#56 – Open Orbific Oratiuncle

Chris Gammell: Welcome to the Amp Hour.

Dave Jones: I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell from Chris Gammell's Analog Life. Hey Chris, so much fail today. You know, I thought we were finally at that point and we got this whole new software set up and everything's looking good there. And then of course, my hardware completely broke. It just fell apart.

Dave Jones: Isn't it useful software that fails?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think this one's going back to the shop and if they're not taking it back, then it's going to the junkyard. Right.

Dave Jones: Do a video with a sledgehammer to it. Yeah, right. One of those destruction videos. You'll get a million hits on YouTube. Yep, yep, yep. Oh boy. Anyway, yeah, Chris is all excited again, people. Go figure. Chris getting excited about some new recording thing.

Chris Gammell: Well, the reason I get excited is because it should allow us to record guests easier. It should. That's one of the things that's been holding us back. And hopefully, you know, now that I finally figured out how to plug in my microphone to something else, I think we could have a guest call in and we'd be okay.

Dave Jones: Yes, because we're now paying the big bucks and we've got our own mumble server. That's right. At a whopping cost of, what is it? $2? $2 a month. $2 a month.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: I think we're being subsidized by all the gamers, right? Yes, that's right. They're the ones who use it. There's this whole massive network of these audio servers, these mumble servers everywhere. And we've, what, so we're buying a part of one, are we? Yeah, we have. Or do we have our own, I doubt we have our own dedicated box somewhere.

Chris Gammell: No, it's like a dedicated slice. It's not really a dedicated server. It's just like a slice. Not even a slice because that's when you have, you know, a part of a server. We're just buying space on someone's mumble server. Or murmur server is actually the better way to say it. Ah, right. That's the server side. Yeah. But in general, it sounds great. I mean, like, Dave's coming through my headphones fine. And I'm sure I'm coming through his fine.

Dave Jones: Yep. But we're still recording locally. So the one that you're going to be listening to, the one that you download, will still be our mixed recorded version. So this mumble stuff is really pointless at the moment because we don't trust the internet enough. This is basically a one-hour test to see if the thing can hold up. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, this newfangled internet technology stuff still isn't as good as recording locally. We just don't trust to get from one side of the planet to the other.

Chris Gammell: Well, if someone didn't live so damn far away, it wouldn't be that bad.

Dave Jones: Well, you should move to Australia then.

Chris Gammell: Clearly.

Dave Jones: Oh, sorry. I forgot America's the center of the world. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Speaker ?: All right.

Dave Jones: What have we got on today's show? Enough mumbling. No pun intended.

Chris Gammell: Mumbling. Man, a lot of stuff. Any shout-outs?

Dave Jones: There's no shout-outs this week.

Chris Gammell: No shout-outs. No. It's been a while since. I've been so focused on looking at the audio stuff, I didn't even look at the list.

Dave Jones: No, neither did I. We've been, yeah. You got carried away with fixing all your fail this morning, and instead of reading the list, I was watching that video you posted, Elon Musk.

Chris Gammell: That's right, yeah. Video.

Dave Jones: If people don't know, he's the guy who founded bloody well everything. He founded PayPal or co-founded PayPal. He founded SpaceX, Tesla, a solar-powered energy company in the U.S. whose name escapes me at the moment. Sun City, I think it's called. Sun City. Is that the name of the company, is it?

Chris Gammell: I believe so. Right.

Dave Jones: I thought that was the name of the project or something. Anyway, yeah, amazing guy. Lucky bastard, too. Because luck has a lot to do with it, of course. If you didn't make your first $300 million, then you wouldn't have gone on to do the other things. Yeah, it's an interesting thing. He was in the right place at the right time with the whole internet boom thing and his little mapping company he first started when he was 23. or something got bought out for $300 million.

Chris Gammell: I mean, he's definitely a driven guy.

Dave Jones: Of course. You've got to give that to him. But there's millions of people like that, but they just don't get the luck of having their company bought out and then having hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank.

Chris Gammell: Right. That seed money really does kind of help. And that's another thing. I mean, so Elon Musk, every time he basically made money, he would push all that money into a new project. So SpaceX, he almost funded all of that himself with, I think it was like $300 million or something like that.

Dave Jones: For the first couple of years, yes, he funded it completely himself.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, we shall put up, as always, we'll put up a link to the documentary of him. It's like, it goes for half an hour. Yep. Yeah, I haven't finished watching it yet, but it's very interesting.

Chris Gammell: Definitely, definitely. You know, there's a lot of people that have, so one of my friends is an aerospace guy, and he actually works for a contractor that, you know, is a NASA contractor. And so basically, his boss is at NASA, and he was kind of telling me how NASA people aren't really as fond of Elon Musk. You know, from an engineering perspective, it's, you know, he's a savvy businessman. He's had these great products, but a lot of, and you know, like the Tesla cars are just badass, right? Yeah. But, yeah, my buddy said that he's not as well liked in the circles, not because he hasn't done cool things, but apparently because he takes too much credit. Basically saying that, oh, well, we built this stuff, and, you know, like the space program is all private now. And my friend who works for NASA is like, yeah, that's great, except he wouldn't really have a customer if it wasn't for the U.S. government or foreign governments. So there's just, it's really, it's really a joint venture, which is interesting to think about. I mean, we've talked about space on here before, about how privatization of space, and obviously SpaceX is a big part of that. But, you know, it's not going to happen without governments that are willing to spend lots of money. Oh, of course. Granted, a lot less than they were spending on their own programs, because they found some off-the-shelf money savings. But, yeah, it's interesting just how he's viewed in the industry versus, you know, the kind of hero worship you and I might have for the guy.

Dave Jones: Right. So is he, does he, is he actually, I wonder if he's actually claiming the credit or the media want a media darling, as they always do, right? So have the media sort of made him look more big-headed than he really is? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Is that what's happening with you? I didn't realize that you had that much media coverage, Dave. Me? Yeah. Is that why you look so big-headed all the time? I'm just saying. Well, no, I'm not.

Dave Jones: Always taking all that credit for. Oh, right, for doing my own videos. Yeah, exactly. What's up with that? Silly me. How dare I? Oh, boy. No, it's the viewers that make me, of course. Of course, of course. Yep. But I do produce a video, so, but yeah, that's the problem. The media want, you know, they want a Steve Jobs. They want a, you know, someone like that. They want a Bill Gates. You know, somebody who takes, or who can take all the credit for it. You know, they don't want to, because it doesn't make a story that, oh, you know, this company who's headed by some nameless CEO in cooperation with NASA. So what, that's a, that's a boring as batshit story, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, people want a, people want a narrative. They want, they want a backstory. Yeah, that's a good point.

Dave Jones: Yeah, they want this one lone genius guy who, you know, did everything. And, well, so, so be it, I guess. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: I don't know him from Biosope, so. And just as a correction, too, it's Solar City, not Sun City. Solar City.

Dave Jones: Okay, right. And that is the name of the company.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And that's interesting, too, the premise behind that. Basically, they lease out solar cells to people's homes, and they recoup costs because then they own the solar cells. And then they get all the profit from, you know, over the lifetime of the solar cells. So, cool idea. Very.

Dave Jones: Wish I'd thought of it. I could be rich, too.

Chris Gammell: If only you had, you know, $10 million to invest.

