• A new t-shirt idea? Dave didn’t understand the reference to “All your base are belong to us“
• Dave’s op amp problem turned out to be from the rails (or so he says!). The “burden of experience” had him testing (and had Chris guessing) at all the wacky things it COULD be before checking what it actually was.
• Learning how to read schematics comes with time. Bob Pease schematics were notorious for being hard to read.
• Would there be interest in doing obfuscated circuit contests?
• Chris just got back from Hamvention, down in Dayton OH. It was great!There was a meetup on Saturday evening, where some t-shirt wearing listeners came to hang out. They were awesome!
  
  Thanks to Bill Boyer (far right) for the picture!

• Former guests of the show Greg Charvat and Kent Lundberg were both at Hamvention! (Greg is the tall one in blue in the back in the picture above)
• eBay significantly reduced the flea market from its former glory, but the selection was still pretty wide. And there were over 24K people in attendance!
• Dave used to buy test equipment overseas and resell locally.
• Chris feels terrible for forgetting his name, but the awesome person in red directly behind Chris in the picture gifted him a challenge coin, a really cool tradition in military circles.
  • Mystery solved! It was Michael Hill! He also was the one who left his Ray Bans. Two for one!
• Dave says coins are a traditionally hidden and traded item between geocaching teams.
• Perhaps Dave should include a collectible coins as a donation level in his yet-to-be-announced Pozzible campaign?
• Thanks to our sponsor for this show, Club Jameco! Go to http://ClubJameco.com/TheAmpHour to see the J-bot kit discussed this week and to learn more about submitting your own kit idea for fun and profit!
• Arduino had some announcements at Maker Faire this week: They will be releasing a branded robot kit and a wifi based Arduino called the Yún. It will have a co-processor running a version of Linux and a wifi stack.
• Jeri Ellsworth and business partner Rick Johnson announce their new project spun out from Valve at Maker Faire.
• MAKE (and the MakerShed) will be expanding its offering and its partnership with Radio Shack. 
• Former guest, Jack Ganssle, has a great newsletter called The Embedded Muse. Someone wrote in about Partkeepr, a linux based inventory tracking system.
• How do you manage your parts? Will anyone build a vending machine for parts for Chris? Kickstarter, anyone?
• Bunnie did a great teardown of the Formlabs Form1. Can’t wait to hear more about the low cost SLA printer.
• The Intel Science Fair winners have been announced. The media over-extrapolated the chemistry project of the first runner-up, saying she created a device allowing a cell phone to charge in 20 seconds. She clarifies in an interview:
  
• The cost of school is still very prohibitive and really handcuffs many people with debt afterwards.
• A new program has been announced between Georgia Tech (a top 5 engineering school), Udacity and AT&T. They will be offering a Master’s Degree in CS for less than $7,000!
• Rapid Fire News!
  • Tinkercad is back! They were acquired by AutoDesk and will be opening up the platform again!
  • Former guest Andrew Seddon and the Circuit Hub team announced they now have support for KiCAD! Whee!
  • theonetruestickman (on reddit) submitted his workbench for WBotW. Looks like a really neat space!

Lost and found: At the end of the meetup at Hamvention, Chris found a pair of Ray Bans. If you lost a pair, please send an email to chris@theamphour.com.

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!

• 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!

• 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

• 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?

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.

Many thanks to our sponsor, Triad Semiconductor! They are giving listeners of The Amp Hour a free 1-year trial of their ViaDesigner software (a $500 value)! Just enter the code ‘amp100′ at registration. Awesome!

• Paul Otellini from Intel made $19 million last year.
• The satisfaction of seeing something made is a good goal to shoot for in a job, maybe more so than money?
• Dave will be doing an Ignite talk later this month. The last time Dave gave a talk (below) he just winged it!

• Chris had a hard time writing his Maker Faire talk (and a harder time presenting it)

• We’ve been going for 2.5 years now! Crazy!
• Setting deadlines for yourself can be difficult http://pandodaily.com/2013/04/05/ten-websites-that-teach-coding-and-a-bunch-of-other-things/
• 5 tips from a former Apple hardware employee (mostly from the mfg side).
• Dave has done a video showing the 2 layer board manufacturing process.

• “Crisis couriers” is how Fedex started. “Why would anyone need a package in 24 hours?”
• If you’re into military tech, this new laser from the US Navy is terrifying and awesome. Lots of cool systems surely integrated to allow it to happen (Tracking, cooling, power, etc)
• Mike Harrison has been playing with lower power lasers.
• The PETMAN robot from Boston Dynamics is super creepy.
• Markings have officially started disappearing from Yageo resistors. While this decision was likely driven by cost in high volume production, it hurts for prototyping.
• Chris is disappointed current sources aren’t real and how that can mess up SPICE sims.
• Perhaps we should have a T shirt slogan: “Current sources aren’t real”?
• Should we bring back WotW? This week Jose writes in showing off his bench (which was confusing until we got to the messy pictures!).
• Should we bring back CotW? This week we talk about the LT6110, a chip that helps compensate when pushing power over thin wires.
• Dave and the EEVblog forum have been investigating wonky behavior in the LT3080 (which Dave used on his PSU). Maybe Bob Dobkin will write us another email about it? (a highlight of our radio show so far!)
• What are the effects of top down design decisions, like this one in Russian metro card readers?

