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Welcome to the macro FEHB engineering podcast. I'm your guest, Josh Rocher.

And we are your hosts Parker Dolan

and Steven Craig.

This is episode 174. So last time, Josh was on the podcast. It was the last December's Star Wars podcast the greatest

the greatest, the best episode we ever had.

So Josh is back. He will be joining us on this podcast. It's not it's gonna be a weird podcast, right, Stephen?

Yeah, yeah, we're sort of not doing like a guest podcast, where it's sort of doing like, Roz is just another person that is helping us out. Not sure how to feel about this. Well, you but we brought you on, actually, because you have some cool stuff to talk about. He's been doing. You've been doing a pretty interesting topic or project recently, right?

Yeah. I mean, it's cool to me. Hopefully, it doesn't put too many people to sleep. But

well, here's the thing. You're on the kind of podcast, probably the only podcast in the world where other people would be like, Oh, that's cool. Well,

yeah, so I will, I'm gonna go ahead and make this disclaimer once this caveat once. Hopefully, I won't have to do it throughout the podcast, because there's going to be plenty of opportunity for me to do it. But I am not an engineer, my education, my background, none of the I'm not an engineer by trade. I don't even work in anything technical from like a technology or engineering standpoint. But so I guess that being said, I know I'm gonna say a lot of things that are probably not completely accurate. And we can save all the keyboard commandos all their finger, you know, fingertips from smashing the keys. I know, I'm probably doing things wrong. But that being said, I yeah, I, as most people probably don't know, Steve and I going way back. We're in bands together, like goofed often in my parent's garage with guitar amps and drums and getting the cops called on us, since we were probably about 14. And part of that out of that friendship, and Steve's kind of interest in guitar amplifiers. I got involved in guitar amplifiers as well. And I've been building amps with Steve, I don't know probably about the last 10 years or so

sounds about right.

You know, varying varying degrees and types and kinds and all kinds of tube, vacuum tube guitar amplifiers, but cutting to the point here. I started winding my own transformers. Crazy enough as it might sound, it really was spawned out of more curiosity. And, you know, Can I do it more than anything? And that led me down kind of a interesting path to where I am now. And I just recently wrapped up my latest one, my first I would call legit one the other ones I kind of took apart and started over because I wasn't happy with them. But yeah, so

let me kind of interject right? Yeah, absolutely. So you just gave a whole spiel describing how you would were not or are not an engineer. If you didn't give that spiel, you could have fooled anyone let's just put it that way. Especially especially with the intensity at which you've approached this project. And and like the weird add fueled rage in terms of like, actually like accomplishing a final product on this. Yeah,

true story. I hope my note nobody who works at the company I worked for listens to this podcast, because I'll probably lose my job once they realize how many hours of their time I spent doing this.

Okay, so what kind of transformer did you wind?

Right? So I started actually, in hindsight with the heart one of the hardest things I could do, which was a output transformer for a guitar amp specifically, it is a output transformer for a 100 watt. Let's call it a Marshall clone, right so for each All 30 fours in the power section, which are type of vacuum tube. And it's essentially an impedance matching transformer that matches the impedance of the output tubes to your, your speaker load. So we're going from about 1700 ohms on the primary of the output transformer 248 or 16, depending on your speaker load and your speaker cabinet, how many speakers you have? And essentially, it's, there's a lot more it's art science, Voodoo superstition, man, there's so much when it comes to output transformers versus just your standard. I don't even want to call it standard because there's nothing simple about this this world at all. But you know, if you're just talking about a a voltage, power transformer, you know, step up or step down transformer. It makes that look like kindergarten. When you're going towards output transformers, there's just so much involved, and everything is interconnected. So yeah, I mean, we can we can dive into as many details as you want. Or I'll kind of let you guys guide me on which direction we want to take it.

Well, okay, so one of the things that I've certainly found interesting is is, Well, Roz, and I've been discussing this for two or three months now via text and a handful of other things. And I've gotten all kinds of pictures and spreadsheets and things like that. And one of the things that's, that's interesting is, a lot of times with with design, what you really either shoot for, or you kind of hope for is that you can have a handful of variables, but they're not necessarily interconnected, where you can turn the knob on one variable and adjust one thing without affecting anything else. And what I've certainly recognized from watching you do this transformer thing is, every single variable is somehow connected to another variable, where if you turn the knob on one thing, you are required effectively to adjust all the other variables,

right. And we're not just talking about from a, like a theoretical engineering standpoint, right it like, from a physical standpoint, if I go from 13 gauge wire to 14 gauge wire, well, that changes the fill of my of my bobbin that I'm winding my magnet wire on? Well, okay, when you're changing the fill, that's going to change the weight, you change the weight, it changes the power handling, essentially and the core loss and well that's going to change, it's going to change your capacitance between the windings because now you have more or less space between the windings in the wires and the the thickness of your insulator on your magnet wire is going to be different. So yeah, it's just all one little variable of changing. You know, I have 14 gauge laying around, why don't I use this instead of the 13 gauge? Okay, well, you can will it work? Sure, it'll probably handle the current. Is it going to be exactly the same type of transformer? No, it's not it's going to it's going to change something. Will you be able to tell the difference? Like sonically to be determined? I suppose.

See you you sound more like an engineer that

we do have the time now. It's audio though. It always matters. Yeah,

right. Yeah. Well, it depends. Yeah, it depends on which cork? You're sniffing? Yes.

Did you cryogenically align all the dipoles in your in your iron?

I did. Yeah. i It's now Yeah, I did a couple of normalizing cycles on the Forge up to 1500 degrees. No, one cool thing about it is is in in out on the market, the type of steel you use for these type of transformers, they do all the annealing and all it's called fully processed Grain Oriented steel, which is what I use for this particular transformer. And you joke but that's one of the benefits is they anneal it and they relieve all the stresses in the metal so even that actually, I know you were half halfway making a joke but even that is is something that affects the the set core saturation of of of your metal.

So does that so I guess if it's relaxed, it allows it to it has a better permittivity for the magnetism

Exactly. So what you can essentially do is wind your wind your transformer to a higher flux density, right? So you can you can basically get a more compact transformer more efficient smaller size, but that's not necessarily a good thing right because smaller physical size could potentially mean you know bigger temperature rise within your in your transformer so it's all kind of like going back to that one variable affects many it's kind of a balance but yeah, essentially you know that higher quality metal is allows you to have more permittivity on on the the core of the transformer so yeah, so as

the as the metal found on like Mount Fuji and Ford and folded like a million times

by Zeus himself, you would

think so because it is it is, I want to say damn near impossible to find, domestically in any kind of quantities that, you know, you were I would want to be able to purchase, right? If I want to I can go down to, you know, Arnold's magnetics or LSI, or there's a couple of hand American vendors out there that are still making this type of steel. It's not all fully, you know, overseas yet. But you're talking a couple of tonnes minimum order quantity. So you got to find basically a shop who does this who's willing to sell you laminations off the side, or you get to cannibalize, you know, a microwave transformer, in which case, you're using mystery steel. And that's

mysteries. Well, but also remember, we're talking about iron here. So a couple of tonnes is like a pallet. Right?

