The Focus Knob Works

ACES Hardware Meetup: Dave recently attended a packed ACES Hardware meetup at the Engineers Australia headquarters, which led to a discussion on whether “Engineer” should be a protected term like “Doctor” or “Lawyer”. Naming Rant: If your startup doesn’t delete vowels (like “X trainer”) or use an un-Googleable name like “Drop Bear,” are you even trying? Dave also shares his frustrations with names like “Goliath” and “Mindvault”. The New Website: Chris reveals the new, blazing-fast static site for TheAmpHour.com, built using Hugo and Claude. It features searchable transcripts for every episode and a “pissed-old amber” SVG scope animation where the focus knob actually works. New Merch: Amp Hour Retro Gauge shirts are back, along with the new RF-themed “Beyond Return” Smith Chart Seance shirt (inspierd by Veritasium’s latest video about the history of Smith Charts). There is even a rug that doubles as part storage, though shipping to Australia is pricey. Dave’s New Hire: Dylan joins the EEVblog team to help with video content, editing, and potentially working on products. Shipping SaaS: Dave rants about the arbitrary limits on shipping labels for services like “Star Ship It” and the unfortunate “cost of doing business”. Microchip Goes Free: The MPLAB XC Pro compilers are finally free 15 years too late. This brings up memories of the podcast episode with Microchip CEO Steve Sanghi. 10-Cent Debuggers: Discussing how the 10-cent CH32V003 can be used as a debugger for other chips. Also, check out these ESP32 Bit Pirate web tools for hardware testing. We have had CNlohr (Creator of the CH32fun library) on two times. 59:30 – Bot Traffic & Pay-Per-Crawl: Discussing Cloudflare’s new pay-per-crawl “toll booth” for AI crawlers and a mysterious Chinese bot hammering a specific forum thread. 68:00 – 1.5 Million Hits: How the 12-year-old static site engineerblogs.org is suddenly getting massive traffic from unknown bots. 73:00 – Rigol’s Tiny VNA: The new Rigol DNA800 series packs a 14 GHz VNA into a handheld form factor. 78:30 – Solar Inverter Explosions: Shahriar from The Signal Path recently had a “magic smoke” event where he had to replace 16 MOSFETs on his inverter board.