#660 – My Toothbrush Is Broadcasting

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Release March 4th, 2024. Episode 660. My toothbrush is broadcasting.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the AEV blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics. What's up, nerd? Dave, I have found the promise of the smart home, and it involves me sitting in my driveway, waiting for my phone to connect to Wi-Fi so that I can press the button on Home Assistant so it can trigger the little finger button that I installed over top of my garage door opener. And about three minutes later, smart home achieved.

Dave Jones: Tried to tell you, but, you know. I know. Yep, yep. There are other ways around this.

Chris Gammell: I never listened to your... Before anyone writes in, I know there's other ways around this, and I know there's... It really struck me, because I don't have a garage door opener in my car right now. Right. And so I didn't have an opportunity. You know, the real thing is I could have gotten out of the car and gotten back in the car and hit the little keypad probably like 20 times faster.

Dave Jones: Where's the keypad?

Chris Gammell: Oh, we have like a keypad on the outside of the garage. You don't have one of those?

Dave Jones: Oh, really? What? You enter in like an actual digit number. Oh, right. Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: That's interesting. Right. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: The code is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Dave Jones: What is it? That's just the factory default. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Chris Gammell: You couldn't be bothered to change it. That's the code of my luggage. No, it's face balls. No. Come on, it's face balls.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, God.

Dave Jones: I don't know anyone who has a pin pad for a garage door thing. That's just not a...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I was really... I mean, it came to the house, so I don't know. It was... Oh, okay. It's very convenient. Very, very convenient. I also have one, though... Like, that's also how I have my front door. I don't know if I should be... I guess it's there regardless. Right.

Dave Jones: A strike plate front door.

Chris Gammell: Is that what it's called? Strike plate? Yeah, it's got a keypad.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's what you install to undo the lock is a strike plate. It's the name of the lock thing that you need to install. So you need to install a strike plate kind of... Yeah. Okay. Is the name. I don't know if that's...

Chris Gammell: This is like a battery-operated deadbolt. Is that what you mean? Like, this is like I have a code on my front door. Yeah. Like, my front door has a deadbolt that's like... Instead of like Bluetooth, it's just numbers. Right. Is that what you're saying? I don't know.

Dave Jones: Yes, but you can override it with a key. With a key. Right? Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yes. Yes. I prefer that. It's been great. Yeah.

Dave Jones: The... Well, sorry. It's not just a strike plate because I believe the strike plate is just the actual metal thing that goes around the outside of the cutout. Yeah. It's the little catch thing. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's an... Okay. Electronic strike plate. So, yeah. Yeah. I never heard it referred to that. Yeah. Something like that. But I think it's just the generic term. Yeah. So, anyway. Yeah. We've got that for the garbage room now.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: For the... Not at home, of course, the infamous garbage room here at the... Oh, right. Oh, yeah. Corporate Towers.

Chris Gammell: Keep out the electronic raccoons that go and...

Dave Jones: Well, because they had so many people dumping stuff.

Chris Gammell: The trash pandas of the electronics world.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Because all the stuff that I find in there is not supposed to be dumped in there.

Chris Gammell: Right?

Dave Jones: Under our strata terms, there's big signs everywhere. Do not dump this stuff here.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know? Yeah. Got to read the signs, folks.

Dave Jones: Yeah. They got so sick of it that they... Yeah. They, which should be me, they actually did not consult me. And I'm on the strata committee and the building committee.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man. You've got to file some stuff, man. You've got to cause a ruckus.

Dave Jones: It was the building next door who also shares the same garbage room. They went out of their way and just installed this new key fob swipe system there. Yeah, that's cool. And they changed the lock. And then all the garbage started piling up outside. So I made them change the lock back, like the physical lock, physical key lock back. And they did that. And now our building has just upgraded our security system to a new key fob thing. And so, which now integrates with the one that the building next door installed. And we're basically forced to do that. It's like, geez, it'd be a shame if your security system stopped working.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And yeah, so we're forced to do that. And now they've changed the lock back. So now I can't even use a key. I have to use a stupid key fob to open the garbage door. Not happy. So.

Chris Gammell: Those things are incredibly easy to spoof too. I mean, obviously not spoof. Replicate and like, you know, like, I don't know. Key fobs are just, to me, they are like the appearance of security.

Dave Jones: They're not that easy. They're usually a rolling security key thing. They're usually like a rolling code thing.

Chris Gammell: No, I didn't mean like, sorry. I meant you have to, yeah, you're right. You have to have the physical key, but then to duplicate it with someone else. So you can just take it like, I saw at Home Depot or like, you know, like our home improvement store here.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: They have like key copying and then they also have like the key fob, like tap it and we'll just replicate it. Really? Okay. I'd never seen that before. I was like, oh.

Dave Jones: Well, no, because our ones have to be registered in the system. So I don't think that's possible with ours. I think that's the poorer quality ones.

Chris Gammell: Wait a second. You can do that too. So you're saying that you walk up with a key fob. Yeah. And it's not just presenting like a, it's doing like a challenge. It's doing a challenge.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No. Each one is individually serial numbered and it's programmed into the system. That's what they, that's what they installed it for is so that they can track who opened the door and dumped all that crap in there.

Chris Gammell: Sure, sure, sure. But those are programmable. That's what I'm saying. Like you can program a key fob to be the same serial number as another key fob.

Dave Jones: Oh, to be the same serial number. Possibly. Yes. Right. Yeah. Okay.

Chris Gammell: That's what I used to have one of those copiers that you could have at home. I had one.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But once again, I think it depends on the, not all of them are the same. Different types. There are different types. Yes. Yeah. So. That's right. I don't think there's some universal programmer that sort of like handles every single key fob, different design on the planet. Maybe there is. I don't know. But I'm doubting it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So anyway.

Chris Gammell: I think you should, well, if only there was an electronics YouTuber that could investigate these sort of things.

Dave Jones: Right. I'm trying to remember the name of it.

Chris Gammell: I remember it had a three.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. They're all encrypted though. Like you can't just, like I've got one of those flipper things. Like you can't, yeah, I can get the data from it or whatever. But if it's like, if it's encrypted and it rolls over every time, it's like, eh, you know, like it isn't going to tell me much. I don't think so. Any good system should not be copyable and should have a restricted license. Keys are like that, for example. Like the key I've got. Like physical key? Yeah. Yeah. The actual physical key for my dungeon and my bunker, I've actually keyed them alike. And I've done a video on this.

Chris Gammell: And you do a rolling code where you throw out the key each time you use it and then you throw it away.

Dave Jones: Well, it's only got 10 million combinations or something. It self-destructs every time you get a key. Yeah, right, right.

Chris Gammell: It gets to the end of the tumblers and then it has a little bit of C4 at the end and just pops it up.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right. So I've done a video on that. And it's got 10 million combinations. And it's the world's most secure key. So there's only a few people on the planet who can actually pick it. And then they've got to use customized tools to do it. But anyway, you can't go to your local locksmith and get a new version of this key. It is so restricted that you have to be an authorized distributor for that particular brand of Abloy key, that series of Abloy key. Oh, is it like Asa Abloy? Yes. Is that right? Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I've heard of them.

Dave Jones: That's the company. And it's the ProTech 2 for those playing along at home. It's the world's most secure key, the Abloy ProTech 2. And you – yeah, and they have to – so I have to go back to the same company that I originally got it cut from. And they have a database of, you know, which code has been allocated to you. And so you can't just – well, you probably could. I mean, if there's some gray market dude with an Abloy ProTech machine, I guess, and you had a physical copy of the key, you could go and get it duplicated. But it's like – yeah, you would lose your license. You would lose your security key license if you actually made a copy of it. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think I mentioned – did I mention on the show I lock myself out? I think so.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Just like seeing like the way the guy actually got into the house and it was not involving any kind of key. It's like, oh.