Right. Right. Yeah, it's like, shows up in a box and one Amazon Prime box.

So okay, how did you go from nothing to something with with this,

so it was I essentially like stepping back into a time machine, in a lot of ways. Back in the day, if you think about when, when our grandfathers were messing around with to radios or whatever, if you needed a transformer, most of the time, they just wound it, they went down to the hardware hardware store picked up the magnet wire, you know, ordered the, the laminations from I don't know Sears Roebuck or whatever they ordered stuff from back then. And, you know, they got it in and wound their own transformers, usually by hand on the bench. So what I did is I went out to the, the interwebs, and just really just read everything I could get my hands on. There's a there's a bunch of really good resources out there from there's one guy, one gentleman who either still does or did at some point, own a transformer winding shop out in the I think Los Angeles area by the name of Robert Wolpert, I believe he wrote a couple of really good, very practical, you know, from the ground up. It's at the right level to where it doesn't like, overload you too fast. But it's a good intro into the subject. But yeah, I mean, I guess to answer your question, anything and everything I could get my hands on, from spec sheets, to manufacturers, to wiring diagrams, winding diagrams, and posts on you know, forums and whatnot, audio file forums, those are usually pretty good, because those guys go to the enth degree as far as detail is concerned. So they're usually good to take some information from those forums. But yeah, there's, there's no lack of information out there. And I'm, I'm just scratching the surface. I've been doing reading this constantly for a couple of months, but I'm just kind of scratching the surface of it. I feel.

So you also found some pretty interesting information by looking at other manufacturers websites, right?

I did. So interestingly enough, well, so there's a couple of transformer designs out there that are just so prevalent. And because of the, I guess, the products they're used in, let's so let's let's take the one eye wound, the reason I did it that way is because I didn't have to engineer it even though I, I reverse engineered it essentially to try and understand what was going on with the physics of the thing. But it's a very well known well copied. You know, you can pick one of these transformers up wound the specs that will work in 100 watt Marshall amplifier for 5060 bucks from a major manufacturer you go out to Hammond or something, you can probably get one for under 100 bucks. And there's, it's more information online. And it's it's more of like a recipe, right? So it's like, layer one winds, this gauge of wire this many times layer two, you know, in it just it's more prescriptive than anything else. So it was like, okay, worse comes to worse. I know, I can at least reproduce what they're saying here. I'll probably have to do it a couple of times, screw some things up, I'll eventually get my groove. But to your point, Steve, once I started learning what these variables do and how they affect each other, and what's required to build a transformer, I can go out to depending on the amount of information that the manufacturer gives you. I can somewhat reverse engineer a transformer that'll get you in the ballpark without really needing to know that recipe, if you will, I can, okay, what's the primary inductance you know, what's the power handling? What's the impedance on the tubes you're trying to hit? And what's the physical size eyes Is it green oriented steel or non green oriented steel, and you can kind of tell those things based on some of the physical factors of the, of the transformer itself, and you can kind of back yourself into a ballpark of of a transformer that will at least work. So, there's, I think one thing is, there's hardly anybody doing this, because nobody's crazy enough to do it. So there's not a lot of information geared towards people, you know, trying to get into this type of hobby or work, I think the only people that really want to do this are the ones that are usually out there, making money at it for a living. So, right, it's, it

sounds very much like on the job training kind of stuff

in. And essentially, that's by reading these manuals. And these handbooks, I felt like that's kind of what I was getting, I felt like this, this manual was written by some guy who owned a transformer winding shop for 30 years, and I was like, my first day on the job, and he was kind of showing me the ropes. And I can share those links to you, they're out there on the web on PDF, I hope I don't get them like taken down because of, you know, somebody's finally aware that they're out there floating around or something. But, you know, they're, they're interesting to say the least, and more than anything, being someone who's interested in guitar amplifiers and manufacturing and building guitar amplifiers, and even kind of dabbling with the idea of doing it, you know, as a source of income? It would, it really helped me understand point, like, from A to Z, the signal chain, what goes into my amplifier? What makes a good output transformer? What makes a good power transformer? When we're talking about a center, tap winding? Why is that important? You know, all those factors we talked about, you know, if I have an amp that needs to be able to hit his particular bass frequency and not go into saturation, alright, what am I looking at as far as transformers that are able to do that? Why is this transformer better at accomplishing that goal, then this other transformer would be, it really helped me understand the mechanics of that. So even if I drop this hobby, and I don't do it beyond, you know, a handful of transformers, which I think is probably doubtful, I at least know a lot more than I did going into it. Before it was just picks up an off the shelf that works. And now it's, you know, a little bit more. I wouldn't call it science quite yet. Maybe Maybe crossing into the art territory, I would say,

Nice. So it's funny, we've had, we've had some people ask before, like,

I've got a topic I want to learn or I want to just become better at XYZ. How do I do that? And I think your whole story right? There is like, do the Raz thing like spend a couple of months just exhausted Google searches? Read everything, you can try it out, spend some money, and then at the point that you're at, and then you can ask yourself, like, do I want to do more of this? Or have I satisfied that itch? You know?

Yeah, and it's funny, I know, you were kind of half joking there at the intro about like the add, you know, thing, but I really think you know, whether it be like personality trait or whatnot, I have this tendency to kind of once I get interested in something, it's, it's hard to think about anything but that right. So I think to my, in this case, advantage, unless you asked my employer probably, or your wife or my wife. You know, in this case, it was it worked to my benefit, because yeah, you just you just get that thirsty, okay, I got I need to know more. You read a line in a book. And that sparks more questions in your head, and then you're out there googling those phrases. And then those phrases spawn more questions. And then you're going back to the original source, because you finally connected the dots on something that you read, like nine pages deep in some forum. That made sense, like the first day you got into this. And, you know, now you're you're going back and rereading that, and it has a different, you know, a different meaning to you now, because you have more knowledge. It really is just, in this case, I didn't have anybody really to bounce questions off of so in that kind of a benefit, the way I see it is like I was forced to learn it. I wasn't able to rely on on, you know, the lazy way out, which is just oh, well, you know, Steve, yeah,

yeah. He asked me crap, and I'm glad I don't know. I've never wanted to transformer.

So stepping back a bit then on wining and transport, what's the steps to wind a transformer then?

Well, so I think, Well, let's think about this. I would say step one is to know what your intended application is. Right? So I know we've talked about it a little bit but audio transform Whereas is really what I've been focused on. And you know, power transformers, which I guess are generic enough to where they're in use across multiple different industries and applications, but you know, are you going to be putting it in a guitar amplifier? Or do you want to super ultra linear high fidelity, you know, cork sniff or tube, stereo amp that you're building, you know, there's probably differences between how you want to construct it too. So just know your application, right? Because that's going to, like we said, the variables are so intertwined that, really, you have to lay that foundation and start building everything with that intended purpose in mind, otherwise, you're going to be, you're going to get to the end and realize you have to go back and start from square one. I think after that, you got to source the materials, they're so hard to come by that you either have to have a line, you got to know somebody, you got to have some materials laying around, or you gotta be willing to, you know, in my case, I found one or two vendors that sell in, in quantity, but not ridiculous quantity, you know, you're talking a few $100 worth of laminations versus a few 1000. And then there's what are

laminations.

