#691 – System Designer Lets You Try Every Part with Michael Gielda

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

Player FM - Internet Radio Done Right

56 subscribers

Physics

הוסף לפני eight שנים

תוכן מסופק על ידי The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones), The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell, and David L Jones). כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones), The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell, and David L Jones) או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלהם. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.

The Dead Of Night

1
The Bag Murders: New York’s Forgotten Victims 6:55

לפני 20 weeks6:55

הפעל מאוחר יותר

רשימות

לייק

אהבתי

6:55

In this episode, we uncover the grim details of the Bag Murders, the systemic failures that allowed the killer to evade justice for years.

לפני שנה 1:11:55

MP3•בית הפרקים

Welcome back (for a third time!) Michael Gielda of Antmicro

Michael and Chris usually see each other around the Zephyr booth at Embedded World, but not this year
Antmicro continues to work on Zephyr, which targets hardware using Devicetree
Renode
Mult-node
testing code
aethero
Data center in space
Cosmic shielding corporation
Tying the simulation to reality
How do you know an actuation has happened
RESD – Renode sensor data format
Drone data example
Finding and testing the variety of use cases
Borderline criteria
Fuzzing
Kenning AutoML
Anomaly detection on an MCU with Kenning
Co-op example
Adding
System designer
Environment al board
Aerocore2 STM
Camera
Checking on the pin / assignment problem
Supporting vendors that have good support / open source
ADI plugins for Zephyr
Root of Trust Caliptra
Interested in Antmicro services and products? Check out offering.antmicro.com

57 פרקים

#Tech #The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones #The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell #Physics #Science #Natural Sciences #Podcasting Education #David Jones

#691 – System Designer Lets You Try Every Part with Michael Gielda

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

56 subscribers

published לפני שנה

שתפו

MP3•בית הפרקים

Welcome back (for a third time!) Michael Gielda of Antmicro

Michael and Chris usually see each other around the Zephyr booth at Embedded World, but not this year
Antmicro continues to work on Zephyr, which targets hardware using Devicetree
Renode
Mult-node
testing code
aethero
Data center in space
Cosmic shielding corporation
Tying the simulation to reality
How do you know an actuation has happened
RESD – Renode sensor data format
Drone data example
Finding and testing the variety of use cases
Borderline criteria
Fuzzing
Kenning AutoML
Anomaly detection on an MCU with Kenning
Co-op example
Adding
System designer
Environment al board
Aerocore2 STM
Camera
Checking on the pin / assignment problem
Supporting vendors that have good support / open source
ADI plugins for Zephyr
Root of Trust Caliptra
Interested in Antmicro services and products? Check out offering.antmicro.com

57 פרקים

#Tech #The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones #The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell #Physics #Science #Natural Sciences #Podcasting Education #David Jones

כל הפרקים

1
#695 – Making The Invisible, Visible with Sam Aldhaher 1:15:13

לפני 13 ימים1:15:13

1:15:13

Welcome Sam Aldhaher , power engineer and 3D graphic artist! Sam has always been interested in art…and power engineering He primarily works in Blender and has been for 5-6 years Inputs and outputs Starting from Altium / KiCad for eCAD Blender doesn’t accept step files, it works with meshes like STL KiCad -> Blender is a good flow , as there are add-ons to import KiCad Making a good visulalization is all about lighting, materials Building library of models Modeling magnetic fields Research in wireless power openEMS vtk format The marjority of tooling is glued together with python ElectroMag Nodes – Sam ‘s tool – $1 Right hand rule Developing intuition Elmer finite element solver Past guest Katerina Galitskaya also visualized RF and talked about the differences of testingi n a chamber vs building a visualization FastHenry is inductance tool that was created in 80s at MIT for wirebonds. Didn’t have a visualization front end, like SPICE 3D whiteboard Using Blender to prototype and then taking it to other tools ( CST , Ansys ) Validating on the bench with an impedance analyzer Simulating power loss is difficult Quality factor “CAD is too perfect” Adding surface imperfections Node system is similar to simulink, adding blocks (Chris also thought this sounded like the effects in Davinci Resolve) Lighting Making the background dark means you don’t need to have far field details Tutorials Blender Guru – how to make a donut Sam’s video about how to draw components on a PCB in Blender Doing the same with Geometry nodes in Blender Ability to create things procedurally How to create ICs in Blender Using LLMs for python glue code What is a shader? HardOps tool, simplifies workflow (shuffle button) Visualizing an Inverted F antenna in Blender Remembering that videos are just still frames in order Electric fields propagating on the antenna itself Radiated electric fields (red and blue and black) OpenEMS generates GBs of data Blender geomtry goes out to OpenEMS so it’s geometrically linked What if it was a ceramic antenna instead of a metal inverted F? Simulating 60 GHz from a radar chipset Meshing – sam ple points in space simulating points in time Impacts of stubs / squares on microwaves Human Hand Interaction with 60GHz Electromagnetic waves SAR simulations – how much heat do you generate Simulating motor windings on a PCB The above was a collaboration with past guest Carl Bugeja When to switch from near field (electro) vs far field (openEMS) Calculating values with inductance calculator FastHenry tool on Github Sam’s work on artstation ZS smart watch Fast track if listeners want to get better at this art Learn blender – donut KiCad -> Blender reference Play with geometries nodes (ElectroMag Nodes, Fast Henry) Find Sam on social LinkedIn Twitter/X YouTube Instagram EEVblog forum…

