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:

Wow, Dave REALLY likes Top Gun Jul 25, 2022

Show notes

Dave received his Tilt5
We had Jeri on the show 5 (!) years ago when CastAR had folded
Troubleshooting
Fewer kickstarters
Chris wrote about using Wireshark to troubleshoot Thread networks
Electrical Engineers on the brink of extinction?
The conversation partially became about SW vs HW salaries, but ultimately people projected whatever they wanted onto the headline.
Naomi (@RealSexyCyborg) mentioned that EEs are harder to find in Shenzhen
CHIPS act still not passed in US
Sam Zeloof says you can buy everything you need to make 5 nm transistors on Alibaba (no word on lithography)
Spectrum article about RISC V
Matt Venn (Zero to ASIC) interviews people at the Free Silicon Conference

Capacitor Schoopage with Ron Demcko from AVX Jul 18, 2022

Show notes

AVX Fellow and 40 year capacitor industry legend Ron Demcko joins Dave to discuss film capacitor failures and capacitor technology. This episode is best viewed in video format on the Amp Hour Youtube channel, as Ron and Dave discuss slides and photos in this video discussion for an EEVblog video on why a film capacitor failed. But we are sure you'll still find the audio podcast version very enjoyable and educational.

Trade Show or Conference? Jul 11, 2022

Show notes

Chris just got back from Embedded World in Nuremberg where he was showcasing stuff for his company Golioth. Embedded World is happening again in March 2023.
Electronica is another German trade show happening in November in Munich (above image is from 2014 Electronica)
Are there any good remaining US based trade shows? Or outside the US?
Howard Johnson episode
DaveCon
Browsing at trade shows is one of hte main benefits
Dave's son is taking an online cosmology course
"AI layout" company raises $25M
Freight DHL
RS-449 has um...a lot of pins
VT100 "Dumb terminal"
EIA
IEEE1394 (which was branded FireWire for Apple's implementation)
Chris has been reading Tony Fadell's book Build
New Raspberry Pi Pico W is $6 and has an RP2040 and WiFi
Dave is interested in the PIO. The Embedded RPi team talked about PIO on the show.
The net effect of shortages
Inside Curious Marc's lab (Daniel from Keysight hosts tour)
Former guest Zach Barth has decided to shut down Zachtronics (maker of ShenzhenIO) to pursue other projects.
Turing Tumble

AI aren't sentient yet...right? Jun 20, 2022

Show notes

A sentient AI would definitely take better show notes

Altium rap
Chris has been reading "Iron Emipres", which is a book about building out train infrastructure.
Mark Rober has a new kit service and workshop. Chris thinks this was designed by an AI because of how it appeals to our demographic.
It's amazing how YouTube will influence future engineers. Dave grew up with The Curiosity Show. Chris grew up with Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Chris has been prototyping with laser cutting using Ponoko
Chris got to tour the Computer History Museum while at the Zephyr Developer Summit (recap article).
Palm Pilot
HP 200LX
Psion Series 5
Intel has their own museum
Google AI research claims the AI is sentient
War Games
Cruise now has a pass for operating in SF at restricted times.
9 euro
NY has passed Right to Repair
Apple might be forced to adopt USB C
EEVblab Right To Repair
ITAR
Russia and Belarus can't buy parts over 25 MHz

Images generated from here, using the prompt "A computer screaming at a microphone": https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini Audio intro generated here: https://resemble.ai

Publicly Traded Hobby with Ben Jordan Jun 14, 2022

Show notes

The Altium stories flow as Ben Jordan discusses working at Altium with Dave!

Ben was a long time Altium employee and PCB and product specialist and still makes Altium tutorial videos on Youtube. He has also worked for Autodesk on Fusion 360. Ben now has his own consulting company Jordan DSP and co-hosts a regular live Youtube show with Bil Herd

Follow him on Twitter

Product Design with Simone Giertz Jun 07, 2022

Show notes

Welcome back, Simone Giertz!

Simone returns to The Amp Hour to discuss her new venture selling products (Yetch.store) that she has been designing.
Simone was last on the show in 2017 on episode 331.
She has been doing more voice overs so that she can focus on the work while recording. Chris mentioned past guest James Bruton recording as he goes along.
Truckla
She's interested in random everyday problems and solving them
Course showing how she designed a fruitbowl
Moved to LA
Scissor lamp - will likely become a product for sale (As Seen On YouTube)
Taking things to production
The Everyday Calendar is a capacitive touch calendar that mounts to your wall and allows you to track a habit throughout the year.
The Calendar was on sale in the MoMA store!
Design For Manufacturing meant reducing costs, so she didn't want to do pushbuttons (especially because there would be so many)
Kickstarter
The product design firm has 1.5 employees, but soon will be 2 people.
Setting prices
Puzzle table
Screwdriver ring
Margin invites counterfeit
Scraps chair
Future flatpack engineering for furniture sales?
Having to think about new challenges for selling things: certification in different markets, sales tax, etc
Collaborate moving stuff into engineering
High cost items like the Vesta Board
"make your own gnome"

Olive-a The World May 30, 2022

Show notes

Dave helped someone on Twitter who was looking to identify a part.
Chip of the Week: Honeywell SM351LT
Please make a dumb car
Also discussed back in 2011 on The Amp Hour!
Shahriar from TSP reviews a 60 GHz chipset :-o
New test equipment that the EEVblog forum uncovered
EV Conversion after 10 years (2019)
Bob Simpson was on episode 112 of The Amp Hour (Tek engineer who converted a BMW)
Chris is struggling to get back into FreeCAD after being away for a couple weeks / months.
YouTuber talking about a Hydrogen breakthrough for cars.
Are Construction EVs a thing?
Catepillar announced mining trucks that are EV
Pat Gelsinger’s Plan To Fix Intel
SMB: Small Businss or Super Massive Blackhole?

