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:

An Interview with Timothy Lamb Mar 25, 2016

Show notes

Welcome Timothy Lamb of Spectral Motion!

Tim works in the special effects industry at Spectral. They worked on special effects in films like Hellboy.
He has been working with Mark Setrakian who often prototypes using platforms like MaxMSP.Tim also helped to create some of the effects for the Robot Combat League which aired on SyFy.
The rates in the industry are rather low. People often do it for passion.
The Hellboy gun is in the lobby of the Spectral office. Some other peoeple try to replicate it on sites like the Replica Prop Forum. Adam savage has also talked about this before on Still Untitled. Adam was building his own version.
DMX is a form of controlling lights for theater applications (among other things). This is a protocol that looks similar to RS485.
These days Tim is working with an Jordan Wolfson, an artist. He has had famous pieces on display in the past, including this super creepy "stripper robot"
Tim also performs "chip tune" music under the name trash80. There are some really catchy tuns over there! He wrote some code that used the game link: this became the arduinoboy, which is very useful for MIDI sounds.
In the future, Tim would like to try his hand at projection mapping with moving targets, such as robots.

Artificially Intelligent Party Platform Mar 18, 2016

Show notes

Chris is selling a "Bodge" shirt
Dave has a new outro on his latest repair video.
Chris just got back from SXSW down in Austin. They used to have lots of chip companies, some of which remain:
- AMD sold to Global Foundries
- Silicon Labs is still there.
- Freescale and IBM are somewhat reduced.
The panel Chris was on included former guest of the show Scott Miller of Dragon Innovation. The topic was DFM for getting to scale. Chris focused mostly on making designs robust.
Another trend at SXSW was IoT and ways of controlling the software layer. The physical interfaces to these devices still leaves something to be desired.
Chris mentioned the industrial HART standard as a possible analog to the problem that connected light switched need.
Artificial Intelligence just beat a world Go champion 4 games to 1.
Dave likes the Numberphile video explaining the math of chess.
Chris has been making 2 minute videos trying to explain problems that beginners don't know much about when starting out. Things like electron flow vs current flow, what ground means. Dave has made a video asking, "Does current flow through a capacitor?"
This may end up becoming a book some day, titled Top down electronics
The Hackaday Prize 2016 was announced! It's new judges and new structure this year.
The Keysight scope contest is having lots of legal woes giving away scopes.
What would happen if The Amp Hour started a political party? What does it look like if an engineer was in charge of legislation? What do they optimize?
Dave mentioned the TED talk about Basic Income. Chris said this is an eventual solution to "what happens when robots take all of our jobs?".
The BeagleBone organization is participating in the Google Summer of Code and you can help out!
Great bumper sticker, "The cloud is just someone elses computer"
Another interesting BBB project, the Bela works for super low latency audio.
Mike's video about the layers of a PCB was awesome! He machined each layer at a time to expose the copper.
The 1953 Transistor documentary by Bell is a great retro look at the early days.
A user posted some fun pictures of the Shenzhen markets.

An Interview with Mark Morin of Nufern Mar 11, 2016

Show notes

Welcome Mark Morin of Nufern!

NuQ Laser
Nice chart that breaks down a bunch of connectors.
Ytterbium
Erbium
Jobs:
ASE - Amplified Spontaneous Emission
Recommended Reading
- World Class Designs: Analog Circuits 978-0-7506-8627-3 Photodiode and current drive circuits
- Introduction to Classical and Modern Optics 0-13-124356-X If you want to try and figure out what will reflect, or refract / absorb this is a place to start.
The discussed obsolete component was the MRF553

Documentation Is A Waste Of Time Mar 04, 2016

Show notes

Travel and potential meetups!
- Chris will be traveling in April to Europe.
  - Berlin for 2 days
  - London for 2 days
  - If you can help set up a meetup for The Amp Hour, please email chris@theamphour.com
- Chris will be giving a talk at Hackaday Belgrade and attending Resonate.io
- There may be an Australia trip and subsequent road trip with Dave in August. Maybe we could see the telescope in Canberra and listen to Voyager.
- Chris will also be in Austin at SXSW next week at the Hardware House.
Bunnie was on embedded.fm talking about design culture in China. You can still preorder the book here.
There is fidelity loss in documentation, especially if you're relying on key designers. Dave has once been told "Documentation is a waste of time".
Cut and paste in documentation used to be just that. It was all stored in A3 folders (in Australia).
The Rasberry Pi 3 was just released! They are still focused on education (as Matt Richardson told us about on the show), but are continuing to integrate more features like wifi and bluetooth.
Dave just got a high speed camera (1000 fps) and is looking for things to film. He did a test shoot looking at a VFD (that Chris used to work on!).
The Gates foundation put out their letter about energy and time. Energy stuff does't usually square with super heroes.
Chris thinks photosynthesis (or general biological conversion) is an interesting way to eventually harvest energy.

