A decade after graduating college, Stephen finally did a differential equation for his job! That is some real engineering I tell you what.
The PinoTaur has reached production status but not without supply chain issues..OF COURSE! Bonus discussion about thermal management for PCBA.
Is there a statue of limitations on open source hardware projects? This week, Stephen and Parker dive into what open source means for both of them.
Figure 1: Happy 4th Birthday MacroFab!
Figure 2: Pinotaur logos that listeners sent in!
Figure 3: Aylons’ FPGA BGA Soldering setup.
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 Mac fab engineering podcast. We are your host, Stephen Craig
and Parker Dohmen. This is episode 85. So this week was this week, I guess, but in more importantly, it was on Wednesday, it was September 13, which was the fourth anniversary of macro fab.
Four years old. Whoo. Yeah. So many layers. Yeah. Oh, cheers. Cheers. I'm sure that came through on Oh, yeah,
these mics are pretty, pretty brutal. That was the day that Makram was incorporated. Not the day that we started doing anything. Well, that's usually how it goes. Right? Yeah, the company had to be incorporated in like, I started on the 30th or the first of October. Okay, so you're almost at four years, almost four years. Congratulations. Oh, not yet. So got two weeks ago. Okay. Well,
I don't think they're gonna Can you in two weeks.
At the end of this month, we have the hardware and electronics engineering meetup. here in Houston. We had to cancel last week's because there was a hurricane. Yeah, just a little storm.
Harvey gotten away. Yeah.
So we have two talks. This time, we have how to design products with lean manufacturing in mind, which you are doing.
That's right, which I was gonna do last time. So we just rolled it over. Yeah.
The best thing he was just like smirking when like we had to cancel an event because he hadn't done his presentation yet.
I'm gonna do my presentation the night before.
3pm On that day on that Wednesday,
yeah. Oh, shit. I gotta write something.
And then we'll have we have some guys from Mouser, who are the sponsors of our meetup. They're going to be doing a presentation on how to use their parametric search on their website,
which is completely nerdy but amazing. I'm actually I really want to see it myself. Yeah, this is something I actually kind of discussed with them a little bit. I was talking to the some of their guys. And I was like, You should show us like tips and tricks on how to use your parametric search, because it's not always the easiest. And like, how do I drill down and get what I want? Quickly? Yeah. So they're going to talk about that.
And of course, we'll have free food, beer and tours of the fab.
Yeah, come hang out. Come network. Yep. Have fun. Yeah, that's
6pm. Last Wednesday of this month, which is the 27th of September. Iris is the best. Yeah. Alright, so topics this week. We're gonna be talking about fixing and Stephens motorcycle. Yep. Which we haven't done yet. But we're gonna be talking about fixing it. New Gear for the Met. Whoo. Yeah. So instead of talking on these moderately, okay, USB microphones, we're gonna be getting some decent equipment. So Stephens gonna be talking about that. We'll have the pick of the week, the PAL and then their RFO Alright, so Parker, yeah, your motorcycle. piece of garbage.
Hey.
What? What motorcycle is it?
I have a 2001 Honda. Aero VT. 1100 c three.
Yeah. It's like what the? It's basically the Japanese like Harley. Yeah,
it was their answer to Harley. In fact, if I don't quote me on this, but I'm almost 100% certain they actually got sued by Harley. Do they copy the trademark sound? They did. They cut they copied the engine, the the internal engine, the rotation of the firing of the cylinders from the 98 year, and then the 99 year was 135 degrees. So you would think that the cylinders would fire 180 degrees out of phase with each other but hardly does 135 That's why when you hear a Harley, it sounds like it's saying Potato, potato, potato potato. It's an effect that and Honda got sued for that. So the Oh, the 2000 and the 2001 model they moved to 180 degrees so it's like yours. Yeah, mine vibrates a
lot less. Yeah. Yours actually runs smoother. It does. Yeah, it does. Although the
135 once you get it up to about 70 miles an hour you don't feel the vibration anymore. No. Yeah. But does vibrate like a madman?
Yeah, I wonder if they make retro kits to like, turned 2000 ones and 2000s to
135? No, I actually designed so in college, I had a class where I had to come up with ideas. We actually had to create products, a couple products every week. And one of the products I made was a retrofit crankshaft for a motorcycle such that you could pull a lever it would break the crank shaft, you could advance it to 135 and then reconfigure the the crankshaft so if you're going in the city and you wanted the Harley sound, you could move the crankshaft to that degrees, or if you wanted to, like go on a trail and Ride for hours and hours, he puts it to 180 degrees. So interesting project, whatever, I had to come up with something and I had a motorcycle at the time that you have to
actually doing design work or is it just like the theoretical high level?
