Shop bots, 450 mm fabs & redFrog - Pick and Place Palillogy

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• Dave is buying a new place! It's not a house in Cleveland, nor a Castle in Europe, but he'll be doing nerdy things there!
• And as Dave likes to say, at least it's not Detroit (with all apologies to Detroiters out there).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZzgAjjuqZM

• Dave''s new place is walkable, unlike the campuses of Silicon Valley and the live-in campuses of parts of China (well, you can walk if you live there).
• What does Dave need to get for his new shop? Let us know in the comments!
• Chris thinks he should get a Shop Bot...only $7k! (and up).
• Patrick writes in about his projects, BuildYourCNC.com and the Pick And Place spinoff, redFrog. Comparisons of the action below:

redFrog (starts at 4:25):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVlad7l9HvI

SparkFun’s MC384:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn0EKtLOVx4

And what can only be described as a “machine gun” pick and place (by Fuji)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7w5OUXwTZs

Dave and Chris favor an IR reflow oven on eBay or on Amazon over the hotplate method of reflowing boards.

• Upgrading from 300 mm to 450 mm wafer processing equipment could cost up to $7 Billion! Yowsa!
• I guess the $4 Billion Intel is pumping into upstate NY will only get them half a fab?
• Government military spending allows for things like the Boston Dynamics Alpha Dog.
• Shonky Product of the Week:
  • The Blackbody, by Lessloss. What a heap of crap! Read all the things it can do, it's precious.
• The downside to the "Financialization of everything". The loss of talent to financial engineering.
• This Day in Nerd History:
  • The true (and vindicated) inventor of the first computer, John Atanasoff, was born (in 1903). The Atanasoff-Berry computer was built in 1937-42 at Iowa State University by Atanasoff and a graduate student, Clifford Berry, it introduced the ideas of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, and logic circuits.

That's all for this week. Be sure to leave us comments on anything you heard: good, bad or indifferent.