Filtrar por género
1216 - The Walmart Greeter of Electronics
0:00 / 0:00
1x
- 1216 - The Walmart Greeter of Electronics
Dave and Chris catch up on Dave’s visit to the University of Sydney Open Day, the shift toward practical hands-on engineering education, and open-source robotics like the Seeed Studio SO-101 and Hugging Face Micro Duck. They also discuss calculator forensics, Dave mentoring his intern Dylan through voltage regulator selection, AI-assisted PCB layout tools, why Chris wants to be “the Walmart greeter of electronics,” reverse-engineering the Rigol DNA800 network analyzer, Dave’s classic toaster design story, and news from Espressif and Build Australia.
Timeline
Open Day at Sydney Uni: Dave discusses taking his son Sagan to the University of Sydney Open Day and wondering where all of their engineering graduates end up working. (00:00:45) Where Do Sydney Uni EE Grads Go?: They speculate on why University of Sydney graduates rarely show up in practical engineering job applicant pools, noting high international student enrollment and potential moves into fintech or graduate school. (00:02:30) Practical Engineering Education: Dave expresses surprise at the massive emphasis on practical, first-year hands-on projects across all engineering disciplines at Sydney Uni compared to past decades. (00:05:15) US vs. Australian Engineering Schools: Chris and Dave compare recruitment dynamics, big state universities like Michigan and UIUC, and smaller elite institutions like Rose-Hulman, Olin, and Harvey Mudd. (00:07:30) Larry Sears and Campus Makerspaces: Chris remembers past guest Larry Sears and his donation to build the 50,000 sq. ft. Sears think[box]makerspace at Case Western Reserve, comparing it to institutional makerspaces at Georgia Tech and Duke. (00:10:15) School Calendars & High School STEM: A quick look at Australian vs. US academic calendars and the rise of high school robotics programs like FIRST Robotics and Lego competitions. (00:13:45) Seeed Studio SO-101 Robot Arm: Chris shares his excitement about assembling the open-source SO-101 robot arm kit from Seeed Studio for trade show demos, using leader-follower training and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. (00:15:30) Hugging Face & Micro Duck Robot: They talk about Nvidia’s acquisition memes ($12.96B ASCII easter egg decoding to the hugging face emoji) and Pollen Robotics / Hugging Face’s upcoming $400 open-source Micro Duck robot kit. (00:17:45) Calculator Forensics: Dave describes explaining 4-bit processors and datamath.org Calculator Forensics to his son Huxley, testing internal register accuracy using trigonometric function chains likearcsin(arccos(arctan(tan(cos(sin(9)))))). (00:20:15) Mentoring Dylan on Voltage Regulators: Dave talks about guiding his second-year intern, Dylan, through parametric searching to pick a 3V fixed regulator for an ESP32-based product. (00:24:00) LDO Stability & Package Selection: Dave delivers an impromptu masterclass on SOT-23 vs. SO-8 packages, LDO loop stability at microamp quiescent currents, transient responses for LCD/Bluetooth burst currents, and dielectric differences between Y5V and X7R capacitors. (00:27:30) AI PCB Design & Astra Announcement: They review OpenAI’s Astra demo showing automated KiCad schematic generation and live 4-layer PCB layout routing. (00:33:15) The Walmart Greeter of Electronics: Chris explains why he refuses to gatekeep hardware design as AI layout tools lower the barrier to entry, preferring to be “the Walmart greeter of electronics” welcoming newcomers into the field. (00:35:15) Debugging & The Middle Gap: They analyze the gap between simple AI-generated microcontroller boards and complex high-speed multi-gigabit hardware, questioning where new engineers will learn root-cause debugging when boards fail. (00:37:30) History of Auto-Routers: Dave points out that automated PCB placement, auto-routing, and neural net hype have existed in EDA tools for over 30 to 40 years. (00:40:15) KiCad, Bezier Curves, and Trace Cloning: Dylan asks why KiCad’s schematic editor supports Bezier curves, and Chris highlights past guest Ian Scott Johnson contributing trace characteristic cloning features to KiCad. (00:43:00) The Power of Open Formats: Chris emphasizes how text-based open formats like KiCad, FreeCAD, and Blender allow AI tools to hook into hardware design, referencing past guest Robert Fennis and open FEM solvers. (00:44:45) AI in Semiconductor Design: They touch on an Asianometry video covering Synopsys and Cadence AI chip design tools, stock market drops, and token-based pricing models. (00:46:30) Reverse Engineering the Rigol DNA800 Scope: Dave details tearing down and reverse-engineering the RF board on Rigol’s DNA800 (Digital Network Analyzer / VNA scope). (00:48:00) RF PCB Layout Techniques: They examine gold-shielded PCB arenas, surface traces vs. inner-layer vias, and unusual stripline couplers feeding IF signals back into the local oscillator. (00:50:45) Leaving Mistakes in Videos: Dave discusses accidentally misidentifying a DAC as an ADC in his teardown video and leaving the mistake in to show authentic reverse-engineering. (00:54:00) The Toaster Designer Story: Inspired by the book Red Rising calling robots “toasters,” Dave retells his classic story of turning down a job designing a constant-temperature toaster controller because “toaster repairman/designer” was an old forum running joke. (00:55:45) The Toaster Chip Legacy: Chris references Episode 541 where they previously discussed dedicated toaster ASICs. (00:58:00) Edge Lab Live at Electronica: Chris mentions Edge Lab Live running a hands-on engineering lab at Electronica in Munich this November. (00:59:15) Espressif Launches Linux BSP: Chris highlights Espressif quietly launching a Linux BSP for the ESP32-P4 chip, as shared on the Contextual Electronics forum thread. (00:59:45) Build Australia YouTube Creator Job: Dave shares a job opening from Build Australia seeking a YouTube creator to visit and film local Australian hardware and manufacturing companies. (01:00:30)Fri, 18 Sep 2026 - 1h 05min - 1215 - Perpetual Wearable Biosensing with Andy Kong
Chris welcomes Andy Kong to discuss “Chargerless” and how to build ultra-low-power wearable health trackers that never need wall charging. (00:00:15)
From Hacker Mindset to Startup Founder: They discuss Andy’s background in biosensing, staying with Samy Kamkar, and bringing a pragmatic “get things done” hacker mindset to founding Chargerless in San Francisco, as documented on Andy’s personal website. (00:02:10)
Solving the Wearable Charging Bottleneck: Andy explains how frustration with daily Apple Watch charging led him to design a wearable requiring only one minute of daily sunlight exposure, noting that modern wearables are bottlenecked by battery volume rather than logic chip size. (00:04:30)
Deliberately Underpowered MCUs: Chris and Andy explore system architecture trade-offs, focusing on Chargerless’s choice of an underpowered microcontroller paired with lean firmware rather than feature-heavy, power-hungry processors. (00:07:15)
Intelligent Sampling vs. Continuous Monitoring: They contrast Whoop and Apple Watch’s continuous PPG power drain with Chargerless’s periodic sampling approach, which reserves high-frequency tracking for active workout modes. (00:09:45)
The Limits of Commercial Sensor ICs: Why off-the-shelf health ICs from TI and Analog Devices consumed 100 times too much power due to unoptimized ADCs, inefficient amplifiers, and fixed pulse timings. (00:12:20)
EKG vs. Wrist PPG: Explaining how multi-lead chest EKGs measure electrical heart potential vectors, whereas wrist Photoplethysmography (PPG) uses green light reflection to detect oxygenated blood volume changes. (00:15:05)
Badge Life and DIY Biometrics: Chris and Andy reminisce about community hardware projects like Chaos Camp’s Card10 EKG badge, Kerry Scharfglass’s IR-synchronized dragonfly badge, and Chris’s earlobe PPG sensor that flashed LEDs inside a Solo cup based “badge”. (00:17:50)
Custom Discrete PPG Frontend: How Andy replaced commercial ICs with a discrete circuit that strobes a green LED 50 times per second for microsecond bursts, cycling both the LED and transimpedance amplifier. (00:20:40)
Eliminating Decoupling Lag: Stripping decoupling capacitors removed turn-on delays, while using two amplifier stages avoided high-capacitance digital potentiometers. (00:23:10)
Pivoting Away from BCI: Andy describes his college research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) with OpenBCI and why he abandoned non-invasive EEG due to microvolt-level signal noise from cable movement. (00:25:55)
Quantified Self & Personal Informatics: Discussing how self-trackers capture environmental data to identify root causes of complex health symptoms. (00:28:30)
Low-Power Bluetooth Data Batching: How Bluetooth Low Energy accounts for less than 5% of overall power draw by batching 10 KB payloads every 10 minutes for fast burst transmissions to the phone. (00:31:15)
Form Factors and Ring Safety: Comparing Whoop, Oura, Garmin, and Fitbit Air trackers, while covering smart ring battery constraints, Samsung battery recall testing, and degloving risks. (00:34:00)
Whoop’s Slide-On Battery: How Whoop designed a slide-on battery pack to charge while being worn, avoiding the user drop-off caused when devices are taken off to charge. (00:36:45)
Solar Harvesting & Laser Dicing: Chargerless uses boost converters to harvest power from amorphous solar cells, which Andy initially custom diced with laser cutters at MIT. (00:39:20)
Bare-Metal Registers & 28-Hour Days: Transitioning from dev boards to custom PCBs required low-level MCU register programming, custom Makefiles, and a 28-hour daily cycle sleep study in tinfoiled rooms. (00:42:10)
Pricing & Open Data Access: Chargerless is rolling out a pre-production run of a few hundred units for $199 with no subscription fees on getchargerless.com and open data export capabilities. (00:45:00)
Power Over Skin (Body Channel Communication): Andy breaks down his Power over Skin research project, which sends 40–100 MHz RF power safely through human skin using the body as an antenna. (00:47:45)
Microwatt Energy Harvesting: Utilizing Skyworks low-forward-drop diodes, tank circuits, and rectifiers to harvest microwatts for powering LED earrings, ring joysticks, and skin patches. (00:50:30)
Thu, 10 Sep 2026 - 1h 06min - 1214 - Hands-on Physical AI with Kevin Cloutier
Kevin Cloutier is the North American Lead for Physical AI at CapGemini, a global engineering consulting firm. He is a computer engineer who is passionate about taking complex computations to the edge. He joins Chris to discuss the transition from legacy, statically programmed factory robotics to modern, imitation-learning-based “Physical AI,” building and calibrating the affordable $200 3D-printed SO101 robot arm using the LeRobot open-source framework or Intel’s Physical AI Studio, and orchestrating complex robotic systems entirely on local edge hardware.
Timeline
Chris welcomes Kevin Cloutier to discuss “Physical AI” and how it relates to robots and things that move in the physical world. (00:00:15) Meeting at Embedded World: They reminisce about meeting at the Canonical booth in front of a robot demonstration, which you can see in the Embedded World Demonstration Video. (00:02:10) Trade Shows and Geography: Chris and Kevin discuss Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany, upcoming SPS, and the high concentration of manufacturing robots in Europe compared to the US. (00:03:50) The “Unicorn Developer” Shift: Kevin talks about his background in computer engineering and how the “unicorn developer” has shifted from the full-stack web developer of the 1990s to someone who can operate, program, repair, and train physical robots. (00:06:05) Factory Robots vs. Edge Cases: Contrasting legacy, statically programmed factory robots (like ABB or Universal Robots hanging car doors) with modern generative AI approaches capable of handling real-world edge cases. (00:09:15) The Robotics Software Stack: Demystifying the layers above motor drivers, including Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS), Linux, and message-passing frameworks like ROS (Robot Operating System) and ROS 2. (00:12:40) Orchestrating Systems of Systems: Kevin describes playing tic-tac-toe using Vision Language Action (VLA) models, where a higher-level camera and computer vision system orchestrate the coordinates for the movement model. (00:15:10) The Evolution of Compute: How modern silicon, integrated GPUs, and SOCs have allowed the massive, heavy control boxes of legacy robots to shrink down to a small NUC-sized device mounted directly on the robot. (00:18:05) The SO101 Robot Arm: Introducing the SO101 3D-printed robot arm from Hugging Face, which democratizes robotics by allowing anyone to build a leader-follower setup for around $200. (00:21:20) How “Backyard Engineers” Learn: Kevin’s advice for firmware and hardware engineers stepping into robotics: follow the documentation, get it running, and then ask questions about what you don’t know. (00:23:55) Calibration and the LeRobot Framework: A look at using the LeRobot open-source framework to calibrate hobby-grade motors and define their movement limits. (00:26:40) Recording “Episodes” via Imitation Learning: How users physically guide the leader arm to control the follower arm while a webcam records the visual and servo coordinate data. (00:28:50) Training the Model: Organizing data into short 5-episode chunks to make deletion easier, and training the model locally on NVIDIA GPUs or in the cloud. (00:31:30) From Training to Evaluation: Moving from training to evaluating the custom model, and asking questions about action chunking, model stutter, and operating frequency. (00:35:10) Sensor Fusion vs. Pure Vision: The current dominance of cameras in physical AI, and the potential to fuse accelerometers and time-of-flight sensors on mobile robots like Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs). (00:41:00) Real-World Calibration Challenges: Kevin shares a story of someone knocking over his camera boom at Hannover Messe and how he used April Tags to quickly recalibrate the camera’s physical coordinates. (00:43:15) The Reality of Humanoids: Debunking humanoid hype and explaining why full humanoids are further out than the public thinks, due to immense hardware cost, degrees of freedom, and safety. (00:45:50) The Puppeteer behind the Curtain: Kevin points out that many impressive humanoid demos, like the Unitree G1 at Hannover Messe, are actually being teleoperated by an engineer standing nearby. (00:48:40) The Complexity of Robot Subsystems: Using Steve Crunch and the book “Exploding the Phone” as an analogy for how modern robotic systems have become too complex for a single human to fully understand. (00:52:15) Understanding SmolVLA and SmolVLM: Diving under the hood of Vision Language Action models, which are fine-tuned transformer models that translate visual inputs into physical robotic coordinates. (00:55:10) Local AI and the NPU: How modern System-on-Chips (SOCs) let engineers run models locally on the CPU, GPU, or Neural Processing Unit (NPU) using optimization toolkits like Intel OpenVINO. (00:58:15) The Joy of the Physical World: Why working with physical hardware and robots is far more creative and rewarding than optimizing spreadsheets or SaaS applications. (01:04:30) “If the Robot Can’t Kill You, It’s Not Fun”: Kevin shares his colleague’s favorite metric for a truly exciting robotics project. (01:07:10) Advice on ROS and “Cobbling”: Starting with duct tape and bubble gum, and learning message-passing frameworks like ROS only when you need to coordinate multiple independent robots. (01:09:30) Physical AI Studio Demo: An invitation to see Kevin showcase Intel’s Physical AI Studio with multiple active robots at the upcoming AI Infra conference in Santa Clara. (01:14:45) Find Kevin online at his website cloutier.engineer or on LinkedIn. (01:20:10)Wed, 26 Aug 2026 - 58min - 1213 - E&M Reality Emerges with Robert Fennis
Robert Fennis is an RF engineer and consultant from the Netherlands and the creator of EMerge: a free, open-source 3D Finite Element Method (FEM) electromagnetic solver written in Python. He joins Chris to discuss demystifying the black magic of RF engineering, the mathematical and physics foundations of simulation, and how Emerge is “the IKEA of FEM solvers” in that it makes electromagnetic simulation accessible to everyone.
