Welcome Julia Desmazes of Tales on The Wire

• Follow along with the blog post we discuss Two Weeks Until Tapeout
  • Matt Venn – TinyTapeout – Episode 616 and 672
  • Andreas Olofsson – openroad/openlane – Episode 254 and 650
  • Tim Ansell – Wafer.space – Episode 375, 501, and 703
• JTAG
• How do you know that tooling is or isn’t working?
• Accelerator
• Rabbithole with floating point (post updated after recording)
• BFloat16
• Follow Julia on GitHubhttps://github.com/Essenceia
• Kapla (official website, not the much cheaper alibaba version):
• Dimity Grinberg personal blog

The post #721 – Chip Design for Fun (and Waffles) with Julia Desmazes first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Alex is founder and CEO of Efficient Power Conversion, a leading manufacturer of GaN MOSFET’s.

Alex is also the inventor of the original Power MOSFET and HEXFET at International Rectifier.
Also, former CEO of International Rectifier (founded by his father!),
https://epc-co.com
We cover everything from inventing the power MOSFET on his first day on the job to silicon physics, AI data centres and humanoid robots. Enjoy.

The post #719 – Inventing the Power MOSFET with Alex Lidow first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Zachariah Peterson of Northwest Engineering Solutions!

• Zach listed the various places people can find his work, including
  • The Altium YouTube channel
  • Zach’s YouTube channel
  • His personal technical blog
  • The Altium Blog
  • various industry conferences like PCB West 01:10
• Zach mentions that he has been creating video content and seminars for several years, traveling to places like Denmark to teach high-speed design. 01:10
• They discuss the recent acquisition of Altium by Renesas and how the company is trying to balance enterprise features with the needs of individual users. 03:15
• He notes that the pricing for professional design software has recently become more accessible for freelancers and consultants. 11:15
• He suggests that learning the fundamentals of EMC is one of the best ways for an engineer to become more valuable in the industry. 14:00
• He warns against relying solely on semiconductor data sheets for EMC guidance because they often contain outdated or incorrect information. 18:45
• They talk about the massive costs and delays that happen when a product fails its initial testing runs in a lab. 21:00
• Zach shares how his background in applied physics and lasers made it easier for him to transition into high-speed RF and digital design. 25:15
• He explains that he relies on mental models and specialized software tools more than solving complex equations by hand on a daily basis. 27:00
• He stresses the importance of understanding the physical manufacturing process, such as how circuit boards are pressed and laminated. 30:00
• They discuss the common problem of engineers over-specifying expensive materials when a cheaper option would work perfectly fine. 32:45
• Zach predicts that the most useful AI tools will eventually be built directly into existing PCB design software rather than living in separate browser tabs. 35:30
• He shares how he uses AI to quickly find generic part numbers, which saves him a lot of tedious manual searching. 42:00
• He compares different AI design tools, noting that some generate schematics from data sheets while others use proven building blocks. 46:30
• He describes an internal tool he is building to help him search through and reuse circuitry from his own past projects. 49:30
• He admits he isn’t a fan of code-based schematics because he prefers graphical tools and doesn’t consider himself a professional coder. 51:00
• He tells the story of how his popular one-minute design reviews started as a spontaneous way to manage the many requests he receives on LinkedIn. 54:00
• He points out that many designers fail to use their software’s built-in design rule checks, leading to thousands of avoidable errors. 58:45
• They talk about the decline of mentorship in the industry and the risk of companies losing important tribal knowledge as senior engineers retire. 61:15
• Zach shares his goals for the coming year, including a deeper focus on manufacturing nuances and advanced EMC testing standards. 66:00
• He encourages engineers of all levels to attend industry conferences like PCB West and DesignCon to learn directly from experts. 70:00
• They conclude the episode by sharing where listeners can find more of his technical articles and videos online. 1:02:30

The post #718 – Layout Review with Zachariah Peterson first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, SeaSats! Check out their open positions making autonomous ocean vehicles.

Welcome David Ray of Cyber City Circuits

• The “Retro Electro” Series: David explains his passion for writing historical articles for Digi Key, focusing on “giants” like Orstead whose contributions to electricity are often overlooked.
• Career Background: David details his path from Marine Corps radio repair to cash register and Motorola radio repair.
• Starting the Business: In late 2019, David cashed in his retirement to buy pick-and-place machines and start his own factory.
• Teaching the First Lady: David recounts the story of teaching First Lady Jill Biden how to solder during a summer camp.
• Growth via Twitter: For the first few years, 95% of his revenue came from relationships built on Twitter (X).
• The Kit Business: David discusses his “Soldering Kit of the Month” program, noting that while fun, the kit business is exhausting and low-margin.
• Equipment & Machines: A discussion on why he uses Charm High machines and his strong advice to buy new equipment rather than used industrial machines, which are often sold because they are “used up”.
• Stencils & Paste: David advocates for framed stencils and GC10 solder paste, which is shelf-stable and prevents cold solder joints.
• Soldering Physics: Insights into the thermodynamics of soldering, especially the difficulty of working with 2 oz copper boards.
• John Fluke History: David previews his research on John Fluke, explaining that Fluke meters became yellow because the Navy had trouble finding gray ones on the ground.
• Upcoming Articles: David mentions future work on the history of Op-amps and strain gauges.
• Business Services: Overview of Cyber City Circuits’ services, including reverse engineering, obsolescence engineering, and free DFM (Design for Manufacturing) consulting.
• Success Philosophy: David shares his “Monopoly mindset,” viewing business setbacks as “chance cards,” and stresses that persistence is the only way to avoid failure.

Links from David

The post #716 – Electronics Manufacturing History with David Ray first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Eric Migicovsky of Pebble!

• Pebble is back after Eric worked with Google to open source PebbleOS and he reaquired the naming rights
• Eric returns to the hardware space after 7 years, including working at yCombinator, a famous accelerator for early stage startups, and on Beeper, a cross platform app for messaging.
• While discussing the difficulties of hardware project, Chris brought up a recent post about a high wattage lamp project HN
• One thing Eric likes about hardware projects vs software is that “hardware projects can be done” as in they have a defined end state
• A more recent project is a smart ring – The Index 01.
• The non-replaceable battery is driven by the product specs, also the need for reliability
• The ring doesn’t immediately need to be in range of a phone, it syncs the memory after the fact
• Pebble is no longer a VC backed startup with a subscription model, so that changes a lot of constraints
• Initially they sold 2 million watches, and 250 million in sales
• Eric is driven by “gadgets”. He read “pen computing” and “popular mechanics” as a kid
• Consumer companies vs other types (and why Eric likes the former)
• Pebble went through different phases
• The team spent 6 months in China, designing the first consumer version and working directly with factories
• CTO of (original) Pebble, Andrew Witte, was a somewhat early guest of The Amp Hour
• How much did the China ecosystem drive design decisions?
• There was no such thing as a smartwatch factory (but are there ever now!)
• The book Apple in China is supposed to be a great read and mirrors the Pebble Experience
• We heard from Chrissy Meyer when she was on the show about working with the Apple Watch manufacturing proces
• Water proof methods codeveloping in China
• It’s an interative process of submerging designs in a glass vessel with pressure and bubbles seep out of the device at different points
• The remedy? According to Eric: “More Glue”
• Eric shares his process on a YouTube channel called Tick Talk (not to be confused with the shortform video site)
• There is a video with the CEO of SiFli, makers of the Bluetooth chip that is in the most recent Pebble devices
• One interesting feature is a custom bus to the Sharp-made ePaper-like screen used onboard
• FreeRTOS pebble OS
• What is PebbleOS?
• It’s targeted at an m33 class ARM chip and the kernel is FreeRTOS
• The bluetooth stack is nimBLE
• Eric went back and forth on whether to port to Zephyr for the Bluetooth stack and hw support from vendors like Nordic Semiconductor
• The Index 01 ring is Dialog Semiconductor (now part of Renesas) part
• One challenge is that rings have different sizes…so they mill the rings based on orders. The larger rings get an extra battery!

The post #715 – Shiny New Pebble with Eric Migicovsky first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Martin Rowe of EE World!

