Know How... 126 (Transcript)

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Father Robert Ballecer: On this episode of know how it is the science fair, your feedback and I know what we did last Christmas.

Fr. Robert: Welcome to know how, it is the twit show where we build, bend, break and upgrade. I’m Father Robert Ballecer.

Bryan Burnett: And I’m Bryan Burnett.

Fr. Robert: And for the next 45 minutes?

Bryan: Considering the late start that we got, 20 minutes. Let’s get this done.

Fr. Robert: For the next 20 minutes we are going to be letting you into some of the projects that we have been playing with over the past few weeks. Now, Bryan, this actually is our first show of 2015.

Bryan: That’s right. Because we pre-recorded our butts off last month so that you could go to CES.

Fr. Robert: Yeah, and then I worked my butt off over there. We are going to be giving you some of the footage from CES over the next couple of episodes. Because there were a few things that I thought might not fit into the twit CES coverage but it would be perfect for know-how.

Bryan: A few things that pique their interest. Off the top of my head I am thinking about drones. We really haven’t talked very much about those on the show. And 3-D printing.

Fr. Robert: Right. Now folks remember we did promise that we were going to give you a couple weeks off from quad copter built. We will still talk about them because that is what the people in our group, our Google plus group, it’s like half of it is all about drone talk. So we will talk about them but we are not doing another quad copter/drone build for a while. We will be teasing a few because we’ve got some really fun stuff coming up. But we wanted to try something a little different for the first part of 2015. We’ve got a new segment called science fair. this actually came to us from a high school student who was wondering if we could do a few segments that could show her some interesting things to do for her science fair. It is science fair season.

Bryan: That’s a great idea. Wow I wasn’t even aware there was a season.

Fr. Robert: There is a season because it leads up to the national science fair in Washington DC.

Bryan: Very cool. So can we have like a volcano with baking soda?

Fr. Robert: We are going to do so much more than that.

Bryan: Yeah, you always have to take it to the next level don’t you.

Fr. Robert: So we Are going to be doing a few segments over the next couple of weeks where we are going to take some basic science, stuff that high school students were playful adults can use to tease us out.

Bryan: Definitely. That sounds cool. That’s a great idea.

Fr. Robert: But before we do that, I want to know what you did over Christmas.

Bryan: Oh, well it was a very busy season. Other than work, I did pretty well for Christmas. My significant other got me an Xbox 1, to her instant regret. But that is my Boy Tibs who helped me open my Xbox 1. He really like to open presents.

Fr. Robert: I was following your feeds, both Twitter and GPlus pretty closely because you had some beautiful photos. You traveled a lot in California. What was up with that?

Bryan: I didn’t travel very far. fortunately I have some relatives that own property fairly close to Petaluma and it is really scenic out there. I don’t think I threw any pictures in the dock for that though. What was the next picture that I had? Let’s see. Oh right. This is something that you really missed out on. Game of drones came. It was cool.

Fr. Robert: I saw your tweet and I did kind of wish I was there.

Bryan: It was really fun to watch. It was not a legit, but more scaled up version of when we fight our drones. Because we will take the Syma’s and run them into each other but these guys were breaking props and stuff.

Fr. Robert: These are 450 plus. These are super modified. There was one that look like a chandelier. They are basically designed to feel like they are drones.

Bryan: And that they did. It was pretty cool to watch. I think next year we will have to make our own drone to fight against them. I wanted to jump in but I didn’t want to use my drone.

Fr. Robert: I watched that segment live on the twit New Year’s coverage and the whole time I was thinking I would build it like this and I would add that… I was thinking of all the things I could put onto it. I was thinking the key is that you have to have a long battery life. Because you could out wait a lot of your enemies.

Bryan: If you are nimble enough you could just kind of dance around them until they make a mistake.

Fr. Robert: And you have to protect. Because the attack, the same attack that we use all the time, is that you get hit from above. So you drop your quad into the quad below you and you mess up their props. So if you could armor your props so they couldn’t do that.

Bryan: We’ll work on that or next year when we do another New Year’s thing. But the next thing was a little bit of sad news, was that the know hole, our basement know hole got dismantled.

Fr. Robert: That’s right folks, the know hole is no more.

Bryan: We kind of knew that I had a time of death because we were flaunting the sprinkler system.

Fr. Robert: We were flaunting some major safety laws.

