The Amp Hour

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Chairs, Sparks and Devices - Optional Olent Obreption Apr 01, 2014

Show notes

This week focused more on electronics! Think we talk about something too much or too little? Let us know in the comments!

Chris finally got a chair and wowsa does it make a difference!

Finding parts online can be tough with distractions, apparently extended internet use can affect the brain. What's a datasheet hunter to do?
If you're still a USENET junkie, Dave is on the sci.electronics.design (accessible through Google Groups).
Shoutout to Junko Yoshida for some of the great articles she writes. Really enjoyed the piece on "The Land of the Rising Silence" when she visited Japan.
Students in the US can get Amazon Prime for a year (Chris got 1-night shipped his chair for $4). Dave dislikes how they won't ship anything but books to Oz.
Dave has been looking for the lowest power 16+ bit A/D converter he could find. All told he found 2412 from over 24 different companies. Crazy!
COTW: The AD7691 from Analog Devices. 18 bits and only 108uW @ 8kHz. Wowsa!
Speaking of low power, our friends from Touchstone Semi have been getting some press from their initial announcements. They're 2nd sourcing components from Maxim IC...hopefully without any issues.
Design Spark has a new plugin for their free CAD software that allows 3D models (incorporated in version 2) to be exported to Google Sketchup. Cool!
With the CADspan plugin for Google Sketchup and 3D printing, it's conceivably possible to make an entire prototype for <$100.
Dave looking for preferences on CAD packages for future OSHW projects. Your opinion?
Have there been any large-scale open source hardware projects? Chris and Dave can't think of any.
Obama announces robot initiative. Only $70 million but the idea is great. Won't be creating jobs anytime soon though!
This Day in Nerd History:
- June 26th (oops!) -- Maurice Wilkes was born. Founding father of many microcomputing principles and techniques (in the '40s, no less!)
- June 27th -- The inaugural run of the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives. June 28th -- Milan, Italy inaugurated the first central European electricity power station.
Lightning Round:
- Company gets approval to store your Facebook data for future employers to look at. Yipes!
- The patent system in the US gets approval in the house. If signed into law, it'd be "First to file" instead of "First to invent'.

That's all for this week. Be sure to leave us some comments and find us on Twitter or Facebook!

Let's Hear It For The Buoys - Vanishing Vessel Vexation Mar 26, 2014

Show notes

Chris has been having trouble getting into a work grove while on his own. Dave "told him so". Chris is now trying out Evernote.
The "Screen Snip" function of Evernote is similar to the recently released Datasheet.net.
The MH370 tragedy is also quite an intriguing mystery. Freescale had many employees on the plane.
Former guest of the show Greg Charvat has been on all manner of TV programs explaining the radar systems used for search.
Recently they figured out that they could use the doppler shift of the signals being sent out from the plane to help locate the flight path. This has never been done before.
Dave's former project, the S onobuoy, is likely being used to help pick up the sonar signal.
As discussed when Elecia was on the show, Dave's firmware decides to scuttles the buoy (sink it to the bottom of the ocean) after a certain timeout period.
An Aussie researcher used Sonobuoys dropped in a relatively close location in the Indian Ocean to see how far the currents drift...the answer? Quite far.
Chris referred to the EAC, which was talked about in Finding Nemo.
Chris will be attending EE live next week. Will you be there? Former guests Elecia White, Bunnie Huang and Jack Ganssle will all be speaking at the conference.
The Computer History museum is NOT next to the McEnery Convention Center, it's in Mountain View. It's the "Tech Museum of Innovation" in downtown SJC.
Sparkfun got dinged for importing yellow multimeters. This apparently violated Fluke's "Trade Dress" in the US (not to be confused with Trademark).
The Fluke response was nice, but predictable.
Chris has been stressing about finding a sub-$100 oscilloscope (even if it's a "throw away") for Contextual Electronics Session 1B. It needs to be available worldwide and a standard product (ie. no recommending an analog scope). Right now he's looking at:
- DSO Nano v3
- Hantek 6022
- Are there others he should be evaluating?
Dave started with a Kikasui 20 MHz scope that he paid $800
Do you feel imposter syndrome? This is a rising trend in the software industry, we were curious is the same happens in hardware. It's easy to feel inadequate with so many people making YouTube videos and submitting stuff to Hackaday.
What do you use for your bare metal ARM toolchain? Alvaro writes about his GCC based approach.
A nice article about how short term thinking and the finance/bean counters gutted manufacturing in places like the US and Australia.
Does Silicon Valley have a youth problem? Depends which side of industry you're in.
Dave and Chris both wonder where hardware startups are headed. How many connected devices can a person handle?
Dave made an in depth video about power supply ripple https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edel3eduRj4

Thanks to Mike Baird for the picture of the buoy.

