• Dave bought a lemon laptop
• Chris officially has solar that is installed, working, and is effectively an appliance at this point…
• Duke Energy and North Carolina nuclear mix
• The impact of batteries on the grid
• The Duck Curve is something Chris and Ari discussed on ep650
• Open circuit voltage on panels
• Dave did a repair on a tennis ball machine
• Chris designed a board with test points too small
• Accupuncture jbc
• High cost vs low cost rework tweezers
• Nanofix YouTube Channel
• Tested
• Ugly multimeter review

The post #702 – Test Point Accupuncture first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave found a wrist mounted DMM that looks…inadvisable
• We’ll discuss the survey results next time!
• Florin Cocos of VoltLog
• Great Scott
• Sam Aldaher on the show last week
• Gerald Undone did a studio tour with Captain Disillusionment
• Short videos
• Dave using a go-pro on a bike
• Separate gyro file to stabilize
• D-y hybrid inverter
• Chart
• Remote shell
• Cline
• Chris is finally getting solar
• open energy monitor
• Emporia vue
• Sense
• We talked with Joe Bamberg when he worked there

• Driving back from canberra
• Ben Krasnow makin’ magnets!
• Bluetooth videos

The post #696 – It Works With Option Number 5 first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Tracking test equipment on one long homepage…the emporer of test equipment
• If you track it, it’s not hoarding…it’s curation
• Very specific piece of junk wood
• Garage
• Solar
• Amber allows you to sell power back in Australia at some wild rates
• Dave is trying out case design in OpenSCAD…it looks…ok
  • 
• Pebble is returning to the world after Google open sourced the OS (kudos)
• Andrew Witte, former CTO of Pebble, was a guest on the show
• Tandy200
• Annie Lennox on the train with her Tandy (see cover image)
• Capacitive forming / reforming
• Electric Dreams
• Multimeter repair
• Tandy teardown

The post #688 – The Tandy Train first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• 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 Ari Gerstman, from the US Department of Energy Office of State and Community Programs

• Chris and Ari went to high school together and Chris was excited to have Ari on the show to talk about how renewables are implemented in the US
• Ari recenly started his DOE job
• He was interested in joining the organization after a large funding effort in the US Senate and House (signed into law)
  • The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)
  • The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), also known as the Infrastructure and Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)
• There is now $100B going towards electrification and upgrading of the US infrastructure and homes in the US.
• The funding is driving supply side incentives to move to renewables, instead of Cap and Trade to disincentivize carbon rich activities.
• Chris asked Ari about the green credits market and whether people should pay attention (John Oliver carbon offsets piece discussed in the past)
• What are the tradeoffs of targeting upgrading homes for efficiency vs solar installs on a roof?
• Solar in the US
• Ari working in a narrow subset at DOE
• Chris has read exactly one book about The Grid, talked about many times on the show before.
• Running capacity building
• Ari is part of the Office of State and Community Programs, which administers a portion of the overall 100B
• There is a large amount of net new electric load, in the form of EVs, appliances, heat pumps, etc. This could roughly double electricity usage for providers and transporters of energy.
• Tennesee has a large manufacturing base and are growing into batteries. This is map of battery activity in the US.
• Ari has 84kW battery in his car, these kind of capacities will only grow over time.
• Is new load a good thing or a bad thing?
• Power providers are excited about it!
• Investor owned utilties are natural monopolies, which is why there is something called a Public Utility Commission (PUC) to regulate them.
• Ari and Chris made up an example about a fake US state (Electifica) with a fake provider company (Utopia), so that we weren’t talking about any specific examples.
• Utopia trades on the stock market and there are known returns, so there are expectations about how things will work.
• Utlities are incentivized to maximize costs because they make percentage returns on the costs passed to customers. PUCs want the opposite.
• Microgrid
• DER – Distributed Eletric Resources
• Energy efficiency and demand response programs are where they notify customers of high load and ask the customer to turn things down. Sometimes there is “Smart Grid” style programs where the utility can take action centrally (turning down thermostats, etc)
• There was a Demand Reponse Brooklyn Queens program that worked
• Building a substation is very expensive, but gives an additional control node
• What is the effect of solar on the grid?
• Microgrids can enable additional cross-grid control, but it gets tricky when figuring out billing for the crossing between subgrids (because utilities have very different billing paradigms)
• Peaker plants need to spin up very quickly and are very dirty.
• Utilities encouraging people to buy battieres
• The Duck Curve
• A net zero passive house could extend usage off a battery backup system and highly reduce load on the grid.
• Building codes can have a large impact on future energy usage by determining how future homes load down the grid.
• Codes in Florida also help things like disaster response.
• There is a large chunk of that $100B going “Transmission sighting”, because additional control nodes on the grid will require additional land (often in expensive areas)
• Ari previously worked on renewables for the District of Columbia.
• With rooftop and solar on the edge of the city, they could cover about 10% of city usage.
• Power companies moving from owning and operating everything is changing paradigms generally.
• How can you learn more?
  • Ari suggests reading legislation
    • BIL
    • IRA
  • Check out the Energy.gov site for general info
  • Read more about Ari’s programs at the DOE SCEP

