#62 – Op amps, Microchips & Mergers - Narquois Nerd Nescience - Narquois Nerd Nescience

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.

Dave Jones: Hey, Chris. There's no one else today. Just us?

Chris Gammell: Just us. Just us.

Dave Jones: You have a change? Just a regular show?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. This is kind of the... This isn't the norm anymore, so...

Dave Jones: Yeah, right. Yeah, true.

Chris Gammell: I like it. I like it. We might actually get through some articles we have posted or anything.

Dave Jones: And regular segments. Because everyone loves the regular Amp Hour segments. Some people do. And we'll try our best to fill those bingo sheets for you.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Maybe we should open them up and go along and see if we can... Right.

Dave Jones: Tick them off ourselves. We'll become obsessed. Ah, boy. So, what's been happening on the other side of the ditch?

Chris Gammell: That's a big ditch, huh? It's filled with water, too.

Dave Jones: Yeah, a big ass ditch. Yeah, about... What is it? 10,000 miles or something?

Chris Gammell: Something like that, yeah. I spent the last week out at MIT, actually. Yes. Do tell. So, I was recruiting for my company. And... I don't know. It was pretty cool. I never... I had never really... I'd been on campus before, actually. I had been out to Boston a couple years ago. For the show, right?

Dave Jones: For the ESC.

Chris Gammell: Actually, that. And also, I had been out there for July 4th just to visit some friends. Okay. And so, I had actually stood in front of MIT to watch fireworks over the Charles River, which is a great experience if anyone ever has the opportunity. Excuse me. But yeah, it's definitely different being on campus. And I was there both times when I think school was out. Or the one time I was on MIT's campus, school was out. So, yeah, big difference. But it's a great campus. You know, lots of smart kids and lots of...

Dave Jones: People work cheap, right?

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: That's the idea. I don't know where you got that idea. Yeah, that's the idea. It is still MIT. That's why companies go to head hunting at these campuses. So that they can get talent cheap.

Chris Gammell: I don't know about that, Dave.

Dave Jones: That's your first job. You work for anything, you know?

Chris Gammell: These are MIT students, though.

Dave Jones: I don't know how you work for peanuts. Come on.

Chris Gammell: I wrote about it last night, actually. I wrote about, you know, just the differences. Because I didn't go to a top-tier school. I went to Case Western, which is here in Cleveland, actually. Yep. And, you know, it's top 50. Whatever. It's not very high on that top 50 list. 50?

Dave Jones: We don't even have 50 in Australia.

Chris Gammell: Well, there you go.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And it's just the differences. The big difference is opportunity. You know, like it was a... I don't know. People could read the article. But it was a striking difference. You know, like they are clamoring for MIT talent. And I was one of the ones clamoring. So, it was really interesting. I mean...

Dave Jones: So, this was like a fair, was it? There were other companies there. Yeah. There were other companies there. Other... Who were the other companies?

Chris Gammell: Oh, oh. Were there other big... Oh, yeah. Big names there. I mean, Google, snapping up talent like crazy. Oh, right. Yeah. The interesting thing was actually hardware. Hardware was not that big of a deal. You know, lots of software, lots of financial companies, which I've, you know...

Dave Jones: You were surprised by this? You sound surprised.

Chris Gammell: I'm a little surprised. Come on, dude. This is reality. Out of 350, there was maybe 20 employers looking for hardware. Like, that made hardware.

Dave Jones: I don't know. I am not surprised at all. No. That's just the way the world works.

Chris Gammell: I guess that's just my naivete. So, it was definitely interesting. You know, there's a lot of financial companies there. A lot of people looking for... Yeah.

Dave Jones: We've talked about that before, haven't we?

Chris Gammell: Of course we have, yeah. And we're not big fans of that. And it's even tougher to see, you know, because they can offer a lot of money. And, you know, I can't really hold it against students wanting to make money. No. But, yeah. It's just the market that it's in right now.

Dave Jones: Yep. And if you're reading between the line there, if there's any students out there, read between the lines, your job prospects are actually better if you're in hardware because there's not as fewer... There's, you know, fewer people. Oh, yeah. You know, to actually compete against. I agree. And it's more niche. I reckon the hardware job prospects are very good.

Chris Gammell: And even more than that, I think, you know, we got so many people on the horizon getting ready to retire, maybe 10 years. It's just... Yeah. It's going to be a bloodbath trying to get talent in 10 years or so. Yeah. Maybe all that talent will be in China, but I don't think all of it will be. Oh, no. No. Not at all. It's definitely interesting that more people aren't. But, I mean, I've been saying that for a couple of years, too. You know, like, the world needs hardware designers, so...

Dave Jones: I've been saying it forever. There's always a job in electronics.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it might not pay as well, but there'll always be a job as long as you... Right. You know, as long... Well, you have to be good enough. They won't just take any dumb shit. Right. You know. Sorry to any dumb shits out there. No, I'm sure we don't have dumb shit. Oh, the dumb shit population.

Chris Gammell: No. I think our listeners are pretty smart, so...

Dave Jones: And I get that question a lot in forums, various forums, not just the EEV blog forum, and even personal email requests for help. You know? They always ask about their career. Oh, should I go into software, or should I go into hardware? And I'm going, go into hardware. Well, really, the answer is... Because there's just so many people doing software.

Chris Gammell: Learn both, but maybe specialize in hardware.

Dave Jones: Well, you ultimately learn both anyway. I don't think there's anyone who... Out there... I don't think there's a course these days where you don't do software in it. So... Right.

Chris Gammell: I agree. Really. I...

Dave Jones: Even 20 years ago when I was doing it, you did a hell of a lot of software. So... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, like, the people there, it was... I definitely put people up on a pedestal from MIT. I thought they were going to be very, you know, like, brainy. And a lot of them were. I mean, they were very smart people, but it wasn't as drastic as I thought it would be. Now, some of the stuff...

Dave Jones: Okay. You were expecting them to bring out Robbie the Robots and... Yeah. You know, that kind of... All sorts of stuff. Yeah. Stereotypical stuff.

Chris Gammell: But, I mean, they're still really bright kids. And... Yeah. One I wanted to particularly point out, she was a sophomore and she built a particle accelerator in high school. Sweet. It was amazing. It was just like... I mean, like, that catches my attention no matter what. I mean... Yeah. And... That's just cool. I'll post a link to their website from when they were developing. Oh, you've got it.

Dave Jones: Okay. Great. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They're called the Cyclotron Kids.

Dave Jones: Right. So, did they do this off their own bat? Or is there somebody, you know, behind there, some teacher behind it actually driving it and convinced them to do it and that sort of stuff?

Chris Gammell: I don't think so. I'm curious. I'm sure there was a lot of mentoring support. But, no, when I talked to her about it, she ended up teaming up with another student who she met at physics camp, she said.

Dave Jones: Physics camp. What a bunch of funsters.

Chris Gammell: I mean... All right. I bet if you go through the roles of that camp, though, I bet they're all doing pretty well.

Dave Jones: No, it's doing kick-ass stuff. Yeah. I know.

Chris Gammell: And so, yeah.

Dave Jones: They're smarter than I am, I'm sure. So, I won't bag them.

