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    Natural Sciences

    The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

    A weekly podcast about the electronics industry. Occasional guests. Lots of laughs.

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    Copyright: Copyright © The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast 2020

    • Apple Podcasts
    • Google Play
    • Spotify
    Latest Episodes:
    #683 – Troubleshooting is the skill Nov 20, 2024

    • AI tools for helping with coding (but NOT layout, amirite)
    • Troubleshooting as a skillset
    • Stick meme
    • Dave got an updated electrical box
    • Home assistant
    • Keith Burzinski episode (ESPhome)
    • Toothbrush show
    • Andreas Spiess discussing Bluetooth proxy
    • Ian Scott Johnson DIY home automation
    • Electrarc240 reviews every element of a linear power supply
    • India power cables
    • Buried cables
    • Spotify is bricking the Car Thing but others are trying to save it
    • “injurnear”
    • Chris recently developed and coded up a cellular connected relay board for a Smart Locker application
    #682 – Your Mind Is The Tool Nov 06, 2024

    • Chris has been troubleshooting a PCB with a dead short on inner layers (put in by board house by mistake)
    • Don’t Touch My Gerbers shirt
    • “Is there an AI tool that will fix this for me?” … No
    • Chris dumped a bunch of current in the board and looked at it with this thermal camera
    • 6.5 digit DMM to track down shorts
    • Etching problems in the old days
    • 100% etest
    • Adding rails to PCBs for production
    • Reddit discussion thread: why not work on a product? That is, Dave, the wise one.
    • Videos
    • Live stream issues
    • Post from Twitter: Is 2 layers all you really need? This person thinks so, or is trying to convince themselves as much.
    • Armchair quarterbacking
    • Ian Johnston replacing the display on an 8.5 digit DMM
    • Jack Ganssle has posted his final newsletter (The Embedded Muse)…happy retirement! Jack has been on the show twice:
      • Episode 54 (!)
      • Episode 489
    • Ward Christensen, Inventor of BBS and XModem, (and former listener of the show!) has passed away
    • Dave is interviewing Lee Felstenstein for our next episode
    #681 – Compact High Speed Design with Lukas Henkel Oct 31, 2024

    Welcome Lukas Henkel of OV Tech GmbH, a product design firm based in Nuremburg Germany!

    • Miniturization and the limits of miniturization
    • Price is a constraint
    • Using standard PCB tech (off the shelf)
    • Open source SIP
    • Steps
      • Conventional pcbs / components
      • Silicon inductors embedded in boards
      • Bonded Bare dies / stacked
    • Need volume to make it work
    • Requirements to fit into ______
    • iMX8 ULP – 0.4mm CSP
    • SIP Footprint
    • Module abstraction layer talk
    • Framework laptop
    • Software support / BSP
    • SIP will be different than PiMX8
    • Crowdsupply campaign launching 2-3 weeks and delivery in Dec/Jan
    • OpenSource laptop
    • CM4 vs PiMX8
    • SPI Flash with backup partition
    • Secure element SE050
    • Footprint for coral tpu and Halo 8
    • Trying to solve the problem of vision use cases
    • Marketing using layout / products but also making money on it
    • Katerina show
    • Visualizing simulations
    • Developing intuition
    • OpenEMS
    • Usability is based on python scripting
    • Using Blender for heat map
    • BVTKNodes uses .vtk file output
    • Multiphysics solvers
    • Things that drive Lukas
    • For HDI, Thinking in 3D / 2.5D and being able to visualize
    • Layers ranging from 4 to 18
    • Any layer design for SIP
    • Wurth electroncis for high density “any layer stackup”
    • Article series on altium for the open laptop
    • Follow Lukas on LinkedIn

    Lukas also was a co-founder of PCB Arts. We had his cofounder Saber on the show in the past.

    #680 – Catching Rockets with Musk Sticks Oct 21, 2024

    • Starship 5 landed on chopsticks! (you know, in case you have been offline for 2 weeks)
    • Dave’s EV had a stuck cable
    • Portable charger is surprisingly good
    • CCS Charging standard
    • Fast charge 36/50 kW
    • MKBHD Chevy Silverado review
    • JLC is now offering silkscreen QR codes to have individually marked boards

      That’s the board that Chris has been designing on a livestream each week
    • 1 wire UID (pioneered by Dallas, then Maxim, now Analog…le sigh)
    • Dave is selling a new Bryman multimeter, the BM2257 (teardown photos)
    • Chris just returned from Embedded World North America, doing a demo at the Joulescope booth
    • Chris also gave a talk at the Zephyr meetup which will be released in a few weeks
    • Hackaday article about their comment section and project/article feedback
    • References
    • Musk Sticks
    • NC floods might impact the supply chain due to Spruce Pine NC being a source for quartz. We didn’t read this article, but it was a better explainer than we had at the time.
    • Meshtastic objects to the proposed FCC changes
    #679 – Satellite Design Engineering with Dan Esparon Oct 11, 2024

    Dan Esparon from Inovor Technologies in South Australia joins Dave to discuss all about the engineering of designing and launching satellites!

    Dan works for Inovor Technologies, an Australian company that designs and builds satellites entirely in-house!

    Recently they designed and launched the aussie Kanyini satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
    https://www.inovor.com.au/missions/

    They design and build their own Flight computers, ADCS systems, UHF radios, Battery modules and Solar Arrays in Australia.

    #678 – All About Antennas with Katerina Galitskaya Oct 01, 2024

    Welcome Katerina Galitskaya!