We hardly ever (never?) get to all the links we’d like to. You can find the other links on our subreddit or comment on or submit your own! If you like the show, also please remember to give us reviews on iTunes and to leave comments below, on the subreddit or on the EEVblog forum. Thanks!

Many thanks to krossbow for the picture showing us just how green the grass can be.

• Chris was notified (2x) that he has the opportunity to purchase Google Glass…for $1500. Dave and Chris Mims are both confused about this.
• There is news that Foxconn is planning on building them in the United States.
• Is it worthwhile to support your local economy for that reason alone? Or should the focus be on the business?
• Could Chris pay with a bag of pennies or dimes? The former would weight 900+ lbs! The latter, 75.
• Avoirdupois is a unit of measurement that neither Dave nor Chris had ever heard of.
• Chris just got back from a long weekend in NYC, where he got a tour of ITP, NYC Resistor and Adafruit. Thanks to everyone who showed him around!
• TinkerCAD is shutting down and moving on. Are other cloud apps at risk as well?
• Take a moment of silence the next time you read the Errata section of a datasheet. It’s likely that many hours were lost to discover it.
• Dave and Chris (and Jeff!) made the EE Times twitter list. Durn shame that they’ve erected a registration wall. UPDATE: The registration wall is no longer triggering for us.
• The tech content is still the best stuff on EE Times/EDN. Chris liked this article about ADCs and the specifics of ENOB/SINAD/etc, in addition to the classic articles by Bonnie Baker in the “Baker’s Dozen” series.
• Video tutorials are also a great way to promote products. Teach us and we’ll consider your product more often (the applications model). Chris enjoys the videos by Matt Duff of Analog Devices.

• Dave has seen tech videos gone wrong, specifically the over produced and expensive Altium Tech Tonight clips

• The survey results are in and the winners have been chosen (listen to the last ten minutes to hear the winners). Keep an eye out for the summary of the survey later this week. And congrats to our winners!

Thanks to Cesar Harada for the picture of the impromptu Google Glass…

Welcome, Ryan Brown of National Instruments!

• Ryan is the second guest from NI and actually introduced us to Matt Ettus, who was on the show previously.
• As a co-op, Ryan worked on the 6552 and the 6542.
• These days, Ryan is a lead on the FlexRIO platform, which allows people to build products onto of the NI ecosystem.
• Ryan’s products are mostly based on Xilinx FPGAs, which are now moving to the Vivado build platform.
• Dr. James Truchard sometimes stops by desks and asks engineers what they’re working on. He also gives keynotes most years at NI Week

• The connector selection is something that haunts you throughout the project.
• Sparkfun is now selling kits that includes an Arduino plus LabView.
• LabView is big/bulky because it has to simultaneously encompass people that want to dig deep into the hardware (listeners of this show) and people who just want to output a graph of whatever data their sensor is outputting.
• Because it’s such a large complex sysstem, design reviews are difficult but crucial to keep the system running.;
• Ryan visited and climbed the Greenbank telescope as part of his work!
• Aracebo is the large dish built into the ground that is featured in Goldeneye from the James Bond movies. Chris is more familiar from the N64 Goldeneye game.
• Austin is a town with lots of hardware: Dell, Freescale, AMD, Samsung and more!
• The SXSW Interactive festival was a couple weeks ago and had lots of focus on hardware startups.
• Ryan runs the ATXHW meetup group, which had a few events during SXSW.
• They take cues from the Ruby on Rails group in Austin, which is also very active.
• During the meetups, they do sessions about different hw aspects, such as Rapid Prototyping.
• One big name group out of Austin is Supermechanical, makers of the successful Kickstarter project, Twine. However, they started much smaller with projects that involved a wallet with an actuator to make it harder to open and a big QR code table.
• Others who regularly participate are Jack Minardi (who won the February YCombinator/Upverter hackathon for his glove project) and the Sapphire OS mesh network.
• No stranger to digging into projects, Ryan’s halloween project for Roomba costumes (see top picture and video below).

Halloween 2012 – Roomba Costumes with Synchronized LED RIngs from Ryan Brown on Vimeo.

• Ryan and a couple others are early members of the Austin TechShop, the first of which to be co-located with a big box hardware store (Lowe’s).
• National Instruments is also starting a pilot program with TechShop to provide hardware and LabView licenses at a reduced cost, as described in this video by Mark Hatch (of TS).
• Waterloo Labs is another group made up of NI’ers, who work on fun projects to promote STEM. They are well known for the iPhone driven car, the EyeMario System and most recently for real life Mario Cart.

• Ryan suggests a couple different BBQ for when visiting Austin (though he failed to mention the old standby of The Saltlick…which technically isn’t in Austin): Franklin on 11th, Stiles Switch and Manns Smokehouse BBQ (believe Chris, you haven’t lived until you’ve gotten the meat sweats from Texas BBQ).

