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This week focused mainly around building a kit business, namely keeping costs down, keeping revenues in check and how to license your project.

• Jigish linked to us from his site. Thanks!
• The Nottingham Hackerspace, Nottinghack, was pushed out of their old space and needs help funding a new one.
• Can hackerspaces thrive in a non-urban setting?
• $37 Million worth of flash chips were stolen! And the dumdums were caught when they tried to sell them!
  Facebook has the details behind a new datacenter online. Looks like quite the fun engineering problem to get it all powered.
• Chris is going to ESC and will be reporting for Element 14. Also doing some video from the show floor with Jeri Ellsworth.
• Jonathon Straub wondering about the merits of starting a kit business for his board etching controller entry for the 555 contest.
• Dave was offered $1000 to do videos walking people through the aspects of board design, start to finish.
• What kind of license should be used for home projects? Here at The Amp Hour, we like the Open Source Hardware License or sometimes the CC-NC license.
  • Ladyada of adafruit has an older article of the benefits of OSHW over CC-NC
• More IP cases being pushed in China, but not to anyones benefit.
• Texas Instruments has been “deputizing” people to be unofficial spokespersons for the company on social media outlets. Could have some interesting side effects, but they need to keep it laissez-faire.

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Jeff Keyzer of Mightyohm.com joins us this week to talk electronics and his new comic book!

• Jeff Keyzer and Mitch Altman and Andie Nordgren just put out a comic book called “Soldering is easy!”. Great resource for those just starting out and a preview of a book to be published later this year.
• Jeff will be at the Bay Area Maker Faire next month, teaching classes.
• He also will be at the Choas Communication Camp in Germany later this year (the place where the Hackerspace was born).
• Chris found out about all this from the Hackerspaces Mailing List.
• Dave is unabashedly asking people to vote for him in the Tektronix Scope Contest! Dave’s video is about the piezoelectric effect in probes.
• Henrik (@hspalm), one of our WOTW alums, writes in about his new project to characterize DIY shipping costs. Could be a good launchpad for a wiki-type site and drive some change at these organizations.
• Digikey has a new community that seems destined to flop right out of the gate.
• Instead, they should try to be more like AVRfreaks or BeagleBoard, which are more targeted and detached from the company.
• Electric Vehicles
  • Chris had the opportunity to hear Bob Simpson, of EVdrive.com, talk about his conversion and upcoming business venture.
  • New idea is V2G or Vehicle-2-Grid, uses cars as load balancing while they are parked in the garage. Don Tuite has a good rebuttal to the practicality of this in a recent Electronic Design article.
  • Why doesn’t the Toyota Prius have plug-in capability?
• Dave is putting up new lighting in the lab. LED for total lumens needed is still impractical. Dave went with fluorescent to cost and light output.
• And finally, in the WTF column, the US Navy is working on a new  lighting scheme: a laser weapon! Good gravy!

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Chris apologizes for the poor audio quality on his end, it was a new setup (again) while the bench is being finished.

• What’s your favorite movie about engineering? Piggybacking on an article by Bill Schewber article from EEtimes.
• Bjork pulls apart a TV and tells us about it. WTF.
  • “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you”
• Intel’s new fab is going down to 14nm! Holy hell!
  • Why Arizona? Why not somewhere with water? Like Cleveland! (we promise, the water isn’t on fire anymore)
• NY wants to bring an engineering school and high tech to NYC? If cost was no issue, perhaps?
• Dave reviews another scope and we talk about system level design
• The battle rages on! An updated roadmap for printed electronics! Chris tells Dave to look for low cost fares to the US!
• You can print wax masks for chips now, perhaps another good step for etching.
• A new podcast exists for hackerspaces, and not just on iTunes as we said in the show.
• Another shout out and place to hang out, the Savage Circuits chat is on the 1st and 3rd Fridays of the month.
• None of these are as big as the Engadget TV show. How do they get so many people? Good for them!
• Dave talks about an article he read about a mathematician that predicts lottery tickets.
• Freescale going public again after having been private for less than 4 years. Are chip companies too big to fail?

A new Amp Hour initiative:

Chip companies should publish their most popular parts. This would allow smaller manufacturers to target chips they know aren’t going away any time soon. This would help on price and longevity of the part for the designer and would allow manufacturing efficiencies for the chip maker as more people gravitate towards these more popular parts. Think about it, chip companies!