#445 – Ludicrously High Frequency Interference

Dave Jones: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Release June 2nd, 2019. Episode 445. Ludicrously high frequency interference.

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: We're back.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and it's real early morning there for you.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, I'm not awake.

Chris Gammell: This is like the old days of you waking up and going to the garage before work.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: If I'm less coherent than I normally am, which is hard, then you know why.

Chris Gammell: You have at least an excuse. At least an excuse. That's good, man. What are you meant to?

Dave Jones: I've been doing the same old shit.

Chris Gammell: All right, all right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm sorry for adding in the swear words. See, that's a swear word in America, isn't it? That'd get us like a PG-13 rating or something.

Chris Gammell: We're already listed as explicit on iTunes and everything. Oh, are we? Yeah. I take no chances. That's purely me. No, not just you. I've been slipping.

Dave Jones: You've dropped the occasional bomb, huh? Yeah. All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, you know, I slip from time to time. Right. Better safe than sorry, you know. Got it. If you're listening in a car with children right now, you may want to cover their ears or they're probably asleep anyways if they're listening to an electronics podcast, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, it's always like, you know, I've had that a few times, not a lot, but, you know, a handful of times over the years. I've gotten emails or whatever saying, oh, you need to be kid friendly and you need to stop doing this and that. And, you know, I'm going, oh, geez. You know, there's like, if you want that, I'm sure there's tons of content already out there. Yeah, but we want your content to be. Yeah. You know, there's sort of like demanding. And I actually got that the other day because Sagan's thought about that the other day because Sagan watches Curious Droid on his YouTube channel. He does like space stuff. Really, really cool. And he wears like big colorful shirt, different shirts in every episode. It's fantastic. It's really well produced material. He loves that. And yeah, I'm thinking, you know, yeah, like, you know, seven year olds are watching that, you know, you wouldn't think that seven year olds would be watching that. Oh, no. Kids watch YouTube all the time. And it's certainly not aimed at kids, you know, it's aimed at, you know, it's pretty advanced stuff he's talking about. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It makes you wonder if like that, you know, if that's going to be, if they kind of like pick stuff up by osmosis or just, you know, just general learning, I guess, you know, it's pretty cool. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, you could be like subliminally teaching kids electronics if you'd clean up your active. Right.

Dave Jones: But even if I did, even if I went totally kid friendly, like it's not like the kids are going to suddenly flock in.

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: You know, it's like, yeah. So we're only talking, it's not, kids aren't not watching me because of that. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah. Yeah. And most parents aren't going to be monitoring their kids YouTube in any way. So.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I don't know about that, but I don't have kids.

Dave Jones: But once they reach a certain age, like if they eat, you know, I can understand, you know, seven and eight, but once they hit, you know, pre-teens and. Yeah. 13 or whatever the age is. Yeah. No, the kids aren't, the parents aren't going to bother anymore.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's like, meh. Whatever. Well, you would get, you'd get beeped out around here, I think, you know, and that's the FCC. I think it's FCC, right? I forget who actually. You're telling the story. Yeah. I think it's FCC. I mostly wanted just to talk about the FCC.

Dave Jones: Do they regulate? You're right. I thought they only regulated the spectrum.

Chris Gammell: They definitely.

Dave Jones: Not the material on the spectrum.

Chris Gammell: I thought it was them too. Like who beeps this.

Dave Jones: Right. Who's the sensor?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. I thought it was the FCC, but anyways, I've been talking to the FCC. Well, not FCC specifically, but I had a chance to sit down with a testing house here in Chicago. Yeah. It was great. Basically, I like, they came in. I didn't know this test house was coming in, but I basically. Coming into where? Oh, to my workspace. The hub? Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. M hub. M hub. Yep. And so this guy just showed up, you know, they were doing like a lunch and learn type thing. I bent that guy's ear for like two hours and he was awesome. Yeah. You know, like, you know, like when you get like a hold of.

Dave Jones: And then they came out going, oh, he's not going to be a paying customer. No, I will probably.

Chris Gammell: No, I probably will. But like, you know, like when you had like that Nobel, the Nobel prize guy on, right? Yeah. Yeah. You just like want to keep asking him questions anyways. Yeah, of course.

Dave Jones: I know. You just keep chatting.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. But what I found out is that there's new, there's a new guidance that's out there. Now, this is like.

Dave Jones: Guidance. Guideline.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. This is like.

Dave Jones: This is official. It's come down. This is an official thing from FCC.

Chris Gammell: Basically, like it's a checklist for getting approved, like for getting stuff approved. And it's really dry wording. But basically, it's like, as people are taking stuff towards part 15A, part 15B, intentional and unintentional. It's like guidelines on what you should be doing for doing that kind of thing. So I said I'd mention it on here because like that. First off, they hadn't had that previously. It was basically like a knowledge based article they had. But now there's actually something out there that's officially like, hey, here's the thing you should be doing. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So I'll link that stuff in.

Dave Jones: You should be doing to what? Pass? Or to be a good little boy? You know?

Chris Gammell: I think it's more like. Well, I guess there's no difference. As long as you pass, you pass, right? Yeah. I think it's more like that. Okay. Yeah. And yeah, it's definitely like dry language. Let's see. What is the question? What is the FCC guidance for equipment authorization of transmitter module devices and equipment that incorporates transmitter modules? Yeah, exactly. And that's not just early morning. And like this whole site, I mean, like the whole FCC site is like that. But oh, man. Well, and that's another thing that was interesting, though. He said, you know, if you go to the EU website, it's actually better wording. But if you pass EU, you'll probably also pass FCC. Of course. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: So I think that's a given.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I didn't know. So like I'm new to a lot of this stuff. And yeah, so really interesting stuff. I'll put some links in the show notes about this and some of what he was going through. You know, I was just talking about using like two unlicensed bands, you know, pretty common ones, 900, 2.4. And like he was telling me what to look through as well and, you know, things you need to look at. So it's a, yeah, it's interesting. It's an interesting new thing. Intentional transmitting. Sweet. Yeah. So, yeah. Got it.

Dave Jones: I thought they already would have had guide. Like, they, well, they have their standards. Well, they write regulations. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they write regulations. This is more like guidelines, right? So. Right. Okay.

Dave Jones: They're trying to be a bit more approachable, are they? I think so.

Chris Gammell: And I think, I think it's like the difference between like a legal document and like a guideline or like a guideline. That's exactly what it is. It's the difference between like a legal document and like a blog post about a legal issue. You know, it's kind of like the equivalent sort of, I don't know if it's quite as friendly as a blog post, but that's kind of the idea. Yeah. So.

Dave Jones: I've got a segue with this.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Go for it.

Dave Jones: Something that apparently if you launch a satellite from US soil, you have to meet FCC requirements or who, I think FCC govern the space as well. Oh, really?

Chris Gammell: Okay. So like the.

Dave Jones: I think so. I think that's how it is. But there's a thing which just, it exploded on the internet last week in that, you know how SpaceX, Elon Musk has been sending up all these Starlink satellites, sent up the first 60.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Do you hear about this? Yeah. Those things are amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they plan to launch like up to like several thousand of these initially and then up to 10,000 plus and 10 or 11,000 of these satellites in low. Space junk. In various radio. Yeah. And if you don't know, there's only a couple of, there's only like 2000 active satellites in the whole, like in the whole sphere up there now. And, and if you include like junk, you know, space junk and stuff, there's only like 3000 or something, you know, like low numbers. They, they plan on like quadrupling the number of stuff up there.

Chris Gammell: It's about to get much more crowded. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And then there's, there's all these other companies. Amazon are doing as well. And there's like two other, at least two other competing ones. Oh yeah. Well, so we have trying to get these internet satellites up there.

Chris Gammell: Right. And I think there's like high bandwidth, like Starlink is like high bandwidth stuff. It's meant to be like a actual, like, like a cable internet provider style. Yes.

Dave Jones: And it's phased array. So it can handle like thousands of connections at once. You know, each satellite can handle, you know, 10,000 people or something's internet and huge bandwidth stuff. Cause they're, and they're so close that, uh, yeah. And anyway, the problem is that nobody really saw coming. Um, that no pun intended is that you can see the damn things.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: And this is like, apparently they're really bright for a couple of hours after dusk and, and before dawn. And this is like, the sky is going to be filled with these. These aren't geosynchronous. So they don't just sit in the one spot. They're going to be moving around. They're just whizzing over. That's right. And apparently they're always doing little course corrections and stuff. So they're very difficult, almost impossible to, to, to track accurately so that the astronomers can actually know the locations of them. And apparently it's going to destroy astronomy or it's going to make it, you know, order of magnitude harder. And it's going to ruin not only astronomy, but like the, uh, the, the, the sky at night for people who just love to stargaze. You know, there's just going to be all these.

