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**The Amp Hour**

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

Latest Episodes:

Satellites and EVs with Joris Aerts Nov 23, 2020

Show notes

Welcome Joris Aerts of Hiber!

Joris introduced us to Maarten (CTO of Hiber), who we had on episode 427
Chris had asked Joris about Starlink, but it will require "the pizza box", which is a phased array modem that will track satellites to maintain connectivity as they pass overhead. That's different than how the Hiber setup works.
The Hiber team had a "theme song" as they were building the satellite: a polka
Chris worked on a project in college (a cardboard box maze) that played "James Brown is dead" over and over.
The Hiber satellite is a Cube Sat with 10x10x30 dimensions
Brock Lameres talked about high reliablity lock-step processors on episode 497
Old days was all rad hard
Satellites these days are "new stuff but super redundant". The main thing is making sure the box can gracefully reboot.
Data has checksums to ensure integrity.
They do statistical models on failed messages coming in and how likely they are to occur.
Downlink not turned on right now
Eccentric Orbits book
Solar panels degrade over time, becuase they collect high energy particles. Those impact the dopants in the semiconductor.
Lifetime expections of a satellite is about 4 years
Their current satellite will be going up in early 2021 with SpaceX
Shaun Meehan talked about watching some Planet Labs satellites blow up
On The Contextual Electronics Podcast, Chris interviewed Joe Barnard about launching model rockets and some of the failures he has to recover from.
The satellites orbit at 400 km above the earth
Joris was surprised that working on satellites is effectively like any other type of engineering
It has different constraints, compared to high volume applications
Having golden backup is key in low volume applications
They have a standard board form factor based on PC104
"Pumpkin space PC104"
Hiber is slowly moving away from that form factor, but there are benefits to using the standard.
The main element Hiber makes is an SDR + Zynq, and then there is a different board with a Linux controller for the whole system
Testing over CAN bus which Joris knew all about form his time working at Tesla
Cost factor is really important in a high volume application
Joris joined Tesla as an intern in 2011 and later joined full time
He worked on the electronics for the very fancy door handles on the model S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thaX-h4oTTI

LIN bus vs CAN bus
LIN Bus is single master, with a 12V transceiver
Working on a cable harness at an organizational level
Versioning is challenging but everything can be updated
Vertical integration helped with firmware deployment
Joris is working on a new form factor for testing boards (Not yet named)
Easy Phi
NI PXI
Link for satellite viz (Space Book)

Many thanks to our Patrons! You can join at Patreon.com/TheAmpHour if you’d like to join the crowd. A special thanks to our corporate sponsor Binho, who now distribute the Sensepeek PCBite.

Depth and AI with Brandon Gilles and Brian Weinstein Nov 16, 2020

Show notes

Welcome Brandon Gilles and Brian Weinstein of Luxonis Holding Corporation

They make the DepthAI system, which uses the Intel Movidius Myriad X
It was initially created for life safety problems, specifically targeted at distracted drivers.
There is research that a car horn on a bike can help to lower fatal interactions.
Brandon had multiple people in his life hurt or killed by cars while biking.
Though a systemic change is needed, a tech solution is more likely in the short term.
They built a hardware protoype and spent a couple hours of coding to prove out the concept.
"Depth perception + CV is a cheat code", but it needs to be useful in the physical world
No way to embed this much power
Current depth cameras on the market
- Intel D435
- Intel D455
Two camera solution senses the disparity in the images
AI (OpenCV) helps tell what is there (Car, bus, etc)
Intel compute sticks
Combining depth plus AI
There are other Myriad X SOMs
Jay Carlson episode where he was talking about SOMs and MIPI
2 lane vs 4 lane MIPI
Base boards open source on github
Luxonis did a Kickstarter with OpenCV and raised $1.4M
Working with vendors
Niche that didn't exist: embedded, low cost, fast boot, performant
OpenCV is a compiled library
PyTorch
DNN Module
DARPA grand challenge
OpenCV is a huge community
The DepthAI has bindings for ROS/Python
What is the Myriad X chip background?
Intel bought the Movidius team in 2016 (Vox)
28 processors on the die, with a "Network on chip architecture"
What gets access to the data from the camera first?
It is flexible, so the software configures it
Asymmetric fell out of favor
Geometries of the boards for the Kickstarter
0.4mm pitch, 400 pin BGA
OAK-1 has the color camera, OAK-D has the color camera plus stereo vision
December delivery, which they are on time for
Possible to get the boards right now at higher prices
They are working with Arducam to try and source different camera modules.
Lower cost overall will come from lower cost cameras
Camera module industry is very opaque
This is why there is a custom RPi camera
IMX 378
Apple and Android are doing visual depth preception on phones, including Apple's new LiDAR on the iPhone
Luxonis did a competition around spatial AI and got over 300 entries
Many of the entries involved "giving another sense" to the visually impared.
Following the bald referee
Privacy centric
What is edge computing?
"Embedded is barely a thing yet for AI"
OpenMV by Kwabena Agyeman works on a ST part
They are working on building out the team.
If you're a PCB layout engineer proficient in Altium, send them an email. (remember: The Amp Hour always recommends sharing a portfolio of your work)
SOM Info, including the pinout of the connector on the SOM, is on the github
For more information, check out Luxonis.com

