And I'm here with Nicholas Vinen from Silic Chip Hey Nichas, how you doing? Ah fine, thanks. How's the stand going? Um, not bad. We've had quite a bit of feedback the last day, most of it positive which is good and even even the people who had criticisms were pretty nice about it, right? Yeah, you can't please everyone with every project, right? Yeah, cuz you're the main project designer for I don't know if I say certainly myself and John Clark are the two people who do most of the projects. Yep, yeah, how long does it take you to develop these projects which are going to take look at? um in terms of uh well, there's the threp put and the latency right throught is about once one a month.

Yep, sometimes a little bit more latency is more like, well, some of them take 6 months, some take 3 months right? I usually have to start them well in advance cuz I usually have one being designed, one that's being made, one where I've built it, and one where I'm testing it and writing the software and so on. cuz some of your projects are quite complex software wise so they take some time some of them can. Sometimes it might take me a whole month pretty much just to write the software. um, a lot of the time I can reuse bits of code I mean I find it works pretty well actually I use usually program in C Actually let me just turn this down so turn it down so it's not intering with my what I'm saying um uh I mean well for example, with this project, I've used the Uh SD card code that we've had before.

I've used a lot of the same audio code. Um, so it's sort of a matter of taking the different modules, putting them together, getting it, getting it to work. um, and then a little bit of custom code for the for the project. but um, lots of late hours working on the project? No, not really.

Um, pretty well. You're pretty efficient at it. Uh yes. I mean sometimes learn to you learn to be efficient? Yeah, uh, it's It's more a matter of scheduling and and just planning ahead than anything else, right? Um.

and also the main thing is, try not to introduce too many bugs and then not have to spend much time fixing them. That's it. And ideas. No shortage of ideas.

Not really. No, um, pretty much I don't have to try to come up with them by the time I need a new project idea? usually there's one waiting, right? Um, at some point I'm sure I'll run out, but it hasn't happened yet. Okay, plenty of suggestions coming from viewers. That's few.

Last video one day we might have viewers, but there you go. Yeah, at the moment it's readers. Should we check out some projects? Sure, if You' like take us through some. Um, well, this is the induction motor speed control.

This is a contributed design. Uh, quite very, very well thought out one. I Think it's a pretty heavy duty piece of gear. Um, huge heat sink on the bottom? Yes, um.

Well, even if it's 95% efficient, if it's running a 1 and a half Kow motor, that's that's a lot. Quite a bit of heat to dissipate. Um, and yeah, it's quite heavy duty. Uh, and you certainly don't want to touch it while it's operating.

that's for sure. 350 volts DC No, that's it's. pretty serious and there's a schematic which you can get if you order published in the magazine. it is y and what have we got we got.

Le Yes, this is a sneak peek. This is coming up in the October and November issues and it's basically it plays music. It also controls 16 St strips of leads um and it's essentially a spectrum analyzer. It varies the brightness with with frequency and power.

Okay, so it's pretty much the idea is you. you build it, you plug it in, you play music, and you have a light show. No extra effort required. Got it? And hey', got ageline of Lo you and new Yep This is some sort of a a portable scope which seems pretty nice actually.

Are you going to do a review of that if they give it to us for review? Yeah, Okay, I wouldn't mind. All right. Um, and here we have the this: this device is supposed to discourage barking dogs. Um, does it work? Um according to Ross Yes with with some caveats, um, some people say the dogs learn just to not bark near the the device.

Pretty smart. They are smart. They're certainly smart enough. But anyway, that's sort of the aim anyways to get them not not to not to sit on your fence and bark at you all day.

Got it? Um, all right. Yep. A This looks nice. This is our Ultra LD Mark III power amplifier.

Um, a lot of tweaking on this one. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. Um, it's almost as good performance as our class A amplifier but with less heat and quite a bit more power I Saw a couple of uh, kids building this. if you saw my video at the local.

uh School You see kids were building couple of these. that's pretty. They had built some serious yeah' things to take on. but um, yes I've been I Mean there are obviously some HSC students who are very capable and they're very capable.