Timeline
Chris welcomes Robert Fennis, creator of EMerge, to discuss RF simulation as a way to unlock knowledge of the universe. (00:00:15) LinkedIn Shout-outs: Chris and Robert praise the amazing RF visualizations done by past guests Lukas Henkel, Sam Aldahar, and Katerina Galitskaya. (00:01:20) The Wizard School of RF: They discuss how RF engineering is often seen as a black magic wizard school of electronics, despite being normal to Robert. (00:03:10) Pyramid of Knowledge: Robert explains how learning RF and simulation is like building a pyramid step-by-step, where you have to understand waves, ports, and S-parameters rather than trying to build it all from scratch. (00:05:00) Python and LLMs: EMerge is written as a Python module but utilizes fast external libraries under the hood. They talk about how script-based engineering allows LLMs to assist by writing simulation code from existing examples on the EMerge Hub on GitHub. They draw a comparison to OpenSCAD’s parametric code-first approach in mechanical design. (00:07:30) The Big Three Full-Wave Simulation Methods: Robert explains how full-wave solvers attempt to approach exact solutions to Maxwell’s equations. (00:11:30) Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD): A time-stepping method that operates similarly to movie physics engines, marching forward in time. (00:12:15) Method of Moments (MoM): A method solving specifically for currents and voltages on conductors, using Green’s functions to calculate interactions without discretizing the surrounding air. (00:13:40) Finite Element Method (FEM): A frequency-domain solver derived from variational calculus (the Principle of Least Action). It solves for complex electric fields in the airspace surrounding conductors, treating conductors as boundary constraints. (00:15:10) The Veritasium Switch Video: They connect the physics of FEM to the famous Veritasium switch debate, noting that energy travels outside of wires. This is why FEM solvers must discretize the surrounding airspace to capture the physics, as famously illustrated in the Veritasium switch video. (00:18:20) The Challenges of Real-World Boundaries: In FEM, boundary conditions define where the simulation ends. Choosing the right boundaries is critical because perfect electric conductors can introduce unrealistic internal resonances. (00:20:45) Simplifying vs. Overcomplicating Models: Mentor advice on simplifying models to ensure convergence. Robert warns that adding too much detail quickly exhausts RAM, which is currently expensive. (00:22:15) Frequency and Detail: A rule of thumb is that higher frequencies make small details matter more. Right-angled corners on PCB traces act as parasitic capacitors at 10 GHz, and silk screen on a 2.4 GHz patch antenna can completely de-tune it. (00:24:30) Bluetooth Antenna Design Workflow: Chris shares his fear of designing custom 2.4 GHz antennas for boards like the NRF52840. Robert outlines his step-by-step customer consultation process, evaluating orientation and directivity (omnidirectional vs. directional). (00:32:15) The Logarithmic Scale of Decibels: Squeezing S11 reflection coefficients from -20 dB to -25 dB only wins a fraction of a percent of energy. Since receivers have massive dynamic ranges, aiming for -10 dB or even -5 dB is often perfectly fine for non-critical systems. (00:36:40) The Incremental Design Method: Instead of modeling the entire system, start with the simplest geometry (e.g., a simple square patch or wire). Find the length where it resonates, and then introduce components like plastic enclosures, screws, or clips one by one to see how they shift the resonant frequency. (00:41:20) Working with Ports in EMerge: EMerge uses lump ports (numbered starting from 1) for PCBs and computes S-parameters like S11, which can be plotted on a logarithmic scale with the built-in plot_SP function. (00:44:50) Alternative EMerge Applications: (00:47:45) PCB Filters: Designing microstrip and coupled-line filters on FR4 or Rogers substrates. FR4 is risky due to variations in refractive index, making simulation validation highly valuable before spending money on expensive substrates. (00:48:10) Radar Cross-Section (RCS): Modeling how objects scatter electromagnetic waves. (Note: Large stealth bombers are computationally impractical for EMerge, but smaller models work). (00:51:30) Power Dividers: Tuning Wilkinson power dividers. (00:52:45) Crosstalk and Signal Integrity: Making sure high-speed 1 Gbps bitstreams arrive intact without degrading or leaking into other ports. You can view an example crosstalk simulation on the EMerge Showcase page. (00:53:30) Under-the-Hood Engineering and Performance: (00:55:00) Robert shares his story of spending a week straight getting 3D solver matrices to assemble and solve. (00:55:15) He highlights that 98% of the effort in building a solver is computational geometry (meshing), for which EMerge uses the GMSH library. (00:58:30) Linear algebra is solved using Intel MKL on x86 platforms (thanks to Olaf Schenk) and Apple Accelerate on macOS (thanks to Dr. Jonathan Hogg). (01:00:15) The solver assembles sparse coordinate matrices converted into compressed column storage. (01:02:00) Robert wants EMerge to be the IKEA of FEM solvers—not perfect, but free, accessible, and good enough. (01:03:50) The Nightmare of Importing PCBs: Why computational geometry makes importing PCBs incredibly difficult. (01:08:15) Gerber Files: Aperture-based photographic formats. Approximating circles with polygons can lead to tiny gaps that crash mesh engines. (01:09:45) STEP Files: They model trace thickness physically (which is unnecessary for EMerge) and cause floating-point rounding errors on round holes. (01:11:30) ODB++: Robert is using Claude/AI to help write an ODB++ parser. (01:13:00) Method Chaining and the Builder Pattern: An alternative to importing CAD files is describing geometry programmatically using a method chaining philosophy in Python (e.g., drawing traces with straight, turn_right, and skip functions). This forces the user to keep things simple, making the design additive rather than subtractive. (01:15:45) Closing Thoughts and Consulting: Robert runs a consulting business but emphasizes that the open-source software is GPLv2 and has no warranty. He prefers teaching clients how to use the software and run simulations themselves. You can connect with Robert and other RF simulation enthusiasts via the EMerge Discord community. (01:19:30)Recommended Reading List
The Finite Element Method in Electromagnetics by Jian-Ming Jin (the mathematically dense Bible of FEM) Davidson’s electromagnetics textbook Computational Electromagnetics with MATLAB by Matthew M. Sadiku(an accessible textbook that can be translated to Python or Octave)Wed, 19 Aug 2026 - 1h 22min - 1212 - The Focus Knob WorksACES Hardware Meetup: Dave recently attended a packed ACES Hardware meetup at the Engineers Australia headquarters, which led to a discussion on whether “Engineer” should be a protected term like “Doctor” or “Lawyer”. Naming Rant: If your startup doesn’t delete vowels (like “X trainer”) or use an un-Googleable name like “Drop Bear,” are you even trying? Dave also shares his frustrations with names like “Goliath” and “Mindvault”. The New Website: Chris reveals the new, blazing-fast static site for TheAmpHour.com, built using Hugo and Claude. It features searchable transcripts for every episode and a “pissed-old amber” SVG scope animation where the focus knob actually works. New Merch: Amp Hour Retro Gauge shirts are back, along with the new RF-themed “Beyond Return” Smith Chart Seance shirt (inspierd by Veritasium’s latest video about the history of Smith Charts). There is even a rug that doubles as part storage, though shipping to Australia is pricey.Dave’s New Hire: Dylan joins the EEVblog team to help with video content, editing, and potentially working on products. Shipping SaaS: Dave rants about the arbitrary limits on shipping labels for services like “Star Ship It” and the unfortunate “cost of doing business”. Microchip Goes Free: The MPLAB XC Pro compilers are finally free 15 years too late. This brings up memories of the podcast episode with Microchip CEO Steve Sanghi. 10-Cent Debuggers: Discussing how the 10-cent CH32V003 can be used as a debugger for other chips. Also, check out these ESP32 Bit Pirate web tools for hardware testing. We have had CNlohr (Creator of the CH32fun library) on two times. 59:30 – Bot Traffic & Pay-Per-Crawl: Discussing Cloudflare’s new pay-per-crawl “toll booth” for AI crawlers and a mysterious Chinese bot hammering a specific forum thread. 68:00 – 1.5 Million Hits: How the 12-year-old static site engineerblogs.org is suddenly getting massive traffic from unknown bots. 73:00 – Rigol’s Tiny VNA: The new Rigol DNA800 series packs a 14 GHz VNA into a handheld form factor. 78:30 – Solar Inverter Explosions: Shahriar from The Signal Path recently had a “magic smoke” event where he had to replace 16 MOSFETs on his inverter board.Wed, 05 Aug 2026 - 55min
- 1211 - The Terahertz Frontier with Greg Charvat of Teradar
Welcome Greg Charvat, CTO and Co-founder of Teradar
Chris welcomes Greg Charvat back for his record-breaking 5th appearance on the show to discuss his latest “pirate ship” venture, Teradar, and the quest for the last frontier of sensing. Reflecting on the 2018 pivot: Greg discusses how his previous work at Butterfly Network (ultrasound), Hyperfine (portable MRI), and Humatics (microlocation) centered on the “hard tech” philosophy of moving everything to silicon to lower costs and increase resolution. The “Moat” strategy: While patents are just paper, Greg argues the true defense for a startup is the 5+ years of “school of hard knocks” engineering required to perfect a sensor-on-a-chip that big companies cannot easily copy. Defining the “Last Frontier”: Terahertz (THz) sensing operates in the hundreds of gigahertz—sitting between millimeter-wave radar and visible light (LIDAR)—offering the resolution of the former with the weather-penetrating “superpower” of the latter. Overcoming “Blobbology”: Greg traces the historical march toward higher frequencies, from the 26 MHz Chain Home systems of WWII to 10 GHz imaging, explaining why Terahertz is the logical progression for high-resolution automotive sensing. The “Uncompromising” Phased Array: Unlike LIDAR which often relies on moving parts like spinning mirrors, Teradar employs a monolithic digital phased array with thousands of channels to scan the environment without mechanical failure points. Hard Science in Silicon: Solving the “difficult link budget” and atmospheric loss by designing from first-principles physics and whiteboard drawings rather than just stitching together existing IP cores. “Dropping the Needle” in the Probe Room: Greg describes the high-stakes world of testing 750 GHz chips, where “dropping a needle” (aligning a probe) requires monitoring a VNA to ensure you haven’t destroyed a fragile, expensive probe. Hiring for the “Pirate Ship”: Teradar is actively seeking “nerdy nerds” across their three tech enclaves: San Jose (IC design), Boston (software), and Connecticut (systems integration). Check out their jobs pageor email Greg directly. The CEO vs. CTO Trap: Greg’s advice for technical founders: stay on the bench where you add value and hire a professional CEO to handle the “people stuff,” HR, and endless investor meetings. The Teradar Motto: “If you can see the antenna, you’re not high enough” Greg’s Reading List: Broca’s Brain by Carl Sagan and a “very dry” but fascinating thesis on the history of radio communications in the Vietnam War. Find out more at teradar.com.This episode was sponsored by Siemens, which is offering a 30 day trial to Xpedition for listeners of The Amp Hour. Listen to the 31 minute mark of this episode to hear the full spot, including insight from past guest of the show Shrouk El-Attar (episode 549)
Remember if you’re interested in applying for positions at Teradar, you can email Greg directly!
Wed, 22 Jul 2026 - 1h 20min - 1210 - Watt Is The DealSpam calls Keysight released the HD3, a 14 bit ADC oscilloscope (teardown video) Chris will be at Embedded World North America, please let him know if you'll be there! Chris will be at the Joulescope stand along with former guest Matt Liberty This is one of the only tradeshows for general electronics in the US, Embedded Systems Conference went away many years ago. Chris, Dave, and Jeff (yesssah!) recorded at ESC in episode 41! Bootstrapping new conferences Cellular power modes Dave old GSM video PSM / eDRX ALT1350 Dave got a smart meter on his home setup EDMI EEVblog forum post about leaky power bill Maybe a trickle Chris has been trying out Meshtastic, which is based on LoRa. Check out Jeff Geerling's video for a good overview. meshtastic subreddit People posting about airplanes flying overhead (example post) like ham radio contacts MeshmapMon, 23 Sep 2024
- 1209 - Moving House (And Lab)Chris has been moving house, which partially explains the terrible audio problems the past few episodes... For a lab, Chris believes in Lots of wire shelving (with epoxy coating) Everything on wheels (including shelving and workbenches) As much storage as you can get Chris has been doing livestreams of hardware design for Golioth. The module he is designing is called the Drachm ("dram") The hardware Chris has been working on for the past 2 years is now open source Flox video with machine learning on a camera also featured Chris Altium finalized their acquisition by Renesas. The price already went up (discussed previously) Raspberry Pi released the RP2350 while we were away Inductor polarity on the RPi Pico 2 RP2350 Datasheet You can choose the processors you want (Dual m33, dual RISC V) Microchip was offline due to .... HACKERS Dave has been trying out a new home battery storage system NMC vs LFP Reverse cycle There have been lots of layoffs in tech, including 15K (!) at Intel Layoffs.fyi Being sued for a battery review? Say it aint soTue, 03 Sep 2024
- 1208 - Changing Course with Shawn Hymel
Welcome Shawn Hymel!
Shawn will be transitioning out Developer Relations at Edge Impulse. He will now be building courses full time. (this was recorded before Shawn announced his departure) He want's to be like a Professor, which partially explains his signature bowtie Should people go into content? What about Developer Relations more specifically? New courses will include FreeCAD and 3D printing and will be published by Digikey Part design in FreeCAD 0.22 in Mango Jelly Learning modeling vs learning an actual program Scoffolding Making a Zephyr course Zephyr / Golioth training Ecosystem vs RTOS Workshop at Harvard Trying to train on hardware What should engineers know about ML Andrew Ng's course on Coursera Updated for NumPy / Python Understand Neural Networks Can treat them as a black box More important to understand statistics and data science Hot dog / not hot dog (silicon valley) Model zoos Hugging Face Coprocessing on U55 - U85 ToorCamp Michael Cheich Robert Ferenec Marketing courses Running You can find Shawn as ShawnHymel on most social Twitter LinkedIn Mastodon Bluesky TikTok Instagram You can also check out his site, shawnhymel.comFri, 09 Aug 2024 - 1207 - Turtles as a ServiceMurphy More efficient with cooled panels Battery storage solution Server rack batteries Chris has been doing hardware Livestreams Geofence n8n, Similar to Zapier, IFTTT Home assistant EE Grad wants some insight on new tech https://4dsystems.com.au/ Scott Williams of Xentronix recorded with Dave and then Chris Saw at Electronex My Cousin Vinny Embedded World North America is happening in Austin in October. There is a vendor map now. Voltnuts Open source book Tiny Tapeout Tantalum Caps from AliExpress What's next for ASML Ben Krasnow printing PCB traces againThu, 25 Jul 2024
- 1206 - Lifelong Learning with Bitluni
Welcome, Matthias Balwierz / Bitluni / Luni!
Midi pedals Old projects LED walls Dunning kruger Sonar scanner Aliens Romulus Lifelong learning Beamforming Previously had worked on something similar in the medical field but didn't realize it was the same tech ESP32 Gowin FPGA Video generation / crt control R2R cnlohr videos for making PCBs ESP32 VGA PCB mill Failing Tiny Tapeout bringing down costs like PCBs Jeri doing "home etching" (making silicon at home) Building the meme project on TT02 GIF construction set Almost like a ROM on board, on each clock it exposes the next byte on paralell output Luni hasn't submitted to each tiny tapeout but is building a new project Browser assembler that runs in the handheld gaming: "Luni-Asm" cpu + gpu to get vector output Bitluni live youtube / Bitluni - twitch happens Weds at 8 pm CEST Community helps Writing memory controllers Bus master because internal SRAM is so expensive Expense of flash/ram is in IP People running test structures the tiles FPGAs, Gowin - 9K standard up to 25k Gabriel / Lushay Labs - Tutorials for FPGAs HDMI connector Some IP blocks from Gowin Yosys support VS code tools and simulation Gowin FPGA designer Learning clock domains Moving back to art Demoscene came from the cracker scene Different categories / limits 4K category only allows 4K of memory for images and sound (generated) White demo competitions Contact bitluni github twitchMon, 15 Jul 2024 - 1205 - Silicon Revolution with Matt Venn
Welcome back, Matt Venn of the Zero to Asic Course and Tiny Tapeout!
(Due to illness and some life stuff happening, my recording setup was crap. Apologies. I also leaned heavily on Matt’s notes, so some of the following links will be out of order. Think of it like an ad hoc scavenger hunt…fun!)
Matt was last on the show on episode 616, about 18 months ago Tiny Tapeout has continued, now working on it's 8th run. the 5th run is shipping soon. Uri Shaked made Wokwi compatible with making chip designs and then compiling them to verilog for later processing by open source tools 12 bit SAR ADC on TT07 linux capable riscv Analog ASIC design with digital standard cells! We had previously posted Matt's review of 2023 and aims for 2024 Siliwiz ASIC inside synchrotron Touring IHP (Germany) facilities Interview with Nordic Semi designer People are building analog structures on Tiny Tapeout There's a new course on Zero to Asic that will be about Analog (sign up for the waitlist) There are some new tools being developed surfer - browser based waveform moosic - logic locking plugin for yosys eqy - formal equivalence checking Matt will be doing a TT workshop at supercon 2024 TT08 will have a demoscene competition - VGA and sound output - what’s the coolest thing you can fit in 1 tile? You have until Sept 6th 2024 to submit! Not discussed, but on the list and interesting! Silicon Supply Chains with Ed Conway An early analog design (temp sensor) on TT03 Get TT quality stickersSun, 30 Jun 2024 - 1204 - NDA SideshowSideshow Bob (simpsons) HERIC Inverter Review Fraunhofer HERIC inverter Dave's video about the CH32V003 Charles episode Altium is increasing the price of their product (by 2x??) HITECH compiler from Microchip Newfound Warp13 Webrings, Blog roll, StumbleUpon Dontronics amazing siteThu, 20 Jun 2024
- 1203 - Engineering Careers with Circuit Break & James LewisFri, 14 Jun 2024
- 1202 - Freelance PCB Design with Petr Dvorak
Welcome Petr Dvorak of Beny Devices
A to Z book about KiCad fancygit lazygit gitlol Customer types Brno - 30% of electron microscopes What is changing in electron microscopes? Higher voltage, no noise Electrostatic steering Transitioning to freelancing Regulations for freelancer vs employer Petr is a prolific poster of electronics content on his LinkedIn Show your work - Austin Kleon 3 years to get first client 1 month buffer of posts on LinkedIn Building repetitions Outliers / 10000 hours Lists of projects Constraints helping new engineers trying to learn electronics 8x32 pixel displays Petr in Shenzhen Gallup - top strength is learning Personality types Contact Get a free eBook about KiCad on beny-devices.eu Follow Petr on LinkedInFri, 07 Jun 2024 - 1201 - 50.0000 OhmsMistakes in house repair for partners Architectural Lighting Power quality Repairing a $4500 DAC Invisible computers Cal Newport on AI AI shortform USB C Spec Tester "50.0000 ohms" HDMI Layout guide (ADI) Bit Error Rate My voice is my passport Fake Dave Hackers War Games Captain Crunch no longer welcome at DEF CON Wifi (WLAN) Location API Polar Semi gets CHIPS act moneyFri, 31 May 2024
- 1200 - Long Distance with CNLohr-a
Welcome back, CNLohr!
CNLohr was on the last episode talking about the CH32V003 part and the CH32V003fun library Charlieplexed errings Fast iteration Lohr-a...LoRa...get it? LoRa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIdHBDSQHyw Started in January 2024 with discussions with mustardtiger / Frank Charles had done Wifi long range before Also FM from ATTINY85 Ethernet + AM Radio signals without radios USB Harmonics LolRa Upchirps / downchirps 903.825 - 903.975 mhz Michael Ossmann talk LoRa doesn't do code matching JP Norair talking about LoRaWAN / DASH7 Tool / emulator for the airwaves 3 lines of the repo Tool to create tables There are two 2 lookup tables (up and downchirps) Table is different for differnet spreading factors and base frequencies Andreas Spiess LoRa/LoRaWAN distance attempts Spreading Factor -- can't past SF10 on this setup for unknown reason AirSpy Matt Knight LoRaWAN -- protocol vs network The Things Network / Helium Activation by personalization Nesting dolls of encryption New parts CH32V002 (also, -005, -006. -007) Charles is excited about the op amp on the CH32V006 that has 64 MHz GBW CH32V203 - 144 MHz - $0.24, has usb xcvr CH32X035 is self clocking - best low cost option for USB All are supported in library now Community - CNLohr discord Porting examples for the parts using the technical reference manual MNIST database - handwriting recognition system Announcement post on CNX about the new parts It's possible to hook up parts directly through the 1 pin SWIO, so you can hot-load firmware Writing code onto a "scratch pad" Want to see more CNLohr experiements online? Youtube.com/cnlohr discord: cnlohr reach out for invite GithubThu, 23 May 2024 - 1h 31min - 1199 - Good Energy CitizenSickness Starliner scrub Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing Toolkit for flying Search industry A380 EUV in semiconductors EV vs PHEV vs ICE Tesla sending emails to suppliers after laying off the Supercharger team powerledger / POWR Virtual power plant DEYE inverter Buying repacked batteries AC Battery vs DC battery Hybrid inverter Colin Furze TSMC running into problems with work culter after moving to US (Arizona) Marketplace piece about jobs at semi plans in AZ 996 Photos of the new Samsung Fab going up on Google Maps Chris asked on Mastodon about the best time to charge an EV Duck Curve, which Chris first learned about on episode for 630 The costs of different aspects of a chip fabWed, 08 May 2024 - 1h 06min
- 1198 - Really long needle nose pliersAnalog Cochlear Detectors Voyager I is back online Sustaining engineering Bobiverse books Chandra telescope Embedded World Embedded World US in October Trade shows in US Travel budgets Z80 obsolete notice Rabbit instruction set Dave trying out the Jumperless breadboard (lights up) Uri Robert Nelson Bluetooth Sigrok Zephyr LLEXT ZMKThu, 25 Apr 2024 - 1h 09min
- 1197 - Simulating doors falling offChris will be at Embedded World 24 next week Bluetooth standard messages like HT, HR Early bluetooth devices (were terrible) WiBree (?) Sequans deal with Renesas fell apart There was a Sequans modem on the PyCom FiPy The low power ISM network Chris couldn't remember was SigFox Synopsis acquired Ansys (back in January) Here comes the flood of Plugin Hybrids Dave's sick car - 2010 Nissan dualis - Second channel New Espressif ESP32-P4 is getting ready to release Bitluni makes custom silicon (spoilers!) Past guest Pete Bevelaqua has a new Kickstarter where he's passing power through a window (up to 30 mm thick) Top 10 Hobby Components (PartsBox) - submitted by former guest Jan Rychter Top 5 transistor video New BealgleBoard.org board isn't in the BeagleBone form factorThu, 04 Apr 2024 - 1h 03min
- 1196 - Motors on PCBs with Carl Bugeja
Welcome Carl Bugeja!
Carl lives and works in Malta He got started with robotics at his university Carl recently announced he would be launching a new company The company is called Microbots and they will sell components and kits for building similar projects to what Carl shows on his channel BigHero6 reference https://microbots.io/products/flatflap Max PCB temp is 130C Driven by series resistance of coil Tg value of PCBs A circuit that can solder itself How hot can a Flex PCB get? Batch vs raster Do you math? Tryng to get the perfect temperatures and dealing with flex materials Dealing with manufacturing differnces Scanning PCB Coils with X-Rays Sending PCB specs Incoming inspection and testing Testing boards with resistance Time flap produce User testing Drive circuits - How do you evaluate? Don't build your own H Bridge Optimizing for size Is Carl looking for other features? Building libraries for driver Foldable 4 wheeled robot , an all one PCB ESP32-C3, connected to playstation remote Boston Dynamics uncanny valley Gathering on social Top down vs bottom up (start at the top) Prior to YouTube, Carl worked at a startup Drones - 2 prop Bluetooth tags Later he moved to the automotive industry Concept vehicles Software What's in Malta? Building a remote electronics business Remote actuators on a PCB Microbots Flexar Driver Driving down the price per cell Similar to how they drove down the cost of LCD displays Pixel, voxel, moxel, maxel? Flipdots PCB Actuation Find Carl on YouTube and Instagram, and check out his work on the new Microbots site!Tue, 26 Mar 2024 - 56min - 1195 - The non-Stinky CarChris got a Chevy Bolt (2023 1LT) The model has since been discontinued 11 kW charging using a level 2 charger Flappy paddle to recapture battery (instead of the brake) Ioniq 5/6 Aptera Marques Brownlee reviews the Prius V2G is avaialble as a software upgrade to the Nissan Leaf 2nd channel abs bypass Microbit v2 Robot video with Huxley Software updates on a door handle Chris is playing around with 20V DeWalt batteries Battery fast charger schematic Bosch adapter Vmount batteries, as explained by Caleb of DSLR Video Shooter Sony batteries Dave's tutorial on charging Chris might try out OnShape If you're interested in helping model some battery stuff (or know someone who can), please email chrisgammell@golioth.io Sony battery lab hackWed, 20 Mar 2024 - 1h 06min
- 1194 - Blogging Electronics with Pallav Aggarwal
Welcome Pallav Aggarwal of CAPUF Embedded!
