#76 – Fremescent Floccose Fortification

Chris Gammell: This is the Ab Hour Podcast, recorded January 2nd, 2012. Episode 76, Freemescent Flacco's Fortification.

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

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

Dave Jones: Hey, Chris. How about that new theme?

Chris Gammell: How about it, man? It's great. I love it. And I didn't write it this time. I actually didn't lie and say I didn't write it and actually wrote it. I didn't write it.

Dave Jones: Well, who did?

Chris Gammell: Actually, so remember last week, the guy who made that video on YouTube mentioning our theme. And then we laughed about that. P. Stevenson, is it not? Yeah, I think it's Paul.

Dave Jones: G'day, Paul. Thank you very much for the theme.

Chris Gammell: Thank you. It's awesome. I love it. I love it. It's kind of like chiptune-y and just a little bit longer. Chiptune-y? Yeah, chiptune. What's chiptune? It's like when people do like 8-bit audio.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. They call it chiptune. Got it. Okay. Never heard of that term.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, it's great. I love it. I think it's a fresh new start for 2012.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Until we get bored with it and then we want another one, right?

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Well, yeah, we might get there eventually.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But Happy New Year. How was your New Year?

Dave Jones: You too? And all our listeners. Happy New Year.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, of course. Of course.

Dave Jones: Yeah, we do have people out there. It's not just us talking to each other. Well, it is, isn't it? That's pretty much all this show is.

Chris Gammell: Well, it could be worse. It could just be one of us talking to ourselves, right? But not this week.

Dave Jones: Yeah, which was my original intention. That would have failed miserably.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and my original try and it did fail miserably. Right. All right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So we know what not to do.

Chris Gammell: We know what not to do. Yep.

Dave Jones: Very important lesson in life, kids. Learn not what to do.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and keep trying. Trying is important. Yep. And speaking of trying, I scheduled my ham test next weekend.

Dave Jones: You've got December 8th on the show notes.

Chris Gammell: Isn't it? Oh, January 8th. Whoops. Dope. I'm stuck on last year. Yep. There we go. January 8th. Yeah, next Sunday. 2012, right? I know, yeah. Yeah, you get that period of time at the beginning of the year when it's, you know, you just keep writing 2011 until...

Dave Jones: Well, if you look at my videos, I've still got 2011 in the copyright on the end of it because, well, I couldn't be bothered changing. Yeah, you'll get there about June. I have to change video editors again. Really? I'm sick of Sony Vegas. Yeah, I'm getting sick of it. So I went from Ulead Video Studios to Sony Vegas. Now I'm getting jack of Sony Vegas. I'm thinking about trying something else. So suggestions, please, except Macintosh. I'm not going to switch to a Mac and use Final Cut Pro. No, it's not going to happen.

Chris Gammell: Might have to try it at some point, though.

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you were having sound problems, right?

Dave Jones: I'm having sound issues, yes. And in my new lab, my latest power supply video, which is uploading at the moment, I had to go through and modify the sound in the whole thing. I had to clean up the sound in the whole thing. It wasn't that bad, but it just annoyed me. It had this, I think it's the air conditioner hum in the background. There's this low frequency going on.

Chris Gammell: And you posted the spectrum on Twitter, right? I mean, you showed, you actually did like a spectral analysis.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's not that great. I'm going to have to, I'll probably have to do a better one where I actually take the background noise and then I take it with the aircon off. Then I take it with the aircon off. Then I do a subtraction of those two. And then that should give me the spectrum of the actual aircon unit itself. Yeah. Anyway, that's the plan.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, well, that'll.

Dave Jones: Just out of interest, really, because I have no idea what the mechanical aspects of a big ducted office air conditioning system like that is to generate the sound. Is it some sort of modal response of the air flowing through the long aluminium ducting and all that sort of stuff? Right. I don't know. I've got no idea.

Chris Gammell: Is it 60 hertz in Australia or 50? 50. It's 50 there? Okay.

Dave Jones: No, it's not that. It seems to be higher. It's sort of.

Chris Gammell: Is it a resonance of it, though? I mean, or a. No, I don't think so.

Dave Jones: Anyway, I have to do a proper spectrum. The one I post on Twitter is a bit bunk. Okay, yeah. Anyway, it's all I had.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: If you have experience in that sort of thing, let me know. How do I get rid of, or how can I dampen my aircon? Do I shove a bunch of cotton wool up in the ducting?

Chris Gammell: Maybe you could do what I'm doing. You could wrap it all in a big blanket, Dave.

Dave Jones: Oh, this is hilarious. You'll see it in the show notes. Yeah. If you're podcasting this, go over to the website, amphour.com, theamphour.com.

Paul Stevenson: Theamphour.com, yep.

Dave Jones: Check out the photo of what Chris is recording in today.

Chris Gammell: I'm just, all you said, we've got to try new things, you know, and I'm trying. Oh, what? Some of our sound wasn't as great, or my sound wasn't as great because I'm kind of talking into a corner. And so I made myself a little forward.

Dave Jones: Oh, he's in the voz. You are the man behind the curtain operating the levers.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: This is hilarious.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know, acoustics-

Dave Jones: You have this huge blanket behind you.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. Acoustics is like this really weird field, and it seems it's coupled with electronics, but it's definitely like its own science, you know. Well, obviously, it's its own science, but, you know, it's like electronics people almost are expected to know it, even though it's a totally different field, really, right? I mean, how sound waves are bouncing off of stuff. I don't know. I think it's pretty drastically different. I used to work at a company that made voice amplifiers for, like, fireman masks. Yep. And so we'd work on the electronics, and I was just an intern there, so I was mostly doing a lot of testing. But I was in charge of testing these things for sound, and, you know, I didn't know what I was doing. I mean, aside from being an intern, right? I didn't know anything about acoustics, and we had, like, a noise source. When we were testing in a room, we had a noise source, but when you're just blasting noise into a room, there's no science behind that, really, you know? If you move it one foot to the left or right, does that matter then? You know, we didn't really have that.

Dave Jones: Well, there's science in the measurement of it, that's for sure.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. But we- And we had talked about, like, trying to automate it and stuff, and even that, you know, when you try and get into, like, if you have a detector, and if that's not placed exactly then, and, you know, there's just a lot of stuff. I started researching into it. It just got very complicated very quickly, so.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. As you know, I come from an underwater acoustics background. Oh, yeah, that's right, yeah. So there's a different- There's a different ballgame altogether, underwater acoustics, which is lower frequency, you know? It's not like you go up to 20 kilohertz in the acoustic domain.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: And a lot of the digital converters, you know, stopped at 2 kilohertz.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, bandwidth. So it was everything under that. But, yeah, a similar sort of thing. And it's very fascinating when you get down to it, all this acoustic stuff.

Chris Gammell: Right. And there's a whole society, really. I mean, what is it, AES? Is that what it is? No, AES. No. What's the Acoustical Engineers? Oh, yeah, maybe it is. Acoustical Engineers Society or something like that? Possibly. I thought there was a big- I've had nothing to do with them. Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Maybe I'm wrong about that.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I've probably forgotten more than I've learned over all those years in underwater acoustics, I think, so. But, yeah, it was fascinating. Subject. I love it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So if anyone can help me with my- I think it's the air con. It's got to be, because it sounds okay without it on.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah. Well, there you go. I'll get some more measurements. That's just troubleshooting right there, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Follow me on Twitter and you'll get my spectrum updates of my acoustic.

Chris Gammell: You'll get blasted with spectrum updates.

Dave Jones: I'll have some automated way to tweet it, right? Yeah. So, tweeting 10 times a day.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Well, we should do some shout-outs. We haven't done these, then. We should open the year with a whole set of shout-outs there, huh? Well, shoot. Okay. First off, I wanted to give a shout-out to XKCD, which I think we've probably done multiple times before. Yeah. But I don't know, man. The guy just keeps coming up. It's Randall Monroe. He keeps coming up with more and more nerdy goodness. And this is actually very electronics-related, too. He comes up with a bunch of mnemonics for science, basically, and SI prefixes, resistor color codes, and order of operations for math. And it's just like these ridiculous mnemonics of how to remember color codes, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, right.