Theoretical, it was theoretical, but you I had to get up in front of a class of 700 people and present the project Jesus huge clap. Yeah, it was huge.
So anyways, motorcycle doesn't run well runs. And the fact that it moves,
yes. So it's a V Twin two cylinders, one of the cylinders fires, the other one does not.
And so, engine, you need three things. Yes. Fuel, Spark compression, right. So one of those things isn't working at one cylinder,
at least multiple things, we and you need the moving parts to actually be in there too. Yes. So that's the fourth thing.
Well, that makes compression, right?
Oh, I got Yeah. Okay.
And so, for the longest time, we even thought it was gas, the fuel part? Because you took it to like two shops. And the gut. No, like, oh, yeah, it's definitely the carburetor. And so they cleaned the carbs. Right? They like rebuilt the whole carburetor. It still has the issue,
right? It just yeah, that back. The back cylinder does not fire. Yeah. And exhaust pipe is cold.
Yeah. And the. But then we were talking about and so we were gonna, we were going to attack it as a fuel problem. We're going to clean the carburetor, all that stuff, all the line total lines, which needs to be anyways, because it hasn't been it hasn't been written in two years. Yeah. And so it's going to be all varnish stuff, right? But then you mentioned that you had a rag stuffed in the exhaust pipe, and it was soaked in gas, the one that wasn't firing.
That's right, you can put your hand over the exhaust pipe, and then smell your hand and it smells like gas.
Yeah. Which means it's getting gas and that cylinder.
So compression is pulling air through the carbs through the carbs
and pushing it out to your exhaust. That's right. And so I'm like, Okay, we're missing ignition now.
So what's an electrical problem? We're talking about motorcycles on the map that yes, it's an electrical problem.
So explain the the circuit that the ignition does on the on this motorcycle.
So there's the I don't I can't remember what it's called the spark jet gap generator that's down in the crankcase. Yeah, that that's a that rotates and basically times the mission distributor distributor. Yes. Probably call it something else on the motorcycle I think it is. But it's a distributor in the car world it for some reason Magneto comes to mind. I think it is called the magneto. Regardless, that thing, it spins down when in time with the crankshaft. In fact, it's directly connected to the crankshaft, that's my distributor,
and Magneto puts power into it. Okay, okay. Yeah,
that's probably actually on the other side of the crankshaft. So that actually sends a basically a pulse to the step up transformer, which is the ignition coil action coils. So I've got four spark plugs on this bike, two per cylinder. And the fact that I'm not burning gas in the back cylinder tells me that you know, it would be it would be it doesn't seem reasonable that both spark plugs for the back cylinder would be bad. Yeah. So we assume that the
ignition coil it's easy to strip is either distributors bad like one pegs broken in it could be or the ignition coil for that one is bad.
So the story goes like this. I used to have a warehouse here in Houston that I lived in. And I drove the bike into it in the wintertime. I knew I wasn't going to ride it over the winter. So I set the bike down from riding it, it ran beautifully. I forgot to turn the petcock off and I let it sit for three months while it was cold here in Houston. And then the next time I tried to start it up in like February, it does not run. So
now I got a question is did you take it to a shop then? No, I don't not. So what you do then,
I was actually moving from my from that location to another location. I actually drove the bike on one cylinder ah to the location which it does not run well. It makes running and it doesn't go above about 35 and it chugs like a madman when you do that. So I wrote backstreets all the way to the new place and then I parked it there. And after after some months I took it to a shop. But I had actually before it took it to the shop. I pulled the carbs myself because I thought it was just a carb issue. I pulled the carbs and I completely cleaned them. All the Jets were were open. You could blow air through them. The bowls both had fuel on it. Yeah, they were coming in the bottom they have varnish the way the guys at the shop actually called it they said it had boogers inside of it. So I cleaned all of those out. And the bike still didn't run so that tells me that it's probably not a fuel issue. Now, you could put a compressor I've compressed air through the carbs and it will spit tons of gas out of it. So I don't think It was a car issue. And I do have the right jets in the card for the pipes that I have on there. So it seems everything seems to point that it's an electrical.