So in the laminations, that that I keep referencing, in this case, the type of transformers that I build, because it's more tradition than efficiency, or anything else like that. So this goes, I'll reference the disclaimer from the beginning here, I know there's better materials out there, oftentimes, but the laminations we're using are, they're called ei laminations. Because if you look at them, they they're physically shaped like the capital letter E in the capital letter I, such that and this will make more sense if anyone goes out and Google's and it's kind of hard to explain, but you basically you wind your transformer on a bobbin. And then you you kind of put these laminations inside that bobbin such that it, you know, you have that core area and you have that that you know, inductor, essentially, that wire wrapped around a hunk of steel, it fits around the middle leg of the E, right, essentially, that's where your windings go is around that middle leg of that E. What it is, is there silicon steel right there, usually around 3% silicon. And apparently, this is a type of steel that that is just from a magnetic standpoint, conducive to the type of transformer that you need for a guitar audio output transformer. So the way I've heard it explained is, you know, lower frequencies below, say I want to say it's like 60 hertz, or so silicone steel is really where it shines. So it's able to handle a lot of power without saturating, which is, when you're talking about audio frequency, you know, human ear, 20 hertz, or so is the cut off, you want to be able to get it down as low as you can, so that you can have that bass frequency without distortion. And the reason they're called laminations is because they're 29 gauge in the type of steel I use, which is green oriented. him six green oriented steel, it's 29 gauge. And the reason it's 29 gauge is it's really thin, because you laminate them on top of each other, you stack them up like a deck of cards, essentially. And they're actually they have an oxide coating on them from the mill, so that they're not conductive between each other. And that's to reduce eddy currents and losses within your core.

So is that the reason why you don't just have a big block of this chunk

of steel? Yeah, what you can do, what you can do, there's like, oh, shoot, I'm blanking on the term, but like, like powdered sintered, powdered sintered. And like Pharaoh Pharaoh metals, I can't remember the name of them like, but yeah, they're basically these,

they're it's glued powder, magnetic pattern,

essentially very junior architecture. Yeah, cheap to manufacture really efficient at some things, right. You know, there's even like nickel. I want to say I can't remember the other alloys because they're ridiculously expensive and probably way better than I would need for my application. But nickel based laminations there's all kinds of different laminations and then then you can get into green oriented versus non Grain Oriented right. So, the Grain Oriented means that the crystalline structure of the steel when they process it, they roll it in such a way that the crystalline structure of the steel is lined up so that the the actual magnetic flux lines have less resistance when you if that's even the word resistance, you know when they're going impedance Yeah,

the word reluctance comes to mind if I remember right reluctance is Your magnetic resistance. I'm, I'm thinking all the way back to physics to now.

Yeah, I took business business level physics, which was like, how does this block slide on this inclined plane? So I got to see

what happens if you throw this cow in a vacuum and your angle?

I mean, it's great for launching watermelons and trebuie chaise, you know, trebuchets in the backyard. But when you're talking about winding transformers, that didn't mean didn't do shit for me. But, you know, there's a point is, is there's all kinds of different Steel's that are, there's no like super, super material that does everything. Well, just like everything, right? There's trade offs. And in my particular application, it's it's those laminated, ei laminations, that seem to do the best job and the EI going back to that that's more traditional, right? I think that's the way that was the common manufacturing method for these, you know, transformer steel, and it's just kind of carried over into today's terms, especially when it comes to guitar amps, musicians, especially, and the nerdy kind of musicians who care enough to know what kind of transformer is in their amp. You know, they're, they're going to be snobby enough to want a specific look and type and hey, if it doesn't match what Marshall and fender and Vox did back in the day, they probably don't want to touch it. So you know, there's a little bit of that kind of nostalgic flair to it. So. But yeah, that's, that's laminations, in a very brief nutshell, barely even bounced off the surface of that one.

Awesome. So just, I guess we can kind of go over this fairly quickly. But

your day job has you working in the Excel or the Microsoft suite pretty regularly, right, Excel, and, and PowerPoint? So you use the little bit of those skills to create your own transformer spreadsheet, right? I did. I did. Yeah. magic behind that.

LLC. I wouldn't call it magic more than, you know, just keeping me sane by organizing things, right? There's just so much that you're having to kind of tweak along through the process. You know, you want to know how what's the cross section of your core area? Right? All right, how many windings? What's the flux density that results from that? What's the size and you got to keep all this stuff straight, and tweak all these the screws to make sure you set it up? And Excel was just kind of the natural way for me to to do that did like you said, day job means that I have familiarity with it. Like most people in corporate America, probably Excel is ubiquitous, it's not going anywhere. And it seems to be like the least common, or like the lowest, least common denominator, I guess, when it comes to data and analytics and calculation and keeping track of data. So yeah, I mean, I can certainly share it with you guys. If, if that's something you you want to look at it, I will I will say that is it is probably more akin to like madman, chicken scratch manifesto, then like a well thought out organized. Like, you know, it's not going to be a step by step formula, input this into this box and then come over, it's not going to you it was never intended to be that. And it never was right. So it helped me design and build and organize and plan out a build for a transformer. It might help somebody if somebody out there is listening and is kind of already going down this path or wants to get in it, you know, they can they can play around with it.

Just check every cell and check every formula. That's a cinch. And

you know, there's, there's, there's some spreadsheets that are out there. And this is one thing that I found, and I'm kind of I'm finding, while I'm talking to you guys about this spreadsheet that I'm guilty of this very thing that I'm about to complain about. There's a lot of information out there, but a lot of people just say, just use this constant, it's fine. You don't need to know the details. Just plug this into your formula. And that always drove me nuts. I was like, No, I want to know why. Like I want to know, in a lot of cases, it's because it's just such a complicated topic when you're talking about, you know, permeability of a specific steel from a specific manufacturer. That's a pretty complex that's not like just a linear algebra equation, right? So oftentimes they do it to save you the pain of trying to drive yourself crazy figuring it out. But

or explain to someone on the internet how it works,

right. So that being said, there's definitely going to be some of that in this spreadsheet. It's not going to be able to tell everybody this secret formula to building a transformer. And I'm happy to share what knowledge I have. I mean, I can certainly give you guys my email address. And we can we can post that I guess in the notes if you all are okay with that. I don't mind that. And I can anybody can, you know, talk to me? And I'm happy to answer any questions and share anything I've learned along the way. Do you use Slack? I have before I've used it for work. So I can certainly set up a Slack account. And

yeah, you should come hang out in our, our macro fab engineering podcast. Oh, you

guys have a slack. Yeah,

we have a Slack channel with like, Gosh, 300 or so active users. And Parker and I are on it every day. So come out and hang out.