Thanks again to Ryan for being on the show! It was great hearing about all his experiences and getting a taste for National Instruments. Don’t forget! If you’d like to take The Amp Hour listener survey for 2013 and put your name in to win a t-shirt, do so before we do the drawing next week! (multiple winners)

This post was meant to post the evening of 3/19 (EST) but for some reason it didn’t post until this morning.

• Dave has lost a bunch of footage because of camera problems.
• They’re looking for volunteers to live (and die) on Mars. What kind of electronics would you bring?
• Dave has been reading, “The Case for Mars” by Robert Zubrin
• System design is important. Could they design with enough interchangeable parts to avoid the square air filter in the circular air filter hole problem like on Apollo 13?

• When big projects are on the line, different groups hear different things and have different prorities, like on this tree swing.
• A new part from Microchip called the BodyCom allows you to use your body as the communication medium.
• The NAND computer looks complex! Is it worth it for you to build one too?
• The lightning detector breakout module from Tautic.
• Perhaps the needed new DfX item will be DfS? Design for Sharing!
• Chris has been troubleshooting SPI recently and fighting with the different modes.
• A new site called CircuitLava hopes to be a marketplace for designs? Sign up to be an early contributor.
• If you’re making boards at home, you can check out the new $2K PickNPlace called Board Forge, powered by a Raspberry Pi.
• Ian from Dangerous Prototypes has a different PnP he picked up in China.

• Bunnie Huang released his book, “Hacking The Xbox” for free in honor of Aaron Schwarz.

 Don’t forget to fill out The Amp Hour 2013 Listener Survey for a chance to win a t-shirt! And to tell us what you think, we really appreciate it!

Thanks to TJ Blackwell for the CC Mars Mashup picture…awesome!

• The patent company Dave interviewed with was Silverbrook
• Do you release your BOM to vendors, distributors and others, even with an NDA?
• Sometimes it’s a tradeoff with how much info you can release. The Raspberry Pi project needed to hold some info back in order to protect distributors that were getting them pricing that allowed them to succeed.
• There are shades of gray in how you do your manufacturing and how much info you release for your OSHW project. Dave reminds us of the unwritten rules of OSHW:

• There is a new non-profit dedicated to geting more people to learn how to code called Code.org. Kind of odd video, but great intentions!
• Hardware will still be necessary though (and hopefully high paying!). This stuff always ebbs and flows like the boom in hiring IT professionals in the 90s.
• SXSW has a bunch of startups that are focusing on hardware!
• MakerBot is one of the prominent hw companies there this week, as well as past guest of The Amp Hour, Jeremy Blum.
• Jeremy was not only making fun quips about the silliness of social media startups down there, but also has been working on the newly announced MakerBot 3D scanner.
• A recent article from The Economist talks about how sacks of potatoes can be used to simulate human beings sitting in airplane seats for RF testing.
• Another Economist article mentioned the sharing economy, citing established companies like AirBnB and RideShare and many new software entrants to the market.
• Could this kind of thing exist for Test and Measurement equipment?
• Dave says it already does for T&M rental companies, but he doesn’t think it’s a great business.
• Speaking of sharing, Intel will soon be acting as a foundry for Altera, which could have other large scale implications for the company.
• Is it stealing hardware if you bought the lowest end model and unlock other functionality that was built in (poorly)? Check out the EEVblog forum thread that brought up this topic.
• The White House recently responded about the legality of unlocking cell phones, which could have implications for other things we buy.
• Would Rigol have sold as many scopes if certain people hadn’t talked about how to unlock the 100 MHz mode?

• The Engibous contest from TI is starting again soon for college students. Win up to $10K…and maybe a job.
• Chris has finally begun cutting metal on his milling machine!

• This can be the prize for Dave’s potential design contest!
• Found on Hacker News: Another site that is dedicated to decapping chips and seeing what is inside of them.
• Please fill out The 2013 Amp Hour Listener Survey! Enter for a chance to win a newly designed t-shirt from The Amp Hour!

Thanks to justephens for the rental sign

Welcome Mike Harrison of Mike’s Electric Stuff and White Wing Logic!

• Mike’s YouTube channel and videos are likely how many of our listeners know who Mike is.
• Mike has been featured on our show in the past, both as the contributor of the show’s name and sending in photos of his awesome bench!
• He started in a repair department, where he learned to troubleshoot and prank people!
• Later jobs included early IT work with early IBM PCs.
• While at that job, he started designing with the BBC Micro (based on the 6502 CPU) and for the ACORN (now ARM) Archimedes family.
• Many programs Mike writes to interface with lower level stuff is in Visual Basic 6 (now defunct). Chris says there is a downgrade path from .NET.
• He got started with PICs when they were transitioning from Mask ROM parts to One Time Programmable (OTP) parts and a customer needed an alarm system that could output different types of alarms.
• Mike is also a registered consultant with Microchip, which has netted him a job or two in the past.
• He got started with LEDs at Dorkbot in London
• The arts have gotten a boost in London from the Section 106 planning development, which mandates all money spent on building must have some portion go to development (including the Arts).
• Mike’s lab has a pick and place machine in the lab (cost around £8K) which he wrote software to optimize.
• He uses PCAD and does the layout first (!)
• Mike has worked on multiple UFO projects, including one in Gdansk, Poland and one in Seattle for Halo 4
  
• The UK scene, especially the art and architecture scene, is vibrant right now.
• Working with “Technology Will Save Us”, Mike designed the Lumiphone (a soldering project with LEDs and Theramin that costs less than £3) and the Bright Eyes Glasses, which was a Kickstarter campaign.
• Mike is obviously known for his great teardown videos!
  
