#26 – The Ben & Jeri Show

Chris Gammell: Welcome to the Amp Hour.

Dave Jones: I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell from Chris Gammell's Analog Life. Hey, Chris. Hey, Dave. Glad you made it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it looks like we just spent half an hour there dicking around with bloody microphones.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: What a pain in the ass. Technology. I hate it.

Chris Gammell: Technology, yeah.

Dave Jones: Ah, these newfangled computers. I don't know. So, I think I'm recording on the right mic because my blog I recorded the other day, the one with the screen capture and the voiceover that everyone complained about because it was too long. Bugger off. You just don't get it. Ah, is, yeah, I was dicking around with the mic on that and it looks like it's affected this morning's performance. My internal mic has vanished and I'm using some external mic and then a dual mic to record and, ah, it's just all too much.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And you know what the problem is? All this is clouding the fact that we are at our half year mark. This is episode 26.

Dave Jones: Oh, 26. Half year.

Chris Gammell: Half a year, man. Yeah. I'm sure. Insert sound effect. Yeah. I can. I'll try. Awesome. We'll see what else I have in the bag later.

Dave Jones: Right. Half a year. Six months.

Chris Gammell: Six months, man.

Dave Jones: And we haven't missed a week, have we? Oh, well, I, technically I have. Yeah. Because I was overseas, but.

Chris Gammell: I think we did miss one or, well, whatever. It's close enough, so we'll celebrate it today. Awesome.

Dave Jones: Ah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: What have we got on today's show?

Chris Gammell: Oh, tons of stuff. You want to start with Workplace of the Week? Workbench of the Week. Workbench of the Week. Sorry. Thank you. Workbench of the Week.

Dave Jones: Oh, he's inserting sound effects live here. Oh, yeah. Brilliant.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, we'll see what else I have. Yeah, we'll see what else I have.

Dave Jones: Because it was dubbed in last week. Yeah, last week.

Chris Gammell: It was a rather dubbed in effort. Yeah. Yeah, that's why Dave didn't sound like he knew what he was hearing there.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah, because I had no idea he was going to do that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: There you go.

Chris Gammell: You know, the problem is, too, with this is we don't actually have a Workbench of the Week.

Dave Jones: No, we don't. No. Get off your asses, people. Come on. Send in your workbench photos.

Chris Gammell: I was following John from Arizona. He's building a new bench. He's been posting it on Twitter. And he mentioned on your forum and a couple other places. And it seems like a lot of people are building benches right now. And it's great. I don't know if it's your video or the fact that we're doing Workbench of the Week or whatever it is. But, you know, that's what they suggest is maybe it's because of the Amp Hour Workbench of the Week. But, you know, maybe we'll see some coming up. And since in that spirit, I'm actually planning a new workbench myself. So, yeah, I'll post a picture of that. I just sent it to Dave.

Dave Jones: Yes. Chris has been playing with Google SketchUp.

Chris Gammell: Ah, my favorite.

Dave Jones: Ah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: When I was a boy, we used a pencil and a bit of paper.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Jeez. Where's the world going to? Sorry, man. I like the nerdery of it. I have like a full... I mean, people will be able to see if they click through. But I have like a full scale... This is like a two scale drawing of my basement with like the colored walls and everything.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's actually to scale, is it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Awesome. Yeah. So, that'll be my new recording and electronics rig and everything all together. It's going to be great.

Dave Jones: I'd love to have a basement. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know, they don't happen that often. I mean, they're... I mean, well, it's cold. It's cold down here. I mean, don't get me wrong. Right. But, yeah.

Dave Jones: Isn't it supposed to be warmer in the basement? Because the ground is supposed to be at like a neutral...

Chris Gammell: Oh, like the frost line? Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah. Yeah. And it isn't supposed to change with the seasons above. So, that's why there are people who actually build their houses completely into the ground for that reason. Is that it keeps a stable temperature year round. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Like Hobbit houses. I've seen those before. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You know, it does. But it's still pretty chilly. So, it's like 40 degrees F, I think. Right. But I don't know what that is in C. Like 8C, maybe. Okay. No, less than that. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Well, that's... 8C is a bit chilly, but nothing to ride home about.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. It's still cold down here. But it is nice. I mean, I used to live in Texas. And because of the formation there, it's all rock. It's all bedrock. So, you can't... You know, to get a basement, you have to like blast through to get it, basically. But up here, it's easy to do. I don't know what it's like in Australia.

Dave Jones: Well, that's what they've done. Some towns here in the outback. Especially some small mining towns. Some of them are built completely underground. Because it's so darn hot out there that it's just... You know, it was much more beneficial just to dig underground and build your house under there. And the pubs under there and everything.

Chris Gammell: Really? Yeah. I would love to see pictures of that.

Dave Jones: I haven't been there. I'll have to find it. Yeah, I'm sure there's one town out there at least, which is almost... All the residents are underground or something. Wow. Like, yeah. That sounds bonkers. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. But it gets stinking hot out there, you know. Oh, yeah. It's the middle of the outback, so... Yeah. It's pretty bad. I guess it's like the middle of Death Valley or something like that in the US. Right, yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's just all desert and gross. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Well, speaking of the outback, we had a shout-out for that, actually.

Dave Jones: We had a shout-out for the outback? You know you make me wanna kick my head like this. Dude, come on. That's copyrighted. We can't just use that shit.

Chris Gammell: Oh, we're using it. That's fair use right there. That's just a little clip.

Dave Jones: Fair use, is it? Okay. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I had a shout-out, though, for all those in Brisbane. I don't know if they're going to be able to be listening, but, I mean, those floods that are happening. And I was gonna offer, if there are any listeners out there and you guys need electronics gear, let us know. We can let others know if they got any extras laying around. We'll, you know, try and hook you up with, you know, get addresses over to you. We don't, you know, if anyone's had their lab flooded, we don't want you to go without. So, just, you know, if you're from Brisbane and you need a little help, just shoot us an email. Excellent.

Dave Jones: Great cause.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, man.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's pretty bad out there, the floods. And now it's starting down in Victoria, down south of here. Yeah. They're starting to get floods in Victoria. I think one person's died already in the floods down there. So, yeah. Ah, Australia, a land of droughts and flooding rain.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Which is a famous Australian poem, by the way. Oh, is it? Is it? Yes, yes. A land of drought and flooding plains. That's it. It rains. Sorry. Yes, everyone gets that line wrong, including me. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Is poetry big in Australia? I didn't... No, not really.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, well, kind of, cause we've, you know, we, it was back in the early days and a few like that have, have stuck around. In fact, one of our national, our actual national anthem was going to be a really bad poem. But they voted against it. So... Ah, ah, gotcha. Yes, yes. So, I guess we were big on poetry here. Yeah. Banjo Patterson and names like that, which you have no idea about. That's okay. You're a yank.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's all right. Yeah. Well, another shout out. A little more self-serving, I gotta say. The second one on there. I don't know if you saw that.