Chris Gammell: They'll look like shooting stars pretty much, right?

Dave Jones: Little shooting, like whizzing stars everywhere. Yeah. And I know it's like people, it's a kind of an exciting thing to, you know, sit out there at night and go, Oh, there's a satellite. You know, like if you sit there long enough and stare at the sky, you'll, you'll, you know, catch a glimpse of a satellite going over. But imagine that multiplied by a hundred, you know, it's, it's like, it's going to become too much. And there's a lot of people out there saying, why didn't anyone think of this? And, and Elon Musk is coming out saying, Oh no, no, they won't be visible. They're too small and blah, blah, blah. And people are taking cell phone videos. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I've seen, I've seen like the, cause it was especially the string of them as they, cause they started as one bundle and then they started going out. Right.

Dave Jones: Then they deploy them and then they've got little, um, little, uh, and it's a whiz bang new, um, thruster system too. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's, uh, not our, it's Argon. It was a noble gas.

Dave Jones: Or something. Yeah. It's one of those.

Chris Gammell: It was Krypton.

Dave Jones: Krypton. Yes. That's it. Krypton.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Fantastic.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And yeah, little Krypton thrusters that move them around. And, and because their position is not critical, unlike GPS, uh, for example, they can like course correct all the time and they don't really have to tell anyone, you know, like it just doesn't matter as long as they sort of keep a rough equidistant between them.

Chris Gammell: Should we do like a countdown before like a satellite collisions are happening?

Dave Jones: I mean, I don't think that's ever going to happen. There's just a space is a big, uh, space is big. Space is big. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, people think, oh, putting 10,000 up there, oh, we won't be able to get through, you know, rockets will just be blowing up as they go up. No, the odds are, you know, it decreases from, or it increases from like 0.01% of a collision to 0.1% or something, you know, it's, or no, not even like, you know, it barely raises the actual percentage of hitting something as you launch a rocket. But still, you know, it's a, because they're, because they're only one object, unlike what, um, was it India? Who, who, who exploded that satellite? Who, who shot down one of their own satellites to test their new weapon system? And the debris just boom into 10,000 little pieces.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Last month. I think it was India or something. But yeah, India wanted to show their, you know, their might and shot down a satellite. So, oops. And now it's just created junk everywhere. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: So you mentioned the FCC was covering stuff on US soil. Does that, does that mean that all those will be also?

Dave Jones: So they, they are, I believe, yes, they have to meet certification because they were launched from the US, um, or any, you, even maybe if you're a US company and you launch overseas, I think you still have to meet their requirements or whatever. So anyway, but nobody thought of what I'm trying to get to here after all this is that nobody thought about the visual problem. Yeah, the visual.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know, which is like interference. Sure. The same as EMC is interference. Right.

Chris Gammell: Oh, did you see my tweet about that? Um, I've been reading this RF book and there was, uh, there's, there's different, like, you know, there's like high frequency, ultra high frequency, whatever. Oh yes. 300, 300 gigahertz and above is, uh, ludicrously high frequency. People kept saying like, yeah, that's light. That's light is a ludicrously high frequency. So it's ludicrously high frequency interference.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I had never heard that before.

Chris Gammell: I had not either.

Dave Jones: Is, is, is that an official band or is that?

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's from, I don't remember where it's from. I mean, so the book is, um, planar microwave engineering and is fantastic book by the way. Really have been enjoying it. I'm sure it's riveting. Sure. No, it's actually really, it's actually really funny written. It's really good writing. Uh, yeah, I'm hoping to, I'm hoping to get, uh, uh, the author on the show later this year. So we'll see. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Uh, one more, one more thing I want to mention about the FCC though. Uh, I was really surprised from this guy told me, did you know that both, so we had made the jokes on here about like the white label goods. Remember how we had talked about that? Like how ovens aren't regulated?

Dave Jones: No, come on. You know, I don't remember, you know, we've done like 500 shows and I don't remember shit.

Chris Gammell: Right. So, so we, we had, we had talked on here briefly, I think. And I think I mentioned on one of the guest shows as well, is that.

Dave Jones: I remember that was in 2012.

Chris Gammell: This was like a month ago, Dave. Come on. Oh, was it? Okay. Right. Oh, come on. Yeah. Um. All right. Yeah. So there was, there was, uh, basically white label goods like ovens and, and dishwashers aren't, aren't covered. You don't have to have compliance on those.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Now it rings a bell. All right. All right. So good.

Chris Gammell: Um.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Which is very surprising.

Chris Gammell: So this guy, Steve.

Dave Jones: Does that include microwave ovens?

Chris Gammell: It does not. Yeah. That one actually. Right. Okay. Yeah. It's, it's certain. That's it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Um, however, did you know that cars are not regulated?

Dave Jones: What?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I had the exact same reaction. And again, this is, this is from this guy, Steve, who I met. And so I'm going completely off his word. I have actually not verified it in the sense, but he said that because he basically said that because cars are going to interact so much with consumer goods that they leave it up to the car manufacturers and they self-regulate. So they still do testing, but they don't, they're not required.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Because I, I see it all the time. Like these test chambers, EMC test chambers, they've got ones where you can drive a car and a truck in and they put the car on the big turntable and they EMC test it. Yeah. Like you, you see it all the time. I thought it was a given that I think it's just like automotive EMC testing is compliance. There's compliance standards they're testing to CISPA 25 compliant. I think that. Anechoic RF chamber.

Chris Gammell: CISPA 25 might be their thing, but I, that at least that's what he was telling me is that that cars are self-regulated, that that is part of their industry, not covered by the FCC.

Dave Jones: Wow. Okay. Right. That's interesting.

Chris Gammell: Which was like, so like, of course you still like, and so like, and we were talking about a bunch of testing things as well. And I'd like to get someone like, like this, uh, Steve on the show as well. Just like someone like to kind of talk about all the realities of the, of the testing industry. Cause I think it's, you know, it's a little snoozy, but sometimes, but like, I, I love it. Like I was really fascinated. And then I think it has huge implications for, you know, the stuff we're doing, um, just getting a little bit of truth around that. Right. But he was talking to like, he was, someone else was, came up and was asking about like UL testing and stuff like that. And same thing, like UL testing is not required by anyone, but what it is required by is like, if you want to sell your stuff in like Walmart, Walmart's going to say, yeah, you better have a UL rating or Home Depot is going to say, yeah, you better have a UL rating. And at that point, it's like an ad hoc rating. You know, it's like, it's like you better, you better have it or else. Um.

Dave Jones: You're right. I'm looking at the list now. Every manufacturer has their own standard, like General Motors, GMW 3097, Ford has their own standard, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Renault. I'm, I'm, I am seeing SAE standard, a J1113 standard, but I think that's just for the connector. I think that's just for like the DIN, the DIN connector interface and stuff. I don't think that's EMC. And there's a CISPA 12, 1325, but yeah, you're right. They have their own, they have their own standards. Wow. You learn something new every day on the amp hour.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Even, even during the amp hour sometimes. Uh, yeah, you'll have to send me that list too. That's, that's a good, that sounds good to, we'll add to the notes too. Um. Interesting. But yeah, I mean like this kind of stuff, it's like, it, it feels like, like so much of the stuff that I was talking to him about was just like, you know, I have like these assumptions about what you do and don't need to do. But, um, you know, it's, at the end of the day, it's, it comes down to like, it's, there's regulation of course. And like even regulation, this is going to sound really bad. It's only regulation. If you get caught doing this thing. Now, if you get big enough, you're going to get caught. Right. Got it. But for a lot of the stuff, it's like, you know, people are doing this in good faith because they are hopeful that they're going to get big enough. And if they don't do this stuff, then if they don't do the regulation, they don't do the testing rather, they're going to get screwed. You know, it's like, oh, your stuff gets pulled from the shelf. You get fine and yada, yada, yada. Um, but you know, just kind of the, the actual, like the absolute minimums of the things you need to do and the things you should be doing. Those are always really interesting to me because what are those things? You know?

