#68 – Radiation Chips & Old Package Types - Technocratic Toilet Troubleshooting

Chris Gammell: Welcome to the Amp Hour.

Dave Jones: I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm Chris Campbell from Chris Campbell's Analog Life. Hey, Chris. Hey, Dave. What episode are we up to?

Chris Gammell: Ooh. What are we on?

Dave Jones: 68. 68. All right. We're there. No particular significance. No. Wanted to know.

Chris Gammell: It's getting away. 68 cats, if you're a cat person. What? If you're a cat lady, you might have 68 cats, and then it would be a... God, I hate cats. I'm not a big fan. Yeah.

Dave Jones: What have we got on today's show? A whole bunch of stuff.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And unnamed stuff, too. I was going to throw in some curveballs, too.

Dave Jones: Oh. Oh, yeah. Brilliant. Okay. I love that. Well, our entire show's a curveball, right? Because we don't know what's going to be on. We have a list, but it's lame, and we don't follow it anyway.

Chris Gammell: All that time I spend putting it all together, and you just ignore it. Yeah. I know. See? You're just wasting your time. I know. See?

Dave Jones: I'm smart. I don't contribute much to it. Yes. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Your apathy really is genius. Yeah. Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: All right. Start with shout-outs.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So, there's a new comic. Did you get a chance to look at this? This is the one you should have looked at. This is the one that you would have enjoyed. This is like, you know, you tell your kid to eat the vegetables, and then they end up eating chocolate-covered jelly beans, right? Right. This is your chocolate-covered jelly bean, Dave.

Dave Jones: Is this the artwork one? Yeah. This is the artwork one, right? It's not really a comic.

Chris Gammell: It is a comic, I think.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, it's a one-panel comic. Yeah, it's a one-panel.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, it's omart.org. Om being O-H-M, not O-M. Yes. Great name. As we tend to do with the old resistors. Yep. I found it. Where is it from? It was on Electronic Design, actually. Okay. They kind of repost some of the stuff from there, and there are some really good ones. It's just, I don't know. I think it's really- I know.

Dave Jones: It's brilliant. I love this. I wish I had the talent to be able to draw stuff like this. It's just like funny little, you know, Sherlock Holmes, and it's got like a little resistor dressed up as Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, a lot of play on words. Very cartoony style. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I like the, there's bridge rectifier one. There's like some transistors. It's always got transistors as the characters, really.

Dave Jones: And it's just great. It's brilliant.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, boy. My favorite-

Dave Jones: And I love the flip-flop.

Chris Gammell: The flip-flop?

Dave Jones: Except that doesn't, except that's very American. It's number 13.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: If you go to number 13, it's the flip-flop. The JK flip-flop. And it's got a bunch of thongs, as we call them here.

Chris Gammell: Ah, yes. Yeah, that is.

Dave Jones: We don't call them flip-flops and they're wired as, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right.

Dave Jones: They're wired in a flip-flop configuration. It's great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I like the, let's see, I like the 25. So that's, I see a sign. It's like a psychic and then there's a sign wave and a little crystal ball.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: And then, I think my favorite, I'll save my favorite one for last, the jitter one, number 55. It's like-

Dave Jones: 55. I haven't got that far yet.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's circuit jitter and there's a little transistor drinking coffee.

Dave Jones: Drinking coffee and he's trying to stop the shakes, right?

Chris Gammell: And then my absolute favorite is 47. 47 is my absolute favorite. It says the EEPROM. The EEPROM class was 77. Seven, right. And then the little subtext is, it was the strangest thing after the DJ turned on special effect UV lighting, everyone forgot everything, including-

Dave Jones: Why they were standing on two legs. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And if people don't get that, it's because they used to erase chips with UV lights.

Dave Jones: With UV light on the window.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. I never used- Did you ever have a little eraser like that? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Before me.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yeah, there was this standard model that was around for- You know, the white plastic with the black pull-out train that had the conductive foam insert. Oh, yeah. It was one of the first, you know, rebadged products back in the 70s, I think. It was just sold under 20 different brands. And it all came out of the one factory.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Were they expensive or no?

Dave Jones: Oh, they were in the day. Yeah. You'd pay $150 or something for an EV- You know, for one of these UV erasers. Yeah, I think.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Back in the- Yeah, it was a- I think it was a big cost. That's crazy. Back in the day. Yeah. Yeah. That's why it was extremely popular to build your own, you know, in the electronics magazine.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And so, yeah, build your own E-Prom eraser, you know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, what's the reason? I mean, it was just most- Was it halogen-based or what? It was-

Dave Jones: It's a UV fluorescent tube. Oh, okay. It's a UV tube you can buy. So it was just coated so that it had the UV- It was coated so it gave off UV instead of, yeah, the normal white light.

Chris Gammell: Brilliant green, yeah. Right, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, that's pretty much all it was. And, of course, a timer because you didn't want to overbake them, so-

Chris Gammell: Why would happen then?

Dave Jones: And the- Sorry?

Chris Gammell: What happened if you overbaked them? They just-

Dave Jones: Oh, I overbaked them. You can actually ruin them if you overcooked them. Oh, yeah. No, you couldn't just stick them in the UV eraser forever. That would reduce their life and maybe even kill them permanently and all sorts of stuff. There was all sorts of research into that and, oh, is it a myth or is it real? Yeah, yeah. All that sort of stuff. But, no, that's why they all had like a 15-minute timer on there. I think it was 15 minutes. Yeah. And you wind it up and it was a big mechanical, you know, and you'd hear it tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Nice. Yeah. Try to take one of those security. Whereas all the good do-it-yourself ones, you know, they'd have a, you know, they'd have a, yeah, and like a LED light up or something. Oh, you'd count down, yeah. So you'd use a 15-minute triple-five timer in there. Gotcha. You know, you'd tweak, eh, eh, eh, you'd tweak it. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah. That's good. Give you a 15-minute delay. Mm. Or you just shove them out in the sun, you know? Get them half an hour out in the sun.

Chris Gammell: There you go, yeah.

Dave Jones: Tight asses back there, you know? Damn, I can't program today.

Chris Gammell: I've got to wait until there's sunlight. I remember there was one, like, one of those, like, tracking down, I think it was, like, EDN or E-Times or something. They had one of those tracking down problem stories. And I always like those kind of stories, you know, like people, stories from the lab and stuff. And I remember one of them, the end result was that they had these chips where they, actually, the chips had windows on them, but someone just lazily painted over the chip window. Oh. But the UV was still getting through that paint. And so it erased the chips, what seemed like spontaneously. It was a really, really good story. I mean, just, like, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because, like, just a single bit would go. And, of course, Murphy's Law says it'll be the exact bit that, you know, that doesn't just cause you to fail and it's immediately obvious it's the EEPROM. It'll, you know, the one bit that would fail would be the one that would lead you down the garden path towards some other fault in the circuit where, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, and you'd spend a week just troubleshooting this thing and all it was was a dead bit in the EEPROM, you know. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: So, yep. Yep. Been there. And back then, yeah, a lot of people would just get paper labels and stick them over. And some of those, they weren't opaque. That might have been it. It might have been paper. They weren't completely opaque. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep. Because then, especially if you're labeling, like, the firmware revision or whatever. I think you're right. I think that's what it was. Right. And that got through there.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: I'll try and find that story and see if I can't get it linked in. But if not, if someone knows what it is and remembers it, let me know because I like that story.