• The baggage X-ray machine took a friend and a van to haul back to his shop…and he broke even on the project!
  
• A more recent project has 2106 LEDs and 2106 PICs, one per LED.  This new design could have issues if Microchip has supply chain problems, as Steve Sanghi’s letter about lead times seems to suggest.
• Mike thinks a good way to get into art is to make your own. He cited the quadcopter stage show.
• See the silly emails Mike has gotten over the years at his “Muppet alert” page.
• You can find Mike on Twitter at @Mikelectricstuf

Many thanks to Mike for taking the time to speak with us!

• Chris is leaving The Engineering Commons after the next episode. If you’re interested in trying out, email him at chris@theamphour.com
• Google has found some old chemicals under one of their facilities in Silicon Valley; a legacy of past chip fabs. What kind of chemicals have you encountered at work? Dave used to work around lots of Isopar-M and Chris used to work in a fab. If the sites are bad enough, they are deemed Superfund Sites (in the US)
• Cleveland’s burning Cuyahoga River  was a key reason that the US instated the EPA (the second time it caught on fire). For those interested, this is the delicious beer that Chris mentioned, Burning River IPA (even better when poured at the local brewery, come visit!).
• Martin Lorton will be moving back to Cleveland this summer from South Africa! Whee! Another nerd in Cleveland! Check out his prolific YouTube channel.
  
• There is a documentary (similar to the Silicon Valley one mentioned last week) that covers the history of Tektronix and how it impacted the Portland area.
• Dave published and sold three different versions of a PC based scope. The mark3 page also has videos where Dave talks about the kit.
• There is a headless scope project in the works that uses a Cubieboard and a BeagleBone to link to your Android as the head unit.
• 100 MSPS ADC chips aren’t hard to come by these days. 10-15 years ago, that was top of the line!
• While reading about Clayton Christiansen and his upcoming book, “The Capitalist’s Dilemma”, Chris found out that Intel was influenced by the book (thesis, really) and that helped lead to the (lower end) Celeron processor.
• Intel is holding a “business” competition for people in Europe.
• It’s not just bailing on industries that can be disastrous; the Helsinki Bus Station Theory talks about persistence and how it’s required for creatives.
• Koenigsegg makes some really fast, awesome cars. They also make their own CAD software…?
  
• Please folks, don’t use autorouters.
• Auto electronics will provide lots more opportunities for sensors and interfaces in the coming years. Why not cars that talk to one another?
• Code reviews, as summed up by Scott Adams: Code Mocking.
• Dave Vandenbout of Xess has a great tutorial (which apparently “sucked donkeys” to write) about getting started with programmable logic in, “FPGAs!? Now What?” New chapter added recently.
• The US Patent Office will be changing their rules on March 16th, 2013 to a “first to file” system.
• Steve Hoefer had some great Valentine’s Day cards based on patents.
• Jack Ganssle did a Valentine’s Day teardown of a “personal astable multivibrator“.

Thanks to FabSurplus.com for the picture of the old machine.

Click the above image for the full resolution photo of all the board Ron built for the book!

Welcome, Ron Quan! He is an engineer and the author of Build Your Own Transistor Radios: A Hobbyist’s Guide to High-Performance and Low-Powered Radio Circuits.

• Ron got his start working for radio stations: KNEW in Oakland (now in SF) (AM) and KALX at Berkeley (FM)
• Prior to that, he grew up playing with #6 ignition battery (dry cell) which is similar to a D cell.
• But that’s not all, he also built crystal radios (poly varicom) and tube radios (5 tube superhet)
• Once he entered industry, it was working on video at Ampex
• Later he worked at Sony
• Video has a lot of great signal processing problems and challenges. For example, they would sometimes have a 4 mhz bw signal with only a 5-10Mhz carrier!
• His first patent was of linearity compensation on B&W CRT TVs at Ampex. However, he has lots of patents to his name!
• Dave asked if it was true about Japanese manufacturers removing caps until the products just work; Ron used to put them every other chip, depending on distance between them.
• Howard Sam’s photofacts is a place to get schematics.
• They often had to make their own op amps, using parts like CA3086, CA3054, CA3127
• Analog video compensation was done with banks of varacter diodes.
• While he couldn’t talk about protection schemes, he did talk about (analog) scrambling of audio and video signals.
• They would move signals by pseudo random frequency shifting; this is different from the simpler and more common sync suppression method.
• Sync suppression could be easily defeated back then, either by DIY solutions or by black market boxes.
• Ron went and had to reverse engineer the reverse engineering of some of these boxes coming out of Brazil and Argentina
• The Analog Aficionados dinner, hosted by Paul Rako and sponsored by various companies, was last Saturday. Ron and various other high profile analog gurus were there.
• Ron published and presented two AES papers which have caused a little bit of a stir; he suggests new ways to measure frequency and develop standards.
• He’s not an audiophile (in the negative sense of the word) but he has worked for Monster Cable in the past!
• The old ways of measuring don’t tell the whole picture, such as THD and intermodulation distortion and freq response
• Newer methods are CCIF twintone signal (18 & 19 kHz), Transient Intermodulation Distortion or TIM test (square and sine wave) and frequency modulation distortion.
• The book was released a few months ago and has gotten great feedback so far!
• Chris likes that it gives context and builds to do up front.
• The whole thing was done in 26 weeks, including over 25 prototype boards! (see top picture)
• We all agreed that this book would be a good fit for a prototyping class.