Many thanks to our Patrons! You can join at Patreon.com/TheAmpHour if you’d like to join the crowd. A special thanks to our corporate sponsor Binho, who now distribute the Sensepeek PCBite.

Thermions Aren't A Thing Nov 09, 2020

Show notes

Chris has been diving into work (to ignore the US elections). He has also been enjoying OTA DFU with Nordic parts
1K video on EEVblog. There was also a Hackaday 1K contest.
BLE112 module
USB PD
Vishay Thermal jumper
Thermal design
Pick and place heat sink
"Thermion"
"Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks: Everything You Know About Cooling Electronics Is Wrong" by Tony Kordyban
Customized heatsink
345 KV / 34.5 KV videoes from 2 weeks ago
Rolling blackouts
Helicopter maintenance of power lines
FE exam
Delta and Wye configurations
Dave is wrappin up his lab move. He made a video about his custom storage for under bench.
Chris is also moving his desk home from mHUB (while staying a "shop" member) since COVID in the US is spiking (again)
Sparkfun introduced the A La Carte (ALC) service for creating PCBs with a point and click menu. This is similar to the Gepetto service from Gumstix. We expect to see more of these "non-layout based PCB tools" in the future.
AMD is buying Xilinx for $35B

Many thanks to our Patrons! You can join at Patreon.com/TheAmpHour if you'd like to join the crowd. A special thanks to our corporate sponsor Binho, who now distribute the Sensepeek PCBite.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the picture of thermion(ic emission)

Embedded Linux with Jay Carlson Nov 02, 2020

Show notes

Welcome Jay Carlson!

The new article "So you want to build an embedded Linux system" is 35,000 words. Why not a book?
Friend of the show Drew Fustini was on embedded last week talking about building Linux
Jason and Robert from BeagleBoard.org on TAH
"I'm your classic electrical engineer"
For the aforementioned article, Jay designed 10 boards with different application microprocessors.
Took 3 hours on the software side
Tweeted about baremetal vs linux

