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 Trey German - Launchpad Laden Lodesman Aug 20, 2014

Show notes

Welcome, Trey German! (@yertnamreg)

Trey currently lives "inside the loop" in Houston, TX.
He went to school at Rose Hulman, an engineering focused institution. He decided to attend after a summer camp where they built a holonomic robot.
During school he was part of Rose Hulman Ventures. This introduced him to the company that gave him his first job, Simma Software.
Simma designs protocols and stacks around CAN and J1708. These are used in large scale automotive applications.
Trey designed a CAN bootloader which allows for reprogramming parts hanging off the CAN bus.
After Simma, he was recruited by Texas Instruments to move down to Houston as part of the C2000.
He had previously worked on Luminary Micro parts using the USB stack at Simma, so this was good preparation for porting that stack to C2000 (after TI bought Luminary Micro)
The c2000 is a 32 bit processor with a built in DSP. This makes it good for applications with real time control and control loops.
The memory address bus is 16 bits, which required defining new types during the USB port (messy!).
USB does not need to run on an Real Time Operating System, though it can. They have a proprietary one called TIRTOS.
lwip and microip are examples of ethernet stacks running without an RTOS as well.
Trey announced his new position at TI: Launchpad applications manager! Congrats!
The C2000 Launchpad (which Trey designed) uses Energia, the fork of the Arduino IDE. Energia supports TI parts and the Launchpad family.
Energia was the rocket that carried a Russian clone of the Space Shuttle.
The C2000 are used for high speed things like a switching regulator controller. The reconfigurable nature allows for efficiency improvements on existing devices in the field!
They are also working on integrating PMBus (an i2c type of protocol for interfacing with switching supplies).
The switching/digital power stuff runs at 100kHz+. The motors run more in the range of 10-50 kHz.
The InstaSPIN software allows for monitoring and controlling motors without needing external sensors (also called Field Oriented Control).
A Cleveland company known as Linestream works with TI on some of this software. Chris got to see a demo at the meetup he runs with Martin Lorton.

The Clarke Transform and Park transform allow the math to simplify, by translating coordinates.
A video by Dave Wilson really helps to clarify some of these points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdiZUszYLiA
There is also a wiki where the theory and application of motor control are discussed in depth.
The code is interrupt driven (no RTOS or OS needed) because of the fast response time needed.
There is also a small co-processor called the Control Law Accelerator. They recently released a C compiler for it.
Trey is working on a quadcopter using instaspin and Launchpad. The body is being cut from die bond material.
You can catch Trey at the upcoming NY (World) Maker Faire. You can also find him on Twitter at @yertnamreg.
Online he hangs out at C2K Central, 43oh and the E2E forums on the TI website.

Many thanks to Trey for being on the show! We can't wait to try out his new quadcopter design!

Design Reviews Are Important - Habitual Hype Hebetude Aug 13, 2014

Show notes

This week’s show will have a very simple set of links due to the nature of the show. If there are any “must have” links that you think will benefit your fellow community members, please let it in the comments. Otherwise, we will update the notes on 8/13.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the image of the Hype Cycle.

