#39 – Dan Pink, Dual Core, level translators - Mumble Mumbo Jumbo

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.

Dave Jones: Well, Chris, you just cut out there. We're using a new program this morning called Mumble. I think you were mumbling.

Chris Gammell: I might have been. I've been accused of that before. Right. By which I mean to say...

Dave Jones: Because we're trying out this new program trying to... Chris is going berserk again, if you're wondering. It took us, yeah, what, 40 minutes to dick around trying to get this new Mumble program up and running. So there's a dedicated server running. We're talking into that instead of Skype. And yeah. And it turns out we failed, right?

Chris Gammell: Well, it's not that bad. It's really my audio setup stuff.

Dave Jones: Well, we're using it to talk to each other. At least it doesn't do the Skype thing of dropping out when we're talking over each other. But no, we can't record. So we're recording locally again. Bummer. We'll get there.

Chris Gammell: Anyway. We'll get there. Yes. Send my job.

Dave Jones: No third guest today. Sorry. No. No third wheel. Yep. Just us. Stuck with us with no clue. And I don't know, a list that's not looking too impressive.

Chris Gammell: We'll make it impressive. Right. Yeah. All right.

Dave Jones: Let's start out with some news. You guys are about the contest.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. We decided that last night. Me and Jerry are going to be announcing the contest winners. Jerry and I. Thank you. Sorry. Jerry Ellsworth and I. We've been scolded before because I didn't explain who that is. But Jerry Ellsworth, Hackmaster Elite, and I will be recording a live video show on Wednesday night at 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And we're going to just announce the winners from the 555 contest.

Dave Jones: American Eastern Standard Time as opposed to Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Chris Gammell: You guys have your own Eastern Standard?

Dave Jones: We have our own Eastern Standard Time. Yes. It's AEST. Australian Eastern Standard Time. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. For you guys, it'll probably be noonish, I think, or something. Oh, okay. Right. So, 9 p.m. here is usually 11 a.m. Sydney, I think. Oh, that's right. Yep. So, I'll definitely be here. Or I should be. Yeah. Yep. So, can't win them all. We kind of left out the UK, but sorry about that, guys. Yeah. Yeah. What are you going to do? There's only so many time zones you can really hit. So, and I have to work during the day. So, yeah. Got to squeeze it in somewhere.

Dave Jones: You poor bastard working for a living, huh?

Chris Gammell: I know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: This audio is breaking up real bad. I'm sure you guys can't hear it, but because we're recording locally, but yeah. You're breaking up there, Chris. Okay. Well, for the technology.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sorry. It's probably my girlfriend downloading something. Yikes. Anyways, the contest is almost over. I'm kind of excited for it to be over. No offense to the people, you know.

Dave Jones: And you, I got a bone to pick with you. You won't allow me to. Yes. You. Christopher Gamble.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You won't allow me to release my winners for my part of the contest, the Australian Award, until you guys release yours. What a load of bullshit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, because it's not your winners. It's the people you're picking for the contest.

Dave Jones: And I should be able to announce that anytime on Dan Worldwide.

Chris Gammell: See, that's why I didn't give you the spreadsheet three months ago when you wanted it. Right. I knew the first thing you'd do, it'd be like, oh, we got winners, all right. And then I'd be like, oh, I guess we have to wait a little longer because not all of us are picking on a whim, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, I am picking on a whim. And that's the way I like to do it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's great. You know, I was going to tell you, if you want to record a video, we could just play that during ours. If you want to do a one minute clip, we'll just play the clip during ours.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. Okay. Or I could just appear live.

Chris Gammell: I don't know how Jerry's setup is, but yeah. Yeah. I don't know how that works. That's the thing. Jerry's got all this video equipment. You know, I feel like an idiot. I'm sitting around with this audio mixer trying to figure this stuff out and she's mixing video and I'm like, oh, I feel awesome. Oh, well, yeah.

Dave Jones: Because she used to work for a company that did that. So, she worked on the hardware to do that sort of stuff. So, yeah. I'm sure she's got a bunch of the company's hardware in the basement, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, she said she raided the junk box for kids. Right. Yeah. But yeah, we'll be doing that and then the contest is over and I'll move on to my next thing. Who knows what that's going to be. I'm actually thinking about, I got a board from Chris Savage from Parallax. So, I think I'm going to try that out.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: Right. I've never done propeller stuff before. So, I was going to try that.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's a propeller. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Versus what else?

Dave Jones: Well, any other bloody microcontroller on the market. You know, it's nothing. It's a propeller. It's a microcontroller, you know. Yeah. Except it's a multi-core cog thing. We've talked about it on here before. Yeah, the cog.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Except that from where I grew up, it'd be CAG.

Dave Jones: CAG?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Like, nasally A's where I came from. Right. CAG. Wonderful. Amherst.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: So, what have you been up to?

Dave Jones: Look out. What have I been up to?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I've been living the dream.

Chris Gammell: Yeah? How's that going? Update our listeners.

Dave Jones: It's going pretty good. Update the listeners. Well, it's unbelievable. You know, you think you've got all the free time in the world now that you're not actually working, right? And no, I've been busier than ever. I don't know how I fitted everything in before. It's incredible. Yeah. While I did have a day job. I still can't fit everything in. That's crazy. Can't do everything I want to do. I know. It's nuts.

Chris Gammell: Did you used to just not sleep, maybe? Maybe that was what it was? I don't know.

Dave Jones: No, I just used to make more of my time on the weekends and at nights in the mornings. Yeah. Yeah. But now, I guess I'm a bit lazier in that respect, you know? Spending more time with the wife and yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's a good thing, man.

Dave Jones: She seems a bit happier. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's good. It's all good. That's good. Tell her you should never work again.

Dave Jones: Well, that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to convince her of that. And I'm working on ways to try and make the blog full-time, you know, full-time living.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, there will be updates to that in the coming weeks, I hope. So, we'll see. Good. Good. I'm excited to hear. Because at the moment, yes, I am living the dream, but, you know, the money's got to come from somewhere, so. That's right. At the moment, it's not quite enough. So, coming from the ads and everything else. But, no, it's certainly keeping me afloat for a while. And I'm still trying to win that damn Tektronix contest.

Chris Gammell: That's going to be a hard win. I've seen some other.

Dave Jones: You can't do it. All these other ones are just, their votes just keep racking up and up. Oh, really?

Chris Gammell: I haven't seen the votes, but that one video, the scanning electron, or the electron microscope one, I saw that one before. You're breaking up big time, Chris. Oh, sorry. Sorry.

Dave Jones: No, I've completely lost Chris. Can't hear him. Uh-oh. Oh, no. He's back. Now I'm back? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: All right. All right. Sorry.

Dave Jones: This thing's breaking up a lot. Worse than Skype. Geez, we thought Skype was shit.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no. I guess they have, you know, people with skills actually doing that stuff. Right.

Dave Jones: Anyway, yes, the Tektronix contest.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, the electron microscope one. That one. I saw that video before he actually entered it into the contest, and that's just a ridiculous

Dave Jones: Oh, that's right. Yeah, I haven't actually watched that yet.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I know. That's crazy. Brilliant. And he built a lot of the hardware. I mean, I think he grabbed a lot of the hardware from like a, you know, like a surplus store, but he ended up kludging a lot of it together, too, and I think he built a bunch of his own, too. Awesome. And I know he used an old tech scope as the eventual display output. Right. As like the XY.

