#578 – Histogrammic or Histomagraphical

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Houred Podcast. Released February 20th, 2022. Episode 578. Histogramic or histamographical.

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

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. What's up, nerd? I think I'm officially in Hollywood now, Dave. I have a sandbag holding down. I actually bought these sandbags probably two years ago, like the actual thing to hold sand, so I can hold down stands, like my microphone stand. And this last weekend, I finally bought some rocks and I put some rocks in today. I have a cantilevered microphone stand, so I am in the big leagues now.

Dave Jones: Because before this show, we were just talking about renovation stuff and I'm thinking, what? He's getting into sandbags and renovating.

Speaker ?: What?

Dave Jones: Okay, right. So you've got, yeah, a little sandbag.

Chris Gammell: Hold down a microphone stand. Yeah, right. Got it. Pretty much a professional photographer.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, what? So you did it yourself without buying like a fancy-pancy, you know, audio full bag for like 200 bucks or something, right? No, you don't need to.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, apparently you can just buy like reinforced like canvas bags.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and they actually have little like caution labels on them so you don't kick them. And yeah, they're great. So now it's just a bag of rocks. Caution labels, yeah. Yeah, just a big bag of rocks. That's all it takes. Innovation.

Dave Jones: Do you actually pay for the rocks or did you just go and collect them?

Chris Gammell: I did have to pay for the rocks, yeah. The rocks that I have are currently being used as a path, so I wanted to keep them in that employ. Got it. Because I could have found a neighbor that has some rocks in their paths, but you know.

Dave Jones: Well, the audio is certainly sounding more solid.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. It's like really weird.

Dave Jones: Are you still using that Linux rubbish that we got? Linux box.

Chris Gammell: Pop, pop, pop, pop last week. I think it was. I think it was actually the, it was not the driver. It was the hard drive that was plugged into the same USB port next to it.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: So I think the traffic might have been a little, I don't know how that works.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because that is not an audio. Like that is, like you'll get that if you've got an analog system, like, you know, current pulses from the drive will be gold, gold, gold.

Chris Gammell: Like the noise from the switching converter or something like that.

Dave Jones: No, this is not it. This is digital dropouts caused by, there's just so much bandwidth being chewed by the hard drive, right?

Chris Gammell: That's right, yeah. Like, yeah, packet loss, I kind of think about it. Yeah, yeah. I may be wrong about that.

Dave Jones: I think the terminology is wrong because you don't, well, no, actually in streaming audio, that might be right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm still signed up to get a Luna, which is a thing that Great Scott Gadgets is making. And it's a Kickstarter that is on the way in theory. All things come with an asterisk these days.

Dave Jones: And what is a Luna?

Chris Gammell: Luna is the brainchild of Kate Temkin. And now being made by Great Scott Gadgets, it's like a USB analyzer, like a low cost.

Dave Jones: Oh, I saw it. Yeah, yeah. I think we've talked about this before. Yep.

Chris Gammell: I think so. Yeah, yeah. So that's still on the way. I think I'd be able to look at the packets though.

Dave Jones: No, it's a USB protocol analyzer. Yeah, I've got one. It's one of those expensive ones. A company sent it in for mailbag.

Chris Gammell: Oh, interesting.

Dave Jones: Basically, it's one of those things is if you need it, you need it. You know, it's like- That's right. Yeah, yeah. What is the price? All right, I'll pay it. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. You'll pay anything because you're actually developing. Yep. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I think, you know, I'm actually just started, I just got an ESP32 S2, which has a native USB driver in it. Hang on. Hang on.

Dave Jones: You physically got an ESP. You physically got, oh no, this is ESP. I thought, no, I was thinking, you physically got an STM32. How is that? Oh, God, no. Oh, no. Nobody gets those.

Speaker ?: What did you do?

Dave Jones: Pay $1,000 for it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. Right. ESP. No, this is ESP32 S2. And yeah, actually, so I have one of the breakout boards just from Espressif. It actually runs CircuitPython as well. And so really fast, really fast prototyping and stuff like that. But the cool thing about it is it's got, you don't need a USB to UR converter anymore, which is nice. Right. It actually is built in. So yeah, lots of fun stuff coming out from Espressif too. I think they have.

Dave Jones: No, yeah, but boo-hoo. I want serial.

Chris Gammell: Oh, you can still access the serial port. I mean, you'll need a, so like there is a USB to serial internally. Oh, okay. I can, yeah.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Chris Gammell: There you go. All right. Fun parts.

Dave Jones: This, like on the Reddit this week, it's all about bloody ASICs and FABs and ASICs and FABs and ASICs and FABs and ASICs and FABs. What the? Yes. Oh, do we have to talk about ASICs and FABs?

Chris Gammell: Some of this, I don't think we talked about last time, but I was actually, you know, a bit cynical, but also a bit excited. TI is building new FABs. That's great. They had previously kind of outsourced some of their production. They still had some of it in the US, but they also, you know, use TSMC like everybody else. I think this is just kind of everybody, like we talked about last week, everybody trying to get some of that US money. Right. Oh, yes.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yes. The Uncle Sam money.

Chris Gammell: That's right. But I think also just spreading it out a little bit more. It'll be interesting, you know, like five, 10 years from now, are we going to be seeing news items of like, well, actually we feel like capital expenses are too high and we're going to outsource it again to, you know, a foundry. I don't know. We'll see how long the memory of this lasts and if we're willing to keep investing.

Dave Jones: Right. So TI borrowing the money for this, is it a gamble or do they just have so much, they're sitting on like a throne of cash that they want to, you know, spend.

Chris Gammell: I think anyone who's not financing this right now would be an idiot. Basically free money right now. Right. But, but this is all, you know, this is going to be for, it's just through 2030. Right. So like, right.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Chris Gammell: This is in theory, a longer play.

Dave Jones: Well, yes. They say it's expected to generate five to six billion in revenue annually for the company once it's fully operational. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think it's just upgrading their fabs too. Like they have, I think they still have some 200, 200 millimeter plants, but they're going to switch it to 300 millimeter. Interesting that you still don't see stuff going past that. You know, the 450 is just not really a thing.

Dave Jones: It wasn't a thing. Didn't turn out to be a thing.

Chris Gammell: And yeah, some of it is just like the process stability across a, a wafer that big is, is really tough.

Dave Jones: I was going to say, yeah, there, there has to be come, there has to become a point where the. Orthography stuff and the physical, you know, manufacturing of the ingot and everything else. And, you know, and like the sawing wafers that thin and wide, you know, like it's, it's got to reach a point where it's.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think of also like, I mean, so my, my old, my old gig and dry edge, like some of it was just like trying to get like a uniform, basically like a cloud of plasma across the whole thing. Yeah. Right. That's like part of, even on a 300 millimeter stuff. And, you know, they play all these different tricks to, to do that sort of thing. So just trying to get that process conformity is really difficult. And I think that's part of the reason, but I think all, you know, some of the stuff you said as well, and I'm maybe the, maybe the efficiency gains aren't as much as they need for the cost benefit, you know?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And then you would need all new equipment to handle, physically handle and probe fabs that big. And then your test jigs get more, everything. The robots that carry things. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Even carrying it would,

Dave Jones: carrying a container and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's good.

Dave Jones: There was this fascinating thing on Twitter, which I retweeted. Why is everything? Why were all computers 80 columns? Why were they 80 columns of text? Why is it still 80 columns as text is the de facto standard. And if you get like, yeah, so this Twitter thread that I put down, we'll try and link it in. I can't remember who it is, but they go through the, like the chronological history or the reverse chronological history of 80 columns and where it goes back to. And if you go back far enough, it goes back like, like 500 years or something. Like it's crazy. But at one point, this is why.

