#9 – From Boston In Boxers?

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. How you doing, Chris? You're in a hotel room, I hear. That's right. Yeah, I don't know if I sound any different. I'm on my new little digital recorder. I've been using it all day to record sessions at ESC, and now I'm talking to you and recording on this thing in a hotel room in Boston. Fantastic. I love technology. Me too.

Dave Jones: But you're paying for that crappy internet access, aren't you?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you know, let's get right into the rants here. All right. I cannot believe. Let's just say this is northwards of $200 by quite a bit. We'll just put it there, just to be nice to Boston hotels. They're ridiculous. Right. So, you know, up into the many hundreds of dollars to stay here, basically to sleep somewhere, not on the street. And I have to pay an extra $10 then to get on the internet. I mean, I can go down to the lobby, but when I want to, you know, surf the internet in my boxers, I have to pay $10. Apparently, that is a privilege that I have to pay for. So, I'm doing that right now in order to talk to you, Dave. I hope you're not just in your boxes. I am fully closed right now. There are no problems with that. But it's ridiculous. I just can't believe it's 2010 and they're still charging this much.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's crazy. I've been to some places where it's completely free. In some countries, it's great. But, yeah, I've been to the U.S. quite a few times. And, yep, they charge you extra for the generally, not all hotels, but all the big business ones. Yeah, exactly. You know, that specialize in business. Yeah, accommodation. They all... It's anything business, really. And they know, because they know that your company's paying for it. And they'll just, you know, you just chuck everything on the room bill. You chuck the breakfast, lunch and dinner, internet, the minibar, the porn movies, everything onto the...

Chris Gammell: I don't know if that one happens, but okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you put all these things on the room bill and they know they just pay it happily. So, it's just gouging.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's like inflation on other things, too. I mean, you think about, like, even buying a multimeter. I mean, you review $100 multimeters, right? But most people in industry aren't buying those things because they can get slightly better performance for lots of money. I mean, like, because companies will pay it. And it's like... That's right. But, I mean, you get a lot of stuff with it, too. But, like, the price differential for someone that's paying for it themselves versus someone that's paying for industry stuff, it's usually pretty extreme.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. It definitely is. We didn't have that on the list of rants, but that is a good point. I know. Certainly, you know. Like, I had somebody tweet me the other last night saying, where can I buy the Fluke 87 in Australia? You know? And it's like $750 here. Oh, wow. You know? Whereas in the US, it's like $300. Well, $300 US, which is almost equivalent to $300 Australian here now. Let's say about $350. So, yeah, it's almost like it's double the cost here. And, you know, but companies will pay it. You know? It's easy. But if you're buying one yourself, if you're a hobbyist in Australia, you're not going to spend, you know, $700 for a Fluke 87 in Australia. That's... Right, right, right. Well, some well-heeled ones might. But, yeah, you're going to buy a $200 one or something like that. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I think a better example, though, Mike, I mean, because that is, I mean, that's still low. But, I mean, you think about, like, the Rigol that you have a lot of, I mean, you get a lot of search hits for Rigol and stuff. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: I'm number one or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, and you compare that even to, you know, those things get rebranded as Agilent scopes. And, you know, like, the price differential there even is ridiculous. And it's because... You're paying for name or something like that. So, it gets insane pretty quick. And it's not just test equipment either. I mean, it's... There's tons of stuff out there like that. I mean, there's hotels. There's any kind of business expense, really. I mean, rental cars. Who pays rental cars? I mean, like, you think about renting cars and, you know, you're going to pay a lot more than you would pay for some little Kia Sportage if they ever run into those kind of things, you know?

Dave Jones: Exactly. So, yeah, if you're on a business trip, you always get the, you know, the upgraded car. You always get the, you know, the second top one or something like that. And, yeah, you just wouldn't buy that if you're forking out your own dough for it generally. Yeah. You're just going to get the cheapest, crappiest thing that'll get you from A to B pretty much. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's interesting, like, the price, I mean, the price differential just for that kind of stuff. Because, I mean, I'm a... I don't know about you, but I'm a cheapskate, like, big time. Oh, I'm pretty tight ass too, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you think, like... And, like, to the point where it almost hinders me. And so when... I mean, like... And so when there's... I mean, that's for a lot of people too. So when there's situations where other people are, you know, have the opportunity to, you know, pay with someone else's dollar, they're going to. And it's just... I mean, it's just reality, I guess. I don't know if companies take advantage or what's the deal, but... I mean, at least on the other side, we know for at least internet. Internet, they are gouging. $10, come on. I know. It's... Yeah, it's ridiculous. Come on. Who's the hotel?

Dave Jones: Name and shame.

Chris Gammell: Oh, it's the Sheraton. Sorry, Sheraton. You failed me.

Dave Jones: Sheraton. Yeah. There you go. Bastards. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I've stayed in plenty of them. The Hiltons and all sorts of ones. Yeah, all charged for bloody internet. Right, right. Well, they... Someone's got... And it's usually pretty shitty too. It's like they make you go through some gateway thing and there's like... I can't often... I can't access my home web mail that's on my server via a hotel connection. It's crazy. They've got some... I don't know. You know, some sort of filter thing there and... Yeah, it doesn't let you do things like that. I can access Gmail but I can't access my web-based mail. Yeah. Which is just nuts. Yeah. So, I don't know what they're doing there. I'm really surprised.

Chris Gammell: I'm in a LAN connection right now which is even crazier to me. It's like, seriously, you guys are LAN still? Like, come on. Bone up for a wireless router here. They're like 30 bucks, you know? You could put one of those in every room.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, true. And there's no requirements for infrastructure and stuff like that. You can have a, you know, one or two cells on each level or something and it just...

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, right now it's like, oh, you're paying $10, Chris? Sorry, you can't browse the web on your bed. You have to be sitting at your desk because the cord won't reach. This is 1995 apparently.

Dave Jones: Well, you have to go fully equipped with your own wireless. That's the, you know, that's pretty much the deal, you know? Probably the next step, yeah. You've got to have your iPhone or whatever, so... Yeah. Yeah. Maybe someday. Well, that's the thing. Who uses these archaic LAN connections anymore? You know, everyone's got an iPad, don't they?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Or even like one of those phones where you can like tether them where you're using a GSM if you really need to, you know? Mm. And so speaking of GSM, let's hear a little bit about your tinfoil hat, Dave.

Dave Jones: Yes, my tinfoil hat. If you missed it, my latest blog about the GSM phone versus the Fluke 87 multimeter, which is up. If you haven't seen it, yes, I put on the tinfoil hat, but... It was great. You've got to find it. It's not... Yep. You've got to find it in the video. That is your challenge. You can see it as the thumbnail. Right. As the image. But, yep.

Chris Gammell: It is hard to find. I will say, I watched the entire thing and I was like, where... I missed it. I don't even know where it is. So, you do have to look for it. But it's a pretty... I mean, it was good too. I was interested to see that those things really cranked out so much power that they really hurt the fluke.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. It's one of these bizarre coincidences. You know, it just happens to be... You know, I'm just guessing here, but there's a track or a track and a combination of component or components in there that adjust the right wavelength to be susceptible to that particular GSM frequency and burst and energy level and then have an effect on the LCD and the firmware and the firmware aspect to actual firmware programming. They can shut it down. So, it's... Yeah. It's just one of those really bizarre coincidences. You know? That... Well, fluke... It's definitely a serious problem and fluke are looking into it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, you got a response from them?

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes. Yes, I did. And they're going to replace... Yeah. My forum viewers meter. So, they've said they'll do that. All right.

