#139 – Google Glass & Adafruit - Obtaining Ostentatious Oculiforms

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast, recorded April 2nd, 2013. Episode 139, Obtaining Ostentatious Aculiforms.

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: Otherwise known as Winner, Christopher J. Gamble. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. You are like going internally berserk. You're that excited.

Chris Gammell: I was. I was. It's been a couple days now.

Dave Jones: Until you realize you've got to pay for it.

Chris Gammell: All right. Well, we should back up first. We should back up. First off, I'm not that lucky. But okay, even further back. You think? Yeah. So I have been chosen as one of the first 8,000 people to be allowed.

Dave Jones: We are not worthy. We are not worthy. We are not worthy.

Chris Gammell: Allowed to go to New York, San Francisco, or LA and hand over $1,500 to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Personally? I hope. That'd be cool.

Dave Jones: Give it to him all in pennies.

Chris Gammell: Oh, God. That's a good idea.

Dave Jones: That'd be hilarious. Yes. That would, seriously, take a video camera launch and give it to them as a bag of freaking pennies. That would go viral.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That video would go viral. I kid you not.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Nerd turns up to Google with bag of pennies to pay for. Seriously. I just thought of that. That is gold. That is worth the plane ticket. And the $1,500.

Chris Gammell: I don't know, man. So $100 in pennies is 60 pounds in pennies. So? So that's times 15.

Dave Jones: Are you a wimpy nerd? You can't lift up 60 pounds?

Chris Gammell: No, no, no, no, no, no. That's 900 pounds, Dave. That's $100 is 60 pounds. $1,500.

Dave Jones: Put in a wheelbarrow or something.

SPEAKER_00: Get the truck to back in, yeah. Yeah, so I'll have to pay.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, do dimes or something instead of pennies, right? That'll drop it by an order of magnitude, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, yeah, at least. Man.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. Probably, I don't know the way of a penny versus a dime. But a dime's tiny, right? Yeah, right. A dime is like the smallest coin you have, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: Right. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, go to your bank and get $1,500 in dimes.

Chris Gammell: Let's see what that would be.

Dave Jones: See if you can do the online calculation now. See if it's viable. I'm telling you, this is gold.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Is your YouTube channel set up to be monetized?

Chris Gammell: Not yet.

Dave Jones: Your partner? Well, they put it on my channel. It'll go viral and I'll cut you in on the proceeds. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What a great deal. I've won another contest, folks.

Chris Gammell: Dave has been willing to take pity on me. It's good enough for Google. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. Yep. I can't find the dimes thing. Shouldn't Wolfram Alpha have this? This seems like something that's, you know, useless.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Come on, Google weight of dime.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, weight of dime times... I was doing like $1,500 in...

Dave Jones: What is the weight of a penny? It's the first shot on Google there. It's the first hit.

Chris Gammell: Ah, this is great radio.

Dave Jones: There you go. It's 2.26 grams.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Wow. Oh, okay. It's 0.9 the mass of a U.S. penny. So that means that 100... So if 60 pounds is $100... Oh, wait. No, that'd be less than two. Yeah, it's roughly an order of magnitude. So it'd be about five...

Dave Jones: It's also 0....

Chris Gammell: $100 would be five pounds, basically. So, yeah, that would be definitely doable. So it'd be... Excellent. 60... 75 pounds.

Dave Jones: Like you carry it in a big, like, Santa sack, you know?

Chris Gammell: Exactly. God, if the bottom broke open, though, that'd be terrible.

Dave Jones: I thought that'd make for an even funnier video. They have to pick it up off the ground, personally. Right, right.

Chris Gammell: I could put it on the Google Glass and spend all day picking up domes.

SPEAKER_00: Oh, man.

Dave Jones: It's also... The weight is also... I've never heard of this term. 0.08... Dramps? Avoid... Avoidrupus. Avoidrupus. What the hell is that? You learn something new on Google every day.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I've never heard of that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, the Avoidrupus. It's on Wikipedia. There we go. It's a systems of weights. There you go. Based on a pound of 16... A pound of 16 ounces. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Word of the day, folks. Just another unit we hope the imperial system will phase out at some point. Like all the others.

Dave Jones: Well, we can put that as the title of the show.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, okay. So, Google Glass. Yep. I have to pay $1,500 to actually get them.

Dave Jones: Plus the airfare to get there.

Chris Gammell: Plus the airfare to get there. Yep.

Dave Jones: So, how much would it cost you to get to where's the nearest location?

Chris Gammell: Probably New York's closest for me. It'll be in a... 200 bucks. And then, you know, food and subway fare. Accommodation to stay overnight. Well, I'll stay with friends, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Plus the money you get... Plus the money you lose when you get mugged in New York... In Central Park.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sorry. Because it's the 80s. It's the 80s that everybody gets... Yeah. 80s. That's right. Ninja Turtles will come save me, Dave. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Turtle power. Yep. All right. Yeah. So, I... Yeah. I don't know. It was very exciting. I mean, so... And then I got interviewed by Chris Mims, who writes for Quartz about it, because he had a similar reaction to you, like, what... What the... What the photon? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Why are you doing this? What is going on here?

Dave Jones: You've got to admit to somebody who...

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I'm confused about it myself. You know, I just didn't... I know. It's like... The only reason you didn't do it is because you forgot to put in a... Entry. You know, it was just a social media thing.

Dave Jones: I didn't even know about it. See? I didn't even know about it. But then again, if I read the rules and conditions, I would have just laughed at it and went, No way.

Chris Gammell: Well, there's nothing saying I have to do it, but I plan to, so...

Dave Jones: No.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: With a Santa sack full of dimes.

Chris Gammell: With a Santa sack full of dimes, of course. Maybe you could fly in. You could meet me there for the first time, and then... Oh. You know.

Dave Jones: And I could film it. Then I could put on my... Hey!

Chris Gammell: There you go.

Dave Jones: You want to know what the ironic thing is? If it went viral...

SPEAKER_00: It would pay for itself.

Dave Jones: The money... The advertising money with that would probably pay for my airfare to go over there. There you go.

SPEAKER_00: There you go.

Dave Jones: I'd probably need like a million views. I'd have to calculate how many views I needed to get enough YouTube advertising revenue on that video. Yeah. It's gold. I'm telling you.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, you said you were jealous, though. I don't know. You said you were...

Dave Jones: Well, I'm... Yeah. I would... Well, I thought you would want it, right? You tweeted this thing. Oh, I have one Google Glass. And I thought, you bastard. Why didn't you tell me about this?

SPEAKER_00: You know?

Dave Jones: And I was... Yeah. I was in a jealous rage, you know? Right. And then I realized, ah, he's got to pay for it. Sucked in. Yeah. There's no way I'd pay $1,500 for it. Well, that's kind of the crazy... $500, maybe.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's kind of the crazy thing, though, too. So, if you do the math, I mean, this is essentially a Google Kickstarter, right? I mean, it's 8,000 people times $1,500. That's a $12 million production run right there. You know? Like, that's...

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's a lot of dough. So, not like Google needs it, but...

Dave Jones: Well, they need it, because they're building them in California.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. That's right. So, that's the other piece of news with this, that they... Not only are they building it, they're planning... Well, news is that they're planning on building it in California, but also that it's Foxconn setting up a facility to do so in California. That's pretty crazy.

Dave Jones: Right. Because Google, as the world's richest company, doesn't have the money to set up their own manufacturing facility.

Chris Gammell: No. That's not the... No, no, no, no. No. No. That's not the news about it. Not to me, at least. I mean, Google, of course they have enough money. They don't have money to do anything. They don't have the expertise.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. And that's what I'm saying. Why don't they? Why don't they get freaking Foxconn? Right? Why don't they do what they sell? Why don't they use some of that cash to set up their own... Right. We're Americans. Yeah! America! USA! USA! And we're going to set up our own manufacturing facility here.

