#102 – Gouging Green Gardyloo

Chris Gammell: This is the F-Hour Podcast, recorded July 1st, 2012. Episode 102, Gouging Green Gardilu.

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

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

Dave Jones: What's up, nerd?

Chris Gammell: Hey, man. Nerd, huh?

Dave Jones: Yeah, and I think you peaked there. I did? No. Nah. Nah, that's just my right. No.

Chris Gammell: That's just the horrible mumble server. The usual bleeps and blurps of the internet are coming through.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: How are things going? What's new?

Dave Jones: Oh, it's a nice day here for a change. Really? It's cold.

Chris Gammell: Still winter.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's miserable.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Peak of summer around here doesn't get any better than this. Right. No, seriously, it's all downhill from here. It's just straight down into the depths of winter. I got about a week and a half. It'll be snowing.

Dave Jones: Right. I was going to say, because you're fairly north, aren't you, in terms of the US? Cleveland's fairly up there, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's up by the Great Lakes.

Dave Jones: It's up there in Lake whatever.

Chris Gammell: Erie. Lake Erie.

Dave Jones: Lake Erie. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. The five Great Lakes. Snow. Biggest sources of fresh water in the world. Did you know that?

Dave Jones: I think I did in some way, shape, or form. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So people should move here, because that stuff ain't getting any cheaper. That's actually... It's interesting from a company perspective. I've talked before about people should start a fab up here, but I know that's never going to happen.

Dave Jones: Right, because you need water for a fab.

Chris Gammell: You do. Yeah, you do. And there's a legitimate argument about it, though, just the amount of water there is up in the Great Lakes, and that's what a lot of people push, like Michigan here, all along it, really. And, of course, there's the usual infighting amongst all the states around the... and between Canada, too.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: It's going to be a really big deal in about 30 years, I think. Maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong.

Dave Jones: So do you actually drink this water, or is it... Oh, yeah, I've got a glass of it right here. Delicious, Lake Erie.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's all purified and everything. But, yeah, it's all pulled from there. Sweet. Yeah. It's... I wouldn't drink it straight out of Lake Erie. I'll say that. Right. Oh, boy. But, yeah. What about in Sydney? What do you guys do out there?

Dave Jones: For water?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's just all, like, reservoirs.

Dave Jones: Well, we have dams and reservoirs, yeah. We have two major ones in Sydney that feed all of Sydney, so...

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: My wife could tell you all about that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah? She's the... She's the water expert. The scientist, yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: She's the water scientist. Yeah. There is such a word. Oh, boy. Yeah, well, no, it has happened here, though. Huge news here. What's that? And as of the 1st of July, it has something to do with electronics, energy, because we all need electricity, right? We've introduced a carbon tax here.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: Yes. Oh. Yeah. We're... I don't know if we're the first country to do it. No. No, I'm sure we're not, but we're, like, you know, one of the few countries to introduce a carbon tax, and it's been a big hoopla, like, you know, our electricity prices are going to skyrocket now that, you know, we've got this carbon tax. Yeah. So...

Chris Gammell: Have you actually seen your bill yet? I mean... Well, no. I doubt that would actually be very instant.

Dave Jones: Well, the interesting thing is we just got a letter from our electricity supplier, because we actually pay, we've always paid, like, 100% extra, like, for 100% green power. So we actually pay double or something. Oh, that's right. You said that before.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So we actually make sure ours comes from new wind technology and solar and all that sort of stuff, you know? So we...

Chris Gammell: And you're just saying, you as in you and your wife. Yes. As in... Your household.

Dave Jones: Because we can choose that here. You can choose a plan. Right. Whereas all your money, you pay extra, and it goes into building new renewable energy infrastructure. So I put my money where my mouth is, you know? That's great, man. And they sent me a letter saying that, yeah, our tariff rate is going to drop by 44%. And I thought, beauty, as it should, right? Because we're... Well, it shouldn't increase, because we're already paying a premium for a new energy, right? So there should be no carbon tax added, because... Yeah. You know? Yeah. And... But then... There's always a but, right? But then they say the service charge is going to rise, and they don't tell you how much. And I reckon...

Chris Gammell: 44%.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Or more, exactly, to offset the thing. So it'll be... Well, see, I think that if it suddenly starts costing less, like if our tariff drops by 44%, and the other dirty ones increase, right, due to the carbon tax, then, well, it's going to be cheaper to buy renewable power. And that is...

Chris Gammell: And then the market... Yeah. More people will be in the market then.

Dave Jones: Well, that is unsustainable. No pun intended, right? Because we don't have enough renewable energy infrastructure to provide all the energy for people who would sign up to this plan. It's not magic. You can't, you know, you can't just sign up and you magically get it. There's only a maximum quota.

Chris Gammell: Well, eventually you start buying more panels or more wind turbines. Well, there's a maximum quota. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but, you know, I mean, if it was cheaper, right, people will buy the cheaper thing. That's why they don't buy green power, because it's more expensive, right? It's why they buy dirty coal, because it's cheaper. So...

Chris Gammell: It is darn cheap.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing. So I don't know what's going to happen. I assume that we're not going to be cheaper than coal, because that's just not going to work. The market's going to collapse overnight. So it's going to be interesting to see what actually happens. So I reckon they're going to artificially bump up these service rates by, you know, 300% or something, which is nuts. I mean, how has introducing a carbon tax just suddenly mean we have to pay more to service it? Like, because the service charge you pay for the line, you know, and all the infrastructure and all the, you know, the guy in the truck to come around and maintain the line when it, you know, all of that sort of infrastructure stuff. And how has that suddenly gone up overnight? It hasn't. Right? Just because the government signed a policy. It's bullshit. Right.

Chris Gammell: That's just a business thing. It's price gouging. Messing with you. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, because I just saw an article today, actually, about how much it costs to charge an iPad. They say $1.36 a year.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And we've talked on here before just about the scale of power and how, you know, the general public has no clue about the scale of power. But if you think about it just in terms of kilowatt hours, right, I know around here, I think I'm not on like a special plan like you are.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: But I think it's like nine or 10 cents per kilowatt hour or something like that. Right.

Dave Jones: No, ours isn't that low.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, yeah, obviously. 15, 20.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. No, no, no. But even coal. Even coal. Oh, even coal. Right.

Chris Gammell: Oh. Interesting. Well. Whatever that is then. Okay.

Dave Jones: But still, I mean, like he's. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, something like that. But just like the scale of power, right? I mean, it's $1.36 for, you know, you'd think medium-sized capacity is probably what? Like maybe 3,000 milliamp hour batteries or something like that. Yeah. Maybe more. I've never looked at the iPad specs. But yeah, I mean, like it's still not that much money. It's tiny. And the same thing goes for like EVs right now. Like EVs are super cheap to just charge off your wall because. There's the other news. Oh. What's that news? Yeah.

Dave Jones: The Holden Vault is coming out. It was on the, advertised on the TV last night, the Holden Vault, which is exactly the same as the Chevy Vault, except they've rebadged it Holden. And they're, you know, it's the right-hand drive for here.

Dave Jones: Nice. And they made the big deal about, oh, it only costs $2.50 to charge it, you know, to charge your tank, you know? Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. But then again, it only goes 80Ks or something like that before it. Right. If you just use the power.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I was, who was I talking to? Someone, Andrew Plum on Twitter. I was talking back and forth with him about his Vault. He's had a Vault for a while now. And I think it was him. Maybe it was someone else. But he said he's only filled up his gas tank once in like three months or something like that. And it's just, man, it's tempting. I know.