Chris Gammell: I didn't know about the computer back then.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, but it eventually makes its way back to punch cards because IBM in 1912 or something made 80 column punch cards. Right. But the thing that reminded me of this is that those punch cards, the reason that there were 80 columns is because that's what they could reliably fit onto that width of card. But why did they use that width of card? It's because they had to fit into the post, the existing postal bins that I think the postal service or something used because they didn't want to upgrade all the storage bins. So they wanted them to be the same width. So that's, that's the width they made the things. And, you know, it's like the old why are train tracks the exact width they are? Because it comes from a horse's ass right back in the Roman chariot days, because they, you know, it's actually two horses asses wide or something. And then, you know, that, that's how they, and the ruts, that they, that the carriages used to go in, they were two horses asses wide, you know, and that's how our train lines became that wide as well. It just, you know, it just carried through the century. Wow. And it's a similar thing with the.

Chris Gammell: See, that's why you got it. You got it. You got to think about this before you go and decide that you're just going to use two horses. Were you thinking about the downstream effects? How's it going to impact trains and their efficiency?

Dave Jones: 500 years old. Yeah. Yeah. What if, what if they made these mechanical horses in 500 years time that, you know,

Chris Gammell: horsepower? Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I thought that was absolutely fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. It's because they, they chose that width because of the physicals, just, just the storage bins they were using and, you know, and at the fabs, it'd be the same, like the physical bins and storage and handling systems. They're all designed for, you know, like, yeah. Yeah. And human,

Chris Gammell: human dimensions as well. Right. I mean, like some of it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: That is a interesting segue. I have been, so I've been searching for new books and I found a new book and it's been pretty good. It's called dealers of lightning. I may have heard about it from dealers of lightning, Xerox park and the dawn of the computer age. And so it's all about that timeframe. So like late sixties through the seventies into the eighties, basically the heyday of park, all of the, yep. All the UI, but just generally, I mean, like I really didn't, I still don't know. I'm only a couple of chapters in, but it's really interesting. Just kind of that mainframe day moving from the mainframes and the time sharing into the individual, you know, personal computer days. It's a, it's a very interesting history. A lot of names. I don't know either, but I probably should like a lot of people are probably screaming at their podcast player right now. Like you should know all this stuff. You should know Douglas Engelbart. I should. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, it's like he's, he did the mother of all demos, you know,

Chris Gammell: what is that?

Dave Jones: Oh God, come on. Wash your mouth out. Douglas Engelbart. The, he did in the 19, when was the mother of all demos? 1968, 19, here we go. I'll give you, hang on. 1968.

Chris Gammell: Is this a video demo? This is like a, I may have read about this and I've just forgotten. I'm also reading it before I go to bed. And so I often forget stuff.

Dave Jones: It's in, it's in 1968. Right. And he, and he demoed everything, pretty much everything we had today. He demoed video conferencing, networking, networking, the mouse, graphical user interfaces, hypertext language, the hypertext types, you know, some sort of markup language. This was all demoed in 1968.

Chris Gammell: Right. But this actually, I don't think that was at park. I think he got hired into park.

Dave Jones: He did. I think something like that. Yeah. This was at another think tank. This was at another government. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think this is at Berkeley computer company or something. Something like that.

Dave Jones: The, the augmentation research center.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: SRI.

Chris Gammell: SRI. Okay, cool. Yep.

Dave Jones: SRI, which is another, which is yeah. The Stanford Stanford research Institute.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Right. Actually, our guests last week used to work there as well.

Dave Jones: So there you go.

Chris Gammell: Michael Corr was a engineer there at one point. Anyway, mother of all demos. Yeah. Mother of all demos, dude,

Dave Jones: watch it.

Chris Gammell: Engelbart's law, the observation. There's actually a video of it.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. I got to learn about this some point. How did you learn about this guy? I don't know.

Dave Jones: Like I, I, I, cause I was into, cause I'm in, into computer history. I was really into it like 20 years ago. And I read all the book, you know, all the books on the history of, you know, park and all the early. Wait,

Chris Gammell: wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you going to have a book recommendation now, Dave?

Dave Jones: I, would you like me to have a book recommendation?

Chris Gammell: Recommendation. I would love to have a book recommended. Usually you go books, but like, this is, I mean like, so it is a very interesting period in history. I'm comparing it mostly. So first off, I do not love the writing in this book. It's like super wordy and like needlessly. So like the guy's trying to prove himself with words, like a dollar words when a 10 cent word would do. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm getting through it. It's fine, but it's just like, all right, tone it down a little bit, Michael, but the content is great. I'm comparing it to the, the book that Jeff Kaiser had recommended to me. The, uh, Oh, what is it called? The, the one about bell labs, the bell labs book that we've talked about many times on here. So,

Dave Jones: okay.

Chris Gammell: If you don't remember it, go and listen to all of amp hour.

Dave Jones: All right. I'll give you a book. I'll give you a book recommendation. All right. Hack it. Hackers heroes of the computer revolution by Stephen Levy. Oh, came out in 1984. Jeez. Okay. I read it in probably 91, maybe something like that. Um, I don't think I read it. Yeah. Hackers heroes of the computer revolution, Stephen Levy. So if you want, yeah, all right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The hacker culture, the hacker ethic at MIT, and stuff like that. It's about how they all, I mean,

Chris Gammell: they keep talking about the engineers engineer. And, uh, I, I, as they talk about that, one of the hardware guys they're talking about and, and how like all of the ROM was built with like, with diodes. And so they actually, when they reprogrammed the OS, they had to like de-solder diodes. And it's just like, Oh my God. So yeah, I would not have made it in those days, Dave. I'm barely making it these days, but, uh,

Dave Jones: right. Okay. So yeah, these are the days of, you know, leave, uh, Felsenstein and others. Is he still around? Lee Felsenstein. He was the, he, he did the, uh, soul computer. You know, this is the days of the early home brew computer club that Steve Wozniak went, went to the first, you know, uh, thing of the first, uh, meeting of the,

Chris Gammell: yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Famous. I think, I think the part of the book is still out of that. Oh yeah. No, there's, oh yeah, no, that was like in the mid to late seventies, the home, the home brew computer club, but there's start. Yeah. There's history before that. Yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely fascinating.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So I'm, I'm like where they're like moving from the SDS nine 38 to the SDS nine 40. That's like the, uh, the big mainframes that they were building and stuff like that. It's just,

Dave Jones: yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Looking at some of these photos, they're just insane. Oh, these are like the room. It's got photos as well.

Dave Jones: Okay. Right. Yeah. Nice. Yep.

Chris Gammell: So lots of history there. Uh, yeah. So like I said, very interesting period in history. I had never really done it. Definitely some personalities, not, but not as strong of person. And that's the thing I was thinking about with the bell labs book is not as strong as personalities because like, you know, like Shockey and Bardeen and, you know, like they're just like, and I forget the manager there that was at bell labs that, this famous, uh, you know, like all of the, you know, they just, the big historic names. I just don't know them from history class basically, or physics history class, I guess. So it's just kind of like in a different era, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, I, I, a ton of them, like probably the vast majority, almost all of them of the early names in, in the computer business and all that sort of stuff. They're all just like lonesome nerds, right? They're all just like, yeah, they didn't, you know, they weren't, they weren't Steve jobs. Like, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It was, yeah,

Chris Gammell: it does sound like there's a lot of, you know, like that was the lonesome surprises me because it doesn't seem like they could possibly do much on their own. You know, it's just like, no, no,

Dave Jones: but they're either hanging out at the lab or something like that, you know, and they would, and they would go to these home, they would go to these homebrew computer meetings, but they weren't, you know, media personalities. Like they didn't, you know, yeah, yeah, they weren't, you know, they were sort of like knowing in their little tiny inner circle. And, you know, that was kind of it, but, yeah. Got it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, I guess if they didn't hit it big either, right. They, you know, Oh no,

Dave Jones: no. Yep. Unfortunately, a lot of them like, Oh God, I can't believe I forgot his name that sold the rights to MS that became DOS for like $80,000 or something. So, and that, that, um, what made. Yeah. Anyway. Yes. I can't believe. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: How would you know in the time, you know, like how would you, you don't, you don't, of course.