Dave Jones: So, there's lots of weird stories like that and ones where the exact same chip with the same label and everything, you know, it would fail in one product and not in the other. What was the difference? Well, the difference was, was that it was used in a bit of gear that had these vent covers on the top, you know. Oh, yeah. Just for thermals?

Chris Gammell: Ventilation. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. For thermal stuff. And it just so happened to be sitting on the bench near a window where at the certain time of day, the sun would come directly through the vent and hit the top of the EEPROM. So, you know, that was just one of those, you know, chance in a million kind of things.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. That kind of troubleshoot, that's actually what I was going to talk about today. Like, just, I've been troubleshooting problems recently. And it's just, like, some of the most frustrating problems ever. Just because, like, thermal problems. Thermal problems bite me in the ass every time because it's just, you know, have you ever done that where you have, like, the hot air pencil in one hand and then, like, the cold spray in the other? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the cold spray in the other, yeah. You could be doing that all day long and it just says nothing about your problem. All it says is that you had a heat pencil and a cold spray in it. Like, you really don't resolve anything. You just keep kind of bouncing between these two conditions, you know. And that's what I was doing all day today. And then I kind of walked away from work today. I'm like, what the hell did I do today?

Dave Jones: I just sprayed a few things. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You're not even really, like, replicating a problem. You're just, you're inducing it, really. You're not replicating it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You try to make it fail because often that's the problem. You know, it's working fine, but you know it fails. Yeah. You know, at some point it's intermittent and you've got to force it to fail sometimes. Yeah. And did you know that little trick here is that if you don't have a can of freezer spray, you get a can of air spray. Or you turn it upside down. One of those air dusters should turn it upside down.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. The stuff they say not to get on your skin because it'll freeze it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's good for it. But you do it anyway, you know. Yeah. Yeah, I've used that in a pinch. It works too. It works fine. You know what it's really good for is inhaling it at the end of the day when you're stressed out and you need some kind of manufactured high.

Dave Jones: And instant oxygen here, right?

Chris Gammell: No, that stuff's nasty.

Dave Jones: That stuff's like... Some people pay good money for that shit. Yeah, right. At our local shopping center, they've got these oxygen bars, you know. Oh, that's not oxygen, Dave. I thought they died out in the 90s.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's true. And of course now, you know, they've got like an iPad in front of you. So now you can surf the web as you suck the oxygen. Oh, really? You know, that's part of the value-added thing. Oh, yeah. You know? So you can have, you know, coffee and you're surfing the web on this iPad and you're sucking down this expensive bloody oxygen. 100% pure. Oh, no. But no, now it's mixed with... The oxygen is mixed with, you know, all sorts of weird shit that's supposed to... Like flavors, yeah. Flavors and all that sort of... Stupid.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: People pay good money for that shit.

Chris Gammell: So for the troubleshooting thing, there was actually a Bill Schwaber article too, I remember. I didn't link it in here, but he wrote about... He's the analog guy at E.E. Times. And he wrote about how, you know, how people say that if you keep trying the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, you're probably insane.

Dave Jones: That's the definition of insanity.

Chris Gammell: And he said, no, well, not really though. Because sometimes when you need to replicate a problem, you know, you have to keep trying it to see if you can catch it, right? Yeah. When you go insane is when you can't find it. If you find it, you feel totally justified. I mean, if I sprayed it that third time with the cold spray and it figured it out, I mean, I got it.

Dave Jones: Oh, awesome. Yeah. How did we get there from OMART? I...

Chris Gammell: Oh, the window. The story about the window and troubleshooting. Right.

Dave Jones: Yep. Like, ah, the EEPROM, yes. And then we... Yep.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Got it. Anyway, back to OMART. Yeah, God, I wish I could draw like that. I wish I had some sort of talent like that. Man, I got nothing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, your talent is being catankerous, Dave. That's your talent.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know. That's it. It's not... Ah, well, works.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. This is nice. I've considered... So this stuff, you can get t-shirts from the OMART.

Dave Jones: Yes, yes, you can buy them on their... Yeah, the store, their... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Zazzle or whatever, so...

Dave Jones: Zazzle, yep. Yeah, the same as my merch.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: I can't talk about my merch. I've only got like two items.

Chris Gammell: Well, because you can draw. You don't know how to draw.

Dave Jones: I can't create shit like this. That's the problem. Yep.

Chris Gammell: There's your problem. Yep.

Dave Jones: Oh, well. Anyway. Yeah, it's awesome. I love it. Go buy some of the stuff.

Chris Gammell: Definitely. Support our artist nerd friends.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Struggling artists there on the street, you know. Holding up a cardboard sign. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So we had one other shout-out this week.

Dave Jones: We'll paint for a multimeter, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So we had one other shout-out this week. I saw on Twitter... We had someone chatting to us on Twitter. And her name is Katie Looper. And I clicked over to her site, and I was very intrigued by her story. Basically... Do tell. She got an undergrad in some kind of science degree, went and got a JD or a law degree, and now she's going back and getting an electrical engineering degree. A bachelor's and a master's. And she must have a high threshold for pain.

Dave Jones: Does that make her a professional student? I know people like this. They don't actually go and work. They just end up getting 20 degrees or something because they just... I don't know. ...like doing it. I don't know. Which is great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. It is great.

Dave Jones: Did she actually practice as a lawyer?

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

Dave Jones: Or she just studied law, and then she got it, and then she went... One day it just dawned on her, oh my God, I'm a lawyer.

Chris Gammell: And the law market is not easy these days.

Dave Jones: And they just tore it up and...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's an expensive piece of paper to take.

Dave Jones: I'm going to be an engineer. I'm going to be... Well,

Chris Gammell: I would like to commend her on her excellent decision to move back into nerd arts. I think it's... I totally agree. Yeah. It's a great move. So, it's interesting. I'm going to keep an eye on this blog. It's... She's kind of just writing about her experiences and stuff, so...

Dave Jones: Cool. What's the story there? She was a... She always had an inkling in... EE stuff, but for some reason got... You know, sidetracked into a... Becoming a lawyer or... Or what? And then has come back to the hobby later? Because that's fairly common. You know, people have it as a hobby early on, and then they... But for some reason or another, they go... You know, parents pushed them into something else, or their friends did it, so they went into something entirely different, and then... Years later, they come back to their hobby.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, maybe.

Dave Jones: That's that. Yeah, that's... I get stories like that all the time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. She said, I'm not sure the traditional lawyer role is right for me, and I wanted to dip my toes in engineering. There you go. So, that's awesome. Yeah. Hope... Well done, Katie. Hope the water... Welcome back. Hope the water feels good. We seem to like it around here.

Dave Jones: Welcome back from the dark side. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Yeah, we love talking about lawyers, don't we?

Chris Gammell: Yes. Almost as much as finance people, and making fun of them, and how much they destroy the economy.

Dave Jones: Speaking of which, we love ranting about the big magazines, and the... We have a thing on UBM, or we have a rant on UBM. Yeah, it's more like a...

Chris Gammell: Really?

Speaker ?: Really?

Chris Gammell: I mean, I know a lot of people at UBM, I like them, but they have this award program, and ACE awards, or whatever, and I saw them advertising that, and it's like, okay, I'll go look at it.

Dave Jones: What does ACE stand for? It's got some wanker acronym, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, like... No, E's at the end, so...

Chris Gammell: Annual Creativity and Electronics. Ah, there you go. So I was looking, I was going to see, oh, maybe I can nominate my buddy Dave, you know, and then it says, oh, $300 to enter.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, we can have the Ampow, we can nominate the Ampow.

