#46 – Autorouter, Datasheets & Obscure Chips - Cloddish Collegiate Conversations

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm Chris Gammell from Chris Gammell's Analog Life. Hey Chris, how's it going? Good Dave, how's the bub?

Chris Gammell: The bub's terrific and yeah, I think I'm awake.

Dave Jones: Alright, good.

Chris Gammell: I guess we'll find out if you suddenly hear a thud against the microphone. That's me falling into it, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't quite snore.

Dave Jones: You're not a coffee drinker yet, right?

Chris Gammell: No, I'm not a coffee drinker.

Dave Jones: You never know. No, sorry. Babies can do weird things to parents, I mean.

Chris Gammell: Not at all.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, it's all fun. It's all good. I'm happy. Wouldn't trade it for anything. Good, that's great. That's a good situation. I think most parents say that. Wouldn't trade it, you know, shit, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Dave Jones: Well yeah, you're not at the worst moment right now either. You're not like up to your elbows and baby poop or anything.

Chris Gammell: Or just, yeah, chasing them around 24-7. Really. Right, you've got a while for that. At the moment, you just stick them there and they just either go to sleep or cry.

Dave Jones: You know, that actually works when they're older too. All you need, roll a duct tape.

Chris Gammell: Right, roll a duct tape and a cage. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, a cage works too. So they can't get out and destroy the place, right? Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Or soldering iron, eventually, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: I don't know. That won't keep them in place, but it'll put them in place if they act up.

Chris Gammell: Well, it'll keep them amused for 10 minutes, won't it?

Dave Jones: That's true, yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's the whole idea. You just keep giving them stuff until they're tired of it and then go on to the next item.

Dave Jones: Yep. Excellent. So it's a little more spacious in here. I've got to say, there's room to stretch my elbows in this new server we've got going on.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yes, the new server. I did that on a whim last night. I should have been working and getting some real stuff done. But, yeah, a few people complained that the forum was going slowly and stuff, so I checked into it. And it turns out, bloody amp hour, it's just too darn popular.

Dave Jones: What is with these listeners?

Chris Gammell: Oh, I don't know. All these bloody listeners leeching our audio files. How dare you? I know. Is that how we set it up to happen? Oh, I don't know. You know, we could do SoundCloud or something. But they're leeching us to the tune of 350 gig per month. Go figure.

Dave Jones: That's nothing these days. Bastards.

Chris Gammell: Anyway, it was putting a drain on the poor old server. And I, on a whim, just got a new one because this special was ending that night, you see. Oh, yeah. They had like a renew special. You can get a whole new server for, you know, four bucks a month. Woo-hoo!

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's good. Excellent.

Chris Gammell: So, I signed up again.

Dave Jones: People were asking about if they, you know, if they, we don't need any money for that. So, we appreciate the offers from everyone. No, it's fine.

Chris Gammell: I worked it out. It's 0.2 cents per month per person or something.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. We'll probably be okay. And really, we're here to offer our two cents, right? Not so much the other way around.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. That's what we're here for. We're here to give you a dime.

Dave Jones: Yep. Well, that's good. It's, hopefully, if people have issues, you know, let us know. But hopefully, it'll be nice and seamless. Dave is an IT master now. I mean, he just...

Chris Gammell: Oh, I am the Database Zen master. Absolutely. Except when I upload files to the wrong subdirectory. Like, because I copied what you do when you move a server. If anyone doesn't know, you copy. First thing you do is copy all the files from your, you know, obviously, from the subdirectory on one server onto your hard drive. Then you upload it back on the server. Plus, you copy the database. And then you move it over. And then you've got to tweak a few database things to make it work. Anyway, I uploaded all the files. And I tweaked the database and uploaded that. And got it all. I thought it should have worked. And on my vast experience of moving databases, I've done it three or four, five times now or something. So, I'm vastly experienced. And it's just nothing. I just got a blank page. And, yeah. I was scratching my head. Oh, what have I done? So, naturally, the engineer in me just thinks the worst, you know, or thinks the most creative thing that can go wrong.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right? Instead of, you know. Instead of, like, checking the power supply voltage, something stupid like that. No, I dive straight into that database. It was Cosmic Rays. It must have been. Yeah. And I start editing these individual database bloody entries. Oh, boy. Trying to get this thing working and modifying PHP files. And, oh.

Dave Jones: What a mess. Yeah. Always back up your files, people.

Chris Gammell: And it still didn't work. And, yeah. I just uploaded the files to one subdirectory higher so I couldn't see shit. And that's why I got a blank page.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's why the site's down if people were wondering the other day. But, yeah. I didn't notice and didn't hear anyone.

Chris Gammell: Because last night it was down for, like, six hours until I was finally figured out I was stupid and shouldn't really operate a computer or a server.

Dave Jones: Had your license revoked.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Anyway, someone next time stop me. Yeah. You know, I've been changing servers willy-nilly. It's crazy. Willy-nilly. Is that a U.S. term? Willy-nilly? Yes. I think that's pretty universal. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Good. We haven't had a little U.S.-Australia thing there for a while, have we? Probably last week. No.

Dave Jones: It's been a while. Bub is the one that got me. I don't know if we talked about that last time, but people call babies Bub in the U.S. That's why I said it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's not. Bub, we do say that here. So, we, you know, if you say the word Bub, we know what you mean. If you say Bub in the U.S.

Dave Jones: Hey, Bub. Yeah, exactly. Say, hey, Bub, get on my taxi. You know? Yeah. Exactly. Hey, Bub, it's $25. Yeah. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Isn't that like a East Coast, New York kind of saying? Am I wrong there?

Dave Jones: I'm in the middle. I couldn't tell you. In the middle, it's just, I'm hungry. Chris is from Hicksville. I'm hungry. Give me more corn.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: I love it. Flip the channel. Where's the cheese puffs? That's what I say every day. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Anyway, this server stuff is pretty darn obvious if you just sit down and do the math. What is the size of an average MP3 file for this episode? Like 30 meg? 30. 30 meg, yeah. Or something. Yeah. Yeah. Multiply that by 2,000 people by four times a month and there's your 300 gig. Oh, yeah. It's like, duh. Yep. Yeah, of course. You know? It's not hard. So, yeah. Maybe, I figure now that we've only got the Amp Hour on this dedicated server, we're probably good for another, we're probably good for maybe 6,000, 8,000, not viewers, listeners.

Dave Jones: Listeners. And you know what? We will issue a challenge. Everybody should tell their friend to listen and try and crash our server by listening too much. Yes. Do it. Crash that bastard. If you do it, that's a happy problem. If you do it, we'll give you a free shout out.

Chris Gammell: There you go.

Dave Jones: That's about the only thing we can offer here on the Amp Hour. 10,000th listener.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: Speaking of shout outs, we should get to those, huh?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, shout outs go it. Shout outs. We've only got one.

Dave Jones: We've only got one. That's right. I'm going to butcher this because he's from Spain, but Daniel Garrido? Better you than me. Yeah. Daniel Garrido from Spain.

Chris Gammell: That's nowhere near the hardest we've ever had. No, definitely not. That's pretty easy.

