• Sideshow Bob (simpsons)
• HERIC Inverter Review
• 
• Fraunhofer
• HERIC inverter
• Dave’s video about the CH32V003
• Charles episode
• Altium is increasing the price of their product (by 2x??)
• HITECH compiler from Microchip
• Newfound Warp13
• Webrings, Blog roll, StumbleUpon
• Dontronics amazing site

The post #671 – NDA Sideshow first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Werner Johansson of Qoitech!

• Chris and Werner met when Werner gave a talk at HDDG in 2017
• The talk focused on Xmega parts, which have a 2 Msps ADC
• Qoitech is a Sony spinoff, where Werner was working on testing batteries on the cellphones.He had previously also worked on automation during linux mainline work.
• Serial port control is an important thing when doing automated testing
• CDB assist
• PSOC5-LP has a CPLD in it
• The Otii Arc was the first product from Qoitech, it’s a 2 quandrant power supply. They started in 2015/2016.
• Chris asked if Werner had previously had used the Keithley 2306
• Field testing is an imporant area for the Otii product line. “Measuremenets on the go” are easier with the extruded case form factor.
• No computer will give you USB PD output power of more than 15W. Test equipment would benefit from a full 200W
• Analyzer (Twinkie?)
• A hub might be possible
• USB Extended Power Range (EPR) will allow 240W
• Are you  sure you should plug that into your computer? Reminder about the OMG cable discussed on the show with MG
• New EPR at 48V has specific shape for arcing
• When designing a power supply for tattoo machine, it could only weigh half the weight of the cable (64g)
• Software defined buck boost was discussed on CNLohr episode
• Digital control is easier to get stable than analog because of programmable delays in the pipeline. You need to measure how long it takes to get the output to “show up”
• Audio project real time jam sessions
• The new product from Qoitech (that Chris got to see at Embedded World in 2023) is the Otii Ace
• PJRC convinced Werner to check out the NXP RT106x family (instead of RT105x)
• Otii is working on battery stuff
• Arc has been out since 2017, but was limited output voltages 500 mv – 5V
• Ace came out recently and goes up to 25V at 5A
• 3 isolation domains in Ace – chassis, banana jacks, expansion ports
• Want resistor on low side for coloumb counter
• Can stack Aces up to 200V
• Dealing with RFI when different domains
• Increased sample rate
• 8 simultaneous sampled ADCs
• Turns readings into audio signals for RT1060, which allows data to stream easier
• There is one reference voltage driving everything in the design, they send frequency spike across gaps to all isolated sections using RF isolators
• Hard time getting the RT1060 parts during shortage
• Battery stuff
• Stepping through the battery internal resistance
• Edging into the world of SMUs
• Building a curve
• Replaying battery data
• Battery emulation
• Continuous integration testing
• Syncing to firmware
• Battery aging
• Devices running on coin cells
• Cycling and automated testing and see it degrade over time
• Thinking of batteries as impedance devices
• Batteries having a passivation layer
• “Low power” means different things to different people
• Teardown of battery emulator
• Low power is less than 200W
• Qoitech equipment has been used in testing and production, including “in-the-loop” testing
• “Generational degrade” when using previous versions of the product to validate new versions of the product. Instead they have a NIST traceable DMM in the loop
• Chris mentions ever calibration shop has a Fluke calibrator. Apparently the HP 8753 wasn’t available in EU because of RoHS.
• To learn more about Werner and the Qoitech team, check out the Otii Ace page

The post #640 – Software Defined Power Supplies with Werner Johansson first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave declares the chip shortage is over! The scopes from a contest 1 year ago have shipped.
• Adafruit video asking Microchip for parts. Adafruit helped popularize the SAMD21 and SAMD51, which are tough to get ahold of

Looks like I am going to put my pick and place circuit board assembly machine in storage. Without electronic components, it just takes up space. Maybe 2023 will be better? Who knows….. pic.twitter.com/vP5KWdvy2j

— factory400 (@factory_400) April 27, 2022

• Dave finally tried taking his EV to 100% charge
• “blowing the carbon out”
• American pickers
• On our subreddit, someone was asking about PCB fabs (and assembly)
• An apocryful story about firms buying finished goods and destroying to get parts out of them (the DailyMail is a rag)
• Josh from Macchina (Earl was on The Amp Hour on episode 388) had emailed Chris about XScomponents. There are some listings on there, but don’t get your hopes up!
• Diamond district effect
• Dave is a really big fan of Bluey
• Belkin is apparently trying out (or giving credence to wireless charginge). Dave was unconvinced (back in 2018)
• Open vs closed cavity
• Chris presented to the Thread Group and talked through some of the things he understands about it on the show. This video was pretty helpful.
• Chris’s wrestling name would be “The BOM Dropper”…apparently.
• Dave got some PCB art in the mailbag. He made a followup video about the “5 layers” of PCB artwork.

