The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#56 – Open Orbific Oratiuncle

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Another week of bouncing from topic to topic. This week included robots, entrepreneurs, OSHW, FPAAs, Ecology and LEDs! Whoo, that’s a lotta stuff!

  • Reminds Dave of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, meant to promote and inspire fitness in Australia and a few other countries.
  • Great build quality on a WBR Regenerative Receiver by Dave Richards (AA7EE)! Looks like lots of fun to build!
  • Margery Conner writes about how Phillips won the USA L-Prize and have produced a commercial replacement of a 60 Watt lightbulb with LEDs.
  • Dave found an old payslip from the early 90s and was bragging about making $11 an hour as an engineer.
  • This Day In Nerd History: Leslie Comrie (born Aug 15) was a New Zealand astronomer and pioneer in the application of punched-card machinery to astronomical calculations. He replaced the use of logarithm tables with desk calculators and punched card machines for the production of astronomical and mathematical tables. This made scientific use of these machines, made originally for only business uses.
That’s all for this week. Remember to sign up for the open source ecology project, especially if you find yourself saying you don’t know what to build.

Comments

  1. Anyone I’ve ever heard of doing Duke of Endinburough camping and bushwalking weekends got up to stuff the Duke of Edinburough probably wouldn’t approve of.
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    I was a bit meh about the “pop stars say its ok to be a geek/nerd” video. But I’m not the target audience. I wonder what they think?
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    Good luck with the theremin…i mean regen receiver if you build it. The copper clad pad grid seems to be a popular method for homebrew radio. An ARRL book I have actually has in it a PCB layout you can use for home brew litho acid etching which is just a grid of fat pads. I love that they felt the need to publish it.
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    The Open Source Ecology project reminds me of the Time Travel Cheat Sheet: http://www.joeydevilla.com/2009/04/11/time-travel-cheat-sheet/
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    LEDs taking over: One of our PCB stuffer houses keeps suggesting we should do more projects with LEDs because that’s what theyre good at and do most of.
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    I used to have to ride shotgun to the bank for work pay packets. I think when we stopped doing pay packets was probably the last time i saw a $100 bill :/ Australian ATMs only dispense $20 and $50 bills.

  3. When Dave mentioned some sort of “lone genius” guy running the show I instantly thought of Tony Stark, the millionaire/playboy/engineer that is every reporters wet-dream

  4. Just to cover the phone specifics:
    G1 – Made by HTC = First released Android phone
    Nexus – Made by HTC = Google’s “this is how we want a phone” phone.
    Nexus S – Made by Samsung (I think) = Google’s second showcase phone.

  5. A few weeks back you guys asked “can anyone think of any large-scale open source hardware projects?” and I immediately remembered that insanely awesome Open Source Ecology project, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember it’s name at the time and all my attempts to google for it failed.

    I’m glad it ended up featuring on the Amp Hour anyway because it is a true philanthropic project in every sense of the word. I just donated $10 to it (I wish I could afford more), because I think it will change lives like no other project has before.

    Forget all that Live-Aid stuff – it helped millions of starving people in Afrika but it was never going to be sustainable. But this Global Village Construction Set is by it’s very definition self sustaining. It’s like that old parable, “give a man a fish and he can eat for a day…” except now you say: “… but give him an open source brick press and a well boring machine and he’s all set for life”.

    It’s such a kickass project, I hope they save the world with it.

  8. Check out PSoC 5 and PSoC 3 families. They have programmable analog and digital integrated peripherals.