#65 – Silego, ADCs & Seismic Detection - Dave's Dingo Dystocia

Chris Gammell: Welcome to the Amp Hour.

Dave Jones: I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm Chris Gammell from Chris Gammell's Analog Life. Hey Chris, what's happening in good old Cleveland?

Chris Gammell: Oh, not much here Dave. What's going on across the pond?

Dave Jones: Oh, it's coming into summer over here and it's going into winter over there, right? Oh yeah. So you're thinking about retreating out of the basement.

Chris Gammell: That's right, yeah. I'm thinking about taking refuge in a warmer location known as upstairs. What? Yeah, I was saying to Dave before the show that, you know, we used to have these, you know, we used to take even longer to record before because we had even less clue of what we were doing. And at the end of the show, I'd be like, Dave, I can't do it anymore. I can't feel my fingers. I got to go upstairs.

Dave Jones: It never gets that cold here.

Chris Gammell: That's nice. Never got to the stage. It does here. It does. Right. Okay.

Dave Jones: Where it's actually snowing, you know. It's never snowed here in Sydney as long as I've been.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Here anyway. So it does snow up in the mountains, you know. Once a year you might get, oh, a little bit of snow, you know. It's rather exciting. People flock up there just for the novelty value. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Speaker ?: Hmm.

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

Dave Jones: It's nice it doesn't get that cold. No. Coming into summer, I love it. It'll be canyoning season again.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Any plans to throw equipment? Are you going to take, like, a spectrum analyzer out with you this year?

Dave Jones: I haven't got anything yet, but if anyone's got any ideas, especially the manufacturers out there, if you've got something that you think can survive a canyon trip, by all means, send it my way.

Chris Gammell: It's too bad that, like, it would be, like, really bad littering to, like, have electronics components, like, float down a waterfall.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, like, take, like, a really old scope, you just buy, it's already junked, and you just toss it off and see what happens.

Dave Jones: Well, everything's lead free these days, so that's not too bad.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but if you're buying, like, a 425, you know, tech scope, you know.

Dave Jones: Right. With a ton of lead in it.

Chris Gammell: It's probably got mostly lead. Lead and mercury. It's, like, that's all it's made out of.

Dave Jones: That's it. Oh, boy. Yeah, I was going to do, like, a waterproof multimeter shootout, but there's hardly any of them on the market. Yeah, there's not really. And I've already done two of them. I think there's one other, which is, like, El Cheapo, Jaycar, one-hung-low brand, so that's about it. Yeah. Yeah, it's not very exciting.

Chris Gammell: Maybe you could do, like, a homebrew version where you just, like, put it in, like, a Ziploc bag. Yeah, a Ziploc bag, yeah. And then you seal it up and you see if that one can survive. That would be the real test, right? Yeah. See if you need to pay for that extra bit of water sealing and testing. Right.

Dave Jones: Or you could always put it in a dry bag, but, you know, it's a bit lighter. True, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Or you could, you know, you could take up scuba diving and really see how far those things can go down instead of just into a waterfall, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, instead of just a meter, you know, it gets plunged a meter. But most of them are only rated to, I mean, you know, IP68, I think it is, is continuous immersion in water at one meter or something. Okay, okay. So, you know, you take it more than that and, eh, nah. Yeah, I can't imagine.

Chris Gammell: I can't imagine. I mean, I understand the waterproofing idea of it, but I, if you're measuring electrical signals, you probably don't want to be in water. I'm just saying.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, exactly. Just for all the people listening out there. I mean, just. Yeah, you don't want to have your probes attached to your measuring. You know, stand near water, up to your knees, and there's your mom. Yeah. Does this thing measure line? Does it measure? Yeah. Yeah. Is it still Cat 4 rated? Yeah, right. Am I Cat 4 rated? Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah, it's a bit silly, the waterproofness of. No, it's good for, you know, I've worked in environments where meters get, you know, dropped in drums of oil and all sorts of, you know. Really? Oh, yeah. All sorts of horrible stuff and, you know. Yeah. And those sort of industrial environments, yeah, meters get the. Crap beat out. So it's not actually the waterproofness itself, because you don't actually operate the damn thing underwater. I mean, that's just, you know, stupid. But the fact that it's fully sealed and nothing gets in, no dust, no chemicals, no, you know, so that if it does get dunked or splashed on or something, you just wipe it off and it's, and it's fine, you know. Right. And it survives, and it's still within cowl, and everything's hunky-dory.

Chris Gammell: And it's just harder to hold now.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly, because it's all slippery, just covered in oil. Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Well, you had a bit of news, didn't you?

Dave Jones: I, uh, yes, there is some news. Uh, there's breaking news just out today.

Chris Gammell: Mm.

Dave Jones: Um, it's the 18th here in Sydney, which is good enough for me, because I wasn't told otherwise.

Chris Gammell: Dave, Dave needs express, uh, gag orders, really, when he's told these, these leading-edge things, but our audience isn't big enough for it to really matter. By the time it really propagates, it's, uh, it's probably fine.

Dave Jones: By the time, yeah, it propagates through, which, uh, reminds us, yes, we had a, the big, the server's choking now, isn't it? Oh, yeah. It's absolutely sorry for everyone who couldn't download last week's episode, um, because the server just can't handle, I'm not sure why all of a sudden, I mean, have we suddenly gained an extra thousand views or something? I doubt that. In a week? No. So, why is it suddenly just falling over? And everyone's getting stream rates of, like, 0.1 kilobytes per second. That's what I got.

Chris Gammell: It was horrible. I tried downloading our own episode. Yes, I got it. It was like, oh, six hours. If you wait.

Dave Jones: Well, it took me, like, five hours to download it so that then I could upload it to my own server. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Ugh. That's horrible.

Dave Jones: Oh, man. It was horrible. So, yeah, sorry, we have no idea what's going on there. Yeah. We're going to post some.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, Dave's server for now.

Dave Jones: Measure, yeah. We're putting the MP. The website's still on the shared server, but the MP3 is now going on my new server, which is completely dedicated, and hopefully it doesn't choke the forum. So, if you're a forum member, and as soon as this upload goes up, please tell us if it affects the forum at all. Yeah. I'd like to know. Because if it can, if my dedicated server can handle, you know, streaming audio and the forum and the blogs and everything else, then great.

Chris Gammell: But if not, we don't know what we're going to do. Yeah, we'll probably buy some other space. So, yeah, sorry about that. We'll post a link to the EEV blog forum. There's a thread on that. So, if people have problems, they can just post in there, and that should be a good place to capture info. So, we appreciate all the people troubleshooting for us.

Dave Jones: Yes. And that's the other place you can leave feedback is on the forum as well as the site as well. So, if you want to chat to other people about the Amp Hour, the forum's the place to do it.

Chris Gammell: Feel free to take some pot shots at us, right?

Dave Jones: For sure. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm used to it. Get it all the time.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. It's fine. Back to the news. Get it. Agilent. Agilent. I'm going to claim credit for this one. Damn right I am. Because back when I reviewed the Agilent 3000 series scope, one of the big features was that it came with a function generator built in. You know? Fantastic. But I complained that there was no arbitrary waveform capability. And Agilent at the time said, oh yeah, we considered it, but we didn't want to do it because then it would ruin our... The guys from the function generator division didn't want it because it would ruin their market. Yada, yada, yada, yada. And sure enough, what is it? Nine months later? Or something? Yeah. They have released new firmware today for the 3000 series and it's got a whole bunch of new things. It's codenamed. They've got a codename for it. It's codenamed Dingo. Really?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Codenamed Dingo.