Dave Jones: Okay, so therefore he could enter the Tektronix contest, as you do. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, that's pretty cool. But unfortunately, it's not based on the quality of the video or the quality of the idea of the Tektronix contest. It's purely based on votes. And, well, let's not say it can be, you know, you can sort of cheat if you want to, I guess.

Chris Gammell: Social engineering. How about that?

Dave Jones: You can socially engineer your result. Right. Oh, please.

Chris Gammell: You were trying to do that, too, mister. Oh, vote for me. I'm on the Empire.

Dave Jones: Well, so am I, but I'm doing it legally, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right. I have a platform to launch my vote getting from.

Dave Jones: Well, it's rather interesting, right, because I've got 8,000 viewers, roughly. Uh-huh. And, you know, and I got pretty much the number of votes I expected, you know, because everyone's not going to vote, right? So they just couldn't be bothered, right? Couldn't care less, which is fair enough. And I got like 1,000-odd votes within a day or two, which is pretty much what I expected, which is fantastic. But then these other ones are beating me. And they're getting like 1,000 within a day or two. And I'm going, well, who are these people? They must have at least the same audience I have, either that or some very dedicated friends, you know? So I don't know. I don't know how it's working.

Chris Gammell: Or heaven forbid the projects are that enthralling, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right, that everyone's voting for it, right. Yeah, what are the top ones right now? There's some really awesome ones on there that have gotten, you know, 20 votes and stuff. So, because they obviously couldn't get anyone to vote for them. And no one's going to visit the site just to vote, you know? Like, oh, I'm going to go on there and vote for the best one. No, you're going to vote for your friend. That's the only reason you go on there. So, anyway, please keep voting every day.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, every day, people.

Dave Jones: I need as many votes as I can.

Chris Gammell: I think the last thing you need is another scope, unless you're going for the iPad, in which case you're on your own, buddy.

Dave Jones: No, I definitely want the scope. I need the money.

Chris Gammell: Nah, there we go.

Dave Jones: If I win it, I'll do a review and a tear down, then I'll sell it. And that'll keep me afloat for another month. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You and your test and measurements reselling business. Right. Start your own eBay channel.

Dave Jones: I have got my own eBay shop. I've got 400 feedback, you know?

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I've been doing it for a long time. I've been buying and selling test gear for a long time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, that's good. Good luck to you, man. I appreciate it. I'm glad you're entering that contest. It's good. It's good fodder for the show.

Dave Jones: Let's get onto something else, shall we?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Speaking of which.

Dave Jones: Oh, shout out? Yeah, go for it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, Jeremy, we talked about him a couple times in here. And he actually was on the Discovery Channel. Yeah. Awesome. On, like, the real TV, you know, not the computer TV.

Dave Jones: Right. The kiddie TV, huh? Yeah. Yeah. YouTube's going to take over the world one day. You wait and see.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. The people that were... He said that they grabbed his video. That was just, like, one of the editors called him. And they have, like, just this video review show. And just kind of going through, like, tech stuff from the week. Oh, right. Okay. And so they saw his. And, yeah, it was good review.

Dave Jones: Is this some sort of new video he's got? Or is it one of his old ones they just happened to stumble across?

Chris Gammell: Well, that's the other thing I wanted to talk about. He calls it the pseudo glove. Because... And I never thought about it that way. You know, I call it pseudo. I don't know. I don't know if I should call it that.

Dave Jones: I have no idea what pseudo is.

Chris Gammell: It's a command in Linux. Oh, right. Well, there you go. S-U-D-O. Okay. Well, yeah. Super user do. That's the idea. And I never realized that people say do and su-do. At first, I thought he was saying it wrong. Because I've always just said it su-do. Anyways.

Dave Jones: That's how I would pronounce it. Yeah. But if you know what the acronym actually means, then it takes on different slants.

Chris Gammell: Anyway. Anyways, I was real confused at first. But it's this glove that basically is a controller for a RC car. A radio-controlled car. Cool. And it's a glove. So, pretty cool. And it's definitely worth...

Dave Jones: And it's just got accelerometer sensors to... And you do hand motions or something, I assume. And it controls the car or... I haven't seen the video. Because I tried to download it and the bloody thing just wouldn't work. It just sat there spinning its wheels around and it did nothing for 10 minutes. So, screw that. That's not good. Discovery Channel Server.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right? Yeah. It's got a flex sensor on it too. So, he can move... He can flex his finger. And that actually is a control as well. So, it does either like a resistive measurement or some other kind of measurement on the sensor. And then there's rotation. So, I think there might be a gyroscope or... And then there's an accelerometer, I believe, as well.

Dave Jones: He's probably just using one of those stick-on stress sensors. Have you ever used those?

Chris Gammell: I've never used those. Have you?

Dave Jones: Oh, they're very cool. Yeah, I've used them before. And they're basically... As you said, they're a resistive thing which changes when you stretch them, basically. When you, you know, contort them. And the idea is you stick them down with glue. You get some special glue. You stick them down on the thing that you want to measure, like a bar or something. You know, if you've got some bar of metal. So, that's how all these strain gauges... They're basically a strain gauge. Oh, okay. Yeah. And you actually stick them to the surface. There's a bit of art in that to get it just right. And then when the bar flexes, the metal or anything, plastic or anything you're trying to measure, flexes, then the thing changes resistance. And, you know, you hook that up to a bridge circuit. And you amplify that. And bingo, you can get a strain output based on... And it's just really cool. You actually stick them on things. Yeah. And, you know, but they're not designed for, you know, bended 90 degrees and stuff like that. They're sort of designed for really micro sort of... Yeah, I think that's...

Chris Gammell: This might be a different type of thing. Possibly. It doesn't look like a... It just reminded me of that. That's what... Linear strain. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's very cool. Strain gauges.

Chris Gammell: What was the application you were using it for? The strain.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, because I'm involved in all sorts of seismic stuff where we stretch things and we contort things and we, yeah, and we have to check that and monitor that and stuff like that. Okay. Because we're building huge mechanical things that are designed to tow behind boats. So, you know, strains and stresses are all very, very important. And then we've got strain isolation modules, which will actually isolate any strain going through, you know, so you can have a module that's sort of stress-free and you need to measure all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, I used to build my own strain gauge amps and stuff like that. That's cool. Roll my own, so...

Chris Gammell: I'm always amazed that, like, you know, with, like, strain measurements and these really strong materials that are actually straining, right? Yeah. It's just amazing that, like, even if you look at the equation, it's just the, you know, it's moving, what, like a sub-millimeter kind of thing?

Dave Jones: Yeah, something like that, a few microns, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but it's like, I don't want it to move at all. That's a rigid substance. That's not supposed to do that.

Dave Jones: Well, if you're into climbing, like, well, you know, abseiling and canyoning like I am, then you have these carabiners and you look at them and they're designed to, like, break it, you know, 2.5 tons or something like that, you know. Ton, that's a US thing, right?

Chris Gammell: Does it have an E on the end, Dave? Oh, right, it's the E on the end, right.

Dave Jones: Okay. Anyway, right, two and a half tons, like, you know, 2,500 kilos, right, huge. And it's just this little bit of lightweight aluminium and you go, how, you know? Yeah, that's crazy. And they do actually stretch when you, if you've actually seen the stress tests on these things, like, they actually do a breakage test on them. And you can actually see them sort of, you can physically see them with your eyes actually stretching a little bit. And it's like, oh, God, you know?