Chris Gammell: They were just really interested in it. They're poking a bit of fun at the other sciences, you know. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. We like... Even though we're nerds, right? We love the Big Bang Theory. Yes, yes.

Speaker ?: You know?

Chris Gammell: So...

Dave Jones: Oh, have you seen the latest Big Bang Theory episode? Yes, I did. The latest... Oh, where he takes apart geology. Yeah. Geology is not a real science. We won't ruin the moment for you. It's good. It's great. It's a funny episode. Or the rock people, as he calls them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I love it. I mean, that's the important thing is still making fun of yourself along with everyone else, right? Yeah, yeah. Of course. That's the best part.

Dave Jones: Take the piss out of yourself. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: There you go.

Speaker ?: There you go.

Dave Jones: I'll take the piss out of myself at every opportunity. Everyone knows that.

Chris Gammell: And so you had the thing on here, actually, about a nerd culture kind of thing real quick. Oh, God.

Dave Jones: This is going to be so bad. So bad. Oh, I got approached. It's not the first time I've been approached via YouTube message. And I'll get to the eventual story, but here it is, right? So I get a YouTube message, which is probably the most unrespectful way to contact somebody, right? Yeah. Like, when you get a personal YouTube message, it's like, oh, some dipshit doesn't know how to find my email address, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Or that's like getting a piece of actual spam mail in your mailbox. Spam or something like that. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. So it lacks credibility, right? Lacks all credibility. At the very least, yeah. So I get a message saying, and the grammar was, you know, didn't introduce themselves, just said, hi, I'm a casting agent, and I'm looking for a, you know, a nerd to be on this new nerd reality TV show or, you know, something. And that was about it. You know, message me if you are interested or something. You know, no other information. It's like, oh, piss off, you know? So I decided to play with this guy, you know, and we sent a few messages back and forth. And I said, well, part of the intelligence test is trying to find my email address on my website. You know, if you can pass that, I'll listen to you, you know? Yeah. So he eventually figured it out. Yay. And he, apologies to him, he did turn out to be a legitimate person. And like, he didn't have a legitimate website, didn't have a legitimate YouTube channel, nothing, right? So not a lot of that in Hollywood, huh? Yeah. So I've had this before. I've had casting agents. Anyway, it turns out he's the head casting agent for a new reality TV show called King of the Nerds. And you may have seen this. It's made all the geek blogs and all this sort of stuff. Yeah. This is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. And yes, it's as bad as it sounds. Basically, they've pulled no expense here. It's from the producers of Survivor, The Amazing Race, Mythbusters, right? So this is a big deal. Okay. Maybe. I don't know. Well, maybe, but they've, right, you can guarantee a lot of money's going into it, right? It's not some, it's not just going to make some cable channel or something, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: So, you know, it is, you know, a big thing. And they've got Lewis and Booger to host it. And if you don't know those names, then hang your head in shame and go and watch Revenge of the Nerds, please. Yeah. So, anyway, they've got Lewis and Booger to host the damn thing.

Chris Gammell: I can't believe that.

Dave Jones: And yeah, it's going to be tacky. And some of the stuff they're looking for, tell us, Chris, what are they asking for here?

Chris Gammell: Well, just all the stuff they smush all together, you know? So they say nerd, which is a pretty generic term, right? But they're talking about gamers, comic book collectors, mathematics majors, physics and biology, people that are passionate about that.

Dave Jones: Star Wars fans.

Chris Gammell: Harry Potter fans. Yeah. Makers and DIY people. Yeah. People who go to Burning Man. I mean, like, where are they getting... Like, this is just such a large swath. I see.

Dave Jones: I don't even know what Burning Man is.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. What is Burning Man?

Chris Gammell: Oh, you had never heard of that? No. Basically, it's like an art and technology festival out in the desert. Yeah. In Nevada. Yeah. And basically, every year they have this huge effigy and they burn it. And, you know, it's like there's a big festival. But there's a lot of really kooky, cool stuff. But I would never put those people in with the people that are, like, sitting in their basement playing video games. I mean, they could both be considered nerds, but this is just a ridiculous show. This is just the beginning of a horrible reality show.

Dave Jones: But they do actually mention Maker and it says, are you Arduino proficient? Right. Can you list all the digits of pi? Are you in Mensa? Yeah. They've just pulled out every stereotype they can. You know. And it's for winning money, too. Maybe if you're one of the rock people. Yeah. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: It's just, it's going to be an embarrassment, I'm sure. It'll make the producers look worse than the people. Well, I'm sure the producers will make the people on the show look horrible. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You're guaranteed to come out looking like a loser. You know. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: In terms of trying to promote the sciences and promote makers and promote, you know, just like the STEM programs. This is basically the opposite of what you want to be doing. Saying geek is the new cool. That's like that stupid, when those stupid rock stars were on the first video, right? We talked about that in the past.

Dave Jones: Oh, here we go. You don't have another dig at that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, my God. It pissed me off so much. It was Justin Bieber saying, hey, guys, I want you to know that I think what you guys do in science is just as cool as what we do in music. And first off, screw you, dude. We do stuff that's way cooler than you. And, you know, like just, I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: So, I don't think this is. Well, we're a big filler. Yeah. This is not a good thing for STEM and everything else. This is quite the opposite.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I will not be participating. He loved my videos and he tried to convince me that I should join. And then I looked at it and I went, well, dude, read your own terms and conditions. Do I look under 30? I mean, you know.

Chris Gammell: Maybe you've just been aged by the Australian sun.

Dave Jones: If you read my about page, it says I've been in the industry 20 years. Yeah, I'm going to be 30 years old, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Maybe. Fail. Anyway.

Dave Jones: Anyway, if you're game and you want to win big in quote marks and you have no shame of looking like an absolute fool, which you will look like if you go on it, I guarantee it. But, hey, if you want to get your head on telly, well, who am I to stop you? But there it is. It's nerdking.net. We'll put the link up if you're game and silly enough to try and enter something like this.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All right.

Dave Jones: But that would be cool if an AMPL listener actually got on there. We could. I guess so. It kind of would. If you're, if, you know, hey, everyone. If they mention the show. Some people don't care. You know, some people might think, hey, that's my big break. You know. And it could be. It could be a big break. If you're talented enough and you go on there and, you know, you've got 10 million, 5, 10 million viewers each week or something, then you can make a big thing of yourself. So I'm not necessarily going to say it's, you know, all, that it's all bad.

Chris Gammell: It's not all bad, but it's not much good. How about that?

Dave Jones: Yeah. In terms of promoting, you know, the sciences and, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's just stereotypes. I mean, it makes a funny movie, right? When you go and watch Revenge of the Nerds, if you haven't watched it, it's freaking hilarious. And, you know, it's great as a movie, but this is, you know, they're trying to make it out this is real. You know, it's real reality. And they'll make you do these stupid contests. And I think I read somewhere that they were going to try and make the contest actually competitive. Like, you only compete in the area that you know. You know, so if you're into Arduinos, like they're asking for here, you know, if you're a hardware person, then, you know, you don't have to compete against a Star Wars fan and answer Star Wars questions or something like that. So I don't know. But, yeah. It's got tragic written all over it.

