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Many thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Electronic Surplus! Check out this page on The Amp Hour to register for their giveaway and to click through to support the show!
- National Instruments buys Digilent!
- Though Chris doesn’t use it much MATLAB is a nice high level math tool
- Octave is the free version with less features and plugins.
- Project Euler (pronounce “Oil-ehr“) is a place you can practice programming by solving math problems.
- Marketing expert Seth Godin says he doesn’t use Twitter because he’s too busy making things. Touche, marketer.
- Circuit hub is a place to download parts for all different types of CAD programs using DropBox. Looks great!
- KiCAD Cloud is a place to pull KiCAD specific components, made by another listener (Joe Ferner)!
- Would you start a company with a stranger you met through an online site? Founder dating is the place to do it (and engineers are highly desirable! Though probably sw).
- There are more and more hardware startups. There are now hardware meetups all over the place.
- Boeing has had some issues with their LiIon batteries. See the discussion in the EEVblog forum for more details.
- Chris has been blogging about his new CNC machine at ChrisGammell.com
- Dave did a video reviewing old ads in editions of Electronics Australia from the past 30 years
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgTF32aQJUo[/tube] - The Hioki Calcu Hi Tester is a combination calculator and DMM!
- Why can’t any meter beat the Fluke 27’s 1000 hour battery life?
- How do you know where to draw the line on design? When to outsource and how much? Or are we all just oompa loompas?
- If you want to give your boards a programatic and artistic flair, try out PCBmodE.
- Akiba of FreakLabs.org, Bunnie Huang (former guest of The Amp Hour) and designers from the MIT Media Lab toured around Shenzhen visiting factories. Check out Akiba’s great blogging about it!
- The MeCam is a super low cost (<$50!) quadcopter with big promises. We’ll see if they deliver.
- Plastic injection molding is cool…and makes stuff so cheap.
- Is Mexico the new China?
Remember, we’d love to hear from you if you’re from the far corners of the earth! Please leave a comment below!
Image via Seattle Times
Octave is free as in freedom. There’s Scilab too. It has a Scicos toolkit which is good for control systems modelling too.
In Test & Measurement, MATLAB is extremely popular for data analysis, visualization, etc., as well as instrument control and automation. Tek even gives the ability to use custom MATLAB functions with the built-in Math functionality of the mid-range and performance series scopes.
Chris – I emailed you one of my favorite “vintage” ads for your future wallpaper 😉
Being a little older than Dave, and in the US, I remember fondly Electronics Illustrated which effectively died after being absorbed by the parent rag Mechanics Illustrated. The rival Popular Electronics was around a bit longer until the mid-80’s (in somewhat original form). According to Wikipedia, EI was in publication until Nov 1972, which sounds about right. Fortunately for me, I moved on to Electronics (McGraw-Hill) by claiming I was a buyer at an electronics firm – sound familiar anyone? I was 13 then, so what the heck. Naturally Electronics magazine died as well, even though it was the premier industry rag and Gordon Moore’s famous article appeared predicting what became know as Moore’s Law. Apparently electronics magazines fair better in OZ land; or are harder to kill.
Is it possible for you to make some sort of “markers” for the mp3 file, so I can jump from topic to topic that I am interested in, instead of neading to listen for the whole show?
Chris, you ask listeners in foreign countries to make themselves known as faithful listeners to The Amphour – well, I’m one of them: an (seventy year) old chap from Denmark.
I podcast The Amphour every week and eagerly look forward to any new video on Dave’s EEVBlog.
I’m an electronics hobbyist for many years, but you two guys have really heightened my interest and expanded my knowledge on todays electronics by your excellent broadcasts.
I really appreciate it – thumps up to both of you!!
Cheers from Joergen
Concerning outsourcing. If you do it right you use the best from both worlds. As the one doing the outsourcing you know the application, the doing the development knows how to develop. But it still remains a lot of work and it takes longer.
If it goes wrong, the contractor doesn’t know what he’s working on and you don’t know what you exactly want and hamper the creativity of the contractor.
I was part of a succesfull outsourcing a couple of years back. You can see the slides about it here:
http://www.slideshare.net/jhaand/outsourcing-hardware-development
The not so succesfull ones are comparable to the battery issues on the 787.
BTW: I’m listeing every week from the Netherlands