Cloud of Disks

Parker Dillmann
Welcome to circuit break from MacroFab, a weekly show about all things engineering, DIY projects, manufacturing, industry news, and design derbies, where your hosts, electrical engineers, Parker Dillmann. And Stephen Kraig. This is episode 417. Circuit breaker from Macrofab. So, Stephen, do you know what a design derby is?

Stephen Kraig
No, Parker. Let me know what a design derby is.

Parker Dillmann
That's what we're gonna call contests on this podcast now.

Stephen Kraig
So we have a contest coming up.

Parker Dillmann
We do have a contest. We haven't done a contest since, I checked, 2019, where we did the useless machine.

Stephen Kraig
That was really, really fun. I I enjoyed it, and it just that seems like yesterday. I'm actually surprised that it's been that long since we've done one.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. It's been almost 5 years.

Stephen Kraig
I think COVID kinda made it a little difficult to do something like that.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. That and it just that was around the time where you moved up to Denver and stuff. So kinda collaborating on stuff like that was really hard to do as well. Sure. But yeah.

Parker Dillmann
So we have a new contest. The topic or not topic, I guess the theme is food, food devices. I'm really excited.

Stephen Kraig
So so how are we defining food devices, Parker?

Parker Dillmann
So it's gonna be basically any electronic device that people design a project or anything that just has food related to it. So some examples I came up with, it's like cooking automation, barbecue controllers, automatic hydroponics, or herb gardens. Is it herb or herb?

Stephen Kraig
It's it's herb. K.

Parker Dillmann
That's what I thought.

Stephen Kraig
I there's actually there's actually a guy totally randomly that I'm working with right now. A a, a vendor I'm working with where the salesperson's name is Herb, and I have to I, like, I have to pause and, like, make myself say Herb every time I talk to this guy. It's actually kinda hard.

Parker Dillmann
So, yeah, food food related, basically, the entries you're gonna have to enter on our discourse form.macafab.com. There's gonna be a link in the show notes where you can just click, and it'll show you where to enter. But we also have prizes. That's, like, the only reason to enter these things. Right?

Stephen Kraig
Well and and and the fun of doing it. Sure. And the prizes are better than just bragging rights.

Parker Dillmann
Exactly. So we have over $5,000 in cash prizes to split up over the winners. We have a themed trophy that is not designed yet. Gotta do that part.

Stephen Kraig
As per usual, we'll get close to you and be like, oh my god. We gotta do something.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. And we're gonna give out trophies to all the winners this time. Whereas last time, the, the first contest was blinking the LED, and we didn't give away any trophies. And in the useless machine, we gave away useless it was a useless clock that told the weather on Mars. Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
It's it was awesome. It was all custom machined and and circuits by by Parker. It was great.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. I remember you machined the aluminum Yep. And then I spent, like, 3 afternoons polishing it to a mirror finish. I'm hoping that it's on that person's desk still super polished and shiny.

Stephen Kraig
And telling the weather on Mars.

Parker Dillmann
And telling the weather on Mars. I don't know if it still works or not because I don't know if that API endpoint still is acting It

Stephen Kraig
might not even exist. Right?

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Because it was from, like, NASA, and who knows if that's still working? Who knows if NASA's still around?

Stephen Kraig
I could tell you from experience, NASA tends to keep things around, but you never know. It could just be could be gone.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. So we're gonna have 3 winners picked by judges, and the judges are to be announced in the future. First place is you get $2,000. 2nd place is going a 1,000. 3rd place is 500.

Parker Dillmann
And then we're gonna do, like, the circuit break podcast favorite where Steven and I will pick a favorite on the podcast, and that's $2,000 cash prize. And all 4 of those winners will also get themed trophies and then free prototyping from Macrofab. I don't know exactly what that dollar amount is yet for the free prototyping. Probably about $1,000 just like that yet.

Stephen Kraig
So on top of cash, you also get some prototyping?

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Also get prototyping through Macrofab.

Stephen Kraig
Very cool.

Parker Dillmann
Yep. So it's gonna be electronic projects that are just food related or adjacent. It doesn't have to be food. That'd be kinda weird. We don't want people to be eating electronics.

Parker Dillmann
Please don't eat electronics. Well, like you said

Stephen Kraig
in your example, something like hydroponics for herb gardens, like, it's it's related. It's adjacent.

Parker Dillmann
It's adjacent. Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
So how do you enter your project?