Bryan: So while you were gone we had to clear that out and I did a little makeshift thing which I've been called the no crevice for the time being. But we are rebuilding.

Fr. Robert: I kind of like the crack of know. It’s very Tolkien-ish.

Bryan: One does not simply walk into the crack of knowledge.

Alex Gumple: And we have some photos from Burk.

Fr. Robert: Actually it is a prison and if you look at the next photo from Burk, that is pretty much what it is going to be like.

Bryan:Somebody got in trouble because they were throwing candy bars through the…

Fr. Robert: Those things hurt.

Bryan: Emotionally and physically.

Fr. Robert: And I’m eating them going stop eating.

Bryan: So that our new place where we will be doing our new projects and stuff. And finally I have lost my drone.

Fr. Robert: Yeah, so like 80 feet or 100 feet up?

Bryan: We went to the redwood forest and I got too confident and I flew too high into the sun.

Fr. Robert: You could’ve used one of these.

Bryan: If I could’ve had the fire department come out that would've been perfect. This was actually in front of the twit studio a week before I lost my drone.

Fr. Robert: The funny thing is that if you looked into the Google plus group over the break, obviously a lot of our fans got Symas. We have been telling people to do it. Get an inexpensive trainer for $50. In fact, Neil got one and practiced. People either put them in trees or burned out motors for one really sad person that I am so sorry to hear about, he thought that he could plug the same battery that you have on a large quad copter into that. So instead of 3.7 V it was like a 7.1. So he burned everything out. And the group he was like I smell burning plastic. Can I fix this? No.

Bryan: Fortunately I had you. Because you knew at some point I was either going to lose it or something was going to happen to it. So you had actually ordered me another one. That one is sitting in the basement right now waiting for me.

Fr. Robert: You know the mods have to be done again. You can repaint that thing.

Bryan: After I had painted it I had kind of forgotten how difficult it is to see it when it is all white.

Fr. Robert: Because you can’t remember which way it should be facing you. And you lose orientation.

Bryan: Exactly. And so I’ve got to paint it before I start applying it. But what about you? What did you do over the break?

Fr. Robert: Obviously CES. But we are not going to show any CES clips because we've got ours as CES clips. Just go to YouTube.com/twitspecials and you can see the videos that we brought you back from CES. We actually did a pretty decent job. We went through every hall, we just brought back the things that we thought were either quirky enough or interesting enough. Or important enough to bring back to the audience. It was Scott Wilkinson, myself, and Dickie Dee. And also we had little segments on our news program. So we are going to leave that be. But, Alex, I’m thinking what you probably want to see is how my vacations now look.

Bryan: Ooooh. Too low.

Fr. Robert: Low and fast is fun, but it causes issues. Bob in the chatroom wanted to know if I had any issues with bringing those to Hawaii and no. Just pack it responsibly and don’t let the LiPo’s beatings. It should be in a proper battery bad. In fact I had my batteries in a battery bad inside of the battery box. No impact, no worries, no muss, no fuss. I brought three. I brought the Syma, because I wanted my family to be able to practice. I brought the 250 because that thing is fun. They are so quick. And then I brought a 450 with a gimbal. So the really steady shots had a gimbal on the bottom. Absolutely gorgeous shot. That one I actually disassembled. I took the arms off so that it would fit in the luggage better. But TSA didn’t even check it. Normally they would leave a little note and they didn’t even open the bad. So if you pack it properly there is no problem.

Bryan: Good. It looks like it worked out for you.

Fr. Robert: It does add a lot of stuff. I took so much footage from Hawaii. It is kind of nice because my family gets to have cool videos.

Bryan: And I had forgotten too, I took my drone out to my relatives property to and was playing around with it. I would chase my friends with it while they were on their dirt bikes and stuff. It is to shots that you can’t get otherwise. They look so cool. Some of the news I heard from CES is that there are a lot of drones coming out that will follow you. So you wear like a bracelet or something.

Fr. Robert: I'm a little worried about those just because, if you notice in the shots that I took, I never did it over a densely populated area. I didn’t fly it over a city block. It was early in the morning when the beach was mostly empty, the people who were there, I would always tell them this is what I am doing just so you know these are the dangers and I am going to keep it away from you. I flew it over the water a whole lot so that if it dropped out of the sky it would go into the water and not dropping to someone’s lap. The thing with those followed drones is that it encourages you to not pay attention.

