Space Difficulties and Lost Heroes - Wanzing Workshop Whemmle

• Chris will be at the Hackaday Munich event where the winners of The Hackaday Prize will be announced.
• Chris and Dave think of Dieter's Dream and European Vacation when they think of Germany, a far cry from reality.
• The Woz announced he will be teaching at a University in Australia, no word if he'll end up living there.
• The reason for Chris' Germany trip is Electronica. It will be huge.
• Dave has been to CeBIT before, a large conference and show in Australia.
• Is the role of conferences declining? Specialized knowledge can be found online, so there is less incentive to be at an inperson event.
• Tom from Car Talk recently passed away. He was an inspiration to our show, not least of all for showing that programs with two weirdos laughing their butts off can succeed.
• One of our listeners put together a clip just from us  laughing during a show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dESWV27chqs
• uBeam is back in the news for getting $10M and for an explaination from a physicist on why it won't work (and why investors are dumb).
• The show Silicon Valley is relatively accurate, even if it is ridiculous.
• The noted "Father of the LED" was wondering why he didn't get a Physics Noble prize. The three inventors of the blue LED recently were awarded the Nobel.
• A list of Physics Nobel prizes shows that only recently have any electronics prizes been awarded.
• There is a new ultrasound chip, being worked on by our recurring guest Greg Charvat! He mentioned when he was on last time that he couldn't talk about what he was working on...but it's this!
• Greg will be at an expert panel event in NYC, hosted by the parent company of the startup he is at.
• Researched recently proved that DNA can carry current, paving the way for self assembling circuits.
• Chris dressed up as "Tony Stark at a cocktail party" for Halloween. Dave hates Halloween.

https://twitter.com/Chris_Gammell/status/528730939388870656

• This provided a good excuse to break out the mill for the plastic case and to attempt milling a circuit board.
• The pcb2gcode script helped for generating gcode from gerbers. Chris broke all of his milling bits and ended up hacking something together.
• There is also a script that will turn a 2D vinyl cutter into a solder stencil cutter. Thanks to Jeremy for letting us know about it in the comments two weeks ago.
• Inventables is running a kickstarter for a "2.5 carving machine" called Carvey. It's really a low height milling machine but their online CAM tool Easel looks neat as well!
• There is another Kickstarter for a reflow oven controller, however it also has kit elements to build it up. They have a great tutorial for building your own.
• Mike did a teardown of the Seek Thermal camera, showing how simple the guts are. Chris got one as well, but it's his first thermal camera so he didn't notice the difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Cr8oZck5m8
• The USB On-The-Go (USB OTG) being used on the Seek could end up enabling a new generation of higher bandwidth hardware with associated apps.
• There is a Hoverboard on Kickstarter (that works!) but man is it loud and not very practical. Buzz Aldrin came in to try it out, Dave is wondering why he wore a helmet.
• We were sad to see the Antares rocket explosion. We were glad no one was hurt though.
• We were even more sad to see the crash of Space Ship Two, where the pilot died.
• Recent former guest of the show Shaun Meehan talked about the "doves" deployed with his co-workers at Planet Labs. 26 of them were lost on the Antares explosion.
• Dave wondered if there is such a thing as satellite insurance. There is. Quite a bit actually.
• Dave posted an eBook about Global Certifications, aimed at makers taking their projects pro.
• We will give away a code for a copy of this eBook to the first 5 listeners to tweet:
  • A link to this show
  • @TheAmpHour (include our name in the tweet so we know you tweeted it) 
  • And the hashtag #eBook

The next two weeks will be Dave and guests! Chris will be in Germany and Austria traveling and talking electronics with Europeans.

 

Thank you to Stuart Rankin for the picture of the “Catastrophic Anomaly”