#11 – Ardui...no Dave This Week?

Dave Jones: Hi, welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. Okay, not really. This is Chris Gammell from Chris Gammell's Analog Life, and Dave is sick. And so today we have a special guest, Jeff Kaiser from Mighty Home. How are you doing, Jeff?

Chris Gammell: Pretty good. Hello, everybody. It's good to be here.

Dave Jones: Yeah, thanks for coming on, man. So Dave's sick, and so Jeff decided that he would be nice enough to fill in for him. And it, of course, had Dave's blessing. And so we're going to talk electronics. And if you don't know about Jeff's site, it's actually a really great site. I mean, you have stuff spanning all of microelectronics and even analog stuff, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I've been working on the site for about two years now, I guess. And it's pretty much just anything that I think is interesting. So you get, like, the full range of the spectrum. I don't know. I've got all sorts of projects on there for people that want to check them out. Just go to MightyHome.com, and you can look at the blog. And there's, I don't know, there's all sorts of stuff on there. I don't know. I could say what the most popular projects I've done are. Yeah, I was thinking about that. That's one of the routers, right? Yeah, the one that I became, like, pseudo-internet famous for was I did a Wi-Fi radio project. And that was early last year, I guess, I came out with that. And I basically took a wireless router, a really inexpensive one that had USB, and I turned it into a Wi-Fi radio that would play Shoutcast MP3 streaming audio.

Dave Jones: Yeah, people could stream the amp hour to, like, their bathrooms or something with that.

Chris Gammell: If you had a Shoutcast stream, they could. Oh, that's why they don't. Yeah, it's got to be a live stream. Oh. But I did this project kind of on a whim because at the time I did it, it was still pretty expensive to buy one. It was, you know, $150 or $200 to get a Wi-Fi radio. And it just kind of took off. And the project has such a life of its own that even now people are always asking me questions. They get stuck. You know, they need help. And so I created this project that kind of became much, much bigger than I ever thought it could have.

Dave Jones: Well, that kind of sounds like most of the open hardware movement that you're pretty involved in. I mean, you kind of have it as designed at the beginning. You have a tutorial and then it just kind of takes off and goes crazy, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you lose control of your inventions or your... Well, that's a good thing, though, too. I mean... No, it's fun. It's fun. It definitely makes it rewarding because anytime anybody shows that they care about something that you've done, that you've put a lot of your own self into, I think that's probably one of the most rewarding things that you can have.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, and speaking of caring, we actually have been averaging 1,000 plus listeners on a couple of our shows now. We're not averaging, but I guess that'd be cumulative. So I just want to give a big shout out to everyone out there listening. I mean, I know Dave's not here, but he's very appreciative as well. That's amazing. I mean, the 1,000 people. You know, at first I was looking at some of Dave's show. I mean, like Dave's show has probably got about 5,000 regular watchers. But you think about 1,000 people, you get 1,000 people in a room. That's a lot of people, man. So I'm very humbled, and thanks a lot for listening to everybody out there.

Chris Gammell: Well, I guarantee after this episode it'll drop to, you know, 350. I know. Where's Dave, right? Where's Dave? Where's Dave? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, he's actually... So he's going to be in the U.S. next week. That was another thing I was going to mention. He's going to be in the U.S. for a conference. And so that was another reason he's saving his voice for this week. And so hopefully we'll hear from him next week, maybe from the U.S., maybe not. Maybe we'll have to get Jeff back or someone else back here. So hopefully if... Well, this will be Jeff's tryout right now.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think I was the only person that responded with such short notice, right? That's true, too.

Dave Jones: Well, availability puts you at the top of the list. So yeah, we very much appreciate it.

Chris Gammell: Well, I'm very flattered to be on this show.

Dave Jones: Yeah, so Jeff, is there anything else you want listeners to know about you if they don't know anything about you yet? I mean, I'm sure a lot have visited your site and such.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, well, I guess I should probably say that I'm an electrical engineer. And I've actually got a couple degrees in electrical engineering. And I've actually been practicing engineering for almost a decade now, I guess, which to me is a long time. Yeah. I know that in terms of Dave's experience, it's not very much. But I basically started out in RF engineering, designing RF power amplifiers. So I'd like to give a shout out to all the RF guys that are listening. Right. They have a special place in my heart.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I mean, on here before, we've even said that the hams of the world are the analog badasses of the world. I mean, I do analog and they blow my mind every time I see stuff for hands.

Chris Gammell: So I always felt whenever I was in school that if I did the analog stuff, I would be a badass. And I don't know if I totally agree with that now looking back. But I do know that if you were a little bit undecided about engineering and you're in a university, you usually do not choose to do the analog courses. And so by the time I was doing all the advanced analog IC design and all that CMOS design, you were like with the cream of the crop. Like it was the most fanatical, most hardcore people.

Dave Jones: The ones that really stuck it out and were crazy about it.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah. Because they really wanted to be there. There was nobody that did it because they just wanted to get a degree. It was all people that were really, really into it. And that was actually pretty cool. It's definitely some of my most favorite classes and experiences were because I did the analog stuff.

Dave Jones: That's great. Well, I mean, you do a lot of AVR stuff now too. So it's good that you have a range of experience.

Chris Gammell: So I actually, in 2008, I got fed up with doing analog RF design and decided that I wanted to try something completely different. And I can go on and on about that, but that's something else entirely. And so I decided I wanted to do some embedded systems work. And so I basically left where I was and started looking around. And pretty soon I actually found an opportunity doing AVR C programming and also printed circuit board layout, which is something I'd always wanted to do. And so since then I've been doing kind of a little bit of everything. And it's actually been really cool because there's very few people doing PCB design and doing embedded systems that actually have a really good RF analog background. And so that kind of makes me a little bit... Ooh, hot commodity. There you go. I'm too modest to say that, but it definitely helps whenever you're looking at a layout to say, oh, yeah, that trace probably shouldn't be right next to the other trace.

Dave Jones: That looks like an antenna.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So it's been a lot of fun.

Dave Jones: That's great, man. That sounds like a really good background. And I mean, your work speaks for itself. So it sounds good, man. So another thing I wanted to point out before we move on is another shout out we had. William, who runs hackersworkbench.co.cc. And I actually asked him if he was part of the Cocos Island because actually a lot of our listeners come from Australia because they jumped over from Dave's show. And I was thinking, oh, maybe this guy's from the Cocos Islands. It turns out that the .cc is just a domain that got generalized. But he has a hacker page. And so he put the Amp Hour logo on there. And we always give shout outs for that. So thank you very much, William. And anyone else that wants to put the Amp Hour logo on the page, just go to theamphour.com and slash link here. And you should see the logo and you'll be able to put it on your page.

