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• Shoutouts
  • Thanks to Mitch (@mitpatterson) for linking to us from his site!
  • Alexander linked here too and asked about what to do when family and friends might not be interested in hearing about your latest project.
  • Octopart now indexes Digikey as well!
  • Electronics porn! Hi res photos of an old Microchip part.
    • Light can get into lots of parts and mess them up, not just the ones that are supposed to get erased.
• WOTW
  • Kibi
    • Workbench (clean)
    • Computer desk
    • Workbench (messy)
    • Current source
  • Darren Landrum
    • Bench Overview
    • Some tools
    • Under the bench
    • The audio bench
    • The YouTube guided tour!
• Discussion
  • Stories of audiofools: Green pens to “increase the audio fidelity” of CDs? Ha!
  • Jeff from Mighty Ohm posted some awesome pictures of the computer museum down in Austin
  • Chris and Jeri Ellsworth started a 555 design contest! Check out the contest site for more details and be sure to start your designs! The deadline is March 1st.
  • Zombie magazines! Is Popular Electronics coming back to life? Many veterans remember it fondly, Dave included!

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• WOTW
  • None! C’mon people! But we did hear that some people have been building benches, such as John S. Can’t wait to see them!
  • Chris is planning a new bench as well! And has been doodling in Google Sketchup to get an idea of what he wants:
    • View from the front
    • From afar with the rafters included
    • And from the top for a better idea of shelving
• Shoutout
  • Many well wishes to any listeners in Brisbane (CRAZY flooding videos if you hadn’t seen it). If your lab got hurt and we can help find you some new gear, please give us a shout.
  • There’s a new site in town that gathers together engineering bloggers, similar to ScienceBlogs.org. The site is called EngineerBlogs.org and is looking for writers if you meet a small set of criteria.
• Discussion Points
  • One of our listeners Mike Cowgill was venting on his site about The Ben Heck show and that it’s not more inclusive of a larger viewing audience.
  • He also wondered why someone like Dave or Jeri (and her new video series) weren’t picked up by Element 14.
  • But Jeremy Blum was recently tapped to do a new video series with Element 14.
  • Element 14 is starting to sell Arduino’s from their store. The beginning of price wars?
  • Arduino? Open Source? Stop talking about them! Glossywhite from the EEVblog forum wrote about how he’s sick of those terms.
  • TI is trying (and possibly succeeding) in busting into the market though…with all their free stuff!
  • And back to the debate about printing chips, why not use lasers instead (once they perfect the board cutting version)? Much more accurate than printing.
  • Analog Devices and the Analogue Dialogue is still turning out great content. This month, there’s a helpful article about choosing capacitors for linear regulators.
  • Other resources from ADI suggested by listener Carmen were the Op Amp Applications Handbook and the Data Conversion Handbook (both awesome and free).
  • US President Obama has been talking about Engineers, whereas past presidents have lumped them in with scientists.

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• WotW
  • JP Wack from Santiago,  Chile
    • Bench with awesome labels!
    • Other work
  • Troy Rank from Rochester, NY
    • Bench page
  • Stynus from Belgium
    • Project page (tons’o'projects!)
    • Workbenches
    • And workbenches with Stynus in the picture
• Followup
  • The 6502 was laid out by hand by one person!
  • A new study out found that ASUS was the most environmentally friendly company of large commercial manufacturers.
• Suggestions
  • Eddie suggested we were being hypocritical for railing against eWaste and promoting CFLs simultaneously. Chris and Dave want to have low power DC in the home to cut down on ballast electronics needed.
• Discussion Point
  • CES is going on this week but is way commercial. Who cares?
  • Listener Brian J Hoskins is designing what he hopes will be a universal interface for instrumentation on a helium balloon he is designing.
  • Is anyone younger than 30 still wearing watches these days?
  • VOTE FOR DAVE in the iiNet Top Geek competition!
    (no need to sign up, just click the VOTE button!

EDIT: A new user-made promotional video about NASA (credit goes to reddit). Inspiring and beautiful:

And one that’s much more rock and roll:

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• Shoutouts
  • Sparkfun has a new “grab bag” program for all their pick and place cast off parts. Could be some good pickins!
• Rants
  • Why does the IEEE still charge membership fees to unemployed engineers? And why does the cutoff for waiving the fee occur at 13k(and below)? Is that a realistic point at which people start being able to pay dues?
• Discussion Points
  • California gives 100W incandescent bulbs the boot!
    • The mentioned EETimes article explaining the switcher circuit innards of a CFL
  • Why do LCR meters (like the kind Dave reviewed) output 6 digits of “resolution” through USB when only 3 are displayed on the device screen?
  • Electronic junk is back in the public eye. There is some research starting on the topic, but in the mean time 3rd world countries are still burning circuit boards to get the precious metals from them.
  • New site about electronic waste and recycling by the people that brought you “The Story of Stuff“
  • And what contributes to electronics junk more than putting electronics in everything? While this can be a boon to new products, is it oversupply of cheap chips or actual consumer demand of the new functionality?
  • TSMC is planning a solar cell manufacturing plant in Mississippi. Good for the local economy (1k jobs, $500M invested). Are we nearing an inflection point where lower income areas in American labor (plus deals from local gov’ts) can compete?
  • New list out about trends in 2011 from JWT. Topping the Amp Hour’s pick’s from that list are: 3D printing (#1), Microbusinesses (#51), NFC (#56), Self-powered devices (#76) and Tap to pay (#88).
  • Also on the list was Detroit and the transformation it’s going through currently, as documented in Requiem for Detroit.
  • Not all predictions go well…Ray Kurzweil responds to the scorching review in the latest issue of the IEEE Spectrum.
  • And since we like IEEE Spectrum so much, we wanted to go over their list from a few months back about the top 25 chips of all time. Really great reading.
• WOTW
  • Ack! Sorry! We didn’t get to it this week! Thanks to the submissions, we’ll promise to do those first thing next week.