#10 – Open Hardware and Self Publishing

Dave Jones: Hi, welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV Blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell from Chris Gammell's Analog Life.

Dave Jones: How you doing, Chris? Pretty good, Dave. How are you? Good. You're back from the Open Source Hardware Summit and the... Well, you didn't make it to the Maker Faire, did you?

Chris Gammell: No, I didn't make it there. Didn't make it there to the Maker Faire, but... The bummer. Yeah, I've been watching pictures. They've been pretty intense. Have you been checking those out?

Dave Jones: I heard it was pretty good. I haven't seen any photos or anything like that, but I've been getting some tweets from people I follow, and they say it's awesome, and, you know, yeah, everyone should have gone, and we missed it. Blah, blah, blah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, rub it in. I live in Australia. God.

Chris Gammell: Well, you're going to be set up your own eventually, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, right. And we'll have 20 people show up.

Chris Gammell: Hey, man, better than nothing, right? No, true, yeah. Yeah, I was talking to one of the guys from Macon. And he said those are pretty big. I mean, like, there's a lot more of them than there used to be, the Mini Maker Faires. And they are a smaller affair, but, you know, they're still worthwhile.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, you've got to remember, I mean, it's that... Who's the group behind Maker? The Penton Publishing Group. No, no, no, no.

Chris Gammell: Not Penton. Isn't it? No, it's O'Reilly.

Dave Jones: Oh, no. Who is it?

Chris Gammell: O'Reilly.

Dave Jones: O'Reilly, that's it. Yeah, some huge publishing conglomerators behind make. So, you know, that's how they can get these things. Yeah. I think Penton is... They've got a lot of money to throw at them.

Chris Gammell: I think Penton is EDN. I think that's it.

Dave Jones: EDN, that's it. Yes, Penton. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of.

Chris Gammell: Shadow corporations. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Evil empires. Yeah. One world government, all that sort of thing. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, conspiracies.

Chris Gammell: Absolutely.

Dave Jones: So, tell us all about it because I know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it was great. I'm kind of in the midst of writing about it a little bit. I thought I was going to be writing a lot more about it, but it's kind of like if I didn't just... The videos are all going to be up. So, I've only... Right. I saw so many people recording video, but I haven't actually seen them all yet. You know, there's a couple. There's one on Adafruit and there's a couple others out there. And there's the Ustream stuff, but you know how that is. I mean, your site, you've seen that where the...

Dave Jones: Ustream is shit. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's almost not worth watching. Yeah. I just uploaded my latest Ustream live show, one and a half hours, and it's just me doing like animated movements at two frames per second. Yeah. It's just shit. It's just awful. Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to watch that.

Chris Gammell: Ustream sucks. I'm kind of waiting on the other stuff. But you know, it was great. I mean, the coolest part was just seeing everybody in one room even. Or you know what the best part was? My favorite part, and I think I started to write about this last night. And it's like, so they ask about, you know, who here does... Because a lot of the hobbyists is a lot of software people that want to get into hardware, which is good. Yeah. Yeah. They asked everybody to raise your hand if you're a hardware designer or even if you, you know, anything like that, right? And the number of people in that room, there's probably about 300 people in that room and about Yeah. 150. At least half of the people were raising their hand. And I've just... Yeah. Wow. I've never had that before, you know? Like, not like there's no hardware designers in the world, but just... That's a lot of people, you know? Like, that's a lot of people that care about electronics.

Dave Jones: Well, I was a bit surprised when you said 150. I was expecting, oh, here we go. There'll be 10 people raising their hand and they'll all be software nerds. Right. Yeah. And that's what they expected too. That's what I expected you to... Oh, right. Okay. So they were... Even they were surprised, were they?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So it was... Right. It seemed like... And I think they also asked about engineering by training, like a double E by training maybe. And I... Yeah. So it was... It was pretty cool. I mean, like, great crowd. I mean, got to meet some people from Make. Got to meet one of the guys from MakerBot. You know, just really nice people. And really inspiring too. You know, you talk to them about their stuff they're doing. It's just like, wow, really? You're doing that? Like, it's... You know, like, it's just... It's cool. Yeah, yeah. You know, you just love, you know, kind of shooting the shit with people about what they're working on. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And that's usually the best part. So...

Dave Jones: Yeah. Except then when they're working on much cooler shit than you, and then you feel a bit depressed, you know, because they're working on really cool stuff.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. They... Maybe. Yeah. You know, I like what I'm doing. But yeah, it's... Yeah. There's some cool stuff out there. And it inspires you at the very least. So hopefully we'll get some links up to the videos. I don't know. I have a couple of things I wanted to mention about. I mean, I went to ESC Boston too. And that was pretty good. You know, I get to meet Jack Gantel. That was really cool. Yeah. He writes on Embedded.com. And he's been writing for a long time. So I got to meet him and talk to him a little bit. And he's a real nice guy too. Excellent. Yeah. I mean, that was a good experience too. But it was just... It was like really different. Because, you know, one is really vendor sponsored. And they're pushing... Not pushing products. But, you know, they're definitely showcasing new products. And even the sessions are somewhat geared towards products and stuff like that. So I liked it. And it was a good experience. And I got to learn some stuff about some embedded software stuff. But again, that's... I mean, I went to it to cover it for e-times. Which is nice. But I'm not as much embedded guy. So it was, you know, it was cool. But I dug the other thing a lot more.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, you talk about those vended sponsored events. I mean, that's what I'm going to in October. Well, in less than two weeks. I'm going to a vendor specific event. So it's, you know, not just the generic public. It's you've got to be a specific fan of that particular company's stuff before you actually go. So that'll be a more niche market even again. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I mean, there are some benefits. Because if you're working on a specific processor or a specific part. And you really want to know and get deep and learn about that part. It's really nice to have actually. Because, you know, you're going to run into some experts on that stuff.

Dave Jones: Well, exactly. And you're only going to run into experts. And the only exhibitors there are ones who actually have tools and stuff for that. For the thing you're interested in. Yeah. That's very true. It's, yeah. Yeah. So I can... I've been to one of those before. Well, they actually had one here in Sydney once. But, you know, it's... Yeah. But I just went because it was a free day off work, really. Yeah. I wasn't too concerned about the company's products and things like that. But I was surprised at the number of people there who, you know, turned up for this manufacturer's, you know. You know, they'll flog in their 8-bit micros. And, yeah, everyone turned up. So it was rather interesting, actually.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, there's kind of a continuum of, like, sessions and stuff that you can learn from. Like, there's some very targeted vendor-specific ones. Like, I went to a power seminar a couple of weeks back. And that was by a company. But it was actually very technically based. And so that was more like school. But it was...

Dave Jones: Well, that's exactly like the one I'm going to, which has, like, 50 different technical classes or something you can take. They're all running concurrently. And, you know, it's just the number, the sheer diversity and the number of classes you can take during this four-day conference thing is absolutely amazing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, and that's good, too. I mean, and then there's the other side of it, too, you know, where there's sometimes, like, distributors will have their own tech days, which are nice, too, because you'll usually have vendor reps come in. But sometimes that's also just free lunch. I mean, like, to be honest...

Dave Jones: It's free lunch and sales and a free tool. That's, yeah, they usually give away a little program. So that's kind of the other end of the spectrum. A programmer or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But they're really big in the U.S. Getting those in Australia is a big deal because, you know, they don't come here that often. So, yeah, if something's on here, I'll generally go to it. But, yeah, I know some of them are just sales winks. Free lunch. Well, we get free lunch at work anyway, so it doesn't matter. Oh, wow. That's nice. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the perks. Free lunch.