1
#694 – Voltage, Vibes, and VOCs 1:11:34

לפני 26 ימים1:11:34

1:11:34

We are doing a 2025 listener survey ! Answer the survey and put in your email to win one of three Jumperless OG units donated by Kevin Cappuccio (past guest of the show ). Last day to input is June 1st. This episode was recorded Monday the 12th, which has implications on discussions. Dave recently returned from Melbourne for Dave’s recent visit to Electronex . Dave saw past guest Scott Williams there (he has been interviewed by both Dave and Chris ). Scott’s company Xentronics is also a Golioth partner They discussed service providers in the electronics industry at including turnkey solutions (concept to production and marketing) versus services only (firmware, PCB layout, CAD). The choice of show for a service provider might depend on the customer vertical (e.g., medical expo for medical device design). Farmers are described as rough clients due to being cost-constrained, needing durable solutions for harsh environments, and being unforgiving of downtime. The Australian Manufacturing Week was unexpectedly enormous , dwarfing the electronics show in scale and attendance, with lines up to 40 minutes long just to get in. The manufacturing show featured “Heavy Metal” manufacturing , like laser cutters, sheet metal benders, and giant machines cutting thick steel, which Dave found more exciting than the electronics demos. They discussed the scale of manufacturing equipment , comparing it to shows like IMTS in Chicago with multi-story machining centers and machines weighing hundreds of tons. Australia manufactures things like steel, large steel structures (bridges), and large custom parts like excavator scoops. Dave is conducting environmental air quality tests in his office , measuring formaldehyde, CO2, and other factors. He has to run his air conditioning for one of the test conditions. The environmental monitor measures temperature, pressure, humidity, VOCs, noise, carbon dioxide, formaldehyde, PM2.5 particulate matter, and radiation . The radiation sensor uses a tube requiring 381 volts . XKCD graphic showing relative radiation Dave observes large formaldehyde spikes every time he opens his door , which go down within about 10 minutes. His CO2 levels are typically 800-900 ppm . The AC unit cycling is visible in the humidity measurements . Chris asks about the availability of affordable VOC sensors now. Dave believes his monitor uses a common sensor like the BME680. Chris explains that the availability of affordable VOC sensors is linked to FEMA trailers after Hurricane Katrina , where high formaldehyde levels caused illness, leading to regulations and subsequently more affordable sensors. Modern VOC sensors often measure gas resistivity in ohms . Some PM2.5 sensors use a fan and a laser to detect particles. Dave saw small desktop lathes at the manufacturing show and was tempted to buy one for $800. Chris explains the difference between a mill and a lathe. Potential uses for a lathe are discussed, including making knobs . Chris advises against buying a personal machining tool like a lathe or mill unless you need parts immediately, suggesting using online services instead, as getting $800 of value from occasional use is difficult. Dave jokingly suggests a lathe might be useful for “zombie apocalypse manufacturing” , or more darkly, for making gun barrels . Chris mentions his past experience with a mill, which he traded for a 3D printer kit. He now prefers “it just works” solutions. They discuss receiving free 3D resin printers and the difficulty of finding uses for them unless you are already skilled in 3D modeling. Discussion shifts to the recent drop in tariffs between China and the US. Dave believes this will lead to lots of manufacturing coming back to the US , citing announcements from car companies and others (but providing no sources). Chris found this CBS article after the fact , but it’s light on details. NPR covered how tariffs are impacting Digikey and Thief River Falls Chris is skeptical that the tariff drops or initiatives like the CHIPS Act will cause significant, long-term shifts in the global supply chain, especially for components like capacitors or packaged semiconductors. The complexities of building fabs and the long lead times are mentioned in relation to the CHIPS Act. Chris recommends a YouTube channel about shipping and logistics and mentions MarineTraffic.com for tracking live global shipping data. Dave mentions issues with Bluetooth data dropouts and incorrect values on a new Brymen BM787 multimeter . Dave recently made a video about Test Controller , a free Java-based program that automates hundreds of test instruments (multimeters, power supplies, loads) via serial interfaces. It allows scripting and custom driver creation. Dave considers using Test Controller and multiple instruments with his microscope PC for overlaying data on video. Chris introduces the concept of “vibe coding,” which means letting AI do the coding . You act as a product manager providing requirements and feedback. Dave has used AI for coding before and is interested in using it for his next project due to infrequent coding leading to needing to relearn tools. He suggests using it for a simple timer project, especially for annoying tasks like generating fonts. Chris is using AI for a location-sharing web app prototype for a meetup. He describes the experience of watching the AI modify files and interact with tools as “trippy”. He uses “Claude credits” for this. They discuss AI as a new tool. Chris expresses concern about how students learning to code today will develop troubleshooting skills if AI does much of the basic work. Dave received a new piece of high-end test equipment: a Microtest Impedance Analyzer (model 6632) . This is distinct from an LCR meter and can measure the entire frequency impedance sweep up to 10 MHz (for the model received). The impedance analyzer can be used to characterize components like PCB inductors, assess bypass capacitor performance on boards, or measure materials like piezoelectric substrates . It can also show admittance circles and DC bias characteristics. Chris mentioned that past guest Carl Bugeja would benefit from a tool like the impedance analyzer Dave notes the impedance analyzer is very specific and requires special fixturing. It supports open, short, and load compensation . Dave also recently received a heavy GW Instek AC power source , which can be used for power line simulation (adding spikes, dropouts, etc.) to test products. Trying out generating show notes using NotebookLM from Google. We’d love your feedback in the comments.…

1
#693 – Small Scale Electronics Manufacturing with Colin O’Flynn 1:18:42

לפני 5 weeks1:18:42

1:18:42

Welcome back Dr Colin O’Flynn of Dalhousie University and New AE tech! Colin has been on the show twice before Episode 239 in 2015 Episode 552 in 2021 Colin continues to publish/do research around side channel attacks Now he’s targeting different ports / Jitter measurements JTAGulator RF Mixer Side channel with power Can you fix it on a chip? Targeting an SD Card port because there’s a clock Other clocked things like displays / RF State of hardware security RPi episode (RP2350) OpenTitan Root of Trust Episode with Laura Abbott from Oxide Open vs closed about security Guidelines for what to care about like in the ARM PSA UK gov’t Lowrisc Sonata System CHERI / CHERIot Secure / non-secure Artix 7 FPGA Mouser bonded area Pick and place experiments Charm High / Neoden Failing on fast turn Person running production Recovering from Covid shortages Airtag teardown ESP32 HCI supposed vulnerability (and response) Colin is writing a book about small scale production Sign up to learn more about the book when its available ! Students “Kids these days” ChatGPT in the classroom Check out Colin’s blog for more info!…

1
#692 – Like a steam engine in your house 1:13:25

לפני 9 weeks1:13:25

1:13:25

We are doing a 2025 listener survey ! Answer the survey and put in your email to win one of three Jumperless OG units donated by Kevin Cappuccio (past guest of the show ) Note: this was corrected from the original, these are not v5 units, they are the original Jumperless units. Apologies for the confusion ~CG Chris signed on to get solar installed He’ll be taking advantage of Duke Energy’s PowerPair , a program to get a bulk amount for the battery and ongoing payments to act as a virtual power plant. Telsa Powerwall 3 Teardown Australian politicians are proposing money for batteries for everyone in Australia Peter Walkinson batteries CATL batteries Back powering off a Chevy Bolt AC battery power Peaker plant Check out the rates for peak power in New South Wales (high!) Base load Chris is working on a new series for tiny hardware nRF52840 With careful planning, it’s possible to get a “0.4 mm pitch” (found out it’s actually 0.35 mm!) onto the JLC 6 layer process because they now allow via in pad. Jumperless v5 episode (though as a reminder, we’re giving away the OG versions, not the v5) Dave review of Jumperless (mailbag video) We are doing a 2025 listener survey and added some new questions Slow trigger R&S version Laminated cheat sheet Jeff Geerling Bosch video The Tariffs in the US are an absolute mess. Since recording they have been downgraded, but they are definitely still going to have some outsized influece on the electronics world. Chris thinks that it makes more sense to race to the bottom of available parts (like the new $0.10 CH572 with Bluetooth), pay the tariff, and put in more time and effort on the software. Not that Chris is the intended audience, but also that it’s not going to have the effect that is Ghostbusters song…

1
#691 – System Designer Lets You Try Every Part with Michael Gielda 1:11:55

לפני 12 weeks1:11:55

1:11:55

Welcome back (for a third time!) Michael Gielda of Antmicro Michael and Chris usually see each other around the Zephyr booth at Embedded World , but not this year Antmicro continues to work on Zephyr , which targets hardware using Devicetree Renode Mult-node testing code aethero Data center in space Cosmic shielding corporation Tying the simulation to reality How do you know an actuation has happened RESD – Renode sensor data format Drone data example Finding and testing the variety of use cases Borderline criteria Fuzzing Kenning AutoML Anomaly detection on an MCU with Kenning Co-op example Adding System designer Environment al board Aerocore2 STM Camera Checking on the pin / assignment problem Supporting vendors that have good support / open source ADI plugins for Zephyr Root of Trust Caliptra Interested in Antmicro services and products? Check out offering.antmicro.com…

1
#690 – Clap on, clap off, lights flicker 1:02:15

לפני 14 weeks1:02:15

1:02:15

Meetup.com doubled their prices so the 3H Triangle group moved to Luma (same is true for SF, Seattle) Note taking apps after Evernote was gutted: Joplin , Obsidian Battery leakage in a DMM Causes of leak The PCB of a Tonie box with an SD card glued in place. Board has an ESP32-S3. ( Product page ) Design decisions – Latched / unlatched EEVblog video Pulse stretcher 3rd mode ‘break on open’ Chris is working on a design inspired by the Apple AirTag Golioth just launched Bluetooth support (recorded prior to this announcement) It has an nRF52840 and NFC onboard, with a bunch of sensors. It won’t work with FindMy nroot tag Linus video about M4 Mini Jeff Geerling talking about storage MKBHD iPhone16e NTN Keyfinders The Clapper SAW filters Dave’s talk at UNSW (months ago) How did you learn about oscilloscopes without the internet AC power issues – brownout? need to scope power Scale of electricity…

