#72 – Kismetic Keithley Katowse

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV Blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell from Chris Gammell's Analog Life.

Dave Jones: And you are free!

Chris Gammell: Free, yeah. I'm free. Free for a week. I got a week.

Dave Jones: Free, free, free for a week. Do tell. Do tell some big news on the Chris Gammell front.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, my life is about to change. I recently left my job at Keithley Instruments and I'm moving on to unnamed company because I don't name the company I'm working for, at least not on the Amp Hour. Yeah, fair call. Yeah, I'm excited. I don't know, I got a week off. This is the best part. Right. I got all the time in the world, man. I spent the day today pulling apart an old electrophoresis supply that my sister-in-law gave me. She picked it out of the trash at her bio building. Right. Yeah, I've been mucking around in a thousand volts of oil all day. Sweet. Yeah, it's great.

Dave Jones: Doing nothing, huh? Yeah. Just sitting there bumming around.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Drinking beer and... You say somewhere that this is your first... I think it was on your blog, maybe. Yeah. I actually read your blog the other day. Go figure. Wow. Wow. That you said this is your first week off since you've left school.

Chris Gammell: I think it is, yeah.

Dave Jones: What the hell, man? What's wrong with you?

Chris Gammell: I know. I know. It's... Well, you know how it is in the US, too. There's less vacation time in the US.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Yeah. Well, we have almost four weeks a year here. Well, we get four weeks a year paid. That's nice. So...

Chris Gammell: That's great. And that's on top of national holidays, then, too?

Dave Jones: That is on top. Yes. We get paid... Yes, I believe so. Jeez. It's so long since I've worked or cared about that stuff. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Now every day is a vacation, right, buddy?

Dave Jones: That's right. Yeah. Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, here's standard two weeks. Two weeks a year.

Dave Jones: Okay, two weeks. Yeah. Ours is four. Ours is four paid weeks. If you're... You know, if you have a standard nine-to-five job, then, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And, you know, I usually don't... I don't go on big holidays, so I don't, you know, travel that much. Just hoarding all that cash, huh? No, I don't even get the cash. All that cash you're getting from engineering. I like taking, like, a Friday off. You know, I'd rather take a Friday off throughout the year, you know, a bunch of those and get three-day weekends and take a whole week off. Yeah. You know, it's just preference. Yeah. As I get older, I'll be able to, you know, afford vacations and... And... It's not like I can't afford vacations. I just don't make it a priority, basically. That's the real thing. Okay. So, yeah. Yeah, this is my first one off, really. And, you know, I used to work a lot more, too, at my first job at Samsung.

Dave Jones: And you've got a week off and you're not going anywhere. He's bumming around home. Oh, man.

Chris Gammell: I got a list. Working on electronics. I have a list. She's nerd. 35 items long. I am so excited about it. I got projects to do. I got housework that I'm going to, you know, put in shelves and all this other crap and clean it up the bench, reworking the bench.

Dave Jones: And you're pissing away your time recording the air power.

Chris Gammell: Oh, this is my favorite part of the week, buddy.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I'm excited. I'm really excited. So, you used to work for Keith Lee. Keith Lee Instruments. Yeah. In Cleveland.

Dave Jones: Some people knew. Just like some people knew that I worked for Altium. Right. It wasn't a huge secret. But like you, I didn't really like to say that I worked there. I just like to ignore the fact that I worked there. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And, you know, I can talk about electronics without talking about work. And I can talk, you know, like just stuff that just general ideas and abstract it out. Like if I'm talking about a, you know, a linear regulator that I've encountered, it doesn't need to be like something I'm working on. It's just something I encountered. So, that's why. And I think it's a good idea to, you know, separate work and hobby stuff. Same here. Yeah.

Dave Jones: There's so many things to talk about. The world of electronics is infinite.

Chris Gammell: So, it's not like shorter stuff. The tough part was that. And the tough part is that you like test and measurement so much. And that if people have ever noticed, I mean, every time Dave starts talking about test and measurement. Agilent or. Actually, every time you brought up Agilent, who's one of Keithley's competitors, I would always just kind of clam up and be like, yep. Hope Dave shuts up soon and changes the topic. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That got a little tougher when Keithley got bought by Danaher. And that's.

Dave Jones: Yes. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So, Danaher obviously owns Tektronix as well and Fluke. Yeah.

Dave Jones: The evil Danaher group. Oh.

Chris Gammell: As I keep calling them.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I call them Papa Danaher. I.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's. They're evil. They have what's called the Danaher way. Yeah. And it's the Danaher way or the highway. It's like the HP way except you get screwed. You know. That's. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, I'm just a lowly engineer there. I didn't really experience a lot of that.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Well, no.

Dave Jones: I've heard some horror stories out of tech. I was almost going to do a blog on it once. I had so many. But when the big buy. You know, when the Keithley buyout happened. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And I heard lots of stories from people.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You know, I've talked to Jerry about it because Jerry's got a lot of friends out in Portland who used to work at tech. And there's a lot of bad blood out there. And it is tough. You know. Like it was. Yeah. Tech was really big. I mean, it is really. It was a huge. It probably too big. I mean, honestly, in a modern day. In a modern day world, I think it was too big. But that doesn't make it any easier on all the really smart engineers that lost their job. Right. Yeah. So. And, you know, you compare even just the old scopes and just how much more. You know, they were more component level. Right. So there's a lot more individual circuits to work on versus today. It's more ASIC based. And so there's a lot of efficiencies there, too. I don't know. I really can't speak to tech because I didn't work there. What I can say about it all, though, is that, and this is the thing I wanted to focus on, is that I love the people at Keithley and the people I met at tech. And man, they were. Cool. I met people at Fluke, too. I met people that worked on the Calibrator, the Fluke Calibrator. Yep. Man, it's just, I'm really going to miss the test and measurement industry just because great people who like really challenging problems. And, you know, that's, it's kind of out of my life now. Not like I'm going to like the dum-dum house, but, you know, like it's just a different industry. So there's different things to focus on.

Dave Jones: I can say something positive about the Danaher group, if you like.

Chris Gammell: Like, all right, let's hear it.

Dave Jones: Being so massively ruthless and the Danaher way, it does actually work, apparently. And they are apparently a very massively profitable group. And when they take over companies, they know how to slash them and slice them and dice them and get the absolute maximum efficiency out of them. And they do. And they return, like, I think I read somewhere it was like 30% per year for the last 10 years. Like, they're just brilliant at, you know, absolutely slaughtering companies until they're so efficient that they, but too bad for the engineers that work there. Yeah, that's part of the problem, right? Yeah, that's part of the problem.

Chris Gammell: It's like if you're good at business, you're not very good at, you know, necessarily

Dave Jones: engineering goodwill.

Chris Gammell: Making it cushy, right, yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. What companies do they own? They own Fluke. They own Keithley. They own Tektronix.

Chris Gammell: Seabird is another one.

Dave Jones: Yeah, they own Mega. Beckman Coulter. Do they own? No. No? No.