Dave Jones: Yeah, to actually invest in the startup to begin with. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Money begets money. Mm-hmm. Yep. They say your first million's the hardest.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, boy. Anyway. What else have we got on today's show?

Chris Gammell: Hmm. A lot of, oh, let's sort by topic here. Let's see. Oh, well, how about a little bit of news? I mean, did you hear about Google? I mean, you just woke up. I don't know if you heard about that. I just woke up? No. What? So, Google bought Motorola's cell phone business.

Dave Jones: Really? Really? Yeah. Oh, there you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, you know, there's a lot of, you know, speculation about what it is. But then Larry Page came on and basically said, I mean, he outright said a big part of it is we want their patents. I think it was 16,000 patents they had.

Dave Jones: Oh, really? Hmm. There you go. It always comes down to that in big business, doesn't it? Mm-hmm. It doesn't come down to, you know, people or plants or anything else. It's, you know, IP.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and it's surprising, too, because I was talking to some friends about it at work today. And, you know, you kind of ask, well, Google's getting big in it. Not even getting big. They are big in Android, right? Oh, yeah. And we're not a gadget show, so we don't talk about it too much on here. But what do they really need from buying a hardware company? I mean, it's cool. I mean, you know, you and I like hardware, right? Yeah. And Google is a good force to have in hardware.

Dave Jones: Well, it's not like they're buying Motorola. They're buying Motorola's phone division, right?

Chris Gammell: That's correct, yeah. Motorola Mobile.

Dave Jones: I don't even know if they make their own phones in-house, do they? Or do they just subcontract them out to Foxconn or something?

Chris Gammell: You're talking about Motorola?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I didn't look at that. I probably should have looked at that, huh?

Dave Jones: Yeah, you probably should have. Because they used to be almost number one in the phone business, weren't they, at one stage? Yeah, like Star Tech days. Five years ago or something. You know, the Motorola Razr or something was like the world's most popular phone or something like that.

Chris Gammell: Razr was a big deal. And they kind of fell off until they came back with the Droid. But the Droid, I mean, it's a cross-platform kind of thing. I mean, there's HTC does it. Samsung has it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, I think HTC are leading at the moment, aren't they, in the Android market? With Samsung not far behind or maybe those two battling it out for number one? I don't know if Motorola's up in the top two anyway.

Chris Gammell: I don't know where they fall, yeah. But the point is that it's not – at first I was thinking it was going to be about the hardware, right? Because anytime you have an Android phone, you have to wait. You know, if Google or the Android development team pushes out a new release, you then have to wait for your manufacturer to actually take the release, package it up, talk down to the low-level firmware, whatever's specific to their phone, and then actually push you that package, right? Absolutely. And they're all different depending on vendors. So I was thinking at first that, oh, well, maybe Google wants to, you know, have control of a phone and have that low level of, you know –

Dave Jones: Yeah, but Google have the Google phone. That's right. What happened to the Google phone? Well, it's out there. Who did they buy to get that? Surely they didn't do it themselves. I think they must have bought a company, surely, to –

Chris Gammell: So there was the – I think they started with the G1. Yeah. And then they have the Nexus S right now, which is the Google phone. And that seems like that's a pretty popular phone, I thought. I mean, not popular, but –

Dave Jones: I think it might be, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Or it's gaining popularity. So what do they want with Motorola? The patents, right? So that – Yeah, that's what kind of leaves behind. So that they can out-sue Apple. Is that the idea?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And it's – I'm already tired of it, I've got to say. I'm already –

Dave Jones: I'm sick of the whole patent bloody lawsuit industry. It's ridiculous. Yeah. Pain in the ass.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, I mean, that seems like between, you know, RIM and Microsoft and Apple and Google now. It's like watching a bunch of gorillas fight it out, you know.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. And beating their chest and – Yep. Yeah. Ah, unbelievable. Speaking of Foxconn, we've had something on this list for a couple of weeks. You found something that said that Foxconn, they – you know, one way to not have all the suicides that they've been having, supposedly, at Foxconn is to well replace all the humans with robots. Yeah. A million of them, right? That's a lot of robots. Yeah. They're replacing – where is the actual story?

Chris Gammell: Item 33 on our list. Oh, you re-sorted on me, dude. Yeah, for all you falling along at home. Well, you can't.

Dave Jones: They planned to increase from 10,000 to a million robots in the next three years. What do they mean by robots? I guess I mean pick-and-place machines, right? Is that –

Chris Gammell: No, I think they mean even – That would be their main robot, right? Well, that would be a robot. But no, I believe they also mean assembly type of robots and everything else.

Dave Jones: They'd actually assemble cases and things like that probably. Yeah. Little robot arms that come in and screw things together. They come down, they pick up screws, and the bit's magnetic, and it comes in, a little robot arm, and – That's my drill sound.

Chris Gammell: That was good. That was good. I like that. Mm. Vroom.

Dave Jones: That's a 12,000 RPM drill right there. Right, right, right. Yeah. So it's basically a Dremel on the end of a Dick Smith robot arm, right? Is that pretty much it?

Chris Gammell: That might be a bit of a simplification, but –

Dave Jones: A bit – right. Okay. Sorry. I'm sure they cost like half a million bucks each or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So they're – I mean they're looking to ramp it up, and it kind of just makes you wonder about what the real future of it is. I mean – because at that point, you don't – you only need to have a technician for repair and, you know, maybe a programmer at some point, but – Yeah.

Dave Jones: Kind of makes you question like the manufacturability. And then you need people to inspect it afterwards and stuff like that, but they can do a lot of that visually now. All the visual inspection technology is absolutely phenomenal. It's more – sometimes more advanced than the assembly technology, than the robots themselves.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So really, is there any – was there any word on how many people they were going to slash as a – When they go from 10,000 to a million robots in three years is a lot.

Chris Gammell: That is a big jump. That's a log jump.

Dave Jones: Man, that is unbelievable.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Wow. I mean that's – yeah.

Dave Jones: I guess there's going to be a lot of unemployed people in China, huh? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And they only kind of just – they just revealed this plan, so there's no real details yet. I mean even – I'm looking at an Economist article right now, and, you know, basically I think that the media kind of grabbed onto the, oh, well, Foxconn employees were killing themselves, and now robots don't kill themselves. That was kind of the main thing. Right. And, yeah. And it's true. I mean robots won't kill themselves, but there's other expenses with robots too. You know, you don't necessarily have – yeah. I feel like I'm going to say something really non-humanist right now. Right. Okay.

Dave Jones: As long as you stick to the three laws, you'll be fine.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: One of the coolest things we have seen this week by far is this open source ecology thing.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah, you jumped to that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah, this is – sorry. I'm jumping straight into this because this is cool. Well, first, let's talk about your video.

Chris Gammell: Let's talk about your video first because if people don't know, Dave did an open source hardware video, and we'll be sure to link that in there too. But –

Dave Jones: I did. Well, tell us about it. Well, yeah, I did – what is open source hardware? What are the benefits of it? I didn't really want to do the downsides. A few people asked me, well, why didn't I do the downsides? You know. Yeah, I wanted to keep it upbeat and short. So it was long enough as it is. I tried to get it into 10 minutes, folks, but I achieved 13. Not bad. Not bad for Dave. I was pretty impressed with myself. So, you know. Yeah. Without having to go out and actually retake something because I mumbled or something like that. So, yeah, I was pretty impressed. Anyway, the idea was to sell, you know, the good benefits of open source hardware and explain it because I didn't think that there was a video out there that actually did that where somebody sat down. And there's lots of lectures, you know, at the conferences and things. People have talked about open source hardware, but you've got to watch the whole lecture, you know.