Chris Gammell: Big brother reptilian overlords yelled, Glenn, brainwashing via groundwater.

Dave Jones: Karl Marx gave the – oh, I can't even pronounce that word.

Chris Gammell: The proletariat.

Dave Jones: Elven zeppelins. What? Elven zeppelins. What?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Unbelievable.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's for SI prefixes.

Dave Jones: And that's for remembering kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zeta, and yotter.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: If you don't know your high-side engineering SI prefixes. Right. It goes up – yeah, yotter. Is there anything beyond yotter? I don't think so. I think it stops there that I'm aware of.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure the wiki thing would know. I think – what's that get to? It's a two, three, six, nine. That nozzle. 12, 15, 18, 21, 20. That's 24, 10 to the 24th. That's pretty big.

Dave Jones: Has anyone actually out there used exa in a practical sense? I think I've used peta. I mean, they're starting to talk about exabytes.

Chris Gammell: They're talking about exabytes.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, but no, in electronics, not in data. Oh. Data.

Chris Gammell: Like exawatts? Yeah, right. Okay. When that happens, you know you found something good. That's a good shit right there.

Paul Stevenson: Oh, and he goes the other way, too. You figured out fusion.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, right. All right. Yes.

Dave Jones: Zetawatts.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Zetawatts. Yatawatts. Yata. Yata. Makes me think of that old Japanese – oh, never mind.

Dave Jones: Somebody complained the other day about how kilo is not uppercase. You know, it's not uppercase K, which is annoying because it's the only – I believe the only one of the upper SI prefixes that doesn't actually have a capital. It's lowercase.

Chris Gammell: Huh. So when it's like in front of a gram or wad or whatever.

Dave Jones: Yeah, or a ohm or something. Yeah. K, it's lowercase. Yeah. I presumably, to not confuse it with that Kelvin, which is another SI unit.

Paul Stevenson: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right? So I think that's possibly where that stems from.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Huh.

Paul Stevenson: Get over it, people.

Dave Jones: I just think any idiot's going to confuse. Well, it's Kelvin-ohms, you know. It's 10 Kelvin-ohm resistor. Yeah. What the – come on. Anyway, there are some anal retentives out there who take you to task if you use that uppercase K.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? Yeah. I've never been taken with that. I just use it to spite them. You know what I always get burned by, though? It's in spice. I always get burned by the M, right? So M is –

Dave Jones: Oh, yes, the M. You've got to put Meg.

Chris Gammell: You've got to put Meg, yeah. So like if you're – Yeah, otherwise it's Millie. Right, exactly. So I'm always setting, you know, resistor values in spice and then I'm like M. And then my simulation blows off and I'm like, oh, what the hell is going on here? You know? Oops. Yeah, that doesn't – so keep it in mind.

Dave Jones: Trap for young players, that one.

Chris Gammell: Meg. Meg, you've got to put in Meg. I'm not sure about the higher – I think T works. So T works for ohms. I've never tried PETA.

Dave Jones: I don't think I've ever tried Terra Ohms in a simulation.

Chris Gammell: I have. Right. You go into the sensitive side of things and you're using Terra Ohm resistors, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. PETA, though. Maybe that starts getting confused with Pico. So they should have – I don't know. Maybe – I don't know.

Dave Jones: Do the simulators even support SI prefixes that high?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. Well, you start running into convergence at that point because if you've got peta ohms, that means you've got femto or ato amps going through it probably, right?

Dave Jones: And you want to use an ideal op amp. Yeah. Not a – you want to use ideal components at that point because practical just blows out the window.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: I love it. Ah, simulation.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I didn't see this other one too.

Dave Jones: The land where dreams come through.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Did you see these pictures? He actually has pictures in here too. So the low side, you know, getting smaller is millimicronano, picofemto, ato, zepto. Yep. Yocto, right? And that one is Microsoft made no profit from anyone's Zunes, yo.

Dave Jones: Zunes. Anyone's Zunes. That's brilliant. Yeah. Oh, man. So good. That's how you can remember it.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: That one works. But the coal marks gave the proletariat 11 zeppelins.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Proletariat is – What is it? It's part of – you know, there's bourgeoisie and proletariat. Nope. Proletariat is like the working class.

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Time to read some – Clearly. Yeah. Chris is exposed as a commie.

Dave Jones: Right. There we go. As well as The Wizard of Oz.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah, right. I am the man behind the curtain.

Dave Jones: He's the commie behind the curtain.

Paul Stevenson: There we go. Yep. I have read it. Oh, man.

Dave Jones: That could be today's – the name for today's episode, the commie behind the curtain. No, it's not weird enough. No. Think of some obscure words.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yep. Because people love that, don't they? I don't know. I don't know. I've never really heard.

Dave Jones: We never get any comments on it. We don't. We never get any comments on our obscure show names. Yeah. I don't know why.

Chris Gammell: We try and give the weirdest names we can just so people learn some new vocab, but no one ever seems to look them up, so.

Dave Jones: Nope.

Chris Gammell: There's fun ones if you go look them up, so check it out, people. It's fun.

Dave Jones: All right. Do we have any more shout-outs? Let's get back on. We do. Oh, no. Sorry. I've got to go back. Okay. XKCD.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Did you see – a couple of weeks back, did this awesome thing on money, where the money goes. It's like this huge – it's like bigger than A0 sheet. Yeah. You wouldn't know what A0 is.

Chris Gammell: No, I wouldn't. No. But like a size D print.

Dave Jones: It's like a huge PDF sheet where you've got to zoom in 10 times to get the detail. How long did it take him to compile that?

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: Oh, my goodness. We'll have to link that in. It's awesome.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It is awesome. And yeah, he's great about it because he did that radiation chart was real similar too. And it plays in real well. I mean, if people want to support Randall, he makes these into posters, and then you can just buy the poster from him.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you can buy the poster.

Chris Gammell: We obviously suggest that's an easy way to do it instead of trying to print it out yourself.

Dave Jones: You wouldn't be able to print this unless you had one of those one-meter-wide plotters. You just wouldn't be able to do it.

Chris Gammell: Right. And speaking of, we actually had a shout-out about the old HP printer. Did you see that YouTube video where they – people are always doing this kind of thing where they do printers and stuff like that. Oh, right. Yeah, I've seen these sorts of things before. Yeah. And this one is – there's a couple of things on here. There's an old HP printer, and there's chip tunes actually from like an old C64 or something like that. And then Hard Drive and everything else. I don't know. It's a lot of fun. I liked it a lot. It's been on here for a while, but playing House of the –

Dave Jones: That video's got over a million views.

Chris Gammell: Does it really? Oh, wow. Yeah. That's crazy. That's crazy.

Dave Jones: Unbelievable.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess you make your computer and your old-school computer and printer and everything to play House of the Rising Sun, and you strike a nerve.

Dave Jones: Well, it's obviously gone viral because it was only uploaded at the start of December. It's already got a million views. So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And Gadget. It's been linked somewhere. Yeah. On one of the geek forums or something like Slashdot or something like that probably. Yeah. Yeah. It is very good. It's very well produced.

Paul Stevenson: Yes. Very nice. Very nice.

Chris Gammell: And final shout-out was for Open Source Hardware. Devin wrote in. He actually included like a whole amp hour section on his new message board. It's pretty fledgling, I think. But we always like when people give us a shout-out on there. And he actually... Thank you very much, Devin. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Devin. He put in... And if people want to, you know, go there for comments, obviously our comment section is still like the main place. But if people want to expound more, they can, you know, talk more about shows or whatever. They can go there. And we'll link that in. Also, there's, you know, on the EV blog forum, there's also an amp hour section, which is, you know, it's active. When some big stuff comes up, it's usually pretty active. So either one is fine.

