#98 – Proemial Passive Poiesis

Chris Gammell: This is the App Hour Podcast, recorded June 3rd, 2012. Episode 98, Proemial Passive Hoiesis.

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

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

Dave Jones: Hey Chris, what's happening?

Chris Gammell: Hey Dave. Oh, what is new? You know, usual. Right. Electronics, designing. Working for the man. Working for the man, yep, yep. Still doing that thing.

Dave Jones: Alright. Are you over your flu or whatever the dreaded... I am, oh yeah. Make a fair flu.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, make your fair flu is kaput. I like that. Excellent. Well done. How goes it rolling down into winter out there in Aussie land?

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's getting a bit depressing here, actually. So, just rainy, miserable, kind of.

Chris Gammell: That's too bad.

Dave Jones: Usually we have pretty good winters here, you know. You can still get around in shorts if you really want to. Well, I mean, technically you can do that anywhere. Those skinny, pasty white chicken legs, you know. Oh boy. Yep, I know that one. Stereotypical. Oh yeah. Engineering nerds. Speaking of stereotypical, I'm going to... No banter today, let's jump right into the stuff. Let's get to it. I... Two spin-offs from this. I went to see The Avengers last night. Very awesome movie. Trust me, this has to do with engineering. I've got two points here which have to do with engineering.

Chris Gammell: I'll wait for it. Yeah. And I'd talk about The Avengers anyways. I mean, just so our listeners know, I would just talk about that for an hour. Oh, it's awesome.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's just... Yeah. Anyway. No spoilers though. Right. So, I was walking out to the theater yesterday afternoon because I don't go at night anymore because, you know, I have a child now. Oh, babies, right. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Also, you don't have a job so you're allowed to do that, right?

Dave Jones: Right. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's Sunday. Oh, I guess it was a weekend, right? Yeah, exactly. I do get my weekends off now which is good. Yeah, yeah. That's good. That's good. Anyway, I was walking out and there's this huge billboard on the side of the building. It was up on top of the top floor car park. Huge billboard with the, you know, so naturally I look at it because there's this good looking chick up there on this billboard, right? So, I'm looking at it and she's naked and she's got a bra on, right? And the slogan is, right, who said engineering is boring in huge letters? That's the slogan for this billboard. What's wrong with this chick wearing a bra? And it's an ad for a bra company, obviously, right? I think it's Burley or someone. I don't know. You know, whatever. Waiting for the punchline here. I got to say, what is the... We need to blame someone but that's their slogan. Who said engineering is boring? I guess they're implying that...

Speaker ?: What does it have to do with engineering?

Dave Jones: Sorry?

Chris Gammell: What does it have to do with engineering though?

Dave Jones: Well, I presume they think, you know, an engineer designed, engineered this bra. It's perfect. It's, you know, it works and supports perfectly and all that sort of stuff. And, you know, I don't know. I don't get it. It's just... It's done.

Chris Gammell: It bugged you, huh?

Dave Jones: It just bugged me. And it bugged somebody else too. And he put it on his blog, Nick Faulkner, because I was trying to search for information on it. And apparently he's from Melbourne and he saw the same ad down in Melbourne, on a billboard down in Melbourne back in April, I think it was. So it's been around for a while. And it's all trying. I didn't, you know, I was actually driving out. So I didn't actually was able to get a snapper, a tweet photo of it or anything. But if I can, I'll get it. I just think it's, oh, just really annoying. Why? Why bring engineering into it? Why imply engineering's boring? Ticks me off. And throwing the sexism at the same time.

Chris Gammell: I have to say, that's not where I was expecting you to go with that, but okay. Yeah, I agree.

Dave Jones: Where were you expecting me to go?

Chris Gammell: I thought you were going to talk about like, it was like sexist or something. And you're more worried about the boring.

Dave Jones: Well, that's what I'm saying. It's both, you know. Oh, okay. They're employing engineering's boring. So they're insulting us there. And the only way to make engineering not boring is to have a chick in a bra, right? I mean, it's just ridiculous. Ah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's insulting and sexist all in one. Anyway, I guess they're target markets, not engineers, right?

Chris Gammell: That's just some bad advertising. Yeah. I know.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Some bloody dickhead marketing company obviously thinks that's a good idea. Because the general public think engineering's boring, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Makes you wonder what it does to change the viewpoint of engineers. If you, I don't know what that would do.

Dave Jones: I don't know. We don't have too many non-engineers watching, listening to this show, sorry. So I guess we can't really get any opinion on that. But we can. And especially if you're a female engineer. What do you think of something like that? Jeez. You know? Ah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, since we're on the rant side of things, I wanted to cover a rant real quick too. Go for it. There was, so I saw this, I follow some famous people on Twitter, as people are bound to do, right? And I saw them, I saw this link keep bouncing around. It was about, it was about these shoes, or this inventor in Kenya, I believe. And they were like, oh my god, this inventor's amazing. He's 24 years old and he made this thing that can charge your phone. And you just, you put it in your shoe and it's got a two and a half year warranty. And I immediately go, that's BS. I didn't even read the article. I immediately knew what it was. And it was just bouncing from person to person to person, right? Also because they probably didn't read it. They just think, oh, this is an amazing story, yada yada yada. Yeah, exactly. And pass it on. Open it up predictably. Well, what is it? Of course, this guy inserted a piezoelectric in a shoe, right? He wired it to a boost converter. He said, oh, we have voltage now. And he said, I can charge a phone with this, right? He runs a wire up to your pocket. And then it just starts bouncing around the internet. And that's just how it goes, right? I mean, that's just the internet. I mean, take it or leave it, right? I mean. Of course. It's infuriating, right? Because people know that just because you have voltage doesn't mean you have energy or power in the case of when you're actually charging something. Exactly. And it's, oh, man. You know how long it would take you to charge a cell phone from a piezoelectric in your shoe? Oh, you're walking all day. It's unbelievable.

Dave Jones: It's just like charging it from a Wi-Fi signal. I did the math in one of my blogs to show how impractical it is. It would take 26 years or something to charge the battery. It's, like, ridiculous. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, boy. A whole bunch of frustrating stuff.

Dave Jones: I don't know. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: This is why we have to have guests on every once in a while just to cheer us back up.

Dave Jones: I think so. So, yeah. Hopefully we'll have guests on. Hopefully. And the other part of the Avengers thing I wanted to talk about is there was this one scene in it. I had probably two-thirds of the way through. I can't remember precisely where and in what context the scene was. Oh, I remember.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah? You've seen it? Oh, I've seen it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's where-

Dave Jones: You've seen this scene where they pan over this multimeter?

Chris Gammell: That's where Mark Ruffalo is playing with- Yeah, because actually Hilary Lustig from La Croix, she actually pointed it out because there's actually a La Croix piece of equipment in there. Oh, right. And you said- You were wondering about the DMM, though, right?

Dave Jones: I was wondering about the multimeter because it just appeared on the right side. Like, you know, you watch it in the cinema. It's on huge and there's this huge multimeter there. And my eyes gravitate towards the big multimeter. I don't care what else is going on. You know? Right. And it looked like it was a one hung low. It was a manual range multimeter. Yeah. I caught, you know, it was reasonably, it seemed like it was on there for a long time, but- It doesn't matter, man.