The post #630 – Renewable Energy Policy with Ari Gerstman first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• It was Australia Day when Dave and Chris recorded
• The pinnacle of stereaming services: The Amp Hour+
• Chris just got a new solar quote for his house, the roof shape is still too weird to make it a good option.
• Thunderbirds episode
• Solar city panels starting on fire
• Dave is looking at upgrading his solar again, including with DC batteries
• Span.io is working on smart circuit breaker boxes
• The Grid book
• Sydney program to use homeowners’ batteries
• How many times has this guy gotten laid off? (the one scamming for 8-10 engineering jobs at a time)
• Big layoffs are hitting the likes of Google, MS, Amazon
• In Australia, this is called “being made redundant” or “retrenchment”
• Conference room innovation for speakerphones
• Tom Scott got to visit and walk on the Parkes Telescope (of The Dish fame)
• Tour of the switch
• Dave has timelapse video of the dish moving
• Dave got to blinky with the RV32, the $0.10 RISC V processor
• Self Soldering Circuits from Carl Bugeja
• Water cooling inside PCBs
• Coin cell cutout on a PCB

The post #617 – Conference Room Innovation first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris and Dave discussed the “beta” function for MOSFETs on Falstad circuit simulator
• We found some references online to “beta” (like this archive from McGill University) but it doesn’t seem to be a normal characteristic? Maybe an approximation term?
• Dave and other EE YouTubers were mentioned in Derek’s 2nd video about the light bulb experiment and energy flowing in fields (Veritasium).
• Dave mentioned Alpha Phoenix as doing the simulations on this, but Chris later looked up it was the Ben Watson video that Chris was referencing during the recording.
• Rick Hartley
• Lumped element model, where would we be without you?
• Bit rot
• Chris has been digging into Segger Ozone and SystemView, the latter first brought up on the show with Brian Amos
• Dave bought a bunch of gear from an optometry business at auction.
• Bubblegum tapshoes
• Dave heard about this STM32F3 part with a super fast timer internal…yep, still can’t get it.
• Open Source HW/SW Microinverter
• Chris asks Dave if he would put something like that on his house.
• Paul Zawada episode
• Enphase Microinvterter
• Zappi charger
• Leigh Brady Episode
• Chris will be doing a webinar this week about the things you don’t know about IoT systems.

  Photo by Ron Lach

The post #589 – Mute Button Discipline first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• • Dave and other YouTubers have been making reaction/explainer videos about Veritasium’s video, “The Big Misconception about Electricity”
  • Feynman lectures
  • How electricity gets to you (Wendover)
  • World’s largest solar array using HVDC
  • Photonicinduction
  • Electric Buses
  • Linus Tech Tips is growing their lab (and business)
  • Do career prospects change for people above 40 in the hardware industry? How is it different from the software industry, discussed on hacker news?
  • Chris recently went full-time at a startup called Golioth. Not mentioned on the show, but Chris also wrote about it here.
    • Started by former guest Jonathan Beri
    • Golioth is built to work with Zephyr RTOS currently.
    • In a former episode, Chris talked about hiring Bilal to write drivers for cellular modems, but that still wouldn’t hook into databases, it just throws MQTT packets at a server.
    • Chris was able to build a proof-of-concept using cellular modems in 3 hours total.
  • Sam Feller (former Engineer Blogs writer) wrote about keeping in touch using a CRM.
  • Amazon Re:Invent is offering private 5G networks in factories

The post #569 – Electric Fields, Son. first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

The post #559 – Occam’s Engineering Razor first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Today’s episode is sponsored by InspectAR! Check out their latest version of the tool to improve your remote troubleshooting, working with manufacturing partners, or just learning more about the circuit boards on your bench.

• Heat events in the world. The Pacific Northwest (PNW) has breaking records.
• Solar + battery might make a lot of sense for areas prone to weather events.
• Dave made a video on clipping the power due to microinverters and moving up to 8 kW
• Chris will be starting from a blank room for his new lab
• Dave shared a rare photo of his old workshed.
• Lighting in the lab
• Call / mute button
• 8 bit guy studio build
• Chris has been working on a water resistant product. He has been targeting an IP rated case with an o-ring and cable glands
• Double o-rings and grease help for high pressure environments
• Nic Bingham talking about preparing electronics for deep underwater
• IP 67 standards
• Re-enterable potting
• Dave is planning to do a teardown on an early 2000s Kodak digital camera
• Sparkfun hooks a patent troll
• Silicon Valley’s episode about patent trolls
• Mota group tried to take down Dave’s videos (and others) of a drone that went bust. Dave responded in another video about the takedown notice.

