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• WotW
  • Adam C of Onecircuit.com submitted the first workbench of the week submission by video!
  • Bob of Ambientsensors.com took a picture of his bench with his pup, including a signed HP 300A!
  • Lieven Blancke of Belgium submitted two pictures of his 7 year old maker son at their bench. Also included a picture of their recent project.
  • Kevin Smith from the UK sends in pictures of his compact bench (and one in B&W for the old school look). Cool setup!
• Shoutouts
  • Jon Oxer has been dedicated to improving shieldlist.org, even donating Arduinos to others. (Correction: Arduino Proto Shields. Still, very awesome)
• Rants
  • EDN’s Hot 100 list could be something cool…if it had any credibility. When all the links are directly to a press release, who believes them?
• Discussion Points
  • Jeri and Mike came up with a new unit of measure. A unit of annoyance known as The Jones.
  • Nice piece on Leo Laporte in the NYT detailing the advertising for all his podcasts on Twit.tv. Chris and Dave are veeeery interested (but not expecting much).
  • IBM released a list of 5 innovations coming in the next 5 years. We don’t agree with all of them, but they’re not bad! And we’re looking forward to 3D holographic technology for user interface design.
  • Speaking of the future, even with the ridiculous amount of data that could some day be  stored by spintronics, we’ll run out of usable matter for storing data in about 600 years (if we have similar rates of technology advances).

We wanted to try out a title similar to the style of The Big Bang Theory…we love it!

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• Shoutout
  • Another Ham-like video podcast called Amateur Logic. We like it! Thanks to the queen of science videos (Jeri) for the link!
  • Dave got scooped! Afrotechmods did an AWESOME video about ultracaps. He arc welded a coin!

• ShoutDown
  • Even though it’s Chris’ favorite news source, NPR recently used Dave’s Kindle teardown video without attribution! Booo.
• WotW
  • Frank from (cold!) Finland
    • View 1 of the bench
    • View 2 of the bench (-1 point for not being in the shot!)
  • Nathan from ASoberNewt (website, not a place)
    • The bench by itself
    • And Nathan in the shot while in the garage
• Follow Up
  • More about last week’s discussion about PhD’s: they only make 3% more on average than those with a Master’s, according to a recent article from The Economist. Monetarily, PhD’s don’t seem worth it (though they may be otherwise)
• Discussion Points
  • Is there a competitive advantage to being a squeaky wheel? Dave’s new videos got good responses from DigiKey and Maxim.
  • Matt from the Antipasto Hardware Blog talks at length about the need for continued innovation in the Open Source Hardware Community.
  • In the US, they are opening up the FM bands for the first time to non-commercial enterprises. Can Dave and Chris buy their way onto the airwaves?
  • There is also more talk about the Nearfield Communication capabilities of cellphones in the near future, as led by Google. There’s an open standard, but how much will be accessible to the user/hacker/maker?
  • More tech executive foolishness. Some were caught “consulting” while holding a high ranking position in a company. What a bunch of dopes!
  • Dave doesn’t want to work anymore. He would much rather retire now and do electronics as a hobby, who’s in?

An early submission from @wa7iut:

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• Seasonal
  • What is on your electronics list for the holidays? Dave and Chris both need new chairs for their labs
• WOTW
  • Henrik from Oslo, Norway
    • Bench setup and explanation.
  • Sylvain from Belgium
    • Bench setup for RF projects.
  • David from Portland
    • Portable bench setup. Taking your electronics on the road is impressive!
  • Mike from the UK (mikeselectricstuff)
    • MASSIVE panorama of his amazing lab. Breathtaking how well he uses the space and how much he crams in there!
• Shoutouts
  • IEEE has a podcast. Not the easiest thing to find but there are a lot of different topics and interviews!
• Discussion Points
  • Are squishy circuits the beginning of the circuit printing we’ve been talking about? Too soon in the technology to tell.
  • Listener Harry tells us about The Woz being on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”
  • The Freagle Campaign is still going. While we appreciate the Cad Soft team getting on Twitter, we still think the revenue generated from EAGLE BOM pushes will offset costs. And if not, RS Design Spark is free!
  • EAGLE also just added a script for getting a PCB quote, apparently. No word who the vendor is but Dave thinks this will extend far beyond PCBs into entire supply chains.
  • Fluke could use a little work on their Tweeting. Not all engineers care about American football!
  • It seems the foundries may be buying into opening up their standards to the EDA vendors. Could this mean more open source tools (like Electric) or will it just open it among the big players?
  • Dave and Chris get asked to fix peoples’ stuff because we’re engineers, but Chris much more often gets asked to be IT. Google has a new site to help with that.
  • What’s the payoff from getting a PhD? Is it even worth it for all the effort required?
  • Inventables, an awesome site with small quantity, weird new materials for use in hobby projects.