1
#689 – A Jumperless Breadboard with Kevin Cappuccio 1:14:05

לפני 16 weeks1:14:05

1:14:05

Welcome Kevin Cappuccio, creator of the Jumperless Breadboard (v5 and before) Check out the Jumperless v5 on Crowd Supply OG Jumperless Video This update shows a bunch of images with the breadboard off 3M whitelabels their breadboards (because of the adhesive?) Breadboard spring clips Spring clips (in 3D) Elecrow 369 CH446Q , a clone of Zarlink MT88161 FPAA Resistance of the traces BSky Schematic CLOSS network Power Op Amps +/- 9V supply Or just all the parts laid out in one pic Layers/routing Probe circuit Bus Pirate adapter Raspberry Pi adapter Interface Full color WJP 3d printing ( and on X ) Zephyr shells You can still buy these on CrowdSupply Repos https://github.com/ Architeuthis-Flux/JumperlessV5 https://github.com/ Architeuthis-Flux/Jumperless https://github.com/ Architeuthis-Flux/breadWare Follow Kevin online Bsky Mastodon Discord…

1
#688 – The Tandy Train 1:10:01

לפני 18 weeks1:10:01

1:10:01

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…

1
#687 – The RP2350 with the Raspberry Pi Team

לפני 20 weeks

—

Welcome James Adams , Chris Boross , Liam Fraser , and Luke Wren ! The last time the RPi team was on the show was about the RP1 (#648) The order of parts being released was RP2040->RP1->RP2350 Check out the datasheet for the RP2350 Learning from silicon Security and power states The part is a “Dual dual core” The Arm side is a Dual M33 The RISC V side is a Hazard 3 processor , designed by Luke based on a previous processor called the Hazard 5 HB5 There is a mux on the core and you select which side you’re going to use at boot There are 48 GPIO (but users always want more) Chris Boross (first time on the show) is on the commercial team. He’s seing interesting applications for the RP2350 including devices that are using it for motor control. They also have seen the part used in satellites because mRAM or masked ROM is less susceptible to radiation errors The PIOs have changed, but are more evolutionary from the RP2040 The PIO allows you to create state machines that process inputs without processor interventions, basically like tiny cores 2 cores – 8 total Interesting PIO applications Luke still likes that DVI on 2040 that was discussed on the first episode they were on (#529) CAN is possible USB host / device MII / RMII ULPI – USB 2.0 Phy The core frequency only increased 133 MHz -> 150 MHz. There is tougher timing with the M33 LVT – lower voltage threshhold 30 -> 40 pins There are now variants listed on the RP2350 product page (but not in mass production) that include flash in the SOM package RP2040 was one power domain “Powerman” (and of course AVR Man ) Switched core AON – always on 32 kHz There is a C/C++ SDK that is the basis for other ports Security is a focus for the RP2350 Bootrom in every chip Secure boot M33 features – secure / non-secure RISC V PMP RCP – Redundancy Coprocessor Raspberry Pi had a challenge / bounty for getting the secret out of the RP2350 OTP with secure boot One of the few silicon companies doing this sort of thing in public Past guest Aedan Cullen was one of the hacks called “Hazardous threes”. He gave a talk about it at 38C3 Past guest Colin O’Flynn was also mentioned because collaboration around side channel attacks with the Chip Whisperer IOActive used a FIB – Fine Ion Beam – and passive voltage contrast to capture an impressive image of a decapped chip (see the RPi post ) “Never want to see ‘novel technique’ in an email” Improving the RP2350 silicon How do you decide what to fix/leave? Can it be changed in metal/vias? SIO spinlock not being fixed Chicken Bit Filler cells are reprogrammable and help with fixes It costs approximately $50K per layer to change (ostensibly because of the high costs of masks) ULA – uncommitted logic array Die shrink doesn’t seem to make sense Will keep making each chip as long as 40 nm fabs are around Thinking about the RP2040 The easiest way to get started is to use a Pico (RP2040) or a Pico 2 (RP2350). Both have connectivity options as well. Raspberry Pi is now a public company! Doesn’t change much other than the business scrutiny.…

1
#686 – A Benchtop Pick and Place with Stephen Hawes

לפני 21 weeks

—

Welcome, Stephen Hawes ! Chris interviewed Stephen back in 2020 for his second episode of The Contextual Electronics Podcast. It was when Stephen was still working at Formlabs and the Lumen/Opulo were a glimmer in his eye. The Lumen v4 is a Benchtop Pick and Place machine that works with OpenPNP Where are we in relation to reprap? Powered feeders Videos about eeprom KiCad pos file Can reliably place 0402 Lumen v4 product page Motherboard of v4 Running Marlin FW Head has two heads/nozzles Compare the Lumen to other methods (hand placed, paying for assembly) OHM (Open Hardware Manufacturing) podcast What industries are open? Thea Flowers (of Winterbloom synth fame ) just joined the team Microscope Other tools Space constraints Stephen does a great job talking through many experiments and upcoming features on his youtube channel Prototyping PCBs with a fiber laser Micronix Making PCBs on a 3D printer (hack session with Stephen’s former employer) Timon (Skerutsch) makes double sided PCBs by inserting enameled wire through drilled holes Is this the year you should get a Pick and Place? Stephen won’t say yes (but I will)…

1
#685 – Data Provenance in the Home, Server, and Fab

לפני 25 weeks

—

Home assistant Homelab subreddit Solar assistant proxmox CarPlay / android auto NUCs Video Interview with Lee (since posted as #684 of TAH) 25K pound amplifier repair and associated EEVblog forum post Louis Rossman also talking about the copyright claim How the Fairlight CMI changed Music Read more here Synths / woodworking are hobbies that will eat all free cash flow (and Chris is considering the latter… ) Pat Gelsinger has stepped down / retired / been forced out at Intel Intel will now have co-CEOs . As past guest Luke Wren wrote on Mastodon, “ Based on historical trends I predict the number of Intel co-CEOs will double every two years “ Startup in Ohio will apparently be making Quectel parts for the US market . We expect to see lots of silliness like this in the next few years because of forthcoming tariffs……

1
#684 – Lee Felsenstein: The Computer Revolution & Counterculture

לפני 27 weeks

—

A full 3 hour discussion with the legendary Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne 1, SOL computer, VDM-1, Pennywhistle modem, and the inventor of social media. Covering everything from the Berkeley free speech movement, the counterculture movement, his career, through to Obsorne and how he invented social media with Community Memory. His book: https://www.amazon.com/Me-My-Big-Idea… https://felsensigns.com/ 00:00 – Full 3 hour talk with Lee Felsenstein 08:24 – University of California at Berkeley, and the Free Speech Movement. 29:04 – First Junior Engineer job at Ampex 36:20 – The first hackathons with Richard Greenblatt 37:33 – Hackers, Heros of the computer revolution 1:03:36 – Techical career at Ampex 1:12:52 – Atari Computers and Steve Jobs, Nolan Bushnall, and Allan Alcorn 1:15:00 – He tried to pitch social media to Steve Jobs 1:22:15 – Designing the Pennywhistle 103 modem + 1:25:36 – Marty Spergel selling kits 1:31:53 – Steve Wozniak and how the Apple 1 is NOT a personal computer 1:43:42 – Osborne Computers 1:53:22 – Osborne 1 physical design 1:57:57 – Osborne 1 development timeline 2:01:19 – The Osborne Effect wasn’t what killed the company…