Bryan: And not know where it is.

Fr. Robert: Right. This was always line of sight. I did not fly FPV if I was near anybody. Because you lose your peripheral vision. You can only see what is directly in front of the camera. It is cool tech but I don’t want to be walking near someone who has an automated quad copter that is following something on his wrist.

Bryan: And then they lose track of the battery. And then it comes home.

Fr. Robert: So again. You know I love quad copters, I am having so much fun with them. But folks if you are going to build them and fly them you’ve got to do it responsibly. Speaking of responsibly. What could be more responsible than home automation?

Bryan: And something that I want to try.

Fr. Robert: At CES home automation was everywhere. In fact, home automation is kind of merged with the Internet of things. Because the idea is that you can control your doors, your windows, your appliances, pretty much everything from anywhere. But there is one problem. And that is how do you merge together all the standards? You may have a light switch from this company and a refrigerator from that company and a TV from a third company and you want to be able to control all these from one central space. Well, until recently that has been very difficult to do. Which is why we are happy to have on the show, Smart Things. It is the of for everything smart. Show us some of the things we’ve got on this table right now. This right here is the smart hub. This is the big mama-jama. This allows you to talk to everything. You connect it to your Internet and suddenly you can control your switches, you can control your lights, you can control your sensors. But Smart Thing it is not just about the hub. They've got everything from door sensors to present sensors to light switches to sockets and open and close door and window alarms. It is really trying to give you a little bit of something for everyone. Now this is CNet’s highest rated home system. This is the Smart Things hub and Smart Things system. It allows you to monitor, control and automate your home from anywhere, using your smart phone. Now your lights, locks, thermostats, home security systems are all connected from a single app, which means you don’t have to use a different app for every product. If you’ve gotten into a home automation at all you know what kind of a bother that is. You’ve got one app for your home security, you’ve got one app for your lights, you’ve got one to check who is coming in the door. No, don’t do that anymore. It all goes through Smart Things. You can set your lamps to brighten each morning at sunrise or when you want to wake up. You can even keep your home protected with Smart Things home security. They’ve got motion sensors, motion detection, water detection and more. You can even enable your speakers to broadcast dogs barking if there is motion outside of your house. That sounds silly but my parents live in ‘Vegas and it is a great system. I use it so that if someone approaches the door and rings the door to see if someone is home, you’ll hear dogs barking. But if it is someone that is supposed to be there, they don’t care, they know we have dogs. But otherwise you are like I'm not messing with that house. It is the simple things that really make the Internet of things work for you.

Bryan: It makes it really easy to mix and match. Because nobody’s home is the same as someone else’s and they might have a different idea of what they want to do and they give you all the little parts that you can play with.

Fr. Robert: Exactly. That is what Smart Things is all about. You can even have your camera set to take a series of photos when it detects unwanted motion. Or if there is an entry. So you could have something watching your door and take a picture of every single person that comes into your house. There are so many different ways to customize your Smart Things. I want you to give it a try. Remember this was named CES 2015 editor’s choice by CNET. To get started setting up your smart phone right now to get your Internet of things, Smart Things is offering Know How listeners 10% off any home security were solution kit. And, you are going to get free shipping in the United States when you go to smartthings.com/twit and you use the offer code twit 10 at checkout. You’ve got to try it. Get automated, get smart, get Smart Things. And we thank Smart Things for their support of Know How.

Bryan: Pretty cool.

Fr. Robert: Now, this is the time when we are going to go ahead and jump into our national science fair.

Bryan: So have we come up with the project that we want to submit?

Fr. Robert: I wanted to start people off easy. Because we didn’t want something that was too high on the difficulty scale. We didn’t want something that was going to cost a lot of money. So what we came up with was gallium. What you can see here, this thing right here is a metal. A flaky, kind of silvery looking metal.

Bryan: Is that the gallium?

Fr. Robert: This is gallium. Gallium at room temperature is a solid. And it looks like any other solid. This is aluminum so it is pretty flexible. We all know what aluminum looks like. This is actually cut from a Coke can. This is gallium. We are going to do some freaking science with these two substances.

Bryan: We are going to need gloves right?

