#63 – Shop bots, 450 mm fabs & redFrog - Pick and Place Palillogy

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm Chris Gammell from Chris Gammell's Analog Life. Hey Chris, what's happening in Cleveland? We're not Detroit.

Chris Gammell: We're not Detroit. That's right, the hastily made Cleveland video. You don't want to come buy a house here, Dave? Is that what I'm hearing?

Dave Jones: I should, yeah, we were talking about that. Yeah, we were. Seriously, you can buy a house for the cost of a plane ticket from here to the US and back?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you can buy $1,000 houses, I think, yeah.

Dave Jones: $1,000 houses?

Chris Gammell: I mean, you don't want to buy those houses. The city doesn't even want those houses.

Dave Jones: No, but you should just snap them up. Like, who knows, in 30 years' time, it might be a booming neighborhood again.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but you've got to pay taxes and stuff on everything.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. Got it. Got it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's the trap for young players, huh?

Chris Gammell: Those are not viable houses, really. Right.

Dave Jones: Well, apparently, in England, you can buy, like, a castle. You know, you buy, like, a castle really cheap. Really? You know, with the whole walls. I've always wanted a castle, you know? It'd be fantastic, you know? Yeah. And, yeah, apparently, you can buy them real cheap, but you've got to pay, you know, huge amounts of money to actually restore them. The council make you restore them or something, and it costs, like, yeah, that's the condition of buying them cheap, is that you must fix them up. So they just sit there dilapidated because no one wants to buy them, and no one will pay up cheap on them? And they don't want to pay up the money to actually fix them because they're so expensive.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, oops. Well, you seem to be buying your own new castle, right? Yes. I'm expanding. You are. Let's hear about it.

Dave Jones: This is the real estate segment here on the Amp Hour. Yeah, right? We do like to mix it up here.

Chris Gammell: If you have the smell of baking cookies when people visit your home, they may be more likely to buy. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, boy. Yes, I might be hours away from, hopefully, hours away from putting down a deposit on a new space, a new, the EEV blog Nerd Cave.

Chris Gammell: The Nerd Cave. Nice.

Dave Jones: Nerd Cave slash lab. Yes, it's within walking distance of my home, and yes, hopefully it's all better.

Chris Gammell: So, explain it to the audience here. I mean, what's the impetus behind this? Is it the garage keeps getting smaller or what? Do you have shrinking walls?

Dave Jones: Well, the garage is pretty small. If you've seen my video where I made a new bench and I'm so desperate for space, it goes out over the bonnet of the car, you know. Or the hood, yeah. Yeah, or hood. Sorry. Let's not even talk about boots, right? Right, right. Which is the trunk. Trunk, yeah. In the US. Yep, yep. Yeah. And, yeah, so that's how desperate for space I was. And still, I don't have enough space because I can't move in there because all the shit is over the floor. So, I've got to, like, move everything aside on the floor before I can even – and sure, I can tidy stuff up and throw shit out, but, you know, stuff just accumulates. And in the study here, which is the other space I've got, there's crap scattered all over the floor. So, what can you do? You know? Move on out. That's what you can do. You can make your wife happy. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: You can get the hell out of there.

Dave Jones: So, and I mentioned it to She Who Must Be Obeyed. One morning I got up and I said, you know, it might be a nice idea if we bought her a little unit somewhere, like an office space, so I can move all my stuff into. And her eyes lit up, you know. And she was practically salivating at the thought of getting rid of all my crap. So, she agreed instantly. Yeah, it's not going to be allowed back in, right?

Chris Gammell: You have to succeed, Dave.

Dave Jones: That's right. So, that's the idea. Nice. Is that we would buy an office space. Well, the first idea was that I'd buy some, like, one of those industrial unit kind of things, you know. It's basically a big concrete warehouse with a big roller door.

Chris Gammell: Oh, like a U-store, yeah. That's what we call them here. Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: Okay, yeah. One of those kind of things. Those things aren't air conditioned.

Chris Gammell: Those aren't cool heated. They're nothing. They hardly even have ventilation.

Dave Jones: A, yes, they've got a tin roof. Very nice and tall. You know, they're really tall. You could, like, install a second level in there if you really wanted to. Oh, nice, yeah. But, yeah, they're not air conditioned. Yep. They're a concrete floor and they just feel like, you know. And they're usually wedged between, you know, some auto wrecker.

Chris Gammell: Liquor store, liquor store, gun store.

Dave Jones: Liquor store, auto wrecker. There's the EV blog. Yep, yep. Wedged between there. So, yeah. But, no, I've got, no. So, we thought, and they're not that common around here either.

Chris Gammell: Ah, okay.

Dave Jones: And they're not that cheap because they're fairly cheap. You just come to Cleveland.

Chris Gammell: We have tons of them. Nothing but space around here. Nothing but space.

Dave Jones: At least it's not Detroit.

Chris Gammell: At least not Detroit. I feel bad because Detroit's doing so well. Like, their makerspace, the makerspaces are doing really well. And, like, they're really trying over there. So, any listeners out there in Detroit, keep on fighting people. Midwest Rust Belt solidarity from me. Right. Oh, Detroit. Boy. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And we've mentioned on here before, if you haven't seen it, see the documentary Requiem Ford or Detroit. It's very good. Yeah. So, yep. And, yeah. So, that's the plan. So, they're not that cheap, at least in this area. Because the whole idea is that if I had to get in a car and drive somewhere, well, you know. I've always bitched about driving to work. And I've always dreamed about being able to walk to work, you know. Yeah. So, yeah. That's awesome, man. So, we decided.

Chris Gammell: That's like quality life through the roof, I think. I think right there. Like, people don't really think about that. And it seems like, you know, engineering companies. I don't know if you've looked, at least. I don't know how it is in Australia. But it seems like engineering companies are always out in the suburbs. You never see them, like, downtown where it's real walking friendly or anything like that. They always want big production facilities. They want big office spaces where they can expand. And so, there's always these office parks. And they're just, ugh. Yep. They're gross.

Dave Jones: No, that's the same thing here. Actually, where I've bought is now the second biggest office park, if you want to call it that, in all of Sydney. And it's probably going to end up being the biggest office park in all of Sydney, if they ever get a train line out to it. Oh, okay. So, yeah. It's very new, and it's very big. And, yes. It's enormous. And, yeah. That's where all companies want to buy. Especially in engineering.

Chris Gammell: So, it just happens that you were out in the suburb where it was. I mean, that's the nice thing.

Dave Jones: It just so happens that I live near, within walking distance of the second biggest office industrial kind of park in Sydney. Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's good.

Chris Gammell: I know if you go out to, you know, I've only been out to California like two or three times now. And, and it seems like out there, it's very campus based. You know, it's like sprawling, for the bigger companies at least. You know, they have multiple buildings. And it's, it's walkable once you get to the campus. And sometimes they bus people to campus. But in terms of, you know, actually being able to walk there, it's just like you spend half your time walking across other campuses to get to your campus. Right. Yeah. So, unless you live right next to it or on it, you know, like that's, and that's how a lot of Chinese companies do it where people are living on campus. Like Foxconn does that, I know. Right. And other, other big companies have similar arrangements. But, yeah, that's, that's great, man. That's great that you'll be able to walk there. It's awesome.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, actually, that was the requirement that I could walk or maybe even ride a bike, you know, but preferably walk. And literally, and as it so happens, we literally got almost the closest building physically to our house. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's too bad it wasn't a mandated bike ride because then you would have been bike time rants.

