Yonderly Yodeling Yobbos

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• Chris is back in the basement!
• How  do our listeners deal with having to be in two locations with work?
• Thanks to one of our most generous benefactors, Maurice! We are able to do more on this show because of people like him. If others are interested in donating, they can do so on our donation page.
• Sick of Dilbert-like meetings that drag on? Pop up this online timer to estimate how much $/s is being wasted in the meeting!
• Former guest and friend of the show, Jack Ganssle's salary survey is out and points out interesting datapoints in the consulting side of EE. His newsletter is a great resource as well!
• Salary can flatten out as you get older. Chris has written about salary expectations for electrical engineers before.
• Margery Conner rightfully calls out Sony for their ridiculous plug for metering and gating wall power. Who would buy that?
• They talked about charging electric vehicles on the Science Friday podcast and the need for electrical distribution, but didn't mention the cost aspect.
• Someone made a Back to the Future quadcopter! Serves multiple interests on The Amp Hour!
• Great video on how reed switches are made (to later go into reed relays).
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhUt7VyMKT4
• Another article on the basics, there was a wonderful article about re-using transformers on EDN.
• Dave has been using DIPtrace while trying out non-Altium commercial packages. Support Dave by buying a license through his site!
• Chris has been talking with people about how to best maintain a public repository of part databases.
  • Stewart Allen has started a GitHub repo to use and contribute KiCAD symbols and footprints.
  • CJ Gervasi has started a Wordpress based site to get vetted parts and footprints.
  • In the end, you'll have to decide if any of these work for you, based on your needs and levels of customization.
• Should Dave design his PSU for lefties? Chris (a southpaw himself) doesn't think so.
• Richard ("amspire") on the EEVblog forums is rebuilding Dave's design in an all-analog, all-discrete version. The control loops are causing him some...headaches.
• Ian and the Dangerous Prototypes crew visit another market, this one in Seoul:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_wa2MPbCAM
• Chip of the Week:
  • The INA219 from Texas Instruments (the Burr-Brown arm). A great I2C output high side current monitor that Dave designed into his PSU.
• Chris is looking for a better way to find parts than parametric search. Some people on twitter suggested the Adafruit Component Database (good for hobby stuff).
• If you're into HV and enjoy (safely!) playing with transformers, check out this great video found via reddit on how to harvest them from microwaves:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRoPHKpCYmg

That's all for this week, be sure to subscribe to the feed or find us on the multitudes of social networks in order to be the first to hear about the new shows being posted.

 

Thanks to Tapir Girl for the yodeling picture