The post #548 – The Last Line of Defense first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Thanks to Housing Works Auctions for the pictures of Beanie Babies

The post #536 – NFT Schematics first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

This week our sponsor is Keysight Technologies, who are ramping up a new contest called “Stump The Experts” and is focused on Keysight’s 5G testing technologies. You can learn more and enter the contest by going to TheAmpHour.com/5G

• Dave tore down his ATEM mini ISO
• Internally there is a Xilinx Zynq that has an $1800 single piece price
• The pipelined data path can also do things like Chromakey
• Texas power outage
• Lawrence Krause
• Dave is upgrading his solar
• Can solar be used as a hedge on inflation?
• North vs south facing depends on your latitude.
• String inverter vs microinveter
• John Edmond of Cree (one of our earliest guests!) talking about LEDs and SiC mosfets
• Past guest Martin Lorton made a set of videos about inspecting solar panels
• DC isolator fires
• Product recall
• RCA TV recall
• Dave had to ship out shims to counteract underspec’d thickness of the PCB on 121GW
• Tesla recall
• Takata airbag recall
• Dave’s video (#10) about how a rubberband cost millions of dollars!
• Marco Reps did a build of an 8.5 digit voltmeter
• Perserverance landed on Mars! So awesome
• The “Marketing Camera” was an off-the-shelf camera from FLIR
• Real Engineering did a video about all of the features on the new rover
• Fry’s is shutting down
• US administration is pushing for more silicon investment (fabs)

Thanks to Wikipedia for the representative rendering of Dave and Chris trying to remember recalls

The post #532 – Recalling Recalls first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris has a remote troubleshooting setup for his ABC boards
• Dave once designed PCBs over remote desktop
• Chris had to do remote chip design in college…while trying to learn Unix at the same time
• “The Best Software of PCB Design EVER” on the EEVblog forum
• Educational curriculum laziness (not wanting to make new content). We discussed this a little with Brock Lameres when he as on the show.
• CU Boulder has an IIOT learning track that looks interesting. But is it worth $500 per class? Maybe!
• Sydney / Dublin / Washington accord
• EEVblog #1175 video about accords
• Mike Engelhardt episode
• Playstation 5 (PS5) teardown
• We had a question on our subreddit about whether we get overwhelmed by learning electronics
• App note about MPPT on the BQ25895
• Past guest Dave Young has made a dev board for Voltaic that has built in MPPT directly on the charge controller chip (BQ24650)
• A DIY VNA that can go up to 6 GHz! (Chris stated the low cost VNAs can’t go past 1 GHz, which it turns out isn’t true)
• Shahriar’s Deepace review
• Charging plates
• Dave experienced the high speed charging problem on his Ioniq
• Dave reviewed electric buses and the infrastructure around them
• Luigi recommended a catch phrase for Chris at sign off

The post #512 – Design For Longevity first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Kerry Scharfglass (@borgel)!

This episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits, who are operating throughout the COVID-19 shutdown to serve medical customers (and normal customers too!). If you need priority service for a medical device related to Coronavirus, please let them know upon checkout. All other orders will be on a non-standard timeline guarantee (because of staffing, priority orders), but will have the same high quality assembly that Screaming Circuits is known for.

• Kerry was using Upverter for layout and switched to KiCad.
• He was designing a badge for DEF CON, which he did multiple years.
• The Dragonfly Badge was based upon Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age
• Synchronizing clock over IR helped each piece of hardware coordinate patterns.
• Kerry has done two HDDG talks:
  • From 1 to 100: Scaling and Selling a Personal Electronics Project’
  • Design for Manufacturing
  • There was another talk by Whitney Merrill about Badgelife that helped Chris understand people were building real hardware.
• Kerry Supercon talk about “medium scale”
• SnapEDA
• Talk with Nadya, Ben, and Zach
• Things learned from ‘small scale hardware war games’
• Photos of units, colorful diagrams
• “All the different things you use profit for”
• Moving from 4 layer to 6 layer
• Kerry’s first job out of school was at Lab126, the company that makes hardware for Amazon.
• At the time, they had released the Kindle and KindleFire.
• He was working on a prototype for what became the Echo.
• A (wearable) ring for Echo
• Wallwart that is cheap enough to throw into everything
• OMAP3 with DSP core
• Tracking COVID cases using phones
• Wake word on device
• Initial integration with Hue worked over UPnP
• Built with Yocto
• After Lab126, Kerry started working at Mindtribe. They were recently acquired by Accenture.
• Dockless scooter
• Speed to market as a design constraint
• How did it impact the firmware side of things?
• “If you can’t communicate with the client about what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what you’re building at all”
• Whiteboarding as a skill in front of clients
• Mercilessly hack away at requirements
• Chris has dealt in the past with consultants who are rude (and doesn’t want to be like that).
• Kerry is now the Lead firmware engineer at Span.io. They are making power panels that can work better with solar and battery systems.
• Things that are different as a full time engineer vs a consultant: “I have all of the skin in the game instead of some of the skin”
• Moving into management vs moving to smaller company
• Storage + Solar
• The Powerwall doesn’t show up as a full system, it needs to be integrated by an electrician or similar.
• Industry is different than commercial
• “Designing for service”
• One customer is the home owner, one is the installer
• EEVblog videos about solar
• Changing wifi connection by the installer
• Altium to KiCad converter
• Hackaday articles
  • Inner workings of a PCB
  • Embedded file systems (LittleFS)
• Check out more about Span.io

