#570 – Keyzermas All The Way

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released December 19th, 2021. Episode 570. Kaisermis all the way.

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

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. And hark, what do I hear? Is it... Yes, sir. The patter of little tiny hoofbeats and a jolly laugh? What is this?

Jeff Kaiser: Well, hey guys. Happy holidays. This is Jeff Kaiser from Mighty Ohm. I'm back. Happy Kaisermis. Woo-hoo! Yes, sir.

Chris Gammell: Yes, sir. Welcome back, Jeff. How are you doing?

Jeff Kaiser: I'm doing great. So just for everyone listening, we have a tradition where we do Kaisermis sort of every year. And I guess Chris and I both, maybe we got a little busy or whatever. But anyway, about 20 minutes ago, Chris said, hey, would you like to do Kaisermis this year? And I said, of course. This is accurate, yes. Yeah. And not making this up. And I said, of course, that sounds great. And when do you want to record? He's like, oh, in about an hour. And that was less than an hour ago.

Chris Gammell: So here we are.

Jeff Kaiser: Woo-hoo! Hey, man. Well, thanks for having me. Glad you're available. On short notice. I canceled all of my holiday plans just so that I could be here right now with you guys.

Chris Gammell: All of those 500-person holiday parties that everybody's having this year. We're like, yay. Like, I'm sorry, folks. I can't come. I can't dance with a lampshade on my head. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. I can't believe that it's been a year, but here we are.

Dave Jones: I can't even remember last year's show. Is it that much of a...

Chris Gammell: I can't believe it's been only a year. It feels like it's been... It's been a year. It's been a long, long year. But yes, I also cannot remember it. So...

Speaker ?: Yep.

Chris Gammell: I have the show notes from last year. I have those up. That helps, I guess.

Jeff Kaiser: Did we talk about anything that's really culturally insensitive or embarrassing given the events of the past year?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You talked about all your kit sales. And I think this year, Jeff, talking about having parts to sell to people by one is very insensitive. You better... I would say don't talk about that. You'll just make... You'll hurt some feelings.

Dave Jones: There was no component crisis in 2020, right? It was a 2021 phenomenon, isn't it?

Jeff Kaiser: You know, I feel like in 2020, I ordered parts and the lead times were starting to get kind of long. And maybe this is actually like January of this year. So maybe you're right. It is a 2021 problem. Because I remember ordering parts to build kits. And for the first time, I couldn't get like LEDs, like really basic. Right. You know, these are through a whole like T1 and three-quarter LEDs. And it took about probably three or four months to get those parts. And at the time this happened, I was busy. It wasn't a big deal. But then when I went to reorder parts this year, that's when I noticed that things are really, really bad. So I think you're right that this is a 2021 problem. I think we were blissfully unaware.

Chris Gammell: Is there a sensitive thing for you to say on the air that you could get any parts in 2021?

Jeff Kaiser: The factories were not making the parts, but there were still a lot left in the supply chain. And then I think it took 2021 for them to actually dry up.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Right, right.

Dave Jones: Once everyone panicked and hoarded.

Chris Gammell: 2021, the year that the supply chain was bled dry and also our souls.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. The year the supply chain forgot is 2021. 2021. Uh-huh. Yep.

Dave Jones: It's like the, what is it? The corn syrup riots or whatever, which is in the Ready Player One movie. Like, you know, he's like, it's, what is it? 2045 or something. It's after the corn syrup. No, the bandwidth riots and the corn syrup droughts and stuff like that. It's like adding the supply chain.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: All right. What have you been up to, Jeff? Has anything changed? What were you doing in 2020 and what do you have been doing in 2021? Is it all still the same?

Jeff Kaiser: I'd say, yeah, more or less it is the same. So I contracted last year and I was doing kits last year and this year still doing kits, still contracting. So yeah, I think business as usual.

Chris Gammell: Didn't one of your products come out though? Like I thought the, one of the things you were working on was released.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, yeah. So, so this year I got to work on, uh, Valve's latest hardware product, the Steam Deck. And I, I got kind of pulled into that project at the beginning of the year while it still kind of felt like lockdown here. So it was great to have, you know, something that was super engaging, super interesting. And also to see firsthand how lockdown had kind of affected Valve and, you know, a company that I've worked with a long time and a company that kind of historically I would have thought would have had a lot of challenges adapting to a work from home, you know, a hundred percent remote kind of a situation. But I joined, uh, as a contractor to work on the Deck project early this year. And I was, I was really blown away by how well they had adapted, you know, a company that really kind of prized like in person, in the room style conversation. Like they have the whole cabal system where people working on projects all sit together. I mean, it's like a COVID nightmare, right? Because historically some of the game cabalers would have like so many people and so many desks that it's like hot in the room because there's too many computers and like, there's nowhere, you can't actually really easily walk because there's just people everywhere.

Dave Jones: And there's just engineers shouting at each other and going, no, it's not going to work.

Jeff Kaiser: Exactly. Exactly. And that's, and that's kind of the environment that the Steam controller was born out of. So that's sort of, for me, the core of my experience at Valve was a lot of people packed in a room, really tight quarters, you know, and, and literally, you know, after CES, we would all get sick, you know, because everyone would be in the same room. That's sharing. That's just CES. Yeah. That's like conflu is what one of the guys I worked with would call it conflu. So, so anyway, that was sort of the image that I was expecting. And then working a hundred percent remote, working at home, which I'd always wanted to work for Valve, but at home. And so I was able to finally like achieve this dream. And I have to tell you, and I guess this is kind of old news, but you know, you only have me on the show once a year. So we kind of have to catch up, but to go from having all of my prior experience with Valve being sort of in the typical, I guess I'll say like corporate, you know, it's like email is on exchange and you know, not a lot of social, uh, of like chat programs and stuff like that. And yeah. And also, you know, doing that kind of stuff. Well, to experience the a hundred percent remote version where, you know, we've got like three or four different chat programs. We're using like every, you know, zoom, Microsoft teams, blah, blah, blah. Like the whole, like so many different online platforms for collaboration. For me, having not had that experience to sort of ramp up to that, because prior to that, most of the consulting and contracting I was doing was still just like email and the occasional zoom call. And it was pretty simple, but to sort of go back into that kind of an environment where you have a company with a lot of people using a lot of different platforms and a lot of things that are kind of new post pandemic. For me, it was kind of like getting on the freeway and the traffic is going 60 miles an hour and I'm like merging on, you know, going 25. It was a very difficult adjustment and, you know, getting single sign on and everything to just work across all those platforms was sort of a project. And for me to learn how to use all of those online collaboration tools, I found it to be really challenging and I felt like old, you know, I joined and I'm like, oh my God, I'm like the dinosaur, I'm the guy who has like the old way of doing things sort of cached in my memory. And so, you know, my first inclination, if I need to talk to somebody is to like pick up the phone or shoot an email. And like email had sort of taken a few steps down and a lot of people were not even using email day to day. And so here I am at the keyboard, like banging out these, you know, long format emails about, hey, here's what I think we should do. And then you realize that no, actually all of the activities happening. 20 minutes ago is happening on chat platforms is happening on like Slack and things like that. And so I found that to be a difficult adjustment, you know, not just because that's not what my experience at Valve had been before that, but also because this is sort of the new, the things that everyone has sort of learned how to do. But because I wasn't working at this company during the whole progression, for me, it was a huge shock to go from not having that to everyone's using it. Everyone's really good at it. And I suck at using these platforms, but I figured it out.

Chris Gammell: To quote one of my favorite Christmas movies, welcome to the party, pal.

Dave Jones: Is that because it's the software people bring in their software mentality to the game?

Chris Gammell: Oh, like, like agile, stand up meeting type stuff, that kind of thing?

Jeff Kaiser: I don't think so. I think that it's really that these tools were-

Chris Gammell: Is it because Steam is bananas and it's a free for all crazy, crazy place? Is that why?

Jeff Kaiser: I think that it's just that people were using any platform that was available in order to get the work done. It's like the work has to get done. And you're working on a project that's got a really tight schedule, that's got a ship on a tight timeline. And everybody's just got to figure out how to be effective in this new reality. And again, this is like probably super old news for everybody. But for me, this was a big part of my year was like seeing and experiencing this. And I think especially in the context of Valve and historically, a company that you wouldn't think would be so good at this, you know, of course they figured it out and they were great. And it's, it's, it was fantastic. And it even made it better when you go back in person. Cause you know, if you're back in the office, now you have this rich library of collaboration tools. That means that the people who are at the factory or halfway around the world, they're a lot easier to communicate with. And, you know, I don't think that this is like a shocking revelation, but to see it firsthand, I thought it was super interesting.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: What is the, uh, what is the steam deck for people that don't know what it is?

Dave Jones: If you heard, uh, both, uh, Chris and myself furiously typing away on our keyboard. That's right. Yes. Yeah. What is this? What is this thing?

Chris Gammell: Uh, it's a, it's a handheld patio, but it's like, uh, you know, you go out there and then, uh, you know, you catch a schvitz, you know, like that's, that sort of thing, you know,

Jeff Kaiser: It's a handheld gaming console.

Dave Jones: Right. I thought, so, so you actually play the games on it.

Jeff Kaiser: That's right. Yeah. It hosts the content locally and it's kind of like you take a, it looks like a Sega,

Chris Gammell: or no, no, no, no. What was it? Not a Genesis. It was the Sega, the Game Boy, the Game Genie. It looks like a Game Genie. That's what it is. I missed out on that. Minus the six AA batteries. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. No more, no more packets of AA batteries. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: Just like burn through them like cartridges.