Chris enjoyed Pallav's series on learning the ch32v003 - fun vs HAL Ambiq Apollo Decision trees when considering hardware vs firmware Expensive to do software and stuff Order some of the boards Pallav created on Evelta India ecosystem for hw India industry CAPUF team size Pallav shares teardowns on YouTube reducing complexity Reviewing customer designs and removing 40% RP2040 in usb debuggers Efficiency consulting Over indexing on form and fit during rev 1 Troubleshoot: Joulescope / Saleae / Static analyzer Pallav has a page where he tracks AI tools for PCB creation There's another page where he tracks AI modules / chips DevRel as a service Nordic Check out Capuf.in for more info on Pallav's consulting or reach out via emailMon, 11 Mar 2024 - 1h 03min - 1193 - My Toothbrush Is BroadcastingPromise of smart home Electronic keypad Keyfob Proxmark Oral B bluetooth toothbrush Braun toothbrush teardown Solar road shutdown Smart mains socket tester ch32v003 testing success Samy keylogger Startups in Germany (can any German listeners verify?) Diyode mag is shutting down KiCad 8 was released! James Lewis did a good overview video SPICE in CAD Composite amplifier Zephyr 3.6 release AlteraTue, 05 Mar 2024 - 1h 06min
- 1192 - Altium...Acquired!Renesas buying Altium Altium bought Octopart in 2017 Tasking debugger Cloud focus after reorg History of Protel / Altium - started in 1985 by Nick Martin Turbo Pascal CAD tool for windows in 90s protel99 Altium Buys Morfik in 2010 Nick booted out After the reorg, the stock steadily grew You can watch the Renesas/Altium announcement on Zoom There is also a slide deck available Dave linked an article from the financial press in Austrailia Zuken Altera is apparently spinning back out Steve Liebsen on The Amp Hour Intel is getting a $10B chunk of the CHIPS act money Steve Sanghi (Microchip) discussed the act when he was on the show Synergy flavored milk Other properties we forgot were part of Altium: Circuit Studio Upverter (formerly on the show!) Gumstix Autotrax - Taylor's version (DEX PCB just...took the name?)Tue, 20 Feb 2024 - 1h 13min
- 1191 - Uncle Al's Eating Garbage AgainAI tools for recording 32 bit recording Pool robot Home assistant Power points in the ceiling in Dave's office park CH32V003 board CNLohr episode rv003usb library Mike Harrison doing a video about a CH32V003 standalone programmer nRF24 Low cost modules Chris bought on Amazon Samy Kamkar on the show Samy talk about balloons Drone shows Time difference of distances Dave's video about HP atomic clocks XKCD Radiation Dose Chart DTCXO In the Bond movies they're not nerds LCD and fonts AI pin Vision Pro iFixit teardown Chris will be at Embedded World again this year, come say hi!Tue, 13 Feb 2024 - 1h 07min
- 1190 - Automating the Home with Keith Burzinski
Welcome Keith Burzinski of Nabu Casa and the ESPhome project!
Nabu Casa is a commercial venture that supports the open source Home Assistant (HA) project Hardware Home assistant allows your smart home to not require an outside connection, which is crucial to breaking free of large cloud providers. Chris just got a Zigbee dongle and switched outlet working in under a minute on HA Automation and triggers Users share their automation routines on the HA subreddit mmwave detecting heartbeat What is esphome? Abstraction / using YAML for business logic Deciding when to go custom Keith got started doing a PR for an IR remote Nixie clocks Boldport / Saar Getting hooked on SMT builds Keith made an STM32 based Tube Clock that Chris was very impressed by at a Chicago meetup Keith reworked the sensing for his HVAC by fusing multiple custom sensor boards Presence sensor - mmwave + IR sensor Geodesic dome Tiny fresnel lenses on low cost PIR sensors Fixing thermostat in apt Creating a network of temp sensors and weighing SRE = site reliability engineer Nabu Casa cloud service The year of the voice Home assistant YouTube Hardware: Blue, yellow, green How often are people reprogramming their devices ESPhome discord ESPhome.io See devices that can be reprogrammed to work with ESPhome Reddits ESPhome HomeassistantMon, 05 Feb 2024 - 1h 23min - 1189 - Pneumatic Tubes, Straight To The HomeDave just drove 4500 km / ~ 2800 miles Dumpster room tier on Patreon? Hyperloop failure Florida train video (Wendover) Pipedream Series of tubes Guam capsize Hugo site builder, based on Go Dreamweaver Chris recommends buying a foldable lightbox (Light this) Chris's blog post when he was going to meet Dave for the first time Dehumidifiers are raising money based on ridiculous hype Spec Sheet for Genesis Systems Chris just got a chest freezer, was surprised at the low energy needs Power charges Texas grid article on NYT after recent deep freeze Energy mix in NC Beta voltaic Used for aerospace Bantam Tools (Bre Pettis) acquires Evil Mad Scientist (Lenore, Windell) Vulnerabilities in the ESP32 RISC V parts Will people make tools to make it easier to crack into something, like discussoned the CAN episode with Ken Tindell Dave might get a free pick and place, the TVM920 Video about the 1980s "drink robots" Chris's daughter is really into robots and gondolas Pool robots videos on EEVblog2Mon, 22 Jan 2024 - 1h 14min
- 1188 - The Twelfth Day of Keyzermas
Welcome back Jeff Keyzer of Mightyohm
Orthodox Keyzermas Twelfth Day of Keyzermas Jeff has been taking care of his ailing cat for the past years and learned a lot about administering medicine RF 8753 / Copper mountain Shariar sometimes features Copper Mountain VNAs on the Signal Path Step attenuator NanoVNA Pallav Aggarwal articles Murata modules Chip down cellular Seattle visit The big dark Input shaping Printing with .25mm Tek TM500 Scope on a monitor arm Test equipment intervention Jay Leno turbine car episode Selling on eBay, including stuff made during the process of making parts for Jeff's equipment Tek groups.io Fluke in Seattle / now Everett Vintage Tek Museum Being set up to ship things Shipping CRTs CRTs are in vogue again (?!) Low latency Retropie Oscilloscope music paying premium for RCA / Heathkit Jeff was off to Hardware happy hour (3H) Seattle Led Zeppelin had many references to Lord Of The Rings. Past guest and Chris's former roommate Steve Kreuzer was a huge LZ fan.Tue, 09 Jan 2024 - 1h 20min - 1187 - Pseudo Code...Pseudo GoodCES is coming up and there's good attendance as one of the last remaining large electronic shows in the US Tradeshow are all bunched up in April for Chris in 2024, specifically Embedded World and Embedded Open Source Summit Dave gives a synopsis of the latest Smarter Every Day video (about NASA) Smarter Every Day video about NASA talk Lunar lander training abort Apollo guide SP287 Speeding up podcast...how fast can/do you go? Last minute designs at the end of the year ESP32 / NRF9160 board limitations Cheap as chips - podcast about fish and chips Siglent oscope SDS7000A Innovators dilemma for car manufaucturers...and scopes too! Kia Carnival Kasm vs Codespaces Home Assistant ESPHome YAML NSW tour video / Quantum Smart home fraturing AI New guide to Shenzhen, updated by Naomi WuTue, 19 Dec 2023 - 1h 06min
- 1186 - Benjamin Cabé Nose Zephyr
Welcome Benjamin Cabé of The Zephyr Project!
Benjamin is the developer advocate at The Zephyr Project, which is both a Real Time Operating System and an ecosystem (or almost like a "distro", rather than an OS) Benjamin does videos on the Zephyr YouTube and maintains an awesome blog / newsletter The ecosystem is deep: Chris recently learned there is a state machine framework Multiple people involved in dev like an OS The Platinmum Members includes chip companies like NXP, Nordic, ADI There are 600+ boards supported in the ecosystem (and more if you do custom) Devicetree is a tough concept, but a powerful one that was borrowed from Linux Who is the audience for Zephyr? Chromebook embedded controller What's the smallest processor that Zephyr can run on? M0s can run it no problem Chris thinks one of the benefits is the ability to bolt new stuff on to a project Simulation through Wokwi (Past Guest Uri) or Renode (Past Guest Michael) Using different levels of abstraction zephyr i2c init Benefits of abstraction Swapping out chips (bubblegum tapshoes) Tying stuff together (bolting stuff on) Infrastructure with CI/CD Zephyr doesn't have an official IDE but VScode "just works" Helper tools from Nordic Open Source Hobby projects Dev survey Custom Keyboards (ZMK) RP2040 support Arduino recenlty joined the project Layers of abstraction Architecture (ie. arm, nios2, x86) SOC (available peripherals surrounding the core) Board (PCB definition which might have:) SOC Memory Peripherals / Sensors Check the tree and PRs for sensors that might be in-flight Compared to Arduino IDE Choosing ecosystems Weekly newsletter Things you didn't know you needed: NMEA subsystem In Jay Carlson's 2nd appearance on the show, he said "I'm reading more code than I'm writing" Benjamin's profile photo is of his artificial nose he created a few years ago Making a machine model for bread (pandemic) It uses TFLite What is the project doing? (in parallel) Acquire data Machine learning inference Display update Network interface Benjamin reimplemented the Nose in Zephyr using ZBus (Chris recorded a video with the author of this subsystem) Like an MQTT broker on device Some of the concerns I (Chris) had when I was starting was not understanding RTOS concepts (threads, queues, etc). Brian Amos was on the show talking about his book, which is a great way to get started with these ideas. Threading / work queues The importance of a project when starting out Starter hardware Hero devkits (Chris likes the nRF9160-DK as a starter board or the nRF5340-DK) M5stack boards iMX8 Jumping down to Zephyr from Linux MPU + MCU Tight integration Zephyr can run POSIX code What about the the RT in RTOS? Does this operate realtime often? (timing critical) BOM cost and software cost Security and dependencies Join the Zephyr discordto talk to other people using Zephyr TechTalks / YouTube Interested in going to a conference in Seattle in 2024 for Zephyr? The ZDS / EOSS CFP is open now!Mon, 11 Dec 2023 - 1h 06min - 1185 - For a couple weeks there...You may have noted a few weeks off in September...Chris was busy with a new kiddo! Starship launch was awesome, but Blue Origin might beat them to market? Chris has been troubleshooting some boards he had made recently. It was pre-baby so sleep deprivation can't explain some of the screw ups! PCB Carolina was a local tradeshow TechTechPotato talks about layoffs at SiFive. Article about the layoffs. RP1 show RetroPie Oversupply in the market is hitting some silicon vendors Dr Michael Burry (highlighted in The Big Short) has been shorting the semiconductor industry At the end of the movie the epilogue talks about how Dr Burry is watching water as well, possibly why he's shorting semis? Chris wondered if Steve Sanghi mentioned why they're still in Arizona while he was on the show Nuclear Diamond Battery video SnapEDA "off by one letter" error while ordering parts PCF85063BTL vs PCF85063ATL Scotty does a tour of the WorldSemi (makers of the WS2812B) factory, it's awesome! Ben Hencke of ElectroMage makes the PixelBlaze, which is a great way to drive LED strips Dave was talking to past guest of the show, Andrea Morello, about future changes to Quantum computers China is turning off exports of Germanium and Gallium, which could impact the upstream supply for the chip industry, including around specialty semis. Breakdown Bunnie writes about why the US shouldn't put restrictions on RISC V (agree!) KiCon has happened in Europe and China now, check out the talks on the KiCad YouTube channel. Future (distributor) was acquired by WT Microelectronics out of Taiwan Check out this 1975 tour of a UNIVAC manufacturing plantTue, 28 Nov 2023 - 1h 07min
- 1184 - Learning Computing with Jeff Geerling
Welcome Jeff Geerling of the Jeff Geerling YouTube Channel!
Jeff sounds so calm one his videos because he records after the kids are in bed He started working with dad at the radio station when there was a transition in radio to digital / online. Jeff had an early job as a technology explainer while making manuals at the station. Jeff still makes videos with his Dad on the Geerling engineering channel Ham radio vs broadcast 1 Million Watts on the Supertower Calling the FCC CamOX facility Keeping people interested during videos Mars 400 RPi clusters It's a good exercise because it helps those building it understanding the limitation of spreading across computers Drupal website on cluster "The constraint gives me the story" A good starter project? Maybe the project pi cluster /r/homelab NAS, monitoring, VPN, pidramble Home Assistant ESPhome yaml files: better than xml, JSON is better Devices should only be added to the house if they are: Local, additive, private X10 Smart stuff in the house Interested in the embedded side LLM Jeff became Chris's de facto Pi5 analyst RP1 episode PCIexpress Jeff discusses RISC VTue, 21 Nov 2023 - 1h 03min - 1183 - Accessible ASICs with Andreas Olofsson
Welcome back, Andreas Olofsson of ZeroASIC!
Andreas was on the show back in 2015 (ep 254) talking about the Parallela, a crowdfunded parallel calcuation board by his then-company Adapteva What is enabling more open source to happen? Unit economics really impact silicon designs Open source effects have been having a positive effect on the industry. Andreas maintains a meta repo of 400 tools. Fewer fabs than 2008, mask sets still expensive Semiconductor singularity Andreas is deep into the world of "chiplets" This is the basis of his new company ZeroASIC Before he started that he was a program manager at a little outfit called DARPA Andreas focused on lowering costs, with the idea that 3 people should be able to design a chip He worked under Bill Chappell, the director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) OpenROAD POSH CHIPS TinyTapeout Andrew Kang UCSD Chiplets We had Ming Zhang on to tlk about ZGlue, but that was a slightly different architecture What is a chiplet? AXI on chip SERDES Types of interconnect Organic Types of output SIP, Chip, SOM ZeroASIC is Andreas' latest company They started by releasing a Silicon compiler project New thing is take system customers and build them an ASIC Optimizing speed and cost Mostly targeting aerospace and defense Try it out yourself on the ZeroASIC emulation page Their main processor is a Quadcore RISC V There are no off the shelf chiplets eFabric Active Interposer Defining a standard arm made a standard called amba AIB from Intel was opensourced Getting external contributors (hardware vs software) LatchUp - Fossi Personal passion drives people to contribute You're really buying a datasheet from a big company Loading the design to AWS Check out the ZeroASIC openings Read about how ZeroASIC is democratizing chip makingMon, 13 Nov 2023 - 1h 03min - 1182 - History of the Cathode Ray Tube with Kathy JosephKathy Joseph from Kathy Loves Physics joins Dave on The Amp Hour to discuss history and physics. They end up discussing the intricate history of the development of the Cathode Ray Tube. Read Kathy's Book The Lightning Tamers: https://tinyurl.com/TheLightningTamers Video of this recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnJ7mQ_Fo-8 Forum: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1577-history-of-cathode-ray-tubes-with-kathy-joseph/Sun, 05 Nov 2023 - 1h 18min
- 1181 - The RP1 and beyond with the Raspberry Pi Hardware team
Welcome back James Adams and Liam Fraser
The RP1 is the new custom silicon on the Raspberry Pi 5 that is the helper chip to the Broadcom part onboard The HW team was last on the show in 2021 talking about the RP2040 They have been working on the RP1 since 2015 It's a small team, especially compared to other companies doing custom silicon. RP2040 update Scripting to reconfigure the silicon clocks/blocks Are they making other chips? Divvy-ing up duties for silicon Broadcom is making the processor and took input for this latest Dialog/Renesas do the power chip on the RPi5 PIO Chris gave an example of a board (the Ostentus) where the PIO is just listening for i2c messages and passing them up the stack. Design goal was to do cycle by cycle processing Someone on twitter having PIO talking to fiber transceivers Sourcing and RP2040 availability They get 20000 chips per wafer Buying wafers a few at a time through IMEC, sometimes through TSMC directly There are often small amounts of availability of "wafer starts" TSMC40 IP block updates: USB 3 / Ethernet Can do diffs on the verilog Receiving high paid IP Liam is the sysadmin / servers are on site Buying from Synopsis Stitching together IP They list what version of the IP they're using in the various sections of the datasheet. Prototyping on FPGAs Controller and Phy interface are exposed ProFPGA system with daughtercards Can't run at full clock speed on FPGA Digital vs analog simulation Could someone (competitors) copy things? As open as possible, being open where it provides value Cost savings on the RP2040 Traditionally the "Southbridge" is the IO hub for computing, the Northbridge was the cache/memory (later subsumed into large CPUs) 2712 on RPi is 16 nm This model of creating different generations of silicon but putting them all together is similar to chiplets but...on a PCB There is a (hidden-ish) PIO in the RP1. There will be more processing delays in RPI5 to deal with, but they won't be noticable because Linux is already pretty not-real-time Hoovering up more functions in one chip Layout of connectors changed again Pins are created to be well laid out on the PCB RISC V foundation The stack / ecosystem isnt as mature James' signature is under the USB3 connector RPi5 is "the most raspberry pi raspberry pi" yetMon, 23 Oct 2023 - 1h 09min - 1180 - Dave hanging with Fran BlancheTue, 10 Oct 2023 - 1h 06min
- 1179 - Fan FanboysChris is out of stock on Tindie and will no longer be a seller (though he was barely one to start with). Props to all the sellers out there! Media mail is a low cost post option in the US Colin Mitchell allowed people to pay with stamps instead of money orders back in the day There is always a struggle for hardware engineers to price a product at the value in the marketplace and not just the cost of parts Teardown of DHO800 Heatsink testing (live during the show) CFD Controlled depth routing We discussed Joe Grand's thin boombox last time, Dave watched a talk where he explained more of the process Scotty from Strange Parts did an awesome tour of the JLC PCB Flex factory Skewed expectations Dave was wondering why during the production assembly of scope that they populated caps but not silicon Intel is investing in ARM, RISC V (say what now?) eBay U1273A meter Old stock 30 year old tek chipsMon, 11 Sep 2023 - 1h 03min
- 1178 - Moving Down The Stack with Scott Williams
Welcome back, Scott Williams of Xentronics!
