Crispy Currents

Welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. We are your host, Stephen Gregg

and Parker Dolman.

This is episode 301.

We are not dead yet.

Just give it a go No 3040 more years, maybe,

hopefully, hopefully.

I want to actually retire someday

you know how it's always like in those cop movies where it's like the old cop is like, I was one day from retirement and then they die. Oh, that trope. It's like the engineer. I was one day from like being retired and then you get a new problem. So you have to like stay on and keep solving that problem.

Engineers never stopped, do they? No, no, we never exit. Okay. Before we get into it, let's let's do a quick tangent.

We were already tangent. I

mean, I know. I know. This is great. When I was gonna ask this question a while ago? How much in a week outside of your day job as an engineer? Do you think you do engineering? How many hours do you think you do engineering? Outside of your engineering gauge? How

many hours are in a week?

Not enough?

It's like 40 is work? What's no wait seven times? 24? Math hard?

Yeah, let me do it for you. 168.

So 128 hours?

From the second you wake up? You know, I'm your honor.

I dream it you?

Yeah, I was I was thinking about that the other day because I was

a dream in Autodesk fusion.

I came home from work. And, you know, said hello to the wife pet, the dog walked right down to the basement and that fired up schematic editor and just started start going for it. And I was thinking about those, like, wonder how many hours outside of work that I do things that are basically the same thing as work? Yeah.

Well, it's convenient when they are the same when you enjoy it.

I should say that, because if you didn't enjoy it, you wouldn't go down to your lair and do it. Well, and I suppose you know, our work is perhaps a little bit different. Because, you know, it's we're not like structural engineers that are making bridges or anything like that, because like, probably not something you're going to do outside of work. Right. But with our

designing it

well, I guess if you would, you could just make the argument and then that's just your day job. I guess I'm saying like extracurricular engineering. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I don't know that. So we never we never flip it off, I guess is what I'm saying there.

Yeah, there's some engineers I met that aren't that can just, they just turn it off. I'm not that kind of person, though. Yeah,

me neither. I honestly, with this kind of mindset, it's really hard. Going to sleep for me sometimes, because I will just sit there and just dwell on

things. Yes, I do. Same thing. Yeah. I have this thing where like, it's really hard for me to like not do anything. I want to know how many people out there can you just not do anything? And I include watching meaningless TV is doing nothing. Like what like if you watch a movie, and you're actively watching the movie, you're doing something you're you're, you're thinking about the movie, right? There's some people that like will turn on ancient aliens on TV. You're not doing anything watching the ancient aliens on TV.

I don't know that sounds like just your opinion, dude.

My opinion?

No, I mean, okay, so on occasion, I'll just go to YouTube and let it roll on just garbage. And I'll just zone out. And

so that's doing nothing. That's totally fine. I that's what I want to know is how many people when I've tried to do that, my brain is like, I'm like, I'm gonna go into the garage and like, do something for some stupid be like, three o'clock in the morning. I'm like, I need to like tighten a bolt or something on the Jeep. Yeah, yeah. No, I feel you need to go to bed. Or like, I will be in the garage like five o'clock in the morning.

I think it's sort of in a way there's there's a an analogous idea. Like, even if you have your car or say a machine at work or something like that. So you have it running perfectly. Like, do you ever really stop like, messing with it? And for me, the answer's no, like I can still have something working perfectly. And I'll be looking at it critically being like, I could probably adjust this one thing and I bet you I could say five minutes on a 12 hour run or something like that. Yeah, like I'm always thinking about that it never leaves. And it's it's sometimes that mindset is exhausting.

Very, very. It keeps me up way longer than I would like it to.

Yeah, especially when when I know I have, I know what my starting thing or starting position on a project is. And I know what my ending position is, but I don't know how to connect those two. That's what kills me. That's what will keep me up at night before going to bed. Where I've just I'm sitting there, I'm just like, I cannot connect the dots and this is killing me.

I'd be really interested to see how many of our listeners are can just like, veg.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's nothing wrong with that. Like, I think I think it's really healthy to do that.

I think so twos. It's like meditation almost. Like, like when I was at your house, and we like, put on YouTube. Like, we were actively like, watching critically analyzing like this person who's like rebuilding a bench vise.

Oh my god, Aren't those the best videos ever? Like those videos that are just like, they're not even they don't even have like much audio on it. It's just somebody restoring some old piece of machinery or something that was amazing to watch. Yeah, actually, you know, let's, let's go ahead and use this as a segue. There's a topic I want to do chat about. And we had it down the list, I'm going to move it for for it just because this tangent sort of work towards towards it. So the title of this topic is the engineering mind? Should we expect others to have it? And that's a loaded question. I can tell you the answer is no. Of course, you shouldn't expect other people to have it. But I want to I want to present

what you want the answer to be. Yes. Exactly. Exactly.

And let me let me kind of detail this for you. So okay, so say you're at your place of work. Who cares what it is you're actually doing. But let's just say some problem in your field arises, how was that problem addressed? How is that problem fixed? We all have problems that we deal with on a daily basis, right? I think engineers, in general, the engineer mindset I, there's, there's some way to detail it or define it, or say it in a better way than the engineer mindset. But let's just run with that. Right? It's

almost like the scientific process.

