This week, Riley Hall of Fictiv joins the podcast to discuss how Fictiv connects engineers and designers to job and machining shops.
The US Mint Denver produces 30 million coins a day. Denes, the tooling department manager, discusses with us how production at this scale functions.
Stephen is on the hunt for the next step in his electrical engineering career and shares the shifts in the industry and what employers are looking for.
Figure 1: The “man in the middle” PCB for the Altera USB Blaster.
Figure 2: Stephen working on the Space Echo RE-201
Figure 3: New adapter plate for the Space Echo RE-201. Allows it to fit into a standard 19″ audio rack.
Parker is an Electrical Engineer with backgrounds in Embedded System Design and Digital Signal Processing. He got his start in 2005 by hacking Nintendo consoles into portable gaming units. The following year he designed and produced an Atari 2600 video mod to allow the Atari to display a crisp, RF fuzz free picture on newer TVs. Over a thousand Atari video mods where produced by Parker from 2006 to 2011 and the mod is still made by other enthusiasts in the Atari community.
In 2006, Parker enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin as a Petroleum Engineer. After realizing electronics was his passion he switched majors in 2007 to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Following his previous background in making the Atari 2600 video mod, Parker decided to take more board layout classes and circuit design classes. Other areas of study include robotics, microcontroller theory and design, FPGA development with VHDL and Verilog, and image and signal processing with DSPs. In 2010, Parker won a Ti sponsored Launchpad programming and design contest that was held by the IEEE CS chapter at the University. Parker graduated with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Spring of 2012.
In the Summer of 2012, Parker was hired on as an Electrical Engineer at Dynamic Perception to design and prototype new electronic products. Here, Parker learned about full product development cycles and honed his board layout skills. Seeing the difficulties in managing operations and FCC/CE compliance testing, Parker thought there had to be a better way for small electronic companies to get their product out in customer's hands.
Parker also runs the blog, longhornengineer.com, where he posts his personal projects, technical guides, and appnotes about board layout design and components.
Stephen Kraig began his electronics career by building musical oriented circuits in 2003. Stephen is an avid guitar player and, in his down time, manufactures audio electronics including guitar amplifiers, pedals, and pro audio gear. Stephen graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University.
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!
Hello, and welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. We're your host, Stephen Craig
and Parker Dohmen. Awesome, there we go. There we go. Ah, so this week I've been working on that same machine haven't worked on it in a while. So the same machine is the semi automatic inspection machine. It's putting together the upper carriage, basically the y axis for the machine and ran into an issue was that I was tapping with the tapping with the M five by point eight, which is the thread you know. Tapping in it was basically a combo drill. Tap that came with all the open beam stuff. Yeah. Broke.
Let me get broke inside.
Yeah, I broke inside the extrusion. Yeah. And it broke just the thread part off, like a quarter inch down into it. You asked me to get out. Oh, that sucks. Yeah, so I have a left hand bit. coming in soon. That's a 4.2 millimeters I think, which is the base is good. And drill it out.
That's the exact noise.
It knows. I'm probably going to use the head job to do that. Yeah, cuz I don't think and you were just drilling aluminum. Right? Yeah. Just aluminum 6061 or something like that. Yeah. 6061 aluminum. Now you've got you've got a big four standard drill press at your shop, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I actually probably use that drill and out. Because my drill press is actually the one at macro fab two are not tall enough for that piece of extrusion, though I can just stand it straight up and just plunge it out. Yeah, I got the full size guy. Wait, no. Does that. Go on back the zero drill press go and reverse.
Just turn the power cable backwards. Right. Work on? You know, honestly, I really haven't had a need for go.
I don't think those go. No, it won't go in reverse. We can try to flip them the belt. And to figure eight.
Yeah, as long as the belt doesn't rub on itself, destroy it while you're going. Yeah, with
it. Figure that out. If anything would just be the portable drill again. Yeah, but does your drill press at home go backwards? No. I have flipped the belt in figure eight. Don't make it go backwards. Okay. But it's a it's an inexpensive Tachi. So like, well, desktop one. Yeah, not like a bit. I think yours is a big Delta. Moving On Off topic to machining land. And then I built a this week, I built a man in the middle board for Alterra USB blaster. And basically you plug the alter USB blaster into it. And then you plug the tap Connect connector on the other side. So you can program boards. Okay, bol powering up the board over the tap Connect. That's convenient. Yeah, so it sends 3.3 volts down the tap Connect. And so when you're basically production, you only have one cable to worry about now, yeah, plug it in, and hit go on computer and bam, it all works.
