#617 – Conference Room Innovation

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released January 29th, 2023. Episode 617. Conference Room Innovation.

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

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Campbell of Contextual Electronics.

Dave Jones: Australians all let us rejoice for we are one and free. Oh, man.

Chris Gammell: You know what that means? I get a pass to sing the US National Anthem on July 4th. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's Australia Day here. Australia Day.

Chris Gammell: Hey, happy Australia Day.

Dave Jones: Thank you very much. Here I am in the office. I'm the only one in the building.

Chris Gammell: I know. How sad is that? Take advantage of national holidays and take a day off. Your boss is just cracking the whip behind you, I guess.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well. Yeah, but I just got back from taking a couple of weeks off. It feels like Australia Day is an awkward holiday for me. Yeah, because I just get back from our big yearly trip, walkabout. And here's a bloody public holiday. Well. Yep. Well, they're thinking about changing it. So, you know, they've changed the date like three times in the past. So, you know, I want to change it again. Yeah. Yep.

Chris Gammell: That's all the talk. That's a sign that the day is not tied to the date. I don't think they'd ever be able to change July 4th because it's like people would go bananas about it. Oh, right. Okay.

Dave Jones: Because that's, yeah. Yeah. Well.

Chris Gammell: I think probably because of the Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum movie. And Bill Paxton.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Right. I can't, like, I cannot count how many times I've rewatched that. Really? It's just, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You watch a lot of stinkers. I do watch a lot of stinkers. Overall. And that one is, you know, it's definitely a timepiece. You're not going to call it a stinker. You're not going to call it a stinker. No, no, no. I would never call it a stinker. No, no, no. It's a timepiece. Yes. It's, like, a little out of date, but also, like, super fun still.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Totally. That's why it's got that rewatchability. You know? Like, if you're just flicking through and you go Independence Day, like, you just stop. Yeah. You're definitely stopping. Like, done. Right. Choice, mate. That.

Chris Gammell: Shawshank. You know.

Dave Jones: I've never seen Shawshank Redemption.

Chris Gammell: Oh. Quite good.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Have I never seen it?

Chris Gammell: Highly recommend it. Highly recommend it. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Right. Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: If I could do a Morgan Freeman voice, I would be doing that right now. Ah, right.

Dave Jones: Okay. Yep.

Chris Gammell: I shan't. I shan't try that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it's not exactly an action adventure, is it? No, it is. It is, actually. Oh, it is. I mean, not, like, action, action. Right. No, no.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no. It's very, very. I mean, it won an Academy Award. Oh, yeah. It's just an amazing story. Yep.

Dave Jones: Totally aware of it. Highly recommend it. Haven't seen it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: There you go. Add it to the list. Next time you're like, hey, maybe I should watch Independence Day for the 50th time or a crappy movie about Mars, like the stuff you post about on Twitter. Yep. Take a shot. You might enjoy it.

Speaker ?: All right. All right.

Dave Jones: What ticks me off these days is that you try it. Like, I'm subscribed to, like, half a dozen bloody streaming services. And, like, you go, oh, I've got to hank it in to watch this movie. So you search for it on your Fire Stick, which searches all the different platforms. And it's not on any of them.

Chris Gammell: Do you do VPNing? Because I feel like if we were, like, sponsored at this point, we'd be like, NordVPN, you know, or whatever they always do that. No.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it's not. You can VPN in different versions. Yeah, but it's not like a location thing. It's just, like, that streaming. Like, it's not on any of the streaming services anymore. Oh, okay. Because they all go in for their own exclusive content and, you know, stuff like back in the day, right? If you had your, the only streaming service was Netflix and maybe Hulu or something, maybe. I don't know. But, you know, but, like, everything was on Netflix back then. Yeah. It was like, oh, yeah, if you want to stream a movie, it's on there. But now it's not.

Chris Gammell: We should take this opportunity to announce we're starting the Amp Hour Plus, which is a new streaming service for Amp Hour. You can listen to it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the cost is nothing. So sign up to the Amp Hour Plus.

Dave Jones: Well, I know. Yuri, we're a year behind here because, like, at least a year ago, I tweeted out that there was the new EEV Blog Plus service.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man.

Dave Jones: And it was for only five bucks a month, you can get all my existing free content for free. Sorry, all my existing free content for five bucks a month.

Chris Gammell: Any takers?

Dave Jones: No, but I did lose quite a few followers over it. People were, you know, people just were outraged. Yeah, they didn't quite get it.

Chris Gammell: They were internetting. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. They were Twittering. So, yep.

Chris Gammell: They were on Twitter. Twitter.

Dave Jones: Well, you told me you are secretly reading Twitter, at least.

Chris Gammell: Oh, come on, man. Why you gotta blow up my spot? No, no. I go on there and I check. Mostly, I'm just checking to see if there's anything critical. You know.

Dave Jones: Right. To see if it's blowing up yet. Yeah, that too.

Chris Gammell: Right. No, really just to see if anyone's, like, trying to reach me. Okay, right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, fair enough.

Chris Gammell: It's still there. I'm just not responding in there. If you want to reach me directly, check out Mastodon. If not, email's fine. Mastodon. You can find lots of places to find me online.

Dave Jones: I remember Mastodon when I was a boy. Yeah, yeah. Jeez, it went the way of the dodo.

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Yeah. Dude, you're so uncool.

Chris Gammell: Oh, you have no idea. Bloody Mastodon. I was actually thinking about that, that, like, being a dad now, like, I get to, like, I get to, like, lean into it, though. And it's actually, it's pretty, it's pretty great. I mean, I've never been cool, but now, like, I get to, like, really tell bad jokes. And, you know, it just kind of rolls our eyes, but less than before. And they're like, oh, it's just a dad. You know, it's just a dad joke. It's great. It's great. Yep.

Dave Jones: Terrific. All right. Well, what actually, what content do we actually have on today's show?

Chris Gammell: Well, I didn't actually tell you this before the show, but today I got, I got a solar quote on my house, and it was shockingly high in the US. How much is shockingly high? Well, it was $28,000, Dave. Yankee bucks. Yankee bucks. And here's the real kicker. It was only half of my usage. For what size? That would be a seven kilowatt, but that included a Elon special, a Powerwall battery. So that's the.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, that's. Well, there's most of the cost. Oh, my goodness.

Chris Gammell: You know, that's currently. 16 grand of that, actually. Yeah. I was surprised by that.

Dave Jones: The battery's now 16 grand US, is it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's right. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Chris Gammell: And that's for 13.5 kilowatt hours. Yep. You know, so like this, this company I talked to, the fantastic, like they were really, you know, they gave me great explanations and, you know, it was just great walkthrough. They updated it because the reason I like got it, I had gotten a quote in the past. My neighbor, unfortunately, had to take down this like really huge tree next to me. And it basically just opened up one side of my roof.

Dave Jones: Oh, I was going to ask because I've seen your roof and the trees around it. It was completely shaded. And it's like, yeah, yeah. Right. So that's, that's changed now.

Chris Gammell: It was like a hundred foot maple. It was like really, really big. It was so cool to get it, watch it getting cut. Like it was sad that it had to get cut down. Right. But like this thing was like a robotic arm that the guy down on the ground was like, like driving the robot and then had like a chainsaw attached to the robot arm. And it just like grabs the arm, it grabs the branch, like saws through it. And then it brings it back down. So much fun to watch.

Dave Jones: Reminds me of an old Thunderbirds episode, the crab logger. Oh, that was one of my favorite episodes. You've seen it?

Chris Gammell: No, I've heard of Thunderbirds. No, no, no.

Dave Jones: Oh, Thunderbirds, crab logger. I'll see if I can get a, see if I can get a photo up here.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh my goodness. The crab logger. One of my favorite episodes. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So unfortunately in the U S so there is a tax credit that, that helps a little bit. Cause that's actually not the full cost. Like that's actually after like a 30% rebate, which is.

Dave Jones: Whoa. Seriously.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I didn't think you had enough like roof space. Cause your house is kind of like weird and angular and all sorts. It's got lots of little bits.