Finding Hardware Flaws with Laura Abbott May 23, 2022

Show notes

Welcome Laura Abbott of Oxide Computer!

Laura will be giving a talk at the upcoming Hardwear.io conference in Santa Clara about the (second!) vulnerability she found in the LPC55S69
Oxide servers are built to be secure from the ground up.
Root of trust
The vulnerability Laura found was a buffer overflow in the firmware update mechanism of the LPC55S69.
TPM
Cortex M33
Trust Zone M
Service Processor - baseband management controller
What does a server board look like?
Power management
Their customer Root of Trust OS is called Hubris
Open compute project
Many of the projects at Oxide are programmed in Rust (programming language)
Memory unsafe stuff
How do you know rust will run on a part? You can see if there is a "crate" available for the part (Rust installer/package manager)
Writing updates for processors
How often does firmware get update on servers?
Host processor talks to management network onboard, it delivers firmware images to the lower layers.
What is a Root of Trust task that it might do on a daily basis?
Laura explained some of the challenges of working remote on hardware
Laura moved from software into security/hardware. Perviously she had been doing kernel development.
She is still a Technical Advisory Board Member at the Linux Foundation
Getting started with kernel
Follow Laura on Twitter at @openlabbott

Mute Button Discipline May 16, 2022

Show notes

Chris and Dave discussed the "beta" function for MOSFETs on Falstad circuit simulator
We found some references online to "beta" (like this archive from McGill University) but it doesn't seem to be a normal characteristic? Maybe an approximation term?
Dave and other EE YouTubers were mentioned in Derek's 2nd video about the light bulb experiment and energy flowing in fields (Veritasium).
Dave mentioned Alpha Phoenix as doing the simulations on this, but Chris later looked up it was the Ben Watson video that Chris was referencing during the recording.
Rick Hartley
Lumped element model, where would we be without you?
Bit rot
Chris has been digging into Segger Ozone and SystemView, the latter first brought up on the show with Brian Amos
Dave bought a bunch of gear from an optometry business at auction.
Bubblegum tapshoes
Dave heard about this STM32F3 part with a super fast timer internal...yep, still can't get it.
Open Source HW/SW Microinverter
Chris asks Dave if he would put something like that on his house.
Paul Zawada episode
Enphase Microinvterter
Zappi charger
Leigh Brady Episode
Chris will be doing a webinar this week about the things you don't know about IoT systems.
Photo by Ron Lach

Siloed Engineering with Leigh Brady May 09, 2022

Show notes

Welcome, Leigh Brady!

Leigh got his start working in different companies in the US as young engineer from the UK as part of the Mutual Defense Agreement
Throughout the episode we explored different themes
- Specialist vs Generalist
- US vs UK hiring
- Big vs small companies
- Defense vs Industrial companies
UK Apprenticeship
V curve
System engineering
Deriving requirements
What is the atomic unit of a system engineer?
F35/JSF
Lockheed IRAD - Internal Research and Development
Sandia National Labs
FPGAs in defense / space
"It's always cosmic rays"
Single Event Upsets
"Triple modular redundancy" is so commonplace in designs there are now buttons in CAD to generate the logic to triplicate a circuit and have the 3 units "vote"
Bleeding edge FPGA tools vs open toolchain
Chris recalls Xilnx ISE with F16 on the CDs
Long term supply contracts
Jumping the line with defense companies in the US - "DPAS - defense priorities and allocation system"
Big vs small
Leigh is now back in a big company
When should an engineer target a big vs a small company in their career?
Training / Budgets / Sampling are better at big companies.
Mentorship
Phillip Salmany (Phil's Lab) talked about the difficulties finding mentors as a young engineer out on his own.
UK Chartered Engineer
PE / EIT vs Chartered
Leigh worked on nuclear weapons at a past company in the UK
It is, unsurprisingly, a heavily regulated industry.
IEC61508
Part of the job is verifying non-proliferation among other countries
Nuclear deterrant
Chris referenced a Ukraine treaty where they gave up their nuclear weapons and ambitions, co-signed by the US, UK, and ... Russia. This was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
Russia control room story about not firing when they detected launches from the US. It's widely believed that Stanislov Petrov prevented a Nuclear war
There are never active nuclear tests anymore (good), so the majority of work revolves around testing and modeling
Is there a "better moustrap"?
What does it look like when new requirements come down from the gov't?
Did Leigh wear a white lab coat?
We were introduced by former guest Carmen Parisi, who worked with Leigh at Wasatch Photonics
Optics have tight timing requirements, especially around the image sensor.
Leigh is now working on medical devices at Phillips.
Medical isn't as slow as Chris thought, nor is FDA planning as dreadful as Chris thought.
"Trust but verify" on part specs
Mapping past experiences into new job
Chris mentioned the discussions with Charles Aylward about not having any control mechanisms or backup as a consultant.
Leigh said there are certain scenarios where a solo consultant won't be a good fit and that "Two people working in a team are worth three"
You can reach Leigh on LinkedIn and elsewhere on the web as Engineer Leigh

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