Parker Dillmann
So you go and sign up for our discourse, forum.maccrowd.com. There is a category for contest. There's a contest category, and you will just post in there with your project. There's also a post that's, like, stickered in there as well. That's the entire challenge details and rules and all that good stuff.

Stephen Kraig
Right. So go there if you wanna know all the extra little details.

Parker Dillmann
Yes. And we're gonna run this contest up till March 31st 2024. And I guess

Stephen Kraig
so it actually technically starts today, but this won't be the day that the podcast actually releases. So February 6th through March 31, 2024.

Parker Dillmann
So, yeah, I'm really looking forward to, seeing what people come up with. Steven and I have been, like, trying to do another contest for, I think, past 2 years, and we just kinda got stuck in a rut of not thinking of, like, topic ideas. And then one night, Steve and I were just playing video games, and we came up and, like, we were really drunk. I came up with, like, 10 ideas.

Stephen Kraig
So Actually, I think if I remember right, we were supposed to do something else.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. We were no. You're right. Actually, you're right. We were supposed to record a podcast episode, like, get ahead.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. And we ended up saying screw that. And we got really drunk.

Stephen Kraig
Let's just go play a game and talk about contest stuff. But, hey, we came up with a whole bunch of stuff and this is one of those ideas.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. So our plan is to have 4 contests this year. So the next one's gonna be, like, April. April 1st will be, like, the next big contest will come out. Oh, and I will have to thank, mouse Mouser is sponsoring the prizes this year.

Parker Dillmann
So thank you, Mouser.

Stephen Kraig
Thank you.

Parker Dillmann
Alright. So with that out of the way, the oh, yeah. So go to everyone out there, go to form.macfab.com. Pause the episode. Make sure to come back.

Parker Dillmann
Go over there in these comments. That's our new community. We have 80 people already moved over to our our form. It's quite a nice place. Everyone's really nice.

Parker Dillmann
People are sharing their projects, and, I really like when people find cool components and stuff and share it.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. There's some great conversations going on, and it's been really fun to be a part of so far. So, yeah, come join up. We had 800 or so people in the Slack channel before, So let's build those numbers back up over on the, Discourse.

Parker Dillmann
Okay. Topic for this episode, the war on floppy disks.

Stephen Kraig
I love this title.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. It's a really good title. So how do you pronounce that? Ars Technica?

Stephen Kraig
Or maybe just a r s Technica.

Parker Dillmann
Has a article about, well, the war on floppy disks. Japan, government accepts it's no longer the nineties, stops requiring floppy disks. The government amends 34 ordinances to no longer require diskettes. What's really interesting is they were requiring certain government agencies to use CD. Like, they specify what the media that they would store information on, which is kinda interesting to think about.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Apparently, there's a bit of the government required multiple formats, including floppy disks, CDs, and mini disks. Still requiring

Parker Dillmann
those Still requiring me. For Sony still getting kickbacks on mini disks?

Stephen Kraig
You never know. Maybe Sony is just manufacturing purely for the Japanese government. Could be. Just to be able to store this.

Parker Dillmann
But that's interesting that they required all these different formats to, you know, store whatever information. What is interesting though is the it's like the industries are quarrying energy and weapons manufacturing. Like, can you imagine having to store, let's say, a modern weapons system platform, like a a Javelin, right, which has, like, its own computer inside of it. It has to store all that information on floppy disks.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Yeah. It's gotta be nuts. I I'm seeing also in this article, they're they're saying things like alcohol business, mining, and aircraft regulation. Like, that's actually like you're saying, it's difficult to pair all your information down to be able to store on physical media like this.

Parker Dillmann
Well, it wouldn't just be physical me like, Bernie, the c CD ROM CDs are at least, like, 700 megabytes, which wouldn't be terrible, but a floppy disk is

Stephen Kraig
One meg. Right?

Parker Dillmann
Yes. 1.44 meg. It's about a meg.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
That's how you like format and all that good stuff. Right. So you would have to have basically software that would split everything down. I I'm just imagining, like, giant banks of floppy disks in some of these back rooms in Japan

Stephen Kraig
Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
Kinda like backing up all this data. I wonder if there's you know, how AWS here in the states where you can just, like, rent servers and stuff, but you rent basically CPU time. I wonder if over in Japan, some of these industries, you can you rent, like, floppy disk space. And so if you'd like like a network drive that you know if you, like, drop a file in there, it goes on a floppy disk somewhere. You don't know where it's at, but it goes on there somewhere.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Honestly, the way they're describing it makes it seem that way.

Parker Dillmann
The cloud of discs.

