- Chris has been issued a challenge to get his (ham) technician’s license by the new year. Can he do it? Do 10 others want to do it with him? If so, we can get Dave to sing on air! (or can we?)
- Dave has a beef with the Agilent U1272A‘s data export capabilities. Perhaps Dave should append his own RS232 port like in a recent HackADay post?
- The Tyne Metropolitan College in England have apparently ripped off Dave’s PCB tutorial document and erased all the copyright info and attribution. Lame!
- Flying probers are crazy to watch! See the video below, starting at 42s in.
- India is predicting electronics imports to top $400B per year in 10 years and want to mandate local production.
- China, on the other hand, wants to move to a knowledge economy (and get rid of manufacturing in the process?). They also want 100 hackerspaces in Shanghai.
- Dave has started his build of an ArduCopter, bought from Hobby King. Their shopping cart plays on human nature and an engineer’s need to optimize.
- Chris hates chasing problems around control loops. They’re interesting, but frustrating.
- From the EEVblog forums: should electronics be more math-centric? Chris and Dave don’t think so.
- This is how Jim Williams taught as well, with less focus on the rote memorization.
- Engineering seems to attract people that are in it just for the money sometimes (they don’t last). WSJ has a great breakdown of salaries (in the US).
- According to Wired, the CEO of Ponoko is predicting printable circuit boards in <24 months. Dave doesn’t think it’s possible based on solder temps.
- There’s been lots of focus on 3d Printing lately, especially in the NYT. One article about The Wild West economy that will rise from the printer availability and another about the possibility of high quality 3D printing coming to a big box retailer near you.
- This Day in Nerd History
- The dry cell battery was patented by Carl Gassner…in 1887! Good gravy, batteries have been around for a long time!
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What? no 69?
Typical error, I had released new version without updating version number once or twice… Thanks for new episode anyway, I’m looking forward to listen to it on my flight to Sydney tomorrow.
Apologies, the filename is right (69). It is not an error, just a typo on the webpage. Suspect copy and paste.
Seems I’m too dumb to get it right!
Does it count if @AJFabio and I got our technician licenses just this past week? 2/10 done?
Congratulations to you and @Ajfabio! I think that Chris is studying too hard for it. I’d bet that if he went online and took some of the practice exams that he’d pass them with flying colors.
Thanks Alan! I totally agree! I could have passed the general test too if I had paid more attention to the practice tests I tried out.
The 100 hackerspaces article doesn’t say “all over China” that but it also doesn’t say just in Shanghai. Living in a 10+ million city myself it just doesn’t make sense to put 100 spaces in such a city. It might make sense to have 3 or 4 in such a city. So i’m very sure it’s all over China.
In any case it’s epic and i don’t think any other gvmt pulling this off either. Most are just not getting the idea.
You should be able to print heat resistant material with Stereolithography. This is not thermoplastic material, but a chemical reaction (some sort of resin). Now of course you can’t print conductive material that way now. Mix materials would be tricky unless you had a a printing solution with both conductive and non conductive properties. Maybe you could add metal particles into the solution and use a magnetic field to bring those to the surface where the printing happens to get conductive properties and vice versa to get non conductive.
Or maybe a dry powder based laser sintering with a non conductive material that melting point is way above 400 degrees. Not sure what those materials could be. Mixing those with conductive materials should be possible in theory.
here is a bit on materials for those printing methods http://www.materialise.com/stereolithography-materials
On the metal foil resistors, look at the reading as you move the legs around. Those are made with a glass substrate, and tend to crack if the leads are bent without strain relief. I used to use them, and would superglue them to the board after forming the leads, leave for a day to cure then only solder the leads. Otherwise they would suffer from drift, easy to see on the 16 bit converter they were attached to. Of course the converter used 741 opamps, which also had noise and drift problems of their own.
Dude edit your video to include a notice that these people are scamming.
they have it embedded on their site…
ummm voltaic pile 1800AD
Has anyone used a Makerbot to mask off the copper area on a pcb and then etch it? Printing a layer or two of plastic on the PCB copper and then etching the bare stuff away would be cool. Not sure how the plastic used in Makerbots would hold up to the etching solution.
I have never had great luck with iron on masking my home-made etched boards, so printing it with a Markerbot woudl give me an additional reason to buy one.
CEO of Ponoko is clueless, he is just a moronic talking head with fat paycheck. All you need to know about that idiot is in the first paragraph :
“To build real-world circuit boards, ten Have explains, we need only two things. The first is file standardization. We need a common protocol that describes each design. Microsoft has made inroads here with its .NET Gadgeteer platform,”
Thats how retarded that guy is. He doesnt even know what gerber is, and when he thinks standardization Microsoft of all things comes to his mind :DDDD and WTF does .NET have to do with PCB files? All that idiot knows are wankwords and powerpoint talking points.
I almost had to vomit when I read the verbal diarrhea of the Ponoko CEO. Clueless to the bone.
ouch. scathing. I haven’t read the article yet. I’ve got a strong stomach though. I shall read it now.
OK. I agree the Microsoft Gadgeteer and .NET comment sounds like a bit of a non sequitur. However maybe this from the Gadgeteer Module Builders Guide (draft) gives us a clue:
————snip————–
JPEGs and CAD Models
When possible, Gadgeteer module designers should provide a high-resolution imageof the module front and back, and also an accurate 3D CAD model of their module.Ideally, the CAD model should be generated directly from the PCB layout data. CADdiagrams can also be provided as STEP, IDF, or IGES files.
————snip———————–
I imagine always exporting to those file formats is more agreeable for those with CNC machines if you’re doing single sided or if you’re industrious enough to get a via kit and actually rivet in the vias for double sided. The guide talks of Alitium, EagleCad, and DesignSpark but only in the context of how to export to CAD and step like file formats. Maybe this is what TEN was referring to. For hobbyists its a way of getting things done. I can’t imagine ever wanting to do my circuit boards this way but I could understand why the guy from Ponoko might wave this flag even if i think he should be in love with gerbers.
The Chinese hackerspace plan is about killing two birds with one stone.
They advance creativity but at the same time keep control over the movement. I wouldn’t be surprised if the end result is that only government-controlled (i.e. licensed) hackerspaces are legal.
In the past they had a huge issue with Internet cafes. Government totally missed the boat when they were popping up all over the place and the youth were discovering them. It took some time, new laws and police raids until the Chinese government finally got some control over them.
The hackerspace plan sounds like an attempt to avoid a similar situation, and instead place the government in the driver seat.
Dave,
do a search for a unique sentence from your tutorial in Google. Put the sentence between quotes.
There are a LOT more copies of your tutorial available on the net.
Use this link to see what I mean: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=%22This+article+is+presented+to+hopefully+take+some+of+the+mystery+out+of+PCB+design%22#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=%22This+article+is+presented+to+hopefully+take+some+of+the+mystery+out+of+PCB+design%22&btnK=Google+Search&pbx=1&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=27295e00023b945&biw=1363&bih=953
Bert
With respect to how much math is used in my day to day I would say a fair amount. Most of it is the standard equations for resistors, caps, inductors, and FETs but I have actually had to solve integrals and derivatives on occasion. The times when those sort of things come into play are typically looking at high-level circuit diagrams for control schemes. I don’t know if solving the integrals and derivatives myself is necessarily crucial but it’s nice to have a sanity check so I’ll keep doing it.
The normal work week in normal jobs is at least 40 hours (usually more). There is jobs that require less hours. Like teachers e.t.c.
But… Here came an “economical crisis”.
Jobs are rare right now. And the standard week is 20~30 hours in many cases. They hire you for 4~6 hours a day with half the money.