Chris Gammell: No. They own a lot of different... They started in the... Danaher started with, like, more tool and die kind of companies. Yeah. And they kind of built up from there. And that's where they developed a lot of their system. But like I said, I don't really know much about it. They just started the test and measurement thing. And that's why Keithley got bought back in whenever it was. But yeah, I've seen some rough times at Keithley. I mean, I started there in 08. I mean, 09 wasn't easy for anyone. But test and measurement kind of took a nosedive. Right. I think I'm leaving on the upswing, which is stupid. But, you know, whatever. Ah, well. Yeah. Change is as good as a holiday. Yeah, you said that before. I know.

Dave Jones: And I bet you feel like a million bucks, right?

Chris Gammell: Well, the beer helps. But... Right. Yeah. I mean, it feels good.

Dave Jones: You must feel good. You feel excited, right? You feel like, you know, oh, it's change, you know? Yeah. It's not the everyday slog.

Chris Gammell: It's the, oh, yeah, I got something big and new coming up. And that's...

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Change is definitely great. I mean, it's...

Dave Jones: And that'll last about six months. And then you'll be, hey, you're back in Dilbert land.

Chris Gammell: Cube farm and yeah. Yeah. We'll see.

Dave Jones: I mean... Prairie dogging and...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I always like that term.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Ah, well.

Dave Jones: Anyway, good luck on you with your new job. It is apparently a lot more... There will be travel involved. Will there not? You can say... Travel, design. You can probably say that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. I'm planning to travel some more. Design. Design a lot more. Because I was kind of in a manufacturing support role, so... Right. But you know, I get to like...

Dave Jones: Obsolescence engineering, huh?

Chris Gammell: Well, not quite that, but more like once the component obsolescence engineer came to me, I'd go and redesign based on that. Right. Yeah. You know, basically, hey, we can't get this part anymore. And I'd go redesign the whole box because I had to... Because there's nothing else to do.

Dave Jones: That's fun once or twice, but then, yeah, when you... It can work all the time. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But I mean, I get to work on a lot of cool stuff too. I mean, I worked on like the... Of course. Yeah. The electrometer stuff. I worked on a lot of picoameters and the low-level stuff. And if people don't know, I mean, like... So, like I said, I've never talked about Keith Leon here before, but one thing that is worth getting is the low-level measurement handbook. And that's actually a free book. Yep. There's an online version, but there's also a... There's a print version I think you can request. And I definitely have that book. That's a great book, honestly. Yes. That should definitely be on your shelf. It's excellent. You don't have it?

Dave Jones: I don't have the print version, no, but I've seen the electronic copy. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely worth getting. It's a good book. I didn't get it at first. You know, it took me a long time. I didn't quite understand it, even when I started working there. And it's just like the value of it, but there's a lot of good stuff in there, like theoretical limits and counts and all that other stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah. When you're talking down at the... You know, you're counting each electron, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's the serious end of the business, you know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was the fun stuff. Yeah, there's one instrument that you can measure 100 at OAMs at a time. I think that's really the resolution. That's not the accuracy. And there is a... You know, in measurement science, there's a big difference there.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. Measurement and accuracy. Resolution and accuracy is a huge thing. Yeah. A lot of... Well, a lot of experienced and beginner people confuse often. Right. Right. I'm sure I'll forget that in about a month. Yeah, they come along. My multimeter has four and a half digits accuracy, you know. And it's... No. No. It's resolution.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Usually accuracy is percentage, right? And...

Dave Jones: Yeah. And it has a whole bunch of factors and it's usually... It usually doesn't match the resolution. Although it can. Your accuracy can match the resolution or be better than your resolution, but not usually. So...

Chris Gammell: Not usually because then that's more dependent on the ADD and everything else too. So... Yeah. Yeah. And the rest of your circuitry.

Dave Jones: But there's a lot of people who think all those extra digits are wasted. Well, if the accuracy is only three and a half digits, then why is it four and a half digit meter? Well, because it's useful. Because you can see relative differences. Yeah. That's when you get into the difference between absolute and relative measurement, you know. So that's when resolution matters. You can have a eight... You know, you can have a seven and a half digit, you know, high end, one of those super HP high end multimeters or something like that. HP. Come on, Dave. Come on. Come on. HP made the ducks guts. You don't see any Keithley meters in cow labs, mate. Come on. Yeah, you do. You only use HP.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah.

Dave Jones: The old school ones with the...

Chris Gammell: The 3458s. Yeah, those sort of things. Yeah, those eight and a half digits. Those things are huge.

Dave Jones: Anyway, you can have one of those and it can only be accurate to 1%, but it's still bloody useful. Yeah. You know, as an eight and a half digit multimeter or something. So...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Calibration science is crazy, you know, like even how they just compare it all back to NIST standards and stuff like that. Yeah. I never really got into the calibration science stuff, but it's crazy. It's all kind of based on one reference and it's cool. I mean, usually... You're usually in the four and a half digit land, right, Dave?

Dave Jones: Ah, yeah. That sort of thing. I have often delved deeper than that, but yeah, not too often.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of a tough proposition if you're a hobbyist, you know, like four and a half digits. That's kind of all you need. I mean, unless you're really cranking on...

Dave Jones: Unless you've got something really exotic you're working on, then yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, that's part of the problem. You know, like... So, I mean, I've got both. I've got a six and a half. I've got a four and a half. I've got a two and a half, you know. Two and a half? Oh, well, yeah. That was free at a trade show, so... Oh, good to tell. What a two and a half digit meter. Oh, yeah, it's a piece of junk.

Dave Jones: That's pathetic. It was free. You can buy two dollar ones that are at least three and a half digits, so I don't know how much is two and a half digits. Well, it was free.

Chris Gammell: That's what I'm saying, man. They didn't want to spend that extra buck, I guess. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Oh, goodness. Yeah. No, that's sad. Let's not go there. Yeah. Speaking of calibration and cowlabs, it looks like I might be visiting a good cowlabbing in January, yes.

Chris Gammell: Nice.

Dave Jones: Yes. Where's that going to be? That will be down in Victoria, Melbourne again.

Chris Gammell: Okay, cool.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You going down there for something else and then you're going to visit? No, no, no.

Dave Jones: They want me to come down there and have a look at their cowlab.

Chris Gammell: Well, there you go. You can settle it right there if they have any Keithley stuff, if they've got all HP stuff.

Dave Jones: Right, okay. Well, we'll take a look. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've got the cowlab around the corner, which is the Trio Smart Cowlab, and I can wander in there any time and use that. I didn't see any Keithley stuff in there. I'm sorry to tell you, but that is sort of like a, you know, it's a NADA certified cowlab, but it's not, you know, it's not like a-

Chris Gammell: It's not like the cowlab.

Dave Jones: It's not like the cowlab. It's a nice little cowlab.

Chris Gammell: So this one you're going to then, is it like one of the better ones on the continent kind of thing?

Dave Jones: It's Agilence cowlab, yep. Oh, cool. That's great. And they've got this portable calibration truck, which goes around. Really? And hopefully- Wow. Well, it's like a shipping container, actually, so I'm led to believe. Okay. They were telling me. So, yeah. And hopefully, when that's there, I'll get a tour of that, because you can move that around the country, and you know, and you can ship it around the place. Hence, you know, it being in a shipping container, you can put it on the truck, and you can drive it in the middle of whoop-whoop. And that's important for many companies, because they can't send you their gear. You have to bring the cowlab to them. And-

Chris Gammell: That sounds expensive either way, right? It's expensive, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it's actually very difficult to get a portable cowlab certified, because, you know, there's vibration and temperature and all sorts of, you know, it's very difficult to actually

Chris Gammell: keep and maintain- You're not going to drive a reference around, like a pure reference around with you either, right? You got to have that in a climate-controlled environment, and that, you got to get it. Yeah. Yep.