Chris Gammell: It's got dodgy written all over it for all those amp hour bingo people.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But no doubt there will be big dollars involved in the production of this thing. So enter at your own risk, folks.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's enough of that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think we've given enough promotion.

Chris Gammell: Let's get some shout outs here. Shout outs. So first up, Gary Servin linked here. It looks like he just started a blog, half in Spanish, half in English. So I'll post the translated page. But, yeah. Great page. And he linked here. And we always like that. So we want to mention on there. So thank you, Gary.

Dave Jones: Yes. Thank you very much, Gary. Good luck with it.

Chris Gammell: Next up, our buddy John Oxer from Freetronics. I actually saw this from a Google alert I have set for the amp hour. I didn't know he posted this. But basically, he did. He's calling it a walk time vlog, even though vlog is one of the worst words in the dictionary. Yeah. I'm not a fan of vlog. Yeah. Yeah. But basically, he's just kind of walking to work and brings a video camera with him, possibly on his phone. I'm not sure how. And kind of spews his mind on the camera. So it's pretty cool. And in his second installment, he takes up the Chip Fab at Home debate, basically.

Dave Jones: Oh, does he? I haven't seen the second one yet. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Is he on my side or yours? You know, it's hard to tell. I think it's closer to my side. But depends on our normal term of the debate. Basically, what he's saying is that it's a different game. So Chip Fab at Home seems ridiculous now. But you can't compare it. So people should just go watch it. It's a really good discussion. And the thing I like best about it is that, and I encourage people, other people, to do similar kind of responses, too. It's tough because, you know, Dave and I are always talking on here. And the way he says it is, it's like he's sitting in a room with us, listening to us talk. But he's in the corner tied up and his mouth is taped. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is his way to express himself. I mean, obviously, we love when people leave comments on the site. But that kind of doesn't always do it justice. Sometimes people really want to get around.

Dave Jones: No, you can't do it real time. You know, you can't interact real time.

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right. And, yeah, so that's – I mean, it was a good – it was a really well thought out, I thought. You know, for someone walking to work, it was very well thought out. Right. And, yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, John is very well spoken. If you've seen him on my latest video, right at the end, we looked at some of the products from Freetronics. Oh, yeah, right at the end. And did you know that –

Chris Gammell: I saw the chip. I saw the chip in there. I thought someone had just bought the Atmega 328 and put it into that board. Oh, right. But I didn't realize that was actually John, so.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that was a good video.

Dave Jones: And he's actually got an RFID chip embedded in himself. Really? Yeah. If you've seen my video, he – well, you can't actually see it, but it's embedded in his arm. He's got – he's only one of, I think, two people in this country who've got an RFID chip embedded in themselves. Wow. He's got his whole house automated. And he explains some of this on my latest blog. It's actually right at the end when I interview him and look at some of their Freetronics products. Yeah, and he talks about, yeah, the RFID chip in his arm. So he doesn't carry keys or anything. He walks up to his front door, swipes his arm, and he's in, you know. That's crazy.

Chris Gammell: I think I read about him planning to do that. I didn't realize he actually went through with it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. I think he was the first person in the country to get it. Wow. And he was telling me the story, actually, of that. He actually had a surgeon all lined up to do it, and the surgeon said, yeah, yeah, I'll do it. You know, because these RFID tags are, I think it's the same one that goes in, you know, dogs and stuff. Dogs and cats, you know, these little chips. I don't know if you have that in the U.S. where all dogs and cats must be microchipped.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, my dogs have microchips, yep.

Dave Jones: Okay, yep. So I think it's the same thing. So he had this surgeon all lined up, and then the morning that it was going to happen, the surgeon called him up and said, sorry, but I talked to my lawyer, and he said, no effing way. Or, you know, something like that. His insurance didn't cover it or something. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So it was a continuing battle, huh?

Dave Jones: So he, no, he actually did it himself, apparently. Oh, wow. So he went, screw that, I don't need a surgeon, and somehow did it himself. I didn't catch the rest of the story. I was going, you know, I was too busy face planting, you know. Yeah, right at that point. No, thanks. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to be microchipped. That's crazy. Anyway, it's kind of cool.

Chris Gammell: I put that video on the list this week because, you know, you showed off the hackers, the people haven't seen Dave's videos in Melbourne, the Melbourne Hackerspace. And so that's our ad hoc workbench of the week. They had, you did a quick pan over the 23 minutes and 50 seconds I saw. So we'll list that as our workbench of the week.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Done. Yeah, it was good. I mean, you know, that's as good as it gets as you can fit in somebody's garage. It was nice. It was a really nice video. Yeah, we had, I don't know how many people were there. It was, you know, 25 people or something. Oh, yeah, at least. Yeah. There were a lot of people there. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. We'll post a link about that.

Chris Gammell: It was a good video. I liked it.

Dave Jones: So I hope they find a space. They've been searching for two years. And yeah, apparently they've been having quite a few problems trying to find one. But they're close. Well, they're always close to, you know. And they're, actually, I was very impressed at the amount of effort they had gone to to get one there. You know, they're talking to government agencies and trying to, you know, trying to get involved with various other big commercial groups and things like that. They're actually going to a lot of effort. Well, it's trying to get stuff for free.

Chris Gammell: It's tough, you know. Yeah, I know. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, actually, they were offered a space for free in a school lab or something like that. But the requirement of them using it was that they had to put everything away afterwards, you know. So it had to be clean, perfectly clean, so that then the students could come in and use it as a proper science lab or something, you know. So, yeah, that's not going to happen, is it?

Chris Gammell: Tinkering is not clean or tidy, you know.

Dave Jones: No, it's not conducive to the tidiness paradigm.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So they had to turn that one down, unfortunately.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's too bad.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Anyway. Yes, that was very cool, the Melbourne. So I've been to the Melbourne hackerspace. I haven't even been to the Sydney one yet.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's next on your list then, huh?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yep, it'll have to be. What else we got? Any more shout-outs?

Chris Gammell: No more shout-outs. What else? There's a whole host of things we can talk about this week. I mean, we've got chips.

Dave Jones: Well, we do have a chip of the week. There are lots of chips.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, lots of chips.

Dave Jones: Lots of chip talk. Well, TI and TI finally merged with National Semiconductor.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they're gone.

Dave Jones: I had almost forgotten about that.

Chris Gammell: I know, right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's like...

Chris Gammell: They're long gone. Sorry. How long ago was that? Sorry, National fans.

Dave Jones: Four or five months?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's been... When the heck was that?

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, probably four or five months, something like that.

Dave Jones: Have you tried actually searching for a National partner? I was just searching last night. I think the websites are still separate and everything, right? Yeah, they are.

Chris Gammell: I found the press release on the National website. So national.com for people that don't know. So, you know, it's all there. It's just there's a big header at the top now. And, you know, you can still get all these parts. It's going to be a while until you can't... Until they start, you know, merging product lines and...

Dave Jones: Yes, and rationalizing their...

Chris Gammell: Rationalizing?

Dave Jones: Rationalizing their product line.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, that could really hurt me because, I mean, I use some National parts that are like some really specialized parts. Yeah. And some really, really precise parts. And, you know, TI makes a lot of precise parts too. They do.

