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    Natural Sciences

    The Amp Hour

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

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    Copyright: Copyright © The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast 2020

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    Latest Episodes:
    Biblical Broker Bucks May 02, 2022
    Show notes
    • Dave declares the chip shortage is over! The scopes from a contest 1 year ago have shipped.
    • Adafruit video asking Microchip for parts. Adafruit helped popularize the SAMD21 and SAMD51, which are tough to get ahold of
    https://twitter.com/factory_400/status/1519398997303054337
    • Dave finally tried taking his EV to 100% charge
    • "blowing the carbon out"
    • American pickers
    • On our subreddit, someone was asking about PCB fabs (and assembly)
    • An apocryful story about firms buying finished goods and destroying to get parts out of them (the DailyMail is a rag)
    • Josh from Macchina (Earl was on The Amp Hour on episode 388) had emailed Chris about XScomponents. There are some listings on there, but don't get your hopes up!
    • Diamond district effect
    • Dave is a really big fan of Bluey
    • Belkin is apparently trying out (or giving credence to wireless charginge). Dave was unconvinced (back in 2018)
    • Open vs closed cavity
    • Chris presented to the Thread Group and talked through some of the things he understands about it on the show. This video was pretty helpful.
    • Chris's wrestling name would be "The BOM Dropper"...apparently.
    • Dave got some PCB art in the mailbag. He made a followup video about the "5 layers" of PCB artwork.
    https://twitter.com/eevblog/status/1519527884540776448
    • Stippling is a technique of adding grayscale to two tone printing. Chris used this on the art for this episode.
    • Using the ESP32-S2 as a USB to UART chip
    • Eric Migicovsky wrote about Why Pebble Failed
    • We had CTO of Pebble (Andrew Witte) on the show back on episode 175
    Fran Blanche Version 3 Apr 18, 2022
    Show notes

    Fran Blanche and Dave discuss publishing, newspapers, Frantone, manufacturing, the kit business, ebay, and pontificate what we would be doing if the Internet didn’t exist.

    The Frantone pedal as used by The Hives’ Nicholaus Arson and Vigilante Carlstroem VIDEO

    How VHS tapes are manufactured VIDEO

    NOTE: This episode is also available as VIDEO

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuFqB9ZeqKI

    Return of the Trade Show Jedi Apr 11, 2022
    Show notes
    • Dave has been posting videos from his time at Electronex 2022
    • Chris will be attending and presenting at Zephyr Developer Summit in June.
    • Chris will also be at Embedded World in late June
    • Walkthrough video from Dave at Electronex 2022
    • There was a larger focus on manufacturing
    • The Art of Custom Test Jigs
    • Force of pogo pins
    • Chris asked about best trade show demos people had seen. We liked past guest Mark Garrison's response:
    https://twitter.com/Marcus10110/status/1507522287192338440
    • Trade show teardown
    • Antmicro released a Snapdragon 845 base board design in KiCad
    • The logistics of corn farming
    • Smarter Every Day did a video on grain silos
    • Australia warns of critical shortage of engineers
    • ABC engineer book
    • Mercedes is backing their self driving software (legally)
    • Chris has been working with Thread at work
    Software for Rockets with Charles Aylward Apr 04, 2022
    Show notes

    Welcome Charles Aylward of Grizzly Peak Systems!