Dave Jones: It's cool. I'd love one.

Chris Gammell: I would too. It's just, you know, there's a lot of upfront costs and that's what a lot of people are messing with.

Dave Jones: They're so expensive. Yeah. I mean, here, this Holden Vault, I reckon it's going to be around $60,000.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: Which puts it well out at, you know, $40,000 would have been the, which I think is the price in the US for the Chevy Vault, I think, is about $40,000. Or even $30,000. I think it's like if you buy it without the leather seats or whatever, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's about $40,000. Yeah. It's like $38,000 and then you get like a discount because of subsidies and stuff. Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, that's doable. You know, here, but $60,000, that puts it into the well-heeled, you know, middle to upper class, you know, income earners kind of thing. But then again, there are people, you know, there are average Joes who like buying a $60,000 car. But me, I'd never pay $60,000 for a car. It's just, you know. No. It's crazy.

Chris Gammell: That's like six cars. Yeah. You know, if you're buying used or something, that's like six cars.

Dave Jones: Well, when you can get a perfectly good brand new compact car for like under $20,000, like $15,000. Oh, yeah. Or something like that. It's, yeah. That's an expensive car.

Chris Gammell: It's crazy. You know, just this whole idea of it though. I mean, like that's big news there. But, you know, power, you don't think about it much with an electronics world. You don't really think about the grid distribution stuff like that. But man, that's big business. You know, that's like usually even out of the realm because there's not as much. I mean, there's interesting. There's definitely interesting stuff because it's high voltage. You know, and distribution is really cool and, you know, trying to match phase of actual when you're actually tying into the grid. All that stuff is kind of cool. But I always have thought of power distribution as just business because usually what you're doing is you're burning something, you're making steam, you're turning something, and then you're shoving that power at everybody on the grid, right? That's it. Yeah. But it's really important, right? I mean, like until people are off the grid, it really matters quite a bit.

Dave Jones: It's what makes our modern civilization. It is what has, you know, we'd still be, you know, pushing, you know, we'd still be

Chris Gammell: horse and carton. All that test equipment you love would not run without it, right? No, exactly.

Dave Jones: And it relies, all of our modern society relies on the fact that we get instant, constant, cheap power. That's it. Oh, yeah. Without that, you know, that's what separates the first world from the third world, right? We have electricity. They don't, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's consistent, right? It's consistent, yeah. Once you can turn on that light bulb and it stays on and you know it's going to come on when you flick that switch, you know, that's the deal breaker. Definitely. And that brings me to a TED Talk, a great TED Talk I saw last week. Yes, by an MIT professor, Donald Sadoway. Have you heard of him?

Chris Gammell: I have not.

Dave Jones: Oh, he's invented the liquid metal battery. It sounds cool, right? It's like the Terminator, you know, from the liquid metal man from Terminator, right? It's awesome. Yeah. What he did, you've got to watch the TED Talk, but the summary is that he decided to try and solve the problem of grid level energy storage, right? A grid level battery, right? And, you know, you know that we can't do that with, you know, lithium ion and lead acid and all those battery, right? It's just not. Well, you can.

Chris Gammell: You just need a lot of them.

Dave Jones: A lot of them, right? Series, yeah. Huge series parallel combinations. Too expensive. They use exotic materials, manufacturing processes.

Speaker ?: Yeah, that's the main thing.

Dave Jones: And, ah, yeah. It's just not viable, right? We need that order of magnitude, you know, increase in the technology to make grid level storage viable, right? And then that's when solar and wind and all that sort of stuff can get backed up during the day and then used at night and, you know, and then the whole thing becomes awesome. That's what I was looking for. Thank you. Yeah. And anyway, so here.

Chris Gammell: And you get those monster inverters, too. Those things are awesome, you know, like the. Oh, yeah. That's what the silicon carbide chips, or silicon carbide, like FETs and. FETs and those big monsters. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's what they're used for. Awesome. And they cost a fortune, but they have those niche applications where nothing else will do the job, you know? Right. Except maybe some, you know, 1960s era Soviet valve or something, you know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Mercury switches and everything. Yep.

Dave Jones: Right. But anyway, he decided that, he thought that, you know, that if anyone's going to invent this thing, this grid level storage battery, it is not going to come from somebody who works in the battery industry. Because they're too tied into the, you know, the philosophy of all the different battery technologies and, oh, let's, you know, tweak this, add a little new chemical here and we'll get an extra 10%. We don't, you know, they need this quantum leap. Yeah. It's an incremental thing. So it wasn't going to come from them. So he totally, you know, started by going, right, this battery must use, you know, chemicals that, or metals or whatever that are totally abundant in the universe, right? That are so abundant and so massively cheap that there's no question about whether or not you can get these materials. Right. So he looked at the periodic table of elements and just, you know, ruled out all the ones, you know, scribbled out all the ones that weren't relevant.

Chris Gammell: That's like going back to first principles. First principles.

Dave Jones: And this is in the TED Talk and he explains how he did this. Yeah. And he, sure enough, found a couple that might be suitable. And then he got the idea that the aluminium smelters, sorry, aluminum smelters for you yanks, right? Like, you know how they take huge amounts of power to actually make the stuff, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: He thought, well, what if you could put that in reverse and you could, you know, they could put out huge amounts of power by having a liquid metal. Huh. Interesting. Yeah. And he looked at the periodic table of elements and all this sort of stuff and he found a couple of salts or something that were, that he thought might do the job. So he put it together and sure enough, they worked. He made this liquid metal battery. And unlike normal battery technology, when you charge it and put energy into it, they heat up and that's bad, right? Whereas this one works better when it heats up. So it's almost the perfect technology, right? You charge this thing up and it's, yeah.

Chris Gammell: There is no perfect technology, but it's a better technology.

Dave Jones: It's a better technology, right? And the other thing is, it's completely scalable in size. So instead of like having to put a thousand cells in parallel, you just make one big cell. So he's talking about making one big cell the size of a shipping container, right? So there is no maintenance issue with, you know, and all the electronics needed to maintain individual cells and all that sort of stuff. It's just, you know, it's just two big salts or something. One on the top, one on the bottom, something in between. And you can make it as big as you want.

Chris Gammell: And wrap it in a lot of metal so it doesn't blow up.

Dave Jones: And wrap it in a big shipping container. It's a brilliant idea. Anyway, apparently it works. And he's formed this company with his graduate student that he had work on it. And, um, and Bill Gates has invested huge amounts of money because he's one of his big things is finding a battery technology to work on the grid. Anyway, I think it's freaking awesome. He went back to first principles. So if you're going to, yeah, I think if you're going to invest in a company, this one's pretty good to, I think something will come out of this. Anyway, batteries are a big, yeah, I will.

Chris Gammell: It's definitely a big, a big topic right now because they've talked about the, uh, you know, there's only been these incremental, incremental breakthroughs, but I have to be a little skeptical. I mean, like, I obviously haven't seen it yet, but anytime you see like a, oh, it's totally different. It's like, well, come on, let me see the details first. But if you did it, I mean, yeah, that's pretty cool. You wouldn't be on TED probably otherwise.