Dave Jones: If there's any overlap, you can expect a bit of a bloodbath there, I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I hope not. You know, it's interesting. You know, one of... I was actually asking for suggestions today. And someone wrote in. It was Niels Mosley from Twitter. And he wrote in about it. And he actually asked, you know, like, how do you select the right op amp? Because, you know, there's so many out there. And obviously, that's a very open-ended question. But the thing is, if you look at it from the other side, when you already have an op amp and you have it in a system and it's a characterized system and you know all the little quirks and everything like that, if you have a National part in there and then TI says, well, it's close, right? But it's a little bit off. If it's not exact and it's never going to be exact and it's not within the tolerance...

Dave Jones: And the phase margin is slightly different. So, the damn thing oscillates, you know? Yeah, some kind of thing like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, at that point, you know, if you're really... If you're trying to find the right op amp for the, quote-unquote, right op amp for what you're, you know, already using it in an application, well, the right op amp is the op amp you already have. Otherwise...

Dave Jones: It's the one that you've thoroughly tested. That is the right op amp. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, if you're in a new application, then the right op amp is, well, depends, right?

Dave Jones: You usually have quite a bit of choice, you know? Yeah. There's usually quite a few parts that could actually fit the bill. So, it might come down to cost, cost availability, you know, package type, package size, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't find that to be too... All that's the stuff. I find cost to be the main thing. Because you could find just about... I mean, everybody makes the ones with their big bells and whistles, especially like the LTEs and the DIs and the ADIs.

Speaker ?: Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: LTEs are good at it. Yeah. You know, they make these really great parts, parts that are great on a lot of different bases, you know? Like, but, you know, offset voltage or input offset, bias current...

Dave Jones: Yeah, but they cost, you know, 10, 20 bucks a chip, you know?

Chris Gammell: Even five bucks. That's a lot, you know? That was one of a learning curve I had when I was getting into... You know, when I started, I started in a high-end field. And so, I was... Then I went and tried to design something on the low end. And I'm like...

Dave Jones: Yeah, totally.

Chris Gammell: You know, you can't put a $5 op amp in somewhere. So, you've really got to start making trade-offs. It's almost harder at the low end than it is at the high end. Because, well, if you have a lot of money, you just... Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: You go to the distributor or you go to your local, you know, rep and you say, well, here's what I need. And they say, how many do you need?

Dave Jones: I've found exactly the same thing. And I've worked at both ends, the high-end and the low-end. I've got to admit, yeah, the high-end is easier. Because you just pick the highest spec part. And, you know, who cares if it's 50 bucks a chip? That's the chip I'm going to use, you know? Yeah. Yeah, the toughest part there is that... Down at the low-end...

Chris Gammell: Thumping on a vendor to try and get the part you really need. So, maybe you have a bias current, you know, part... The part with a low bias current that you need, right? But you can't find anything with the right, you know, common mode rejection ratio or something like that. So, then you have to try and go and encourage these chip makers to be like, this is what I really need. And then they have to actually say, this is also what other people need. And that's usually not the case, you know? So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's hard at the low-end. I've probably done a blog on that. There's so many trade-offs, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Trading off price, availability, package type and...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, it's just... Yeah. And then trying to make sure you don't miss the little things. That's when it gets really tough. You know, like if you're... You run into like a voltage rail that you didn't realize that you don't have enough headroom or something. You know, like that's... Yeah, exactly. Ugh. Ugh. Problems out the wazoo. So, to answer...

Dave Jones: And often... And sometimes you'll change your specs based on a part you can get. You know, you actually have a... You have a product spec. And you think it's fixed, but then you come down to it and you go, well, I'm not going to meet my price target with those specs. I'm going to... It's either not make this product at all, or I've got to lower... I've got to change my specs to meet this part I can get. But, oh, you know, often you'll find a part and you'll go, oh, this part's great. It's available. There's 10 million of them. It's cheap. It's in the package I want. But it's... Eh, specs aren't that great. So, you might have to re-engineer the circuit, change your specs, you know, things like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Dave Jones: So, that can come into it. There's so many trade-offs. Ugh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, I think to answer Niels' question, how do you pick the right op amp? Carefully.

Dave Jones: And speaking of choosing the right part, what about this microchip thing, which you put on here today?

Chris Gammell: You know, I thought about you when I saw this. I saw this on Twitter today. Let me find the link real quick.

Dave Jones: And you thought about me? Oh, how nice.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I know. It's so sweet, isn't it? Yeah, basically, it's an 8-bit micro, though. And now, so, microchip has a... It's part of the PIC family.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: I'm not sure which one, but the...

Dave Jones: Well, I'm looking at the brochure, and it's part of the 10F family and the 16F family. And the 12F, so three of their baseline kind of PIC families.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But the big news is that they're putting reconfigurable logic inside of it, which is crazy.

Dave Jones: Not just reconfigurable logic, but they're putting a complementary waveform generator and a programmable switch mode controller and a NCO as well. They've got a whole range of these new peripherals. They're putting in these PIC micros.

Chris Gammell: Sounds like they're putting a kitchen sink in there, basically.

Dave Jones: The kitchen sink. They're trying to up the ante big time. And as far as this configurable logic goes, it's a configurable logic cell, just like, you know, an FPGA cell or something like that. And it has a flip-flop in it. It's got, you know, it's got your gates, and you can configure it any way you want. It doesn't say how many are inside the chip, though. I presume they only have, like, a couple. So don't get terribly excited that you're going to be able to get, you know, FPGA. So it's like an FPGA with two macro cells or something. That's basically what it is, I think. Although, don't quote me on that. They might have 100, but I doubt it. I think this is just like a couple.

Chris Gammell: It's for simple logic, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's for simple logic, and then they all have that other stuff in there for waveform gen and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Well, some of their example applications, they put data modulation power sequencing, Manchester IRDA encoding, switch mode power supplies, event sequencing, yada, yada, yada. Yeah. Boost buck regulator stuff, you know, all that sort of thing. So, yeah. So even though you might only have a couple of macro cells in there, these are independent of the software. Well, they're tied in. You can tie them in to the peripherals inside your PIC, but they can effectively work, you know, as separate outside of your source code. So it's cool.

Chris Gammell: That is cool.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I saw that they did like, I mean, PIC is known to have, you know, real small six eight pin parts anyways, but it seems like this one, I saw it had eight pins, it had FPGA style logic, and they're not necessarily FPGA in there.

Dave Jones: It doesn't have FPGA density. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. And then five volt rails. And I remember though, that you had said that in the past, that that was what you were really looking for.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was thinking.

Dave Jones: Actually, it doesn't meet that, but hey, it's cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's a good start. Good start.

Dave Jones: I like it. And there's a whole, yeah. And there's a, it's not just that, a whole bunch of other, it's got a, a complimentary waveform generator and a complimentary output generator and a numerically controlled oscillator, a 20 bit numerically controlled oscillator. Yeah. Wow. You know, and I'm not sure if they're all on the same chip and chip. It's got a programmable switch mode controller in there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And the crazy thing is that this isn't even our chip of the week.