Chris Gammell: We could, if we had $300.

Dave Jones: Maybe we can scrape together some donations. I know,

Chris Gammell: I know, I'm sorry, I don't want, no.

Dave Jones: Is there a suitable category? I don't even know. What are the categories? Oh, here we go. Startup of the year, company of the year, executive of the year, design team of the year, innovator of the year, and it goes on and on. Energy technology awards, student of the year, mentor of the year, ultimate products. Wank, wank, wank, lots of ultimate products.

Chris Gammell: There you go. I mean, it's good. I mean, like, it's a good idea to recognize people, but it's just $300, really?

Dave Jones: Yeah, well, that's the thing. That's, you know, the people who win these are the ones who pay the, who fork up the 300 bucks to enter and, you know, some, not, you know, and the big companies, the PR agencies of the big companies. Right. You see, that UBM will target the PR companies, the PR departments of the big organizations and convince them to enter these things. Right. So, you know, and often there'll only be five people enter, so it's not hard to win. You know, it's not like they considered everything out there. They just consider the ones that, you know, fork over the 300 bucks to enter. So, you know, it's a bit, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

Chris Gammell: I'm guessing they're probably going to miss out on small, yeah, they'll miss out on the smaller stuff, but maybe that's not what they're going for. So that was just a little bit of a rant from me, you know, use my platform of complaining this. So,

Dave Jones: fair enough rant. Yeah. I think. Anyway, if you want to enter yourself, January 6th.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. 300 bucks.

Dave Jones: It's the deadline. 300 bucks. 299. Let's don't oversell it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, good point. Good point.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But it's per, it's per category.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Yeah. If you want to enter more than once, you got to, you got to, you got to bone up.

Dave Jones: Oh, but it's a bargain though. You can submit additional nominations in as many categories as apply. Oh no. Sorry. Yes. Per category. So I'm not sure if the 300 bucks and you can enter 10 things in the one category or not. Yeah. Under your 300 bucks. Probably not. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Oh, well. Do they, if you win, do they fly you out there? Cause if they, if you know, otherwise, you know, that's not bad odds, you know, I pay 300 bucks and maybe I could win one of the obscure categories or something. And, and if they fly me out there to accept my award, maybe it's a cheap, maybe, maybe, maybe it's cheap.

Chris Gammell: Maybe that, maybe that's it. I don't know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I have to read the terms and conditions.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, that's always a good idea.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And who's judging? Have they got any industry luminaries?

Chris Gammell: Uh, they didn't ask us. No, they didn't. Why not? I don't know. Maybe they heard about your, your disastrous 7,400 contest. Disastrous? No, I'm kidding. It was good. I know. I just wanted to segue.

Dave Jones: That reminds me. I've got to actually do the final judging too.

Chris Gammell: I thought it was final. I thought it was.

Dave Jones: No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: I saw an article. That's why I was going to, I was trying to segue into this. Oh, no. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, they announced the, um, they announced the, uh, user, uh, they announced the audience. Oh, the audience choice or whatever, you know? Okay.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So, yeah. And that was, well, there's an article on our list here, uh, under followup, but, uh, yeah, there was, uh, they said, uh, the 7,400, uh, capacitive touch array. And this was an awesome project. I don't know if people saw this. Yeah. Yeah. It's very cool. Yeah. The, the, the, the entrant, uh, who was it? Sorry. Uh, basically they, they built a cap touch sense out of discrete, discrete logic. So yeah, pretty darn cool.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Not surprisingly. I, you know, I'm not revealing anything by saying that made my top 10 list, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So,

Dave Jones: yeah. I think it made everyone's top 10 list.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah, it was pretty good. Yeah. There are some, you know, huge standouts like that one. Um, so who knows? It might win. It might not. We don't know. See, I thought this is now we, now we have to like, now we've, um, actually narrowed it down to the individual ones. Now we have to vote in the individual categories, you know, like what, as in like, how much does it score for documentation and all that sort of stuff. So, you know, it's, whereas, whereas up front, we, we just chose our top 10, you know, that was it just based on our gut feel.

Chris Gammell: Gotcha. Are you sure you didn't miss this? Cause I think, uh, I guess not. I guess I'm, I'm reading this wrong. Yeah. Reader's choice was the cap,

Speaker ?: the cap,

Chris Gammell: the cap touch and the, reader's choice. Yeah. And the capacity and its meter won first place from, uh, a top 10. Are you sure? Anyways. I hope I haven't missed it. I better catch up on it immediately after the show. I missed it. Yep.

Dave Jones: I, yeah, I got the emails and I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, we'll, we'll link in the, what I thought was the final list. And, uh, it has a, it has a good layout of all the different entries. So if people didn't see it last week, it's, yeah, it's all, it's all laid out there. So the top 10s.

Dave Jones: And if I have missed it, isn't that rather embarrassing? It shows that they really care about me judging it.

Chris Gammell: Or it shows that you, you're sleeping out there in Australia, buddy.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's what I've been doing a lot of that lately.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, well,

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Well, what else do we want to talk about this week? Cause we have a, but a metric, but a ton of things to talk about and, and no, no real direction about where to go with it.

Dave Jones: I'm surprised you're using, metric.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Right. Bloody yank. Metric butt ton. Yeah. Bingo. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. We've had, there's quite a few today. We've had females. We've had lawyers. We've had, um, yeah. Yeah. Yankee jokes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Getting close to bingo time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right. Please continue.

Chris Gammell: Uh, so how about some, uh, inspiration? There's a, there's a video this week actually about, um, it was actually from, uh, Scotty, James doing, uh, talking about the playing, playing an engineer on TV. Basically, uh, he said, so this is an old interview. Cause I, I think, I believe he passed away, right?

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes. And, Scotty is no longer with us. Yeah. He's, um, ashes. Weren't, weren't his ashes, um, sent on the, on a rocket out to space? I don't know. Ashes was scattered. Yeah. I'm pretty sure. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. You know, I do kind of remember a story about that. Hmm. Anyways, apparently back in the day they did this survey, uh, over at the, the engineering school at university of Milwaukee. And they said over half, whatever year this was, they said over half of the students listed him as an inspiration for engineering.

Dave Jones: Wow. Yeah. It was in, in, it was in 2001.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yep. So yeah, 10 years ago,

Dave Jones: I think.

Chris Gammell: Wow. That's crazy.

Dave Jones: Half, half,

Chris Gammell: half. That's insane. Half. Yeah. I wonder who, uh, I don't, I don't know who people would list these days. I mean, yeah, it's interesting.

Dave Jones: please not, you know, even, Oh, Steve jobs, you know, someone like that, you know, I wouldn't design Apple products, you know,

Chris Gammell: right.

Dave Jones: I don't know. I,

Chris Gammell: I got, I got into, uh, electronics just cause I was looking at it. I was looking at cell phones and I thought, well, I'm about to design one of those. That's kind of cool. That's a, uh, interesting looking gadget. Uh, I don't know.

Dave Jones: I got into it because I'll just love taking shit apart.

Chris Gammell: Right. And that is, that's a very common story. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm too young to actually remember, you know, people ask me that all the time. Oh, when did you realize that, you know, you first, you know, wanted to do electronic, you just know, you just, go into it. Yeah. You know, if you're five or six years old, you can't remember this sort of stuff, you know? Yeah. It's like, yeah, you know, I had my workshop when I was eight, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: So how do you, I don't know. You're just too young to actually remember details back then.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, I agree. I agree.