Dave Jones: It's like, you can actually buy a battery from them, but it's only the size of a, you know, a lunchbox or something. Right. And it's only, you know, half a kilowatt or something like that. But, um, yeah, it's cool. It ticks all the boxes, uses abundant chemicals, cheap and, uh, scalable and single cell and, you know, no maintenance and boom.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I saw a similar article about batteries since we're on the topic. Uh, they, you know, cause what you were talking about with lead acids and other types of batteries is usually the, uh, the costly part is the cathode. Yes. The lead. The cathode nano. Right. Cause platinum or lithium or whatever's in there. Right. And then there's an electrolyte usually. Well, in this case they found some, I was reading an economist article about it and they found some way to make, uh, it was a cathode out of paper pulp by-product. Oh. So they're calling it a wood battery basically.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. So we got liquid metal wood.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Next to plastic battery. No, plastics too. You know, it'll do. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I mean, they have water batteries, right? That's like a fuel cell. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. But, uh, man, it's just crazy. I mean, you just, you gotta try everything, right? But, uh, whatever's gonna be easiest to make it and really cheapest. That's what's gonna, that's what's ultimately going to drive it.

Dave Jones: Cheap and abundant. Why is lithium so expensive? Why is it? Because lithium is like the third most abundant element in the universe, is it not?

Chris Gammell: Uh, no, I don't believe so. Lithium is the third on the periodic table, but it's not the third most abundant.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Because I, I thought, you know, like, uh, hydrogen, helium, and lithium were formed in the Big Bang or something, and maybe one, one or two others, but everything else was formed in, you know, the supernova explosions after that. So, I thought lithium was somehow magic, or maybe, maybe here on Earth it's not abundant. Yeah. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I had something on the, the spreadsheet from a long time ago. There was actually a thing about lithium wars they're talking about because of, you know, how hard it is to find. But, um, yeah, I don't know. I've, uh, I know it's, it's not as abundant as, as, as a lot of other stuff. Right. At least maybe not, maybe it's the elemental form. Maybe that's the hard part of finding it in the elemental form. Right. Yeah. Yep. That's getting into chemistry. I don't know. I'm not a huge chemistry person. No, neither am I.

Dave Jones: I have to ask the wife again.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Geez. We could have her on as a guest. Right. I don't know. That'd be weird. It would be. It'd be freaky.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Ah. All right. What else have we got on the show?

Chris Gammell: Oh man. Tons of stuff this week. Uh, did you see all this Google stuff? All the, uh, Google that was announced, stuff that was announced?

Dave Jones: The Google glass, the, where they, yeah, the eye thing. I haven't looked into the details of that, but they jumped out of a plane or something at some demo. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: And like really the, the glasses, I mean, it's commercial level stuff. So we usually don't talk about that much on here. But the whole idea behind it is just kind of, it kind of just had me sitting back and saying, man, we're really getting up. Like, it's just like, it feels like it's so far out of like my domain that I'm just, I'm already clueless about it. You know, like video processing is usually, it's pretty tough when you're doing like the actual processing of frames and everything. Like I worked on that a little bit before, but man, when you start shoving it into like these little tiny displays and then you got like the focal length and everything and just all the electronics that are in there. Oh, it, it makes my head hurt. I don't know how they're going to do it. You know, like, and, and cost wise too. I mean, like, it's just, they're just doing some crazy stuff and it, it makes me sit back and say like, oh, that's magic. You know, like, you know, like that point where they say like, uh, hardware, you can't figure out. I forget what the phrase is. It's, it's indiscernible from magic kind of thing. Oh, yes.

Dave Jones: Yes. That's, um, Arthur C.

Chris Gammell: Clark maybe or something like that.

Dave Jones: That would be Isaac Asimov maybe.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. One of those sci-fi writers.

Dave Jones: The quote, official quote is from memory, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That is the quote. Yeah, you're right. That's the quote. Yeah. And that's what it feels like. I mean, it feels like magic to me. I mean, I know it's not right. I mean. Right. Of course. I'm sure you're going to get your hands on it and tear one down. And then I'm like, I told you, I told you were in the other week. I can't, I can't wait to see that.

Dave Jones: Piece of cake. Yeah. I'll just call up, uh, Sergei and. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hey Larry, what's going on, man?

Chris Gammell: Calling in my favor. But yeah, I mean, it's, uh, it just, it just feels like it's at that point. And I know, I know it's not right. All of this stuff. I mean, you do teardowns. I rip stuff open, you know, like, it's not like crazy, undescribable stuff, right? Everything can be explained.

Dave Jones: A team of engineers spent two years building it, you know? I mean. Right. Right. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: But I think about it in terms of like stuff that I've built and it's like, man, it's, it's not like that. That's what it really comes down to. It's like, it's not like that. And that's the point. It's like, it's, it's, it's such a new application and it's such a new. It's so far from anything I've ever done.

Dave Jones: But that's probably the only difference, right? It's the application, the technology. And it's probably just the same technology that's in all the other shit. It's just the different application of the technology.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's true. That's true. I, you know, I don't think there's a quantum hit. And even the application itself, it's, it's existed before. I told my coworker about it. I was, I was all excited. I told my coworker, he's like, yeah, you know, they've had wearable computing and they've had, you know, they've had heads up displays for years. And I'm like, I know, but Google, he's like, so? Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah. Yeah. I get excited easily. Right. Yeah. No surprises there. No. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's just a, I feel, I felt deficient looking at that stuff. It's just, it's, it's very, it's a very new application for me. So that's, that's why.

Dave Jones: That, that brings up an interesting point we've had on the list for a couple of weeks now. Somebody, um, ASDF from the, that's his handle from the, uh, comments on The Amp Hour. Thank you for that. Um, he commented about, uh, Valve, you know, how all of our guests have gone to Valve to form the hardware group. And, you know, it sounds fantastic. And they're, and they're living the utopian nerd lifestyle there. Um, he pointed out that Valve hasn't, well, this is, these are his words. So, um, Valve hasn't introduced anything, any physical innovation in over 10 years. And he says that without those oppressive management deadlines in quote marks, um, nothing appears to get done. So, you know, does he have a point? You know, do you need that, that oppressive management whip to go whip? You know, this thing needs to be out by, you know, we, you know, real artist ship is, you know, Steve Jobs's famous line, whether or not he actually said it, but yeah. Right, right. Um, you know, so it's all well, cause I've worked in a company like that. Where you're just allowed to work on anything you're damn well, any cool thing you're damn well like. And, you know, and I can tell you, yeah, very little of it got out the door. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And same with like, uh, HP Labs and, uh, Bell Labs, you know, a lot of research institutions too, you know, they, they had very interesting stuff.

Dave Jones: Back in the, you know, where all the tech, modern technology came from, everything, Ethernet and, uh, GUI and all the Apple and yeah, it came from Xerox Park.

Chris Gammell: And I mean, it's often lamented is like, oh, there's a lot of money. And it gets, they don't say it gets wasted. It just gets, it doesn't become a commercial product. Exactly. I think, I think, uh, maybe that's not the best, you know, if it's not a product, it, that's not necessarily the best measure. If it gets rolled into something else, you know, if you're publishing it, if you're, if you're sharing it, then I'd say ultimately it doesn't matter because it's, it's still.

Dave Jones: If you're publishing and sharing, yes. But what if you're a company like Valve or someone else who doesn't publish and share it? Or, well, I'm making a presumption there. Maybe they do plan on, uh, I think they just released a software product that allows, which was based on their internal thing. But you know, I think, yeah, yeah. Whether or not they do the same thing with hardware, I don't know. Cause software is easy, right? Cause software is free. You just release it, right?

Chris Gammell: Software's not free, Dave.

Dave Jones: It's not free to develop, but to actually make the decision to release it, right? Yeah. People can use it. It's usable without costing anyone anything, right?

Chris Gammell: Right. So it's free to distribute.

Dave Jones: It's free to distribute and for the end user to use, but hardware is not, right? Hardware always costs money to actually make something.