Scott was on Episode 624 talking to Dave about the business of consulting, but they discussed Scott coming back on to get more into the technical side of things. Chris listened to the episode and wondered if Scott would get more pulled into management of the day-to-day There's a new program in Victoria (Australia) to enforce deposit/rebates on bottles and cans. This opened up an opportunity for an electronics project. Bin management is another common IoT project Industrial - Site Hive is a long-time customer in the construction space Consumer goods Scott said he's likely to reach for a Raspberry Pi CM4 for quick prototyping/POC Wht about the high density Hirose connectors? Does Xentronics "go down the stack" by using tools like Buildroot / Yocto? Cameras make products much more difficult. Raspberry Pi cameras have a CSI interface but aren't "standard" per se. When starting projects, Xentronics is likely to pull out ESP32 for WiFi, Nordic for Bluetooth, STM32 for generic processing Bare metal vs RTOS? Normally they start in the RTOS space to add things later Pre-made / prior art Colin Karpfinger of Punch Through, a firm that largely focuses on Bluetooth EMC resources/courses PCEA educational EMC Todd Hubing Keith Armstrong Ken Wyatt Wurth seminar - Scott never got the recording, but will try again and we'll update here/reddit if he gets it!Tue, 05 Sep 2023 - 1h 22min - 1177 - Garbage NinjasChris joined the 2010s and got a step tracker, the Fitbit Inspire 3 There are commercially available teardown reports you can buy One of the sensors on board is well supported in Zephyr. This influences how Chris chooses parts. The RT500 (discussed by Aeden in episode 638) is supported in Zephyr and targets the smart watch industry Kalman filters are pretty amazing Dave blew out his other knee (!) and went to go see a Podiatry specialist to get his gait analyzed. He has "impressively flexible feet" Dave did a teardown of the classic Boombox from Say Anything Joe Grand made "The World's Flattest Boombox" to showcase a piezo speaker. It was a really cool PCB! Joe Grand was also on The Amp Hour (twice!) Episode 60, one of our earliest guests Episode 575 in early 2022 when Joe was hacking on Trezor wallets eBay Garbage ninjas Recycling electronics uSupply video Part number stuff Chris has been putting a design through Macrofab. Chris and Parker were on episode 243. Tempo automation has maybe (probably?) shut down. There was a weird email that Chris shared. After the show, Chris found a post about how they're down to 7 employees, so probably aren't manufacturing any boards... Making a RISC V processor in 100 lines of Verilog!Mon, 28 Aug 2023 - 1h 02min
- 1176 - Calibration & Repair with Ian Johnston
Dave and Ian Scott Johnston discuss the PDVS2mini DC Voltage Calibrator Source, production, China, CERN, ebay reselling, test gear, pick and place machines, assembly, automated test systems, and Youtube repair videos.
https://www.youtube.com/@UCtiK8QrcCrsjDXpKzB1PO1A https://www.ianjohnston.com/
Tue, 22 Aug 2023 - 1h 09min - 1175 - Sad Violins for SuperconductorsChris is developing a booming "dad" voice, perhaps? Memorizing modem sounds The Amp Hour turned 13 years old (episode 1 went out Aug 12th, 2010) The Fluke 87 is 35 years old Everyday DMMs Chris enjoyed Dave and Toby discussing the DMM a lineman uses Bryman Dave will be giving a talk at a University sooon...should he dress up like Bob Pease, the Czar of Bandgaps? Dave made a video about one of the LK99 groups What are the practical limits of superconductors? Meissner effect is how superconductors levitate Maglev trains Trains on YouTube Chris is working on a new board, the first time in a while Abandoned scooters around Seattle have RPi4s in them How did the 2n2222 get its name? A new group of semiconductor companies (Bosch, Infineon, Nordic, NXP, and Qualcomm) join forces on RISC V Former guest Mike Engelhardt releases a new spice version with Qorvo called QSPICESun, 13 Aug 2023 - 1h 07min
- 1174 - Power Transmission with Toby Robb
Fellow Aussie Toby Robb joins Dave to discuss everything related to mains power generation and transmission and his role as a linesman.
Ask Toby a question here: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/amphour/im-linesman-and-electrical-fitter-in-powerline-distribution-in-australia-ama/
Links:
TransGrid’s substation design standard https://www.transgrid.com.au/media/zgogqoqg/1-1-substation-primary-design-standard-rev-2.pdf https://www.energy.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-08/2019_10_NSW_ServiceAndInstallationRulesOfNSW_underlined.pdf
Mon, 31 Jul 2023 - 1h 12min - 1173 - Software Defined Power Supplies with Werner Johansson
Welcome Werner Johansson of Qoitech!
Chris and Werner met when Werner gave a talk at HDDG in 2017 The talk focused on Xmega parts, which have a 2 Msps ADC Qoitech is a Sony spinoff, where Werner was working on testing batteries on the cellphones.He had previously also worked on automation during linux mainline work. Serial port control is an important thing when doing automated testing CDB assist PSOC5-LP has a CPLD in it The Otii Arc was the first product from Qoitech, it's a 2 quandrant power supply. They started in 2015/2016. Chris asked if Werner had previously had used the Keithley 2306 Field testing is an imporant area for the Otii product line. "Measuremenets on the go" are easier with the extruded case form factor. No computer will give you USB PD output power of more than 15W. Test equipment would benefit from a full 200W Analyzer (Twinkie?) A hub might be possible USB Extended Power Range (EPR) will allow 240W Are you sure you should plug that into your computer? Reminder about the OMG cable discussed on the show with MG New EPR at 48V has specific shape for arcing When designing a power supply for tattoo machine, it could only weigh half the weight of the cable (64g) Software defined buck boost was discussed on CNLohr episode Digital control is easier to get stable than analog because of programmable delays in the pipeline. You need to measure how long it takes to get the output to "show up" Audio project real time jam sessions The new product from Qoitech (that Chris got to see at Embedded World in 2023) is the Otii Ace PJRC convinced Werner to check out the NXP RT106x family (instead of RT105x) Otii is working on battery stuff Arc has been out since 2017, but was limited output voltages 500 mv - 5V Ace came out recently and goes up to 25V at 5A 3 isolation domains in Ace - chassis, banana jacks, expansion ports Want resistor on low side for coloumb counter Can stack Aces up to 200V Dealing with RFI when different domains Increased sample rate 8 simultaneous sampled ADCs Turns readings into audio signals for RT1060, which allows data to stream easier There is one reference voltage driving everything in the design, they send frequency spike across gaps to all isolated sections using RF isolators Hard time getting the RT1060 parts during shortage Battery stuff Stepping through the battery internal resistance Edging into the world of SMUs Building a curve Replaying battery data Battery emulation Continuous integration testing Syncing to firmware Battery aging Devices running on coin cells Cycling and automated testing and see it degrade over time Thinking of batteries as impedance devices Batteries having a passivation layer "Low power" means different things to different people Teardown of battery emulator Low power is less than 200W Qoitech equipment has been used in testing and production, including "in-the-loop" testing "Generational degrade" when using previous versions of the product to validate new versions of the product. Instead they have a NIST traceable DMM in the loop Chris mentions ever calibration shop has a Fluke calibrator. Apparently the HP 8753 wasn't available in EU because of RoHS. To learn more about Werner and the Qoitech team, check out the Otii Ace pageTue, 25 Jul 2023 - 1h 11min - 1172 - Daaaamn We're DuuuummmbDave has been traveling around Australia with family. He made a video about an old solar thermal facility. Chris also has been traveling, he gave a talk at the Embedded Open Source Summit about doing embedded training. Solar thermal efficiencies What is the efficiency of a mirror? What is the efficiency of a transformer? Power engineering class Nic Bingham giving a talk about high pressure electronics Chris was inspired from CNLohr's episode where he talked about building a switcher. He recently bought a bunch of CH32V003 parts. WSJ article about Chiplets (Archive) Chiplets have been mentioned on the show a bunch before Ming Zhang Craig Bishop Dave reviews the Analog Discovery 3. This is Chris's daily driver at this point, especially when on the move. While searching for something during the episode, Chris stumbled onto an old reddit post from 9 years ago about how they decide where to build fabs. Chris and Dave both felt dumb while watching Shahriar's Starlink teardown Kathy Loves Physics will be doing videos about Maxwell's equationsMon, 17 Jul 2023 - 1h 04min
- 1171 - Building AR Headsets with Aedan Cullen
Welcome, Aedan Cullen!
Chris first learned of Aedan from his 2022 Hackaday talk about building an AR system AR is "Augmented Reality", but that term is different depending on the company / headset (think "magic leap" vs "google glass") Got into AR because of robotics, he had be doing software around SLAM and CV Interacting with objects in 3D space The first board he was working with was the Jetson TK1 Magic Leap's "Lightpack" had a Tegra in it Apple's new Vision Pro is more like VR with passthrough (and creepy eyes!) Being able to wear an AR unit all day Resolution matters What is it worth spending power on in a headset? The previous rev used the AllWinner D1 RISCV and can support one camera Which way should you point a camera on a pair of glasses? MIPI DSI outputs and DSP processing Lots of SIPs available for high density designs Octavo makes SIPs out of other companies' silicon. Jason and Robert from BeagleBoard talked about Octavo when they were on the show ECX337 from Sony needs 10V Torex power modules helped save space too by being stacked on top of the inductor Sony uses LVDS (FPDlink) and not MIPI Offloaded processing to a phone or computer Power Wi-Fi vs bluetooth New goal is to minimize power during processing, now it'll be efficiency around WiFi and Display With OLEDs you can selectively turn on pixels Goal for the battery is 8 hours for "all day" What is Aedan's "requirements space" and what's driving it? Cost has become a concern for new boards Using an assembly house to have one known-good assembly board What's on the new board? The new display has MIPI DSI The display doesn't support 2 lane DSI out of the box Displays are sometimes configurable in terms of how many lanes with registers What do the lanes refer to? Each pair ("Data lane") is a differential pair Most displays will do 4 lanes (8 conductors) at 1Gbps "Giganibbles per second" Silicon backplane with OLED on top ViewTrix The processor is the NXP iMX RT500 "This is design is made for Garmin" Aedan is coding it in Zephyr Drivers are in MCUexpresso DCnano display driver in Zephyr no GPU driver in Zephyr 2D GPU in the chip WiFi module is the same as the past rev, the Si Labs WFM200S Sending compressed data over the WiFi link Mechanical Tweaking displays and 3D printed mounts Prism Flex cables XReal / NReal Using your brain as the combiner Zach from Voidstar Aedan just went to the Augmented World Expo in May. "No one was wearing an AR display around the conference" Vision for the future Follow Aedan online GitHub TwitterSun, 09 Jul 2023 - 1h 08min - 1170 - CH32V003...fun! with CNLohr
Welcome to the show, CNLohr of the YouTube channel of the same name!
CNLohr has been working on projects and a library for the ch32v003, the $0.10 RISC V part Dave has made a video about that part, using the official toolchain from MounRiver How far will you take the chip? Moving from knowing the arm instruction set to the RISC V instruction set The benefits of knowing assembly The CH32V003 is a RISC V part in the low end space made by WCH. CN thinks it's about eqiuvalent to an AVR You can buy a dev board on Tindie (this is the one Dave and Chris have) Compiler tooling is done for you AVR GCC While discussing Espressif entering the market the way in which they did, CN said, "There's only going to be one of these in all of computing" Community reversing esp8266 using a virtual machine that had a leaked toolchain on it. Compared to cc2500 / mediatek / realtek ESP8266 without an RTOS "nonOS SDK" lwip and wifi stack Community port of FreeRTOS onto the ESP8266 CN worked on the "NoSDK 8266" It didn't have the WiFi enabled which meant timing wasn't critical and he could overclock it to 380 MHz Minecraft on a microscope slide Ethernet on an AVR Other people in this space igor plug lwusb is massive (relative to the space on the CH32V003) What about the support burden of writing things yourself? Chris made a comparision to college USB on CH32v003 CNLohr already had hardware on hand for decoding and debugging the USB stack He livestreamed the development! Chris said he was not sure he could livestream, but CN said that the audience acts like rubber ducks and pair programming ESPUSB vusb on avr Does communicty work like this have an influence on the market? Padouk 3-8 cent micro Grainuum library (later figured out it was written by past guest xobs!) lufa / tinyusb What are the physical requirements to implement USB without a transceiver? Only real thing is you need a pullup on the USB D- line You also need to change pins from intput to output in the window of responding Can make HID devices, but everything is low speed USB (1.5 Mbps) CN built the Nixie tube controller On GitHub there are examples on how to use various aspects of the part The chip has DMA During the chip shortages, CN was browsing lcsc and found a 10:1 transformer and wondered if he could make a flyback with it Single wire debug Check out the CH332V003fun library on github Getting started The next few months CN will be working on getting everything to be really good for the library There will also be support for other (larger, more expensive) parts Join the Discord! (cnlohr) Follow CNLohr on YouTubeSun, 25 Jun 2023 - 1h 15min - 1169 - Discovering Cursed ConnectorsChris and Dave try to figure out what's going on with the Rode Go 2 PCB photos from a reddit post Chips on board Nordic Semiconductor nRF52810 Renesas (Dialog) DA14195 SmartCores ATS8233 Maker Moekoe's soldering setup Chris is buying and using random connectors from Amazon. Dave says it's Chris discovering DIN connectors Non standard cable connectors Cursed connectors Tracker in the car for insurance price reduction 3G shutting down in Australia later this year. Already mostly done in the US. Shoe phone EAGLE support / sales will officially end in 2026 This monster board of throughhole components with 74 series logic Chris will be giving a talk and showcasing at the Embedded Open Source Summit in Prague next week.Mon, 19 Jun 2023 - 1h 04min
- 1168 - Low Power Connected Devices with Andrea Longobardi
Welcome Andrea Longobardi of AL2tech!
Andrea is a consultant in the HW / FW space, based out of Italy. Chris met Andrea when he was transitioning to consulting and he joined the consulting forum. Andrea comes from a family of engineerhing, His father is an EE who made PCBs at home but kept it from the kids He worked at ST Micro designing drivers for server disk drives If you lose power, the arm will crash into the platen. So when power fails, you use the energy in the motor to backpower the arm. Didn't like being pigeonholed and he wanted to get into apps engineering Moved to Maxim, which he knew about because of their sample program Working in automotive space: harsh environment and dealing with things like: Load dump Cold crank Low power during shutdown Dealing with customers on last minute basis Went abroad to the UK and worked for ARM/PA Consulting Chris asked about the engineering culture in Italy/UK Lot of focus on theory "With the internet you can become an expert very quickly" AL2Tech is Andrea, his brother Allessandro and a lab assistant Had been back at Maxim focused on low power, connected devices What's it like working with a sibling? Finding first client as a consultant: Networking with people on linkedin Looking at job openings and offering part time work Did it while building up the company Showing side projects (air quality sensor + BLE) since he couldn't talk about his work at chip companies It worked when a small company took a chance on him FAEs were big companies, didn't get access to the smaller company engs Building test boards to learn new things (for the Joulescope), like a custom front panel Gas monitoring is an area of focus for AL2tech The device is battery powered, sitting on the meter. Certification is critical: the certifying body is looking at schematic / layout and making sure nothing heats past the point of igniting gas. Zone 0, 1, 2 Conformal coating Why not put everything in Resin? Cost Volume correctors for gas monitoring For billing, they lean on PV=nRT Internal product at AL2Tech is the Elektra There is a CO sensor that caches data and sends over NFC and BLE It detaches from a shirt with battery, but a reed switch disables power when not connected (so it can be washed) Using the shirt to attract people and talk about capabilities Embedded World helped expand outside of Italy Other proejcts Rain Vision Tauanito Sensors Find Andrea on LinkedIn Check out al2tech.com to learn more about the companyMon, 05 Jun 2023 - 1h 16min - 1167 - The CAN bus can! with Dr Ken Tindell
Welcome Dr Ken Tindell of Canis Labs
Ken heard episode #631 where Chris was talking about a Noisy Rude Bus and he objected. Stringently (it seems Ken has since pulled down the posts, but they were in good fun) Chris had been planning to talk about Ken's recent awesome post about CAN hacking and cars being stolen, so he asked Ken to be on the show! CAN was invented to reduce weight in car cable harnesses, which were increasing rapidly with more electrical features being included. CAN vs LIN CAN was expensive, but LIN is cheap because it's bit banging the protocol from a microcontroller There are bridges to go between CAN and LIN buses. Modern cars have 20-100 ECUs (controllers), but it depends on the features the car has. But that's not just microcontrollers, Ken estimates that could be as high as 700. Chris and Ken both had dealth with Philips / Freescale / NXP / Motorola as silicon vendors in the automotive space How does a tiny microcontroller get data onto the bus? Prioritized traffic CAN indentifier field has priority baked in Bus works like a giant AND gate where the lowest address wins 11 bits How to unwind CAN traffic Packing signals into CAN frame Tools to reverse engineer Protocol decoder for sigrok CAN HG 250kb is slow CAN bus bandwidth There is Ethernet in cars now, especially with more and more cameras Bandwidth vs latency Addressing through a gateway Atomic broadcasts means you know that each device has processed it Protocol hacking Trucks aren't OEM based so more vertically integrated SAE J1939 standard in trucks If say Toyota develops the CAN messages, DBC files decode everything. But manufacturers don't publish them, so some car messages are reverse engineered Accessories bus Who has access to DBCs? Diagnostic systems OBD2 CARB CAN is physical ISO 11898 CAN XL has IP packets, so you can use wireshark Ken has written about wireshark CAN 2.0, CAN FD Devices on a bus are normally all bare metal or RTOS because of the timing requirements OSEK standard Embedded system abstraction Dealing with the magnitude of decisions making in the automotive industry Chris asked about whether self-driving will happen in 5 or 20 years? (ie. does he agree with Chris or Dave). It was the latter, sadly. Autonomic Cars podcast with Dr Phil CoopmanTue, 30 May 2023 - 1h 08min - 1166 - Engineering OptimizationWelcome to the Luddite Hour, where Chris and Dave discuss the merits of Embossing Tape Steve Sanghi was on the show last week, Chris disagreed with some of his points about paying for tools Chris talking himself out of a job? Ken Tindell wrote about a CAN hacking device that unlocks cars through the headlights. He will be our guest next week! Vincent Himpe is on the job market. He was our longest running guest at 3 hours. Hiring engineers means paying for their optimization Once chips start to standardize that optimization, it gets commoditized VU Meter LED bars: LM3914 / LM3915 Person detection with TinyML: The Person Sensor AM Radio: MK484 CNLohr using the CH32V003 and Nixie tubes. He will be a future guest! Charles also started the CH32V003fun library. Former guest Eric Schlaepfer on a podcast with former guests Ben Jordon and Bil Herd Flipper Zero on YouTube HS01 review view The Pine-cil soldering iron Projects Dave reviewed a escooter on eevblog2 Thingy91 / buzzer videoMon, 22 May 2023 - 1h 04min
- 1165 - Steve Sanghi - Microchip CEO for 31 Years!
Dave talks with Steve Sanghi who was Microchip CEO for 31 years, now Executive Chair.
Check out his new book, Up and to the Right. How Microchip was built into one of the biggest and most pofitable chip companies in the world.