Dave Jones: No, this is not our chip of the week. Exactly. This is our family of the week. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. But yeah, it's very, I don't know if you can actually get real parts. I guess they wouldn't announce this if you couldn't buy real parts. Right. I don't think microchip do the vaporware thing. Um, so yeah, I, I presume there's only, you know, a few chips at the moment that would have this capability built in, but I like it. It's awesome.

Chris Gammell: Me too.

Dave Jones: Well, that's just, that's how micros have built themselves up. They started out, they were just a microcontroller with IO ports and some internal memory. And that was it, you know, then they started adding, you know, a serial port periphery, you know, like a UART peripheral and an ADC. And then, you know, they're building up and now they've got, as you said, the kitchen sink almost. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's crazy.

Dave Jones: Which is great. And that's the advantage of micros is that they have all this stuff built in. And that's the disadvantage of FPGAs is that they don't have this stuff built in. You have to define it all in the hardware, you know, and it's just, isn't as easy to use really. But, um, as we've probably mentioned on here as well, the FPGAs are now starting to have hard, what's called hard silicon, which has a lot of all these functionalities actually encoded in as a hard silicon block inside the FPGA. So you can use it more like the, uh, more like it's being used here inside a micro. So, yeah, they're trying to jump on the same bandwagon.

Chris Gammell: Um, yeah, it's almost like they're all going to converge eventually, you know, just kind of dive down into the same area. Yeah, a micro, yeah. But they're all trying to cover as much space as possible, you know, chip makers don't want to make something that one person is going to buy. And then they're like, well, sorry, no one else is buying this. So they want to try and cover as much space as possible. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But as always, FPGAs won't match micro, like a hard silicon solution. That's why they're embedding hard silicon solutions in them is because they can't meet the price point. They can't meet the power consumption, the speed, all, all that sort of stuff. So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'd give you the power and the speed, but I don't know with an eight bit micro, I mean, it's, I guess that's price point. It's a, it's a price point thing. You know, you can. From a perspective of like processing power, you can start to match that kind of thing. Oh, yes.

Dave Jones: You can in, inside your FPGA. Yeah. You can have a, you know, a hell of a micro, but it's not like you can have a one gig arm processor inside a, inside an FPGA. Right. You're just not going to be able to get that. It's just not fast enough, you know. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, that's, that's just the way it is. You can't beat an actual, you know, a laid out silicon. You know, you can't beat properly laid out silicon in terms of speed and power. It's just not doable. Well, in the. Once you get to a certain level. In the spirit of. In the spirit of. Everyone knows inside that FPGA, you can stick an 8-bit soft core in there and it works a treat, you know. Right. Up to 50 meg or something.

Chris Gammell: In the spirit of not beating silicon, let's, let's get to our, we've already mentioned this once on the show today already, but there's actually a decent article, I have to say, about printed electronics. I know.

Dave Jones: Dude.

Chris Gammell: I know. I know. I know. But this is actually a guy, so he's got printable organic electronics, okay? He's from some Linkoping University in Sweden. His name's, uh, Lars. Wow.

Dave Jones: I don't think we've had the Swedes on the Ampire before.

Chris Gammell: Right. They're giving me a run for my money on my, on my pronunciation.

Dave Jones: Oh, they've got great names. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Lars Helogson. Helogson. Helogson. Anyways, he's able to get down to a 100 nanometer gate with print, like, conventional printing techniques. Yep. Basically, he's using electrolyte, and he's using a polymer, and he's printing organic transistors in, like, complementary N and P types.

Dave Jones: Awesome.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And as I said, it's possible. Of course it is. It is possible.

Chris Gammell: People are doing it.

Dave Jones: But this ain't gonna be a revolution, dude.

Chris Gammell: It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well. Yeah. I think this is moving us closer. This is, so he says, let's see, the supply voltages are, the supply voltages, they operate down to 0.2 volts, and they have static power consumption of 2.5 nanowatts per gate. It's crazy. And they can switch at about 0.2. I guess switching time's a big deal, too, when you're doing organic stuff, because it's a lot slower. Oh, of course. You can't get as much, you know, charge injection into the gate, you can't switch as fast. But it seems like they're switching pretty fast in this thing, too. So, I don't know. I'll post the link to this guy's paper. It was, he's, he's, it was like a, you know, a master's, PhD type thesis.

Dave Jones: Yes, it is a PhD thesis.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, I don't know. And he's going into industry, too. I mean, he's, he says, what else? He's working at some thin film company out there in Linkaping. Linkaping. Excellent. Yeah. I love it. I don't know, man. I think, I think it's, it's getting better. It's getting better.

Dave Jones: Of course it's getting better. I've never said it wasn't.

Chris Gammell: All right. Well.

Dave Jones: Dude. Even if you get your damn printing machine that does it, it's pointless.

Chris Gammell: I don't think so. I don't think so, dude.

Dave Jones: Oh, man. Okay. Just try and package it, dude.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Try and test it. Try and characterize it. And you'll find that buying your 50 cent micro from DigiKey is just a hell of a lot easier. And you've got a hundred thousand to choose from.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Your eight bit micro with reconfigurable logic. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You're just going to, it's. Oh, it's just not going to happen. Next. You know what? Everyone's ticked off.

Chris Gammell: John Ockster agrees with me. Yeah. Anyway. Okay.

Dave Jones: I agree with you on certain things, but we're part of it. But it being a bloody revolution and people will print their shit out instead of buying their chips is absolute bullshit. Always has been. Always will be. You're just not thinking fourth dimensionally. You're not thinking practically. Bit of a back to the future joke there.

Chris Gammell: Fourth dimensionally. I like that.

Dave Jones: Fourth dimensionally. Yep. Right. Had to throw away. You've got to come back with me. Back where? Back to the future. Sorry. I could recite the entire movie, but I won't.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's. Yeah. Okay. That's good. Let's not do that. All right. All right. Well, then how about we ground, ground ourselves back in reality, get back to chip of the week because I kind of stepped away from that. So this was your, this was your chip of the week. You picked this one out.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. My chip of the week. Okay. Let me call it up. All right. I don't have to. No, you don't have the real time music.

Chris Gammell: I don't have the music. No. No.

Dave Jones: All right. But the real, the chip of the week is the linear technology again. They've been on here before, haven't they?

Chris Gammell: These guys. These, these frigging guys.

Dave Jones: Anyway, the linear technology LT1512 or 1512. I like calling it 15, you know, double digits kind of.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So the, how would you pronounce it? Would it be the LT1512 or would it be the 1512? 1512. So would I. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Anyway, it's a, it's, it is a nothing special. It is a lithium ion battery charger. It's actually a multi chemistry, right? But I will explain why I think it's kind of neat. Cause I was looking for this the other day. I'm, I'm actually going to use this chip, I think. Okay. I was searching for it last night and for a, for a thing I'm working on. And, uh. For a thing, you know, a thing with a guy. A thing with a guy.

