THIS TRANSCRIPT IS AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED BY COMPUTER VOICE
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accurate.  Do not cite it or take it too seriously; if people do, then
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i
good afternoon welcome to my scheduled stream as i try here to get the
lights out a few there
i
hello to mrs baker and
whoever else is on the chant here it as usual it doesn't really tell me
very clearly who is where when etc so just a few minutes before
i was due to start this stream
i got an email that i was not too happy about
and
see i've got these transistors here
the leapfrog filter which is one of the things for which i'm preparing 
kids right now
it really uses a lot of what were originally bc five five seven g 
transistors so when i first designed it and made just one for myself 
before i thought that i was going to be going pro
i designed the ports to use those b c five five seven c g transistors 
and then just as i was in the process of saying well okay i'm going to 
go pro with my hobby here and actually start selling these and i wrote 
up the documentation and you know i was getting everything
set in ordering panels and whatever else i got the notice that type b c 
five five seven cg was being discontinued you wouldn't be able to buy 
those anymore
so i went through a whole thing which hello mr baker ah
i went through a whole thing with trying to find a replacement and i 
ended up hitting on these b p n two hundred and eight transistors which 
are electrically find that they have a different pinout the leads are 
in a different order as they stick out of the package so that meant i 
had to redesign the circuit boards fortunately i didn't
i hadn't actually ordered the circuit boards yet so redesigned the 
circuit boards went through and rewrote the documentation refer to png 
one hundred a
and then in two thousand and nineteen it was announced that the pi and 
two hundred day transistors would be discontinued now i don't know i 
may have actually gotten an email notice about that i wasn't able to 
find one when i later searched for it but its possible that i got one 
and deleted it and ignored it and figured oh i'll deal with that later 
but
then towards the end of twenty twenty list of course the pandemic and 
other bullshit going on i went to reorder p n two hundred eight 
transistors and realized i couldn't because they'd been discontinued 
and it was now outside the window for making a lifetime by so ah
i did a fair bit of research and i tried to figure out what kind of 
transistors can i use instead of the pi and two hundred days and i went 
so far as to build a whole new leapfrog filter using some samples that 
i got a different kind of transistor here
now these these are zed x tp twenty twelve a s t zed transistors
and i'm going to try holding them up to the
camera here this is one of the pn two hundred days that i've been using 
for years and my commercial leapfrog and also in some of my other 
products all the leap frogs are really the sticking point cause there's 
twelve of these and a leapfrog
and it has a body that is quite round here and it has three leads that 
stick straight out
now this is one of the z-index tp twenty twelve a s t zeds
it has kind leads stick out like they they go out at an angle like this 
which means that its going to be hard to fit it into
into a circuit board right also if this is less important but it has a 
more flat body so i said well these x tp etc as those would be ok if i 
could get them with unkempt leads
and four months ago i placed an order with mauser for what was planned 
to be a lifetime by i figured i'd buy four thousand of these and 
they're rather expensive there they cost significantly more than the 
older ones four thousand of them just like you see here except with an 
kinked leads so that they would actually fit on the search
get bored and i am also told me it'll take twenty weeks so five months 
to to actually deliver that and then just today i got the email saying 
oh sorry the manufacturer can't deliver those wouldn't you like to 
substitute zetec cp two thousand and twelve as
he said its just the same its not that zetta etc estes ed is the one 
that's packed on a tape like this and it has the kink leads since the 
whole point of this exercise was for me to get some that did not have 
kink leads and the idea of buying four thousand of them that's enough 
to make a few hundred quote
leapfrog as well as coilovers and atheists ours and that's probably 
going to be a lifetime supply right i won't feel bad if in like five or 
ten years i end up having to discontinue the leapfrog but i don't want 
to discontinue it today probably although it did occur to me you know 
those sleep folks are really a bitch to caliber
great so
there might be some reason i might not be completely broken up if i 
decided that i couldn't sell any more of them so
i wrote back to mouser saying hey that's that's not an i cannot use the 
as cs said parts the whole point of ordering the ones i did was so that 
they would not be kinked lead so can you offer me anything that's a 
similar kind of transistor without the king leads
now its not really a very demanding application i mean these are not 
exotic transistors i can use almost any pnp silicon transistor 
preferably with a high gain but even that isn't terribly important
but i would really like it to be something that will fit on my circuit 
boards
i just ordered another batch of these circuit boards a few days ago 
from the people in india and that was another adventure but that's 
that's in progress now so i'm going to be on the hook to pay while i've 
already paid for those so i don't want to have to throw them out and
and i don't want to i mean if i'm just building a leapfrog myself okay 
fine i can deal with the kink leads and bending them into shape and so 
on but i don't really want to inflict that on my kid customers
so you know and these these
oh seven kids here that i'm in the process of preparing and i can't 
ship those until i get some sort of transistors into them
i could maybe if necessary i still have a few of these original png one 
hundred days so i can put put some of those in and get just a few kids 
out the door if if necessary
so its a big mess and i don't know what the resolution is going to be
i may be able to deal with some other manufacturer who can produce a 
somewhat similar transistor with a with an kinked leads
inverse team worst i guess i could say well that's it the kid customers 
are just going to have to deal with the fact that the leads are not in 
the greatest shape for the boards and you have to bend them but i don't 
really want to do that i don't want to spend like two thousand dollars 
on a lifetime supply of these transistors if they're not right if i'm 
going to
be buying that quantity i want them to be right so that's where that 
stands
and i don't know what the answer is going to be
it certainly is clear that the leapfrog days are numbered but that may 
still mean like several more years of being able to sell them and its 
especially annoying because just this week i finally got around to the 
item that was on my to do list for months of updating the lie
for documentation to take into account then the new transistors so all 
that work is going to have to be redone as well as the similar changes 
that i was going to make on other
other designs because i figured okay i'll i mean anywhere i use a pnp 
transistor these pm two hundred days seem pretty good i'll standardize 
on those put them in all my products that use such a transistor and so 
the leapfrog is really the issue because it has twelve of them
but the qoyllur has two of them and will need some sort of replacement 
as well
and so forth and so on
now slightly better news is that i got another package of
front panels here these are basically the ones that will fill the role 
of those those other ones that hit were defective and have to be used 
differently so i can definitely make some progress on cutting these up 
and get those onto the shelf
and there'll be useful in my current batch of kits that i'm working on