• Martin is a long time journalist in the electronics space, having worked at magazines like EDN, Test and Measurement World, EE World, and more!
• Kenneth Wyatt
• Concentrated vs diffuse information
• Product reviews
• Unitrend scope video
• Tek 5 series B
• Wirecutter for test equipment / parts
• Skepticism
• Webinars – 3 levels
• Martin has an HP34401A early model
• Touring T&M companies
• Littelfuse
• Martin is in the Boston area
• Boxborough has multiple EMI labs
• Article on building an anechoic chamber
• PCB East was in Boxborough now in Worcester (“Wuh – Stah” )
• International Microwave Symposium (IMS) inBoston this year
• What is driving the Boston ecosystem?
• NYU wireless
• 6G summit
• Components trickling down into the other parts of the industry
• Ted Rappaport from NYU writing a paper
• Open RAN
• 5G standalone vs nonstandalone
• Poster session
• ISAC
• Test equipment has to test everything leading edge
• 3GPP
• The impacts of satellite connectivity
• IoT still talking about LTE
• 5G modems and battery life
• Private networks
• Automation software
• The Measurement Blues song, among others
• Find him online
  • Martin Rowe on LinkedIn
  • EEworldonline
• Martin sent over some links related the things we discussed during the episode
  • 6G discussions: How things have changed. We assembled a timeline of the topics so you can see what’s come and gone
  • Nokia Bell Labs’ Peter Vetter talks 6G research Live from the Brooklyn 6G Summitd
  • Teardown: HP 8112A pulse generator – I bought this at a flea market. MIT holds these once a month April through October. I go every year to buy things for teardowns and to take photos.
  • DSL router uses parts from old phones – Heard about this from a European telecom newsletter and just had to get the details
  • The slide keyboard is back, in a 5G phone – Video interview from 2020. I mentioned the Psion Organizer. The designer of this phone used to work for Psion. He designs beautiful products.
  • Tryout: two low-cost USB inline meters and a load – My latest. This was the one where the audio in the videos seemed overdubbed. I uploaded the videos again using different file names. Seems OK now.

The post #714 – The Measurement Blues with Martin Rowe first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Aaed Musa!

• Aaed is a YouTuber who builds a variety of robots and a mechanical engineering student at Purdue. He just completed his undergrad degree and is now working on his Master’s degree. I believe he is the first Amp Hour guest who is still a full time student.
• His channel has a great variety of builds including designing all the way down to gearboxes.
• Aaed says the MIT “mini cheetah” launched many low(er) costs builds of robots, including his own.
• Boston Dynamics (and many others) announced their new ATLAS robotics platform at CES this year.
• FOC motor controller
• Backlash is a measure of how much movement you have between the teeth of gears (and thus how accurate you can be with open loop control)
• Ball bearing balancing robot
• Inverse kinematics
• Past guest of the show James Bruton was a model for the builds that Aaed does
• what does the glue look like
• His recent build uses…rope…to build a robot dog?
• A Capstan drive has virtually zero backlash
• “relatively new rope” DM20
• High precision speed reducer using rope
• the impacts of materials on design processes
• Juicero
• Relationship with classmates and professors as a YouTuber
• Purdue Engineering
• Aaed picked up electronics from youtube
• What’s his take on LLMs?
• Making next CARA open source
• New video recently came out about a spinning top
• bulk of the cost is in the motors and motor controllers
• growing up in the age of youtubers

The post #712 – Robots Everywhere with Aaed Musa first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Dr Mark Palmeri, professor at Duke University!

• Mark has been at Duke since 1996, and has completed undergraduate, graduate, medical, and PhD degrees here (!)
• He has focused on making medical devices and now teaches others to do the same in his Biomedical Engineering (BME) courses
• Verification and Validation (v&v) is a large constraint in getting a regulated medical device to market
• BME design fellows is a program that guides students towards real world use cases and design projects
• The courses that Mark runs reminds Chris of “automatic job offers” that Chris has heard about for classes like those taught by former guest Larry Sears (at CWRU). Also SMPS design courses at UT Dallas and microarchitecture courses like those taught at University of Michigan.
• Teaching the skills of troubleshooting / debug
• Putting together circuits like Legos
• There are difficulties when teaching students with various levels of experience, namely how deep to go on any particular subject and how much background to provide.
• Mark has been flipping a circuit course on its head, instead prompting students with ideas like “how do you capture bio signals electronically and pull them into a microcontroller”
• Tools of the trade for Mark’s courses include
  • KiCad
  • ngspice (built in to KiCad)
  • Jupyter notebooks
  • VS code
  • Git
  • Zephyr
• Talking about power as an intuition builder, as opposed to currents or voltages
• V&V requires that you have a quality management system (QMS)
• IEC60601
• Going through companies that have  QMS can be a shorter path for bringing a device to market
• Even face shields needed to go through that process when COVID hit
• Firmware and embedded in BME at graduate level
• Mark and students in BME Design Fellows course have been working on a Tympanometer, targeted at resource constrained industries
• Mark also teaches students how to use Zephyr, as opposed to how most educational programs migrate towards arduino
• A challenge for teaching Zephyr is the devicetreed
• They target Nordic Semiconductor parts, which have great support and educational resources
• Mark experienced a “vertical learning curve” when first migrating designs to Zephyr a few years ago
• Complicating things is that most students haven’t coded in C, if they have done much code at all
• Teaching how to lock to a particular version with Zephyr manifests
• Using CI/CD for automated builds
• Focusing on state machines early on, using Zephyr’s state machine framework (SMF)
• All of Mark’s courses are on github under his username mlp6
• Teaching stack vs heap
• Mark only ever has taken one official progrmming course
• The benefits of experiential learning
• Accreditation is a constant challenge with non-standard courses and testing
• Duke is taking retrospective and prospective looks at the space of education
• Problem sets are moot these days
• Mark gave a great example about teaching a student about Bode Plots
• “Thats a trick problem” is something Mark hears wrt testing (when it’s definitely not)
• “Getting the reps in” is an important concept in educational contexts, and something Chris really resonates with
• Building open ended problems vs closed
• The more open ended a problem, the more time it take to grade / evaluate
• TI-85 / 83 / 92 calculators
• Jupyter notebooks as a way to track progress and have students show their work
• More about the tympanometer project
• They have been working with Duke hospital, a major benefit for Mark and his BME colleagues
• Continuous middle ear infection that causes scarring that causes lifelong loss
• Sound reflection under vacuum is an indicator that more testing is needed
• The key innovation is making it lower cost and allow a layperson to do the screening to hand off a child to get more screening at a pro clinic
• BME Design Fellow students getting to design the various parts of the design
• They have multiple sources of funding: private, nih, etc
• Value engineering in medical space
• Mark points out the philosophical question on whether you can reduce costs by reducing testing … but thinking about whyat that takes to satisfy that need
• Find Mark online
  • mlp6 on Github
  • His Duke homepage
  • tymp project article
  • Find him on LinkedIn
  • Duke BME design fellows / on LinkedIn

The post #711 – Medical Electronics Education with Mark Palmeri first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Dr Barry Marshall won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease.

But Barry is also an electronics hobbyist and vintage HP and Tek oscilloscope and vintage computer enthusiast. He visited the EEVBlog lab and sat down with Dave for an impromptu discussion about all sorts of things.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2005/marshall/facts/

The post #709 – Nobel Prize Winner Dr Barry Marshall first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Davide Andrea, author or The Electronic Connector Book! And many thanks to Blues for sponsoring this episode of The Amp Hour! Get 10% off your next order in their online store for a development kit by using the code AMPHOUR.