Dave Jones: And then you have to have the traceability and the calibration history, and the, you know, that it's stable after you've shipped this thing, you know, across the middle of Australia, and it's still good, and you've got, you know. So, it's really difficult to maintain, and expensive to maintain a cowlab like that. So, hopefully, I'll get a tour of that, which will be cool. That's really cool.

Chris Gammell: That sounds like a lot of fun.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Speaker ?: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I'll probably jinx that one, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Is that mostly for scopes, or is it for everything?

Dave Jones: That's for everything, I think. Okay. I think they've got a whole bunch of, you know. Most cowlabs will do, you know, a whole range of stuff. They'll do pressure and temperature and all the engineering parameters.

Chris Gammell: Anything to the sensor, right? I mean, anytime you have a sensor, you need to have, or transducer, as it really is, you need to be able to normalize it against a standard. That's kind of the idea. Yeah. And yes, a resistor is a standard, folks. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And they'll have, like, flat tables for calibrating flatness. Really? Yeah. And they'll have tables for calibrating hardness of, you know, durometers and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Most cowlabs will be able to do, you know, a whole range of measurement stuff like that. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. There's so many things out there in engineering that you can actually measure. If you go look at them, there's got to be hundreds of different things. You know, it's not just voltage current and voltage current. I know, but those are the coolest ones, I think. Well, yeah, of course. Because, I mean, that's the thing.

Chris Gammell: Everything comes back to that eventually, right? I mean, if you have a transducer, it's usually coming back to voltage or current. I mean, regardless of what it is, sometimes flux, sometimes other stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah, if it's an output, yeah, it's coming back to a voltage current output.

Chris Gammell: I mean, there's always a signal that's going to exist in some manner like that. Yeah. And then, you know, you've got to go from analog to digital then, and then, yeah, that's what you need. Yeah. So, there's different levels, I think. I mean, I know what you mean, though. Like, yeah, there's tons of sensors. There's light sensors, everything else, vibration, whatever. But I think, eventually, signal gets back to analog realm and then digital realm.

Dave Jones: Yep. I've been involved in a lot of that. Because a lot of my jobs over the years have been involved in that sort of, you know, especially in the seismic and sonar industries, there's lots of exotic stuff involved there. And you've got to measure, you know, various things for ceramic material and stuff like that and other buoyancy material. And you've got to measure, you know, a whole bunch of stuff. So, yeah, it's fun and interesting. Yeah, definitely. Just working on, you know, Ohm's Law each day, it's, you know, you have to learn some other stuff, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Although, Ohm's Law is my bread and butter, so, you know. Yeah, same here. Can't speak to, can't speak against that. I don't know. I was going to say, though, I'm a little worried because I'm really spoiled. You know, like my bench at work, I had access to infinite amounts of DMMs and microameters and electrometers and smooths and everything.

Dave Jones: What oscilloscopes do Keithley use? What oscilloscope did you have on your bench?

Chris Gammell: I, oh, what did I have? It was a TPS 2000, I believe, the battery-powered floating scope, the isolated channel.

Dave Jones: Oh, the tech?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, the tech one.

Dave Jones: Ah, that's it. That's the one with the shitty little sample memory.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's an older scope. It's an older scope. They're reviving, I think, but I don't know. For what I was, I hardly, how often do you store stuff in memory? I mean, like, do you really do that that often?

Dave Jones: Deep memory is everything, dude.

Chris Gammell: Not for me.

Dave Jones: Get with the program.

Chris Gammell: Real time for me, buddy. I mean, like, come on. I mean, like, yeah, you're talking.

Dave Jones: Okay, go ahead. No, I'm sorry. Deep memory, yeah. The first big advancement in digital scopes, which made them practical, was the TDS200, which was the real time, okay? Ten times the sample rate was ten times the bandwidth, right? That was the number one big change in this. The second big change is deep sample memory. It is, it's the duck's guts. Once you go deep, you'll never go back. I'm telling you.

Chris Gammell: That sounds horrible.

Dave Jones: I know.

Chris Gammell: Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: Oh, I'm telling you. Deep memory is everything. Well, maybe I just haven't had the right scope. It's life-changing. Yeah. It's life-changing. Let me tell you.

Chris Gammell: I don't know, man. I mean, most of my stuff's always... So you're saying you'll store stuff and then go back and look at, like, the whole record and have the resolution for it?

Dave Jones: Well, no, because, like, well, restore, right? You just use it as a regular scope, right? Just, you know, like, you don't zoom into anything. And then you go, oh, I'll zoom in on that and have a look. And if you've got... And because you didn't mean to store that much. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, exactly. And you can zoom in, and that's the beauty of it. And once you know that you can zoom in, then, you know, you don't have to set up the scope tricky and then, you know, do all that. Yeah, and then resample and everything. I get it. You've always got it. Bang. It's always there. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. I mean, I just...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I was never found... I mean, either way, it doesn't matter to me.

Dave Jones: You've never been spoiled by it, so you haven't... Right.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. And that's how it goes for most people.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You can't go back.

Chris Gammell: Right. I mean, me using a six and a half digit DMM every day, right? Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: You can't go back. Oh, well. Pocket kit. Three and a half.

Chris Gammell: You can't measure, you know, nanovolts easily, right? I mean, that's shit. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's the same kind of thing. But is that really necessary?

Dave Jones: Nah, maybe not.

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

Dave Jones: Of course you use Textronics gear, because it's a Danahur group, right? Oh, it was before. Was there any other competing gear, you know, in your company? Or was there... Yeah, man. Or was it mandatory that you had to use?

Chris Gammell: No. Everybody uses everything. Come on, man. There's different uses for everything. I mean, I don't want to speak too much about specifics and, you know, Keithley or anything, but, like, I'm sure Agilent has Keithley gear. Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course. You know, I'm sure Tektronix has Agilent scopes. I'm sure they have Rodier swords. That's all. Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, there's a lot there, but in terms of just stuff I use, I use that floating scope. I like the two. I like the isolated, and especially when you're moving grounds around, that's important, you know? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, I can tell you as a fact that nobody at Altium, for example, used competing tools, you know? Oh, well, yeah. Okay, that's interesting.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but that's... Okay, I get it. I get it. But that's... You can never have... I'm sure you can speak to this point. You can never have enough test equipment, right? I know. I know. If you work at Keithley and you get an HP thing on your bench, you're going to rip into it, and you're going to try it out, at least, right? Of course. And I'm sure HP guys are the... Well, Agilent guys are the same, so... Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'll miss it, but I've got some stuff at home. What I'm probably going to do is develop a sickness like you and...

Dave Jones: And start buying shit on eBay, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm really worried about that.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Do it. I mean, you... Yeah. Yeah, I will. I will. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know about the whole, like, buy-sell thing. Like, I'm probably more of just a buy person. A buy and hoard. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: I got a lot of room on my shelves, so...