i don't feel wonderfully great health wise today and i hope that that's 
just because i drank too much last night
but i think i may also be being affected a little by this wildfire smoke
i've been coughing a fair bit and i really hope that that is all it is 
and not the dreaded rona
although
if i do get a mild case of the dreaded rona and recover and then
i'm that much more immune for the next time around

i made a minor change these panel design i made these grey parts a 
little darker in this in this iteration
i
i have in the past had just a few panels that seemed to be defective in 
terms of the grey parts not being grey enough as our baker did you go 
to a super spreader event to celebrate vaccination i would also drink 
too much if beer was only a buck like it is in ontario well i kind of 
did an
actually i did a couple of days ago go out and visit some friends who i 
haven't seen in a long time
and i had really mixed feelings about that i wasn't sure if it was the 
right thing to do but i did it now we were all outside and you know 
everybody almost everybody they're vaccinated and so forth and so on 
not exactly a classic super spreader of events but it did occur to me 
well
is that going to catch up to me
there was one guy there who
i had thought that he was anti vaccine but it turns out that his point 
of view is rather more extreme than that and he was point the organizer 
told him we don't want any trouble and keep that stuff to yourself and 
he really didn't he he was passing out literature about how covert nine
team does not exist
and i mean there are people there i know who have lost loved ones to it 
and so that's not really cool you know saying that this thing that your 
family member died from doesn't exist at all
i
and that was that i mean there's not really a lot i can say or do about 
it but this guy and also is quite elderly so i hope he's not going to 
end up really learning the hard way the error of his ways as our baker 
was it doug ford on no it wasn't
someone a fair bit older than doug ford
anyway as for buck a beer i've never actually seen one dollar beers 
available here i think that by the time that ford
was able to push that concept through that breweries would be allowed 
to sell beer for a dollar
you know it it no longer makes commercial sense for them to actually 
try you can't really make beer at a retail price of a dollar anymore 
even if the government will allow you to
so you know i mean if the government announced that i could sell my 
finished modules for fifty dollars
at the moment there's nothing that prevents me from doing that except 
that it wouldn't be commercially valuable so
a legal thing saying that i'm allowed to do so you know they they might 
they might do it essentially as a loss leader they might as a sort of a 
gimmick hey now we're allowed to have back a beer we'll we'll do that 
but i can't see it ever really being a regular thing
beer isn't all that expensive here but
it certainly costs more in ontario than it did in denmark
doug ford's next election promise will be fifty dollar north coast 
modules well if doug ford can do that in a way that
that allows me to make a profit
it might be a thing and i could certainly use the publicity

but i'm not holding my breath for that

so anyway
yeah the i had a problem with some of these panels at one point where 
the grey parts didn't seem to be entirely bonded to the surface so that 
it was possible for just to scratch that away no i don't think
that i actually shipped any of the banned ones
to customers but there were a few that that i did notice were bad and 
have to
actually they went into the stream with those other defective panels 
for repainting
so i'm hoping that by specifying this grade a darker color there will 
be a little more ink deposited and then it'll bond nicely
i
yeah the the the solid blue here is certainly no trouble with that 
rubbing away
but the the lighter grade it was an issue
i
so i figure if i make the grade a little darker it may i think it 
actually does look nicer too which is always a plus but it may be more 
rugged and i guess if someone does get a bad panel and complains about 
it then i can ship them a new one
enter some points that way

