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Welcome, Bob Davidson of Ambient Sensors!

• One of their current project is a concussion detector built in to the chin strap of football helmets.
• This involves testing with a “head banger” that can impart forces up to 150G’s!
• They use a MEMS accelerometer and a low cost microprocessor, in order to try and make it affordable for high schools. The processor can assess the likelihood of the impact meeting the head injury criterion.
• Bob got his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and did his undergrad at Johns Hopkins University (in xray astronomy!). A full listing of Bob’s past work can be found on the About page of the Ambient Sensors site.
• He is also now an adjunct professor at Boise State University, teaching engineering stats, finite element analysis and electromagnetics.
• For a good portion of his career so far, Bob worked in research at HP in the hard disk division.
• In the early days the plattens were spun using washing machine motors! They weren’t cheap either, 400 MB for $25K!
• Bob has been a ham radio operator since ’67. His callsign (and twitter handle) is WA7IUT
• Early boards were done using tape on paper, so he is amazed at the ability to make boards these days (using tools like EAGLE). Some of the ones he has been making have Bluetooth Low Energy.
• Modules such as the Bluegiga BLE112 prevent needing to get a product recertified for FCC compliance. Jeff Rowberg has been really helpful in getting Bob started.
• These modules can act as a serial peripheral or can act as a standalone using BG Script.
• Bob’s startup in the early 2000′s was a consumer product for high end entertainment. They pivoted to working with security cameras.
• Back at HP, one of Bob’s patent’s covers the method of how they measured the disk during rotation. They used heterodyne interferometry phase measurement. Crazy. Bob also had a publication about this, “Applications of Heterodyne Interferometry to Disc Drive Technology”
• During Clayton Christiansen‘s PhD work which later became, “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, Clayton shadowed Bob. The march of progress in disk drives was one of the main topics in that book.
• Bob was an early user of ARPAnet, the precursor to the modern internet. He was upset when they started commercializing it.
• For low cost test equipment, Dave’s comparison video of the new and old Rigol scope has Bob tempted.
  
• Bob is a fan of OSHW and has attended the Open Hardware Summit in the past. This coming year it will be in Boston.
• Some of his projects to give back to the community involve energy harvesting. This was implemented in a project monitoring a grape vineyard.
• Back in Vietnam days, Bob was a member of the Military Auxiliary Radio Program, helping patch soldiers back to loved ones at home.

Thanks again to Bob for being on the show! We’re excited to see what he works on next!

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Welcome, Ryan Brown of National Instruments!

• Ryan is the second guest from NI and actually introduced us to Matt Ettus, who was on the show previously.
• As a co-op, Ryan worked on the 6552 and the 6542.
• These days, Ryan is a lead on the FlexRIO platform, which allows people to build products onto of the NI ecosystem.
• Ryan’s products are mostly based on Xilinx FPGAs, which are now moving to the Vivado build platform.
• Dr. James Truchard sometimes stops by desks and asks engineers what they’re working on. He also gives keynotes most years at NI Week

• The connector selection is something that haunts you throughout the project.
• Sparkfun is now selling kits that includes an Arduino plus LabView.
• LabView is big/bulky because it has to simultaneously encompass people that want to dig deep into the hardware (listeners of this show) and people who just want to output a graph of whatever data their sensor is outputting.
• Because it’s such a large complex sysstem, design reviews are difficult but crucial to keep the system running.;
• Ryan visited and climbed the Greenbank telescope as part of his work!
• Aracebo is the large dish built into the ground that is featured in Goldeneye from the James Bond movies. Chris is more familiar from the N64 Goldeneye game.
• Austin is a town with lots of hardware: Dell, Freescale, AMD, Samsung and more!
• The SXSW Interactive festival was a couple weeks ago and had lots of focus on hardware startups.
• Ryan runs the ATXHW meetup group, which had a few events during SXSW.
• They take cues from the Ruby on Rails group in Austin, which is also very active.
• During the meetups, they do sessions about different hw aspects, such as Rapid Prototyping.
• One big name group out of Austin is Supermechanical, makers of the successful Kickstarter project, Twine. However, they started much smaller with projects that involved a wallet with an actuator to make it harder to open and a big QR code table.
• Others who regularly participate are Jack Minardi (who won the February YCombinator/Upverter hackathon for his glove project) and the Sapphire OS mesh network.
• No stranger to digging into projects, Ryan’s halloween project for Roomba costumes (see top picture and video below).

Halloween 2012 – Roomba Costumes with Synchronized LED RIngs from Ryan Brown on Vimeo.

• Ryan and a couple others are early members of the Austin TechShop, the first of which to be co-located with a big box hardware store (Lowe’s).
• National Instruments is also starting a pilot program with TechShop to provide hardware and LabView licenses at a reduced cost, as described in this video by Mark Hatch (of TS).
• Waterloo Labs is another group made up of NI’ers, who work on fun projects to promote STEM. They are well known for the iPhone driven car, the EyeMario System and most recently for real life Mario Cart.

• Ryan suggests a couple different BBQ for when visiting Austin (though he failed to mention the old standby of The Saltlick…which technically isn’t in Austin): Franklin on 11th, Stiles Switch and Manns Smokehouse BBQ (believe Chris, you haven’t lived until you’ve gotten the meat sweats from Texas BBQ).

Thanks again to Ryan for being on the show! It was great hearing about all his experiences and getting a taste for National Instruments. Don’t forget! If you’d like to take The Amp Hour listener survey for 2013 and put your name in to win a t-shirt, do so before we do the drawing next week! (multiple winners)

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Welcome Mike Harrison of Mike’s Electric Stuff and White Wing Logic!

• Mike’s YouTube channel and videos are likely how many of our listeners know who Mike is.
• Mike has been featured on our show in the past, both as the contributor of the show’s name and sending in photos of his awesome bench!
• He started in a repair department, where he learned to troubleshoot and prank people!
• Later jobs included early IT work with early IBM PCs.
• While at that job, he started designing with the BBC Micro (based on the 6502 CPU) and for the ACORN (now ARM) Archimedes family.
• Many programs Mike writes to interface with lower level stuff is in Visual Basic 6 (now defunct). Chris says there is a downgrade path from .NET.
• He got started with PICs when they were transitioning from Mask ROM parts to One Time Programmable (OTP) parts and a customer needed an alarm system that could output different types of alarms.
• Mike is also a registered consultant with Microchip, which has netted him a job or two in the past.
• He got started with LEDs at Dorkbot in London
• The arts have gotten a boost in London from the Section 106 planning development, which mandates all money spent on building must have some portion go to development (including the Arts).
• Mike’s lab has a pick and place machine in the lab (cost around £8K) which he wrote software to optimize.
• He uses PCAD and does the layout first (!)
• Mike has worked on multiple UFO projects, including one in Gdansk, Poland and one in Seattle for Halo 4
  
• The UK scene, especially the art and architecture scene, is vibrant right now.
• Working with “Technology Will Save Us”, Mike designed the Lumiphone (a soldering project with LEDs and Theramin that costs less than £3) and the Bright Eyes Glasses, which was a Kickstarter campaign.
• Mike is obviously known for his great teardown videos!
  
• The baggage X-ray machine took a friend and a van to haul back to his shop…and he broke even on the project!
  
• A more recent project has 2106 LEDs and 2106 PICs, one per LED.  This new design could have issues if Microchip has supply chain problems, as Steve Sanghi’s letter about lead times seems to suggest.
• Mike thinks a good way to get into art is to make your own. He cited the quadcopter stage show.
• See the silly emails Mike has gotten over the years at his “Muppet alert” page.
• You can find Mike on Twitter at @Mikelectricstuf

Many thanks to Mike for taking the time to speak with us!

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Welcome, Andrew Seddon of CircuitHub.com!

• Founded the company with Jonathon Friedman, from across the Atlantic!
• Andrew went to school in Leeds but left for a design position.
• Previously worked for companies such as Turnsafe and Active RF and in his spare time worked on model rockets. Check out all of his past work on his personal site.
• London is barren, but outlying areas of the UK do electronics. Hardware is stronger in Cambridge, with companies such as ARM and Cambridge Silicon Radio.
• There is also the M4 corridor, west of London
• Amateur electronics is growing in London. Shared spaces, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces allow for shared tools, which are a premium in expensive real estate areas.
• Andrew and the team needed to learn web software and currently use CoffeeScript, a JavaScript stack
• CircuitHub uses an online interface to create parts and then allows users to find and sync with the footprints and schematic symbols using Dropbox. The site creates parts compatible with 3 of the top PCB CAD programs available today and more are planned for the future.
• Circuit hub is sponsoring hackathon along with yCombinator and Upverter (and more!)
• How parts are handled depends on workplace culture and software packages. Altium and EAGLE handle associating footprints different and big companies might have a librarian whereas smaller companies may not.
• Companies likely won’t be revealing any information by pulling and sharing footprints from a central database, but trust will be an issue with larger companies.
• They will be open sourcing all possible code and feeding it back to the community. You can view the team’s work on GitHub.
• The main tool will always be free. Revenue will come later by integrating with manufacturing.
• The project started because Jon and Andrew were “scratching their own itch”. They submitted a yCombinator application on deadline day. 
• Because it’s strikingly difficult to get a visa for the US, even if you’re a founder of a startup, they are operating out of Playa del Carmen for the next few months. The US has only recently considered any kind of legislation in this area (!?)
• Andrew reluctantly agreed to some kind of gamification in order to encourage participation (“we’ll see,” he says). Chris cited the awesome Adafruit badges as a good example of this in action.

Be sure to head over to CircuitHub.com and start an account. You can start pulling in designs to your projects and submitting new footprints to the community.

You can follow Andrew on Twitter at @seddonandrew and can also follow @CircuitHub.

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Welcome  Brett Fox, CEO and Dr Jeroen Fonderie, VP of Engineering from the (relatively) new,  yet quickly growing analog company, Touchstone Semiconductor!

• After leaving Micrel, Brett was an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR).
• Touchstone was officially formed in 2010 with Brett, Joeren and Adolfo Garcia.
• Invested in by Gill Cogan of Opus Capital and Pierre Lamond of Khosla Venturers. $12 million starting captial (which isn’t much for an IC company!). Gill was an original investor in Maxim, Pierre was a co-founder of National and was involved in funding LT. Wowsa!
• They use TSMC, among other foundries. They have worked with Rick Cassidy, the North America head of TSMC, which helps facilitate a startup relationship.
• The foundries provide the designer Process Design Kits (PDKs) which are then used with Cadence toolsets.
• Surprisingly, people have asked for original designs, in addition to part crosses.
• Part crosses (and the basis of starting the company) was to provide alternate sources for harder to get Maxim parts.
• When hiring, they hope the designers will have experience taping out a chip, usually requiring many years of experience.
• While no one will ever replace Jim Williams, Touchstone has a full apps team (and they’re hiring more!) working on new notes.
• The name “Touchstone” was chosen after consulting a thesaurus for the word “Maxim”!
• They seek patents that can be used offensively or defensively, at the circuit level.
• Touchstone has to wait for technologies to enter the foundry before they can begin designing for them. There will be a new design center working on developing Graphene, as reported by EE Times Europe.
• Chris gets bad news that two executives from a chip company don’t think a chip printer is feasible. Ouch.
• Packaging keeps getting smaller, the Touchstone Demo Board program should help getting up and running quickly.
• Touchstone does a die bank, which helps hedge against high demand at a low cost.
• Working remotely is difficult. Monolithic systems has tried this, with designers in Asia and management in the US.

You can follow Touchstone Semiconductor on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. Thanks to Brett and Jeroen for stopping by The Amp Hour to talk shop!