Dave Jones: And I've got a rant for today's show. Well, somebody ranted about us, so we might get onto that later. Oh, okay. I didn't see that. I don't think we want to segue into it because we want to finish the shout-outs. Or are we finished?

Chris Gammell: Oh, I'm done. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, right.

Speaker ?: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Maybe we should segue into it. Well, actually, there's one more thing on here, I guess. There's always one more thing on there. Yeah, there's one more thing. Yeah, I actually got – I mean, I get contacted about jobs. And I think you do too, Dave, about, you know, people looking for this or that or this or that. And it's great. I love – I mean, it makes me feel special. Not necessarily that's the reason to do it. But, you know, I know a couple of people. But mostly it's – I don't know if there's any interest in the amp hour community who's looking for jobs or, you know, if the skill sets would match up. But, you know, we could always start up a job board. And I think you said – Well, I've actually got one. You have one too? Oh, you do too?

Dave Jones: Yeah, I've got one. Technically, it's there. I've installed it.

Dave Jones: I've eevblog.com slash jobs. But I haven't actually set it up properly yet. So it's been there for like a month. Yeah. So, yeah, if you go there, there's probably a couple of spams that have gone through or something like that.

Speaker ?: Yeah, that's always a problem.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, then you'd start dealing with recruiters too. And, you know, recruiters are – they are what they are.

Dave Jones: They're just pure evil. Let's put it that way.

Chris Gammell: I mean, they're not pure evil. They're just –

Dave Jones: I've done a whole video on that.

Chris Gammell: Ah, you know, they can be useful. But more often than not, you've got to really watch out. You know, like it's – they're not looking out for your best interest. They're looking out for theirs.

Dave Jones: They're a necessary evil sometimes.

Chris Gammell: Sometimes, yeah. Depends on the position.

Dave Jones: You cannot get through the front door unless you go through their approved recruitment company. Right. Exactly. Exactly. In the story, you know. Right. Right. So –

Chris Gammell: And I think that was – I think this guy might have been a recruiter, but I think he was like an internal guy. So he was actually calling me to see if I wanted to work for these people. But I really didn't have any interest. But it was for like testing high-end analog chips. And so if people want to know about that, I can give them info. But I don't know. Like it's – I don't know if we really want, you know, recruiters coming through us. So – but this one actually, you know, I vetted it. It sounded really cool. I just – I just changed jobs. So I'm not going to do it. So –

Speaker ?: Right.

Chris Gammell: So – How's the new job going, by the way? It's going great. I have been doing Google SketchUp, like modeling and mostly just mechanical – not even just mechanical, but just kind of prototyping and stuff just to kind of pass the time. A lot of people are out of the office over the holidays. So – Right. Yeah. I mean I started three weeks before the holidays. It's been pretty quiet. So I think tomorrow I'm going to hit the ground running. So I'll let you know next week. Excellent. How it's really going.

Dave Jones: If I'm like, oh, God, I hate it. No, I'm disillusioned already. It's only a week. I want a new job. They lied to me, the bastards. They said it was utopia and it's not. It's Dilbert. I have to do work.

Chris Gammell: You poor bastard. I think it's going to be great. I think it's going to be great. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Excellent.

Chris Gammell: Yep. It's going to be good. I have to tell myself that. If not, I'll convince myself otherwise. Yeah. All right. So on to your rant. What was your rant?

Dave Jones: Well, it wasn't my rant. It was somebody on the forum and it was Pete from Texas. G'day, Pete. Hi, Pete.

Chris Gammell: Pete, g'day.

Dave Jones: Texas. Everything's bigger in Texas. Texas.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I can only imagine my Australian sounded as bad as your Texan.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know. That was a pretty bad attempt. Yeah. Yeah. We can get Randy to call in again. No. He's from Hicksville.

Chris Gammell: No, you need to unhook your phone, Dave. That's what you need to do. No phone. If you start recording at the new office, no phone's allowed. Right. Oh, boy.

Dave Jones: I can't do anything at the new office yet. The bloody internet's not. I don't know. My phone line's connected. Technically, it's connected to the room down the stairs, but the dude, you know, Telstra, who's the telecommunications company here in Australia, handled all the lines. They came in and installed the line and they went, right, it's hooked up to the cupboard in the basement in the car park. Our job is done.

Chris Gammell: Like, hey, thanks. Hope you know something about phone lines.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, well, no, they did actually try to connect it up here, but they couldn't get into the comms cupboard because it was over the break and the Strata management, they had gone on holidays and the cafe was closed where they keep the keys, apparently, to the comms cupboard or something like that. Oh, and so he went, well, there's nothing I can do.

Paul Stevenson: Yep.

Dave Jones: As far as I'm concerned, my job's done. You only paid to have it connected to the-

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. I mean, things just, like, shut down during the- Yeah. People were, I think someone wrote in saying that they were even surprised we were doing shows this week because nothing's going on, but luckily we've got a list about, you know, 20 feet long of old things.

Dave Jones: Well, luckily because nothing goes on on this show anyway, so.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's great. Who needs current events when you have nothingness to talk about?

Dave Jones: And rants to rant on about. Of course. Of course.

Chris Gammell: Of course. So, what is this thing? This is a-

Dave Jones: Anyway, he was, get your bingo sheets ready, I guess, because we're going to, well, we may not talk about it again, I'm just going to mention it. Where is it?

Chris Gammell: Oh, did you resort this list? No, no, I didn't do that. It's the third one down. All right.

Dave Jones: No, it's not. That's Arduino.

Chris Gammell: Oh. Which one are you talking about, then?

Dave Jones: No, I'm talking about-

Chris Gammell: Well, what's the topic? It's about the power splinter? Oh, man.

Dave Jones: He complained about, Pete in Texas complained, took us to task that we were always talking about how crap the education system is.

Paul Stevenson: Oh. Oh, okay.

Dave Jones: And how it doesn't produce people who can do basic stuff. You know, they can't use a multimeter, they can't use an oscilloscope, you know, really basic stuff. And he took us to task for it, saying, pretty much, you know, I'm sick of it. Stop raving on about it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Presumably, it was prompted by our discussion the other week where our guest mentioned it. Yeah, it's tough. We didn't actually bring it up that time.

Chris Gammell: No, that was bad. And it is tough because it's always a mismatch of expectations, right? That's what the real thing is. I mean, in education...

Dave Jones: Well, I have pretty low expectations of people coming out of university. But one thing I expect is to be able to at least understand how an oscilloscope works. You know, I don't think it's asking much. I don't want them to come out knowing how to operate every single piece of equipment, bang, like that. You know, I just need them to understand... We just want a better mix, really.

Chris Gammell: That's what it really comes down to. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Understand some basic concepts. It's not hard. My interview questions are really easy at the job. I deliberately keep them incredibly easy.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. I like doing a build-up where you start real simple, and then if they're struggling on the simple things, then you say, okay, well...

Dave Jones: Then, you know... You take your expectations. ...because it weeds them out. You only need simple questions at job interviews.

Paul Stevenson: Right.

Dave Jones: You know? Right. You know? Have you heard of an 0805 resistor? Right. You know? Like, you give them a board and say, tell me about it, you know?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know?

Chris Gammell: I think a lot of the complaints, too, is that, oh, well, employers should help train on the job, which I do agree with. I think that is a very important part of any education because, to be completely honest, I did learn on the job. I mean, like, I would not be... Like, if Chris coming out of school would not be... I would not give him a job today. That's just... You know, you got to learn it somewhere, though, and I learned it on co-op. You know? Like, if I just didn't do co-ops, then I would have been screwed. That's the main thing for me. So...

Dave Jones: Well, I learned it all through my hobby.

Chris Gammell: Right. Exactly. And that's another great way to do it. And that's what I've come around to, is that I've seen enough people doing hobby stuff that it's like, not only can you learn how to do it, but also the fact that you're actually interested in it. You know? That's always the tough part. You know? If people aren't actually interested in it, if you're really interested and you just don't... You never got that opportunity, okay. I'd love to give you a chance. But if you're just coming out of school and saying, I deserve a job because I went to school... Yeah, yeah. It's like... And you're not... Yeah. Yeah. Then...