• Davide is an engineer working on Battery Management Systems at Elithion
• He got into writing and editing books via a postcard sent to him after he gave a talk
• For many years he was an editor at Artech house
• He works on Lithium BMS systems for large setups
• How do young engineers learn about connectors, but for tribal knowledge within larger companies?
• Digikey catalog is a good search for connectors overall
• Industrial cinch by Harting
• Should you design a custom connector (“no”)
• Davide also built and maintains an online tool for finding connectors called Identiconn
• Fretting is when vibration causes a connector to fail
• Davide had to go to Bell Labs docs to look up some specs
• Chris remarked that Identiconn is a McMaster (Carr) style browsing experience
• Vendors divide based on how the fields are set up, because that is actually logical for them selling parts. It’s harder for finding/discovering components though.
• On distributor sites, the connectors are grouped by how they were bought
• Chris asked Davide about things that have gone wrong in his career with connectors
• FFC doesn’t connect back into the socket after the tab is ripped away
• ribbon cable vs ffc, CIC vs FPC
• IDC – insulation displacement connector
• Davide has filled in with generated terms where there are no defined language for a family/type of connector, such as with “bump idc” connectors
• “dual beam?
• Chris and Davide did a joint search for the high density CM4 connector that mounts the Raspberry Pi module to another board
• Gender of connectors (note: there is a great discussion about the historical nature of using gender for connectors in the book)
• Pin vs plastic gender
• Shrouded vs enshrouded
• gaziatea (sic) – poem from the 1800
• USB type A connector
• Self mating
• APC7 – self mting connector
• Anderson connectors
• TNC BNC search
• PFFE for the dielectric on a BNC/TNC
• Magnetic connectors with pogo pins
• Example connector from Hyte
• Crimps were designed in the 50s

• The source of having so many power connectors is … imperialism? tahiti / fiji / nz all have different connectors
• Why antennas are male/female is…money? And regulatory silliness via the FCC
• Davide has also written about and is working on lithium ion batteries
• A sodium ion battery book (self published, unlike the LiIon books) should be out next year
• The Connector Book is self published. Your purchase directly supports Davide’s work…and you get the web tools for free!
• “peak lithium”
• What is required when refining sodium for batteries?
• The voltage range and charging needs are different for Sodium Ion. For instance, the range goes from 4V to 2V
• Find Davide on his various websites, on LinkedIn, on StackExchange, and on reddit

The post #708 – All the Connectors with Davide Andrea first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Joren Vaes, design engineer at SOFICS

• Simulation is critical when designing analog devices based on a PDK from the fab
• Parasitics are significant, especially with new nodes having upwards of 16 metal layers
• Chris complained about a class where the professor made them draw planar structures with graph paper with colored pencils
• Large fabs on leading edge nodes have 1800 page textbook of rules
• Because the constraints get tighter, that book gets longer for each node
• 2 nm mass production on finfet currently with TSMC
• 22 was the last classic cmos
• Finfet, looks like a devil
• ‘gate all around’ / nanosheet
• CFET (complementary field effect transistor) is next
• Joren really gets Maxwells Equations…as you have to at super high speeds
• SOFICS are making phy’s / IP blocks
• Amplifiers that are DC to 50 GHz
• Making a datasheet for the resulting IP block
• Joren got his PhD working on millimeter wave applications
• It’s all just physics
• Using coils to impedance match between layers
• Reflecting off of different materials at angles is Snells law (not lorentz equation) and that extends to different materials at different wavelengths
• Cables are very lossy at 100 GHz…dBs per cm
• Parasitics impact every part of the design process
• Wireline community – name for the high speed interfaces, including research in the space
• Most transistor threshhold voltages that Joren works with are … 750 mV!
• Voltage dependent drc rules
• Electromigration – holes in wires from electrons
• ESD is a big part of the business, and a large source of parasitics
• New product development for IP blocks
• Working with customers and Foundry at the 2 nm node
• Design companies need to be paying 100s of thousands to software providers
• After, it goes to spice and schedmatic
• Joren decides whether to jump in on layout
• LVS – layout vs schematic
• Parasitic extraction (spice netlist)
• PDKs define how you can do the layout stage
• Lower cost tools exist but more expensive tools have tooling that tells you when you’re violating DRC
• 3 main vendors
  • Cadence
  • Synopsis
  • Siemens (Calibre)
• Foundries soemtimes only support one tool
• Doing test wafers  allows testing of structures. They often get MPW at a discount from the fab (since they’re often testing new processes as well)
• How do they test with packaging options?
  • ‘low speed’ can be die bonded or pcb mounted
  • high speed does on wafer probing (with veeeery expensive probes)
• Check out Sofics.com for more info on the company. They also have a blog with a great name.
• Follow or connect with Joren on LinkedIn

The post #706 – Leading Edge Analog with Joren Vaes first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Jerry Twomey (Effective Electrons) author of the book, Applied Embedded Electronics: Design Essentials for Robust Systems. Chris first heard Jerry on Embedded.fm last year.

• Jerry’s Background and Book Motivation: Jerry shares his quick history, moving from the Boston area to San Jose (Silicon Valley) and eventually to San Diego, where he has worked across diverse sectors including consumer electronics, aerospace, defense projects, DARPA research, and medical electronics. His book focuses on how to develop robust systems, providing guidance that is timeless rather than applications manuals that quickly become outdated.
• The Analog Problem: Although modern systems may be digital end-to-end, Jerry emphasizes that the predominant causes of failure and design difficulties are often analog in nature. Academic study often teaches ideal signals but neglects real-world issues like inductance, noise, and cross-coupling.
• Consulting Experience & Troubleshooting: Jerry discusses being called in to fix systems that failed strenuous regulatory testing for medical devices, where reliability is first and foremost (similar to an aerospace way of thinking). Failures often stemmed from basic issues like a lack of ESD protection, absence of error correction in data streams, insufficient detection of errors, and common mode noise rejection problems.
• High-Speed Data and Signal Integrity: At high data rates, communication becomes a “communications channel problem,” not truly a digital one. When bits are underneath a tenth of a nanosecond, the communication turns into multiple standing wave transitions. The two primary limits on performance are rise and fall times and distance traveled.
• Real-World Applications: Jerry has worked extensively on medical devices, including early-generation Dexcom glucose monitoring systems (two on-body monitors and a hospital insulin pump/monitor), and a wearable EEG monitor. He also worked on a system that required packing five video cameras into an endoscope distal head, measuring 11 mm in diameter and 13 mm long.
• Architecting Systems and Identifying Bottlenecks: When starting a new project, Jerry suggests defining needs and interfaces and looking at the system as a black box. Engineering time should focus on the bottleneck—the hardest part of the system. For medical implantables, this might be minimizing power consumption down to virtually nothing, which could take up 90% of the effort.
• Power System Design: Jerry advises purchasing commercial AC-to-DC converters due to competitive pricing. He notes that switching supplies (buck converters) commonly introduce noise that can lead to EMI failures or corrupt sensitive analog front ends. A classic case of “digital thinking in an analog scenario” is when a sensitive analog front end is powered by a noisy switching converter.
• Working with Embedded Teams: Jerry prefers guiding embedded teams toward “self-discovery,” using bench time and empirical measurement (such as comparing grounds on a scope) to demonstrate non-ideal connections and grounding issues. He advises against the “seagull manager” approach.
• Grounding Best Practices: For integrated circuits (chips), designs must be fully differential because securing a good hard ground reference is impossible. On singular circuit boards, a common uncut ground plane (dedicated ground plane, often multiple layers stitched together with vias) is the recommended approach. Cutting the ground plane is discouraged as it can create a slot antenna, increasing the signal radiating from the board by about 7 dB. Jerry has published rules on grounding.
• Engineering Intuition vs. LLMs: Jerry notes that intuition is gathered through painful learning experiences and guidance from experienced designers. He expresses concern over the reliance on LLMs (Language Learning Models), which, while improving, can confidently provide incorrect answers, especially regarding complex topics like signal grounding.
• Limits to Moore’s Law: CMOS scaling is approaching physical limits, likely unable to go below 10 or 11 nanometers. Modern performance gains are achieved through more parallel processing, not significantly faster clock rates, which have plateaued around 5 GHz due to parasitics and timing limitations. Jerry’s article discusses this topic.
• RISC Architectures: The industry benefits from migrating to RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) architectures (like ARM) because they eliminate useless architecture and transistors associated with complex instruction sets (like x86).

Find Jerry on Effective Electrons and on LinkedIn

The post #704 – Applied Embedded Electronics with Jerry Twomey first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome back Tim Ansell!