That's that's really convenient. Actually, just last week, I was actually working with an st link version two, and it runs on 338. The documentation says that it can power from one of the pins, but it's not recommended. And I think it's not recommended because it can only source something like 10 milliamps. Yeah, so I had to have this, you know, I had to go from our bench with the power supply over to the board and then from the board to my computer with USB and is just it was just a mess. So having having a programmer that can spit out some juice is super convenient. Yeah. And
actually, I made a a repository on our macro fab GitHub account for fixtures like this. And so as I I'm going to design one for the MSP for 30. Programming, I'm going to design one for ISP, all this stuff where you can send power down a tag connect connector, and power boards with one. One guy. Cool. Yeah. So I'm going to go they're going to be all open source and stuff like that, so people can use them and that kind of stuff. It's one of those things where you think someone would have already designed something like this, but usually they just build like a breadboard hack thing. That's sort of like what I did. Yeah. Sounds kind of like what you do with St. Link. Yeah. But uh, yeah, so we'll see how that works when it comes in and we can have now yeah, cool, should be cool. And then the jagah destiny.
I don't know if I ever talked about that on the podcast. I think we've mentioned it before. But
yeah, I think we did camera weeks ago is that basically a fixture that Ken made of aluminum that can hold a 16 by 16 panel without it going through reflow and blah, blah, blah.
And we just we just got the prototype in four. Yeah,
we got the second prototype in you right second. Yeah. It's the first prototype that's milled out of aluminum not pieced together with extrusion. But I put together all the pieces look like they fit really well. I'm just waiting on a couple 256 Number 256. taps the comment from Master and so I can thread those a couple holes out and mount those guys in super tiny. Yeah, I actually ordered a couple of extra taps. He's like order the day I wrote that tap. Tap on the same.
never hurts to have more.
Yeah. And the cool thing is these aluminum pieces, I hadn't machined out at this, another startup called parts hyphen badger. And they're up in Wisconsin. And they do fairly inexpensive machining for, you know, makers and that kind of stuff. But they also did a Stevens phone ring. They'll they do anodising. And it was like $4 to do anodising. And I was like, Yeah, I'll do anodising for $4 I was expecting you to get machined aluminum bear aluminum back.
Well, they have a kind of a fairly unique system themselves where you can upload your design files direct line
vibrated to with both fail. Yeah, sorry.
Yeah, no. So so the parts badger you can you can upload a DX F, or DWG, I should say, I believe yes, directly, and then get quotes right on the spot. So it's less of having to draw engineering drawings and dimension everything, you can just kind of send them a 3d model. And they'll give you a quote on it. Yeah. And
you, you basically pick how many operations your device or your your object has. So like, an operations in machining terms is like, How many times do you need to flip the thing over two machine different sides on a three axis machine? And so like, most of the stuff we're doing is only one side, right? Is every all the punches are on one side and all the cutouts on one side? Or they got the six, six sided, and they will do contouring and all that kind of stuff, too. Yeah.
I'm sure that really jacked the price up. Yeah, I haven't looked though.
But it was fairly inexpensive. I think it was for a 16 by 16 piece of aluminum that was 316 thick. It was like $100 that anodising. That's really cheap. Yeah, I think the other quotes I was getting was like 700. So it was a 7x difference. And it was, you know, it wasn't like absolutely perfect. But everything was in the right tolerance. The holes were in the right spot. The cutouts in the right spot. And the finish was pretty good. I was very pleased. Yeah, yeah. Especially for the cost. Yep. For the cost. And then I started researching a couple of projects that we've had up on the board, if we can use this, the octavo chip, the OSD 3358. Chip that rang was talking about on the last podcast last podcast. Yeah. So I've been actually settled on a project yet to do it. Because me and Steven come from a like, low power embedded background. I do Siemens more analog. And so we don't really like when we design our projects, we kind of gear them towards low end microcontrollers. Yeah, or, or more analog stuff. And so having like that much horsepower, it's like, what can we do? To think about it? Yeah, it's hard for us to do because, you know, we write we usually write to bare metal, you write your registers. Yep. And so it's kind of like, oh, we can actually write a Perl slash python script to make this stuff work. So you don't actually have to worry about that kind of stuff.