Dave Jones: Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Chris Gammell: Right. And that's the tough part. You know? I'm... Anytime someone's excited and passionate about learning, I'll hire that person. Yep. Absolutely. Unless there's someone better and I'm really in need. But a lot of times...

Dave Jones: Well, it depends on the requirements. Yeah. Typically, we're talking about graduates. Right. You know, here. We're sort of, you know, coming out and you just want somebody general and you want, you know, and you want them to work cheap. That's why you hire graduates, you know? Seriously. Yeah, no. It's true. You've got a project budget and you can only afford, you know, you can't afford someone with 20 years experience. You're going to, you know, you're going to hire, but you want somebody just to do some general stuff. Well, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You're going to hire a graduate. Right? Give somebody an opportunity.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And, yeah, I'm sorry, but, yeah, if the interest ain't there, then, you know, I don't care if you've got first class freaking honors and the Dean, bloody Dean's Medal or whatever at University Medal. I don't give a shit.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Dave Jones: If you don't know that, you know, you can't measure a 20 megahertz square wave on a 20 megahertz bare width scope, then, well, you know, something's wrong.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, someone wrote in, actually, about coming out of, they said they were a junior at Rutgers. This is actually in the comment section from the last show. They said they were a junior at Rutgers and they had, you know, a really high grade point average or whatever.

Dave Jones: Where's this? Sorry.

Chris Gammell: This is actually on last week's page. This is a response to last week.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but where's the place you said?

Chris Gammell: Oh, at Rutgers. It's a school in New Jersey. This is a pretty good engineering school.

Dave Jones: Sorry, I don't know all my engineering schools in the U.S.

Chris Gammell: That's okay. Oh, I've lost it now, though. But basically, he said that, you know, he's in his third year and the fact that they don't really see that much stuff. And it's the same experience. You know, basically, though, my suggestion was really, really nerdy. Actually, I reference Harry Potter. So, are you a Harry Potter fan? Do you ever read the Harry Potter books or anything like that?

Dave Jones: Oh, I haven't read the books, no, but the wife is. I've seen all the movies.

Chris Gammell: Okay, you've seen the movies. So, in the movies, they have, like, the secret club where they're learning on the side because they're not learning.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's right, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they're not learning what they need to do in school.

Dave Jones: They're learning the dark arts because they have to take on the easy. Yeah, yeah, there we go.

Chris Gammell: There's the nerdy reference. Right. And so, basically, I said the same thing. You know, like, if you're not getting what you need in school, then you need to be able to do that outside of school. And it could be a club. It could be hobby stuff. It could be a hacker space. And that's kind of, you have to supplement your own education. So, I'm not sure if Pete in Texas would agree with that or not, but, I mean. No, probably not, no.

Dave Jones: But, anyway, everyone's entitled to their opinion.

Chris Gammell: Of course, of course.

Dave Jones: And the reason that we often bring it up is because that's where practitioners in the field, and that is what we see. I mean, we're just telling it like it is. We've interviewed graduates. We're, you know. Right. Both of us have hired graduates and done this sort of thing, as have other people in the industry. And, well, we call it like we see it.

Chris Gammell: Right. And I'm not saying it because- Most of them don't know nothing.

Dave Jones: They don't know anything. Right.

Chris Gammell: I'm not saying it because I don't like universities. I'm saying it because I want these students coming out of university to be better prepared. I wish I was better prepared. You know? That's where it all comes from.

Dave Jones: I made an offhanded comment in the forum post on this that they should probably have special classes for the people who are truly interested. You know? Like a special, oh, a special, you know, subsection of the course or something that you can only take if you're, you know, you have to earn your place in there by being, you know, passionate in the field rather than just one of the cruisers who go, you know, through and they don't care, but, and you can do quite well. I know people who go get through, get first class honors, win the medal and all the rest of it, yet they don't give a rat's ass. Right. You know? They're just very good at memorizing, doing exams and memorizing stuff. Right. But they have absolutely no interest. Right. I think there should be a special, you know, some sort of special class or special course.

Chris Gammell: There's a course like that at my alma mater, actually. Oh, there is. Yeah. Well, sort of. I mean, not like, it's not like weeded out or anything, but it's just, it's got a reputation. It's taught by a guy from industry, you know? He teaches out of the art of electronics, if that gives you any idea. I mean, so that's something I approve of. And basically, he's just teaching them how to, and he gives them a very broad concept, like you have one transistor and you need to build a, you know, you need to amplify a circuit, 20 dB, go. And then basically, that's kind of the idea. And it's a really tough class, but every student I've ever interviewed coming out of that class knows what they're doing. There you go. And they're going in because everybody hears about it. And so that whisper class, like, oh, shh, that class is really tough. You know, you might not want to take that. And that reputation alone usually does it. Right. I got it. Yeah. And I've actually written about the idea of, like, the other side of it before, not the really passionate people, but the people that didn't get an opportunity. You know, because I understand I was that way, too. I didn't come into university with, like, tons of electronics experience like Dave did, where, you know, I should have had just a tinkering class. You know, like just a, you know, I called it remedial tinkering, basically.

Dave Jones: Remedial tinkering. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And that's what you need. You need to be able to have a broad objective. And you need to have in groups that you're working together. And you need to just go and figure stuff out. And I know it's like a really silly idea when I say it like that. But, you know, you need.

Dave Jones: And that's from our completely biased point of view. Of course. Of course. Because you need all sorts in the industry. You know, you don't just need the ones who are passionate and tinkerers and all that sort of stuff. You know, you do need all kinds. Yeah, no, that's a good point, too. We're not saying everyone should be like that. We're just saying there should be more, like us.

Chris Gammell: We're just saying we like us. That's what we're saying, right?

Dave Jones: We want a robot army of us. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, I think I know what you're talking about. Like, yeah, I've seen people that are more like they're in electronics, but it's more programmatic kind of. They're kind of fade towards more software. They're more in computer engineering.

Dave Jones: Well, there might be systems engineering. They might be, you know, there might be more research oriented. So they want to, you know, go into the physics type level of electronics. You know, there's all. Yeah. There's all sorts.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And I'm not saying change that.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. I don't know. Have we ranted enough about that? I think we have. I think we have. I mean, it's still an interesting. I think it's always interesting to talk about. Yeah. It is.

Dave Jones: There's so many opinions.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know.

Dave Jones: We just happen to be similar.

Chris Gammell: We do.

Dave Jones: Because we come from the same sort of, you know, industry. We're both practical.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. We're board level. We're not like, we're not designing chips. So.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Dave Jones: That's right.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Maybe. I think in the future, we're actually supposed to have a chip designer on later this month. So we'll have to pose that question to him.

Dave Jones: Excellent.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Can we say who we've got on next week?

Chris Gammell: I think we can. I think. Possibly. I think it's. Well, we hope so. It's a possible. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's the, speaking of Harry Potter and the master of the dark arts. Oh, yes. It's Dr. Howard Johnson of, what's it called? Signal Consulting. Oh, I've forgotten his company. Sorry. But yeah, Dr. Howard Johnson. He writes a regular column in, I think, EDN. But he writes great articles about a lot of high-speed design and digital design.

Dave Jones: And he's written the classic text on the subject. Yes. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Cannot wait. Cannot wait. I think that'll be a great episode. And I'm looking forward to talking to him. So.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. So that's next week. So fingers crossed.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Yeah. We always have to temper our expectations with technical difficulties and schedule problems and, you know, everything else that could go wrong.

Speaker ?: So.

Dave Jones: Well, they simply may forget. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Like I do every week. Well, yeah. If you forget, then that's something else. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I have no reference point anymore.

Chris Gammell: I know. You're just drifting. You're a drifter, Dave.

Dave Jones: I know. Tell me about it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I had so much to do today. And then I got up and remembered. Oh, shit. The radio show's on.