Yeah. What we'll do is we'll have you hold the spark plug, and I'll crank it over.
Yeah, sounds great. I'll put on my tongue. That's what you do with a nine volt battery, right? Yeah. That's 30,000 volts.
That's the That's the worst electrical shock I've ever had. You've been hit by a sparkling I was hit by my distributor cap. Oh my god. Yeah, yeah, that was fun. I have done that actually knocked me on my butt.
Back in high school, I was mowing my buddy's lawn, and he had a ghetto lawnmower, and you couldn't turn the lawnmower off. The only way you would turn off is just pull the cap off the spark flow. And he had a zip tie on the line and the zip tie was long and you would grab that and yank it off. Well, I tried doing that my hand slips so I just grabbed the wire and pulled it right off. Oh, and 30,000 volts will arc a couple inches. Yeah,
a couple years especially since you're like you know you're mowing the lawn. So you a little sweaty, salty, sweaty?
Yeah, yeah, I got hit by like, even just a lawn mower. And oh, my god that woke me up. Yeah.
Yeah, it knocked me on my butt. And I just was like, Well, I'm done working on a Jeep for today.
It hurts. Oh, yeah. So we're going to be doing that this weekend. Not the lecture cleaning part. Well, yeah. So I've got I've got gobs and gobs of parts, because we're going to be doing new filters, new plugs, new oil, new everything. Yep. So we're just gonna I don't know. I'll bring beer. We'll have fun. Yeah, we shouldn't take a video of it. Yeah, why not?
Weather together and see if it actually works or not.
Hey, it needs to work. Yeah. The weather is about to be good. And I want to ride it to work. Yep.
So yeah, that's gonna be fixing seems, I guess next week. Next week, we have a guest. So the week after that, we'll have an update on motorcycle. Okay. And lots of people pay attention to Twitter. And they'll know right away.
Yeah, we'll post something about it.
So yeah, new gear for the map, or the maktab engineering pocket, right.
New motorcycle, new gear. So, you know, we've been for the past couple episodes, two episodes, actually. So we haven't been recording with Josh, due to the hurricane. And we kind of made the decision to get our own gear and start doing it here at macro fab. So we're changing things up a little bit. So I actually Specht out a whole podcast recording set. And we better than your average podcast recording. Yeah, we want this to we want this to sound nice. We want it to sound as good as how it did when we were at Josh. In other words, when you're listening to us, we want you to not realize that you're listening to us, you know, in other good sound in general. So I'll just give you a quick rundown of a couple of things that we're getting. We're getting a Motu eight pre USB interface. Yep. Motor is a pretty good brand. Not pretty good. They're like mid to upper range. Brand. prosumer prosumer. Effectively, yeah, so we're not spending gazillions of dollars getting it. But it's also not the cheapest thing you can buy. Yeah, we're getting to SM seven B. By Shure microphones. Those are kind of gold standard for podcast recording and the ones we use at Joshua studio. Yeah. They sound great. And they'll last a long time for us. So everything else that we're getting is a lot of housekeeping stuff like rackmount power supplies, rackmount interface for XLR connections and things like that. So Parker, you have a rackmount case that you're kind of donating to the map, right? Yeah.
So I've got this like, old school 50s era rackmount. That's still it's 19 inch. All that good. Yeah, standard spacing. And it was made by at least the bad John, it was made by what the precursor of TI was. And that looked that up real quick. So keep talking about this stuff. Okay, so
Well, the point of this is we decided we want the whole podcast recording rig to be in a rackmount format. So we don't have to have a bunch of cables lying around or anything like that. So I actually SPECT everything out, this is great. It's all rackmount including the power and everything is accessible in terms of the plugs from the backside of all the rack stuff. So the front of this rack mount case will just have all of our dials and knobs and all the stuff that we want plus the the place where we plug our mics into, but all of the signal routing and everything is done on the back of the rig. So it looks super clean, and it's really easy to set up. Yep.