Chris Gammell: I'll definitely be putting it on my page. All right. That's another one.

Dave Jones: Looks like Jeff is coming back next week, at least in the form of a shout out. Yeah. So and then one last thing in terms of shout outs. So John from Tronic Stuff, and we've mentioned John on here before. He actually sent me a copy of Silicon Ship. Have you ever read that magazine, Jeff?

Chris Gammell: No, I have not. But it I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead. I have never seen it before.

Dave Jones: I hadn't either. And apparently me and Dave were talking about it last time on here. And Dave was saying it's an electronics magazine in Australia. And it's the last one. And I'm thinking, OK, it's like an E.E. Times or an EDN, whatever. And I get this from John. He sends me a digital copy. And I open it up. And I'm like, it was like, you know, like you hear the angels sing. It's like, oh. And it's just all circuit ideas. The whole thing is just like brilliant projects and circuit ideas. And like I had never seen that before. So I didn't know if that actually exists in the U.S. anymore. Even, you know, the rest of Europe or anywhere else. I had never seen a magazine like this before.

Chris Gammell: You know what it reminds me of is Elector. Have you ever seen Elector before? I haven't, no. Yeah, I think you would like Elector. It's primarily a European magazine. But there is a U.S. distribution center or a U.S. version of it, which has basically all of the same articles, except everything is in English, no matter, you know, what it originally was in. And it also has U.S. ads. So all the ads are localized for the United States. But I think you would enjoy it because that, to me, it sounds like that's the same thing. It's all projects, more so than Nuts and Volts and more so than Make Magazine. Elector is a very hardcore circuit design magazine, project magazine. That's great.

Dave Jones: I'm definitely going to check that out. And we'll be sure to link that into the page for this one, too. So if you're listening through, you know, podcast readers or whatever or, you know, feed readers, be sure to click through to the page. Yeah, so that's great. You know, I was very impressed by that. And if anybody else knows of another magazine like that, I'm going to definitely check out Elector. But, you know, please leave that in the comments so everybody can see it. I was, it was awesome. So thank you to John. And, yeah, awesome.

Chris Gammell: I'll definitely check that out. It looks like it's pretty neat. I'll look at their site. Yeah. It's probably pretty hard to get it out here unless somebody sends it, though, right?

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, this was the, it was the final, like, printed copy. It was, like, it's effectively a scanned copy. Ah, okay. Don't tell anybody. And I think you can get that. You can order it. And, you know, I'd actually consider ordering it. You know, like, you know how, like, you get, like, a, you know, tech magazine, and usually it's all ads. So that's how you usually get it. But, in this case, I would consider ordering it. So pretty awesome. And so that was another thing we were going to talk about, actually. Basically, the U.S. magazines, or at least the ones I knew about, and Jeff, you said the ones we talked before the show, they're getting crazy. I mean, like, the way that they're recording, or the way that they're recording, the way that they're publishing these magazines now are, they're basically sales pitches. Each of the articles, quote-unquote, are now just white papers or sales pitches from marketing people.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I completely agree. I feel like most of the trade magazines that I receive, and especially the ones that are always pushing free subscriptions, the quality of the articles, and I don't really want to make enemies, but I think they're just crap. I mean, like, I think that you're getting at, you know, all the articles are actually thinly veiled advertisements, usually. Maybe even not so thinly veiled. They're just advertising.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I think they call them advertorials or something like that. There's actually like a term for them.

Chris Gammell: That's a terrible, terrible word.

Speaker ?: I know.

Chris Gammell: I know. That's just wrong. I think, like, I won't even name them, but I probably get at least three, maybe five trade publications that are like e-times, but much worse in terms of content to advertising. And a lot of them, they just come in the mail, and I toss them directly into the trash or the recycle bin, and whenever they call back to renew the free subscription, I usually just tell them no. You know, it's great. Yeah, I appreciate that you were sending it, but honestly, you know, it's just going to go right in the trash. It's going to go straight into the landfill or the recycling center, and it's just not good for the environment, and I'm not actually getting anything out of it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, and that's part of the Jones diminishing blog law that we've talked about on here before, basically. And actually, I sent Dave a thing about that today, or yesterday, rather, about there was a – oh, shoot, I didn't have it up here. There was an article in BBC News about social media, and it kind of – it almost, like, spoke directly to that about this company that they had two things. They had a printed magazine, and they had a Twitter campaign. And the printed magazine had about 2.2 million subscribers, and then the Twitter campaign had 15,000 followers. And they had the exact same response based on those two numbers for this contest. And it's like, well, where the hell is all that paper going? Like, really? That's – I mean, they just don't – I think they don't understand – I mean, or maybe they do understand where it's going. And that was kind of what Dave was saying is that there's a factor of 10 or a decade difference of, you know, people that read it and people that care about it. And then the people that care about it, there's even a fewer number that go online and participate.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and I think often – and I don't know this for a fact, but I believe that sometimes their advertising revenue is based on readership. And I think sometimes readership is just considered publications mailed. Yeah. So it doesn't matter if anyone's actually reading them. I know that some papers in San Francisco where I used to live, they live on that. They just kind of letter bomb people and just give them magazines or newspapers whether they want it or not. And that's how they get their advertising dollars. So it's not good. I'm not a fan at all. I don't appreciate getting the junk mail. It's just totally worthless in my opinion.

Dave Jones: Well, it's – and, you know, it's like – you know, we talk about these magazines. And some of them are – it's like you feel bad almost because it's like they're kind of playing the game and then the advertisers are playing the game too. And it's almost you have to hold the advertisers or the vendors that are paying these people accountable too because they're the ones that are – you know they know that this isn't actually happening for real because they're only seeing so much. I guess.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I guess I just don't understand why they don't stop. But it must be really, really cheap, you know, relatively speaking, to just spam everybody instead of doing targeted advertising. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, that's not our realm. But, you know, getting back to the actual content in the magazines too, it's like I think one of the problems is that in the downturn we saw a lot of places that we – you know, like don't get me wrong. I mean like the EDNs and the ETE Times of the world, like they had some great people throughout the years contributing articles.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, absolutely. And I think – Absolutely. I mean I've read any of Bob Pease's articles and, you know, I seek out that stuff.