Dave Jones: Right, bike time rants. Well, I thought about the walk time rants and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. There you go.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But, yeah, so I could live. I could, you know, sell my car and live, gain more garage space, ironically. Oh, yeah. And I could live my entire life without having to go anywhere within walking distance of my house. You know, the gym's within walking or riding distance of my house. Nice. Bike ride and shops are within riding distance. This new office will be within walking distance. So, I think it's about 10 minutes walk or I haven't actually ridden my, rode my bike there yet, but it's probably only about three or four minutes by bike, you know, tops. So, it's very quick. Very close. I like it.

Chris Gammell: And it's at 36 square meters. Yeah, I was going to say, how big is it and what are the plans for it? I mean, that's a lot more. Well... You want two square to 36 square? Is that right?

Dave Jones: Yep. Well, no, currently four square meters in the lab, roughly. Yep. To 36. There's actually currently a wall in there. There's a huge wall and it's actually two separate offices because the guy, when he bought it, he decided to put a wall up and rent out half of it, you know. Yeah. So, the wall's coming down and it's going to be one door again. So, it'll be one big open space. I think it's seven and a half meters by five and a half meters or something, if you do the math. What does that add up to, you know? But it adds up to 36 square meters. And please, if you've got any ideas about what to do, I don't know. I haven't thought about it. I guess when I get it, I'll stand in there and go, right, what do I do? I say shop bot.

Chris Gammell: That's my first thing. I think those things are awesome. Right. Have you seen those? I think I mentioned those on here. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They're quite a few thousand dollars, aren't they?

Chris Gammell: I haven't looked recently. Let's see if I can pull it off.

Dave Jones: Five grand or something, maybe.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty fun, though. I don't know. I think it'd be cool. You could build a lot of cool stuff, you know?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. See, I've got room for all this big stuff now. Whereas before, it was totally out of the question. I couldn't even buy a MakerBot because, you know, I literally would not have room to put it.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: So.

Chris Gammell: Holy moly. Yep. Yeah. Seven grand for a shop bot for the desktop. Yeah. There you go. Right. It's not. Not cheap.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's not sort of a petty cash kind of outlay. No. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's the real problem. Now you've got another payment. You can't go out and buy a new gear.

Dave Jones: No. Exactly. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, the plan is probably, you know, five benches, something like that. Because I've got to have, like, I will duplicate my current bench. Well, no. I'll dismantle my current bench and I'll move it as is. So, the look will, the idea is to keep the look of the video the same if I can, you know. Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: You just take a picture and put up a cardboard backing behind you. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I'm in a real lab. Yeah. There you go.

Dave Jones: So, you know, because that's kind of one of my trademarks is the lab behind me kind of, you know, aspect of the video. Yeah. You get to rework it. So, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I think this is the fun part when you get to, like, dream it up and, you know, that was the fun part about building my bench.

Dave Jones: Yep. But in the end, there's probably not much choice, you know. It's a big open area. So, what do you do? You put benches around the outside. You put bookcases and cupboards and then you put- Then you fight robots in the middle. A big table in the middle. And I'm going to have beanbags, of course.

Chris Gammell: So, basically, this is going to be like a 12-year-old's den, right? Like, with electronics. Oh, yes.

Dave Jones: So, there will probably be an arcade machine. Dave is reverting. Maybe a pinball machine or something. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I saw that. Yeah, I don't think. Yeah. I wouldn't do much else if I had a pinball machine around. Right.

Dave Jones: But, no, you know, I figure I need- I probably need five benches. You know, I need one as the backdrop, right? And that's to do my electronics at. You know, that'll be the soldering slash work slash test bench. Then I need another bench beside that where I just do teardowns. You know, that'll be the teardown bench.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. You're going to get some good lighting in there and everything, right?

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah, it has to- yeah. I've got to figure out lighting. And so, there'll be a teardown bench. Then there'll be another bench for just unpacking shit, you know, and doing stuff like that because, you know. There'll be another one for a current project I'm working on. In fact, I probably should have two for current projects I'm working on and things like that, you know, because I'm always- you know, I'm working on half a dozen projects at once. So, they all have to sit somewhere, you know. I hate having to put them away in boxes because then they're out of sight, out of mind.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. So- Instead of a glance at something being like, ooh, I needed to do that.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's nice.

Dave Jones: Anyway, another part of the reasoning behind it is that it's more of a psychological thing, you know. If I feel as that- like, if I have to get up in the morning-

Chris Gammell: What?

Dave Jones: What was that?

Chris Gammell: I was just singing.

Dave Jones: Right, as you do.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, psychological thing, you know. If I get up in the morning and I have to physically, you know, hop on my bike or walk and buy honey, you know, and I'm off to work, you know, then it's- Yeah. I, you know, I feel as though I- once I'm there, I should actually do something useful as opposed to pissing away my time, which is what I mostly do these days.

Chris Gammell: Right, and now when Sagan grows up, you can be like- you can take him to the office, you know, and show him around versus- Yeah, exactly. Hey, Sagan, let's go to the garage. Yeah, that's right. So- There you go. Yeah. That's good.

Dave Jones: Yeah, so it's a bit, you know, it's a big step forward in, you know. That's exciting, man. Okay, I'm excited for you.

Chris Gammell: I'm going to tell you what to do. Thank you very much. Like crazy. Right. No, no, no, put this in. Spend some more money, Dave. You got, you got to spend more money. You got to spend money to make money.

Dave Jones: Got to spend money to make money. Yeah, right. All right. Got to buy an eight grand shop bot. There you go. Which is probably like 10 grand here in Australia, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I don't even know. Yeah. Oh, it looks pretty though. I like it. Oh, I like it. Right.

Dave Jones: Anyway, write in, please. Comment in. Write in. Yeah, physically write a letter to the app outlet.

Chris Gammell: Mail it in. And you'll have a mailing address now too. You can have people maybe stop by the EEV blog shop. Is that going to be-

Dave Jones: I could because, you know, I've- You can have like office hours. Yeah. Yeah, I could do that. Because only before, because it's my private house, you know, only very select few people have been allowed to come here. You know, I don't want, you know, people just, you know, turn up anytime to our house here. It's not, you know, if the wife doesn't like that.

Speaker ?: Yeah, it's two in the morning.

Dave Jones: It's dog electronics. I mean, you know, everyone's nice and everything, but you know, it's not- Yeah. We just don't want it to turn into that. The post-pub drop-bys, yeah. I've had so many people, you know, oh, I'm coming to Australia. Can I drop in and see you? And, oh, yeah, I'd love to, but it's my own private home, you know. Right, exactly. It's like, you know, it's, yeah. The wife doesn't like that too much. Yeah, I can imagine she would, yeah. Yep. The real question is- As opposed to the hackerspace, the Melbourne hackerspace where Andy's- Oh, I know. His wife is great. Just lets everyone just rock up and destroy their house. That's awesome. That's awesome. I think he married well. Yeah, there you go. Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's good. I can't- And maybe we can bring back, you know, I was asking on Google Plus today too, if people wanted to see Workbench of the Week again, and it seemed like it's been a big enough time. Maybe that can be our inaugural Workbench of the Week. We can have a little walkthrough of the new lab once you're all set up.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, there will be no doubt there'll be videos. It'll take some time though, you know. That's okay. It'll be a mess.