Chris Gammell: I should be sharing it with the broader audience here, but it is, it is a weird, it is a weird shape. The roof is like not optimal for it. Some of it's south facing. So I knew it was a long shot, but unfortunately not super efficient for this. So probably not doing it, but you know. How many hours per day?

Dave Jones: Like, would you get like, okay. It's like, so the tree's gone. So you get sun, but like do other trees shaded or is there a, you know, like.

Chris Gammell: It would be okay. It would be okay in terms of sun, but it's actually the majority of like the biggest part of the roof is, is facing almost due East, which is not optimal. So you get pretty much like, I don't know, two thirds of the day and not in an optimal optimal way. But then some of the, some of the roof has some other cover. There's some other parts that has more Southern facing.

Dave Jones: Well, I'm like my, my old system is on the exact opposite side of the roof that you want it on. Right. And it's still doing pretty well. Yeah. I'm, I, that's my existing.

Chris Gammell: What is your latitude there?

Dave Jones: Three, three kilometers. Oh, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I like, I'm just wondering how, how low does the sun get in the, in the sky? Like in the, in the winter is, do you still get pretty good coverage?

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's like, I don't know, 30 degrees or something.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: You know, like it gets up like 30 degrees in the sky or something, 35, 40, maybe in

Chris Gammell: winter. Sydney latitude. So you guys are at, yeah, 33.86 South and Durham latitude. If I can spell latitude, right. Is 35.99. So I'm a little bit higher up. Right.

Dave Jones: So you'd be equivalent to probably Melbourne here, perhaps. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. The Southern, Southern tip. You're not quite Tasmania.

Chris Gammell: No, not that far.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, but I mean, and that's better than like, they'll, they'll install it a lot of places too. Like, you know, like I had a friend who was selling in Chicago, selling solar systems and that's much further North from here. So.

Dave Jones: So you're telling me that solar companies will sell you solar whether or not you need it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Whether or not is a good idea. I'm shocked. I know. It's pretty crazy, right? Yeah. Actually, I mean, I think they, they get decent, some decent stuff too. It looks like Canberra. I'm pretty much equivalent with Canberra.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Right. Got it. Yeah. Well, you guys are, I mean, you're basically working from home, right? So you use lots of power during the day. So, you know, you can make a good argument for just going for a solar system with.

Chris Gammell: Just solar by itself.

Dave Jones: With solar by itself without the battery. And that saves a huge amount of cost. And then you're offsetting, you could offset probably half of your energy usage. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Just with a cheap, you know, just get the cheapest pedals you can and, you know, the cheapest inverter. And yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think that's the other thing too. I think these are pretty, pretty high-end panels and stuff like that too. Yeah, right. So I think these are solar cities slash Tesla. So, you know.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, I don't know if those are high quality or not, but.

Dave Jones: Oh, they, well, I've done videos about the Tesla panels catching on fire.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Maybe I'll get another quote.

Dave Jones: They're kind of famous for it. They like half the Walmarts in the U.S. burnt down because they had Tesla. Well, you know, I'm exaggerating. No, but there were, I think it was Walmarts. They had, or was it Kmart or something? They had Tesla. They did a deal with Tesla and they had solar panels on their roof and like three installations caught fire or something.

Chris Gammell: Oh boy. So yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is like the first step back into it now that the tree's gone. So.

Dave Jones: All right. Okay. Cool. Excellent.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So I don't know. We'll see how it goes. It is not as straightforward as I thought it would be. I could think like there are more options than I guess I thought it would. I thought it would just be like, oh yeah, like pick a installer and they just do it. But like you said. It kind of is that easy. There's research to be done.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, yeah. I mean, it could be, but I probably will not treat it that way.

Dave Jones: Right. No, of course not because you're an engineer. Yeah. Exactly. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yep. I think also because I need to optimize for my specific scenario where the roof kind of sucks.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Well, I'm trying to do an upgrade on my system at the moment and it's like. It's yeah. Oh. I'm going to expand it again. And I'm getting. Analysis paralysis is the term, isn't it? Yep. Yeah. And like. You're just like overthinking everything. Yeah. I'm just like. But more thing is I've got two existing non-compatible systems. Like, like what the hell do I do? Do I put in a third in the non-compatible system? Or do I consolidate? Or do I, you know, actually replace one of them? Yeah. Yeah. Well. Yeah. Cause, cause there's no exist. Cause I've got two systems. I've got a sunny boy inverter system, but it's maxed out. Right. So I've got to change the inverter for that. And a company's offered me an inverter for free. Right. So it's like, well, yeah. Okay. They're offering it for free, but then I'm locked in to the type of battery I can use with that. Right. And then I've got my.

Chris Gammell: Are you looking at battery?

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm also looking at battery. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Uh huh. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But, but it won't tie, but I'm looking at a DC battery as opposed to the Tesla one, which is an AC battery, which powers your whole house. So that would, so the battery I get would only be compatible with my string inverter system. It wouldn't be compatible with my N phase system. So as far as the battery is concerned.

Chris Gammell: I was looking at that too. Like Generac versus N phase versus Powerwall.

Dave Jones: It's just nuts. It's just nuts. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And the Generac stuff was not super well reviewed. Like there was some, some weird stuff about it. Right. Generac's one of the brands here, at least. I'm not sure, you know, they're probably different in each place.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Uh, Frotius, the German, uh, inverter maker, they've, they've offered me, uh, like a six kilowatt, uh, battery hybrid inverter for free. Oh, wow. You know, it's, you know, it's quite an expensive top of the range one, but it's only compatible with one specific brand of battery, which is the Chinese BYD ones, which are like one of the best in the world. Right. So there's nothing wrong there, but I'm locked into that brand. You can't use another brand. And I'm locked in to a specific model or two specific models in that brand. Like I can't even get the model that I wanted, which was the lower voltage model. It's only compatible with the higher voltage models from BYD. And it's like, uh, you know, like, do I take the free, free inverter in our quote marks and then buy the more expensive and then to be tied into the more expensive limited battery solution. I don't know. It's like, yeah, I'm going to have to start doing a spreadsheet to like work it all out, which is going to be, you know, most cost effective in the end.

Chris Gammell: Are you looking at like powering your whole house off these batteries or are you just going to do like partial?

Dave Jones: No, no. It'll just be a partial thing. Although, well, no, the battery will power the whole house at night. It'll be, see when, when you have these DC batteries, right? So it stores excess energy during the day in the battery. So during the, during the day, if you, you know, if your house is using X number of kilowatts, it'll supply that and any excess over that, it'll store in the batteries. And then once the sun goes down.

Chris Gammell: The top up, the top up instead of going back to the grid, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. And then at nighttime, it pulls it back from the battery and it's, it's as if the sun is still up, right? It's as if the sun is still there at nighttime and it pumps the, you can use the energy in the house. So it is a whole house solution like that, but it's not if the power fails, if the power fails, then a hybrid inverter only gives you an emergency PowerPoint backup. So then you'd have to frantically run around and plug your fridges and freezers via extension cords in the, you know, emergency power output. Got it.

Chris Gammell: Cause you're saying there's no, no inverter on the other side of it or whatever.

Dave Jones: Well, there is, but only, but it doesn't power the whole house. So it won't, it won't backfeed into the whole house. Got it. It's not, it's not designed for that. It's not approved. It's not authorized. So it's, so it'll give you an emergency power and like a point, it'll give you an emergency power point, but it'll disconnect your house otherwise. Got it. So everything else is off, but you will have it. So you could actually, you know, wire in a big switch, changeover switch to the emergency power point, you know, so that you can, you know, if the power does fail, you can even have an automatic switch. I've done a video on how those automatic switches work. Those automatic transfer switches, you can wire in one of those. And if the power does fail, clunk, you know, it automatically detects and it switches over. But you've got to rewire your house for the appliances that you want to have on the backup side of things. That's where the Tesla AC batteries, they are, they, they just back up your whole house. Right. So you don't have to rewire your house. You don't do anything.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You just, you know, it just, your house just keeps running. So.

