#53 – Biarchy Birthday Bavardage

Chris Gammell: Welcome to the Amp Hour.

Dave Jones: I'm Dave Jones from the EEV Blog. And I'm Chris Gammell from Chris Gammell's Analog Life.

Chris Gammell: Hit the music. I don't know, are we allowed to play this song? Are we going to get it hit for copyright? No, no one gives a shit. Come on. That's alright. Yeah. Well, we've got to get at least the first song. I should have queued it up a little better. Yeah, you should have. We could just start singing ourselves. Keep going. Say it's your birthday.

Dave Jones: Say it's your birthday. Say it's your birthday. Say it's your birthday. Alright. There you go. Alright, happy birthday to us.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's less than 30 seconds, I think.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. We can't even... You can't even sing happy birthday without getting sued. I know. You know, either that or the regular happy birthday song.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's the happy birthday to you. Oh.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm not going to hit there. There you go. Ah, we don't care. Come on.

Chris Gammell: Nah. So, 52 episodes in the back. This is number 53, folks. That's right. Three, yeah. We have made it one year.

Dave Jones: We sort of goofed last week. We sort of thought it was the... Yeah. It had been a year.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Which it kind of had, because we had put 52 in the can.

Chris Gammell: And before congratulating us on the page and everything, right?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: It's close.

Dave Jones: So, I don't know. But yeah, technically, this week is out. Yes, we have done 52, but...

Chris Gammell: Right. Today, we turned one. Yes.

Dave Jones: Well, actually, it's not the actual date. Didn't somebody say it was August or something? No, it was the last week of July. That's about right.

Chris Gammell: Oh, was it?

Dave Jones: Okay. Yeah. There you go. Yep.

Chris Gammell: This crazy experiment keeps on rolling. Keeps on rolling, man. It does. And we still have no clue, do we? Nope. I'll tell you what I'm not going to do is go back and listen. And... Right. It's just... Every episode. Well, not even that. I just... It's just so bad. Like, you know, it's not like... Well, maybe it's bad, but it's just... It's so hard to hear it, you know? We've tried out new things. We sort of know what we're doing now. I'm sure in a year from now, we'll go back and look at the videos and be like, what were we thinking?

Dave Jones: Yeah, the videos are shit, because we would have finally figured that out or something, right?

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Yeah. And so, that's another thing to mention. I messed it up. I am responsible. I said last week there would be a video, and basically what happened was, I have to do a screen capture, because there's no Google Plus way to do this easily yet. And the... First off, the recorder ran out of room, because I have it on an older laptop. And second off, Dave's getting calls... No, I'm just kidding. Second off, the... We still haven't figured out that calling part.

Dave Jones: No, no. It's got to be another calling. It's got to be another...

Chris Gammell: Don't do it, Dave. Another one from Hicksville.

Dave Jones: All right, I won't do it.

Chris Gammell: All right.

Dave Jones: I won't answer it.

Chris Gammell: All right.

Dave Jones: Somebody took me to task, because there is a real Hicksville in the US.

Chris Gammell: That's right, there is. Yep.

Dave Jones: I... Apologies to anyone living in Hicksville. We have at least one viewer. Yeah. Sorry, I forget your name, who actually lives in Hicksville. I don't know where Hicksville comes from. It's just a generic, you know, like, you know, some Hick town is a common expression. Is that an expression over there? Yeah. Like a small Hick town?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's... Kind of thing.

Dave Jones: And then there's a natural extension to Hicksville, and I've heard it before, and I...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it actually exists. It does. Anyways, before that phone call, before that caller got ignored, the video last week got messed up, basically, because I saved it in this proprietary format from this crappy program that couldn't end up rendering the video, so it got locked in that format, and forever it will stay, unfortunately.

Dave Jones: And he can't figure out how to export it, so...

Chris Gammell: I have no idea. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that's broken, so... What are you going to do? Hopefully this... I'm trying something new this week. We'll see if it works this week. No promises, though. If you're just listening, you probably don't even care, so...

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. As most of our listeners are.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: But it will be uploaded. We do have an Amp Hour YouTube channel. Yawn. Okay. Yep. A radio show has a YouTube channel. Wonderful.

Chris Gammell: Ah, well. So, speaking of people that are listening to us, I heard there's a new awesome way to listen to the Amp Hour. Oh, there is. This is fantastic. Who did this? Ah, D-I-C-S. So, dicks it is. Dicks. Good on you, dicks. That's one of the EEV blog forum members, so...

Dave Jones: Yep. Where is it on the list? I've got a...

Chris Gammell: I've got a call... It's up top on our list. It's actually from the... It's actually from the EEV blog forum. He posted a video.

Speaker ?: Oh, right.

Chris Gammell: Of course.

Dave Jones: Duh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, and I already had it up. Duh. Double duh. And, yeah. He's got a YouTube video. He's got a... He's got a... What is it? Atmel on a breadboard. So, it's a lashed up breadboard prototype. No, sorry. It's a pick. To all you pick fans. Sorry. I use the evil Atmel word. He's got a pick. 18F25J10. Don't you just hate picks numbers? Like, they're just... Like, they've got so many of them. There's like 500 bloody processors they've got. They've got these weird numbers. It's crazy. Anyway, it's running at 40 megahertz and he's playing the amp power as an 8-bit PCM from a card, from an SD card, through a PWM DAC and a one transistor amplifier.

Chris Gammell: It's awesome. So awesome.

Dave Jones: I would love to hear how it sounds. I actually... Oh, yeah. You actually can hear it in the YouTube video, can't you? So...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There might be some compression losses, but I'm guessing the distortion on the PCM wave sound is really what you're hearing. So it's probably pretty accurate. But it's great. That's good stuff. It's really great.

Dave Jones: And it's a really ugly breadboard prototype, you know? No, man. It's a thing of beauty. Why is it hanging all over the place? Oh, yeah. It's beautiful. In fact, it looks like he's just got some extra stuff from some other project or something hanging on there as well. I'm sure it's not. Yeah. Brilliant. I love it. So there you go. Can anyone beat that? Where are you listening to the Amp Hour? Are you currently on top of Mount Everest or something very cool like that?

Chris Gammell: Probably not anything that extreme. No. Right. I think our crowd's mostly indoor kids like me. Right. I've been saying that all summer.

Dave Jones: White pasty.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's summer here. I don't like bugs. I don't like the sun. I am an indoor kid. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Just like me. I burn in about two minutes in the sun. Yeah. But I do go out in the sun.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, that's good.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I have to slip, slop, slap as we call it here.

Chris Gammell: Nice.

Dave Jones: Yep. Slip, slop, slap, which is slip on a hat, slop on the sunscreen. Slip on a hat. No, slap on a hat. Sorry. Slip on the... Oh, sorry. Slip on a shirt. Here we go. I'll get it right. All right. Here we go. Slip on a shirt, slop on the sunscreen, and slap on a hat. There you go. That's the... It was just like... It was like a marketing thing that they had probably back in the 80s, I think it was.

Chris Gammell: Like a public service kind of thing? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like a public service thing, telling people to cover up, the sun will give you cancer and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And it worked. Everyone knows the slip, slop, slap campaign. Yeah. It's amazing how those things stick with you.

Chris Gammell: I mean...