Dave Jones: No, actually, no. What? You had to get a locksmith to get you in.

Chris Gammell: I had a locksmith, yeah. So, like what happened was –

Speaker ?: Oh, no.

Chris Gammell: You haven't told me. Tell us. Yeah. So, like I have a – like I said, I have electronic locks.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But I have deadbolts for when I'm inside, right? So, like when I'm in there – or sorry, not deadbolts, but like sliders, whatever. Yeah, yeah. So that like when I'm home, even if you have the code, you can't get in unless I'm home, unless I unlock it.

Dave Jones: Unless you unlock it from the inside.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And so like I had left the house and I'd gone through the garage as I often do, locked the garage, went out through the garage door, but then the power was out. And – or no, sorry. The garage door opener was like just jammed up. Like something happened with it. Like it lost power. And so I just couldn't get in. And so I called locksmith. I'm like, you know, everything's locked. And it turned out that like everything he tried, there was no keys involved. Like it was just like, you know, using like an instrument pad. I thought maybe I mentioned on here. It was like an expansion pad. Yeah. He has like a little pump up thing to like help like jam open different things. The methods were very surprising to me.

Dave Jones: Right. So they were physical methods, were they?

Chris Gammell: They were more physical methods, yeah. It was like – Right, okay. Yeah, like he had gotten like a – the creepy one was like there's like a hook you can have for like a catch in a garage door opener. I don't know if this is how they work in Australia. Right. But like in the U.S. there's like a release so that if the garage door opener is broken, you pull on this little cord.

Dave Jones: Yes, and then it free slides or whatever.

Chris Gammell: So this guy basically like snaked like a long wire, like a – or like a – I don't know, like a flexible piece of metal through the top of the garage. And he pulled the whole red thing out from the garage.

Dave Jones: Oh, wow, nice.

Chris Gammell: And then he was like pulling on it and mine was broken.

Dave Jones: That must have had a camera on the end of it because there's no way he could do that blind.

Chris Gammell: He did a blind. Oh, no, there's windows in the garage door. So you could see it.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay, so you could physically see it. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: But still like that's nuts. Yeah. Just like all of the other things that, you know, just like the other things that get people into – it's just, yeah. It was very surprising to me. It was eye-opening, eye-opening.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Keys, dude, I'm telling you.

Chris Gammell: Keys were the answer. Yes, that's right. The thing I was thinking of was the Proxmark 3. I used to have one of those.

Dave Jones: What's a Proxmark 3?

Chris Gammell: So that's the RFID reader. I'll link that to you here. It's the RFID. It's like a programmer for Fox.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I've got an RFID programmer thing somewhere, but it only works on certain ones and it doesn't –

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and this might be what it is. I don't have enough to know.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep, there you go.

Chris Gammell: I don't actually remember why I got it either. It was like one of those things where I was like reading Hackaday and like, oh, I need one of those. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that, you know.

Dave Jones: So you've installed like a smart home thingamabob.

Chris Gammell: Thingamabob, that's right, yeah.

Dave Jones: Internet of things thingamabob or is it just a Wi-Fi thingamabob that –

Chris Gammell: It's a Bluetooth thingamabob, yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, that opens your garage door, which was already an existing system. So it had like a – what, an external input? It's just a button push. Oh, button push.

Chris Gammell: Okay, so you used like a transistor to – I just used like – it's called a switchbot bot. Right. It's basically just like a little electronic finger that you can just trigger with over Bluetooth. Yeah. But then I hooked that into Home Assistant.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Chris Gammell: And Home Assistant now is very, you know, validated to trigger this thing. And so the nice thing – the actual thing that I thought about it with this is you could have like automations there. Again, it is a retrofit, like you said, I have a garage door sensor on there and I could say like, hey, if the garage door has been open for 20 minutes, trigger it, right?

Dave Jones: Actually, shut it automatically so I'll forget. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I have to say like – and like, yes, someone out there is probably like, well, you could like buy a system that does this. And I could – but two things. One, I don't want to. I don't want to replace an existing system that works fine. Yeah, yeah, of course. That's what it really is meant to do, which is open and close the garage door. And two, a lot of these systems from like manufacturers are like, well, yeah, you'll hook it into our Wi-Fi thing. And I'm like, no, I just don't want it to leave my house. I don't want it to like go to someone else's server, especially like – Yeah, no. No, totally. No offense, a garage door company, you know, like doing the IoT thing.

Dave Jones: Who, sell your data of when Chris opened and closes his door. I mean, I guess, yeah. Somebody's got to pay for that. Someone's going to pay for that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The really freaky thing is the – you know, so in Home Assistant, I've been playing with Home Assistant more. And like I was just looking through what available integrations were there. And I was like – one night I was using my toothbrush. And I was like, well, I wonder. And I logged into the app. I logged on to my Home Assistant thing. And I was like, Oral-B, which is the toothbrush brand I have. And I'm like, yeah, we have an integration for that. And then you just start seeing like, yeah, your toothbrush is active. It has a little timer. Basically, my toothbrush is just broadcasting on Bluetooth. There was no like key exchange.

Dave Jones: What if you have a Bluetooth toothbrush?

Chris Gammell: I had no choice, Dave. It's just what it came with. It was like a $60 toothbrush. It just has Bluetooth. I didn't – Robbie, you have a choice.

Dave Jones: You don't have to buy the Bluetooth version.

Chris Gammell: I didn't buy it. My in-laws bought it for me. Like literally, I didn't know it had Bluetooth until I opened it up. I'm like, oh, look, there's a little Bluetooth signal on it. But the thing is like that means everybody has Bluetooth, right? I mean like everybody has access to the signal, which means I'm just broadcasting when I'm brushing my teeth. And I don't like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but granted, it's not going to reach the people next door because Bluetooth is pretty low energy.

Chris Gammell: It's my whole house. I'm not in a small – I'm not in a big house, but I'm in a small house. And like it's all the way across the house, Dave. Like Bluetooth can really – Oh, I know.

Dave Jones: I have so many problems. Most of my Bluetooth stuff can't even get through a single wall.

Chris Gammell: Oh, you know what? I think – you know what I think it is? What? In Australia, the Bluetooth, it swirls in the other direction. Right, it goes in the other direction. Okay, yeah.

Dave Jones: All the antennas need to be polarized in the opposite circular direction.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. That's what it is. Yep. All right. Yeah. I think they charge extra for that. Yep. Yeah. So I was surprised. And like – and that's – I mean it's interesting to go through like on Home Assistant just seeing what's like available. Then like you can kind of use that as a proxy for like what's out there and what people have written integrations for. But I did not expect a Bluetooth toothbrush. So now it's just on there and I monitor it.

Dave Jones: What the hell do you do with a Bluetooth toothbrush? Do you have your app which – I don't know. I assume it's an app, right? Which then gathers the data and tells you, oh, you've spent, you know, an average of two minutes brushing your teeth. You need to increase it to three.

Chris Gammell: Like to try and gamify it maybe for like kids or something.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Maybe.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But – oh, this is sad. I weep for the future.

Chris Gammell: I mean it's fine but I just – I don't want it, you know.