Chris Gammell: See, there's even more proof right there.

Dave Jones: So it's codenamed Dingo and it's released today. October 18th. You should presumably be able to download it. I've got an advanced copy of it, which I've installed and I've had a play around with. I'll probably shoot a blog today on it actually. Cool. To show people what it can do. Yeah. Left that a bit late, didn't I? Oops. And yeah, it's free. You can download the new firmware and it's got arbitrary waveform capability built in. Ta-da!

Chris Gammell: So Dave, what you're saying is you impregnated the Agilent with this idea nine months ago and now they've birthed out an ARB baby. Is that what I'm hearing?

Dave Jones: That's pretty much, yep. You're right on the money. I'm going to claim credit for it. It's my baby. It's Dave's baby.

Chris Gammell: That's right. It's an ARB baby.

Dave Jones: Anyway, so I'm rather surprised actually that they did do it because I don't see, you know, I thought they might do it if they got pressure from, you know, another manufacturer came out with a scope that had, you know, a built-in function gen and it had ARB capability. Then, you know, Agilent might up the ante and do that because the architecture inside was always capable of it. In fact, it basically did have an ARB gen in there. You know, it's got 8K of sample memory or something and it was all built in. That's how it generates its internal waveforms is actually in an arbitrary type manner. That's why I can have all those different waveforms. But it just wasn't software, you know, the software wasn't there to enable you to save and edit the waveforms and stuff like that. But now it is. And it's cool. You can actually edit the waveform on the screen, which, and it really seems to work quite well.

Chris Gammell: Now Dave's gushing over his child. All right, save it for your video, Dave.

Dave Jones: Right. Anyway, there you go. They've released new. And it's got, they've added new software modules as well. Like, oh, look at the little baby. Oh, look at the dimples in his cheeks. You'll like this power supply analysis module. It's really cool. That's cool. And I love these new scopes. Like, they pop up on the screen. When you go into the power supply module, you know, it pops up with the connection diagram of how you should hook it up to your, you know, here's your DC to DC converter. Here's your current probe on the input. You should put the current probe to channel one, the voltage probe here, and the output, da-da-da-da-da. And it's a little diagram to show you how to set it up. It's great. Cool. You don't have to read the manual or think about it or, you know.

Chris Gammell: It's good. Yes, let's not think about it.

Dave Jones: No, let's not think about it. Let's just do it by now. You know, but it's just nice to help you. You know, if you haven't done that for, you know, five years or something, you're going to have to put your thinking cap on. Yeah. But there it is. It's all there. It tells you how to hook it up and how, you know, how it works with it. Because you're not sure, like, you know, how the software wants things interpreted and probed and stuff like that. So, you know. Cool. It's fairly important to have that sort of thing. So, it does that. I like it. All right. But that's not free, I don't think. The software module. So, don't get excited there, folks. But the ARB capability, download it, install it if you've got a 3000 scope.

Chris Gammell: Anything else? Do you want to tell me how it's going to grow up to be a big soccer player or how it's going to be a concert pianist, Dave, or anything else like that?

Dave Jones: No. I'll tell you my next idea, though. No, no, no, no. Come on. Can I impregnate them again?

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah. This will be an interesting thesis here.

Dave Jones: The other thing I've been complaining about is that it doesn't, the function gen doesn't have external modulation capability. Whereas I'm wondering, is, does the architecture inside support the capability of using one of your analog channels as the modulation input? That'd be cool. That'd be kind of cool. That would be cool. That would be cool. Can it do it in real time? Can it sample that analog input and feed that through and modulate the ARB function capability? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That'd be a cool idea.

Dave Jones: That'd be nice. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Definitely.

Dave Jones: Because the buses didn't put an external modulation B and C on the back. So, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Like most function generators have.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. Well, that'd be cool. All right. We'll see. Maybe it'll be Dingo Jr. Nine more months.

Dave Jones: Right. Dingo's got my baby. That's an Australian joke. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's. And most Americans know that, I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's. They talk about that in Seinfeld. I think that's how that got big around here.

Dave Jones: Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. As everything in the U.S. in the, what, 80s and 90s got big.

Chris Gammell: 90s, yeah. Through Seinfeld. Was it 90s?

Dave Jones: Seinfeld was 90s, right?

Chris Gammell: It was 90s. Cheers was the 80s. That's what you're thinking of. Cheers, yeah. Right. Yeah. Got it. Pop culture. It's important, people. All right. Let's get some shout outs. Shout outs. How about the first shout out? How about that third one on there, Dave? That's my favorite one.

Dave Jones: Oh. Chris. It's us. It's us.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Both of us.

Dave Jones: Well, the shout out is usually to us because we give you a shout out if you mention us. Usually. That's how it works, right?

Chris Gammell: Well, there's that, but this is actually us. This is actually us talking about us now. Talking about us. So we were on Zombie Tech. Oh, sorry.

Dave Jones: Oh, I thought you meant the E.E. website. No. Yes. We were on another podcast.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. We were both individually. I was on last week on Zombie Tech, which is by Toymakers. And Dave was just on yesterday.

Dave Jones: Yes, I was. I recorded it yesterday. It was cool. And it comes out Thursday. So you've got to wait for it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Unfortunately. A couple days. But you can go listen to me right now. It was fun. It was a lot of fun talking about it. It was, you know, it branched out more. They talk about like, and we've talked about that on here before, but they talk about technology as it relates to zombie apocalypse just as a conversation starter. Although, I don't know, Addie might actually be kind of worried about zombies.

Dave Jones: I think she's genuinely concerned. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we talked about it fairly extensively.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Given my limited zombie geek experience, which is zero. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. It's a fun premise, though. I mean, it gets people moving on ideas. So I talked about a lot of stuff I don't think you and I have ever talked about on here. So it was cool.

Dave Jones: Excellent. I think mine was just an hour of absolute blather.

Chris Gammell: Blather. I love that word.

Dave Jones: It is pretty good. Blather. Yeah. So I don't even remember what I talked about. I have no idea. Sorry. Yeah. I don't think it's that technical. Okay. Could be. I don't know. No, they asked me lots of questions about the show and stuff like that. Cool. Yep.

Chris Gammell: But there are the traditional shout outs we have as well. Eric, the embedded guy, we've talked about because he won that Touchstone contest and everything else. He actually was in the Pulse magazine, which we talked about last week, which is by EE Web. And he mentioned, I actually just saw someone clicking through from that thing, from the online version. So he mentioned the Amp Hour. And so thanks, Eric. That was cool. Cool to see it in print. I've actually never seen the actual print version.

Dave Jones: I was going to say, yeah. It's electronic print, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Put it on my e-reader.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And let's see.

Dave Jones: And one more shout out.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Dave Jones: Well, you're. You're the one who put it in here.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Well, it's Dennis Machida. He runs Garage Engineers, his blog. And he just wrote about the Amp Hour. And he just started up a site a couple months ago. And so he linked here from there. And he's got some great content on there already just about the stuff he's learning. He's teaching himself engineering, basically. So right on. It's awesome. Excellent.