Almost almost. Yeah. Yeah. So the question is, like, how our problems fixed, what I have been running into, in certain aspects of my life, inside and outside of work, is that just coming to the understanding that people, people, first of all, don't have the engineering mindset. And people rely on you having the engineer mindset having an engineer mind. And what I mean by that is, when a problem happens, there's sort of a tendency for people to just be like, throw their hands up and say, I don't know, come and fix it, you come and fix it. And and I kind of want to give MIT perhaps some advice, or just some, some some thoughts on if you are, in your position, if you are presented with a problem that occurs when you're working on something. attempt to fix it yourself. Don't just throw your hands up in the air and immediately say, there's someone else who is capable of this, or there's someone else who knows how to do this, or there's someone else who is proficient at this. I'm not trying to get too heavy here. But I what I'm what I'm kind of getting,

that's a really loaded question, too. Because I have an example that is, would be completely counter to that.

Well, you don't want people you don't want anyone fixing anything, right? Cuz a lot of times, I mean, if you just rely on anyone to fix anything, you'll probably end up creating problems, right? There are people who are trained to fix things. But say, yeah, we'll say something happens before just throwing your hands in the air and calling the person who you who you think knows the answer to it, attempt a few things or maybe, like, try to identify what the issue is before then such that you can speak intelligently about the issue as opposed to just saying thing doesn't work, make work in like, and I'm not trying to be mean to people here, or anything like that. But sometimes I get called in to fix something or asked to fix something. And I don't know the answer to things. I don't immediately know the solution. Like I just follow a path of try things and half the time that's googling stuff. Sometimes it's even me writing an email to somebody else who I know has that exact answer kind of thing or like Oh, I'm machine's not working and I don't know the answer to it, I can contact their support team. But you could also contact their support team, like, you know who they are like. So I don't know, I'm not trying to dodge any work or anything like that. I guess what I'm what I'm, I'm curious about is the engineering mindset where I can or where an engineer can sit back look at a problem and kind of devise a way to approach it such that we know what the end result is, the end result is we want something fixed, and we know what fixed looks like. And we know what not fixed looks like, because it's staring us right in the face, to be able to walk from point A to point B. Is it? Is it reasonable to expect people to be able to do those kinds of things in their head? I'm wondering, I think you're the musician, for sure. For sure. For sure. Yeah. And it's funny, because I was talking with someone I was like, Who can we expect to do that? And the person I was talking to is like, engineers, that's why we hire engineers. That's why you guys are the guys that do this stuff. You know?

Could be Yeah,

I guess I guess the the the other side of that is, if you're listening, and you're not an engineer, I think that this is a really like fertile ground here. In terms of if you're working at your position, these are things that can that you can start to adopt. And really like, pull yourself away from the rest of the pack. Like, say, if you're a machine operator, that that is doesn't have the title engineer in front of you, but your machine breaks down will maybe not try to like hardcore, fix your machine, but like, try to be really involved in fixing it and come up with solutions to things and see what's wrong with the machine before going to the engineer. And I think that engineer will have a ton of respect for you. If you come up with like, here's what I've seen what is wrong? And here's what it's doing. And here's what's different about things. I'm not sure the solution, but I want to be a part of the solution. I think the engineer would freaking love you if you did that kind of stuff. And I don't know, maybe maybe it's inherent maybe it's not, I don't know,

I don't think it's inherent, it's just different. The interesting thing is you and I are very similar kind of engineers, how we tackle problems. And we are in that kind of position at work. My official title is like Application Engineer, which just means everything is what that really means. Yeah. And you're just saying thing

that my official title is director of operations. And so like, it's my job to make sure that things don't stop working.

Yeah. I will tell you what people don't like if you're an engineer, and they ask you a question.

Yeah, what's that?

I don't know.

That's true. Yeah.

I say that all the time. And yeah, people hate me for it.

Yeah, you're supposed to know, right? So I think that's really unfair. It's really unfair to expect your engineer to know things. They're human just like you. They're not going to know the answer. And by the way, all of this, all this talk here. I'm not trying to make engineers out to be messiahs, or these these like God godlike figures that no

other people hate it. When I say I don't know. It's just like, well, I don't know, I can go find it. But it's like, it goes back to that what you were talking about earlier? It's like, when I say, I don't know, usually, it's also like, it's also you can go look for that answer yourself by like searching the Google Drive or something like that, or searching the email chain or something like that. It's kind of a shouldn't say that anymore. Which is, I shouldn't say, I don't know anymore. I should use different words. I guess.

What I look at a job, I think it is 100% acceptable to say I don't know, if I don't know is actually the truth. If you don't know you don't know. Like, that's not a problem. The the problem exists with if you're lying about knowing, or if you don't follow it up by I don't know. But here's how I can go. No, I think that's that's really important. Especially if you're, if your boss comes to you, and is like, Hey, what's up with XYZ? I don't know. But let me go find it for you. That's a totally acceptable answer, but lying about it and saying like, Oh, yeah, sure. It's like this, this this. And then and then you get found out that you're lying about that stupid, don't do it.