Dave Jones: Well, next time you upgrade, make the conscious choice to not buy these – Yeah, like a dumb smart toothbrush. A dumb toothbrush. Yeah. Toothbrush, yeah. I do like a – I've done a tear down. Electric toothbrush. I've done a tear – yeah, that was 10 years ago or something. I did a tear down of one of those Braun toothbrushes. They're very interesting.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All right. We'll link that in. I'll have to watch that. I have not watched that myself.

Dave Jones: Right. Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Braun toothbrush tear down.

Dave Jones: BEV blog. Yep. I think it's a brawl. Yeah. Yes, yes.

Chris Gammell: What else is new in the world of teardowns? You've been tearing stuff down lately besides Solar Roads people? Don't –

Dave Jones: I just released that. Yeah. They're going to do – Yeah. Hardie salute to the Coles what way? Solar Road in France. Mm-hmm. Normandy in France. They're about to tear it down. Bon voyage. After eight years. Au revoir. Yeah. It failed. Anyway, moments before we recorded this, I just released the video. So go watch that. Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Dave Jones: I'm still earning the coin from the endless grift that is Solar Roadways. At least I'm earning some perpetual income from it. That's right.

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, boy. No.

Chris Gammell: So no teardowns? I have some build-ups if you'd like to talk about those. Actually, I don't even remember if we talked about this. We recorded two weeks ago.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right?

Dave Jones: I don't remember what my last teardown was.

Chris Gammell: Oh, we talked – oh, that's right.

Dave Jones: So – I did a repair, but I haven't done a teardown. Oh, hell. You did like a stereotype repair, right?

Dave Jones: My last teardown was one of those main socket testers, one of those smart main socket testers, which are a gimmick. How smart? Once again, it's an example of – How smart is it? It's so smart, it's impractical, you know? Yeah. So, yeah, it's just like the brawn freaking Bluetooth brush. It's just stupid. Like these smart socket testers? No. Just get like a Fluke or some other brand voltage stick or some other voltage – one of those dumb voltage testers. Sorry. It does actually have a near-field contact thing built into it. It's like, no, I don't want to combine my tools. Why – like a socket tester just tests the wiring of your socket, right? So if you're wiring up sockets every day, then – Yeah, yeah. Plug it in. Make sure your earth active and earth aren't swapped or something, you know? That's great. And, yeah, just a dumb one with three LEDs in it. That's it. You don't actually need anything more than that Fluke cell one. It's a dumb thing. It's got three LEDs in it. And if they're in a certain sequence, it's wired upright. If they're not in a certain sequence, it's wired wrong. I mean, it's not rocket science. Jesus. But no, no, they had to put a multimeter chipset in it. They had to measure the voltage. And then you can measure the current through the earth terminal. And then it's got near field voltage detection as well. It's like, no. God. Even if it's cheap. Even if it's like, you know, I think it's eight bucks or something. It's like, no, just give me the dumb one, please. Even if it costs more. Just because it's going to – it's simpler and more better. It's just dumb. I don't get it.

Chris Gammell: I mean, marketing is a thing, Dave. I don't know if you know this. Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: More features. Yeah, but –

Chris Gammell: Yeah, comparison shopping.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: But what you need to do is you need to stand at your local hardware store and just shout at people. I think that's really what it is. Shout at people, right, yeah. It has to be your – this has to be your life's work.

Dave Jones: That will be my retirement. We'll be – Yeah. Yeah. Shouting at people in stores. Don't buy this.

Chris Gammell: The people that like – at least in the U.S., like, you know, like the proverbial old guy at the hardware store. Right. You just see someone like sitting there like listening about the differences between like, I don't know, types of nuts and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, right. And just, you know, like – Yeah. Oh, man. One of the two people in that conversation are living their best life.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: Exactly. We have that here. There's a lot of old people that work at the local hardware stores. Yeah, I mean, it's – Bunnings. Yeah. It's a thing. It's a retirement thing because they just want to still work. Yeah, I mean, you just chew the fat all day and you just hang out. Yeah. That's great.

Chris Gammell: A great week. Probably free coffee. You know, like –

Dave Jones: They don't care, you know. They just enjoy talking to people and yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's basically this except, you know, they actually do something useful. Yep.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Yep. I was at the hardware store yesterday and I was looking – I needed to find something because, you know, like when you go on the website, it tells you which aisle it's in. Like you can see if they've got stock of something you need. Sure, sure, sure, sure. And they tell you which – and it said, sorry, we can't tell you which aisle you're going to have to talk to a staff member, right? So I go in there and, you know, I knew they had them in stock. So I go up to the oldest dude who I could find, right, because, oh, yeah, he'll know, you know. And sure enough, you know, the oldest dude goes, oh, yeah, I think that's in the commercial. I'm pretty sure we have it in stock but I don't precisely know where it is. Talk to this young girl over here. She knows everything. And it was like – so I went to talk to her and, yep, sure enough, she knew where it was and, you know, maybe it was new and just didn't know where stuff was. But I'm sure if I wanted to know the difference between, you know, 5 eighth inch, you know, hex bolts versus, you know, some other bolt, he'd know the business.

Chris Gammell: Do you have 5 eighth – do you have – imperial bolts there?

Dave Jones: I had to use imperial bolts yesterday. No way. Yeah, they came in imperial. Like I opened up my soccer set because I'm building some stairs, right? Sure, sure. And, you know, so I've got these stringers which go down the side of the stairs, you know. That's what I was getting from the hardware store. And, like, I've got these bolts that screw into, like, a – it's like a wooden coach bolt. So it screws into wood, so metal onto wood. Okay, yeah, sure. So a coach bolt thing. And so it needed a socket, you know. I was getting out my socket set and I go, right, metric. And I'm going, no, 14 mil, no. 16 mil, no. Ah, it must be the 15 mil one, which my set doesn't have, so I bought a separate one ages ago because to fill it in. It must be the 15. No. It's not. Then I go, oh, it's bloody imperial, isn't it, you bastard? Sure enough, my set has both imperial and metric, so I had to go through the bloody imperial. And sure enough, it was some bloody 5.8s bullshit. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. See, Dave, you did it all wrong right there. What you should have done – I should have started with the imperial. You should have gotten out your 3D printer and said, you know what, I will model this myself.

Dave Jones: I should have got out my calipers.

Chris Gammell: Start from the ground up. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: I should have just got the calipers and measured it precisely and then it would have – Bingo. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Sorry the scourge has reached your land, but, you know, no sympathy for me. Oh, boy. Well, I've been building stuff. I think I mentioned it two weeks ago, two shows ago rather, but I got those boards built up. I think I mentioned that I had them, the CH32 V003. Yeah. And now I have built them. I have programmed them. That's probably the most impressive thing. Not with my code, with someone else's code, mostly. It's the Anilor stuff. Right. But I've now gotten two boards talking to each other over NRF24, displaying on the OLED when they were sent and received.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And most importantly, I've gotten the USB library working. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so, kind of stalled out after that. You know, I'm back at work. But, yeah, I feel pretty confident about, like, at least using and, you know, like, using this chip and putting down another design. And I feel like they've, like, crested that hill. And so, we'll see. Very good. We'll see how that goes going forward.

Dave Jones: Fantastic.

Chris Gammell: Good luck. I can think of one creepy thing to build with this. Mostly, I could have a send and receive. And the receive side could be plugged into someone's computer. And the USB hid profile for keyboards is there. So, I could, like, send a keyboard command to someone else's computer from afar. But I shan't. But that was what came up in my head. I was like, oh, yeah, I could glue that code together.