Chris Gammell: I'm not in a hurry for Workbench of the Week again.

Dave Jones: All right. Cool. Anyway, yeah, no doubt. The Amp Hour show will still be done here. This will still be my audio recording studio and probably my video editing studio. So the whole idea would be that I would go there to work on my stuff and shoot the blogs and then come back here and edit. So I spend more time with the family, you know. So that's the idea. Because if I edited my videos there as well, I'd be there all day, every day. And, you know, yeah, that sort of defeats the purpose of sort of having your own business is that I can spend time with little Sagan and the wife as well. And the lady. For that matter. Not that she matters anymore because my little Sagan is so cute. Yes. So what should we talk about this week? She's listening. Which she is. The walls aren't that thick here. Oops. She can hear everything.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, shall we move on?

Chris Gammell: Yes. Yeah, let's. I'm sure people are sick of us here. Us talking about the lab by now. But it'll be fun. Anyway, it's exciting. Yeah. How about this. So speaking of things that you could stock in your lab, how about this DIY pick and place? I was pretty excited to see this. You didn't seem as enthusiastic.

Dave Jones: Well, I think it's very cool, right? It's just like making your own chips. Okay. Folks. It is a very similar thing. It's very cool. It's possible. But is it practical?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Not really.

Chris Gammell: Well, let's get some background first. So Patrick Hood Daniel is the guy that wrote in. And so he runs a site called, oh, where's it called? BuildYourCNC.com. And there's a couple CNCs out there already. I think there's DIY Lil CNC. That was like a Kickstarter project. And people are trying to make desktop CNCs. That's the idea. And when you think about like MakerBots or RepRaps, they really start to converge because it's XY platter or XY stage. And then just some kind of Z motion. And then what you do with it is up to you. In this case, it's a drill. It's a typical CNC.

Dave Jones: So you can do board routing. Oh, by the way, my remarks at the start were in regards to a pick and place, not a CNC. Right.

Chris Gammell: No, I understand that.

Dave Jones: A CNC is useful. So we're only talking about pick and place.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Yeah, we'll get to the pick and place. But the CNC, I mean, and really, CNC, you know, there's XY stage. There's a Z stage for up and down. And then there's a drill. And you can route out boards. You can cut out, you know, cut out boards, cut out wood, metal, whatever.

Dave Jones: You can even add a laser to it maybe. And you can laser cut stuff if you want.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's kind of interchangeable in that way. And that's what makes them pretty cool. And so what Patrick did is he put a suction tip on one of those. And I think you had actually mentioned doing this before.

Dave Jones: Yes, I mentioned it on my raw show.

Chris Gammell: Okay, okay. And so he put, I believe he was the one that built the initial buildyourcnc.com. And then he put a suction tip on the front. And then there's an actuator to turn suction on or off. And then he made it into a pick and place. That's kind of it. I mean, like, it's not it. As you do. Right? Yeah, it's not it because it's not easy to do. But that's the basics of it, right? Yep. So he sent in some videos. And obviously we can't really talk through them too much. But there's a couple of interesting things on here, I thought. Let's hear your opinion first, Dave. I mean, I'm talking all about this.

Dave Jones: Well, my opinion is that, yeah, I originally said on my raw show that, oh, wouldn't it, you know, how hard can it be to do a pick and place? You know, but it was a sort of an off the cuff remark. And I knew it wasn't really practical. Yeah, go figure. It was a bit of a throwaway remark, you know. Because I knew very well that it wasn't really practical. Because, see, the problem is, yes, you can get, you can build a pick and place machine as he's done. And it works. Okay? Great.

Chris Gammell: And it looks awesome.

Dave Jones: Right? Yeah. And it does work. But it all comes down to the practicality of how many parts it can, yeah, it's speed, how many parts it can place per hour versus manual placement. And also how many feeders you have and how well the feeders work. And how long it takes to set up the machine and, you know, tweak it to get it. And how reliable it is and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. To make it into a practical pick and place machine that actually saves you time over manual soldering.

Chris Gammell: Right. And that's a very valid point, I think.

Dave Jones: And also compared to what it costs you to go to an assembler who has a proper $150,000 machine, which does it 10 times quicker. They know how to set it up. They're the experts. They know how to maintain it.

Chris Gammell: I disagree with that one.

Dave Jones: And you've got to dick around with all this shit in your garage to what? And it turns out that if you do the numbers in terms of, you know, dollars saved versus time versus pick and place, versus sending it to a commercial assembly house to do it, there's a very narrow window of where a do-it-yourself pick and place machine makes sense. A very narrow financial, you know, time cost of benefit window.

Chris Gammell: Ooh, I get to quote yourself. I get to quote you back to you, Dave. Oh, please. And this quoting you back to you, quoting someone else. Oh, this is delicious. I can't wait. You're not thinking fourth dimensionally, Dave. Which I was watching. I was watching that the other day, too. I was watching Back to the Future. I mean, yeah, you're right. Right now, the way the speed it's set up at, I totally agree. I think, you know, it's slow, but it's all about developing it. You know, it's people like Patrick and people that are doing this that are passionate about it that are kind of moving it along, though, right? So they might work on the next generation. Of course it's going to be more realistic to go to an assembler, I think. But I think he's doing it for the art of it, not the...

Dave Jones: Of course he is. And that's brilliant. It's like making your own chips. I fully support it, right?

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Okay. So you're just saying from the commercialization, using this in a...

Dave Jones: Just from the practical... Yeah. From the, you know, is it practical to have, to make your own do-it-yourself pick-and-place machine? Not at the moment. Not at the moment. Not even close. But it's... Not even close.

Chris Gammell: I think it's pretty cool to start with.

Dave Jones: They need to be 10 times quicker. Yeah. And they need to be 10 times more reliable. You know, they're an order of magnitude out of where they should be.

Chris Gammell: Right. Really. And I think for posterity, we can... Posterity, is that the right word? I don't even know. I think we should include a video of an actual, like, large-scale pick-and-place. Because those things are zippy. Those things are just... Oh, man.

Dave Jones: They're lightning quick. You can't even see them almost. I know.

Chris Gammell: They're that quick. And they're really cool to watch. And they have, you know, feeder rolls and everything like that. And it is good as a reference point. Because that, you know, in large-scale manufacturing, that's what's being used. And that's kind of the standard these days, right? These large machines.

Dave Jones: And it's not that expensive. These days, just like manufacturing PCBs isn't expensive these days. The prices have plummeted down to rock-bottom levels where you can afford to get your own board, you know, assembled. You only need 100 boards assembled.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I thought you were going to say the actual, like, commercial pick-and-places. Because I know that, like, Adafruit has one and DIY Drones has one.

Dave Jones: They started about 10 grand. The Adafruit one cost about 50 grand. But they do start at about 10. Right.

Chris Gammell: And I don't think they have, like, the super fast. They have fast ones, but not the fastest ones.

Dave Jones: Yeah, they're not that bad. But then you've got to buy all the feeders. Right, yeah. Because that's the key to a pick-and-place is that if you don't have enough feeders to handle all the components you need, then you've got to go for a second or a third run through. And that just kills the time advantage of the pick-and-place machine. It just absolutely kills it.

