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Jeff Keyzer of Mightyohm.com joins us this week to talk electronics and his new comic book!
- Jeff Keyzer and Mitch Altman and Andie Nordgren just put out a comic book called “Soldering is easy!”. Great resource for those just starting out and a preview of a book to be published later this year.
- Jeff will be at the Bay Area Maker Faire next month, teaching classes.
- He also will be at the Choas Communication Camp in Germany later this year (the place where the Hackerspace was born).
- Chris found out about all this from the Hackerspaces Mailing List.
- Dave is unabashedly asking people to vote for him in the Tektronix Scope Contest! Dave’s video is about the piezoelectric effect in probes.
- Henrik (@hspalm), one of our WOTW alums, writes in about his new project to characterize DIY shipping costs. Could be a good launchpad for a wiki-type site and drive some change at these organizations.
- Digikey has a new community that seems destined to flop right out of the gate.
- Instead, they should try to be more like AVRfreaks or BeagleBoard, which are more targeted and detached from the company.
- Electric Vehicles
- Chris had the opportunity to hear Bob Simpson, of EVdrive.com, talk about his conversion and upcoming business venture.
- New idea is V2G or Vehicle-2-Grid, uses cars as load balancing while they are parked in the garage. Don Tuite has a good rebuttal to the practicality of this in a recent Electronic Design article.
- Why doesn’t the Toyota Prius have plug-in capability?
- Dave is putting up new lighting in the lab. LED for total lumens needed is still impractical. Dave went with fluorescent to cost and light output.
- And finally, in the WTF column, the US Navy is working on a new lighting scheme: a laser weapon! Good gravy!
Who is Hans and how did he bust Dave’s April Fools post? I couldn’t find anything.
Regarding Altium Questions:
What’s your thoughts on Altium’s rich list of FPGA IPs?
I’ve been hesitant to venture too far from Altera/Xilinx’s IDE, but would love to see how a project could be put together using Altium IPs, synthesized, routed, and downloaded to a board all from with the Altium IDE!
Also, is there an auto-3d router that can place components based on their heights (assuming you have a multiple board configuration with tight spacing between them)
We were talking about Hans Camenzind, the creator of the 555 timer. As for the Altium stuff, I’ll let Dave take that one…
Talking about forums reminded me of when Freescale enthusiasts moved from Yahoo groups to Freegeeks (kinda like AVRFreaks) until Freescale killed that and now it’s just Freescale Forums on Freescale’s site. It has dampening effect on any social appeal like chatting while your teacher or boss is in the vicinity.
The Sydney branch of the Australian Electric Vehicle Association is quite active. There’s plenty of electronic, mechanical and EV philosophy banter that goes on at the meetings and there’s always someone in the middle of a conversion or designing a charger, BMS or instrumentation. OZ national forums: http://forums.aeva.asn.au/forums/
Mal was the guy in Silicon chip with the ute conversion. It’s very interesting. It’s AC induction from a +/- split pack of 12V? SLAs. He just sold it and is now maybe going to do a BMW E30 318i. http://a4x4kiwi.blogspot.com/ While you’re there, check out his 555 contest entry.
~70 miles (~112km) per charge on LiFePo4 packs is more the norm now (depends on topography). $25K -$33K for a decent conversion is not far off the mark depending on how much you can do yourself and that’s already with a doner vehicle. The majority of that amount goes towards traction pack. Unfortunately in OZ we get slammed on delivery charges for heavy overseas parts that go in the conversions.
JD
I think taht only conventional 2-stroke engines are off production. TLDI (Two stroke Low pressure Direct Injection) engines are still in production and within environmental laws.
Sorry, my vote has to go to this cutie!
http://mytektronixscope.com/videos/?bcpid=782299138001&bckey=AQ~~,AAAArH1tTNE~,ee1_EMk3RMrmNYoZtYY_3PLuqzUzvk8X&bclid=790226492001&bctid=894914708001
I’ve voted for Dave but hope the guy with the electron scanning microscope wins, an awesome piece of work. Second prize is nice too…
The soldering comic is great! I am going to promote it in the circuit design lecture that I do every fall.
Thanks! Please do teach with it, that’s what it is intended for. 🙂
Howdy Folks! Awesome show as allways! and excellent guest-work done by Jeff.
I must say that batteries are the limiting point not only for the electric car’s viability but for the whole “unplugged” universe of consumer products, and if it’s going to be a huge revoution in the industry, it will be when that problem is solved. But, then again we’ll have to wait for the BTTF Mr Fusion’s even more portable version.
Figgin Lazers!! C’mon man! this “ray of death” thing is so unpractical, the US army is trying to come up with the death star thing since they saw the movie and still fail to realize that is a pile of BS!. Anyways, they must justify the huge pie they get from the budget spending idiotic ammounts of money on this kind of nonsense.
(Sory I got in a Dave’s Rant kinda mode)
Well ass always keep up the good work!
Hear ya!
AVRfreaks is owned by Atmel. This is from the domain’s whois entry:
Registrant:
Atmel Corporation
Paramjyot Chugh
2325 Orchard Parkway
San Jose, CA 95131
US
Email: domains-legal@atmel.com
Yes, we mentioned this in the show (I looked it up while Dave was yammering on about how it wasn’t owned by Atmel!)
One correction: the hackerspaces movement predates CCC 2007 (by a lot), it’s the hackerspace movement in the *United States* that was kicked off by conversations at CCC.
Ah, my bad. I am a stereotypical American.
How are the US Navy going to put these lasers on the sharks if they require so much power?
WE NEED ANSWERS FROM OUR GOVERNMENT!!!
don’t you mean “freeking lazer beams”? 🙂 Guards!!!!!
Thanks for mentioning my link list! I’m always looking for suggestions on how to improve the list, but how can I maintain the sorting function using a wiki? I know most courier and postage fees can be calculated from plugins, at least in the eCommerce platform, so maybe put up a “calculate shipping”-plugin for all available postage services on a given online store wiki-post. Hoping to get some more suggestions here, also additions to the list itself.
Henrik (Heinrich?)
Atmel also has their hand in the development of the WINAVR compiler. They hired a few of the lead developers from the open source community to support and further develop the WINAVR compiler. Smart move on their part. They really do a good job fostering and facilitating the use of their products. If they could just get rid of the STK500 development board, right Dave? 🙂
And also if they could just improve their website. When I’m looking for a device to use for my project, I want to be able to specify some key parameters and view a list of candidates that satisfy those parameters. Microchip do a fairly decent job of this with their parametric search facility, but there’s no real equivalent for that on the Atmel website. Not that I’ve ever been able to find, anyway.
This is probably the #2 reason why I’ve never used Atmel micros. I already spend a lot of time scanning through specs in order to choose a part, so the more helpful a search tool is the happier I’m going to be. But the Atmel website makes finding a “best fit” Micro a real headache. This also makes it difficult to directly compare AVRs with their PIC counterparts on costs and features.
Brian.
Of course, there are some third party vendors (such as Farnell) that provide a parametric search facility for some of the parameters, so it is possible to use their website to make a short-list of potential parts, but personally I’ve only ever had limited success with this – I find it far easier to use Microchip’s own parametric search facility for choosing PIC devices.
I’m not saying Microchip’s parametric search facility is perfect either, though. There’s definitely room for improvement – or room for a competitor (Atmel) to trump them on it.