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones: So I thought I'd do a neat little summary. And everyone seemed to like it, which was good. Yeah. And the reason I did it is because I found – did I mention this last week? I found that somebody hadn't open sourced – they claimed it was open source hardware, but they weren't releasing the CAD files. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: We talked about that for like 20 minutes on the show. Oh, did we?

Dave Jones: All right. Okay.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: Someone's not getting a lot of sleep. The kid's keeping them up.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Anyway.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, so I did the video and it was quite popular. Everyone liked it, which is good.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm glad. And I saw some comments on the Adafruit site because they had reposted it about how you had come around about it. And it's like, well, no, we've always been fans of it. I mean, like, at least – I mean, the amp hours always talked highly of it.

Dave Jones: This is the thing, right? Everyone thinks that I was somehow anti open source hardware. I've been doing open source hardware for 20 years. And I think I'm going to actually have to do a video to prove this. I'm going to get out some old magazines and I'm going to talk about –

Chris Gammell: You did it before it was cool, folks.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: It was so obscure you probably hadn't heard of it.

Dave Jones: That's right. So, I'm actually going to – I think I'm going to do a video, get some old magazines and show what it was like back before the internet and doing actually open source hardware magazine when I was a boy.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, I'm going to have to do that because I think a few – you know, a lot of young people wouldn't know what that industry was like back then. So, I think I'll do that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's probably a lot different then, huh?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And there was all these unwritten rules about, you know, what you did and if you publish something, it became public domain and, you know, all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, I think I'll have to do a video on that. I was going to do it as a follow-up to that one but, yeah, I went on to something else. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Well, in the – I'll keep going with the story then. So, Dave comes to me the next day. I say, oh, Dave, great video. You know, I enjoyed it. It was a lot of good responses and everything. And he says, oh, I'm number three on YouTube for open source hardware. And I'm like, oh, that's great. You know, like that's awesome, Dave. And then I looked at number one and number one deserves to be number one. Absolutely. It is awesome. You bet it does. So it's a TED Talk and I've already forgotten the guy's name. But Marcin Joubikowski, I think it is. Jack Koubowski. Yeah, sorry. Jack Koubowski. Yeah. So basically he's part of the open source ecology.org. Yes. And you want to explain the rest of that, Dave? Yep.

Dave Jones: Basically what they're doing, what he started out, he wanted to build and what they've called a global village construction set. So what this is is basically the instructions that you could fit on a single DVD. I'll go into that later because I think that's a bit impractical. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Focus on the important things, Dave.

Dave Jones: All these open source plan, open source plan to construct all of the basic equipment you need to restart modern civilization. Like all the farming equipment, you know, that you need to, you know, stay alive and then generators and then a car and then, you know, all sorts of stuff to sort of, you know, start from scratch. If there's a, you know, if there's a Holocaust or something, a nuclear, you know, if we stoop enough to wipe ourselves out, then, you know, somebody somewhere in the middle of Siberia can, you know, or in the middle of Australia or something. Who the hell's going to nuke the middle of Australia anyway? Yeah, they can start again. They can, they've got all these plans that they can build these open source, you know, tractors. And he's actually gone ahead and built them. Yeah. And all these people are joining in. I think they've built like seven of the 50 machines. Basically, they've got a list of 50 machines that they want to build. Yeah. And I think they've built like seven or eight of them so far. Full on, you know, farming tractors and things like that. It's great.

Chris Gammell: It's, it's amazing.

Dave Jones: Oh, man.

Chris Gammell: And I mean, to hear it from him too, he said he came out of, I think he came out of college with a PhD in fusion, you know, like some kind of fusion related science. In nuclear fusion, yes. So I think he quickly figured out that he should do some more practical stuff.

Dave Jones: Anyway, the video is.

Chris Gammell: Maybe he'll make a fusion machine eventually too, you know.

Dave Jones: Well, he could. Well, the video is only four minutes long. I thought it was so brilliant. I shouted out to the wife, come on, watch this, come on, watch this. And she sat there and watched it and she thought that was the most, it was the most brilliant thing she's ever seen. Yeah. So there you go. That's saying something.

Chris Gammell: And so another thing that's important about it too is, is not just about if, you know, the world ended tomorrow. It's also about third world countries and making. That's the big thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is something that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: These third world countries don't have much money. Right. And they don't have, they can't buy a, you know, a million dollar machine. They, they, you know, they will have to build it themselves because, you know, that's the way that they can, you know, small villages in the middle of somewhere. And yeah, they, they can't afford to go to, you know, some big company and buy the finished machine. Right. But if they can build it themselves, fantastic. If they have the plans and they have the materials, then awesome. Go for it. So that's really the whole idea. It's not about, you know, a nuclear survival thing or something, you know, or if we get hit by, you know, a five kilometer asteroid or something like that. But yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all about, you know, third world countries being able to build and afford these things without big business getting involved and making profits and all that sort of stuff.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's really exciting from that perspective. So right now, if you go on their site on the wiki, actually, so they have a wiki where they're documenting all their stuff. So things that are in development right now, sawmill, a laser cutter, an industrial robot and a steam engine, and then some things that are already done. So a CEB press, a tractor, and a power cube. And I believe the CEB press is, yeah, it's a brick presser, basically. So you can actually take, you know, straw and clay. Soil and earth and clay and stuff and press bricks. Yeah. Right. And then you can build housing establishments with that. And that alone, I mean, it's pretty impressive.

Dave Jones: That's very awesome. Yep. Yeah. And there's a 3D printer on there. There is. Just like a MakerBot. It's actually right up. It's RepRap. They don't put them in number order. They don't actually. Oh, okay. It's actually a RepRap. Okay. Yes, it does look like a RepRap. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You can always tell from the triangle shape. Well, I guess it's like an elongated pyramid. A wedge kind of shape. A wedge. That's about a wedge shape. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And they've got a 3D scanner to go with that. So you can scan an object and then print it out. Yeah. And then they've got things like a wind turbine, you know, an open source 50 kilowatt wind turbine and then, you know, a backhoe. And it's a really weird list of stuff, actually. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I didn't see how they came up with it, but the list.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Some of them are, you know, and there's a CNC machine, of course, you know, for making parts and stuff like that. And actually making circuit boards. That's one of the things they say. You can actually, a CNC etching mill to make your own copper clad circuit boards. And, you know, it's quite funny that, well, okay, you've made your circuit board. Where do you get your components from? You know, it's this chicken and egg kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, you can argue that, you know, if you really had to start up a civilization from scratch, it's really not going to work. But anyway, I thought it was brilliant. And they advertise it as that, oh, you could have all of the plans to restart civilization on one CD-ROM. And, well, okay, but where's your computer to read your CD-ROM, you know? Right.

Chris Gammell: Or if you have a computer, how are you generating that power to start with, right? Yeah, exactly, to do it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know. But still, the idea is brilliant, and they're implementing it, and it's fantastic. It makes me want to contribute.

Chris Gammell: It really does. I think you should. I hear you have tons of free time, Dave. Right, yeah. Right. Just like me. I mean, tons of free time. Absolutely.

