#85 – Reputable Radio Reification

Mar 5, 2012 1:04:38

Show Notes

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HAXLR8R is rolling! And we helped inform one of the participants! Tom from Boulder ElectroRide was accepted and is now writing about his experience on a new blog. Star Simpson, another member of the HAXLR8R program, is keeping a journal of her travels as well. Both are super interesting!
So glad that there are hardware startups...and people are starting to notice!
Lattice has a new logo...and it could mess up your ability to spot one of their parts until you learn the new logo. If you need to spot old logos, check out this site.
Dave's video about the anti static bag myth was passed down the chain by Element14 and they should be using the correct bags now.
BoredAtWork writes on the EEVBlog Forum about the silliness of pricing when it's just a software upgrade, but Chris and Dave understand the reality behind it. You need margin in order to work on next generation stuff!
Chris Anderson wrote a series on "Maker Businesses" and makes a similar point. You need to charge 2.4x your costs in order to maintain business! (i.e. $10 in parts means you have to charge $24).
Business Week writes about the true cost of low cost products: managers beholden to shareholders chasing the rock bottom prices will not have time and resources to focus on a good product.
Chris uses Dropbox to maintain CAD files across computers/platforms.
New web-based SPICE program available for the NerdKits guys. It's called Circuit Lab and has some great features!
This Week In Nerd History
- In 1977, the first Freon-cooled Cray-1 supercomputer, costing $19,000,000, was shipped to Los Alamos Laboratories, NM. It was 133 MegaFlops. The A4 processor in an iPhone is 34 MegaFlops!
Chip of the Week
- Dave likes the LT3600, a 15V, 1.5A Synchronous, Rail-to-Rail, Single Resistor, Step-Down Regulator (whew!)

Thanks to kafkan for the radio tower picture

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Archived Discussion (16)

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Josh March 5, 2012
So cool of you! Thanks guys!
Show naming March 5, 2012
True nerds would use GUID's for show names ;-)
Steven Casagrande March 5, 2012
Since we're on the topic of KiCAD, I would like to point out this great resource:

http://kicad.rohrbacher.net/quicklib.php

It will let you quickly make a schematic library component. After, just add the 1 component library file it gives you (preferences->library).

Loved the discussion on business and pricing. As someone who is getting ready to start selling some OSHW equipment, it was nice to hear about pricing.

Great job as always gentlemen!
firewalker March 5, 2012
Chris be careful with DropBox. It can bite you really hard. I was keeping a project between my desktop pc and my laptop. For a couple of days I was working on the desktop only and hadn't turned on the laptop. When I did so Dropbox pulled everything from the laptop to the server and downgraded everything.

Alexander.
Steven Casagrande March 6, 2012
@firewalker/Alexander:

You can revert to previous versions.
John Dowdell March 6, 2012
Just so Chris feels validated, I downloaded and played around a little with KiCad the other week after I felt he was building momentum behind it through his KiCad musings.
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As far as product marketing goes, Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational is a great read about how the human brain can be manipulated and how marketeers take advantage of it. The section on how the brain likes to compare things is most interesting. He talks about how a manufacturer will have a smaller, less featured product on the shelf next to their better higher priced one just so your brain will compare the two and validate it's decision on buying the higher priced one that the manufacturer wanted you to buy anyway. This is one reason for mid tier pricing. There's no real market for it, it just makes you feel better about buying the higher or lower tier priced product.
JD
1. Mark March 6, 2012
  interesting - I'll have to check that out. I always thought the high and low were there to lead a person to the middle because a person can feel like they didn't waste on the highest and didn't get the worst either. In our company we are always (not me) talking about the "sell-up" story. drives me nuts. we'll go through pains to find a way to trivially differentiate the levels of our products.
  1. Chris Gammell March 6, 2012
    Yeah, I thought it was this way too...and they price a crapload of margin in to the middle version. I know I usually end up buying "medium" coffees...when there's 20 cents on either side, it's pretty trivial.
Slobodan March 6, 2012
Dave, why don't you try DesignSpark PCB 3.0 too? And do a review of it?
It is completely free without any restrictions.

http://www.designspark.com/pcb
mikeselectricstuff March 6, 2012
LT make some nice chips but they are just too expensive compared to the competition in most cases
Katie March 6, 2012
About CircuitLab.com, as a reasonably new EE student, I have found it to be really valuable for me. I have tried various SPICE programs and found them to be entirely too complicated for a quick and dirty circuit drawing for a lab report. It's so easy for a beginner and you can create a basic circuit in less than 5 minutes. Win!
Joel March 7, 2012
I haven't had any trouble with Dropbox at all. As long as you don't do edits on multiple computers at the same time and let them sync regularly, it works great. I put all of my Altium project folders in it and they are synced between all of my computers and backed up online. Recently when my Windows virtual machine stopped booting, I just had to reinstall Windows, Altium and Dropbox and all of the files were synced back across the LAN. Altium's cloud preference saving is actually handy in this sort of situation too!

I did all of the various tricks to expand the limits of the free account and currently have 23.1 GB, so it's more than enough for all of my work and documents.
Yi Yao March 7, 2012
Online CAD tools? Sounds like Upverter:
http://upverter.com/

They don't have PCB layout yet, just schematic capture.
Charlie March 14, 2012
the LT3600 link is broken.
Charlie March 14, 2012
About the price in high end products, I hate when people say that they are ripping you off just because the price tag of the product is many times higher than that of the BOM. It is not the parts, it is how the parts are put together (in all means).

At the end, products are the result of experience, knowhow and R&D.

CH!
Tom McKinnon March 17, 2012
Thanks for mentioning HAXLR8R and our company. You mostly hit the nail on the head describing the program but here are a few clarifications:

1. We're in Shenzhen for 12 weeks, not 6.
2. It's funny you mentioned seeing pushbuttons from Star's photos of the Hua Qiang Bei electronics market. Just before I left, I sourced some IP67 weather-tight push buttons for $10 each. At Hua Qiang Bei they are $0.50. Are they really IP67? Do they really work? Who the heck knows. That's the challenge of working in China. The good fab shops don't trust anybody; everything is tested when it comes in the door.
3. The funding comes from SOSVentures in exchange for a small stake in our company.
4. We're physically located at Seeed Studio. Eric Pan and his crew have been super helpful.
5. The networking opportunities in Shenzhen are out of control. It's the wild west.

It would be fun to have a short report on TAH about HAXLR8R and the experiences of gringos trying to keep our heads above water in Shenzhen. Let me know if you are interested.

Tom

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