. And I think the, I think that we probably did mention this when we, when it first came out and it's like, I don't think that most people need to switch between platforms. Right. That's just not something that happens that often. Exactly. I think it actually probably happens quite a bit at like a SparkFun, right? Exactly.

Dave Jones: At a, at a, at a hobby experimental level. Yes. Yes. It has its place, but in like serious design, serious product design, it's just not going to happen. Yeah.

Dave Jones: The product design thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Something that's going to go to production is no, but okay. Counterpoint to ourselves, I suppose. I saw someone on Twitter said that they actually made a micromod board because they only had 10 parts left. They only had 10 STM 32s left that they needed to do. And they wanted to be able to switch them between parts, between boards that they were making. So like, that is a great use case. Gotcha. Okay. Yep. I would like to think that is a use case that is going away, but that is like a perfect example of modularity where they're like, look, I only have 10 total microcontrollers that I need to deploy into all these different tests that I'm set up, set up, that I'm doing. It's like, okay, that, that is a good use case. Yep. And it, but if you designed an entire like business case around that, I feel like that would be a little reductive overall.

Dave Jones: This is what I talked about in the, in the live show that I did the other day, modular electronic design. And I mentioned on the show, how I got into a, like a month long debate with some guy on, on the old school use net forum back in the like early nineties or something, right? About, oh, the future's modular, right? You won't have to design everything. You see kids, people didn't use to argue on Twitter.

Chris Gammell: They used to argue over, over bulletin boards. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Bulletin boards and use net and BBSs and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: See kids, a bulletin board is a, an electronic version of a piece of cork that, you know, old people used to stick to the walls to find rides places and get guitar lessons.

Dave Jones: So anyway, I do believe from memory, I think this guy wanted to go into business with me and he had this idea for modular electronics. And I'm going like, and I just spent like a month or more trying to convince this dude that this is never going to take off. It's never going to be a thing. And then of course it never happened. And then when I joined Altium, it was like, oh, Altium's doing, wants to do modular electronics. Yeah, here we go again. And the eyes rolled in the back of my head and, you know, and seriously, that, that, that was the vision. That was one of the Altium vision was that nobody would want to design their own fully custom PCB anymore. It'd be because why, why? Because like, like layout a board from scratch. Why? Because every, like every product has a switch mode power, like just assume every product has a switch mode power supply, right? Because somebody, right? It's already been done a million times. Why redo the layout for a switching power supply when you can simply take it, that module and drop it in and boom, your product's done. It's like, there's just so many reasons why this was never going to work. And the vision, you know, it, it makes for a great wanky vision, but in, uh, practice, it's just, it, it, there's so many reasons why it's not going to work.

Chris Gammell: You know, it's just, I think, I think that's, I think it's the same scenario where it's just like, for some people it makes the most sense, right? It is the answer, but I don't think it's, I don't think it's the mass market. And I, yeah, so I think that's just, it's over, it's over playing a hand, right? It's like, uh.

Dave Jones: Can, can somebody name a product out there in the audience? Can somebody name a product that uses modular design like this effectively? And it's famous for it. And it's, and it's the leading product in its field because it's modular. Maybe on, you know, like PC server, you know, like you get the plug-in power supplies and stuff like that, but that's all, I don't even think there's a standard for that. There's like, oh, HP have their own plug-in power supplies and it's all, you know, it's not sort of some universal standard type thing. Can anyone think of anything? PC 104 comes to mind, I guess. I've, I've done a video on PC 104 standards where you, but you know, which is a thing. It's, it is still a thing, but it's not a big thing. It's one of those, you know, niche kind of industrial control kind of things. I don't. Yeah. Nah. Again. I don't see it. I can't think of anything.

Chris Gammell: I think cost always runs into it.

Dave Jones: You know, like there's cost of connectors, cost of optimization and, and the engineer design, engineers designing the thing. And they go, no, I don't want to use that chip. That's a pain in the ass. We, we use this on all our products. So we're going to use this again. And we're going to, you know, like, oh, there's just so many reasons. Or no, I hate that company. I'm not using their chip. Piss off. You know, they've, they've burnt me before. No, I'm not going to.