the transistor thing i mean
that that really does concern me because i don't know what i can 
actually do about it
i thought that i was getting of buying some insurance by buying 
essentially a life supplant lifetime supply of them but
and then evidently i can't do that with that particular part number and
now i'm faced again with going back through all the i i almost wish 
that i procrastinated even more on the documentation updates because 
then i wouldn't have to go and redo it all yet again
but at the same time i was hoping that i could have everything ready so 
that when the package of the new ones arrived i could just stick them 
into my ready made
already prepared vins and be completely ready
this actually came up on twitter i figured while i was making those 
changes i might do some other updating on
on the instructions from the manuals because i watch someone else's 
livestream of building a leapfrog
now that was quite educational to see how he interacted with the kit 
and and the instructions and one thing i really noticed was that he 
like in the in the instruction manual there's a a thing called the bill 
of materials the bomb
be a win in this cases bill of materials and not byte order mark but
and its just a table its a list of all the parts in
a given section of build
and what the guy was doing was he was using that instead of the 
instructions he was just going down the the steps not the steps the the 
list of parts in the bomb and saying okay where's this resistor and 
then just kind of search the board for work with the resistor b and so 
on now that's a problem in a couple of ways because first
of all it means you're going to be installing the parts not necessarily 
in the right order
usually it doesn't matter what order you put them in but a few times it 
does and if you follow the actual text instructions it'll say this part 
you can put in any order that part you've got to put it in this one 
first or else it won't work
but also it means for instance that
you don't know where anything goes whereas if you go through the actual 
instructions there's a photo for each part thing with the location 
circled you know put this here
and there are enough other clues like the silkscreen markings on the 
board that you don't really need those photos
but if you're ever searching for something
you could save yourself a lot of time if you were actually going step 
by step through the instructions because there would be a folder in 
each spot saying
put it in here so
i was debating and i actually ran a twitter poll although it got few 
enough responses not to really be very conclusive
thinking what can i do about this do i just say well i provided the 
instructions people can build it the way they want and if they find it 
harder than they showed that's their problem
or i could just like try to really be a nazi about it and like not even 
have a bill of materials in there to force you to read the the words
my tentative thought was that maybe i don't change much but i just put 
a note at the top of each build materials sing this table is not a 
substitute for the instructions
let people figure that out to the extent they care i mean if you want 
to build just from the bill of materials and if that works for you fine 
right
but i also want to maximize the chance that someone who builds one of 
my kids is going to end up with a module that works
and i don't if someone thinks the bill of materials is a substitute for 
the instructions then they're reducing their chances of success
you know its its really sort of an interesting higher level question 
how much do i hold the user's hand
my existing instructions are probably already very verbose
and not everyone is going to want to read every word and i don't want 
to read every word on the other hand
if someone is at all unsure
did you know that reading every word would help them
and pretending that the the bomb is a substitute will not
okay so i just cut out all of these panels and i'd better count them 
because sometimes these people ship a few extras i think there are 
supposed to be like twenty of each
maybe thirty


there are twenty of these ones
from the size of the stacks there's probably twenty of the other as well



twenty one
okay bitter recount them and make sure
three
six
nine
twelve
fifteen
eighteen yes twenty one
so i'll make a note of that


and for the other ones
twenty in
new batch
okay
i
so you're trying to make these disappear off screen here
they'll go on the the shelf later but
alright
so the the customer panels
the the custom panel modules are now online available for sale
nobody's actually bought any i don't know if they will however doesn't 
really matter i mean
i budgeted for
for running that as a research project and if i can recover anything 
from selling
the results that's nice but that wasn't really the main reason for 
doing it the reason for doing it was i wanted to to try out those 
techniques and when i did get some valuable data from that for possible 
future projects so essentially its already paid for
i
looking at this i'm trying to figure out where i left off basically i 
haven't touched this since last week because i was doing other things
i guess
yeah the next thing i should be working on is putting all the
all the lumber objects into these
into these bins
and there'll be twenty of those per been so that's actually going to 
use up most of the lumber objects i can have here













alrighty

these are the jacks that come with the
relatively good
northern lights
its the the right angle jacks that go in some of the smaller modules 
that have sometimes have nuts with not really enough thread so i ended 
up buying some replacement nuts
to substitute for the ones that were a little suspect
however i have been able to update some of my other
parts lists recently because i finally used up basically all of the 
knobs that had suspect hardware
so i no longer feel that i need to ship
extra set screws
to replace possibly bad ones and in those knobs




i've been putting off this task of counting out the the lumberjacks in 
particular because
its kind of mind numbing i have to sit here and thread nuts onto one 
hundred and forty of these
however just today after
not to
not feeling great about that transistor situation it may be what i need 
to kind of wind down and do something very simple

alright there's plenty
sign for the next one
















the something else i found out over the weekend although it actually 
happened about a year ago
was that one of my friends went to a fairly substantial lottery prize
you know not enough to become a
multi millionaire but
enough to buy more than half of a house
and he was someone that had recently lost his job
i was having some in you know during the pandemic having trouble 
getting another one so
it really came at the right time for him
i meant to
some of us who were kind of worried about him don't have to worry quite 
so much so that was a really nice piece of news to have




