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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 Bil Herd - Zany Z80 Zygology** Oct 29, 2014
Show notes

Welcome Bil Herd, designer of the Commodore C128!

Bil grew up in Indiana saying things like "see-ment". Chris mentioned that a lot of how people say things change depending on location in the states. There was a post on /r/dataisbeautiful about this.

He grew up grew up fixing stuff and traded for food/beer. Later he started designing synths while listening to Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

After leaving school and wanting to fix TVs, he joined the Army nat'l guard and became a teletype repairman to get around the need for a diploma to take the TV repair class.

Bil learned to valuable rules while doing repair:

Use your eyes to troubleshoot

"Shut up and figure it out"

Chuck Peddle designed the 6502. He, Jeri and Bil all did a YouTube call together a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cns75TIrzb8

At Bil's first design job (at the scale company), he had to make their own battery backed RAM.

After the scale company, he was hired at Commodore (around '83, when they were working on PET/VIC). They had relocated to West Chester PA. There were 5 chip fabs on Route 30.

Bil was told about the gig from Hedly Davis who designed the DRAM for the XBOX.

There were early problems with the 40 column displays because of the RAS and CAS (DRAM) timing

Commodore was in the space above the MOS fab. They were later convicted of dumping chemicals into the water table.

A key component was the VIC (Video Interface Chip). This allowed offloading some of the video processing.

6845 for CRTs

6847 color (but lame)

The VIC II integrated the concept of "sprites" (but were called a movable object block). It was "borrowed" from the TI994A.

The TED (or TExtDisplay) chip helped for manufacturing a low cost computer (with only 121 colors) that was meant to compete with the Sinclair ZX-Spectrum.

Bil made a video about the C116: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPD5N43VIsk

$49 16K memory based upon making their own chips (almost as much as you had to pay for just the memory by itself).

C128 was done 5 months before CES

When making the chips, they were 7 layers and about 150,000 transistors on a 1 uM process. The designers used Rubylith to make the lithography masks.

There were multiple programming languages for the Commodore: C64 BASIC, C128 BASIC, CPM

The board layout done on a VAX (C128 first board with CAD) and it was designed to work with Panasert/American Universal through hold assembly machines.

C128 had a switching regulator which ended up benefiting some of the high draw of CPM cartridges.

The z80 clock had to go to 4.9V in 10ns. So Bil made a workaround

The stringent nature of FCC certifications meant that Bil couldn't add any more chips to the board...but could add transistors like above.

There was also a need to hold reset, so he designed this circuit:

FCC worries about the edge frequencies, because of the high harmonics of a square wave.

There was a reflection problem that Bil fixed with a long Red/White wire. You can see it on this high res image of a C128 board.

Bil has attended and given talks at the VCF( vintage computer forum) in the past. He also met former guest of the show Alan Wolke there.

The Commodore 364 talked, using chips from the Magic Voice team (formerly on the Speak and Spell)

The Zilog Z80 was added to be compatible with CPM cartridges.

The Commodore LCD was a laptop designed and promoted, but never sold...because Marshall Smith (the CEO) was told not to by the competition.

Instead, the Tandy Model 100 (which Dave has done videos about) went on to sell tons of units. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prl6D7bqQo8

After leaving Commodore, Bil went to work at an EMS center

There is a movie about Amiga called "Viva Amiga" that is promised to come out soon.

A documentary of the last day before Commodore shut down was Dave Haney's "Death Bed Vigil"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHI7_pU0y70

Bil believes that Commodore was doomed when Jack Tramiel left.

The Commodore name was passed around a bunch, but Bil owns C128.com site, which has tons of great info about the era.

He also runs a site about designing hardware and teaching people about analog/FPGAs at Herdware.com.

These days you can see Bil making videos over on Hackaday. He was introduced to the gig via winning an Open Hardware Summit grab bag from an episode of adafruit's "Ask An Engineer" There he was introduce to Ben who runs Datasheet.net (and works with Hackaday stuff).

Bil also has a range of videos over on his own YouTube account.

You can also find @BilHerd on Twitter.

2 hours didn't seem like enough! We hope to have Bil back on soon to talk about his current projects and to catch a few more stories from the golden era of 8 bit computers.
*And because we mentioned it, the picture of Bil, courtesy of Wikipedia:*

Reset-Holdoff — **An Interview With Bil Herd - Zany Z80 Zygology** Oct 29, 2014
Show notes

Welcome Bil Herd, designer of the Commodore C128!

Bil grew up in Indiana saying things like "see-ment". Chris mentioned that a lot of how people say things change depending on location in the states. There was a post on /r/dataisbeautiful about this.

He grew up grew up fixing stuff and traded for food/beer. Later he started designing synths while listening to Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

After leaving school and wanting to fix TVs, he joined the Army nat'l guard and became a teletype repairman to get around the need for a diploma to take the TV repair class.

Bil learned to valuable rules while doing repair:

Use your eyes to troubleshoot

"Shut up and figure it out"

Chuck Peddle designed the 6502. He, Jeri and Bil all did a YouTube call together a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cns75TIrzb8

At Bil's first design job (at the scale company), he had to make their own battery backed RAM.