Dave Jones: Thank you for coming here. And he's got a photo of himself on there. I love that. I love when people put a photo of themselves. Smiling, waving. There we go. Fantastic. Good on you. I hate, you know, blogs. You just, you know, you've got some blurry little stupid photo, if anything. You know, it's just, eh, I don't like it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, I like it when people put a nice photo up there. You can see who's running the blog. It's great. Good on you, Dennis.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's great. And then one last one that was going to be a shout out, but actually I decided is a rant. Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: Rant away.

Chris Gammell: So, Ben Rampling, who's wrote in here before, he started a subreddit. So, people don't know, this show started because of Reddit. Me and Dave were both on one of the subreddits at a time, which is just like a message board, basically. You know, talking back and forth. And that's how me and Dave started the show. And so, I'm a very big fan of Reddit. Dave used to be a big fan of Reddit. I don't know if you're other.

Dave Jones: I haven't looked at it for a long time. So, yeah, I got into it a bit at one stage, but eh, sort of novelty wore off. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, that's okay. And basically, though, Ben started up a thing called Nice Chips. That's the subreddit it's called, is Nice Chips. And we'll put that in the show notes. But basically, it's 24-7 Chip of the Week. And now, like, how the hell are we going to find a chip that isn't mentioned on this site now? It's like, what? You're killing me, Ben. You're killing me. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, I'll tell you how. Because if you go to DigiKey, there's about 100,000 chips out there. Yeah, I know. And unless they plan on covering a lot of content, then...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's true. There are a lot out there. But it's cool. I mean, the ones that are already on there are pretty good. You know, and it's nice because you can set up commentary and talk to other people about it. And even link in app notes and stuff like that if you're so inclined. But mostly, it's just about finding... You know, that's always the hard part is finding out about new chips. And, you know, it's hard to do. But there's some good ones on here and some that I had never heard of.

Dave Jones: How do you start a new Reddit category?

Chris Gammell: There's a... So, if you're looking at a Reddit page, on the right-hand column, there's a Create Your Own Community.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. There you go.

Chris Gammell: I'm predicting Dave's going to start within the next four minutes.

Dave Jones: You could be right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's not hard to create one. It's hard to maintain one, you know. It's a... Right.

Dave Jones: And build up an audience in there and get people... Yeah, not even an audience.

Chris Gammell: It's just, yeah. It's, you know, it'd be like spreading out the EUV blog forum if you really wanted to. But, I don't know. It's...

Dave Jones: Yeah, nah.

Chris Gammell: It's hard to... It's not an easy thing to do to keep people engaged like that. So, it's... If you can, I hope this Nice Chips thing works because it's a great idea for a subreddit. There's ECE, which is Electrical and Computer Engineering, and then Electronics. And I'm a member of those, and I like them both. So, I don't know. Hope people do the Chips thing because then we can snag one or two for Chip of the Week. Like, we'll still try to find new ones, but, you know, it's tough. So, that's it for the shout-outs, Dave. That's all I got. Only... That's all you got, you're out. It's only four, yeah.

Dave Jones: Might have to move on to something else?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You pick, man. It's up to you. We got a lot this week.

Dave Jones: Well, we can talk about ADCs. First cab off the rank. Everyone likes ADCs. Oh, that's lazy. Why?

Chris Gammell: Everyone loves ADCs. Everyone does love ADCs. This is an electronic design article I saw a couple weeks back. Basically, talking about the difference, though, between, like, a precision ADC and an audio one. And, you know, if you can use audio and, like, a high precision. Because you see, like, oh, 24 bits. Okay, that would be great. I want 24 bits in my measurement.

Dave Jones: And it's $2, you know, and it's... Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, this is cheap. Why wouldn't you use it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And it's got a lot of other...

Dave Jones: There's some good reasons. It's because they're shit for precision applications. And that's why they have audio ADCs and they have precision ADCs, even though they're both 24 bits and they're both...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and then one of the 24-bit one is... Both the same architecture. Yeah, the precision one is, like, you know, like $30 or something like that. Probably not $30. You can probably get a 24-bit for... Depending on how fast it is, I guess. Because that's the real thing that trades off then, too.

Dave Jones: Well, I used to use a $100 ADC.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: What was that for?

Dave Jones: That was for my tote array seismic stuff. So we would have 10,000 channels of these things. What? And each channel was $100. Good guy. The ADC. I'm not kidding.

Chris Gammell: No, I believe it. That's crazy.

Dave Jones: That's how high-end these chips were. High-end, specialized, you know. Each one individually manufactured by nude virgins. You know?

Chris Gammell: I don't know about that one. I'm going to stop there in the believing. Right. And so you used precision, though?

Dave Jones: No, no, no. We used audio. Well, seismic ones in particular.

Chris Gammell: Oh, so real good low-frequency characteristics and stuff like that? Real good.

Dave Jones: Yeah, they only go to, like, 4 kHz bandwidth. They can't even do audio. But their THD is phenomenal. You know, leading edge. You know, you can't even touch them. And the other thing is extremely low power as well. Oh, okay. Extremely low power for a given bandwidth.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Because the problem in the seismic industry is that when you've got 10,000 channels towed behind the boat, these things have to be buoyant. They've got to float. So when you've got... And they're about 10 kilometers long. What's that in feet?

Chris Gammell: I have no idea. What's 10 kilometers in feet?

Dave Jones: It's 30,000 feet, right? These things could be up to 30,000 feet long towed behind these seismic boats. They've got to float in the water. So there's a huge trade-off between the amount of buoyancy material you need versus the power... Well, no, you start out with the power consumption of the ADC. This is why it's so critical. When you add up 10,000 channels, that, you know, each... That's a lot of channels. Each little microwatt counts. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of channels, right? And what year was this? Counts. Oh, this was 90s. 90s? No, sorry. Yeah, 90s to 2000s.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Mid-2000s. Five, six years ago was the last time I worked on it.

Chris Gammell: See, because it feels like there's been a big upheaval, not upheaval, but like a lot of strides taken in the past 10 years. Just looking back, obviously, I wasn't using precision ADCs in the past, you know, 10 years ago. But it seems like they move really fast and now they're kind of starting to reach a threshold of specs. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong, but it just seems that way.

Dave Jones: Yeah. There's a limit to how good you can make them. There are. You know. It's sort of just tweaking around the edges. Eh, eh, eh, eh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we should explain the difference, though, between audio and precision. I mean... Well, hang on.

Dave Jones: I haven't finished my story.

Chris Gammell: Oh, whoa. Okay. Jeez. Throw your 10,000 channels back in the water, Mr. Jones.

Dave Jones: 10,000 channels, right? So each one of those takes X amount of power, right? If you just ignore the other circuitry, you just look at the ADC itself, right? You know, if it uses an extra microwatt or, you know, or whatever, then it all... The power consumption adds up and over that, you've got to get the power to those modules that can be up to 10 kilometers out in the ocean along one cable, right? So the more power you take along that chain, the thicker your copper has to be to get all this power 10 kilometers down and the higher the voltage, like, because they would typically start at 400 or 500 volts at the boat end, and by the time it gets to the other end, it's like 60 volts or something because of the huge drop along the cable. And so the more copper, copper's heavy, right? So you've got to... So the greater the copper... So the more buoyancy material, right? Yeah. The greater the copper, the more buoyancy material you have to surround it so it's neutrally buoyant so the thing can, you know, not just float, well, actually be buoyant, not actually float, but just balance so it can... It's buoyant. And then the more copper you have, the greater the more buoyancy material, so the greater the diameter of these streamer cables are. The greater the diameter, the bigger the drums have to be on the back of the boat to store them when you winch them in and wind them up. And there's only so much, so that limits the length because you need bigger drums. So it's all a massive trade-off. It's awesome.

