The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast
By The Amp Hour
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Podcast Description
An Electronics Radio Show
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The Amp Hour #96 — Senseless Saccadic Shemozzle | Chris is off to Makerfaire in San Fran Dave loves his Classic Messenger bag The East Gipslands MakerSpace is starting up, and they have rented a HUGE space. See the Walkthrough People don’t want smart meters on their houses. OrCAD now has an online marketplace, where you can download footprints and “apps” Mayhew Labs have a nice online 3D Gerber viewer New package announce by NXPs. Jeez, can’t they get smaller? I have a job, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do! Map of ee jobs in the US Environmental protection: What is it for? How is it done? When is it necessary? Chip Of The Week – STM6524 | 5/20/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #95 — Feracious Fabless Facilitator | Welcome Øyvind Janbu, CTO of Energy Micro! Øyvind went to school in Trondheim where there are multiple schools and many tech companies based around them. Many early members, including the CEO, were part of ChipCon, which was later purchased by Texas Instruments. Energy Micro (EM) is mostly employee owned. Since EM is a fabless semiconductor company, the processing (manufacturing) is done primarily at TSMC. “Le Sense” is an homage to the movie Pulp Fiction, in the same scene where they mention the Royale with Cheese. Energy Micro has a VP of Simplicity, dedicated to making things easier for the customer. The radios coming from EM are a variety of radio standards, including Bluetooth Low Energy. The royalties of an ARM core are confidential, but ARM has more information about licensing in their annual reports. Some of the newest parts in the EM Gecko family use the ARM M0+ core, which many vendors are promoting right now for low power. The EM products have some unusual features, like DMA from an ADC while in sleep mode. Energy Micro publishes their longevity guarantee right on their website for all to see. Chips are available through distributors like Digikey and have been part of their strategy from day one. Many thanks to Øyvind for being on our show and giving us more insight into chip companies. He was really straightforward with his answers and we hope you learned a lot from him. Please leave any additional questions in the comments and we’ll try to make sure the proper people answer them. | 5/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #94 — Gnomic Gazumping Gobemouche | We’ll be interviewing Øyvind Janbu, the CTO and co-founder of Energy Micro next week! We’ll have a separate post for asking him questions. Chris will be speaking at the Bay Area Maker Faire. If you’re going to be there, find a comfy chair and prepare for a snoozefest Second reminder for applying to the Lemnos Labs hardware incubator program, which will be closing soon. Our friend Alan Wolke did a really fun tour of his shop…through the screen of his oscilloscope! Lots of fun! Dave has finally figured out his MakerBot…with some help from his friends and by reading the (friggin) manual. Chris brings up a fun direct ink resist print using a vintage Epson printer. Great quality! Sometimes process adjustments are necessary to get more life out of a process node. Chris mentioned an Engineer Blogs post about Photolithography, but that actually doesn’t talk about the interference. There is a slide set from the University of Waterloo that does a good job explaining this process. Intel continues to win by being the bleeding edge process company. Will be interesting to see if they get into the foundry business. Dave mentioned the recently announced scandal involving Silverbrook in Australia, who have failed to produce output for many many years. Apparently it’s possible to print super caps with a Laser Scribe DVD burner: DigiKey instituted a visual catalog…online! Finally! Have they been listening to the show?? LEDs that are going to be lighting up homes and workplaces almost were not possible. A researcher in the field explains the small margin on the bandgap required. Dave mentions Gazumping, which Chris had never heard of. Relays are a simple and yet crucial part of electronics. Chris was looking for cheap and small ones and was shown these from Omron. However, they didn’t fit the bill. Instead, we found out about new research into relay-like devices….on silicon! Wow! Don’t forget to subscribe to us! We suggested Miro (Dave’s favorite for the desktop) and BeyondPod (Chris’s favorite for his Android phone). There are lots of great options out there, we just want to make sure you hear about new shows when they are posted! Thanks for subscribing! | 5/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #93 — Cacaesthestic Chronometric Carriwitchet | Welcome, Tom LeMense! Tom is a grad of Michigan State University and has worked throughout the automotive electronics supply chain, including at Ford Electronics, Lear, TRW and a large automotive chip manufacturer. Prior to the work, he helped design the boards that detected the Top Quark at Fermi Lab. He recently got the boards he designed back, which were designed using ECL logic Here’s what Tom wrote to us after the show about them: Attached are some photos of a couple of the “D0″ (D-zero) equipment cards that I designed back in the late 1980′s for the Fermilab particle accelerator in Neperville, IL. These were part of the experiment that confirmed the “top quark” and are closing in on the potential of the Higgs boson. The Fermilab Tevatron and collider was shut down just last September, but there’s so much data that the physicists can continue to crunch, that they keep finding stuff. I should have put a scale in the photos to make clear how large these are. The floor tiles that they are resting upon are 12×12 inch (30x30cm). If you look at this photo, towards the bottom you can see blue-yellow racks – those house these cards (amongst others): The “master timing generator” (MTG) was loaded with a whole slew of bipolar PAL’s to generate the weird trigger/transfer control signals required in the rest of the system. 