https://twitter.com/jaydcarlson/status/1313730320169078784

Device tree
Operating system
Object files in C
POSIX
A33
UBoot, Yocto, Buildroot
Building for the A33
Git repo
Olinuxino A33 board
Erik Larson on the Contextual Electronics Podcast
Want a good exercise for learning the build system? Change where the UART is located
What if they don't know linux?
"I just break stuff and cycle around and keep trying"
Twitter thread about linux shell commands
V3S Allwinner
Hackaday podcast talked about the 0.8mm pitch parts
Using higher grade parts to get more margin on (memory) parts
$50 bucks and a weekend
"Just try it"
10 breakout board with parallel board
Adding a new driver
NUC980 internal RAM
Student stories
- Spotify daemon
- Networking is "free"
- SDIO wifi module for $0.60
- Set top box example
Jay and Chris discuss a theoretical project, like a sous vide with a cap touch screen
How big is the screen? With most of the 10 boards shown, they'd be OK up to 5"
Newer displays have MIPI
Most parts are older and have parallel interfaces (which can be an EMI risk)
MP1 and A33 only have MIPI
LVDS
Video of the QT5 demo
iMX8 is another category of layout
Robert Ferenec course
NUC
Research lab at Univ Neb - Lincoln
Occult tracking of pigs
When do you switch down to a micro?
STM32F7
Power considerations
$1 microcontroller article
When should you use an RTOS?
For most programs running on Linux, Jay recommends to wrap it in a while 1 loop.
"Linux benefits from the whole human race"
Combining low power and high power systems. Sometimes Jay will send data over USB (if he needs high speed transfer) or set up SPI/I2C for direct control.
MP1 and AM335x have built in micros
Listener questions!
"Have any vendors contacted him to use his designs as a devkit or just permission to promote it? He mentioned working with one on GitHub for bug fixes but I think that was it."
- Ran a verison without serpentine traces
- Overclocking the memory chip to try and break it
- Vendors should use a 0.1" form factor
"What CAD package did he use for all of those boards?"
- Altium
What core elements does he try to address in the class, and as embedded systems change where does he see intro course work going?
- Intro embedded systems class
- Working on a platform to learn embedded systems
- Jay talked extensively about engineering education on Embedded.fm episode 303
Which of the three pinmux tools (NXP, TI or ST) did Jay like the most?
- All similar
Assume I now working hardware (an iMX6ULL series board) as a base I can work upon. After what complexity point should I consider using this embedded linux system in a project?
Any luck interfacing with current smartphones cameras?
- Camera modules will be raw output over MIPI
Do you see embedded linux, combined with something like etherCat or modbusTCP, as a viable replacement for PLC machines?
- This is the type of application the AM335x is targeted at
How much did he use the dev board from each part before making its own board ?
- Not much. Most went straight to proto. THe STM32MP1 dev board stinks as a SBC.
Hard RealTime Linux for safety applications. Why is it a good idea and why it's a horrible idea?
How good are different silicon vendors about upstreaming their kernel patches?
- What is upstreaming?
- Smart cameras and rear cameras example
- Quectel module with Android
Why Lincoln, Nebraska?
Yes Man
Jay now works for Virtual Incision, a surgical robot company located in Lincoln.

You can find Jay via his website JayCarlson.net. You can also find him on twitter at @jaydcarlson.

Thanks to our Patrons for sponsoring today’s episode. You can become one of them by going to Patreon.com/TheAmpHour. A special thanks to our corporate sponsor Binho.

Focus, Dammit Oct 25, 2020

Show notes

We resume our discussion of "specialist" vs "generalist", as discussed many other times on the show.
We started out talking about how Chris recently hired Bilal, who is a great developer focused on Zephyr. We discuss how that kind of focus can be useful to a young developer.
Chris was first exposed to Zephyr on the BeagleConnect, a new IoT product that uses Greybus coming from the BeagleBoard.org foundation soon.
Past guest Greg Davill - MJ of home assembly?
10x engineer
Book recommendations:
- Ultralearning
- Mastery
- First 20 Hours
Anti-Recommendation
- Range
Tom Brady talking about his improvment over time
Michael Phelps (long arms, swimmer) vs Hicham El Guerrouj physiology (long legs, distance runner). Chris later realized this was discussed in James Clear's Atomic Habit book.
Nick Yarris on the Joe Rogan podcast
Should we have called the episode, "Chris and Dave talk sports"?
Next week we'll have Jay Carlson on to talk about his recent tome on building Embedded linux systems, ask your questions here.
Jay also wrote The Amazing $1 microcontroller
Chris used the "Send to Kindle" Chrome plugin to read on his Kindle
Jay has been on two great episodes of Embedded.fm, 226 and 303
The $1 micro page is how Chris started working with the EFM8LB1
Raspberry Pi 4 Compute was recently announced
It is on an 8 year cycle. No one wants to get a "Last time buy" notice, espeically when designed into an industrial scenario.
Baremetal programming on the TinyAVR 0
Chris was surprised Dave hadn't heard of a "long range radio power transmitter", but apparently it's an older article!
Bare Conductive (where past guest Stefan Dzisiewski-Smith works) wrote about how they have maintained an office, albeit changed in the era of COVID
Dave mentioned Altium used to have "half cube" (low walls) but not like the startups do with a truly open office plan.
WeWork has glass boxes
Dave is downsizing commercial property
"Does this DMM bring me joy?" a la Marie Kondo
Both Dave and Chris downsizing
Dan Anderson, the creator of the pink polyethelene bags, talks about static (content warning: not PC)
345 kV substation and 34.5 kV substation reviews

