• Dave is back from vacation. He should have bought a Starlink mini (not as cheap as we thought) because his coverage was very poor throughout the trip.
• Space twitter
• Artemis II is going up soon (early Feb 2026)
• Billy makes artemis go up 
• Sparkfun and Adafruit are on the outs
• PJRC (and Paul Stoffregen) makes the Teensy and it is now produced exclusively by Sparfkun
• The pinout is open but the bootloader is proprietary and sold as the magic black box.
• Paul’s wrote about what was happening on the EEVblog forum
• Tim Lamb (Trash80) talked about teensy in his devices on episode 292 
• Chris modified a Tag Connect 10 pin footprint for an upcoming design
• RAM prices are wild right now!
• After following a tutorial on “Doom Coding”, Chris picked up using Claude Code
• A friend pointed out that more horizontal, open source programs like KiCad (version 10 coming soon) will have an advantage with LLMs/coding assistants over more vertically integrated tools. The vertical tools won’t be able to move as fast.
• Also in the Doom Coding exercise, Chris found an app called Terminus that allows connecting an Android device (and maybe iOS?) and getting a terminal interface from the phone using a USB-C cable in OTG mode.
• Zephyr builds in lots of capabilities
• Chris loves using Zephyr shells to build interfaces (even custom ones) to standard functions in Zephyr
• CES wrapped a week or two before this recording. The Donut lab solid state battery proposed impossible specs.
• Some engineers modified a Rivian to try and make the Cannonball Run. It was an interesting look into battery packs and what it takes to charge them fast.
• Dave and Chris took a long roadtrip to the Deep Space Network back in 2017.
• Piers Rocks has a great video about how PIOs work on the RP2xxx chips from Raspberry Pi
• The Raspberry Pi should always be viewed from the perspective of “what is cheapest”. The RP team mentioned that drove the decisions of external flash on the RP2xxx boards
• Past guest Jeff Geerling talked about some of the pricing challenges with RAM prices increasing

The post #713 – Rubber Duck Incarnate first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

For the first week of the new year, we welcome back some past guests to talk about electronics in 2023.

• Alvaro Prieto is a co-host of The Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast and has co-hosted The Amp Hour before. He currently works at Sofar Ocean.
  • 363 
  • 456.2
  • 440.2
  • 440.3
• Ariel Briner was on episode 260 of the show talking about CartesianCo, a now defunct startup. Ariel now runs an 8 person consulting shop in SF called Electron Labs.
• Chris Osterwood was on episode 425 talking about Capable Robot Components, which he is still working on. They are preparing to release new hardware in 2023.
• State of robotics
• Possible to have consulting with robotics?
• We were recording during CES 2023
• AgTech
• Robotic pizza
• 3H meetup
• Modex Fulfilment(conference)
• IoT
• Electron labs projects are 30% IoT, but more are connected (50%+)
• iPhone globalstar connection is now possible and Iridium is coming soon.
• Alvaro uses Blues Wireless modems to do firmware updates on buoys near the shore. Ray Ozzie (founder and CEO of Blues) was on episode 603.
• Bugs in different locations due to unicode characters (or null characters)
• FreeRTOS vs Zephyr
• STM32U5 has DMA in stopmode, which is a low power option for DMA
• Alvaro has been creating Joulescope front plates
• What kind of mix of hw and software are each person doing?
• USB C cable tester
• ESP32-C3 is a RISC V wifi chip from Espressif. There is also support for Rust on that and some other Espressif chips (Chris Osterwood has been trying it out)
• Hubris OS from Oxide. Oxide engineer Laura Abbott talked about this when she was on the show. Another Oxide engineer Rick Altherr was on the show (before he worked there)
• Board bringup is a hardware activity for fimware engineers.
• Firmware with hardware when the power rails are controlled by the micro
• CM4 / Linux
• Buildroot vs Yocto
• Custom vs dev board
• Chaos camp
• Mark Rober video (car breakins)
• RISC V
• AI
• Midjourney
• ChatGPT
• Is it all just “Stochastic BS”?

The post #614 – Reunion Impedance Matching and 2023 Predictions first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Christina Cyr, CEO of dToor and the Cyrcle Phone

• This was their 5th year at CES. Mostly hanging out at Eureka Park, which is the startup area
• 2 years ago saw companies doing encryption for voice data because of creepy speakers, now they have gone mainstream.
• Startups are only allowed to be there for 2 years.
• This year dToor got coverage on BBC, CNET, The Daily Mail
• Enclosure company didn’t finish, so Christina 3D printed
• CTA is Consumer Technology Association. $97 to join and worth it.
• Wyze cameras, selling for $19.99
• Random connections from having a booth
• Christina works out of WeWork. Previously she was at Extra Slice in Bellevue, wanted a landline (LAN connection) for older builds of linux
• Metrix Create, Sodo also shut down
• Volunteers at their booth:
  • Aileen McGraw, WeWork Labs Manager
  • Xuny Haley, CoMotion Labs Manager
  • Nalin Chuapetcharasopon, Crowdfunding Expert
  • Anna Chuapetcharasopon, EdTech Consultant
• Former guest Scotty Allen dropped by.
• How did this phone get started?
• Phone wasn’t fitting in a pocket in 2014
• People wouldn’t take cardboard prototypes seriously
• Decided to use Seeed Studio’s phone kit with a different “skin”
• Presented as a phone for women, that was a mistake
• Featured in the telegraph out of context
• Demographics were 50/50
• Marketing tech products to women
• Apple Watch is taking the place of similar kind of role
• Joel Telling (3D printing nerd) goes to the hospital, after his watch alerted him to tachycardia
• Unity (software)
• The 4G version of the phone has
  • Dual SIM
  • Two headphone jacks
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon
  • Transitioning from micro-b to USB-C
• Working with vendors
• 4 vendors that have the snapdragon
• Tier 1 and Tier 2 companies
• Vendors want to hear 100K units
• Navigating working with vendors
• Looking at doing testing in China for FCC
• Dealing with Tariffs, as batteries and LCDs are coming directly from suppliers
• CES Tech Talk – Caught in the Crossfire: How Tariffs Impact Tech with Austere Sage Chandler, Vice President—International Trade, Consumer Technology Association (CTA)
• Harmonized Tariff Code 
• Different goods have different Tariffs
• Should have been an LLC instead of an S Corp or C Corp
• NRE for a completely custom display is $6M!
• Circular display is off the shelf, with 800×800 outer dimensions
• The 4G LTE phone will have a “tangential foot” (see image below)
• Module comes with Android 9
• Christina put together a document for hardware startups in Seattle, might be useful to listeners even if not in Seattle
• Cyrclephone.com
• @CyrChristina

The post #475 – An Interview with Christina Cyr first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome back, Jeff Keyzer AKA Mightyohm!

• This is now our 5th Keyzermas! Check out the past ones here:
  • Mightyhohm For The Holidays
  • Merry Keyzermas
  • The Ghost of Keyzermas Past
  • Wait, Why is Jeff Glowing?
• Last year Jeff had just quit his job but has since re-joined Valve as a contractor
• Overhead
• Jeff has not joined Chris’s Consulting Forum. You can join here if you’re interested (now 100+ strong!)
• Jeff has been focusing on Signal Integrity
• It’s helpful to “Be the signal“, a visualization popularized by Eric Bogatin
• Dave things Jeff should get a video game maker to make a simulation. Maybe former guest Zach Barth of Zachtronics?
• “The Terminator”
• In his new SI role, Jeff is checking things like
  • Jitter
  • Eye diagrams
• And using equipment like
  • VNA
  • TDR
• Learn your Z transforms, kids! They’re important!
• We’ve had some great signal integrity guests on the show:
  • Eric Bogatin
  • Howard Johnson (though Chris completely forgot)
  • Henry Ott
• Elektor started carrying mightyohm kits
• The Seattle scene for hardware has been growing. Jeff isn’t a NIMBY yet.
• The effect of recessions on new company creation
• Boeing tour
• Things that have or haven’t happened
• USB C 
• TS80
• New bandwidths – 60 GHz
• Hiber and other low earth orbit satellite offerings
• Looking at the 2018 hype curve
• Jon Beri talk at HDDG about Brett Victor’s concept of “seeing spaces”
• CES trends
• Connected home
• Autobiography of Tek (think it’s “Winning with people: The first 40 years of Tektronix”)
• Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks by Tony Kordyban
• Jeff pointed out the 27 series set from Rad Lab

Thanks to Mrs Mightyohm for the picture of Jeff and my sister’s instagram account for the picture of the elf on the shelf

The post #421 – The Legend of Keyzermas first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Simone Giertz! (@simonegiertz)

• Simone’s company back in Sweden is called Artificial Stupidity
• Since creating her first robot GIF a couple years ago, Simone has been crowned the “queen of shitty robots“.
• Chris first met Simone at HardwareCon in 2014. She was working with Colin Karpfinger at PunchThrough, makers of the Light Blue Bean.
• Simone’s great-great-grandfather was one of the founders of Ericsson!
• The kits Simone has been using lately are from Vex Robotics. Previously she has showcased items from Actobotics.
• Simone is mulling the idea of making her own Maker Kits, but has dealt with sourcing issues.
• Chris talked about his machining journey and highly recommended the Guerrilla Guide to Machining. This shows methods for making molds for small gears, which can be used to gear down high RPM motors.
• Simone has also been working at Tested.com. She works alongside Adam Savage and the other crew there.
• Beginners mind (Shoshin) is important when teaching and learning new subjects.
• Simone has been building out her lab and made a “favorite things” video for 2016.
• As part of her sponsorship agreements (the good ones that stuck around!), she visited CES last week.
• Chris called out the Internet of Shit twitter moment that showcased some bogus gadgets.
• One of Simone’s favorite things there was the Furrion racing robot. This would be a racing league in the same way that Megabots will be a robot fighting league.
• Simone has a new show for premium viewers called “It might work“.

Thanks to Simone for stopping by! For those who listen past the credits, here is the tweet Chris is referencing.

The post #331 – An Interview with Simone Giertz first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave and Chris recall minimum wage not so fondly, except having cash in hand.
• Dave has been having trouble getting his Maxim parts in hand, but it was actually DHL getting them stuck in customs.
• When working with small quantities, ordering parts up front can be a necessity. @Roteno tweeted about doing a design and getting stuck without any stock in the world. 
• Bunnie Huang (former guest) writes about the ‘soylent supply chain’ (“It’s made of people!”). Much of business is still done based upon relationships and working with other humans.
• Distributors have changed and consolidated, even since when Chris started working in the industry. Dave’s friend used to collect and compare business cards so he could see as sales people jumped from one distributor to another. 
• FAEs aren’t likely to go away any time soon, nor will factory applications engineers. Marketing rep firms might though. Chris explained the difference between types of sales/marketing/technical support engineers on Engineer Blogs back in the day.
• Dave now has an article on wikipedia! Quick, someone deface it!
• Elon Musk recently did a fantastic AMA on reddit. This made Chris realize he doesn’t really care about space (electronics); more specifically rockets seem boring, but it’s likely ignorance about the required specs for doing something like that (similar for a Model S). 
• The Hardware Battlefield showcases new hwstartups at CES, a range of which don’t seem to be doing interesting tech. This competition feels similar to Dragon Den/Shark Tank.
• Chris mentioned the a lot of hwstartups aren’t that interesting because of the fields they cover, but one that has been interesting (though it’s “older” now) is Boosted Boards. Here’s a good review of them:

• Amazon has big changes coming to Lab126 (designers of the Kindle) after failures of the Fire Phone. This highlights how even in big companies, even the “research” departments aren’t immune to the sales cycle (which may point to the fact that they aren’t truly research at all).
• Dave used to do research by doing long term testing of components. This still isn’t basic physics/academic research, but it’s closer than the development Chris mostly did.
• Bell Labs was able to operate because of the margins MaBell had due to their monopoly. Much like modern distributors, these margins continue to shrink.
• Graphene seems like a physics experiment that is on the cusp of being useful for the past 5 years. The New Yorker has an interesting piece comparing the graphene timeline to that of aluminum, which took nearly 50 years for its first commercial use and another 50 for its widespread use.
• The student who was told “No Microcontrollers” had a clever workaround.
• iRobot is offering the hackable Roomba for $200. Former guest Scott Miller used to run manufacturing for them.
  
• Dave is moving onto the next round of hiring for his intern. Still no word on which CAD package they’ll use, though many Aussie students learn Altium because it’s given to the Universities there to get them hooked.
• Chris is excited about the upcoming (but not research-new) feature on KiCad: Matched impedance calculation for traces as their being drawn.
• While Chris was interviewing after leaving college, he took part in a group interview.
• Will the changes to how courses are delivered to students affect how they learn and are hired for jobs? Do courses like this Georgia Tech online course help students stand out? Veritasium did a video about how online courses won’t revolutionize education, just like technologies before it. 

The post #231 – Supply Chain Woes And Wares – Nonplussed Neotechnic Nithing first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

We are joined once again by our old friend Jeff Keyzer (Mightyohm)!

• Last time Jeff was on show was after the 2013 Open Hardware Summit (episode 162).
• Jeff has been working on a new high volume consumer product and has been experiencing the need for DfX. Instead Jeff has learned that shotgunning issues is a more likely way to find problems.
• Back in the day Jeff used to do III-V semiconductor PA design. This was part of what we talked about last week with Shahriar.
• Dave was very curious about whether Valve would be showing anything at the upcoming CES.
• Dave just tore down an Apple Lisa:
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hxdz6c8bHg[/tube]
• Chris asked if Dave and Jeff have needed to use IEEE 488/GPIB/HPIB for programming test equipment.
• Jeff (and his wife) have still been selling the Geiger Counter kit, both online and through distributors like adafruit.
• Adafruit has a tutorial about packing and shipping kits and talks about using a counting scale.
• Dave is currently hiring an assistant, but didn’t expect people to apply from outside the country. They would need a travel visa to work with Dave.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_qhlFc-MVU[/tube]
• Jeff hasn’t found too many in-person hardware events in Seattle but the Kent mic and key swap meet has been well maintained and interesting. Jeff compared this to the De Anza swap meet down in Silicon Valley.
• Jeff got to see Mike Ossmann speak (from afar) at TAPR. Microsoft has a HAM group called microhams.
• One of the most north-westernly conferences in the US is ToorCon.
• Jeff also wants to visit the Hanford Superfund site/reactor in eastern Washington where they enriched some of the early plutonium for US projects.
• There is a Living Computer History museum in Seattle paid for by Paul Allen.
• Another museum (the Space Gallery) is owned by Charles Symonyi. He was the lead developer of Micosoft office; Bill Gates hired him because he did a phd on compiler design.
• The 1405 intel chip was recently decapped and photographed by Ken Sheriff.
• Jeff has thought about making an art project out of scope he picked up at swap meets. like the ICO435.
• What Jeff really wants is the Keysight MSO4000 series. He likes things like the touchscreen and the USB analyzer.
• Another piece of test equipment that would enable a lower cost RF consultant would be a piece of equipment like the Fieldfox.
• Jeff has found a bunch of low cost/no cost tools for RF design:
  • LT Spice
  • QUCS (outputs S2P files)
  • AppCad
  • NEC antenna sim, EZNEC
• The Art Clock was an impressive project that Dave posted about recently.
  
• Adafruit has an article investigating who owns and the history of Heathkit (and an update today).

The post #229 – MightyHohm For The Holidays – Kaiser Keyzer’s Kits first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

EDIT: A new user-made promotional video about NASA (credit goes to reddit). Inspiring and beautiful:

And one that’s much more rock and roll:

The post #25 – NASA, WOTW & Modular Design – The NASA Nostalgia first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.