6 layers, mixed TTL and ECL. 54 MHz accelerator ring resonance frequency, but skew was super critical so hence the ECL signal path and bipolar pals. The closeup of the MTG shows the whimsical icon (recognize it if you’ve ever read Mad magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” cartoon) that I got to stamp on all my creations. We all had an icon. There was a surfer guy, a fleur-de-lis, the RCA victor dog, etc. Gotta love working in a university environment, funded by the US Department of Energy… The Calorimeter Trigger Backplane was my PCB layout masterpiece – those interconnect signals aren’t simply bussed – there’s a very complicated interconnect scheme between them to reflect the physical layout of the calorimeter detectors. PCB is 16 layers, 4 plane layers, the remaining 12 are signal layers with the differential ECL traces between, with all attempts made to control the impedance of the interconnect (ECL likes 100 ohm Z0). Blind and buried vias were used as well. I recall the day we sent out the magnetic tape reel (!) with the gerber data to the only company that returned a bid on the job – we commented that we could either order two of these backplanes, or go and buy a new Chevy Corvette – each PCB was about $11K in 1988 dollars, IIRC. These were designed on an Intergraph CAD workstation, based upon a VAX 11/750 minicomputer, dual 20-something-inch monitors, 2-foot x 4 foot electromagnetic mouse+digitizer, etc. Pretty heavy duty stuff for a dumbass college student to be using! I became a complete CAD snob after that experience. In recent news, Cray (the supercomputing company) was bought by Intel. Tom got his start in RF working on the Super Regenerative circuit. He sent us a great scan of a 1922 article from Armstrong about the Super Regen Circuit. Armstrong also invented the Super Heterodyne circuit. For those interested in automotive testing, Tom sent us a link to a paper Ford published about their EMC testing requirements. We also talked about the automotive supply chain and how the chip vendors are required to do stringent temperature testing and guarantee parts for 10 years. Cars primarily use the CAN bus to communicate these days, though they also use the lower cost LIN bus in more places where it’s less critical. Dave was thinking about the previously discussed news about BugLabs pairing with Ford on opening up their infotainment system. We announced the Lemnos Labs hardware incubator program, which is closi[...] | 4/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #92 — Vellicate Videogame Vocation | Another round with the MightyOhm! Welcome back Jeff! Jeff has a new job! He’ll be joining Valve as a hardware designer in June! There is a handbook for working at Valve that was previously released online. Additionally, another employee wrote about the culture of working at Valve. Jeff highlights the importance of networking. Chris has written about this before, specifically for engineers. In getting a new job, it’s becoming increasingly important to show a portfolio of sorts. Jeff does this by documenting his projects on his MightyOhm website. Jeff’s kit business will continue but may need to be outsourced to a third party. Kickstarter is getting bigger, as are the projects. The Pebble watch is now at $6 million dollars (and counting) and has 26 days left. Ian of Dangerous Prototypes visit the SEG market in Shenzhen and show off the true power of a large electronics ecosystem/supply chain. New type of patent agreement out of the engineering group at Twitter. States that patents will only be used defensively and continue to be used in the same manner wherever those patents go. Speaking of legal issues, a seemingly bogus lawsuit is being claimed against (many) companies that sell vacuum tubes with mercury in them…that they have mercury in them! Shocker! See more from this Hack-a-Day post and accompanying law filing. It was great having Jeff back on the show and we can’t wait to see what he develops while at Valve. We wish him the best of luck! Thanks to sigma for the picture of the valve. | 4/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #91 — Idiographical Interconnect Intorsion | Logic analyzers use state analysis and timing analysis. They also can do state triggering. Ask the listeners: What is the craziest errata you’ve ever seen? Dave went and picked up 100 kg of Electronics Australia magazines. Chris still gets tripped up by rules of thumb for the metric system. XKCD has a brilliant chart of different ways of remembering amounts. The CSIRO are trying out a new wireless data system that can transmit over 10 Gbps! They also are the rightful inventors of WiFi and receive royalty checks for people that use the standard. We don’t like companies that only defend patents (like Intellectual Ventures) but if they roll the money back into research, that’s ok! Dave was watching a TV special on a software lock technology company that took on Microsoft…and won! (well, settled) OSHW Association was announced recently. They will be a registered 501c3 corporation. Followup from the other week: The Raspberry Pi made it through EMC testing and will be manufactured and sold now. Andrew Back does a first look at a beta unit, connecting it up to a vintage CRT monitor. What other hobbies have home labs? Most chemists are afraid to have labs at home because they might be accused of devious behavior. Though they still have a ways to go, plastic electronics are getting lower impedance and are still printable. Molex has mini-fit crimp terminals that have a 1500 mating cycles at 13 amps! What are your connector design considerations? Chip of the Week: The Linear Technology LTC4366 (yes, LT again). It’s a chip that can detect and protect against incoming surges. It’s programmable for time and over voltages. Plus it can float on your rails! Cool! Got anything we’ve missed? Want to hear something different on The Amp Hour? Let us know in the comments! And be sure to subscribe to make sure you’re getting the latest episodes right when they’re released! | 4/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #90 — Chaffered Chocolate Coemption | Dave and Chris discuss the after-Easter candy/chocolate sales. And many other cultural differences. Injection molding plastics is an art and a necessary skill for high run products. Have you ever worked on molds? Chris has a new podcast about general engineering topics. This will free his brain to talk more circuits on The Amp Hour! Dave likes the new OSHW RC controller by Gizmo For You. Design files can be found at OS-RC.com. Kent Lundberg is still working through Jim Williams’ app notes. There is a great “best-of” page that points out the key ones to read. Though it’s still just a rumor, the DARPA grand challenge that could be forthcoming sounds awesome. Robots to save people…then conquer them all? Is there any use still for Germanium Diodes? Interesting uses in an old Sylvania manual. Have they been supplanted by Schottkey and other low drop variants? Or does an application still exist that requires them? Jack Ganssle calls out a similarly awesome old book for playing with BJT circuits. Lots of great applications for trying out analog circuits. Do you go to expensive conferences on your company’s dollar? Would you go to the forthcoming Hardware Innovation Workshop for $775? Conferences are good for networking, if nothing else. Chris recommends, “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi, a book on how to do just that. Chris used CircuitLab to share a SPICE-like circuit with a friend to illustrate a point. If you want to see the Low Pass Filter Chris entered into the program, see here. If you’re interested in sharing schematics (KiCAD only right now) in a more interactive way than PDFs, Circuit Bee is an option. Chris was