The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

A weekly show about the trends in the electronic industry.

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  2. Ahh power cuts. I grew up in Zimbabwe – weeks long were not uncommon, and many people have daily load shedding for months. I remember all the logistics during particularly long ones as people frantically moved food to fridges in areas that still had intermittent power. Fortunately, our house is on the same line as a hospital, some embassies and the home of our dear esteemed leader, so we get very few compared to everyone else 😀

  3. Guys, one of the reasons I listen to the show is because the arguments, is the normal thing in a coupled show. Maintain the original formal, is more fun.

  5. Chris, Dave,
    I really appreciate your work with last episode, but – please – come back to the previous style 🙂 I am aware of timezone disadvantages etc. but (in my humble opinion) your conversations and influencing one on another, makes show more dynamic and more entertaining.

    • Sure those podcasts of Chris G. with Contextual Electronics and Dave J. with EEVblog quite informative and correct. It is confident to mention, that they say in there utile data with regards to Electrical and Computer Engineering, I.T., Embedded Systems, Science and Technology, Robotics markets and technology trends. The quality of the information they represent is very high, the amp hour thoughts are right.

  6. Interesting format, but I prefer the “original” one. This ping-pong is clearer for the listener, but the lack of true interaction makes it dry and cold.

    On the power outage front, here in France, I think we have a very reliable sytem : the outage time is in the order of magnitude of a few minutes every couple of years. It can be worse if you’re living in a isolated house in the middle of the Alps, but even then, the downtime is very localized and rarely longer than a day.
    The problem of power outages is caused as much by bad grid design (no redundancy, under-scaled cables, etc…) than by to few generators (or generators not suited for the demand). There usually are not enough energy storage deployed to absorb consumption soars and benefit from lighter consumption (like retention lakes). The fact that Australia is it’s own continent is also a downside : when we have energy to spare we can sell it to our neighbours and vice-versa for a reasonable price. You are pretty much alone to deal with shortages and over-production.

    On the subject of FPGA and IoT DDOS, some Provider here just uses the first to mitigate the second : OVH programs FPGAs to deal with monstrous DDOS throughput on their front-facing network equipment. They also propose FPGA server leasing https://www.runabove.com/FPGAaaS.xml.

    On the Chinese part “not seen anywhere else”, BigCliveAnderson often shows a ubiquitous PIR sensor chip and some unmarked led driver chips that seem to only come from a Chinese black-hole and are somewhat very efficient at the tsk given.

    On the revision control front, just to clarify :SVN and SubVersioN are the same thing, tortoise is the name of the client software under windows (There is a TortoiseSVN and TortoiseGIT available). I use TortoiseSVN for all my projects (software and hardware), coupled with a copy to a new directory for “major” revisions. It saved my bacon a few times.

  8. Re: the security camera denial of service attack.

    Chris, the person who received the attack is a well known security blogger. The attack was a retaliation for an article. The 145,000 security systems generated close to a terabit per second, not gigabit.

    Dave, recently I was going through the access logs on a system that I take care of and noticed someone knocking on the telnet port. After very little investigation I found that it was a security camera PVR system. It took another minute to find the default ID and password. The system was running an operating system called BusyBox from FLASH memory, and someone had loaded a bitcoin miner onto the system and a program that searches out other systems of the sort and infests them in the same way.

    That night I managed to shut down 6 of these systems in various countries of the world. Just reboot them and they stop mining and propagating. BUT the command to change the passwords did not work. You could not change the ID and password from the defaults.

    No level of password file encryption or complexity will help out if the manufacturers don’t support changing the password. You are far too generous in your analysis of the I-oT security situation.

  9. I like the dialogue between you and Dave and the contrast in styles. During this episode the style felt a bit like a run on and when one of you would normally chime in to keep the flow – you would fill in with words like “anyways” (which is not a word) – which started to bother me. Before I was focused more on the content – interviews are my favorites – not the format or presentation style.

  10. It was nice for a change not having Dave saying “yeah but, no but” all the time while trying to be the resident skeptic but that’s also what makes the show a real conversation.
    I don’t mind this format for once in a while when you’re both in inconvenient time zones.

    Speaking of inconvenient time zones for you like GMT, Big Clive seems to make videos very late at night so interviewing him would work even though he’s on the Isle of Man.

  11. The format was really refreshing. I like both, the new one maybe not as much. I feel like I heard more of Chris’s opinion on the subject rather than Chris’s opinion on Dave’s opinion. Its also nice to hear both of you have more than 10 seconds of thought at a time. Both are great!

  12. I was affected by the 2003 northeast blackout here in Ottawa. What was really weird was at the time I was at work near the Parliament Buildings, and the power went off. I went home, which was at the time, over the bridge and just barely into Quebec over the river. The Quebec side was not affected, so no problem as soon as I went 1km home. I live on the Ontario side now. There was a weird like twice dimming of the lights for like 1/5th of a second before the power went out over a 4 second period. The power was off for like a day and everyone was angry that the engineers linked up with the US grid.