Thanks to phobia for the shot of the fail documentation

Call In Show #3 Feb 26, 2016

Show notes

Our third (non-embedded) call in show!

Callers
- Mahesh called in about a recommendation on soldering irons for his business in India.
- Sebastian was having his micro lock up when his wall wart was leaking current (assumed) onto the device and then it was shorted to chassis via a USB ground.
- Aaron called in asking about how to change careers
- Brian called in from Trinity College asking for advice on getting through an engineering program.
- Paul was also interested in changing careers, thinking about going from test engineering to design.
- Adam was wondering about resources for learning about high speed design.
  - Dave and Chris both recommended Robert Feranac's Fedevel Academy. He teaches high speed design using Altium.
- Rudy was wondering if we have tried OpenSCAD. Neither Chris nor Dave had.
  - Rudy also has a bet going with his son about when self-driving cars will be implemented (5 or 10 years?).
- Andy is building a fridge that is meant to age steaks. He is building buttons for the control in KiCad and wanted to know about making hatched planes. This is not directly available in KiCad, but there are some workarounds.

Another great set of questions this show! We'll be back for future shows where you can call in. Check out our post about how people could contact us this time and keep an eye out for future announcements.

Thank you to rfduck for the picture of the phone.

Pull The Trigger Feb 19, 2016

Show notes

Chris needs a PCB checklist to ensure each board that comes out has the important pieces on it.
Dave used to use the 3D viewer to inspect his board and see it from a different perspective.
Chris has been learning Fusion 360 for 3D models. Dave and David have been learning OnShape.
Why we started from scratch
Coworking feels like a pipe dream, though people continue to try it. Chris prefers Git for revision control, Dave prefers dropbox.
Chris was on The Engineering Commons a few weeks back talking about being a cross discipline engineer.
Making custom components can be addicting, but there are tradeoffs with doing so. David2 hasn't been burned yet!
Sometimes you just need to pull the trigger and accept there will be bodge wires.
PIC announced they now have cloud tools. It's a popular hobby tool since it gave access to reprogrammability.
The PIC16C84 (which had an eeprom) was introduced in 1993. Even in assembly, you can do amazing things. Former guest Voja has done just that on some of his projects.
The AVR was introduced in 1996.
PIC stands for "peripheral interface controller". It was first made by General instruments.
Web based tools are more and more common, Dave and Chris are actually ok with it. The mbed tool (mentioned on the embedded call in show a bunch) is used often. Even Jack Ganssle seems to be on board in his TEM newsletter.
Lead time can severely impact product development times.
Cash flow is an important business concept, because you need to front the money in order to get parts ready for purchase. Dave has worked on projects that had up to $1M in part purchasing before a single board was manufactured.
When you remove a shunt that is passing current past a 50 kW AM station...it makes some noise.
Bob created a $50 optical inspector for the boards he is manufacturing.
Dave will be doing a giveaway on the forum, which is part of the Keysight "scope a day" giveaway.
The scope is spec'd at 1GHz--and worth $15K--isn't needed for most people. Is it better to instead sell the two Dave is giving away and then give away lower cost scopes?

An Interview with Saar Drimer Feb 12, 2016

Show notes

Welcome Saar Drimer of Boldport!