alright here's another twenty
one hundred to go





























i'm not really expecting mauser to have anything intelligent to say for 
themselves about this transistor thing
and although i have sort of an instinctive feeling of wanting to blame 
it on them i think its probably not really their fault
ah you know if the manufacturer took this long to tell them all we 
can't deliver that it may not be the most they could have done much 
different
given that i've already in within the last month or so had a different 
less than perfect interaction with their customer support
at some reason for me to feel i kind of want to blame them but you know 
it
it may be though
that's the right answer for me is to go directly to not necessarily 
this manufacturer but some manufacturer
i do usually they don't want to deal with you
unless you're placing an order for a few thousand dollars worth at once 
but this order had it gone through
would have been about fifteen hundred
so that's starting to be
mr baker says if you start filling out the forms now did you keane 
might be willing to sell you something fewer than five months well
maybe but i mean
even the way you put that suggests that you already foresee some of the 
problems with with digi-key cars
they really want me to promise that i'm not going to reexport
these and i cannot honestly make that promise if i'm going to be 
selling them in kit form that gets distributed around the world
so i think that probably rather than going through someone like mouser 
or digi-key it may be that the right answer is for me to go directly to 
the manufacturer
yeah i mean i suppose also there's always i could go on alibaba and to 
try to deal with a chinese manufacturer i'd really prefer not to do 
that i have never not had quality problems with things bought through 
through ali baba
and they make a whole big thing about oh well you can get your money 
back but really getting my money back if its defective is not good 
enough i needed to not be defective
ah
but you know there are other manufacturers who
either or not don't operate in china or at least they have american 
offices that are for real
mr baker says i ordered one usb serial cable from digi-key it took 
three forms in two weeks then once it was shipped it was here the next 
day yeah i mean really the thing that that bothers me about digi key 
doing that granted you know there are laws that they have to follow but 
nobody else in their business
us
thinks that they need to enforce those laws with respect to something 
like a transistor or a usb serial cable you know
i
if if it were if we were actually buying you know high precision
inertial navigation systems okay that's something that would be useful 
in a missile and so they want to make sure that they're not going to be 
selling it to somebody who was acting as a front for the north korean 
government but if the north koreans are
buying these silly discrete to pnp transistors then
they're not a threat and they're not buying those songs
and the the relevance the actual regulations from the us government 
have very broad exceptions that the kinds of things i'm buying 
certainly fall into
there's no legitimate reason for them to demand to know exactly what 
i'm doing with the transistors or to demands that i promise that what i 
am doing will not include exporting them
and i know of course if i were to just lie on those forms it would it 
would never catch up to me but what if it does right
when running a business i can't be quite as cavalier about such things 
as i would be if i were just a hobbyist
i
alright so now we're up to eighty more than halfway
but yeah and you know when i've bought
i have bought semiconductors that are a little bit more involved direct 
from the manufacturer like i bought those on thirteen seven hundred 
from texas instruments and buying direct from manufacturer on the one 
hand there's always weird annoyances like normally if a package comes 
in by u p s u p s acts as the
broker and they bill me afterwards except
these manufacturers either they use fedex instead and fedex will not do 
anything except over the telephone or ewp it goes through some weird 
different process with u p s i end up having to exchange email with 
customer support just to get the package or whatever else
there's always some some snag when i deal with a manufacturer directly 
which is understandable right i mean mouser and digi-key markup the 
product and that's how they earn it is by actually having a a process 
you can deal with
but dealing directly with a manufacturer may be maybe the right thing 
to do even if it means i end up having to buy ten thousand of them 
instead of four thousand or something
i probably get a better price that way

the
the it does force me to think about sort of what is the expected 
lifespan of my product
alright how long
will i either want to or be able to continue getting parts that
for this item
the
buying parts in a lifetime by situation kind of locks that in both that 
i won't be surprised but that i will end up
eventually running out
okay that's one hundred