Chris Gammell: It is interesting. So I saw, I had, I had heard about span. I know someone that works at span and that's like a, basically like a new kind of smart, uh, haven't heard of what's it called? Yeah. Span.io is like a circuit breaker plus like a bunch of intelligence in there. And so, but one of the things is like when you are, I didn't quite understand. I thought it was just measuring like the power going out to each individual, you know, breaker you have in your house. So like, Oh, well the kitchen is drawing this much or the dishwasher is drawing this much versus the, you know, the, the washer dryer is doing this much, that sort of thing. And it does do that. But the other thing it does is it actually allows you to programmatically turn stuff on or off in a, in a back power situation. So like when your battery kicks in, you basically say like, instead of only, instead of hardwiring, like the battery to certain breakers, then instead you can select, it basically just feeds the, feeds back to the breaker. And then you basically say, Oh, actually don't turn on the HVAC. Don't turn on, you know, this part of the house. Here's the things that I want to power with my limited power stuff.

Dave Jones: I'm, I'm having a look at that now, but it's like, like how complicated do you want to, I mean, I, how complicated is a house? My entire house has two circuits, right? It's not like, you know, it's not rocket science, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It doesn't have to be if you don't want it to be right. But like, this is definitely making it more complex.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Like how big and complicated do your, does your house have to be for you to have this, which has, you know, 31 circuit breakers. This looks like a panel. This looks like the exact same panel. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: This is very high.

Dave Jones: This is the panel that I have down in the basement of this building that powers the entire building. Yeah. There's 32 circuit breakers on. It's like, you know, like this is not for a house use. This is bullshit.

Chris Gammell: Oh no, no, no, no. This is, no, this is, this is for a house. It's for a high, very high end. This is targeting high end, right? I think it's targeting like, you know, people that have an electric car, they have a battery backup. They have, you know, they have all this, you know, a couple of power walls and all that, like a couple of the photos they have. Yeah. And they have like, it's just a very high end house and the panel costs $4,500 versus what is a, you know, a stamped metal panel costs like a couple hundred bucks. So like, no, this is, this is very expensive.

Dave Jones: And it like, it looks like it's sole job is to like manage the power, smart, manage the power to your house when the power fails.

Chris Gammell: Like that's one of the things that like, I would use this thing.

Dave Jones: Even if I installed it, I would use this thing once a decade and then it only works a couple of hours. It's like, that's how useless a product like this is to someone in my scenario, for example, like sure enough, your power fails all the time. But like, if your power fails every week, you know, if you live in a, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I think if you live in PG&E, that's the, that's the California power. Right. Yeah. It could be. They have like rolling back blackouts in like, you know, the Bay area. So that's like a thing all the time. The Texas grid is having a lot of issues. You know, like there, I think this is increasing. So like the reason I started going, the other reason I started going on this path, other than my neighbor's tree is because I finished that book, the grid and you know, it scared the bejesus out of me. It was like, you know, and basically one of the things they talk about is like, as, as more people do what you're doing, right. You are already well done this path. You know, the, the costs of being connected to the grid and all of the people that are back feeding to the grid when there is excess power. Right. So Dave's got increasingly up, you're at eight now. I'm sure you'll get up to like what? 12 kilowatts. I'm sure you will definitely, you will outstrip your house's power. And like, at a certain point, they're going to not allow new connections. Yes.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: And then I think at a certain point, they're also going to penalize people that are staying on the grid because the costs, their costs are going to go up, right? It's costs a lot to maintain lines and do all that stuff.

Dave Jones: Although here in my state, I'm kind of starting to investigate this. There is a new government incentive program. They want to, the government want to use your battery storage and you can go on these special programs where they will pay you up to 70 cents per kilowatt hour. I think it is to use your excess battery during peak times.

Chris Gammell: Peak load. Right. Yeah. 5 PM is like peak time. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Cause everyone comes home and they switch on all their appliances, blah, blah. So they will pay you, but, but if you export energy during a non-time, you have to pay them like during a time that they don't want it, you have to pay them.

Chris Gammell: It sounds like a modern, a modern version of like a card you would get in Monopoly. Right. You didn't read your solar agreement with the city. Pay $50.

Dave Jones: Pay $50. Yeah. Well, it's only two cents per kilowatt hour, I think is the penalty, but technically, yes, they will, you will have to actually pay them to export energy to the grid during times they don't like it, which is. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: As the sun comes out, the sun comes out and all of this excess grid power comes on and like they already have, you know, they have to then pretty much go and shut off like a power plant. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right. There are some very real consequences.

Dave Jones: It's very difficult to reroute the power and do, you dump it and store it and, you know. Right.

Chris Gammell: Like, and when Paul was on the show too, like Paul was the water on the show, he was talking about like the costs of doing that are very, very high and the power quality is not that good either. Right. So now you have all these people running, you know, so he mentioned like some of the reactive power is getting built into these newer inverters, but like you have low cost inverters connected to the grid. And now all these people are feeding in when the sun's really bright and it's like, you know, a hot summer day in Sydney or Durham. And it's like the main thing that's running is big compressors on air conditioners. Like that's right. Right. That other type of power there. It's crazy. Yeah. So yeah. Looking forward, like I don't think we're there yet, but like, you know, solar continues to grow. I'm very happy about that. And wind continues to grow, but until the battery stuff catches up either within people's houses or grid level storage, which is still very difficult.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I, I think, I think the consumer is going to get hit. And the guy I was talking to today, granted a salesperson, he said that my local company just put in my local electric company with Duke Energy just put in for a 15% rise in rates this year.

Dave Jones: Like, you know, that's, that's, that's low compared to Europe.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Exactly. Cause especially because they're offloading with a lot of natural gas, a lot of places and natural gas is like spiked like crazy. Yeah. I just, it's.

Dave Jones: They shut down their nuclear plants and they're like, it's just a lot of stuff going on.

Chris Gammell: And so like, you know, started this and then, you know, and granted I was talking to a salesperson. You always got to take that with a grain of salt, but like, but it, you know, he's talking some truth there. So I would love to hear other people's experiences. Yeah. We have a comment section. Please come shout at us and tell me some knowledge. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, paralysis analysis, analysis paralysis. It's like, it's like, I don't know what to do. I like, I like I'm, I'm getting to the point. Yeah. I'm going to have to do a spreadsheet to try and come out. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Do a spreadsheet, but then you got to find like an expert in this region, in this area and then be like, you know what? I just want to like interview you on my blog about, and, and, and, you know, we could use my house as a, as an example case here. You can just tell me what to do.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, I'm sure if I really wanted to, I could probably, you know, get companies to give me all this stuff for free if I really wanted to, you know, you know, if I really went out there and actively tried to do it, but then that's how I ended up with bloody, well, no, it's not how I ended up. Well, it's kind of, sort of how I ended up with two separate systems at the moment because well, you know, Enphase emailed me and say, Hey, do you want to, you know, do you want some bloody Enphase microinverters and LG Conta? Hey, do you want some new panels? Hey, let's tee up with Enphase and here you go. You just have to pay for installation and yeah, great. But now I've got like two separate systems and it's a pain in the ass. Well, it's a pain in the ass if I want to expect, like if I want to add battery storage or I want to expand it, it's like, what the hell do I do?

Chris Gammell: It's not like as designed. It's like, no, no, I am.

Dave Jones: No, mine is definitely totally not typical, you know? So, and that's kind of a problem. So I don't know. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Yep. And then where, and then the throw into the mix, we're trying to where maybe this year don't know, cause there's a construction crisis here in Australia at the moment.

Chris Gammell: Sure.

Dave Jones: But we, we do have plans approved to expand the house as in expand upwards, right? We're putting an extension on the house upwards. That means all of our existing panels have to come down. So what the hell do we do? And it takes six to nine months to build, you know? Sure. Like, sure. So I don't know, do we go without solar for six or nine months and we just store the panels and the, and stuff or do we, or do we move them temporarily onto the house? And how, how does that tie into my expansion system that I want to add? And like, oh God.

