The Amp Hour

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Natural Sciences
**The Amp Hour**

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

Latest Episodes:

Professional Scooter Charger Oct 24, 2022

Show notes

Pot vs trimmer
Charging scooters
Dave is getting a heat pump based water heater and will make a video about it soon
Intel is taking a bunch of money for the US gov't but also...laying off people
Chip companies losing tribal knowledge when they outsource
Dave asked on his forum and on a recent video about whether an $800 scope (MSO5000)
Unlock the oscilloscope
Best side cutters video
Storing cables in the lab
A (Google) list of electronics conferences in Australia
Check out the badge for the upcoming Hackaday Supercon
Chris will be giving a couple of talks in the next few weeks
- All Things Open in Raleigh on November 1st
  - There will also be an open Demo Night from 5 - 8 pm hosted by RIoT
- Hackaday Supercon on November 6th

The Lightning Tamers with Kathy Joseph Oct 17, 2022

Show notes

Kathy Joseph from the Kathy Loves Physics Youtube channel joins Dave to talk about the history of electricity and her new book The Lightning Tamers.

Website: https://bit.ly/GoKathyLovesPhysics Go Fund Me (for Audio book): https://bit.ly/DonateforAudiobook Patreon: https://bit.ly/KathyLovesPhysicsPatreon

Robo Fry Guy Oct 10, 2022

Show notes

The Hyper Encabulator (natural successor to the Turbo Encabulator and later the Electro Turbo Encabulator that Dave was part of)
DALL-E is the AI art engine that made our artwork this week.
The cool thing you missed at the Tesla AI day (eevblog)
Laura from Oxide Computer was on the show talking about servers
The "Open Compute Project" is the FB project Chris was thinking of.
Robotic Ice Cream Fail
Fast food robots are being promoted in the press currently. But that's nothing new! NYtimes has a history of "robots doing jobs" at fast food places.
Jack of All Trades
Chris is working on what he calls a "Lego" prototype, basically PCBs to replace just point to point wiring between other breakout boards.
He has been working on an IoT Trashcan Monitor Reference Design and also wrote about the process (and made a video about it)
The NXP RT1062 is on the Teensy 4 and is a beast of a part...600 MHz microcontroller
Chris is also looking at getting a milling machine again
Past guest John Saunders got started with a milling machine in his NYC apartment (hence NYC CNC)
Dave made a video about how to shop for enclosures...and forgot he made it because of Chris!
Dave is looking for an enclosure with an angled screen.
Shopping for boxes is the only activity we'd consider in the metaverse
Chris has been working on remote hardware training, including build systems for firmware.
Dave has been doing low power auditing in the home, looking for power leaks.
X vs Y cap
Romex is a commercial term for power cables in the wall in the US
The Smart Grid episode with Paul Zawada is a good reference for people learning about power
Dave made a recent video about the financial viability of battery backup in the home.
Vampire power
Federal Pacific Panels Blow up! Chris had one in the house he bought in 2009 (it was replaced)
Video of the measurement

An Interview with Ray Ozzie (Blues Wireless) Sep 26, 2022

Show notes

Welcome Ray Ozzie, founder and CEO of Blues Wireless!

Chris had a Notecard / Notecarrier in front of him from a training he attended.
Blues describes the Notecard as a "data pump".
Ray first encountered the cellular IoT space with the Safecast project, which started in March 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Former guests Akiba and Bunnie also worked on the Safecast project.
The earliest versions of monitoring were Geiger + GPS + cellular. Sometimes they collected data onto SD cards when cellular wasn't available.
When the towers were available, it was 3G. Early prototyping was with Adafruit Fona 3G modules and Voltaic panels. Later prototypes included LoRa networks.
There were software solutions involved using Balena.io (formerly Resin.io)
Solarcast boxes
PSM (power save mode)
PTCRB certification
Craig Mundie
Ray had formerly worked at Microsoft, where he took over as Chief Software Architect when Bill Gates stepped down to work on his foundation.
Ray also worked at places like
- Data General
- Software Arts
- Iris Associates
- Groove Networks (the acquisition of which brought Ray to Microsoft)
Ray's early days were programming on TRS80s and using Intel 8080s to help Physics grad students do their experiements.
Ray has a range of huge software projects he's worked on
- Visicalc
- Lotus123
- Lotus Symphony
- Lotus Notes
Competition in the 90s
Chris is amazed at hearing about how early software was built, which reminded him of the Xerox Parc book discussed on the show previously.
Ray referenced this "org chart for Microsoft" with guns pointing at one another. (found here)
300 to 2400 bps upgrades was a big deal!
Ray on working on tech in the 'good old days': "You knew where it was going but it took so much longer to get there"
The Blues Notecard is built on top of the STM32L4R5, which has 640K RAM, and 2 MB Flash. It felt familiar to Ray because of his early programming days on similarly constrained computers.
Drawing people into orbit to increase impact
Ray is a Computer History Museum fellow as of 2021. Tributes from Bill Gates and Mark Cuban. Ray will be helping to induct Don Bitzer for his work on PLATO.
Storage Tube
Blues Wireless was Ray's solution to the problems of cellular IoT
Developing connectivity into products
PIC32 talking to cellular
Ray gives an example of how an engineer might retrofit an older product with a Blues Notecard
Dev.blues.io is the hub for people building with Blues. It has links to the Notehub, which is how you interact with your data coming back to Blues.
Uri / Wokwi episode
"we dont' provide the glass"
A cellular Notecard is $50 for hardware, 10 years of cellular data (500 MB), plus consumption credits on the Blues Wireless Notehub. Most people sending back data won't go over limits unless they're trying to send a lot of data.
Powered applications can save on session overhead by staying connected. Also applications can queue "notes" (data packets) and then send all of them at once to cut down on the need for multiple sessions to the cell tower. The data will synchronize to Notefiles (database).
Chris asked for Ray's predictions for 5-10 years out, since Ray has been very successful in the many parts of his career. Ray wants to get 10s of billions devices and thinks this will enable a lot of new things.
Find Ray online!
- @rozzie on twitter
- Ray's LinkedIn
Check out the main site at blues.io and check out the developer portal at dev.blues.io. Ray recommended picking up a kit to get started.