Fr. Robert: We are going to need gloves. Here I’ve got one for you. Just one. But that on whatever hand you want to keep. This is not toxic. It is not going to hurt you. But what it can do especially in its liquid form is that it can stain your skin. So if you don’t want to stain your skin black just go ahead and get some cheap gloves.

Bryan: So where did you find this gallium?

Fr. Robert: I got this off Amazon. Just buy 99.9% pure gallium. This is the cool thing. This is what it looks like it room temperature and this is what it looks like just above room temperature. So I just put this in some hot water out of our bubbler. It is now a liquid.

Bryan: It looks like mercury.

Fr. Robert: It does. In fact it asked a lot like mercury. Now there are a few things that you should know about gallium. Gallium is an element that is on the periodic table. You will notice that it is just below aluminum and it is just above indium and it is between zinc and germanium. Remember if you don’t remember chemistry anything that falls along the edges of a section is kind of reactive. And so gallium is actually reactive. It will readily alloy with a lot of metals and that is one of the things that we are going to play with today. So here’s what we are going to do. I've got this piece of aluminum and what I want to do is I want to make a reaction spot.

Bryan: Oh, so you are going to scuff it up.

Fr. Robert: Because aluminum will actually form a skin on its surface. It is an oxidation skin. So oxygen comes into contact with aluminum and it creates aluminum oxide and it creates a protective film.

Bryan: Okay. So you need to scratch it off.

Fr. Robert: which, interestingly enough this is not how it works if you’ve got iron. If you have iron in here it will rust and creates iron oxide that it will keep going. There is no protective film. Aluminum, one of the reasons why it is so corrosion resistant is because it allows it to create that film which means that it is not going to go any further past that initial exposure to oxygen. So what I have done is I just scuffed it up and allowed this to react.

Bryan: On me to hold it down? Or bend it?

Fr. Robert: okay so what I am going to do is I am going to go ahead and get my heated up gallium and make a mess.

Bryan: Is there anything bad going to happen to this twit…

Fr. Robert: We may not be able to use it after this. But that’s okay. It is for science. So check this out. Just a little tiny bit. I don’t want to pour too much. That is way too much. But it looks cool right? All this is, this is pure gallium. This is 99.9% pure. And I’m going to go ahead and just mix it around a little bit. I want to give it time to react with the surface of the aluminum. It is going to take time. We actually sped this up yesterday by heating it. So we put a light underneath it and any time you add heat to assist him it is going to change it. So this is going to start to alloy with the aluminum.

Bryan: So as it cools it is going to become more solid?

Fr. Robert: It is going to become more solid. But here is another cool thing about gallium. In its heated state, it kind of self insulates. Because a thin film is going to form on the outside which means the inside is going to stay warm enough to stay liquid. It melts at 85.57 degrees. Which means if you hold this in your hand it will melt. Your body temperature will melt this. It is soft and silvery and it is a very ready alloy. That is why we are putting it on aluminum. It is going to alloy with aluminum and the aluminum is actually going to take on some of the characteristics of the gallium. Gallium is used very extensively and electronics. You are going to find this in microwaves. Anything that uses radio frequency devices, gallium is used to dope a lot of the services. It is also in high-speed switches. So if you are using the Internet today you are using something that has gallium in it.

Bryan: Why would you use gallium?

Fr. Robert: Because it is a ready alloy and because it changes the properties of whatever it alloys with. We are always looking for that whenever we start doing physical science. You can also find it in IR circuits and of course lasers.

Bryan: You know how much we love lasers.

Fr. Robert: So actually do me a favor. Take this and open it up. I don’t want to waste all this because that is a lot of gallium. First I’m going to do this. What?

Bryan: Is it expensive?

Fr. Robert: It is not that expensive. If this was on my hand it would be leaving a black mark which is why we are wearing gloves.

Bryan: It is like a new baby Terminator.

Fr. Robert: Is solidified a little bit and again that is the skin. Put it back in the water so we can get heated up again.

Alex: Don't put it in your copy.

Fr. Robert: It won’t kill you it would just make you poop. It is slightly anti-microbial or, it is like silver in that it will kill the bacteria in your gut.

Bryan: Pretty much the whole way down.

Fr. Robert: We will show you this at the end of the episode because we are not going to cheat, we actually do want to show you what this going to do to the aluminum. But we’ve got something here that we did yesterday. This is what it looks like when you expose aluminum to gallium. So, this is untreated aluminum see how it bends. Look at what it did to this. It just becomes super brittle. It breaks apart. I can just pulled us apart. But, because it is alloying with gallium, it really… here feel this. Start pulling it and it just flakes off.