Chris Gammell: Maybe put them in a tree, you know, like a solar tree.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's just, yeah. Nah, it's painful. It's just, yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What if you, you know, what if your boss that makes you work holidays, what if he lays you off? Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: I'm screwed. Well, it's not a problem if you're working in the, working online, really. I mean, if you've got 10 full-time jobs going, that was a beautiful segue. I know. You can compliment me now.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Good.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Come on. Set up. Set up. Here it is.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Hacker News, I just retweeted this today. Apparently, you know, take it with a grain of salt, right? Whether or not this person is, you know, actually telling the truth or not. But this is actually from eight months ago. They currently have, oh, I'll read it out. I currently have 10 fully remote engineering jobs. The bar is so low. Oversight is non-existent. And everyone is so forgiving for underperformance. I can coast about four to eight weeks before a given job fires me. He's currently, I'm currently on $1.5 million run rate for compensation this year. And the interviewing process is so much faster today. Companies are desperate. It takes me two to three hours of total effort to land a new job with thousands to choose from.

Chris Gammell: Like, what? And this is the problem with software companies. Yeah. I mean, so that was posted eight months ago, right? Yeah, right. I think we maybe brought that up very briefly on here. But like, pandemic companies were desperate, right? Like, absolutely desperate, like he mentions. And remote hiring is tough. And so, yeah, I could see this potentially working. This sounds exhausting to me, even if you are making $1.5 million a year.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but if you're brazen enough to do it, I can totally see it working. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like, how would these companies know that you're, you know?

Chris Gammell: Well, eventually you don't actually write any code, but.

Dave Jones: And then you don't write, you just bum around. You're Wally in Dilbert. You are Wally. That's right. Right? You are Wally. If you don't know, everyone knows Dilbert, right? Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. You are Wally. Wally is the character in Dilbert who basically just carries around a coffee cup and he doesn't do anything. Right? He doesn't, you know, he goes out of his way to do nothing. Right? That's right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's great. And I think, so the reason this came up again is because all these layoffs are happening now in tech. Yep. It's interesting, like, so, you know, so the big, big names are like Google, Facebook, Amazon, everybody, you know, Microsoft is laying off for the first time in a long time. It's interesting. I haven't heard too much on the hardware side of things, but maybe that's also happening. I think it's just because a lot of these digital companies. I think it's across the board, isn't it? Got overextended.

Dave Jones: Well, I think. Like these software companies have hardware divisions as well. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right, right, right. But I haven't heard, like, so even though, like, Meta is, which is Facebook, is doing poorly before this, you know, before this time, like, I haven't heard them be like, oh, we're cutting the entire hardware group. We're not like, they're not, they're not dumping the metaverse yet and all the hardware that they're building. They probably should, but they're not. Right. Yeah. So, yeah. I don't know. I think it's, have you ever been part of a big, big layoff like that? Like, I don't know.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Twice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really? Oh. Yeah. Well, Altium, of course. Altium. Oh, right. All right.

Chris Gammell: That's what brought us the EV vlog that we know and love today. That's right. It did.

Dave Jones: That's when I went full time. Yeah. That's right. Well, you know, yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. They, they just laid off half the company. They, you know, it was pretty non-discriminatory. It was giant. Like it was across the board.

Chris Gammell: It was like, yeah, it was every department.

Dave Jones: So yeah. And they only got like, we, we had four people in our hardware group, right? There was only four of us. And basically, yeah, they laid off three of us. So it was, you know, there was only one left in the end. And in the end, I don't think he lasted them another six months or nine months or something. And then, you know, they totally got rid of the hardware because they knew the hardware was, you know, like just a stupid thing for a company. It was expensive to, I mean, it's hard. It's really expensive to build hardware, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So long timelines, all that stuff.

Dave Jones: And it just, you know, it didn't fit in with, you know, the company had to get back to profit. Right. And there was new, new management, right. Came in and they just went, no, look, you know, we've been bleeding cash for a decade now. No, stop it. And this hardware is not helping. So, you know, hardware has to go. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think it lasted six months, maybe 12 months, and then it was gone. Yeah. Like, you know, so yeah, Altium, don't do hardware as far as I'm aware. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, now that I think of it, I have been part of layoffs too. Like I, I kind of put it out of mind, but I have been part of layoffs.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I haven't been personally laid off. I suppose that's the big thing, but there was definitely things happening at the time. Like hologram got rid of their hardware and I was basically pushed into the marketing group, which was no fun. Yeah. But I was at Keithley during layoffs, which were just like during the recession, the great recession.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. So was that like one person from every department or was it like a percentage? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It was probably like 10 to 20% of the company got laid off.

Dave Jones: Okay. Right. But it was basically across every department fairly equally. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: There wasn't like, uh, they did shut down one division as well, but that ended up coming back a couple of years later. It was interesting. Right. So yeah. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I was involved in another one, which was a key corp back in 1994. I think that was, and that was, yeah, they sacked, well, third of the company overnight.

Chris Gammell: Wow. Wow.

Dave Jones: At least a third. And that was, once again, I think that was across the board. So yeah.

Chris Gammell: How does it, how does it work in Australia? Is it like you guys get like automatic severance or how does that, or like unemployment? Yes.

Dave Jones: You automate. Yeah. Every full-time employee gets, well, you'll get a four week. It depends on how long you've been at the company. There's a, like a.

Chris Gammell: But it's like, it's like codified for the country.

Dave Jones: It is codified. That is your response. You legally take on that responsibility if you hire a full-time employee. Yes. You, you have to give them. Yep. If you make them. Redundant. Four weeks for every year you're there or something like that. Four weeks for every year or something. Oh, it's, yeah. I can't remember the exact figure. But yeah, there, that is codified into law. It is different if they quit. So that's why, you know.

Chris Gammell: That's why you try and get, that's why you pull a wall in, try and get fired. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. That's it. You try and get made redundant. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. No, no. Well, there's a difference between getting fired and a genuine retrenchment due to the company just has to cut staff. You know, that they are different things.

Chris Gammell: What are the different terms here? You were saying different things. You're saying redundant, retrenchment, and fire.

Dave Jones: Redundancy and retrenchment are basically the same thing. It's just different words for the same thing. Got it. Got it. It means the company just has to cut staff and it isn't anything personal. Like, it's not something that you personally did. Got it. To get like, you know. All right. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They say that with cause, without cause.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So, it's without cause, basically. But with cause, as in you're fired. Like, you're an asshole. You're fired. You screwed up. You're fired. Kind of thing. No. You don't get it up. Right.

Chris Gammell: But then the onus on them to actually prove it and that sort of thing.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yes. You can take them to court and all that sort of jazz. But then, even then, you still have to pay them out their holiday pay. You've got to pay them. Sure, sure. I think it might even be two weeks or something. There is laws there as well. Got it. Yep. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Not so much in the US. Not so much. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's fairly generous here. And if you work for the government, it's even more generous.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, it's, you know. Yep. It's interesting because it's like, you know, I'm reading a lot of different takes on this and Google especially. And it is like a lot of the people that are being like, are like super senior as well. And I just wonder about like, you know, getting hired again as a super senior person. You know, it might be see, we might see some influx of consultants out in the world. Right. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All the best.

Dave Jones: Yep. So I wonder if this guy's been, how many has he been laid off from how many jobs?

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, from his 10 fully remote engines. The 10 fully remotes.

Dave Jones: But I can totally see this as, you know, working. If you've got the gall to do it and you've got the hours to, you know, as in like you don't have to work, but you at least have to like, you know, make the appearance that

Chris Gammell: you're working. You're going to show up at meetings, right? You know? Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You've got to make the appearance.

Chris Gammell: Anything with like FaceTime, I think that's where it really starts to get you.

Dave Jones: And with chat GPT now, you can cut some code, you know, you can at least make an attempt to cut some code to make it look like you're doing something. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: This is why hardware is better. How are you going to fake hardware? Chat GPT ain't got nothing on us yet.

Dave Jones: Well, I don't know. Look, I updated the Gantt chart this week. Like me working on projects. I don't know what it's been like for you, but I've worked at companies where, you know, nobody comes to check. It's like, oh, just show us the Gantt chart and where, how much progress you made. And that's basically take your word for it. Like you wouldn't, you wouldn't have to show them hardware. Like you wouldn't, you know, it was like, okay. Cause it's on the Gantt chart for a two months time. Okay. You've got two months leeway to do nothing if you really wanted to. Like actually before they find out, you know, like they go, Hey, where's the hardware? And you go, sorry.