Yeah, it's a different beast when you don't have to. When you have, we don't have the analytical capability yet, when you don't have to cut Yeah, you don't have to worry about that. You know, you could write a class into your your code and not have to worry about how much RAM it takes up.
Yep. Because you have, you know, 512 megabytes, megabytes. Yeah. Not not like, third 2k bits
are like what the macro, watch where you're squeezing, you're going to get down to the point where you're measuring clock cycles on the scope just to make sure everything's right Like, you don't have to worry about that stuff. No, you don't have to use single board computers. But yeah. Any any hints on what you're thinking about doing?
Ah, not yet. Okay. Um, I probably think by next week I'll have something. A good project.
reveal something cool. Yeah,
I hope. If not, it just be lame. I'll reveal it anyways.
Another computer.
Yeah, another computer, another in your pocket computer
for only 30 bucks. Yeah, actually, you
figure that you were talking earlier this week about? How like, the basically the price for all these like, development kits and computers that single, you know, fit on a single board. Yeah, they all talk about driving the price down. Yeah. And so the point where $5 gets your computer now? Yeah. You can't draw. You cannot? Well, maybe someone will surprise me. But you can try that. Someone got tomorrow back for dollar computer. I'm like, Ah, crap.
But okay. So I think I think the main thing is, when you look at it, the difference between $5 $15 $30 It really isn't much. So I see a lot of or have seen a lot of crowdsourcing things and open source projects and stuff where it's like, we're the first person to make a $7 widget computer. And it's like that, you know, that was really cool a couple years ago. Now, there's so many of them where it's like, give me features. Show me like what's super cool about your thing? Because to me the difference between $5 $10 $15 It's not a huge difference.
Yeah, we need a $5 widget. Yeah, that has a one gigahertz processor, a giga RAM, Wi Fi, a keyboard and a monitor.
For five bucks. $5.05 bucks.
There you go. Yeah, I
buy that. Yeah.
I buy that for $1 $5.
Ah, crazy. Yeah. Well, cool. This week, I've actually been working on the FX dev board a bit. I've been getting with the Crowd Supply guys to get things kind of set up and moving forward. So I got all my documentation to them. And they're doing a review right now.
It's probably the most well documented project I've ever gotten. Oh, yeah. It's like a whole tech doc about everything. No, like, we just need pictures.
I wanted to be thorough.
Oh, that's very good. Yeah.
So yeah, we still got still got to get the enclosures in the quotes. We got them done by a machine shop that I really liked here in Houston. I've worked with them in the past, and they're just awesome dudes. And I was a little bit scared because I had a budget for the enclosure. And I sent off my my, my, my drawings. I was like, gosh, I hope it comes in. And that price they gave me just shatters the budget in terms of being way cheaper than I thought it was gonna be. So so I'm excited about that. And got a couple little mods I want to do to it just to make it a little bit more fancy. Because now I have a little bit more money to play with.
Yeah, fill up blue budget out. Get back. Yeah, you
never get it back. That's the rule. Like the end of the quarter spend all the rest of your money.
And we actually we you actually did this last week, but we had Greg on you did a lot more experimentation with these new tubes. Yep. knows of the basically the dip style tubes that we've been, you know, raving about by Korg
Yeah, yeah, the cord new tubes. So so I've been getting acquainted with them and trying to figure out their inner workings. And, you know, there's, they're cool and they're, they have some some unique features. They are, they're fun. And I'm, I'm working on a project right now to make a, an all tube stereo Hi Fi amplifier with them. I'll be actually posting up some information on the GitHub soon about that. Got the schematic and everything done and got some concept drawings. The thing I found about the tubes is they just don't really have a lot of grunt. They're pretty weak.
So why are they weak? The
has a lot to do with the internal construction and the fact that their their filament is driven so lightly, it runs on point seven volts at 17 milliamps, which just doesn't, isn't really emitting a lot of electrons.