I'd love to. And that being said, I mean, I'm in the chance that there's somebody out there who's listening and like shaking their head and all this stuff. I'm saying that's completely wrong. Because they know more than me about this subject, please, I'd love to talk to that person as well. So I'm still learning and I'm definitely nowhere near an expert, I would say in this topic. So I'm, I'm happy to hear you know, other people's advice or direction or learning or knowledge and you know, that that'd be great. I'd love to join the channel and kind of, you know, poke around whatever topics come up, so.

So I got one more question. Before we move on Roz. Yeah. What's your favorite Transformers movie?

Can I can I cheat? Can I say the Beast Wars transformers show from back in the day was that was legit. Yeah. I never really I never really got into the newer transformers, like movies, the Michael Bay ones, mainly because it's Michael Bay.

I don't have a problem. Michael Bay, I have a problem with I have no idea what's going on the screen because everything's so zoomed in.

True. Yeah. I just go back to Team America. You know, Pearl Harbor sucks. And I love you. You know, that's what I think about Michael Bay.

One thing that I think is funny is you were mentioning that whole like, you download somebody spreadsheet and and just like, oh, just use this value. Don't Don't worry about it. It kind of reminds me of a quick, quick thing from when I got to my junior or senior year of college, I was like, Finally I've made it. I'm past the entry level engineering stuff. And I get to like semiconductor physics class number two, and it's like, I'm learning about all this stuff. And then and the professors just like, Will, when you're doing this equation, just use this this value and just don't question it. Just just use it. It'll work, you know? And it's like, wow, okay, I've gotten to this level and your senior year. Yeah. Yeah. No, and it was it's kind of funny, because it's super, it's super, like, it's just an exact relevant thing. Cuz I'm like, Wait, aren't I aren't I here to learn why I should use that value, not just use.

Yeah, you got to pay extra and go get a post grad degree to learn those things. You know,

there's there's a lot of truth to that.

I actually, I actually noticed that a lot was when I had professors that that had classes that were upper grad and then undergrads. Yeah, like they weren't combined. They were kind of like that, like Stephen experienced where like the undergrads, they just think we're too stupid. Yeah, to understand, like, what where stuff comes from, but if you take I took some classes that were mixed, so they had upper and lower undergrads, those like, it's like an upper graduate class, and you're like, holy shit, this isn't saying, These people are doing this. And they're like, they're getting A's and you're getting like C's. And you're like,

I have, you're happy for that. C two, you're like,

a year older than you. You know, they're 2021

Are they doing this?

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Nothing to realize us this.

Is that's actually the only class are taking.

But they have the TA a couple labs, you know, that evening, so

No, it's because it's because you were playing drug wars on your TI 83. While they were actually doing the math problems from

TI 89 Titanium. Get it right, Roz.

Hey, I got my I got my finance calculator floating around here somewhere. Yeah, it's

probably a ti 83.

Yeah, I use the three year old through college. No, no, no funny story.

I may have told this before. I bought a ti 89 My junior year halfway through my junior year, and you could see a visible change in the in the curve of my grades after buying a ti 89 Like just what it is capable of doing like it made a difference. And not an end not just taking notes and pulling them up in during an exam.

You don't remember you don't remember the big box that the teacher would walk around with with all the calculators and you'd have to take yours out and just for that very reason. So you couldn't like save stuff into your calculator.

Now they didn't do an engineering No, they did not know because they knew if you didn't have a calculator, there was no way you were doing anything

in Yeah, at all. So I have my 83 I still have on my desk. Oh, nice. So I do have an 89 that I bought for 20 bucks. I think I've told this story before I bought it for 20 bucks at a garage sale in Austin, Texas. And I use it for my last my senior year. And you're right though. It's like, holy cow like differentials. You just punch it in, and it spits it out, like factored out. And you're like, Fuck my last three years.

It has, it has a solved command on it. You could just type a ball, you could just type in solve and like it will do solve for the variable solve for a variable like that. That was game changer. Yeah, that was absolute game changer.

But the thing is, oh, by senior year, for me, it's because like, you weren't doing stuff like that. Like you weren't solve for x. Like for, like calculus and stuff like that. My senior year. I wasn't doing calculus anymore. But like, it was one of those like, well, I should have bought this when I was a freshman it would made my freshman life a lot easier. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, but how well does it run Oregon Trail?

You don't think it runs Oregon Trail at all?

I know. I

know. You haven't seen like Doom ported to the tip.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it will it ran a tech space adventure.

I wonder if I saw my games on it. I got booted up some time.

You know what, so goofy, nerdy sidenote, there's the processor in the TI 89 actually has two. It's just like a regular processor, where it has two caps that connect to the crystal. And I believe they're 22 pico Ferens. It will run if you reduce those to like nine or 10 pico ferrets. And so you can overclock a ti 89 and get into

what's it like? 200 megahertz or so?

That it's not a crystal? It's an oscillator in there. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I, this was a decade ago that I've researched it. So it may be different nowadays. But, but yeah, you could do that. And in fact, I did. I did actually do that back in the day. And I set up a Fourier transform one time, where I had my calculator, calculate a Fourier transform to something ridiculous, like 2000, like n is equal to 2000, where it has to do iterations of this calculation 2000 times, and I let it run for an entire week. And it graphed it at the end of it. And I kept, I think I did a Fourier transform of something that ended up just being a sawtooth wave. And so the graph like it probably would have looked the same at n is equal to three as n is equal to 2000. But I it chugged along and did an entire week's worth of calculation. I mean, it ate through for double A batteries. But it did it.

Yeah, so more than you ever wanted to know about transformers, but I'm glad I could at least have an audience well, there's

there's only one thing more nerdy than collecting transformer toys that is winding your own transformers for electronic toys.

Right so if I if I didn't already have a wife there would be no hope for Oh, yeah.

Right now this happened after you got married. Luckily, lucky for you down

in some dingy basement somewhere and like winding my Transformers to my heart's content. All lonely by myself. Gollum.

Yeah. Okay, so we've gone for a while Parker what's up?

So I got an update for the Doom shitty add on. Yeah. So Ross, do you know what this is? No. Okay, so we'll start out with what a shitty add on is. And like, all our listeners are like, Oh, we've heard this 1000. So should he add on is a PCB that gets plugged into another PCB, and the main PCB that is for art for a conference badge. So like, if you go to a conference, and they just give you like your name badge, yeah, that says you belong at that conference. Some of the more tech conferences have electronic badges. And this has kind of exploded into this ginormous like scene called hashtag badge life.

