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- We lost two greats in the past week, Neil Armstrong and Hans Camenzind.
- Oneirophoros — n. Bringer of Dreams
- Chris has been continuing his Chip Report TV project, check out the video below for the “buck fiddy” reference (Starting at about 6 minutes)
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2kycKTbz_U&t=5m47s[/tube] - XKCD has a comic about the number of people that have set foot on another planet diminishing.
- Jeff Hammerbacher was a former facebook employee quoted on BusinessWeek.com as saying, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”
- Our links for the show now live at reddit.com/r/theamphour. Much like the discuss server, you can add, vote and comment on each story for the coming shows.
- The spinnaker chip and associated boards were made to help model the human brain. That’s a lotta chips.
- DARPA is looking into analog computers as a next generation computing platform.
- Dave enjoyed the “NASA and we know it video”, lampooning the lander crew and their quirks.
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFvNhsWMU0c[/tube] - With ever increasing costs and needs for high volume chips, will large companies “insource” their chip manufacturing? Unlikely.
- The Apple and Samsung court case is over and was annoying.
- The 21st annual obfuscated C contest has started and runs until Sept 14th. Dave thinks this is a waste of time.
- This is done in hardware as well sometimes. People put in fake circuits either on the board or in an ASIC.
- Sometimes code doesn’t need to be obfuscated, like for people that don’t know how to properly write code. The Engineering Commons discussed scientists and non-programmers writing code.
- Chris has been working with the BeagleBone, trying to make a hardware development platform.
- Dave thinks the Bus Pirate might work for simple SPI communication.
- Other times, the best digital platform is the one you used last time.
- And the best development board is your final production board, with the assumption it might just be wrong.
- OSRAM has developed a footprint to make it more compatible with competitors devices.
- Old school Motorola modules for TVs made footprint matching with common tubes impossible (starting about 12:50 or so)
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X89j8XZGgqA#t=771s[/tube] - Speaking of tough to find parts, EMSL showcases a 23kV, 15A fuse. Wowsa!
- If you’re a Tesla fan, The Oatmeal is helping raise money for a Tesla museum. Donate and get cool stuff!
- Or check out The Oatmeal’s (raunchy) comparison of Edison and Tesla.
Be sure to check out our new subreddit for The Amp Hour to see any stories we didn’t get to and contribute your own for upcoming shows!
Speaking of flipping individual atoms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBmBMmuUBMk&feature=plcp
I would not have known about the 555 inventor’s death if I hadn’t heard it here.
I agree completely with Chris about it being important to have some “bad-ass geeks”, which become “formidable geeks” if you’re writing for a distributor, as icons: http://bit.ly/PV92JT
At 18:50 Dave is saying that big boards with lots of FPGAs on them might be hard to re-use. Here is a video about how to reuse surplus FPGA boards from ebay for code breaking. They only need to find the JTAG to program them, and a few IOs to put in the problem and get out the ahswer – they don’t need a lot of other IO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=r5-T7Hv78kc#t=1003s
I really enjoyed this episode almost as much as the last episode. To be honest I have been getting a bit bored of the amp hour of late, but the last two episodes have restored my interest.
Although probably alone in this, I am not a big fan of having regular guests. Larry Sears excluded, most the guests are specific to one thing (FPGA´s, RF, chip design, etc) and while interesting, it´s too much for me to listen to some guy getting technical on something I know nothing about and normally have no interest in, for over an hour. I say Larry as an exception, because he talked in general and when he did get technical it was interesting, brief, and explained well, which kept me interested and I might of even learned something. There have been other guests in the past who were like this, I am just singling out Larry as he is the most recent.
I think a better format for the guests would be to have say the first 15 – 20 minutes of the show talking about who the guest is and what they have done etc. Then move on to the regular show with the news items that you normally cover, but have the guest as an extra voice for another opinion. If you´re lucky there may even be something in the news which is relevant to the particular guest you have on the show. It would break the show up a bit so its not an hour ( or more) on one particular subject.
Like I said, it is just my preference and I am probably alone in that everyone one likes the way it is now.
P.s. It still sounds weird Chris not saying “Chris Gammell´s analog life” at the start.
Well that’s good this week hit a sweet spot. I’m guessing its because we were discussing board level electronics, as on our current projects. It’s tough because we wouldn’t be able to update or find things to talk about on our own projects every week. However, if there are any questions you think it would be good for us to cover, feel free to drop them over at http://reddit.com/r/theamphour
As for the one on, one off schedule, that’s more about finding a guest to talk to every week and then limiting it to a half hour. We usually could keep going past the 1.5 hour mark that we usually hit. Finding guests is getting easier as we get a little more prominence, but there is a significant amount of setup in getting someone on the show. Or in thinking up who to ask on. We like the mix right now, but we’ll keep your idea in mind for the future.