#439 – Grow A Superbrain

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released April 21st, 2019. Episode 439. Grow a superbrain.

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

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Dave Jones: I told you we need a new intro the other week. I just went, oh shit, I've been saying that same shit for 10 years.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, we've been saying that in a while.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'll figure something new.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I've been putting everything in my life, so I've had a bunch of things come up, and the answer to everything is like, I'll get to that after Kaicon. Ah, right, okay. So if we want to do a new intro, that's fine, but let's just do it like May 1st, yeah? Okay.

Dave Jones: Right, okay. I've heard it's sold out.

Chris Gammell: There's exactly one ticket left as of this recording, so by the time it posts, yeah. Wow, excellent. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So you literally can't fit anyone else in the room? There's no more chairs? Are you going to actually have enough chairs and stuff? Yeah, we'll have enough chairs. Do you have like a content, like, oh, it seats 300. Do you actually sell 300 tickets?

Chris Gammell: It seats 200, and we sold 200 tickets. Right. There's multiple rooms, so it's basically like who, you know, the one room will be full for the main thing.

Dave Jones: That's right, because it's not just one two-hour thing where everyone's in a concert hall or something, right? Exactly, yeah. Yeah, everyone's just mingling everywhere, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, there's like a main event space, and then there's like a set of workshops, and then there's kind of like a centralized social area, and then there's a second set of talks. So like people will be spread amongst those things, but I think like anything more than 200-some people, it just starts to get out of hand. So that's for a first year, I'm very, very happy with those numbers. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, very excited. That's terrific. I, not in the KiCon world, or KiCad world even, I've been doing some Allegro work, some Cadence Allegro, and I have an eight-hour clock going. I put in, well, I mean, I'm getting started with it. I'm not like doing contract work with it, but I'm just kind of like investigating it. Right, I was going to ask, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I put in a request this morning for like any kind of sales information on Cadence Allegro, and it's now eight hours later, eight plus hours later, and I haven't heard a peep.

Dave Jones: Yep, you can't even get a price.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: That's insane, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I'm going to get contacted by a human salesperson in about three days, and they'll be like, we heard you're interested, we'd love to set up a call, and we can talk to you. We have availability in two weeks, and it's like, okay, all right, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We'll see how that goes.

Dave Jones: I always, I just happen to get in the other, like, regular as clockwork, like every week, I'll get some company want me to, you know, look at or promote their new app or their new product, the thing. Yeah. And, you know, usually like it's, this one was like an online component tool thing. Okay, sure. Like component search tool, just like your old, your former employer.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, parts I know.

Dave Jones: Right? Yeah, and they reckon, oh, yeah, they've solved the world's problem of creating components, blah, blah, blah, right? Mm-hmm. You know, everyone claims that. Sure. Anyway. I used to. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And it was the usual thing. Oh, can we get on a call with you? We'd love to, like, talk you through it. And it's like, no. Yeah. I don't want to be handheld through things. Yeah. I want to try it out for myself. And that's where the real learning, that's where you find the issues. I don't want to be handheld through.

Chris Gammell: That's true. That's a good point. Like getting that first look on things and, like, get a feel for it first.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think, you know, I think some of it is generational, though, too. Like, I think some people, like, so here's my, you know, anecdotal evidence, at least.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Like, when people are really out of it or really, like, confused, sometimes that actually is a welcome thing.

Dave Jones: Oh, no. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And, like, in my case, like, I literally wrote an email today to my accountants and I'm like, hey, can we just get on a call? Like, we were trying to do everything by email. I was like, can we just, I just want, like, 10 minutes. You know, it's just a higher bandwidth method of communication. And, like, some people want that. But, like, what you're saying, other times I'm like, no, I don't want to talk to someone about, like, ordering a PCB or trying out a piece of software. Yeah. Or a new component that I just want to get a sample of or a dev board of. Like, yeah, I don't need a human in the loop there. That's a worthless meat controller.

Dave Jones: And I know a lot of people think that's the wrong approach because a lot of my videos have been, like, a first look bumbling around. Be it actually with a scope or some other instrument or with software, CAD software, for example. I did that key CAD one and the other one, the dip trace or whatever. But where I was just, like, bumming around. Like, I just did it, like, from scratch. And it's like, I think that's hugely valuable. Because it shows you a bit. A lot of people don't agree. You know? A lot of people think, oh, no, if you just read the manual or talk to someone who knows what they're doing, you would have learned all this shit in 10 minutes. And you could have, you know, wasted, you know, saved an hour of your time. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm going to try and soften my answer here. Some of the CAD stuff you said, I was like, oh, okay, Dave. But also at the same time, I think what you're saying, though, is that you're saying that there's value. And there is value in, like, how intuitive a thing is. Especially someone with your experience of, like, oh, well, usually it's here. Right? Right. So, like, I think from that perspective, it is. Some of your stuff I disagreed with as we talked about, what, two weeks ago? Or three weeks ago. And I was like, but at the same time, yeah, you're right. I mean, like, there's value in seeing that difference of opinion. In fact, one of the things that we're talking about at Kaicon is, like, getting people together that have past experience with, you know, the pads and the Allegro's and the altism in the world. And, like, just being like, what's missing? Because there is, there's definitely some stuff missing.

Dave Jones: Oh, there's tons of stuff missing. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: And some of that stuff, like, well, like I said, I was on the Allegro site today. And, like, some of the stuff they have in there, it's, you know, it's the 30-year-old tool. It's got a shit ton of, you know, built-in, like, RF tools and all these other crazy things that Kaiket does not have. And so, okay, sure. I'd love to talk about getting some of those things in. But, so, yeah, I think that's right.

Dave Jones: Even the KiCat developers admitted that I had some really good points. And they'll look at including some of that stuff. You know, yeah, sure. Some stuff I just couldn't find because, like, because I needed another 10 minutes of searching or something. Right, right. And I liked that. But the other things, I was right on the money. It was like, yeah, it doesn't do that.

Chris Gammell: You can't find certain things. You know, sometimes it is hard to find certain things. And it's, like, you can't really depend on a video by me or someone else. You know, that makes a lot of sense. So, it's, yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of the trends are changing, too, especially if people are coming in from, like, you know, the fancy-schmancy nice GUIs that are out there these days for, like, tablets and other things. You know, people coming in from that space as well. It's just there's a lot more focus on making things actually usable, which is good, you know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And the other thing is, as a reviewer, as a professional reviewer, I guess, right, I find the downside of people hand-holding me through a demo or something, you know, like, something like that is that my brain is not – my brain won't get in that mindset of booking and thinking of things. I'm, like – it's like watching a movie or something, you know, like, you're just on the journey, you know, like, you're just on the – like, you're just flowing with it. Like, your brain's not as engaged. Whereas if I'm trying to figure it all out in myself, there's a million little things running through my brain which leads to all these other questions and, you know, like, tentacles going out.

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

Dave Jones: I find it just doesn't work. I've been to, like – You know, sometimes it's good, like, oh, I didn't know about that feature, right? So I might – so the downside is if I don't get the hand-holding thing, oh, I might miss some very cool features, right, that I'd otherwise see. But, yeah, there's pros and cons both ways. Anyway, I turn people down for that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think the best case scenario in that case would be, like, if someone wanted you to review something, like, they should give you a list of tasks that you should do and then just let you do it, right? Because that's ultimately – like, that's when – whenever I'm using a new piece of software, I don't really know how to do a thing until I need to do it. You know, like, it's like, okay, you can, you know, have a walkthrough tutorial of, like, click here, then click here, then click here. But it's like, if you tell me how do you do a 3D model, it's like, okay, I'm going to go searching around for, like, how to find the 3D model thing and then figure out how intuitive it is, you know? You need to basically have that list out there.

