#96 – Senseless Saccadic Shemozzle

Dave Jones: This is The Amp Hour Podcast, recorded previously but aired May 21st, 2012. Episode number 96, Senseless Cicadic Schmozzle. Welcome to The Amp Hour, I'm Dave Jones from the EEVBlog.

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

Dave Jones: Hey Chris, we can't cut a break here, can we?

Chris Gammell: Nope.

Dave Jones: With this stupid mumble thing where you have to rely on this bloody thing they call the internet to keep our show up. We just started it, five seconds into it, it just died.

Chris Gammell: You keep refusing to move to Ohio, so...

Dave Jones: And buy my ten luxury houses for the price of a VCR, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Oh boy. Yeah, well maybe it's because we're coming to our listeners from the past.

Dave Jones: We are, we recorded this a week ago, although it's live for us now.

Chris Gammell: It's pretty live right now, yeah. So we're confused. Dave's usually stuck in the past. I am. Today we're both stuck in the past. Yep.

Dave Jones: When I was a boy.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yep. Yeah, and that's because I am, how would I say this even, I'm currently, Chris is currently at Maker Faire, I guess. Or wrapping up Maker Faire whenever we release this. Basically...

Dave Jones: No, you'll be back, huh? Will you?

Chris Gammell: I'll probably be on a plane by the time we release this. Oh, right, okay. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we didn't want to deprive you of hearing us blather on for an hour. So, yeah, right? Exactly. So we did it a week early. We did. And I'm impressed with us for thinking ahead. It's... I know. It's very... I can't do this in many other parts of my life. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. But apparently in the amp hour I can.

Dave Jones: Engineers are probably generally shit at that, right?

Chris Gammell: What's that?

Dave Jones: Thinking ahead and... Well, no, we can think ahead in terms of, you know, if you're laying out a board or something, you know, if you're doing something technical. But, you know, when it comes to your life and stuff like that, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, I mean, there's just so much stuff to do. I mean...

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And speaking of, I've got a ton of stuff to do before I go. Like what? Still got to write that speech. Still got to, you know, bring a hack. I got to... I don't know.

Dave Jones: What, you have to bring a hack? Is that... No. Is that expected?

Chris Gammell: I don't have to. Eh, maybe. I don't know. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: I thought you only bring a hack if you get it like a stand. Like to show off something.

Chris Gammell: No, a lot of people like bring stuff, you know, they'll just make stuff and bring it. They don't necessarily have to be showing it off.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: Usually it's a little more portable in that case, but...

Dave Jones: Right, yeah. And it hangs in your backpack, right? And you... Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: I'm a huge fan of the man bag, by the way.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, like the satchel? The satchel. The, uh... Yes. European carry-all?

Dave Jones: The satchel. The Jack Bauer satchel in particular. Jack Bauer. Oh, yeah? Like 24? 24, yes. He carries... I have the exact same one, and it's brilliant. I highly recommend... Yeah. I highly recommend the classic messenger bag. So Dave likes man purses, huh? Classic messenger bag, it's called.

Chris Gammell: Not a man purse? No. That's not a man purse? No. That's a bad answer. No. Okay. Why do you like them, so?

Dave Jones: Yeah, they're just... Like, it's huge. I can... There's an amount of stuff you can pack into this thing. It's just incredible. You can put your cheese, you can put in some lip gloss, you can put in a little package of tissues, you can... And it's, you know, any one pocket on the side. I've permanently got a roll of tape, a roll of electrical tape, I've got my Swiss Army knife cyber tool, and I've got my Leatherman, and, you know, it's just...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, so quite a hack bag there, huh?

Dave Jones: Yeah, absolutely. I take it everywhere. That's not bad, then. And it's easy access, you know? You don't have to undo zippers or something, the flap just comes up, and just grab your shit out.

Chris Gammell: See, I don't like those kind of bags, because they always end up... You know, like, you only put them on one shoulder, even when you put them over your head, it's just... I'm more of a backpack man myself now.

Dave Jones: Well, okay. Yeah. But, well, I find it kind of evenly distributes the load. It's got a big, thick, wide strap on it. It's just very nice product design. I like it.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Anyway.

Chris Gammell: I'm not a man, but I'm not a European carry-all carrier. Neither was I. Neither was I.

Dave Jones: I was a backpack man, and no, I switched, totally. So, I use that, and I, you know, I use it walking to work, and easily I can slip out my wallet, right? It's really easy when I come up to the swiper thing to actually, you know, to get into the building, and yep. Yeah, I don't have to take off my backpack and, you know, get it out, and, you know, it's just, the thing just swings from the back to the front, and it's, ah, it's nice. Elegance of engineering, it is.

Chris Gammell: Or a purse, whatever.

Dave Jones: Right, whatever. Yeah, but it's a nice, you know, sort of army-colored olive, you know, army-olive color, you know? It's very manly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I guess.

Chris Gammell: I hate making fun of you for having a purse, because, you know, like, we don't try and be sexist here, because, you know, but it's just a funny thing to say to a guy, I guess. I don't know. No. It's not a purse.

Dave Jones: I mean, you know, a purse is like a...

Chris Gammell: Well, I was just thinking of that Seinfeld episode, you know, like, they talk about the man purse.

Dave Jones: Oh, I don't remember that one.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. A huge Seinfeld. Yeah, that's where the European carry-all term comes from.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. See, I don't know the European carry-all term, that term, I don't, I've never heard that.

Chris Gammell: No. Yeah. That's some Seinfeld. No. No. I am not that creative. Right.

Dave Jones: And I didn't really know about these bags until the TV show came along, you know, and Jack Bauer was carrying one.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: I didn't know. Interesting. All right. There you go. Well, I kind of knew, and I thought, oh, that's what, you know, yuppies, you know, carry-

Chris Gammell: So do you watch, like, do you watch Lost, and you're like, yeah, maybe I should go hang out on a desert island. It'd be awesome. Yeah. Why not? Or Big Bang Theory, and you're like, yeah. Maybe I should have Asperger's syndrome. I don't know.

Dave Jones: But I've got to say, this is the only, this particular bag is the only one I like. I don't like any of the other styles. I don't like the leather ones. I don't like the, you know, because you can get, like, really fashionable leather ones, and all the people, well, people in Sydney will know, you know, all the people on the North Shore carry them, you know. That's like the, you know, the rich affluent area. No, I wouldn't know that. Right. Okay. And every city's got its rich affluent area, and it's usually in the North, right? You know, a North of a, maybe?

Chris Gammell: Uh, for us, it'd probably be the South, because it's warmer in the South.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. Okay. Well, in a city, or are you talking the state of Ohio?

Chris Gammell: I just meant in the, uh, in the country.

Dave Jones: Oh, in the country. Right. We really go on macro scale now.

Chris Gammell: I don't know. North, for me, is a lake, so. Right. I guess. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Okay. Fair enough.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. Perhaps we should talk electronics at some point.

Dave Jones: Yeah, we should. I know. We've just busted seven minutes on freaking man bags.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Oh. Well, what were we going to do this week? And, uh, we'll see how it works out. People know we have this list thing, right? Yes. We do. And, uh, it kind of goes back a ways. Oops. You know, we have guests on. We have, we talk about one thing. We talk about, you know, man purses for one whole show. Exactly. And that wasn't on the list, you know? Right. And so, sometimes we just end up deleting it all. But sometimes there's a lot of residual stuff. And there's some cool stuff on there, too. So, we're going to kind of go over some of the older stuff. Maybe not all of it. But, yeah. We kind of, this will be like the, you know, like on Jeopardy. Do you ever watch Jeopardy at all? You watch that show? No.

