Due to time constraints this week, we’re going to try going back to a mostly link-based page. If you find yourself really longing for silly and extraneous commentary encapsulating the links, be sure to let us know in the comments! Curious about the title of the episode? Now you have to listen to the show!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
-
- The Pantyhose Screen!
- Events
- Chris will be at ESC Boston
- And the Open Hardware Summit!
- Dave is going the BrizTube!
- Shoutouts
- Shoutout from Jason! Thanks!
- Thanks to Jon from Freetronics for the Arduino kit! Having tons of fun with it!
- Tech News
- Tech Discussions
- Jim Williams: Analog Badass
- Modularity in practice at Buglabs
- Talking SPICE simulators and mentioned the experience of Flying Flux
- Rants
- Iranian walking robot
- Clay Shirky’s book about Cognitive Surplus
- Dave’s followup to the calling out the IEEE about their Kindle review
- Dave’s experience with Digikey reminds him of the Tenacious D song The Government Totally Sucks!
They’re not in order, but hopefully all of the links are included that we mentioned. If we’re missing any, please let us know in the comments.
And finally, thanks to the folks over at The Conversations Network; The Levelator seems to have cured ALL of our sound woes! Holy moly was it easy and effective at making us sound good! Many thanks to George Graves for giving us the heads up!
Once again, an interesting show. Wish we could hook up at the Open Hardware Summit. Next year!
Thanks
john
I DON’T KNOW WHEN TO SAVE A BACKUP, and I grow up with Doom and Quake.
And about the walking robot rant: you hit a nerve in me guys (yeah, I tried to implement an equilibrium system myself) but that’s true, I wasted time researching the big set of sensors and variables involved and then, the enlightenment, my work was all BS from 15 years ago, a noble effort on understanding it, but no use for the 600 US$ that my team spent. (I recycled most of the hardware thou)
Great show as always, the audio is excellent!
Nice encouraging bit about the importance of getting to know people. I think you’re right that it’s very useful, but being concerned about my internet appearance it’s quite hard to get out there. Maybe some day.
Great episode and top sound quality.
Still no rimshot!
Dave, for youtube calculate the amount of man-hours that go into watching them. 10k people watching a 30min teardown ~ 600k 30sec lolcat hits.
P.S. In terms of education vs. entertainment you sort of missed the mark. Granted you aren’t doing 555 tutorials or shift registers. You guys are right that there are already many on the internet, but often for a beginner (myself) the trouble is being made aware of concepts so that they can be searched on google. I often have amphour open on one tap while searching tangents on another. From a beginners standpoint, the show is very educational albeit as a starting point.
I had the same problem with Digikey recently, when i happened to click on the personal use since the larger portion on the purchase was not for work purposes. There is never an option for “it looked like a shiny new chip i hadn’t seen before and i thought i’d grab one to play with”.
Not all the components are for the one thing. Some are for the company i work for, some are for me for home stock and who knows what project it’ll end up in and some are for a side project a friend or colleage and i are working on.
Plus the guy that sends you the email asking export regs questions is out of your time zone. So I ordered something on Tuesday, went to training Wednesday and Thursday expecting a package to be there on Friday and was met with the email instead.
It reminds me of the DRM analogy where piraters are still getting unhampered use of games and music but the rule followers get shafted. I wouldn’t be surprised if people fudge the export regs questionairres in order to get the stuff they need. The joke is most of the stuff is available via local suppliers, it’s just cheaper,quicker or more convenient (besides export regs) via Digikey.
I also wonder if ordering certain devices like high speed FPGAs trigger flags in their exports department. I found at one time a while ago there were certain uCs it wouldn’t let me buy at all. That may have been due to that patent/copyright case thing that Freescale (and maybe others?) were dealing with last year where there was a freeze on them selling some of their chips.
*sigh*… at least they don’t think I’m from Austria anymore.
JD
That Freescale chip thing was a big ol’ mess. Can’t believe they didn’t just pay for the licensing of the BGA package type!
At the beginning of the show Dave asked Chris to remind him about some rant regarding Australia…
What was it? They didn’t mention it again, was it cut out?
Nope, completely forgot about it. I’ll see if Dave remembers for next time.
There are plenty of things to pick on if you guys want to rant about Iran, but the robot seems like a perfectly good and valid piece of R&D endeavour. I’m a bit puzzled by the negativity.
On a more positive note, thanks for linking to the Flying Flux. I appreciate the fact you make it sound like using complicated EDA tools to do IC design is really hard to get into. It discourages others and reduces competition for me. Thanks! 😉
Darn, the sound really is good. Compared to previous it is like gold to my ears 😛
And I really have to agree with the Iranian robot.
I actually love the DigiKey thing. It is same kind of user agreement that there have been for many software programs. I really am wondering if they think that saying I will not make nuke with it makes anyone stop or do anything…
re: audio quality : last time it was better. This has too much high freqs, sounds a bit harsh.