Chris Gammell: Well, good for them. That's great.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But let's see what their response is. They might go, oh, well, you know, who's going to put their mobile phone right next to it? Well, I hope they don't do that because a lot of people do. Right. I've seen it very often. You know, you've got your multimeter on the bench and you've got your phone sitting right next to it on your bench. Well, I mean... That's a very common thing to do.

Chris Gammell: From a problem perspective, I mean, like seeing this on the other side is like from the business perspective, sometimes you really want to say that. You want to just be like, all right, so your problem is you're creating this condition. Why don't you just change the condition? That's right. And understandably, like I would want to say that every time because it is common sense. But at the same time, like there's going to be a situation at some point in the future where, you know, as a business, they need to watch out for, there's an unavoidable, you know, like they're getting installed in some mobile application where they're, you know, installing an 87 and then they're transmitting over GSM. Someone does that. And what are you going to do with them? And it's like, oh, well, you should use CDMA or you should not use a cell phone. And it's like, well, at that point, they're really screwed.

Dave Jones: Well, it's crazy. Well, at the moment, I'm working on a GSM mobile, well, not a mobile phone, but I'm working on a GSM design on my desk. What am I supposed to do? Not use my Fluke 87 or not put it near it? It's crazy. Especially when, as I showed in the video, other meters, even the cheap ones, aren't susceptible to it, you know? And I can understand if it's some, but, you know, the other meters, the other brands might be susceptible to some other frequency, but it's not the GSM mobile phone, which is the most common device on the planet. Is it really?

Chris Gammell: I didn't know that.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. It's more ubiquitous than the humble home computer. I think there's more mobile phones than there are computers or, I don't know, something like that. Don't quote me on that. But yeah, it's like everyone who doesn't have a mobile phone, right? Everyone in even third world countries has a mobile phone now. It's just nuts. So for it to be susceptible to that, that is particularly bad. So yeah, Fluke really need to fix it. I don't see any other way, any other way out of this. I don't think that they can just say, it's, I think it's unacceptable for them to just say, well, you know, it's, you know, don't, it meets all the specs and the requirements for some EMC requirement or whatever, and just don't put your mobile phone near it. You know, this is the industry standard multimeter. Basically, it has been for 20 years and people trust and rely on this meter. And that's a big thing. And for it to be susceptible to the world's most common gadget is quite frankly unacceptable.

Chris Gammell: We're susceptible to this thing called water and we don't like it. So be sure not to use that around our product.

Dave Jones: Well, my laptop is susceptible to water, as everyone knows, on my first live show. Especially when you pour it on it. Yes, I'm using my sippy bottle here today. Yeah, that's good. Again. So anyway, yeah, I actually took apart the Fluke 87 on my live show, which I haven't uploaded yet. I haven't edited it. Oh yeah, I didn't get a chance to watch it. But yeah, I actually took that apart. And there's a CD4069 chip in there, the old CMOS hex inverter chip. Okay. Yeah. And that is on the left-hand side of the, that's the only circuitry on the left-hand side, which is right at the susceptible point. So I suspect it's, you know, it's highly likely to be something around that CD4069 hex inverter. So you're going to build them for your hours now?

Chris Gammell: You're going to call them up and be like, hey, fixed your problem. Give me some money.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Okay. I can consult. Right. Yeah. As I did with the X-Tech thing, I solved it for them in the video. Oh, very nice. It turned out to be the exact same problem I drew the schematic of. And yep, sure enough, that was it. And they, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, speaking of video shows such as yours, did you, uh, do you get a chance to watch any of, uh, the new Ben Heck show?

Dave Jones: I just did then before because I, you sent me the link a couple of days ago and I, and I went to it and it's a silly element 14 side again, you know, it's all over the shop. It's a mess. We've talked about that before. And for the life of me, I could not find the video of his new show. And it turns out it's, you know, it's hidden sort of in the bar up top. I don't know whether or not it just wasn't there when I looked the other day, but, oh, it's really, yeah, they don't make it as obvious as they should. Well, however they're going to sell it. I mean, who cares?

Chris Gammell: But the show, I mean, I think the show itself, I thought was pretty cool. Did you, so you actually did watch it?

Dave Jones: It has very high production values. I can, as a guy who does a video or two every week, I can assure you a lot of effort. Right. You don't want to do that stuff yourself, right? Full-time effort. Yeah. Well, that's a full-time effort, actually producing videos like that. But he is a filmmaker, as we said in the last thing. He's made films and stuff like that. So he has multiple cameras and, you know, the lighting is perfect and everything and the sound is perfect.

Chris Gammell: I thought it was very impressive.

Dave Jones: But yeah, really, really high production.

Chris Gammell: You know, actually, when we mentioned that about the Make Podcast a couple weeks back, I actually got a tweet back from Colin Cunningham who did it. And he said he did all his own production too. So I don't know, Dave, maybe you got to step up your game with the old video, huh? You got to go geek out and get some...

Dave Jones: Well, I do, but these people do it as full-time jobs. Oh, true. So, you know, that's... God, you know, if I had eight hours a day to work on my videos, you know, I'd be punching out a video or two every day and that'd be much higher production values. I'm getting closer towards my goal. Oh, good. Well, we look forward to that day. Yeah. Of being able to live off just making a 10-minute video each week.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. That'd be great. Did you see that link I posted about the Wired show too?

Dave Jones: Yes, yes, the Wired show. I had a look at that. Oh, yeah, it's typical. Yeah, it's good because the content's quite decent. Yeah. The hosts, you know, they come and they walk towards the camera and do the... Oh, yeah, that one. ...in the wanky studio and all that sort of stuff, you know. Well, I like the segments. I didn't like that aspect of it.

Chris Gammell: I like the segments. I mean, like the Chris Anderson thing about the do-it-yourself drones. I mean, like, I follow Chris and I go to that site sometimes about the do-it... I mean, that stuff's just getting crazy. I mean, it's... Yeah. I bet we're going to start seeing restrictions on that kind of stuff. I don't know about in Australia, but I bet we'll start seeing restrictions on, like, even including them in, like, no-fly zone kind of things just because, you know, you think about, like, security risks.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, they'll want licenses and everything. They'll try and... Oh, yeah. You watch the US government crack down on that. Once one geek does something stupid and flies into some restricted zone... Yeah, exactly. ...by accident or by purpose, you know, flies over NORAD or something like that. Yeah. You know, it's... Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's all gone once that happens. Yeah. I've been looking... I mean, I've been looking at stuff because, I mean, it's really interesting. And I know that they're starting to... I guess they already do sell kits for, like, a quadcopter with an Arduino built into it. Like, they're, like, getting ready to sell, like, $300 or $400. You can get the whole thing and just put it together yourself. And then you're ready to just start programming that thing. And they'll probably sell thousands of those. I'd love to buy one. I think that'd be so cool. I mean, like, I would... I've already thought about, like, projects where I'd, like, chase my dogs around with those things or, like, program... Yeah. Like, you could keep animals entertained. I mean, like, I don't know if anyone's going to do this. They probably already have. But, like, I was thinking, like, you could install, like, or you could put something on their collar so it always knows where they are. And then keep, like, five feet away from them and taunt them. And then just, like, tire them out, you know? And, like, you could, like, tie a hot dog to it. And, like, I was telling my girlfriend about this. And it was, like, that would be brilliant. Like, you could sell that even. I mean, like, you could have, like, basically doggy sitters. You know? Like, I love my dogs. Absolutely. I love spending time with them. But sometimes I just want them to be tired and get their exercise without me having to do it, too. You know? Like...

