#27 – 555 Contest, Computer Museum, Octopart - The Green Pen Hornswoggle

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

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

Dave Jones: Hey Chris, what's happening over there?

Chris Gammell: Oh, not much, you know, kind of a busy week for me actually. Right. What have you been up to? Just work? Oh, I've started two new websites, but I think I'll tell more about that later.

Dave Jones: Right. Excellent. Two. Well, I'm only aware of one, so one's a surprise to me.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, I talked about the one last week was the engineer blogs.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, engineer's blog, and then you started the 555 timer contest, which we'll get into, and something else. A new mysterious website coming from Chris.

Chris Gammell: No, no, that's two. That's more than enough.

Dave Jones: Oh, is that the two? Oh, come on. Disappointed.

Chris Gammell: Sorry.

Dave Jones: What a letdown.

Chris Gammell: I know.

Dave Jones: So easy to set up websites these days. Yeah, it kind of is. Just set them up on a whim, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, that's kind of what I've been doing, so.

Dave Jones: Excellent.

Chris Gammell: Whatever works, whatever works.

Dave Jones: Indeed. Indeed.

Chris Gammell: What's new out your way?

Dave Jones: Ah, jeez. I don't know. Not much. Busy, busy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Trying to get some blogs done, but things get in the way. Yes. Saw the battery one. What can you do? Life. Yeah. It's terrible.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, let's jump in, huh? We got some stuff to talk about.

Dave Jones: We got a fair bit of stuff. What have we got? A couple of shout-outs to start off with.

Chris Gammell: Do we have shout-outs? Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: There was... No.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, we do.

Dave Jones: Mitch. Yeah. Mitch put a logo on his site.

Chris Gammell: Let's see. Yeah. Okay. So Mitch, yeah. And he also goes by Mitch Electronic. No. MIT Patterson. That's right. Mitt Patterson on Twitter. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hey, Mitch.

Chris Gammell: So he's actually the first one to use that one logo with the text on it, I think.

Dave Jones: Ooh. Innovator.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So thanks to Mitch. That's great. That's really great. And another one is Alexander. So his is his lastname.com. I don't know how to say it. Sorry. But he actually had a question for us because he was talking about... Shoot. He's from Norway as well. And he was talking...

Dave Jones: We seem to get a lot of people from the Nordic countries, especially on my blog as well. The Nordic countries are big.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's great.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Lots of listeners up there. Awesome.

Chris Gammell: Must be the long winters.

Dave Jones: It must be. Yeah. Exactly. Inside activities, you know. There's no sunlight, you know, for six months of the year or something in some of those regions. Crazy.

Chris Gammell: Once you get done skiing a couple of times, you're like, all right. So what else? What else have we got on the plate? Yeah. So he had a question about publishing though. So he has these projects he does and he shows a couple off on his site people should check out. But he was wondering, you know, he shows it to like friends and family and they're all kind of like...

Dave Jones: Oh, there's your mistake. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's tough. It's tough because it's a niche kind of activity, you know. But... Niche.

Dave Jones: I love the American pronunciation of that.

Chris Gammell: Niche. Niche. Niche. That's all right. There's only... There's an I in there, Dave. There's not like two or three E's or four E's. Right. Niche.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's near perfect.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: Wow. I love it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So what should he do?

Dave Jones: Well, stop showing it to family and friends because you're only going to be disappointed.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, when I was a boy, yeah, I didn't have anyone who was interested in electronics. I didn't know anyone. There was no internet back then. You know, there were no electronics clubs out where I live. There was nobody. It was just me. And, you know, I rush in and show something to my parents. Look what I built. Oh, yeah, that's lovely, dear. You know, and...

Chris Gammell: You said you were going to stay out there for a couple more hours, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah, exactly. I usually stayed all day out in the shed, but, yeah, it's just... No, and then you show it to your school friends and it's like, well, you learn pretty quick that they'll just, you know, laugh at it, really. What the hell is that? What did you build that for?

Chris Gammell: I think he's doing it right so far. I mean, if you look at the site, he's already documenting and stuff, and I think that's kind of what you got to do. That's what you do. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the internet is your new showing off place, you know?

Dave Jones: Absolutely. It's where you can find, you know, people that share your enthusiasm.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And people will go, oh, wow, that's cool, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And then past, I think past just publishing, you got to kind of maintain relationships, you know, kind of keep up with one another. And that has a lot of other dividends, too. I mean, like, keeping up with someone. You say you meet up someone from Norway that, you know, you trade electronics projects with as a kid or younger. Not a kid. I don't think he's a kid. But, you know, then if you're looking for a job later, you know, even if that person doesn't have a job to offer you directly, you can call them up, say, hey, what have you heard? Because, you know, I hear about jobs. Yeah. Everybody hears about jobs. So, that's the, I think you're doing it right, Alexander. So, keep it up.

Dave Jones: Yep. Just publish it. And maybe check around for a local hackerspace or something like that. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's a good start. That's a real good start. I mean, and if you're really, I mean, if you're worried about people still not seeing it because, you know, people don't know your site, you know, submit it to Make or submit it to a lot of the aggregators out there. You know, Hack Gadgets is another good one. You know, like, there's a lot of…

Dave Jones: Yep. Absolutely.

Chris Gammell: A lot of good ones out there that want to show off your work. They do. So, don't be afraid to just email them and say, hey, look what I did and see what happens. The worst they can say is, no, we've got enough content right now. But a lot of them will not be saying that these days. I don't think.

Dave Jones: No, I know. They're all trying to get new content galore. Same with the magazines. Get it published. You know, write an article. Go to them. Yeah. They're always looking for contributed content. So, do it.

Chris Gammell: Definitely. And, you know, me and Dave always push for more people on Twitter. You can follow more people on Twitter and, you know, see what's going on more real time. And you don't have to, but it's an easier way to keep up with people, I think. Yep.

Dave Jones: Very time-consuming way because you've always got to, you know, thousands of comments you've got to read, you know, through, especially if you follow on lots of people.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's true.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But, no, it's by all means, join a hackerspace. There's got to be a hackerspace up there somewhere. Surely.

Chris Gammell: And if not, start one.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Exactly. Start one in your garage. Invite people over. Yeah. Just add your garage. You can go to the website. You can add it as a list of hackerspaces and invite people over and that's it.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. There was a rant on the forum the other day or the other week about somebody mentioned that, oh, hackerspaces are shit. They're just for, you know, software hackers and no real hardware hackers go there. And, well, I don't know. I've never physically been to one, but everything I see and read and hear from people about it, that's not the case. No, I don't know. Not the ones I've been to. Maybe they've just had some bad experiences.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, that's the downside, right? On the internet, everybody's kind of local, right? But when you start going to a physical location, then you're limited by the people that are there. So, that's kind of the tradeoff.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, I think it must be intrinsically wrong, that comment, that it's just full of software people. Why, if you're a software, if you just want to do software, why would you go to a hackerspace? A hackerspace, by definition, is a place to meet and share physical resources to build something. Oh, you know, you meet people as well with like-minded things, but, you know, there are countless software and geek forums out there that you can join to talk about software and discuss any niche topic you want to talk about. And, you know, that will be much better resourced than a hackerspace, which may only have one or two people there that are experienced in software or something like that, maybe. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Maybe the person meant because-

Dave Jones: I think if you're a software person and you're going to a hackerspace, I think you're, you know, you're pretty much wasting your time. You might as well jump on a forum.