Chris Gammell: To the general public, it, you know- I know, but- Confusing, electronic gear is confusing, right? I mean, like-

Dave Jones: No, it was just out of place. It was so low tech. Like, it was a manual range, one hung low multimeter within, like, surrounded by all this high-tech Ironman type technology we've talked about before. Yeah. You know? It was just-

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, we've- I don't know if we've talked about that on here before. I think I was talking to Twitter to some people about it. But just, like, you know, there's just always that kind of stuff. And I remember someone said that there's a logic analyzer that was used as, like, some other ridiculous purpose. It was used as, like, an ECG machine or something like that. You know? Because, like- Yeah, yeah. I can't necessarily fault people in, you know, the movie industry for not going out and doing that because they've got a lot of their stuff to do, right? But, you know, like, when you're using an oscilloscope is like, oh, this is for fluff-alizer, you know? It's like, oh, well.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Come on, people. But you would think- I mean, these movies are so huge budget. They have a person to scratch your ass, you know? They've got a person to do everything, right? You would think that in something like one of the- especially like the Ironman movie, which is really revered as having high-tech engineering in it, you know? And I'm sure they have consultants for all that high-tech, you know, stuff like all the touchscreens and everything else.

Chris Gammell: Well, no, we- you and I are available for consulting.

Dave Jones: Well, we are. On that. We will consult on the next movie. Just have somebody on site. If you're going to put engineering shit in a movie, then have an engineer on site which at least matches it up as an appropriate piece of device. You know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So your oscilloscope isn't used as your ECG machine or something, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's just a- I think it's always a rush job for everyone like that, but it's frustrating.

Dave Jones: Well, they just get the usual prop department, right? Yeah, a prop.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it looks techie.

Dave Jones: You know? Near enough. They don't know. Right, yeah. Jack shit, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's frustrating.

Dave Jones: I know. It's annoying. Yeah. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Well, speaking of LaCroix, and I mentioned Hillary from LaCroix, there's some big news there.

Dave Jones: Oh, there's two sets of big news there.

Chris Gammell: Where the heck that come out of, right? I don't know.

Dave Jones: That just, yeah. It just broke, didn't it? So, straight off the teletype. Yes, off the teletype. We've got some breaking industry news. Well, you know, it's a week old or something, but- Right. Anyway, that happened this week, so it's breaking for us being a weekly show. If we were a daily show, it would be daily break.

Chris Gammell: If we were a daily show, people would get really sick of us. I think so.

Dave Jones: Anyway, LaCroix are being bought out by somebody. Okay, probably not surprising in itself that they're going to get bought out by somebody, right? It happens all the time in this industry. But who are they being bought by, Chris? Tell us. Teledyne. Teledyne? Teledyne. Right, of course. When I hear the word teledyne, I think 1960s military- Right, right. I thought, are they still around? What do they do?

Chris Gammell: Monolith, kind of, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I don't really have any, other than big. Teledyne sounds big. And they are big. I mean, they're too billion.

Dave Jones: They're a military contractor, so they're sucking Uncle Sam for all his worth, right?

Chris Gammell: Right. They're sucking the money out of Uncle Sam's backside, right? Yeah. Yeah, right, right.

Dave Jones: Milk and that cash cow. Boo.

Chris Gammell: Mmm. Delicious Uncle Sam milk. Unbelievable. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But yeah, so they're getting bought out.

Chris Gammell: And they say they're going to keep the, you know, they're going to keep the name, they're going to keep it as LaCroix, and they'll be a subsidiary of Teledyne. And it's, you know, it's just a further consolidation of the industry into, you know, big players slugging it out. And yeah, I was...

Dave Jones: Well, and they reckon that, well, Teledyne claim that it's going to be good for LaCroix because they're going to invent, you know, they're going to help, you know, increase their product R&D and all that sort of crap.

Chris Gammell: So, eh. Yeah, you know, as someone that's worked at a small company that got bought by a big company, eh, I think I might have some view on that. That's what they say. They always say that. Come on, who wouldn't say that? I mean, worst case scenario, right? If you're in charge of those companies, you get accused of the bait and switch. You say, oh, well, we didn't know everything at the beginning, so yeah, sorry it didn't work out. We thought it was going to be good for these little companies. But yeah, of course you're going to say that at the beginning, right? I mean, NBA playbook. We all know about the NBA playbook, right? I mean, like... That's right. You don't have to tell the truth at the beginning. You just have to say good words at the beginning.

Dave Jones: In fact, if you tell the truth, you're doing it wrong.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah, that's how business works, right? Kind of. I mean, to be honest, right? I mean, this sounds terrible, but the number one goal of a merger from the employee side is to keep everyone calm, right? Because as soon as a company gets bought, the first thing is... I'm going to lose my job. And I know that because I did that. I was... Right. And yeah, it's... Best case scenario, I think, mergers and acquisitions, or M&A, as people call this crap. M&A. M&A? No, really. They call that M&A. I haven't heard that term before. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's like whole divisions devoted to that kind of stuff, like investment banks. And the best case scenario, it's just people playing with numbers, right? They don't see it as... They end up slapping words on it like, oh, synergy and divestiture. No, that's a bad word, actually. Not ideas. But they slap the words on it, and it's not always... Usually, it's just numbers on a page, right? We know that we can make more money like this, and yada, yada, yada. But it sucks. I mean, you see more... I mean, like, LaCroix is another one. Started, you know, small companies, you know, like... None of these test and equipment... Test and measurement companies started out huge. They started out by engineers and scientists, and then, you know, they get bought out. And it's just kind of the reality of our day, and it kind of sucks. But what are we going to do about it?

Dave Jones: Exactly. Well, don't LaCroix own Hameg as well?

Chris Gammell: Do they?

Dave Jones: I think so. I didn't know that. Am I getting that wrong from memory? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I thought they might have just rebadged Hameg, but maybe not. No, no, no.

Dave Jones: They bought... Yeah, they bought Hameg. So, you know, those... Right, and that's a good brand, too. ...hameg, what happens to them, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: I mean, yeah, best case scenario, nothing really happens. Is that all the money just kind of goes up the chain to Teledyne, right?

Dave Jones: It's never the best case scenario, though, is it?

Chris Gammell: Never works. I don't know. I've only seen it a couple times myself, so... Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Personally, what I think happens is, you know, they keep doing their thing, and they slow down because they're part of a bigger company, and then tiny companies come in, and they knock them off their pedestal, right? I mean, like Asium, right, like the iPad scope company. People say, oh, it's just an iPad scope. No one's ever going to buy that, right? But they just released a logic analyzer, right? And they're increasing their product offering, and they're starting from the bottom, right? Just like every Asian manufacturer does, too. They start at the bottom, and then they work their way up the value chain, just like they do in the auto industry, too. That's just how it always works, right? And every single time, there's people with these big teledynes and agilants and, oh, Danaher's, I don't know. Danaher's, yeah. Right. And they all say, oh, well, we can't worry about that right now. And it's true. They can't. But eventually, they have to start worrying about it. And if they don't start worrying about it in time, then eventually the Asiums become the agilants. And then the agilants shut down or downsize. And then the Asiums get bought by someone else. And the green grass grows all around, all around, and the green grass grows all around. And we all hold hands and dance and sing songs. Yeah, I mean, that's...

Dave Jones: Here's a quote from Teledyne. This, at the same time, we expect this combination will accelerate our product development efforts. This includes extending our current oscilloscope path to 100 gigahertz and beyond by utilizing Teledyne's leading... HB... Indium phosphide, HBT. Indium phosphide and HBT and HEMP... HEMT technology.

Chris Gammell: Which means that that's the really expensive silicon-based, you know, like really crazy chips and wafers. And it's true. I mean, that stuff's not cheap. No.

Dave Jones: But, yeah, well, it remains to be seen. But what else is happening there is that... We'll post this link as well. It's just come out that now the shareholders are crying foul and they're suing Teledyne, apparently, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but here's the little secret about that is... And that happens every time. You know, like a public company gets bought out by a different company and it's like, oh, why didn't you get more? We're going to take it to court. And that's just lawyers being lawyers and investors being investors and it's like, all right, well...

