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• Happy Halloween! Has anyone heard of people giving away circuits as a Halloween?
• Did you know: CR2032 batteries reference the size of the battery? Chris didn’t!
• The BeagleBoard folks just released the BeagleBone! It looks great! Also, kudos to the folks at TI, especially those on the team.
• Dave has a deposit in on the new place!
• CadSoft is releasing EAGLE 6 soon! It will now use XML data.
• Chris is working on KiCAD tutorials right now:
• Download KiCAD for Windows, Mac or Linux.
• The XML data on EAGLE 6 will help with diff-ing files. EMSL has a great article on the usefulness of visual diffs.
• If people know of a good system for FPGA project revision control, please let us know.
• Dave is a judge for the Dangerous Prototypes 7400 Contest! Lots of great entries so far!
• The IEEE sent out a note to their email alert recipients about the less-than-desirable title for a recent email:

• In brighter and awesomer news, The White House has a video encouraging young female scientists and engineers to “Start Breaking Stuff!“. Great advice!
• India has waaaaay more schools than they need for engineering students.
• Robots are getting creepier and are now walking upright. The petman robot from Boston Dynamics…one step closer to the Terminator!
• Reminds Dave of one of the robots from his childhood favorite show The Thunderbirds.
• Robots are also useful, like the agrarobots in this recent hackaday post.
• They’re also a career opportunity as more and more jobs are taken over by robots.
• Silicon Valley is looking for software talent as well, even outside of those with degrees. Learn on the job, right? Perhaps going from high school to “the pros” is a good way to entice engineering extracurriculars in school?
• Or perhaps SV should adopt a model more like Germany’s apprentice system and co-develop curriculum with schools.

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• Jeff’s new setup is on Flickr! As are the pictures of his new cases for the Geiger Counter kit.
• He cut out the new cases at the ATXHackerspace using the ULS laser cutter.
• There’s a new Design News Radio Show. You can listen…if you trade all your information.
• Dave prefers using off-the-shelf cases from DigiKey.
• Chris brought up the recent news from Xerox PARC and Thinfilm. They announced 20 bits of printable memory from organic transistors. Chris recognized this is not the print-at-home revolution he is looking for (but it’s a good first step!)
• The term “baud’ used in communications comes from Baudot Codes used in telegraphy. Chris learned about it in the context of Radioteletype (RTTY while studying for a HAM exam.
• Farts cause seismic issues.
• Hackerspaces should install Ham radio stations.
• Jeff suggests reading/following along in The Electronics of Radio by Daniel Rutledge.
• He also is building a Norcal40 kit along with the book. This is a standard kit used in college electronic classes.
• The IEEE refuses to publish papers already in the public domain. Why do people use the IEEE still? Couldn’t people publish outside the IEEE?
• Jeff has found it useful, especially for older (more general) topics. He read about the Early Effect in issues from the early semiconductor days.
• China back in the news for stopping the sale of rare earth elements to outside countries, for a month! But why? To increase prices, silly!
• The US is responding with research dollars for a program called REACT to try and reduce dependence upon these rare earth elements.
• Shonky Product of the Week:
• From listener Wilhelm: The Fostac Maximus will harmonize your electro-smog. Just don’t forget to give it a few months to kick in!

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• We had some network problems the last few weeks. If you have more problems, post them to the EEV Blog Forum thread on the topic.
• Agilent has a firmware upgrade for their 3000 series scopes, Dave is claiming a victory!
• Dave and Chris were both on the Tymkrs ZombieTech podcast. Lots of fun.
• Eric the Embedded Hardware Guy mentioned us in his article in the EE Web magazine.
• Dennis Machida, the garage engineer, mentioned us on his site. Thanks!
• Ben Rampling wrote in to let us know about a new part of reddit, /r/nicechips! It’s like a perpetual Chip of the Week! Awesome!
• How are ADCs different if they’re audio or precision? Dave explains his use of seismic ADCs.
• Part packages continue their relentless march towards infinitely small! Chris posts pictures of the parts in his Google+ album.
• New low power micro announced from ST in conjunction with MIT researchers. It has 0.54V turn on for some of the transistors…crazy!
• Hackers and DIYers are taking the matters of their electric car diagnostics into their own hands and reverse engineering the firmware.
• Dave (with the help of the EEV Blog forum) found the Micro OTP FPGA from Silego. Cool idea for a toolbox part.
• The co-inventor of C and UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, has passed away. He did a lot for the industry and the world!
• Now they have training for socially awkward students…to learn not to  be so awkward.
• Chris found a new picture  at the computer history museum of Bob Widlar that is fantastic.
• There is also a fun exhibit online of analog computers.
• Still one of those socially awkward nerds but want to be among others like you? Go on a Geek Cruise!

