The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#28 – Bowie and The Brown Note

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  1. Re the cost of the laser cutter – chances are it uses a fairly exotic laser to be able to vapourise off the copper without damaging the substrate, probably a series of extremely short pulses from a YAG or similar laser. We’re not talking cheap Chinese CO2 tubes or laser diodes here. It will be a low-volume made-to-order laser with a 5 digit price tag. It also needs good optics and solid mechanics to achieve the quoted small spot size (about 25 microns) and 2 micron mechanical resolution

  4. For Chris and the flexible circuits with components mounted on it.

    Not my original design (might recognize a logo on the polyamide). But have my own version of the circuit. No inventory at the time to show mine off… Will post mine if we get some soon.
    There are a lot of tricks with routing the traces and the critical flex points and adding some cutouts to increase the flex diameter and components placement. It can be a tricky thing to design (flex with components mounted).

    Just thought I would share.

    http://s1036.photobucket.com/albums/a447/Strube09/

    Strube

  5. Talking about WTF’s, it’s more a software engeneer thing (yeah, yeah, boohoo to me), but if you don’t already know about http://thedailywtf.com/ you should really have a go, it’s often hilarious, even for non-nerd (try the “error’d” section). For the little story, they had to change from daily What The Fuck to Daily Worse Than Failure, to get past some (stupid) firewall filtering so people everywhere can enjoy it.

  7. everytime i heard crickets in the garage, i’d step on them, but leave them just barely alive.. as a warning to the other crickets to shut the f up.

    At first, whenever I’d go in the garage they’d all stop making noise, but I’d hunt them down and do my stomp…

    after a few weeks of this, I don’t have any crickets! or at least they’ve wised up and don’t make any noise.

    dave : some of your videos have those stupid crickets making so much noise.. very distracting

  8. I thought batchpcb (dorkbotpdx) includes silkscreening and soldermask for the price?

    Where can I find the fine pitch soldering video (Chris’ brother?)

    Thanks

  9. Chris, how about a “What the beeeeeeep” Soundbite from the last show with Dave’s voice. He said “What the…” this one time very nicely. =D Add the Beep and see how it sounds!

    Greetz from Germany

  10. I believe the story of the boss-man not firing someone who had made a million dollar mistake, but rather decided to keep them since they just “spent a million dollars training them” is a story told by Lee Iacocca IIRC.

  13. One reason why chips can fail over time is if the current density in a track on the chip is too high. This causes something called electromigration, where the current causes the metal to move gradually away from the place where the current density is high. This in turn makes the track thinner at one point, which further increases the current density and so on. Copper tracks are less affected than aluminium, and the effect is worse at high temperatures.

  16. Only recently found “theamphour” blog. I’m a year behind at episode #28. Enjoy listening to you guys. I have a Signetics NE555 dated 7322 (I’d send a pic if I knew how). Bad news is all my junk is old (including me).
    Best regards.