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No guests this week, but lots of rants and items! Suggest future guests you’d like to hear either in the comments section or on the Suggestions Page.

• Mike Cowgill is building an LCR meter. Looks like a really cool build!
• Welcome to Adam Ward, who recently started a new site and gave us a nice plug. Good luck with the new projects!
• Why did National Instruments do away with An Engineering Mind? We would have loved to see that continue and they wasted a good brand.
• Friends don’t let friends go into finance. An article about how engineers started coming back to design, but are trending towards trading garbage CDOs.
• Dave has a bird problem, but doesn’t like how Americans all want him to shoot the birds.
• Listener Patrick York writes in about a great site showing off all of the old RadioShack catalogs! Awesome bit of nerd history.
• Eduardo writes in about how HP open sourced one of their financial calculators. Dave already know about and talked about it way back in the fledgling days of EEVBlog.
• Who needs a calculator? Endolith on Electronics StackExchange writes about how Wolfram Alpha can easily convert between units. And give you some awesome bonus calculations.
• Hameg released a new scope weeks after the Agilent one Dave reviewed. Why do things seem to come out at the same time?
• Touchstone Semi, a new analog chip company popped up on Twitter and is pushing new niche products.
• Hackaday looking for a full time hacker, though not for much money! At least in California. Would equate to earning 9-12k in Cleveland.
  • MakerDino started a new site in response to show he’ll do it for free: HackAWeek!
• Design Contests:
  • The 555Contest is wrapping up this week (judging)
  • Dave is judging the Renesas Rx Design Contest. They only got 30 entries, but it’s a different type of contest.

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The Amp Hour — Now with 100% more guests! Welcome, Jeri Ellsworth!

• C vs. assembly language. Jeri still uses asm, Dave has in the past but favors C, C stands for Chris, that’s good enough for him.
• Management of projects could improve projects, but not much can help code reviews.
• Jeremy is done (for now) with his Arduino videos. More types of uC’s to come!
• Jeri’s encounter with misogynistic bus gadget maker continues. Peter Bartok really dug quite a hole.
• Continuing of misogyny in the electronics world, Edmund Optics’ new catalog has made a stir, just like the one 4 years ago.
• Chris hates that the first thing tech magazines started doing was talking about supply shortages (as people were being pronounced dead and missing).
• Dave thinks being female will help you stand out in the job marketplace. Jeri suggests to stand out in any other way possible. She also mentions how much more difficult it is once in a workplace.
• Bad way to stand out: being a white collar criminal. Tyco execs sent to jail and have huge fines for embezzling over $600 million. May explain the name change to TE Connectivity.
• New Kickstarter project has first proto boards in: An open source USB protocol analyzer. Sextupled the funding request (!) and looks to be a great project.
  • Fund your favorite project, likely found under the “Technology” section of KickStarter.
  • The Australian version of KickStarter is called Pozible.
• Looks like another Open Hardware Summit is on the horizon, set up by the wonderful folks at BugLabs.
• Go Gear Go!
  • Dino suggests a printed sticker breakout board called Protoflex. Pretty cool! (and expensive)
  • Alan Yates (@vk2zay) suggests a set of SMD component boxes for storing teeny tiny parts.
• There’s a whole conference for printable electronics!
• Jeri is considering printing her own chips, much like the folks the referenced her on video.

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• Chris has a new bench!
• New podcasts!
  • Vintage Volts is a podcast about electronics “back in the day” by Jeff Salzman.
  • The BeagleCast is a new podcast from the folks at BeagleBoard.org.
• Jaime (@jpwack) is the awesome dude who put together the text and processing behind the final Widlar poster.
• Tell your favorite chip vendor to get on Twitter!
• Dave doesn’t like that Atmel uses a broken system to download programs. Shouldn’t have to re-register for each download.
• Instrumentation amps are powering future applications of EEGs as a control device. One exampled discussed was the AD620.
• Why is Tyco switching to TE Connectivity? Re-branding is a waste of time!
• RS DesignSpark recently released their 2.0 software version. Also, we found out that RS = Allied.
• What will happen when the world runs out of jobs? NYT article on the falling demand for brains. Has already happened for lawyers.

Listener and WotW alum Jaime (@jpwack) wanted a poster to put up on his friend’s bench. The friend was…how to say it…analog-averse? Here’s the Widlar shot from Paul Rako’s blog with a famous Widlar quote. Jaime also added some good info for context once people walk by and are curious as to why they’re seeing someone flip the bird.

Click on the image for the full resolution poster.

1024×1520

And an even HIGHER resolution one, based on a file sent from Paul Rako (and with a few updates to the parts designed, as corrected by Bob Pease).

2048×3028

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Protip: If you don’t understand the title, think U2…

• Corrections
  • It was Electronic Design, not Design News with the new radio show we mentioned last week. Sorry!
• WotW (our last?)
  • Lucas Weakley writes from Florida to show off his bench and some kind of device in a pelican case.
  • Our first female WotW submission, Irmi from Austria! She shows off her bench.
• Soliciting feedback!
  • We want to hear your thoughts about changes to the show!
    • Should we bother with a live section? A chat room?
    • What do people think about some small sponsorships of the show so we can use the money for improvements?
    • A project show off/cry for help segment?
  • Please leave your thoughts in the comments below or on the EEVblog forum page about this topic.
• Suggestion from a listener
  • Natalie Portman used to be a nerd! Awesome! She was an Intel semi-finalist. Check out the video!
  • Wow
• Rants
  • Why do the likes of EDN and EETimes think pop ups are effective? Tell your chip suppliers to not advertise like this with them anymore!
  • Nor buying covers of magazines for that matter. Silicon Chip Magazine is known to expressly forbid this.
  • Chris hates how the defacto prize in competitions is an iPad these days.
• Discussion Points
  • Dave likes the new boards he ordered from ITead. Cheap and decent!
  • “The New Cool” by Neal Bascomb is a  book about the FIRST Robotics competition. Great interview on the Diane Rehm show with the author and Dean Kamen, the contest founder and head of DEKA research.
  • Should apprenticeship be a path towards engineering? Discussion with the author of “Shopclass as Soulcraft” on Boston public radio.
  • While talking about the process of “Muntzing” a board (systematically taking off components to reduce cost), we also talked about Bob Widlar and Paul Rako’s recent article. Here’s Chris’ poster idea for all aspiring chip designers to hang on their cube wall.

  

  A high res version for printing