That's kind of like a BJT at that point. It is and
it also brings up some curious concepts on how to you supply point seven volts to it, because finding a point seven volt regulator is not really easy. Easy. Yeah, the solution that Korg has come up with is literally just an RC, just a resistor and and a big cap. Because the current that the things pull is is constant, or I mean fairly constant across the lifespan,
I wonder if you could use like a point seven volt reference,
you know, I had thought of actually using two diodes in series with a transistor such that such that it would drop down to point seven volts, but I'm not sure what I'm going to go with yet. Yeah. Regardless the what I was in doing my calculation, so I'm using an El 34 power tube. And with the screen voltage and the plate voltage, I'm going for to drive up to maximum output, it's about a 20 volt peak to peak signal. what's convenient is one of these tubes, which has two sections in it, the gain of each section will get me right to 20 volts peak to peak with a standard audio input of point four volts. That's cool. So it stripped down the design. And actually what we were talking about the other week with that high impedance constant current source. I don't even need to use it anymore. I can just use a resistor. So I was gonna get all fancy with it. And I was like, I don't really need to do
that. And that was what the those fancy fats to. Yeah, depletion mode fat depletion mode, right? Yeah. That was two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So yeah, you'll be seeing more on that.
Yeah, I'm actually kind of looking forward to finally listen to this thing. Yeah. We we've been using their their dev board that we've got from them to listen through basically some headphones, they do sound good. Yeah. And they can pump out some volume, just by themselves
just a little secret. They're kind of cheating on that they have an op amp driver right on the output. So the tubes aren't driving the headphones directly. Regardless, soon, we will have an amp and I'm actually at the moment building some speakers to go along with
it. Ah, those speakers some like parts Express.
I believe that's where the kids come here. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're called try tricks. Okay. Try tricks, their transmission line speakers. fairly, fairly budget, but they have good reviews. So that comes out. So also, this week been working on getting back on the SSPs, we kind of had a bout of lots of customer stuff. That took me away from the SSPs. But I'm getting back on that now. Because we want to get moving forward. Because Parker got his front panel moving forward. And I'm all sitting here like, oh, I need to get
stuff done. Yeah, the the front panel test board should be done next week. Yeah. And that's gonna be excited to actually program up I've actually been working a little bit on the software side. So that when it comes in, I just load it up. And hopefully everything works. The first try, which it never does never use the yet the flip some bits somewhere and you know, you miss some register, you have to hit. Right. But yeah. But yeah, so what do you been working on for that?
Well, the the main energy on cube that we talked about a handful of podcasts ago, the PCB that goes along with the energy on cube, which is our main capacitor stack that includes all the regulating power supplies and the output op amps. Yep. So I've got the majority of the schematic done for that. I'm still figuring out a few small details about it. But hopefully, copper will be going down tomorrow.
Yeah. And you're working on the simulation for it to this week.
Yeah. So I had this, I got kind of analog II on it and started just having fun by putting a bunch of op amps in and calculating all my gains and doing all kinds of stuff. And I had done that a few weeks ago. And I revisited the project this week, looked at it and realize that I just made a huge stupid mistake, or I shouldn't say stupid, and it worked. So it's not mistake. No, yeah, no, it totally worked. But I realized that I could take out two or three, I can't remember how many was full op amp circuits out out and compress it all down into one. And I was like, Oh, why didn't I do that from the get go?
Does it work just as well? Yes. Okay. Yeah. It's not like you lost any fidelity or anything like that. Actually, they I mean,
I think it'll work better because it uses fewer parts. So we'll have fewer offset few less drift, less issues with tolerance. And what's cool is now the analog drive circuit, I think I it has like five, six resist or something like that. And only two different values in there so we can we can better control our gains. And I also I moved some of the game around because previously I had the the output op amp set up as just buffers. Now they're, they have gain on them. Neat. I knew that was gonna creep in
That's from our last podcast. Yeah. Ah, cool. And then we we start working on Josh's SpaceX. Oh, yeah. We, I think it was on Wednesday we basically flipped it over, took it apart. started designing stuff buying caps, right. Yeah. Yeah.
But a handful of caps found some interesting issues. It was.
And we're getting a flood warning here.
It is absolutely pouring or has been for the past couple days. Yeah. Houston's been hammered in the last two months. Two months. Yeah. On the on the SpaceX, we found a an interesting issue. When it was upright, the device would not turn on. We flip it upside down. It does turn on. Then we flip it right side up again. And it turns on again. Yeah. So it seems kind of conditional. The device I think it's uh, I think the serial number goes back to 1977. So we're gonna do the whole re solder everything
Yeah, suck all the solder out, put new solder and Yeah, put some nice Kester 6040 big thick led solder. Yeah, with rosin flux. And we're gonna recap the whole shebang. Yep.
