Posts Tagged "EDN"

June 20, 2011

The Amp Hour #48 — Posthumous Pease Porridge

Though it’s been a sad week for the field of analog engineering, we want to honor Bob Pease and Jim Williams’ passing. They were wonderful educators, engineers and people and we felt honored to even talk about them on the show. Please share any comments you might have about either of these two great men in the comments section.

Chris just returned from a friend’s wedding and wrote an engineer’s guide to Vegas.
Ivan Hamilton was nice enough to send along a copy of Silicon Chip magazine. It’s a great! Ivan has some great projects of his own on his website!
Bob Pease died while driving home from Jim Williams funeral, doubling the loss of great analog engineers.
- Paul Rako has a touching obituary and a comment section with many people sharing fun stories from the past
- Bill Schweber also has a great piece about Bob, along with the story we read on air about how he resigned from Philbrick.
- If you’re in the Bay Area and would like to attend, EDN is remembering both Bob and Jim, tomorrow, June 21st.
If you’re looking for a feed-only option to find out when the latest Amp Hour is posted, check out The Amp Hour twitter account.
If twitter isn’t enough, we could buy a Top Level Domain (TLD) for $185,000. How about theshow.theamphour? or We’re.nerds?
Friend of the show, Jeri Ellsworth, has been working on a great Software Defined Radio in recent videos. Chris tries to explain (wiki does better).
The price of LEDs to drop 90% in 4 years? How?
Dave needs a new camera. Is he at the high end? Or does he need to go higher?
Perhaps he should buy a pair of these videocamera sunglasses, being funded by Kickstarter. Could be a good way around this Apple DRM-at-concerts idea, recently patented.
New Android-specific processor being made by a fabless house in China? Could be similar to the ill-fated Java-based processor idea.
Other chip companies playing nice? AMD and ARM striking up deals to make chips talk better.
Get free copies of AutoDesk to get started with their software. Good for the hobbyists!
Other hobbyists are heading out to space! Awesome!

We’ll keep Jim and Bob’s families in our hearts. Be sure to read some of their old app notes (mentioned in the show) or watch some old videos (also mentioned in the show) to remember just how awesome they both were!

December 28, 2010

The Amp Hour #23 — The Innovation Speculation

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WotW
- Adam C of Onecircuit.com submitted the first workbench of the week submission by video!
- Bob of Ambientsensors.com took a picture of his bench with his pup, including a signed HP 300A!
- Lieven Blancke of Belgium submitted two pictures of his 7 year old maker son at their bench. Also included a picture of their recent project.
- Kevin Smith from the UK sends in pictures of his compact bench (and one in B&W for the old school look). Cool setup!
Shoutouts
- Jon Oxer has been dedicated to improving shieldlist.org, even donating Arduinos to others. (Correction: Arduino Proto Shields. Still, very awesome)
Rants
- EDN’s Hot 100 list could be something cool…if it had any credibility. When all the links are directly to a press release, who believes them?
Discussion Points
- Jeri and Mike came up with a new unit of measure. A unit of annoyance known as The Jones.
- Nice piece on Leo Laporte in the NYT detailing the advertising for all his podcasts on Twit.tv. Chris and Dave are veeeery interested (but not expecting much).
- IBM released a list of 5 innovations coming in the next 5 years. We don’t agree with all of them, but they’re not bad! And we’re looking forward to 3D holographic technology for user interface design.
- Speaking of the future, even with the ridiculous amount of data that could some day be stored by spintronics, we’ll run out of usable matter for storing data in about 600 years (if we have similar rates of technology advances).

September 20, 2010

The Amp Hour #9 — From Boston In Boxers?

No, not in boxers, but definitely from Boston! On a $10 internet connection no less! Highway robbery! Next week we’ll do a round up of my trip to ESC Boston and the Open Hardware Summit, but for this week we stayed within the usual tech bounds. The links mentioned are below and as always, comments are welcome and encouraged!