In this episode we discussed:
The early microcontrollers, ROM, EPROM, EEPROM, FLASH Semiconductor Fab's and locations How the US Government CHIPS act is a golden handcuffs trap US/China rhetoric What really happened durign the covid supply chain crisis How 90% of medical devices use Microchip parts Lead times Respect for the chip manufacturers and supply chains Just-In-Time becomes Just-In-Case How the Toyota production system works and how it had to change The impacts of a potential war in Taiwan How does it make sense to make thousands of part variants? The secret to making part varients Why Microchip chose MIPS vs ARM Atmel didn't make any money! Pricing discipline How buying Atmel almost didn't happen, and how Dialog Semiconductor goofed it Draconian NDA terms Atmel was bloated RISC-V plans Customer Driven Obsolescence Foundry vs In-House limitations Open Source FPGA tools? Third party tool support Why not offer free optimised compilers? It's all about black swan events, down cycles, pointy haired bosses, and how All your Cost Bases Beyong To Me Hobbyist vs professionals How Microchip is the largest aerospace chip maker in the world. Nothing leaves earth without a Microchip part in it. Radiation hardended parts Market value profitability Will Microchip ever get acquired Strained US vs China relationsMon, 15 May 2023 - 1h 06min - 1164 - A Noisy Rude BusDave is celebrating his 10 year anniversary of the dumpster room There's now a camera on the room! Chris has been writing code for the Nordic Thingy91. Dave said it's not a buzzer (only one tone), it's a piezo transducer Dave's video about the first micro/Merlin "Did Ed Sheeran ACTUALLY Plagiarize Marvin Gaye?" by Adam Neely "AInxiety. The feeling that you might not have chosen the best AI tool for the job" Wendover Productions video about production in Mexico instead of China Dave should be interviewing Steve Sanghi next week I2C vs "two wire interface" I3C compatibility is a new topic as well, written about by TI on Planet Analog Chris has been looking at CAN stuff. CAN bus is a "Noisy Rude Bus" Practical Engineering talking about strain gauges in bridges Strain gauges often are measured by a Wheatstone bridge Chris wishes he could tell his younger self to "Get prototypes off the bench quickly" Having a range of measurement test capabilities in your pocket WiFi visualization by Sam A ElectroBOOM making a jar full of "fireflies" Becky Stern doing a teardown of RayBan Smart Glasses. Scans of the inside by Lumafield.Mon, 08 May 2023 - 1h 05min
- 1163 - Renewable Energy Policy with Ari Gerstman
Welcome Ari Gerstman, from the US Department of Energy Office of State and Community Programs
Chris and Ari went to high school together and Chris was excited to have Ari on the show to talk about how renewables are implemented in the US Ari recenly started his DOE job He was interested in joining the organization after a large funding effort in the US Senate and House (signed into law) The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), also known as the Infrastructure and Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) There is now $100B going towards electrification and upgrading of the US infrastructure and homes in the US. The funding is driving supply side incentives to move to renewables, instead of Cap and Trade to disincentivize carbon rich activities. Chris asked Ari about the green credits market and whether people should pay attention (John Oliver carbon offsets piece discussed in the past) What are the tradeoffs of targeting upgrading homes for efficiency vs solar installs on a roof? Solar in the US Ari working in a narrow subset at DOE Chris has read exactly one book about The Grid, talked about many times on the show before. Running capacity building Ari is part of the Office of State and Community Programs, which administers a portion of the overall 100B There is a large amount of net new electric load, in the form of EVs, appliances, heat pumps, etc. This could roughly double electricity usage for providers and transporters of energy. Tennesee has a large manufacturing base and are growing into batteries. This is map of battery activity in the US. Ari has 84kW battery in his car, these kind of capacities will only grow over time. Is new load a good thing or a bad thing? Power providers are excited about it! Investor owned utilties are natural monopolies, which is why there is something called a Public Utility Commission (PUC) to regulate them. Ari and Chris made up an example about a fake US state (Electifica) with a fake provider company (Utopia), so that we weren't talking about any specific examples. Utopia trades on the stock market and there are known returns, so there are expectations about how things will work. Utlities are incentivized to maximize costs because they make percentage returns on the costs passed to customers. PUCs want the opposite. Microgrid DER - Distributed Eletric Resources Energy efficiency and demand response programs are where they notify customers of high load and ask the customer to turn things down. Sometimes there is "Smart Grid" style programs where the utility can take action centrally (turning down thermostats, etc) There was a Demand Reponse Brooklyn Queens program that worked Building a substation is very expensive, but gives an additional control node What is the effect of solar on the grid? Microgrids can enable additional cross-grid control, but it gets tricky when figuring out billing for the crossing between subgrids (because utilities have very different billing paradigms) Peaker plants need to spin up very quickly and are very dirty. Utilities encouraging people to buy battieres The Duck Curve A net zero passive house could extend usage off a battery backup system and highly reduce load on the grid. Building codes can have a large impact on future energy usage by determining how future homes load down the grid. Codes in Florida also help things like disaster response. There is a large chunk of that $100B going "Transmission sighting", because additional control nodes on the grid will require additional land (often in expensive areas) Ari previously worked on renewables for the District of Columbia. With rooftop and solar on the edge of the city, they could cover about 10% of city usage. Power companies moving from owning and operating everything is changing paradigms generally. How can you learn more? Ari suggests reading legislation BIL IRA Check out the Energy.gov site for general info Read more about Ari's programs at the DOE SCEPTue, 02 May 2023 - 1h 20min - 1162 - At least my house isn't hauntedChris fills in the rest of the story told as a "Puzzler" in the last episode. Unfortunately none of the submissions won this week, possibly because the clues given were too obscure. The long and the short of the story is: my house isn't haunted The culprit (top) and the victim (bottom) Capacitive coupling lighting up LED lamps Phases in US vs Australia Reality tv producer setups Paul Zawada episode Buzzing components Predicting penny Enough about houses not blowing up, a Starship blew up! (on purpose, it seems) Chris read two books about space mining that he loved (2 part series...so far). Delta V Critical Mass Emerson Electric is buying National Instruments for 8.2B NI makes Labview, a popular test stand and automation software Dave has been choosing microcontrollers and did a recent PIC24 vs STM32 comparison Nordic just announced the nRF54H20, which is the successor to nRF52, nRF53...but also has a bunch of RISC V coprocessing cores. Another fun image generated by Midjourney for show art this week...Mon, 24 Apr 2023 - 1h 03min
- 1161 - Two Dads Puzzlin Things Out
Dave Young of Young Circuit Designs joins Chris to record a now-rare in-person episode of The Amp Hour!
Dave has been on the show a couple of times in the past 305 409 601 Chris was recently on Embedded.fm talking about Golioth and firmware PUZZLER: Chris lays out a problem with home power Email theamphour@gmail.com with the subject "PUZZLER" Chip shortage is...over? (better?) Inspring kids (including students) around electronics Amazon Sidewalk is now available, it operates through Amazon devices if you're using AWS IOT.Mon, 17 Apr 2023 - 1h 01min - 1160 - Works on my machineGordon Moore died two weeks ago Do EEs really retire from electronics? Or just switch to hobby mode? Eevblog2 video about going to a ham radio meetup with Dick Smith Dick sold the shop in 82 Dave at the Fully Charged Show, he briefly met with Robert Llewllyn The Sears XCargo The Aptera is a funky looking, long range EV Prusa Mk4 was released, Chris liked Thomas Sanladerer's video about it Dave is building a new desk out of pallets Shawn Hymel's video about GitHub actions Gitpod / GitHub Codespaces Thunderscope looks awesome! It started as a Hackaday Prize entry and is open source on GitHubMon, 10 Apr 2023 - 1h 10min
- 1159 - Intelligent Routing with Sergiy Nesterenko
Welcome Sergiy Nesterenko of Quilter.ai!
Just prior to recording, Chris saw that Dave had been talking about a different "AI autorouter" Configuration on Quilter is currently pretty simple (not a lot Sergiy worked at SpaceX in 2014 doing a bunch of boards for testing "PCBs were the tail end of the design, so it became the critical path" Check out some of the public designs on the Quliter Blog Quilter has remade the schematic of the OpenMV camera. This reworked board is indicative of the kinds of boards they can handle. Generally sub-300 MHz, Sub 2A Quilter has a full time EE on staff who helps try out different designs and give feedback. They can parellelize designs by sending them off to a cluster for processing. Chris noted that it felt similar to Place and Route on an FPGA. Quilter doesn't currently enforce "octolinear traces", so the traces aren't straight lines. It makes it possible to detect generative designs, like on the "QPlayer" example The toold helps by defining manufacturing constraints for you, specifically around available board houses. Cost of compute How do you balance the problem of knowledge? Chris and Dave discussed this for newer engineers in episode 625 "What is the job of a PCB?" (perfectly replicate a schematic) Quilter is doing additional checks, including solving for Maxwell's equations and Thermodynamics There are decisions to make within the routing algorithm, ie. Should they enforce "star ground"? When starting out, there was skepticism around code compilers! But over time people came to trust them more and more. How can you try out Quilter? Sign up for waitlist!The best candidat designs will be: Sub 2000 pins sub 100 parts sub 100Mhz sub 2A Open source designs All the boards on the site have no human input When trying out the service, many customers don't trust the first board (but later they start to) Spits boards back out as the same file format, they currently support KiCad, Altium, Eagle NASA story designing S band antenna When starting with new boards, the tool will import outlines by parsing layers in KiCad / Altium / Eagle. Reconsidering different elemetns of a design (constraints) Relaxing constraints (physics) Software models Why don't some of these tools exist in layout software? Specifically simulation and physics engines. Many do! (Ansys, TDK, etc). Often the cost isn't justified for simpler boards, so people go without. Feeding back real world squishiness into the model Costs - Not yet set, but there will be different tiers for hobbyists and open source designs. Sergiy mentioned $50/month for non-enterprise, but it seems like it's much too early to tell. Check out more on the site at quilter.aiMon, 03 Apr 2023 - 1h 07min - 1158 - Gremlins in the machineDave had alarms going off just prior to recording SVB There was a post for a "Prompt Engineer" paying $335K in SF Who fixes things created with AI when they break? What if no one knows how it all works? Coaching around learning electronics Louis Rossman talking about rungs of the economic ladder missing Super Troopers ARM is considering changing how they charge for their IP (linking to Ray Ozzie's LinkedIn post because it was how Chris learned about the article and because clicking through from LinkedIn actually lets you read the article, whereas direct linking doesn't...for some reason) Gordon Moore passed away between when we recorded and posted, otherwise we would have obviously mentioned it. We will discuss his life and legacy on the next show with the two of us.Mon, 27 Mar 2023 - 1h 01min
- 1157 - Design & Manufacturing Consulting with Scott Williams from Xentronics
Scott Williams from Xentronics in Melbourne joins Dave to discuss setting up and running a design and manufacturing consulting business.
Sun, 19 Mar 2023 - 1h 06min - 1156 - Artisanal CrystalsStatistically less safe prototypes Artisanal crystal "Too good for the job" Story about boost converters Dave video current consumption NGA100 Dick Smith chat Beagle Play and Beagle Connect were recently released Linus Tech Tips studio mHUB moving Fran newspaper story (still think it's on Fran's patreon page only) Live/work spaces Shipstation Shipping with Southwest (or other airlines) Wendover video about the logistics of cargo carriers during COVID New RPi global shutter camera The death of Europe's last electronics giant (Philips) Yes, today's intro was done by a robot, Chris is stuck in an airport again on the way to Embedded WorldMon, 13 Mar 2023 - 58min
- 1155 - Building Firmware and Hardware for Trade Shows with Mike SzczysMike and Chris work together at Golioth, Mike agreed to join Chris this week after Chris forgot to schedule a guest because of working on demos for Embedded World 23 Mike was on TAH episode 403 at DEFCON 26 talking about Badgelife Backlit LEDs Mike was the Editor in Chief at Hackaday for 9 years, he was there a total of 13 years Remoticon happened twice during the pandemic Supercon returned in November 2022 The Zephyr Project Mike loves manifest files (or has come to love them) Marti Bolivar - Macrobatics Zephyr Devicetree FreeRTOS - Brian Amos Zephyr The Linux Foundation Nordic chose Zephyr as their go-to RTOS / Ecosystem (they build the Nordic Connect SDK on top of Zephyr) Beginner content in Zephyr (check the
sampleandtestfolder in Zephyr) Benjamin (new Zephyr DevRel) is interested in getting the Wio Terminal supported Sensor subsystem in Zephyr Kconfig Zephyr shells ESP-IDF Mike was recently on Robert Ferenec's YouTube channel building an IoT solution live Command line vs IDE VScode plugins help bridge the gapo The Adafruit MagTag EPaper displays often are lacking docs Pimoroni badger Mike created an i2c listener which uses PIO for i2c. It passes received commands up to the Micropython layer. Marshalling Micropython allows you to use things like Hershey font files Jared Wolff was on the show talking about the nRF9160 feather (and Zephyr) Find Mike on Mastodon at @szcyzs@chaos.social Mike's personal site is jumptuck.comMon, 06 Mar 2023 - 1h 12min - 1154 - The Magic of CalipersDave had a protracted battle with GitHub/Lab but found a way to upload files with drag and drop IoT Devices that have IP addresses eInk doesn't seem super prevalent these days in products but has advanced a long way Repurposing grocery store displays If you'll be at Embedded World, Saber from PCB Arts (episode 608) will be holding an event on Wednesday 3/15 (free to attend, need to register) Calipers Capliper videos Jimmie Rogers tattoo Sam Zeloof is starting a company to fab chip fabs with Jim Keller. They have raised $15M, from OpenAI(?) Former guests Matt Venn and Uri Shaked recently released SiliWiz. It helps students to learn how silicon transistors work (and therefore how ASICs are built) Mike Englehardt is no longer at ADI (who acquired LT) working on LTSpice. His website says he is working on a new simulator to be released in May of this year. Chris often defaults to Falstad simulator for easy circuits. Dave is having ChatGPT write a program for him Botsplaining Past guest Andreas Spiess did a recent video about OpenMQTTGateway which helps you to listen to 433 devices with an ESP32. KiCad 7.0 was released The Mother of all Demos (Doug Engelbart)Mon, 27 Feb 2023 - 1h 07min
- 1153 - Engineering Education with Dr Don Wilcher
Welcome, Dr Don Wilcher! He joins us right as he’s about to release a new book, M5 Stack Electronic Blueprints
He worked at Willow Run early in his career (facility now closed) Henry Ford Community College Larry Sears Having joy in the courses The Knack John Davis joined on a previous episode to talk about Industrial machines What is a PLC? Relay ladder logic Industrial Computer vs Controller Scan loop on a PLC XIC / XIO A Distributed Control System (DCS) networks many controllers together Don taught a blueprint reading class Chris asked about why connectors are drawn the way they are Later in his career, Don moved from the industrial space to design in cars Wiring harness Body controller module CAFE laws - California Air Fuel Economy 68hc11 Wetting current for switches CAN Cigarette lighters in cars Don was working on the (Jeep) Grand Cherokee Decoding CAN with a scope Packard electric connectors Cars have a "shower curtain" for water in the door Don got his PhD and switched to education He taugh courses like Electric Circuits 1 / 2 Intro to robotics Automated system and diagnosis Electronics Industrial Maintenance Instructors putting bugs into the system to test students PLCs still reign supreme Arduino recently released the Opta, which is targeted at the industrial market Don writes for Control.com OpenPLC is software that can run on a variety of accessible platforms (like ESP32/Arduino/etc) Industrial I/O OpenPLC based on IEC spec (61131-3) Different programming styles of programming Blackhat (movie) with Chris Hemsworth Stuxnet worm He wrote and article about using OpenPLC with Arduino Dr Don has a new book that was just released! The M5 stack book Continuing Education Courses IEEE certificate Dr Don will be speaking at the Embedded Online conference coming up in AprilMon, 20 Feb 2023 - 1h 15min - 1152 - Super Tecmo BugThunderfoot AI Video about ChatGPT Prototyping tools: Chris has been laser cutting using Ponoko (and Inkscape). 3D modeling + low cost 3D print services means you could make some amazing stuff. Dave has been finding bugs will doing scope testing FFTs in scopes Series 2 tektronix There's no concept of a Bug Bounty in the hardware world. The BM786 will have a flash micro in new versions, it was previously one-time-programmable (OTP) Past guest of the show Jay Carlson (ep 515) wrote a new post about the cheapest flash micro you can buy (it's not the RV32). Jay has previously written about the $1 Micro and Embedded Linux. What is the most complex prototype you could you build for $100? There should be a contest! "The Amp Hour $100 prototype index" FedEx took Coral microcontroller dev board for machine learning applications Dave is building a RetroPie with his kids (they can play Tecmo Super Bowl!) The electric Mustang SUV has a mile of extra wire harness. What is a wiring harness? Here's an article about a simple harness install on a classic Mustang Enphase has bidirectional charging for a house. Unstated: your car needs to support it LightYear Zero company went bankrupt (shock, horror) Carbon Offsets - Wendover Carbon Offsets - Last Week Tonight (John Oliver) ESG investing - A good Planet Money episode about it Saber from PCB Arts (ep 608) will be holding a meetup on Wednesday March 15th during Embedded World! If you'll be at Embedded World, let Chris know! Tesla are removing AM radio...maybe because of the antenna? AM/FM chipsets are available in single silicon packagesMon, 13 Feb 2023 - 1h 10min
- 1151 - Refrigerators and Robots with Amitabh Shrivastava
Welcome Amitabh Shrivastava of Refrigediro.org and Tinkrmind!
Amitabh moved from Physics into Engineering. He did an internship at Brandeis for astophysics and radio astronomy and realized astrophysics mostly coding these days. Kit for teaching teachers in India There was a limited Electronics scene in India. Amitabh grew up in Bangalore (Bengaluru) Manufacturing in India has been growing, including in the silicon space. Chris used to work at a place that had a CM in Bangalore. Gaming startup making tag games using LoRa XBee Logistics company that tracked 2 wheelers. Their breakout product was a laser scanner for packages. Amitabh went to ITP at NYU, which is a technology and art crossover program. Past guest of the show Matt Richardson also went there. Creative aspects vs technical aspects. Amitabh enjoyed consulting for other artist, much like past guests Mike Harrison and Todd Bailey discussed. Programmable Air is a kit that allows people to more easily build soft robots and use pumps. Chris and Amitabh met at Teardown 2019. That was also the event where Chris recorded with Joshua and Zach, before recording again this year. A "jammer gripper" is a soft robot that allows you to pick up arbitrarily shaped objects using friction. "Backpack inflatable car" from Otherlab Open Source Project Programmable Air was crowdfunded on Crowd Supply. As such, it's still available on Mouser. The valves in the kit were meant for keurig machines. Spec sheets are super basic for mechanical components. Chris saw Amitabh at Supercon 22 wearing a backpack refrigerator. It's called "Refrigediro" Amitabh gave a talk about the project at Hackaday Supercon 2022 The source of the name is "Harry potter and the methods of rational thinking" Refrigeration is an old industry PV=nRT Kipp Bradford and Adam Savage video on building tiny refrigeration. Other uses for small scale refrigeration is vaccine storage, cold chain storage. Ammonia refrigeration allows you to keep things cold with a fire. Gradient window cooler is a heat pump with a cool form factor. Not shipping yet though? Modding an icemaker Follow Amitabh on Instagram or YouTube for his latest experiments and builds. Follow him most places as "Tinkrmind"Mon, 06 Feb 2023 - 1h 11min - 1150 - Conference Room InnovationIt was Australia Day when Dave and Chris recorded The pinnacle of stereaming services: The Amp Hour+ Chris just got a new solar quote for his house, the roof shape is still too weird to make it a good option. Thunderbirds episode Solar city panels starting on fire Dave is looking at upgrading his solar again, including with DC batteries Span.io is working on smart circuit breaker boxes The Grid book Sydney program to use homeowners' batteries How many times has this guy gotten laid off? (the one scamming for 8-10 engineering jobs at a time) Big layoffs are hitting the likes of Google, MS, Amazon In Australia, this is called "being made redundant" or "retrenchment" Conference room innovation for speakerphones Tom Scott got to visit and walk on the Parkes Telescope (of The Dish fame) Tour of the switch Dave has timelapse video of the dish moving Dave got to blinky with the RV32, the $0.10 RISC V processor Self Soldering Circuits from Carl Bugeja Water cooling inside PCBs Coin cell cutout on a PCBMon, 30 Jan 2023 - 1h 09min
- 1149 - Open Source Tapeout with Matthew Venn
Welcome back to the show, Matthew Venn!
Matt was previously on Episode 467 from 2019 Supercon, before he started working on the open source toolchains and the education around them. A bunch of news in the open source silicon space Latest shuttle was MPW8, MPW9 coming up soon 2 new open PDKs Open source tools growing, much of it comes from Google "Willy Wonka-ing" process and sponsoring the shuttle This was driven by past guest Tim Ansell (on 501) Tim Edwards of efabless Claire Wolf was on the show in the past Dan Burke talked with Matt at Supercon 2023 about the term "Tapeout" Matt runs the ZeroToAsicCourse youtube channel, which includes a podcast. Global Foundries / IHP open source What is driving the growth?- Open source tools Google MPW Open source PDK RISC V
Mon, 23 Jan 2023 - 1h 15min - 1148 - Augmented EngineeringDave is currently on holiday (at the time of recording), try to find him with this Tweet. Worldle YouTube channels that do Chris and Dave took a Canberra trip when Chris was in Australia Dave made a video about AI and ChatGPT Chris could not get midjourney to make a "curly" straw and so he did it the old fashion way. For those interested in low power, there is a webinar coming up Weds about "Sipping Cellular IoT Power" Moving up the value chain Collaboration and augmentation Chris has started building his conference calendar, reach out if you're going to be there! Embedded World in Nuremberg Germany March 14-16 Embedded Open Source Summit / Zephyr Developer Summit in Prague, June 26-30 There was a community Maker Faire in Melbourne, Dave was suprised they are still happening. Chipsets for mobile phones to talk to satellites T9 text input Starlink New Espressif P4 Chip PCB with built in strain gauge for weighing MLCC capacitor cracking. AVX Ron Demco talked about that when on the show Yearly perfomance reviews Want to work with Chris? Check out the FAE job posting Twitter has not collapsed, Chris lost the bet to Dave MounRiver makes the compiler for the ch32v003. We asked ChatGPT about a compiler company name "A good name for an embedded compiler company could be something like "FirmwareForge" or "EmbedCompiler Technologies" or "MicroMate Compiler" which effectively communicate the company's focus on embedded systems and compilers." Pete Holmes talking about not knowing Dave used to be "advanced" by adding digital photos to lab reports Dave's Sony Mavica teardownMon, 16 Jan 2023 - 1h 15min
- 1147 - Reunion Impedance Matching and 2023 Predictions
For the first week of the new year, we welcome back some past guests to talk about electronics in 2023.