Chris Gammell: That's good. Well, the open hardware, though, I mean, it was cool because there was a couple... Yeah. ...and one of them was, like, was Lamore Freed, who's part of... Yeah. ...Lady Ada from Adafruit. And they actually posted her talk on adafruit.com, on their blog.

Dave Jones: I've seen that. I haven't watched it yet. I've only watched the Arduino one. Oh, okay. They've also posted that, the video of the Arduino, the whole Arduino team's there, and they talk about the history and the new change, which is coming up, which we might talk about, and things like that. Yeah. So, that was very interesting.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, her talk is, you know, it's really good, and it's really personal, too. You know, like, talking about how she's kind of come up through doing all this stuff, and just for all the people that shun away from swearing, even though you do listen to Dave, you know, there is a little swearing in there, and it's a little harsher than Dave sometimes, so just keep that in mind. Right. Just thought I'd throw that in there. Excellent. I love it. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: So, it's rated PG, is it? Or M or something.

Chris Gammell: PG-13 or something, yeah. PG-13 plus or something, yeah. But that was a good talk, and then who else was on there? You know, there's some other talks that I didn't think would be very interesting, but actually turned out to be quite interesting. One of the lawyers from the Creative Commons was there, and he does science coverage for Creative Commons licensing, and I thought, you know, that kind of thing's going to be really boring, but it actually was really good. Who was it? It was John Wilbanks, and he's a great speaker in the first place. But just learning about all that stuff and how...

Dave Jones: Okay, that helps, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, you and I have talked about that before with patents and how that's kind of a big area of strife, but not only that patents exist, and they are a tool, and they can be an impediment, but also, even if you want to ignore them completely, they're still going to affect you, because even if you try and license it and open everything up, you might not be able to do that, and there's like a legitimate worry about that. So say, you know...

Chris Gammell: ...you do a new design, Dave, and you say, okay, I'm going to open source this, but I also want...

Dave Jones: Somebody squatting a patent.

Chris Gammell: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Bastards. So there's some legitimate, like, licensing concerns there, and it's interesting. I didn't think I was going to like that at all, but that was actually one of my favorite talks, so... Right. I look forward to hearing that one again.

Speaker ?: There you go.

Chris Gammell: A lawyer.

Dave Jones: Evil lawyer. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Who would have thought? Well, he's an evil lawyer, but he's an evil lawyer with a technical background, so he is acceptable.

Dave Jones: And he's actually working on the good side, too, right? That's right, yeah. He's working on the open hardware side. He's not fighting for money for patents. He's not a patent lawyer. That's right. Right. Yes.

Chris Gammell: And then there's some other good ones, too, like the panels. So, you know, some big names are on there, like Chris Anderson and Peter Semelhack from Bug Labs and Filterone from Adafruit as well. Yeah. Actually, even Massimo Banzi was on there, too. So, it was cool. You know, interesting, you know, kind of hearing about the business side of it and how they actually still make money, but, you know, it's still all about, like, oh, well, it's all open source, but there's always kind of this interesting, like, undertone of, well, we're still making money on this, though. You know what I mean? No, of course. Yeah, yeah. Like, one of your kits is open source. Didn't you have a kit that's open source, or?

Dave Jones: Oh, well, I've open sourced my watch. I've open sourced the software. I haven't open sourced the hardware yet, because I haven't been bothered, but, well, the information's up there. You know, you can just go and have the schematic. I haven't released a piece of e-files yet, but, you know, I'll send them to people if they want them. It's, you know, so it's effectively open.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: All of my projects are effectively open, because I've had them published in the magazine, which is before all this open source hardware came along. That's how you opened your project, was to publish it. Yeah. You know, publish it in Silicon Chip, or something like that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And that's actually a really interesting point that John Wilbanks, that Creative Commons guy, talked about, is that the best defense for the future is to publish everything. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because if, I mean, you've done that before, but not even that, but like, even if you have an idea, right? And say, tomorrow you want to have, you know, a hat that tweets the weather. You know, some silly device that someone might want to patent someday. The best defense is to publish your idea now. So, and even if, so, and if everything was published right now, if somehow we could publish everything simultaneously of every idea that's ever done in the future, then in 17 years, when every patent has run out, then there would be no more possible, because it would be in the prior art database. Exactly. No one would be able to get it anymore. And boom, everything's open then.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, but it still wouldn't stop them, because it's a matter of finding prior art, which is one of the arts of patenting and defending patents and things like that. So, you know, yeah, you can't just tweet it or something like that, maybe, because you'll never find it again. But if you publish it on your site that's viewed by, you know, 10,000 geeks a month and indexed on Google for that specific search term, then, you know, it's much better.

Chris Gammell: He is, he was actually advocating for putting it into the prior art database. So, however, however that's done.

Dave Jones: Oh, there is a prior art database. Apparently, yeah, there is. Oh, right. There you go. That's news to me.

Chris Gammell: Right. And so, yeah. And so, I mean, his talk was great. I mean, hopefully that'll be up soon. And, you know, there was, there was just so many great talks and people and I don't know. It was, it was really cool. Even just. Rub it in. Yeah. Sorry. So, how's stuff out in Australia, Dave?

Dave Jones: Well, you know, it's all happening out here. Yeah. I interviewed myself. Yeah. That was fantastic. Hey, look at me. Look at me.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I might be here in Australia. Anyone heard of Australia? Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. Let's rub it in. But no, that's, that's fantastic. I love the, I love the fact that you can go to stuff like that when you're, you know, in the US. They have those things. Seems like every month there's something really cool like that happening over there. So, yeah. I'm really hoping they're having it again.

Chris Gammell: I talked to Dale Doherty, who's the founder of Make. I got to meet him actually. And he's a really nice guy. And I asked him and I'm like, are you going to have this, you know, is this going to happen again? And he's like, he actually pointed out that this wasn't put, the Open Hardware Summit wasn't put on by Make. It was actually mostly hosted by Bug Labs. Oh, okay. And, uh. There you go. And also Little Bits. No, sorry. The, yeah, the, the people who set it up were Alicia, Alicia Gibb and, uh, Aya Badir. And so they were setting everything up. And so they were basically the ones who got all the big funding, like Bug Labs, I think was the main sponsor. So hopefully they'll do it again next year and maybe you can come out for that.

Dave Jones: Possibly. That would be fun.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'd love to, I'd love to just do a trip over there and, you know, actually tee up a couple of these events and stuff like that. If the wife lets me go and.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it's, it's all about money, you know, it costs me thousands of dollars. Right. Maybe I can get someone to sponsor to send me back. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, they actually had, uh, Bunny, Bunny Huang from, uh, Chumbie. He was actually up on Skype the whole time. So they had a video of him up there. So, I mean, at the very least you could do that. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't know if anyone's going to be interested to see me in two frames per second up on Skype on the big screen, are they?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, it would be better than you stream. It'd be Skype. So that, that video is not too bad, but it's.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So it was, it was good. All around good.

Dave Jones: It was excellent. Excellent. Well, I, I was really, I was really stunned by the number of hardware people there. We probably should talk about that. I mean, I expected them to be all software focused people who just dabbled in a bit of hardware. But from what you're saying, it seems like, you know, a good half of them were, what, actual hardware engineers or, or did hardware for a living or.

Chris Gammell: You know, I'm trying to think back to it now. I hope I didn't misspeak. I, I think the thing that everybody raised their hands at was actually the engineer question. So who had a formal engineering training? So that actually might have been thrown off. Now, if you're a CS kind of major, then I don't think you'd raise your hand, but maybe you would. I don't know how that counts.

Dave Jones: Well, maybe, yeah, because they might have an inferiority complex because they're at a hardware conference. Oh yeah, I've done my computer science degree. That's got to count. Right. So they raised their hand.

Chris Gammell: But I still think that in terms of, I think there was more than, there was more there. And from the ones I talked to, at least most people that I talked to were doing some kind of hardware in some capacity. So that's not a great sample size because I didn't talk to everyone.