Dave Jones: Those things can stick. Yeah. So marketing does work sometimes, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That's okay for the good things like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. As opposed to... We've got an item here about the tech shop in San Francisco. What are they trying to do here? You put this one on here, but they're trying to pay... Is it $25,000 to put an ad on the side of a bus or something? What's the deal there?

Chris Gammell: Oh, I've lost this. I haven't seen this. I mean, I put it on here, but I don't know where this is. So tech shop, the tech shop in San Francisco, if people don't know, is a place where you can go. It's like... Basically, it's like a... It's a gym for people, for indoor kids, right? That's how I think of it. Right. For us nerds.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So it's not actually a hackerspace?

Chris Gammell: No. Tech shop is like you pay like $100 or $120 a month, and you get access to the top-of-the-line stuff. So hackerspaces are donated or second-hand kind of stuff. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: Okay. But this is kick-ass stuff. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Like high-end laser cutters, lathes, milling machines, everything else. So anyways, they are in conjunction with a bunch of hackerspaces in the Bay Area are trying to get the word out basically about invention. I believe the campaign's called Invent. And so Tech Shop, who is this commercial venture, is matching donations for this advertising campaign they want to have where they're talking about getting out and venting and getting to hackerspaces or tech shops or anything else like that. And so if people donate money to that, probably if you're in the Bay Area, it would be the most localized. But if you're interested in doing it outside that area, you can also do it. But yeah, it's just a new campaign coming up, and it's worth looking at.

Dave Jones: So is all the money going towards a billboard campaign?

Chris Gammell: I believe so, yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. See, yeah, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, not necessarily one billboard campaign. Maybe not, yeah. An advertising campaign.

Dave Jones: Yeah, still, I can't help but think that billboards for stuff like this is just money down the drain. I see it all the time in all these small groups. They all think that they have to get a billboard out there, and they put all money, they put $50,000 towards a billboard, or they spend $50,000 taking out a half-page ad in the newspaper and stuff like that. I can't help but think it's poor value for money. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, maybe less so in the Bay Area, but I would tend to agree that, yeah, if you're putting up a billboard in Cleveland about a tech shop...

Dave Jones: Oh, no, I'm sure it's, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You're just going to miss most of the population because, first off, they're not going to know what it is, and second off, going from a billboard to taking action is very, very difficult.

Dave Jones: But surely the people who are going to be interested in that sort of stuff and are going to take action already have. So you're almost preaching to the converted there, and you're paying money to... I see it as that for niche stuff like this, you are paying money to preach to the unconverted who really won't convert anyway. So that's the idea, right? I was going to say, advertising is preaching to the unconverted. Right. But, yeah, but those people just...

Chris Gammell: What you do is you go out and you try and convince people of your viewpoint, and then if they go for it, you win.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but what's the viewpoint? What are they... That invention's a good idea. Invention, you just do anyway. People who want to do it, just do it. And they're advertising Maker and Hacker Dojo and Noisebridge and Tech Shop and Tech Museum, I see on the big billboard sign here. But I don't know. I just can't help but think it's billboards for niche stuff like this is just flushing it. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: You can't say that always, though. You can't always say, oh, the people who do it are going to be doing it. That's the thing.

Dave Jones: Well, no. But, yeah. I mean, how many... I just think you can spend your money better elsewhere. It's just a... You know, you'll probably get some people from it, but I don't think it would be many.

Chris Gammell: Are you trying to get them to advertise on your website or something, Dave? No. It's not going to work here, man. It's not going to work here.

Dave Jones: No, it's not.

Chris Gammell: I mean, eventually all advertising is kind of throwing a... It is throwing a poo against the wall and hoping some of it sticks, right?

Dave Jones: But that's the... Yeah. You're throwing your own... Gee, does Dave have a baby? He's not the stage of throwing his feces against the wall yet. That's good. It's all self-contained. Yes. But, yeah. That's the typical advertising thing, isn't it? Is that it's... Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I just... It's good that they're matching. There's better, cleverer ways to advertise. Advertising, you shouldn't have to spend money. You know, local newspapers and stuff like that, if you give them a compelling story, they will advertise you for free. You know, so... Anyway. Yeah. Anyway, it's not my money, so I hope it works. I hope it works, guys. But that's just my off-the-cuff thing about advertising. I see it all the time, and I can't help it, you know.

Chris Gammell: Dave, the man who makes his livelihood off of advertising, does not agree with advertising.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I don't. I don't have to agree with it, but I'll happily make a living from it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No.

Dave Jones: No, no. But, see, we're talking about large companies, right? For large companies, it's not a big deal. But for small companies like this who are raising funds, see, that's my problem, right? Is that, you know, they're raising this money, and that money could probably be better spent elsewhere. I just... You know, you're pissing away on a couple of billboards. And there's a similar thing in Australia. There's a group called, you know, there's a group... They... This is all they do, right? They raise money, and they're like a... I'm not even sure what they are, really. They're like a social conscience group or something, and they tackle... And they protest about all sorts of social issues and things. And they raise... And they've got, like, 200,000 members across Australia, and they raise money. And they take out these huge full-page ads in the newspaper and stuff like that that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it's like, oh, geez. And they make these really good videos, they make these awesome videos that go viral all the time. And I can't help but think that, you know, just do the video and let it go viral and let the media advertise for you. And you won't have to spend a cent on your half-page ad, you know, or your full-page ad. Anyway, let's stop talking about advertising.

Chris Gammell: I don't like it. We don't have to talk about advertising anymore. I think it's interesting with this. I mean, maybe they're trying to reach... You know, if you think about it, there's a lot of engineers that are not online, especially, like, older engineers, maybe ones who would want to mentor and stuff like that. So if that's the case, that could be really money well spent, if you're chasing those markets. But it's easy for us to say that everybody's online, right? Because we're online.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but that's not what the campaign's about. The campaign's about invent. So, you know... Yeah, but if you're just getting the word...

Chris Gammell: How's that going to spur someone online to... Well, I don't know. I don't think it exists. I don't think the campaign actually exists yet. I think they're just ramping up. Oh, right.

Dave Jones: They're just throwing it out there as an idea, are they? Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they've got $19,980 to go.

Speaker ?: That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yikes.

Dave Jones: It reminds me of the famous Altium Billboard campaign. Altium paid huge dollars to put these huge billboards up across San Francisco, I think it was. Well, near Silicon Valley somewhere, I think it was. And it was, yeah, it was just much laughed at at the time. Yeah. Anyway, billboards, big money. These things cost big money too. They aren't cheap, you know? No, they're not cheap at all. If you can get a billboard for a grand or something, you can yourself... I reckon you should just start... Not that I promote breaking the law or anything like that, but you could go around with one of these laser projectors and you could just, at night time, just project your ad on the side of a building somewhere and leave it there for an hour and then bugger off, you know?

Chris Gammell: Or put it on a robot and have the robot drive away. If it sees someone coming, it drives off. That'd be pretty sweet, actually. That'd be awesome. That would be great, you know? That sounds like a hell of a project. Or like a quadcopter holding on one of those. Come on, Hackerspaces, get on it.

Dave Jones: Oh, like a... Yeah. Yeah, they wouldn't be able to catch it. They wouldn't be able to catch the quadcopter, you know? Someone give that shot here. With a projector. You see the cops down there taking pot shots at the quadcopter.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah, there you go.

Dave Jones: That'd be brilliant.

Chris Gammell: There you go.