Stephen Kraig
You know, if if anything that I've learned from the last year of having to read lots of government documents, Things we all know the government moves slow. They move slower than you think they even, you think they move. Things are just at a snail's pace. And, of course, I'm talking about the US government, but, I wouldn't be surprised if that's just a blanket statement for most governments. In fact, it's funny.

Stephen Kraig
I was working on a project the other day where I had to look up a military specification for a particular test. I don't remember what it was. It was probably like thermal cycling or something like that. And it was referencing a document that literally the last revision was 1969. And so I was like, oh, usually when I find something like that I'm like, oh, okay.

Stephen Kraig
Well, there's a few more revisions of it. I just probably got the first rev. Nope. That was the document. That's still the test.

Stephen Kraig
Like, the test has not changed since 1969, and I guess you could say like, okay, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But it's like, wow, okay. And it was it looked like one of those documents that's been photocopied 4,000 times, you know, and you could barely read anything, but still, that's what the government said. If you wanna test this part, go to this 1969 mill doc and, and there you go. So so I I'm actually at first when I read this article, I was a little surprised because I was like, wow.

Stephen Kraig
And then I I thought back to things like that. I was like, no. No. That that totally makes sense. I do wonder though, with sunsetting the use of physical media, do they have what it takes in place to replace this?

Stephen Kraig
Because I'm sure they have tons of processes on how to handle all of this. Because it it is difficult to handle physical media in mass quantity like that. I'm wondering how much it's going to be, a a little bit of a nightmare of, of getting everything switched over to digital media.

Parker Dillmann
No. I bet you everything was in digital already. It's just it required also these formats.

Stephen Kraig
Well, no. I mean, obviously, it it it switched or not switched. They required the submission of floppy disks for particular government functions. Right? Now you have to build the infrastructure to be able to accept that in some other way.

Stephen Kraig
I'm wondering if that's like a flip the switch kind of thing or if they've been preparing for this for, like, years on end.

Parker Dillmann
I don't know. I'm kinda worried because a lot of the floppy disks that you can buy now are from Japan still because their their government, you know, mandated that they would you that certain industries had to have it as their backups had to be on this media, basically. Yeah. But with that being gone, how am I gonna take my hipster photos with my Sony FD 5?

Stephen Kraig
I mean, your your floppies are now a ticking time bomb. They will eventually die and you can no longer take your hipster photos. That's true. How many megapixels? That thing was, like, 2.

Stephen Kraig
Right?

Parker Dillmann
No. That's that's way over. Oh, really? If I recall, it's like 0.3.

Stephen Kraig
Okay. Parker was at my house last year at a party that I was having. He was snapping pictures with that. We're planning on on having that same party this year again because it's an annual thing now. And so you need to bring that thing back.

Parker Dillmann
Oh, yeah. It took really cool photos of that event. It basically looked like we were all from, like it it whenever you take photos of that camera, it always makes it look like it's 1998.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. It's just auto 1998.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. But the thing is when you look at, like, a camera like, let's say you use your phone, and then you put a filter on it that kinda, like, pixelizes it and makes it look old. It still looks like a like a modern photo.

Stephen Kraig
That's been

Parker Dillmann
filterized. Altered or filtered. It doesn't have the crappy plastic lenses and the terrible compression. Like, it's missing something. So I I I

Stephen Kraig
So now you you're starting to sound like the cork sniffing that I do with audio and and whatnot.

Parker Dillmann
It's a little bit I mean, I do have vinyl records and stuff, so I like listening to albums that way.

Stephen Kraig
Oh, no. I'm just saying in terms of how you're describing, like, that it has to be, like, the right tech for it to be the bad thing that you're looking for.

Parker Dillmann
Well, not not exactly though because one of my favorite lenses on my I have a Sony mirrorless camera. Yo. It's a modern camera. It shoots, like, 24 megapixel or something stupid like that. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
Ridiculous, you know, resolution for the sensor, the pixel density on the sensors. But the my favorite lens is it's a lens. It's just a body cap. So, like, if you don't have a lens on your on the camera body, you just put a cap over it. Where I drilled a hole and put a lens in it from a disposable camera Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
And, like, hot glued it in. Yeah. That is my favorite lens. Because it

Stephen Kraig
it just works that good?

Parker Dillmann
It looks like a it it does look like a more modern photo because it does have, like, higher resolution than, like, a crappy 35 millimeter disposable camera would have.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
But it actually uses that lens. And so it it doesn't it has it's physics. It's something about the physics of it that is better than a digitally applied filter to the image.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Oh, for sure.