Dave Jones: Oh, this is, this is Mike.

Chris Gammell: No, not Mike, the one above it, the one above it. I edited it. Oh, okay. I snuck it in there. So, there's an engineer blog site out there. I don't know if you saw that.

Dave Jones: Um, there's no link, dude.

Chris Gammell: Oh, sorry. It's engineerblogs.com, or .org.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And the, uh, the wonderful purveyor of that is, is me. One Chris Gammell. I, well, not just me, me and, and Cherish and Fluxer and Frowtech and, so we got, we're blogging now.

Dave Jones: But you are keeper of the domain.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I am keeper of the domain. I didn't think I had enough stuff going on in my life, I guess, but we're gonna kind of, I don't know if you, have you ever been on like scienceblogs.com? No, I haven't. My friend, my friend, uh, is doing his PhD and he told me about it. And, you know, it's like 80, I think it's like 80 bloggers on there or something, some very large number like that. So. Blogger overkill. Well, it is, but it's, you know, it's like every topic in science basically. And, and people that are pretty.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Yeah, that's a good point because there would be 80 topics in science really. I know. Whereas electronics is a bit more, you know, you could focus in a couple of areas maybe, but yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, and engineering too. I mean, the, I mean, we're doing engineering, so we need other kinds of engineers.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: But the thing is engineers don't really write. I mean, uh, we're, they, they don't really write. I mean, they do video blogs, which is good. Uh, but writing for some reason, scientists like writing and engineers don't. I mean. Hmm. Interesting. So if people know engineers, we need some more. Uh, but yeah, nice, nice little self shameless self promotion there.

Dave Jones: Why not? Why should they go? Come on. Give us the hard sell. Why should they go to your site instead of, uh, just put up their own WordPress site?

Chris Gammell: I don't know that they should, they should put up theirs too. But basically it's kind of like a, you know, the, the parts are greater than the, the sum is greater than the parts kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Right. So does it link in to other blogs or do you have to specifically go and push content onto your site?

Chris Gammell: Uh, no, we're doing, we're doing specific content on this site, but then, you know, people are supposed to do like, so like I'm still supposed to be writing posts on my site, you know, Fluxer is doing that too. And I, you know, everybody's doing it basically on their own site, but then once a week we're doing on, on the engineer blog site just to kind of have a central location. So if you're a writer, if you want to be a writer, give me a shout. I, uh, we have some requirements, but you know, just kind of.

Dave Jones: But if they like your stuff, right, let's say somebody likes your stuff on engineer blog, then do, then do they have to follow two blogs? The one on engineer's blog and your own personal blog to, to actually get all your stuff?

Chris Gammell: To get all of it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. See, that's the problem. That's where you're, yeah.

Chris Gammell: No. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I know that. That's the problem with these in here. That's the inherent problem with these websites that don't auto correlate content and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: You can't be, you can't be everything to everyone though. That's the problem. Yeah. I know. It's impossible. We might link in other stuff later, but like the thing is like, we don't want to try and be everything to everyone because that never works. I don't know. I, I've never followed. It doesn't. I've never come to a site and be like, oh, this is the only site I want to follow. So, you know, so I, I don't know. Enough about me. Enough about me. How about Mike? Let's talk about Mike.

Dave Jones: Let's talk about Mike. Let's talk about Mike. Because Mike's got a rant. Mike has a rant. Right. Tell us about it.

Chris Gammell: So, he actually has been listening for a while. I'm not sure if we mentioned him on here during a shout out at all, but he had linked to us and he had a logo and stuff. So, you know, obviously we should, we always mention that anyway.

Dave Jones: Yeah, his logo's up there on the site.

Chris Gammell: So, his site is electronicsdesigner.blogspot.com. And he had an interesting, an interesting commentary basically about Ben Hexnew's show and basically how it's too stereotypical. You know, like, you know, he, not stereotypical in the sense that it's, you know, expect the content because, you know, it's good content. Ben makes good content. He does. But just kind of the, the look and style. He was a little disappointed that you go to it and you think, oh, well, you know, this is a media personality versus, you know, Ben's a nerdy looking dude just like, you know, me and you. And I don't know what Mike was expecting, but, you know, it's, he was, I think he was hoping for a more hip look kind of thing and trying to draw people in with a non-stereotypical image.

Dave Jones: Or possibly, I don't think he mentioned it, but possibly he was getting that, that maybe it was too polished. And that, I sort of read in between the lines here, maybe that's one of the gists of his gripes with it. It's just, it's, it's too polished. It wasn't, you know, down to earth enough and all that sort of stuff. But Ben is actually a filmmaker as well. I think we've mentioned that on here before and he's actually made his own, he's got a whole series of movies or something he's made. So he's, he's pretty much a filmmaker. That's why, that's why the contents really, that's why the actual production of his shows are very, very good. Right. Because he's very good at that sort of thing.

Chris Gammell: And he's with Revision 3. That's the other thing too.

Dave Jones: And he's with Revision 3. That's right. So I don't know how that works. Like Element 14 sponsor it. Right. But it's done through Revision 3 media, which do other big, well, much bigger names than Ben Heck, that's for sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they did Dignation, didn't they? I mean, back when Dig was big.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. Okay. I didn't know they do that. Maybe that's where they started out or something. But yeah, they've got some big names, huge international names on there. And yeah, so he's tied in with that somehow. And somehow Element 14 have hitched on the back of that and they sponsor it. And basically what Mike's getting at, well, you have to read the article. It's quite funny. Because I actually tried to post a reply to his. Here's a little rant. I tried to post a reply to his blog. And Blogspot don't allow you to post a reply unless you've got a Blogspot account, which is stupid.

Chris Gammell: Or a Google account too.

Dave Jones: Or a Google account. But then it made, oh, it was just, even with the Google account, I couldn't do it for some reason. It was stupid. So I couldn't post my lengthy, rather lengthy, ranty comment.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But basically Mike goes on about that, yeah, why didn't they get Jerry Ellsworth or myself to do the show or something like that?

Chris Gammell: You're pretty nerdy, Dave. I mean, I don't know.

Dave Jones: I'm pretty darn nerdy. But, you know, mine are more, yeah, mine aren't nearly as polished and Jerry's aren't nearly as polished as Ben's shows. Right. In terms of the production value and stuff like that. But, and he went on to say that, well, Jerry's got, like, boobs, you know? And, like, why didn't they get her?

