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- After returning from Serbia, Chris met and hung out with Kenji Larsen at the TechCrunch Hackathon in NYC. He brought an amazing suitcase full of hardware.
- Hackathons are a young man (or woman)’s game. Chris was not happy in the morning.
- One chip that was used in the hackathon (and many other places since) was the ESP8266. Still no idea where this comes from…but it’s cheap!
- Dave made a vide about the newly updated data about solar roadways:
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-ZSXB3KDF0[/tube] - South Korea does covered solar bike paths instead of roadways. It seems like a much better solution.
- Telsa recently released the Powerwall, which is touted as a great (and sleek) way to store the power from your solar panels. The NYTimes wrote about it as well.
- Chris has a friend that claims the Apple Watch will obviate all other wearables.
- Wearables in general will have a tenuous future. The Intel Curie is interesting, but likely not going to have longevity.
- Micrel is being bought by Microchip.
- Dave asked why the small fabs in China aren’t being bought by larger (non Chinese) companies. Chris says it’s because the rules of China require the owner be a Chinese national (in name at least). There is also the concept of a WOFE.
- The consolidation doesn’t stop with Microchip buying Micrel…ST Micro announced they will stop their manufacturing past 16 nm.
- There have been a couple of public hardware failures including Wattage and Ninja Blocks. This has always happened but it’s more public now because they are being funded via crowdfunding.
- There is generally a larger focus on startups, especially wrt hardware. In popular culture there is the startup podcast and Silicon Valley talking about a lot of the issues.
- Chris has been working on modular development for his robot modules. This was partially inspired by Nadya’s episode of The Amp Hour.
- We didn’t get a chance to talk about all the great stories this week. Dave brought up the fact that we have each story posting to @theamphour via the service IFTTT
Thanks to Jill Clardy for the picture of the path that looks like it’s covered in solar cells.
ESP8266 can be put into really deep sleep (78uA on 2 AA batteries – 3 years of standby). Pretty cool chip, and considering I got some for $4 each from China the barrier to entry is really low 🙂
The last couple of shows without Dave and his attitude were quite refreshing!
Okay, I managed to make it through about half the show before Dave and his know everything attitude got to be too much… Chris, I encourage you to consider a show on your own… Dave;s work is best without sound…
It is amazing how Dave believes he can predict the future and knows what people will want/use…. Chris, I just don’t understand how you tolerate his arrogance…
As an example of Dave’s arrogance, If you include phone function in a watch, then all of a sudden you don’t have to carry that damn smart phone around.
The idea of charging your Tesla battery during the day when away at work, and at night, using that energy first before tapping off the grid seems ideal. However, in the u.s. I don’t think they allow battery storage connected to the grid. Something about the UL1741 inverter potentially forcing power on the grid should it go down is a safety issue for the linemen.
SO… is it meant for only off-the-grid usage? Seems awfully niche, since how often does the power go out, MAYBE a couple times a year for a few minutes each? What am I missing?
Most municipalities have net metering, so the utility grid acts as your battery – giving you credit during the day for excess production, that you can effectively use at night.
My home utility bill is ~$300 a month:
$50 elec (450kwh) +
$20 gas +
$60 Water +
$50 landscaping +
$150 misc (cable/internet/landline)
Regarding the ESP8266, can this be used with a tcp/ip stack running on one’s own micro, or is the idea that the API / serial interface gives you processed frames with whatever protocol layers the chip supports?
Is there a link to the startup podcast / silicon investor?
Relying on a cloud service (google big or ninja small), only for it to go bust is not exactly new… My poor chumby has been showing the same screen for years.. maybe it’s burned in at this point 🙁
Chris, do you have any info you can share how to do the if-this-then-that for the reddit/twitter integration? I’d love to be tweet myself whenever there’s subreddit posts that match keywords. Thanks!
Startup podcast: http://gimletmedia.com/show/startup/
I can’t seem to publish the recipe for IFTTT, but I promise it’s really easy. Just go through and use the reddit app as the IF and then the Twitter (or Buffer) app for THAT
Great guests help, but this show is at its best when both Chris and Dave are present. Many thanks to you both!
Re: Distributed Control; putting a microcontroller on every board:
Jack Gannsle addressed this very well a number of years ago in his book The Art of Designing Embedded Systems. Advantages include forced modularity with limited well-defined responsibilities of each system. Also, the potential for reducing complexity, development/debug time, and defects.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll check that out. I have read a lot of Jack’s stuff, but don’t remember that.
Bike paths in the middle of a roadway are a very stupid idea. Who would cycle there?
Syzmon, if you see a picture of the bike path, it is enclosed and appears to be well protected from the vehicles.
Good show you guys. I usually like the more technical topics but somehow the two of you make the business side of electronics very interesting. Thank you both for taking time to create this podcast for our enjoyment.
Dave, don’t be discouraged by PLANOFUJI’s remarks. I thought the same things about you when I first started listening to the podcast but when I started to watch your videos on the EEVblog, I came to understand your personality better and see how much you love to share and talk about engineering and electronics. Thank you for continuing to be yourself. Some people, like myself, just take a bit longer to understand things that intimidate us.
Keep up the great work guys!
You are dead on right.
Dave is very quick to focus on present obstacles, be either technical or viable ones. He is not good at “assuming problem A gets solved, then…”
Of course, I do love him for his quick gut feeling of what can be made to work and most of the time I’m in complete sync with him.
But I think he is way to hard on Chris’s ideas on tomorrows tech.
Dave is the type that would have dismissed all of the following ideas upfront;
The telephone, the horseless carriage (ie car), the radio, television, internet, mobile phones, smart phones, smart tvs, and the latest: wearables.
Every single one of the above ideas (while near their infancy), would have been doomed to never become ubiquitous items by Dave – but now they are everywhere.
Wearables in their current state are – IMHO – near useless fashion items.
However, I’m old-of-age/young-of-mind enough to realize, that once the tech gets better and proper use cases see the light of day, then wearables will also reach a state of ubiquity.
To get back to the main point: it _is_ a bit tiring to hear Dave jump into his same routine so often all while I’m screaming at him behind my steering wheel in the faint hope he will hear my counter arguments.
But he is who he is I guess. Besides, I kinda like screaming at him on a regular basis.
Better him get those punches than I take it out on the Missus.
Please get your facts straight. Macedonia is not a country, FYROM is.
Found the person from Greece!
You’re correct, of course, but yeah…