Now these badges have expansion ports on them that you can plug other boards into, and other badges

that you have to get like the red key card to go into certain like, seminars and stuff like

that would actually be kind of that would be legit,

to plug in a red key card into your badge and open the red door. No,

no. So the Doom should he add on is a add on that plugs into a normal board that has Doom guy's face on it on the screen. And he's just like looking around I got my prototype running so you can least see the the yet and as I share the video with our listeners last week, but um, so I basically I made a prototype ordered the boards. This week the screens arrived. So I ordered like 200. And I shouldn't have said that, because we don't have the what quantity we're going to make 200,000 LCDs when

we'll fix it and post

200,000 LCDs. And so when they arrived, they arrived this Wednesday, I ordered them like last Tuesday. And so they're showing up in like, a little over a week, which is pretty quick from China. And so I want to take one of those screens and like I got a little breakout board I ordered online and I'm going to solder the screen on to it, like take the one I have here off, put the one I got just got just to make sure it works. It works similar because so many different manufacturers make these things. You don't know what you get until you get it. So

you know Okay, so Parker, I just had an idea. I'm going to I need to purchase one of these from you. And I need to create a new a new project go figure I'm making a new project but but okay, so get this sorry, I'm totally hijacking your thing here but this just came to mind because I've been needing to solve this thing. So I moved positions in my basement the other day and now my back faces the stairwell so if my wife walks down the stairs now most of the time I got headphones on I can't hear and it scares the living shit out of me

because she's like and I keep telling her like announced when you're coming down like make big noises here's what I want to do. I want to get a shitty add on and I want to put it above my monitor and put some kind of sensor on the stairs such that Doom like so. So like go God Mode or something if if she's walking down the stairs so I can be like okay great my wife can close

that Chrome browser though well

incognito window

to God, look at this. She just walked down the stairs. I didn't even notice until you guys started like this is why I need Doom guy.

It was a shitty Doom guys.

Oh my god. Like it's a great example right there. She just walked on. I need this. So yeah, put me on the list for one Doom guy, please. Hi,

Lauren. I don't know what I would do with the Doom guy. But I'll find the cool thing is I'm making a kind of like a dev board as well. So all the IO for the microcontroller that's not used come out to the edge of the board. So you can solder like LEDs and stuff to it or sought out more hardware. And you can it's all gonna be open source. So you can download the code and put whatever faces or whatever into it. So it's gonna be pretty cool.

Oh, okay, so I could put like, I need to you know what I needed to have? I need to have like the submarine siren sound whenever she comes into that Red October Yeah, no, Sean Connery starts talking to me when she comes out a Russian Sean Connery that's yeah,

which just sounds like the regular shot

have a death. So one of those is going to be available Parker.

So I don't know when we're going to sell him yet. The prototype is gone. I'm gonna have the prototype next week for macro fam. And then if that works, then basically I'm going to press you know go on the run and then we'll probably start selling them. So minimal two weeks from now we'll start taking pre orders and then I got the I think I talked about last week this Atmel ice to tag connect adaptive board I got that ordered. So this allows you to plug in that Mike's programmer into it and then convert it to the tag connect connector and it also provides power to the tag connect so when I'm programming you know all 200,000 of these Doom should the add ons. I just have to plug the tag connect in and it powers up the board and programs so you don't have to play this thing.

Does it have that really ridiculous like super tiny pitch 10 pin connector on it? Yes. Okay, that that connect that connector is so hard to find.

Yes it is. X actually the the Atmel ice we have at work the the headers that are actually on the programmer are worn out so the cable just keeps falling out. Yeah, I got it I basically had to go in there and take the circuit board out and D solder that header and put a new header and good

luck. I remember searching for that when I was working at macro fab those those connectors and they're just a pain in the ass to find. And and those little tiny pigtail cables are like 35 bucks a piece.

Yes, they're ridiculous how much they cost? And just a ribbon cable. It's No, there's nothing special about it.

But it there is something special. It's tiny. It's like really tiny pitch. So I don't know,

1.27 millimeters is what it is. It

seems smaller than that.

Yeah. Actually, the part number that you found, like four years ago or three years ago is what I use all the time.

Yeah, cuz, because we would go through those damn things, you know, we'd have a customer come in with like, Hey, can you program 1000 of these units? Well, you know, we'd go through two or three cables, just programming 1000 units, I was a pain in the ass.

So hopefully, this tack neck system, you know, alleviates that problem. That'd be nice. It should yeah. And then, since we're kind of talking about weird projects, like Trent, like winding your own transformers and stuff, I finished the Jeep Wagoneer is grill. I don't know if Ross has seen this. I think I just texted the picture to your eyes. So the this was kind of like an experiment in like refinishing aluminum. And so it's not just bare aluminum though, is it's an anodized, clear aluminum that they use all over his vehicle. And so the problem with that and is aluminum is it's really, really hard, which is good when it's brand new. But when you get some like chips and some scratches in it, you can't really buff it out. Because because the scratch went through the anodized aluminum into the soft aluminum and reenergize hands. And you can't bust through the hard anodized you just can't do that. So you have to strip the anodizing off. And I basically use sodium hydroxide, which is lie, and I made like a trough in my backyard. That's like eight feet wide, and like two feet deep. And yeah, like so dangerous. And I filled it with like five pounds a lie and some warm water. And then dipped the grill into it, and let it sit there for two hours. And it just like fizzled away all the anodizing off of it. And then I pulled it out, you know, rinse it off, and then took some like 220 grit sandpaper and fix all the scratches and then buffed it all out. And it turned out pretty good. It just I never thought they would be that much labor involved in doing that though. It took weeks of weekends.

I mean, aluminum oxide is what they make, like industrial abrasives out of that stuff's hard.

It is hard, cuz that's the thing is I first started, I thought I could sand through it. But your sandpaper is aluminum oxide. Yeah, so you're trying to sand. Basically, your hardness levels are the same. So it takes forever and a lot of sandpaper to do it. Right. But yeah, and the thing is, the certain amount of drugs only took two hours. And all I had to do was just like drink beer and watch it.

I know what's actually really funny about this. Today, a ve on YouTube came out with a video about soaking your carbide bits in sodium hydroxide. Basically, if you cut off your cutting, you cut aluminum really, really aggressively with a carbide bit, you can actually cold weld, I guess you could say, the aluminum to your bits. And then you basically you lose the edge on your bid and you just end up with like a cylinder that you're trying to like push into new metal, you don't have an edge anymore, well, you can actually just drop the bid in sodium hydroxide and basically erode off the aluminum and then pull the bit out and you have your edge again. That's kind of kind of neat.

So that was a it was a fun experiment because I've never tried anything like that before and it it was definitely like several. I tried several different things, progressing through all the aluminum pieces on my wagon. And of course on the last piece I need to do. I found the magic formula, the process that would retain plein air involved. Oh, yeah, like the first was like I did like the front bumper and it's the same thing aluminum with a clear anodized on it, and I sanded the whole thing. And it took three days of sanding. So like you know, about six hours each day just to get to the anodising

so I got a question for you. Do what do you do? Do you take Kitt Are you getting it re anodized are plating I'm

going to leave it bare,

bare anodized itself in the atmosphere.

There's nobody spotted off when it does that, because yeah. But the trick is just to keep polishing it. And yeah, it'd be nice and shiny for ever.

in quotes, it's funny because we do some, we do some engraving at work on anodized aluminum. And so we basically just take a 3000, thin depth cut on some black anodized aluminum. And what it does is it exposes the raw aluminum underneath it. And it looks fantastic, because you have this really nice contract contrast between black and silver. And I cut some pieces and showed some people and they're like, you know, it's just a little bit too shiny, I was like, wait a couple of hours and come back. And just sitting out in the atmosphere, the fresh cut aluminum oxidized and dull just a little bit. And it's not so much of a mirror finish, and it ends up looking great on it. Put it under water, you know, and it'll energize quick.