Parker Dillmann
That you can just tell when you look at it. Yeah. It's the same thing with audio amps and listen to records and all that. So there's something about it that you can't describe, and no matter how you can replicate it in a filter, you still can't perfectly replicate it for some reason.

Stephen Kraig
You know, kind of along this same lines, I kind of got into a little bit of I don't I don't know how to say this without being crass, but a little bit of a pissing match on a forum the other day because I was arguing with people that for the most part, the construction of capacitors doesn't matter, and, like, the actual dielectric of capacitors doesn't matter. And and most of the people were arguing about the difference in qualities between like polystyrene and polyester and polypropylene and basically film caps with plastic on the inside. And I basically came in and was like, guys, this is kind of dumb. Like, you can you can make an argument that there's a difference between a a poly cap and a ceramic cap because it's something that's, like there's a voltage coefficient that actually is easily measurable on something like that. And the conclusion after days of multiple people arguing about this is, for your project, 2 things matter, the cost and the second thing is if you're like into the same world that I'm into, the color of the cap.

Stephen Kraig
So pick whichever ones look the way you want them to and cost what is in your budget. And everyone's like, yeah, sure. Great. That works.

Parker Dillmann
It's like you and those those red resistors.

Stephen Kraig
You know, I actually dumped those red resistors. I love those. They're super cool and they look fantastic, but I dumped them and here's the reason why. Those resistors, if you go to their data sheet, they have air quotes in one of their applications. It's like low noise audio resistors.

Stephen Kraig
I didn't pick them because they were low noise audio resistors. I picked them because they were red and they looked really fantastic in my stuff, but I actually switched over to Mil Spec, the CMF 60 resistors, and the reason why is because they're actually tested and they are proven to be low noise. So like I can actually hang my head on that as opposed to just some marketing term that says low noise and something saying that at one point in time, we've tested it. No. Mil Spec resistors have a military specification and a test performance specification that they have to meet.

Stephen Kraig
If they don't meet that, they don't sell it, and they cost about the same to buy those. On top of that, a little bit of a secret about the military stuff, it is so unbelievably derated that you can actually buy smaller resistors that have bad, or not bad, I should that's the wrong word, that have ratings much lower than you think because they're actually derated from really high value stuff. So, like, a 1 watt resistor might be labeled a quarter watt resistor because they pre derate it for you and they just tell you it's a quarter watt, so you just buy it even though it's actually capable of dissipating 1 watt. So if your situation doesn't actually require military derating, you can actually save a little bit of money by the military grade stuff at the lower rating and work. Just just know what you're buying.

Stephen Kraig
But I I do like when the components I buy are backed up with data showing that they actually meet this.

Parker Dillmann
I'm imagining now some people some punk rockers buy your amplifiers and, like, they sing about, like, anti they're anti war, and they have, like, the specifications that built their amp is to military spec.

Stephen Kraig
Yep. Yep. One of the things I find really interesting, I've actually I've been doing a we talked about this with James Lewis. I've been doing a lot of reliability analysis recently. And automotive resistors or components, we were talking about them in that podcast.

Stephen Kraig
I've been doing a comparison of military versus space versus automotive and the things that go into it. And and surprisingly, in the automotive world, some of the tests that are required for automotive parts are straight up identical to military tests. And one of the reasons why is because it's just known reliability, and it's there's a test report that you can just find on Google and go and do, and then you know you're at least meeting the military spec. But in many of the cases, the lot sample sizes that are needed in order to pass the tests in automotive, they actually test way more parts than the military do or space applications do. And for the most part, that's due to the fact that in automotive world, they they make a lot more parts.

Stephen Kraig
So, you know, there is the military might order 5,000 parts or something like that for a project they're working on. And in space, you might order 100. Whereas automotive, they're like, we're making 500,000. So, yeah, their sample size

Parker Dillmann
On a weekend. On a weekend.

Stephen Kraig
So their sample size is is is a little bit bigger in that sense. But it is interesting that they all tend to do very similar tests. Like, automotive parts go through the majority of the tests that go to space. They just do it in a more relaxed format, and it's less strict.

Parker Dillmann
So back to floppy disks.

Stephen Kraig
Sorry. That was a tangent. Yeah. Floppy disk. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
So what's interesting about floppy disks is according to Wikipedia here, the last floppy disk ever made or manufactured was Sony, and that was in 2011. I think you can still buy new ones, though.