Saar started at Xilinx in the Virtex group, working on testing silicon. The parts needed to be tested in ZIF (zero insertion force) sockets.
After Xilinx he went back to academia at Cambridge, joining the security research group. Knowing hardware was an advantage! He did research on protocol for securely updating firmware.
Later research was on the implementation of Chip and Pin security (and trying to break it)
Saar published papers about a man in the middle attack and a r elay attack.
After a postdoc at the computer lab, Saar started Boldport.
The company was initially meant to improve FPGA software via The Boldport Flow. The goal was to make FPGAs more intuitive but not necessarily easy to beginners.
When Gate Rocket (cosimulation software company with funding) flamed out, Saar saw it might not work.
Then came PCBmodE, a software to help people make boards. The flow:
- It uses JSON files, converts to SVG
- Edit that with InkScape
- Updates JSON files after modifications
- Generates Gerbers
- JSON file contains shapes and co-ords
Saar fabricated his first PCBmodE board in 2013. Version 4 of PCBmodE was just released.
Dave's friend has made a board with 5+ soldermask colors.
In case you missed it, Saar was published in Marie Claire for his Haute Circuits.
ERC/DRC is mostly "knowing what you're doing" when doing PCBmodE. However, Eurocircuits does online DRC, Saar uses that. He also thinks regardless of package, using outside tools helps to find different errors.
Saar gave a talk at FOSDEM in the EDA Dev room. It was set up by Javier from CERN. One of Saar's talk was about PCBmodE, the other about the EDA industry itself.
The Boldport Club is a monthly subscription program where you get a different board every month (purchased in 3 month increments). The first 3 will likely be:

You can find Saar on Twitter on @boldport. Find more info about PCBmodE and BoldPort on their respective websites.

Something's Serially Wrong Here Feb 05, 2016

Show notes

Dave was asked to be an expert witness...no way! Past guest Jack Ganssle has done this many times, as has Michael Barr.
Dave's rebranded multimeter is up for sale soon and he has been struggling with WooCommerce.
Both Chris and Dave have put out unintended public links/posts.
Security in general on IoT is terrible, you can now search webcams that are just open on the internet.
Up until the late 70s, the Nuclear launch codes in the US were 000000.
Bunnie is crowdfunding a new book about electronics in Shenzhen. Both bunnie and Akiba have been on the show in the past talking about this topic (as have others!)
Chinese new year is coming up! Beware! Shouldn't we just make it an (electrical) engineering holiday?
Chris has been working with Class D Amplifiers as part of Contextual Electronics. It's a new field for him.
FTDI is back at it, bricking chips with their interface software in new and innovative ways.
Dave makes the comparison in PR to the Fine Brothers, who recently had a drastic turnaround in their asshattery.
If you need an alternativeUSB to serial, try the MCP2200.
Jonathan is launching the beta for PCB.ng, a new assembly service that is priced by the area of the circuit board.
The Hackaday square inch contest would do well pricing their assembled boards in this way. Dave had a project called the uRGB.
Dave is hoping to start assembling his pick and place machine kit (on a cart?)
The Aeroscope is a new wireless with impressive specs. We'll need to wait on the cost and the actual performance.
Bluetooth Smart can talk to both BLE and BT classic.
The dean of MIT graduate education is leaving to start a new school with no degrees, majors.
Udacity has been announcing a lot of interesting things like Nanodegrees and paying students back for finishing in 12 months.

An Interview with Great Scott Jan 29, 2016

Show notes

Welcome, Scott of the Great Scott YouTube channel!

The channel started October of 2013. YouTube in Germany is more focused on gaming and non-electronics channels.
Scott's job training started in 2011. He works in the electrical power industry.
Apprenticeship in Germany has a bunch of different names. One of them is einer ausbildung. The one that Scott did was duales studium.
The electric longboard project was 10 - 20 hours of building/prep! The controller uses a wii numchuck and it communicates via an attiny85 (with an RF chip). The Xcarve was also used for the mechanical portion.
German distributors
- Conrad.de has a component window, as well as other home automation type equipment.
- Scott buys most components on eBay.
- Chris asked if he had used Ragworm for boards.
The mentioned 7 segment display project
Scott is an expert soldering with perfboard (see the intro to each video as an example). The mapping program L ochmaster helps plan out spread it
Audio amplifier video
Scott's town does not have any hackerspaces. CCC is held in Hamburg.
Beginners are a larger portion of the audience. The recent electronics basics video goes over brushless motors. Scott things the Afrotechmods video on amps vs volts is a great start.
Scott started with op amps and encourages users to do the same.
The 555 timer contest was back in 2011. Analog Tom's servo videos blew Chris away.