Dave Jones: Hmm. Well, I of course come from the ultimate free for all market. Um, the, the, um, the oceanic market, the marine, uh, environment there are, once you leave international waters, there are no, there are no, uh, you know, there are no regulations. I never had to design to EMC. The only rule is there are no rules. Anything. And yeah, so all the, so all the military, all, all the marine underwater military stuff I worked on, all the, um, all the civil stuff I worked on for the underwater seismic stuff and, and boat based stuff as well. Equipment goes on. None of that had to meet any standards at all. Really? Okay. It was like, yeah. And the industry didn't really even have its own, any of its own standards. There weren't any in-house standards as well. It's like, does it do the job? Yep. That's it. You know, it's like, screw anything else.

Chris Gammell: Spew an RF like it's its job. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: That's it. So yeah, you just didn't care.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, I mean, I think that's, as we talk to people that are doing like consumer, consumer goods, of course, this is like number one kind of thing. Oh, of course. Heavily regulated. Yeah. Right. Uh, and it makes sense too, from a volume perspective, like what you're talking about, sometimes you were working on things that were really expensive, but you'd have like 10 of them in the world, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. You'd have 10 of them. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Versus something where it's a cheap, cheapo thing. That's going to be like 10 million of them in a month. Okay. Yeah. A little more impact there. That's interesting. Got it. Was it, was, I mean, there was no regulation on anything or what?

Dave Jones: No. Okay. I don't ever recall a regulation on anything at all.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I guess you would be self-testing though, too. I guess that's when I think. Oh, yeah. No. That's the difference is like testing versus regulation.

Dave Jones: You would make up your own testing requirements. I'd be, I'd be writing the testing documents myself. Yeah. Coming up with the standards. Right. Well, and there's like mil spec stuff too. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That is used as like a guideline.

Dave Jones: Oh, there's mil spec stuff. Yeah, yeah. Right. Of course. And if you're interfacing with stuff, then of course you have to meet the interface specifications of that thing. But apart from that, no, you know, EMC just, jeez. Yeah. Nobody ever worried about that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, and I think too these days, like as so many more things have radios on them, you know, it's just such a, such an important concern these days because like everything spews 2.4 gigahertz, everything spews 900 megahertz or whatever your local thing is. And it's like, that's when it's really going to start to, you know, people get mad at that. They run out of wifi. And if your thing is messing up their wifi, they're going to get pissed. Yep. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: The only time I had to meet any standards was doing some RF test gear for use in the production facility. Oh, okay. And stuff like that. You know, yeah, you've got to get certified modules here, you know, your things like that. But yeah, apart from that, no. Yeah. Not in the actual products. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Hmm. Huh.

Chris Gammell: Cool. Well, we'll get some more people on here to talk about that for sure because I was like thinking about asking Steve, this guy to be on. I was like, I could probably ask him a bunch of free questions about stuff if I just have on the amp hour. Everybody else gets to hear it too. That's great.

Dave Jones: Freaking salted. Yeah. My secret's out now. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Been doing that for nine years now.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Now we have to talk about the Huawei thing. Am I pronouncing it correctly? That's how I say it.

Chris Gammell: I say Huawei. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Huawei. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I usually don't even say the H usually. I don't know if that's correct or not. Really? Huawei. Huawei. Huawei. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's like a very Aussie thing to do is to drop.

Chris Gammell: Or British thing too, yeah.

Dave Jones: British, yeah. You know.

Chris Gammell: Aussies are just diet British people, right?

Dave Jones: You're right. Right. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: British people you left in the sun for too long. Yeah. That's it. Little sun-addled brains.

Dave Jones: Oh, goodness.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: This is because I bloody went and bought a new Huawei Mate phone. I know. Which is really great, by the way.

Chris Gammell: Those are like good, nice specced phones. Like the cameras are amazing. They're really.

Dave Jones: They're really great. They're still shit in low light. Oh, yeah? Okay. They're still the most amazing cameras ever. Yeah. Put them in freaking, go down to my dumpster room and try and take a video. It looks like shit. Right. Okay. Why didn't they call you about that, Dave? Well, the thing is, it looks fantastic on the screen. Oh, yeah. When I was down there, right, because my old phone, which was a bloody, what was it?

Chris Gammell: It was a Motorola, wasn't it?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Motorola X-Force, right? And it just shot horrible video down there and it looked horrible on the screen. You could see it. But the Huawei one looked fantastic on the screen. So I thought, when I first shot video down there, I'm going, this is amazing footage. It looks great on the screen. Then I got it back and blew it up on the editing, full screen editing go. And I'm going, oh, look at all the processing they're doing on that smoothing out things. Yeah, exactly. Oh, it's like you're going to be shitting me. This is terrible. So it's still crap.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Right?

Dave Jones: So, yep.

Chris Gammell: Well, if you just replace your computer monitor with a Huawei as well, then you'd be in good shape.

Dave Jones: Right. With a tiny little shrink it down. That's right. Get a little six-inch preview screen and everything will look fantastic. Unbelievable. Anyway, yes, they are very good if you give them enough light. But anyway. Yeah, so I went and bought one. And then like three days later, of course, the big announcement came that Uncle Sam would, you know, was banned them. And then Google, of course, being a US company, had to comply. And then they announced that they were going to stop in 90 days. They were going to stop supporting Huawei products. And of course, if your phone doesn't support Google, that includes the Google Play Store. Yeah. So you won't even be able to install bloody Android apps, you know? Right.

Chris Gammell: And Apple, it doesn't matter for Apple because you're not going to have, they don't support it with iOS. So then it's basically like, okay, so now what? Are they just going to spin up an OS from scratch? It's like, oh, maybe not.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, no, because Android's open source, right? Right. They can technically take it and spin their own version. Right. They can do that. Sure. There's nothing legally stopping them. But if you can't, if consumers can't access the Android app store, then, well, they have to make their own app store. And then people will have to put their Android apps on the Huawei store specifically. So now you'd have to, you know, all those millions of apps out there would have to be on, people would have to manually upload to these different platforms as well.

Chris Gammell: Right. I wouldn't actually put it out of the realm of possibility that that happens and it takes off potentially. People love cheap hardware and like good hardware too. Oh, yeah. To be honest. So I wouldn't actually.

Dave Jones: Well, it's not cheap hardware. These phones aren't cheap. That's true.

Chris Gammell: Sure, sure. But they also make cheap hardware. They don't just make really high-end stuff. Oh, right. Okay. I haven't looked at that. Yeah. You know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's interesting how this is. I mean, so we should say, obviously, this is a protracted US thing. I personally, I'm pissed off about it all. I think it's. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's ridiculous. In this era of global trade, it's just. Yeah. It's just ridiculous.

Chris Gammell: The protectionism is very frustrating. You know. Yeah. People can have their politics. That's fine, whatever. But I'm personally very frustrated. And, you know, there's more tariffs that came through. I'm paying tariffs like crazy.

Dave Jones: See, I don't mind the idea of tariffs and actually protecting your country and stuff like that. If you want to do that, well, okay. You live and die on the marketplace, right? Kind of thing. But to outright ban. Yeah. Like this is just ridiculous.

Chris Gammell: Well, so I do agree with the tariff stuff. I don't agree with. I do think there's some IP abuses in general. And I don't know how to deal with them other than that. I think that it's a little commingled in there. So I don't really know how to deal with that stuff. I will give that some credit. But at the end of the day, it's just interesting to see how this has rippled through the industry as well, right? There was also. Yeah, it's huge. An article about the. How internally at Arm now as well. So Arm is not a US company. It's a British company, right? They're based out of Cambridge in the UK. Yeah. And there was. I already lost the article. Where did it go? It was basically like the. Here it is. There was an internal memo that said stop working with Huawei. Yeah. At Arm.

Dave Jones: And that is pure politics. That's come through. Somebody knows somebody. Somebody's tapped somebody on the shoulder at 10 Downing Street. And then 10 Downing Street has tapped somebody on the shoulder at Arm. Oh, maybe. Yeah. I don't even know if it's about that.

Chris Gammell: It could just be a pure profit thing, though, too. I mean, like if it's like. If it's a.

Dave Jones: No. No. Of course they're going to want to sell. If it's pure profit, they're not going to want to ditch one of the hugest companies on the planet. Yeah, that's true. Huawei. I mean, they're enormous. They're like just. I think they're just about to overtake Apple. They were like, you know, months away from overtaking Apple in terms of like market, you know, wealth. Kind of, you know, market.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, like. Valuation. Capitalization.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So like they are enormous. So if it's purely profit motive, no way. No way. I ain't buying that for a second. So nah. Nah. Somebody does. I just meant like it could be.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it could be from other side of things. But yeah, you're right. I guess you're right that they would probably just want to sell as many chips as they could. So it'll be interesting to see what happens from that. And if.

