The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#91 – Idiographical Interconnect Intorsion

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  1. “The CSIRO are trying out a new wireless data system that can transmit over 10 Mbps!”

    10 Mbps? Thats like so yesterday.

    The linked article says 10 Gbps. I think thats more noteworthy. 😉

  2. There is something wrong with the MP3 download link. When I click it, I get a file, which looks like php source code instead!

  3. That ABC doc isn’t viewable outside Oz – anyone have a link to a copy?

  5. In this and other shows Dave mentions “Improvised electronic devices” as an established term for something the security authorities are worried about. I have never heard this elsewhere and Google mostly seems to find pages about a Front Line Assembly album with this name.

    Could it be that this is a mix-up with the term “Improvised explosive devices” (IEDs)? Airport security e.g. might worry about electronic circuitry being part of an improvised explosive device and might want to investigate further, but I doubt they will refuse people from traveling with some circuit boards as long as they are just not connected to explosives.

    Am I wrong? Is security staff really banning electronics from everywhere or is it just that Dave happened to misinterpret the abbreviation IED as referring to improvised electronic devices rather than to improvised explosive devices?

  6. ETI loved it. In the UK it was around (to the best of my knowledge) until the mid ninety’s or so the disappeared. Had every edition for over ten years until her indoors called enough and they went to the tip. Just wonder how how much they would be worth now? Looking forward to seeing them again great idea but make sure you are not infringing an copyright by using their content, isn’t it like music (licence wise)? Would love to see that format return, even Elektor is a poor substitute in comparison.

  7. Sweeper there was a big case involving MIT student jailed for wearing some leds on her shirt inside an airport :/
    http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N40/simpson.html
    Boston blowing up blinky led banners? plenty of those

    Uneducated retards in position of authority = where we are now.

    chemist lab and sticking to the man? dont think so
    just google “Toronto’s G20 hacker”. Hobby rockets = jail time.

  8. Regarding the wifi, etc. I don’t think you have covered this before. The origin of spread spectrum or frequency switching came from an unlikely source:

    Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

    I just listened to this audiobook and really enjoyed it. There is a fair amount of information about player pianos and how ideas from the player piano provided one possible implementation for switching control frequencies of a radio guided torpedo – WWII era. cool stuff.

  9. I wish you had expressed a little more skepticism of CSIRO’s patent claims. Although it’s not one of the hated software patents, the claims in the ’069 are quite broad. Intel requested ex parte reexamination at the USPTO and 15 of the original 72 claims were struck as part of the reexamination process.

    • Considering that the CSIRO beat the likes of Microsoft, HP, Intel, Dell, Toshiba and others *combined*, to me shows that there must have been some validity to the patent.
      And they settled too, which means they knew they were going to lose. And these are not companies that just settle willy-nilly.

      • Just because big companies settle does not mean that a patent is any good. These companies are all part of the broken patent system, and are so stuck in it that they are not interested in getting rid of it.

        This is a quote from Bill Gates about patents from 1991:

        “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.… The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can. ” (from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates)

        The one who pays the bill is the small companies and the consumer.

        • Just because big companies settle does not mean that a patent is any good.

          Maybe not, but these big companies have an infinite amount of money and legal resources, and they usually do not settle unless they are pretty darn certain they are going to lose the case.
          Their modus-operandi in patent suits is usually never to settle, just keep throwing money and the best lawyers at it and stalling, until the smaller company goes bankrupt.

          • If the amount of money to settle is smaller than the amount needed to drive the other company into bankruptcy, they will settle. And even an infinite amount of legal resources won’t help to convince a judge who has strong opinions on patents. Judges and lawyers are not engineers, and they have a different opinion on what constitutes an “overly broad patent claim”. There is a reason why in the US, most patent lawsuits take place in the Eastern District of Texas:

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_Eastern_District_of_Texas

  11. Regarding errata sheets: when the Atmel ATmega161 came out, it was the first AVR with a SPM instruction (for self-programming it’s flash memory). That’s what the errata sheet says about it:

    “At certain frequencies and voltages, the store program memory (SPM) instruction may fail. Problem Fix/Workaround: Avoid using the SPM instruction.”

  12. Surge suppression… A DEF Stan spec for vehicle 24vdc supplied equipment includes a load dump test which applies 100vdc with 0.55 ohm source impedance for 50ms. You would need more than 50 SMC package tranzorbs in parallel to clamp that to 43v.

    You need a series element to either shut down (if acceptable) or regulate through the surge. You precede that with higher voltage tranzorbs and/or some capacitance to protect the series element from high voltage low energy spikes.

    The LTC4366 looks interesting. I would be more excited if it included a charge pump and level translator to drive an N channel MOSFET.

  15. Weird confluence of events. I recommended EEVBlog to some guys on the MITX server (MIT’s experiment in open college courses) and I figured I’d go back to some of Daves early Vblogs. Guess what I came across?

    The CSIRO!

    Dave’s first VBlog talks about the patten suit of 802.11!

    Same thing you’re talking about today. Dave, you’ve come a long way.
    Best of luck,

    -Z

  16. I think the word you were searching for to describe Dave’s like for the misfortune of insertion machines failing is “Schadenfreude”