#602 – Rigorous engineering stuff may be out the window

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Release September 11th, 2022. Episode 602. Rigorous engineering stuff may be out the window.

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? Oh, you know, just 600 episodes in, apparently I start bumping microphones during recordings.

Dave Jones: Is this actual number 600? This is 602. Yeah, we did 600 the other something. I don't know. I think we stopped keeping count at 100, didn't we?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think so. Kind of, yeah. I was listening to episode 28-something, 2800 of Car Talk the other day. We got a long way to go if we really want to. You know, I know those guys, one of them passed away, but like.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We got a lot of room to run.

Dave Jones: We got a lot of catching up to do, you know. That's right. Joe Rogan's at like 1500 or something, isn't he?

Speaker ?: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: There's a lot out there, so. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Oh, well. Yeah. We're still here, though. We just plod along. Yeah, we're still here. Yeah. Still here? I'm still standing. I have to wait. That's right. Oh, boy. Anyway. All right. Kind of a big news day for us Aussies.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Not just Aussies. Poms and.

Dave Jones: Well, Poms and I guess. Canadians. You Yanks. Canadians. Yeah, that's a much. New Zealanders.

Chris Gammell: I mean, the world, really. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And the world.

Chris Gammell: We're recording this on Thursday. Yes. Friday your time, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Friday my time. I just woke up this morning, although it was sort of hinted at last night. But Queen Elizabeth II has passed away, which is, we were talking about this before the show. You were asking me the general sentiment here. I think, you know, like everyone's quite sad about it. You know, I was talking to someone in the lift on the way in here today. And it's like, yeah, like she's really upset about it. You know, people are sad because like everyone liked her. Like even the, I tweeted this last night, even the staunch Republicans, I'm not talking US Republicans, but the people who want an Australian Republic, i.e. to get away from the monarchy, you know, they want a president and everything else, yada, yada. Even they like the Queen, right? Everyone likes the Queen. She's been the monarch for people's, most people's living memory over 70 years. She just had her platinum jubilee, her platinum jubilee, which is 70 years as the ruling monarch of Australia and England and all the Commonwealth realm. So yeah, it's just, yeah, I don't know anyone who didn't like her at all. So yeah, it's quite sad. She was like part of the furniture. It's just like, as I said, most people's living memory. Like we just don't know anything else. And you said it, it'd kind of feel weird to have a King. Yeah. It's like, well, what? What? It's like her majesty. It's not his majesty, you know? So, oh, well, I guess they don't have to change the title of all the ships. You know, HMS is her majesty's ship. Yeah. Right. Right. So now it's his majesty's ship. Yeah. We all have to pledge allegiance to the King. Now, I guess that will come eventually, but yeah, they actually revoke Parliament. They actually wrote formally, they revoke Parliament here until Parliament can actually swear an oath to the new King. And then they won't let them sit until they swear an oath to the new King. So, yeah, it's still a formal thing, you know? So, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. We did away with that a while ago.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. You guys sort of had like kind of a war over it or something. I've heard. We kind of did some stuff. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. So, yeah. I mean. Sad news all the same. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. It's sad. Like Queenie was like, yeah, everyone liked her. So the last time we thought about this was 1999. We actually had a national vote on this and whether or not to become a Republic or not. It was voted nay. Nope. We're going to remain as part of the Commonwealth. But I expect there to be another efferendum in the coming year, I think. Yeah. I think. Sadly, I think the monarchy might die with her because like she was the bedrock, like the glue that still, I think, I think the institution itself, like it won't actually die, but I think countries like Australia, part of the Commonwealth, New Zealand, Canada, and all those, they will be rethinking the whole Commonwealth thing. I think I would expect that. So, yeah, I, I, I think it's that big a change that, yeah, people will reevaluate. I'm quite sad.

Chris Gammell: Reprint all the money, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh yeah. All, all the coins, all the coins have to be, all the notes, everything. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Maybe we'll just go, uh, digital coins, you know, maybe that's, maybe that's. Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: Over my dead body, you know? Yep. Yep. So yeah, I'm, I'm actually quite sad that I never got, I, I always wanted, I always wanted to see, I always wanted the queen to go beast mode. Right. I always wanted to, you know, like, like her to just come out and settle some dispute in Australia or Canada or New Zealand or elsewhere and, and, or even in the UK and just go, no, I have decided by Royal decree, you will do it this way. I, I, you know, and you'll stop the fighting and, you know, I have spoken. I have spoken. I have literally spoken, you know? And I think if she did that, everyone would have went, oh, okay. The queen has spoken. That's it, everyone. Yep. Home with business. I, I think it would have worked. You know, I think everyone had that much respect for her that that would have worked, but she never really used her authority, her power like that. Because yeah, she, in the Commonwealth, she has ultimate power over pretty much everything. It's really, you know, it's quite all encompassing. And she never really used it publicly, so to speak. It was always sort of done. Things were, you know, moved and done behind closed doors with a, a nod and a, you know, and a, and a quiet word to other leaders and politicians and stuff. So yeah. Yep. Shaking things up. It's interesting. Yeah. So Australia might be, can't we, we might eventually get a president out of this. I, I suspect that's kind of, yeah. Yep. We might ditch the, the prime minister. Yeah. Works out great in the U S. Oh boy. Anyway. Anyway. Yep. That's, that's the, uh, public service announcement for today. London bridge has fallen folks is the official term. London bridge has fallen. And, uh, yep. So there you go. What do we have on the electronics front?

Chris Gammell: Well, personally, not much. I, uh, I'm still hot gluing, uh, boards together. Right. The shelf boards. I actually, I do have an idea. So one thing that I've been, you know, I don't know how much you've, you've paid attention to these things. The I've been using like a quick, quick boards. Have you seen those things? Those are spark fun modules.

Dave Jones: No, there's so many things like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There's a lot of breakouts and different standards and things like that. And basically there's like a, I think it's like an XST is the, the JST type of connector that's on there, but it's basically like a two millimeter pitch, maybe less. No, actually maybe 1.5 millimeter pitch four pin connector. Right. So it's just like a standard JST four pin connector. You can get them anywhere.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So they kind of, so spark fun standardized on this and then Adafruit also did it. And so basically you get like kind of this, it's just a basically ground power chip select and data, right. Or not chips like clock and data.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And so I squared C only, and you know, there's a lot of sensors out there that are I squared C and now you can get a whole bunch of boards from spark fun from Adafruit and then other people kind of adopted it too, which is kind of like these ad hoc standards. I, I do like ad hoc standards. I talked about feather last time. And the only downside is that so many of these chips are, they have like interrupt pins and it's just kind of completely ignored. And so almost by default, these things are like only for, you need like a five or six pin cable to really utilize it, but there's no standardization around that.

Dave Jones: And to get the advantages of the extra features. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Chris Gammell: Cause you know, like you almost always want to know, like, so if an I, so if you have an I squared C accelerometer and you have it like waking up when it starts to fall, you want to like interrupt the micro and say, Hey, take a reading right now. So, you know, I'm falling and take some action based on it or something like that, or, or have a shutdown pin. That's another common one. You know, I want to be able to like shut stuff down and that's not there either.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You want to be able to remotely shut it down or remotely reset it. Or, you know, you want to actually break out the reset line or, you know, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Then this goes all the way back to like, you know, RS two 32 days when, Oh, somebody only implemented the three pin configuration, the transmit, receive, and ground. Yeah. Right. And they didn't implement any of the handshaking lines, you know, they, they just didn't route them through, you know, they just didn't bother because you know, and like sometimes it would have been.