Dave Jones: Right, exactly. And like Jack Ansell at Embedded.com and ETE Times sometimes. I mean like these are like the big names that you kind of follow a lot and that's – like you said, it's who you seek out. But the thing is that they don't have any money right now and that's kind of the – I don't know if it's the gamble law and I know it's not. Like if you look at – like you can actually tell how good the economy is doing based on how thick these magazines are and I think we might have mentioned that on this show before. But, you know, if it's a really thin magazine, you know that you're probably not doing well economically in terms of the entire economy. So – but if you start getting these really thick advertising dollars laid in magazines, then they're also going to be paying writers and so that's when you start seeing some more content. So for now I guess we just keep throwing them in the trash and hope they stop sending them.

Speaker ?: But –

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. I think that maybe it's important to let them know that their content is not interesting to – you know. If it's something that – probably very few people, I'm particularly guilty of this, are actually giving them feedback that their content is not what I want in a magazine or in their magazine. And so instead of just throwing it in the trash, I always tell the guys that solicit the free subscriptions exactly why I don't want the magazine. That probably doesn't actually go through either. But, you know, if somebody were to start maybe responding and saying, you know, this is not – this is not cool. You know, I guess maybe I'm too much of an optimist, but you'd hope that maybe they would do something about it.

Dave Jones: Well, that sounds like – I mean, in terms of like actual effect that social media could ever have, that seems like one of the places that you could do it. You know, like if you say that kind of stuff on Twitter or, I mean, God forbid, a radio show on the internet. You know, like if there is anyone listening. Yeah, that's true.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's true. And I've found that if you criticize certain companies, especially companies that are on Twitter, they will tend to know or notice that this is happening. And one good example of that is I know that DigiKey reads Twitter. And DigiKey, if you make a remark about DigiKey, like why don't you do this, they'll respond. And I'm actually – I've been pleasantly surprised. It seems like they've got somebody who as a – you know, not full-time maybe, but as a portion of their job is to monitor the tweets that incorporate DigiKey's name. And that's really encouraging to actually have somebody who cares about that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, and that's actually what that BBC article was talking about as well. Basically, that is the new standard. That is the new customer service. So, you know, there's a – I wrote an article recently about E or for E Times, speaking about bad writers for tech magazines. But, you know, I was at a conference. I went to a thing on social media. And a lot of people still don't like it. But in terms of like being able to get heard by big corporations and maybe actually being able to enact some small change, that might be one of the few benefits for the mass population. Now, if everybody starts doing it, maybe it won't be as big a deal. But in terms of like if every customer starts doing it. Now, if every company starts listening to that kind of thing because it is so destructive when it goes the wrong way, like when United's – when that guitar guy had his – or when that guy had his guitar broken. Yeah, right, right. I think they're looking at the worst possible case right now and a lot more of them are monitoring it. And so if you haven't done Twitter, I'm not saying you have to, but I'm just saying if you want someone to shout at, that's the way to do it probably right now. So that's kind of interesting, I thought. So, yeah. What else are we talking about today? I think we were going to talk about the Arduino Uno, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I figured I should probably talk about things that I actually know about. I don't know if that's ever stopped you guys before.

Dave Jones: That's better than being Dave. I was going to say that. That's better than being Dave.

Chris Gammell: No, no. I actually – I have kind of an interesting perspective on the Arduino Uno because I actually got a board this week. I ordered one as soon as they came out. Okay. And it took a few days for it to get here. But I finally got it, I think, on Friday or Saturday, and I finally opened it up on Monday of this week. So I've actually got an Arduino Uno in my hands. And then I've actually started playing with it, and it's pretty cool. Okay. So – I'm actually very impressed by the new board. And I don't know if everyone's familiar with Arduino, but I assume that most people probably are. It's hard not to know what Arduino is these days.

Dave Jones: Right. So maybe if you just run over the changes, that would probably be a very good, useful thing. And maybe give the perspective of the old one, too.

Chris Gammell: So the Arduino is a platform for doing embedded systems at kind of a very accessible level. So making lights blink and solenoids turn on and off. And people have used it in physical computing. Like, I don't know, if you want to make a stage prop or you want to make a prototype of a product and you don't want to invest in actually making a custom printed circuit board or a custom embedded system, you can use the Arduino kind of as a springboard. And so it's kind of a – it's an easy way to jump into doing embedded systems. It's an embedded system that doesn't really call itself an embedded system. Right, right. And so the Arduino Uno is the latest release of the hardware, which looks pretty much the same as Arduinos have looked for years now. And it was debuted at the open source hardware.

Dave Jones: Yay!

Chris Gammell: So I think you were actually there, right? I was there. You actually got to see – I missed the session where it was debuted. I had to catch a flight, unfortunately. Oh, that's too bad. Well, I watched it on Ustream, and I actually saw part of a talk that they did where they kind of introduced the hardware. They were also – they were all over in the open source hardware community. They did a – there's – Tom Igo was on Adafruits, Ask an Engineer, answering questions about the Uno. But basically, they made a really big deal about it. And it's kind of the first Arduino that has like kind of branding, I guess. It's got like a logo now, and it's got – the printed circuit board on the back has this fancy logo. And it still, of course, says Made in Italy, and it's got all this open source blah, blah, blah stuff on it. But it's – I think that they feel like this is a major improvement over the existing platform. Okay. So if you look at it – so you ask yourself, so what's actually different about the Arduino Uno?

Dave Jones: It's different, right? Because they keep – they continually update the IDE, the Java-based IDE, right?

Chris Gammell: That's right. But, I mean, admittedly, those changes have been very minor. They keep talking about 1.0 of the IDE that's going to come out. Okay. And so I assume that there will be some more radical changes to that. But for now, we just have the 1.0 of the hardware, I guess, which is the Uno. I guess it makes sense that it's called that. But so what are the changes between this and the previous – the Dumilinove? I mean, one of the reasons they changed it is nobody can say that correctly, right? Italian is not an easy language. So I have to say that having looked at the Uno, overall, the hardware has not changed very much. Interesting. Okay. It is really, really similar to the previous – I mean, it still uses an Atmega 328 microcontroller. That's right.

Dave Jones: I would have figured they would have changed that around, maybe changed it just a little bit just for the –

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: Because I heard about the part shortages they see everywhere.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess – so, no, they didn't. And from kind of a black box perspective, it's exactly the same. The hardware, the I.O., the voltage input, it has the USB connection. It's got the, I guess, 9-volt or whatever it is, DC input that you can use. I mean, if you looked at this board from a couple feet away, you probably wouldn't even know that it's different than the Arduino has been for the past couple years. However, there are a couple – maybe a minor change and a major change.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: The minor change is that the components are almost completely different, except for the Atmega and the USB connector and a couple other things. They've moved to 06, 03 components pretty much everywhere. And they've also moved to these resistor packs instead of discrete resistors. So, if you look at it from a component perspective, I think that they're trying to reduce cost. Okay. And I think they're trying to make manufacturing a little bit easier as well. Did you just –

Dave Jones: If you just – Give some background on what it was before. So, was it all through-hole before?