and although i've been spending time on other things i'm actually
i have actually made a whole lot of progress on the usb
interface
which is an exciting thing i have now implemented i've got a talking to
usb midi to a corded keyboard to mouse and importantly to a flash drive 
now
i dunno if y'all who are tuned in right now are aware of how talking to 
a flash drive works but i mean you've got to get your basic usb 
communication working
but then the the protocol that they all use i mean that the official 
protocol has many many options but what they all do is they tunnel 
scalzi commands over usb
and so every time you send a command to the drive you have to wrap it 
in a usb header which has little indian fields
and you then have to wrap the send the actual command as a scalzi 
command block which has big indian fields
often containing the same information
and the usb header is fifteen bytes long
and then has a sixteen by field for the scas e command
which means that all of your
on your fields in your schedule you can block end up unaligned
but since you're having to if like me you're using a little indian 
machine to write the
right the fields you have to deal with them one bite at a time anyway 
so that's not such a huge issue so you know all this nonsense just to 
talk to the dr and then of course you have to decode the das file 
system on the drive
i actually have code for all of that now
its not fully tested
i really the next significant step on that is going to be to load the 
latest version and see see if it works hello academy impossible
but in theory if there are no ghosts no other serious bugs i should 
already be at the state where i can look right a new set of firmware 
onto a flash key plug it into the module and the module should be able 
to do read it decode the partition
table decode the fat file system load the actual firmware and reflash 
itself
and that's really pretty exciting i was never sure that i would be able 
to get to this point at all
and then that will mean that there are basically two books of 
documentation i have to write before the hardware and the software
but in theory it'll mean that someone who gets one of these modules 
will be able to write their own software for it
using tools for which they don't have to pay a fee
and put the the new software onto a flash key and plug it in and load it
have all that work
the one thing i am worried about is people actually trying this and 
managing to brick their modules because
there's a lot of software that has to be included in the new firmware 
image to allow it to actually be able to load the next one
and if somebody decides to mess with the usb driver they can quickly 
put it into a state where it won't be able to refresh itself
i
but
that like the business of building something in the wrong order 
ultimately if someone buys the device and
and then screws it up its their own problem
you know if you if you have the the hardware depot tools you can solder 
another little header onto there and plug plug your hardware debugger 
into it and then you can even if it is quote unquote bricked you can 
unbrick it
but i would really like people to be able to do some development on this
i'm going to do gpl to gpl three for for this the same as basically all 
my other stuff
that's in response to the question in chats of what license will it be 
under
and i'm already using gpl three for the hardware designs which its not 
a perfect fit you know trying to put the gpl license on hardware but
that is what i'm doing

ah
i'm not happy to have been proven right about this but it is a fact 
that for many years i've been putting things under gpl such and such 
version not gpl such and such version or later
and i think i have been kind of proven right that the free software 
foundation cannot be trusted to stick to its own print stated 
principles so i don't want gpl version four to turn out to have 
failures embedded in it that i strongly disagree with and have all my 
code suddenly
become potentially covered by that which is why it is
gpl three and its not gpl three plus
although i realize that those that doing that does potentially create 
some compatibility issues

its interesting to look at the the licenses on
quote unquote open source hardware
i mean there are licenses that people have drawn up specifically for 
this mutable instruments has historically used mit license for the 
software and then i think some version of creative commons for for the 
hardware
and if gpl isn't a great license for hardware i think creative commons 
is significantly worse
but that's where that stands but then
emily of mutable has also been pretty unhappy about the way that her 
mit license code has ended up being used so
that may not have ended up being the greatest decision
now i am i have seen a few indications of people
selling modules that are
appear to be derived from mine
and not distributing machine readable hardware designs
so far i've not been at the point where
where i felt i really had to do something about that because if someone 
runs off five boards and builds two and sells three
i don't really care but
it has always been my view that's my intended interpretation of the gpl 
on my hardware design is if you sell the physical product then you have 
to make available the machine readable design files such as the 
keychain files or equal or whatever
but you know i kind of wish that i were big enough for there to be
a knock off versions that were also big enough to be worth looking at

its our baker says he still trusts fsf on licensing but less on social 
political issues so probably the right decision i mean licensing 
ultimately is socio political that's the point of of having this kind 
of license so i see it as very hard to sell
alright so that's all one hundred and forty of the famous lumberjacks 
there okay
and so i can tick that off and start packing them into bags


five

are very quickly approaching the point at which i'm going to have to 
actually do something serious about recycling or reusing all those 
empty bags i've been collecting
but its hard because i don't really have a clear idea of what i 
actually want to do with them most are not really a size that i can use
and even the ones that are a size that i can use many are going to have 
to be somehow processed to remove the labels
i guess that's another r and d project right what's the best way to 
remove labels and not leave you on
on the bank
i'm hoping that i can maybe make use of some of that to glycol ether
that i have on hand because
that stuff was expensive and its somewhat dangerous to store for 
extended periods
and so i hate to try to dispose of it as hazardous waste if it has any 
use it can be put to
but i'm thinking that maybe i i guess i was i've also partly been kind 
of waiting or hoping that the prices advisor propyl alcohol will come 
down as both the pandemic winds down and people become more and more 
aware that hand sanitizer is not real
really all that useful
hello blood luster
i mean
iso propyl alcohol is now significantly more expensive than it was in 
the before times
and to
and the company i used to order it from is now much less eager to sell 
to the public than they used to be regardless of the price and so forth 
and so on
so i was kind of hoping that you know the day would come when i could 
get a couple more five liter jugs of that at something closer to the 
before times price
and then just do a whole bunch of soaking and scraping and remove 
remove labels from bags but i'm thinking that probably a good solvent 
to use would be iso propyl alcohol with like a few percent of
to be talks the ethanol glycol ether has been calling it
that stuff is its cool stuff its its both a solvent and its like a 
detergent so its very good for dissolving
stuff like label glue

i may not be easy for me to talk on stream while i'm doing that though 
because i'll probably be wanting to wear a respirator
i guess if its only a few percent gloves may be good enough but
don't want to take any more unnecessary risks than necessary if that 
makes any sense


i mean like windex is i think one or two percent
of that stuff and people don't get to
too much panty bunching over windex