Thanks to our Patrons for sponsoring today's episode. You can become one of them by going to Patreon.com/TheAmpHour. A special thanks to our corporate sponsor Binho.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Audio DSP with Shannon Parks Oct 19, 2020

Show notes

Welcome Shannon Parks of Parks Audio!

We haven't had many audio guests selling directly to the consumer.
Chris rewatched High Fidelity recently and was spotting Chicago locations.
Adam Savage visits Jack White's pressing factory in Detroit (Third Man Records)
2014 recordstore day in Bloomington Illinois
"Zoomers"
Parks Audio's main product is the Puffin Phono pre-amp
Does Shannon have grumpy customers? No more than other industries. But he has been doing product research by emailing with audio people for many many years.
Record player cartridge
Here are some record equalization standards from the 1930's to 1970's
"A lot of engineers think these audio guys are crazy with the terms they use and the snake oil devices. The words might not be correct, but they're talking about real problems they have"
- "The music sounds thin"
- "I want more warmth"
- Warmth is a balance of the lower frequency vs higher frequncy
- Mastering engineers do this all the time
Ben Krasnow needle in the groove
Hi Fi sound in the late 50s
LPs blew away 78s
Edison vs Berliner
What is the Puffin and what's inside it?
- The main element is a Cortex M4
- Analog front end
  - Pre-amp
  - ADC
  - Power supplies are switchmode above 50 kHz
defeatable tone controls
Graphic EQ
Sliding filters like on Instagram
Hagerman site on cartridge impedance and loading. You can't assume it's a flat line.
Shannon adjusts for cartridge in DSP.
Tooling and testing for DSP was originally done in Matlab
Do you visualize the sound input?
Using Matlab's FVtool, he can work with Pre-calculated coefficients and see what might happen on the output.
Tilt function
Talking 3 different coding languages
On the most recent update to the code, he started writing in assembly to lower latency, which is a problem for audio products.
Doing everything with 64 kB
Interrupt based timings
Looking at Cortex M7 like on the Teensy 4.0
Floats to target FPU
Went to fixed point math last year
Previous guest Eli Hughes has videos about fixed point math
- https://youtu.be/bbFBgXndmP0
- https://youtu.be/7pkXlcapNB4
- https://youtu.be/SrELHqRqKjo
Getting rid of pops and clicks with the "Magic" firmware update being developed for the past year.
PDF from early 90s, "record restoration"
Working and focusing on a single product
Previous product was the "Budgie" - tube phono preamp
- Lead bending
- Solder bath
Parks Audio is a one person factory (two since his wife helped with Budgie assembly!)
Macrofab does the assembly for the Puffin units
"I can monkey around with DSP for the rest of my life"
Dealing with FBA
Steve Ballmer talked about Microsoft working with IBM. It was like "Riding the bear" (try not to fall off)
1000 true fans by Kevin Kelly
Responding to email
Get in touch!
- Parks Audio homepage
- Facebook group
- Youtube
- Buy on Amazon
Bonus link from Shannon:
- One more possible link - though previously unmentioned - would be to "Digital Signal Processing Using the ARM Cortex M4" by Donald S. Reay. You were basically asking me how to "Get to Blinky" with DSP, and I focused more on the prototyping tools with Matlab and Python - probably because I end up having many more hours doing that work than writing C code. But Prof Reay's book lays everything out in black and white by using the STM32F407 Discovery board and Wolfson Audio Card to start creating digital filters (both still available). It has actual C code - not snippets but actual files that compile with Keil (free under 32kB) - and walks you through everything. As soon as I started reading it, I knew it would "get me to blinky" and I'd be able to do anything I wanted DSP-wise. It's what I recommend to folks that email me wanting to get into DSP.

Thanks to our Patrons for sponsoring this show! A special thanks to our corporate sponsor, Binho!

Design For Longevity Oct 12, 2020

Show notes

Chris has a remote troubleshooting setup for his ABC boards
Dave once designed PCBs over remote desktop
Chris had to do remote chip design in college...while trying to learn Unix at the same time
"The Best Software of PCB Design EVER" on the EEVblog forum
Educational curriculum laziness (not wanting to make new content). We discussed this a little with Brock Lameres when he as on the show.
CU Boulder has an IIOT learning track that looks interesting. But is it worth $500 per class? Maybe!
Sydney / Dublin / Washington accord
EEVblog #1175 video about accords
Mike Engelhardt episode
Playstation 5 (PS5) teardown
We had a question on our subreddit about whether we get overwhelmed by learning electronics
App note about MPPT on the BQ25895
Past guest Dave Young has made a dev board for Voltaic that has built in MPPT directly on the charge controller chip (BQ24650)
A DIY VNA that can go up to 6 GHz! (Chris stated the low cost VNAs can't go past 1 GHz, which it turns out isn't true)
Shahriar's Deepace review
Charging plates
Dave experienced the high speed charging problem on his Ioniq
Dave reviewed electric buses and the infrastructure around them
Luigi recommended a catch phrase for Chris at sign off

Brewing Electronics with Eli Hughes Oct 05, 2020

Show notes

Eli helped Chris out with some Zephyr stuff recently!
His background is in low level embedded, c, RTOS
He got FreeRTOS running at a conference after sitting with someone who convinced him to consider an RTOS instead of just a superloop.
RTOS book
Traffic analogy
Pyrotechnics
Eli was a guest on The Macrofab Engineering Podcast, not too long ago and gave some great background info there as well.
Transitioning from FreeRTOS to Zephyr
Eli loved nordic parts
KConfig and Device Trees
Nordic tutorials
Eli has a talk coming up at Altium live about his experience in engineering
Rick Hartley
Lee Richey
"Being a student for the rest of your life"
What is TZero building? A Tri Clamp based hydrometer that talks over cellular
Had been a consultant most of his career, at least on the side
SBIR
There are companies just diong SBIR grant writing
Eli met an investor who said, "The product sucks, but the team is great" and became their patron/investor
Sounds like Gerry Roston, former guest of the show
Mark Barnhart of NPC
Jeri Ellsworth episode where she talks about silicon valley.
Starting narrow but going horizontal
Saving time by going cellular
Amper is a company shipping out celluar data to monitor shop floor processes (based out of mHUB)
Making a flexible solution
Send all data to the cloud, to cut down on firmware
"Wifi is free"
Videos of tri clamps failing on YouTube
Tzero ships the sensor to the brewers for install, so it's a very hands-off process (no field support required)
Glycol (used for cooling) process monitoring is another area they're getting into
Wendover productions video about COVID vaccine shipping
SynBioBeta Conference
Impossible burger
"Everyone loves just-in-time (logistics) until things blow up"
Working relationship with NXP
Videos for the Freescale cup
Codewarrior
After the NXP and Freescale merged, found out about "Pro Support"
They are like internal mercenaries/paratroopers, for hire out to NXP's customers
Eli has been writing about parts that just came out, like the LPC55S69
For more info about Eli's company, check out tzerobrew.com
Find Eli online:
- LinkedIn
- Twitter @EMH203

Thank you to our Patrons for sponsoring this week's show! You can join them at Patreon.com/TheAmpHour. A special thanks to our corporate sponsor: Binho, makers of the Binho Nova