Dave Jones: It's the... I guess it's the modern version of the old carrot on the stick, right? Yeah, exactly. They just, you know, tie a carrot on their... Do a stick on their back and they'll just... Or a sausage. Right. And they'll just chase it around all day.

Chris Gammell: And... We'll have reached the Jetsons future where... Wasn't Astro the dog... Wasn't he, like, on a treadmill, like, chasing something in the intro to that?

Dave Jones: I think so. Yeah, I can remember on a treadmill doing something. But... Yeah. Yeah. Those quadcopters, they're just amazing. I saw the video, you know, sent through of one of those, you know, like, going through hoops and they throw the hoop up in the air and then it flies through the hoop in real time. Yeah. It's like, how do they do that? I know.

Chris Gammell: And it's, like, scary too. It's scary. I mean, like, you think about, like... I mean, I don't know. Like, it's obviously a ways off. But you think about, like, the Terminator movies, how they had those copters in there. Like, you start to kind of, like... Your mind wanders a little bit, you know? It's like... I mean, eventually... Like, they already have drones bombing people, you know? Like, so why would it stop there?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So...

Dave Jones: Yes. Yeah. Cyberdyne Systems is not that far off, right? And the... What's the network called in the Terminator? Oh, that is Skynet. That is Skynet. Skynet. Yes. Yes. Skynet is... Yeah. It's not too far around the corner. It'll become software. Yeah. That's scary. Yeah. These things, yeah, they build intelligence into them so that they can, you know, autonomously fly and land back. And yeah, next thing, all they need is a, you know... It's... I'm sure it's actually trivial to actually program them to go around and bomb people completely autonomously. I don't think that's trivial. It's just that they don't do it because, you know, of the shit that would happen. But it's, you know, it's just a simple firmware mod.

Chris Gammell: I don't... No, I don't think it's that simple. I don't think it's that simple. I don't... I mean, like, if you look at the... You don't think so? Everything's in place, though.

Dave Jones: Well, yes, sort of. They can detect threats and go... And you just need the threat to be past a certain threshold. And then they go, right, that's a threat I need to bomb. And, you know, so in theory, it's possible. So...

Chris Gammell: I guess you're talking about the mods are trivial. But maybe... I mean, the actual underlying... I mean, I don't know if people out there who are listening understand... Like, know what quadcopters are. They're like... It's like usually like a cross shape. You know, there's a cross brace shape. It looks like a plus sign. And then on each... On the end of each one, there's a pretty simple... I mean, simple DC motor. They're powerful, but they're DC motors. And then there's a battery. There's a control board. It would be Arduino, beagle board, whatever. And then there's a lot of sensors to know where you are, you know, what your rotation is, all this other stuff. Yep. But like taking all that input, cranking on it, and then actually reacting to it. So if, you know, if there's a... If someone pushes the quadcopter, it has to recover. And like from a control system perspective, I think that's really a pretty impressive system.

Dave Jones: It's really leading edge stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's pretty phenomenal. I love it. It does... Does each of the motors actually have that pan tilt functionality like in a regular helicopter as well? I assume it does.

Chris Gammell: No, it doesn't actually.

Dave Jones: So you've effectively got four helicopters, haven't you? No, it's actually... On the end of each arm.

Chris Gammell: That's why it's not super expensive because...

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. It's because it's just a fixed DC motor on the end of each arm. Exactly. So there's no armature to pull, to actually bend, to actually move the blades, tilt the blades.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. The way that you do motion is you speed up one blade or another. One blade or another, yep. And then you can rotate, you can... I mean, if you increase the speed of the motor, that'll make the thing go higher. If you decrease the RPM, it'll go lower. If you just decrease two of them, it'll tilt one way, you know, and you can do lots of different things. But it's actually... That's why it's a lot cheaper. That's why it's possible. Because the stuff you were talking about, the blade rotation, that stuff gets really expensive.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's all very advanced hydraulic, you know, interconnect mechanisms and all that sort of stuff.

Chris Gammell: Right, exactly.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Not hydraulics, but, you know, yeah, little armatures that, you know, go up and down and tilt the blades and do all that sort of stuff. Yeah, that's why the standard remote control helicopters, like the really good ones, the really pro ones are quite complex and... And expensive. And expensive, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, these little quadcopters, yeah, if you can just put four DC motors on a cross-shaped arm and, you know... Yeah. But I guess it's all in the type of motor. It's got to be a certain power to weight ratio and the blades have to be a certain, you know, the blades have to have a certain efficiency. You know, I built a little helicopter when I was a kid with a motor and, you know, it got off the ground, but barely, you know. So it could, you know, hover around and stuff like that. But because it was a big, heavy motor and the blade, you know, I didn't know about designing aerodynamic blades and, you know, efficient blades. So I just sort of, you know, just sort of mucked around with it. I was melting and bending plastic and stuff like that. Nice. Yeah, trying to get the blades. I was... God, I was... I probably wasn't even 10 at that stage or something. Wow. That's impressive. Yeah. And that was fun. But yeah, it didn't get very high or far because, you know, I just used a standard big, heavy hobby motor and just started whacking blades on until it got off the ground. Hey, well... Kind of thing.

Chris Gammell: If you got it off the ground, that's still pretty impressive. I think. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. It's still good. It worked.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: In fact, I did it with sticks, you know, the ice cream sticks at first. I managed to get it slightly off the ground just with ice cream sticks. That must have been a pretty beefy motor. And then I realized, no, I should actually bend some plastic, you know, so I get some plastic thing and I, you know, flame and I get a flame and I bend the plastic and it melts and sets back into a position. And I was able to actually make my own blades out of that. So... Wow. Yeah. Yeah. God, that brings back memories. Jeez. That was... Yeah, that was there. That was 30, almost 30 years ago now. So... Wow. God. God help me. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's pretty cool, man. I mean, I've only seen them online. And if you've never seen the videos online, go check them out. There's so many good... I think I've talked to them on the show before. I mean, they... They'll blow your mind. I mean, especially if you... Like, and I think I had asked you last time about control systems. I mean, I do some control system stuff and, like, you learn about that and it just gets... It gets intense so fast, you know? It does. I'm not sure how much the math works its way into, like, a quad captor, but... And, like, the programming of it. But, like... Like, if you actually do the math out of that stuff, it gets pretty intense. So, I am very impressed.

Dave Jones: It could. Or... You know... But you probably don't have to do the math to actually do it. You can do it by trial and error and experimentation and stuff like that if you want. Right. And you, like, over spec stuff. Yeah. So, you can know nothing about any math except, you know, above Ohm's law and you could still, you know, design and develop your own quadcopter, I'm sure. Yeah. But, yeah. But if you really want to get into the... Yeah, I'm sure you could write a PhD thesis on how those things work. It's, you know... I think they are. It's that complex. I think that's the video that we're going to link.

Chris Gammell: I think those guys...

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Is it? Oh, okay. Right. Oh, right. Because they're from some uni, aren't they? So, yeah. Pennsylvania. They're probably some grad students doing some master's or PhD or...

