This weeks special guest is John Edmond, the co-founder and Director of Advanced Optoelectronics Technology at Cree, Inc in Durham, NC.

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• John talks about the history of Cree and how they built the company with no venture capital. Awesome!
• Lots of technical LED talk on manufacturing, Stokes loss, Haitz’s law and  chemistries involved in making LEDs.
• Cree got one of their biggest breaks supplying the blue LEDs in the VW Beetle and Jetta’s of the late 90s models.
• How do you measure the light output of a LED? With an integrating sphere!
• One competitive advantage Cree has (over China, for instance) is their Energy Star compliance.
• In China, Cree has gained market share by buying COTCO four years back.
• Cree also makes SiC FETs and Schottky diodes.
• How many LED’s can you fit on one wafer? How long does it take you to test them?
• Will the war of the currents finally be won by Edison? Should we have DC power our homes for localized efficiencies?
• Some of the other bulb manufacturers are GE, Osram (Sylvania) & Phillips. Some of the other LED manufacturers are Nichia, Avago and Osram.
• Dave talks about doing the math on LED lighting for the new office and how the payback is 15 years. John claims something closer to 6 years.
• John answers the million dollar question of when and how LED lighting will reach critical mass mainstream.
• Those more interested in winning some of Cree’s products (US only, unfortunately) can check out their contest site at Cree LED Revolution.

Many thanks to John for speaking on our show and for Ginny (Cree’s social media personality and the person behind the Cree Twitter account) for helping set it all up! It was a lot of fun!

While we don’t usually post much that isn’t a new episdoe, we also usually don’t get such high profile guests on our show. This coming Monday we’ll have the Director Advanced Optoelectronics at Cree, John Edmond, on the show! We also decided its better to tell people who will be on our show beforehand instead of trying to surprise people, as we did with Joe Grand and Jack Ganssle. If you have any questions about the LED industry, Silicon Carbide and other crazy materials or anything else that the technical founder of an LED company might be able to answer, please leave it in the comments. Thanks!

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• Chris explains what he thinks Thanksgiving was about (or what he thought it was about, he’s no historian).
• The Daily Show had a segment about “Evacuation Day” and the history behind it.

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• Ask our listeners: How many hours do you work in a work week? How much is the norm in your country of origin?
• Chris’s friend Dave wrote about the surprises of going full time as a consultant.
• Dave mentions that on the software side, jobs on sites like Elance are underbid  by overseas contractors.
• Chris loves an article from an IT consultant with some tips on how to be a good consultant to hire.
• Though Dave did not show much interest in ham radio in general, he did decide to go hang out with them!
• Chris is still looking for more people to join him in getting a license by the end of the year!
• If you want to study, there are study sites and practice exams out there.
• Chris has been looking at buying a snowblower and has looked at making it autonomous. There is even an autonomous snowplow competition!
• Perhaps this is a future venture for iRobot and their Roomba platform?
• Dave’s office is ready for some wall hangings (post-approval from the wife, of course). He should hang up the Widlar poster!
• The_Axis wrote in about their reuse of PCBs as tail stabilizers for a homemade rocket!
• Eric the Embedded HW Guy wrote a post on EEweb about a homebrew solder smoke fume extractor.
• Our occasional co-host Jeff Keyzer (@mightyohm) set up a Flickr photo pool with pictures of electronics benches. Add yours today!
• Chip of the Week:
• Gleaned from the /r/nicechips subreddit, the ATtiny10 is a (tiny!) SOT23-6, 8-bit microcontroller with integrated flash (1K), SRAM (32B), ADC (4 channels/8 bit) and a lot more. Crazy!
• Is there a standard footprint repository where someone can find IPC standard footprints (and maybe some of the odd ones too)?
• On Ask An Engineer this week, Chris wrote in with a question about KiCAD and Limor and Phil were hopeful about the emerging XML standard from EAGLE, that it would open up the ecosystem.
• Bunnie Huang of Chumby writes about buying an iPhone schematic on the street in Shenzhen and using it to source cheap parts. Chris calls this Coattailing.
• Apparently phone makers need to recoup costs in the first few months of sales of their product because they are so quickly overtaken by the newest phones.

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• Chris has been issued a challenge to get his (ham) technician’s license by the new year. Can he do it? Do 10 others want to do it with him? If so, we can get Dave to sing on air! (or can we?)
• Dave has a beef with the Agilent U1272A‘s data export capabilities. Perhaps Dave should append his own RS232 port like in a recent HackADay post?

• The Tyne Metropolitan College in England have apparently ripped off Dave’s PCB tutorial document and erased all the copyright info and attribution. Lame!
• Flying probers are crazy to watch! See the video below, starting at 42s in.

• India is predicting electronics imports to top $400B per year in 10 years and want to mandate local production.
• China, on the other hand, wants to move to a knowledge economy (and get rid of manufacturing in the process?). They also want 100 hackerspaces in Shanghai.
• Dave has started his build of an ArduCopter, bought from Hobby King. Their shopping cart plays on human nature and an engineer’s need to optimize.
• Chris hates chasing problems around control loops. They’re interesting, but frustrating.
• From the EEVblog forums: should electronics be more math-centric? Chris and Dave don’t think so.
• This is how Jim Williams taught as well, with less focus on the rote memorization.
• Engineering seems to attract people that are in it just for the money sometimes (they don’t last). WSJ has a great breakdown of salaries (in the US).
• According to Wired, the CEO of Ponoko is predicting printable circuit boards in <24 months. Dave doesn’t think it’s possible based on solder temps.
• There’s been lots of focus on 3d Printing lately, especially in the NYT. One article about The Wild West economy that will rise from the printer availability and another about the possibility of high quality 3D printing coming to a big box retailer near you.
• This Day in Nerd History
• The dry cell battery was patented by Carl Gassner…in 1887! Good gravy, batteries have been around for a long time!

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• Great comics from OhmArt! Be sure to check them out and buy some of their merchandise!
• Tales from the cube talks about a label over an EPROM…has anyone seen this article?
• Bill Schweber wrote about the persistence and insanity of engineers chasing problems.
• Katie Luper is a former lawyer going back to school for EE! That’s different…and awesome!
• You can be a winner at the ACE awards! If you pay…
• The Dangerous Prototypes 7400 Contest is over! (or is it? Dave wasn’t sure)
• We need more engineers in popular culture! Scotty (James Doohan) tells that over HALF of the Milwaukee school of engineering listed him as an inspiration for them joining the program.

• Dean Kamen talks about the role of innovation and why we need people to solve problems…not create jobs.
• 31% of new grads don’t have jobs?! Crazy. Also, this survey says that the majority of new hires make <$30k. Is this realistic in your area?
• Chip of the Week:
• Maxwell’s HNS-1000 Nuclear Event Detector…know when there’s a nuclear event with a chip!
• NXP puts an ARM Cortex M0 in a DIP package!
• Potential art for Dave’s new office? A toilet made out of PCBs!
• Extra Charge Capacity:
• A recent hour-long tribute to Jim Williams at the Computer History Museum.
• Old news for Dave, but RS232 transmitted over a wet string!