• Tim’s past appearances and previous work
  • Discussing Tomu on 375
  • Discussing Fomu on 456.3
  • Discussing the open source PDK on 501
  • Tim’s previous work at Google involved releasing a manufacturable open-source PDK (Process Development Kit), which contains the fundamental information needed to create integrated circuits.
  • Key open-source tools discussed include OpenROAD (a backend compiler for IC design) and Open Lane (an end-to-end suite turning chip descriptions (RTL) into manufacturing data (GDS)). Andreas had been on the show talking about his work on OpenROAD. Not discussed on the show but after Efabless went away, Open Lane has been replaced with LibreLane.
  • Efabless, a VC-backed startup, shut down in early 2025 due to investor disagreements. Efabless previously provided pooled manufacturing access (similar to OSH Park for PCBs) using the SKY130 process from Skywater in Minnesota.
  • A Skywater run costs $200k–$300k, which Efabless divided by 40 to reach roughly a $10k price point per slot.
• Tiny Tapeout
  • Matt Venn’s Tiny Tapeout program further subdivides the manufacturing costs, making it the cheapest way to create custom silicon, typically costing around $300 per design.
  • Tiny Tapeout lowers the barrier to entry, allowing people to “just try it and see if you like it,” similar to writing a “hello world” program.
  • The program has already processed almost 3,000 projects, demonstrating high community demand when costs are low.
  • Despite limitations, advanced projects are possible: a developer taped out a Linux capable SOC using open-source tools and the Tiny Tapeout space.
• Introducing Wafer Space
  • Tim started Wafer Space, based in Singapore, to provide community access to open-source manufacturing after Efabless ceased operations.
  • Wafer Space focuses on the GF180MCU PDK (Global Foundries 180 nm process), which is a much cheaper technology manufactured in Singapore.
  • The core offering is a low-volume production run: $7,000 USD gets you 1,000 chips back. This volume is enough for prototyping and shipping a small product (e.g., 500 units).
  • The design envelope area is 3.8 x 5 mm (20 mm squared) using the 180 nm process.
  • Interested parties should sign up via the Crowd Supply page.  The deadline for purchase is the November 28th and submissions are due by December 3rd, with delivery by March 15th.
• Manufacturing & Packaging
  • By default, customers receive bare silicon die
  • Tim is working with PCB manufacturers (like JLC PCB, PCB Way, Seed Studio) to offer Chip on Board (COB) wire bonding assembly onto custom PCBs (think black epoxy blob on a PCB)
  • COB packaging is significantly cheaper (sub-$2) than standard packaging houses (which often charge around $7 per chip).
  • This approach also provides faster iteration speed, as PCB manufacturers offer quick turnaround times (sometimes 3 days) compared to typical packaging houses (3 months)
• Getting Started & Resources
  • If you are new to chip design, starting with Tiny Tapeout’s click and drag tools is highly recommended. Matt Venn previously talked/sang about Siliwiz
  • More advanced tools include Verilog and VHDL (coding style) or KLayout and Magic (drawing shapes, similar to PCB design).
  • To follow the project or seek help, join the Wafer Space Discord
  • New services offering open-source silicon manufacturing include IHP (Europe/130 nm) and Chip Foundry (US/Skywater), increasing ecosystem resiliency.
• Website: Wafer.space
• Sign up on the CrowdSupply campaign

The post #703 – Building wafer.space with Tim Ansell first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome back Todd Bailey of Starlight Engines, now Muon Space! (11 years later)

• Todd was on Episode 194 of The Amp Hour, when he was consulting in the art and design space and building instruments like Where the Party At (WTPA). He was designing ‘robot doors’ for Calvin Klein’s house, discussed last time.
• Through Andy Reitano, Todd learned about a role at Lockheed Martin (a US defence company) working on sonar for submarines.
• “What a good job is”
  • Fun
  • Lucrative
  • Skills / teach you
• Todd, Andy, and other Lockheed Martin friends worked on the VEC9 discussed in ep194
• Clearance was required to work on sonar
• Military electronics had some differences from his past work, but Todd was interestingly complementary of requirements driven design / waterfall
• Chris and Todd were hanging out in a bar before he moved over to working on space and Todd mentioned he wanted to be Zefram Cochrane and do interesting things that matter (in space).
• Star Trek First Contact (gah, I said generations)
• Past guest Shawn Meehan talked to Todd and that’s how he started working at the “stealth space startup” at the time
• Astra
• HBO (not Netflix) special called Wild Wild Space
• Other past guests of the show who were at Astra include Charles Aylward and Jeri Ellsworth
• Silicon Valley Startup
• “When the heavens went on sale” (book)
• Commercial space by SpaceX
• Rocket Lab was second
• “Fail on stage”
• Booster state of that rocket motor control
• Electric turbo pump
• Delphin engine
• Cryogenic / feedback was hard
• Alameda indoor test facility
• Meant to fit in shipping container (8×8.5×40 ft)
• System design and market requirements (launches don’t want small rockets)
• Working remote
• No place like home Jim Williams essay
• Leaving Astra
• Staying in the trenches
• Rocket Lab
• 3rd stage “Kick stage, now known as “Photon“
• Things you can work on in space
  • Radios
  • Sensors
  • Power
• Electric propulsion (EP)
• Apollo fusion – Alex Zannos (Contemporary) and Mike Cassidy (CEO)
• After working on fusion didn’t have legs, they switched to working on Hall effect thrusters
• “Low earth orbit is 50% of the way to anywhere in the solar system”
• Rocket equation
• Stage fires then falls off
• Kick stage is 3rd stage
• Accelerating an ion beam
• Delta V book
• Rocket efficiency
• “Seconds of ISP” How much mass do you use to go distance
• Asteroid mining
• Who buys EP?
• SpaceX built their own Argon thruster
• Torque rods / reaction wheels
• Apollo successfully pivoted
• Acquired by Astra space / finished the apollo constellation engine
• In 2022, Todd and his cofounder Mark Hopkins started Starlight Engines after some initial proof points and then fundraising
• Had opinions about EP
• Goebels and Katz textbooks about EP
• Busek electric propulsion is a family business that has tried all kinds of EP. Run by Vlad Ruby & son Pete.
• Starlight is based on solid Zinc propellant
• Traditionally it’s Xenon
• “The honda civic of hall effect sensor systems”
• The atomic mass of Zinc is light
• “Lickable EP”
• Discharge converter runs the ion beam
• Custom magnetics
• 300W – 800W
• 28V spacecraft bus
• “Plume divergence”
• Need to go from solid to gas
• Cathode is a thermionic emitter “Like a tube amp”, it emits to boil off electrons
• Zinc gets caught in electron cloud, knocks an electron off to make ions, ejected from a positively charged plate nearby.
• Novel propellent is a differentiator
• Starlight had a scrappy factor, like they built their own vacuum chamber (for 15K!)
• The device is not known to be operational in space yet (they sell it but don’t operate it, so it’d be tough to know)
• “Give the first one away”
• Have sold 4 propulsion systems
• Muon space needed a propulsion system and instead decided to buy the company. They weren’t put off by “two guys in a garage and contractors”.
• Muon builds things like fire detection satellites
• For more info about their past work and see pictures of the plumes, check out Starlightengines.com
• To see the new things they’ll be working on, check out Muon space

The post #701 – Electric Propulsion with Todd Bailey first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Back, Andrew Seddon! Founder and CEO of CircuitHub.

• Andrew was first on episode 131 of The Amp Hour
• CircuitHub has a partnership with Worthington Assembly
• Worthington and CircuitHub host the Pick Place Podcast
• Mimicing silicon manufacturing
• Common parts library
• Setting the factory up to have only 50k SKUs in house for speed of loading / attrition
• Driving people to 2000 parts was the original intent, but didn’t hit the mark
• Level of production needs to be high
• Many parts need to work in conjunction
  • Reflow
  • PnP
  • Throughhole
  • Selective soldering
  • Inspection
• Need to solve for the whole setup. Making smt 10x better doesn’t make overall 10x better
• Starlink manufcaturing localy
• PCB fabs in the US, 50 left, getting rolled up under Private Equity (as are things like machine shops)
• AI with VCs
• How it impacts the electronics industries
• KiCad
• More AI stuff
• Automation on checking
• Still humans involved
• PDKs for chip companies
• File checking / JLC
• Types of customers
  • 10 largest companies on the planets
  • It’s individuals who order and try it out, that often becomes a repeat business thing
  • Customers / types of boards / size of orders
  • More startups who also want production
• Future serving lower cost areas
• Proto service 2-4 layer black soldermask (unlisted)
• See the CircuitHub capabilities
• Going high volume
• People making weekly or monthly units and spreading it out
• Spinning up custom in-house high volume
• Flattenting the price curve
• Tariffs
• New customers approaching them because of it
• Can consumer be done in the US?

The post #699 – CircuitHub, 12 Years Later with Andrew Seddon first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Matt Brown of Brown Fine Security!

