The Amp Hour

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**The Amp Hour**

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

Latest Episodes:

An Interview with Clint Cole of Digilent Jun 10, 2016

Show notes

Welcome, Clint Cole of Digilent!

Clint's first venture sold in '96. They developed one of the first portable defibrillators and sold it to Philips.
After that he went back to teach at WSU and realized there was a need for boards for courses.
He started Digilent with Gene Apperson.
Dave did a video on COGS and how much to charge for projects.
Their first commercially available board was the XLA, which also used the first Spartan chip. It had a reverse engineered programmer on board.
In 2011, Digilent had 250 products, 750K units shipped and 10M in sales. They were considering VC investment to up their advertising/marketing budget. Up until that point they were only spending 1% on advertising.
Instead, in 2013 Digilent was bought by NI.
Clint believes there is a looming crisis for EE employment. In 2013, 2014 , only 25000 engineers graduated with EECS degrees. Instead companies are importing engineers, exporting jobs.
When hiring for a new position, Clint tells the candidates, "Go solve this problem". The best candidates are those who are Jack of all trades and who have tenacity. Chris thinks people like Ben Krasnow and Jeri Ellsworth show tenacity in their videos, the way they approach odd problems scientifically.
Clint likes the newer versions of teaching: Free range engineering, MOOCs, flipped classroom, etc.
While teaching at WSU, Clint taught two classes
- Entry level survey class about digital logic.
- Junior level digital design class.
Clint's method focused more on doing. At WSU, there was a requirement to do 6 projects. This got you to a "C". Doing extra work could then help you to get the "A". Chris also recalls Kipp Bradford talking about a method where grades are based upon number of project iterations.
The ChipKit is an Arduino inspired product with a drastically different processor (PIC32 vs ATMEGA328)
The soon to be announced OpenScope uses the MZPIC32, will be completely open and will retail around $100.
Digilent has always posted schematics/BOMs, gerbers when asked. The products are not specifically marked OSHW.
The Analog Discovery 2 is not open, but Clint recommends checking out the wealth of information available in the technical reference manual.
Competitors:
- Different vendor - Terasic - Altera side
- Massively parallel - Beecube
- Massively parallel - TED (japan)
After many years, the lower cost programming cables from Digilent are now supported by Xilinx directly.
Why care about FPGAs in general? Most people don't understand how they can be useful. Chris mentioned the Snickerdoodle, as they are enabling high data throughput systems with FPGAs. Drones are another good example, like the applications Chris Anderson was discussing on the Hardware Podcast.
Dave asked about drop shipping from the Digilent manufacturing partners. However, with the exception of Europe, most of the shipping now happens from the HQ in Pullman, WA. This is also where WSU is located.
Being in town with WSU allows for easy hiring of interns. This summer they have 20+!
When selling the company to NI, Clint talked to Matt Ettus (former guest), who was going through similar motions with selling Ettus Research to NI.
Want to try out a board or three? Use the coupon code "THEAMPHOUR" at checkout on store.digilent.com to get 15% off for individual products from their most popular categories for the next two months.
Clint doesn't have social accounts, but you can follow the @Digilent twitter account to see what's up with their new products.

Many thanks to Clint for taking almost two hours to talk to us about electronics and education!

The Nerd Calendar Jun 03, 2016

Show notes

It was like Christmas at Chris's house
- Chris got a Narrative Clip 2. It has GPS but we're not sure how much power that takes.
  - GPS started out as a military-only device. Then up until 2000, there was "Selective availability". Once that was lifted in 2000, Geocaching become a thing.
- Chris got a kit from Boldport Club...and you can too! (You may remember Saar was on episode 286)
  - Tweet a link to this episode with the hashtag #TheAmpHour301 and you'll be entered to win a 3 month subscription. Or just use this link to prefill your tweet!
- Bunnie's Guide to Shenzhen was also in the mailbox. Dave pointed out you don't need to pronounce the words...you can just point at them in the book. Bunnie was on embedded.fm talking about the book a while back.
Dave had a rover visit the lab!
2017 will have 3 rovers on the moon! That's crazy, but how are we supposed to hear about it? We need a Nerd Calendar. JPL has one, but it's not formatted like a calendar.
Kyle asked on Twitter about measuring high dynamic range signals. William asked something similar on call in show #4. You really can only solve it with a low noise environment, a good dynamic range ADC with high resolution and patience.
Or buy a stupid expensive DC power analyzer.
Dave had an opportunity to play with a piece of characterization test gear for ADC & DACs
Dave was tickled that Forbes said the Theranos founder is now worth $0 instead of $4.5B (hint, she never actually was)
Chris is sick of all the focus on investing and stupid shows like Shark Tank. This is a bad sign.
IEEE bought GlobalSpec. We thought IEEE was only a non-profit (it is) but it is "also a business"
What's next for tech companies?
Dave will likely be at the Vivid festival again this year.
Given a circuit diagram in a data sheet, what would you add to make it into a REAL circuit?
What are some common rules of thumb young engineers should learn? Simplified datasheets could be nice, especially for jellybean components.
Proto G is doing a new series on Antenna Design.
RF doesn't need to be mystifying, it's like other bits of electronics: just try it! Also, follow Mike Ossmann's guidelines.

