Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.

• 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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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!

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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).

• 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:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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?