Chris Gammell: And that is something that I wanted to call out about this DIY pick-and-place because I think it's pretty cool. The way he does it, actually. So if I can explain it. If you're looking, if you imagine your finger is like the suction tip, right? So it's coming down on a part. You turn on the suction. It picks up the part. It goes over and places it on the board and whatever rotational it needs it, right? Because sometimes you have rotated parts. Yeah, you have 45-degree parts and rotated parts. Right, right. So then it goes back over, right? And now you have an empty tray inside a reel, right? So a reel tape, really. So if you think of an 0603 resistor, where that once was, there's now just an empty spot. What he uses, so imagine your finger going down and going into that hole now, and then he moves. So he knows the distance down, right? And he moves the suction tip towards the board so it actually advances the tape for you. Now, that obviously has a time hit, right? Which is the eventual thing that could really hurt you. But I think in terms of like an innovative way to remove the need for real advancers. So like, that's pretty cool. That was definitely the first thing that popped out about this video to me. I thought it was so cool. You know, the tip comes back down, moves the tape over, and then moves back to the next part, and then it moves on. Yep. So I thought that was... That is quite nice. That was very elegant.

Dave Jones: So that, yeah, I mean, it looks like he's got, I don't know, what, a dozen or more tape holders? Right, right. Really? So that's actually a lot, you know. And really it's infinite.

Chris Gammell: I mean, you could, as big as your stage is, you know, if your XY motors were, you know, 20 by 20 meters, you could have infinite tapes.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It'd be stupid to do that, but yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's right. But is the tip strong enough to actually pull the tape through like that without breaking the suction?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it looked like it. And he talks about it too, so I emailed him back. He just emailed me about this.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, so they're actually off-the-shelf tips, which is good. And they are metal. I mean, I think they might be stainless steel. And you might have seen them before. They're like a translucent pink or blue or green plastic. And usually you put them on top of, you know, I've used them on top of like squirt bottles for using like flux or water.

Dave Jones: Yeah, on squirt bottles and syringes and stuff.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it's like that kind of thing. So they're relatively strong. I'm sure if like the tape got stuck, you'd probably bend a tip or hopefully you wouldn't damage the stage. But yeah. And then he says, I don't know. You could put cups on top of the tip then for picking up bigger components. He uses like a, what are those called? The 44 pin where the pins like wrap underneath the chip. I've forgotten the name of that package type. Whatever that is. But he was building like a driver board, like a motor driver. So, you know, I had probably 50 parts or so. Probably took about five, ten minutes. But it seemed to line up well. And then he ended up doing, he shows in his videos too, he does the SparkFun hot plate method. Or I don't know if it was SparkFun, but he quotes SparkFun. So, I don't know. It was, I think all in all, I was extremely impressed by it. I wouldn't have been talking about it otherwise. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, it's good. I think it's the best attempt out there. How to do it yourself. You can place machine. It's by far the best attempt, I think. Yeah. So, I do like it. Yeah. And speaking of the hot plate method for doing the reflow, I don't know why you'd bother these days. On eBay, you can buy the reflow ovens for 200 bucks. Yeah. You know, yeah, those IR reflow ovens. Even here, I think it's 250 bucks, including postage, to Australia. Oh, really? It's like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For these, I'm thinking about buying one for the new lab. I've never had room before, but now I can, ah, yeah, it's cheap enough. Yeah. It's almost one of those impulse buy things.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right. That's going to happen a lot.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know.

Chris Gammell: Nicole's going to be looking at the bank account and yelling at you, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, it will vanish into the noise compared to all the baby stuff. Oh, there you go. Impulse buying, you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Just keep a little, keep track of that.

Dave Jones: Be like, ah, but what about those booties? That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I've used the IR reflow ovens before on just like rapid circuit prototyping stuff. And I mean, those things are great. I mean, you can actually create temperature profiles. You can do preheating and everything like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know.

Chris Gammell: I was pretty interested. I haven't looked at the SparkFun tutorial on it, but I was interested by the fact that they're only from the bottom side. So like, you know, you put a circuit board with, you know, solder paste and the parts on top, whatever, and you only heat it from the bottom side. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And you have to rely on the heat flow through the, through the FR4 laminate. Right. Yeah. So if you're doing like metal core. It's not that great.

Chris Gammell: If you're doing metal core, it's probably better like for. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. High heat conduction for like LED boards. But yeah, I don't know.

Dave Jones: No, it's a poor way to do it. And it doesn't save much money. You know, I hear about people, oh, they go out and they bought a, you know, some sort of hot plate and they're modifying it to turn it. But why? For 250 bucks, you can buy a proper IR oven. I don't know. I mean, that just might be the DIY spirit of it, you know, just trying to build it up. Yeah. Possibly. You know, but yeah. I can certainly understand it playing around, but when, you know, it's, when things get down to a point where they're, you know, so cheap like that and, and it's the right tool for the job.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's a good, that's a good point because you might end up burning up boards. And you don't want to ruin your components, you know, you don't want to, so you know,

Dave Jones: it's fairly important to get that sort of thing right. So yeah, I don't understand why you'd do it yourself these days. Right. I would certainly come down to a price point where it's not worthwhile. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think it's the DIY spirit of it, right? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Anyway. I like the idea, I like the, you know, I don't know how big SparkFun's ever going to get, but I like the story that of like Nathan Seedle in his dorm room building boards like that with a, with a hot plate. I think that's like a good, like lore, you know, like kind of like in the HP garage when the guys were, when Bill and Dave were building, building boards, they did, what was it like Bakelite?

Dave Jones: Yeah. They'll build in the, what, the HP 200 oscillator and they're putting them in the oven. Right. You know, they'll put the front panels in the oven. Right.

Chris Gammell: In his wife's oven. Yeah. And then they'd go like make a cake in it later.

Dave Jones: They'd go like a drill press and they were drilling their own holes. So that's, that's some fun lore, right?

Chris Gammell: I mean, but. Oh yeah. I don't know if people would replicate it just because Bill and Dave did it, right? You know? Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But that's the thing. You can do it there. You know, you can manufacture hundreds of boards in your own home. You know, you can start up your own business and you don't need anyone. Yeah. Really. That's true. That's true. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So any plans for 3D printers in your future, Dave? No.

Dave Jones: Oh, no. Not really. I don't think they're at a point yet where they're, they're, you know, they're not as good as they could be. The quality's not there yet. I don't think.

Chris Gammell: I said 3D printers. I didn't say MakerBot. I didn't say RepRat. I said, so 3D printer could be, I don't know, $5,000 on eBay, right? You can get some of them.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, yes. One of the commercial ones. Yeah. Well, I'm thinking about reviewing one. There's one, there's a company here in Australia which have a reasonably good looking one. And it's pretty cheap, actually. It's almost the same price as the MakerBot actually built up. Because MakerBot's about $2,000 built up or something. $2,500, I think. And this commercial one. Yeah. And this commercial one's only $2,500 built up. Oh, okay. So, you know, it's very similar. You know, it's an open frame. It's a very similar look kind of thing. I forget the name of it.

Chris Gammell: Is it based on RepRap or is it just a...