Yeah, that whole thing, but I'll look into it as well though. You got to be careful with that response, though. Because when when you start saying that, you start. People start realizing that you can just go and find his answer for them as well. It's really that like, you start what I tried to do is start teaching people how to fish. Yeah, I like that. So better is especially if it's an answer that you don't know, but you know how to go find it. And it's, it's easy for the other person to go find it. They just, they might not even know how to go find that answer. But you can teach them to go find that answer in the future. Yeah. And so a lot of times I will bring that person in, and I'd be like, Okay, I don't know that we're going to go figure it out together. Because then they will never come back to you for that answer.

Again, I yeah, I like that. If someone's like, Hey, can you let me know what the stock of inventory is for XYZ part? Well, I don't know that off the top of my head, but you have access to our server. system. If you don't know how to look it up. Let me show you. We can do it together. And then you'll know how to do it from here on out. I think that's, that's totally reasonable and really good. Or like, a lot of times when people are like, Hey, can you email me this schematic? Well, they're all available on the server, I can show you where to go find our schematics. And then you never have to ask me where that? Yeah, I like that. Yeah.

Yeah. It's better than saying, but it depends on on the response, though, because like, it could be like, like, what's the derivative of blah, blah, blah, big ol formula? Like, I don't know, I, it'd be really hard to go train someone to do that to teach someone how to do that. So it really depends on the question

at hand. Well, and I guess, okay, so let's take another quick hypothetical situation. Let's say there's a problem. Let's say yeah, okay. So let's say there's a problem with your selective solder department at work. And, and your selective solder machine is acting up having having lots of problems, and not just like, some problems, lots of problems. You know, if you're a, let's get it done, kind of engineer a guy who's like, I know, the end result is I need

boards that are soldered. I need boards that are so yeah, I need stuff to work.

You know, one of the solutions in that situation might be, you know, we need to hire a different team, we need to work out better technicians. For this, we need to adjust how this is we need to identify is this. Is this machine going to work for us? Do we need to purchase a new machine? How do we purchase a new machine? How do we set that up? How do we make the facility optimized for the workers and things like like these, like all of the all of the pieces start going together as opposed to like, oh, the machine just doesn't solder? Like, how do I make solder? Or let's just let macro is actually a great example, before you had a selective solder. Anything It was done by hand, right? Well, like, put an engineer in terms of how do we make this better? Well, there's machines that do this. And if we would buy a machine, we hire the right people, and we train them up in the right way and give them you know, this, give them the power that goes with the system behind this, we can create an entire process that works well. Like that kind of mindset. I I find engineers think that way. But I don't think it's necessarily inherent to engineers think you can anyone can adopt that kind of mindset.

I agree. Yeah, that's all I was saying earlier. I don't think it's inherent to engineers I've met I've met engineers that don't get can't do that.

Yeah. So

I want to say can't they just, they haven't done that yet, I

guess. Yeah, I guess I guess take this as I think it's something that anyone can learn. Let's, let's just let's take this as an example. Like, I guess this is upper level management. But let's say let's say an engineering manager came to you, and had like a gizmo or a widget, let's say like, aluminum thing. And it's, it's a piece of aluminum. And it's anodized, okay. And they said, hey, look, I want you to make 10,000 of these next year. And you don't have a machine shop, you don't even have a building, you don't have anything. Let's say you have nothing. And he's like, I want you to make 10,000 of these next year. How do you even approach that?

And first question is, what's my budget?

Right? Well, I mean, there's so many ways to approach that there's, there's like, hey, I can shop it out. But shopping it out requires a lot of upfront engineering and making sure that you have people who can, you know, talk with vendors and actually accomplish it, but you have to offer your drawings. The other option is are we going to do this in house? Well, okay, now I need to establish a machine shop. Now I need to hire machinists for this. I need to make sure that my building is set up for whatever machinery we purchase. You know, there's just so many different but being able to think through that entire process. In other words, I think I think that's such a valuable thing to put on your resume. Let's just put it that way. A valid, really valuable skill to be able to say I don't have something I want something how do I get there is just really big. And if you can demonstrate that, gosh, I'd hire you tomorrow, if if you can demonstrate those kinds of skills to me.

So awesome blossom in Twitch chat says, and I don't think that gets taught in college, which should be really the starting point to learn that kind of mindset. I actually don't think college is the right spot for that either. I'm just looking at, like, just remembering my curriculum. I don't think of any way that could be like maybe senior design, or capstone in your case project called Capstone. Or we call it a senior design. Oh, what was the capstone project? And I don't know, I, I set my brain.

