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:

The Automation Amish Jul 10, 2017

Show notes

Image credit to the Weird Al classic

Dave has been having computer troubles (again).
New chips from TI can do 80GHz. Like usual, the hardest part is getting the demo up and running.
The Flashing Light Prize is on! We watched Ben's entry, but there are a lot of familiar faces. Check out the site to see who's already entered. Goes until August 2nd.
The constraints are what matters. The 1 square inch contest and the 1K contest were also fun.
The Lunar X prize is still going (as well as many other challenges). Dave has done a video about it in the past with a participant who has since dropped out.
CastAR has shut down. We've had Jeri on the show many times in the past.
Former guest Ian and his company Dangerous Prototypes has started offering custom cables using an online builder.
SKU
Build your own voice assistant with SNIPS
Dave is going to become Automation Amish
We've had a voice controller project on the show in the past when Gerald and Bertrand came on to talk about Audeme
Dave was a fan of Firefox with Clint Eastwood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5DsLow4SVQ

Intel has discontinued their Joule, Galileo and Edison platforms.
Zeptobars continues to make some rockin die-shots!
- Fake 555s
- Batteroo
- ST-2STD1665
The thermal transfer rate across a die is surprisingly slow. Adding a special macro lens to a thermal camera might help see the transfer.
65C02 teardown. We had Chuck Peddle on the show in the past, arguably our most famous guest!
Though we had a little trouble at first, we googled around and realized the differences between CMOS and NMOS.
GlobalFoundries is already starting on 7 nm wafers!
You can still buy a 130-in-1 kit from Sparkfun (Chris thought these were no longer made)
The CSR8645 has an insane amount of stuff in it! These are the chipsets used in "bluetooth speaker" that spam emails want to source for you.
The amount of stuff on-die is reminiscent of the conversation with Jorgen about hearing aid chips.

An Interview with Zach Dunham Jul 03, 2017

Show notes

Welcome Zach Dunham of Kickstarter!

Zach has a music background with experience in pro audio (he obviously didn't record this show because it doesn't sound all that great). He later dreamed of becoming a Foley artist.
His first Kickstarter project (before working there) was the public radio. This has recently relaunched as a Kickstarter Gold project!
The original project had 1700 backers and sold an additional 400 after the campaign. The project was on Grand St, which was purchased by Etsy.
Zach took the MIT 6.002x class with some friends, including former guest Todd Bailey.
Bolt Boston meetup
Their manufacturing was with friends in a warehouse, referred to as "Manufacturing salons".
A Raspberry Pi running PiFM would help to program the radios.
The radios contain the FM IC from Silicon Labs, the SI4702
Hackaday post on FCC
Kickstarter is a "public benefit corporation" which is even more stringent than a B corp.
Each year they publish their stats
They have a Policy and Integrity team that helps to fight scam projects.
Read more about their Community here
The Neolucida was another successful project that was at Maker Faire Bay Area. It's coming back as an "XL" version.
If you want updates from any project, back the project with $1.
A while back, Kickstarter sent out a request for projects. Zach is the outreach coordinator on creative tools. Heather in the UK works on design projects and Clarissa in the Bay Area does science and exploration.
Wazer was a good example of one of the projects they'd look to have on their site.
Kickstarter is not a store.
A while ago they launched Kickstarter Live which is meant to connect project creators directly with backers.
Their newest initiative is the Hardware Studio, which is a joint venture with Avnet and Dragon Innovation.
Founder of Dragon, Scott Miller has been on the show in the past.
Andrew Seddon was also mentioned, a past guest.
They needed to troubleshoot the radio front end. It turned out to be the Class D amp interfering with the frequencies.
Ben from Bolt wrote that "Kickstarter is debt". This was also said by Kane Hsieh who gave a talk at Chris's meetup recently.
There is a "Right way to fail"
The Toolkit knowledge base will be one of the first things to launch from the Hardware Studio.
Connection is a program members will be able to apply for (the "approved" projects)
Perpetual motion TED talk
Check out Zach's personal site or follow him on Twitter.
As a reminder, they recently relaunched the Public Radio on Kickstarter and you can back it!

An(other) Interview with Jon Oxer Jun 26, 2017

Show notes

We once again welcome Jonathan Oxer!