1
#683 – Troubleshooting is the skill

לפני 30 weeks

—

AI tools for helping with coding ( but NOT layout , amirite) Troubleshooting as a skillset Stick meme Dave got an updated electrical box Home assistant Keith Burzinski episode (ESPhome) Toothbrush show Andreas Spiess discussing Bluetooth proxy Ian Scott Johnson DIY home automation Electrarc240 reviews every element of a linear power supply India power cables Buried cables Spotify is bricking the Car Thing but others are trying to save it “injurnear” Chris recently developed and coded up a cellular connected relay board for a Smart Locker application…

1
#682 – Your Mind Is The Tool

לפני 32 weeks

—

Chris has been troubleshooting a PCB with a dead short on inner layers (put in by board house by mistake) Don’t Touch My Gerbers shirt “Is there an AI tool that will fix this for me?” … No Chris dumped a bunch of current in the board and looked at it with this thermal camera 6.5 digit DMM to track down shorts Etching problems in the old days 100% etest Adding rails to PCBs for production Reddit discussion thread: why not work on a product? That is, Dave, the wise one. Videos Live stream issues Post from Twitter: Is 2 layers all you really need? This person thinks so, or is trying to convince themselves as much. Armchair quarterbacking Ian Johnston replacing the display on an 8.5 digit DMM Jack Ganssle has posted his final newsletter (The Embedded Muse)…happy retirement! Jack has been on the show twice: Episode 54 (!) Episode 489 Ward Christensen, Inventor of BBS and XModem, (and former listener of the show!) has passed away Dave is interviewing Lee Felstenstein for our next episode…

1
#681 – Compact High Speed Design with Lukas Henkel

לפני 33 weeks

—

Welcome Lukas Henkel of OV Tech GmbH , a product design firm based in Nuremburg Germany! Miniturization and the limits of miniturization Price is a constraint Using standard PCB tech (off the shelf) Open source SIP Steps Conventional pcbs / components Silicon inductors embedded in boards Bonded Bare dies / stacked Need volume to make it work Requirements to fit into ______ iMX8 ULP – 0.4mm CSP SIP Footprint Module abstraction layer talk Framework laptop Software support / BSP SIP will be different than PiMX8 Crowdsupply campaign launching 2-3 weeks and delivery in Dec/Jan OpenSource laptop CM4 vs PiMX8 SPI Flash with backup partition Secure element SE050 Footprint for coral tpu and Halo 8 Trying to solve the problem of vision use cases Marketing using layout / products but also making money on it Katerina show Visualizing simulations Developing intuition OpenEMS Usability is based on python scripting Using Blender for heat map BVTKNodes uses .vtk file output Multiphysics solvers Things that drive Lukas For HDI, Thinking in 3D / 2.5D and being able to visualize Layers ranging from 4 to 18 Any layer design for SIP Wurth electroncis for high density “any layer stackup” Article series on altium for the open laptop Follow Lukas on LinkedIn Lukas also was a co-founder of PCB Arts . We had his cofounder Saber on the show in the past.…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#680 – Catching Rockets with Musk Sticks

לפני 34 weeks

—

Starship 5 landed on chopsticks! (you know, in case you have been offline for 2 weeks) Dave’s EV had a stuck cable Portable charger is surprisingly good CCS Charging standard Fast charge 36/50 kW MKBHD Chevy Silverado review JLC is now offering silkscreen QR codes to have individually marked boards That’s the board that Chris has been designing on a livestream each week 1 wire UID (pioneered by Dallas, then Maxim, now Analog…le sigh) Dave is selling a new Bryman multimeter, the BM2257 ( teardown photos ) Chris just returned from Embedded World North America, doing a demo at the Joulescope booth Chris also gave a talk at the Zephyr meetup which will be released in a few weeks Hackaday article about their comment section and project/article feedback References Musk Sticks NC floods might impact the supply chain due to Spruce Pine NC being a source for quartz. We didn’t read this article, but it was a better explainer than we had at the time . Meshtastic objects to the proposed FCC changes…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#679 – Satellite Design Engineering with Dan Esparon

לפני 36 weeks

—

Dan Esparon from Inovor Technologies in South Australia joins Dave to discuss all about the engineering of designing and launching satellites! Dan works for Inovor Technologies , an Australian company that designs and builds satellites entirely in-house! Recently they designed and launched the aussie Kanyini satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket https://www.inovor.com.au/missions/ They design and build their own Flight computers, ADCS systems, UHF radios, Battery modules and Solar Arrays in Australia.…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#678 – All About Antennas with Katerina Galitskaya

לפני 37 weeks

—

Welcome Katerina Galitskaya ! Chris started following Katerina’s antenna posts on LinkedIn Monopole vs dipole Lower frequences are harder bc longer wavelength PCB size half of frequency Place antenta on the shorter side How to ruin your PCB When to go to a antenna engineer? Where will the device be? Antenna environment Start from vacuum, start adding elements Dummies in the lab. The one in the episode photo is a dummy head filled with liquid (?!) SAR – Specific Absorption rate Simulation vs lab work (dimensions) Anechoic chamber When to go with custom antenna? Buying off the shelf antenna? New Airpods with fancy 3D antenna Ben’s video about laser sintered antennas MIMO / Beamforming the failed promises of 5G When to simulate Some open source programs out there (“EMSee”?) Simulating vs visualizing Most of the time it’s not about vizualizing fields What is the iteration elements of the antenna? Satellite antenna design Good to go external Thinking about the dielectric const of case Follow Katerina on LinkedIn !…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#677 – Watt Is The Deal

לפני 38 weeks

—

Spam calls Keysight released the HD3 , a 14 bit ADC oscilloscope ( teardown video ) Chris will be at Embedded World North America , please let him know if you’ll be there! Chris will be at the Joulescope stand along with former guest Matt Liberty This is one of the only tradeshows for general electronics in the US, Embedded Systems Conference went away many years ago. Chris, Dave, and Jeff (yesssah!) recorded at ESC in episode 41! Bootstrapping new conferences Cellular power modes Dave old GSM video PSM / eDRX ALT1350 Dave got a smart meter on his home setup EDMI EEVblog forum post about leaky power bill Maybe a trickle Chris has been trying out Meshtastic , which is based on LoRa. Check out Jeff Geerling’s video for a good overview . meshtastic subreddit People posting about airplanes flying overhead ( example post ) like ham radio contacts Meshmap…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#676 – Moving House (And Lab)

לפני 41 weeks

—

Chris has been moving house, which partially explains the terrible audio problems the past few episodes… For a lab, Chris believes in Lots of wire shelving (with epoxy coating) Everything on wheels (including shelving and workbenches) As much storage as you can get Chris has been doing livestreams of hardware design for Golioth . The module he is designing is called the Drachm (“dram”) The hardware Chris has been working on for the past 2 years is now open source Flox video with machine learning on a camera also featured Chris Altium finalized their acquisition by Renesas . The price already went up ( discussed previously) Raspberry Pi released the RP2350 while we were away Inductor polarity on the RPi Pico 2 RP2350 Datasheet You can choose the processors you want (Dual m33, dual RISC V) Microchip was offline due to …. HACKERS Dave has been trying out a new home battery storage system NMC vs LFP Reverse cycle There have been lots of layoffs in tech, including 15K (!) at Intel Layoffs.fyi Being sued for a battery review? Say it aint so…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#675 – Changing Course with Shawn Hymel