trying to illustrate Bode Plots for the friend. Pronounced “Boh-Dee”, according to his (impressive!) wikipedia page. If you’re interested in analog filtering, specifically Sallen Key Filters, check out this app note from TI. We have a winner from last week’s contest, Lorin Tauss! Though it was not requisite, the chip he suggested was great and was this week’s CotW! Chip of the Week The AD8555 by Analog Devices is a zero-drift, digitally programmable sensor signal amplifier. You can tweak offsets with a DAC and clamp at a specified input voltage. Pretty cool! Switch mode power supplies (SMPS) are a topic most younger engineers (Chris included) take a while to get accustomed to (especially when starting with a linear regulator or similar). There was a great application note by Microchip about the basics of SMPS and the different topologies that are available. Dave has talked about the differences (and similarities!) between SMPS and Linear Regulators before on EEVblog: Thanks to Patrick Nouhailler for the Easter candy picture! | 4/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #89 — Dissimulated Demigration Dontopedalogy | April fool’s joke went a little too well. We are not joining Tested.com but we appreciate all the congratulations we received (we’ll pretend it was for our superior acting skills…) There are other (much better) April Fool’s Jokes out there, especially from back in the day. Paul Rako goes over a bunch of fun ones from the heyday of National and LT. And Bob Pease’s site has the classic fake datasheet from Signetics, the Write-Only-Memory. Were you fooled by our foolery? Dave also had a separate trick involving laser probes from Extech Not fooling about this one: Photonic Induction is back! Well, at least his videos! Dave is about to cross his 3-year anniversary of the EEVblog! Our pal Dino just completed his one year quest at Hackaweek! He finished it out with a great oscilloscope-like laser project. Another scope, Claudio of the Amateur Engineer is making a homebrew oscilloscope! Did you know: The unit of the reciprocal of inductance is the “yrneh”? That’s “henry” spelled backwards. Wall street isn’t just hiring code monkeys. They also build some pretty impressive hardware. Even if you’re not a fan of the work the computer will eventually be doing, the architecture is impressive: We finally bring up the Raspberry Pi again on our show. But from the skeptical point of view. Will they be able to push out the boards at the price point they stated? ($35) Olimex on “The Back Shed” forums lays out a good case against it (via reddit). If you’re interested in building your own boards and are looking for an arduino-like project, check out the VinciDuino. It’s a way to practice your SMD soldering and wind up with an 8-bit based Arduino (based off the forthcoming “Leonardo” platform). Are you a fan of OSHW, like we are? If not, you’d likely have stopped listening by now to us Check out the OSHW community survey over at adafruit. Great video of Brian Fuller’s Drive for Innovation at their stop…where they tore the car apart! Over 100 micros and 288 batteries. Lots and lots of Freescale processors. Do you primarily use microcontrollers in your projects? Or microprocessors? In the push to get more consumer-like experiences, Freescale continues to move away from their Coldfire line and towards ARM based products. This new one has a second core dedicated to “iPhone-like” features (which require more memory). Regulation in the US means you have to PAY to see the standards! Pretty crazy, right? How is that enforceable? Turns out…it isn’t! Giveaway! Sponsored by Freetronics. Win an EtherMega board. Just email us with “contest” in the title to theamphour@gmail.com. Let us know your favorite chip, hopefully one we’ve never heard of before. Added bonus, we might use it as Chip of the Week in the future! We’ll mention you if we do! Chip of the Week ST Micro released (?) a new EEPROM that can be programmed by RF (more specifically NFC). Would be great for packages/project boxes you cannot open and need to upgrade the firmware. This Day In Nerd History The first mobile phone made a call in 1973, by Martin Cooper of Motorola. The phone was 10 inches in height, 3 inches deep and an inch-and-a-half wide and weighed 30-oz. Cooper has said “The battery lifetime was 20 minutes, but that wasn’t really a big problem because you couldn’t hold that phone up for that long.” That’s all for this week. We promise not to pull any more legs until next April 1! Thanks for playing along! Picture used and modified under CC from the BadAstronomy Flickr page. Thanks Phil! | 4/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #88.5 — Telematic Tested Tacenda | Chris and Dave have some big news about the show! Tested.com Hint: The Amp Hour could soon involve more explosions… Thanks to LVCHEN for the picture of Jamie and Adam! | 3/31/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #88 — Yonderly Yodeling Yobbos | Chris is back in the basement! How do our listeners deal with having to be in two locations with work? Thanks to one of our most generous benefactors, Maurice! We are able to do more on this show because of people like him. If others are interested in donating, they can do so on our donation page. Sick of Dilbert-like meetings that drag on? Pop up this online timer to estimate how much $/s is being wasted in the meeting! Former guest and friend of the show, Jack Ganssle’s salary survey is out and points out interesting datapoints in the consulting side of EE. His newsletter is a great resource as well! Salary can flatten out as you get older. Chris has written about salary expectations for electrical engineers before. Margery Conner rightfully calls out Sony for their ridiculous plug for metering and gating wall power. Who would buy that? They talked about charging electric vehicles on the Science Friday podcast and the need for electrical distribution, but didn’t mention the cost aspect. Someone made a Back to the Future quadcopter! Serves multiple interests on The Amp Hour! Great video on how reed switches are made (to later go into reed relays). Another article on the basics, there was a wonderful article about re-using transformers on EDN. Dave has been using DIPtrace while trying out non-Altium commercial packages. Support Dave by buying a license through his site! Chris has been talking with people about how to best maintain a public repository of part databases. Stewart Allen has started a GitHub repo to use and contribute KiCAD symbols and footprints. CJ Gervasi has started a WordPress based site to get vetted parts and footprints. In the end, you’ll have to decide if any of these work for you, based on your needs and levels of customization. Should Dave design his PSU for lefties? Chris (a southpaw himself) doesn’t think so. Richard (“amspire”) on the EEVblog forums is rebuilding Dave’s design in an all-analog, all-discrete version. The control loops are causing him some…headaches. Ian and the Dangerous