Dave Jones: For those who don't know, Arm don't sell chips. That's right. They sell IP. They sell licenses to cause. Yeah. Sell IP. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And so people on the various forums were talking about like, oh, RISC-V now is going to become huge for this. Like, I don't really, I don't, I don't think that's going to be the ultimate result of this. But it is an interesting, you know, mind game at least of like, oh. Yeah. Maybe there is another way, you know. But we'll see what happens with that.

Dave Jones: What is the competition to Arm? I mean, RISC-V is technically competition, right? But it's so new and small in the scheme of things. Right. That, you know, it's more, it's much more niche and academic than it is practical, I guess. Yeah. I think the other thing would be like. What other competition is there?

Chris Gammell: Intel Mobile. But like, yeah, I don't think that that actually is a real thing.

Dave Jones: You're right. Yep. Yeah. So anyway, it's fascinating. And how Huawei have been buying up stock in anticipation of this happening. So they were buying up stock, like billions of dollars in stock, as in components, supply stock.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So they can keep going for a while. They can keep manufacturing phones. But of course, you can cut them off at the software front.

Chris Gammell: Right. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And it all has to do with Google. Googly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, I think like what you said earlier is like, it keeps highlighting like how completely interconnected the ecosystem is. And like any small wrench in the works, really just the whole machine comes tumbling apart, I think. I think that's why I'm concerned in general. Like, obviously, I buy out of distribution. I'm the smallest of the small players. It's not like I have any stake in this. Right. Like you said, you know, I pay the tariffs. That's fine. I have to do it. Like, I'm just going to do it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But it's not a show. Yeah. But it hasn't been a showstopper for anyone. Yeah. Like, people are annoyed by the tariffs. Right. But I think that like... But it hasn't stopped you getting parts. And that...

Chris Gammell: That's correct. That's correct. But I think that like the brinksmanship type actions from all this, I think that could lead to greater actions, greater, you know, shutdown of factories, stuff like that. I think like mostly I'm just nervous about it. Like, you're right. There's nothing in the short term that affects me. I'm not Huawei. Right. Right. It's surprising, but it's true. But I think that I'm just, you know, keep an eye on things.

Dave Jones: And it is, you've got to, you know, cue the conspiracy theorist, but it's very interesting timing for this. I mean, Huawei were virtually unknown a year ago, right? Nobody was buying Huawei phones, right?

Chris Gammell: I was. I had a Nexus 6P. That was by Huawei. Yeah. That was a Google phone. They were making Google phones.

Dave Jones: Oh, they were making Google. That was the Google phone, was it?

Chris Gammell: The Nexus 6P was. They bounced between different manufacturers, you know, between the Nexus 5, Nexus 4, whatever. They were all different.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But you were buying a Google branded phone, like Huawei. Like, it's not like you were going bragging to people. Hey, look, I've got a Huawei. That's true.

Chris Gammell: I bought it because it was a Nexus 6P. That's right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. So, yeah, they were just like this mysterious OEM who manufactured these phones in China, right? Yeah. And, you know, as huge as they were, yeah, they weren't well known. But now their brand, as just like in the last year.

Chris Gammell: Well, they weren't well known outside China, I think. I think that's the big thing.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. No, of course.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And last year, year and a half, they've gotten huge. And, of course, they're threatening to overtake Apple and become, like, the biggest player on the market. And, yeah, all of a sudden, well, let's stop them, basically. So, I'm not sure of the original trigger or what is – and do you know what the original trigger for all this is?

Chris Gammell: The two things that I read about was that –

Dave Jones: They arrested one of the Huawei executives. They arrested one of them, the U.S. authorities.

Chris Gammell: Yes, that's right. The CTO was arrested in Toronto. Yep. And then sent to the U.S.

Dave Jones: For what? For what?

Chris Gammell: What was the – I don't remember on that one.

Dave Jones: This is our new politics segment of the AirPower.

Chris Gammell: The two things that I kept hearing about were, one, the concerns about 5G equipment on the back end and then having tie, like, basically back doors into that. That was one concern. Oh, okay. That I heard about.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes, because they were selling chipsets or something, weren't they? No, no, server-side stuff. Or they were selling, like, router products and stuff. Yeah, exactly, server-side stuff. Yeah, yeah, like, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And then the other thing was just general, like, IP, like, playing fast and moves with IP and then having no recourse against it. So, those are the two things I heard. I'm not sure how accurate those are. I'm sure people will let us know in the comments. They're so good about popping out of the woodwork when there's politics stuff. Yeah, of course. But, you know, like, I think there is, you know, there's a lot of, like, geopolitical stuff that's tied up in this as well. So, yeah. Yeah, it's...

Dave Jones: Way above our pay grade, Chris.

Chris Gammell: Way, way above. I mean, at the end of the day, you just want a phone that works and now you've got a... Right, yeah, I know. You've got a boarded phone, huh?

Dave Jones: Literally, like, three or four days after I bought it. Yeah, it sucks. Like, yeah. I just... Yep. Anyway, luckily I didn't buy the high-end one. See, because I never buy the leading edge phone. Yeah. I always buy, like, a gen behind at least. Yeah. Because they're cheaper and they're almost as good as the, you know, the latest one.

Chris Gammell: Nobody has ever accused us of being a bleeding edge, Dave. Right. Okay.

Dave Jones: True.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: There goes our plans to rename the show to the Bleeding Edge podcast.

Chris Gammell: Oh, we were going to do... Oh, that's right. We were going to do Bleeding Edge. We were going to do a crypto coin. That's why I sent you that email, Ben.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. A crypto coin. Yes. I've been thinking about doing my own crypto coin.

Chris Gammell: Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: As well as my own real coin. I think I want to put my head on, like, a real minted coin. So, I want to mint my own coin. So, seriously, I'm dead serious. If anyone out there has any contacts or any skill in actually designing the punched dies... Oh, I was going to say you should just... Or the artwork for the coins that you can send to the punched die makers, please get in contact.

Chris Gammell: Well, you should look at those... You know, challenge coins are, like, a big thing now. Do you know what challenge coins are? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they are. Okay. And, like, there's, like, services now. You can do those on demand.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but they're more medallion-like. Like, I actually want a crafted... Like, there's two ways to do these type of coins. There's the, you know, there's the cheap way, like, the challenge coins are done. And then there's the old school professional way, which is to get some, you know, grey-beard nude virgin to sit there carving out the queen's head on the stamping die, you know, on the stainless, like, on the steel stamping die, and then actually stamp them out, the high-relief coins, as they're called. Got it. And there's various finishes on coins and stuff like that. And, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And you knew none of these things, you know.

Dave Jones: No, well, you know. So, yeah, if anyone has the skills to do that, I'm actually dead serious about getting my own, you know, pure silver coin minted. So, yep. Please contact me, davidevblog.com.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: There might be something in for you, in it for you.

Chris Gammell: Right, I'll pay you in coins as soon as you make them.

Dave Jones: I'll pay you in coins, yeah. I'll pay you in silver.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But, yeah. Yeah, we should be doing our own crypto coins. So, you reckon it's too simple these days, do you? It really is.

Chris Gammell: I had sent Dave an email.

Dave Jones: Well, a coin or a token. Yeah. A coin or a token, Chris. It's a big decision.

Chris Gammell: I don't want to do any of this stuff, Dave. I was just joking about it. That was just a bleeding-edge joke. That's all that was.

Dave Jones: Because you know that I'm into crypto. Yes, exactly. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Cryptocurrency, not cryptography.

Dave Jones: I do accept crypto on my store, and I give a discount on evblog.com slash store. Right. Over and above, my usual sale discounts. If you're paying crypto, you actually get, like, 10% off the time.

Chris Gammell: Selling. Selling.

Dave Jones: I will happily, I've got to shill the merch, so I will happily take your crypto. Thank you. You can use it to buy a real, something really tangible.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah, especially as you, I guess you've been moving through revisions on stuff too, right? You said you, was that what, why did you put, you put something on sale or no?

Dave Jones: My meter's on sale, my 121 GW meter. I'm just trying to clear out stock. Oh, yeah. So I got cash for a new big shipment.

Chris Gammell: Ah, got it. Yep. So, yep. Cool. Yep.

Dave Jones: It's all a cash flow thing. You know, we talked about that on a previous. Yeah, we did talk about that previously. Yeah, like six months ago when I ran out, business ran out of cash. Oops.

Chris Gammell: Yep. He's still here, though. He's still here.

Dave Jones: I'm still here. I'm not destitute. That's good. I'm not Will Podcast for Food. You know, I'm not sitting there with the brown paper sign, cardboard sign. That's right.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. I, I've actually been doing some CM stuff and-

Dave Jones: Contract manufacturing.