Stephen Kraig
Can you? They're just not new old stock?

Parker Dillmann
I think that they might be old. It's like floppy disk dotcom where you can buy new floppy disks. I wonder if these are new old stock.

Stephen Kraig
Are are you sure these are not just, like, old stock here?

Parker Dillmann
Maybe they are old stock.

Stephen Kraig
I think these are old stock. I think they just have warehouses full of flops.

Parker Dillmann
I like how old they have a house brand.

Stephen Kraig
House brand. I'll have your well floppies. Wow. And they're they're a buck a piece.

Parker Dillmann
And then also the other brand is multi laser.

Stephen Kraig
Oh, nice.

Parker Dillmann
But I don't think floppy disks work on lasers, but okay.

Stephen Kraig
I'm pretty sure they don't.

Parker Dillmann
Oh, so they do have you could buy brand new Sony diskettes. I actually like calling them diskettes a bit too.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Kinda like because they're not floppies.

Parker Dillmann
No. No. They were the 5a half, which predated the 3a half floppies, were actually floppy. Like, they bend. Right.

Parker Dillmann
But, didn't they, wasn't there a size even bigger than that before? It's like a 8 something. Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. But you

Parker Dillmann
can actually buy brand new. I actually should just buy a brand new box of, like, good They're not cheap. No. But I've had problems with so I inherited discs from my grandfather. That's what I've been using, and a lot of them are probably, like, really, really cheap ones from, like, the early aughts, and they're not very good.

Parker Dillmann
Like, I lost an entire disk of images from that party, and that was not fun.

Stephen Kraig
Aw, that sucks.

Parker Dillmann
So and then I took it to Defcon, and I lost an

Stephen Kraig
I lost 2 discs at Defcon of data. So the reliability is not terribly good.

Parker Dillmann
On those old discs? Yeah. Yeah. I I I just need to buy some new discs and and what basically, what I found out is that camera is usually you get, like, 20 ish shots before it, like, runs out of space on the disk. Mhmm.

Parker Dillmann
If it starts taking more than 20 shots, it's the floppy disk is just corrupted. Like the file system is corrected and they, the camera itself doesn't realize it at that point.

Stephen Kraig
So I guess I never really thought about it, but a floppy disc is a it's just a piece of plastic with magnetic coating on it. Mhmm. Yeah. I I never really thought of what the materials actually were.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. The it's a magnetic flux is what you're reading off the off

Stephen Kraig
the disk. Right. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
I actually need to get that working because I have a it's called a grease weasel, And, it allows you to hook up a floppy disks to it and then you basically can just read the magnetic flux directly into an image. It's kinda like actually like an ISO. An ISO image of a CD ROM, but it does the same thing for a floppy disk. And then you can, like, transfer that file and boot it up anywhere. So you can read, like, old Amiga disks and that kind of stuff.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. And those like, Windows 10 we've talked about this before. Windows 10 and 11 just do not handle floppy disk well at all. And that's why I have the grease weasel so I can hook up a floppy disk to Windows, like, 11 and have it work correctly. You gotta jump through a hoop to make it work because you have to, like, copy the magnetic flux image, and then you emulate it.

Parker Dillmann
Emulate the disc. Kinda funky.

Stephen Kraig
Do you ever remember floppy disc bombs? No. Where you replace the actual magnetic disc with an abrasive wheel and put match heads inside of a floppy disc. It's so someone inserts it, it just spins and ignites your computer. Don't don't ask me why I know that.

Parker Dillmann
I've never heard of that before.

Stephen Kraig
Never heard of a floppy bomb?

Parker Dillmann
No. But, yeah, what's interesting about this this, back to the article about the floppy disks is talking about Japan's, like, their industry. Because Japan in the eighties was this technological force to be reckoned with, and we all bought their amplifiers and their Walkmans and all that stuff. But right now, they're ranked 30 sec I don't know what digital competitiveness means, but the 32nd in it, which doesn't sound like it should be this it feels like Japan should be ranked higher than that. Right?

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Yeah. Just just due to the perception. Right.

Parker Dillmann
The perception of the device like Nintendo and Sony being there, making video game consoles that are in, like, almost every single household in America. Yeah. But, apparently, this is due to, like, the slot like, basically, in the eighties, a lot of, like, analog stuff got cemented into businesses, like like floppy disks. And that kinda just slowed down the change of time. Whereas here in America, we just throw it away when it's old.

Stephen Kraig
Maybe that's why we're top of the digital competitiveness is just because we purchase so much and it's always new.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Everyone's gotta have a new cell phone every 2 years.