Chris Gammell: I love it. Total harmonic distortion and money versus... Versus everything. Drum size.

Dave Jones: Versus drum size on the back of the boat.

Chris Gammell: That'd be a fun graph to see, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, there are graphs until the cows come home. Yep. And...

Chris Gammell: There's graphs for cows coming home. It's crazy.

Dave Jones: Yes, there is. And just trying to model the power system. Like, you know, I had to model the power system over 10 kilometers and it's just... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just... Good God. Yeah. Yeah. The complexities involved are just stupid. Anyway, so there you go. Power matters, folks, when you talk about a shitload of channels like that in some bizarre application. That is a bizarre application. Yeah, it is. And that's why they cost $100 each.

Chris Gammell: See, now, I've used... I've used A to Ds mostly in the precision sense. And... Yeah. So I'm the one paying a lot.

Dave Jones: Well, you were going to mention the difference between precision and...

Chris Gammell: Right, yeah. And so one of the big things is DC accuracy. That's like... That's a big deal, especially when you look at, like, these really fast ones, because that's where a lot of the leading edge is, you know, they're like, oh, this is 1.2 gigasamples per second, that kind of thing. You're like, oh, well, can it measure a volt? Accurately.

Dave Jones: Well, that is actually the definition of a precision analog to digital converter, is that it's accurate at DC. Yeah. That is basically the definition.

Dave Jones: Right.

Dave Jones: And down there... That's the difference between an audio ADC and a precision ADC.

Chris Gammell: Right. And down there, it's harder to do it. I mean, measuring down... Oh, yeah. Not hard. It's a different problem, obviously.

Dave Jones: And it's got to be monotonic, and it's got to be, you know...

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah, and linear is another thing, too. Linear and edge, yep. You know, missing codes and all that other crap. Yep. And in fact, you know, if people are interested in this kind of stuff, I mean, Bonnie Baker, I always point people to her articles. She has tons... She works at TI. She's got tons of great articles on ADCs. I think she's into doing some other stuff and writes about other stuff now. But I always love her Baker's dozen articles. I don't know if they're still published, but she was...

Dave Jones: Yeah, I used to read those.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, same level as, like, Jim Williams and Bob Peace kind of stuff. So, it's great. Yep. So, I'll see if I can link some stuff in there for that. But, yeah, it's interesting. So, the answer is really... Yeah, you can use them, but...

Dave Jones: Depends on your application.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you can use them, but don't expect... Don't be surprised when your measurement looks like crap if you're trying to measure something precisely, you know.

Dave Jones: Like, yeah, you're trying to measure a bridge, you know. You're trying to measure a strain gauge or something like that. You can't use an audio ADC, even though it is a, you know, 24-bit Delta Sigma, exactly the same as this other 24-bit Delta Sigma, which is classed as a precision ADC. Right. To measure, like, a strain gauge, which is a DC thing, you know. It's a bridge. It's a resistor bridge. Yeah, yeah. It's a bridge. And to measure that, you need a precision ADC, not an audio, even though they're both 24-bit Delta Sigma. The difference is one works at DC and is accurate and all that sort of shit, and the other is just good at the dynamic stuff, you know, the THD and the signal-to-noise ratio and all that sort of thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, but when you're measuring a bridge like that, you know, all you care about, you don't care about the THD, you care about the bloody, you know, the gain and the offset errors and that sort of stuff. All that precision, in quote marks, stuff.

Chris Gammell: So, there you go.

Dave Jones: There are differences.

Chris Gammell: Definitely.

Dave Jones: So, if you're going for a job, man, you, you know, and they ask you about ADCs, there you go. You can tell them all about the difference between precision ADCs and audio ADCs.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And did you happen to see, so, so the ADCs, I mean, the packages aren't too weird on those, but did you happen to see those pictures I posted this week about packaging? I met with a vendor this week, and he showed me some, like, some of the new packaging. And it's not that new. I mean, it's just new. It's new to me. I know that. But, my God, it is just, like, unbelievably small. I took some pictures. I don't know if we can see them, but.

Dave Jones: I've got a picture here. You've got, yeah, you've got some SOD packages, some SOD 923 and SOD 523 and stuff like that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think all the dimensions are millimeters, right?

Dave Jones: Millimeters, yeah, metric.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that difficult metric stuff, yeah. Ah, it's not that bad. But, like, the SOD 882L, right? That's the one I'm looking at. I don't even know if these are proprietary. How many pins is that package, though? How many? That's a two pin. Right. Ah. I know. That's just a diode or something. But that's 1.05 by .65 by .4 millimeters.

Dave Jones: Ah, it's huge.

Chris Gammell: It's like a... Why?

Dave Jones: That's a whole millimeter, dude.

Chris Gammell: In the lengthwise direction?

Dave Jones: It's a whole millimeter in length. Come on.

Chris Gammell: How big are these packages that you're using? I mean, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

Dave Jones: But that's only a two-terminal device, you know? I know.

Chris Gammell: But then there's other ones, too.

Dave Jones: Well, we've bitched about the .4 millimeter pitch BGAs on here before, you know. It's just...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but these are... Like, you could put... Like, they're putting analog components. They're putting op-amps in these things, man. They're putting switchers in the... I mean, the switchers, they usually put, like, you know, at least a tiny little thermal pad so it can squeak, like, you know, a little, little tiny, tiny little bit out of there. But, man, it's crazy. I don't know. One by... Here's a six-pin package. It's like 1.05 by 1.05 by .5. That's not cool. That's a six-pin... Or it's a five-pin package. Yep. That's not cool, man. I can't see that. No, it's not. I can hardly, you know, sneeze that right off the board.

Speaker ?: I know.

Dave Jones: I feel like... And that happens. I know. When you're assembling the prototype boards, you've got your parts there, and the last thing you want to do is sneeze, because you sneeze and your parts are gone. They're landed on the carpet and that's it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, God. That's what I never get. What was the carpet like at past jobs? Did you ever have... Did you always have, like, the... Like, the camouflage carpet? I just feel like...

Dave Jones: No, it was always blue for some reason. It was always pale blue or something like that. Oh, that's not too bad. It was just a carpet, you know?

Chris Gammell: It wasn't like shag. It's just like there's no choice. There's no chance of it ever coming back.

Dave Jones: No, yeah. It falls down between the fibers. It's just... It's gone. Anything below, like, a... And 0603 is probably... You might get that one back, you know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You're probably going to end up picking up another 0603 that's on the floor as well, and then you'll just... You know? That's what always happens, you know? Because there's always, like, that littering of just a... It's a part graveyard down there. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: It's like a Jim Williams-style part selection bin, you know? Oh, yeah. Oh, I need a 100-inch cap. There's got to be one down in the carpet. So, yeah. Start fishing around down in the carpet to find 100-inch.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, just don't go for those ESD-sensitive components, you know, with all the...

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Ah, ESD. Overrated. Yeah. Blah. Real engineers don't worry about ESD.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Yeah. ESD will put hair on your chest.

Chris Gammell: Or you can duck through it or something, right?