Dave Jones: Right. Can you read what they're typing as well?

Chris Gammell: No. I don't think so.

Dave Jones: You can't. Like a key logger. Yeah, like a key logger.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I don't know how to do that. I'm sure someone does. But no, I don't. Right.

Dave Jones: But it might be possible. So, you could still steal people's passwords. I guess if you, like, listen on the bus, maybe you could. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, I was telling someone about, I mean, I mentioned Sammy last time we talked about this board, too, because it was a balloon project. But, like, that Sammy cam car project where he put an NRF24 listener and he reverse engineered the Microsoft protocol. Nice. It was, like, it's still, like, in my head. Like, at this point, it's, like, it would be even smaller. But he basically was off-the-shelf boards. He had a NRF24 where he reverse engineered the Microsoft keyboard protocol. He had a AC to DC converter. And then he had a 3G modem board from Adafruit. And he glued them all together. And he fit them all inside, like, a USB plug pack.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Nice.

Chris Gammell: And on someone's wall. And it was just, like, oh, my God. And then so it's just sitting there logging your keystrokes. And it looks like it's just a charger. And it's just, like, oh, man.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's crazy.

Chris Gammell: That's still, yeah. And it's, like, you know. And that's just Sammy with, like, not just Sammy, but that is off-the-shelf stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. You could make it even smaller. It's just, like, it's just creepy. It's just kind of creepy, you know.

Dave Jones: No, if people wanted to steal your, you know, your passwords and whatnot. And they've got physical access to your workspace. Then, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not hard if you know what you're doing.

Chris Gammell: Right. Almost as creepy as listening to my toothbrush. Toothbrushing.

Dave Jones: Does that have a microphone in it? Does it actually, like, transmit your, like, the audio of your...

Chris Gammell: It does. It transmits how long you've been brushing. Transmits which status you're in. So what state you're in. So, like, a stall state.

Dave Jones: It's like a little gyroscopic sensor in there so it knows how fast you move it. Because my dentist, like, wagged the finger at me saying, you don't spend enough time on each tooth. With the electric toothbrush, you're supposed to, like, spend, like, five seconds on each tooth. You'll never make them happy. You'll never make them happy, Dave.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, you make them happy when you fork over all the money.

Chris Gammell: That's true. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: So maybe it tracks how long you spend on each tooth. See, that could be a metric.

Chris Gammell: It could be. That would be a tough one to do, though, I think. Right? No. You just know that. Like, dead reckoning in someone's mouth. Like, that's dead reckoning, right? Yeah, but no, no.

Dave Jones: If it's moved over, you know, surely it knows if it's moved over a couple millimeters. No. A five millimeters.

Chris Gammell: You would have to, like, think about it. Oh, no, true. If you had an accelerometer in there.

Dave Jones: Because your head's bouncing around everywhere. Your head is bouncing around everywhere. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: If you had an accelerometer, like, you'd have to, like, do a common filter and, like, do two integrations on that to get to position, right? If you have acceleration, you'd integrate once, you get the velocity, integrate once.

Dave Jones: And even then, no, I don't think you could do it because nobody's staying still. You can make it work, but the subject would have to be standing completely still.

Chris Gammell: You'd have to have, like, a light tower, like the valve index was. You know, like, have, like, a light curtain to see if your head's been moving. And then you have a field reference, you know, a camera system. And then you have AI, of course.

Dave Jones: Right, of course. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Did we just start a company? I think we just started a company, Dave.

Dave Jones: I think we just did a million-dollar Kickstarter right there.

Chris Gammell: There we go. Yeah. That's it. That's Dream is small, man. It's the world of AI. It's money to be had, Dave. It's money to be had.

Dave Jones: I just tweeted, I think, yesterday. I'll try and find the tweet for you where Germany, somebody posted it in jest, but apparently it's a real list of what – here it is. I'll send it to you right now. Okay. A list of what it takes to form a startup company in Germany. Oh, yeah. Actually, that's not nothing. And apparently some people said, oh, yeah, this is a real list, but it didn't go far enough. And it's like – and the list is enormous. Let me go through and say, please, German viewers, let us know – if they're German listeners, let us know how to do startups, Germany edition. One, put aside €25,000 for company formation, find a notary to draft articles in a corporation, open a bank account, deposit share capital and send a notary, entry into the commercial registry, ignore official looking scam letters. And it's got 20 different steps you have to go through. Make sure you have a compliant legal notice on your website or risk getting a €50,000 fine, blah, blah, blah. And there's like 20 different steps to setting up a limited liability corporation in Germany.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Dave Jones: Wow. How easy is it in your thing? It'd be state-based, right? Yours would be state-based?

Chris Gammell: It is state – well, you get an employer identification number, which is basically like a VAT ID. You could effectively like a VAT ID if you don't have VAT.

Dave Jones: A tax ID, yeah, right. A tax ID. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Thanks. Right. Yeah. So it's like that. And that's really – that's at the federal level. Federal level, yep. Yeah. Then you have to register on each state because then you have like state taxes for each of your entities. And if you're operating in multiple states, you usually have to like be a foreign corporation.

Dave Jones: Well, it's because every – like if you're shipping a kit, you're going to be shipping to every state, right? Which is just dumb. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yes, yes. But I think the sales tax is usually only applied to the state that you're in, I think.

Dave Jones: Right, yep. And that's all usually taken care of by like shipping ones like Shopify and stuff like that, isn't it? Isn't all that – Some of them are, yeah. Some of them.

Chris Gammell: And like tax jar is a big one. But yeah, it's like – it's a whole industry because of it, right? I mean it's – Right, yeah, yeah. It's very non-trivial, right? It's very non-trivial. But if you're not like selling stuff, then it's a little bit easier, but then there's also other considerations and – yeah.

Dave Jones: Is there any minimum amount of money? Like it sounds like there's a minimum amount of money you have to put in here in Germany to set up. Oh, in Germany.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I'm not sure. There's nothing like that here. I had a friend who's in California and he said that like there is a four-figure cost to like get started in a business. So he was holding off unofficially as a consultant.

Dave Jones: It's certainly four figures here. Like it's probably one to two grand to set up a shelf – like a shelf company as they call it here. So maybe on the cheap side you can do it for $1,000 maybe. But usually you've got to hire like an accountant who then subcontracts it to a – there are – once again, there's an industry built up around it. There are companies that specialize in doing – creating all the paperwork. And so you just say to your accountant, I want to form XYZ Proprietary Limited and they just go, right, okay, no worries. We'll have it for you next week. And then comes this big ring binder from a company. I think it's called ClearDocs here or something. But this one is a huge company that does it all and they generate all this paperwork for all – how many shares each director has, blah, blah, blah, and all the rest of the inquiry. Right. But yeah, it's probably 1,000 to 2,000 to set up a corporation.

Chris Gammell: It does depend here too. Like there's different levels of corps in the US. So like C corps and S corps. Yeah, see, there's really only one here.

Dave Jones: You're either a – well, there's three. You're either a sole trader or you're a partnership, which is basically only two people, which is sort of like a quasi in-between thing. It isn't very popular or you're a proprietary limited corporation. There could be – like there's others like a nonprofit or something like that, but they're like totally –

Chris Gammell: The proprietary corporation you're talking about is that you have to have shares in that case?

Dave Jones: Yes, yes. Even if you have a single director, that single director has to have one share in the company.

Chris Gammell: Got it. It's just for legal reasons. There's a delineation there I think in the States. It's like C corps are much more involved and have like reporting standards because you often have to like have shares that you could sell for other people. But then S corps are like I think up to 100 people. Right. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an accountant.