Dave Jones: And it's a really weird list of things. So, what would you put on the list? What do you think should be, as in you, the audience, think should be on the... What about me, Dave? Come on, man. No one cares about you, Chris. Come on.

Chris Gammell: That's true, man.

Dave Jones: Sorry. That's all right, buddy. Laser cutter. Awesome.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I can't imagine that would be an early thing, maybe a low-hanging fruit kind of thing, like something easy to knock out if you had a laser, I guess.

Dave Jones: If you have the laser, then you have an XY stepper motor and a frame, and that's pretty much it. Yeah. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think the things like the material things you'd think what you'd need first. So, they have an aluminum extractor and a bioplastic extruder. So, if you have aluminum and plastic, you can build a lot of stuff, right? Yeah, that's right. I think you need that to really start processing raw materials. That's what it... I think that's what it ultimately comes down to. You've got to start back from the beginning. But it's...

Dave Jones: And they've got an open-source car, you know. Open-source car. That's interesting. I think I'll tackle that one today, you know. Yeah, right. I'll tackle the open-source car. No problems at all. And there's a battery, and it uses nickel ion. It uses the old nickel ion batteries. It's right down the bottom. It's on the list.

Chris Gammell: Iron or ion?

Dave Jones: Ion. Ion. Nickel ion, as in I-R-O-N.

Chris Gammell: Sounds like you're saying ion, like I-O-N. Ion. No.

Dave Jones: Nickel ion.

Chris Gammell: I-ron. I-ron.

Dave Jones: We don't pronounce it I-ron. I know. Neither do we. Right. Anyway. Yeah. Nickel ion batteries. So, there you go. Yeah. An open-source truck. No problem. Yeah, whatever. It's great. I love it. I know.

Chris Gammell: I so want these things. Well, like, I mean, that's great. I mean, like, that's exactly what you should be feeling, right? You should be like, I want to do this. I want to be part of this. You know? Like, it's...

Dave Jones: Why can't... It makes me jealous that I can't do something to change the world like this, you know? Well, I probably can, but I'm not.

Chris Gammell: You know? If you didn't have a family to support. I mean, I don't know what this guy's story was. I mean, like, maybe he had, you know, some kind of sustaining income or something. But, yeah, there's some serious... You know, you really have to be devoted to this kind of thing. No matter what you do. Even if you do it as a hobby, you have to be really devoted. So, yeah. It's... From that perspective, it's even more impressive. It's just... It's very impressive. I am very impressed with this guy and everyone that's involved with this. So, people should check it out and definitely consider getting involved. Absolutely. Especially people that say, oh, I don't have a project to, you know, work on. You know, that's... Yeah, exactly. Oh, I don't know where to start. Well, start here. Rebuild civilization from scratch. That's a good starting point, right?

Speaker ?: Exactly.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. I always get tons of email, you know, and I read it on the forums all the time as well. Or students saying, oh, what project can I work on so I can show something at my job interviews when I finish and go for jobs? Well, contribute to something like this, you know? It's... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I always say that to software guys. Whenever I'm talking to software guys or girls that are, you know, like in college or even in high school, they're always saying, wow, I don't know where to start. And I'm like, you know, get involved in an open source project. You know, that's what they're there for. To get experience. You know, you'll get mentored because you're going to have someone architecting the design. You're going to probably do some of the grunt work, but you're going to learn how the flow works. You're going to learn. You're going to have mentors because, you know, someone's going to have to help you out at some point. And then you're going to be forced to learn a lot on your own too, which is probably the best part. And it looks amazing when you're showing someone else, hey, I built this part of this piece of software that everybody uses now. Yeah. So this is the exact same. Situation with hardware now. So it's. And this expands beyond just electronics hardware, too. This is, you know, mechanical. I'm sure. Yep. You know, a majority of this is mechanical work, too. So. Oh, yeah, of course.

Dave Jones: There's so much. So many projects you can get involved in. It's almost infinite. There is back before the Internet when I was a boy. You know, you know, there was just nothing you couldn't. You know, there was nothing like this. Maybe if you went to a local ham, you know, meeting or something like that. But that was about it. Really. Yeah. So it wasn't this world of information revolution, which we've got now, which I love.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Got to love it. So speaking of open source hardware and, you know, electronics in the case that we were talking about there. Right. So, you know, where do you start? Say you have a board router, but, you know, where do you get the copper clad from? Right. Or say you actually are able to.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Where do you get the fiberglass, the copper, the components, the. Exactly. You know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So that was another point I saw.

Dave Jones: Oh, you're not going to bring up the chip maker, are you? We need an open source chip maker.

Chris Gammell: No, I actually wasn't going to bring that up. Excellent. But it is related to chips. You know, someone on the YouTube comments, and not in a horrible way, someone legitimately asked what, you know, is it, you know, you and I have talked about it before with open source hardware projects, and, well, if you're using Eagle, it's a Slamite closed off format. And someone brought up, well, if you're using chips, then you're using a proprietary format technically, right? You are. Yes. That's right. And I never really thought about it like that. You know, they said, oh, well, you have to use like 74 series logic, you know, in order to really make it open source, because everybody makes versions of that.

Dave Jones: Well, no, but then it's not open source. Then it's only multiple source. It's still proprietary. That's, you know. That's true, yeah. So really, yeah, but it's much better. That's the goal of any electronics design, not just open source, is to get, you know, is to make sure you can source your parts from multiple vendors. Oh, yeah. You know? So that's a really big thing. You can get really caught up the creek without a paddle. Yeah. If you, you know, have just a fixed source, well, a single source part. Yeah. So, yeah, but, you know, that's the thing. I mean, you can't just go back to basics all the time. You've got to build upon stuff you can get. That's how we build our advanced stuff these days. You think you can go and build a, you know, a notebook with Wi-Fi and everything else using, you know, 7-4 series chips on a chip printer? You know, you've got to, it's just not possible, you know?

Chris Gammell: Or like 2N3904s or something like that. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: You know, oh, I'll use it, make it using, make everything, all my open source projects using discrete transistors, you know? Well, good luck. Right, or vacuum tubes.

Chris Gammell: It ended up looking like in your favorite movie when Doc Brown replaces that microchip with vacuum tubes.

Dave Jones: He replaces the flux. Yeah, he replaces the time circuits with the tubes. That's right, the time circuits.

Chris Gammell: And the circuit he was replacing was probably a 555 or something, you know? Right.

Dave Jones: Oh, so yeah, you know, you've got to be realistic that, you know, the advanced stuff these days, and that's why the chip making thing just isn't going to work, because you can buy 100,000 different chips from DigiKey. But what about when the world ends, Dave?

Chris Gammell: Come on. What about when the world ends?

Dave Jones: I think that'll be the least of your worries. I think so too, yeah. If you can make your RGB lids flash in a printer.

Chris Gammell: I'll be worried about the food printer more than the chip printer, right? Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: That's right. Yeah. Solar panel first, you know, so that I can actually get some power. Thank you, to actually light, you know, light up a light bulb.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Speaking of light bulbs.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wait, I wanted to mention something about the chip printer first. I had one more thing about it. Oh, okay, go for it. Unfortunately, it's actually in the Dave camp this week. Of course it is. Come on. I know, whatever. Yeah. So basically, there was an EDN article about this new chip called, it's from Triad Semiconductor. But now it's basically, they're starting to push more analog functionality into FPGA kind of stuff. Yeah. So it's got like a million gates or something like that. What's it called? It's called a VCA6. And it's got like a hundred op amps in there, a million total transistor, or ASIC gates rather. So it is programmable from that perspective. And then it's got a bunch of, you know, selectable resistors and capacitors and everything. And, you know, even though the analog characteristics of this thing is probably pretty subpar, that's pretty cool.