Chris Gammell: I heard an apocryphal story about a U S patent examiner that I used to go to school with where he would do, you know, so they only have quarterly check-ins basically. So every three months and basically he would do absolutely nothing for two months and like two and like 20 days. And then the last week and a half of the month, he would just stay up. He would basically like drink as much coffee as he could and stay up all night and go through patent patent applications until, until he's done with the work. And then he kept his job. Wow. It's like, yeah, that's, that is not a great system. So when you're thinking, Oh wow, I'm so proud of my patent. It might've been this guy just, you know, trying to, trying to get his stuff out the door. You know?

Dave Jones: Oh boy. Nah, that's anyway, it looks possible. So although isn't the trend, like the trend is going back to working at the office now.

Chris Gammell: It's like, yeah, that is a lot.

Dave Jones: I don't know. I'm not going to say Tesla started it, but that was like the whole, that was like, sorry. Tesla and Tesla and Twitter started it, but that was like, you know, that was like the cover that other companies needed. Like, Hey, if Elon Musk is doing it, like we can sort of get away with that too.

Chris Gammell: It's always, yeah, it's been, it's been chipping away at it, but yeah, Mr. Musk was very, very upfront about it. Yep.

Dave Jones: But I've, I've noted that other companies are suddenly, they've actually jumped out of the woodwork and said, Hey, yeah, we want you back in now. It's like, yep.

Chris Gammell: Yep. You know, so I'm an all remote, I'm an all remote company. The benefits. Yeah. Cause you aren't even in the same state as where your company headquarters. That's right. There's no one in my state that I work with and it works on a lot of levels. It works.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: But as a, you know, as an individual, as a somewhat social engineer.

Dave Jones: Yes. You're a, yes. You're one of those rare social engineers. One of the weirdos. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: One of the weirdos. You know, and really just high bandwidth type stuff, right? Like you can really get a lot done when you're, when you're kind of like hunkered down together. And I miss that sometimes, you know, I still get a lot done. We all get a lot done. Right. But it's, I just miss the camaraderie I think is the main thing. Right. I think, I think the hard thing is like, you know, a lot of companies are, are increasingly trying to go like hybrid. And I think that is not, not the option because they're still, you know, despite three years of pandemic and despite all of the hardware in the world, nobody has fixed the conference room problem. And it is, it is so painful to have like.

Dave Jones: It still sucks, right? It still sucks. All the.

Chris Gammell: And especially being one person out to be like the one, the one person that's like left out. It's like your second class at that point. And so it's like, I think all remote or all in person, you know, maybe having multiple offices.

Dave Jones: Just imagine like if you're in a, you know, if, if you're at a, if you're in a meeting and there's, there's supposed to be 10 people in the meeting and nine of them are physically there and you're the only one who's actually remote. It's like, you may as well not even be there.

Chris Gammell: I think that's right. You're basically, or just get a recording after the fact, you know, like they might stop and pause otherwise. And, you know, at past companies.

Dave Jones: Otherwise they're not going to put it, you know, how much time and effort is spent at the start of the meeting, just getting the bloody system working and making sure you're there. And if they, are they going to do that for one person? If nine others are in the room, there's going to go, ah, who cares about Joe blogs? We just won't bother. His system doesn't work. You know, exactly. Yes. We have a quorum, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think it's just tough. And like I said, I'm really surprised that we didn't see any kind of like technological improvement. They're not like expect holograms or anything, but just any kind of like better presence is not taken off. My thing is I'm, you know, obviously we, Dave and I do audio and I think conference room audio is like, so like when people sign up for the show and they're like, oh yeah, I'm going to like dial in from a conference room. It's like an all glass conference room. I'm like, you are not coming on the show. No, exactly. We will not have you here. If you were in that conference, it's so tough because it's sounds bouncing off the wall. You're far away from the microphone.

Dave Jones: Even though it's supposed to be a properly set up, you know, that's like, oh yeah, we've got a conference with, with all the latest whiz bang tech. And it sounds like shit.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. It's starting from the worst place. And like, you know, and they have PhDs doing all this echo cancellation, but it's just, you're fighting physics from day from, from right from the jump. And so like, I'm just always surprised my idea for this sort of like solution was always, you know, like when Griff in back to the future too. Yeah. Here's a deep cut. You know, when he has, when he pulls out the, the hoverboard and then the other folks pull like the, like the, the, the drag, the toe lines off of that has the powered one. Yeah. He has the power one. And they all pull the toe lines off of it. I always thought like, why not just put lapel mics off these drag lines and then have everybody have a lapel mic right in front of like on their shirt or whatever. Right. And then, and then everybody has a perfect microphone, like right there, right next to it. Yeah. Yeah. You know? Yep. And it's just, it's never, it's never, never happened. So if I ever started a startup, Dave, that's the one that's the, I'm going to start it.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. I would have. Right. Then tell me, I'm going to search for this after this, I think, see if it exists. Right. You know how the conference, you know, the conference things are usually like a box that sits in the center of the table. Yeah. It's always in the center. Yeah. And it's always in the center. Right. Why can't that box have like 10.

Chris Gammell: Mike's.

Dave Jones: 10, 10, 10 little, you've, you've seen that road, you know, the road, uh, go Mike, the, the one that actually.

Chris Gammell: The yellow road.

Dave Jones: No, the road. Right. Yes. The Australian company road. Right. Yeah. They've got that little wireless transmitter. Those things are amazing. There's no cable. Right. They're great. I've got them. Right. And why can't you have like 10 of those little things that have an internal battery and they've got, they've even gotten into the latest one. Sitting on a recharger plan. Yeah. And see them, see them in a reach. So that little thing in the middle just has like 10 pockets for the rechargers. Perfect. And when you walk into the room, you pick it up, you clip it on. Yep. Done. Perfect. It automatically pairs. And then when you're done, you put it back at rechargers. Boom.

Chris Gammell: Perfect. Yeah. And then the other thing you need to have is when it goes out, when you, when you forget to take it off at the end of the meeting, it needs to alarm when you leave the room. Yes. So like it's far enough away from the base.

Dave Jones: It needs to start beeping. Yes. If you go out of range. Yeah. Cause I've, I've done that when I'm interviewing people, I'm on site or whatever, then I totally forgot my wireless mic still attached. That's going to happen.

Chris Gammell: That would be the main error. That would be the main error that happened. Yeah. No, I think that's, I, I had a similar thought with the, uh, with the, you know, the wireless to wired, you know, that that's a natural jump. Yeah. So why doesn't that product exist? Go, go, go, go forth and make this company. I would just love to have that in a conference room. Conference rooms suck. I hate conference rooms.

Dave Jones: Totally. Yep.

Chris Gammell: All right, Dave. We're on the same, we're on the same wavelength here.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. That's a winning idea. That's, yep. It is. Well, let's, let's do a pitch deck and let's, let's go get, let's go get funding for this. Oh no, no, no, no. I don't think so.

Chris Gammell: Come on. No.

Dave Jones: Why? The last innovation.

Chris Gammell: No, I just, you know, I'm already at a startup and also, you know, it would be a really remote startup. You know, I don't want to work that far away with a coworker.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but there's a guy that works for 10. I also don't want to work with you.

Dave Jones: There's a guy that works for 10. Come on. Surely you can, yeah, I can, I can understand not wanting to work with me. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Totally. Who's going to write the software? Two, two guys arguing about hardware. Yeah. You write the software. You write the software. You write the software.

Dave Jones: Yeah. We're both equally shit at it.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm getting a little better.

Dave Jones: I have been doing your slightly better. I would.

Chris Gammell: So I'm doing, I'm doing some more. Back your skills. Starting from a, you know, a good template is really important for me. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know where there's been no technology, technological progress? Where's that, Dave? The Parks Radio Telescope here in Australia.

Chris Gammell: That's right. 1965. I think it was when it was first installed. Is that right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Something like that. Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And what, what is still running there today?

