- Dave has a new $140K oscilloscope in his lab! Amazing how he wouldn’t use it normally.
- Rental companies will happily rent you one for less.
- Dave is getting a new MakerBot Repicator soon. One of the employees there printed a box for the uCurrent.
- MakerBot was at ComicCon, where Seth Green seemed to like them.
- Marcus of Little Bird electronics recently got VC funding for the Ninja Blocks, a successfully funded project on Kickstarter.
- Will KS become a hunting ground for hungry VCs?
- Nathan Seidle of Sparkfun recently wrote/spoke about “The Pit of Despair”, when Kickstarter projects are big, but not big enough to quit your job.
- Ian Daniher and Kevin Mehall of Nonolith Labs, wrote a response (after being used as an example “Pit”) about the benefits of starting a company that way.
- Elon Musk took some risks once he cashed out of PayPal:
- Dave enjoyed the documentary called, “The Revenge of the Electric Car“, which featured Elon.
- Do you know how ceramic capacitors are made? Johnson Dielectrics details their process.
- Library and BOM management is quite a hassle. How do you manage it?
- The Component Organizeris a small, cross platform, open source application for managing BOMs and stock.
- One of the interns at Octopart is working on “Historical Part Pricing” to let us know what parts cost over time.
- Bob Dobkin agrees with Chris (ha! More in the other direction) about the importance of being connected to a fab.
- Foundries are growing overall, but TSMC still is the most dominant player (by a lot!).
- Will the Memristor deliver in 2014 as HP/Hynix says it will? Can it compete with entrenched technologies?
- Next week on the show, Chris Anderson of Wired and DIYdrones. Get your questions in now! (or vote on others’)
As Chris said at the end of the show, we would appreciate reviews and ratings wherever you can find us. The iTunes store is a good start. And don’t forget, a great way to chat about the latest episode or anything else electronics that might be on your mind is on the Discuss Server. See you there!
EEVBlog, Not sure if you got my message on twitter. I was wondering how much longer you’ll have that 13GHz scope. I built a small board with some fast CMOS logic inverters (forget exact part number) that can produce square waves rather than just pulses, and I found that the rise and fall times were <300ps when I had the opportunity to measure it on a scope like the one you've borrowed. If you'd like to have a play with that little square wave generator, I could send it to you. As I'm in Australia it should get there next day.
Another interesting thing to do with those fast oscilloscopes is to stick about 2.5cm (1") of wire into the input connector (or preferably an adapter, don't want to damage the scope's connector!), then get a plastic bag and put a 5-10 coins in it, then jingle the bag of coins a metre or so from the little antenna wire. It is quite surprising how many volts can be induced in the little antenna just from the coins, it's pretty easy to get several volts, so start off far away or use an attenuator. I found out about that phenomenon here:
http://emcesd.com/tt2004/tt090104.htm
Chris