Stephen Kraig
My cell phone's so old, but you know what? It's still going, so no need to replace it.

Parker Dillmann
I felt really bad when I finally got rid of my Pixel 2 after five and a

Stephen Kraig
half years. Yeah. You had that a long time.

Parker Dillmann
It still works. I still have it.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
I use it in the garage all the time.

Stephen Kraig
My galaxy is 5 years old now.

Parker Dillmann
See, that thing's ancient.

Stephen Kraig
It does not have a cracked screen, but, the fingerprint reader is that long since busted. But the, the screen is burned in so I could see, like, letters on it and stuff.

Parker Dillmann
When you have, when you, like, turn on, like, the touch of your pen, is it hieroglyphics? Yeah. Yeah. All right. So industries that let's actually come back over here in America, industries that still use floppy disks.

Parker Dillmann
I know medical devices still use floppy disks sometimes, especially older ones.

Stephen Kraig
Gosh.

Parker Dillmann
And some avionics I've seen, Like test equipments.

Stephen Kraig
I mean, I've seen oscilloscopes use them.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. I bet you half our listeners have an oscilloscope that uses floppy disks.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Or I've seen one. Let's put it that way.

Parker Dillmann
I bet you everyone that's listed to us has seen a floppy disk. It's it's the new save icon or it's been the save icon, I guess.

Stephen Kraig
It's actually funny. My my father hit me up not that long ago and said, hey. On our old family computer, we found some of your files. We didn't know what to do with them, so we burned them to a CD and we're mailing them to you. And I'm like, okay.

Stephen Kraig
I I have no idea how I don't have a CD drive anymore. Like like

Parker Dillmann
They couldn't just like Google drive them to you? No. No. They could not.

Stephen Kraig
Like, okay. Cool. Thanks.

Parker Dillmann
That's that's sweeter than to think about, though.

Stephen Kraig
No. No. Yeah. They're they're, it is sweet of them. And, yes, I'm mocking them, but, it is it is really nice.

Stephen Kraig
But now I have to figure out, like first of all, I don't know what they are, those files. So it's like, should I get a CD drive just to find out what, like, it's like, random lyrics from songs I wrote when I was 15 or something like that?

Parker Dillmann
Oh, no.

Stephen Kraig
It'd be bad stuff.

Parker Dillmann
We have to recreate some of it on on, with AI.

Stephen Kraig
Oh, just go to AI and say write a bad song, and you'd get it. So yeah. What And

Parker Dillmann
so I'm seeing a list here of, like, industry, like, companies in the United States, like, famous companies, like, famous in quotes, I guess. Let's use sloppies. So Chuck E. Cheese.

Stephen Kraig
What wait. What do they use it for?

Parker Dillmann
Use floppy disks up to, 2023. Really? Yeah. I wonder what they use them for though. They didn't say what they are using them for.

Parker Dillmann
Jeez. I hope it wasn't for, like, programming the animatronics.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah, what, Rockafire Explosion? The, the band that played at, Chuck E. Cheese? Yeah. That would be really funny if you if they had to literally change songs by just putting in a new floppy.

Parker Dillmann
I wonder how they programmed those. I wonder if it's like a g code derivative thing.

Stephen Kraig
There's a documentary about those animatronic things. But when it was like, what, showbiz pizza and Chuck E Cheese and there's a really fascinating documentary where they apparently the factory where they made them, they just, it got abandoned one day. Like it's almost like a video game where there's still like robot heads on an assembly line and they just left them there and this and they walk through this facility and there's just like robots that are, like, partially covered in fur and stuff. It's fascinating.

Parker Dillmann
No wonder 5 Nights at Freddy's is you know what that is?

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. It's just directly that.

Parker Dillmann
It's just Yeah. It's that.

Stephen Kraig
It's It's just that factory.

Parker Dillmann
It's nightmare fuel to begin with. Yeah.

Stephen Kraig
It's called the Rock afire Explosion.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. I'm gonna have to give that a watch.

Stephen Kraig
Because there was a guy, I don't remember their name. Somebody acquired an entire Rockafire Explosion and started doing covers with them on YouTube of popular songs, and some of them are fantastic.

Parker Dillmann
Oh my god. There's a clown animatronic that is literally the worst, scariest it's a it's a SCP. Wait. What's an SCP? You know what SCP is?

Parker Dillmann
Oh, you are, like, now done for the rest of the day. Maybe tomorrow. Well, maybe I'm just missing something here. Secure, contain, protect, SCP.

