Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
- We will be having another call in show on December 16th around 8 pm EST (not 6:30 pm as stated). Keep an eye out for a post about it!
- Dave gets grief from his wife about how he pronounces “math”
- No, your town is not the new silicon valley. Sydney is trying this with the busted “ideas boom”
- Dave has been playing around with a new linear power supply. Chris wonders about a switched cap output supply (to reduce noise) with a SMPS base.
- The Steorn power scam is back. As is a new scam claiming to power your home with a bike.
- The KiCad 4.0.0 release came out recently. It’s time to update!
- Saar from Boldport made some beautiful PCBs that made it into a fashion magazine.
- A couple months back former guest Voja posted on Hackaday about PCB enclosures.
- More mergers, this time Microsemi and PMC-Sierra.
- There was a discussion about FPGA bitstreams on Hacker News. The Icestorm has been out for a while, as well as Yosys, enabling non-vendor based tools.
- Thimble.io is doing a subscription kit based business. This is similar to Pirate Electronics and TronClub. Dave mentions this used to happen often in the 70s out of the back of magazines.
- Dave is dealing with bulk order shipping for a product. Chris likes watching ship traffic.
- Chris is struggling with finding interconnects for various PCBs. He is targeting pre-fabbed solutions and ended up landing on the Seeed grove system (because of the simple connectors and fabbed cables)
- Dave will use SamTec for high speed connections, but those can be pricey.
- Instead of working with cabling or battery holders, David2 is molding custom cases and putting retention and header features into the design.
- Car harnesses can be huge and insanely complicated — Here’s a picture of a modest one…. That makes cable manufacturers love them ($$$).
- Check out this gate level simulation/visualization of an ARM1 processor.
- Dave talked with the president of Sigilent and Eric mentioned he’s starting to have trouble getting labor (skilled and unskilled) in China.
Reminder: Our next call in show will be December 16th!
Always love the show. Dave, definately not something that would have worked on your own. You guys make a great team.
For more info on the power scam bike, there’s a (free) documentary called Billions In Change that goes into a lot more detail about it… definitely worth a watch. Good to know however, that .5kw is near the limit of what a pro cyclist can do!
Incredible what boldport has done with pcbmode!
Whenever I order from china via ebay, it alays shows a 1 month window for delivery, yet seems to always arrive in a week! It’d be nice to track it with marinetraffic/flightaware
Also, at the end of show when Dave mentions his early podcast idea… how did he know to contact Chris? Wasn’t that time frame way before Contexual Electronics?
Chris, was this what you were thinking of when you talked about $300 shipping? Looks like you might be right on that.
https://www.flexport.com/blog/why-are-ocean-freight-rates-so-low/
Yep, that must have been the article. I think the difference may have been that this article is talking about a particular shipping route, which may not have applied to Dave.
And if the race to the (profit) bottom isn’t bad enough, Amazon want’s to jump in!
http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/14/amazon-is-getting-into-the-oceanic-freight-shipping-game/
The bike claims to power a rural home in India, not a western home, so it is not unrealistic.