לפני 45 weeks

—

Welcome Shawn Hymel ! Shawn will be transitioning out Developer Relations at Edge Impulse. He will now be building courses full time. (this was recorded before Shawn announced his departure) He want’s to be like a Professor, which partially explains his signature bowtie Should people go into content? What about Developer Relations more specifically? New courses will include FreeCAD and 3D printing and will be published by Digikey Part design in FreeCAD 0.22 in Mango Jelly Learning modeling vs learning an actual program Scoffolding Making a Zephyr course Zephyr / Golioth training Ecosystem vs RTOS Workshop at Harvard Trying to train on hardware What should engineers know about ML Andrew Ng’s course on Coursera Updated for NumPy / Python Understand Neural Networks Can treat them as a black box More important to understand statistics and data science Hot dog / not hot dog (silicon valley) Model zoos Hugging Face Coprocessing on U55 – U85 ToorCamp Michael Cheich Robert Ferenec Marketing courses Running You can find Shawn as ShawnHymel on most social Twitter LinkedIn Mastodon Bluesky TikTok Instagram You can also check out his site, shawnhymel.com…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#674 – Turtles as a Service

לפני 47 weeks

—

Murphy More efficient with cooled panels Battery storage solution Server rack batteries Chris has been doing hardware Livestreams Geofence n8n , Similar to Zapier, IFTTT Home assistant EE Grad wants some insight on new tech https://4dsystems.com.au/ Scott Williams of Xentronix recorded with Dave and then Chris Saw at Electronex My Cousin Vinny Embedded World North America is happening in Austin in October. There is a vendor map now. Voltnuts Open source book Tiny Tapeout Tantalum Caps from AliExpress What’s next for ASML Ben Krasnow printing PCB traces again…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#673 – Lifelong Learning with Bitluni

לפני 48 weeks

—

Welcome, Matthias Balwierz / Bitluni / Luni ! Midi pedals Old projects LED walls Dunning kruger Sonar scanner Aliens Romulus Lifelong learning Beamforming Previously had worked on something similar in the medical field but didn’t realize it was the same tech ESP32 Gowin FPGA Video generation / crt control R2R cnlohr videos for making PCBs ESP32 VGA PCB mill Failing Tiny Tapeout bringing down costs like PCBs Jeri doing “home etching” (making silicon at home) Building the meme project on TT02 GIF construction set Almost like a ROM on board, on each clock it exposes the next byte on paralell output Luni hasn’t submitted to each tiny tapeout but is building a new project Browser assembler that runs in the handheld gaming: “Luni-Asm” cpu + gpu to get vector output Bitluni live youtube / Bitluni – twitch happens Weds at 8 pm CEST Community helps Writing memory controllers Bus master because internal SRAM is so expensive Expense of flash/ram is in IP People running test structures the tiles FPGAs, Gowin – 9K standard up to 25k Gabriel / Lushay Labs – Tutorials for FPGAs HDMI connector Some IP blocks from Gowin Yosys support VS code tools and simulation Gowin FPGA designer Learning clock domains Moving back to art Demoscene came from the cracker scene Different categories / limits 4K category only allows 4K of memory for images and sound (generated) White demo competitions Contact bitluni github twitch…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#672 – Silicon Revolution with Matt Venn

לפני 50 weeks

—

Welcome back, Matt Venn of the Zero to Asic Course and Tiny Tapeout ! (Due to illness and some life stuff happening, my recording setup was crap. Apologies. I also leaned heavily on Matt’s notes, so some of the following links will be out of order. Think of it like an ad hoc scavenger hunt…fun!) Matt was last on the show on episode 616 , about 18 months ago Tiny Tapeout has continued, now working on it’s 8th run. the 5th run is shipping soon. Uri Shaked made Wokwi compatible with making chip designs and then compiling them to verilog for later processing by open source tools 12 bit SAR ADC on TT07 linux capable riscv Analog ASIC design with digital standard cells! We had previously posted Matt’s r eview of 2023 and aims for 2024 Siliwiz ASIC inside synchrotron Touring IHP (Germany) facilities Interview with Nordic Semi designer People are building analog structures on Tiny Tapeout There’s a new course on Zero to Asic that will be about Analog (sign up for the waitlist) There are some new tools being developed surfer – browser based waveform moosic – logic locking plugin for yosys eqy – formal equivalence checking Matt will be doing a TT workshop at supercon 2024 TT08 will have a demoscene competition – VGA and sound output – what’s the coolest thing you can fit in 1 tile? You have until Sept 6th 2024 to submit! Not discussed, but on the list and interesting! Silicon Supply Chains with Ed Conway An early analog design (temp sensor) on TT03 Get TT quality stickers…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#671 – NDA Sideshow

לפני 52 weeks

—

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 Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#670 – Engineering Careers with Circuit Break & James Lewis

לפני 1 year

—

Check out the Circuit Break Podcast for show notes Parker Dillman Stephen Kraig James Lewis

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#669 – Freelance PCB Design with Petr Dvorak

לפני 1 year

—

Welcome Petr Dvorak of Beny Devices A to Z book about KiCad fancygit lazygit gitlol Customer types Brno – 30% of electron microscopes What is changing in electron microscopes? Higher voltage, no noise Electrostatic steering Transitioning to freelancing Regulations for freelancer vs employer Petr is a prolific poster of electronics content on his LinkedIn Show your work – Austin Kleon 3 years to get first client 1 month buffer of posts on LinkedIn Building repetitions Outliers / 10000 hours Lists of projects Constraints helping new engineers trying to learn electronics 8×32 pixel displays Petr in Shenzhen Gallup – top strength is learning Personality types Contact Get a free eBook about KiCad on beny-devices.eu Follow Petr on LinkedIn…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#668 – 50.0000 Ohms

לפני 1 year

—

Mistakes in house repair for partners Architectural Lighting Power quality Repairing a $4500 DAC Invisible computers Cal Newport on AI AI shortform USB C Spec Tester “50.0000 ohms” HDMI Layout guide (ADI) Bit Error Rate My voice is my passport Fake Dave Hackers War Games Captain Crunch no longer welcome at DEF CON Wifi (WLAN) Location API Polar Semi gets CHIPS act money…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#667 – Long Distance with CNLohr-a 1:31:23

לפני 1 year1:31:23

1:31:23

Welcome back, CNLohr! CNLohr was on the last episode talking about the CH32V003 part and the CH32V003fun library Charlieplexed errings Fast iteration Lohr-a…LoRa…get it? LoRa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIdHBDSQHyw Started in January 2024 with discussions with mustardtiger / Frank Charles had done Wifi long range before Also FM from ATTINY85 Ethernet + AM Radio signals without radios USB Harmonics LolRa Upchirps / downchirps 903.825 – 903.975 mhz Michael Ossmann talk LoRa doesn’t do code matching JP Norair talking about LoRaWAN / DASH7 Tool / emulator for the airwaves 3 lines of the repo Tool to create tables There are two 2 lookup tables (up and downchirps) Table is different for differnet spreading factors and base frequencies Andreas Spiess LoRa/LoRaWAN distance attempts Spreading Factor — can’t past SF10 on this setup for unknown reason AirSpy Matt Knight LoRaWAN — protocol vs network The Things Network / Helium Activation by personalization Nesting dolls of encryption New parts CH32V002 (also, -005, -006. -007) Charles is excited about the op amp on the CH32V006 that has 64 MHz GBW CH32V203 – 144 MHz – $0.24, has usb xcvr CH32X035 is self clocking – best low cost option for USB All are supported in library now Community – CNLohr discord Porting examples for the parts using the technical reference manual MNIST database – handwriting recognition system Announcement post on CNX about the new parts It’s possible to hook up parts directly through the 1 pin SWIO, so you can hot-load firmware Writing code onto a “scratch pad” Want to see more CNLohr experiements online? Youtube.com/cnlohr discord: cnlohr reach out for invite Github…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#666 – Good Energy Citizen 1:06:59