Chris Gammell: It does.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It does. And, uh, and there is costs associated with doing it too, but I, I don't know. Um, what was the question again?

Dave Jones: Basically, are they, you know, are they going to actually produce anything out of this hardware team? I don't know. I hope they do. Right. Well, I guess it'll take a few years, right? I mean, we need to sit back and wait.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm not, I'm not too worried about those guys. They're, they're, they're, they're good people.

Dave Jones: But yeah, it raises that interesting question. You know, when you, when you don't, when you have organizations like this that don't have any, you know, management infrastructure at all, really, it's just like a free for all. Um, you know, how do things get done? And if any of our, um, audience out there work at such a company, does it work? Let us know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Um, yeah. I mean, yeah. Cause you're right. There is cost in that, in the, the development of it. So, I mean, you'd think eventually they'd want to push it out the door.

Dave Jones: See, I return on the investment. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There's a, there was an interesting story this week about, uh, analog devices actually. I don't, I don't know if many people caught this is, uh, so analog devices is, is this great, you know, chip company. They do, they're like the biggest in A to D converters and they do a lot of great op amps that I like and, uh, a lot of great analog products. They do power too. It's in power. Okay.

Dave Jones: Everyone knows where analog devices are. Come on.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Not everyone. Hey, don't, don't make assumptions, Dave. Anyways, they talked about, uh, moving their, their, their new process to TSMC for their 180 nanometer process. I assume they're, they're at 250 on, on their current stuff. Cause people know that, that analog processes always lag digital, right? Cause you hear about, oh, you know, 18 nanometer, 21 nanometer stuff. Um, but yeah, 180 nanometer is the new, the new analog process, but they're moving it to TSMC, right? Yep. And so my question about this is, is design enough to sustain an analog company these days, right? So previously analog devices did a lot of their own fab work. I mean, I think they split some of it, but you know, much like, like their competitor to linear tech and everybody else, like, you know, they, they actually had these process tricks up their sleeves where they would tweak this and the process and tweak that. That was how they were able to get the magic. Right. Exactly. That's like the, that's the black art. You know, that's what, that's what these designers are doing in, not just in the software when they're, when they're using like, um, uh, the kind of software that, that Steve Leibson sells, right? Like, like cadence or something.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So actually lay out the devices. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. And then also, but also tweaking stuff in the process parameters, you know, in the fab, like actually tweaking parameters in order to make these processes even better.

Dave Jones: And, uh, and that's how they get the specs, you know, they get the ultra low noise, they get the ultra low, uh, quiescent current, or they get the ultra low input bias current or something like that. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's in that little process tweak. It's not necessarily in the design of the layout of the transistors, right? Right. It's, you know, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And so if you give all that up, like what, what do you have left? I mean, like, I just questioned it from a, I guess a business development, I'm not business because it's, it's their business. They can do whatever the hell they want with it. But I guess I question it from a, from a, from a buying perspective, right? If, if, if ADI now has the same process as, uh, you know, like touchstone or some other fabless analog startup, like where, where is their advantage then? I just don't get that anymore. I know that like fabs are expensive to, to maintain, like, cause they really are. They're, they're unbelievably expensive and, and TSMC and the foundry model looks really attractive, but like, man, that's, that's like shooting yourself in the foot, isn't it?

Dave Jones: Well, I think it likely is. And why are, why would they dump their own fab to begin with? Why do they need to push to 180 nano? Why can't, you know, I, I thought that really didn't buy them much benefit at all by going

Chris Gammell: to a smaller, oh, well, when you go to a smaller geometry, remember you also get, you get smaller dye so you can get more on a wafer.

Dave Jones: More on a wafer. But when you're selling premium, yeah, well, yeah, I guess it always comes down to cost, right?

Chris Gammell: I mean, there's always a push to that, right? I mean, yeah, there's always that push is more chips on a wafer.

Dave Jones: Exactly. But you're chopping off your foot, you know, by, right.

Chris Gammell: And that's the point I'm making is it's crazy. Yeah. I think so too. Not, not a lot of people noticed a story this week, but I mean, it's, it's a, I think it's a big deal because eventually, right. If it seems like, you know, it's probably a high level management move or something like that.

Dave Jones: And eventually what happens is the encounters have taken over the asylum.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Exactly. And, uh, you know, we, we, we can lament that, you know, as an abstract at any point we can say, oh, well, the accountants are taken over, but when this kind of decision is made, it's very obvious. And if that happens, eh, you know, you really start to lose your edge. I think, I mean, like they're still going to make good products, I'm sure. But, uh, yeah, you start to start to lose everything else. Hmm.

Dave Jones: So it'll be interesting to see.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Yeah. Maybe they keep a tight leash. Maybe they've got their own little line at TSMC where they can, you know, tweak, you know, the guys with the gray beards from analog devices come in and go, eh, eh, eh, eh, and tweak it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure TSMC is good at that kind of stuff. Like they do, foundries can, can keep stuff separate, but at the same time, if they even said in the article, they said, uh, the process was described as TSMC, a TSMC process. It's expected that TSMC will now be able to offer the process up to customers besides analog devices. And it's like, well, crap, man.

Dave Jones: I know.

Chris Gammell: If you're just handing over the, I mean, it looks great up front because someone else is doing that research for you, but if you're handing over the keys, then, you know, that means everybody gets it.

Chris Gammell: Oops. Yeah. I don't know. They could. Commoditizing yourself like that is kind of, uh.

Dave Jones: You could come to regret it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So if ADI parts start to stink in about 18 to 24 months, Chris called it.

Dave Jones: Well done. Renesys. Have you heard about Renesys?

Chris Gammell: I did.

Dave Jones: Speaking of fabs. Yeah. Renesys, um, have announced that they're, they're in deep financial trouble, right? This is the world's biggest microcontroller manufacturer. If you didn't know. Yeah. Right. It's not microchip or Atmel or, you know, or TI. No, it's Renesys. Right.

Chris Gammell: Because they're getting designed into huge, huge designs.

Dave Jones: Cars and lushing machines. And they've got any, and when they merged with NEC, they became the biggest, you know. Oh, yeah. Anyway, they're in deep financial poo-poo. And, um, they're seeking money from a investment firm called KKR. And, um, anyone who remembers the, um, uh, NXP, uh, buyout. Buyout? Was it? No. They also invested.

Chris Gammell: It was a privatization, wasn't it?

Dave Jones: Privatization, yes. In this same company, KKR, they invested in NXP and NXP went down the toilet and they lost their investment. Apparently it was written down to like 10% or something. So anyway, they're having a second bite at the cherry and they're going to take the controlling share in Renesys. And, uh, and, uh, and then, and they're going to slash a third of the jobs or the, or they already have or something. Cause that, uh, that's not going to take the job cuts. Actually, the announcement of the jobs came, the job cuts came before this KKR investment announcement came back in May or something. So, but anyway, yeah. And they're going to shut down a bunch of fabs too, apparently. So I don't know. Things are not going well there.

Chris Gammell: Well, they, they got hit by the, the tsunami slash earthquake as well. Wasn't that part of it?

Dave Jones: It did, but they recovered in record time. They got their fabs back up and running in three months or something. I think it was very quick, but they were, but they, I think they had deeper, that's probably part of it, but they had deeper troubles than that. I think, you know, they bought out NEC and they had lots of duplicate product lines and all sorts of, you know, and, uh, apparently the parts of the industry. I have to read the article, but the parts of it that are failing are like the system on chip type, um, areas of the company. So. Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Which is that Steve Leibson type level. So maybe he knows all about it.