Dave Jones: A PDP 11. A PDP 11 mainframe is still driving that dish to this day. It's great. They just, yeah. Anyway, Tom Scott has done a, a tour. I didn't even know he was in the country, but he's just, his latest video is a, he got to ride the dish. Oh, not jealous at all.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. We should say, so this is not the telescope that we went to. This is the one that's actually. This is the one that replaced the one in the dish or this is the dish.

Dave Jones: No, this is the dish. As in the, the movie, movie recommendation of the week, folks, the dish. I'm sure we've recommended it before, but you've seen it. Cause I, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's great. It's hilarious. And it's, and it's got, yeah. It's basically how the dish received the Apollo 11 moonwalking video.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Although that was Honeysuckle Creek technically, but then it switched to Parks, but let's just, you know, not go into the details.

Chris Gammell: I mean, for the, for the movie, it's movie magic at that point.

Dave Jones: I have actually been to, and you've been to that facility where that is the original Apollo 11 moon receiving dish is. They moved it from Honeysuckle Creek to the deep, to the Canberra deep space tracking complex. They did moved it in the nineties and it's still there, but it's actually a decommissioned now, but it is the dish that received the one small step for man. You know, one, one giant leap video. So, and in the museum there, they've, they've got the switch. They've actually, they've actually, I've got a tour of the thing there and you can see it in one of my videos somewhere. They've got the switch because the camera was mounted upside down. The camera on the limb was mounted upside down. So they had to have this switch and some dedicated circuitry to actually invert the video image. Yeah. They had to, somebody had to.

Chris Gammell: You want to talk about a bad conference call, you know, that long distance call from the moon. Oh boy. Oh yeah. So grainy.

Dave Jones: But anyway, yeah, that's, yeah, it's a cool little, it's cool complex. We've been there. It's great. But yeah, I've, I've been to the dish, but I did shoot. I do have a video on my second channel. I did like, I had a back, I had a little small compact camera with me. I did get a full transition of the dish moving. So if you search my channel, there's a great video of a time-lapse of the dish doing a full rotation over.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And yeah, I. And Tom got to ride it actually like, cause there's stairs. Cause it actually touches, almost touches the ground.

Dave Jones: It practically touches the ground. Yeah. The dish is that huge that it. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's super cool.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I want to ride the dish. I want to. Bloody Tom's got, got to do it the best. I know. Yeah. I've been, I've been thinking, I've been talking about it for years. Oh yeah. I should email him and say, Hey, you know, next time you have a maintenance day, can I come and ride the dish? Yeah. Although they probably get, you know, a million people, you know. Sure. Sure. Sure. Wanting to do it. Yep. Anyway. Yeah. I'm jealous. Anyway. Yeah. They've still got a PDP 11 running. And the, the guy there who Tom talked to interviewed, he said, Oh yeah. Well, why, why didn't you train you? You know, why haven't you modernized? Well, still works. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Right. It's got dials and everything. And it's just, yeah. There's just a control program. Why?

Chris Gammell: They've definitely added stuff since the PDP 11 though. Oh yeah. You can tell there was more modern like drivers and more stuff.

Dave Jones: More modern receivers and stuff like that. Of course. But the, but the actual drive for the motorized and everything else, you know, and the control loop to, you know, to do it all and everything. Yeah. It's all in software. It's all runs of PDP 11. It's great. It's great. It's awesome.

Chris Gammell: Big changes coming in the tiny world, not the huge dish world, but in the tiny world of, well, I guess big company, small stuff. Apple is ditching Broadcom and Qualcomm. I think this is a, this is a trend we're going to see more and more. So we had Matthew Venn on the show last week and we were talking about, you know, risk five and custom Silicon generally. But like, I think more and more companies are going to bring chip design in house just because it's so, so much more accessible and the IP, you know, they're still going to buy some IP I'm sure. But, but necessarily going to Broadcom and Qualcomm directly.

Dave Jones: What chips are they currently using? Like, you know, like 5G, 4G, like RF? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think a lot of the, a lot of the RF stuff and the cell, cell stuff. Yep. You know, an Apple, Apple had bought PA Semi a couple of years ago. Right. But I think, I think what's going to happen is like, you know, you think about the value add on top of like an ARM processor that a Qualcomm and a Broadcom is doing, right? They're, they're doing these huge, huge ASICs that have IP from ARM, right? That's in there. And there's a lot of stuff surrounding that, that centralized IP. But I think Apple is just basically gobbling up more of that, of that capability. So they, you know, they, they keep buying smaller companies and, and they want to put their own stuff in there. They want to maintain secrecy. I'm sure. Yeah. I think that, I just think that both with going direct to ARM for really big people that are going to stay in the ARM ecosystem and then also risk five. It's, it's, I think we're going to see more of this.

Dave Jones: What processor is inside a Broadcom and Qualcomm chips? Cause they don't, it's not like they're just analog. I don't think there's got to be processing in there.

Chris Gammell: I think the Snapdragon is like a ARM 845, you know, like 8,000, you know, like there's just like tons of huge ARM stuff in there, like multi, multi core. What was it? Like the 880, the Snapdragon 880? Snapdragon 880.

Dave Jones: So Apple, Apple ditched ARM for their M1, you know, their in-house M1 processor. And the M2 just came out. And yet they're still using ARM because they're in Broadcom and Qualcomm chips that they were using.

Chris Gammell: So yeah. Right. Well, and I mean, there's still ARM. The M1 is ARM though. That's the thing. And like, so you look at M1 and M2, it's still ARM IP and there's still compiles with ARM compilers, right? But it's, it's just not external. It's not using other people's design chipsets. So.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yep. So I don't know what's actually, I don't actually know what's in the, I guess the custom stuff is in the iPhone too now? I don't, I don't, I don't follow. I don't know.

Dave Jones: I don't follow these 3D gadgets.

Chris Gammell: But I know a lot of like, it's like a lot of the Android phones are Snapdragon. Yes. And those are, you know, huge ARM things as well, right? They have big video processing. They have all of the, all of the RF stuff in there too. So yeah, they're just way beyond my comprehension, but it'll be interesting to see, see how this stuff changes the industry, I suppose.

Dave Jones: Meh. I didn't think I cared about Apple. It's a meh.

Chris Gammell: It's our design, but yeah. Yeah. It's just, I think it's just big players doing big moves like that. Right. And I think it, it could change the landscape in terms of other people being willing, you know, and also like if it hits Qualcomm's bottom, bottom line, they might change how, how they market their stuff to other people. Right. You think about like, it's, it's impossible to, you know, to access some of their parts as a small player, but if they lose some of their big players, then they have to start targeting the smaller market as well. So it might change how, how they operate as well. So it, it could, could have some impacts on the industry at some point.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We'll see.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. How is your, how's your chip design stuff going? So, you know, I owe you a hundred dollars in chips as we talked about last time.

Dave Jones: You owe me a hundred bucks in chips. I still have not decided which one I'm going to go for, but yeah, we'll see. I just did the video on the 10 cent.

Chris Gammell: I saw that. That was fantastic video. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Good. Glad you got it to Blinky. And yes. I think the other thing that, that was in that video, I think I linked it last time when we talked about it, but cause I, yeah, cause it came out between when we recorded and when I posted. So I did, I did link it in. So you're welcome for all that traffic, uh, you know, all those links from the amp bar. Uh, yeah. Thank you. But the thing I liked about that video was your focus on just like the, I wish someone would have sat me down, not saying you sat me down on this, but I wish someone would have sat me down on like the examples code. Yep. Like that is just such an important thing when you're getting into new microcontrollers and like each sample is like just a dedicated piece. One thing I've talked to Alicia and Chris about from embedded FM is just like, I feel like there's not enough. Uh, I think I've said this when I was on the show before, but like one, one skillset is being able to like glue that stuff together and being good at like making SDKs from different companies and samples that come in a lot of these SDKs and, and example, like IDEs and stuff like that and being able to glue that stuff together in a cogent way that is like testable and is updatable and maintainable. And, you know, that's like, that's a skill I wish I've got. I would have gotten earlier in my career, both to actually go and read and like really dig into those samples, but then also like have the skills to pull out the important nuggets and build my own program with them.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, that's, that's how I do my, uh, software development, especially if I'm coming up on a new platform or I'm using the new feature, I just pull in an example code for that peripheral that I want. You know, if I want to learn how to use the analog to digital converter in a micro, just pull in the example and it's, you know, it shows me how to set up the registers that at least gets me in the ballpark. And then I can write, I can get some compilable code that's actually reading a value out, but it might be gibberish because it's, you know, it's, it's got the wrong channel or it's got the, you know, the wrong, uh, you know, set in, it's got the wrong, you know, something or other, but at least I'm getting something out and then I can drive into the data sheet and see the actual register values that I actually want. Then substitute those back in and then boom, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You're at least a good starting point. And if you're maybe handing it off to someone else or you're at least able to test things. Yeah, totally. I just feel like early in my career, I was just like, Oh, every program starts from a blank page. And that is completely wrong. That is. And I think increasingly wrong.