Dave Jones: Hmm. Anyway, yeah. People, like, they always ask for that all the time. Can we hand-hold you through it? I'm almost sick of, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. This – I've been researching the – have you heard – I'm sure you have – the Feynman method. Do you know what that is? No. Oh, okay. Well, you know Richard Feynman. Yeah, yeah, of course. So I've been doing – I've been reading this book about, like, education methods.

Dave Jones: Of course you've been reading a book. Every week you've been reading a new book.

Chris Gammell: I know. How dare I? How dare I read a new book? Okay, so I'll give you some real talk here. I've been feeling very fortunate lately that I get to spend a lot of time doing, like, self-education and things like that. So I've been like, how do I learn faster? And so that's the book that I'm reading. It's like, how do I learn faster and grow a super brain? That's what I'm really trying to do here, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right. So this week's book is Grow a Super Brain.

Chris Gammell: Grow a Super Brain, yes. Oh, goodness. All right. But the Feynman method is, you know, it's pretty simple. But it's – I'd never really thought about it like this before. Or it's basically like it's kind of a do-revised – or sorry, do-inspect-revised kind of loop. And so –

Dave Jones: And that's revolutionary how.

Chris Gammell: No, it's not. But the idea is – and I'm probably going to butcher this, but I'm trying to pull it up here too. So here we go. The Feynman technique, the best way to learn anything – I'll link the article that I have here too because I went outside of the book that I was reading. But basically, choose a concept is step one. Easy. Step two, teach it to a toddler. Step four, identify gaps and go back to the source material. And then step – sorry, that was step three. And then step four is review and simplify. And basically, the idea – the interesting thing is the explain it to a toddler. And I started thinking through like how I would explain certain concepts to a toddler because I've always, you know, struggled in C and things like that. So I was like, all right, well, how would I explain pointers to a toddler? And maybe not a toddler. Let's say just a kid.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I was going to say toddler is too low.

Chris Gammell: Toddler is pretty tough, right? You're going to have to like reduce your – Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, it's like to an eight-year-old or something. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So I have not finished this yet, but here's what I started with. I listed the old way first and it was like, okay, you give your best friend a signed photo of Tom Brady for his birthday. That's a football player. Right. He stores it in his dad's office a half mile – in his house a half mile away from your house. But you're such good friends that he says you can come over and see it whenever you want to. Now your cousin comes and says – hears about the signed photo and he says, can I get a copy of that? I don't care if it's actually the original. And so you walk over to your buddy's house, go into the office, take it to the library, take it to the library, make a photocopy of it, hand it to your cousin and then go – who wants to go and show it off to people. And then after it's copied, you walk to your friend's house and put it back in the office. And then the pointer idea, the pointer instead would be basically like giving your cousin the address of your friend's house. It's a little bit literal I guess in that way. But it's basically giving him the garage code and the address to your friend's house and telling him he can just go and do that for himself. I don't know if that was actually realistic or not.

Dave Jones: I didn't know where you were going there, but now I get it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: So that was my first attempt at doing this. And I'm going to keep trying to do this because obviously that is not simple. But I like this method. I don't know. I don't know if there's other things. I was thinking we could try and do the same thing for resistors and capacitors. And I think I've talked about it on the show before. My old colleagues at Keithley used to always talk about – they had those kind of mantras of – oh, jeez, I've already forgotten them. V equals LDIDT, right? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And they would have these mantras of – it was just equations. And so they would use these when they're kind of like thinking through problems and stuff like that. And that seems kind of like these mental models that Feynman was doing too. And obviously he did it for particle physics and quantum mechanics and everything else.

Dave Jones: Of course, because he was a science popularizer. So he had to do that.

Chris Gammell: He was, but he also did amazing things.

Dave Jones: Of course, he won a Nobel Prize.

Chris Gammell: Right. I mean like so – what's his name? Who's the astrophysicist these days?

Dave Jones: Neil Tyson. Yeah, thank you.

Chris Gammell: Neil Tyson. Neil Tyson has done research, of course, but he's mostly the popularizer. He hasn't won the Nobel Prize yet.

Dave Jones: No, he isn't a researcher. He's a head of the Hayden Planetarium.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. Well, he started as a researcher. That's what I mean. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. I thought it was an interesting method. I don't know if it's realistic for things, but I'm going to keep working on it. Maybe I'll try and do some more for – Got it. As I learn new things and things like that.

Dave Jones: I like to think that's why my tutorials are popular because I do dumb it down, so to speak.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: I try and – I don't jump in with the equations off the bat. Yeah, right. Right. It's like – In fact, I try and avoid them all where possible or use the very simplified ones.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, and I think it is important to build intuition in some way because that is always – Of course. Yeah, especially in electronics. When you're getting started, especially thinking about voltages. Like, voltages for me were always, like, so, like, numerically based, and I had no intuitive feel for, like, what they actually represented and how, you know, how current is actually flowing in a circuit and how those two things are – how they're interrelated and, you know, in time or just in, you know, scale.

Dave Jones: The classic one here, the absolute classic example of this is current through a capacitor. Through, in quote marks, right? Right. I've done a video on this. Does current flow through a capacitor? Right. Right? Like, for the way you want to think about and analyze it, yes, it damn well does because that's just the better way to analyze it. You don't go, oh, the electrons build up on the plate, then they go backwards around this way. Right. Like, no.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know? Like, no. You're just thinking about it wrong, you know? Sure, if you're a physicist, yeah, that's how you want to teach it in, you know, physics 101 class, right? Right. Fine. Well, I mean – Do that. But to a practical electronics person trying to use it and use – and have it as a tool to analyze circuits, no, it's useless.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know?

Dave Jones: Well, I wouldn't say it's useless, but it's just not the right way to do it.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, I think that's a lot of the – you know, math first is a common educational thing, right? Right. And so that's the – I'm not against math, but I think it's – you know, building up the intuition first is helpful, I think. Especially when it corrects, you know?

Dave Jones: It's the whole – Leeuwen – there's a, I don't know, 100-page debate on the EEV blog forum about – 100-page? Walter Leeuwen's – yeah. It's 100 – like, and there's thousands of posts. Walter Leeuwen's lecture on Kirchhoff's current law. Right? Have we talked about this on the show? I'm not sure he has – Kirchhoff's current law? Well – Well, I mean, we talked about – I'll have to link – Yeah. Yeah. I'll have to link you to it. Anyway, Meddy, the –

Chris Gammell: Oh, Electroboom.

Dave Jones: Electroboom guy. Yeah. Yeah. He did this video sort of, you know, because Walter Leeuwen's been teaching, you know, physics for, you know, 50 years or something.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: And anyway, he's famously done this lecture on Kirchhoff's law is for the birds, right? Okay. Sort of implying that Kirchhoff's law is wrong and it doesn't hold in the presence of magnetic fields and stuff like that, right?

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones: And it's a very controversial type video. People have been arguing over it and his demo. He's got this demo where he has this simple two loops and he shows that the current doesn't flow – I'm going to butcher this – the current doesn't flow down one side or the currents don't add up, right? In Kirchhoff's current law, right? They just don't add up. And people have been debating this well before YouTube. Yeah. His demo of this is famous. And he's not wrong, right? From a physics point of view and Maxwell's – and he goes back to Maxwell's equations and everything else and he's technically not wrong. But his demo does leave a bit to be desired. And that's one of the arguments. And ElectroBoom did this video saying, look – and he built this. He methodically built this whereas Walter Lewin's demo was like really loosey-goosey. And it's like, huh? What? That doesn't make sense. And ElectroBoom built it meticulously and showed that, hey, I think he's wrong. You know? Like Kirchhoff's law does hold and all this sort of stuff. And there's this huge debate. Right. And Walter Lehman replied with a couple of video responses and then Mehdi replied back. And it was, you know, this huge community debate. And it's massive.

Chris Gammell: I have to say about Mehdi, I did not like his videos at first.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: But once I give a chance actually, like once I skip past the first time he shocks himself – Yeah, yeah. No, they're actually – yeah, like they're much better than I –

Dave Jones: Once you get past the entertainment value, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: I didn't realize that it was just like that was always the lead in. And so I didn't know to skip it. But then like – yeah, of course. I mean like he's very well-educated and he's done a lot of interesting work. And so it's – I still don't agree with him showing – him shocking himself. But I get that it's a YouTube thing and blah, blah, blah. Anyways. Yeah. Oh, we can talk about that.

Dave Jones: Remind me. We'll segue into that later. But anyway. Yeah, it's a huge debate. And once again, Walter is ultimately right.

Chris Gammell: So can you explain how he's right? I mean I guess maybe it's not digging in too much.

Dave Jones: Oh, no, no. It takes lots of in-depth theory. I'm not going to – yeah, I couldn't possibly rattle off the top of my head. Sorry. But basically according to Maxwell's equations, Kirchhoff's current law is just a special derivation of Maxwell's equations. Right? It's just – and it doesn't hold in the presence of a magnetic field. Right? A change in magnetic field, which is what an inductor is and is what Walter Lewin's demo shows. Got it. Is that – yeah, the currents in the circuit don't add up. Right? You know, Kirchhoff's current law is that Kirchhoff has different laws. But one of them is the current law and they must all add up to zero. Right? The current in the – like around the loop. Right? And he demonstrates –

Chris Gammell: So is it because some of the current gets transformed – not transformed, but some of it's stored as magnetic energy so you're not seeing it instantaneously in the loop? Is that kind of the general idea?

Dave Jones: Yes, but it's deeper than the – if you want to go into the – it's deeper than that. But ultimately, yeah, kind of. Kind of, sort of.

Chris Gammell: I think that we'll link to the Electro Bloom video. It sounds like that's a good starting place and then the thread is a good way down. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And people are so passionate. But there's people that just joined the forum full time just to debate this one thing.

Chris Gammell: Oh, my goodness.

Dave Jones: You know, and it's just – yeah, it's really heated and passionate. And, yeah, it's really tricky stuff. And that reminds me, you know, of the difference. Like, you know, Kirchhoff's current law, everyone uses Kirchhoff's current law to solve practical circuit problems, right? But technically, it's only a special derivation of Maxwell's equation. So you've got to be careful using it. But, you know, in 99.999% of practical electronics applications, it works just fine.

Chris Gammell: Right. And I think that's actually a good point in general is that it's like a lot of the things that we talk about are just – you know, everything is based on Maxwell's equations. And it's just kind of like this zoomed out view to make things simpler. Like if you talk to a physicist, they're going to want to, like, you know, do derivations of everything. It's like, okay, well, guys, I'm just going to go over here and use these rules. Great, your eyes roll in your back of your head. Well, it's just the rules of thumbs that we know. And, like, you know, like some of it's not going to be precise and some of it's going to be confusing. But it's all – but also we're not writing the simulators that are – you know, if you're writing a simulator that's, you know, looking at the RF fields that are going off and, okay, you should know these things. And have these, like, very detailed models. But I think sometimes it's a speed thing, so.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So anyway, I thought that was the absolute classic example. Speaking of safety and electric shocks and everything, Big Clive. Please tell me you watch Big Clive. Big Clive's cool.

Chris Gammell: I'm not sure if – I used to. I'm not sure if my subscription is, like, giving me the bell. Oh, right. Okay.

Dave Jones: YouTube's automatically unsubscribed you or one of those crap things. Yeah, one of those annoying things. So anyway, Big Clive did this video where he literally wanted to find out how much current he could take. He could take hand-to-hand through his body while still releasing – while still being able to release the probes. Right?

Chris Gammell: Is this recent?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Sorry?

Chris Gammell: Is this a recent video?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. It's recent, like, last month or something. Anyway, yeah, it's as bad as it sounds. You know, it's – he ramped up the current one milliamp. Yep. One milliamp flowing from hand-to-hand. Like, he had these, you know, these posts and holds onto them. One milliamp flowing hand-to-hand. Yep, I can – no problems. Barely even feel that. Yep, my hands can release. And he slowly increased it. I think he got up to, like, 12 milliamps or something. And it's like, oh, God. Oh, God. Like, oh, big Clive. Love you, mate. You better try it home. Yeah. But, geez, geez, you know. Yeah. So he naturally copped a lot of flack for that. And he was getting hounded so much. People saying go – like, he – you know, our audiences are quite large, even. They amp our audience. So there was a – I think a heart surgeon or some sort of cardiologist or something in the – and he went, go and get yourself checked. Like, you know, you could have – yeah, you could have done some damage. Like, go and get yourself checked out.

Chris Gammell: Because it's going, like, across your heart tissues and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's going right across your heart tissue. Like, it's – you know. Oh, well, it could be mostly flowing on your skin on the outside. Sure, sure. You just don't know, right? Right. But, yeah, and everyone was hounding him. Go and get yourself checked out. You may have done some damage. And he went in and checked himself out. And apparently the doctor in there went, oh, so you got a shock, did you? And he went, yeah. And he went, oh, how did it happen? He went, oh, I did it deliberately. I gave myself –

Chris Gammell: Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: Like, oh, God. Yeah, not something you want to admit to your doctor. Anyway. And he's fine, apparently. Oh, good, good. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, please.

Chris Gammell: Don't do that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, don't do that. Oh, goodness. Oh, boy. Speaking of Nobel laureates. Yeah. Well, how about –

Chris Gammell: As we did with Richard Fryman. I was going to say – Fryman.

Dave Jones: I just – No, that came out right. Fryman. That's okay. Fryman.

Chris Gammell: Yes. And also doctors, right? Isn't this guy a doctor?

Dave Jones: Yes, doctors. Speaking of doctors and Nobel laureates, yes. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: This is a great video. This is one of your fans, huh?

Dave Jones: Yes. Yeah. Well, one of my fans is Dr. Barry Marshall. You may not know the name, but if you've ever had an ulcer, he's probably saved your life.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right?

Dave Jones: Because, yeah, he won the 2005 Nobel Prize for realizing, for discovering that bacteria in your stomach is the cause of ulcers. And it's not stress or any other thing that they made up to invent that. And it's an absolutely fascinating talk. And he dropped by the lab and we turned on the camera and, yeah, 50-minute video. It's great. Absolutely fantastic stories of how he discovered that.

Chris Gammell: When I saw the preview image on YouTube, I thought he had brought a monster Nobel coin with him.

Dave Jones: A monster Nobel coin. What? You're fooled by my amateur Photoshop skills.

Chris Gammell: It was very amateur when I looked at it closely, but I was just like, why would he do that? And then I was like, wait, do they give those out? Is this the thing that they do? Like, it was just really stupid. I think it was – I must have looked at it, like, first thing in the morning. My brain wasn't on yet.

Dave Jones: Right. But, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, no, it was great. It was really great.

Dave Jones: Well, he said next time he drops by, he will actually bring his Nobel Prize.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow. That's great. He's a Sydney base?