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. I love it. Yeah, I know. Packages are annoying.

Chris Gammell: Got to learn. There's another article about chips. There was a low-power micro that was announced a couple weeks back. I don't know if you saw it from ST. It was... So, it was designed with MIT, which is pretty cool. I didn't know that they were, like, designing alongside, but it seems like it's going to be actually available. But let's see. It can operate down to 0.54 volts. That's ridiculous. And then...

Dave Jones: I know. Well, the good thing is, is that that is actually below single cell.

Chris Gammell: What do you mean single cell?

Dave Jones: As in, like, a single 1.5-volt battery. Typical, the end of life on that is 0.8. So, for many years, the holy grail of low-power parts was 0.8 volts, you know, or maybe under a volt, you know, it was sort of... Because then you'd use up most of the energy capacity in a single-cell battery. Yeah. So, you could power your device from a single cell.

Chris Gammell: So, 0.8 is where... So, battery curve kind of comes down...

Dave Jones: And it just drops off like a brick wall at 0.8 volts. Right at the end, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It just drops. Yeah. Totally. So, you can't extract more energy out of a battery below 0.8 volts. And you could argue that a little bit of the area under the curve that is between 1 volt and 0.8 is, you know, like, the last 10% of the battery or something. So, you know, it's not a problem if you throw... If you only use 90% capacity of the battery, that's deemed to be good enough. So... Yeah. There's a lot of people out there that actually design their, you know, circuitry to actually cut out. If you're powering things for batteries, you've got to, you know, have a battery cut out. You design it at a volt per cell is... Okay.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: ...a rule of thumb. But you should, in theory, go down to 0.8 if you design the battery-powered circuit. Remember that. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Another interview question. There you go. I've never done battery design. No?

Dave Jones: I love battery design.

Chris Gammell: It's a whole other game, really. I mean, like... Yeah. I mean, I haven't done a lot of design, really. So, let's be honest about that up front. But, yeah, it's definitely a design constraint that I'm not used to. But it's a good one. I mean, it's realistic these days, at least. Yeah. I think that... I mean, the voltages are changing because of lithium-ion and stuff like that, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, those are, like, three...

Dave Jones: Which, a typical cutout for a single lithium-ion cell would be three volts. Yeah. Whereas, if you go below that... It starts at 3.8 or something like that. Yeah, there's a little bit of energy left, but, yeah, you might ruin the cell or, you know... Yeah. So, generally, you might cut out. It depends on the chemistry, though. The chemistry can be slightly different, whether it's lithium-ion, lithium polymer, coke, or whatever anode, you know, blah, blah, blah. Hmm. So, yeah. There's all these different technologies. Coke and graphite anodes are the two main types of lithium-ion. And then there's a lithium polymer, and then there's various other ones, and there's more lithium-ion technologies than you poke a stick at these days. Can't even keep up. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, definitely. Hmm.

Dave Jones: Bet you don't want to poke a stick at a lithium-ion cell. Actually, that is one of the tests. If you read... Really? ...he's a little aside. Poke it? Yeah. There's actually a defined test for this. They actually get a nail, and you put the nail through the battery. They define, you know, like a five-millimeter nail through the cell, and it's designed not to explode. You know, they'll actually say that in the data sheets, you know, that you can actually get a hammer and a nail and puncture this cell, and it won't, you know, it won't blow up on you. So...

Chris Gammell: So what happens if it does?

Dave Jones: Well, if it does, well, it doesn't. Like, is it like... Is it like a... Well, some of them do, right?

Chris Gammell: Is that like a monster explosion or like a little explosion?

Dave Jones: Well, it can be, you know, you've seen some of those horror videos of laptops catching on fire, right? You know?

Chris Gammell: I don't think I... I don't... Do I want to see these? I don't think I have.

Dave Jones: Oh, they're great. Yeah. Don't you like seeing a laptop burn up in smoke? Well, like, no one gets hurt.

Chris Gammell: Do they get hurt or no?

Dave Jones: Oh, no, no.

Chris Gammell: People don't get hurt.

Dave Jones: No, no. It's usually... No, it doesn't explode, but it'll like, you know, heat up and catch on fire and burst in flames and that, you know. So, it won't explode in your face, you know.

Chris Gammell: I do remember... Oh, my God!

Dave Jones: My laptop exploded! Oh!

Chris Gammell: I do remember there was one story a while back about this unfortunate Japanese man who had a Sony laptop and it was like on his lap and it kind of burns junk. Oh, no. Yeah. I remember reading about that and I was a little scared to have a laptop at that point. I don't know if it was like, tonight at 11, is your junk getting burned by your laptop? You know? But it wasn't like, you know, that's like the local news scare kind of thing, but I mean...

Dave Jones: Exothermic reactions are a real bitch. I gotta say, yeah. I mean... Yes. That's called exothermic, folks. That can ruin your day. Yeah. So, yeah. Anyway, there are data sheets, you know, some manufacturers will claim that their cell, you can puncture it with a nail, you know, and they will define the size of the nail that you can puncture this damn thing with and, you know.

Chris Gammell: Really? Yeah. It's like isospect or something?

Dave Jones: I think there is a spec for puncture tests. Yeah. Don't quote me on that, but I think there might be.

Chris Gammell: Wow. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. Well, speaking of batteries and big old batteries, there was an article in New York Times today, yesterday maybe? Basically, people are hacking their cars now. And you see, I didn't actually post that link there. I'll put the link in there. But the Nissan Leaf, people are hacking their... Nissan. Huh?

Dave Jones: Nissan.

Chris Gammell: Nissan?

Dave Jones: That's how we say it here in Australia. Nissan. Not Nissan. Nissan. Nissan. No, we say it. Nissan. It's Nissan, mate.

Chris Gammell: I think the Japanese would have something to say to you about that. I don't care. Nissan. This is Australia.

Dave Jones: Once it comes here, we can call it anything we damn well like.

Chris Gammell: Uh, okay, well, the Nissan Leaf, uh... Ha! Um... Oh, we're... Oh, crap. Uh... I forgot to post the link for you. Uh, basically, though, they're reverse engineering. It's like all these retired guys, and there's, like, clubs now, and they're reverse engineering it because the battery gauge only gets... Speaking of batteries, the battery gauge only gives you, like, 12 bars, so you don't have enough resolution on the measurement. Yeah, that's pretty shit. Yeah, exactly. And, uh...

Dave Jones: Yeah, and you... Is it... But is it, like, a proper energy gauge, or is it just, like, some lame-ass voltage gauge they whacked in there? Or is it just, like, an LM3914 or something?

Chris Gammell: I don't know what it is. I mean, it's, uh... It's just... It's not... It's not accurate, basically.

Dave Jones: Because if it's a true charge, you know, if it actually... If it's one of these charge gauge ICs that actually truly measures the charge going into the battery and then the charge coming out, they're 100% accurate. You know, so, um... So, you know, 12 gauges... You know, 12 bars would be good enough, especially if it's modelled based on the discharge characteristic curve of the... You know, if the algorithm takes into account the discharge curve and stuff like that. So... It can be accurate. You know, it can be good enough. But, uh... I guess it's not if they're willing to try and hack it. Well, I think people would be doing it either way, right? Yeah, we want zero to 100% display, right? That's probably what they're after.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, and they're doing other stuff, though, too. I mean, it's not just the battery gauge. The guy is also... He's reworking, like, the cabling. Apparently, you have to buy, like, an $8,000 charger station. Like, or $5,000. To, like, to get the fast charge. And then he's like, well... Right. No, this is just kind of... It's already good enough. You know, all cables are rated to $250. So, he's just... He just kind of hacked it in there. And he tested it out. And he said it's fine. So... I don't know. I think it's a cool idea. But... I don't think that Nissan can officially... Nissan... I don't think they can officially like it. Because... No way. Not a chance in hell. Because of the safety implications. But... No. I mean, I like it.

