The Amp Hour

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

Natural Sciences
**The Amp Hour**

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

Latest Episodes:

Jobs For Weirdos Aug 14, 2015

Show notes

Standing out during a first impression is the best way to get to the interview.
Chris was at a job fair at MIT where he met someone (Matt) that he interviewed and then saw again recently at the Hackaday Boston event. Matt had a machine that could output code onto tape and Chris printed, "The amp hour rocks"
The Hackaday Prize is due in a few days...get your entry in! Last year's winner (SatNOGS) took the money and started a non-profit.
Former regular guest of the show Michael Ossmann designed the badge for CCCamp this year, the Rad1o.
There was a cool badge at the Open Hardware Summit a few years back designed by Wyolum. This year's OHS will have a badge by Parallax.
Dave will be at the Sydney Maker Faire this coming weekend.
How do you find out about new parts?
- The Digikey product index started calling out the "new" parts (not sure on the timeline).
- Chris used to watch the datasheet.com RSS feed for ChipReport.tv.
- The /r/nicechips subreddit can be a source of new components to explore.
- Karl and Cory do "Part of the Podcast" over on The Sparkgap podcast.
COTW! The TPS65982 is a power management chip for USB 3.0. Dave is considering putting this on the uSupply project.
Chris and Dave are both pumped about The Martian moving coming out. Chris also recommends Ready Player One, which is another nerdy Sci Fi movie. Apparently Speilburg (who is directing) is trying to get G ene Wilder out of retirement to play one of the characters.
Dave is interested by the recharge road. This will be different than Qi charging, used by more and more consumer level devices.
Other interesting stories:

Thanks to Ford Buchanan for the shot of the Gonzo figurine.

Recycle All Your Microcontrollers Aug 07, 2015

Show notes

Tindie joins Hackaday!
Dave has been using Shopify for his platform to sell his uCurrent.
Contextual Electronics will have an embedded portion. Chris is bringing on people to help.
CotW (sorta): TimerBlox
Vagrant is a program that helps to script installs. CE will have a fully formed image for getting up and running with Linux/KiCad/dependencies.
When Colin K was on the show, he talked about designing with modules and the tradeoffs in cost/certs. Jeff Rowberg also mentioned similar things when he was on the show (sorry I blanked on your name, Jeff!)
PunchThrough just announced the Bean+.
Chris asked how to explain switching converters without math. He didn't realize Dave had made a video about this back in his early days.
The board in Dave's old intro used a Virtex 5, which Chris thought that past guest Philip Freidin worked on. Dave needed to do Bit Error Rate Testing (BERT) after running traces on that board it was so high speed.
Dave and David2 will be switching away from using (Altium) CircuitMaker on the uSupply project. They will be using KiCad!
Chris is reinstalling KiCad now that he has a Windows 10 box. The eevblog forum has a post about which EE programs are affected by the upgrade.
Chris asks about recycling programs for electronics (and making sure they aren't just shipped off to a 3rd world country).
Silicon is the 2nd most abundant element in the earth's crust.
Our wonderful patrons on Patreon now cover the cost of sending a microphone to each guest we have on. You can help contribute as well!
If you cannot help financially, you can give us a review on iTunes. We're currently lagging in popularity behind a dentist podcast! (to be fair, looks pretty good)