Dave Jones: But his site too, it's in Spanish. But it translates well. Google Translate. Rocking it like usual. Right. And it does a good translation. But the Iapero tech? I took French in school. I'm sorry, folks. I, yeah. Nothing to do. Anyways, he put a picture and a link to the Amp Hour and we always like that. So thanks a lot, Daniel. That is awesome. Thank you. And I always like, I always like seeing it, you know, like the fact that, you know, he's kicked, dude. What's that? No, no, not like that. I mean, I was going to say, he has a lot of code on his site because he works with Arduinos and other things. And, you know, people that are non-native English speakers that code in English, it just always blows my mind. I think that's so cool. I mean, I feel kind of bad. Like, it's like, oh, well, you got to learn that. But I mean, it's almost like...

Chris Gammell: Well, that's just the way it is, you know? I know. If you want to be a pilot, you've got to learn English. It's the international language of... Really? Yeah, yeah. If you go into any airport in the world, you must speak to the control tower in English. It's a... Interesting. I didn't know that. There you go. Trivia for today.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's good. Yeah. So, you know... Thank you, Daniel. Thank you very much, Daniel. And we've got some news, too.

Chris Gammell: He's got a normal first name.

Dave Jones: I think... Normal is a...

Chris Gammell: Normal is a... From our... Everything's always from an individual's perspective. Right. From our Western... It's a biblical first name. Our white trash Western perspective, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Absolutely.

Dave Jones: So, news. We've got news, too.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yes. The Open Source Hardware Summit is on again. Has it been a year?

Dave Jones: It has been a year. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I will not be going this year. A lot of things have changed. New server, new baby. Jeez. Yep. And... Chris won't be going because that's the day he's getting married.

Chris Gammell: Oh, there you go.

Dave Jones: So, yeah. Congratulations. I can't make that one, folks. Sorry. Ah, well. But, people are... They're looking for entry. So, if people have open source hardware projects or ideas or anything else like that, you can submit it. We'll link the site. But, you know, they're asking... And they're going to have breakout sessions this time. So, they're looking for things like past projects, manufacturing tips, development of distribution, fabrication, all this other stuff. So, if you've got any of that stuff, you know, give them a shout. Maybe you can present there. I'm not sure if they have funding to actually get you there. But... Oh, I doubt it. Yeah. Yeah. It's right before Maker Faire.

Chris Gammell: I think it's a, yeah, minimal budget kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think it... Unless you were, you know, the was or someone like that. Yeah, the people who need it the least. The least, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I can say... I mean, I talked about this last year. We were on, like, our... I think, like, ninth episode last year when we started. Or when this was going on. Wow. Yeah. And, uh... It was... I mean, it was a ton of fun. I... And just all those people in the same room. It was really cool. So, definitely check it out. And, as they say, you know, it's getting a lot bigger, too. So, this could be the... Another year of big things being announced.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's only the second year, isn't it? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Only the second year.

Chris Gammell: Well, I could see it's still going anyway.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I'm sure it'll be bigger and better than last year. I mean, it was pretty big last year, but...

Dave Jones: Yeah, it was about 400 people last year, I think. Yeah.

Speaker ?: And, uh...

Chris Gammell: And getting married on that day is no excuse, by the way. Surely you can Skype it in from the Elvis Chapel in Vegas. Come on. Surely.

Dave Jones: Don't think... Don't think that would work.

Chris Gammell: Show some dedication to your profession. Come on. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: There we go.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I thought about that. It's like, oh, crap. Well, uh... Yeah, you...

Speaker ?: Let's see.

Dave Jones: You get married on a Saturday. Sunday will probably be kind of busy still. But Monday, I could probably record the amp hour. I've honestly thought about that. I was like, oh, how am I going to work that out? And we'll see if that one works out. I might need to call in the reinforcements. Give Mr. Kaiser a call. I think we might have to. Yeah. Yeah. Love it. So, also on the open source hardware front, Brie Pettis, the guy who's in... The front man for MakerBot, he's actually going to be on the Colbert Report, which, if people don't know, is a fake news reporting program in the U.S. That's a pretty big deal, right? Yeah, I think so. You know, I've seen... There was actually a really good interview with Dean Kamen on the Colbert Report. And if I could find the clip, I'll try and link it in here. But the... Dean Kamen was talking about this new water purification technology that DECA Research had just come up with. And so they're showing two tanks of water, one dirty, one clean. And so then Stephen Colbert, who has the show sponsored by Doritos, dumps the Doritos into the dirty side. And he's like, there's no way you're keeping that delicious nacho flavor out of the other side or something like that.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It was awesome. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, they get big people on there. So, I mean, the fact that Brie's going on there, that's a big deal. So, that's great for him.

Chris Gammell: I assume they're going to talk about the... Are they going to talk about open source hardware or are they going to talk about the MakerBot or... I'm sure both. Well, it's all one of the same, isn't it? Yeah. I think... Really. I've seen other interviews with Brie before. That's an example of open source.

Dave Jones: And he usually prints something small, like a whistle or something like that. You know, something that's very friendly for presentations and less likely to mess up. Yeah. Exactly. And, yeah, it's good, though. You know, mainstream is good. Even if it doesn't bring people in to work on it, even that kind of exposure, you know, so then more Kickstarter funding comes through or whatever, however else it's going to happen. That kind of exposure is good. So, good on him. I agree. That's awesome. Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Hey, if you're watching, have fun.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Or listening. I'm watching. Because that's what people do for the EFR.

Chris Gammell: That's what people do when you have a radio show and not a video blog. Dave has a tough time transitioning. Oh, I do. It's tough. Listeners, viewers. Such a difficult concept. Yep. Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: Yep. All right.

Chris Gammell: So, that's the news for this week. Yes. Do the teletypes.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And if people have news, they can always write in, too.

Dave Jones: You can. Yeah. So, what should we talk about this week? We, I just resorted the list to get it into talking about this kind of stuff.

Chris Gammell: Well, I did, well, on the subject of the server change, I did rejig the forum as well. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. I've just added, expanded it, added extra topics. And I do have the domain name lurking out there as a separate thing. I've been thinking about moving the forum over to that. But then I ruin all my search engine optimization. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All that sort of stuff.

Dave Jones: So, you're just saying that if people go to EEV forum, they can get there. That's what you're saying?

Chris Gammell: Forum.com, they will be, yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, good.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think I used that link as well, too.

Chris Gammell: Right. That's good. Because do you want to know how this happened? Here's a rant.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: This came, but you're probably not aware of this, but I'm on the Altium forum, which is a private, closed forum only to customers of Altium Designer, my former company. And I, you know, it's shit. I mean, their forum is, quite everyone says it. Go check. Well, you can't check it out unless you're a member, I guess. But yeah, it is absolute shit. It's written in Morphic, which is a company they acquired. Morphic? Yes, Morphic. It's an Australian company, coincidentally run by former Altium people and good buddies of the CEO of Altium. So, yeah, there were nothing involved there, I'm sure. And anyway, they bought Morphic, and Morphic have their own. Morphic is a development package for writing web-enabled applications and all that sort of shit. It's very niche, very obscure kind of package. And yeah, they decided to write their own forum. Instead of, you know, instead of using, you know, PHP, BBS, all of the open source ones, Simple Machine Forums, and V Bulletin, which is the most popular. Yeah. You know, things people have been spending a decade writing and refining, and everyone loves these forums and know how they work. But no, Altium in their infinite wisdom decide to write their own, and it sucks. And it will, you know, they can refine it for the next 10 years, and it still won't be better than one you can just install with a single click from one of these open source ones. Anyway, I digress. Yeah. Yeah, you did. Anyway, it sucks. And everyone's been talking about, you know, having a proper separate Altium forum that's Google indexable and actually works and is usable, right? Yeah. And open to everyone.

