#160 - Troubleshooting, PCBs, LEDs - Quaintized Quich Quelling

Dave’s PCB ruler went gangbusters on Pozible! So much so that PayPal locked down his account!
Octopart has a handheld tool for referencing footprint sizes and reading resistors. It’s made out of FR4 and has some serious silkscreening!
NXP had a chart that showed relative footprint sizes in the past, but Chris still wasn’t satisfied.
If you don’t want to go with the traditional crowdfunding sites, you can always roll your own like Lockitron did. They called it SelfStarter.
Do you hire in your country specifically? Is it a matter of supporting your countrymen/women? Is it convenience?
Will you hire them if they’re instead robots? What happens when robots continue the march towards more productivity, specifically for workers?
Troubleshooting gave Chris a particular case of heartburn this week. Dave told stories of past troubleshooting.
One possible cause in Chris’ analog circuits is layout issues and will always be a problem for analog circuits. There is a guide for mixed signal boards that is pretty good from Maxim Integrated.
Todd Bailey and friends worked up a badass demo showing off a vector screen and all the hardware involved in driving it at 4+ MHz for a game they invented. It reminds Dave of Vectrex.
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEkPHPiHuio[/tube]
Ambient backscatter (absorbing or deflecting ambient RF) is a way of communicating between devices without batteries…slowly. Dave asks, “Why not just add a battery?”
Chris got chance to hang out in Cleveland and Akron with Dale Dougherty, founder and publisher of MAKE. Super nice guy. They met in Akron at Tiny Circuits, a former Kickstarter project that now is producing boards full time.
In-person networking is important! Chris and Martin Lorton (mjlorton on YouTube) will be having a regular meetup in Cleveland called “Charged Conversation”. Subscribe on meetup or start your own in your city!
Were you stumped by the LED circuit videos released a few months back? The creator, Henryk Gasperowicz, has released the schematics on his Google+ page.[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1eMryiU1ro[/tube][tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvXKSSmItls[/tube]
Interested in quadcopters but don’t want to dig all the way down into building from scratch? Now platforms are being released to build applications on top of the assembled quadcopter.
Next week on the show we’ll have Michael Ossmann of HackRF and the UberTooth project. Get your questions in on the subreddit!
Want to see Chris’s crowdsource project? Too bad! He’s doing Contextual Electronics instead!

Going to be at the Open Hardware Summit in Boston? Keep your ears peeled for info about The Amp Hour meetup, including a tour of Bolt, the hardware accelerator!

Comments