• Matt has been reverse engineering a “smart” smoker controller that talks back to AWS IOT
• Jeff Geerling talking about his dishwasher
• Storing private keys on the device??
• Threat models
• Key rotation
• What is the best case scenario for an IoT device?
• Secure boot / trust zone
• Keys encrypt flash storage
• Chris has designed in the ATECC608 before
• Replacing Certificate Authority (CA) cert in grill firmware
• Matt has a Linux hardware / reverse engineering background
• Flash is always external
• Ghidra / idapro / binwalk
• Security cameras are 99% linux based (battery based cameras might be embedded)
• Best practices
• Encrypted firmware
• hidden uart / jtag
• Keys
• Are linux devices “worth more” to a security researcher?
• CVSS risk scoring system
• Attack vector
• Vulnerabilities are better if it can be a remote executed
• Linux devices have more compute
• Bluetoothe LE
• Ability to enumerate
• Scale reverse engineering
• Chris has discussed the silliness of a bluetooth toothbrush on the show before
• Tools / Software of the trade
  • xgeku firmware reader
  • picoemp
  • PCBite
  • Saleae
  • SDR USRP B200
  • Universal radio hacker
• Stick-to-it-ness
• Matt just came back from hardwear.io, one of his new favorite conferences
• Find Matt at the embedded systems village at DEF CON
• Follow Matt via his YouTube channel
• Matt has a new IoT Security newsletter starting up

The post #698 – Hardware Security with Matt Brown first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Tim from Mitxela!

• Introduced by Mike Harrison, past guest of the show
• Fluid pendant
• Volumetric display
• London hackspace

• https://matthias-research.github.io/pages/tenMinutePhysics/index.html
• FLIP in Blender
• CHNT36ta Pick and place doing 0201
• Precision Clock
• Sewing machine (check out that GIF!)
• Secret life of machines – Tim Hunkin
• Isaac Singer
• Tim has many Lathe projects on the hardware projects page
• Flag Steam Engine
• Learn how to machine from MrPete222’s YouTube channel
• Schlock Mercenary (Comic)
• Sprite tm on The Amp Hour
• Gameboy advance link cable
• Writing a gameboy emulator 
• Emulators got him into electronics
• No$ (“nocash”) emulator
• AVR instruction set
• MIDI
• CNLohr on The Amp Hour
• https://mitxela.com/projects/slide2
• Forcing
• brainfuck (language)
• quop
• movfuscator
• Puzzles
• Spacechem (Game)
• Zach Barth of Zachtronics on The Amp Hour 
• babaisu
• LED errings

• watchdog timer allows ridiculously low power
• 1 way loader 
• autobauding
• Find all of Tim’s projects on mitxela.com
• Watch the latest videos on the mitxela youtube

The post #697 – LEDs Everywhere with Tim from Mitxela first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

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 – sample 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

The post #695 – Making The Invisible, Visible with Sam Aldhaher first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

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!

The post #693 – Small Scale Electronics Manufacturing with Colin O’Flynn first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

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

The post #691 – System Designer Lets You Try Every Part with Michael Gielda first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

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

The post #684 – Lee Felsenstein: The Computer Revolution & Counterculture first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

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 post #679 – Satellite Design Engineering with Dan Esparon first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• 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 post #649 – History of the Cathode Ray Tube with Kathy Joseph first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

The post #647 – Dave hanging with Fran Blanche first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Dave and Ian Scott Johnston discuss the PDVS2mini DC Voltage Calibrator Source, production, China, CERN, ebay reselling, test gear, pick and place machines, assembly, automated test systems, and Youtube repair videos.

https://www.youtube.com/@UCtiK8QrcCrsjDXpKzB1PO1A

https://www.ianjohnston.com/

The post #643 – Calibration & Repair with Ian Johnston first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Fellow Aussie Toby Robb joins Dave to discuss everything related to mains power generation and transmission and his role as a linesman.

Ask Toby a question here:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/amphour/im-linesman-and-electrical-fitter-in-powerline-distribution-in-australia-ama/

Links:

TransGrid’s substation design standard https://www.transgrid.com.au/media/zgogqoqg/1-1-substation-primary-design-standard-rev-2.pdf

https://www.energy.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-08/2019_10_NSW_ServiceAndInstallationRulesOfNSW_underlined.pdf

The post #641 – Power Transmission with Toby Robb first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Aedan Cullen!

• Chris first learned of Aedan from his 2022 Hackaday talk about building an AR system
• AR is “Augmented Reality”, but that term is different depending on the company / headset (think “magic leap” vs “google glass”)
• Got into AR because of robotics, he had be doing software around SLAM and CV
• Interacting with objects in 3D space
• The first board he was working with was the Jetson TK1
• Magic Leap’s “Lightpack” had a Tegra in it
• Apple’s new Vision Pro is more like VR with passthrough (and creepy eyes!)
• Being able to wear an AR unit all day
• Resolution matters
• What is it worth spending power on in a headset?
• The previous rev used the AllWinner D1 RISCV and can support one camera
• Which way should you point a camera on a pair of glasses?
• MIPI DSI outputs and DSP processing
• Lots of SIPs available for high density designs
• Octavo makes SIPs out of other companies’ silicon.
• Jason and Robert from BeagleBoard talked about Octavo when they were on the show
• ECX337 from Sony needs 10V
• Torex power modules helped save space too by being stacked on top of the inductor
• Sony uses LVDS (FPDlink) and not MIPI
• Offloaded processing to a phone or computer
• Power
• Wi-Fi vs bluetooth
• New goal is to minimize power during processing, now it’ll be efficiency around WiFi and Display
• With OLEDs you can selectively turn on pixels
• Goal for the battery is 8 hours for “all day”
• What is Aedan’s “requirements space” and what’s driving it?
• Cost has become a concern for new boards
• Using an assembly house to have one known-good assembly board
• What’s on the new board?
  • The new display has MIPI DSI
    • The display doesn’t support 2 lane DSI out of the box
    • Displays are sometimes configurable in terms of how many lanes with registers
    • What do the lanes refer to? Each pair (“Data lane”) is a differential pair
    • Most displays will do 4 lanes (8 conductors) at 1Gbps
    • “Giganibbles per second”
    • Silicon backplane with OLED on top
    • ViewTrix
  • The processor is the NXP iMX RT500
    • “This is design is made for Garmin”
    • Aedan is coding it in Zephyr
    • Drivers are in MCUexpresso
    • DCnano display driver in Zephyr
    • no GPU driver in Zephyr
    • 2D GPU in the chip
  • WiFi module is the same as the past rev, the Si Labs WFM200S
    • Sending compressed data over the WiFi link
  • Mechanical
    • Tweaking displays and 3D printed mounts
    • Prism
    • Flex cables
    • XReal / NReal
    • Using your brain as the combiner
• Zach from Voidstar
• Aedan just went to the Augmented World Expo in May. “No one was wearing an AR display around the conference”
• Vision for the future
• Follow Aedan online
  • GitHub
  • Twitter

The post #638 – Building AR Headsets with Aedan Cullen first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome to the show, CNLohr of the YouTube channel of the same name!

