We’re trying out a relatively new service in town called Tee Spring, with a familiar idea behind it: We’ll be “crowd funding” the first round of t-shirts for listeners of The Amp Hour! Basically it’s just us setting a threshold we must cross in terms of commitments to t-shirts.

• If 100 or more people purchase before the end of the campaign, it’s on! You’ll get your t-shirt in time for Hamvention or Bay Area Maker Faire! (if you’re in the US)
• If we don’t make it, we’ll give other ways for people to buy shirts on an “on demand” basis. The low volume shirts will be roughly $10 more than the shirts offered here (dependent on shipping)
• The campaign is set to end April 29th and you won’t be charged until we meet our goal.
• If this campaign is successful, we’ll try similar ones in the future with other colors and graphics/ideas.

If you have any questions, leave a comment below or shoot us an email at [email protected]

Click the picture above or follow this link to Tee Spring to participate in the campaign!

We’ve been dragging this out for far too long, but wanted to finally share the t-shirt design we like best. We hope to have a few designs released  before the big shows coming up in May (Maker Faire, Hamvention, HIW) and encourage everyone to try to wear a shirt there (easier to find each other!).

We will have other designs available in the near future as well, but check out what one of our designers cooked up for us:

Let us know what you think! We’ll have the link to the store soon!

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Thanks to our sponsor, Via Designer and the folks at Triad Semiconductor! Check out ViaDesigner.com/TheAmpHour for a free trial of the software for a year and start designing your custom, low cost ASIC for mixed signal designs!

• Dave has been cleaning up his lab. Do you have a messy or clean lab? Send us pictures!
• It seems like with the amount of stuff Dave grabs from the trash room, he could appear on the US show Hoarders one day.
• It was tax day when Chris and Dave recorded. How do you deal with business income?
• Gold has been dropping recently on the markets. Is that a good thing for buying connectors?
• What about buying parts with lots of copper? Does that lower the Seebeck Effect, the primary mechanism in thermocouples?
  
• Many chips are moving towards a copper metalization layer, not just high end processors anymore.
• Dave and Chris both agree this is interesting tech, but is not moving towards chip printing.
• When there are more robots, will there be less human resource issues? Will robot suicide be as big a problem at Foxconn as human worker suicide?
• UBM has a slight shakeup lately. Test and Measurement World is shutting down.
• EE Times no longer has a print edition and hasn’t since the beginning of the year apparently. Design East (in Boston) has also been cancelled.
• Though they are primarily going to an online model, Dave reminds bloggers to not sell out.
• The MAKE Hardware Innovation Workshop has a great speaker list again this year. They’re also taking applications for people to show off previously unshown prototypes to investors and others at the workshop. You have until April 19th to submit your idea.
• If you’re really looking to dig into a design, you can design an analog circuit in your garage for less than $3K (but you’ll have to wait 4 months!)
• How do you teach the importance of iteration?
• Listeners asked about how to get started with FPGAs. Aside from pinging many of the resources already out there (Papilio, Xess, Digilent), Dave suggests to start with existing projects. Chris suggests to try and get ahold of softcore processor kits if you can afford them.
• If none of those work for you, head over to the EEVblog forum and ask your specific questions
• Kenny asks about choosing an op amp for a ultrasonic application.
• App notes are hard! Dave’s post about buying a new computer took 2.5 hours and that was without testing or graphs or anything!
• This video about the origin of negative feedback, as told by its inventor, Harold Black is one of many awesome ones available on the ATT Tech Channel.
  

The t-shirts are coming! Hopefully by this week or next! Thanks again to everyone for your patience!

Thanks to epSos.de for the picture of the gold coins.

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Many thanks to our sponsor, Triad Semiconductor! They are giving listeners of The Amp Hour a free 1-year trial of their ViaDesigner software (a $500 value)! Just enter the code ‘amp100′ at registration. Awesome!

• Paul Otellini from Intel made $19 million last year.
• The satisfaction of seeing something made is a good goal to shoot for in a job, maybe more so than money?
• Dave will be doing an Ignite talk later this month. The last time Dave gave a talk (below) he just winged it!

• Chris had a hard time writing his Maker Faire talk (and a harder time presenting it)

• We’ve been going for 2.5 years now! Crazy!
• Setting deadlines for yourself can be difficult http://pandodaily.com/2013/04/05/ten-websites-that-teach-coding-and-a-bunch-of-other-things/
• 5 tips from a former Apple hardware employee (mostly from the mfg side).
• Dave has done a video showing the 2 layer board manufacturing process.

• “Crisis couriers” is how Fedex started. “Why would anyone need a package in 24 hours?”
• If you’re into military tech, this new laser from the US Navy is terrifying and awesome. Lots of cool systems surely integrated to allow it to happen (Tracking, cooling, power, etc)
• Mike Harrison has been playing with lower power lasers.
• The PETMAN robot from Boston Dynamics is super creepy.
• Markings have officially started disappearing from Yageo resistors. While this decision was likely driven by cost in high volume production, it hurts for prototyping.
• Chris is disappointed current sources aren’t real and how that can mess up SPICE sims.
• Perhaps we should have a T shirt slogan: “Current sources aren’t real”?
• Should we bring back WotW? This week Jose writes in showing off his bench (which was confusing until we got to the messy pictures!).
• Should we bring back CotW? This week we talk about the LT6110, a chip that helps compensate when pushing power over thin wires.
• Dave and the EEVblog forum have been investigating wonky behavior in the LT3080 (which Dave used on his PSU). Maybe Bob Dobkin will write us another email about it? (a highlight of our radio show so far!)
• What are the effects of top down design decisions, like this one in Russian metro card readers?

We hardly ever (never?) get to all the links we’d like to. You can find the other links on our subreddit or comment on or submit your own! If you like the show, also please remember to give us reviews on iTunes and to leave comments below, on the subreddit or on the EEVblog forum. Thanks!

Many thanks to krossbow for the picture showing us just how green the grass can be.

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• Chris was notified (2x) that he has the opportunity to purchase Google Glass…for $1500. Dave and Chris Mims are both confused about this.
• There is news that Foxconn is planning on building them in the United States.
• Is it worthwhile to support your local economy for that reason alone? Or should the focus be on the business?
• Could Chris pay with a bag of pennies or dimes? The former would weight 900+ lbs! The latter, 75.
• Avoirdupois is a unit of measurement that neither Dave nor Chris had ever heard of.
• Chris just got back from a long weekend in NYC, where he got a tour of ITP, NYC Resistor and Adafruit. Thanks to everyone who showed him around!
• TinkerCAD is shutting down and moving on. Are other cloud apps at risk as well?
• Take a moment of silence the next time you read the Errata section of a datasheet. It’s likely that many hours were lost to discover it.
• Dave and Chris (and Jeff!) made the EE Times twitter list. Durn shame that they’ve erected a registration wall. UPDATE: The registration wall is no longer triggering for us.
• The tech content is still the best stuff on EE Times/EDN. Chris liked this article about ADCs and the specifics of ENOB/SINAD/etc, in addition to the classic articles by Bonnie Baker in the “Baker’s Dozen” series.
• Video tutorials are also a great way to promote products. Teach us and we’ll consider your product more often (the applications model). Chris enjoys the videos by Matt Duff of Analog Devices.

• Dave has seen tech videos gone wrong, specifically the over produced and expensive Altium Tech Tonight clips

• The survey results are in and the winners have been chosen (listen to the last ten minutes to hear the winners). Keep an eye out for the summary of the survey later this week. And congrats to our winners!

Thanks to Cesar Harada for the picture of the impromptu Google Glass…