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Welcome back Jeff! Joining us for some holiday fun!
- Chris started a new engineering job today! Dave is getting the keys to his new lab today!
- Jeff is attending DorkBot Austin tonight! Reminds Chris of PechaKucha.
- What should we call a group of nerds standing around? Chris likes the term, “a grumbling of nerds”.
- Dave hasn’t seen Altoid tins in the grocery stores, but has built projects in tic tac boxes, cassette cases and hammond cases.
- Chris just got a new BeagleBone to play with! It’s awesome!
- Digi-key is doing their Digi-Wish again this year, so you can ask for something out of their catalog.
- Chris wished for some of the classical CDs they stock at Digi-Key(?).
- What’s the difference between black and pink foam in electronics? One is conductive (black) and one is static resistant (pink)
- Our wishlists:
- Dave — A spectrum analyzer, likely one off of eBay. The Rigol ones are too much for Dave so he needs to go older.
- Chris — A sig gen like the newer Rigol DG1022 because a certain Aussie’s kit isn’t available anymore. Jeff and Dave say Chris isn’t wishing big enough.
- Jeff — Lots and lots of kits!
- The adafruit Icetube clock kit.
- The NixieKit NixieTherm thermometer kit (suggested by electroman-j).
- The Fun Cube Dongle kit.
- Jeff’s new Ham Callsign is W6OHM! Awesome! Dave wants VK2EEV (but has to get his license first!)
- Chris’s co-worker did a homebrew solution for programmable outdoor holiday lights, controlled by text message!
- [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77bTCBb8apc[/tube]
- We loved John DeCristafaro’s (@johngineer) post on displaying a holiday image on an old scope with a micro!
- Our past guest, Jeremy Blum was named the IEEE “New Face of College Engineering”! Awesome! He will be featured during national eWeek.
- Itching to get your hands on an old micro? Try out the new Microbee Z80 kit, which is now available!
- This Day in Nerd History:
- As seen on today’s Google Doodle, it would have been Robert Noyce’s 84th birthday. He started Fairchild and Intel. Wow!
- It was on this day in 1901 that Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic radio transmissions. They had been transmitted from his large transmitting station in Poldhu Cornwall England and he had received them in St Johns Newfoundland. (thanks to Alan Wolke for the suggestions!)
- New contest from DesignSpark for using the ChipKit in an energy efficient application. Giving away 1000 ChipKits but you have to play by their rules.
Happy holidays to everyone! We’ll have one more episode before Christmas but we wanted to make sure we could give you gift ideas now. If the holiday mood strikes you and you’re interested in joining our cause of spreading electronics-nerdery the world over, The Amp Hour is now taking donations. This will help us buy more bandwidth and develop content for the show. We appreciate any and all help you might be able to give.
I like the new youtube layout. 😛
I work in an organisation filled with high caliber “nerds”.
My wife calls it a “menagerie” of nerds.
Got my Technician on the 8th and just passed my General tonight!
Collective nouns : An Obsession of nerds
Awesome, I love the ending. Nicely done. 🙂
Poor Jeff… I wonder what happened to him.
Menagerie of nerds … Kinda like it.. At least it’s better than NerdHerd 😉
Free Chipkit would be nice since I have not done anything with Pics in many years, but mandatory PCB design with their tools don’t sound too attractive. Do I really need to design/make a PCB for some energy-efficient project? And not even using PADS..
A Discrepancy of Nerds
I’ve always used the term “tribe” for that sort of description. A tribe of nerds.
Many many people want routing videos, realy.
here is mine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNPYknNKtEA
and great guy antoker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuAbi1lJo7E
Yes, ignore Jeff’s derision over PCB layout videos. I have been doing them since I was a kid and still find plenty of new things to find out. Especially when the person doing the layout is an expert. So, Dave is after a vanity callsign, and a spectrum analyser hey. I reckon he is weakening and will be a qualified radio ham before long 😉 Seriously though, it really is fun to do, and adds another dimension to electronics, and social networking. It has been a bigger conversation starter on my CV (resume) than anything else, including my degrees and job history.
It can only be “An Argument of Nerds”!
Ha, you guys can feel the linux users pain! I am so sick of having to run stupid windows only crap in a virtual box.
Also someone needs to build Dave’s power supply in an Altoids tiny just to annoy him.
For a gathering of nerds – I thought of a couple…
subset of nerds
intersection of nerds
…and I thought of one more on my way home today, and can’t remember it now… Will post reply later if I think of it…
Now I remember, a noodling of nerds. Ok, I guess it wasnt that great.
I side with Jeff on Google’s changes to Reader and the other apps. I was pissed when they went into effect and can’t stand them personally.
I also submit a squadron of nerds for consideration.
The POES NOAA weather satellites are using APT. As Dave mentioned they have been sending these signals since the 70s. A SDR like the funcube is not required to receive, most scanners / receivers that can tune ~137Mhz and have a wide FM mode / adjustable bandwidth can receive them. For the funcube, or any SDR for that matter, the benefit of using one is the adjustable bandwidth. The APT signal has a bandwidth of about 35Khz. Most cheap scanners have a bandwidth of 15Khz which will cause data loss within the encoded image.
NOAA 19 launched a few years ago was the last APT capable POES satellite that will be launched. The older NOAA satellites APT subsystems are slowly dying, only a few left have a usable APT image.
Got my UK Intermediate license last week. Did both the Foundation and Intermidiate at the same time. Great show as always.
Just got a chance to listen to this episode. Thanks for the shoutout! As far as I know, I don’t “get” anything aside from some cool recognition.
I suspect the appeal of the Altoids tin as a project case is more about the fact that the tin feels nice enough that the engineer in you immediately thinks: “Hmm. I really should find something cool to do with this.”
In Australia, I get this reaction most often with the tins containing Eclipse mints. Somehow they seem too neat to just throw away…