Digital? Every idiot can count to one. pic.twitter.com/OTAZD0HjQs

— Dave Jones (@eevblog) April 28, 2022

• Stippling is a technique of adding grayscale to two tone printing. Chris used this on the art for this episode.
• Using the ESP32-S2 as a USB to UART chip
• Eric Migicovsky wrote about Why Pebble Failed
• We had CTO of Pebble (Andrew Witte) on the show back on episode 175

The post #587 – Biblical Broker Bucks first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Livestream available here:

The post #557 – Generic Nodes with Orkhan Amiraslanov first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Today’s show is sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz. We hear in the ad today from James Lewis (@baldengineer) about how to use an oscilloscope and how probe capacitance can affect measurements. For more information about the scope discussed today, check out AskAnEngineer.us.

• Seth Hillbrand did a KiCad stream working on Medtronic’s ventilator files.
• Will be interesting to see how the license for the released files changes once the pandemic is over.
• FormLabs SLA printer
• Spreadsheet of every project
• Dave did a repair video after an inductor blew in a found laptop
• Kits for parts, parts drawers
• Alvaro (past guest, remote correspondent and co-host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast) uses PartsBox.io and a barcode scanner to set up a home inventory system for electronic components.
• Dave considered buying the inventory of an electronics hobbyist.
• IPC standard pad sizes
• Density heat map
• Members of The Amp Hour Patreon now get access to an exclusive Discord server. We’re looking for other ways we can give back to our Patrons.
• 3H meetups are going virtual as well. Have you always wanted to join a 3H? There is one a Chicago meetup coming up on Tuesday April 14th. Join the 3H discord if you’d like to connect any time.
• The Myth of the 3 Capacitor Values
• Eric Bogatin on the show
• Application notes for FPGAs
• Eric’s Rules of Thumb articles
• We were asking some questions posed from our Patrons on Discord
• Microcap is free now
• Mike Engelhardt on the show
• After listening to our episode with John Day, an apps engineer was asking if there were other practical app notes that don’t exist and should be made.
• TI AN-1148
• Keithley Low level measurement handbook
• Microchip app note about LCDs

Thanks to peakpx for the sowing picture

The post #488 – Sowing Discord first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, John Day, Technical Fellow and FAE from Microchip!