Chris Gammell: Well, maybe because the software people are the ones trying to learn the hardware aspects. Maybe that's what they meant, but honestly, I didn't read it, so.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. Well, no, the guy's comment was that, I forget who it is. Sorry. And they just said, no, everyone there had no interest in building anything. All they wanted to do was, you know, write software, you know, design an app for an iPhone or something.

Dave Jones: Oh.

Dave Jones: I think I'm paraphrasing there, but. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I think that's, no. That's a one-off, hopefully. That's a bit far-fetched. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, thanks to Mitch and Alexander. That's great. And one more shout-out in there. Lane on Twitter, he posted up, the thing, I mean, he let us know about it, but DigiKey is now listed on Octopar. Did you see that?

Dave Jones: Yes. I haven't actually tried to use it. Yep. Sorry. But, yeah, because FineChips doesn't work for me. FineChips doesn't work at work. There's a, I think they've still got a bug. They've had it for months. Yeah. Where it doesn't work with some stupid, obscure, you know, corporate server thing or something. And our company just happens to have that corporate server thing it doesn't work with. So, FineChips doesn't. Yeah. Bloody well work at all. Ever since they got bought out by that, you know, conglomerate company. Yeah, whoever that was. The media company or something. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Oh, God. Unbelievable. I tweeted them about it and gave them a serve for it, but they never, I don't think they ever fixed it. No. Anyway, I've been using OctoPAR, but I haven't used it lately for the DigiKey thing, but that's great. Yeah. Because they're one of the majors, DigiKey, and not to have the, I don't know why it wasn't on there before. Maybe, yeah. So, it beats me.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I like, I always like those aggregator sites for the parts. I mean, that's a lot of database work. So, I mean, many, many good words towards the people that do that, but man, it's nice to have it all in one place. That's for sure. Hmm.

Dave Jones: It's really only good for finding stock and or prices. You know, it's not good for, you know, there's no parametric searches on there to find your part or something like that.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's not a primary, you know, you don't go there first. As I've shown on a couple of my blogs, you go to DigiKey or Mouser or somebody first to find those parts. And then once you found them and you need stock of them and you need to check stock. So, you know, typically I'll have like two windows open, you know. I'll have, well, I'll have three. I'll have three screens. I have one screen dedicated to the data sheets, one screen dedicated to DigiKey or Mouser or Farnells. Farnells, Element 14. Yeah. It's Farnells. Bah. Bah. And I'm still getting over Agilent Hewlett-Packard thing.

Chris Gammell: You're a little late going on that one, Dave.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know.

Chris Gammell: But you'll get there. You'll get there.

Dave Jones: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. And a third window with, you know, fine chips or something like that. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, all people need is three really huge screens like Dave has. That's all you need.

Dave Jones: And then it's not enough.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: Once you get three, it's still not enough. Then where are you going to put the amp on, right?

Chris Gammell: You want that open so you can listen and see the show notes.

Dave Jones: Yeah, where are you going to put, you know, Twitter. You've got to put your tweet deck up there somewhere.

Chris Gammell: You probably need some kind of huge interface, like an entire wall's worth.

Dave Jones: Yep, absolutely. Like in Batman, you know, one of those, yeah, that big huge wall of monitors. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Nice.

Chris Gammell: That's what I need. Yes. Yeah. Hook it up.

Dave Jones: Maybe I just need the info to be implanted directly into my head and that's the next step.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Wonderful. There was one other shout out. I'm not sure this is actually a shout out. But it was, I think you posted this link about the old microchip parts.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. I don't know where I got it from. Maybe the forum and I tweeted it. And yes, I probably posted that on the list here.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yes.

Dave Jones: There's some porn to be had.

Chris Gammell: Electronics porn. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Some high res photos. The old UV windows to erase the chips, which, I mean, maybe you should explain that because I didn't know about that for a long time. I didn't know that's how they used to do it.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. If you didn't know, to erase the old fashioned EPROMs, that's what they, you know, they were erasable programmable read only memory, not electrically erasable. They were erasable. And the way you erase them is not with, you know, sending it a pulse or something like that, was to actually put it under ultraviolet light. And to do that, the physical chip has a little glass window on top. Yeah. And you expose it to, you expose the actual dye inside to ultraviolet light. Yeah. And via a process, which I won't go into, they will, that would actually erase the part. It had set all the bits back to FF. And, but it was a very non-precise process. You know, you, you, you didn't want to overcook them and you didn't want to undercook them because to underexpose them meant not all the bits flipped back to FF. So you'd have to blank check them. Yeah. That's why these days, a lot of all this, all these, you might've used a microchip programmer or something else. They still have this blank check thing before they actually programmed the device. And that's a legacy thing, which goes back to the old days of these windowed EPROMs. Yeah. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Good old days, huh? I'd also like to just call out the fact that you call them erased. I don't know where the Z is in that letter, in that word. So. Right. Man, these are some good pictures though, man.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. They're very nice.

Chris Gammell: People definitely have to check them out. It takes like a minute and a half to load the page, but like the, uh, man, they get like down into like the dye and the dye bonding and it's just really.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You can see the wires attaching to the, yeah, the bonds going over and attaching to the chip and yeah.

Chris Gammell: Very high quality. I like it. So we'll link to that on the page. So thanks microchip for making chips. Whoever they posted there, that's a, I'm not sure, neozoi.com. I don't know. I don't know. Something like that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No idea who posted it, but it's very cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's very cool.

Dave Jones: And that's how it used to work. And the first pick, the first pick chip, that's how you reprogrammed it. You erased it. You put it under the ultraviolet light and then you programmed it. And then they came out with the pick. That's why we talked about the other week, the top 25 chips of all time or something. The pick 16C84 was the first electrically erasable chip. So you didn't need the UV anymore. They didn't have to put the glass window, which is very expensive manufacturing process to put in that little glass window. It makes the chips, you know, quite expensive. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And less shockproof and everything else too, I'm sure.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. And all sorts of stuff. And you had to cover it up. That's the thing. If you left that window open, right? This was very common in commercial products, retail products, everything like that. If you didn't put like an opaque, you know, tape or a sticker over the top of that window and you just stuck the chip in your product, then light would eventually filter into the product. Usually, you know, it might come through some vent holes or something. And it would slowly over the years erase your EEPROM. So your actual product would start playing up and stop working because a few bits here and there might get changed or flipped. Oh, man. And yeah, it was nasty.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I saw an EE Times story about that. Like one of those like design stories where they, I think it was EE Times or EDN, basically that happened where the tape ended up coming off and they kept like checking everything else and finally they realized the tape was gone. And that's right. And it was just messing up the product.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And it would do it subtly because all of a sudden, like your EEPROM wouldn't just suddenly go blank. It'd be one bit here or there, you know. And yeah, can cause all sorts of weird problems. And it's not just EEPROMs that are susceptible to that sort of thing. There's silicon transistors are susceptible to light. So that's why they have to put them in an opaque package. That's why the package is actually black or it's a metal can. It's a sealed metal can.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So like the photoelectric effect.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because a photo transistor is just a normal transistor, but with the top cut off and a clear window on it. You know. Yeah. And some chemical changes. But yeah. In theory. Yeah. But basically in theory, any transistor will be susceptible to light. Yeah. So, you know, in some way, shape or form. Yeah. So, yes.