Chris Gammell: Exactly. ...something like that. Right. Right. And that's the nice thing. I mean, it's just... I mean, that's the best thing about open source hardware in general is, like, you kind of just don't have... I mean, you still have to worry about it, but you don't have to go out and design it. I think about, like, starting up, like, senior kind of project stuff. I did a senior project and we didn't even get to the hardware phase because you only have a semester. But if you have... Yep. If you have, you know, a platform to start with, you know, there's some stuff, but you're going to be able to focus on improving one thing. And then you can even feed it back to the community, which is also very nice.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Well, I saw that video and I think at the end on the credits, they had that... They just bought their quadcopter from, you know, such and such. I don't know who it was. It was a German company. But obviously, yeah, they didn't build it themselves. I think they just went and bought it. Yeah. And all of their, you know, all their stuff, their entire thing is just in the firmware to actually drive it.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, all their intelligence and stuff like that is all... Yeah. I don't think they actually did much hardware there. So, as you said, you can just, yeah, get these open source hardware platforms and just build stuff around it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And it's great. It's great. Yeah. I mean, like we've talked about, I'm going to that conference on Thursday. So, I don't know if I'll get to talk to anyone cool like the Chris Andersons of them. But definitely... Do you try? Impressed with everything. Everything about it. So, I've already looked at the schedule and I'm just like, I'm like afraid to go. I'm like, hey, I do a radio show with Dave.

Dave Jones: Well, maybe they've heard of me. I don't know. Mention me. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Name drop. Name drop. Who's that guy? Dave Jones.

Chris Gammell: Hey, do you know this crazy dude?

Dave Jones: This crazy Australian dude who wears tinfoil hats. Tinfoil hats. That's right. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. What else have we got on the list today? Oh, we got a lot of stuff. Well, you said...

Chris Gammell: Well, I said...

Dave Jones: I don't think we've covered anything we've got on the list. We haven't.

Chris Gammell: It's like 20 minutes in. We're really...

Dave Jones: And we're just ranting randomly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, no. We did have the tin. No, we had the Ben Heck thing.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's off the cuff today.

Dave Jones: Oh, ballsy recruiters. You wanted to rant about recruiters.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, I got a piece of mail the other day. I mean, I think this happens no matter what. Like, I've only been in the industry like five years or so. And I get calls sometimes. But for the first time ever the other day, I got a piece of like snail mail. Yeah. And then it said, hey, you know, we're from this executive recruiter firm. And we'd love you to look, you know, like be considered for this job. And I open it up. And I'm like, I can't do this. And they're just spamming.

Chris Gammell: Like, of course they are. It's ridiculous. But they're doing it the expensive way. I know. Well, yeah. But I mean, like, I prefer a phone call.

Chris Gammell: I think. Because I can just ignore it if I really want to. I know when recruiters are calling. I have, you know, caller ID if I don't recognize your number, you're either a magazine or you're a recruiter. And if your number's blocked, you're probably a magazine. So otherwise you're a recruiter. Simple. I don't get that many calls these days because the economy's not that great. And, you know, or maybe they just. Right. You know, know my game and they don't want to hire me.

Dave Jones: But I mean. So this was actually snail mail. This was real letter.

Chris Gammell: This is a piece of paper. Yeah. A piece of tree. A piece of dead tree. Wow. I have never seen that before. And like, it's bad enough that, you know, they had no inclination to even look at who I was and what I. Of course they didn't.

Dave Jones: No, they just mailed that out to 20,000 people they bought. Because you can buy these lists. Yeah. You can buy lists of people in certain industries and from certain job recruiters as well. There's companies that sell job recruiting contacts. That's ridiculous. Yeah. So you just have to buy it, mail it out. And, but the thing is, it works on statistics. So they will get, you know, 0.1% of people back and they will actually make money out of that. They'll make a living from that. So it, you know, it most likely works for them. Just don't be the 0.1% idiot who actually goes back to them unless the job happens to be absolutely perfect in what you're looking for. Well, that's the problem, right? Because for someone it is.

Chris Gammell: It's almost certainly not. Right. Well, that's the problem. I mean, like I've gotten a call before and they're looking for a mechanical engineer. And I'm like, seriously, mechanical? Like, did you even stop? And you know, the problem is they go on like sites like LinkedIn. And if anyone out there listening doesn't know it, I mean, because we have a lot of hobbyists that listen, you know, like LinkedIn is good. It's good for quasi networking. It's not great. I mean, you can connect with people on there. It's more like a directory now. You know, it's kind of the real basis of it. And it's like she was searching for manufacturing something. And I've done manufacturing stuff before. And she's like, oh, well, can you do like CAD drawings and machine shop stuff?

Chris Gammell: And I'm like, did you even read anything else?

Dave Jones: No, exactly. No, they don't is the answer. I know. It pisses me off too. But I don't know if I've mentioned this on The Amp Hour or not, but I've mentioned it on my blog. I did a blog rant on it, one of my drive time. No, it wasn't a drive time rant. But yeah, about how I've had these recruiting companies call me up and not offer me a job. They don't want that. They want my advice. Really? Yes. They want my advice on a particular job and who would be suitable for it, as in not a particular person, but what type of person, because they don't know anything about the industry. There's some dumb ass recruiting company, know nothing about engineering. Right. And they just go, right, we've got this, what does PCB design mean? Who should we be looking for? Really? Yeah. So yeah, I've done a rant on that. So yeah. That's ridiculous. It's a fun one. So if you love me ranting on that sort of stuff, I won't duplicate it here. We'll try and find a link. They're the kind of phone calls I get. So yeah, for some reason, I'm marked down as this guy will help you out.

Chris Gammell: You've been too nice at one point.

Dave Jones: Oh, I've been too nice at one point by helping them out. Because I've always got an opinion on everything. So if they ask, I'll generally...

Chris Gammell: Dave Jones has an opinion?

Dave Jones: Go figure. Wow, I can make a show out of that. Weird. Weird. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Anyway, the bastards. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah. Well, I guess it's nice that they're calling again. I mean, it's probably a good sign for the economy. So that's kind of a bonus. But yeah. I guess it's just something to live with.

Dave Jones: Yep. Anyway, so if any recruiters call me anymore, I will now... My thing is, I will now say, oh, look. Oh, I've got this great advice for you. I'll send you this link to the video I've done. And it'll be the video ranting and calling them a dickhead. So I will actually email them the link to my video calling them a dickhead. That's awesome. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I have a similar thing for... I don't know if I should put this on the air, but when magazines call me... So I took over this guy's job a couple years ago now. But I get calls from magazines still. Like, he loved magazines. So he got tons of them. And I don't want them at all. Right. And I try telling him to take me off the list. And I'm like, you know, it just didn't work. So I came up with the new... I started doing, like, Seinfeld kind of things where I was like, you know, like doing... You know, you want me to call you at home? You know, whatever. Yeah, yeah. I stopped doing that even. I just say, oh, he doesn't work here. He has a different number. Can I transfer you? And I'll put them on hold. And then I'll just wait and see how long they hang on. And I think the maximum...

Dave Jones: Yeah, and just waste their time.

Chris Gammell: I think they got up to five minutes. And they... Oh, really? It dropped off after... I mean, like, they started to cut off calling me. But if you have problems with magazines, here's the way to go. So if e-times, EDN, anybody is mailing you magazines, even though you tell them you don't want them anymore, that's how you do it. You say... Because, I mean... And it's not even the magazines that are doing it. It's these call centers. And they just go through their lists. And that's how you really get the message across. You say, hey, let me transfer you. And you just put them on hold. And they'll get the message eventually.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Well, I've got a friend of mine who, if he gets marketing calls at home, he goes... You know, when they say, can I speak to the head of the household? He goes, certainly, just wait a minute. And he actually puts his two or three-year-old on the phone. And then they just talk to them for like half an hour and waste their time. It's amazing. Oh, that's awesome. So they just put them on and the two-year-old just goes, has great fun. You know? They're like, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. Yeah. Bah, bah, bah. You know, I think they're four or five now. So they can really talk. Oh, nice. That's awesome. Yeah. And it's funny to see how long they'll actually hold on and, you know, so you waste their time.

