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As much as electronics is about the technology, knowing the basics behind businesses can be important to having the capital to keep making fun projects and gadgets that can impact the world.
- HackaDay is looking for a new home (and a new editor). Jason Calcanis is looking to sell it to move onto something else and Caleb Kraft (former editor-in-chief) is moving on to other projects.
- Dave has been having a heckuva time getting his MakerBot firmware to work. He can’t get ahold of a simple AVRdude EXE file.
- Sometimes there aren’t steady builds because they expect you to build it yourself. This stems from firmware repositories and the idea that you should have access to the source code.
- What firmware revision control do you use? Dave and Chris have both used SVN but haven’t dove into Git (which seems to be the defacto standard these days).
- The Microsoft architect who was the first paid traveler into space was Charles Simonyi
- But why go to space when you can just have your picture taken up there? The ARKYD telescope was funded on Kickstarter to the tune of $1.5M!
- Hardware is hard…who knew?
- Investing is hard too!
- Chris has been thinking about low capital businesses. Topping the list are software and brands…which is why VCs love them. Chris also thinks mining, but Dave has seen the large up front capital outlays.
- There is a rise in one-person million dollar businesses (but not really, since some of it is outsourcing tasks)
- Thanks to our sponsor this week, NetBurner! Check out their offer for 20% off dev boards for listeners. Go to NetBurner.com/theamphour
- The Leap Motion is surprisingly mostly software and then IR LEDs. Mike Hord from Sparkfun shows off the hardware and the current consumption.
- The “Systemization” of chips continues, with vendors pulling in more and more of the design. This is driving the Internet of Things.
- Chip of the Week: A Bluetooth Chip from Dialog Semiconductor, the DA14580. This rivals TI’s CC254x and Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF51822.
- If you don’t want to buy an SoC that has everything on board, you can grab a design from TI’s precision library.
- Or you could go learn how to be an IC designer. But how? The question was asked on the EEVblog forum recently. (hint: slowly and with good credentials)
- Tektronix is headed to the fab for their next generation ADC SoC (which is the heart of real time scopes). They are tapping the 350 GHz SiGe IBM Process (WOWZA!).
If you’re in New York City, Chris is planning a meetup for Friday the 19th in the city (he picks up his Google Glass the following day). Also, if you want to win a t-shirt, submit links or ideas to The Amp Hour Subreddit.
Thanks to Bryan Champ for the picture of the “Capitalism Works For Me!” sign.
You;ve kind of got it arse about face Dave. Tools like AVRDudewhere developed to allow non-windows PC users to work with devices that the manufacturers only supported on Windows. As far as I know Atmel still dont supply versions of AVR studio for anything other than windows. Microchip have only just got MPLAB X for Linux. A lot of the open source tools don’t support Windows well because thats not the intended market – Windows users already have the official tools. There are people who create Windows builds for open source projects but in many cases thats a “side project” from the main build done by someone who does it for the love of it, and happens to have paid $$$ for a Windows compiler.
+Ian k Rolfe: Right, as a Linux user, I rarely have to compile things because my distribution packages things like AVRdude. Most open source developers think along these lines, just release the software, and let distributions worry about builds. This also allows bugs to be filed against specific builds of software on specific configurations, as apposed to Dave’s conception of everyone grabbing source and building their own binary.
Bummer for Windows users just looking to get something running though.
Hi Guys
Regarding chip designs and pains and gains, you should ask Chip Gracey from Parallax for an interview on the show, I’ve been following the ins and outs of the creation of the new parallax 2 processor on their forums and it’s pretty eye opening.
Try WinAVR… it’s the gcc compiler suite for Windows for AVRs. the avrdude utlity is (with exe, lol) is included.
+1 for Craig on that.
Yeah I had to search around in the manual:
http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/nongnu//avrdude/avrdude-doc-5.11.pdf
It is tucked in at pg.30; in any case can’t complain about a free and open source alternative.
Why I live in Silicon Valley: @ 49:30 you start talking about Dialog Semiconductor. When I heard about this product a month ago, I was frustrated that the online info was no more than a product brief. So I got in my car and drove over to their office, about 10 minutes away, and chatted to one of their engineers. The specs do look great, and IF they hit their RX and TX power numbers this will be a great chip. It is hard to directly compare to Nordic’s nRF51 products, since they are actually shipping, and full data is available. Dialogs data sheet is not yet available, chips won’t be available till some time next year. As for chip of the week, I would recommend you go look at the nRF51822 block diagram. It has all the same blocks, and is available. Here in the US I can get it for $2.50 in small qty.
Dave’s rant about AVRDude hit a nerve.
Windows is the dominant platform and most free SW packages have not only a Windows installer (or just .exe), they also include the Mac OSX binaries as well. In both cases, this is just smart stewardship for your community and there’s no reason to exclude links to the source in GitHub as well – all users win. I’ve seen whole companies die as a result of thumbing their nose at Windows and its users, but the free market wins out here.
Some in the software community just don’t get the mindset differences between HW engineering and SW development, and then there are the Open Source purists in the SW community….
I do hope that the embracing of hardware by traditional software developers does cause some of them to ‘see the light’. This ad hoc cross training may lead to better software processes as a kind of positive unintented consequence for once.
Russ
PLEASE STOP BUMPING THE MICROPHONE! It is very annoying.
With respect avrdude executable for windows. It is present in the same directory from where dave got .tar.gz file.
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/avrdude/ under as http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/avrdude/avrdude-5.11-Patch7610-win32.zip ,
As a rule of thumb , file ending with .tar.gz are for the penguin folks (like me ) who wants to compile from source. you should look out for files ending with .zip , which is generally for windows people looking out for double click install solutions in download area of any open source project.
Warning : Even if you download the winodows exe from above mentioned location. It still might not work out of box , unless you have libusb already installed .