Thanks to Ron for being on the show! We thought this was one of the most technically dense shows we’ve had yet, with tons of great industry history and fun stories from throughout Ron’s career.

Dave is back from his trip to Melbourne and has lots of calibration stories!

• There is a new documentary out about Alan Turing
  
• However, you need to request that it come to your city.
• PBS has a new documentary about Silicon Valley that looks amazing! Multiple parts.
• Dave visited the Agilent Melbourne Standards and Calibration Lab
  
• And many more videos, which will be posted to Dave’s EEVblog channel throughout the week
• Dave also visited the Melbourbe hackerspace
  
• Andy Gelme, who is part of the LiFX bulb team was showing Dave around and Alex Bradbury of Raspberry Pi was there as well.
• The Raspberry Pi team will soon be releasing a camera module to use with OpenCV.
• Dave and Chris haven’t dug into their RPi’s yet, but Chris has bought Matt Richardson’s book on getting started. Now to find the book on how to get started on the book!
• What do you do to ensure proper bring up of new boards? Power, test points, code, etc?
• Fran Blanche did a great video reverse engineering the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) of the Saturn V rocket!
  
• Dave saw an article about the quirk found in the electronics on the Pioneer Spacecraft in a recent IEEE Spectrum edition.
• Interested in following along with Kent Lundberg’s prototyping class, discussed on The Amp Hour previously? You can follow the assignments and writeups on the class blog!
• If you’re interested in learning more about MOS transistors (namely their physics), check out a new MOOC class on Coursera about MOS devices.
• Where should school start and stop? How can we better give context for schooling?

If you want to see upcoming links or stuff we didn’t get to this week, check out /r/TheAmpHour. If you like the show, please consider giving us a review on iTunes! Thanks!

• Founded the company with Jonathon Friedman, from across the Atlantic!
• Andrew went to school in Leeds but left for a design position.
• Previously worked for companies such as Turnsafe and Active RF and in his spare time worked on model rockets. Check out all of his past work on his personal site.
• London is barren, but outlying areas of the UK do electronics. Hardware is stronger in Cambridge, with companies such as ARM and Cambridge Silicon Radio.
• There is also the M4 corridor, west of London
• Amateur electronics is growing in London. Shared spaces, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces allow for shared tools, which are a premium in expensive real estate areas.
• Andrew and the team needed to learn web software and currently use CoffeeScript, a JavaScript stack
• CircuitHub uses an online interface to create parts and then allows users to find and sync with the footprints and schematic symbols using Dropbox. The site creates parts compatible with 3 of the top PCB CAD programs available today and more are planned for the future.
• Circuit hub is sponsoring hackathon along with yCombinator and Upverter (and more!)
• How parts are handled depends on workplace culture and software packages. Altium and EAGLE handle associating footprints different and big companies might have a librarian whereas smaller companies may not.
• Companies likely won’t be revealing any information by pulling and sharing footprints from a central database, but trust will be an issue with larger companies.
• They will be open sourcing all possible code and feeding it back to the community. You can view the team’s work on GitHub.
• The main tool will always be free. Revenue will come later by integrating with manufacturing.
• The project started because Jon and Andrew were “scratching their own itch”. They submitted a yCombinator application on deadline day. 
• Because it’s strikingly difficult to get a visa for the US, even if you’re a founder of a startup, they are operating out of Playa del Carmen for the next few months. The US has only recently considered any kind of legislation in this area (!?)
• Andrew reluctantly agreed to some kind of gamification in order to encourage participation (“we’ll see,” he says). Chris cited the awesome Adafruit badges as a good example of this in action.

Be sure to head over to CircuitHub.com and start an account. You can start pulling in designs to your projects and submitting new footprints to the community.

You can follow Andrew on Twitter at @seddonandrew and can also follow @CircuitHub.

Many thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Electronic Surplus! Check out this page on The Amp Hour to register for their giveaway and to click through to support the show!