So the trick is you just have to keep, you have to polish it. And for aluminum and Houston, which is very humid, you pretty much have to keep it polished, about using Polish about once every two to three months. You just watch it. And usually when it naturally analyzes it's not even a thick layer. And so you polish it right off. And the Polish leaves like a slightly waxy finish that protects it and stuff

like that. You could probably find some kind of like sin oil or grease or something that's like relatively neutral that could probably make that stretch. You know, even longer, I would imagine probably

Yeah, carnuba wax or something like that.

Yeah, possibly. But like if you try to put like, if you try if I let's say I took it and got an anodized it wouldn't be as shiny as it is anymore. And then in about 10 years, that anodized would have faded. And I'd have to recondition it all over again. And I do not want to sand that much ever again in

my make a giant death pool in your backyard. Right?

I want to post the pictures that death

a Superfund site in your kiddie pool in the backyard isn't really

well. I first thought about doing it in the bathtub. Yeah, good thing you didn't. And the only reason I didn't know was because how much fumes it makes. I'm like there's no way I could ventilate the bathroom fast enough to handle that volume of sodium hydroxide. No battery, the bathtub would be spotless. Well, it's done.

Well, as I say, Isn't sodium hydroxide? Isn't that drain cleaner basically?

Well, it's got I mean, it's concentrated drain cleaner. Anything that is organic is dead. What does

it produce? I wonder if there's any chemists out there gonna tell us what it produces when it mixes with aluminum oxide?

Probably Probably, I'm guessing not something good.

Yeah, your lungs gonna turn into a giant block of aluminum. So aluminum. Actually,

it was interesting when I started draining it. I actually filtered out because I had I filtered it out in a I had a like a paint a paint. What do they call it? Like a paint strainer I guess is what you call it. It's like a big mesh bag thing. And I actually filtered it all because you can when you're done with it. It's sodium hydroxide and water to solution. So you just put down your toilets, and you just clean all your drains. Well, I wanted to filter out all the solids because like you looked at the solution, it's just it's just flecks of aluminum minutes. And so I don't know if it actually reacted with the aluminum or what that mechanism is. It probably just

gets under the aluminum and eats the bond oxide layer something. Yeah,

well, it does eat the aluminum too. So you have to be careful because if you if you let it sit too long, you'll get pitting all over your aluminum.

Oh, fun. Nice. Yeah. So I

have a what's it called a wort chiller for beer brewing. That is a it's a multiple plate chiller. That's made of steel. It's braised steel together. And I made the mistake of accidentally letting some wart dry in there. And that's, I mean, it's sugar. It's really concentrated sugar water. And once the sugar water dries out, you have like concrete sugar that's inside this thing that you're trying to keep sanitary. I filled that with concentrated ly water and that came out super clean in no time flat. That works you just cycled why water through it off the keep done. Yeah, yeah. I you know, when I did it in fact, I think I even sent Parker a picture of this. I I had gloves that went up to my L Bose on, I had a respirator and I put a motorcycle helmet on just to like, catch any splashes that came out because I use some pretty concentrated ly on

I was wearing a splash shield and

full gloves and oh yeah, yeah, you don't mess around with that stuff. So apparently turns

into sodium illuminate. So that's what I was skimming off my my strainer.

It's what is that like in Flintstones kids chewable?

I think that's in Fight Club somewhere. Right? Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Melts his hand. Robert. Cool.

So we've been up to Steven,

I've got an interesting thing. That's sort of a side note that is different than what I've normally done. So last November, I actually got the opportunity to purchase a rifle from a buddy of mine who had them available. And I'm not, I'm not particularly much of a gun guy. But he had a rifle that I ran the serial number on and it was August of 1941. It was an M one grand rifle, which I've always had a an affinity for that rifle, which is a pretty cool gun and the fact that it was August of 1941, before America entered World War Two, I was like, okay, yeah, I kind of need to have this. This is a cool like, this is a cool relic to just have, right. But sort of in this, like the same vein of like cleaning things up. I get this rifle, and the thing is greasy, and nasty and caked with cosmoline Oh, God constantly Yeah.

It's like Satan's earwax.

That's a really good, that's a good descriptor for this. So the I don't know, I guess this is I may be wrong here. I don't know who all uses it. But the American government has traditionally used cosmoline as a protector protectant for firearms. So when they, I guess, put firearms away for long term storage. They serve long Yeah, effectively. This this stuff is a grease compound. It's basically petroleum byproducts and paraffin wax mixed together. And you I've watched YouTube videos of this, you can take an entire gun and just dip it in a 55 gallon drum of this crap. And swear to God, it looks like earwax. It smells awful. And it is the stickiest grossest crap you've ever you've ever messed with. But it will preserve things like nobody's business. And, and funnily enough, so this last weekend, I'm imagining

like on your rifle, there's like a mosquito on it. And you dunk it in their mosquitoes Jurassic Park, and they can like recreate a Steven in nine years,

right? Do this stuff. This stuff is like a finds away. Exactly. So So I spent this last weekend actually cleaning this, this m one grand cleaning the cosmoline off of it. I had actually done it back in November. But that stuff is so nasty and greasy, it had gone deep into the 70 year old wood, that like even cleaning it a few months ago, like it comes back out. And on top of that I think this gun had been in the possession of somebody who was had an affinity for smoking, and cosmoline seems to really enjoy picking up the scent of cigarette smoke. So this code smelled horrible. Regardless, the whole point of bringing this all up is more along the lines of

the cleaning up effort was was kind of fun, but I actually ended up finding that cosmoline itself has like a military specification. And you can go and get the datasheet for cosmoline which will provide a datasheet for it. And there's it's cool because there's a whole bunch of test reports on what cosmoline can handle and like stuff like 700 hours of sitting outside with zero effects to the underlying material 500 hours of being sprayed with a 5% saline solution. So basically saltwater just spraying it for 500 hours. And it has done nothing to this grease, you know, that should tell you how hard it is to get on. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, and that's just the thing, like Yeah, the government just packs it away. You know, we've all seen Indiana Jones Like they just pack it away in crates in a big warehouse somewhere right next to the Ark of the Covenant. Exactly.

But and then they sell it, they sell it to us later on in life. But the cool thing is, I found a product that is sold at Home Depot, it's just called liquid gold. And it's wood wash. And this stuff is great. For some reason, it just eats cosmoline alive, and it will pull it out of the wood. Yeah, it's a wood, it's a floor cleaner. You know, go figure. Now this podcast has turned into like, here's how you clean your floors. But

no brought to buy liquid gold

and you know, use sparingly, I'm not going to just spray it all over a vintage, well, antique now gun, but you can use it a little bit on the on the actual steel portions of the wood and I mean the of the gun and it'll pull cosmoline right off. So go figure. Check that out.