Dave Jones: So like if a beginner came in and they wanted to, and they were starting to use Altium, then they could say, oh, well, I'll go to this forum instead of the one I have to register for, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. And well, not register, but yeah, you've got to pay. Well, you have to be a paying customer. Gotcha. Anyway, it's not Google indexable, and it's not very flexible, and everyone hates it, and everyone's leaving because they don't want to use it. So yeah, I thought I would start altiumforum.com. So I registered the domain name, altiumforum.com, and I installed Simple Machines Forum. I had it all up and running in like an hour. No problems at all. No biggie. You know, here it is. Everyone starts using it. And Altium took offense to not me setting up the forum, although I know they really ultimately don't like that because it's competition for them. But you know, tough tips. Let me guess.

Dave Jones: They didn't like you using their name.

Chris Gammell: They didn't like the word Altium in the domain name. Yep. And they sent a cease and desist email. So you did. Polite. Polite one. So yeah, I didn't want to argue the point. Yeah, whatever. Okay, you're being a dick. Fine. You know. And then I thought, oh, shall I get a new name? And oh, it was all too hard. And so I decided, no, I'll just fold it into my existing forum. So I generated a new EDA category, which has all the packages on there. So if you want to talk about the packages, Eagle or Altium or PCAD or, you know, Jeter, KeyCAD, anything like that, there's a forum there for you. A young forum. Go and use it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've got to move some questions over to so it makes it look like it's, you know, give it some content to kickstart it.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Anyway, that's how it came about because Altium decided to cease and desist me. So there you go. That was fun. That was a bit of fun.

Dave Jones: Well, on the topic of boards and board software, I had an item on here about auto routers. And I think we've talked about it before on here.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, this is an old link you've got here too. This was, somebody did this when I did my blog rant on auto routers.

Dave Jones: Right. So there's a link to, oh, I forget who it is, Silicon Farmer maybe on Twitter. And so we were going back and forth and just talking about it on Twitter, just talking about auto routers and are they worth it. And then someone brought up the fact that you actually had talked about, you know, a side-by-side comparison and they're actually out there. But Wendell from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories actually mentioned a new one that's out there. This, I'm not sure if it's new. It's called Topo Router or Topo Router. Yep. Have you seen that software ever? I've heard, I haven't used it. I've heard about it. It's really interesting if you look at it. So it's, it's, it's like a, it's all based on algorithm, you know, it's all algorithmic, which I realize all auto routers are algorithmic. But this is like a, it's almost like more loopy looking, you know, like it's very. Loopy looking. It's like loopy looking. It's like, it's not, it's not very, I don't know how to explain it. It's not intuitive, but it, it seems like it, it works better. Right. So, I don't know. I thought, I thought it was interesting and worth calling out the, this Topo Router stuff. And it's like five, it's kind of expensive. You know, it's like five grand, I think for like a license for it. But it's, and it's like a third party tool actually from a board software package. So, you know, you have to work that in there too. But at the same time, if you can, you know, if this thing can route a BGA package in two hours where it might take you, you know, two days, then, you know, maybe that's worth it. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, it's, it's funny. I'm having a look at the images now and it looks like instead of using a grid based system, it actually routes it like you would by hand. And like, as in like a free hand drawing with like the old fashioned tape stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it looks like. On the old, on the old clear cellar film stuff. That's before your time, Chris.

Dave Jones: Oh, I know. But you know, it actually though, if, if, you know, I pulled apart my old tech scope and I see the boards in there and that kind of stuff.

Chris Gammell: And they're, and they're taped out. Yeah. You know, hence the word tape out. Tape out. Right. Well, they still use that in terms of ASIC and stuff like that. Right. But that's what I meant by loopy.

Dave Jones: You know, like, so less, less, you know, 90 degree angles.

Chris Gammell: And there's no 90 degree. Yeah. It's a, yeah. It's just, you know, it isn't based on a grid. And I hate that. It looks horrid, you know, unless it's done by hand and then it kind of looks artistic, like in the old tech scopes and stuff like that. Yeah. It can be quite nice. This just looks like it was done by a child. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But who cares about artistic? It's about, I mean, I understand from a.

Chris Gammell: What? Oh, wash your mouth out.

Speaker ?: Oh.

Chris Gammell: PCBs are works of art. Thank you very much.

Dave Jones: Whatever. I, I, I think from a utility standpoint, PCBs, you know, if you could trace a, if you can follow it easily, that's an important thing. So that from a grid perspective.

Chris Gammell: In terms of layout and functional tracing. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. But if this, I mean, if this saves you a lot of time, I mean, that's kind of what it comes down to. And that conversation we were having on Twitter too, is like, you know, you should get your, you always get your critical stuff done first. But then after that, it's just like, who cares? You know, I just want it done. So click the button. Right. That's, that's what it always comes down to.

Chris Gammell: You don't take pride in your work or you're under a tight deadline. No, you take pride in your time. Yeah. Time. You know, I, I use auto routers too, but I use them in very specific circumstances. You know, everyone thinks the auto router is magic and you can just place down your components and hit go. Oh, no. And you've got to finish board. It's bullshit. No, I agree with that. So.

Dave Jones: And that, that's all placement anyways. That's where the real magic comes in, right? And we've talked about that before. Routing is 90% placement. Yes. That's right. Yeah. Anyways, I think, I think the software, I think it's cool. I'm not sure.

Chris Gammell: Oh, it's just another auto route. I mean, there's some very good auto routers out there. Yeah. Altium's not, not one of them.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And I've used, I've used the Eagle one before. It's like, eh, it's, it's very blocky, but it's not, it's not the worst. I mean.

Chris Gammell: No, it's not the worst from an algorithm point of view. The Altium one actually went backwards. Backwards. It used to be quite reasonable. And then they bought a company's technology and then they put that in and promote it as the whiz bang latest and it just ruined it. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Great work there. But no, there are some very good auto routers out there, not necessarily doing the whole board, but doing, you know, some aspects of boards. There's some very good ones that fan out BGAs nicely. There are other ones that, you know, do differential pairs nicely and stuff like that. So yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's another important one. I mean, that's the nice thing about it too, is like if you have a constraint thing where you can just put in, well, I need, you know, a 50 ohm match impedance here and it knows that, then that's a lot easier than trying to hand do it. Right. I mean, a lot of. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Often a lot of your time is spent setting up the auto router. Right. That's true. Once again, an auto router is 90% set up and 10% is where you hit the button go button and it does the job and then you tidy it up. Yeah. So yeah, you've got to put a lot of effort in to make these things work well. Yeah. But as somebody showed on that other link you've got there, which you might link in, he did an eagle board and it's not bad. Yeah. Somebody routed an eagle board out. This was when I did my blog. He just went, oh no, the eagle one's not bad. He's an example. And yeah, it's not bad. You know, there will be cases when they actually work just fine.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But other cases, you know, they'll just be totally useless. Yep. What can you do? Anyway, auto routers, I'm not a fan unless you know how to use them. My argument in my blog back in number 93, it was. So long ago. I didn't pull that off the top of my head. Yeah, I know. It's listed there. It is. Yeah. What was my comment going to be?