Yeah, I don't think that's it. And we just call it a senior design. Yeah, cuz that's my

thought. And I'm like, why is Capstone anyways? The, that might be the only way to kind of teach it. But the problem with with senior design is, it's, they don't really tell you the endpoint really, for those projects. Either. They kind of just like, here's a problem. Go, go have fun. That's about it. There's no like, end goal. Because like, it's like, you know, a year, like half a year of research, and then half a year of doing it. And a lot of times, that's, you know, it's not a full time job. So you only get a couple hours a week on working on it. Right? That's like, what can you really accomplish? In basically, two ish months of work is what it boils down to. Yeah, I don't know if there's a a good solution to that in leasing college. You really need to need hands on. Like, that's job training, job training. Yeah. Because it's not really like, engineering stuff is like what you're saying earlier, like, a selective solder machine is not working correctly. What are the different paths to solving that problem? Right. And it might you know, the different inputs? Yeah, it

might be as simple as, Oh, this one thing was wrong. Fix the machine. Or it might be as difficult as we need a whole brand new everything.

Yeah, machine. Yeah. Right. Right. Because we haven't so Mac wraps, like our selector solder just hobbled along. And then one day, we're like, well, we gotta get a new one now.

Well, I, you know, I actually, and even more difficult is, let's say you have a selective solder machine that is working and doing stuff. But the CEO of the company comes up and says, Hey, next year, we're planning on 6x growth in all of our stuff. Now you have a problem is, is that selective solder machine, even though it's working? Is it going to cut it? Now? How do you solve that problem? Because it's a problem that isn't really even a problem. But it will be a problem, you know? Yeah. So I don't know. Yeah, that's a I've been thinking about this recently, like, how do you hire a team of people that have the mindset of being able to ingest information and come up with paths towards solutions? And does that mean that you kind of have to turn towards engineers for that? And maybe,

I would say, more engineer, it's also because the people I know, too, this is a huge bias. But because I know more engineers and non engineers,

sure. But we talked a few 1000 each week.

I'm just saying this is the people I bet to most of them are engineers, or have interesting of this mindset to like they are, you know, they, they know how to traverse the A to B with a problem.

You know, at the same time, there could very easily be a different podcast with two salespeople who are sitting there being like, well, engineers just don't get it. They don't have the sales mind. They don't know how to talk to people. They don't know how to get someone excited about something. And there's another podcast of business guys out there. Like, you know, the salespeople, and these engineers have no idea how to create a plan that that drives the company forward. So yeah, perhaps I'm just being a little, no myopic with my view. Yeah,

I mean, tribalism is real man. Yeah, for sure. So we're human nature is that way.

I just think that's a lot of that's a lot of area for growth. If you say if you are somebody in a company that is working, that is not in the engineering team, or whatnot, I know there can be a lot of elitism in the engineering team. And most of the time, like, that's worth just ignoring whatsoever. But I think there's a lot of things to learn from the engineering team at the same time, in terms of being somebody who's reliable at solving issues, especially and I know this is goofy, but especially not being the person who raises their hand and causes the engineering team to come and solve your problem for you. You

it's not even just raise your hand well, but like, explaining the problem really well. Yeah, is worth its weight in gold. For sure. That like, like, in video game logic is like game testers game. You can just say game. Like when you're a kid, you're like, I want to go to be a game tester because I just play video games all day. No, you get the Phillip bug reports all day, all day all day. And so a bug report or game tester, I guess doesn't. They're not developer. They're not coding. But they're really good at explaining the problem and how to replicate the problem, which gives the developer one, they can just do what it says on the sheet to replicate the problem, so they can fix it.

Yeah, that's super valuable, right? Yeah, if replicating is is like half of fixing things, right? It is, especially with RMAs. I get Armisen all the time. And it's like it doesn't do what you said. It does.

Yeah. But the moon's got to be at the right. Right face.

Yeah. And your tongue is at the right angle, right.

Your tongue is at three o'clock, and you're squinting and you turn the knob three quarters to the left. It does this. Yep. Yeah. But only when you

have no idea how often that happens. Yeah.

Yeah, replication is yeah, you're right, those like, half the time when I'm trying to fix something. I'm like, I gotta get this thing to break again.

I hate that. I hate that so much, actually. So if you're in the repair business, now we're really tangente. But if you're in the repair business, one of the worst things is sometimes you have to fix the problem, to find the solution to the problem. That like, yeah, try something and then you fix it. And now you're like, how do I quote the customer the job? Do I quote them? And I really, really hope that they accept the quote. And then if they don't accept the quote, do I break it? Do I bring it back to where it was? Like, because it's already fixed? Right? It's tough.

Yeah. Oh, that's a rough one. That's that's a big moral quandary there.

Yeah. See, that's

what the that's what the business people are for, though, because they don't have morals.

They don't have Don't worry. Actually, yeah, no. Yeah. The the. Yeah, the bit the business guys would would find some way to make money off of that. Actually. The job though. Yeah, it is. It totally is. And we need people like that, um, you know, yeah. You know, the hardest repairs for me were people who would bring in equipment. And I was very clear with them. I have a diagnostics fee. And I might find that a fuse blew. And I would replace the fuse, and their stuff would work. And 99% of the time that was because their fuse was 30 years old. And it just, it popped because it was old, right? The fuse is old

and worn out. Yeah, old, right. And right up close. It's amperage limit for 30 years, right. And I

would have to charge them a bench fee. Because you're not paying for the fuse, you're paying for me to look at it. And that's, but that also feels really bad. I'm like, oh, man, I should just let you go for like five bucks. But no, sorry. Like, you agreed to the fee. Like that's just how it is.