Chris Gammell: That is a skill to have for the ages. You need to know how to deal with, regardless of if you're in electronics or not, you need to know that stuff. So that's great. Absolutely. That's awesome.

Dave Jones: Well, we've got some news. Yes. There's a huge expo. There's the Electronica Expo in Germany. It's in Munich on the November 9th to 12th.

Chris Gammell: Not the best time to be in Germany, I've got to say. That's a little cold.

Dave Jones: Well, I've been to Germany just before Christmas in December and it was lovely. I was up in Hamburg. Really? But I think I hit some global warming heat wave. Yeah. I was walking around in shorts and a t-shirt or maybe I was just nuts. But yeah, it's very good. It certainly gets cold. Anyway, it's down in the south part of Germany, down in Munich. But yeah, I don't know if you've seen the stats on this, but there are 2,700 exhibitors. This is from, I think it's every two years. This is the stats from the 2008 one. 2,700 exhibitors, 73,000 visitors through the doors, 12 different halls. That's incredible. And 720 journalists covered it. That's intense. It's just... That's a lot of people. It's insane. Yeah. And I've heard people that, because our company has a stand there and I've heard people who've been there and they just say, you know, you can't possibly walk around it in the three or four days it's on, let alone visit every stand. Yeah. You know, it's that huge. Wow. That's intense. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Are you going to try to go?

Dave Jones: I am. Yeah, I'm trying to go. I'm trying to organize for someone to pay for my ticket to send me there. So, hopefully, yeah, I've... Yeah, I'm working on that.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, we'll see if it comes through. If they want a full-blown amp hour there, I mean, I might be able to make it there. You know, I don't mind going to Germany. I have a passport. All right. I've got to have passport. We'll... Yeah, we'll travel. Yes. Yeah. We'll accept gratuitous tips. I'll do it for the cost of an airfare. Yeah, right? That'd be cool. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Yeah. I've never been to Europe, so...

Dave Jones: Okay. Yeah. It's... Germany's an interesting place. Yeah. It's very nice. Yeah. It's... I'd love to go back there. I've got a lot of... I have a lot of viewers in Germany. So, hello, everyone to... All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, hopefully they're listening. Do you know any German? Do you speak German with an Australian accent? That would be... Nein. Nein. Nein? Is that what you just said? Did you say nein?

Dave Jones: Nein. Nein? Nein. Nein. I'm not sure... See, I can't even pronounce it. I don't even try. Oh, God. That's awesome. I just suck at it. I tried to do it on my blog where I reviewed the German multimeter and no. I just... That's rough.

Speaker ?: No.

Dave Jones: I'm sure it come across absolutely hilarious. Yeah. I cannot do... Yeah. I cannot do foreign languages or accents. No. It's not in my... It's not in my makeup.

Chris Gammell: Well, if you go... I hope you go and maybe I'll be talking to you in a couple months time from a hotel room in Germany.

Dave Jones: That'd be awesome. Well, yeah. I'm off to the US in under three weeks, less than three weeks.

Speaker ?: All right.

Dave Jones: All right. So, yeah. So, I don't know. We might have to skip it for a week because I'll be on holiday then. I'm not sure if the wife will want me to do the Amp Hour radio show while we're actually in the middle of holidays. Oh, come on. I don't know. We might have to film it before... Film it? Film it. We might have to record it before we go and then...

Speaker ?: Okay.

Dave Jones: Maybe. And then just, yeah, maybe upload it for that week or something. So, it might be a fake Amp Hour. Right. Yeah. Not live as this one is live, isn't it? Sort of. Sort of. Well, kind of. Not really. We're talking live. Well, it goes up the same day. Right. Usually, which is pretty live-ish. Yeah, live-ish. Yeah. That's good. I like that. But, yeah. I'm off and I scored big bang tickets. You did? I got up. I'm a bit bleary-eyed this morning because I stayed up to 2 a.m. in the 1.30. A.m. or something in the morning this morning to get big bang tickets. That is awesome. But I scored them.

Chris Gammell: That is awesome.

Dave Jones: And the server was down. It was crashed. So, all these nerds have written all these scripts, I'm sure, to try and get on the website to get their free tickets. You did it with old-fashioned clicking, huh? I did old-fashioned clicking. Yeah. I'm not one of these script kiddies. Wow. I like scripts. Yeah. But we finally got through and it sold out in like 10 minutes. But we managed to get... We managed to score two tickets. So, we're going to now plan out. Now, plan our holiday around that, which is crazy.

Chris Gammell: So, you can't talk about... So, you're going to see an episode. You can't tell us what it is, though.

Dave Jones: No. I won't be able to. I'm sure there's some confidence. Oh, that stinks. And I'm not allowed to take any recording devices in there. No mobile phones. Nothing. So...

Chris Gammell: Maybe you can meet them. But that'll be cool. Maybe get some pictures, at least. Maybe you can... Like, afterwards, I don't know if they do, like, photo shoots with the cast. Well, yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, you're not allowed to take your stuff in there. Right, right, right. So, maybe afterwards, yeah, you can bring your camera, but leave it outside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or something with a tag in the cloakroom or something. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. But, yeah, I'm not sure how that works, but they tell you, yes, do not bring anything. Otherwise, you know, you'll be shot or something. Yeah. Yep. But, yeah, that'll be cool, because I love Big Bang Theory. If you're... Look, if you're into electronics, you're going to... If you haven't watched The Big Bang Theory, you're going to love it. I guarantee it. It's just... It's physics, but it's... I don't know if you... You know. Yeah. It's just these, you know, nerdies. And there's a token engineer in there, Harold Wallowitz. I know. And they make fun of him all the time. Yeah. Because he's only got a master's, you know. Right, right. Only a master's. And everyone else has PhDs.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but then he holds it over their head when they're trying to do something. When they're actually trying to do something, he always holds it over their head. Actually do something practical.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's awesome.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's a great show. So, yeah, I'm stoked this morning. I'm still on a high.

Chris Gammell: That's great. Woo-hoo! Big Bang Tickets. I'm glad you're going. Well, hopefully once the episode comes out, you can talk more about it. But... Yeah.

Dave Jones: So...

Chris Gammell: Nice. Man, so we're at half hour. We haven't even gotten into, like, discussion stuff yet.

Dave Jones: We're at half hour already.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, we're at half an hour. Jeez. Jeez. All right. What have we got? Well, not much, actually.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: There's a forum. John Chandler on the forum. Hi, John. You were talking about absolute maximum ratings on components. And I'm not sure what his exact question. I think he just wanted people to talk about it. Because there's all these, you know, hackers and hobbyists out there who are overclocking these chips. You know, they'll have a PIC chip which might be rated to an absolute voltage of six and a half volts or something. And then they'll, you know, run it off nine volts and it still works or something like that. Really? Yeah. You're not going to get any money back for that.

Chris Gammell: That's for sure.

Dave Jones: Well, the answer for that is it's a really, really bad idea to exceed the absolute maximum ratings of components because they're, you know, they're not designed to survive outside of those. But there's probably components like leads and things like that that will work outside of their absolute maximum ratings. You'll just shorten their life. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: So, he's talking about like driving it straight without a resistor kind of thing. Is that what he's talking about?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, yeah, you know, yeah, yeah. You can exceed the maximum current. Yeah. You know, so it's, yeah, it's one of those things that there's a few components where those absolute maximum ratings are based on not the actual absolute maximum rating, but based on an expected lifetime of that component. Right. So, you can actually push it and go over, but it's, you really have to know what you're doing. And, you know, if you're certainly going to do it in the product.

