The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#25 – NASA, WOTW & Modular Design – The NASA Nostalgia

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EDIT: A new user-made promotional video about NASA (credit goes to reddit). Inspiring and beautiful:

And one that’s much more rock and roll:

Comments

  1. I’m 25 and I still do, in fact I don’t take it off, ever! I do that for all my watches.

    I made sure that the latest one is solar and I haven’t taken it off since 18th May 2009 – the day I got it, not, once. The battery lasts a month if you do let it charge.

  2. I don’t like using third party modules for products that want to remained unchanged in design for a time. The module gets discontinued or delayed, the manufacturer folds or the vendor can’t source them for you anymore.
    I don’t mind using them for one-offs (if the manual is managable) or to concept something.

    I’ll happily use it if the tech is beyond my ken or beyond my ability, the fibreglass manufacturers ability or the board loaders ability. In those cases you don’t have alot of choice anyway.
    I’ll grudgingly use it if i couldn’t hit the same price point doing it myself or if time did not allow.

    I like building code/circuits from scratch. You learn something and end up building a little collection of personal IP. If i reinvent a wheel then i know better how wheels work. And then the wheel and the vehicle are a better match.

    Props to your friend if he/she is doing it themselves just because they can.

    I cringe everytime there’s NASA cutbacks. But then i don’t pay US taxes. From the perspective of space geeks in space tech starved nations like Australia(University of NSW’s BLUEsat is still on the ground 12 years after their first funding), NASA is doing the cool stuff the rest of us can’t or won’t pay for. And through their excellent public outreach let us feel like we’re somehow part of it.
    One of my favourite NASA web destinations:
    http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures.cfm
    I’d like to see a lecture on electronics design considerations for space, other planets and moons.

    JD

      • Thanks. Those issues are pretty interesting. I wonder what my design success rate would be if i had to take high vibration and vacuum pressure into account.

  3. Hey!

    So to address your questions:
    – Yes, James P. Wack is a anglophone-friendly pseudonym, my name is Jaime (Chris pronounced it righ)
    – The CRT scope’s brand is HUNG CHANG (no kidding)
    – A “chicken’s teeth” is any item so rare thats next to impossible to find.
    – The massage chair: I was commissioned to remove the remote completely (sooo fragile), sadly the bus wasn’t serial (just digital bursts) and I can’t see the signals clearly on my scope, I need a Rigol (at least).
    – http://www.goodfuckingdesignadvice.com/ is for graphic designers! anyway they’re widely applicable and plenty of F-bombs.

  4. On DC power standards – call me crazy but I’d love for every outlet in a house to have a USB power socket. Not a perfect solution but I think it would help.

    On Watches, I’m a few years older than Dave and I have a collection of watches that I no longer wear. Chris is right in that a lot of people rely on their mobile/smart phones to be their timepiece (and alarm clock) these days. For younger folks it’s more convenient than Dave thinks, because we have to remember their smartphone is their most used communication device (SMS, Twitter, Facebook, etc) so it’s not quite the exercise to get the current time as it would seem.

    On incandescent bulbs, I agree with Dave about hating how horribly inefficient they are, but its only until recently have CFLs really meet the same color temperature and light quality as a cheap incandescent light. Don’t get me wrong I’m not a tube amplifier purest, but in the workshop and electronics lab I’ve gone thru quite a few brands and color temperature CFLs to find a good quality light.

    • On house DC Power: USBs with +5V and maybe data wires to a central computer, and a bipolar 12-0-12 V plug for LEDs, laptop computers, screens and whatnot, maybe even a molex for internal wiring.

  5. I like the idea of a USB outlet next to the AC outlet. It wouldn’t be hard to design. I wonder if anyone has patented it.

    The voltage where additional rules kick in for the US National Electric Code is 30V. So maybe it could be 24V. A 20A 120VAC circuit in a house is common. The house could also have some 20A 24V circuits (480W). That won’t run an appliance, but it’s a huge step up from Chirs’s suggestion of having DC outlets that provide 10 – 15W.

    If such a thing catches on, it won’t be a separate circuit from the mains. It would have to be based on outlet replacements that fit into a standard electrical box and have a power supply to generate DC using the AC line voltage.

  7. I think that is worth to mention Burt Rutan to see point of view of private sector in opposition to NASA. You can find his great TED talks here:

    http://tinyurl.com/kuadgy

    and a bunch of articles in archive of PopSci.com

    Maybe NASA lacks of such visionary like Burt Rutan today…

    Greetings from Polska(Poland)

    ki3

  8. Hey fellas,

    Enjoyable first show (for me) — looking forward to the NASA discussion.

    Waiting for the scientific calculator watch…

  9. Additional comment: pretty sure the NASA manned program isn’t “shutting down” per se, but rather shifting focus away from low Earth orbit to focus on longer distances (such as asteroids or the la grange points. Gotta move on…

  10. I use my cell phone or iPod all the time because watches are itchy and uncomfortable. They also don’t sync to satellites and change themselves automatically if I happen to switch time zones.

  11. I kept losing watches so I just pull out the old cell phone for the time. If I can remember where I put it last …..

  12. On my website there’s a link (LiveView) to a watch Dave will love: It doen’t even show the time without a Bluetooth link to an Android phone X-)
    But as you can see, you can send notifications to it 🙂

  13. I thought for DC in home, you could use those car plugs and get the same kind of power from as you would get from it in a car, typically. It already exists and you could then use stuff at home and in the car.
    That or maybe 4-pin XLR plugs that are already widely used, at least I know it’s used in a lot of audio equipment.
    Or else +/-24V phantom power, like it’s used for microphones.

  14. I’m skeptical about a low voltage DV power supply. AC is actually a very amazing thing with lot’s of benefits.
    And for todays efficient switching power supplies it does not matter that much if they do DC-DC or AC-DC down stepping. The principle stays the same.
    You need to have a high supply voltage (small wire diameter), so you still need to down-convert everything.
    No big win there.
    I would even argue that the suggested 48Volt is too low to scale. Even the 110 V AC in certain backwaters of the world appears to me rather whimpy, but this is perhaps not the point…

    And AC is in fact a safety feature. Arcs break off more easy and you have no electrolysis effects.

    I could see low voltage DV for room by room for lighting becoming a standard. Like the 12V AC we already know for Halogen lighting.

    There is one thing I agree with all of you. The Edison screw needs to die!
    I’m in the UK at the moment, and they actually managed to establish a bayonet style lamp socket here. But the Edison screw looks still very strong here. 🙁

  15. While it’s nice to hear someone quoting Douglas Adams here, that quote is missing some crucial context that flips it around! The digital watches referred to are the early ones where the display took so much power you had to push a button to read them, making them a novelty item with no practical advantage over mechanical ones. Thus the quote made the exact same point as Dave!

  16. I actually want a analog watch of which has a digital clock on the face of the watch also. I’m intending for an analog watch with a digital stopwatch and/or timer.