• John has worked at Microchip for 27 years! It was almost startup when he joined in 1993.
• He previously had worked on IO subsystem modules at DEC and had interacted with FAEs.
• He did some research on the company before joining, by checking out their databook
• John’s first computers were the C64 and the TRS80.
• Microchip was a spin-off of General Instruments in 1989, with Steve Sanghi as the head of the company (still in charge!)
• Focus was on low cost components, like ROM
• We take In Circuit Emulators (ICE) and In Circuit Programmers (ICP) for granted these days, in the 80s and 90s you could only really use emulators.
• With the lower costs, engineers could go to production on an EPROM. This made more devices “field programmable”.
• Why was the PIC was different when it came out?
  • There really weren’t C compilers
  • Most programmers are not familiar with the ISA
  • Used to be writing direct assembly code
  • Didn’t have a lot of peripherals
  • Wouldn’t have a peripheral for i2c/smbus or similar
  • Timing would be really critical
  • PIC was single cycle
• The first part was the PIC16c64, it had no interrupts, 512 words.
• Microchip was early movement into flash, the first component with it was the PIC16f877 in 1997
• They were also the first to have in circuit debugging; John Andrews and John Day chatted about having this and did a proposal for the debug registers to the chip designers. The software group followed. This was for MPLAB 8.
• ICD1 was developed outside of Microchip, but later pulled in house
• It came up after talking to customers about their needs
• The PIC32MZ was another good example of working with customers. They talked with Clint Cole and Keith Vogel of Digilent. They ran into an ADC non linearity that drove changes to the silicon.
• PIC32EF
• In order to issue and errata, engineers need to cut down source code to minimal size for isolation of the issue.
• John gets to work with automotive, gaming, commercial, and a lot more types of customers.
• Sometimes he finds himself writing code for customers, like special IP that is needed. This happened for a high volume part that needed better test coverage to find errors that happened once every million units. It turned out to be a brownout problem.
• John used and likes his Saleae logic.
• Microchip started an analog products group in late 90s, especially because a lot of the IP was developed for the microcontrollers.
• They bought Microsemi / Actel 2 years ago.
• FAEs at Microchip now have “specialist areas”
• ATC chips are ultra secure chips that hold root keys
• App Notes
  • The LED Cube is a Harmony reference design, meant for PIC32, Harmony3
  • In-Circuit Serial Programming (ICSP) of Calibration Parameters 
  • D/A Conversion Using PWM and R-2R Ladders to Generate Sine and DTMF Waveforms  
    • DTMF for Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS)
    • The R2R ladder is also used on OpenScope
  • Piecewise Linear Interpolation on PIC12/14/16 Series
    Microcontrollers
    • Linearizing a sensor with low power components
• App notes can take a while: the LED cube took over a year. This is because they’re publishing them, in addition to their regular job.
• People expect code generator / configurator tools these days, so the nature of app notes have changed.
• John assigns himself personal projects to learn new technologies
• Building Nixie tube clock to learn boost converters, ethernet stacks (this is shown in the photo above)
• Aside from microcontrollers, John is a huge fan of Pinball
• “You can always have space for a pinball machine”. In fact, he fit a pinball machine in his college dorm room.
• Gottleib Genie
• Ran on Rockwell 4 bit micros – 3 of them
• Batteries used to retain settings, but they would leak and destroy MPU
• Ralph Fien in Germany took MAME project and made a pinball machine, which all ran on a RPi
• 3 PIC18s to talk to IO
• There are drivers on separate boards, similar to TIP102s.
• 4 bit latches on the bus
• Periphieral IO Expander (PIA)
• NI-WUMPH
• Mission Pinball Framework (MPF) allows you to write all your game rules in Python.
• Ben Heck made a custom pinball machine
• John’s first machine was a 1973 Gottleib Kingpin, for which he did a restoration.
• You can hear John on The Classic Pinball podcast for episodes 27 and 28.
• John has had some interesting experiences as an FAE:
  • He was offered a gig (in cash) to build a cable tv descrambler
  • UPS design for a customer in a bad neighborhood
  • Almost blowing himself up while building high voltage power supply during co-op
• John is a fan of Dave’s teardowns and learning from them

The post #485 – An Interview with John Day first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave is negotiating a new lease for a lab space. His lab will be combined with his office.
• Dave also wants to build a mobile phone jammer for the lab, but the ACMA (FCC of Australia) might not like that…
  CTIC
• EEVblog video about compliance
• Chris points out the Water Abundance Xprize winner, which was apparently debunked
• Thunderf00t’s video about Waterseer 
• Fontus
• Bill Gates on a recent episode of Ezra Klein talking about the real needs for philanthropy (hint: not tech related)
• OLPC
• “You’re not going to build a house out of FR4”
• Chris started a forum for individuals who work as consultants (currently at about 50 people). Want to join? Fill out this form. An example topic was them talking about how to take vacation as a consultant, among much more technical topics.
• Chris will be at the Hackaday Superconference next week
• Boldport Club is changing
• Sagan started soldering
• Dave enjoyed this old magazine article about a DIY chip (it was an April fools joke)
• A listener asked on The Amp Hour subreddit about “The Fall of PIC Microcontrollers”
• PIC on wikipedia
• Dave said they became the defacto because of the standard and the cheap interface
• “The horse has bolted”
• People still use PICs regularly. For example, Mike Harrison (guest host for episode 412) uses PIC32s for many of his designs
• Microchip Masters is a regular conference throughout the world for Microchip products(with the largest one in Phoenix) each year.
• There is a new Hardware Happy Hour (3H), also in Phoenix. If you’re in the area, check it out!
• Chris got to chat with former guests Joe Grand and Joe Fitzpatrick about the questionable Bloomberg article about implantable spy chips.
• Both of them are (were) on a panel at BSides Portland about Hardware Implants