Dave Jones: There you go, guys. There's a better idea. There's The Amp Hour's idea. Well, Dave's idea, anyway. Chris might want to distance himself from it. There's our idea to more effectively use your funds. Build a quadcopter and get a laser projector. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That'd be pretty sweet. That would be great. So, since we're on the subject of Hackerspaces, I mean... So, we are an electronic show, but, I mean, Hackerspaces are a burgeoning thing, and we've talked about it on here a lot. And I kind of wanted to talk about it a little bit more, just because the college I went to, my alma mater, is actually talking about building one. Not building one. They're actually talking about building an inventing side to the school, basically, more of a tinker lab kind of thing. But also, they're talking about possibly pairing up with a local hackerspace. And so, I was kind of interested in this. Very cool. Had you ever heard of any schools that had paired up or done this kind of thing, Dave?

Dave Jones: In Australia, well, Sydney, I don't hear about other ones in other states much. Oh, they do not so much just general stuff like that. You know, they set up very specific labs. You know, some unis might set up like a specific circuit board making lab or something like that, you know, where you can make boards and stuff like that. But they're not open. Is this thing open to the public, or is it...

Chris Gammell: Well, this is still in its concept phase. So, I went to Case Western Reserve, if people don't know that. Yeah. And it's called Think Box. And actually, it's by this guy. I think one of the people behind it is Larry Sears. I'm not completely sure if he's like the... He's not the only one behind it. But he's actually, you know, a local philanthropist. And he started a company around here and stuff. Right. Anyways, it's still in concept. So, that's why I was asking around if it's existed anywhere else. But the idea would be it's going to be such a big building. The building that it's planned to be in is going to be so big that it's just tons of room.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's going to have its own dedicated building.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's pretty huge. That takes big dosh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And that's why... And I think they got like a special donor just for this and everything too. Right. So, it's very exciting. I mean, for even just being in the area. So, if you had a publicly, you know, school-based area and a hackerspace area, which would be then a public area, you know, you could do a lot of really cool stuff like that.

Dave Jones: And that's where? Where is that? Is that Texas?

Chris Gammell: I live in Cleveland, Dave.

Dave Jones: Oh, no. But I thought you went to school. So, I thought you went to another state. Oh, no.

Chris Gammell: I used to live in Texas. I went to school in Cleveland, moved to Texas and moved back because, you know, I'm an idiot.

Speaker ?: Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, yeah. It's really exciting. And so, I was asking around on like Twitter and other things. And there are a couple out there. Some like more... So, what I was really looking for was like a publicly... Like a school-funded what effectively was a hackerspace. Right. So, come here... Yeah, I don't have anything like that here.

Dave Jones: And I'm surprised it's in Cleveland. Like, I'd expect something like that in Silicon Valley. But I wouldn't expect it in somewhere like Cleveland. Sorry. No offense to Cleveland. No, it's okay.

Chris Gammell: It's okay. I mean, that's why I'm so excited about it.

Dave Jones: You know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's great.

Chris Gammell: So, I came up with a term. If this ever does go through, I came up with a term to trademark. I want to call them... Oh, God. Hit us. Hack diversities. Or hackerversities, rather. Hack diversities.

Dave Jones: Or makerversities. I don't mind that. Yeah. And I like it, too.

Chris Gammell: Because, I mean, like... So, one of the things about my school was you had to be full... You had to be like a mechanical engineering student to get in the machine lab. And you had to be, you know, a material science student to get into the foundry. And a double E to get into the certain double E labs. You know? Like, so all that kind of stuff. You know? And there's no place to actually just go and do everything yourself. And so, this is effectively going to be like the tech space or the tech shop we were talking about. But instead, on a college campus. And a tech shop, you have to get trained up on everything. You know? You have to learn how to use a lathe so you don't slice your finger off. But once you do, then you're, you know, you can just go and... You're sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Use anything. So, other places I talked to some people about. One was called Builds. I have to... Some of them are just websites. I have to be reminded about some of these. So, I believe Builds... Where is this one? It's at Boston University. And so, that's kind of a... So, it's a student-run research lab and workshop that, you know, these Boston University students can go and try stuff out there. And, you know, 24-7. I think 24-7 is a big part of it, too. Right. Another one, the people brought up were... Auburn has one, apparently. This SPARK, the Student Project and Research Committee. And... Oh, what else is there? Man, there's a couple. There's a couple. I like this. I mean, none of them were... I guess I had... That's building up. Yeah. And I had this idea in my head, but... You know, of what I was expecting. And there are some that are similar. And then there's, like, MIT-ers. That's a... Yep. Which might be said MITERS. But... Same kind of thing. You know, as they say, I founded this club to give them free and open access to computers. Now it has more stuff like welders and lathes and bandsaws and everything else. So that's kind of the idea, too. And you'd expect MIT to have that kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you would. And then someone...

Dave Jones: If anyone knows of anything in Sydney or Melbourne here, please shoot me an email. And I'll be sure to check it out. And it will go on my list of places to visit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I was going to say, Dave needs some more video blog locations to be shot on location. Yes, I do.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. And actually, not just those sort of places, but if you've got any other good ideas for something that would make... I'm hijacking the amp hour here, but that's a lot of regular views. If you want to see something in Sydney or Melbourne, because I will be hopefully going to Melbourne next... In September. So, yes, I'll be hopefully visiting a few places there while I'm there, making use of my trip. So, that will be good. If you've got any ideas for places or people I should visit that would make a good blog episode, please let me know.

Chris Gammell: All right. That's good. Yeah, Dave, can you go to Cleveland? Thank you. What do you think about that?

Dave Jones: At Cleveland, yay. No worries. It's only, what, 18 hours away or something?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, horrible flights. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And so, one last one...

Chris Gammell: I think it's 15 hours to Dallas and then... Yeah. And then another two. So, one last one that people brought up is the MIT Media Lab. Have you ever heard of that, Dave? Yes, I have. Yeah. So, that actually... I didn't realize how massively funded that was. And that's actually probably the best example in terms of schools doing innovative things that are like really cool things and way off the map of most other, you know, like... So, they get... Electrical engineering department might be doing research, whereas this is more... The Media Lab does more of application type research, right? And they have some serious money.

Dave Jones: You know, they do autonomous robots and they do all sorts of weird and wonderful things, you know, new, you know, brainwave interfaces and stuff like that. Right, exactly. And all sorts of funky stuff. Yeah. Whereas the labs I've heard of in the past have always been very specific, you know, like a uni, as I said, will have like a specific lab for, you know, building circuit boards or they'll have a lab for...

Chris Gammell: Like lasers or...

Dave Jones: Investigating lasers or, you know, hearing or solar cell research or something like that. You know, very specific things, but not just a general lab where you can do everything, which is where the change is coming around, I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And I... Yeah, I like that too, because, I mean, you think about in terms of time and everything else, people want to be able to just go and build their own stuff and just get it done. So, that's...

Dave Jones: But the big question is, with this new one that you're talking about, will... Will Joe Public have access to it?

Chris Gammell: That is... That's the big question. That is the question. And even if it acts as a tech shop where you have to pay, that's okay.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. I'm sure, you know, it'll be a fee-based thing, but that's pretty groovy.

Chris Gammell: But if you can pay to be a member, that's great then, yeah. Yeah. So...

Dave Jones: Absolutely.

Chris Gammell: So, that's... We've got news. We do have news.