Chris Gammell: Well, cause wires are expensive and pin, you know, more connectors, more pins on the connector is more expensive. More pins on the connector is more. Yeah. I mean, it, it really does have implications, right?

Dave Jones: Well, exactly.

Chris Gammell: And so, uh, so one thing I've been thinking about with this though, is like, well, you could make an interstitial board. So basically have a board in between the quick headers and basically, so stuff further down the line, you basically, you don't control it over I squared C because then it would be kind of moot, but maybe you could, but, but basically have like a low power power switch kind of in between so that you can then go and turn off the power to all this stuff downstream. Cause they all can daisy chain together as well. Right. And so that's, you know, kind of on my to-do list for near term.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the, that's one of the things when you're designing a product, how much flexibility like that should you build into it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, totally.

Dave Jones: Even if you're designing like a test or a debug interface or something like that, do you bother breaking out the reset line? Do you bother, you know, breaking out, you know, other debug lines or other useful or other potentially useful interface lines, you know, like do you implement individual power supplies for modules so that you can bring up and shut down, you know, sequence you can, should you go to the effort to power sequence stuff? I don't know, just in case, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm sure if you're building a space probe that's going to Pluto, then yeah, you're probably going to want that sort of flexibility. But if you're just designing your little farting novelty widget, yeah, totally. Probably not.

Chris Gammell: Well, you got to draw the line somewhere, right? It's always about where you're drawing the line on these things. And I think, you know, and I think for a general use case, actually, you know, they made the right choice, right? Like it's small, it's, you know, it's, it's fewer of wires so that, you know, like you don't have as much, many wires, like the bundle of wires isn't as, as thick and stuff like that. And most of the time, you know, these really, I'm kind of using them out of spec anyway. It's not out of spec, but like I'm using these things as like kind of more quasi production instead of like, you know, spinning my own board in this case, I'm trying to just kind of glue stuff together and make it all work. And really these are meant for like, you prototype with it and then, okay, you put it on your own board and then you're, you're good to go. So like, I get it, but yeah, it is a little, a little frustrating sometimes because then it's like always on, always pulling, that sort of thing. So yeah, just, I think the real answer is Chris, make a custom board. Right.

Dave Jones: Okay. But you couldn't be asked to do it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Been there. Done that. Yep. Too lazy. Yeah. I mean. Well, I'm, I'm probably after this, I'm going to shoot my video about doing the, designing the TTL implementation of my MacGyver clock project thing. I'm going to eventually get around to that today.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: And like, am I going to bother to build it up? Nah. Am I going to bother to draw it in CAD? Nah, I just draw it in DaveCad. DaveCad. Yeah. And, and, and even then, will I even bother to like do, do the entire pinout and do a complete schematic? Nah, probably not. You know, it's just like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, the rigorous engineering stuff. It may have gone out the window for us. Right.

Dave Jones: For this simple little project. Yeah. I don't want to spend any more time on it than possible. But anyway, speaking of spending time on something, a bloody JST and JST connectors. Oh, we get, ah, what a pain in the ass. Last night.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yesterday, I tweeted a photo of this. You know, I got one of these huge EcoFlow battery things, you know, 3.6 kilowatt hour battery thing. It's my latest video. Right. I did a teardown of it. In the old garage, by the way. Thank you very much. I really liked the old, actually Segway here. We'll get back to the JST connector in a minute. I really enjoyed being in the old garage with the roller door and having the light come in, just having the light that's all there and just having like the breathing, the fresh air. And it's just like, geez, I think I'm going to shoot more stuff in the garage now. You know, it makes me want to have like, you know, there's something about having a roller door, like a garage door to your lab that, you know, either a lab or, you know, either a garage door or a big, you know, industrial roller door or something that you can just roll up and you can just like do things sort of like semi out in the open, you know?

Chris Gammell: Sure. You know, you got to be careful though, because, you know, drop bears can hang on top of the door when it rolls up.

Dave Jones: It's always dangerous, but yeah.

Chris Gammell: Got to watch out for them. But otherwise, yeah, you know, those and the spiders and the snakes and everything else.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because like about 10, 10, 11 years ago, like I was making a real big decision. Should I actually move from this, sell this place and actually buy a, like in another industrial park, which is like just across the road here kind of thing. And it's got these sort of like roller dory type, you know, like it's like half office and it's half like, you know, roller dory garagey kind of thing, you know, and they're, they're, they're really cool. Yeah. I just, yeah. I kind of envy anyone who's got a, a roller dory lab.

Chris Gammell: Well, you know, in Northern US, you probably wouldn't be in certain times of the year, but I gave it to you. Right, okay, right. Yeah, we're here.

Dave Jones: Like even, yeah, it's, well, technically it's not winter here anymore, but it's, you know, only a week out of winter, but you know, there I was with my t-shirt. No worries.

Chris Gammell: It's all good. That's great, man.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no, I mean, I'm sure it's, you know, that's always nice to go back to the old, old planting grounds and try stuff out.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to get more big stuff, I think, and just shoot it in the garage and at home. But yeah, anyway, I enjoyed that. And. So JSD connectors. And well, no, no, no, no, I haven't finished yet. Yeah. And those mobile trolleys. Like I got one, I got one for the lab here and I also got one for the home garage, you know, like it's a trolley on wheel, like that's a workbench on wheels and it's got, you know, the tool drawers underneath and stuff like that. And that's great to sit a project on and actually wheel it around, you know, like you can, like instead of moving your camera, you can just wheel the trolley around and, you know, change orientations and work on it. And you can walk all the way around it. I, I do like the island bench thing. I've always been a fan of island benches and in particular moving, moving island benches.

Chris Gammell: I mean, you're, if you don't mind me stating one of your weaknesses in this way, uh, is you, you tend to put stuff all around the island. Yes. It's hard to move. One of the downsides. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, on the floor, but you know, come on, you know, the sentiments there, right? No, I, I used it here the other day, right? I was able to wheel, I was able to wheel the bench just behind me for like a shoot. So it was in the background, you know, I didn't have to move my camera gear to it. I moved the bench over. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I almost bought, this was, uh, eight years ago or something. I almost bought like a big 130 square meter place, like, you know, almost three times bigger than what I've got now. I probably should have, cause it was reasonably cheap. It was in a different part of the park. And my, and my plan was to have lots of island benches so that each project could get its own bench. You know, each project would have its own bench and then you could walk around the bench. So you could work on your project from any angle you could shoot in, you know, in, in, because I shoot videos for a living, right. I want to be able to, I can shoot videos from any angle and stuff like that. And, and, you know, if you, if you're not working on the project at the moment, you can sort of like move, you know, you can sort of like wheel the thing off to the side, you know, so you can have like a bunch of projects and everything to do with that project is on that one bench.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You want basically like the, uh, Amazon, uh, robot, robotic, uh, moving the bench to you instead of you moving to the bench sort of thing. Right.

Dave Jones: Right. That's yeah. And, and everything, all the parts, all the tools for that, you know, all the, you know, if you're in the middle of it, you know, tearing something apart, it's all, you know, it all just sits there rather than, you know, you just have your one workbench. It's really luxurious.