Rigorous engineering stuff may be out the window Sep 11, 2022

Show notes

We recorded on Thursday Afternoon / Friday Morning, the Queen of England had just passed away. Dave explained what it might mean in Australia.
QWIIC and STEMMA
TTL clock update
Ecoflow battery video
JST connectors
Fully Charged Show
85% of battery packs for US cars will need to be source from US materials
Past guests Matt Venn and Uri Shaked are working on TinyTapeout. Matt made an intro video.
3D printing silicon layout shapes
Tektronix New Employee Orientation
This new book from Windell Oskay and Eric Schlaepfer looks amazing!
Why The World Relies On ASML For Machines That Print Chips
WHY does electricity travel at the speed of light?
MAX77958 - Standalone USB Type-C and USB Power Delivery Controller

Thanks to Cottonbro for the window image

Rebuilding Projects with Dave Young Aug 28, 2022

Show notes

Chris's good friend Dave Young joins the show again. He was first on episode 305 and then again on the initial "Consultant Impedance Matching" episode (409)
The consultant episode is where the idea of the Consulting Forum was born. Interested in joining? Apply here.
Dave has been spending many of his working hours changing out parts (Bubblegum Tapshoes)
Dave mentioned it feels like a "cascade failure".
In the analog space, measuring things is getting easier because of integration, but there are fewer vendors overall.
Dave made the switch from EAGLE to Altium and likes the capabilities of Altium365.
Phillip / Alvaro / Memfault webinar
Chris is skeptical about the "ever present need" of moving mechanical stuff on layouts
Handling change management as a consultant
Coaching consultants
Chris learned the importance of personal finance and financial stability before consulting from Dave.
Cornell summer accelerator
Dave is the founder and runner of Blue Stamp Engineering, which helps high school kids learn by building. It has been running for 11 years.
Common denominator of projects
AI projects are popular, but they tell the students, "You don't want to spend your summer cleaning data"
Learning as a consultant
Showing a track record
The challenges of remote vs in-person education
The students have a limit of 20 jumper wires for projects if being debugged over video. Ben Eater projects need not apply!
Independent study / tutoring
Find Dave online
- youngcircuitdesigns.com
- bluestampengineering.com

cricket

The Custodial Arts Aug 21, 2022

Show notes

Chris and Dave reflect on the joys of having children, despite illness
Dave's latest Scope winner is a young person developing PCBs for the Framework laptop
Dave recently posted a debugging video with Sagan
What's your "daily driver" scope?
- Chris - Analog Discovery 2 (portable, very low needs)
- Dave - National Instrument virtual bench (flexible), but has many many more options.
Chris's boards were featured on the adafruit blog for using the Feather standard. These were the demos he worked on for Golioth.
Jared Wolff makes one of the nRF9160 feather boards, he has been on the show.
Chris likes that the Actinius Icarus has a higher voltage input pin to power from the thing you're plugging into (instead of only from the USB cable)
Adafruit Feather specification
Nordic Semiconductor recently announced their new Wi-Fi product, the nRF7002
The nRF9160 has a GPS modem, but it's time sliced with cellular.
Low tech is more Dave's speed
Dave prefers working with a decade counter like the CD4026 for clock projects
Dave showcased his clock build from his teenage years
Carl the Janitor
Submitted by community member unmanaged615, the TPIC6595 is a shift register that can deliver 250 mA per pin.
Not recognized at first, but Dave designed a variant into his Nixie tube design series
Matt Keeter from Oxide Computer Company (same place that past guest Laura Abbott works) showed how they debugged UDP packets direct from an QSGMII pair.
Will an 8 bit computer run Doom?
Logic probe
Logic pulser

An Interview with Uri Shaked (Wokwi.com) Aug 15, 2022

Show notes

Welcome Uri Shaked of Wokwi.com!

