Gotta Update My Dog

We’re back after nearly 4 weeks without a Chris/Dave show!

• Dave just interviewed a 105 year old hobbyist!
• Dave just got a Rode Podcaster. Chris uses the Zoom H1 when on the road.
• Even though Chris just got back, he will be traveling again and there will b a bunch of meetups.
  • Chris will be giving a talk at Maker Faire (time, location TBD) on revision control for hw.
  • Hackaday Meetup on the Saturday of Maker Faire.
  • Bring a Hack on Sunday of Maker Faire
  • HDDG13 on Thursday the 26th (Mike Harrison will be giving a talk)
  • Meetup in Denver on Sunday May 29th (details to follow)
• The London Science museum was fantastic! They have the Watt workshop there.
• The London Amp Hour Meetup went great! Check out pictures from the event.
• Lots of negativity going on in the electronics industry these days.
  • Makerbot surprises no one by killing their US mfg.
  • Microchip/Atmel is having disputes with their severance packages.
  • Intel is laying people off.
  • IBM is laying people off as well, but apparently doing so with a bit of ageism
• A bit of good news, Electric Imp raised some (more) money. Maybe there are some jobs there?
• In general, the future of electronics companies seems to be changing.
• Nest is bricking hardware (Revolv) that consumers thought they would support.
• Jack Ganssle mentioned similar things about the ARM mbed in the past. What happens when you don't control the toolchain? Microchip is moving that way as well with their online compiler, MicrochipOne.
• If it's ease of use that you seek, you can hot load a program onto a Raspberry Pi Zero using the PiShift. (Explained by Tom at the London meetup).
• Dave has been searching for aliens (SETI) using software for the RPi called boinc. It all comes down to MIPS/watt for processing these datasets.
• There was an article from Georgia Tech about FPAAs being more efficient. This would be a drastic swing back to the old way of doing things (when op amps were used for math operations). Chris and Mike saw a bunch of analog computers when in Serbia.
• Chris has been releasing 2 minute topic videos. Suggestions welcome!
• Dave has been working with his mystery manufacturer, spending time up front on chip selection so that there is enough room in the memory for firmware updates and new features.
• Chris saw a presentation about machine learning with software called The Wekinator by Rebecca Fiebrink. There is also an associated course you can take.
• There is more space stuff happening. Stephen "Steve" Hawking and other scientists announced plans to send ships to Alpha Centauri, even if there might not be full details on how that'd be possible as of yet.