לפני 1 year1:06:59

1:06:59

Sickness Starliner scrub Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing Toolkit for flying Search industry A380 EUV in semiconductors EV vs PHEV vs ICE Tesla sending emails to suppliers after laying off the Supercharger team powerledger / POWR Virtual power plant DEYE inverter Buying repacked batteries AC Battery vs DC battery Hybrid inverter Colin Furze TSMC running into problems with work culter after moving to US (Arizona) Marketplace piece about jobs at semi plans in AZ 996 Photos of the new Samsung Fab going up on Google Maps Chris asked on Mastodon about the best time to charge an EV Duck Curve , which Chris first learned about on episode for 630 The costs of different aspects of a chip fab…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#665 – Really long needle nose pliers 1:09:54

לפני 1 year1:09:54

1:09:54

Analog Cochlear Detectors Voyager I is back online Sustaining engineering Bobiverse books Chandra telescope Embedded World Embedded World US in October Trade shows in US Travel budgets Z80 obsolete notice Rabbit instruction set Dave trying out the Jumperless breadboard (lights up) Uri Robert Nelson Bluetooth Sigrok Zephyr LLEXT ZMK…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#664 – Simulating doors falling off 1:03:33

לפני 1 year1:03:33

1:03:33

Chris will be at Embedded World 24 next week Bluetooth standard messages like HT , HR Early bluetooth devices (were terrible) WiBree (?) Sequans deal with Renesas fell apart There was a Sequans modem on the PyCom FiPy The low power ISM network Chris couldn’t remember was SigFox Synopsis acquired Ansys (back in January) Here comes the flood of Plugin Hybrids Dave’s sick car – 2010 Nissan dualis – Second channel New Espressif ESP32-P4 is getting ready to release Bitluni makes custom silicon (spoilers!) Past guest Pete Bevelaqua has a new Kickstarter where he’s passing power through a window (up to 30 mm thick) Top 10 Hobby Components (PartsBox) – submitted by former guest Jan Rychter Top 5 transistor video New BealgleBoard.org board isn’t in the BeagleBone form factor…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#663 – Motors on PCBs with Carl Bugeja 56:42

לפני 1 year56:42

56:42

Welcome Carl Bugeja ! Carl lives and works in Malta He got started with robotics at his university Carl recently announced he would be launching a new company The company is called Microbots and they will sell components and kits for building similar projects to what Carl shows on his channel BigHero6 reference https://microbots.io/products/flatflap Max PCB temp is 130C Driven by series resistance of coil Tg value of PCBs A circuit that can solder itself How hot can a Flex PCB get ? Batch vs raster Do you math? Tryng to get the perfect temperatures and dealing with flex materials Dealing with manufacturing differnces Scanning PCB Coils with X-Rays Sending PCB specs Incoming inspection and testing Testing boards with resistance Time flap produce User testing Drive circuits – How do you evaluate? Don’t build your own H Bridge Optimizing for size Is Carl looking for other features? Building libraries for driver Foldable 4 wheeled robot , an all one PCB ESP32-C3, connected to playstation remote Boston Dynamics uncanny valley Gathering on social Top down vs bottom up (start at the top) Prior to YouTube, Carl worked at a startup Drones – 2 prop Bluetooth tags Later he moved to the automotive industry Concept vehicles Software What’s in Malta? Building a remote electronics business Remote actuators on a PCB Microbots Flexar Driver Driving down the price per cell Similar to how they drove down the cost of LCD displays Pixel, voxel, moxel, maxel? Flipdots PCB Actuation Find Carl on YouTube and Instagram , and check out his work on the new Microbots site !…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#662 – The non-Stinky Car 1:06:25

לפני 1 year1:06:25

1:06:25

Chris got a Chevy Bolt (2023 1LT) The model has since been discontinued 11 kW charging using a level 2 charger Flappy paddle to recapture battery (instead of the brake) Ioniq 5/6 Aptera Marques Brownlee reviews the Prius V2G is avaialble as a software upgrade to the Nissan Leaf 2nd channel abs bypass Microbit v2 Robot video with Huxley Software updates on a door handle Chris is playing around with 20V DeWalt batteries Battery fast charger schematic Bosch adapter Vmount batteries , as explained by Caleb of DSLR Video Shooter Sony batteries Dave’s tutorial on charging Chris might try out OnShape If you’re interested in helping model some battery stuff (or know someone who can), please email chrisgammell@golioth.io Sony battery lab hack…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#661 – Blogging Electronics with Pallav Aggarwal 1:03:33

לפני 1 year1:03:33

1:03:33

Welcome Pallav Aggarwal of CAPUF Embedded ! Chris enjoyed Pallav’s series on learning the ch32v003 – fun vs HAL Ambiq Apollo Decision trees when considering hardware vs firmware Expensive to do software and stuff Order some of the boards Pallav created on Evelta India ecosystem for hw India industry CAPUF team size Pallav shares teardowns on YouTube reducing complexity Reviewing customer designs and removing 40% RP2040 in usb debuggers Efficiency consulting Over indexing on form and fit during rev 1 Troubleshoot: Joulescope / Saleae / Static analyzer Pallav has a page where he tracks AI tools for PCB creation There’s another page where he tracks AI modules / chips DevRel as a service Nordic Check out Capuf.in for more info on Pallav’s consulting or reach out via email…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#660 – My Toothbrush Is Broadcasting 1:06:15

לפני 1 year1:06:15

1:06:15

Promise of smart home Electronic keypad Keyfob Proxmark Oral B bluetooth toothbrush Braun toothbrush teardown Solar road shutdown Smart mains socket tester ch32v003 testing success Samy keylogger Startups in Germany (can any German listeners verify?) Diyode mag is shutting down KiCad 8 was released! James Lewis did a good overview video SPICE in CAD Composite amplifier Zephyr 3.6 release Altera…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#659 – Altium…Acquired! 1:13:13

לפני 1 year1:13:13

1:13:13

Renesas buying Altium Altium bought Octopart in 2017 Tasking debugger Cloud focus after reorg History of Protel / Altium – started in 1985 by Nick Martin Turbo Pascal CAD tool for windows in 90s protel99 Altium Buys Morfik in 2010 Nick booted out After the reorg, the stock steadily grew You can watch the Renesas/Altium announcement on Zoom There is also a slide deck available Dave linked an article from the financial press in Austrailia Zuken Altera is apparently spinning back out Steve Liebsen on The Amp Hour Intel is getting a $10B chunk of the CHIPS act money Steve Sanghi (Microchip) discussed the act when he was on the show Synergy flavored milk Other properties we forgot were part of Altium: Circuit Studio Upverter ( formerly on the show! ) Gumstix Autotrax – Taylor’s version ( DEX PCB just…took the name?)…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#658 – Uncle Al’s Eating Garbage Again 1:07:46

לפני 1 year1:07:46

1:07:46

AI tools for recording 32 bit recording Pool robot Home assistant Power points in the ceiling in Dave’s office park CH32V003 board CNLohr episode rv003usb library Mike Harrison doing a video about a CH32V003 standalone programmer nRF24 Low cost modules Chris bought on Amazon Samy Kamkar on the show Samy talk about balloons Drone shows Time difference of distances Dave’s video about HP atomic clocks XKCD Radiation Dose Chart DTCXO In the Bond movies they’re not nerds LCD and fonts AI pin Vision Pro iFixit teardown Chris will be at Embedded World again this year, come say hi!…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#657 – Automating the Home with Keith Burzinski 1:23:14