    • Chris started following Katerina’s antenna posts on LinkedIn
    • Monopole vs dipole
    • Lower frequences are harder bc longer wavelength
    • PCB size half of frequency
    • Place antenta on the shorter side
    • How to ruin your PCB
    • When to go to a antenna engineer?
    • Where will the device be?
    • Antenna environment
    • Start from vacuum, start adding elements
    • Dummies in the lab. The one in the episode photo is a dummy head filled with liquid (?!)
    • SAR – Specific Absorption rate
    • Simulation vs lab work (dimensions)
    • Anechoic chamber
    • When to go with custom antenna?
    • Buying off the shelf antenna?
    • New Airpods with fancy 3D antenna
    • Ben’s video about laser sintered antennas
    • MIMO / Beamforming
    • the failed promises of 5G
    • When to simulate
    • Some open source programs out there (“EMSee”?)
    • Simulating vs visualizing
    • Most of the time it’s not about vizualizing fields
    • What is the iteration elements of the antenna?
    • Satellite antenna design
    • Good to go external
    • Thinking about the dielectric const of case
    • Follow Katerina on LinkedIn!
    #677 – Watt Is The Deal Sep 23, 2024

    • Spam 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
    • Meshmap
    #676 – Moving House (And Lab) Sep 03, 2024

    • 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 so
    #675 – Changing Course with Shawn Hymel Aug 09, 2024

    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.com
    #674 – Turtles as a Service Jul 25, 2024

    • Murphy
    • 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 again
    #673 – Lifelong Learning with Bitluni Jul 15, 2024

    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
      • twitch
    #672 – Silicon Revolution with Matt Venn Jun 30, 2024

    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 stickers
    #671 – NDA Sideshow Jun 20, 2024

    • Sideshow 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 site
    #670 – Engineering Careers with Circuit Break & James Lewis Jun 14, 2024

    Check out the Circuit Break Podcast for show notes

    • Parker Dillman
    • Stephen Kraig
    • James Lewis
    #669 – Freelance PCB Design with Petr Dvorak Jun 07, 2024

    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
    • 8×32 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 LinkedIn
    #668 – 50.0000 Ohms May 31, 2024

    • Mistakes 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 money
    #667 – Long Distance with CNLohr-a May 23, 2024

    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
      • Github
    #666 – Good Energy Citizen May 08, 2024

    • Sickness
    • 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 fab
    #665 – Really long needle nose pliers Apr 25, 2024

    • Analog 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
    • ZMK
    #664 – Simulating doors falling off Apr 04, 2024

    • Chris 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 factor
    #663 – Motors on PCBs with Carl Bugeja Mar 26, 2024

    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!
    #662 – The non-Stinky Car Mar 20, 2024

    • Chris 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 hack
    #661 – Blogging Electronics with Pallav Aggarwal Mar 11, 2024

    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 email
    #660 – My Toothbrush Is Broadcasting Mar 05, 2024

    • Promise 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
    • Altera
    #659 – Altium…Acquired! Feb 20, 2024

    • 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?)
    #658 – Uncle Al’s Eating Garbage Again Feb 13, 2024

    • AI 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!
    #657 – Automating the Home with Keith Burzinski Feb 05, 2024

    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
      • Homeassistant
    #656 – Pneumatic Tubes, Straight To The Home Jan 22, 2024

    • Dave 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 EEVblog2
    #655 – The Twelfth Day of Keyzermas Jan 09, 2024

    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.
    #654 – Pseudo Code…Pseudo Good Dec 19, 2023

    • CES 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 Wu
    #653 – Benjamin Cabé Nose Zephyr Dec 11, 2023

    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 discord to 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!
    #652 – For a couple weeks there… Nov 28, 2023

    • 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 plant
    #651 – Learning Computing with Jeff Geerling Nov 21, 2023

    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 V
    #650 – Accessible ASICs with Andreas Olofsson Nov 13, 2023

    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 making
    #649 – History of the Cathode Ray Tube with Kathy Joseph Nov 05, 2023

    • Kathy 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/
    #648 – The RP1 and beyond with the Raspberry Pi Hardware team Oct 23, 2023

    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” yet
    #647 – Dave hanging with Fran Blanche Oct 10, 2023

    Dave hangs out with Fran Blanche for her 4th appearance on the show. Space, Youtubing, tube testing, storage nightmares, and oopsies.

    #646 – Fan Fanboys Sep 11, 2023

    • Chris 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 chips
    #645 – Moving Down The Stack with Scott Williams Sep 05, 2023

    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!
    #644 – Garbage Ninjas Aug 28, 2023

    • Chris 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!
    #643 – Calibration & Repair with Ian Johnston Aug 22, 2023

    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/

    #642 – Sad Violins for Superconductors Aug 13, 2023

    • Chris 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 QSPICE
    #641 – Power Transmission with Toby Robb Jul 31, 2023

    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

    #640 – Software Defined Power Supplies with Werner Johansson Jul 25, 2023

    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 page
    #639 – Daaaamn We’re Duuuummmb Jul 17, 2023

    • Dave 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 equations
    #638 – Building AR Headsets with Aedan Cullen Jul 09, 2023

    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
      • Twitter
    #637 – CH32V003…fun! with CNLohr Jun 25, 2023

    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 YouTube
    #636 – Discovering Cursed Connectors Jun 19, 2023

    • Chris 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.
    #635 – Low Power Connected Devices with Andrea Longobardi Jun 05, 2023

    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 company
    #634 – The CAN bus can! with Dr Ken Tindell May 30, 2023

    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 Coopman

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