but then its going to be a whole big production right because i'm 
going to have to sort out which which banks i actually want to try to 
process and remove the labels
and then they'll probably have to be soaked probably also dried
so that the the labels will come off

i don't think that just mechanically peeling them off is going to be 
good enough because when i've tried that
it leaves
it leaves a sticky residue on the bag and i can't really have if i'm 
going to you using the bags the way i'm using these ones these are 
brand new bags
you know feeding them and putting them inside other bags for a rub
for the parts in the kit
i can't really have those bags be sticky
so the glue does have to come off if its going to be useful


huh

alright

so that's i
seven bags of
jacks and other miscellaneous parts

and i can tick that off on the list
and then i guess the next thing to do
really the only significant thing to do is
resistors
which are again a lot of work not an item i'm super thrilled to do but 
has to be done at some point

so
gonna need a couple of different kinds of
pins and other writings here
i
hundred one
i don't think i handled these on stream but i have now gotten the
whew
values that i was missing so i do actually have all the resistors here 
that go into these kits and actually since the
since this
middle path does not use
those pnp transistors i and i've got the front panels now i have all of 
the parts that need to go into this batch of middle path kits
so at least we'll be in force




















the
hundred one is one of the palindromic ones its brown black black black 
brown is the color code



next is to seventy one



for these purposes





in programming the
usb thing the the microcontroller chip on there is a microchip pic 
twenty four series microcontroller
and so i've spent a little bit of time on the microchip corporation web 
forum
looking for answers to different questions
few of which were helpful
and the microchip web forum
apparently at one point they had a big problem with spam robots
so they implemented some kind of auto sensor filter
and in particular some of the spam from robots were trying to advertise 
free ipods so they blocked the word ipod except they didn't block it as 
a word they blocked to the actual sequence of characters i p o d
so that means for instance there's a there's a member of the forum who 
uses it quite a lot well regarded member of the community
and his username is anti podium
a n t i p o d
in
cause he's in australia
so if you mentioned his name
then your message will be blocked because it has ipod in it
he has it right in his signature do not mention me by name because your 
message will be blocked but people either don't comprehend that or 
don't believe it and they
try to talk to them and their messages get blocked
and it appears that nobody at microchip either considers this a serious 
enough problem to solve or knows how to solve it
and they're just stuck with this forum software that and that's not 
even the only word that gets blocked although its the one that comes 
up most often just sometimes blocks messages because its over 
zealously trying to avoid spam robots
but instead of fixing this they have decided that in twenty twenty one 
the words master and slave are unacceptable
so when you're describing something like an eye to see us which is a 
very common peripheral that their products used for communicating with 
other chips
they had to go in and change all the data sheets issue new lw datasheets
so that they wouldn't say master and slave
and to make matters worse they change to those words in at least some 
of the data sheets to host and client which do not mean the same thing 
so if you know how am i to seabass works and you're reading the 
datasheet
all of a sudden its talking about hosts and clients which are not the 
terms normally used for describing this and its not even in those 
terms already have meanings and they're not using them in their 
accepted meanings of what host and client mean
so its a huge mess
and so you know someone started a thread on the forum complaining about 
this
but the company doesn't read their own forums so they're just you know
talking to each other
and its not a very interesting flame war because everybody's on the 
same side of it
alright so this is supposed to be thirteen yeah thirteen six eighty one 
resisters




and if they're so concerned about forbidding a word that might upset 
someone maybe
they could fix their
word forbidding software on their forums
so that this guy i i'm amazed that antipodean is still even willing to 
deal with these clowns and contribute to their forum
given the way that they're treating him
and its just through stupidity right its not like they somebody made a
yeah as our baker says that sounds a lot like a lot of twitter a big 
flame where where everybody's actually on the same site true enough 
although i mean i said flame where its not a flame war you know its 
just someone posted this thread and twenty five other people piled on 
to say yeah you're right that is really stupid so it is
it wasn't even a really really a flame war
its just a thread of people occurring with each other

alright so these last few
there are eight that remain i'm going to set them aside for some future 
use


like when i'm building a building and assembly the one i can use those 
and then five of the newer ones but i'd rather have a a single chunk of 
thirteen
to ship in the kit







one thing i've found
with customer service is that it seems to be the hardest thing in the 
world to get them to actually work with you like suggest what you could 
do that was certainly my thing with the chinese panel manufacturers 
several years ago when i was trying to
possibly start a business relationship with them then i would say you 
know here's here's what i'd like i think you probably won't be able to 
do with do it but what can you do that is kind of like this and you 
know first they would say yes we can do that and then months later they 
would saying oh we actually can't do that but they would never ever 
answer the question
what else can you do instead
and that's the concern i have with mouser that you know they said well
we can't ship you those transistors okay what can you ship that meets 
my requirements here are my requirements
i hope they will be able to give me an answer to that but i don't think 
they will i think they won't go any further than saying well here's the 
manufacturer's recommended substitution which does not meet the 
requirements
because its on tape
and i need some that are i actually don't care whether they're on tape 
but i care about them not having the lead spent and normally if its on 
tape it'll have to have the lead spent because that's what they do to 
make it fit on the tape