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: No? We don't have that here. Yep. Okay. It's like an American show. I've seen it. Yeah, I've seen it. Okay.

Dave Jones: And you answer a question with a question or something, don't you? Is that the?

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, they give you the answer, then you have to ask it as a question. Yes, I think that's stupid. Alex Trebek is the host.

Dave Jones: I think that's the dumbest format ever.

Chris Gammell: It's interesting.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's retarded. No, don't like it.

Chris Gammell: It's iconic, man. It's iconic.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Yeah, okay. I can understand it's iconic.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, there's a category on there called potpourri. And it's just the, you know, it's a little bit of everything. Yeah, yeah. And that's what this will be. It'll be a potpourri show.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. All right.

Chris Gammell: So, where do we start?

Dave Jones: Well, I've got a shout out to a hackerspace. Well, sorry. They call it a hackerspace.

Chris Gammell: Oh, this is actually kind of new. This is a newer one.

Dave Jones: This is, oh, sorry. This is a new one. Yeah, like I just put it on the other night because I just saw it on YouTube. East Gippsland here in Australia. Yeah, that's in Victoria, which is a state here, which is south of us. So, not as good as New South Wales, which I mean. That's right. And it's sort of out in the sticks, you know. It's not near Melbourne, which is the, you know, center hub of Victoria. It's sort of, you know, it's way out in the sticks. And as we call it here. I don't know. What do you call it out there? Yeah, the sticks and the boonies. The sticks, the boondocks or something. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. Anyway, it's way out there. And they've got this. Man, watch the video. This place is enormous.

Speaker ?: I did.

Dave Jones: I did.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Man. It was like.

Chris Gammell: What is that place? I don't know. It looks like an old.

Dave Jones: An old school. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it was weird. It had like a really long central corridor. Yeah. And then just a lot of huge rooms off to the side.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, you walk in the main door. And there's, yeah. There's this, like, it's got to be a, you know, 100 plus meter long corridor. Yeah. With, yeah. All these, you know, with a dozen rooms branching off. Unbelievable.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure when they walked into that space, they were probably thinking. You know, I do the same thing. I just think about, oh, I could put a bench over there. You know, you just start dreaming up, you know, like, and, you know, all the different things you could do. Yeah. You know, like, put a carport in even. And, you know, like, for, like, working on cars or stuff like that.

Dave Jones: They've got a room for everything.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It definitely is a cool space. But it's, I'm sure, you know, like, I'm sure you do the same thing when you walk into spaces, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You'd put. You'd start planning in your head.

Dave Jones: I love actually going to open homes, you know? Yeah. Like, even though I'm not buying a home, right? I just love going to, you know, local open homes and those home display villages just to look at how useless the spaces are these days, you know? And go, what do you do with this? This is useless, you know? When they've got. Right, right. You're just pissing away the space here.

Chris Gammell: Gotcha. Yeah. Says the guy that was in a two square meter area.

Dave Jones: That was incredibly efficient.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah. That was a master of efficiency, my old lad.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What are you doing with all your space now, buddy? 50 square meters.

Dave Jones: I just spread the shit everywhere, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. That's right. I think about that picture when you moved in, it was just crap all over the floor.

Dave Jones: It's still like that. Is it? Yeah. What, four months later, it's still like that.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Any update on your space? You know, any plans coming up for it? No.

Dave Jones: No, no. Oh, my mate Doug's coming over and going to install some lead lighting for me. That'll be exciting. Oh, very nice. Yeah, because he's been to China, because he's in the lead lighting business, so he picked up some, apparently, reasonable quality stuff from China. He's going to pop over and install that, so I'll... Is it going to be custom, then? No, no. There'll be those tubes, you know, those fluro tubes, but he does have some custom stuff he wants to put on my bench, apparently. So he's, you know, he's really keen to do that, so...

Chris Gammell: Oh, fancy.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So we'll no doubt record that, and...

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that'll be a good one.

Dave Jones: But apart from that, I want to build, like, a big camera rig that is up on my top shelf and slides along, and then the camera can actually look straight down. And I want to build something like that, but it's got to hold my heavy, you know, big Canon camera, you know, and it's got a... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's... Yeah, it's just... I don't know. I don't know exactly how to do it. So I was going to have those bearings, you know, those sliding bearings along the top there. I think I've talked about this before, and I don't know. But anyway, that was the plan, but... Yeah, you'll figure it out. Yeah, probably. Do you guys have smart meters there yet? We do. They've been blowing up.

Chris Gammell: Yeah?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, hang on. Can I just finish the hackerspace thing, the makerspace, before we get onto that? Yeah, like, my first thought was, how the hell do they afford a place like that? And apparently, like, you know, this thing's a complete building they've built. They've rented, right? They don't... They didn't buy it. They're renting it. But they put the money up for, I think, 12 months in advance, the two people who founded it. So yeah, they put, you know. But because it's out in the middle of nowhere and it seems abandoned, I think they got it reasonably cheap, you know. Like, if you bought a space like that here, it'd be probably in the order of $40,000, $50,000 a month, you know. A month? A month. Yeah. A month.

Chris Gammell: If you do that here, it'd be like at least $6 or $7 a month.

Dave Jones: Right. Just some old abandoned building, huh? Yeah. You'd probably do it free if you're really adventurous. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You can have it for free as long as you keep the criminals out, you know. Right, right, right. Yeah. Right. But anyway, it's awesome. So it's the East Gippsland Makerspace. Cool. Yeah. Hope it goes well, guys.

Chris Gammell: You have to go down there.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, I am going to Melbourne next month. I think it's finally locked in, perhaps. Cool. Oh, dear. Anyway, but it's a long way out. It's, you know, I'd have to drive for half a day to get there or something. Oh, wow. Okay. It's a long way out of Melbourne. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So, smart meters. Yes, they've been blowing up here. They've been making the news. Really? The government's been, yeah, they started this program where they're installing smart meters, you know, to monitor energy, you know, use. Well, and, you know, so someone doesn't have to come around and read your meter. You know, a man comes around with a little handheld computer and types in your number and all that sort of stuff. They don't need that anymore.

Chris Gammell: And they've been talking about this for years. Yeah, they have. I mean, and the smartest ones, they're supposed to be able to, like, you know, network with each other, create a mesh network, and then be able to talk back to the grid and tell them not only, like, billing stuff, but also, like, live data on what the people are using.

Dave Jones: I'm not sure how smart our ones are. I know they're smart meters and they do report back somehow, but I'm not sure exactly, you know, if they mesh together in a grid or, you know, or whatever. Right, right.

Chris Gammell: Right. And the reason they do this is because, you know, like, big loads. I mean, it took me a long time to kind of conceptualize this, I think. But when you think about, like, a big load jumping on the network, right? Like, someone turning on their dishwasher or, I don't know what else, maybe like a washing machine.

Dave Jones: It's down in the noise, man. Come on. When you're talking about, you know, a thousand houses hooked in parallel, you know, it's, you know, it sort of averages out. People are turning off, while others are turning on, you know. Talking big loads, come on. Talk real loads, you know. Talk factories, you know, somebody switched on the lights to a factory or something. That's a big whomp and load. House loads, I think, even out. I think there is. Anyway, go on with your story. Sorry, I ruined it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, now that you...

