#86 – Emolumental Evaluation Emporetics

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• Survey Results are in! Thanks to the 330 or so people that participated! (Results will show up in a separate post)
• Australia lost the SKA to South Africa.
• Chris is going to this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire! If you’re going to be there, let him know!
• For our European listeners, Future electronics (the distributor) has a program where you can get dev boards if you trade your information. Decent mount of vendors participating.
• Today’s show centered around the different types of sales people, Chris has written about this before at Engineer Blogs.
• When is it OK to hang out with vendors? Is there an ethical limit to what you should agree to? Is just lunch OK?
• IBM creates a quasi-off-the-shelf Terabit Transceiver for network communications at under 5W power. Way outside the range of everyday networking but a good sign for the future!
• Altera had a press release this week about their built in optical transceiver.
• This is in line with much of the module-based electronics that are being developed by chip vendors these days.
• Printed electronics on a machine that cost less than $10K! Does Chris win? Thanks to Cherish from Engineer Blogs for pointing it out!
• Want micro machines to go along with your printed chips? Try a printed dragon fly, on a print platform the size of a business  card!
• ZombieTech.tv did a great interview with James Neal (@laen), who runs the DorkbotPDX service (the purple boards).
• Dave has his MakerBot working and printing! He was happy he had to repair the machine so he now knows how it works and what to watch for.
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• And the recently posted video!
• [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdC7kTT-nN4[/tube]
• Dave is getting custom bean bags made for his office made with a custom fabric (if you’re interested, you can easily purchase it here):
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• Chris has been struggling with KiCAD but learning as he goes, similar to the struggles Dave has been having.
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• Dave used to have to do actual tape out on old boards and could do negative patterns in his head!
• COTW:
  • A new(?) chip from Analog Devices, ADM1166, can monitor 10 different power rails and store the continuous voltages for readback after a failure. Can also throw alarms and coordinate power sequencing. Cool chip!
• Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, was sick of people emailing him with “better” punchlines to his comics. He now allows you to add your own ending to a comic strip (registration required, however).

If you’re still interested in participating in the survey, please see episode 85 to get to the form. If you have any other feedback, you can reach us on Twitter (that’s really just the feed, Chris and Dave are both on there as well), Google+, Facebook or email us at theamphour@gmail.com.