The Amp Hour

Latest Episodes:

Motivational Speaker May 05, 2019

Show notes

KiCon is over! The only thing that really went wrong is Chris lost his wallet briefly.
Former guest Chris Anderson (@Chr1sa on twitter) is no longer going to TED conferences
Matt Foley motivational speaker
Simone Giertz is our only past guest who has given a full TED talk (?)
Derek Kozel
Dave "threw a grenade"
PCB wars
Dave made two predictions
- Displace the low end tools
- There will be a commercial venture supporting KiCad at some point
We discussed something similar in episode 188
KiCon Developer panel
Chris stood up a site for Reality Instruments, which is for add-ons for the Valve Index
Open source hardware
Names matter, don't lock yourself in
Trademarks and brands
Tim Poole of Subverse
Anki shuts down, lays off staff
They had just done a new Kickstarter project
Boston Dynamics' Spot Mini showcased during a Tech Crunch event
James Bruton
Silicon Valley is a documentary
The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley (documenatry about Elizabeth Holmes / Theranos)
Mousr
Brian Benchoff posts about the cost realities of low volume production
A twitter thread about #badgelife and getting started with electronics

Image from the SNL Sketch "Motivational Speaker"

#440.3 - Interviews with Anool Mahidharia, AJ Keller, Uriel Guy, Ste Kulov, and Craig Bishop at KiCon 2019 May 04, 2019

Show notes

Anool Mahidharia - Lumetronics
AJ Keller - Neurosity
Uriel Guy - Light Art
Ste Kulov - HD Retrovision
Craig Bishop - Craigjb.com
- Craig was also a guest on the Hackaday Podcast this week

#440.2 - Interviews with Greg Davill and Michael Ossmann May 01, 2019

Show notes

We sit down with Greg Davill and Michael Ossmann for two brief chats at KiCon 2019

#440.1 - An Interview with the core KiCad development team Apr 29, 2019

Show notes

This is the first of a couple episodes that will be posted from KiCon 2019.

This interview was in two parts with some of the developers from the KiCad project (there are many people involved with making KiCad a reality). We talked with:

Wayne Stambaugh
Maciej "Orson" Suminski
Tomasz Wlostowski
Jon Evans
Seth Hillbrand

Thanks to Piotr Esden-Tempski (our first remote correspondent) and Alvaro Prieto (co-host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast) for help with recording.

(Image above: Seth Hillbrand, Wayne Stambaugh (facing away from the camera), Maciej “Orson” Suminski, Tomasz Wlostowski, Jon Evans, all working together on KiCad development at the end of the conference)

Grow A Superbrain Apr 22, 2019

Show notes

Chris will be dealing with everything after KiCon
Cadence Allegro
The downsides of someone showing you how to do things
The Feynman method
- Pointer example
Current through a capacitor
Building up intuition first
100 page debate Walter Lewyn lecture on kirchoff
Electroboom built a device to test the theory (which started the debate on the forum)
Big Clive nearly put himself in the hospital!
Dave had a Nobel Laureate -- Barry Marshall -- over to the lab
Testing it on himself
Article discussing the signal integrity decisions of the BeagleBone Black
Eric Bogatin on The Amp Hour
1 in a million problems
Dave's example of a best case board
- gnd
- signal
- gnd
- signal
- gnd
- signal
- gnd
- signal
- gnd
- power
Choice of termination might matter more
Blind and buried is better than whole vias
Chris made a video about what blind and buried vias look like
PCB Shopper
Getting coupons for PCB reviews
Dave has been on YouTube for 10 years!
There will be a KiCad course at Microchip Masters
Latchup Conference is happening the first weekend in May in Portland
Former guest Bil Herd is doing a video series testing high speed PCB
Ring of Chronos high speed cameras
Former guest David Kronstein and his company Krontech are coming out with new v2.1, they did a teardown of the camera
Great Scott did a video about battery management
Solar plus storage costs are under $0.10 per kwh
Are the costs actually coming down?
There's nothing better than lithium ion coming soon
South Australia installation Saved $40M already
Chris has been listening to a book/lecture series about energy generation and storage
The KiCad banana!

Thanks to lady traveler for the brain mechanics picture

An Interview with Bart Dring Apr 15, 2019

Show notes

Welcome, Bart Dring!