Chris Gammell: No. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And of course, at the large, ultra large scale, I mean, you know, you engineer, you know, cost is everything, right? You engineer everything to save costs. And then you get, you know, if you're an Apple or somebody, you get such huge deals from the manufacturers because you're ordering 10 million chips, right? It's just, you know, it's nuts.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think the other thing too, is that like, you know, okay. So an Apple, maybe at the beginning, that's a bad example of the Apple, but like, uh, you know, let's just say large company at the beginning, it makes a lot of sense to have this modular thing for swappability and to, you know, be flexible and nimble and whatever. And you could say, let's keep doing it, but like, there's always, even if there's not like cost pressure in terms of like margin, there's always some other engineering reason

Dave Jones: to do it. There's some, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Engineers, engineers are there for a reason, you know, that's what it comes down to. Yeah. Is that like, yeah, they're like, well, we hired all these engineers. What the hell are they doing? Yeah. Right. Okay. Go cost down a product. Like, get out of here, man. Like go do the, go do your job. They aren't building Lego, right?

Dave Jones: They're not just go, geez, I could have done that myself. I just could use these boards and plug them all together and there's our product, you know, it's like. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So I think that always comes up and like, you know, any, I've seen this kind of like system level, like as well, like, you know, having this ultimate flexibility is great and people are willing to pay for it at the beginning of a setup. But I think then it's just, at some point there is like a efficiency, not an efficiency, it's like a, a cost trade-off where it's like, okay, well we could keep, you know, like, so the, the cost of, of modularity, say you have to pay like five bucks a month to maintain the modularity on this thing. It's like, okay, that sounds fine at the beginning, but that five bucks a month per whatever you're selling like scales linearly. So you do that for, you know, a hundred devices. Okay. 500 bucks a month. We can handle that. But now we're selling 5 million devices. Okay. So 25 million. How many engineers could I hire for 25 million? I could probably hire five engineers and, you know, pay them, you know, a couple hundred grand a year and get rid of $24 million of cost. You know, it's just like, oh, we're going to do that. So at some point there's always like a crossover of like, just hire someone to go make it cheaper.

Dave Jones: Don't underestimate the change. Like when, when you hire a new engineer, they want to prove themselves. So they do that by making changes. It's like when you hire, hire a new management or a new company CEO, right? The first thing they come in and change everything because they want to justify that. They, you know, nobody like, imagine if you're a CEO coming to a company and go, I'm going to make no changes whatsoever. Right. It's like, everything's good. Why the hell did we hire you? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You guys shouldn't have hired me.

Dave Jones: You know, it's, it's the same with engineers too, right? You hire an engineer and they'll come in and they've got their ideas and they want to prove to you that they're clever and that they're, you know, genius and they're going to save you money and they're going to optimize it and they're going to do everything. And, and, you know, if you get the wrong engineer, they can optimize your company straight into the ground, you know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think that's, that's interesting. I've had to deal with that on, I've had to deal with my own inclination to do that sort of thing.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So like I come into a consulting job, right? Someone's like, Hey, you know, we had this system. We want you to work on it. I'm like, okay, cool. And like, sometimes the right answer is to not do that. Right. And it really is tough.

Dave Jones: Is to not do anything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're doing it fine. You know? Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you feel as though you're not contributing. You feel as though you're not earning your keep. Right. So you've got to make, so you're forced.

Chris Gammell: Well, in my case, I literally don't make any money. I literally, like, I literally. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. That's the really tough thing. But I think that like from a, I've talked to a friend about this, another consulting friend about this too. And it's like, but if, if you think about the true, like output of a job is like your good name and like being recommended for the next job and the next job and the next job and the next job. Yeah. And like those good feels, that's actually what you're getting out of it. And it is so hard to do that versus like, oh, I could probably build them like, I don't know, 200, 200 hours to, you know, to go and redo this thing. And yeah, I, I have to not do that. So yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Pesky humans, you know, they just want to change shit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Annoying.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. All right. Sometimes you just go and change the name of your company and that's, that's a story too.

Dave Jones: Is it? Is that a story? That, uh, oh God, no, no, that wasn't even on the list. We're not going to talk about it. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: I'm just scrolling down my Twitter feed now.

Dave Jones: Oh, just, yeah. Now I scrape in the barrel.

Chris Gammell: No, I actually, I have, I have something I want to talk about. I am going to probably be at Embedded World, which is in Nuremberg in March.

Dave Jones: Nice.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So if there are people out there listening.

Dave Jones: Is this a company thing or is this off your own bat?

Chris Gammell: Uh, this is a company thing. Yeah. So.

Dave Jones: All right. Okay. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And so I've never been before. I've heard about it. I actually have a friend that has been a couple of times because he actually lives pretty close in Nuremberg. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, I don't know how huge it'll be this time because, you know, the whole. Yeah. Yeah. It'll definitely be the biggest one that I'm going back to.