    • I heard of Charles from past guest Todd Bailey, they worked together at Astra. Charles is also a member of the Consulting Forum.
    • Astra is a "new space" company
    • These are non-traditional companies (sometimes startups), that move a bit faster with modern software methods and using more commercially available hardware (non-rad hard parts)
    • Past guests in "new space" companies Joris (Hiber), Shaun (Planet), Brent and Bryce (SpaceX, Relativity Space)
    • Astra provides a smaller launch vehicle (rocket), which means the ride share equation changes.
    • The rocket equation means it could be advantageous to launch a smaller rocket.
    • Chris thought of Charles when he thinks of software and hardware rigor.
    • How do you know you're ready to launch?
    • Charles was the software engineer for the early launch vehicles.
    • Design reviews early on had fewer people but pulled in other people. Todd was working on electronics.
    • 6 months to launch
    • There's no dev kit for starting a rocket.
    • A rocket is a distributed system
    • Multiple clock domains
    • Lossy comms
    • Charles and Todd talked through some guiding principles
      • "No modes"
      • "Debug data and test data is first class data"
      • "The principle of least surprise"
      • "Boot causes no action" (powering on a system causes no action)
      • "The system is only hot under control"
      • "Only a single source of control at a time"
      • "Messages are globally unique"
      • "When you're sending commands to subsystems, you are sending the absolute state"
    • Some other (out of order) thoughts around the guiding principles discussion
      • Cataloguing all software failures on space systems
      • Need to design in wider data channels as a result
      • Exposing parts of the RTOS stats
      • Safety related
      • Default off states
      • Pointy side up, fire side down
      • Nodes on a network
      • Babbling node
    • Deterministic system
    • Priorities are similar for all systems on a launch vehicle
    • What are the constraints of the system?
    • Creating a walking skeleton
    • Deciding to put ethernet on board
    • Desirement
    • "Judson's Razor"
    • Using an RTOS
    • Classes of real time contrsaints
      • Soft
      • Firm
      • Hard
    • Real Time Systems - Hermann Kopetz
    • Hard Real Time Computing Systems - Giorgio C Buttazzo
    • PID loops
    • So what was it like at Astra?
    • Charles joined in 2017, first launch 364 days later
    • They launch things like cube satellites (10x10x10 cm)
    • The vehicles can go up to 100s of kg
    • Still getting new space contracts
    • Startups
    • "Rigor gets a bad rap because of agile", but there's a crossover point for investing in the setup of new systems.
    • In consulting, there is often pressure is high to get first proto out quickly
    • Azonenberg's checklist on github
    • "What happens if the test fails?" You need to have recovery time baked into a schedule and a plan
    • Contact
      • Twitter
      • Freelance info
      • Email
      • LinkedIn
    • Other links, sent from Charles after the recording
      • I left Astra before this particular launch, but Scott Manley has a good/fun video on what happens when your systems don't "fail fast" but instead "fail operational"
      • You asked where one can pick up some of this stuff (regarding rigor etc). A lot of my early thinking on robust software was formed by Robert Rasmussen from JPL. He has published a lot but by far the best synopsis on thinking about dealing with inevitable errors (fault tolerance) as not a special case, is in this paper. This basically ties right in with the "observability" thing we discussed.
      • Another good foundation for coding standards is the JPL "powers of ten" paper. There are things I disagree with, and outright reject, e.g. pointers can't be used safely, but, like the principles we discussed on the show, it's not that there's some prescriptive golden list, it's just that you want to build out a complete list like this of your own. Pulling what you think makes sense from JPL P10 or MISRA can really help.
      • The best way to contact me is probably twitter.
    Click image for link to Charles' site with explanation
    The Smart Grid with Paul Zawada Mar 28, 2022
    Show notes

    This episode is brought to you by Mouser Electronics. This week we hear about Digital Therapeutics. Go to TheAmpHour.com/digitalhealth to learn more.

    Welcome, Paul Zawada of Syntonous LLC!

