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- Chris used a (new) shoe as a mic stand this week. EMSL asked on Twitter if Chris was making his own ASICs now.
- Dave’s lab internet has been out for 3 days now due to broken fiber.
- Do you develop or use a tablet for your electronics?
- Chris wrote about an experiment of trying to do layout while on a plane. Conclusion: Unless you prep properly, the airplane test might not be a good measure of whether online CAD tools are a good fit.
- Do you download datasheets? Or do you use Google as a repository?
- In Dave’s latest video, he talked about white van speaker scam after finding speakers in the junk room.
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3B_KKyntQE[/tube] - Even though there may be slightly fewer white van scams, crowdfunding sites continue to pump them out, the latest (gag?) being a Perpetual Magnetic USB Charger.
- Slightly better–though still disappointing–the Printeer recently threw in the towel after realizing they couldn’t deliver $500 3D printers from their garage alone. When they talked to Dragon Innovation, they said the company would need $1M+ to make the manufacturing run make sense.
- That doesn’t seem like much money when compared against the amount that Samsung is spending on their new chip fab: $15B!!! Must be for all the automation and robots.
- Speaking of robots, “Humans Need Not Apply” is an interesting look at the upcoming threat to human labor as more and more jobs are consumed by automation and robotics.
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU[/tube] - Chris has read about this before in “The Second Machine Age”. The authors have also been on the Innovation Hub podcast in the past talking about this book.
- The Sparkfun Engineering team lays out how much time goes into which tasks for product design.
- In the Kasparov vs Deep Blue match, Kasparov ended up throwing in the towel after being shocked by a non-standard moe.
- Chris just launched another Teespring campaign for a new design. Get your “I have the power” teeshirt now.
- Octopart and a coalition of manufacturers have started collaborating on the Common Parts Library. We talked about this 2 weeks ago, when we found out Seeed Studio is doing the “Open Parts Library”. Seeed is part of the coalition.
- This week Chris will be at a meetup in San Francisco where former guest of the show and Electric Imp engineer Brandon Harris will talk about subGHz RF.
- Chip of the week: The Altera MAX10. They also recently published a useful eBook called FPGAs for dummies.
- Chris got to see 1o57, creator of the past few DEFCON badges, speak at the Hackaday 10th Anniversary party (great talk, definitely worth watching)
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCL7dE-nqg[/tube] - JohnnyMac (also a collaborator on the badge) talked about the Parallax Propeller. This design for the Propeller was recently released to the open source community. They are also hard at work on the new Propeller 2.
- Chris was asking Dave about PIC vs AVR, having only used the latter.
- Much like the browser based CAD tools, we have derided the browser based IDE in the past. The mbed platform/stack looks interesting though and if it “just works”, we’re willing to give it a try.
- ARM and Atmel released an “IoT” dev board using mbed and a 6 LoWPAN radio module.
- Bolt wrote a great piece of reality check for people, “No, you can’t manufacture like Apple does“.
A couple of weeks ago the University of Alberta had their reunion weekend and the Department of Computing Science had their 50th anniversary. The alumnus guest speaker was Murray Campbell, who did his B.Sc. and M.Sc. at the UofA, and went on to write the software of Deep Blue. He’s the guy that is sitting across the table from Kasparov in many of the pictures.
Murray said that one of the things that Kasparov does is intensely stare at the competition, trying to unnerve them and break their concentration. Murray managed to piss off Kasparov since he was just feeding the moves into the computer and the stares weren’t going to work.
On another note, the current Dean of Science at the UofA, Jonathan Schaeffer is the guy who solved the game of checkers, the worst that his program will do is draw. Others at the UofA are working on a poker program that can bluff.
It’s not the computers that are smart, we know that they’re not, it’s the code written by highly talented people that makes the computers look smart.
As for the machines taking over, not when some dude will be selling them out of the back of his white van.
The TWIS pocast (This Week in Science), with the great Justin Jackson, usually has a segment called ‘This Week In World Robot Domination’. In it, they present the cutting edge research going on with our future overlords.
http://www.twis.org/category/world-robot-domination/
Regarding reverse engineering cad files, just opening a .step file without having to install massive (often not free) programs would be nice. I know open3mod has a viewer that leverages assimp but would love to see a browser based version.
What’s nice about the Max10 is that unlike a CPLD it has a PLL and memory. And by targeting their soft-core Nios processor on it, it makes very a very inexpensive logic/processor solution.
Printeer is another interesting 3D printer start-up story.
But just like Makibox, the financials don’t work. Especially for any sub $1000 design. It all changed when the Davinci 1.0 was released by XYZprinting. This mass produced sub $500 printer designed and built by a professional engineering company with the means to make it a success is so phenomenal, the only area left to conquer is making the design software easier. Even Makerbot has had to produce cheaper printers and 3D systems cube is now about 1/2 price.
And with Autodesk leading the charge in software with the purchase of TinkerCad and their other excellent software, the days of the kickstarter 3D printer projects are essentially done. Printrbot has held on by innovating and constantly releasing a lower cost design but time will tell if they can survive. 3D printing is going mainstream, but for the home hobbyist with dream of creating the next printrbot on kickstarter, I’m afraid the ship has sailed.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-man-vs-the-machine-fivethirtyeight-films-signals/
Kasparov, the 44th move.