We're Sorry! But Apple Ain't! - Remorseless RAM Racketeering

The Amp Hour · 9 Apr 2014 · 1h 14m · Episode 193

What this episode covers

Dave Jones and Chris Gammell discuss the 'Silicon Mafia,' detailing how Apple uses its massive capital to buy up Renesas fabs and memory at rock-bottom prices, squeezing suppliers like Cirrus Logic. They analyze the Novena laptop's open-source hardware ecosystem, featuring a Spartan 6 FPGA and swappable batteries, and critique the Saleae Logic 4's streaming architecture. The hosts also expose a fraudulent Indiegogo campaign for a calorie-tracking watch and discuss the challenges of attending maker fairs and trade shows as embedded consultants.

Other shows on the same ground, closest first.

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  • Embedded.fm · 52m

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    Mark Garrison, co-founder of Saleae, discusses the evolution of his company from a garage-side project to a small business selling the Logic 8 and Logic 16 logic analyzers. He details the challenges of bootstrapping, the importance of distributors like Avnet over Digi-Key for production, and the technical hurdles of FPGA design and manufacturing. Garrison also shares anecdotes about debugging a custom electric sailboat project and the company's plans for new high-end products.

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  • Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast · 1h 43m

    044 - Scots Army Knife

    Piotr Esden-Tempski of 1BitSquared discusses the company's role in manufacturing open-source hardware, specifically the Glasgow digital interface explorer, the iCEBreaker FPGA board, and the Black Magic Probe debugger. He explains the economic rationale for using an old Quad 4C pick-and-place machine for small-batch production and details how Glasgow uses an FPGA to dynamically generate hardware protocols via the nmigen HDL. The conversation also covers the geopolitical shift toward RISC-V in China, the challenges of debugging legacy industrial equipment, and the importance of documentation and community education in the open-source hardware ecosystem.

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