Chris Gammell: I'm just going to say that you probably still would manage to fill everything up with, uh, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So I just get more benches, you know?

Chris Gammell: Well, you know, that only works for so long.

Dave Jones: Well, then you buy a bigger place, you know, that's the whole idea. Yeah. That's the, that's the whole idea.

Chris Gammell: Eventually, eventually you run out of atoms in the universe. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Ah, boy. Anyway, Island benches. I really like, I'm a big fan boy of Island benches.

Chris Gammell: So yeah, no, it is nice for that sort of thing. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Highly recommended. So JST connectors. I'm glad you asked.

Chris Gammell: Before you do JST connectors, what is an EcoFlow battery? What is this thing you're tearing down?

Dave Jones: Oh, it's, it's a home storage battery. It's a, well, it's, it's a portable home storage. Huh? Sorry.

Chris Gammell: On the go. Like, uh, looks like it's on wheels. So like, you can roll around.

Dave Jones: It's actually, you can actually wheel. It's got one of those, uh, trolley, you know, luggage pullout handle things. So you can physically wheel it around. Yeah. It's, it's designed to take camping or to put in your RV or to use at home and then have the ability to take it somewhere else. And so it's a big battery bank, but it's also got solar power, like solar inputs. So you can hook up solar panels to it, or you can hook up external generators to it, or you can, uh, it's got a charger. So you can just charge the mains or whatever.

Chris Gammell: Did I tell you that I got my battery confiscated when I was coming back from Germany? No. I'm so pissed about that. Really? Yeah.

Dave Jones: What battery? It was, I mean, it was a monster. Well, anything over a hundred watt hours, I believe the international airline limit is a hundred watt hours. Was it bigger than that?

Chris Gammell: I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

Dave Jones: Ah, yeah. Trap for young players. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think it, I think it was something like that. And like, uh, no, I read it was one 85 on the, it was one 85 watt, uh, kilowatt out. Wait, is that right? Watt hours. Watt hours. Watt hours.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: A hundred eighty five watt hours.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Whatever it was. I think you're right that like they said the limit was a hundred, but I'd read on, I actually had gone on the airport website and it said 185 or something like that. Right. And they're like, yeah, you can do that, but you have to get, like approval from the airline. And I'm like, right.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: I'm not going to do that.

Dave Jones: So you just rocked up hoping you'd get away with it. No, I had no idea. I just had no idea.

Chris Gammell: Like I was just clueless. Yeah. What I should have done is just left it in my bag. Like I did on the way there and they would have been like, Oh look a battery. Cause they always just say, look a battery.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, this is why the new Tektronix 2 series scope, which is a portable battery powered one, right? It's got these hot swappable batteries. That's one of the reasons it's got the hot swappable batteries is, and each battery is less than the hundred watt hour. I think it's 96 watt hours or something. It's less than the international airline limit. So what you do is you leave one in the scope and then you can carry the scope on board. And then you put the other one in your carry on luggage. And that's how you can ship. You're not supposed to leave.

Chris Gammell: Oh, and your carry on, not in your check luggage. I see. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Check. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. Check.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. You're not supposed to put it in the check. You're supposed to put it in the.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's supposed to be on the carry on. Is it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's not supposed to be in the hold.

Dave Jones: Oh, is there, is there another limit for checked baggage? I'm not sure you can put something in your checked baggage. Can't you?

Chris Gammell: I don't know. All I know is I was very upset with some German security folks and they didn't have much sympathy for me. Also, I was running really late. So I was like all sweaty. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Dave Jones: So they've obviously destroyed that battery. Have they? Oh, it's long gone.

Chris Gammell: It's long gone. Yeah. I did love it though. It had like a, you know, it actually had like a DC to AC converter on it. So I could plug my laptop in. It was awesome.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Right. Yep. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I didn't see that on many others. So anyways, I will try and get another one, but because that is super useful. Like the fact that that's even a thing is like super cool. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. No, it's, yeah, it's great. Anyway, these, yeah, these batteries are very cool. It's, yeah. Okay. So EcoFlow, same kind of thing. Yeah. Similar sort of thing. It's a, yeah. It's got everything. It's got everything but the kitchen sink built in. How much is it weigh? 47 kilos. Woo. So you multiply that by 2.2, that's 110 pounds or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's in a little chonker.

Dave Jones: It basically weighs as much as my wife. So it weighs the same weight as my wife. You know. Right. Yep. It's pretty heavy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Careful there, buddy. And you're right.

Dave Jones: Yep. I'm going to cop that. Oh, boy. She doesn't listen to this anyway.

Chris Gammell: Either way. Just careful there, buddy. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Anyway. Well, anyway, so you tore the whole thing down. JSD connectors.

Dave Jones: JSD. Yeah. No, I tore it all down and then I put it back together. Right. And I was very careful. You know, there's lots of cables in there. It's very careful. And there's lots of screws to put it back together. Right. So I was very careful to make sure all the cables are in. Right. I double checked. All the cables are in. Yep. Gave them a wiggle. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. They're all pushed in. Put it all back together with the 20 million screws. And then, you know, it works. It powers up. But then I was using one of the features of it, which is a fast charge, slow charge switchable feature. Right. And that's got a physical switch on the back panel. You know, and I was realizing why my software, like, you know, it's got an appy thing, whatever on your shoe phone. And I was wondering why it wouldn't enable that feature. And because it worked, it had worked a day before. Right. Actually, before I tore it down.

Chris Gammell: But it was professionally put together.

Dave Jones: Yep. And then it dawned on me. Oh, God. I've left the cable off. Right. I've let, because like it literally, like there's a tiny little board that all it has is a switch and a two pin JST connector. Right. And it's just for that switch. And obviously that switch needed to be shorted in order to enable that mode. Right. So that's why, that's why the software didn't detect it because the switch wasn't closed. And so I reluctantly took it apart, but surprisingly I found that that cable was plugged in. And, and it's like, like I tried to push it in further and it was like, nope, it's, it's, it's plugged in as far as it goes. Then I actually got the meter out. I actually buzzed it out. And sure enough, the switch was not, you know, it wouldn't, wouldn't work. It wasn't active. It wasn't getting over to the main board via this JST wiring, two wire harness thing. And then, so I took it off and like, and then I'm getting pliers to try and insert it. Cause it's a bit difficult. You know, the angles, unless you take it all right, you know, fully apart, it's very difficult to get in there. And, and I put it back together and it finally, like it finally worked, but the, but the connector looked like it should have clicked. Like it should have had that little bumpy clicky thing, but it didn't. So I think it's, you know, it's just a poor quality connector.

Chris Gammell: They got, I mean, it also could have been you like jamming the crap out of it. Right.

Dave Jones: I mean like, Oh yeah, but I didn't like, I wasn't brutal with like, I like it literally came apart once and I put it back together.

Chris Gammell: Like, I mean, so I'm, I'm, you know, I'm speeding through this video. This is yeah. I mean, yeah. It's not like fatigue. I just mean, no, no, no. Jammed the thing together, but like, this is an intense looking build. Like this is not, this is not a.