Chris Gammell: And that's the story of how we had black parts.

Chris Gammell: That's why they're not green or white or clear. Black parts. That is the story. Yep.

Dave Jones: Ah, boy. And it also leads onto the audio fool business. You know, you can buy black paint to go around and paint on all your transistor cans and stuff like that to inside your audio amplifier to make it sound better and shit like that. What? Oh, yeah. Really? I've never seen that. Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Typical audio fool stuff. They take some concept that's technically correct in some niche way and then expand it to encompass everything. So, that's how the audio fool industry works.

Chris Gammell: That's awesome. I would sell that paint for $1,000 an ounce. Yes. Yeah. Some people did. I'm sure they did. Oh, this is specially formulated. There's gold flakes in it as well.

Dave Jones: Just like, I don't know if you remember, you might be too young, but back when CDs first came out.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: It was probably the late 80s. I don't know. They came out early 80s, I think, CDs. Yeah. But by the late 80s, somebody had caught onto the concept. You could get this green pen. I think it was green. And you would actually run the pen around the outside of the CD edge. And that would supposedly make it sound better. And they sold millions of these things, I think. Everyone had one. They were painting the edges of their CD green. I'm going to have to look it up. Just like in the no data area?

Chris Gammell: Is that what you mean?

Dave Jones: No, no, no. The actual edge. The, you know, the one mil wide edge around the outer.

Chris Gammell: So like the thickness of the CD.

Dave Jones: The thickness of the CD. I think that was it. Oh my God.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep. Wow. So it was, yeah, because the laser light, stop the laser light dispersing out the edge. I don't know. I can't remember the details, but go and look up. That is brilliant. Google like, yeah. Google like CD green pen or something. Let me do it now. Okay. This is always good on a radio show.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: To type live here. CD green pen. The green pen tweak. High end audio. Ah, yes. There we go.

Chris Gammell: That is just a brilliant con man right there.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's great. It was, yep. There was no better con than the famous green pen.

Chris Gammell: Oh my God. Yep. You know what we can do while you're looking that up? I can get the sound effect in it.

Dave Jones: You know you make me want to.

Chris Gammell: I forgot the place.

Dave Jones: Take my hand up and sound. Throw my hand up and sound. Throw my hand back and sound.

Chris Gammell: I need more sound effects if people know. I mean, you know, if people want some sound effects, I mean, I can do it. I'm just saying, you know. I forgot to do that one before. I was trying to do it, but I couldn't get it to work, so.

Dave Jones: Okay. I have something here. It's a post from the Rec Audio High End Usenet group. Woohoo. That'd be a fun group to join. Now, it says, off and on for some months now, I've been researching the history of the green pen tweak, which I think will become, if it has not already become, the classic case of audio file cultural folly. There you go. I love it. So, somebody's looking up the history of it, so I'm sure you can, yeah.

Chris Gammell: We'll post a link to that. We'll get the link in there for the people to read.

Dave Jones: Oh, here you go. There's a post which says, somebody, they named them, fesses up to having penned an April Fool's article circa 1987 on Rec Audio, where he believes he may have started the hoax. There you go. That's brilliant.

Dave Jones: And people just caught on to it. And you can buy these, I think you could even buy the pen at your local, you know, your local audio store or your local record store.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, like they have the little display out by the checkout counter. Oh, I picked this up for $4. Wow.

Dave Jones: Wouldn't you be so proud if you started that hoax and it actually went retail?

Chris Gammell: Oh, man.

Dave Jones: Oh, that would be the ultimate. That'd be bad. I'd be so proud of that. That'd be so bad. Well, you feel bad that people got sucked into buying it, but just from a practical joke point of view.

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

Dave Jones: Oh, that's brilliant. Yes. We have to come up with something good like that. Yeah. See if it'll catch on. Yeah. That'd be great. It's got to be something really so simplistic and creative like that. Oh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But back then, nobody understood how CDs work. It was magic. You know, lasers were magic back then.

Chris Gammell: I bet we could do something with like an iPhone and how it works better if you're, you know, if you skip on one foot while you're making a call on AT&T or something like that.

Speaker ?: What?

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: Oh, what's that garbage?

Chris Gammell: What? I don't know. Just because you can't make money off of it, Dave, it can't be a hoax.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. I don't want to make money. I just love to start a hoax like that. We'll brainstorm. We'll brainstorm.

Chris Gammell: People leave stuff in the comments. They can leave stuff in the comments if they have ideas. Or just go do it, you know, report back. It's fine.

Dave Jones: No, but then it's public, you see. If it goes in the comments, people are reading it and then people will catch on. So it needs to be done privately.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay.

Dave Jones: Anyway, sure we'll come up with something. Yeah. Next April Fool's, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's coming up. A couple months.

Dave Jones: Maybe because it's too obvious. If you do it on April Fool's, and it's too obvious. I reckon a good practical joke should be not on April Fool's. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Chris Gammell: August 1st. That'll be the one.

Dave Jones: Right. Let's make up some other date that has some sort of significance. I don't know. When was the transistor invented or something, you know? Yeah, there you go. Right.

Dave Jones: All right.

Speaker ?: All right.

Chris Gammell: So how about some workbench of the week? Because I actually remembered it's workbench of the week.

Dave Jones: Workbench of the week. Workbench of the week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Pretty good. We're all impressed with your audio editing skills. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no. It's going to play the other clip. There we go. All right.

Dave Jones: Anyway. We have two people this week. We do. We have Kibbe first up. Kibbe? Kybe? K-I-B-E-I? I'm not sure how you pronounce that. I have no idea where he or she is from.

Chris Gammell: I'd say Kibbe. Sounds right.

Dave Jones: Kibbe? Yeah. Sounds good enough to me. And this is, I love it. This is the classic computer desk turned into a really nicely laid out workbench. It's just one of those tiny, you know, maybe four foot wide computer workstations, you know, with the shelves on top. And then he's got the component trays on top of that. The next level down's got a power supply and all the hand tools and one more component tray. And the bottom's got a power strip, multimeters, and a soldering iron. And an anesthetic work mat.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's beautiful.

Chris Gammell: It is. It's clean. Very clean. I like it. They said that in the post, too. They said it's not nearly as messy as it should be. Right. But it's very laid out, very nice. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Nice self-contained little workbench. And that's all anyone needs in there. You know, even if you've got like a, you know, if you're stuck in a dorm room. Do they call it in the US, you know? Yeah, yeah, we call it that. You're stuck in a dorm room at uni or something. That's all you need is one of those little workstations like that. And, you know. Yeah, granted, the chicks aren't going to be very impressed if you bring them back. And look at my workbench.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, check this out. You ever seen a multimeter? Hello.

