- Dave lost the bid for a lab which we discussed last week. š
- Shoutouts:
- Jim Williams’ desk is moving to the Computer History Museum. Chris wants to turn it into a wishing well.
- EE Web continues to publish some intriguing interviews with people throughout the industry. We especially liked these two weirdos. Great format for a portal as well.
- Sesame Street is taking on STEM topics and teaching engineering! As Elmo seems to say: Yaaaaay!
- A fourth Open Source Hardware Company has gotten funding, this timeĀ Ayah BdeirĀ and her company Little Bits. Also relevant, there was an article from Phil Torrone, talking to Bre Pettis of MakerBot and their recent round of funding.
- David Manners on Electronics Weekly writes about the growing gap and competitive advantage of large fabs…and how that will jack up the price of chips.
- TI has decided to give away some of their chips and award senior projects that use 3 or more in a design with up to $10k. We see it more as a way for them to recruit new talent.
- When do you decide (monetarily) to start working on a low sales-volume product to refresh it?
- India launches a $45 dollar tablet ($35 after subsidies). Is it real and how did they actually get the cost that low?
- Memristors are supposed to be in production by 2013 (and likely expensive) in a joint venture between HP and Hynix. It’s weird that they are a whole newĀ componentĀ that could be designed into new products, as well as the math that goes along with it.
- This week’s history is an entire site, devoted to transistor history. How cool is that?! Be sure to check out the oral histories with some of the inventors of key chips.
- Shonky Product of the Week:
- The AMPilizer. A capacitor in a box! It’s based around the ideaĀ of Power Factor Correction, but this should not be required in homes (esp. where Dave lives, as they don’t charge for apparent power).
Please leave thoughts, comments and circuit diagrams in the show comment section! Thanks for listening!
Regarding the memristor discussion, watch the following presentations by the HP inventor (first and second vids) and the original researcher who came up with the concept in the ’70s (second vid):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFdDPzcZwbs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY
Quite long, but worth to watch, for those who care.
*looks at the semiconductor museum website*
COMIC SAAAAAAANNNNNSSS!!!!
http://www.explosm.net/comics/2301/
Re Shonky product of the week.
Here in the UK we do not pay for apparent power (YET) but this is set to change as more and more domestic environments use non linear loads (plasma tv’s, smp’s , ‘Green lighting’ etc,) and legal powers are in place to make the polluter pay. Question is who is the polluter? the manufacturer of the equipment or the user? No definitive answers yet from the power companies but I know what my guess would be. Check out my thread at EEVBLOG http://www.eevblog.com/forum/index.php?topic=1561.0
I don’t know if the site is under a DDOS attack or something, but I am getting a download speed of 2.4kB/s now.
I’m looking through the logs now, it’s ridiculously slow for me as well. Sorry for the slowness.
See the “Suggestions page”.
Dave shouldn’t want to stick it to the man. Chris and Dave are on their way to being the man.
Regarding low lighting, I like it. I’m one of those people who unscrews a bulb and configures my development environments for black background.
Regarding angel money, my understanding is angel funding is for people trying to get to the point where VCs might be interested.
Regarding memristance, I think it’s not as paradigm shifting as they say. People think of it as another fundamental property like inductance or resistance, but the math I’ve seen for it can be simplified to I = V/M(q), where M is some function of the amount of charge that has passed through. That’s Ohms law, except resistance isn’t constant. That’s a huge deal, but I don’t see as paradigm shifting. I see it as we still have Ohm’s law but we know that resistance isn’t a constant but rather a slight function of q.
The world’s largest, ultimate, hackerspace can be hidden in plain view, here:
http://www.neatorama.com/2011/10/09/worlds-largest-shopping-mall-is-empty/
Chris ,
I understand your concern about the new math . As an application engineer we don’t have to deal with this kind of math to use the memory. As an engineer I never stop learning new things from analog, digital, micro controllers and also software and firmware. We learn in every new design.
Cheers from Brazil.
Heh, of all the technological solutions Dave has the ability to come up with to dim his reading lamp, he goes for half dead batteries. Well, the simplest solutions……
I prefer low light. Until I need to read the writing on a component or take a photo of something. But I’m blasted by fluoros at work.
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The story of Jim Williams desk reminds me of when work moved premises. Because I was out on site most of the time when we were peparing to move, rather than wait for me to sort out my workstation, they just lifted it on to the back of the truck with everything on it. It turned up to the new joint like it had always been there.
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I was thinking maybe they’ll let you buy an LED for 10 cents to light and leave at JWs desk.
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New math? Three generations from now their heads will ‘slpode because we tried to know too much š In school when we were learning things like atomic physics I wondered how sparse the physics curriculum was when my grandparents were in school.
JD
Indeed. The best mod is no mod! and I can reuse “flat” batteries that came out of other gear.
Oops, where is episode 64?
Oh no! A copy pasta error when we transitioned over to LibSyn. Should be fixed now. Thanks for letting us know!