The Amp Hour

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Op amps, Microchips & Mergers - Narquois Nerd Nescience - Narquois Nerd Nescience Sep 27, 2011

Show notes

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NOTE: Yes, there were some audio issues this week in the first half of the show. We’ll get back to our better quality next week, sorry for the ears we offend.

Lots of fun this week as we get back to the old format of Chris and Dave just shooting the breeze. Hope you enjoy it and please let us know what you thought in the comments!

Chris spent the last week recruiting at MIT and wrote about the experince of recruiting at a top tier engineering school on EB.
One of the students there built a particle accelerator as a high school student! Awesome!
A new show stereotyping and pitting nerds against one another is looking for people to cast on their show. Yuck, not what we need for STEM.
Shoutouts:
- Gary Servin linked here from his relatively new site. Thanks Gary! We love it when people put our logo on their site!
- Jon Oxer, founder of Freetronics, did a video response to the ongoing chip-fab-at-home debate. It's a well measured look at both sides and he gets to participate in the conversation. We definitely enjoyed the fact that people can respond to our ongoing battle (or any other comments we make) in this manner.
Dave visited the Melbourne Hackerspace and they have an unofficial WOTW in the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ9tpTB2orM

TI and National are officially one company. We're waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Listener Niels Mosley asked about how to pick op amps when there are so many out there. Chris' answer? Carefully.
A new part from Microchip pairs an 8 bit micro with reconfigurable logic and a few other fun bits (like an NCO).
More on the printable electronics front: Lars Herlogsson from Linkoping University in Sweden published papers about new organic, printable transistors with gate geometries down to 100 nm. Awesome!
Chip of the Week!
- Dave picks out our top pick of chips this week: The LT1512, a SEPIC topology, multi-chemistry battery charging circuit.
A new part for solar installations, a 50 mV diode that can pass up to 20A. Cool for solar cell installations.
Chris didn't know about this (apparently) Open Source Logic Analyzer. Dave doesn't like that it's built on an off-the-shelf development board.
Some fun breadboarding tips from ProtoStack. We especially liked the part with the SD card plugging into a breadboard!
This Day in Nerd History:
- In 1922, Dr. Albert Taylor and Leo Young at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory near Washington, D.C., demonstrated that if a ship passed through a radio wave being broadcast between two stations, that ship could be detected, the essentials of radar.

That's it for this week! Hope to hear from you in the comments or in video responses!

Moore's Law, GaN and SiC devices - Gallimaufry GaN Gabble Sep 20, 2011

Show notes

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We’re joined once again from our friend Jeff Keyzer of MightyOhm.com, calling in from NYC. He is wrapping up weeks of travel, most recently at the Open Hardware Summit and the World Maker Faire. Welcome once again Jeff!

Chris is a married man! Sorry all you throngs of lady-listeners to The Amp Hour, this nerd is taken! Would you marry an engineer?
Chris will also be in Boston for the coming week. If you're around give him a shout!
Dave just got back from his trip to Melbourne. He saw lots of great stuff, to be explained in future videos. But check out his latest video about cell phone SAR testing.
Also on the schedule was an interview with Colin Mitchell of Talking Electronics.
Great presentations from Bunnie Huang about the future of Open Hardware and from Amanda "w0z" Wozniak about the importance of documentation.
Some other captured videos are available on the side bar of the OHS ustream page.
Shoutout: A short news-based podcast called "This Week in Engineering" popped onto Chris' radar.
Jeff also mentioned the Open Source Hardware Junkies podcast, which neither Chris nor Dave knew about.
Chris was at the ICSCRM conference last week, one focused on GaN and SiC devices. Pretty cool future for power and switching applications!
Jeff mentioned the importance of these more exotic, non-standard materials entering the market, like when Dr Shuji Nakamura used GaN to create a blue light LED.
Chip of the Week: Well, really package of the week. The International Rectifier DirectFET2 package is really cool! It's a flip-chip die in a tiny metal can that allows heat sinking on both the top and the bottom.
Listener Ben Rampling sent in an amazing video for our Shonky Product of the Week segment. The guy in the video is claiming your being bombarded with deadly radiation, as shown on his 0-1KHz FFT plot that zeroes out when he puts his feet on a grounded surface and his wrist on a grounded mouse pad. A must watch for ridiculous product claims!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLOx1kWCWoc

Another episode flown by the seats of our collective pants. Hear something you did or didn’t like? Let us know in the comments!