Chris Gammell: Yep. That'll happen. That'll happen. Ah, well. Yep. Not to worry. Well, what else should we, man. There's a lot. Oh, I know what we need to talk about here. So I've got a big thing. I got a big thing. This is big. This is real big. So speaking of. How big? Bigger than Texas? Texas is pretty big. Have you been to Texas? You haven't been to Texas?

Dave Jones: No. I haven't actually been to Texas. No. I don't believe so. Yeah. No. It's nice. I miss it. Texas is small fry compared to states we've got here in Australia.

Chris Gammell: That's true. Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I think one of our states, Western Australia, is about four times bigger than Texas. Really? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Three and a half. Don't quote me on that.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, never mind then. I guess everything's bigger in Texas unless you're from Australia. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. This is about people that need help though. And so I got an interesting email on Christmas morning actually. I got an email from Marcin Jakubowski who – and we've talked about it on here before. He's the guy in charge of the open source ecology project, which we are both very big fans of. How did he find you? Actually, through Jeremy Blum. Jeremy Blum did a talk about open source hardware.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Yeah. I've seen that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. And so then a bunch of emails later, Jeremy said, hey, well, maybe Chris can mention on the Amp Hour. And so that's what I'm doing here. So basically what they're doing though is they've got like eight –

Dave Jones: Because it doesn't get bigger than the Amp Hour radio show, folks.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Once you get a mention on here, you've made it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely a TED Talk notwithstanding.

Speaker ?: No. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: A TED Talk. No, that's right. Blah, blah, blah. Millions and millions of views. The pinnacle of your career would be a mention on the Amp Hour. Don't think that's what it is. But basically if people don't know what it is, Open Source Ecology Project, it's open source hardware. It's basically they're trying to develop the 50 machines that can – you can have – Restart civilization. Restart civilization. And restart is kind of – Kind of. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Basically poor underdeveloped countries can build their own stuff to at least get a decent living. Right.

Chris Gammell: And so that's – yeah, that's an easy way to think of it as restart civilization. But more likely it's for developing nations or even local farmers for developing hardware together and then being able to feed it back to the community. So a lot of – we're big fans of open source hardware as well. So great idea. They were working on the Christmas present to the world, they were calling it, or the Christmas gift to the world. Basically this idea of 50 machines on a DVD and that's the civilization starter kit. That's the idea. So they're kind of – they've got the plans done, but it's still using a lot of commercial equipment in terms of – in this case, the most important thing is power delivery. So what they're looking for is people that are interested in helping out with the power system. So they're trying to do a universal power supply basically to convert any kind of power to what they need for their various devices that they're building up. So induction furnace, universal welder, plasma cutter, laser cutter.

Dave Jones: So we're talking very high energy stuff here. We're not talking about a 10-watt switch mode here.

Chris Gammell: Right, yeah. And so that's – yeah, that's something I struggle with because I've never done super high power stuff before.

Dave Jones: Yeah, high power stuff is not my field. Right, right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But it's interesting. So they're looking for – and I'm trying to help them shape the problem statement too about what they really need in terms of power delivery. And if convention actually makes sense too. So if you're using a welder and it's normally AC, does it have to be AC, right? Or can it be – is it better to try a DC solution, right? Same thing for induction furnaces and everything else like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But –

Dave Jones: Well, I'm thinking how – I think it would be reasonably important to base the design also on the most generic components possible as well.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And we're talking through hole here. We're talking even almost components, you know, transformers you can wind yourself, inductors you can wind yourself.

Paul Stevenson: Right.

Dave Jones: You know, because, you know, really, I mean, you know, anyone can go – you know, any competent engineer given enough time can design a real, you know, whiz-bang high power switch mode, you know, inverter using the best available Chinese, you know, components. Yeah, yeah. It's a little surface mount and everything else. But I don't think that would be a good idea in this respect. I think it needs to be really old school.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. No, that's – I totally agree. Right. And really with high power stuff, you're going to be – I mean, you're going to have, you know, big ferrites and, you know, you're going to need to really move – if you need to move that much power, you're going to be using big stuff to start with, right? That's just –

Dave Jones: And preferably, like, you don't want a microcontroller to control the damn thing either. Right. Right. That's just crazy. You want as simplistic as possible, you know, no intelligence in it. It just works. Right. Power in, power out.

Chris Gammell: Right. Especially if you're in a –

Dave Jones: You can almost make your own capacitors, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's not a bad idea.

Dave Jones: Maybe not. But certainly inductors and transformers can actually wind yourself. It's not, you know –

Chris Gammell: Right. No, that's true.

Dave Jones: It's not hugely difficult. So you can actually manufacture those components. What other components can you manufacture yourself relatively easily in high-powered components? I'm not –

Chris Gammell: I mean, you could do parallel plates if you really wanted to, but then you start running into –

Dave Jones: You could do parallel plate capacitors. Yeah, you can do diodes using parallel plates. I've looked at old battery charges that the diode, the actual rectifier is some plate sort of system or something. I've never seen that. To that effect. Yeah, I'm not sure. Don't quote me on that. Or I don't know what the actual – how it actually works, but yep. Okay. It didn't have a silicon-based, you know, like a silicon-based diode. It was some sort of plate-based system. So if anyone knows anything about that, link it in.

Chris Gammell: Right. And, you know, this is all kind of a struggle I always have with thinking about the open-source ecology project with regards to the civilization starter kit. You know, it's always – my brain always works itself back to, well, okay, so you have this tractor, but where do you get the controller? Where do you get the pistons from? And really a lot of it they are building themselves. I mean, to be fair, they are building frames themselves with metalworking and they've thought through a lot of this stuff. Don't get me wrong. But I think you bring up a good point, Dave, of simple known solutions. But at the same time, you have to be able to build them basically from scratch. So that's a good design constraint. So I'm not sure if – I don't know. Maybe we could have a regular segment on here talking about it or if people are – I mean, definitely if people are interested, I was going to set up an email address. Just – or sorry, a Google Docs spreadsheet just to kind of collect information about who people would be interested and then ship that over to them. Because they're – I mean, there's probably some people that could help build and some people that are domain experts and that kind of thing. So if you are interested, I'll link it in the show notes. But yeah, I'm not sure. Maybe we can do some more with the Amp Hour and this project because it seems like a good topic. You know what I mean? Like it's – Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: It's just – I haven't heard of such a cool project in a long time. It's just awesome.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah, yeah. It's –

Dave Jones: Just from a philosophical point of view almost. Right. And it's very high level too, right?

Speaker ?: It transcends the –

Chris Gammell: It's almost –

Dave Jones: It transcends the practicality of it almost.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. It's like, really? You're going to do that? But then it's like, yeah, yeah, let's do this. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean it's cool. And I don't know. So I highly encourage people to write in if they're domain experts and we'll probably try and bring it up again on here and I'm going to try and participate myself. So – Excellent. Definitely wanted to bring it up.

Dave Jones: Speaking of doing it yourself stuff, there's an active do-it-yourself 1 gigahertz active probe.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Someone's written an article. Sorry, I don't know who it is. Alan Yates. I got it from his Twitter thing, I think. Alan Yates.

Chris Gammell: He's always doing stuff.

Dave Jones: And –

Chris Gammell: And great job on the end of the – he finished up his advent calendar of circuits. It was brilliant. Oh, yes, he did. Well done. So –

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Another shout out for that. That was –

Dave Jones: That was a circuit a day for a month.

Chris Gammell: Circuit a day, yeah. And he built them up too, didn't he?

Dave Jones: Yeah, he built them all up.

Chris Gammell: He said he was going to be doing the write-ups into the next year.

Dave Jones: Wow. That's a lot of work. Well done.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, definitely. So this is a 1 gigahertz active probe. Is it just like G-foot input? Active probe.

Dave Jones: It's just got a dual gate FET on the input.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's got a dual gate FET and not much else. There's a 78L05 to power it and AC coupled output going into your coax into your scope and that's it. It's AC coupled input and the input cap is actually half a picofarret and he actually makes it out of the PCB material. Nice. I love PCB caps. So you have plates on the – yeah, but they're not that great. No, no, they're not great.