The company that was before TI that won't became TI was geophysical services. They did, like geological like surveying and stuff and
Oh, okay. Yeah, like seismic seismic stuff. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, the the plan right now and I'm actually kind of happy about this. I think it's going to be great. We have the we actually have four mics, two of them are the SM seven B's and two are sure sm 50 as well. They're kind of gold standard for mics. And in fact, a lot of the guests that you've listened to on the map have used sm 58. Silver at Josh's. So we have the ability to have up to eight input. So we could have four people with four other inputs for whatever, synthesizers. That's right. Yeah, all of them in the background. So the cool thing is everything plugs into one patch bay in the front. And then it gets signal routed all to the back. We also have two, three, you rackmount drawers, so we'll put so all the mics and all the cables go in there, the whole thing collapses it, and that becomes one unit.
And this thing is like two and a half feet by two and a half feet. Yeah. And so and it's on wheels. So we just wheel it into a corner, where it will live for 99% of its life and then wheel it out for the two hours on Thursday. Door recording, put it all away. And everything we have the computer there yet all ready to go.
So you plug it into the wall, you plug what however many mics you need into it. I'm going to create templates in our recording software such that the EQs and everything are all set. So we basically just turn it on record, plug it all back in or pack it all up and put it in the corner. It's going to be super awesome. Real easy real transport. It's, it's meant for this podcast, and basically this podcast alone.
Yeah, it's for the style podcast.
Right, right. And so on top of that I've actually had here at macro fab I've had to mine print DTC, which stands for dual Tube channel. microphone preamps. And compressors. Yep. That I've been meaning to fix. Eventually, they've been sitting in my area of the engineering department. And we moved here dislocation. Yeah, actually, I brought them over right after that, right after we moved. Yeah. So I picked these things up at a local electronics store. For 200 bucks, both of them and they go for $3,000 each. Yeah, so I got a killer deal on them, but they didn't work at the time. So I've basically been bringing them back to life. And we're gonna use those as our microphone. preamps.
So, and that's a German company that builds those, right? Yeah, I
don't, I don't even remember what the company's name is. I mean, it's mine print ink was mine print, but they're owned by some other German company, German name, whatever. They're pretty rare. You don't really find them all over the place. So for any hammer, stammer, is that what it is? Oh, yeah. Okay, so Parker's got the schematic form, and it back over to him. stammer, okay. Yeah, it's
their logo is kind of weird. Yeah. Or that's the company that just did the design.
It's possible. I don't know. So, getting the schematics was kind of interesting. So I, I've been trying to fix these things without schematics. And they're pretty complex. And there's some issues in them that are not just like, simple things like, Oh, the power supply doesn't work. That's usually an easy fix. Find the thing that's burnt? Yeah. But so I decided to get the schematics for this. So I contacted them just on a whim. I was like, Do you guys offer schematics, I fix things. And I actually got an email back from them. And the email was weird, because the support lady was like, Are you technically minded? And she goes, she goes, send me any information of you being technically minded, suddenly, you're versus target SSN. And exactly. So I'm like, Oh, my gosh, because I used to be certified as a Korg. authorized repair technician, okay, back in the day. So I just took a screenshot of my Korg like, login, that I funnily enough still have. And I sent that to her. And she's like, this is acceptable. I also looked you up on Google, and there's pictures of you in a shop and that was fine, too. Like, okay, so she sent me.
I looked you up? Yeah. stalking you. Yeah. No,
she's like, it looks like you know what you're doing. All right. So we have the schematics and it's 20 pages of schematics.
And there, it's pretty well, the best thing is the functional diagram on the on the front. Yeah, because it has a three blocks. Yeah.
I don't know if we can post this. She did say make it confidential. Yeah. So we can't post but it's really simple to
Yeah, it's simple. It has on the left side of the box says power supply. Yeah. And on the right side, it says it has another box that says all boards, that just wires, the wires with what voltages they are, but it's not like they're color coded or anything.
And this thing has like eight boards. It has had eight different ones just says all
boards. Yeah, but this one's got a lot of power rails. It does plus minus 22 volts. So you got two rails there. Yep, plus minus 1502 plus seven equals your guesses the heaters for the tubes. No, that's plus
300 volts. That's the plus 300 volt would be the anode. Yeah.
Negative 12.6. That's the heat and then ground.
Okay, so plus minus 15 is like every op amp that's in the thing. Yep. The plus 70 is actually, its unfiltered. And then they filter right at the microphone input for phantom power. So they bumped 70 down to 45. Is 4840. Okay. Yeah, you know, yeah. 48. And then what was what was the other one? The minus 22? I have no clue. I don't know what that does.
