July 02, 2012

Gouging Green Gardyloo

1 hour 6 minutes

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This week on the show we covered everything from energy to electronics. Some of the links go to the associated pages on The Discussion Server, but any page that has a link to an external site can be accessed at the title link at the top of that page.

Australia just enacted their carbon tax.

Holden (sister company of Chevy) is releasing the Volt in Australia.

MIT professor, Donald Sadoway has invented the "liquid metal" battery using salts and technology and thinking from aluminium smelters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sddb0Khx0yA

A recent article from The Economist talks about pulp/paper byproduct being turned into cathodes.

Google announced and showed off their Project Glass (a set of Heads Up Display glasses). The scale of technology made Chris nervous.

ASDF asked on our Suggestions page whether a project run without a large managerial deadline can be shipped on time.

Analog Devices is partnering with TSMC to utilize their new process. What is an analog company that doesn't control their process though?

Renesas could be taken over by KKR, the same company that tore NXP apart.

SPECIAL OFFER! CircuitCellar and Elektor are offering discount magazine subscriptions for listeners of The Amp Hour in celebration of CC's 25th anniversary!

Dave wanted a custom case but really wanted to know the price up front. He found PolyCase (of Avon, OH!) who gave him ballpark pricing.

Chris wants the same kind of ballpark pricing to happen for electronics distributors.

BlackMagic Design released a new high end video camera.

On the Discuss Server, Tim asked about who has used XMOS in projects before (and if you have, we'd still love to hear from you on the Discuss Forum). Software Defined Silicon seems like an interesting idea but we're not sure about price/features.

Listener of the show, Mike Kershaw is working on a new OSHW ZigBee based hw/sw project called the KisBee that should allow protocol analyzing and having other things built on top of it. Looks great!

The Retro Computing Roundtable Podcast is a new (to us at least) podcast about old school computers.

Though we've probably mentioned it once before, if you've never seen the Visual 6502, it's pretty cool!

Chip Of The Week:

The BQ25504 is a late comer to the "green" market (didn't we abandon the planet in 2009?) but this part is pretty cool for doing single cell energy harvesting. It has an input impedance matching network and only takes 330 nA when it's off. Plus it's got a ridiculously low cold start voltage (330 mV) and once started it can run on 80 mV and charge a battery or super cap. Crazy crazy. More discussion about it here.

There is a company called "Mean Well" that has been around since 1982. What is the funniest electronics company name you've ever heard of?

Next week on the show, we’ll have Philip Freidin of Fliptronics. He was an architect of the RISC (AM29000) and Bit-Slice (AM2900/29300) products at AMD and FPGAs at Xilinx (XC4000, Virtex, Virtex2, Virtex4, Spartan).

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By The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

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