Dave Jones: No, no, no. It's their own design. It's their own commercial design. Yeah. And it's sold by, you know, half a dozen different companies. It's rebranded and all that sort of stuff. Oh, that's interesting. It comes from, I don't know, the Netherlands or something. Huh. That's cool. Yeah. You should do that. Yeah. Hopefully, I'll get one and I will review it. And if it's really good, I'll buy one. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: There you go. There you go.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: I was thinking about it. I saw some videos this weekend and I'm just like, oh, you know, I'd really... I'm thinking about it, you know? Like, it's... Right. It's kind of getting to that point of, like, I mean, $1,200 is still $1,200. Don't get me wrong. Yeah. Yeah. But, man, it just seems like something I just really wanted to try. I mean, I was really jonesing for a shop... A shop... A shop bot. But, sorry. Yep. Sorry, Skype barfed at me there. Right. And, yeah, I really wanted a shop bot because I was looking at building some, like, wine rack stuff. But, if anyone knows one in the Midwest, I'd love to hear about it. Yeah. There's no, like, tech shops or anything like that around here. So, unless you know someone with the actual equipment, you have to either go buy it yourself or try and sneak into a university lab or something like that. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Maybe there's a hackerspace somewhere.

Chris Gammell: Well, there's a hackerspace in Cleveland. There's a... Yep. And there's a couple up in Detroit. There's... I don't know. There's a couple around. But, none that I'd heard had a shop bot. So, that's what I'm looking for.

Dave Jones: Right. So, yeah, I'm probably going to hang out for the next generation one because, you know, I've looked at the outputs of the MakerBots and they're just not that great. They're fun, right, to play with. But, you have to do a lot of work to finish off a part kind of thing, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, like scrub it down with acetone. Scrub it, yeah. And file it.

Dave Jones: And file it down. Yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, their alignment's not the best, you know. So...

Chris Gammell: It's getting better, though. It's good.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, it's getting better. Every generation gets better and it won't be long before that, you know. But, yeah, it's sort of, you know, if I'm going to spend, you know, $1,500 or $2,000 on a 3D printer, I want it to work well, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah.

Dave Jones: I can't really justify spending that sort of money just to have fun with it and print out, you know, little toy figurines or something, you know. Right, yeah, you want to have some. Yep. But, whereas if it was at the $500 level, then, you know, it'd be an impulse buy. You know, you'd go out and you'd buy it just for printing little toy parts and things, right? So...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. As long as they're non-toxic, you can give them to the kid, right? Yeah, that's right.

Dave Jones: It's all a matter of price point. Yeah, that's true.

Chris Gammell: That's true. Yep. What about laser cutters? Laser cutters in your future?

Dave Jones: Laser cutters are getting cheaper. I think $3,000 on eBay or something gets you a kick-ass laser cutter. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That seems like a lot of kits are showing.

Dave Jones: Well, it's a made-in-China no-name one. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think that's actually how they're making certain kits, too. Like, I know Evil Man Scientist Labs, they use their laser cutter for some of their kits. Like, I think that Eggbot kit is actually a laser cut part, so... Yeah, you can do some fun stuff with that.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, for sure. I was...

Dave Jones: Nah, if I get back into the kit business seriously, I would... I would certainly... I would certainly consider actually, you know, spending some real money on some real gear for this sort of thing, so...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That'd be cool. It would be cool. You know, you expand your operation. You can hire me. Right. You can't afford me. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. And for the cost of the airfare flying over here, I can buy a house in... There you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You can just set up a remote shop in some dilapidated house in Cleveland. I can buy one of those thousands of houses and set you up over there.

Speaker ?: Dave, I'm freezing.

Chris Gammell: It's December. Why am I in an empty house?

Dave Jones: Ah, toughen up, man. Back to the laser cutter with you. Ah. Ah. Oh, boy. Ah. So, there you go. Yeah, do it yourself, pick and place. Eh?

Chris Gammell: I like it. I think it's great. People should check it out.

Dave Jones: I think it's cool, too. But, yeah, don't get one thinking that's going to save you time and money. Yeah. Because it won't. But, jeez, it'd be a fun toy.

Chris Gammell: Yes, it would. Speaking about building out like you and your lab, have you been watching any of this 450mm wafer thing? Have you seen anything about that? I mean, I'd... No, do tell, as usual.

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: No? You don't want... I mean, it's actually, it's your buddy, Steve Leibson.

Dave Jones: Steve Leibson? Yep. Hey, Steve, if you're listening.

Chris Gammell: He, uh... So, he was writing about, actually, someone else's article, though. So, if people don't know, 450mm wafers are 18-inch silicon wafers. So, if you can imagine that, I mean, that's... That's like, what, the size of my forearm? I mean, I guess that's more of a flip.

Dave Jones: Yeah, how big is the silicon... Yeah, the silicon slug has to be that wide that they slice these things up from, right?

Chris Gammell: Right, so that means it has to be, like, uniform all across that, too. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: The really, actually, the thing that I had experience with was etch stuff, right? And the really big problem is that, like, when you try and, like, distribute chemicals, or in the case I was working on plasma, like, evenly across silicon, it just... Yeah. It doesn't work, because it's just so much area. You know, when you're doing a 2-inch wafer or a 4-inch wafer, you only have to concentrate it. Like, you can have plasma all over the place, but you only have to concentrate it in one spot, really. But when you're doing, you know, 18 inches across, that's just... Yeah. That's ridiculous. Anyways, so there's, like, all this build-out talk. You know, they're talking about Intel, and Intel's building this new fab up in Albany, and crazy stuff. And the only reason they're doing all this stuff is Moore's Law, right? They're just kind of trying to march along and keep in front and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: See, the only reason to go to a wafer this big is so that you get more chips per wafer, and you lower the cost of your devices, right? Right, yeah. In theory.

Chris Gammell: Because you can only get so many wafers through, right?

Dave Jones: If you take out the cost of the fab, right? If you ignore the cost of the fab, the only reason to go to a bigger wafer, because, like, it's not like you make a big one chip that's 450 millimeters wide, right? So, yeah, the whole idea is you get... It's just, you know, a scale thing. You get more chips, more dies, more chips per wafer.

Chris Gammell: Right, and especially with, like, if you start moving... I mean, not like power devices are getting this big, but if you have power devices that need to consume more power, or, you know, burn more power and dissipate more heat, then those have to be bigger, too, so you get less of those per wafer.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So that's kind of the whole big thing.

Dave Jones: But, like, what am I saying here? Does it cost $7 billion to upgrade the lab to 450 millimeters?

Chris Gammell: No, it's saying $2 billion to upgrade from 300 millimeter up to 450 millimeter.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. So that'd be, like, replacing... Well, can't you buy... Can't you build another 300 millimeter lab for $2 billion? Fab for $2 billion?

Chris Gammell: Last I saw was about $5 billion for a full-size fab. All right.

Dave Jones: Oh, jeez, you're getting down to the point where it's... You know, there's not much in it, is there, between whether or not you upgrade, you try and upgrade, or you physically just build another fab,

Chris Gammell: a second 300 millimeter one. Yeah, there's a lot of concerns with that, though, too. It's not easy to... I mean, like, you're just saying more floor space, more, you know, utilities and everything, right? And just... Yeah, but then you gotta pay more taxes, you gotta... It's just becoming such a narrow game. And that's what, you know, Steve points out, and that's what Deepak, the guy that wrote an article about this, and he's from Monolithic IC3D. Basically, it's just becoming an unreasonably large game, right? So, you know, you talk about... Dave, you talk about, oh, chip making is not realistic at home because the cost is so low because of these fabs. And this is what they're doing to try and keep costs low, is that you have to keep making more and more chips so that one wafer process... You know, because, like, the different processes take a long time. So, you know, you gotta try and maximize the chips per wafer. But, man, $7 billion. That's a lot of dough, you know? You see what you did, Apple? You see what you did?