Dave Jones: Well, no. Because that's their mucking around with serious shit there, right? That's a serious battery pack. That can ruin your day. You know, if you screw around with that, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, you actually drive low and your car catches on fire, you know? And blows up.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, they're not allowed to officially... And they say that's the thing with most cars. You know, that's the problem. Like, an open ecosystem in a car would be really cool. You know, like, to be able to look at the engine computer and try and tweak parameters. See, yeah.

Dave Jones: But you can do that. Because that's just sucking out data. So, it's easy to design in an interface that is idiot-proof, you know? Yeah. If it's just an interface that just outputs data from the engine computer, then they can design that in. No problems.

Chris Gammell: No, but I mean, actually, like, tweak the ROM. Like, that's the thing. You always have to...

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Well, yeah. No. That's silly, you know? Because these computers... Well, no. They probably have separate computers to control, you know, all sorts of various aspects of... Yeah. Yeah. If, you know, like, you don't want to muck around with something that, you know, is working on your anti-lock braking system or something. Well, yeah.

Chris Gammell: But some people would, right? I mean, some people would say, well, I can do that better. If the capability was there, yeah. I don't want to be in that car, personally. But, I mean, some people will say that, you know? They want to say that, and they will... And then... But... I mean, they are opening up other systems. Like, we talked about Bug Labs last week when we were talking about open source hardware. But... And they're, like, working on the info side, I think, you know, like, in the display side. But they're not in the engine computer. Like, that's a... You know, that's an optimized... People would want to get into that, though, for either fuel economy. They want to try and, you know, mess with that. Or, you know, charging, in this case, because it's an electric car. Or some people want performance and all that other junk. But I don't think they want to open that up to consumers. Even though it would only be, well, 0.1% that actually would touch it, right? Yeah, exactly. Oh, not even, yeah. I will not be. For the record, don't worry about me, Nissan. I'm fine. Nissan. I will be okay. You can't get over that, huh? It's Nissan.

Dave Jones: I can't get... No, it's Nissan, mate. Nissan. Nissan.

Chris Gammell: All right. Anyone that speaks Japanese out there, you can confirm... I'm probably saying it wrong, too, but I'm sure I'm closer than Dave is. Oh, probably, but I don't give a shit. I took three semesters of Japanese in college. I know a little bit. I used to know a little bit. Yeah, but you don't speak Australian, mate. So... I don't speak... Right. That's what I meant to say. I couldn't find a teacher that would teach me that. They're all at the pub. Oh, boy. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, we have a new... There's a new chip on the mic. It's kind of new. Well, no, it's probably not news because I don't think it's new. In fact, I'm pretty darn sure it's not. But if I pronounce this company's name correctly, Silego?

Chris Gammell: Silego? Silego? Silego? I would say Sil because it's probably like Sil, right? Yeah, Sil. Sil.

Dave Jones: And Sil Ego.

Chris Gammell: Sil Ego, yeah. Sil Ego.

Dave Jones: Sil Ego. Or Silly Ego. There you go. That'll probably be their nickname forevermore. Silly Ego. Yeah, I would say. Because they do have...

Chris Gammell: They mess something up, right? Right.

Dave Jones: Anyway, what they've come out with is a little 8-pin FPGA, like a little micro FPGA kind of thing. But it's got analog stuff on there as well. And one of the amazing things is that they cost like 23 cents each. And that's for the high-end one. I think the low-end one is like 18 cents. And that's not like a thousand of quantity. That's a hundred quantity, right? So that's 23 bucks for a hundred of these chips.

Chris Gammell: One-time programmable. You should mention that. But they're one-time.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's it. There's always a catch, folks. I'm glad you asked. Yes, they are one-time programmable. OTP. Yeah. That's a cool idea. Which is something I haven't heard in a while, you know? Nobody does OTP anymore. I know, right?

Chris Gammell: We need those UV erasable, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's so 1990s, you know, OTP. It's great because they're, Mark, I mean, they claim, I don't see it on the website, but people on the forum where I found this has claimed that they've come out with some sort of press release or they mentioned somewhere that they have sold a hundred million of these devices.

Chris Gammell: Oh, 23 cents a piece. I mean, why not, right?

Dave Jones: And they design into these, you know, all these high-volume consumer kits. So, here's a company that you've never heard of and they've sold a hundred million of these things.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's cool.

Dave Jones: You know, that is freaking awesome. And they've got like a cheap dev kit for like 50 bucks that comes with like a 50 chips or something. So, it's a USB program.

Chris Gammell: We're giving these away down here. Giving them away, but I've heard there's a catch. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: I think the postage is like another 50 bucks. Is it really? So, yeah. Oh, that's shady.

Chris Gammell: That's like as seen on TV crap right there. Yeah, exactly. So. Come on down. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.

Dave Jones: Anyway, and it's got this nice looking, I haven't used it, but I've seen it. I've watched a video of it. The video is terrible. It's got one of those computer voiceover. Sounds almost like a computer voiceover thing. It's awful. Really? Yeah, I hate those. And, but anyway, it's a nice graphical user interface. So, none of this, you know, VHDL Verilog rubbish, right? It's a nice little graphical interface where you drag and drop, you know, drag and drop a little lookup table and a flip-flop. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, because this is low gate count, right? I mean.

Dave Jones: It's small enough where you don't want to dick around with Verilog and VHDL. You know, you just, you know, it's only got, I don't know how many gates, but it might have, you know, 10 flip-flops in it or something, you know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Now, what would be cool is if you saw someone who, like, did a, put a bunch of these together and basically built up a full-scale FPG. Now, granted, it would be, like, the size of a pizza, but I mean, like, yeah, that'd be funny. I mean, it sounds like a cool idea, though. I mean, like, a nice little toolbox chip.

Dave Jones: It looks really nice, yeah. I mean, I would prefer to design my chips like this. I know exactly what I'm getting. I've got a visual representation of what my internal circuit of that chip is. I love it as opposed to VHDL.

Chris Gammell: You're just afraid of Verilog and VHDL, aren't you? Yeah, I am.

Dave Jones: I just, you know, give me a schematic any day.

Chris Gammell: No, that's horrible.

Dave Jones: But there's no schematic.

Chris Gammell: It's not practical these days. Most times people are using FPGAs these days. Yeah, you need to be in CPLD land or below. That's what you need.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. So, and that's what this is. It's almost a CPLD. It's basically a CPLD, you know. It's like a tiny one, yeah. With an FPGA architecture, but a CPLD density level kind of thing. Third catch, folks, I'm glad you asked, because I know you sniffed bullshit. Yeah. Okay, third catch is... What the way, there's more! It's only available in a 2mm by 2mm, what is it? Leadless grid array package.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, the one where it's like a 90 degree metal angle on the sides.

Dave Jones: It's like leadless ceramic. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: See, you can solder it down and then you can probe it, but you're probably going to be hard...