• National Instruments buys Digilent!
• Though Chris doesn’t use it much MATLAB is a nice high level math tool
• Octave is the free version with less features and plugins.
• Project Euler (pronounce “Oil-ehd”) is a place you can practice programming by solving math problems.
• Marketing expert Seth Godin says he doesn’t use Twitter because he’s too busy making things. Touche, marketer.
• Circuit hub is a place to download parts for all different types of CAD programs using DropBox. Looks great!
• KiCAD Cloud is a place to pull KiCAD specific components, made by another listener (Joe Ferner)!
• Would you start a company with a stranger you met through an online site? Founder dating is the place to do it (and engineers are highly desirable! Though probably sw).
• There are more and more hardware startups. There are now hardware meetups all over the place.
• Boeing has had some issues with their LiIon batteries.  See the discussion in the EEVblog forum for more details.
• Chris has been blogging about his new CNC machine at ChrisGammell.com
• Dave did a video reviewing old ads in editions of Electronics Australia from the past 30 years
                             
• The Hioki Calcu Hi Tester is a combination calculator and DMM!
• Why can’t any meter beat the Fluke 27′s 1000 hour battery life?
• How do you know where to draw the line on design? When to outsource and how much? Or are we all just oompa loompas?
• If you want to give your boards a programatic and artistic flair, try out PCBmodE.
• Akiba of FreakLabs.org, Bunnie Huang (former guest of The Amp Hour) and designers from the MIT Media Lab toured around Shenzhen visiting factories. Check out Akiba’s great blogging about it!
• The MeCam is a super low cost (<$50!) quadcopter with big promises. We’ll see if they deliver.
• Plastic injection molding is cool…and makes stuff so cheap.
• Is Mexico the new China?

Remember, we’d love to hear from you if you’re from the far corners of the earth! Please leave a comment below!

Image via Seattle Times

Welcome  Brett Fox, CEO and Dr Jeroen Fonderie, VP of Engineering from the (relatively) new,  yet quickly growing analog company, Touchstone Semiconductor!

• After leaving Micrel, Brett was an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR).
• Touchstone was officially formed in 2010 with Brett, Joeren and Adolfo Garcia.
• Invested in by Gill Cogan of Opus Capital and Pierre Lamond of Khosla Venturers. $12 million starting captial (which isn’t much for an IC company!). Gill was an original investor in Maxim, Pierre was a co-founder of National and was involved in funding LT. Wowsa!
• They use TSMC, among other foundries. They have worked with Rick Cassidy, the North America head of TSMC, which helps facilitate a startup relationship.
• The foundries provide the designer Process Design Kits (PDKs) which are then used with Cadence toolsets.
• Surprisingly, people have asked for original designs, in addition to part crosses.
• Part crosses (and the basis of starting the company) was to provide alternate sources for harder to get Maxim parts.
• When hiring, they hope the designers will have experience taping out a chip, usually requiring many years of experience.
• While no one will ever replace Jim Williams, Touchstone has a full apps team (and they’re hiring more!) working on new notes.
• The name “Touchstone” was chosen after consulting a thesaurus for the word “Maxim”!
• They seek patents that can be used offensively or defensively, at the circuit level.
• Touchstone has to wait for technologies to enter the foundry before they can begin designing for them. There will be a new design center working on developing Graphene, as reported by EE Times Europe.
• Chris gets bad news that two executives from a chip company don’t think a chip printer is feasible. Ouch.
• Packaging keeps getting smaller, the Touchstone Demo Board program should help getting up and running quickly.
• Touchstone does a die bank, which helps hedge against high demand at a low cost.
• Working remotely is difficult. Monolithic systems has tried this, with designers in Asia and management in the US.

You can follow Touchstone Semiconductor on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. Thanks to Brett and Jeroen for stopping by The Amp Hour to talk shop!

Many thanks to our sponsor, ElectronicSurplus.com. Check out the large amount of stock they have available for your next project.

• No, the US will not be building a death star.
• Nor will they be moving to the metric system (aside from the fact that metric is already the official system)
• Chris highly recommends this (free!) book on analog system design.
• Dave references the Aussie classic, Young Einstein.
  
• This Kickstarter project selling a dev board and started by a commercial company rubs Chris the wrong way.
• Congrats to the Raspberry Pi team for selling over 1 million units! Check out our interview with Eben Upton, the creator of the RPi, for more info.
• Patent trolls have been roaming the lands. One claiming they invented podcasts, many years past the date of their inception; another continually growing and shedding corporate shells (Intellectual Ventures) in order to avoid action against the larger company.
• Learning takes a long time. Listener Jope suggests this article about learning programming.
• Learning about chip layouts also takes a long time. This blogger reverse engineered an ST 24C02 sector 17 clock.
• If you’re into learning about RF, check out this database of circuit designs and start building!
• Chris is geeking out about his new mill. He’ll continue to make videos like this first one
  
• We need a new slogan! Email your ideas to slogan@theamphour.com
• Next week we’ll have the CEO and the VP of Engineering from Touchstone Semiconductor. Keep an eye out for the post asking for your questions!

