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Our last show of 2012! Thanks for another wonderful year!
- Chris has been holiday shopping on Amazon. Merry Booksmas!
- Dave likes shopping the smaller stores through Abebooks.
- Getting bound versions of the Linear Tech Application Handbooks are enough to fight over! You can get all the PDFs from the handbooks on Archive.org.
- Will books become the new LPs? Where only collectors bother? Different speeds of LPs changes the bandwidth of the recording.
- Paper is still preferred for datasheets, but many people try out tablets.
- Chris’s friend suggested the Onyx M92 as a large screen version (with the ability to write on the screen). Looks like a good option for datasheets.
- Balancing design and purchasing is tough. EBN has a good article about The Art of Concurrent Design.
- TI has changed the status of the Stellaris Cortex M3 parts they inherited when they acquired Luminary Micro. They are now listed as NRND or “Not Recommended for New Designs”. Death knell! (eventually)
- ARM has so many variations, it’s really hard to keep up! Should we blame them though? Or the companies that buy the IP?
- The Freescale debt is so unsustainable that the CEO has mentioned they’ll be “Focusing” in 2013. Said another way, they’ll End Of Life (EOL) a bunch of products. Same goes for NXP and STMicro.
- ST and Renesas might get a reprieve since the country they’re based in might bail them out. Japan has already restructured debt for Renesas and France might for ST at any time. Too big to fail in chips?
- Bunnie is working on an awesome open source hardware laptop. Dave thinks it will find further use as a high powered dev board.
- Zach “Hoeken” Smith, who was on The Amp Hour episode #121, posted a link to a desktop Pick and Place on TaoBao. The video is very impressive!
- The Kick project from Kickstarter has decided to move production back from China after 2 failed attempts. Chris and Dave discuss the value of manufacturing locally, even at higher cost.
- Students in Florida might get a break in tuition for studying engineering. What will this do for engineering enrollment?
- There are 5 realistic predictions for disruptive products in 2012 on the new tech site, Quartz. Were there any missed?
- We’re on break until the 2013! Leave your questions, comments and suggestions on TheAmpHour.com or on the /r/TheAmpHour subreddit. Let us know about the projects you’re working on!
- We will have transcriptions available for select shows. Thank you to all of our wonderful sponsors for making this possible! If you’re interested in donating, check out our Donation page on TheAmpHour.com.
At the risk of putting my corporate pants on: TI actually didn’t discontinue Stellaris line. Actually we are ramping development and pushing the M4F for a more stable process technology. The M3 line (legacy process technology from the luminary aquisition). The silicon is available for purchase. NRND means we have a suggested replacement. TI in general doesn’t obsolete products easily if there is someone using it (we actually have an entire end of life support with Rochester to support to the very end of the customer’s life cycle).
🙂
Ah, that’s good to know! And I’m sure anyone who can afford the transition to Rochester very much appreciates it. Sometimes it pays to pay though!
Pay to Pay? (I’m a bit confused).
TI does help with the pricing through Rochester too (since it’s part of the life-cycle). Obsolescence is one of the corner stones to our portfolio. We still have TMS1000 shipping (although not recommended at all). It’s hard to show it, but TI takes obsolescence (sometimes almost perversely) seriously. Having said that the NRND announcement isn’t an easy thing for Design Engineers if they aren’t used to working with TI through one of these. Not that it’s a light thing (since most of my next year is dealing with this perception), but the big thing is that Stellaris (our ARM cortex M-) has a lot of things in the pipeline and is a viable technology (on our processes) for TI.
*step off my platform here* 🙂
Outside of that one section of this episode, I loved your iPad App idea.
As for transcriptions, I think you should prioritize guest episodes.
OK, that’s good feedback. I had leaned towards the episodes with me and Dave but I suppose you’re right about what people will be searching for the most.
You guys were talking about a chip that has proximity detection and possibly gesture detection. If this is real magic I would love to check some of these out. Could you link few in?
Happy Christmas!
P.S. I agree with Yi Yao about the transcription priorities. I think you will get the most bang for your buck that way.
https://leapmotion.com/
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/why-the-leap-is-the-best-gesture-control-system-weve-ever-tested/
looks like it might work on the same principle huge touch screens work (array of IR leds and photoelements)
As an owner of Boox M92 I really recommend buing it. It’s not the best tools for web browsing, but otherwise it a supreme piece of hardware.