Dave Jones: And it's got a thermal pad on the bottom. There's one device with a thermal pad. So, anyway, yeah, that's one, you know. So, it's not like you can go buy it in a Dip 8, you know. If you could, if you could get it in a Dip 8, this thing would be a hell of a lot more popular. Well, at the hobbyist level, but I guess they don't care, right?

Chris Gammell: No, they don't give a crap. Not at 23 million.

Dave Jones: Why are they selling, you know, hundreds of lots? They've got like an online shopping cart where you can buy 100 chips, you know.

Chris Gammell: See, what you need is you need... I mean, you could do an easy breakout board for that, though. I mean, like... Oh, yeah, of course. SparkFun or someone like that would probably do one. So, I don't think it's that big a deal.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's not, but it's, you know, nobody wants that. They want the actual chip.

Chris Gammell: I don't think... I wonder if they're even making... I mean, they must be, right? But, like, you've got to figure that, like, the people who are, like, selling Dip leads, they pour the actual package type, right, with the type of material it is. But, like, the leads itself, I mean, those have to be in lower demand than they were, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Unless people are just manufacturing their own. So, you think there's a massive... There's a whole bunch of people sitting out there. Damn, I wish we could make more, churn out more Dip 8. No, I don't think that at all.

Chris Gammell: But, I mean, there's just... It seems like the whole... The architecture for doing it is kind of... Not the architecture, but the system for making these parts, and it's just going away because there's no demand for it. Or there is, but it's very small demand.

Dave Jones: Right.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Instead, they want one by one by a half millimeter parts, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: That's what everyone wants. And the other... And fourth catch. Fourth, wow. Fourth catch, yeah. Is that, you know, as you can probably imagine, it's not leading edge performance in any way, shape, or... I think it's quite low power. It's probably got that advantage. But in terms of, like, as I said, there's analog functionality in there, and it's pretty shit-looking analog functionality. Of course it is. It's not precision, as we've talked about, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, people, if you're thinking about this part, it's meant to go into, like, a smoke detector, or a thermostat. Yeah, exactly. It does not care if you need 18 bits. If your noise floor is... Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: One bit or 10 bits, you know? Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, it's rather novel, because there's nothing else out there like it. So it wins in its novelness, I guess. So is this... And the fact that it's so cheap. I mean, that is just jelly bean stuff. Yeah. It's crazy.

Chris Gammell: Is this an unofficial tip of the week? I mean...

Dave Jones: It's probably a tip of the week. Yep.

Chris Gammell: I don't think it's on that other site yet. I don't think it's on the Reddit site, so...

Dave Jones: There you go. Yeah. We found it first.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Always listen to the amp hour before Reddit.

Chris Gammell: There you go. You heard it here. All right.

Dave Jones: And, well, fifth catch. Oh, God. Yeah. This is worse than the scope baby. I haven't checked on this. I'm going by hearsay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Is that the programming interface is not open. So you have to use their programming tool and their software and everything else, I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but it's not like there's code either. You're doing a... You know, you're using a proprietary... Unless they allow you to use code. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: So it's not a huge deal. But technically, eh. You know, if you wanted to build your own programmer, eh. You know.

Chris Gammell: Here's a real question. Is it the 23 gigabyte install that Xilinx wanted to put on my computer? Right. Because if it is... If it isn't... I haven't downloaded the package. Oh, my God. Xilinx. Yeah. I love Xilinx parts and I love Altera parts. They're all the same. But it's unbelievable.

Dave Jones: That's too big. That is too big. See? And you love FPGAs, right? And you want people to use these shit. Bloody...

Chris Gammell: Give me a break. No. It's... The problem is they support everything. You know, they don't selectively support, like, one board. The thing is they'll have one development board, right? And that will need, you know, 400 megabytes in support files. And then they support, like, 30 different boards in one install. And so there's just gobs and gobs and gobs of code. It's unbelievable. They should do it on a per basis.

Dave Jones: Well, it's not just their support for the chips. It's support for all the other, you know, if you want power analyzers, timing analyzers. It's all in there. You know, if you just want to write a bit of VHDL or Verilog and program your chip, that's it. Thank you, ma'am. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Looking through directories, it seems like it's mostly the board support stuff because... Right. Okay. I mean, the power analyzers these days are still... They're still spreadsheets. I mean, it's like...

Dave Jones: Yeah, they do a lot of that. But, you know, there's so much that these packages can do. It's just ridiculous.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I agree. It's all in one. And I need more of a cafeteria style. Even though, you know, stupid consumer might not know what he needs. Right. If you make it easy, if it's integrated with the web, it should be relatively easy to download. But the thing is, it's not a big deal to them because they just... You don't have a choice. Yeah. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Tough tits.

Chris Gammell: Tough. Yeah. Tough indeed.

Dave Jones: That's the price you pay for FPGA development, really.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And speaking of programming, so did you see about the co-inventor of C? Yes. Dennis Ritchie.

Dave Jones: Dennis Ritchie, yes. Everyone who's ever studied C has a copy of his book along with Kerrigan. Kerrigan and Ritchie, isn't it? Is the name... Are the authors of the C? Oh, the other co-author. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's the co-author of the standard C book.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, yeah. But he's... A lot of people don't know he was the father of Unix, one of the fathers of Unix as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And, I mean, Wires has a great article, basically. We didn't really mention it last week about Steve Jobs dying, but, you know, Steve Jobs wouldn't have had Apple without Unix and C. I mean, like, it's... No, exactly. It's just everywhere. I mean, you don't even realize it. It's just everywhere. Everything, low-level, everything. You know, like, it's just... It's too bad. I mean, I think he was sick for quite a long while, Dennis Ritchie. Right. But, yeah, it's, you know, just kind of giants of technology kind of passing away. So, it's too bad.

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, that's bound to happen, right? Given enough time.

Chris Gammell: Apparently, time marches on. I've heard about this.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's a bitch. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Luckily, I will be frozen in my basement.

Dave Jones: Right. Like Encino Man or something like that. Right. Well, Thor, right. And when the world's in grave danger, we Thor out. Chris Camel saved the world.

Chris Gammell: And then he starts complaining how cold it is, yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: Austin Powers.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Let's not go there. Yeah. There's a couple other interesting bits of information about Dennis Ritchie that I didn't realize. I mean, I knew about the Unix thing. I knew about the C thing. But he won the Turing Award. He won the National Medal of Technology. Yeah. And those are to be expected. I'm sure he'll get even more recognition posthumously. But there's another fact in here. I should have wrote it down. And there's something else in here that was pretty crazy. I mean, there's a big picture of him on a PDP-11. It's pretty crazy.

Dave Jones: I've seen something in this list, which I just noticed. And I must talk about it.

Chris Gammell: Are we skipping away now? Yeah, we're skipping away. Sorry. Well, rest in peace, Dennis Ritchie. Dennis Ritchie. Yes. All right, Dave. What was so important that you took away from the tribute to a great man?

Dave Jones: The University of Minnesota. It's going to look really bad now. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of, well, what are you going to talk about? He may have been in this camp. Here we go.

Chris Gammell: You might be in this camp after this segue. We'll see.

Dave Jones: We'll see. You put this on here, right? So I'm going to... Actually, this is all on you.

Chris Gammell: This is from my friend who's a buyer. He's a purchasing agent, and he loves explaining the differences between engineers to me. Oh, okay. He sent this to me.

