This coming week, we’re pleased to welcome Chris Anderson!

Chris is the editor of Wired and has been for 11 years. He is also a co-Founder of DIY drones, a 20,000+ strong community of UAV enthusiasts and also runs the commercial arm, 3D robotics!  He has also written books about the growth of the internet including The Long Tail and Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Later this year he will be releasing a book about the Maker Movement called, “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution“.

Please head over to our discussion forum to ask questions for the show coming up this week! We can’t wait to talk with him!

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Just when you thought the names of episodes couldn’t get any weirder…

• US economy seems to be diving again, hopefully it will not seriously impact the electronics industry.
• If it does, Chris thinks startups will be even more reliant on Angel Investors like Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail)
• Is DIY finally going mainstream, as Wired suggested recently? An article from Futurismic seems to think this is a bad thing and that money coming in will ultimately hurt the “Maker Movement”.
• One bad thing could be that people could license their projects as Open Source Hardware (like the Penguino) … but then not be open!
• One thing that comes with more visibility…money. And the US government is funding small startups, some of which might be OSHW. Modeled after a program at Stanford.
• University of Michigan is also starting a program for burgeoning startups, granting new Masters of Entrepreneurship Degrees.
• Have you ever seen an electronics-inspired license plate out on the road before?

• Embedded Eric sent in the entry he submitted to the Touchstone Semi design contest that is wrapping up. A 4.4 uW 555 clone that can run at 18 Hz. Awesome!
• Shoutouts:
• Our pal and regular guest, Jeff Keyzer of MightyOhm, has a new OSHW Geiger Counter Kit. He’ll be showing one off while he’s at the Chaos Communication Camp in Berlin.
• Chris’s good friend Dave Young just finished running a program teaching high school kids electronics over 6 weeks. The kids have written up their impressions of the program and they are/will be posted to the Blue Stamp Engineering blog portion of the site.
• Shonky Product of the Week:
• First pointed out on the EEVblog forums, ”Fuel Savers” for cars seem like an utter load of bunk.
• Forum member oPossum did a great review of a ‘popular’ one and found a few passives and a linear regulator.
• This Day in Nerd History:
• Neville Mott passed away in 1996. He was a theoretical physicist who helped discover some key points in metal/oxide transitions in semiconductors. He won the 1977 prize in physics and the “Mott Transition” is named after him.
• Video of Dr. Mott from 1985, along with many other Nobel Prize winners, is available from the BBC.
• Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, writes about the need for boredom to inspire creativity. Too many devices preclude boredom these days.
• A writer at Gizmodo maintains that creativity is still possible and cites the design of the iPhone as an innovative product. What is the iPhone designer like though?
• 
  

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!