Dave Jones: You know,

Chris Gammell: I will say if, so obviously I'm reading about this stuff now, if people are listening and they're like, you know, there's this pioneer of computing history still around, interested in talking to people, love to talk to them. You know, this is not, we've had bill heard on the show. Bill's a little bit later in this process. Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Who did bill introduce us to?

Dave Jones: He's, he's still a young whippersnapper bill heard.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Unfortunately, no more Douglas Engelbart. He's not still around. Lee Felsenstein. I'm looking at, Oh, he's currently 76.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yep. And that's the other thing. So like I was, I was telling Dave about this the other day we were chatting and like, I was like, Oh yeah, you know, I'm reading this new book. I'm really excited. We should like try and talk to people. I was like, Oh yeah, this is like 45 plus years ago when they were, most of the people, you know, they're in their twenties and thirties. I'm like, yeah, this is like, they're all retired. You know, like they're very certainly not, well, I'm not even all retired, but like they're getting on in their careers. They're probably at retirement or should be retiring, you know, like sort of thing. So, uh,

Dave Jones: yeah,

Chris Gammell: at least relaxing, you know, relaxing and doing electronics for funsies. That's what I'd hope. Right. Well,

Dave Jones: what's the official retirement age in America?

Chris Gammell: Uh, there isn't really like an official one, but it's like, it's usually, it's usually pegged to like when social security kicks in. And so the three ages are 62, 65, 70. And so you get different amounts of the pension, effective pension, uh, depending when you, when you decide to, when you file for retirement. Got it. More is later. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Uh huh.

Chris Gammell: But, oh, I found, I will be going to the computer history museum finally.

Dave Jones: Oh, excellent.

Chris Gammell: Yes. I'm very excited about that. Yep. If all goes well, I will be there, you know, health wise and such. Maybe I'll be learning more about this stuff. Yeah. Maybe I'll run into, uh, some, some of the, the big names just mulling around. I'm sure, I'm sure they just hang around there all the time. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I made it, you know, as, as, as the kids come in, I built this. And the kids. I mean, it happened at the train museum.

Chris Gammell: Why not at the history museum? Mommy,

Chris Gammell: that means scary. He's trying to tell me about computers.

Chris Gammell: How would I just like bring a microphone and just like, look for someone who's a little bit older and I'm just like, Oh, what is, what did you invent on the computer? Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I can remember going there. It was great. Yeah. I, I, I walked, I took the train and then I walked like, I don't know, because it's, it's in the U S I walk like five miles or something to get there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I remember,

Dave Jones: Oh, screw taking the bus. This is too hard. I'll just walk. So I just walked to the computer history museum. Anyway, very cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I don't think the, the train drops you off too close.

Dave Jones: Computer history. Good stuff.

Chris Gammell: Well, I'll have more to report later as I read more of this book. And as I visit the museum.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Well done.

Chris Gammell: I will also be, I will remind people I'm, I'm supposed to be going to embedded world. Assuming that happens. It'll be in Nuremberg, Nuremberg, Germany in the third week of June. So if you're going to be there, give me a shout. I got rescheduled for March.

Dave Jones: This is a corporate junket, obviously.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. This is a big one. This is like a mini electronica, basically embedded focus.

Dave Jones: So yeah,

Chris Gammell: yeah, I'll be at that and ready to mingle.

Dave Jones: You'll be, so you'll be on the stand, will you? You'll be man in the stand.

Chris Gammell: Probably. Yeah. At least part of the time I'll be around. Yeah. A stand.

Dave Jones: Cool. Well, no, it's not because anyone who's been on a stand knows how. Yeah. It's tough. How painful it is.

Chris Gammell: Comfy shoes and a lot of hand sanitizer.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: And eat. Otherwise you'll like just faint or something because you've been standing up all day and it's,

Chris Gammell: you know, it's never been a problem for me in the past, Dave. Right. Okay. I just, I like, I like eating quite a bit.

Dave Jones: So I don't know. I thought you were looking pretty skinny these days. I mean, I've,

Chris Gammell: I walk a lot now,

Dave Jones: but right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: I eat a lot too. So doing fine. Doing fine in that, in the energy realm, the energy realm.

Dave Jones: Got it. Speaking of standing up, I'm, I'm contemplating getting one of those newfangled standup desks.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're, you're right at the bleeding edge of the trend. I'm about 20 years. Of the trend. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Is this, is this just for the computer desk or for the, the, the bench as well?

Dave Jones: Oh no, this is just for the computer. Got it. Got it. Thing. So, of course I asked Twitter if, you know, of course, of course. And, and, and the poll was that only, I think about 10%. I have to link it in. Only about 10% of people actually said, Oh yeah, it was completely life changing. I use the standup desk all day. The majority of people said, Oh yeah, it's okay. But you wouldn't use it all day, but you wouldn't stand up all day. Yeah. So if you are going to get one, you get one of the hydraulic preset ones so that you can just go, Oh, I'd rather stand up for, you know, an hour or two. So you hit the button and the whole thing just raises up to his preset height and Bob's your uncle. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, there's another thing you could do. So I am currently sitting in a drafting chair, so it's, you know, higher up off the ground. And so basically I have my desk set at a standing desk height. My chair is much taller. When I'm ready to stand, I get off the chair.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: That's another way to do it. Oh,

Dave Jones: right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: It's a little less sturdy to be honest. I mean, it's not as, as useful that way, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. So yeah, maybe, maybe I'll give it a, maybe I'll give it a try. I don't know. See what happens. Yeah. I mean,

Chris Gammell: I would recommend if you, if you do get one, I have a man, you've seen my manual benches that have like a crank on them. Yeah. I don't crank does not happen that often. I had a motorized one at my workspace at M hub and that I got into using more.

Dave Jones: So yes, I know. I definitely get the motorized one. Cause you don't want to dick around. Like, cause you, like you set it properly. Right. And then you preset the height. So it's perfect. So all you're going to do is push the button, wait, no, 10 seconds. And it goes up and it's the perfect height. You don't have to dick around. You don't have to, you know, don't have to do.

Chris Gammell: That's a fancier one that I had. Mine was just up, down. Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right. No, no, I want, and everyone recommends ones with the presets.

Chris Gammell: So yeah. Cool. Yeah. I mean, that's interesting.

Dave Jones: Yep. Oh, going back to books for a minute. Oh, once again,

Chris Gammell: going back to books for a minute,

Dave Jones: going back to books for a minute. I, I was going through my bunker the other day and I found my counterfeit copy of the Bible. Oh, and yeah, it was, I posted some photos of it on Twitter and all the pages of like, yeah, I don't know if it was like that when I got it, I'd have to maybe search for some, I was going to do a video on it when I got it, but I'd never got around to it because they sent me a counterfeit copy and a real copy. Right. So I could see the difference and all the pages of like turned yellow and like, like the edges of the page. They're all just like all these multicolored, almost like rainbow colored pages in this counterfeit copy. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So what is the recommendation here? Is the recommendation to buy a counterfeit copy of the art of electronics?

Dave Jones: Cause I don't think we should recommend it. That is not the recommendation. No, it's yeah. It, it does not last. If you buy your counterfeit copy, I suspect it may not be.

Chris Gammell: How did you know it was counterfeit? It actually looks. So this is the third edition too.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes. It's the third edition. You can tell I, because when they sent it to me, it had counterfeit on it, but, but you can tell like, like the pages just like the pages aren't neatly aligned. The papers thinner and cheaper and crappier. It just makes you screen like, you know,

Chris Gammell: is it counterfeit or like I've seen like, like, yes, it's actually low cost additions. No, no, no,

Dave Jones: no, that is not, it's not an official low cost edition. It is a completely ripped off version. Yep. Interesting. And yeah. And it just uses like, like variable quality paper. Like that's why you can see it all different. Like the papers just like, they used whatever paper they could get and they shoved into this thing. And it's like multiple different types of paper. And it's, they've all just like faded and colored differently. And, and, and you can tell like some pages aren't neat, neatly aligned. They're like slightly askew and the print quality is not as good. And you can really tell. So, yeah. So there you go. Don't buy a counterfeit copy. The art of electronics is no good. They're garbage.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay. All right. What else we got? I was waiting for a new book recommendation. I guess I'll have to wait. I'll wait a little longer.