Alvaro Prieto is a co-host of The Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast and has co-hosted The Amp Hour before. He currently works at Sofar Ocean. 363 456.2 440.2 440.3 Ariel Briner was on episode 260 of the show talking about CartesianCo, a now defunct startup. Ariel now runs an 8 person consulting shop in SF called Electron Labs. Chris Osterwood was on episode 425 talking about Capable Robot Components, which he is still working on. They are preparing to release new hardware in 2023. State of robotics Possible to have consulting with robotics? We were recording during CES 2023 AgTech Robotic pizza 3H meetup Modex Fulfilment(conference) IoT Electron labs projects are 30% IoT, but more are connected (50%+) iPhone globalstar connection is now possible and Iridium is coming soon. Alvaro uses Blues Wireless modems to do firmware updates on buoys near the shore. Ray Ozzie (founder and CEO of Blues) was on episode 603. Bugs in different locations due to unicode characters (or null characters) FreeRTOS vs Zephyr STM32U5 has DMA in stopmode, which is a low power option for DMA Alvaro has been creating Joulescope front plates What kind of mix of hw and software are each person doing? USB C cable tester ESP32-C3 is a RISC V wifi chip from Espressif. There is also support for Rust on that and some other Espressif chips (Chris Osterwood has been trying it out) Hubris OS from Oxide. Oxide engineer Laura Abbott talked about this when she was on the show. Another Oxide engineer Rick Altherr was on the show (before he worked there) Board bringup is a hardware activity for fimware engineers. Firmware with hardware when the power rails are controlled by the micro CM4 / Linux Buildroot vs Yocto Custom vs dev board Chaos camp Mark Rober video (car breakins) RISC V AI Midjourney ChatGPT Is it all just "Stochastic BS"?Mon, 09 Jan 2023 - 1h 14min - 1146 - It's a Keyzermas Miracle!
Merry Keyzermas, 2022! Jeff Keyzer of Mightohm.com joins the show once again.
Jeff has been at his place in Seattle since 2018 Previously when he was in Redmond, he put his antenna up in the trees This year Jeff set up antennas at his new place New things in Amateur radio, SDRs ICOM IC705 portable Sunspot cycles impact how far you can communicate 5-10 watts in the backyard Taking ham radio setup camping Crater lake Goldeneye antenna coming out of a lake (Aricibo, now busted) Cape Disappointment Parks on the Air "2022...which is this year" Long Beach Washington kite festival Jeff put an antenna on a kite Doers vs talking in amateur radio FT8 mode QRZ.com IC7300 brought people back Alan Wolke YouTube channel Jeff hasn't been doing much consulting Kit business gangbusters because of Ukraine Atmel DIP parts are easier to get than other Atmel parts (but still not easy) Eurorack companies closing Test equipment upgrade 8753D Agilent took down legacy resources Fixing test equipment as a way to learn 53310A Can't just get a piece of test equipment on a whim GPS connected to MDA can get parts per billion (!) Plot frequency vs time Saluki Fusion news Hotplate vs oven for reflow Making generated art (couldn't pass up the Clark Griswold reference, sorry)Mon, 19 Dec 2022 - 1h 44min - 1145 - Slapping Industries
Show notes
Listener points out Dave said to slap him in Episode 255 if he ever said he was getting a pick and place. Dave stated as much in episode #610 Dave posted a bunker tour and clean up video on Odyssey 10 cent micro showed up to Chris's lab (discussed in #610) The tooling has a windows focus, the toolchain is called MounRiver. There is some OpenOCD tooling specifically for it. GitHub repos open a web based VScode window when you hit "." (period). You need to be logged in. Discussion on embedded.fm 435 about GitHub codespaces Christmas lights Arduino is targeting the industrial market with the Opta "microPLC". They will have ladder logic for this device. John Davis was on episode 385 talking about the difficulties of working in a machine building environment. A new part from Sony/Altair, the ALT1350, looks like it has EVERYTHING in it: Cellular, GPS, WiFi (hotspot finding only), 2.4GHz / 802.15.4, sub Gig. So many radios! Lock teardowns Artemis The Grid (book)Automated transcript
00:19.99 Dave Welcome to the amp hour I'm Dave Jones from the EeV blog00:24.37 chrisgammell And I’m Chris Gammell of the slapping industries because I am supposed to be slapping you.
00:30.24 Dave Well oh I know what this is about right? Thank you to the person who put this on who do who did who put it on the silly lie and yeah, thank you very much got the most up votes. Yeah, go ahead. Do it do it. Although I haven’t technically got 1
00:36.26 chrisgammell Ah, five days ago yeah this is this this silly lion.
00:43.43 chrisgammell Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay here we go here. We go ladies and gentlemen in the light of last week’s episode I just wanted to say that in episode number two fifty five at timestamp Fifty Six Twenty Dave says that quote.
00:47.77 Dave So you know and.
01:00.31 chrisgammell You ever hear me utter. The the words I’m contemplating getting a pick in place just you know slap me. Thank you and happy holidays. Fantastic! What a great callback? Yeah yeah there we go all right? all It’s okay, yeah.
01:07.57 Dave Ah, ah, ah or cheese and ah oh I think I’ve come to my senses I well was I thinking. Ah oh boy. Yeah, um, so yeah, so trust some nerd to remember.
01:20.52 chrisgammell And yeah, well I mean that’s I have to wonder like were they just now listening were they to listen to it recently or they have like photographic memory. Yeah, right, Very impressive.
01:25.78 Dave Right? Remember Well did they actually pull that out of their memory bank I wouldn’t surprise me if they pulled that out of their memory bank because I can still say oh yeah I can remember that in in you know, an episode ah episode and a copy of.
01:44.83 chrisgammell And yeah, yeah, it probably means that they they they had something in their memory that they they’re like yeah I really would like to see Dave slapped.
01:45.10 Dave Electronicks Australia Magazine back in 1985 there was this article that said blah blah blah blah blah you know like I can probably pull that out of my ass. But.
01:57.77 Dave Right? Slap me right? Yeah possibly Yep yep I don’t know I’d like ah I don’t know what triggered it I don’t know.
02:04.26 chrisgammell Ah.
02:09.15 chrisgammell What the the urge to get a I think it is completely natural I Think here’s here’s the thing the ah the I think the journey often goes like this.
02:10.15 Dave The ah the the lust for a pick and yeah, the urge to get a pick and place machine I don’t right.
02:21.58 chrisgammell Ah I’m so frustrated if only I could just build you know like ah these boards are taking so long to build if I’m sending them out or they’re taking so long to build if I have them in-house. All I just needed is some robot to do this. It would be so easy if a robot would do this and the answer is yeah of course it would if it was perfect but it it just sucks you know like even you know even the ones.
02:26.95 Dave There. All right? and and then you start realizing that it’s oh it’s only five bucks a board to get your board assembled or whatever right insert symbol here like and insert your assembly figure.
02:41.15 chrisgammell Yeah. Sure sure yeah.
02:48.61 Dave There right? Yeah, but let’s just say five bucks to assemble aboard you go like well how do you justify $10000 pick and place machine and all the infinite amount of time and energy required to run it and massage it and maintain it and pull your hair out and learn it and you know and.
02:56.98 chrisgammell Yes.
03:03.51 chrisgammell Yeahp I think it’s it’s really that like the idea of like the drop of the hat you know I always talk about like the 2 a m problem and like if you had a thing at 2 am yeah you know like this would be super super useful, but most people I feel like do not have that and the ones that do you know.
03:06.68 Dave Yeah, right? yep.
03:20.10 Dave Yeah, oh yeah, of course well I think part of my motivation is that it would and part of the inspiration is that I think it might motivate me into doing actual designs and getting them assembled.
03:21.50 chrisgammell It’s probably faster cheaper to just pay for overnight service like from a actual assembly house. So I think it’s.
03:37.50 chrisgammell M.
03:39.21 Dave Right? because I’ve if I’ve got the capability there I go oh here’s an idea for I could sell a couple hundred of these boards you know? and yeah, why not just do this and then just right.
03:41.56 chrisgammell And yeah I I I don’t I don’t agree with that for myself I think that’s like the the buying a buying a treadmill in order to start running I think really I should just go outside and start running. Yeah.
03:54.21 Dave Right? Okay, yeah, yeah, you should just and do it but I’m sort of a bit and unusual Caseian I’ve got a large audience who will you know look if I came up with some little widget that you know I could probably like sell and distribute a couple of hundred of them. That’s that’s that’s no problem I think so you know.
04:00.40 chrisgammell Sure sure I think.
04:09.41 chrisgammell I’m sure you could yeah of course of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m not saying that I’m saying that you should if you were actually serious about that you should build 2 little widgets first. Yeah yeah.
04:13.85 Dave Yeah I should build the widgets first and then and then figure and well maybe I should do that. Maybe I should build the maybe I should build a couple of widgets in anticipation of getting a pick and place machine right? And then I haven’t ready to go. Yeah.
04:24.64 chrisgammell A exactly right? because and there’s always future ones too right? You’re going to. You’re going to do like variations and upgrades and stuff like that. So yeah.
04:35.48 Dave Yeah, well well well straight off the bat I could get into remanufactory my um, my microcurrent or a variation of it. Maybe I can just do a new variant of that. But I’ve got a couple of ideas I just need the inspiration to spend the time on them to you know to actually get it done. So.
04:40.36 chrisgammell Chair there here. Yeah, yep, totally right? yeah.
04:52.61 Dave Yeah, and and I’ve got the extra room now to do it So that that’s another thing right? Well actually it pretty much I think it it was that no it was if you see my video. It’s um, over it’s on my Odyssey channel.
04:56.74 chrisgammell Right? right? Maybe oh actually it’s full of stuff already.
05:11.23 chrisgammell No, okay, that’s I haven’t in that yet. Yeah.
05:12.60 Dave It’s an exclusive over there I think I don’t think I put it on my main thing. But anyway we have to link it in. It’s where yeah I actually cleaned up my bunker and I was so astonished at the amount of bench space I had and I went war I could put a desktop pick and place machine here if I wanted to you know and.
05:20.62 chrisgammell Um, yeah.
05:27.14 chrisgammell Yeah, yeah, yeah.
05:31.90 Dave And and then I actually started So that’s what like I and then I just grabbed my camera and I just shot a little blurb down there and that’s what that’s where the inspiration came from I think and and.
05:38.74 chrisgammell That’s what started the whole thing. Why and so and actually there was an update on that right? So we had we had talked about it on the show and then you would also kind of kept going with it and then I think you had kind of figured out that like you don’t you don’t want to go with that machine that you had talked about on the show.
05:44.29 Dave Yes, well.
05:52.34 Dave No the kit. No, even though. Um, thank you the light place. Sorry I forget his name but um, yeah, he’s still making the light place and he did. He said if I if I wanted to actually do because the kit I’ve got is like 7 years old and so it’s not you know.
06:06.40 chrisgammell Note this wasn’t the kit. This was ah you had talked about the the YYZ or something like that if you the need why I okay yeah.
06:11.70 Dave Ah, all the ah why why one yeah the yeah yeah, no I no look there. There’s been discussion on the forum I’m involved in this forum 3 where some people are you know there’s like 3 or 4 people on the ev blog forum we’ve got one you know and like. There’s there’s 1 person saying look. It’s okay, it’s doing the job. You know I solved these problems but most people seem to think oh no, the feeders are really dicky and you know and then the last thing you want is feeders that a dicky right? That’s that’s the whole thing with pick and place machines is reliable feeders right.
06:45.58 chrisgammell Yeah, yeah, totally yeah.
06:47.27 Dave That’s that’s that’s that’s like the biggest grief with a pick and place machine. It’s not that you got to spend the time to programmer you know, look that’s you know, easy easy peasy right? Yeah, no, but that’s but that’s you got to do that with any you got to do that with any machine right? But the differences between machines are in how reliable is the pick and place.
06:53.18 chrisgammell But that’s that’s something. But yeah, it’s not as much right? Yeah yeah.
07:06.46 Dave Stuff how reliable is the vacuum system the feeders, the pulloon the tape back and you know doing all the rest of it right? Can you just set it up and go and come back and you know you’re a thousand parts are done orchi or do you have to sit there and massage the damn thing you know. So yeah and like yeah, there’s just too many reports of.
07:07.48 chrisgammell Ah, yeah.
07:12.72 chrisgammell Um, yeah.
07:17.59 chrisgammell Right? yeah.
07:25.96 Dave Of dicky feeders these friction These are three D printed by the way they’re three D printed feeders. So as I think you spotted on the previous podcast. You actually see and you saw the image and you went Oh they’re they’re being three D printed. No, apparently they’re three D printed. Yeah so.
07:30.28 chrisgammell Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah I looked I looked at the photos at least but that could have been promotional or early photos versus production. Yeah, interesting. Yeah.
07:45.26 Dave Yeah, which is fine if they work right? But yeah nah anyway, um, an update from the previous show when we talked about is I did actually put a bid on on a local used machine. Um, and it came with 44 yamaha feeders.
07:48.96 chrisgammell I guess.
07:57.89 chrisgammell No interesting. Oh Wow. Okay.
08:04.72 Dave Right? It was like like it was yeah it was the real deal right? and it was a desktop one and I would have had to drive to canberra to get it but fine. Okay I could do a road trip right? to get it and you know and um, a rent a Ue yep and well actually I did actually check.
08:10.93 chrisgammell Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, rent a Ute.
08:22.90 Dave The I car I did actually measure the car and it might have just fitted in the car. It’s ah it’s more of like the awkwardness because it weighs like one hundred and ten Kilos so it’s more like the awkwardness of trying to like slide it in there and you know stuff like that. So it it it? Yeah, so well don’t care about that. It’s an old car but you know, um.
08:25.77 chrisgammell Oh okay I know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, not hang up the car to ah at it.
08:41.43 Dave Yeah, so we weren’t yeah so it it would have actually fitted the problem is getting it anyway. I could have figured out the transport right? And so I unfortunately I should have hit the buy it now button. Okay because the guy like there was a make an offer thing so I went. Oh yeah, I’ll make an offer So I made a you know quite a generous offer on it.
08:51.31 chrisgammell Me.
08:59.50 Dave Um, but it it was below the selling price. So I waited for the guy to get back to me and then he didn’t get back to me and then the it it just vanished the actual ebay listing just vanished right? So um I contacted him said hey yeah, what’s going on you know and he said oh no, we decided to keep it. It’s like oh damn.
09:08.14 chrisgammell Yep.
09:17.94 Dave So even even if I hit the Bowat now button and like paid for it straight away I think he would have re-nigged on it anyway. So you know anyway, yeah, and and that yeah it was a use machine. Um was it the charm high or something which yeah I know they got a bad. Oh no, it’s some variation you know it.
09:19.59 chrisgammell Yeah. Yeah.
09:36.47 Dave It is one of the chinese ones but it’s one of the better ones. But yeah, like but but but it uses yamaha feeders right? So it’s one of the ones. Yeah, and okay and it came with like forty yamaha feeders for goodness sake. So I’m like like and it was only like 3 3 grand or something.
09:37.35 chrisgammell But then yamaha feeders Interesting Interesting. Yeah.
09:48.18 chrisgammell And maybe you should just ah contact that person and just be like hey you want to build some boards.
09:53.96 Dave Yeah, right? Well ah well I’ve already got my assembly guy up the coast. You know I’ve already got my assembly guy for what board assembled you know? So so’s no problem. Um, hey I’ve got one I’ve got one in the business park here. There’s an assembly house in the business park here. You know I can just walk.
09:55.56 chrisgammell And come down I can do some videos and yeah may okay, they go? Yeah, Okay, sure sure. Okay. No there you go Boom done. Okay, So what’s the problem here Man just go talk to that person again.
10:11.63 Dave Down the road and have my boards assembled. It’s not the same. You know what I’m making myself Anyway, yeah so um, yes I was all hyped about that.
10:19.58 chrisgammell Okay, well.
10:24.58 Dave And was all ready to go. You know I was planning my trip I was checking out you know, ah you know prices to hire utes and stuff that you know I was like I was going to go yeah know and like I was happy to pay the original price like if he wanted to haggled on the price I would have paid the full price right? And um, yeah, and he just know Damn it.
10:38.92 chrisgammell Um.
10:43.48 Dave So that one fell through and like and they’re so rare here. That’s the problem right? Yeah, yeah, well you can buy secondhand pick and place machines here, but you get them through like there’s 1 or 2 big dealers and no, you’ll be paying 20 grand for one so you won’t be able to get like a used desktop one for.
10:45.16 chrisgammell And yeah, yeah I think that’s the thing they haven’t been imported right.
10:56.30 chrisgammell Um I see oh.
11:02.88 Dave You know under 5 grand no isn’t gonna happen. So this was yeah rare as hens teeth, especially one with that many feeders and I think they were genuine yamaha feeders. So who you know anyway. Ah boy I don’t know whether I should just go for it and yeah.
11:12.95 chrisgammell If yeah. Oh well, there goes that dream I think you should just build some honestly you should just build something I think you got to you got to get those muscles flexing again you know think about it like the gym right? This is your couch to five K but it’s a couch to building this all icon of widget. Yeah yeah I like build something like.
11:22.56 Dave Yeah.
11:29.54 Dave And bill as in build something or actually design a product you talking to build build in right.
11:36.76 chrisgammell It all the way through get it all the way through to a a yeah you know of actual build product. No I think you should I think you should hand place it I think you should feel the pain. Yeah I think you should I think that I think this is an important.
11:39.70 Dave But using my own using my own pick and place machine. You think I should just buy 1 and just try and no I don’t want to hand place the bloody things anymore. No no screw that.
11:56.36 chrisgammell Important thing because it also gives you you know you could do. Basically if you hand place your first set of boards is basically you have about 6 hours or however long it takes to hand place the first couple boards or board or two whatever that is when you’re dreaming up all the dfm things because you’re going off fuckinging.
12:05.15 Dave Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
12:12.56 chrisgammell Why did I make this such a small resistor. You know like this is like the best way to do Dfm is to experience the pain of of your design decisions I’m saying a new thing I’m not saying I know that you’re talking about building the old thing I’m saying build a new thing.
12:17.43 Dave I Dude I’ve I’ve already done that I’ve already done that many many times and using why it’s the same pain. The pain doesn’t feel anything different just because it’s a new design. What is its.
12:28.79 chrisgammell You said you, you were saying the whole reason I wanted to do this sure it does. Yeah, it does it gives it gives you that that that new set of of grumbles that you know you can use to revise your design. You said that you wanted to do this.
12:35.54 Dave So it doesn’t.
12:42.46 Dave Right? So you’re saying the new the new set of grumbles is more valuable than the memorized grumbles.
12:51.29 chrisgammell That’s right memorize grumbles. Well the memorized grumbles have probably already made their way into your design as you updated your your ah your microcurrent. But you said that you wanted to get a pick in place to inspire more design I’m saying you should just go and make a small design and then that’ll also.
12:53.77 Dave Right? right? yep.
13:07.77 chrisgammell You know kickstart the process you know.
13:07.91 Dave Yes, right? Yeah, true true. All right in the meantime I’m looking out for a pick and place machine. So if anyone sees one? Um, yeah, and that that’s how I found the one that um one of my ah viewers Um, sent me an email.
13:13.44 chrisgammell Okay, yeah I think that’s interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
13:21.72 chrisgammell Oh well.
13:23.41 Dave And said hey check out this because the whole ebay hey ebay like watch this thing is all screwed up now. So it’s like I don’t know what they did do it but none of my watch list bloody work anymore. So yeah, if if you certainly if you know of 1 please email me? Yep yep.
13:27.90 chrisgammell Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, send dava a secretive message. Pick and place flies at midnight.
13:46.53 Dave Because if if if 1 pops up I will nab it even if I don’t have a design ready to do it and then where’s to put it right because I originally might might my bunker which is in another part of the business park right? I I can walk there but you know it’s like.
13:50.89 chrisgammell Got it? yep.
14:04.80 chrisgammell Sure sure Sir now.
14:05.90 Dave I’ve got to get off my Ars and walk there right? whereas my dungeon is downstairs and so I’m thinking. Ah no, maybe I can put it in the dungeon downstairs because that would be easier. You know I can just go downstairs and you know? Yeah yeah, so I think that might be better.