Chris Gammell: Guess we'll have to talk to him again.

Dave Jones: Yep. But yeah, it's not, it's not good. So what's going to happen to Renesys? Bought out by the KKR, the kiss of death. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh boy. I mean, you got to figure eventually, you know, like all these chip companies, people are still going to need chips, right? So there's always going to be someone that pops up.

Dave Jones: There's going to be demand. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, um, but it doesn't mean it's going to make it any easier on, on the, uh, the people that are designing with it. Right. Especially if you, you know, if you see companies getting split up and put back together and yada, yada, yada, that's, that's not good for the, uh, the confidence of designers. Right. I mean, that's.

Dave Jones: That's getting messy. We don't like a messy market. But we like confidence that the chip we're designing is going to be around next week, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. And it's, uh. That's important. Yeah. We talked to Oivind about that, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's right. With, with, they, that was like their, their thing. They actually wrote it on their website or something. And, and that's something we look for. I mean, like just in general, if, if you're trying to design in a product, you want to make sure that it's not going to be, you're not going to be redesigning it in two years because that sucks. Nothing worse than telling your boss. Oh yeah. About that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it all falls on your shoulders as the designer. If you're the sole designer or, you know, if you're a group, it still falls on, you know, someone, someone's going to take the shaft in for it. That's for sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, definitely.

Dave Jones: Oh boy.

Chris Gammell: So before we go any further, I totally forgot. We had a special offer. Special offer? Yeah. Circuit Seller. They, they offered the Amp Hour listeners actually a discount. They did. It's not like a ad advertising, but they, they just wanted to give our listeners like a discount on their magazine. So Circuit Seller and Elector are the same magazine. Yeah. Do you get, do you get a subscription or no? I used to. You used to?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I, I don't get it currently either, but I don't know. Maybe, maybe this will be it. You've been interviewed. I've been interviewed both in Circuit Seller, right? And, uh, yeah. Yeah. And Elector is more like a hobbyist. Circuit Seller is supposed to be more like embedded side, but, uh, we'll put some links in the comment section. They, they sent us a link and it's a really nice offer. So if people are interested in, uh, you know, ponying it up for a subscription, it could be worth it. I might, I might, I might try it out myself. So, uh, is it like a coupon code? Yeah. It's like a coupon code. You click through and it'll, uh, I think it's, it's half off for Circuit Seller and 25% off for Elector. And it's all because, uh, or it's Circuit Seller's 25th anniversary. That's what it comes from.

Dave Jones: Ah, there you go.

Chris Gammell: So partially for the amp hour and partially because of the 25th anniversary. So kudos to them for making it 25 years. And if Dave and I make it 25 years. Yeah. Without killing each other. If we make it 25 years, uh, yeah. It's, I don't, 50% off of, uh, the host on this show by that point, I'm sure.

Dave Jones: 50% off my sanity by that time. Yeah. Right. Oh boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Ah. Electronics. Shall we?

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: Well, it's not, it's not electronics. Sorry. Well, it is. Okay. But it's, it's, uh, housings, electronics, enclosures. Oh, more, uh. Right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Just for the, uh, the USB power supply. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: USB power supply. Right. So I'm looking at a punched chassis now instead of a, um, in still like a punched ABS box. Right. With the ends, but like holes punched in the ends instead of, I was looking for one that had, that had the removable panels at each end. Right. So then I could insert like a circuit board panel and I could cut it that way. So I wouldn't have to punch the case. Yeah. You know, it's just an extra step, you know, punching the case. It's always extra cost. And, uh, and you usually have to commit.

Chris Gammell: Would you do that yourself or no?

Dave Jones: Oh, no, no, I would get the manufacturer to do it and that's why it's usually an extra cost. And, you know, um, because if you get a third party to do it, then you've got handling issues. So you've got to receive the cases, then you've got to ship them off to the supplier or you get them directly shipped there and then they've got to punch it and it's, it's messy. And you've got, usually got minimum volumes, right. For, um, for punching cases. So, you know, it's usually a big upfront risk and things like that. So, right.

Chris Gammell: And if you, if you try to change your design as, as someone is known to do, then you're stuck in a lot of boxes.

Dave Jones: I've stuck with 10,000 cases here in the corner of the room. What am I? They've got holes punched 20 millimeters apart. I want 15 now. Oops. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Oh my God.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, um, anyway, um, uh, why can't all the manufacturers put their ballpark price in? Like most of the case manufacturers, right? They will offer to customize your case, you know, either silk screening, machining or whatever, punching holes, you know, um, most of them will do that. Um, if you pay them, you know, money, but why don't they put that pricing on the website? Just ballpark pricing, you know, so I can get an idea. I found a company that does. Really? Polycase. Yes. Polycase. They've got, you can go to their website and they, and there's, I've put a link in the spreadsheet. Sorry, not in the other one. And they've got, um, a direct link to a PDF sheet of their ballpark pricing for, uh, you know, for actually, uh, customizing their cases. It's great. And there it is. Like, you know, and I'll give you some. Printing. Yeah. Printing and CNC machine. I'll give you an example. And they'll do anything from one case. They'll, they'll actually machine one case for you, you know, and, uh, or they can go up to thousands. Right. And, and, and, but the pricing's there right down to the scent. They, they call it ballpark pricing, but it's down to the scent. You know, I don't know what happens.

Dave Jones: Right. But if you just want one surface machine, well, no, let's say you want two ends of a case punched. Right. You want it machined and holes drilled and all that sort of stuff. If you just want one case, it's 74 bucks. Right. Which is quite reasonable for a one-off. Right. Somebody's got to program the machine, handle it, blah, blah, blah. Right. And, and then if you want 10 cases, it drops to eight bucks. Right. And, and then if you want a thousand cases, which is the order I'm looking at, right. It's a dollar to machine both ends. And it's, you know, it's quite, not only are they reasonable, but they do it any quantity. But the thing I think I love is that they put the prices there. So you don't have to go get a bloody quote from them for, you know, you know why you

Chris Gammell: probably like it so much, Dave?

Dave Jones: Why?

Chris Gammell: It's from Ohio. This is a Cleveland company. Well, Avon. It is. That's right. Avon, Ohio. Yeah. That's like 40 miles from here.

Dave Jones: Oh, there you go.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's the exact opposite side of Cleveland, but yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Okay. There you go. Polly case. That's great. Thumbs up. To Polly case. All right. Maybe we should put them onto this episode. Maybe they'll send me some free cases or something. Because we just gave them up. But, you know, I love that. Yeah. It makes me want to use them because they put the bloody prices there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And you know what? You can, if you're a business too, you could probably, you know, charge a couple cents extra just because you do this, right? I mean, because you're giving a ballpark, you're probably padding it, you know, 5%, 10%, whatever. Of course. And then you can give it, you know, you can give an extra bit if, you know, if Dave is a good customer, you know, oh, Chris is from Cleveland. Why not give him an extra 5%, you know? Yeah. Well. Yeah. Like those kinds of things are priced in because you never want to publish your absolute bottom price. No, that's right. But even this, yeah, you're great.

Dave Jones: Well, I'm sure it comes cheaper, right? If you only want one round hole drilled in each end, I'm sure it's probably cheaper than the $1 for $1,000, you know? Whereas if somebody else wants, you know, 20 holes and slots and other things, you know, it's obviously not going to be the same price. But ballpark, right? As a designer, that's what you want. You want, you know, is it cost effective to do this or do I have to choose some other solution, right? Because you've got your bomb cost target in mind or, you know, and.