Chris Gammell: Well, because the same reason... Why don't you... Why don't you do your own server work, Dave?

Dave Jones: Because I don't have $100 billion in the bank.

Chris Gammell: Why don't you...

Dave Jones: Why don't you do your own board assembly, Dave? And a team of 100,000 employees.

Chris Gammell: Why don't you make your own PCBs, Dave? I mean, there's... Because I'm one dude. No. This is the... No. Okay. No.

Dave Jones: If I had Google's money, yeah, I'd set up my own PCB manufacturing facility. No, that's such a hassle.

Chris Gammell: Why would you possibly... You wouldn't... There is no way you would do that. Absolutely. Of course I would. No, you wouldn't.

Dave Jones: $100 billion? I would just pay someone. No. I'd hire someone to set it up and manage it and do it. Right. I'd buy my entire building and then on each floor I'd have a different manufacturing facility.

Chris Gammell: That is silly. That is so silly. Why?

Dave Jones: $100 billion who gives a shit?

Chris Gammell: Why wouldn't you just hire the people who already do it already? High volume production. Why don't you just hire experts? Don't you do that for anything else? Didn't you do that when you were...

Dave Jones: Because Australia has no freaking PCB manufacturing facility... Manufacturing capability left. That's why. Okay. So that's just a personal thing. You don't fly.

Chris Gammell: Man, if... Right. Yeah. You don't see like... I mean, even like architect firms, you know? They don't hire just people locally because they hire the best. You hire the best for a reason.

Dave Jones: Dude, we're not talking practicalities here. We're talking about being so filthy rich. You're sitting on a throne of cash that it's just a drop in the ocean and you do it because it's fun and you want to.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And you want to make your...

Chris Gammell: You don't stay filthy rich for long by doing that kind of stuff. That's my viewpoint on it. Yeah. Maybe it is fun. But also, the other thing about that is manufacturing is not fun most days. You know, that's the dirty little secret. No, it's not. That's why you hire some poor bastard to do it. Yeah. Then you're just outsourcing. And why not just outsource it to the experts? I totally disagree with you on this.

Dave Jones: No, but at least you own it. You're not outsourcing. You own it. It's yours. You can just wander down there and say, make me this.

Chris Gammell: You still own it if you're using a CM. You still own it. Believe me. No, you're totally wrong on this. You know, our survey said I have to stand up to you more and I am standing up to you on this one. Right.

Dave Jones: Somebody on there said you're a pussy and your wife's got you on the short leash and you need to stand up and grow a set of balls.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Whatever.

Dave Jones: I'm not wrong. If you had a hundred billion dollars, you could do anything you damn would like. You could hire anyone you like. Dude. No. Wrong.

Chris Gammell: Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Dave Jones: Says someone who never buys lottery tickets for the dream of winning the cash so that you can do something like this.

Chris Gammell: Right. Because I use my money for real stuff like eating. And beer. All right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, dude. I don't know. I think. You've got to spend enough time dreaming. That's your problem.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Maybe. Maybe I. Yeah. Maybe I should. But. I wouldn't spend my money on that. I just don't think it's worth. Unless you're trying to do something super secretive. Right. If you were. If you were trying. I mean, if they hadn't announced it at all. Right. Then maybe you do it. Right. Apple did that.

Dave Jones: I'd do it for the convenience sake. There is no. If I had a hundred billion bucks. Dave. Yes, there is. I could just wander downstairs to my personal manufacturing facility and say, drop all the jobs you got. Put mine through. Thank you very much.

Chris Gammell: You can do that with money. You can do that with money. That's what you do with a CM. You say, here's a bucket of money.

Dave Jones: What's the personal satisfaction of being able to walk downstairs and do it and have it in this country?

Chris Gammell: No. First off, they are going to be in this country. Well, you're in your country, whatever. But with Google, they're going to be in this country. They're hiring experts. It's like hiring consultants. I mean, it's not like, you know, you're not like just shipping them everything. They're setting up stuff here. At least initial runs.

Dave Jones: It'd be so much cooler. Imagine if Google, we'd be apeshit over this, right? This would make our, you know, this would make our headline news for the next week's show. If Google opened up their own hardware manufacturing facility right in California.

Speaker ?: You'd...

Chris Gammell: No. I would... You would go berserk. I would go... Okay. As a news item, sure. I would go berserk. But I've been meaning to talk about this on the show anyways. So, you know, we've been talking about reshoring and all this other stuff. You know, like all this other, you know, manufacturing. Yeah, exactly. All this manufacturing moving back and how it's such a strong economic thing. Well, there is a dirty underbelly to all this stuff. Is that manufacturing is dirty and annoying and... Oh, it's a shit job. Yeah. It's a crappy job. You have to work long hours. You have no life. I mean, if you're, you know, unless you have a very strong structure system to hand off between shifts and you have, you know, good... You know, if you're on a... Like when I was working in a fab, you know, there are no hours. You know, you're just there until you're done. It's like, you know, there...

Dave Jones: I know. I've worked on 24-hour manufacturing facilities.

Chris Gammell: I know what I'm... I mean, maybe if you're... Since you're footing the bill, maybe because you're footing the bill. But in that case, why not just hire people from the beginning? Then you don't have to go hire them. You don't have to go train them, you know? Ugh. Why...

Dave Jones: Because there's a satisfaction to having your own company to do that.

Chris Gammell: With a CM, they effectively are your company. You know, you're renting them. If you're paying them enough money...

Dave Jones: They can tell you to piss off. They can. I've worked at companies where... The contract manufacturer has told us to piss off. We don't want to do business with you anymore.

Chris Gammell: And why do they say that?

Dave Jones: Well, one reason we weren't giving them enough business. The other reason they didn't like... No, the other one was that they didn't like some people within the company. So they would not deal with this anymore.

Chris Gammell: All of this stuff is easily smoothed over with... With Benjamin Franklin's and Hamilton's and other denominations with famous faces on it. Yeah. Money can cure all those evils. Because if Foxconn won't do it...

Dave Jones: But it's still not your company!

Chris Gammell: It's still not your company. But you know what? At the end of the day, when the hardware doesn't work out long term, like the Nexus Q and other projects that Google's done, then you're not stuck with a manufacturing facility. You have to lay everybody off.

Dave Jones: Okay. Where does the profit go when you hire Foxconn?

Speaker ?: Hmm?

Chris Gammell: Probably in your pocket. Foxconn gets... No. Foxconn gets razor-thin margins. There's been tons of stories about that. That's why...

Dave Jones: Yeah, but where does the money ultimately go? It goes back to China. It's going out of the US. You're funneling it out of your country. You're planning your country's own demise.

Chris Gammell: No. I mean... I'm being a bit melodramatic. Where do you buy resistors from? There is no domestic component progression of anything.

Dave Jones: That's why if you had $100 million, why not set up your own... $100 billion? Why not set up your own resistor manufacturing facility? Yeah, we can do all this in America now. You could. All this in Australia now. But I wouldn't want to.

Chris Gammell: Would you want to? Do you want to make resistors? I mean, maybe... I would love...

Dave Jones: If I had an infinite amount of money, I'd love to set up manufacturing facilities. There is one reason to do that. If you didn't give a shit about making money.

Chris Gammell: No. There's only one reason to do it, and it's for security. It's for security to supply chain. Because even Apple gets turned down sometimes, but most of the time they don't. They come in, they buy the whole fab's worth of chips because they're Apple. And then they ask for the price they want because they're Apple. Companies just fall over themselves to do that kind of stuff because the almighty buck, it rules.