Prototypes crew visit another market, this one in Seoul: Chip of the Week: The INA219 from Texas Instruments (the Burr-Brown arm). A great I2C output high side current monitor that Dave designed into his PSU. Chris is looking for a better way to find parts than parametric search. Some people on twitter suggested the Adafruit Component Database (good for hobby stuff). If you’re into HV and enjoy (safely!) playing with transformers, check out this great video found via reddit on how to harvest them from microwaves: That’s all for this week, be sure to subscribe to the feed or find us on the multitudes of social networks in order to be the first to hear about the new shows being posted. Thanks to Tapir Girl for the yodeling picture | 3/25/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #87 — Nascent Nonolith Numquid | Welcome, Ian Daniher of Nonolith Labs! Ian was one of two developers on the CEE, a USB analog multitool. This was kicked off as a Kickstarter Project, which more than trebled their funding goal! They also pitched the idea to Imagine K12, a funding source similar to Y Combinator (but for educational purposes). They assembled much of their Kickstarter kits in house (the mechanical sections at least): Hardware startups are definitely different than the app “startups” that seem to pop up all over the landscape lately. 3D Printing Consortium Rep Rap had a successful funding drive through the Kickstarter alternative, Indie Go Go. HAXLR8R (mentioned on the show a few times before) is actively investing in hardware. The Startup Bus was a set of buses the drove to SXSW from different cities, “creating apps” on the way. Oof. The US based JOBS act could potentially inject more startup capital into the market. Now individual investors can invest up to $10,000 in a company in exchange for stock (up to $1 million). While the JOBS act could have potential abuse, Kickstarter has similar issues as well. A drones project was cancelled when the product to be delivered was in question. Another dicey looking project was the bluetooth DVM (or iVoltmeter) , based upon what is promised and the relatively low cost. Is the CEE test equipment? Ian calls it “Cavalier Instrumentation” Rigol does call themselves test equipment and are now selling a 2000-series scope (or will be, eventually), a long awaited successor to their 1052E model. Chip of the Week: The Atmel ATXMEGA32A4U, used on the CEE (which Chris then decided to use on his project). NOTE: For those who asked, the Open Source Hardware Definition. Point 4, you cannot call your product “Open Source Hardware” or “Open Hardware” if you use any form of Non-Commercial clause in a license, nor can you use the OSHW logo. | 3/18/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #86 — Emolumental Evaluation Emporetics | Survey Results are in! Thanks to the 330 or so people that participated! (Results will show up in a separate post) Australia lost the SKA to South Africa. Chris is going to this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire! If you’re going to be there, let him know! For our European listeners, Future electronics (the distributor) has a program where you can get dev boards if you trade your information. Decent mount of vendors participating. Today’s show centered around the different types of sales people, Chris has written about this before at Engineer Blogs. When is it OK to hang out with vendors? Is there an ethical limit to what you should agree to? Is just lunch OK? IBM creates a quasi-off-the-shelf Terabit Transceiver for network communications at under 5W power. Way outside the range of everyday networking but a good sign for the future! Altera had a press release this week about their built in optical transceiver. This is in line with much of the module-based electronics that are being developed by chip vendors these days. Printed electronics on a machine that cost less than $10K! Does Chris win? Thanks to Cherish from Engineer Blogs for pointing it out! Want micro machines to go along with your printed chips? Try a printed dragon fly, on a print platform the size of a business card! ZombieTech.tv did a great interview with James Neal (@laen), who runs the DorkbotPDX service (the purple boards). Dave has his MakerBot working and printing! He was happy he had to repair the machine so he now knows how it works and what to watch for. And the recently posted video! Dave is getting custom bean bags made for his office made with a custom fabric (if you’re interested, you can easily purchase it here): Chris has been struggling with KiCAD but learning as he goes, similar to the struggles Dave has been having. Dave used to have to do actual tape out on old boards and could do negative patterns in his head! COTW: A new(?) chip from Analog Devices, ADM1166, can monitor 10 different power rails and store the continuous voltages for readback after a failure. Can also throw alarms and coordinate power sequencing. Cool chip! Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, was sick of people emailing him with “better” punchlines to his comics. He now allows you to add your own ending to a comic strip (registration required, however). If you’re still interested in participating in the survey, please see episode 85 to get to the form. If you have any other feedback, you can reach us on Twitter (that’s really just the feed, Chris and Dave are both on there as well), Google+, Facebook or email us at theamphour@gmail.com. | 3/11/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #85 — Reputable Radio Reification | We’re showcasing other podcasts this week and asking more about you, our listener! Please take the survey on our episode page! New (or previously unannounced) Podcasts: Engineer Vs Designer, a podcast about 3D printing, CAD and the conflict between engineers and designers. They have a competition in process to win a MakerBot Replicator. IEEE Spectrum Podcast — Host Steven Cherry talks to industry veterans in 10-15 minute clips about all manner of industry topics. Story Collider — A mashup of science and comedy, this podcast has a different person talking each show about funny stories involving science. We’ll add a section on the website for other podcasts we like HAXLR8R is rolling! And we helped inform one of the participants! Tom from Boulder ElectroRide was accepted and is now writing about his experience on a new blog. Star Simpson, another member of the HAXLR8R program, is keeping a journal of her travels as well. Both are super interesting! So glad that there are hardware startups…and people are starting to notice! Lattice has a new logo…and it could mess up your ability to spot one of their parts until you learn the new logo. If you need to spot old logos, check out this site. Dave’s video about the anti static bag myth was passed down the chain by Element14 and they should be using the correct bags now. BoredAtWork writes on the EEVBlog Forum about the silliness of pricing when it’s just a software upgrade, but