After the scale company, he was hired at Commodore (around '83, when they were working on PET/VIC). They had relocated to West Chester PA. There were 5 chip fabs on Route 30.

Bil was told about the gig from Hedly Davis who designed the DRAM for the XBOX.

There were early problems with the 40 column displays because of the RAS and CAS (DRAM) timing

Commodore was in the space above the MOS fab. They were later convicted of dumping chemicals into the water table.

A key component was the VIC (Video Interface Chip). This allowed offloading some of the video processing.

6845 for CRTs

6847 color (but lame)

The VIC II integrated the concept of "sprites" (but were called a movable object block). It was "borrowed" from the TI994A.

The TED (or TExtDisplay) chip helped for manufacturing a low cost computer (with only 121 colors) that was meant to compete with the Sinclair ZX-Spectrum.

Bil made a video about the C116: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPD5N43VIsk

$49 16K memory based upon making their own chips (almost as much as you had to pay for just the memory by itself).

C128 was done 5 months before CES

When making the chips, they were 7 layers and about 150,000 transistors on a 1 uM process. The designers used Rubylith to make the lithography masks.

There were multiple programming languages for the Commodore: C64 BASIC, C128 BASIC, CPM

The board layout done on a VAX (C128 first board with CAD) and it was designed to work with Panasert/American Universal through hold assembly machines.

C128 had a switching regulator which ended up benefiting some of the high draw of CPM cartridges.

The z80 clock had to go to 4.9V in 10ns. So Bil made a workaround

The stringent nature of FCC certifications meant that Bil couldn't add any more chips to the board...but could add transistors like above.

There was also a need to hold reset, so he designed this circuit:

FCC worries about the edge frequencies, because of the high harmonics of a square wave.

There was a reflection problem that Bil fixed with a long Red/White wire. You can see it on this high res image of a C128 board.

Bil has attended and given talks at the VCF( vintage computer forum) in the past. He also met former guest of the show Alan Wolke there.

The Commodore 364 talked, using chips from the Magic Voice team (formerly on the Speak and Spell)

The Zilog Z80 was added to be compatible with CPM cartridges.

The Commodore LCD was a laptop designed and promoted, but never sold...because Marshall Smith (the CEO) was told not to by the competition.

Instead, the Tandy Model 100 (which Dave has done videos about) went on to sell tons of units. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prl6D7bqQo8

After leaving Commodore, Bil went to work at an EMS center

There is a movie about Amiga called "Viva Amiga" that is promised to come out soon.

A documentary of the last day before Commodore shut down was Dave Haney's "Death Bed Vigil"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHI7_pU0y70

Bil believes that Commodore was doomed when Jack Tramiel left.

The Commodore name was passed around a bunch, but Bil owns C128.com site, which has tons of great info about the era.

He also runs a site about designing hardware and teaching people about analog/FPGAs at Herdware.com.

These days you can see Bil making videos over on Hackaday. He was introduced to the gig via winning an Open Hardware Summit grab bag from an episode of adafruit's "Ask An Engineer" There he was introduce to Ben who runs Datasheet.net (and works with Hackaday stuff).

Bil also has a range of videos over on his own YouTube account.

You can also find @BilHerd on Twitter.

2 hours didn't seem like enough! We hope to have Bil back on soon to talk about his current projects and to catch a few more stories from the golden era of 8 bit computers.
*And because we mentioned it, the picture of Bil, courtesy of Wikipedia:*

Warming Up To IoT - Tendentious Thermal Tools Oct 22, 2014

Show notes

Dave has been busy trying to characterize the front end of the Rigol scope (DS1057A) he did a teardown of last week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9P1Am9aFU
Chris laments trying to go back to making 2 layer boards after being spoiled by 4.
Dave will be giving a presentation to a physics conference next year. He will get to go check out some of their awesome lab gear sooner.
The Hackaday Prize 5 finalists have been chosen with some help from Dave. Chris helped to cull the initial list of 850 entries.
One of the popular favorites, the $300 Pick and Place didn't make the cut and wrote about 3D printing jumping the shark. We hope the device ends up in the market at $300!
Chris took a step towards home manufacturing by beginning to hack together a toaster oven for reflow. He will be using the Contextual Electronics BenchBudEE board for control.