That's the mind print, power, my mind power. That's gonna be the code word. My power
line print power. So if you, if you email in mind print power to podcast at macro fab.com. Along with your address, we will send you some sweet swag. If you are in the United States. Yep.
And actually speaking of that, because last week, we had the contest. That's right for the pen retard. And I'm I and I just remember this. I did not write down the notes of who sent we have three we had three people right in.
Well, yeah, we had Tom. Tom was one Tom Anderson.
Yeah. Which is from The Matrix.
Mr. Anderson?
Yeah, it was there was Tom and Tom. Thomas Anderson. Is is in matrix. Yeah, and whatnot. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And then we had another one this morning. Econ designs, which, I guess we don't have a name for that. Anyways, we'll put all of them up in the podcast notes because they're freaking awesome. Yeah. All three of
them. They're very different. Yeah. Very different. And they're all co they're also super, super great. So thanks, guys for taking the time to to draw out the Penetang. Yeah. You need to use one of those.
Yeah, no, I'm so excited. Like, like, the fact that someone actually one person, or all I cared about was yeah, the write in
and one of them is like sketchy. Yeah. And the one of them is like full color. Yeah, they took the watercolor. Yeah, it is it is that somebody took like a lot of time on that. And the other one is, I don't know. It's fine art. Yeah, liner, and it's fantastic. They're all offended. All great. Great. So thanks a lot. Have you talked to the rest of the Pinhead crew?
I just couldn't send it over to them. They haven't responded. Oh,
I'm just gonna do it. You just gonna put it on there. Yeah.
I think what I'm going to do is take all three. One's gonna be like the official logo. And then like on the back of the board, I'm gonna put all of them now. Okay. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So it'd be cool. What a special thanks, and blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, yeah. I think we've got some sweet stuff going their way.
Oh, yeah. They're gonna get T shirts and swag and probably some macro watches.
Awesome. Thanks, guys.
So that's the end of the project section. Yep. So the pic of the week. This was from our Slack channel. And there'll be a link down below for the Slack channel that we started. We actually started to get I think it's like 42 people in there now. Yeah, just pretty cool. This guy, his name is I want the lawns, a lawns, a lawns. He showed off a really interesting way to like reflow BJs at home. Okay, so what he did is he took a close iron, like an iron, like the iron you're close with? Yeah. Okay. flipped it upside down and put it in a vise. Okay. Okay. And then so he just has a hot plate. Yeah, he has a hot plate, but it's a close iron, logical design. And then you put a thermocouple on it so he can read the temperature with his multimeter. Okay. Okay. And then he uses the PID, which is a person in Dominion. Zoo to basically he looks at the temperature and flips a switch on and off
to control the temperature. Oh, my. Okay. Okay. So he puts it puts the board down and out of variac. But just to switch off switch on and off. He's very slowly PWM. Yes.
So he puts Well, the thing is what he figured out I want to guess is there's a lot of thermal mass. And so when it gets up temp, he just clicks it on and turns it off, and waits for it to cool back down. turns back on. Oh,
yeah. You know, those things don't cool down or heat up. Yeah, super fast. Yeah.
So the, so he takes his board, ramps it onto the the iron. Cleans the board to the iron. Yeah. He has big like spring clamps. Okay. And then he puts the BGA on, right? Yeah, where it needs to go. And then he takes another multimeter and diode mode that connects it to one of the pins on the board that connects to an IO pin, an FPGA and one that connects to the ground plane. So
he's reading the internal diode.
Yes, that goes to the ESD ESD protection. No. So when it reflows the multimeter beeps and he can turn off the iron.
That is awesome. Yeah. Brilliant. That's like hacker level. 9000 Yeah, no, I'm sorry. You sent a picture
and everything so I'm gonna put that in the description
because that is that is to to rely on the internal protection diodes to determine if you're recording. Yeah, that's a liquid. Yeah yeah yeah that's awesome yeah
cool thought you would think that's awesome
yeah I actually had not seen that so that is that is really cool
okay so the RFO we got to this week
get
this week we have a sewer in London's East End menaced by giant fat Berg found that on New York Times. And then a question from our CEO Chris church.
Oh man, I haven't heard this one. I don't. I'm not reading it. I'm not really.
So we're gonna go to the fat Berg. Okay. Actually, Justin are our operations VP, VP. Thank you because I always I don't know who people are.
titles don't mean anything to Parker. No.
