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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!
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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.

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!