Dave Jones: And they'll probably settle down the middle and they'll get an extra dollar instead of the two dollars they were looking for or something. You know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And that's just... If you had to do it every time, no one would ever... I mean, if you had to go to a board every time, you know, like, then you have to show your hand when you're, like, selling a company, right? And it's like, well, that's not always possible either. So they just kind of deal with it and they move on. And the thing is, though, that doesn't affect engineers at all. The only thing that ends up affecting engineers is the stuff they talked about. And that actually could be good. You know, like the 100 gigahertz stuff. Oh, yeah. Which is... Yeah. It's LaCroix and Agilent, I think, at the top right now in terms of speed of scopes, if you possibly need a 100 gigahertz scope. Scope? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that could be good.

Dave Jones: You know, they'll charge you a couple hundred thousand dollars and they'll hand deliver you a, you know... Those sort of things, they actually personally, you know... One of the R&D engineers comes out and personally hand delivers and sets up and shows you how to use one of these beasties, you know. Because it's a couple hundred thousand bucks worth, you know. Yeah. And they need like 20 of them, right? And they make them to spec. You place your order and, yes, sir, thank you very much. We'll get right on it. And they start making one from scratch, you know, because they've got to, you know, get their, you know, guys with their wise gray beards to stroke it and tweak things and, you know. Yeah. And too bad if they're on holidays, you know. They have to wait until they get back and...

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: Oh, boy. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That set me off good. That stirred up some emotion in me, Dave.

Dave Jones: Yes. Well, you don't work at the evil Danaher Corporation anymore, do you? Ah, they're not that bad.

Chris Gammell: Come on. They're not that bad.

Dave Jones: They gobble everyone up and they're masters of the chainsaw. Come on. They come in and they... It's fine. They're a very good company to invest in, apparently, because when they buy somebody, they strip them out and, you know, get them lean and mean and making a profit. They're a very profitable company, apparently. Danaher. So...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, can't say I pay attention much anymore. Right. But, like I said, the main thing is, I always lament the small town... You know, there's a downside to being smaller businesses, right? Because in a global world, it's harder to, you know, be distributed, just like a lot of kid people have problems with. But, you know, it's...

Dave Jones: Well, that's what I wanted to talk about.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, yeah? What kind of stuff?

Dave Jones: Well, I am going to experiment selling my microcurrent adapter through a third party for overseas sales. Yes. So...

Chris Gammell: Well, that'll be... That seems like it'll be hassle-free up front and then later you'll be complaining on this show about it.

Dave Jones: Possibly, yeah. Well, we'll see, you know. Because, yeah, I... You know, packing and shipping internationally is hard work, you know, and it's chewing up a lot of my time. And, but, you know, well, it's a trade-off here. And the trade-off is, as we've talked about before, I'm sure, you know, you've got to give up a fair bit of your margin if you want somebody else to sell it. Because, you know, usually the person who makes the most amount of money is the final retailer, right? That's where the... Is that true? I don't know if that's true. Often.

Chris Gammell: No, I don't think there's a lot of money in retail. I don't think Best Buy is like, ooh, we're making huge margins. We sell this for twice as much as we get it for. I don't know if that's true.

Dave Jones: Well, they're... Maybe I'm wrong.

Chris Gammell: If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear from our listeners.

Dave Jones: Well, but, you know, a typical company is going to make 30%, 40% markup, right? On a product. So, you know, if it's 50 bucks, they're going to want to buy it for 30, right?

Chris Gammell: So you're saying the biggest dollar amount? I mean, I guess... Probably the biggest dollar.

Dave Jones: It gets tricky when you start talking in terms of markups, because markup's not the same as margin and stuff like that. But, yeah, in terms of the actual dollar amount, possibly, it's not uncommon for the final retailer to make the most actual coin on the product. But, yeah, I guess that makes sense, too, because... It's like if you're in the book publishing industry, right? If you're the author, you get paid, you know, you get your 5% or 10% of the retail price. And the bookstore takes their, you know, 45%, 50% of the retail price.

Chris Gammell: Now Amazon takes their whatever.

Dave Jones: Well, you know. Amazon's not too bad, especially if you're doing a Kindle book or something. You can... Depends what version you sign up for, you can get, like, 70% of it or something like that. So it's quite the... As the author. So, you know, it's not bad.

Chris Gammell: That's not bad.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: All right. Where's my pen? Right. I'm going to start writing. Pen? People don't write anymore, do they? Keyboard. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, is that too old, too? Do I need to...

Dave Jones: Possibly, yeah. You need voice dictation, you know?

Chris Gammell: Voice. Yeah. Whatever.

Dave Jones: I could do it the real old-fashioned way, have a secretary to actually... Or I could get a scribe, right?

Chris Gammell: A scribe, yeah. I mean, I could go really old school and have a hand copy all the dictation from one Bible to the next, right? Right. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I would not be able to afford that, though.

Dave Jones: I'm going to see how it goes. Anyway, you know, I'm going to see how much time it does actually save me and if I, you know, feel good about all that sort of stuff.

Chris Gammell: It might be good just because you get to spend more time in electronics, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I can spend more time making videos or making more kits or whatever, you know? Right. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: I think that's the idea behind it. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: I'm still going to keep up the Oz sales, though, because it's really easy to sell within Australia because, you know, you just slap it in a prepaid postage satchel and it's gone, right? So it's, you know, you don't have to line up the post office. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to do any of that stuff, so... Right.

Chris Gammell: But now you have to support stuff overseas more, probably. You don't have to just support customers. You also have to support distribution.

Dave Jones: In... Right. Right. Yes, I don't... Yeah, they take care of that. Right.

Chris Gammell: If the manufacturer is done somewhere else, then you have to be, oh, well, this, you know, this flat pack part isn't working and now you have to, you know, oh, well, here's my process tips and everything else. Although I guess you're probably doing that there, right?

Dave Jones: Well, a lot of people are going to claim that I'm still doing it wrong, you know, because I'm still buying the parts myself. I'm still getting everything. It comes to me and then I ship it off to my assembler and it's like, ah, Dave, you're doing it wrong. You know, you need to do the whole turnkey, somebody else. And, you know, or just get somebody to, or just get some fulfillment service who work on a smaller margin. Right. But no, I'm getting one of the names you'll be familiar with. I probably won't say it right now. We'll just make sure it all goes through first. And, but no, you know, I'm getting a name that you know and trust to distribute my... And I think people feel better about that rather than just some, you know, one hung low fulfillment service in China. You know, who are you giving your credit card number to or something like that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And actually, Ian did a... Ian from Dangerous Prototypes, he did this talk at Maker Faire, but he also just recently posted the, what he called the studio version of the video. And actually, he goes through all the different options of what you can... You know, like the same kind of things where you can do just a royalty-based model, right? Where someone does everything else for you and you just get royalties. Yep. Or you do fulfillment house, like you were just talking about, or self-manufacturers. And then there's one other one, I think. And yeah, great video, you know, because Ian's done all that stuff too. Please link it in.

Dave Jones: Send it to me.

Chris Gammell: I will. I will. Excellent. It's a good video.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Because there's so many pros and cons. I mean, like, if you want to make the absolute most amount of money, you do everything yourself, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: And not much else. You don't really sleep. You don't really talk to your family. Exactly. That's right. You don't really work on electronics.

Dave Jones: And you will make the most profit margin, right? You will make the most dollars per kit or dollars per product or something like that. So, yeah. Anyway. Boy. Speaking of kits, did you see the USB power supply on Kickstarter?

Chris Gammell: I did. Yeah, I wasn't very impressed. Coincidence.

Dave Jones: I've been sitting on the USB power supply for a couple of years now.

Chris Gammell: You know, I thought you had released your video in response to that. But I actually, I had known about your USB power supply for a long time. Yeah, I showed you photos of it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Donkeys years ago, didn't I? Yeah. Right. Yeah, a long time ago. And it's, I don't know, it's just one of those ones that just never made it out to the public. You know, I always, you know, just, I wanted to change my mind or I just didn't feel it was ready or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, now you're talking about putting yours on there. And I don't know, man. You've always lamented Kickstarter. Yeah, I have. At least on this program.

Dave Jones: But it's a marketing dream Kickstarter.

Chris Gammell: If it hits it big. If not, it's just a, you know.

Dave Jones: Well, it's just an ordinary. But there's, you know, I don't know. How many nerds out there are just sitting there, you know, getting, you know, just looking at stuff on Kickstarter. Oh, that's cool. I'll buy that, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess so. But, you know, the thing that Keen and Keen kind of keeps striking me over and over again about Kickstarter is if you really want to be big on Kickstarter, you're not marketing to electronics people. You're marketing to design people. Like even that Pebble watch, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's right.

Chris Gammell: Really cool electronics stuff in there, right? It's actually a very cool watch. Great circuit board, a little e-ink display. But it's not marketed to electronics people. No, that's right. It's marketed to gadget people and hipster design people and, you know, like, oh, you could do this and that. Because people don't want that electronics. Like the people listening to this show, I think those are the people I want to be talking to. They're the ones I want to hang out with because they actually know or care if they don't know because I don't know a lot about electronics still. Like about the guts, people that care about the guts. I could list, you know, 50 different gadget shows where no one has any idea what's going on inside the phone or the laptop or anything like that. And that's boring. Who cares about that stuff? I mean, like, yeah, user size is important. And if you want to sell it to people, that's important. But that's boring to me. I don't know. It's just, I don't know. I think it's one of my hang-ups. But what are you going to do? Yeah.

Dave Jones: Eh.

Chris Gammell: So you're going to list, though? Are you going to list on Kickstarter?

Dave Jones: Well, no, it's not easy for me because I'm not based in the US. Oh, right.

Chris Gammell: It's not easy. So you have to emigrate first.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, there is an Australian version, but that kind of defeats the whole purpose because the whole purpose of being on Kickstarter is that you're on Kickstarter, right? It's the popular place to be. It's like being on YouTube or being on Amazon. You know, if you put your stuff anywhere else, it doesn't matter, right? Because nobody looks there. So, you know, I may as well just put it on my own website, you know? Yeah. That's interesting. No, I don't know. We'll see. Probably not. It's just too much hassle.

Chris Gammell: If people see me listing a USB power supply that looks suspiciously like the one Dave's doing, you might figure things out there. You might say, hey, wait a second. Just don't tell Kickstarter about us. Oh, boy. Dave's giving me a hefty commission for that. Yeah. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I don't think I need to, really. I, you know, I don't know. I just thought maybe it'd be fun. It'd just be curious. I think there's a subset within the electronics group. More for it just to see what would happen, you know? Yeah. I know, you know?

Chris Gammell: But I think there's a subset within the electronics group that even would want a USB power supply. I mean, it's a cool idea and it's good, but it's like portable, you know, like how many people are doing portable projects, right? I mean, a lot of people are, but do you need that? I know. And if you are, can you just –

Dave Jones: It's another niche-ish – niche – niche-ish? Is that even a word?

Chris Gammell: It is now.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Kind of product, you know? Right. Yeah. It's not – you know, it's not a pebble watch. It's not a – or it's not just a general purpose power supply, you know? Yeah. Right. That sort of everyone needs. It's sort of –

Chris Gammell: Right. And I think that – so there's actually another thing on our list here about the yo-yo. I think it's pronounced. I-O-I-O, which is the interface – Oh, is that how you pronounce it? I believe it's yo-yo, yeah. Yo-yo. Yo-yo. No, I don't like it, sorry. That's actually coming out with a second generation of boards from the guy that invented it.

Dave Jones: I didn't even know that was the first generation, but okay.

Chris Gammell: You didn't hear about the first generation? No, I don't think so. Well, it was one of those things – Let me have a look at it. Okay. So there was two things. There's the Android ADK, which is like an Arduino kind of tied to an Android. Yeah. And then you can get at the USB side of things. And I think the yo-yo was the kind of third-party version of that because this guy just –

Chris Gammell: The – I don't know how to say his name. Yutai maybe? Ben Svi? Oh, sorry. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Good luck on that one. Yeah, I see. It was a hardy project for him. It's a generic IO interface board. It's got a row of 0.1-inch headers, and it plugs into your Android phone, right? And it converts your app into IO, so it allows your app to talk to IO, right? That's basically it.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yep. Yeah. And yeah, this was all before the Android development kit, which is like an Android-based one from the Android group.

Dave Jones: Well, has that killed everything? Because that's the standard. Why wouldn't you use the Android development kit? I don't know. Why would you use anything else if there's an official one out there? I know it started out being like real expensive. It was like 300 bucks or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it was like 400 bucks.

Dave Jones: 400 bucks, yeah. And – but I think that's – you know, people have built hardware clones of that because the software is open source. Even the hardware is probably a source. I don't know. But yeah, people have built clones of that. So you can actually buy – I guess – you know, it's not official, but it's at least a clone of the official hardware, which is good enough, you know? But so – yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't know. So yeah, I mean, any kind of hardware project is bound to branch at some point, right? So even though there is the ADK, I mean, why not have a second version of the OYO? Because there's always users that want a second generation or you run out of – you know, you can't get the same parts as you had before. So that is kind of moving on to the next generation. And maybe at that point, you know, like maybe if someone is doing a hardware project out of their phone, it would make sense to have like a, you know, a USB-based power supply too. You know, that's why I was thinking about it because when you're doing that kind of stuff, you need – you know, you need more than a phone is going to give you. So that could be a good place for a USB power supply. Maybe. I don't know.

Dave Jones: Maybe. We'll see. Yeah. Anyway. I'm just going to develop it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think phones are like a really compelling idea because everybody has one, right? But surprisingly, I was talking to a friend about this. There's really no fast way to get data in or out of phones. And same goes for – so I talked about Osium earlier about the iPhone and iPad-based oscilloscope, right? It's actually a really restricted interface. They're both of them. There's actually no like open way to get data in or out of phones right now. I assume because that means then you can defeat – what's it called? DRM on like stuff you download from them, right? Because if you could just translate that data and push it out like a USB port, then you could re-encode it or something else. You could capture it, right? So that's just still locked down. And so I think that's going to be like a next step. I think if a phone manufacturer and a mobile company actually kind of get together and finally ever do have like an open interface that's fast. Like HDMI is a fast output from a phone right now, but that's all locked down too. There's no way to really get fast information out. But once you do, I mean like it's all kind of still converging towards that single device in your pocket that does everything. That'll be a big deal, I think.

Dave Jones: Well, it's got to be the USB connector, right? Because all phones have a micro USB for charging, right? That's standardized.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So it makes sense to – But it's still restricted some way. I mean that's the software side of things. Well, they've got to stop it. Bastards. Yeah, you stop that right now. But the problem is anytime someone defeats it, then they end up updating the firmware and they push it out to all the phones. And that's the main thing. So it needs to be like across all phones. You need some kind of open interface across all of them. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I just don't – I don't know if phones are going to go for that. Which isn't as hard these days because you've got iPhone or you've got Android. That's it, right?

Chris Gammell: Right. But if one phone manufacturer says, oh, we're going to be like an open interface now, right? The other phone manufacturers won't necessarily do that. And Apple is never going to do that because it's Apple. Right. Right. Yeah. Because you need to have like Asium and a bunch – and every other iPhone or iPad gadget developer or whatever you call it, they all have to have like a tag on them. And they have to have some special chip that talks across that interface and it's kind of ridiculous. And I know why they do it. They do it for a competitive advantage. But I don't care. Exactly. I mean like if you want to use it as an actual interface for electronics, right, you need to eventually have an open interface there because otherwise, unless you level the playing field for every device, then – It's not going to take off. And make it fast enough. It's just, yeah, you can't use – you can't guarantee it across. Because if I buy a device that says it's going to talk to my Android phone, right, and then I buy – and I'm saying, oh, great, great. You know, it's a video monitor for, I don't know, like say a scope or something like that. I've talked about that before, right? You know, dropping a tablet into a scope. Well, if I then can't – if my tablet breaks and I go buy another tablet and I can't get the old tablet that I had and it's not the same interface now, then that, you know, $700 scope head that I bought – Is useless, yeah. Or the scope base, rather – is worthless, right? And then I'm going to be all pissed. That's right. So if they do that, I think that we'll see, you know, eventual ubiquity. But until then, yeah, no dice. Oh, goodness.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, it's too complicated.

Chris Gammell: It is. Yeah. All that crazy bits flying around and everything.

Dave Jones: I reckon they should go back to sticking a D9 RS-232 on there. What do you think? That would be interesting.

Chris Gammell: You get like a SCSI port on the side or – GPIB. There you go. Oh, yeah. Near and dear to my heart. You just slap a 4-bit micro on there, just like that video you did, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, I did. I opened up my Braun electric toothbrush. And probably not surprisingly, there's a 4-bit micro controller in there. People think 4-bit micros are dead, right? People think 8-bit micros are dead.

Chris Gammell: Was that the Intel one, the Intel 4040 back in the day? Wasn't that the precursor to 8080? Yes, it was. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But that's not what's in this phone. No, no.

Dave Jones: Phone? Toothbrush.

Chris Gammell: Toothbrush, right. Yeah. See, eventually you could use your phone as an interface for your toothbrush.

Dave Jones: Right. Oh, boy. Yeah. Don't laugh someone who's working on that right now. Anyway, it's from a company I've never heard of, EM Micro Electronic.

Chris Gammell: Hmm.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And get this. They're part of the Swatch Group. As in, you remember Swatch Watchers from the 80s? You know? Yeah. They're part of the Swatch Group. Go figure. And they claim they specialize in, you know, low power, low voltage micro controllers. And they've got this EM6600 core. I don't know where the core comes from, whether it's their own unique development or a spin-off from some other architecture from 1970s.

Chris Gammell: Right, because they didn't have a lot of open architectures back then. Right.

Dave Jones: No, exactly. So, and it's a 4-bit. It's a 4-bit architecture. And it's got, you know, it's designed as like a single chip. There's no external oscillator. It's just internal oscillator up to 800 kilohertz maximum. Right? That's its maximum operating frequency. Right? It's pretty low power. It's got a 10-bit counter timer. And, you know, it's got a 4-bit ADC in it. Right? It doesn't even have an 8-bit. So, they're saving. They're really... 16-hole levels. See how cheap this...

SPEAKER_02: Have I told you about that? It reminds me of that New Zealand joke. Have I told you this New Zealand joke on here before? Sorry to all my New Zealand listeners. Does it involve sheep? No, no, it doesn't actually. Okay, good.

Dave Jones: I was on holiday in New Zealand and we were watching TV and we saw this ad come on, TV commercial, for a local shopping centre in the local town we were staying at. And there was this guy, you know, this actor, you know, going up this... He was going... He was actually standing on this escalator as he was going up, right? Do they call them escalators in the US? Yeah, escalators.

Chris Gammell: Unless they're broken and then they are called stairs.

Dave Jones: The stairs, right. So, he's going up this escalator and he says, you know, come and visit such and such centre. It's got two levels, up and down. I just pissed myself for about two hours.

SPEAKER_02: I just lost it.

Dave Jones: And it was like, this was so innovative for this small town was to have a shopping centre that had two levels, you know.

Chris Gammell: So, this wasn't like tongue in cheek, huh? And it was actually like a real thing.

Dave Jones: No, I thought they were serious, right? This was a real marketing. Come and visit us. We've got two levels, you know. Like, this is how big this shopping centre is. Mum, mum, we've got to go there.

Chris Gammell: Oh, man. That's great.

SPEAKER_02: And I'm sorry to all my New Zealand listeners, but it was the funniest thing I've ever heard.

Chris Gammell: It really was. Oh, that's pretty good.

Dave Jones: To this day, my wife and I always joke, it's got two levels, up and down. Every time something's got two levels, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yeah. You walk by someone in Australia, they're like, oh, there must be a bunch of Kiwis over there, huh? Right.

Dave Jones: Anyway, this thing has a 4-bit ADC in it, right? And it's got a battery level gauge as well. And, you know, so it's, you can tell they've really optimized, you know, it doesn't use a single transistor more than what it needs to, I'm sure, right? And it's got a mask ROM, no flash ROM business, right? Piss that off, right? That's complex and expensive to make a die with flash ROM, you know, heaven forbid. And so it's a mask ROM thing. And these things are designed for, you know, things like these electric toothbrushes. Yeah, throw it away. You manufacture, you know, you buy, you know, well, you order, you know, 10 million of these chips, please, sir. And they manufacture them and they mask the ROM for you.

Chris Gammell: I'd love to see the pricing on these. I would just love to see it. Oh, I know.

Dave Jones: It'd be, yeah, you know.

Chris Gammell: What was the packet tape when you saw it?

Dave Jones: If you think one of those spare die pick chips.

Chris Gammell: How much was the, how much, or sorry, what was the package type that you were looking at?

Dave Jones: The package was a 14-pin T-SOP. It was just a standard T-SOP package. So it wasn't bare die or anything, you know, they were mounting this thing on the board.

Chris Gammell: It wasn't dip or anything like that either. Nothing crazy, right? No, no. It was a T-SOP. At least modern packaging.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. 14-pin. It comes in an 8-pin SO. It does come in an 8-pin dip as well. It comes in a 14-pin SO and a 14-pin T-SOP. So there you go. And I bet you can get it in raw wafer as well. You can get it in, you know. Oh, yeah, where you do the glop of poop on top of it, right? Just die form. Yeah. So you can get it as a wafer, a sword and wafer on a frame or a waffle pack, you know. Oh, I'll have a waffle pack of chips, thanks.

SPEAKER_02: It sounds like you're ordering fries at the local Whammy Burger. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'll have a waffle pack. It would be really intriguing to design with it. I mean, because a lot of people still design with 8-bits. I mean, you always see like Jack Ansells. Of course I do. I do a survey every year too about, you know, 32s versus 8-bits. And any kind of, you know, any kind of consumer electronics stuff, very likely could still have an 8-bit. I know that there's 8-bits even in auto electronics still doing, you know, smaller tasks. Of course there is. Yeah. You know what I hate. Because you don't need it. What's that?

Dave Jones: Of course. You know what I hate. Are these newfangled fanboys of 32-bit arms, right? Oh, what are you using the 8-bit pick for? You know, you idiot. Put in a 32-bit arm. It's the same price. You're a dickhead. Shut up. Sick of you. You know, and they're really annoying. And they get like every time. You know. Right. I post one of my videos with an 8-bit.

Chris Gammell: And they're probably telling you the programming is C++ too, right? I mean.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You must use C++ and, you know, object-oriented crap. Oh, freaking hell.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Give me a break. Right.

Chris Gammell: And you sit those people down in a room with a, you know, assembly language and a task that, you know, the room closes in on them if they don't do it, right? Got it.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's really annoying. You know, there's this push on for people who think, you know, who are just, who aren't considering the, you know, the sense. Who don't have any sense. Because they're not considering sense.

Chris Gammell: Oh, not like the dollars and cents, right? You're talking about the common sense or the sense of design.

Dave Jones: They don't have the common sense to consider dollars and cents, you know? Right. And I'm sorry, an 8-bit micro still is cheaper than a 32-bit micro. Kiss my ass.

Chris Gammell: Right, right.

Dave Jones: Yeah, and that's the thing.

Chris Gammell: A lot of the 32-bit micro people are, you know, they sell based on that, right? I know that, like, NXP does that with their LPC. Is that them? No, that's ST. Yeah, yes. Yes, the LPC.

Dave Jones: And you can buy them for, like, a, you know, a dollar or something, you know, certain versions of them. Right, right. But then you've got to... Right, an MSP 430 is like 25 cents. It requires, yeah, but then it might need an external supply for the low-voltage freaking core or something like that, you know? You've just blown your budget right there. And, ah, pfft.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, and that's the thing. It's a top-line marketing spec.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. But, you know, and there is some truth to what they're saying sometimes, you know? But in the end, no. An 8-bit is still going to be cheaper than a 32-bit.

Chris Gammell: The die is smaller, you know? And if you look at the code, too, I mean, a lot of people are using these memory spaces, right, where they're actually just masking off and they're only using one bit anyways. And it's like, well, what's your deal then, right? I mean, like, yeah, you have 32 available to you, but you don't necessarily need it. So, it's, yeah, I think it's a trade-off.

Dave Jones: And you've got to pay that license to arm as well, right? Well, that's... That license to arm costs a couple of cents or whatever, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you know, I know it even didn't tell us what it was, but I don't think that's really a very significant cost.

Dave Jones: But, no, it's still a cost, right? It's still a cost.

Chris Gammell: So, you know? I think that's pretty sub-cent. I wouldn't worry about that, personally. I'd worry more about the power. I think you got it right. The power, I mean, the availability, too. And the feature sets, too. That's another thing to worry about, right? I mean, you have maybe one chip from a vendor where they're top-lining. You're saying, oh, it's a 25-cent 32-bit micro or a 60-cent 32-bit micro. That's really cool, right? But as soon as you need, you know, oh, a 10-bit ADC isn't enough for me. I need to go to a 12-bit. Well, see you later. You're up at $2 now. And that's what they're counting on, right? They want to get you... It's a bait-and-switch again, right? They want to get you in the door with that low price, and then they want you to say, well, I can't do it with that. And then you say, oh, well, we have this great $2 option. And then you say, I could have gotten a $2 option anywhere, right? I didn't come to you because of the $2 option.

Dave Jones: That is why Oivind said it himself. We asked him specifically, you know, do you prefer to have, you know, just one chip, you know, to sell like five chips, which do everything, or to have 50 chips, which do very niche things? And he said, oh, 50 chips, which do the niche things, right? That's their goal, is to have a chip specifically targeted for each little niche market.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: You know, for almost each customer, if you're big enough, they might, you know, spin you a version. In fact, that's, I'm sure, what's happened in this electric toothbrush, because I found the generic device, but the device actually using the toothbrush, I think, is probably a custom spinoff directly for Braun. So they got exactly what they wanted, and they shaved a few cents off.

Chris Gammell: And chip companies love that too, right? Of course they do. I was talking to a distributor about this again. And I was lamenting the fact that I couldn't, I couldn't just see the pricing, right? The 100,000 piece pricing or the million piece pricing. Not that I'm using a million pieces. But I was lamenting the fact that there is, there is no capability of any chip manufacturer that I know of that says, you can go in, log in with whatever company you're working for, or even just see it generically. Of what chip is, you know, the one piece price, the 100 piece price, the 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1 million piece pricing, right? No one's ever going to do that. And the dirty little secret behind that, and it's not that big of a secret, and it's not that dirty, really, is the fact that, you know, they are upping the prices. What they're doing is, when they're offering you a good price on one side of things, they're upping the price somewhere else. It's all balancing out. Don't you worry about that, folks. If you're getting a really good price somewhere, you're probably not looking at where the money's coming back out. And it's just how the game's played, and that's why it's never going to change, right? And to the same effect, nothing against Oyvend or any other chip company, really. They want 50 different chips because they don't want, they want Dave's company, you know, Dave, or EEV Blog Inc., right? They want them to buy 10,000 pieces of, you know, chip 1, dash, 4, 4, 1, 7, whatever, whatever the dashing is, right? Because there's always the dashes. Because they want that dashing to be a lot different than the one for me because then they can charge him 20 cents more when he's not looking. And me, I'm getting the super great deal, right? I mean, like, there's a number of crunchers in every company doing this kind of thing. And they're trying, they're just edging it up here and edging it down here. And you talk about chip companies, or kit companies, rather. You know, the downside of having a kit company is that you don't have a purchasing department. Purchasing departments, they fight those battles for you. And they go to vendors and they say, this is BS. You can't sell us this chip for this much. Or they say, oh, yeah, okay, we'll pay this much, right? I mean, like, that's the benefit of a purchasing department. So, if you got them, go give them a hug. Oh, boy. Hug your purchasing manager today. That's right, yeah. One of my best friends is a purchasing guy. And he hates engineers. Yeah, I know. We're paying the ass. And rightfully so sometimes. And, you know, I give him crap about being a purchasing agent. But it's just part of the ecosystem, you know? It's just our ecosystem, whatever. And, yeah, what are you going to do?

Dave Jones: Speaking about another arm, yet another arm device, yawn. Hang on. Oh, my.

Chris Gammell: That boring, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. And what's this zinc thing? Zinc. Pronounced? Yeah. Oh, come on. Who thought this shit up, right? Z-Y-N-Q?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. Is that how it's pronounced? The same person in the 90s who spelled cool, K-E-D-O-N. Z-W-L. That's right. Yes, they need to be shot, basically. Be beaten with, like, nickels and some socks, that kind of thing, you know?

Dave Jones: And we have Xilinx to thank for this abomination.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Xilinx, not Zilog, as Dave thought I said at first.

Dave Jones: Because when you told me that there's this new micro out there, and you said the name, you know, I immediately thought of, hey, Xilog, you know, Phoenix, risen from the ashes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. And speaking of Phoenix, risen from the ashes, sorry, little aside, when one of people spun off from a company I used to work for, what did they call themselves? Phoenix. Because they were rising from the ashes of the previous company, you know? So, yeah, it's so common in the industry to call yourself something like that.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, anyway.

Chris Gammell: Just a little aside there. Right. I love it. Anyway. So, the Zinc chip, it's this new thing from Xilinx. And basically what it is, and they've tried this before, actually, for all you trivia buffs out there, they've actually tried this where they put hard-coded processors inside of their chips, right? I mean, they tried it, I think.

Dave Jones: We've talked about this before. It is the industry move back to hard-coded silicon. Right. Because the FPGA concept, you know, didn't take off as the industry thought. They thought, oh, everyone will be using FPGAs for everything. You'll be able to buy them for 10 cents. They'll be cheap as chips, and they'll do everything, and microcontrollers will go the way of the Dodo. Wah! Sorry, didn't happen. So, they've had to go back to hard silicon. So, they're embedding ARM processors in FPGAs now. They're embedding transceivers. They're embedding UARTs. They're embedding all the peripherals you get in microcontrollers now.

Chris Gammell: Basically, they're throwing IP at everything, right? Exactly. This is the thing that chip companies do. They say, oh, well, we have this big bucket of IP. Which is also known as intellectual property. And it's basically a prepacketed version of all these different cores. Or in the case of ARM, it's a core. Or maybe it's a memory controller or other types of peripheral controllers, that kind of thing. And so, Zinc is this new thing where they're throwing... I should have looked at that first. Sorry. They're calling it the extensible processing platformer. God, bleh. Whatever. Whatever. But what it really is, it's a dual-core A9, which is an ARM-based processor. And I believe the A8 is what's in iPhones and iPads. I think that's the core. And then they rolled that into... I don't know. It's a very powerful processor. That's the important thing, right? And then what they're doing, basically, is they're wrapping it in logic, right? And then they also put a DDR RAM controller out there so you can put some external memory. Because that's another downside to FPGAs is that when you use block RAM or internal RAM, it's usually limited, right? You can run out of that, but it's... Yeah, it's only a few K, usually. Right. If you have some kind of internal micro, usually you have to have some kind of external memory, right? So it actually is more like a processor in that respect. So... But this is hard-coded now. So the idea is, whereas, you know, like... You could buy a Xilinx part today or an Altera part or a lot of other parts, and you can put a core in there, but the thing is, it's in the fabric, right? It's actually... Yeah. Each time you recompile your design... It's in the dynamic fabric.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Every time you recompile your design, it's redesigned, right? They recreate the connections between all these LUTs and flip-flops and everything.

Dave Jones: There's lots of things that can go wrong in that process.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. And it's slow, too. That's the main thing. It's really slow. So this new one, basically, is that the idea is you can run it faster. That's kind of the cool thing about it, right? And since it's an A9, it's pretty powerful, and you can run it faster than that, even. And all in all, this is a really good idea, right? I mean, you have a hard-coded dual-core processor, and then you have... But it's nothing new.

Dave Jones: It's a processor surrounded by FPGA fabric, right? You know what I mean?

Chris Gammell: Well, the difference is that you get rid of a bottleneck, right? And that's why they keep doing this back and forth between soft-core, hard-core, that kind of thing, is because you have bottlenecks in each one, right? If you had a processor outside of FPGA, then you have to create a memory interface and talk to the FPGA logic, right? In this case, you just kind of, boop, it just pops up right outside the core, and all of the logic you create outside of it is just right there. That's a really cool idea, right? And don't think for a second that Altera is doing the exact same thing right now, because I'm pretty sure they already have one. But the thing is, you know, it's a good idea, and there's a new platform for it. It's called the Z-Board. That's this new development board, like a BeagleBoard or a Raspberry Pi, that kind of thing. But, and the point I'm trying to get to here is, really cool part, you need a lot fewer peripheral chips and everything else. It's friggin' expensive, though. Like, it's really expensive. How much? You know, you compare it against... Tell us the price, son. Last time I saw it, it was like 40 bucks for a chip.

Dave Jones: Ouch. Right. And maybe that was the pricing I saw, and maybe it was too early. What sort of quantity are we doing?

Chris Gammell: Oh, that was low-quantity stuff, I mean...

Dave Jones: Right, okay.

Chris Gammell: But the thing is, it's huge.

Dave Jones: Well, that's not surprising. I mean, yeah, it's a massive device.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's high performance, and it's cool, and you'll need a lot less chips, right? And it's probably, they're probably pricing it right below the cost of buying, like, you know, like an OMAP processor and putting an FPGA next to it, right? Right, yeah. Because whatever they have, they have marketing people that know that how much that stuff costs, and they price it just below that. But it's still, I mean, like 40 bucks? Come on, man. Like, I want it at two bucks. You know, I'm a consumer, right? Oh, boy. Okay. So, the thing is, it's... The thing that you're locked into here is the fact that it's just so much horsepower that you're going to have to pay for it. And that's the problem. That's my gripe. And I'm sticking to it. Gosh darn. Powerful chips are expensive. Who would have thought? I know. I know. But, I mean, it's worth checking out. If people aren't... If they do have... I mean, if you do have the need for it, it's a cool-looking thing. I mean, it's got...

Dave Jones: It's all 28-anam-year logic. But you've got to have that niche need. You've got to have that need where you need to wrap some custom logic around an ARM processor. You know?

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: And, you know, it's a...

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. If I had my way, I would never do stuff with processors. It's... Come on. Who wants to iterate on something when you have custom logic for it? That's cool. You know? Like...

Dave Jones: No, it's... No. Give me a... Give me a tested and proven microcontroller any day of the week.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But then you have to write untested and unproven software for it, right? Why not use your time testing all that stuff for the...

Speaker ?: It doesn't matter.

Dave Jones: At least you've taken one step out of the whole process. Give me a break. That's why... No way, man. If you have... FPGAs are a pain in the ass. Because you're... You know? It's like using a soft core processor. In an FPGA. No way, man. Give me a proven...

Chris Gammell: I'm not saying use a FPGA soft core processor. I'm saying if you need to do like a... A fur filter or something like that. Say you're comparing like a DSP chip or micro running DSP-like code...

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, we're talking parallel shit now, right? Right. Exactly. I think the parallel stuff's the coolest stuff. I mean, that's... Well, of course it is.

Dave Jones: That's the use for FPGAs and things like that. But if you just want to... You know? If you just want to control something... You use a micro... You use a proven micro controller with all the proven peripherals around it. Yeah. Yeah. If you want low cost...

Speaker ?: You know?

Dave Jones: You don't roll your own in a freaking FPGA and then... Yeah. No, I agree with that. Yeah. Then hope your open core UART plugin works, you know? And then...

Dave Jones: Yeah. Man, come on. Got better things to do.

Chris Gammell: I agree with that. I agree with that. No, that's true. That's true. If you're doing little popcorn stuff, but if you want to, you know... No, even big stuff. Do some big boy processing, right? I mean, if you want to, you know... Depends on the type of processing. Dig in, Dave. Come on.

Dave Jones: Come on. No, it depends on the type.

Chris Gammell: Professional level stuff, you know?

Dave Jones: Professional level stuff can be more suited to micro controllers and FPGAs.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, whatever.

Dave Jones: It depends on what you're doing. Of course it does. Come on.

Chris Gammell: Whatever. All right, so speaking of professional level stuff, so that same dynamic, right, of really high and powerful stuff versus little rinky-dink stuff. I had to call this out because it has just been gnawing at me. Rinky-dink? Rinky-dink stuff, yeah. And it's not rinky-dink, really, but you'll see what I'm talking about. All of these companies now, right? So I love analog stuff, right? I've been talking to LT. I've been talking to TI. I've been talking to all these people, right? All these big chip companies, right? Actually, it's just those two to start with, but I'm sure other ones are doing this too. LT and TI.

Dave Jones: Well, at the rate they're merging, though, you know what?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, maybe. I don't think so.

Dave Jones: I'll be the only two left, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, maybe. Anyway, sorry. Continue. So they're discrete companies now. When the hell did this happen? Have you heard about this at all? Do you know what I'm talking about? No, I haven't. What? Yeah. So LT, linear technology, they make tons of analog parts, right? They do RF stuff. They make awesome analog parts. Real expensive analog parts, right? Really expensive. They do tons of really specialized. If you see any kind of a lot of renewable energy stuff, they got into that. Boost converters, really cool stuff. I mean, really high margin stuff for them. I really like them a lot. They started selling resistors. I can't get over it. Yeah, it's so crazy, right? And so basically the reason being is they sell difference amps, right? Or even instrumentation amps, right? And they have these laser cut resistors in the silicon. And what they started doing is they said, oh, well, we know how to make these really great resistors. And I'm going to count this as chip of the week this week because there's a bunch of different chips in here that I'm talking about. They started talking about, they started taking these resistors that they put into instrumentation amps and difference amps. And they said, oh, we make these great resistors. And they're like super awesome resistors. We're talking like, we're like one ppm TCR or temperature coefficient resistors. Like they are like choice resistors, right? And they said, eh, we'll just sell these. And now they just sell just resistors. You can buy an SO8 package with just resistors in them with an LT label on them, right? So that's number one. That's weird, right?

Dave Jones: You've got to provide a link to this. You haven't given me a link to this one. Oh, yeah, I'll link all this stuff. It's called the LT5400. You've linked in these ideal diodes that they're doing. Oh, I'll get there.

Chris Gammell: Don't ruin it. Don't ruin it. Okay, so then I go to a TI seminar, right? I go to a TI seminar, right? And they start talking about, oh, well, TI's got this great packaging technology and they've got all these, you know, and so TI is really big on power too, right? And so they have all of these switching regulators, buck converters, boost converters, flyback converters, all this stuff where you have integrated FETs, right? And not only are they integrated FETs, they are nice FETs, right? These are, they're not necessarily huge power FETs, but, you know, they're really well done, right? And so what they said is they said, oh, let's start selling these FETs back to back, right? And so they have this fancy new package now and, oh, did I not link it in? Oh, crap. I didn't, I don't know if I linked that in. No, I did. Okay. The links are all the way to the right for you there, Dave. And they call these power blocks, right?

Dave Jones: I'm looking at the quad match to resistor network now. Yeah, that's the LP thing. 0.01% matching, 0.2 PPM. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And believe me, you should just, your nose should be bleeding right now because that is where the money will be flowing out of if you use these things.

SPEAKER_02: I've got to say, how much does it cost? Oh, you don't even want to know. How much do they sell this puppy pool?

Chris Gammell: I was shocked. I was shocked.

SPEAKER_02: 10 bucks?

Chris Gammell: Less than that, but it's still a lot. But I was talking to them and apparently, you know, they're just ramping this up now, but it's crazy, right? And so TI is selling FETs. They're calling them power block FETs, right? And so they're just the FETs from buck converters, right? And so now you can buy these really fancy packaging because TI's got some really fancy packaging, right? You can just buy FETs from Texas Instruments, right? And then I saw another thing, right? Now LT, and this is a little bit less so, but LT just announced a thing. The other day about an ideal diode. Now, it's not actually a diode. They're not just selling you a diode, although I'm sure they would if it was profitable enough. What they're doing is they're trying to say, oh, why actually use a diode? Why not use this fancy integrated circuit, which it is. I mean, it's actually got like monitoring and feedback and everything, and it's pretty cool. But it's acting like a diode. It's probably just a FET in there, and it switches on and off. It's just a, you know, if you look at an ideal diode curve, it just shoots straight up, right? It's all the way on or all the way off.

Dave Jones: Ideal diode is an important building block. It is. In a lot of circuits, you know, you need that ideal diode that has no drop. And there's a way to do it, you know, you put the op amp inside a, sorry, you put a standard diode inside an op amp feedback loop, and you can take out the drop of the, you know, of the diode, and they're used for precision peak detectors and stuff like that. You know, if you want an example of an application where an ideal diode is used, you know, or switching converters, you know, if you're switching loss, you've got switching loss in your diode, right? So a lot of the times you'll implement what's got, you know, this ideal diode circuit in your switcher to try and eliminate that or lower that loss that you get in your switching diode and, you know, stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: And so this is a whole new chip that does this stuff. I'm not so much surprised about this one.

Chris Gammell: And this one really is. It's an integrated circuit that replicates the behavior of a diode. But wait, there's more. Okay. This one really blew my mind. All right. And we're back to TI again, right? And now we look at it, right? TI is selling an ESD diode. And that's all it is. It's an 0201 package. It's an ESD diode. I swear these... ESD protection diode. Yep. It is unbelievable. We got TI, we got LT, and they are selling the street components. It's unbelievable.

Dave Jones: Well, there's a market there because, you know, you have to protect your USB input or something. So you'll get, you know, there's companies that make these specific, say, USB diode input protection chips, right? And they see a market, you know? Oh, yeah. And that's everything. Yeah, they get there.

Chris Gammell: And it's the same thing as the LT with the resistors, right? They have every chip, every op amp has ESD diodes on the inputs, right? They have protection diodes. Yep. All of the CMOS, you know, like the OMAP processors, those all have ESD diodes in them. I mean, like, this stuff is all there. It's, again, it's just like throwing around this IP where they say, where can we make money? Where can we make money? Where can we make money? And, yeah, I mean, why not, right? But in the end, the end result of it is...

SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry. I'm just picturing a whole bunch of, you know, like monkeys in a ballroom drawing. Where can we make money?

Chris Gammell: Where can we make money? Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money. Oh, brilliant. Good stuff. Oh, yeah. So that has been our active component suppliers become passive component supplier roundup for the week. And that is your chips of the week.

SPEAKER_02: Oh, boy. I love it. Yeah. Well done.

Chris Gammell: Thank you. The whole world seems like it's going bananas when that happens. I'm sorry. When LT's on resistors, I just feel like a crazy person.

Dave Jones: Well, the world's run by marketing monkeys, right?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: It's run by marketing monkeys. What do we expect?

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I mean, it's not a bad thing, right? I mean, like, these could all be very good products. No, no, it's extra choice, you know? There's more chips appear on DigiKey. Brilliant, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, great. I like it.

Chris Gammell: Yep. And I just hope more people end up doing the resistor thing because then we can price the resistors lower. That's what I want, so. Yeah. I'm actually very interested in those.

Dave Jones: There's always a good market for more precision resistors, you know? That'd be...

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: I think we're way out of time.

Dave Jones: We are.

Chris Gammell: We are. People can find us. Where can they find us, Dave? Usual places?

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. You know, Twitter, all that social media crap. Yep.

Chris Gammell: But the number one is to sign up for the RSS feed or the podcast feed. Those are the number ones.

Dave Jones: Or just visit the site every day because we need the traffic.

Chris Gammell: I guess so, yeah. I think so. Fine. Some people do that. Or just disregard everything we've been saying and just show up. Yeah. Whatever it is, we'll be happy to see you.

Speaker ?: Some people like that.

Dave Jones: Is it every day?

SPEAKER_02: Is there a new one? Is there a new one? Is there a new one?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. All right. Well, keep on checking people.

Dave Jones: Maybe we should post other stuff on our blog on The Amp Hour page in the meantime. Should we do that?

Chris Gammell: Let us know. Yeah. That is a good question. Let us know.

Dave Jones: Should we just post our episodes or should we post other things we think are of relevance? Would you like to see it turn into a more? Not turn into, but just, you know, would you like to see us put a bit more content on there if we find something? Or news items throughout the week. Or news items or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Let us know. Or do you not give a toss? Yeah. Let us know too. But then again, if you don't give a toss, I guess you're not going to let us know, right? I think we'll post them, yeah. Yeah. Jeez, what a fickle industry we're in. I don't know. Yeah. All right. See you next week. See you. See you.

Speaker ?: See you.