Dave Jones: Oh no, no. I was very impressed. It's, it's a really serious, it's a really good example of how to build a robust, a big robust item. And all the boards are conformally coded of course, because it, you know, yeah. The whole idea is you throw this in the back of the ute when you go camping. Right. So it's going to get, you know, thrown around, it's going to get vibration. So, so they've got elastic holding down every component, you know, that could potentially vibrate and flap around in the breeze. And, you know, it's, it's pretty well done. Yeah. No, no, no. But you do pay top dollar for it, of course.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Yeah. That's the other thing I was going to say about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And there's lots of really rugged molded plastic in it and start like in this huge metal standoffs as well. And it's got huge, big carry handles. Cause you know, it's got to support the 47 kilo weight.

Chris Gammell: If you thought about like, instead of bringing like a big battery like this camping, you could just do wireless charging. That would probably be.

Dave Jones: Oh, of course. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Probably better.

Dave Jones: That's obviously the solution. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You could beam it from a local tower to satellite. Satellite's even better.

Dave Jones: You can do a Tesla style. Yeah. Yeah. Why not?

Chris Gammell: In the atmosphere.

Dave Jones: Please tell me we don't have a wireless power Segway.

Chris Gammell: No, we don't.

Dave Jones: No. Oh, good.

Chris Gammell: It's just, it's just always, you know, just a practice.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's always good. This is a really nice build. This is a really nice build. Yep. I found out my sister got a new car. I'm just looking at one of the boards that you're, you're poking through right here. And some of it's unpopulated. My sister got a new car and they just left features off. They just said, yeah, you know, it's a brand new car. We'll, we'll let you know when the board comes in.

Dave Jones: Well, that's what Tesla were famously doing. They were literally leaving out seat warmers. They were leaving out other features. They were just, look, we don't have the chips from.

Chris Gammell: Uh, she's not in the Tesla, uh, echelon of, uh, buying cars. Uh, no one in my family is.

Dave Jones: What car is it? Like, can we name and shame? Some.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no, probably Toyota, something like that. Yeah. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Toyota Crappiola or something.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: No, Toyota, great. Toyota cars are great, man.

Dave Jones: No, not for you. No, I, we, we went on a road trip in my Toyota Corolla.

Chris Gammell: Great cars. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. We, we went from Sydney to Canberra. We said, we went.

Chris Gammell: We said Crappiola. I don't know. Like. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But no, that was just a name for whatever generic variant they're bloody producing. You know, I didn't mean to say no. Toyota. If you want a reliable car, buy a fricking Toyota. Right.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Sure.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Like.

Chris Gammell: I have been watching the fully charged show. Do you watch that? Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Sometimes with. A little flashy. He was the, he was on Red Dwarf or something. Wasn't he? I don't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I never watch it. Yeah. It's, you know, I catch it here and there. Yeah. Like sometimes it's good. Sometimes. No, I have actually criticized them in the past for. Oh, yeah. Getting stuff wrong.

Chris Gammell: I think for me, I just don't really have any. Like, I'm not like checking out trade magazines. I don't know what's out there. So like when I catch like a new show, a new car, I'm like, oh, okay. You know, like a new. Right. Like there was a new mini. No, MG. That's what was surprising when it was like a new MG that's coming out newly. It's all electric. So like, that's cool. And I think we did. Yeah. Cause we talked about them. I think the first time I'd seen them was when they were talking about the electric delivery trucks, the UPS structure.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. We talked about that one. Years ago. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so still, still watch it. Still, you know, still not in the market for an electric car.

Dave Jones: Right. Cool. Well, you wouldn't be able to buy one anyway. You just can't get them. That's true. That's true.

Chris Gammell: You know, so not to, there was some politics stuff that is funding, uh, cars stuff in the U S. So like, that was like part of a, a bill package. I was very surprised to learn 85% within like a couple of years, 85% of the battery pack on these cars has to be built in the U S that seems bonkers to me. How many years? I have no idea. I don't know how many years that is. Like, I just know that eventually, I think at the end of whenever this is probably 10 years from now.

Dave Jones: But they always make these plans. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm sure. But, but still 85%, like nothing is 80, like no electronics in a car is built 85% in the U S. Like that is.

Dave Jones: No, no.

Chris Gammell: If that does happen, that's insane. So.

Dave Jones: No, no, it is not going to happen. Where do the rare earth minerals come from? Good luck. You know, like. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. I don't, I don't see them like picking up.

Dave Jones: Where does your cobalt come from? I don't see many U S cobalt ones. Right. Right. Right. Right. It's probably not going to be doing that in downtown DC. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Apparently there is lithium in the U S, but, but again, it's just like, who's going to go get it? Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So.

Dave Jones: No, it's yeah. No, they claim, no, all this, all this new environmental push is like, is not going to happen because, you know, everyone like Australia just signed a environment. You know, we have to go X amount of renewable and, you know, green energy in the next five years or something. I don't know. I can't remember the details.

Chris Gammell: It just passed the other day.

Dave Jones: And it's like, it's just not going to happen. Right. They just like, you know, so many things have to like, you know, has to cause so much pain to so many people in such shorter time that it's just, yeah, they make all these plans and they, you know, it's, it's just not going to happen. So. Yep. Well, I, yeah. Take it with a grain of salt. You know, I think grain of salt is right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think that's true of any kind of like, you know, incentivized program like that, but, but, you know, like the, the money that's behind it for like, you know, if you want to get like a, so like if you wanted to get like a discount on a car in the future, you know, like they're doing now, I don't know if Australia, Australia still does that or no for electric cars. Like, did you get a discount?

Dave Jones: We've never had an EV discount. Never had that. No. Okay. No. The best we would get was, oh, you might get 50 bucks off your rego or something, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That ain't doing it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, no, no. It's like, no, I, I, I envied. Everyone who was buying fricking Teslas for like 30 grand in California. It was like, Holy shit. They're like $80,000 a year. Yeah. Well, you guys get other.

Chris Gammell: The small one, you know, it's like, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: We've got other stuff, but you guys had so many state subsidies and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Some states. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And then you'll get the state subsidies for, you know, putting the solar panels into power your Tesla. And like, there were some people in some States who were telling me the car's almost free. It's like, by the time they installed the solar system and got the subsidy on that and the subsidy on the Tesla or whatever, it would, they were practically getting it for free over five years or something. It was like, it was that good a deal. And of course the taxpayer, you paid for that, Chris. So congratulations. You know, well, you know. And your kids will be paying for that. So yeah. Congratulations. That's fine. You know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Anyways. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So 85%, we'll see.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: You know, that's. Yeah. Yeah. They are building a new battery plant in North Carolina. I was surprised. No. Okay. I think maybe I mentioned on the show in the past, it's like, you know, it's in the boonies. It's nowhere, but it's, it's going to be big. It's like a, so I think it's a, I think it might be Toyota who's building it like in conjunction with Panasonic. I should write that up, but no. Yeah. So North Carolina, big battery plant.

Dave Jones: So we, I'm sure I've mentioned this on the show before. We shut down literally every auto making plant in this country.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. They're, they're, they're all gone. We, we, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Ford and Holden, at least, I think they were the big four. They all manufactured cars here locally. All now gone. Completely, utterly gone. It's, it's just so stupid. It was such a stupid thing, you know? Yeah. And they just let it die. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway, if I want to see my tax dollars being spent on something, I would like to have seen the mandate. You know, I generally don't like mandates. I'm not a fan of mandates as a lot of people know, but in this particular case, the government could have mandated that all new government cars had to be built here in Australia. Sure. They could have simply mandated that and that would have kept the factories going, you know, or at least some of them. Right. So, yeah. I mean, it's tough too.