Dave Jones: Well, well, it is the open source hardware summit. So I guess it's not surprising, right? It's not an open source software summit. So yeah, I guess it's not surprising when you think about it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, if you are a software person at your day job kind of thing, but you go home and you work on an Arduino shield at night, I would call myself a hardware person at that point. I think that's totally legit. Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Dave Jones: If you've laid out a board and etched a board, you're a hardware person. Oh, definitely. That's pretty much it. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Or sisterhood, whatever. And actually, that was another interesting thing too. Ah, do tell about the ratio. Well, it was at the beginning, but it was like the two hosts were female. And then Lemore stepped up on stage. And then so Aya, who was one of the main, she was the main host. She steps up. She's like, I just want to mention three fourths of the people that have been on stage so far have been female. Right. Which is awesome. And it was a great point. And there were, in terms of what I view as, at least my exposure to engineers in workplaces, it seemed like a much higher percentage. And hell yeah. That's great. Yeah, why not? I think that the, you know, tying in the Maker Faire kind of stuff, it's just a much broader appeal. And the fact that these people are working on hardware also, I think in terms of ways to encourage women to get into engineering, like practical applications like Maker Faire stuff, that is the way to do it.

Dave Jones: You know, that draws them in because they, you know, it draws them in, you know, subtly it draws them in because, oh, it might start out being arts and crafty kind of maker stuff. And then they go, oh, I can add LEDs to my little thing. Can I? Oh, what's this microcontroller thing? Right. Oh, you know, and bang.

Chris Gammell: And it goes both ways too. And because they gave us a free copy of Craft magazine, which I had never read before. And that goes the other way where you're starting to do like LED lampshades and all this stuff. And like awesome stuff, like I'm like, oh man, this is what I want my house to look like, you know, like so.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, I've thought about that too. I've thought about doing, you know, some sort of weird electronic sculptory art or something like that. You know, I've never gone ahead and done it, but, you know, it's maybe something that if I had enough free time, I would have a go at, I think. So, you know, I would suck at it, but, you know, I'd have a go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, so it's interesting. And it kind of leads into what I wanted to talk about next was, you know, did you hear about Nokia at all? Did you read that article?

Dave Jones: I read the thing about Nokia and they've got a new CEO who is just a, well, I won't say he's a douche, but he's just a manager guy. You know, he's not a, he's not a, I think he might, I don't know. Is he an engineer? I don't know, but he's certainly not.

Chris Gammell: I think he's MBA style more than engineer style.

Dave Jones: MBA style engineer, right. So he's never actually designed anything, but he, I'm sure he manages companies really well, you know. Yeah. But the story is, the gist of the story is, we'll have to put up a link for it, but it was basically that that's what, that's what they don't, they don't need someone who can manage the company. Because Nokia has been a perfectly managed company from day one, I think, you know, there's no problem. Their problem lies in their products and the actual development, how to compete with Apple and all that sort of stuff. And, you know, everyone's beaten them nowadays, you know, Apple, Samsung, and God knows who else, and HTC, and everyone, basically.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I'm always amazed when I see the percentage of the market that they still have. Like, Nokia worldwide is still pretty high, but it's dropping off a cliff, I think, so.

Dave Jones: And they know it's very, very, they're right on the edge of the cliff, and they know it. Because, you know, everyone's, yeah, my last phone was a Nokia, because I've always used a Nokia. So I just got another Nokia, really, you know, and it seemed to be the right, you know. How do you say that? A bit of choice went into it, but, sorry?

Chris Gammell: Nokia? It sounds like, you ever had that pasta, that potato-based pasta? From, uh.

Dave Jones: Right, no, no. Gnocchi? Yeah, in Australia, it's Nokia, it's not Nokia. Is there a G in front of it? Is that how you pronounce it? Nokia. Nokia. Nokia. Nokia. Yeah. Nokia, mate. Yeah, no worries, mate. Nokia.

Chris Gammell: All right, that's good.

Dave Jones: Not this Nokia rubbish. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Nokia. Well, what are the first two letters in there? It's no, right? That's the word no? Yeah, exactly. I don't know any Scandinavian people, so if I'm saying it wrong, I'm just, I apologize. Well, you know. Anyway. Anyway, it's Nokia here. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. All right. That's how we pronounce it. Mostly. I think I'm sure there's people.

Chris Gammell: Is, so, you know, you look at the two companies and. Yeah. Obviously.

Dave Jones: What? Apple and. Yeah. Are we talking about Apple? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Apple and Nokia or Nokia or. Yeah. You know. Nokia's fine. I can live with that. Okay. Okay. And they're basically Nokia is clamp or at least all the pundits are clamoring for an Apple kind of revolution, right? With, you know, Steve Jobs comes in and. Yeah. He fixes everything. He has a vision. And that's what they're saying that this new guy is not. Right. And, well, what my question is, is, you know, I was just spending, I just, we just spent 20 or so minutes talking about the awesomeness of open source. But Apple is the furthest thing from open source. You know.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. They're, they're almost the evil, you know, the evil empire compared to open source. Right.

Chris Gammell: They are the new Microsoft, right? They, there was a, yeah, there was a tweet about that a couple weeks ago. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're the original, you know, 1970s, 1980s. Yeah. Version of Microsoft, you know, who wanted to rule the world and, and only have their products and, and, you know, fiercely defend it. And the way they push their ideas is the way the market should go.

Chris Gammell: Right. And, and people are latching on now and people, and, and, uh, interesting side note, historical side note for people that did not attend the open hardware summit. You might see it in videos. I have never seen so many Apple products at an open hardware summit before. And granted, this is my first summit. Really? But it, like the contrast was just really striking. I mean, these people that are, were attending obviously love good design. That is no, there's no doubt about that. But if you're at a open hardware summit with an Apple device, something in my head screams irony, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, it does. It, absolutely.

Chris Gammell: That's, that's fascinating. You know, I think, I think part of it is just the culture of these people, a lot of them are craftsmen, you know, a lot of them make stuff and they probably appreciate good, you know, nice design.

Dave Jones: They appreciate a good design and they curse. I'm sure every one of them will bitch about the non openness of it and the proprietary nature and all that, you know, they'll, they'll bitch for hours about it, but they love good design. So can good design triumph over, you know, the pure open source ethos kind of thing? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: And so that's the question. I mean, like, is, is one person dictating from top down? Basically it's top down versus bottom up top down being, you know, Steve Jobs says it has to be like this. This is my vision. I've worked with these people, but is my, you know, eventually comes down to one person. Whereas bottom up is, you know, all these individual parties are developing separately. You know, I, I develop a, an open, open hardware board. Dave develops one, whoever has more people following it. And eventually, you know, it's like an evolutionary type method where the best one wins.