Really into Electronics they are. Um yeah, this is this is um my P AVR programming adapter board. Uh, which basically solves the problem that I've run into many times. which is that you you have an in circuit programmer, you've built your board.

whatever, for whatever reason, you don't have a header on it to program your chip. Um, and you need a way to do it. And I got sick of building rigs for every different chip to program it right? So this one is basically intended to be a one device you can reconfigure to to Route the programming and power signals to your microcontroller. There you go and it supports every pretty much every pick and 8 32s not I don't know about the 32s.

Um I don't think they were in dip package when I designed this. Ah yeah, they may not be I it depends on the pin configuration. It's possible that they're programm. Um, a lot of P use the same.

You know? there's probably about eight different configurations that Ed by most PS but then there are some Oddball ones? yep and I couldn't support them all. Yeah, of course. Um, but yeah, pretty much everyone that we've used in a project will can be programm with this board. So that was the main goal.

Brilliant. And did you write your own software for that? or was it this doesn't have software? Actually, it's all discret logic. There was, uh, a few reasons for doing that. One of them is I didn't want people to have to program a pick in order to program picks.

Got it? Chicken and egg? Yes, yes. and the other. The other reason was if I had a microcontroller controlling it um, because of the mosfet Gate Drive I'd need a lot of level shifting and it would have ended up being almost as complicated anyway. So so I thought just great logic was the way to go.

Excellent! And we've got what's this? Six test instruments in one? Yeah, this is. Um, it's essentially a USB sound card with a scope type interface so you can use it as a audio frequency scope in combination with correct software. You can also use it as a spectrum analyzer. Um, the software will also do Distortion measurement.

so it's a pretty handy tool to have, especially if you don't have an oscilloscope. Or even if you do it can. It can do some things that Scopes can't easily do right. So it's just basically a uh input, uh, scope preamp, and uh offset shifter.

Uh, it's pretty much. it's really only for AC coupled signals. Oh, only for AC Okay, got it? Oh, because the sound card's only as yeah. Well, this actually it has its own sound card essentially.

but that chip is designed for AC coupled inputs. So got it? Yeah, Okay, so it uses Aus logic. It's actually it's a Texas Instruments B Brown USB audio chip. Got it.

And next up, high quality digital audio signal generator. Yes, Um, we have that feeding the the test instrument interface. Um, generating a sweep at the moment. Um, you can also generate a pulse.

It can do do mixed sine waves. You can also do square waves triangle Sawtooth and it has um, analog and SP if and toslink outputs. Very nice. That's all right.

Hey, it's Leo Simpson the editor How you doing Leo We're just running through our projects here. Oh, that's good. good, excellent. How's the magazine going? It's going reasonably well.

We've got this Champion contributor here. He is. he is. Yeah, that's right.

and uh, uh, what? Um, your subscribers mostly Australian Still, or are they you're getting overse? the vast majority would be right. Okay, because I I everyone I Hear a lot of talk. They're saying that Silicon Ship is the best produced Electronics magazine in the world I Love to hear that sort of thing though. That's wonderful.

Just keep that coming. that's really good. Uh, well. actually, we don't know what'll happen to the subscriber base once we go live with our new website, which like Page to View and all the rest of it, so it'll be quite a lot better than our that's interesting.

What's the rationale behind that? Well, we think our our existing website is well past its Us By dat you can say that I think that's the sort of, you know, fairly subdued way of putting it. Yeah, and what will be on the new website? Well, all the magazines that are presently there, right? But it'll be page to view so you know you just turn the pages just. and all the all the adverts and everything. which so it'll be quite a big step up from our existing website.

And if you're an existing subscriber, do you get that access to that? Yes. If you got access to a particular issue in the old format, you have ACC You're old digital subscriber. Well, I should say old. I should say a legacy subscriber.