Chris Gammell: When like, when there's, you know, you think about all the support stuff though, too, like machine shops and just like, I always forget about that.

Dave Jones: There were huge flow on effects. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Massive.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's like, that's, that's the reason that sometimes it is one directional, you know, like you think about like, what's going to, you know, you can't just like turn it off and turn it back on again. Right. So if you lose all these factories and then like, and then all the sporting businesses all go to, it's not like, Oh, actually. Yeah. Nevermind. We've relied. We just come back. It's like, well, all those machinists just retired and all of those support staff just lost their job and now works, you know, they retrained, like they're gone, man.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So yeah. It's really, you know, they're like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. They're bootcamps. Sorry.

Dave Jones: Yeah. The, the old learn to code thing, you know? Yep. Yep. That was hilarious.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Someday Dave, we will someday. Right. Yeah. I don't think we may learn about someday. Uh, so this is actually a really cool post from Thorsten Knoll on medium, how to print a 3d cell for like a semiconductor. So did you see this thing? No, is it on our list? It's on our list. Yeah. What is it listed as? Uh, open source, I see cells as 3d prints. So basically if you ever wanted to like visualize what it looks like to make a standard cell on like the sky one 30 process. Right. So, you know, like all of this, actually that's another, was that not on our list? I don't know if it was.

Dave Jones: That's a cool educational thing that you can give students and go, well, look, you know, it's, you can physically see the, the, the layer structure of the cells and you do it in different colors for different layers. You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. Actually.

Chris Gammell: So the reason this has been popping up too. So actually past guests, uh, Uri from walkway, he just released another thing. This is further on this on our list too. It's just further down. I thought it was, I thought we would have talked about this, but tiny tape out. Do you see that thing?

Dave Jones: I I've had a look at that. That's yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's so crazy. So what it is, is if you haven't seen it yet, basically, uh, Uri was on the show talking about walkway, which is basically a simulator for doing Arduino type stuff or expressive type stuff.

Dave Jones: And yeah, it's very cool. You have to check it out.

Chris Gammell: The Pico, you know, so you basically, you can go and kind of hook up like a digital version of a circuit, like on a breadboard and see how it actually, actually is simulated all the way down. And we recommend that that episode was awesome. Like Uri is amazing. But then he goes and does this other thing where basically now he says, okay, well you make a digital circuit using this schematic program, which is on, you know, tiny tape out as part of walkway basically. And then I'll take that circuit, which is basically a schematic and then convert it. And then it'll get some, some of them by lottery that gets submitted to the, the shuttle runs that are happening at Skywater, which is like, oh my God, that is, that is so cool. So can you simulate these digital gates and stuff too? No, I don't think you actually have much visibility into the, uh, I think it's all at the schematic level. So you're basically using like primitive. So if you click on that video, the tiny tape of video that Matt Venn was sharing.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So like at the two minute mark, you kind of see him hooking stuff up. So like buffers and logic gates or gate and gates, that sort of thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But I'm wondering if that like actually simulates and you can drive that led display. Cause this is perfect for my MacGyver project. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. If, if, if this actually did seem, you know, I can use some other digital simulator. Yeah. To sort of, you know, uh, simulate it, I guess, but I, I just, yeah, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Something like this might be perfect for what you're trying to do, you know, like, and then, and then you could eventually submit it to be actually made into silicon as well, which is like.

Dave Jones: I could get a custom ASIC for my MacGyver bomb project. Oh my goodness. A little bomb project. Oh, that's just, that's insane. That's just nuts. Yeah. That's, uh, wow. Wow.

Chris Gammell: It's another level. Yeah. Talking to Uri is, uh, yeah. Yeah. It's, so I don't know how far that's going to go, but then anyway, so then Thorsten basically did this thing where now it's, you can take the GDS files, which are basically, I think it's gate train source, but basically it's one of the formats that then can be processed by the fab. Right. Basically working off of old knowledge here from anything else. Yeah. But then you can convert it into an actual 3d visualization of the different layers, because basically you're saying, you know, you basically are making these standard cells and you're saying, okay, at this, at this layer, I want to have, uh, you know, this section open, this section closed. I want to have, uh, you know, a diffusion hole down to this other layer, that sort of thing. And then you're doing implantation. All of this stuff is in the open. Oh, what the hell do they call it? Man, I'm so out of my, my league, all of the Skywater stuff. They have like, they open the open kit for how they actually make the different components. Let's see. So further down the page on this medium article, there's a process stack diagram. Yeah. I can see. I'm looking at that now. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And that's, yeah. It just shows the different, uh, metal layers, the via layers and, you know, stuff like that. And then the polysilicon gates down the bottom.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Basically all the, basically all your, all your gates are down the bottom and then all your metal actual routing is on the, is stacked above that. That's right. Yeah. Pretty much. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And I think I've mentioned on the show, but like we did this when I was learning this stuff that Samsung back in the day, like I had no knowledge of it prior. I did very, very poorly in my chip design classes in school. Uh, but the, a couple of people actually made like 3d models using, like, I think it was SketchUp at the time. And just that is so, so helpful to actually understand like what's happening. What do all these things mean? Why do you need to have some sections open, some sections not open? It's just like, yeah, that is this kind of like 3d assembly and 3d like modeling of what it looks like. So, so helpful. Yeah. I don't, I don't know if it's the scale, but I don't, I don't think it even matters.

Dave Jones: It makes no difference. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. No, that's great. Yeah. Hats off. Fantastic. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Very, very cool project. So Thorsten, nice job.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: I don't know what you do with the 3d prints afterwards. I think they probably just sit on your desk. Kind of looks like a weird, like almost like a key.

Dave Jones: Well, as I said, like it's an educational thing, you know, it really gets the students, you know, head around physically what's happening down at the micro nano nano these days. Micro. Jeez. When I was a boy, one micron process, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right. The size of a human hair.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Right. Yes. Transistor, the size of a human hair. Yeah. Yeah. That's good stuff. Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. Yep. Anyway. Speaking of old, old school.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I do like the vintage tech museum has actually released the new employee orientation video for techtronics.

Chris Gammell: The new old video. The new old video.

Dave Jones: It is not for the new employees unless you like coming in a 1960s Cadillac or something and, you know, with your.

Chris Gammell: Black grasses and a white shirt with a black tie. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And this is a 22 minute long. Yeah. This is the video that showed new employees, I guess, at the company, you know, where your first day on the job, you'd get sit in a room with five other newbies and you'd sit down and watch, you know, this new employee orientation video. I haven't watched it all yet, but I'm flicking through it. Oh man. I got to watch this. This looks great. Right.

Chris Gammell: It's like, yeah, probably the, you know, the, the official techtronics brand cigarettes that you get handed.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Is it, is there anyone smoking in the video?

Chris Gammell: I don't see it. No, I don't think that anyone is smoking the video, but.

Dave Jones: It's just sold to smoke.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Oh boy.

Dave Jones: I'm just at, at, at five minutes, 48, I'm just looking at, there's this woman who's soldering. Oh my God. She's her, the grip on this wooden handled. Oh my God.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Wooden handled soldering iron. Oh my God. What?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: This is just, oh my goodness.

Chris Gammell: This is like, uh.

Dave Jones: Like, she's like holding it like, uh, like stabbing style. Stabbing style. If that's the correct. Yeah. I think that's right. Yeah. Like. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're going to stab someone. You know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, psycho or something.