Chris Gammell: I just think they're really – that's almost kind of like where the chip making world meets the PCB world. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Because that's how they do capacitors on chips, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you started doing serpentine on a PCB, you'd be a little crazy, but that would be the same kind of thing too, right? I mean, making your own serpentine. Well, serpentine.

Dave Jones: You can do –

Chris Gammell: Or Ls. You can do inductors too, right?

Dave Jones: Inductors on PCBs. You can do transformers on PCBs. You can do antennas on PCBs. I've done all three of those on PCBs just with tracers and they come for free because you're already etching the board. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. All you get is taking up space, right?

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But like I've done ones where you use like a 12 or 14 or 16 layer board and you actually wind the inductor into the – you know, is actually goes through all the different layers on the board. And then you put the ferrite directly, like the core, directly into the board. You know, you actually drill the hole in the middle and you put the ferrite over that and that gives you an extremely low profile. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Do you have any pictures of that? I would love to see that. No, I don't have any pictures. It was classified in inverted commas. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. If I did show photos, I'd probably be shot. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool though. Yeah, this is cool. I'm not sure if it's performance. He doesn't actually plot any – you know, it doesn't show any response curves, but he says it's good to over a gig or something.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, it's neat. That is neat. Yeah. And this is – what is this? Is this like a magazine or something? David Jewsbury?

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's a magazine. Some – I don't know. Is it German or something?

Chris Gammell: Well, the article's in English. I like that. Elector. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Maybe it's a German version of –

Chris Gammell: Elector or something. Hungarian, apparently.

Dave Jones: Oh, Hungarian or something. Yeah, there we go. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Because the page is in Hungarian. Google tells me.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. But the article's actually a PDF and it's in English. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, and it's great. It's great. DIY saves a pretty penny. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it does.

Dave Jones: Because a good FET probe can be more expensive than your scope. Yeah. Yeah. Does he talk about the power supply here? A lot of people don't realize that. You know, they buy these 1 gigahertz bandwidth scopes and they think that, oh, they can use their time-send passive probe. Right. Right. A lot of the time, eh, no, sorry. It doesn't work. You have to spend the price of your scope again, you know, $10,000 on a whiz-bang active probe.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's almost like the Gillette model where they want you to buy the, you know, give you a discount on the scope and then they sell you the razors. Or in this case, pros. Yeah. Or the Canon. Yeah. The Canon printer model. Oh, yeah. Like printers. Yeah. Oh, God.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Here's a free printer, but the cartridges are $60 each. And we shortchange you on the ink.

Chris Gammell: That'd be interesting if 3D printing ever got to that point where, like, they start giving away the printers and then the fancy cartridges. But the ABS plastic cost. Yeah. Yeah. Cost a fortune. That would be, I guess you'd have to do it with, maybe if it ever goes, like, truly commercial where it's, you know, 3D printers on your desk with, you know, like, fully assembled and low cost. You know, that's the direction they're moving.

Dave Jones: Maybe they'll be that low cost because there's a, really, there is a significant amount of physical, mechanical engineering that's involved in them as opposed to a, well, maybe they'll get it down if they get their print heads, like, you know, just a roller-based thing and a, you know, X-axis print head. I mean, someone said that about printers at some point in the past, right?

Chris Gammell: They said, oh, well, when will you ever need a plotter in your house? I mean, what are you going to do? Make blueprints in your living rooms?

Dave Jones: But those printers have always been the same form factor there. You know, dot matrix, they have a roller with a, feeds the paper through and it scans, you know, X. Yeah. Is the only, you know, thing it has to do. Yeah. So they're relatively easy. Oh, I see what you're saying.

Chris Gammell: 3D printers are... Because there's more, yeah, there's more planes.

Dave Jones: 3D printer, you add that, possibly you can get away with the two-axis stuff if you had a roller-based system with the same X-axis print head, you can get away with that, but then you've got to build it up, you know? Yeah. So you've got to have that third-axis motor, unfortunately. I don't know. Maybe they will get that... Well, they probably will eventually one day, but I think that's a fair way off, but anyway.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I wonder how low they will go, whether or not they'll get to that point of the printers, because they build intelligence into these print heads, you see.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So that, you know, it's hard to use, you know, after third-party market, you know, print cartridges and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you like lock people out, basically.

Dave Jones: And, yeah. And they put a limited amount of ink in them, and even the third-party ones do. Even the third-party ones only give you a limited amount of ink. It's not like they give you, oh, he's a whole liter of, you know... Yeah. Just fill it back up yourself.

Paul Stevenson: We don't want to say it anymore. Yeah.

Dave Jones: This stuff's cheap.

Chris Gammell: We're giving it away. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Was that a Texan accent?

Chris Gammell: No, that was my best car ad.

Dave Jones: Oh, right.

Chris Gammell: You know, you see my...

Paul Stevenson: Use car salesman. Right. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. The world of radio. I'm here at Honest L's.

Dave Jones: Use car a lot.

Paul Stevenson: Oh, boy. Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see if they do actually get down to that point where the, you know, they try and shaft you on the cost of the ABS stuff. At the moment, they're just spools of ABS, and you get a hell of a lot of ABS on a spool for your 20, 30 bucks or whatever a spool of ABS costs, you know. Yeah, yeah. You get an awful lot on there. So, you know, several kilos, I think. You get several kilos worth of ABS. Yeah. So, you know, I was... Sort of, the market's almost already, you know, shot itself in the foot in that respect. It's hard to go backwards.

Chris Gammell: It is. It definitely is.

Dave Jones: You know, whereas Inkjet first started, they went, ha-ha, let's just put a small amount of ink in there. Let's not give them too much. Right. And they sewed the market up, and people got used to that. But people are already used to buying these huge reels of ABS, so...

Chris Gammell: Well, I don't think they'd be... It wouldn't be the ABS stuff. It'd be the, you know, if they ever had like a rest or... Oh, the more advanced. Yeah, like a floating polymer.

Dave Jones: More, yeah, polymer. Yeah. Yeah, really fancy stuff that goes into... Yeah, they might start if somebody can crack that market where they can get the low-cost print head and, you know, with the many nozzles and the boom.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, that's actually...

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That's another thing on here. So, they were talking about that with graphene, right? So, you know, I'm a big fan of printable electronics, and we all know that, yada, yada, yada. But this is actually, you know, they were floating graphene inside a polymer, basically, and then they put it into a print head. This has actually happened a little bit now. But basically, they're able to now print a gate material with graphene. So, that's kind of... That might be a market, right? If there ever was any kind of printable electronics on your desktop for some reason, then maybe... I don't think you'd be getting... You're not going to get a one-gallon drum of graphene... One-gallon drum for a dollar. Graphene in solution. Yeah. Well, I just went down to the local surplus store. We're giving it away. Yeah. So, I'm sure it'll be the more exotic materials, you know, like... Then you can just... Even just put it into a... Even if you just have a cheap printer, because this is talking... There's an Engadget article about it, too, basically, where... I think it's the same... Maybe the same article. They did this at Cambridge, where they just used a regular old inkjet printer, basically. They used a... Yep. Photosmart MFP. Oh, wait. Maybe that's not right.

Dave Jones: They always use the Epson ones, because the Epsons are the piezoelectric heads, I believe. They're different to all the other brands on the market. Oh, they're not... Like the non-thermal. They use the thermal. Yeah. Yeah, the non-thermal ones. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. And all the others, the Canons, use the thermal bubble jets. So they boil the liquid, and that's what makes it come out as a dot, whereas the Epsons work on a different piezoelectric principle. Interesting.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you know, you don't see this a lot in that. Maybe it has been hacked together by people, but I'd imagine that would be a good project for people to do, too, you know, like hacking Epson printers and trying to put funny things in there.

Dave Jones: There's a whole Yahoo group out there. Is there? Yeah, there's a whole Yahoo group. Oh, cool. You can join it. And there's people who are printing their own circuit boards using these Epson printers. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay, I'll have to look that up. I'll try and link that if I...