לפני 1 year1:23:14

1:23:14

Welcome Keith Burzinski of Nabu Casa and the ESPhome project ! Nabu Casa is a commercial venture that supports the open source Home Assistant (HA) project Hardware Home assistant allows your smart home to not require an outside connection, which is crucial to breaking free of large cloud providers. Chris just got a Zigbee dongle and switched outlet working in under a minute on HA Automation and triggers Users share their automation routines on the HA subreddit mmwave detecting heartbeat What is esphome? Abstraction / using YAML for business logic Deciding when to go custom Keith got started doing a PR for an IR remote Nixie clocks Boldport / Saar Getting hooked on SMT builds Keith made an STM32 based Tube Clock that Chris was very impressed by at a Chicago meetup Keith reworked the sensing for his HVAC by fusing multiple custom sensor boards Presence sensor – mmwave + IR sensor Geodesic dome Tiny fresnel lenses on low cost PIR sensors Fixing thermostat in apt Creating a network of temp sensors and weighing SRE = site reliability engineer Nabu Casa cloud service The year of the voice Home assistant YouTube Hardware: Blue , yellow , green How often are people reprogramming their devices ESPhome discord ESPhome.io See devices that can be reprogrammed to work with ESPhome Reddits ESPhome Homeassistant…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#656 – Pneumatic Tubes, Straight To The Home 1:14:09

לפני 1 year1:14:09

1:14:09

Dave just drove 4500 km / ~ 2800 miles Dumpster room tier on Patreon? Hyperloop failure Florida train video (Wendover) Pipedream Series of tubes Guam capsize Hugo site builder, based on Go Dreamweaver Chris recommends buying a foldable lightbox ( Light this ) Chris’s blog post when he was going to meet Dave for the first time Dehumidifiers are raising money based on ridiculous hype Spec Sheet for Genesis Systems Chris just got a chest freezer, was surprised at the low energy needs Power charges Texas grid article on NYT after recent deep freeze Energy mix in NC Beta voltaic Used for aerospace Bantam Tools (Bre Pettis) acquires Evil Mad Scientist (Lenore, Windell ) Vulnerabilities in the ESP32 RISC V parts Will people make tools to make it easier to crack into something, like discussoned the CAN episode with Ken Tindell Dave might get a free pick and place, the TVM920 Video about the 1980s “drink robots” Chris’s daughter is really into robots and gondolas Pool robots videos on EEVblog2…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#655 – The Twelfth Day of Keyzermas 1:20:14

לפני 1 year1:20:14

1:20:14

Welcome back Jeff Keyzer of Mightyohm Orthodox Keyzermas Twelfth Day of Keyzermas Jeff has been taking care of his ailing cat for the past years and learned a lot about administering medicine RF 8753 / Copper mountain Shariar sometimes features Copper Mountain VNAs on the Signal Path Step attenuator NanoVNA Pallav Aggarwal articles Murata modules Chip down cellular Seattle visit The big dark Input shaping Printing with .25mm Tek TM500 Scope on a monitor arm Test equipment intervention Jay Leno turbine car episode Selling on eBay, including stuff made during the process of making parts for Jeff’s equipment Tek groups.io Fluke in Seattle / now Everett Vintage Tek Museum Being set up to ship things Shipping CRTs CRTs are in vogue again (?!) Low latency Retropie Oscilloscope music paying premium for RCA / Heathkit Jeff was off to Hardware happy hour (3H) Seattle Led Zeppelin had many references to Lord Of The Rings . Past guest and Chris’s former roommate Steve Kreuzer was a huge LZ fan.…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#654 – Pseudo Code…Pseudo Good 1:06:08

לפני 1 year1:06:08

1:06:08

CES is coming up and there’s good attendance as one of the last remaining large electronic shows in the US Tradeshow are all bunched up in April for Chris in 2024, specifically Embedded World and Embedded Open Source Summit Dave gives a synopsis of the latest Smarter Every Day video (about NASA) Smarter Every Day video about NASA talk Lunar lander training abort Apollo guide SP287 Speeding up podcast…how fast can/do you go? Last minute designs at the end of the year ESP32 / NRF9160 board limitations Cheap as chips – podcast about fish and chips Siglent oscope SDS7000A Innovators dilemma for car manufaucturers…and scopes too! Kia Carnival Kasm vs Codespaces Home Assistant ESPHome YAML NSW tour video / Quantum Smart home fraturing AI New guide to Shenzhen, updated by Naomi Wu…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#653 – Benjamin Cabé Nose Zephyr 1:06:50

לפני 2 years1:06:50

1:06:50

Welcome Benjamin Cabé of The Zephyr Project ! Benjamin is the developer advocate at The Zephyr Project, which is both a Real Time Operating System and an ecosystem (or almost like a “distro”, rather than an OS) Benjamin does videos on the Zephyr YouTube and maintains an awesome blog / newsletter The ecosystem is deep: Chris recently learned there is a state machine framework Multiple people involved in dev like an OS The Platinmum Members includes chip companies like NXP, Nordic, ADI There are 600+ boards supported in the ecosystem (and more if you do custom) Devicetree is a tough concept, but a powerful one that was borrowed from Linux Who is the audience for Zephyr? Chromebook embedded controller What’s the smallest processor that Zephyr can run on? M0s can run it no problem Chris thinks one of the benefits is the ability to bolt new stuff on to a project Simulation through Wokwi ( Past Guest Uri ) or Renode ( Past Guest Michael ) Using different levels of abstraction zephyr i2c init Benefits of abstraction Swapping out chips (bubblegum tapshoes) Tying stuff together (bolting stuff on) Infrastructure with CI/CD Zephyr doesn’t have an official IDE but VScode “just works” Helper tools from Nordic Open Source Hobby projects Dev survey Custom Keyboards ( ZMK ) RP2040 support Arduino recenlty joined the project Layers of abstraction Architecture (ie. arm, nios2, x86) SOC (available peripherals surrounding the core) Board (PCB definition which might have:) SOC Memory Peripherals / Sensors Check the tree and PRs for sensors that might be in-flight Compared to Arduino IDE Choosing ecosystems Weekly newsletter Things you didn’t know you needed: NMEA subsystem In Jay Carlson’s 2nd appearance on the show , he said “I’m reading more code than I’m writing” Benjamin’s profile photo is of his artificial nose he created a few years ago Making a machine model for bread (pandemic) It uses TFLite What is the project doing? (in parallel) Acquire data Machine learning inference Display update Network interface Benjamin reimplemented the Nose in Zephyr using ZBus (Chris recorded a video with the author of this subsystem) Like an MQTT broker on device Some of the concerns I (Chris) had when I was starting was not understanding RTOS concepts (threads, queues, etc). Brian Amos was on the show talking about his book , which is a great way to get started with these ideas. Threading / work queues The importance of a project when starting out Starter hardware Hero devkits (Chris likes the nRF9160-DK as a starter board or the nRF5340-DK) M5stack boards iMX8 Jumping down to Zephyr from Linux MPU + MCU Tight integration Zephyr can run POSIX code What about the the RT in RTOS? Does this operate realtime often? (timing critical) BOM cost and software cost Security and dependencies Join the Zephyr discord to talk to other people using Zephyr TechTalks / YouTube Interested in going to a conference in Seattle in 2024 for Zephyr? The ZDS / EOSS CFP is open now!…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#652 – For a couple weeks there… 1:07:58