Dave Jones: Yeah. The fact that you can do basic stuff with it. Yeah. There's other ones on the market that, you know, analog arrays, you know, actually programmable analog chips. It'd be nice if you could just get that functionality on its own. I think that'd be nice. Yeah. Especially if you need something to lower your component count. You don't want separate resistors and separate capacitors and separate op amps and everything else, you know. But you only want, as you said, they're a pretty basic performance usually. They're not, you know, super low power. They're not super high speed. They're not, you know, super precision, all that sort of stuff. But for most purposes, yeah, it'd be great. So if there was like a little DIP-8, you know, analog chip that you could program to do, you know.

Chris Gammell: I was like single signal in, single signal out. And then you program all the junk inside.

Dave Jones: You could program a filter in there or you could program something else. That'd be awesome. There's a chip startup thing for you. It was just a little basic analog. You know, they seem to always integrate this with the large ASICs and, you know, the digital aspects of it. Screw that. Just give me a little programmable analog part. Yeah. Is there anything like that on the market?

Chris Gammell: I haven't seen anything. And I've kept an eye out for that kind of thing. You know, I was so excited when I heard about the Actel part. Now, Micro Semi, the, what do they call that? The Power Fusion or whatever the hell that thing was. Oh, right. And it had, yeah. Yeah. It's like an FPGA. And they got all the ADDs in there. Yeah. And they got op amps and everything else. And I think they were targeting, they were targeting very specific markets. And I get that. Yeah. But I was so excited because they were like, oh, you know, programmable logic and analog stuff. And I look at it and I'm like, that's not analog. That's, that's crap blog, you know?

Dave Jones: It's not crap blog. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, it's just like, I didn't, I didn't want to touch it. You know, it was like 10 bit ADDs. But for some people, that's, that's awesome. You know, that's, that's what they want. So it's just, there's, there's no value in it yet. And even with the processing of making those things, I don't think it's really capable of making really precision analog paths in with digital processes.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I think that's why they, I think they can achieve better if they just did that idea of just a single little analog chip. Surely they, the, they could get a better process and which is more finely tuned to analog performance.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: If they just did that. So come on, people do it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And one of the problems with that is that it's always a discrete thing, right? So even if you have a filter in there, usually what they're doing is they're switching in resistors to capacitors.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. So you would have to have a digital thing in there so that you could talk to it via I squared C or something to configure it. Maybe you would have to have some flash as well to actually store the configuration and things like that. So yeah, yeah, yeah. But I know it's, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, they're discrete values though. So like maybe there's a 1K. They are discrete values. Yep. Yeah. I want something that's like, you know, programmable, like a, like a transistor in there that has an equivalent impedance of like 1K. And I've never seen, I mean, there's like, what are they, varactors that are like variable capacitors.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you can probably do that, but it's not as easy as having just the fixed component values. But, but, but the fixed component values are fine if you just want like a gain of 10, you know, give me an op amp with a gain of 10 while you switch in, you know, the suitable value resistance. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Or if you need to filter it, you know, usually you don't need an ultra precise filter. You just need something basic, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, just roll off the real high frequencies or the low frequencies depending on what you're doing. Yeah. That's a cool idea.

Dave Jones: But then again, you can argue, well, you can just do that with an RC filter, right? So. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but multi-pole kind of stuff. You need to start.

Dave Jones: Yeah, if you want to, if you want a multiple pole thing. Yep. To get a better roll off and stuff like that. Yeah. So that kind of defeats what I just said about not caring about the exact frequency. You probably do if you're wanting multiple. Yeah. Roll offs and stuff like that. Anyway, I don't know. I just think it'd be cool.

Chris Gammell: But is it viable? I don't know. I don't know either. I haven't seen anything in the market yet. And I think that analog vendors are sticking with the analog chips. But like I mentioned on the show before, you know, a lot of them are integrating stuff. So whereas maybe the absolutely programmable filters aren't going to be realistic in the near future. I think that.

Dave Jones: Well, it's just like the whole. Sorry, go on.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like a 1x, 10x, 100x kind of like amplifier. I think that's very realistic.

Chris Gammell: And useful.

Dave Jones: You can buy those from companies like analog devices. They sell ones that you can actually, you know, there's pins on them and you can actually program the gain. Yeah. Yeah. Like instrumentation amps and that kind of thing. Yeah. Instrumentation amp front ends and stuff like that. But I guess it might come down to the same thing with FPGAs. They're like, you know, everyone said, oh, they're the future and everything. Did we talk about that last week? Probably.

Chris Gammell: That was with Jack. That was two weeks ago.

Dave Jones: Oh, that was with Jack two weeks ago. All right. And yeah. And but they've got too many compromises to be used as an everyday part, you know? Oh, yeah. Like a mass produced kind of thing. As a mass produced, cheap jelly bean bit of, you know, logic.

Chris Gammell: Well, none of them want to be a jelly bean part. You know, they all want to be their. Oh, yes. Everyone wants to be the jelly bean. No, I don't think they want to be a jelly. I think they want to be. They want to be the Vertex 7s. You know, they want to be the. Yeah. They want to be the OMAP 9 or 10 or whatever the hell they're on now. You know, they want to be the high margin part. They don't want to be the jelly bean part because then someone else comes in and.

Dave Jones: There's very low margins in. Exactly. Jelly bean parts. Yeah. That's why they're jelly bean.

Chris Gammell: Exactly.

Dave Jones: It's because everyone is out, you know, everyone's out doing each other until nobody makes a profit on them anymore. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: They want to be like the high end Ferrero Rocher chocolate part, you know? Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't know. So anyway, I just think it'd be cool to see. But yeah, realistically, I don't think we'll see it. Okay. What a bummer.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'll tell you what's not a bummer. Here's my lack of lack of segue. I want to just talk about this. Have you seen. So we talked about the video. I think I think I sent you the video. Right. For the the first first robot competition. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. With the. Yeah, I love this. You didn't like it. I didn't like it at first. Okay. So people don't know. Will. I am. And a bunch of celebrities. Basically, there's this promo video came out.

Dave Jones: Who the hell is Will. I am.

Chris Gammell: So he's from the Black Eyed Pea. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. He's from the Black Eyed Pea. Exactly. But it's a bunch of celebrities.

Dave Jones: I'm sure all the young kids know who he is. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And a whole bunch of other celebrities anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Steven Tyler. How about that? Aerosmith. Right. So. No. Nothing. What are you. No.

Dave Jones: I. Dude, if the music didn't come from the 70s or 80s, I don't know it. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Aerosmith did come from the 70s. Really? Aerosmith weren't the 70s? Yeah, they were. That's when they started. It was the 70s. Yeah, they went all the way through the 80s, 90s. That's why he looks like he's frigging dead. Anyways. Right. So they had this video. If people hadn't seen it, there was a promo video for First Robotics. So First Robotics being the robot competition that Dean Kamen started. Dean Kamen being the guy that invented the Segway and a bunch of insulin pumps and a bunch of really awesome things is company's deck of research. So there's 20-year competition that's been going on. And now finally, they're getting some real traction here. I mean, not that this is the real traction point of it. There's been books about it. There's been documentaries about it. But this is more of the popular culture. This is kind of the final. I think this is the final step. And it's a good step, I think. I mean.

