The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast
#193 - We’re Sorry! But Apple Ain’t! - Remorseless RAM Racketeering
- Yes, it’s true, episode 192 (last week) was a lame attempt at an April Fool’s joke. This could have been caught if you noticed the mention of Touchstone starting up. Â Dave also did an April Fool’s video, but released it early in order to increase trickery!
- Adam Carolla is taking the fight to the patent trolls! You can support the fight too by participating in their fundraising campaign.
- Chris got a Sparkfun meter (contraband!) at his local Microcenter.
- Bunnie gave a talk at EELive about OSHW and the slowing of Moore’s law.
- He also showed the newest prototype of his open source laptop. You can join in and buy your own through the crowdfunding campaign.
- Dave doesn’t think he’d ever buy one because he could get low cost hardware for a PC, but Chris pointed out the software ecosystem you’re really buying.
- All of the software is available on GitHub under Xobs (Bunnie’s co founder) account.
- The laptop has a built in Spartan 6 FPGA
- The newly announced Saleae logic analyzer and scope family was just announced! They have 4 different flavors, the lowest being $99. Too late for Contextual Electronics, they’ll be using the Gabotronics Xminilab instead.
- Chris didn’t like that they are crowdfunding a product that very obviously will be released regardless.
- Sometimes you don’t get a large variety of component choice when you’re inside a niche industry. Dave used to find and report silicon bugs to manufacturers when he was working with leading edge analog to digital converters (explained on our episode about buoys!).
- Advertising at tradeshows is extreme, Chris questions if this is why he has to pay more for products.
- Apple is working to buy a dominant stake in Renesas. Their supply chain needs and excess cash has them taking risks like buying companies with huge losses ($6B+ in the past few years) in order to have first shot at the silicon.Â
- Buying lots of chips at once basically allows cash-heavy companies to act like mafias (“leaning” on their suppliers).
- The Raspberry Pi foundation just released a new “Compute” module based on a SO-DIMM form factor. Dave mentions that these were used in the past and had a standard associated with them, the embedded open modular architecture.
- Yet another BS indiegogo, this one creeping past $1million dollars (and still going) that can claim to track your calories through skin resistance. NOPE.
- A high-flying crowdfund campaign that isn’t BS is the MicroView, which crossed the $500K threshold. Marcus was on the show a few weeks back talking about the device.
- Chris did a booth mini Maker Faire. It’s amazing that some people do this for conferences as large as Bay Area Maker Faire (which Chris will be attending as a participant, not a presenter).
- This year there will be a “Gauntlet” that runs for 1.5 weeks:Â MakerCon -> Maker Faire -> SolidCon.
Thanks to Wikipedia for the image of Al Capone and to Apple for not suing us (…right?)