Chris Gammell: Right. And you don't want to have to wait for the quote. That's the main thing. You want it now.

Dave Jones: I want to make this decision now, damn it. You know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I've been thumping on, you know, on distributors about that. Like I want to be able to log in. And like, I have a distributor that I go to for most things. I want to be able to log into the distributor site. And then I want to be able to click, all right, here's my account. It knows what company I work for. It knows where all my discounts are. And then I want to be able to say, I need a thousand of this part. And I don't want to have to send an email. I just want to click, give me a quote. And even if it takes a half hour versus, you know, two days, that's awesome. Why does anyone do that? Is that out there? Does anyone know about this? Like I know DigiKey does, you know, they do like a thousand now. And I think they do 2,500 on certain things they quote. But I need thousands. I need like 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, 100,000. You know, like I want all that stuff. And I know there's a formula somewhere. Like just give me the formula. Put in 5% extra and just give it to me. That's all I care about. Because eventually.

Dave Jones: I'll go. Let's continue. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. What is it? What do you think the reason?

Dave Jones: The reason is, is that they have to protect their distributorships.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But just. No, that's fine. But give it an extra 5%, right? Because eventually what happens is. Right. Okay. Ballpark. It's out of the estimate side, right? Engineer is done with it. Okay. You know, my hands are clean. And it goes over to the purchasing agent. And the purchasing agent is going to do their magic anyways. And they're going to go back and forth. And like, then that's great. They're awesome at that. But I don't care. I just need to know for. Ballpark. A design. Yes. Yeah. A ballpark. Exactly. Yeah. I agree. I know. So why can't people do that? Even if you pad in 10%, that's fine. I don't care. Just give me a ballpark that's better than, oh, well, this chip is $4 in quantity of one and a dollar in a quantity of $100,000.

Dave Jones: Even if they pad in 50%, it's almost, you know, it's still almost ballpark.

Chris Gammell: Well, at that point, I could just pull the number out of my butt if I wouldn't put in 50%. Okay. That's not a ballpark. That's like, you know, the same state, right? Right. But still, yeah. I mean, having something would be nice. Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know.

Chris Gammell: They'll never do it, though. I don't think they'll ever do it. Don't you think so? No. Well, everyone I've asked, I usually get this sour-looking face, and then they start to whimper like, don't you like me?

Dave Jones: Why don't you want to talk to me? You're trying to put me out of business.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, that's what it usually is. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker ?: Exactly.

Chris Gammell: You know, like, there are these systems in place. You know, people that are new to this, I didn't realize this, you know, like, until a couple of years ago, there's these systems in place, and you think about every salesperson and every distributor rep and every F-A-E in between you and the people that make chips. And there's a lot of money in there, and there's a lot of, you know, just a lot of churn. It's churn. Some of it's necessary churn, but some of it's churn. And to make that more of an efficient system could impact a lot of jobs, and the people that it would impact are the people that you regularly deal with as a designer. So, yeah. I mean, I try and keep that in mind, because I like all these people I work with and talk to, but at the same time, I just want the price faster. Yeah. So, yeah. I know.

Dave Jones: Because as a designer, you've got to make quick decisions about the direction of a part, or, you know, how... Yeah, exactly. Waiting a couple of days, it's whipping your ass.

Chris Gammell: Right, exactly. It's killing you. You know, and sometimes it goes all the way back to a factory, right? So, if I go to Company X for a new chip, right, and they say five bucks, and I get back and I say, no, I need a million of them. Well, it's going to go back to their pricer person, right? Yeah. That they actually have someone who is setting prices, and they will give you, like, a break if they think it's worth it, and yada, yada, yada. And it's like, well, why not just have it so that they're tied into a system as well? That's the whole idea I have, is if it just sends them a notice on some centralized system, then they can just type in a new price. That's fine with me, but, you know, it's got to go through everybody in between.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Are you listening? Are you listening, DigiKey? Or... Aero, or Avnet, or Future, or anyone out there? Is anyone listening? No. None of them are listening. No, that's okay. Oh, boy. It's an electronics show. It's not a distributor show. No. So, yeah. If someone figures it out, I'll like them.

Dave Jones: Can I do something slightly off topic? But it's Australian, so it's cool.

Chris Gammell: Do I have a choice?

Dave Jones: Well, it's actually product design. It flows on from that. There's a new product from an Australian company. Okay. Black Magic Design. They've been in Cole's doco. He's a long overdue doco. Oh, yeah. Is that there? No? No, no. He's still... He needs funding to spend the time on it.

Chris Gammell: Kickstarter. Oh, Indiegogo.

Dave Jones: He's well aware of all that sort of stuff. Gotcha. I'm sure it'll happen. Anyway, Black Magic Design, right? They make custom solutions for the video industry. You know, the film industry. Like custom software and custom hardware that accelerates all editing of videos and all that sort of cool stuff. Right? But they've just released their own camera. Their own video camera.

Chris Gammell: Fancy.

Dave Jones: It's like, whoa. Like, where did this come from? Everyone's going, holy shit, they developed their own camera? Like, it's really funky looking. Check it out. Black Magic Design. I've put the link in there, I think. Did I send you?

Chris Gammell: Oh, is this on the Disqus server? Is that where it is?

Dave Jones: It's on the Disqus server. I put it on the Disqus server to please.

Chris Gammell: Dave. Dave put in something new.

Dave Jones: There we go. It's right up the top, dude. It's the first link. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: There it is. All right. EEV blog. Yeah. Submitted something. Whoa, that is funky.

Dave Jones: Right? Wow. That kicks ass. Well, it's just the camera at the back. It's not all the big lenses. Because it uses standard, like, Canon lenses or something like that, right? Yeah. Standard mount. But they developed their own. Camera. And it's really freaking funky. Right? Yeah. You know, it gives 13 stops of dynamic range if you're into that sort of thing. And that's, you know. Yeah. Yeah. All right. And it's got this touchscreen. And I just like the format of it, too. I like the. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's cool. You know? It looks like the. What's that? Is it the red? It's the red.

Dave Jones: The red one, it's called or something. Yeah. The red one. It's a similar sort of. Both of them. But it's not like 4K. It's only 2.5K pixels. Yeah. But still. I mean, yeah. It's. It really is nice. And they developed this. I'm not sure if it's developed in Melbourne where they're based or.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, it's interesting. But it's interesting. You're on cameras.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That image thing I was talking about earlier and just how I've worked a little bit on imaging stuff before. Mm-hmm.

Chris Gammell: The thing I didn't realize is that, you know, like, the thing that limits it now, the thing that used to limit it was the film technology and the mechanics of the, you know, like the actual. It was a mechanical device before, right? Yeah. So, it was a shutter speed for a still camera. Yeah. Or, you know, the lenses for a motion camera. Well, now it's all in the CMOS sensor and then the processing behind it, right? Yep. So, that's, you know, that's a new thing. So, now it's a CMOS sensor, an FPGA, and a fancy processor. And you've got a camera, basically. Exactly. And you just add features. And I'm guessing that's the same thing. I'd love to get a teardown of this thing.

Dave Jones: I'm assuming, like, there's FPGAs galore in here, which is doing all the heavy processing, you know? Yeah. Heavy real-time process. Oh, well, I assume they're doing processing in there. You know? I'm not sure if they're...

Chris Gammell: It looks like it's just based on the screen on the back, LCD.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, yeah. And just doing histograms and, you know, stuff like that. Yeah. All the fancy... Oh, that's cool. Yeah. It's... I can't believe they developed their own camera. Yeah, man. It's like, only the big names do that, right? Only the Canons and the, you know, the huge, massively funded companies, right?