Dave Jones: Hello. Yeah. Oh, dear. Feel these probes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, dear. That's just insane.

Chris Gammell: The computer desk is a nice picture of the amp hour up on there. That's a nice touch. And Dave's favorite vulgar design website.

Dave Jones: Yep. Which I found out only after the fact that it had to do with graphic design. It wasn't to do with engineering at all. The site is where it puts up F for everything. There's a quote. And F is in every quote. And it's quite funny. And some of them have, you know, application to electronics and engineering. Yeah. Which isn't surprising because you're actually designing stuff. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yes. So, I like that. They're not in the shot, though. And he or she, still don't know, does have an EcoTanker drink bottle. Same as what I've got on my desk here right in front of me.

Chris Gammell: We need to get...

Dave Jones: So, one of those stainless steel. Yep.

Chris Gammell: You need to get one with your face on it. People could buy that.

Dave Jones: Right. I need EEV blog merchandise.

Chris Gammell: There we go.

Dave Jones: Drink bottles, do I?

Chris Gammell: Big old grin on there.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. My little cartoon me.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, there you go.

Dave Jones: Yeah. My little cartoon. That'd be jarring. That'd be jarring looking at that in the morning.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: So, thanks for that, Kibby.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Next up is Darren. And we've actually... Darren Landrum. Hey, Darren. Talked about Darren before, I think, because he was asking about... We have. Way back when we started, we were talking about how we record the show, and he was asking about that for his podcast. And so, yeah. He submitted a couple of flicker shots of his workbench, and what do you think about this one, Dave? Absolutely.

Dave Jones: And he's been on the forum since day one, I think. I think he probably watched my first blog episode ever or something. He's been around forever. So, thanks, Darren. Yeah. Sticking around. Yeah. Stop putting up with Dave. He's just got a basic... He's got a bench with stuff sitting on it. Yeah. You know? All your hand tools, your power supply, and your multimeter, and your solder and iron. That's, you know, a hot melt glue gun. Everyone's got to have a hot snot glue gun, as we call it here. Hot snot. I like that. Yeah. Hot snot.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I think the thing I like best is he shows pictures of his audio side, too, and that's where I start geeking out. He does. Yes. He's got a nice little MIDI controller there, some kind of Korg synth, or I don't know what that is, but...

Dave Jones: Yeah. Some sort of... Yeah. There's lots of audio goodness there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Fancy. Big old... I like it.

Dave Jones: I'm jealous. I don't have any audio gear here. I've got a crusty $2 mic and a laptop. That's about it. There you go. And a big pillow in front of me to stop the echo.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah. But what else do you really need? You need... No, exactly. Those things you mentioned and a bit of piss and vinegar, and that's all you really need, right, Dave?

Dave Jones: Yeah. All you need is a decent mic, and I've got a Samson. Oh, yeah. What is it? It's a... It's a C01U, so it's a... I might even be superseded now, but yeah, it's just a USB mic, and it works very well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. It's certainly not in the... Well, you always end up sounding better than I do, and I've got this stupid microphone and everything else down here, so... Oh, right. Okay. I'll probably cave one of these days and buy one, but not yet.

Dave Jones: Right. And it's all you need, and they only cost like $100. They're not that expensive, and yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's all you need to do a podcast. That and a notebook.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Because if you use the notebook audio... Like, if you use one of those external desk mics you can get for $2, you know, at the local computer store on eBay that just plugs into the external mic input of your laptop, don't. Don't even bother, because they are shit, quite frankly. Yeah. And the noise floor, the noise performance of the built-in audio chipsets in PCs and laptops and all that sort of thing is just garbage. Yeah. So, that's why you've got to get one of those external amplifiers or an external USB one like I've got, where the preamp is built right at the microphone input. And the A to D, yeah. So, where it needs to be. So, it doesn't pick up any noise at all, and it's all, you know, it's power supply filtered, and it's beautiful. Picks up no external noise. It's got a metal case. It's shielded, and... Well... Et cetera, et cetera.

Chris Gammell: And that means the A to D is out there, too, because it's going on USB.

Dave Jones: And the A to D is there as well. So, yeah. The mic preamp, ADC, it's all there. Yep. It's all got its own low noise linear regulator in there, I'm sure, and...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Cleaned as a whistle. It's got a, you know... So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Dave, you're starting to sound like an audiophile.

Dave Jones: Well, I've designed a couple of, you know, audio front ends and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Nice. I don't mind it. It's not, you know, and trying to get good audio performance.

Chris Gammell: Does it have that nice warm sound, you know, really...

Dave Jones: Right, the tube sound.

Chris Gammell: The tube. Oh, yeah, it sounds so good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Warm and fuzzy.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well... Oh, dear. No, you can do that in post, can't you?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, sure. Right. I don't know. I don't do it for us, so...

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: No, ours is pretty much straight, isn't it? It just... If you're not aware, we just put our audio, we just record it directly on the mic at each end, and then we mix it. We mentioned this back on episode two or three or something. We mix it using a little program, which just, you know, changes the levels. Yep. And that's it. It doesn't actually apply any filtering, though, does it?

Chris Gammell: No, there is some internal, I think, to that program. It's called Levelator. Yeah. It's compression and filtering and stuff. But yeah, I mean, past that, it's not too much.

Dave Jones: No, no, we certainly don't add in any manual filters anyway. We just pass it through that program, and it just makes us all sound level.

Chris Gammell: My only filter is a sock or panty hose.

Dave Jones: Yes, yes, of course. Yeah, technically, we do have a filter. I've got my panty hose screen here, which goes over my mic for my pop filter. So if I go, puh, puh, puh, pop, like that, apparently it's supposed to stop that breath popping sound.

Chris Gammell: Let's just do that for the rest of the episode. What do you think? Right. And there's one last thing for Darren. Darren also posted a video. We'll post a link to that, and he gives a little tour of his lab. So thanks again, Darren. And Kibby. Kibby? Kibby. Kibby. Kibby. Yep.

Dave Jones: Great name. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. All right. Thanks, guys. That's the end of Workbench of the Week. Oh, man. I wasn't ready for that. I could have put the sound in again. Anyways.

Dave Jones: Come on. What sort of sound guy are you? I'm the worst sound guy in the world. You've got to be ready there to the thing. I'm sorry.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Is this done with like an external mixer, MIDI thing or something, or is it just a...

Chris Gammell: It's just on a laptop, and then I pump it under the board. Oh, right. It's on the laptop. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. And it's fed into another audio channel, is it? Yeah. Yeah. Because you use an external mixer, right? Yep. With like real knobs and everything.

Chris Gammell: Nobs. Yeah. There's analog knobs on there.

Dave Jones: Analog knobs on there. Wow.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I love it how they... You always see like video of these big recording studios, you know? Yeah. And they've got the 10,000 knobs. Yeah. And these slider controls, and they're all digitally controlled these days, and they've got little motors on each one. Yeah. And you see them, and these knobs are magically moving up and down like a ghost, you know, like a ghost controlling them.