The post #413 – A House of FR4 first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• We’re trying out Zencastr
• Bidding jobs vs hours
• More Free Energy
• The Hackaday Prize is back in 2018
• Google NSynth
• New  Raspberry Pi
• Broadcom/Qualcomm deal falls through
• Intel might buy them instead
• Lead times are still off the charts
• A+++++++++ Will Buy Again
• “The Silicon Garden” – A way to share parts locally (via an ICO?)
• Dave has been thinking about soldering after his review of irons.
• Louis Rossman had made a response video about it
• DJones, Manure Hauler
• Measuring 2 nv/sqrt(hz) noise via LinearTech
• Stephen Hawking has passed away
• Martin Lorton is back from NC
• Microchip will be buying MicroSemi

The post #384 – A++++++ Will Buy Again first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris and Scott were talking on email about the JLink (edu) debugger that Chris got from Adafruit.
• Scott attended U of W before starting at Google on the maps team working on the bike directions overlay.
• This layer was part of “Ground truth” initiative at Google, a way to map data from the real world. Their primary dataset was from the rails to trails project.
• After he left google he was working on quadcopters and drones,which used the cleanflight / beta flight software. This was for his company Chickadee tech.
• Scott talked more about the project on the Macrofab Engineering Podcast (MEP22)
• His personal/portfolio site (as well as many of his online handles) is called Tannewt
• After showcasing quadcopters on Adafruit’s Show and Tell, he was asked to port micropython to the SAMD21.
• We have talked about MicroPython on the show before when Tony Dicola was a guest
• A good place to start is asking “What is python“
• Automate The Boring Stuff book
• Interpreted vs compiled languages
• Machine code vs byte code
• MicroPython vs CircuitPython
• Ports coming for SAMD51, nRF52
• The python struct library helps for interfacing to C and hardware.
• Scott has a great tutorial about using a JLink debugger.
• Microtrace buffer allows you to store the trace location in RAM.
• You can download the latest CircuitPython release for various adafruit boards. This is the binary you can reload onto your chip that will allow you to start dropping files onto the mass storage drive.
• Radomir/deshipu showcases CircuitPython via the uGame, which is sold on Tindie
• Emily Dunham “How to automate your community”
• Bill Gates answers the “tabs vs spaces” question
• Ask an Engineer is a weekly show by Adafruit.
• Adafruit has a Discord server where they discuss CircuitPython (and other projects)
• The Adafruit CircuitPython group does a weekly voice meeting on Discord, it’s later posted to YouTube
• A blog post about the plans for CircuitPython in 2018
• Scott is the one running the Seattle 3H group (Hardware Happy Hour)
• PyCon in Cleveland 2018 and 2019
• The Open Hardware Summit (OSHWA) is in Boston on Sept 27th, 2018
• Reach Scott on the Discord server or via email

The post #383 – An Interview with Scott Shawcroft first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave has been dealing with an over-zealous, “over-unity” power…person.
• Ring was bought by Amazon. It was on Sharktank as DoorBot.
• Our Survey is still open and we have had some great responses. You can win a 1000X if you take the survey. Results will be posted later.
• Dave’s wondering how people prefer to control power supplies.
• Maplin is finally shutting down. They have taken the slow nose dive behind Radio Shack and Tandy.
• Toggle the bot
• Chris has a soft goal of “no longer saying he’s bad at software“. He’s been using the educational JLink debugger from SEGGER.
• State of Electronics keeps posting nice videos lately
  • Visiting the LIFX bulb factory
  • Machine plastic
• Microchip is looking to buy Microsemi. (after the show was recorded this was confirmed).The latter makes FPGAs and was always jockeying for the number 3 or 4 position with Lattice (who make the parts described by Claire (nee Clifford) Wolf when she was on the show)
• Amazon also bought a company making chips that are used in low power video monitoring equipment.
• Sign up for The Amp Hour newsletter (below this post or on the home page) to get notified of new episodes and possibly when there are links posts.
• You can now get an “on demand” Amp Hour T-shirt (instead of bulk buying through teespring) and a Widlar poster if you’d like.
• Update: Dave’s testing with Toggle may have been all for naught!

The post #382 – The Toggle Boggle first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Chris and Dave record from the same room! Weird!