Chris Gammell: Not anymore. Now it's these fancy, you know, people... It's now a small company.

Dave Jones: I'm not sure how big Blackmagic are, but I thought they were just this small Melbourne Australian company who did a few, like, plug-in PCI cards for, you know? Oh, yeah? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's... Now all the magic, the Blackmagic is now in that image sensor. That's what I'm saying, is that... Well, not all of it, because there is a lot of image processing. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, you know, they've obviously done a deal with somebody who makes sensors. They're obviously not making their own sensor and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. Right? So...

Chris Gammell: Definitely. That's cool. That's just great. That's really cool.

Dave Jones: It's cool. I'd love to get a tear down of...

Chris Gammell: Definitely.

Dave Jones: ...this sucker. It'd be awesome. So maybe when I'm in Melbourne, I have to visit them and maybe we can...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, go knock on their door.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Maybe they've already got one that's in pieces, you know? Prototypes. Yeah. I'd love to see the breadboard prototype, you know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So speaking of local design, we had some local design as in listeners of the Amp Hour. Local? They actually wrote in about it. Mike Kershaw, he's developing this thing called the Kismet, I think it is. But basically... Kismet. Kismet. I know, right? It's a Zigbee... I think it's a Zigbee. I think it's Zigbee. Yeah. It's a Zigbee... It's a Zigbee protocol analyzer, basically. Right. But this guy... Mike's doing this and he's one of our listeners, so I know Mike. Hey, Mike. Yeah. And, you know, it's kind of... The way I try to, you know, figure it out is... I was like... So it's like Wireshark for Zigbee? And I don't think it was quite that, but it's...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: It looks really cool. It's like all open source hardware and he's got like a software backend on it and everything. And yeah, it looks really cool. So people should definitely go check that out. It's all done in KiCad and... Yeah. Listener-powered awesomeness. Brilliant.

Dave Jones: Open source hardware. It's just... It's never-ending, is it? Everything's open source. I...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I don't see it slowing down yet. I don't know.

Dave Jones: It's going great guns.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right. What have we got? Ten minutes left. What have we got? Ten minutes left. You... There's more stuff on this list. Because you've got this magic new list. Everyone can see all the things we're going to talk about. I don't think we've used a single thing from the list except mine, have we?

Chris Gammell: Some of this stuff was on there. Yeah, I know the Renesasus stuff I put on there. So if people don't know what Dave's talking about, on the Disqus forum, on the Disqus dot the Amphour dot com. I've been putting... You know, me and Dave have talked about the list before. Yeah. But basically the list is now public. It is. Me and Dave are throwing news items up on there now. And you can discuss them if you'd like to. You can add your own stuff and we can look at that. But yeah, it's just an easy way to collect links and collect thoughts about the links. So love of people.

Dave Jones: Should we separate it out as opposed to the main discussion server? Or that kind of defeats the purpose because you want people to discuss each topic, right? Yeah. That's the idea is that the topic's there automatically and then they can...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, I think in the best case scenario, you know, like if people are discussing something throughout the week on the discussion server that, you know, we could just as easily bring it up and add our opinions on air and then we automatically win, right? I mean, we just...

Chris Gammell: We get our final word. And then people could yell at us on the discussion server as well. Cool. Yeah. So we actually had someone write in about the XMOS processor. Have you ever used those at all?

Dave Jones: I haven't used them, no. They're an ultra low power thing, aren't they?

Chris Gammell: So it's the idea of like a software-defined silicon. I was just researching a little bit and I had never used one. But, you know, I've used FPGAs before. And Dave, I know you've used FPGAs before. And I think they're supposed to like kind of fill that gap in between FPGAs and processors. And...

Dave Jones: It does such a gap even exist. You've got to, you know... Well, yeah. You've got to ask. Because there's already that blur. The FPGAs now have hard silicon on them to do the, you know, to do the microcontroller type stuff. So you've got the crossover there. And likewise, the microcontrollers are coming with little embedded sort of, you know, FPGA fabric in them. So they... Both, you know, you're being forced from both sides. You know, both sides are crossing over into each other. Right. And it's not just another territory. So where does that leave XMOS if it is a bridge in technology? I guess you could call it.

Chris Gammell: Well, I was looking at it on... It's definitely multi-threaded. I was looking at it just on Wikipedia and on their own site. And that's kind of the main crux behind it is, you know, you develop these threads and you have multiple of them going on. And some of our listeners actually talked about it a little bit on the discussion server. And, you know, Casbahs used it, he said. That's one of the guys on the server. Right. But he didn't end up using it in the final product. And basically, though, it is that idea of, you know, like a multi-threaded application. You know, like if you have many things going on at once. And that is usually where processors break down, right? And if you're, you know, you have to context switch usually if you're doing something in a processor versus if you had something that was actually, if you had silicon that was actually doing multiple threads at the same time, it would be the equivalent of like a multi-core but actually integrated. Exactly. That would be kind of the idea. And, you know... And it's their own core.

Dave Jones: It's not... It's the X core. It's not ARM. It's not a variation of that as far as I can tell. It's the X core. You know, so it's... Yeah. It's completely unique to them. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And, you know, I keep seeing things pop up about XMOS and every time I'm kind of like, oh, you know, like what is this? And it seems like there is like a pretty tight-knit group around it. You know, like there is pretty good forums and everything. So, if there are other people out there that have used it, I would be interested in just seeing more projects even, you know, where it really did excel because like Casbah that wrote in about it, you know, he said they didn't even use it on their final rev. So, maybe there's some kinks to work out. But it seems like a cool idea, you know, especially if the cost was lower because FPGAs and even multi-core kind of things can be kind of pricey right now. But if the XMOS wins on the price, then, you know, like you said, like we were talking about power at the very beginning of the episode. If you're the lowest cost, you're almost always... People will find a use for it somehow. Even if they just use the single thread. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, I'm interested to know why did he drop the core? If it like he was using it and then it didn't make it into the final product. Well, that's a big, you know, turnabout. You can't just, you know, halfway through the development cycle go, well, I'm going to ditch my entire process in architecture and go with something else. That's a huge core.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, he said it was overpowered, basically. So, probably cost versus what it had.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, that'll do it, you know.

Dave Jones: That'll do it every time, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, especially if someone's... Shave that last cent off.

Chris Gammell: Well, if you have that management deadline that we were talking about earlier, you know, that'll usually make you say, well, maybe we should just go to this thing that works already. Make a little tiny trade-off where we change the entire architecture of the system. Whatever. No big deal.

Dave Jones: Now, you put a thing on the list about a company called Meanwell.

Chris Gammell: Meanwell, yeah.

Dave Jones: I've used this stuff.

Chris Gammell: You have? Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah, they make some excellent DC to DC, like a lighting, like power transformers and stuff like that. Like a little brick. I'm using them for my LED lighting out on my back porch.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: And they're actually fairly well-respected, you know, as far as I'm aware, fairly well-respected, you know, DC to DC converters and power converters and stuff. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they're talking about, yeah, power supplies, a lot of stuff like that, right? Yeah, they're a fairly good brand. You know, I was going through a newsletter and they must have done some advertising, so for the first time ever, it's worked on me. Right. But it worked because I was like, what is this name? Meanwell? No, they're from 1982. Like, that's before I was born. That's like when they started. But just the name of the company, like, it's like, were they kind of like padding their future? It's like, in case something broke down, they could say, well.

Dave Jones: Well, we meant well.

Chris Gammell: We mean well. That's what it all was, you know? I was like, really?

