The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#78 – Alteritous Andy’s Absquatulation

  • Chris visited a FabLab today (not a fab!) to work on some projects and hang out with friends.
  • Chris has also been reading Neil Gershenfeld’s book of the same name, FAB.
  • Melbourne had its first MakerFaire, though Dave was not able to go, unfortunately.
  • Dr. Howard Johnson offered rewards for finding errors in his book, much like Don Knuth did for his programming book.
  • Chris is officially a ham! His callsign is KD8RND! (Dave is warming up his vocal chords)
  • Do you prefer calling or emailing?
  • Andy–PhotonicInduction on YouTube–announced he’s officially shutting down his YT channel (NSFW language possibly).
  • [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC-IYP1xjow[/tube]
  • Dave got and has unboxed his MakerBot Thing-o-matic. Chris met one of the 3D printing competitors today from MakerGear.
  • This American Life on NPR had a great feature on how consumer products are made, specifically Apple stuff at Foxconn.
  • OpenCores is now taking donations for their development of an Open RISC processor.
  • Cory Doctorow had a good speech at 28c3 about the impending closing off of electronics systems in the future.
  • A process engineer managed to sneak some fun stuff out of a fab:
  • [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmrBs3BX9SQ[/tube]
  • Dave is building a ArduCopter currently but new types of quads keep on getting released. The AR Parrot 2.0 has a 720P camera mounted on it and is only $300!
  • Friend and IT Guru Alan Garfield was miffed that MicroChip doesn’t provide command line tools anymore. Are IDEs the only way, in the eyes of vendors?
  • Chris is making videos for the soon-to-be-released CEE (started on KickStarter)
  • Shonky Product of the Week:
    • The HojoMotor is a perpetual energy motor based on permanent magnets (how original!). The video is frigg’n hilarious! Watch it before the site is shut down! 😉
  • Chip of the Week:
    • Listener Clifford Wolfe writes in about the LMC6042 because of the 2 fA (typ) input bias current for sensitive applications.
    • Chris also likes the LMP7721, which specs 3 fA typical (Chris mispoke, the max is actually 20 fA).
    • Dave and Chris like any chip that offers an upgradable option (through binning or otherwise)!

 

Got questions? Comments? Let us know below!

Comments

  1. Well, about Andy’s channel… It’s not only about safety. It was also people complaining about pollution. People just flagging his videos with no reason. So yeah, he indeed got fed up with all that and decided to quit. I really do hope he’ll release a DVD with his work or something like that, though. I’d instantly buy it. 😀

  2. Hidden or None documented features in a cpu are not new, the zilog Z80 had loads. The extended code set of the z80 was controled by 2 reserved bytes ( ED and another I cannot remember) but the list was full of holes ie if you mapped the opcodes out against its base opcode you found that certain extended opcodes did not exist (officially), no sinister reason just that they did not work as expected so zilog simply pretended they did not exist. However lots of game designers used theses codes for speed and anti hacking reasons (If you ran the code through a standard Disassembler you got rubbish out) and compensated for the snafu’s (mainly corruption of the flags register) Happy Days 🙂

  3. I was really sad to hear that the Photonicinduction channel had been removed. Its a giant loss, there were a lot of informative videos on that channel. I don’t really see why he would pull them all off, that makes the time he spent on them completely wasted!

  5. Dave, I don’t know when you ordered your PCBs at Iteadstudio, but you won’t be getting anything from them during the Chinese Spring Festival. They’re having a complete hiatus. I had to switch to a different ‘board house’ as well.

  6. As a microcontroller designer, the idea that the world needs another CPU core because too much of the current micros is hidden sounds like a lot of weak BS. The 8051 had 255 instructions. The 1 extra instruction possible in an 8 bit CPU was used by in-circuit emulators to generate breaks. I doubt the Z80 or any other legacy part had some undocumented instructions that would improve performance – if they hadn’t been kept secret.

    If there are any undocumented SFRs in your micro, they are either for testing the part or maybe for some broken feature that was deemed by marketing cheaper to remove from the datasheet than fix.

    I look forward to seeing what Open Cores comes up with. Like any other IP, the difficulty isn’t in writing the RTL, it’s in making it perform in silicon.

    Chris

  7. In Z80s and 6502s in the 1980s, games programmers certainly used undocumented codes to try and confuse hackers and reduce their code size. When all you have to play with is 32kB and most of that is graphics and frame buffer, each byte matters! I remember what a big thing it was when the market realised the Z80 had an entire set of alternate registers.

    There are plenty of “open” cores out there, hacked together by hobbyists. I guess this one has the potential to be the Linux of cores, but unlike the OS market, Intel and AMD have a huge number of patents locked up. Chances are that if this core becomes good/popular, they will suddenly bring out an obscure patent and kill it in one stroke. Increasingly we seem to be held to ransom by manufacturers who think they still own equipment we have paid for, so I can see why they are doing this.

  8. Judging from the hojomotor website’s copyright information the site has been online since 2010 😉

    • To the best of my knowledge Zilog never corrected the errors and I know for a fact that clone cpu’s contained the same errors, asyou say Zilog simply removed the Opcodes from the data sheet no conspiracy just they didn’t work as designed…

      • Whoa! Just took a look at the link you posted…Did you read who wrote it? A certain Mr David Jones…..No it couldn’t be He’s far too young(?)

  10. Damn EE’s! 🙂 His name is Donald Knuth (the k is not silent) and long live the command line!

  12. Hehe, I was also mortified to hear Chris and Dave failing to know “The Art of Computer Programming”…

    I’m lucky enough to be the proud owner of both TAOCP (the full 3 book box set) and TAOE (including the student manual).

    Both tomes are wasted on me, though because I do not possess even 10% of the requisite intelligence to understand either of them fully 🙂

    They both have massive geek cred though, so that’s nice. 😀

    I’ll post a picture of them in a bit. *pride*

  13. MPLab X itself doesnt support command line tools because it is just an IDE.

    But all of MPlab’s compilers can be ran from command line. I and currently using MPLAB C30 to do work with PIC24’s and I do all my builds form command line. (This is on a linux box though, story maybe different in windows?)

    • MPLAB’s compilers are all actually basically command line driven, even under windows. If you look at the build output window, it shows the full command line used to build each file, and then the linker command used to build the final executable. And now, with MPLABX, it is all running natively under Mac and Linux, too.

  14. If that Hojo thing were real and easy to build, it still wouldn’t be easy to connect it to the power mains. It seems like they’d need to have electricians who are “in on the secret of free energy” to help people install it. I wonder what the devil they send you if you send them money.

    Regarding transistors, Chris is more excited by looking at curves than when he was in college.

    Great show!

  15. lol the HoJo – sounds like a stereotype pimp name.
    These scammers always do that, claiming, that there are patents (there maybe are some but there is exactly NO testing if it works by the patent office) and then claims, that the plans were secret. Guess what: you just give the office money and they will send you papers about that patent(if not in “pending” mode). The whole original purpose of the patent system was to publish and protect for a certain time, not to obscure or how would you be able to design around a patent?
    Also it wastes 15 minutes and never gets to a point and they, as usual, do not explain why aluminum plants are not using such a tech or over the horizon radars. These guys would be all over such tech no matter how much the power industry would try to suppress it. Hey I got an energy for free Idea: just rub your hair with a balloon! Cost: next to nothing. Plus, you get some awesome hairstyle!

    • Giving the patent office money?

      The stuff is online, for everyone to see. If you don’t want to bother with the USPTO search function you just plug the patent number and the word Patent into Google and find multiple sites re-publishing the documents.