Dave Jones: I think it only changes here if you do a share market float and you become a public company. I think that's the only time it changes. Got it. So apart from that, no, I think the one proprietary limited incorporates pretty much everything here. So there's only one type really. Yeah. Sounds like that's like S corp here. Okay. All right. All right. There you go. Cool. Anyway. Cool. Business solved. It doesn't sound like it's trivial to do a – become a limited liability corporation in Germany. Yeah. Yeah. Bummer. Anyway. Too bad. Speaking of too bad, Diode Magazine has – Oh, yeah. I saw that. As folded. As in not diode as in diody. As I used to call it when I was a kid, I used to call diodes diodes because I didn't know anyone who actually pronounced the word diode and never heard anyone actually say it.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Of course. Of course.

Dave Jones: I think the first time I ever heard the word diode spoken by anyone was in the movie War Games. A silicone diode. I'm not going to entrust the safety of your country to some silicone diode. You know? And with that real, you know, American twang. And that's the first time I heard it. Before that, I thought they were diodes.

Chris Gammell: And then you started talking like that?

Dave Jones: And I started – well, I didn't have anyone to sort of talk to about it, but I sort of talked to myself. You know, oh, I'm going to Tandy to buy a diody, you know? Diody, yeah. Or, oh, I have to suck these diodes out of this board because I'm going to put them in my parts kit, you know? Yeah, I used to call them diodes. Diodes, so there you go. Because I literally didn't know anyone who ever said the word diode before.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Had never heard it. And, yeah, there was no internet when I was a boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, the internet was in your own head. There you go. And on your internet, it was diodes.

Dave Jones: Anyway, so it's very cleverly spelt DIY-ode. Yes. Yeah, which is really cool. It's been going for eight years. So it started out in 2016. And I think they're up episode, like episode. They're up to issue number 74 or something. So they made like 74 issues before they just can't compete these days. I think like six months ago, they stopped actually making the print version of it. Yeah. So everyone sort of probably knew they were on their way out.

Chris Gammell: I mean, this makes me feel a bit old, but I'm pretty sure I remember when they started. We announced it on here.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm pretty sure we announced it on here. And I got a shout out in their first issue. And in fact, The Amp Hour got a shout out.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, good riddance, diode. No.

Dave Jones: The Amp Hour got a shout out in the first issue. Okay. I take it back. In the very first issue, like on the second page.

Chris Gammell: I take it back.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep. Got a shout out. I wouldn't actually wish. There you go. So there you go. That's a shame. It sucks. I mean, like. But it was inevitable, I guess. I mean, I hate to say it, but, you know.

Chris Gammell: Any kind of publishing is just.

Dave Jones: Mm. Mm.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, I was talking to someone, well, I won't name names, but I was talking to someone about this. And he was saying that, yeah, it was never going to work if they couldn't produce the kits for it. Like, you know, because these projects are, these magazines are all based on projects and stuff. And if you can't sell the kits to go along with it, it's just a flashy rag. You know, it's just like a. Yeah. So, yeah, apparently they didn't do kits or they didn't do it well. And that was, you know, that's how they, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I'm looking for like a store link on their site. I don't see anything like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, they don't have anything apparently. So, yeah, they never really did the kits.

Chris Gammell: I mean, that's tough though too, because it's like that is entirely. Not that other companies don't do it, but like that is such a. Someone who's a publisher and a content creator in the first place. It's like, that's a very different business. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Than kits. But I suppose at a certain point with the way media is these days, it's just like.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no.

Chris Gammell: The economics of media businesses is really, really tough. So, it's almost.

Dave Jones: I think Silicon Chip Magazine, who are still going, they do sell kits, I think.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Oh. I don't know. Please correct me. I'm going to have to double check myself now. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, that's probably the only way you can keep yourself going. You've got to have less supplemental income rather than just the shop. Shop. Here we go. Back issues, PCBs, program micros, components, kits, sets. Yep. Yep. So, they sell kits. Yes, I'm sure they do. Yes. In fact, yes, I got a Silicon Chip set. It was one of those tweezer LCR meter things. Oh, yeah. Somebody set those in or do I get it from a trade show or something? And, yeah, no, they sell heaps of kits. So, there you go. Yep. I don't know if they do those in-house or who actually, you know, builds the kits for them or whatever. But, anyway, yeah, they do sell that. So, that's probably, you know, that's probably like half their income. I don't know. That would be a total guess. But, yeah, it would certainly keep them going.

Chris Gammell: So, yep. Yep.

Dave Jones: There you go. Yeah. Although, Silicon Chip has changed hands, though. The original founder, Leo Simpson, he sold it like three, four years ago or something like that. He sold it to their former top contributor who was working there. So, he now owns it. Yep. Anyway. Yeah. Cool. Sorry to hear another magazine go, but.

Chris Gammell: Sorry, Diode. Yeah, it sucks. It sucks.

Dave Jones: Are there any US-based hobby magazines still going?

Chris Gammell: I mean, no.

Dave Jones: I think there are in Europe. I think Europe still has. Yes. Elector is still going. Elector is still going, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Again, you mean like specifically print?

Dave Jones: I am talking print, yeah, as in monthly issue. Even if it's online, like even if it's a PDF now, I would still class that as still a magazine, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, I was just double checking and this says make is still being made. Is that right?

Dave Jones: Make magazine.

Chris Gammell: Fabrication? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Make or maker? Because make magazine died. The entire corporation died.

Chris Gammell: That was like five years ago. This is make magazine digital fabrication 2024.

Dave Jones: Oh. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Volume 88. Is that possible?

Dave Jones: I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Wow. Okay. Wow. Wow. We don't know. Make, make zine.

Chris Gammell: Make magazine. Yeah, make zine.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Maybe someone took it over.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, maybe it's still there. I thought it was also, like I know the centralized maker fair.

Dave Jones: Yeah, the fairs are still going.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, like the small ones, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, the smaller ones. But yeah, I'm sure the company went bust, but I don't know. It rose from the ashes somehow. It could be. And I guess it's still, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so that's only what I had in mind. I don't know. There might be other ones, but I'm not privy.

Dave Jones: Yeah, there it is. Volume 88. Yep. So be it. There you go.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. Okay.

Dave Jones: Anyway, yep. Hats off to at least trying. Imagine starting this in 2016, thinking, oh, yeah, I can make a go of, you know. You can imagine, like I originally almost did it before I started the blog, but that was 14 years ago, right? So probably 15, 16 years ago. Did they have paper back then, Dave?

Chris Gammell: 14 years ago?

Dave Jones: I think so. And seriously, yeah, I thought about it. I thought about it. And then I thought, nah, it's a dead end. Nah, can't do it. So I started the blog. And, yeah, it's worked out a tad better. Anyway, yeah, imagine in 2016 starting, I'm going to do a print electronics magazine in Australia. It's like, and when they still already have one. You know? Yeah, it's bold. Yeah, it's pretty bold. So, yep. So hats off for lasting eight years, I guess, but it was probably inevitable. I mean, they don't say much about it in their final blog post. They just said, unfortunately, the world is a different place in 2024 and diet is no longer sustainable. We've decided to close the doors. There will be no March issue. So there you go. That's it. Yeah, no, they didn't give us any further insight there, unfortunately. But obviously, you know, only so many people are going to, like, they had to go away from the print issue to save some cost, I guess. And then, I guess, there wasn't enough. Because it's a pretty slick magazine, right? It's pretty slick. And, like, you know, there's a lot of effort and a lot of people that must be involved in actually making that. So I think, like, I looked through the first issue last night and the list of people that they had presumably working for them was extensive. Like, there were, like, ten people or something. It was quite, you know, it was quite the effort. But, so, yeah, I don't know how you keep that many people on staff with or even on contract or whatever with, I don't know. They probably only had, like, sub 10,000 subscribers or something. So I don't know how that works. But, unfortunately, it no longer works. So, yep, sad.