Chris Gammell: No, it wasn't. It was mostly 0805s and discrete resistors, capacitors, LEDs. The old version had a few through-hole parts, and the new version actually does, too. It's not completely surface mount, but it's mostly surface mount. And so, now, instead of 0805s everywhere, you've got 0603s, and you have – where they've taken individual resistors, and they've merged them into these little kind of rectangular resistor packs, which are pretty cool. But the only reason I could think that you would want to do that would be to minimize cost, both in terms of the component cost, as well as if you're talking about, like, pick and place, and the cost of the pick and place is related to the number of components.

Dave Jones: Right, because more parts would be more time spent. That's right.

Chris Gammell: So, the new board has quite a bit fewer parts. It actually looks very simple if you look at it. And you can actually see images of the board if you go to the arduino.cc site and click on hardware. And it's a pretty neat design. So, I was talking about minor changes. Well, the major change is that the new Uno has, instead of the ubiquitous FTDI RS-232 converter, it's got an AVR microcontroller. Huh. So, instead of using a proprietary USB-to-serial IC, which kind of everybody's got some experience with, those FTDI chips are really, really common. Yeah. They've instead decided to use an AVR, and it's actually an Atmega 8U2 microcontroller.

Dave Jones: Okay. So, does it boot up with, so now this is taking, it's doing the same function where you have some kind of USB talking to a USB, I guess that would be host? It would be talking to the host. It's acting as device, right? That's right. It's acting as a USB device. Okay. And then it's converting that into a serial stream with RS-232 protocol.

Chris Gammell: It's RS-232 signaling, but TTL levels, just like the old Arduino. That's what interfaces with the brain of the Arduino, which is the Atmega 328 dip, the big chip that's on the bottom of the border. And so, they've essentially taken a proprietary USB-to-serial IC, and they've replaced it with something which is an AVR, which is actually running an open-source USB-to-serial stack.

Dave Jones: And so, is it an Artox? Or is that a, Artox being, for listeners out there, a real-time operating system?

Chris Gammell: It's running something called LUFA, L-U-F-A. And I can't remember what LUFA stands for. I think it's Lightweight USB Framework for AVRs. I don't know. I think I get a dollar if that's correct. Or a popsicle. I probably, oh, thank you. I probably butchered it. But basically, what this is, is it's a USB stack written by Dean Camera, who's an, I think he's an Australian, actually. And so, this stack has been around for a little while, but this is the first time that I've ever seen it used in, that I know of, in something this large scale. And so, now you've got, instead of this proprietary chip that you can't poke around in, you have an actual AVR microcontroller running an open-source USB-to-serial stack that you can actually, you can download code for, which is really, really cool. And so, they've actually gone so far as there's an ISP header on the UNO where you could potentially change the firmware that's running on that AVR.

Dave Jones: So, eventually, you could switch it over to Ethernet or USB 2.0 or whatever else you wanted to do, really, right?

Chris Gammell: The examples that the Arduino team give are making the Arduino emulate a mouse or maybe a MIDI device or a keyboard. USB has a few device classes which are fairly easy to implement, and Lufa supports maybe a dozen, at least, including USB to audio, et cetera, et cetera. Interesting. And so, it's conceivable that you could take the Arduino Uno, reprogram the AVR chip that's attached to the USB port, and make it look like something completely different, like a mouse that responds to some kind of external inputs.

Dave Jones: So, tell me, if that happens, so say you have an Arduino Uno, and you program the AT-Mega, sorry, the AVR, the 328, sorry, the ATML 328, right? That's right. And you program that through the USB, through this AVR chip that's now emulating the USB to serial functionality. And then you have your program running on your 328, and then you reprogram it. Would you ever be able to program the 328 again, or would you have to take that off and use like a ROM burner kind of thing?

Chris Gammell: Well, the most direct way would be to use the ISP port on the 328. So, unless you left some kind of functionality in there where you could somehow maintain the USB to serial function or revert back to it somehow, I don't know how you do it. Yeah, exactly. You would have to hook an AVR programmer like the USB Tiny up to the 6-pin port that's next to the 328 and use that to flash it back. But, I mean, my feeling is that if you're at the level where you're flashing USB programs, that's probably not an issue for you. You've already kind of accomplished that. But, I mean, you have to use that to program the AVR, the USB controller anyway, unless you use Atmel's, I think it's called DFU. There's a bootloader where you can actually send programs to the AVR over the USB port. So, you've got a couple different options for getting programs on. But, again, if you're at that level where you're hacking your Arduino into a mouse, you probably can handle sticking the programmer on and reflashing the 328 manually.

Dave Jones: That's like the equivalent of, like, if the USB to serial is your training wheels, if you're at the point where you're programming it, you're taking those training wheels off and you're using them as nunchucks, basically. That's basically the equivalent, right? I mean, like, yeah. Yeah. Very advanced users in terms of Arduino because that stuff is all there to get you started. I was just, I just actually just started, I have a sitting here, I just started reading, Massimo Banzi's Getting Started with Arduino book. Oh, cool. Yeah. And so, you know, there's a lot of actually, like, inspirational stuff in here, too. And it's interesting, you know, reading this stuff, it's actually a much higher level view of how to get started in electronics and why he started with this stuff. So, it's interesting from a historical view. And then he kind of gets down into the, you know, how to actually start using the Arduino itself.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. Yeah. I actually have that book and I, there's a forward in it, I think, or one of the beginning chapters that talks about tinkering. Yes. And the way he wrote it, it's been so long since I read it now that I can't remember exactly what he said, but I thought it was very inspirational.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, it's actually a cool, it's a cool read. And it's good for people that are fairly new to electronics or new to the Arduino. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. And I'll definitely put the link on the website, too. If you've never, if our listeners have never read it, it's definitely a good book. And it's interesting because he did, you know, was one of the founders. So, and he talked at the Open Hardware Convention as well. So, at the Summit, rather. Okay. So, speaking of books and Arduino and microcontrollers, why don't you tell us a little bit about your upcoming project? I know you said it might be a ways off still, but...

