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- Chris is selling a “Bodge” shirt
- Dave has a new outro on his latest repair video.
- Chris just got back from SXSW down in Austin. They used to have lots of chip companies, some of which remain:
- AMD sold to Global Foundries
- Silicon Labs is still there.
- Freescale and IBM are somewhat reduced.
- The panel Chris was on included former guest of the show Scott Miller of Dragon Innovation. The topic was DFM for getting to scale. Chris focused mostly on making designs robust.
- Another trend at SXSW was IoT and ways of controlling the software layer. The physical interfaces to these devices still leaves something to be desired.
- Chris mentioned the industrial HART standard as a possible analog to the problem that connected light switched need.
- Artificial Intelligence just beat a world Go champion 4 games to 1.
- Dave likes the Numberphile video explaining the math of chess.
- Chris has been making 2 minute videos trying to explain problems that beginners don’t know much about when starting out. Things like electron flow vs current flow, what ground means. Dave has made a video asking, “Does current flow through a capacitor?“
- This may end up becoming a book some day, titled Top down electronics
- The Hackaday Prize 2016 was announced! It’s new judges and new structure this year.
- The Keysight scope contest is having lots of legal woes giving away scopes.
- What would happen if The Amp Hour started a political party? What does it look like if an engineer was in charge of legislation? What do they optimize?
- Dave mentioned the TED talk about Basic Income. Chris said this is an eventual solution to “what happens when robots take all of our jobs?”.
- The BeagleBone organization is participating in the Google Summer of Code and you can help out!
- Great bumper sticker, “The cloud is just someone elses computer”
- Another interesting BBB project, the Bela works for super low latency audio.
- Mike’s video about the layers of a PCB was awesome! He machined each layer at a time to expose the copper.
- The 1953 Transistor documentary by Bell is a great retro look at the early days.
- A user posted some fun pictures of the Shenzhen markets.
Thanks for the links and the always entertaining show!
Chris, if you run in the US and shoot 100% for space, you have my vote.
Dave, I really think Chris is more to the point regarding the IoT arguments: you are definitely not the target customer.
What you are missing is that next generations are having their cellphones close to them for longer hours of the day – heck, in an old episode Chris said he uses his phone as a wristwatch! (heresy!)
Under this new crowd the light on/off phone control (which I also think it is silly) will be ubiquitous and perceived as more convenient than a wall switch – especially if tied with additional functions such as tonal and brightness controls. Under that thinking the TVs with remote control are silly but nowadays are everywhere: all the switches are there in the panel! Why would someone want to control these away from the TV?
You may argue the media itself (internet) is what is wrong with the picture, which I also tend to agree, but using proprietary protocols is perceived as bad nowadays in the land of free and “open source” and available everywhere. People are naturally attracted to the word “internet” – just look at the number of connected home security cameras that can be accessed from your phone.
I read somewhere that the game of Go has much more move combinations than Chess. Amazing but apparently true. http://users.eniinternet.com/bradleym/Compare.html
Explaining the obvious was always historically hard, that is why armchair critics will always poke holes at any attempts to explain these. I agree with you guys and, paraphrasing an old video from Dave, publish and be damned! 🙂
Industrial IoT is where the money is and embedded Engineers are needed. Consumer IoT is an obvious sandbox for makers to play in, but as noted in this episode and previous ones, the use cases are weak and usability is not improved.
I will say though that I use my Echo a lot. The voice recognition is nearly perfect and performance has been excellent. Now that Amazon has opened up the Alexa Lambda service and accounts on Temboo, Azure, M2X, etc are free or really cheap, makers have a lot of power at their disposal and practcal/useful project possibilities are opening up.
Fun times.