Dave Jones: Yeah, see, that's something I've never had. Now, with the new office, I'll have the room, so I'll be able to buy shit.

Chris Gammell: That's a bad sign, man. And you should tell people what you did buy. Did you tell... You didn't tell the wife yet, did you?

Dave Jones: Yeah, but she don't... No, I haven't, but she doesn't listen to the show. She doesn't listen. You should tell people. But she can probably hear through the door, he's all whispering in the microphone. Okay, okay. I've got an arcade machine for the new lab.

Chris Gammell: That's awesome! Oh, that's so awesome. You better not let her find out. You're so screwed.

Dave Jones: I know, I'm so screwed.

Chris Gammell: And so, you said it was one of those, like, emulators where it's like the control panel, right? Like an old arcade machine, but it's actually a computer back end.

Dave Jones: It's a jammer-based system, and all the people out there will know what I'm talking about, I'm sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and if not, you can look it up online. Well, we'll try and link to it, too, yeah. What's it called? Jammer, you said? Jammer-based? Jammer. Jammer-based, yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. You would be so in trouble. This is like... That's kind of the problem with your lab, you know? Like, you've got a lot of room for test equipment now. You're going to be buying, like... You know, you'll probably end up buying, like, an Etcher like Jerry did. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, see, those sort of really good shit is hard to come by, but I've caught myself going to the auction sites, not just eBay, and looking at all this obscure gear you can get from, like, medical companies, and, oh, yeah, I could do with a... Yeah. I could do with an ultrasound machine. Yeah, right? You know, let's... Yeah. What if we have another kid? That's cool. Who knows? Yeah. And I'm looking up all these obscure machines, and they got them for, like, $10, right? This machine must have cost $20,000, $30,000, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's a mass spectrometer or something, right? And I'm going, you know, that's just cool. I wanted the $10.

Chris Gammell: Dave Jones CSI.

Dave Jones: That's right.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Dave Jones: It's just... You know, so I'm looking up all these... You know, oh, it doesn't do anything useful. And I'm looking up, you know, fluorescent spectro... Spectro... I can't even say it. Spectroscopy? Yes. Thank you. Yeah. Zuntike. And, you know, I'm looking up, oh, that's... I don't know what to do with it, but it's only $10, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Shipping. $10,000.

Dave Jones: No, but see, I only did the local stuff where you can actually go and pick up. Oh, that's good. You know, so... Yeah. Yeah. But then you've got to buy a truck, right? Yeah, hopefully, once the new lab comes in and... I have a 3D model of the new lab. I tried to use Google SketchUp.

Chris Gammell: Yeah?

Dave Jones: I... I've seen it. It's not bad. I did an okay job, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, what you've got to do is start loading it up with all your footprints of all your junk you're buying, and then you can... Right. Right. Yeah. just hoard it all in the corner oh my god yeah you're gonna you're gonna need a storage locker now too yeah i know honey we're buying another office 50 square meters wasn't it yeah right

Dave Jones: i'll be short changed it's not really only 48 square meters oh yeah that lasts too oh that's where you're gonna do it bloody walls thicknesses walls yep yep oh man ah well yeah anyway do it buy gear i will recommend yeah excellent so the last thing i want to mention

Chris Gammell: about test measurement is the thing that that i never really mentioned on here but i always kind of wanted to because i feel like a lot of people don't know about them is smus and and i called them smooths to dave and he had he didn't know what the hell they were no i that's yeah no yeah never heard of it yeah so i worked on those yes of course okay smus what smu i didn't say smu i didn't i didn't add the sch oh right okay yeah um no but yeah i love those things and a lot of people don't know about them and that's one of those things where if you start using it you'll get addicted to it because i'll like i'll plug an led into one and i'll program 10 milliamps and it just does it you know it's easy you know it's you just program currents and it measures voltage so well and the

Dave Jones: other way around too it's basically a programmable power supply that and that can sample back that's

Chris Gammell: pretty much yeah that's pretty much it's a little bit more complicated but yeah i mean that's the

Dave Jones: easiest way to think about it yeah yeah you can you can program constant voltage or and or constant current and you can measure those back as well and that's that's pretty much what it does right and

Chris Gammell: if you and if you go too far in one direction because the impedance of your your load changes it'll say yeah you also programmed so if you say one milliamp and 10 volts and then your your load starts to change and it starts creeping up towards 10 volts it'll actually stop at 10 volts yeah and so yeah that's that's what i've been spoiled on so i'll miss i'll miss that the most that's oh you'll have to buy one on ebay or build one or build one or actually so that's another thing i want to talk about one thing that i never really talked about on here was because of the uh you know because i worked for keithley whatever the conflict of interest yep yeah i guess it's kind of conflict interest there is an open source one that's uh that was a kickstarter project and i'm super excited about this it's called the uh c ee which is i think it's like compute experiment and explore something like that something like that yeah yeah yeah and uh yeah i'm really excited you know if you like if you help fund the the kickstarter uh they would give you they you know there's some level of

Dave Jones: funding where you'd actually get one yeah they'd send you a kit or something yeah i if you right i give them a hundred bucks or something they'll send you a kit i don't know what it is but did they reach their funding target because this was ages ago this was like nine months ago or something wasn't it

Chris Gammell: yeah uh more than maybe yeah maybe that yeah about that um they blasted through their funding they said six grand and they got it they got it to 20 grand oh awesome so that was back in july yeah and uh yeah awesome so yeah they and they got a couple big fun they got a thousand dollar funders too a couple of

Dave Jones: those and yeah speaking of which uh crowdfunding they've legalized why there's a there's a senator

Chris Gammell: wants to legalize crowdfunding a uh yeah a senator from the u.s is like really behind i think he's the one who drafted legislation with a couple other people right but um it's actually you know the what i think congress might do something doing work i know yeah right that's that was my first shock as well uh yeah and so i found this on it was on adafruit first but help draft they usually don't

Dave Jones: even read these things let alone draft them right right i'm just sorry my lobbyists do my reading for

Chris Gammell: me yeah uh but this is a great idea i really like it's a wired article and so basically the idea is right now in the u.s at least i'm not sure how it is in australia um if you want to fund someone if you want to help fund a company so right so say so say uh ian the guy who's doing this open source hardware thing right if you wanted to instead of getting a gift and for funding you wanted to actually get a piece of the company you wanted shares you wanted just like creed

Dave Jones: last week we had on yeah they said they did that give us a five grand check and we'll give you a

Chris Gammell: a share in the company you know right but that was all family mostly right i mean that was

Dave Jones: how they did it yeah but it's still the same whether it's family or not you know they're taking all these little bits of funding from everywhere right but there's no way to actually give that

Chris Gammell: person a share of the company as far as i know so right now they have to be a family member i think that's how it goes oh right okay right so the idea is basically you open it up and you say well why not why not let why not let everyone fund everything right yeah limit it you limit it at a thousand dollars per person and a million dollars total in funding and then they actually can have an early stage piece of this business yeah and so the idea is that that would kind of ramp up um you know investment in ideas now personally i think there's gonna be a lot of stupid ideas at

Dave Jones: the beginning well it'll be almost like gambling not investing you know it'd be yeah well investing is