So funny story, my my brother is a little bit of a collector himself. And he also has an in one grand, same story, we got coated in a crusty layer of cosmoline that was probably 70 some odd years old. And we got it and we we did the same thing. We scrubbed it, we stripped it apart, we poured it in hot water, we put all kinds of like chemicals on it, and got it pretty damn clean, like this thing was looking like mint almost, you know, put a nice layer of oil on the metal and went out to the range and started shooting it. And you know, two three dozen rounds in your barrel starts to heat up, the gun starts to heat up in the woods starts to heat up, as our causeway starts oozing out of the pores of the wood. And I mean, we've shot several 100 rounds through this gun by this point we don't want it's not like the kind of game you go out and just shoot every weekend for fun. So first off, it's expensive. Second off, it's a classic. We don't really want to ruin it by wearing it out. But dude, there's still to this day, every time we go out and shoot and that thing cosmoline just starts pouring out of the pores of that would like a fountain.

So I wonder what the US or any government because I know a lot of governments use cosmoline to preserve firearms like what do you what's their plan? unmask buying those rifles

selling it to a civilian

sell them by the Create load like the Russians do with their, their mosun against

well, they're, they they mothballed because they expect to maybe use them in the future. And then they become defunct and then they sell them. So what if they had to, let's say during the Vietnam War needed on create those M ones? Well, so I

guess what happened? They spent like $100 million worth of taxpayer dollars to invent anti cosmoline where they just dip it in and pull it out. And it's just cut down. Perfect. Right?

It's Agent Orange. Yeah.

Well, we found something to coat your bumper and Parker smells awful. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I never. I don't know this for a fact. But I would imagine that it wouldn't take much to get a gun working. If it was dipped in cosmoline, you just probably wouldn't want to hold

it very long. You always have to wear big gloves.

So if it's like an Enemy at the Gates kind of situation, and you're you're busting out the mothballed mosun the GaNS in the basement, you know, you could probably make them work, but it probably not an ideal situation, I wouldn't

be surprised if a gun was completely covered and cosmoline, especially the one with how reliable it is, you could probably just shoot a couple of rounds through it. And and you know, in all the critical paths of the of the bullet, the cosmoline would be gone, it would be all over your body, but it would still function.

Now it's preserving y'all.

Just a little bit in my hair, you know, a little bit of wax slicked back,

your hair will be permanently in that shape.

Oh, yeah. If you got cosmoline in your hair, it would take you a week to get it out. That stuff is so narrow. Stuff is growth, but it's impenetrable.

So did you find anything interesting in the cosmoline datasheets.

Mainly just the like the test reports and things and the fact that like, okay, so cosmoline is is, you know, in terms of human lifetime, it's ancient, right? Like, we've known about it for a long time. It's, it's, it's kind of like just coding things in tree sap, basically. And the funny thing is, like the way the datasheet kind of describes it is just like, Yeah, it's like, wax and

it's kind of like that, but it's funny. because it's a wax, okay, that Wikipedia describes it as a genericized trademark for a common class of brown wax, like, sorry, brown wax likes petroleum based corrosion inhibitors. And it was, I guess, developed by the US military for this exact reason. So, like, it had one goal and they certainly reached it you know, like they got the exactly what they were going for.

So I'm reading like, because usually, like this data sheet is actually a safety data sheet. And usually they have things like how do you get it on something it's not supposed to?

Just said good luck.

says Like if you get it on your skin, because I've had Cosmo lying on my on my skin before it says wash for plenty of soap water, that does not work. No, no, it just smears it it just spreads it around.

The Yeah. So I guess I guess the moral of the story is if you for some reason purchase a vintage weapon from the from the US military, be prepared to have like weeks of cleaning, you know, it will happen

you know what it was it was probably they actually you could probably just go down to like your local kitchen sink and there was some household cleaner back in the day that was good at taking probably just lie as aggressive. And it like it probably like pulls the paint off of walls and causes cancer now and they just don't sell it anymore. It's known

to the state of cancer to cause California

it was like an additive to Kool Aid and stuff. And now it's just like completely forget all the fun stuff. DDT and

yeah, you just melt lead chips, lead paint chips and water. Oregon's potentially affected by exposure, liver and kidneys, liver and kidneys.

I don't need those. We're just fine. Yeah, that's

all the stuff that filters.

Yeah, I drink at Target. Target toxin for those every night.

weaponized liquid? Great. Well, that's what I've been up to. You guys want to roll off on to the RFO section. Sure, cool. So Roz, the RFO stands for Rapid Fire opinion. It's basically a section where we just have fun and talk about, you know, whatever news fancies us write on.

Alright, so the first article is engineered tripped on LSD after touching 1960s synthesizer that was coded in it. So the story is he is refurbishing a synthesizer that has been sitting in a warehouse slash closet for a long period of time. And he's like, he sprayed some fluid into the potentiometers because they're crunchy. And he trips,

which, okay, so these particular synthesizers are under the name of Bukola. And they're very classic design. I've seen a bunch of them. I've dealt with customers that work with these every day, the world, these vintage style designs. I you know, I saw this and it's like, I really want to know how real this is. And also does does LSD degrade? You know, does it like break down? I would think so. But who knows, maybe this was a more modern synthesizer that somebody sprayed down recently. Yeah, that's

all I looked into. But I thought it was funny is His Word say? I felt like I was tripping on LSD. Do you know what LSD is? Like? Elliot, Curtis.

Just like take a big whiff of that DeOxit or whatever.

DeOxit do you guys. Okay, so side note DeOxit has a red can and a green can and the only reason why notice because I was over at Microcenter the other

day. Stop and go yeah,

what's the occiput DeOxit is a potentiometer cleaner. Okay, and they've got a red can and a green can and this is this is poor marketing if you ask me. They're both claimed to be potentiometers cleaners. They both claim to do the exact same thing. They both have the same price. They both have the same size, but they're different. And why are they different? You know, I had to sit there with myself. I just sit there with my cell phone and like research like which one should I buy and then I you know of course I ended up buying both. Because one isn't a more aggressive cleaner and one is a less aggressive but has more lubricant in it. So technically like the quote proper way according to DeOxit is you spray read in and you clean clean it and then you spray green in and you get some more lubrication, but they don't have that kind of information anywhere on the can. And if you're if you're like just some kind of like whatever guys at Microcenter trying to buy pot cleaner like what do you do?

So one is so one is lube with cleaner and one is cleaner with lube. Yeah,

that's exactly right. Yeah, thanks DeOxit.

Now that's interesting is is brake cleaner is sold the same way. You can get chlorinated work cleaner stuff, and it's an usually red cans. And then the green stuff is non chlorinated. And so I always I always have, I buy actually brake cleaner in bulk. And I have like, a reusable pressurized container. So you'd like pour the cleaner in it and then you pressurize it up with your air compressor. You have a soda fountain. Yeah, basically for brake clean. And that upper the Korean

little sip to your cocktails

is so much better than non chlorinated stuff. But the problem with that is I also do a lot of welding and you like that? cannot come near my welding table.

That stuff is like is flammable is Zinni

noise is the chlorinated break clean? We'll turn to FOSS was it? Phosphorus gas? The white phosphorus like, no, no, no, it's not white phosphorus. It basically is a mustard gas.