14:15.82 chrisgammell Um, yep, well while you procrastinate buying a pickin place I am procrastinating digging into this this chip that we talked about on the show I think maybe the last time as well. I finally I did get the boards in the ¢10
14:23.32 Dave Ah.
14:33.20 Dave No, mine’s mine still I have to check my P O box but no mine must night hasn’t turned up yet. So no must be on the slow boat goodzunai. Yep.
14:33.11 chrisgammell Risk five chip. Do you
Tue, 13 Dec 2022 - 1h 10min - 1144 - Grad School Time Capsule with Joshua and Zach
Joshua Vasquez of The Allen Institute and the Jubilee Project and Zach Fredin of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Welcome Joshua Vasquez of The Allen Institute and the Jubilee Project and Zach Fredin of Commonwealth Fusion Systems!
Background This is a special show because I (Chris) found a 2019 recording during Teardown (other shows were released from that event). Somehow the show with Joshua and Zach was never published, I think because I found it on my recorder much later. The 2019 show (starting at 1:31:00 on the recording) was when Joshua had been in grad school at the University of Washington for 1 year and Zach was getting ready to go to grad school at MIT at the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). Both were intending to get their PhD. I caught up with Joshua and Zach at the 2022 Hackaday Superconference in early November (discussed on 610) and learned that they had both left their PhD program with a Master's Degree and now were back in industry, working at some verycool new jobs. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to record with them again in 2022 and get their perspectives on grad school...but I didn't let them hear the 2019 show first. The Jubilee Project is a toolchanger on a CNC machine / gantry. Zach had been on the show before for Neurotinker Zach worked on Reconfigurable computation systems NMR Joshua joined University of Washington to work with past guest Nadya Peek "Fabricatability" Kinematic coupling, which is a method of exact constraint It's like "Free body diagrams but in reverse" Bal-tec precision balls Joshua contacted a seller on alibaba and has an 8 mm ball with M3 threaded hole made for other people wanting to build a Jubilee Hackaday vocabulary of parts Misumi Jubilee project long term? Still going, some people building the project still. Filistruder makes a kit based on it. Jubilee Discord community The community is working on some specialized heads, like a sonicator head Zach was working on nuclear magnetic resonance, trying to make containers that could withstand 7 million rpm / 112 kHz. Using the machine they were able to get the molecular spectrum (like mass spectrometry) of things like brain plaque for Alzheimers research. PI = Principal Investigator Work is continuing on the microadjusters and making diamond tubes What are the downsides of grad school? Getting to work on the things you want to work on Balancing Research and Development Prior to grad school, Joshua was at a synthetic biology company. He was "the human who would write software for hardware" and building machines for their manufacturing capabilities. E3D toolchanger Was drudgery part of the process? Zach gives cautionary advice for grad students: "Early on you need to learn how to evaluate rabbit holes" (note this advice when listening to the 2019 section) Tidal forces How to make almost anything Joshua says that in grad school, "the projecting part of you becomes weaponized. [It was] was near and dear to who I was" A lot of work before grad school was trade secret Joshua's current work is open source, which is an unexpected benefit. He works at the Allen institute (named for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen), in the recently formed "Institute for Neural Dynamics". They are imaging mouse brains to understand what are the ingredients inside the brain. They already know a lot of the genes in neurons, but now they're finding out where those genes are expressed. The project he's working on is like a "reverse SLA printer". It's a rolling shutter camera with a laser sheet slicing across a mouse brain that is "transparent" (with some bio chemical voodoo) 1 mouse brain = 100 TB of data Zach is now working on Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a 400 person startup for fusion energy. They are busy trying to get deuterium and tritium to fuse ITER is a long running fusion project in France, built using the magnetics available at the time. CFS is using higher temp superconductors, which represent better magnetics. Magnetics and plasma containment are one of the key constraints for "power in vs power out" Zach does instrumentation for the machine as a "Tokamak Instrumentation Engineer" The platform CFS hopes to commercialize is called "ARC" Zach is getting back to making by joining the recently relaunced Artisans Asylum Joshua felt bona fides (masters degree from UW) helped in the interview for his current job (which he found out about at the Seattle Hardware Happy Hour!), but he didn't need to have the knowledege gained at grad school to understand the work. The 2019 portion of in the show starts around 1:31:00Mon, 05 Dec 2022 - 1h 59min - 1143 - Picking a Pick and Place PickinessDave is considering getting a Pick and Place Chris mentioned the episode with Saber where they talked about the Vapor Phase One. Seon (UnexpectedMaker) has detailed his trials with Charmhigh and Neoden Pick and Place machines Chris gave a talk at Hackaday Superconference called The One Engineer Dev Shop, which mentioned having in-lab manufacturing (and how it might not be a time saver) Neoden YY1 is less than $3K. There's a thread about it on the EEVblog forum. Chris mentioned the Lumen (by Opulo) from Stephen Hawes (who also documents on his YouTube channel), but Dave thinks it'll be too DIY for his needs. Mrs EEVblog pointed out this article about using Mushrooms to reduce eWaste After seeing the name of the site, Chris recommened The Anthropocene Reviewed, a book by John Green (vlogbrothers) Dave posted a Heat pump follow up video to the original (we talked about this the last time we recorded together) Chris is reading a book about the Grid now that he finished past guest Kathy Joseph's book about the history of electricity. The Hackaday Supercon badge was a 4 bit computer that you programmed with assembly. See how all the badge hacking turned out (and spot a familiar face around the 20 minute mark) The winning "add on" category hack was a "punch card" A $0.10 RISC V part was released by WCH out of China The manual is available here and the product page is here Maybe Dave will use that on the first product he picks and places? :-DMon, 21 Nov 2022 - 1h 08min
- 1142 - Open Circuits with Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay
Welcome Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay. They are Co-Authors of “Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components”.
Windell's background is in physics, he worked on some very sensitive experiments at NIST. He has been running Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (EMSL) with Lenore since 2006. Eric has worked at large software and semiconductor companies throughout the bay area. Eric and Windell started collaborating together on the "three fives kit", which allows people to build their own 555 timer out of discrete components. The first prototype was breadboard that is still in the EMSL library. The 555 Footstool They went on to collaborate on the 741 discrete op amp kit, which comes in through hole and surface mount. Eric made a fake datasheet on an ideal op amp The MOnSter6502 was a discrete version of the MOS 6502. It had additional LEDs that showed the state. Chris was thinking about it when he saw the Hackaday Supercon 2022 badge. The meetup after Bay Area Maker Faire was where it was conceived when Bunnie (past guest) asked what the largest discrete version of a part could be. The meetup was also the basis for Hackaday Superconference ("what if we could make that meetup be the entire weekend?") The creator of the 6502, Chuck Peddle, was on the show back in 2015 Open Circuits is a book they have been working on for a few years together that was recently released. Focused on components, not devices Chris just finished Kathy Joseph's book The Lightning Tamers and was amazed at the comparison of modern electronics with how things started in the field of electronics. Natural vs synthetic materials The Way Things Work (McCaulay) was another formative "coffee table" book, albeit with more Mastadons on the cover. The book Eric was trying to remember was ... alsocalled The Way Things Work Why not use CTs? Loses texture and color Flattens the image What are the slogs of writing a book? The time process Took 9 months to get inital material Took another 9 months for editing and getting things right (explaining to a wide audience) No Starch Press provided a great editor. Describing complex topics like "multiplexing" is tricky to a wide audience. "Up Goer Five" (XKCD) is an example of simple language trying to explain complex topics. Windell works on the AxiDraw on a daily basis, which is a pen plotter (and associated software) #PlotterTwitter is a hashtag on Twitter to follow digital artists TubeTime is Eric's experiments on Vintage computing. He also does long tweet threads on many of his projects. He's currently making a replica Apple I computer There is a large community; AppleFritter is a site that documents a lot of idiosyncrasies of the original computer Many early computers has async logic to cut down on required circuits. HDL solves clocking for you. Eric troubleshoots using a Saleae Logic Pro 16 Stringy floppy How to preserve data in an era of "using other peoples' computers" (Cloud). The Internet Archive maintains a lot of data. Twitter is hopefully not shutting down anytime soon, but :shrug:. Get your copy of the Open Circuits Book at any of the vendors listed on the book website. Evil Mad Scientist has signed copies! (be sure to click "yes") Find Windell online at evilmadscientist.com Find Eric on Twitter at @tubetimeus, his website tubetime.us, and (if needed) tubetime@mastadon.socialMon, 14 Nov 2022 - 1h 05min - 1141 - Vapor Phase with Saber Kaygusuz
Welcome Saber Kaygusuz of PCB Arts!
PCB Arts has been developing the EdgeKit, a modular platform for AI and vision applications baesd on the nVidia Jetson Saber and team were building robots previously, up through 2017 After they encountered software people not understanding hardware, they decided to focus on nvidia jetson They focus mostly on smaller companies Example application is an inspection tunnel in auto manufacturing Use nVidia resources to rebuild camera modules in the kernel They have 6 people on the team and do consulting services in additoin to the products they build 3 month timelines for projects They have been focusing on reinvesting in the business and investing in product development Buying parts 1.5 years ago Complexity of the product determines the percentage of the overall process the design piece is (vs manufacturing / certs / sales) The Vapor Phase One is a prosumer level Vapor Phase reflow machine Chris first encountered Vapor Phase when Jonathan Hirschman of PCB:ng was on the show. Compared to infrared ovens, Vapor Phase doesn't have to worry about scorching or shading components. Normally they are 10K+ euros for oven Safety wise, it's safe as long as the liquid is heated precisely The Vapor Phase One is available in their web store Also available on Mouser for US people (as are most Crowd Supply campaign products). There are 4 distributors in Europe. It was a hassle to get the product certified in the US They targeted a $1500 price, ended up at $5k (still half of most Vapor Phase) The liquid inside the machine is called Galden, which stays at a stable vapor temperature when heated. 1kg lasts 1 year or more. After a bit of time, you need to clean the flux out of the Galden resevoir. There is a post cleaning process based on water cooling built in the system. At 120C, the PCB will come out "dry". PCB Arts has posted on Twitter/their blog about visualizing boards in Blender. They are focused on software improvements for the Vapor Phase machine. Since PCB Arts is based in Nuremberg, they will again be at Embedded World Follow the company and Saber at PCB Arts on their site. Follow Saber on LinkedIn Note: Chris lost his voice at Hackaday Supercon, that's why we had a computer intro!Tue, 08 Nov 2022 - 1h 07min - 1140 - The Joulescope Upgrade with Matt Liberty
Welcome back, Matt Liberty, creator of the Joulescope! Matt was on The Amp Hour in early 2021 (Episode 527) talking about the previous product revision called the JS110. The new model is the JS220, which goes on sale November 2022.
Who uses the Joulescope? Changes between JS110 and JS220 Switching to pub sub PicoRV32 core (created by past guest Claire Wolf) on the ECP5 Specialized ALU on the ECP5 built with Verilog and cocotb Matt got some help on the marketing/business side from Harris Kenny, cohost of the (now paused) Hello Blink show. "Hit by a bus" test Contact Matt (below) about helping with support on the JS220 Asking customers what they are really trying to achieve On the consulting forum, we have heard part shortage stories Ordering 500 from CM Cashflow as a small business Voltmeter and ammeter are separate now on the JS220 Matt sourced a custom cable assembly and carry case from Alibaba. Testing stations at MFG For tracking manufacturing, Matt uses PartsBox (former guest Jan Rychter) Forecasting Power supply is done with a Cuk (topology) converter to generate the -15v rail Higher rails makes for more dynamic range. The JS220 has more bits on the ADC (15.1 ENOB) Enwavify Measuring through range switches Bounded error during times of switch "Anyone who's played with mosfets says 'this is super weird' " Power profiler from Nordic and similar chip company offerings will do some but not all measurements. ISO17025 Why would you need 100 MHz of bandwidth? Only if you're able to probe directly on silicon 300 kHz on the Joulescope for boards because that's likely what your board can handle with parasitics on the PCB C API with Python bindings Moving towards Simultaneous Device Support, bringing it to the UI Matt Venn MPW shuttle Evaluation kit with RP2040 Thonny is a simple IDE for Python REPL Using PIO onboard with the generation code in the examples for the RP2040 Reserve your JS220 today on Joulescope.com Follow Matt on Twitter: @mliberty1 For support, visit the Joulescope Forum Listen to Matt talk about working with contractors on Hello Blink episode 23 Check out Joulescope projects on GitHub New Joulescope driver JLS (file format) Pyjoulescope (JS110 & new compatibility layer) Joulescope UI Joulescope examplesMon, 31 Oct 2022 - 1h 15min - 1139 - Professional Scooter ChargerPot vs trimmer Charging scooters Dave is getting a heat pump based water heater and will make a video about it soon Intel is taking a bunch of money for the US gov't but also...laying off people Chip companies losing tribal knowledge when they outsource Dave asked on his forum and on a recent video about whether an $800 scope (MSO5000) Unlock the oscilloscope Best side cutters video Storing cables in the lab A (Google) list of electronics conferences in Australia Check out the badge for the upcoming Hackaday Supercon Chris will be giving a couple of talks in the next few weeks All Things Open in Raleigh on November 1st There will also be an open Demo Night from 5 - 8 pm hosted by RIoT Hackaday Supercon on November 6thMon, 24 Oct 2022 - 1h 09min
- 1138 - The Lightning Tamers with Kathy Joseph
Kathy Joseph from the Kathy Loves Physics Youtube channel joins Dave to talk about the history of electricity and her new book The Lightning Tamers.
Website: https://bit.ly/GoKathyLovesPhysics Go Fund Me (for Audio book): https://bit.ly/DonateforAudiobook Patreon: https://bit.ly/KathyLovesPhysicsPatreon
Mon, 17 Oct 2022 - 1h 42min - 1137 - Robo Fry GuyThe Hyper Encabulator (natural successor to the Turbo Encabulator and later the Electro Turbo Encabulator that Dave was part of) DALL-E is the AI art engine that made our artwork this week. The cool thing you missed at the Tesla AI day (eevblog) Laura from Oxide Computer was on the show talking about servers The "Open Compute Project" is the FB project Chris was thinking of. Robotic Ice Cream Fail Fast food robots are being promoted in the press currently. But that's nothing new! NYtimes has a history of "robots doing jobs" at fast food places. Jack of All Trades Chris is working on what he calls a "Lego" prototype, basically PCBs to replace just point to point wiring between other breakout boards. He has been working on an IoT Trashcan Monitor Reference Design and also wrote about the process (and made a video about it) The NXP RT1062 is on the Teensy 4 and is a beast of a part...600 MHz microcontroller Chris is also looking at getting a milling machine again Past guest John Saunders got started with a milling machine in his NYC apartment (hence NYC CNC) Dave made a video about how to shop for enclosures...and forgot he made it because of Chris! Dave is looking for an enclosure with an angled screen. Shopping for boxes is the only activity we'd consider in the metaverse Chris has been working on remote hardware training, including build systems for firmware. Dave has been doing low power auditing in the home, looking for power leaks. X vs Y cap Romex is a commercial term for power cables in the wall in the US The Smart Grid episode with Paul Zawada is a good reference for people learning about power Dave made a recent video about the financial viability of battery backup in the home. Vampire power Federal Pacific Panels Blow up! Chris had one in the house he bought in 2009 (it was replaced) Video of the measurementMon, 10 Oct 2022 - 1h 18min
- 1136 - An Interview with Ray Ozzie (Blues Wireless)
Welcome Ray Ozzie, founder and CEO of Blues Wireless!
Chris had a Notecard / Notecarrier in front of him from a training he attended. Blues describes the Notecard as a "data pump". Ray first encountered the cellular IoT space with the Safecast project, which started in March 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Former guests Akiba and Bunnie also worked on the Safecast project. The earliest versions of monitoring were Geiger + GPS + cellular. Sometimes they collected data onto SD cards when cellular wasn't available. When the towers were available, it was 3G. Early prototyping was with Adafruit Fona 3G modules and Voltaic panels. Later prototypes included LoRa networks. There were software solutions involved using Balena.io (formerly Resin.io) Solarcast boxes PSM (power save mode) PTCRB certification Craig Mundie Ray had formerly worked at Microsoft, where he took over as Chief Software Architect when Bill Gates stepped down to work on his foundation. Ray also worked at places like Data General Software Arts Iris Associates Groove Networks (the acquisition of which brought Ray to Microsoft) Ray's early days were programming on TRS80s and using Intel 8080s to help Physics grad students do their experiements. Ray has a range of huge software projects he's worked on Visicalc Lotus123 Lotus Symphony Lotus Notes Competition in the 90s Chris is amazed at hearing about how early software was built, which reminded him of the Xerox Parc book discussed on the show previously. Ray referenced this "org chart for Microsoft" with guns pointing at one another. (found here) 300 to 2400 bps upgrades was a big deal! Ray on working on tech in the 'good old days': "You knew where it was going but it took so much longer to get there" The Blues Notecard is built on top of the STM32L4R5, which has 640K RAM, and 2 MB Flash. It felt familiar to Ray because of his early programming days on similarly constrained computers. Drawing people into orbit to increase impact Ray is a Computer History Museum fellow as of 2021. Tributes from Bill Gates and Mark Cuban. Ray will be helping to induct Don Bitzer for his work on PLATO. Storage Tube Blues Wireless was Ray's solution to the problems of cellular IoT Developing connectivity into products PIC32 talking to cellular Ray gives an example of how an engineer might retrofit an older product with a Blues Notecard Dev.blues.io is the hub for people building with Blues. It has links to the Notehub, which is how you interact with your data coming back to Blues. Uri / Wokwi episode "we dont' provide the glass" A cellular Notecard is $50 for hardware, 10 years of cellular data (500 MB), plus consumption credits on the Blues Wireless Notehub. Most people sending back data won't go over limits unless they're trying to send a lot of data. Powered applications can save on session overhead by staying connected. Also applications can queue "notes" (data packets) and then send all of them at once to cut down on the need for multiple sessions to the cell tower. The data will synchronize to Notefiles (database). Chris asked for Ray's predictions for 5-10 years out, since Ray has been very successful in the many parts of his career. Ray wants to get 10s of billions devices and thinks this will enable a lot of new things. Find Ray online! @rozzie on twitter Ray's LinkedIn Check out the main site at blues.io and check out the developer portal at dev.blues.io. Ray recommended picking up a kit to get started.Mon, 26 Sep 2022 - 1h 16min - 1135 - Rigorous engineering stuff may be out the windowWe recorded on Thursday Afternoon / Friday Morning, the Queen of England had just passed away. Dave explained what it might mean in Australia. QWIIC and STEMMA TTL clock update Ecoflow battery video JST connectors Fully Charged Show 85% of battery packs for US cars will need to be source from US materials Past guests Matt Venn and Uri Shaked are working on TinyTapeout. Matt made an intro video. 3D printing silicon layout shapes Tektronix New Employee Orientation This new book from Windell Oskay and Eric Schlaepfer looks amazing! Why The World Relies On ASML For Machines That Print Chips WHY does electricity travel at the speed of light? MAX77958 - Standalone USB Type-C and USB Power Delivery Controller Thanks to Cottonbro for the window imageSun, 11 Sep 2022 - 1h 05min
- 1134 - Rebuilding Projects with Dave YoungChris's good friend Dave Young joins the show again. He was first on episode 305 and then again on the initial "Consultant Impedance Matching" episode (409) The consultant episode is where the idea of the Consulting Forum was born. Interested in joining? Apply here. Dave has been spending many of his working hours changing out parts (Bubblegum Tapshoes) Dave mentioned it feels like a "cascade failure". In the analog space, measuring things is getting easier because of integration, but there are fewer vendors overall. Dave made the switch from EAGLE to Altium and likes the capabilities of Altium365. Phillip / Alvaro / Memfault webinar Chris is skeptical about the "ever present need" of moving mechanical stuff on layouts Handling change management as a consultant Coaching consultants Chris learned the importance of personal finance and financial stability before consulting from Dave. Cornell summer accelerator Dave is the founder and runner of Blue Stamp Engineering, which helps high school kids learn by building. It has been running for 11 years. Common denominator of projects AI projects are popular, but they tell the students, "You don't want to spend your summer cleaning data" Learning as a consultant Showing a track record The challenges of remote vs in-person education The students have a limit of 20 jumper wires for projects if being debugged over video. Ben Eater projects need not apply! Independent study / tutoring Find Dave online youngcircuitdesigns.com bluestampengineering.com
cricket
Sun, 28 Aug 2022 - 1h 15min - 1133 - The Custodial ArtsChris and Dave reflect on the joys of having children, despite illness Dave's latest Scope winner is a young person developing PCBs for the Framework laptop Dave recently posted a debugging video with Sagan What's your "daily driver" scope? Chris - Analog Discovery 2 (portable, very low needs) Dave - National Instrument virtual bench (flexible), but has many many more options. Chris's boards were featured on the adafruit blog for using the Feather standard. These were the demos he worked on for Golioth. Jared Wolff makes one of the nRF9160 feather boards, he has been on the show. Chris likes that the Actinius Icarus has a higher voltage input pin to power from the thing you're plugging into (instead of only from the USB cable) Adafruit Feather specification Nordic Semiconductor recently announced their new Wi-Fi product, the nRF7002 The nRF9160 has a GPS modem, but it's time sliced with cellular. Low tech is more Dave's speed Dave prefers working with a decade counter like the CD4026 for clock projects Dave showcased his clock build from his teenage years Carl the Janitor Submitted by community member unmanaged615, the TPIC6595 is a shift register that can deliver 250 mA per pin. Not recognized at first, but Dave designed a variant into his Nixie tube design series Matt Keeter from Oxide Computer Company (same place that past guest Laura Abbott works) showed how they debugged UDP packets direct from an QSGMII pair. Will an 8 bit computer run Doom? Logic probe Logic pulserSun, 21 Aug 2022 - 1h 07min
- 1132 - An Interview with Uri Shaked (Wokwi.com)
Welcome Uri Shaked of Wokwi.com!