• CNLohr has been working on projects and a library for the ch32v003, the $0.10 RISC V part
• Dave has made a video about that part, using the official toolchain from MounRiver
• How far will you take the chip?
• Moving from knowing the arm instruction set to the RISC V instruction set
• The benefits of knowing assembly
• The CH32V003 is a RISC V part in the low end space made by WCH. CN thinks it’s about eqiuvalent to an AVR
• You can buy a dev board on Tindie (this is the one Dave and Chris have)
• Compiler tooling is done for you
• AVR GCC
• While discussing Espressif entering the market the way in which they did, CN said, “There’s only going to be one of these in all of computing”
• Community reversing esp8266 using a virtual machine that had a leaked toolchain on it.
• Compared to cc2500 / mediatek / realtek
• ESP8266 without an RTOS “nonOS SDK“
• lwip and wifi stack
• Community port of FreeRTOS onto the ESP8266
• CN worked on the “NoSDK 8266“
• It didn’t have the WiFi enabled which meant timing wasn’t critical and he could overclock it to 380 MHz
• Minecraft on a microscope slide
• Ethernet on an AVR
• Other people in this space
• igor plug
• lwusb is massive (relative to the space on the CH32V003)
• What about the support burden of writing things yourself?
• Chris made a comparision to college
• USB on CH32v003
• CNLohr already had hardware on hand for decoding and debugging the USB stack
• He livestreamed the development!
• Chris said he was not sure he could livestream, but CN said that the audience acts like rubber ducks and pair programming
• ESPUSB
• vusb on avr
• Does communicty work like this have an influence on the market?
• Padouk 3-8 cent micro
• Grainuum library (later figured out it was written by past guest xobs!)
• lufa / tinyusb
• What are the physical requirements to implement USB without a transceiver? Only real thing is you need a pullup on the USB D- line
• You also need to change pins from intput to output in the window of responding
• Can make HID devices, but everything is low speed USB (1.5 Mbps)
• CN built the Nixie tube controller
• On GitHub there are examples on how to use various aspects of the part
• The chip has DMA
• During the chip shortages, CN was browsing lcsc and found a 10:1 transformer and wondered if he could make a flyback with it
• Single wire debug
• Check out the CH332V003fun library on github 
• Getting started
• The next few months CN will be working on getting everything to be really good for the library
• There will also be support for other (larger, more expensive) parts
• Join the Discord! (cnlohr)
• Follow CNLohr on YouTube

The post #637 – CH32V003…fun! with CNLohr first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Andrea Longobardi of AL2tech!

• Andrea is a consultant in the HW / FW space, based out of Italy.
• Chris met Andrea when he was transitioning to consulting and he joined the consulting forum.
• Andrea comes from a family of engineerhing, His father is an EE who made PCBs at home but kept it from the kids
• He worked at ST Micro designing drivers for server disk drives
• If you lose power, the arm will crash into the platen. So when power fails, you use the energy in the motor to backpower the arm.
• Didn’t like being pigeonholed and he wanted to get into apps engineering
• Moved to Maxim, which he knew about because of their sample program
• Working in automotive space: harsh environment and dealing with things like:
  • Load dump
  • Cold crank
  • Low power during shutdown
• Dealing with customers on last minute basis
• Went abroad to the UK and worked for ARM/PA Consulting
• Chris asked about the engineering culture in Italy/UK
• Lot of focus on theory
• “With the internet you can become an expert very quickly”
• AL2Tech is Andrea, his brother Allessandro and a lab assistant
• Had been back at Maxim focused on low power, connected devices
• What’s it like working with a sibling?
• Finding first client as a consultant:
  • Networking with people on linkedin
  • Looking at job openings and offering part time work
  • Did it while building up the company
  • Showing side projects (air quality sensor + BLE) since he couldn’t talk about his work at chip companies
• It worked when a small company took a chance on him
• FAEs were big companies, didn’t get access to the smaller company engs
• Building test boards to learn new things (for the Joulescope), like a custom front panel
• Gas monitoring is an area of focus for AL2tech
• The device is battery powered, sitting on the meter.
• Certification is critical: the certifying body is looking at schematic / layout and making sure nothing heats past the point of igniting gas.
• Zone 0, 1, 2
• Conformal coating
• Why not put everything in Resin? Cost
• Volume correctors for gas monitoring
• For billing, they lean on PV=nRT
• Internal product at AL2Tech is the Elektra
• There is a CO sensor that caches data and sends over NFC and BLE
• It detaches from a shirt with battery, but a reed switch disables power when not connected (so it can be washed)
• Using the shirt to attract people and talk about capabilities
• Embedded World helped expand outside of Italy
• Other proejcts
  • Rain Vision
  • Tauanito Sensors
• Find Andrea on LinkedIn 
• Check out al2tech.com to learn more about the company

The post #635 – Low Power Connected Devices with Andrea Longobardi first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Dr Ken Tindell of Canis Labs

• Ken heard episode #631 where Chris was talking about a Noisy Rude Bus and he objected. Stringently (it seems Ken has since pulled down the posts, but they were in good fun)
• Chris had been planning to talk about Ken’s recent awesome post about CAN hacking and cars being stolen, so he asked Ken to be on the show!
• CAN was invented to reduce weight in car cable harnesses, which were increasing rapidly with more electrical features being included.
• CAN vs LIN
• CAN was expensive, but LIN is cheap because it’s bit banging the protocol from a microcontroller
• There are bridges to go between CAN and LIN buses.
• Modern cars have 20-100 ECUs (controllers), but it depends on the features the car has. But that’s not just microcontrollers, Ken estimates that could be as high as 700.
• Chris and Ken both had dealth with Philips / Freescale / NXP / Motorola as silicon vendors in the automotive space
• How does a tiny microcontroller get data onto the bus?
• Prioritized traffic
• CAN indentifier field has priority baked in
• Bus works like a giant AND gate where the lowest address wins
• 11 bits
• How to unwind CAN traffic
• Packing signals into CAN frame
• Tools to reverse engineer
• Protocol decoder for sigrok
• CAN HG
• 250kb is slow
• CAN bus bandwidth
• There is Ethernet in cars now, especially with more and more cameras
• Bandwidth vs latency
• Addressing through a gateway
• Atomic broadcasts means you know that each device has processed it
• Protocol hacking
• Trucks aren’t OEM based so more vertically integrated
• SAE J1939 standard in trucks
• If say Toyota develops the CAN messages, DBC files decode everything.
• But manufacturers don’t publish them, so some car messages are reverse engineered
• Accessories bus
• Who has access to DBCs?
• Diagnostic systems
• OBD2
• CARB
• CAN is physical ISO 11898
• CAN XL has IP packets, so you can use wireshark
• Ken has written about wireshark
• CAN 2.0, CAN FD
• Devices on a bus are normally all bare metal or RTOS because of the timing requirements
• OSEK standard
• Embedded system abstraction
• Dealing with the magnitude of decisions making in the automotive industry
• Chris asked about whether self-driving will happen in 5 or 20 years? (ie. does he agree with Chris or Dave). It was the latter, sadly.
• Autonomic Cars podcast with Dr Phil Coopman

The post #634 – The CAN bus can! with Dr Ken Tindell first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Dave talks with Steve Sanghi who was Microchip CEO for 31 years, now Executive Chair.

Check out his new book, Up and to the Right. How Microchip was built into one of the biggest and most pofitable chip companies in the world.

In this episode we discussed:

• The early microcontrollers, ROM, EPROM, EEPROM, FLASH
• Semiconductor Fab’s and locations
• How the US Government CHIPS act is a golden handcuffs trap
• US/China rhetoric
• What really happened durign the covid supply chain crisis
• How 90% of medical devices use Microchip parts
• Lead times
• Respect for the chip manufacturers and supply chains
• Just-In-Time becomes Just-In-Case
• How the Toyota production system works and how it had to change
• The impacts of a potential war in Taiwan
• How does it make sense to make thousands of part variants?
• The secret to making part varients
• Why Microchip chose MIPS vs ARM
• Atmel didn’t make any money!
• Pricing discipline
• How buying Atmel almost didn’t happen, and how Dialog Semiconductor goofed it
• Draconian NDA terms
• Atmel was bloated
• RISC-V plans
• Customer Driven Obsolescence
• Foundry vs In-House limitations
• Open Source FPGA tools?
• Third party tool support
• Why not offer free optimised compilers?
• It’s all about black swan events, down cycles, pointy haired bosses, and how All your Cost Bases Beyong To Me
• Hobbyist vs professionals
• How Microchip is the largest aerospace chip maker in the world. Nothing leaves earth without a Microchip part in it.
• Radiation hardended parts
• Market value profitability
• Will Microchip ever get acquired
• Strained US vs China relations

The post #632 – Steve Sanghi – Microchip CEO for 31 Years! first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

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

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

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

Dave Young of Young Circuit Designs joins Chris to record a now-rare in-person episode of The Amp Hour!

• Dave has been on the show a couple of times in the past
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  • 601
• Chris was recently on Embedded.fm talking about Golioth and firmware
• PUZZLER: Chris lays out a problem with home power
  • Email theamphour@gmail.com with the subject “PUZZLER”
• Chip shortage is…over? (better?)
• Inspring kids (including students) around electronics
• Amazon Sidewalk is now available, it operates through Amazon devices if you’re using AWS IOT.

The post #628 – Two Dads Puzzlin Things Out first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Sergiy Nesterenko of Quilter.ai!