They call they actually have a name for a couple of White Chapel fat Berg. It's under the fat bird or it's under the White Chapel Street.
Okay, so that bird what is a fat bird is
a collection of what wipes and grease that's congealed into almost like concrete structure. In their in their drainage.
It's actually somewhat more like a fat glacier. Yeah. That doesn't move flow. It's not like floating. It's like just sticking there.
But it's, it's it's a sixth of a mile long. Oh my god. Yeah. And it weighs an estimated 140 tons.
Yeah. And it's just completely clogging the pipes. Yeah. This is the best was a quote
from this guy named Lee Irving which is like on the engineering team or something like that. That's tasked for removing the fat bird. It is described the experience as a countering a fat. Oh, wait, I'm reading this wrong. I'd know I just typed it down wrong. Okay. Yeah. Experience of accounting a fabric as overwhelming with a smell that mixes rotting meat and I smelly toilet, smelly toilet.
As opposed to a regular. Yeah. I can't believe we're talking about
this. This is great. So the reason why I brought this up is because it's really an opinion to have on a fat
burner. Um, I I kind of like it, Parker. You're right. There's zero opinion. You have one option when
you get rid of it. Yeah, isn't there so how do you how they're going to get rid of it is they basically are sending eight people down there to spend three weeks what jackhammers, jackhammers and pickaxes and shovels to get rid of the White Chapel fat burger. So what would you how would you get rid of the fat burn?
Kill it with fire? If it's grease? Can you just ignite
it's all probably burned forever. Yeah, cuz it wouldn't be because you could burn the the the wet wipes would be the wick. Oh, and then all the sludge just have to you'd have to to make that work is you'd have to force force and duct air into the the sewer. Yeah. Because and then just like, I wonder how long that would take. Okay, another idea or just cashed the entire sewer system on fire? It would do that? It would for sure. Yeah. And that would be Yeah, all the all the potholes
would just explode straight through the street. You'd have geysers and flames across the all of London so no ain't gonna work. Have you seen how they drilled the English Channel? They? Oh, yeah, they just take one of those and just drill through and filter just
a small version of those. Yeah, yeah.
Just a whole bunch of diamond nibs or whatever. You know, those little inserts they put on the things and just have it just destroy it? Yeah. How about you? What how would you take care of fat Berg?
I would probably like it depends on like how they say it's like concrete. But if it's like movable anyway, like, I would like make a plug and try to shoot it out. Like put just build like a what they called a pig in in oil and gas. Okay, so it's a pig for your for your pipeline is basically it sucks in like a cork. And then you put pressure behind the pig. And the pig just moves through the pipeline because the pressure differential. Yeah, and it kind of scrapes all the sludge off the pipeline. All right. So if you put a giant pig behind it and just like crank that psi up and shot it out into the things River.
Oh, that's great. Yeah that's fantastic. I did not expect that explanation. It wouldn't have to make like a great noise like like that whole, like, as it comes out of the two of you know,
they would do a documentary about that process right. Oh, so they had to have like the slow motion of like arcing over the river. Oh, that's
disgusting. Because then it just lands in the river and now you gotta you gotta floating fat Berg in the middle of the river. Oh, so Okay, yeah, maybe their solution is the best just send a bunch of dudes in there and chisel it out.
I do like the fire method. Yeah, just burning right. Yeah,
but I mean, then you just have a bunch of ash to take care of. Yeah. And smell. Yeah, I bet you it smells absolutely horrendous. Well, they said so rotting meat and the bad
thing about that is it and that aren't New York Times article. They have a the current sewer system in London was like built in like the 1800s or something like that. After an event called The Great Stink.
Where Yeah, they mentioned that Parliament had to had to leave. Yeah,
because the thing is river smelt too bad. naming scheme, the Great Stink
a great thing. And aren't they creating a new sewer system called the super super, super super? That's where the ninja turtles live for.
Super Syria. Okay, so onto the question from our CEO, Chris church. So I was looking for more our photos. Okay. And this was posted into the Slack channel. Okay. And the question is, do engineers in space helmets work faster or slower than caffeinated chipmunks? What? Yeah. magnifier printer? Come on, man.
So engineers in space helmets. So it's not in space just in space helmets. Okay. In Space helmets work faster than caffeinated. So
we know we need to qualify her to because it doesn't mean that your head's in the space helmet, or does your entire body have to be stuffed into the space helmet? mortar, we need to find an engineer small that that fits all the way into space helmets.