Wokwi is an online microcontroller simulator built to make it easy to test different code types / platforms like Arduino, MicroPython, Rust, C, and more! Hardware targets: ESP32 (and -C3, -S2) AVR RP2040 It was initially built to scratch own itch and get rid of lots of hardware on his desk. It all started as an Arduino simulator. Chris has had bad simulation experiences in early 2000s (felt so fake) Uri has talked about the simulator on Embedded.fm as well The Wokwi simulator is built on mutliple layers Schematic layer creates a netlist All the code get compiled to a binary The binaries get loaded into microcontroller core simulators (depending on the processor/instruction set) All things on github open source Simulating an LED is especially hard because of PWM and user screen refresh rates An often asked for feature is a built in debugger. Uri has been working on getting LLDB working. gdb compiled as x86 binary and then simulating the linux distribution Fast LED Library and the code required to work with its timing life of a packet: comple source code to hex file starts AVR simulator ESP32 connection to the internet The ESP32 uses the Xtensa instruction set (though the -C3 is a RISC V part) Espressif didn't publish the instruction set manual Reverse engienering the wifi driver was tough and involved Ghidra, an open source reverse engineering tool. There is also an xtensa plugin in Ghidra and Uri was using gdb on the physical chip as well for comparison. Uri gave a talk about this at 2021 Hackaday Remoticon Uri published the Gateway code (in Go) on Githubwokwi-gw You can vote on what's next on the roadmap by joining the Wokwi Club Cortex-M4 parts are coming soon Extending Wokwi - how to create your own chips Writing code for the external parts like an i2c keypad driver What is WebAssembly? How much is running in the browser vs talking back to the cloud? Micropython projects have very little interactions with the servers Blog post about Kasm Caching at the project / compiler level pic simulab How accurate should a simulator be? Hardware in the loop testing Show with Pete from Blue Clover Show with Akbar from Lager Data For the Skull, Uri recorded signals with Saleae, added that as a simulated output Saleae episode Join the Wokwi.com Club! Ask questions on the Wokwi Discord More than anything, Uri is trying to gather feedback, so please try it out and let him know what you think!Mon, 15 Aug 2022 - 1h 22min - 1131 - Best way to find a leakDave has been reverse engineering 10 pin connector from the ultrasonic gas detector he got in a recent mailbag Intrinsically safe Executive Decision Dave is deciding between discrete logic vs micro Chris recommends the RP2040 and utilizing the PIO (kind of doing both) Die shots of the RP2040 W 74HC164 datasheet "Richer than Bill Gates' Back to school - Triple Lindy Chris is currently reading Accelerando Dutch town installs secondary traffic lights on the ground for texters Tour from temporary labor workers inside of the Digikey fulfillment center LCSC "wireless antistatic wristbands" JayCar warehouse video Stacey Higgenbotham reported on how Helium isn't making much money. Are any of you being targeted to utilizing the connectivity from the Helium network? Nordic Semiconductor is recruiting a RISC-V designer. Interesting what this implies about other chip companies hiring RISC-V designers. Espressif's new chip line are mostly RISC-V. We have been talking about RISC-V for a few years now, but the project started in 2010. Google and Skywater announced they're moving down to a 90 nm node. Chris recently found out Skywater is a former Cypress Semi fab. Semtech (owners of the LoRa IP and makers of chips) are buying Sierra Wireless (a cellular module maker). Uh...why? Google starts testing AR glasses Meta lost 2.8B on the metaverse last quarter... Thanks to Kate Ter Haar for the photo of the matchesMon, 08 Aug 2022 - 1h 06min
- 1130 - An Interview with Mike Engelhardt (Re-broadcast)
For the original show notes, check out the original page: https://theamphour.com/196-an-interview-with-mike-engelhardt-spice-simulator-synteresis/
Mike Engelhardt is the creatore of LTSpice. Mike is no longer at Linear Technology, and Linear Technology is no longer a company (now part of Analog Devices), but the simulator is still awesome!
To listen to all episodes in your podcast listener back to episode one, use the LibSyn feed (our hosting platform): https://theamphour.libsyn.com/
Sun, 31 Jul 2022 - 1h 32min - 1129 - Wow, Dave REALLY likes Top GunDave received his Tilt5 We had Jeri on the show 5 (!) years ago when CastAR had folded Troubleshooting Fewer kickstarters Chris wrote about using Wireshark to troubleshoot Thread networks Electrical Engineers on the brink of extinction? The conversation partially became about SW vs HW salaries, but ultimately people projected whatever they wanted onto the headline. Naomi (@RealSexyCyborg) mentioned that EEs are harder to find in Shenzhen CHIPS act still not passed in US Sam Zeloof says you can buy everything you need to make 5 nm transistors on Alibaba (no word on lithography) Spectrum article about RISC V Matt Venn (Zero to ASIC) interviews people at the Free Silicon ConferenceMon, 25 Jul 2022 - 1h 02min
- 1128 - Capacitor Schoopage with Ron Demcko from AVX
AVX Fellow and 40 year capacitor industry legend Ron Demcko joins Dave to discuss film capacitor failures and capacitor technology. This episode is best viewed in video format on the Amp Hour Youtube channel, as Ron and Dave discuss slides and photos in this video discussion for an EEVblog video on why a film capacitor failed. But we are sure you'll still find the audio podcast version very enjoyable and educational.
Mon, 18 Jul 2022 - 1h 25min - 1127 - Trade Show or Conference?Chris just got back from Embedded World in Nuremberg where he was showcasing stuff for his company Golioth. Embedded World is happening again in March 2023. Electronica is another German trade show happening in November in Munich (above image is from 2014 Electronica) Are there any good remaining US based trade shows? Or outside the US? Howard Johnson episode DaveCon Browsing at trade shows is one of hte main benefits Dave's son is taking an online cosmology course "AI layout" company raises $25M Freight DHL RS-449 has um...a lot of pins VT100 "Dumb terminal" EIA IEEE1394 (which was branded FireWire for Apple's implementation) Chris has been reading Tony Fadell's book Build New Raspberry Pi Pico W is $6 and has an RP2040 and WiFi Dave is interested in the PIO. The Embedded RPi team talked about PIO on the show. The net effect of shortages Inside Curious Marc's lab (Daniel from Keysight hosts tour) Former guest Zach Barth has decided to shut down Zachtronics (maker of ShenzhenIO) to pursue other projects. Turing TumbleMon, 11 Jul 2022 - 1h 06min
- 1126 - AI aren't sentient yet...right?
A sentient AI would definitely take better show notes
Altium rap Chris has been reading "Iron Emipres", which is a book about building out train infrastructure. Mark Rober has a new kit service and workshop. Chris thinks this was designed by an AI because of how it appeals to our demographic. It's amazing how YouTube will influence future engineers. Dave grew up with The Curiosity Show. Chris grew up withBill Nye the Science Guy. Chris has been prototyping with laser cutting using Ponoko Chris got to tour the Computer History Museum while at the Zephyr Developer Summit (recap article). Palm Pilot HP 200LX Psion Series 5 Intel has their own museum Google AI research claims the AI is sentient War Games Cruise now has a pass for operating in SF at restricted times. 9 euro NY has passed Right to Repair Apple might be forced to adopt USB C EEVblab Right To Repair ITAR Russia and Belarus can't buy parts over 25 MHz Images generated from here, using the prompt "A computer screaming at a microphone": https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini Audio intro generated here: https://resemble.aiMon, 20 Jun 2022 - 1h 08min - 1125 - Publicly Traded Hobby with Ben Jordan
The Altium stories flow as Ben Jordan discusses working at Altium with Dave!
Ben was a long time Altium employee and PCB and product specialist and still makes Altium tutorial videos on Youtube. He has also worked for Autodesk on Fusion 360. Ben now has his own consulting company Jordan DSP and co-hosts a regular live Youtube show with Bil Herd
Follow him on Twitter
Tue, 14 Jun 2022 - 1h 08min - 1124 - Product Design with Simone Giertz
Welcome back, Simone Giertz!
Simone returns to The Amp Hour to discuss her new venture selling products (Yetch.store) that she has been designing. Simone was last on the show in 2017 on episode 331. She has been doing more voice overs so that she can focus on the work while recording. Chris mentioned past guest James Bruton recording as he goes along. Truckla She's interested in random everyday problems and solving them Course showing how she designed a fruitbowl Moved to LA Scissor lamp - will likely become a product for sale (As Seen On YouTube) Taking things to production The Everyday Calendar is a capacitive touch calendar that mounts to your wall and allows you to track a habit throughout the year. The Calendar was on sale in the MoMA store! Design For Manufacturing meant reducing costs, so she didn't want to do pushbuttons (especially because there would be so many) Kickstarter The product design firm has 1.5 employees, but soon will be 2 people. Setting prices Puzzle table Screwdriver ring Margin invites counterfeit Scraps chair Future flatpack engineering for furniture sales? Having to think about new challenges for selling things: certification in different markets, sales tax, etc Collaborate moving stuff into engineering High cost items like the Vesta Board "make your own gnome"Tue, 07 Jun 2022 - 1h 05min - 1123 - Olive-a The WorldDave helped someone on Twitter who was looking to identify a part. Chip of the Week: Honeywell SM351LT Please make a dumb car Also discussed back in 2011 on The Amp Hour! Shahriar from TSP reviews a 60 GHz chipset :-o New test equipment that the EEVblog forum uncovered EV Conversion after 10 years (2019) Bob Simpson was on episode 112 of The Amp Hour (Tek engineer who converted a BMW) Chris is struggling to get back into FreeCAD after being away for a couple weeks / months. YouTuber talking about a Hydrogen breakthrough for cars. Are Construction EVs a thing? Catepillar announced mining trucks that are EV Pat Gelsinger’s Plan To Fix Intel SMB: Small Businss or Super Massive Blackhole?Mon, 30 May 2022 - 1h 04min
- 1122 - Finding Hardware Flaws with Laura Abbott
Welcome Laura Abbott of Oxide Computer!
Laura will be giving a talk at the upcomingHardwear.io conference in Santa Clara about the (second!) vulnerability she found in the LPC55S69 Oxide servers are built to be secure from the ground up. Root of trust The vulnerability Laura found was a buffer overflow in the firmware update mechanism of the LPC55S69. TPM Cortex M33 Trust Zone M Service Processor - baseband management controller What does a server board look like? Power management Their customer Root of Trust OS is called Hubris Open compute project Many of the projects at Oxide are programmed in Rust (programming language) Memory unsafe stuff How do you know rust will run on a part? You can see if there is a "crate" available for the part (Rust installer/package manager) Writing updates for processors How often does firmware get update on servers? Host processor talks to management network onboard, it delivers firmware images to the lower layers. What is a Root of Trust task that it might do on a daily basis? Laura explained some of the challenges of working remote on hardware Laura moved from software into security/hardware. Perviously she had been doing kernel development. She is still a Technical Advisory Board Member at the Linux Foundation Getting started with kernel Follow Laura on Twitter at @openlabbottMon, 23 May 2022 - 57min - 1121 - Mute Button DisciplineChris and Dave discussed the "beta" function for MOSFETs on Falstad circuit simulator We found some references online to "beta" (like this archive from McGill University) but it doesn't seem to be a normal characteristic? Maybe an approximation term? Dave and other EE YouTubers were mentioned in Derek's 2nd video about the light bulb experiment and energy flowing in fields (Veritasium). Dave mentioned Alpha Phoenix as doing the simulations on this, but Chris later looked up it was theBen Watson video that Chris was referencing during the recording. Rick Hartley Lumped element model, where would we be without you? Bit rot Chris has been digging into Segger Ozone and SystemView, the latter first brought up on the show with Brian Amos Dave bought a bunch of gear from an optometry business at auction. Bubblegum tapshoes Dave heard about this STM32F3 part with a super fast timer internal...yep, still can't get it. Open Source HW/SW Microinverter Chris asks Dave if he would put something like that on his house. Paul Zawada episode Enphase Microinvterter Zappi charger Leigh Brady Episode Chris will be doing a webinar this week about the things you don't know about IoT systems.Mon, 16 May 2022 - 1h 05min
- 1120 - Siloed Engineering with Leigh Brady
Welcome, Leigh Brady!
Leigh got his start working in different companies in the US as young engineer from the UK as part of the Mutual Defense Agreement Throughout the episode we explored different themes Specialist vs Generalist US vs UK hiring Big vs small companies Defense vs Industrial companies UK Apprenticeship V curve System engineering Deriving requirements What is the atomic unit of a system engineer? F35/JSF Lockheed IRAD - Internal Research and Development Sandia National Labs FPGAs in defense / space "It's always cosmic rays" Single Event Upsets "Triple modular redundancy" is so commonplace in designs there are now buttons in CAD to generate the logic to triplicate a circuit and have the 3 units "vote" Bleeding edge FPGA tools vs open toolchain Chris recalls Xilnx ISE with F16 on the CDs Long term supply contracts Jumping the line with defense companies in the US - "DPAS - defense priorities and allocation system" Big vs small Leigh is now back in a big company When should an engineer target a big vs a small company in their career? Training / Budgets / Sampling are better at big companies. Mentorship Phillip Salmany (Phil's Lab) talked about the difficulties finding mentors as a young engineer out on his own. UK Chartered Engineer PE / EIT vs Chartered Leigh worked on nuclear weapons at a past company in the UK It is, unsurprisingly, a heavily regulated industry. IEC61508 Part of the job is verifying non-proliferation among other countries Nuclear deterrant Chris referenced a Ukraine treaty where they gave up their nuclear weapons and ambitions, co-signed by the US, UK, and ... Russia. This was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Russia control room story about not firing when they detected launches from the US. It's widely believed that Stanislov Petrov prevented a Nuclear war There are never active nuclear tests anymore (good), so the majority of work revolves around testing and modeling Is there a "better moustrap"? What does it look like when new requirements come down from the gov't? Did Leigh wear a white lab coat? We were introduced by former guest Carmen Parisi, who worked with Leigh at Wasatch Photonics Optics have tight timing requirements, especially around the image sensor. Leigh is now working on medical devices at Phillips. Medical isn't as slow as Chris thought, nor is FDA planning as dreadful as Chris thought. "Trust but verify" on part specs Mapping past experiences into new job Chris mentioned the discussions with Charles Aylward about not having any control mechanisms or backup as a consultant. Leigh said there are certain scenarios where a solo consultant won't be a good fit and that "Two people working in a team are worth three" You can reach Leigh on LinkedIn and elsewhere on the web as Engineer LeighMon, 09 May 2022 - 1h 08min - 1119 - Biblical Broker BucksDave declares the chip shortage is over! The scopes from a contest 1 year ago have shipped. Adafruit video asking Microchip for parts. Adafruit helped popularize the SAMD21 and SAMD51, which are tough to get ahold of https://twitter.com/factory_400/status/1519398997303054337 Dave finally tried taking his EV to 100% charge "blowing the carbon out" American pickers On our subreddit, someone was asking about PCB fabs (and assembly) An apocryful story about firms buying finished goods and destroying to get parts out of them (the DailyMail is a rag) Josh from Macchina (Earl was on The Amp Hour on episode 388) had emailed Chris about XScomponents. There are some listings on there, but don't get your hopes up! Diamond district effect Dave is a really big fan of Bluey Belkin is apparently trying out (or giving credence to wireless charginge). Dave was unconvinced (back in 2018) Open vs closed cavity Chris presented to the Thread Group and talked through some of the things he understands about it on the show. This video was pretty helpful. Chris's wrestling name would be "The BOM Dropper"...apparently. Dave got some PCB art in the mailbag. He made a followup video about the "5 layers" of PCB artwork. https://twitter.com/eevblog/status/1519527884540776448 Stippling is a technique of adding grayscale to two tone printing. Chris used this on the art for this episode. Using the ESP32-S2 as a USB to UART chip Eric Migicovsky wrote about Why Pebble Failed We had CTO of Pebble (Andrew Witte) on the show back on episode 175Mon, 02 May 2022 - 1h 09min
- 1118 - Fran Blanche Version 3
Fran Blanche and Dave discuss publishing, newspapers, Frantone, manufacturing, the kit business, ebay, and pontificate what we would be doing if the Internet didn’t exist.
The Frantone pedal as used by The Hives’ Nicholaus Arson and Vigilante Carlstroem VIDEO
How VHS tapes are manufactured VIDEO
NOTE: This episode is also available as VIDEO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuFqB9ZeqKI
Mon, 18 Apr 2022 - 1h 13min - 1117 - Return of the Trade Show JediDave has been posting videos from his time at Electronex 2022 Chris will be attending and presenting at Zephyr Developer Summit in June. Chris will also be at Embedded World in late June Walkthrough video from Dave at Electronex 2022 There was a larger focus on manufacturing The Art of Custom Test Jigs Force of pogo pins Chris asked about best trade show demos people had seen. We liked past guest Mark Garrison's response: https://twitter.com/Marcus10110/status/1507522287192338440 Trade show teardown Antmicro released a Snapdragon 845 base board design in KiCad The logistics of corn farming Smarter Every Day did a video on grain silos Australia warns of critical shortage of engineers ABC engineer book Mercedes is backing their self driving software (legally) Chris has been working with Thread at workMon, 11 Apr 2022 - 58min
Mostrar más episodios
5Podcasts similares a The Amp Hour
El Partidazo de COPE COPE- Herrera en COPE COPE
- La Linterna COPE
- Es la Mañana de Federico esRadio
- La noche de Cuesta esRadio
- Hondelatte Raconte Europe 1
- Au Coeur du Crime Europe1
- Affaires sensibles France Inter
- LEGEND Guillaume Pley
- El colegio invisible OndaCero
- La Rosa de los Vientos OndaCero
- Les grands dossiers de l'Histoire par Franck Ferrand Radio Classique
- Espacio en blanco Radio Nacional
- Enquêtes criminelles RTL
- Entrez dans l'Histoire RTL
- Le grand récit RTL
- Les Grosses Têtes RTL
- L'Heure Du Crime RTL
- Parlons-nous RTL
- El Larguero SER Podcast
- SER Historia SER Podcast
- Todo Concostrina SER Podcast
- Un Libro Una Hora SER Podcast
- HISTORIAS DE LA HISTORIA VIVA RADIO