    • Paul was nice enough to respond when we said we were hoping to talk to someone about the grid/smart grid. He is an "operations technology engineer", which means he straddles the line between the power side and the technology side of things.
    • What are grid operators' appetite for new tech?
    • SCADA
    • How do blackouts happen?
    • Generation, transmission, distribution
    • i2r losses are why they operate long distance transmission at 765 kV.
    • China's grid has newer tooling, which allows it to go at higher voltages.
    • You can tell the voltage of transmission lines by "counting the bells". It's roughly 15kV per bell and they do odd things to the shapes of insulators to prevent arcing.
    • Video about the Ohio blackouts in 2003 we talked about last week
    • Where does control happen for "the grid"?
    • PJM
    • Frequency determines the health of the grid
    • Bike analogy
    • Tesla battery - Hornsdale Power Reserve
    • Moving to a renewable grid has some potential issues
    • Grid has "inertia" due to the spun up generators. They're working on modeling "Synthetic inertia" for a more renewable grid.
    • "A disturbance in the electromotive force" (I'm sorry Dave, that title was too long)
    • Dave asks why does the voltage go up on his setup?
    • RMS voltage vs Vpp
    • The Power Triangle
    • ELI the ICE man, CIVIL
    • 99% of the time, loads are inductive
    • The role of reactive power in the grid
    • VARs
    • VAR tends to control the voltage
    • Real power determines the frequency
    • Hawaii example of a local grid with a lot of solar (and that's kind of a problem)
    • Capacitors help to balance the grid when it there are too many inductive loads.
    • "Grid Following inverter" (vs "Grid Forming")
    • Dynamic inverter
    • 4 quadrant inverter
    • "Don't call it imaginary power"
    • IEEE1547
    • Inverters have to be able to deal with frequency changes and take setpoints from the grid
    • The 50.2 Hz problem
    • Smart Grid
    • California Rule 21
    • Smart meter and Power Line Carrier Standard (PRIME)
    • Communication with meters
    • WISUN
    • COSIM
    • PLC
    • Private LTE
    • Brokers
    • Pool analogy
    • Stability of the grid wasn't built for two way flow
    • Managing a wide range of inverters is difficult
    • Standard for comms by SunSpec (Smart Inverter Standards)
    • Control systems with SCADA
    • While analyzing hte grid, they use a state estimator (which is a mathematical model of the various sources in a grid system) and then do real time contingency analysis
    • Spinning reserve
    • Rolling blackout is when the grid systematically takes different parts of the grid offline to preserve the overall ability to deliver power.
    • Texas example
    • Dave asked about available power on the grid
    • Steel recycling takes a TON of power.
    • Different wires from generation (in Texas)
    • Community Energy Storage ("Backyard Batteries" w/ Four-Quadrant Inverters)
    • Wind turbine go to DC first (because of variable wind speeds), but are then feed to an inverter
    • Proposed Soo Green HVDC Link [Underground]
    • Grain Belt Express: Proposed Kansas-Missouri-Illinois HVDC Transmission Line
    • Pacific DC Intertie
    • Silicon transformer
    • Paul's pet peeve is people asking him about "exploding transformers". It's almost always a fuse or a cable shorting to ground.
    • Expulsion Fuse Blowing (NSFW Language)
    • Another Expulsion Fuse Blowing
    • DC vs AC arc
    • 250VDC control of relax elements in power plants
    • Air Blast Circuit Breaker
    • "(The grid is) the most complex machine we 've ever built"
    • Consulting and day job AND he is working on a Doctorate of Technology at Purdue. We're grateful he found time to talk to us as well!
    • Follow Paul on Twitter! @engineerz
    The Same Wavelength Mar 21, 2022
    Show notes
    • Brain computer interfaces
    • Chris is still finishing up a book on PARC. Hearing about management decisions made him upset.
    • Dave is fighting to get through Ready Player 2
    • Position JWST mirrors with nanometer accuracy (video)
    • More about mirrors from NASA
    • How alignment is being done
    • Dave's son is getting into Kurzgesagt (amazing YouTube channel)
    • Chris and his daughter like The Universe app, though looking at info about M87 (Virgo Alpha) gave Chris a panic attack
    • Shenzhen is on lockdown after COVID has gotten worse in Hong Kong and some has crossed the border.
    • During a (very) brief search during the show we found 90% of electronics production is done in Shenzhen? Can that be right??
    • Packaging is expanding in the US, but Chris is skeptical it will put a dent in the supply chain.
    • How technology impacts working conditions (in this case, calling out the monitoring of truckers)
    • DRM labels or paper
    • On the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast, they interviewed a Starlink reverse engineer, who was recording from Kyiv as air sirens were going off.
    • Ghidra
    • Reverse engineering a Tesla keyfob
    • Substation
    • Highest volume individual
    • Chris has a new meetup group in the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill). Please help spread the word!
    Photo by Luan Rezende from Pexels
    Real Time Operating Systems with Brian Amos Mar 14, 2022
    Show notes