• Just prior to recording, Chris saw that Dave had been talking about a different “AI autorouter”
• Configuration on Quilter is currently pretty simple (not a lot
• Sergiy worked at SpaceX in 2014 doing a bunch of boards for testing
• “PCBs were the tail end of the design, so it became the critical path”
• Check out some of the public designs on the Quliter Blog
• Quilter has remade the schematic of the OpenMV camera. This reworked board is indicative of the kinds of boards they can handle.
• Generally sub-300 MHz, Sub 2A
• Quilter has a full time EE on staff who helps try out different designs and give feedback.
• They can parellelize designs by sending them off to a cluster for processing.
• Chris noted that it felt similar to Place and Route on an FPGA.
• Quilter doesn’t currently enforce “octolinear traces”, so the traces aren’t straight lines.
• It makes it possible to detect generative designs, like on the “QPlayer” example
• The toold helps by defining manufacturing constraints for you, specifically around available board houses.
• Cost of compute
• How do you balance the problem of knowledge? Chris and Dave discussed this for newer engineers in episode 625
• “What is the job of a PCB?” (perfectly replicate a schematic)
• Quilter is doing additional checks, including solving for Maxwell’s equations and Thermodynamics
• There are decisions to make within the routing algorithm, ie. Should they enforce “star ground”?
• When starting out, there was skepticism around code compilers! But over time people came to trust them more and more.
• How can you try out Quilter? Sign up for waitlist! The best candidat designs will be:
  • Sub 2000 pins
  • sub 100 parts
  • sub 100Mhz
  • sub 2A
  • Open source designs
• All the boards on the site have no human input
• When trying out the service, many customers don’t trust the first board (but later they start to)
• Spits boards back out as the same file format, they currently support KiCad, Altium, Eagle
• NASA story designing S band antenna
• When starting with new boards, the tool will import outlines by parsing layers in KiCad / Altium / Eagle.
• Reconsidering different elemetns of a design (constraints)
• Relaxing constraints (physics)
• Software models
• Why don’t some of these tools exist in layout software? Specifically simulation and physics engines.
• Many do! (Ansys, TDK, etc). Often the cost isn’t justified for simpler boards, so people go without.
• Feeding back real world squishiness into the model
• Costs – Not yet set, but there will be different tiers for hobbyists and open source designs. Sergiy mentioned $50/month for non-enterprise, but it seems like it’s much too early to tell.
• Check out more on the site at quilter.ai

The post #626 – Intelligent Routing with Sergiy Nesterenko first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

The post #624 – Design & Manufacturing Consulting with Scott Williams from Xentronics first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Mike and Chris work together at Golioth, Mike agreed to join Chris this week after Chris forgot to schedule a guest because of working on demos for Embedded World 23
• Mike was on TAH episode 403 at DEFCON 26 talking about Badgelife
• Backlit LEDs
• Mike was the Editor in Chief at Hackaday for 9 years, he was there a total of 13 years
• Remoticon happened twice during the pandemic
• Supercon returned in November 2022
• The Zephyr Project
• Mike loves manifest files (or has come to love them)
• Marti Bolivar – Macrobatics
• Zephyr Devicetree
• FreeRTOS – Brian Amos
• Zephyr The Linux Foundation
• Nordic chose Zephyr as their go-to RTOS / Ecosystem (they build the Nordic Connect SDK on top of Zephyr)
• Beginner content in Zephyr (check the sample and test folder in Zephyr)
• Benjamin (new Zephyr DevRel) is interested in getting the Wio Terminal supported
• Sensor subsystem in Zephyr
• Kconfig
• Zephyr shells
• ESP-IDF
• Mike was recently on Robert Ferenec’s YouTube channel building an IoT solution live
• Command line vs IDE
• VScode plugins help bridge the gapo
• The Adafruit MagTag
• EPaper displays often are lacking docs
• Pimoroni badger
• Mike created an i2c listener which uses PIO for i2c. It passes received commands up to the Micropython layer.
• Marshalling 
• Micropython allows you to use things like Hershey font files
• Jared Wolff was on the show talking about the nRF9160 feather (and Zephyr)
• Find Mike on Mastodon at @szcyzs@chaos.social
• Mike’s personal site is jumptuck.com

The post #622 – Building Firmware and Hardware for Trade Shows with Mike Szczys first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Dr Don Wilcher! He joins us right as he’s about to release a new book, M5 Stack Electronic Blueprints

• He worked at Willow Run early in his career (facility now closed)
• Henry Ford Community College
• Larry Sears
• Having joy in the courses
• The Knack
• John Davis joined on a previous episode to talk about Industrial machines
• What is a PLC?
• Relay ladder logic
• Industrial Computer vs Controller
• Scan loop on a PLC
• XIC / XIO
• A Distributed Control System (DCS) networks many controllers together
• Don taught a blueprint reading class
• Chris asked about why connectors are drawn the way they are
• Later in his career, Don moved from the industrial space to design in cars
• Wiring harness
• Body controller module
• CAFE laws – California Air Fuel Economy
• 68hc11
• Wetting current for switches
• CAN
• Cigarette lighters in cars
• Don was working on the (Jeep) Grand Cherokee
• Decoding CAN with a scope
• Packard electric connectors
• Cars have a “shower curtain” for water in the door
• Don got his PhD and switched to education
• He taugh courses like
  • Electric Circuits 1 / 2
  • Intro to robotics
  • Automated system and diagnosis
  • Electronics Industrial Maintenance
• Instructors putting bugs into the system to test students
• PLCs still reign supreme
• Arduino recently released the Opta, which is targeted at the industrial market
• Don writes for Control.com
• OpenPLC is software that can run on a variety of accessible platforms (like ESP32/Arduino/etc)
• Industrial I/O
• OpenPLC based on IEC spec (61131-3)
• Different programming styles of programming
• Blackhat (movie) with Chris Hemsworth
• Stuxnet worm
• He wrote and article about using OpenPLC with Arduino
• Dr Don has a new book that was just released! The M5 stack book
• Continuing Education Courses
• IEEE certificate
• Dr Don will be speaking at the Embedded Online conference coming up in April

The post #620 – Engineering Education with Dr Don Wilcher first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Amitabh Shrivastava of Refrigediro.org and Tinkrmind!

• Amitabh moved from Physics into Engineering. He did an internship at Brandeis for astophysics and radio astronomy and realized astrophysics mostly coding these days.
• Kit for teaching teachers in India
• There was a limited Electronics scene in India. Amitabh grew up in Bangalore (Bengaluru)
• Manufacturing in India has been growing, including in the silicon space. Chris used to work at a place that had a CM in Bangalore.
• Gaming startup making tag games using LoRa
• XBee
• Logistics company that tracked 2 wheelers. Their breakout product was a laser scanner for packages.
• Amitabh went to ITP at NYU, which is a technology and art crossover program. Past guest of the show Matt Richardson also went there.
• Creative aspects vs technical aspects.
• Amitabh enjoyed consulting for other artist, much like past guests Mike Harrison and Todd Bailey discussed.
• Programmable Air is a kit that allows people to more easily build soft robots and use pumps.
• Chris and Amitabh met at Teardown 2019. That was also the event where Chris recorded with Joshua and Zach, before recording again this year.
• A “jammer gripper” is a soft robot that allows you to pick up arbitrarily shaped objects using friction.
• “Backpack inflatable car” from Otherlab
• Open Source Project
• Programmable Air was crowdfunded on Crowd Supply. As such, it’s still available on Mouser.
• The valves in the kit were meant for keurig machines. Spec sheets are super basic for mechanical components.
• Chris saw Amitabh at Supercon 22 wearing a backpack refrigerator. It’s called “Refrigediro“
• Amitabh gave a talk about the project at Hackaday Supercon 2022
• The source of the name is “Harry potter and the methods of rational thinking“
• Refrigeration is an old industry
• PV=nRT
• Kipp Bradford and Adam Savage video on building tiny refrigeration.
• Other uses for small scale refrigeration is vaccine storage, cold chain storage.
• Ammonia refrigeration allows you to keep things cold with a fire.
• Gradient window cooler is a heat pump with a cool form factor. Not shipping yet though?
• Modding an icemaker
• Follow Amitabh on Instagram or YouTube for his latest experiments and builds. Follow him most places as “Tinkrmind”

The post #618 – Refrigerators and Robots with Amitabh Shrivastava first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome back to the show, Matthew Venn!