Knob and Tube Wiring Sep 29, 2020

Show notes

Want an Amazon Ring Drone in your house?
Dave is back in his old lab and his mic was not working.
Tel Aviv charging electric buses via the road?
3 classes of charger in Australia for EVs
- 240V * 10 A = 2400W
- 240V * 30A = 7200W
- 3 phase = 22 kW
Knob and tube wiring
CCS connector
Can you plug into most connectors? There are Type 1 and Type 2, with adapters.
Dave plans to review the protocol
Tesla Battery Day (summary) video
Buy or build a powerwall?
Chris has been reading "Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers: Building real-time embedded systems using FreeRTOS, STM32 MCUs, and SEGGER debug tools"
TV that turned off wifi to a UK village every morning for 18 months
Single high-level impulse noise (SHINE)
50% pre and post triggering
Bunnie has a new open source RISC V "phone" coming out soon, focused on security
Quectel plug in module (SA800UWF) with Android ready to go
8 Bit Guy reviews 108 obsolete types of media

Thank you to our Patrons for sponsoring this week's show! You can join them at Patreon.com/TheAmpHour. We'd also like to welcome our first corporate sponsor, Binho. Check out our interview with Binho founder Jonathan Georgino in episode 461.

Cellular IoT with Jared Wolff Sep 20, 2020

Show notes

Welcome Jared Wolff of Circuit Dojo!

Jared is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology (which Chris also considered attending). He did co-ops while there, like we talked about on last week's episode.
While on co-op at Cisco, he was in the cable group and marveled at the techs doing repairs with magnet wire.
He is an east coast guy at heart, so he moved back to Connecticut eventually
Jared worked at Apple for a while, but the lifestyle is difficult because of time requirements and stressful travel. He was also there when Steve Jobs was still around and there was a bit of over the top hero worship.
Nordic's early bluetooth chipset was the nRF8001, which was a transceiver over SPI (no micro)
Working for startups was interesting if you thrive on doing a lot of different things
Burnt out on his last startup, decided to ride his motorcycle up and down the west coast. He got sick and ended up diagnosing himself with Valley Fever, a fungal infection prevalent in one of the places he visited.
After healing up, he went to Taiwan for 4-6 monhs.
There is a semiconductor fabrication program at RIT. There is a silicon ingot in a display case out front there.
While recovering from burnout, a previous mentor hit him up for the IoT project.
Mix of international and domestic manufacturing in his past
A lot of military nearby in CT
Comparison quotes with Taiwan, it was only a few dollars more for domestic production.
Currently building a board with an nRF9160 module, the new cellular module from Nordic Semiconductor.
Current status of nRF9160 is that it is shipping and working on different carriers throughout the world on Cat M1 networks.
What does it take to get a modem talking to towers?
Modems abstract commands in software
Jared will be testing for FCC, ISED, CE
Working with Resin
The cellular module is pre-certified but carriers still want you to test your design on their network.
Verizon requires over the air firmware capabilities, in case something goes wrong. The nRF91 firmware OTA is on the application side, which is unusual.
Jared is hoping the modem will have bluetooth at somepoint as well. The external wideband antenna he is using might be good enough.
Crowdfunding had an external antenna included.
There are different categories of cellular service. Most cellphones operate with Cat 4 or Cat 6 connections. The higher the category, the faster the speed.
Cat M1 is the slowest on LTE. NB-IOT is different equipment, so it isn't even considered to be LTE.
Based on the development from Nordic, Jared is using Zephyr to run his board.
It's an Real Time Operating System, but "feels" like linux for embedded. Zephyr is built on top of the chip's SDK. "West" is the downloader that pulls in necessary dependencies, based upon a definition file.
Huge library of boards available
Jared wrote a post on how to create your own drivers on Zephyr
The Device tree maintains swappability
The nRF91 board is based on the adafruit feather form factor. Jared had previously created the air quality wing, which had various sensors:
- TVOC
- Humidity / Temp
- Particulate sensor
Compatibility matrix on the Nordic site
Chris recommends checking what kind of coverage you have with open signal.
Though the first board run is no longer for sale, some boards are available soon. You can get a discount on a board at jaredwolff.com/amphour
You can also follow along on Jared's progress on his blog, where he also writes about firmware tests.

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