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe we should wait on that for a second because there's a couple other things that I wanted to talk to you about the Uno. Okay. Wow. So, maybe before, yeah. This is all Uno all the time. That's right. On this episode of the Amp Hour. So, there's a couple things that I wanted to point out. And the first thing is that all this USB hacking, for anybody that's interested in hacking USB and AVRs and open source USB stacks, I have noticed through talking to people and through Twitter that there are a lot of people who I think were inspired by the use of the AVR for the USB to serial on the Uno, who are now working on boards and software that make use of the Atmega 8U2 family of microcontrollers and doing USB projects. And so, I actually see an interesting opportunity here because, like the Arduino, if a bunch of people start and decide on sort of the same hardware for doing USB experiments and everyone starts working on boards that are very similar, the code that they write will probably run on multiple people's boards. Like, it won't just be a one-off thing. Right. But you may actually be able to develop a code base that works on a variety of hardware that all use the same microcontroller. Wow. And so, what I see happening here is I see the Atmega 8U2 and also its big brothers, like the 16U2 and the 32U2, becoming like the platform for USB experimentation with the AVR. Interesting. And so, I've seen just in the past two weeks, I've seen two designs, and I'm not going to plug myself, but I'm working on one too. Uh-huh. So, I've seen, that's a total of three designs now, just in the past two weeks, since the UNO's announcement, where people are building breakout boards and boards to play around with just the AVR that's doing the USB.

Dave Jones: So, tell me, is the Atmega 8U2, is that a more powerful chip than the 328? Because I thought the Mega had a larger memory space and RAM and everything.

Chris Gammell: The Megas are the more powerful parts. So, it's actually very, very similar. Okay. The 8 and the 8U2 is the amount of flash. So, unfortunately, the 8U2 only has eight kilobytes of flash memory. So, compared to the 328, that's not particularly good. But there is a version called the 32U2 that actually has 32K. Okay. The Atmega 8U2 and its big brothers are not as powerful as the 328 because they don't have as many A to D converters and they don't have as fancy of a peripheral set. But they do come with a USB transceiver built in and that's something that the 328 definitely doesn't have. So, it's different. It's not quite the same thing. I mean, just like microchip, AVR has a zillion parts and they all have different versions with different peripherals and it's really confusing to try to understand what the differences are between the parts. But my thought is that just because the Uno is using the 8U2, it's worth looking at because you know that it's going to be around for a while and that people are going to start playing with it just because it's on the Uno. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's really interesting because it's almost like they're building an ad hoc dual core. It's not actually dual core, but there are two legitimate processors on there now. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's right. And in an interview, I think it was on Adafruit's Ask an Engineer. I can't remember who was saying it, but they didn't bring out all the IO to the 8U2 because they were worried that having two independent microprocessors would be confusing because then people wouldn't know, oh, well, pin three on the 8U2 or pin three on the 328. And so they actually chose to restrict the access to the 8U2's IO ports, which I find disappointing just from my perspective as a kind of a hardware hacker. It's kind of annoying that they didn't bring all the IO out. But I can understand what they're trying to do. They're trying to keep the Uno similar to the hardware that already existed. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, that backwards compatibility is always a stinker. Yeah. I deal with that. It works sometimes, but it's...

Chris Gammell: The worst one is the pin spacing on the digital ports is still not a standard 0.1 inch spacing. Oh. And they chose not to fix that on the Uno, which I give them credit.

Dave Jones: Every shield then is just busted. That's right. Then you have automatically V1 for the old, you know, compatible with the old one, compatible with the new one.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah. I don't blame them, but you were talking about reverse compatibility and how that can somehow... Sometimes that can kind of hold you back. And I think that's... In this case, it definitely was a factor in the design. So I just think it's going to be interesting to see what USB designs come out based around this micro. And I'll definitely be looking around to see what's available just because I'm working on some hardware based around it just to play around. And I think a lot of other people are too. So there was one other thing I wanted to talk about. Okay. As if people were not tired of the Uno yet. And that is... And this hopefully will be pretty quick. There seems to be a bit of controversy right now surrounding... Yeah. So this is something I was going to talk about too.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Well, why don't you go ahead then? I'll let you talk about it.

Dave Jones: Oh, I hate to upstage you there, but... No, go ahead. Well, basically, I had been seeing it on Twitter. So independently of before asking Jeff to do the show when we found out Dave was sick, you know, on Twitter, I've been watching and seeing people's reactions. And Jeff was actually one of them. But just kind of back and forth. Oh, did you see some process issues? Yeah, I saw some process issues. You know, what's going on here? What's wrong with your board? And so, Jeff, you actually wrote a post about it, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And this started because there were some things flying around on the web and on Twitter about quality issues with the Uno, with the Arduino Uno. And I really didn't make much of it because the original post, and we can post a link on the site, there was a guy and he was complaining that the finish wasn't as good, that there was flux residue, the solder mask was too thin, there were headers that were installed a little bit crooked, things like that. And so whenever I took my Uno out of the box this week, you know, I looked at it. I looked at it closely just to see, you know, how does my board look? Does it look like it was produced well? Are there any issues? And it's within five seconds of looking at the board, I noticed that one of the resistors, and this is actually resistor R1 that sits directly below the crystal that powers that 8U2 microcontroller, was actually tombstoned. And so tombstoning is where, yeah, tombstoning is where during the reflow process, one pad of the resistor or one terminal of the resistor lifts up because the resistor kind of gets sucked upwards by the other pad. Yeah, the surface tension. One land pad will, exactly, the surface tension on one land pad will cause the resistor to lift up on the other one. And so I looked at it, and I could see that something was wrong. And so, you know, they sent this board to like the wrong person because I just happened to have a stereo microscope. And so I took a couple photos with the microscope, and you can actually see that the left terminal, the resistor, is not actually making contact at all with the land pad. And the amazing thing about it is that the UNO still works fine, even with the resistor not connected.

Dave Jones: So what was the function of it initially?