An interview with Ariel Briner of Cartesian Co Jul 30, 2015

Show notes

Another Aussie! Ariel and his team are from Brisbane, which is in Queensland, Australia.
Dave interviewed Ariel on site at CeBIT
Moved to Brooklyn where there are other 3D printing companies:
- Sols - 3D printed soles for shoes
- Shapeways is also there.
The product that Cartesian Co makes is called the Argentum. Formerly called the EX1, when it was raising money on Kickstarter.
They are currently on batch 4. 200 total have shipped, 80 went to Kickstarter backers.
The Argentum uses 2 part ink vs 1 part ink (nano particles) make by companies like Dupont, Mitsubishi and Mithode. Currently these only are advertised to print on pre treated materials.
The printer itself uses old inkject cartridges to deliver the inks.
Competitors:
- Voltera
- Voxel8
- AgIC
- Real competitor is low cost batch services and milling/etching boards
The focus was on an MVP...just like in Southpark.
The reason for using silver is copper chemicals are much more dangerous to handle.
Cartesian is planning on creating multi layer boards using insulative ink in selective areas.
One interesting future avenue is printing on fabric/paper. The paper can even be reflowed.
A current issue is stringing, which causes unwanted shapes on a print.
The specs - 20 mil space/trace.
Dave was interested about the business setup moving to the US. Cartesian is setup as a corporation in Delaware, as many are.
Apparently internet denizens can now also apply to be part of Estonia as a digital citizen.
We were of course discussing "Fartesian Faux, Inc" in all of these discussions.
Though investment in startups is changing via the JOBS act, it might not be as much as people expect. Public/general solicitation is still very restricted, especially since the SEC rewrote some of the rules.
The main idea is to protect investors without much money from losing their life savings. This was implemented during the great depression. China is experiencing a crash right now because of similar boundless enthusiasm in their stock market (and the resulting correction/crash)

Many thanks to Ariel for telling us more about circuit printers. It seems like the desktop technology has some fun years ahead. Chris is looking forward to getting his skin printed on and eventually getting a Cartesian chip printer.

No More Naming Jul 23, 2015

Show notes

We will no longer be using the alliterative titles for our episodes. Our "secret" source of words was phrontistery.info and luciferous logolepsy
We appreciated everyone who filled out our survey! A lot of people suggested guests that have already been on, check out our list to hear old episodes.
fbz (guest two episodes ago) got funded on the scarf project! Kickstarter funding can be a tricky and annoying game.
Past guest Andreas Olaffson from Adapteva wrote about how he'll never do another campaign
Selling tools are usually terrible, Dave still loathes using eBay.
The idea of a smartphone with community design seems like a tenuous proposition.
Dave using to use delta sigma ADCs that only Cirrus and Analog made while working at Circel/Tally's. There were only about 5 customers.
When determining features for general chips, you need to throw in everything. Espressif was talking about their new features on Twitter.
The ESP8266 is a story of bottom up success, similar to the stories discussed in the Innovator's Dilemma.
Though Dave doesn't like Chris talking about the book, it's the same story for companies like Rigol.
Steve has a great way for sorting out parts in his lab.
COTW: The AD8232
Scotty was right!
This Coin teardown was interesting, showing how they handle the mag strip on a credit card. Dave says that you cannot even use mag strip in Australia, it's all chip and pin.
Tesla announces Ludicrous speed. It achieves higher speed by improving fusing on the pack.
Chris (was) is at a Hackaday event.
Dave will be at the upcoming Sydney maker faire.
The Flux Capacitor shirt is for sale again. As is the 555 shirt.
Chris thought the Accuweather app was like BTTF

Thanks to quinnanya for the picture

An Interview with Bertrand Irrisou and Gerald Friedland of Audeme Jul 16, 2015

Show notes

Welcome Bertrand Irrisou and Gerald Friedland of Audeme!

Audeme has a kickstarter for the Movi platform, a speaker independent, cloudless speech detection Arduino shield.
The Movi also solves a range of privacy issues, as no audio goes to the cloud. This is in contrast to the Samsung TVs sending voices to 3rd party companies.
Dave has done a video on a voice detection chip from the 80s, the VCP200. There was also a similar version called the SPO256. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFth9K_IvwA
Chris mentions that there is a big difference between a modern speech synth and a Speak and Spell.
ELIZA was a 1970s NeuroLinguistic Programming product that provided a surprisingly cogent speech engine.
All of these chips are based on phonemes, which allow a conversion from sound to actual word meanings.
Audeme is using the Allwinner A13 chip which has a single core Cortex A8. It also has a built in synthesizer.
They are running Debian on board, which allows low level driver control and high level software (via Linux).
Chris has seen something similar on his mobile, the MotoX. It has a coprocessor that listens for audio cues.
Algorithms are open source, will go online when released.
Audeme will be at the Embedded System Conference later this month.
Users can expect a response time of 0.5 sec normally.
The audio front end has an Automatic Gain Control op amp, which can implement echo cancel if an external mic array is used.
The Movi was recently used to control the Romibo robot. It needed to "listen" through a set of fur.
The expected frequency response of the Movi is 50 - 16 kHz (in contrast to a 300-3kHz response for a telephone)
The processing uses MFCC. This is in combination with a DCT -> Mel spacing -> DCT cycle.
Using the Movi with a push To talk (PTT) helps to reduce overall errors. Callsigns (like Siri) also remove false triggering. Chris wants to talk to it like JARVIS (from Iron Man).
The board has a peak power requirement of 3W.
The interface, including for the Arduino, uses a RS232 protocol for the interface. This means it can be used for any platform, not just Arduino.
The code requires is mostly C/C++ for low level, Python for glue, Shell scripting for OS stuff. It's a wide variety of programming languages and platforms.