Dave Jones: Look, countries like Australia, you wouldn't know what's happening here. Sure. Countries like China are coming in and buying everything. They're buying all our land. They're buying all our companies. They're buying all our assets. Everything. Right? We'll have nothing left. That's why this sort of stuff, you do it because you want to save your country.

Chris Gammell: I don't know where to come down on that. But I disagree with the mandating that it be, you know. If you need to get up and running fast, you pay the money. This is the same argument I was having with a friend. That's a different argument. Come on. No, this is the same argument we're having. Because if you want to get up and running fast, you pay for it. You know, it's what? Of course. Speed? Cheap? You can have something fast?

Dave Jones: If you want to get up and running fast, you don't start your own company from scratch.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. So, that's what you're saying though, aren't you?

Dave Jones: I never said that. Yeah, you are.

Chris Gammell: You're saying start. Yeah, you just said, oh, it should be an Australian company or an American company. No, man. Hire them. If they're doing it locally, that's a bonus. You get faster feedback cycles.

Dave Jones: Oh, dear. You're not thinking fourth dimensionally. Unbelievable.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think I'm well spent. But I do want to make this point because I was arguing with my friend about this. So, he's talking about this work he needs to have done. And he said, oh, you know, I can get an intern. I can get two interns for a decent rate for the entire summer. And I think I can get all this great work done. I'm like, okay, well, that's good. But why not just... You've got to train them. Yeah, exactly. You have to train them. You know, it's the same thing. Now, before I go any further with that, there is value in training them. Namely, that you can show them how you want to do stuff yourself. And obviously, it gives back to the community and everything else. But if you have stuff you need to get done...

Dave Jones: Ah, there's the key point. Back up, back up. Okay. Giving back to the community, the local thing, you know, rather than just farming everything out. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: No, really. I mean, that is a valid point. I mean, yeah. But... Thank you very much. Yes. Okay. But on what scale, right? That's what I'm trying to get at. Do you do that on everything? Do you do that on...

Dave Jones: If I had $100 billion, I'd like to, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, then... And who the hell are you to tell me I'm doing it wrong?

Chris Gammell: Well, no one, unless you pay me to, and then I'll tell you anything you want. Oh, dear. But yeah, I mean, so... I don't disagree with, you know, wanting to support communities and everything else. But if you're a business and you're trying to get stuff done, and you're trying to make money on a new product, and you're trying to scale up enough that it... You know, you actually can build a lot of something. You might have to make some sacrifice. And one of those might be that you're hiring a CM to hire other people locally. Because they're not going to be able to hire people at China wages. I know that. Not in California. Definitely.

Speaker ?: You know?

Dave Jones: When do you get your Google Glass?

Chris Gammell: Okay. So here's the other thing. I don't know.

Speaker ?: All right.

Dave Jones: A year down the track? Because they have to set up the local manufacturing facility, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Even if it is Foxconn, yeah, you're hiring the experts, right? Yeah, they've got to set up that fab. Yeah. Right? It'll all be custom tooling. You know, these things are, you know, not just stuffing some boards.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right? This is, you know, very precision, careful, high-tech manufacturing with 100% custom tooling for everything.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: It's, you know. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They were guessing the end of the year.

Dave Jones: Why not just set up your own from scratch?

Chris Gammell: Ah, no way, man. You know the difference there.

Dave Jones: Poach people away from Foxconn. Get them out of China, right? Bring them in on your, you know, your visa programs or whatever, your skilled visa programs. Bring them in and pay them real wages and, you know, poach the talent.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, that could get us into a deep, dark hole about visa programs in the United States. But I can tell you. Who cares?

Dave Jones: You're a big enough corporation. You buy off the politicians. What's the problem?

Chris Gammell: No, they just run out. They go within, like, the first month. Every H-1B is gone. So. They're not easy to get. And I think F-1s are.

Dave Jones: Ah, they are for big companies that have politicians in their back pockets. No way, man. They're the ones who buy them up quickly. Yeah, man.

Chris Gammell: They're the ones who buy all the H-1Bs. Don't kid yourself. Who? Big companies do. Because they can afford it. Yeah, we're talking about Google here. Right. But I'm saying that they've run out. There's a finite amount in the United States. And they all go very quickly. So even if you wanted to buy them all up, there'd only be so many. I think there's only... Nah, I'm not going to guess. But, like I said, that's a deep, dark hole we can go down.

Dave Jones: There's always a loophole.

Chris Gammell: I suppose.

Dave Jones: Or you're in the politician's pocket. Buy them to write a loophole.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, I think that... No problem. I think when the conspiracy theory stuff comes out, we have reached the end of that rant.

Dave Jones: Conspiracy theory? You don't think your politicians are bought and paid for? No, I don't. You're living in fairyland, dude. Yeah, I know. Oh, dear. America.

Chris Gammell: Yep. So, yeah. Speaking of New York, I was just there this weekend, though.

Dave Jones: You were. Tell us about it.

Chris Gammell: So, I was in town just visiting some buddies, but I decided while I was there, I might as well try and get some geek touring in, which I hope all of our audience tries to do as well. I usually try and do...

Dave Jones: Minus the... Minus she who must be obeyed, of course, because she wouldn't let you go on geek tours.

Chris Gammell: That's a good point. Yes. My wife decided that it was going to be a dude's weekend. And all the other guys' wives decided the same, too. So, that helps. But, yeah. So, it was me and my buddies, and we went around to... I always like going to hacker spaces when I'm in town. So, we went over to NYC Resistor. What day was that? On Saturday morning. And got to meet some cool people. And that's a cool little space. I didn't realize they actually have two spaces there. They... Because they expanded to have, like, heavy industries, it's called. So, they have, like, a machine shop.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: And what's surprising is they actually... New York, in general, doesn't have a tech shop at all. Which I was surprised by. Because there's been a lot of good... You know, I've got a lot of good press about tech shop. There was a good video by Robert Scoble that was posted last week with the COO of tech shop, Mark Hatch. And, you know, it was just good to see all that stuff. But, you know, New York doesn't have one yet. Obviously, Cleveland doesn't have one yet. Which needs to be remedied. Australia doesn't have one yet. Yeah. They only have... So, they have, like, three in California. One in North Carolina, right around the Research Triangle. One in Pittsburgh, which is daringly close. And then one in Detroit, which is, like... Also, in the other direction, is pretty close. It's about three hours each way. So, we're getting there. We'll see. Awesome. Yeah. So, uh...

Dave Jones: I thought you had one in Cleveland.

Chris Gammell: No. That Larry Sears, who was on the show previously, he's working on something similar at Case. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's what I thought it was.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's not a tech shop. It's not a brand of this tech shop. But it's going to be a similar kind of thing. Ah, right. And I think they're going to have some public access. So, that'll be helpful. And there's a bunch of Fab Labs in Cleveland, too. So, we got some stuff, but, you know... You always want more. You should start one in Sydney. You should just franchise.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. I'll start one with the infinite amount of time and money that I've got.

Chris Gammell: Well, just hire people. You know, if you've got infinite money, you can just...

Dave Jones: Yeah, with the infinite amount of time and money I've got. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They actually have a thing on their website, on the tech shop website, to say if you... Like, inquiry if you want to start one. So, I filled that out at one point. Right. They haven't called me yet, but maybe someday.

Dave Jones: I would love to do something like that, because, like, there is a ton of vacant space...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: ...in my building. Tell me about it in Cleveland, man. It seems like everyone's leaving. I must be talking too loud, you know. Oh, yeah. I saw you tweet about that. Or I'm stealing their garbage from the garbage room.

Chris Gammell: Why think I keep walking in our room? We use that as the server storage room, and he just keeps taking stuff... And tearing it apart on YouTube.