Dave Jones: It's just one of these, you know, Asian names for things. Well, yeah. You know.

Chris Gammell: Like, is it lost in translation kind of thing? I don't know.

Dave Jones: Hilarious. Asians, for some reason, love giving these hilarious names. I don't know whether they're deliberate or, you know, happy, joy, lucky PCB company, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: As if it somehow appeals to us Westerners, you know?

Chris Gammell: Well, or if you add more, like, positive sounding words in, the better it is, right? Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: That's, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You're like one-upping it, right?

Dave Jones: Maybe they're taught that in their MBA school, you know? You must have a positive sounding company name, you know? Yeah, maybe it's in the playbook, man. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so I don't know. Maybe they were just hedging their bets. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Please send us your best names. Oh, yes. And we'll go through them next week if we can get a list.

Chris Gammell: Yes, if we'll get a place to drop all these things.

Dave Jones: Yeah, if the best, you know, happy, go, lucky PCB company. Yeah. You know, names like that, you know? One Hung Lo, you know?

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. And that's a real name, too, right? Because we always talk about that, but that's a real name, right?

Dave Jones: Well, no, it's not.

Chris Gammell: I thought it was. I thought there was a real One Hung Lo.

Dave Jones: No, I made it up. No? Okay.

Chris Gammell: I thought it was like a thing that became a parody of itself. I thought that was. No? All right.

Dave Jones: No, no. Sorry. No, as far as I'm aware, there is no genuine One Hung Lo company. There's one that sounds close. I've got a photo. Maybe that's what it was. Doug, my mate, Doug, who used to use the term One Hung Lo. That's where I got it from.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Okay.

Dave Jones: And he actually opened up a product, and he found a power transformer inside that was very similar to One Hung Lo name. I'll have to post a photo of that. Nice. One Hung Lo. So please, if you've got those, put them on the list. We'll put one category in the discussion forum, right? We'll have a thread there.

Chris Gammell: How are we doing on time? Because I had a couple last things I wanted to mention, now that I've finally looked at the discussion forum. Two things. Okay. So first off, there's a shout out that I didn't get to. There's actually a new podcast. Not a new podcast, but a podcast I just found out about. The Retro Computing Roundtable, RCR Podcast.

Dave Jones: Ooh.

Chris Gammell: So there's rcrpodcast.com. They kind of go over, I guess, like old architectures, the 80s and 6502 kind of stuff.

Dave Jones: I was a boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Right. And yeah. So if you go through, they have a lot of talking about 6502s are obviously a big one. I love vintage computers. Yeah. Huge fan. Yeah. So that's cool. I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but it's on my podcast list.

Dave Jones: I think I'm going to check that one out.

Chris Gammell: All right. And another thing is, I'm not sure if we talked about this on here ever before, but I saw a couple of weeks ago a visual representation of the 6502 since it's in the same. Yeah.

Dave Jones: We've done it before. I'm sure we have. We have talked about that. I'm sure we have.

Chris Gammell: I saw it posted somewhere and I'm like, I don't remember if we did.

Dave Jones: Maybe it's just been on the list for two years.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. But it's pretty cool. I didn't remember having seen it, so maybe I didn't click through to it before, but you know, you can actually see all the registers lighting up and everything, so it's kind of cool. Sweet. And finally, to bring it all full circle, the chip of the week this week is a single cell solar energy, or single solar cell energy harvesting chip from TI. Basically-

Dave Jones: TI again?

Chris Gammell: TI again, yeah. But this is, I think this is actually national previously. It's tough because they- Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, they've rebranded everything.

Dave Jones: And their data sheets are weird now. They've got like a weird combo in there and they try and rebrand the national data sheets as now.

Chris Gammell: And the app notes, actually. I was looking at an old app note and they just slapped TI on it now, too. Yeah, exactly. So that was someone's job to go through and redo all the headers. I'm sure it was.

Dave Jones: The work experience engineer, you know. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So this is, you know, a lot of people are trying to capitalize on green stuff, national semiconductor specifically, actually. The BQ25504. But basically, it takes about, it's only 330 nanoamps when it's off. So it's just a boost converter, right? There's a lot of chips like this out there now where they're just boost converters. But it's just the scale of the boost that is pretty crazy. So the cold start voltage, which is basically the minimum amount you need to get started, is 330 millivolts. That's all you need in order to get this thing cranking, right?

Dave Jones: How do they even get the transistors working at that?

Chris Gammell: I have no idea. I'm thinking they probably have some kind of charge pump that actually has like a 330 millivolt zener in there or something. So when it finally starts to conduct, you know, current, and then it actually cranks on. But then after that, it can run on only 80 millivolts. So if your solar cell...

Dave Jones: What the freak?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I know, right? So if your solar cell drops because it gets dark or something, but it's still generating 80 millivolts in a loaded condition, it can still like pump charge into a battery or, you know, a super cap or something like that. That's insane. Yeah. So that's like a single tiny little solar cell. And you can, you know, you could charge a big battery and then eventually you could, you know, use it to do an RF transmission or you could just do it for simple, simple, you know, like wake up processing with like a, you know, real low power processor, like a MSP430 or something like that, or one of the other ones that's out there. Energy micro or something. Right. So definitely cool. And you're probably not buying any grid level energy that's using solar cells that need this little chip. But if some of our listeners are doing projects with solar cells, it's pretty cool, I thought.

Dave Jones: I agree. Chip of the week.

Chris Gammell: Definitely.

Dave Jones: That's it for this week.

Chris Gammell: So that is it. It's all over. It's all over. Next week, we will have another guest. We're getting good at this. Who have we got? Oh, it's, it's my friend, Philip. And I, I hate to say, I don't know how to say his last name yet. Frieden, I think. I think that's how you say it. I meant to ask him before the show because I always see it. And you know, like, you know, sometimes you just see last names. Anyways. Anyways, I asked him, you know, how he wanted to be known. But basically, he was an architect on the Vertex, Vertex 2, Vertex 4, and the Spartan, and the XC4000, and an architect of the Risk AM 29,000. XC4000? How old is that? That's one of the, well, there was what, the 3030 was one of the first ones, right? Yeah. In the 3000 series. So, yeah. Pretty early. And he's a really cool guy. We got to hang out with him out at Maker Faire. And so he's going to be on the show next week. Cool. And we will have a thread going on the discussion server. And I think Dave might be excited, more excited than anyone, because even though I think Phillip's now officially resident of the U.S., he is an Aussie. And he does sound like Dave.

Dave Jones: Awesome.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, no, we've had, oh, I'm sorry. We've had. He went to the dark side.

Dave Jones: He's actually a U.S. citizen. I think so. He's been here a long time. He's been here a long time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, man. Fail.

Chris Gammell: Australian Transplant into Silicon Valley. So, he's, yeah. So, he's got his own projects going on now, too. He can tell us all about the history. We'll have a discussion thread going on the discussion server. People should just leave questions about that stuff. So, is he still working there or doing that stuff? Oh, yeah, yeah. He's full go. He'll tell us about his current projects and stuff.

Dave Jones: Or part of the furniture, is he?

Chris Gammell: What?

Dave Jones: He's part of the furniture. It means he's been there a long time, you know.

Chris Gammell: Oh. So, yeah. He's been around. He's done some cool stuff. So, he's going to be a good guest. Awesome. Yeah. All right. Check out the discussion server if you haven't already. It's awesome. Dave's tried it out once now. He loves it. Yeah. All right. We'll see you next week.

Dave Jones: Bye. Bye.

Dave Jones: Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. !