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- Chris is currently at DesignCon showing off Parts.io.
- Contextual Electronics is also underway and the first project is doing a simple layout to get everyone acclimated with the tools.
- Dave just hired his first lab assistant from a great pool of candidates! This should hopefully free Dave up to do more hardware builds.
- Someone tweeted to us about printed 7400 series electronics.
- The 3rd Edition of The Art of Electronics is now available for pre-order!
- In the US, there are restrictions on when credit cards can be charged for a crowdfund campaign (30 days). This doesn’t seem to be the case in Australia.
- There was a conference in mid January about the open source RISC V processor. They just added the videos yesterday!
- Dave predicts there will never be a successful open source processor.
- Chris was interested in the Clay Christensen book “The Innovator’s Solution“, a followup to “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.
- Dave agrees with his favorite pundit that Yahoo! should spend all the money they raised from the Alibaba IPO funding other companies and good ideas. Chris thought this sounded like the often discussed “spray and pray” method of investing in companies.
- Dave did a rant about free energy devices
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoqF3gjLIyI[/tube] - The new DARPA robot for their Robotics Challenge now has a battery pack and has been redesigned for everything above the knee.
- Dave really enjoys this history of atomic power. He likes the book, “The making of the atomic bomb“.
- Once the new assistant starts, Dave may attempt a portalab like Chris built last year for having at home. This would be like a “bug-out bag“, but for electronics
That’s a great image for this episode! I am still laughing.
Also they do a lot of robot mobility testing at NASA Glenn
Hey guys, I wanted to clarify a few things about RISC-V. First, it’s NOT a processor. It’s an ISA specification. Anybody – students, researchers, start-ups, corporations – they are all free to build their own RISC-V processor. No patent issues, no licensing fees. They can even keep their processor closed-source if they want.
We know of at least one company with a product that contains a RISC-V core they built themselves and there are many other companies making RISC-V cores as well. At Berkeley, we have open-sourced one of our cores called Rocket. It has been fab’ed out to silicon 6 or 7 times now. You can put Rocket on an FPGA if you want, although it’s not designed to be a soft-core (we would’ve made different micro-architectural decisions if that were the case). We use Rocket as a general-purpose application core to drive our research accelerators. LowRISC is using Rocket for their own open-source SoC product. Check them out!
Dave, for nuclear age aficionados, check out also a good book about “the other side”: Stalin and the bomb. http://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Bomb-Soviet-Atomic-1939-1956/dp/0300066643
Dave mentioned Mike’s Youtube channel for quality technical electronic videos (due in part because they’re spinoffs of his day job).. but what’s the name of the channel?
My 2015 predictions:
1) A PayPal alternative. Many seem to despise Paypal, yet nothing else has taken hold.
2) Yahoo’s Screen will carve out a niche market away from Youtube for content developers.
BTW, regarding the amphour’s picture on last week’s episode, there’s a show called Inside Man with Morgan Spurlock that did a segment on robots.. and the Beam Pro telepresence robot is exactly what you guys were talking about!
Looks like ROS does run on Pi: http://wiki.ros.org/ROSberryPi/Setting%20up%20ROS%20on%20RaspberryPi