The post #487 – An Interview with Kerry Scharfglass first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome JP Norair of Haystack Technologies!

• Chris knows JP from the Consulting Forum. Want to join us? Apply here
  • 0h 0m 40s
• LoRa
  • 0h 1m 49s
• Chirp Spread Spectrum
  • 0h 1m 53s
• LoRaWAN
  • 0h 3m 16s
• The standard initially came from IBM
  • 0h 3m 23s
• Formed the LoRa alliance
  • 0h 3m 34s
• Comcast strategy shifting
  • 0h 4m 9s
• Sigfox was a competitor
  • 0h 4m 55s
• Senet
  • 0h 6m 53s
• Campus deployments
  • 0h 8m 44s
• Moving data on LoRaWAN
  • 0h 9m 25s
• Was probably meant for meter reading
  • 0h 10m 17s
• Haystack
  • 0h 11m 30s
• DASH7
  • 0h 11m 35s
• Savi
  • 0h 11m 58s
• Asset tracking on a global scale
  • 0h 12m 49s
• Exposed to technology standardization
  • 0h 15m 43s
• iso18000-7
  • 0h 15m 59s
• People who are contacting are using LoRaWAN and it hasn’t worked
  • 0h 20m 11s
• QOS means there are packets that are received correctly
  • 0h 21m 21s
• LPWAN is not that mature
  • 0h 22m 58s
• Borrowing from space based telemetry
  • 0h 23m 6s
• Claude Shannon – Information theory
  • 0h 24m 15s
• There is built in error correction in the LoRa hardware
  • 0h 27m 43s
• Matt Knight episode from ToorCamp
  • 0h 27m 55s
• Alphabet soup of standards
  • 0h 32m 26s
• One of them specifies a convolutional code
  • 0h 32m 35s
• Soft decision
  • 0h 33m 39s
• Proprietary stuff sweetens the deal
  • 0h 35m 56s
• LDPC error correction
  • 0h 36m 9s
• Startups are willing to take a risk
  • 0h 40m 25s
• Bigger companies are worried about failing
  • 0h 40m 33s
• Working with startups
  • 0h 41m 52s
• Larger businesses are willing to pay for time and materials
  • 0h 42m 1s
• Payment on milestones
  • 0h 42m 34s
• Selling hardware allows you to put cost into it
  • 0h 44m 3s
• Mobile vs fixed
  • 0h 45m 22s
• Link budget
  • 0h 49m 7s
• ITU region 2
  • 0h 49m 50s
• RSSI
  • 0h 51m 41s
• Fresnel zone
  • 0h 55m 33s
• SolPad
  • 0h 58m 33s
• Have to be ready to bounce between full time and consulting
  • 0h 58m 50s
• Not a solar company
  • 0h 59m 36s
• Battery backed storage and conversion solutions
  • 0h 59m 40s
• John from Cree
  • 1h 1m 24s
• Doing GaN inverters
  • 1h 1m 28s
• Smaller inductors
  • 1h 2m 9s
• Roof mounted inverters and batteries
  • 1h 3m 15s
• Shahriar talking RF
  • 1h 7m 13s
• Trying to broaden expertise
  • 1h 7m 18s
• Dash7 over a wire
  • 1h 9m 6s
• RS485
  • 1h 9m 33s
• Sometimes wireless feels like it’s actually more reliable than something like RS485
  • 1h 12m 8s
• JP has a person site called Indigresso
  • 1h 19m 3s
• Using MATLAB to simulate antennas
  • 1h 20m 28s
• Johanson antennas
  • 1h 23m 1s
• Making a different frequency antenna by adding extra wire
  • 1h 24m 11s
• Start with a higher freq chip antenna and modify it downward
  • 1h 24m 25s

The post #443 – An Interview with JP Norair first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Dr Sam Stranks, entrepreneur and professor at Cambridge University!