• There will be a Sydney meetup, on Tuesday April 11th at 6 pm. More details here. You can also RSVP via meetup.com.
• Chris will be doing a meetup in Melbourne on Tuesday the 18th, with details to follow. He also may get to tour the Syncrotron as Dave did a few years back.
• Another sci-fi book recommendation, Chris just finished the first book of The Expanse (which is also a show now)
• They were ordering pizzas via computers all the way back in the 70s!
• Dave has played with voice chips in the past, like the SP256AL2.
• The Octavo chip is the main package on the BeagleBone these days. Someone made a version that fits inside the small version of the altoid mint tin.
• Microchip used to be called General Instruments.
• Potato Semiconductor sells super fast 74 series chips.
• Chris wrote about Continuous Integration in hardware.
• There was a really good post about the depth of the Hardware Development Process.
• Sandsquid is no more.
• Dave needs to restock his microcurrent, but each time is re-figuring out the order process.
• Amazon now has FPGA instances available via AWS.
• If you’re looking to learn FPGA stuff, we recommend things like the Arty board, the Papilio or the Xess boards.
• Chris was amazed by the tenacity of Pete during this talk about building a VNA.

The post #342 – Our first in-person show first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave has been testing U1272A’s again after learning about a possible EMC issue.  Dave had previously tested Fluke 87s with GSM.
• A new open source radio project (FaradayRF) has Chris wondering if there are possible.
• Dave is back to working on his Supercomputer idea (with BOINC).
• A new board might use a Microchip SPI -> Ethernet part, the ENC28J60
• NextThingCo (makers of the CHiP) announced the ChipPro and the GR8 SOM.
• They include a non-NDA datasheet for the AllWinner R8.
• Chris got to see the Chipsetter up close and personal at MFNY. 
• The Open Hardware Summit went ok! Interesting discussions about the new license.
• The “Got Milk” campaign was used as PR for drinking more milk
• Taking 11 hours to get a Wifi kettle working
• Chris and Dave may start licensing “DC-Ether” for products.
• Randall from XKCD discusses design decisions
• Solar roadways installs are a disaster
• You can watch MegaBots discuss their design decisions.
• 3D Robotics seems to be in trouble. It seems like they are pivoting to a “software only” model. We had Chris Anderson on the show back in 2012. Contrast this with bootstrapping a business like MailChimp.
• The reddit thread about SpaceX was actually about “why” we’re trying to colonize mars, not the space race between boeing and them, but is interesting nonetheless.
• Dave has been watching an LHC documentary. It has not destroyed the world (yet), keep an eye on that here.

Thanks to acidpix for the image of the solar panels

The post #319 – Photon Rich, Cash Poor first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Clint Cole of Digilent!

• Clint’s first venture sold in ’96. They developed one of the first portable defibrillators and sold it to Philips.
• After that he went back to teach at WSU and realized there was a need for boards for courses.
• He started Digilent with Gene Apperson.
• Dave did a video on COGS and how much to charge for projects.
• Their first commercially available board was the XLA, which also used the first Spartan chip. It had a reverse engineered programmer on board.
• In 2011, Digilent had 250 products, 750K units shipped and 10M in sales. They were considering VC investment to up their advertising/marketing budget. Up until that point they were only spending 1% on advertising.
• Instead, in 2013 Digilent was bought by NI.
• Clint believes there is a looming crisis for EE employment. In 2013, 2014 , only 25000 engineers graduated with EECS degrees. Instead companies are importing engineers, exporting jobs.
• When hiring for a new position, Clint tells the candidates, “Go solve this problem”. The best candidates are those who are Jack of all trades and who have tenacity. Chris thinks people like Ben Krasnow and Jeri Ellsworth show tenacity in their videos, the way they approach odd problems scientifically.
• Clint likes the newer versions of teaching: Free range engineering, MOOCs, flipped classroom, etc.
• While teaching at WSU, Clint taught two classes
  • Entry level survey class about digital logic.
  • Junior level digital design class.
• Clint’s method focused more on doing. At WSU, there was a requirement to do 6 projects. This got you to a “C”. Doing extra work could then help you to get the “A”. Chris also recalls Kipp Bradford talking about a method where grades are based upon number of project iterations.
• The ChipKit is an Arduino inspired product with a drastically different processor (PIC32 vs ATMEGA328)
• The soon to be announced OpenScope uses the MZPIC32, will be completely open and will retail around $100.
• Digilent has always posted schematics/BOMs, gerbers when asked. The products are not specifically marked OSHW.
• The Analog Discovery 2 is not open, but Clint recommends checking out the wealth of information available in the technical reference manual.
• Competitors:
  • Different vendor – Terasic – Altera side
  • Massively parallel – Beecube
  • Massively parallel – TED (japan)
• After many years, the lower cost programming cables from Digilent are now supported by Xilinx directly.
• Why care about FPGAs in general? Most people don’t understand how they can be useful. Chris mentioned the Snickerdoodle, as they are enabling high data throughput systems with FPGAs. Drones are another good example, like the applications Chris Anderson was discussing on the Hardware Podcast.
• Dave asked about drop shipping from the Digilent manufacturing partners. However, with the exception of Europe, most of the shipping now happens from the HQ in Pullman, WA. This is also where WSU is located.
• Being in town with WSU allows for easy hiring of interns. This summer they have 20+!
• When selling the company to NI, Clint talked to Matt Ettus (former guest), who was going through similar motions with selling Ettus Research to NI.
• Want to try out a board or three? Use the coupon code “THEAMPHOUR” at checkout on store.digilent.com to get 15% off for individual products from their most popular categories for the next two months.
• Clint doesn’t have social accounts, but you can follow the @Digilent twitter account to see what’s up with their new products.

Many thanks to Clint for taking almost two hours to talk to us about electronics and education!

The post #302 – An Interview with Clint Cole of Digilent first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

We’re back after nearly 4 weeks without a Chris/Dave show!

• Dave just interviewed a 105 year old hobbyist!
• Dave just got a Rode Podcaster. Chris uses the Zoom H1 when on the road.
• Even though Chris just got back, he will be traveling again and there will b a bunch of meetups.
  • Chris will be giving a talk at Maker Faire (time, location TBD) on revision control for hw.
  • Hackaday Meetup on the Saturday of Maker Faire.
  • Bring a Hack on Sunday of Maker Faire
  • HDDG13 on Thursday the 26th (Mike Harrison will be giving a talk)
  • Meetup in Denver on Sunday May 29th (details to follow)
• The London Science museum was fantastic! They have the Watt workshop there.
• The London Amp Hour Meetup went great! Check out pictures from the event.
• Lots of negativity going on in the electronics industry these days.
  • Makerbot surprises no one by killing their US mfg.
  • Microchip/Atmel is having disputes with their severance packages.
  • Intel is laying people off.
  • IBM is laying people off as well, but apparently doing so with a bit of ageism
• A bit of good news, Electric Imp raised some (more) money. Maybe there are some jobs there?
• In general, the future of electronics companies seems to be changing. 
• Nest is bricking hardware (Revolv) that consumers thought they would support.
• Jack Ganssle mentioned similar things about the ARM mbed in the past. What happens when you don’t control the toolchain? Microchip is moving that way as well with their online compiler, MicrochipOne.
• If it’s ease of use that you seek, you can hot load a program onto a Raspberry Pi Zero using the PiShift. (Explained by Tom at the London meetup).
• Dave has been searching for aliens (SETI) using software for the RPi called boinc. It all comes down to MIPS/watt for processing these datasets. 
• There was an article from Georgia Tech about FPAAs being more efficient. This would be a drastic swing back to the old way of doing things (when op amps were used for math operations). Chris and Mike saw a bunch of analog computers when in Serbia. 
• Chris has been releasing 2 minute topic videos. Suggestions welcome!
• Dave has been working with his mystery manufacturer, spending time up front on chip selection so that there is enough room in the memory for firmware updates and new features.
• Chris saw a presentation about machine learning with software called The Wekinator by Rebecca Fiebrink. There is also an associated course you can take.
• There is more space stuff happening. Stephen “Steve” Hawking and other scientists announced plans to send ships to Alpha Centauri, even if there might not be full details on how that’d be possible as of yet.

The post #296 – Gotta Update My Dog first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Our second call in show….was ruined by Star Wars!

• Stu was our screener and works in the security industry.
• Vikas
  • He was wondering about how to build an arbitrary waveform generator. He will be using a Raspberry Pi Zero and will be bare metal programming
  • He will be using an 8 bit dac, the TLC5602. The plan is to put the LM318 behind it as an amplifier.
  • Vikas isn’t sure about how to do the DC offset and whether to use a discrete amplifier.
  • The STM8 Discovery kit has a built in signal generator demo.
• Ryan
  • He is a student who wants to buy test equipment on a budget.
  • The Digilent Discovery 2 was released recently. 
  • Ryan’s school also has TDS1000 series
• Microchip offered to buy Atmel (from under the nose of Dialog!)
• Dave had interviewed Steve Sanghe a couple years ago.
• The CastAR is refunding money and giving a voucher for a consumer version of the glasses.
• The Steam Controller video was beautiful! 
• A FOUP is not just fun to say, it’s also how wafers are carried around fabs.
• When your fridge can’t display a calendar on a screen.
• When automation and labor collide
• ARM is starting to chart out plastic chips!