Dave Jones: I think it's awesome. Yeah. And you can argue that the video is a bit cheesy, maybe. Is that the word? It's super cheesy. It's horrible.

Chris Gammell: The video itself, the clips. Like, I have to give credit. Like, Will.i.am is the one who set a lot of this up. You know, him and Dean Kamen were actually the ones interacting, you know, and trying to pair up, like, the celebrities with the technical side of things. And I think Will.i.am was the focal point with Dean Kamen. And the other ones that came in, you know, like Jack Black and, like, Justin Bieber and all these. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, Bieber. I almost threw up when I saw Justin Bieber. He just looks at the camera.

Chris Gammell: He's like, hey, guys, I just want to let you know, working on robots is just as cool as what we do in music. It's like, shut up, dude. We're way cooler than you. You know, like, you're a little punk, you know? Get a haircut, hippie. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hey, you can't talk to those sideburns, dude.

Chris Gammell: Oh, those are gone. Those are gone.

Dave Jones: Oh, and sideburn's gone.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. Oh, there you go. Anyway, so, yeah, there's this promo video, and we'll link it in there. You know, at first, I didn't like it. You know, I didn't like that. You know, it looked like, it kind of reminded me of, like, the, it seemed like they were paying these people to say this stuff. Right. Honestly, that's what I first thought. And, and, and basically what the point I've come to is it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter even if they did.

Dave Jones: Exactly. That's what I saw from day one. I thought, yeah, this is, you know, but it doesn't matter. The fact is, the kids will listen to these people. Yeah. You know?

Chris Gammell: It's a focus on it. So, and even if it's not like the kids, even if it's just, hey, you know, other people looking at that and being like, hey, all these celebrities are endorsing this. Hey, there's more focus on first. That's the ultimate, ultimate good thing that's come out of this. And so, actually, last night, they, they aired the special. So, it wasn't just this commercial. I thought at first it was just a commercial, but it's actually this hour-long special they had on, on ABC in the US. Right. And it's, it's amazing. You know, they, they showcase all these teams. They actually, you know, they, they had, they, I think they were in the St. Louis, um, uh, football stadium, the Dome. And so, they actually had the competition there. Like, 600 teams were in the finals. Uh, and then at the halftime show, they had this huge, you know, Black Eyed Peas concert and, uh, all these other artists came in and. All right. It's awesome. It's, it's, it's exactly, it's exactly what I wanted to see. I was, I was smiling the entire time I was watching it. It was just amazing that there was any kind of focus on it like that. It was just absolutely amazing. And, you know, I was, I was talking to my fiance about it and she's just like, well, why the hell didn't we have this when we were kids? You know, like.

Dave Jones: I know, we had nothing.

Chris Gammell: I, well, even less for you, Dave. I mean, like, I had some stuff. Oh, yeah, we had nothing here in Australia. At least you were in the US where the action was. Or even just, you know, that many more years ago. Like that, like it, it, it got a little bit better, but like, man, this, this is a big deal. I think this could be a really, really big deal. And I'm so excited about it. So, uh, I'll, you know, I'll link in the videos too, but man, it's, it's just spectacular. I, I, I'm, I'm gushing. I'm gushing. I, I, I, I'm. Chris is excited. I am so excited. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. It is amazing. So, uh, you know, at first by itself, even before it was, you know, before it was featured like this, you know, Dean came in starting this and then all of the amazing volunteers, you know, because a lot of the importance of, of the first program is built on the people that are volunteering with it.

Dave Jones: Oh, that is the foundation. You can't have it without those people, you know, who actually run the programs and get the kids excited.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Exactly. Yep. And, and, you know, if you look at the numbers too, it's like the, uh, I think like the male female ratio in it is almost 50 50. It's just everything about it. They're doing right. I mean, it's right. Okay. Okay. All right. I'm going to calm down now.

Dave Jones: I love these kinds of programs.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Me too. Me too.

Dave Jones: Do you guys have a bit of an aside from technology here? Sorry. But do you guys have the, uh, Duke? No, you wouldn't. It's probably only in Commonwealth countries, but the Duke of Edinburgh.

Chris Gammell: Awards. No, I never heard of that.

Dave Jones: No. Okay. It must only be a Commonwealth thing because it's the, yeah, it's to do with England and the Duke of Edinburgh. Anyway, it's a program in schools here in Australia. It's probably in England and other Commonwealth countries as well, where they encourage kids to get out there and do adventurous stuff, you know? So, and, and it's got all the kids so excited that they're going out and they're doing a week long hike somewhere through the mountains, you know? So if you do. Yeah. So it's a similar sort of thing to first. You join up, like you, you don't have to do it. It's not compulsory. Uh-huh. But, you know, the kids are all excited, so excited about doing this Duke of Edinburgh's thing where, you know, where the requirement is to actually get the Duke of Edinburgh award, you have to go out and do X amount of outdoor stuff, you know? Uh-huh. Outdoor physical activity, you know? Or you've got to go to the gym or, you know, you've got to go hiking somewhere. You've got to do something else.

Chris Gammell: Oh, it has to be physical?

Dave Jones: It has to be physical, yeah. Okay. It doesn't actually have to be outdoor, you know? It can be, yeah. But it's great. So it gets, we had nothing like that when I was a kid. That's awesome. You know, you just sat in your school and that was it. Yeah. You know, you sat in your room and classroom. Oh, you might have a swimming carnival once a year. That was about, that was about the extent of it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but I think it's brilliant. So these sort of programs that get the kids excited and involved is great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. Oh, man. Speaking of other awesome things. So I wanted to call out a build I saw. So it was, I, I, someone actually suggested this to me, but they, they built a 40, 40 meter, you know, so I, I'm starting for a ham exam, right? So I'm going to sit for the test eventually once I, you know, finally study. Right. But it's a, it's called a WBR, right? And it's a 40 meter receiver. You know, you can receive lots of different channels. And it's Dave Richards, AA7EE. It's his, you know, his ham call sign, right? We're not, we're not big in ham, but whatever. Uh, and I just wanted to call out how absolutely gorgeous this build is. This guy built it all, all, he built the, the receiver case out of copper clad and he tacked it all together with solder. And, and then he built, it's just, I, I honestly, I honestly have this.

Dave Jones: It's very common. It's very common.

Chris Gammell: The, what building it out of copper, you mean?

Dave Jones: Building out of copper clad or building your circuit on, on the actual copper clad board itself. But it's not uncommon to build the case out of copper clad as well.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: Because it's a great, it's a nice, cheap, easy to work material, readily available. And, you know, it's great for shielding. So, and, and, and you can solder to it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's brilliant. But I wanted to call out, I mean, yeah, that, that in itself is cool. And, and, and I, I had only seen that a couple of times, but, uh, this build quality is just flawless. Did you see the pictures of the build?

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, it's great. I'm staring at it right now.

Chris Gammell: It's, it's the back, it's the background on my computer right now. Like that's, that's how beautiful it is. And, uh, you know, he did a lot of little breakouts, you know, like, so like those, how, I think SparkFun and a couple other, you know, the people did that where they have like, you know, S I, S O I C to, to, to, uh, like, you know, pin breakout kind of things. And he did that on top of the copper clad. He tacked it down. Yeah.