Dave Jones: Right.

Dave Jones: And because that's what, presumably to get lower noise, because they want to feed the signal through a good quality pot instead of an analog to digital converter. Yeah. And a, you know, so they actually, rather than actually feed it into an ADC and a DAC per channel, you know, this thing might have hundreds of channels on it. Instead of doing that, they actually put a little motor in there, which drives the stem of the slider pot.

Chris Gammell: But, I mean, Jesus. They're fun to look. I like how they look. I mean, yeah, people have probably seen that in like movies.

Dave Jones: They look really funky when they're working. All these knobs are going up and down, but...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think they do it too for the... Shit. Because it ends up looking almost like a graphical equalizer. You know, like how the... Yeah. You can see like the peaks and valleys and stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You can do it electronically, and I don't know. They wouldn't wear out, and apparently there's a big business. People go around, and they change these pots. They service these audio desks. I think that, you know, people probably do it as a full-time job.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Big money. Big money. Big money.

Dave Jones: And they just go and change these pots over every... You know, they service them every... It's like servicing your car, you know? Yeah. You've got to get a regular service on your audio console.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, if you ever hear it when you get like some grit or some... I mean, even a regular pot, you know, when you start to feel a pot or a slider start grinding it all, because like some kind of schmutz gets in there, you know, the... What? Schmutz. Schmutz. Schmutz. Yeah. Schmutz. The word of the day. The word of the day. There we go. I think that's Yiddish. I don't know. I love that word. Anyways, when you get some schmutz in there though, the... You know, it starts to... It can actually affect your performance where you have like a... It'll jump over a turn or it'll, you know, start to just scratch against... You know, if there's actually an electrical contact there, it'll actually disrupt your signal. So, I think there's some real reason behind that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well... Also means they can charge more too. You know, you can pay $100,000 for one of those consoles, I'm sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.

Dave Jones: And the rest, probably.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Because imagine the complexity of having a motor drive for each one of those pots and they're hundreds of channels wide. You've got hundreds of motors.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but they get that warm, fuzzy sound, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right. The warm, fuzzy sound. You would think you'd get like vibration through as well. Yes. You would think, you know, the motors turn in, there's vibration there and that would translate through to micro vibrations in the pot or something. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Like a piezoelectric effect kind of thing?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Something. Well, yeah, it's probably not. I don't know if you can get that on a pot.

Chris Gammell: Or microphonic, I guess it would be. It would be microphonic.

Dave Jones: It'd be a microphonic type thing. Yeah. So, I don't know. You'd have to have your other electronics boards, you know, shock mounted or vibration mounted. Apart from, you know, away from your front console, which had a hundred bloody motors on it, were in a way.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Maybe, maybe just they don't even hire EEs because we'd overthink it so much. They're like, what? It's just a slider. You just put the signal through it and it attenuates it. I mean, what's the matter with you guys?

Dave Jones: Oh, goodness.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I will. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I can appreciate, you know, using knobs because I'm a knob man. You know, I like to have a knob on something, even if it's an optical rotary encoder. You know, I do like to twiddle my knobs. So, I do get it. Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: I'm sure that's very funny for your childish mind there, Chris.

Chris Gammell: Let's just not say that again. What can I say? I do like to twiddle my knobs.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Come on.

Chris Gammell: I hear a t-shirt brewing.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: Oh, my God. Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: Let's move on. Let's move on. Too much audio.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. I know. Kind of related, though. So, Jeff. Oh, God. Right. No, not related related. I mean, kind of just auxiliary related. But Jeff from Mighty Home. He has some really good pictures. He lives down in Austin now. And apparently, there's a Goodwill computer museum down there. And he posted a bunch of them from his Flickr feed. And it's just great seeing all these old computers and stuff. I mean, like, I know that there's the one computer museum out in San Jose, but I didn't know about this one. So...

Dave Jones: No, I didn't know about this one either. And it looks pretty impressive. If you have a look at the photos, they've got, like, individual, like, walls set up for different, you know, like, there's an Apple wall. So, for different classes of computer or different, you know, company products. So, there's the Apple. And they've got, you know, a Leaser there and, you know, all sorts of stuff. And they've got the old rack mount ones, Dinabyte. And they've got an old Dell. Apparently, Dell, I didn't know this, but Dell started this company called PCs Limited.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And that was their name before they changed it to Dell. So, and he's got a keyboard signed by Michael Dell himself. And, you know, it's great. Well, yeah. Bow down. We are not worthy. Yeah, right? Yeah, we are. All right. Yeah. Dell. Oh, dear. Oh, I just spat on my little pantyhose screen there. Oh, my. How gross. Glad this isn't video. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. And there's an old Heathkit oscilloscope. Yeah. It's not just computers. Heathkit. Yeah. Which youngsters wouldn't know anything about Heathkit. Even you wouldn't know about Heathkit, Chris.

Chris Gammell: You know, I only know my name. And you're American. I never built one. They still built, you know. You know, they still have them.

Dave Jones: I think so. Yeah, I haven't looked them up for.

Chris Gammell: I think they got bought out. And I think they're more of like an educational company now.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I think they still exist in some way, shape, or form.

Chris Gammell: But I don't think they're even close to their former glory. I mean, if people don't know, like, they used to be entire amplifier kits, entire oscilloscope. Like, people would build these oscilloscopes kind of things. I mean, like.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I used to drool over those when I was a kid. Because, you know, in Australia, you couldn't get them. Right? There was no such thing as buying over the internet or credit cards or bloody anything like that back then. You just could not buy these things unless you walked into a resale store in the U.S. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And by that, I guess the fun part is putting it together, too. So, by that point, if it was a resale store, I mean, you're halfway past. I mean, you'd have a scope then. I don't know. You probably didn't. Did you have a scope when you were a kid?

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes, I did. But I saved up my money and bought my own two-channel oscilloscope. Nice. Very nice. Rocking 20 megahertz bandwidth. Rocking. Yep. Absolutely.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, I remember the day vividly. I saved up all my money and walked into David Reed Electronics in the city. I took a trip into the city. You know, I took the train in there and, yeah, went and handed over the cash for my first oscilloscope. Yes. Ah, those were the days.

Chris Gammell: Ah, one of these days. Such fondness. Dave's going to post a picture of himself when he was, like, 12 and, like, super geeky. But... I don't... Because we've all been there. Photos are rare.

Dave Jones: Photos are rare back then. You know, digital cameras didn't exist and, well, you know, why the hell would you want to take a photo of yourself when you're a 12-year-old in your electronics lab? It just... I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Ah, one more surface eventually.

Dave Jones: The photo culture wasn't around then. You know? Yeah. It's hard to believe. But nowadays, people take photos of bloody well everything. Right. You know, and... But back then, it was like you didn't even think about getting... You know, the camera is only something that came out at special occasions. You know? Yeah. You just didn't think of documenting things with photos back then. Yeah. So, just, yeah. Different world.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, this computer museum looks pretty cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't know how big it is. It seems, you know, reasonable size. They've got quite a collection there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, if you're in the area, where is it again?