Chris Gammell: I can't, I cannot imagine working with this many wires and. Oh, just what a mess.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Wiring harnesses and point to point and tag board, you know, tag board. Like, you know, I, I come from an era where tag board was a thing. You know, you would open up your, you know, uh, his master's voice radio. Right. HMV is like an Australian thing. His master's voice. It's a right. Yeah. For those outside Australia and also not old enough to remember. Anyway. Hey, you know, you open up your HMV radio. It was all like tag board construction. For those who don't know, it was like, you would like, there was this, like, like a strip of little solder tags. And you would just wire your components point to point on these solder tags. So that you, you didn't have boards. You would have solder tags, you know, and that's how, or you might have a board in there for some complicated function, but other simpler functions were done with just tag board. So yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think you still might find it these days in say a passive, uh, crossover in a speaker or something like that. You know, you might find like the, you know, the, uh, L's and C's in there and in a, you know, some sort of crossover field, a point to point wiring, you know, still find it there. That's probably the only example. I don't know that I can think of these days. I'm sure there's others leave it in the comments, but you know, this is such, man, this

Chris Gammell: is such a time piece. Yeah. I know. It's like, oh yeah. 1973. Remember we were talking about this last time. Yeah. 1973, 50 years ago. Holy crap. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: It doesn't say like, yeah. Cause no.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if I mentioned this on the show ever before, but they, so, you know, I worked for the company, a company that was bought by Tektronix and I think it was someone when we were there, but they were telling us about like how vertically integrated used to be a Tektronix.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. They, they, they spun their own tubes and everything. Like they, like, like they did their own CRT tubes in their own vacuum tubes. I think the whole, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But this was like to the level. And again, this is not me, but like they'd have a machine shop where they'd like, you'd order a desk from them. Was that, you know, like you'd call down and order a desk for your office. That's crazy. Right.

Dave Jones: It's just, yeah. Nuts. Yep. I can, I can remember working at Australian defense industries. I didn't spend long there, but yeah, I had a short stint at Australian defense industries at Garden Island here, which is a naval base here. Yeah. They, they had their own machine shops for everything. You know, like you could, if you just wanted something made, you could just go down to the machine shop and get it made, you know, like custom built for it. You know, it was, yeah. Yeah. It was great. So, yeah. It's crazy. So anyway, we'll, we'll link this. Oh, you've got to watch. Oh my God. The hair. Oh, the hair. Oh, have a look at, have a look at 12 minutes, 48.

Chris Gammell: I know exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Oh my God. The beehive. Is it the beehive hairdo or whatever?

Chris Gammell: That's a beehive. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Definitely. Right. Oh, that's great. With, with the sunglasses inside. Inside like a boss wearing the aviator sunglasses inside. She's wearing the rose colored glasses inside. That's just, yeah. I don't think they're protect protective glasses. It's well, maybe they are. I don't know. That, this is great. This is great. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, the concentration on her face. Is she spinning tubes?

Chris Gammell: I think she's doing CRTs.

Dave Jones: I think she's spinning vacuum CRTs. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Like if she's like working on this spinny table thing, which has these. Yeah. I think she's glass blowing the CRT tubes or whatever. How, however they construct those. Yeah. Yeah. Oh God. Oh, surfer dude. There's, there's surfer dude. We'll let people watch it, Dave. Come on. It's great. Oh, it's just, just terrific. I'm loving it.

Chris Gammell: Now that I know that the, there's more of this, uh, there's more stuff on the list than I thought there were. I saw a bunch of upvotes and I was like, oh, that must've been from like, last time when we talked about it, but it, no, it's been, yeah. It's been a while. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's, it's been a while. Yeah. I think we skipped a week or something.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It was a holiday last week.

Dave Jones: So. Right. Yep. Yeah. It's all right. We don't have to do this thing every week. Come on, man. Yeah. Well, we're the boss.

Chris Gammell: We don't ever hear from anybody. Yes. Yeah.

Dave Jones: We, we, we hereby, by royal decree, Dave and Chris have decided that we will, we will release an episode when we feel, when we feel like it.

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Dave Jones: It's a, yep. Yep. By technical decree.

Chris Gammell: All other, all other requests for a new episode can be sent on the back of a $26 bill to the following address.

Dave Jones: Oh boy. Yep. Yeah. Okay. What else we got on the list? Yeah. Like 10 minutes later. Jeez. They're flowing today.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, there is this, uh, open circuits book. I think that's been out for, it's been announced for a little while at least, but, uh, that's, uh, Eric and Wendell. I think we maybe mentioned it a little bit on here, but basically. Possibly. Yeah. There's a new book. So Eric Schlepfer and Wendell Askay basically took a bunch of circuits and then put them on a bandsaw. And I'm very excited to see this.

Dave Jones: We've definitely mentioned it before. Yeah. We have mentioned it. Oh, it's actually been physically released now. Cause I know they'll take in pre-orders or whatever. Ooh. Yeah. I got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. That's, that's, that's what it was. That's why we mentioned it. Cause they had announced it and they were showing like sneak peeks and you can download like the first chapter or whatever. I think you can download the first chapter for the website so you can get a feel for what's there. And it's just gorgeous coffee table book. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I mentioned this before is that every tech company should have this as a coffee table book. Like, you know, just, just in the foyer. Yeah. I would totally have this. Right. If I had like an EV blog foyer, you know, if you had a foyer, right.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. You could just like glue it to the front door of your office.

Dave Jones: Right. I could, I could just leave it down in the foyer of the building. I could like, there you go.

Chris Gammell: What if you did it like an old phone book where you had it like on a cord? On a cord. On a cord. On a cord. Yes. Yes.

Dave Jones: So people could read it as they're waiting for the lift. I could just leave it on a chain. Exactly. Hanging from dangling out, outside the lifts and people could go, Ooh, look at this. Ooh. Yeah. Really? That's what's inside my iPhone. Really?

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh. I don't know. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, it's, it's, it's gorgeous. Yeah. It really is. Yeah. I'm going to have to get myself a physical copy. It's just great. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: All right. Well then we've already talked about that before. Uh, what else then?

Dave Jones: Um, come on, but what's this DC powered house thing?

Chris Gammell: No, I don't want to talk about that.

Dave Jones: The DC nanogrid house.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. I don't want to do it.

Dave Jones: No, no. You don't want to do it because you know, like some people, well, no, look, it's worth talking about people ask this. Why don't we just have DC running around our house? Well, it's.

Chris Gammell: Why don't we have DC running around our house?

Dave Jones: Well, I squared our losses, you know, it's like, you know.

Chris Gammell: Cause transformers are frigging awesome.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I mean, switching power. Yeah. Like, yeah, we could do away with all these switching power supplies. If we all just had a 12 or 24 volt, like outlet instead of a 240 volt. Not 110 volt rubbish.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Uh, yeah. I like, but no, it's just, it's not. No, no. You, you quadruple. I don't know how much copper extra copy you'd have to like physically thick copy. You'd have to run to power all the stuff. It's just, it's like, I don't know. Anyway, Purdue university is running.