Jeff Kaiser: It's a really cool handheld gaming system that runs Steam, runs lots of great games and is super high performance, like has really nice GPU graphics processing is, you know, like surprisingly for me, like surprisingly great for something in that form factor.

Chris Gammell: It looks like custom Silicon, but that's just maybe just the, the, the graphic on there. It looked like they had a chip that had valve on it, but yes, no.

Jeff Kaiser: Ooh. I don't know. I can confirm nor deny because I don't know.

Dave Jones: I mean, fancy render.

Jeff Kaiser: Full disclosure. I worked on a tiny, tiny, tiny little piece of this thing. Got it. And so, you know, I came in super late. There was a team that had been working on this for a long period of time. And I was very fortunate to join, to help work on some specific things based on some experience that I had, because if you look at the interface, it's like kind of familiar, right? Like, you know, you can imagine how sort of the legacy of the Steam controller fits into this device. And actually one of the funny moments of my time at valve this year was that I got to work on a circuit that was called the legacy haptic circuit. And you definitely feel old when someone calls something the legacy haptic circuit. And you realize that that is your haptic circuit that you designed, you know, several years prior. So it's kind of cool to see that lineage actually of stuff that, you know, the team that I worked with years ago on the Steam controller actually going into current products. That was really neat to see. Kind of makes you feel good as an engineer when, you know, there's time has passed and somebody, you know, if an idea works really well, it gets reused, you know, and it gets used in current products. So, so I was lucky to work on a super tiny little piece of it. And it was a, yeah, it was a great thing to a great product and something really interesting to work on in 2021 for me.

Chris Gammell: That is, that is an interesting like point about the, like coming back and like seeing your work and whether it survived or not, because I've definitely, I've seen some of my stuff did not make it, did not make that transition.

Dave Jones: I have an official dead projects list of dead projects I've worked on that I've worked on, you know, sometimes for six months or a year or something or more, and they've been canceled, you know? So yeah, it's...

Jeff Kaiser: I started my career in chip design. We've talked about that in the past. And one of the first companies that I worked for out of college, not the very first, because that was a startup that kind of went out of business very quickly after I joined. But the second company I worked for was a company called Sorenza Micro Devices. And I was a gallium arsenide IC designer. And I was only there for a couple years, but years and years after I left, like probably three, four, five years after I left, I talked to somebody who worked there and they said, oh yeah, by the way, we're still making your stuff. Yeah. In the chip industry, I mean, gas, I think moves a little more slowly than silicon, but in the chip industry to think that like three or four years after I'd left the company that they were still making products that I designed, that felt really good.

Chris Gammell: It's either a really good design or you're making stuff for military and they have to just keep making it the same way.

Jeff Kaiser: No, it wasn't military. But I mean, yeah, you also run the risk that they're still making it because like no one understands how to... That's true too. Yeah, that's right. That's the black box of... But I don't think that's what happened in this case. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Actually, so Dave and I were talking after recording last week, I don't think we talked or two weeks ago rather, I don't think we talked about it on the show at all, but I mentioned to Dave that I'm working on like updating my portfolio site. And Dave mentioned this guy that he knows that has this amazing portfolio site where he tracked everything. What was it, Dave? Like 20 years, 30 years? I don't remember.

Dave Jones: At least 20 years, at least probably more. Yeah. Yep. Wow. He's got every project he's ever worked on at every company that he could because I've worked with him at two different companies.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Technically three. And yeah, there's many, like his biggest projects he's worked on, he can't put on there because they're secret. You know, they're actually... Yeah. They're actually... But still, the detail... And he sorts them by year. So we'll link that in. And Steve Howell is a mate of mine, ex Altium and ex Sersel and Talies and everything else. Yeah. And yeah, he's just got an amazing site. It's like it's old school HTML. It's very...

Chris Gammell: It's like handwritten HTML.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's handwritten. You know, I don't think he's changed. It's the original code from like 1980, 1996 or something, you know. Cool.

Chris Gammell: The thing about that is it loads really fast.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And he documents every single project. And then the process technology used, he'll say, yep, I use it. This was an eight layer, you know, X process on the PCB with this tolerance and this mask. You know, all the little technical details are there for every project he's worked on. It's absolutely incredible. That's great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sounds like Jeff's would actually have a lot of active stuff on there still. So that's pretty impressive, buddy. More of that, I guess. Let's move on to the other pressing issue in terms of, you know, Kaisermis and Jeff being on the show. Where's my stuff, Jeff? You still got my HP 8753 in your house. Oh, he's still bit on me.

Jeff Kaiser: I do. I'm actually looking at it right now. I know. He's not even babysitting. And the bills in the miles.

Dave Jones: The bills in the miles. No, no.

Chris Gammell: For the storage. He's like, he wipes it down every day with like a, with a soft cloth. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's well taken care of, I'm sure.

Jeff Kaiser: I actually just put protective caps on all the BNC connectors on the back. So I, it is true that I'm taking fairly good care of it. Way better than I did, I'm sure. It's in a coveted spot in my office here. It's sort of, sort of on the list. I've been going through some old HP equipment recently. You know, it's well known that these stupid Rifa capacitors that are in everything, which, which by the way, I think that it would be great if there was a list or a database of what equipment had these cursed capacitors in it. Yeah. Because it kind of seems like pretty much everything HP did in the eighties has them. Yep. Like as a certainty. But one complicating factor is that I know that they're also in a lot of line filters. And of course, a lot of the line filters are potted. So you, it's not obvious like what's in there. That's right. And so I've been replacing line filters when I can, like if I can easily order a replacement, but then I have like a 3562 that has this giant, you know, huge line filter that looks really custom and really unusual. And I'm not going to throw that away, you know, like I'll never get another one of those. So I've been going through and trying to replace caps and stuff. Cause I have a lot of old HP gear here now and all of it needs some level of attention. And so the 8753 is kind of my best.

Chris Gammell: I saw someone's a Rifa cap thing and they like, I think it maybe was on your thread as you've been fixing yours. And so, and someone like posted a photo of the Rifa caps and I was like, oh look, they made, they made Christmas toffee. They're a meme now.

Dave Jones: They've totally turned into a meme. Like there's a t-shirt, you can get Rifa capacitor t-shirts and you know, yeah, somebody's selling them. I would love it.

Jeff Kaiser: So, so, oh, sorry to interrupt you, Chris.

Chris Gammell: No, there was, there was a, someone said there was an acronym Rifa stands for something like replace in. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: I said it's replace if found always. Oh yeah. That's great. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. But the thing that's, I think surprising to me is that you can still buy these and they still make this cap new. So you can still go on digi-key. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I didn't know. Well, in the same sort of clear, in the same sort of clear, really?

Jeff Kaiser: And I've heard, I've read that, oh, they changed the formula, blah, blah, blah. But they look identical. I mean, they look literally identical. I would love to talk to somebody who represents that product line and say like WTF. WTF. Like, you know.

Chris Gammell: So what is Rifa first off? I mean, that's also interesting. It's a brand.

Jeff Kaiser: It's a brand. Yeah. It's like Wifa.

Speaker ?: It's a brand.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, I thought it was like a technology. No, no, no, no, no.

Dave Jones: It's a brand name. Oh. No. Okay. No, it's, they're, they're just, as far as I know, they're just regular metalized polyester, aren't they? They're paper.

Jeff Kaiser: They're paper.

Dave Jones: Oh, they're paper.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. That's the problem.

Chris Gammell: So, so I just typed Rifa into Google and do you know that Rifa in Spanish translates to raffle in English? That's pretty great. Put one of those in is pretty much like having a raffle inside your, your equipment.

Jeff Kaiser: You guys should get somebody from whoever owns that product line to talk about these caps and talk about why there's such a problem and why on earth they're still made. Like, I don't understand why you wouldn't just discontinue. Like you can still go on DigiKey and buy those, what, PME 271Y capacitors that are like, you know, reaching a hundred percent failure rate as time goes on. Like why there's gotta be a reason about why you can still buy these things new. Like, do they do something that's different or better or way cheaper or like, what is the deal? Cause I, I find it shocking. These things are basically little firecrackers that are in every piece of electronic instrument that ain't.

Chris Gammell: Jeff, tell us how you really feel.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, I mean, it's a huge pain in the ass to have to go replace these things, right? Because sometimes they're buried like deep inside.

Chris Gammell: You're replacing them from like the 80s and 90s and before as well, right? I mean, like that's also, you have a lot of time against, fighting against you as well.

Jeff Kaiser: Of course. Yeah. But I mean, my question is if I buy a reefer capacitor today in 20 or 30 years, is it going to reach the same fate? Is it going to meet the same fate? Like, I think so, but I don't know.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But surely they aren't using the same technology anymore. They look the same. They look the same. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Sometimes the caps though, they look the same and then inside it's just too, uh, surface mount, too ceramic. A surface mount part.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, I mean, these parts have clear epoxy or whatever, some kind of plastic housing. So they can't hide too much in there. It's possible that they change some small thing about the packaging, but like, I want to hear about it. I want to hear somebody explain to me why the new ones are okay. And I want to understand, it's just weird to me that they wouldn't just discontinue this series of what has become like a cursed capacitor. Maybe it's just that the fact that, you know, more than five, 10 years ago, nobody had ever heard about this problem. But again, it's just weird. It's, yeah. Yeah. They're right.

Speaker ?: They're right.

Jeff Kaiser: They're right.

Dave Jones: They're right. They're right now. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: But Kemet still has a, like a PME 271 capacitor, which is like the infamous series that has failed.

Dave Jones: I'm looking at the data sheet now. And it's, um, no. They are metal. Ah, they are metalized paper film. It's so, yeah. So they are actually paper. They're metalized paper. Wow.

