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•  Chris has a new mic! An AT2020 USB microphone. Dave uses a Samson C01U USB microphone.
• The Jacksonville police mistake LED lightbulbs for a bomb! Whoops!
• Shonky Product of the Week:
• The ADE651, a scam bomb detector. Similar to a dowsing rod…in that it’s full of crap!
• Shoutouts:
• Fake EE Quips has created a bingo game to play along with during The Amp Hour.
• Tymkrs has created a new podcast called “ZombieTech” as part of their broad range of educational material.
• Another site for electronic education called The Signal Path. Similar format to Dave’s videos, they’re great for learning about electronic components.
• DIY Drones has a fun (unlisted video) that shows a (possibly fake?) electronic human-scale multicopter. The guy driving it wasn’t being very safe, but we’re glad he’s ok.
• Dave wishes we could talk about it more, but he wanted to remind people about the Tektronix announcement coming up in a few hours (from when the swhow was taped). Dave may or may not have something to say about it soon.
• Rumor about TI selling the OMAP family to Intel or Broadcom. Junko Yoshida (the EIC) was upset they took so long to respond (because they don’t regularly participate?).
• TI has a new app out for all their products. Speaking of, Chris just got a Nook and has Android unlocked on it, but probably won’t put electronics apps on it. Do you use mobile apps from vendors?
• High voltage electronics and a funny accent? Yes please! Great (dangerous) videos from PhotonicInduction!
• We’ve talked about Kickstarter before on here and the viability of HW projects. Geekscape describes an unfortunate scam on Kickstarter for a project that sounded pretty cool (and too good to be true)
• Prizes were ridiculous, but didn’t compare to the money required to get the top prizes in the the MC Frontalot Kickstarter Campaign that recently completed.
• This Day In Nerd History: 
• Charles Kettering, an American engineer whose 140 patents included the electric starter, car lighting and ignition systems. Later had the General Motors Institute named after him (now Kettering University).  Vice president and director of research for General Motors Corp. (1920-47).
• Are robots going mainstream? At $285K per robot, probably not. But it’s a good step forward. Dave is building a Microbric robot at home for fun.
• Should green cards be stapled to diplomas? Could help with the exodus of skilled workers back to their home countries and instead entice them to start companies in the US (or wherever they are educated).

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Welcome to another awesome guest: Alan Yates, VK2ZAY!

• Alan works on pyrotechnics for fun(?!)
• While he’s not worried about burning out over doing similar hobby/paid work, Chris has written about burn out recently and how that might be a part of it.
• He also is an active ham operator, mostly working with PSK31 type communications.
• Ham could have been a good option for the recent SF BART shutdown.
• Low frequency transmissions could be possible with fractal antennas.
• RF, Analog, all are needed in spades in the Bay Area…or elsewhere!
• Alan did two killer designs for the 555 contest, the adding machine and the HF spectrum analyzer.
• For radiation related sites, Alan is also a fan of TechLib, Burkhard Kanika’s site and the Maxim app note 2236.
• Alan also likes the 2N4117A for an input JFET. Chris is more a fan of National’s LMP7721 for an ion chamber.
• HP has announced a drastic shift in their business by selling off their PC division and moving away from consumer goods.
• Why isn’t HP making innovative products anymore? Possibly because they’re not spending the time like they used to!
• Though it has many names, Chris just learned it is called “bootlegging” as well.
• In other news, Taiwanese companies are getting undercut by Chinese companies in parts of the already low T&M market.
• You could make your own kit (though not a new scope yet) with the newly revised Heathkits.

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Another week of bouncing from topic to topic. This week included robots, entrepreneurs, OSHW, FPAAs, Ecology and LEDs! Whoo, that’s a lotta stuff!

