The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

A weekly show about the trends in the electronic industry.

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#274 – Our First Call In Show

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PreTapedCallinShow

  • Our first attempt at a call in show! We’re using CallInStudio.com for the actual call handling.
  • It’s been a year since Tom Magliozzi (of Tom and Ray/Click and Clack) of Car Talk passed away.
  • Our call screener is Gary Servin who lives in Paraguay. He works on Robot Operating System (ROS) during the day but then also creates educational programs using small robots at night
  • Our callers!
    • Richard
      • He is from Vancouver is working on battery powered sensors that will be used in a high voltage substation.
      • The floating sensor is meant to measure voltages remotely.
      • The main concern is anything being ground referenced. Oscilloscopes have trouble measuring floating circuits because of this. Dave made a video on how to not blow up a scope:
      • Chris
    • Arsenio
    • Brandon
      • He is one of our former guests and a lead engineer at Electric Imp.
      • Do hardware engineers have the same duty to quietly report security errors, like software people normally do? Or is it different for hardware.
    • Steve
      • He teaches electronics and programming to 3rd and 4th graders and is worried about through hole parts disappearing.
      • The classics (LM741, NE555, etc) will be made in through hole packages for a long time because it’s cheap to do so. “New old stock” is also a possibility.
  • Next week Chris is off to the Superconference he is helping plan. Dave is busy judging the final round of The Hackaday Prize. 
  • We were placed on the muffinworks podcast map! It’s cool to see how they are all connected and use it to discover new shows!

Image courtesy of Mr. Show which did the “Pre Taped Call In Show”

Comments

  3. Nice show! I think the format was interesting and made for enjoyable listening. A couple of responses to the caller having issues with I2C and UART:

    TI has an appnote titled “I2C Bus Pullup Resistor Calculation,” link is: http://www.ti.com/lit/an/slva689/slva689.pdf

    I agree that the garbled data from the UART could be due to mismatched baud rate between transceivers. I’d bet his FIFO overflows were because he was generating data faster than it could be sent; hence when he increased baud rate, the UART was able to keep up, and the buffer no longer overflowed.

    Please consider another call-in show, it really was great.

  4. Wanted to give this show 2 thumbs up! Enjoyed the call-ins. One suggestion if you do it again is ask your ‘Producer’ to ask what method the people are using to call in: ie.: Landline, blaa blaa – I caught a hint on Chris being uneasy with the call in portion (maybe the delay causing him issues?). Guys, you have to do it again… worked well. Maybe do it while you have a guest on and have the questions directed to them as well…

  5. Great show. I think at least once a month and maybe more for this format. I think you’ll be overwhelmed by callers so make sure you treat Gary well.

  6. Guys, the best that happened to TAH in a long time. NOW you have a show. As said above once every two shows when no guests are available, a call show will be fantastic.

    Thumbs up!

    CH!

  8. Hi all

    Some comments for Richard (I hope they’re helpful):
    – you should consider what happens during a power network fault – you could hit 28kA or more! That could cause sufficient induction to stuff things up.

    – metal boxes are your friend. They provide shielding from electrostatic fields and a little protection from magnetic fields. Use smooth corners to prevent electric field concentrations

    – consider your safety very carefully. If the unit becomes ‘involved’ with a network fault, any cables coming out of it could be deadly. Ground wires could literally cease to exist under the discharge, or be ripped off by electromagnetic forces (it’s happened to me). It would be best to use an RF or fiber optic commas link.

    – your box should operate at a well defined potential. Maybe it’s earthed, maybe it’s on potential, maybe you’ve done a bunch of electrostatics simulations and made sure it forms a capacitive divider to the right potential. Those are all fine. What’s risky is to just jam it in and let it float around, for Murhpy will come to the party and eventually it will float to exactly the wrong potential.

    – consider the over voltage class of the installation. This might be 3x normal operating voltage or more.

    Good luck!

  9. Good show, guys! Only problem is that it only lasted one hour. Next time double the hours, halve the amps – but it would still be just one Amp-hour 😉

  10. That was a great show. Having people call in with real-life engineering problems is a great way to learn. Having these shows once in a while would be great!

  11. Props to Gary the screener, for the nice diversity of questions! I’ve been wanting to use ROS.. waiting to see if ROS2.0 works with the EV3 when it comes out.

    What’s the name of the alternative solution (to CallInStudio/Twilio)? Perhaps once the smoke settles on the process, a new video can be made on how it all works behind the scene.. similar to:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP3Z_N8IkQQ

    Regarding i2c, in addition to an oscilloscope, I’d recommend a cheapy $5 logic analyzer serial protocol decoders (with sigrok based software)
    http://www.aliexpress.com/item/1set-New-Arrival-USB-Logic-Analyze-24M-8CH-MCU-ARM-FPGA-DSP-debug-tool/1971933314.html
    https://www.ikalogic.com/scanaquad-logic-analyzer-signal-generators/

    Congrats on getting listed on the MuffinWorks podcast map.. I’ve also sent an email to Earbud.fm and AudioSear.ch to have TheAmpHour indexed / transcribed.

  12. Awesome show will surly be calling next time.
    I am going through your old shows too and have heard you talk about India, Indian education so will you be interested in knowing about it? Or should I be calling with some technical problem?

    And also how do I know about you next “call in” show? other then the twitter don’t use it much.!

  16. This was a fun episode. It did have something of Car Talk about it, which I liked. A format where Dave is challenged with random questions on the spot is a genius move. More of this in future please.

  17. What a great episode. I love the call ins. I hope you continue this in some future episodes.

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