Dave Jones: $7 billion for a 450 nanometer. That's to upgrade, yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's for a new one.

Dave Jones: Yeah, he is estimating... It actually costs not $2 billion, but $7 billion to upgrade to a 450 millimeter fab. That's what he's saying here. Oh, to upgrade?

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay, I missed that.

Dave Jones: Yes, to upgrade, yeah. Oh, wow.

Chris Gammell: That's... I thought that was from scratch.

Dave Jones: Like, the original estimate is $2 billion, and he's saying that's bullshit. Oh, yeah, yeah. And it's actually gonna be close to $7 billion. Yeah, yeah. And, well... Wow. Yeah. You know?

Chris Gammell: Wow. Wow. So, what does this mean for consumers, Dave?

Dave Jones: Well, it means, up front, the price of chips isn't gonna drop, because somebody's gotta pay for that $7 billion capital investment.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. And so, what if you can't get the ear of TSMC or TI, whoever's making these huge wafers? What if you want to have a custom chip made and you can't get them to?

Dave Jones: Well, you can. There's plenty of services out there that have deals in place.

Chris Gammell: What if you can't afford it, though, because the costs are going up so much, and, uh... Hmm? What if you want a custom chip, Dave? What if you want a custom chip at home, Dave?

Dave Jones: Yeah, good luck that it does anything more than flashing LED. If you're looking at a custom chip, then you're looking at something ridiculously... You almost did. ...ridiculously advanced, you're not gonna be able to do it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's... It's... That was not the point of bringing this up, but I thought that was a nice little add-on there. Nice little jab. Dude. It's getting crazy, though. Let's agree on that one, right? It is getting unbelievably crazy. It is silly. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I... I... I... You know, can't they just whip the Oompa Loompas faster to make more 300mm chips? Isn't that cheaper than spending $7 billion to upgrade to 450mm? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: You get a big bump from moving up in wafer size, you know?

Dave Jones: Ah, yeah, I guess.

Chris Gammell: And it drives equipment sales and everything else, too. I guess that's good for, I don't know, the industry. Whatever. I don't care. Yep. Yep. But, yeah.

Dave Jones: But how long is that fab offline while you upgrade it to 450mm?

Chris Gammell: Well, you can do it in stages, so... Yeah, I guess. Yeah. But... And then you can have selectively, you know, like, certain type of wafers go to one machine, other wafers go to another machine and have a transition over. There's very little in the way of downtime in fabs if they can help it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know, because it's their business. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And they say that... Let's see. I've worked in the manufacturing environment where we work 24 hours a day.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know? And, you know, they had three shifts around the clock. And you always had standing orders, you know? If you worked in these places, you had... When you're employed, they go, right, your standing orders are, regardless of what else you're told to work on, if there's a problem on the production line... Yep. ...that takes priority over everything. You go out and fix that. Yep. Because we will lose, you know, $100,000 an hour or something if our production line is not working.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's almost like the perfect embodiment of time is money, right? Yes. Yeah, it is. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It literally is. So, you know...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's interesting in those situations, too. I mean, I've written about that a little bit before, but it's interesting in those situations, too, is just how much wallets seem to kind of loosen up, you know? Oh, yeah. And it makes sense. Like, if you're a manager, right, and you've got... So, Dave Jones is my engineer, because, of course, Dave would be working for me.

Dave Jones: Right. Hey, dude, who's got the empire now? Oh, that's true. That's true.

Chris Gammell: I don't have an office yet. I just have a basement in Cleveland. Amateur. Yeah, right. Oh. Anyways, Employee Jones, you know, says, oh, I want to update this thing. And I say, no, we don't have it in the budget. And then the whole product line goes down, and he says, oh, I need to update this right now. Well, yeah, it's probably worth it if you're losing $100,000 an hour or whatever it might be. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's amazing how that really seems to start... Yeah. ...get thrown into sharp relief at that point, so... Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think for us, it was $100,000 a day. That's what we would lose. So it wasn't quite $100,000 an hour. We weren't that big. But still, yeah. You know, that's a fair chunk of change a day. Yeah. You know? Yeah, that's your operating capital, right? I mean, if you look at that as a... You are literally going to lose that amount of money. Right. And you're going to piss off the customer who wants this stuff, you know? And... Yeah. So there's lots of flow on effects. So yeah, like just spending, you know, 10 grand to go out and buy something to fix something within an hour instead of a day is worth it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the... Yes, the wallets would suddenly become, you know, like hours before they would not sign your requisition sheet to... If I could... Can I buy a new multimeter, please, for, you know, $100? I don't know. No. Yeah. I can't afford it. And then an hour later, shit, it's the fan in production. And they're signing off on 10, 20 grand gear, you know? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's funny.

Chris Gammell: Never waste a good crisis, right? That's what... Right. Yeah. He knows Rahm Emanuel in the US. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I like it. Yep. Anyway. Yes, it's very eye-opening working in a production facility like that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And it's... Well, it's a dying art in the US, at least. I mean... Right. Nothing's made there anymore, huh? I'm sure in Australia it's the same thing, you know? Not a lot of production going on, but...

Dave Jones: No. Only niche stuff, you know? Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Or in our case, it's always military. Military seems to have a lot of... Yeah.

Dave Jones: Military is the big thing. Yeah. Yep. Of course. But then you're not under the same time pressures. Because military, it's like... You know? Yeah. What? You're only a year later? Oh, man. Fantastic. There's a bonus.

Chris Gammell: No, it's not like that.

Dave Jones: Yes, it is. I've worked in the military. That's how it works.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I guess I haven't, so...

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. So, well, I've not worked in the military. I've worked in the defense industry. Ah, gotcha.

Dave Jones: That's how it works. You're only a year late, sir. Fantastic. You know? We will award you another contract.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: You know? That's crazy. I know. That's the world, though. The world is nuts.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it is. And, I mean, it's interesting where everything... I mean, like, everything's going... Like, military spending, at least in the U.S., too, seems to be... You know, that's dropping off. And that's a significant investment in, like, in technology these days, at least in the U.S., is military spending, like, Department of Defense, and with cuts in the U.S. coming, it'll be interesting to see if, you know, one of the remaining sources of, like, hardware innovation is kind of in trouble. I don't know if...

Dave Jones: Well, it'll be interesting to see where they make the cuts. You know? Is it going to be in research kind of engineering, you know, fields? Right. That would be my fear. Or is it going to be in, you know, actual...

Chris Gammell: Personnel, yeah.

Dave Jones: Subs and, you know, aircraft carriers and planes and shit like that. Right, right. Is it actually going to be hardware or is it going to be, you know, talent and R&D?

Chris Gammell: Right. So... And that's actually... So, one of the... I didn't post it on here, but there's been videos recently of the Boston Dynamics. And, actually, I actually have a friend that works there. But, they've been working on this... What, is that a company, is it? Yeah, it's a robotics company, actually. So, they're up in... Boston. Boston.