Chris Gammell: gambling often uh so sometimes yeah if you're not if you're not researching it right i mean

Dave Jones: well effectively always is it could always fall out from under you you're taking a gamble it's all risk

Chris Gammell: management right yeah i guess so it's almost like angel investing is like gambling right

Dave Jones: we've talked about that on here before well that's just higher risk but you can go and buy a house as an investment it's a relatively low risk you know compared to say one you know stocking just one

Chris Gammell: company that could fall through the floor it's a tangible asset or so it's a because it's a tangible

Dave Jones: asset it's always going to have a unless if you live in cleveland i guess boo yeah sorry i had to get

Chris Gammell: that money that's okay um yeah so that's the idea and that's kind of their their justification it's like well people can gamble now and it's like well if you limit it on both sides i love the idea personally i think i sounds good i think i think it's a great idea now i think i think it speaks highly to to dave something you always talk about is you know you should always try and bootstrap and always yourself yeah last resort to take money from somebody else last resort exactly and you know there's a lot of benefit in that then because then you think about the difference you you are the only funder at that point and you basically you own it all you're in control whereas however this might work it might it might you know if you have a oh you know it's bad people will be hounded every

Dave Jones: day if you take a thousand bucks from a thousand people right you will have a thousand people emailing

Chris Gammell: you every week you know yeah if you get to ten million dollars they're gonna say i want my ten or ten thousand dollars now or whatever right i mean like yeah so there will be some diciness to it but regardless of all that however it ends up shaking out it doesn't matter to me i i love the idea

Dave Jones: regardless i mean i think i think it's a great idea the idea is very good it just needs to be applied cautiously to those who want to do it yeah if you can avoid it avoid it if you can avoid it avoid it it's a it might be a good idea but it's not the best idea that's a good way to say it yeah yeah

Chris Gammell: yeah definitely so uh i'm not i don't have any companies on the uh on the back burner right now

Dave Jones: but uh maybe people out there does it have the ability to do like the kickstarter thing where you get something tangible in return for your money like yeah you're giving us money but we're going to give you a kit or a finished product when we build it or it's just investment in the company yeah i think this is more like the then how do you get your money back if you invest it the only way to get it back is if the company gets bought out or it floats right that that's it uh i would yeah i would think you're stuck in the traditional that traditional thing where the only way you can get your money back like if you go work at a startup right you know you risk everything go work at the start and they give you a shitload of stock and uh well that stock's worthless unless the company either floats or maybe gets bought out in some way shape well sometimes there's like

Chris Gammell: private exchanges too i mean like if you look at like early days of stock too there was always private exchanges so you could go to someone and be like can i buy your stock and then it's still a tangible asset a piece of that company that you can buy but it's much harder to sell yeah it would be definitely much harder to sell but i think what would happen is you'd end up having you'd end up having probably another market like a like a smaller stock market and it that would just be this

Dave Jones: that's what the country needs another stock market yeah you sell cdo's on top of that and then you can play derivatives on them yeah why not yeah let's base bets on bets on bets on bets

Chris Gammell: nothing nothing can go wrong guarantee winner all right davy i i realize this could be taken advantage of i don't care i still don't care i think it's great whatever whatever gets people spending money on on good ideas or even stupid ideas it doesn't matter right all right feckle yeah yeah because if this even gets if this gets 10 more people trying to make companies and one of them succeeds yeah good enough for me i don't care you know as long as as long as there's there's limits on the on the on the amount of money that can be spent and hopefully on the derivative markets that might pop up uh yeah oh boy yeah all right can we change the topic of course of course i and and hell a hilarious

Dave Jones: looking oh no a serious looking engineer i love this we had it on last week's last week list but because we had uh john on from creed we we didn't really talk about anything but creed this is awesome we you have to see the photo okay it's pointless unless you actually see the photo yeah and you found this on reddit right yeah it was on the front page i read it and it's a photo of this guy what's his name

Chris Gammell: do we i don't know it was it was the submitter's father secret is he yeah he didn't say who it was

Dave Jones: okay right but it's a guy it's the kid's dad right and he took the photo and he posted it on reddit anyway it's it's this guy you know he's an old guy and he's standing there and he's got his arms crossed like this and he's standing in front of his kick-ass workbench right he's got all these instruments all don't see any keithley gear there oh yeah there is one i saw yeah there is there's

Chris Gammell: one okay i'm staying corrected yeah that uh to the left of his ear i think that that beige one is

Dave Jones: really old keithley gear oh okay right yeah very good and uh and he's just got this serious look on his face and it's like just add the caption down the bottom add any caption you want and it's cool yep exactly this guy just looks like he can kick your ass at electronics you know

Chris Gammell: i just love it it's brilliant yeah and there's all these they already put it into like uh one of these stupid sites quickmeme.com you know reddit always ends up doing that kind of thing so there's always they basically apply the captions like oscillator i hardly know her he's great though yeah and and the best thing is the is the title too i used to think my dad was a nerd now i realize he's awesome here's a picture i took in front of his workbenches basically the kid doesn't do electronics but the dad's a big enthusiast so you know if you guys are enthusiasts out there in about 60 years if you have children he'll he'll think you're a really cool maybe at 60

Dave Jones: years maybe about 40 years anyway i i just love it yeah all he needed instead of the mobile phone on his pouch he needed like a pocket you know he needed like a calculator those old-fashioned calculator pouches or a slide real pouches really they had pouches in the 70s you bet your ass they did everyone bought their hp 35 and they put it you know the big badge of honor for any nerd was to have your calculator pouch on do you have a picture you wearing with these

Chris Gammell: do you have a modern day would you have one maybe that's in your next ebay purchase i am not that old no no come on man you got you got to have nerd cred you got to put wear it on your

Dave Jones: i designed my own calculator watch thank you very much yeah yeah all right that's got that's got cred that that's that's more my time was the calculator watch cred rather than the yeah i can't believe you don't know about this i know i know about it the the calculator watch no the the pouch oh the pouch oh yeah yeah okay um calculator belt pouch it it like back in the 50s and 60s you know when they were landing men on the moon back when nerds were nerds and nerds were nerds and they all wore white shirts and tires you know thin black tires right yeah yeah and they all had the slide rule pouches on their belt you would have you would carry around your slide rule in your pouch right on on your belt and that's what you did and then once the hp 35 came out first pocket calculator you would have the pouch for that and it had had rechargeable batteries you'd put it in there and you'd walk around campus on all the lab or whatever with your pouch so if anyone out there any listeners still have a send us a photo please of you wearing your calculator pouch yeah in fact i'd love to see that we'll we'll give you a shout out next week if anyone still has one and can post a photo we'll sell it to dave dave would dave would wear it anytime right i wonder if there's any on ebay i could search