Chris Gammell: I didn't read that part.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. You didn't read far enough. I guess not. Well, I can quote someone like Jerry Ellsworth, brackets, who is not the only one who's female things with a chest and stuff, but it's really rather, you know, hello. So, I thought, it was just, it's funny. I cacked myself up when I read that. Yeah. Yeah. And he called me, or Dave Jones, a ranty, health-loving Aussie with a love for canyoning and general having a life sports. There you go. Oh. Go figure. But, yeah, he was basically asking, yeah, Ben was, like, too stereotypical. You know, he's got the glasses and the balding and the receding hairline and the, and apparently he's got some overweight, I think that he mentions here, some overweight colleague who helps him out or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And that was just the stereotypical, you know, engineering thing. So, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: It's tough. It's the same kind of thing where, like, do you try and be everything to everyone? You know, like, kind of with the, what I was talking about before, like, do you try and do that broad appeal? Or do you say, no, we know who's actually going to watch this and just target those people? Because in that case, you know, Ben is a great spokesperson for, I mean, like, Ben knows what he's doing. He's doing a great job, you know, like, so.

Dave Jones: Well, the thing is, it is, Mike, one of his points, I think, was that it might not have been the best choice to get Ben because it's not really hardcore electronics stuff. It's more, you know, gaming modders and stuff like that. Yeah. Which is one of the reasons I don't really watch Ben's show because, well, you know, it's great content and I like him, but, well, it's gaming and modding stuff, basically. And, you know, I'm not that interested in modding an Xbox to do something, you know. So, yeah, I don't know. So, he pretty much focuses on that kind of, because that's the background he comes from, is the gaming console modding thing. That's what he's famous for. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I just don't think we're at the, I mean, like, that's the thing, though. I don't think electronics are at the level where, you know, most people don't know how light switch works, you know. Like, so, I don't think, if you're really trying to broad appeal kind of thing, if you're trying to do the gamer audience, like, you look at that, the gamer audience is a huge audience.

Dave Jones: So, oh, it's massive. It's much bigger than electronics, I think, possibly.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, it deserves to be on something different to Element 14. It's great that Element 14 is sponsoring it in some way. I'm not sure how they do that, money or gear or what. But, yeah, it's, you know, you could argue that it really doesn't belong on Element 14. I've got to admit, when I first, I think you first mentioned it on here, didn't you, back in one of our early shows. You mentioned that, Ben, and started a new show. And I thought, well, it's a gaming, modding thing. What's it doing on Element 14, you know? Why doesn't it, you know, why doesn't some big gaming site or forum or something sponsor him? And then you get a much more massive audience than what he gets on Element 14. Yeah. Because here's the rant I wanted to get into, and I've mentioned this before, is that Mike Mike asked, why didn't they get Jerry or myself to do something like this? And, well, I've mentioned before that Element 14 have tentatively contacted me in the past, along with many other similar sort of sites for me to do content for them. And, of course, they want you to do content for free, basically. You know, they might give you free gear or something like that, but they're basically fishing for free content. And while that's good, you know, the fact is they don't really have the viewership that makes it interesting for someone like Jerry or myself who already have established, you know, relatively large established audiences. So there's not much benefit to us to put all the work in to generate content for them if we're only going to get a relatively small number of actual hits and views from the Element 14 site.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, and the views on Element 14 are not real views, by the way. So if you post your blog on Element 14, you go, oh, look, a thousand people have viewed it. No, that's not actually right. It's more like a hundred people have actually viewed it. I don't know how they get their numbers wrong on there, but I've actually verified that and, yep, their numbers are inflated. So, yeah, I don't know. That's why I'm not going to do stuff for them.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, and the other question, I mean, like the, I mean, like Jerry's doing those new videos with Adafruit now, which are, which are great, by the way. Yeah. I don't know how she got to paper puppets, but, you know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm not sure where that concept came from, but it's kind of cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But, you know, like, I don't know if that is the kind of thing you're talking about, Dave, where like, I mean, Adafruit has a ton of viewers. They have, but so does Jerry. So it's not a big deal. So I don't know what that deal was, but who cares, right? I mean, that was more mutual than it would have been with Element 14.

Dave Jones: Yes, exactly. And we may have mentioned before that Element 14 and DesignSpark and many other websites, including the big magazine sites and stuff like that, they are actively going around targeting bloggers. The, you know, the smaller bloggers, can you produce content for us? And, oh, we'll promise you a million viewers, you know, you'll be, you know, you'll be famous and stuff like that. Well, you know, just be wary of people offering free candy, as you call it in the US, free candy. I guess. Yeah. They're, yes. Their intentions are, I'm not going to say less than honorable, but their intentions are to get content for as little money as possible. And that's what they all try to do. Be it Element 14, DesignSpark, or one of the big, you know, the big magazines like EDN or, you know, anyone like that. They are looking to get content for Knicks because they know there's a lot of, you know, eager people out there producing all these blogs for nothing because they're just doing it because it's fun and they just, you know, want to be out there. Same as how I started and it's the reason I still do it. And, but they, yeah, they prey on people like that. So just be careful. Cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's actually, they did. They just added someone new. Cyguy14 has on YouTube. I don't know if you saw his videos.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Yep. Jeremy Blum. Yeah. Jeremy Blum. And I was first introduced to him from that video he had. He was talking at an event, an Eventbrite or, I'm not sure what that was.

Dave Jones: It was an Ithaca thing.

Chris Gammell: Ignite. Ignite Ithaca, I think it was. Yep. That's right. And he had this really, really great talk about all his projects. Like he's done some badass projects. I mean, like if you go to his site, tons of great examples. Yeah.

Dave Jones: There's like a Nerf gun and there's all sorts of stuff. So yeah, very cool.

Chris Gammell: So he's featured all the time on like Make and, you know, Adafruit's always popping up with him, his stuff too. Yep. And so now he's doing Element 14 and he's just kind of doing Arduino stuff and intro stuff. But, you know, at the same time, I mean, it might not be bringing much to him, but maybe the people that watch his videos regularly are now shifting towards Element 14.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well. Or maybe not. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. I have to say, you know, it's a good thing. Good luck to him. It's great that he's doing that sort of thing. But I'd be weary of, you know, hooking up with people. You know, I think I'm a big believer of produce your own stuff, do it your way and, you know, don't sell out for a couple of free multimeters or, you know, something like that. So anyway, it can only help actually bring in viewers. I'm not sure how many of you. I think he had maybe, I think he's got over 6,000 subscribers on YouTube, but they don't all watch or something.

Chris Gammell: So nice, nice justification there, Dave.