Dave’s Lab:


A video tour of Dave’s EEVblog lab:

This is the “Summer Oasis” that Dave’s wife made him build her. Dave thinks it’s a waste of space and it should have been used for a big shed!”
(yes, that tiny tool shed is behind the opening fence.
Before and after shots:

Dave and I missed our usual Monday/Tuesday recording so I thought I’d do a little “snow and tell” (ha!) to give an idea of the stuff I have to wade through on Monday afternoons in order to record for you, our lovely lovely listeners! Hey, I chose to live in Cleveland, so this is what I deserve, right? Well at least I get to experience what’s in the 2nd and 3rd picture, those are pretty fun. Enjoy!

This was the mess I had to blast through to get to up driveway.

Yes, folks, it’s true. People that like electronics also can like dogs (no offense to Darlington and Mosfet)

Chris has a dog that also likes being a snow demon.

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• Our first WOTWs!
  • Mike, who works at Ascot TV in Christchurch New Zealand! More info about Mike’s is here.
    • Dave likes the Bob Parker ESR meter.

  

  • David work at Delta-Q Technologies in Vancouver, Canada. More info about David is here (as are many more pictures!).
    • David plans on doing something similar to the Electric Delorean project.

  

• Follow-up
  • Mario, a reader/listener on Linked In, wrote to let us know about the existence of cross reference sheets for transistors that are still readily available (the sheets, not the transistors).
  • Frank wrote in the comments of Episode 19 about a different user interface device called “I-love-sketch” from the University of Toronto. Looks like a cool stylus based way of interacting with your designs.
  • Dave mentioned the video of Scott Adams drawing Dilbert using a similar type of vector based system.
  • Chris’s additional argument for making your own chips…no more obsolescence unless YOU decide you don’t want to make it anymore, inspired by companies playing on our emotions i.e. Zilog canceling popular parts back in the day and now IXYS bringing them back. Dave recons it’s a straw man argument!
  • RS DesignSpark contacted us and told us they will be fixing their FAQ section. Hopefully it’s soon!
    • On a separate note, since RS and Element14 seem to trade blows, perhaps E14 should think about making Eagle completely free? (Freagle? – Free Eagle). Dave & Chris start the Free Eagle campaign!
• Discussion Points
  • Engineers in the military-industrial complex. How do you decide whether or not to participate? What about developing weapons with algorithms designed to remove any places left to hide?
    • There’s no right or wrong answers, just personal choices. Do you work for one? Please let us know below, we’re very curious.
  • Badass (military?) hackers are an army unto themselves, they took down the Iranian centrifuges for months!
  • Is Jones’ Diminishing Blog Law already named? Or does Dave need to just update that wiki page?
  • Right in time for all our WOTW stuff, @UptownGreen posted a list of essentials for the lab you might not have thought of.
  • And while a crowbar is not on the list, Chris keeps one around his lab for a heatsink…
  • Hi-Res stuff is expensive difficult! We’re impressed by Jeri’s new TSA hack but Chris realized how much he expects Hi-res for images. Same for a new project using an Arduino for an IR camera.
• Rant
  • Rambus is going after big chip makers for patents. And worse, now they’re sinking their teeth into LED patents! Chris is still pissed at them for closing off RDRAM in his Dell Dimension 8100…

That’s all for now. Please submit your (audio or text) questions/suggestions at the suggestions page and your pictures at the WOTW tab if you’re interested in being featured!