An Interview with Joe Grand - Pancyclopaedic Prototyping Polymath Sep 13, 2011

Show notes

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Welcome to our guest this week, Joe Grand! Hardware hacker, electrical engineer and former TV host! (but not a washout as Joe was saying)

Joe gave us a behind the scenes look at being part of a TV show (all the design docs here). His 13 episode show was Prototype This on The Discovery Channel.
There are some clips available on The Discovery Channel's YouTube channel or some behind the scenes footage on Joe's YouTube channel (example below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BDHsKMGOEE

Joe was an early members of The L0pht, a hacking group out of Boston throughout the 90s (Joe's handle was "Kingpin")
Corporate influence and commercializing the company hurt the group later.
We wonder if the recently announced BugLabs collaboration with Ford will have a similar effect on the OSHW nature of their devices.
Joe still stays in touch with some from the group, including Mudge, who is now a program director for DARPA trying to get funding for quick turn solutions from hackerspaces, called Cyber Fast Track.
Aside from hacking days, Joe has debuted and licensed multiple designs to other companies, including:
- Emic Text-to-Speech Module
- The yet-to-be-released Low Cost Laser Range Finder. The build log is here and it's predicted to be coming out next week.
- DEFCON 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 badges
We also talked to Joe about manufacturing and where he does his, prompted by multiple articles about smaller companies moving manufacturing back to the US. Joe has used:
- Sonic Manufacturing in the Bay Area.
- E-Teknet in China and the US
The Boston Consulting Group has predicted a resurgence in manufacturing in the US in the next 5 years.
Shoutout: MakerBot TV just started, a weekly show about using a MakerBot! Awesome!
This Week In Nerd History: On this day in 1958, Jack Kilby demonstrated his invention of a miniaturized electronic circuit to his boss at TI. This was recognized as the first integrated circuit to be built and operated. This was not the first transistor ever invented (as Chris wrongly stated).
Dave took a picture of his ad-hoc recording studio:

Thanks again to Joe Grand for stopping by the show!

An Interview with Jeff Keyzer and Jason Kridner - Bonafide BeagleBoard Bionomics Sep 06, 2011

Show notes

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Wow…kind of a long episode this week (but totally worth it), due to having TWO guests on the show! Jason Kridner of the BeagleBoard Project and Texas Instruments and our regular co-co-host, Jeff Keyzer of MightyOhm.com.

Some of Jason's favorite projects for the BeagleBoard are robotics, including some that utilize the libfreenect library.
Jason sees the BeagleBoard getting smaller and cheaper in the future, trending towards other projects like Raspberry Pi
The Gadgeteer (from Microsoft) doesn't appear to be open source hardware, but is a way for .NET programmers to start with hardware.
Though the hardware may not be OSHW, the .NET Micro Framework is FOSS. And using .NET on Linux is a possibility in part by Miguel de Icaza.
Jason's next project with the BeagleBoard will be to remove the need for his iPad for his retro gaming interface system, the iCade.
Due to frustration over a broken 40 pin zif socket Jeff went out and bought and fell in love with a Hakko 808 desoldering station.
Jason has seen some crazy BGA mods. Send in pictures of your favorite board mods to be featured on the show.
Software on the BeagleBoard is pretty varied. The Angstrom Distribution is based upon similar code to WebOS, the main software of the temporarily cheap and available HP touchpads.
Roel Adriaans took The Amp Hour Bingo concept to a new level! Follow along when you listen to the show!
Bill Porter did an unconventional thing: he proposed to his girlfriend by hijacking her PCB panel order from @Laen!
A new competition in the works: a 7400 logic series competition from Dangerous Protoypes!
Jeff had a great time at the Chaos Communication Camp, held outside of Berlin Germany. Check out his photos on the MightyOhm Flickr Page.
There was a talk about sending hackers (in satellite or human form) to space in the near future.
Jeff compared it to Burning Man, the annual art festival in the desert of the US.
Jeff was selling his Geiger Counter kit at the CCC and will continue to at the NY Maker Faire.
Why isn't there overnight camping at any of the MakerFaire events?

There was a lot to talk about, so we went over by about 15 minutes, but hopefully you can wait it out. It's all worth it in the end! And the very end of the show has some fun news. Enjoy!

Multicopter, DIY drones & Tektronix - Zappy Zendik Zoilism Aug 30, 2011

Show notes

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Chris has a new mic! An AT2020 USB microphone. Dave uses a Samson C01U USB microphone.

The Jacksonville police mistake LED lightbulbs for a bomb! Whoops!
Shonky Product of the Week:
- The ADE651, a scam bomb detector. Similar to a dowsing rod...in that it's full of crap!
Shoutouts:
- Fake EE Quips has created a bingo game to play along with during The Amp Hour.
- Tymkrs has created a new podcast called "ZombieTech" as part of their broad range of educational material.
- Another site for electronic education called The Signal Path. Similar format to Dave's videos, they're great for learning about electronic components.
DIY Drones has a fun (unlisted video) that shows a (possibly fake?) electronic human-scale multicopter. The guy driving it wasn't being very safe, but we're glad he's ok.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEa0V6mOodI

Dave wishes we could talk about it more, but he wanted to remind people about the Tektronix announcement coming up in a few hours (from when the swhow was taped). Dave may or may not have something to say about it soon.
Rumor about TI selling the OMAP family to Intel or Broadcom. Junko Yoshida (the EIC) was upset they took so long to respond (because they don't regularly participate?).
TI has a new app out for all their products. Speaking of, Chris just got a Nook and has Android unlocked on it, but probably won't put electronics apps on it. Do you use mobile apps from vendors?
High voltage electronics and a funny accent? Yes please! Great (dangerous) videos from PhotonicInduction!
We've talked about Kickstarter before on here and the viability of HW projects. Geekscape describes an unfortunate scam on Kickstarter for a project that sounded pretty cool (and too good to be true)
Prizes were ridiculous, but didn't compare to the money required to get the top prizes in the the MC Frontalot Kickstarter Campaign that recently completed.
This Day In Nerd History:
- Charles Kettering, an American engineer whose 140 patents included the electric starter, car lighting and ignition systems. Later had the General Motors Institute named after him (now Kettering University). Vice president and director of research for General Motors Corp. (1920-47).
Are robots going mainstream? At $285K per robot, probably not. But it's a good step forward. Dave is building a Microbric robot at home for fun.
Should green cards be stapled to diplomas? Could help with the exodus of skilled workers back to their home countries and instead entice them to start companies in the US (or wherever they are educated).

Did we miss something? Have some suggestions about what we talked about or did a story strike you as odd? Think we should add or subtract segments from the show? Let us know in the comments!

An Interview with Alan Yates - Recondite Radiation Raconteur Aug 23, 2011

Show notes

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Welcome to another awesome guest: Alan Yates, VK2ZAY!

Alan works on pyrotechnics for fun(?!)
While he's not worried about burning out over doing similar hobby/paid work, Chris has written about burn out recently and how that might be a part of it.
He also is an active ham operator, mostly working with PSK31 type communications.
Ham could have been a good option for the recent SF BART shutdown.
Low frequency transmissions could be possible with fractal antennas.
RF, Analog, all are needed in spades in the Bay Area...or elsewhere!
Alan did two killer designs for the 555 contest, the adding machine and the HF spectrum analyzer.
For radiation related sites, Alan is also a fan of TechLib, Burkhard Kanika's site and the Maxim app note 2236.
Alan also likes the 2N4117A for an input JFET. Chris is more a fan of National's LMP7721 for an ion chamber.
HP has announced a drastic shift in their business by selling off their PC division and moving away from consumer goods.
Why isn't HP making innovative products anymore? Possibly because they're not spending the time like they used to!
Though it has many names, Chris just learned it is called "bootlegging" as well.
In other news, Taiwanese companies are getting undercut by Chinese companies in parts of the already low T&M market.
You could make your own kit (though not a new scope yet) with the newly revised Heathkits.

You can contact Alan on Twitter and see more of his great videos on his YouTube channel. We really appreciated having him on the show!

Open Orbific Oratiuncle Aug 16, 2011

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Another week of bouncing from topic to topic. This week included robots, entrepreneurs, OSHW, FPAAs, Ecology and LEDs! Whoo, that’s a lotta stuff!

Elon Musk is an enviable entrepreneur and engineer. Great video piece on him on Bloomberg.com.
Google buys the Motorola handset business for $12.5 billion. Chris thought it was for access at first, but it's much more likely for the patent portfolio..
Robots taking over some high risk jobs at Foxconn. Robots don't care about crappy working conditions, right?
Dave posted a new video explaining the finer points about open source hardware. Mentioned in the comments of Dave's video, but does using vendor made parts make it not open source? The line needs to be drawn somewhere but we don't think that's where it is...
The number one link on YouTube for "Open Source Hardware" is a TED Talk about Open Source Ecology. Amazing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEMkvT0DEk

What, no chip printer in the 50 tools needed to restart a civilization? Chris will settle for a new chip with 1 million programmable gates and > 100 op amps.
FIRST robotics has some celebrity weight behind it. The ad promoting the event was just a warm up for the actual show, aired last night.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLMOKM4QKcE

Reminds Dave of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, meant to promote and inspire fitness in Australia and a few other countries.
Great build quality on a WBR Regenerative Receiver by Dave Richards (AA7EE)! Looks like lots of fun to build!
Margery Conner writes about how Phillips won the USA L-Prize and have produced a commercial replacement of a 60 Watt lightbulb with LEDs.
Dave found an old payslip from the early 90s and was bragging about making $11 an hour as an engineer.
This Day In Nerd History: Leslie Comrie (born Aug 15) was a New Zealand astronomer and pioneer in the application of punched-card machinery to astronomical calculations. He replaced the use of logarithm tables with desk calculators and punched card machines for the production of astronomical and mathematical tables. This made scientific use of these machines, made originally for only business uses.

That's all for this week. Remember to sign up for the open source ecology project, especially if you find yourself saying you don't know what to build.

1943-555 — **Shonky Stiver Stultiloquence** Aug 09, 2011
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Just when you thought the names of episodes couldn’t get any weirder…

US economy seems to be diving again, hopefully it will not seriously impact the electronics industry.

If it does, Chris thinks startups will be even more reliant on Angel Investors like Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail)

Is DIY finally going mainstream, as Wired suggested recently? An article from Futurismic seems to think this is a bad thing and that money coming in will ultimately hurt the "Maker Movement".

One bad thing could be that people could license their projects as Open Source Hardware (like the Penguino) ... but then not be open!

One thing that comes with more visibility...money. And the US government is funding small startups, some of which might be OSHW. Modeled after a program at Stanford.

University of Michigan is also starting a program for burgeoning startups, granting new Masters of Entrepreneurship Degrees.

Have you ever seen an electronics-inspired license plate out on the road before?

Embedded Eric sent in the entry he submitted to the Touchstone Semi design contest that is wrapping up. A 4.4 uW 555 clone that can run at 18 Hz. Awesome!

**Shoutouts**:

Our pal and regular guest, Jeff Keyzer of MightyOhm, has a new OSHW Geiger Counter Kit. He'll be showing one off while he's at the Chaos Communication Camp in Berlin.

Chris's good friend Dave Young just finished running a program teaching high school kids electronics over 6 weeks. The kids have written up their impressions of the program and they are/will be posted to the Blue Stamp Engineering blog portion of the site.

**Shonky Product of the Week**:

First pointed out on the EEVblog forums, "Fuel Savers" for cars seem like an utter load of bunk.

Forum member oPossum did a great review of a 'popular' one and found a few passives and a linear regulator.

**This Day in Nerd History:**

Neville Mott passed away in 1996. He was a theoretical physicist who helped discover some key points in metal/oxide transitions in semiconductors. He won the 1977 prize in physics and the "Mott Transition" is named after him.

Video of Dr. Mott from 1985, along with many other Nobel Prize winners, is available from the BBC.

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, writes about the need for boredom to inspire creativity. Too many devices preclude boredom these days.

A writer at Gizmodo maintains that creativity is still possible and cites the design of the iPhone as an innovative product. What is the iPhone designer like though?

An Interview with Jack Ganssle - Embedded Elchee Epexegesis Aug 02, 2011

Show notes

Embedded industry maven and prolific writer, Jack Ganssle, joins us on The Amp Hour this week.

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Dave called Chris a "young whippersnapper" (actually "young feller", but the same sentiment) in writing about Jeri's chip making.
A former colleague of Jack's maintained that spec's for computers were driven by the porn industry and how much traffic they expected their servers to handle.
Dave notes that the "big thing "a few years back was the soft processor promise (inside FPGAs) and now it has reversed.
Jack mentions that he likes the Altera C-to-H functionality, but that it's always going to be a tradeoff.
Dave is working with the Actel (Microsemi) Igloo Nano. The same size as two 0603 decoupling caps! Tiny!
Jack thinks the rash of mergers will continue based upon the costs involved in making chips.
Jack also takes Dave's side on the home-printed chip debate.
Jack has a strong stance on work-life balance and tries to take 4 months off per year. Chris has been experiencing the opposite lately.
The embedded systems conference in India only had 400 or so attendees but was a passionate bunch of people.
When asked about the Maker Movement, Jack responded "Finally!". Industry is taking notice too, Autodesk just bought Instructibles.
Back in the day, Jack got his start building radios as a ham operator (N3ALO).
Writing (technically or otherwise) is an important skill for modern engineers. Presenting in front of nerdy audiences is important too!
People can hear/read more from Jack in his weekly column on Embedded.com or from his bi-weekly(ish) newsletter.

Thanks again to Jack for coming on the show! His industry insight is unparalleled and we hope to get to talk to him again soon!

Biarchy Birthday Bavardage Jul 26, 2011

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Happy Birthday to us! One year in the bag! Thanks for all of our wonderful listeners!

From the EEVBlog forums, user "dics" is listening to The Amp Hour on a breadboard! Awesome!
Tech Shop SF is matching donations on a new campaign to spread the word of Hacker/Makerspaces in the community.
Chris's alma mater, Case Western Reserve, is talking about starting something called "Thinkbox". Could be a school/hackerspace joint space, hopefully as well stocked as a Tech Shop. If it materializes, we think it should be called a Hackerversity™
There are other examples out there in existence today, but not quite a fully public/private sharing with good funding. Some examples:
- BUILDS
- MITERS
- SPaRC
- MIT Media Lab
Dave is excited about the possible re-release of the HP15C calculator.
Funky Hakko guide to soldering. Perhaps it was lost in translation but some of the "stories" in this are downright creepy. We prefer "Soldering is Easy"
Another post from the EEVblog forums, a member asks about how much fudge factor a design should have, specifically relating to power budgets.
Chips continue to pull in system level functionality. Does this affect the role of a hardware designer? Examples of "all in one" type chips:
- Radar front end
- ECG Processor + Front End
- An audio codec (DSP, DAC, ADC, PGAs, op amps, etc)
COTW: The temperature sensing Texas Instruments TMP006, a thermopile based sensor with a serial output.
This Day In Nerd History: Joseph F. Enbelberger was born (July 26th). He developed the first industrial robot in the US and is referred to as the "Father of Robotics". Also co-founded Unimation in 1965.
New segment, yet to be named ("wank of the week" doesn't seem to fit the bill). If you hear about bogus products or claims, send them our way. Though not a product, the TI "Thank An Engineer" videos receive honorable mention for having "engineer" in the title but not actually being about engineering...

That's all for this week. Looking forward to another year of shows! Remember, you can find us on Twitter, Facebook or now on Google+

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