Three Hundred Down, Three Hundred To Go May 27, 2016

Show notes

Dave busted his knee! He'll need to get an MRI.
Chris went to Maker faire and gave a talk about revision control. He included the fact that Altium has had revision control for a long time (but not many engineers use it)
Chris' favorite display was theMonster 6502 by Eric of TubeTime.us. He did an interview with Mike from Hackaday.
Chris made an art project out of his repurposed (4x over!) badge. It's blinks with his heartbeat.
Lots of robots in the news.
Dave will soon have a moon rover in his lab!
While in SF, Chris saw former guest Mike Harrison get lessons on riding a monowheel from former guest Ariel Briner.
There's a book for learning Python for everyday automation called Automate The Boring Stuff.
Dave was happy to hear that Google admitted self driving cars are still 20 years off. However, Chris saw a video which appeared to show the driver of a Tesla asleep at the wheel (while it was still moving/driving).
Arrow teamed up with Indiegogo. It's good they're making strides to check projects, but it might hurt Arrow in the long run.
A scam came to light about the Peachy printer. However it was the high quality videos explaining the stolen money that weirded Dave out so much.
Dave made a video about the Orange Pi vs Raspberry Pi. They are different chips on board, so they have quite different functionality.
In the mailbag this week, Dave got a cyclopedia from 1924, "The complete book of applied electricity" Chris wasn't quite sure about the things that wouldh ave been included then, but found a timeline of electrical engineering.
Dave posted a formerly filmed video of sped-up layout.
The Current Source is making videos about baseline electronics subjects, the one about SCRs was great!
Chris will be holding a Denver meetup this Sunday, 5/29 at 4 pm!

An Interview with Jonathan Hirschman of PCB:NG May 20, 2016

Show notes

Welcome Jonathan Hirschman of PCB:NG!

The "NG" stands for "Next Generation" (think Star Trek)
They are not alone! Refactory (Tom Kennedy) is another assembly house in Brooklyn .
PCB:NG will be similar to other on-demand services (with low customer service needs). Sites like Moo/Teespring/Shapeways/Ponoko.
There is not much standardization in the industry. There was an attempt using ODB++ and GerberX2.
Dave uploaded one of his micro supply designs: http://imgur.com/f9wABJS
The limits of PCB:NG are:
- 4 mil space / 4 mil trace
- 2 or 4 layer
- 8 mil drill, 5 mil annular ring.
- 1 oz outer copper, 0.5 oz inner
- Surface mount only
Betas get $1/sq inch in 6 quantity. Other future promos might include incentivizing doing everything in metric.
Like other online services, DFM (orientation) needs to be verified in the web interface.
"Confounding user tricks" really means dumb mistakes users make (including Chris).
Pricing
- Quantity 6
- $8 sq single sided
- $12 sq double sided
- Delivered in 12 calendar day
It's never quite "apples to apples" comparisons.
Pick and place machines have a wide range of interface software. There are roughly between 20 and 30 vendors.
The PCB:NG Software
- After a user uploads, it gets assgned to panel.
- Then another algorithm does the Tab routing.
- The front end updates the database, which delivers files to machine automatically.
In the US, assembly amounts for $35B in economic activity. However, most designs are 1-100 quantity.
Jon as also the person who brought the Pieco paste press to market. Jon shuttered the company after the support requests became untenable.
If you're interested in trying out PCB:NG beta and want to jump the line, use the signup code "theamphour" or "amp hour" and you'll get instant access.