Dave Jones: It's horrible.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I think increasingly wrong with, with a lot of our tosses that I do now. Right. It's like, there's so much complexity that you're building on top of that. If you think you're starting from a blank page, even a blank example project where maybe you have like just free our toss set up, you're screwed. You know, you could do it. And like, I'm sure that the pros, the very pro risk, you know, firmware engineers want to do that sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Like man, me, I'm screwed.

Dave Jones: So that's why I was so impressed when. You know, I, I loaded that package in and I had, and I saw the examples and I went, Oh, they've got an example for every one of the peripherals in this chip.

Chris Gammell: That's exactly what you want. Yep.

Dave Jones: That's exactly what you want. No more, no less. You know, like that's it done. Right. It's everything I need. I am, I am going to use your chip now because you know, you, you gave me these examples.

Chris Gammell: I think that's like table stakes, right?

Speaker ?: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And then you optimize later. Right. Premature optimization is an enemy.

Dave Jones: But yeah, anyway, it may be the risk. It may be something else. We'll see.

Chris Gammell: Okay. All right. All right.

Dave Jones: Yep. Cool. But anyway, a lot of people said they want to see me do risk five assembly. So maybe, maybe I'll do that. Cause they want to see how fast the pin could toggle. Right. And I was using the, I was using the library. Right. I was using the pin, like I was using the toggle library. I haven't looked at the source code for the actual, you know, when, when, when you call up, uh, you know, what is it? A write bit or something to a port, you know, I haven't looked at the source code of how it does that, but it's, it's obviously more than a couple of instructions. Right. Because, you know, it's got to be bit loaded and all, you know, all sorts of things. And so, so that takes time. So if you're trying to toggle a bit as fast as possible and you're calling up the standard write bit, you know, write port one, you know, bit one or whatever, then, you know, that's using more instructions than what you would if you hard coded it yourself in either assembly or like some other direct, it doesn't have to be an assembly, but it needs to be compiled down to a single instruction that writes to that register, you know? So, yeah. Yep. Yeah. So people wanted to see how fast it could pin toggle because using the regular C library with a 24 meg processor clock, it only toggled at one, just under one meg. So, you know, that wasn't exactly a fast pin toggle. So everyone wanted to know, well, how fast is it? Can you do it? If you're used assembly. So that'd be an interesting video. Based on the number of bloody views I got, I think I'll milk that cash cow. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think, you know, I am drawn personally to cheap parts. Like the most you can do with cheap parts, it's always going to do well because it's like accessible too, right?

Dave Jones: Well, I have not failed with one of my cheap parts videos. You know, all my cheap parts or, you know, cheap, cheap tools, cheap workbench, cheap, you know, test equipment.

Chris Gammell: Chip of the week is always the, I guess we don't really do cheap chip of the week, but that's probably a good idea. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, people just love cheap shit. Yeah. You know, it's like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think it just, it gets the maximum, you know, like, you know, a very well off person can still use it, right? So it just gets your maximum audience, I think.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. No, totally. Well, a well off person might be looking to develop a, you know, million of some widget where, yeah, price matters, right? So they care that it's a 10 cent micro instead of a 30 cent micro, you know? Yeah. So it sort of like matters to everyone. So yeah, that's why it's hugely popular. Yep. Which wasn't a surprise. I would have been incredibly disappointed and I would have been asking questions if that video hadn't have gotten a lot of views. You know, I would have, I would have investigated and gone, well, what have I done wrong? Is it my presentation? Is it my thumbnail? Is it my description? Is it like, you know, cause, cause I knew people like cheap, cheap stuff like this and it, and it does bring in the views. So yep. Hmm. A new channel idea.

Chris Gammell: Just cheap stuff. Just cheap stuff. Yep. Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of the-

Dave Jones: EV cheap coming soon.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. EV cheap. You could also do just like AliExpress finds and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Just AliExpress finds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a big Clive's territory. You know, he just buys these, you know, 50 cent things on there and, you know, he's making a killing out of it. So yep. Yep. Oh boy.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Last digs, cause our amp hour's up.

Chris Gammell: Our amp hour is up. Anything else on the list? Hmm. Hmm. Once again, thanks to Unmanaged 615 for popping this list.

Speaker ?: Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: He's posting everything. Oh man.

Chris Gammell: It would be a ghost. It'd be a ghost town otherwise.

Dave Jones: It'd be a ghost town if it wasn't for Unmanaged 615. Yeah. Who is totally not a bot. No. I think it was a bot. If it's like a good bot. If it's a good bot. Oh, well, we're very happy.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: What is it with Ferris Bueller's synthesizer? That got lots of votes up. I'm a huge Ferris fan. Save Ferris.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Save Ferris. Did somebody made one or has somebody used, somebody got the actual one? That's, yeah, that looks like they reviewed the one that was in Ferris's, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Chris Gammell: Emu Systems Emulator. Yeah. Yeah. I never, I mean, I've watched Ferris Bueller, but I never like got into the mythology of it.

Dave Jones: Oh, dude.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: No. No. That's just wrong. It's just wrong.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I lived in Chicago. How about that?

Dave Jones: Okay. Well, there you go. It should be like your favorite movie then.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly. Abe Froman, The Sausage King of Chicago. Yeah.

Dave Jones: The Sausage King of Chicago. See, you can recite lines. You're doing pretty well. I'm pretty good at that stuff. Yeah. Right. Anyway, so there's no teardown there. That's a shame.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's just got a review of it. But that's cool. What about the self-soldering circuits? Do you see that one?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. A lot of people wanted my comments on this. I went, yeah, it's cool, but like totally pointless, you know?

Chris Gammell: No, it's meant to be pointless. That's the fun part. I know.

Dave Jones: And that's the fun part about it is that it's just so stupid that it's, you know, it's fun. It's great. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't think you'd ever use it for, but I think it was good because it kind of showed like the importance of like thermal planes and the ability to pass power through stuff. And it's like the idea of like self-replicating as well. That's interesting.

Dave Jones: For those playing along at home who don't know what we're talking about, which is probably most of you. It's, sorry, I don't know who actually did it.

Chris Gammell: It's Carl Bougeser.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, he made a PCB with a heating element on the inner layers, right? That's right. Which a heating element, of course, is just a trace, right? It's just a copper trace. So he did like a zigzag copper trace, like a heating element inside. And he came and he bought those out to tabs, you know, big sort of like, you know, big clamp tabs on the side of the board. Yeah. That you hook up a high current power supply.

Chris Gammell: And he also, it's not like he just did it willy-nilly. He also calculated what the resistance would be and what he would need to heat it up to and whatever, and made it safe for, so he didn't delaminate the board. He mentioned that a couple of times. Yep. He used low temp solder. I think you, what was it?

Dave Jones: But there was no thermal feedback, right? There was no temperature control feedback, right? It was just like, I've done, oh, was there?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, because he uses one board to build another board then. And then the one board has a control. He has a PID loop to control.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: Soldering the next board. So I thought that, yeah, that was clever. Yeah. That's good.