Dave Jones: Well, my response, I've said this before and I'll say it again, that I think the best products are designed by as fewer people as possible. One person, one genius, one idea, one vision. They produce the best products. I have no doubt about that. Open source is great, but does it produce a good, a well-designed product? I don't think so. It produces a popular product, but I wouldn't say well-designed. Typically it tries to be a jack of all trades and it tries to satisfy a lot of people. It's just a natural, you know, there's too many hands in the pot, you know, too many, too many chefs spoil the, spoil the broth as they say. And yeah, I'm, I'm a huge, I'm a huge believer that one person should really, really, you know, one person is more than capable of, is, is better suited to produce a good, a top quality product than a bunch of rabble, you know, really. I love the bunch of rabble. I love the open source hardware thing, but does it produce, you know, can it actually produce an iPhone? Well, you know, I, I don't think so. I mean, there's a chumbie out there, which is pretty darn good, but ultimately I think that's done by one or two guys at chumbie. Well, that's, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's open hardware, but how many people actually contribute? Right. Very few. Well, if you look at other stuff too. How many people contribute to the Arduino? You know, there's not many, there's only, there's only a couple of people doing the Arduino. Yeah, that's a good point. And so on and so forth. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I mean, like even Weaverboard, I think, uh, Gerald Coley was, you know, I started it out. And I think he's the one who laid out the first one. And it's interesting because there is that initial push that it's got to start somewhere. You know, someone has to come up with this vision. So yeah, it's interesting. And then you kind of let it go and put it through the ringer.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, I, it would be interesting to know, you know, everyone loves all this open source stuff, but I, I, I think it's a, it's a bit of a sham really. I think people just love it because it's cool. Right. They, they, they don't actually care that they can actually get the source code. I mean, the percentage of people who actually go and, you know, recompile the kernel for Linux or go and recompile the, uh, the firmware for the, um, Arduino or something like that is very few. The majority of people just want to use the product and they like it because it's open, because it's cool. And maybe one day they might be able to modify it, but very few people actually get around to actually doing that. I think so. I wouldn't call it a sham though.

Chris Gammell: I don't think, I don't think.

Dave Jones: No, no, it's not a sham that's, that's probably the, but, but that's the illusion of open source that, oh, everybody is, everybody's contributing and you know, everyone's modifying it themselves where they're not. I think the majority of people just use the finished product and that's it. Well, that's true. Yeah. I mean, and it's the same with any open source, you know, I've got, I use open, a lot of open source software on my, on my machine here, you know, open source stuff, but I don't ever want to download the source code. Who cares? I just want the compiled binary. You love Linux. I hate Linux. Well, only because I'm so, I'm so used to windows. You know, I love the concept of Linux and when it works, it's great, but yeah, I don't know how to compile it and I don't care. I just want the finished binary and I love it. And that happens sometimes because I know that.

Chris Gammell: That happens with a lot of stuff.

Dave Jones: Well, the reason I love open source software on a PC is a bit of a tangent here is, is that I know that many people have contributed, well, a few, quite a few people have contributed to it. And that means many people have checked it, which means it, it's usually quite solid and it's got no spyware built in, no, you know, weird hidden stuff and things like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So that's, that's one of the good aspects of it is there's a lot of people that have actually checked it to see that it's actually good. So as opposed to just a commercial product, people use it and they, you know, you can't see what's under the hood.

Chris Gammell: So. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Not too many people checking out the iPhone schematic stuff, but 20 layer boards or whatever

Dave Jones: they are. Yeah. Yeah. They just use the finished product. Right. I hate to say it's same with the Arduino. Most people just use the finished product. I'm sure, I'm sure the Arduino team would actually agree with me that the majority of people who buy their boards just buy the finished Arduino, they buy the finished shield and they buy the, you know, which is fine. Right.

Chris Gammell: And a lot of times that's the point because it's just getting off the ground quickly. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. You're building an open source product and people want to buy the product and yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's interesting.

Chris Gammell: I mean, when you think about it like that with one person kind of starting it and then a branching to like a super user group and then, but I mean, like you said, that happens in software too.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. But I don't think, you know, once it reaches a sort of a small massive core people actually developing the product, it's not going to get any bigger than that. There's not going to, you know, it's not going to grow to a thousand people contributing stuff to a product, you know, even, even, um, uh, huge open source software projects. If you look at the list of core developers, there's usually only half a dozen or something.

Chris Gammell: Wikipedia pages are like that too, where, you know, yeah, it's like following a power law kind of stuff where the, the, the greatest contribute, the, the fewest contributors are contributing the most work basically. And it falls off very rapidly.

Dave Jones: Exactly. It's a bell curve thing. Again, as is everything in electronics.

Chris Gammell: No, it's not. It's a power law.

Dave Jones: No, no, it's not. No. Oh, right. Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: So it falls off much quicker than a bell curve.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. Yes. Of course it will. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But yeah, it's, uh, it's interesting and we'll probably see more and more of this. I mean, they, the, another thing they brought up was, you know, encouraging companies to open up their designs and I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't, I don't know how many would, I mean, I think about commercial designs, you know, like if, if I'm doing contract work for a manufacturer, I'm not going to encourage them to open up their design if they're the only people making it. I mean, there, there are some situations where it's like, no, I don't think so. But if it became a development platform, you know, if I was working on a development platform, hell yeah, I'd tell people to open it up. I mean, it's. Oh, of course. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's a different thing, you know, development platforms are different to products and so forth.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So we'll see more of that in the future, I'm sure.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. But, uh, yeah, it sounds like open source hardware is the go. Yeah. And I think, uh, all of my future products will be open because I've always made them open really. So, um, I don't think there's one product I haven't, um, of, of my own personal project that I haven't made open that, that I haven't published and made open in some way. So I've been doing that for 20 years plus.

Chris Gammell: Man, that's another great segue right there. So, uh, let's, let's talk about publishing some projects because we actually had a, a question. That's right. For, uh, where is it from? It was from someone on your forums, I think. Oh, it's from last week. That's why. Okay. So basically someone had asked. Oh, it's in last week's column, is it? About, yeah. Like, you know, and how, uh, a lot of, a lot of sites out there are looking for content these days. Understandable. And they all want content and they're going to, they'll even pay you for it. But really what is the best way to get your content out? And if so, say you're making a new Arduino project or a new BeagleBoard project or Bug Labs project, whatever it's going to be, how do you, how do you publish it? When, so what's the best ways to do that?

Dave Jones: Well, the best way to do it now with the internet is via the internet. I mean, but, well, that's the, well, it's the easiest way. Okay. It may not be the best way. Um, the best way is to get it, um, published or get it at, at, you can put it on your own blog, your own website, but how many people visit your own personal website? Right. You know, you're not like the, you're not like my website and you know, you get a hundred thousand, 150,000 hits a month or something. There you go. I do. I'm so popular. I am so popular on my blog. People just keep coming back. And yeah, but, but yeah, like an average small time blog, you know, you might get, you know, 50 people a week or something, you know, so you really need to get it mentioned somewhere, but you can publish it there, start there, submit it to the other ones, maybe get on hacked gadgets or get on one of the other blogs, one of the more popular blogs or something like that. Yeah. But, um, but the traditional electronics magazines are still out there. Yeah. And they still accept submissions, Silicon Chip and Circuit Seller and, and all the rest of them. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And a lot of them are paying these days.

Dave Jones: So they do pay, um, Silicon Chip, if you don't know, is a hundred, uh, Australian dollars per page, which isn't much, but if you do an, you know, if you do a 10 page article, there's a thousand dollars, um, you know, so yeah, it's, you haven't seen Silicon Chip?

Chris Gammell: No, I don't think I've ever read it.

Dave Jones: Well, it is an Australian specific one. It's the only remaining Australian electronics magazine. So do they write with an accent? It is kind of, it goes right with an accent.

Chris Gammell: It looks, it looks pretty normal.

Dave Jones: Well, it is pretty normal. Silicon Chip, there you go. Um, but yeah, uh, that's one of the few electronics magazines left. There's probably three or four of them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: This is nice. I like this. And, and they all accept, they all accept projects and they all pay for projects. Um, so it really doesn't, you know, a lot of people over the years have asked me, you know, do I make money out of publishing my projects in the magazine? Um, no, the amount of time you put into a good magazine project, you know, even if you're getting a thousand dollars for the article, I'm telling you, I would have spent a lot more than a thousand dollars in my time, um, to actually do it and, and write the article and buy the prototype parts. Yeah, you do it for the exposure.