Chris and Dave understand the reality behind it. You need margin in order to work on next generation stuff! Chris Anderson wrote a series on “Maker Businesses” and makes a similar point. You need to charge 2.4x your costs in order to maintain business! (i.e. $10 in parts means you have to charge $24). Business Week writes about the true cost of low cost products: managers beholden to shareholders chasing the rock bottom prices will not have time and resources to focus on a good product. Chris uses Dropbox to maintain CAD files across computers/platforms. New web-based SPICE program available for the NerdKits guys. It’s called Circuit Lab and has some great features! This Week In Nerd History In 1977, the first Freon-cooled Cray-1 supercomputer, costing $19,000,000, was shipped to Los Alamos Laboratories, NM. It was 133 MegaFlops. The A4 processor in an iPhone is 34 MegaFlops! Chip of the Week Dave likes the LT3600, a 15V, 1.5A Synchronous, Rail-to-Rail, Single Resistor, Step-Down Regulator (whew!) Thanks to kafkan for the radio tower picture Please fill out the survey! Loading… If you hit submit, scroll back up to see the confirmation notice. | 3/4/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #84 — Bunnie’s Bibelot Bonification | Welcome, Bunnie Huang! Bunnie is the hardware designer behind the Chumby family of products. He also wrote a book about his experience of Hacking the Xbox. He got a little help from some friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also recently released the NeTV, which was met with some DMCA resistance due to the method in which he injects pixels. You can get chumby/NeTV hacker kits over at adafruit. He gets to go to some of the electronics markets, such as the SEG market in Shenzhen. Ian from Dangerous Prototypes went to the Japanese version of this market recently: While in the SEG market, you can even buy an iPhone schematic! Bunnie discussed Moore’s law (and the breakdown thereof) at the OSHW conference and we discussed on episode 61 of The Amp Hour (with Jeff!), around 20 minutes in. We asked why he decided to use Marvell chips, as opposed to a more open chip company like Freescale (in relative terms). Thanks again to Bunnie for taking the time to talk about his work and his philosophy on design. We hope you all enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed talking to him! Please leave any unanswered questions in the comments and we’ll try to follow up by next week! Note: We changed the encoded volume of the podcast so we don’t blow anyone’s eardrums out when they jump from their favorite NPR podcast (Car Talk, duh) to ours or whatever else you’re listening to. Sorry if this has been an issue in the past. | 2/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #83 — Aggravating Agersia Agiotage | Lots of talk about CAD, Education, Startups and China today! Sparkfun is having a soldering contest! Just like paying for FedEx, people are almost always willing to pay for faster service. Dave is working on his MakerBot directly after recording the show today. Chris is off on a trip to go do a technology transfer on Monday. Dave has done this in Germany once before. Mike Demler linked here from the new newsletter he’s editing for Open Systems Media. There’s a new site called EE Forest that linked to us (or did at one point, looks like it might have changed). If you liked Leslie Green’s book mentioned on here a few weeks back, be sure to donate and support him. MIT is offering their intro circuits course for free online…and you can get a certificate from it. Dan Pink’s eBook tells you to try doing things reverse of normal in order to innovate…Chris liked the education example. Simon from the EEVblog forum found some fishiness with regards to Element14′s adwords for KiCAD. Chris is working on his own KiCAD design and has been using a written tutorial to get parts made and figure stuff out. Erin (@RobotGrrl) did a great CAD comparison piece a few weeks back of all the different CAD programs. She points people to Wayne and Layne’s KiCAD tutorial. Is the future of employment all freelancing? Chris thinks so (if US insurance gets a bit better). The HBR asks about “crowd sourced labor”. Do you work at a shared workplace…for your everyday job? What kind of place is it? How does it work for you? The Sydney Hackerspace moved a little closer to Dave, who is now considering it a bit more. Jeff let us know he stepped away from the Austin space. Age matters, even in startups (however, older = higher success rate). Both Dave and Chris still have a chance to be successful when they get older! Chris got proper mad at the Mint blog for talking about investing in whiskey. Invest in people who are making stuff, folks. Is there value in starting up domestic chip/electronics/PCB facilities in the event that things go very wrong in China? Protests are on the rise and there is (always) risk that something could go wrong. Did we miss something? Did our ranting and raving this week get you as worked up as Chris was? Let us know in the comments! Next week, Bunnie Huang will be on the show! (for real this time) Get your questions in now! Thanks to Uwe Hermann for the KiCAD photo! | 2/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #82 — Vecordious Vacation Variorum | Chris is back from Hawaii, and we are joined once again by Jeff Keyzer of Mightyohm.com. All about Sabaticals, and trying to get out of working for a living :-> We ridicule a Spray-On Antenna in a can! We are reluctant to mention a new reality TV show called Top Engineer. Before auditioning, be sure to check out Joe Grand’s experience with a Discovery Channel reality TV show. The Mythbusters are producing a show called Unchained reaction Jeff doesn’t quite like the new $1300 Cube 3D Printer from 3D Systems, because they ain’t playing the open source game. But it seems all Dave’s predictions are coming true. Dave is having 2nd thoughts about doing a through-hole PSU kit Dave rants about several things, as per usual. Jeff is headed to the Computer History Museum to check out the Jim Williams exhibit. Jeff like this new book: Analog Circuit Design: A Tutorial Guide to Applications and Solutions Next week on the show, we’ll have special guest Bunnie Huang! Get your questions in for him ASAP! | 2/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #81 — Jersey Jeff Jactitation | Whilst Chris is on his belated honeymoon, regular cohort Jeff Keyzer from Mightohm.com takes over. Jeff has been travelling again: He barely survived Berlin for New Years, what with their readily available fireworks, unlike Australia. The Edison National Historic Park in New Jersey Another surplus shop tour, including the TWR swap meet. Will Detroit just make crappy cars again? or will they turn all Japanese? Dave heard a big BANG on his desk, something smells fishy. Jeff isn’t too happy with TI’s new MSP430 web based development environment Will Raspberry Pie meet their $20 price target? Dave & Jeff think they might have a hard time. There is a 6502 documentary in the works. | 2/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #80 — Otiose Ontocyclic Opiniasters | Dave’s choice of an Arduino as the brains of his new power supply is giving him strife. They are manufacturing the 6502 again! Similar to how Rochester Electronics makes old parts. “Programming (Hardware) is like sex: One mistake and you’ll support it for the rest of your life!” Chris is looking at a new project and considering new uC’s and mp3 chips. Looked at Limor’s (LadyAda’s) Minty MP3 project and a few other projects people have done. Maybe MP3s aren’t necessary? People always have an opinion when it comes to programming! The supply chain in the immediate area can affect electronics companies. Salary is a small part of keeping jobs “insourced”. Obama announced manufacturing initiatives as well, but are they realistic? Dave was upset to learn about the true specs of the MCP4922. What do you tell kids to study to be ready for jobs in 10 years? Dave got it right: whatever the field, be passionate. (Thanks to @Sheltoneer for the link) Do the gray beards of SV have passion still? Why can’t older engineers find jobs? Are there any “stable” engineering jobs? If you can’t find ‘em, train ‘em! Living Social is going to try and teach 24 software people from scratch. What criteria would be used to determine if you should teach someone hardware from scratch? If you want to learn “startups” from scratch, check out Haxlr8r. You have until Jan 31st to apply for their hardware development program. If you’ve got bare walls around your lab, Agilent is offering some fun posters (via reddit). And by popular request from Dave, Weird Al’s version of “I’ll Sue Ya”: Thanks to Windell Oskay for the flea market picture! | 1/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #79 — Ludibrious Luxating Layout | Happy Chinese New Year! Find out how to say it on YouTube. Or how to say it as a hardware engineer! Dave wasn’t able to get parts from AliBaba. So is he a locavore now? Locatech? Ugh, terrible term. Dave’s new boards are from NZ! http://www.pcbzone.net Chris likes the LPKF S43, which can dispense solderpaste right after etching a board. If only he had 15k sitting around… Looking at beginning a startup? Look at localized funding sources. The Cleveland Foundation is an example in Chris’s hometown. A new kickstarter campaign is looking to fund $30K in the next 7 days for a board cutter project. Is it lack of interest in this niche-ier piece of gear that prevents us from seeing an OSHW version of one? This one looks a tad expensive but quite accurate! Love the capacitive mechanism for board sensing. The Open Source Ecology project has one on their roadmap. They were happy to hear from our expert listeners are now are looking for one more. Interested in helping with project management for the Universal Power Supply? Fill out the form below! TI came out with a new chip that allows users to easily add WiFi to anything. Dave got a creepy new webcam for his office. Vendors continue to chase boundaries, such as switching speeds. Is millivolt switching a realistic goal for chips? Chip makers also keep chasing 3D processes in their continuing quest for nano devices. Kodak announced it’s going into bankruptcy protection last week. They’ll emerge as a niche player…because there’s always a niche, no matter how bad! On the EEVforum, “Aurora” clued everyone in to a free eBook available online about analog electronics from Leslie Green. Great resource! Chris found out that Sergio Franco, author of one of his other favorite books, “Design with Operational Amplifiers and Analog Integrated Circuits“ just released a new spiral bound book for a new class of his, “Analog Circuit Design: Discrete and Integrated“. Chris also found a copy of the 1987 Linear Technology Application Guide with AN1-AN21! What an awesome find! (though they’re all available here) Kent Lundberg (@DoctorAnalog) is reading all of Jim Williams’ old app notes and adding commentary on his site, “Reading Jim Williams“. Great to follow along! We now have all of our files going through LibSyn! Let us know if you have any issues with it. Thank you so much to our donors! Looking for a bit of fun? Check out these ridiculous “science” stockphotos. Brad Lyster writes in about a tutorial about laser cutting a solderpaste stencil from KiCAD. Dave likes being able to hold a proto or board in your hand. Chris wrote about how this is what keeps him motivated in engineering, just last night! Thanks to Heidi & Matt for the Chinese New Year picture! | 1/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #78 — Alteritous Andy’s Absquatulation | Chris visited a FabLab today (not a fab!) to work on some projects and hang out with friends. Chris has also been reading Neil Gershenfeld’s book of the same name, FAB. Melbourne had its first MakerFaire, though Dave was not able to go, unfortunately. Dr. Howard Johnson offered rewards for finding errors in his book, much like Don Knuth did for his programming book. Chris is officially a ham! His callsign is KD8RND! (Dave is warming up his vocal chords) Do you prefer calling or emailing? Andy–PhotonicInduction on YouTube–announced he’s officially shutting down his YT channel (NSFW language possibly). Dave got and has unboxed his MakerBot Thing-o-matic. Chris met one of the 3D printing competitors today from MakerGear. This American Life on NPR had a great feature on how consumer products are made, specifically Apple stuff at Foxconn. OpenCores is now taking donations for their development of an Open RISC processor. Cory Doctorow had a good speech at 28c3 about the impending closing off of electronics systems in the future. A process engineer managed to sneak some fun stuff out of a fab: Dave is building a ArduCopter currently but new types of quads keep on getting released. The AR Parrot 2.0 has a 720P camera mounted on it and is only $300! Friend and IT Guru Alan Garfield was miffed that MicroChip doesn’t provide command line tools anymore. Are IDEs the only way, in the eyes of vendors? Chris is making videos for the soon-to-be-released CEE (started on KickStarter) Shonky Product of the Week: The HojoMotor is a perpetual energy motor based on permanent magnets (how original!). The video is frigg’n hilarious! Watch it before the site is shut down! Chip of the Week: Listener Clifford Wolfe writes in about the LMC6042 because of the 2 fA (typ) input bias current for sensitive applications. Chris also likes the LMP7721, which specs 3 fA typical (Chris mispoke, the max is actually 20 fA). Dave and Chris like any chip that offers an upgradable option (through binning or otherwise)! Got questions? Comments? Let us know below! | 1/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #77 — Winsome Waveform Wizardry | Welcome Dr. Howard Johnson! He has published two reference books that are a must-have for the field of high speed signal propagation: High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic High Speed Signal Propagation: Advanced Black Magic Howard hails from Twisp, WA. Martin Graham, the co-author of his book, was also his longtime mentor at ROLM. Howard teaches a class at Oxford every summer. He also teaches classes throughout the US, both in public and private forums. He also has published articles regularly at EDN and other technical magazines. Other things mentioned during the show: Chris mentioned his article about Bell Labs and the Trickle Down Techonomy. Howard mentioned how the Voyager Space Craft actually experienced some cosmic ray data corruption, though it doesn’t happen often on earth. As connectors get scale smaller, signals get better. However, on boards as traces get longer, they also need to get wider. To continue increasing the speed of modern day comms, Howard believes we need to move to Multi-Level Communication (as we always do with every medium). The limits of channel capacity are governed by the Shannon-Hartley Law (referred to as Shannon’s Theory on the show). In “The Early History of Data Networks” by Gerard J. Holzmann and Bjorn Pehrson (there’s a “synopsis” here…), they talk about torches being used in single and multichannel modes. Howard helped define the Gigabit Ethernet Standard (with no help from “Ernie”!) Howard suggests “The Theory and Practice of Modem” Design, by John Bingham as a good starter text on the subject of encoding and data transfer. If you need a place to talk about signal issues, check out the SI-list, part of freelists.org. The IEEE EMC society also is a great place to meet other designers. At EMC meetings, they often watch related videos, such as the ones on Howard’s website! Howard responded to silliness relating to claims of “skin effect in audio cables”. The 90 degree question: Is it wrong to make right angles on your board layout? This rule was propagated by microwave designers who were designing with 120 mil line widths. Your board already has tons of 90 degree turns…in the vias on your board. It’s the added material in a right angle turn (beyond the normal width of a trace) that can add parasitic capacitance. We had a wonderful time talking with Dr. Howard Johnson. It was great getting to know the kinds of work he does and the kinds of signal integrity problems he works with regularly. Please leave any questions you might have about the show or for Dr. Johnson in the comment section. | 1/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #76 — Fremescent Floccose Fortification | Happy New Year! We hope 2012 will be a great year for The Amp Hour and all of our listeners! We have a new theme by Paul Stevenson! We love it! Chris has a ham exam scheduled for next Sunday! Dave has been chasing a hum at his new studios, he took a spectrum snapshot of it. Chris has been preventing noise with his new “studio enhancement” Acoustics is a whole field of its own, but is often coupled to electronics. The AES is actually the Audio Engineering Society, not the Acoustical as Chris thought. Shoutouts: Randall Munroe wows us again with his cartoon about mnemonics to remember science terms, including crazy ones for SI prefixes and resistor color codes. A music/tech enthusiast made his old computer gear sing: Devin linked to us and put up a section to discuss The Amp Hour on the newly created OpSoFo, a place to talk about OSHW. Chris was contacted about a cool sounding job for testing analog chips. Do people want us to post jobs? No recruiters, of course. More on the discussion about engineering education, including a discussion on the EEVblog forums started by “Pete in Texas”. Chris thinks we should have remedial tinkering classes in colleges for more academically minded students (Chris would have needed these classes). The open source ecology project is looking for help designing their Universal Power Supply. If interested, please fill out the form at the end of this post. If you’ve never seen it, check out the TED video below. Once your 50 top machines are done, why not try making a DIY 1GHz scope probe? Could save you LOTS of money. Printing transistors could be a step closer with graphene suspended in polymer. Researchers at the University of Cambridge printed using a commercial printer. If that’s not quite your level, you can already print resist directly onto FR4 for making PCBs. There is a message board dedicated to doing this. A new site talks about the downfalls of having 90 degree turns on your PCB. We’ll verify with our guest next week, Dr. Howard Johnson. This Week in Nerd History: In 1813 in York England, many Luddites were convicted of destroying equipment in a factory; they believed it was responsible for job loss. 17 were put to death (yikes!) because it was a capital crime back then (Chris wasn’t laughing at people dying, but the ridiculousness of the situation). Many others were sent off to the English prison island…now known as Australia. Will we see similar rebellion against robots and the taking of jobs in the future? Will there be next generation Luddites? The EU is considering instituting engineering passport cards, so people can practice engineering in multiple countries. Do you think certifying engineers is a good idea? The electronics industry is set to grow 2.2% in 2012, according to Gartner. Hopefully these “noisy” predictions aren’t being used to cut jobs! Looking forward to a great year! Please leave us some feedback in the comments section below! Loading… | 1/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #75 — Sprauncy Saccadic Spintherism | Welcome to Ben Krasnow! (Also seen as bkraz333 on YouTube) We decided we had to have Ben on the show once we saw his crazy LED in a contact lens video: Ben started as a researcher/technician with a TMS lab, which led him to starting his own business, Mag Design and Engineering. That also led him to experiment with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation for a YouTube video: This is just a single pulse, the commercial/research ones do a pulse train at roughly 30 Hz. Ben also has built a DIY Scanning Electron Microscope, with an oscilloscope used as a display: But now, Ben is getting out of the magnetics business and into the tinkering business. And once Ben is done for the day, he kicks back and either has a glass of argonated beer or a skewer of meat cooked on thermite. Google Patents is a great source of ideas of things to try in the shop. Apple was recently in the news for patenting fuel cell technology, a possible hint towards their future (or not, often patents are published to throw people off). Ben tells us about all the gear in his shop. Perhaps Dave’s new shop (below) could use some metal working equipment? The education system is broken. Ben believes that its far too academically focused and not practical enough. Perhaps there should be a “tinkering” degree? Travis Goodspeed is getting a PhD at Penn in Reverse Engineering, which he did on the Girltech IM me. Stanford is re-upping their free participation online courses (similar to their recent