Don't Turn It On, Don't Take It Apart May 13, 2016

Show notes

Dave has been struggling with his Windows7 upgrade.
Chris released a new version of KiCad tutorials, which was needed because of software upgrades. MeowCAD was listed as a possible open source alternative to KiCad, though it doesn't look like many are developing it. Dave knows someone named Meow Meow.
Dave's manufacturing/design partner relented and is switching from a PIC16 to a PIC32.
It's amazing how much time is spent in organizations simply maintaining lines of communication.
Dave has been sort of acting as a manager, but mostly offers his opinion.
There was discussion about whether Dave's product should be 0pen source on the forum.
Competitive advantage these days comes down to cost of components and branding.
Chris gave a talk on "Top down electronics", which made him rethink about how he thinks about modules.
uBeam
Other links we mentioned

An Interview with Jake Baker May 06, 2016

Show notes

Welcome Dr. Jake Baker!

Jake is currently a professor at UNLV and teach mixed signal chip design.
Reticles/Mask sets are $10M+, so big companies are risk averse.
Jake has a total of 142 patents, about 50 of which were non-lawyer changes.
He also regularly acts as an expert witness for cases.
Chris asked about the RamBus RDRAM, because it was so expensive for his old computer.
One of Jake's early job was working on projects funded by Reagan's StarWars program.
This included some of the Nevada nuclear test sites from 1985 into the 90s
After that Jake landed at Boise and Micron working on DRAM/SDRAM. This includes work on some of the early DDR memory.
Later he consulted on a large (older) process CMOS imagers when .
A new thing coming out is Resistive memory. Intel and Micron recently announced it will be moving towards production. This is somewhat like the theoretical memristor, propsed by Leon Chua in the 70s.
Jake also worked on research for the Field Emitting Display, which worked like a miniturized CRT.
On the CMOSedu site, there are a bunch of course videos, but Jake will also be investigating further online education models for his courses as part of the university.
Jake's latest designs use a 130 nm SiGe process.
The students Jake advises use MOSIS, which is part of the USC Info science institute. They get 2.5x2.5 mm chips on the 500 nm node. It costs $6K for 40 chips not in packaging.
Unfortunately, most fabs only release Process Design Kits (PDKs) for Cadence. This means that Jake primarily teaches Cadence (so students are marketable upon graduation).
In the past, he has taught using the free/open source Electric VLSI, which is Java based. Students around the world have learned from his videos on the subject.
There are a range of books that Jake suggest for design, such as CMOS VLSI by Harris and Weste. However, he also has written two books on the subject!
The future is designing modules on chip (SOC) because of the scale of many designs.
There is a section of CMOSedu that is similar to the AoE, that talks about "Bad Designs"

You can find Jake on his homepage and get in contact with him there. Definitely dive down into all the great content he has made for his students and the world! Thanks to Jake for being on the show.

Gotta Update My Dog Apr 29, 2016

Show notes

We’re back after nearly 4 weeks without a Chris/Dave show!

Dave just interviewed a 105 year old hobbyist!
Dave just got a Rode Podcaster. Chris uses the Zoom H1 when on the road.
Even though Chris just got back, he will be traveling again and there will b a bunch of meetups.
- Chris will be giving a talk at Maker Faire (time, location TBD) on revision control for hw.
- Hackaday Meetup on the Saturday of Maker Faire.
- Bring a Hack on Sunday of Maker Faire
- HDDG13 on Thursday the 26th (Mike Harrison will be giving a talk)
- Meetup in Denver on Sunday May 29th (details to follow)
The London Science museum was fantastic! They have the Watt workshop there.
The London Amp Hour Meetup went great! Check out pictures from the event.
Lots of negativity going on in the electronics industry these days.
- Makerbot surprises no one by killing their US mfg.
- Microchip/Atmel is having disputes with their severance packages.
- Intel is laying people off.
- IBM is laying people off as well, but apparently doing so with a bit of ageism
A bit of good news, Electric Imp raised some (more) money. Maybe there are some jobs there?
In general, the future of electronics companies seems to be changing.
Nest is bricking hardware (Revolv) that consumers thought they would support.
Jack Ganssle mentioned similar things about the ARM mbed in the past. What happens when you don't control the toolchain? Microchip is moving that way as well with their online compiler, MicrochipOne.
If it's ease of use that you seek, you can hot load a program onto a Raspberry Pi Zero using the PiShift. (Explained by Tom at the London meetup).
Dave has been searching for aliens (SETI) using software for the RPi called boinc. It all comes down to MIPS/watt for processing these datasets.
There was an article from Georgia Tech about FPAAs being more efficient. This would be a drastic swing back to the old way of doing things (when op amps were used for math operations). Chris and Mike saw a bunch of analog computers when in Serbia.
Chris has been releasing 2 minute topic videos. Suggestions welcome!
Dave has been working with his mystery manufacturer, spending time up front on chip selection so that there is enough room in the memory for firmware updates and new features.
Chris saw a presentation about machine learning with software called The Wekinator by Rebecca Fiebrink. There is also an associated course you can take.
There is more space stuff happening. Stephen "Steve" Hawking and other scientists announced plans to send ships to Alpha Centauri, even if there might not be full details on how that'd be possible as of yet.