Chris Gammell: I mean, and, and, you know, to be fair, you know, if, if you are, if you are publishing, you know, that, that is a way to get noticed if you're looking for a new job, if you're looking to connect with other people. Oh, absolutely. That could be a great way to network. So, you know, I always got to remind people about the human aspect of things and, uh, you know, people aren't going to know you're out there unless you show them, but.

Dave Jones: Exactly.

Chris Gammell: That's not the only motivation.

Dave Jones: Yeah. As I've maybe said in one of my job search blogs, even before the internet, there was nothing better than turning up to a job interview and, and the person interviewing me goes, Oh, you're Dave Jones. I've read your article. You know, it was great. And it's like, whoa, hello. So, you know, yeah, it's fantastic. Nothing. Exactly. Nothing beats that. I mean, you know, turning up and you already have a rep before you turn up to the interview. Nothing, nothing can beat that. Right. Seriously. So yeah, if you've got a new design, publish it on your blog and try and get it published in the magazines as widely as possible. Um, you know, there's, there's quite a few ways to do it now. So yeah, it's just the magazines.

Chris Gammell: What about self-publishing?

Dave Jones: Self-publishing in, in what?

Chris Gammell: Just on like a website. I mean, cause we say like publish it on a blog or something, but I mean, you and I both do that, but maybe people out there listening don't know how to do that. So maybe we should go.

Dave Jones: Well, blogs are incredibly easy, you know, for $5 a month, you can get your entire web host like mine. And I host half a dozen different websites on there for, you know, you can get that for $5 a month. And WordPress is a single click install and it's just, you know, a single click install for a wiki. Maybe we should slow it down a little bit. It's pretty trivial. So basically. If you want HTML.

Chris Gammell: Right. So web hosting is if you are buying servers, uh, uh, basically a part of a hard drive and the associated processing on someone else's server. So it might be, you know, like bobshosting.com and you're going to go there and you're going to log into his site, dump all your files there, probably through FTP. And then hopefully like, like Dave said, they'll have like one click installs. So that's a really great way to be able to publish your stuff. And then once you get a WordPress install, WordPress is what Dave and I both use. And actually the amp hour does as well. It's a open source, uh, blogging template and they'll give you a bunch of free stuff. They'll, you know, commenting and picture uploading and all that stuff. You used to have to do that by hand. Dave, you've done that by hand, right?

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. I used to do all my, all my old websites. You see are all HTML coded by hand. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. So, you know, no longer have to do that. WordPress is all on PHP. There's other stuff out there. Actually just today I saw Microsoft, uh, had a live blogging platform and they actually just merged with WordPress.com today. So all of their blogging is going over to WordPress. So.

Dave Jones: Oh, interesting. So the, the, when you say Microsoft merged with somebody, that means they bought out WordPress. Did they? No, they didn't.

Chris Gammell: They didn't. Well, they probably did. Well, I'm guessing that I didn't, I only just read the article. There's two parts of WordPress. WordPress.org is the open source component where they, uh, you know, they'll give you the software files and that's basically their code repository and everything. And, and that's where you go to get the actual software to, to make a WordPress blog. WordPress.com is actually a hosting site in itself. So you can go to WordPress.com, get Chris Gammell. You can get that one, but you can get Chris Gammell is awesome. Uh, blogspot. Dot, or, or, dot WordPress.com. And that is going to be your own blog, which will be, you know, Chris Gammell is awesome. Uh, and then exactly.

Dave Jones: And it doesn't cost a cent either. It's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And so the only difference there is you'll have the WordPress.wordpress.com in your title. But if you don't mind that, and you just really just want to throw stuff up on the web, that's probably a pretty easy option. And it's free.

Dave Jones: Like Dave said, it's a very easy option, but I wouldn't recommend it. I would spend $5 by a.com domain name and, and set up your own one. Cause it's trivial. You can literally set it up in five or 10 minutes and it costs you, you know, even as little as two or $3 a month. I think you can get a really basic hosting package and a .com domain is $5 a year or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think, I think now you can actually even point .com names. So like, you know, eevblog.com, you can actually point that at WordPress.com servers. So it's still going to be hosted. I think it's still hosted on WordPress.com.

Dave Jones: Right. But does it mask it? Cause that's what I'm talking about. If you see the WordPress.com in, oh, it doesn't mask it. Okay. Well, there you go. I think so.

Chris Gammell: Only because I think, uh, cherish the scientist.net, you know, our friend, from there. Yep. I think she did that. Now I'm not, I'll have to double check on that, but I think you can finally point, uh, specific domains at the WordPress hosted. Right. Blogs. So hopefully we didn't lose anyone, but.

Dave Jones: No. So yeah. So the idea is, you know, get yourself a blog or something like that and put your information up or even if it's just a HTML page or something like that is perfectly fine. Or just file somewhere. You can always just do that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But yeah, I recommend you get your own.com domain name and it's pretty easy. So it's self publish. It's easy. But then once again, people aren't going to find you in a hurry. Um, it's all about the search terms and the specific, I won't go into search engine optimization, but you can check out that. Right. Um, yeah, but really you've got to get mentioned somewhere after that, after you put it up.

Chris Gammell: Right. And if that's, and if that's your concern too, if you're just looking to, you know, publish yourself, publish for yourself, you just want to have your information up there as like a personal journal, even that's okay. You know, if you want to have that as a record of what you've done, maybe for prior art, like we talked about earlier, that's okay too. Yeah. But like Dave said, unless, unless people are finding you, you're probably, you know, like people aren't going to find you easy unless you start doing some work towards that. I'm not saying it's important, but it, it, uh, if that's what you're interested in, don't, don't expect big, big visits up front. That's the only, that's the only thing to watch out for.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. You really have to work towards that. But if you just put it up there and do nothing, people will eventually find you. Yeah, that's true. You know, it's, it's, it's really, you know, it's a given that they will find you. Yes. Yes. You can't, uh, you can't escape Google.

Chris Gammell: So yeah, they're watching.

Dave Jones: But yeah, by all means, um, self-publish, self-publish everything, put it up there. And then, um, when you go to, if you're, you know, you're young and you want to get a job in the industry, point them to your blog site and make it look not fully professional, but at least make it look respectable. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's kind of like the new resume, you know, you don't, it's not necessarily just showing where you've worked, but also what you've done. Like Dave said, it's what is a really powerful thing. You know, I'm massively. It's, I'm always, I'm always impressed. Like whenever I see someone like a resume and stuff, you know, you, you could see what people have done sort of, but once you see, even, even if they've worked on a, uh, you know, like a solar car team or something like that, or, or electronics at home, anything like that, that, that immediately jumps out to me as someone looking at resumes. I don't, I don't know about, about Dave or anybody else, but that's something that jumps up to me.

Dave Jones: Yep. Absolutely.

Chris Gammell: And, and like Dave said, if you show them a circuit when you're actually there, that's even more impressive.

Dave Jones: So, well, exactly. If you actually bring stuff along and yeah, show them your little widget you've designed or something like that, that's the best thing you can do. But yeah, definitely put in your webpage on there and say, Hey, go check out my stuff I've designed and you're just going to be streets ahead of everyone else. Because literally when, you know, if I'm sorting through, here's your maze, you know, I will literally, you know, I will do like a five second glance at each one and I'll toss them either. Okay. That's worthy of an, a second look or it goes straight in the bin, you know, and it's really, and I'll see. And generally, um, the thing is, well, if they've got their own website, okay, that'll go in the site I'll check out, you know, cause I'll go check them out. It won't get binned. Um, you know, whereas if you're just going, Oh yeah, I worked at such and such and I did this and it's like boring and it's filled with grammar and spelling mistakes. Well, you instantly get tossed out. Right. Right. But if you show that, Oh, you've done stuff and, and there's extra info I can look at.