Dave Jones: Yeah. I poo-pooed it.

Chris Gammell: Anyways, there's a bunch of crazies that don't want these smart meters on their home. And they're insisting that they don't have them. And I was getting there, but Dave kind of kiboshed my point. But, yeah.

Dave Jones: Are these the same people who, when they get their notebook or their new smartphone, they actually tape over the camera, just in case the government's watching?

Chris Gammell: I bet they're probably in conjoining groups, yeah. Right. Yeah, and they say because, oh, well, they're going to be watching, you know, what we use and whatever else, you know, like what kind of power consumption and...

Dave Jones: Well, that's the idea.

Chris Gammell: Right, exactly. But for some reason, that's a privacy concern. Right. And I agree that it is a privacy thing, and that you could back-calculate, you know, if someone turned on their dishwasher, but who cares?

Dave Jones: I know. Who gives a shit? I mean, that's just...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, yeah, I don't... But that's the, you know, it's the thin edge of the wedge, as they call it, you know? If you let them in to monitor something as, you know, as pointless as your dishwasher switching on, then what's next, you know? Kind of, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So I can sort of... Yeah, no. No, these people are still crazy. And really what I think... So I remember the thing I was thinking. I was thinking about air conditioners, right? So like big honking inductive compressors, right?

Speaker ?: Yep.

Chris Gammell: You know, those are really big. And that's really when the big problems come in, is in the summers, right? When you got, you know, a thousand houses, and it's a hot day out, and everybody switches on their air conditioner at the same time. And then you have to kick in, you know, a whole nother... You know, you get to turn on a whole nother turbine at a power plant or something like that. That's when it really matters, right? And I don't agree with like power companies being able to control your thermostat, because some of them actually do that, which is kind of weird. But, you know, like if it's on, it's on. Who cares? I don't know. I guess that's more of a privacy thing than it is a electronics thing. But so what I'm trying to say with the smart meter thing is, I think they're being stupid, but, you know, because it's the same group that also talks about, you know, radiation being, getting sick from like Wi-Fi radiation and stuff like that. It says in the article. So, right. Right. Crazy about one thing, crazy about everything. That's kind of my, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So what else is on here? This is, that was a, yeah. What else should we talk about on here?

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. We have, uh... We have Orcad.

Chris Gammell: Orcad. Yeah, you were interested in this. So Orcad has a new online marketplace we've been talking about. And we found about this from Steve Leibson's blog, actually. Mm-hmm. But apparently it's supposed to be like an app model. And I'm not sure if they opened up the, the, uh, the ecosystem or if it's just, you know, like only closed and you can just buy bits and pieces from them. But... Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, they're talking about down, like footprint symbols, simulation models, um, get, and get a look at app notes, white papers and multimedia educational material. Huh? All from your convenient web browser. Well, isn't that possible now using something called Google? Right, right. Right. It's just, I don't know. I see, I didn't think that they, that, um, they were in a position to actually, um, you know, to do that, to sell stuff like that. I know that Altium were looking into, Altium have spoken about that sort of model and how they want to do that eventually down the track, you know, how everyone will contribute. Yeah, everybody wants to do that. Everyone wants to copy. You know. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But it's sort of, Altium's probably in a more of a position to do it technically because they do, you know, FPGA stuff and they do all the whole works, right? So the whole idea is that you can buy, you know, IP modules from, you know, people who upload, you know. So the idea is, you know, average Joe can upload this IP module. And then, you know, Joe blogs can download it and buy it, you know, and it's like. Right. Except it's supposed to be a CAD program.

Chris Gammell: So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I like the idea. And it's the same thing we've, we've talked about in here. We, you know, we talked about how, uh, you know, like the, the KiCAD models, we were talking about getting, getting some, like a, something started up with that or, or CJ's. A central repository kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Having like a repository. And, and I don't know if I mentioned back then, I actually found a service you can subscribe to. I don't know if I mentioned that. Um, I forget what it's called now though. I think you did. I didn't have the link here. I did. Okay. So go listen to that episode and then listen to all the rest of the episodes too, people.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Right. Listen to the whole hour just to get this one snippet that you're.

Chris Gammell: No, no. I'm saying go back to episode one and just listen to all of our episodes all over again. Oh, goodness.

Dave Jones: But there are companies. Yeah. You can pay. Well, there are companies you can pay and they'll do a thing for you. They'll do the footprint, the 3d model and the whole kit and caboodle for you, you know, first, you know, for 10 bucks, five bucks or 10 bucks or something, you know, like for a small, you know, it's sort of like a micro.

Chris Gammell: Oh no, this is a lot more. This is like a $5,000 a year thing that I was talking about.

Dave Jones: Oh, right.

Chris Gammell: Okay. I mean, I like this idea of having a marketplace for, for footprints, but everything else.

Dave Jones: But they've always been free. They've, it's always been a given that you, you know. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But if you do it as like a subscription stuff, right? If you said, oh, like a hundred bucks a year, you can access it.

Dave Jones: And yeah, but then it's, you know, is it going to be in the footprint, in the format that you want? I mean, that's the age old question with CAD. And we've mentioned this before. Mostly, probably the majority of people redo their own footprints because they have their own internal company standard. They have specific manufacturing requirements, specific layout requirements, et cetera, et cetera. And those footprints aren't covered by the IPC standard ones.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: I don't know. I just think it's, I can't see how this thing can be, you know, be useful at all. And, you know, Altium have had zero success with the course and I'm sure that ORCAD will too. It's just, you know, it sounds great on paper, you know, you're at the marketing meeting and it sounds brilliant. You know, someone probably got a promotion for bloody thinking it up, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's just not going to work in practice. It's not going to work.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, speaking of your former employer, we had another thing on here from a couple of weeks ago, the 3D Gerber viewer. Oh, yeah. This is actually, I found out about this through Lane on Twitter. Yep. Mayhew Labs is the name of the site. I've heard of them.

Dave Jones: What else do they do? Because I've heard of them.

Chris Gammell: I have no idea.

Dave Jones: Anyway. Yeah. They've got this cool looking 3D Gerber program. It's free. Oh, they do. Like, they're a hardware. They do hardware. Like, little kits. They do Arduino shields and other little kits and stuff like that. But, yeah. I assume they wrote this themselves, a 3D.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, this is HTML5 and it's a 3D viewer.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. And, oh, it's online. Oh, sorry. I.

Chris Gammell: What did you think it was? You didn't even try it before, did you?

Dave Jones: No, well, it was only on the list this morning. I haven't had a chance to try it. Here we go. I've loaded it up. And you can drop your Gerber file straight in there. Should I do it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Live on. Well, you could. There's a bunch of examples there, too, which is a little easier to do. But, yeah, it's great. I mean, it's, you know, simple white background, but it's actually a 3D rendering of the, you know, everything. All the information on your Gerbers, all the vias and everything, too. Awesome. It's pretty nice. I haven't. The only thing that's not on there that I haven't seen is if it's more than two-layer, which I don't think it is so far. Okay. So, that's the only downside.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: But I also haven't uploaded a 4-layer.

Dave Jones: I'm going to try it right now. I've got the...

Chris Gammell: Oh, this.