Chris Gammell: Well, on to new and things that are improving and releasing in 2024. Do you see there's a new KiCad? KiCad 8?

Dave Jones: I've heard there's a new KiCad 8. I have not seen it nor used it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There's some summary articles out there and some of the new stuff. I am not, I've not swapped over yet because I usually give it a, I don't go for 8.0.0. I usually wait for the .0 point whatever.

Dave Jones: I thought you were, like, on the bleeding edge. No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: I barely ever touched the Nightly's even.

Dave Jones: Really? Yeah, but there was one point in the not too distant past. You were Mr. KiCad.

Chris Gammell: Sure, but I was always behind. I was almost always released behind.

Dave Jones: Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Wimp?

Chris Gammell: Yes. I think cautious would be another word to say that. Sure, wimp. Wimp also works. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I can remember I had to use the daily build of Altium.

Chris Gammell: I know, Dave. Yes, yes.

Dave Jones: The daily build.

Chris Gammell: Back in my day. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, when I was a boy working at Altium.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and so there's a summary, there's a summary, list of summary posts and stuff like it. You know, you can go on the KiCad forums, you can go, you watched Wayne's talk, stuff like that. It just kind of just keeps getting more pro. One thing that kind of is relevant to last week's episode about Altium getting bought out, is that the importer for Altium files has gotten better. Oh, right. Like libraries are not importable. Right. Like, just there's always been a push to that because you always want to, you know, make it welcoming for people to move the projects around.

Dave Jones: Well, that's absolutely essential to be a success. Yeah. Absolutely.

Chris Gammell: Especially for like binaries coming in. You know, like it's pretty easy to go from KiCad to something else because it's all ASCII. But anything that's like binary coming in, that's where the difficulty comes from, I think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And as far as I know, the Altium haven't published their binary. Like their thing. Yeah, like the key to their. Yeah. You have to reverse engineer it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: As far as I know, anyway.

Chris Gammell: I believe that's right. I have not tried it. So the importers and stuff like that. But I think the libraries are, you know, probably more useful a lot of times because if someone's offering a library in Altium, it's like free data, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. All right.

Dave Jones: Like I could download it and play around with it. But really, you know, you've got to do a project in anger. Really?

Chris Gammell: You've got to do it.

Dave Jones: Like, and you've got to do a decent size. Like people go, oh, how does it compare with Altium? You know, people ask me this all the time. It's like, dude, I would have to do some massive project. Like I would have, like, you know, I'd have to spend a month doing a massive project just to, you know, tell you what the real differences are. And it's just, you know, yeah. No, sorry.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I think other like kind of highlight things, like for me, like actually James Lewis did a top eight, eight things in key CAD to try out. That was good. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. That's like, yeah.

Dave Jones: You need something like that. Here's the top new eight features, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Because it is, it's like a lot of fixes and yeah.

Dave Jones: Although I was thinking about redoing my auto routing video because that was four or five years ago now and seeing how the tools have improved both Altium and the latest version eight now. So maybe it's timely to redo that perhaps. But once again, auto routing is one of those things where it's not just a magic thing. Like you need to spend, for it to be useful, you need to spend more time setting it up than you do just, like you can't just import, you can draw your spreadsheet and go, go. You know, like it doesn't. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I agree.

Dave Jones: It doesn't work like that. So anyway, I thought, you know, maybe.

Chris Gammell: I'm surprised at the, what you mean, maybe you should do. I think here's an idea for a video, which you should not like my ideas, but I think it's not bad. They've been pulling in a lot of like spice features. Okay.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Did you ever use that in Altium? I never really understood that.

Dave Jones: I rarely used Altium for simulation. Like it could do it, but it wasn't kind of, eh, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think what I would like to do is like to have a, yeah, redraw it. I would love to have like, just like a, like a click and drag over a circuit and then be able to export that to like an LT Spice or whatever, you know. That'd be nice. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Cause most of the time you aren't simulating your entire project. You're simulating just a little, you know, a little motor driver circuit or you simulate a little DC to DC converter circuit. And it's true. You know, you spend 20 minutes and you can copy it over, you know, you can just copy it over to any other simulation package. It's not, you know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like you want to save time. So like that would be good.

Dave Jones: So, so if you could do that, but it's not a pain in the ass to, you know.

Chris Gammell: No, I think it's just a risk to maybe have lost, you know, to like skip something.

Dave Jones: Because you could have goofed something. Right. Yeah, of course. But you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I was always surprised. But then like, you know, some people who are living in like, like, I think it was like someone who was a cadence user was talking to me about it. Like, yeah, but like I'm in such a complex project that I have to basically use it. You know, they were using like IBIS modules and like all the way down to the bottom.

Dave Jones: Yes, they go into the down the rabbit hole all the way. Sure.

Chris Gammell: You know, like, but like there's somewhere between that intensity and like, you know, me using false dad simulator. Yeah, right. Yeah, of course. Do I remember how like JFETs work? The answer is no. The answer is always no. Right. Every single time I see JFET, I'm like, what do I do? Thumbing through the art of electronics. I don't know. Oh, boy. Yeah. So, yeah. But that would be, I think, good to do that sort of thing.

Dave Jones: I've got a potential new video on the whiteboard here that may involve a JFET. Never know. I might include that.

Chris Gammell: It's a headphone amplifier. It's always headphone amplifiers with JFET.

Dave Jones: No, well, it's a, no, you want to, you want to spoiler alert? Sure. It's about composite amplifiers. I was going to do a tutorial video on composite amplifiers. So.

Chris Gammell: I don't know what those are, Dave.

Dave Jones: You don't know what composite amplifiers are.

Chris Gammell: I would usually say composite, by the way. This is like an aluminum, aluminium thing.

Speaker ?: Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Bloody American thing.

Dave Jones: Composite amplifier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, a composite amplifier. A composite amplifier is one where you have another amplifier or another amplifying element within the feedback loop. So, if you, like, I've done a video on this where you can get two amplifiers and you join them. So, you can, they're called.

Chris Gammell: That's the Voltron amplifier.

Dave Jones: Cascaded amplifiers. So, they're cascaded. So, they're joined together in series. Right? Got it. So, that's it. And you can get more bandwidth and other things out of that or extra drive capability. Whereas, a composite amplifier, they're not cascaded like one after the other. The second amplifier is within the feedback loop of the first amplifier. So, you can combine various, you know, because often when you're going out on the bleeding edge of requirements, you're not going to, you may not find the one op amp to do everything you need. Right. Right? So, if you need ultra low, ultra high input impedance, ultra low leakage on the inputs and you need, but you need super fast bandwidth and you need huge drive capability and, you know, also all these sorts of things and massive bandwidth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're always a trade-off. Whereas, a composite amplifier allows you to mix and match, say, a really, you know, massively low noise, low offset voltage amplifier on the front part of it. But then, you combine that with a really grunty line driving op amp to drive a coax cable. Right?