Chris Gammell: Thank you. That's some big cash outlays as well. But it's been-

Dave Jones: Oh, on your part. Why? Because you've got to build the stuff?

Chris Gammell: No, no, no, no. Sorry. It's not my dollars. It's just going and seeing the dollars slide by and I pay the-

Dave Jones: Oh, you pass it off. I pass on the invoice. That's right. They, they, they pay you a million bucks and then you realize you have to pay $950,000 to- Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: It's the old Kickstarter thing. You know, you do your Kickstarter and half a million dollars suddenly appears in your bank account and you feel rich and then you realize, well, I've got to spend five and almost, almost that amount on actually buying stuff.

Chris Gammell: $493,000. Yeah, yeah. That's it. $1,000, yeah.

Dave Jones: So if people want to know how much I made off my 121GW Kickstarter, don't ask. It's a bit depressing.

Chris Gammell: Hey, if you made any dollars, you're in good shape actually. Exactly. Yeah.

Dave Jones: If you came out ahead, that's right. So, yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's been interesting.

Dave Jones: I was still, I was still paying bills like nine months later after that.

Chris Gammell: I believe it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like, you know, stuff I'd forgotten about and then all of a sudden I'd get an invoice from a, like, ah, unbelievable. Yeah. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Cashflow is a real business thing, man. Especially in hardware. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And if you don't keep track of it, you can come and gut her.

Chris Gammell: That's right. That's right. Yeah. You think you have, I mean, like, that's why it's always dangerous to look at the bank account balance, I think. Yeah. Versus like what's in your accounting system.

Dave Jones: I thought it was done and dusted. Like, oh, it's been six months, nine months or whatever. I thought, oh, yeah, I've paid. I've paid for everything. Then all of a sudden a supplier comes to you and said, hey, you haven't paid for those things or you haven't paid for the shipping. Just like three months ago. How long was the Kickstarter ago? A year and a half ago. It was only like, it wasn't that long. Maybe three, four months ago. I got a, maybe four or five months ago, I got an email from the manufacturer saying, hey, you haven't paid the shipping invoice. It's like, you know, $12,000.

Chris Gammell: Oh my.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's like, wait, we shipped all these things to Europe for you. You didn't pay that.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Dave Jones: It's like, holy crap. Yeah. That's a lot of money. And that's US dollars.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So that translates to like 18 grand Australian or something.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. That's a crap ton of money. Aussie buckaroos. Is that what they call them?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Aussie dollaradoos.

Chris Gammell: Dollaradoos. That's right. Yeah. That's all that I'm talking about. Dollaradoos. Yeah. Yeah. Dollaradoos.

Dave Jones: And that's from a Simpsons episode, isn't it? I think.

Chris Gammell: Probably right. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And that just comes out of the blue. And then you like, then you have to try and go through your records to see if you've paid this. And it's like, and you're just going through and, oh, yeah, it looks like I haven't, but I'm not 100% sure. And because money was just flowing willy nilly everywhere.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, during that. And it was just, it's hard to keep, impossible to keep track of. This is why you need, you know, we talked about the ERP systems and stuff like that. Yeah. To keep track of these sorts of things.

Chris Gammell: Dave, I have a book recommendation. If you'd like one. Yeah. Yeah. Of course.

Dave Jones: You know, I always like your book recommendations. I know.

Chris Gammell: I know. This one's called Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs. You might like that one.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm, I'm, I've just started. I'm about 10% in. It's pretty good so far, though. It's like approachable for what it is, you know, basically being able to.

Dave Jones: Do you ever implement anything in these books that you read? All the time. These oodles of self-help books that you read?

Chris Gammell: This, this one's less, this is actually more practical than self-helpy. I can tell, I just read How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big. Like that's, that's very self-helpy. And I actually didn't like that. That's the Scott Adams book. Right. Okay. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, as in Dilbert.

Chris Gammell: Dilbert. Yeah. Yeah. He wrote like a self-help book effectively. Yes. Not, not very.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. Yeah. If you actually follow his blog, he's, you know, big on that sort of stuff. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's basically, it was like reading like a condensed version of his blog. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is more about actual like doing finance for small businesses. So that was more in that, in that vein.

Dave Jones: I'm sure everyone's rushing out to get that one.

Chris Gammell: Hey, whatever, man. These are, there might be someone who likes it. It's good. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Of course. This stuff can be important. You know, it's just like, it's not sexy. Right. Definitely not. No one wants to, no one goes, oh, I'm going to learn all about finance. Right. Right. Like, oh God.

Chris Gammell: It's a Friday night. I'm going to grab a bottle of wine and a cashflow statement and see what happens.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's it. And I'm going to finish off my TPS reports. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: For those who don't, Google TPS reports. Watch the movie. That's right. It's hilarious.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, so I'm actually in the middle of like doing reporting stuff though too. Like, so this is, this is kind of what I want to talk about, like CMs and standardization and stuff like this. I wanted to ask your opinion on doing assemblies, right? So. Yes. Um, when you start stacking up, uh, different, you know, like, so you have a bomb for your, your, uh, your board.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Uh, but your board is probably getting integrated into plastics that also has, you know, maybe some glue and some screws and some, you know, labeling and everything like that. And there's like going to be a top level bomb that is actually for your entire product. So like, let's just use the 121 GW meter as an example, right? Yep. That top level, the 121 GW top level assembly has a case, the tilting bale, the PCBs internally, the battery slots.

Dave Jones: The rubber surround, the buttons, the button moldings, the, uh, the, uh, screen protective acrylic thing, even the peel off thing, which goes on the screen, you know, that. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The protector. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, everything. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That costs money. Right. Um, so. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's a, it's another bomb item. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. So, okay. So now this isn't a great example because I don't think you assigned part numbers for everything, but say you were doing.

Dave Jones: Well, I am not that deeply involved. Exactly. Yeah. You're not 21 manufacturing. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. So you've never seen the actual bomb. Right.

Chris Gammell: You spec'd it out, but you didn't, you didn't actually do that. So now like, let's go sideways to a, maybe it's just a product you're making or I'm making,

Dave Jones: which is the micro supplier just sent you a photo. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So. And that's. We can talk about this.

Dave Jones: Cause we're, we're, we're actually getting four assembled at the moment.

Chris Gammell: Perfect. Perfect. Perfect example. And we're allowed to share this picture or no?

Dave Jones: No. Okay. I've shared it to the supporters on the forum. Okay.

Chris Gammell: All right. So people, people know that there's a keypad because you've talked about that. There's an LCD, there's, you know, probably plugs, whatever. And there's a case, right?

Dave Jones: There's custom banana plugs. There's like seven different custom parts on this thing.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So you've got custom parts now. How do you create a name for that for each part?

Dave Jones: We don't essentially. We, well, the manufacturer usually does that. Man, manufacturer will give it an internal part number. And then we just use that. We just take that internal part number that the manufacturer supplies. It'll be, you know, you know, Jones dash 20 or something. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Like, yeah. Right. So then, okay. So, but you, you are making the circuit board assembly that's in there or multiples assemblies, right? Yes. So what do you call that?

Dave Jones: Oh, we wouldn't go to that detail because we're not that advanced. We would, we just call it the assembled PCB. Like we wouldn't. Right. Like it wouldn't have a part number. Like some people, and this is the thing, companies I've worked at, you will put the assembled part number onto the silk screen of the board.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So there'll be two part numbers on the board. There'll be a part number for the bare PCB. And then there'll be a part number for the assembled PCB. And that's actually done at the design stage and put onto the PCB. Like we would have systems internal to the company where you generate a new part number.

Chris Gammell: Right. That's done in like a product lifecycle maintenance software, like PLM. Yeah. Right. Like arena system or matrix.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And if you're a huge enough company, you know, you'll have like, you know, three, six, four at, at the start. And then that designates that product. And then you'll have like a four digit number after that. That's right. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. So I've been, I've been looking through all this and like, no, it's, it's super yawn, but it's like, but, but this can really like ripple through your design. You think about it. Like, so I've been thinking like forward. Right. I've been thinking forward way too far. It's like just something I do. And. Yep.

Dave Jones: And just thinking about like, okay, I think we've noticed. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. But like thinking about, okay, so, so we're getting one product now, but like, so let's say there's a top level assembly, ABC one, two, three, and then there's a sub assembly called DEF four, five, six. Right. Yep. The idea is we could name everything ABC one, two, three dash something to be the sub assembly, but then the, that thing could very realistically be reused in another product. Right. And so then it. It could. And that's when it gets really, really confusing.

Dave Jones: Like if you had like an RF module or something.

Chris Gammell: Well, like even. For example. Say, say that you were going to do, so like the micro supply, right. You were going to have top level assembly ABC one, two, three, and then there's a secondary option thing. So someone, there's like a high power version where it's going to be ABC one, two, four. And then.

Dave Jones: And then you need two of those boards or something because it's high power. So it's double. Sure. Yeah. Something like that.

Chris Gammell: Or it's a slightly modified version or even just, even there's just a color modification where like the pegs are going to change or something like that. And it's like that ripples through everything. And so I've been like pushing for like, Hey, let's do custom, custom names for boards and stuff like that. I've been reading. I've been reading a bunch as well about like other ways people do this. Sometimes it's, it's literally like everything's just a unique part number. It literally does not matter what it is. And that's how some companies do it, right? It starts at zero, zero, zero. And then the next thing is zero, zero one. And the next thing is zero, zero two. And zero, zero one might be a screw. And zero, zero two might be a fully assembled PCB, but you just do it incrementally.

Dave Jones: We've had categories of parts. So we would have like, you know, one, two, three dash, and then four, five, six. And that four, five, six would be a screw. And then you'd, you know, that'd be a category. That'd be, so they separate into product and then category. And then the individual part in that category. So if you've got 10 screws, it'd be one, two, three, four, five, six, double, oh, one, double, two, double, three. And they'd be all screws. So you didn't know that they're all screws.

Chris Gammell: And that's the other crazy thing about thinking too far forward, right? Is like, at a certain point, maybe not now, maybe not next year, maybe not in 10 years. But like some companies that I've worked at have been around for 25 years and they ran out of part numbers. It's like, holy crap. It's a real thing that can happen. And it's like, who thinks you're going to run out of like five digits?

Dave Jones: Like HP? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. Like there's famous companies like HP that would have HP dash and then they'd have three digits and then four digits or whatever. And they would get the manufacturers to silkscreen these onto the chips instead of, you know, it's a 74HC00, right? It's a regular 74HC00, but the manufacturer puts the HP part number silkscreen onto the chip.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So if you go to the HP website now, you can still access that database. They have this database where you can look up this HP code and it tells you, oh yeah, it's a 74HC00. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know, like, that is a thing.

Chris Gammell: But there's actually some purchasing. Like, so this is like kind of merging like engineering into supply chain stuff too. And it's like, there are some real reasons to do that too. Like you could start to have like on a, which one is it? Is it MRP or ERP? Whatever it is. You know, like you basically have a- ERP. ERP. Sure. Yeah. I think, yeah. But basically, you know, okay, ABC123 is now the part number of that 74HC00, right? But you might buy it from, you know, you need 10 million of those parts per year. You might buy, as long as they're all specced and approved from different vendors, you might buy a bunch from TI and a bunch from XP, whatever. And it doesn't matter because internally, the only thing you refer to is the ABC123. That's all you care about.

Dave Jones: And I've done that. I've done that at companies. And companies like HP will do that. Sure. You know, that HP part number for the 7400, there will be like five different manufacturers of that 74HC00. And it doesn't matter.

Chris Gammell: Right. And we should-

Dave Jones: Because you've done the qualification and I've done these qualifications.

Dave Jones: Right. These qualification reports that ensure that, you know, these three different manufacturers, they're all equivalent parts and they get assigned the company part number.

Chris Gammell: Right. And we should say right now-

Dave Jones: So that there's purchasing people-

Chris Gammell: We should salute the component engineers out there, Dave. Don't you think? We should- Right. We salute you. Yes. We know you're listening. We love you. You're amazing. It's a shitty job. And you do good work. Keep it up, folks.

Dave Jones: And all those component obsolescence engineers out there. Oh. We salute you.

Chris Gammell: Dave. I remember Dave. He was- That's a real title. Yeah. Oh, no. He's good people that I worked with. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. They were component obsolescence engineers. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It's big enough. And yeah, so then the buyers, like the, you know, you would have a team of buyers and they know nothing about electronics and stuff like that, but they buy these parts and they know that that part they can buy from these five different manufacturers. Mm-hmm. You know. Yeah. It's all because it's all in the system and then they're all linked and approved and whatnot. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Because at the end of the, yeah. And then they're able to go and do the buyer thing, which is, you know, again, we should give a little bit of props. One of my best friends is a buyer. Yep. But like they go and they shout at the manufacturers and they say, you need to give us a 10% price reduction. And that actually can have some like long ripple effects there too. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Absolutely.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So I'm just kind of trying to figure out like, what is the best practice for, for naming these things? You know, do you give each assembly a unique name? Do you just start pulling numbers? You know, like.

Dave Jones: There's pros and cons. Like I, I wouldn't even want to try and hazard a guess at a best in quote marks way to do it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I will, I may have also shared this story once before, but at my first co-op, for some reason, they let, they let the engineer, the co-op engineers pull numbers. They let, there was a internal system. Right. It was just a data. It was like over top of a Microsoft access database or something like that. And, you know, you just, you know, you, you pressed a button and it pulled the next number. So it was like 18,557. And then you press the button and it said 18,558. And that was the number you pulled and it was no big deal. However, one of the interns typed in 28557 and jumped 10,000 part numbers in one at once. And that lives forever. You don't go back. You can't go back. And so now there's just this gap. And for all time, for as long as the company exists now, they're gonna be like, what happened here? It's like, oh, frigging Mark. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, man.

Dave Jones: We, we, we had a convoluted part number system at Altium of all places, you know, because I believe it. Like internal. Yeah. Because our, our hardware group, obviously we, we had to have, you know, these approved parts that would like, because then would, they would have a designated footprint and they'd have a designated schematic symbol, you know, and all that sort of stuff. So it ties into the design level like, like that as well. It's not just the assembly side of things. And yeah. Yeah. And it was convoluted and, you know, kind of, sort of worked, but it was kind of, sort of annoying at the same time. And it was just. I mean, that's the thing.

Chris Gammell: Like all of these systems, they're always annoying, but damn, are they important. You know? Like, I just remember like, we were like right at the, at Keithley, I think it was, we were right on the edge of like using a new system. It was all web-based, but it shouldn't have been yet. You know, it should have been a local database, but they're trying really hard to make it web-based. And it was just like, you would lose work all the time. And it would just, it was a hot mess, you know? But, but like, this is where like information systems are really, really critical, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah. And, and one of the problems was that, especially at the PCB stage, like you would go searching. Okay. So you're, you're designing this new board, right? Which we did tons of. And you're looking, so you go searching for the part. You're about to put your schematic symbol down, which is then tied to your footprint and everything else. Sure. So you need something like a 10K resistor. Oh, yeah. Something simple like a 10K resistor. Oh, there's got to be one in the system. Of course there is, but it's a, and it's, and it's the footprint, it's the size you want. So it's an 0603 10K resistor, right? But of course, you know, from the standards, the PCB footprint standards, there are three different sizes. There's large, medium, and small, or whatever it is, right? There's the three different variations in the official IPC standards.

Chris Gammell: Got it.

Dave Jones: For that.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: So that, so you, so you may have used a normal one, right? The part in the system's normal, but then you're doing this ultra compact board where, no, you've got to do all these small size footprints. Oh, jeez. The ones with, you know, a smaller fillet on it. So you'd have to create a new damn part, another 10K resistor, and with a slight variation on the footprint, even though the schematic symbols, and it'd just go on and on and on. Oh, my God. And, and you'd end up with, you know, 20 10K resistors in the system.

Chris Gammell: Right. And then you grab the wrong one sometimes, right?

Dave Jones: And then you grab the wrong one, or you spend half the day just like looking at all the different parts because they weren't labeled, you know, properly. Or you'd have to go in and double check just to make sure the previous person who did it didn't goof, you know? And it's like, oh, you just spend forever.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. This is the, this is the argument against, I think the argument against atomic libraries like this. But at a certain point, like when it comes to like tying into actual like manufacturing systems, it's, it's almost necessary, right? Because it's like, when you put down a part, you want to know that it is, it is the actual physical part. It is solid. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And you've used it before and it's, and it worked and, and you guarantee it's going to work again. Yes.

Chris Gammell: And then when you were doing that, did you guys have a dedicated librarian to do that kind of thing as well? Or were you doing the actual generation?

