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The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast — Natural Sciences
The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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

Copyright: Copyright © The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast 2020

Latest Episodes:

#684 – Lee Felsenstein: The Computer Revolution & Counterculture Dec 10, 2024
A full 3 hour discussion with the legendary Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne 1, SOL computer, VDM-1, Pennywhistle modem, and the inventor of social media. Covering everything from the Berkeley free speech movement, the counterculture movement, his career, through to Obsorne and how he invented social media with Community Memory.

His book: https://www.amazon.com/Me-My-Big-Idea…

https://felsensigns.com/

00:00 – Full 3 hour talk with Lee Felsenstein
08:24 – University of California at Berkeley, and the Free Speech Movement.
29:04 – First Junior Engineer job at Ampex
36:20 – The first hackathons with Richard Greenblatt
37:33 – Hackers, Heros of the computer revolution
1:03:36 – Techical career at Ampex
1:12:52 – Atari Computers and Steve Jobs, Nolan Bushnall, and Allan Alcorn
1:15:00 – He tried to pitch social media to Steve Jobs
1:22:15 – Designing the Pennywhistle 103 modem +
1:25:36 – Marty Spergel selling kits
1:31:53 – Steve Wozniak and how the Apple 1 is NOT a personal computer
1:43:42 – Osborne Computers
1:53:22 – Osborne 1 physical design
1:57:57 – Osborne 1 development timeline
2:01:19 – The Osborne Effect wasn’t what killed the company

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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

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