An Interview with Marcus Schappi - Kit Ketch Kenophobia Mar 19, 2014

Show notes

Welcome, Marcus Schappi!

Marcus and Maddy Schappi started Geek Ammo and are producing the MicroView as a Kickstarter (but only 5000 of them).
They also own and run Little Bird Electronics, the largest Australian distributor of Open Source Hardware.
Marcus does customer support and is tempted by "Let Me Google That For You" -- http://lmgtfy.com
They run the business out of their house! Which is even crazier when you realize they carry more than 10,000 SKUs (Stock keeping units)
Prior to the latest Kickstarter venture, they started Ninja Blocks. It's based upon the BeagleBone (original) and raised more than $100K.
The idea behind NB was to act similar to IFTTT.com ("If this, then that"), but for hardware/real world interactions.
They were able to run this campaign on Kickstarter before it came to Australia by incorporating in Delaware as a US company.
They were assisted and supported by StartMate, a resource for Aussie companies.
At first, the idea of an Arduino with a built in display was an off-hand joke. However, they wanted it to be real (like Chris wanted with the Tacocopter).
Early protos were done with the $4K pick and place from Shenzhen.
The MicroView will also have an interactive course for iPad. There are 11 modules to get people started.
When submitting the project to Kickstarter, they didn't believe the picture was a prototype because it was so shiny. In fact it was a machined and polished CNC.
Cases are a difficult problem to solve; with the Ninja blocks, they 3D printed each and every case (more than 1000!). They did this inside the Little Bird house and Marcus's child may be as much as 10% ABS plastic because of it.
Marcus is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of Ninja Blocks. They did a $1m investment round and recently launched the very shiny Ninja Sphere on Kickstarter.
The MicroView will be manufactured by Sparkfun. The engineering team was our guest a few months back and it's easy to see why such a talented team is growing into such a powerhouse company!
Sparkfun also produced the Makey Makey, a popular MIDI interface tool based on the Arduino.
Marcus was able to convince Nate by making an analogy to the AMG/Mercedes Benz relationship.
Arduino is now incorporated in Switzerland (the Delaware of Europe!)
The MicroView is participating in the "Arduino at Heart" program, a quasi-licensing/approval that alerts users that the guts of a device are hackable.
It's about creating products that "just work". Marcus likes the Electric Imp, which gives users wifi inside an SD card.
What did Marcus learn from the online game Clicking Bad? Distributor networks really matter! And Sparkfun has a LARGE network.
Apparently 30% of Kickstarter backers are outside the US. At least for Marcus and Dave's campaign.
Sparkfun are outpacing their competitors. Marcus and Dave wonder if anyone would/could buy them?

Thanks so much to Marcus for "debuting" his Kickstarter project on The Amp Hour! As of the posting of the show, the campaign already crossed the $45K mark! Jeesh, so much for a "debut"!

Capacitors, Simulation and Closures - Deonerated Design Dealmaking Mar 12, 2014

Show notes

Chris is currently in Florida, a somewhat crazy state. Don't believe him? Check out this "gameshow" called "Fake or Florida": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG5EdFAy3FI
Dave is busy testing the boards from his Kickstarter. He still has more than 1500 for the assembly house to test! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UESc7ms4efo
This is also why Dave has been developing a precision current source.
People have asked why he isn't using a flying probe machine? The overhead is too high for low number of pass/fail tests.
Dave likes controlling a lot of aspects of the operation, including shipping, because he is able to optimize.
Chris decided to optimize for time by offloading the shipping of PCBs for Contextual Electronics.
Do you panelize boards? Here is another great resource about how and why to do it.
Can anyone compete if they're not using some component of "Free" these days?
Touchstone Semiconductor seems to be shut down; Silicon Laboratories bought their IP for $1.5 million.
They're not alone, Radio Shack is closing up 1,100 stores as they figure out their business model is crap.
Dave saw the same thing happen when D ick Smith sold to Woolworth's.
Analog Devices also decided to close up a tiny bit of their shop; they will no longer offer an ADI branded version of MultiSim (the simulator from National Instruments). Dave points out there may be SPICE based tools in the future.
Many vendors buy their tools from third parties; LT Spice was formerly switcherCAD. We'll have Mike Engelhardt on the show in April!
TI (formerly National Semi) WebBench adds schematic modification and simulation. This might finally make the tool useable!
Another entrant into the fray (and one that has yet to prove its usefulness) is Schematics.com
One thing that WILL be working is former guest Adam Wolf taking on the nightly builds of KiCad for OSX!
Chris spills his idea that someone should start a Red Hat for KiCad; basically a company dedicated to serving corporate customers with supported open source tools. Then feed the enhancements back to the community like Red Hat does with CentOS.
Dave wants to call it "Tinfoil Hat" or alternately "Copperclad Hat".
Cereamic capacitors can fail...and 80% of the time it's from the mechanical assembly of the boards they're on.
This can cause capacitors to "sing". Dave used to do this purposefully when building ceramic hydrophone elements.
Speakers can be microphones and microphones can be speakers. Chris enjoyed Innovation Hub talking about how the Beatles did this for ~~"Paperback Writer"~~ Daytripper.
Ceramics aren't always the answer! Sometimes you need a minimum esr for switching regulators.
Sometimes other capacitive elements can be sensitive. Former guest of the show Mike Harrison (Mike's Electric Stuff) showed how PIC microcontrollers are pressure sensitive! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCXCLR3xq8U
There are now 50 Billion ARM devices in the world! Dave doesn't think that is susprising, but Chris does giving that it's mostly recent growth (since the iPhone) that things really exploded.