Chris Gammell: The resistor is a parallel resistor across the crystal. And in talking with a few people that know more about this than I do, apparently some crystal oscillator circuits on microcontrollers need to have a bias resistor in order for the oscillator to function. And it seems like the AVR does not, although it's possible that they added the resistor there to improve like high frequency noise or some kind of like an EMI or RFI issue, because I know that these boards were FCC tested. So it's possible that they had to add this to pass FCC and get whatever certification they were going for. But it turns out it's not strictly necessary. And so that's why it worked fine whenever I plugged it in. And I also speculate that's why they shipped it was because their electrical testing didn't uncover that there was a problem because they turned on the board and it, you know, it worked just fine. It powered up and everything seemed okay. And so I just thought it was interesting that people are talking about quality issues with the Arduino. And, you know, there we go. I got one that had a problem with it. Um, and so, uh, you know, I, I wasn't really upset, um, because I saw the problem. It was an easy fix. I fixed it in about, you know, five minutes because I've got all the equipment to do that here. Um, but I, I actually want to point out that, um, I sent an email to both, uh, uh, my, my reseller where I bought the board as well as the Arduino team. And they have been super, super, super helpful. Uh, they, they instantly offered me a replacement board. They said, you know, we're really sorry. We, we apologize for this happening. And, and so I actually talked to one of their, um, the guys on the Arduino team today and said, you know, Hey, what are you guys doing to try to avoid this happening again in the future? You know, to make sure that other people don't get boards that have, you know, components missing. And apparently, uh, the Arduino team is investing in a visual inspection system, like an automated visual inspection system so that as boards come through their manufacturing line, um, they'll actually be inspected by a machine to make sure that no components are, are misplaced. Interesting. So I thought that was really cool because it means that they're actually in touch with the situation. They're not denying that this is an issue and they're actually investing in their manufacturing line. So I was, I was very impressed by that. That's great. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Owning up to that kind of thing, you don't see that as much anymore, but it seems like they're very down with the community. So that's, that's very good. And you, I mean, you had posted a link here too, about, they posted an article called one, one bad Arduino doesn't spoil the barrel, but you know, yeah, they did. And that's, if you have customers screaming, you're going to, you got to deal with it either way. So it's, that's good that they're doing it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Their, their claim is that the, the number of bad boards is a very small percentage of the, the total produced. And I think I believe them. Um, I think I was just unlucky, you know, I, I just happened to get a bad board and so did some other people that were very vocal about it. Yeah. Um, but I, I mean, obviously they're, they're making a lot of these things and if they haven't fixed the bugs now, they, they will have to do it real soon because they're going to have a lot of people that are unhappy. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, that is interesting. And we'll have, we'll have to keep an eye on that in the future. Uh, looks like there's much more to come obviously with that. And, and it seems like a lot of, a lot of, uh, manufacturers, a lot of small, you know, the smaller manufacturers at the open hard work, uh, summit, a lot of them were talking, you know, Chris Anderson from do it yourself drones. And he's a editor at wired. He, he was mentioning that he, you know, they just bought their second pick in place. So that's, that's an interesting, interesting trend that, you know, you see these small scale manufacturers kind of like all the price pressures from these huge industrial machines that were happening before, uh, now are getting pushed down into these small scale manufacturers and they're actually doing their own stuff. You know, like the, the Adafruits and the DIY drones, the Arduino. I don't, I don't know how big, uh, Arduino is, but.

Chris Gammell: I think Arduino is pretty big. I actually don't know how many Arduino boards they've shipped, but I think it's a very large number. Um, and I think that as, as these small companies, uh, get more into doing manufacturing themselves, um, which, which I actually don't think that Arduino makes their own boards. I think they contract it out. Um, but DIY, they, they don't do their own assembly and they don't do their own PCB manufacturing. Obviously that's all contracted out. Um, but I, I do know that companies like DIY drones are doing their own assembly and Adafruit does their own assembly. Um, you know, you have to realize that corporations spend a huge amount of time and money optimizing their manufacturing processes. I mean, I, I've worked with manufacturing engineers who their entire job is to basically figure out why stuff like this happens, you know, why components don't solder correctly. And there are people who that's their entire career. And so, um, you know, these smaller companies don't have that experience. And so it'll kind of be interesting to see as some of these small guys scale up, whether they run into problems with quality. Um, because I think it can be much harder than people make it out to be. I think if you're making things on a small scale, it's not that bad. You know, you can inspect things and you can rework stuff, but if you're making like thousands or tens of thousands of boards and you have a problem that occurs on some reasonable percentage that can shut you down. I mean, you can't easily recover from that. You've got customers that are waiting for boards and now, you know, your time is worth something. And so you're not actually going to make any money because you're spending all this time doing rework. Um, I think it's interesting. It'll be interesting to see, um, where, where all of that goes.

Dave Jones: Yeah, definitely the scale up, you know, me and Dave talked about the scale up before and, and I've mentioned that I think eventually you're going to start seeing small scale kit makers start eating each other. I still think that's true. I think eventually, you know, these small companies are going to become big companies and I think more small companies will enter the market too. But yeah, definitely the, the growth cycle, you know, it's, it's kind of interesting because I don't, I don't know how many times I obviously when, you know, like when cars are started, you started seeing, you know, companies spring up and, and, and start, start growing. And, and rapid cycles and, and that, that's still a kit, you know, and, and they're at that point today where they're making millions of units and they're doing statistical process control and everything. Right. And that's, that's kind of like what you spoke to where you're not watching each individual unit. You're watching the statistical, you know, some statistical amount of all those units and making sure it's still trends the same way. I used to do that kind of stuff and it's kind of boring to be honest.

Chris Gammell: Uh, yeah, yeah. I, I w I was going to say that, uh, I've worked with those engineers at previous companies that I've worked at and they're not usually, they don't have the greatest jobs. It's not a fascinating thing unless you're fascinated by that stuff. It, it seems pretty boring to me.

Dave Jones: Statistics ends up getting really rough. Uh, but yeah. Anyways, where was I going with that? Basically, oh, you know, we've, we've, you know, there's, there's been companies like that before, you know, if you look at, look at the automobile industry, that all came up and obviously now that's a huge industry and it's relatively stable. You know, you could argue that China is, is entering the scene as, as a huge consumer of it now. So it's scaling even more, but you know, that that's basically scaled. Well, we've never really seen a small scale movement with this amount of, you know, like a lot of the people in the small scale movement are very public. They're very, um, transparent about what they're doing. So that, that's kind of the interesting thing and seeing, seeing all the issues as they bubble up. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it is. It is interesting to be able to watch, uh, completely unaffected by the, the outcome.

Dave Jones: Oh, your boards aren't working. That, that sucks, man. I'm going to grab a sandwich. So yeah, that's right. That's right. I'll buy one when it works.