alright seven times thirteen
of the six eighty one registers
and i need seven times fourteen so i guess that's ninety eight
of the one k







let's count again three six nine twelve fourteen
the
the
the
the seven little strips of fourteen inch
the see if i can fix this
the
the
the middle path is one of my later designs and i am basically applying 
some of the things i learned in the earlier ones so whereas
leapfrog has a long list of resistor values and often there will be 
only one or two of each used in this that i've tried to consolidate 
into so have a smaller selection of resistors so they're like thirteen 
of these and fourteen of those and a relatively small number of 
different values
it makes both the kit prep and probably the build easier
alright next is two point seven k
the

the


the
the
okay that's seven of those
the
the
the
the hello to f top buyer
or if maybe after payer i dunno

i've been gradually adding more
followers on here not quite at the magic fifty number yet but 
reasonable to hope that i will within a few more weeks
the six point eight
seven of those
the
the
yeah
baker says hill
celebrate my reaching fifty with two subs i think there are other other 
items i have to also achieve before i can actually take subscriptions
and goodness knows what the tax implications are going to be
but certainly something to look forward to
the
the scissors need to be lubed
property damage second
six point eight k
the
guess really i should have lubricated the scissors before doing this so 
they could have some time to dry but
its literally to chain streamers on that
the
alright
here's the scissor lubricant but i'm going to to
thanks to you


the okay actually maybe i didn't even need this clinics
wonder if i can just dip this
content

the yeah i'll probably do
i mixed up several different softens and some vaseline in here hoping 
to make something that i could apply to my scissors to
remove the sticky stuff
and it basically works but it doesn't work really well and now i'm 
stuck with this jarvis that will probably last a long time i don't want 
to throw it out cause you know environmental whatever
but i really should have done a bit more experimentation first to come 
up with a mixture that would really work up the the main problem is 
that the solvents do not act in the mixture i used do not actually 
dissolve the vaseline so the you get blobs of vaseline that satellite 
to the bottom and that's the
the part that's actually helpful for lubricating and so would have been 
nice to have
use some solvent or mixture that would actually dissolve the vaseline 
and nadia dana alright i check off six point eight
and now its eight point two is next

environmental whatever is a great brand name for those of you raised by 
hippies well at least the song name i don't know if i'd want my whole 
band to be
under that banner


















ten k



hmm
i have these ten k resistors but they're the smaller ones think i'd 
probably want to only ship the larger ones in the kit
and then i'll save the small ones for when i'm doing it myself just 
cause they're a little annoying













alright ten k










and i'm also going to need to have the twelve case now i don't quite 
remember if these might be
the ones that aren't rocket loose yeah
so those are going to have to go on to tape i think

you know that this is the same as the issue with the the transistors 
that
its not enough just that the parties the rights kind of part it also 
has to be packaged in the way that works for whatever manufacturing 
process you're doing
and for the transistors that means i want them not on tape
for resistors like these i actually want them on tape if possible
the untaped ones are
not so annoying that i can't use them but they're
annoying enough that i prefer not to

but i just wasn't paying quite enough attention when i when i ordered 
this little bag of almond
with the
with the transistors because i was looking to spend about fifteen 
hundred dollars then i did pay close attention to which kind i thought 
i was ordering and i thought i'd i thought i'd done it i thought i'd 
count them
in order for the the actual item i wanted and then they say oh sorry 
you can't do that wouldn't you like to use this other thing that is the 
thing you were specifically trying to avoid instead no no i don't want 
to do that
the little tiny ones are cute
but they're not quite so practical so these ones in addition to being 
bulk pack they're also tiny












alright these
unfortunately this masking tape is not quite as good at taking up
incas
previous kind of fun this is not too bad actually
i've sometimes had trouble with the masking tape not taking up the ink








the okay now the eighteen case
at least one server
using relatively large quantity



the
the
the
the seven here
the
the one i
wrote on this label i didn't realize i was going to end up having to 
break it to
open the package but
probably still be ok
if necessary i can slap another label on here
the






six

that'll be seven

the








hello to on far


the
so for these twenty two ks
i am channeling a one per bin


huh which means labeling is going to be
fine print
the








the




the











the

ten of these
ten of the twenty seven k



hello hello to
var and hello to fix levin





the
the
the
the
the
the alright the twenty seven ks
the next is thirty six which i think might be another these ones find 
out in a second
the thirty six
don't know what i've got i was going to say it might be one that i have 
to put on my own tape but evidently not
its already taped over

the


the
the
oh hello to joint effort

the
the thirty nine killed






okay so they've
splice together two chunks of tape in here
using some kind of red
plastic sticky tape
it sticks to everything except where it should
just remove that
yeah that sounds like the spelling you might stuff

i guess that's the way they have to do it in order to to put the tape 
through a machine right
because this tape would normally be rolled onto a roll and then
spooled into the robot
people who make electronics by hand are just such a
discriminated minority that they don't care
they don't have products for us and that's why i'm sure
i had a hard time sourcing those transistors
sorry i heard about the transistors but you know they it is really an 
important thing i can't make
leapfrog without winter
something of that nature
if i have to use the ones with the kinked leads
it'll be a significant issue
so let's hope that that doesn't actually unfold that way



