לפני 2 years1:07:58

1:07:58

You may have noted a few weeks off in September…Chris was busy with a new kiddo! Starship launch was awesome, but Blue Origin might beat them to market? Chris has been troubleshooting some boards he had made recently. It was pre-baby so sleep deprivation can’t explain some of the screw ups! PCB Carolina was a local tradeshow TechTechPotato talks about layoffs at SiFive . Article about the layoffs . RP1 show RetroPie Oversupply in the market is hitting some silicon vendors Dr Michael Burry (highlighted in The Big Short) has been shorting the semiconductor industry At the end of the movie the epilogue talks about how Dr Burry is watching water as well, possibly why he’s shorting semis? Chris wondered if Steve Sanghi mentioned why they’re still in Arizona while he was on the show Nuclear Diamond Battery video SnapEDA “off by one letter” error while ordering parts PCF85063BTL vs PCF85063ATL Scotty does a tour of the WorldSemi (makers of the WS2812B) factory , it’s awesome! Ben Hencke of ElectroMage makes the PixelBlaze , which is a great way to drive LED strips Dave was talking to past guest of the show, Andrea Morello, about future changes to Quantum computers China is turning off exports of Germanium and Gallium, which could impact the upstream supply for the chip industry, including around specialty semis. Breakdown Bunnie writes about why the US shouldn’t put restrictions on RISC V (agree!) KiCon has happened in Europe and China now, check out the talks on the KiCad YouTube channel. Future (distributor) was acquired by WT Microelectronics out of Taiwan Check out this 1975 tour of a UNIVAC manufacturing plant…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#651 – Learning Computing with Jeff Geerling 1:03:52

לפני 2 years1:03:52

1:03:52

Welcome Jeff Geerling of the Jeff Geerling YouTube Channel! Jeff sounds so calm one his videos because he records after the kids are in bed He started working with dad at the radio station when there was a transition in radio to digital / online. Jeff had an early job as a technology explainer while making manuals at the station. Jeff still makes videos with his Dad on the Geerling engineering channel Ham radio vs broadcast 1 Million Watts on the Supertower Calling the FCC CamOX facility Keeping people interested during videos Mars 400 RPi clusters It’s a good exercise because it helps those building it understanding the limitation of spreading across computers Drupal website on cluster “The constraint gives me the story” A good starter project? Maybe the project pi cluster /r/homelab NAS, monitoring, VPN, pidramble Home Assistant ESPhome yaml files: better than xml, JSON is better Devices should only be added to the house if they are: Local, additive, private X10 Smart stuff in the house Interested in the embedded side LLM Jeff became Chris’s de facto Pi5 analyst RP1 episode PCIexpress Jeff discusses RISC V…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#650 – Accessible ASICs with Andreas Olofsson 1:03:50

לפני 2 years1:03:50

1:03:50

Welcome back, Andreas Olofsson of ZeroASIC ! Andreas was on the show back in 2015 (ep 254) talking about the Parallela , a crowdfunded parallel calcuation board by his then-company Adapteva What is enabling more open source to happen? Unit economics really impact silicon designs Open source effects have been having a positive effect on the industry. Andreas maintains a meta repo of 400 tools. Fewer fabs than 2008, mask sets still expensive Semiconductor singularity Andreas is deep into the world of “chiplets” This is the basis of his new company ZeroASIC Before he started that he was a program manager at a little outfit called DARPA Andreas focused on lowering costs, with the idea that 3 people should be able to design a chip He worked under Bill Chappell , the director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) OpenROAD POSH CHIPS TinyTapeout Andrew Kang UCSD Chiplets We had Ming Zhang on to tlk about ZGlue , but that was a slightly different architecture What is a chiplet? AXI on chip SERDES Types of interconnect Organic Types of output SIP, Chip, SOM ZeroASIC is Andreas’ latest company They started by releasing a Silicon compiler project New thing is take system customers and build them an ASIC Optimizing speed and cost Mostly targeting aerospace and defense Try it out yourself on the ZeroASIC emulation page Their main processor is a Quadcore RISC V There are no off the shelf chiplets eFabric Active Interposer Defining a standard arm made a standard called amba AIB from Intel was opensourced Getting external contributors (hardware vs software) LatchUp – Fossi Personal passion drives people to contribute You’re really buying a datasheet from a big company Loading the design to AWS Check out the ZeroASIC openings Read about how ZeroASIC is democratizing chip making…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#649 – History of the Cathode Ray Tube with Kathy Joseph 1:18:12

לפני 2 years1:18:12

1:18:12

Kathy Joseph from Kathy Loves Physics joins Dave on The Amp Hour to discuss history and physics. They end up discussing the intricate history of the development of the Cathode Ray Tube. Read Kathy’s Book The Lightning Tamers: https://tinyurl.com/TheLightningTamers Video of this recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnJ7mQ_Fo-8 Forum: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1577-history-of-cathode-ray-tubes-with-kathy-joseph/…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#648 – The RP1 and beyond with the Raspberry Pi Hardware team 1:09:02

לפני 2 years1:09:02

1:09:02

Welcome back James Adams and Liam Fraser The RP1 is the new custom silicon on the Raspberry Pi 5 that is the helper chip to the Broadcom part onboard The HW team was last on the show in 2021 talking about the RP2040 They have been working on the RP1 since 2015 It’s a small team, especially compared to other companies doing custom silicon. RP2040 update Scripting to reconfigure the silicon clocks/blocks Are they making other chips? Divvy-ing up duties for silicon Broadcom is making the processor and took input for this latest Dialog/Renesas do the power chip on the RPi5 PIO Chris gave an example of a board (the Ostentus) where the PIO is just listening for i2c messages and passing them up the stack. Design goal was to do cycle by cycle processing Someone on twitter having PIO talking to fiber transceivers Sourcing and RP2040 availability They get 20000 chips per wafer Buying wafers a few at a time through IMEC, sometimes through TSMC directly There are often small amounts of availability of “wafer starts” TSMC40 IP block updates: USB 3 / Ethernet Can do diffs on the verilog Receiving high paid IP Liam is the sysadmin / servers are on site Buying from Synopsis Stitching together IP They list what version of the IP they’re using in the various sections of the datasheet. Prototyping on FPGAs Controller and Phy interface are exposed ProFPGA system with daughtercards Can’t run at full clock speed on FPGA Digital vs analog simulation Could someone (competitors) copy things? As open as possible, being open where it provides value Cost savings on the RP2040 Traditionally the “Southbridge” is the IO hub for computing, the Northbridge was the cache/memory (later subsumed into large CPUs) 2712 on RPi is 16 nm This model of creating different generations of silicon but putting them all together is similar to chiplets but…on a PCB There is a (hidden-ish) PIO in the RP1. There will be more processing delays in RPI5 to deal with, but they won’t be noticable because Linux is already pretty not-real-time Hoovering up more functions in one chip Layout of connectors changed again Pins are created to be well laid out on the PCB RISC V foundation The stack / ecosystem isnt as mature James’ signature is under the USB3 connector RPi5 is “the most raspberry pi raspberry pi” yet…

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#647 – Dave hanging with Fran Blanche 1:06:25

לפני 2 years1:06:25

1:06:25

Dave hangs out with Fran Blanche for her 4th appearance on the show. Space, Youtubing, tube testing, storage nightmares, and oopsies.

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

1
#646 – Fan Fanboys 1:03:31

לפני 2 years1:03:31

1:03:31

Chris is out of stock on Tindie and will no longer be a seller (though he was barely one to start with). Props to all the sellers out there! Media mail is a low cost post option in the US Colin Mitchell allowed people to pay with stamps instead of money orders back in the day There is always a struggle for hardware engineers to price a product at the value in the marketplace and not just the cost of parts Teardown of DHO800 Heatsink testing ( live during the show ) CFD Controlled depth routing We discussed Joe Grand’s thin boombox last time, Dave watched a talk where he explained more of the process Scotty from Strange Parts did an awesome tour of the JLC PCB Flex factory Skewed expectations Dave was wondering why during the production assembly of scope that they populated caps but not silicon Intel is investing in ARM, RISC V (say what now?) eBay U1273A meter Old stock 30 year old tek chips…

ברוכים הבאים אל Player FM!

Player FM סורק את האינטרנט עבור פודקאסטים באיכות גבוהה בשבילכם כדי שתהנו מהם כרגע. זה יישום הפודקאסט הטוב ביותר והוא עובד על אנדרואיד, iPhone ואינטרנט. הירשמו לסנכרון מנויים במכשירים שונים.