Dave Jones: We had dedicated librarians in Tasmania, insert Tasmanian jokes here, who would do like footprints and they would do stuff for us. But we, we had to tie together at the higher level. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what's crazy about it. They would do the footprints. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And that's, and that's, people haven't done that before. It's like, so, okay. So like Dave's example, he needs a new 10K resistor now. It's like, okay, so you have to submit a request now here. It has all the same part specs. Here's an example data sheet. Here's an approved part, an actual part number that's for it. And then, and then you also have to say like, oh, I want it to be this specific type of tighter footprint. Please go and make this and attach it to this thing and tie it all the way back to the database. At the end of the day, it's like four hours later. It's crazy.

Dave Jones: I know. And, and, and people might think, well, how can you get so many variants on a 10K resistor? Well, let me tell you how. Okay. Not only is it a 10, okay. It's a 10K resistor. That's fine. You might have, you might have a different schematic versions. You might have a larger one and then a more compact version. It depends on the style of the squiggly lines versus the box, right? So there's two variants. And then it goes down like a tree. And then each one of those variants can have, okay, is it a 1% resistor? Is it a half percent? Is it a 0.1%? Yep. Okay. And then the tree down on that, oh, is it, is it 50 PPM? Is it 15 PPM? Is it 10 PPM? Oh man. Right. And then the variation down on that, you can see this tree just growing. And then the variation down on that is, as I said, the footprint, is it small, medium or large or some other weird ass custom thing?

Chris Gammell: Right, right. And then if you know, you know, if you know, like from the beginning, if you're like, oh, I need an R96 resistor. It's like, well, I'm definitely putting in a part request because the chance that you have a resistor at this weird ass value that you chose, you know, and all the specs that you need is like, there's no chance, you know, you just start.

Dave Jones: And it was never there. The part Murphy would ensure that the part you wanted was never there, even though it was a 10K resistor.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, Murphy would say that there'd be one just about there.

Dave Jones: It's almost there, but you had to then take out another part number to create a variant because you wanted 10 PPM instead of 15. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: You know, like, oh my God. Yeah. Like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Seriously. People think, oh, this modular design or whatever you want to call it, you know, is, is just, you know, these global, why, why isn't there one library out there that the entire internet, there's whole companies based around this. I got an email from one the other day who's, oh, we've solved the component problem. You know, look at the whole community is just come together and verify that this component's good. And it's like, dude, like you don't understand the complexity. Right. Everyone needs something slightly different. Right. And that is the fundamental problem and it always will be.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think, I mean, I think that's why there's a business for like the snap EDAs and the, you know, the ultra librarians of the world. Like the, and, uh, uh, Uberter has that now too. The, uh, EE. Oh, I forget what they call their product. But basically like all of these like on demand generation services is because it's solving, it's basically solving this problem that we're talking about where it's now, you know, hire it out to someone else, you know, pay, pay the fee, whatever it is. And they just do it. You know, that's, that's their business model effectively. No, nothing's solved. It's just, everything's custom and a little bit faster.

Dave Jones: And, and, and again, there's no best way to do it. Yeah. Do, do you create the 20 different variants of that 10 K resistor or do you have just one or two and then on your PCB once you've, uh, and then tweak it on your PCB? Ooh, I need a small footprint instead of the large one, you know, kind of, do you do that or do you go back and do it at the schematic?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know, a component level with its own individual part number. It, there's no right or wrong there. Yeah. I do the latter. There's nothing wrong with tweaking on the PCB. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's what I do. But then it's like, that is only for small companies, I think. Right. It's like, because then I'm going out, I'm buying parts from a distributor, like a Mauser, DigiKey, whatever.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I think the bigger you get, the more inevitable it is that you create a bigger monster. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: If you're buying, if you're buying by the wheel or if you talk to a, to a supply chain expert, if you have a supply chain expert in your company, there is very little chance that you get to tweak it on the PCB, I think. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They, they won't tolerate that. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: I have.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's a, it's a can of worms.

Chris Gammell: I have one other question about, about revision or sorry, part numbers, since we're on this enthralling topic. Yes. How do you do revisions on your board? So I was, I was asking about this on the consulting forum as well. I'll give you, I'll give you an example of what I do and maybe just use that as the basis. Again, there's how long is this piece of string as you like to say, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But this is what I've been doing is like, uh, X dot Y dot Z. And then this is the one I proposed at least it's like major minor and then firmware revision where you leave a blank for the, the, the firmware revision. Cause it's probably going to be a sticker or, you know, put under the board because that's going to change the most often. But major would be like PCB revision. Y would be like, um, modifications to population options. And then Z would be like firmware revisions, you know? And like I said, stickers are probably going to be stuck on the board in order to, to modify that thing.

Dave Jones: Um, yeah, I w I would never go to the firmware level.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'd never go to the firmware. That would always be done as a sticker. That would never be populated as a, as part of the part number or part of the revision for the PCB.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. Nothing. So like, like when I say it's on the PCB, I would say like, it would almost be like on the, so if it was like version three of the PCB itself, it'd be a three dot blank dot blank on the PCB because then you'd fill in like, you know, what revision is, cause you're not going to rev the PCB each time. You're going to rev the PCB once and then you might have population options and then you have firmware options. But I'm saying now when I write you an email and I say, Hey Dave, uh, three dot one dot two, which is, you know, PCB three version three, assembly version one, uh, firmware version two is borked as it is inevitably to be. I'm saying like, you need like this.

Dave Jones: Like the, yeah, well you're, you're tying together, uh, PCB revisions with assemblies. Yeah. That's a different, that's a different beast. You're, you're talking about a top level part number of a multi, you know, of a product that has multiple variations. Like you talked about right at the start of all this. Whereas if you're talking about just revision of a PCB. Yeah. Then, uh, so I, are you talking about revisions of assemblies?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. This would be the entire thing.

Dave Jones: Okay. In, in, in, in terms of the micro supply.

Chris Gammell: Sure.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. You'd, you'd have the PCB part number, then you'd have the assembly tacked onto that. It'd be dash, dash, dash. Um, sorry, XXX dash Y, Y, Y, Y, Y. And then dash, you know, and then rev one. So the rev two of the micro supply might have a blue banana jack instead of a red one.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: For example, is that what you're talking about?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. If you're saying that's a, uh, okay, let's go back to the.

Dave Jones: Because it could be a different audible product for, for different market segments, right? In, in Europe, they want blue banana plugs, right?

Chris Gammell: Oh, I see what you're saying.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That might be. Whereas the U S market want red banana plugs.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Seriously. Yeah. Yeah. I totally believe that actually. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, this was actually more talking. This was kind of a separate discussion than, so this is now just thinking of the PCB, the assembled PCB with firmware on it as an assembly, right? It's, it's in the overall case. Okay.

Dave Jones: So you're talking about just the PCB. Yeah. Forget the case.

Chris Gammell: So I, I basically order something from a, from an assembly house, right? I say, Hey, I want to order from you, you know, version three or sorry, 3.1 is effectively what they would know. Maybe I say 3, 3.1.12. This is the example I've been using 3.1.12, right? That would be version three of the PCB, right? That would be the third time I've read the actual, uh, you know, uh, FR4, uh, version one of the actual assembly of that FR4, right? And then pre-programmed or programmed, uh, firmware 12 when I order it. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I, I, I, I.

Chris Gammell: Is this too complicated? Like, so, so then the question is, how do you do it? Do you just say, oh, it's rev A, rev B, rev C? Is that how you do it?

Dave Jones: Yeah. On the boards. Yeah. We would separate boards from assembly. Like it's, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: I mean, that's, this is why I'm asking. And then there's, yeah. And then there's this discussion of, well, what should you rev? Or what, what dictates revising a PCB? If you just, you know, do a few tidy ups on the traces, especially internal revisions. Okay. It's not just external, it's internal revisions. How do you do your internal stuff? Like you've, okay, you've finished your board and then you might decide, oh, no, I just want to tweak a few things. Are you going to increase the revision of the board, even though you haven't released it yet? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: A lot of companies will say, yes, you must. Right. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Because I think there's a psychological, there's a psychological thing of like, oh, well, I don't want this to be like a major new revision. It's not a 4.0. I was just on 3.0.

Dave Jones: I just moved a few traces over here. Right. You know, like, yeah.