Stephen Kraig
What what is this from?

Parker Dillmann
You don't know about SCP, the biggest conspiracy theory in all time? Oh, I'm sorry. I've I haven't

Stephen Kraig
been to Defcon in a while. So if if let me know what it is.

Parker Dillmann
SCP is a crowdsourced copy pasta site about different creatures in an organization called Secure Contain Protect. You know, we play, this game called GTFO where, like, you go underground and there's, like, monsters and there's, like, a virus that makes people go crazy and stuff like that. That could be that virus could be an SCP that got is that escaped,

Stephen Kraig
Steven. Okay.

Parker Dillmann
So think about that, but it could be stuff like this crate. I want I should make this clown like the featured image of this podcast episode, and then we will have, like, 0 listeners next week.

Stephen Kraig
Okay. I'm gonna need to do a little bit of research on this.

Parker Dillmann
But SCP, it's not all scary stuff. It's got, like, stuff stuff, is, like, super mundane. But it's, like, weird objects that are, like, you can't explain with science and that kinda stuff. Oh. It's all fake or is it?

Parker Dillmann
Alright. Everyone that's still listening to us ramble about floppy disks or diskettes. I I still like diskettes. What equipment are you still using or industry you're in that still use diskettes? I bet you just like some old, like, plasma cutters.

Parker Dillmann
Actually, yeah. There's a plasma cut well, this is 2,004, so 20 years ago now. But I bet you it's still there. There was a the plasma cutter at a compressor assembly line fabrication shop that and I say compressor, like, compressed natural gas. These things were, like, v 20 Caterpillar engines that had, like, you know, school bus size canisters for the compression vessels or the separation vessels, I should say.

Parker Dillmann
But they built all the steel there, and so they would roll these inch and a half thick steel out onto this, like, 5 car garage size plasma table. And person would just pop in the floppy disk and hit the big green button Just go. And it would just fire up the whole thing.

Stephen Kraig
Love it.

Parker Dillmann
So I bet you I think it's still running. But, yeah, let us know what industries you're still using floppy disks in. Because I'm not sure there's still some soul around. Form.macrofab.com. I think it's also, like, techtalk.macrofab.com as well, if you like that one.

Parker Dillmann
Choose which one. Choose the adventure.

Stephen Kraig
Or circuit dash break dotmacrofab.com? Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
There's that one too. That's the original. Everything forwards to that. Alright. So two questions here.

Parker Dillmann
What is gonna be the last industrial or commercial use of a floppy disk? I think I'm gonna say it's gonna be a side icon, but that's not that's not a real use of a floppy disk, I guess?

Stephen Kraig
No. I think exactly like what you just said. I think industrial machines that just continue to work and there's nothing wrong with them, they just require a floppy, those will be some of the last to just give up the ghost.

Parker Dillmann
And they're gonna keep using it until the new floppy disc costs more than the next machine.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Yeah. And then what

Parker Dillmann
is gonna be the tech equivalent of the next tech equivalent of, like, floppy disks? I guess it'd be like CD ROM, but I don't think CD ROM is gonna have the staying power that floppy disk had.

Stephen Kraig
I I have a thought. I think we will eventually get to the point where mouse and keyboard are like museum pieces, where we will have some other form of tech for input to whatever your device is doing that is superior to mouse and keyboard. And we'll do we'll be like, hey, you used to have to drag this thing across your desk and, like, slap your meat fingers all over this, like, button pad.

Parker Dillmann
You know that touch screens aren't gonna be the thing. No. Like, people already don't like touch screens as, like, a thing.

Stephen Kraig
No. But perhaps I'm just getting a little too star trek y or whatnot, but maybe it's just like you have some kind of mind control. And so it's just you don't have to move the mouse, You just think and it's over there. Right?

Parker Dillmann
You don't have to move the mouse. You can just be, like, think in, like, the word doc opens up.

Stephen Kraig
Right. And then you just start thinking in the words appear. Well, I guess if you

Parker Dillmann
had that, you could have the opposite way where you, like, you can close your eyes and it's, like, a text prompt input.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Sure. So, I don't know. I mean, we're we're we're a ways off from something like that, but if okay. Let's put it this way.