Bryan: It is like holding a dry leaf.

Fr. Robert: Everything that makes aluminum soft and malleable that all goes away when you expose it to gallium. Right?

Bryan: You wanted to destroy the aluminum cans in your possession…

Fr. Robert: It is more than just destruction. This is just an introduction. We are actually going to show people what they can do with gallium. There are some very cool experiments that you can play with. Which is why we are bringing it in for a science fair project.

Bryan: We have learned a little.

Fr. Robert: We’ve learned a little and we have grown. Now, we are going to be doing a lot more of the segments. The next substance I want to play with is farrow fluid.

Bryan: Oh is that the oxygenated stuff?

Fr. Robert: No, it’s got iron in it. Like a liquid metal with iron particles so it changes it’s characteristics when you expose it to a magnetic field.

Bryan: Oh, I have seen that.

Fr. Robert: We are going to bring you more gallium. There are actually a couple of party tricks that we can show you that there are also some very cool science stuff. So if you are doing a science project you might like it. But let's get past the freaking science because we’ve got some feedback.

Bryan: People were pretty busy over the holidays while we were gone.

Fr. Robert: We’ve got extensive feedback today because we were gone for a while and there were some really good questions so we want to get to a few of them.

Bryan: Our first one is about soldering. Don asked “what temperature should I use when soldering? I have a variable temperature iron that goes from around 300° to 500°. I understand too hot a temperature can damage board traces and components and too low a temperature may result in things not heating up enough for solder to flow. I think the latter is the problem that I am having lately. Trying to solder wire into a circuit board pad. You are supposed to tin both the wire in the pads first by placing the hot iron part of the wire. And then waiting for it to heat up and then melting some solder on another part. I hold it there and then I hold it there but it never seems to hold up enough for the solder to flow.”

Fr. Robert: Let’s answer that. This is actually a two-parter. The first one is a very good question. This is actually something that stops a lot of novice electronics workers. This is a Weller, it is a $25 soldering iron. It is a 50W so this is plenty hot to do any electronics that you are going to be doing. You you don’t really need any more temperature than this. It is nice to have one with an adjustable temperature but this will work just fine. The first thing you’re going to want to do, especially if you are new, is use the chisel tip. It looks like a little chisel. You don’t want to use too fine of a point. Now This is the problem that he is having. He is doing this. You don’t heat up the solder, you heat up the wire and then you have the solder flow to it. The problem is he is heating it and nothing is happening. There is actually a trick here that sometimes people don’t pick up on. That is that you want to create a heat bridge. The heat is not making it into the wire fast enough so what you can do is you just put a tiny bit of solder on the iron itself. I am basically tinning the iron. Now when I touch it to this wire that little bit of solder is going to conduct heat so much better and now when I do this it just goes. There you go, now we are tinned.

Bryan: So that is why you put a little bit on the iron.

Fr. Robert: Exactly. Put a little bit on the iron, because the iron is a hard flat surface and wires tend to be kind of curved. So you probably are not getting a whole lot of purchase on that wire. If you put a tiny little blot of solder…

Bryan: That will help mold it to the wire.

Fr. Robert: And it transfers more of its heat. And remember the worst thing you can do is to leave it on there. If you believe it, then it means that he is actually going to the component. You want to put a lot of heat very quickly, solder and pull away.

Bryan: And that will work with pads too.

Fr. Robert: I didn’t bring it with me but I have a container with the billow pad in it and normally I would keep this back up and do cleaning. Do not sand it, do not cut it because it has a coating on here that will allow the solder to bead up and if you cut that off then you’ve just killed the tip of the iron.

Bryan: The next question he had is that he's seen a lot of quad copter builds that are using silicone wire. And unfortunately he can’t seem to find this stuff anywhere locally and he needs to wire up his ESC’s. Is there anything wrong with using regular non-silicone hookup wire. Assuming that the correct wire gauge to handle the amount of current in use, or do I really need to use a silicone stuff?

Fr. Robert: Very good question. We get this a lot. This is what silicon wire looks like. It looks like any other wire. The difference is the coating. So a lot of other is PVC, plastic. Which is fine. Silicone has a couple advantages. First, it is very flexible. I could do this all day. The wire inside is going to stress and break before the casing. Versus PVC. With PVC the outside will break first. And when you are dealing with a lot of current that is a bad idea. You don’t want any of that snapping.