Chris Gammell: If you're not doing it at all. I think, yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, sometimes you have to. Like what though?

Chris Gammell: Like temperature or current? Or what are you talking about?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, occasionally you might, the only way to do something might be to, you know, exceed the absolute maximum rating of something. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But you can switch parts too. I mean, like there's always other options.

Dave Jones: Well, you can, but if it's some obscure part and only that part's going to do the job and you just have to drive a little bit more and. But that's such a corner case too, you know?

Chris Gammell: That's a corner case. I think that's the point where like, if you say that and then someone's like, oh, hey, I tried it with this part and worked for a little bit, but then it blew up. It's like, well, it's not even worth saying that then, you know?

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. You wouldn't do it into a proper product. You wouldn't do it in a commercial product. But if you were doing a one-off thing, a test jig or something, you just have to get it working that day. And you're not going to wait a week for another part. You're going to, you know, over spec that thing and try and get it out. Right. Working probably.

Chris Gammell: But yeah, it's a bad thing to do. He's not talking about like power ratings on like a FET, was he? Because like a lot of times there will be that curve where like you can have, you know, you might be able to, it might be able to handle like 10 watts of power and dissipate it. And it can do 100 watts, but it'll only do it for like, you know, a millisecond.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. It'll have a peak pulse power and you can exceed those figures. And it will generally survive, but you know, I mean. For a couple of times. But don't be surprised if it does fail. Right. You know. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker ?: So.

Dave Jones: Yeah, they test all that stuff. And it shortens, as I mentioned in one of my, I think the heat sink blog, I mentioned that, yeah, as you increase the temperature of a component, its lifetime falls a square or something. It's, you know, it falls drastically with increased temperature. So. Yeah. If you're talking about a power fed or something and you're over, you know, driving it above its maximum temperature rating, then well, it'll probably continue to work, but it's going to have a short life. So.

Chris Gammell: Yes, kiddies. And that's actually a big, that's a big market right now too, because like, you know, with all the LED lighting stuff coming online, they'll have. Oh yeah. They'll have these optimum driving points for LEDs where, you know, LEDs can work over a really wide range because once you get past that voltage drop, you know, you're going to be dumping some amount of current through there, but you need to also balance like, you know, the total power, the heat is dissipating and everything like that. If, if you have, if it's dissipating, you know, five watts and then you go down to two and a half watts, you might see that, that lifetime increase that actually makes it worth it for you because, so say your wall switch is actually supplying DC. Most of them don't, but say it is. If, if you can optimize that so that you're getting the optimum power to the, to the LED without dissipating as much heat, you're going to save however many years. And it's going to be years with LEDs of life. Exactly.

Dave Jones: So, well, and that's the difference between the good brands, the good world design brands and the cheap Chinese one hung low brand LED lights. If you buy those creep, you know, those $5 ones on eBay, those LED replacement lamps, they're, they're almost certain to be over-specced in some way and they're going to have a short life. But if you get a proper big name manufacturer, well-designed, yeah, they're, they're going to under-spec it because they know that, you know, it, they, they know about the life versus temperature and, and power and all that sort of stuff. So they, they do deliberately under-spec them to get a much, much longer life.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah, it's, yeah. Don't buy the, you know, don't be surprised when your cheap eBay $5 LED replacement, you know, light dies in six months. Yeah. You know, you think, oh yeah, LEDs last forever. No, they don't. They, they, life is dependent upon temperature.

Chris Gammell: So yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Um, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And that's big money. I mean, like, and that's big money too from like, so if, if, if you're out there and you're listening and you're looking for job stuff, I mean, like that's something to look at because there, there's going to be tons of LED stuff coming online still. And you might think it's boring. Oh, well, it's not that hard to turn on an LED. No, it's not. Um, but doing it right and doing it right every time and not destroying the lifetime is important.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. And building in overload protection, surge protection, especially if it's connected to the mains and stuff like that. Oh, there's, yeah. There's a, there's an art in doing that. And, um, yeah, in, in actually producing a solid, reliable, um, solid, reliable actual product, final product on the market.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So yeah, don't be, uh, don't underestimate that at all. It's, it's actually not, not that easy to do.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Um, especially, and it's not just the LED either. It's the driving electronics as well to actually get, you know, if like the, the, the lead might have a lifetime of a hundred thousand hours or something, but can you design electronics to match that?

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, especially when you're trying to drive it from the mains and you've got, you know, you've got capacitors, you know, all sorts. And, uh, you know, you've got to survive surges and all sorts of things. Yeah. And you've got switch modes and yeah, you need to design, you need how, know how to design circuitry for a long MTBF or mean time between fire for the kiddies out there. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And that's the thing, like the design part of it's really fun, but the, uh, the actual testing for MTBF gets kind of boring. I, I really don't like that as much. Yeah, it does.

Dave Jones: It's not, well, it depends what you're doing sometime. Yeah. You know, you're whacking, I've whacked things in a thermal chamber and left them there for a month. Right. Well, yeah. You know, yeah. It's not that exciting. But even going over the datas.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's tough on the testing side, but designing for that, you can, you can encounter some, some interesting design problems that you wouldn't have had to think of otherwise. And even like for long life stuff. I mean, you think about like electrolytic capacitors, if they're in a high, high heat environment and you're going to leave them there for a long time. They'll die in a thousand hours. Yeah, exactly. They're not going to, they're not going to last that amount of time. So you got to, you got to think of other situations, you got other, other options for those. So there's a lot of cool, cool design problems within that just because you need, you need long life. Exactly.

Dave Jones: And then, yeah, you might decide to replace those capacitors with ceramic capacitors you think might have a longer life, but then they're, to get those in high values, they're highly susceptible to, they're very, not only very expensive, they're highly susceptible to stress. So if you've got these mounted on a board in a high vibration environment, you can be in, you know, deep trouble. So it's, you know, there's, there's lots of things to consider for, for designing, um, high lifetime, um, circuitry.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah. And it'll be interesting seeing that play out too. I mean, we, we've kind of watched, I mean, we talked about the, the hobbyist movement kind of like, you know, a lot of it is getting started and stuff and a lot of our listeners are hobbyists, but I think it's, that's going to even evolve because you're going to see people making more and more stuff at home and then they're going to want to, you know, they're going to be sick of replacing their, you know, their power modules in their wall every year if they're starting to make their own stuff. And so they're going to start getting into it too. So it's actually something that, that a lot of people should care about is, you know, looking at these kinds of decisions and maybe even paying a little more, which is sounds stupid, but that can often pay off in the longterm because you don't have to replace it.

Dave Jones: It can pay off. You know, you, you, you pay five times the price for a lead light replacement, but it'll last 10 times longer than one of the one hung low brand ones. So, you know, yeah, it can definitely pay off.

Chris Gammell: Do you always call it one, one, what, what, where does it, where does it come from?

Dave Jones: One hung low. One hung low. It's a, it's a play on words and I won't describe what it refers to because it's a bit rude. Right. So, um, it makes an Aussie blush, huh? Right. Oh, no, not quite. And you know that's bad.

Chris Gammell: Well, I appreciate that. So we don't get rated R over here in the U S or whatever it would be.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: So have you, I actually was at a power seminar the other day. I mean, we talking about power today. I was at a seminar the other day. Have you ever looked at like any of the digital power stuff before?

