The social media nightmare

Circuit Break Podcast #358

The Social Media Nightmare

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December 23, 2022, Episode #358

This week's topics are: Porsche's Synthetic Gasoline, Record Chip Manufacturing Sales for the year 2022, and the Raspberry_Pi Social Media Firestorm.

Porsche’s synthetic gasoline factory comes online today in Chile

  • Way back on episode 265 (Feb 2021) we talked about this announcement from Porsche.
  • Production
    • 34,000 gallons (130,000 L) a year
    • 14.5 million gallons (55 million L) a year by 2024
    • 145 million gallons (550 million L) a year by 2026
  • Wind power to electrolysis water into hydrogen and oxygen
    • The hydrogen is then combined with carbon captured from the air or industrial sources to synthesize methanol
    • Then be converted into longer hydrocarbons to be used as fuel
    • Recycling CO2 in the air
  • Is this the future of current Internal Combustion Engines?
    • Direct drop in for normal gasoline
    • “Carbon Neutral” way to run your classic car

Chip manufacturing equipment sales record in 2022

  • Record fab constructions have driven total semiconductor manufacturing equipment sales to cross the $100 billion mark for a second straight year
  • Chips Act is $280 billion. 
    • China, Taiwan and Korea are projected to remain the top three destinations for equipment spending in 2022.
  • Most of this money is going towards Wafer Manufacturing Equipment with a focus on wafers for logic / active components like microcontrollers

Why The Computer Company Raspberry Pi’s New Hire Caused A Social Media Firestorm

  • Hired an ex–police officer, Toby Roberts, as its maker-in-residence. 
  • “I was a Technical Surveillance Officer for 15 years, so I built stuff to hide video, audio, and other covert gear”

About the Hosts

Parker Dillmann
  Parker Dillmann

Parker is an Electrical Engineer with backgrounds in Embedded System Design and Digital Signal Processing. He got his start in 2005 by hacking Nintendo consoles into portable gaming units. The following year he designed and produced an Atari 2600 video mod to allow the Atari to display a crisp, RF fuzz free picture on newer TVs. Over a thousand Atari video mods where produced by Parker from 2006 to 2011 and the mod is still made by other enthusiasts in the Atari community.

In 2006, Parker enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin as a Petroleum Engineer. After realizing electronics was his passion he switched majors in 2007 to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Following his previous background in making the Atari 2600 video mod, Parker decided to take more board layout classes and circuit design classes. Other areas of study include robotics, microcontroller theory and design, FPGA development with VHDL and Verilog, and image and signal processing with DSPs. In 2010, Parker won a Ti sponsored Launchpad programming and design contest that was held by the IEEE CS chapter at the University. Parker graduated with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Spring of 2012.

In the Summer of 2012, Parker was hired on as an Electrical Engineer at Dynamic Perception to design and prototype new electronic products. Here, Parker learned about full product development cycles and honed his board layout skills. Seeing the difficulties in managing operations and FCC/CE compliance testing, Parker thought there had to be a better way for small electronic companies to get their product out in customer's hands.

Parker also runs the blog, longhornengineer.com, where he posts his personal projects, technical guides, and appnotes about board layout design and components.

Stephen Kraig
  Stephen Kraig

Stephen Kraig is a component engineer working in the aerospace industry. He has applied his electrical engineering knowledge in a variety of contexts previously, including oil and gas, contract manufacturing, audio electronic repair, and synthesizer design. A graduate of Texas A&M, Stephen has lived his adult life in the Houston, TX, and Denver, CO, areas.

Stephen has never said no to a project. From building guitar amps (starting when he was 17) to designing and building his own CNC table to fine-tuning the mineral composition of the water he uses to brew beer, he thrives on testing, experimentation, and problem-solving. Tune into the podcast to learn more about the wacky stuff Stephen gets up to.

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!

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