Dave Jones: Yeah, no worries. No, no, he's in Perth.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: But, you know, he actually travels a lot. He's a very busy guy. I'm sure. Yeah, and he turns out he's a vintage Tektronix scope fanboy and he's a vintage HP fanboy and he's a hobbyist. And, yeah. It's great. Like, this is where Nobel Prize opens the door for you. Like, I just happened to read my email the day we shot the video. I just happened to read the email about, I don't know, 2 o'clock or something. And it pops up because I get messages from my patrons, right? It comes directly to my inbox. And the title was, you know, look, I'm in Sydney. I'd love to meet you or whatever. And I get these, you know, fan invites all the time. And I do try and accommodate them where possible. But I was busy. You know, it was late in the day. I wanted to get something done. And so, you know, so I was reading it thinking, oh, no, I probably don't have time today. You know, like, I'm really busy. And then he mentioned, oh, I'm the winner of the Nobel Prize. And I went, ah. So I checked him out and sure enough, he was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. So I thought, oh, this could be interesting. So I dropped everything and I said, yep, come on over. So he talked and, yeah, he jumped in an Uber and came on over. And then just before both of us had to leave, actually, we decided, oh, let's just turn on the camera and have a chat. Yeah, I'm glad you did. Turned out great. It was fantastic. Interesting. So that was very unplanned, very last minute kind of thing.

Chris Gammell: It was interesting, too. It kind of got me thinking, like, someone who's like a – so he's like a physician and a researcher, right?

Dave Jones: He's actually a doctor. He's a researcher, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Okay. But, like, thinking about, like – yeah, of course there's people that are doing that. You know, I usually think of, like, the hobbyists are, like, you know, people that are in tech and some other field that did it. But, of course, that's not the only space and that's cool that there is crossover. No, that's right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And his excuse for going into medicine, he wanted to go into engineering. But it was too expensive. He couldn't afford the hobby back then. Oh, yeah, right. Back in the, like, late 60s, right? And, like, a single transistor cost, like, $10.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly.

Dave Jones: It was an expensive hobby. And he figured, well, if I did medicine, I'd have enough money to afford my hobby. So that's why he went into medicine.

Chris Gammell: Got to get those doctor dollars.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And sure enough, you know, yeah. It's bought in fortune and glory. So, yeah, it's great. And he's not famous for winning the Nobel Prize but famous for testing it on himself because you couldn't test this on humans, right, because it's the bacteria. So he actually grew this bacteria. Oh, I forget the name. Helio allori or something. Helio factor allori or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, let's maybe leave the Latin to the doctors, Dave.

Dave Jones: Yep, exactly. And I prefer the astrophysicists in this regard. Speaking of astrophysicists before, I'll go off on a tangent. They famously name things, like, normally.

Chris Gammell: Like simply. Right?

Dave Jones: They, like, it's the Big Bang. It's a red giant. Right? Seriously. Like, they don't have technical names or anything. That's how astronomers do things.

Chris Gammell: Some of the deep planets they discover get those names, don't they? I mean, some of them are just numbers. But don't some of them.

Dave Jones: Oh, their numbers. That's due to the sheer volume of them. Yeah. They sort of. But even the numbers make sense. It's like the year it was found and the catalog number. You know, it's like.

Chris Gammell: I thought there was, like. I thought they have, like, galaxies are named after, you know, mythical things sometimes or shapes or whatever.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. But see, it's simple like that. It's not, you know, it's not like a new, like, the paleontologist and they'll find a new dinosaur or something. You get some weird ass. Right.

Chris Gammell: You're not saying they're doing, like, kingdom phylum, whatever it is. Yeah. All the way down. Exactly. Yep. There's an acronym there for all those things.

Dave Jones: I'm sure there is. I'm sure there's a name for all that. Anyway. Yeah. All those technical names. Astronomers and astrophysicists don't do that, which is fantastic. Unlike all the other fields. Anyway. Where was I? Yes. He couldn't test this. Like, he had this theory. Couldn't test it on himself. He had the hypothesis. Right. Couldn't test it. Got to be accurate. Couldn't test it on patients because that's, like, you just can't do that. Right. You can't just test this on humans. So he decided, well, there's no law that says I can't test it on myself. Right. He just can't give it to patients. So he grew the bacteria and he actually drank it. Right. He, like, cultured it and everything and he drank it. And it's, like, five days later, sure enough, he had an ulcer. And then he took these antibiotics. And five days after that, he was cured.

Chris Gammell: That's crazy.

Dave Jones: Like, you know, bang, publish, you know, win a Nobel Prize.

Chris Gammell: Maybe Big Clive was just trying to, you know, figure out how much, you know, like the Nobel Prize for how much current can go through your heart.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. No, it doesn't really flow through the heart. It actually flows through this thing. It's through the brain. It's through the brain. Right. Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Anyway, that was absolutely fascinating.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's cool. Please watch that. It doesn't have, like, but everyone who watched that just praised it to the hilt. Yeah. You know, they just thought it was the best thing ever. So, yeah, please give that video a go because it is fantastic. I know it's, you know, a big time investment, 50 minutes or whatever, but it's a fascinating story. Yeah. So, there you go. Are we done on the tangents? I guess so. And the segues?

Chris Gammell: Well, I'm just thinking, like, where do we go from biology? Right. I guess back to electronics. What have we got? There was some interesting, you know, I've been surprised. There's been some interesting, like, tech journal articles recently. I've been catching some of those. There was one today I saw that was an analysis, I guess, you know, speaking of high-end PCB tools. This is the low-cost design when best practice is too expensive. This is someone from Mentor Graphics that basically did an analysis after the fact of the BeagleBone Black.

Dave Jones: Oh, I went in there and I tried to read that, but that just jumps right into the deep end straight away. You think so? I'd have to engage really. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I guess, well, yeah, I guess so.

Dave Jones: Low-cost design when best practices is too expensive. It starts off a dress line changing planes and it's got this, like, 3D interior view of it.

Chris Gammell: I linked, sorry, I linked the third page. My bad. I don't know how to go back to the first page. Oh, I was going to say, it didn't make sense. Okay. At the bottom, there's a previous button. Oh, okay. That's why. Right. Yeah. So, sorry. But it's interesting, too, because it's talking about, like, so they take the BeagleBone Black, which is a six-layer board. Yep. And it's a little bit critical of it, but I think it's ultimately in the guise of, like, showing the trade-offs that are happening there, right? So, it's like a six-layer board. So, you got two signal layers around the ground, which is at the top, and then two signal layers around the power plane, which is at the bottom. And, you know, so it's like power is layer five, ground is layer two, and all the others are signal. And basically doing some simulation around, like, okay, well, now when you hop down through these different layers, what is the impedance? And, you know, doing controlled impedance stuff, especially with regard to DDR3, which I've actually never done, so that was interesting to me. And then talking about how, like, currents are returning then, you know, I always think about currents returning on the ground plane, but if you're down on those lower layers near the power plane, it might actually return on the power plane. It was like, oh, I didn't know that's a thing either. So, I'm sure you know all this stuff, but it's good.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. Like, power and ground, from a rule of thumb point of view, you treat them the same. Because the bypass capacitors, at various frequencies, of course, keep them essentially the same. They keep them at the same impedance. Like, ground and power, there's really not, you know. But when you get into the finer details of it, it matters. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a thing. For me, this is just because I'm never doing these kind of, like, super high-speed design things like this. And so that was interesting. And then they actually backed it out and did some simulations based on, like, the IBIS models and, like, the traces and stuff like that. And they talked about some of the best practices with Eric Bogutin, who's been on the show before. Yes. So we can link that in. Eric's a wonderful resource for all things high-speed. Absolutely. But, yeah, I don't know. I just kind of wanted to get your take on it, too. Like, obviously, this is, like, a hot take at this point because you didn't – because I linked the wrong page.

Dave Jones: Well, this sort of stuff, it's all done in the simulation. Yes, that's right. It's all done in the signal integrity tools.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so they're setting up, like, eye diagrams in the signal integrity tools.

Dave Jones: In the signal integrity tools. And I've never had those tools, right? I've never really had that level of stuff. So I've had to go by rules of thumb and actually test this sort of stuff. Yeah, I've had to go by the best practice and also just, yeah, like, suck it and see. Build it. Does it work? Yeah. You know, measure it sometimes. You know, sometimes you're measuring the eye diagram. You physically got on there with your FET probe and you're actually measuring to see if the eye is good.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And that sort of stuff. Other times, you know, it's just simply building up, using best practice, building up, crossing your fingers and hoping it works and then flogging the ass out of it in terms of actually testing it. Like, you're tested over temperature. Right, put it through a temp chamber. You're tested over voltage extremes and stuff like that. And if you're tested over all those extremes, well, then, you know, it's good. Like, you don't care about the rest of the detail. You don't have to simulate it. You don't have to measure it. You're just, like, you've thoroughly tested it. It works fine. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: This almost sounds like it's, like, kind of going back to that discussion we had earlier of, like, what a physicist might do. Obviously, this person writing this article is not a physicist, I don't think. But, like, is it, like, base level principles working or is it, like, 99% of the time working?

Dave Jones: Right. And that 1% gotcha. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right, exactly. So it's like a pure science versus engineering kind of quote-unquote thing.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. And when you're doing memory like this, what we've done in the past is you would, of course, as part of the testing, you'd fully exercise all possibilities of the memory address and data combinations. Oh, interesting. Because you're talking about there could be that 99.999% case where if all of your address lines are at 1 and all of your data's all at 0 and they're all crossing each other, boom, that can cause a big transient that causes an error in that 1 out of a million case. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Because of how the traces are all, you know, configured and everything interferes with one another.

Dave Jones: Or your bypassing might be right on the edge of the transition. Your terminations might be slightly out and your return pass for your terminations might be out. Oh, there's, like, countless different variations of things that could possibly go wrong in this. It's just incredible.

Chris Gammell: Well, but you're saying that it's still worthwhile to just do it and see versus simulate everything because, like, the cost goes up a lot more.

Dave Jones: Well, A, most people don't have access to these ridiculously high-end tools.

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

Dave Jones: And, like, even Altium doesn't have this.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Right? You've got to buy – yeah, but the high-end cadences and stuff like that, yeah, you can buy these plug-ins that do all this sort of stuff.

Chris Gammell: I think this guy's from Mentor Graphics or something.

Dave Jones: And these tools cost – you know, that tool might cost $50,000. Right. Right. For that signal integrity tool because it's a ridiculously complex thing to do.

Chris Gammell: Right, because, you know, the apples of the world makes a lot of sense. You have to do that because you're making a million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And you want to get it right and you want to make sure the margin's there. And if you're going – you know, if you're designing a space probe for NASA that's going to Pluto, then, yeah, you want to make sure it's right.

Chris Gammell: Right. You know. Well, that kind of sounds like when Chrissy – so Chrissy was on the show two shows ago and she was talking about, like, she was working at Apple and, like, doing the million kind of volumes and stuff like that. Like, then you're going to start to have enough tolerance buildup probably that that might be one of the failures that stack in there or something like that. Oh, of course.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you get that one in a million thing. Yeah. Yeah. It could be a big problem. Yeah. But most of the time, right, you can't afford something like this. Right. If you've got four signal layers, right, ideally what you would want in this particular case is ground on top, signal layer – okay. Let me add these up. I've got fingers here. Okay.

Chris Gammell: So, like, you said a six-layer total board, you're saying?

Dave Jones: Okay. No. They've done this on four routing layers.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, four routing layers, two power layers.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Hang on. Yeah. So, let's calculate how many layers you need to do this. If you wanted to use – if money was no object and you just wanted to make sure it was the absolute best signal integrity possible, you would put a ground layer on top. Then you'd have a signal layer. Then you'd have another ground layer. Then you'd have a signal layer. Then you'd have a ground layer. Then you'd have another signal layer. We're up to three signal layers now.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh.

Dave Jones: And then you'd have another ground layer. Then you'd have another signal layer.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh.

Dave Jones: And then you'd have another ground. And then you'd have the power on top of that. so we're looking at 10 layers you're up to a 10 layer board i think you just said a

Chris Gammell: unless i missed the first power one you said you said nine layers there i think but but two powers you said two power layers yes yeah no no no there's only one power layer okay

Dave Jones: but no you need you need to wedge hang on i'm gonna do this i'm gonna get this if it kills me ground on top ground on top ground on hang on i'm gonna write it down i'm gonna write it down here we go i'm gonna write it down here we go here we go ground yep layer ground layer ground layer uh we're up to three ground layer and then you want another ground when you're saying layer you mean signal signal layer right a layer yeah signal layer and then power one two three four five six seven eight nine ten that's 10 oh you're saying because oh i see because each of the layer

Chris Gammell: each of the signal layers is sandwiched between a ground layer so that gets the other correct

Dave Jones: correct got it yes and then not sandwiched between a power not sandwiched between a power layer like a positive power layer unlike what i said before in that you can a rule of thumb is you treat the power layer the same as the ground layer right because the bypass capacity should keep them at the same like a same low impedance right but you know that's a rule of thumb thing right and and and and then that's a good rule you know it's a decent rule to use it's good like you can keep your signal layers next to your positive power plane and that's almost as good as keeping them near a ground plane right yeah so well it's better than not keeping it near any plane at all yep okay let's put it that way so yeah um but no so ideally to do this properly you would need a 10 layer board but of course they got away with a six layer board so there's there's going to be and that'd be perfectly normal if i was doing this for a commercial product i'd be using a minimum number of layers too i'd be using a six layer board if i can get away with it you're damn straight right

Chris Gammell: yeah i do wonder like as um you know i don't think the higher layer count stuff's going down anytime soon but i think that you know the dropping cost of two layer stuff is and you know in four

Dave Jones: layer and it's moving up as well layers dropped to almost yeah yeah exactly trivial proportions so

Chris Gammell: it'd be interesting yeah right but to see if that's if it keeps moving up and so if they get you know so if you need four signal layers at that point then maybe maybe in the future a 10 layer board isn't as big a deal i think at the volumes that most people are willing to do that kind of thing it's

Dave Jones: like yeah they're fine with it so yeah but still it's yeah i i think i i can't see a future where a 10 layer board is so trivial super common everyone's doing it yeah right right no so in that case you said that and there's really ultimately no need to unless you're on the bleeding edge of the performance right right somewhere like and and just having ddr3 is not you know is not reason enough to do that yeah right i mean it depends on what speed you run that and and other things so and and your termination your choice of termination can make a bigger difference than how many layers

Chris Gammell: you use yeah so and then there's all sorts of factors okay in that case you said the you said

Dave Jones: the top the top layer would be ground yes the top one the top most layer yeah i'm going to do a video from from an emi point of view sure top one you you could get away with not having it but once again we're talking i'd but we you'd only save one layer there and and you're not going to get a nine layer board manufacturer doesn't you know doesn't work like that you have to get an even number made so um well you don't have to but the manufacturers are going to look at you silly right say i want a

Chris Gammell: nine layer board please right so i'd like nine and a half thank you right uh but what i was gonna ask about that is like in that case do you lose out on like having the direct connection i mean i guess it's probably going to be if you're doing this kind of level of density anyways you're probably going through a bga package anyways but like in that case yep do you lose out because you're not

Dave Jones: routing on the top layer then like you don't have those direct not necessarily because i'm i'm looking at this one this one's got pins all it's turtles all the way down yeah so it's got pins all the way in the middle you you you lose one uh you'd probably lose one and a half uh pin layers of routing if you didn't use the top but in in this particular case you would just drop them all down yeah as vias anyway you just drop more down and in this particular case you would you know once again ideally you wouldn't just go to a 10 layer board you go to a 10 layer with uh uh blind and buried

Chris Gammell: vias right so that they're not wiping out all that space in between right they're not wiping out that

Dave Jones: they're not chopping up that ground plane yeah i've done a video that's the thing it's a no it's not from a space point of view we're we're talking about signal integrity here right right well i mean

Chris Gammell: the space matters too though i think that that does oh it does but but we're talking about signal

Dave Jones: integrity here got it right and when you're talking about signal integrity yet worst thing you can do for signal integrity point of view is chop up your ground plane either by splitting it with a trace or by dropping the vias down and then the then the signal has to go around yeah that and you just you know it's like swiss cheese have you have you done any videos about blind and buried

Chris Gammell: not on its own okay i've done a video that dave hasn't done all right so i will refer to you uh so only because i uh there was a visualization i figured out how to turn off the side of the 3d uh visualization of the board in kai cad and it i could show how the the blind and buried was it was

Dave Jones: really nice visualization so if people don't know what that is i tried to do that in my video i tried

Chris Gammell: to like zoom inside the board and i couldn't see it yeah you have to turn off one of the if you just turn off one of the the things in the 3d viewer i think i remember you doing that yeah it used to be you had to like get in the middle of the board and then like you know like really manipulate the the the 3d weird um okay but that's it yeah all right yep groovy yeah yes blind and buried vias um yeah it's getting cheaper too so like i've seen that more but it is getting cheaper of the uh the chinese uh assembly house or fab houses are like they're offering it at a decenter price decenter yeah and decenter there's my word of the day right there

Dave Jones: it's yeah basically if you need to um you would yeah you would do it there's no real excuse not

Chris Gammell: sure sure these days yeah so i would i always caution people i'm like and i think i said that in the video too it's like don't most people that are getting started at least don't even think about it you know but like oh no no but as you as you start moving up it makes it makes a lot more sense

Dave Jones: so of course yeah actually i was going to do a video um going through one of the there's some because everything's online now right you get these online uh pcb pricing tools sure right and so you put it you upload your file and then you select all your technology how many layers do you have do you want controlled impedance do you want blind buried vias and all that sort of stuff i was gonna i thought it'd be interesting to do a video actually breaking down the cost difference of what it what it costs to get blind buried vias on a board for example what does it cost to go for controlling peanuts rogers uh yeah rogers material right what does it what does this cost what does that cost and all that sort of jazz but that'd be great kind of like like a site like anyone can do that themselves anyone can just load up the you know pcb website and just type in you know random stuff and see how the price changes but i thought like a nice summary video might be good for that so it'd be good and

Chris Gammell: it's almost like that's like a live version of like pcb shopper too because we've talked about that a little bit i don't know yes yeah they have basically a live version of that let's see no they don't they don't have blinded buried on there so that would be good too i i still you know i love that we love we love that site right yeah one of the annoying things is that i'm effectively

Dave Jones: promoting that supplier yep exactly you know it's it's not like i can i can like blank it out like you know people are going to go oh where did you get that from you know where's that tool oh i

Chris Gammell: don't i don't even i try not to mention the word pcb on twitter anymore because it's just like hello oh can we connect on the ev blog forum yeah yeah yeah yes this was we were talking um the

Dave Jones: other bloggers and uh myself were talking we've got a like a secret group secret group that i'm not on secret no that's it and uh and anyway um yeah we were talking they started seeing an increase in the comments on the youtube videos about you know like links to these pcb companies and that they look to be coming from genuine users instead of like you know spam like uh tiffany at yeah right right right like billy one two seven seven nine four two two one one and and they look to be genuine users because they because you can go in and check out that user they look to be you know fairly genuine and i go yep i get this all the time on the ev blog forum not only do we get spam but we get and not only do we get sock puppet in accounts where or um astroturfing right the the astroturfing thing where the manufacturers employees at the pcb companies they actually um join the forum under a fake name and then post fake fake reviews right right actually pretending to be a a user and then on top of that the way they're doing it these days is they're actually paying customers yep so they actually pay their existing customers to give them review they they say look we'll give you 50 bucks if you go on the

Chris Gammell: ev blog forum and post a positive review yeah i've seen that i saw you do that on twitter too i saw i saw you call someone out on twitter too and i was like oh man that's yes yes i did and that person

Dave Jones: actually oh finally at you know at first they said oh no no it's just me and then i went bullshit i know you've been paid by yeah and then they finally admitted yep okay i look i'm a student i'm poor 50

Chris Gammell: yeah i mean that's the thing exactly it's like you know of course and yeah that's it i've been a

Dave Jones: student and and and they give you like you know free free boards and they give you free free pcbs and 50 bucks and for a you know struggling student that's that's a lot and they that's how they entice these uh you know genuine people to go and get and give reviews and they target specific videos they'll target ev blog videos they'll target big clive videos or they'll target signal path or somebody else you know and they'll um and and the various forums and they'll tell people where to go to post this stuff it's not just randomly posted yep it's like they'll they'll tell you where to go unbelievable anyway so yeah so i'm i'm loathed to like on the one hand i want to do videos like this that show these cool tools but on the other hand i don't want to promote them right right so it's like yeah anyway ah and and they've advertised on my like they've paid to advertise on my website and forum before sure and i've i've banned them now i've said no i don't i don't want your money piss off you're you know and they beg and they plead and they they said oh look we've we've made all our employees aware that they're not to do this anymore it's just like we we didn't know that this was bad and please forgive us give us another chance not piss off right you know so i i i had to ban them all

Chris Gammell: so yeah it's really annoying yeah anyway ah yep um we oh i'm looking back through links i didn't say uh speaking of the ev blog forum and site and everything yes 10 years man 10 years oh yes yeah

Dave Jones: congratulations doing this for 10 years meh thanks you know you know it's a job whatever no big deal yeah whatever it's like yeah yep april yeah april 4th 2009 i started yeah so yeah there you go that's good nothing's changed same shit some things have changed but okay

Chris Gammell: like like what um it's your full-time job uh it's full-time job now yeah i've got not a lot of the content of what you and i say changes but um you have products now you have uh so that's

Dave Jones: different yeah true you know yeah youtube's kind of a bigger thing than it was back then so much much bigger it's changed like insane back when i started yeah you just like nobody was doing it full-time so you started it with absolutely no thought even in the back of your mind that you could that this would be a yeah that you'd make money from it a full-time job yeah so yeah it's just yeah just wasn't a thing yep now it's like yeah everyone sees that people are earning millions of bucks on youtube and every kid wants to be a youtuber yeah that'll have different uh that'll

Chris Gammell: have different uh consequences in your many years so i've i've mentioned this i i go to school

Dave Jones: sometimes and gives talks on you know at a career advice day and stuff like that you know they invite people in from industry and stuff like that and i i get in invited a fair bit to give uh talks about what it's like to be a full-time youtuber you know and stuff right not about electronics well no no sometimes i talk if they want to talk about engineer i'm the resident eng if you want to be an engineer i'll talk about engineering you know so it just depends but like i am for your next