Bryan: So it is safer to use silicone wire?

Fr. Robert: It is safer to use silicone wire especially in applications where there is going to be a lot of vibration. Vibration is the enemy of insulation, like a quad copter. The other reason I use silicone wire it exclusively on my bill is because you can heat it without melting the insulation.

Bryan: The temperature resistance on the silicone is…

Fr. Robert: So much higher. If you start soldering on those plastic coated wires, it will work but it starts to melt.

Bryan: When I was doing my little quad copter and I had to splice the wires and I was heating them, when I tried to solder the wires together and I used heat shrink to heated up I melted the wires on each side because the heat for the heat shrink was too much for the wires on the outside.

Fr. Robert: That is actually very common. And that is why, especially if it is going to be a build that I’m going to be going back to again and again, which means I’m going to be soldering them a lot I always use silicone. It is a lot more expensive. But, what I typically do is that I will place an order on eBay overseas for a whole bunch of it. It might take six weeks for me to get it but then I have six different gauges and 10 feet of each link.

Bryan: And then you are stopped up for a while.

Fr. Robert: Because if you are doing it right you are now wasting a lot of wire.

Bryan: All right we have some more feedback to get through here. Capturing PC gameplay. Okay. Eduardo would like to show where PC gameplay is Shirt, edited and posted into YouTube. He tried Fraps but it really slowed down the FPS in the game. He has lost the editing video applications.

Fr. Robert: What we have here is this is Avermedia. This is the live gamer HD. I like this. This is a great board because it does all the encoding on the board. You could put this in a low powered computer. It’s got HDMI in and HDMI out. This is designed to go in the same computer to your gaming in. It should reduce the overhead and network doesn’t affect your gaming. But for the ultimate capture machine I put this in a separate low cost box. And it becomes a dedicated capture machine. HDMI goes in and it just captures anything that it sees. It absolutely will not affect my gameplay and the nice thing about this is that I can capture multiple sources. Anything that outputs HDMI I can get with this.

Bryan: That is cool and so how much is that?

Fr. Robert: I think I got this one on sale for $130. It was not cheap but it was not super expensive. Now there are other options. Frapps is one of the most popular because you can run it with everything, but as the poster said that will affect your performance.

Bryan: I remember I used to use Frapps a long time ago and I did not like it. The one I used for a while is Afterburner. And I didn’t notice as much of lag with that and finally I have been using twitch. Twitch software that if you broadcast to Twitch you can set it to record automatically and you can send it to your youtube channel if you want.

Fr. Robert: If you have an Nvidia card, Nvidia Shadow Play is fantastic. It works really well and I don’t notice that much of a performance hit as long as you are using an SSD. If you are not using an SSD it actually will start competing with the game for loading levels and such. But, we are going to do an episode specifically on that. We are going to show you a couple of different ways to capture Nvidia cards, ATI cards, Frapps, and the dedicated hardware. And then you choose which one meets your requirements.

Bryan: Very cool. I’d like to play with that. I’ve been thinking about capturing some more game stuff. And the next one is a pretty straight forward question from Marcel asking how to format an SSD. “I have a simple question, how to I format? I just got an SSD I would like to put a clean Windows install.” Like you would normally write? But you wouldn’t want to do with zero fill.

Fr. Robert: No. People ask this all the time. How do I clean an SSD? I want to prevent people from getting data off of it. Then the strobe light melted. It is not like a hard drive unless you have a very low level tool. Steve Gibson from security now has a tool that will do this. Because of the way and SSD is constructed and because it’s long cavity depends on the write, not the read, simply formatting doesn’t actually destroy the data in the cells. Even most of those security race utilities will look like it is secure erasing but really all it is doing is destroying the table of contents. Because, and SSD with the embedded electronics will not let you just randomly start writing to data cells.

Bryan: Because that is what starts to degrade the SSD.

Fr. Robert: Right. And remember it is not just that it destroys it, it is that as you do it it just gets slower and slower. So, what I always tell people is there a way to format it securely? Yes, there is. You can do it but don’t count on that. What I say is once you own an SSD you will always own the SSD. Never give your SSD to anybody else. But that is just me.