Chris Gammell: right now that's what i said yeah yeah all right well you talk when you look for that i'm going to talk about another workbench because this guy's in front of the guy we're talking about is in front of a great workbench uh paul rake of one of the analog guys uh at edn he posted about barry gilbert who's an he's written a couple books uh about analog and i think i don't know if it's op amp cookbook or which one it is um but barry gilbert's this great uh analog devices fellow basically um and and so paul rake did a workbench photo shoot and either i don't know not sure if he sent it in or whatever but this is just like high-end beyond high-end like tubes out tubes out the wazoo test equipment like different modules for like the uh the modular 7000 series scopes yeah modular scopes yeah oh it's just it's just gorgeous every everything i mean and granted like the lab is really cleaned up but i mean like cabinets all over the place and oh what is this even the the thinking station he's got eight dozen javelin sharp pencil i mean this is like ocd on the on crack right but but i mean just beautiful beautiful bench i mean yep microscope and uh old text go old the old tube text scopes um he's even got like a module like a synth station and like a reel to reel oh man it's just like this is like nerd heaven right here you can't really tell the size of the the lab but it probably looks like 15 15 by 15 feet or you know five by five meters and uh yeah it's so this is a workbench of the week yeah uh well not not directly but yeah definitely yeah maybe the workbench of the century i don't know i don't know how many people could beat this kind of thing uh well it's it's just old school right that's the well it's old school and also uh you know well funded i'm sure that uh you know a fellow at 8 edi is probably doing pretty well right yeah you suspect so but it's big money in engineering folks stick with it i don't know about that one do i yeah yeah yeah we're all eking

Dave Jones: out a living right i mean you haven't been able to take a holiday in 10 years right yeah you poor bastard yeah yeah that's 10 years i've been out of school five years save oh you only been working yeah you're a young whippersnapper yeah yeah yeah so it was your first job right no keithley wasn't your first job you used to work at a samsung yeah in a fab i used to work in a fab yep yep i don't miss that uh right yeah working in those production environments huh oh yeah i used to wear yeah i was

Chris Gammell: talking i mean i asked john john edman about bunny suits last week and i used to wear bunny suits so

Dave Jones: yeah yeah i don't miss that at all can i add this to the list for today this is freaking hilarious okay the large hadron collider oh you it did you you must have yeah i added this yeah yeah this is actually old electronics but this is hilarious i'm gonna say i couldn't i couldn't not put it on here some guy was he was arrested trying to sabotage the large hadron collider right this is actually back when they were getting the front door or what did he he posed as like a maintenance guy or security guy basically oh and it was it was dressed strangely and um yeah he was arrested for trying to sabotage it and um his story was is that he's from the future he's from the future and they discovered the higgs boson which led to unlimited power and the elimination of poverty and kit kats for everyone this is his quote kit kats for everyone it is a communist chocolate hellhole and i'm here to stop it ever happening yeah obviously this guy had a lot

Chris Gammell: of uh issues even if he was from the future you think from the future you think he'd be a little

Dave Jones: more convincing if he was from the future you think but you're able to come up with a better story than a communist kit kat plot yeah oh it's brilliant what it's just brilliant yeah sorry that's funny

Chris Gammell: oh no it's it's a great article people should definitely i found it somewhere on twitter or google plus or something it's it's a lot of fun you know you have a lot of time when you're not working anymore uh yeah yeah i found myself i have to like battle against you know like just the online now that i have all this non-working time like just just for the week i gotta make sure i don't go too deep down the rabbit hole of twitter stories and google plus and everything else and

Dave Jones: yeah yeah but speaking of you were hanging out on google plus last night begging me to join you i was

Chris Gammell: yeah i was over at evil mad scientist labs they unbelievable they had uh they had they set up a a camera at their at their party and so i was a little nerd in the corner drinking a beer on a computer screen and people were nice enough to come by and talk to me it was great it was great

Dave Jones: so you were in the corner of the room yeah yeah i was like that i was like that nerdy kid yeah

Chris Gammell: the tele presence right yeah exactly the next time hopefully we'll have a robot i can control but

Dave Jones: oh good that is just i i didn't know that you you didn't tell me there was a party happening oh sorry yeah yeah i would have laughed at you even harder yeah i know right well speaking of

Chris Gammell: tele presence and people from the future i want to bring up this other thing uh about about there's a segue there oh yeah there's a segue there it's about it's about the future dave basically they figured out a way to on on chip right so in silicon they figured out a way and we were talking about transducers before too so there's a little segue there too they figured out a way on chip with

Dave Jones: silicon to do optical communication yeah they've been researching that stuff for a decade no they've

Chris Gammell: been they actually need to have uh actual something that takes you know like an led basically so you go from electrical signal and then you flash an led this is actually you pulse a current through something and it actually transmits a photon all right okay got it yeah and so basically this whistle allow on chip optical communication without needing like fancy processes and stuff basically what it means is they're going to be able to start doing i mean granted this is like a future thing right so this is uh this is at an mit lab right now but yeah uh you know it's it's definitely they're showing it's possible so uh basically you can now create photonics in a fab so you can do high right high density high

Dave Jones: volume i was going to say what's the advantage is it right power is it faster is it well think about it

Chris Gammell: before you had to have some kind of special way of getting from a uh chip right that because right now you're right that some things have optical transceivers but basically i think what they do is they actually have to connect a bond wire from a uh i think that yeah something like that separate component that actually does that optical transmission from an electrical signal right now if you're doing it on a chip basically electrical signal in photon out right yeah and it's all done in a fab and so it's just another part of your your chip process so you know you do your normal 300 steps that's fantastic what's the advantage cheaper faster son yes it's cheaper it's faster and it's easier to do well not easier to do is it higher density is it is it lower power it would be higher density yeah because you'd be able to think about it like if before you needed say you had a one millimeter by one millimeter uh silicon die right and then you would need some other small maybe small but some other piece of material that you

Dave Jones: know actually does that electronic hang on is this just data transmission or is it actually building transistors and stuff like that actually circuitry or is it just a way to transmit data across the die

Chris Gammell: uh that i don't know that i don't know well that's a million dollar question isn't it

Dave Jones: it says come on dude ah come on i've been i've been doing all the time in the world oh you should talk

Chris Gammell: yeah yeah oh boy whatever people can read it but it's it's all right it's a big deal this is a big deal people this is a big deal yeah fine yeah fine fine that's the future i'm not even talking about printable electronics and i've got stuff on the list i could talk about right i've got um

Dave Jones: something from the forum somebody we've talked about oscilloscopes and test equipment and product design in fact i've got a couple of things on the list for that surprise surprise so we'll go back you huh yeah yeah go figure uh this is from the forum and uh somebody complained i did my video you know with a i was working you know my scope i was showing waveforms and stuff on there and uh somebody his name is uh well his username is let me get it right here uh no i probably won't yes uh manolis manolis um on the asked um can i use different color traces because he can't see the difference in the colors because he's colorblind and well okay fair enough um and i know nothing about color blindness apart from yeah it's not good if you're into electronics because you can't read resist the color codes and you can't obviously can't view scope traces like that you can't see

Chris Gammell: the difference or even excel plots or anything like that or excel plots and graphs and you know it'd be

Dave Jones: really annoying in electronics to be colorblind um and well is that a design oversight on the part of agilent and let's talk on the forum about some massive percentage of people are colorblind and yeah there's different versions of colorblind and you know yeah depending on how they all

Chris Gammell: i think the majority is on is on the y chromosome too i think so it's mostly mostly male but not

Dave Jones: significant not not exclusively male yeah and uh i don't know is it bad product design not to is it a