shenzhen-special — **An Interview with Omer Kilic** Apr 22, 2016
Show notes

Welcome, Omer Kilic (@OmerK)

Omer has an academic background. His thesis started off being about FPGAs.Towards the tail-end of his research, he started exploring Erlang for embedded devices.

He programs using Erlang, which was created by former mobile phone giant Ericksson (device making has tailed off, they still do network infrastructure).

They had a phone called the T28 that was well designed.

Erlang can uses the "actor model" of concurrency, which maps really well into the hardware domain. It's used for the backend of apps like WhatsApp. More info at http://www.erlang-embedded.com/

Chris had spend the day at the London Science Museum. It was fantastic!

Omer has worked with a few hardware companies in the past, including doing work on large manufacturing operations in China.

Now Omer is the CTO and Chief Hacker at Den Automation.

Nothing replaces being able to sit next to each other during development.

While in China last time, Omer tried talking to big semi with mixed results. It was easier to get a few chips in the market as an experiment.

Omer has talked about access to chips in the past at OSHUG.

The main problem with intelligent devices is interoperability. How do you get multiple devices to talk to one another without loads of software?

Setting standards aren't the answer, there was a relevant XKCD about that very topic.

Usually it's companies saying "use ours!" and this only rarely actually works out in the end (like Motorola with SPI)

The National Microelectronics Institute (NMI) will host a talk in May, falongside BCS (British Computing Society) and OSHUG. The event is called the NMI Open Source Conference.

Open source can be something people hide behind and use as an excuse for mediocrity in their products.

The company was started by Yasser, now only 20ish years old! They raised 500K of seed funding

We put a chip in it!

The Internet of Shit is a great novelty account. They recently tweeted about the stats of people planning to use Javascript in their devices.

The Den Automation devices will be a connected wall switch and socket, along with a couple of auxiliary helper devices. Sockets in the UK have switches on them as well. At first they will only be making UK based devices.

Each socket/plug will have power consumption monitoring and also will allow the user to "label" which device is plugged into it.

The problem is that they are building the entire socket/switch from scratch. This means lots of regulatory hurdles. The British standards must be passed, as well as CE for RF.

The problem with dynamic languages (like Javascript) is the overhead required if it is to be run on each device.

Den already is utilizing a PLM because of the impending regulation process.

The decision to move production to China should not be taken lightly. There was a Wired UK series on production there.

The initial funding for the project was raised on Seedrs, they are are raising a second round now.

See more about the project at http://getden.co.uk/

Omer has given another talk about IOT called "The IOT Hardware Kerfuffle"

Many thanks to Omer for talking about the connected device market and doing manufacturing with a small team! It turned into a constructive conversation about getting products to market.

Live from Serbia with Mike Harrison Apr 14, 2016

Show notes

Welcome back, Mike Harrison (@mikelectricstuf)