Dave Jones: So, yeah. I always think about that. Oh, look, I'd love to rent that space and turn it into a... Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Some sort of hackerspace or something. You know, it'd be awesome, but... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's expensive. I mean, you do have to charge it and rent anything.

Dave Jones: It costs money, yeah. It's expensive. It'd be... You know, I don't know what... I think it'd be $12,000, $15,000 a year or something for a space the size of mine. Oh, no. Something like that.

Chris Gammell: That's way too small.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's only... Right? So, you know, a bigger one, it'd be $30,000, $40,000 a year.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. It'd be in the millions, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. And, you know, so that video with Mark was talking about the value just to... You know, it's like $120,000 a month for the California one. That seems like a lot of money for, like, being a member, but you can... You know, you get access to a lot of crap, especially in denser populations.

Dave Jones: Well, you would want to be serious at $120,000 a month. Oh, yeah. That's a very... You know, that's a serious expense. That'd be one of your biggest expenses.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's no gym membership you ignore. Although some people do CrossFit, which is like $200 a month. Yeah. Those guys are crazy.

Dave Jones: My gym's, I think, $36 a month.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. But got to meet up with some good people. Bill, one of the Hacks of Faith members, and then Matt Richardson from Make stopped by, and we all hung out. And Sophie Kravitz, who's one of the former writers on engineer blogs with me. So, we all hung out. Yep. Good times. Good times. I had a bio. Cool. And then yesterday, I got a chance to meet up with John DeChristofaro, and I got a tour around the new Adafruit space by Phil. Excellent. And Sadhead, Hyda Lamour. And cool new space. That's cool. And then met up with Matt again. It's huge, I've heard. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Really big space. And so, yeah. They just launched a new show, too. So, I got to hear about that yesterday. That new... Oh, have they? Their new puppet show. It's kind of cool.

Dave Jones: Puppet show?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They're doing like a... They got some cool like stuffed puppets. They're like 555 timers and resistors and LEDs and stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh, I've seen those. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're very cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I like the names. They named the resistor Moe. Yeah, yeah. And the 555 timers named Hans.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's great.

Chris Gammell: So, it's really cute. And, you know, hopefully it does, you know, help kids and stuff, too. It'd be really great if it does, so.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Fantastic.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And then, you know, just kind of toured around other stuff. Matt Richardson showed me around the school he's at in the shop there. And that was... You know, there's just a lot of like... Oh, I saw a friend's space, too. And the really interesting thing was my other friend works at a software startup that does educational stuff. And the thing that blew me away... There's two things that blew me away. One was just the density of people because, obviously, there's just... There has to be there. You know, just smaller desks and no one has their own bench. New York. Right.

Dave Jones: I thought that was a given.

Chris Gammell: Right. But, I mean, I'm used to like... I walk into like an engineering space and I'm like, oh, well, where's your bench? You know? And there's just... There's no room for it. And most... A lot of times it's software type stuff. So, it's like, you don't need a bench. So, that was the first striking thing. And then the other striking thing was that in Matt's space and my friend's space, there was artists all over the place. Right? So, like... Not that that's a weird thing in general, but it was just different for me because I've never worked at a location with artists before. And, you know, like you think whiteboarding is fun with like engineers. Man, you let an artist at a whiteboard and it's just like, it's awesome. You know? And so, that was really great. I mean, just to kind of see that culture. I've never really experienced that before. You know, I have some friends who've done engineering installations, but I've never really seen that in progress as much. And it wasn't a big group of people. It was more of one-on-one stuff. So...

Dave Jones: We had that at Altium. We, you know, they had an arts department, you know? Oh, really? What kind of stuff? More artists than programmers, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And so, yeah, like doing, you know, product packaging and, you know, and ads and, you know, things like that. Yeah. And all sorts of, you know, Photoshop graphics, arts, you know? Yeah, I guess I've been to places with that.

Chris Gammell: But I've never like... Like how much did you interact with them though? That's the thing. It's like...

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. They're a... It's just like a siloed group. It's like marketing, you know? Yeah. It's just like another version of... It's like another subgroup of marketing.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Yeah. In this case though, it was like the product was, you know, art and technology product. And I guess Adafruit too. I mean, they have tons of stuff like that too. And, you know, just that... It was just really different for me. I mean, I've just never really seen that kind of co-working space. I guess you don't even call it co-working space. I've just never seen companies like that in person. So, yep. It was great. It was really great. I was glad I got to walk around and see everybody.

Dave Jones: And you'll be back in New York? Yeah. Sooner... Probably next year by the time they get... Yeah, sooner than later. ...get around to manufacturing this Google glass.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. All right. Shall we get on to something else?

Chris Gammell: Sure. What next? Should we do... Electronics?

Dave Jones: We have... Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. This was bound to happen. Yeah. Tinkercad have gone bust.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. This is...

Dave Jones: It's like told you so, you know, like...

Chris Gammell: Well, we should say they're not electronics though. They're... They're a CAD pro. I mean, they're a 3D CAD.

Dave Jones: But hey, you know, this is one of these online CAD companies, right? These web-based... Cloud. ...CAD companies. And they... Cloud-based. Yeah, exactly. You know, and do everything online. And well, they've just suddenly decided to shut up shop and go on to their next startup. Well, not suddenly.

Chris Gammell: They're giving... You know, they're giving some time to...

Dave Jones: Oh, they're giving time to extract your files off there or something. But whoop-dee-doo. You know, it's like... Yeah, they aren't even keeping the thing going. They're not going to open source it. They're not going to do anything. It's like, see ya. We're just shutting up shop, you know? Yeah. Thanks for all the fish. So, I... Yeah, that's... It rubs you the wrong way, huh?

Speaker ?: That's the danger.

Dave Jones: But you don't have a real... Like, you can't even keep it going, right? Yeah. You can't even... I presume, right? You can't just... You know... Because it all exists on their server in the cloud, right? The actual processing... Right. Of it all. It's not like you can keep this program running for the next 10 years because you've invested... Which we've talked about before. You know, using old CAD programs or old compilers or something like that. You know, having to keep these old systems alive to support your things into the future. And, well, you can't do that with this.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, it's tough when they don't...

Dave Jones: Because as soon as they decide to shut up shop, that's it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, when they don't give, like, a path for transitioning either. Like, I mean, you can always export to, like, a generic format and then try and import it somewhere else. But it's not like you're going to be able to natively export their shapes and then, you know, re-import them. Because that's a significant amount of work in the first place. At least, as far as I understand it. Maybe I missed that part. But I thought it was just kind of like, yeah, see you later. Right. Right. Yeah, it's...

Dave Jones: And they've gone on to do something called Airstone, an interactive simulation environment powered by a supercomputer. So they went, oh, well, we got bored with Tinkercad. Let's just do another startup, you know, and abandon that. Like, yeah. It's tough, man.

Chris Gammell: I mean, anytime you start... I mean, I felt this with, like, the Engineering Commons, too. You know, it's like, there was reasons I decided to give it up. But any... You know, like, people can say, oh, well, you know, only start things that you intend to finish. But when do you define a finish point, right? There's always going to be someone...

Speaker ?: Well, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Well?

Dave Jones: I have no problems with them. You know, yeah, that's fine, right? You do a startup and you realize it's not working or you're getting bored with it. Fine. Okay, move on. But the problem here is you're providing an online tool that people are investing their future in, right?

SPEAKER_00: That's true.

Dave Jones: And relying on that tool. It's not like you're selling a product and, well, you can just not decide to sell it anymore.

SPEAKER_00: Right.

Dave Jones: Right? It's, you know, it's a different ballgame with this. So, yeah. I think you need to have more commitment to it. Or maybe... Just a path, right?