Stephen Kraig
If something of that sort was around, keyboard and mouse would go away.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Unless there's there's always gonna be, like, the purest though for, like, fighting games that still that still use, like, a stick

Stephen Kraig
and buttons. That's true. That's true. Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
There's still there will be those people that are still playing Counter Strike 1.6. I mean, there's probably still someone out there that has floppies of doom and use those to play it. Right? Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. I think Nex I don't know. What do

Stephen Kraig
you think is the tech equivalent of a dinosaur?

Parker Dillmann
The dinosaur floppy what's they're gonna be next after floppy disks? Yeah. Something that we use all the time that where you're just gonna look back and be like, that was awful.

Stephen Kraig
How about this? We're already kind of there, but hardwired Internet.

Parker Dillmann
It still has the best latency. So you know what I'm actually gonna say? Touch screens.

Stephen Kraig
You think touch screens would just go the way of the dodo?

Parker Dillmann
I think once the next thing, like, what you're thinking is thought.

Stephen Kraig
Yeah.

Parker Dillmann
Like, thought control. I bet you that when thought if thought control is the next thing for controlling devices That Yeah. Touch screens immediately go away. But guess what? Mouse, keyboard, physical buttons on things is still gonna exist well beyond the touch screen still existing.

Stephen Kraig
That's a yeah. That's a good point. I could I could see it because because I don't know. I don't like touch screens at all. And, if you could just think and have it do whatever, do you need to get your greasy fingers all over a greasy screen?

Parker Dillmann
Like, no. We're already kinda halfway there with voice activation. Sure. Alexa, buy 5 pizzas. Order.

Parker Dillmann
Confirm.

Stephen Kraig
Okay. I could get on board with that. That that that does make yeah.

Parker Dillmann
Kinda like how, CDs never really came back once we went to digital, but vinyl records have come back. And, like, that's vinyl records are like

Stephen Kraig
Cassettes have come back.

Parker Dillmann
Cassettes have also come back. So maybe, actually, CDs will wrap around and be nostalgia, but I don't think anyone's gonna be nostalgic for because the problem with CDs is they're so fragile, and I think virtually everyone hated them.

Stephen Kraig
You dealt with them because they were the best we had.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. But you just dealt with them. We're, like, vinyl records, no one really hated them because there was at that time, there was just no alternative. So you didn't have anything that liked better.

Stephen Kraig
Sure.

Parker Dillmann
And then cassettes were really convenient because you could just they're so robust unless you have a magnet, near them. But, otherwise, they're pretty robust. And then CDs just man, they're just super fragile comparatively. Well, I'm looking for the report of the files that are on the CD that your parents mailed you.

Stephen Kraig
Well, yeah. Somehow, I have to figure out how to actually get a I don't think I have a CD drive. Well, maybe I do. Maybe I have a computer lying around somewhere in the basement that is ancient and has a CD. Has one.

Stephen Kraig
So Yeah. Maybe.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. Alright. So if you have a prediction of what you think is the last or the next dinosaur to sunset, let us know inform.macfab.com. We're really pushing that this week. But

Stephen Kraig
Yeah. Just a little bit.

Parker Dillmann
I I really like what we set up there. It's it's been really nice. It's like the old Slack, except now stuff hangs around. So it's oh, by the way, if you want the feature of, like, normal chat, it does have normal chat. And the chat goes away after 30 month, not 30 months, 30 days.

Parker Dillmann
Right. So there is, like, a rolling chat in there. If you want to if you want that normal Slack experience, it's there still.

Stephen Kraig
I mean, it's set up where where chat is kind of chat about anything, and then the the forum pages are specific topics. Correct.

Parker Dillmann
Oh, yeah. I mean, we're gonna get away with a sub 50 minute episode this time.

Stephen Kraig
Dang. It's been a while.

Parker Dillmann
Yeah. I it might have been it might be, like, 200 episodes since that's happened.

Stephen Kraig
It possibly.

Parker Dillmann
So, yeah, reiterate, We have that contest. Food. Go to our Food. Food. The food theme, form.macfab.com, or there'll be a button in the show notes where you can go click and boom, you'll be reading all the notes about the, contest.

Parker Dillmann
And, yeah. So thank you for listening to circuit break from Macrofab. We are your hosts, Parker Dillman. And Steven Craig. So long for now.

Parker Dillmann
Take it easy. Thank you. Yes. You are a listener for downloading our podcast. Tell your friends and coworkers about Circuit Break, the podcast for Macrofab.

Parker Dillmann
If you have a cool idea, project, or topic you want us to discuss, let Steven and I and the community know. Our community where you can find personal projects, discussion about podcast, contests now, and engineering topics and news is located atform.macfabdot

Stephen Kraig
com.