Chris Gammell: Right. Oh, and it's definitely important because a lot of times you can't even talk about everything that you've done at a, at a job. You know, I, I can't talk about everything I've done at my job, but I can talk about everything I've done outside of work because I do whatever the hell I want, you know, like, absolutely. So that's where the real power comes into. You can, you can show nitty gritty. I spent 20 hours troubleshooting the circuit, but I finally found that stupid wire that was stuck and I found it and now it fixed and that's it. And they show, it shows you care.

Dave Jones: And that's a massive selling point. Really. When, when you're trying to sell yourself to someone, that is, there's nothing better. So students, anyway, we should get off that. Yeah. Yeah. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, you want to talk about design then? Low power design. I think we wanted to have a little rant about, cause you got stuck. Tell us about the lame ass, uh, digital recorder you got stuck with.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, David has suggested that you had suggested that I, you know, look at, uh, zoom H1 and then they're sold out everywhere. And basically I had one apparently in the mail and I just talked to him today and, you know, apparently they found the packing slip quote unquote, but there was no, there was no zoom attached to it. So they said they were sending me one, but I'm going to get it somewhere else now. So anyways, I go and pick up.

Dave Jones: But you actually bought it from Amazon, didn't you?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It was like one of those side sellers on Amazon. You know how they do that stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. It was through Amazon, but a side seller. Yep. Yeah. That's, that's shady sometimes. I ordered mine from eBay. So mine's in the post, supposedly.

Chris Gammell: That's good. Yeah. So I'm going to get one eventually, but, uh, I ended up going out and buying a different one. And, you know, I, I looked online after, of course, after the fact I was, I was rushing to get to this conference. And after the fact, I, I looked at the battery life, it says, oh, seven and a half hours and it's got like two, two double A's. So three volts at how many capacity. Yeah. It was like, you know, a couple, there's like 1400 milliamp hours or something like that. Uh, whatever a double A is.

Dave Jones: And a double A is 2,800.

Chris Gammell: 2,800.

Dave Jones: Okay. 2,800 milliamp hours.

Chris Gammell: That's a good number to remember.

Dave Jones: Uh, there you go for an alkaline for a standard alkaline. Right. Yeah. And that's what I was using. That's a nominal figure. So.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. And so, you know, I, I looked online and said seven and a half hours. I go record this thing and it's two hours. I'm like, oh, that is shocking. I know. And so I'm burning through batteries. I feel guilty about that. I'm burning, burning through cash because buying batteries in Boston apparently is, uh, you know, right. High, high margin enterprise. And, uh, and, uh, yeah, so I, I'm, I'm switching over. It's yeah. I, I, but like what, you know, like it makes me wonder because I bought a device that was probably, I'm not sure exactly when it was released. It was, I don't know if I should name and shame on here, but, uh, you know, it didn't look, look that old. It was a Tascam DR07, you know, and I'm like, yeah, bunch of bastards.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And they have a couple other ones. Don't touch it, fellas.

Chris Gammell: I went, I went the low end and maybe that's my own fault for going low end, but, uh, you know, this, this other one I'm supposed to get is supposed to be 10 hours. So, you know, what are the, what are the components of, of, of low power that they're probably doing wrong? That's, that's what I wanted to talk about. You know, the actual electronic side of it, because that's, that's what's important to, to this show.

Dave Jones: Uh, and the, and the zoom to everyone, the zoom H1, which we're getting that has this 10 hour rated 10 hour battery life. And I'm sure it meets it because zoom's a big company and they stand by there. They're the best in the industry or something. Um, but it's 10 hours off a single double A. Whereas the, uh, whereas the Tascam one, um, the DR07 is two double A's and only got what? Two hours.

Chris Gammell: Right. So that means they're probably boosting it on the, uh, on the zoom. They're probably boosting it at least up to, you know, two, five or three, three or something like that. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm sure that they obviously have to be, but yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, there's, there's losses associated with that too. So, you know, boost converter, you probably only get like 90% nominally, you know, best case fully loaded scenario. Yep. Absolutely. So that's, that's already a strike against them. So what the hell's going on here? That's, I mean like, so. Well, the Tascam one is just poorly designed, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So leakage currents were probably one thing that they, uh, you know, they, they messed up on.

Dave Jones: They just probably run the processor at full tilt or something like, you know, they probably run eight megahertz when they don't need to, or something like that. And they haven't optimized it. Has it got like a big led? Has it got like a backlight on the display or something stupid like that? Yeah. It's got a backlight. Is it permanently on? I believe so. Is it permanently on the backlight? I don't have it. Well, there you go. You're pissing away current for the, for the backlight LEDs there. What do you need that for?

Chris Gammell: Right. And I think, you know, and I even tested, I thought at first, cause it's got a wave record and then it, which is native, you know, that's, that's basically straight into an ADD. And then there was MP3 record, which is compressed. So I thought, oh, I'll turn off the MP3 and just, you know, I have to unload the data off there more often. And nope, same, same thing.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the, yeah. Well, that's the interesting thing about the Zoom H1 is that I couldn't believe this when I read the spec. It's got a rated 10 hour battery life for recording direct to MP3. Yeah. Well, it isn't direct. It's got to go through an MP3 decoder and we'll talk about that. But in the, to actually store the wave file, it's got a nine and a half hour battery life, which really floored me. I thought, you know, I expected it to be double when you're recording wave. Cause I'm not sure if you go and look at how much effort's involved in encoding an MP3 file, it's actually a lot of work. You're going to get a dedicated, either you've got to do it in your micro and it's got to be a real grunty one, or you've got to have a dedicated MP3 encoder chip to actually do it. And there's lots of software and algorithms involved processing grunt to do real, you know, real time MP3 encoding. Whereas a wave file, as, as you said, is just recording directly from the microphone, pretty much straight onto the, straight onto the card. It doesn't really have to process it.

Chris Gammell: It's got attenuation to make sure you're not clipping into the ADD and then you, but

Dave Jones: it's, you know, it's, and then it's just basically ADD values.

Chris Gammell: It says, you know, at time, time zero, the value was four volts. And then time, time zero plus 0.001 is for, you know, 3.9. And then that basically traces out your, your waveform.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So maybe I think it's happening. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: No, go ahead. I'll hear yours first.

Dave Jones: What I think's happening in the zoom H1, because it's so close, I think nine and a half, 10 hours. I think what the difference there isn't a real difference. I think it's just, that's just the error in the battery measurement, in the, in the actual measurement. I think they're running at exactly the same speed really. And that's the thing. I think the processor, they're just running the processor that's optimized for doing MP3 and they don't slow it down and try and save power when you switch to wave mode. I think that's what's happening. They just optimize the design around the highest processing requirement, which was the MP3.

Chris Gammell: So, you know, I was going to guess, I was going to guess on the Tascam, which is only getting the two hour life that, that they had internal algorithms based on, so maybe the wave doesn't have to have any algorithms applied to it, but if the MP3 algorithm had that, but I guess that doesn't really matter because the battery life was the same for both. So, right.

Dave Jones: Well, it's effectively the same on the zoom too, you know, nine and a half, 10 hours. I think that's just the error in the measurement really. Almost. So. Yeah. That's weird. Yeah. I, yeah, I think they haven't dropped the processor speed because that's one of the things you can do in low power design is if you're not doing a lot of process, you can dynamically put them to sleep, but because these things have to record all the time, pretty much, unless you're, unless you're not recording. Then, but when they're recording, they have to be processing full time. So you can't put them to sleep, but you can adjust, dynamically adjust the speed of the clock, speed of the processor clock. Usually it depends on what sort of processor they're using in there, but all your modern, all of your modern processors, your picks and your atmels and et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Most of them have dynamic clock switching. So, yeah. Yeah. So if you need to do like a little burst of high power processing, you don't optimize, you don't just run your micro at the one high speed just because you might have to do a bit of processing every now and then. Right. You just switch the clock speed, go do your processing, then switch it back down again. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And that's how you can get good low power design. That's a starting point anyway. Right. And I don't think they're doing that in the Zoom H1.