Chris Gammell: birthday party folks yeah that's it

Dave Jones: and i and like and sometimes it depends on the format of the school you go to but like you know sometimes they'll like go around in groups and you talk to like smaller groups instead of like addressing a large larger audience and and like and they go from like you know you might go from like table to table and they just uh like and you can see the kids that like they're at the accounting table they're talking to an accountant oh man they're talking you know it's like i would freaking

Chris Gammell: love that but yeah i guess the kids don't have a lot of tax questions they're right now

Dave Jones: and then they get to my table and guess what i do for a living like youtube videos and their eyes just light up man i've got their attention 100 do you play online yeah yeah yeah it's often the first question yeah yeah and yeah but their eyes light up because they know like that's the hottest thing for a you know like 15 16 year old or something yeah yeah so

Chris Gammell: yeah that's crazy anyway

Dave Jones: all right what else we got we're almost out of time we are there's actually two there's a bunch of stuff about emi this week i don't know if it's because hey hang on yeah my hang on your your business you're you're in trouble here me you've got competition competition mike you've got competition microchip

Chris Gammell: are doing key cad courses oh i saw that yeah where is that on the is that on the forum that's on there

Dave Jones: that's on the the reddit oh no that's a that's not that's that's the thing at their conference they're

Chris Gammell: gonna have a workshop that's like yeah that's good competition dude yeah you're right it's competition yeah just like the people that are coming to kai con uh sean and barry who are going to be doing uh kai cad workshops and annul they're all doing workshops so competition yeah uh yeah that's actually have you ever thought about i mean i know that masters is obviously in um in the states but

Dave Jones: have you ever thought about going to that that's no i do well yeah i have like i do i tried i think i tried to get it when i was working at a company one year i tried to extract it right i think they have a couple of them yeah it's pretty big yeah it's pretty big i've been to a few of those when they come to australia sure okay you know like yep like i've been to a um uh i think it was an st one was it st at the time anyway if they come here i generally go yeah yeah yeah like the

Chris Gammell: when i was working for the company sure yeah makes sense yeah cool yeah when someone's paying for it you know of course yeah yeah yeah because some of those things do get expensive but uh if you want to go to a free conference uh this is actually one that's coming up the in two weeks and it's free uh it's in portland oregon it's called latch up um and it's for people doing uh open source silicon so a lot of the you know risk five type stuff their risk five stuff and um is it risk five or risk v i'm gonna keep getting it wrong i'm sure so you know it's better if there's mystique around it exactly we'll just say there's mystique um but uh that looks like it's gonna be interesting they are that's actually there's one over in uh europe as well that's happened and that's a uh basically it's kind of people getting together i don't think it's like an official um risk five thing but um but still it's good crowd i think so i think i think uh clifford has been at the europe one i'm not sure if he's gonna be at this one so so that's good um yep i was gonna say there's other um emi things that were on the list this week too um so bill heard did some videos about it's not from this week i guess but um that's

Dave Jones: actually quite old that yeah we talked about that before oh we did okay it was in it was in january

Chris Gammell: yeah yeah okay yeah we've mentioned it before maybe i okay i figured because it wasn't that then there's uh there's a couple other uh edn articles about emi um they were interesting as well so i granted i've been thinking about this lately for some of the designs i've been doing so i'm sure that that's what's actually uh you know you can kind of see if you follow the amp hour reddit you could see uh what what i'm nervous about and what i'm looking up all right so uh emi stuff has been has been on my mind also uh what else is on there uh waterproofing former former guest uh david uh

Dave Jones: kronstein have you seen his bullet time oh my gosh yeah oh yeah so why don't you explain what it is first what a new new version 2.0 of his high-speed camera uh 2.1 i've i've got his yeah i've got his version one you know his original prototype kickstarter camera here and it's great um but he's yeah so he's got this new version so he's at some trade show i think he built this for like a demo at a trade show he's got like a big stand now he's pretty highfalutin now uh national association of broadcasters so that was like a big vega show okay that's a big show anyway he built his 48 cameras 48 of his brand new high-speed cameras just the cost in those alone is is phenomenal yeah right and he put them in this you know circular ring up on this big truss thing and all these lights shining down on this table and he can take bullet time you know rotational so what is it they all they're all synchronized he built a custom synchronization rig that synchronizes all these cameras and they all shoot at the same time in high speed so you can put something in the middle of the table it lights it up and you can like smash it with a hammer or something yeah and and then you can then in post-processing you can then get that view from anywhere i think they actually rotate around i don't think they're

Chris Gammell: actually all recording i think they're sequenced so i think it's like they hand off uh so the one triggers the next oh okay right okay um right yeah but then they all get networked back to the uh to

Dave Jones: the server and they all get networked back and you can yeah and you can rotate around is that oh is

Chris Gammell: that right is that how they yeah i think so i think that's why it was the fixed time as well because i was like oh this is spinning kind of fast around these things that i mean the things they were showing were super cool like slow motion fire and breaking stuff yeah it's just oh it's great

Dave Jones: anyway that's a that's a huge effort to build a rig like that very impressive i'm sure that'll go

Chris Gammell: down well at that trade show yes which it's already over actually so um all right yeah he does another video about the teardown and that's uh yes that's another video i haven't watched it all i've only i've

Dave Jones: only had to skip through it but yeah he's got all the technical details of how he synchronized them i think yep and all that sort of jazz yeah so yeah that's great that's great stuff that's killer demo that's how you do a trade show demo that's right yeah that's draws people a little bit of flash and

Chris Gammell: a little bit i mean i think there's probably the that's the kind of trade show if it's in vegas it's like the this monster stands and everything but yeah yep you don't just want to be one of those

Dave Jones: stands that just has a chair like a table it doesn't even have a chair like a piece of eight by 11 paper you know like yeah yeah they're always sad just sitting on the chair yeah it's like oh dude you got nothing to show off you know yep very sad uh anyway i bet but some people are like that like that's just their business right they're just there to meet you know yeah

Chris Gammell: they hope people wander up and shake hands and talk they're they're they're not counting on the

Dave Jones: they're just the random people walking past they're counting on people have already organized themselves to be there like because everyone in the industry is going to be there so oh i'll actually drop by your stand and say hi yeah you know kind of thing it's yeah it's just a networking thing so that's why they don't put any effort into the stand they just have their i don't even know why they have a stand actually it's got to be embarrassing yeah yeah so yeah sitting there on your chair it's like that clint eastwood thing you know talking to the empty chair oh boy that was that was weird that was i don't remember that but yeah so um the couple of things that you

Chris Gammell: could see my uh my neuroticism about looking things up i had a bunch of stuff about lithium ion like we talked about the show a couple weeks back so there's more stuff there um and then uh so i'll link that and there's like a battery properly protecting packs there was a oh who was it oh actually no this was great scott uh former great uh guest uh oh yes yes i saw him do a video on that i

Dave Jones: haven't watched it but i saw it pop up yeah so that was about like uh off the shelf protections

Chris Gammell: and stuff like that so uh great scott's been on the show before too so we'll link that in um and uh kind of related but not really um the cost of uh batteries is dropping in general like so just like lithium ion batteries um there's it's just kind of like weird conflicting information because like i keep seeing all these things about the cost is it the cost yeah just like cost of storage is going down like crazy so there was an article in here about hawaii so hawaii's new reality of solar plus storage under 10 cents so that's i believe the grid cost of putting in solar and having storage

Dave Jones: backup i'm not sure for how long but basically yeah no that that generally wouldn't be for overnight