Dave Jones: Yeah, go figure. Yeah. Now, is Boston better than Detroit as well? Boston's awesome.

Chris Gammell: I was just out there, remember?

Dave Jones: That's right, yeah. Yeah. Boston, yes.

Chris Gammell: Boston's a great city.

Dave Jones: I swear Detroit's going to come back and it's... Oh, they are.

Chris Gammell: They're going to kick your ass, too. They're going to kill everyone.

Dave Jones: They're going to kick everyone's ass.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And, yeah. So, this company, though, they make robotics. And so, they're famous. They made the big dog. It's like this transport vehicle. It's a four-legged transport for cargo. And, they just came out with the Alpha Dog. It's like this other, you know, next generation thing. But, they make some... Four-legged? Yeah, four-legged. So, it's like a pack. It's like a pack meal, basically. But, it's a robot. Right. It's awesome. So, it's just... It can handle any terrain, basically. And, it can carry...

Dave Jones: I'm sure it costs an awesome amount of money, too. It does, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But, I mean, that's the kind of thing that, like, DOD's funding, right? Or, maybe that's even DARPA. And, that's an example of, you know, well, you can cut military budget. But, that actually funds, you know, future robotics, too, right? So, whatever they develop to make this big dog, you know, whatever it is, like a new actuator, because they need to be able to carry more weight, that actually gets propagated out into the ecosystem. Same kind of thing with, like, NASA and everything else, too. You know, when NASA was spending a lot of money, that popped up a lot of new vendors. Yep. You know, whatever you want to think on the government spending side of things. I mean, the investment in technology is all I care about in the end. And, it sucks whenever you see that going away, so...

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, for sure. So, let's hope that doesn't happen.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, speaking of pissing money down the drain, we have a shonky product of the week. Hey, hey. Hey.

Chris Gammell: Oh, this is a good... Sorry, so I'm not a fix. This is another good one.

Dave Jones: Yeah, this is just, like... This is pornographically, you know, bad, really. It's just... Right.

Chris Gammell: And, we should mention, again, this is Ben Rampling, the same guy who sent in that fire... The guy in front of the fireplace. Yep. Ben's the one who found that and sent that in. Everyone loved that. We posted that. Oh, it was brilliant. Yep.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I've seen this one before, because I get, you know, with my audio file thing, I get a couple of emails every week of, check out this one, check out this one.

Dave Jones: And, this is great. Anyway, tell us about it.

Chris Gammell: Basically, it's... So, it's called lessloss.com. I mean, we're not going to, you know, withhold the link this week, because... Oh, no, no. It's not that bad. Well, it is that bad, but it's too good to not post, right? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. You've got to go there and have a look at the bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. You know, first hand, really.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: It's worth giving the publicity, because we know no Amp Hour audience listener would be stupid enough to buy one. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yep. So, basically, it's a black body box, right? And, you put it in the room. You put it in the same room as your audio gear. And, it's supposed to condition the ambient field, of course, right? Let's see, it says, and this is a quote, placing the black body near your gear will condition the ambient field. Your gear's ambient... Your gear's radiation is transformed into room temperature black body radiation, inhibiting the sound's degradation.

Dave Jones: And, on the front page here, the ambient field conditioner neutralizes equipment-borne radiation, lowers the noise floor, sharpens focus and imaging, eliminates sonic smearing of high frequencies.

Chris Gammell: Oh, my God. That's amazing.

Dave Jones: Oh.

Chris Gammell: And, all for the bargain price of $1,323. That's American dollars. $1,300. Yep. American dollars, folks, please. But, free shipping. Oh, of course. Wow.

Dave Jones: And, if you want large quantity orders, you email them direct. Because, you know, the more you put around your room, the better it is. Yeah. You see.

Chris Gammell: I like the second picture, too, with, like, pointing right at a tube. Like, that those two are intimately related.

Dave Jones: Yeah, like, you know, it makes the sonic vibrations in your tube, you know. It lowers the sonic vibrations. Great, great photographs, really. Yeah, they are high quality. You know, nice promo. Yep. It almost makes you want to buy one, you know. And, it almost looks like it belongs in a DeLorean, you know. Yeah, it does. Like, it should be in there to replace the flux capacity, you know. There you go. There you go. Yeah, very similar. So.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man. This is great. So, thank you, Ben, for sending that in. We love seeing these things. Oh, my God.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh.

Dave Jones: I would do a tear down.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: There's nothing in it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man.

Dave Jones: And I'm sure it's substantial weight, too. I bet you they filled it with, like, a resin to make it feel really heavy. Yeah. You know. Because you can't have something like this feeling light. That'd just cheapen the effect, you know. Yeah. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I like the press coverage and the quotes they have. They have two-word quotes. I'm sure, you know, they have one that says, highly recommended. I'm sure in front of that it said, not highly recommended, you know.

Dave Jones: I love where down the page, how do I position it for top performance? And they've got, like, these, you know, two incorrect photos of how, like, you've got it off-axis to your amplifier. Right. And it's not dispersing all these little particles.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Then when you call in and you're all pissed off, oh, well, maybe you didn't position it correctly. Perhaps you should try and reposition it.

Dave Jones: And if you don't know, you've got to actually point it at your equipment. Yes. You know, so you've got to, like, adjust the right, and it's got an angle field, apparently, that it comes out and pushes all the nasty. Right, this is not unidirectional.

Chris Gammell: It is very focused, right?

Dave Jones: No, it's quite focused. It's got a narrow, but it's got an angle coverage of 35 degrees. There you go. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Yep. And they actually recommend opening up your gear and looking at where inside your circuitry is located. And if possible, several blackbodies should be used in tandem to maximize the coverage and effectiveness. The more, the merrier, they say.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yep. Speaking about things that piss us off, I had to follow up real quick about financial engineering. Everybody could fill in their amp hour bingo sheets. Basically, my friend sent this in to me. It was a NPR story. And basically, it's this guy who's been in the financial field since, like, the late 70s. And, you know, brilliant dude working on all kinds of derivatives and everything else like that. But basically, he said, the last line on this page, and I'll post the article and the link and everything like that. It also had an unfortunate side effect. The best and the brightest went into finance because it paid better than other professions. So, we had this whole generation of people who would otherwise have been great scientists, great doctors, great creators of other things, attracted to a business which ultimately only provided to a substantial degree. And remember, this guy is in the financial field. Toxic waste. And that's the tragedy of our time. It was this diversion of enormous amounts of talent. And it's like, you don't even think about it. You know, like, one or two people, yeah, that pisses me off. Right? I knew someone that's going in the financial field, and I was trying to discourage him. But, man, like, a whole, just, what, throughout the 90s, 2000s? Yeah, yeah. You know, like, that's a substantial amount of people. And it's those people are not working on stuff the world needs. And that sucks, man. I know. So, I don't know if the solution is to, I don't think the solution is more money in engineering. I mean, I'd love more money in engineering, but I don't think it's ever going to get there. Like, I don't know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I don't think so either. It's just got to be cooler. I mean, you know, because ultimately smart people are nerds, and they will ultimately want to do cool stuff. That really wins out. Right.