Chris Gammell: Right. Oh, you're saying they're not doing that in the H1 or the Tascam?

Dave Jones: No, I'm pretty sure they're not because the wave should be probably double the battery. Not, maybe not double, but at least more. Right. But it's actually the same or less. Yeah, if it's less intense. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure that's what they're doing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Maybe they're offloading. Like you said, though, maybe they're offloading for the MP3 and that's actually a lower power chip or something, too. Yeah, maybe. You won't know until we rip it open and I'm not ripping mine open, so.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, I might take mine apart, but yeah, it depends on how easy it is to rip it apart. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the analog side of low power stuff. So obviously, in the resting state, the quiescent current, and if listeners don't know that, it took me a long time to ever figure out what the hell that was. And basically, that's a fancy word for resting current. So if it's just burning current without actually doing anything. So if you have an op amp and it's not actually amplifying anything, but it's just sitting there kind of at zero, it's burning some amount of quiescent current just to stay on and you got to worry about that.

Dave Jones: But... And by the way, kiddies, that's a nice keyword to throw in at job interviews, quiescent. It sounds like you know what you're talking about. You know, it's speaking terms of DB and quiescent. So yeah, exactly. All right. That's good. Scrabble score. That's pretty much it.

Chris Gammell: Just try and string as many big $5 words together as you can. That's it. And you'll get the job.

Dave Jones: Anyway, back to what you were saying.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. I mean, other things there too. I mean, you could have... A lot more of the chips now these days are lower power silicon processes. So they might be running off two 5-rails instead of 5-volt rails. And then you'll have smaller drops internal to the chip. And then they'll actually need less active power as well. So they might only need, you know, one milliamp of current draw through an op amp versus three previously or something like that too. So that could be just, you know, we're five years down the track if the Tascam's that old. And that's just something they, you know, the Zoom benefited from. But I find it hard to believe that there was, you know, they couldn't have found anything low power back then. But again, I didn't check when the Tascam TR-07 was made. So yeah, I should check that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I don't know why you'd market a product like that. It's only got two hours battery. Are you sure these batteries weren't a one hung low brand Chinese thing? Were they good energizers or Duracell alkalines or something?

Chris Gammell: I'm pretty sure they were Duracell, yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Oh, there you go.

Chris Gammell: It wasn't like super hot that day either. I mean, I know that you can get some better battery life out of cold batteries, but nope.

Dave Jones: That's bizarre. It's a shame.

Speaker ?: Really?

Dave Jones: It's a shame. Because why would you release a commercial product like, you know, a recorder that only gets two hours from a set of double A's? That's just shit.

Chris Gammell: I don't understand it. I mean, I had, you know, I had a one-off case. That's not a good test sample size, so that could have been it too. Right, yeah. I don't want to get yelled at by Tascam. I mean, but basically I am a very unhappy customer right now to the point of taking it back. So, sucks for them.

Dave Jones: Well, there we, yeah. That's all that matters again. We'll switch to Zoom, shall we? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We'll see. I mean, I don't know. I'm sitting back down in my basement, so I'm not sitting in Boston in a hotel room in my skivs anymore. So, I'm not saying I was last time, but you know.

Dave Jones: You're right. Right, yes, yes, sure, sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, but low power design, that is quite an art, as we've always said, you know. Yeah. And if you, you know, just something simple like you're powering a lead for your power indication or something like that. Yeah. You know, if you look at the traditional textbooks, they'll say, run your lead at 20 milliamps. Well, that's just bullshit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I can fly halfway to the moon on 20 milliamps. It's ridiculous. So, just, you know. Up that resistor. You can get, you can up that resistor, run them at a couple of milliamps. Get a high brightness version if you have to. If you're really designing a proper commercial product, it might, where it costs, where it's more important about the battery life is your prime requirement. You might spend a dollar for some super efficient LED, you know, because that, that you can run the damn thing at half a milliamp or something like that. Right, yeah. Some incredibly bright thing, but it costs you a dollar. But who cares? Because your key requirement is your battery life. Right. And that's those trade-offs we talked about before. And, and, and, and you can pulse the LED as well. Oh, yeah. That's another good one. So, to get an, you know, to get an average brightness over, over time. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's, there's. There's a lot of fun tricks about that. And also, you know, if you're using a 10K pull-up, you know, everyone uses like a standard 10K pull-up. Well, you're pissing away current there too. So, you know, up it to, up it to its maximum value, but watch your input leakage currents, kitties. Yeah. So, you can't just up it to, you know, oh, let's up it to 10 meg or 100 meg or something.

Chris Gammell: Those digital folk don't really care about leakage currents quite as much as the analog folk do. So, that can burn you. Oh, I wouldn't say that. Well, it can burn you though. You know, if you've got some big leakage current then and, and your, your pull-up resistor isn't small enough, you know, then you're, you'd be floating around a little bit and you, that is, that is not a fun, that is not a fun thing to track down either. You know? Oh, yeah. Because then when you start touching, start touching things to the, the pins, you know, you start affecting the pins by probing them and your problem goes away and you're screwed. Absolutely. Yeah. So, I'm just saying.

Dave Jones: Now, well, that brings us onto babes as everything does. Because you wanted to. How does that bring us onto babes? Everything does. Yes. You wanted to have a rant about the, about the babes on the booths, the booth babes at trade shows.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Do tell. Well. What's the problem?

Chris Gammell: All right. Here's the thing. I, here's a question for you. If, if you're walking around a conference and, and Dave, you said you've walked around conferences before. Yep. If you're walking around a conference and you see, you know, boring nerd in the booth, boring nerd in the booth, maybe they have cool products, you're boring nerd in the booth. And then you see like, you know, someone who.

Dave Jones: A chicken hot pants.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I don't want to sound, I don't want to sound sexist here because this is not a sexist comment, but like, who's, who's hiring these women? Like, what is, what is the point here? And, and Dave, you said it works, it works on you, but I immediately discount every product that does that. I'm like, really? Is your product that bad that you need to grab attention like that?

Dave Jones: Oh, dude, you're thinking too much. Go for the hot women. Okay. No, it works. It can be, it's a valid marketing tactic. They know that 99% of people that come through are going to be, you know, male. They're going to be, you know, they're going to be nerdy and they're going to like looking at hot chicks in hot pants. And it actually brings them in. And, and, and, and very few are going to think like you, well, I'm going to boycott your product because I wouldn't mind taking the moral.

Chris Gammell: It's just healthy skepticism. I mean, like, come on, like, really? Like I, that, even it, all right. So even if you had, all right, let's just remove the hot babes from the situation. Right. And excuse the babes if that offends you. Uh, but I mean, even, even if you're giving away, I was once at a job fair and they were giving away t-shirt. There was to individual people. They're giving away t-shirts, uh, you know, like 10 pens, like two throwy balls, like whatever, whatever. Like it was like, they were filling up like shopping bags of branded stuff for a programming company that I won't name here. Uh, the owner of it might be the mayor of New York, but, and I was like, what, what are you doing here? If you need that much crap to sell your company on the auxiliary side of things, you know, if you're not saying you're going to love working here, this should be enough. You're going to, you're going to be, it's going to be a prestigious job to work here. What are you doing? Why are you doing that? Sure. Maybe you'll bring them in with a pen or, you know, whatever, you know, whatever fun toy you want to have. But if you're, if you're going that over the top, I immediately discount you just from the skeptical side of things.