Dave Jones: And the ones with the CD trays in them, you know how you can put the CD in and you can put it into your inkjet printer?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it prints the labels on the CDs. Well, that so happens to be just the same thickness, the tray, for a 1.6 millimeter PCB. So you don't have to modify your printer. You just stick it on the tray and you can get these inserts that can hold your board inside the tray and you slide it into the printer. Huh.

Chris Gammell: And now is this for like a resist in order to print?

Dave Jones: This is for a photo resist thing. Okay. Okay.

Chris Gammell: So this is a negative resist then, right? So then you're actually catching still.

Dave Jones: No, this is a photo positive.

Chris Gammell: Oh, positive.

Dave Jones: So it's actually... Because they've determined that some of the inks, once you actually bake them at a certain temperature, become an etch resistant. So you can positive print directly onto the board. Huh. Okay. And then throw it straight in the etchant. Well, after you throw it in the oven to bake it, you throw it in the etchant.

Chris Gammell: Okay, but you get really good resolution then too, huh? It's probably limited more by the printer than the... Yeah. Yep. Huh. Well, that's cool.

Dave Jones: And then I think there's some people who have actually tried to print conductive ink. Yeah, that's what I thought you were talking about at first. No, no. I'm talking about the photo resist process.

Chris Gammell: I like the printing of conductive. I mean, that's a little tougher, I think. But, you know, we've talked about the pens and stuff like that. So the inks out there are like the silver nitrate, I think, or not silver nitrate, but silver in solution, basically.

Dave Jones: Yeah, they've been around for 30 years since I was a boy. Yep.

Paul Stevenson: Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Dave Jones: And so, yeah, you don't have to modify these printers at all, apparently. You can just, you know, throw in your circuit board and away you go.

Chris Gammell: That's pretty cool.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it's, you know, it's touchier than that. You've got to... Well, yeah. You've got to do things right. You've got to get the right type of ink, the right brand of ink and all sorts of jazz like that. But apparently it works. There's a whole group. So, yeah, go check it out. Huh, that's pretty cool. You're into that sort of thing, which I was almost desperate to do. I was almost going to do this the other day. I'm waiting for my boards for my new power supply. Oh, yeah? Oh, bloody hell. Yeah, I'll do it myself, right? I've got to wait for these boards. Almost, geez, it's only double-sided through. Oh, I can make this myself. Oh, I thought about dragging the cobwebs, you know, dusting the cobwebs off the old light box and get some old crusty FR4 material I've got and having a go again.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know, the tough part with that is plate and the through holes. That's always the tough part.

Dave Jones: Oh, you don't bother. Plating man. What do you want that for? Sold her on both sides like a real man.

Chris Gammell: How many, is this just a proto? This wasn't like something you're selling, right?

Dave Jones: Oh, no. This would just be a proto so I could get the proto up and running so I can do more videos.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Okay, I see what you're saying. Yeah, Mel, that's a good video too, man. Maybe you should just jump in. I mean, you've turned around on other things before, right?

Chris Gammell: Dave's a flip-flopper.

Paul Stevenson: Politics season in the US, you can tell. And I'm metastable too. Look out. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Speaking of PCBs, there was actually an interesting, there's like a new site out there. It's called Chooftech. I'm not sure if that's how you say it. Gesundheit. Yeah, right? But basically, it's a nice article on basically why you don't make right angle traces about the high frequency effects that'll burn you every time.

Dave Jones: What are they saying about it?

Chris Gammell: Oh, I put this on the list a long time ago.

Dave Jones: Because there's a lot of myths there. Yeah? There's a lot of myths with right angle traces. What are the myths that you're talking about? Oh, that the electrons fly off the corners and they generate extra ESD and it really, and it totally kills the impedance and all this sort of, you know, rubbish. Or it etches away. If you do right angle traces, it's bad because when they get etched, all of the bubble, the etchant material actually bubbles up and it gets caught in the right angle corner and it etches away more of the trace and all that sort of stuff, you know. And all these things, it's like the audio fool industry, all of these things are technically true to a certain niche extent, but, you know, they're in practice there. Well, you'll get 80%. Is that the idea?

Chris Gammell: I mean, you'll get the 80% effect basically.

Dave Jones: You'll get 80%, you know, 90% modern processes and all this sort of stuff. And, you know, it's really old school thinking. And if you think it changes the impedance, well, it doesn't happen until many gigahertz, you know. And even then, it may not be a big deal.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, maybe that's a good question for next week with our high-speed signal black arts master. Guru, yep. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Howard Johnson, yes, he's the man who knows. Yeah. Yeah, I knew it was hype. And people have done experiments on these things. I think Howard's even done experiments himself.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so we'll have to bring that up next week.

Speaker ?: Yep.

Chris Gammell: All right, well, we should bring up the nerd history from this week. Because we were giggling about this before the show. Yeah. We're getting on towards the end of the amp hour. But on January 2nd in what year was it? 1813. This is actually like history, history. You know, it's not just like, oh, well, this happened today. Well, I guess that's history, right? Right. Yeah. It's not like someone was born today. This is actually history. In 1813, they put 66 people on trial for Ludism. Ludoidism. Yeah. Ludism. It's actually Ludism. For being Luddites. Ludism. Right, right.

Dave Jones: For being Luddites.

Chris Gammell: And I didn't realize.

Dave Jones: For being afraid of technology.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I didn't realize. You know, we talk about Luddites on here before with about like, you know, like you say that when someone's, oh, don't be such a Luddite. You know, you're afraid of technology or whatever.

Dave Jones: I'm afraid of technology. I hate technology. I'm a Ludoid.

Speaker ?: I'm a Ludoid.

Dave Jones: I'm a Ludoid. I know. Yeah. These newfangled mobile phone crap.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Technology doesn't work. It's crap. I hate it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Nothing ever works. Everything fails.

Chris Gammell: Well, you know.

Dave Jones: I should go bush and start the- You should build it from scratch, man. With my civilization. Start again. There you go. Start again. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So apparently, though, these people- So a bunch of people were on trial back in the day. York, England. 1813. And there were, like, 17 of them were put to death for being Luddites. Because what they were doing-

Speaker ?: You shouldn't laugh.

Dave Jones: That's serious.

Chris Gammell: I'm not- Yeah, you're right. Sorry. 17 people were put to death. Sadly. But this guy- This is actually- They were named after Ned Ludd. They were Luddites. They said they weren't going to be associated with technology. In this case, technology being, like, machinery and factories. But they would go in and do industrial sabotage. And they made it into a capital crime. And when it's a capital crime, they got convicted. And they were- Capital punishment. Yeah. They were hanged. It was crazy. But I thought it was relevant to the show. Because, first off, it's hilarious. Sort of. And second off, it's kind of like we're at that same point with, like- Not the same point. But people say the same things about robots. Oh, robots are taking jobs. Yeah. You know, maybe we should do it the old way. Because then it provides more jobs for people. And I don't know. I doubt we'll see the same kind of punishment for it. But I could see industrial sabotage happening.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Anything's possible in the U.S.

Chris Gammell: Oh, come on. Let's not go there.

Dave Jones: Come on. They passed laws for everything.

Chris Gammell: Well, maybe we should talk about countries. Everyone's a terrorist until proven innocent. Yeah. So 17 were executed. Guess where the others went, Dave? This is English prisoners, by the way.

Dave Jones: Where did the others go, Chris?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Where did the others go, Dave? They were sent to Australia. We're a country of Luddites. You are a country of Luddites. It might have been your ancestors. Who knows? So the ones that were put to death, they were sent to prison island.

Dave Jones: Sorry. No. My ancestors came over on the first free settlers in Australia. I am directly related to the first free settlers in this country.

Chris Gammell: That's interesting. I actually...

Dave Jones: The oldest... Still the oldest house in Australia was built by my great, great, great somebody.

Chris Gammell: That's interesting.