Image via MovieClips.com

The post #278 – Our Second Callin Show(ish) first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• After returning from Serbia, Chris met and hung out with Kenji Larsen at the TechCrunch Hackathon in NYC. He brought an amazing suitcase full of hardware.
• Hackathons are a young man (or woman)’s game. Chris was not happy in the morning.
• One chip that was used in the hackathon (and many other places since) was the ESP8266. Still no idea where this comes from…but it’s cheap!
• Dave made a vide about the newly updated data about solar roadways:
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-ZSXB3KDF0[/tube]
• South Korea does covered solar bike paths instead of roadways. It seems like a much better solution.
• Telsa recently released the Powerwall, which is touted as a great (and sleek) way to store the power from your solar panels. The NYTimes wrote about it as well.
• Chris has a friend that claims the Apple Watch will obviate all other wearables.
• Wearables in general will have a tenuous future. The Intel Curie is interesting, but likely not going to have longevity.
• Micrel is being bought by Microchip.
• Dave asked why the small fabs in China aren’t being bought by larger (non Chinese) companies. Chris says it’s because the rules of China require the owner be a Chinese national (in name at least). There is also the concept of a WOFE.
• The consolidation doesn’t stop with Microchip buying Micrel…ST Micro announced they will stop their manufacturing past 16 nm.
• There have been a couple of public hardware failures including Wattage and Ninja Blocks. This has always happened but it’s more public now because they are being funded via crowdfunding.
• There is generally a larger focus on startups, especially wrt hardware. In popular culture there is the startup podcast and Silicon Valley talking about a lot of the issues.
• Chris has been working on modular development for his robot modules. This was partially inspired by Nadya’s episode of The Amp Hour.
• We didn’t get a chance to talk about all the great stories this week. Dave brought up the fact that we have each story posting to @theamphour via the service IFTTT

Thanks to Jill Clardy for the picture of the path that looks like it’s covered in solar cells.

The post #249 – Wearables Might Have Limited Fashion Options – Lachrymogenic Lane Language first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Voja Antonic!

• Chris had the opportunity to interview Voja while in Belgrade for work.
• Voja is the inventor of the Galaksija computer, which was the first (legally available) computer in Yugoslavia in 1984. It was based on the Z80 processor.
• There is also a more in depth discussion of the Galaksija in Serbian that can be translated with Google Translate.
• It was illegal to import other computers that were available at the time because of the cost of the finished goods.
• Over 8,000 DIY builders wrote in to the magazine published by Dejan Ristanovic (computers in your home) to mention the article inspired them.
• The cost of components was 230 Deutschmarks, which this site coverts at 2.871 / 1$. That means it cost roughly $80 in 1984 which would cost roughly $185 in today’s dollars (if this is wrong, please correct in the comments)
• They used to broadcast games over the radio station, which people could record onto tapes and then play on their computers.
• Voja will be demoing and running a workshop based around his DIY Single-chip 2D Retro Game Console at Choas Communication Congress (CCC) this year. Be sure to download and check out the (assembler) source code!
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbTwWFwbsE4[/tube]
• In the late 90s, Voja wrote in about the Engineer’s Assistant, a multitool that could do logic and protocol analysis. This became Microchip’s AN689 but was later pulled because of sanctions against Yugoslavia at the time.
• Voja also wrote books such as The Guide To Critical Thinking and Patents That Won’t Change The World (Wayback Machine version).
• He also talked about the Vampire Detector (also only available on the Wayback Machine), a machine with switched mirrors that allowed you to see if someone in a crowd is a vampire. This was a send up of the patent system.
• Chris didn’t know about Voja’s site until after the interview, unfortunately. Check out this other awesome project with an OCR system for Bingo Balls.

Voja was a wonderful guest and I’m so glad we got to meet in person! Many thanks to my co-workers at Supplyframe for introducing me while I was in Belgrade.

The post #247 – An Interview with Voja Antonic – Gerontogenous Galaksija Genesis first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

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.