Chris Gammell: You need a path.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, but of course, as a user, you've got to be aware that this is possible too. So, you could... So, in essence, you can't blame the company. Really? You know, it's their decision to shut up shop and, well, if you're not happy with that, well, it's your stupid fault for choosing that tool to begin with. Because you know that can happen.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: They can just shut up shop or they could all get hit by a bus tomorrow and, boom, the company's just vanished.

Chris Gammell: I mean...

Dave Jones: Right? I mean, seriously, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: If you're listing risk on a purchase, right? You know, like, that's the other tough part is that a lot of times, you know, these start as free services and they, you know, they get users started like that kind of thing. And, you know, if it... Not that I condone the $10,000 licenses because I don't. But if you were trying to switch from a $10,000 license to another $10,000 license, you're going to do so with some trepidation and some kind of analysis. And at that point, you might say one of the risks of changing is we might not be able to support, you know, we might not be able to get this stuff in the future, right? And with lower cost software or stuff like this, you just... You don't have that necessarily baked in, you know, it's not something you have to consider because it's just like, oh, it's free. So it's just a hidden cost, you know, a hidden risk. So... Right. Yeah, it's... Makes you wonder if it's a... I doubt it's doom and gloom. It's not the last time you're ever going to see a CAD software or a cloud-based CAD software, you know? We see this with other services.

Dave Jones: No, we've talked about, what, half a dozen of them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, Upverter and Circuit.io and CircuitLab and tons of them.

Dave Jones: Well, here's another one. They contacted me and, oh, can you, you know, talk about us on your blog? Well, we can't do it on the blog, but we can do it here on the radio show. And it's not a CAD thing, but it's very similar. It's called SandSquid. So SandSquid.com as in beach sand and squid as in squid. And it's because it's an ocean of electronic parts, you see. Right, right. Yeah. And I love the little symbol. And, yeah, it's an online bomb thing, right? It's another online bomb. You know, there's a few of them out there. Yeah. And you can track your stock and you can optimize your costs and you can combine bombs and blah, blah. And search, I think it ties into, I think it, I haven't tried it, but I think it ties into all the, you know, the component, you know, fine chips and other companies and digikey and all that sort of stuff. So DFM, Designed for Manufacturing Tool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right. But also, please give us your data and then we'll give you a service for that. Pay with data.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, at the moment it's a free thing. You know, they just want to build up numbers. Oh, well, no, no, no. It's not free. There's no free.

Chris Gammell: Remember, when there is no cost, the product is, when the product costs nothing, that means you are the product. Right. And that's true for all these things, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, granted. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Like, mint.com, the financial services thing. I know that I am the product there, right? They are using me in aggregate to look at all my financial data and lump me in with a bunch of other people.

Dave Jones: And technically, we do the same thing as well as actual bloggers, right? All of the Amp Hour content is free, all of my EEV blog content is free, all of your blog content is free, right? But what we get back is we get data on our regular viewers.

SPEAKER_00: What do we get back to?

Dave Jones: Well, not data, but we get X number of viewers, right? And then, you know.

Chris Gammell: And then internet bucks.

Dave Jones: In my case and our case, yeah. And then that, well, that pays my full-time living, right? It attracts advertisers, that's, you know. So it doesn't cost you anything to watch my show, but by watching my show, it enables me to make a full-time, you know, income from it. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's an attention-based thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It's a... But, yeah, I'm not sure what their terms of service are. Yeah, I'm looking at them now.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like, it looks, like, pretty generic. You know, if we mess up, it's not our fault.

Dave Jones: Yeah, all that sort of jazz. Yeah, the links. And once again, the same, you know, rules apply here as the Tinkercad thing. If you rely on this thing, if you build your workflow, your design workflow around this tool, this online tool, and they go bust or change it or decide to shut up shop or get hit by a bus, then, well, you know, it's all over Red Rover and your system's all screwed up.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's tough, you know. And sometimes, I've seen these decisions being made by coworkers before with, like, software and stuff. And a lot of times, you know, they'll look at open source solutions, closed source solutions, and everything else, and they just go straight for the supported one. You know, because when you're paying money, you got someone to yell at. You got someone to... Yeah, yeah, that's right. ...chase down. It's not a faceless entity, you know. Hopefully, there's other customers. Not always the case. Right. Yeah, it's weird. There's always that kind of crowd mentality need, too, where they get in that critical mass to kind of take the leap. Then one ever wants to be first. Mm-hmm. And every company wants to pretend they're already full of users. Right. You ever had that happen before where you start using a chip, and you're like, oh, you know, I was having this problem. Has anyone else had this problem? And they look at you, and they're like, well, there's just you. Because that is a terrible feeling.

SPEAKER_00: It is. I know. I've been duped. Yep.

Dave Jones: Always have a backup plan, folks.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Well, you never want to be the one. I mean, unless you have the time, or you're getting such a good deal that you're, it's worth it. You never want to be the one finding the errata. You know, if you, if there's a piece of silicon that gets changed because of you, you're going to have a bad time.

Dave Jones: I've been there, done that. I've used, you know, alpha silicon. This is our, you know. Fire to air. Because we needed the, yeah, because we needed the leading edge, you know, bleeding edge thing. Look, we're developing this new chip, you know, for you, for your requirements. Yeah. You know, hey, congratulations. Slap on the back, here you go. Yeah. You get to debug it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Maybe I'll give you my requirements and come back after it's been used a little while. That's how it feels sometimes.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Because I used to work in an industry where silicon would be developed for not more than like half a dozen customers. You know, there'd be half a dozen major players in the industry, but volume was high because they'd use them in the millions. Yeah. Right. So it was worthwhile to the major chip companies to make this silicon for half a dozen customers. And we were one of them. I don't know, man.

Chris Gammell: You know, and that's like... I think we're kind of moving back, not necessarily in the exact same way, but with a lot of the analog chips, they're moving to the ASSPs, the... Application specific. Yeah. I forget what the other S is, though. But basically, you know, like a lot of the highly integrated, you know, system on chip type stuff. You know, like you're probably going to have components that are tested individually. You might have an A to D in there. You might have like, you know, power supplies internal. But if they hook up the wires wrong and, you know, you're a smaller market, you know, it's very targeted towards your market, then, yeah, you might run into some problems, you know. Oh, you wanted a pin here?

Dave Jones: Well, that happens with mainstream chips. Any one of the semiconductor makers, anyone, say, any one of the microcontroller manufacturers, for example, who produce 500 variants of their microcontrollers, right? If you choose some obscure one that hardly anyone else is using, well, odds of you finding a silicon bug are, you know, are going to be reasonably high.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Best case scenario is you're just getting a feature that they unlocked.

Dave Jones: Because ultimately, somebody has to find those silicon bugs and it's not always the manufacturer doing their, you know, exhaustive testing on their new product. That's right, folks. That's right, folks.

Chris Gammell: So every time you read an errata sheet, make sure you take a moment of silence for the poor engineer that was at his bench at two in the morning pulling his hair out. Just take a moment of silence. Say, thank you. Thank you. You poor bastard. Yeah, exactly. Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. We've all been there, done that. If you haven't, well, you haven't lived. Yep.

Chris Gammell: So you are. So that's that. A number one. What am I? You are. I have a lot of things that I say about you, Dave. But you are a number one engineer to follow on Twitter. Did you know about that?

Dave Jones: Well, I came in at number 10.

Chris Gammell: That's right. You did. I didn't know which way it went, if it was up or down.

Dave Jones: And then, ironically, I bitched and ranted about how shit their website was that actually listed the damn thing because it wouldn't let you view it.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You had to sign up or something to view more than two pages, and I was like on page 10.