Dave Jones: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. One of my, I, I, I list some of my, my like modern day heroes, you know, like there's like the Jim Williams out there and there's, but I mean, another one is like, just in general is like Dean Kamen, right? He's, I, I think, I think he's got a lot of exposure, you know, to older engineers like us, older, right? To engineers in industry. Yeah. But, you know, I think there's a lot of exposure for people in the first program too. So that's, I think that's, you know, that,

Dave Jones: that's just like in Australia, you would never have heard of Dean Kamen, right? Oh, really? I, I had never heard of him until a couple of years, you know, yeah, guy invented the segue or something, you know, who cares? Yeah. You know, I never heard of him, but maybe he's more.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I think he will be. Yeah. I'm not sure about how the teams are over in Australia.

Dave Jones: TV shows and stuff, right? And they got,

Chris Gammell: well, yeah, I guess there's that.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. He, he, he, he was interviewed recently on a, there's a U S news article about him and just about innovation versus, you know, trying to create jobs. And basically he had a lot of really good points and, you know, like that's kind of what, what got me thinking about it again.

Dave Jones: And basically one of my, no, sorry. One of my big influence was Dean Hutton from the curiosity show. Everyone in Australia will remember that. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: What, what was that? Like,

Dave Jones: it was a, there were two scientists and they just, you know, took you through projects and how to build, how to build little science projects and stuff. And it ran for like 20 plus years.

Chris Gammell: That's awesome. That's like a bill. And I, the science guy around here who's yeah. Yeah. Bill Nye is still awesome. Right. Still. He's on talk shows all the time now and putting people in their place with science. And it's awesome. But yeah, this article by Dean came in those is just great. I mean, like I put a quote on it. He said, we create a society that's so risk averse. The kids are taught, whatever you do, don't fail. And a consequence of which is that you'll never really try and do big things. And it's like, that's true. I mean, like I'm sure when you were out in the, your electronic shed, you were probably doing nothing but failing at first, right?

Speaker ?: Of course.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's the way you learn, man. And there's that video Jerry has too.

Dave Jones: Even now, half the things I build fail first time because I did something stupid, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm every day. I'm still learning.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And the important thing is that you just keep building it and keep trying them, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, I just spent, you know, a hundred bucks getting a custom PCB made. Oops. I screwed it up.

Speaker ?: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, eh, fail. And you just do it again and again and again until you get so, so good at it that you still fail.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You just keep trying harder and harder things. You just keep trying. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What happens? So, so this was actually, you know, I had asked on Twitter because I sometimes ask on, on Mondays before we record about what people want us to talk about. But, uh, Natalie asked, what are some of your get out of a jam parts? So like, what would you, what are some of your, uh, tricks and, and tips on messing or fixing up a messed up board? Do you have any, any, uh, tips there?

Dave Jones: Oh, actually like you screwed up the layout or something like that.

Chris Gammell: I guess lay out. I mean, like you drill out, you drill out traces or, uh, I mean, you just jumper wires a lot or I just jumper.

Dave Jones: Well, I just, yeah, I am skilled at the art of pin lifting. Pin lifting. Yes. Pin, pin lifting. Yes. Without breaking it off. Cause when you break off that pin, you know, you, you, you do it a few times and you learn, you know, you learn through that. Cause once you bend up the pin and it just snaps off, yeah, you know, that just ruins your week. It really does. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I found like if you,

Dave Jones: if you don't have a, you know, and, and then you can actually get back in there. Then you can get the Dremel out and you can just go around the pin and you can still solder a little wire onto the pin, even if you snap it off flush with the case.

Chris Gammell: So really it,

Dave Jones: yeah, it is. It is possible to solder leads on, even though you snapped off the lead flush with the case. It's, it's doable. It's tricky. It's certainly not a robust thing, but it can be done. So, yep. Anyway. Yes. Yeah. I'm, I'm into mod wires and pin lifting, but then if you got, you know, if you're talking like an eight layer board with blind and buried vias and things like that. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have to start doing some really tricky stuff to get yourself out of the jam.

Chris Gammell: Or like BGA is something like that. Yeah. And you're, and you're screwed.

Dave Jones: It's a, it's a real pain when you screw up the ground. Like, you know, if a ground's an important thing and you've screwed it up and it's, and it's on the inner ground, you know, you've got all these multi grounds on the, one of the inner planes and stuff like that. Trying to fix up that can be a real dog.

Chris Gammell: Right. Cause then you got to pull up every, uh, every reference to it.

Dave Jones: Pull up everything. Oh, it's just, yeah. Or, or then you just go, Oh, screw this. I'm just going to brute force all the grounds together. And that'll be good enough for my first prototype. You know, even though the noise floor is higher or something like that, you can, at, at least you'll have a functional board or something. So,

Chris Gammell: yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I, yeah. it can, it can, it can get tricky.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Other, she also asked about debugging too, and like parts for that. And I don't know, I, I like, like, so when I do lift the pin, sometimes I'll put a resistor in there just to try and see if I can see any drop to see if there's any current flowing through there. Obviously that can, that can, uh, mess you up sometimes cause you've, you know, you might drop too much, but, uh,

Dave Jones: well, and if you're on an, if you're building a board and you know that, you know, you get an inkling that you're going to have to modify this thing, you know, you're not sure it's going to work first go. A lot of the times people will pull their unused pins, um, uh, low, right. Or high or something like that. And they will hard tie them high or low. Yeah. Well, that's bad because you've got to lift the pin or something like that. But if you actually think about your design upfront, then you go, okay, I'll stick a resistor in there.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: In, instead of low, I'll put a zero ohm and pull it low through a resistor. Yeah. It's more work to assemble. It's more space on the board, but if it's only a prototype, then you don't have to lift the pin and stuff like that. If you have to use that pin, you can just sort of take off the resistor and bang, you've got some pads to attach to. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I learned that one the hard way and I've started doing, I started doing that designs too, to the point where I've kind of gone over Zola sometimes where I'll put too many, too many spots in and by the end you're just like, oh, there's no room left. Oopsie. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it, and it, and it turns out like some demo board or something and all these pins are fanned out to connectors. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Uh, and you can tell that if you open up, sometimes if you open up a commercial product, like you open up a scope or something like that, you can often see that all these unused pins are just bought out to these header connectors because they wanted to use them during debugging or something like that. You know? Oh yeah. It was like an FPGA or something too. That,

Chris Gammell: that is like one of my favorite things about FPGAs is that you can, you can just keep jumbling the inside of the FPGA and bringing out different pins. I know that a lot of like vendors are doing like the, the internal logic analyzers and scopes and stuff, but inside an FPGA, but I love being able to just grab all, all any pin I want to and just route it straight out. It's awesome. So people know of any, uh, I always like looking for those too, like the, the real high density, uh, connectors, the real high density pin count connectors. Oh,

Dave Jones: I hate those. No, use a 0.1 inch bloody header, man. No. Be a real man.

Chris Gammell: Use a 0.1 inch header. Yeah. You got too much room. See the thing is I have angled pussy. No, that's the thing. I have, I have the, the real small, the small pitch connectors and then I have a breakout board and then, and then it goes to the, the 0.1 inch. Oh, that's ridiculous.

Dave Jones: Just put the 0.1 inch in and be done with it.

Chris Gammell: Then you can drop this thing anywhere. And then you have just test spots all over your, what if you had like four FPGAs, right? And you have, you know, you want to get 16, you have 16 extra pins on each one. You don't want to put 0.1 inch, uh, connectors on. Yes, you do. No, no, you don't.