Dave Jones: Here we go. Live. The thrilling radio, huh, Dave? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Here we go. I'm going to do my... I assume that you have to do your drill file as well, because it knows how big your holes are and stuff like that. Or is it... No? No?

Chris Gammell: Funny thing, folks. Dave has not yet figured out why his videos are so long. Right.

Dave Jones: All right. Here we go. I'm dropping my Gerber files in. Oh, and that's neat. It automatically knows which files you dragged and dropped, and it tells you that... It then asks you, with drop boxes, which layer it corresponds to. And it got them correct. So it obviously knows the Altium layer naming format, like file extension, like .gbl is bottom copper, you know. And that's rather neat. And that's... They've got no... Okay. That's the outline. Okay. The mechanical layer. Done. I'm going to click done. Here we go.

Chris Gammell: And hopefully Dave will be able to share this with everyone. I'll be able to share... Which board is this?

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Is this the microcurrent?

Dave Jones: This is the microcurrent. I've dragged and dropped the microcurrent. And it's worked. Oh! Nice.

Chris Gammell: Very nice.

Dave Jones: Hey! This... I wish I could show this to you. And it works as you expect. The center scroll wheel on your mouse, you know, the mount... That allows you to zoom in and out, and then... Yeah. And then allows you to pan around.

Chris Gammell: You know, here's something... Here's something different from the last time I looked at it, and this might help explain it. Finish with your design, order your PCBs for $1.50 per square inch for three copies. Which sounds... Right. Strikingly like lane service. So perhaps that's how we found out about it.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Yep. They sell it. There's a slight error on the silkscreen here, but... Maybe an error on my solder mask, or is that my board? I don't know which version I dragged and dropped in here. It may be an out-of-date one. The only problem is it doesn't show the holes, which is really annoying. I mean, I did drag and drop in my file for the drill, all of the drill information. It didn't read that, obviously. But that's a... You know, that would have been really nice if it could show your actual drill holes and stuff like that. But anyway, you can see your solder mask expansion, which is one of the main things. And it does seem to render the silkscreen beautifully. I mean, I am quite impressed by that. You can't zoom inside the board, but... Oh, hang on.

Chris Gammell: Actually, this price is a lot better than Lane as well, too.

Dave Jones: Okay. This price is a...

Chris Gammell: It charges five bucks a board, or any per square inch.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Wow. Okay. It's rendered the pads on my SO package incorrectly. Oops. I think they were ovals. Yeah, I think they were oval pads, and it's really shaped them, well, as massive ovals. Like, not as sort of, you know, rounded corner kind of ones. So, yeah. Oops. There's a few issues, but that's pretty neat. Especially when you can just do it online like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Nice. Okay. Yeah. That's pretty neat. Thumbs up. And I'm sure it's a new thing, so, you know. Yeah, it's probably got some bugs to look out. Well, yeah, it's new. It's probably got some bugs in it, you know. It gets sorted out, but yeah. I like it.

Chris Gammell: Neat. Now, here's a part you can mess up on there. There's this new-looking part from NXP, and it's called a sidebar. SOT 1226. Have you seen this? No.

Dave Jones: No. It's a 0.8 by 0.8 millimeter.

Chris Gammell: No good can come from this announcement. I know. It's terrible. It's so tiny. SOT 1226. Yep. 0.8 by 0.8 by 0.35 millimeters. That's like fleck of... That's like half a fleck of sand kind of thing. Yeah. And it's got five pins on it, though. Oh, my God.

Dave Jones: Well, has it got three per side?

Chris Gammell: Three pins per side?

Dave Jones: Actually, no. It's weird. Like, no. Okay. So, it's showing... Oh, no. Sorry. It's got like a diamond center pad. I'm actually mistaking... It's a diamond center pad. I'm actually mistaking the pads on the side. Those gold pads on the side. I thought they were...

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's probably for testing, which... Or something. I mean... I don't know.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. The bare die. Yeah, there's not enough room in there for the die. It's got to stick out the sides, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's actually silicon.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Oh, boy. I mean, sometimes...

Chris Gammell: I mean, I've been doing smaller designs lately, and I've been shocked that I've been like, oh, Sot 23? Oh, that's much too big. No. That's huge. Yeah, I know. Give me SC70 or give me death.

Dave Jones: Yeah. If you're making tiny stuff, then you love these things, right? But otherwise, it's just grown.

Chris Gammell: And if you have a microscope on your bench, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Well, you couldn't solder this. You would have to reflow it, right?

Chris Gammell: Oh, no. You definitely can't solder this.

Dave Jones: We could solder the corner pads, but that fifth pad in there, that diamond pad in the middle, which is right smack under the middle, it's like a thermal pad. Is it a thermal pad?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you could do it with a... It's probably a pin. It's for logic. This is for logic stuff.

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah. And then, of course, could you route that out? Is there enough room to actually route out that pad or...?

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, that's the question without doing like a... Would it be a blind via?

Dave Jones: A blind via straight through the pad. Or a via in pad, as they call it. Yeah. Which is often frowned upon because sometimes you have to plug... Sometimes you have to plug the via if you don't want the solder to wick down through the via and, you know, you end up with a bad joint. So sometimes you have to ask for plugged vias, please. Please plug my vias.

Chris Gammell: Sounds horrible.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I know. It does. But otherwise, you know, if it sucks away or especially if you've got like a thousand pp G8 and you've got via in pad, right? You know? Via in pad. Because you didn't have room to round out those bastards, right? And it can suck away all of your solder paste, you know? It just gets whipped out down through via capillary action, is it? That wicks it down through the via, you know? One of those physical actions of...

Chris Gammell: I'm not sure with solder if it's capillary action or if it's called something else. I mean, it's... Yep. It's the same idea, I think. I mean, it's...

Dave Jones: I'm not a physicist. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Or a biologist where capillary action usually exists.

Dave Jones: Ah, right. Yeah. That's probably where I'm getting it from. Anyway. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a rather interesting pain in the ass package. There you go. By all means, use it. Right. At your own peril. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. If you're doing a mobile phone or something, you know? Right. Boy. And what's the target of that? What type of devices?

Chris Gammell: They're talking about discrete logic. Ah, right. Discrete logic. If you're doing, like, NAND gates.

Dave Jones: Which is perfect for the five pin count, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right, yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. So you've got power, ground, two input, and output. So it's perfectly suited to an individual gate package.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's not bad. Or an op amp, if you've got a simple op amp.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. You could have a simple op amp with no external feedback, no external compensation pin or something like that.

Chris Gammell: I think your, yeah, your Theta JA might not be very good with that. I mean, your heat syncing ability with a little tiny package like that, I think, would probably burn up after not much at all. It's not that great.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, it's signal devices, but I don't know. Meh. Grown. Imagine taking that to your manual. Like, you take that to your board loader, and they've never done one before, you know, using this weird obscure package. And they've gone, okay, we've got to spend a week experimenting on how to get this bastard right, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right. I mean, how do you even place something like that? I mean, I've only seen pick and place machines that are, you know, like, decently large parts. You know, they can do like 0603s, no problem, but 0402s that start to misalign, you know.

Dave Jones: Usually there's a step. That's what I've seen. Usually there's a step up. When you go from 0603 to 0402, you have to have a different type of nozzle and stuff like that. So, some pick and place machines aren't capable of going the 0402 route. So, and then if you get smaller than that, you know, you've got 0201 or something, well, you need smaller things again. Smaller heads, smaller nozzle heads. And not every manufacturer is going to be able to do that, or they have to buy them special. So, they're going to, you know, charge you extra. Yeah. We have to charge 10,000 bucks NRE because we have to buy special nozzles just for your project, you know. And then that's where you start haggling. Oh, but you can amortize that cost over other customers, can't you? And they go, no, screw you. And give us a 10th day.

Chris Gammell: You're it, buddy. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Or if you've got some super wide package and they have to buy this special feeder reel that's, you know, two inches wide or something like that, because you've got a super long connector or something and they don't have feeder reels to do it. Oh, boy. Yeah. It's, you know, those are the joys of having your stuff. Has sheen assembled? You know, you can't just send anything off to a manufacturer and expect them to do it. You know, they may not have the capability to do that.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's no, it's no 3D printing, you know, like circuit maker yet.

Dave Jones: No, definitely not.

Chris Gammell: You ever done high volume stuff before? You said you have, right?

Dave Jones: I've done a couple where the run is a few hundred thousand, if you call that high. Some people laugh at that. That's prototype, you know. I know.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: You know, compared to my farty novelty toy, which we ran through 10 million of them, you know.

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right.

Dave Jones: I've only started to get into high volume lately.

Chris Gammell: Like the high volume stuff I've been doing is...

Dave Jones: What's your idea of high volume at your current... My stuff?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, hundreds of thousands. I mean...

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No one's saying it's from my current employer, per se.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Just to, you know, pretend.

Dave Jones: Is that like the individual product level? See, the reason we got up to that level, like our actual product was only... We made, I think, 15,000 or something of this product, which is not huge, but there were 25 of one particular board in that product, right? So we had to, you know, so then the volumes go up by times 25, right?

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Because there were 25 individual boards, you know, they're little sensor boards that, you know, are on these long five metre long arms and they, you know, and you've got 25 or five arms times five sensors and, you know. It adds up. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it does. And at those sort of volumes, we actually designed our own automated test machine for that. Really? Wow. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. It had the hydraulic thing, you know, our own custom chute. You'd shove the... I've mentioned this before, surely. You'd shove the boards in the custom chute and the hydraulic.

Chris Gammell: I think you were talking about pogo pins and everything, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, the pogo pins and the custom, you know, and all the custom hydraulics to push the boards along the little jig and then it goes into a pass fail bin and the little flippers to automatically feed them to the right. Yeah. But if you're manufacturing a couple hundred thousand, that's, you know, you can put money into automating that because you'll have the budget. You know, you might have a couple hundred thousand dollar budget to automate the testing of these things.

Chris Gammell: So, the point I'm trying to make about the high volume stuff, though, and even though like my volumes aren't like super high volume, but like I didn't realize like just how much volume can like do for you in terms of price on parts. Like I just never really get it. Oh, yeah. You know, like I don't think, you know, like we talk to a lot of hobbyists too and a lot of hobbyists deal with, you know, the onesie, twosies pricing and, you know, and we do, we deal with that as our own hobby stuff, right? But it's just, it's insane, you know?

Dave Jones: Well, even some hobby stuff can go into the thousands, right? You might buy a whole reel, right? That's, you know, hobbyists can do that. If you're manufacturing, you know, hundreds of kits, you will buy reels of components, right? Right. So, you're automatically up into the thousands sometimes, but yeah, this is another step up again.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. And you really, I mean, it really starts to get crazy, you know? And as someone pointed out on Twitter, it's also about relationships too, you know, like if, it's not just if you're buying one reel at really high volume, it's also if you're buying, you know, a thousand different reels from the same company at very high volume, that can, that can make a big difference too. But man, I just never realized, you know, like it's, it's bonkers. It's nice to be able to throw your weight around. I like it.

Dave Jones: One of the design problems with that though, is that getting prices can like, you know, if you're the design engineer, right? And you're trying to choose a part based on price. Well, you know, trying to convince people that you are actually going to buy that sort of volume can often be hard. That's where a full-time purchasing person with all the contacts and the trust with the various vendors will, you know, they will get a genuine price for that. Yeah. You know? Right, right, right. Whereas you, if you phone, you know, you're an absolute nobody and you've, you know, you're the designer and you phone up, you know, somebody called, oh, I'd like a price on, you know, 200,000 of these. They, they, they, they might even, you know, laugh at you almost like, who are you? I've never heard of you. I've never dealt with you before. Right. Yeah. Kind of thing. And you know, I don't have a relationship with you. Where are you coming out of the blue? You know, this is not how it works kind of thing. And, you know, yeah. When you're up in those sort of volumes, yes. Then the, you know, you start having to build relationships and all that non-engineery stuff that engineers hate, you know, building, you always want to sit in their cubicle and everything's online. And if the price isn't online, well, screw you. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I've always wished, I wish there was like a way that a, you know, that'd be like at a distributor or somewhere else. Like, like, you know, it knows what I'm buying for, right? So it knows I'm buying for Project X and Project X is projected to do this. And I just want to be able to look at everyone and say, I want to know just their best price. I want, I want like an online marketplace, kind of like that app market we were talking about, but totally different purpose, right? I want to be able to have people compete in front of me, in front of my eyes on a screen, right? Versus. Right. Versus like emailing someone, you know, oh, what's the price on this one? Yeah.

Dave Jones: And then go for lunch with them and maybe. I don't mind the lunches. Negotiating a better price over lunch.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: I guess you don't like people, so. Yeah. Exactly.

Dave Jones: Humans. Yeah. Yeah. Grown.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: So, yeah, I know where you're coming from. Right. You know, it's going to be. But, yeah, I, you know, I just want it up front. You know? Dicking around. It's just inefficient. Right. Just waste your time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's what it comes down to is eventually it's, it's very, it's very inefficient. It's, you know, it gets annoying. Yep. So, hmm.

Dave Jones: Because if you have to wait two weeks to get a reply from somebody about the price of an item, you know, a super huge volume price for an item, well, that's, you know, your, that throws off your design schedule because you have to make a choice now whether or not you're going to design that part in. Right.

Chris Gammell: And it's realistic. I mean, people go on vacation. Sometimes the boss somewhere else just isn't around and it's like, well. Yep. All right. Well, see you later. You know? Like, it's like, you could, you could go on a hunch, but you might. And I'm getting, getting in trouble for that. You know? It's just, that's no fun. So. No.

Dave Jones: Oh, well. Yeah, I've, I've had that many a time. Why did you choose this part? It's gone obsolete. Well, Jesus. You know? It's just bad luck. I, I didn't know it was going to go obsolete. Right, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, you know, I asked them and five years ago they said, yeah. No problem. This year. About me. Me time frame.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Anyway. Ah. Speaking of work and stuff like that, I love this Reddit post. Oh, yeah. Where is it? Somebody on Reddit. It's a little bit old, but that's what we're doing today. We're going through old shit. Somebody posted on Reddit. We'll post the link up. Go and have a look. It's hilarious. They basically said, I've got a new job. I've just started my new engineering job and I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I'm just sitting here playing online games, you know? Yeah. And some of the hilarious stuff is in the comments. So you have to read the, read the comments. People throwing in all these suggestions. Right.

Chris Gammell: It's a tough thing. I mean, and people always say, oh, well, enjoy it while you can. But like you've, I mean, anytime I start a new job, I'm like, yeah, that's when you're the most eager and you have the least to do, right? I mean, like some, it is a tough problem to deal with, but yeah, some of those suggestions are kind of ridiculous.

Dave Jones: I know. Well, they were designed to be because it's funny. So everyone took the piss out of it and as we say here, took the piss out of it.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: And absolutely hilarious. And hey, you know, one of my early jobs, I was hired as the assistant. I was hired as a designer, but I was an assistant to the R&D, the R&D director. Right. So I was kind of, you know, just to work on whatever he desired. Right. And it wasn't a real job. He just hired me because he liked me. Right. And he wanted me to maybe do some shit for him. So, you know, I turn up to work and well, he's never around. Right. Yeah. So what the hell do I do? You know? Like he was one of the ones who like, you know, turned up at seven o'clock at night and then worked from seven to two a.m. Oh, really?

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Dave Jones: It was just, yeah, it was just never around. And actually, you know, trying to get some work was like extracting teeth. It was tough. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, co-ops were like that for me too. You know, like I'd had a couple where it was just like, you know, you're really hoping that they'll give you the good work is, you know, you don't want to be handed like someone's like, oh, here's a database. Go fix this. Yeah. And then you look like a, you know.

Dave Jones: Here's a broom. Go and sweep the floor. Yeah. That kind of thing. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I sure could use a cup of coffee. But yeah.

Dave Jones: Can you please go wet my soldier and iron sponge?

Chris Gammell: That'd be a hell of a job title on a business card though.

Dave Jones: Soldier sponge wetter.

Chris Gammell: Sponge wetter. Yep. Yep. Oh, that'd be good.

Dave Jones: Extraordinaire. Sponge wetter extraordinaire. Imagine all the creative titles you could come up with for how you wet wet sponges. Oh, boy. Marketing wank word bonanza. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I love it. But yeah, that's, you know, it's probably more common than you think. I've had no shortage of companies, especially interviews I've gone to. I haven't gotten or taken the job there. But, you know, I've asked them, what will I be working on? I don't know. We just need more people is their response, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sometimes you get hired because there's money to hire people, right? And they don't want to give that up. There's money.

Dave Jones: Exactly. I've had them come out and say that, you know, because there's money, you know, and we need to hire people. Because if we don't spend the money, well, we don't get it again for the next project.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. Yeah. And you never know when you might need someone. So why not just have them sit around twiddling their thumbs?

Dave Jones: Have them sitting around, yeah. They sit around on tap, you know, and that's not uncommon. I've spent many, many an hour, many a month, many years sitting around playing games in the labs. Oh, man. Hell yeah.

Chris Gammell: He's like, you're like the relief pitcher, right? You're like the...

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know. But then when the shit hits the fan and, you know, well, you need to produce now. You need to produce now, you know. Right. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, sometimes, you know, a whole week would go by and you've got absolutely nothing to do. A whole team will have nothing and you're just sitting all sitting in the lab playing video games or bitching about, you know, how crap management is or, you know, spreading rumors, making shit up.

Chris Gammell: What time frame was this? What years? Because I just don't know if this... Like, does this happen anymore? I don't know. And in fact, I'd love to hear from our listeners if this does still happen.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: So I...

Dave Jones: Hang on. Hang on. Can I go to the door? I heard the doorbell. The wife's not here.

Chris Gammell: Oh, live action. Can we go... Live action again.

Dave Jones: Can we go and get a mystery package? Hang on. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: All right. Hmm. What should Chris talk about? Hmm. Jobs. I like this. Okay. So there's a... There's actually a post. This is another one of the... Old... Old from the list. And this is more for the US engineers. Right.

Chris Gammell: But there's actually a listing on the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Which is a US government site. BLS.gov. And there's actually a map. And it's pretty cool. So you can actually mouse over different country... Or different states in the country. And this one on Lincoln is actually for electrical engineers. And you can see the densities of where the most engineers are. And it's kind of surprising, actually. So there's like... And it does it by color. So... What state is that? Colorado's white? That doesn't make sense. They must not have data from there. But... Texas is pretty dark. California's dark, obviously. Ohio. Virginia. Virginia probably because of like the defense contracting. That kind of stuff. And then Massachusetts and Florida. And that's like... It actually shows the different... Different densities. So I thought it was pretty cool. What else is this? There's other... Other... Other graphs on here. Mean wages and stuff like that. Obviously, California is super... Super high wages. As is Arizona. And... You know... Washington because of Seattle. And stuff like that. So... Definitely a... Cool map to check out. I feel a little naked here. Dave's not here to yell at me. Maybe he's not coming back. Alright. Well... Let's see. The jobs is done. I'm coming. He's coming. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Guarantee this was like baby clothes or something like that.

Dave Jones: Well, that so didn't work.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What was it? Baby clothes? Yeah. Sorry.

Dave Jones: Have you been talking all this time?

Chris Gammell: I've been trying. It's tough, man. Without you here. I haven't done that in a long time.

Dave Jones: That was a total schmuzzle.

Chris Gammell: What was it?

Dave Jones: I went to the front door. The front door's locked, right? I couldn't find the keys. So the wife bugged it off. You got locked in your house? My keys.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I locked in my house. I had to go out. Someone save Dave. He's locked in his house. It's a week later now. I had to go out via the roller door. Right? Yeah. I had to go out via the roller door. And there is a package there. But then there's two people standing there as well. You know, dressed all nicely and smartly. Hello. We'd like to talk to you about Jesus. Bloody hell. Would you do a break? No.

Chris Gammell: Oh, my goodness. So the Amp Hour just got interrupted by Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses?

Dave Jones: I don't know what they were. I don't care. You might as well be talking about Santa Claus. Oh, that's... Anyway, I do actually have a package here.

Chris Gammell: Oh, jeez. Another mailbag segment. Now it's for the Amp Hour.

Dave Jones: Another mailbag segment.

Chris Gammell: I promise we'll have a guest next week or something here. So this won't... Actually, next week from when you're hearing this episode, hopefully we'll be talking about Maker Faire because this has been a round disaster so far. Why? Oh, well, I just went outside and got accosted by...

Dave Jones: By freaking Mormons or something.

Chris Gammell: By traveling religious people.

Dave Jones: Yep, I did. Live... Oh, this is ridiculous. I know. This is a Shamozzle episode. Hey! That could be the title.

Chris Gammell: What's a Shamozzle?

Dave Jones: Shamozzle. A Shamozzle is a mess. It's an absolute, you know... It's just... It's a big balls up, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Shamozzle. I don't... Yeah, I don't know where the term came from. Maybe it's Australian. Maybe. I don't even know how to bloody spell it.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Shamozzle. Anyway. We don't have to talk about electronics on here. It's all part of the... People just listen not for the electronics, right? Not for long, man. It's entertainment.

Chris Gammell: It's better than... If they listen for electronics, they're not listening anymore. I guarantee that. Right.

Dave Jones: Ah, boy. So...

Chris Gammell: So maybe we should talk about electronics. No, Maker Faire? What about it? I haven't been there yet.

Dave Jones: Oh, well, you're... Well, I know, but you're going. I am going. It's exciting, you bastard. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm trying to figure out what I should do in San Francisco. Obviously, this would have already happened by the time people are hearing this, but... Yep. So don't bother giving me suggestions, because I'll just feel bad. But I'm going to be down there Thursday, just in the city. I don't know what I'm going to do yet. Maybe just cool around, rent a bike or something. Oh.

Dave Jones: I can give you a whole list of suggestions.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, like what?

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. What? So you've got a whole day there?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, a whole day in downtown San Francisco.

Dave Jones: All right. Right. Here we go. I'm not even from San Fran yet. I can tell you all about it. Okay? Are you into Alcatraz?

Chris Gammell: No. See, that's the thing. I want it to be nerdy stuff. So I was thinking like...

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. Okay. First of all, if you're going down to Fisherman's Wharf, right? Very touristy area, but you have to go... Sort of have to go down to Fisherman's Wharf, right? But there's an arcade museum there with all these... It's free. You just walk in. It's got some weird French name, I think. Le Arcade. Le Mechanical or something. Because it's got all of the old mechanical arcade machines as well. Oh, yeah? And it's great. You're just walking off the street and they're all playable. You can put your money in and play these things. Oh, that's pretty cool. And it's great. Trust me. Definitely worth... Very... Techo. Very worth seeing.

Chris Gammell: All right. Cool.

Dave Jones: Go to the... Then you can walk along the... Walk along the bay and you can go to the... Exploratorium.

Chris Gammell: See, that's what I was thinking about. The Exploratorium. Yeah. The Exploratorium is pretty good. Okay.

Dave Jones: So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, let's think about that and biking around and, you know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Worth seeing. Make sure you get the cable car which goes north... Which heads south, north, over and heads down to Alcatraz. Make sure you take that cable car. It's the best. It's the steepest hill and it goes straight down towards Alcatraz. Oh, cool. It's great. All right. Yeah. Have to ride a cable car. Yeah. I've done that before. It's compulsory.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. You ever do like... You do like nerdy vacations, right? I mean, like, when you do business trips. Me? I mean, not with like your wife, but I don't know.

Dave Jones: I think it's kind of fun to train. Yeah, I do. You know, I go to the computer history museums and, you know, stuff like that. Yeah. But... Yeah, I'll be doing that Friday. It's sort of... Right. I... No, I sort of haven't done that much in the past, you know. My overseas work trips, I've just wanted to see the sights of the city. You know, I haven't specifically targeted nerdy things because I didn't really give it a second thought. If there was something nerdy, you know, then I would go see it. But I wouldn't... Yeah. Yeah. But I wouldn't sort of hunt them out. See, that's like another thing.

Chris Gammell: I'm thinking about going to like tech shop. I might stop in there just to see what that's like. Right. Okay. You know, I'll probably visit a hacker space. Like probably go to Noisebridge. That's that kind of thing.

Dave Jones: See, these things weren't around when I was going overseas for work trips. They would if you would have gone this time. No such thing as... Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I'm in the culture more now. You know, I'm in the nerdy sort of hackery culture a bit more now.

Chris Gammell: Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones: So, than I was before. Because it wasn't... There wasn't really a culture like that 10 years ago. You know, something like that. Yeah, it's true. Those sort of things weren't around. Yeah. So, when you visited a new city for a work trip. Yeah. Yeah. You just went and saw the normal touristy things.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. So, I guess it's just...

Dave Jones: I'm a big fan of walking the city. You know, I always walk everywhere.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Because, I mean, I live in the suburbs now too. So, I don't... I drive everywhere now. So, walking... Yeah, yeah. Same here. Taking public transport is very... It's very high on my list of things to do. Yep. Same here. As weird as that sounds to people that live in cities, I'm sure.

Dave Jones: No. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But, the best way to see a city is either walking and or taking the public transport.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Absolutely. You know, I think if you have to hop in a cab to go somewhere in a city, you've failed. You know? Right. I think you've...

Chris Gammell: You haven't planned it right.

Dave Jones: Yep. You... And you're not getting the... You're not getting the best experience, you know? Right. Because I've found a whole bunch of stuff just by walking down alleyways and things, you know? Yeah. And, you know, yeah, just walking around the cities and it's great.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: So, highly recommend you do that.

Chris Gammell: Okay. I'll check it out. Yeah? Hmm. How about electronics? Uh... Hey, I was going to ask you about... Slim pickings today. No, no, no. I got a good one. So, what about, like, environmental stuff? Because you worked on... You know, like, you worked on... What was it? Seismic stuff or underwater or something? Wasn't it?

Dave Jones: I worked on seismic oil exploration.

Chris Gammell: So, tell me a little bit about the environmental protections you've done before. So, not like... Not like... Rojas kind of stuff, but... Right. ...sealing it up. Like, how did you usually do that stuff? Did you pot it? Did you use, like, conformal coating? Because I've been thinking about that for one of my projects and I'm just wondering about what I need to do and what I need to consider there.

Dave Jones: Well, that... When you conformally coat or you pot something, it's to protect your circuit. It's not to protect the environment.

Chris Gammell: No, I know. Really? That's what I meant. Environmental.

Dave Jones: How are you protecting the environment?

Chris Gammell: No, no. I know. I said environmental protection, but I meant protection from the environment, not protection for the environment. From the environment. Okay. Gotcha.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: I knew I was going to get that confused in here. I'm not... I know I was going to say it wrong, but... Yeah. So...

Dave Jones: Yes. Potting is a big deal. I've potted stuff to go down 3Ks down on the ocean floor. Oh, yeah? So, you know, 3,000, 4,000 metres, I think, down on the ocean floor. And that's an art in itself because, you know, you have to... If you're potting wires coming in and out, each wire has to be individually prepped and cleaned with isopropanol alcohol for your pot it so there's no contamination on each wire because otherwise the water will wicker, you know, the actual... The material that you're potting with won't adhere completely to the surface of the wire or the surface of the component or the connector or whatever. And, you know, water can... Has a magic way under pressure of leaking in.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: To things like that.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, it's a big deal. Have you seen that XKCD comic of the different depths they were... He was showing for the... When James Cameron went down to the Marianas Trench.

Dave Jones: Oh, no. I haven't seen that. Oh, it's so good.

Chris Gammell: He shows all the different levels, right? And he shows Lake Erie, actually. Lake Erie is one of the shallows, which is right where I live. Right. But he shows a lot of these different lakes and stuff. And he actually starts to map out where different things happen. So, he says, like, at one level... I don't know how deep it was. I don't have it up in front of me. But he talks about, like, at this level, the cork in a champagne bottle pops inward. That's how much pressure there is. Right. And he just maps it all the way down. It's crazy.

Dave Jones: Nice. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Another one was, if you punctured your air tank, no air... I think the water would flow into it versus the air trying to escape out. That's kind of like the... That's the measures he gives. And it's a great... You know, Randall's brilliant, obviously. But... Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. So...

Dave Jones: How does he come up with that shit? I mean, it's just... I don't know.

Chris Gammell: He keeps hitting home runs. I know. Every time.

Dave Jones: That's why we like it. Yeah. So... So... And that's why he's popular. Yeah. Because he hits a home run each time. Yeah. Well, not... No, actually, some of his ones I don't like, you know. Right. I just think, oh, no, that one's stupid. Right. Or boring or whatever. But, yep. So... As opposed to Dilbert. I think Dilbert hits the nail every time. Yeah. Well, some of them are just kind of... No.

Chris Gammell: Boring, if anything. I mean, they're just kind of... Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, you have to clean these wires so the water doesn't get in. But are there other concerns? Yes. It doesn't get in. So, what about... Because doesn't the potting compound actually... Isn't it heated? Like, it creates heat? Like, an epoxy? It actually is exothermic?

Dave Jones: It... It can... Well, it depends on the type. There's many different... As you learn when you get into potting stuff, there's many, many different types of potting material with many types of thermo... What's the word? Thermoreactive... I'm sure that's wrong. You know? Thermo... Processes. When they... You know, you join the two parts together and they're, you know, exothermic or they're endothermic or whatever. Right, right. Yeah. Exothermic being generate heat and... And then another thing is they can expand and stuff like that and they can crack solder joints and they can do all sorts of things. Do you use a soft one? Do you use a hard one? Do you... Do you want vibration to external, you know, which is an environmental concern? You've got vibration. You want to... You don't want that to couple through to your components. So, you might use a soft potting compound and I've done transfer... So, it's like spongy or what? No, it's spongy. I've done transfer characteristics of how much shock and vibration travels through different types of potting material and, you know, stuff like that. That's pretty cool. So, you know... And you might have your board loosely sat inside your potting material so it's not rigidly coupled to the outside walls of your box. Because if you do that, you transfer all the vibration through the sides of your box straight into your board and your potting compound's useless, you know?

Chris Gammell: So, how do you do that? You, like, put it in a baggie first and then pot around that or what?

Dave Jones: Sometimes you would actually hold it. You would have a jig which holds the board in place. So, you would, you know, have a little arm which holds it in the center of your box or the thing you want to pot it in and then you pot around that. And then once you do that, you pull the holder back out and then you've got to fill the hole. You've got to plug the hole where the holder was. Okay. And, yeah, it's, you know... So, it's a whole art form, huh? It can be tricky business. So... Yeah, it's a whole art form and it can be very messy setting up test jigs to... actual production jigs to do this, you know? Yeah. You'd have a separate bench for each different process of production. It's very different when you're designing an electronic product as opposed to a largely mechanical product with electronics in it, you know? There can be a big differentiation there, whereas most of your manufacturing processes are in the mechanical world as opposed to the electrical world. I guess so. Okay. So, you know, sure you'll have pass-fail testing in your board or characteristic testing, but that's only a very small part of it, you know? Yeah. So, yeah. It's not uncommon. Like, we've got a huge... You know, we'll have a huge factory, which is our production room, and nine-tenths of it is all these benches set up for all the different mechanical processes, you know? Oh, right, right, right. And then the last one is, oh, he's testing the circuit. Yeah, yeah. That's like one-tenth of it, you know?

Chris Gammell: Like, this is important, whatever.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. You ever done sealed cases, though? That's very interesting.

Chris Gammell: Or no? Like, yeah.

Dave Jones: Sealed cases?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you know, like having, like, a rubber grommet around the edges and actually, like, clamping that down.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes, they would be O-ring sealed. We would have a gas machine, like, you actually fill them the way you test them. Test the ceiling. You would actually fill them with the gas, and then you use a gas leakage detector to make sure it's not leaking through the O-ring and stuff like that. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, there's a whole to do.

Dave Jones: There's a whole art form to... Yep.

Chris Gammell: Man, I got a lot to learn. So, did you actually have, like, a resource then, or no? Or did you just kind of, like, learn it from manufacturing engineers?

Dave Jones: Oh, you learn from other mechanical people who've been doing it for 20 years! All right. And at these large companies, yeah, you've had people there that have been there for, you know, 20, 30 years, and they've been doing this sort of shit. So, yeah. Learn a lot. I like it.

Chris Gammell: All right, cool.

Dave Jones: Is our amp power almost up?

Chris Gammell: Almost. Do you want to do a chip of the week before we go, since this is a...

Dave Jones: If you have a chip of the week, by all means.

Chris Gammell: I do. And I guess it was a chip of a couple weeks ago. But... This is a pretty cool chip. It's simple. It's really simple. But it's a... It's an interesting idea for, like, gadgets that don't have... They have, like, hidden power buttons or something like that. And so, it's called... It's a smart reset chip from ST. And basically, it allows multiple... It basically just kind of shrinks down... You know, you could create a logic circuit that does this kind of stuff. But, you know, you could hold down... If you had, like, four buttons on the front, you can hold down two of them, and that'll do one action. Got it. And if you do, you know, hold down another two, it'll do a different action and stuff like that. So, yeah, I thought this was pretty cool. The, you know, it's just a...

Dave Jones: But most importantly, it does those actions independent of whether or not your CPU is frozen.

Chris Gammell: Correct. Yes. It's like...

Dave Jones: That's the key. You know, if your product... Your new smartphone is frozen up because it's got 10 million lines of freaking code out of India, you know... In Java. Yeah. In Java or whatever. You know, and it's just... Yeah, you leave it on long enough, it's going to lock up, right? Right. And, yeah, you need a way to overcome that.

Chris Gammell: Right. And a lot of people have these for... You know, like, I know, like, my e-reader has this. You know, it's like a... It's actually a timer, and it's built in even if the processor, you know, blows off somewhere, it'll... You know, after, like, 30 seconds, it'll do a hard reset, and there's probably just a, you know, a cap or something like that in there watching the power line if it's been down for long enough, and then it does compare. And this is the same kind of thing, but this is with actually two buttons so that it won't, you know, you won't just hold down one button. I don't know. I don't do a lot of button stuff myself, but I thought it was a cool single purpose.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's a very consumer-y type thing, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, it definitely is. But, you know, like, I thought our listeners might have some different stuff, and I thought it was a cool little part, so...

Dave Jones: These little parts, by their very nature, have to be extremely low cost. Yes. Because, you know, like, if you're in a design review meeting, and people, you know, and you go, well, it'd be nice to have one of these chips here, you can't afford it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: Instant, you know, can't afford another chip. What's that, three cents?

Chris Gammell: No, we're sorry. It's gone.

Dave Jones: No, can't afford the extra three cents. 0.3 cents, maybe. And these are really jelly bean cheap parts, especially in huge volume. You know, you buy it from DigiKey and one off there. You know, well, it says here they're 33, 24 cents. 24 cents. In a thousand, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Which means for a hundred thousand, they're probably...

Dave Jones: I don't think anyone uses these in a thousand quantity. Two cents.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah, you might, they might actually return your phone call at, you know, a hundred thousand. Yeah, yeah. Quantity. Yep. Otherwise, it's bugger off.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Okay, so you don't really like this chip, but it could have some use, you know, maybe in a high volume situation or a... Maybe, you know, it's just a cool single-use part, so maybe people will find a use for it, but I thought it was pretty neat. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Chip of the week. All right. Got anything else? Any other last-minute things? Yeah, we probably should. All right. Well, you can find us the usual... Yeah, yeah. You can find us the usual places. You can find us on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, and you can find us on our personal accounts, Dave's EEV blog on Twitter. I'm Chris underscore Gamble. But most of all, we want you to subscribe. Subscribing, right. To the RSS feed. That's the ticket. The ticket to more... That's the ticket laddie. Yep. All right. We'll talk to you next week.

Dave Jones: And enjoy Maker Faire.

Chris Gammell: I will. I did.

Dave Jones: So we'll talk about it when you get back?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You did. I already did. I'm coming to you from the past. Bye-bye.

Chris Gammell: Bye-bye.

Chris Gammell: Bye-bye.