https://twitter.com/Chris_Gammell/status/522784508618502144

There is a simpler version available on Kickstarter now called the Zallus. It has a nice looking touchscreen interface.
Dave has an oven controller that only uses LEDs for indicating which part of the cycle the device is in (ramp, soak, reflow, etc), but it still gets the job done. It also has a "learn mode" so it can be recalibrated when there are different thermocouple placements or different amounts of thermal mass in the chamber.
Chris has been on a buying streak lately. He just got bit by the robot bug and bought the RedBot from Sparkfun.
On the IoT side of things, Chris picked up the Light Blue Bean, which allows easy Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity (but only from a mac for n0w). They also got their module certified for sale if you fall in love with it.
Dave started using Patreon for viewer support. He can send special footage to backers on there.
The Annonabox is a Kickstarter sham; they raised over $600k before their funding was put on hold when they couldn't substantiate their claims about designing their own hardware.
Chris will be travelling to Electronica in Munich, Germany this year. The amount of money being spent is already pretty ludicrous: Digikey is giving away a Tesla (and that likely won't be the craziest thing there).
We re-opened our campaign for the black Amp Hour t-shirts (and sweatshirts).
Want your fix of "Workbench of the Week" even though we don't ever do that on The Amp Hour anymore? Check out the /r/Workbenches subreddit. The /r/nicechips subreddit also acts as a good proxy for "Chip of the week"
Dave is planning on digging out a fun old chip: The SPO256 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t6P_8OkBVQ
Chris has been creeped out by the Internet of Things: watching the temperature in the Analog Life Lab tells you lots of things about what's going on there. It was build using Luke Beno's tutorial and board. This is also the argument for why Google bought Nest. Dave used to have a service like this before the webapp shut down.
Another Google acquisition, you can watch Dave in his lab on Dropcam, even highlighting when there was movement using the historical function.
Fellow Ohioan, Ken Burns (who is currently running the TinyScreen kickstarter) recently wrote about why he started his business in Akron. It's possible to start a business just about anywhere, it was interesting to read his reason for Akron.
Chris thinks that talent pool is a big factor in deciding where to locate a business. The Technical Illusions team (builders of the CastAR, founded by Jeri), just decided to move down to Mountain View to get access to a bigger pool.

Next week on the show we'll be talking to Bil Herd, designer of the Commodore 128. Get your questions in here: Next Week on the show: C128 designer, Bil Herd

An Interview with Shaun Meehan - Doctiloquent Dove Deployer Oct 15, 2014

Show notes

Welcome Shaun Meehan of Planet Labs!