Chris Gammell: All right. Oh yeah, definitely. We'll see. Yep. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Cool. Oh, speaking of which, the electronics trade show has just announced that it's coming back in March, I think. Don't quote me on it, but March. Sorry, Dave. I can't go.

Chris Gammell: I can't. I can't fly to Sydney instead of Germany.

Dave Jones: Why?

Chris Gammell: To go to.

Dave Jones: Yes, you can. Come on. The company milk, milk that cash cow company you're working for. Come on. Come on. I'm sure you can. I just mean, I can't fly. This is a huge show in Australia. We have to have a stand there. We have to. Yeah. And, you know, come on. Oh my God. What?

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You don't think our dinky little electronics show here is good enough? I don't. I didn't want to say it. Our little rinky dinky.

Chris Gammell: How would I say this nicely in Aussie++?

Dave Jones: Yeah, nah. Just give me a yeah, nah.

Chris Gammell: Reckon I'll have a walkabout until that trade show gets bigger.

Dave Jones: All right. Come on. There's a good 50 stands there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That's like a whole afternoon.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Until you spend more time on the plane than you do walking around. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Literally.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh boy. Yep. Come on. Don't disparage our little Aussie batman trade show.

Chris Gammell: I think I will. You're going to go though?

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Oh yeah. It's here in Sydney. Cool. You know.

Chris Gammell: You guys are doing it wrong though. You should try and get a big one to come there and then have like everybody would want to come to, you know, down under.

Dave Jones: And everyone would want to go to Australia. Of course everyone wants to go to Australia. All their company. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: Come down, eat some ridiculously cheap avocado toast now that the avocados are cheap in Australia.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Another news article from the week. Yep.

Dave Jones: Quality content here on the Amp Hour. Yep. Quality relevant content.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep.

Dave Jones: How would you do that? How would you convince people to come to, like, how would you, money, right? That's how you would convince them. You go, we'll pay you to move your trade show here. You know. I guess so.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think you'd have to have someone so important that they'd say like, oh, we have to be down there so that such and such will go or we'll attend or whatever. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: It's a chicken and egg.

Chris Gammell: You know, it's always, yeah, it's always like a center of gravity kind of thing. You know, like people are like, oh, I'm only going to go to the big trade shows. And the big trade shows are only going to be where all the people are. And it's like, oh, okay. Well, how do we, how do we get this moving here? So, yeah, that is one way to do it.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Last thing that I have, this is the bottom of the barrel. So, so we did talk a little bit about the, the KiCad debacle with the website moving and the website, sorry, being sold out from under them by a past developer.

Dave Jones: Is there some update there or?

Chris Gammell: There is. So it was just a landing page before, like a, you know, hosted by GoDaddy or whatever. But now someone actually cloned the site. And the only thing they changed on it so far is that they removed how to verify the download after you've downloaded the package. So if you go and download KiCad from the old site, which is kicad-pcb.org, do not, do not download anything from there. The correct site is kicad.org. If you go to the old site, they've basically cloned the, cloned the site. So it looks exactly the same. If you click on downloads, the only thing that's different right now is they've removed how to validate that the package is correct with like CRCs or I forget how they, the hash of the, of the download.

Dave Jones: Okay. So I'm at, I am now at kicad-pcb.org.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: And you're saying that's not the right one in quote marks.

Chris Gammell: That is correct. That is, that is a scam site of some type.

Dave Jones: They've got a, they've, they've got a donate button in the top, right?

Chris Gammell: That goes to the same place. That goes to.

Dave Jones: CERN and societyfoundation.cern slash.

Chris Gammell: That's right. That is, that is the official. Well, I'm not sure when you actually click. Hang on.

Dave Jones: So you're saying this bogus site is linking to the official donate for the CERN KiCad project.

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Dave Jones: I don't see the problem. Why, why is that a problem? Why is that a problem?

Chris Gammell: What happened the last time is that they, they basically someone, so whoever used to own kicad.org, the old site.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Basically hosted a malicious version. Basically it was like spyware inside of the KiCad binary. Okay. Right.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: And basically what it seems like this person is going to do is try and look legit enough so that people go and hit download. And, but there's no way to tell that it's a malicious download. Right. So if you click download right now.

Dave Jones: So has, has this been verified that the actual download is a spyware version?

Chris Gammell: There's no way to tell that right now. The only thing that's happened is that they've cloned the site. So it looks legit.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And they've removed the thing that says, so if you go to kicad.org and then download, you'll notice on there, it tells you how to check the signing of the package. That is not on the.