that's the thirty nine case


next we're on to the next bin and fifty six k
i've got this one i should also be looking for sixty eight and ninety 
one
ninety one
sixty eight
fifty six

seventy five i've got a lot of seventy five cent here

not using those in this build so









the
the
the
the sixty eight i saw one of the some going to have to write small
the




the
the
the and ninety ones
the
the
the


the
alright so the next item on here is the twenty four of one hundred k
three sisters
from the big box
know how many thousands of these i've used over the years but
quite a number anyway
six nine twelve
six
twelve

the


the
the four

five
the
six see here
yeah
the and cetera
the
the
the
the kick
just looking in here to make sure that the when i
did the hundred one ones earlier
i should not have had that was say one hundred k an easy mistake to 
make while writing loose labels
but its there they only say one hundred
the next is the one thirties
if i can find them
let it go
the


the
the
the
the alright next is the one meg
the kitten near the end here
only those in a minute
probably these ones actually
there's the one mix
and yeah
i'll get one one th

i'm probably not going to want to actually do the final packing up
unless stream
although i guess i maybe do have time for it
probably not though

that might be a subject for
an extra stream actually

and some other non monday day











a couple of these already countered doubt
in pairs let's say one point in it meg
so i just need a few more like that




what would be a fun robotics project
to try and build a machine that would to process these resistors like 
not only am
counting them off the tape which relieves the easy part but
if he could like print little labels that would replace the tape
and be nicer than the hand written ones

of course just like building a printer or anything that handles paper
there'd be a lot of
annoying you know not quite right alignment things and
oh there was a little too much or too little friction and so it didn't 
to
didn't catch where it should or that sort of thing but
seems like there ought to be a way to make that work
alright that is all the resisters counted out
so i'm going to need seven more bags and then to count them let's see 
three
six
twelve
twenty two twenty two resistor values in the bag










one two
three
four
five
six seven
h
nine ten eleven
twelve

thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen seventeen team


nineteen twenty twenty one twenty two

that's by way of cross checking that i actually have
at least the right number of different chunks of resisters in the bag
it should rule out stuff like will i
countered out the right pieces and then dumped them in the wrong band 
while i was doing it or something










hint



thirteen
jane


twenty two







five here

seven
ten




twenty two



the
the six year
the thirteen
sixteen seventeen team
nineteen twenty i'll be twenty two
the girl
the
the alright
one
the six
the
twelve thirteen
seventeen
and five more is twenty two
the
the h here
the ten twelve
fourteen
the twenty
twenty two
it looks good for the current year
probably not missing any pieces

and i think i probably am going to call it after iowa
finish these bags because i don't really want to also have to dig out 
all the other things that go in here and print out the happy user 
letter and so on
five here
i had an adventure with my printer that
after an upgrade of katie e it would no longer print properly
and after extensive debugging
i determined that it was somehow telling ever it was forcing everything 
to be converted to a four paper even though
nothing in my system
is set for a four
the ten

and i don't believe that the kt eighteen will take it seriously if i 
attempt to report that
that's a shame because
such errors are really important
fifteen

twenty


and twenty two

as our baker move to says move to sweden then you can print well that 
does seem to be the level of fun
customer support that
katie e people really seem to think is adequate that oh well its your 
fault for living in a place where the standard print sizes different 
from what it is somewhere else
but
that doesn't really work that way you know alright so
got all four small plastic bags i've got shield banks
i actually do have pcbs
and panels so yeah whenever i'm a little more enthusiastic about doing 
the final assembly on these which
maybe within the next few days
i'll be able to put together
some middle path kits are now unfortunately the leapfrog kids
i'm going to have to work out they're going to have to wait both on the 
pcbs they're currently in production in bangalore
and whatever i'm going to do about those transistors
i mean i have a few
of the old p n two hundred days i don't think i have enough to finish 
this batch of kits
i have a few of the new set of cp twenty twelve a s t zed which is a 
mouthful which don't really fit on the board properly those were bought 
for testing
and again its if i were building these
assembled myself i could press those into service but i don't really 
want to force kit builders to build them especially not if i'm not 
going to actually be using those for regular production
and then i sure hope that mauser or somebody will be able to come 
through with
a replacement for the paean to one hundred day that i can really use 
properly
but i can't ship the kits until i either do that or come up with a 
workaround and they're going to be waiting on the circuit board anyway
which i sure hope come out properly because
these people have burned me before and with a bad silkscreen
and i they didn't really seem very respect and receptive to my comments 
on this order of hey i its really important to get the silk screened 
right they said oh well here are our specifications if you follow those 
there should be no problem but i followed the specifications last time 
and it there was a problem so we shall see
but anyway thank you all for tuning in
and if you have not
if you've not followed me yet then please do so
and i hope you enjoyed
and see you next time
yeah
the
the
the