Dave Jones: Yes, you do. You can always find room. Come on.

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: Stick it on the bottom. Be creative.

Chris Gammell: Stick it under the, you know, daughterboard. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Be creative, man.

Chris Gammell: Just make more space. Just expand the product. Just make it bigger. Right, Dave? Absolutely. Yeah. Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Products is too bloody small these days anyway.

Chris Gammell: Seriously, Dave's eyes are just getting totally,

Dave Jones: right.

Chris Gammell: Too old, man. You're getting too old.

Dave Jones: I don't wear glasses. I'm about the only one I know who doesn't wear glasses.

Chris Gammell: Well, then stop complaining. No,

Dave Jones: but it just, it just ruins your day when you, you know, you want to hack something on, you want to hack a lead on there and you've got this little pissant custom bloody, you know, 0.5 mill, you know, one millimeter pitch connector on there, surface SMD connector on there. What a pain in the ass. At least put some 0.1 inch headers on there.

Chris Gammell: I, I like the idea, but sometimes you just don't have space, man. Sometimes it's just a space thing. Nah. It's just a space thing.

Dave Jones: Tell your story, walking.

Chris Gammell: Whatever.

Dave Jones: Ah, boy. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Uh, gone dead. Yeah. I, uh, so what's next? What else, what else we got? I'm, uh,

Dave Jones: I listed, you've made this list so darn long. You can't find anything on it. See,

Chris Gammell: there's your problem. Analysis paralysis.

Dave Jones: Now, that's the name of today's show. Analysis, the analysis paralysis. You never heard that before?

Chris Gammell: We have so many options.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I have. I just think it's, yeah, that's a cool term.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You have so many, so many options. You just, yeah. Yeah. I know. Options can be a pain in the ass. Sometimes you just wish, you know, it doesn't matter what, it doesn't have to be electronics. You're searching for something. You got to, you know, you're buying a new phone or something. You got too many options. Sometimes you wish there was just one option. So then you had no choice.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, that happens on, yeah, even in electronics, you know, you can go to DigiKey and you're like, you're like, oh, oh, cool. 10,000 DC to DC converters. Yeah, that's right. Awesome. You know, I had nothing else to do with my afternoon. Thanks a lot, guys. And then, you know, there's like the 18 different versions of one of them. So that kind of inflates. Yeah, that's right. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: But then when you search, you know, you drill down in the parametric search and you go, right, that one's in salt by price. That one's the cheapest decision made. Yeah,

Chris Gammell: that is what you end up doing. You latch onto something and then you end up. That's it. Picking some crappy part. I don't know. I wish, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's too bad there's not like a way to search on those parametric searchers by like, just the pins you need, basically. Like, that would be a good way to do it, but monstrosity to maintain.

Speaker ?: Well,

Chris Gammell: you can search by pin count. How do you mean? Ah, like, like, you're like, oh, I want a shutdown pin. You know, like, they don't classify it by what pins they have. Right. And they all call them different things and they all have different functions. Yeah. You know, there's, because of the, the variation from package to package, it just,

Dave Jones: I was doing that the other day. Yeah. I wanted to, you know, I wanted to, as I was after a regulator and I wanted to eliminate all the ones that didn't have a shutdown. Cause I didn't want to shut down pin. I didn't want an extra pin to have to mess up, right? Exactly. That's right.

Chris Gammell: You have to put a zero ohm resistor there. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Ohm resistor in there just in case I got the logic wrong. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know, and that's right. You know, so, but you know, you can be a bit smart in that. You, like, you know, that a three pin one is not going to have a shutdown pin, you know, it just doesn't have the pins for it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so sometimes you, sometimes you can do it that way, but yeah, I totally agree. Yeah. That'd be a nice feature. Fine chips. If you're listening out there. Yeah. Please add something like that. Well, no, they can't because the whole back end of the digi key. It would be tough.

Chris Gammell: It would be really tough. I mean, it's yeah, it would. The problem is that it's like an IT problem.

Dave Jones: If there were enough categories already.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. You know,

Dave Jones: yeah, yeah. Like you need a monitor. That's bloody 12 foot wide because you've got to scroll that bar all the way across for these parametric.

Chris Gammell: Right. Points, you know? Yep.

Dave Jones: I, it just never fits on the screen. It's just got to scroll across for three screens worth.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Crazy. World's gone mad. Well, not mad, but yeah, it's, it's good. It's gotten, it's gotten complicated.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: Here's, here's another one where the world's gone mad. 31% of new graduates don't have jobs. What the?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I, I, I don't know many new grads anymore. I think I'm far enough outside of school that I, I have, I'm sure some of our listeners are. I mean, if you're a, I'm sorry, if, if you can't find work that, that really sucks. Uh, it does. Yeah. I mean, the, the thing that's frustrating about it is that, you know, we keep hearing over and over and over again that, oh, well, there's not enough engineers, not enough engineers. Like, well, really? Because maybe it's just not the engineers that you want. That's, that's what it really is. Yeah. Well, it's the matchup. That's always the case. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Everyone wants exactly what they want. And yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So there's like, and they complain if they can't get it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. There's, this is from a salary survey of, of, uh, electronic design. And they, they like, they like doing salad. Most of the magazines end up doing a salary survey once per year, but, um, 44% only. So this is all recent grads. 44% are employed full time. That seems pretty low. I gotta say. Uh, yeah. Does that all add up to, I'm not sure their, uh, numbers all, do they all add up? Eight. Yeah, I guess they do. Uh, double checking their article for, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It looks like it's right.

Dave Jones: Pop up ad. No. Electronic design.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Continue on or wait eight seconds. Yeah. I'm going to, who that freescale. You bastards. You're paying for these Primo. How much does this Primo ad cost? Like $40,000 or something to have that pop up in your face. Kiss my ass. Yeah. Oh, there you go. Don't buy freescale parts. Cause I paid for that. Pop up ad that just pissed me off. Yep. Electronic design. All of them do it. EE times. We've ranted about them before. I'm sure that's a bingo square somewhere.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Bloody hell. Ah, okay. Oh yeah. That was a nice pie chart with nice big figures there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And if you click through to it too, there's, it shows other stuff too. Uh, you know, salaries and, and offers and everything else. I just wonder, I mean, I, I always wonder about this cause you, there, there is a big, like, there's a big group of engineers that are supposed to be retiring in the next 10 years. That's another thing you always hear about, right? Yeah. Engineers. You always hear that. Yeah. Yeah. Where's the talent coming from? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Well, companies really need to start hiring now. I mean, like you're going to just get screwed. Like once if, you know, if the stock market got better, if the stock market got 50% better tomorrow and all these engineers say, yeah, I could retire. I'm guessing that a bunch of them are going to retire, you know, like even if they're not at the, the, the age that they said they were going to, it's just about opportunity at that point. So, um, yeah, right. Better start, uh, hiring the youngins now. I think it's, it's an,

Dave Jones: what aspect of engineering is this? They just say engineering, but because it's in electronic design, I assume it's electronic engineering.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I would assume the same.

Dave Jones: Or is it, or if they just pinch the data from some bloody, someone else. And it's just, yeah, yeah. Government thing. It's just generic. And they lump engineering under the, all the same banner. Cause all engineers are engineers, aren't they? You know,

Chris Gammell: that, that actually doesn't happen though.