Hobby of motion contollers and CNC
Got started at Williams pinball (who also make games like Joust and Space shuttle)
A lot of wear in pinball cabinets.
Got the itch to move onto a "real engineering" job.
Microwave for deep space networks
Multi kilowatt units with high power dissipation
Waveguide switches
Getting heat out of the potting
Used on things like news trucks and DSN satellites.
Military specs for harsh environment
CNC machines were discussed by past guests:
- John Saunders
- Nadya Peek
Sending steps to machines was easier with a parallel port. Now need something like a USB to parallel.
Started doing tutorials on Instructables, wanted to win a contest with a human powered Segway to win Epilog laser.
Started to document along the way on Buildlog.net
First comprehensive laser cutter kit out there, the 2.x laser sold 400 kits
Maker Slide was a system for building machines. The Kickstarter raised $25K
Since it was open source, others re-started KS campaigns 5 times around the world
Factory for extrusion is like 300m long
Wrote a yield optimizer to spit out a better way to cut material in his garage.
Laen (OSH Park) also talked about optimizers when he was on the show.
Approached Inventables to fulfill Maker Slide orders.
Worked out a deal for a royalty, they still pay it on orders.
Inventables makes Easel, which is a web based program for working with their routers.
Inventables also took on the Shapeko, designed by Edward Ford. That machine is made out of Maker Slide.
GRBL is the motion controller behind all of Bart's CNC machines.
It started with the creator interested in optimizing the code to put on an Arduino.
RAMPS controllers
Plug in stepper drivers
G-code
Bart ported GRBL onto PSoC5
Why PSoC5? Bart likes the graphical interface and uses it a lot for prototyping.
Motion planner
Started looking at ESP32 for Bluetooth/WiFi
Robots run off the phones
Angus doing Arduino stuff for Espressif helped to move things along.
API has public functions for RTOS, so it was harder in a real time control sense.
Plan was to use primary core for GRBL, other core for communication.
Bart put the project down for a while, but Jeroen Domburg (Sprite_tm) convinced him to try again.
The processor had a lot more RAM than other boards, especially Arduino.
Finished September 2018
Tindie sales
Complete web UI for sender
Web page has jogging controls and configuration
Hoping to put an Easel-like program on there
Nickelbot
Square coasters with traction feed (Coasty the Coaster Toaster)
Exotic kinematics
Polar coaster
Converting polar to Cartesian coordinates
Drawbot badge
Hobby servos
"Adorably wiggly lines"
Workshop at Supercon
Scripting in python
Polar Platform String Art Machine
Open loop vs closed loop
Twang
Follow Bart on twitter as @buildlog

An Interview with Chrissy Meyer Apr 08, 2019

Show notes

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Welcome Chrissy Meyer, partner at Root Ventures!

We previously had talked to Avidan Ross, the founder and partner at Root Ventures.
- 0h 0m 30s
They try to target talented founders and not the company
- 0h 3m 21s
Rose Hulman
- 0h 8m 10s
Lincoln Labs
- 0h 8m 49s
Went back to school at Stanford for an EE MS/PhD
- 0h 10m 42s
She started at Apple and the iPhone launched the first week on internship
- 0h 11m 27s

