PCBs, Tektronix & Ham Radio - Habitual Handicraft Hangups

From The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

Lots of old, awesome ads for computers! Definitely a different age of advertising and definitions of good taste.
There is rumor that there will be a Mad Men like show written to take place during the early days of NASA!
Magazines used to attach project PCBs to the covers. Dave says this technique was started by Colin Mitchell of Talking Electronics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXWRLNq8OCU
This also used to happen with CDs/Cassettes/disks for video game and software magazines (later on).
We will now be publishing our RSS feed to Twitter and Facebook of links for /r/TheAmpHour
We are using a site called IFTTT (If this, then that), which also has implication for connected devices and the internet of things. Thanks to Nick Pinkston of the /r/hwstartups subreddit for the advice on how to set it up!
Do we have a moral imperative to sourcing from places that treat their workers well? The link is now broken to the original article asking this question, but it refers to the recent collapse of a factory in Bangladesh. Do we as designers have the ability and the drive to go to ethical workplaces? Or does that hurt countries even more?
Moreover, is the SMD nature of electronics manufacturing becoming such that low cost countries don't matter as much anymore?
One thing you need no matter where you manufacture is an engineer optimizing for the pick and place maching. Changing footprints to optimize speed and accuracy of part placement is common...Dave used to do it!
Speaking of SMD, why having through-hole parts (pth) gone away yet? Cost is an obvious one, as pointed out by Windell from EMSL on reddit. Kitmaking is another one.
Another t-shirt in the works? "I'm not cheap, I'm optimizing my engineering solution"
Cost can be relative. This new shield for helping to learn on the Arduino is retailing (with the Arduino) for $60, whereas a Raspberry Pi goes for $35. Volume explains a lot of the disparity, but not all.
newcomers-byob/
Former guest of the show, Zach "Hoeken" Smith has been working like crazy on his BotQueue project. As a regular creator, he suggests that people go for publishing online to protect ideas vs trying to patent them.
A throwback version of Shonky Product of the Week! The old standby of fearing the radiation in your phone...and paying through the nose to "protect yourself".
Tuomas writes in about his poorly lit, messy bench. The perfect prototype of what we expect from a bench! He also has great projects posted to his blog, be sure to check those out.
And since Chris can't determine which scope is which, he asked former guest of the show Alan Wolke to do a walking tour of his Tek-laden bench on his wonderfully informative and entertaining YouTube channel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94mOGNe5kfo
Chris is gearing up for Hamvention in Dayton. He bought a Handi-Talkie (HT) radio from Amazon, the Baofeng UV-5R+.
How can we branch out from the necessity of narrow of experiences of careers? Recruiters favor experience in very similar fields because that's what employers ask for!
Have you made any radical shifts within the technical side of electronics? What kind of shift have you made? Let us know in the comments!
Dave found out about a new ST Micro part called a "lab on a chip". These kinds of disease detection circuits aren't super new, but biological processes are becoming more common on silicon.
Biology also might help make the next generation of silicon chips: DNA based lithography allows researchers to etch graphene!
At the end of their advertising run, we'd like to thank Triad Semiconductor and the ViaDesigner team for sponsoring us! If you haven't yet, be sure to check out the FREE software you can get access to for a year (actually 13 months) at ViaDesigner.com/TheAmpHour