Risky Components and Hardware Innovation - Slipshod Shack Shutdown Aug 06, 2014

Show notes

Dave will be giving a talk on trends in hardware innovation at Maker Faire Sydney.
One example given was board share programs like OSHpark (we had @Laen on show 149) There is also a new Aussie version called breadboardkiller.
Chris will be doing a talk on KiCad at an event at Supply Frame (sign up here!). He will also be at DEFCON this coming weekend.
MultiSim from National Instruments is now available via Mouser with a bunch of the parts from their catalog.
There are lots of online SPICE simulators, but as M ike Engelhardt discussed on show 196, they are based on the open source (but also out of date) Berkeley SPICE engine.
Chris is attempting to re-work his Wurlitzer 200, discussed back when the show started.
[CHRIS THE AMERICAN IS POSTING THIS LINK]http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-30/wikileaks-publish-details-of-suppression/5634800[/AMERICAN]
Dave has been having issues with part sourcing. He has a special Digikey part number for a resistor $6K.
The job of engineers is to reduce risk in components and designs. Chris thinks it's better to pay for better parts and offload that risk to the part manufacturer.
IBM is trying to reduce risk by selling off their chip fab...for negative $1B.
Radio Shack has planned the closure of a large chunk of its stores...but may not have the money to close them.
Panasonic is partnering with Tesla to build the Giga factory for batteries.
Chris was around when Samsung built a new fab in Texas...the logistics of building a huge facility are daunting.
A new PCB printer called Squink is fundraising on Kickstarter. It is similar to the previous Cartesian Co, but also has Pick & Place capabilities and it dispenses conductive adhesive.
The TI F ly Buck (the LM5017) is an interesting way to generate isolated power.
Why aren't there schematic standards (like coding standards)? Maybe there are for mil spec / ANSI?
Dave looked at this in his recent vintage power supply teardown, which had some odd conventions on the schematic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc2HKX6XwiA
Chris also had troubles reading the cap values on a his Wurlitzer schematic

https://twitter.com/Chris_Gammell/status/495286961762861056

Thanks to Eric Horst for the pictures of the resistors.

Headless Units and Baseless Batteries - KiCad Kickoff Kopophobia Jul 30, 2014

Show notes

Chris recently announced that he is releasing all of the KiCad videos from the Contextual Electronics course.
There is also a new site over at KiCad.info and there is a forum to talk about KiCad at forum.kicad.info
We also still have an IRC channel! There are also channels for KiCad and Electronics on Freenode.
Dave used to own A ltiumForums.com but they got antsy about him owning that.
The "Lithium Ion super cap in a battery" is being updated to say they're using homemade graphene capacitors.
The current requirements are insane, the dynamic current would be higher than most car chargers.
GE claims to have made a fuel cell breakthrough and are in early production.
Another gimmicky crowdfunding was someone claiming to have replicated Wardenclyff.
Weird Al has a new song about conspiracy theories called "Foil". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-0TEJMJOhk
Dave recently got into OK Go videos, citing the Rube Goldberg as his favorite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w
OK Go was part of the White House maker faire
Dave has camera woes after losing an entire day of footage going through old magazines.
National Instruments recently released a headless unit/multitool. The specs for the scope appear that they are using off the shelf silicon (100 MHz for 2 channels).
Dave mentioned that there is also a wireless head unit for multimeters from Agilent. It is ruggedized for field work.
Fluke also has been pushing their safety equipment.
The hard problem to solve is streaming data back across a wireless connection (especially if you expect it on a particular ).
Dave recently found that low scan rates on the RF section of MDO3000 lock up the keys on the scope. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6R3uynR9Kk
A Cleveland accelerator is now looking for hardware startups.
Dave found out there is also a hardware accelerator in Sydney.
Many of our listeners will be tempted by VC/accelerator money as well. Just be sure you know why you're taking money for a company idea.
Ben Einstein of Bolt (another hardware accelerator) wrote a piece on why so much money is heading into hardware.
Littlebits released their CloudBit module, which connects their platform to the internet. Chris was interested to know that people are using it as prototyping.
Google is giving $1 million for the "Littlebox challenge". It's all about trying to get the maximum power density for a microinverter.
The EDA solver is meant to be a way to search through available components for a PCB and pick the best ones. It will be interesting to see if that kind of thing works for non-example designs.

Thanks to Low Voltage Labs for the picture of the pumpkin made in KiCad

An Interview With Nadya Peek - Gallant Gcode Gerontology Jul 23, 2014

Show notes

Welcome, Nadya Peek! (the picture above is her ordering PCBs while on a beach)

Nadya is part of the Machines That Make group at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.
Her advisor is Neil Gershenfeld, author of "Fab - The Coming Revolution To on Your Desktop". The group is also responsible for the concept of Fab Labs.
Chris joked that the Rep Rap is not actually self replicating (Nadya is often asked if her machines can do that). Nadya likes that the Rep Rap community is composed of people thinking about machine design.
Some old machines have a "Load Tape" button.
The MTM reconfigurable machines use virtual machines that abstract out directions and axes. However, the machines can still interpret Gcode if necessary.
The reason these formats (gcode, gerbers, pdf) persist is they are portable. Nadya seeks to make things portable by making readable, friendly code (even if it will need to be reworked at some point in the future in a new language).
Dave asked if there is concern about projects branching off, but Nadya says that's the point (increasing access to tools).
There are differences when looking at robots vs machines.
The "How to make (almost) anything" class at MIT is one of the most popular at the school.
They attempted to make a circuit board cutter that could supplant the Modela. This started as the MTM Snap machine.
Others associated with the lab are working on board cutters as well; J onathon Ward went to Otherlab, who are the makers of the Othermill.
After the Snap machine, the MTM group wanted to extend the head to allow cutting and extrusion and vinyl cutting: they made the Pop Fab into a suitcase

This was made much quicker using a Flexicam CNC machine
Tool making moves outside of just electronics though; Nadya wants to help people automate any task, like in synthetic biology or a lab.
Nadya's cohort Ilan was doing a project for a friendship bracelet loom...and ended up making a machine to wind the coils for the loom!
Nadya told us about a 3d printing documentary called "Print the legend".
Ilan was also behind the vision based CNC handheld router by Taktia. They needed to make a machine to make the custom tape for vision tracking as well.
There are lots of Kickstarter projects that come out of MIT
- $10 spectroscopy
- Kite mapping
Nadya also likes that Bunnie and Xobs' Novena project will not only be an awesome open source project, but also will a commentary on getting things made outside of the usual mass produced pathways. This is in contrast to Bolt, which works with Dragon Innovation helping out (or Highway1 which has PCH Int'l helping out).
Another CBA project, Google's Project Ara also has modularity at heart.
Nadya won't be making Chris a chip printer, but offered to possibly make a potato chip printer.
'Dave tells Nadya and Chris about Potato Semiconductor, which makes high speed digital logic (and has a ludicrous website).

You can find Nadya's work on her website, Infosyncratic.

B Plus Boards and D Minus Cities - Uneath Urban Ubication Jul 16, 2014

Show notes

Chris went to Detroit with the Hackaday guys for the Red Bull Create competition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbYtahfsS0M
The population in the 60s was about 2 million people, it's now below 600K.
The art culture in Detroit is great, encouraged by low priced living and a variety of urban landscapes to work with.
Previously Chris had been at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for recruiting. Dave doesn't understand how big companies chase graduates.
Chris really enjoyed Backyard Brains, who make kits for measuring brain activity. They were controlling cockroaches and scorpions.
Another company they visited was Pinocc.io, a mesh based connected device platform: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLER2I1r2-U
Another connected platform, Spark just raised $5M after having going through the HAXLR8R program and raising $600K on Kickstarter.
Not all crowdfunding projects work out so well though, a $3.5M project failure has disappointed their backers and shown that hardware is not guaranteed.
An article about embracing hardware on O'Reilly is probing the idea of why hardware has become more prevalent and what we'll do with the data.
Our cousin podcast, Embedded.fm was talking about IoT as pet rocks last week...it's novel but mostly sits there after the fact.
The Sydney Maker Faire is coming up again, less than a year out from the last one. It will be held at the Powerhouse again.
Chris got to visit the Ford museum in Dearborn and see the massive power generation capabilities.
The Raspberry Pi B+ was just announced the other day, it has improvements and fixes over the original version.
These are being produced by/with Element14, who also recently started offloading manufacturing of the Beaglebone.
The BeagleBone has been integrated into lots of commercial projects, which makes it difficult to keep them stocked.
Dave has been searching through old magazines to find mentions of the 74 series logic mentioned last week. See below for some shots of the magazines.
Next week on the show we'll have Nadya Peek, who works at the Center For Bits And Atoms on reconfigurable, custom CNC machines. Very cool!

Thanks to George Thomas for the picture from inside the abandoned Detroit building.

https://twitter.com/eevblog/status/488552881843228672

https://twitter.com/eevblog/status/488551413975248898

https://twitter.com/eevblog/status/488550740751691776

https://twitter.com/eevblog/status/488549634432716800

https://twitter.com/eevblog/status/488548340875816960

An Interview with Martin Lorton - Variegated Video Vagility Jul 08, 2014

Show notes

Welcome, Martin Lorton! Video blogger and fellow Clevelander!

Fresh off replacing his basement, he stopped by Chris's basement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mprDdGp6rWI
Martin got started in IT, working for the large company EDS in his home South Africa. That was bought out by HP and they managed BP's accounts.
Once Martin moved to the states in 2008, he had extra time to begin video blogging.
Fluke got ahold of his early videos and started sponsoring him. At one point, Martin was making a video per day. (!)
The reason Martin got into video was to explore solar, which he did extensively and eventually he put onto his house back in South Africa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agSfgsH97PE
The test equipment was another market that he got interested in exploring, especially because it was related to solar.
Martin says up front that his videos are from a novice perspective. Chris mentions a book about teaching adults that says this is necessary to be an effective teacher.
Another important aspect is to maintain the community, much like Dave does on his forum.
The support that Martin and Dave both get seems to stem from the idea of 1000 true fans.
At the beginning, Martin did not appear in front of the camera. In fact, he hired a female actress to be in front of the camera (without much success).
One part of solar that the mjlorton channel focuses on is the data. Chris mentioned a book by Astro Teller that does the same for marriage called Sacred Cows.
You wouldn't think of Cleveland for renewables, but wind turbines are popping up everywhere. Lincoln Electric has a HUGE one that can output 5 MW.
Dave's solar data from his house is available online (but not updated regularly).
Another project that is approached from the "beginner" perspective is Martin's power supply project. Much like other modern problems, sometimes it's simply knowing what terms to Google for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70dsAWBkXIM
Sometime you need to find ways to filter the audience to get to the core of folks who really care. Money is one way to do that.
Long form videos come naturally to Martin (and Dave), they realize how much is left out from DMM tutorials like the one from Afrotech. Same thing for Curious Inventor's 5 min videos (who told us he spent 6 months learning more about soldering before making his popular video).
Other engineering video blogs:
- Signal Path
- Engineer Guy
- Photonic Induction
Martin acts as a stimulus for audience talking to one another on various medium.
Both Dave and Martin are in the midst of trying out KiCad. Martin used Design Spark for the early part of his power supply project.
Recently Jack Ganssle started putting out videos on YouTube.
Dave lets us know that 74 series logic is celebrating its 50th video (really 5400 series)

Many thanks for Martin stopping by the basement to talk to us. If you come through Cleveland you can join Martin and Chris at the Charged Conversation meetup.

Solar Factories and HVDC Lines - Pollent Power Pushing Jul 02, 2014

Show notes

Chris says that there is still lots of time to enter The Hackaday Prize. Don't Panic.
Dave recently did a judge interview.
Need to connect your project? Chris got his Electric Imp working in about 10 minutes using their getting started guide.
Dave recently had to declare email bankruptcy. Chris was listening to a podcast about someone who had to do the same with nearly 10,000 unread emails.
Sometimes we get used to the reminders we set for ourselves. Chris either needs a speaker in his house that announces meetings or a shock collar that punishes for not getting something done.
Dave recently made a video debunking the solar roadways we discussed a few weeks back.
Elon Musk (via SolarCity) recently bought a solar manufacturing company. They will be opening a new plant in Western New York near Chris's hometown.
They will also use the abundant power from Niagara Falls to help power the plant. Chris took pictures with a Nikola Tesla statue up there when he was younger.
Germany now gets 50% of its power from renewable sources.
Martin Lorton is installing solar panels on his house in Cleveland. Even with cloudy cities like Cleveland (and some in Germany), they can still output significant power.
Dave says there are now 1 million homes with solar in Australia.
Chris reveals that he used to design instrumentation at ABB.
The exciting stuff coming from ABB in the past few years have been around HVDC, specifically with an eye towards long distance transmission of massive amounts of power (think gigawatts).
Another exciting piece is the DC Breaker that can switch the large amounts of power in less than 20 ms.
They also look amazing, the standoffs required for 800kV is significant.
The Diagrammer by Mergenthaler was a badass piece of industrial equipment for making schematics. Think there are any still around?
Rhode & Schwarz stopped branding products in the Hameg product line as Hameg (with the associated logo).
Someone made a compilation video of Dave saying America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D8bdemvjIk
Our buddy Mike Ossmann has been working on the NSA playset, a replication of the hardware shown in the catalog of gadgets to order. He will be showing it off DefCon.
Chris will also be traveling to Detroit in two weekends to hang out with the Hackaday guys and film the Red Bull Create competition.
Dave has been duking it out in the harsh Aussie winter by competing in the Tough Bloke competition.

Image is courtesy of ABB

An Interview with Noah Feehan - Biloquistic Blinking Blush Jun 25, 2014

Show notes

Welcome, Noah Feehan (@AKAMediaSystem)!

Noah is one of the hardware (and more!) engineers in the New York Times R&D Lab. Their charter is to look 3-5 years out, especially how media will change.
He found out about the group from a post on PSFK, an aggregator blog similar to Kottke.org.
Prior to the New York Times, he did his master's at the MIT media lab.
The New York Times Idea Lab is separate, they work more on the future of display on the web.
One of Noah's latest projects (which he talked about at Solid) was Blush, a wearable that listens to conversations and lights up when it hears common topics between those talking.
It interfaces with Curriculum, a Chrome browser plugin that captures and infers high level topics of interest. Privacy is maintained for the pages it scrapes by anonymizing data.
The device is built upon the RFduino, tiny cortex with a built in bluetooth module.
The Blush is a single bit output. In the future, the "Clip-E" project will have a small display.
They want to be informative without being overbearing and interrupting the conversation.
- More Monty Python conversation card
- Than the PeeWee Herman secret word https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxMZgeBlqzQ
Kate Hartmen of the Social Body Lab in Toronto works on Nudgeables, 1 bit haptic interactions.
Noah has experimented with this as well, mapping and applying heat via heating pads from adafruit.
REVEL is a haptic interaction designed by Disney, it changes as you move your finger over it.
The NYT R&D lab has a nice setup of equipment, Noah is excited to get the ex1 to start printing flexible electronics.
Noah really wants to build a time lapse moveable setup. This reminded Chris of a Tech Shop video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88vTsKdysoo&t=14m00s
Chris got started with the guerilla guide to CNC machining.
The members of the R&D lab try to give back to open source communities, as many of them came from them.
While working in the hyper instruments group at the MIT Media Lab, Noah was introduced and consulted for Bjork on her Biophillia album.
A favorite (weird) video of ours: Bjork explains a TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75WFTHpOw8Y
Collaborating on projects can be really hard with hardware, Noah was impressed by the work that Mathieu Stephan (limpkin) has done for the Mooltipass as part of Hackaday.
Another project that Noah has worked on recently is the GridEye, a tiny 8x8 pixel thermal camera. It uses a a $40, export controlled sensor from Panasonic.
Noah really wants to see more of the spectrum...like a Mantis Shrimp!
Another interaction piece, Noah installed the "Fixture" project in his wife's office. It tracks the orientation of his smartphone throughout the day and displays it on the wall. This reminded Chris of the Weasley family clock in Harry Potter.

Many thanks to Noah for stopping by and telling us about his projects! It's always interesting hearing from people who bridge the gap between art and science and who are pushing the boundaries of how we communicate and consume information.

Tesla, Checklists and Bullies - Emerging External Eupsychics Jun 18, 2014

Show notes

Thanks to carspottingmex for the picture of the Tesla

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