Dave Jones: What? I already gave you a book recommendation.

Chris Gammell: You said another recommendation. Okay. Anyways. Oh,

Dave Jones: well, no, I always said we're going back to books. I didn't say I was going to give you another recommendation. Good point. I'll give you one recommendation a week. How's that?

Chris Gammell: That's fair. Yeah. I'll take it. All right. Mark it. Okay. All right.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of bum deals. Okay. Arm apparently is not going to NVIDIA.

Dave Jones: We predicted this, didn't we? We thought it wouldn't happen. I don't know if we did. There was a good chance. I think we were erring on the side of, well, it may not happen.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Let's just call it that we predicted that wasn't going to happen. Because yeah. Sure. For those who don't know, yeah, there was too much regulatory issue because companies, you know, there's so many companies that use Arm, which are competitors to them. So if they own Arm, then they can technically get access to their competitors' IP. Right? And it's like, ugh.

Chris Gammell: Probably not directly IP. Yeah, I wouldn't say directly.

Dave Jones: but you know, like it was just.

Chris Gammell: But they could definitely influence. They could unfairly.

Dave Jones: They could unfairly. Oh, sorry. The fab's a bit busy this week. We're going to have to delay your production a week. And another week. Sorry about that. Oh, oops. Oops. A machine broke down this week. Oh, we won't be able to deliver those. Oh, you wanted your new iPhone. That would, that would be the foundry.

Chris Gammell: That would be the foundry who's saying that. This would be more like, uh, we, uh, we're delivering, you know, the arm H 5,500 or whatever new crazy name they have for a thing. Right. But, uh, well, for you, it's going to be a little bit more expensive.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, you've got a bug in that thing. Oh yeah. We'll work on it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I don't know, but they're going to IPO instead, I guess, you know, whatever. I don't know. Uh, who cares? Arm is, uh, in, in weird places right now. You know, this is, so they were bought by a, people don't remember. They were bought by SoftBank.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: You know, a long time ago. And a long time ago.

Dave Jones: Hang on. Hang on. If they're going to do an IPO, that means they're a public company.

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Dave Jones: They better be careful how many shares they release. Otherwise, in theory, couldn't they just come along and buy every share?

Chris Gammell: That's right. Well, I think, I think normally in that case, uh, the price would go up so much that it wouldn't be worthwhile. Cause as I start, they wouldn't be able to buy enough at once to be able to become a majority. If you offer enough, people will sell. Right. Right. But that's the idea is that it might not be worth. It'll be probably priced. Okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But then you're relying on the market to control the sale. And well, sure.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Yeah. I think there's still ways that they could exert influence in that way. No doubt about that.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: But, uh, I didn't really care about this purchase myself. Yeah. No,

Dave Jones: I didn't care either. No, zero.

Chris Gammell: This is, this is many, many steps above my head. uh,

Dave Jones: Oh,

Chris Gammell: until it's,

Dave Jones: by the way, we missed a segue. We missed it. Like we're talking about the art of electronics and we missed the segue, dude, we need to hand back our, uh, professional, uh, podcasting credentials. I mean, you know,

Chris Gammell: I actually just don't know what you're, uh, what you're talking about here.

Dave Jones: It's in, it's in the Reddit list. It's in the Reddit list. Look, where is it? Number. I don't know. It's about ninth down. That's right. The community contributed solutions. Community contributed solutions to the art of electronics. If you don't know the book comes, there's a companion student thing for it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. This is, this is actually for the, I, well, there's also problems throughout the text as well. Yes. Yes. Yes. There is. So I think, I think this, this set of solutions is for the problems in the text because there's no solutions guy. Oh, okay. So if you wanted to go and check your work, you wouldn't be able to.

Dave Jones: Got it. Yeah. Okay. So,

Chris Gammell: so yeah, if people are listening and they want to contribute, uh, and you like playing around with LaTeX and laying out, laying out formulas,

Dave Jones: which is a, um, kind of like a, is it a markup length? Is that, is that the correct?

Chris Gammell: I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Mark down markup. Yep.

Dave Jones: And you call it LaTeX. It's LaTeX. I thought it was LaTeX.

Chris Gammell: Wiki we go.

Dave Jones: This is quality radio.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I don't really care what it's, you know, me, I don't really care how it's pronounced, but I, I'm late, LaTeX, LaTeX or LaTeX.

Dave Jones: LaTeX. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't think the X is actually an X.

Dave Jones: Oh, really? Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Jeez. All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Anyway, it's like a markup-y kind of language. You can, you can do like formulas and everything with it. It's kind of, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think people in the academic world are very used to it. You've written papers before, that sort of thing. And, you know, it's better than like, I actually remember physics class, like not having access to this sort of thing. And, and then like trying to go into like Microsoft word. Yeah. I know. Actually, no, this is a square root. So I have to find a square root symbol. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And drag it in and you do it manually.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Second power. Oh, yikes. What a mess. So like from that, I get it. I get it. That's fine. Totally. But not something I'm using in a regular basis.

Dave Jones: Anyway, cool. So this is a GitHub-y type thing. So you can add to, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You could submit a pull request. You could, you know, submit an issue against it. So like, oh, this is right. This is wrong. Whatever. I worked out this problem.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Had discussions around it, that sort of thing.

Dave Jones: So does it tell you, does it give credit for each person who solved each little, bit and wrote up each bit? It doesn't seem to. I'm having to look through it now.

Chris Gammell: Just care about the credit, huh, Dave?

Dave Jones: Well, no, but you know, like, you know, like who, well, in which case you don't know who's authoring what. Right. So it'd just be like. Well,

Chris Gammell: you do from the revision history, right? So you'd have that. You could see who submitted it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But no, I think it'd be nice if everyone put their name next to the solution.

Chris Gammell: What if you have 15 people working on a problem together?

Dave Jones: Okay, fine. Oh yeah, but come on. And these things, these things are always one person. Come on. These things are never, these things are never multiple people. As if, as if you're going to have a team of people working on one problem, one Ohms law problem in the art of electronics and, oh, let's, let's form a team and we're going to solve this. And then we're going to publish it together. And we're going to fight over whose name goes first on the pubs. No, it comes down to one person.

Chris Gammell: I mean, if, if Bill and Dave are working on a problem and they work on problem 1.11, and Bill does all the work on it, but Dave corrects his, you know, LaTeX syntax, do they both get credit on there? I think it's the easiest to just leave it off, you know, in that case.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But if somebody went to all the effort to format it and write it and do it, their name would go there. And then you'd have to go, and then you'd add a corrected by, you know, Joe blogs kind of thing. I guess so.

Chris Gammell: But I, I, I, I'm fine without it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: It's in the revision history.

Dave Jones: Oh, we've got the two capacitor problem. Do we, I'm just seeing the, sorry. I'm just seeing the two capacitor. Oh no, no. Okay. No, they're not going into the two capacitor charge problem. No. It's where the half in the half CV squared comes from. Where does the, where does half the power magically vanish? Where does half the energy magically vanish to when you charge two capacitors? And yep. Let's not go there. Wow. Yep. All right. So be it. Uh, did we ever follow up speaking of weird things like that? Did we ever follow up with the, their potassium, you know, does current from, does energy flow in the wire or outside the wire?

Chris Gammell: No, no, we didn't. I opted out. And then, uh, I think there was other stuff that came out and I was like,

Dave Jones: okay. So I didn't mention the quantum electrodynamics possibility.

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: Okay. We'll have to, here we go. I'll link. Uh, here we go. Uh, Pontus, um, uh, I will. Yeah. And, uh, uh,

Chris Gammell: so you're saying that,

Dave Jones: hang on, I will get you the link here. All right. Here it is. So I'll send you the link.