Shaun has two large industrial robots named FRED and Lefty.
He used the Whistled from Limpkin to create the WhistleBot. Future planes are to calculate location based upon a snap or dog clicker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etKIbUnqIOA
FRED was won in an online auction and transported from Connecticut to Coloardo. It was listed in the wrong category so it was cheaper than normal, ($700 vs $10K) but the freight calculations were not included (almost $2K).
Lefty was formerly owned by the FIRST Robotics team teacher at Shaun's HS. It was also locked up, which led Shaun to learn lockpicking. When the EPROM burned out, Lefty was given to Shaun.
The robots are still in Colorado but will hopefully be transported to CA soon. Shaun thinks somewhere in industrial space in Oakland. Chris was trying to remember the name of Bluesprout, a new incubator/co-working/living space.
Both robots are IRB2000 models from ABB. Shaun also has a 2 axis piece in SF currently.
The power was a large problem when getting started. It came in on 100A at 220V, single phase service. Shaun converted this into 220V 3 phase. Then this was stepped up with a 3 phase transformer bought from some hillbillies.
The voltages between 48V and 1KV is terrifying to Shaun because the equipment doesn't seem well suited to the task of handling stuff that can kill you. Above 1kV, all the equipment looks like the stuff Photonic Induction uses.
Shaun grew up in Fort Collins (north), near Colorado State University. His neighbors were professors there.
He built his own kitchen timer rocket launcher and also cooked up the rocket fuel in the kitchen.
Then he moved to Melbourne for 6 months.
In high school he worked at the lasers workshop at CSU. He was making optics mounts, vacuum chambers and more on the CNC mill.
This lab was developing and commercializing high power XUV lasers. These operate around 100 Hz and at a wavelength of 46.9 nm (or less).
Another neighbor traded Shaun yardwork for a superconductor. He went down to AirGas to get liquid nitrogen (apparently anyone can).
After the lab, Shaun applied to be general assistant at South Pole. A friend gave hints on how to get into the program such as working at Tractor Supply Company (TSC) on heavy equipment and doing a deep snow survival course.
He got into the program to be an assistant and flew down to the McMurdo Station on the coast. On the first trip out to the South Pole the plane had a "rough" trip.
Once on site, he was an iron worker, helping build new buildings. Construction only happens from November to February. Temperatures are -20F on a good day.
One benefit of the job was getting to pick the brains of scientists stationed there. Cool projects included the bicep team and neutrino (Ice Cube) team.
The neutrino team puts basketball sized photomultiplier tubes (the ones they use are called DOMs - Digital optical module) down into the ice. Then they observe Cherenkov Radiation and back calculate where it is coming from.
Seeing neutrinos gives an indication of where to look for supernovas. Chris though this might be how they know that Eta Carinae is going to go hypernova "soon".
While fixing the N64 at the comms shop, Shaun found out the comms tech couldn't stay on over winter. He applied and stayed as a the tech.
He also went back the following year after becoming disillusioned with school after one semester. Overall Shaun spend 24 months on the ice.
While at the South Pole there isn't much communication for internet. They can use the TDRS satellite for parts of the day.
When Shaun went back to school he got dropped into a dropped into lab with working on high power RF and laser work. The laser could pulse 50kV at 20kA, which it then steps up to 150kA pulse, discharges through capilary. A Z-pinch generates the laser.
These are controlled using shady Russian Thyratron, a Deuterium filled valve with a 5 nS commutation.
A friend passing through town told Shaun he had just left startup in SF. He applied and was hooked and then dropped his research program. He was the 3rd electrical engineer at Planet Labs, formerly Cosmogia.
Dove 1 and Dove 2 launched before Planet Labs came out of stealth.
The Goal of Planet Labs: image the entire earth once per day.
The satellites are in a sun synchronous orbit.
The cameras on board currently capture 1 fps and have a 3-5m resolution. This allows you to count trees, not but not cars (alleviating privacy concerns).
The 3U cubesat has dimentions of 10x10x30cm.
Radio system is X band, has it's own downlink at ground stations.
12 iterations on the doves since company iteration
Shaun does image compression using FPGAs.
ITAR controlled, soon will be controlled by commerce instead of DOD
Largest constellation of earth observing satellites.
They have artist in residence who makes art that is laser etched those onto outside panels of the Doves.
Planet.com has some great images. The image used for this show was a shot of SF.
The benefit of regular captures is you can watch timelapse of data. This is useful for tracking agriculture, natural disasters and a lot more.
Satellites have 3 methods of attitude control
- Rotate to get more drag using the solar panels (because there is atmosphere)
- 4 Reaction wheels, can slow or speed up the normally 4000 rpm to generate inertial.
- 3 Orthogonal coils can use magentics to align with the earth.
The Imaging / Verification is done with a Kalman filter (to calculate absolute position). The filter accepts inputs from:
- Gyroscopes
- Magnetometers
- Photodiodes on the outside of the craft
- A star camera
- Picture of the earth (compared to what they think they should be seeing)
There are only 3 or 4 people in mission control. Much is done by optimizer code. All scheduling and ground stations are autonomous.
28 satellites from Flock One launched from ISS, the biggest simultaneous deployment of earth imaging satellites ever.
The engineers hooked into the Yo app, which triggers each time the satellite says makes first contact.
Planet Labs piggybacks on launch service providers, buying their spare space - US, Russian, Dnepr Rocket, ISS commercial resupply
They are doing Agile aerospace: Make lots of stuff quickly and see what does and doesn't work. This allows them to use the most advanced processors in space because they don't stress about RadHard parts (but measure to make sure things are still working). This also means it's OK to lose a satellite or two -- that means they are pushing the envelope.
The company was an offshoot of the PhoneSat program.
Shaun recently developed a MPPT for the onboard solar cells. They went concept to integration in 3 weeks (launch took a lot longer)
Monitoring is key:
- There are 60 temp sensors inside the satellite
- Every voltage rail has an ADC measuring it
- Every device can have short circuit protection and monitoring
The Dove 4 spacecraft is still awaiting deployment in an Italian spacecraft.
The temperatures experienced are surprising: Internal parts experience 40-70 C. Solar (external) panels experience -100 to 100C.
To Chris's surprise, Planet Labs is a VHDL shop for writing code for their FPGAs.
They are currently hiring RF engineers (and more!).

Thanks to Shaun for sharing his crazy experiences and his work on satellites. Read more about Planet Labs or check out some of Shaun's blog posts about robots over at Logic Low.

Have the power tshirt — **Get Smart About Automation - Caducous Cyborg Concerns** Oct 08, 2014
Show notes

Chris used a (new) shoe as a mic stand this week. EMSL asked on Twitter if Chris was making his own ASICs now.

Dave's lab internet has been out for 3 days now due to broken fiber.

**Do you develop or use a tablet for your electronics?**

Chris wrote about an experiment of trying to do layout while on a plane. Conclusion: Unless you prep properly, the airplane test might not be a good measure of whether online CAD tools are a good fit.

**Do you download datasheets? Or do you use Google as a repository?**

In Dave's latest video, he talked about white van speaker scam after finding speakers in the junk room. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3B_KKyntQE

Even though there may be slightly fewer white van scams, crowdfunding sites continue to pump them out, the latest (gag?) being a Perpetual Magnetic USB Charger.

Slightly better--though still disappointing--the Printeer recently threw in the towel after realizing they couldn't deliver $500 3D printers from their garage alone. When they talked to Dragon Innovation, they said the company would need $1M+ to make the manufacturing run make sense.

That doesn't seem like much money when compared against the amount that Samsung is spending on their new chip fab: $15B!!! Must be for all the automation and robots.

Speaking of robots, "Humans Need Not Apply" is an interesting look at the upcoming threat to human labor as more and more jobs are consumed by automation and robotics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Chris has read about this before in "The Second Machine Age". The authors have also been on the Innovation Hub podcast in the past talking about this book.

The Sparkfun Engineering team lays out how much time goes into which tasks for product design.

In the Kasparov vs Deep Blue match, Kasparov ended up throwing in the towel after being shocked by a non-standard moe.

