Dave made it home safe and sound! We’re glad to have him back and appreciate Jeff from MightyOhm stepping up to the plate in his absence. This week we jumped right past the videos Dave plans on posting and into talking about current events, so why don’t we do the same with the links?

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• Shoutouts!
  • Thanks for the mention from Jack Ganssle, rock star of the embedded world for mentioning The Amp Hour in his column. And he mentions Jeri’s awesome garage experimenting as well!
  • In terms of larger custom designs, we like Jeff’s idea of using MOSIS for chip development.
  • We were added to the Podcast Bunker. Thanks!
  • Dean Kamen, famed inventor of the Segway, has a new show called “The Dean of Invention” on the Discovery Channel. The first episode about biometrics is available for free online.
• Discussion Points
  • Sky high! A video on fixing an RF control tower! Awesome!

  
  Climbing A 1786 Foot Tall Tower – Watch more Funny Videos

  • Speaking of dangerous, a 500 kV rock sorter that blows rocks apart with high voltage (thanks to reddit for the link mention)
  • Blue collar vs. White collar. Mike Rowe (of the Discovery Channel show, Dirty Jobs) discusses why the former is important for a strong middle class.
  • Also important is the role of entrepreneurs. Chris went to a seminar last night with Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen of the University of Michigan’s Center for Entrepreneurship. While Dave and Chris were slightly skeptical about the “teaching” of building businesses, from what we hear it sounds like they are doing it right: namely the “doing”.
  • Speaking of entrepreneurs, Dave noticed the “EcoSwitch” is finally available. It’s a cautionary tale about staying away from companies that claim to want to help you design your invention.
• Rants
  • Dave doesn’t like that it’s “Open Hardware” instead of “Open Source Hardware”, mostly that he’s corrected about it.  Who cares about the name?
  • China / US tensions building. Bills introduced in US gov’t, China cutting off rare earth supplies. Could get messy, but hopefully it’s just dumb politicians rattling the saber.

It was good to have Dave back and us making fun of one another from different continents. Something about that just seems right. Do you have something to make fun of us about? Did we miss or mess something up? Let us know in the comments!

Holy YouTube clips, Batman! We have tons of clips this week. Me and our special guest were talking about lots of stuff and it turns out many of them were video based. We can’t wait to see many of Dave’s videos, he’s still traveling around and is still working on editing and uploading many of them. On to the links!

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• Shoutouts
  • Chiphacker.com has become Electronics Stack Exchange. It’s a really awesome format and a great community so far!
• Discussion Points
  • What would it take to make open hardware chips?
  • Jeri Ellsworth has done it! In her garage no less!

  • One of our listeners Richard thinks it could be done with laser printers.
  • Chip fabs are better places to do that, just like the one Jeff visited (well, not during the taping of this music video):
  • Fabs use some nasty chemicals (and some that aren’t allowed under ROHS) like SF6. But SF6 is fun too!
  • Jeff has used the services of James (@laen) who has a great PCB bundling service.
• Rants
  • No parts? Still? AVRs are hard to find and it hurts small businesses!
  • Dumb analysts are sad FPGA lead times are getting better.
  • Chris hates it when there aren’t standard pinouts!

Thanks (again) to Jeff from Mighty Ohm for sitting in on The Amp Hour! It was really fun talking to him again and we appreciate it!

Dave is back! And blogging from a hotel room, just like Chris did in episode 9 of the Amp Hour. He has lots of great videos he made at Renesas Dev Con and some good stories and experiences. On to the links!