Dave Jones: He actually stuck them down, glued them down. So he's done all the components sort of dead, not quite dead bug, cause they're not upside down, but just, uh, freestanding on the copper clad board. And that's a time honored, time honored construction technique. And it's a great high frequency technique. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Cause you have that really nice, you know, ground plane.

Dave Jones: Nice ground plane. And you just, you know, you sold the component directly to the ground plane and bang, it's there. You know, there's no inductance.

Chris Gammell: And exactly. Yeah. It's brilliant. But yeah, just this, the entire, the build quality on this is just amazing. So I, I had to call it out and, uh, it's gorgeous. I, I want to build, I want to build something like this.

Dave Jones: So I've got a technical query. He's joined in, in, inside the case is soldered like the front panel, the back panel, you know, so he's joined all the copper clad on the inside, but the copper clad on the outside seems to be floating.

Chris Gammell: Really? Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: He, I, I, he, I don't think he's actually made an electrical connection to the outer side of the copper.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. What about the screws on the side? So if you, so you can actually, if people look at it.

Dave Jones: I'm sure it's, I'm sure it's connected or maybe via one of the B and C connectors. Actually, it could be via the B and C connector on the back. Yep. But, but then he hasn't joined that back panel with the other panels. He hasn't made a proper connection on the outer copper layers.

Chris Gammell: If you screw, if you had the screws on the side, that could be your, your chassis connection.

Dave Jones: Oh yeah, possibly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think that's what it is. Yeah. I think it is the screws.

Dave Jones: But, but then that's only the side panels. What about the top panel there? It's got nothing. It's got no connection to the nice copper clad on the top. Yeah. So it's sold. It's only on the inside because it's a double side of, it's double side of copper clad, right? It's only sold on the inside. There's no magic connection.

Chris Gammell: Then you only have the capacitance of the outside copper and the inside copper. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So the outside's resonating at some frequency, but you know, possibly, who knows? Maybe that's the antenna. Who knows? Right. Hey, that'd be novel. Yeah. Yeah. Patch antenna. There you go. Based on the, awesome. Anyway. Yes. It's very nice.

Chris Gammell: It's gorgeous. Copper clad. I love it.

Dave Jones: But then to keep it clean and to finish it off, that's hard because copper, you know, you've got to seal it with a lacquer and it's, you know.

Chris Gammell: Because it oxidizes.

Dave Jones: And it oxidizes very easily. So, yeah, sealing it is very difficult. And you can actually see his front panel. You can see the fingerprints and, are they fingerprints on there? But you can see that the front panel's already starting to oxidize on the fully assembled version of it. So, anyway, it's very good. Yeah. And let's get on to, so, well, no, we have a news item today, possibly. News? Phillips in the U.S. have won some LED prize. Oh, this is a light bulb thing. This is a U.S. government thing, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, this is a light bulb thing you were going to mention before. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yes. They're, who is it? Is the government, did the government put up the prize?

Chris Gammell: Uh, yes, the U.S. government did, yeah. So, they, uh. U.S. government? They called it. They won 10 million bucks? It's like the X prize, but they called it the L prize. The L prize.

Dave Jones: Why the L prize?

Chris Gammell: Well, like the X prize.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but the L, what does L stand for? Lamp?

Chris Gammell: LED. LED. Right.

Dave Jones: Right. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Duh.

Chris Gammell: And so this is Marjorie Conner writing about it. So, Marjorie's a great, she's one of the best writers at EDN, I think. You know, she, she writes some great articles about, uh, lighting. She's real big into lighting. But, uh, Phillips basically developed one of the first, you know, fully dimmable LED based, you know, you know, Edison socket based lamps. You know, you can use all LED. You can dim it. It has the circuitry inside and it's all LED.

Dave Jones: So, and it's got the equivalent lumens to a 60 watt incandescent bulb. That, that was the whole prize. You had to replace a 60 watt incandescent bulb. Totally. So. Yeah. Yeah. I, there's no photo of it. I, can you use it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. If you go to the article and then you actually click on the, uh, the previous week. So there's a, uh, Phillips. Oh, right. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yep. Got it.

Chris Gammell: And so, uh, yeah. So they'll, they'll win the, you know, they have the prize. The target price for it was 22 bucks and $15 and then $8, you know, keep on going down. So, but I mean, uh, if it, you know, if it lasts the amount of time that LEDs are supposed to last, that, that could definitely pay off over, over time. So.

Dave Jones: It's interesting that they've done it in, uh, quadrants. It's like four different segments. Three, three, three segments. Sorry, three, is it? Sorry. Yeah. Three. Um, yeah. And it's, it's rather interesting construction actually. Yes. Because I was wondering how would you do the, how would you do the, uh, you know, because a compact, uh, sorry, an incandescent lamp is a globe, right? It shines out equally in all directions. So how would you mimic that within, in terms of reflectors and lenses and, you know, diffusers stuff like that and, and diffusers and they've sort of done it in thirds. Um, they sort of split it into.

Chris Gammell: And heat sinking is obviously another big thing. I mean, that's. Yeah. Heat sinking is a huge thing. That's been one of the biggest parts of any, uh, any LED thing is you've got this tiny little dye. That affects the life. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Dave Jones: We've mentioned this before. You can get a 60 watt. We, we, I could have built one of these, right? And won the $10 million prize, but it would have had a lifetime of, you know, 200 hours or something. Yeah, exactly. Um, because I'm overdriving the LEDs to get the, to actually get the lumens required. Right. So yeah, I, yeah, I don't know. What is the life of this thing? Have they, I don't know what, what temperature does it get to? Oh, come on. I want the technical details.

Chris Gammell: I'm sorry. I didn't work at Phillips.

Dave Jones: Oh man. Anyway, they have met the requirements of the requirements are greater than 900 lumens using less than 10 Watts, um, not greater than 90 lumens per watt, obviously. Um, and, uh, a temperature to match a color temperature, sorry, a color temperature to match, um, the incandescent. So it's, uh, 2700, uh, Kelvin and, um, a color rendering index of greater than 90. And they met all of those requirements. So bingo, they win, but they didn't, you know, um, oh, there we go. A lumen maintenance of at 25,000 hours should be 70%. That was the requirement. And Phillips got 99.3% after 25,000 hours. Nice. But that, well, of course they haven't been able to test 25,000 hours. So it's a 95% confidence that they can write. Right. And that might be based on the, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, sometimes they do the Arrhenius equation, everything. So they, they age it in a heat chamber and everything.

Dave Jones: And yeah, then you can work it out. Yeah. So they've got a 95% confidence over 200 units that they'll get 99.3% of the lumens after 25,000 hours. And that's, that's, that's actually remarkable. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. That's phenomenal. Um, 25,000 hours. What is that? What does that translate to? That's if the components inside last that long, like the capacitors. Like capacitors. Yeah. That's what I was thinking too.

Chris Gammell: If you've got an electrolytic cap that's like just waiting to dry out. Right.

Dave Jones: That's right. Yeah. So I'm sure they've, you know, I'm sure they've taken that into account. This isn't some one hung low brand. So.

Chris Gammell: So let's see. 25,000 hours is, uh, 1,000 days. Right. Yep. And that would be divided by 365 is three years, three years continuous, which is not

Dave Jones: three years continuous. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Realistic. But, um, you know, if you did that at a, uh, what maybe 50% duty, I mean, it's six years then five and a half, six years. Yep. So.