If it was if it was that simple, they were done it themselves. Good point. So that's how I get around that issue with, like, fix someone's car or something.

Well, there's, you know, there's that whole joke about like a guy like looks at a machine for you know, five minutes. Like you hire this guy to come in. He looks at your machine, your big, expensive machine, and he pulls out a little hammer and just taps it in one place. And then the machine starts working and he charges you 1000 bucks for the 10 minutes. He was there. And and you say hey, all you did was hit it with the machine. He's like, Yeah, it was $10 to hit it with the with the machine. It was $990 for what's in my head to know where to hit it. Yeah. So speaking of blown fuses, you've got some some stuff on blowing fuses, right? Oh, yeah. So

this is a recap or revisit from the melted fuse holder incident that happened on my wagon incidents two months ago now. Something like that. Yeah, two months ago. Sounds right. So basically what happened was the fuse holder for my electric fan setup on my Jeep Wagoneer melted the holder itself melted like the fuse was actually fine inside the holder. It was melted, and it melted on the unprotected side of the fuse, which is like what you don't want it to happen because basically if that shorted out to the chassis, a would have a four gauge wire. It would well have Yeah, like 800 amps going through a four gauge wire and it probably would have it probably would have just melted insulation off and caught fire and probably wanted to burn the Jeep down but would not have been fun to be stuck on center road. So anyways, we're talking about it and engineer Bob from our slack in Twitch chat mentioned that they bought the same kind of fuse holders because like I engineer Bob said, they bought on Amazon and I'm like, What's the link? Oh, those things was I bought. And so engineer Bob took it apart and then photographed and basically what we found out is it's probably not a bad crimp because we thought it was a bad crimp inside the fuse holder inside the molding, where the wires go in and then they get crimped to like spade connectors, basically, a flat connectors where the fuse plugs into it was the blade receptacle itself is probably flawed for high current because it's, it's rated at like 30 amps. And it's got 14 gauge wire on it which can handle like 50 chassis wiring style, you know, short runs. But the the receptacle inside is just flimsy brass. And so it doesn't have the contact retainment force to basically push on the blade and dig in and dig in and allow high current flow through. Or if it was okay, at the beginning, that connection is loose enough to where moisture can get actually in between the connection and start to corrode. I didn't really see any corrosion on mine but Granted it was pretty charred. So we set out to find a solution to this because when you go online find fuse holders, you cannot find a legit good fuse holder. Like everything's like a copy of a copy. And they all probably come from like one big factory in China. So did some searching around. And I found that Delphi which is not Delphi anymore, they got bought by out via Alpha. I'm gonna make sure I get this right should have wrote down. But Delphi got by active as a PT IV I think they just changed their name because because it whenever you see like research Delphi, it says like active, formerly Delphi. I think they just changed your name or something like that. But Delphi makes a fuse holder setup based off their metri PAC system, which is like the weather pack, like automotive connectors. Oh, yeah, it has real terminals, like steel terminals that are like tin plated.

Oh, well, I'm looking at the pricing on these I was I was expecting quite a bit more.

No, no, not like the same price as a off shelf one that you would normally buy. Yeah, you got to assemble it yourself and crimp it. But that's actually I would prefer that that way you don't have to make a wire splice, right, your harness. Yeah. And as you get to know that the crimp is good, you get to know the crypto is good, but you're also using real terminals that have retirement for us. And they actually have like a amperage rating, and all that good stuff. But so they make a a series connector that works with with a ATC automotive fuse. And you get one of those and then you get some terminals depending on what gauge wire you're running and you're done.

Oh man, they even provide 3d files on the from their website, you can get the GS files that's awesome and are

really like is the cover they have for it actually has a little tab on mounting tab. So you can mount the fuse somewhere. So that's the I'll post it into the podcast notes. Because there's like a lot of part numbers. But what you're looking for is like the mitre pack 630 series, fuse connector. And example, part number is like 12066681. And then there's part numbers for the terminals and all that good stuff.

Okay, this is just like a really beefy version of what you had.

It's beefy, but it actually has like specifications that you can like, look up, you can hang your hat on. Yeah, it's like terminals. They have this many insertion force like this is the insertion force. This is how many cycles they can handle all that stuff. Whereas when you buy a fuse holder on Amazon or eBay or whatever, you don't know that these are honestly not that much more expensive or actually the same price because I think you still pay two bucks for like a use older

and these are waterproof, right? I mean the other ones are too, right? Yeah, they're waterproof. These are having like a little rubber boot or something like that. Yeah.

I would say splashproof is probably more adequate than waterproof.

IP five something for something. Yeah.

Something like that. They also call him like weather pack. Because they're the the weather resistance.