Dave Jones: Thing with a guy. Yeah. You know, the thing with a guy at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Everyone knows that. Yeah. Right. And, uh, I was searching for a lithium ion battery charger. I see in a dip package. Right. And there's not that many. Okay. Because they've all moved to these tiny little. Yeah. Cause who uses dip packages anymore. Right. Who uses dip packages? Well, this was going to be for a kit. Right. So I thought, okay. I wanted to keep everything dip for just old time's sake. Right.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: So I thought, you know, and I was looking for it. And not only is it dip, but it's an eight pin, uh, dip as well. Okay. And it's a lithium ion. Actually it's multi-chemistry. Okay. So it can do a lithium ion as well as NICAD and nickel metal hydride and lead acid. And it's a, you know, it's got the constant voltage, constant current, uh, mode thing. So it's able to do, um, lithium ion batteries, but it's, um, a, uh, CEPIC, uh, converter or CEPIC, however you want to pronounce it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's a CEPIC usually. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. CEPIC, uh, CEPIC converter, which means that, uh, if you're not aware of those, it means that, um, it can charge the battery from not only above with an input voltage above the battery voltage as a normal linear, uh, mode, uh, converter, uh, works. So that's how most, uh, lithium ion charges work. You need an input voltage greater than your, um, cell voltage that you're trying to charge because they're just a linear pass element and, you know, that sort of stuff. But this is a, um, with a CEPIC converter, it can be equal to or lower than the input voltage. So it can actually go up and down. Um, the input can go any range and it will still charge your battery. It's brilliant. I love it. Yeah. And it's like a universal input almost, you know, it's not really, I don't want people

Chris Gammell: to think you could put like AC into it, like AC mains into it or something, but you know, it's, it's very forgiving, you know? Yes.

Dave Jones: Yes, it is. And that's the joy of the, uh, CEPIC, uh, CEPIC converters. They're just excellent. And, um.

Chris Gammell: So now do you hit, do you take a hit on, on, uh, efficiency when you do that kind of thing because you are dropping more?

Dave Jones: Yes. I, yeah, there's, it's complex. Yeah. But it's not the most efficient converter out there. Let's, you know, if you're going for ultra efficiency, then you wouldn't bother. But, uh, it's, you know, but CEPIC converters are really nice. Like if you're powering, say a 3.3 volt, um, circuit, right. And you want to power it from a single lithium ion cell, this isn't just for charging. You can use this as a DC to DC converter to power your circuitry. Um, these are CEPIC converters. So, but a, uh, lithium ion battery at full voltage will be, uh, around about 4.2 volts, right. And it will cut out around about three volts. So that goes from above your 3.3 volt rail you want to below your 3.3 volt rail. So if you want to power your 3.3 volt circuit from one lithium ion battery over the full operational range and, uh, extract the maximum, uh, the maximum capacity from your battery, this is the way to do it. Use a CEPIC converter.

Chris Gammell: And that's the difference, the difference between using just a buck where you have to, if you're doing that same 4.3 down to three, then you have that whole 1.3 volts to drop and then you have more volts to drop at the top. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So you've got to use one or the other and you can use a buck. You can use a buck boost converter as well, but, uh, CEPICs are really nice. And if you don't know what it says, CEPIC is, uh, the single ended primary inductor converter. That's it. Um, and it's, it's neat. It's a neat solution. Anyway, I thought this chip was really, um, kind of cool because it's available. You can buy it from DigiKey. It's an eight pin dip and it's a multi chemistry and it's a universal input range. Oh, what more do you want?

Chris Gammell: Um, it to be, uh, one penny to be cheap.

Dave Jones: A penny. Oh, sorry. Well, no, it's not that cheap. It's like three bucks or something, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting though. Uh, yeah. And they probably get away with that with like, you know, low, low drop. Yeah. That's kind of like, I, I kind of struggle with, with like switchers because I know they're so crucial and they're kind of part of this whole like energy, you know, green power friendly revolution. Right. It's, it's, it's a really big thing. And like all of these companies are getting into it, you know, like the biggest chip players, it's, it's a very large part of their market, you know, and they all have, they all have a very big chunk of the market even. But sometimes I just find myself going, ah, this stuff's kind of boring. You know? Right. I don't want to say that because they're, they're really complicated internally. I mean, like they're, they're, they're essentially small control systems inside, you know? Oh yeah. And the theory behind them. Yeah, exactly. You're drawing off a little bit of current and, you know, going across the sense resistor, feeding that back through. That's your information that actually then changes your drive circuitry and switches your PWM and everything else that's crazy inside of that.

Dave Jones: And then you can switch into different modes depending on what part of the cycle you're at. And you know, they can skip, you can skip pulses and you can do, you know. Yeah, exactly. It gets pretty advanced.

Chris Gammell: It's, it's very, yeah, it's very advanced. And then there's even just the, the physical side of it, like, no, and like power dissipation, this packaging, all these vendors are trying different packaging types. I know LT does like that land grid stuff where they actually sink into the board. But man, like.

Dave Jones: And then there's switching losses, board layout losses and all sorts of, you know.

Chris Gammell: And I know I'm supposed to like it because I like analog stuff. Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: Well, what's wrong with you there?

Chris Gammell: It's just boring. It's just boring sometimes. I mean, I mean, part of me, this is just me being honest. Part of me says power is just supposed to work. I know it doesn't. That's actually one. Yeah. That's, that's a very big misconception, right? But. Yeah. That's, that's what I want.

Dave Jones: Well, that's it. I was working on my design last night. And well, I was putting all this effort into charging my bloody lithium ion battery. And I thought, shouldn't be this hard, you know? I know.

Chris Gammell: I know. And yet at the same time, that's one of the most potentially dangerous things because lithium ions can blow up in your face, right? That's right. Exactly. That's bad. That's real bad.

Dave Jones: That can ruin your day.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, boy. But, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, I mean. A lot of people will avoid that. If you're working on low volume stuff, you will just whack in a DC to DC converter brick. That's already, that, yeah, that's already done for you, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It'll cost you 30, 40 bucks or something, but who cares? You know, it saves you a week of design time.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Yep, exactly. Yeah, getting that, getting that money out in one of these is like really, it's pretty tough. Right. Yeah. Well, that's a good part, though. I, uh, that's a good, that's a good pick, Dave. I like it. I'm sure. All right. I'm sure our listeners will like it as well.

Dave Jones: Very good.

Chris Gammell: One thing I wanted to point out, uh, in the same energy vein, there was a, I saw an article today about a 50 millivolt drop diode. So it's actually, yeah. And this is actually for, it could pass 20 amps. So forward biased, it can pass 20 amps with a 50 millivolt drop. So what is that? That's like 0.1 volts. What? Or 0.1 watt rather.

Dave Jones: What manufacturing process does it use to get this sort of stuff?

Chris Gammell: I have no idea.

Dave Jones: It's got to use something exotic, right?

Chris Gammell: Uh, I think, I don't know how it works. Uh, uh, basically I was, I was fixated on the 50 millivolt drop. I mean, there's a lot of focus on this is actually, I was talking to somebody the other day about, about doing, doing their master's thesis about, you know, trying to work on lower and lower drops because, you know, you really start to lose efficiency there, but man, 50 millivolts, that's crazy. Yeah. So I'm not sure, I'm honestly, I have no idea how they did it. Um, I'm not sure if it was, you know, just straight silicon with crazy doping or if they went to, uh, if they went to like some more exotic topologies, but, uh, this is meant for like solar operations. So, you know, if you're. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're, they're, they're talking about solar panels and stuff like that. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So you do need to pass a lot of power still, but I don't know. Yeah. So that was, that was my little fun thing I saw. I don't know.