Chris Gammell: It's in Austin, I believe, south... Austin, Texas, somewhere. Austin, Texas. Right in the middle. Right in the middle. So, that's where I used to live too. I love it there. Oh, there you go. Yeah. You know, that's called Silicon Hills. They call it... Oh, really? It's not the Silicon Valley. I think that's more of a self-imposed... Like, they try and brand it as that. Like, oh, yeah. Right. But, I mean, they do have a lot of chip companies down there. Less than they used to. But, I mean, they were... There's a bunch of chip companies down there. So, like, AMD is... The American version of AMD is there. Right. Obviously, the rest of it being Germany. Yeah. Yeah. So, there's... I mean, there's... Freescale is from there.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Awesome. So, this is just like a computer store, is it? No. It looks like... I think it's just a computer store with a... No, I... With a museum in the back, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: No, I... I don't think so. Well, maybe.

Dave Jones: Well, there's no sign out the front that says museum. So, it's...

Chris Gammell: Oh, it's a recycling center. That's what that is. Yeah. So, it's a... Ah, right. Okay. And that's why. So, they get all these old, you know... Right. That makes sense. Really old pieces of computers. So, that's why.

Dave Jones: Yep. Right. You were going to say junk there, weren't you?

Chris Gammell: I was going to. Sorry.

Dave Jones: Ah, I could sense it. Sorry. I got the vibe. Ah, you've offended a lot of people.

Chris Gammell: Ah, sorry. I've ruined memories. Young whippersnapper.

Dave Jones: Yep. Ah, dearity. That's cool. I've been to the other one, which you mentioned, which is the computer... What's the name of it? The...

Chris Gammell: The one in San Jose, you mean?

Dave Jones: The one in San Jose, yes. The Computer History Museum.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's it, yeah.

Dave Jones: And that is awesome. I mean, that is nerdvana, really. Yeah. Ah, you know, you've got to make the pilgrimage there. It's just fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah. I can remember I walked all the way from the station. I caught the train to somewhere and I went, I'm not going to take a bus. Bugger it. I'm going to walk. Yeah. And... Big mistake. About an hour later, I finally found it, you know. Yeah. But no, it's well worth it. And they just reopened it, apparently. Yeah. I think I heard about that. Yeah, I went to a news article and, of course, Steve Wozniak was there and, you know, a couple of other pioneers of the computer industry were all there to reopen. And they've got a Charles Babbage engine there. Well, they used... I think they were only going to have it there for a limited time, but it's a full-scale replica, working replica of the Charles Babbage thing. I've even got some video of it, of them actually testing it. Oh, nice. So, I might have to dig that out and post it, actually.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be really great.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure you can get it on YouTube, but I'll see if I can dig mine out and upload it. Okay. Anyway. Yeah. Actually, it's on my site somewhere as an MP4, my alternate zone site. But anyway, it's cool. But definitely get a chance. The Computer History Museum, you've got to go there. It's just awesome. It really is. It's a totally... Like, it's a fully professional, dedicated museum. It's huge. And it's just...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they've got a lot of stuff there. I've seen pictures of them, but...

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's fantastic.

Chris Gammell: Is it like a whole day kind of thing?

Dave Jones: You could easily spend a whole day there, yes. If you went around... In fact, you probably wouldn't get through a whole day if you went and read every sign. Yeah. You know, every info sign for every computer in chronological order. You know, they start out with, you know, stuff from the 16th century and all... You know, they're Chinese, you know, tabulators and all sorts of stuff.

Speaker ?: Abacus and stuff, yeah.

Dave Jones: Abacus and, you know, and they work their way up. You know, the Antha... I can never pronounce it. Oh, I don't know how to say that. The Antithica Mechanism.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The one that they built out of Legos recently. They replicated.

Dave Jones: They built out of Lego. Yeah. I can't pronounce that word to save my life. I can't either. But, yeah, I don't think they have the original there. It's in some more affluent museum, I'm sure. But, yeah, they've got a display on that or something. And, you know, they've got the first mouse there, the first wooden mouse that Doug Engelbart worked on, you know. Yeah. Oh, it's great. Nice. Yes. Memories of my trip there. God, I wish I had the blog when I visited that. Because then I would have filmed it as a blog thing and, you know.

Chris Gammell: Not as a tourist.

Dave Jones: No, yeah. Not as just, you know, I just spent too much time reading the signs, let alone photographing or filming stuff.

Chris Gammell: Anyway. That's okay. It was a throwback. Just back to the days when there was no film, right? Right. Or video film. You didn't bring your 8mm camera.

Dave Jones: No, I didn't bring my 8mm camera, but it was a DV tape.

Chris Gammell: Turn the crank on the side, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It was a DV tape camera.

Chris Gammell: There we go. There we go.

Dave Jones: So you can hear the whirring sound of the motor. If you listen carefully, the whirring sound of the motor couples through to the built-in microphone and you can actually hear the, you know. Well, how about... Nardy.

Chris Gammell: I think it's time to finally talk about the, speaking of old stuff, like 40-year-old chips. What do you think? Should we talk about the other thing?

Dave Jones: You can definitely talk about your contest. Go for it. Plug away.

Chris Gammell: Is this a plug? I guess it's a plug. I'm just talking about what I've been doing all week. Come on, man. So if people haven't seen it, me and Jerry, because Dave opted out.

Dave Jones: Me and Jerry? Jerry and I. Let's get our grammar correct.

Chris Gammell: Oh, God. You too, huh? Yeah. Someone else corrected me on Twitter about that this week. I don't know.

Dave Jones: All right. Okay. Here you go.

Chris Gammell: Sorry. Sorry, teacher. Jerry and I are, we're running a design contest. So for the 555 timer, I don't want to start that whole 555, 555, triple nickel, five, triple five, whatever.

Dave Jones: Triple nickel. Bloody hell. Triple five. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Anyway. So we're going to have a contest and we've got a bunch of categories and we have a website now. So it's 555contest.com. And we've got some prizes coming online, even from the Honorable David L. Jones.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes. There will be a, I will be contributing a prize and also judging that prize. It will be the Aussie prize, by the way. It'll be only available to Australians because I'm completely biased. Right. So if you're in Australia, then you should enter because if you're the only one, then you win the prize by default.

Chris Gammell: Right. And hopefully they're not the only one. Hopefully we're getting, I don't know. I got, I looked at the traffic and we got people coming in from 68 countries and that's at least looking at it. So that's, that's a good start. I don't know if we'll actually get, you know, 68 countries.

Dave Jones: I'm sure there'll be at least one entry from Australia or I'll enter it myself and keep my own prize.

Chris Gammell: Oh, there we go. Yeah. Right. Oh, and Jerry wanted people to know because people usually get scared off. She is not entering the contest. Right. So none of her crazy designs, but she said she will be doing some videos on it. So she's going to be releasing some videos. Uh, I don't know. It's a deadline is March 1st. That's the reason I'm pumping it so hard because the, it's kind of an early deadline. It's not like super early, but the logic behind it is, well, people always wait till the last minute anyways. Why not move the last minute up a little bit? Right. Have you done, I mean, have you done a lot of design contests, Dave?

