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#70 – Idiorhythmic IPC Inconcinnity

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Next week, we will have John Edmond, the CTO of Cree, on the show! Wow!
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Comments

  1. Look forward to listening later this week. I enjoyed Dave’s video from the local club hamshack. My travels have taken me into iRobot – and the REALLY cool stuff they do are the things they do for the military… And, regarding Widlar – I had a nice conversation with Bob Widlar’s brother on the radio several years ago (his brother is a ham) – he had some really interesting stories as you might imagine.

  3. Dave, I think you are both right and wrong about the difficulty of software engineering versus “hardware” engineering. I think you are wrong in the sense that I think a really good engineer in any domain requires a significant time investment (e.g., the 10,000 hour rule). However, I think you are right in that you can be a rubbish software engineer and make something work. Hardware tends to either work or fail dismally; software tends to still work even if it fails subtly.

  4. I blame JEDEC for the silly mechanical standards names. They don’t mean much to me either. I usually get to prototype then iterate a design before real prodcution anyway. And I tend to make my own footprints. If the board maker or board stuffer make a reasonable suggestion regarding footprints and yeilds based on those suggestions I’ll make a change to the footprint. If their suggestions or reasons for poor yeild seem unreasonable, there’s probably some other place that doesn’t have a problem with it and just deals with it.

  5. Chris, add another Ham license to your count by year’s end!

    Around here we think of Dave as “The Crocodile Dundee of Electronics.”

    It would be awesome to see Dave to his best Crocodile Dundee impersonation:

    Dave “Crocodile Dundee” Jones: [chuckles] That’s not a multimeter.
    [Dave pulls out a Fluke meter]

    Dave “Crocodile Dundee” Jones: THAT’s a multimeter

    I’m just not sure if he should be picking up a new Fluke or an old school Simpson meter in the scene….

  6. There is so much rubbish software out there because so many developers think it doesn’t take much training, experience and dedication to write software. These stupid “Teach yourself programming language X in 21 days” are a symptom of this.

    And people accept the rubbish software because Microsoft successfully managed to lower people’s expectations over decades.

    A message to the hardware developers out there. Just because you manage to write some software to blink a LED doesn’t make you a software developer.

    • Sure Microsoft software is not perfect but it is the standard and to be honest does a reasonable job. The main problems arise when development time clashes with cost, and cost wins (always) Then you get half arsed software driving your hardware..

      • Yes, it is “the standard”. But a very low-level standard. If you have ever seen real software, not that Microsoft junk, performing, you know how low that standard is.
        The real sad thing is that people have accepted the junk as the standard, and therefore effectively blocking progress. If you new car would work like Microsoft software you would overrun the salesmen with the car to teach him a lesson to never again sell someone such junk. But when it comes to Microsoft people accept their fate and even ask for more of the same junk.

  8. As the third quarter of 2011 came to a close, ARRL VEC Manager Maria Somma, AB1FM, began calculating the number of licensed Amateur Radio operators in the US, as well as the number of new licensees. “At the end of September, I saw that the number of hams in the US was high,” she said. “When I started comparing that number with other years, I found that it was an all-time high.” For the first time, there are more than 700,000 radio amateurs in the US.

    more here:

    http://www.arrl.org/news/us-amateurs-now-700-000-strong

  9. You guys should check out the whole Arduino craze. When you were talking about the ATtiny it sounded like you didn’t have a clue the Atmel processors are incredibly popular due to the the Arduino implementation. The ATtiny microcontrollers can be programmed using a regular $20 USD Arduino board. No need for JTAG connectors.
    See this video for more info: http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=1229