Chris Gammell: They have a registration wall now. It's like, oi.

Dave Jones: Who was it? EDN?

Chris Gammell: EE Times for that one. Yeah.

Dave Jones: EE Times. Yeah. Well, we've talked about them before, haven't we?

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, thanks for putting me on the top 10 list, but hey, by doing so, you get a serve. It's this stupid registration wall. Yeah, hopefully they change it. I mean, like a Y post. I hate that, right? If you're going to post a Twitter link to something, like they proudly posted this, and then everyone was reposting it to me. Hey, look, you're on the top 10 list. Yeah. And I'm going, great. Okay. But if you're a company and you're going to post something like that, you know, make sure it's readable.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I agree.

Dave Jones: Without having to join. I mean, that's just ridiculous.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, we, you know, we were all having our, well, I think you were sleeping when it all came out, but we were having our little rants about it, too. And then Kathy, who's in charge of UBM Electronics, was trying to calm us down. It's like, oh, caught some attention there. Okay. No such thing as bad publicity.

Dave Jones: Hey.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess so.

SPEAKER_00: Well.

Chris Gammell: I, I, I, I don't agree with that. You know, because they moved to that, you know, like each page is a new link, too. And it's like, okay. I mean, I know they're trying to get their page views up and everything else. And it's like, I get it. I get the business. It's not great. But man, I don't know what the answer is. And I don't think that's it. You know?

Dave Jones: No, exactly. Yeah. How about this? This is a novel concept. Just produce good content and they will come and continue to come.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's expensive, right? I mean, it's expensive. You know? I mean, yeah. It's an expensive proposition, but there's got to be something in there. I don't, I don't, honestly, I don't know the answer. I, I don't envy them in that regard, but I agree that the only, the only stuff I really care, I, I guess I care about industry news, too. I'm not sure about other, you know, how much like people care about like buying and selling of companies. I don't even know if I care about that, really. But, you know, general EE times is business stuff. But yeah, the, the design stuff is what really, I think most engineers care about. So.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: If you want to grab our attention, that's how to do it. More design stuff. We like it.

Dave Jones: I'm just peeved off that they, you know, tweeted the thing. Look, have a look. Here it is. Go and have a read. Yet you can't. Right. Right. There's a trap. I mean, sure. Okay. If you want to do that on your website and have the content hidden, fine. You know, and you have to register. Fine. That's your choice. But then don't publicize it as if, look, just click here and you'll be able to read it. And you can't. It's bullshit. Yeah. News companies do it, too. Right. You go to, you know, various. Oh, Wall Street Journal is the worst for that. New York Times, Wall Street Journal. They're the worst. Right. Yeah. And they give you, like, the first paragraph.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Here's the news story. Click here. Right. Answer official tweet or something. And you click here. Great. I want to read this news story. And it's the first paragraph, you know. It's like, oh, piss off.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's interesting because there's a lot of other, you know, news companies that are moving to, like, the, who was it? Andrew Sullivan. The, he's a blogger. I don't even know about. But, like, he actually is asking for subscriptions now from people. Like, he'll give you so many in a month, which is kind of like how New York Times does. And then after that. Right. You know, you have to pay. But it's a significant amount. It's not two. It's like 20. Right. You know. So, if. Okay. There's a certain threshold of, like, power users that will pay for that stuff. So, I don't know. Yeah. Right. Maybe that's the way to do it. But.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I do not know the answer. If I did, I'd be making lots of dough from it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I think they're just betting the wrong horse there. I mean, it just pisses engineers like us off. If you have to go to these technical, right, these magazine websites or these technical websites. And, you know, and you've got to register to just read stuff. It's just.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's bullshit. You would get more. Like, and they do it to get you into the funnel. Right. Yep. So, that you're in the. So, that your name and all your details are in there. So, they can. And they actually sell it. I've posted links. Oh, yeah. Yeah. To their marketing material. Right. That they give to the advertisers. And they say, yeah. And they will even sell your database. Right. They will sell you as. Yep. You know, they'll sell your contact. You can go to e-times and buy a list of all of their contacts. Right. For X many tens of thousands of dollars. Right. You pay it and they will send like an email blast to their, you know, 50,000 registered fake accounts. I was waiting for it. I guess a lot of people do that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Oh, man. Well, okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's. So, that's a thing. You know. We made a list. Oh, I was on there, too. I don't know if you know what you said. If we said that. But I was number two. Oh, yeah. Jeff is number one. Oh, were you? Yeah. Right. Yeah, you didn't even look at it, did you? Well, I couldn't. I know.

Dave Jones: Oh, bastards. Yep. Anyway. Actually, one. Yeah, thanks for that honor.

Chris Gammell: One article from e-times that I saw recently that I did like. All right. One. Oh, this is old, though. But I was searching through about A to Ds and stuff. And this is a pretty good article from back in the day. So, I don't know. I'll post it. But I don't know. How much you care about A to Ds these days. Are you doing A to D stuff these days?

Dave Jones: I'm always sort of on. It's always on my mind.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: There's always a requirement there to do some sort of A to Ds.

Chris Gammell: I get kind of caught up in the E knob cycle, you know, trying to figure that crap out.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Effective number of bits. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, because there's effective number of bits. And then there's also effective resolution. Then there's sign ad and all the other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's good articles about it. You know, Bonnie Baker always has done really good stuff with that. She's from TI. I always like her stuff. Baker's doesn't. But then there's another one here by Steve Logan from Maxim. And this is another good one. I mean, you know, there's a lot of good information out there. But it's just really confusing about, you know, all the RMS and everything. I don't know. It's like I was whenever I get deep into it. I'm like, oh, math. I remember this.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This is the stuff you learn. You know, when you learn ADCs, you learn about all this crap. And then you promptly forget about it. Yeah. So you've got to, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: It's.

Dave Jones: And there's lots of formulas that go behind it. And there's lots of theory. You know, if you want to really get. If you're serious about your analog to digital conversion, like you're, you know. Yeah. Like quantization and I and L. Yeah. And if you're doing, you know, designing a 10 gig sample per second ADC front end for an oscilloscope or something. Yeah. You know, you've got to know your shit.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Definitely.

Dave Jones: You can't just buy an off the shelf chip and whack it in there with the head with the banner specs and go, oh, yeah, she'll be right. Yeah. You know, it's. No, no. I put down the resistors.

SPEAKER_00: Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Yeah. It's serious business. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So this is a really good. You know, in addition to all the Bonnie Baker stuff, I really like this article. So I'll post it. It's good stuff.

Dave Jones: And you don't have to register for it. It's just there.

Chris Gammell: You don't. Not this one. So. Yeah.

Dave Jones: See, why do they give some in-depth thing like this for free yet some little fluff piece about the top 10? Because that's what it was. It was a fluff piece, right? I went in and read the first one because I was allowed to. And it's like, oh, it doesn't really tell. Like, they, you know, at least have a couple of paragraphs or something, you know.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Jones: On each person. And then I finally was able to figure out how to hack the thing to get to my page. And I read my page. And it doesn't say anything about what I tweet. You know, it's dumb. It was a fluff piece. Yeah. Sorry.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. This great technical content. Detailed content. Fantastic. Free. What? Why? Why?

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: Unbelievable.

