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Thanks to our sponsors at Club Jameco! Head over to The Amp Hour section of their site to see the kit we discussed this week and to find out more about submitting a kit for a coupon or for revenue if it’s chosen by the community.

• The USB DVB-T (such as this one sold on Amazon) is a great way to learn more about the radio spectrum, even without a ham license (because you’re only receiving signals, not sending them). The software defined radio inside works with programs like SDRsharp (Windows) or GQRX (Mac, Linux). Thanks to Matt Richardson’s video for alerting us to this!
• If you haven’t seen Commander Chris Hadfield doing “Space Oddity” by David Bowie (from the ISS!), you’re missing out!
  
• “At least we’re not Detroit!” is no longer valid. They have a new Robocop statue. And a rapidly recovering auto sector!
• Not from Detroit, but from Michigan (Grand Rapids), thegeekgroup.org have a great YouTube channel with lots of well produced videos on electronics and machining.
• A promotional video from DASIX was recently posted online.
  
• Chris has been shopping for a scope and finally realized the value of the upgradable firmware (it looks “cheaper” initially).
• Dave and the EEVblog forum were discussing why the “Alt Trig” was removed from modern oscilloscopes.
• Former guest Alan Wolke surmised that the free frame capability allows you to “trigger” by freezing the screen with a long capture window. He also explained it in one of his videos from a year and a half ago
  
• PCBweb is one of the first CAD tools with a built in Digikey library. The online tool also looks nice (though there is no desktop analog yet).
• Thingsquare Code allows for you to compile and distribute your code online (and track revisions). The reason this makes sense is because you’re already buying into their platform.
• SapphireOS is an Internet of Things campaign that just launched on Kickstarter. This was also mentioned by Ryan Brown when he was on the show.
• And speaking of Kickstarter, the Othermill is a PCB milling machine with a 4″x5″x2″ pocket. OK for many boards you’d want to do at home, but chemical etching could do the same for many things (though you could also engrave with the Othermill). Chris dove more into machining but has a tool capable of still making PCBs (1 mil accuracy).
• What kind of PCB artwork have you seen? Anything as crazy as these?
• Jeremy Hong sent in a picture of his basement lair, which looks great!
• Harrymj from the /r/TheAmpHour subreddit submitted the lab he works in at Stanford for the solar car team. Nice gear and a bonus Delorean!

Be sure to take pictures with other if you’re attending Maker Faire or Hamvention!

Thanks to Richard Cox for the pictures of where all our future programs will live…in the cloud!

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Welcome, Bob Davidson of Ambient Sensors!

• One of their current project is a concussion detector built in to the chin strap of football helmets.
• This involves testing with a “head banger” that can impart forces up to 150G’s!
• They use a MEMS accelerometer and a low cost microprocessor, in order to try and make it affordable for high schools. The processor can assess the likelihood of the impact meeting the head injury criterion.
• Bob got his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and did his undergrad at Johns Hopkins University (in xray astronomy!). A full listing of Bob’s past work can be found on the About page of the Ambient Sensors site.
• He is also now an adjunct professor at Boise State University, teaching engineering stats, finite element analysis and electromagnetics.
• For a good portion of his career so far, Bob worked in research at HP in the hard disk division.
• In the early days the plattens were spun using washing machine motors! They weren’t cheap either, 400 MB for $25K!
• Bob has been a ham radio operator since ’67. His callsign (and twitter handle) is WA7IUT
• Early boards were done using tape on paper, so he is amazed at the ability to make boards these days (using tools like EAGLE). Some of the ones he has been making have Bluetooth Low Energy.
• Modules such as the Bluegiga BLE112 prevent needing to get a product recertified for FCC compliance. Jeff Rowberg has been really helpful in getting Bob started.
• These modules can act as a serial peripheral or can act as a standalone using BG Script.
• Bob’s startup in the early 2000′s was a consumer product for high end entertainment. They pivoted to working with security cameras.
• Back at HP, one of Bob’s patent’s covers the method of how they measured the disk during rotation. They used heterodyne interferometry phase measurement. Crazy. Bob also had a publication about this, “Applications of Heterodyne Interferometry to Disc Drive Technology”
• During Clayton Christiansen‘s PhD work which later became, “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, Clayton shadowed Bob. The march of progress in disk drives was one of the main topics in that book.
• Bob was an early user of ARPAnet, the precursor to the modern internet. He was upset when they started commercializing it.
• For low cost test equipment, Dave’s comparison video of the new and old Rigol scope has Bob tempted.
  
• Bob is a fan of OSHW and has attended the Open Hardware Summit in the past. This coming year it will be in Boston.
• Some of his projects to give back to the community involve energy harvesting. This was implemented in a project monitoring a grape vineyard.
• Back in Vietnam days, Bob was a member of the Military Auxiliary Radio Program, helping patch soldiers back to loved ones at home.

Thanks again to Bob for being on the show! We’re excited to see what he works on next!