• Perovskites
  • 0h 0m 49s
• The family is based on the crystal structure
  • 0h 1m 15s
• Have been worked on for 2 to 3 decades
  • 0h 1m 44s
• Only since 2009 have they been used as a solar cell
  • 0h 2m 36s
• Sam’s background is physicist
  • 0h 4m 46s
• Raised in Australia
  • 0h 6m 23s
• Broad undergrad background
  • 0h 7m 0s
• Bridged chemistry and physics in Master’s program
  • 0h 7m 22s
• Worked on removing white wine proteins
  • 0h 7m 32s
• The mechanism is similar to how alzheimers blobs together
  • 0h 8m 50s
• 2007
  • 0h 10m 24s
• He got a Rhodes scholarship which meant he ended up going to Cambridge University.
  • 0h 10m 29s
• Research included carbon nanotubes
  • 0h 11m 7s
• Wrapping polymes around then
  • 0h 11m 21s
• Popularity has been dropping
  • 0h 11m 47s
• Fullerenes, Graphene both won Nobel prize.
  • 0h 12m 2s
• Producing nanotubes is difficult
  • 0h 12m 21s
• Dave made a video about a bunkum Kickstarter doing Graphene heaters
  • 0h 12m 34s
• Specifically separating out metallic and semiconductor types
  • 0h 12m 47s
• Finished PhD 2012
  • 0h 15m 5s
• Joined Henry Snaith‘s group doing dye sensitized solar cells
  • 0h 15m 21s
• Reemergence of perovskites
  • 0h 16m 21s
• The initial focus was on a dye sensitive cell made out of perovskite
  • 0h 18m 25s
• Early efficiency was 3%
  • 0h 18m 56s
• The research is done in a place that looks more like a chemistry lab than a semi lab
  • 0h 22m 23s
• Solar simulator to replicate the sun
  • 0h 23m 40s
• How are perovskites different from solar cells?
  • 0h 25m 34s
• Silicon has an indirect bandgap
  • 0h 26m 49s
• Multijunctions cells (the kind on satellites) have different absorbers (different colors)
  • 0h 27m 52s
• Record silicon efficiency is 27%
  • 0h 28m 21s
• Full panel is about 20%
  • 0h 28m 39s
• Perovskite is at 23%
  • 0h 29m 5s
• Triple junction is 39%
  • 0h 29m 27s
• Videos from past guests Sam Zeloof and Jeri Ellsworth
  • 0h 30m 53s
• Printed solar cells
  • 0h 32m 4s
• ABX3
  • 0h 34m 4s
• Thickness only needs to be half a micron
  • 0h 34m 41s
• The name ‘perovskite solar cell’ is derived from the ABX3 crystal structure of the absorber materials, which is referred to as perovskite structure. The most commonly studied perovskite absorber is methylammonium lead trihalide (CH3NH3PbX3, where X is a halogen atom such as iodine, bromine or chlorine), with an optical bandgap between 1.5 and 2.3 eV depending on halide content. Formamidinum lead trihalide (H2NCHNH2PbX3)
  • 0h 35m 56s
• Currently using Indium for the contact, but it’s hard to get, running out
  • 0h 36m 13s
• Talking through the stack
  • 0h 37m 12s
• Bottom electrode is Indium Tin oxide
  • 0h 37m 37s
• Then a layer of perovskite
  • 0h 37m 53s
• Top layer is organic
  • 0h 38m 37s
• Illumnate through the glass,
  • 0h 39m 33s
• InSnOx is transparent up to UV
  • 0h 41m 14s
• Perovskite absorbs 200-800
  • 0h 41m 28s
• Using lasers to test with pulses
  • 0h 44m 57s
• Pulses for a 1 ps
  • 0h 45m 7s
• Monitor how they recombine and lose energy
  • 0h 45m 38s
• What causes a defect?
  • 0h 46m 23s
• What actually makes electrons mobile in the ABX3 structure?
  • 0h 49m 15s
• Structure is mostly from the B and the X (lead and iodide)
  • 0h 49m 35s
• Covalently bonding vs ionic bonding
  • 0h 52m 35s
• Other applications being targeted
  • 0h 56m 47s
• Light emission (LEDs)
  • 0h 56m 57s
• Also using for lasing materials (LASERs)
  • 0h 59m 41s
• Want to make an electrically pumped laser
  • 0h 59m 55s
• Have been some changes in the A site that stabilize ion migration
  • 1h 1m 55s
• Sam is a founder of Swift Solar
  • 1h 2m 29s
• The 6 founders had spent time together in Henry Snaith’s group
  • 1h 2m 43s
• Focusing on making tandem cells
  • 1h 3m 20s
• Making a solar sheet
  • 1h 4m 13s
• More solar cells in a smaller area
  • 1h 4m 59s
• Payback periods
  • 1h 5m 25s
• Why hasn’t this started on the production side yet?
  • 1h 6m 18s
• Solar is coming down to 20 cent per watt
  • 1h 6m 43s
• Install costs are still $1 per watt
  • 1h 6m 56s
• The lightweight aspects lowers the cost of installation
  • 1h 7m 20s
• Sam did a TED talk
  • 1h 8m 13s
• Integrated photovoltaics
  • 1h 8m 25s
• Group web page
  • 1h 9m 27s
• Want to learn more about bandgaps? Check out pveducation.org
  • 1h 9m 33s
• Scientific American wrote an article about The Perovskite Boom last year
  • 1h 9m 54s
• Sam’s lab is taking new students! Reach him via his web page or reach out to him on Twitter (@SamStranks)
  • 1h 11m 59s

Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

The post #433 – An Interview with Sam Stranks first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris just got back from the Hackaday Superconference, where he got to hang out with/meet Ben Krasnow, Andreas Spiess and many others.
• Flex PCBs
• Scotty from Strange Parts (our guest last week) gave Chris iPad PCBs, which were pretty thin!
• Transmission line impedance calculator
• PCBs inside of cameras
• Always easier to Pick and Place as a flat thing
• 3D printing onto fabric
• Dave and David found a thermal imaging watch project in the lab cleanup
• Chris was impressed by a project that used a grid eye and a TI pico projector, built by former guest Robert Nelson
• Chris was asking about off the shelf cases vs 3D printed ones.
• This was discussed in our interview with Marcus Schappi when he talked about the  Ninja Blocks project
• uSupply moving to 2 part die cast case
• Video about how to do an SMD board to fit into two part cases.
• Writing a datasheet first helps to bound the constraints of a board
• Pleasing the last .1% of the customer
• Chris will be doing assembly again this week and released an intro video about using the NeoDen4.
• Past guest Piotr Esden-Tempski did a great video/stream showing how to do PCB panelization in KiCad
• Chris didn’t understand how panels were spec’d and you didn’t need to put out a full panel size.
• Mike’s video about the fish installation talked about stretching what was possible with PCBs and assembly.
• Dave’s old DfM video(s) go over good practices for getting boards assembled.
• Dave’s move is going slow
• Dave was mentioned on the Techmoan channel talking about Data Play discs
• At the Hackaday Superconference, Chris gave a talk about common circuits that can protect designs
• Jimmy Carter’s Solar panel
• Dave’s experience with solar
• Ergs per second are akin to kW. Do your own conversions online.
• Check out Ben Krasnow’s talk from Supercon, his deposition of electoluminescent material was particularly impressive (including the methods he used to drive them)

Thanks to pagedooley for the picture of the solar farm

The post #415 – Ergs Per Second first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave’s knee is gross. You can see all the videos and updates about it on his secondary channel.
• A research lab claims to have made PV cells that mimic photosynthesis.
• Hyperloop busted by thunderf00t?
• A reader asked about non-fiction books. Chris was more excited to talk about the fiction book he’s reading, Seveneves.
• What would happen if the sun vanished?
• Former guest Chuck Peddle
• Avnet is the top bid for Premier Farnell
• ADI is buying LT.
• We love LTSpice and had the chance to chat with the head of it, Mike Engelhardt.
• ARM was bought by SoftBank. In an article about why SB is paying 32B, they talk about the possibility that ARM starts mfg their own chips.
• Bunnie/Snowden

Missing links? You can always see our list of links on our subreddit, /r/TheAmpHour or see the same links posted to our twitter, @TheAmpHour. You can support the show via our Patreon Page.

Thanks to Ruin Raider for the picture of the collision.

The post #310 – Mergers and Acquiescence first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Stefan Dzisiewski-Smith! (@stefandz)