Speaker ?: Cool.

Dave Jones: There. Anyway. So yeah, right. Everyone thought this was settled and that, uh, Maxwell and, uh, point in rule. Okay. Max, you know, you, you can't question Maxwell, um, pointing, right? Pointing says, pointing theorem says that energy flows in the fields. End of story. The end, except if you don't care. Right. Which is what Richard Feynman famously said. He said, I look, if you don't want to worry about the details like that, I don't blame you. I'm sort of paraphrasing Richard Feynman, but that's basically what he said is that, you know, eh, don't worry that it flows in the fields. Who cares? You know, it's like, so yeah, that was in his official Feynman notes. Right. So anyway, but if you look at it from a quantum electrodynamics point of view, now I've linked in, we'll link in a video to, uh, Hontas Farmer. That's actually her name. Hontas Farmer. And she's a quantum professor or something. She has to do with quantums, not quantum electrodynamics, but she does work in the quantum field. Right. Quantum field. I'm here all week. Oh, geez. Okay. Oh, I've got to pay that one for myself. Thank you very much. Anyway, Pat on the back. Yep. Anyway, she basically explains on the whiteboard how, according to quantum electrodynamics, no, sorry, but with 99.9% certainty and with 99.9% probability, the energy flows within the wire in the electrical bonds between the electrons. So that, yeah, if you, you know, so essentially quantum electrodynamics trumps pointing and Maxwell in this respect, so to speak, if, if you believe quantum electrodynamics, and it's not necessarily proven, I don't think. So I can't speak authoritatively on this. Obviously, I, I did try to read a couple of papers on it and my head exploded. So yeah, not recommended. Yeah. But no, anyway, she, she explains how, you know, essentially, this is like Newton, right? Think of, you know, pointing and Maxwell as Newton's laws. Yeah. This is, you know, it's, it's a bit more complicated than that, but Newton's laws, which people still use, right? You can still fly to the moon. Sure. Yeah. Like relativistic versus Newtonian physics. That's what I mean. Yeah. Versus Newtonian physics. It's like that in the, you've got classical electrodynamics, which is pointing and Maxwell. And then you've got quantum electrodynamics, which is the quantum world of that, which involves probabilities of, you know, fields and things like that. And yeah, she explains how it, no, it, it actually mostly flows within the wire and it's like, okay. And, and all of a sudden when that was raised on the EV blog forum, all of the pointing to Maxwell, people who are so sure of themselves go, okay, their eyes start darting around. Then they go, let's, let's just ignore that, you know, because it's, it's, it's actually too hard. So I've been thinking about trying to get like an expert, a quantum electrodynamics expert on to see if they can verify that, you know, to see if they verify that, that according to the, that theory, it actually trumps pointing and energy. So you, for all you energy flows in the wires, God damn it, people, then you can quote electrodynamics. Apparently quantum electrodynamics.

Chris Gammell: Quantum electrodynamics.

Dave Jones: Hmm. Anyway, it's, it's, it's, it's fascinating. Yeah. So, yeah, I, I don't know much, you know, it's not, you know, because we're all taught, right? We're, we're all taught Maxwell's and pointing, you know, any, any, if you go to university, you're taught Maxwell's and you're taught pointing. Right. And that's, you know, and it's fine. Right. I'm not saying pointing is wrong. Nobody's saying pointing is wrong, but if you want to go.

Chris Gammell: People say pointing is wrong. If you're pointing and laughing at something.

Dave Jones: But if you want to go to another higher level of, you know, not thinking, but another higher level of explanation, then apparently quantum electrodynamics trumps pointing. So it's, it's, it's a fascinating argument, you know? Yeah. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, all this stuff comes down to like, like mental models. I feel like as well, there's all these different, some of it is the actual like math behind it. And like, what is actually happening in the physical realm. But then I have very simplified views of everything that's happening here.

Dave Jones: Same here. Because we're, because we are practical engineers, right? So we're solder jockeys. Yeah, exactly. Solder jockeys. Yeah, exactly. What the hell does it matter for slowing the wire?

Chris Gammell: Did the light bulb turn on? This is what I said last time. It doesn't matter. Did the light bulb turn on? It did great. Awesome. You know?

Dave Jones: I can explain that with capacitance between the wires. Why do I need anything more complicated than that? You know, maybe all transform a coupling. If you want to get fancy, fancy, you know, or maybe it's a dipole antenna. If you want to get even more fancy, fancy, fancy, right. And so it's,

Dave Jones: anyway, it's, I, I also brought up somewhere that, because I'm now obsessed with DC, with this question at DC, right? Because to me, that's the fundamental question is what happens at DC? Does energy actually flow in the wire at DC? And like, you know, and it's easy to explain this thing at AC and transient and everything else. Cause there's so many different models. There's transmission line models, there's capacitance models, there's inductive models, there's a man antenna models, you know, and then the photon models. And, you know, there's all, you know, half a dozen different ways to look at the transient thing. But when you're talking about DC, right, does the energy flow in the wire or does it flow in the field outside the wire? Yeah. You know, it gets a bit harder, but anyway, I was thinking that the, the problem here is, is that if you can come up, uh, see, cause people have tried to, uh, people have built physically built this thing, right? I mean, they haven't gone to the moon and back, right? Halfway to the moon and back, but they've built physical things and they've hooked, hooked their oscilloscopes up to it. And they've measured that, you know, it travels there within the one on C seconds, right? Some is, you know, some energy flows there on, um, so it works, right? You can prove that, but I don't believe there's any experimental way, physical experimental way that you can prove or attempt to prove that energy flows in the fields at DC. If anyone can come up with, because I think if you can physically prove, if you can physically build an experiment to test that, then you've proved quantum electrodynamics or not, right? It's that like, you know, it's, it's almost like the fundamental thing. If you can come up with an experiment that proves that energy flows in the field at DC, no transients at all, then you've, then you've either proven or disproven quantum electrodynamics. And I think that's probably no world prize winning stuff. You know, I mean,

Chris Gammell: isn't it impossible to truly ever reach DC though? Like, cause at some point it's turned on. So eventually, you know, it has to get to steady state. So you have to like, it's like how you window it and stuff like that. Okay.

Dave Jones: So it's the time of the universe thing. Right. Okay. Well, I mean, yeah, I switched it on, but that was 10 years ago, but it's still not DC. Cause you don't know what happens in the future. I might switch it off in a year's time. And then, Hey, it's not DC anymore. Is it? It's like, come on. Right. But that's what all the theorists, you know, they just sit around thinking about this shit. 10 minus 12 Hertz. No, no, sorry. That's what the mathematicians sit around trying to prove. Right. So if a mathematician was trying to do this, they would go, Oh yeah, nothing's ever DC because you know, you can't see what's you can't know what's going to happen in the future. You may switch it off. Right. Right. And therefore it's not DC anymore. It's, you know, it's just like, you know, a one year cycle time, you know, that's right. Yeah,

Chris Gammell: exactly.

Dave Jones: Oh boy. But anyway, I think it's still, I think it adds a fascinating curve ball. Are you sure we didn't talk about this previously? I kind of remember yapping on about it.

Chris Gammell: I don't remember anything about quantum, quantum theory stuff.

Chris Gammell: okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think you brought up the Feynman. stuff. Right. Yeah. Okay. Talking about like the simplification of it. Got it.

Dave Jones: Yep. Hmm. Anyway, I think it's fascinating. So there you go. Yeah, definitely. Yep. And I'm kind of biased because I, I, because I'm on the side of a DC, damn it. It flows in the wire. Fight me. You know? Yep. Anyway, there you go. See folks,

Chris Gammell: this is what happens when there's no chips to be bought. All we can do is sit around.

Dave Jones: Bicker about.

Chris Gammell: Bicker about inside or outside the wire. And then someone goes, wait, how are we going to be able to buy this much wire?

Dave Jones: Come on. So give it, where does your flag fly? Inside the wire or outside the wire?