Chris Gammell: I do remember one of the first consulting things I ever got was like someone, like I was almost a brand new engineer and someone's like, yeah, I have this idea and I, I, I need someone to work on it. And so they, they, they had me sign an NDA and I was like, okay, yeah, yeah. I'll sign, I'll sign this NDA. And they're like, I want to put USB ports into wall outlet switches. And I was like, there's no way you could possibly fit that. That would never, ever work. I can't work on this. I'm sorry. And of course they have it. Like, it's no problem at all. You know? Yeah. I, as an engineer, I had no how to, no idea how to do it now as an older, more wise engineer, I still have no idea how to do it.

Dave Jones: It, it, it is a big problem though. Every one of those wall outlet USB things that I've used and installed has failed every single one of them.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Cause there's.

Dave Jones: Heat death you think? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's gotta be. I haven't investigated. It's gotta be. It's gotta be heat death. Yeah. Cause they try and, you know, shrinkify it down and then they do put a lot of stuff in there. And then they usually pot it. You know, you can buy them at your local supermarket. Yeah. As you, like you mentioned, there was an Aussie guy. I can't remember, but this is probably 15 years ago now. Yeah. He, he actually, he tried to patent it and you know, I think he did. I think there's like, I think he spent like hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to patent the damn thing. Yeah. It was USB in a PowerPoint and he got, I think it was granted. And then he went, yeah, there's gotta be an article out there. I'm sure I've shared the article like a decade or 12 years ago or something like right back at the start.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. The guy like failed because he spent so much money. No, I think, no, people fleeced him or something because he had this brilliant idea about USB in a PowerPoint. So, oh yeah. Okay. So all the, all the patent attorneys come in and fleeced him for the cash. Then those inventor companies, you know, those inventors that turn your invention idea into a, a viable product. I think they, they like fleeced him. And I think he even wrote the article himself or something, how I got fleeced. Oh God. It's, I'll see if I can find it, but yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The idea is not that valuable.

Dave Jones: No, no, no. It's not.

Chris Gammell: You got to spend about 5% of your money on the, the patent filing. You got to spend 5% of your money on the development of the idea and the other 90%. And then however much else you can scrape together to go and sue anyone else who has any idea about how to do it themselves. Because that's really, that's really, that's where the money is, is the suing everybody else.

Dave Jones: Exactly. No, it's just, uh, anyway, yeah, I, I felt sorry for him at the time that, yeah, he just, yep.

Chris Gammell: I mean, generally it is a good idea. I mean, and now we see USB PowerPoints everywhere, right? I mean, they're, they're built into every airline seat, every, everything. Right. But, uh.

Dave Jones: I'm just looking at a patent from this that was granted in 2016. Really? Yeah. Really? It's like, oh, come on. You know, it's, it's just taking the piss. Yeah. It's just. Yep. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway, you can patent any, like you can't patent the idea, but you can patent your method of doing it, you know, so to speak. So, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Design patents and similar. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Here's my method. I'm going to mount the USB vertically instead of horizontal. Woohoo. Patent granted, you know, rubber stamp. Congratulations. You know, you own the vertical USB market, you know, like, God, nah. Anyway. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Did you see that the chip printer was in here? Why the world relies on ASML for machines that print chips.

Dave Jones: Oh boy. Did we want to get back into it?

Chris Gammell: No, this is, this is a, this is a joke title. A joke title. Okay. Right. Yeah. But it is about ASML, which is, you know, legitimately one of the most important companies in the entire world, right? Yes.

Dave Jones: Because they make the, yep.

Chris Gammell: They make the lithography equipment that basically enables everything else.

Dave Jones: Where are they from? They're from one of the Nordic countries, aren't they? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: One of the Nordic countries. Yeah. That's right. I'm not sure.

Dave Jones: I can never remember the bloody Nordic countries. So I just call them the Nordic countries, you know, sorry.

Chris Gammell: I think it's Norway. I think it's Norway.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Finland's on the right. Norway's on the left. Sweden's in the middle. Denmark's down below.

Dave Jones: Denmark. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. I'm sorry to all of our listeners. We just, no. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We're, we're just.

Dave Jones: No, Yanks and Aussies. Stupid. Yeah. We've got no idea. We're just on the other side of the planet.

Chris Gammell: We got our own things going on. Do you know how many drop bears are in Dave's garage right now? Exactly.

Dave Jones: Right. Just waiting.

Chris Gammell: Just hanging out on top of the garage door, just waiting to drop on them.

Dave Jones: Oh boy. Anyways. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So this is, you know, this is like a key thing. And this is, of course, there's been tons of articles about how they can't build the machines that build chips so that you can't build more chips. So you can't build more chips. So you can't build more machines to build chips and on and on and on and on. So yeah, that's, that's been an ongoing saga there. But man, these, these machines are just insane. You know, like nanometers, single nanometers. So yeah. And at high speed.

Dave Jones: Got it. What has Alpha Phoenix done this time? He's done a video. I changed the speed of electricity in brackets, electricity, not electrons. What's this about? He's talking about propagation.

Chris Gammell: I didn't watch it.

Dave Jones: In fact, I haven't watched it either. Anyway, he does really good videos. They've got really nice animations and really nice production values. And yeah.

Chris Gammell: Was Alpha Phoenix the one that did? No, that's one of the response videos for.

Dave Jones: He was. He did the first physical build response video to Erotasium's, you know, circuit question thing. Moon to Earth to Moon. You know, flicking a switch light bulb question.

Chris Gammell: Flicking a switch. Right. Yeah. Totally. Okay. Yeah. I'll have to watch that one too. You know, we do appreciate people adding this stuff. I don't. I haven't been on Reddit much at all lately. I really should, you know. I don't use Reddit at all.

Dave Jones: That's the one I should go on here. Apart from our Ampower thing. I know. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We should probably log in before the show. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, if I see something, I pop it in the Reddit thread. Sure. Sure. Sure. It happens. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Hang on. He's got a garage lab. I can see he's physically got the roller door open. And he's. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: There's something to emulate right there. But does he have drop ears?

Dave Jones: Done.

Chris Gammell: That's the key thing. Yeah. I think you had posted a little bit about this on Twitter, but there's some other stuff about basically there's China's kind of getting cut off from certain stuff. So like apparently they're not allowed to have NVIDIA stuff anymore. Yep. And there's been some.

Dave Jones: Well, a certain NVIDIA stuff, not all NVIDIA. It's not. No. Certain levels. But there's nothing new here. I mean, there were exports controls on the bloody PlayStation, for goodness sake. You know?

Chris Gammell: There were?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, I didn't know. Don't you remember that? Yeah. The PlayStation. I think it was the PlayStation 2 at the time. Please correct me in the comments. But anyway, it was one of the PlayStations was such a supercomputer level at the time that there were export controls. You could not sell it to uranium fancy in countries. Let's put it that way. Who might build some gadget? Because they could use this for simulating, you know, implosions of certain devices. Got it. Yeah. It was such a powerful GPU in the thing. That, yeah. It was export control. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's just, it's still interesting to me that there's statecraft, like this sort of stuff coming up. So, I don't know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, it's absolutely no surprise. This happens all the time. Like, heck, I can't even buy certain MOSFETs, right? Really? Outside of the US, you can't even buy certain MOSFETs.

Chris Gammell: Which?

Dave Jones: Because they're deemed to be so fast that they're used in said gadgets that, you know, yeah.

Chris Gammell: This is like ITR stuff and things like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's all these regulations and, you know, you can't buy a FLIR thermal camera that's over five frames per second outside the US. They're actually limited.