Bryan: Surges format like you normally would and don’t zero fill it.

Fr. Robert: Yet. We’ve actually got some more feedback but we are going to have to hold it for the next show because ran long. This never happens.

Bryan: How did that happen? I want to do the next one.

Fr. Robert: We’ll have to do that next time. Right now, we did promise some CES and this is cool because it leads us to SSD stuff. We wanted to give you a little preview of some of the stuff we are going to be doing in February and Kingston is a big part of that.

Fr. Robert: Hey Know It All’s, I’m here at CES 2015. Looking for some of the gear that you are going to want to put into your next system. Now we all know that I like Kingston SSD’s. It is a personal preference, I understand that people like different SSD’s in different manufacturers. But for me they have always been tops in reliability and speed. Their Hyper X line has been particularly good. We’ve been using it in our builds for gaming PCs. We just heard about their refresh. This little machine is going to be able to do 560 MB per second read and 540 MB per second write. Which is amazing. We are going to be testing some of these when we do our build for the perfect video editing rig. But, I am here with David Leon from Kingston to talk about something else that I find really exciting for those who want extreme performance. David, I’ve known you for a long time we’ve been working together on a lot of projects tell me a little about this little thing we see in front of us.

David Leon: Well this is really cool. This is our Hyper X Predator PCIE SSD, M.2 based PCIE drive, coming out next month. 244/480 gig to start and we’ll follow it with a terabyte. PCIE, we’ve kind of reached the limit of the SATA Bus right? You talked about the Hyper X Savage being 560/520 write and where do you go from there? PCIE, you go by 4, 500 mg per lane by 4, 2000 mg. You know. Speed wise where we’re at right now is 1400 mg per second read and 1000 mg per second write. That is really, really fast.

Fr. Robert: That is just insane. I remember a few years ago, maybe two or three years ago, at the Kingston party you showed up a rig that had 16 drives, it was pulling 1100 mg per second. It was nice but it was impractical. It was kind of a monstrosity. This is everything on a single device. Remember, this board is just an adapter. The actual magic is this. This is an M2 module. M2 is a standard right? So it may come on your motherboard, it is definitely going to be on higher end laptops.

David: You know you look at the M.2 form factor this really… M.2 has about 5 different form factors to it. We as a company, we make a couple of them. We do some on the OEM side, which is a 2240. 22 ml by 40 ml long. Where do you find those? Ultra books and tablets. Don’t think about the size of the M.2, think about the size of the device it goes in. So if you are buying an ultra-book or a tablet PC it’s got to be small right? And then we also make a 2280, 22 x 80 ml which I believe is around this size. So, shipping this M.2 like you said is available as a stand alone. Or with a half length adaptor. So depending on what kind of build That you are doing, we want to make sure that we are covering all the bases as a company.

Fr. Robert: Right now I know my know it all and I know they are getting out over the speed. 1400! With that kind of speed If you have this in your machine and you had your OS loaded, that is instant on I don't care what OS you are working. That is just press the button and you are working. Now, the way that you made this happen, I was also listening to one of your technical talks just a little earlier, is fascinating. Because what I have seen like in the Acer S7 which is my Notebook of choice, is they take two SSD’s and stripe in on a single card to give them some decent through put. You’re Not doing that. This is not multiple SSD’s and an array. You’ve just created a better controller, a way to have the controller and the bridge all in one chip. Which means it talks really fast. Where does this technology go from here? Obviously you are going to make them faster but where do you see this being used? This is a consumer board but I can see it being used in the enterprise.

David: It really is. The controller that is in here, thanks to our friends at Marvel, this is using or powered by Marvel’s first native PCIE controller. And that is a really good thing because shrinking the form factor, increasing the performance, single M.2 SSD to get all that throughput. So really, where we go from here - data centers. We’ve talked about this before. Putting it in a data center is number one, enthusiasts will have to be on the cutting edge are going to want this performance. They are saying to us, hey look we know what SATA 3 does, we are there we’ve done that, in we’ve rated them. What next? PCIE, next. Data centers, bleeding edge consumers, that is really what we are looking at.

Fr. Robert: I think we actually starting to see the extinction of status. When people start getting a load of this kind of speed they are not going to want to drop in and SSD anymore, you are going to want to plug-in an M2 module. I know that this is not released yet, I know that the refresh the savage refresh is out this quarter or late this quarter. This is probably going to be coming out next quarter, we are going to get all of this on know-how for our builds right?

