Dave has a dead car. He will likely be getting the Mitsubishi Miev (which he has gotten a tour in before). It has a range of 150K.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8P4w9hnKls
Dave says he would rather get a Holden/Chevy volt because it has a built in engine. Chris thought that Bob Simpson talked about a 2 stroke motor that could charge the battery bank on his car. mPower is a startup that wants to use plugged in cars to help balance the grid.Batteries are still the thing holding back electric cars and startups don't seem to be making any breakthroughs.Thunderf00t, a controversial YouTuber and chemist PhD, recently followed through on his assertion that sodium doesn't chemically explode...it turns out that it is a coloumbic charge release.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmlAYnFF_s8
On the EEVblog forum, they were talking about how to measure the charge from something like this. The Voltera just released on Kickstarter. It's a great looking project, we were questioning how much it would get used in prototyping (because of turnaround times).Bolt and yCombinator just announced a partnership. They will open a second location in San Francisco.Macrofab is a new service out of Houston TX that automates assembly using an online interface. It looks low cost and friendly. It seems similar in scope to Circuithub (Andrew Seddon was on the show in the past) but with more automation on the assembly side, not just the sourcing. Dave did a breadboard build using the VCP200.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFth9K_IvwA
The VCP200 is a MaskROM chip using the 68HC04. Chris found Dave the datasheet.It reminded Dave of the PIC16C84 which was UV erasable.Dave wrote a video overlay program into 1K of memory. The Raspberry Pi 2 has an issue with a xenon flash.Shahriar did a 3 part video with LeCroy involving their 100 GHz scope.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3w_EWgGQuk
We found out the RISC-V (Rocket Cores) processor has been taped out in 28 and 45 nm silicon.We like the schematic tattoos!The analog aficionados dinner is coming up on February 22nd.Thanks to Don Graham for the picture of the jalopy