Chris Gammell: And I think it's summed up in, like, purpose, too, right? Purpose is, like, you're actually doing something that matters instead of shuffling money around like a, I don't know, toad. I don't have a squirrel. A squirrel. A squirrel hiding nuts.

Dave Jones: You've got to ask, though. Are these people who went into this, would they have actually really made talented engineers? Or were they just smart guys who were good at math and shit like that? Would they have actually? Because, you know, you've got to have that passion. If you've got the passion, no amount of money almost is going to sway you from that. So, all of the best and smartest engineers have passion. And I don't think these people had it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, maybe. And I mean, I guess there's the argument, too.

Dave Jones: They wouldn't have scored so many people.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. Maybe the argument, too, is that if they were in the field, then, you know, it would have flooded the market and yada, yada, yada.

Dave Jones: But, yeah. I mean, there's no way to really know, right?

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's like you look at, like, the Alexandria Library, right? And that, like, burned down in the ancient times and had all this knowledge. And you don't know what happened. I mean, people could have just sat on that knowledge for years. But we'll never know. You know, like, you...

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So, it's a shame. Darn shame. Ah, well. Yeah.

Dave Jones: What can you do? Anyway, it's coming to an end, right? That is the good news. Maybe. I don't know, man. Surely. We must stay vigilant. Everyone knows that these people are evil, right? The people who do this shit and work on these derivatives. They ruined America, right? And caused the world the greatest financial crisis since the Depression. I mean, everyone thinks these people are pure evil. I don't know about pure evil, but definitely... Anyone with any brains knows these people are pure evil.

Chris Gammell: I don't know if I'd say pure evil, but they're not on my happy list. You know. Who's worse? They're highly diluted. Not many. Not many. Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Marketers.

Chris Gammell: No. Come on. Bingo. Bingo. Oh, there you go. Yeah. All right. How about this day in nerd history? We can close out on that. Go for it. So, there's a guy named John... Ooh. A... A... A... A...

Chris Gammell: ! N-I-A-C... Is that E-N-A-E-A-C? Ugh. The E-N-E-A-C. E-N-E-A-C. Sorry. That was one of the first computers, right? Yes. And... Yes. So, basically, later on, he was vindicated in court and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So... That sucks, but... Yeah, so this guy...

Dave Jones: It sucks that you have to get a patent to recognize you as the inventor of something, you know? Right.

Chris Gammell: Right. That's just crap.

Dave Jones: Hate that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And there's that thing about how people always seem to file for patents around the same time, too, which is always weird coincidences, but...

Dave Jones: One notable exception to that I was reading about recently is the guy who invented, I think, the cure for polio. Oh, yeah? I'm not sure of his name. I can't remember. But instead of actually doing a patent, you know, instead of patenting things, no, he gave it to the world. You know, he said, look, I've already got a great career, a great job. They pay me well. I'm a researcher. This is what I do. I've got a big house and a nice family. What do I need, you know, trillions of dollars for? I don't. So, here we go. Here's the cure. I give it to the world, you know? And he's famous for doing that now. Wow. Not only for famous for inventing it, but for giving it away.

Chris Gammell: So... Yeah, try seeing that at a pharmaceutical company these days, right?

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah, I know. You'd be marched out the door by security.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Jonas Salk, that's it, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, as I thought I would be at Altium, you know? Yeah. Hey, let's not go there. Oh, we could.

Chris Gammell: No, that's okay. Maybe next week. Maybe next week. It was Jonas Salk. That's the name you were looking for, I believe.

Dave Jones: Ah, right, yes. Yeah. Right. That rings a bell.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And he famously gave it away, so I reckon that's great.

Chris Gammell: Yep. So, yeah, he... Basically, there's a Tannisoff Berry computer, and that's in Iowa State University, and you can... Well, it's just a Wikipedia link, but... Yeah, he was born on this day, that's actually the history side of things, October 4th, 1903. So, pretty awesome dude. It's always fun seeing, you know, all the... You can't look for electrical engineers early in the days, you know, you always have to look for physicists. Physicists spawned electrical engineering, really. Even though Einstein started as an electrical engineer, that was a different kind of electrical engineer than what we think of today. That's more of an electrician, I think, right?

Dave Jones: Ah, something like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I think that's what... I think that's how it was. He was kind of doing wiring and stuff like that. That was his trade, and then he was a physicist in his free time. So. Oh, boy. Very good. Well, I like it. Any final capacity stuff for today? What do we call that again? Final?

Dave Jones: Extra capacity on the amp hour? Extended capacity? I have no idea. Yeah, yeah. We're so disorganized on this show. I don't know. There's got to be something. Come on. Quick. Throw it in there.

Chris Gammell: Google Plus now allows people to watch the stream. So if people wanted us to do video again, we could do that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I think. Yeah. Tell us if you want to somehow watch live as we actually record this hotch-potch of a show. Yeah. No.

Chris Gammell: You have to watch me sitting around at the beginning, waiting for Dave to wake up. Right, yeah.

Dave Jones: I've had a big problem of that lately.

Chris Gammell: But once you have an office, you won't, right?

Dave Jones: No, because I'll be back into a.

Chris Gammell: A routine?

Dave Jones: Five-day-a-week work routine, probably.

Chris Gammell: There you go. That'll be nice.

Dave Jones: That'll be good. Yeah. Yeah. See, because as part of the deal, the wife wanted the weekends back, you see. That was, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's good. I think that's good, man. Work-life balance. Yeah, it's good. That's a very important thing. You don't have that, and you're going to start seeing a lot of things fall apart, I think.

Dave Jones: Although I still don't think of this as work, but, you know, I, well, you know, it is. I've got to get up. Maybe you need to. Maybe I need to. That's the thing. Otherwise, it's so easy to sit around in your pajamas until midday and, you know, just chat on forums and surf the time sink that is the internet.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, work can be fun. I mean, and purposeful, right? That's what I think of when I think of work. I think of, I want to get stuff done today. And I think a lot of people feel that in their hobby life, too, like the hobbyists and makers and stuff like that. Yeah. But, yeah. Work's about getting stuff done and feeling good about getting stuff done, I think. And, yeah.

Dave Jones: You've got to work and wake up with purpose. You know, some mornings I'll wake up and I go, right, damn it, I'm going to do this today. Yeah. You know, I'm going to shoot this blog or I'm going to design this thing or I'm going to, you know, prototype this or something. And, yeah, you've got to have some purpose. Yeah. Otherwise, you will fritter away your life.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And the job is just forcing you into that. Hopefully, it's purposeful when you get there, but then the rest of the time when it's not, you've got to go anyways because they're paying you. Exactly. Yeah. The world of Dilbert. Yep. Alrighty. Well, I look forward to hearing more about your update, Dave. I think that's going to be a lot of fun.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yeah. Hopefully, yes. Hopefully, within some time today, I will be putting down the deposit. So, there you go.

Chris Gammell: Keep your eyes glued to Dave's Twitter.

Dave Jones: Yes. It'll be tweeted.

Chris Gammell: There you go.

Dave Jones: There you go. And once that deposit's down, well, that's it. There's no going back.

Chris Gammell: It's locked in. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: All right, guys. Well, wish Dave luck. Leave us comments in the comment section and find us on Twitter or Google+. Absolutely. All right. We'll see you next week. See ya.

Speaker ?: Bye. ! Thank you.