Chris Gammell: I should be taking advantage. Yeah. I should take advantage.

Dave Jones: You should take advantage of that. You can get your full 50 frames per second thermal imaging.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Everyone else has to live with fire.

Chris Gammell: See how fast I can blow up a MOSFET myself, you know? Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, you can film your MOSFETs blowing up with your high-speed infrared camera and, you know.

Chris Gammell: That's all I've ever wanted. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And I can't do a thing, you know?

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Mwahaha.

Dave Jones: Well, maybe we can, you know, maybe some back-channel stuff could happen and, you know.

Chris Gammell: I'm not shipping you one, Dave. Just saying. I'm not shipping you one. I'm not shipping you one.

Dave Jones: Come on. It's just a MOSFET.

Chris Gammell: I didn't even like shipping you a poster. I didn't even like shipping you a poster.

Dave Jones: Used MOSFET. Used MOSFET is the official description.

Chris Gammell: There you go.

Dave Jones: Just saying.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Good old machine parts as the, yeah. Just a pro tip for those who want to send real money through the post. Machine parts. Right? Coins are machine parts. Pro tip. Yeah. Pro tip. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Bloody restrictions. All right. Last. Really? Last?

Chris Gammell: Article. What else we got? Sure it's the last. I think last.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, maybe.

Dave Jones: Yeah. All right.

Chris Gammell: How old is up? Oh, there was a tip of the week sort of, kind of. Nah. Well. The Mac 77958. Does it count? Do Maxim parts count?

Dave Jones: Are you able to still buy Maxim parts? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, they're analog devices parts now. Well, yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, they're still Maxim to me.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. USB Type-C and USB power delivery controller.

Dave Jones: Oh, I'm interested in that. Yeah. So where's the, where's the dinky dink?

Chris Gammell: That was number, chip of the week. That's not a very good article title, but 18 days ago, chip of the week.

Dave Jones: Oh, geez.

Chris Gammell: Let me just send you a link.

Dave Jones: Oh, 18. Oh, geez. You're really dregs. You're really dregs in it. Chip of the week. Oh, geez. Yeah, you are. Here it is.

Chris Gammell: Well, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You really went down the list there. I'm looking for the good stuff. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Looking for the good stuff.

Dave Jones: Right. Yes. Yes. Standalone Type-C USB power delivery controller. I am currently interested in this.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: I won't say why, but I'm currently interested in, yeah, because when I've rolled USB power delivery PD stuff before, it's a complicated bastard. Right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. You can get a micro with it built in, you know, for the micro supply project. We used, yeah, a part, but we had, like, it was an ST semi stack that it was a software stack that did the USB power delivery. And it's like a 30K software stack just to implement bloody USB power delivery. And it's like, like, no, just give me a chip that I plug. I solder onto my board and it negotiates my 10 amps or whatever I want. And it's all built in. And I, that's all I want.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Maybe with an I squared C interface so I can, you know, just tell it how much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that, that's all I want. Right. Yeah. There are Chinese makers who make these really simplified USB power delivery chips now, which they did. I don't think they existed even a couple of years ago when we were doing the micro supply, like four years ago or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, when you guys started, I think it was not.

Dave Jones: Oh, it was quite some time back.

Chris Gammell: There weren't a lot. I remember you were saying there weren't a lot of PD bricks out there.

Dave Jones: There wasn't a lot of power delivery solution parts out there. No. Yeah. No, there just wasn't much at all. So there were, so we had, so we ended up going down the path of like the complex ST part chain. And there was another chip we used, I can't remember off the top of my head. And it was, you know, it was a complicated thing to get working. It's really hideous. So yeah, anything, anything that takes away the pain gets my chip of the week vote. So I don't know. This one seems.

Chris Gammell: I haven't tried it on this. Yeah. This does seem pretty simple. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like it's got a lot of, it's got like GPIOs as well. So it's like got its own little, it's its own little micro-y thing rather than just like an 80.

Chris Gammell: It's probably for like LEDs and stuff like that though too, right? They've all got micros internally, you know, and then ROM, like mask ROM, stuff like that. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm really after just like an eight pin SO package that's USB in and enable and, you know, like power out, you know, it's fine if it uses an external, you know, power transistor or something. I don't know. But yeah.

Chris Gammell: What is this? This is interesting. Interactive data sheet. I mean, it's a webpage.

Dave Jones: Interactive data sheet.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: This is on the maximum. Oh, I see it. Interactive data sheet. I am clicking. I am clicking.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's not bad. I mean, this is probably what they use to generate their, their PDF from. I can copy paste values. That's pretty nice. Boy, that's nice actually. So like in.

Dave Jones: I'm not seeing any, I'm just seeing regular tabs and.

Chris Gammell: Maybe you're not allowed to do it because you're in Australia. Yeah. I mean, the interactive data sheet, this I'm seeing, it is just, it's just a webpage, right? That's what they're calling.

Dave Jones: It's just a webpage and there's general text and there's, it, it, it looks like the first page. Yeah, but if you go to like register map. And there's absolute, oh, register map. I don't see register map. All I've got is revision history. I can go to detail description, pin specifications. I'll go to pin specs. No, all I can do is call up images. This is not very exciting, Chris. What are you talking about?

Chris Gammell: Go, go to the, go to the right. Where, where are you? I just sent you a link. Go to click on that link. I just sent you. Yeah. This has been on my list for a while. Like.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No, this is no, it gives me the same thing. It's like it, I just get a bunch of tabs. It just looks like a regular webpage.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it is. That's what I'm saying. It's just a regular webpage. But if this is. So like PDFs have been the standard since. Yes. Basically started scanning in paper data sheets. Right. But like.

Dave Jones: Why? What's the advantage of this?

Chris Gammell: You can copy and paste stuff. You can like, so you could go.

Dave Jones: Well, you can copy and paste from PDFs as well. It's terrible. It isn't as elegant. Sometimes it's a bit. That's terrible.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They're harder to search. True. Right. They're not indexed by Google.

Dave Jones: Yeah, true. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's not always true. Some of them are indexed by Google.

Dave Jones: I would not call this an inter. Yeah. But with. Like. Using the word interactive. I expected. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's true. Interactive is overused. Yeah. You're right about that. Yes.

Dave Jones: It's just a web data sheet. I would just call this web. That's a better name. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Interactive data sheet would be like, you'd be able to like put in a value and it'd be like, oh, actually you need this size inductor.

Dave Jones: And that's what you got me all hyped up for that. That's what I was expecting. I was expecting like little formulas built in so I could like, you know, like in the app circuit. And then I could like spit out a value or it would do something exciting like that. This is. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's kind of like the, the TI national instruments. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Those. Yep. Yeah. The TI. Yeah. I can't remember the name of them, but.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Power designer or something like that. So yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Power designer, something like that. Yep. Well, anyways, a bit of a letdown at the end, but yeah, not a bad part.

Chris Gammell: Not a bad part.

Dave Jones: Okay. All right. Fine.

Chris Gammell: All right. Yep. Cool. Well, I guess it's. That's it. We've earned all our time on that. Yeah. So we'll be back without reading links in another two weeks or so, or whenever we feel like it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. By then, Australia could be a republic. Who knows? Find out. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Probably.

Dave Jones: Tune in for the next. No, it's not going to happen that quick.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Anyway.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Catch you next time.

Chris Gammell: See you.

Speaker ?: We'll be right back.