Dave Jones: Cause then people who build buildings and bridges are the same as electronic design. And I think,

Chris Gammell: I think in China and India, the, um, the title engineer sometimes gets lumped in for like technicians and such as well, or even just, um,

Dave Jones: yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think it's a much more broad term and other, other parts of the world, although it's arguably, arguably pretty broad here as well, because, um, you know, there's not as much, uh, professional engineering stuff. So,

Dave Jones: wow. Here's a shock. They've got, they've got your, uh, dream jobs. They've got a graphic, which shows people's dream jobs. Yes. Wow. Big surprise in this list. Google, NASA, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Apple.

Chris Gammell: I would work one of those places. Which one? The one that rhymes with Dougal. Uh, and maybe you've not even, I don't know.

Dave Jones: If I had a choice out of all those, I'd work at NASA. Give me a break. Yeah,

Chris Gammell: maybe. NASA's got a lot of, you know, Google's so me too. It would, working at Google now would not be as cool as working at Google 10 years ago. Right. But, um, I think the, the thing is Google's getting more into hardware. I think that, that part's pretty cool. I think the, the fact that they're,

Dave Jones: Oh yeah, true. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: 10 years ago, you wouldn't be able to, right? But now they've got, you know, those cars that do, um, like the street view. It's just the fact that they're interacting with the world so much more that they have, they have need for hardware, which is, and Android and everything else too. So, I'm a fan of that. I don't know.

Dave Jones: What, what would impress people these days? Cause like back before the Googles and the Apples came out, came along, right? If you said you worked at NASA, you know, if you're at a dinner, Oh yeah, I work at NASA, then you're like right up the pecking order. Right. That's pretty hard to top.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's rockstar kind of stuff. I think that still happens. You know,

Chris Gammell: sweeping floors. Right. I think that still happens with NASA. I don't know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm sure it does. It's NASA, right?

Chris Gammell: They do some cool stuff. What about like a CERN? If someone told me they worked at CERN these days, I would, I wouldn't forget about that. I would be very impressed.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Chris Gammell: CERN, CERN.

Dave Jones: But your average person doesn't know what CERN is. They have no idea. Well,

Chris Gammell: that's their problem.

Dave Jones: You would have to explain it. And even if you did explain it, then their eyes would just roll back in your head.

Chris Gammell: I can imagine that at a cocktail party, explain it. Well, what we do is we really quickly speed these particles around a circle and then we smash them together. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And then we spend six months analyzing the little picture that comes out of it. Yeah. Yeah. And it costs, you know, $12 trillion to do it or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's the thing. I think a lot of these, a lot of these top six are based on, you know, consumer brand, you know, like big name stuff. And if you ask an engineering student what they want to work at, they don't know about the, the smaller places that might be, have really cool work.

Chris Gammell: of course. Right? Yeah. Um, I don't know. I don't know what would do it. I don't go to cocktail parties, Dave. Sorry. I'm not a fancy, fancy person like you are. I, uh, I sit in my house. Me,

Dave Jones: fancy?

Chris Gammell: Oh boy. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway, I, I, I reckon that's just engineering in general, this thing, because it doesn't say otherwise. So you've got to assume that it's just lumped under. Yeah. There's 61% earning under $30,000. That seems kind of low. Is that for real?

Chris Gammell: That does seem kind of low. I mean, maybe it's just based on location.

Dave Jones: This is U S I am presuming. This is, you know, cause the world revolves around the U S of course.

Chris Gammell: So, uh, maybe not. Yeah, that's true. I guess if it was broader, then it would push that number. Anyway,

Dave Jones: I'm sure this is a U S study done by some U S think tank. And, uh, yep.

Chris Gammell: That's low though.

Dave Jones: But there you go. That is low, man. 61% under $30,000. Yeah. Please. If you, if you're listening to this and you earn under 30, well,

Chris Gammell: you want to send us your salary info and your social security number and your credit cards.

Dave Jones: So we can sell your data to the evil corporate empire. Like everyone else does. Nah, screw that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. We'll just,

Dave Jones: but yeah, I mean, if you're willing to admit that you've been hired for under 30,000 bucks, I mean,

Chris Gammell: there's different costs of living in different areas. So that's good. I mean, that can happen.

Dave Jones: I mean, that's, I'm not sure what the minimum wage here in Australia is now, but it's got to be close to that.

Chris Gammell: Dave, just because you make millions a year. Don't, uh, don't hate. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No, I just, I don't know. Is that a big figure in the U S I, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Um,

Dave Jones: you know, I have no sense of scale.

Chris Gammell: I think,

Dave Jones: well, I have some sense of scale.

Chris Gammell: I think if you're living in a metropolitan area that it would not, it would, California, that would not fly. I must say adjusted this down. No, it wouldn't fly. Um, maybe, you know, more Midwestern kind of stuff, but I think that's low for Cleveland, I think. So that's my only reference point. I don't know.

Dave Jones: And there's, but there is hope people. There are 10% of people who start on more than $70,000.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, and if it's, and if it's just engineering and not electronics engineering, those people are probably petroleum engineers. So, uh, yeah. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: All right. Let's get back to, uh, yeah, let's get back to some, uh, chip stuff. In fact, let's do some, uh, get back to reality. No, let's go the other direction. Let's, let's go to a chip of the week. That is, the opposite. Oh, yes. The opposite of reality. Why don't you tell us about this, Dave? Cause you seem extremely excited about this.

Dave Jones: I just love the simplicity of this chip. Is it, what is it? A 12 pin? Hang on. Let me, let me call it up. It's not a big chip.

Chris Gammell: 14 pin.

Dave Jones: It's a, it's a 14 pin, uh, chip.

Chris Gammell: Metal, metal can.

Dave Jones: And it's made by a company called Maxwell, who make obscure devices. Let's say.

Chris Gammell: Let's wait for people to make that judgment on their own. Right, Dave? Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And it's a, it's powered from five volts. You hook it up to five volts and it's sole purpose. It has one output pin. And the sole purpose of that output pin is to go low when there is a nuclear explosion.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Dave Jones: How awesomely specific is this chip? It's amazing. You hook up five volts and yep, pin two goes low. It's an open collector output. It goes low. It detects a nuclear explosion. What else can you say? It's freaking brilliant. I want one.

Chris Gammell: I, I, I'd say, uh, check pin one and make sure your power is there and that, that, that didn't blink and go low too. Cause you do not want to, uh, you do not want to get this one wrong.

Dave Jones: And the pin is actually called NED. Um, and that stands for nuclear event detection. Bar,

Chris Gammell: bar net Dave. It's gotta be.

Dave Jones: A bar, bar net. I stand corrected. It is active low. Active low.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep. Oh man. So it, uh, it detects around what? 10, two times 10 to the sixth, uh, sieverts per second, right? A total, or no, one times 10 to the sixth sieverts. And, uh,

Dave Jones: dude, I'm sure we're talking out our ass again.

Chris Gammell: No, well that's, I mean, that's the right unit. I mean, I'm going to have to go back and check XKCD or talk to Jeff in order to, uh, I don't know. I mean, yeah, the point is that there's something like this. We, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: It's it. I'm sure, I'm sure they sell a lot of them. Each one comes individually tested and certified as well. When you, I am sure this is like $10,000 a chip, right? I'm sure it's not cheap. Yeah. And, um, and if you're wondering what its use is, um, it's primarily designed for, um, space, uh, satellites and things when they detect a nuclear explosion. Yeah. Then this pin goes low and I don't know, it shuts down. Yeah. You probably,

Chris Gammell: you probably go into a battery save mode at that point, right? You would,

Dave Jones: you would go into a safe mode.