Yeah, we got I got a list of every electrolytic in there and,
and speaking those caps Yeah. So you got some Nikki cons? Yep. Which are really good. But you got audio grade ones, right.
I decided to eat you know, eat the crap that they sell just because this is Josh's a buddy of mine. And this is like audio gear. I decided to go for the whole audio grade capacitor. The so NICHICON has they said Go ahead. Okay, go ahead, man. Good. Michigan their their audio grade capacitors. It comes wrapped in gold. Yeah, gold foil gold foil. Well, it's it's kind of like, I don't know. It's kind of like copper yellow color. But it has that whole Mystique look to it.
as well. It's a really dark black silk screening on it. Yeah. Well,
I mean, it just I mean, it looks like it sounds good. Right. In script written on the side, it says fine gold.
Yeah, it looks like someone drew it out with a with a a fine inkwell pin. They signed each one individually by the maker of that cap.
Oh, my gosh. And I went to the website, and there's a description up there, it's that this is a direct quote. It is certainly the best choice on electrolytic capacitors for top end devices.
Yeah, like the space
audio file crap. Yeah,
um, it's, I think, I think we could just put whatever caps in there. But, you know, these are great. caps are only slightly more expensive. So what are you gonna do?
Well, okay, and let me let me defend something here. So I was buying all these from Mouser. When I've go for electrolytic caps, and I'm looking for their application, whatever they do in the circuit. For most of these, they're just power filter caps. I went and filtered everything down by the size by the blah, blah, blah, that everything and made sure the ripple current and their ESR was low, because that actually makes a difference in this kind of circuit. Correct. And those audio grade capacitors were what popped up. Yeah. So it's like, Okay, fine. We'll get those. It's kind of funny.
Very low. ESR verlo. ripple current? Yeah, yeah. Actually, the caps I really like and since we're going off the whole, like, what it looks like. The Nikica is Nikki on cap there, UB W series, okay, because they're baby blue with like an eggshell finish on it. I like that. I pulled them out of the package. I was using them for my prop fan. Board designer caps. They had those. And I like pulled them out. I'm like, ooh, it's all like, it doesn't feel like electronics. At that point. It's like a really nice matte finish on them. Oh, no, I thought it was interesting that they would actually coat their caps. And as a I guess it's like a heat shrink kind of that plastic. Yeah, that's actually they chose something else besides the typical shiny plastic that
you were in the baby blue ones have have a texture to them.
Yeah. So yeah, it's got us a interesting, matte texture. Yeah, you actually feel it? Yeah.
So if you really want to check out something cool. And have some fun, go check up Mundorf caps. That's m u n d o r f. Just go check out their website. It's it's fun for an engineer to see what they have to offer and their calves. Talk about the highest end that comes with the highest end pros
was that website you were talking about? What it was comparing caps and how they sound? Oh, I
found that just through a Google search. I don't remember what the actual site what
the pool through your your search history. Yeah. Hopefully I don't find anything weird. Anyways. Yeah, different categories this person was listening to all these different caps. Yeah. And he had different qualities for these cap, right? And I think one was like, Well, okay,
and 90% of these qualities are things that are entirely subjective and cannot be quantified by any specific means. It's just a
guy sitting here in his living room basically. Yes, caps. Yeah. I can't remember the one that stuck out to me. It was the was it spatial definition spatial definition?
Was forehead
and spread? Yeah. And there was one other one I can't remember. But I just, I will find the link and post it in the show notes. But it was just ridiculous. Like, it's like, you can't measure any of these things?
No, no, you can't. And and and so one thing that that a lot of people I think get wrong is it's not necessarily, if you do hear something with these capacitors, most of the time, it's not something that is actually the capacitor is not doing it. The capacitor is affecting other things in the circuit, that they themselves are doing it. Yes, that's like it. If you take a cap with a really low ESR, and replace it with a cap with a really high ESR. I'm talking like, magnitudes of of orders above that, yes, you will notice a difference, you will absolutely notice a difference. But that's not necessarily the cap physically changing the sound. That's the cap screwing up the rest of the circuit.
I'd really like it these, these peep these these audio five people. Yeah, they would, they could do this objective stuff. But then actually just have the audio signal in overlaid with the audio signal out and see how it actually affects it on a waveform standpoint. Seems like oh, yeah, that cat does this to the waveform. So you actually have measurements?