Thanks to jurvetson for the DS picture

• 3d Printers are here to stay, at the very least as prototyping tools.
• OSHW’s true test will be a large company continuing to stay completely open as they grow.
• Sparkfun has had some growing pains with their Free Day, which is a shame; that was a really cool program!
• How do can electronics survive extreme cold? Start by keeping them dry!
• Should you learn about FPGAs? Or 32 bit processors? We think the former in a classroom setting and the latter on your own online.
• Online, there are resources like Xess and the Papillio
• Why do power supplies hum? Vibration of the components.
• The mechanical part of components can also lead to drift.
• Eric’s was the one mentioned in episode 116 as a request from his lady.
• Schaum’s Outlines help people learn or relearn topics in a condensed format.
• The Art of Electronics is always a good place to re-learn basics (and advanced topics). Maybe not the best for beginners.
• We now have a page where you can leave suggestions for which guests we should invite on The Amp Hour. Special shoutouts to people that can introduce us!
• Sometimes learning just takes time and a bunch of experinece. This is the ethos behind Learn Python The Hard Way.
• The key to electronics was well put by Jeri:

Though this was a show dedicated to just Q&A, you’re always welcome to ask questions on the show. The best place is on the /r/TheAmpHour subreddit or contact us. We love audio and video questions!

Thanks to ARM Climate Research Facility for the picture!

• Chris has been holiday shopping on Amazon. Merry Booksmas!
• Dave likes shopping the smaller stores through Abebooks.
• Getting bound versions of the Linear Tech Application Handbooks are enough to fight over! You can get all the PDFs from the handbooks on Archive.org.
• Will books become the new LPs? Where only collectors bother? Different speeds of LPs changes the bandwidth of the recording.
• Paper is still preferred for datasheets, but many people try out tablets.
• Chris’s friend suggested the Onyx M92 as a large screen version (with the ability to write on the screen). Looks like a good option for datasheets.
• Balancing design and purchasing is tough. EBN has a good article about The Art of Concurrent Design.
• TI has changed the status of the Stellaris Cortex M3 parts they inherited when they acquired Luminary Micro. They are now listed as NRND or “Not Recommended for New Designs”. Death knell! (eventually)
• ARM has so many variations, it’s really hard to keep up! Should we blame them though? Or the companies that buy the IP?
• The Freescale debt is so unsustainable that the CEO has mentioned they’ll be “Focusing” in 2013. Said another way, they’ll End Of Life (EOL) a bunch of products. Same goes for NXP and STMicro.
• ST and Renesas might get a reprieve since the country they’re based in might bail them out. Japan has already restructured debt for Renesas and France might for ST at any time. Too big to fail in chips?
• Bunnie is working on an awesome open source hardware laptop. Dave thinks it will find further use as a high powered dev board.
• Zach “Hoeken” Smith, who was on The Amp Hour episode #121, posted a link to a desktop Pick and Place on TaoBao. The video is very impressive!
• The Kick project from Kickstarter has decided to move production back from China after 2 failed attempts. Chris and Dave discuss the value of manufacturing locally, even at higher cost.
• Students in Florida might get a break in tuition for studying engineering. What will this do for engineering enrollment?
• There are 5 realistic predictions for disruptive products in 2012 on the new tech site, Quartz. Were there any missed?
• We’re on break until the 2013! Leave your questions, comments and suggestions on TheAmpHour.com or on the /r/TheAmpHour subreddit. Let us know about the projects you’re working on!
• We will have transcriptions available for select shows. Thank you to all of our wonderful sponsors for making this possible! If you’re interested in donating, check out our Donation page on TheAmpHour.com.

Welcome, Ian from Dangerous Prototypes!

•  Ian created the Bus Pirate and was later convinced to start selling it while he was a contributor to Hack a Day.
• It and all the other Dangerous Prototypes parts are sold through Seeed Studio, in Shenzhen China.
• All Dangerous Prototypes hardware is OSHW and is not released under a license. They consider it to be public domain.
• Ian got re-started on hardware while in grad school working on Berkeley Smartdust (with TinyOS), which was not user friendly at the time.
• These days Ian has been travelling to many of the Maker Faires around the world and showcasing the marketplaces and the hackerspaces nearby on YouTube.
• He recently interviewed Mitch from Hackvana about navigating the Shenzhen supply chain:
  
• Ian has a made presentation about how to get your open hardware manufactured, based on a talk given at Maker Faires and elsewhere
  
• The PIC24 has programmable pins for reassignment after layout. Convenient!
• The Bus Blaster is a product that allows you to debug your JTAG chain.
• The ATX power supply breakout board turns your old computer supplies into a low cost bench supply!
• If you’d like to get a case for your designs, you can now use the Dangerous Prototypes standardized “Sick of Beige” Case, based on their standardized board outlines.
• There is work done for the open source USB stack, since USB stacks have a sketchy history
  
• The 7400 Series Logic competition was a success this year, but may be put on hold for a while. Next year might be a test equipment design competition!

Thanks again to Ian for stopping by the show! If you’re interested in learning more about the company or contributing, stop over to Dangerous Prototypes. You can possibly even pick up a free PCB!

This week on the show we cover our usual stomping ground topics, including some of our favorites like chip printing and complaining about former employers.

• Tektronix just released another basic scope, adding to what Dave says is an arsenal of outdated scopes.
• The Atlantic magazine talks about the new trend of in sourcing,versus the MBA Playbook™ approved method of outsourcing which was so en vogue for all those years.
• Dave points out a video alerting president Obama to the lack of advanced physics education in the USA.
  