Chris Gammell: I've told you, I don't, I just don't care. I think inside the wire, but I literally haven't thought about this long enough. Like I just, Dave, I'm just trying to survive here, man. You sold a jockey. Trying to buy parts. Yeah. I'm just solder jockey, man. Solder jockey, writing some code sometimes, making videos sometimes. I just, I, I, yeah, just trying to stay afloat. You know, I, I am, I am back to the, to the wellspring that is LCSE and buying more parts from the Chinese ecosystem. Just because it's all I trust right now. It's really weird.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Like how this has all gone down. Like my, first off, I'm just buying a lot of parts at once. Just so I know, like, I'm going to just buy a bunch of parts.

Dave Jones: You're part of the problem. You're holder.

Chris Gammell: I'm totally part of the problem. I said that last time. I know that, but I'm going to, you know, I'm committing. I'm basically, I'm going on a blind date with a component and I'm saying, well, I guess we're married now. You know, for better or worse.

Dave Jones: Because I've got 10, I've got 10,000. I've had 10,000 kids with you. So I'm stuck. Four reels of you.

Dave Jones: exactly.

Chris Gammell: To have and hold until the next part shortage.

Dave Jones: Oh boy. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So I'm in looking at, let's see, what is the, what is the latest winner of part of the week? John Aerosmith. Tech.

Dave Jones: What?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's the name of the company. I, I, that's the thing I'm buying chips from like unknown companies from the Chinese ecosystem.

Dave Jones: John Aerosmith. Is, is this a, is this a Chinese companies? John Aerosmith. It's like, when I,

Chris Gammell: John, X, X, I, A, N, John.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure I'm saying it wrong. I apologize to everybody who speaks, right. Mandarin. Or,

Dave Jones: um, that's, um, yeah. Yeah. Juan or something. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Cause I thought it just reminds me of every time I deal with someone in, in, uh, China, it's, Oh, hello, Tiffany. Hello, Jack. I mean, they, you know, I wish,

Chris Gammell: I wish they didn't feel like they had to do that, but it's understandable why they do. It's,

Dave Jones: it's universal.

Chris Gammell: If everybody butchered my name all the time, I'd probably pick one as well.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. I guess. Yeah. I just,

Chris Gammell: I feel bad that it's the people.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Bruce, you know, hi, hi Bruce. You know, when it's like, yeah,

Chris Gammell: yeah, it's fine. Uh, anyways. Yeah. So, I mean, and it's interesting, like, you know, so sometimes you'll see parts that are pretty darn similar to other vendors. So like, you know,

Dave Jones: right.

Chris Gammell: So I'm just trying to find, have you got a link to this?

Dave Jones: Have you got a link to this? Oh, sure. One arrow Smith. Is it actually arrow Smith?

Chris Gammell: No arrow. Did I say arrow Smith? Oh my God. I thought I said arrow semi. Sorry. I mean, I thought I said arrow space, but it was arrow semi.

Dave Jones: Oh, as in arrow, not arrow.

Chris Gammell: Arrow, like A E R O.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Arrow. Arrow. Did I really say John Aerosmith?

Dave Jones: Yep. That's what I heard. It's your Yankee accent.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, so they make, uh, so they make op amps, uh, they make precision op amps, uh, they make lead drivers, they make power management ICs. Yeah. I mean,

Chris Gammell: it's like, you know, not, not quite jelly bean, but, uh, you know,

Dave Jones: jelly bean ish. Let's have a look at their precision op amps. Shall we?

Chris Gammell: I think a lot of these two are there. They're second sources for a lot of things. Right. So like looking at a buck 40.

Dave Jones: Sorry.

Chris Gammell: I don't know what you're talking about here, but yes, a buck 40.

Dave Jones: Oh, I'm looking at a precision op amp for a buck 40, which is cheap for a precision op amp. You know,

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's a chopper. Which, ah,

Dave Jones: it's a chopper. Okay. So they make, Oh, okay. So this is right. Right.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: Get to the chopper.

Dave Jones: Get to the chopper. It's the MT 0762. And it's a rail to rail 6. 6.6. Meg jobby. And it's a chopper. And where is it?

Dave Jones: five, Oh, 5.1 micro volts. Typical. Yeah. Yeah. You know,

Chris Gammell: it would be interesting. You know, you've done, you've done op amp reviews before, and it'd be interesting to find a company like this. They're, I think they're, like I said, I think they're second sourcing, you know, maybe very similar designs. I don't want to make any assumptions here, but either finding the, the comparative, the comparative part, but you know, this is what happens a lot too. You know, you people talk about like, Oh, I sent my design overseas and it went through a cost down cycle. It's not like they're like, you know, if you're working with a manufacturing engineer, they're not like designing it with discrete components. They're just finding stuff in the local ecosystem. That's a lot cheaper. Yeah. Right. And so, and then validating that it's, all the specs that you have. It's like, okay. And so there's been stuff there at some point. I've never had visibility into that space prior to, you know, sites like this. You know, I, I could go on 21 IC and stuff like that and try and do it, but now it's just, it's just gotten a lot easier. And like I said, they have stock and that's, that's really all they care about right now. Right. Especially for, and I mean, I'll be honest. I, you know, I've, I've thought about it once or twice with, you know, like certain components, if I was putting intelligence in them and they, they were network connected, maybe I'd be a little bit more standoffish. Right. I'd be like, Oh, okay. Well, you know, trust, but verify.

Dave Jones: Right. So you're, so you're drawing the line at some obscure Chinese microcontroller, for example,

Chris Gammell: I'd say like security elements and things like that. I mean, I guess you could say I use expressive components as well. And, you know, I love those, you know, but like, yeah, yeah. Some of it's just kind of a feel thing, you know, I trust the engineers, but maybe not the, not the PRC. So, you know, but like a chopper op amp. Okay. Boost converter. Okay. I would be interested, you know, one thing I think about with like the boost converter, you know, and like you look at what's like a boost converter, buck converter is anyways, right? Like they're, they're very mature ideas at this point. Right. You can have more and more complicated kind of like surrounding circuitry, but the, you know, like, like you talked about when we were talking about switching converters the other day too, it's like, basically it's, there's a switch, you know, there's like a pass switch and, and then there's some logic around that, you know, probably a feedback circuit and an op amp internally and a reference and all these things. And it's like, okay. And so if you know how to make all that stuff and it does it as it's supposed to, I don't really need a lot of bells and whistles for the things I'm doing. So, okay, that's fine.

Dave Jones: And as, as, as long as you can verify that the part, you know, as long as you don't have to put a lot of effort into verifying that the part is going to do the job. And as long as you're not on like the bleeding edge of specs, because if you're on the bleeding, like if you've got a precision op amp that I told you about here, right, this precision chopper op amp, right. You're using that because you want like low, ultra low input offset voltage. Right. And then things like the spread can matter. Right. Even like, like you buy one and you measure it and it's fine. Right. Oh yeah. And then you, then you build 10,000 of them and you find that 10% of the units are out because these have a bigger yield, a wider yield curve. Right. Then, then the analog devices part that you pay 10 times the price for. Right. So, right.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. And yeah. And sometimes you're paying for testing and binning and all that other stuff too. And it's, and so it's just, it is rolling the dice. So like, I probably would not buy a precision op amp because of those kinds of things you're talking about right now. Right. But I can validate if, you know, I'm making a 3.3 volt to 12 volt. Yeah. Boost circuit. Yeah. Yeah. I can measure if it's 12 volts or not. Right. I could maybe I could, you know, I could at least look at the noise coming off of it and see whether it's within bands. But like I said, the stuff I'm doing is pretty low, low stakes. Right. And pretty low volume, to be honest too. Got it. So,

Dave Jones: so you have to weigh it up for each case, you know, because like sometimes you just like, yeah, like it, it doesn't matter. I don't care. This is a jelly bean op amp, right? This is a jelly bean application that I'm doing. It doesn't like, I can literally drop in almost anything, you know, as long as it's stable or something. Well,

Chris Gammell: and the pin out's the same and stuff like that. And like, this is a five pin device, right? There's nothing, there is nothing fancy about this, right? There's a feedback pin. There's an enable pin. There's a drive. There's a switch pin. Yep. There's an input pin. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So like super simple type of thing. There's just, yeah, you need to make sure that works.