Max current 46 amps. Yeah. Beefy.

Well, because they have proper it's a proper steel terminal in there.

Right. And I would say they have, I guess three different flavors based off of your wire gauge wire gauge. Yeah, for anywhere from 10 to 20. Gauge. Cool. Yeah.

And I bet you they probably have different terminals if you need a different codeine on to. I think those are just tin plated. I bet you they make because I know it's

not Delphi anymore, but you gotta get gold plated for your car. Yeah, gold plated. Yeah. It looks like these crimps are tin.

Yeah, I think those are attended by you can probably get any, any flavor of codeine you want on those terminals. But the good thing is that there's their steel. So

okay, so you're replacing your the monstrosity you had in your Jeep with this, right?

Yeah, I ordered those parts a couple of days ago.

What that what gauge wire? Do you have 14? Okay. Yeah. That is cool. And so I'm sort of, I've just been looking through these. Where does the fuse sit in them? Is it like internal to the connector? Yes. Oh, okay. Okay, I see it, it kind of plugs in the end part over here plugs into the end of it. That is neat. What is that? Little like? It's almost like a, like a belt clip is sort of time that hangs off. I guess that just connects to the other side.

Let me see. Which part are you looking at?

of the very? Yeah, that's a

yeah, that plugs into the the

it's got a cap. Oh, the cap that goes over the few. So this Yeah. onto the

cap? Yeah. Okay. You actually have a positive retention on the cap too.

Right. Okay. And then and then the rubber boots around the bottom between the cap and this connector. That's what makes the seal. That's cool. And then both both your wires just come out the back end of it? Yes. Nice.

Yeah. So I ordered some of those parts. Unfortunately, Mauser has sold out of stocks. I'd ordered them from they ordered from weight tech, which is like a big online automotive voting supplier. I like them a

lot. This is this is so typical now. Like I look at this, and I'm not even surprised. Right now I'm looking at a part on Mauser. And it says zero in stock. I was like, oh, on order, when is the next thing available? And it says six 120 22. And I'm like, Huh, that's not bad. And like, oh, no, you know, like, I'm so used to it now. It's just like, six months lead time. All right. That's more than six months lead time. That's eight months. Eight months? Yeah. So it's just like, okay, cool. Yeah, I'm used to this kind of thing. That's yeah, it's rough.

It's a connector. The good thing is, I think you can get the other distributors. So it's not like it's too bad. You can go for some reason. mousers out of stock on them. But mousers typically, actually doesn't really carry too much of Delphi stuff. Or if they do, it's out of stock a lot. Hey, it's active. Formerly active. Yeah, you're right. It's

yeah, cool. And the body is made of nylon. So

yeah, high temperature. And it's like, self extinguishing, too. It's got a UL number, all that good stuff. Like, again, it's like, it has all the credentials, and it has all the ratings and you can just look it up. And it's like, this is where I need my

life. It's just not some random rubber part from Amazon. That you buy, and then you hope is good. And then you keep on fire. Yeah. Or your Jeep is almost on fire. Yeah, I got really lucky that you got super lucky dude, that would that would have sucked. Yeah.

There's a reason why. If you're listening out there, and you have Project CARS, put a fire extinguisher in your car. Actually, honestly, if just if you just drive, put a fire extinguisher in your car, you never know. Yeah, and get one of the you can't buy Halloween anymore. But there's an equivalent now. Oh, buy one of those don't buy don't put a regular like ABC chemical. Because the moment you spray that on anything in your car, it's going to corrode it so like because a lot of times cars have either it's caused by electrical fire or oil. And so you spray it on your engine it's going to eat all the wiring on your engine, right? So you might causing a lot of problems. Well you might put the fire out but then the entire car is totaled because you have needed a wiring harness. But you can't buy well you can buy pylons but normal people can't because I think it's considered normal people there's some reason why you can't buy it might be like a

regulation thing.

Well it is because it's harmful to you know something

oh god they're not cheap either.

How long's? Yeah, yeah. Um, let me see if I can split this up. So it's turning into a lot of like, look stuff up on online.

Oh, how long has a extremely high potential for ozone depletion? That's it.

Yeah, it's harmful to ozone. But you can get a I think it's called hollow Tron which is like an equivalent

Ella Tron that's great.

But oh unavailable now. Anyways, get like a five pounder. Hello Tron or equivalent of that, because anything under five pounds you're not going to put the fire out. So you need a five pounders like the minimal and then it's going to it's going to be like 260 bucks. But it's going to save your it's gonna save something someday.

Yeah, that's not cheap. Yeah, five pound from Uline is $360.

That hollow Tron? Yeah. Yeah, you can get a Buckeye hollow Tron on on. Amazon for

what? 250 To 12 to 12. Yeah, yikes. Actually, no,

this is this. Yeah, this is one I have in my jeep. No, my red Jeep. I have a 10 pounder and in my wagon. I have a five pounder.

Yeah. Just in case. You never know,

man. Yeah.

Yeah, if something did happen, then 220 bucks is nothing is nothing. Yeah.