Dave Jones: Okay. Right. So given that somebody who owns the trademarks to KiCad and stuff, surely you could slap a, if it's hosted in the U S you could slap a DMCA takedown on the site. Why doesn't somebody do that?

Chris Gammell: The Linux foundation owns it.

Dave Jones: Yep. Well, why don't they slap them with a notice to a takedown?

Chris Gammell: They're working on it. Oh, okay. They're working on it.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Got it. All right.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Cool.

Chris Gammell: So just.

Dave Jones: Okay. There you go. Well, that's sneak. So does, do we know who is actually behind this site or is it just a.

Chris Gammell: Nope. Nope. There's no. Nope.

Dave Jones: Really? So we don't. Right. It's just a. And they said they went to all this effort to target this niche product so that they could install spyware.

Chris Gammell: Like that's. Yeah. I don't know. This has happened before. I'm not sure why. I think it's kind of like, you know, like sometimes when you go to like, what is that? They hosted a bunch of like freeware on the site. I can't remember it.

Dave Jones: But it's got to be someone in the community. Right. Otherwise who would know it? Like your regular, you know, scammer. Yeah. Is not going to know. Right. What the hell key cat is. Right. Right. So it just doesn't make sense.

Chris Gammell: Dave. I don't get it, man. Like I don't. It's a lot of work for. Yeah. What's the payoff here? But I'm just telling, you know, like this is our job to do public service. So this is a, this is a public service announcement.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. It's really, it's really, really annoying because I've been chasing down old links and just, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Cause it, it looks totally legit. Where, where does it appear in the Google search? Does it appear in the Google search?

Chris Gammell: It does not appear in Google right now.

Dave Jones: Okay. Right. Well, that's good. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Cause this looks totally legit. I would. But there's like, there's like a hundred thousand links to it, to the old site still. So that's what it, that's the problem is that you still have just like the, the carcass of this old site, you know, being linked to throughout the internet, you know, like who, who goes through, you know, like if you don't own a redirect, right. If you own a redirect, that's if you own both sites and you redirect the new one, that's fine. Right. But if you don't own that old site, there's just all of these like vestiges of old links that still point, like even some of my own sites, they had, I had links to the old site and there's just nothing you could do.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Wow. It sucks. Okay. So do the, does the, well, see the thing is the official page, which is keycad.org. Is that correct?

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

Dave Jones: Yes. So the official legit page is keycad.org. Why don't they have a huge banner on the front page saying this other site is not legit. This other site is bullshit. That's a, that's good idea. Yeah. I mean, they should change the look and. Yeah. Yeah. There should be a massive banner. So if they want to copy it, it's like, well, they'd have to copy this own, this banner saying that this site's not legit, but obviously they wouldn't be dumb enough to do that. They'd take it out. But then, you know, yeah, no, they, they need to put, if this is that serious, then they need to put a gigantic banner on the front page telling people about this. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Good idea. Good idea. I'll pass that along.

Dave Jones: Yep. Hmm.

Chris Gammell: It's just a lot of, uh, yep. A lot of, a lot of, uh, BS, you know, it sucks.

Dave Jones: Yep. Hmm. Nasty. Oh, I can't remember who the company, this reminds me of another company that had to do this. It was in our space and they had to put a big war, you know, a big banner warning on their website going, Oh, you know, this source is not a legitimate source. Here's the, you know, here is the, here is the official version and stuff. And because this other person, yeah, they just stole this site or whatever. And yep. So it has. Yeah. Wow. But it's gotta be someone in the community, but I don't, yeah. Wow. It's weird. Anyway, there you go. It sucks. Yep. Do we have any last news? Last comments? Cause our NPR is up.

Chris Gammell: No. Give me a message. If, uh, yeah, if people are going to the embedded world, let me know. Give me a, shoot me a message. Love to hear from you. Maybe I'll try and do a, you know, safe meetup if we can.

Dave Jones: And if you're doing, going to the electronics, the superior electronics show in here in Sydney in March next year. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yep. That's right. It's a tough choice, folks. Yep. That's a tough choice, but, uh, you know, choose your plane tickets wisely.

Dave Jones: Come to Australia. It's way better.

Chris Gammell: It's way warmer. Uh, I'll give you that.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: And your, your programming languages are cheekier. Right.

Dave Jones: Vostly superior. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Uh, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Cool. All right. Well, catch you next time. See ya. Bye.

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