Dave Jones: Well, no, that's the way it is because a lot of people sign up and X amount won't watch. Everyone, it's going to be a quick two-part video.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow. Oops. Auto start there. What was that? That was his video. I was clicking over to his site.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. The auto start pops up. Yeah, I knew that. That's why I didn't open his page because it would auto start the YouTube video. Oops. But no, that's the way it happens. You see a lot of, especially if you've been on there for a long time, if you've had a YouTube account for a long time, yeah, you might have built up 5,000 or 10,000 subscribers, but every time you upload a new video, you might only get 100 people watch it because all those people have just died off because you weren't producing regular content or you weren't doing whatever. Or they just found you as a one-off and something like that. So it's very common for someone to have 5,000, 10,000 subscribers, but only 100 people watch them, only 100 regular viewers. So it's not uncommon at all. But yeah, I'm sure it's a big boost for him to get on the Element 14 site, but just putting it out there. Be careful, people.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, in the end, it's the more the merrier kind of thing. Yeah, it's more the merrier. The more people that are just making stuff and showing it off, it's all that really matters.

Dave Jones: Maybe I'm just, I'm a bit jaded because I just keep constantly have people coming to me and saying, can you do a blog for us? And you know, can we, you know, can you do a special thing for us, for our site? It's like, no, go away. Just want to do my own site. Thank you very much. I'm quite happy, quite content to do my own site.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: And the thing is, they never offer to pay you. That's the thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, they just want you to produce content. Look, we've got millions of viewers. Oh, no, you don't. I've looked at your damn figures and they're fake and you've only got bloody 100 viewers. So go away. Anyway, that's me.

Chris Gammell: I think we need to either give Dave a snack because he's cranky or we need to change topics. One of the two.

Dave Jones: It's early in the morning here. Oh, that's right. I just got up. Give me a break. Yeah. Have a minute. Anyway, let's get on with it.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: What else have we got?

Chris Gammell: Oh, man. What else do we have? Oh, God. I got another. There's another article about Element 14. I'm going to just skip that one.

Dave Jones: Why not? Come on.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no, no. We'll just. Yeah. I don't even know what it was. That's right. I'm going to talk about this because I think it's interesting. Okay. Do it. So basically, they announced that they're going to start selling their own. They're selling. They're not their own. They're selling Arduino boards in their shop. So basically.

Dave Jones: Are these the genuine ones?

Chris Gammell: They're the genuine ones from Italy. So this is kind of starting to come full circle of my prediction of the price wars have begun because you think about all the people that are out there as buy seat resell agents. You think about the Adafruit or SparkFun. They buy resell because they want to actually support the Arduino team, which is good. But now you got Element 14 coming in and high volume. They're going to get a volume discount, maybe a larger volume discount. And we might start seeing some undercutting here. So we'll see.

Dave Jones: Well, I mentioned on here many moons ago that Element 14 were selling their own version of the Arduino.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: So what happened to that? Now they're selling their own ripoff version plus the genuine one? Yeah. I'm sure they're selling.

Chris Gammell: They're probably selling both. But my prediction is that they're going to try and get a lot of people buying the Arduino boards. And this isn't just Element 14. I think this is going to be any kind of larger.

Dave Jones: Oh, it'll be all of them. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, and basically then you try and introduce with this, you know, $35, $35, $40 board. And then you show them a $20 board because you have the volume to do it. And we're going to start seeing some price wars. And it's going to, unfortunately, it's going to cut into the bottom line of the smaller people that are constantly outputting good stuff like Adafruit and SparkFun and all those guys.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the problem with open source hardware, isn't it? Anyone. I could come along and make an Arduino board tomorrow, get it manufactured in China and undercut the Arduino team and put them out of business probably. You know, there's nothing stopping me doing that or anyone else doing that.

Chris Gammell: I mean, there are the things that are always quoted in open source is that, you know, the community and the software and everything else. But, yeah, you're right. In general, yeah, there's not much stopping. I mean, just that.

Dave Jones: Well, but isn't that the whole idea is that, well, yeah, you have loyalty to Arduino or the original designer. But if somebody sells exactly the same thing cheaper, isn't that better and moving the whole industry forward? Or should you keep an artificially high price just to, you know, pocket the original, you know, just to help out the original designer? I mean, and which has more weight? You know, helping out the original person who actually designed it or for something like the Arduino, which is big in the industry, moving that forward? I don't know. Which way? Buy lower in the price? Because the Arduino is quite expensive if you want to use more than one of them. Right. So, yeah. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, you're probably not using that if you are. We've said that before. You know, if you're using more than one, you're probably not using it, to be honest.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. You're probably rolling your own or something like that. But, yeah, still, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: And maybe we should just stop talking about it. You've got to weigh that up. Maybe we should just stop talking about, in general, this forum post from Glossy White. He's sick of hearing open source and Arduino. He's got quite a bit of a rant on the forum. It's pretty crazy.

Dave Jones: It's pretty hilarious, yeah. If you don't know what we're talking about, we'll post a link to the EAV blog forum where... Yeah. What's his name? Glossy White. Glossy White is his username. I don't know what his real name is, sorry. And, yeah, he basically ranted. It was a great rant. It was brilliant. That he's sick to death of hearing about bloody Arduino and bloody open source. Hardware. He's just sick of it.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Ah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I think people that are into the details of it, right? I mean, I'm sure that when the Tandy came out and people were mucking around in the Tandy, that they got pissed off when everybody started buying an Apple IIe, right? Because, hey, I'm programming this stuff every day. I'm doing my thing. You know, I'm working hard doing this kind of thing and learning how the device works. And now someone goes and buys it and just buys discs and gets up and going. You know, like that's frustrating for people who dig into designs and work on it, you know?

Dave Jones: Right. Well, that's... Yeah. And each one builds up their own fandom, you know? Right. There's the Arduino fans and they'll defend it to the bitter death. And then there's, you know, then there's Atmel fans and there's Pic fans and there's God knows what fans. There's MSP430 fans and Launchpad or whatever it is. And that brings me to something I wanted to talk about. Yeah. Is that TI are just continually giving away heaps of shit. Which is shit being the good stuff, you know? The good stuff. Okay.

Chris Gammell: That's an important distinction, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, right. Exactly. So, there... A lot of people on the forum, the EUV blog forum, got all these MSP430 USB development kits for free. And I got mine the other day and they shipped me three of these kits. You just got them? I just got them. Did you order those like six months ago? Oh, no, no. They're the Launchpad. I got those. I've had them for... God, I've had them for four or five months now and I haven't done anything with them. Okay. Will, I was going to do a review on them and just never got around to it. But, yeah, they're shipping all this stuff out. Free courier, everything, just, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Fantastic. If they're not bloody careful, they might actually gain a loyal following. Ooh, that would be bad. That'd be bad, wouldn't it? Yeah, they might actually convert some of the Picker App Mel people.