• Chris and Stefan met at Resonate.io, through mutual friend and former guest Mike Harrison.
• He studied EE at Imperial College, both undergrad and grad degree.
• An early project was writing assembly on a PIC16F87. 
• After that, he was convinced to apply to the Royal College of Art for a multidisciplinary Industrial Design Engineering.
• It required a portfolio, much of which was created right before applying.
• The first job out of school was working at a high voltage power supply company. The floor started on fire at one point after an arcing supply.
• Xray tubes are hard to simulate so they would test real ones in lead lined boxes.
• One large project after joining Jason Bruges studio was the Matthew Knight arena (Eugene Oregon). This project uses Shutterglass.
• After leaving the studio, Stefan joined the company that became Buffalo Grid. The initial project concept was a bicycle generator to charge phones in Uganda. It later switched to being solar. The business model was to give away equipment, do profit share
• Internally, there was an MPPT board from NXP and a BeagleBone Black. These days it’s a more integrated solution and a MPPT unit from “Roc Solid Solar“.
• Stefan now works at Bare Conductive, which makes capacitive sensing using carbon paint. It was started by 4 RCA grads, including his former roommate Matt.
• Listeners may have seen the Touch Board an Arduino compatible project with SD card, audio output and a capacitive sensor. It was a key part of their first Kickstarter, which rasied nearly 122K pounds.
• There will be a new product in September meant for the RPi Zero. Chris mentioned these are hard to get, to which Stefan mentioned the site “Where is my Pi 0?” Chris heard rumor there are some available at his local MicroCenter.
• Unicorn Poo?.
• The chip behind it is the MPR121. It was originally created by Freescale but then sold to Resurgent Semi. Stefan wrote a new low level library for Arduino
• Stefan brought up current events, how Analog is buying Linear Tech.
• These days Stefan is working on an Induction cooker.
• You can find more about Stefan and his past work on bycgwtsf.com and you can follow him on Twitter

Many thanks for Stefan sharing his wide variety of knowledge and experience!

The post #309 – An Interview with Stefan Dzisiewski-Smith 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, Martin Lorton! Video blogger and fellow Clevelander!

• Fresh off replacing his basement, he stopped by Chris’s basement
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mprDdGp6rWI[/tube]
• Martin got started in IT, working for the large company EDS in his home South Africa. That was bought out by HP and they managed BP’s accounts.
• Once Martin moved to the states in 2008, he had extra time to begin video blogging.
• Fluke got ahold of his early videos and started sponsoring him. At one point, Martin was making a video per day. (!)
• The reason Martin got into video was to explore solar, which he did extensively and eventually he put onto his house back in South Africa.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agSfgsH97PE[/tube]
• The test equipment was another market that he got interested in exploring, especially because it was related to solar.
• Martin says up front that his videos are from a novice perspective. Chris mentions a book about teaching adults that says this is necessary to be an effective teacher.
• Another important aspect is to maintain the community, much like Dave does on his forum.
• The support that Martin and Dave both get seems to stem from the idea of 1000 true fans.
• At the beginning, Martin did not appear in front of the camera. In fact, he hired a female actress to be in front of the camera (without much success).
• One part of solar that the mjlorton channel focuses on is the data. Chris mentioned a book by Astro Teller that does the same for marriage called Sacred Cows.
• You wouldn’t think of Cleveland for renewables, but wind turbines are popping up everywhere. Lincoln Electric has a HUGE one that can output 5 MW.
• Dave’s solar data from his house is available online (but not updated regularly).
• Another project that is approached from the “beginner” perspective is Martin’s power supply project. Much like other modern problems, sometimes it’s simply knowing what terms to Google for.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70dsAWBkXIM[/tube]
• Sometime you need to find ways to filter the audience to get to the core of folks who really care. Money is one way to do that.
• Long form videos come naturally to Martin (and Dave), they realize how much is left out from DMM tutorials like the one from Afrotech. Same thing for Curious Inventor’s 5 min videos (who told us he spent 6 months learning more about soldering before making his popular video).
• Other engineering video blogs:
  • Signal Path
  • Engineer Guy
  • Photonic Induction
• Martin acts as a stimulus for audience talking to one another on various medium.
• Both Dave and Martin are in the midst of trying out KiCad. Martin used Design Spark for the early part of his power supply project.
• Recently Jack Ganssle started putting out videos on YouTube.
• Dave lets us know that 74 series logic is celebrating its 50th video (really 5400 series)

Many thanks for Martin stopping by the basement to talk to us. If you come through Cleveland you can join Martin and Chris at the Charged Conversation meetup.