Dave Jones: Yes. Hit it. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. That's the news coming off the teletype. Yep. Here in the Amp Hour studio. No, it's not. It's retro news. It's retro news. I'm excited because it's a calculator. You're excited, yeah. And I actually predicted this. It must have been a year ago.

Chris Gammell: What really excites Dave, the fact that he's right.

Dave Jones: Right. Is that my prediction came true? Yeah. It's not official yet. This is all a big marketing mistake by Hewlett-Packard, not Agilent, Hewlett-Packard, who are going to release the new, well, the old retro HP 15C Voyager calculator. Voyager is the series of calculators. The landscape format calculators. We'll have to put up a link and a photo to it if you don't know. And if you don't know, you probably don't care. But if you do know, if you were around in the 80s and you do remember the famous HP 15C calculator, I think it came out in about 82 or something and it finished and they actually produced it up until the end of the 80s. And there's been a big campaign for enthusiasts to actually bring back the HP 15C and they've finally done it.

Chris Gammell: So tell me, what is a, why, why? I don't get it.

Dave Jones: Because it fits in your pocket. It's small. Why? Why? Okay. You've got to love, you've got to be a calculator, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it says it sells for hundreds of dollars and thousands of individuals to sign a petition. Why? This thing is a 10-digit. Oh, you could, what, a 10-digit?

Dave Jones: You could sell if, no, it's just like a 10-digit calculator. It's got, you know, it does advance, you know, it does some advanced matrix stuff and stuff like that. But, and it uses RPN, of course. Right. It doesn't use the standard algebraic entry system. But it's just small. It fits in your pocket. And it famously runs for about 20 years on one set of batteries. Okay. That's impressive, yeah. Yeah. But it's, people just fell in love with this little thing. And it was this, you know, industry standard engineering calculator almost.

Chris Gammell: It was the HP 15C. This is Dave being nostalgic here. I don't see the value in it, but I mean.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's me. Yeah. Me being nostalgic. But, and they, and if you've got one, seriously, they sell for about a really, one in a pristine box, pristine condition. They'll sell for like 600 bucks on eBay. That's ridiculous. I'm not kidding. That is ridiculous. People, I think, you know, one of them's even made over four figures or something like that because it was like a low serial number, you know. And there's nerds out there who bloody collect these things and pay an absolute fortune. Anyway, HP, they canned it, you know, back in the late 80s. And, but they kept their 12C calculator going, which is the industry standard financial calculator. Everyone in the finance industry, you know, all big CEOs and, you know, CFOs, they all use the HP 12C, which is exactly the same style of it. Chris is laughing at my nerdiness here.

Chris Gammell: I just, I mean, I don't get it. I don't get it, Dave. Why are people using these still?

Dave Jones: Well, I know. They are very archaic to use. The display is very archaic, you know.

Chris Gammell: But, I don't know. I mean, I guess I have a TI-30A. I mean, like, it's a 30XA, whatever. I guess it's, I mean, I like having these on my desk, but I don't need it to be an old school HP one. I mean, is it like a nerd cred thing? Is that what?

Dave Jones: It's a nerd cred thing. And in the finance industry, it's got finance cred too. You know. Okay. You know, if you're a finance professional, if you don't whip out your 12C from your pocket, then you're a loser, quite frankly. And, yeah, that's, anyway, they kept that going because there were huge sales for that. And, of course, it's what they teach in the finance schools too. So, they teach you, you know, they train you how to do all your, you know, financial calculations on the 12C. And so, there was still a big market for that. So, they kept it going. And a couple of years back, they actually, they couldn't actually make the ASIC anymore. The original ASIC they designed back in the 80s. They just, you know, for some reason.

Chris Gammell: They're like, sorry guys, 20 micron line widths. We don't do that anymore.

Dave Jones: We don't do 20 micron fabs anymore. We can print this crap at home. Because it's only got, yeah. I mean, if you want some tech specs, the process has only got, let me pull it up here. It's only got 85,000 transistors, right? It's not a huge, and that includes like the memory and everything.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow. Yeah, I'm sure from that perspective, it is very, you know, awesome to look at. I bet you could open the back of, you know, or get down in there with a microscope. Oh, yeah, you could. Yep. Actually tell it to be able to use everything.

Dave Jones: And it draws 250 microwatts during operation. And 10 nanoamps, you know, leakage, you know, standby current when you actually switch it off.

Chris Gammell: That's pretty awesome, yeah.

Dave Jones: And that's why the batteries last for like, you know, 15, like the shelf life, basically. So, and it's slow as well, right? These things are slow. These things are not quick. You sort of run your calculation if it's a, you know, if you're doing a large calculation, you can wait, you know, 10 minutes for your answer kind of thing. So, anyway, they redesigned it because they couldn't make the ASIC anymore. So, they redesigned the whole architecture based on a new ARM chip, right? And then they got the original ROMs and they emulated the original processor so they could run the original ROM so that they were, because nobody, especially in the finance industry, would tolerate a single bug in that calculator, right? So, the only way to guarantee that it worked exactly like the original one was to actually emulate it and use the original ROM. So, when you do an emulator like that, it pretty much either works or it doesn't kind of thing. You know, it's much easier to prove than to write all the algorithms for each calculation again from scratch kind of thing. So, yeah, so they emulated the ROM and they bought that out as a new calculator. But, of course, the battery life went to shit. And I took them to task. I've mentioned this on here before. I took them to task way back in a very early blog that they goofed that up because they ran the thing at 30 megahertz and it's powered from a coin cell battery and it takes gulps of current from the battery and it's very inefficient and et cetera, et cetera. So, anyway, they redesigned the whole thing. And then I thought, hey, all you need to do to turn it into a 15C or a 10C or something like that is a new set of key tops and a new ROM. And because all their calculators, the 12C and the 15C were based on the same architecture, exactly the same process, exactly the same keyboard and everything, just different key legends and all that sort of stuff. So, anyway, I predicted that they would actually release a 15C. That'd be crazy not to. And they've finally done it. Well, not yet. Because it appeared on the Japanese HP website and somebody found it and it wasn't, they actually hadn't announced it yet. And, oops, they took it down very quickly. But there was the photo and the specs and, you know, everything. So, ah, anyway, it's fantastic. They've finally done it. It's very cool. But it's based on a new ARM chip. So, there you go. It looks exactly like the original calculator. Feels exactly like the original calculator. But it's powered from a new ARM processor instead of an old-fashioned, you know, 14-bit, I think it was. Don't quote me on that. Custom ASIC processor. So, back in the 80s. Are there any other products that get, you know, rehashed like that? Any other retro products that actually make a comeback in their original form? I don't, I can't remember too many.

Chris Gammell: I, ah. If you do. I don't have that kind of historical perspective for you, Dave. I'm sorry. No, because you're not old enough. Right.

Dave Jones: Anyway, ah, how, ah, what did I rant off for 10 minutes there about calculator? I think you're too close to calculators.

Chris Gammell: You and your little watch.

Dave Jones: Anyway, it's just, it's very exciting that they would do that. That they would actually bring back a such a, you know, a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old. Actually, it's almost 30 years old. 30-year-old calculator, seriously. That's how old it is. 1982, I think, it first came out. So, there you go. So, which means they would have designed it in, you know, 81. And it literally is 30 years old.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, you mentioned, you mentioned Japan. And you had a thing up a while ago from, ah, HAKO? HAKO? How do you say that? The soldering manufacturer. The soldering iron manufacturer. Oh, HAKO. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Some people pronounce it HAKO. Yeah. I do believe the, well, here in Australia, it's HAKO. So, there you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Uh, I wanted to call this thing out because it is, uh, it is loads of fun to read this thing. Uh, uh-oh. Oh, is this this comic? Uh, we lost our video, unfortunately. Apparently, we have another.