It's just like, Okay, now I do keep an ABC for camping though. Yeah, that's like 15 pounder, because you're trying to put out brush fire.

You need all you need. I actually I keep an ABC hanging on my beer brewing rig. Oh, yeah. That's a good idea. Just in case. You know, like, it's still Steve Craig wired to 2050 amps. At least

it's not in the post office box anymore. Hey, that's what that was. That was a test. And it was successful test. Might be the sketchiest thing ever done on this podcast?

Maybe? I don't know. We've done sketchy stuff. That's up there though. Yeah, that would that was up. There was fun. We got beer out of it.

You got beer out of it? Yep. Yeah, I went over your house to brew that day, too.

Yeah. Yeah.

That was we went over the house. That was your apartment. We went to your apartment to brew but that was also we did the podcast with that was the first time we did the podcast with Chris gamble. Was it? Yeah. Recorded a podcast on? Yeah. In brewed beer.

Yeah. That was fun.

That was a long day. I think it was a Friday.

If you well not. The next time you come up here. I'm gonna we're gonna wheel the rig out into the backyard. And we're gonna brew us a batch. We're gonna turn that catches on fire. Yeah, good. Good beer day. So okay, so I've got some, some parts that I want to share, too. So I didn't start using these parts until about, I don't know, a handful of years ago. And now I've been using them. They're there in almost everything I do. Now. They're not particularly special. But if you're not aware of them like this is a good chance to go and take a look. So the DG series analog switches. So these ICs are analog switches that generally run high voltage, high voltage being about 44 volts. So they're bi directional switches that you can pick basically, whatever flavor of switch you want. So they there's however many channels typically one to eight channels, but you can get DPDT DPST, SPDT SPST, you can get any almost any kind of switch all bi directional, and they're there. They're full they except full analog signal, up to 44 volts. But they're all controllable with TTL logic. So you can, for the most part, plug them directly into whatever micro you have. And you can steer your signals. Regardless of basically, regardless of the signal, unless it's just like some really high high speed signal, you can steer them wherever you want in your circuit. So they become, in a lot of the circuits that I've been working with, they become really invaluable. Because one of the nice things about having an analog switch I see is being able to place the IC really close to where it needs to be to be able to switch things and ideal,

the ideal spot where you need to switch the signals, yeah, then run your switch to the panel.

Exactly, exactly. And it allows you to have to, honestly, to put less expensive mechanical items on your front panel and have them just control really, really low voltage, really low current digital signals that go over to these analog switches that do all the magic right at the analog section, because I like to keep my analog stuff as compact as possible in one location as possible. So I put these Digi switches in my analog portion, and then just use mechanical switches to do things. It also opens up the ability such that you can, you can have mechanical switches that are really simple on your front panel do multiple functions. Whereas if you didn't do that, and you had to send signals to your front panel, you end up buying really expensive switches in order to do multiple functions at the same time. But these these Digi switches are awesome. So So Snoopy DJ in the chat is asking, would they distort audio at all? And the answer is, you know, if you're if you're trying to do like Hi Fi audio, I'm maybe someone would complain about something like these, I don't believe that there is a significant amount of distortion in these. I haven't noticed them. But my application typically doesn't require like, immaculate distortion specifications. So you know, he restored it. Well, not really trying to distort it. But like any distortion can be chalked up to character, I guess you could say like, it gives, it gives our stuff more flavor. But so I wouldn't use these in like super hypercritical, like if you need an absolute voltage, I wouldn't use something like this, mainly because these switches tend to have non zero source impedance in between. So you can expect it like on a really good switch, you might get like 10 ohms, but on like the regular DG switches that you're seeing, I've seen like 100, ohms, 150 ohms. And saying

that these are these I've looked up, like this is the DG q 27. Apa, as an honor point three, seven home.

Yeah, and that's, that's really fantastic. But it's also that one's probably a little bit more expensive, it probably is more expensive. Yeah, most of the stuff that I use is closer to the 100 Ohm range. And I just account for that if say if I'm, if I'm using this to switch whatever source goes into like an op amp or something, if I need it to be more accurate, I'll take that into account. But I'm usually not using these switches to, to switch things that have really critical amplitudes on them. I'm switching audio signals and things like that, where it's not a big

already processed audio are going to be processed. It's not like an a feedback loop or anything like that,

well, I have these human feedback loops, and they work pretty well there too. As long as you just don't care about the absolute of the feedback, you know, like if it's changed, like you could use one of these, honestly, you could use one of these in a feedback loop and have like four discrete levels of feedback or eight discrete levels of feedback, and then have some kind of actually, this is a great example of what you could do with that. Say, you have an inexpensive rotary encoder on your front panel, send the rotary encoder to a micro have the micro talk to one of these DG switches and change feedback levels on an op amp and your analog section.

Yeah, and what's the gain stage, you can basically change your gain really easily, super easily.