Chris Gammell: Another good resource for this stuff since I'm already on it. So I really like that the YouTube stuff and the video stuff that Chip companies have started doing. Not started doing. They've been doing it for a while. I guess this one's from last year. Yeah, they have. But Matt Duff from ADI, he's actually the, he does some really, you see him post this sometimes actually too. Like Adafruit will post them sometimes. And Dangerous Prototypes will do it sometime too. And Matt, I've actually met Matt before. And he's a really bright dude. And he does some great videos on this. And so like, in that case, right? You know, like that's, they're getting lots of great views. And I'm more likely to go and like check out the parts he's talking about. Because they always, you know, it's kind of like Jim Williams method, right? It's like, I'm likely to go actually look at the parts he's talking about. Because there's all this application stuff attached to it. Great application stuff. Yeah, exactly. So it's tough for a third party company maybe. But I don't know. Maybe if the E Times of the world is trying to do that kind of stuff. They just, you know, hire people to make these kind of videos and application side of things. And then boom, you know. Then they can sell the referral to different chips. I always told them, I think I mentioned that on the show before. But I always wanted to see them do facing off of different chips. That's what I want to see. Right. I want to see battle royale between chips, you know. Battle to the death. You can even have different apps engineers from different companies. You can do like a game show if you wanted to, you know.

Dave Jones: Oh, God. Yeah. Don't let it end up like the famous Agilent. Agilent. Altium 1.

Chris Gammell: Oh, was there one?

Dave Jones: Oh, look. Oh, dude. I'm going to, if you haven't seen it. Tech Tonight.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really?

Dave Jones: I think it's called Tech Tonight. Oh, like we're going to have to post this in because it is.

Chris Gammell: Were you on it?

Dave Jones: No, I was not in it. But I remember all the talk within the company when we did it. And it was like, oh, it was embarrassing, really. And they spent so much time and effort on this and money. Yeah. Actually producing this thing. And it's just shit. Yeah. Really. Well, it's great. You know, it's well produced, right? But it's like, and they got their own domain for it and everything. I'm going to have to find it and we'll link it in. But oh, man, it's just ultimately just a total embarrassment and a fail. Let me find it. Anyway, it'll be LinkedIn. Please check it out. It's hilarious, folks. Go to the website and I'm sure I'll be able to find it. If they haven't removed it, I'm sure there's a copy out there somewhere.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's no surprise that you and I are fans of video, though. I mean, like, I think that's a good way for, you know, like, I like that chip companies are starting to do that kind of stuff, too. Like, what was it? Intercell hired Jerry a while back to do that kind of stuff. And it might be a little tougher when it's, you know, you're hiring third-party companies to do it. But I don't know. I think it's a great one. I've been learning a lot from this kind of stuff, too. I mean, and even just as refresher stuff, you know, like, like I'm staring at the filter stuff that Matt Duff does. And I don't know. I think is company, you know, companies like I like speaking of ADI, they pulled a bunch of resources out of Cleveland because, you know, it's Cleveland. Right. And so, like, this is like a support thing. Cleveland. It's like not like I can't get a hold of them. At least we're not Detroit. But, yeah, it's not Detroit. It's not like I can't get a hold of them, but this is just good supplemental information. I think personally this is kind of the future of applications, you know, for good and bad. You know, it's just and, you know, they're not going to hire some bozo like you or me to do it because we don't know the ins and outs of the parts. So why not give away good information if you're already pretty smart, you know, FAEs that are working for you. So I think it's a good idea.

Dave Jones: And they do want to pay peanuts, too. I mean, I've had some major companies approach me to do some videos for them. Yeah. And, you know, quite frankly, they don't realize the effort involved.

SPEAKER_00: Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And, you know, they want to pay peanuts. And it's like, well, no, it's going to take me, you know, a couple of days of my effort to produce a really schmick, you know, because they want to demo things and they want to, you know, so you've got to set up experiments and demo stuff and everything. You know, it takes many days to, you know, it can take days to do that. Yeah. To shoot a simple five-minute video.

SPEAKER_00: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: You know, and, well, you know, I mean, yeah. And I went, and they finally did it themselves. And I think they realized, oh, yeah, it's quite a bit of work, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. So there you go.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of work.

Dave Jones: I've sent you through the link to Tech Tonight. All right. It's still up there.

Chris Gammell: I will post. That'll be fun.

Dave Jones: Yep. It's hilarious. We'll embed that.

Chris Gammell: So speaking of work, not that we did any. Work sucks. Yeah, work sucks.

Dave Jones: No, I don't work for a living. I know.

Chris Gammell: But all of our, a good chunk of our listening audience, probably 10% of our listening audience, were nice enough to fill out the survey.

Dave Jones: Yes. Thank you very much. So it's been. I was surprised at the response.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, we had like 600 people so far.

Dave Jones: And we've read your, yeah, that's huge.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Now.

Dave Jones: And people left all sorts of comments, negative and positive feedback.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. This might come as a shocker, Dave. Only 3% of our listening audience is female. I know. I know. It's a shocker. But.

Dave Jones: I can't believe it. Mine, mine's about 4%.

Chris Gammell: Is it? Okay. The 3% that are out there. Something like, you know. We, that is so awesome. You rock. Bring your friends. But yeah. You know, so we got all this demographic stuff. And I'll, you know, I'll post all this stuff like I've done in the past too. You know, it's, a lot of it's expected, you know, like age groups and stuff like that. It's usually, usually pretty similar year to year to, you know, North America. Yep. You know, continents that people live on and stuff like that. But yeah. It's really, really cool data. We really, really, really appreciate it. I mean, you know, me and Dave were just complaining about dicing up data. We're not going to dice up emails or anything like that. But this does help if, you know, if people want to advertise on the show and they want to know who's who.

Dave Jones: Yeah. We need stats for stuff like this. Yeah. Because, yeah. Yeah. But no, we don't harvest emails. I don't harvest emails and we don't do it here on the show. And, you know, it's just evil. Nah. Yeah. In fact, why, why did we, oh, we had to ask for people's emails so that if they won the t-shirt, they, we could contact them, right?

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And so, yeah, we got, I mean, we got a bunch of. So are we going to draw this shit or what? I was going to go through more of the stats first. I don't know. I think some of this is interesting.

Dave Jones: Well, go for it.

Chris Gammell: I mean, so a quarter of our audience is students, which is less than I actually thought. I thought more we're going to be students. If you look at the actual degrees and stuff, 4% of you have PhDs, 18% of master. You're a professor, 41% bachelor's, 12% technical. And then that's, that's crazy. I mean, 44% of you work in design. And then I'll, I have to apologize for that because I asked about other and I didn't capture everything, you know, like I, you know, if you're in like repair was a big one I missed, you know, design. I would say it's support maybe, but I don't know. I might get yelled at for that. 24% of you are interested in analog, 23% digital, 24% firmware, 2% software.

SPEAKER_00: Yay.

Chris Gammell: 10% robotics and other again. That's the thing. You know, it's like hard to capture all this stuff.

Dave Jones: So yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, and number one, most important question. Where do, where does our audience come down on the chip printer issue? Oh. And I regret to announce that I am in the minority. That I'm right as usual. Well, not, not completely. Okay. So 40% of our audience thinks it'll happen in the next 20 years. 29% don't think it'll happen in the next 20 years. 23% will think, don't think it'll ever happen. And 8% think it'll happen in less than 10 years. So if we add together, listen, if we add together, it was actually 39, not 40. For the first one. So if we add together. Oh, come on. Less than 20 years. No stretching. In the less than 10 years. Then we are at 47 to 53. So I'm just saying, we're pretty close, Dave.

Dave Jones: And your original bullshit claim was that it would be five years. Did I say five years? I remember. Oh, we need people to go back and listen. It was like episode two or something.

Chris Gammell: Oh, jeez.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That was a long time ago in a galaxy. In the comments, when we asked what we're doing wrong in the show, people say we talk about the chip printer too much. So we'll try not to talk about it. No, we're going to talk about it.

Dave Jones: Or that bit where I sing Waltzing Matilda.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Someone did mention that.

