The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#26 – The Ben & Jeri Show

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  1. Great podcast!

    PS, I’m an engineer (in training) and I enjoy writing…let me know if you need help on the blog. To Dave’s point though, I’d prefer if I could post to my site and have it go on your blog as well. I know there are plenty of blogs out that auto-aggregate content from other blogs. I find duplicates of my posts on them all the time (without my permission of course).

    • Those of us who started it felt that having the site be a simple aggregator was redundant: there are lots of sites that do it already. I think we were aiming for a showcase of higher quality blogging about engineering rather than a catchall.

  2. Also, on the topic of my element14 sponsorship: I don’t think it’s the same setup that Ben has, but everything is left up to me – the content, the editing, etc. So basically, it’s just been a good way to increase traffic to my videos, which means more money from youtube revenue sharing. I was planning on making these videos anyways, so I’m basically getting some cash from element14 to buy parts, and increased viewership (which I’ve been tracking with analytics, and I’ve seen an increase).

  4. Element 14 selling Arduinos? So? Mike Cowgill mentioned it in his rant about Element 14, they don’t sell to private individuals. Not only in his area, they also don’t in my area.

    Now, to whom do they want to sell these Arduinos? To retailers? To professionals? It doesn’t make sense.

  5. I think the reason why posting comments on Blogspot doesn’t work for some people is that they want you to “enable third party cookies” in the browser settings. It would be helpful if they added an error message to explain why it doesn’t work…

  6. *The Ben Heck Show & related: I think his show is geared toward the ‘couch potatoes’ of the electronics hobbyists world (maybe this overlaps with gamers). There’s not a ton of detail on how he really builds things from start to finish, but enough tidbits to encourage the more hands on hobbyists to roll their own. Overall, it’s to much like any of the other non-electronics ‘fabrication’ shows, i.e. there is always a “big build” & you see the completed project without really knowing all of the details (and work) that was required. It probably has the biggest chance of being mainstream, since most people love to watch work, vs. actually doing it. Chris is spot-on with the broad appeal here. The upside for hand on hobbyists? A lot of Ben Heck show watchers will reach out to their hardware hacker friends to make/mod things for them, like “I saw on the Ben Heck Show” Throw in some manufactured drama/screaming/and a bullshit deadline and it might be a hit show – I’m mostly kidding about this part.

    Jeri is complete the opposite, her content is all about showing you the gritty details, and could care less about production value. For those who want to know how to do it there is no substitute for shows like this. Kudo’s to Jerry Blum for also aiming to help those who want to learn and for being up-front about how Element 14 does help fund by increasing his YouTube revenue. At least now I feel better knowing that Jerri Elsworth is making a few bucks for her time on YouTube as well.

    Dave should rethink his presence on Element 14, so long as they provide him one free piece of test equipment for each new review he does, with the understanding he will call it shit if it is! Plus his latest episode gave DigiKey (or was it Mouser) some great free press on using their website to streamline part selection. They owe him a few bucks for that.

    *Undercutting Open Source: The community will always survive, due to the loyalty. Dave is right that a bigger company can take the market by storm, but as we’ve learned even today Hippies are still around, just ask Glossywhite. There is a place for AVR fans that hate Arduino/Open Source – The AVRFreaks web site. He should check it out.

    Really though, there is room for both to exist, I make a conscious decision to purchase things from AdaFruit, Sparkfun and via Dave’s sponsors because I love the content and what they are doing. But I also use Mouser & DigiKey as well.

    *Chris’ New Workbench: what’s the angled work surface for on the left hand end of your bench?

  8. Thanks for the mention guys. I thought something was odd when the number of visitors doubled in a few hours!

    Thanks for the heads up about not being able to post a reply Dave, I’ll see if pulling the antispam helps at all. Possibly not as the spam folder doesn’t have anything in. Its probably a bad thing when even spammers can’t get on to leave comments. Sigh.

    Farnell in the UK do have a “domestic” outlet that will sell to individuals, at http://cpc.farnell.com/ or http://www.cpc.co.uk . It is a different range of products though, with the addition of the sort of crap that Maplin now sell (helicopters, satnav, disco lights…) but no links to the Ben Heck articles, which would be a better synergy than Farnell. I note that a search for Arduino on CPC comes back blank. That’s absolutely mad, surely the Arduino is aimed at the amateur market, not pro engineers?

    I think I was maybe a bit subtle about the brilliant Ben Heck, my point was that if Element14 want to broaden the appeal of engineering to “ordinary” people, you don’t do it with a stereotype geek, you do it with a more typical real world engineer. Here in the UK, the BBC uses Prof Brian Cox to front many science shows, he is late 30s, charismatic, an ex rock musician and people love him. He makes science feel like something for “real” people not nerds in lab coats.

    There must be a real engineer with enough charisma willing to do the job, I guess having the background in video production is a huge advantage for Ben. Talking of which, I really look forward to seeing more videos from you Jeremy, you are much more the sort of guy I was at uni with, and much more representative of what a real engineer is.

    It is probably just as well I didn’t upload the rant that I wrote last night, I think I need to talk to Chris first, as it is about an article on the EngineerBlogs.org site

    • Funny, I am an engineer running around in Jeans and T-shirt. So do all my colleagues.

      For fun and giggles my colleagues and I contemplate for some time now to show up at work in lab coats. In white lab coats. Just to show THEM who is really making the money at that place and who deserves some more respect.

      No, don’t dismiss the lab coat. I better times it was a status symbol, and maybe it was a mistake that our profession wiggled out of them to look more normal. When every bum in the company accosts you because, well, because you look like one of them, when the bean counters don’t take you serious it is maybe because the times of the lab coat are gone. Gone like the times when an engineer had a secretary for the paperwork and access to draftsmen to do the detailed work.

  9. One on Revision 3’s flagship shows was systm, it was a electronics show similar to Ben Heck before they were cool. It had a huge following till it started creating software episodes and suddenly dropped it.

    It’s still work watching some of the older episodes.

    Mike.

  10. The last of the co-hosts David Calkins use to peeve me off he had a sudo understanding of electronics. He just made a name for himself with his robotics work.

    Mike.

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