The Amp Hour #39 — Mumble Mumbo Jumbo
Posted by Chris Gammell on April 18, 2011 in Radio Show |
A few audio snafus this week, but we decided to leave them in for the “real experience”. We’ll get it eventually.
- Chris and Jeri are broadcasting a live video show to announce the 555 contest winners.
- Dave is stressing about the Tektronix contest. He’s trailing in votes!
- Jeremy Blum was featured on The Discovery Channel! Awesome!
- Dave hates standby power consumption. The Agilent 3000 series scope has 6.5W standby power!
- Chris missed out on the trend of NerdCore Rap!
- Chris found out about Dual Core from the recent tweets about Notacon in Cleveland.
- Dave enjoys the movie, Nerdcore Rising about MC Frontalot.
- MC Frontalot’s most recent video.
- Chris has been reading Dan Pink books lately, because of the video below.
- Dave enjoys the TI TXB0104 voltage level translator and had a fun time trying to troubleshoot the circuit.
- The MathWorks has released a C compiler for MATLAB code for translating designs. Won’t this hurt young engineers?
- China starts to feel some outsourcing pain as Foxconn looks to move some manufacturing over to Brazil. (the mistakenly posted UMC story is here)
And the Article explaining some of the mysteries
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FYI, the “Foxconn” link is pointing to a story about UMC (Taiwanese foundry).
Thanks Stanley. I fixed it but kept the older story as a separate link. Thought that was interesting too that they’re just upping wages 7.5% across the board. Probably won’t see that in the US anytime soon!
Why the angst about Matlab to C? It’s just another tool. Matlab has been able to convert to Verilog or VHDL for a while now.
About the design translator: it will hurt likewise the calculator and the FFT, YOU HAVE TO DO THINGS THE OLD STILE AND THEN DO IT THE FASTER WAY IF YOU WANT TO (sorry the caps, but learning to do integrals and then using Wolfram’s Mathematica is enlightening: you can do it burning tens or even hundreds of watts or just with pencil, paper and a candle, your choice, I choose to double check).
PS: I haven’t heard the show yet, it’s f**king late in Chile, must work in 5 hours
You should livestream the show while recording, it shouldn’t be that hard to do.. And it would be awesome!
Just admit it Dave, You are just not cute enough…Sex sells.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrwGGSH9SUU
Makes no sense to me either, you have nearly 6000 views on your own youtube channel, you have the highest views on the Tektronix youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/tektronix) and your been beaten by this site (http://dev.emcelettronica.com/) maybe people just don’t like your new boss, can’t believe an irish guy with a key fob is in 2nd place. Try this site (https://twitter.com/GetOnlineVotes) I just want to see a teardown and comparison of a Tek scope.
While I don’t mind the suggestion, The Amp Hour does not endorse voting help from bots.
and it would be fair to say that i normally don’t mind when people comment without reading first. it’s not a bot, its an online community of PEOPLE who vote for each other, there is already another tektronix user using it. its no worse than asking for the votes on a youtube video blog!
Ah, you caught me, I didn’t go check out the Twitter feed. I don’t think anyone will fault me for not going to a feed called “GetVotesOnline” though. I also don’t go to feeds that are “Onlin3G4mblingN0w” and “GIRLSGIRLSGIRLS”
. Like I said, I don’t mind, I just don’t think we can endorse it.
No probs I understand, you couldnt send me the link to the “GIRLSGIRLSGIRLS” sounds good
loved the show today as usual, keep it up.
Chris / Dave, you discussed piggy-backing chips on today’s show… I’ve heard of this practice before but I’ve never seen it in any of the numerous devices I’ve torn apart over the years. Is piggybacking chips regarded as “acceptable” in commercial products? Or is it just something an EE might do in the lab as part of a debugging routine?
Is it just analog IC that support this interesting technique or are there some digital ones that allow it too?
Interesting anyway. I certainly enjoyed the bit where you actually talked about electronics
hehe
Very rare to see it physically done piggyback style, but not uncommon to see multiple gates in a chip in parallel.
Hey guys I love the show and just heard the latest podcast. I wanted to address the standby power comment Dave had about commercial power supplies.
In the US, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 established no-load power requirements of 500mW for all power supplies with a nameplate output power less than 250 watts, which corresponds to level IV in the international efficiency marking protocol. Energy Star 2.0 requirements lowered the standby requirements to 300mW for all external power supplies with <50W nameplate output power (like a Nokia wall wart) and kept the 500mW requirement for power supplies with output powers of 50-250 watts, which corresponds to level V. However, Energy Star is a voluntary EPA program rather than a strict regulation. Some countries are exempt from meeting all of the provisions of Energy Star under certain conditions, (like Australia and New Zealand do not have to meet the standby requirements for AC-AC external power supplies) but can still have their power supplies labeled as level V .
The EU has gone even further and set a standby power consumption limit of 300mW for all electrical equipment up to 150W output power. DOE is currently working on new stand-by standards in their "Battery Chargers and External Power Supplies" rulemaking.
As a side note, these regulations all apply to external power supplies rather than one embedded in the product like the Tektronix oscilloscope so I don't know how much merit there is in comparing the two cases. Keep up the good work!
Hey guys
Just wondering… since Chris got all this cool recording equipment, and with that, one would think you would do some editing, why leave in all of Dave’s comments about “I can’t hear you.. ok let’s switch to Skype… oh I heard the Skype startup sound in my headphones… uuuugh, oh you dropped out…”
just saying….
Bring back WOTW! Grass roots stuff…
thanks.
I had a TXS0104ED smoke on me a while ago. I never investigated why. It might have been an honest wandering wire short or metal under board on the test bench kind of short.
I’ve encountered piggy backed logic IC’s a couple of times on boards in the field where they obviously weren’t quite cutting it with the one chip. Pretty sure it was an as-installed remedy for site conditions rather than as-designed.
[...] Via: Procrastineering and The Amp Hour [...]
Matlab has supported c-code generation ***LONG AGO****!
I forget what its (was) called, but if your m-files were proper, it would convert it to c-code, and even download to the target board!
(I think it was something like real-time-workshop or xpc coder or something like that).
So what’s the NEWS here??
No real new product here…
This is just a licensing change and a repackaging of their existing software. This engine has long been available under the name “Real Time Workshop”, but has now been renamed “Matlab Coder 2.0″.
Ex. “Real-Time Workshop Embedded Coder”, used the same engine but targeted embedded devices, is now called “Embedded Coder 6.0″ + “Matlab Coder 2.0″
and for Simulink,
Stateflow Coder is now renamed to “Simulink Coder 8.0″ + “Matlab Coder 2.0″
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2:53 – That’s what she said.
I guffawed
[...] Via: Procrastineering and The Amp Hour [...]
I’m behind on my Amp Hour listening. The part about standby power reminded me of a recent project where I considered using a linear power supply to generate 0.5V from 5V, 10% efficiency, b/c of noise concerns.
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[...] project was featured on the Amp Hour Podcast on [...]