Chris Gammell: Got it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, you can, and drive it at 100 volts. Right? So, you can have like a high voltage or a high power amplifier and you put them in the same loop. So, it appears functionally as the one amplifier, but it combines the best of two elements of two different op amps. And as I mentioned, I might put a JFED in there because you don't have to have an op amp. You can put a JFED. This is common for scope front ends, for example. They might use composite architecture where they include, you've no doubt seen this if you've seen a schematic of any like scope front end, you know, old school ones. They'll have like a JFED on the input. That's how you get your high input impedance for your one mega ohm input impedance, right? So, you see, you need like a JFED on the input or usually it's a matched pair, you know, on the input of JFEDs. And then you'll have, you'll wrap that within the feedback loop of the amplifier, which gives you the bandwidth and the drive capability to go to the analog to digital converter, for example.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Composite amplifiers. There you go. They are a thing. All right. All right.

Chris Gammell: All right. Cool.

Dave Jones: They're magical. Yep. So, and they're real. I don't think anyone's done a tutorial video on composite amplifiers. I have to do a search, but I don't think so.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it doesn't sound like they're very common.

Dave Jones: No, they're not. Well, no.

Chris Gammell: But it's like one of those things where you don't know about it when you need to reach for it.

Dave Jones: So, that's great. So, yep. That's great. Yep. So, it's currently on the white, like I've just written it on the whiteboard. So, it forces me to get off my ass and go.

Chris Gammell: Stare at it and be like, not yet. No, no, no. Not yet.

Dave Jones: It's been on there and I've done three videos since I put it up on the whiteboard. So, anyway, it is there and I'm sure I'll get around to it. So, composite amplifiers. There you go. Circuit technique of the day. Composite amplifiers or composite if you're a yank.

Chris Gammell: As I am.

Dave Jones: Oh, there you go. Weirdo. Composite. Unbelievable. All right. What else we got?

Chris Gammell: You probably don't care about this one. But speaking of things that get pronounced differently than I, I say Zephyr. And whenever I go to Germany, which I will be doing in April, they say Schefair.

Dave Jones: I would definitely say Zephyr too. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I know. And yeah, there's a new version. A lot of interesting changes there. Probably more interesting to me, though, is the new sponsors on the project. Basically, it's down to pretty much every chip vendor is now a sponsor of the project.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And they're kind of all in it in some, at least like dip in a toe in kind of way. Right.

Dave Jones: And yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The new changes, though, you know, things like GNSS and this new thing called LLXT, which is basically like loading up binaries like dynamically. That's pretty cool. All right. So you could like load in like dynamic, not files, but like different code and stuff like that. Yeah. So it's pretty neat. I don't know. This is like the stuff I'm in all the time, but I have not tried out yet. So we'll see. I think the the by the GNSS is the most likely to touch my life because it's like dealing with any MEA like messages. So it's like it's always the same coming out of GPS units. So like, why didn't they have this previously? But now it's like just going to parse that and make it easier to talk, talk to these different devices. So that's good. Got it. So, yeah. Easier to read sensors. You know, I like that.

Dave Jones: Yep. Totally.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: All good. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: When are you going to when are you going to sign up, Dave? Sign up for Zephyr.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. No.

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: Well, if I had a project that needed.

Chris Gammell: I know.

Dave Jones: To do. So we got to.

Chris Gammell: That's what we got to work on. That's what we got to work on.

Dave Jones: All right. Yep. No, sorry. Back in the working world.

Chris Gammell: I've got some stuff, you know, I got some stuff I'm building. So that's nice.

Dave Jones: Right. Now I've got two projects. Neither of them would have any benefit whatsoever. No connectivity. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. Sorry. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Two projects. That's good. That's good. Yep. All right. Looking forward to hearing about those on here. What else? Stupid Intel Altera thing. They're called Altera again.

Dave Jones: That's happened since.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. We talked about that, I guess, last time. Oh, did we?

Dave Jones: Okay. But it has. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We talked about it briefly. We just said, you know, we talked about Steve and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: But we didn't know. I don't think we know they were going to keep the name.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's right.

Dave Jones: Altera. They kept the name, but it's all lowercase now. It's all lowercase. I did a tweet about this. It's all lowercase. And if you have a look at their new logo, they sneakily included AI at the end of the logo.

Chris Gammell: Well, of course they did. Of course they did. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sneaky, huh? One day they must have added another couple hundred thousand to the bill from the consultant, the logo consultant for that. Yeah. That's right. For adding AI on the end. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sneaky bastards, huh? Yeah. Because they claim to have all their silicon is AI compatible or some wankery like that.

Chris Gammell: Of course.

Dave Jones: So, yeah. No, but yeah. I read an article about FPGAs and AI. I can't remember where it was. And they said, like, everyone thought at the start of all this AI thing, like many years ago, that FPGAs would be the future of AI because they're more versatile. And then everyone realized, no, the GPUs are better. Yeah. Right. They're just, yeah. Yeah. GPUs just killed them. So, nobody does. Oh, very few people do AI with FPGAs anymore. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, custom processing and stuff like that. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's just, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, can you imagine, like, just the number of, like, the crushing number of chips you need to have. Yeah. Just the FPGAs would be so expensive comparatively. And it's not like the GPUs are cheap, right? No.

Dave Jones: Well, I was actually speaking of which, NVIDIA have just released or recently released the RTX, which, because all their GPUs are now RTX. They move from GTX architecture to RTX architecture. And all the RTX architecture is AI compatible, of course. And they've now released this new AI, which you can run locally on your GPU card. And you can feed it all your, so you can have your own AI running locally on your own machine that uses your own GPU. And you can feed it videos. You can feed it videos. You can feed it anything you want and have your own local AI system. So I was going to see if there's any benefit in actually feeding it all of my thousands of videos and seeing if there's any useful data that can pop out of it. I don't know. It'll certainly, maybe it can help you find old videos.

Chris Gammell: I'm imagining that it's like, yeah, no, sorry, there's nothing useful here.

Dave Jones: The thousands of videos, you realize your life has been pointless.

Chris Gammell: I now want to go on the EEV blog forum and talk about 10-volt references.

Dave Jones: Well, I thought about doing it for the forum as well. I thought maybe, you know, if we like did like a local AI. Train it, train it.

Chris Gammell: You're selling your data.

Dave Jones: Not selling it. I'm just efficiently collating it.

Chris Gammell: I'm just profiting off of it, yeah.

Dave Jones: Efficiently collating it. And, yeah, and then we could have like a better search engine on there because the search on the forum's not that great, you know. So heaps of people use Google search. So instead of using the forum search, they actually go to Google and they put in, you know, site colon and then evblog.forum. Yeah, right, right, right, right. And they use that. Well, maybe, you know, maybe there's a, we can do some sort of plug-in that, you know, does like an AI. We can build up a local database, AI database.

Chris Gammell: It's like Ask Jeeves for your EEV blog forum.

Dave Jones: Right, for your own forum, yeah. Yeah, that'd be useful because there's tons of, you know, there's like 15, 14.

Chris Gammell: You know, Jeeves was ahead of his time. Ask Jeeves was ahead of his time. Ask Jeeves, yeah.

Dave Jones: Whatever happened to Ask Jeeves?

Chris Gammell: Lost to the ages.

Dave Jones: To some, you know, it's probably been absorbed five times.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I watched, on my parental leave, I watched, I re-watched all of Parks and Rec, the Mike Schur show.

Dave Jones: No, what's that?