Chris Gammell: You blew up the world. Yeah. I'll shut down for a while. I'll come back.

Dave Jones: Your satellite's still working. Yeah. The satellite will, you know,

Chris Gammell: yep.

Dave Jones: Satellite will, uh, uh, cover in a minute or something like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Because the whole idea is, is to detect the incoming. Event. And then through the bigger event, which knocks out all your electronics by the time that comes along, then it would have, hopefully you've shut down some stuff. Yeah. You save data.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You save data or you, you know, bring down a shield or something that, I don't know. No idea. Anyway, if you're, if you've, if you've actually designed stuff like this, then let us know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And we should thank Craig for sending this in. This was not our find. Thank you very much. He sent it in with an email and he said, if that's not a chip of the week material, the gentleman, I don't know what would please you.

Speaker ?: And we,

Dave Jones: we agree totally.

Chris Gammell: It's brilliant. And, I just love the simplicity of it. Oh, brilliant. Yep.

Dave Jones: It doesn't do any, there's no feature creep in this, right? It is just, pin two goes low when there's a nuclear explosion.

Chris Gammell: What if we had two pins? No,

Dave Jones: well, there, there, there is another one which does have a second output pin. And I reckon that's, you wouldn't use that one. It's just too complicated. They actually have a range of these chips. It isn't just one. They have got a complete,

Dave Jones: okay.

Chris Gammell: I didn't look at it that much. Oh man.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Oh,

Dave Jones: it's just brilliant. It is brilliant. Maxwell, it's, I, you know, it's, maybe it's obsolete these days, but you can still buy these sort of things. I don't know. No, no, it's on their website actually. Maybe it's not.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, another.

Dave Jones: It's under their category, nuclear event detectors for space. Components. Okay. There you go. Okay. Yep. And they've got four, four different devices in the range.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's amazing.

Dave Jones: Oh, what is a nuclear event flat? They're, they've actually got a parametric list here. And that's one of the, that's one of the parameters is nuclear event flat. Yes or no?

Chris Gammell: Flat?

Dave Jones: Flat.

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: F L A T. They're, they're all exactly the same. They all operate from minus 55 to plus 125. They all have the same detection range. They all have the same supply voltage. The screening level's different. 10% or 100%.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: That's the only difference between the parts. There you go.

Chris Gammell: Go figure. Oh, so this is Maxwell. These are the guys that make, I didn't realize who this was. These are the guys that make, uh, super caps and ultra caps. They make, uh,

Dave Jones: Oh, they make tons of stuff. Yeah. I didn't realize who it was. One of the things. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah. Hmm. That's fun. Um, Oh, so we had one other, it's not really a chip of the week, but I wanted to mention it too. Cause I thought, I thought it was interesting seeing, I don't know. I see, I'm seeing more and more stuff in packaging these days and, and just focus on it. You know, I, I've heard, I've heard that before when, you know, you, especially with, um, you know, like Silicon and when you run out of room on the process node, usually you have to, I think there was an article about that. When you run out of room on a process node, you usually have to start innovating around the, the, the packaging in order to, you know, reduce parasitics and, and everything else. And, uh, and this is kind of going in the opposite direction though. So there was recent, uh, announcement for, I don't know. It wasn't even an announcement. It was just a, a product introduction from NXP and, uh, they put a Cortex M zero in a dip package. Uh, brilliant. Yeah, that's great. I mean, uh, it's great. It's awesome. Yeah. I, maybe, I don't know if they're specifically taking on low cost markets or hobbyist markets. I can't imagine anyone sitting in a, a conference room being like, we're going to target the hobbyist market. There's a lot of money in that. Uh, but,

Dave Jones: Hey, the smart, no, there's no money in it, but that's prototyping. Maybe, I mean, prototyping, it brings people in and then they're the ones who go on to design products in the future. And then they'll remember, ah, I use that brilliant, you know, um, Cortex in the dip package from NXP. I love it. NXP. I'm going to use their products in my.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Do that. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm doing for work. Right. At a point where smart companies think like that. It, no, you don't make, they're not going to make money on these dip chips. Right.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: I mean,

Chris Gammell: as evidenced by the fact that no one makes them. I mean, I mean like the packaging. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. But it's a smart move. Yeah. And I guess you could always, if you're,

Chris Gammell: if you've already, uh, if you've already got that code and everything written that, you know, you want to breadboard or whatever, then you could always just move it over to a different package and make it surface mount or whatever else. So definitely a cool idea. And I mean, it runs up to 50 megahertz, which isn't bad. I don't know if you'd, uh, start running into some breadboard limitations at 50 megahertz.

Dave Jones: Ah, yeah, you would rule of thumb breadboard stops at about 10. Okay. It's kind of like the rule of rule of thumb there. Okay. So, so, yeah, but you certainly can, can operate higher because it's only internally operating at that. It, it, it isn't like you're trying to, you know, drive, you know, it's not like trying to toggle the output pins at 50 megahertz. So,

Chris Gammell: you know,

Dave Jones: um, especially if you use the internal oscillator, if you try and you hook on an external 50 megahertz.

Chris Gammell: So yeah,

Dave Jones: an external 50 megahertz crystal. But if it's like an external 10 megahertz crystal, then it's got an internal, um, internal, um, uh, phase lock loop that ups it. Then, you know, that,

Chris Gammell: yeah,

Dave Jones: that'd work just fine.

Chris Gammell: And it's got a internal power measurement unit too. So that's kind of cool too. You know, they're really targeting kind of an all in one solution, which is definitely cool. So nice. I'm down. I like it. I'm down with this. Uh, I don't know if we have a, uh,

Dave Jones: I sniff a design contest.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. That would be a good idea. If only someone thought of a way to constrain that contest, you know, some kind of memory based something or other. One K. That'd be weird. I,

Dave Jones: yeah, we talked about on here before. Would you limit? I, I would limit in size and memory, not pins.

Chris Gammell: Oh, definitely not. No, no.

Dave Jones: What?

Chris Gammell: No, you don't agree. No, no, I do agree. I would definitely not. I would limit, I would, I mean, we agreed about this last week. I think, uh, Oh, right. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah, probably did. I wouldn't,

Chris Gammell: I wouldn't limit pins. So,

Dave Jones: right.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. Hmm. Let's do it. You, you really, really? I, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe when you're, yeah, maybe when you're moved into your office, huh?

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Once you got all that room, you can start hiring, you know, workers and they can do all the sorting through the thousands of entries. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: With all that money I make. Right.

Chris Gammell: We can call, call up vendors and work out the, yeah, that'd be lots of fun, buddy. You have no idea. You have no idea, man.

Dave Jones: I reckon it's doable though. I reckon you could actually, it'd be the first contest. You could probably convince multiple manufacturers to get involved in. Cause there's never, as far as I, I, I know, and please correct me if anyone knows that I'm wrong, that there's been no contest where, which is a cross manufacturer contest. You could say that the triple five tech, but nobody cared. Right. That's not really, you know,

Chris Gammell: nobody cared. Let's be honest. Let's be honest here.

Dave Jones: People did any triple five manufacturers actually sponsor the contest.

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

Dave Jones: No, there you go. Whereas I think this one, you could actually get half a dozen of the top semiconductor, the top microcontroller manufacturers to, actually pony up real money for something like this. I, you know, has all the hallmarks of being the biggest contest ever. Just saying.

Chris Gammell: Maybe.