Dave Jones: All right. Done. What is that? That's not really a chip of the week. It's sort of a technology of the week. Is it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I guess so. But I don't even know how the technology works.

Dave Jones: Well, that's a fail around. If you got to put it in here, do your research.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Yeah. Do my research.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. As if we research anything on this show, right?

Chris Gammell: Well, speaking of something else I didn't research, uh, this is actually something someone told me about. I didn't realize there was an open source, um, logic analyzer out there. Did you hear about, have you ever heard about that?

Dave Jones: I believe there's more than one. I think there's. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. I've heard of a couple of them, I'm sure.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So this one's called the Sump or Sump.org. And then it's some kind of analyzer. I, I was talking to someone about this at that career fair I was at and they mentioned it and, uh.

Dave Jones: And it's analyzer with a Zed, with an American Zed.

Chris Gammell: What do you spell with an S? S. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Really? Yes. That's interesting. We do. Yeah. We spell analyzer with an S. Hmm. Yep. In fact, that's one of the big bugbears when you're actually working on Australian, you know, and spell checkers all have Zed, you know, if they're American based, they will actually change all of your S's to Zed's. It's really annoying. It's actually a big deal here.

Chris Gammell: Yeah?

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's playing the R's.

Chris Gammell: It's like a, it's like a pain point for you guys.

Dave Jones: Oh, huge. Because we have a lot of words where you guys use a Zed and we use an S. There's a whole bunch of them. Analyzer's just one of them. Sure, there's many dozens.

Chris Gammell: So do you pronounce it different?

Dave Jones: No, same.

Chris Gammell: Analyzer? Oh, well, analyzer. Analyzer?

Dave Jones: No, we don't say analyzer. Analyzer. Well, I can't even pronounce it. No, we actually say it the same. We say it as a, almost a Zed-like, I think, but anyway. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, yeah. So I had never heard of, I mean, I hadn't heard about this. It's basically just using a starter kit, actually. So like a Spartan 3 starter kit. Yep. So off the shelf kind of kit you can buy.

Dave Jones: There's a problem with that, though. Using starter kits, they're not a long-lived product. They just do like a batch of them. They manufacture, you know, 5,000 of them, and then they don't manufacture them again. It's a, so basing, there's a little, there's the Amp Hour tip of the week. Tip of the week. Is that a new segment?

Chris Gammell: Blank of the week, yeah. That should go on the Amp Hour video.

Dave Jones: Try not to use one of these manufacturer development boards as a platform for any sort of project you're working on. Because you won't be able to buy it in a year's time, I guarantee it.

Chris Gammell: And that's, that means it's not open source either, right? I mean, like.

Dave Jones: Well, probably not. I don't know. But even if it is open source, it's a pain in the ass. Because then you'd have to go out and manufacture it yourself. The whole idea of using a manufacturer's development board is people can just buy it, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: From a, yeah. So, anyway.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. It's a pain. Yeah, I guess I didn't, I don't know. I thought, it mostly looks like, it mostly is a software interface. So, maybe that's what the person was talking about. Oh, I'm sure it is. Yeah. With the open source side of things. But, it seems, I mean, if it can actually do what it says. It says 16 channels at 200 megahertz. That's not too bad. I mean, it's not. Yeah, that's pretty good. It's not blazing fast, but that's not too bad. So, I agree with you, though.

Dave Jones: But, state, it can only do up to 50 megahertz. So, using an external clock. Oh, okay. But still, that's, you know, that's decent. Yeah. So, hmm. Because with the logic analyzer, there's state analysis mode and there's timing mode. And timing mode is almost always capable of a faster speed than state mode. So, yeah, it depends on what the state mode is. Because it's internal clock. Yeah, it's an internal free-running clock. Whereas state mode uses an external clock from your system under test. So, your logic analyzer is synchronized to your circuit under test. And that's usually, for various reasons, at a slower rate than timing mode, which is a free-running clock. I didn't know that. You see, that's the thing.

Chris Gammell: I've only used logic analyzers. I just hook them up and go. So, I don't know. Yeah, trap for young players.

Dave Jones: Well, I had a logic analyzer project. It was published back in, I don't know, 2000. No, sorry, 2000. God, 1994 or something. It was published, I think. Ah, same thing, right? So, there you go.

Chris Gammell: A whole great bunch of years ago.

Dave Jones: Yeah, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I had a logic analyzer design published. And once again, it was open, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, do you have a link to that? Is that up on your old school site?

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's up on one of my old sites, yeah.

Chris Gammell: We'll have to try and find a link to that.

Dave Jones: And it used a... It used a... It used a...

Dave Jones: It used a... It used a...

Dave Jones: It used a...

Dave Jones: It used a... It used a CPLD, so...

Chris Gammell: Good luck finding one of those these days, huh?

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I... I mean, they're still making a CPLDs, but... I maxed that thing out. And I... Oh, yeah. Actually designed... I fitted it all by hand, right? Because, like, I... You know, I didn't use a high-level description language like VHDL or Verilog. I actually went in there and did it at the gate level. Oh, really? And I actually placed... Yeah, I placed the individual gates in the individual quadrants of the chip. And I got, like, 100% routability on this thing. I used every pin. I used every logic cell. And it just fitted. And that's something you can't do. If you leave it up to the computer to figure out where to put stuff, right? So I hand laid out this CPLD. And, yeah, I was actually quite, you know, chuffed that I got 100% routability in this device. And they claim you couldn't get 100... You know, you might be able to achieve 95% routability or something in these chips. But, no, if you do it yourself and you're clever, you can actually get 100% routability. I was quite proud of that. Anyway, that's a little side thing. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, today to get that kind of thing, you just need... You basically have, like, a law of diminishing returns, usually, with... You're right. ...when you get up 97%, 98%, 99% of the usable logic in a device. You know, they say... Like you said, they say it's possible, but...

Dave Jones: No, when you're trying, actually... No, there's a lot of overhead. Not practically, right? Yeah. Exactly. So, there you go.

Speaker ?: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Did we learn something today, Chris? I did. You learned the state analysis and logic and timing analysis on logic and... Logic and... If you looked at my logic analyzer tutorial I've got up there, there's a video. It goes for, like, an hour or something.

Chris Gammell: I've read through everything else except that, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: I read through your crazy-ass nerdy dating site book, whatever the hell that was. I'm kidding. I haven't read that.

Dave Jones: I've got a lot of content out there. Well, you don't need to now, right? You're hitched.

Chris Gammell: No, no. I am hitched. Yep, yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Just like last week. Has she started to leave that thumbprint on your forehead yet?

Chris Gammell: No, not yet.

Dave Jones: No? No? It'll... It'll... It'll happen.

Chris Gammell: All right. I'm telling on you. I'm telling your way.

Dave Jones: You dobba.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: So, one last thing I wanted to mention before we're up. Well, I don't know. Maybe we can get the... This Week in Nerd History, too. But I don't know if you saw the Hackaday link. There was a link. They linked over to Protostack. Yes. Protostack had this pretty cool little tutorial. It was, like, eight tips on how to use breadboarding. You know, like, different breadboarding tips. I thought those were pretty cool. I haven't seen it.

