The Amp Hour #462 - Boat Anchors

The Amp Hour

• Chris has almost finished reading Eccentric Orbits and has been working on satellite comms in the meantime.
• Flat earther documentary on Netflix, Behind The Curve
• Satellite internet is en vogue again, with Elon Musk launching Starlink and pasts guests like Maarten Engalen (Hiber)
• 5G distances are pretty short (depending on the implementation)
• Discontinuing 3G in Australia
• GSM wasn't a big factor yet during the timeframe of Eccentric Orbits (1993 - 2002ish)
• Shahriar did a review of the Siglent SVA1032X and Chris is getting a demo unit soon!
• The HP8753ES was another one on Chris' watch list, but it's a "boat anchor" (heavy piece of test equipment)
• The TDS220 was one of the earlier scopes that changed the standard for how much space it took up on the bench top.
• Dave advertises when there are auctions on the EEVblog forum "Buy / Sell" section. This is a good way to find an auction house to sign up for future notifications.
• Gerbers were a standard format used for photo plotting. The aperture was how wide the light beam was opened as it passed across the board.
• Chris has a "residency" where he gets to try out a Bantam Tools machine. He talked with MG about milling circuitboards a couple months ago.
• The Dragonfly is another machine that supposedly "prints" layered PCBs. It would work well as a super crisis option, but probably not for most PCBs.
• The plan is for Chris to mill out antenna shapes, like those shown in TI App Note 58 (AN058)
• Dave and David have been working with the Richtek USB C processor
• Seeed Studio has some new boards coming out with a RISC V Bumblebee core, made by Giga Devices. The part number is super confusing!
• ARM is allowing custom instructions to be added to the Cortex cores, ostensibly because they're feeling pressure from the RISC V option.
• In Dave's new video about LED lights flickering, the part he was looking at was marked the same as a datasheet, but had a completely different implementation.
• Chris released Getting To Blinky 5.0 videos
• A writer at Digikey tore down and reviewed a $17 power supply
• The device we were discussing on episode 460 was a process meter (Dave made a video about it). It ended up selling out very quickly.
• Dave is a doctor-certified tight ass (hence knee problems)
• We are doing our 2019 survey! Please consider filling it out, we will have prizes for people randomly drawn for filling it out.

Loading… Thanks to Stew Dean for the photo of the anchor