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:

Our first in-person show Apr 10, 2017

Show notes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN0E1HvFS1U

Chris and Dave record from the same room! Weird!

There will be a Sydney meetup, on Tuesday April 11th at 6 pm. More details here. You can also RSVP via meetup.com.
Chris will be doing a meetup in Melbourne on Tuesday the 18th, with details to follow. He also may get to tour the Syncrotron as Dave did a few years back.
Another sci-fi book recommendation, Chris just finished the first book of The Expanse (which is also a show now)
They were ordering pizzas via computers all the way back in the 70s!
Dave has played with voice chips in the past, like the SP256AL2.
The Octavo chip is the main package on the BeagleBone these days. Someone made a version that fits inside the small version of the altoid mint tin.
Microchip used to be called General Instruments.
Potato Semiconductor sells super fast 74 series chips.
Chris wrote about Continuous Integration in hardware.
There was a really good post about the depth of the Hardware Development Process.
Sandsquid is no more.
Dave needs to restock his microcurrent, but each time is re-figuring out the order process.
Amazon now has FPGA instances available via AWS.
If you're looking to learn FPGA stuff, we recommend things like the Arty board, the Papilio or the Xess boards.
Chris was amazed by the tenacity of Pete during this talk about building a VNA.

All the way with DLJ Mar 27, 2017

Show notes

Trip Planning! Chris has two meetups scheduled for NZ
- Meetup in Auckland on 3/30
- Meetup in Wellington on 4/1
Dave started making explainer vids using his new tablet. His first one was about digital logic.
There is a new printed magazine that will be starting in Australia called DIYode.
Want to read a bunch of old Bell Labs journals? Check out this collection of them on Archive.org
There is a great short course about Op Amp stability
Chris enjoyed this presentation about engineering documentation by one of the Hackaday writers.
We have a bunch of Amp Hour notebooks now, courtesy of former guest Ryan O'Hara.
US farmers are hacking their tractors with Ukranian cracked firmware so they can repair and upgrade the stuff they own. This is also a focus of the "Right To Repair" legal battle.
Former guest Louis Rossman is a big proponent of the right to repair, for obvious reasons.
Congrats to Photonic Induction for returning to the video world and for getting married! That dude looked super happy.
All the way with LBJ
Google Glass is dead. Long live, Google Glass! (industrially)
Apparently Swatch is getting into the operating system game? Oof.
Dave likes the new Rhode and Schwartz scopes. Mike Harrison just did a review of the new one for sale.

An Interview with Jason Cerundolo Mar 20, 2017

Show notes

Jason is currently an engineer at CastAR, who now have 100+ people! They work out of a space called Playground Global, who were also their lead investor in their A round.
Jason's side projects are done under a brand called Reclaimer Labs.
He also sells some of his projects on his Tindie store.
Jason did a talk about LED drivers at an SF meetup a few months ago. (slides are here)
The "Internet Window" has 25000 LEDs. Which apparently isn't that hard, even at a resolution of 128 x 64 LEDs. At a 3 mm pitch on the LEDs, the display is roughly 1 x 2 ft wide.
Most of his projects are connected via a Particle Photon.
The LEDs draw 5V at 16A in a normal state (with PWM). The incoming power is at 24V.
The "Internet of Thermocouples" was a weekend project to help his friend not have to go check the temperature on an induction over every couple hours.
Lately Jason has been prolifically posting about USB C. His latest project is building an easy bake oven.
The cables are "Electronically marked" and come in varying qualities online. There is a Google engineer who reviews USB C cables on amazon.
Some of the high level capabilities of USB C we learned:
- The Super speed pins can do video
- It's possible to easily deliver 15W (3A at 5V).
- The default is USB 2 high speed.
- The max speed of data is 10 Gbps x 4 lanes = 40 Gbps throughput.
Power delivery communication
USB developers page and download the zip files
VESA runs the display port spec.
Jason ported a library, which ended up being over 4000 lines of code. Google has open source code that was the basis of this project.
They troubleshoot with a Lecroy T2C USB analyzer.
The defaults don't really need much:
- One extra resistor to use USB C without a PHY
- 5V @ 500 mA - USB 2 high speed
- Can watch that pin to see if it's offering .5, 1.5 or 3 A
- Alternate modes
Follow Jason on twitter as @AscendedDaniel. Check out his blog and projects at ReclaimerLabs.com. You can also follow his code on GitHub.
They're hiring at CastAR! Firmware, EE, others

Look at nature and meet nerds Mar 13, 2017

Show notes

Chris is headed to Australasia in less than a month! Interested in meeting up? Check out the post about the trip here. And get in touch if you’re interested!