Dave Jones: Exactly. That's, that's impressive. And it's still after that, assuming the electronics haven't failed, it's 99 point, you know, it's 99%.

Chris Gammell: Right. So. Yeah. So they're talking about light output versus actual lifetime, which is. Yes. Assumed. Yeah. Higher. Right. So. That'd be interesting to know how that fails too, because with, uh, with, uh, with, uh, incandescent, at least it, you know, pop and just goes away. Right. The, the filament burns up.

Dave Jones: But incandescents, likewise, similar with LEDs. You can run those for 50 years if you want, if you underrate them. Yes. Right. The, the reason light bulbs fail is because they're overrated. Okay. They're not designed. But if you underrate them, then they can last for 50. I think the longest lasting light bulb at the moment, there's a, there's a webcam, which points to it. Yeah. I have a hundred years or something in some fire station in the U S or something. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That thing's like super weak. It's like hardly even on.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But it lasts that long. And, uh, same thing with LEDs, but yes. What's going to fail first folks, the circuitry or the LED dye itself?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's a good question. Regardless, I think it's kind of like the first million we were talking about with Elon Musk, right? This is, this is that point where it's like, okay, well start making them. It doesn't matter that they're 20 bucks for now. Some people are going to be early adopters and the rest. And then the competition is going to ramp up and hopefully in five years we'll have LED light bulbs for everyone at, you know, one hung low brand prices.

Dave Jones: And, and, uh, if, if there is any given in this industry, it's that LEDs are going to overtake everything else for home lighting and, and maybe not on the huge massive industrial scale lighting, you know, stuff like that, but they'll at least overtake home lighting, you know, street lamps and things like that. Uh, it's just.

Chris Gammell: Well, and if the economics get there, I mean, they'll just, they'll just parallel everything. I mean, like. It's a given. Yeah. Absolute given. It's awesome. I love it. Yeah. And it's good too. I mean, it's good for the electronics industry. I mean, uh, hell we talk about electronics in here, right? I mean, like there's a lot of electronics that are needed even in the simple little light bulb, you know, you got dimmers. Uh, if people don't know how dimmers work, it's kind of stupid actually, to be honest. I mean, basically if you have an AC waveform, you're chopping off the top of the waveform. Chopping it. Yep. Yeah. That's, that's horrible. You know, like.

Dave Jones: And it's horrible from an EMI point of view too. It spews out all this EMI shit. Yeah. It's terrible. Dimmers are awful.

Chris Gammell: I hate dimmers. I know. But from an electronics standpoint, I mean, that's a very difficult problem to solve in a low cost and high volume kind of production manner. So, well, uh, you know, if, if robots are taking our jobs in some spots, if the Foxcons of the world are, are losing, are losing jobs to robots, then, uh, those workers can go work on LED problems because, you know, there's no shortage of those right now. So. Yep. Uh, life, life finds a way. Right. To quote my favorite scientist, Daniel Goldblum. Interesting. There you go. Oh, dude. Come on. Worst movie. I love it. I love it. Oh, man. Oh, boy. Yeah. Oh, that's terrible. He should have heard it, right? I think we're running out of time, Dave.

Dave Jones: Yeah, we are. I forgot to start the stopwatch, but we are. We've been recording for an hour and one minute.

Chris Gammell: Can I sneak in some history for today? Some, uh.

Dave Jones: Yes, please. You sneak in something and I'll sneak in something.

Chris Gammell: Oh, you too, huh? Okay, so. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: I've got a very quick one.

Chris Gammell: Okay, so this day in nerd history. Oh, I lost it. Oh, no. Where'd he go? Oh, shoot. Okay, you go first.

Dave Jones: I tweeted yesterday. I was digging through my old records and I found an old pay slip from 20 years ago. Wow. And listen, people, do not say engineering does not pay, okay? I used to earn $11.6396 per hour. Wow. Woo-hoo. All right. Engineering pays, folks.

Chris Gammell: Do you have a picture of it? Can you take a picture of it? Like black out all the personal info?

Dave Jones: I probably could. This one's from 91, but I actually started this job. That was just before I left, I think. So I started the job in 89. So, yeah. But I think I was on the same. Yeah. I was on the same way. It was my first job. Yeah. And, yeah. I could. And it's $11. And it's actually got four significant digits there. 11.6396.

Chris Gammell: You never know when those last two might make you an extra buck or two, you know?

Dave Jones: Exactly. That's right.

Chris Gammell: That's beer money right there, man.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: Oh, brilliant. And they used to pay you in cash. You know, somebody would go to the bank and you'd, you know, and somebody would have to ride a shotgun. It used to be the secretary goes to the bank, but somebody would ride shotgun with them, go to the bank, and they'd pick up the pay slips. The money was in these little envelopes. The bank had already put cash in these envelopes. Yeah. And they'd come around and, yeah, yeah. They'd hand you an envelope with cash in it.

Chris Gammell: That's awesome.

Dave Jones: That's how it used to work, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I'd love to see a picture of that. I bet that'd be a hoot. Just to see what that looks like. I love it. I found out what I was looking for. So born on August 15th, John Comrie, or also known as Leslie Comrie, I believe his real name was, he was a New Zealand astronomer. And basically, this guy was one of the first ones to really start using punch cards. You know, punch cards were there before he started having programmable memories to do astronomical calculations. It was really cool. So before that, you know, they were mostly using computers for business where there was, you know, a real money case for it. Yeah, finance thing. Exactly, exactly. And he started using it for science, you know, actually using to do log tables and mathematical tables. And so then he started a company called Scientific Computing. Oh, wow. Yeah. Very cool. And so that was in 1938. You know, that was like a long time ago. So, and he was kind of the, one of the, I guess, pioneers of software. I mean, not the pioneer of the pioneers, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, but yeah, the first private company for actual scientific computing. So, you know, and then later he worked in World War II of computerizing, you know, calculations for weapons and all that other nasty stuff. But yeah. Yeah. And yeah. So definitely a very important dude. And, and that's today's.

Dave Jones: And he's a New Zealander. And he's a Kiwi. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: He's a Kiwi. We won't, we won't say what, what Dave thinks about New Zealanders.

Dave Jones: Well, then we'll, well, we'll just claim him, obviously, because that's what we do. We're allowed to do that here in Australia. Oh, really? Any, anyone who's any good that comes from New Zealand who does anything significant, we, we claim them as Australian. Oh, yeah. It's a, yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's a hell of a deal.

Dave Jones: Yep. I know. It's great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sneaky New Zealanders, we call them. Sounds like you guys are the sneaky ones. You're stealing them. You're stealing credit. That's right. Sneaky Aussies. Yeah. Oh, man. I still have to put.

Dave Jones: Well, there are some New Zealanders who promote themselves as Australian because nobody knows where the frig New Zealand is, right? So they go, oh, yeah, I'm Australian, you know, and then they, right? So they. That's not straight up very far. Right. Oh, boy. Give me a break.

Chris Gammell: Anyway, we're way over, dude. Oh, we are. We are.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: All right, guys. Well, it's been another fun and packed amp hour, I guess, huh? Talked a lot about that. It was pretty random, though. That's okay. We haven't had one of those in a while.

Dave Jones: Because, yeah, we were a bit absent-minded today.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Too many other things happening.

Chris Gammell: Yep. But we will talk to you guys next week. As always. See ya. Bye-bye.