Dave Jones: But when you have to rely on the performance, that's when you've got to put your thinking cap on and, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think that's a, you know, trust but verify type of thing and, you know, see if it's fits your risk profile. And much like you probably should be doing with a TI or an ADI as well. Right. But it's, you know, maybe you're just a little bit more, of course. I'm a little bit more lulled into the, the data sheet.

Dave Jones: And, and you can't just, Oh, because it's analog devices. You can't just trust them. You've got to go right deep down into the data sheet and you've got to go, well, what is the production spread? Right. Because they'll, they'll actually like a good data sheet will put like, if the parts important enough, like they won't do this on a jelly bean part. Who cares that a jelly bean op amp, what it does over, you know, temperature and manufacturing yield and stuff. Right. No one cares. Right. But on your, on your precision parts, a good manufacturer will put in all those. Okay. They've actually tested a thousand or 10,000 parts for you. And they actually put the histogramic data. Histogramic. Is that a word?

Chris Gammell: It is now. It's histomographical. Histomographical.

Dave Jones: Histomographical. That's even better. Histomographical data in the data sheet for you. Right. So they've done all the production testing for you. Right. And then you can feel more confident, but even then you may not, but even then I've worked at companies where go, no, that's not good enough. We're going to do it ourselves. Thank you very much. You know, and yeah, Oh God, we have to test, you know, a hundred chips or something. Have you ever done that? That's right. Have you ever tested like a, like a hundred chips for a.

Chris Gammell: At Keithley. Yeah. I mean, we had a, we had a, we had like production, production test jigs, and stuff like that. Some of the magic was the actual like matching of transistors, like actually setting up.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Right. And stuff like that. Match transistors. And, and, and, and then do you thermally, thermally couple them? Gone are the days of people thermally coupling. You put a little. Nobody does that anymore. Nice little, put them back. A little piece of heat drink. Nice little blanket around them. And you know, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Snuggle those together. You know.

Dave Jones: Anyway, speaking of which, I've got a segue for that. My. Figured you did. Mike. Of course I did. Dave,

Chris Gammell: we're getting our cred back here. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. My Keithley 2400. Shmoo. Source measure unit.

Chris Gammell: Shmoo.

Dave Jones: Source measure unit. I was using it the other day. Like I was using it for precision measurements. And yeah, like I was going to like do some, like a whole bunch of measurements for this. I was setting up like, sort of like an automated little station to do. Cause I was going to do a whole bunch of measurements. So I'm setting it all up and, and you know, it works fine. Always cross correlate instruments. If you're doing precision measurements like this, you know? So if, if you've got like a, in my case, I've got the Keithley 2400 Shmoo and the Keithley, I can't remember the bloody part number, but it's this Keithley seven and a half, seven and a half digit meter.

Chris Gammell: DMM 7510.

Dave Jones: All right. Yep. There you go. Cause I can't see it from here. It's, and it's a weird color. Oh God. It's the same background, bloody color is the, get your colors right on you. Oh no, no, it could be green. I just can't see it from here. Anyway, I won't go on that rant. And I already did an embarrass myself, but that's all right. Yeah. So I'm using these and I cross, cross correlated the two and they're all, you know, they're all hunky dory, right? Everything's fine. So I started doing my measurements and then I decided, this was late at night. So I went home and I thought, Oh, I'll leave them on overnight because you know, you're these things, when you do them, doing precision measurements, you want your instruments to warm up and get nice and stable. You know, you don't want them to, yeah, you're right.

Chris Gammell: Got to get that LTZ 1000 at it. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: It doesn't just, you know, heat up instantly. You know,

Chris Gammell: it's not about, it's not about the actual absolute temp. It's about the stability of that temp folks. Yes. 40 C. No problem. Just keep it there. Just keep it there. That's it.

Dave Jones: And yeah, so I left it on overnight. I came back the next morning and I did some, no, I, yeah, I did some more measurements. Everything was hunky dory, but I was sitting here, I was sitting on my computer and then I'd hear this, like there was this like beep, beep, like, and I didn't know where the hell it was coming from. It happened a couple of times. And then all of a sudden I see out of the corner of my eye, the 20, the Keithley 2400 shmoo reset itself. The bastard reset itself. So I went, aha. And then I actually shot a video. I've put it in the Reddit. It's not released publicly. So if you want a behind the scenes video, you can actually see it. Cause I do a lot of, I do those. Sometimes I do like just for my supporters and stuff. So this was like an, a supporter video. I just uploaded. And I meant like, so I said, so I got the camera out and I thought, ah, this bastard's not going to work. It's the lab coat syndrome, right? It's the white coat syndrome. If I, if I turn on my camera and start talking about the fault, it's never going to happen. It's never going to reappear, but sure enough, it did. It actually, Murphy was asleep and it, and it happened a couple of times, like half a dozen times while I was talking about it right on camera. And you can see the thing fail and reset itself. So,

Chris Gammell: so what is it? Do you know?

Dave Jones: Ah, that's the thing. Right. So I, so I, I took the lid off and left it running and it hasn't failed again. Well, no, it failed once. So I heard it fail once and then like, you know, so I left it like two days or something and it basically only failed once that I heard. So it's really annoying. So it's hard to troubleshoot those sorts of things. But anyway, I uploaded the video and a fellow YouTuber, Marco reps, actually, he, he saw the video and he coincidentally had exactly the same fault and he just fixed it. And he said, would you like a spoiler? And I went, oh, well, I've had it for two days and it's not failing. So yeah. All right. Because like, there's not like, I can't troubleshoot this thing if it's not failing. Right. I can't, you know, I just can't set up probing and wait, you know, a week for the damn thing to fail. And he said, it's the battery. It's the CMOS backup, you know, the real time clock, backup, backup battery. And he said that he looked at the, at, at the, at the chip. It's a Dallas semiconductor chip. I can't remember the exact number. It's in the comments there. You can probably go have a look yourself, but he said that real time clock chip or that, that chip, that Dallas semiconductor chip has a, has a reset output, which will reset the CPU. If the battery's a bit flaky. Right. So I thought, ah, that's gotta be it. But of course I came in this morning. I measured it. And it's not that the battery is perfect. So Murphy's not going to cut me a break, but yeah, his one was apparently doing exactly the same thing. And it was the battery, but it's not on mine. So I don't know what the hell I'm going to do now. I guess, I guess I put the lid back on it and I just leave it powered up for a week and see how many times it dies. I don't know. It's a pain in the ass. It's really annoying when you get a fault like this and you can't, I mean, this is my second one recently. Recently, I just did a video on my fluke scope meter that I got off eBay. Right. And it was working. I was shooting a video. Ah, look, look what I scored on eBay for under a hundred bucks. Isn't this brilliant? It's practically brand new, gorgeous scope. Right. And then while I was shooting the video, boom, the CRT collapsed on it. Right. And then for the life of me, it just wouldn't happen again. So I started doing some troubleshooting, you know, and stuff like that. I resoldered a few joins and, you know, did a few like, you know, hail Mary's and, and I put it back together and it, it hasn't failed since. So I'm not, I don't know. Like, geez, you know,

Chris Gammell: maybe, maybe you got the touch, man. Is this the combi scope?

Dave Jones: This is the fluke combi scope. Yep. Yep. Fluke combi scope. I've also got a video on the second channel where I do some, uh, more further tests and inspections of it. Yeah. It just hasn't failed since. And I can't make the damn thing fail. And I bet you the same damn thing happens with the Keithley as well. I'll put it back together. It just won't fail anymore. And then I'm always going to be wondering, well, what the hell was it? And, and you can't troubleshoot something that's not failing. Right. So, so frustrating. It always happens to me every, every time.