Chris Gammell: design oversight how would you do it differently i mean would you do dotted lines i don't know i mean that's usually what i come down to it's like you know try to put myself in those shoes or you choose

Dave Jones: the right colors but i i know that hp are one of the leaders and this goes back to the original hp 35 calculator by the way hey we're segwaying everything today and i would join in all the dots here for you folks oh yeah and darts like colored lines no because they famously put a lot of research into what uh text overlay colors would go on the front of the calculator they did a lot of research they did papers on it and everything what is the optimal color for contrast and quick viewing and and you know all that sort of stuff so um hp are actually have a very deep history in this in choosing the right colors for stuff so um yeah i'm not sure if it goes into agilent uh today i do know for a fact that the um that the waveform button on the new um is blue because the designers liked blue and they wanted the blue lead on it and that's it yeah that was the sole design okay fine it's a blue you know it's a

Chris Gammell: blue button fine just like those uh vauxwagon guys that's right they just yeah yeah right the the guys

Dave Jones: they designed it just wanted at least one blue lead on the whole scope so they got one um but yeah i

Chris Gammell: mean i don't know i mean that's that's what i always try to do is i try and put myself in their shoes and it's like i don't know what i do how would you do it differently that's it's kind of hard when there's existing solutions you know yeah well the obvious one is yeah you've got to have it you'd

Dave Jones: have a dotted tray so you'd have like a little two next door one next door but then there's extra clutter on the display and then that annoys people who aren't colorblind i guess so there's got to be a trade-off there you know or but you know but it's all software these days right

Chris Gammell: they can select this sort of stuff in in firmware that's yeah that's an interesting idea i mean that that wouldn't have been a the case with like an old crt scope or something but no that's right

Dave Jones: these days yeah i don't know well i don't know what they complained about anyway when i was a boy you had a crt scope and it was green and uh all the traces look the same and you were happy for a second you were happy for a second waveform there right you were happy for a second trace that's right you were living living the good life when you had that second trace yeah you gotta line them up and yeah

Chris Gammell: yeah that's right i don't know maybe that's the uh you know maybe that's that's going to be the competitive advantage because you know they're the only thing i can really speak about from the test measurement side of things is that there's a buttload of um competition from like the low end from like china you know like obviously yeah you talk about rigol all the time right i mean you like rigol scopes and i think you even had something about here about how they uh they slashed the

Dave Jones: price on their honey yes we'll we'll get onto that we'll say that one as well so i mean you start to

Chris Gammell: run into issues of like well where do you really go as a if you're in the test and measurement industry which is a cool industry you know how do you really justify charging a lot more for scopes and you really need to start having some cool features and uh and it's it's always a problem because the heart the general hardware like the off-the-shelf hardware keeps getting better right that's that's what the chip makers want to keep doing and uh and if you could cheaply put that into a a rigol scope or a you know a low-end dmm then you know you start to really lose a lot of market share and that and that really hurts so you you really have to play your play to your customers needs and

Dave Jones: and maybe that's one of them yeah and possibly we've talked about this here on this before but there's i don't like to say there's collusion in the industry but it's sort of like an unspoken rule perhaps that you know if you're an oscilloscope manufacturer for example and you can offer you know a one gigahertz scope for a hundred bucks you're not going to do it because that then slaughters the market for everyone else and potentially for you as well because then everyone else would you know and it lowers the whole bar and it lowers the margins for everyone so companies they want to keep their margins high so they're not going to suddenly you know give you a 500 megahertz scope for a hundred bucks right because then there where's the margin right there's no margin in the high-end gear anymore if you can get the high-end gear for a hundred bucks the company you're going to go out of business well i think in general just because you can do it you're gonna

Chris Gammell: you're gonna try and charge as much as you can as a market exactly so yeah that's right especially in like low volume lower volume stuff i'm i would i would charge yeah you know dave if you if you would buy a widget off of me and i could charge you 10 grand i would not feel bad about charging you 10 grand even if the the cost to make that widget was ten dollars uh that's right because it's you know

Dave Jones: so that's how the industry works you know you just a company would just be crazy to undercut themselves

Chris Gammell: basically it just you know because then you have to you have to make so many more even even just to supply your own customers and you have to you have to maybe you have to supply the whole market at that

Dave Jones: point and then yeah you can't and you'll look stupid and and that's possibly why the entry level oscilloscope up until very recently has still been you know that 25 megahertz maybe it upped it to 50 once that rigol sort of price point came down yeah kind of thing but but now this is what we were talking about before rigol have now slashed the price of their 100 megahertz model to be the same as their 50 megahertz model um so basically all of the dealers are now what you know actually last week if you bought you bought a 50 megahertz model for 399 they will now give you the 100 megahertz model

Chris Gammell: yeah which is some of my friends were actually selling they were selling their uh they did they didn't want to do the firmware hack themselves they're like yeah i'm just going to sell my scope and buy buy the other one and uh why not right i mean that's right because it's exactly the same

Dave Jones: scope as you know you know it's oh yeah yeah yeah i've seen your video

Chris Gammell: yeah um have you done that have you done that on yours yes yes interesting yes i hacked it it's

Dave Jones: in i've got a special boot up screen on mine it boots up with my picture on there really that's

Chris Gammell: great that's great oh boy and interestingly uh rigol's u.s headquarters in cleveland did you know

Dave Jones: that no i did not know it's in cleveland yeah which is not detroit not detroit again not detroit

Chris Gammell: the very good dave you're learning geography no i did not that's what i like i like that i can talk about tested measurement now i know i know

Dave Jones: yeah i know one of their guys see isn't this cool we're talking about this is great our industry toys you should have quit long time ago that's true yeah yeah oh boy that's terrific but yeah like so is this what so what does this mean they've dropped the price point of this uh scope so is now this sort of a new benchmark for the low-end scope industry where they've suddenly jumped to 100 megahertz which will be the new entry-level price point or will they just lower the bottom end you know they'll still sell their 50 megahertz one but they'll sell it for 200 bucks instead of 400

Chris Gammell: bucks what what's yeah what's gonna happen here in the industry moves can really that could shake some stuff up i mean i mean there's always a lower level right i mean like there's all there's so much carbon stuff that's in there right not necessarily carbon right there's metal and everything else too yeah but in terms of just you know raw raw materials coming out of the ground you know like some of that is not cheap you know if you've got if you like like a power supply right you know if you've got a if you've got a crappy power supply if you have a heat sink on there there's some chunk of aluminum that is it costs money you know and iron in the transformer and the copper

Dave Jones: it all you know it costs money yeah exactly you can't build something for infinitely cheap

Chris Gammell: right you know and uh and as it starts to approach that i mean you yep you you give up a lot on quality of the device but over time i think that that gets you know as it gets easier and easier to build something simple you know i've seen a video where this crazy guy builds a power supply oh it's a horrible video it's three videos they drag on forever about 40 minutes each ridiculous who the hell would upload shit i know it was good i liked it um uh but yeah i just i didn't oh i did i i liked it guy just yaps on some weird accent i don't know speaking of we should mention that too some of your competitors did you uh did you see your competitor uh alan alan yates one of our former guests hey alan yeah he's doing this great thing he's doing the the advent calendar

Dave Jones: of electronics i have no idea what that is it's some it's some some religious thing right yeah it's really which is weird because he's an atheist i know but it's just a it's just a term it's just a