Chris Gammell: That's the thing. I mean, they already do. They have a very strong community with BeagleBoard. I mean, like... And I actually got to see one of the Liquidware kits the other day. Did you ever see those, the Android development kits from Liquidware?

Dave Jones: I've heard about them. I haven't physically seen one, but...

Chris Gammell: They're slick. They're really slick. They actually include a battery pack and everything. I mean, they're expensive. They're like a grand, I think, but...

Dave Jones: Ah, right. Yeah. Completely out of the ballpark.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They give you a ROM, though, and it's just like up and booted and running immediately. It's pretty cool. And I mean, so, I mean, it's not out of the question that TI could do it. You know, they... Obviously, you know, the BeagleBoard has a great following. Yep. Uh-oh. Had a little blip there, Dave. Oops.

Dave Jones: I actually have a friend at work who bought himself a BeagleBoard, and he wanted to set it up and teach himself and, you know, get up like a TCP IP Ethernet thing, you know, happening, and he said it was a real bitch. Really? It just didn't work out. Yeah. It didn't work out of the box, and he spent ages trying to get it working, talking to Linux and doing all sorts of... just to get Ethernet up and running or something. So, yeah, apparently it's not as polished as... Well, maybe... I don't know the details of it, but he just said it was a bitch, but in the end, he was quite happy it worked, and...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, Ethan, it's pretty hard to get up and running on its own anyways. I mean, if you're going from scratch and you're, like, starting to stack and everything, that's not exactly an easy thing to do by itself. Oh, no.

Dave Jones: He was using all pre-existing, you know, source and code and stuff, but, yeah, just putting it all together and getting it going apparently was a real dog, so...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I think the real question with TI and their launchpad kit, because, I mean, it's like $4.30 at the beginning, right? I think it's gone up since. Oh, has it? I think it's like... Yeah, I think so. Maybe not. The real question, though...

Dave Jones: Skyrocketed $4.60, has it? Yeah. What is that?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, well, inflation. The real question, though, is, is this a new form of advertising where you don't even bother to advertise and you just give shit away? I mean, like... Good point. I mean, I think that would be a very viable model. I mean, essentially disposable. You know, we've talked about waste in the past, but, you know, at $4.30 for a microprocessor board, that's cheap, man.

Dave Jones: Well, actually, that is cheaper than some of the hits that they're paying for for advertising. If you buy through Google AdWords, some of those AdWord hits can be $4 or $5 a pop, right?

Chris Gammell: Exactly. I mean, shit. And why not just give them all away and then have idiots like us talk about on the air, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: And we go up shit over it. You're welcome, Texas Instruments. You're welcome.

Dave Jones: I think you might have hit on something. They could be actually very smart because... And just the other forms of advertising, not only the per-click one, but the impression-based advertising. You know, you see those big TI banners on the... You might go to EDN website or something. You see DigiKey or TI with their huge ads there. They cost an absolute fortune. Yeah, those are like 10 grand, aren't they? They actually know what the CPM figures are and they're astronomical, you know? They're paying massive dollars for every thousand impressions and...

Chris Gammell: It's crazy.

Dave Jones: And that's just an ad impression. That's not people actually clicking through and actually buying, you know, actually using your parts. Whereas now, they can give away something for $4 or $5 or $10 even and they're, you know, they're actually... That can be much more valuable, infinitely more valuable than paying for some stupid advertising campaign.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Mmm. And speaking of advertising, some of the best... Some of my favorite advertising in the world, it's in its second year now. The SparkFun Free Day was last week.

Dave Jones: Oh, it was, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I haven't seen the figures. How many did they sell? I mean... How much value?

Chris Gammell: They always give away... For both years, they've given away $100,000. This year was a little different. They actually made you answer a quiz before you could just go to the shopping cart. I couldn't even load the page. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't even load the page. All right. But I mean, I don't need stuff anyways. I mean, I was just doing it for fun. But yeah, that's... I mean, that's great advertising too. It's the same kind of thing. It's the... I mean, the Chris Anderson Free, you know, like how he wrote that book about it. You know, basically, you give it away. You give it away and you see who comes back. And again, we're talking about SparkFun, right? That brilliant model. I... You know, $100,000 in advertising probably did nothing for the amount of people that tried to get to their site. And even the ones that pre-built a shopping cart and said, okay, I'm going to buy this stuff. I bet, you know, some percentage of them went back and said, oh, I really need this stuff anyways. I'm going to go buy it from them. You know, so they're brilliant. I mean, it really is brilliant.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it'd be almost impossible for them to actually track the stats on that to see who actually came back and bought something and whether or not the $100,000 was actually well spent or not. And they got back more than their $100,000 in, you know, further sales down the track. So that's... I think I remember a speech from the... What's his name? He founded SparkFun. Jeremy Seedle?

Chris Gammell: Nathan Seedle.

Dave Jones: Nathan Seedle. Sorry. Yeah. I remember a talk I heard him give about something along the lines of that the average person to their site only spends about $50 and then doesn't come back, apparently. That's, I think, $50 or $100 and then they don't come back. That's the thing because then they realize, oh, well, I can buy the chips cheaper at Mouser or DigiKey or something like that. So they come there for once to actually have their start, to get their start. You know, they buy their solder and iron and their little kit and they get started. And once they get started, they don't bother buying from them anymore because they can buy it cheap because they know exactly what they need and they can buy it cheaper somewhere else. Yeah. So I think that was directly his quote or something.

Chris Gammell: See, now that'll be interesting later on when they say, okay, so now a distributor comes to them, you know, like the DigiKey you spent an hour on on your video, right? Yeah. DigiKey comes to them and says, okay, well, we're going to help sponsor your free day because you guys are a launch off point for people getting into electronics. If you tell them to go to DigiKey after they are through with you, you know, if you have a tutorial on how to do DigiKey stuff when you're done with, you know, the SparkFun projects, send them our way and we'll help, you know, we'll help you out. So maybe that's the future of advertising. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Well, why do these big companies need advertising departments? They can just ask us. We've got all the answers.

Chris Gammell: I guess so. Yeah. We should charge for this.

Dave Jones: For a fee. I was going to say for a fee. Thank you very much. Yes.

Chris Gammell: I need the money. All those Amp Hour listeners are getting it for free, but I don't know about those marketing and sales departments. Come on now.

Dave Jones: Boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I love all my advertisers, by the way. A big shout out to all my advertisers. Thank you for continually advertising on my side.

Chris Gammell: Come on. Come on, dude.

Dave Jones: They do help pay the bills. Of course.

Chris Gammell: That's very nice of them. Yep. What else we got here? So, did you see the one I posted from Matt Metz over at Make?

Dave Jones: No, I didn't. Is this the skill sets one?

Chris Gammell: No, they did have that. And that's interesting. They're kind of doing a tutorial set on soldering. They're just kind of building up. The thing is, people are going to keep making these tutorials on how to solder and how to do everything else. But that's actually not the one. I was pointing to laser cutting circuit boards. Now...

Dave Jones: Oh, laser cutting the circuit boards. Yes. I've seen that.

Chris Gammell: Now, I already know what your argument's going to be here. But, I think that in terms of printing versus laser ablation. So, this is a very high level thing and it's very DIY kind of thing. So, basically they have... They cut out the traces with laser. But, if you think about it, you could have laser ablation of a very... An ablation being where you like blast away little bits. You could do that to cut into silicon. Okay. So, maybe that is another alternative to the future printed transistors that we love rambling on about. Oh, dear. Rambling on about. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh. No. I've got to say it. I've got to do the Australian expression. Tell him he's dreaming. Dreaming. Dreaming, mate. Yeah. Dreaming. Oh, come on. Yeah. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. There's a million ways to produce. There's, you know, circuits and ICs and stuff like that. There's, you know, there's countless ways. I'm sure we haven't seen the end of ways to produce them. But the basic concepts come back of it's pointless to actually do it. God.

Chris Gammell: Blah, blah, blah.

Dave Jones: It's not the fact of being able to do it, which is difficult in itself for any scale you're actually going to want to do it at. A decent scale. As in a small scale. We're talking about here. Very small. Yes. Very small. It's just not going to happen. And then you need the multi-levels. And then you need the via interconnects. And then you need the... Don't get me started.

Chris Gammell: You're dreaming. I just wanted to get you going.

Dave Jones: Anyway, it's very cool. Yeah. They laser print these boards. They actually do it like an inverse process. I think they say, like, they put down masking tape first. And then they burn out the masking tape. And then they actually put... And then they use that as a mask to actually lay down the actual track. So then they've got a positive thing... Sorry, a negative image out of masking tape on top of the board. And then they lay down some silver or something like that. So it's a rather interesting process, actually.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's cool. And it's kind of the laser idea and, like, the rastering across. I mean, this is not necessarily rastered. But I'm always interested by that. Because if you look at, like, what they're talking about with next generation, like, actual silicon chip making capabilities and talking about, like, you know, 20 nanometers and below. Yeah. They're talking about doing that with EUV, which is enhanced ultraviolet. But it's basically like a beam, I believe. And they do that kind of rastered, you know, back and forth, back and forth and blast away. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: At the photo mask. But the thing is, it's so slow right now. So that's kind of the problem.

Dave Jones: Okay. That's the problem. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So it's actually a raster. It's not a vector thing. It's a raster-based scan.

Chris Gammell: I think they had multi-lasers, or not lasers, but multi-beam. But yeah, as far as I know, because it's just so small. You know, it's a very short wavelength, basically. And trying to blast away at the photoresist. And plus, they're getting in the crazier and crazier, like, the actual chemicals they have to put on top of the wafers. Yeah. I totally veered off there. Sorry. Right. I read about that stuff sometimes, but yeah.

Dave Jones: What are the chances of actually being able to laser etch directly onto a copper clad board? I don't know if it's possible, but that would be really cool. If you could, like, instead of having, like, one of those NC machines that actually mill out the copper on your board, which are quite popular, you can get those from making prototype one-off boards, what if you could do the same thing with laser? I don't know if it's actually possible, because the heat would possibly disperse through the copper plane, rather than burn out a little spot, maybe. I don't know, but if that would be possible, that'd be a great way to make all these boards. Well, that's what I was talking about.

Chris Gammell: I was talking about doing that, except very small. That's what I was saying.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but no! It's different when you get down to making chips. There's a huge technological difference between them. You're dreaming.

Chris Gammell: I know. I know. Dreaming in a good way, Dave.

Dave Jones: Dude, you lost big time. Stop being so negative.

Chris Gammell: Stop being so negative.

Dave Jones: I'm being practical. I'm not being negative. I'm encouraging people to go out there and do it and prove me wrong.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You have my full support.

Chris Gammell: All right, well, that's good. Boy. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Anyway, that'd be cool if you could laser etch directly onto your copper clad board. But as always, then you'd have all the excess copper left. Same with the NC milling machine. When you actually mill the thing out, unless you mill out the entire plane, then your board is filled with plane, which is okay for most things anyway. So that'd be awesome.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if anyone's tried it. Maybe you could do it with multi-layer too, where the strength of the laser would blast it at different levels kind of thing. You know what I mean?

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. So you do like a... Or maybe you could get photo resist board. You could get one of those pre-coded photo resist boards and laser etch the actual traces out of it, perhaps. And then you throw it in the developer, then you throw it in the etcher, you know, same as you do for a normal board. But instead of using like a laser printed overhead transparency and your UV light box, you expose it using a laser, perhaps. I don't know. That'd be cool.

Chris Gammell: That would be cool.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Interesting.

Dave Jones: Sure, it's possible in some way. That'd be awesome. Maybe I should get like a little laser out of a CD player and a XY motor and go for it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's a fairly big, complex project. So a lot of trial and error, time-wise, that's for sure. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Did you see this article from The Spectrum about the president of the US and the E-word?

Dave Jones: The E-word? He mentioned engineers, did he?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, he did earlier. I mean, but it's interesting. The article talks about how past presidents in the US, at least, have been, they shy away from the E-word. They kind of lumped them in with scientists before.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And now it's kind of changing a little bit. You know, it's interesting from a, you know, like a national discourse. Like, what do you really want more of, right? I mean, do you want more scientists? Do you want more engineers? Engineers. I've been seeing more stuff lately about, you know, the important, you know, like, not more lately, but, you know, the importance of making stuff and just like, that's important to innovation. And I wish I would have posted that link. I just saw that somewhere. But, you know, basically that innovation isn't possible unless you're actually making things. So you need to be making things.

Dave Jones: As well as developing things. Because scientists typically develop processes to do stuff and then engineers, you know, go and make real shit.

Chris Gammell: Right. Using that.

Dave Jones: So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. It was interesting that they didn't mention it before because they said it almost made it into a couple speeches, but it was like, it was honestly one of the first times that that they had ever used the word before. It's like a swear word.

Dave Jones: Really? First time ever, you think, that a president's muttered, other than in passing. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Like in a speech. Like in a speech. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. And he got up there and I assume he was all Obama-like and engineers will change the world and engineers will revive America and all that sort of stuff. Was it very wanky like that or what? I don't know. I guess we have to see the video of the speech.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, it was a while ago. It was back in October, I think. Oh, okay. Oh, old news. Yeah. And they do events and they, you know, they do events and like, like the Obama administration is big on like STEM. Like they have a, you know, I mentioned on here before the change the equation.org. That's like a STEM. It promotes STEM education, science, technology, engineering, and math. And that's good. I mean, it's just a little frustrating when you hear like, oh, engineers will change everything and we need more engineering jobs. But then, well, sorry, they're still moving stuff overseas.