Wokwi is an online microcontroller simulator built to make it easy to test different code types / platforms like Arduino, MicroPython, Rust, C, and more!
Hardware targets:
- ESP32 (and -C3, -S2)
- AVR
- RP2040
It was initially built to scratch own itch and get rid of lots of hardware on his desk. It all started as an Arduino simulator.
Chris has had bad simulation experiences in early 2000s (felt so fake)
Uri has talked about the simulator on Embedded.fm as well
The Wokwi simulator is built on mutliple layers
- Schematic layer creates a netlist
- All the code get compiled to a binary
- The binaries get loaded into microcontroller core simulators (depending on the processor/instruction set)
All things on github open source
Simulating an LED is especially hard because of PWM and user screen refresh rates
An often asked for feature is a built in debugger. Uri has been working on getting LLDB working.
gdb compiled as x86 binary and then simulating the linux distribution
Fast LED Library and the code required to work with its timing
life of a packet:
- comple source code to hex file
- starts AVR simulator
- ESP32 connection to the internet
The ESP32 uses the Xtensa instruction set (though the -C3 is a RISC V part)
Espressif didn't publish the instruction set manual
Reverse engienering the wifi driver was tough and involved Ghidra, an open source reverse engineering tool. There is also an xtensa plugin in Ghidra and Uri was using gdb on the physical chip as well for comparison. Uri gave a talk about this at 2021 Hackaday Remoticon
Uri published the Gateway code (in Go) on Githubwokwi-gw
You can vote on what's next on the roadmap by joining the Wokwi Club
Cortex-M4 parts are coming soon
Extending Wokwi - how to create your own chips
Writing code for the external parts like an i2c keypad driver
What is WebAssembly?
How much is running in the browser vs talking back to the cloud?
Micropython projects have very little interactions with the servers
Blog post about Kasm
Caching at the project / compiler level
pic simulab
How accurate should a simulator be?
Hardware in the loop testing
Show with Pete from Blue Clover
Show with Akbar from Lager Data
For the Skull, Uri recorded signals with Saleae, added that as a simulated output
Saleae episode
Join the Wokwi.com Club!
Ask questions on the Wokwi Discord
More than anything, Uri is trying to gather feedback, so please try it out and let him know what you think!

Best way to find a leak Aug 08, 2022

Show notes

Dave has been reverse engineering 10 pin connector from the ultrasonic gas detector he got in a recent mailbag
Intrinsically safe
Executive Decision
Dave is deciding between discrete logic vs micro
Chris recommends the RP2040 and utilizing the PIO (kind of doing both)
Die shots of the RP2040 W
74HC164 datasheet
"Richer than Bill Gates'
Back to school - Triple Lindy
Chris is currently reading Accelerando
Dutch town installs secondary traffic lights on the ground for texters
Tour from temporary labor workers inside of the Digikey fulfillment center
LCSC "wireless antistatic wristbands"
JayCar warehouse video
Stacey Higgenbotham reported on how Helium isn't making much money. Are any of you being targeted to utilizing the connectivity from the Helium network?
Nordic Semiconductor is recruiting a RISC-V designer. Interesting what this implies about other chip companies hiring RISC-V designers. Espressif's new chip line are mostly RISC-V.
We have been talking about RISC-V for a few years now, but the project started in 2010.
Google and Skywater announced they're moving down to a 90 nm node. Chris recently found out Skywater is a former Cypress Semi fab.
Semtech (owners of the LoRa IP and makers of chips) are buying Sierra Wireless (a cellular module maker). Uh...why?
Google starts testing AR glasses
Meta lost 2.8B on the metaverse last quarter...

Thanks to Kate Ter Haar for the photo of the matches

An Interview with Mike Engelhardt (Re-broadcast) Jul 31, 2022

Show notes

For the original show notes, check out the original page: https://theamphour.com/196-an-interview-with-mike-engelhardt-spice-simulator-synteresis/

Mike Engelhardt is the creatore of LTSpice. Mike is no longer at Linear Technology, and Linear Technology is no longer a company (now part of Analog Devices), but the simulator is still awesome!

To listen to all episodes in your podcast listener back to episode one, use the LibSyn feed (our hosting platform): https://theamphour.libsyn.com/

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