Dave Jones: I have no idea. Oh, yes. You don't use it if you're a beginner. Is that kind of the idea?

Chris Gammell: Don't use it if you're a beginner. An auto router is a tool, a very advanced tool for advanced PCB designers. If you're a beginner and you use it, well, you shouldn't be. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Sometimes you should learn to drive the car before you start using the auto parking mechanism, right? Exactly.

Chris Gammell: That's why I think there shouldn't even be an auto routing tool in Eagle. It's a hobbyist level package. Not according to that. And yet they've put all this work into, you know. Yeah. They've put this work into an auto router and they continue to refine it and stuff like that. But that takes away from development resources to work on the real package, you know. Yeah. The actual layout package itself. So, yeah. It's crazy. I don't know. And then these open source ones. They've got free. They work on auto routers as well. Why? I think because it's an... Spend all your time working on the user interface and the functionality of the base package.

Dave Jones: I think it's because it's such a fun algorithmic problem.

Chris Gammell: It's a fun thing. Yeah. I know. I can do that.

Dave Jones: It's like, oh, well, how do I... You know, it's like a puzzle solver, right? It's very mathy, you know. Yeah. It's less graphical. It's more math based. Yeah. I could see that's probably a ton of fun to try and solve. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's fun to work on if you're a programmer and you're doing... And you're working on this thing for fun. Yeah. You're not getting paid to work on it. So...

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I can understand, but still, it'd be better if, you know... Because where the open source packages like Jeter and KeyCad fall down is their user interface is not nearly as good and not nearly as refined as the commercial packages. Yeah. Yeah. So that's where they really need their work focused, I guess.

Dave Jones: Probably boring to work on.

Chris Gammell: Anyway, there you go. Auto routers.

Dave Jones: So you think students shouldn't use... Students and newcomers shouldn't really use auto routers. That's the final word. Okay. It is. So speaking of students, we have an item on here about college life. And you and I had talked after the show a while back about the differences, the cultural differences between college in the US and college in Australia. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Well, it's not even called college in Australia.

Dave Jones: Well, what's it called there?

Chris Gammell: University.

Dave Jones: Oh, university. Wow. University.

Chris Gammell: That's uni. It's called. Uni. We shorten it to uni. Yeah. As we do, we shorten everything. You know.

Dave Jones: And so you were... I think... I forgot what we were talking about. I think we were talking about it from like a lifestyle standpoint more. Like the fact that... Yep. US students kind of go off and try and pretend to living on their own, but are actually, you know, living in these dorms. Dormitories. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Are they called dormitories? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Dorm. Yeah. Dorm, right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Dorms. Yep. Dorm life. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: And that's the big thing. That's the thing that we're bombarded with on TV for, you know, well, since ever, right? Since I started showing that sort of stuff on TV. We, being Australians and other countries see that lifestyle, that's the typical US lifestyle, is that everyone leaves home to go to college. Yeah. You know, and that's just, you know, and that's just, and that's just doesn't happen here, really. So what's the difference? It's very rare. The difference is here, you typically stay, you actually live with your parents still, or you might even, you know, rent with some friends somewhere, but you stay close to home, and you go to the university, which is closest to you. You don't go, oh, I'm going to do engineering, and MIT's the best, so I'm going to go all the way across the country to go to MIT. You know, we don't do that. It's very rare for someone to do that, unless you're like out in the middle of the sticks, and there is no university, and then you have to leave. Yeah. Or there's only one choice there, and you know, you really want engineering, but your university in Armadale or somewhere doesn't do it. Then you have to move. But apart from that, no, you make your choice based on, not necessarily the nearest, but each major city, like Sydney, we might have four universities, I think. Macquarie, Sydney, four or five. So, five, yes. Yeah, so you just choose the one that, you know, suits you the best within your geographic location. That's it. And you, typically, you don't go live on campus, because there's not much, some universities don't even have dorms. Or if they do, they're very small, the numbers are limited, and it costs a lot of money, and only the overseas students, because we've got a big percentage of overseas students come here to study. And they're the ones who live in the dorms. We have that too. A lot of overseas students, especially in engineering programs. Right, yes. So, the local students, they don't go to dorms. They stay home with their parents, or they rent with their friends on the beach somewhere or something like that.

Dave Jones: That's a smart idea.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Interesting.

Chris Gammell: That's how it works.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I mean, no doubt, US and Australia are different. I'm sure it's different in other parts of the world too, like Europe and Africa and everywhere else. But I don't know, I was interested by that. I don't know if other people have input on what their college experience was like, if they didn't even do college or anything else like that. But I thought that was interesting hearing about the fact that, because college in the US is so dorm-based. Yes. But I don't know.

Chris Gammell: And very lifestyle-based with your fraternities and stuff like that. We don't have fraternities here. Right, right. It's a totally foreign concept.

Dave Jones: And then there's always the option. There's this new option. Did you see this news about Peter Thiel, the guy that started PayPal?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, PayPal.

Dave Jones: So Peter Thiel, one of the biggest investors in PayPal, and now he's doing stuff with Facebook, if you saw the social network or followed Facebook. Basically, he's got this new thing. I think it's going to be a yearly thing, but he's offering $100,000 to students in order to drop out of school. Awesome. Yeah, saying that, hey, I guess you really don't need school, you know, kind of school of hard knocks and just go start a business.

Chris Gammell: That's fantastic. Love it.

Dave Jones: I love it, too. I think it's a really cool idea, and someone made a really good point about it. It's like, if you fail, you can always just go back and do college anyways, which is a great point. I have to say, though, if someone came up to me and said, and maybe it would just be that I wasn't the right kind of person to do this kind of thing, but if someone came up to me when I started college and said, here's $100,000, go, you know, go start a business, I would have been like, uh, and just sat there. I mean, I'm sure that a lot of them are students who already have businesses, you know, but are things that can be turned into businesses. But, man, that's crazy.

Chris Gammell: It's great. I would have jumped at it. It's fantastic.

Dave Jones: And he's talking about high school, too, so $100,000 should be dropped out of high school, too. Okay. And start businesses.

Chris Gammell: Why not? I'm sure he wouldn't just give it to anyone as a, you know, you'd have to show some promise, I'm sure.

Dave Jones: Yeah, and I think there's a application process, too, so.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I'm sure.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Sure, it's highly vetted, so. And the other thing I wanted to comment on with the college lifestyle thing is that, really, you guys seem to make a big deal of which college is best. You know, which college is better. That's how we get started talking about it. Like, reputation and all that sort of stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's right. That's how we got started talking about it. Because, you're right, there is a, you know, and I think that's true. And the whole rivalry thing. Well, not even rivalry, but just from a hiring perspective. Certain schools get a lot more recruitment from them. Like, MIT. You go to an MIT job fair, that's going to be a lot different than a Cleveland State job fair. Yeah, I love Cleveland State. They have some great engineers, but the fact is that the industry just doesn't see them the same way.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: So.

Chris Gammell: And that's totally the opposite here. Nobody really gives a shit which university you went to. They literally don't care.

Dave Jones: So, how did they, I mean, is it just based on interview stuff, then?