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• Dave lost the bid for a lab which we discussed last week.
• Shoutouts:
• Jim Williams’ desk is moving to the Computer History Museum. Chris wants to turn it into a wishing well.
• EE Web continues to publish some intriguing interviews with people throughout the industry. We especially liked these two weirdos. Great format for a portal as well.
• Sesame Street is taking on STEM topics and teaching engineering! As Elmo seems to say: Yaaaaay!
• A fourth Open Source Hardware Company has gotten funding, this time Ayah Bdeir and her company Little Bits. Also relevant, there was an article from Phil Torrone, talking to Bre Pettis of MakerBot and their recent round of funding.
• David Manners on Electronics Weekly writes about the growing gap and competitive advantage of large fabs…and how that will jack up the price of chips.
• TI has decided to give away some of their chips and award senior projects that use 3 or more in a design with up to $10k. We see it more as a way for them to recruit new talent.
• When do you decide (monetarily) to start working on a low sales-volume product to refresh it?
• India launches a $45 dollar tablet ($35 after subsidies). Is it real and how did they actually get the cost that low?
• Memristors are supposed to be in production by 2013 (and likely expensive) in a joint venture between HP and Hynix. It’s weird that they are a whole new component that could be designed into new products, as well as the math that goes along with it.
• This week’s history is an entire site, devoted to transistor history. How cool is that?! Be sure to check out the oral histories with some of the inventors of key chips.
• Shonky Product of the Week:
• The AMPilizer. A capacitor in a box! It’s based around the idea of Power Factor Correction, but this should not be required in homes (esp. where Dave lives, as they don’t charge for apparent power).

Please leave thoughts, comments and circuit diagrams in the show comment section! Thanks for listening!

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• Dave is buying a new place! It’s not a house in Cleveland, nor a Castle in Europe, but he’ll be doing nerdy things there!
• And as Dave likes to say, at least it’s not Detroit (with all apologies to Detroiters out there).
• Dave”s new place is walkable, unlike the campuses of Silicon Valley and the live-in campuses of parts of China (well, you can walk if you live there).
• What does Dave need to get for his new shop? Let us know in the comments!
• Chris thinks he should get a Shop Bot…only $7k! (and up).
• Patrick writes in about his projects, BuildYourCNC.com and the Pick And Place spinoff, redFrog. Comparisons of the action below:
• redFrog (starts at 4:25):
• SparkFun’s MC384:
• And what can only be described as a “machine gun” pick and place (by Fuji)
• Dave and Chris favor an IR reflow oven on eBay or on Amazon over the hotplate method of reflowing boards.
• Upgrading from 300 mm to 450 mm wafer processing equipment could cost up to $7 Billion! Yowsa!
• I guess the $4 Billion Intel is pumping into upstate NY will only get them half a fab?
• Government military spending allows for things like the Boston Dynamics Alpha Dog.
• Shonky Product of the Week:
• The Blackbody, by Lessloss. What a heap of crap! Read all the things it can do, it’s precious.
• The downside to the “Financialization of everything”. The loss of talent to financial engineering.
• This Day in Nerd History:
• The true (and vindicated) inventor of the first computer, John Atanasoff, was born (in 1903).  The Atanasoff-Berry computer was built in 1937-42 at Iowa State University by Atanasoff and a graduate student, Clifford Berry, it introduced the ideas of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, and logic circuits.

That’s all for this week. Be sure to leave us comments on anything you heard: good, bad or indifferent.