Started as a PM
- 0h 12m 55s
Anti-GANTT charts
- 0h 13m 29s
Baijiu
- 0h 15m 10s
Chrissy helped ship 3 generations of iPod touch, one nano and the beginning of the Apple Watch.
- 0h 16m 38s
Apple makes scaling look easy
- 0h 17m 5s
They have developed the formula over decades
- 0h 17m 28s
Walking into Foxconn
- 0h 18m 37s
Dealing with the different layers of manufacturing
- 0h 21m 5s
Final assembly and PCBA is normally the same location
- 0h 21m 20s
Vertical integration is more competitive at scale
- 0h 22m 22s
DJI is a good example
- 0h 22m 30s
Early stage startups have access to higher levels of integration...but it doesn't always make sense
- 0h 23m 37s
"Think really long and hard about who you're choosing, make sure [the manufacturer is] a good fit for your size and complexity"
- 0h 24m 41s
1 in a million problems are actual problems for high volume production.
- 0h 26m 17s
Tiger team
- 0h 26m 45s
The problem is getting a line moving
- 0h 28m 8s
Glue machines
- 0h 28m 56s
HDDG talk
- 0h 30m 1s
DfM
- 0h 33m 25s
Mechanical parts seem to have less consistency
- 0h 37m 38s
Electrical is a bit more cut and dried
- 0h 38m 43s
Big companies are talking to suppliers from day one
- 0h 41m 43s
With companies like Apple, these discussions are shrouded in secrecy
- 0h 42m 33s
"You have to be high touch if you want to be fast"
- 0h 43m 47s
Joined Square with 300 people
- 0h 46m 9s
Cost was everything
- 0h 46m 46s
Developing hardware for businesses was different
- 0h 47m 15s
Sales cycles can take a while
- 0h 48m 24s
It requires the perfect spacing between iterations
- 0h 49m 24s
Was a founding member of the startup Pearl Automation
- 0h 50m 41s
They made wifi based backup camera for users
- 0h 51m 42s
So much of startup success is timing
- 0h 52m 28s
Learned about how to be a startup, which was useful for her time now at Root.vc
- 0h 54m 30s
Different for VCs that write lots of checks
- 0h 56m 41s
Root invests in 6-8 companies per year
- 0h 57m 25s
Instrumental.ai
- 0h 59m 18s
They do final inspection that can automatically flag anomalies
- 1h 1m 0s
What are you Interested in the hardware space now?
- 1h 3m 24s
Chrissy is interested in tools for manufacturing, like supplier discovery
- 1h 4m 7s
We're far away from the promised "dark factories" in the world of automation
- 1h 4m 53s
Reach out about opportunities, either on LinkedIn or via their site.
- 1h 6m 30s
The next step is to come in to brainstorm!
- 1h 7m 47s

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Downward Sloping Trace Mar 31, 2019

Show notes

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Dave is judging the Keysight innovation challenge
EEs talk tech
May 1996 issue of Elektor had a very similar project to Dave's later project (which he didn't know about). He has previously reviewed Electronics Australia magazines and their demise.
ISP1016 CPLD
Dave made a video about the logic analyzer
40 MSPS
Timing analysis mode vs state analysis mode
Throwing a scope on it
Custom heat sinks
Volumetric efficiency
The form factor informs the design
Aluminum extrusion video (how to get the heat out)
Heat sink design video
Heat sinks on previous incarnation of uSupply
Plastic melt story
DP832 power supply has thermal shutdown problems
Error stack up inside on a hot sydney day
Precompliance
The Practicing Mind

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An Interview with Andreas Spiess Mar 25, 2019

Show notes

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Welcome, Andreas Spiess!

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You may know Andreas from his YouTube channel about connected devices and electronics, as "the guy with the Swiss accent"
The content on the channel is for intermediate people
A lot of his content is piecing things together
His newest video shows how to use tire pressure monitoring systems for home brewing
The advantage of age is having seen a lot and having "lots of hooks in the brain"
Goethe wrote "I didn't have enough time to make it this short"
Andreas got started in the 70s, working on a forbidden fm transmitter
CB radio wasn't allowed in Switzerland at the time.
He was in military service, where he learned Morse code.
He later worked in Cameroon and Damascus for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
After a degree in EE, he realized he made his hobby into his job.
After an MBA, Andreas started doing product management.
He also had a product that was a Morse code trainer. These were the topics of his first few videos on YouTube.
"Every engineer should go into sales" to learn about things like sales pressure and budgeting.
PhD in sales of investment goods.
Using tech used in manufacturing (SPC) but applied to sales.
First you had to find a process
ERP systems
Automation for buying parts
Rules are important for automation
"The most applied rule is 'it depends'. This requires trained people which is expensive."
Even AI is finding out the rules
"The most valuable world in the world is no"
ESP32, ESP8266
Rules based influenced on IoT interests
First computer was TRS80
James Bruton
Ben Krasnow's cookie machine
Ben Krasnow's video on laser traces.
Multiple Dimensions is a company that Andreas helped get started. They make 3D PCBs, shown in the video above.
Videos about antenna performance
Influence of battery life on antenna
Was first meant for PCBs and then later antennas were figured out
Sleepwalking an ESP32
Using both cores on the ESP32
Building a reggae robot.
AvE and This Old Tony
Fleet management
IoT App Story
OTA updates
Other things coming on the channel like BLE
Micro (circuit) python vs arduino
Will be doing a video with Damien George
Benchmarks of micropython
Check any of Andreas' videos for contact info. He's on FB and Twitter but mostly YouTube.

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