    Bert

  11. Unemployment tax is separate from self-employment tax. Self-employment tax is as Chris described, the employer side of Social Security. Unemployment tax is a tax the gov’t charges you to cover unemployment payments to laid-off workers. They give you the rate based on your employees’ history of using unemployment insurance, and you just have to accept the rate they give. It’s reasonably fair, but it feels like robbery since they don’t tell you how they got the rate.
    The tax rate is not 50%. Income taxes start at 0% and go up to 35%. You pay the social security + Medicare on only the first $100k or so of earnings, and then most of it stops. Wisconsin takes about 7% or so. The result of this is my wife and I take home about 60% of our revenue, save 10% for expenses and retained earnings, and save 30% of revenues ( 33% of gross profits) for taxes; so far we’ve never been way under or over on our quarterly estimates. All of this is separate from stuff associated with payroll: state/fed unemployment, 940, 941, and maybe one form I’m forgetting.
    Chris said: Engineers don’t have business acumen; a nice way of saying being a dick. My wife will tell you that lawyers do have business acumen and therefor have earned their reputation.
    Regarding quotes, I sometimes do not-to-exceed. I don’t like firm fixed anymore because it’s a hassle when scope creep occurs. Also the probability distribution function of amt of hours is a Rician distribution. That’s the distribution used to model the probability of the strength of a radio wave when you can see the tower but also have various random constructive/destructive reflections.
    I don’t think Chris romanticizes consulting. If I could get a captive job where I would only have to be concerned about my job function, I wouldn’t mind it. The trouble is they want you to sit in meetings about how well their European office is doing when I don’t have any authority over that issue whatsoever. They want to you to do it, though, so we can pretend like we’re a family. In reality I’m a hired gun to help get your stuff working. But as an employee, you can’t even say you’d like to do something that would help the company get sold for a high price or eliminate the need for expensive engineers like me. You have to carry on the totally false illusion that we’re a family and everyone’s job will go on forever. IMHO if a client is paying me for years to do the same GD thing, we’re doing something wrong. Let’s automate it or send it to China and move on to creating the next really cool thing!
    I can’t believe Chris is studying for the ham test. He could have passed it cold with no preparation; I’m completely sure of that.
    I agree w/ everything Dave said about footprints being custom, but sometimes it would be nice to have a starting point footprint. The idea of a central database that people can edit sounds as stupid as a wiki disrupting Encyclopedia Britannica. In other words, it sounds stupid to me too but it just might work.
    Thanks for the great show! I wonder how long I could make these comments before your website would reject them.

  12. Thanks for the shout-out on the show.

    The biggest problem with taking the autonomous mowers and snowblowers to the market is the safety aspect.

    One of the big uses for the iRobot Roomba platform that you guys were talking about is the Turtlebot (http://turtlebot.com/). It uses the Roomba as the base and the Microsoft Kinect as the perception sensor, and gives hobbyists a pretty cheap entry into the robotics field.

  13. The normal work week in normal jobs is at least 40 hours (usually more). There is jobs that require less hours. Like teachers e.t.c.

    But… Here came the “economical crisis”.

    Jobs are rare right now. And the standard week is 20~30 hours in many cases. They hire you for 4~6 hours a day with half the money.

  14. I’m in on the 10 hams by 2012. I’ve been planning on doing this for a while, but I haven’t found the motivation to actually sit down and study for the test. This seems like a fun way to get it done. Thanks for the links. I’m sure my wife will love the idea of me taking on another hobby 😛

    • Sweet, there’s a local test scheduled for Dec 19, and I have the ARRL book on my kindle, which I will only study while on the toilet . . . you know, to prove that it’s not difficult . . . to study for the exam.

  15. EAGLE comes with the IPC-smd library which contains most of the standard footprints, any gaps can usually be found in the ref-packages library.

    hth,
    Jorge Garcia
    Cadsoft Support

  16. Thanks for the shout out guys. I saw that Altoids Fume extractor on a MAKE Youtube video and thought I’d give it my own spin. It works pretty good, but does need to be right next to the tip of the soldering iron to get all the fumes sucked in…. not bad for using up some of my junk drawer stuff.

    embeddedEric

  17. I have the lawnbott grass cutting robot. I completed my fourth summer with the same lithium battery. It uses a perimeter wire to not stray off the property. It does not use GPS. I like it.