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This week focused more on electronics! Think we talk about something too much or too little? Let us know in the comments!
- Chris finally got a chair and wowsa does it make a difference!
- Finding parts online can be tough with distractions, apparently extended internet use can affect the brain. What’s a datasheet hunter to do?
- If you’re still a USENET junkie, Dave is on the sci.electronics.design (accessible through Google Groups).
- Shoutout to Junko Yoshida for some of the great articles she writes. Really enjoyed the piece on “The Land of the Rising Silence” when she visited Japan.
- Students in the US can get Amazon Prime for a year (Chris got 1-night shipped his chair for $4). Dave dislikes how they won’t ship anything but books to Oz.
- Dave has been looking for the lowest power 16+ bit A/D converter he could find. All told he found 2412 from over 24 different companies. Crazy!
- COTW: The AD7691 from Analog Devices. 18 bits and only 108uW @ 8kHz. Wowsa!
- Speaking of low power, our friends from Touchstone Semi have been getting some press from their initial announcements. They’re 2nd sourcing components from Maxim IC…hopefully without any issues.
- Design Spark has a new plugin for their free CAD software that allows 3D models (incorporated in version 2) to be exported to Google Sketchup. Cool!
- With the CADspan plugin for Google Sketchup and 3D printing, it’s conceivably possible to make an entire prototype for <$100.
- Dave looking for preferences on CAD packages for future OSHW projects. Your opinion?
- Have there been any large-scale open source hardware projects? Chris and Dave can’t think of any.
- Obama announces robot initiative. Only $70 million but the idea is great. Won’t be creating jobs anytime soon though!
- This Day in Nerd History:
- June 26th (oops!) — Maurice Wilkes was born. Founding father of many microcomputing principles and techniques (in the ’40s, no less!)
- June 27th — The inaugural run of the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives.
June 28th — Milan, Italy inaugurated the first central European electricity power station.
- Lightning Round:
- Company gets approval to store your Facebook data for future employers to look at. Yipes!
- The patent system in the US gets approval in the house. If signed into law, it’d be “First to file” instead of “First to invent’.
That’s all for this week. Be sure to leave us some comments and find us on Twitter or Facebook!
For a free open source EDA Cad, go for KiCad or gEDA. Please note that EAGLE is just free and NOT open source. The free version has limitations. i.e. limited PCB size, just one schematic sheet, only two signal layers. There is no guaranty EAGLE would be free forever.
I have seen many OSHW EAGLE projects with unrouted PCB files. Since those PCBs are 4 layers or big, they can not be easily modified and hacked by average user.
We’ve been here before… :p
Nope never figured it out, in fact Chris and Dave are still talking in my head.
Deja vu… #49
Diptrace has no size limitation, only pin/layer limitations. The paid versions have multiple tiers. You’ve reviewed Diptrace favorably in the past. Its mostly about the fact that the UI was designed with somewhat of the “User Experience” (UX) in mind.
KiCAD or gEDA would be preferred if either could up their UX game.
Even Eagle needs UX work. For example, Eagle has the standard “Group” function but no standard “UnGroup”. I had to poke at the UI for five minutes and ultimately Google for name of the function, which turned out to be “Smash”. There is a number of things like that just slows the UI way down and are evidence that they haven’t paid attention to UX.
Took me a whole 11 minutes to realise this is a rerun of an old ep. If I want reruns I’ll simply buy BBC3.
Yay! Chris releases on April 1st. Much fairer than Dave releasing on March 31st!
Right from the start I thought Dave’s voice sounded different to usual. Maybe it was before he got the acoustic wall hangings? Or the new mic?
It did make me think I could go back and listen to all the old ones and I’d probably pick up on the things I missed when I wasn’t paying attention..
I think this one is a repeat!? still great! 🙂
Go for Kicad or EAGLE Dave! but Kicad would be my first choice!
Well that was disappointing, go to work, decide to listen to a podcast, finish SYSK, automatically goes to this episode of TAH and immediately i’m thinking “i don’t remember having this old episode on here, it’s set to 5 episode history…”
2/10, more effort next time Chris!
Was that the best you guys could think of for April the 1st? Was that a yankee or an aussie idea? Won’t be wasting another minute downloading or listening to you any more. Plenty of repeats on television not to watch – don’t have to consciously download them as well.
This didn’t fool me one bit, just made me a touch angry. Oh well, joke’s on me o/
I joined at episode 100(ish) so this is new to me! confusing but new! don’t really factor in the April fools when listening to it on the 3rd though!
I was like “this sounds familiar”……”man I swear they’ve talked about this before”……..”Chris screwed up again!” hahhahah j/k. I can see how some folks got upset but it’s only once a year…..hopefully. You guys need a break once in a while.
I realized that you guys talked more about electronics early on compared to recent episodes, but it’s still a great show no matter what. Keeps my bay area commute tolerable, once a week.
Keep up the good work
No mention of Facebook buying Oculus Rift for 2 BILLION?? Since former guest Jeri Ellsworth’s venture is in the same space maybe they will get bought out in the future!!
Got me! although in all fairness I’m a fairly recent listener 😛
I found it strange that you were talking about amazon prime student though lol
If your goal was to make me question my sanity you succeeded, thumbs up. As far as an April fools joke it is a fail. I do not give much thought to April’s fools day on April 1, on April 6 when I tried to listen to this I gave it none.
I just started listening to the show around October of last year, but I have a 94 mile round trip work commute so I have had time to listen to some older episodes. I do not remember which episode I started with but at first I was going backwards from there until I reached episode 146 where I decided that was not the best idea as I could not get a lot of the references. I then went to episode 1 and just today finished episode 71. ( I have been listening to new ones within days of them coming out.)
It has just been within the last few weeks that I listened to this episode so I recognized it right away, I just could not figure out what was going on, bad link, lost my mind with the file names, etc. Bad joke just never crossed my mind. I would suggest you put up a notice for others late to the party, especially when the intro says March 31. Anyhow your show, do as you like.
I do enjoy your show and appreciate the time and effort put into it and I want to say thanks.