Yes. So when we when we go live, we should have about 5 years of new archive material. The old material will still be there, so people will still be able to access all of that material that was there before. So any plans on releasing all the old EA stuff on DVD Is that difficult? Well, you know I've got to get it scanned and you know then it's got to be searchable.

I mean I'm told the best way to do that is to send it to India but there are copyright issues for some of the stuff. they are for the contributors like myself. Exactly. That's right.

So while we own the entire copyright for ETI and uh, electronics Australia and going much further back, still the original copyright thing that may contributors may or may not not have uh, you know, uh, given over to EA and we don't know who did what? y okay, um cuz as a contributor to EA I didn't sign anything. So if you didn't sign anything, well then you will. Copyrights? Well, you're just a very mean person, right? No, you can have my you can reprint you have my permission. Well I'd always talk to you anyway.

but no there is. There are copyright issues and the same thing applies to Electronics Today or ETI or whatever it was called in its various guises. So it is a bit difficult for us. but you released Wireless weekly on yes, but oh no, we didn't Not wireless weekly.

Um, what was it? R Radio TV Hob See, now that's that's out of copyright so we don't have an issue there. and you know we didn't have those sort of copyright issues in those days. Anyway, y life was much simpler and a lot much simpler. Everyone was much Kinder every.

I don't know that everything was I I wouldn't necessarily I Think people are still reasonable. you know? Still, of course of course I I didn't have any road rage on the way here this morning. that's right, and I didn't I wasn't subjected to any. so no.

Anyway, so that that's it. So and we'll have, we'll also have have a shop so people will be able to buy stuff we don't know the full details yet. We're presently negotiating with the people who actually house our website now, so we're hoping to transfer that over within a month or so. I noticed.

Um, you're now selling. Uh PC You're now selling the Pcbs that? so all the projects that you see here we would have PC boards available. So it's not not all the boards going back. but I think we've probably got most of the boards going for the last 2 years or so.

Something like that. And if people really want something, well, we can have a look and see whether it's economic for um for us to order it in. Obviously we have to process the the board artworks and then send them off to to get them made of course. but they're very high quality boards which you've probably seen who actually, uh, makes those a little Chinese person, right? Yeah, some one hung low chinesee PCB Factory Okay, yeah, cuz there's not much PC I don't think there's actually there's quite a bit it left in Australia I don't know, there's quite a bit cuz I'm getting mine made in New Zealand now by our circuit Labs who are? there's some people? uh, Newport isn't it? um who will do a quick prototype for us and good quality and all the rest of it so we've use them them from time to time.

But there are other other PC board manufacturers now whether Farm some of that offshore sure too. and they don't tell you you ask. But obviously there's a lot of PC board assembly in this country. Yes, there is.

I get my boards assembled here in Sydney Yeah yeah, so it's not all black. In fact, people say, oh, you know there's no Manufacturing in Australia Well, there wouldn't be a show like this if there wasn't Manufacturing in Australia Yes, a lot of it. sort of. Niche Manufacturing Highly specialized.

There's very little consumer manufacturing these days, but Australia's still k up There it. is. It's still doing good. so stand's doing good here.

Yeah lot coming through. Yes, yes that's right, ter lot lot of them just saying hello. Of course the vast majority of people do know us of course. So yeah.

I love it. And you we're looking at some of your well. I Think we've done most of the projects well. This is only a very small selection, small selection, and how many projects on average each month? Oh, three to four, three to four project.

You're the only magazine in the world doing that. I think really to that frequency. Oh yes. I mean there's Elector still and there's Circuit Celler but they're not doing the same sort of stuff as we do.

I Don't think they're as handson or as or as you know, hobby, as friendly or any or accessible that sort of thing. Um, Epe magazine in the UK which of course is on sale in Australia where you can buy that but you will find it's full of silicon chip projects exactly. It's done under license. Yes, so that's fine.

Yeah, Terrific. thanks. Le Okay, thank you David and uh, all the best for the Show Excellent thanks Nicholas Thanks.