Dave Jones: Then again, it could completely fall on sarsen. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think if, if there is a contest, there's a, there's a piece of art I put, I posted on here. I don't know where I found it. I might've been native fruit or something, but, uh, there's a piece of art or so-called art. It's a, uh, something made out of circuit boards. Some are 14 on the list for you, Dave.

Dave Jones: I, I haven't seen it yet, but I know what the title is.

Chris Gammell: Someone made a toilet out of circuit boards. I, as you do. I know, I don't. I, why?

Dave Jones: Oh, come on. That's frigging brilliant. I'm looking at the photo.

Chris Gammell: Have you ever like reached into a box of circuit boards before and like gotten like the, the piercings and like, you're like, you're like, you pull your hand out and you're just like, oh man, I just got lead poisoning. You know?

Dave Jones: Oh, come on. You got to, this is freaking art, man. It is art. This is real art.

Chris Gammell: It's probably art. Yeah. It's, you can buy it. This is brilliant. You can buy it on Etsy. You can buy it on Etsy.

Dave Jones: Oh, really?

Chris Gammell: PCB creations. This might, this might need to go in the office, Dave. Yeah. There's a, there's a whole site on, you know, you know, Etsy. It's like a, it's like an art marketplace.

Dave Jones: it's a US.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's a great reuse of,

Dave Jones: it's only 500 bucks US. I'd buy that.

Chris Gammell: Oh boy. Yeah.

Dave Jones: How much was shipping cost? Is it actual size?

Chris Gammell: I can't tell how big that is. no,

Dave Jones: it's not just, no, you can see the size of the chip. 12 inches. You can scale it up. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's pretty small. Okay.

Chris Gammell: 12 inches by 11 inches by five inches.

Dave Jones: Five inches. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's not too big, but still pretty great artwork. I, I like it. I mean, and you can,

Dave Jones: this has to like this sort of stuff. I have to get for the new office. I've got to put like electronic art in there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, you're going to,

Dave Jones: if you've got any good, you've got any good suggestions, let me know.

Chris Gammell: You might have to make your own. Cause this stuff is not cheap.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know. I said before I suck at art, man. I wish I had some talent to do shit like this. I,

Chris Gammell: this is good stuff. I like it.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I like it.

Dave Jones: Maybe I'll build a full size one.

Chris Gammell: A full size PCB toilet. Yeah. That, that would, that would cost a bit just in a board files.

Dave Jones: Right. I do have a bunch of old boards, old blank PCBs. Yeah. If you've got a suggestion, what I can do with them. Unfortunately, they're all black. And you can't really see, you know, they're not as artistic, I guess, as say, yeah, yeah. Traditional green board with, you know, all through whole components and you can see the tracks and stuff like that. So,

Chris Gammell: do you have, it's all right. I mean, it's not like blank blank. It's like actually routed and everything.

Dave Jones: These are route. Yeah. These are fully, you know, So maybe you could acid etch the top off. They've got black. Well, I asked that in the forum. I asked, you know, if you can get a, actually, if you can actually etch off the, the mask, if you can actually etch off the solar mask, and there are some nasty chemicals that can do it.

Chris Gammell: Sweet.

Dave Jones: So, you know, I'm, yeah. That would look cool.

Chris Gammell: I think that'd look really cool.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I know. If I actually, if I actually, you know, if you have any experience in that, actually taking off the solar mask and leaving the copper, then please let me know, because if it does work, then yeah, maybe I'll go to the effort to actually do that.

Chris Gammell: Definitely.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Cause I was thinking like having one wall, you know, like a whole, yeah, just a circuit board wall, you know, kind of thing. So I, I don't think I have that many that would cover a whole wall, but you know, it could, I could certainly have a big picture frame worth or something. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's too bad. Do you have like a local board manufacturer that might be able to give you some extras? I don't know if they probably wouldn't hand those out, huh? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, I don't know. Well, you don't, if you don't ask, you don't get right.

Chris Gammell: That's true. That's true.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Hmm. Interesting.

Chris Gammell: Well, I love it. I love it. Toilet. Looks like we're almost at the end of our amp hour. Do we have any last stories we want to, you want to get to? I always, uh,

Dave Jones: any wonky shonky products?

Chris Gammell: No shonky products. Nope. For this.

Dave Jones: Oh, if you've got a shonky product, send it in, please. We're running low.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hmm. No, we, we're scraping the barrel here.

Chris Gammell: We are. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: We're such radio professionals. We can't, uh,

Chris Gammell: there's a, there's, there's a video that someone sent in a while ago that about Jim. I mentioned Jim Williams earlier in the show, but I wanted to mention it here too. There's, there's a tribute that they did actually. It's, uh, Bob Dobkin and Greg Kovacs and Steve Pietkiewicz and Steve Young. And, uh, it's pretty great. It's, it was at the computer history museum and, you know, they're just kind of sitting around remembering his life. And kind of nice closure on a lot of the work he did and everything. And obviously Bob Dobkin worked, they all worked with him a lot. So, um, definitely, definitely worth a watch. It's an hour long. So, uh, you know, gotta be in for the long haul, but yeah, it's, it's great. I liked it a lot.

Dave Jones: You've put a Reddit, a thing on here from Reddit. You're a Reddit fan. I'm a huge Reddit fan. Somebody transmitted RS-232 over a wet string.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's been done before. That's old school. I had not seen that before.

Chris Gammell: And maybe this, maybe this wasn't.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. You know what? The schematic date is 1994.

Dave Jones: Ah, there you go. Not everything you see on Reddit's new, folks. No,

Chris Gammell: I didn't think it would be, but have you, you've seen this before too? I, I just never seen that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. I've, I've seen RS-232 on wet string. So it's just,

Chris Gammell: yeah. Using it as a transportation media. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's, yeah. It's quirky. It's fun. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Have you ever done it? No. Yes. No.

Dave Jones: Uh, no, I thought about, no, I thought about doing it once, but yeah, no. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Oh,

Dave Jones: well, I think that's, it sort of takes the fun out of it. Like, you know, if you know somebody's done it and it works, what's the fun of doing it yourself? You know,

Chris Gammell: I think there's arguments for it. Oh,

Dave Jones: there, well, there's some fun, but yeah, sort of, you know,

Chris Gammell: some people would argue that it's all about the process, right? It's just about getting it to work yourself. Yeah,

Dave Jones: exactly. Whereas if somebody come to me and said, I wonder if you can send, you know, RS-232 over a, uh, over a piece of wet string. And then you go, ah, well, let's give it a go. But if you know somebody's done it and it works well, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, it's kind of fun in a science fairy kind of way.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hmm. And an amateur rocket went up 121,000 feet. Yep. We'll just link that one in because it'll be old news next week. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Or is it old news already? It already is. That's the thing. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: I think we need a list to refresh so, uh, people can send their stories in. It's kind of a little petering out of our stories at the end there. But yeah, uh, I don't know. I've had such a busy week at, uh, with my troubleshooting that, or I guess busy Monday and busy week last week. It bogs you down, you know, man, it's just, uh, yep. It'll do that. You get home at night, you're just like, oh, oh, you don't have that anymore.

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: Lucky, lucky duck.

Dave Jones: Not working for the man anymore.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: All right. The only one I'm trying to beat these days is laziness. Well,

Chris Gammell: hopefully your new office with all your toilet art will, That's the plan. will, uh, will inspire you. Yep.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Cool.

Dave Jones: All right. Well, we'll catch you all next week. Yeah. See you guys later. Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye.