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• We lost two greats in the past week, Neil Armstrong and Hans Camenzind.
• Oneirophoros — n. Bringer of Dreams
• Chris has been continuing his Chip Report TV project, check out the video below for the “buck fiddy” reference (Starting at about 6 minutes)
  
• XKCD has a comic about the number of people that have set foot on another planet diminishing.
• Jeff Hammerbacher was a former facebook employee quoted on BusinessWeek.com as saying, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”
• Our links for the show now live at reddit.com/r/theamphour. Much like the discuss server, you can add, vote and comment on each story for the coming shows.
• The spinnaker chip and associated boards were made to help model the human brain. That’s a lotta chips.
• DARPA is looking into analog computers as a next generation computing platform.
• Dave enjoyed the “NASA and we know it video”, lampooning the lander crew and their quirks.
  
• With ever increasing costs and needs for high volume chips, will large companies “insource” their chip manufacturing? Unlikely.
• The Apple and Samsung court case is over and was annoying.
• The 21st annual obfuscated C contest has started and runs until Sept 14th. Dave thinks this is a waste of time.
• This is done in hardware as well sometimes. People put in fake circuits either on the board or in an ASIC.
• Sometimes code doesn’t need to be obfuscated, like for people that don’t know how to properly write code. The Engineering Commons discussed scientists and non-programmers writing code.
• Chris has been working with the BeagleBone, trying to make a hardware development platform.
• Dave thinks the Bus Pirate might work for simple SPI communication.
• Other times, the best digital platform is the one you used last time.
• And the best development board is your final production board, with the assumption it might just be wrong.
• OSRAM has developed a footprint to make it more compatible with competitors devices.
• Old school Motorola modules for TVs made footprint matching with common tubes impossible (starting about 12:50 or so)
  
• Speaking of tough to find parts, EMSL showcases a 23kV, 15A fuse. Wowsa!
• If you’re a Tesla fan, The Oatmeal is helping raise money for a Tesla museum. Donate and get cool stuff!
• Or check out The Oatmeal’s (raunchy) comparison of Edison and Tesla.

Be sure to check out our new subreddit for The Amp Hour to see any stories we didn’t get to and contribute your own for upcoming shows!

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Welcome, Larry Sears!

• Our first in-studio guest ever!
• Larry is currently an adjunct lecturer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (Chris’ alma mater)
• After school, he was a teaching assistant and soon after started a design and build company called Hexagram.
  
• One of the earlier products was working on the MeisterMatic600, a computerized embroidery machine
  
• Since he wanted to develop a turnkey, proprietary product for someone, he chose gas meter reading.
• Initially, the wired device required a person to walk up to a wall and take a reading
  
• Later, they “bet the farm” on the STAR system, which worked with cellphones and low frequency RF
  
• Hexagram was bought by ESCO in 2006
• Shortly thereafter, Larry set up an endowment to ensure students would have a place to tinker.
  
• Larry is working on a new project at Case, think
  (previously mentioned in episode 53 of The Amp Hour)
• This will be a makerspace/incubator/classroom housed in a 50K+ sq ft building.

Many thanks to Larry for making the trip to Chris’s house for the interview! You can reach him at [email protected]

Thanks to Larry and Case.edu for the images.

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• The curiosity has landed! And the crowd goes wild!
• The electronics onboard are quite rugged, but kinda pokey.
• They wrote more than 2.5 million lines of C, 500,000 just for the landing!
• Does this mean more kids will learn C? Chris is dismayed his alma mater is teaching LabView as “programming” (though it’s good for other stuff!)
• Maybe if Curiosity had crashed due to unit conversion again, they would finally push metric in the US?
  
                  (Thanks to Randal Monroe…for everything he’s ever done) 
• Chris is sorry for the mess with the servers. It should be fixed now.
• Dave did a new video about “The Unwritten Rules of Open Source Hardware”
  
• The video was kicked off by the Tangibot project on Kickstarter, a clone of the MakerBot (pictured, top)
• Akiba of Freaklabs wrote an interesting piece about this as well.
• Dave and Chris might take the “paid commenting” model public. A new Kickstarter project!
• Chris has backed the 99 percent invisible podcast (a great podcast about design and architecture), which raised $170K on Kickstarter.
• The top 10 chips for power aren’t all names you’d expect. High volume parts aren’t always accessible to small run electronics.
• The India Blackout may have been caused by an upgrade, in addition to the usual stealing of power.
• There will be a lot more growth in the power sector in coming years. IEEE Spectrum says that’s where the jobs are (or will be).
• Chris learned that to do isolated power, you don’t need a flyback per se. You can use a regular buck controller/converter, a transformer and an isolator.
• Sick of Kickstarter yet? Too bad! Go check out this rideable hexapod robot. The bumper sticker is awesome.

Thanks to retrocactus for the MakerBot photo

This past week on Thursday, our server had an unwelcome guest. He decided it would be fun to send out emails about C1al1s and such from our server. As such, we had it shut down while we took care of it. Due to circumstances beyond our control (until we really started yelling) it was quite unfortunate how long it took to get our server back under our control. To our webhost’s benefit, they did a full restore of a recent backup, which allowed us to circumvent needing to hunt down and destroy the scripts that were affecting us.

Regardless, thank you for your patience. We hope to not have these issues in the future.

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Welcome, Tony Long (@mmwave) of ReactanceLabs.com!

• How can you get started with microwave RF? Tony wrote a post about that!
• Dave couldn’t make it today, he’s out geeking out about the Curiosity landing
  
• The different parts of the atmosphere absorb 1+ GHz at different levels.
• There is a broad range of 1+ GHz bands available to ham operators.
• Tony will be shown on the TWiT show HamNation, which was filmed at the ”Tune Up Day”
  
• He is also part of the San Bernadino Microwave Society.
• Some of the chips on board are made by Hittite, TriQuint, MiniCircuits
• Wire bonding video:
  
• Tony posted a BUNCH of photos (links go to the Flickr galleries)
  • His 47 GHz build
    
    
  • His 79 GHz build
    
    
• Tony is about to start selling a kit of the frequency synthesizer kit! Next will be a multiplier, though likely not a kit.

Many thanks to Tony for being on the show this week! He was great! Check out his products and buy them! And get involved in the hobby!