Thanks to Scott Kellum for the Florida picture

An Interview with Elecia White - Wirewove Worshipping Wookieist? Mar 05, 2014

Show notes

Welcome, Elecia White of Logical Elegance and the Making Embedded Systems podcast (and book)!

Elecia's wonderful book is called "Making Embedded Systems" and is published by O'Reilly. You can get a discount by going to this site and using the code 'authd'
The notebooks discussed are the SNCO 2001
Her career so far has taken her to the depths of management and back. She was a full time manager at Shotspotter.
Dave loves it when his reputation precedes him to an interview (shocker!), Elecia doesn't.
Want to get into embedded? Start with Arduino.
Elecia sees lots of projects using the Cortex-M3, was surprised the Cortex-M0 didn't do better.
Unless a software stack is required (ethernet, bluetooth), Elecia doesn't like RTOS's because they often still don't run fast enough (or aren't deterministic enough).
She has worked wit the c2000/Piccolo family and likes it for math heavy operations because of the DSP.
The compilers aren't getting any less expensive...or better. She prefers the GUI of Visual Studio but no embedded IDEs seem to have the same functionality.
Power optimization is a challenging/fun part of Elecia's jobs as well.
She worked on some of the Fitbit devices out in the market today (one, flex, force).
Also some of the toy lines at LeapFrog, such as the Violet.
A common frustration among embedded engineers is when people expect embedded systems to be like their iPhones.
Self commenting code is something to strive for, but is unrealistic.
Elecia believes commented out code snippets should be deleted (and tracked by revision control).
"If code is the main meeting that is happening, comments are the backchatter that happens between engineers over IM"
She doesn't dislike Git, the processing being used when she first started with it was poor.
El likes touch feedback and sees haptics as a new area for innovation, especially for VR/AR.
Writing a book is tough...she did it 3-5 hours a day for 6 months...while consulting!
Making Embedded Systems was similar to the O'Reilly Head First series.
Going to be at the EE Live event in April? You can go watch Elecia do a teardown and give a talk about IoT being disappointing.
Elecia and Christopher have a Nest Thermostat and a Smoke Detector and they aren't quite living up to expectations. At least not $3.2B expectations from the consumer perspective.

It was great to have Elecia come tell us more about the embedded world and about her vast experience in the field! Be sure to check out her podcast and all of the wonderful guests and banter on the show!

Added extra, which Dave thinks is hilarious: The Choke-A-Chicken Novelty Toy.

Someone is watching...we think - Horme Hostility Hypochondriac Feb 26, 2014

Show notes

Chris is in Pasedena. Want to meet up? Keep an eye on the @Hackaday twitter feed.
Dave is pissed about the US gov't affecting his purchase outside the US.
Chris likens this to how China handles the internet...you want access to their market? Play by their rules.
There still is a chance that BTTF shoes are a reality.
CE is going well, moving into week 6!
Dave was supposed to get a 6-in-1 scope from Tek but its stuck in Customs.
Aside from getting scopes, Dave also recently was selling scopes at the Wyong Field Day. He got between 30 and 280 for a TDS220 scope. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yAx1Etr1Gc
Chris is perturbed by the shortage of BeagleBone Blacks.
More discussion about the shades of gray in OSHW.
Do you pick parts based on available libraries? Which types of parts?
DARPA is hoping to fund the development of chip that can prove authenticity overseas.
Dave is now a mailing house! Surprisingly, the cost to send something to Australia and outside Australia are simiar.
Chris wants a feature length film about the T raitorous 8. Maybe we should start a Kickstarter?
There was a silly KS project about how to succeed at KS...that did not fund...
More links!
- A great teardown over at the EEVblog forum: A Keithley 2002
- Google recently released Project Tango
- Supply Frame/Hackaday just launched the "Projects" site to share your work with others easily.

Thanks to Jackie Sutherland for the picture of the creeper cat

An Interview with Hank Zumbahlen - Zoppa Zumbahlen Zateticism Feb 19, 2014

Show notes

Welcome, Hank Zumbahlen!

Hank graduated from University of Illinois in 1974
He then worked at National Semi 2 months before there was a huge layoff. Other companies followed with similar fates, due to the timing of the job market.
He has been at Analog Devices for 25 years now! Awesome!
He started in field applications but now works in central applications, developing writings and seminars.
The most famous of which is the Linear Circuit Design Handbook, one of the best (free!) resources available online for analog. Hank was the editor and there were other contributors as well. They called the book, "the seminar that never was".
Another great (free!) resource is the ADI's "Op Amp Application Handbook", Walt Jung, Editor.
Hank works out of the San Jose office and his home office, but also travels around to train people. He'll let us know when he's doing his next public seminar.
Yet another awesome resource (and something that got integrated into the Linear Circuit Design Handbook) is an app note called, "Staying well grounded"
Both that article and an article by Henry Ott about split ground planes (Henry was a former guest of the show) helped Chris get through many design problems.
Hank suggests to "Think like an electron".
While working on a particularly difficult verification circuit, Hank had to build a 3500W linear amplifier(!!).
Hank puts the "Low vs High Frequency" division at about 10MHz-100MHz. Basically when you need to start worrying about EMI.
Integration continues to increase in analog components. Chris recalls the ADuCM350 discussed last week.
In order to keep advancing technology, we need more package changes. Really this means we need to be able to access I/O on silicon.
Hank maintains his audio hobby, including his work as a musician. He built an outboard DAC with a "ludacris fringe" -- a 7 pole filter for the DAC output. Wowza!
The precursor to Hank's "Staying Well Grounded" was Paul Brokaw's AN202, "Making things go right for a change"
Many people don't understand the mechanical to electrical conversion process, as in an accelerometer. Hank says they measure zeptofarads.
When looking at ADCs, some look at SNR and some look at ENOB.
Hank doesn't work much with IBIS because he stays in the relatively low frequency realm.
The newere tech is "evolutionary vs revolutionary". But that means consumers will get more for less (and faster!). Chris likes the isolators like the ADUM2401.
PLLs are getting faster too...now running around 18 GHz!
Hank's next series of articles will be about phase response filters.
This will appaear in the A nalog Dialogue, an awesome newsletter about all things analog (a little bit of marketing, but its bearable). There are also very valuable archives.
If you'd like to reach Hank, you can email him at hank.zumbahlen@analog.com

Thanks so much to Hank for talking to us on the show this week. It's always great to get analog gurus with their war stories on the show! Also, thanks to Michael Ossmann (@michaelossmann) for joining us again!

Chris Becomes Self Employed - Quixotic Quitting Quaere Feb 12, 2014

Show notes

Chris recently put in his two-week notice and will soon be completely self-employed. This is based upon the success of Contextual Electronics so far and Chris wants to spend more time focusing on it for those who signed up. Thank you to everyone in The Amp Hour audience who has been part of it!
Australia has decided to ditch automotive manufacturing and all the add-on industries it supports. Holden, Ford and Toyota are all pulling out. All cars will be imported from now on.
High complexity manufacturing should be less and less of a labor issue these days, as factory automation continues to increase. Dave and Chris recalled the video of the Tesla factory.
Dangerous Prototypes and other fun hacker types are setting up a soldering workshop and market tour before the Shenzhen Maker Faire.
Digikey also gave tours of their gigundous facility, in a town with no unemployment. They are isolated logistically but make it work.
It was surprising seeing how much manual work is still involved in their operation. Chris and Dave propose having stickers of the face of the person that packs and ships your order.
Kiva systems, recently purchased by Amazon, helps with warehouse automation by moving shelves to the pick and pack people. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KRjuuEVEZs
Though robots aren't taking over, TI, Intel and IBM are all slashing headcount.
Dave is working on a precision current source as part of the test jigs for the thousands of uCurrent Golds being produced. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2ohz8DyJoQ
The Bench BudEE (the project being built in Session 1 of Contextual Electronics) has a similar current source output, but lower precision.
There is a new 6-in-1 Tek scope that will be released later this month (and you can win one). Dave was able to find some info with some strategic Googling. Chris thinks this is better marketing than they could have ever designed!
Dave is making a video about some behind the scenes Kickstarter logistics.
Mike Harrison (of Mike's Electric Stuff and former guest of the show) is working on a crazy LED project. The manufacturing of those long PCBs seems treacherous!
Chip of the Week! 2 Weeks running! The ADuCM350 is an all-in-one medical device chip, meant to measure, process and communicate body data. It's a crazy amount of peripherals in one chip.
Bill Nye debated a crazy person. While the debate dragged on a little and Bill wasn't as aggressive as Dave would have liked, Bill used it as a platform to talk about he importance of science education. Our favorite quote: "We NEED scientists, and especially engineers, for the future. Engineers use science to solve problems and MAKE things.
We may have an Android app soon, as part of our LibSyn account! We'll update this page and the subreddit with more info.
We forgot to mention it on the show, but Hank Zumbahlen, prolific Analog Devices applications engineer will be on the show next week! Get your questions in here!

Thanks to Marsmett Tallahassee for the Plan B picture

An Interview with Scott Driscoll - Impacable Interdisciplinary Inventor Feb 05, 2014

Show notes

Welcome Scott Driscoll, the man behind the Curious Inventor videos on YouTube!

Scott's popular soldering videos (which out rank Dave's) took 100s of hours to learn about (Scott was a novice when he started), make and perfect (Scott continues to be a perfectionist). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NU2ruzyc4
He often teaches himself electrical concepts and even went to IPC soldering training. He studied as a mechanical engineer and now works on software.
The Curious Inventor site also has a wonderful KiCad tutorial (written) that helped Chris back when he was learning.
Scott used KiCad to design the V meter, a capacitive touch device that acts as a MIDI controller.
The device went through FCC testing, with the help of a friendly FCC engineer. All it took were some strategically placed ferrites.
This is not uncommon for products to get in trouble; a few years back there was an FCC court case with Behringer, an audio device manufacturer.
Scott works out of Atlanta and now works full time after deciding not to run the Curious Inventor store/distributorship anymore.
He now works at Equipcodes, which makes interactive manuals for field training.
There is an awesome video on the Curious Inventor channel showing an Augmented Reality overlay of a circuit. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfVQ4N-u0sk
Scott is impressed by 123D Catch and how they can make 3D images from photos.
Much of the coding they do at work uses a Google apk, which stitches things together using go, python.
The program used to make the overlay video used the Unity engine which is mostly C# and Javascript
Back in college as a grad student Scott designed and interacted with a drum robot! Awesome!
The future of computing will be dependent on MIPS/watt. This could be dependent on battery tech or have alternate on-demand generators.There is a cool triboelectric generator that could do this on your handheld device.

Scott's personal blog is called Imponderable Things where he discusses any topic that strikes his fancy. Be sure to catch his video explaining Bitcoin! Thanks to Scott for stopping by to tell us about all of his varied projects!

Manufacturing By Wire And Skipping Testing - Calefacient Cuculine Cash Jan 29, 2014

Show notes

Contextual Electronics is up and running! You can still join in the "audit" tier, if interested.
Chinese New Year is coming, affecting production for many electronics companies.
Dave enjoyed the NSA gadget catalog (even though Chris and Greg Charvat talked about it 3 episodes ago!). It reminds Dave of the movie "Enemy of the State".
Dave's kickstarter is starting to ship out. In fact, his next round of boards is at the assembly house, run by a project backer/EEVblog fan.
Chris is super jazzed about the beta version of Circuit Hub Fabrication.
Dave got one of the first uArm Robots! Looks like a fun new gadget! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4V1xPHL804
The cost of testing can impact the overall price of your project. Designing with decent tolerance parts can help remove the need to (extensively) test.
Google bought Nest for $3.2B. What the hell?
Nest actually acts as a wifi host in order to configure getting it onto your home network. New devices aim to be "point and connect".
Wiki paged containing a list of companies Google has bought. Nest was the second biggest behind Motorola Mobility, the cellphone division (for $12.5B)
Is this all just a money scheme for big VCs? It's crazy to think how much money is pushed around. And that's not all...CEOs in silicon valley conspired to keep wages down.
Dilbert attempts to explain why wages stagnate.
The new film Jobs was a bit of an dramatic exaggeration. Woz spoke out about it on Google+. He's also working on a script of the events from his perspective.