Most of this week’s discussion revolved around open hardware. The summit definitely provided some interesting conversation points, explained below. If we missed any links, please leave them in the comments!

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• Open hardware
  • The open hardware summit was awesome! (writing for EEtimes at ESC Boston was cool too!)
  • Videos aren’t all online yet but Limor Fried’s is on Adafruit (one of my favorites).
  • I also really enjoyed the talk by John Wilbanks, VP of science at Creative Commons
• Not-so-open hardware
  • Nokia pundits lament not having a product visionary.
  • They’re really saying they want a Steve Jobs.
  • Interesting historical footnote: lots of people at the open hardware summit had some of the most closed source products on the planet. Irony.
• Self Publishing
  • WordPress.org is where you get the open source software, WordPress.com does hosting.
  • Silicon chip magazine — The last electronics magazine from Australia.
  • Microsoft Live spaces will not host it’s own blogs anymore and they’ll be pushed to WordPress.
• Low Power design
  • Tascam DR-07 isn’t winning any awards with Chris
• The Akihabara Electronics Market in Japan
  • Amazing tour of the amazing market.

Anything else we might have missed? Let us know in the comments!

No, not in boxers, but definitely from Boston! On a $10 internet connection no less! Highway robbery! Next week we’ll do a round up of my trip to ESC Boston and the Open Hardware Summit, but for this week we stayed within the usual tech bounds. The links mentioned are below and as always, comments are welcome and encouraged!

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• Shoutouts
  • Can you find Dave in a tinfoil hat?
  • Ben Heck’s new show looks great! Nice job!
  • Wired has a new (?) show as well. Dave doesn’t like the intro stuff but the content is awesome! This clip is Chris Anderson documenting people from the DIY drones community.
  • Speaking of, Quadcopter based control systems keep improving. Amazing!
• Events
  • Electronica is coming up in Munich, Germany in November. It’s huge! If sponsors want to send an awesome radio duo, inquire within.
• Discussion Points
  • Jon from the EEV Blog forums asks about Absolute Maximum Ratings and when to use them.
• Rant
  • If you can come up with circuit ideas, the bar is pretty low at EDN apparently. We didn’t see much special about a 7 segment hooked up to a LUT, but they paid for the idea!
    • We’ll talk more about how to publish your ideas in the 10th episode of The Amp Hour. We can’t believe we’re almost to double digits!

That’s all for now! There was more to the show, including quite a bit of true off-the-cuff content.  If we missed any links, feel free to add them in the comments or let us know and we’ll update the main page. Thanks for listening!

Thanks again to everyone who filled out the survey. We got some fun responses (as I mentioned in Episode 8) and we’ll continue going through them for ideas and suggestions. Don’t think we don’t still watch our official Suggestions Page though, because we do. Feel free to continue posting ideas there.

One resounding theme that came through on the comments was that people really didn’t like us talking politics. That message is loud and clear. I can’t promise we’ll never mention policy ever again…because it truly does affect us and how the electronics industry runs. However, I (Chris here) can personally promise that I won’t try and overtly push my political views on anyone. If I start to, just give me a shout or vote with your feet (ears?). If we see people stop listening, we’re obviously doing something wrong. I highly encourage you to stick around though, we have tons more to spout off about electronics!

Onward to the results!

Who you are:

What you like:

Where you’re from:

Where you listen:

Thanks to all of those who filled out the optional survey. If you haven’t yet, there’s still time! Feel free to add your info!

We also took some of your advice (and some of our own) and veered back towards tech talk! Yay! And based on some other feedback we received, we also tried giving some more background on topics that might not be known to everybody. Hopefully we were understandable about any topics you might not have heard of before.

We’ll stick with the mostly-links format from last time, click on through to read about stuff we were gabbing on about!

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• Events
  • Chris is going to be at ESC Boston and the Open Hardware Summit in NYC. If you’re going to be there, give him a shout!
• Shoutouts
  • Adafruit “Ask an Engineer” turns 1! Congrats!
  • CMC put our logo on his page. Thanks for the support!
  • Ben Heck has a new show sponsored by Element 14. Welcome to the podcast party!
• Discussion Points
  • How does someone go about becoming a PCB designer? Dave offers  some tips based on his experience.
  • Dave and Chris discuss the usefulness of Twitter
  • We agree with Bob Pease’s recent article about how helpful component engineers can be. Looking up parts is a full time job!
  • The search for components got a littler harder now that FindChips.com got bought by some marketing business.
  • Dave introduces “The Jones Diminishing Blog Law”. Readership goes down by a decade per medium change.
• Projects
  • Mind hacking is new and AWESOME. Hackaday shows off a python library for the Emotiv headset and Hacked Gadgets showcases a the use of the Emotiv headset to record emotions. Unreal!

Please only fill it out once!