Chris Gammell: But I actually saw that taken to an even more extreme example. I was reading some mechanical stuff. I think it was GrabCad or someone, one of the online like mechanical companies had an ebook about this. And they're like, if anything changes, you pull a completely new part number and you'd mark it as such. Right. Now they're talking mechanical stuff where it's like, it is, you know, you change the chamfer on something and it's like, no, no, no, that's a new part now. But I, I kind of like that idea. It's just a, it's just a nightmare from a, you know, keeping stuff up to date. It's fine in theory. Yeah. Keeping stuff up to date. And like, and that's, I think one of the problems is like, if you're just as a computer, a computer is like, yeah, it's a unique identifier. I don't care what you call it. But if it's a human, you're like, oh, this switch from a 3.0 to a 4.0. What did you do? You know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know. Exactly. So it's like, yeah, well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep. So, yeah, I mean, I've had some good responses about it and, and some good discussions about it, but like, generally I'm just, you know, curious about resources on this stuff too. Cause I, I'm sure it's out there. I just haven't found it. I don't know if I'm searching for the wrong things. Um, and, and it's all opinion too. So it's, it's basically just trying to.

Dave Jones: Oh, everyone will think their system's the best and everyone will give you 10 reasons why their system's the best.

Chris Gammell: I actually think everyone's is the worst, including my own. This is the problem. You know, like you've dealt with it. I've dealt with it. Right. It's always like, it's usually legacy. And now that I'm like working with startups and, you know, younger companies, it's like, I want to put something decent. You get to introduce it from scratch. Yeah. I just want to put something decent in place. It doesn't be perfect, but just something decent. Yeah. And so that's why I'm asking these questions of like, yeah, what's like a best practice at least. You know, if there was like a general guideline, I'd be like, yeah, that's fine. Let's do that.

Dave Jones: I see. I don't think it matters as long as you, as long as you're consistent.

Chris Gammell: I agree with that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I, I, I, I, I really don't. Yeah. As long as you're consistent and then all new employees that come to the company, they learn that, you know, system and they become consistent with it and it's, it's fine. Yeah. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, lots to, lots to learn, I suppose.

Dave Jones: Yeah. At the, I like for startups, you see, I, I would be against introducing too much of a rigid system like that. It really stifles the.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Too much process, you're saying.

Dave Jones: You know, the lean sort of, you know, startup, you know, ethos. It's like, it goes against all that. Sure. It's like, you know, you, cause you want to churn out prototypes quick. You want to, you know, you just like, everything's forgotten about last week. You know, who cares what we did last week? We're just going forward. No, no.

Chris Gammell: I get, I get that. But like when you start interacting with a contract manufacturer, that's when it's like, no, no, no, this is real. Yeah. And it's like, because the thing that I worry about is like talking to someone. And that's why I was saying like 3.1.2. If I would talk to someone, it should be enough of a, an address effectively so that it's unique enough that they're like, oh, I know what that is. And I say, I know what that is. And we talk about that together. If I just say, it's like, oh, well it's Rev3 and you know, we built a couple of these boards and it's, you know, we put the latest firmware on. It's like, what the hell does that mean? You know, that doesn't, you know, like having like something where it's an actual unique identifier that says something useful is what I'm really trying to get at. So I'd love to hear from people if they have best practices on that stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Depends on your anal retentiveness level. That's right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: We are running out of time, but I wanted to mention. We're out of time. Yeah, we are out of time. I'm going to be at Teardown in Portland. That is at the end of June. That is a conference for run by CrowdSupply. And I'll be giving a talk there about, what did I call it? Five minutes of...

Dave Jones: Hang on, hang on. Let me guess. KiCad.

Chris Gammell: Nope. Five minutes of video in a 10 pound bag or something like that. It was like basically like how to record videos really fast, you know, about KiCad. Right. Yeah, of course.

Dave Jones: Using the example, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of KiCad videos, all of the KiCon videos, almost all the KiCon videos are now up on the Contextual Electronics channel. Excellent. I'll link those as well. There were some really good ones. Yeah.

Dave Jones: How many of them are now obsolete? Because somebody's changed something.

Chris Gammell: I think these are, you know, probably 10%.

Dave Jones: Right. 10% are obsolete or only 10% are relevant? No, I was going to say obsolete.

Chris Gammell: I don't think they're actually obsolete, but that was, yeah. All right. There might be some stuff there. All right. I also wanted to announce I will be going to, I got a ticket for Chaos Communication Camp, which is in Berlin in August 21st to 25th. So German listeners, if you're going to be there, I'd love to meet up. I'd love to see more of Germany. I love Berlin as well. So if you're going to be there, let me know.

Dave Jones: I have not been. I have not been to Berlin.

Chris Gammell: Well, you want to go, Dave? Come on. It's only, what, 40 hours of travel to go sleep in a tent?

Speaker ?: 50?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, 60, actually. 60. Yeah. 60 hours. Okay. Yep. To get to Berlin. Yeah. Yeah. There and back.

Chris Gammell: Yep. 60. Yeah. Worth it, man. Come on.

Dave Jones: Yeah, totally.

Chris Gammell: A bunch of nerds hanging out in a field. It's good. It's good stuff. Right. Not showering for five days. It's going to be something else.

Dave Jones: All right. Utopia. Yeah. It's going to be the Woodstock of the nerd generation. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And then one more. Sorry. One more. I'll also be at Supercon in November. So that is the last thing. Those are in Black Hat. So those are like the rest of my conferences. I'm done with conferences. Oh, I am.

Dave Jones: I thought you were giving up the conference thing. I thought you were settling down.

Chris Gammell: I mean.

Dave Jones: Giving up the whole.

Chris Gammell: Get out for some things, you know.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Now the difference is I pay for my own travel, Dave. Oh, yeah. Bummer. Yeah. It's good. So I got more. I got shorter things. More shorter XLR cables. I'll be recording too. So Amp Hour listeners will benefit.

Dave Jones: Excellent.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Cool. All right. Well, good luck with the yet-to-be-seen microsupply. I'm sure people will be excited to see that.

Dave Jones: Thank you very much. Oh, you might be interested. One last thing. You might be interested to know that we've decided to actually get a contract manufacturer to assemble four for us. Oh, great. It's like we couldn't be asked to assemble them ourselves. Like we just want four of these boards. We just couldn't be asked to do it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's probably a good test run for actually assemble two.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's a reasonable test run. And there's lots of fiddly little piddly parts on it. Right.

Chris Gammell: They'll be able to give you feedback that another CM would probably, like a higher volume CM would be getting too. So that's a good test run. You should go and sit there probably while they do it. Or get video of them. Ask them to do video while they do it.

Dave Jones: Oh, and the thing is they'll source all the parts too.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's nice. So it's like a box build. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: They'll source it. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's great. We just give them the bomb and they'll source everything, assemble them and deliver us four assembled boards. Yeah. Yep.

Chris Gammell: That's great.

Dave Jones: You know how many hours that saves us? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's almost always worth it. I've been coming around to that finally.

Dave Jones: And like, whereas one, you know, before we've been assembling one, it's like, you know, it's a fair prototype. Testing is like, well, we can't go and get them to assemble one. Right. You know, that's just, you know, that's just not, no, we just, you know, head down, bum up, do it ourselves. But four, it's like, you know, because we want a few of these, four, maybe five of them. And it's like, yeah, let's just, let's just pay the, I think it's 1200 bucks or something.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: To get five, which, you know, it might sound. It's like six hours of time. You know, but it's, yeah, it's like, yeah, exactly. How much, you know, you would spend a lot more hours than that doing it and can like, yeah, that'd be expensive if it was just assembly, but it's not, it's sourcing every, and we've got a lot of parts on this thing. There's a lot of individual parts. It's a big bomb. You wouldn't, you'd be stunned at the number of bomb items on a little tiny handheld power supply thing. And yeah, and they'll, they'll just take care of all that hassle for us. And it's like, yep, no, yeah, that's a, that's, that's complete no brainer. We'll do that.

Chris Gammell: Awesome.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Well, I'm looking forward to getting my first unit. You know, I'm sure we're going to get people on the list of the first four in.

Dave Jones: Oh, maybe. I don't know. I don't know what we're doing for. Yeah. I'm not a good beta tester. We get 10 where we're still not a hundred. Like if we were sure that if we were like 80% confident that this was like the final thing and there were going to be no mods, then we'd probably get like 10 of them and ship a few out to people. But it's like, yeah. I asked David the other day and how, how confident? Oh, 20%. It's like, that's a good, that's a good, that's a good hedge right there.

Chris Gammell: That's a good hedge.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. We'll just get four. Yeah. Thanks.

Chris Gammell: You can ship those out and have a set back. I mean, that's, that's still doable.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah. It's yeah. But anyway, yeah, we want a couple and then a few to totally abuse. You know, we want a couple just to use from a, you know, a firmware usability and testing point of view. And then you want a couple that you can have your way with.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's great, man. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Cool. We'll talk about that more next time.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time. We'll see you next time.