Yes. Probably have to have more than that, like transient response. Yes. And things like that. But yes, yes. And then I'm sure there's plenty of people who have done things of that for it.
Yeah. So the more quiet the best thing about that site is he has these really fancy graphs that don't have units. And they have like a nice grid and stuff. And it's just like a scatterplot of all these points, and
it shows it shows some caps are higher on the graph, and some are lower.
It's like a it's like, on one axis it says good, bad. But then the other ranges, like doesn't have anything.
It's fun to just go and cruise these websites. Yeah.
Yeah. So the RFO section, yep. Crap, but five opinions when we got to this week. Cool. Um, technically, we had three because we were talking about those caps, but you know, whatever it is what it is a Seuss. I think this article is actually recent today. They came out with this really cool robot. At least I think it's cool. Called the Zenvo.
That Z and Bo vn
bows and bow. And it looks like if you took a tablet and stuck it to a vacuum cleaner. It's basically a ball. That's kind of like a vacuum cleaner. Chips. It's a little oblong a little bit. Yeah. And it's got a little tiny stick with a tablet that it's apparently that's its face. Okay, and you can touch it and
is it like like a BB eight kind of thing?
A little bit. Okay. It reminds me a lot of those. FaceTime robots. That aren't segues. Oh, yeah, yeah. monzi lot of that. The cool thing is, this is supposed to be like a personal assistant style robots, where it follows you around the house, and allows you to control your house through the robot through voice commands touching the screen. Your calls come through it and so you just talk to the robot when you're talking to someone, which is a little weird, but yeah, that's you know, I think with enough time, you would get over that. Sure. Apparently, you can show emotion. So it's kind of like one of those robotic pets
when you show emotion or it shows you it shows emotions. Oh, okay.
Yeah. So it like those robotic like dogs and stuff that you can buy it at at Toys R Us. Yeah. I think the coolest thing about this was the price tag. It was only it's only $600. Hmm. Which is kind of expensive. When you Think about it, but it's not really because everyone carries $600 devices in their pocket every day. Yeah. And that's what this looks like. I am actually surprised I hit that price point. The fact that it's got a huge tablet for face plus all this mechanical stuff and it's in its body. Yeah. So apparently it's supposed to entertain kids and that kind of stuff too. Okay, so if you want your kids leave you alone just go robot play with the kids
and again kids Zenvo entertain kids was waiting for I don't know what he's gonna do. I really wish you could see the hand motions. I just think Robbie the Robot. Yeah, my or not Robbie. What's it what's the one from Lost in Space? Like way back? You know, danger Will Robinson danger. That's not Robbie. No, it's not. But it flail its arms around it had like the dryer tube arm things you know? I don't know. I'm getting off track.
Remember, Josh? Oh, Josh is outside. Nevermind.
He would probably know that he would probably know what will convene with Johnny Five. Oh, Johnny Five is from short circuit. Yeah, it's a different movie though. Yeah, yeah. No, no.
I don't I've actually never seen that movie.
Lawson space was a was a television show. Way back and
haven't seen that. not that old. Yeah, but it's classic.
Come on danger. Will Robinson ad. I
got to put that on my my. Yeah, it's on the books must watch.
Maybe? Maybe. Josh. The robot from Lost in Space. Do you remember the name of that robot? He's cringing. You know, danger. Will Robinson. I've not said that. Three times. Name is. Okay. We don't know. No, we don't know. We're trying to figure when you see
the one that sets us right. He's actually gonna He's gonna Google it right now. This is super important. Yeah. Positive positive.
Well, I'm gonna pull that $600 device out of my pocket that Parker I can also Google it.
Who will win the giant tablet like computer on the recording equipment? Or the $600 computer phone? Let's even Susan all our listeners love this.
Be nice. Man. I thought I had a That's a lame name is terrible. Yeah. Okay. I thought it had I thought it had a human name that they gave to it. Hmm. Okay, we need to find a GIF of it. flailing its arms around.