Dave Jones: Oh, I've entered a couple. Yeah. And, um, I've sort of wanted to enter a couple and I've started and then not had the time or the inclination to go through with it. And I've followed quite a few over the years because there, there are a few serial winners of these contests. Oh, really? Yes. Yes. Uh, a, uh, French guy who now writes for circuit seller, uh, um, Lacoste.

Dave Jones: Lacoste.

Dave Jones: Robert Lacoste is a serial winner. If you look up his name, he's won like 10 international design contests or something like that. Wow. And for some reason he seems to get the formula right for winning these contests. And, um, yeah, it's, you know, some people enter them and that's what they do. They enter these damn things and they, and they build up a name for themselves and he turned it into a full-time contracting business and stuff like that because he got famous through winning these contests and.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Dave Jones: Yep. But he doesn't do it anymore. He's pulled out. He said, oh yeah, one 10, you know, that's good enough. So yeah, because there is a formula. If you look at all the contests, like especially ones done through the professional magazines, the triple five ones, not as anal as this, but the, the restrictions are very, you know, there's lots of things you've got to do. You know, you've got to write your, your abstract, you've got to do an abstract, then you've got to do the full documentation. It has to be written in a certain way and presented in a certain way and all sorts of stuff. And yeah. And for some reason there's some magic formula there that, you know, means you can win it every time or get close to it anyway. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, that's good. But I actually entered with my watch, my scientific calculator watch. Oh, nice. And I thought that was a shoo-in to at least get, because it was so novel. Nobody's ever done one. Right. And, you know, I just thought it was so novel. Well, they're going to look at, as most people did and go, wow, look, he built his own scientific calculator watch. And I didn't even get a mention, you know, it was like, and I was beat out by some bedside clock. No, a motor controller. You know? That's it?

Chris Gammell: Just, just a motor controller?

Dave Jones: A motor controller. You know, it was some, a three-phase motor controller or something like boring.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, maybe I'm just a bit bitter, but.

Chris Gammell: It sounds like a little bit.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but, you know, and then the next winner, and then the next runner up was a, you know, a bedside clock radio, a streaming clock radio or something, which was okay. You know, it was ethernet connected or something, but.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't know. It was, yeah. I don't know. Anyway, I didn't win.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Well, ours is really simple. So, we're, we're having a, you know, it's a simple contest. Basically, you can submit it however you want to. You can do it like Dave and have a video, which is good because then you can show it working. You can submit schematics and documentation, like, like a more classic kind of thing. But you got to just prove it works somehow, and then you got to impress us. And the guy who's, the main judge is going to be Forrest Mims, who, I don't know. Awesome. I mean, Dave, you know who that is. But people don't know. He wrote a bunch of books about the 555 back, back in the day. He did indeed. And that was actually for Radio Shack, apparently. The, uh...

Dave Jones: He wrote all of Radio Shack's. I've, I've still got one here. I've got the Forrest Mims. I think I showed him one of my blogs. I flashed it around. Yeah. And, yeah, he wrote all the, all these electronics, getting started in electronics books for...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think he did a couple...

Dave Jones: Radio Shack back in the 70s.

Chris Gammell: Like, didn't he do 201 kit kind of things too, or no?

Dave Jones: No. He, as far as I know, he wasn't involved in the making of the 200 or 51 kits.

Chris Gammell: Some of his books were. Okay.

Dave Jones: No. No. They're a different style, I think. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. No, I don't, I'm pretty sure he wasn't involved in those.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: He's, well, his name certainly isn't on them. Right.

Chris Gammell: That's for sure, so. Right. Yeah. Yeah, so he's going to be judging, and we'll have a couple other judges. We don't have those finalized yet, but we're hoping everybody... And some of the categories, we have an art category, so like music or visual art kind of stuff. Complex or extreme kind of circuits, so that'll be like if you use like a thousand 555s to, you know, sequence some kind of crazy thing. A minimalistic kind of thing, so if it's a really tiny circuit, or if it uses two parts to do something really amazing that's never been done before. Yeah. And then the last one's utility, so that'd be like if you're, you know, making a solar cell controller or something like that, or something that has a very defined use and kind of like a social good kind of thing. And not necessarily just social good, but, you know, like even test equipment if you make some kind of timer into test equipment, or even like math computational kind of stuff, so. Right. A lot, a lot, a lot of different things you can do, so. Awesome. Awesome. We should be announcing prizes this week too, so.

Dave Jones: And my prize is a lifetime supply of LCDs.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Lifetime supply of LCD modules. There you go. Absolutely. So, I don't know what you're going to do with them, but tough. That's what you get. A lifetime supply of LCD modules. Yeah. With a little asterisk next to it. Right. There are terms and conditions with the lifetime supply of LCDs. But yeah, you'll get a shitload of LCDs. Yeah. And mine will be judged on a whim. On a whim. Because that's how I like to do it. None of this methodical process. I think, oh, yeah, that one's cool. Yeah. You know. There we go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, I'm not going to tell you how I'm going to judge that because I have no idea myself. Yeah. I'll just know it when I see it.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, that's my thing. That'll be fun. Yeah. I think it will be fun.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I hope it goes well.

Chris Gammell: I really hope we see a lot of cool things. And I don't know. Maybe we'll be able to showcase a couple of the more interesting projects on here. Sure. Well, I don't know how it's going to work out, to be honest.

Dave Jones: Well, suck it and see. You'll find out.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. The...

Dave Jones: You know, if you get 500 entries, you're in deep shit. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because... And poor old Forrest Mims probably doesn't know what he's getting himself in for.

Chris Gammell: Well, we're going to thin it down for him either way. But, I mean, the... Yeah. It's... I was thinking about that. I'm like, oh, God. What... I'm just going to like...

Dave Jones: Well, because... I'm supposed to be judging this up-and-coming design contest for Enesis. And they're, you know, expecting a couple of hundred entries or something like that. And we've actually gone through... And if you... I've actually sat down and thought about it and gone through the math of how much time it's going to take me to review each submitted entry and you multiply that by, you know, something in the hundreds, then, well, it's a shitload of work to actually do it properly. Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's a full-time job. So, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, we'll see what happens.

Dave Jones: That's why mine's going to be on a whim because I just couldn't be bothered doing that. So, good luck there, Chris. Thank you.

Chris Gammell: Thank you. And once again, this is 555contest.com. People didn't have that. We'll put links in the show notes. But, yeah.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. Exciting.

Chris Gammell: Exciting.

Dave Jones: Speaking of old... Old. ...magazines and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: This is a blast from the past. Popular Electronics Magazine.

Chris Gammell: See, now, I had not heard of this magazine. I mean, I gathered it was like Popular Science. Go wash your mouth out. Yeah. Popular Mechanics, that kind of stuff, right?

