Vacuuous Vortex Verification [ 1:13:23 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dave is back from his trip to Melbourne and has lots of calibration stories!

• There is a new documentary out about Alan Turing
  
• However, you need to request that it come to your city.
• PBS has a new documentary about Silicon Valley that looks amazing! Multiple parts.
• Dave visited the Agilent Melbourne Standards and Calibration Lab
  
• And many more videos, which will be posted to Dave’s EEVblog channel throughout the week
• Dave also visited the Melbourbe hackerspace
  
• Andy Gelme, who is part of the LiFX bulb team was showing Dave around and Alex Bradbury of Raspberry Pi was there as well.
• The Raspberry Pi team will soon be releasing a camera module to use with OpenCV.
• Dave and Chris haven’t dug into their RPi’s yet, but Chris has bought Matt Richardson’s book on getting started. Now to find the book on how to get started on the book!
• What do you do to ensure proper bring up of new boards? Power, test points, code, etc?
• Fran Blanche did a great video reverse engineering the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) of the Saturn V rocket!
  
• Dave saw an article about the quirk found in the electronics on the Pioneer Spacecraft in a recent IEEE Spectrum edition.
• Interested in following along with Kent Lundberg’s prototyping class, discussed on The Amp Hour previously? You can follow the assignments and writeups on the class blog!
• If you’re interested in learning more about MOS transistors (namely their physics), check out a new MOOC class on Coursera about MOS devices.
• Where should school start and stop? How can we better give context for schooling?

If you want to see upcoming links or stuff we didn’t get to this week, check out /r/TheAmpHour. If you like the show, please consider giving us a review on iTunes! Thanks!

Necessary Networked Novelty [ 1:32:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Welcome, Andrew Seddon of CircuitHub.com!

• Founded the company with Jonathon Friedman, from across the Atlantic!
• Andrew went to school in Leeds but left for a design position.
• Previously worked for companies such as Turnsafe and Active RF and in his spare time worked on model rockets. Check out all of his past work on his personal site.
• London is barren, but outlying areas of the UK do electronics. Hardware is stronger in Cambridge, with companies such as ARM and Cambridge Silicon Radio.
• There is also the M4 corridor, west of London
• Amateur electronics is growing in London. Shared spaces, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces allow for shared tools, which are a premium in expensive real estate areas.
• Andrew and the team needed to learn web software and currently use CoffeeScript, a JavaScript stack
• CircuitHub uses an online interface to create parts and then allows users to find and sync with the footprints and schematic symbols using Dropbox. The site creates parts compatible with 3 of the top PCB CAD programs available today and more are planned for the future.
• Circuit hub is sponsoring hackathon along with yCombinator and Upverter (and more!)
• How parts are handled depends on workplace culture and software packages. Altium and EAGLE handle associating footprints different and big companies might have a librarian whereas smaller companies may not.
• Companies likely won’t be revealing any information by pulling and sharing footprints from a central database, but trust will be an issue with larger companies.
• They will be open sourcing all possible code and feeding it back to the community. You can view the team’s work on GitHub.
• The main tool will always be free. Revenue will come later by integrating with manufacturing.
• The project started because Jon and Andrew were “scratching their own itch”. They submitted a yCombinator application on deadline day. 
• Because it’s strikingly difficult to get a visa for the US, even if you’re a founder of a startup, they are operating out of Playa del Carmen for the next few months. The US has only recently considered any kind of legislation in this area (!?)
• Andrew reluctantly agreed to some kind of gamification in order to encourage participation (“we’ll see,” he says). Chris cited the awesome Adafruit badges as a good example of this in action.

Be sure to head over to CircuitHub.com and start an account. You can start pulling in designs to your projects and submitting new footprints to the community.

You can follow Andrew on Twitter at @seddonandrew and can also follow @CircuitHub.