You should consider backing this project via their Kickstarter page. You can also see a variety of videos of this board in action on their Facebook page.

An Interview with Fabienne Serrière of KnitYak Jul 10, 2015

Show notes

Welcome Fabienne Serrière (AKA fbz) of KnitYak!

fbz (prounounced "fobs") got started in hardware by designing an audio studio from scratch. This was affected by the falling of the world trade center, as it promoted her to "get the job done" status as an intern and then later "director".
fbz was also an early writer for Hackaday and Engadget.
She also attended the ITP school (part of NYU) and developed a super low latency linux computer for dancers. It used the C ricket from MIT and PC/104 hardware.
During a hackathon a few years back fbz, Edwin and Ralph built a connected m assage couch (with lots of other fun bits) that also happened to run CouchDB.
Not content with the space and attention given to hardware at earlier CCC, fbz started Hardhack. It was a convention purely for hardware. It later became a part of ToorCon as well.
The hw scene in Europe (specifically Germany) was and is very strong.
fbz and her husband toured around and decided on Seattle as a place to start a business. The Seattle community has lots of SV transplants and has mentoring and services via programs like SCORE. The logistics are strong because Amazon is located there.
The company is called KnitYak and they currently have a Kickstarter project trying to raise $100K.
This will go towards an industrial knitting machine, with the goal of developing hardware and software that will allow users to submit custom designs directly, similar to Shapeways.
This started via a project with Travis Goodspeed where they designed a top line scroller machine called "Multi threaded banjo dinosaur knitting adventure 2D extreme!!!". The winner got a custom made scarf.
The current machine used for this sort of thing is a non-industrial machine, often a Brother KH-930. fbz's work built off the work of Limor / Becky / Steve of Adafruit.
The designs being used for the scarves are Cellular Automata. There are numbered sequences which allow for completely custom designs. One of the designs (#110) is Turing complete. Another looks like spaceships in a line.
Dave recommends reading more about this in Choas by James Gleick
Dave saw a talk about WW2 coded scarves, which helped during the Belgian resistance.
fbz and Sam Muirhead designed an open source QR code hat on camera. This video also is a great way to see how the Brother machine works, including its needle preselection mechanism.
Machine Knitting with FBZ: Part II - In Deep Knit from Sam Muirhead on Vimeo.
There are others doing custom knitted materials, though not many.
- There is a custom company in London with lower capabilities that just raised a bunch of money.
- Disney recently posted about hiring PhDs that are interested in doing something similar, but for intern levels of money.
- Nike is working on designing custom uppers for their shoes.
fbz had to get rid of all her lab when moving to the states from Germany. The awesome orchid ecosystem/case (based on a BBB) had to stay behind, but the environmental monitoring tech will likely get reused to monitor the shipping container where the machine may end up being operated/stored.

We had a blast talking to fbz about KnitYak. You can reach her on Twitter (@fbz) and you should definitely back this awesome project and an awesome hardware hacker!

Is This A Show? Jul 02, 2015

Show notes

With Chris and Elecia White of Embedded.fm

Please fill out the 2015 survey!

Offered mostly without comment, because ~~Chris lost all his notes~~ it’s worth listening to the show! Also there weren’t many links this week. Please leave comments if you think any of the links should be in here.