Cool. Yeah. Chlorine gas. Yeah, yeah. Well, isn't it?

Brake fluid? And, gosh, what is it?

Don't say it. You're gonna get, you're gonna get the FBI down here.

I've been on the FBI watch list since I was like 14, you know, because you and I got on it together.

That's probably true. Making what you're about chlorine tablets

and brake fluid. Isn't that what it is? And you throw it in a two liter bottle and cap it off and throw it? No, no, no. Yeah, all the

kids listening phosphine I can I can neither confirm nor deny these.

It's phosphine is what it makes when you if you accidentally basically expose chlorinated brake clean to really high temperatures and makes phosphine gas which will eat the insides of your lungs.

Yeah, so that's how you know it's working.

Yeah, this is the thing that was you. I need to fix this in my shop. But right now, the good thing is I'm the only one that is in the shop. Because I have a because usually, chlorinate brake clean comes in red containers. And I put it into a it's called sure shots, which is a metal container that's got a trigger and you pressurize it up and liquid comes out. So it's like a you can arrow size anything basically and I use that to buy broccoli in bulk and do that. But the thing is, my Sure Shot is red is green. Okay, but I have a red sugar shot that I use for welding that has acetone in it.

Oh, that's sweet switch.

I need to switch. switches to their re Phillip

is the switch. Well you have aerosolized acetone

it's really good for cleaning before you well,

um Yeah, I'm sure it is. But it's also kind of dangerous, right? You don't want to breathe I mean your slides acid.

It works really good at cleaning. Your welds gotta get that you know cosmoline off

good for cleaning baby bottles and pacifiers

and kill brain cells

you know actually works really well as because acetone is what you normally use for it some people still use brake clean for before you weld and I'm like, Man, you grabbed the wrong brake clean can and that's the end of you

know, it evaporates so fast though.

True, but if there's one little puddle Yeah, that cost me blue and you

Yeah, that yellow smoke. I had a history professor actually wants to describe what mustard gas does to a human body. And it's not pleasant that's for sure. There's a reason we banned that after World War One.

Thanks Kaiser Wilhelm.

So, so I need all the fun I don't have to have them labeled though. I do have them labeled and the bright clean one is stored away in a cabinet. Whereas acetone one just like you know hangs out by the welder

not booze

had don't drink. Don't drink or burn this, please. So we got LSD after touching this synthesizer

this tangent night.

Yeah. So do you think that actually happened? Or do you think he had a little bit of the cleaner? Well, okay,

let's put it this way. I think I'm not gonna say that it did happen. But if it were to happen, it would probably happen from touching a booklet synthesizer. That's, that's the closest thing you could get for it. Yeah, for sure.

And the article does mention. Back in the day, there were rumors, musicians would wet their fingers and touch a device coded and LSD to feel the device better.

You know, okay, I've never I've actually never even seen LSD let alone used it. But I've heard it had been talked about enough and how difficult it is to get that I doubt somebody would just like randomly coat things. It's kind of like the same thing with get

a sure shot and spray down. synthesizer liquid.

It's kind of like the same thing. We're like, everyone got so scared about there being drugs and kids Halloween candy and stuff. It's like, who would waste their money? Putting drugs we can do.

Most of the druggies I know he's gonna share man. I guess the question is, is did he start here in gotta defeat as soon as he started tripping? That's the that's the that's the test. That's your Yeah,

you're right. You're right. Yeah. Or Dark Side of the Moon just came on in his head. And it's just like, Well, man, there we go. Yeah, it's proof.

I like this quote right here. It's possible the LSD was conveniently placed there by musicians hoping to be inspired. As they created fresh sounds.

I could see that you're built, you're building these new modules. And on the bill of materials, instead of putting LSD it's just called out as inspiration. Apply. Apply inspiration to modules. You have an engineering drawing, apply inspiration here. All right, what else we got in the RFO?

Alright, so the next topic is our memo tell staff to stop working with China's tech giants. This is basically the whole stuff and who a witch is, you know, China's version of, I guess, like Google and Samsung, and Sony all rolled into one company. So basically arm pulled all their licensing from Hawaii. And basically, so if you have an ARM core processor, they can't make ARM core processors anymore, which basically run all their devices.

So I also heard that Google will no longer be supporting their devices for Android. Correct for Android operating systems. Yeah. And

another another one that happened was, this one has been kind of MIS represented, I guess, in the media. Because the SD card association is that SD card, SD Association, that brand, the branding of SD cards basically dropped who away from their trading group, which means they, like a lot of people thought that was they can't use SD cards anymore in their products. No, they can still use SD cards, but it just can't. Mark just can't put that nice label on it. Yes, it's like the USB association will still do. Yeah, they probably will actually like the SD, USB B port on your box that your like USB compatible, that like logo, you have to be part of the USB Association and pay them money and stuff like the

same thing. believe it's the same thing with the MIDI Association. If you want to use MIDI in your product and use their logo, you have to, you know, you have to sign up.

So what did they do? Like?

So the basically what it is, is the US secure is what's the actual department that says don't use them. Probably one of the three or four letter departments NSA, they said basically, the stop using Huawei, and you can't associate with them anymore. And so basically, if you have any us, you know, jurisdiction, you had to say, Okay, we can't work anymore. Some Beto embrace. We're not going to use the phones anymore. Okay, okay. Because reasons are, I don't know, man.

As with as with all this crap up on his nose, right.

I've been trying to keep up on all this tariff stuff and some of the decisions are just mind boggling.

Well, it's Steven, I got into this one day over text message. It's, it's totally a it's a ploy to try and get the two parties to the negotiating table. They don't really think these tariffs are going to do anything.

Sounds like they're doing things

Well, I don't know at this point is is like, I don't know, I read an article the other day even Trump's like advisor who suggested the tariffs or who's who's, you know, advising Trump on the whole trade thing was saying, you know, oh yeah, it's gonna be a problem for both sides. Both sides are gonna pay right after Trump said no, they're gonna be we're gonna make lots of money.

Did you ever hashtag sad?

Like all I know is that if I can't get my cheap PCB boards for my new guitar amplifier, I'm going to be very angry. Well,

yeah, well, actually, we've not been priced a park and I talked about it, they went from $2 to $2.50 sawn off thanks, Trump

can't blame him anymore.

All right, I think we should I think we should use that as a as a good moment to close out on this unless you guys have anything else to put in. No, I think I'm good. All right, Roz. You want to go ahead and close this it?

Let's do it. That was the macro fab engineering podcast. I was your guest Josh Rocher.

And we were your hosts Parker Dylan and Steven Greg.

Let everyone take it easy

Thank you. Yes, you our listener for downloading our show. If you have a cool idea, project or topic let Stephen and I know Tweet us at Mac Feb at Longhorn engineer or analog EMG or email us at podcasts@macro.com. Also check out our Slack channel and I think Josh is going to be in that slack channel. Now. If you're not subscribed to the podcast yet, click that subscribe button. That way you get the latest episode right when it releases and please review us wherever you listen, as it helps the show stay visible and helps new listeners find us