I'm what I'm trying to do right now. What I've been trying to piece together is is my knowledge of what Chris church would think would be an answer to this. I'm trying to figure out what he would think would be an answer. I can't even be
asking these questions like potential people that work here. As interview question, interview question,
yeah. Would you rather be in a space helmet? Or would you rather be a caffeinated chip? My mother used to always used to ask me, Are you reading the school bus? Or are you taking your sandwich to school? You know, she would ask like random questions were like they're two completely unrelated things. That's what this is. Exactly. Those kinds of things. I don't know. I you know, I know. I don't know what your thoughts
it's, I don't think if you're just wearing a space someone I don't think it impedes you from working except maybe visually.
I'm probably
and does a company chipmunk. It depends on the work. We're gonna chipmunk, a cafe chipmunk is definitely going to be better at collecting nuts, then any kind of human being? Will but is that
the task that you're going for it? Well, just like work? Just Oh, just general.
Yeah, there's just general work. So it's like, is it coding? Is it you know, moving this desk across the floor? Is it collecting nuts in the street? Well,
okay, so I know one thing. I cannot wear any kind of visual thing on my head without it fogging up, and that is guaranteed. I hate safety glasses because I don't do anything so no matter what I would be better than me for sure. Okay, cuz it would fog up. Yeah. Yeah.
I think it'd be better than chipmunk unless it's clucking nuts.
I'm wondering if he asked that question because your profile picture is you in a spell space.
That's actually part of what I guarantee you and you know what his is so he's asking better than anyone else's. His profile picture is a is a squirrel, or I don't know it's caffeinated or not.
I Yes. That dude lives on monsters.
In a bonus question. Yeah. And which does less damage
Oh,
so in the DMV, by far so in d&d, how much if a chipmunk attacks you? What kind of dice holders again? Huh?
The human gets a D six, D four. Okay, hearing that unarmed, unarmed human If you're just if you're just punching someone you get d for Okay, so
d for a space helmet on. So you get a ramp. You get a blunt weapon head weapon.
Oh, so if you if you're just swinging a space helmet, so no no if you if
what is there? What's a roll for blunt head? Jab? Oh, like so if you have a helmet like a steel helmet on and you like try to like, pay him someone,
they would actually probably still call that a de force. Like he basically tried
to get targeting calling football
Yeah, I think I think just if I remember right, I think it's just everything that you try to like whack with your body is what's what's a baseball bat. A baseball bat might be a D six. Okay, be it but it's kind of up to the D I
don't think I don't think a homerun would give you a mechanical advantage over just your bare
head. Well, it will give you it would give you dexterity you would you would go down actually your armor class based off of that helmet would now we're getting into d&d,
so you get de force. What about chipmunk though?
A chipmunk would get probably a D to actually okay. And and it would have a very hard time doing damage to you. Yeah. So it will get mega negatives. So what a good rule to 20 though, if a rule for if you're playing off of version three, if it rolled a 20 and then it roll the 20 it kills you.
So it is possible,
it is absolutely possible for a chip,
but it's the same probability that a human would kill someone with the specimen on if he did it. 2020 as well.
Yeah. According to those rules, and it's kind of annoying, or some people think it's kind of annoying. I 2020 kills anything. effectively. So anything that rolls 2020
That's a one out 400 chance. Yeah, why not? 20 out of 120 Yes, yeah.
And it does happen. Well, I've seen
that odds is actually not bad. No. 400 No, no, if you play long
enough, you will run into that. Yeah,
though. I bet I bet you were on that roll. Was there like oh, yeah, rolling one to 20 in a row is probably not gonna be profitable. But when you just go it's one 400 chance it
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely happens. Yeah, I have I have DM the game and put my characters against a big thing. And one guy looked at it, he rolled a 20 rolled another 20 on the single attack killed. It was like, Oh my gosh, now I have to like just create a second big thing. So that it's not just like okay, well, we're done go home. Yeah, I actually, I pulled a really crappy DM move where like, they went in a cave and there was a big monster and the guy just quit it. And then all great, so I had like, its partner was right behind it.
Oh, yeah. And the door opens up and much like her
2020
You can say that rule. You know, what's what's the same with the what hindsight is? 2020? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm that bad joke. Yeah, that would be the macro fab engineering podcast. Yeah. We are your host Parker.
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