Dave Jones: So you're thinking too much. It's all about marketing. As much as I hate marketing, it does actually, a lot of it works. Um, you know, you could say most of it works and the freebies get you in, you know, in some stands get freebies will always trump boobies by the way. Um, when it comes to nerd stalls, okay. At these trade shows, you know, the guys will go after the, well, people will go after the freebies rather than the boobs, but the boobs help and the freebies help. They really do. You know, it's, what can you say? It's just, and there go all our female listeners. Sorry, female listeners, but you're a very small percentage. So as far as marketing's concerned, you don't exist. So don't blame us. Blame marketing.

Chris Gammell: Right? I hate it. I, I, I, I think that is so, I mean, part of me says, Dave, you're right. You know, like you see someone giving away, you know, even like someone's giving away a toy car, something stupid, right? Yep. And you're like, okay, I'd love to have a toy car. And it doesn't matter. It's just a matter of get it grabbing attention. And that's, you're totally right about that. And it is a proven marketing technique, but I'm saying it doesn't work on Chris Gammell. I did not like it. I, I thought it was underhanded and low and, uh, right. Yeah. So take that.

Dave Jones: Well, it works at a different level too, not just to get them into the booze. Cause a lot of, a lot of nerds will be actually scared to go up and talk to the booth, but these hot booth babes, right. Yeah. And get this stuff from, but they'll hang around the booth and they'll just like hang in a neighboring booth, but they'll be constantly watching the other stand. Right. Because there's, there's hot women over there. So you're going to be looking at that stand and you're, that just gets in your subconscious and you stare at that stand for 10 minutes and you're going to go, Oh, okay. Even if I'm scared of the babes or I don't like the babes, I'm going to come back later. Yeah. Or it's name recognition. They're taking, or, you know, I'm going to check out this stuff because it's ingrained more in your subconscious. It's, you know, no doubt. I mean, even more of your brand in your head.

Chris Gammell: Right. And I, I dislike them, but I remember their name because of it. There's a lot of booths there that I don't remember, but I remember their name. Now I'm not going to say who it is because I'm not going to sink that low. I'm not giving them the benefit of being mentioned on a prestigious show like the amp hour. And that's right. I just called our show prestigious. But it is prestigious. I, I am not giving them that honor. So anyways. Highly awarded. I, I hope that you get to see lots of booth babes, Dave, but I, I don't need any of that.

Dave Jones: Well, I don't need it either. It's just nice if it, if it pops up, you know, you walk around the corner and there's these nice looking lady, you know, what's wrong with that? Anyway.

Chris Gammell: I think we're out of time.

Dave Jones: Let's not talk about that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Speaking of, um.

Chris Gammell: No, Dave.

Dave Jones: Are we out of time?

Chris Gammell: I think we're out of time, man.

Dave Jones: Oh, bugger.

Chris Gammell: I think so. Oh, come on.

Dave Jones: We have to at least talk about the Akihabara electronics market in Tokyo. That is awesomeness, right? That's pure awesomeness. I wrote, holy crap awesomeness. We'll definitely put up a link. Yeah. We'll put up a link to this, the Tokyo hackerspace. Some guy there who runs, I can't remember, some other blog, which is, um. Anyway, he goes on, he takes you on a guided video tour of the Akihabara. It's like 20 separate videos. You've got, they're all, most of them are short. Yeah, like five minutes. Guided tour in Japan of all these electronics marketplaces. And they are so awesome.

Chris Gammell: Cool.

Dave Jones: Picture just digi-key scattered among, you know, all these, more than that. You know, you can get front panels manufactured there and walk in and it's just.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, all the containers or the enclosures too. That was what he talked about a lot. And that was really cool. And I've never been to one. I've read about the one in China. It was like a bunny something. I think it was named something bunny. But, uh. Right. I've only heard about them.

Dave Jones: Well, I've been to one in, um, Singapore. Uh, Simling, uh, Tower is the one in, uh, Singapore. I think that, I think there's another one too. There's one in Hong Kong. Yeah. Um, near, um, um, Shenzhen somewhere. I can't pronounce. Oh, that's the one I think I'm thinking of.

Chris Gammell: It was in Shenzhen. Right.

Dave Jones: Okay. Yeah. It was in Hong Kong. I've been to a similar one in, um, Shanghai. But it's more computer consumer oriented. You had to go through like four different levels of consumer shit before you got to more of the hardware-y type stuff. It was like selling AirPods. And there wasn't as much as. Yeah, exactly. But, um, yeah. The one in Singapore was exactly like this. So, I just want to know at what point, and there are all these Asian countries, I've never heard of these, um, style of marketplaces in other, you know, in, in other Western countries. I just, I just haven't heard of it. So, um. I guess you can open one, Dave. I don't know. What is the. I can open one. Yeah. Right here in Australia. The manufacturing.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like the manufacturing centralization there. I mean, it's not, I don't think it's a hobbyist thing. It is. It's, you're benefiting from it as a hobbyist. But it's definitely manufactured. It's all in manufacturing. I mean, they even talked about like.

Dave Jones: All the parts come from there, and they're all surplus, right? There's 20 million. Yeah. You know. And people know. So, everyone buys all these surplus bits, and they.

Chris Gammell: Right. Open up a store. Yeah. And probably cheap, cheap space, too. It was interesting seeing some of those. Yeah, exactly. Last cases where they actually had people selling stuff personally, like an, like an on-site eBay kind of thing. That was different.

Dave Jones: It was an on-site eBay. Yeah. They had all these second, all these second-hand goods, and all these, all these test equipment. Oh, yeah. There's a few. In the U.S., there's a few of those surplus. Well, there's quite a few, actually. There's surplus test equipment. Different, you know, places. But we're talking about like an entire shopping complex. Yeah. Like multi-levels. You go up the escalators, and here's another hundred shops, you know. Yeah. And they've all just got the parts and the, anything you want.

Chris Gammell: I think the thing that would have to happen, you need like a really dense city center like they have there, right?

Dave Jones: You do. Like in Tokyo, or in Shanghai, or in Singapore. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I was going to say that they would never be able to afford it in New York City, but then I think, well, Tokyo's not cheap on any scale either. So, obviously, someone's.

Speaker ?: No, it's not.

Dave Jones: But they cram. If you've seen how small these stalls are, you almost can't walk in there because things are stacked up to the walls. Yeah. It was so awesome.

Chris Gammell: The one with Transformers, there was an entire stand full of Transformers. I started drooling. I was like, oh, that's so cool. At first, I was like, Transformers, why is he showing, you know, more than meets the eye? And then I'm like, oh, those kind of Transformers are awesome.

Dave Jones: It's great. Anyway, check it out. The link is there. We'll put the link up. And yeah, fantastic. And that'll probably do us for the day. I think we're out. We didn't get on to one or two things, but we'll carry them over to next time. So, wow.

Chris Gammell: Didn't that one fly by? It did. Hopefully, we still have some female listeners and also some people that love open hardware that didn't like us talking about closed hardware. But hopefully everybody's still listening.

Dave Jones: Well, don't turn up to the Open Source Hardware Summit with your bloody iPhone, people. For goodness sake. Goodness.

Chris Gammell: Well, anyway. I don't think there's open hardware phones yet, but we'll see. We'll see.

Dave Jones: And, well, isn't the Android? That's the software. Hardware, but software's open. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The Bug Labs just released something today as one last final note. They just released something where the Bug Labs is a modular thing and you can talk to Verizon's network now. They have a development tool. Oh, cool. Yeah. So, we might see that in the future.

Dave Jones: The revolution is starting. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks for joining us. It's been a good one. We'll talk to you soon. And we'll catch you next time.

Chris Gammell: Bye.

Dave Jones: See ya.

Chris Gammell: Woo-hoo! Yay, 10. We didn't even mention it was number 10. 10th show, man. That's crazy. Bye.

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