Circuit Break Podcast #152

Third Annual MacroFab Star Wars Christmas Special – Vader’s Fake Finger

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Josh Rozier returns for the 5th time on the podcast which might be some kind of record. This time Josh talks about his beginnings in laying out PCBs.

Fourth Annual MacroFab Star Wars Christmas Special

Josh Rozier and Hyr0n join Parker and Stephen to talk about the latest Star Wars lore, technology, and media! Star Wars HeathKits and The Mandalorian.

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Josh Rozier returns to talk about designing and building custom audio transformers.

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December 26, 2018, Episode #152

On this episode, Josh Rozier joins Parker and Stephen to discuss if the "Force" is a force and Parsecs.
  • Josh Rozier
    • By day Josh Rozier does business intelligence and data analytics for a large, east-coast insurance monolith
    • By night he is Roz, a level 5 Scoundrel and chief troublemaker of the StarWars D20 RPG group
  • Is the Force a Force?
    • Midichlorians – Stephen has a potential justification for this
    • Originally described as part of the cellular makeup of a Jedi
      • This is taken as a living organism or carbon-based thing but maybe not
    • Obi-Wan, in A New Hope says that The Force is “an energy field created by all living beings.”
    • Perhaps Midichlorians are a name for a subatomic particle that acts as a gauge boson
      • In particle physics, a gauge boson is a force carrier, a bosonic particle that carries any of the fundamental interactions of nature, commonly called forces. Elementary particles, whose interactions are described by gauge theory, interact with each other by the exchange of gauge bosons—usually as virtual particles
      • Photon – carry the electromagnetic interaction – All electrical Action
      • W and Z Boson – Carry the Weak interaction – Radioactive Decay
      • Gluons – Carry the Strong interaction – Holds particles together
      • Gravitons (theory)
    • Could the force be a gauge boson that interacts with all bosons? Could jedi just possess more of the gauge bosons?
  • Hyperspace Ramming
    • Why was this not done in previous installments?
    • Hyperspace sniping bases
      • Ability to ram things at lightspeed would make capital ships entirely obsolete
        • They are just massive expensive easy to kill targets
      • Why does the empire keep building planted destroying superweapons?
        • If that’s the goal all you need is an asteroid and a hyper drive
    • Droids can pilot ships so it is not a question of suicide/kamikaze
    • Only Capital Ships have enough mass and large enough hyper drives?
      • Xwing weighs around 12,000 lbs (estimate based on fighter planes) or about 5500 kg
      • Assume just light speed and not FTL so Velocity is ‎299792458 m/s
      • Kinetic Energy is ½ mv^2 so we have around 247,157,674,152,624,851,000 Joules of Energy or around 247 quintillion Joules
    • Hyper Drives are expensive
      • All X-wings have hyper drives and tons of those where blown up trying to defeat the deathstar
        • Where you could have taken a single Xwing and just hyperspace rammed the deathstar. 1 Verse 20 ships lost?
    • Gravity wells cast “Hyperspace” shadows
      • Possibly DeathStar has enough gravity?
      • We know from The Last Jedi even the largest of ships do not have enough gravity
  • 12 Parsecs? Solo’s famous line that shows Lucas has no idea what he was writing
    • Solo’s line from A New Hope – Millennium Falcon “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.”
    • Parsecs is a measurement of distance instead of time
      • A unit of distance equal to about 3.26 light years
    • Traveling to Kessel has a set path to travel through the space storm
      • By going into the maelstrom and off the set path, Han was effectively taking a shortcut, cutting the distance down to 12 parsecs
    • Tho pretty much any ship can then take this short cut
    • Another Idea however, If the Falcon is “The Fastest ship in the Galaxy” it can indeed fly closer to the blackhole seen in Solo and still escape it thus actually being able to cut down distance
    • Schwarzschild radius of objects
  • Predictions from the previous podcast
    • Stephen was right – Luke Died
    • Parker was wrong. Though is Rey really a Jedi without training?
    • Rey didn’t change her name to Neo
  • Predictions for EP9?
    • Is luke actually dead?
    • Will we see CGI Carrie Fisher?
  • Best and Worst movies of the Star Wars Franchise.

Visit our Public Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!

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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