Inspirations and Aspirations - Recanting Rocket Rationale Jun 26, 2015

Show notes

Chris is back in California, after getting a tour of SpaceX and Northrup Grumman two weeks ago.
Way late to the party, but Chris is currently reading The Martian. It's awesome. A movie is coming out soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue4PCI0NamI
The New Horizons probe is about to reach Pluto.
Most space photos are not in the visible spectrum. An example is the picture of the Pillars of Creation.
The James Webb telescope will be launching in a few years. The Hubble is now 20+ years old.
Dave has a work experience student shadowing him...for video production!
It's interesting what kids are looking at for careers today. There is more exposure to engineering than there used to be (in popular media). In the past, it was Bill Nye and maybe a few others.
In the age of cable, there are more programs that touch on science and engineering.
YouTube enables this effect times 1000. Ben Krasnow's Applied Science channel is an example that could draw people into engineering and expose them to new things. His recent video about showing a record needle surely caught the eye of new people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8
Dave is still working with his manufacturer and has taken more of the reins.
Caleb Chung talks about Pleo the Dinosaur. He also worked on the Furby.
Seeed recently announced a 3 day PCBA turn (which Chris mistakenly thought you needed to use the open parts library).

An Interview with Andreas Olofsson - Adapteva's Ampliative Abacus Jun 18, 2015

Show notes

Welcome Andreas Olofsson of Adapteva!

Adapteva are the makers of the stackable supercomputer called the Parallela. This uses the Epiphany chipset, which is the main product of Adapteva.
The company is located outside of Boston.
Before starting Adapteva, Andreas was a lead designer on the Analog Devices TigerSHARC DSP.
The Epiphany architecture allows for rapid calculation of paralleled tasks.
The Parallela has 3 tools on board, which are required for any good supercomputing system.
- A micro for the OS and easy interfacing and troubleshooting.
- A high performance coprocessor for handling heavy duty calculations (with GFLOPS/W)
- Flexible logic for handling interfacing and offloading other tasks from the main processor.
The reason that licensing the Epiphany platform outright likely won't work is the scale of SW add-ons that is required by industry.
To get started with the Parallela
1. Buy the board (it is carried on Amazon)
2. Download the SDK
3. Join the community to chat with others and learn about existing projects.
There have been some interesting uses so far:
- Drone video footage processing (on the drone!)
- Matrix math
- FFTs
- Password cracking - bcrypt
This all started back in Fall 2012 with a Kickstarter.
The Adapteva blog is great as well. Chris enjoyed this post about Semiconductor Economics 101.
Funding has been difficult as most VCs don't like investing in chip companies.
Andreas is always interested in partnerships. You can reach Andreas on twitter under his handle @Adapteva. You can also write to him at support at adapteva.com.

Consolidate All The Things - Zonked Zelotic Zaitech Jun 12, 2015

Show notes

Chris has been working on Contextual Electronics for 2 years.
Dave has been busy with his new project, Huxley! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKf_SIdCH1Q
Atmel is apparently shopping around for buyers. This may have something to do with their margins being similar to grocery stores.
This comes at a time of other huge mergers and acquisitions
- Avago buys Broadcom
- Intel buys Altera
Apparently OnSemi and Microchip put together a hostile bid back in 2008.
Companies getting bought always has the looming threat of not being able to buy parts after the company changes. Chris mentioned this can create interesting scenarios where replacement projects require solutions like FPGAs.
Dave recently tore down a Sony Walkman, which had some interesting single in line packages.
These can get 8 hours battery life on alkaline batteries. Dave has been talking about batteries lately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iEshd6izgk
The DARPA robotics challenge happened recently. Teams programmed humanoid robots to complete a series of tasks like walking through doorways, turning a water valve and driving a car.
It was about as fun watching the robots fall over as it was watching the best robots win. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo
We have talked about the $9 CHIP board in the past, Olimex debunks some of the cost using quotes from the chip maker.
The WiFi charger is back in the news, but there is some solid analysis by physicists as well.
We are put off by the struggle over "the OS for IoT". Google is trying with their Brillo platform.
Chris gets to tour SpaceX! They recently took $1B from investors (mainly Google/Fidelity) to raise money for building satellites.
Limor (from adafruit) did a great interview with Paul Horowitz. There was also a text interview with both AoE authors on E14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCI3B5eT9NA
The Open Hardware Summit was announced and will be on September 19th in Philadelphia.
The Amp Hour t-shirt in black is once again available for purchase (for a limited time). For a short time, you may also be able to buy the Solder Jockey t-shirt.
Chris will be speaking at Solid in two weeks, if you're there say hi!

Thanks to debaird for the image!

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected