The Amp Hour

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

Natural Sciences
**The Amp Hour**

The Amp Hour is a weekly conversation about electronics and the people who design them.

Latest Episodes:

Discovering Cursed Connectors Jun 19, 2023

Show notes

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
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.

Low Power Connected Devices with Andrea Longobardi Jun 05, 2023

Show notes

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

The CAN bus can! with Dr Ken Tindell May 30, 2023

Show notes

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

Engineering Optimization May 22, 2023

Show notes

Welcome to the Luddite Hour, where Chris and Dave discuss the merits of Embossing Tape
Steve Sanghi was on the show last week, Chris disagreed with some of his points about paying for tools
Chris talking himself out of a job?
Ken Tindell wrote about a CAN hacking device that unlocks cars through the headlights. He will be our guest next week!
Vincent Himpe is on the job market. He was our longest running guest at 3 hours.
Hiring engineers means paying for their optimization
Once chips start to standardize that optimization, it gets commoditized
- VU Meter LED bars: LM3914 / LM3915
- Person detection with TinyML: The Person Sensor
- AM Radio: MK484
CNLohr using the CH32V003 and Nixie tubes. He will be a future guest! Charles also started the CH32V003fun library.
Former guest Eric Schlaepfer on a podcast with former guests Ben Jordon and Bil Herd
Flipper Zero on YouTube
HS01 review view
The Pine-cil soldering iron
Projects
Dave reviewed a escooter on eevblog2
Thingy91 / buzzer video

A Noisy Rude Bus May 08, 2023

Show notes

Dave is celebrating his 10 year anniversary of the dumpster room
There's now a camera on the room!
Chris has been writing code for the Nordic Thingy91. Dave said it's not a buzzer (only one tone), it's a piezo transducer
Dave's video about the first micro/Merlin
"Did Ed Sheeran ACTUALLY Plagiarize Marvin Gaye?" by Adam Neely
"AInxiety. The feeling that you might not have chosen the best AI tool for the job"
Wendover Productions video about production in Mexico instead of China
Dave should be interviewing Steve Sanghi next week
I2C vs "two wire interface"
I3C compatibility is a new topic as well, written about by TI on Planet Analog
Chris has been looking at CAN stuff. CAN bus is a "Noisy Rude Bus"
Practical Engineering talking about strain gauges in bridges
Strain gauges often are measured by a Wheatstone bridge
Chris wishes he could tell his younger self to "Get prototypes off the bench quickly"
Having a range of measurement test capabilities in your pocket
WiFi visualization by Sam A
ElectroBOOM making a jar full of "fireflies"
Becky Stern doing a teardown of RayBan Smart Glasses. Scans of the inside by Lumafield.

Renewable Energy Policy with Ari Gerstman May 02, 2023

Show notes

Welcome Ari Gerstman, from the US Department of Energy Office of State and Community Programs

Chris and Ari went to high school together and Chris was excited to have Ari on the show to talk about how renewables are implemented in the US
Ari recenly started his DOE job
He was interested in joining the organization after a large funding effort in the US Senate and House (signed into law)
- The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)
- The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), also known as the Infrastructure and Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)
There is now $100B going towards electrification and upgrading of the US infrastructure and homes in the US.
The funding is driving supply side incentives to move to renewables, instead of Cap and Trade to disincentivize carbon rich activities.
Chris asked Ari about the green credits market and whether people should pay attention (John Oliver carbon offsets piece discussed in the past)
What are the tradeoffs of targeting upgrading homes for efficiency vs solar installs on a roof?
Solar in the US
Ari working in a narrow subset at DOE
Chris has read exactly one book about The Grid, talked about many times on the show before.
Running capacity building
Ari is part of the Office of State and Community Programs, which administers a portion of the overall 100B
There is a large amount of net new electric load, in the form of EVs, appliances, heat pumps, etc. This could roughly double electricity usage for providers and transporters of energy.
Tennesee has a large manufacturing base and are growing into batteries. This is map of battery activity in the US.
Ari has 84kW battery in his car, these kind of capacities will only grow over time.
Is new load a good thing or a bad thing?
Power providers are excited about it!
Investor owned utilties are natural monopolies, which is why there is something called a Public Utility Commission (PUC) to regulate them.
Ari and Chris made up an example about a fake US state (Electifica) with a fake provider company (Utopia), so that we weren't talking about any specific examples.
Utopia trades on the stock market and there are known returns, so there are expectations about how things will work.
Utlities are incentivized to maximize costs because they make percentage returns on the costs passed to customers. PUCs want the opposite.
Microgrid
DER - Distributed Eletric Resources
Energy efficiency and demand response programs are where they notify customers of high load and ask the customer to turn things down. Sometimes there is "Smart Grid" style programs where the utility can take action centrally (turning down thermostats, etc)
There was a Demand Reponse Brooklyn Queens program that worked
Building a substation is very expensive, but gives an additional control node
What is the effect of solar on the grid?
Microgrids can enable additional cross-grid control, but it gets tricky when figuring out billing for the crossing between subgrids (because utilities have very different billing paradigms)
Peaker plants need to spin up very quickly and are very dirty.
Utilities encouraging people to buy battieres
The Duck Curve
A net zero passive house could extend usage off a battery backup system and highly reduce load on the grid.
Building codes can have a large impact on future energy usage by determining how future homes load down the grid.
Codes in Florida also help things like disaster response.
There is a large chunk of that $100B going "Transmission sighting", because additional control nodes on the grid will require additional land (often in expensive areas)
Ari previously worked on renewables for the District of Columbia.
With rooftop and solar on the edge of the city, they could cover about 10% of city usage.
Power companies moving from owning and operating everything is changing paradigms generally.
How can you learn more?
- Ari suggests reading legislation
  - BIL
  - IRA
- Check out the Energy.gov site for general info
- Read more about Ari's programs at the DOE SCEP

**At least my house isn't haunted** Apr 24, 2023
Show notes

Chris fills in the rest of the story told as a "Puzzler" in the last episode. Unfortunately none of the submissions won this week, possibly because the clues given were too obscure. The long and the short of the story is: my house isn't haunted
The culprit (top) and the victim (bottom)

Capacitive coupling lighting up LED lamps

Phases in US vs Australia

Reality tv producer setups

Paul Zawada episode

Buzzing components

Predicting penny

Enough about houses not blowing up, a Starship blew up! (on purpose, it seems)

Chris read two books about space mining that he loved (2 part series...so far).

Delta V

Critical Mass

Emerson Electric is buying National Instruments for 8.2B

NI makes Labview, a popular test stand and automation software

Dave has been choosing microcontrollers and did a recent PIC24 vs STM32 comparison

Nordic just announced the nRF54H20, which is the successor to nRF52, nRF53...but also has a bunch of RISC V coprocessing cores.

Another fun image generated by Midjourney for show art this week...

Two Dads Puzzlin Things Out Apr 17, 2023

Show notes

Dave Young of Young Circuit Designs joins Chris to record a now-rare in-person episode of The Amp Hour!

Dave has been on the show a couple of times in the past
- 305
- 409
- 601
Chris was recently on Embedded.fm talking about Golioth and firmware
PUZZLER: Chris lays out a problem with home power
- Email theamphour@gmail.com with the subject "PUZZLER"
Chip shortage is...over? (better?)
Inspring kids (including students) around electronics
Amazon Sidewalk is now available, it operates through Amazon devices if you're using AWS IOT.