Chris Gammell: I mean, because you have. Yes. Yeah, it's purely based on your attitude. Your personal attitude.

Dave Jones: But certain programs must have a high, like, there's no, like, difference in engineering. I mean, there's got to be a difference in engineering programs just based on resources, right?

Chris Gammell: Yes, there are differences between the individual unis in terms of their courses, of course. And, yeah, and some might specialize in certain things which may get you, which may help you get a job because you've got experience in that sort of thing. You know, oh, yeah, I've worked on solar cell research, you know, at certain universities. So, you know, you'll easily get a job in the solar research industry as opposed to someone who just did some generic thing and you did mainly software or something like that. So, yeah, it's certainly that, but not from a rep point of view. Like, yeah, it's, no, it just doesn't really happen here.

Dave Jones: What? Yeah, that is different because, I mean, it's less so for engineering, I think, than business schools. Like, business schools, I've heard that if you don't do top 10 to get an MBA, it's like you don't even bother, right? Right. Engineers can still learn a lot at other schools, but you get different experiences, definitely.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: And different recruiting, for sure. I mean, that's another thing, so.

Chris Gammell: They do actually try to make them standardized here. The engineering, well, I'll only talk about engineering. The Engineering Institute of Australia, they try and make the courses all very similar. So, that's, you know, they don't force them to, but they encourage the different universities to all cover the same base stuff. So, yeah, they tend to be fairly similar.

Dave Jones: That's interesting.

Chris Gammell: And also, we don't have anything in terms of scholarships, right? Well, there are scholarships here, but they're incredibly rare. They're pretty darn rare to get a scholarship here, whereas it seems like every second person in the US gets a scholarship.

Dave Jones: I think that's probably a bit more of a misconception.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's an exaggeration. Right. Okay. Well, that's the impression we get, is that scholarship, well, I'm sure they're in order of magnitude more. In terms of the percentage of people in a particular school would have scholarships would be in order of magnitude more than us, at least, I'm sure.

Dave Jones: Oh, maybe.

Chris Gammell: And just because there's more money poured into it, and there's more money involved, and

Speaker ?: there's...

Dave Jones: Yeah. I mean, if the prices are higher, I mean, that's kind of the case, too. A lot of engineering students, or any kind of students, you know, you can't go to school unless you get that stuff. I mean, financial aid is a huge, huge thing here. I mean, I couldn't have gone to school if I didn't take out money or get grants or anything like that.

Chris Gammell: See, we can here, because we have a government-sponsored thing where the government will effectively pay for it for you. And then you pay them back slowly once you start work.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's how it works here. So, as long as you can... Yeah. So, you don't, you know... You do have to have some money to pay for it, but basically, the government do that for you. Yeah. You've got to pay for your books and stuff like that, and, you know... Hmm. But the actual fees themselves, the government paid for.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's another difference, I guess.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And we don't have sports scholarships and stuff like that, you know. Oh, well. I mean, it just doesn't really happen, you know. That's its own thing. There's a lot of universities over there that are all, you know, sports, you know, the college football. We have nothing like that here.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. You know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, well, yeah, you know, there might be a little group who play, you know, football or something like that, but, yeah, it's nothing like the US. Yeah. Yeah. So. And a scholarship to go play football at a college is just unheard of here. It's crazy.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well. Oh, that's right. We've said that before. Football is the same here and there. Because it's not the same in Europe. It's European football.

Chris Gammell: Football is a round ball, yes, which we call soccer. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We don't call that football here. Football is with an oval-shaped ball. Yeah. Yeah. And it's mostly done with the hands and running and crashing into each other, not actually using the foot.

Dave Jones: Gotcha. So, if people need money for school, there's another way that could happen, not just scholarships. There's actually. Go to Australia and government pays for it.

Chris Gammell: Yay. Oh, you can just. Yeah, you can go to Australia. Just move to Australia and the government will. Yep. That is another option. That's why all these boat people are trying to come here, right?

Dave Jones: I guess so.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You wouldn't know about that. That's local news. Right.

Dave Jones: No, I actually, I was going to talk about this new competition from DIY Drones. Did you hear about that? No. Do tell. Oh, yeah. There's this.

Chris Gammell: I haven't heard much. I just play with the baby and, you know, that's about it.

Dave Jones: He basically is locked inside his house.

Chris Gammell: I pretty much am now. It's quite depressing.

Dave Jones: That's what happens, buddy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I know. It's his consulting gig, too. Yeah. I've been working my butt off on that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, and I want to talk about that in a little bit. But first, there's this DARPA. So, DARPA, which is Army or Defense Advanced Research Projects.

Chris Gammell: It's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Dave Jones: That's right, yeah. And they're the ones that started ARPAnet, which is now the internet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyways, they have a competition. So, if you create an unmanned aerial vehicle that costs them $10,000 and can be carried in a rucksack, and that's a quote. They said rucksack. Right. Rucksack. Yeah. Basically, they're going to have 10 winners, and then they're going to have a performance competition. And then the winner gets $100,000, and then they can get up to a $2 million contract after that. So, if there's any UAV experts out there, I think they have to be quadcopters. I'm not sure if they're exactly quadcopters.

Chris Gammell: You probably couldn't fit it in. Well, you could fit a regular plane, like a wing-based one, but the wings would have to fold. Yeah, that's true. You'd have to spend time setting it up, whereas a quadcopter, you could just whip it out and press go, really. Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine a quadcopter being more stable for a given size and stuff like that, whereas if you've got a small, lightweight plane, it's probably... I don't know. I'm sure. We might be talking out our ass again, which we'll talk about.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: We got taken to task for, and rightly so, last week. Yeah. That's fine. No, let's just go right into that. How about that? Yeah, let's just go right into that. So, yeah, we don't need to talk about the DARPA.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it is about moving parts again, though. How about that? So, not just a quadcopter, but...

Chris Gammell: Yes, it is.

Dave Jones: It turns out that a camshaft is not what the hell we meant.

Chris Gammell: No, well, I'm going to blame you, because I knew that it was a driveshaft.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But, you know, my mind just wasn't engaged, and you said camshaft like 10 times, so my brain just ran with it, so I blame you.

Dave Jones: Right. So, a camshaft is what actually controls the... I want to be careful here. The intake valves...

Chris Gammell: Dude, you just got to screw it in.

Dave Jones: ...of an internal combustion engine. I'm sorry for all the car buffs out there. I don't even change my own oil, and I know I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of shit for that, too, but... Yeah, I'm not a car person.

Chris Gammell: Camshaft is bits within the engine itself.

Dave Jones: Yeah, the inner bits. It's like if you're looking at a chip, it's where the electrons flow, right? If you're looking at an engine, it's where the go juice flows.

Chris Gammell: Oh, this is brilliant. Just keep digging. You'll make it all the way to China.

Dave Jones: I will say... I will say that I have been listening... Someone asked me what one of my favorite podcasts is, and it is a podcast, it's a radio show also. It's called Car Talk from NPR. It's these two guys up in Boston. And they are some of the funniest dudes ever. And that is a great... I know nothing about cars, and I still enjoy the podcast so much. So, people should check that one out, too.

Chris Gammell: Same thing with me and Top Gear. I don't give a shit about cars at all. Yeah. But I love Top Gear. It's one of my favorite shows, because the guys are freaking awesome.