Dave Jones: Right. Popular Science is... Yeah, that's what it was based on. It's an American magazine which famously... What it's famous for is publishing the Altair computer kit. Oh. Which wasn't actually the first computer kit that was in Electronics Australia magazine, actually. But let's not go there. Let's not argue with America versus Australia there. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. The popular electronics article for the Altair that, you know, Bill Gates famously ran... Was it Bill Gates ran across the Harvard quadrangle and shouted to Paul Allen, look, we've missed the boat. You know, look, the computer revolution's starting without us. We've got to jump on this, you know. Yeah. And they dropped all their work at Harvard and they... Or their study at Harvard and for the next couple of weeks they actually wrote a basic for it and the rest is history. Yeah. And, yeah.

Dave Jones: Man.

Dave Jones: Not many people know this. Trivia time. Okay. Because I'm big into computer history trivia. The Altair you see on the popular electronics magazine, that cover, I can't remember the exact date, but the one you see on the front is actually a mock-up because the real, the only Altair in existence from... What's his name who designed it? Oh, God. Mental block. So much for my computer history knowledge. Ed Roberts. Thank you. Ed Roberts from MITS. Okay. That's it. Yes. Anyway, he developed it and he shipped it to Popular Electronics Magazine and it got... It went missing. It went missing. The world's first consumer... You know, the world's first computer went...

Dave Jones: You know, personal computer, in this case, it was built up and he sent it to them for photographing and checking and it actually went missing in the post and they never found it.

Chris Gammell: Some nerd intercepted it and just was like, yeah, I got it, I got it.

Dave Jones: I got it. Yeah. So, if somebody, if that ever pops up on eBay or something, you'll know that that's stolen because the world's first personal computer was actually knocked off. So, what they did is they quickly knocked up another one that had flashing LED lights on the front and nothing inside. So, the one you actually see on the front cover of the magazine is actually hollow inside.

Chris Gammell: Just like trade shows, huh, Dave?

Dave Jones: Yeah, just like trade shows, smoke and mirror stuff. Yeah. Yeah, they decided to go ahead with the article anyway and trust that, you know, the thing actually worked and all that sort of stuff. And, yeah, they actually, that was a fair bit of a gamble there on their part. So, yes, Ed Roberts, who's no longer with us.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's too bad.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. He became a doctor.

Dave Jones: Really?

Dave Jones: Yeah. He gave up the computer industry. He sold MITS after a couple of years and got out and went back to a small hick town somewhere and went and studied to become a doctor and, yeah, he was a doctor in a small town for the rest of his life. So, yes. And if you don't know what MITS stands for, it's Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems or something. Multiple Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. I don't know. I'm testing the limits of my computer history knowledge.

Chris Gammell: I think we should note, too, that, I mean, like, back in the day, too, like, I mean, computer, like, people, like, hear younger, I mean, at least when I first started hearing about it, I think younger people start hearing computer stuff and they think, okay, high-level kind of computer systems. But, like, back then, you open up an old, like, Apple or, you know, an Altair or whatever it is. And it's, I mean, like, it's electronics. You know, it's just, like, straight up. You know, you could wire pin-to-pin kind of wiring, even, stuff. And that's how a lot of the pros of today are, you know, they learned on stuff back then. I mean, I'm talking about, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And the Altair never actually worked properly. There's a lot of people who don't know that. They think it was some, you know, it was just a heap of shit. And it never worked properly. The PCB layout was bad and it just, you know, the memory cards never worked and, you know, they manufactured thousands of memory cards. And these didn't work. And, yeah, but they were, because it was an open design, you know, hey, open source hardware. Hey, hey. Bullshit. It started back in the 70s, you know. Yeah. And, yeah, because that was open. That become the S100 industry slot because the connector used in the Altair had 100 pins on it. And so some manufacturers got together and said, hey, let's just kind of make it sort of an industry standard and we'll call it the S100. And, you know, yeah. The rest is history. The rest is history. Well, S100 didn't last for more than, you know, half a decade or something at most, I think. Yeah. But, yeah, Popular Electronics, huge magazine. We didn't actually mention it. They got a project to they need 40K to get it back up and running.

Chris Gammell: Well, we should mention that, I mean, that magazine does not exist right now. I mean, it shut down in the 90s. Or, no, 2000s.

Dave Jones: It was bought by Nuts and Volts magazine, apparently. Okay. Okay. So, yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So someone separate from the original people bought the rights to it, like a fan, I believe. And he's the one starting it back up. It's a Kickstarter project. So if you're really interested in it, you can go and donate money there. Donate money. Yep. You'll get, you know, three years of subscriptions or whatever if you're donating so much.

Dave Jones: For 16, 17 bucks or something. I started a thread on Psy Electronics Design and Oz Electronics Usenet groups about it. And a lot of people on there are bitching that it's a scam and all that sort of stuff. They're going, oh, it's got to be a scam. Anyone who, you know, only needs 40K to start up a business, it's obviously they don't know what they're doing.

Chris Gammell: I can't imagine starting a print magazine these days. I mean, I know that they're saying they're developing for the iPad and everything else and they'll have special paper copies. But just the, I don't know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, it's not primarily a print magazine. I think it's primarily going to be an e-magazine. Yeah. E-zine. Yeah. E-zine. Yeah. I hope they just do it in standard PDF because really, you know, the other formats suck.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, those ones are like, you know.

Dave Jones: Or the iPad version or whatever, which is the e-reader format or, you know, a Kindle version. Yeah. Even which automatically pops up on your Kindle. But yeah. Anyway. So there you go. Popular electronics magazine. They're looking to come back to life. So we'll follow that one and we'll let you know what happens. Yeah. And if you want to donate, if you think it's a good cause, we'll put up the link.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I wonder what they're sitting at right now. I don't know. Last time I saw it, it was pretty low. But I think it was right when they just started it. Right now they have $760. So.

Dave Jones: Yeah. $760. Well, of their $40,000 goal. And they've got 35 days left. So. So. They've got 22 people to back it. Yeah. So far. Yep.

Chris Gammell: So, if you're interested. I'm a. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They've got a long way to go. So. So what happens? Do you get your money back if you.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's how Kickstarter works. So if you pledge it. And if they don't meet their goal, then you get it all back.

Dave Jones: Right. So you don't put money up front. You just pledge it basically. And then they have to go around and actually collect all the money.

Chris Gammell: Well, no. You put a credit card in. I mean like you're. Oh, right. Okay. If they hit their goal, you're. It's. It automatically gets. Okay. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. But if not, then it just doesn't. It doesn't charge. So.

Dave Jones: Okay. Cool. And that's it for our amp hour.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. That was.

Dave Jones: Our capacity is up.

Chris Gammell: Ooh. Nice. Yeah. All right.

Dave Jones: I know you're very excited about the battery capacity blog I did the other day.

Chris Gammell: I saw that. I liked it.

Dave Jones: Because I mentioned amp hours.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I liked it.

Dave Jones: Little plug there. Subtle plug. Yeah. Yeah. It's very subtle. People didn't realize I was actually plugging in.

Chris Gammell: You should have just said it. You should have just said the amp hour. I can't believe you didn't say it, Dave.

Dave Jones: Ah, well. Not to worry. Anyway, we're two minutes past.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, thanks for listening.

Dave Jones: See you guys.

Speaker ?: Thank you.