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Shoutouts
- Can you find Dave in a tinfoil hat?
- Ben Heck’s new show looks great! Nice job!
- Wired has a new (?) show as well. Dave doesn’t like the intro stuff but the content is awesome! This clip is Chris Anderson documenting people from the DIY drones community.
- Speaking of, Quadcopter based control systems keep improving. Amazing!
Events
- Electronica is coming up in Munich, Germany in November. It’s huge! If sponsors want to send an awesome radio duo, inquire within.
Discussion Points
- Jon from the EEV Blog forums asks about Absolute Maximum Ratings and when to use them.
Rant
- If you can come up with circuit ideas, the bar is pretty low at EDN apparently. We didn’t see much special about a 7 segment hooked up to a LUT, but they paid for the idea!
  - We’ll talk more about how to publish your ideas in the 10th episode of The Amp Hour. We can’t believe we’re almost to double digits!

That’s all for now! There was more to the show, including quite a bit of true off-the-cuff content. If we missed any links, feel free to add them in the comments or let us know and we’ll update the main page. Thanks for listening!

August 23, 2010

The Amp Hour #5 — Girl Power

Today’s show got a little heated, it’s true. We went over a lot of things, but none more than a recent campaign to try and get more young women interested in engineering…in a not-so-great way. We welcome all debate about the issue in the comments or a link to a discussion elsewhere. We also covered a lot of other industry thoughts. On all these topics, please be sure to let us know if you like the direction the show is moving or not. We just like hearing from you.

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Shoutouts
- (Found on Hacked Gadget’s humongous list of links) Tech Dirt is a great site for a lot of internet type issues…just be careful, it’ll make you really mad at lawyers and entitled-feeling people around the world. The example story is about professor who says 24 hour news should get protections so people can’t link to it. NEWSFLASH: The internet is good for weirdos like Dave and Chris and bad for people trying to make money the same way newspapers were run 50 years ago.
- Kickstarter…is awesome. Crowdfunding/microfunding for all types of artistic and technical endeavors.The new Lasersaur project was funded ($20,000!) through Kickstarter. Be sure to click through and check out all the awesome projects that are on the horizon. You can help fund them and maybe get a cool souvenir.
Tech News
- Stanford change solar cell design with a new process paradigm “photon enhanced thermionic emission,” semiconducting material with a thin layer of the metal cesium. High temp, could reach up to 60% percent efficiency! (Currently around 30% in some academic settings)
- Chips are still hard to get! Dave mentions that the big distributors such as Digikey and Mouser seem to be keeping up though. We also point out the importance of designing with part availability in mind.
- Money trickling back to chip startups. There will always be money flowing to where venture capitalists can see a return on their investment. The real problem is bootstrapping a chip start up is next to impossible so funding is one of the only options available. We also referenced the reader comments from last time concerning making 10 micron feature size chips at home and encouraged people to give it a shot. Who are we to say what people can or can’t do.
- Margery Conner (EDN) links us through to a theregister.co.uk story about the cluelessness of people who want to “go green”. It’s amazing how little people understand about the scale difference of mW, W, kW and MW.
- Design News is just announcing the TI launchpad. Is the hobbyist industry going to lead the professional industry?
Rants
- Dave dislikes the EDN Survey, done by Canon Communications and KMPS group. Why do they do surveys like that?
- A horrible concept for a new reality show about women in engineering.
  - Women shouldn’t need to be enticed with “style” to buy into engineering. That just makes it stereotypical, regardless of women wanting to preserve “identity”.
  - They should encourage young women with programs like MAKE, encouraging curiosity in the sciences from a young age.
  - Instead, show women regardless of how they look or dress doing really awesome things!
  - Model it off people like Jeri Ellsworth and Kari Byron. Focus on what you can do with engineering and sciences, not that it needs to be “stylish”.
- Why do the people closest to the money get paid the most? Is this a fundamental problem with engineering (salary at least)?
Projects
- At Jeff Keyzer’s request (talking about projects): Chris’s idea for a simple temp controlled wire (DC based, no AC supplies so we don’t need relays). Basically just a copper wire with known resistance and a power FET (or many paralleled FETs) with a PID controller. Saw that Lady Ada built a PID for their reflow oven so that could be a good starting point.
- No updates on Dave’s mysterious project!
Discussion Points
- Transformers vs. switchers. Are the former headed out? We don’t want to say “the transformer is dead” of course…we’re not Chris Anderson talking about the web or anything (sorry, couldn’t resist!)… But there seems to be more focus on the switching side of things because of portability of devices.
- Fake Caps!