    Welcome, Brian Amos, author of Hands-on RTOS with Microcontrollers

    • Learned about the book from past guest Phillip Johnston. Also talked to Alvaro Prieto (Unnamed RE) about FreeRTOS.
    • "How do I RTOS?"
    • When do you want to use a Real Time Operating System (RTOS)?
      • Assume you can from a state machine
      • User interface you'll want it
      • Communication capability (IoT devices)
    • Differentiating OS vs RTOS
    • Amazon acquired FreeRTOS in 2017
    • FreeRTOS is a bottom up methodology
    • It's possible to make a completely statically allocated memory for a project (no heap, no malloc, etc)
    • Simple examples around reading a sensor, pump status, screen, internet
    • System level design decisions
    • Interrupt Service Routine (ISR)
    • Ticks are important
    • How did Brian get into this?
    • Brian was working on a product that had a
      • Telos module
      • MSP430
      • TinyOS
      • nesC?
    • James Grenning's book on TDD for embedded
    • Modern micros can do a lot in parallel, especially using hardware like DMA
    • Troubleshooting an RTOS
      • SEGGER Ozone (debugger)
      • SystemView
      • Percipio Tracealyzer
    • Many of the graphics in the book are available on Brian's github page as CC by SA licensing
    • Page 48 graphic
    • Brian taunts us on Page 98 showing lots of STM32 parts in stock...
    • NucleoF7 board used in examples (unsurprisingly...out of stock)
    • There's an onboard debugger that you can reprogram to Segger
    • Going through exercises
    • Working with HALs
    • Logic analyzer for troubleshooting
    • Embedded Linux
    • Still goes bck to superloop
    • Find Brian on:
      • LinkedIn
      • GitHub
      • Amazon book
    Electrical Archeology Mar 07, 2022
    Show notes
    • Dave has been reverse engineering a MOSFET that burned out on his LED panel.
    • SM4303 Datasheet
    • APM4303 Datasheet
    • Chris has been looking at ideal diode controller
    • Dave has been trying to reverse a deep discharge of battery
    • SloMo Guys blow up capacitors and it's AWESOME!
    • Floating Solar Farms
    • Common sense skeptic video
    • We recorded an episode driving down to the Deep Space Network in Canberra
    • Our email address (Feedback@theamphour.com) is working again! For now!
    • We are looking to talk to power engineers, please let us know if you know anyone.
    • Smart grid
    • Chris was asking about localize power storage in the home without having solar panels
    • Software salaries are huge at FAANG/MANGA companies, in part due to the stock portion of compensation, also known as an RSU
    • FUIFV
    • Google is making employees going back to the office (and now Apple too!)
    • Looking to change jobs? There are lots of posts in newsletters like The Embedded Muse, The Prepared, and The Analog
    • Hacker News also has a "Who's Hiring" post on the first of the month.
    • Revenue per employee
    • Cost of engineers
    • "I Quit! - Why Millions of People Are Quitting Their Jobs" - Cold Fusion TV
    ADC Chip Design with Anthony Wall Feb 28, 2022
    Show notes

    Welcome, Anthony Wall!

    • Anthony is a PhD student in the MCCI group at Tyndall, which is a research institution in Ireland.
    • Why did companies like Intel and ADI choose Ireland?
    • There was a recent history on 99% Invisible about Duty Free, the Shannon Airport and the first Special Economic Zones (which later inspired Shenzhen!). Definitely worth a listen!
      • In the 1930s, the flights from NYC to London needed refueling, so they set up the Shannon airport.
      • A man named Brenden O'Regan started doing some of the food there (and later invented the Irish Coffee -- though the wiki page is contentious on the first one).
      • They implemented the first Duty free shop in an airport and later expanded the idea of a tax free zone to a fenced perimeter.
    • As for chips, the limestone and lack of seismic activity means litho machines are very stable.
    • There is chip industry in Shannon/Limerick, Cork, and Dublin (with different companies, focus areas)
    • Like many other industries, there are hiring problems
    • The ADC research world isn't that large.
    • Current ADCs allow a different design methodology and can allow for removing a transimpedance amplifier in front of an ADC circuit.
    • But putting it all on one chip is difficult
    • 1.2V core voltage rail on 65nm, so there are many power considerations
    • Why measure current? Parasitic capacitance of each transistor is getting lower, so it gets easier to estimate "filling up buckets" with current.
    • Ring oscillator
    • Relaxation oscillator - sometimes these are shown as 3 inverters connected in series
    • Want it to look like a sawtooth waveform. Dual slope ADCs also use sawtooth waveforms to capture information.
    • What tools are available for tweaking the output on a chip design?
    • Knows it's roughly 70 ps to dump charge
    • Currently they are mid precision (8 bits-ish) at MHz capture rates
    • The chips were designed using the Cadence toolchain
    • MPW is run by Europractice, which is similar to MOSIS
    • The chip is 4x4 mm and certain high density runs get more. Anthony got about 100 chips back and it cost them 3.5K as an academic institutin
    • The MPW was sent to TSMC
    • There are different board level packaging options from Europractice
    • Building test boards as a chip designer is a different experience. IC software is more constrained than PCB CAD software, even made by the same company like Cadence.
    • P Cell - Parameterized cell
    • The PDK from the fab is for the digital designers, but analog designers use it too.
    • In the chip EDA space: there is Cadence and Synopsis
    • Anthony added a graphic of a pair of "Shorts" to the metal layer
    • LVS - Layout vs schematic is the method of checking between the two elements of chip design.
    • Transistors are a 4 terminal device, you need to think about the body of the chip and how current will flow in the substrate. Chris and Anthony discuss whether this should be the first thing learned in the mental model of a transistor.
    • Building higher level components on a design using re-usable blocks.
    • Anthony needed to design the digital section of the chip as well, which written in verilog
    • He had to downsample the data output on chip and deserialize it.
    • Verilog gets synthesized to gate level (using the PDK) and then there is an interface between analog and digital sections
    • You can separate different parts of the design by implementing "deep N-well"
    • Advice from supervisor - "A PhD is like a religion, it means nothing to anyone else apart from you...you [need to] do it because you believe in it"
    • During his PhD, Anthony has been teaching non linear circuits. A small pandemic silver lining is the change in teaching forma: notes handouts, lectures recorded by default (which can be paused), flipped classroom where they can go over home work in Falstad
    • Get in touch with Anthony!
      • Twitter
      • His research site (with his contact info)
      • Direct email: aw@anthonywall.ie

    Chip Layout:

    The 5 small sections down the middle are the ROSCs, the big block in the middle is the synthesised digital (mostly very expensive decoupling cap, with some digital that you can see as a messy glob in the mid-right), the bottom is a 100 ohm termination resistor & the clock buffer.

    Die Shot:

    On the die micrograph, you can see the density fill pattern we discussed (small squares). These are on the ~order of the wavelength of light, so they cause the diffraction pattern seen also. The bigger wires you can see are the power distribution network. You can also see the split between analog (left) and digital (right) on the IO ring to separate the power domains. If you REALLY zoom in, you can see different colour shading in the green regions (look in the ROSCS and CLK buffer); These are transistors.

    Histogrammic or Histomagraphical Feb 21, 2022
    Show notes
    • LUNA
    • ESP32-S2
    • TI is building new fabs in the US
    • Why are computers all 80 columns wide?
    • Unintended consequences: railways are about two horses wide
    • Chris has been reading Dealers of Lighning: Xerox PARC and the dawn of the computer age
    • Douglas Engelbart
    • "The mother of all demos"
    • Hackers - Steven Levy
    • Lee Felsenstein
    • SDS 930
    • Computer History Museum
    • Dave is thinking about getting a standing desk
    • Embedded World was rescheduled to June, Chris will be there!
    • Counterfeit copy of the bible
    • The ARM sale to NVidia will likely be blocked, they're going public instead
    • Open source solutions to problem sets in The Art of Electronics 3rd Edition
    • LaTeX
    • Quantum dynamics and the question from Veritasium
    • Xi'an AeroSemi (not "John Aerosmith") part that Chris is looking at
    • Wobbly 2400 SMU. Dave heard it could be a burnt out backup battery but wasn't able to validate that fix. Chris mentions a possible problem he heard about.
    • Combiscope repair
    • Tin Whisker growth
    Thanks to Pete Birkinshaw for the histogram(agraphical) image
    Previous 1 14 15 16 17 18 76 Next

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