Hi I’m Dave Jones. I was speaking to my colleague the other day and we were talking about video blogs and you know all that online stuff. And he said why isn’t there a blog for engineers like us. And well, I did know of like text bogs and things like that. But, I had a look around and there are no video blogs something that we can watch every week. So, he suggested why don’t I do one. Do a video blog about engineering. And I thought well why not. I would give anything you need. So here it is, my first, very first video blog about electronics engineering for guys like me. I came out with a couple of ideas. We can have book reviews, equipment reviews and general news I guess. You can find about what cool parts are on the market and anything else I can thin of. Let’s try a book review and I’m not talking like nerdy sci-fi books or anything like that. I’m talking about books that should be of interest to electronics engineers. So, my first one is iWoz by Steve Wozniak. Now if you don’t know who Steve Wozniak is, then well, you shouldn’t be watching this video blog I guess. It’s his autobiography. It’s his autobiography about how he started Apple of course and came up with the first Apple I and the Apple II and the cream sold the computer and all these practical jokes he used to do and all that sort of stuff and its got lots of info in here about his methods of design, His methods of minimization, circuit minimization and its just a really good read. There is also an audio book version. I haven’t fully read through that one. But, unfortunately, it’s not spoken by Steve himself. So, I much prefer audio books that are spoken by the original author. But yeah I recommend it, get it, iWoz.

And today’s chip is the linear technology LT 3085 and it’s advertised as a low drop out 500 milliamp voltage regulator. Nothing unusual there. But, it’s got two useful characteristics. The first one is the upper voltage is set by a single resistor which is really handy to lower your past count. Better than the traditional jewel resistor approach. But, secondly and most importantly, the output voltage is, the output voltage can go down to zero colts which is very unusual. There’s not many voltage regs on the market that can actually go down to zero volts and that’s really quite handy for many applications. And the way it works is unlike a traditional voltage regulator. This one is, it’s actually very simple. It’s a bang up current cells with an op amp voltage flow and a serious pass transistor and it’s basically all of this. It’s really simple but because its all in the one package and it’s whirlwind tiny surface mount packages. It’s a real handy device and quite unusual. So, check it out. The linear technology LT3085.

I came across a very interesting concept recently. It’s called hacker spaces. Basically, what a hacker space is is a communal hardware lamp so to speak where engineers, hackers, nerds, geeks, get together and they work on just interesting and cool projects. They build them. They disassemble things, do tear downs and just generally just hack around on stuff and there’s a monthly filed or something like that involved but basically, if you join you can turn up and use all the facilities and the associate with all the other people there and it sounds like a really good concept. And they are setting up all over the world basically there’s a whole bunch in the US, Europe. There’s a couple trying to be formed in Australia here in various cities. So, that sounds like a great concept. So check it out. Its hackerspaces.org.

There was news just the other week from Atmel who make the AVR range of microcontrollers amongst other things and the big news is that they are coming up with this new 80 tiny AVR microcontroller that supposedly operates under 0 .7 volts which you know sounds fantastic. It means you can run an app from a single cell, single AA alkaline cell. And it sounds like a really good micro, great. They have come out with some new process technology that allows the micro drop right down to 0.7 volts. But, now as usual there always a catch and basically, its just a regular AVR 80 tiny micro with a built in boost converter. So, you need all the usual external parts. You need an inductor, and a diode and some caps and I guess it’s handy for some people to lower their parts count in some apps. But really, it was a bit of a disappointment. So, a good try but yeah marketing.

Some other big news this week, concerns the CSIRO, the Australian research Commonwealth owned company and they have just won a patent lawsuit against Hewlett Packard. Actually Hewlett Packard settled out of court I think and basically it involved Hewlett Packard among many other companies infringing on the CSIRO patent for Wi-Fi. Not many people know that but CSIRO actually developed Wi-Fi, the 802.11 standard, what led to the 802.11 standard. And they have been suing everyone left right and center to try and keep those patents and it looks like they actually won. They beat Hewlett Packard. So, I guess all the other companies who make 802.11 gear are shaking in their boots and probably have to pay up royalties as well. Otherwise they are going to get hauled off to court too. Good honest CSIRO I guess.

Oaky let review some really cool equipment. What I have got today is the Rigol 1000 E series. It’s a pretty new series. Not too be confused with the 1000 B series or the 1000 A series. They are all different. So, just be careful, it’s a bit confusing. This is the DS1052 E, the 50 Megahertz version. Bottom of the range but its really low cost. It’s incredibly low cost. I got mine for A$ 679 delivered. For you Yankees folks, that’s less than US $500. So it’s really a remarkable price breakthrough here. Even they are cheap oscilloscopes, they are really high quality. This one’s really quite amazing. It just feels like a quality scope. All the button indents are really quite high quality. The button presses, the screen. The screen is really good. It’s a 320 by 240 quarter VGA which is pretty standard in this price bracket. But it’s got a nice bright LED back light. 7It’s almost too bright really and it’s a big step up form their previous series. Other things are a really nice carry handle which locks into place. You have got some real nice sturdy feet which snap out into position like that. It’s got a USB host. Very important. It also you to plug in a memory stick, get screen captures and takes a few seconds to do boot up. One of the, I guess really the main annoying aspect which I have is that it does actually have a fan. It’s not too loud but it’s certainly not like a fan unit like the TVS 210. Now it’s big. Selling point of course is that it’s got a one mig point memory and one gig sample per second. Sampling. Now right one of the first Asian manufacturers to roll their own 1 Gig sample per second frontage which is what they are actually refined and they have finally used in this unit and what’s quite well, firm is really stable and of course Rigol designed and manufacture Agilent, HPs low end scopes as well. So if it’s good enough for HP, it’s good enough for me. Definitely, thumbs up, the Rigol 1000 E series. So that’s it for my first electronics engineering video blog. I hope you liked it and I love a feedback. So actually I am after a really cool name for it. So, if you got nay ideas for a name for the blog, let me know. Thanks. See you next time. I hope.

Read the Italian version: Rassegna sugli oscilloscopi Rigol DS1052E