Yeah, we'll find one or make one. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we could do that. Alright, and the second one is redo. Shaq is returning Ooh. The guy new CEO earlier last month since it's the first. So it was in May they got a new CEO. Yeah. And his name is Dean Rogers. Cool. Yeah, guy worked at Target and some other places that don't really matter. So apparently, they had I was really interested in seeing how many stores they actually closed this last year and a half over 2000 stores. Yeah. So they have a little bit over 2000 A little under 2000 left things like 1000 800,700 and something like that. But they're refocusing all the stores for being for makers and that kind of stuff and bringing back computer electronics and that kind of sounds like the trying to make miniature micro centers, huh, because micro center we actually have one here in Houston. It's awesome. It's that's probably one of my favorite stores, brick, brick and mortar stores that still
exists. It's kind of it's kind of like a smaller version of fries. Yeah. And but they
have more variety of things. Yeah, or more variety of electronic things right? Whereas Fry's Electronics has, like has a store is filled with like, beds and appliances. Yeah, kind of weird. And they have a bunch of random toys all over the place. That's the coolest part about Fry's Electronics. Yeah, it's all the random like cheap Chinese toys you can buy. You've never seen before. Yeah, I've never seen like mercy stuff.
I actually have a I got really lucky with the Radio Shack closure. So When RadioShack was closing, my buddy and I, we went to the nearest Radio Shack to us walked in there and was like, how much can we give you for all of your electronics? Everything, everything, everything and you know the you know, they had those pullout drawers and it was full. Absolutely everything. The lady behind the counter goes I don't know why don't you give me 25 bucks 25 bucks and walked out of the store with three black trash bags filled with electronic parts.
I wish you should ask that if you can buy the drawers. Oh, that
would have been cool. Well okay, so on top of that the counter Yeah, that they the display counter and the counter that they have for where they check you out. We asked how much those were and we bought those two
just bought the whole store for 25 bucks 25
bucks I think I can't remember we bought we bought all the all the counters for like 150 and then and still to this day. All of the drawers in those counters are just filled with Radio Shack bags. And if I need a switch or if I need an LED or something like that I and I don't have it in my stock of parts that I already have. I just go digging through the doors and drawers and it's there. It's there. Yeah, that's all that was a pretty good. So I like that part of Radio Shack.
This. Yeah, so they're really gearing their their stores. Yeah. And there's some suggestions on like the Hackaday article about it and what they should do? Well, I personally would like to see, it's kind of like a will will like when you're in college and you had a we'll call of like desk where you can request parts and stuff. I'd like to see that kind of setup where you can order parts on their website and then go pick it up. And so you skip the shipping part from like all the distributors. But instead of doing like them carrying like bazillion different kinds of one kg SMD resistors they carry one brand kind of like we do at macro fab for our house parts. Yeah, we have an MF Oh 805 10k resistor right? There Panasonic's. So they can use whatever brand is but you just go and go a, I need a 10k Oh, 805 a stripper 10 or whatever I want. So you buy like a stripper 10. And you can just order it on the radio shack website. And then you show up the store. And it's sitting there on the counter ready for you to pick up. That's what I want is then the carry Jelly Bean resistors caps, some dev boards, maybe some microcontroller parts, basically a stripped down version of a distributor, but they only carry one brand of everything. Yeah, that would be nice to see. So in case you need ex parte you can go down the store and get it
you know what that actually reminds me of? You probably had a really similar experience, but the parts counter in your engineering lab at college, we just walked up and said I need these resistors in these caps, and they just gonna throw a match. Yeah.
They just like, like, the pole pole mount either. Like if you need like, I need a two and three, nine or four. Yeah. And they're like, they pull the bin out and go find it. This is a bin full of jelly bean transistors. Or
we used to go get resistors for our labs and and the legs. Oh, no, we're meant to complete hell. Yeah, because they had been used by 500. Kids know engineers
get like the really big wire around once. And you're like, how long as this cat pin in here? Or this resistor? It's like, right. Ah, since the 70s.
But here's the thing your professors asking you to make precision circuits within?
Yeah, with this old crappy like, plus minus 20%. On the resistance. Yeah. Well, okay,
so you know, Radio Shack.
When you when you were back, when you're in college, that your breadboards that you got from the world call desk actually work?
Oh, God. It was there was many strips within the breadboard that did not work.
Like you would put it in the your, your wire jumper in and feels like he went in, right? Yeah, that's because the plastic had a close fit on it. Whereas the metal underneath was so bent out of shape. Yeah. And so you'd like you'd get a nice waveform, you know, for your analog circuit. And then you go to UTA because the TAs got check it off, and you turn around and there's no way for. Like, I didn't touch anything it was working. And the TAs like zero.
