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:

A Benchtop Pick and Place with Stephen Hawes Jan 21, 2025

Show notes

Welcome, Stephen Hawes!

Chris interviewed Stephen back in 2020 for his second episode of The Contextual Electronics Podcast. It was when Stephen was still working at Formlabs and the Lumen/Opulo were a glimmer in his eye.
The Lumen v4 is a Benchtop Pick and Place machine that works with OpenPNP
Where are we in relation to reprap?
Powered feeders
Videos about eeprom
KiCad pos file
Can reliably place 0402
Lumen v4 product page
Motherboard of v4
Running Marlin FW
Head has two heads/nozzles
Compare the Lumen to other methods (hand placed, paying for assembly)
OHM (Open Hardware Manufacturing) podcast
What industries are open?
Thea Flowers (of Winterbloom synth fame) just joined the team
Microscope
Other tools
Space constraints
Stephen does a great job talking through many experiments and upcoming features on his youtube channel
Prototyping PCBs with a fiber laser
Micronix
Making PCBs on a 3D printer (hack session with Stephen's former employer)
Timon (Skerutsch) makes double sided PCBs by inserting enameled wire through drilled holes

Is this the year you should get a Pick and Place? Stephen won't say yes (but I will)

Data Provenance in the Home, Server, and Fab Dec 23, 2024

Show notes

Home assistant
Homelab subreddit
Solar assistant
proxmox
CarPlay / android auto
NUCs
Video Interview with Lee (since posted as #684 of TAH)
25K pound amplifier repair and associated EEVblog forum post
Louis Rossman also talking about the copyright claim
How the Fairlight CMI changed Music
Read more here
Synths / woodworking are hobbies that will eat all free cash flow (and Chris is considering the latter...)
Pat Gelsinger has stepped down / retired / been forced out at Intel
Intel will now have co-CEOs. As past guest Luke Wren wrote on Mastodon, "Based on historical trends I predict the number of Intel co-CEOs will double every two years"
Startup in Ohio will apparently be making Quectel parts for the US market. We expect to see lots of silliness like this in the next few years because of forthcoming tariffs...

Lee Felsenstein: The Computer Revolution & Counterculture Dec 10, 2024

Show notes

A full 3 hour discussion with the legendary Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne 1, SOL computer, VDM-1, Pennywhistle modem, and the inventor of social media. Covering everything from the Berkeley free speech movement, the counterculture movement, his career, through to Obsorne and how he invented social media with Community Memory. His book: https://www.amazon.com/Me-My-Big-Idea… https://felsensigns.com/ 00:00 - Full 3 hour talk with Lee Felsenstein 08:24 - University of California at Berkeley, and the Free Speech Movement. 29:04 - First Junior Engineer job at Ampex 36:20 - The first hackathons with Richard Greenblatt 37:33 - Hackers, Heros of the computer revolution 1:03:36 - Techical career at Ampex 1:12:52 - Atari Computers and Steve Jobs, Nolan Bushnall, and Allan Alcorn 1:15:00 - He tried to pitch social media to Steve Jobs 1:22:15 - Designing the Pennywhistle 103 modem + 1:25:36 - Marty Spergel selling kits 1:31:53 - Steve Wozniak and how the Apple 1 is NOT a personal computer 1:43:42 - Osborne Computers 1:53:22 - Osborne 1 physical design 1:57:57 - Osborne 1 development timeline 2:01:19 - The Osborne Effect wasn’t what killed the company

Your Mind Is The Tool Nov 06, 2024

Show notes

Chris has been troubleshooting a PCB with a dead short on inner layers (put in by board house by mistake)
Don't Touch My Gerbers shirt
"Is there an AI tool that will fix this for me?" ... No
Chris dumped a bunch of current in the board and looked at it with this thermal camera
6.5 digit DMM to track down shorts
Etching problems in the old days
100% etest
Adding rails to PCBs for production
Reddit discussion thread: why not work on a product? That is, Dave, the wise one.
Videos
Live stream issues
Post from Twitter: Is 2 layers all you really need? This person thinks so, or is trying to convince themselves as much.
Armchair quarterbacking
Ian Johnston replacing the display on an 8.5 digit DMM
Jack Ganssle has posted his final newsletter (The Embedded Muse)...happy retirement! Jack has been on the show twice:
- Episode 54 (!)
- Episode 489
Ward Christensen, Inventor of BBS and XModem, (and former listener of the show!) has passed away
Dave is interviewing Lee Felstenstein for our next episode

Compact High Speed Design with Lukas Henkel Oct 31, 2024

Show notes

Welcome Lukas Henkel of OV Tech GmbH, a product design firm based in Nuremburg Germany!

Miniturization and the limits of miniturization
Price is a constraint
Using standard PCB tech (off the shelf)
Open source SIP
Steps
- Conventional pcbs / components
- Silicon inductors embedded in boards
- Bonded Bare dies / stacked
Need volume to make it work
Requirements to fit into ______
iMX8 ULP - 0.4mm CSP
SIP Footprint
Module abstraction layer talk
Framework laptop
Software support / BSP
SIP will be different than PiMX8
Crowdsupply campaign launching 2-3 weeks and delivery in Dec/Jan
OpenSource laptop
CM4 vs PiMX8
SPI Flash with backup partition
Secure element SE050
Footprint for coral tpu and Halo 8
Trying to solve the problem of vision use cases
Marketing using layout / products but also making money on it
Katerina show
Visualizing simulations
Developing intuition
OpenEMS
Usability is based on python scripting
Using Blender for heat map
BVTKNodes uses .vtk file output
Multiphysics solvers
Things that drive Lukas
For HDI, Thinking in 3D / 2.5D and being able to visualize
Layers ranging from 4 to 18
Any layer design for SIP
Wurth electroncis for high density "any layer stackup"
Article series on altium for the open laptop
Follow Lukas on LinkedIn

Lukas also was a co-founder of PCB Arts. We had his cofounder Saber on the show in the past.

Satellite Design Engineering with Dan Esparon Oct 11, 2024

Show notes

Dan Esparon from Inovor Technologies in South Australia joins Dave to discuss all about the engineering of designing and launching satellites!

Dan works for Inovor Technologies, an Australian company that designs and builds satellites entirely in-house!

Recently they designed and launched the aussie Kanyini satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket https://www.inovor.com.au/missions/

They design and build their own Flight computers, ADCS systems, UHF radios, Battery modules and Solar Arrays in Australia.

All About Antennas with Katerina Galitskaya Oct 01, 2024

Show notes

Welcome Katerina Galitskaya!

Chris started following Katerina's antenna posts on LinkedIn
Monopole vs dipole
Lower frequences are harder bc longer wavelength
PCB size half of frequency
Place antenta on the shorter side
How to ruin your PCB
When to go to a antenna engineer?
Where will the device be?
Antenna environment
Start from vacuum, start adding elements
Dummies in the lab. The one in the episode photo is a dummy head filled with liquid (?!)
SAR - Specific Absorption rate
Simulation vs lab work (dimensions)
Anechoic chamber
When to go with custom antenna?
Buying off the shelf antenna?
New Airpods with fancy 3D antenna
Ben's video about laser sintered antennas
MIMO / Beamforming
the failed promises of 5G
When to simulate
Some open source programs out there ("EMSee"?)
Simulating vs visualizing
Most of the time it's not about vizualizing fields
What is the iteration elements of the antenna?
Satellite antenna design
Good to go external
Thinking about the dielectric const of case
Follow Katerina on LinkedIn!

Watt Is The Deal Sep 23, 2024

Show notes

Spam calls
Keysight released the HD3, a 14 bit ADC oscilloscope (teardown video)
Chris will be at Embedded World North America, please let him know if you'll be there!
Chris will be at the Joulescope stand along with former guest Matt Liberty
This is one of the only tradeshows for general electronics in the US, Embedded Systems Conference went away many years ago. Chris, Dave, and Jeff (yesssah!) recorded at ESC in episode 41!
Bootstrapping new conferences
Cellular power modes
Dave old GSM video
PSM / eDRX
ALT1350
Dave got a smart meter on his home setup
EDMI
EEVblog forum post about leaky power bill
Maybe a trickle
Chris has been trying out Meshtastic, which is based on LoRa. Check out Jeff Geerling's video for a good overview.
meshtastic subreddit
People posting about airplanes flying overhead (example post) like ham radio contacts
Meshmap

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