Jeff Kaiser: It's crazy. Come on guys. Like it's not the 1900s anymore. Why are we making capacitors out of paper?

Chris Gammell: Glass jars with, uh, with oil in them. The coil of the paper plates.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, anyway, so I, I'm, I've become curious about this just because these caps have become, you know, very, uh, notorious infamous. Yeah. In the past few years. And sure enough.

Chris Gammell: Positive press on the internet. No, no.

Jeff Kaiser: And yeah. I, and, and I, I posted about this on Twitter, uh, you know, with a replace if found always. And Tom Anderson said, well, you know, a lot of people who are restoring equipment, they want to replace like for like. Yes. And I, I get that. But again, it's, I don't know. I, there's a limit to me. Like, I don't want to be going into equipment and replacing things. Like, you know, the, the reality is that anytime you tear into a piece of equipment, at least if you're me, you always break some little tab or some screws, you know, it doesn't quite thread in right. And so, you know, you put a lot of wear and tear on this gear by taking it apart and stuff breaks. And of course you can't get parts. Jeff's breaking my gear, Dave. I haven't, I haven't opened your 8753. Again, it's safe here. You know, it needs to be, it needs to be serviced. It's being held, it's being held hostage. That's what I'm hearing. Well, if you want to replace the caps, you know, I'll send it back.

Dave Jones: And for those who don't know, these are X-class capacitors. They're X-class mains capacitors. There's X and Y-class. What the X-class means is that they're directly across the mains. So they're directly, that's why they explode when you turn them on. If they fail internally and there's a short or some low impedance thing, the energy just builds up in there and they just explode because they're directly across the mains.

Jeff Kaiser: The worst thing is that a lot of times they are on the main side of the power switch. Like that's the real problem.

Dave Jones: Yes. They're on the filter side. Yes. They're, they're before the fuse sometimes. So there's, so you've got the whole, you've got the whole energy of your mains system behind that. So we can pump in, you know, as much energy as your main fuse back at your circuit board.

Jeff Kaiser: And I've, I've heard that the part of the reason they fail is that people will disconnect equipment from the mains and then store it for years and years. And that's definitely true of the stuff I've got. I don't leave stuff plugged in. So it sits for years and a moisture migrates into the package, gets into the paper. That's what happens. Yep. And then when you plug it in for the first time, boom, you know, you get a lot of heating because you've got this lossy stuff that's in your dielectric. That's not supposed to be there. And so, you know, even the caps that I took out of this 35665 I was working on and, and those are relatively new. It's not a super old piece of equipment. They had hairline cracks that you can see even without a microscope. You can see them with your, your eye, uh, had hairline cracks that are the indicator that they would have failed eventually.

Dave Jones: Yes. Because the cracks allow the moisture to get in. Normally they are hermetically sealed, but the plastic actually degrades over time and all the moisture can, I don't know, seeping through the plastic somehow eventually over decades, I guess. But yeah, no, if they're cracked, then yes, you're getting moisture in there and moisture and paper when you've got mains potential between them, they do not mix. So yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: So Kemet, Kemet, we want to hear from you. Why are you still making these things?

Chris Gammell: Yagyo bought Kemet.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, Yagyo. We want to hear from you. Why do you still make these? Why? I don't understand.

Dave Jones: Because some people demand them. It's, it's just like the video I released yesterday, which has been extremely popular. Why are flukes so expensive? Why, why do people still buy a fluke multimeter?

Chris Gammell: Because the market will bear it guys.

Dave Jones: That's because, and because they want to replace once again, like with like.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. So that's, that's why, you know, that's why they still make them.

Chris Gammell: Obviously.

Dave Jones: Is there any other company that makes, please leave it in the comments. If anyone knows any other company that still makes metallized paper X-class capacitors. Paper technology.

Jeff Kaiser: Tell us so that we can not buy them and buy something else.

Dave Jones: Surely they would put not recommended for new designs, right? Stamp on it. Right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The old, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think that's the thing is like, you got to zoom out and look at the actual function that it's trying to solve or the problem is trying to solve. And it's like, there are other solutions there, but.

Jeff Kaiser: I think so. I mean, their X and Y-class capacitors have some unique requirements. Like, I think they're supposed to be self-healing. Yeah. And they're supposed to be, have properties which make them more suitable to be sitting on a mains connection where you, you know, have a safety related concern. But I don't think paper is the only answer because you can buy like what polyester, polyester film. I think you can buy other film caps that are.

Dave Jones: I don't think anyone else makes paper ones. I thought they had gone the way of the Dodo. That's why I was very surprised when you said that they were still paper. Surely they would have changed.

Jeff Kaiser: I wonder, I wonder if they still, do they still use beeswax to seal them? Maybe they're just organic. These are organic artisanal capacitors. Artisanal capacitors.

Chris Gammell: In a small town in the mountains of West Virginia.

Jeff Kaiser: Of Rifa, Rifa, Switzerland or whatever.

Dave Jones: Made with the clear, the clear waters.

Chris Gammell: Rifa mountains. Yeah. Jeff, what are you fixing up? What is that piece of gear you keep mentioning?

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, so it's a dynamic signal analyzer.

Dave Jones: Yep. Same as the one I've got. Yep.

Jeff Kaiser: Yours is a 660, I think. Oh, is it? Right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Dang on.

Jeff Kaiser: I know because I watched your video recently. And I think it's almost identical. Yes, mine's a 660. He's gone off the check. All right. So mine's a 665, I think, which is very similar. It's a dynamic signal analyzer. So it's basically an FFT box. You know, it's a box that unlike a time domain analyzer, like an oscilloscope, it's more of a frequency domain analyzer. Kind of like a spectrum analyzer, except that DSAs typically are for really low frequencies, like audio frequencies. So they typically go down to-

Chris Gammell: So different than a network analyzer as well? Because that's more like time-based?

Jeff Kaiser: So a lot of DSAs will also do network analysis, but usually not like full two-port. Like they'll do through. So you can do like- No, they don't. You know how some oscilloscopes have that? They'll use their source and then you can plug a network in and it'll give you a transfer function. So DSAs have been doing that for a long time. And there's sort of a- Like HP has a legacy. And actually, HP is not the only player. What is it? Stanford Research?

Dave Jones: Stanford Research do them. I used to use an old Rockland one, which I'm sure they've gone the way of the Dodo Rockland. I've also used an Ono Soki, which I think is a Japanese one.

Chris Gammell: To be fair, guys, HP has also gone the way of the Dodo.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway, there's a few old school manufacturers of dynamic signal analyzers, but there's hardly any left. And what ones are left are either, you know, HP or still the Keysight will still sell you one.

Jeff Kaiser: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones: They'll be a PC-based one.

Jeff Kaiser: Right. Which actually makes a lot of sense because- Oh, of course. It's a very computer- It's low-frequency stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Dave Jones: And it's very computer intensive. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Right. And I think part of the reason that I've been interested in these boxes is that everyone knows that the FFT on most oscilloscopes sucks. You know, like oscilloscopes are generally horrible. The only exception I know of is the new tech MSO5 and MSO6. Those actually have a really good FFT. And so I actually started the year needing to work, needing to do a lot of frequency domain stuff. And, you know, I'm an RF guy. Frequency domain has been a part of my career, you know, since I was in college. But the interesting thing is that if you're an RF engineer, usually your tools kind of crap out at like 100 kilohertz. Like, you know, if you have an 8753, the 8753, I think might go down to like 30 kilohertz or something like that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But generally that's about the limit. I think the lowest spectrum analyzer I've seen is like eight kilohertz or something. That's right. And it's like, you know, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: And so typically they have like a DC block, like they won't go to DC. No, that's right. You know, the couplers that they use don't go down to DC. And so I became really interested in this because I realized that I had this hole where anything below like 100 kilohertz, my scope sucked. So I, because I have a, you know, a nice key site scope, but scopes generally are pretty bad for FFTs. And I needed to be able to look below 100 kilohertz because of a specific problem I was working on. And so I started to become interested in...

Chris Gammell: Maybe a haptic circuit somebody works on.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, I mean, actually, haptics are a great example of a thing where you care about things below 100 kilohertz because haptics are generally pretty low in frequency. And so, you know, part of the reason I started collecting this equipment is that I wanted to be able to do some work in haptics and understand haptic systems. And HP back in the 80s, when this equipment was new, the 35665 is actually 90s. So it's sort of the culmination. And there's, I think maybe the 35670 is like the last one in the line. Like, and it was a...

Dave Jones: Oh, I've got one, but it's faulty. Yeah. Okay.

Jeff Kaiser: So those were like the ruggedized portable. The equipment that I have is not portable. Well, it's still...

Dave Jones: Well, they do actually... HP did make a portable version of this DSA. I can't remember the exact number, but it literally, like it is a handheld. It's got an LCD display and everything else. Ooh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: What is the portability necessary for though?

Dave Jones: But it's dynamic range is very poor. Well, portability is important because I've been out in the field where I'm doing shock and vibration measurements out in the field. And oh, yeah, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: So that is the area that I think is the most interesting application of these devices. So if you look at old DSAs, a lot of them have tachometer inputs in the back or they have RPM inputs in the back. And there's some really fantastic app notes and white papers. I mean, HP authored hundreds of really, really, really good app notes. And there's a whole library of app notes for DSAs, particularly when the 3562, which is sort of the flagship. There was, I think, the 3561, which is the first one. These were all designed outside of Seattle, I think, as well as in California. So there's some kind of local interest to the 3561 and the 3562. Those were DSAs that came out, I think, in the early 80s. So they're pretty primitive. I think the 3561 has bubble memory and stuff like that. The 3562 does not.

Dave Jones: But these... It's the 3560A is the portable handheld one.

Jeff Kaiser: Yep. 3560A.

Dave Jones: 3560A. Ooh, yeah. Look at that.

Chris Gammell: Four digits instead of five. Yep. Is that... That's right?

Dave Jones: Yep. Okay. And that is the portable LCD version. I think I used it once or twice back in the day. But its dynamic range isn't actually close to the desktop ones. Its performance is lower. But it's portable.

Jeff Kaiser: So it's interesting that it's clearly a much later unit, but they were kind of... The model numbering is a homage to the 3561 and the 3562. So the 3561 was a single channel, and then the 3562 had an optional second channel. If you buy one on eBay, you have to be careful because all of them have two BNC or three BNCs on the front, but it was an option to get channel number two. Yes. But if you do...

Chris Gammell: There's no circuit board behind the second BNC or something?

Jeff Kaiser: Literally, yeah.

Dave Jones: But you want the second channel. You want the second channel.

Speaker ?: You do.

Jeff Kaiser: If you want to be able to do frequency response measurements, you have to have two channels because it uses the first channel as the reference channel. So you sort of lose a channel.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So that's almost like VNA mode.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, I've just done a... I just did a video on this a couple of weeks ago, and I've linked that in, where you can... Once you enable the second channel, you then get cross-spectrum analysis and, more importantly, coherence. Right. And I've done a video on what is coherence and how to set up a test jig and actually measure the coherence and how that's important. Oh, this is when you were shaking the shit out of those TO220s. And I'm shaking the shit out of those TO220s. I did a follow-up video to that where I explained what coherence is. Because you don't... When you don't learn this... And I titled it, there's something you don't learn in school, right? Because you don't learn about coherence. It's a mathematical concept, right? This coherence. I won't go into too many details. It's in the video if you're interested. But basically, it's something... When you go out, if you... Once you start doing vibration testing and you see your results and you... And they're just garbage. They're just garbage. Because... What? I've got a $1,000 calibrated accelerometer. I've got a $10,000 calibrated charge amplifier. I've got a $10,000 calibrated shaker. Why are my results crap? It's because you didn't set up your jig properly. You didn't measure your coherence. Pebcac.

Chris Gammell: Pebcac is the answer to that one.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's...

Jeff Kaiser: Well, so your coherence is... Isn't that a measure of how related the output signal is to the stimulus signal? So making sure that...

Dave Jones: That is 100% correct. And it gives you a value between zero and one. So a mathematical coherence value of one means that all of your output signal was due to your input signal. So there's no other distortion in your test gear. There's no other external noise. There's no other vibrational resonance in your test jig. There's no, you know, anything else. There's no clipping on your signal. There's no everything else. So, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: So I think one of the things that's interesting about DSAs is that this idea of using them to do shake and vibe and mechanical modal analysis is what they call it. The ability to do this with mechanical systems, I think, is fascinating because I've always been kind of interested in the mechanical side, the electronic side. Here is a piece of equipment which has a tachometer input that's made to be connected to, like, rotating equipment to be able to look at whether bearings are failing because the vibration signature will change. Correct. And there's these great white papers and app notes from the 1970s and the 1980s about how to use this equipment to do this. And I've been kind of slowly piecing this stuff together because this is, again, stuff that they don't teach in school. Right, Dave? Exactly. This is just kind of a little bit of an oddball. But I'm sure that for people in this little bit of the industry, in this niche in the industry, this is important stuff. And there's just so much out there about how to do this. Like, say you've got an enclosure and you want to know what are the resonances of that enclosure. Well, you know, these days, if you were going to do this, you'd probably go to Audio Precision and you'd buy some really expensive AP gear, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to be able to do this. Or you go on eBay and you try to find a 3562A, which essentially does the same thing, right? Or the 35665 is the nicer, you know, later version that has a floppy disk.

Dave Jones: But then you've got to know how to do it. You've got to have the, you know, you can't just, as I said, you can't just plug in your all expensive calibrated sensors and shakers and expect to get a result out of it. It doesn't work like that.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, yeah. I mean, the limiting factor. Also true of most test equipment. Just again, just one level set here.

Chris Gammell: Very true.

Dave Jones: But this is much less tolerant, though.

Chris Gammell: Case in point, the VNA in Jeff's hands versus in mine. Right. Okay. Sorry. Back to D-Roth.

Jeff Kaiser: No, it's very true. This is one frustration I have with a lot of new test equipment. You know, there's a lot of nice multimeters and things that you can buy that have a lot of bells and whistles. But I feel like you kind of need a degree to be able to fully use them. You know, I'll say a lot of digital multimeters that have touchscreens on the front made by, you know, reputable vendors. I buy them thinking, hey, I'm going to have a great time with this piece of equipment. It's so powerful. It does so much. And then you turn it on. You're like, wait a minute. I have to learn how to program whatever its internal language is.

Chris Gammell: Having worked at Keithley, which I'm pretty sure Jeff's talking about. The thing is, like, it's a test equipment company. They didn't know UI at the beginning. They got better at it. But it's, yeah, it's tough. I mean, it's just like a tough thing. Like, it's a tiny screen. All of those are, like, tiny screens. You know, like, even on the scopes, there are these huge 10-inch screens. And then now you're squeezing it down to, what, a 5-inch, 3.5-inch screen? And it's just like, oh, man, it's tough to get it all in there. You know, menu on menu on menu. It sucks. It's true.

Dave Jones: Another area where I've done this in is fluid dynamics as well. It's not just mechanical stuff. The fluid stuff happens down in the, you know, the hertz region. Dynamic fluid flow over products, you know, because I've developed underwater gear. And all that sort of stuff is important. So you have, you're using fluid dynamics and air dynamics as well for wind turbines. And, you know, so anything involving physical vibration, physical shock, fluids, air, all those sort of physical properties. This is where, this is the domain of the hertz and the kilohertz and even the right down to DC. I mean, these things will go down to microhertz, right? They actually, like, if you enter frequency, there's a microhertz button, right? Yeah. And there's a microhertz button for a reason, because that's what these things can bloody well analyze.

Jeff Kaiser: Right, right. And they're really their best for that. I mean, that's really their sweet spot is very, very low frequencies. Because, you know, typically they top out at 100 kilohertz. Like 102.5 for some reason is like the max frequency.

Dave Jones: They'll halve if you turn on the second channel. It goes down to 50 kilohertz, you know? That's right. And the interesting thing about these is that with your oscilloscope, you might be used to having like, you know, 10 times oversampling. So if it's 100 megahertz analog bandwidth, we've got a segue here. By the way, Chris, just setting it up. 100 megahertz analog bandwidth.

Chris Gammell: I can feel it.

Dave Jones: Well, it's in the Reddit list, dude. I bagged where it was.

Chris Gammell: You don't have to tell me where a segue lives, Dave. Come on, man. Year 11.

Dave Jones: Year 11. So where was I? Yes. So the bandwidth, like the sample rate will be 10 times that. So it'll be one gig sample per second. Whereas these things, you get 2.3 times, you know, just like just the minimum Nyquist, you know. And you can actually turn off. Yeah. It all comes out in the math, too.

Jeff Kaiser: You can turn off the anti-aliasing filters, too.

Dave Jones: And have you seen the output waveform on these things? It's not like a pure sine wave often. It's like a discrete step wave. Because these don't bother filtering it because they know that it all comes out in the math, right? When you actually do your sampling and calculations and apply your software and hardware filters, it all just magically vanishes. You don't need, you know, you think this really expensive bit of kit is going to generate a nice pure sine wave test signal. Right. Go and look at it. It's just a step, you know, a step approximation. But it's good enough.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, it just pops out. It's magic.

Jeff Kaiser: I think that, you know, back to what you guys were saying before, you do sort of need to do your legwork to understand how these systems work. Because they really expose you to the warts of FFT. Like, you kind of have to understand how window functions work and what window functions are the right ones versus the wrong ones. And it turns out it matters. You can't just use whatever. You know, you can use hanning or hamming for like 90%. Flat top. But sometimes you're going to get into trouble. And I think that's also for me, I was not a great student in college when it came to DSP. And so I kind of wish I had maybe paid a little bit more attention. Because now suddenly I find myself reading these papers about. And again, the app notes are fantastic. There's so many app notes on this stuff that you can read, you know. And you kind of have to look at the ones for each piece of equipment, too, because they sort of build on each other. So you have to go back to the beginning. Yep.

Dave Jones: I can vividly remember my first day as a contractor working at the military side of things at GC Marconi. First day on the job, you know, I come in and I was hired as a PCB consultant, actually. But first day on the job, it was, oh, can you go over and fix this vibration test rig with this charge amplifiers playing up? And my first words were, what's a charge amplifier? Like, I had no idea. Like, it's charge amplifiers.

Chris Gammell: What is a charge amplifier, Dave?

Dave Jones: I had never worked with. It amplifies charges.

Chris Gammell: I'm actually more curious about PCB consultant. I just imagine Dave walking over and being like, have you thought about using a PCB?

Dave Jones: And it was like, yeah, I learned really quick what a charge amplifier, what a dynamic.

Jeff Kaiser: What is a charge amplifier?

Dave Jones: A charge amplifier actually will amplify a charge signal down. Instead of voltage output from a sensor, you'll get a charge output from a vibrational sensor, like a piezoelectric element or something like that. You put it into a charge amplifier and it takes out a lot of the noise because you're only amplifying the charge rather than the actual voltage. It's not a high impedance voltage amplifier.

Chris Gammell: It's like a current meter, but it's, you know, a bit derivative. Did I get that right? There was a joke in there about integral too. I wasn't sure if I was going the right direction. Anyway, there's a circuit. Go and look, I'm charging. Anyway.

Dave Jones: Anyway, charge amplifiers. Yes. There's a critical element because basically the feedback of your charge amplifier will be an op amp basically with a capacitor feedback element. So instead, so it's using a capacity to integrate. Okay. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: So there's a very high impedance input, I'm assuming on these things. Sounds like op amp territory to me. Yes. It's yes. Especially because it's super low frequency. So op amps are perfect for this.

Dave Jones: But back in the day, the problem we had is that you had to get NPO ceramics, right? These ultra stable NPO ceramics. And they didn't go past a nanofarad back then. But because you're dealing with low frequencies, you need, you know, like the higher the capacitance, the better to convert your charge into, right?

Jeff Kaiser: They should have used a reefer capacitors. Come on. Metalized paper is where it's at. Now, is it because you need to make sure the other dielectrics tend to store charge and stuff like that? Is that the problem? Is that why NPO is...

Dave Jones: They're non-linear. Yes. They're non-linear. So you need the NPO not only stable with temperature, but they're linear with voltage as well. Oh, right. A lot of people don't realize your bypass capacitors, right? You stick in your 10 microfarad, you know, or 100 microfarad bloody little 0603 ceramic in there. They're garbage. It's got a horrible dielection. They're garbage, right? Yeah. There are 100 microfarads in quote marks at one volt, but you take them up near their operational voltage and it just plummets. And they're so non-linear. They're just horrible.

Jeff Kaiser: It's so surprising to me that a lot of modern LCR meters don't accept bias. Like, it's weird that that's not...

Dave Jones: You need a benchtop one for that. You need one of the...

Jeff Kaiser: And you need to spend $30,000. I mean, or get used one. Yeah, several thousand dollars. LCR meters are ridiculously expensive.

Dave Jones: Hang on. I'm just going to have a check. I just bid on a LCR meter on eBay. A benchtop LCR meter.

Chris Gammell: Live updates.

Dave Jones: Live updates. See if I want it.

Chris Gammell: If people were listening live, they could bid against Dave. They could, you know... No! Yeah, what's the listing number?

Dave Jones: Oh, it went for double than what I bid.

Chris Gammell: Ooh.

Dave Jones: Oh, gosh. Well, it went for... Oh, man, no. No, it went for four figures.

Chris Gammell: I can't take the heartbreak of eBay.

Jeff Kaiser: I think any Agilent or Keysight LCR that's fairly recent is a four-figure meter.

Dave Jones: Well, this one's a Wayne Kerr. I have to pronounce that correctly. Wayne Kerr. Is this one of the ones that has a CRT display on it? No, no. This is the modern one. This is the modern one with the color LCD and everything. Fancy-pancy. That sounds expensive. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. They're like five, ten grand brand new or something. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, but I was hoping to get it for a song, but no. I was outbid. Yep. Yeah, it just finished 16 minutes ago, and yep, it was more than double what I bid for it. So there you go.

Chris Gammell: Sorry if you lost it. Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: Sorry if you lost it. And I thought I was paying a pretty penny for it, too. You know, I thought I was, you know. Yep. But no, no. There's always someone willing to pay more for their wanker gear. If you don't know, it's like, seriously, look up Wayne Kerr and the stuff they make, the high-end gear they make.

Chris Gammell: W-Y-N-E? Like Wayne?

Dave Jones: Like in the name Wayne and then Kerr. K-E-R-R. I'm giving away some of my eBay search terms here. I've got a secret Excel list with all these obscure brand names that have all these, you know. Anyway, Wayne Kerr is one of them. Okay, so I'm giving away one. And they make all this high-end, obscure, like, you know, kit. And it's like, and they're still going, I think. I think Wayne Kerr is still around. And I don't know. They might have been gobbled up or something. I don't know. Does anyone know? Can we Google that?

Chris Gammell: I've never heard of it, so.

Dave Jones: No. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Wayne Kerr. No, they make all this high-end gear, LCR meters and all sorts of other fancy, fancy test gear, like real high-end stuff. And yeah, like you've never heard of them, right? It's like, why not? I don't know. But they make all these, you know, 10, 20, $50,000 bits of kit. So, yeah. Nine in, no. The spoke. Eh. Wayne Kerr Electronics Test. They're still around. Yep. Yep. They do impedance analyzers, you know, like this is like the high-end of the LCR type thing. You know, they'll go the impedance analyzers up to 100 megahertz or something. So, you measure your transformers, your inductance. They'll do, you know, they'll do magnetic analyzers. So, you can actually characterize your switching transformers and stuff like that. You can get all the properties, like you hook them up. And, you know, if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it.

Chris Gammell: So, it does like the B&H curve kind of thing?

Dave Jones: It does the curves. It does everything else. It fully characterizes them up to, you know, tens of megahertz and stuff like that. And yeah, they do all these right rules. Do you have any of those?

Chris Gammell: That'd be a cool video to see.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. I know. I've been trying to get one for years. They're so expensive. Like, I'm not going to pay like two or three thousand bucks, you know, for a... Like, I should, maybe. But I don't know. Because I'm actually trying to outfit my lab. I'm willing to spend a reasonable amount of coin to get things like vibrational test setups. I'm trying to get a new thermal chamber at the moment, but I can't. Well, I can. I found one that I really liked. It was really schmick from a French company.

Chris Gammell: That's heavy stuff, though, to like... That means that's got to come in the country.

Dave Jones: You've got to buy it locally and you've got to spend a couple of hundred bucks for the transport fee for the courier to, yeah, actually deliver it. But, yeah, I found this great one I like. And it's like used from this used test equipment dealer. This is not eBay. You know, there's specific like scientific and laboratory used dealers around. And I just got a quote. Oh, yeah, $4,500 plus GST. Thank you very much. It's like, geez, for this used small, you know, little benchtop thing, you know, thermal chamber. I'm going to, geez, well, what does it cost brand new? Holy crap. You know, and it's like I'm finding it incredibly difficult to get something like a thermal chamber. Like that has a decent range on it, you know, that I can do thermal experiments with. So I want to do thermal experiments. I want to do vibrational experiments, maybe acoustic experiments and stuff like this. And I want to set up specific test kits for this sort of stuff. But it's not cheap.

Jeff Kaiser: Sounds like a reliability lab.

Dave Jones: Yeah, kind of thing. I just want to do all your videos that no one else does.

Chris Gammell: You know what it was, Jeff? He watched that Linus Tech Tip video. I did watch that.

Dave Jones: This is where it came from. I watched that Linus Tech. If you haven't heard.

Chris Gammell: He's like, I'm going to go buy more gear.

Dave Jones: Yeah, we talked about this two weeks ago. Yeah, we did. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I have not seen this video. This is just you dreaming about a new lab. You're like, oh, more gear to buy.

Dave Jones: Let's just cover it for Jeff. Linus is basically.

Chris Gammell: Drying the wash on top of a thermal chamber. You're going to be heating up your lunch in the thermal chamber. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like he's basically come out and he said that like he's built or is he renting? I don't know. This huge new building. He's going to turn into a giant lab. And he's basically said, if you're an expert, if you're an expert engineer in, you know, vibrational tests, acoustics testing, if you're, you know, in, you know, thermal measurement and stuff like that, if you're a world expert in that, I want to hire you. And if you don't think I can afford you, try me is what he actually said in the video. He's got, he's putting huge money behind this and he wants like world leading experts to set up this test lab and run it.

Chris Gammell: Jeff, isn't it so sad during the holidays when some people get taken in by pyramid schemes and big plans, you know? Right. Great.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I think it's fantastic. So, you know, yep.

Chris Gammell: Jeffrey, how is, how is Seattle these days? I mean, you're still up in the Pacific Northwest. Yep. How's the, how's the scene? How's the scene in the, in the PMW? They don't say that.

Jeff Kaiser: It's good. It's good. I guess I feel like Seattle was already a pretty introverted place. And I think the pandemic has sort of amplified that. So, you know, I say there have been a lot less gatherings. Certainly. We also sort of followed the letter of the, the cool guidelines, CDC guidelines pretty closely. So there hasn't been a lot, you know, in the maker scene, but we did have, there was a holiday party a couple of weeks ago. And we also had a hardware happy hour meetup last month. That was great. That was at a brewery. You know, one of the challenges we have is that this time of year is so cold and wet that, you know, a lot of places, you know, they have outdoor, but like you wouldn't actually, you wouldn't actually want to use it because it's pretty miserable. It also gets dark at like three 30 in the afternoon here. Oh, no, screw that. Screw that. Like it is 312 right now and the sun is like noticeably setting. Oh boy. So, yeah, but I think things are great. It's, it, I, I love living here. It's a great place to live. I feel very fortunate to live in a city that, you know, it's just got a lot of things of interest. You know, one thing I went speaking of kind of Pacific Northwest Seattle area, there's a fantastic museum in Bellingham, which is a couple hours North of here called the Spark. What is it? The Spark Museum of Electrical Invention. Oh, which is, I believe one of the largest collections of antique electrical apparatus in the country. Like it's the kind of place where you walk in with sort of, if you're me, you have pretty low expectations, you know, you kind of go in expecting that, oh, it's probably like a, you know, kids museum, nothing against kids museums, but you know, you don't expect there to be a lot of rich technical things for an engineer to sort of get into. But yes, there is. And I don't know the full story behind this museum, but it was started by a couple of guys who I think had a lifelong interest in collecting antique radios and antique, not just radios, but like antique electrical apparatus. So, you know, like the, one of the original Edison light bulbs is at this museum. And it's like one of a very, very small number of the original light bulbs. And that's just one example. Like they've got a hundred other things that are kind of like that. Like, you know, things that Benjamin Franklin worked on and, you know, like when you have like the frog legs jumping and stuff like that, like they have that, that kind of gear, like there's a lot of wood and brass and glass and voltaic piles and stuff like that. And, you know, I'm not super knowledgeable about that super early electrical stuff. So for me, it's super interesting to go and look at the stuff.

Chris Gammell: They also have reefer caps in there. We should have the museum of capacitors. Terrible ideas.

Jeff Kaiser: They also have a Tesla coil show, which is, I guess, more for kids and a bunch of other stuff. And I thought it was super cool. And I went in expecting I was going to spend like an hour there, but no, it's like big and it takes a while to, to see everything. But Bellingham is kind of a neat, you know, smaller city in the Pacific Northwest, kind of a cool place to visit. And I want to go back and actually spend more time and look at more of the exhibits. Because I thought the museum was really, really cool. And like I said, I think it's one of, there's only a couple of museums like it in the country. I think there's one on the East Coast that has a lot of similar, you know, antique voltage and current demonstration stuff. But yeah, it's kind of a treasure that's sort of taken away.

Chris Gammell: Do you know what that's called? The East Coast?

Jeff Kaiser: I do not know. I don't know. Oh, okay. Someone from the East Coast will have to speak up.

Chris Gammell: I'm on the East Coast. I'd love to hear about that. I will have many kids museums in my future. So that's probably, I need something to offset it, you know? Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: I also went to the museum. Oh, I have to look up what its name is. The Telephone Museum that's in Seattle, which changes its name on what seems like a fairly regular basis. It's in Georgetown, just south of Seattle, the Connections Museum, which is a museum with a lot of antique telephone stuff. So if you're interested in telephone things, the Connections Museum is another museum that I think is the most significant of its kind on the West Coast. And I think there is another museum like it, I think in Maine, which has a lot of antique telephone stuff.

Chris Gammell: Of course, yeah. You know, we have to have our stuff.

Jeff Kaiser: You know, the East Coast has their stuff. We have to have our stuff because we're on the West Coast.

Chris Gammell: Well, I'm not flying to Seattle to go to these museums, probably. I mean, if I'm out there, maybe.

Jeff Kaiser: Both of them, totally worth it. I think both of them, totally worth coming here to go see. The Connections Museum, especially-

Chris Gammell: 18 hours from Sydney to Seattle. Not a problem. Yep. Yeah, not bad, not bad. I mean, once you're allowed out.

Jeff Kaiser: I would absolutely recommend, especially the Connections Museum is like really close to downtown Seattle. I think it should be like a mandatory visit for anybody interested in tech that comes here. It's not open seven days a week is part of the problem. I think it may only be open on weekends, but totally, totally worth going. And a lot of the people that you run into at the museum are also people you run into at places like Tour Camp. So it kind of feels like they're part of the whole community of hackers.

Chris Gammell: Tour Camp is the conference that I sailed up to, Dave, if you don't remember that. Yes. Yeah, that's the one up in the- Yep, I remember. The Upper Islands.

Jeff Kaiser: So yeah, Seattle is great. Great place to be, except for the getting dark at three o'clock thing. But that'll be over soon. The days are getting longer again.

Dave Jones: Nice. We did have a segue, didn't we, Chris?

Jeff Kaiser: We did.

Dave Jones: You know what? I said that with a segue. Pull it out. What is bandwidth? What is bandwidth on the oscilloscope? And it's-

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah, this was James Lewis.

Dave Jones: Someone who put it on here? You did. I put it on there, yeah.

Chris Gammell: But it's James, you know, actually who used to work at Temet, I think.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, he's got some answers or, you know, I've got questions for him. All right.

Dave Jones: Excellent. So what is the video? He's talking about sample rate and bandwidth, sample rate and bandwidth and how people confuse. I watched a little bit of it. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's the usual, you know, Nyquist and, you know, you better go above Nyquist if you ever want to see something. 10x, Nyquist is usually pretty good, that sort of thing.

Dave Jones: Well, Nyquist is two times, right?

Chris Gammell: Right. Nyquist is two times, but you want to go 10 times to get-

Dave Jones: No, but as I said before, technically 2.3 or is it 2.4? I think. Mathematically, for a Gaussian response scope, I believe, it's got to be a Gaussian response scope. You can get away with only 2.3 times above the bandwidth as sample rate. So if you're sampling, so if your bandwidth's 100 megahertz, you need 230, 230 meg samples per second. And then you're guaranteed not to alias.

Jeff Kaiser: I know for a fact that high speed scopes from some of the big guys are not even two times. Oh, really? Like, you run into this when you're looking at high speed.

Speaker ?: Oh, yeah, no.

Dave Jones: The old school ones are the old school multi-gigahertz sampling scopes. They had a 20 meg sample per second 8 ADC.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, no, that's equivalent. That's equivalent time sampling, though. So there's those. And yeah, I think those have been around for a long time. They have. But even like the new single shot, like real time scopes, if you look at like a high speed 40 giga sample scope for doing like HDMI and DisplayPort testing, they are absolutely not oversampling more than two times for some of the really high speed stuff. And I've talked to their engineers about this. And they're like, oh, yeah, this is, you know, we don't need it for doing. And I think it's, you know, the requirements of doing like mask testing are maybe not as rigorous as if you were using it as like a general purpose tool. And I think that they sort of like, you know, gloss over a little bit of the wiggles in the signal and say it's good enough. But I was surprised by that.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes. Because I do believe it's 2.3 times to reconstruct using sine X on X interpolation to be able to reconstruct the original sine wave. That's the mathematical guarantee. So it's actually slightly above Nyquist. So Nyquist has to do with aliasing, but this is talking about signal reconstruction. So most scopes will run sine X on X interpolation as a default. You can actually turn it off. I think there might be a couple that have alternate ways to reconstruct and like actually different to sine X on X waveform reconstruction. But yeah, if it's 2.3 times, you can guarantee that the sine wave you're seeing on the screen is legitimate with a Gaussian response scope. But if your scope isn't a Gaussian response over your bandwidth, like as in the roll off, then it's a different formula or something. So that's how it works. Don't ask me for more details. But yeah, it's yeah. But yeah, they can get pretty close to that two times and still reconstruct the signal. So it's absolutely amazing. The mathematics behind it. Magic. It just pops out. It's just like I was saying about the dynamic signal analyzers before. You don't need it. You don't even need to generate a perfect sine wave into your test source for, you know, because it just doesn't matter. Once you apply the filtering and the algorithms and everything else and the averaging or whatnot, it all just comes out in the wash. It all just doesn't matter.

Jeff Kaiser: Just average it all out.

Speaker ?: Right.

Jeff Kaiser: Nobody needs to see that. Yeah. That is interesting. I haven't seen the step sine waves, but I'll have to look more closely at that.

Dave Jones: Okay. Anyway, I think Tektronix have an app note on this, like the 2.3 times. Tektronix. Anyway, if I can find it, I'll include it. They've got an app note that talks about it, I think. So I will find it.

Chris Gammell: Jeff, how is the world in consulting these days?

Jeff Kaiser: It's good. I mean, things have been good. It's been a good year, I guess. I feel like last year was tough. People were still trying to figure out, like, how to get things done in this environment. But this year has been much better. So, yeah, it's...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think as people... Like, Kenny, like you said, too, with like Valve, learning how to work remote, it actually benefits hardware engineers who might be remote as well. I mean, everyone's remote by default, basically, unless they're not. And that makes it actually kind of easier to hire consultants, I feel like. Maybe not structurally within a company, but at least from like a functional, logistical, everyday kind of thing, that's a little bit better.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, I do feel like it's getting a lot easier to be remote. And yeah, as a consultant, I think that's an important... It's an important thing. I mean, I'm lucky to live in an area where there's a lot of tech. But like, if I didn't, I think it would be easier now than it has been in the past.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, my new spot, not a lot of electronics people here. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Hey, I'm... This one got the most upvotes on the Reddits. It's the evolution of the EarPod. I'm not into my fruity Apple gadgets, but this is a really cool...

Chris Gammell: This is just a... It's like an MRI scan, right?

Dave Jones: It's like an MRI scan and the evolution of the AirPods. Yeah, it's just really cool. I just like how they've done the... Yeah, the scans. This is just awesome.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Wow. It's very... As you scroll down the... As you scroll down the webpage, the insides, you know, it actually reveals all the stuff inside. It's really fascinating. So, this is like a 3D scanning site, is it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. This is kind of like those scans. I've shown you scans before using... I remember Mhub, where I used to work, they had like a scanner like this. And then it seems like they actually took the layered data, like the layered PCBs that are in there, and then they started to... The magic of this particular website is they did a lot of post-processing on it as well.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: It's very cool. It's crazy with the dot in there.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I'm thoroughly impressed by that. See, this is the kind of tools I'd love to have in my lab. I'm actually trying to get a radiation license at the moment.

Chris Gammell: You're not going to get one of these in your lab, buddy. This is about a million dollars. I know.

Dave Jones: But a basic x-ray machine would be nice if I could get one. But you've got to have a bloody license here to buy one.

Jeff Kaiser: This looks like 3D x-ray. These are CT scans.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I'd say CT scans. That's right. It's just so cool, though. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: See, I don't get the show notes, so I have to use Google. Like, these guys are talking about AirPods. It's been on Reddit. But it's the scan of the month.com.

Chris Gammell: We have a Reddit, Jeff. It's called reddit.com slash r slash DMR. Yep. Nice reminder for the audience as well. When Dave and I are like, oh, it's on the Reddit. Yeah. People can add links throughout the week, and we'll talk about it. So if you want us to talk about it.

Dave Jones: And you can upvote them. And the most upvoted thing sometimes.

Speaker ?: That's right.

Chris Gammell: You can subscribe to that subreddit so that it's on your Reddit. Yep. When you're browsing while sitting on the toilet, you can read what we're reading.

Dave Jones: And every post that goes on the Reddit gets pushed out to the Amp Hour Twitter feed as well.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah. So please don't post anything terrible. Right.

Jeff Kaiser: I've actually got experience using a 3D x-ray like this. Oh, yeah? Valve has one that's really, really nice. And there's a lot that goes into using one of these machines effectively, like how you fixture the part and stuff like that. Yeah. I took a class a couple years ago and got certified. I've got a little certificate that's posted somewhere in my lab.

Chris Gammell: But is there a scan of the certificate?

Jeff Kaiser: Pardon?

Chris Gammell: Is there a 3D x-ray of the certificate?

Jeff Kaiser: That's a flat thing. So I don't know. It wouldn't be that interesting. Nothing is truly flat.

Speaker ?: Also, it's paper.

Jeff Kaiser: True. We could roll it up. Yeah. But yeah, it's a great tool. It's one of those things that, you know, you don't, as soon as you get one, you start thinking of like things to stick in there. Yeah, exactly. And it helps with a lot of things. Like you can use it to do precise measurements of mechanical things. So, you know, normally you think about, oh, you're going to put a PCB in there and you get to see the solder joints and stuff because those are like the high atomic number, like high Z materials. But it turns out that if you have like a single material, like a plastic, you can actually get a pretty good image. It's the dynamic range that's really tricky. So if you have like plastic that also has lead, like solder, that's tricky because now you have a high Z and a low Z material and that really stresses the machine. But if you have just like a low Z material, like plastic, and the entire field of view is this low Z material and then air, which is very low, you can actually get pretty good imaging. And one of the interesting things you can do with some of the more sophisticated machines is that you can bring in like a step file 3D model and then you can compare that with your x-ray data and use it to do like tolerance analysis of like a plastic part, which is interesting by itself.

Chris Gammell: Something that's shot out of the mold. So, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: And it turns out, you know, it's kind of like looking at anything under a microscope. If you look at a plastic part under a microscope, which these 3D x-rays essentially are, they look really bad, you know, because you see all the imperfections, especially when you've got the model sitting there. You know, you see how flat things are not flat because like you said, nothing is actually flat. You get to see voids. You get to see bubbles. You get to see flow. Plastic is really hot.

Chris Gammell: And it cools in funny ways.

Jeff Kaiser: So I actually got to work on something like that this year where we were looking at measured versus modeled comparison of plastic parts, which is something I never would have really thought of x-ray as being the right tool for plastic because it's so hard to image. But it turns out that if you set up the problem correctly, you can actually use it to do some, you know, get visualization in 3D. It's a lot better than using a micrometer or using, you know, an optical comparator or something because you actually get a 3D image of like what's it's called deviation analysis where you can look at measured versus modeled. And you actually get like vectors that show you differences in the software. There's some really expensive, really sophisticated software for doing this stuff. Like volume graphics is one example. And that's another thing that takes a while to sort of come up the learning curve. But as soon as you get it working, you kind of want to stick all sorts of stuff in the machine and image it because, you know, it's like anything. The more you do it, the better you get at actually setting up these comparisons. So these AirPod images kind of remind me.

Chris Gammell: I can't stop scrolling on this page. It is really, really well done. I mean, just like looking at like the fold, like how they constructed the fold and like where the battery lives. Like I didn't realize that the stem was really, I would have guessed that the bulk of the AirPod, you know, so if people don't know what an AirPod is, it's basically, it's like, you know, thing. It's a little white nubs that you see in people's ears as they're walking around their Apple headphones. And the older ones, the original ones had this long stem that came out. And that's where the battery cell is. It looks like a single quadruple A or something smaller.

Jeff Kaiser: It does. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And that's probably what informed that design, which is even crazier. Like that's so cool.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. Yeah. That's, this is really great for like reverse engineering. I would like to see a, someone to recreate the functionality of an AirPod like this with like the multiple microphones and the, you know, the Bluetooth processing that's likely on here and all that stuff. And then, and then stick it to someone's head. But like just do it with dev boards.

Dave Jones: But aren't there 20 million rip-offs of these? Aren't there like. Oh, there are. Yeah. Everyone's doing them.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I'm, I'm, that totally exists. I want to see this with, just with dev boards for each individual component that's in there. And then you like duct tape the whole mess to someone's head, you know, walk around like that, you know. But then, then what you do is you're like, oh, well, this is a class A amplifier. I really just like the sound, you know, it's like a warm, it's like a nice warm sound. Yeah, I need to carry a battery with my car battery with me, but it's worth it.

Jeff Kaiser: It'd be great if they posted the 3D files of these so that you could actually, you know, zoom around them in 3D.

Chris Gammell: But yeah, it's great. I'm, I'm not sure about the machine you use. The one machine, the, that machine I mentioned that I've used in the past, the format was just, it was wonky. It like shipped out of .exe. And then like basically each image, you open this program, this standalone program basically. And then you could scroll in and, and, you know, self-contained in that way. It was very.

Jeff Kaiser: So you're saying it was, it was a virus. Every image was a virus. Yeah, pretty much.

Dave Jones: Where the hell is the battery in the 29N version? It's gone from the stem. It's gone from, it looks like a circular. It's, it's behind the thing, but geez, it's, it's so much smaller volume. So they must've really got the power consumption down because I'm sure they would have had like the same specs in, in terms of like life and stuff like that. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All these things where they get like four or five hours before charging back in the, in the larger scale. Yeah. It's great.

Dave Jones: And they've got to have in, in inductive charging coils too, don't they? These are inductively charged, aren't they? They're not contact.

Chris Gammell: No, usually they're contact charged.

Dave Jones: Are they contact charge? Oh. I thought you just threw them in.

Chris Gammell: So if you guys are on the bottom most one, you can see right before it, well, this is not going to work, but there, there's two gold contact points, but basically because of how the case is aligned.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I see it. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't think they would, I don't think they have room for a coil. The coil would have to be, if you imagine like, you know, Qi charging, you need a decently sized coil. Yes.

Jeff Kaiser: You're going to really, well, somebody's probably thought about using the speaker as the charging coil, right? Yes. All right. Yeah. I want to be on that patent Apple. If you see, if you say it. Yeah. Yes.

Dave Jones: Oh boy.

Chris Gammell: So Jeff, what's, what's in the, what's in the year ahead for you then? More of the same, more kits, more, more Valve-y stuff, more consulting?

Jeff Kaiser: Well, the, the contract for Valve is up, so I, I don't think anything on that front, but.

Chris Gammell: But other people can hire Jeff Kaiser, the legendary engineer, to replace the Rifa caps? Oh no.

Jeff Kaiser: That, that's like, that's like a, you know, a nightmare where you wake up and you're sweating. And yeah, the, the Rifa caps are dancing, dancing around.

Chris Gammell: You don't say no, you just, you just quote them a price. You just quote them a price.

Jeff Kaiser: Uh, well, kits will definitely be a part of my 2021 if I can get parts. So I, I mean, we started on that subject, but, uh, I have to say that I ordered the parts for probably all the kits I'll build next year. I've already ordered them and it'll be, I think, May or June.

Chris Gammell: You'll get to build them for 2023. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, I mean, you guys know how it is now. There's a lot of parts where if you go on Mouser or DigiKey, you do see 2023 as the, as the dates now. So, you know, I was actually talking to a friend of mine about, you know, startups and prototyping electronics. And it's like, I don't know how you would do it if you can't get parts next year. It's like, what are you going to do? Take the year off? Like as a, there was actually somebody on Twitter recently, and I wish I could remember who it was, but basically said, uh, I can't get parts to build hardware. So I decided to go back to software again. And for me, I think that is like the banner tweet of 2021 is like, you know, that's, that's a sign that yeah, hardware engineering is not in a great spot right now because of the supply chain stuff. If people are changing careers because they can't get parts because microcontrollers are

Chris Gammell: on their eighth rev of a board recently, the same board just revved to try and make, just to try and use anything that's in this. Oh, right. Single digits.

Dave Jones: That's, that's geez. We didn't like that. You haven't lived, Chris. You haven't lived. Come on. Single digit revs. Come on.

Chris Gammell: I'm not saying for like functional over time sort of thing. I'm just saying that like, you know, just for, just for part shortages, I guess. Yeah. Maybe that's low. I don't know.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. It's, it's not great. I don't know what's going to happen next year, but, uh, get your orders in now. I guess if you want to build anything next year, make sure you've got your parts on, on order. Uh, bunny just had a post recently about that. Just hoard like everyone. Well, yeah. I mean, that's the, that's the other.

Dave Jones: That'll solve the problem. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: What'd you say about bunny's post?

Jeff Kaiser: Bunny just had a supply chain post, uh, just a couple of days ago. And one of the lines in, in his blog post was about, he had a component that was on a 28 week lead. So, you know, you place the order and you say, all right, I'll wait the 28 weeks, which I think that these days is kind of, that's the name of the game. And then he waits the 28 weeks. And on the 28th week, the supplier says, oh, by the way, we've decided to cancel your order. And again, that's another like 2021 because somebody paid more.

Dave Jones: It's not because they're not making them. It's because somebody paid. It's because someone like freaking Apple came along and said, we're going to, you know,

Chris Gammell: they've already done that a bunch.

