Op amps, Microchips & Mergers - Narquois Nerd Nescience - Narquois Nerd Nescience

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NOTE: Yes, there were some audio issues this week in the first half of the show. We’ll get back to our better quality next week, sorry for the ears we offend.

Lots of fun this week as we get back to the old format of Chris and Dave just shooting the breeze. Hope you enjoy it and please let us know what you thought in the comments!

• Chris spent the last week recruiting at MIT and wrote about the experince of recruiting at a top tier engineering school on EB.
• One of the students there built a particle accelerator as a high school student! Awesome!
• A new show stereotyping and pitting nerds against one another is looking for people to cast on their show. Yuck, not what we need for STEM.
• Shoutouts:
  • Gary Servin linked here from his relatively new site. Thanks Gary! We love it when people put our logo on their site!
  • Jon Oxer, founder of Freetronics, did a video response to the ongoing chip-fab-at-home debate. It's a well measured look at both sides and he gets to participate in the conversation. We definitely enjoyed the fact that people can respond to our ongoing battle (or any other comments we make) in this manner.
• Dave visited the Melbourne Hackerspace and they have an unofficial WOTW in the video.

• TI and National are officially one company. We're waiting for the other shoe to drop.
• Listener Niels Mosley asked about how to pick op amps when there are so many out there. Chris' answer? Carefully.
• A new part from Microchip pairs an 8 bit micro with reconfigurable logic and a few other fun bits (like an NCO).
• More on the printable electronics front: Lars Herlogsson from Linkoping University in Sweden published papers about new organic, printable transistors with gate geometries down to 100 nm. Awesome!
• Chip of the Week!
  • Dave picks out our top pick of chips this week: The LT1512, a SEPIC topology, multi-chemistry battery charging circuit.
• A new part for solar installations, a 50 mV diode that can pass up to 20A. Cool for solar cell installations.
• Chris didn't know about this (apparently) Open Source Logic Analyzer. Dave doesn't like that it's built on an off-the-shelf development board.
• Some fun breadboarding tips from ProtoStack. We especially liked the part with the SD card plugging into a breadboard!
• This Day in Nerd History:
  • In 1922, Dr. Albert Taylor and Leo Young at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory near Washington, D.C., demonstrated that if a ship passed through a radio wave being broadcast between two stations, that ship could be detected, the essentials of radar.