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• Lots of old, awesome ads for computers! Definitely a different age of advertising and definitions of good taste.
• There is rumor that there will be a Mad Men like show written to take place during the early days of NASA!
• Magazines used to attach project PCBs to the covers. Dave says this technique was started by Colin Mitchell of Talking Electronics
  
• This also used to happen with CDs/Cassettes/disks for video game and software magazines (later on).
• We will now be publishing our RSS feed to Twitter and Facebook of links for /r/TheAmpHour
• We are using a site called IFTTT (If this, then that), which also has implication for connected devices and the internet of things. Thanks to Nick Pinkston of the /r/hwstartups subreddit for the advice on how to set it up!
• Do we have a moral imperative to sourcing from places that treat their workers well?  The link is now broken to the original article asking this question, but it refers to the recent collapse of a factory in Bangladesh. Do we as designers have the ability and the drive to go to ethical workplaces? Or does that hurt countries even more?
• Moreover, is the SMD nature of electronics manufacturing becoming such that low cost countries don’t matter as much anymore?
• One thing you need no matter where you manufacture is an engineer optimizing for the pick and place maching. Changing footprints to optimize speed and accuracy of part placement is common…Dave used to do it!
• Speaking of SMD, why having through-hole parts (pth) gone away yet? Cost is an obvious one, as pointed out by Windell from EMSL on reddit. Kitmaking is another one.
• Another t-shirt in the works? “I’m not cheap, I’m optimizing my engineering solution”
• Cost can be relative. This new shield for helping to learn on the Arduino is retailing (with the Arduino) for $60, whereas a Raspberry Pi goes for $35. Volume explains a lot of the disparity, but not all.
• newcomers-byob/
• Former guest of the show, Zach “Hoeken” Smith has been working like crazy on his BotQueue project. As a regular creator, he suggests that people go for publishing online to protect ideas vs trying to patent them.
• A throwback version of Shonky Product of the Week! The old standby of fearing the radiation in your phone…and paying through the nose to “protect yourself”.
• Tuomas writes in about his poorly lit, messy bench. The perfect prototype of what we expect from a bench! He also has great projects posted to his blog, be sure to check those out.
• And since Chris can’t determine which scope is which, he asked former guest of the show Alan Wolke to do a walking tour of his Tek-laden bench on his wonderfully informative and entertaining YouTube channel.
  
• Chris is gearing up for Hamvention in Dayton. He bought a Handi-Talkie (HT) radio from Amazon, the Baofeng UV-5R+.
• How can we branch out from the necessity of narrow of experiences of careers? Recruiters favor experience in very similar fields because that’s what employers ask for!
• Have you made any radical shifts within the technical side of electronics? What kind of shift have you made? Let us know in the comments!
• Dave found out about a new ST Micro part called a “lab on a chip”. These kinds of disease detection circuits aren’t super new, but biological processes are becoming more common on silicon.
• Biology also might help make the next generation of silicon chips: DNA based lithography allows researchers to etch graphene!
• At the end of their advertising run, we’d like to thank Triad Semiconductor and the ViaDesigner team for sponsoring us! If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out the FREE software you can get access to for a year (actually 13 months) at ViaDesigner.com/TheAmpHour

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Thanks to our continuing sponsor, Triad Semiconductor! They make a lot of what we’re doing possible! Check out ViaDesigner.com/TheAmpHour to get a free year subscription!

• We have a t-shirt, which you can now buy! Get in on the low cost initial purchase, buy before April 29th!
• We hired a couple freelancers off of People Per Hour to do our artwork (and previously our transcriptions). Quality often correlates with price! We decided not to go with 99 Designs, though that’s another good option.
• T-shirts should arive in time for both Hamvention and Maker Faire. Please wear them! Find other listeners!
• The Dayton Hamvention (sponsored by DARA) will be a huge set of events and a swap meet that will make the Wyong field day that Dave attended look like a garage sale!

• Chris will try to check out the museum at Edwards Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
• Chris will be on the lookout for mullets in Dayton. They and rat tails characterize wonky hairstyles from the 80s.
• Dave just did his Ignite talk in Sydney about videoblogging

• It was started by Bre Pettis (of MakerBot) and Brady Forrest in Seattle in 2006.
• Seth Godin has a good post on how to do concise, impactful presentations.
• Do crowdfunded tech projects sometimes bamboozle people? The EEVblog forum is skeptical of the Mu Optics hosted on IndieGoGo.
• Chris reminds everyone that EEstor still hasn’t delivered (and likely never will).
• Bamboozling is one of the major drawbacks of the yet-to-be-implemented JOBS act in the US, which allows small investment by individual investors.
• The ZionEyez project is another failure, with definite overtones of shadiness.
• Projects that are simply late (yet still promise to deliver) have some pundits claiming that Silicon Valley’s hardware renaissance is stalling.
• Bunnie has been finding some interesting stuff in the China marketplace, this time a $12 cell phone.
• Chris worries that super low cost hardware will affect all of us from an employment perspective, but Dave assures him that very little employment comes from the consumer space.
• What about you? Do you work in consumer electronics? If not, which field do you work in? Check out our survey at the bottom of this post.
• The new Beaglebone Black looks great! It’s now $45 to get closer to the price of the Raspberry Pi and has many many more I/O. Chris is lukewarm on the Cloud9 IDE and Bonescript.
• Light pens were how people used to interact with screens and persisted where Chris used to work in the fab.
• Bill and Mara got married in the geekiest way: They soldered as part of their vows! Awesome!
• WBotW!
  • Chris
    • 
  • Yi
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  • Jan
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• Survey! What kind of industry do you work in?

Please consider supporting the show by buying one of our t-shirts! More colors/designs will be available 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.