Jeff Kaiser: I kind of feel like we're getting to a place where unless you have the parts physically in your hands, you can't really trust that things are going to do not, do not send out a PCB

Chris Gammell: until you have all the parts in your hand. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. We are. I mean, it's kind of, I posted a tweet earlier this year. Like I would love to see the inside of Digikey or Mauser's warehouses. Like it's like subletting space. Is there like a go-kart track or like, you know, what are they doing with all that extra space? Laser tag maybe. Yeah. That's a good idea. Like what, what is, because literally the shelves have to be empty. Like what is there? I mean, the warehouses have to be empty, right? Right. Like there have to be miles of unfilled shelves. But like some, some staggering percentage of their catalog has got to be out of stock right now. Right.

Dave Jones: Somebody, I guarantee you somebody's going to, and this is a challenge, somebody out there write a, a, a, a tool that scrapes the Digikey or, uh, yeah. Or Mauser website. And then processes it. And in like many different ways I can search or there's probably a market out. You could probably pay that as a service. Like, you know, for what Digikey don't tell you, like, show me all the parts in stock for this kind of, you know, like all the stuff Digikey won't show you. I'm sure the data's there. If you just scraped it all. Octopart probably knows.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say there's pretty, they've got a lot of people scraping their site all the time. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That'd be cool. Yep.

Jeff Kaiser: What, uh, I was thinking about this the other day that, you know, it's getting to be where unless you are a tier one OEM, your access to parts, I'm sure you guys have talked about this, like it's getting, you know, unless you're Apple, there's a lot of parts that you're not going to get this year. It kind of worries me as a hardware engineer, like kind of where, where does this go? Does it come back to normal or does it get to be, unless you're working for a big OEM, you just can't be competitive because you can't buy the same stuff. You know, that's kind of where we've been heading for a long time. But one of the things that, you know, crossed my mind this week is like, what if we lost a major distributor in the United States? You know, we've, we've got a few key players in the electronics distributor. They're probably hurting because of the crisis in supply chain. Like what if we lost one of them? What, how much harder would it get to develop electronics in this country?

Dave Jones: I think they might be deemed of strategic importance.

Jeff Kaiser: You think so?

Dave Jones: Like, seriously, I, I, given that there is a focus now on, of course, bringing, uh, tech back to the U S bringing manufacturing back, uh, to the U S and supply chains, uh, there's a lot of political pressure for this sort of stuff.

Chris Gammell: So you're saying that I don't think they're paying attention to the, they're not paying attention to catalog though. Like, I don't know. I think the thing that's going to kill the things that would kill a distributor these days is probably just, they're, you know, switching to a different business model. Like arrow and have net or basically banks. Now they're not like, they don't even hold stock, you know, like, so like they've just opted out of doing that, you know, entirely basically. So not entirely, but you know, effectively.

Dave Jones: I would bet that if say a Chinese company came in and tried to buy, actually tried to buy them. I agree with that. I think, I think it would be blocked.

Chris Gammell: I think that's right. But I think that's a different thing.

Dave Jones: Even though in the scheme of, even though in the scheme of like companies, they're actually not that big a company. Like, you know, they're, they're not like a hundred billion dollar company or something. Right. So they're not that huge in the scheme of things, but they're so strategically, I think they'd be deemed strategically important.

Chris Gammell: I think there would be focus on the, yeah, I think that's, I think that's probably got some truth ringing true there, but I don't think it's, I don't think it's from a monetary perspective. I think it's more of a, yeah. I think it's just, there's sensitivity around electronics in general these days, around that stuff. So yeah.

Dave Jones: The trade wars are coming. No, no one else agree. I don't know. You can't feel the vibe out there that, you know, the US China tensions are getting worse and no.

Chris Gammell: It's just, it's just, there's, what am I going to do about it, Dave? It's just, we're just totally. No, I know.

Dave Jones: But you know, anyway, hoard, hoard, hoard, like there's no tomorrow. Cause that'll solve the problem. People.

Chris Gammell: I've gotten to know new chipset families because of this. That's like you dig through. Oh, you're just like, what's going to work for me or what can I get anything here? You know, I'll take, well, you can't get an STM 32.

Dave Jones: So it's got to try anything. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: So, you know, just keep an open mind in 2022. You know, maybe you'll, you'll use a new obscure part. Maybe you'll roll the dice on something you find in LCSC that like you've never heard of, you know, just, there's a lot of, there's a lot of electronics to be done.

Dave Jones: Do, does I log still make their obscure? What is it? The, the, what is it? Z8? You know, the old. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: I put together. Z8. No, no.

Dave Jones: Z8. I'm talking about the microcontroller.

Jeff Kaiser: I put together a blue ESR kit this year.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Jeff Kaiser: And it uses a, I think a Z8 processor and it's kind of a cool little chip. I presume that it was probably coded in assembly because that's a kind of an old kit. But yeah, somebody pointed that out when I posted photos online, like, oh yeah, it uses a weird old Zilog and you can actually still buy those parts. And I think they're in stock too. So yeah. Let's go back to, we're going to go back to pick a 16F and we're going to go back to Zilog. Zilog Z8. Yeah. And maybe, maybe some like Cypress stuff, some old P socks, you know, some of the older, the 80, 50 ones.

Dave Jones: Can anyone beat obscure one I've worked on a rabbit 2000. Who remembers the rabbit 2000 processor?

Chris Gammell: We've, we've, we've heard about that before, but yeah.

Dave Jones: I've used the rabbit 2000. Nice. It, it, it had like four UARTs in it back when, you know, no microcontroller on the market had four UARTs. Like, you know, that was like, oh, that was the hot ticket. And it had really nice real-time operating system integration with the C compiler. It was all integrated in there. A, it was all, you know, part of it. It was all, you, you, you got your real-time OS and they had that like really easy calls in for a dummy software, dummy, like movie doesn't know about real-time OSs and stuff like that. I was able to use it just fine. So yeah. Rabbit 2000. Can I name another one that I've used? The propeller.

Jeff Kaiser: Have you done anything with the basic stamp recently? Oh, basic stamp.

Dave Jones: Well, what about the, oh, the parallax propeller? The parallax propeller.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Are those still, are they still making those? They're still there? There's a propeller tube. I don't know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're still out there.

Chris Gammell: They're still out there.

Dave Jones: Apparently that was done by one guy. That was one guy's thing. Yeah. He, he, he did the whole lot. I don't, I can't remember his name.

Chris Gammell: Chip and Ken Gracie. Those are the, those are the guys. That's right.

Jeff Kaiser: That's right. Yep. Good memory or quick on the keyboard there.

Dave Jones: Quick on the keyboard.

Chris Gammell: That was actually, that was the old brain ticker guys. That was the old brain ticker.

Dave Jones: And that was a multi-core processor. That actually, I think had eight. I think it had eight, eight cores. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Hence the name, because the cores were a propeller. They were like cogs and the outside of a wheel or something. That's right. That was the, uh, where analogy.

Jeff Kaiser: Yep. That's exactly right.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Jeff Kaiser: And they had their own, uh, programming language called spin. Spin. Yes. That's right.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Jeff Kaiser: The theme.

Dave Jones: Oh, hilarious. Yep.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, now that we can buy those parts and not anything else, I guess we're going to see a lot of parallax propeller designs in, uh, in 2020, uh, bring back the basic stamp.

Dave Jones: I can remember when that was the basic stamp was the Arduino of the day. Yes. Absolutely. It was huge. It was the Arduino of the day because you didn't need a programmer. It, it had the bootloader in there actually pre-programmed in and you can hook it up to a serial port. Right. And then you could just program it. You could dump your program in via the serial port. Exactly. Like you do with the, uh, do we know these days? In fact, I think the Arduino might've spawned. Like the idea for the Arduino might've spawned from the basic stamp, like an, an improved version or something, or, you know, like C version of it.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Dave Jones: In, in the, in its concept in having a bootloader built in and it's, yeah, you didn't have to buy a programmer. This was back in the days when an actual programmer for a pick micro cost a fortune.

Jeff Kaiser: Right. Yeah. They still do, by the way. Oh, right. Have you bought a J link recently? Yeah. Yeah. Even, even arm programmers, if you get the good ones, they're still going to set you back. Uh, but yeah, I remember amateur radio magazines, like what, what was the, what was the magazine? Not amateur radio, but shoot, what was the embedded magazine? Oh, circuit seller. Right. Oh, circuit seller. Yeah. Yeah. Embedded magazine. Like they used to have tons of basic stamp projects. Like, you know, all, yeah. It was like the, the bad old days, I guess. I mean, it was nice at the time, but compared to what we've got today, programming and basic seems pretty, that's pretty tough. Yeah. Not great. I'm sure there's still people who are big supporters of what pick basic and, you know, there's probably still folks developing with that stuff. Yep. But, uh, these days it seems pretty old fashioned.

Speaker ?: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Well, whatever gets the job done these days, that's what we're really, that's what we're getting at. Whenever you can buy parts. Yeah. Yeah. True. True.

Dave Jones: Well, I think our amp-house well and truly up.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I was going to say, uh, I think we should, uh, wish you a happy holidays and, uh, see you next year here.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, thank you so much for, uh, having me on the show and maybe next year you can tell me, I'm going to have, ask for at least 24 hours. Yeah. Way so funny. You're a consultant. It's fun. What do you got to do? It's a consultant.

Chris Gammell: It's just, you know, it's just time and money, you know, just that kind of stuff.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, thanks for having me. It's great to talk to you guys as usual. Awesome. Happy holidays. Happy new year. All that. And I guess I'll talk to you, uh, next year. All right. Bye. Thanks Jeff.

Dave Jones: And, uh, are we going to have another show this year, Chris? I don't, are we? Is it planned? Or is this it? I don't know, dude. I don't know. We'll see. No idea. Anyway, catch you next time.

Dave Jones: Bye.

Dave Jones: Bye.

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