• Elon Musk is an enviable entrepreneur and engineer. Great video piece on him on Bloomberg.com.
• Google buys the Motorola handset business for $12.5 billion. Chris thought it was for access at first, but it’s much more likely for the patent portfolio..
• Robots taking over some high risk jobs at Foxconn. Robots don’t care about crappy working conditions, right?
• Dave posted a new video explaining the finer points about open source hardware. Mentioned in the comments of Dave’s video, but does using vendor made parts make it not open source? The line needs to be drawn somewhere but we don’t think that’s where it is…
• The number one link on YouTube for “Open Source Hardware” is a TED Talk about Open Source Ecology. Amazing!
• What, no chip printer in the 50 tools needed to restart a civilization? Chris will settle for a new chip with 1 million programmable gates and > 100 op amps.
• FIRST robotics has some celebrity weight behind it. The ad promoting the event was just a warm up for the actual show, aired last night.
• Reminds Dave of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, meant to promote and inspire fitness in Australia and a few other countries.
• Great build quality on a WBR Regenerative Receiver by Dave Richards (AA7EE)! Looks like lots of fun to build!
• Margery Conner writes about how Phillips won the USA L-Prize and have produced a commercial replacement of a 60 Watt lightbulb with LEDs.
• Dave found an old payslip from the early 90s and was bragging about making $11 an hour as an engineer.
• This Day In Nerd History: Leslie Comrie (born Aug 15) was a New Zealand astronomer and pioneer in the application of punched-card machinery to astronomical calculations. He replaced the use of logarithm tables with desk calculators and punched card machines for the production of astronomical and mathematical tables. This made scientific use of these machines, made originally for only business uses.

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Just when you thought the names of episodes couldn’t get any weirder…

• US economy seems to be diving again, hopefully it will not seriously impact the electronics industry.
• If it does, Chris thinks startups will be even more reliant on Angel Investors like Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail)
• Is DIY finally going mainstream, as Wired suggested recently? An article from Futurismic seems to think this is a bad thing and that money coming in will ultimately hurt the “Maker Movement”.
• One bad thing could be that people could license their projects as Open Source Hardware (like the Penguino) … but then not be open!
• One thing that comes with more visibility…money. And the US government is funding small startups, some of which might be OSHW. Modeled after a program at Stanford.
• University of Michigan is also starting a program for burgeoning startups, granting new Masters of Entrepreneurship Degrees.
• Have you ever seen an electronics-inspired license plate out on the road before?

• Embedded Eric sent in the entry he submitted to the Touchstone Semi design contest that is wrapping up. A 4.4 uW 555 clone that can run at 18 Hz. Awesome!
• Shoutouts:
• Our pal and regular guest, Jeff Keyzer of MightyOhm, has a new OSHW Geiger Counter Kit. He’ll be showing one off while he’s at the Chaos Communication Camp in Berlin.
• Chris’s good friend Dave Young just finished running a program teaching high school kids electronics over 6 weeks. The kids have written up their impressions of the program and they are/will be posted to the Blue Stamp Engineering blog portion of the site.
• Shonky Product of the Week:
• First pointed out on the EEVblog forums, ”Fuel Savers” for cars seem like an utter load of bunk.
• Forum member oPossum did a great review of a ‘popular’ one and found a few passives and a linear regulator.
• This Day in Nerd History:
• Neville Mott passed away in 1996. He was a theoretical physicist who helped discover some key points in metal/oxide transitions in semiconductors. He won the 1977 prize in physics and the “Mott Transition” is named after him.
• Video of Dr. Mott from 1985, along with many other Nobel Prize winners, is available from the BBC.
• Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, writes about the need for boredom to inspire creativity. Too many devices preclude boredom these days.
• A writer at Gizmodo maintains that creativity is still possible and cites the design of the iPhone as an innovative product. What is the iPhone designer like though?
• 
  

Embedded industry maven and prolific writer, Jack Ganssle, joins us on The Amp Hour this week.

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• Dave called Chris a “young whippersnapper” (actually “young feller”, but the same sentiment) in writing about Jeri’s chip making.
• A former colleague of Jack’s maintained that  spec’s for computers were driven by the porn industry and how much traffic they expected their servers to handle.
• Dave notes that the “big thing “a few years back was the soft processor promise (inside FPGAs) and now it has reversed.
• Jack mentions that he likes the Altera C-to-H functionality, but that it’s always going to be a tradeoff.
• Dave is working with the Actel (Microsemi) Igloo Nano. The same size as two 0603 decoupling caps! Tiny!
• Jack thinks the rash of mergers will continue based upon the costs involved in making chips.
• Jack also takes Dave’s side on the home-printed chip debate.
• Jack has a strong stance on work-life balance and tries to take 4 months off per year. Chris has been experiencing the opposite lately.
• The embedded systems conference in India only had 400 or so attendees but was a passionate bunch of people.
• When asked about the Maker Movement, Jack responded “Finally!”.  Industry is taking notice too, Autodesk just bought Instructibles.
• Back in the day, Jack got his start building radios as a ham operator (N3ALO).
• Writing (technically or otherwise) is an important skill for modern engineers. Presenting in front of nerdy audiences is important too!
• People can hear/read more from Jack in his weekly column on Embedded.com or from his bi-weekly(ish) newsletter.