Chris Gammell: term right i used to do this as a kid it's like this little calendar you flip days open till christmas and yeah there's religion stuff of it too but mostly for me it was just a countdown for days until presents right uh yeah of course yeah so you know you get these kids all juiced and and some of

Dave Jones: have chocolate little pieces of chocolate in there anywho uh right i've i've never heard of the term okay never heard of the something new today buddy there you go but alan's been doing these great

Chris Gammell: circuits he's doing he's doing build-ups and and i thought of it because he did a power supply on the on day one or two and it was real simple i think it was even simpler than yours it was just 30 904s and 30906s yep but um yeah it's he is knocking them out of the park uh-oh dog's barking at the at the gamble household it must be getting close to the end of the show this is like a common theme now right i'm gonna start triggering the dog somehow i'll uh you know knock on a window or

Dave Jones: something i can barely hear i don't think the audience can hear it oh well that and that's only us yeah well yeah anyway yeah alan's yeah he's doing a circuit every day until christmas yeah or is it

Chris Gammell: christmas or is it new year i'm not sure i don't i hope it's new year just so they keep going uh they're yeah they're awesome he's getting into rf stuff and and uh yeah it's it's awesome it's awesome uh so you are it is almost amp hours almost up though i will say that oh we've got come on we

Dave Jones: must have a uh must have a shonky product or something we can add in we do oh there's a good

Chris Gammell: one oh there's a really good one it's a usb cable have you seen you didn't see it i've seen this yes

Dave Jones: i have seen it well i'm not sure if it's the same one i said people send me this sort of stuff all the time because i've got that audio file theme video out there right right right right yeah yeah people go oh i take a look at this one can you debunk this one and yeah i mean this isn't too easy at this point right anyway this is the what is it how do you pronounce it the sino shore sino shore yeah yes it's and that's by the locust design group is it yes yeah let's get them right there yeah

Chris Gammell: locust design group the total crap and i'm reading it at first who sent it to me uh it was uh sheldon bailey sent it to me uh and and you know i'm reading it i'm like oh yeah you know we built this with like a you know wired wrapped you it's a usb cable you know and so you know custom braid and

Dave Jones: everything else like that yeah it's a fine construct you know right right and then they

Chris Gammell: put a lot of effort into construction as they do with these shonky products right right exactly and uh and then i'm like getting down to the bottom oh yeah i you know i had problems with this and that and whatever else yeah and i get down to the bottom 3500 dollars for a three foot cable i'm like what the

Dave Jones: hell as far as shonky products go that's actually a reasonable price no yeah three feet of a usb cable dave come on there is more i think i think you'll find that there are more expensive ones out there

Chris Gammell: but uh yep yeah oh my god it's it's pretty bad huh any custom cable may return within 30 days and a 20 restocking fee so what's 20 of 3500 that's 700 he gets once you realize you got you got you know you

Dave Jones: got hamstrung yeah and aren't they individually burned in and uh yes they're hand built they're burned in and evaluated in one of my reference systems by me personally wow terrific yeah oh people are so

Chris Gammell: stupid you know what he wouldn't be selling them if people didn't buy them no someone out there is

Dave Jones: there's a market there's a market for everything there's a sucker board every minute every minute yeah and good god those suckers have a lot of money yeah they do i wish i'd thought of the whole audiophile industry i'd be a billionaire by now i know yeah hey ah well no i've got too much of a

Chris Gammell: conscience to yeah rip people off like that there's another uh one of my one of my friends from work

Dave Jones: actually um he sent me a thing oh god oh okay but like if it actually takes them a long time to hand build these things then you could almost i'll give the this benefit to the you know this shonky product industry right if they're handmade like this and the guy's sweating he takes a week to build the things he's got all these exotic materials and stuff then it might actually be worth 3200 bucks just in labor and and time and sweat and energy to actually build one of these things but assuming this guy's valuable in any way assuming that that you know yeah you know yeah assuming he couldn't actually build something useful other than a usb cable yeah and i'm sure they don't churn these things out by the millions right you know he's building you know no there's no market for that you know he's building you know 100 a year or something you know he's building one a day or something like that and yeah you know there's some value in that but the fact remains they don't make a rat's ass difference

Chris Gammell: it's still a usb cable right that's right you know if you want a gold-plated usb cable perhaps i could sell you a gold-plated turd of mine you know that's just just as useful really yeah it's uh something that actually could be valuable i i'm not so sure about it there's actually a thing my friend told me about called past labs and uh i think this guy's actually like a pretty significant amplifier builder but he actually uses high voltage silicon carbide fets in his in his build now i'm not sure if they actually do anything but i thought the site itself is pretty cool he's got some good articles on his site just about uh you know building building class a class b kind of stuff and feedback and distortion so i thought i'd add that into and uh it's not not super shonky but it was a follow-up from uh when we talked about high high voltage silicon carbide fets and and we talked to john last week about silicon carbide so cool it's cool some people are using it i guess so i'll have one

Dave Jones: more thing which has been on here for a couple of weeks okay there because we have to get ham radio for the bingo sheet thing so here's the ham radio thing there's a ham radio kit somebody pointed out sorry i forget who and it's an awesome freaking looking kit i think it's about 700 bucks or something so it's not you know like for a transceiver this is actually a transceiver right a full-on ham transceiver and there's two versions there's one where it's um the boards are pre-built and there's an older model where it's all discrete components and there's a lot of components in this sucker you could spend a week assembling this thing oh yeah right and that's what you can spend do that's what you can spend your week off doing assembling one of these ham kits yeah and uh to go off your

Chris Gammell: ham license it's actually dave richards who i think we've we've been i think dave is the one who did the uh the manhattan technique when we when we had focused on that and uh he's actually the one talking about this and building this so yeah it's great looking it is a great looking kit but it looks like you better you better build and test as you go along because you don't want to try and

Dave Jones: troubleshoot this thing once it's done you know well apparently the instructions are really good and

Chris Gammell: it's actually a really top performer so nice yeah all right well maybe i'll have to do this once my uh once my license and all my buddies are it's the k2 it's the k2 kit right yes yeah it's great all right cool well i guess that's uh that's the hour of amp huh it is it's all done and dusted

Dave Jones: yeah and you're a free man for the rest of the week and then rest of the week you're back to dilbert yeah yeah yeah and it'll be exciting for a while next week we might do a christmas show

Chris Gammell: what yeah christmas show dave just learned about it what the hell do you do on a christmas show i talk about you know lilly d blinky projects and everything yay

Dave Jones: yeah that's how to get them coming back for more we have blinky leads on next week's episode hey

Chris Gammell: whatever we had leds last week so yeah we did a little different a little different yeah all right so google plus we know you can find us on there the amp hour on there you can find dave at eev blog on twitter me at chris underscore gamel and uh what else we got yeah tons of crap go to our site i probably got a facebook comment on the site comment on the site yeah all right guys well i'm gonna go build some projects and clean up a bench so sweet have fun see you next week dude bye

Dave Jones: you

Speaker ?: you

Chris Gammell: obligatory burps i shouldn't i shouldn't drink beer when i'm doing the show but so hard not so i got my week off you know you