The post #62 – Op amps, Microchips & Mergers – Narquois Nerd Nescience – Narquois Nerd Nescience first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Happy birthday to Jeremy!
• How do people say “Arduino”?
• Friend of the show and 555 contest entrant, Jason Pruitt linked here recently from his new site. Thanks!
• Alan did a great “thank you” video for the 555 contest.
• Many of Jeremy’s friends are going to internships over the summer for “financial engineering” (blech), similar to what we have discussed before. CJ Gervasi recently wrote about how this could be good for the financial services sector but we think it’ll corrupt them all!
• Lots of fun links about weather balloons and ham radio!
  • Alvaro wrote in about a balloon that got to 116,000 feet! Woo!
  • Troy Rank wrote in about a balloon documentary about a 2 day journey to find a balloon.
  • And Bob Kochis wrote in about a  balloon carrying a geiger counter, ostensibly to measure radiation in the upper atmosphere.
  • XKCD mentions how much radiation you get while on an airplane.
• Bob also wrote in about a new X Prize to create a “tricorder” like device that could diagnose anyone.
• Google announces their ADK (Android Developers Kit) for all new phones and tablets.
• Microchip announces a partnership with Digilent to create a PIC based version of the Arduino (sans trademark, of course)
• Jeff will be at the Bay Area Maker Faire next week, judging the Great Global Hackerspace Challenge.

Thanks to Jeff and Jeremy for sitting in with us this week! If you’ve got comments about anything we discussed on this week’s show, let us know in the comments (or hit me, Dave, Jeff or Jeremy up on Twitter).  Be sure to subscribe using the buttons in the upper right corner (RSS or email) to be alerted as soon as the next episode is released.  Thanks for listening!

The post #43 – An Interview with Jeff Keyzer and Jeremy Blum – Audacious Arduino Arguments first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Chris apologizes for the poor audio quality on his end, it was a new setup (again) while the bench is being finished.

• What’s your favorite movie about engineering? Piggybacking on an article by Bill Schewber article from EEtimes.
• Bjork pulls apart a TV and tells us about it. WTF.
  • “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you”

• Intel’s new fab is going down to 14nm! Holy hell!
  • Why Arizona? Why not somewhere with water? Like Cleveland! (we promise, the water isn’t on fire anymore)
• NY wants to bring an engineering school and high tech to NYC? If cost was no issue, perhaps?
• Dave reviews another scope and we talk about system level design

• The battle rages on! An updated roadmap for printed electronics! Chris tells Dave to look for low cost fares to the US!
• You can print wax masks for chips now, perhaps another good step for etching.
• A new podcast exists for hackerspaces, and not just on iTunes as we said in the show.
• Another shout out and place to hang out, the Savage Circuits chat is on the 1st and 3rd Fridays of the month.
• None of these are as big as the Engadget TV show. How do they get so many people? Good for them!
• Dave talks about an article he read about a mathematician that predicts lottery tickets.
• Freescale going public again after having been private for less than 4 years. Are chip companies too big to fail?

A new Amp Hour initiative:

Chip companies should publish their most popular parts. This would allow smaller manufacturers to target chips they know aren’t going away any time soon. This would help on price and longevity of the part for the designer and would allow manufacturing efficiencies for the chip maker as more people gravitate towards these more popular parts. Think about it, chip companies!

The post #31 – Freescale, Hackerspaces, Printable Electronics – Publish Popular Parts Please! first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Events
  • Analog aficionados meeting out in Silicon Valley. Sounds awesome!
• Rant
  • TI is SO thoughtful to let us upload videos for them to keep! Wow, thanks guys!
• Discussion Points
  • Dave did a review of the new Agilent Scope! Great teardown!
  • Agilent moving manufacturing for low end back into the US. Is this a new trend?
  • Karl’s documentary still isn’t done, but will be an interesting look into local electronics manufacturing in Australia.
  • Science funding is under threat in the US, but Obama is pushing for more funding in next year’s budget.
  • Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains why science funding is important regardless.
  • New wireless system for cell phones called “LightRadio” could get rid of towers.
  • Dave turned down his wireless router, but does he have ElectroMagnetic sensitivity?
  • Cold fusion is back in the news. Dave thinks it’s viable in <20 years, based on a documentary he saw recently.
  • Microchip is selling already programmed parts under different part numbers. Cool idea!
  • At the recent SavageCircuits chat, EOD asked our opinion of the Parallax Propeller.
• WTF
  • DigiKey sent Dave a catalog?? And from Switzerland no less!

  Ferudun Yurdabak emailed Dave with a photo is his old 555 timer chip, the exact same batch as Dave’s one – amazing coincidence after 34 years!
  

For reference, the WTF soundclip comes from here: End Of The World

The post #30 – Agilent, Analog, Cold Fusion – Funding Fusion Is Not Futile first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

The post #27 – 555 Contest, Computer Museum, Octopart – The Green Pen Hornswoggle first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.