Chris just launched another Teespring campaign for a new design. Get your "I have the power" teeshirt now.

Octopart and a coalition of manufacturers have started collaborating on the Common Parts Library. We talked about this 2 weeks ago, when we found out Seeed Studio is doing the "Open Parts Library". Seeed is part of the coalition.

This week Chris will be at a meetup in San Francisco where former guest of the show and Electric Imp engineer Brandon Harris will talk about subGHz RF.

**Chip of the week:** The Altera MAX10. They also recently published a useful eBook called FPGAs for dummies.

Chris got to see 1o57, creator of the past few DEFCON badges, speak at the Hackaday 10th Anniversary party (great talk, definitely worth watching) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCL7dE-nqg

JohnnyMac (also a collaborator on the badge) talked about the Parallax Propeller. This design for the Propeller was recently released to the open source community. They are also hard at work on the new Propeller 2.

Chris was asking Dave about PIC vs AVR, having only used the latter.

Much like the browser based CAD tools, we have derided the browser based IDE in the past. The mbed platform/stack looks interesting though and if it "just works", we're willing to give it a try.

ARM and Atmel released an "IoT" dev board using mbed and a 6 LoWPAN radio module.

Bolt wrote a great piece of reality check for people, "No, you can't manufacture like Apple does".

An Interview with Eric VanWyk - Meiotic Mountenance Mooshimeter Oct 01, 2014

Show notes

Welcome, Eric VanWyk!

Eric is now an adjuct at Olin College of Engineering. They started in 2001 but have quickly grown in prominence due to their willingness to try new teaching methods.
He teaches the computer architecture class and 1 hour seminars (2014 coursebook here). The current one is called, "DANGER: High Voltage" and a previous one was about power supplies in a practical manner.
This reminded Chris of classes by past guests Larry Sears (at CWRU) and Kent Lundberg (also at Olin). Former guest Ian Daniher was also a student at Olin (one of Eric's students, actually).
Eric was heavily involved with FIRST robotics.
This also helped him land his first job designing medical devices at DEKA research.
There is a lot of focus on the regulatory side of design in medical companies. This was recently discussed over on a recent Embedded.fm podcast.
The toughest ones are FDA certifications. The devices Eric worked on were Class 2, which means they had to fail without causing any harm (but didn't need to keep working).
Also while at DEKA, he helped update the design of the robot kit given to students for FIRST (Dean Kamen started FIRST). The system uses NI Compact RIO and has an FPGA backplane that controls safety.
After DEKA, Eric went to work on development boards using the stellaris family at Luminary Micro (which was bought soon thereafter by TI and renamed the Tiva). It was actually an FPGA eval kit.
He also designed the fixed point math library used for motor control on the stellaris.
After TI, he moved to National Instruments and worked on the kits that are used for the First Lego League.
Initially this was the NXT and later this transistioned to the Linux based EV3
Eric also got to go visit the LEGO factory in Denmark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJbQ7zAlYo0
He stopped designing toys after responding to an email snarkily from his alma mater (Olin), which helped him land a job as an adjunct.
From there, he teamed up with James Whong (while he was at Boston Dynamics) and started designing a measurement platform that could be used on robots that are moving around. This became the mooshimeter.
"Mooshim" is a Zen Buddhist phrase meaning heart without heart. Eric lived in Tokyo for a while and understood more of the cultural meanings vs the straight translation.
The device has 2 channels, but 4 inputs (common, high voltage, current, multi input -- resistance, low voltage, etc). It is tested to 600V CAT III.
Because of the multi input, it's good for things like power factor, measuring the VI Curve of a battery and other measurements that might take multiple meters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3o1_sWSaUU
It communicates with phones using Bluetooth LE. It cannot currently have multiple devices hooked to one phone, but might in the future.
The mooshimeter has about a 100 uW average draw from the two AA batteries. This gives a battery life of anywhere from 10 days (full on) to a few months (low duty cycle).
The project was crowdfunded through Dragon Innovation. They force project owners to set the target funding at the estimated breakeven point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIJ8R2O1WJc
Dragon offers manufacturing assistance and services, but it is not required as part of the crowdfunding.
Eric and James went through both FCC testing and 61010 testing. This required some very high energy pulses to be pushed onto the product.
Dave has previously worked with his pal Doug on blowing up DMMs with high energy sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-FZP1U2dkM
On the dielectric withstand test, they had a problem because the SD card allowed more area exposed to user. They ended up changing the mold.
The mold they got can shoot about 10K parts. This was based on estimations from the breakeven calculation. They ended up with about 1000 backers.
Initial prices during the crowdfunding where students for $80, everyone else $100. Retail will be closer to $120.
The chips on board were the CC2540 for Bluetooth LE and the 8051 on board and the ADS1292 for the analog front end.
The boards are now in production and the product should ship to all backers by mid-October. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcJ93lLPUtY&feature=youtu.be

Thanks again for Eric being on the show. If you'd like to pick up your own Mooshimeter, you can preorder over at http://moosh.im