Speaker ?: No, I've got.

Chris Gammell: No, no. I've got video up my end. Nope. This is our, uh, our third party recording was lost.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Ah, well, there we go. Sorry, folks. We're back to radio. Two weeks in a row. We're back to radio. All right. Tell us about this HAKO thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Uh, so, it's, it's, I believe it was written in Japanese the first time. My, uh, my buddy who speaks Japanese is going off and trying to find the actual, the actual Japanese writing. But, uh, you can tell, just based on how they're writing some of this stuff, that, uh, this is, I feel like. This is a comic, right? It's a soldering. It's a soldering comic, and yeah. And, uh.

Dave Jones: Like, with, like, a little story of people and how they get into soldering. I know. It's hilarious.

Chris Gammell: I feel like this is like, uh, like Jeff Kaiser's, uh, you know, like, soldering is easy kind of comic, except, except it took a wrong turn at the storyboarding stage or something like that.

Dave Jones: Took a wrong turn at Albuquerque, huh? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Uh.

Dave Jones: It is. Took a left turn at Albuquerque is the expression. How did that expression come about? Come on, Chris, tell us your, uh, using your vast, uh. Yeah, my American knowledge. My Americana knowledge. American historical.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sorry, I don't, I don't got it for you, Dave. Lexicon knowledge? No?

Dave Jones: Don't know? All right. Left turn at Albuquerque. Yeah. So, it's just. What happens if you get to Albuquerque and you do turn left? Who cares, Steve? Sorry, I'm just fascinated by these US expressions I hear. I can't help it. Oh, come on. I thought you'd know.

Chris Gammell: The answer to that is it depends what direction you're coming from. That's the answer to your question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I was waiting for that. That's what I was hoping for.

Dave Jones: Anyway, we'll post up a link to this comic. Yeah, it's pretty hilarious.

Chris Gammell: It's awesome. And it starts to get creepy, too, in story fours. There's a bunch of different stories.

Dave Jones: It is, almost.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah, I actually tweeted that. I couldn't help myself. It was just hilarious.

Chris Gammell: How did you find it initially? How did you find it?

Dave Jones: I have no idea. Maybe somebody else tweeted it. Maybe it was a retweet. Oh, a forum, perhaps. I don't know. I can, you know. So many sources for stuff. Well, I don't. There's only like three or four, but still. You know. I can't remember.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, there's really not a lot of practical knowledge in this. I mean, I guess there's some.

Dave Jones: No, there's. I didn't get right through to the end. So is there finally practical knowledge at the end of how to. I mean, they talk about. It's basically advertising their own products, right? Yeah, exactly. Little Johnny has his Heiko FX 888 or something.

Chris Gammell: Here's a good example. The story number six is called Mr. Fusamura is a Nice Man. That's the title of the story. I feel like we should act one of these out sometime. We could do like. We could do soldering theater. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Soldering theater.

Speaker ?: Great. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's coming. And that's coming to Broadway soon, right? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, boy. I've got a bone to pick with that. Bloody Broadway. When I went to New York, right? We turn up to Broadway and we're thinking, right, where's all the stuff on Broadway? It's not on Broadway. It's on bloody 42nd Street.

Chris Gammell: I swear, Dave, next time you yell at me for not talking about electronics on this radio show, I am just not taking any responsibility here. I got to say. We don't have any electronics today. Sorry.

Dave Jones: No, we got it. What is it on here? Well, calculators was electronics. Let's bring it back retro. Yeah, that's sort of electronics. If you want me to talk about the processor architecture, let's go into it.

Chris Gammell: I don't want to talk about that. But you were talking about power from that. So you were talking about... Low power shit. Low power, yeah.

Dave Jones: Basically the shelf life.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, there's another question from the forum. A-sick engineered or A-sick engineer, I guess it is. Great name, yeah. So how much fudge factor do you put in a power budget, basically?

Dave Jones: Yeah, pretty much. It's a very good question. And once again, it depends. It depends, yeah. It depends on what you're talking about. But I think he's talking about DC to DC converters, pretty much. So how much fudge... It depends on your design. Once again, it depends on your design as well. Yeah. But some designs like this HP calculator are going to consume pretty much a static amount of current when they're operating. There's not a big variation in the system operating current. Right. You know, when you switch it on and it's doing a calculation, it's going to draw, you know, X amount of power. And really, it's okay to design your DC to DC converter or your power regulator or whatever. That's quite close to that. There's no problem with that because you can be pretty much assured that it's not going to go over. If it does go over, well, there's a fault. And well, you know, you can't design your power supplies to power the fault, can you? I mean, that's just... Yeah. So you can actually get quite close. So if you know your... If your circuit takes a watt, then you can design your DC to DC converter. I'd whack on 20% in that case or something like that. Yeah, that's what I was going to say too. Or, you know, yeah, yes, you don't design it for a watt. If your thing takes a watt, you don't, you know, you're looking for, you know, 20% would be a minimum margin you'd put on something like that.

Chris Gammell: I usually do it too where I'll do a worst case calculation first.

Dave Jones: A worst case versus temperature. Temperature is one thing a lot of people forget. That's true, yeah. Oh, yeah, you know, yeah, they go, oh, it draws, you know, and they'll build up their prototype and they'll go, oh, it draws, you know, one watt. But then, well, what happens at 70 degrees? If you're designing a commercial product, you know, it's got to operate over the commercial operating temperature range. Yeah. Right? Which is...

Chris Gammell: For selling to Qatar or Egypt or something. Well, yeah, exactly like that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, but technically, hey, you know, if you're selling a commercial product, it's got to meet the commercial temperature range usually. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's a good point.

Dave Jones: If you are designing it properly, you would actually stick it in a thermal oven and you'd measure its power consumption again at the extremes at zero and 70, for example. So...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Now, would you actually just, would you just build it first and just do it... You've always got to build it.

Dave Jones: You've always got to build it. I mean, yeah, I agree.

Chris Gammell: Eventually you've got to build it. But if you're trying to design in a DC to DC converter, you need to know that as you're built, I mean, unless you like build it in pieces, right? But... So if you have...

Dave Jones: No, because you can build most circuits without the power supply. You power it from your bench supply. Yeah, but... So you don't... Your power supply, you might design last.

Chris Gammell: I guess if you're doing multiple revs, you could do that. But, you know, if you have... Oh, yeah. Yeah, true. Yeah, true. Okay. If you're trying to calculate it all out first.

Dave Jones: If you're trying to get it in your first spin, actually. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Technical term is. Yeah. Yeah, I know.

Chris Gammell: In that case, I would take all the worst... The worst case... There'd be a lot of padding in there, too, because, I mean, a lot of vendors will pad their numbers just to... Yeah. You know, make sure that they can meet their own specs, right? And then... Yeah, exactly. If they say a chip's going to draw 20 mils, right? Yeah. And that's... Even over temperature, it draws 20 mils. It's like, that's going to be their worst case. And then... Yeah. You're going to add all that stuff up and add your own 20%. So... Yeah. There'll be quite a bit of margin there, I think.

Dave Jones: So... Well, there is. And a lot of good data sheets will have a... They will have a worst case figure, or they will have a, you know, a worst case maximum. Yeah, tip and max. And they will have a typical operating figure. And usually, the worst case will be at the temperature extreme. So you can actually take those. Yeah. Because they're actually guaranteed by the manufacturer. You know, you can add all those up. So you would take your worst case figure. You wouldn't use your typical figure. Man, I've... You would use your typical figure to maybe determine battery, you know, life and, you know, a typical battery life or something like that. But yeah, when you're designing your power supply, you know, how much current you need from your power supply. So... And by the way, it's not current from a power supply. It's always power. A lot of people forget that. They go, oh, you know, they'll add up their currents, but they don't realize a couple of things are working at different voltages and things like that. So always work in power when you're doing power supply stuff.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I work in currents when I know it's a set rail, like if it's a linear regulator.

Dave Jones: But you've just got to be aware. Yeah. You've got to be...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's totally true.

Dave Jones: ...aware that it translates to power. So...

Chris Gammell: See now, have you ever gotten burned by typical specs? Because I've definitely gotten burned by typical specs in the past.

Dave Jones: Oh, a couple of times from memory. Yeah. Not by much, but yeah, it's your own fault, really. Yeah. And I've, you know, I've gone, oh, it doesn't meet its typical specs because I've got a chip which is outside the bell curve. And if you don't know the typical, when they manufacture devices, it will actually be a bell curve shape usually. And the specs will, you know, there will be the outliers which will be close to that maximum figure. So you can't really rely on that typical figure. Although most of the time, it's going to be close to the typical figure. Right. Because the majority, just based on stats, you know. Yeah. The majority of parts, you know, odds are you're going to get a part that will meet, that will fall within the typical, you know, around about that typical figure. But yeah, you can't guarantee it. So trap for young players.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that would be the thing I'd say is that, yeah, watch out for those typicals because they can, they can burn you.

Dave Jones: And if you're using a linear regulator, it makes all your calculations easier because a linear regulator is current in equals current out. So if you're, if you're powering, you know, if you've got five volts in and you're dropping it down to 3.3 volts and you know your chip takes five milliamps at one point at 3.3 volts, you know, it's going to then reflect back to five milliamps at five point at, at your five volt input.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: So you can easily calculate your power. But when you get down to DC to DC converters, that's when it becomes nasty. And really, you've got to build it up to measure your efficiency. And, you know, you might build it up and find, oh, it's 70% instead of 80% I was hoping for or something like that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Those curves can be tricky too because they're, they're very constrained. So like if you, if people are looking at like a DC to DC converter curve, they'll usually have, you know, they'll say it's, oh, it's a 95% efficient DC to DC converter, but that's at one very specific operating point. So you have to have your load actually drawing, you know, one amp at five volts. Exactly. You know, the sun has to be shining yet 87 degrees from the azimuth. Your tongue's got to be at the right angle. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. All that crazy stuff.

Dave Jones: So that's, that's why if you design a product which has different operating modes that draws different currents, that can be a real pain in the ass for a DC to DC converter because it will likely, very likely have different efficiencies at those different operating currents. Yep. So, which can really cause havoc to all your calculations and yeah, it can, you know, be real nasty. And then if you've got multiple DC to DC converters to power all the bloody cores in these processes and FPGAs these days, you know, oh, you need 3.3 volts for your IO, you need 5 volts for something else, you need a 1.2 volt core or 1.5 volt bloody PLL core and all sorts of crap like that, you know, and it's not unusual for, it's not unusual to, sorry, Tom Jones there. Yeah. It's not unusual. Dave Jones sings Tom Jones. Now I've got that stuck in my head. Not unusual to have five different, you know, half a dozen different power supplies in a basic design.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's bloody annoying. I hate it.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Modern design. I don't know. Give me everything working at 5 volts.

Chris Gammell: Much easier. Here's an interesting question. So, when I was looking for chip of the week, which we actually do have this week, I was I was looking through a bunch of different data sheets and I was amazed at how much, you know, I think we've mentioned it before on here, but, you know, more and more chip companies are pulling in, are pulling in as much functionality as they can. And I wonder though, I mean, are they just going to throw a linear regulator in there too? So then you can have, you know, a single 10 volt input and then it just says, okay, I'm going to make my own or an integrated switcher, switching power supply and all that other stuff.

Dave Jones: A lot of the processes do. A lot of the, you know, the picks and the atmels and the arms and all that. They have built-in DC to DC converters and not only DC, but they have, you know, linear ones as well to power the core. Yeah. They're all, you know, they're built in and they end up having an extra 20 pins on it because you, they've got all these built-in bloody switching converters in them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Which can be handy, but, oh, you know, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's annoying. Some of them are nice because they've got, they're just built in and all you do is put the bypass cap on there. Like the, uh, pick 32 series has got a built-in voltage regulator for the core. The core actually operates at 1.5 volts or 1.8 volts or something like that. Uh-huh. Um, but, but, but, but the chip is powered on from normal voltage, you know, from, you know, three volts up to six or something like that. Um, and the built-in voltage regulator takes care of it. You don't have to do anything.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Um, except hook on a cap. Huh. An external cap for the bypassing. That's it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And you've got to be careful. I've been caught. There's a trap there. I was, uh, when I built up one of my calculator watches, actually, I think it was, um, I accidentally put the wrong value cap in there. I put a hundred in instead of one mic because they look very similar, right? You know, they've got no markings on them and accidentally got mixed up on the bench and I couldn't figure out why. I can't remember the FOMO, but it was really weird. It was like, you know, it was, uh, resetting randomly or doing some other weird thing, you know, and I thought I had software problems and it turned out to be the bloody voltage regulator was, you know, acting up on me because it didn't have the minimum required output capacitance because it's a low dropout voltage regulator, which are inherently unstable.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, anyway. And that was just a goof in, in me actually building the, um, actually assembling the prototype. I chose the wrong cap.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's tough to check that. That kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's tough to check, you know, it's the last thing you sort of, yeah, the golden rule of troubleshooting, thou shall check voltages, but yeah, you know, if it's, if it's okay,

Chris Gammell: 90% of the time and then just, you know, hiccups or something, you know, where it just hits,

Dave Jones: you know, it does this particular instruction and then the, then the regulator resonates or something, you know, just oscillates and yeah, bastard. What a trap.

Chris Gammell: So, I think, so the thing I wanted to ask about with, uh, with those integrated chips, the ones that are like pulling everything in. Cause I found, I found a couple that are like, there's like, like, there's like a EEG full front end processor now and like a radar detection front end and tons of different stuff. Like, uh, uh, free scale has an, uh, that's, oh, that's the EEG one. And then like the, like free scales even got this, uh, you know, like a, a processor inside of it too. So it's got the, all the front end stuff and then actually pushes it into a processor too. And then there's all these like audio codecs, like, um, you know, they have like multiple DSPs and DACs and ADCs and everything.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah, we've got DSPs and stuff in them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I've seen those. So here's a real question. Is, is being a hardware engineer a reality over the longterm or is it just going to be chip makers? Of course it is. No, no, no. Field apps people. I think this is a legitimate question, Dave.

Dave Jones: No, this single, yeah, I know. And they've been talking about it for 30 years. It's the single chip paradigm, right? They're all, everyone's, it's the Holy grail, you know, the single chip computer, you know, that's it. You just hook up voltage to it and a bypass cap and that's it. But it never happens for various, various reasons, um, which I'm sure I could go into if I could think about them. If only he'd read the list beforehand. Right off the top of my head, you just dropped this on me. And no, it's like, you know, there's the usual thing about, well, they've got to design these things and then there's always a trade-off and there's people need flexibility. You know, you can't have a chip to do everything. It's much more versatile. You know, some manufacturer may want something slightly different or they can't do another entire chip for them. It's easier just to have the one processor. And they always go back to, you know, the, the discrete design. I mean, it's...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but here's the question. Is it, is it people that are...

Dave Jones: It always seemed to naturally come back.

Chris Gammell: But is it the people that are designing the circuits that say, oh, I need it to be perfect like this? Or is eventually it's just going to be that the businesses get so big and there's so much, so many different flavors of these chips that, well, you just need fewer hardware engineers.

Dave Jones: No, I think it's the, it's the demands of the designers like us and the companies that demand what they want. You know, they demand X amount of spec. And I think it's almost impossible for the chip makers to manufacture these complex chips for every, otherwise everyone would have an individual ASIC design for them, right? That's the, you know, because a lot of your big companies, they, they will have the clout with the manufacturers. They will go, okay, I love that chip you've got, but can you add, can you design us a little custom spin-off of that that does, you know, this, this, and this. And a lot of them, if you throw enough money at them, they will do that for you. Yeah. You know, your linear techs or your nationals or something, they will actually design you a custom or semi-custom chip based on technology they already have. But it requires a lot of money. And in the end, and with the fast design to market as well, you know, these days you just can't meet that with those things unless you find that chip, which does absolutely everything perfectly that you want. It's better for you to just cobble together the individual discrete chips to do exactly what you want. So, yeah, it, the, I, I think the demand's always going to be there. It has to be. You can't, I, I, I can't see it happening.

Chris Gammell: All right. Well.

Dave Jones: Just like the chip making machine.

Chris Gammell: Just like the chip making machine. Right, right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's my first, that's my off the cuff opinion of that one.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's what we're here for. So, chip of the week then. How about that? We haven't done this in a while. Chip of the week. So, this is a, I don't know if you've seen this one. You've put it on, I haven't even looked at it. Well, that's not my fault. Yeah, I know. So, the chip of the week is TMP006 from Texas Instruments. And basically, it's pretty cool. It's a, it's a thermopile, but it's on a, it's inside a chip. And then it's got all like the, it's just a serial out basically. And it uses like this little cavity inside the chip to actually collect incident infrared rays, you know. So, like if you have a radiating body across from it. And then this thing actually solders directly to your board. So, say you had a, you know, a heat sink. As most chips do. Right. But most thermopiles are leaded, right. So, you could turn it and bend it. This is actually going to be like the flush of the board. It's the surface mount part. So, it's got a, you know, it's got an internal PGA across this internal thermopile. Then a DAC. It's got feedback. It's got internal or outside reference, digital control. And then it's got the serial output. So, I don't know. Right.

Dave Jones: So, this differs from a regular temperature sensor in a chip. Which uses a silicon, usually uses a silicon diode or something like that. You know, a junction to measure the temperature, right. This is some sort of. So, the novel aspect of this is the thermopile, is it? Yes. Is that the.

Chris Gammell: That and the packaging. So, and it's really tiny.

Dave Jones: Okay. So, does it have like a little window on it or something? Does it have a. No.

Chris Gammell: This is like a BGA part, basically. What do they call it? Duh. I know, right. No, I think we should ban BGA parts from BGA for the week. It's pretty cool, man. I don't know. I like it. I'm guessing this will probably have more traction with like the, you know, the cell phone and the computer board manufacturers that need to know the heat. But, I don't know. I thought it was really cool. If you look at like the documentation about how it was done. Right. Okay. That's the cool part. Okay.

Dave Jones: Specs. What's the relative?

Chris Gammell: What's the absolute accuracy? It'll do a degree reliably, I believe.

Dave Jones: Right. So, it's not.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's not going to be. You're not going to be sticking this thing in your kid's ear, you know, measuring their temperature, right? But, you know, all in all, I think it's an interesting idea. And the thing that really did catch my eye is all the integrated stuff that's in it, right? So, it's not just a separate. You know, it's basically a front-end digital output temperature sensor. So, it's kind of cool.

Dave Jones: Okay. There you go. Chip of the week. 240 microamps. Man, you fly to the moon on 240 microamps.

Chris Gammell: Well, you are doing an A to D in there, too. Yeah, true. Yeah.

Dave Jones: 1.6 millimeter by 1.6 millimeter wafer chip scale package BGA. Oh, does it get any more evil than that? It's only eight pins. They could have put the damn thing in a Si-8. No, they could have put more. Oh, great.

Chris Gammell: Because that middle pin, so it's like a matrix of nine pins, and you can't put that middle one in there because that's where the actual thermopile is.

Dave Jones: What a bastard of a package. I'm sure it's great for mobile phones and shit like that. But otherwise... Ah, come on.

Chris Gammell: It's going to give SparkFun something to make a new board for. There you go. You know, like a little breakout board.

Dave Jones: And there you go. There's a histogram of the error. Yeah, and I'm sure if you went into it in more detail, I'm looking at the data sheet here, and that would actually be a bell curve, as we talked about before. That would be a manufacturing bell curve of the accuracy of these devices. Yeah. So, which is a three sigma thing, you know, either side of the mean. Yeah. So, there you go. It's on the first page of the data sheet there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and it shows there the...

Dave Jones: Which, it's a very crude one, but I'm sure it would actually, if you smoothed it out and got a thousand samples, it would actually be a bell curve.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's weird they don't... They must have rounded up there, because they only took like...

Dave Jones: They've... Yeah, there's only four bars there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so the highest bar is 20 samples, so that means they only took like 50 samples or something like that. Yeah, it's not huge. Come on, guys, you're making more of these, you could probably make a little smoother of a graph, but I'm sure it suited their purpose, and the data sheet, you know, maestros were conducting that one well, right? Right, yeah. It's the front page, so you really can't trust that graph.

Dave Jones: Right. Is that the...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you've got to go to the eighth page.

Dave Jones: Yeah, tip of the week from the amp hour, don't trust front page specs.

Chris Gammell: Oh, never trust the front page, yeah. It's fun to look at. Because they typically get them wrong. Yeah, it's fun to see what they conveniently skip, I always like that.

Dave Jones: I actually like it. On page... Down on page five, they've actually got all the individual lines, like for all of those 50 devices that they tested or something. Yeah. And they've got all the individual actual responses. They actually measured the full response of those things. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so that's a little better.

Dave Jones: Yep. Very interesting. Yeah. Chip of the week. BGA.

Chris Gammell: Sorry, I'm not happy. In the future, we'll try and stay away from BGA.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: All right, how about...

Dave Jones: Oh, it's okay if it's warranted, but yeah, I don't know about in this case anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay, how about this day in nerd history? Let's keep rolling with our normal segments. Boop, boop, boop. So this day in nerd history, Joseph F. Engelberger was born. Well, not this day. Not my day. Dave's day. It's actually July 26th. It's only the 25th here. But, you know, there wasn't anything...

Dave Jones: You actually got it right this week. You get a gold elephant stamp. Congratulations. All right.

Chris Gammell: So this guy developed the first industrial robot, so that's kind of cool. It was back in the 50s. And I'm not a big robot person myself, but apparently he was referred to as the father of robots... Robotics, rather. And one of the first companies being Unimation. So he was born on this day. I believe he passed away back in 2009, which is unfortunate. But yeah, cool dude. And we'll post a link to the Wikipedia page about him.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Have a read.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I love it. And there's a new segment, which we want to start. But I don't have anything this week. I came up with the idea of Wank of the Week.

Chris Gammell: Wank of the Week. I didn't realize that was what we were calling it, Dave.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Yeah, we haven't even thought of the name. That one now, mind it.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's a bit... Anyway, I came up with the idea that we would actually name and shame a wanky product. Some stupid, you know, be it some $10,000 audio full cable or some other, you know, free energy scheme or something like that. Then we can... Actually, there is one on the forum. If I could find it in time. Our hour's up. But somebody did a teardown on... Maybe we should hold it over to next week when we've actually got the info. That sounds like a good idea.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, let's hold it over to next week. Anyway, if you've got an idea for a Wank product of the week, please let us know. Yeah. It's, you know, anything that sort of doesn't do what it... You know, that has more marketing spin than, you know, real function, then we want to hear about it.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: That'd be great. Yeah. And if you've got a name for the segment, I don't know, Wank of the Week's problem. Can you think of anything better, Chris? Come on.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't have anything better. But I do have a potential here. So since we gave TI the grand honor of Chip of the Week, we can also, you know, give him a little jab as well. Because they brought back their bank and engineer. Have you seen this, Dave?

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. Yes, I have.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So if people don't know, basically, Bank of the Week was this marketing campaign. I don't even know where it came from. I think it might have just been... I don't know. I don't even want to say where it came from because I don't know. But basically, they said, oh, well, Bank of the Week was a big deal. Well, thank an engineer because you have GPS. And then they go and they show these videos about... They don't show how a GPS works. Here's my pet peeve with it. They don't show how a GPS works, which would be the cool part, right? I would love to see a TI person telling me how their awesome chips are in a GPS. Nope. Instead, what they do is some crazy video showing, oh, here's the before when someone doesn't have a GPS. And then they, oh, this is so kooky. Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. And then here's the after video with the GPS. Oh, this is so simple. And it's just like, what? I don't get it. I don't know why they're doing it. I mean, this is their second season, as they're saying. I mean, like...

Dave Jones: Right. They've had a whole season of this.

Chris Gammell: It just doesn't make any sense to me.

Dave Jones: And they got 10 people watching and marketing went, wow, we've cracked social media. Woo-hoo, let's do another season, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I mean, that must be it.

Dave Jones: They have a trailer. We'll have to put up a link to the trailer for the new season. I watched it, and it's just people wandering through corridors or something, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: Oh, no, they do like an introduction. It's special. I'll have to watch it again.

Dave Jones: But, yeah, it's like, I don't know. And they go around to people's, you know, they go around, presumably the company, they go around TI, and they go to somebody's lab or somebody's cubicle, and they shake their hand. Thank you, you know, for being an engineer or something like that. I don't know. What?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't care. It doesn't make much sense to me. I'm sure it was a great idea when it was designed by committee, right? They were sitting around, and this is what the committee came up with.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't know.

Chris Gammell: So, nice job on the chips, TI, but keep trying on those videos. Maybe throw Dave a couple bucks, and it'll make something better. And that's Dave's crappy editing skills.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, my absolute shit editing skills and no script. Yep. I'm sure they're all scripted there once, too.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: No, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: All right, well.

Dave Jones: When are these companies going to learn that people don't like production values? Engineers don't care. I want the data, man.

Chris Gammell: I just want to see some cool stuff. I don't care how it's made. That's it. I mean, I've been watching Dave's videos for all this time. I don't think it can get much rougher than that, huh, Dave?

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's it. No, it doesn't get any rougher than my slap-together videos. So, I am the world leader in engineering slap-together videos. Thank you very much.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, we will be back next week with a special yet-to-be-named guest. I hope it works out. We'll see. It'll probably be audio-only again. But, sorry about the video as well. I, uh... Video. Yeah, I don't know. I think video is probably a failure. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, we'll see. You know, it doesn't hurt us to hit record, I guess.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. We keep trying to see if it finally works one of these times. But, uh...

Dave Jones: But then again, having it on YouTube sucks away audience numbers from our main site. So...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's true.

Dave Jones: I don't know. You know?

Chris Gammell: Well, we'll keep trying.

Dave Jones: I know it's all about the stats with you, Chris. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you know me. You absolutely cried. You just cried when the stats plummeted the other week when everyone watched it on YouTube.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh. Yeah, it says the guy who watches his YouTube stats like a hawk. Right.

Dave Jones: To make sure they're still linearly going out.

Chris Gammell: Oh, there you go. Yep, yep. Yeah. All right, folks. Well, hey...

Dave Jones: I think I'm going to go...

Chris Gammell: Oh. Play with... Huh?

Dave Jones: Some... I'm going to... I think I'm going to go play with my new Tektronix scope I've got.

Chris Gammell: All right, man. Well, I look forward to hearing about it. It's not new, man. It's old. Yeah, I want to hear about it.

Dave Jones: It's a Tektronix 2225. I got it on eBay.

Chris Gammell: I want to hear about it next week.

Dave Jones: Bargain price. Actually, I'll probably have a teardown done by then, I think. Okay, great. I'm going to do a retro teardown, I think. Great. So... This sucker does 500 microvolts per division, dude.

Chris Gammell: Nice. Nice.

Dave Jones: Awesome.

Chris Gammell: So, one last reminder. We are on Facebook now. We are on Twitter. And we are on Google+, though I'm not sure how long. Apparently, they're pulling down things that aren't people. So, we'll see if we actually stay on there.

Dave Jones: Yeah, what the freak is the deal with that?

Chris Gammell: I don't know. We'll see if we survive it. If not, Twitter... What?

Dave Jones: So, they're going to pull me down because I'm on there as EEVblog?

Chris Gammell: Probably, yeah.

Dave Jones: Are they going to pull me down, too?

Chris Gammell: Well, your picture's the EEVblog, but you go by Dave Jones on there, right?

Dave Jones: No. Well, no. My title is the blog. I don't use my name as part... As, you know... If you search for my name, you won't find it. So...

Chris Gammell: No, your list is Dave Jones on there. No, your list is Dave Jones on there. So, you're fine. Oh, am I? Yep, you're fine.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Oh, it says Dave. Yeah. Okay. Right. I'm fine, am I? Yep.

Chris Gammell: You're fine.

Dave Jones: Okay. Oh, good. So... Then why is my... Oh. Anyway, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I'll throw a link on the site.

Dave Jones: Don't be evil, Google. That's supposed to be your... Yeah. Supposed to be your phrase, isn't it? Supposed to be your... Mantra.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Decades. All right. Decades. Well, I think we're well past... The one thing we're not doing anymore, like we did on our first shows, we're well past our hour, so we should probably go.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: But here's to many more years, Dave, and we'll... Catch you next week. Yeah, we'll catch you guys.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. First year. Yes. First anniversary. Was that exciting?

Chris Gammell: Yep. Well... Come on. Hit the music again. One more time? All right. End us with the music. Oh, crap. Did I close it? Ah. There it is. Another Chris Gammell fail.

Dave Jones: See you next week. Bye, guys.

Chris Gammell: See, and this is why we can't go on YouTube.