Dave has been hacking the 1000x scope (in two parts!): part 1, part 2
The bandwidth is tied to Claude Shannon's Information Theory.
Dave did a monster survey! Over 10,000 respondents. Chris thinks that there might be a slight cult of personality going on.
The Vault 7 was a huge CIA leak to Wikileaks.
Chris has been loving The Idea Factory (which he just finished). It was very interesting learning about the personal nature of a lot of the big names. Claude Shannon was a huge tinkerer who built flame throwing trumpets and rocket powered frisbees and Chess playing automatons
The AWS outage affected a bunch of IoT devices. Jon from Superhouse.tv made a video about how some devices went down.
There were some super fancy electronics created that can survive on the surface of Venus.
Elecia and Chris from Embedded.fm are doing March Madness for Microcontrollers
Dave has used the Basic Stamp in the past. It's actually a layer programmed on top of a PIC part.
There is an IoT Teddy Bear that was insecure and leaked a bunch of messages and images onto the internet.
We can speed up terraforming Mars if we (somehow) install a huge magnetic field.
Chris only understands terraforming from watching Firefly.
The Martian has been released in a "classroom friendly version".
Electric meters are reporting 6 times lower than normal, but Dave thinks it's likely just power factor.
Chris wanted to talk about the dangers of hooking signals directly to platforms like a Raspberry Pi.

Thanks to volvob12b for the picture of Millford Sound

An Interview with Jørgen Jakobsen Mar 06, 2017

Show notes

As mentioned in the intro blurb, Chris has revised his Australia / NZ plans and will be doing meetups. Check out the current plans and get in touch if you’d like to meet up!

Welcome Jørgen Jakobsen!

There is a large hearing aid industry in Copenhagen, based around acoustic companies in the area, as well as the Denmark Technical University (DTU), where there is a focus on IC design.
Jørgen's early job was at Ericsson.
Nokia was also a presence in Copenhagen, making the 3310 (which is making a comeback)
He left those to join a startup called Silicide with a former co-worker. Bluetooth spec was out, but the company only worked on the first 15 pages in their silicon (with external control).
The Die photo of the esp32 shows that 10% of the IC is the analog components.
The higher voltage process is often a BCD process. They are currently on 180nm, which suits their needs fine (especially because it's a well understood process node).
After the startup, he joined Oticon A/S. They had 10 analog IC designers!
A typical hearing aid is composed of
- 2 microphones
- Beam forming/noise cancellation
- ADC
- Filtering
- Compression
- Speaker
- Battery charging
- Sub 1mA
Thought they're starting to adopt bluetooth, many of the hearing aids need to still support Telecoil
The chip stack for a hearing aid is usually:
- DSP
- Analog
- Memory
It is overall an insular industry, because of the specific skills required and because of the patent pool that exists.
Testing chips needs to happen in less than 4 seconds, including all the analog tests.
Jørgen's latest enterprise is designing IC amplifiers at Merus Audio. These are all Class D amplifiers.
Maintaining at the halfway point between the 12V and GND, there are switching losses. They even patented how to turn on transistors in a new way!
- https://www.google.com/patents/WO2012055968A1?cl=zh
- https://www.google.com/patents/WO2013164229A1?cl=zh
They do 5 level modulation now (paper about it on IEEE), instead of 3. Check out the datasheet for the ML12070, which does this.
There are "listening" and "party" levels for sound.
The rise of amazon echo and similar voice connected devices will eventually want to switch to battery power.
When the DACs/Amps are driving either side of the speaker, it's called a bridge tied load.
The communication method with the chip is i2s.
Jørgen has been playing around with the new esp32, which has 2 channels of i2s. He has built a full 128kb mp3 audio streaming decoder running on the ESP32 with an i2s hookup to the input amplifier
He has pulled in other low cost development tools, setting up automated testing using Raspberry Pi's
The power output on these chips maxes out at 2x70, which is based around the crest factor.
Apparently K Pop is the most dynamic/loud music for testing audio chips.
Jørgen recommends hanging out on hackaday.io for finding people to discuss new ideas and code.
Check out more about the new chips coming from Merus Audio on their website.

Fake it till you make it Feb 24, 2017

Show notes

A lot of design chatter this week! We obviously must be faking it!

Dave is creating a new PCB for his Nixie project, Chris recommends they shop on PCB Shopper
At the shared workspace Chris is at, Twisted Traces is doing bundled assembly.
For a new industrial board Chris is looking at, he's considering an RS485 physical layer with an RJ45 connector and using Cat5 cabling.
For a single master, multi slave configuration on a bus, he'll need to use DIP switches.
Dave has used 1 wire Unique ID (UID) chips in the past, such as the DS2401.
The Tiko 3D printer failed.
CNLohr had some good war stories about making 2000 wifi/blinky badges for MAGfest
Is something like the Chipeasy a requirement for your lab? It's still funding on Kickstarter.
There are other tools that manage your in-lab inventory with software like PartsBox.
Keysight will be giving away a bunch of scopes in March...and we're judging!
Chris wanted to give some insight to people starting to freak out about the EE job search (hint: build stuff)
Zachtronics apparently aren't the only ones making Hardware design video games. Is this a trend?

Many thanks to our Patreon sponsors! We'll be back next week!

Thank to Ian Kennedy for the fake sign photo.

An Interview with Bunnie Huang (2nd) Feb 17, 2017

Show notes

Welcome back, Bunnie!

Bunnie was on Embedded.fm about a year ago talking about projects.
Since then he has been working on/with:
- Edward Snowden on iPhone detection / Media Lab forbidden research
- Suing the US gov't with the EFF over Section 1201 of the DMCA
- Working on Chibitronics and making electronics more inclusive. Bunnie talked about this more on Ask an engineer (as well as a bunch of other things!)
Bunnie has released two books in the past two years
- Essential guide to electronics in Shenzhen.
- The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware
Bunnie recommend working with CrowdSupply. We had Josh on the show on ep 314.
He also liked working with professional book publishers at No Starch Press.
There is biology stuff at the end of the book!
Bunnie also recently talked about "hardware as a cat meme" on the Hackaday hack chat
On a similar note, he has written about the Gongkai cell phone culture in China in the past on his blog.
This is also the case for how "hoverboard" came into being. He talked about this in an NPR interview.
"Childhood as a service"
Bunnie regularly works with:
- Sean "Xobs" Cross - Novena
- Jie Qi - Chibitronics
- His hardware team in China
Bunnie had a project he decided to dump a year ago, an encrypted keyboard. This was meant to be more secure than "Dirty Dirty Dirty Mobile Phones"
Lately Bunnie has been working with the Kinetis chipset.
This was first prototyped on the Orchard Badge, which used the KL02.
A listener asked about this Dangerous Prototype's interview with Bunnie where he talked about the availability if schematics.
"My life is a series of PhDs"
Bunnie is now learning how to code in Rust.
You can find Bunnie online at his blog: bunniestudios.com, or on twitter under @bunniestudios
His business sites are Kosagi.com and chibitronics.com

We can't wait to hear what Bunnie is up to next!

When the TV watches you Feb 10, 2017

Show notes

Dave played with an ECG kit...shirtless.
Chris started a new YouTube project called Science Not Silence. He is growing algae as a basic science experiment and doing other projects to alleviate frustrations.
Future projects will be using the CE header. Headers are nothing new, of course. Digilent uses the Pmod and Seeed has their Grove connector.
NXP is spinning out their passive business called Nexperia
Be careful with naming, esp on the internet: You might get Boaty McBoatface
Audiofools could test and test cabling but would still "hear" differences
James Randi offered a million to people that could prove their case.
China factory implemented robots...to expected ends. To be fair, it does appear this is a car manufacturer.
CGP Gray's "Humans Need Not Apply" is a classic on the coming age of automation.
Apparently Vizio TVs are tracking user habits. Do you trust a "Smart TV"? Or other device? Sparkfun created an "Alexa Kill Switch" More discussion on the topic at the EEVblog forum.
Chris has been looking into TAILS, which boots an entire OS off a USB stick. Reference podcasts like Steve Gibson's Security Now for more knowledgable discussion on these topics.
Olimex built a DIY laptop in KiCad! A build PDF is found here.
Wayne, the KiCad project lead, discussed the upcoming roadmap at FOSDEM.
Former guest Great Scott made a fun video about building a DIY battery pack with standard Li-Ion cells.

Next week, we'll be welcoming Bunnie back to the show! Ask your questions here. Listen to the first time we had him on (ep 84!) in the past.

Thanks to FlashPro for the image

An Interview with Gerry Roston Feb 04, 2017

Show notes

Welcome, Gerry Roston!

Gerry is the CEO of Civionics, an "IIOT" company (Industrial Internet of Things)
He worked at JPL as one of the early engineers on the Mars Rover project. The equipment was things like the Puma 560 controlled by a PDP11/73
The prototype that Gerry helped create was called Robby the Rover. This was primarily used to develop the software for the final rovers. The first successfully landed/drive was the Sojourner. This landed by deploying large airbags and bouncing.
Chris was sad thinking about lonely rovers, like shown in XKCD695
Some of these robots ended up in the Boston Computer Museum
We also discussed kalman filters, which are utilized in sensor fusion.
The PUMA robot was from Unimate.
After JPL, Gerry went to get a PhD at Carnegie Mellon. Boston Dynamics founder Mark Raibert was either staff or faculty at the CMU School of Comp Sci when he got there.
The department is called the Field Robotics Center (FRC). Part of the lab was recently hired away by Uber to work on self driving cars (They also poached from the closely affiliated National Robotics Engineering Center.).
Gerry worked on early versions of these, some of the first cars using GPS. But they had to use degraded resolution WAS.
The vehicles were called Nav Lab 1 & 2. Watch it in action here.
Self driving trucks could be a disruptive technology (to the economy). Gerry mentions truck convoying is already possible.
Gerry's PhD thesis was on meta design, systems that evolve over time. ("A Genetic Methodology for Configuration Design - The Robotics Institute")
"Technology after a while becomes easy" but people did not. Gerry moved into the startup world.
He is now the CEO of Civionics, a startup monitoring sensors at large industrial facilities. They currently monitor the cooling fans' current on large stamping machines. They have stopped 3 downtime events already.
The system is a hub and spoke system with "Leaf" nodes and a "Cloudgate" node. Inter-node comms is 802.15.4 (zigbee) and the cloudgate talks wifi or 3G.
Gerry is also an executive in residence (EIR) at TechTownDetroit.
He recommends Steve Blank's course about building startups (free). He also recommends the book "Talking to humans", which details how to do customer discovery.

Science, Not Silence Jan 28, 2017

Show notes

Dave and Chris discuss the news!

Dave just got back from a holiday. He couldn't keep away though and posted videos from the beach!
Dave is focusing on logistics, using shipping from DHL and Wordpress / Woocommerce for the interface.
Marketing is tough for engineers but David Kronstein did things right. Spending marketing dollars on hardware for people to review.
EAGLE has switched to a subscription model. Dave made a video about it.
Switching to KiCad? Chris made Getting To Blinky 4.0 which is a decent start at trying out the program.
Watching technical videos? Chris recommends the Video Speed Controller Chrome plugin. Speed up or down any HTML5 video.
A bit of a jump. LTspice went from version 4 to version...17! Likely due to the ADI acquisition of LinearTech. We interviewed creator and maintainer of LTspice, Mike Engelhardt!
Chris noted that the Falstad Simulator (which went online a couple years ago) now has current and voltage visualization, similar to the EveryCircuit android app.
Nvidia simulated photographs of a moonwalk to debunk online wackos. The Mythbusters had done a similar thing with a physical model.
The Trump administration is messing with science. This will not stand. We enjoyed the badlands national park reactions.
The AT&T archive videos are fantastic, check out this one on wave behavior
Jeff Keyzer (Mightyohm, yessah!) posted his pictures of his tour to Bell Labs.
When you're depressed (or stressed) make something.
Dave is working on his custom multimeter, almost as a project manager. A new role for Dave!
The gadget apocalypse is upon us!
Captain Disillusionment did another video about the Cicret bracelet
GoPro slashing staff.
Chris was intrigued by a new variation on a business model showcased at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Do not forget to announce the drawing for AoE