• President of National Instruments, Dr. James Truchard, talks about the lack of engineering graduates and how that will affect industry. Shouldn’t this means salaries are increasing?
• The show TerraNova demonstrated a chip printer, similar to what Chris has dreamed about (and threatened to just go make, if no one else will).
• If Elon Musk complete his mission to send 80,000 people to a colony on Mars, would we need a chip printer out there?
• If you’d like to buy a piece of the Hubble space telescope history, you can buy some heavy equipment for $75K on eBay.
• Ageism continues to be a problem in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the technology world. Some people are going to extremes by dying their hair and getting plastic surgery to hide the fact that they are older.
• Resumes are a key part of getting hired into any new firm. Dave and Chris have lots of tips for getting yours noticed.
• if you can get a hiring manager to do you a favor, you have more likelihood of being viewed favorably by that manager. This is a result of the human condition known as “the Ben Franklin effect”.
• Jeremy Blum in former guest of The Amp Hour has a great example resume that people should check out.
• Chris promotes the benefits of stalking on LinkedIn even if that sounds creepy.
• An episode of The Engineering Commons talked about the importance of influence in the workplace and in getting hired.
• Altium’s Board of Directors finally removed the president, Nick Martin. They will now go back to “their core” and focus on the layout tool like we all care about.
• Chris has been trying to reteach himself programming specifically C programming. It is not going well.
• Why do startups always seem to have food and who pays for it? Doesn’t this just mean they want you to work more hours?
• If you do work at a startup, you likely will have a higher than average salary for some reason or another. Perhaps because there is venture-capital money to go around?
• Why are enclosures always the hardest part of electronics designs?
• Tesla Motors is raising the cost of their latest model S. While this doesn’t happen often in electronics, it has happened before for Tesla.

That’s all for this week. Please try to give us a rating in iTunes if you haven’t already. Or check this out over on Twitter or any other variety of social networks out there.

Thanks to Yanec for the picture of the resume cloud.

 

• Thanks to our sponsor, Club Jameco. To see the kit featured this week and to learn more about their program, check out http://ClubJameco.com/TheAmpHour.
• Jon has held positions and started companies in both hardware and software.
• His current company, Internet Vision Technologies, has over 20 employees and software based.
• Jon helps to organize the Arduino Mini Conf, which occurs on the first day of the Australian Linux Conf
• Jon’s main venture (and most directly interesting to this show) is Freetronics, an electronics kit development and manufacturing operation.
• From his first company, he has learned to focus on the core for business, similar to what is discussed in The Lean Startup.
• Their most popular kit is the EtherTen, based upon the Arduino platform but with integrated Ethernet.
• When working on electronics, Jon prefers the TAPR license.
• They also work on Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices, because it was something Jon dream up for his house.
• Jon’s blog about his house and his centralized home automation system is Super House TV.
• This is also the name of his YouTube channel where you can find a range of videos, including a response to our show!
  
• In order to get into his house, Jon installed an RFID chip…in his arm!
  
• DIY Biohacking is a new trend, some even putting magnets in their fingers
  
• Jon has written a few books, including Hacking Ubuntu and Practical Arduino.
• He is also a member of the Melbourne Hackerspace
• At one point, Jon hacked his car and decided to start a site called Geek My Ride for other car-hacking enthusiasts. This is also his most popular YouTube video:
  
• And if he weren’t busy enough recently, Jon has been participating in the ArduSat project, working on their payload. This is an evolution of the CubeSat program.

• Thanks to our sponsor, Club Jameco. To check out the Forrest Mims kit we featured this week, involving the Atari Punk Console, check out http://ClubJameco.com/TheAmpHour. Thanks!
• Buzz Aldrin is pissed. Great front cover of the MIT Technology Review.
• Dave is pissed too. Why does it always come down to one number? Agilent gets dinged for not meeting shareholder expectations while still performing ok. Why are the tech and products left out?
• TI is giving the ax to the OMAP line (unless they end up selling it).
• EDN asks whether ARM will eventually take over. Chris asks whether it should. Dave says it won’t happen anyway.
• Jason Kridner (former guest of The Amp Hour) states that it will not affect the BeagleBoard-xM nor the BeagleBone.
• The CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini, is retiring.
• And unfortunately, Hakko has decided to retire the FX-888.
• Listener @einball had a terrible time at the Electronica show out in Munich, due to discrimination based on how he was dressed.. Is there a different expectation of fashion at tech shows in Europe?
• Dave recently reviewed the 4000x series scopes from Agilent
  
• He also conveniently left out the fact that you can control/view signals with a tablet!
• Upverter 2.0 was recently released, they now have in browser schematic and layout.
• Previously discussed circuits.io is on a similar mission, including trying out back end integration so you can buy boards and parts directly.
• Chris isn’t too big a fan of TinkerCAD or any program that is very basic simply because it’s running in the browser. Maybe he’s missing something?
• Did you know the “-ND” on Digikey part numbers comes from the legacy, “No Discount” tag from their catalog days?
• Dave didn’t like the recent upgrade from the Beta to the full time version of 123D from Autodesk.

Please give us a rating or a review on iTunes. That helps more interested nerds find us! Thanks!