Chris Gammell: I hope that people learn from each other. And I think that there's a lot of people that are in the same position right now. And then there's companies that have been doing this for a while, like SparkFun. Right. And I hope that people share their, their knowledge of manufacturing because, uh, I think it's going to be required for the open source hardware industry to continue growing. Right. It's going to be knowledge of this, uh, whether you're Arduino or you're SparkFun or you're Adafruit. And, and, and Adafruit in particular is particularly good about sharing information, um, like soldering processes and pick and place machine instructions and, and things like that. Yeah. It's, it's really interesting to, to look at their stuff because it's all out there. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it'll be interesting as well to see, because, because we're seeing more of these tools that are actually doing the work, you know, the pick and place. I'm not, I think the pick and place is still a commercial machine, but you know, we're seeing more entrance in the market of people that are making machines like the, you know, no one, no one's necessarily selling, you know, stuff that's coming off a cupcake maker bot, but we're seeing more people enter the market as, you know, equipment makers. And so that's as that stuff opens up as well too. And there's transparency on the software side of how a vacuum picks up a little tiny part and places that somewhere in its accuracy and everything that kind of adds in there as well with the, the type of equipment that the knowledge about that type of equipment and and how that spreads across all of the companies that use it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm, I'm still waiting for the open source pick and place machine. And I actually think it's going to come. I do too. Yeah. I think we're going to have it eventually. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think right now, the only thing that probably stops it is the economy of scale of, of doing one versus, you know, the, the relatively low cost, because if you're using a pick and place, you probably are making enough money off your kits because of the volume you need to really require a pick and place. You probably are making enough money that it's, you know, you can make that money back relatively simply. So maybe, maybe that economic argument will argue against it and no one will ever decide to jump in. But I'm guessing with this many people looking at, you know, projects and things to do that we'll see a pick and place very soon. So, you know, Jeff Kaiser will come out with a pick and place in 2013. Just, just, you heard it here first.

Chris Gammell: Well, I have to, I have to finish the book first. Okay.

Dave Jones: That's right. Yeah. So, so tell us a little bit about that.

Chris Gammell: And, oh yeah. So, so, so, um, uh, as you mentioned before, um, I'm working on, uh, I'm actually coauthoring a book, uh, with Mitch Altman. And I think you've talked about Mitch before on this show, right?

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. The TV be gone. That's right. The TV be gone.

Chris Gammell: And those, those glasses and, and he's, he's, he's, he's contributed to make magazine. Uh, he's got some interesting products out there that are, they're all kind of fun. Um, and he also travels around the world giving soldering workshops. And so, uh, a lot of people know Mitch because of that. People that are new to electronics. Uh, he's a, he's a really interesting guy. Um, I've known him for, for a little while now. Um, but, uh, we were approached, um, by, uh, publishing company, uh, called No Starch Press, um, which publishes computer books and books about a lot of things actually, no more than just computer books. Um, and so we've been working on a book about programming, uh, AVR microcontrollers. Um, and it's targeted towards hobbyists and beginners. It's not like a, an industry book. It's a, it's a hobby book. Uh, and the book will feature, uh, I think it's 10 or 12 projects, uh, all contributed by Mitch, myself, as well as other people, uh, that wanted to be a part of the book. And so we're basically going to be showing projects and describing how they work. Uh, basically showing people how to compile the code themselves, uh, you know, build the kit and then work on the code, learning, doing C programming, learning AVR microcontrollers, learning, you know, microcontrollers in general. So, and it's, it's targeted towards people who may have never had experience with a soldering iron before. Wow. So that's really awesome. That's, that sounds like that could be the art of electronics of beginning with AVR. Well, I, I don't know about that. The art of electronics is, is, is probably going to be a lot heavier than, than our book. It's like three of our books.

Dave Jones: I'm just hoping that you put that on the inside cover. Chris Gammell says, it's like the art of electronics of the AVR world.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, it, it, I think it's going to be really cool. And I mean, I'm not just saying that because I'm, I'm involved with the project, but I think that, uh, right now there are no good introductory book books for AVRs and particularly for people who are interested in electronics, but don't have a lot of experience with embedded systems. Uh, there's not really a lot out there to, to try to, you know, teach them. And so hopefully this will change that and it'll make it much more accessible, um, for anybody that wants to start, you know, flashing LEDs, but then also doing more sophisticated things. We've got all sorts of projects in the book and they're from contributors who are around the world, not just in, in the United States. That's really great.

Dave Jones: Tell me, is there any, so I, I, another article I wanted to mention, I saw it in the O'Reilly radar, um, newsletter. Is there any focus on, uh, you know, young ladies in electronics at all, or is that kind of left just, just very nondescript in yours?

Chris Gammell: Um, well, I think Mitch teaches all kinds of people, not just, uh, guys, uh, uh, male, you know, engineer types, uh, how to solder. And so, um, I would certainly hope that this book would, would be received well by women that are interested in electronics and, and interested in, in playing with this kind of stuff. Uh, I mean, some of the projects that are in the book are by, uh, Lamore, uh, Freed, uh, AKA, uh, Lady Ada. And so it's, it's not an entirely male dominated, um, uh, scene, uh, as it exists right now, but I was just interested.

Dave Jones: I would certainly hope. Right. So more egalitarian. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's good too. It was interesting. I saw, I guess that was more of a bad segue than anything. I hope people don't think I'm like putting Jeff on the spot here, but the, uh, there was an interesting article by, uh, Benjamin Mako Hill, and it was basically about application, the application side of, of, you know, how, how to bring females into engineering and electronics and stuff like that. And it was interesting because they, they showed the statistics on the, the lily pad, which is another version of the Arduino. Do you have any experience with the, the lily pad at all?

Chris Gammell: I'm familiar with it, but I don't have any experience with it directly.

Dave Jones: So it's, it's basically a, a circular, um, circular PCB, and then it has contacts on the edge, which you can then so conduct a thread into. And basically the article that was really interesting because they called it unlocking the clubhouse and, you know, it kind of refers to like little rascals and, and, and, you know, like no girls allowed kind of thing. But just the, if you look at the application side, so if it's no longer just pure programming, right? If it's more, well, what can I do with this programming? And I'm sure that's very much what your book gets towards is like, what can I really do with this? It's, it, the, the application side is what really can differentiate the difference between, you know, a young lady deciding to enter, um, enter electronics and not. And it's, it's, it's really interesting. You know, me and Dave have talked about it before because there's other campaigns or, you know, schools of thought out there about how, how to get more involvement. And it was like, oh, we'll make it all flat. I don't know if you, did you listen to that one at all, Jeff? Which one? The, we talked about, there was this engineer nerd girls or something like that. It was some ridiculous social media campaign about how to get.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I did. I, I don't know. I don't know what to say about that. Right.

Dave Jones: And so this is, I just wanted to say, you know, in MP3 format, when you're listening that I think this is the way to do it. You know, like application side, you show awesome things you can do with, uh, you know, a simple microcontroller and that's how you get interest. And I'm sure that your book is very similar more in terms of like everybody, you know, projects anyone would want to do.