Dave Jones: Who wants to do math?

Chris Gammell: Well, that's a good question. I mean, we need.

Dave Jones: You know, is there any more math that needs to be done? You know?

Chris Gammell: Oh, you mean as like a career?

Dave Jones: As a career to be a mathematician.

Chris Gammell: Oh, there is. It's just really weird problems.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Yeah. I'm sure I'll get attacked by all the mathematicians now. I'm sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't think they listen to the Amp Hour.

Dave Jones: Everyone listens to the Amp Hour. Even Obama. He emailed me the other day and said, it's a great show. Love it.

Chris Gammell: Great show. Oh, yeah. We'll make all the STEM kids listen to it. Dave should stop swearing because kids are going to be listening to it.

Dave Jones: You've got to stop being un-American. You've got to be a patriot.

Chris Gammell: A patriot.

Dave Jones: Oh, you yanks. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I know. I can only imagine what it's like on the outside.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's hilarious. I tell you, we just, every day, we just laugh. There's another news item. Oh, what's America done today? That's hilarious. Nice. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Nice.

Dave Jones: Yes. Sorry, but you are pretty much the laughing stock of the rest of the world. That's okay. Yep.

Chris Gammell: That's okay.

Dave Jones: You had on here, actually, here's an American thing. You had on the list here, see if I can find it, that analog devices spelt analog wrong. What? Their actual magazine was called the Analog Dialogue.

Chris Gammell: I was kidding about that. Right. They spelt it with the U. I know. With their U-E. Yeah, yeah. I was just joking about that. I know. Because that's an American thing. I know. I know. We chopped it off. We have American English versus the British English.

Dave Jones: So, analog in America is A-N-A-L-O-G. And that's it. But the rest of the world uses a U-E on the end.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm keeping aware of that.

Dave Jones: We don't, actually. Because it's one of those words where we've just sort of succumbed to the American way of life. Nice. That way. Yep. Sorry. But we have pretty much conformed. Even I spell analog without the U-E because it's just superfluous. It's two extra characters to type and I just couldn't give a shit. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like the word color as well.

Chris Gammell: And then like analog devices. Analog devices doesn't spell like that. You know, you just see it more and more places. And eventually it's like, okay, well, yeah. I guess it's like that. But we should talk about that because they have on analog.com, Analog Dialogue is... And that was actually what someone suggested for this show, calling the show once. But unfortunately it was taken. Yep. But it's a great... It's like a monthly newsletter from analog devices.

Dave Jones: It's been going for decades, I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Like since the 70s.

Dave Jones: I can remember reading it. Jeez. Might have well before the internet, that's for sure. So before, you know, 93 or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. For sure. Yeah. And, you know, it's great that they're still... I think they might still mail it out if you want it. I know Linear Tech has one like that where they mail it out too. Yeah. And, you know, it's great to see that they're still doing like great applications work like that. Oh, it's awesome. Yeah. Because that's where a lot of people find their design ideas. Yep. And, you know, I think about like my own writing and like, you know, these guys are writing like technical, technical articles. You know, like this is like... And it's not fast to do that kind of... You know that too from videos. Oh, no.

Dave Jones: It takes forever. It can take you months to write a short article like that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The more details you have, the longer it takes to write. I mean, I look at like a Jim Williams article and I just... I can't even imagine how long he spends on that stuff. But it's his whole job. You know, that is his whole job is developing these experiments and these circuits and, you know...

Dave Jones: Yeah, absolutely. And he builds stuff up and verifies it and you see the photo of it in the article and, you know...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it's great. Some of the best books I've got here... People talk about textbooks, right? Some of the best books I've got on my reference shelf here are like analog devices books, which are essentially just a collection of all their application notes, you know... Right. And they put them all together. You know, they might all be about analog to digital converters. So there's all their, you know...

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: There's a book of all their app notes on analog to digital converters. And I've actually got it in physical print form and it's fantastic. Something I'd never throw out.

Chris Gammell: And that's actually one of our listeners, Carmen, put that in our suggestions page about the Op Amp Handbook. Or the Op Amp Applications Handbook. Yep. And I think that's... Young? J-U-N-G? Is that him? Or is that the other one?

Dave Jones: Oh, that doesn't ring a bell.

Chris Gammell: I'm sorry.

Dave Jones: I'm trying to find my book here. They're all in a pile at the moment. I did sort them out, but they're literally all sitting in the corner in a pile. And I think it might be right down the bottom.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, Walt Young. Yeah. So Walt... Oh, Walt. Yes. Yeah. Walt Young. Yes. The two Walt's.

Dave Jones: There's Walt Young and there's Walt Kester. Is it Walt Kester? I think. I don't know that one. He actually came to Australia once and gave a lecture here, which I saw. He gave like a series of lectures. And yeah, it was great. Yes. The two Walt's.

Chris Gammell: The veritable rock stars of analog. We called that to the ham radio operators before, but these guys are the ambassadors basically. Jim Williams, Walt Young.

Dave Jones: I can remember him. There was one girl in the actual class where he was giving this lecture and he did this really crude female joke. You know, it was like, you know, everyone sort of laughed and then we realized, shit, there's a girl in the room, you know. He was really old school and yeah. Yeah. Where, you know, back in, well, back in his day, you know, there was never a woman that did engineering. It was just unheard of, you know. Right. So, it was, and that's just the age he was brought up in where, you know, whereas it was very politically incorrect joke. Even if there were no women there, I thought it was a bit, you know, I thought it was a bit, bit much really. Oh, yeah. Even for my standards.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I was going to say, coming from you, that's bad. That's really bad.

Dave Jones: I can't remember what the joke was, but yeah, it was funny though. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's probably good not to repeat it here, Dave. Jerry's going to, she'll kick your ass.

Dave Jones: Oh, she will. Yeah. I've seen those brass knuckles down a bra. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's right. And that works. Yeah. So, the latest article, I want to give a specific mention of this because it's about bypass, you know, it's just about linear regulators. And you don't think, you know, like linear regulators hook those up, that's fine. But this is about all the different types of capacitors you can hook up to it. And just the different concerns you have about ESR and loop bandwidth and all that other kind of stuff. And yeah, it's a really great article. So, you know, if you're doing linear designs, it's worth, or linear regulator designs, it's worth a, you know, a look-see. So, I would check that out. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, what else was on here?

Dave Jones: We've got about five minutes left. We have to kill five minutes. Come on.