Jon was previously on episode 123 of The Amp Hour.
Jon runs Superhouse.tv, a channel about creating home automation. He also runs Freetronics, a kit company run out of Melbourne, Australia.
Jon also previously had a software company, which he sold at an effective loss. During the job search, Jon got frustrated with the requirements for most jobs and posted about it on Facebook.
In the past, Jon has felt imposter syndrome (so say we all)
He may end up doing consulting, Chris recommended this document about being a good consultant.
DIY home automation
Power-Over-Ethernet isn't talked about as much as it was, but is still a popular category for Freetronics.
Jon helped to design the Ardusat, which had a very different set of constraints. It had a total production run of 5
The Lightning McQueen teardown was impressive for how it was constructed.
Jon was impressed by a totally robotic milking system.
If you like drones, you should check out the UAVfutures YouTube channel.
Sumo bots are small competitive robots that try to knock their competitor out of the circle.
LIN interface Superhouse.tv episode
Angus Gratton hung out with Jon and Chris and consulted on all things ESP32 for Jon.
Chris discussed "replay circuits" which seems like it would make it easy to "clone" a device controller. Jon can emulate using a 433 MHz shield he designed. He has given a conference talk about it as well.
Samy and Joe scared Chris into thinking about security (among others).
OpenHAB is a way to control devices throughout the home.
Jon talked in a past video about the risks of having a device "calling home" as a method of control.
Want to hire Jon? Email him here.
Follow him on Twitter as @JonOxer
Check out his sites: Superhouse.tv and Freetronics.com.au

An Interview with Art Kay Jun 18, 2017

Show notes

Welcome, Art Kay of Texas Instruments!

Art started working as a test engineer at then Burr Brown, located in Tucson, AZ.
They had a 4 inch wafer fab on site, which is now gone.
The two stages of test engineering were:
- Initial stuff - "Characterization"
- Ongoing testing - "Test"
Art worked in test in the following groups
He then moved into factory application engineering, often focusing on electrical overstress issues.
These days Art has been recruiting at Universities. Hobby interests continue to look good on resumes.
The Analog Engineers Pocket Reference, written with Tim Green
There is also an analog engineers calculator which covers similar things but online.
There are 1000s of op amps and 100s of data converters
Art's main passion these days is working on Precision Labs. There is one for op amps and will soon be one for data converters.
We're glad to see technical content instead of Zombie videos coming from TI!
The Precision Labs has a section that uses the National Instruments VirtualBench, discussed previously.
Art is now an application manager for the SAR converter group.
These are now getting up to 20 bits and significant speeds. The power consumption (like the nanoSAR) continues shrinking as well.
SAR converters
Delta Sigma Converters
Art also has a book available on Amazon! Operational Amplifier Noise Techniques. This was derived from the content formerly on the En Genius site.
You can find Art on LinkedIn or on E2E (requires login)
If you're interested in working with him, check out the TI careers page

Re-scoping the problem Jun 13, 2017

Show notes

New podcasts
- Restart
- Hardware entrepreneur
- EWOD
- (Missed one!) Stemiverse
Tek released their 5 series scopes, Dave has a take on it here. Summary: Lecroy beat them to the punch with the HDO8000
Power rail sequencing video
Dave uses his Casio calculator which has some sweet EE functions.
Siglent entry level 200 MHz - Teardown
This entry got an extra spot in the contest for being awesome:

https://twitter.com/TheAmpHour/status/862484282002075648

Pete gave a talk about building a VNA without knowing much about it. Now he's selling it on Kickstarter.
Worst PCB ever
IBM at the 5 nm node!
Remember memristors?
Thank you to everyone who participated in our contest! Here are the winners:
- Enrique Vetere
- Ståle Sætervik

An Interview with Joe FitzPatrick Jun 05, 2017

Show notes

Welcome, Joe FitzPatrick! (@securelyfitz)

Joe got started working at a CPU vendor, analyzing verilog and hardware for vulnerabilities. He moved on to training people in the company to look for these as well.
Afterwards, he moved to a private company doing trainings with his company SecuringHardware.com
Joe worked on a part of the NSAplayset, specifically the Slot Screamer, which works over PCI express. Ulf Frisk later built a software suite for it that auto ran a bunch of commands.
A recent snafu with software behind the mirror...

https://twitter.com/securelyfitz/status/870348354022133762

With USB-C, every device needs to be smart. If you want to watch traffic you need to do so with a tool like USB Proxy (Dominic Spill). The other Great Scott Gadget being used for USB analyisis is the Daisho (Jared Boone)
Thunderbolt3 converged with USB C.
We had previously talked about USB C when Jason Cerundulo was on talking about his EZ Bake Oven.
Joe talks about "hardware implants"
JTAG, SVF files
Oregon professional engineer who was getting sued
Bug bounty companies like Bug Crowd
There is an ISO standard about security disclosures
Joe will be at Recon helping with former guest Dmitry Nedospasov's training about using programmable hardware devices to test vulnerabilities.
There is a new joint group of trainings happening Nov 6-9 in San Francisco. More info can be found here: HardwareSecurity.training
devtty0 on Twitter
Joe's talk about compromising a yubikey and an RSA Token. Slides can be found here.

Joe's final words: Trust, but verify

Chris is still frightened.

Milling About May 31, 2017

Show notes

We referenced a TON of past guest shows this week:
Dave and David have been fixing up a microscope.
Chris got back from Maker Faire and some very nice people showed up for his talk. There were also some crazy demos:
- Intel/Microsoft had a demo that identified gender, age and if the person was smiling pretty accurately. Felt like the pizza shop that was doing the same.
- IBM quantum computers were running user code
- There was a younger lady from Australia at Maker Faire showing off a homemade particle accelerator.
Automation craziness in a grocery store/warehouse.
Chris likes NYC CNC's Fusion 360 tutorials
David2 prefers Solidworks, because of the integration with Altium.
Dave liked eMachine shop, which was a intuitive interface for Dave to build project boxes.
Bre Pettis purchased OtherMachineCo, makers of the Othermill.
Dave talked about getting a 24 hour turn in his PCB manufacturing video for the Nixie board.
The milling machines use copper clad FR1 (phenolic paper) vs FR4
Dave is considering registering as an educational organization for tax purposes. But it probably isn't worth the hassle.
Kickstarter, Avnet and Dragon Innovation announced a partnership to help funding campaigns make more manufacturable hardware.
Dragon used to have a crowdfunding platform that was shuttered.

Thanks to all of our Patreon supporters! Thanks to Bill Automata for the picture of the milled circuit board.

Back Into The Swing Of Things May 14, 2017

Show notes

After a recovery hiatus, Chris and Dave are back to record a show. No, it’s not any better than it used to be. The downward trend continues.

Chris relaunched Contextual Electronics! There is a new site for serving up content and a bunch of new content on there with more on the way!
There is also a new Contextual Electronics forum!
The EEVblog forum was discussing a recent hackaday article about whether former guest Robert Ferenec's Fedevel course is worth it. We think so!
We had lots of responses on our educational loans survey, thanks! Here are the results (no identifying info included).
Check out the highlights from the EEVblog/Amp Hour meetup in Sydney!
You can see where Voyager2 is currently.
Check out the EEVdiscover videos about the dish we went to go see in Canberra.
Chris attended the (rainy!) Science March in DC.
Nvidia is releasing a next-gen GPU board called the Volta
At the Melbourne meetup, Andy Gelme mentioned that machine learning is the way forward robotics. It may obviate (or reduce) the need for Inverse Kinematics.
Before Dave got the BSOD, Chris was reading about Chicago's various maker spaces, amateur and pro.
Dave has a work experience student for a week and was dismayed at the lack of options they have at that school.
Dave ordered boards from Elecrow during his Nixie tube video.
TED -> DAVE
Should you build your own SMT line?
Chris is building the ControlLeo2 reflow oven at home.
Video Speed Controller plugin makes any HTML5 video faster or slower.
Industry news
Chris will be out at Maker Faire next week giving a talk (4:30 on Sunday) There are other fun events too! Here's what Chris will be at:
- Thursday May 18th - HDDG21 featuring former guest Avidan Ross as a speaker.
- Friday May 19th - Paella Dinner at Maker Faire (invite required, Chris is going as a speaker)
- Saturday May 20th - Hackaday's Bay Area Maker Faire Saturday Party
- Sunday May 21st - OSHpark sponsored Bring A Hack party

Thanks to Halfrain for the picture of the swings.

Shahriar and Dave Chat May 08, 2017

Show notes

Shahriar has been on The Amp Hour before, on episode 228.

Check out the directions for the 2017 scope contest!

The Signal Path YouTube channel

Road trip to the deep space network Apr 17, 2017

Show notes

Dave and Chris record while driving to the Deep Space Tracking Network in Canberra!

We had a successful meetup in Sydney. People posted lots of pictures to the meetup page.
Check out what the DSN is tracking on any given day here: https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
The Dish
Dave has been posting his videos since this was recorded, including announcing a new channel. Be sure to subscribe!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzRP1qdwPKw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rCrfQUcXDI

We also talked about education and the stark difference in costs between the US and AUS. Please fill out this survey about the cost of your university:

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