AI class), now offering CS 101, Machine Learning, Game Theory, Natural Language Processing, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Software Engineering for Software as a Service, Human-Computer Interfaces and more. MIT is continuing their classes as well, now also offering a certificate of completion, perhaps the first step towards educational reform. Hackerspaces are another possible avenue for educational reform. Ben lives near Noisebridge but hasn’t had the time to attend regularly. Ben prefers mechanical equipment and has other machines he wants before a 3D printer, which he demonstrates for elementary schoolers. Dave is getting a MakerBot soon! Awesome! Other chemistry-type videos on YouTube are great (though they get tagged as “dangerous” because it’s associated with bomb/meth making). Ben likes NerdRage’s Youtube channel. And at the end of the day, all of the electronics and chemistry videos are out-watched by his own cake-making videos! It was great getting to talk to Ben, even though Dave had some technical difficulties. We can’t wait to see what he’s cooking up next! | 12/26/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #74 — Younker Youtube Yarling | Thank you, thank you to all of our donors. We are currently shopping for Virtual Private Servers and will hopefully have zippy web service by the end of the calendar year! If you’re still interested in joining the cause and helping out, please check out our Donation page. Thanks again! Thanks to PStevenson for including us in his YouTube tribute song! DigiKey ended up sending me a classical music CD as part of my (jesting) Digi-Wish: Dave often has to deal with filling out an export form when ordering from DigiKey or other vendors. He’s ordering parts for his new power supply kit, which should be out in a few more weeks. Chris thinks future designs won’t need to design in LCDs because they can pipe data to low cost, standardized tablets. Dave disagrees. Dave is in the middle of building benches for his new lab/office. Dave having issues with a “short circuit” on a single plane of copper, according to ITead Studios(?). There is a Mini Maker Faire coming to Melbourne, the first in Australia. And if you’re interested in all things Maker related, there is now a dedicated blog on Forbes.com about Makers. If you’re into 3D printing, there is a cheap one available as part of a Kickstarter project, the 2nd most funded project ever (thanks to @clothbot for the link). The first most funded project to date was the TikTok Watch Band, which Dave used as a model when he designed his next-gen calculator watch. Chris met a fellow alumni at a recent event who told him about the often-referenced Booz Allen study about money in R&D. Especially how this data gets misused as a reason/excuse to cut funding when this is a narrow-minded view of the data presented. Listener Adam Ward wrote in about a recent Hackaday article that focused on a rip-off product. If you’re thinking about moving production to China, keep the air-pollution in mind; it could affect the long term viability of your product. | 12/19/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Amp Hour #73 — Horrisonous Holiday Habromania | Welcome back Jeff! Joining us for some holiday fun! Chris started a new engineering job today! Dave is getting the keys to his new lab today! Jeff is attending DorkBot Austin tonight! Reminds Chris of PechaKucha. What should we call a group of nerds standing around? Chris likes the term, “a grumbling of nerds”. Dave hasn’t seen Altoid tins in the grocery stores, but has built projects in tic tac boxes, cassette cases and hammond cases. Chris just got a new BeagleBone to play with! It’s awesome! Digi-key is doing their Digi-Wish again this year, so you can ask for something out of their catalog. Chris wished for some of the classical CDs they stock at Digi-Key(?). What’s the difference between black and pink foam in electronics? One is conductive (black) and one is static resistant (pink) Our wishlists: Dave — A spectrum analyzer, likely one off of eBay. The Rigol ones are too much for Dave so he needs to go older. Chris — A sig gen like the newer Rigol DG1022 because a certain Aussie’s kit isn’t available anymore. Jeff and Dave say Chris isn’t wishing big enough. Jeff — Lots and lots of kits! The adafruit Icetube clock kit. The NixieKit NixieTherm thermometer kit (suggested by electroman-j). The Fun Cube Dongle kit. Jeff’s new Ham Callsign is W6OHM! Awesome! Dave wants VK2EEV (but has to get his license first!) Chris’s co-worker did a homebrew solution for programmable outdoor holiday lights, controlled by text message! We loved John DeCristafaro’s (@johngineer) post on displaying a holiday image on an old scope with a micro! Our past guest, Jeremy Blum was named the IEEE “New Face of College Engineering”! Awesome! He will be featured during national eWeek. Itching to get your hands on an old micro? Try out the new Microbee Z80 kit, which is now available! This Day in Nerd History: As seen on today’s Google Doodle, it would have been Robert Noyce’s 84th birthday. He started Fairchild and Intel. Wow! It was on this day in 1901 that Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic radio transmissions. They had been transmitted from his large transmitting station in Poldhu Cornwall England and he had received them in St Johns Newfoundland. (thanks to Alan Wolke for the suggestions!) New contest from DesignSpark for using the ChipKit in an energy efficient application. Giving away 1000 ChipKits but you have to play by their rules. Happy holidays to everyone! We’ll have one more episode before Christmas but we wanted to make sure we could give you gift ideas now. If the holiday mood strikes you and you’re interested in joining our cause of spreading electronics-nerdery the world over, The Amp Hour is now taking donations. This will help us buy more bandwidth and develop content for the show. We appreciate any and all help you might be able to give. | 12/12/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 25 Episodes |
Customer Reviews
Best hour of the week!
I absolutely love this podcast. Been listening since I found out about it on twitter around episode 20. I can never wait until next week's show! Topics range from "chip of the week" reviews to tributes and shout-outs to designers and products of relevant electronics kits, services, and vendors. Special guest appearances by big names in the EE twitterverse. Listen long enough and you might even hear Dave let someone else speak! No, actually he probably just lost his Internet connection.The best hour of the week! (FYI- website is easier to use than iTunes )
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Super podcast if you are into electronics hardware projects. I get tons of ideas from them. And entertaining.
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This is the best Electrical/Electronics engineering podcast out there! Thanks guys, keep it up and I'll keep listening!