Dave Jones: And it's still standing. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I have some interesting history in my past, too. My four great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather was on the Boston Tea Party boat. He was throwing tea off the side. Right. Yeah. A little criminalism in my past, too, I guess.

Dave Jones: You pale and support are you.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What?

Dave Jones: So you're a commie, pale and supporter.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no.

Dave Jones: And a tea party, right? Isn't she involved in a tea party? No, I'm not a tea partier now. I threw... Come on.

Chris Gammell: My relative threw tea off a boat a long time ago. Not related.

Dave Jones: Well, you're calling me a Luddite because, you know, centuries ago. So I'm allowed to make the stretch that you're a...

Chris Gammell: A tea partier now, yeah.

Dave Jones: You're a commie, tea party...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's... A guy behind the curtain. Yeah, I am the man behind the curtain, if nothing else.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. That's hilarious.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I like this.

Dave Jones: This is great. This is good history.

Paul Stevenson: Good history, yeah. So...

Dave Jones: York. I love York.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah?

Dave Jones: It's a great city. Yeah. I've never been to England. York is England. Yeah? England's great. Love England.

Chris Gammell: I'm more of a New York, you know, like... Right, yeah. ...Modern York. I'm from the newer York.

Dave Jones: Well, the newer York, yeah. The state of newer York.

Chris Gammell: Yes.

Dave Jones: Right. No, York is excellent. It's a walled city. It's got a wall all the way around the outside. And it's, you know... Yeah. That's really cool.

Chris Gammell: Nice little city, York. That's cool. Yeah. All right. Any last...

Dave Jones: If you're a listener from York, we'll give you a shout out.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Dave Jones: What are the odds?

Chris Gammell: There's got to be one, right? Maybe.

Dave Jones: One in, what, 2,500 listeners or something? 2,500 regulars, yeah. Yeah. So, how, you know, what are the odds? How many cities are there in the world? Lots. Yeah. I think the odds are quite small, though. Yeah, they probably are. That people have a listener in York. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, well.

Dave Jones: Maybe from York. I don't know. Are we out of time?

Chris Gammell: I think we are. I don't know if we... We might have time for one last tidbit. Oh, we've pissed away our hour. Yeah.

Dave Jones: What's the last tidbit? I don't know. You had a suggestion for the last tidbit?

Chris Gammell: Mm.

Dave Jones: We always had a last tidbit, don't we?

Chris Gammell: Well, speaking of Europe, they're actually... So, they're talking about engineering card. This is actually from Spectrum. They were talking about coming up with, like, a card, like, being a card-carrying engineer. Can you imagine that? It's kind of like the professional engineer in the U.S., I think.

Dave Jones: Relax. I'm an engineer.

Chris Gammell: And you hold the card up. That's a good T-shirt. I like that. You should... If you like that, stand back. I'm about to try science.

Dave Jones: Or I'm an engineer if you see me running T-shirt.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, go the other way. Yeah. Yeah, follow behind closely.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I think it's an interesting idea to have a...

Dave Jones: Well, what's it gonna... I don't know. It's the first time I've heard of this, and my initial reaction is, well... What does it get?

Chris Gammell: It's hard to... Yeah. It gets you in the door, probably. You know, it would be like a... The same with IEEE. You know, same IEEE, same kind of thing. Having a... You basically gotta just pay, I guess, to be a member of IEEE. But like, how about a professional engineer? I took the fundamentals engineering exam in the US. Right. And, you know, I could... Now I've had enough years that I could go take the professional engineering exam. Okay. And I would be able to put P-E after my name, and yada, yada, yada.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. And what would that get you? A job in some stuffy company who gives a shit about that sort of thing?

Chris Gammell: Actually, a lot of government work requires it. But it's more... Actually, it's more for like civil engineers. So if you're signing off drawings, you need to be a professional engineer.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. Civil engineering is... Building real stuff like buildings. Right. Stuff that can fall down. That's it. That's something that can fall down

Chris Gammell: and kill someone. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Stevenson: Right.

Chris Gammell: So, you know, I like the idea. It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure... I mean, I probably would complain about the test I'd have to take or, you know, certification or whatever. But it always comes down to enforcement. If people don't say, well, you have to have this card, then who cares, right? I mean, like then...

Dave Jones: In Australia here, it's... You sometimes see jobs that, you know, especially in the medical field, for example, where they will advertise, you know, you must be eligible for entry to the Institute of Engineers. You don't have to be a member. You just have to be...

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. So they use that as like a benchmark, basically.

Dave Jones: They use that as a benchmark. Yeah. You just have to be eligible. Yeah. We don't actually give a shit. Yeah. But, you know, yeah. That's weird.

Paul Stevenson: Hmm.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, well, I mean, it's an interesting debate. I mean, maybe our listeners have strong feelings in one way or the other. I mean, I don't really care. Like I said, I haven't gotten my PE yet, so... And I'm not sure if I need to even. You know, like, there's very little that I would really need it for that says I'm not doing power line stuff. Right. You know, if I ever started doing power line.

Dave Jones: So is it expensive to do that? Is there a yearly thing to maintain it or what?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's like a $300 fee for the test, which usually employers pay. And then, you know, if they care. My last employer paid my FE exam fee. And then you need like 10 to 15 credit hours a year where you could just do like online classes and stuff like that just to keep up. And that's a good idea. I mean, in general, I agree with it. I just haven't done it yet. So it's a feather in your cap for most electrical engineers. It's not like a necessary thing, but it's a feather in the cap kind of thing. Right. Maybe this would be the same or maybe it would be a more stringent thing. You know, Europe's pretty good about... Or good or bad, depending on how you look at it. I mean, they're pretty stringent when it comes to these kind of things. And they're really talking about it for, you know, crossing country lines and going throughout the EU and being able to say, like, I'm an engineer, I can work anywhere. Got it. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's an EU thing.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: If the EU survives.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Good luck, guys. May not. May implode.

Paul Stevenson: Oh, we'll see.

Dave Jones: One last thing. Oh, no. Well, you put it on the list. Semiconductor revenue is going to top $308 billion next year, which I guess is this year, right? Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. $308 billion. Has that gone up?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that has gone up. It was some amount below. It was 7% higher.

Dave Jones: Otherwise, it wouldn't be news. It'd be like, well, you know, it's sad. Semiconductor revenue was only $308 billion this year.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's a 2.2% rise. I don't know. I don't put it. I don't put it. 2.2%.

Dave Jones: That's in the noise. That's noise.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. I can't watch these reports.

Dave Jones: How do people measure shit like this?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, well, that's the problem. It's not the measuring. It's the acting on it.

Dave Jones: How do they measure global warming temperatures in the noise?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but if you look at this data, though, people actually use this as a firing and hiring kind of decision. So that's the real problem. Yeah, right. Yeah. Great. Hopefully, no one's job is in jeopardy because it's only 2.2%.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the job of the pointy-haired boss. Yes. Right? Yes. From Dilbert is to make those. Or the cone-headed. No, the pointy-hair is just the boss. He's not the owner of the company. The cone-head dude is the...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. The CEO.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, good God.

Dave Jones: We're doomed. We'll all be out... All our jobs will be outsourced to Elbonia.

Paul Stevenson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: What is it?

Paul Stevenson: Is that... I think it's... Yeah, like Elbonia. Yeah, like Elbonia. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: No, I'm sure I've got that wrong. Elbon... Is it? It's not Elbonia. It's Ebonia or something like that. Anyway. Yeah. Our jobs are going to be outsourced. All right, well... I work for myself. Maybe my job will get outsourced.

Paul Stevenson: Yep.

Chris Gammell: That would suck. I think you'd have to blame your boss on that one, Dave. Yeah. Yeah. Bastard.

Dave Jones: All right. Our amp power's up.

Chris Gammell: It is. Catch you next week. People can find us, usual places, Twitter, Google+, our website. So, yeah. We'll see you next week, guys.

Dave Jones: Bye. Bye.

Chris Gammell: Recorded January 2nd, 2012. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.