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We continue our “every other week” tradition (a guest one week, just Dave and Chris the next) with lots of news and projects!

• Chris has a new project and affiliation — ChipReport.tv! (Links at the end of the video to subscribe)
  
• The “Still Untitled Adam Savage Project” on Tested.com is pretty good!
• Shahriar from The Signal Path super-cools an LED…and it changes color! Awesome!
• Temperature can affect your designs…but do we really need to worry about it?
• Tom LeMense might say so, having worked on automobile designs.
• The Olympics have started! There are some cool engineering design questions regarding timing and video.
• Analog Devices and Digilent released a DMM/Oscilloscope board for relatively cheap (esp if you’re a student). Dave doesn’t like it.
• Even though Chris would argue this is a further push towards using off the shelf tablets for scopes, the Antipasto Hardware Blog says to utilize custom Android tablets, if at all.
• Some butthead is buying up all the copyright to Heathkit schematics and is pursuing any left online.
• Digikey now has a schematic tool built in…but why doesn’t it interface to CAD programs?
• Do you watch the financial health of a company when making decisions to design in a part? ST Micro is running out of cash.
• There is a database of chip logos that can help you find out which chips you’re looking at.
• Mike’s Electric Stuff has a video of entire boards with rebadged chips from a military computer:
  
• ARM is working with TSMC to develop sub 20nm designs…does this mean ARM might make a chip one day? What stops them?
• Tektronix is accepting feedback on their products via a new site…and want video reviews?
• Duane Benson of Screaming Circuits is writing articles detailing his first impressions about learning FPGAs. 
• Erin “RobotGrrl” has a great video showing a timelapse of a curvy board layout. Mesmerizing!
  
• Dave used to do tape layouts by hand!
• If you’re doing a manhattan technique build, there is a great technique for creating “islands” on the copper clad.

That’s all for this week. If you enjoy the show, we would love it if you gave us a review on iTunes! It really helps new people find the podcast. Or tell your friends! Thanks!

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Welcome, Chris Anderson (@chr1sa)!

Chris is the editor of Wired and has been for 11 years. He is also a co-Founder of DIY drones, a 20,000+ strong community of UAV enthusiasts and also runs the commercial arm, 3D robotics!  He has also written books about the growth of the internet including The Long Tail and Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Later this year he will be releasing a book about the Maker Movement called, “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution“.

• Chris also started the Geek Dad Blog, now run as an official Wired Blog.
• With his own children, 3D printing doll house furniture is a regularly enjoyed activity.
• Chris has had many of the early 3D printers and currently has a MakerBot Thingomatic.
• Dave recently got a Replicator (and promptly broke it)
  
• The next round of 3D printers might move towards SLA-like lasered resins, similar to this recent kickstarter project.
• Chris believes there are more than one “Pit of Despair” as stated by Nathan Seidle of SparkFun
  • As stated last week, there was also a followup piece called “The Pit of Opportunity” (not mentioned on today’s show)
• The DIY Drones community had help from Andrew Tridgell of the Samba project and Jono Bacon of the Ubuntu project (and author of “The Art of Community”)
• Tim O’Reilly calls this the Architecture of Participation
• DIY Drones is seeing more cloners, some in China (though there are great contributors from China as well)
• Manufacturing for 3D Robotics is done in San Diego, CA and Tijuana, Mexico.
• Co-Founder Jordi Muñoz now runs the day to day operations of the commercial arm.
• There is a mysterious release planned for later this week, but we didn’t want to invoke the Osborne Effect.
• 3D robotics has its own brand of rf mesh (as opposed to the Xbee) called the 3DR radio based on the Hope RF HM-TRP module.
• Chris does not think they would have used Kickstarter when beginning 3D robotics.
• Arduino is moving to an ARM for their next revision in the Arduino Due.
• The ArduCopter platform actually still has processing power to spare because of the offloading and multiple chips on board.
• The Invensense MPU6000 does a lot of processing which helps offload the main processor.
• The next round of innovation will be machine learning so that drones are more aware of their surroundings and PID loop tweaking won’t be as difficult.
• Chris has a new book coming out in October called, “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution“.
  • Makers allow for The Long Tail of manufacturing things. Whereas a large company might not see a reason to make something, now people are empowered to make it in small quantities and distribute it via the internet.
• To find out more about Chris, check out his wiki page (or edit it) or just Google him.

Many thanks again to Chris for stopping by The Amp Hour. Please leave comments here or on the Discuss Forum and let us know what you thought! Also consider signing up for the DIY Drones community or subscribing to their feed to get the latest news in this exciting field.

This coming week, we’re pleased to welcome Chris Anderson!

Chris is the editor of Wired and has been for 11 years. He is also a co-Founder of DIY drones, a 20,000+ strong community of UAV enthusiasts and also runs the commercial arm, 3D robotics!  He has also written books about the growth of the internet including The Long Tail and Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Later this year he will be releasing a book about the Maker Movement called, “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution“.

Please head over to our discussion forum to ask questions for the show coming up this week! We can’t wait to talk with him!

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• Dave has a new $140K oscilloscope in his lab! Amazing how he wouldn’t use it normally. 
• Rental companies will happily rent you one for less.
• Dave is getting a new MakerBot Repicator soon. One of the employees there printed a box for the uCurrent.
• MakerBot was at ComicCon, where Seth Green seemed to like them.
• Marcus of Little Bird electronics recently got VC funding for the Ninja Blocks, a successfully funded project on Kickstarter.
• Will KS become a hunting ground for hungry VCs?
• Nathan Seidle of Sparkfun recently wrote/spoke about “The Pit of Despair”, when Kickstarter projects are big, but not big enough to quit your job.
• Ian Daniher and Kevin Mehall of Nonolith Labs, wrote a response (after being used as an example “Pit”) about the benefits of starting a company that way.
• Elon Musk took some risks once he cashed out of PayPal: 

   

• Dave enjoyed the documentary called, “The Revenge of the Electric Car“, which featured Elon.
• Do you know how ceramic capacitors are made? Johnson Dielectrics details their process.
• Library and BOM management is quite a hassle. How do you manage it?
• The Component Organizeris a small, cross platform, open source application for managing BOMs and stock.
• One of the interns at Octopart is working on “Historical Part Pricing” to let us know what parts cost over time.
• Bob Dobkin agrees with Chris (ha! More in the other direction) about the importance of being connected to a fab.
• Foundries are growing overall, but TSMC still is the most dominant player (by a lot!).
• Will the Memristor deliver in 2014 as HP/Hynix says it will? Can it compete with entrenched technologies?
• Next week on the show, Chris Anderson of Wired and DIYdrones. Get your questions in now! (or vote on others’)

Sorry about the mixup. A few updates on other parts of the server caused the redirection to break on the Discuss Server. If you ever notice  that in the future, please feel free to email me at chris {at} theamphour {dot} com.

Don’t forget, any question that didn’t get answered during the show and which gets to 10 points on the page of questions for Philip Freidin (our guest this week), will get a detailed answer. He’s really just trying to be nice to me to encourage people to use the server. If you really have a question, feel free to ping him at his twitter account, @PhilipFreidin.