Chris Gammell: stuff that'd be for like simple yes like a couple hours you know a couple of you know yeah but i think that that's so i have a lead on a potential guest from a storage company and i'm very interested in talking to someone that works on like grid level storage because i think that's you know like we've talked about some renewable stuff but that's like that is the last piece that matters and um so if they could start to figure that stuff out it could really really have some impact but are the battery

Dave Jones: are the costs really coming down because the last i heard yeah for the electric cars the battery pack in the tesla model 3 for example costs just the battery pack just the manufacturing costs costs more than an entire internal combustion engine car that's how expensive these battery packs are that's why electric cars in australia where where we don't subsidize at all so you're paying the true are

Chris Gammell: ridiculously expensive yeah yeah yeah ridiculous like prohibitively expensive people think these

Dave Jones: electric cars are going to take over the world well not if they can't get the price down they won't

Chris Gammell: right that is definitely the big and that was the conflicting information that i so like i've seen these things about um about the you know the storage you know coming up and ramping up but then i also saw so panasonic and tesla have the joint venture on the gigafactory that's like the battery factory out in

Dave Jones: reno nevada and but this is post gigafactory sure sure this is like everyone thought oh gigafactory will make these batteries so cheap they'll be everyone will have one and it's like right no right that

Chris Gammell: i don't think it's happened and so maybe it's just like ripples in the market but the news on that is that the panasonic and tesla put a hold on expanding the factory anymore so it's like it's kind of like steady state yeah and so that's the why why is that i think just because i think because the car demand is down and that's ultimately what's driving their their investment in like building out like they can still make a lot of batteries but it's not growing the capacity of the battery making so um so that's what i think storage might help them out there is that one of the things i think so and i mean like well they did that so like tesla did that experiment at

Dave Jones: least in southern australia right for yes i want to do a video on that i've got some info that i want

Chris Gammell: to go through yeah yeah it just seems like it seems so crazy in terms of like so you know i've been working with cells now a little bit but like you know they can store a lot of energy no no doubt about that but just like thinking about how many you would need to like store an appreciable amount of energy it's just like holy shit you know yep and then uh oh there was another article about this too it was like uh don't uh don't hold your breath basically it's a uh oh yeah here we go battery reality there's nothing better than lithium ion coming soon that's just like frustrating so it is like it is going to be like a scale thing you know you need to you need to basically build enough that

Dave Jones: you could do this kind of thing like yep and uh do do you want the skinny on the uh south australian tesla

Chris Gammell: factory yeah right installation right this is the installation yeah the the this is the

Dave Jones: installation it's been operating for like a year and a half or two years now right so they actually have the data on this sure uh basically it has uh not only paid for itself i think the installation was 20 million dollars okay and it basically is has saved 40 million dollars in cost whoa is that in terms of like like fuel class paid for itself or what uh that's in terms of what the government what the south australian government was paying third party backup providers because what the south australian battery pack is is it's a grid backup right so when you know when a transmission tower line goes down because there's a lightning storm somewhere which is what happened in the first place to get this thing installed right all south australia lost power and so it was a systemic grid fire so there's various backup things in place and they were south australian government were paying these contractors like you know 20 30 million dollars a year it's crazy to to provide this instant on to have these backups just sit in there waiting and as soon as some part of the grid fails boom it it switches in and and saves the rest of the grid from going down right right from from taking it down and that's the purpose yeah and that's the purpose of the tesla thing i think they do sell like they do use some of the energy during the day but basically it's fundamentally there as a as a backstop preserve that comes in yeah that comes in and the good thing about the lithium ion uh solutions is that they can switch in in tens of milliseconds yeah right that's crazy whereas whereas your other ones take seconds to kick in and that's you know that can be an issue right right uh and yeah so they've now uh told those other backup providers sorry we don't need you anymore and they're saving 20 30 million dollars in cost so whether or not they were just getting ripped off from those existing providers whether or not it's a true saving but yeah so people think oh south australia is powered from the tesla battery no it's like it couldn't even power one percent of the grid yeah right if if the whole if the if all if all our energy sources went down this would only be able to supply like one or two percent like it's it's nothing but it's a critical piece of the infrastructure and this is how you'd have to talk to somebody who knows how the grid stays alive you know and and and how these systemic failures propagate through the system if one goes down and you don't have a backup switch in fast enough then they'll load on the next one it'll pop and that'll take the next one boom boom boom and the whole state goes down you know um so yeah it's it but it's paid for itself that's great it's everyone's celebrating going this is the greatest thing since sliced bread but you've got to you know and it might be for backup solutions but it's not powering right it's not it's not it's not basically

Chris Gammell: sucking in power then and then going yeah it's not like from no that's right so there's a lot of fake

Dave Jones: news i guess for want of a better word or un uneducated news going oh the battery yeah early powering the early jubilation it's a success yeah it's saving yeah it's saving all this money it's only saving money because it's they're not paying for these other backup solutions that they're getting probably ripped off on anyway right well it's so like so anyway yeah but no but it's great it's a success it's just you need to yeah you realize what it's doing and what it's not so uh you're gonna you're

Chris Gammell: gonna love this one i actually am uh uh in the middle of another book uh so this one is the science of energy and it's actually it's um it's actually a uh a college professor who's like kind of it's almost like a college course but it's like red for for audible and um right i really really like it goes over it's this really good balanced look at all of the different types of energy like all of the trade-offs involved so like coal oil solar you know geothermal like i didn't realize how like geothermal was actually not very i always like thought it was like this great thing but i was like disambiguating i was i was ambiguating rather well they haven't put enough money and research into it no it was even no no it was it was like locational even so like and that was the thing like so i i always think of geothermal there's the difference between like naturally harvesting like like from volcanoes it's like in iceland it makes sense because that's like naturally there versus that one where you're a small country yeah and you're uh and you're the one where you're using the ground as like a heat sink i forget what that's called that's like that's like using like as a heat sink and you uh thermal mass uh storage yeah that thing right and so like that's a different thing than geothermal and so yeah yeah that one actually makes a ton of sense whereas geothermal is like doesn't really make sense a lot of places um anyways it's a great book it's got really shitty reviews unfortunately i think there was like it only has four reviews and like one of them's a one star and so like that's very unfortunate i personally i i think it's great it's um um yeah it's basically like listening to a college course and so i will link that as well um i've been kind of heavy on audiobooks so uh this is a really really good one why have you been doing a lot of uh traveling where you know have time to listen to audiobooks no when i take the dog out now like whenever i'm like all right you know at on dog walks like you know you know yep listen for an hour or something so that helps uh and uh yeah so but it's a lot of stuff that i didn't know about about the power industry and and like how and and like a lot of the scale things too like you know you think about like like solar is still like less than five percent you know it's growing for sure and the costs are dropping like crazy and this book's from 2015 i think but it's like or this lecture's from 2015 but still like it's you know it's a small fraction of the overall energy needs in the world so it's just a really good like leveling and a very uh scientific look at at how it all how it all goes cool bananas yeah oh good good segue the last thing i wanted to mention is the kai cad de banana did

Dave Jones: you see this thing no i have not seen the kai cad banana it's so silly oh man it's uh so you know

Chris Gammell: like on reddit a lot you'll have people ask for a banana for scale you ever seen that oh yeah right yeah uh this is a pcb banana so right you can basically drop it in drop it in uh arturo did this you can drop it in as a uh it's not not only a a scale in your schematic or in your uh layout it actually is a 3d model of a banana it's beautiful it's just got it beautiful take that altium

Dave Jones: all right oh man oh god all right we'll leave on we'll leave on a banana that's right all right

Chris Gammell: all right man cool talk to you soon catch you next time

Speaker ?: you you