Chris Gammell: No idea. It's, I don't know, it's like a sitcom for like six, it went six or seven years.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Pretty great. I loved it. But like one of the people that are in that town always use Ask Jeeves instead of Google.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. That's great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, wait, no, sorry. Maybe it was Alta Vista. I may have been confusing with Alta Vista.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But yeah. Either way, there was some alternative search engine. They were still on in this town.

Speaker ?: So.

Dave Jones: All right. Ask Jeeves, I think is still ask.com. Oh, is that what ask.com? Yes, it's ask.com. I've never used ask.com, but apparently it's still going. Ask.com, yes.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, that's the same font for sure. Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: I'm surprised they haven't integrated, like they haven't spun into AI. What's going through the Wikipedia? Yeah, founded in 1996 as Ask Jeeves. There you go. They're still going. They haven't been bought. No, it's a subsidiary of, no, who's the parent company? It doesn't say. It's a subsidiary.

Chris Gammell: Ask Media Group.

Dave Jones: Ask Media Group, okay. He's probably, yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: Wow. That's.

Dave Jones: There you go.

Chris Gammell: I didn't think I would learn that today. There you go. Well, Dave, you could maybe hire them to become.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you could ask Jeeves on EV blog.

Dave Jones: Ask Dave. I'll do like a custom version. Ask Dave, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm going to go out and askdave.com. I'm going to register.

Chris Gammell: I bet that one's taken.

Dave Jones: I bet it's taken. Askdave.com.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I'm on it now.

Chris Gammell: The Ask EEV blog, how about that one?

Dave Jones: It isn't loading. Ask EEV blog wouldn't be taken, but Ask Dave looks like it's taken because it's not loading.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right.

Dave Jones: No, adscheaper.com. There's a domain squatter. There's a beaver as a domain squatter. I got beavered. Okay. Okay. All right. Yep. Jesus. Ask Jeeves. Unbelievable. Yep. For those who don't know, you know, for those who don't remember, the kiddies out there wouldn't remember pre-Google, you know. It was AltaVista was the search engine of choice.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I know there's a lot of them, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yahoo was playing in that game. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yahoo was. Well, Yahoo was more of a repository, like a compilation repository of links kind of thing. It wasn't really a search engine. And so they all started. As such.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, come on. They all. Yeah. Yeah, I guess you're right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It was. Yahoo was a curated engine. Like things were curated. Sure. Sure. Like human curated, I think. Something like that. So, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The dark times. The internet. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Good times. Come on. It was great. Good times.

Chris Gammell: Good times.

Dave Jones: Now it's just they're all evil and tracking you and, you know. Yeah. Like back then it was. Yeah. No one was evil.

Chris Gammell: There was no podcast back then. So, I mean, if you get a bunch of listeners that are interested in that sort of thing, I'm sure they're.

Dave Jones: Totally. Yeah. Oh, boy. Now everything's bloody AI and, yep. AI is just evil and, yep. Anyway, won't go there.

Chris Gammell: How's your week ahead looking?

Dave Jones: You think I plan a week ahead?

Chris Gammell: Oh, well, some of us have day jobs, Dave.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I've got some hardware validation. I've got some hardware sitting in my desk that I've had manufactured for about three weeks, four weeks. Yeah, right. I need to make sure it actually works. And, uh.

Dave Jones: Well, I may or may not sort of move the two meters over to the whiteboard and actually switch on the camera. I don't know. There you go. You know. I have to build up the motivation to do it. Yeah. But I just, I just shot, edited and released a video this morning before I, before we press record. That was before midday. It was like, so I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself. I'm feeling pretty efficient. Get your feet up. Right.

Chris Gammell: Chill out. Yeah, exactly. For an amp hour.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Reward yourself a little amp hour time.

Dave Jones: Kill some time for a couple of days. Go home and hang out in the pool. And then I'll go, it's Thursday. And I don't publish videos on Thursday. Go home and film the pool robot. Because, yeah, I filmed the pool robot. Yeah. Yeah. There's some quality content right there.

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. I should take one of those pool robot sponsorships I get. You know, many, I could get thousands of dollars just for doing one pool robot video.

Chris Gammell: Bingo. Bingo. Anyways, back to the hardware. Yeah. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Got to get, got to get validated. I had about, I think I had my pull request before I made this piece of hardware. It was about 30. Like 30 significant changes.

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: Like, like not screw ups, but like 30 like changes. And so I had to go through and evaluate all those. And I don't know. I still have to make a, do you, did you, back in the day, did you make like a list of things to check before your hardware showed up? Or was it more like a.

Dave Jones: No, just in my head. You know, I just, no, I just go through it. And if I. More like functional testing and stuff like that. And if I miss something, I'd just, you know, that's just Darwin. Right. So. That's just Darwin at work. So, yeah. No, I, I figure if it wasn't important enough to remember, then it probably wasn't important enough to do. So. Yeah. But. And I was doing it all the time. So it was like really like. Yeah. I mean, if you're spinning a lot of boards. But. If you spin a lot of boards, it was just, yeah. Fair. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: 100% agree with that. But I mean, like functionally, that's how I operate. So I. Yeah. And.

Dave Jones: Well, it depends on the importance of the board. You know. I mean. If you can just spin another one, if you just want to do, you know. It. Not. Not all boards are the same. Not all boards have the same requirements. Let's put it that way.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So.

Chris Gammell: Looking at this board now, there are some like untested features. Like I just assumed that the buzzer was going to work.

Dave Jones: I assumed your buzzer was going to work. Buzzers are pretty easy. Did you get the wrong buzzer? Did you get a piezo sounder instead of a buzzer? Did you get like a piezo transducer? You did.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. I'm just saying I. All right. I haven't tested it yet. So like that's. That's something I just kind of kicked the can down the road. I got to.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Test that. But. You know, first boot up and stuff like that. It didn't smoke. LEDs came on. Everything. It programmed. But it just didn't buzz. I'm already like. It just didn't go. I'm like already on the path. Yeah. No, no, no. I never. I haven't written any.

Dave Jones: I haven't written any code yet. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, if you've got a real buzzer. See, if you've got a real buzzer, all you need is one line of code, which just sets the output to one. Right. You just apply power to it and it buzzes. Yeah. Because a lot of people don't know. That's a difference. No, we've talked about that in here. A buzzer's got an internal oscillator. Yeah, of course we have. A buzzer's got an internal oscillator and a piezo transducer is one that you have to actually drive with a square wave at the frequency you want to drive it at. Yeah. Bingo. Yeah. Pros and cons.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Buzzer's pretty simple, dude.

Dave Jones: Just, you know.

Chris Gammell: It's not the only thing on the board, Dave. Come on, man. It's to sell you an IoT thing. Toggle that pin, dude. Toggle that pin. Tons of stuff on here.

Dave Jones: You know?

Chris Gammell: Tons of stuff on here.

Dave Jones: Toggle the pin. All right.

Chris Gammell: I will toggle the pin. Yes.

Dave Jones: Thank you.

Chris Gammell: I will. You know what I'm going to do? What? I'm going to wait until it's like two in the morning.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: I'm going to test the buzzer. When it works, I'm going to call you and it'll just be. Excellent.

Dave Jones: Yep. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Complimentary wake up call. Fantastic. Just what I need. That's what the internet enables for us.

Dave Jones: Fantastic. Love living in the future.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All right. Well, I will report back next time. Whether or not your buzzer works. Whether or not anything works. How about that?

Dave Jones: All right. Sounds good. All right.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time.

Chris Gammell: See you soon.

Chris Gammell: See you soon.

Speaker ?: See you soon. See you soon. See you soon. See you soon. See you soon.