Dave Jones: And yeah, it basically, the board heats up from the inside and it solders itself. Right? So you don't need an external thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep. Carl has, people probably have seen his stuff. He does a lot of like PCB motors. That's like one of his common things. Yeah, right. Yes, they're very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really cool thing. Yep. And he's done a couple of talks about it. He has a great YouTube channel. So definitely check it out. Yeah. This is, I feel like this is like a, kind of like a one-off thing he started doing and it just became a bigger thing. So it's, it's great.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely terrific, but it's absolutely non-functional. Oh yeah. You would never, ever do this in a product. You would never. You would never do this in a product.

Chris Gammell: Maybe you would do this. Where would you put a heater in it? I don't think you'd do it for soldering though. You'd maybe do it just for like, if you were in space and you need to keep your board warm. Oh yes. No, you totally would. You know, they have a heater on the copter that's on Mars, right? Yes. Doesn't that have a heater?

Dave Jones: Uh, yes, but usually that's inside the enclosure. They would heat up the enclosure because you want to heat up the parts as well. You know, like, yeah, that's true. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to delaminate or desolder the parts either. No.

Dave Jones: And it's a very inefficient way to do it as well. If you're trying to heat up the components, which are on top of the board, you don't want to be heating inside the board and then cover your heater with insulated, with thermal insulating material, fiberglass.

Chris Gammell: Well, it would have, it would have a different curve, right? It would have a different curve.

Dave Jones: It's not, you know, it is a very poor way to do it, but it's possible.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. There might be something niche up.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm guessing NASA doesn't do that, but, but there are reasons to have heaters like that and yeah, heating elements at least inside of.

Dave Jones: Well, you can embed cooling elements inside your PCB. There's, there's high end PCBs. You go to the high end PCB suppliers, they can route water cooling channels inside your PCB.

Chris Gammell: Okay. That's nice.

Dave Jones: Like that's really schmick, right? Yeah. That's like, don't ask the price. Like you're not going to get that on your $5 shared panel. Okay. Just no.

Chris Gammell: See, that's the next thing people could do is like, maybe you could take two, two JLC boards and you can just like, you know, make your own channel, you know? Yes. Yes. Yes. You could.

Dave Jones: You can actually, yeah, you can do control depth routing and then you could, or you could get three of them. So you could have one routed slots.

Chris Gammell: I was thinking like a 3D printed inner thing, right?

Dave Jones: Then you actually glue them together. But no, you don't have to 3D print it when you can get the PCB maker to make it. So you can get the, the, the inner one does all your channel routing. And then the outer one is just a fixed board on the top and bottom. I mean, you glue them.

Chris Gammell: I'm hearing a video idea here, Dave. You know, you should, this is like, you know, fire and ice.

Dave Jones: You could play off.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I thought about, I've always thought about doing like a video series on like obscure things you can do with PCBs. Like I've done like turning them into front panels, you know, like. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: I do that recently. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's, it's good.

Chris Gammell: It's tough to not have vias.

Dave Jones: Like this heating up thing is one of them, you know, and you can add cooling channels and you can. In fact, I just, uh, Twitter the other day, somebody was trying to embed a coin cell in a PCB. And they came up with, yeah. And they came up with this. So you do read Twitter. There you go. And it was on Hackaday, you butt. Oh, was it? Okay. Right. Anyway. So I responded to him on Twitter. I said, yeah, you won't get this on a shared panel. Cause it's got to use a really thin routing bit and stuff like that. So he was trying to embed it. And so there's lots of ways, you know, you can embed, you can do control depth routing or you can do several very thin boards and then you can actually glue them together. And that's an, that's another way to do niche products. If you're doing fit to envelope product design, you know, like you're doing a smartwatch or something, you know, you've got to do like, you know, weird things with boards to try and get things to fit in there and you embed components into the board and, you know, all that sort

Chris Gammell: of stuff. I think I've told you I've been, I've been taking a language classes.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: And did you know that another way to say weird in a different language is expensive as hell?

Dave Jones: Right. Yes. Pardon my French.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's right.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. If you're thinking about these things, be ready to pull out the wallet. Yeah. Well, it's actually not that expensive.

Dave Jones: You see, if you did that three layer method I was telling you about, or even two layer, like you do not go to the manufacturer and go, I would like control depth routing, please. Cause then your price goes up a hundred fold. That's right. That's right. But if you go, give me, give me.

Chris Gammell: You don't go to a baker and say, I want a wedding cake. You say, I want a cake.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You want a cake. Exactly. Yeah. And then, but you go to the cheap manufacturer and you go, I would like two PCBs, please. Two different design PCBs, please.

Chris Gammell: Not on the same, not on the same panel either.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But yes, but make them thin, make them 0.8 millimeters. So then you can glue them together and you've got your 1.6 millimeter standard thickness board, but you can, but then you've got your control depth. Right. So it's like, you know, you, you can, you can put batteries in their components.

Chris Gammell: Hey Dave, guess what? I will bet you a hundred dollars in parts that you can't make this happen. That's, that's a double or nothing bet right there.

Dave Jones: All right. You, you want to see it happen now. All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right. I'll have to do a. I'll have to think. Yeah. Cause you got it. Like, I can't just do it and mention, you need a date. I've got to, I've got to come up with like, Oh God. Don't put pressure on. I'm already behind on like six different videos. I've got to do.

Chris Gammell: You don't have to take this bet. You don't have to take this bet. I'm just saying that's, that's the bet. I'd say we give it the same amount of time as we did to the, so when did we say the Twitter thing would happen? So we said it would be done on the 15th. Obviously it was not. I was, I was wrong there.

Dave Jones: I've got to get boards made and shit.

Chris Gammell: But I don't, this isn't my problem. I'll give you an extra two weeks.

Dave Jones: An extra two weeks.

Chris Gammell: When was it? Did we talk about it on Kaiser Miss? When did we, when did we make that bet?

Dave Jones: I don't know.

Chris Gammell: No, it must've been on Kaiser Miss.

Dave Jones: No, it wasn't on Kaiser Miss. No, no. It was before that. No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: Kaiser Miss was the last of the year. Okay. So then you got plenty of time. Okay. You got plenty of time. It was the one before Kaiser Miss. So that was like, we recorded that on the 8th of December. So you basically get a month and a week. You had five weeks. You could totally get PCVs back in five weeks.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but I've got like, yeah, but I can't just do it. I've got to plan shit.

Chris Gammell: No bet. No bet.

Dave Jones: No bet. Otherwise it's putting too much pressure on me.

Chris Gammell: He's just going to rest on his laurels and take the $100. Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: And take shit apart and open mail.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think we should keep these bet things going. We should take these bet things going, you know? Yep. Yep. It kind of makes things happen or not happen in case of Twitter. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I was thinking about doing double or nothing for another five weeks from now.

Dave Jones: How would you like to win your money back?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right, right.

Dave Jones: In that I bet you're not on Mastodon in 12 months time. I bet you're back on Twitter.

Chris Gammell: Ooh, that's an interesting thing. Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones: Mastodon's going to die in the ass.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, you know, that one, I don't know if I take that one. There'll be niche groups there, you know, but eh.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's pretty easy for me to do. I just have to tweet on, you know, one year from now. Right. Toot one year from now and I win. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'd say no bet on that one. Yep. That's not a good bet for you. Fickle. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Anyway.

Dave Jones: Anyway. All right. I will- Okay.

Chris Gammell: You think about it.

Dave Jones: I will endeavor to do my best.

Chris Gammell: Think about it.

Dave Jones: I- It'll go on my official glass whiteboard list here. I have a list of stuff on my glass whiteboard here. That is-

Chris Gammell: That sounds like that's pretty involved. So that's a lot of planning.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But I've got to come up with something cool. And I probably, you know, and once again, I'd probably want to do several examples in one video where I shouldn't. I should just do one and turn it into a series. Like, here's one video of how to do this clever thing with PCBs. Here's another. Yeah, you should. And do a whole series. All right.

Chris Gammell: Especially just for the bet, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. All right. I'm going to at least come up with a list, whether or not I do it. No. It's like, I'll come up with a list of ideas for videos I can do, whether or not I actually get off my ass and do it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay. All right. Another thing. The first step is making a list.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: All right. Good luck, buddy.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time.

Speaker ?: Bye.