Actually, you know, it's interesting, I had a breadboard once in one of my labs. That was such garbage that I physically couldn't make the circuit I was required to make on it. Because the parasitics were so high that it swamped out what the circuit was actually saying. supposed to do? I literally had to go get a whole brand new breadboard and restart the whole.
Well I learned my junior year I went and bought I went to Fry's Electronics. We didn't have a micro center in Austin. And I went to Fry's and bought a breadboard. And that's the last bird board ever. I actually still had that breadboard. Yep. I did everything on it. And after that, you build you build something and it worked.
It wasn't it wasn't hammered upon by 1000s of other students. Yes.
I betcha that breadboard I'll use my first two years is still there at that school.
still rocking and rolling, barely still causing students hours and hours and hours of grief. Oh, yeah.
Oh, we had bad BNC connectors first scopes to Oh man. Terrible. Yeah, cuz you have no idea what's going on? Yeah. And you think it's your circuit? No, it's the cable. Yeah, you always check your cables with a multimeter first Oh,
yeah, we had at the back of our lab, we had an RLC tester. It was actually a pretty nice one. It was like an Agilent or something like that. But we had a lab where we were doing tank circuits. RLC kind of tank circuits. And nobodies was working. Nobody could get anything working. And eventually, we found out that the actual connection box to the RLC tester. That was bad. So everyone was measuring wrong caps and wrong. inductors that was it. That was a lab that was supposed to be like two hours and ended up being like six. Man fun times. Yeah.
School labs. I'm so glad we have decent equipment now. Yeah. All our equipment works. I did find that our used frequency generator and macro fab does have it's not perfect, and needs to be calibrated. Yeah, I think we have to calibrate it, though. It's like does our own wind scope, which is not a very good scope, either. It's perfect for us. But it's not like highly Rec. It's not even a regal scope. You don't We don't know how close that is. You bring in one of your Do you have anything calibrated at your shop?
I have a DC voltage standard. That goes zero to 10 volts down to 20 bits. Who? And it last i i tested it in October. And one or two of the bits was out of spec.
Hmm. I wonder if we can see how close the open is. I think oh, it only goes on the two digits on that. Yeah. No, I can do three sig figs and millivolts. Yeah, I can't. Well,
my voltage standard was about 50. micro volts out. So I don't even think our scope can measure 50 micro volts.
No, I don't think you can. Yeah, let's give it a shot. See how close that oh, and I was hoping you would have a calibrated frequency generator.
I have a really killer HP synthesizer. And that guy is killer. Let's bring that in. That thing is is Yeah. Good. I'll bring it into
work. Yeah. And we'll we'll compare it to our $80 80s era frequency generator
that we got. We purchased that and that's the exact same one. I have a munch Ah, yeah.
It works really well. It's just that when you plug it into scope you only you're like, point oh, one you know hertz off.
Yeah, and it's it's sine wave is a little sharp at the peak. Yeah,
it needs to be calibrated. It has. We're gonna recap it with some audio great caps made by Nicky con and the gold. It'll sound amazing. sound amazing.
Even put a frequency generator into an amp. No, it sounds terrible.
It says one harmonic one harmonic.
It does not sound good. I wouldn't imagine so. Yeah. But with those caps, huh?
Yeah. Nice. Golden sound fine. Gold, fine gold sound in scripts. Do you have anything else to add?
No, I think that was we went way off on a tangent there. But yeah, well, but that's good.
Yeah, it was pretty fun. Um, we're looking at getting a another guest at the end of this month. Yep. I think that's going to probably wrap up. The guests guests for this month. We'll have two guests this month. And I had no idea where I was going with that.
So we're having a guest at
the end of the end of this month. So it'll be episode 18 night so episode 20. We'll have a guest right Sure, yes, that sounds right. Or 21 Look forward whatever. Yeah, in the future. Hmm. Well, this has been the macro engineering podcast. We have been your hosts, Parker, Dolman and Steven, Greg. CATCH ON THAT sound guys. Take it easy
The US Mint Denver produces 30 million coins a day. Denes, the tooling department manager, discusses with us how production at this scale functions.
Stephen is on the hunt for the next step in his electrical engineering career and shares the shifts in the industry and what employers are looking for.
This week, Riley Hall of Fictiv joins the podcast to discuss how Fictiv connects engineers and designers to job and machining shops.