Dave Jones: The University of Minnesota has a program to help socially awkward engineering students. What the? Isn't that every one of them?

Chris Gammell: Not me, Dave. What about you? Were you an awkward...

Dave Jones: Bloody oath I was. See, you're not a real engineer, because you're not socially awkward.

Chris Gammell: Oh, well... I'm pretty socially awkward, let's be honest here. Not as awkward as going away from the tribute to the inventor of sea to talk about nerds, but... So what's going on with this thing? We can't talk about it in the whole show. Yeah, I know. He was cool. He's gone. Rest in peace. So what do they teach? There's 11 classes, right? I don't know. You're telling the story. You put it on here. You tell us. This is from, like...

Dave Jones: There's 11 free classes. Hang on.

Chris Gammell: This is from, like, last week... Two or three weeks ago, yeah. Basically, let's see. They learn leadership, personal networking, navigating office politics, teamwork, and understanding generational differences. Wow.

Dave Jones: Oh, wow. What?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I can imagine navigating office politics. And now, what we're going to do is stand behind your partner and stab him in the back.

Dave Jones: And here's how you design an early warning boss detection system for your cubicle. Yeah. Oh, man. Come on. That would be funny. That office politics would be... I'd love to teach that. That would be freaking hilarious. Oh, yeah. Oh, that would be great.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't really play in office politics if I can. I try and avoid that.

Dave Jones: Oh, see. I don't play it. I, you know, laugh at them and insult them and tell them to piss off and all sorts of things. That's why I never got promoted. Ah, okay. You know, I'm not leadership material, apparently.

Chris Gammell: Gotcha.

Dave Jones: Yeah. See. Number one rule of office politics is don't speak your mind.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You're bad at that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm not doing too well. Maybe I need to go to the University of Minnesota and learn this stuff.

Chris Gammell: Another person who's bad at this kind of stuff, Bob Weidlar. We've talked about him in the past before. He was kind of a brash character at National, right?

Dave Jones: As evidenced by his famous photo of him flipping the bird. Right. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: And so, I was looking through some of the people coming in. Or no, I was looking up that photo and how people search for it now because that's how some people are finding the Empire these days. Yeah. Pretty cool, right? And so, I go and search for other pictures of Bob Weidlar. And I find, I go into the Computer History Museum site, which we talked about last week. And there's this picture of him on there. And it's a picture of him in front of a blackboard with, you could see like wells and junctions and everything on silicon drawn there. And he says, digital circuits? I'd rather fight than switch. And he's holding a frigging axe. Oh, yeah. That's great.

Dave Jones: It's amazing. That's a fairly young Bob because he hasn't got the gray hair there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is, it's taking my friend Hofford who took the other picture as well.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's awesome.

Dave Jones: That's great. Yeah. It's a great picture. I love fight and switch. Yeah. Oh, it's brilliant. Oh, boy. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: This is just more ammo in the chamber to go and go to the Computer History Museum. There's a whole, there's a whole section on analog computing that you can look through online. It's, it's really cool. And, uh.

Dave Jones: You've, you've got to get, you've got to physically go there. It's great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There's, there's a one picture at the end of this analog computing thing that I'll link in. But it's just, it shows like, you know, and they're doing like transistor based stuff. And I think some of that even before that was like mechanical based stuff. And, uh, but like point to point wiring on the transistor based stuff and triodes and pentodes and all that other, all that other tube stuff. It's just, it's just crazy pictures, you know? And it's like, man, they used to use this for calculations. It's like they, they weren't, they weren't joking around there.

Dave Jones: No. So anyone who hasn't been there, seriously, make, make, make the pilgrimage. Go on a road trip by way of, you know, all the surplus stores and end up at the Computer History Museum.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Dave Jones: That'd be great. What if you got a bus? A nerd bus? And you went on a, a nerd bus and you went on a nerd road trip. What stuff would you include on the nerd road trip? Well, obviously the HP Garage, right? Given.

Chris Gammell: You'd start there. Uh, you can go north. I mean, you're talking about even just sticking around Silicon Valley area or getting out of Silicon Valley eventually?

Dave Jones: Oh, no, get out of Silicon Valley. It's a road trip, dude.

Chris Gammell: Oh, well, I would definitely go over Hoover Dam. I mean, I love the Hoover Dam. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I've been to Hoover Dam. That's a nerdy, a nerdy marvel. Uh, you could go north, I guess. Go up through Northern California. I don't know where you'd stop up there.

Dave Jones: Uh, I don't know. If you've got any good ideas about what we could include on a nerd road trip.

Chris Gammell: A nerd road trip, huh? That's like the, uh, nerd cruise. We had that on here from a long time ago.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that, that's right. Yeah. That's a little bit different, though. But that wasn't electronics nerds, right? That was like computer nerds.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that was, uh, yeah. That was like, they actually rent a boat. And I guess they give talks. And it's kind of like a, I think it's like a DEF CON style. Like where they actually have like a. Right, yeah. Lectures and. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And papers and things.

Chris Gammell: God, that's got to be a gross pool scene. No offense, people. That's just a lot of pastiness like me. If I'm sitting around a pool, you do not want to walk by. Dave's a fit dude. I, not so much. I don't get outside much, so.

Dave Jones: And, and there is that stereotypical difference between a computer nerd and electronics nerd. As in, well, the, the computer nerds are more geek, right? So they're stereotypically like fatter, you know, overweight, right?

Chris Gammell: I don't think we want to get into this, uh.

Dave Jones: You know, nerds are rather, you know, sickly, thin, gangly, kinda. Yeah, I think it can go either way, really. You know.

Chris Gammell: I don't, I don't want to be divisive amongst our nerdy brethren here. Why not? I am inclusive of all great nerds. I, uh, I love all my nerdy brethren.

Dave Jones: It's nothing like a good nerd fight. Come on.

Chris Gammell: Oh, come on. I don't want to get, I don't want to get into a nerd fight with people. You know, we were talking about cars before. If someone hacks a car, they can, they can mess you up, man. Uh, and to be honest, I mean, this stuff is all converging, too. I mean, I, it's interesting seeing, like, at least in the hobbyist scene, you know, like, a significant number of people that are getting interested in electronics seem to be, uh, IT type personnel. I mean, maybe it's just because of sheer numbers, but, um. Yeah. You know, and there are a lot of IT people out there, but it seems like there's a lot of great interest from them. And, hell yeah. So, I mean, immediately then you're, you're, uh, you're, you got some crossover nerd there, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, but ultimately they would rather spend their night installing a new version of Ubuntu Linux or something than they would, you know, stoking up the solder in iron and sucking some fumes. Sucking some fumes, huh? Yeah, that's right.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: You know, or searching DigiKey or something like that. Right, yeah. Yeah, they're a different type of, yeah, they're, they're more geeks than nerds.

Chris Gammell: Okay, well, we'll have to send them, maybe we can have a nerd school or a geek school, as well as a socially awkward how to, how to go through office politics kind of school.

Dave Jones: Right. And we'll have to talk about it next week on the Amp Hour because our Amp Hour's up.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, that's way up, huh?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You missed a lot. You do it, dude. Yeah. Sorry. Next week. All right. All right. Well, we will see you all next week and thank you for listening.

Dave Jones: Bye.

Dave Jones: The End

Dave Jones: The End