Dave Jones: I know. Exactly. So, you know... And, yeah. So, who cares, right? But you learn a little bit of auxiliary knowledge from that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You learn a little bit. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, that's good. That's right.

Chris Gammell: But, obviously, not enough to talk about drive cars. Thank God I never called into that show. Speaking of which, Malcolm Fade, if I'm actually pronouncing his last name, F-A-E-D, who wrote an article in Silicon Chip magazine. He built his own electric ute. Yeah. Hybrid ute. Truck, as you call it in the US. And he's got access to a new Mitsubishi iMiev, is it called? And he offered me a test drive in it. Nice. Well, he offered to take me around. I'm not sure if I'm actually allowed to get behind the wheel, because I'm probably not covered. Right. But, anyway, he offered that, but it has to be this week. So, I've got to tee up sometime this week to actually do that. And he does listen. I haven't even replied to your email. Sorry, Malcolm. But, yes, I am interested.

Dave Jones: Don't offer it to anyone else. Me, me, me.

Chris Gammell: I have a baby. And he's got a bike as well. Nice. A fully electric bike. Well, he doesn't have it. He's working on it, so he can show us that too. So, that may be on the blog.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That'd be great.

Chris Gammell: So, hopefully, I'm allowed to open the bottom and have a look at the battery packs and the motor and stuff like that. Yeah. Can I just tear apart your whole car now? I would have liked to just drive around it and go, okay, yeah, it's a car and it's got a fancy dash and that's about it. Yeah. Yeah. Dash?

Dave Jones: Is that a US word? Dash too, yeah. Dash. We do dash, don't worry. So, you're going to have time with all your new consulting gig? I mean, how's that going?

Chris Gammell: Hopefully. That's going flat out at the moment because I'm trying to meet my first milestone. I was hoping to finish yesterday. Oh, milestone. But milestone and then take a couple of days off and actually get some stuff done, like actually do a blog and go see Malcolm's car and, yeah. Add to many other field trips. I've been promising various people and myself that I was going to do, you know, a visit to Farnell's. I've got a cow lab I want to go to. I've been invited to. Yeah. And, yeah. So, I want a tour of that. There's a couple of other tours and people I want to talk to for the blog. So, there'll be lots of, hopefully, if I get time, lots of field stuff. You won't see me in the shop too often.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That'd be cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Get out and get some fresh air.

Chris Gammell: I guess it's... That's right. I certainly need it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Also, I mean, it's getting kind of colder there, huh? It's probably starting to turn into...

Chris Gammell: It is the middle of winter. Well, it's not the middle of winter. It's the start of winter. Yes, we are officially in winter here.

Dave Jones: I always forget about that. Damn. Yeah. Stupid world being round. What is up with that? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The planets, yeah, it's round. It's a globe and it tilts and... Ah, it's just a theory. ...the axis is tilted and when it goes around the sun, it, you know...

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: ...the sun heats up one part or the other.

Dave Jones: I've heard about this, but I...

Chris Gammell: That's not heating outside at the moment.

Dave Jones: Unsubstantiated evidence.

Chris Gammell: Right. Okay. That's right, because you haven't actually flown around the world yet, have you? No. You don't actually know firsthand that it is actually round. I have to see with my own eyes. Right. I've flown around and you do actually come back to the same point.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I can verify it.

Dave Jones: Oh, you have? Okay. You've seen the curvature of the earth and everything, so...

Chris Gammell: No, I haven't seen the curvature of the earth.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Well then...

Chris Gammell: Not firsthand anyway. Yeah. Unfortunately. That's one of the things I want to do. That's one of my things on my list.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah? Yeah. Or get up in space? That's on your list?

Chris Gammell: Ah, the space would be awesome, but barring that, I'd love to go up to 10, you know, 80,000 feet, 100,000 feet, see the curvature of the earth. That'd be fantastic.

Dave Jones: That'd be pretty cool.

Chris Gammell: So, I think you only have to go up to like 60,000 feet or something, but higher would be nice anyway. So, now you say feet. Feet, yes. Because that's an aeronautical term. Really? Yeah, feet. Height of planes is always in feet. Huh. You don't talk in... Although they do, they try to metricate, if you go on the plane, they'll actually show you both feet and meters. You're at 30,000 feet, which is 10,000 meters. So, that's the altitude that a 747 and most commercial airliners will actually cruise at is 10,000 meters or 33,000 feet. And yeah, no, feet is the internationally recognized, I think, aeronautical term.

Dave Jones: Well, that's weird because I was talking to another Aussie the other day. And he quoted me a board. Please, please say Aussie again. Aussie. Aussie. Aussie. Aussie. Sorry. Aussie. Aussie. That's pretty good. Is that better?

Chris Gammell: That's pretty awkward, I've got to say. All right.

Dave Jones: He quoted me a board in 2x3 inches. He was talking about a board. And I was like, what? And he said, well, he's in the US now. And he said he moved before the switch happened. And I didn't even realize that there ever was a switch. I mean, you...

Chris Gammell: There was indeed. We converted... Because we were from the English side of things. Imperial, yeah. And we inherited their imperial system. Yep. And, no, we switched in... When was it? You know, the 60s. Late 60s. No, late 70s, I think.

Dave Jones: Late 70s, early 80s.

Chris Gammell: It took a decade or more to actually do it. But, yeah. Yeah. I think it officially started in the 60s. Yeah. In certain areas.

Dave Jones: In legislation passed and everything. Yep. Man. Yeah. I have to say, I'm really jealous about that. I know some people are big fans of imperial units for some reason. Yeah. Like, I was talking to a co-worker. And I think he was joking with me. But I think it's so stupid. I could switch over tomorrow and I wouldn't care. Yeah. But there's a great Wikipedia article about it. I'll switch it over. Or I'll link it over. But, yeah.

Chris Gammell: How we changed.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Changed them. As many countries have. Yeah. All the smart countries have.

Dave Jones: And the impressive thing, and a really smart thing, is like, I think they said, all of the road signs switched over in less than a month.

Chris Gammell: That's amazing. See, that's before my time. I was too young to remember that. So, what year was that? Do they say? I think it was...

Dave Jones: 74. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: See, I was only two years old then.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And that right there is a big deal, right? I mean, first off, that's a lot of signs. Probably more in the US. But that's a lot of work.

Chris Gammell: Oh, a lot more in the US, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But still, that is a big job. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it is. And it's so smart, though. Because it's just like, well, you're going to learn it. Because you have to. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Here it is. Bang.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. I just...

Chris Gammell: It isn't just the occasional... And they didn't put both at the same time. I think they just ripped them down. They did, yeah. Put them up. They forced you to... Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought that was... Although we don't really have... We have less of the mileage thing that you do. I'm using a US term there, mileage.

Dave Jones: Mileage. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You guys have signs on your highways. You know, it's 15 miles to Hicksville. And it's 10 miles to Hicksville. Five miles to Hicksville. And we don't really have that as much here. So there weren't as many, nearly as many signs, let alone roads. Well, you don't need a sign to the middle of nowhere, Dave. That's right. Oh!

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yes, we actually have Outback and Wilderness and all that sort of shit.

Dave Jones: Ew. Yeah, so do we. It's in the middle. That's where I live.

Chris Gammell: World heritage even. Stick it up, yeah. There you go.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. I was just flabbergasted.

Chris Gammell: We haven't totally, you know, spread all over the planet and ruined everything. Yeah. A lot of stuff out there is...

Dave Jones: Yep, yep.

Chris Gammell: Still original.

Dave Jones: Yep. I was just amazed that, you know, I should have figured that at some point it happened, but I was just amazed that there was people from Australia that still use Imperial Units. Yep. I thought that was interesting. What about this...

Chris Gammell: Oh, that leads me on to something else. Yeah. Sorry.

Dave Jones: No, hit it.

Chris Gammell: Anyway, we also changed our national anthem as well. Oh, yeah? We changed the Australian national anthem back when I was a kid. Huh. Because we used to be from England. It was God Save the Queen. Ah. You know, and yeah, thank God we changed that. Because that was just shit. And now we've got an even shitter one, which is Advance Australia Fair, as you heard a couple of weeks back.

Dave Jones: Yes, we all heard that one when Dave hijacked the editing process. A couple of times.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah, we actually changed to that. So we're, you know, no strangers to changing huge stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Well, that's a good thing to be able to change. So...

Chris Gammell: Hmm. I wish you guys... Well, no. See, you guys changed your currency to put a God reference on all your currency against the Constitution, of course. But, you know, I can't see you guys changing that back now. Because it's just... Yeah. You guys don't make those big changes anymore. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, that's what I was thinking about with terms of metric. I just don't know. That's kind of... It's like despair. It's like... And I love a metric-based system. Yeah. But I think about the logistics of it, and it's just like, God damn. Oh, it's... I know. It's never going to happen.

Chris Gammell: I can't... Yeah. I can't really blame you for putting it in the too hard basket, really.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's a tough, tough problem.

Chris Gammell: But, you know, sometimes you've just got to do it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I agree. That's the only way to really... I mean, yeah. You just got to kind of...

Chris Gammell: Well, you guys probably can't just do it in one hit like we tried to. Yeah. You know, well, even us, it took a decade to actually filter everything through. For you guys, it might take 30 years or something. Yeah. But you've got to start, you know. You've got to introduce it to the schools and, you know, get things and, I don't know, change the gas pumps. That would really screw the Americans. People would start riding in the streets with their guns and everything if you change the gas pumps.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Right? That's probably the worst thing you could probably do. Actually, you could probably change everything else. Yeah. Except the road signs and the gas pumps, right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: And people just wouldn't notice.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, I mean...

Chris Gammell: I'm just stereotyping. No, it's cool.

Dave Jones: I mean, all our booze is sold in milliliters. So, maybe that's a good starting place.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? There you go.

Dave Jones: Yeah. 750 milliliters.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Well, that's a good start.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That is good.

Chris Gammell: Start with beer.

Dave Jones: And it's cheaper. I mean, it's... Well, not beer. Beer is double listed, but... Oh, right. But, like, straight booze is... Yeah. Right. So, maybe someday liquor will lead the way. The U.S. will finally be drunk and in metric units.

Chris Gammell: Fantastic.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, tell me about this consulting stuff before we get into the chip of the week, because I wanted to hear about this.

Chris Gammell: What aspect of it? What I've been working on?

Dave Jones: Yeah. What you've been working on, because you were talking about that before.

Chris Gammell: Well, I can't tell you the application, but I spent... No, no.

Dave Jones: Just the problems you've been having.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I know. The problems... I spent a couple of days searching for a lithium-ion battery charger chip, a suitable chip for a certain design. And, yeah, I can tell you, here's a stat for you. I think there are 398 different lithium-ion battery charger chips on the market. I may have missed a couple, but let's round it up to 400.

Dave Jones: Okay. So, that's without all the variations in, like, package types and lead-free and...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's just listed on the manufacturer's websites. And there are 22 different manufacturers. I think I'm quoting that from memory, because it's etched in there. 22 different manufacturers of lithium-ion battery chips. And searching for something like this is not something you can do just on DigiKey or Mouser, as I've done a whole video blog and we've talked about before the parametric search. Yeah. Really, because I was searching for very specific stuff for a niche application.

Dave Jones: Right. And that's a limitation of that, too, because you can't search for, oh, well, I need it to be able to charge in two seconds, whatever the hell you're searching for. Exactly. Because not every chip conforms to that.

Chris Gammell: DigiKey and Mouser won't have that search capability. In my case, I wanted to search for a very low-capacity battery, which is quite unusual. Most chips are designed for, you know, an amp or two amps, several amps. Yeah. You know, well, from the range several hundred milliamps up to several amps is the typical range where 80, 90% of the parts are actually manufactured for.

Dave Jones: Dave, are we talking amps or amp hours? Amps. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Because capacity... Milliamp hours, I shorten it to, yeah. Okay. I just wanted to get amp hour in there.

Dave Jones: You know, talk about amp hours, you know. Yep. Amp hours.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, I just shorten it. Okay. Because, well, you know, it's easier. Right. Anyway, everyone knows what I'm talking about. When you're talking about, because I said up front, we're talking about capacity. So everyone should know, oh, it's Dave's actually talking about milliamp hours. Right.

Dave Jones: Coulombs per hour times hour equals coulombs. That's capacity.

Chris Gammell: Yep. So, yeah, anyway, so this is a very low-capacity battery, which is a very niche application. And also, it was a 4.1 volt battery, which uses a Coke anode, it's called, as opposed to a graphite anode, which is 4.2 volts. And I'm going to have to do a blog on this, probably my next blog, because it's so on my mind. Yeah. That's probably what my next blog's going to be on. Anyway, and once again, like, you know, only about 90% of the parts out there are for 4.2 volts. So I had to search through and filter 4.1. Thankfully, that's an easy characteristic search. Most manufacturers will, you know, you can sort by 4.1, 4.2. So you can do a good first pass on that. Yeah. But then when you've got to go through and look at each individual data sheet to see if it can do the minimum current you require. Oh, yeah. That's not a parametric search.

Dave Jones: No, looking through data sheets by itself is pretty rough.

Chris Gammell: And you learn to, like, flick through really quickly. And, you know, and hopefully your eye captures the figure that, or the graph that you're actually after.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You know, and speaking of data sheets, we were, this is another Twitter conversation, but we were talking about how people, I was asking how people read data sheets at the bench and talking about, like, iPads versus tablets and everything like that. And I just wanted to call out this one because Paul Clark.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. This sounds cool.

Dave Jones: This thing looks awesome. I mean, it.

Chris Gammell: I haven't seen it yet.

Dave Jones: Where's the link? There's a. Which number is it? 30 on our list. But it looks like probably the coolest product ever, but I'm pretty sure it's fake. I mean, it's just got to be fake. It's $99 for, you know, e-ink, and you can write on it, and it's a 13-inch tablet, and you can store PDFs on it. And it just seems like the dream tablet, but it's vaporware right now, or as they call it in this article, buzzware, because it's all buzz.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. It looks like a rendered product. It looks. It's rendered.

Dave Jones: But if it was real, I mean, just anyone. Just make it. I don't care. I'll pay three times that. I'll pay eight times that. Like, it looks amazing. It's, you know, it's very catchy, you know? And in terms of, like, what an engineer could use on their bench, this is it. You know, like, people.

Chris Gammell: This is it. I would buy one of these. Absolutely.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And so, you know, we were talking about iPads, and I was asking about Kindles, and you have a Kindle. Oh, yep. And, you know, Kindle DX would be good for data sheets, but, you know, data sheets is tough.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, because it's got a bigger screen, but still only nine inch. It's not A4 size. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Or letter size, as the U.S. is. Yep. You guys aren't in A4 yet, are you?

Dave Jones: No. Not yet.

Chris Gammell: Or the A sizes.

Dave Jones: I call it eight and a half by 11. That's what I call it. Right. That's the inches for people that don't know. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So, hopefully this, I don't know if this thing's going to come out, but I thought that was interesting just because you're mentioning data sheets.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's brilliant.

Chris Gammell: And there doesn't need to be much in it, though. I mean, it'd be nice if it had Wi-Fi, of course, so that you could wirelessly transfer stuff. And it'd have to have an SD card slot. But even if it just had an SD card. And like a thousand other things. You know, and you put the PDFs on there and it just read that, I would still buy it. Yeah. Even if it didn't have Wi-Fi or any other, you know, stuff in it. And because, really, there wouldn't be much. There'd be a low-power processor to drive the display and there's the display itself. And it's touch, of course, so it's got to have a membrane on the top of that.

Dave Jones: Because you need to be able to write on it. That's what this thing is for.

Chris Gammell: Because there's no keyboard. Well, you don't even need that. If it was just a document viewing device, you wouldn't even need the touchscreen, which draws extra power.

Dave Jones: That's true. But I think having a sketch pad, too.

Chris Gammell: And it affects the display, as well, because you've got to look through it. Yeah. So, it...

Dave Jones: I don't know. This got me really excited about stuff. And then I realized that there's a list on Wikipedia, actually, of all the available tablets, and none of them come even close to this, which also points out that it's probably fake. But... Right. Man, it looks awesome.

Chris Gammell: Well, such a large e-ink display wouldn't be cheap, I guess. No. And for $99. But they're coming down in price with the Kindle drive in it and all the other e-books.

Speaker ?: That's true.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Because the e-ink display... We've talked about this before. And you called me on it once. But have you actually ever seen in person an e-ink display?

Dave Jones: Yes. My mom has a Kindle.

Chris Gammell: Oh, and they're freaking awesome. I know. They are so awesome. Just the contrast of the... I know. It looks like... It's better than ink on paper. And no LCD will ever match that. Can't. Yeah. You know? And LCDs have been researched for... And refined in manufacturing processes for 30, 40 years or something now. And they won't... Have not even gotten close and they never will. E-ink just totally buried it overnight in terms of replacing paper. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So... But of course they can't do... You know... Well, they can do color now. But they can't do high motion video and all that sort of stuff. Right. Yeah. So... Yeah. The high refresh rate.

Dave Jones: It's a segmentation. But I was looking at it for just reading data sheets outside.

Speaker ?: It's a branch off.

Chris Gammell: It's not going to kill LCD anytime soon.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: But if you're doing... And e-books would not be popular now if it wasn't for the e-ink display. I guarantee it.

Dave Jones: I agree with that. Yeah. I think that's a big part of it. Yeah. Because people weren't reading it on LCDs before even when there were products. Or reading on their computers.

Chris Gammell: And the battery life is too low. But when the Kindle comes out and it's got a one month battery life.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's sick.

Chris Gammell: And this display that's better than paper.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, you can go, hey, sold.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I agree.

Chris Gammell: Right. So...

Dave Jones: Mm.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Brilliant. So that's just great. I would definitely...

Dave Jones: Yeah. Definitely buy one of those. I'll post a link to that, man. It'll have people drooling. But hopefully it'll come out at some point. But yeah, I don't know if it will.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of PDFs and data sheets. Yes. Sure. I've probably ranted on this before. But I'm going to have another rant. Oh, no. Because I've had to look at so many data sheets. I hate manufacturers who do not save the PDF file name the same as the part number.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. So it's not in the name.

Chris Gammell: You know, instead of, you know, it's not a microchip MCP, you know, 5500 or something. It's a... Call it, you know, an XYZ1234.pdf. Yeah. That's horrible.

Dave Jones: What is that bullshit? That's horrible.

Chris Gammell: You know, you've got to rename... If you want to download it to your heart, you've got to rename the damn thing so you can find it.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Later. It's just crazy. Yep. Please. There's a couple of manufacturers that do this. Microchip's one of them. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Those guys.

Chris Gammell: I could name a couple of them. There's like five or six at least that I encountered in my search that did that. That's a real pain in the ass. Yep. Stop it. Yep.

Dave Jones: So I'm going to try and squeeze in chip of the week before we go. I know we've got a couple of minutes left, but...

Chris Gammell: Oh. Oh, shit. Our one hour's up. Yeah. Our amp hours up.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Sorry.

Dave Jones: That's okay. Let me just squeeze it in real quick, though, because I've heard about this, and it's a really cool chip. I had never heard of it before, so people know about...

Chris Gammell: And you're an analog guy. I know. This is hilarious. I know.

Dave Jones: It's crazy. Have you heard of this kind of chip? Just before we actually showed it to this.

Chris Gammell: Of course I have. Man, I don't know how the hell... Back in that... I heard of these back in the bloody 70s and early 80s, for goodness sake.

Dave Jones: I don't know what it is. I've just slipped my mind. I've just never seen them. Anyways, a friend at work was telling me about these. So, people know op amps. That stands for operational amplifier because you can add, subtract, and do all this analog math, right? Well, there's stuff that's missing from that, which is a multiplier. And I didn't realize... I just kind of never really thought about it. Just the stuff I've been doing has not required it. Sure. Yeah. So, it's AD633 is a multiplier. And, you know, in itself, it doesn't sound like much up front. Okay, you're going to multiply two signals together. But when you think about the applications, that's pretty damn cool. And so, the thing to look at this in this data sheet is the application notes. It's all about, like, modulation, demodulation.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And that was why...

Chris Gammell: All that RF stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that was why I really haven't seen it much because I'm not modulating stuff, right? But, yeah, man, it's cool. You can do some fun stuff, you know? Analog math. Absolutely. Great chip. It's chip of the week. Chip of the week. And I'm sure all the hams will, you know, chide me for not knowing this chip or other types that are like it. But, yeah, whatever. I'm just getting started, folks. All right. Chris is just a noob. I'm a noob. Yep. With a double O. So, do we have anything else this week? Anything else in the amp hour? Not really.

Chris Gammell: We had, like, 44 points or something. Yeah. And we didn't even cover.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Half of those. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, well. Carry over to next week. Yeah. Keep on dragging along with us. There's stuff from, like, six weeks ago on here.

Chris Gammell: Keep on trucking.

Dave Jones: Yep. All right. So, people. As they say in the U.S., don't they? Some people. Not me. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: Guys who wear caps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Trucker ads. There you go.

Dave Jones: So, if people have comments, we can always be reached on Twitter. Or leaving comments on the websites is always appreciated. Telling your friends. Yes. So, they crash our shiny new server. A server. Because we have so many listens. That'd be great, too. And if you have any suggestions, we have a suggestions page, too. So, hit us up on there.

Chris Gammell: Absolutely. We'll talk to you next week.

Dave Jones: I know it's Coulombs per second. Duh.