Chris Gammell: Like the plasticity of it and everything. Yeah, yeah. I remember that. It's scary. It really is.

Dave Jones: And some of them are individually tested before they ship them out. So, you actually see these little marks on them where they've actually put them in the jig and they've stretched them up to, you know, half the capacity, half the braking capacity or something just to individually test each one. And it's like, well, you know, I hope you didn't do any damage to it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I was going to say, so your hobby is going and taking this already lightly used equipment and then hanging off the side of a cliff with these things, Dave? Yep, pretty much. Oh, that is, wow, that's healthy.

Dave Jones: I have faith in the engineering.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know, I, yeah. Playing drums hasn't killed me yet, so I think, I think, I think statistically I'm a little safer than you.

Dave Jones: You're breaking up again.

Chris Gammell: Uh-oh. Man, sorry. No, he's gone. He's back. Is he? No. Am I back? You're back. All right.

Dave Jones: Back from the future. All right.

Chris Gammell: Man. Well.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I've got a rant.

Chris Gammell: Okay, go ahead. Oh.

Dave Jones: I uploaded my latest video last night. The Agilent Scopes. Okay. Agilent going to get a kick up the ass for this.

Chris Gammell: What's your latest video?

Dave Jones: Oh, it's, well, you've got to go watch it. It is.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's not on your site yet.

Dave Jones: Oh, no, it's not. But it's up on YouTube because I have an update. I always upload to YouTube first. So, if you want to see my videos first, you've got to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Come on. Get with the program.

Chris Gammell: You know, I'm not subscribed to yours and I don't know if I want to now after that harsh language, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right. Anyway. Standby power consumption of the new Agilent Scopes. I thought it was zero because I thought it had a real, yeah, I thought it had a real mechanical main switch, right? It's got the, it's, it's got the, you know, the real plunker mechanical switch. Yeah. It's got the mechanical bar, which goes back to the mains board at the back. Right. It's got a, it was a fairly wimpy looking switch. When I did the review and original review and tear down, I thought, oh, that switch looks a bit wimpy, but I didn't really look into it. It was on the main section of the board, you know, the isolated main section of the power supply board. And they went to all the trouble to engineer the rod going back from the front panel that pushes on the switch and all that sort of stuff. So I just assumed, silly me, duh, that it actually switched the mains, you know, on and off. And I didn't bother to test the, you know, the standby power consumption because I just assumed it was zero. Silly me. But somebody on the forum mentioned that he realized that it was getting a bit warm when it was switched off and he measured it. And sure enough, there is a standby power consumption. And they, it's, the switch is not a mains one. It's a logic one, which goes and switches the commercial switch mode power supply output off and on. That's basically what it does. Nothing wrong there, except for the fact that the damn thing takes six and a half watts standby power. You can fly to the bloody moon on six and a half watts. Speaking of which, that's the name of my latest video. Agilent fly to the moon.

Chris Gammell: I still can't find it. I'm looking for it here on your site or on the YouTube's channel. I can't find it, but I'm a YouTube dum-dum. Right. Okay. Okay.

Dave Jones: It's number 164, I think. So, yeah. Search for that.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So, so let's define again. So, you're saying standby power. You're saying switches off.

Dave Jones: I can't hear a thing you're saying.

Chris Gammell: Okay. How about now?

Dave Jones: Yep. Now I can.

Chris Gammell: All right.

Dave Jones: This is not working well for the radio show. Maybe we should switch back to Skype.

Chris Gammell: All right. Let's do that. Let's do that real quick.

Dave Jones: All right. Here we go. We're switching back to Skype. Let's start it up and...

Chris Gammell: We're going to do a live switch here, people. A live switch. Hot switching. Yeah. We'll see if this works.

Dave Jones: Oh, I got that silly Skype startup sound in my headphones.

Chris Gammell: Ah. Nice.

Dave Jones: Ah. This makes for great radio, doesn't it?

Chris Gammell: Anyways, the thing I'm wondering about is the... So, defining this... You said standby power, right?

Dave Jones: Standby power. Yep. When you switch the thing off.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So, switch the thing off. So, you're not talking about like quiescent power. Like when it's on, but it's not really... Oh, no, no, no.

Dave Jones: This is, you know, the front panel on-off switch. And it's a big clunking switch. You push it and it goes clunk. And it switches off.

Chris Gammell: Clunk. Clunk. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, did you trace where it's going? I mean, like, it's got to go somewhere, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, yes, yes. I traced it. It goes to a control pin on the commercial switch mode power supply.

Chris Gammell: All of... Six and a half watts goes to the control pin? No, no. Are you talking about the switch?

Dave Jones: It's a logic switch. So, it just actually ties a pin to ground. That's all it does. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, so they use this really expensive mechanical switch just to...

Dave Jones: They use this big expensive mechanical switch to switch an input on the power supply to ground and that switches off the output of the power supply. Wow. Which is functionality built into this commercial lineage brand power supply they're using, which is a really high quality power supply apart from that. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of build quality and stuff like that and brand and...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But, yeah. Six and a half bloody watts. Can't believe it. That's a lot of watts. Are you kidding me? That's a lot of watts. Oh, God. As I said in the video, I was like... It reminds me of the 1970s, you know? The 80s standby power consumption where nobody gave a shit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But these days, you know, it's all the rage. Standby power consumption in a product is pretty much everything.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But, I mean, test and measurement equipment doesn't really care about that.

Dave Jones: I know, but still, it's poor engineering.

Chris Gammell: If it was battery powered.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, but...

Chris Gammell: It's a trade-off, you know? Like, that's a trade-off thing. I don't think that's that big a deal. It's annoying. It's...

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, I know. It's a waste of energy, right? I know. It's... Yeah. But it's six and a half bloody watts. It's a lot. There's just no excuse for that. And the thing is, they went to all the trouble and expense to engineer it all properly with the control rod, the old-fashioned control rod back. It's on... And these switches on the mains. It's an isolated part of the board and everything, but it's not a main switch. So, it's like... Unbelievable. So, I don't know if that was like a late change in the design, because it looks like they engineered it for a main switch, and then they maybe changed their mind and went, oh, no, let's make it a logic switch instead. So, I don't know. I'm waiting to hear back from... Oh, I have to hear back from Agilent. My contact's on a break at the moment. And you haven't shown up on Skype. Where are you?

Chris Gammell: I'm here.

Dave Jones: Not on my list, you're not.

Chris Gammell: I must have unfriended you, after all those mean things you said to me.

Dave Jones: You bastard.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. We could use Google Chat.

Dave Jones: No, we could. No, because then it adjusts my volume. I don't like that. Oh, it does do that. I refuse to do it. No, Google Talk.

Chris Gammell: I don't even know how to find you.

Dave Jones: It's great quality, but... Nah. I don't like it touching my microphone level.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Don't touch it.

Dave Jones: That's got to be a t-shirt. Don't touch my mic.

Chris Gammell: Here we go. Let's see if this works now.

Dave Jones: He's on. All right. Here we go. Oh. Answer. All right. We're up.

Chris Gammell: Oh. Wow. That's kind of weird now. It is freaky. Some people listening up. All right. I got to shut this down. All right.

Dave Jones: Maybe she shut down the other one, huh?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's better.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: Mumble. All right. Sorry, Mumble. We loved you. It was a good try. I think the problem is my server. I mean, we're still going across an ocean here, Dave. I mean... Yeah, we are.

Dave Jones: What is it? 270... A ping of 270?

Chris Gammell: Milliseconds.

Dave Jones: Millisecond ping?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Unbelievable. What's the world coming to you?

Chris Gammell: Pretty high, yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway. It worked for a little bit. It seemed great at the start, and then we went, yeah, let's use this. You know, the quality was awesome. Yeah. It just cut out. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It must have been those Australian ISPs, the tricky guys over there.

Dave Jones: Dodgy Telstra, yeah. I've taken them down before, the bastards.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Anyway.

Dave Jones: Anyway, we're back online. We're up.

Chris Gammell: That was a hot switch right there.

Dave Jones: That was a hot switch. Live on radio. Was that a first?

Chris Gammell: No, probably not. I doubt it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm sure the pros do it all the time, and they don't even say so, but we're just, you know, lack so much material on this show that we're just willing to throw anything in.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Next up, Chris brushes his teeth.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I hate high standby power consumption. It's just bad engineering, really. You know, I mean, it's a lot of effort which goes into power supplies, commercial switch mode mains power supplies these days.

Dave Jones: Yeah. These days to make them, you know, to meet all these new energy requirements. You know, I think it's 0.1 watts is the typical standby consumption of like, you know, your little Nokia war wart charger or something these days. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, really tiny. So, you know, I don't expect that small, but geez, under a watt would have been nice. But anyway, I don't know the reason why they need to actually leave it on because it looks like no power is actually going to the main board. It literally just switches off the output. So, maybe it's something to do with, well, the power supplies, it'll have a longer life if you leave the input capacitors charged, which is what it's doing. And it just switches off the output. So, then you don't get that big, you know, inrush surge of current when you do a big clunky main switch. And that stresses it. And if you're doing that 10 times a day because you turn your scope off and on, maybe that's going to kill the power supply in a shorter amount of time. But, you know, those things could be engineered as well.

Chris Gammell: Like, no storage or anything like that? Nothing going to the digital boards?

Dave Jones: There appears to be, I measured it, and there appears to be nothing going to the digital board at all. So, yeah, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Maybe you caught a legit bug. Who knows? Maybe it's not supposed to happen.

Dave Jones: No, this is purpose designed. This is, they've done it deliberately.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, the line to that, or to the pull down.

Dave Jones: Oh, no, they've definitely engineered this deliberately to leave the power supply powered up and just disable the output. So, yeah. Yeah. Beats me why. Anyway. Agilent. I'm sure Agilent will get back to me on that. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: So, how about Upside of Scopes? What else do you want to talk about?

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You want to talk about my China?

Dave Jones: Oh, well, it leads right into Nerdcore rapping.

Chris Gammell: Obviously. Oh, yeah. That's a good segue. Yeah. Yeah. So, there was a conference in Cleveland called Not-a-Con. I didn't go to it. Not-a-Con? Not-a-Con, yeah. Oh, Not-a-Con. Yeah, Not-a-Con. Love it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little more hacky, like, traditional, like, security kind of hack than I would have been interested in. Right. Okay. I didn't partake. But I was watching people tweet about it, and they started talking about Dualcore, who's a rapper.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Nerdcore. That's the thing. I was talking to some people about this. I didn't quite understand all of the names. There's a lot of different names, but my God, this is some nerdy rapping. And they're not bad, either.

Dave Jones: Oh, they're pretty good. There's a huge thing out there. I highly recommend everyone go watch Nerdcore Rising. We'll put a link in the show. It's a movie. It's a documentary. And it follows MC Frunalot, who's my favorite Nerdcore rapper.

Chris Gammell: Wait, so this is a movement of music? This is a movement.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's a huge... Boy, I totally missed it, huh? That's what the movie's about. The movie's about MC Frunalot, who actually decides to chuck in his day job and go the world's first full-time Nerdcore rapper. And he goes on tour. Goes on tour across the US.

Chris Gammell: Insane.

Dave Jones: It's great. And, yeah, he does some really great stuff. I'll put... I'll also include a link to his latest video, because his latest video is cool. It is ultra cool for his latest song. I actually tweeted that last week, I think it was. Oh, really? Okay. Cool. Jeez, you're out of date. You don't follow my YouTube channel. You don't follow my tweets.

Chris Gammell: I don't think anyone could ever fault me for not being cool. I mean, like, even in the nerd scene, I'm not cool. You know? Like, I'm okay with that. Right.

Dave Jones: It's always... Yeah, but based on that photo you've got on there with you and the microphone on the amp hour.

Chris Gammell: I know. Well, that's because I'm 12 in that picture. You look about 12. Yeah. That looks uncool. Yeah, you posted it.

Dave Jones: I did. I couldn't resist.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I just missed it, I guess. I don't... So you listen, like, do you listen to this stuff, like, when you're just, like, in your car?

Dave Jones: I've got MC Frontalot's new album, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Like, in your car? Is that, like, where you're listening? Are you listening while you solder? Or is it, like, where you're laying on boards?

Dave Jones: Whatever.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Huh. Yeah. MC Frontalot's great. I love it. Well, it sort of helps that I was going to be on his new album, but unfortunately, I didn't. I didn't make the cut, so...

Chris Gammell: Nothing like a little ego to get your attention, huh, Dave?

Dave Jones: No, he asked me to be on his new album, so... Oh. Yeah, he wanted to use a clip from one of my YouTube things on his... You know, I gave him permission to use it, and yeah, it turns out it didn't make the cut. He went in a different direction with that song, slightly. So... Ah, well.

Chris Gammell: I still think he's cool. I feel like it's, like, a sub-subculture, you know? Either that or I'm just, like, not immersed enough yet.

Dave Jones: And they've got these, you know, you'll see in the movie that they've got these hardcore fans who follow them around, and, you know, they'll have, you know, 10 hardcore fans that turn up to the front row, and... Wow. It's great. Wow. Absolutely brilliant. Yeah. And the... Of course, the fans are nerdier than the guys who actually do it, so... Yeah. That's okay. That's all right. And MC Frontalot wears a headlamp on stage. He's got, you know, that's his trademark look, is these... You can actually buy his nerd, nerdcore glasses. So, he wears the glasses, and he wears the headlamp on sideways, and that's his signature look. And it's just...

Speaker ?: Ah.

Dave Jones: That's terrific. I love it. Anyway, there's a whole slew of them. So, it's a whole rising industry. That's why they called it Nerdcore Rising, the movie. So, check it out.

Chris Gammell: See, now, that's an interesting question. I don't know if any of the... Obviously, I haven't watched the movie yet. But if any of the... Is it just because it's fun, or is there actually, like, a... Hey, we want to get, like, younger people into... You know how, like, they always have, like... For some reason, they always try and associate, like, hip-hop with, like, the younger crowd. It wasn't anything like that, right?

Dave Jones: No, it's just that they're rapping about stuff that nerds and geeks care about. You know, they're rapping about technical stuff. And the lyrics are brilliant, and they're all about technical... Well, they're usually about technical... You know, if you listen to some of MC Frontalot's lyrics, they're really bizarre, some of them. But, yeah, they're usually got a technical, nerdy theme behind them, and they're just brilliant. Right. Another one I used to listen to was MC... Was MC++. So... Which I think's a brilliant name. MC++. Oh, my. I think he's faded off the scene, though. So, he was one of the first... He was one of the early ones, but I don't know what happened. I haven't listened to him in a while. So, I think he just died off and went and got a real job or something. So... Yeah. Anyway... That's brilliant. Yeah. There's people out there making a full-time living from this, and they go around to all the nerd conferences, and they get gigs at the... Yeah. So, apparently, you can earn a living from it if you're a good nerdcore rapper.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's great. Yeah, that's really good. I'm surprised they don't have him at... You know, some of the bigger trade shows, ESC and shows like that, so...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But they tend to get him at, like, more of the geek conferences, you know.