Dave Jones: I've actually got a Protostack here. He sent it to me a long time ago. In fact, I... Is he Australian? I think he might be, or am I mistaken? Sorry. I'm not sure.

Chris Gammell: I'm not sure.

Dave Jones: And I forget his name, too. So, sorry. But, yeah, he sent me a Protostack. And they're not bad little boards.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yes. Forest Lake in Queensland. Yes. Australian. There you go. Protostack.

Chris Gammell: Nice.

Dave Jones: Protostack.com. And, yeah, they make little prototyping boards. And they're quite neat. I like it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I like the... So, what, number six on their little list. They actually soldered some... Like, some gold 100 mil spaced headers. Like, conversion headers. To a SD card. And then they plugged that directly into a breadboard. So, you could just break out the pins.

Dave Jones: Oh, I see it. Oh, that's sweet. You can plug an SD card into your breadboard.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I thought that was really clever.

Dave Jones: It's the same pin spacing, is it? It's almost... I guess...

Chris Gammell: It might be a little off.

Dave Jones: A little off, but it fits. Yeah. That is neat. I like that.

Chris Gammell: I thought that was a really cool idea. And they call it ghetto. I remember you were a little weirded out by that word the first time I said it. Ghetto? Ghetto, yeah. Ghetto microdislatze. I think that's what he was saying. Ghetto, right?

Dave Jones: Ghetto is a slum area, right? It's a low-rent...

Chris Gammell: Right, but it also means, like, jumbled together kind of thing. Right, okay. Low-budget kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. That would be the idea.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That is neat. I like that. I'm impressed.

Chris Gammell: I like that, too.

Dave Jones: That's it. Yeah, okay. We'll definitely have to put that one up as a link. That is a great little thing. Yeah, I'm amazed at the things people are pushing into breadboards these days. They push all these big, fat pins in there. And people, they, you know, there are specs on the size of wire.

Chris Gammell: Well, I was just going to say the signal integrity. I mean, you run out of room real fast, you know?

Dave Jones: Well, no, but the spring contacts inside, it pushes them apart and it forces them apart. You know, if you try and push a big square, 0.1-inch header into the breadboard, it's not designed for that. And you're just going to bust the thing. So, anyway. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I get peeved off that these days. People sort of, yeah. I see all these photos of all these hacks and people have shoved all these things into the breadboard. And I cringe every time I see it. I know.

Chris Gammell: But it's a good trade-off to get more, if it gets more people involved. Of course. Yeah, yeah. If that works them into soldering and everything else, then that is a good thing. So, I'm okay with that. Yeah. A couple breadboards get ruined, but whatever. Yeah, okay. Well, yeah. Fair call. They're pretty cheap these days.

Dave Jones: I've got like four breadboards or something. So, yeah. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Right. Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: All right. How about we close out with some nerd history today? Do it. All right. So, today in history, in September of 1922. So, this is actually the 27th. You know, we play games sometimes because it's technically the 27th in Australia. It's only the 26th here, but really nothing on the 26th happened fun in history. Right. Okay. At least nothing electronics related. So, in 1922, though, basically, it was the first time that they ever proved out radar. And it was Dr. Albert Taylor and Leo Young. And basically, I think they were just playing with, you know, RF stuff. And a plane flew by and they experienced interference. And they're like, hey, we could use that. Brilliant. This is a good idea. Yeah. And it didn't get commercialized so much later. But, you know, they were doing experiments. And, yeah. Well, it really...

Dave Jones: All the research happened during... All the main research happened during the war, right? Or was it just before the war?

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: That's when they really ramped it up. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. They really ramped it up. And I think 45 was when I think the British started using it in an actual capacity of, you know, trying to see if planes are coming. But...

Dave Jones: Well, they had it at... Didn't they have radar at Pearl Harbor? They had just installed one and they were using it. And they didn't see it or something. I'm not a big history buff.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm fairly sure they did. They had something operational then. Some crude system. And it... Yeah. It... I think it did work. It saw the... It saw the Japs coming. But... There you go. Is there a bingo square for war stuff?

Chris Gammell: No. I don't think there's a war one yet. No. All right. It was interesting though, reading about the second guy, Leo Young. He... It talks about him and like using spark gaps. So, just like how they used to do radio transmissions was... They... I never... I never knew about that. You know, basically you charge up an antenna and then you have a spark gap and that determines how much voltage you need to jump across. And then every time it jumps across, that's actually when it's shooting, you know, RF into the air. And I was reading that and I just immediately thought, my God, they must have been just like blasting themselves with radiation. You know, that's how they make x-rays these days, isn't it? I mean, like you like spark a gap at a really high voltage and you start radiating energy. So, I mean, yeah, you get a radio wave, but you also get, you know, a nice little shot to the gut of... Actually, maybe I'm wrong about that. I don't know.

Dave Jones: A few hundred volts per meter or something, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I thought that's really bad for people. I was thinking that'd be fun to try and build though. Like these days, if you could shield yourself, you know, like wear some lead underpants or something like that. Faraday cage or something. Faraday shorts, right? Right.

Dave Jones: Tinfoil hat. Don't forget your tinfoil hat. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Tinfoil hat. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: Oh, brilliant. All right.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think that's it though. I don't know if your stopwatch is still going.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Our time's up. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Is it?

Dave Jones: Yeah. I think we've gone over.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Bummer.

Chris Gammell: Well, not too far. We didn't go over too far today.

Dave Jones: I wonder if anyone got bingo.

Chris Gammell: I hope so. Let us know in the comments. You know, let us know in the comments or anything really. Our comments section has been kind of bare lately. I don't know if people haven't had much to say or we haven't been saying stuff that have been piquing people's interest. But, you know, if you've got comments, leave them there. If you want to hit us on Twitter, you can check out our Twitter accounts. I'm Chris underscore Gammill and Dave's EEV blog.

Dave Jones: And, of course, Chris is obsessed with Twitter. So, please tweet him. It's his life.

Chris Gammell: Please. It's not my life.

Dave Jones: You were tweeting on your wedding day or something.

Chris Gammell: Come on. I was writing an article on my wedding day.

Dave Jones: No, you were writing a blog article on your bloody wedding day.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And it was really popular. And you know what? That's... Yeah. Take that.

Dave Jones: All right. Sorry. You're still a nerd.

Chris Gammell: During the ceremony, I'm fine. I was like... It was like 10 in the morning. I was watching cartoons. It was fine.

Dave Jones: I think you need to go on that King of the Nerd. You're under 30. You can go on this King of the Nerds. I'm not going on a Dave. Reality show. Come on.

Chris Gammell: No, I'm not doing it. I'm sorry.

Dave Jones: Please, if you want Chris to go on, comment, tweet him. Let us know. Chris must go on King of the Nerds so we can make fun of him on television.

Chris Gammell: There you go.

Dave Jones: That'd be brilliant.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All right, guys. Well, we will talk to you next week. More electronic nerdiness. And maybe Dave will have convinced me by then.

Dave Jones: Right.

Speaker ?: All right.

Chris Gammell: We'll see you.

Dave Jones: See you, guys. Thank you.

Speaker ?: Thank you.