And you're not having to send a feedback signal all the way through connectors up to your front panel and back. So it's, it's a hell of a lot better for your signal integrity. So yeah, if you go if you go to one of the big players and search for vishay, DG or even just DG analog switches, there's a ton available out there. You know, I saw I saw a really cool example. A circuit the other day that had in a four channel analog mux basically, so for in one out, it's bi directional, but it was basically for it. One out is what they were looking at. And so this one person used some flip flops with a clock signal to be able to cycle through all four of the signals. And they and they took the output of the analog switch to an A to D on their processor. And they took the clock signal to their, their processor. And they were able to channel sweet with 180 D, and one of these Digi switches. So it was it was they had fewer pins on their processor. And it was just a nice way to do channel sweeping on that and reading through. So there's a lot of really cool applications for this. And I see a lot of like DIY projects out there that are doing things like sending signals all the way to a switch and then sending it all the way back and things. And that's a great example where it's like, you could buy a cheaper switch and just put one of these Digi analog switches in your circuit it to do the exact same thing and it would work. Probably better.

probably much better actually. Yeah. Cool.

Wow. 51 minutes.

Yeah. We'll save my next topic for next time. Sounds good. Which is a very tasty USB type C connector, which will probably want to talk for like five minutes. But that'd be a cliffhanger for this week.

Five minutes or 30 however it works out our works out. So that was hey, got it. Hang on. Well, before we leave, don't you have a stream going on coming up here soon? Oh, yeah.

Well, easy to get in. For some reason. We just, we just tangent it right into the pond,

we just blitzed right past.

So this weekend, coming up November 6 2021. I'm doing my 20 my yearly 24 hour video game stream for the extra life charity, which benefits the Texas Children's Hospitals. Here in Texas. Last year, I did the same thing. And I was able to raise like, I think it was like $2,500 or something like that. So this year, I'm going for 5000 Double that you can donate through my extra life channel. It's like extra hyphen life.org/participant/four 63007. Or just go to the blog and click the link. If you don't want to donate, but still want to participate in Hangout, just come out to the Twitch channel. And first it's not gonna be the macro Twitch channel. It's going to be my personal one, which is twitch.tv/crab. Foam at CRABF Oh, A M. and I'm gonna start playing at eight o'clock on Saturday on November 6, and then I play until November 7. And that's actually daylight savings as well. So actually probably be gaming for 25 hours.

Ah, so that's you're starting November 6 at 8am 8am. Yes,

yeah. Yeah. Because that way when like 8am rolls, rolls around on Sunday, I just got to go to bed and like, wake up at like 6pm bars and go back to bed again. Yeah, yeah, well, we will drop a link into Slack. It'd be on Twitter and all that good stuff.

Just another reason to join our Slack channel so you can get these links, these hot links.

And so this year I'm gonna be playing. I think we decided on Legend Zelda Ocarina of Time when we tried to beat it in 24 Slash, excuse me five hours. So it's going to be interesting. I've never tried to, quote speed run this game. I'm not going to try to actually speed run it. But like, for me, like when we move in.

So you, you got four days until this hurrah happens.

It's actually three hours, three days and 16 hours, something like that.

Okay, so not not even four. So yeah, so the, the, do you know? Like, can you just beat Zelda right now in your head? Or are you going to have to like remember how to do it?

I'm gonna have to remember how to beat it. Okay. beforehand. I've been in the game a couple of times before and I've beaten the what they call the master quest version a couple times. And so like I know the general order of like to do things and where things like the key items are located right. Like we probably won't go for like the extra stuff.

Oh, sure. Well also you're playing a game that like it's a gamers game. Like every gamer has played this. So if you ever need to know something, he could probably just turn to the chat and be like, Guys, where is this? And they'd be like right here.

Shouldn't have that much of that. But yeah, it's not like last year I played half life to the whole whole series of that those games. Those or like I can almost do that in my sleep. Yeah. And so there's a rule last year and I carried the rule for this year, which is if I die in the game, you die. Life. I had to take a drink. Oh, I didn't even drink a whole beer or take a shot. Oh, wow. And so I don't want too many of those early and Half Life in Half Life two, I didn't die at all.

To be honest, Zelda is Ocarina of Time isn't particularly difficult.

No, I bet Chai will die though. Because there's maybe once or twice.

Yeah. Cool. Well, we'll we will all tune in. Yeah,

I hope so. It's been a lot of fun. Oh, and then like, the for like lunch that sat or I guess. For dinner on that Saturday. I'm going to cook a pizza by scratch. I'm gonna stream that as well. I don't know how exactly endless stream not yet, but I'll figure it

out. If you kill the pizza, you have to take a shot.

So you're gonna make the pizza by scratch to the extreme that the pizza making? So that'd be fun. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of fun. It's one of those like, I have to make sure I'm like pro gamer by it's like,

how many RGBs do you have on the wall behind you? None. Not pro gamer? Not programmer enough. Yeah, it's got your rooms got to be like neon. Neon.

pulsating. pulsating between blue and purple. Oh, yeah.

All right.

Yeah, that was are we done that we're done. The microwave engineer podcast we host Parker Dolman and Steven Gregg lair everyone

take it easy.