Dave Jones: Not really. Power is not really my area. Power control and all that stuff. I'm a micro electronics guy. Really? Okay. Yeah. Digital power. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Digital power control. It's interesting because I mean, like you look at like basically what's the you know, like a switcher that you've, you've looked at on your, your video blog before, basically what that thing's doing and the internals of it are, you know, pretty complicated. But if you want to like pull all that stuff out and just drive a push pull controller, all you really need for that is a PWM and a lot of micros can do that kind of thing. And so I saw some, some stuff. I mean, I always hear about it from vendors and stuff and they love that. You know, they want to throw a $2 arm. They love motor control.

Dave Jones: You know, yeah, you get a microchip website and they'll have 20 million applications for motor control. No, no. Power control. Oh, sorry. Well, but yeah, but yeah. Yeah. Still push pull. Three phase power control and all sorts of things. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: They love doing that. And so push pull controller.

Dave Jones: Well, it's a huge market.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. But push pull controller for people that don't know, it's basically, you know, you have two transistors, usually an N type on the top and a P type on the bottom and you just flip it high and low. And then the top one turns on, the bottom turns on, top one turns on, bottom turns on. And basically in that way you can, you can transfer power through a transformer or an inductor and then you can step it up, step it down, and then you can rectify it on the other side. And then that's how you basically can transfer power and there's different efficiencies and everything. Watch Dave's video blog about that. He explains it a lot better than I feel. Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's only a specific start, but there are specific chips for that. There are actually specific controller chips designed just to drive discrete, actual discrete controllers like that. Right, right, right. So, you know, and yeah, there's a chip for almost everything for one of those power control applications.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, what I was talking about though is like, so there, yeah, there are very specific chips, but...

Dave Jones: You can integrate it into microcontrollers and things like that if you happen to have a micro in your product. But if you're just using a micro to do that, well, and that's its only job, well, that might be deemed to be a bit silly because there are purpose designed chips for that.

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah, the thing I was looking at is because like, it was like, it was talking about like having like, you know, 10 rails or something like that to the point where you have to buy a crap load of chips. And I had never really thought about it before. And I mean, it was, it was a cool session. I had never really done this stuff before. So it was really, really new to me. And it's interesting, but I just wonder about where it's going to go. And if it's worth taking the time to actually learn it, because when you, when you have, when you're programming a micro yourself and you have to actually, you know, control when, when one transistor is turning on versus the other one, there's some legit time you have to put into learning that. And I'm, I'm not sure if I have to.

Dave Jones: There's lots of theory involved. And well, and that's exactly what I'm saying. You can build it into microcontrollers and stuff, but yeah, you've got to know the theory and there's lots of, you know, and, and you really have to test it thoroughly and do all sorts of things and yeah, it can get hideously complex. That's why there's example code out there and there's app notes and they've got a power control circuitry built into some micros, I think. Yeah. So yeah, to like handle some of the more, you know, to handle some aspects of it. So you don't have to do it in code. You can actually, you know, there, there is like a hardware, digital power control module in there or something like that. Yeah. Which sort of helps out. So you just feed it some data and it sort of takes care of it for you.

Chris Gammell: But I mean, don't get me wrong. I mean, like linear tech wants me to buy $3 controllers every time I need to put power on a board. But what I'm asking, can I use a 65 cent microcontroller and learn how to do it myself?

Dave Jones: And you know, like, well, you can, I, I did that in my watch. I mean, it's a very simple application. When I designed my scientific calculator watch, it's got a voltage doubler in there that just used as a PWM output and a couple of diodes and I got my voltage doubler to drive the LCD. Oh, nice. So, you know, yeah, I didn't need to get a separate voltage doubler chip, like a, like a seven double six O or something like that. You know, I, I just, I just use the micro and I save myself, you know, 20 cents or something. Right.

Chris Gammell: And that can be a big deal in a lot of people's design or, you know, or even if you just want to learn it too. I mean, like there's some cool stuff in there. So anyways, absolutely. I thought it was cool. I don't know. I don't know if we're going to see more of that. They, the, this seminar went to seem to kind of point that way and, and they like kind of how reconfigurable it was. And I just never really thought about it before. So I wanted to be sure I brought it up here. Not, not.

Dave Jones: Well, most of, yeah, I think most of the major semiconductor manufacturers, the market's getting so big for digital power control and, you know, all that sort of stuff. And, and, and they lump in motor control as well and all sorts of things, but they actually report revenue from that as a separate market segment. Oh, really? Oh. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I think TI do it and, and Maxim, you know, and quite a lot of manufacturers do it. Even, um, I think even, uh, Atmel, is it Atmel or Microchip? I think have, you know, they've got power control products and they're, you know, they, they actually report that as a separate market because it's a huge market.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. There's so, and it's going to get bigger too. I mean, cause throwing a linear regulator on there isn't really an option anymore. Like with, with new like power standards and everything, you know, you hear about like, uh, not like power star. Is that what it is? Energy star. That's what it is. You know, energy star compliance stuff. That's starting to get crazy. And that's, is that over in Australia too?

Dave Jones: Yep. Yeah. We've got the energy star requirement here, all sorts of plug packs and products must meet that requirement. But yeah, there's so many, uh, because the, um, uh, micro controllers, micro processors, FPGAs and stuff like that again, so complex, some of them need like four or five power rails, you know? Yeah. It's, it's crazy. You know, they, they need like a one volt for the core or 1.1 volt for the core. They need a 1.8 volt for the high speed transceivers. They need a 2.5 for something else. And they need a 3.3 for the IO. And then if you would need five volt IO, you need that as well. And like, it's just, it's crazy. Yeah. Oh, some of these things I've, I've designed products with seven and eight, um, seven, eight or more actual, um, actual, actual power rails in it. Wow. You know, it's just nuts. And yeah. And, and, and that's not the, and that's just the lower end of what you can get. You know, if you need plus minus five, plus minus 12, plus minus nine, plus minus 15, some designs use plus all those smaller ones I mentioned. Right. And if it has to do, have a dozen or more.

Chris Gammell: Right. And if you have to do high power too, you have to start worrying about heat. You have to start worrying about noise. You have to tons of stuff. Oh, it gets crazy. And, and, and all of that, you think about like how you start out. Right. So, so if you're starting out and you're just using an Arduino board, those are pretty well set up where it's, you know, you plug in a five volt regulator off the wall power. Yeah. And then, or I don't know if it's, it probably is up at six or so. And then you just linearly regulated down to five and that's good. But you don't always get to do that with FPGAs and all the other crazy stuff that's out there. Exactly. Yeah. I never knew, I mean, DDR, I, I, I just did some DDR probably a year or two ago. And I never realized that with DDR, you actually have to use a top rail. So if it's like a 2.5, 2.5 volt DDR, I think that was DDR one was that you actually have to have a voltage at half that that's, that's how it works is DDR. Yeah, exactly. It has the half voltage line and then it double clocks it basically using the.

Dave Jones: And there are, once again, there's specific chips to actually do that as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, they're cheap because they're, they're very plentiful, but I mean, like. Yeah. You know, if you have to put multiple memories on your board or something, it starts to get expensive again.

Dave Jones: It adds up. Yeah. All this, all this complexity. So go hug your power engineer.

Chris Gammell: If you have a power engineer at your company or you know one, go hug them and say. Oh, yes. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Dave Jones: Or yes, you can actually, you can walk up to them and do that. You know, you can actually hound down to them. You know, we are not worthy. We are not worthy. You know, the Wayne's world kind of. Right. You could do that, but yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's. It's. Yes.