Mike is in Belgrade with Chris, both attended and gave talks at Hackaday Belgrade (will be posted eventually)
Mike gave a talk about the Eidophor
They will also both attend Resonate.io but neither will speak.
The fun continues in the UK!
- April 19th - Beer and electronics meetup! We'll be at the Yorkshire Gray on Theobalds Rd starting at 6:30.
- April 20th - "Nerd Nite" event
- April 21st - There is an Open Source Hardware Users Group meeting.
Mike recommends learning (uppercase) cyrillic to help get around places like Serbia or Russia.
Consulting projects continue to get more interesting, you can see them on whitewing.co.uk
- There is a new project that was installed in terminal 2 of Heathrow airport
- Holiday decorations in Hong Kong
  - There was a fixture to program physical locations of the assembled PCBs.
  - All high level comm was done using RS485.
- Selfridges on Oxford St
  - Mike saved the setup time by starting a truck using a drill battery.
  - Uses the APA102.
  - Test jigs are critical in field jobs, especially time critical ones like busy installs.
Trade shows for other industries
- Mike went to one for wearable tech, ended up going to underwater exploration instead.
- Saw the company that makes the underwater buoy that Mike tore down. (Sonardyne)
Museums
- Tesla museum was underwhelming, but Mike saw the first ever radio boat.
- Chris and Mike went to the science museum together and saw the Galaksija (previous guest Voja Antonic's design)
Devices
- Mike has been designing devices using loads of 0402 white LEDs. He also gets $0.01 4mm LEDs on aliexpress.
- Osram Duris E
Reverse engineering
- Mike has experience reprogramming analog(ue) phones. This was done by modifying or moving the ESN of a device.
- The Sony D50 service manual that Dave tore down had a great service manual. Some of the old phones used to have those, but they were hard to get.
- The eeproms were something like 9346
- Mike had to write disassemblers and then read the output to figure out what was going on. He also ended up tracing program flow using a logic analyzer
- Vodaphone had prepaid phones, others were not well implemented and ended up giving away free calls.
- Mike ended up emulating the Dallas UID chips with a small board in order to reprogram the ESN.
The last time Mike was on an Amp Hour episode he talked about using PICs.
Write the bootloader first...and make sure it's rock solid!

Image linked from Twitter, also features @szczys

Call In Show #4 Apr 01, 2016

Show notes

Chris will be leaving for Europe soon. If you're interested in getting together, here are the days he'll be there:
- Berlin, April 5th and 6th.
- London, April 19th, 20th.
  - The London meetup will be at the Yorkshire Grey (2 Theobalds Road WC1X 8PN London) at 6:30 pm on April 19th.
  - Watch @chris_gammell's twitter account for any last minute updates/changes.
Callers!
Trevor
- He works on wholesale electricity and was wondering about how they change voltages on generators. Chris eventually started talking about different taps on the windings, but that could be wrong still.
- Trevor is also interested in DSP
  - Chris suggested a theoretical book by Oppenheim.
  - Dave mentioned the free online DSP guide.
  - This is in hopes of hacking Zwave devices.
- Get in touch! Either correct us in the comments below or talk to Trevor directly on Twitter: @trevorstweeting
Todd
- He's from the Upper Peninsula, making him a "Yooper"
- Surface wave transmission line by N6GN. Some YouTube videos:
- They hope to also use it for powering weather ballons / quads, not just transmitting signal. This would be useful for a technology like Makani (now owned by Google)
Sam
- Wavetek 27xt
- He was asking about whether to start a kickstarter with a friend and whether he can focus on a problem that is sufficiently technical.
- Chris recommends the book "Scale"
Arsenio
- Arsenio called in to our first callin show about his rocket. There was an issue with i2c layout and the library. He has since gotten a 1054Z at Dave's recommendation. And has shipped off his first board to OSHpark!
- He's having issues with spiders in the workshop. Not as big as the one Dave had in his workshop a few years back.
- Dave recommended trying something like an ultrasonic cockroach repeller. Chris recommended asking Tim and Greg from Backyard brains who have been on the show before.
Chris
- He's working with a battery powered ATTiny 84 board that controls an RC boat. Recently switched from a linear regulator to a switching power module...and started blowing stuff up.
- Dave predicts that it is SCR Latchup on the logic. He has made a video about that before.
- This could possibly be solved with an N-channel mosfet controlling power distrbution to the rest of the board.
Intel news
- Andy Grove passed away.
- Intel is toning down their process jumps, indicating a shift in the predictive power of Moore's law.
William
- The Fried Circuits USB tester has steadily added features, but he's not sure how to get more resolution at the low end. This is a dynamic range problem.
- Current chip is the INA219, also has been looking at the INA169
- The new USB C version requires 24 super narrow pitch pins and does not allow for any breaks in the line because of the high speed signals.

Thanks to everyone who called in! We'll continue to refine this type of show and keep trying to answer your questions!