Chris Gammell: All right. I'm going to tell you, I actually know of a, I think I've relayed, I'm going to tag this as maybe when we just cut out this, we're going to see how this goes. Remember, I've told you about a failure where the guy like tried something for weeks and weeks and weeks, couldn't trigger it to fail. Do you remember me telling you that story?

Dave Jones: No, I've, I've told several stories like that, but I don't remember your one. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So one of those stories is the Keithley 2400.

Dave Jones: Oh, great. Okay. Did you tell? Come on.

Chris Gammell: I mean, so what the end, what it ended up being is so something you can look at.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, the air, the, the issue ended up being tin whiskers. So not tin whiskers. Oh yeah, right. Right. Basically it was, they had switched out a power supply and it switched to, from like a, the power connector had been coated in gold and it either went to gold flash or it went to tin or something like that. But basically there was intermittent, on the, from the power supply up. So like, you know, it has like a 24 volt power supply coming in offline. Yeah. So yours is a 20, two 40 in to 24 volts. Okay. 120 for the U S and then 24 volt supply. And then that goes up to the, to the board. But this would only happen every once in a while where the, the connector had been swapped out. They didn't know about it. And so they couldn't get this thing to fail because it would only happen when the corrosion would build up enough.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: On that connector. And then it, you'd have intermittent connectivity. Right. And then the other problem is when you go to troubleshoot it, you pull the connector off and guess what? It wipes all the corrosion off too. And so you don't even see it. Yeah. And then you plug it back in. It's like, Oh, everything's fine again for another month until the corrosion builds back up. So maybe it's that. Right. Maybe it's that.

Dave Jones: Guess, guess what you get. If you have a tin whisker and a corroded connect and, and touching a corroded contact, that's a Yahtzee. You get a point contact diode, right? It can act as a point contact diode.

Chris Gammell: Interesting.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So you can get like obscure.

Chris Gammell: I said tin whisker. I don't think it actually is tin whisker though. I think it is just a, it's just a corroded contact, but between the power supply and the connector.

Dave Jones: Because I have tin whiskers and I found them by careful inspection under, you know, times 20 magnification. That's crazy. And it's like, yeah, you get so desperate. And I found tin, like on really small products. So you can do this, right? Like on a large board, like this Keithley 2400, you can't inspect everything for tin whiskers, right? It's just like, it's impossible, but I've, I've had, I mean,

Chris Gammell: without a schematic too, right? You're, you're, you're basically probing blind.

Dave Jones: Is there a service manual available for the 2400? I don't remember ever seeing one. Not a public one. Okay. Damn. Yeah. All right. That makes it even harder.

Chris Gammell: Talk to me like, you know, 10 years ago, Dave. Right. Okay.

Dave Jones: Right. And you could have hooked. It's been 10 years. You could have hooked me up.

Chris Gammell: It's been more than 10 years. I think it's been more, mate. Good Lord. You're old.

Dave Jones: You're married with kids now in a house in the suburbs. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Totally different part of the country. Yeah. Yeah. Jeez.

Dave Jones: But anyway, yeah. Yeah. Tin. For those who don't know, tin whiskers are, they, they grow. It's a, it's a metallurgical crystalline growth due to tin. And I, I still don't think from a physics point of view, they understand tin whiskers. I don't think, but anyway, if you've got tin, they can mysteriously grow and they actually, and tins conductive, of course. Right.

Chris Gammell: I thought it was related to unleaded solder though, too. Wasn't, isn't that right? Or no,

Dave Jones: I don't know. Wasn't that part of the,

Chris Gammell: if it's got tin in it? Well, unleaded solder has tin and silver. So yeah, it does.

Dave Jones: I think it can still do it in theory, but you know, yeah, I don't know. But anyway, yeah, the, the tin grows and the, you know, the, they grow in these shafts and they can bend over and they can short out to the pin next to it. It's like these things actually grow on your board and short out. It's freaky. Go and search for photos of tin whiskers. And it's just like, you'll, you'll just be stunned. Like, and this, this isn't the same thing as like a solder splash or something, right? This isn't that it's, it's like your sold is perfect. Absolutely perfect. And it grows these little, Oh, these little shoots just come out and they actually grow out and they grow. I think that people have even done time-lapse of tin whisker growth. Oh,

Chris Gammell: that'd be awesome.

Dave Jones: In the lab. Of course, like you wouldn't get that in, you know, right. I'm going to set up my time-lapse camera on this board and you've got point, you know, you've got 0.000001% chance of it happening. You know, it's, yeah, but it's, it's, it's a real thing. I did find a video here.

Chris Gammell: I just, I just posted it. I got her. Oh, NASA Goddard center. All right.

Dave Jones: Okay. Let's, let's have a look. Sorry. I have to watch this. Yeah, I do have,

Chris Gammell: like it kind of looks like a, you know, those really lame fireworks where they're just like the smoke snakes. Yeah. Yeah. The smoke. It kind of looks like that. It looks like that. Or like a elephant. What's his name? Mark Rober. Oh, tooth. Yes. Yes.

Dave Jones: The elephant paste or no elephant. Oh,

Chris Gammell: elephant toothpaste. That's it.

Dave Jones: Elephant toothpaste. I just watched it the other day with Sagan. Cause he's watching Mark Rober now.

Chris Gammell: Oh, cool.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So yeah. And they're very cool. Actually,

Chris Gammell: I want to grow up and to be like a, a big YouTuber, like Mark Rober.

Dave Jones: Right dad? Yeah, exactly. Oh man. Oh boy. Anyway, apparently in Sagan's class the other day, he told me that all the kids, cause they were stuck inside and I was raining or something. They were stuck inside. And so they were all giving like free. So they had free time or whatever. And, and all the other kids in the class were, were, were actually Googling me. They were Googling my channel and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: So yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I, ironically, I did have a very comprehensive video on tin whiskers, a very comprehensive presentation that I filmed. I went to all the effort to film a comprehensive presentation on tin whiskers. It wasn't me, it was somebody else. Some end like an expert on tin whiskers giving the presentation and they told me to take it down. So it's been removed. It's in the vault. So yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: It's too bad. Yeah. Like it, it is technically like a paid, it was like a paid thing, right? Normally you have to pay to go to this course on tin whiskers, but I actually asked permission. I didn't just turn up and turn on my camera. I asked permission. Can I shoot this? And I'll upload and edit it. You know? Oh yeah. Yeah. Sure. No problem. And then I did so.

Chris Gammell: And they thought more about it. And they're like,

Dave Jones: and did it, you know, and then, oh, hell broke loose, you know? Yeah. So, yeah. Sorry. You can't see the tin whiskers video, which is very fascinating. So there you go. Well, that's it. Our amp hours up. We pissed it away talking about quantum electrodynamics and I don't know, rocks.

Chris Gammell: Computer history. Yeah. I don't know.

Dave Jones: What the hell are we going to title this one?

Chris Gammell: I was thinking we're going to call this one. Oh, I wrote it down.

Dave Jones: We can actually title it. What the hell are we going to title this one?

Chris Gammell: How about histogramic or histamographical?

Dave Jones: Histamographical. Yes. Well, you could put histogramical or histamographical. You can actually put the word or and put both words.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no, that's what I meant. Yeah. Oh, right. Okay.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds fine. I just don't ask me how to spell it.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Don't ask me how to make art for it.

Dave Jones: I'll just put in a bloody histogram, dude. Just put in like a,

Chris Gammell: don't, don't, don't, don't, don't tell me how to do my process. I'm an artiste. I'm an artiste. You saw the bubblegum tap shoes. Oh yeah. Bubblegum tap shoes.

Dave Jones: That's, that's beautiful. Dude, you should sell that as an NFT.

Chris Gammell: NFT. Oh man. Bring it on.

Dave Jones: You'd make millions.

Chris Gammell: It's going to be rich. You're going to fleece some suckers about shitty art. See you next week.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time. Bye.