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- Martin Lorton is thinking about selling off his stack of gear. Chris is excited for the opportunity serendipidy might bring.
- Dave got an email about how to find a new job. One way is to just email, using a tool like Email Hunter. However you should be very cognizant of the person’s time you are emailing.
- Louis Rossman made a cryptic video about the future of his channel. It might turn out ok. Chris hadn’t heard of him until Louis did a popular AMA.
- The Juno probe has gotten to Jupiter and was successful!
- The Megaprocessor is awesome. 43.2K transistors. Should people learn processors? Maybe. But there probably isn’t time for the general EE audience.
- Rudolf Kalman has passed away. If you don’t know, Kalman Filters are present in many sensor applications these days.
- EAGLE was bought by Autodesk (for an estimated $20M, no official numbers). Autodesk has a large suite of tools now:
- Fusion
- Inventor
- Tinkercad
- Circuits.io
- Adafruit did an interview with Dave and Chris’s former co-worker (worked with both of them individually!). Matt didn’t answer all the questions.
- Chris thinks a CAD tool is like Religion. You’re not changing without a “Catalyzing Change Agent”
- Circuit Maker continues to lack features, but Altium finally reduced the price on Circuit Studio, which puts it into competitive territory.
- Surprisingly, Chris still recommends learning KiCad (using something like Getting to Blinky)
- Our episodes will start uploading to The Amp Hour youtube channel. This will allow deeplinking of the audio.
- Dave has been releasing videos of his chat with Karsten about space electronics.
- We will be having a call in show next week! Email feedback@theamphour.com if you’d like to join in on Skype.
- Chris will be in Chicago from the 15th to the 17th! Get in contact if you’d like to hang out (chris@theamphour.com)
- Limor did an interview with the CEO of Digikey.
- The Daredevil Camera is a fantastic use of paralleled signal processing!
- Dave had forgotten he already made a video about orders of magnitude back in video 286!
Thanks to CGPGrey for the image of the bottles
re: PCB Software Religion – I have used a lot of PCB design tools. All of them are defective. They are difficult to learn. Once you put in the effort to learn a tool, you don’t want to learn a tool that has a different workflow. I always have to use additional tools to get the job done.
Most of the time my board outlines are very complex to conform to the cabinet design and I draw the board outline in mechanical cad, export the outline in dxf, and import the dxf outline into the PCB CAD package.
My designs tend to be mixed analog and digital including, microcontrollers, analog processing, and power circuits (up to 27Mhz – 100W). Most PCB CAD packages define the component by the value field and combine all the parts of the same value as one part identified by all the Designators. I may have five different 0.01uf capacitors in a design with different characteristics. Some PCB CAD packages enable me to add an additional part field that is our corporate PN and then I can export each part by designator and PN. I then can use an external database program to construct the BOM. I use Parts and Vendors for this which allows me to provide alternate part numbers and reference to the part data sheet.
Most of my PCB vendors required a FAB drawing which I provided by an additional layer in the design and printed to pdf and included with the gerbers and drill files. Some packages are easier and some packages are harder to accomplish this layer.
Of all the packages, I choose KiCAD. The price is right, the board design is virtually unlimited, and you can get the job done.
Hey Chris and Dave,
Yep, PCB design packages can be a real pain in the ass.
For the hobbyist, there’s way too many bells and whistles to wrestle with.
I want software that is capable enough to layout simple two-sided boards…and no more.
My biggest pet peeve with these full-blown packages, is having to diddle with schematics and net-lists before even getting to the PCB layout. I just want to jump right into the layout, in a simple “what you see is what you get” control of part placement.
I want a decent grid system that gets more detailed as you zoom in. I want a snap-to-grid layout capabilities that can be specified for each class of item (i.e. footprints, traces, holes, vias, etc). I want to be able to turn on, and turn off, the visibility of each class of item. But not only on and off…I also want to be able to set the opacity of each item class on the fly, so items lying below others can bleed into view.
Besides PCB Layout, I also want a “footprint editor” to create footprints for new parts.
Finally, I want a simple process to create Gerber’s…namely…type in the top-level name of the Gerber files you want to generate. Then the software will create a new directory with that name…populate it with the Gerber files with that name and applicable extension, and also save the current state of the layout design. In this way, at the precise moment the Gerber’s were created, you have an archived usable copy of the layout.
I’ve pretty much looked at everything…
Nothing even came remotely close to my wishes…
So, I wrote my own.
Chris, if you ever have a hangout in Cleveland, please post it.
I’ll come up from Columbus and show you the software…as well as some of the boards I’ve created with it.
I’ll also show you the Tablet Radio project I’m working on.
I’m trying to replace the conventional RC Airplane Transmitter/Receiver Combo with something that is tablet based and uses the 433MHz radio band.
Keep up the good work on the Podcast.
Jim Kirkley
Columbus, OH.
re: Space Videos on EEVBlog main – I haven’t had time to watch any! I’m definitely interested but I totally get it’s probably kind of far off/away from your normal main channel viewers.
re: Hangouts On Air etc… I wonder if someones come up with something better using like Open Broadcaster or that + XSplit? Would be cool to have something halfway decent for things like Hangouts On Air. I’ve done absolutely zero research on it though.
Speaking of the Daredevil camera, didn’t the guest from Digilent talk about a idea for a project where he would place microphones all across the ceilings of a room, and then using only software (dsp) be able to isolate and perfectly hear any conversation in the room?
BTW, people do like to hear about the production side.. xsplit, tricaster, whatever! Over 6500 views on how the amp hour is done!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP3Z_N8IkQQ