3D Printed Shark Jumps - Edifying Edison's Energy Sep 24, 2014

Show notes

Dave has been dealing with people saying he has changed. He proved them wrong by doing a simple calculation.
Chris just returned from Maker Faire NY. He decided to go after the discussion last week.
Former guest of the show Ryan O'Hara and Chris discussed the multitude of 3D printers and how they may have jumped the shark (see above)
GE paired with FirstBuild to let users "hack their fridge".
FirstBuild will be launching the Green Bean on IndieGoGo in the coming months. Chris encouraged them to do a self starter instead and it got awkward.
Dave is now a government adviser! (sort of). They were asking about crowdfunding and will be publishing a report about how that can affect the economy there.
There is a often-cited report on the main EEVblog site.
Dave also got to try out a Tesla! Check out his footage on his secondary channel (EEVblog2). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RRKWORDPxM
The Intel Edison has some very impressive specs (dual core Atom, Quark microcontroller, wifi, bluetooth, runs linux). However, it consumes 20-30 mA in it's "off" state (though we didn't have exact numbers on what that state is and what it involves).
Sparkfun is working with Intel on helping get the development boards and education into the hands of hobbyists and engineers. Former guest (along with the rest of the Sparkfun Engineering team) Mike Hord was there showing some of the new features.
Chris also got to try the new tool from Altium, CircuitMaker. He was told that once the design is downloaded, it will be cached locally (allowing you to work on layout). However, if you need a new part, it seems that the libraries will all be in the cloud.
Lots of devices and device makers are moving upmarket with more sophisticated offerings. People that are just trying to sell electronic assemblies (with no case, firmware, software, marketing, etc) may find themselves outmatched by an increasingly crowded and sophisticated set of veterans.
EMSL showed off an impressing version of this with their new machined EggBot.
The SeeMe CNC Part Daddy was an impressive feat though it was "just" an open frame 3D printer...because it was 15 feet tall! Wowsa! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRL5IVQdcw4
Dave thinks the eventual move towards increasing levels of sophistication means melted plastic is out...printing with LEGO blocks is in!
Former guest Adam Wolf and Matthew Beckler (of Wayne and Layne) showed off a cool new script for KiCad that allows the .POS files to be pushed directly to the low(ish) cost Pick'n'Place machine. They also showed a pretty zippy version of assembly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ughvx2P5CW8
Solderpaste stencil squeegying is fast, but there are solderpaste printing machines out there that are amazing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK_AdDDQ1SI
Another small run assembly shop is coming online soon called MacroFab.
There were other former Amp Hour guests there this weekend: Jason Kridner, Ian Daniher, Trey German.
There is a new SMU kickstarter in the works called Xtralien
Chris was interviewed by former guest Martin Lorton on his show. They talked about the voltage feedback in a power supply. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlZIcD2WX5c
Have any listeners ever signed up for classes or a university program at a tradeshow? How did it work out? Please let us know in the comments.

Last Minute Decisions - Obdurate Onepercenter Obstacles Sep 17, 2014

Show notes

Dave's mother got cheated out of a vacation when her cruise ship broke! Chris knew someone who has been on the Oasis of the Seas, the largest cruise ship built to date.
Dave worked at a company on Garden Island in Sydney's Central Business District. He worked there two months and subsequently left it off his resume.
Do you ever leave stuff off your resume?
Dave just returned from Electronex where he had a trade booth, which listed The Amp Hour! The big hits were the microscope and core memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vJ0c0ioAXY
Dave is also looking at foregoing a bigger lab and instead getting a bigger space.
Apple released a new smart watch, will be interesting to see how it changes the sensors game.
Chris just got back from the Hardware Workshop in San Francisco (notes available here). It was more "business" focused than electronics.
This coming weekend is the World Maker Faire in NY. Chris said on the show that he wouldn't be there, but changed his plans!
Altium will be officially releasing their new free PCB tool. Dave has a list of the upcoming features. One possible showstopper is that you have to save your files to the cloud (no local copy).
Chris will continue working with KiCad.
Breakin (Breakdance) and Breakin' 2 (Breakdance 2), Electric Boogaloo. 80s classics! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMDbBSyS1Rk
Chris's is working on a new component search engine! A new way to discover parts called Parts.io. There is an Alpha signup as well.
Chris got to meet the folks from Seeed studio and learned about their Open Part Library. This should reduce cost if you send a board to them. They also have an EAGLE library with the part footprints.
This is similar to what CircuitHub is going to be trying with the part bundling. Andy talked about CircuitHub way back on episode 131.
Do other CMs publish their part lists? It would be good to create a database or wiki page with links to these.
Chip of the Week: The TI FDC1004, "Capacitance to Digital Converter"
There was a wonderful teardown of a Tesla 85 kWh battery pack. The pictures show the multitude of networked 18650 lithium cells.
We wonder about what happens when a fuse blows. Chris recalls when Bob Simpson was on the show he talked about bypassing cells if necessary.
We also learned that Vincent Himpe (also a former guest of the show and prolific EEVblog forum member) recently got a gig as the lead PCB designer for Tesla! We'll try to get him back on the show at some point.

