Prepping For Hoverboards - Gallionic GitHub Gabble

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

Dave is mentally preparing himself for buying a hoverboard. Getting one of those is more likely than being able to go out NYE when you have a kid.
In Austin, the Alamo Draft House is showing a 20 hour marathon of Hobbit and LOTR movies (with food).
Dave has been having issues rendering high frame rate videos.
The 80386 also used the 80387 Math co-processor. This was required for some CAD programs. Other ones like Protel came with Hercules mode (using the expensive Hercules video card)
Chris will be demoing during a trade show in January (DesignCon)
Contextual Electronics will be starting up again January 19th. The format has changed in order to match reality, with more iterative design and with less linear paths to learning.
Chris also made a video detailing things that are good to check out before starting CE:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obKwQXlr_b4
Writing (or planning) your firmware up front can help you make hardware decisions. Dave did this for the uCalc watch because it was a design contest entry.
The Gantt chart is a ridiculous tool of managers, yet we have all had to deal with it.
Chris was recently on The Engineering Commons (his old podcast) once again, discussing how much of design has moved onto silicon. He said it could be irresponsible to design with discrete parts because the low cost and better specs of some newer parts so far outstrip most discrete solutions.
Dave talked about a similar situation (designing a VGA to HDMI conveter) on a mailbag video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQgJmmn-eSE
Chris referenced Jim William's app note (AN28) about temperature measurement...a classic! LT has a recent product that blows some of those specs out of the water though! The LTC2983 is pricey but looks awesome.
LT jumped on the bandwagon and now offers Arduino sketches to exercise chips. They have a derivative platform called the Linduino.
Dave has a t-shirt idea: It's 2015: Instead of hoverboards, we got was the Arduino.
Chris was intrigued by a question posed on /r/ECE: What are some important topics that aren't taught in EE/CE school?
Dave still hasn't tried out Git/GitHub. Chris recommends running from the command line and explains why the repos online look so confusing.
Chris recommends at least using Dropbox for revision control. You can go in and find older versions of files.
Altium has a version control system build on top of Subversion (SVN). It's really meant for collaborative design (which Dave and Chris don't think is necessary unless you're a huge company).
If you want a friendly way to view Git repos, check out SourceTree from Atlassian. It helps to visualize revisions/branches/merges/etc.
Dave had to deal with a lot of this stuff when his Makerbot was bricked.
When Dave finally hires an intern next year, he'll have to decide which PCB package he'll purchase/use with them. Altium is planning to release a mid range version called CircuitStudio alongside CircuitMaker. Chris still picks KiCad, which Dave says is a possibility. Chris didn't like going back to EAGLE after all these years.
Dave released an eevBLAB video about spelling errors. It's really more about how you present yourself than how many typos you might have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2sOEN_TVT4
There are tons of great videos that have been posted from Chaos Communication Congress. Check out some great talks (among many more!):
- Towards General Purpose Reconfigurable Computing on Novena (Starts around 18:00)
- An Open Hardware and Software Platform, Based on the (nominally) Closed-Source MT6260 SoC
Thanks to everyone who made 2014 great! Also thanks to Paul Stevenson for donating The Amp Hour theme! We still love it!