Chris Gammell: Gotta kill it. Gotta kill it. There was something I wanted... Oh, the, uh... So, this was another one from the forum. So, what... Probably not five minutes. But the question was from, uh... Where is it? It is from David on the forum. And he was asking, you know, what is real-life design like? I mean, that's kind of a very broad question.

Dave Jones: But... Yeah. And this is what prompted me to do my top five tips for graduates. Ah, okay. Somebody actually complained about that yesterday, I think. They complained that, uh... Because I think I titled it the top five tips for graduate engineers. And they thought that meant people who were doing PhDs and masters. Ah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You just mean, like, people who had already gotten a degree.

Dave Jones: I was talking about people who had just got their degree or were just doing their degree or something like that. Or their other course, their diploma or whatever. Yeah. And, um... Yeah. So, yep. Sorry. I should have thought more about the title. But, no. It applies to everyone. And, yeah, that's what prompted my top five tips, which I can't even remember them now. But, um... Must not have been that good, huh? Yeah. Dilbert is real. You know? The world of the corporate politics and the world of the... You know? Just the endless meetings and the pointless meetings and having your project shit-canned and all that sort of stuff. It's real. It happens. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, he was asking about a specific job. He was asking if the following is this. He wants to know if you're given... So, number one was given a specification and you're just told to fix it. Number two is you get to jump straight into the details of how to tackle the problem. Number three is you start pulling ideas together and mock up a prototype. Number four is you follow the project through to the end and hand over the finished product to the... Assumingly to the customer or the end user. And then, number five, you do some documentations, at least the basics, and support the project. And my answer would be... Most cases, no. But you could do that in your house just fine because that is the only way it's going to happen if you're doing it on your own.

Dave Jones: Well, not necessarily, as I replied. But I agree with your summary that, in general, no, that's not really the way it happens. They're going to have, you know, specialists who... That is what's called a typical one-man band job. Yeah. And they do exist. Those jobs do exist. And that was Dave's... You know, that's what he wanted to do. He wanted to do everything from concept through to production and documentation and the whole works, right? Yeah. Software and everything. And you can get jobs like that. But typically, they're more in the subcontract world. You know, those small companies, they've got five engineers and you hire them to subcontract. You subcontract out your design to them and they do everything. It's a turnkey solution, basically. And they might typically put a single engineer doing the whole project. So it depends on the size of it, of course. But, yeah. But, no, I've worked in companies, large aerospace, large companies that, you know, I've been the one-man band. I've done everything. So they certainly do exist. You've just got to look out for them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, I think it's pretty common, too. You know, like a lot of schools, they don't really tell you everything that's going to happen. I mean, there's a lot of options out there. But, you know, if you're looking at a job and you accept it and you think it might be one thing and it's not, I mean, I don't know. I don't think it's wrong to jump somewhere else. But, you know, sometimes you're going to be trading security for excitement, you know?

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. But no job is 100% perfect, you know, 100% fun 100% of the time. It just doesn't happen, you know? You're going to have to put up with some shit sooner or later, you know? You're going to have to do stuff you don't like. And even if you are, even if you do get that ideal one-man band job that you're after, there's a lot of responsibility. It can suck because all the responsibility is on you. You've got to do everything to meet the timeline and meet the project timeline. And then when it goes out there and something goes wrong and there's a million-dollar screw-up, whose fault is it? Well, you know, you can't go, well, it was him, you know? No, it was you, you poor bastard, because you're the only one who worked on it. 2.30 in the morning?

Chris Gammell: Come on in. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. So, be careful what you wish for. Yeah. Yes. It might come true.

Chris Gammell: You know, I've kind of, I was writing about that last week and, you know, like, I don't know if that's the kind of thing that I want to do eventually, you know? Like, I've looked at that too, like, you know, starting a company or even just contracting for other people. Oh, it's a lot of work. It's a ton of work, you know? And, like, where do you kind of draw that line of, well, I want to do other things or when do you want to be the end-all designer, you know?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: I don't know when that happens.

Dave Jones: That's why I've said it before, you know, the goal should be to do as minimum amount of work as possible for your money, you know, or your living. Hard work is highly overrated. If you're slogging your guts out 80 hours a week on your own business, working, you know, subcontract business, designing shit for other people, then, well, you're doing it hard, I reckon. Even if you might be bringing in the big bucks at, you know, 100, 150 bucks an hour or something. Yeah. It doesn't matter. You're working your ass off, you know?

Chris Gammell: I recall that now. We called that the hard work hypothesis, didn't we?

Dave Jones: Oh, did we? Okay. I think so.

Chris Gammell: That was the name of a couple episodes ago.

Dave Jones: That's right. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: There we go. Dave's hard work hypothesis.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think, yeah, I just wonder, I wonder if that's the only going to be the way to go eventually is if, you know, if the corporation as an employer, man, are we repeating topics? I feel like I've talked about this before.

Dave Jones: I think we always repeat shit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think we do. Yeah. I just wonder if that's going to be eventually the only thing you can do. No, I wrote about it. That's what it was. I wrote about it with the...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But I think eventually that's going to be the only option eventually is going to be everyone's going to be an independent contractor, you know? Like you're going to be out on your own. You're going to be designing little projects and there might be a corporate overlord with tons of MBAs trying to tell you what to do. But I don't know if... Corporate overlord. I don't know if people are going to keep... Maybe engineering staffs will cease to exist. Maybe they'll just be contractors.

Dave Jones: Oh, I don't think that's going to happen because there's the... You know, there's always an equilibrium with that. There's a natural equilibrium that always happens within companies and they're always going to want staff. So, yeah. I don't see it happening.

Chris Gammell: But... I mean, that's true. I mean, managers have to have someone to tell what to do, right?

Dave Jones: Exactly. Whereas subcontractors, you can... See, because subcontractors, you've got to be careful with them because if you... You know, you can't be too mean to them like you can with employees. If you've got a bunch of employees, you know, you can whip them to death. But, you know, if you piss off your subcontractor and you're 100% reliant upon them to do, you know, to finish your turnkey solution, well, you know, good luck to you because they'll do the go slow, they'll do whatever and or they'll just tell you to piss off or they'll just ignore you or, you know, there's plenty of ways they can screw you around. So, just... Yeah. Whereas employees, if you've got a dozen engineers and, you know, half of them can do the job, well, you can whip them until they're dead, you know, because you know that, well, you can just get somebody else to do it. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, well. I guess we need to keep some underlings around, huh?

Dave Jones: Exactly. Some peons.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: Oh, dear Eddie. What can you do?

Chris Gammell: We can talk more about it next week.

Dave Jones: Awesome. Why not?

Chris Gammell: All right. 26. We're done with it. Okay. Thanks for joining us. See you next week. Bye. Bye.

Chris Gammell: We'll be right back.