The post #206 – An Interview with Martin Lorton – Variegated Video Vagility first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris says that there is still lots of time to enter The Hackaday Prize. Don’t Panic.
• Dave recently did a judge interview.
• Need to connect your project? Chris got his Electric Imp working in about 10 minutes using their getting started guide.
• Dave recently had to declare email bankruptcy. Chris was listening to a podcast about someone who had to do the same with nearly 10,000 unread emails.
• Sometimes we get used to the reminders we set for ourselves. Chris either needs a speaker in his house that announces meetings or a shock collar that punishes for not getting something done.
• Dave recently made a video debunking the solar roadways we discussed a few weeks back.
• Elon Musk (via SolarCity) recently bought a solar manufacturing company. They will be opening a new plant in Western New York near Chris’s hometown.
• They will also use the abundant power from Niagara Falls to help power the plant. Chris took pictures with a Nikola Tesla statue up there when he was younger.
• Germany now gets 50% of its power from renewable sources.
• Martin Lorton is installing solar panels on his house in Cleveland. Even with cloudy cities like Cleveland (and some in Germany), they can still output significant power.
• Dave says there are now 1 million homes with solar in Australia.
• Chris reveals that he used to design instrumentation at ABB.
• The exciting stuff coming from ABB in the past few years have been around  HVDC, specifically with an eye towards long distance transmission of massive amounts of power (think gigawatts).
• Another exciting piece is the DC Breaker that can switch the large amounts of power in less than 20 ms.
• They also look amazing, the standoffs required for 800kV is significant.
• The Diagrammer by Mergenthaler was a badass piece of industrial equipment for making schematics. Think there are any still around?
• Rhode & Schwarz stopped branding products in the Hameg product line as Hameg (with the associated logo).
• Someone made a compilation video of Dave saying America [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D8bdemvjIk[/tube]
• Our buddy Mike Ossmann has been working on the NSA playset, a replication of the hardware shown in the catalog of gadgets to order. He will be showing it off DefCon.
• Chris will also be traveling to Detroit in two weekends to hang out with the Hackaday guys and film the Red Bull Create competition.
• Dave has been duking it out in the harsh Aussie winter by competing in the Tough Bloke competition.

Image is courtesy of ABB

The post #205 – Solar Factories and HVDC Lines – Pollent Power Pushing first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Today’s show got a little heated, it’s true. We went over a lot of things, but none more than a recent campaign to try and get more young women interested in engineering…in a not-so-great way.  We welcome all debate about the issue in the comments or a link to a discussion elsewhere. We also covered a lot of other industry thoughts. On all these topics, please be sure to let us know if you like the direction the show is moving or not. We just like hearing from you.

• Shoutouts
  • (Found on Hacked Gadget’s humongous list of links) Tech Dirt is a great site for a lot of internet type issues…just be careful, it’ll make you really mad at lawyers and entitled-feeling people around the world.  The example story is about professor who says 24 hour news should get protections so people can’t link to it. NEWSFLASH: The internet is good for weirdos like Dave and Chris and bad for people trying to make money the same way newspapers were run 50 years ago.
  • Kickstarter…is awesome. Crowdfunding/microfunding for all types of artistic and technical endeavors.The new Lasersaur project was funded ($20,000!) through Kickstarter. Be sure to click through and check out all the awesome projects that are on the horizon. You can help fund them and maybe get a cool souvenir.
• Tech News
  • Stanford change solar cell design with a new process paradigm “photon enhanced thermionic emission,” semiconducting material with a thin layer of the metal cesium. High temp,  could reach up to 60% percent efficiency! (Currently around 30% in some academic settings)
  • Chips are still hard to get! Dave mentions that the big distributors such as Digikey and Mouser seem to be keeping up though. We also point out the importance of designing with part availability in mind.
  • Money trickling back to chip startups. There will always be money flowing to where venture capitalists can see a return on their investment. The real problem is bootstrapping a chip start up is next to impossible so funding is one of the only options available. We also referenced the reader comments from last time concerning making 10 micron feature size chips at home and encouraged people to give it a shot. Who are we to say what people can or can’t do.
  • Margery Conner (EDN) links us through to a theregister.co.uk story about the cluelessness of people who want to “go green”.  It’s amazing how little people understand about the scale difference of mW, W, kW and MW.
  • Design News is just announcing the TI launchpad. Is the hobbyist industry going to lead the professional industry?
• Rants
  • Dave dislikes the EDN Survey, done by Canon Communications and KMPS group. Why do they do surveys like that?
  • A horrible concept for a new reality show about women in engineering.
    • Women shouldn’t need to be enticed with “style” to buy into engineering. That just makes it stereotypical, regardless of women wanting to preserve “identity”.
    • They should encourage young women with programs like MAKE, encouraging curiosity in the sciences from a young age.
    • Instead, show women regardless of how they look or dress doing really awesome things!
    • Model it off people like Jeri Ellsworth and Kari Byron. Focus on what you can do with engineering and sciences, not that it needs to be “stylish”.
  • Why do the people closest to the money get paid the most?  Is this a fundamental problem with engineering (salary at least)?
• Projects
  • At Jeff Keyzer’s request (talking about projects): Chris’s idea for a simple temp controlled wire (DC based, no AC supplies so we don’t need relays). Basically just a copper wire with known resistance and a power FET (or many paralleled FETs) with a PID controller. Saw that Lady Ada built a PID for their reflow oven so that could be a good starting point.
  • No updates on Dave’s mysterious project!
• Discussion Points
  • Transformers vs. switchers. Are the former headed out? We don’t want to say “the transformer is dead” of course…we’re not Chris Anderson talking about the web or anything (sorry, couldn’t resist!)… But there seems to be more focus on the switching side of things because of portability of devices.
  • Fake Caps!

The post #5 – Girl Power first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.