Thanks to Charlie J for the picture of the guts of a Rolex

Wrong Hardware, Wrong Software - Fugacious Fan Funding Sep 08, 2014

Show notes

Both Chris and Dave have trouble shutting off when on vacation.
Dave will be at the Electronex trade show this week with a booth. He has gone in years past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fQiQF9-hBE
Different jobs have different amounts of strain associated with them. From anecdotal evidence, design houses (places that contract design for others) tend to be grind houses.
What is your experience with different levels of stress/strain between different jobs you have worked?
YouTube recently enabled fan funding. This allows people to support content creators without watching advertising (and for more niche creators). You can support Dave on his YouTube page.
Another popular option for content creators is Patreon, which allows you to pledge money for each new video made.
One of our favorite video makers, Afrotechmods, recently enabled Patreon. He mentioned that it takes hours for each minute of content produced. Bonkers. He has a great new set of videos out about switchmode power supplies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEhBN5_fO5o
The triboelectric effect induces noise on cables from movement. Dave had to deal with this in his job building seismology equipment.
Chris recently got a new version of a dev kit...after buying the wrong one! He needed the TMDSHVMTRPFCKIT and instead bought the TMDXHVMTRKIT5X (which isn't compatible)
This is a kit made by the same group that Trey German works in; Trey was our guest in episode 213. Chris was introduced to Trey by a friend when trying to figure out the kit conundrum.
Power factor is the difference between real power and apparent power. The power factor correction circuit on the dev board is a boost converter (and controller).
TI also released a wireless reference design that has just about every wireless standard on board (and a Sitara processor).
Marcus and the Sparkfun team have been taking some lumps on a programming error for the Microview. It has been great to see how open they are with the details of how they are fixing it.
Marcus has been on the show before. So has the Sparkfun Engineering team.
Chris has been working on a new website for his day job. It is amazing how the mentality differs between hardware and software (especially web software). There is so much more license to change later (a big benefit, to be sure).
Chris also thought about how software people must feel when getting into hardware: they want it to be a one-click solution, just like how Chris wants Wordpress (which we use on The Amp Hour) to "just work".
Dave says this is the promise of modular hardware, which never really lives up to the hype. Chris thinks LittleBits is a good example of this: you can try lots of different things, but you would never differentiate in the marketplace without going custom (and losing the swappability)
Dave thinks that Altium is gearing up to make a purchase. Chris doesn't think they have enough cash on hand, but Dave rightly points out that EAGLE was bought by Newark/Farnell/element14 for only 12 million euros (not dollars like stated on the show).
Dave has been reading "The Decline and Fall of IBM" on Kindle.
Infineon recently announced they are buying International Rectifier. Infineon was a spinoff of Siemens.
Ken Sherriff did a great teardown, analysis and writeup of a suspected counterfeit 7805.
Chris says the best way to learn about silicon is to construct 3D models using programs like Sketchup (no longer owned by Google).
Luke Beno wrote a project that graphs user data off of data.sparkfun.com, a free cloud solution for IoT.
There is a post about the absolute minimum funding you need to be able to deliver a 3D printer for a kickstarter project. The "viability line" shows this clearly.
Dave talked about how lots of people are using Tindie these days to sell their electronics. People should remember to price properly on there as well (BOM * 3 to be safe). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9lYHIAZeTc
Chris is heading back out to LA and SF this week. He will be at the Hardware Didactic Galactic meetup on Thursday and attending the Hardware Workshop later in the week.
Dave may get to test drive a Tesla later this week. He is dreaming about doing a full review (and a teardown?).

"Impedance Matching" With Charvat And Ossmann - Recurring RF Remontados Sep 03, 2014

Show notes

Welcome back Michael Ossmann and Greg Charvat!