Chris Gammell: Like the... Or the dev cons and all those kind of things. The dev cons and the... Yep. Yeah. Yep.

Dave Jones: And all those comic ones, you know, all the comic con and all that sort of, you know. There's a whole bunch of shows like that. Yeah, they're extremely popular, and they all, you know, they have these huge concerts after the show at night, apparently, and... Yeah, yeah. Everyone's down there in the mosh pit, all these nerds down there in the mosh pit. That must be a sight, really. Yes. You can get your eye taken out of the pocket protector. Sorry, I'm being too stereotypical.

Chris Gammell: That's okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's great. And anyway...

Chris Gammell: I have nowhere to go after that, Dave. I don't even know where to go next.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's pretty hard to segue into something else from the mosh pit or rapping. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. Well, how about this? It's pretty creative, and I want to talk about creativity. Have you been... Did you read that link I sent over?

Dave Jones: Which link is this? You send a whole bunch of links. You're a link machine.

Chris Gammell: I sent a lot of links. Yeah. So, I've been reading a lot of... Uh-oh. Warning. Warning. Again? Really?

Dave Jones: Chris has been reading again. Oh, like, that means he's got ideas. Feed dropped out. Oh, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and they're totally original, too.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Tell us all about it.

Chris Gammell: I'm very easily convinced. Let's be honest about that.

Dave Jones: What's your latest... What's your latest thing you're all excited about?

Chris Gammell: A lot of Daniel Pink lately? Do you ever read any of his stuff? Never heard of him. Never heard of him.

Dave Jones: Wouldn't know him from Bar of Soap.

Chris Gammell: So, there's a video we'll link, and this is actually how it all got started. So, he did a talk at the Royal Society of Academy or something like that, and basically then this guy, he goes and he takes the talks. I know, right? It sounds like it really happening. I hear they have Nerdcore rap after they all meet, right? Right, after the show, and everyone gets down. Yeah, right? Yeah. No, but after the fact, then they take the talk, and then they cut it up, and then there's this guy who animates it on a whiteboard. He, like, draws it all out, and then they sync up the talk to it. It's a really cool thing to watch. But anyways, this is how I kind of got into it. And so, the thing that it's about is, it's mostly about Dan Pink's book called Drive. And basically, his entire argument is that, and I'll get to the point that actually is relating to engineering here soon and electronics. Sure. Basically, he refutes the entire idea of, like, pay for performance. So, if a company comes to you, or say you're working for a company, and you get a salary, and then they say, if you make a great new product, we'll give you $1,000. And he says that there is no way that's ever going to work.

Dave Jones: And why?

Chris Gammell: Because that's just not how humans work, basically. That's the simplest explanation, is that that's not how the human brain processes rewards, right? So, like, that's the carrot and stick model, where if you make a great new product, you then get $1,000. Well, that will work at first. People will go off and do this, you know, go work real hard. Yeah. But there's, like, tons and tons of studies where, basically, people do worse. They actually, they stress themselves out, and they focus so narrowly on, I need to get a great product, I need to get a great product, that they end up making a crappy product. I know.

Dave Jones: It doesn't work. Yeah, I totally agree. It can backfire.

Chris Gammell: Have you had, like, bonus programs like that before?

Dave Jones: At my previous company, who is now not nameless. No, that's right. Yeah. They offered bonuses if we got, you know, if we got something. Oh, no. It's a profit. It was a profit share bonus. So, if the company made a profit at the end of the year, you get a bonus. And it's like, well, whoop-dee-freaking-do, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And the argument with that is, well, I'm just one of the, you know, parts of the cog. How can I, you know, influence, directly influence? It's not like I'm a salesman, and I can go out there and, you know, actually make sales to help make that profit, you know? And then the standard company argument is, well, everyone's part of a team, yada, yada, let's all work together, yada, yada. And then they, yeah, you just start yawning and go back into your dildo cubicle, you know? And that's, yeah. It's, I don't know. It works in some industries. But, yeah. I don't think it does. Engineering, well, no, on sales and, you know, stuff like that where their whole earning capacity is based on bonuses.

Chris Gammell: That's when it gets really crazy, the stuff he talks about. And that, and like stuff that I always get pissed about, right? So, like, so, like, like executive bonuses, right? Like big pay performance-based bonuses where they, these guys, you know, CEOs give themselves like million, two million dollar bonuses, right?

Dave Jones: Regardless of the outcome. Regardless of the performance. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: So, it's pay for performance. And it does a couple things. First off, it does, it causes you to set goals and then you'll do anything to make those goals. So, you know, like. Oh, of course. Either be unethical or fudge numbers.

Dave Jones: But that's why it works for sales. Because sales are, you know, they will do anything to get the sale. And once you've got the sale, that's it. But then you can argue that there's, you know, client relationships you can lose and because you've screwed them over and all that. Well, you know, I, yeah. It gets very complicated.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I think that it has other, the whole, I mean, it's, it's, obviously, I'm not trying to boil the whole book down to one thing. But basically. Koshua. Yeah, I am. Another thing about it, though, is like they try and, they're talking about when you get paid for something, right? You don't want to do it as much. And they show that with like kids, like when they're, these, they encourage kids to like draw something. When they say the kids know they're going to draw it, they don't want to draw anymore. And it's the same thing for people, right? When you get paid for something, it's a job. And so I think that's an interesting bit for the hobbyist movement because you look at a lot of the, the awesome work that people have done, right? So 555 contests, that tech contest of the, some of the entries for that, like, and, and just like the projects we see every day coming out through the media, right? Like they're not getting paid for that. There's, there's nothing. I mean, you could say they're getting paid in publicity, but. Well, no.

Dave Jones: Well, there's prizes at stake. You think most of those people would have done those projects if there wasn't a prize or a contest or fame at stake? Well, yeah. There's a prize. I think so. It doesn't have to be money. It can be, it can be fame or anything else.

Chris Gammell: I think they would have done it anyways. They're just, I think a lot of the people are just looking for, uh, uh, bounded conditions for, for making awesome stuff, right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: But they probably wouldn't have put as much effort into it, especially in terms of video and, and documentation and other stuff. So, you know. Maybe so.

Chris Gammell: Maybe so. But I, I think in general, like, okay, so outside contests then even, you know, just like everyday hobbyist movement, right? I mean, like there's people doing awesome things. Yeah. Just because they want it, of course. Just for the sake of doing it, right? And, and if you started saying, well, if I'm going to pay you for that stuff, you know, every, every, uh, you know, every awesome product project you submit to Hackaday or make or whatever else, you get a thousand bucks. Well, you're going to start seeing it drop off. I think.

Dave Jones: Well, that's why I'm not going to take money to produce certain videos for my blog, you know, because then I'm going, and then I'll be under a different sort of pressure. Oh, I've got to produce this nice video because they're paying me and it's got to, you know, and then I'll think too hard about it and I won't do it the way I originally would have wanted or something, you know? So, uh, yeah, I, I, I have been offered that before, you know, money to do a certain video on a certain topic for a, you know, sponsored by a company. So that episode is sponsored by, you know, X brand company. Um, but it's the topic that they wanted me to do, which I might not have necessarily done. You would have hated it. On my own. Well, I wouldn't have hated it because it was still an interesting tech topic, but it's not something that, you know, I just wanted to do on a whim, which is how the blog currently works. So yeah, it'd be different. And I know my mentality doing it would be different as well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, I, I, I just, I just think that I've been, you know, reading this book and reading a couple others of his and, you know, it's, it's really interesting because it seems like a lot of people do it wrong. Uh, I'm sure people listening have experienced their work or otherwise, you know, like, but it's, it, I don't know. It just, it's been, this book's been kind of opening my eyes to the, the whole, cause it, it really feeds for creativity too. Like how do you really get someone to be creative, especially at work? Right. You let them do what they want to do. Exactly. That's it. That's exactly right. Yeah. And you have to be willing to like, you know, waste some money on that. You know, you have to trust your people. Right.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Waste. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's like you used to tell me how you had at one of your past companies, you had like just a blanket account, right. Where you could just kind of charge stuff as long as it was below a certain amount. Right. Yep. That was brilliant. I think that's a brilliant way to do it, to handle electronics, you know, designers. Yeah. Because.

Dave Jones: I had my own company credit card and I could, you know, pretty much buy and I was free to investigate any technology I wanted to. Yeah. So yeah. That's.

Chris Gammell: That is the way to do it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's pretty cool.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure that helped a lot too. Yeah. So yeah. The, the things that Daniel Pink talks about are autonomy, which is what you were just talking about. Mastery. So you want to get really good at what you're doing, you know, so allow your people to do that. And then purpose is, well, hopefully it serves some kind of purpose, like help people out. But, you know, whatever product you're making is helping people out. So, so what I'm trying to say, Dave, is I'm going to become a management consultant. That's what I'm really trying to say. Cause I read this one book.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Cause that's what it feels like sometimes.

Dave Jones: Right. I hate analyzing shit like that. It's just, you know, let engineers do what they want to do. End of story.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I kind of agree with that.

Dave Jones: Don't, don't try and control them. You know, let them, let them run wild. That's how you produce a good product.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Because you can't design something by committee. It doesn't work.

Chris Gammell: No. Yeah. Like smaller teams and allow people to kind of pick who they're working with and what they're working on.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Give the engineers a playground, right?

Dave Jones: Absolutely. And don't stifle them when they get passionate about it. You know, when they speak up and tell you, you know, tell a manager that his idea is shit. So, which, which is, it's just the way to kill anyone's, you know.

Chris Gammell: You mean the manager saying that the ideas of the engineers? Well, no, no.

Dave Jones: You know, the manager stopping you from, from speaking up and, you know, speaking your mind. That kills creativity dead right there.

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

Dave Jones: Anyway. Anyways. Let's stop talking about that management shit. I don't like it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, that's fine. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a great book though. I highly suggest it. Recommend it. At least the video. The video too is really fun to watch. So, they have a bunch of cool videos. So, we'll post that.

Dave Jones: Sounds too stressing on the mind. I highly recommend just watching Nerdcore Rising and relax and chill out and design something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You're so chill, Dave. Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: And people think I'm totally wound up. I know. It's all part of the show. No, they confuse wound up. People always ask me. I got another comment last night. How much coffee do I drink? You know, am I on any drugs? I don't drink coffee. I'm caffeine free. I'm drug free. I'm just, I work on passion and enthusiasm. People don't seem to understand that.

Chris Gammell: Dave is actually a wind up car. He has a little. Right. Yeah. Every morning he turns the crank and the rest of the day is just unwinding.

Dave Jones: I'm passionate about electronics and product design. I like to think that's why people watch the blog. Why it's been popular and successful. You know. Yeah. No. I'm not on drugs. No, I'm not. You know, it's just natural, natural enthusiasm. God. How about you get some? You know. Instead of criticizing me for being, you know, too hyperactive and too whatever. For being Dave. Exactly. God. Yeah. Nothing wrong with being passionate about something. Jeez. Anyway. Enough about that. How about we get on to some technical shit?

Chris Gammell: Okay. All right. It's been on the list for a while. You pick. Yeah, go ahead.

Dave Jones: All right. I had a bit of a fight with some bi-directional voltage bus translators a couple of weeks back.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So are these the active kind or the passive kind?

Dave Jones: These are the active kind.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: I guess you could call them. They're a TI part. They're very well used. The TI-TXB 0104 and 0108E parts. Okay. We'll put up a link to them. And I'll put up an interesting link to a discussion paper explaining all of the problems with these active bi-directional voltage bus translators, which we found. This is... It's rather interesting, right? We built up this prototype circuit because we wanted to use these... Yeah. We wanted to talk bi-directionally, which is the key here. Yeah. Both directions, two different voltage levels. So, you know, from 3.3 down to 1.2. Okay. And it's easy if you do it in one direction. You never have any problems, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I've done that one before. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Exactly. And it's easy if you do... It's easy to do bi-directional if you have a direction control pin. So then, you know... Oh, yeah. So then your... But then your software has to do more. It's got to know that you're now talking in X direction instead of Y direction. And you've... You know, and then you switch a bit, which then enables the output buffer and it drives in one direction only. So these are actually automatic. But what we were trying to do is do that with... Do bi-directional without any direction pin, right? So like an I2C bus or something like that. Except it wasn't. It was like a sort of a SPI type bus. Okay. It was actually a hard bus. It wasn't like a pull-up bus like an I2C. Oh, okay. C.

Chris Gammell: So... So what kind of speeds are we talking about here?

Dave Jones: And that's the other thing. We wanted fairly high speeds. We wanted 20, 30 megabits per second, right? Which is pretty high speed when you're talking bi-directional stuff like this. As we found out, we're getting all sorts of weird effects with capacitive loading on the lines and how long the lines were and our flying leads and all sorts of stuff. And, yeah. And it comes down to that. The fact is these special bi-directional voltage translators from TI and others, I think analog devices make some too, and they all work exactly the same. In fact, if you read the data sheet for it and see the internal circuit for it, it's very interesting. They've got like one-shots, so they detect when the input on one side transitions, and then that triggers a one-shot which instantly transitions the other side, and then they've got to do that bi-directionally. Anyway, it's very cool. Yeah. And it turns out they are weak drivers. They're very weak. They deliberately design them not to drive any hard loads because if they do, then they can conflict and they can blow themselves up and all that sort of stuff.

Chris Gammell: Do you mean feeding back into themselves or if you had two-?

Dave Jones: If you have two drivers, two hard drivers on the bus trying to drive the bus at the same time, one's positive, one's negative, you can blow them up and you can cause all sorts of other problems.

Chris Gammell: So it's like a built-in fail-safe.

Dave Jones: It's a built-in fail-safe system, yeah. But the problem with that is that it has lots of implications for driving. You basically can't drive long lines, which is what we wanted to do. We thought, oh, these things are drivers. And we didn't really look into the details of how hard they were driving the actual line. And it turns out not very hard at all. So we found like it worked if it was just like an inch away from our device, but that wasn't good enough for us. So, yeah, it was just really difficult and lots of issues involved there and something you think was simple to convert voltage levels.

Chris Gammell: So how did you actually end up fixing it?

Dave Jones: Oh, we just actually, oh, yes, this is the interesting part. We actually went, well, screw that. We want these things to be really hard drivers. And you can't get any on the market that are hard drivers or a week. So we did the old trick of just paralleling the chips up. We paralleled the channels up. So you literally put chips piggyback. Well, they were like four or eight channel devices. So we wired those up in parallel. And we found four or five channels wired in parallel would drive the amount of line that we wanted to drive. So, and then, you know, but then you can do the old trick of actually soldering chips on top of each other as well.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I've never seen that one.

Dave Jones: You've never done that.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I've soldered chips on top of one another before, but not for line drivers where you're paralleling them.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because you get more drive capability when you put two gates in parallel. You know, a 7400 gate, you know, an AND gate or something. Yeah. You can get more drive capability when you put them in parallel. And it works the same with these bidirectional bus translators that work to treat. So that was our solution to wire up the channels in parallel.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I thought it was really neat. And we went through all sorts of, you know, there was lots of signal integrity shit involved in this because, you know. Yeah, 20 meg, right? Yeah, 20 meg. And, you know, I was making up little probes to actually probe the thing properly. And, yeah, and we couldn't figure out what was going on. And we're using a different brand of chip. And, ah, it was all doing the same thing. So there you go, a trap. They're designed for weak driving.

Chris Gammell: Did you build your own probes, you said?

Dave Jones: I built my own, well, low.

Chris Gammell: Just like a J-Fed input kind of thing?

Dave Jones: Not actual active probe. No. Okay. At the ground and the test points and stuff like that. Oh, okay. I had to solder directly where I wanted them and stuff like that. So just to get decent signal integrity to measure it. We're scratching our heads for ages and, you know. And it'd work if we, you know, actually grasp the wires with our hand, you know. It'd work. Oh, yeah. And, you know, you stand in a certain position and it works.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I hate it. You know, you always can, like, isolate that to capacitance. You're like, oh, it's capacitance somehow. It's like, wow.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it turns out they're bloody weak drivers, piss weak drivers. Yeah. And they work, yeah, they're only designed for incredibly short distances, like, you know, an inch tops, actually, between the devices.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, how often do you have, like, level translations? But usually it's for chip-to-chip kind of thing, right?

Dave Jones: It's usually for chip-to-chip kind of thing. So that's what they're designed for. And we were trying to, you know, silly us, we were trying to drive a couple of inches of wire, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Shock horror. Anyway, yeah, the article goes into all the, you know, the mystery surrounding these bi-directional voltage translators. And it's a really interesting topic. So if you're after some, you know, some porn to read, then I highly recommend reading these data sheets and these articles. So we'll link those on the site.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, definitely. Anyway, I was quite excited by it. It was good fun. That sounds like, yeah, it feels good to, like, talk technical stuff again. That's good. It does.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, they're great. And I love it. So, yeah, it's just a different challenge because I don't think I've ever used these specific ones before. I've done it where you have the direction line, which makes it easy because then you can have a nice hard driver and your software controls which, you know, so there's no chance, unless you goof your software up, there's no chance of two drivers driving the bus at the same time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, anyway, these little chips are quite smart. I like them. They're great. The TXB0104, chip of the day.

Chris Gammell: Oh, chip of the week.

Dave Jones: There we go. Chip of the week. There we go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway, that was good fun. Yeah. You know, that gave me a couple of hours of joy, sort of debugging all that sort of stuff.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It was good to do some real engineering for a change.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: How about... You know, I actually use one of those oscilloscope things.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. How about quasi-engineering? So, I wanted to talk about this... Quasi-engineering.

Dave Jones: That's called management, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: No. No. Well, maybe. Anyways, MathWorks just released a C code generator. Did you see that? Yes, they have. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I've seen it.

Chris Gammell: I don't know how I feel about that. Which is...

Dave Jones: Well... I don't know how... It's another awesome tool, right? But... Yeah. Well, it's $6,500 a seat, by the way.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not going to be like, you know, a student goes out and buys this to complete his...

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: ...his embedded systems course or anything. No.

Dave Jones: $6,500. Jeez. You know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I guess my argument against it is... So, my alma mater started teaching MATLAB as a programming language.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It was... MATLAB's all the rage. Everyone does MATLAB. Every engineer who comes out now is a MATLAB guru. Yeah, I know, but... They love MATLAB at unis.

Chris Gammell: I know, they do, but... They think it's a duck's guts. I know, but... Doesn't that, like... Isn't that bad? I mean, like, I understand where this comes from. There's probably a very real need for a C code generator, because hiring someone to take your MATLAB code into C is probably not cheap. And it's probably cheaper to buy a $6,500. Well, it's another time-to-market thing.

Dave Jones: You know, a lot of people... A lot of companies, they're working on, you know, lots of DSP-intensive stuff. And they'll do a lot of that in MATLAB. Or they'll do all of it in MATLAB. And they'll simulate it and do... You know, get their systems working perfectly. And then you want to convert those without error into C code to run on your micros. And, well, you know, it's a great tool for that. But, yeah, I know where you're coming from that, yeah, it dumbs you down. But, yeah, it's like an emerging old man feeling. There's all the Assembler diehards out there saying C killed programming, right? Because, oh, we don't know anything about the architecture anymore. Well...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, once things get to a certain level, you've got no choice. What do you want to go out and do your simulations in MATLAB and then go hand code in Assembler? Well, you know, I mean, it's...

Chris Gammell: I don't know how to feel about it, you know? I don't know. I haven't read a book about it yet, Dave. Come on.

Dave Jones: As always, there are pros and cons both ways. You know, I can see it being a valuable tool. And then I can see it just being, yeah, as I think you're getting to. It's a lazy person's tool, pretty much.

Chris Gammell: I worry about, like, students getting this at university, like you said, and coming out and being like, huh, memory? What? Like, you know, like, it's like the same thing that a lot of people deal with when they're going from real high-level languages. But I don't know. I see it as a need because I see embedded getting bigger, right? And memories aren't getting much bigger for embedded things.

Dave Jones: So is MATLAB. I see a lot of jobs out there for MATLAB skills.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? Start brushing up on Dave.

Dave Jones: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I know. Yeah. Jeez, I've used MATLAB once or twice, you know, and that was 10 years ago. So, yeah, I know jack shit about it, pretty much. But, yeah, a lot of people use it as their be-all, end-all tool now. And this is just another extension of that, I guess.

Chris Gammell: Expensive, it's an extension, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, you've got to say the same. And if you talk about this, then you've got to say even worse things about people who use LabVIEW and stuff like that. Those really ultra-high level, you know, it doesn't get much more dumbass than MATLAB. Sorry, LabVIEW. LabVIEW. Yeah. Ah, they're all the bloody same. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I mean, I can see it from the prototyping standpoint and everything like that. But eventually, you've got to cram that stuff into a micro, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, you do, but then you line up. Unless you can charge. But then Moore's Law helps you out there, right? That's true, too. Because you get more processing grunt per dollar every year. Yeah. So, you know, it's project-specific. Sometimes you're going to, you know, you just don't care. You just want your system to work, and that's it. And you can throw as much money and processing power and memory at it as you like. And, you know, that's not a design requirement, right? Okay, well, I've been in both. I've been in that situation where, you know, it doesn't matter if you use a $1,000 FPGA and, you know, gigabytes of memory to get your job done, right? It literally does not matter because you've got to make 10 of these things or, you know, or they sell for a million dollars a piece. So, who cares if you use a $1,000 chip, right? It doesn't matter. But other times, yeah, it's really critical that you get that, actually compress all that shit into as much cost-effectiveness as possible because the hardware price point matters more than anything else.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I guess, yeah, I mean, part of the problem, too, I think, is a lot as, like, more, like, lower-end, like, small micro stuff goes to China and India and stuff. Maybe that's, you know, because, like, where the money is, it's the high-level focus stuff, right? So, the real math-intensive. Yeah. Not that it's going to happen for long.

Dave Jones: Well, that's where a lot of the leading-edge stuff is these days. You know, it's a lot of high... Well, no, it's in all this high-level stuff. You know, a lot, huge amounts of DSP and fancy stuff like that. Well, you know, you try and code that in assembly language and you're screwed. You've got to use your MATLAB. You know, you sit there for six months engineering this thing and simulate it in MATLAB to make sure it does exactly what you want and then port that over. I mean, that's pretty standard for a lot of these high-end, complex products these days.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know, it's just... And I don't know if that's going to last forever, either. I wonder what the next step is after that. I mean, maybe it's, like, system, like, even more system-level simulation. Well, I don't know.

Dave Jones: An interesting real-world company example of this is Dolby. Dolby are here in Sydney. They have their development labs here. Oh, yeah. And they're always hiring. And almost every second job there has to be MATLAB. You know, you've got to know a lot about MATLAB and DSP because it's all this super... Because all their core technology is all in this DSP stuff. That's it, you know? And they, you know, you can spend a year of your life just developing and optimizing some MATLAB routine to do something.

Chris Gammell: Something like algorithm.

Dave Jones: Exactly. And then... But because it's Dolby, they often do end, you know, actually commercially price-sensitive end products. So then, you know, you may have another engineer that needs to spend 12 months converting that MATLAB routine into some HDL or something like that to really do it efficiently in an ASIC or something. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. But...

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway, it's a good tool, but it's expensive and it's not good for everything.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So there you go. I think it'll be interesting as more of that kind of higher level work too. Because you know it's going to happen too. You know they're going to move it to China eventually. Right. Like everyone, right? Right. Right. Like Altium. Well... Well... Well... Well... Interesting thing about China. I don't know if you saw this news article. Foxconn. So one of the huge manufacturers in China. I saw this. Yeah. They make Apple products, make HP products. Yep. They're moving out of China. Yeah. Because it's too expensive. Oh my God. Welcome to our pain. Oh man. I love it. Yeah. They're moving to... At least they're in talks. They haven't moved yet. Yeah. But they're in talks to move to Brazil. Where there's a very...

Dave Jones: Which is industry speak for it's going to happen. Right. Or it's already happened and it's just a matter of you know. Yeah. Signing on the dotted line really. It's... Yeah. Trust me. They've done a lot of investigation into it. These companies don't just suddenly announce something like that on a whim and then don't do it. It's...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we won't. You know. Right.

Dave Jones: No. No. Yeah. They're definitely moving out. Because engineering... Yeah. You might... Yeah. Like labor just you know unskilled labor is still quite cheap in China but good quality engineering labor is not cheap in China. Yeah. Yeah. In fact in Shanghai where Altium have moved to I've heard it's... It's not too far off here if you want really good quality you know smart engineers. They're... Yeah. You know on... They're going to be on similar wages to here. So really it's... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. Well that's... That's crazy. I mean I know... I've read... I've only read about Brazil but I've heard their tech sector is kind of burgeoning. You know it's kind of growing a lot so...

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well we'll see.

Chris Gammell: Interesting to spread that kind of stuff around you know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: We'll see what happens. Yeah. But those sort of companies have the dollars to just move in and instantly ramp up you know and ramp up talent and ramp up everything else you know. Yeah. They've got the resources and the money. So... Oh well. Good luck to them. Yeah. And that's just a natural progression. I mean you know if anyone thought China was going to dominate the world forever you're an idiot. You know things naturally move on. Yeah. Yeah. It's just the way of the world. As the Chinese people you know their standards of living come up and they all want what we want. And in you know in our first world... Well they're... I'm not saying they're a third world country but you know their standards of living and expectations are you know lower than ours at present. So...

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. It's silly to think otherwise right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Dave Jones: And there you know it won't be long if they're not there already like in cities like Shanghai and you know Hong Kong and places like that. It's you know people want a higher standard of living. They want higher wages and they want all sorts of stuff and they want their fancy cars and they want their big plasma TVs and they want their iPhones and whatnot. And yeah you know all of that lifestyle stuff costs money and therefore you know you're... I don't know it's a whole finance thing but yeah eventually...

Chris Gammell: Let's just ignore that. Yeah. Well the interesting thing about that is... It all builds up. Is you know like what happens after... So first you know blue collar jobs kind of went overseas. At least I'm talking from the US perspective. Right. And then next is obviously... So if the blue collar jobs then are moving from China to somewhere else right? So then possibly the white collar jobs you know like the technical work and we've already seen that with you know chip manufacturers are setting up shop in China because there's a lot of great talent over there. Both analog and digital. And India is a rising you know rising star in those markets too. Not rising. They're already there right? Yeah. So those things are going too. So what's left right? So what's left after all those jobs move overseas or even just spread out what's left then? Because this is kind of another thing.

Dave Jones: Countries panic and realize that they need to bring them back. Well there's that. And that's happening in the US you know. They start realizing oh it's economically viable to do it here again is it? Yeah. And the cycle starts again.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well there's a higher level though. So that's... So this Dan Pink guy that I've been reading about right? That's another thing he writes about in a different book that I read. Is basically that the last level is creativity. Like so say you've abstracted all of the process stuff out. So you're not making it anymore and you're not even necessarily creating the system pieces like an analog chip or a digital chip or anything like that. What's left after that right? Well yeah. Dreaming up the system. That's the last level.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Somebody's got to come up with the ideas and dream it all up and make it happen.

Chris Gammell: And here's the crazy thing. That's the hobbyist movement. That's what's crazy to me. Like I mean granted it happens in industry too right? Of course it does. There's these large system integrators that you know need to make products or are making products.

Dave Jones: And there's the apples of the world that lead in that sort of aspect.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. But the thing that's interesting is that the small guys can now do it because there's all those other resources available. That's what's interesting to me. Very true. Yeah. So you know you have your little video clip of one hacker one maker. You know you like saying that stuff. Yep.

Dave Jones: Can change the world.

Chris Gammell: There it is. He said it.

Dave Jones: One hobbyist can change the world. They really can. And that leaves us for today's show because we're well over.

Chris Gammell: Are we really?

Dave Jones: I think so.

Chris Gammell: I haven't been tracking.

Dave Jones: No. I forgot to press the stopwatch as well but I can see we've been recording for an hour and six minutes. So unless we dicked around for six minutes at the start then.

Chris Gammell: Well I can try and cut out some of the audio snafus maybe. Eh. Who cares. Leave it in. Yeah. Yeah. So as a new reminder if you have any suggestions please leave them on the website. You can tweet me or Dave. And you know Dave's EEV blog forums are another good place to. Yep. Find information about the show. So.

Dave Jones: Please join the forum. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and.

Chris Gammell: I'm not going to do it.

Dave Jones: Ah. Come on. I need the numbers.

Chris Gammell: I already did it. I did it while we were talking.

Dave Jones: Awesome. It's all about the numbers.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. I'm just. I'm just.

Dave Jones: I'm going to be doing more of that. By the way. I'm going to be encouraging people to. Yeah. Subscribe and you know. Yeah. Do all sorts of things and donate.

Chris Gammell: Now I'm just a cag in the machine.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: All right. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week guys. We'll see you next week.