Dave Jones: Or me whining. Oh, yeah. We should have a no whining policy.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: And where have the bloopers gone?

Chris Gammell: They're there once in a while. No. It's like if we forget to hit record before or after, you know.

Dave Jones: We don't really have bloopers. This is basically a, you know. No, but they're talking about like just a record and upload show.

Chris Gammell: Me and you BSing before the show. You know, that's the kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: That's the kind of stuff we usually use to put in the quote unquote bloopers.

Dave Jones: Well, often we don't record it. It's just. Yeah. I mean, we're talking like 20 minutes before the show. Yeah. We didn't record any of it.

Chris Gammell: Super secret stuff. Oh, yeah. About, oh, crap. We forgot to look at the survey.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But we. So I have to say that the comments were very kind of everyone. Even the snarky comments, I really enjoyed and appreciated. Yeah. They're funny. Yeah. You guys are funny and it's really helpful. You know, it's good. I wouldn't say it's, you know, we're not like looking for validation on it, but it is nice to know that, you know, we're not completely wrong on the wrong path. So, you know.

Dave Jones: Well, we wouldn't have what? 6,000.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Dave Jones: Listeners, if that was the case.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So we are going to pull for five t-shirts from all the people that responded. We'll do one, we can do one drawing later on if people are still interested in participating because we know some people follow, you know, they are catching up on episodes and everything else like that. So maybe in a month or so we'll pull a second one for, you know, anyone that's filled it out past this. Please don't fill it out again if you already have, you know, that whole thing. But yeah, 600 people, man. That's crazy. Yeah. It's like 600 nerdy friends too, you know. It's like, it's great. I mean, it's just like, you know, because it's like right now it's so Facebook, right? It's just me and you. But then, you know, you see names, you see what, you know, people are, you know, what industry they're in and everything. It's like, it feels good that like, you know, we're not alone, you know. I know that you get that probably a lot more with like the YouTube channel and stuff, but it's like sometimes it feels lonely, you know. It's just like, it feels like, man, I'm the only one working on this and oftentimes it's not, you know. It's just, you're the only one in your area or at that time. So anyways, we had 415 people say that they wanted to be entered in the contest out of the 600. So what we're going to do is have, how are we doing this, Dave? The calculator or something?

Dave Jones: I've got a calculator here with a random number generator, so I'm just going to use that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And so I sorted by email.

Dave Jones: For the calculator aficionados, it's a Tandy EC4031.

Chris Gammell: Nice.

Dave Jones: Which is, of course, a rebadged Casio. Right. Something or other. Yep.

Chris Gammell: All right.

Dave Jones: And I'm going to round down two, by the way, because what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a random number generator, which gives you a three-digit number from zero to one, and then I'm going to multiply that by 415 and then ignore the decimal points. So that's going to happen.

Chris Gammell: And I am probably going to butcher names. So let's do this. Right. Number one.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. I've got to give another number, do I? Oh, crap. Okay, it's 0.877 times 415. Oh, no. What is it? 415. Yeah. Hang on. 0.877 times 415. I thought I had 415 in my memory, but I didn't. 363.

Chris Gammell: 363. Stephen Hill. All right.

Dave Jones: Next. Good on you, Steve. I assume that you're actually writing these down and recording. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I should probably record that, huh? Also, we have an audio recording of all this stuff.

Dave Jones: I don't know if you knew about that. We have an audio recording. I think I pressed record at the start of the show. Yeah, right. All right. Next.

Chris Gammell: That's you. You hit next. Oh, sorry. We shouldn't do this live on air, should we? Yeah, I know what I'm doing. We could just put this in the blooper roll.

Dave Jones: 0.675 times 415 is 280.

Chris Gammell: 280 is... Oh, boy. Oh, my goodness. Mindogas Stambroscus. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Mindogas Stambroscus. All right. Winner, winner. Chicken dinner. Better you than me. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Awesome. Good work. Number three. Number three. 200 and 0.244 times 415. 101.

Chris Gammell: 101 is... Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Ken Meyer. All right. On you, Ken. Number three. Number four, rather.

Dave Jones: I'm hoping for like a binary multiple here. 0.067 times memory recall. Well, that's got to be early. 27.

Chris Gammell: 27. Ah. Drew Fustini. All right. Hey, Drew.

Dave Jones: And point... Hang on. Random number. 0.742 times... If you recall, 307.

Chris Gammell: 307. Oh, man. Alexander...

Chris Gammell: Pukrovsky. Gesundheit. Oh, I'm so sorry, Alexander. Alexander Pukrovsky. Yes. And we will email all of you, which might have been a better idea from the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. But thank you to everyone else who entered. Okay. So now the t-shirts. We are still working on them, but we will have them done soon. The way we're going to do it is we're actually... So from now on, when we do giveaways on the show, though, we'll actually send out codes. A lot of people were entering their t-shirt size. That wasn't necessary. The way it works is we'll send you a code, and then you go and redeem it at the site, and you can pick whatever size you want, and usually whatever color shirt you want, too, we'll have a couple choices. So that is what we'll do for all you guys. Cool. And then shortly after we send out those codes, we will have this first t-shirt available in the t-shirt store, and other people will be able to purchase them for a nominal fee if you're interested.

Dave Jones: But then it won't be exclusive.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Maybe we'll change it up then. But there will be t-shirts available soon. That's the main point.

Dave Jones: Once we get around to design, yeah.

Chris Gammell: It started. It started.

Dave Jones: Should we have, like, a mug or something? Should we have, like, a coffee mug?

Chris Gammell: No. I never... Who does that? Do people buy mugs from you? I don't know.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. I've got a 555 timer mug.

Chris Gammell: If we have mugs, it'll be a snarky mug that's just for mugs. How about that?

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Like Go-Go Juice or something like that.

Dave Jones: Do you want to tell them about our slogan?

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, the amp hour. And then the tagline is going to be, keep current.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. It's good, right? You know.

Dave Jones: It's brilliant.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, we were going to steal Jeff's one, weren't we?

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Well, Dave was talking about it. Yeah. The mighty young one.

Dave Jones: I think we should steal it. It's his fault if he didn't trademark it.

Chris Gammell: That's true. That's true. Yeah. We always talk about how much we love patenting and trademark. Join the resistance. Patenting and trademark is such a well-loved thing around here.

Dave Jones: Share the love. Yeah. Join the resistance. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Anything else from this week? I think we kind of hit everything we needed, so obviously not a lot of deep.

Dave Jones: Deep. There was nothing from the list. No. A couple of items, but yeah, no, we just get half an hour bitching at the start of the show. Yeah. Yeah. And you actually grew a set of balls for a change.

Chris Gammell: Hey, hey.

Dave Jones: That was fun.

Chris Gammell: All right. Expect more arguing from now on, then.

Dave Jones: It's no fun if people don't argue back. I mean, where's the fun in that? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, I've gotten that at work, too. I've been, you know, I'm usually pretty deferential, too, because I get really uncomfortable when I'm not well-informed. Not always, as some of our listeners told us in the comments of the survey, right? They said, don't talk about stuff if you don't know about it. It's like, okay, yeah, I get it, but sometimes we've got to talk about something, you know? But, you know, it's like work. It's like, you know, I just, sometimes I just clam up. It's like, you know, it's just a personality trait. I'm normally a quiet guy, but yeah, I guess on here I have to shout at you more, so.

Dave Jones: Excellent.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. All right. Well, we'll see you next week, Dave. Right? See you there. This time? Yeah. All right. I think I'll be. All right. Cool. See you.

Dave Jones: Bye. Bye.

Chris Gammell: so what you're saying is you like balls

Dave Jones: well yeah i do there you go quote me on that but you're excited that you said yeah you grew a set of balls

Chris Gammell: you