Since we last talked to Greg, he has made many more media appearances.
Engineering on TV shows continues to be a lame proposition. The auxiliary Mythbusters crew just got laid off. Joe Grand told us about the rigors of being on an engineering show when he was on The Amp Hour.
Mike has started releasing videos in his SDR series. These are a supplement to the in-person 2 day classes he teaches at security conferences.
Power and low cost requirements drove choice of no FPGA on the HackRF One (now shipping!).
Greg has friends at the MIT Haystack observatory that have had doing similar SDR issues and don't hire FPGA programmers.
Mike is planning to do some add-on boards for the HackRF; limpkin has already made some of these. The higher sample rates means you could see "farther" (up to 1Km) and more detail of things in the distance. This would also allow for range dopler imaging.
Greg says that many Signal Processing PhDs talk about spacial frequency domain.
Mike says he needs to buy Greg's book. You should too!
Mike has been playing around with CW radar using "arduino radar" modules off eBay.
Greg recommends instead using FMCW 24 GHz modules. One good example is RFbeam microwave K-LC1a, which cost roughly $5.
The coffee can radar kit is currently avaiable from Quonset for $600. Lincoln Labs make one for their grad students and UC Davis are developing an Arduino shield.
The Amp Hour (and Greg) recommend the upcoming kit of Tony Long, former guest of the show.
Greg wrote a Circuit Cellar op ed about the future of small radar tech.
RADAR is seeing more use in the home. One example is a video game system shown by MIT Media Lab that can detect gestures.
Mike gave a DEFCON talk about the NSA playset. This is the set of tools used for spying, many of which used RF retroreflectors.
Greg recommended that Mike skips the cheap Chinese modules and instead get a surplus police radar unit. Another good choice is the hot wheels radar gun which surprisingly runs with a 10GHz chipset. Jeri did a video with the toy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhp21FxttWM
Mike has been trying spread spectrum for his retroreflector setup.
There is a research paper about doing arbitrary quadrature modulations in a backscatter device. They discuss a simple passive device that is a MOSFET with an antenna. Awesome.
Mike uses antennas from WA5VJB (Kent Britton). These are log periodic, PCB based, antennas that can go from 850 to 6500 MHz.
Chris was embarrassed for not doing more with his USB TV tuner. Mike explained that many don't because they are lacking PAL connectors (which convert to SMA or BNC).
Greg talks about how LabView is great for getting set up with quick experiments and validations. Chris used to use this in his FPGA DSP work.
The HackRF will hopefully be used for derivative/add-on project.
- Jared Boone (one of the HackRF team members) is working on the PortaPack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koS-RobcKXI
- There are people that are connecting the HackRF with the BeagleBone Black.
- Mike is working on Filter/LNA board between HackRF and the antenna for extending filtering capabilities.
- He also wants to possibly do a VNA board that could also do RADAR.
Greg explains that a prior company he interned for made coversion boxes to make the HP8510 into a RADAR array.
Mike used to get grant funding (which helped to develop the HackRF/Daisho) from the Cyber Fast Track program (which recently ended).
Mike also used to work on the P25 digital radio at the Boulder lab of the Dept of commerce (they also do the atomic clock, wwv & wwvb).
All were a bit skeptical of the goTenna use cases, but were intrigued by the use of the MURS. This band is similar to the similar to FRS.
We aren't completely sure about the goTenna but future filings about their FCC activity will be found on the FCC website.

Many thanks to Mike and Greg for returning to the show! It was great to get them together to hear brainstorming about how the coffee can radar kit and the HackRF might work together some day!

Thanks to the Poland MFA for the picture of the tower.

Travel Recaps and Altium Announcements - Artisinal Aussie Assemblage Aug 27, 2014

Show notes

Chris was having issues with his internet provider (or so he thought). Chris is afraid of the possible TimeWarner/Comcast merger.
Dave heard about a pristine version of an early Superman comic going on eBay for $3.2M.
On a episode of Innovation Hub, an expert or risk talked about about HP betting on the HP35. Did he forget about everything before that??
Can anyone think of an early version of a popular technology that has sold at auction for big money?
Dave got to see an Apple I at the Sydney Powerhouse, where the 2nd Sydney mini-Maker Faire was going on during the weekend.
Dave had a fireside chat with the Bluechilli CEO (yet to be posted)
The Rome Maker Faire is another "major" Maker Faire. It will coincide with the open hardware summit in Rome this year.
They announced the speaker list for the OHS and it looks like a great mix of familiar faces and new ones.
Chris will be at the Hackaday 10th anniversary party in LA.
Chris gave a talk about KiCad at the Hardware Didactic Galactic. He had to install KiCad on a Mac using a virtual machine running Ubuntu.
Chris will be at the Hardware Workshop in San Francisco and we'll have another meetup if you're in town.
Dave announced the changes coming to Altium.
They took some of Dave's suggestions for the top 5 for Altium when he thought they were bringing out a low cost tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GjBFQgVWv0
Chris asks about open design formats and how much that affects OSHW. Presentation:

Open Source Hardware (OSHW)...What About The Tools? from ChrisGammell

The new KiCad forum (forum.kicad.info) is going well, Discourse has turned out to be great forum software.
If you want to donate to get CERN to spend more time on KiCad, you can do so here.
When do you decide to pull the trigger on a CAD program upgrade?
Dave used to use a "best bet" version of new builds of Altium while working there and designing hardware.
The XL741 is a new kit from EMSL, which shows how a 741 op amp is put together.
Hardware companies continue to raise money: Electric Imp just raised $15M. You can hear our interview with Brandon Harris when he was on The Amp Hour.
Is there any way to avoid the standards wars in the emerging internet of things.
One thing that will limit IoT is the takeup of IPv6.
Samsung bought IoT company SmartThings for a rumored $200M.
Chris was enamored with an online book about DSP that was posted to the subreddit. Dave informs him that this book has been around for a long time.
NPR published a piece about women in engineering and how workplace culture and how there is a 40% fallout. Dave and Chris agree about the impact of the workplace on retaining women, but think the numbers need to be normalized against men leaving the workforce.

Thanks to panavatar for the original picture of the secret bear.

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