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• Shout outs!
  • Thanks to Nathan from the Sober Newt for linking here!
  • Thanks to Alan at From Orbit for linking here as well!
  • Chris likes the wrist scope from Seeed studios. Dave says he wouldn’t use it.
  • Thanks again to Jeff from MightyOhm for helping us out last week. We look forward to having him on the show again sometime.
• Tech News
  • Arrow buys Nu Horizons, more consolidation in the distributor market.
  • Actel bought by Microsemi, who wants to use the parts now that they might go obsolete?
  • Farnell has an announcement on October 25th, we’re guessing they’ll just become Element14 officially.
  • The BeagleBoard team has released the Panda Board!
  • New Robot (video) podcast starting soon. Live hack every episode!
• Discussion Points
  • Microsoft has a new development platform called the Gadgeteer. Designed to work with .net.
  • Dave is back from Renesas Dev Con! Check out EEVblog for all the latest videos!
  • Chris visited his local hackerspace for the first time, the Maker’s Alliance in Cleveland.
  • Dave gave a preview of his talk with DJ Delore. Conversation about the Open Hardware definition. Why aren’t open tools part of the open hardware definition?
    • Update not mentioned in show: EAGLE will have XML datafiles
    • Phil Torrone also discusses this may be a part of the 1.0 definition.
• Rants
  • The Gadgeteer mentioned above connects to Silverlight? Seriously? It’s the antithesis of the open hardware movement! Gah! Plus the smallest program will be 64K? We don’t like it so far.
  • The IEEE has a crap article about social media. Not even going to link to it, they don’t deserve it.

That’s it for this episode. Keep your eye on EEVblog or YouTube, no videos of Dave’s presentation yet but we’ll be watching to see if he remembered to mention The Amp Hour!

Note: We still see random 502 and timeout errors which we think are still server side. Please keep trying to download the episode if it doesn’t work the first time.

We’ve already had some reports of issues with downloading episode 11 of the Amp Hour (and my abhorrent impression of Dave!). We’re not yet sure if it is the server or the podcasting software or the audio itself that is at fault. Here is the direct link:

Direct link to download The Amp Hour #11 (Right click and “save as” to download)

Please let us know in the comments below if you’re still having problems or if you find a way that lets you definitively download the episode. Thanks!

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NOTE: I apologize about the sound quality on this recording. Thanks to the Zoom H1 autogain (very bad thing) and recording in a cubby like desk at my house (nearly as bad as the autogain) I sound like a mouth breathing, key pounding cubby troll. I’m very sorry and I tried to fix it best I could. If you hear the occasional ramp up of background noise or mouth breathing, forgive me.

So did my Dave Jones impression fool you? No? I thought it was pretty bad as well. Dave is unfortunately under the weather and was not up to doing a show this week. In all honesty, he is rightly saving his voice for his upcoming trip to the US! Very exciting for him! And of course very exciting for Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory, as Dave Jones will be attending his taping! I know I’d be pumped!

Anyway, we were very lucky to have Jeff Keyzer of Mighty Ohm join me in Dave’s stead this week. Jeff explained more about his background during the show, so onto the links!

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• Shoutouts!
  • To you! Thanks to the 1000+ people that have listened to our podcasts!
  • Thanks to Jon at TronixStuff for linking me to Silicon Chip magazine.
    • Jeff suggests Elektor magazine out of Europe. Similar style magazine.
  • Thanks to William at HackersWorkbench for linking here!
• Jeff was one of the first to receive an Arduino Uno board.
• The ATmega8U2 is a big difference to the board, people are already hacking it.
• It uses a USB to Serial stack written by Dean Camera.
• Some issues but good response from the Arduino team.
• “Getting Started with Arduino” by Massimo Banzi is a great starter book.
• But not as great as Jeff’s new book with Mitch Altman will be!
• Getting young ladies involved in electronics is usually a matter of applications more than how it’s taught.
• How else can we get kids interested in STEM?
• Who else can we get engineers interested in twitter? (BBC article on social media)

If we missed anything or if you have other magazines that are similar to Silicon Chip or Elektor, please leave them in the comments. Thanks again to Jeff for helping out this week!

NOTE: I apologize about the sound quality on this recording. Jeff actually went out of his way to try and get a good setup but then I go use my Zoom H1 with the autogain on (very bad thing) in a cubby like desk at my house (nearly as bad as the autogain). I’m very sorry and will try to fix it next week.