Chris Gammell: But yeah. And, and a lot of it is about focusing on, um, the results rather than the technical details of getting there. And, and I think that, you know, we're, we're, we've definitely made a conscious decision that we're not going to get bogged down in the technical details. Um, because I think so often, uh, there's a lot of technical content that's really interesting to the person that created the project. And it's really interesting to people who actually want to learn about the technical side, but for somebody that just wants to make something happen or, or just wants to compile some code and, and maybe he doesn't really know exactly what the code is doing, but he knows that if he changes, uh, this particular line to add, you know, a thousand instead of adding 10 to some variable, um, that makes something happen. Right. And I think that that's the way that you get people interested. You know, you don't tell them, oh, well now you have to learn about registers and now this is the data direction register and you have to set this. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think for a beginner book and, and I'm sure that we're going to get flack about that. You know, people are going to say, oh, you're glossing over the details. But, but I think if you don't want to turn people off that are interested in electronics and interested in microcontrollers, try to get them to the place where they're actually doing something and they're having a, there's a, there's an output from their labor where their, their project springs to life and it does something. Try to get that to happen as quickly as possible. You know, don't, don't spend a lot of time in the details until at least you've accomplished that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's, that is, that is exactly. And that, you know, I'm still staring at this book here and that's a lot of what Massimo Bonzi talks about too. It's, it's important to just get it done first, you know, get anything happening. And then eventually you're going to get, you know, if it's a child doing it, then they're going to eventually say, well, what's next? And you say, well, you go, you go figure out what's next, you know? And that's, that's the real power of it. And that's kind of, if you look at it from like a teaching perspective, that's how you do it. You, you, yeah. It's almost like you're inspiring curiosity. You know, people think that curiosity is an innate thing, but it's not necessarily an innate thing. Sometimes it has to be, well, I really like what I'm doing. I want to do more of this. And that's kind of where the curiosity comes from.

Chris Gammell: And I, it's like those, those old, uh, Radio Shack, you know, 101 electronic kits. Yeah. You know, a lot of people start out with those and they just, they follow the directions and they stick the wires and the little spring clips and they follow the little diagram that they have. And, you know, whenever I was a kid, I had no concept of how the circuit actually worked. And I mean, to tell you the truth, there's still some of those circuits that I look at them and it would take me a while to figure out what's actually happening.

Dave Jones: So is the spring doing something or is it just holding it in there?

Chris Gammell: And so I think, you know, for people starting out, it's, you know, focus on, on, on, you know, you follow a simple procedure, you, you build something. And then once it works, you start thinking, well, how does that, how did that do that? You know, what, what happened there? These are just wires and, you know, little resistors and things like that, but somehow, you know, they've come together and they've done some amazing thing. And, and I think that's the key to, especially whenever people are, are at the very early stages. Um, and you know, everybody's different, but I think that that's definitely one way to expose people to electronics in a way that inspires curiosity.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And there's one last thing I, you know, we're almost running out of time here, but one last thing I did want to mention, there's a new program from the, from the federal government and it's called change the equation.org. It's a, I think it's all charity based, but basically it's, it's a focus on how to get, they understand that in terms of, I'm sorry, this has us bias. I'm sorry about that because I always forget that, you know, Dave's usually here to remind me that Chris, there's not only us people and he calls me a dumb American. Uh, so got that in.

Chris Gammell: Well, now we've got, now we have two, we have two dumb Americans actually.

Dave Jones: Two dumb Americans makes a big pile of, uh, self-interest. Anyways, but there is, there is a program about this and you know, there's a lot of places in the world that could use this too, but there's, there's a very big focus on understanding that science, technology, engineering, and math, STEM is so important for like future economic growth and how do you really get kids involved because they point out that, you know, salaries are not going to do it. I, engineering salaries are, are very good at the beginning, but if you look at like life, lifetime earnings, you're probably better off being a doctor or, you know, a CEO, right? So you're, that's never going to do it. And, and personally, I think that's the worst reason ever. So how do you do it? I mean, what we were just talking about, it's, it's, you get people inspired, you show them that they can change, be the masters of their environment and change stuff and make stuff. And, you know, I've seen a lot of stuff from Tim O'Reilly talking about this lately and Dale, uh, Dale Doherty, both of them from O'Reilly publishing, you know, they've been kind of pumping this stuff lately too. And like, it's exciting. It's really exciting to see this stuff and be like, yeah, that's how it's going to happen. This is the answer. So, you know, now we got, yeah, I agree.

Chris Gammell: I agree. I think that make should get that, that converted fire truck of theirs that they've got. And I think they should go on a road trip and I think they should go to college campuses. I think they should go to high schools. I think they should go to elementary schools and, and they should allow kids to have hands on exposure to science and to technology. And, and if it's not make, then, then maybe teachers, it's, you need to have hands on experience and you need to have, uh, you need to bring that wonderment and that kind of that, that just jaw dropping amazement that, that I think that whenever I was first exposed to these things, it was through hands on experience. Like the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco is a great example.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You see, you see children of all ages in there, uh, wrestling with the machines and, and getting hands on with, no, it, I mean, really it's a very physical hands on kind of a place. And I think that that's what inspires people to pursue engineering and science. You know, you see things like that and it changes your life.

Dave Jones: Yep. Exactly. Yeah. We have the Great Lakes Science Center here in Cleveland and I've been there before and it's similar. I, I'm not sure about the Exploratorium, but it, it sounds, it sounds very similar. And I've been to other children's museums. So definitely stuff out there. So if you're a parent listening right now, take your kid there this weekend, make them, make them into an engineer. We turn out. Okay. Just look at me and Jeff. We may, we might be nerds, but we, you know, we talk, we talk on a quasi radio show and, and Dave too, you know, he turned out. Okay. So it looks like that's about all the time we have. I think we're a little bit over actually on the amp hour. Wow. Yeah. That was fast. It does go fast. Doesn't it? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, it definitely, it felt like the amp, a millisecond here. No, there we go. Yeah. The, that didn't feel like 3,600 Coulombs.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Okay. Well, Jeff, thank you so much. And, uh, hopefully.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And thank you very, very much for having me on the show. I, I feel, I feel like I'm not worthy. I feel very privileged, uh, uh, to be a guest and I, I, I don't think that I'll definitely fill Dave's shoes, but hopefully I said something interesting.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And so, yeah, if you haven't been to Jeff's site, remember it's mightyome.com and we'll link it all through the page. But it was good talking to you, Jeff. Yeah. You too, Chris. All right. See you next week. Bye.

Speaker ?: Thank you.