David: You are going to have everything and whatever you need for know-how. By the way, the Predator PCIE is out next month. The middle of February. And the Savage is later this quarter.

Fr. Robert: Fantastic. David is always a pleasure to talk to you. I’ve had you on my consumer show, I’ve had you on Know How, I’ve had you on This Week In Enterprise Tech, the work you are doing at Kingston just blows me away. Father Robert Ballecer, this is David Leon from Kingston. Back to you Padre.

Bryan: Such a smooth hand-off. Man.

Fr. Robert: Smooth, right? Now, we are going to be using these in the future. We are doing a speed build because people in the group have been asking us what do I do to create something for the ultimate video editing machine.

Bryan: And I am more than willing to try and do that.

Fr. Robert: The bottleneck is not really the processor, it is just getting it into the processor and then out. One SSD? Good. Two SSD’s? Better. Three SSD’s? One for assets and one for rendering, better. Now take three of those crazy PCIE ones, yeah.

Bryan: It will be like smoke coming out of it.

Fr. Robert: I like the smoke. Now folks we just wanted to leave you with a parting shot for the start of 2015. This comes to us in the chat room. This is from YouTube. This is Grant Thompson and he shows people how to make a mini metal foundry. all this is is a metal bucket with plaster of Paris, you drill a couple of holes, you heat up some charcoal and that is the bottom half of a used fire extinguisher. You can recycle aluminum cans by heating this thing up and then it becomes a flowerpot.

Bryan: What? That is so cool.

Fr. Robert: Absolutely. I kind of want to do something like that but I don’t think we can line up a foundry inside the studio. He’s looking at me really bad right now.

Bryan: There are a lot of hands…

Fr. Robert: We could use it for cooking food. When we are not melting soda cans.

Bryan: We could use that in the basement. That is really cool.

Fr. Robert: Just to do that. I don’t know what I would do with it but just the fact that I could collect cans just to melt them down.

Bryan: So I guess the hard part for us would be coming up with molds. Coming up with what we would mold it into.

Fr. Robert: That is actually a hold another lesson, but it is fun. Basically it is sand you make an imprint and then you pour. We like it.

Bryan: Project. If we’re not here though it is because we burned down the building.

Fr. Robert: That is our bad. Let’s wrap it up. I know that this has been a lot of information for you to take in. Everything from the gallium to the feedback answers. We are going to be bringing you a whole lot of new stuff coming in the new year. So, make sure you go to our show notes page so you can see our individual notes. Like for example if you want to know where you can buy gallium, if you want to know where you can buy the parts that we were talking about for our builds, if you want to know where the links are for the videos we show, Bryan where to they go?

Bryan: They go to twit.tv/KH and all our previous episodes live there and like you said, you can find all the show notes. This is our official real 2015 show. We are setting the precedent for the rest of the year right now.

Fr. Robert: Also, don’t forget we have a Google plus group. 8000 users right now. Get in there, it is active. There are smart people. If you’ve got questions, if you’ve got answers, if you want to see what other people are doing.

Bryan: If you got projects that you are doing and you want to show off.

Fr. Robert: We pull a lot of our show ideas directly from the Google plus group. So if you are really proud of something that you have built put it in there. We will get it on the show. This is as much your show as it is ours.

Bryan: They have great ideas. And if you are not into the Google plus, you can always figure out what we are doing on our breaks on twitter. Where are you Padre?

Fr. Robert: I’m @PadreSJ. If you follow me you will find out not only what I’m doing on all of my shows, but you will find out what I do when I’m not tech-ing out.

Bryan: Or working very hard down in the basement.

Fr. Robert: Where do you live on twitter?

Bryan: I’m @cranky_hippo. And when we’re not doing that, Alex is on Twitter.

Fr. Robert: Now that the knowledge crack is so small I’m not sure that Alex is allowed in there. He’s got his own office.

Bryan: Actually we got rid of his desk that he had down there.

Fr. Robert: Alex, where do they find you on twitter?

Alex: It doesn’t matter.

Fr. Robert: Okay folks you find him @anelf3. Until next time, I’m Father Robert Ballecer.

Bryan: And I’m Bryan Burnett.

Fr. Robert: And now that you know how…