Dave Jones: Power engineers. Yeah. Yeah. Not going to do much without power. That's for sure. No, exactly. Yeah. And yeah. Some of the products I've worked on, it's spent half your design time just getting the efficiencies of all your power rails. Right. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And then that translates into heat again and everything. So yeah. It's, it was interesting at this seminar I went to, they were actually talking about, I mean, a lot of the, the technical knowledge of transformer construction. This is talking about transformer construction as well. Yeah. And you know, like I've mentioned, I think I mentioned last time or the time before people, you know, if you're a younger engineer and you're listening to this, there is a limited supply of people that know how to do transformers anymore. I mean, you think about, I mean, Dave, you probably did EM types, electromagnetic kind of stuff in school. Right. Cause I know I did. Yep. But I never, never got deep into.

Speaker ?: It was boring.

Chris Gammell: It was bad shit, wasn't it? Well, it is, but that's at the abstract like math level, right? When you're actually doing transformers. Yeah, exactly. Like these, there's like pros out there that'll wind transformers by hand, you know, with magnetic wire and they'll do, you know, 10, they'll, they'll be doing like by hand. It's almost like the crossover between electrical and mechanical stuff because you're winding these things by hand and you're dealing with magnetics and there's like crazy, you know, Maxwell's equation kind of stuff. And it, it gets so intense and there's so few people out there, not so few, but an increasingly fewer number of people out there that can do this stuff. So if you like that.

Dave Jones: And it isn't just building them either. It's actually testing them and actually characterizing them as well is, is a, you know, is a hell of a lot of work. Right. And you really have to know what you're doing.

Chris Gammell: Right. And switchers are great. I mean, don't get me wrong. And a lot of transformers go into switchers, even like inductors go into switchers. But the, the fact is, if you have a, if you, switchers are noisy, you know, they, there is innate noise to having, to putting pulses through a system. And that's basically what switchers are. And if you need, if you need a quiet system and a lot of, a lot of systems do, you need transformers. Uh-huh. And, uh, so, you know, if you're a younger engineer, learn your transformers. Cause I'm, I'm just learning them now and it's intense and. Yeah.

Dave Jones: And not just quiet in the electrical sense, but quiet in the mechanical sense as well. Cause transformers can hum and vibrate and do all sorts of weird stuff. So it's not just quiet on the noise level, but on the physical, you know, uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, transform, you know, if, if you've heard like a squeal coming from your computer monitor or something, you know, that's likely one of the transformers in there. Yeah. Um, so yeah. Um, yeah. Well, that's an argument against transformers, I guess. You have to know how to do that sort of stuff too. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I guess that's probably a bad design. I mean, that's probably, you know, some mass production. That's poor design. That's some mass production thing in China where, you know, they're cranking out a million transformers a month and. From the one hung low factory. Yes. One hung low. Right. And, uh. One hung low. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And, and they're just not high quality either because they were designed that way in the beginning or maybe it's just a manufacturing thing, but it's like, it's like a big deal. And you know, like that, that gets fed through the customers and I don't, I, I get pissed off by those noises. I get freaked out by them sometimes. I think things are going to blow up. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: We, we actually at work, we had one, uh, last month. We, it, all of a sudden this high pitched it, like it actually failed. It wasn't, you know, it all of a sudden somebody's monitor just failed and they weren't at their desk and there's noise, just this weird, and it was modulated and all sorts of stuff. And everyone's just walking around trying to pinpoint it because we couldn't.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Actually, it took us about 10 minutes to pinpoint where it was coming from.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And it was coming from someone's Dell monitor.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Dave Jones: So, uh, yeah. Yeah. The power supply had just gone nuts in there and yeah, God, it bugged everyone on the whole level. It was just, it was so loud. It was incredible.

Chris Gammell: Maybe, uh, you've done videos of exploding capacitors, right? Yep. Maybe you should get some old transformers and make those fail. And do that sort of stuff. Yeah. You could just like make little, make little cuts in the, in the transformer wire and see them short together and see what happens.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, I've done one, um, on the video that I did with, uh, Doug. Well, I did, I had this large coil and I hooked it up and I generated all the sparks from the coil and everything. Oh, I didn't see that one. That was very cool. And I captured it in slow-mo. So, okay. All right. That's in one of my. I'll have to go back and watch that. Absolutely. I don't know which number it is. I, I don't keep track of numbers. I've done too many shows. Yeah. Far too many. Plus 100 at least, right? Yeah. And what's this? Is this number eight or nine? We're nine.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Show number nine. Oh yes. It's down on the spreadsheet here. That's right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Chugging along. Chugging along.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Double digits next. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: We'll celebrate. We will have to celebrate. Maybe we'll, something with tinfoil hats. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Yeah. That'll, that'll, that'll really work on, on, uh, audio radio. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: We can, we can like crunch them into the microphone.

Dave Jones: Right. So, well, on that note, I think we should probably, uh, call it quits. Are we quits?

Chris Gammell: Oh, sad.

Dave Jones: Yep. I think it's pretty close to our amp hour. Oh. Sorry, Chris. I know you just want to rant. You just want to keep on doing it. I thought, yeah, I thought we started five after. Oh no. One more quick rant. I've, I've got to do it. Okay. The, uh, crap EDN design circuits idea. Yeah. Did you see that?

Chris Gammell: I looked at it. I didn't see what the.

Dave Jones: It was a, it was basically, you know, they pay 120, sending your circuit idea. They pay you 125 bucks. What it was. Oh.

Dave Jones: We'll actually put up link. Yeah. And it was a seven segment lead display hooked up to a micro. And they gave like the table to drive the segment. So you can avoid using a BCD to seven segment decoder. And then the computer I see, well, no shit, Sherlock. You know, people have been doing that for 40 years. I know. How else would you do it, right? I mean, like. Exactly. Yeah. It didn't seem like much there. You're not going to use the external chip. Yeah. Well, you might use the external chip if you've only got four pins available. But if you've got the eight pins, you, you know, you avoid using. But yeah, they paid this dude 120. So they're pretty desperate for. Yeah. So I guess.

Chris Gammell: I guess if people are listening, you should. And you actually have a design idea. You know, you make a little bit of dough, but. Yeah. 125 bucks is not. You want to throw it in.

Dave Jones: And well, and we did have another point there, which led onto that. Didn't we? Which was. No, that's a follow on point from that. We could probably cover it. We can probably go a minute over. Okay. Or should we talk about this next time? Where there's these websites out there, some websites trying to get your ideas. They want you to send them your circuit ideas and they will publish it. I'm doing the quotes thing with my hands.

Speaker ?: Oh, right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You can't see those. For, you know, 75 bucks or 100 bucks or something like that. And I think some of them even want actual rights to it. Jeez. You know, so you're pissing away your rights for 75 bucks. It's crazy. And actually, we probably should do that next time, which is the best way to publish your project. Oh, okay. That's right. That's right. We won't go into it. We can talk for 10 or 20 minutes on that, I'm sure. Yeah. Well, then publishing is. So we'll definitely do that last time. Okay. Yeah. That's good. Yep. Excellent. All right. Well, thanks for joining us, everyone.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Thank you for listening. And I'm in Boston. Hope you enjoyed it. I won't be here next week, but I'm glad we got to do this.

Dave Jones: And Chris is in a hotel room in his boxer shorts watching porn on the TV. Hey, come on now, Dave. Don't be spreading lies. All right. All right.

Chris Gammell: Well, we're going to sign off the air now and I'm going to, you know, yell at Dave.

Dave Jones: Put some clothes on. All right.

Chris Gammell: Thanks for listening. See you guys. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Chris Gammell: Bye.