• Matt was previously on Episode 467 from 2019 Supercon, before he started working on the open source toolchains and the education around them.
• A bunch of news in the open source silicon space
  • Latest shuttle was MPW8, MPW9 coming up soon
  • 2 new open PDKs
• Open source tools growing, much of it comes from Google “Willy Wonka-ing” process and sponsoring the shuttle
• This was driven by past guest Tim Ansell (on 501)
• Tim Edwards of efabless
• Claire Wolf was on the show in the past
• Dan Burke talked with Matt at Supercon 2023 about the term “Tapeout”
• Matt runs the  ZeroToAsicCourse youtube channel, which includes a podcast.
• Global Foundries / IHP open source
• What is driving the growth?
  1. Open source tools
  2. Google MPW
  3. Open source PDK
  4. RISC V
• Ming Zhang on The Amp Hour talking about chiplets with ZGlue (now defunct).
• If you don’t get into the lottery, you can pay efabless $10K for 300 chips
• Packaging is also tough
• Volume problems – What happens between 300 chips and 10K chips?
• Why should people get started with trying out the open source tools?
• Why are people signing up for the couse?
  • 30-50% want to understand silicon
  • 20% are academic — many Universities are switching to the open source toolchain
  • 20-30% are commercial users who might want to use the info for
• Reasons for going custom silicon as a business?
  • Security by obscurity
  • Space
  • Power
  • Sourcing (?)
• MPW gives you about 10 sq mm
• Matt put more designs onto his MPW slot, bundling even more designs (which has continued on)
• OpenRAM
• You could fit 25K of SRAM on 10 sq mm
• #OpenSourceASICHighlight
• Mohamed Kassem of eFabless was on the show in the past. eFabless highlights designs on their site.
• Check out the 2022 highlight video from Matt!
• Open Tapeout
• FOSSI foundation runs the Latchup Conference
• OSDA
• India driving growth of chip design, many large scale companies also have verification teams in india
• Security and “inspectability” from cloud companies
• Root of trust chips – Laura from Oxide talked about this when she was on the show.
• TSMC has an educational program for students in Taiwan
• TinyTapeout
• Extension of the course, joining designs together with a tristate bus
• “Vosotros” is the “y’all” of the Spanish language
• HDL is mostly controlled by the tools
• OpenLane by eFabless was based on OpenRoad
• TinyTapeout is meant for beginners
• Uri from Wokwi (on show 599) worked with Matt on TinyTapeout
• He added gates to Wokwi, which then can be connected together. The program pushes the gates out, which then can be synthesized.
• You’re closer to the hardware with Wokwi than you will be with Verilog.
• 500-600 standard cells in tiny tapeout
• The Shuttle lottery is getting harder to win
• There are more TinyTapeout slots
• It costs $25 for design only, $100 for chips
• When you get the chip back on a PCB, you select your design (or others!) with a DIP switch
• Check out what was on the TinyTapeout 2nd run
• Olof Kindgren won the Serv RISC V prize, which is a small bit serial processor. Past guest Greg Davill put that design onto TinyTapeout.
• There is a Discord for the course
• Siliwiz explains how silicon can work, allows you to use sliders to control how the silicon gate sizes change.
• A wafer will take 6 months start to finish if all goes well.
• MPW1-4 had a hold violation. Sylvain (TNT) who was also on episode 467 did some wizardry to get things working!
• Siliwiz still not open to public
• What does it take to tape out a design? Putting the logic inside of other logic when creating a wafer. Then eFabless takes care of the rest.
• The harness with everything that allows you to access the low level IO is called “caravel”
• Europractice is another IC service

The post #616 – Open Source Tapeout with Matthew Venn first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

For the first week of the new year, we welcome back some past guests to talk about electronics in 2023.

• Alvaro Prieto is a co-host of The Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast and has co-hosted The Amp Hour before. He currently works at Sofar Ocean.
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  • 440.2
  • 440.3
• Ariel Briner was on episode 260 of the show talking about CartesianCo, a now defunct startup. Ariel now runs an 8 person consulting shop in SF called Electron Labs.
• Chris Osterwood was on episode 425 talking about Capable Robot Components, which he is still working on. They are preparing to release new hardware in 2023.
• State of robotics
• Possible to have consulting with robotics?
• We were recording during CES 2023
• AgTech
• Robotic pizza
• 3H meetup
• Modex Fulfilment(conference)
• IoT
• Electron labs projects are 30% IoT, but more are connected (50%+)
• iPhone globalstar connection is now possible and Iridium is coming soon.
• Alvaro uses Blues Wireless modems to do firmware updates on buoys near the shore. Ray Ozzie (founder and CEO of Blues) was on episode 603.
• Bugs in different locations due to unicode characters (or null characters)
• FreeRTOS vs Zephyr
• STM32U5 has DMA in stopmode, which is a low power option for DMA
• Alvaro has been creating Joulescope front plates
• What kind of mix of hw and software are each person doing?
• USB C cable tester
• ESP32-C3 is a RISC V wifi chip from Espressif. There is also support for Rust on that and some other Espressif chips (Chris Osterwood has been trying it out)
• Hubris OS from Oxide. Oxide engineer Laura Abbott talked about this when she was on the show. Another Oxide engineer Rick Altherr was on the show (before he worked there)
• Board bringup is a hardware activity for fimware engineers.
• Firmware with hardware when the power rails are controlled by the micro
• CM4 / Linux
• Buildroot vs Yocto
• Custom vs dev board
• Chaos camp
• Mark Rober video (car breakins)
• RISC V
• AI
• Midjourney
• ChatGPT
• Is it all just “Stochastic BS”?

The post #614 – Reunion Impedance Matching and 2023 Predictions first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Merry Keyzermas, 2022! Jeff Keyzer of Mightohm.com joins the show once again.

• Jeff has been at his place in Seattle since 2018
• Previously when he was in Redmond, he put his antenna up in the trees
• This year Jeff set up antennas at his new place
• New things in Amateur radio, SDRs
• ICOM IC705 portable
• Sunspot cycles impact how far you can communicate
• 5-10 watts in the backyard
• Taking ham radio setup camping
• Crater lake
• Goldeneye antenna coming out of a lake (Aricibo, now busted)
• Cape Disappointment
• Parks on the Air
• “2022…which is this year”
• Long Beach Washington kite festival
• Jeff put an antenna on a kite
• Doers vs talking in amateur radio
• FT8 mode
• QRZ.com
• IC7300 brought people back
• Alan Wolke YouTube channel
• Jeff hasn’t been doing much consulting
• Kit business gangbusters because of Ukraine
• Atmel DIP parts are easier to get than other Atmel parts (but still not easy)
• Eurorack companies closing
• Test equipment upgrade
• 8753D
• Agilent took down legacy resources
• Fixing test equipment as a way to learn
• 53310A
• Can’t just get a piece of test equipment on a whim
• GPS connected to MDA can get parts per billion (!)
• Plot frequency vs time
• Saluki
• Fusion news
• Hotplate vs oven for reflow
• Making generated art (couldn’t pass up the Clark Griswold reference, sorry)

The post #613 – It’s a Keyzermas Miracle! first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Website: https://bit.ly/GoKathyLovesPhysics
Go Fund Me (for Audio book): https://bit.ly/DonateforAudiobook
Patreon: https://bit.ly/KathyLovesPhysicsPatreon

The post #605 – The Lightning Tamers with Kathy Joseph first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

The post #596 – Capacitor Schoopage with Ron Demcko from AVX first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Ben was a long time Altium employee and PCB and product specialist and still makes Altium tutorial videos on Youtube.
He has also worked for Autodesk on Fusion 360.
Ben now has his own consulting company Jordan DSP and co-hosts a regular live Youtube show with Bil Herd

Follow him on Twitter

The post #593 – Publicly Traded Hobby with Ben Jordan first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome back, Simone Giertz!

• Simone returns to The Amp Hour to discuss her new venture selling products (Yetch.store) that she has been designing.
• Simone was last on the show in 2017 on episode 331.
• She has been doing more voice overs so that she can focus on the work while recording. Chris mentioned past guest James Bruton recording as he goes along.
• Truckla
• She’s interested in random everyday problems and solving them
• Course showing how she designed a fruitbowl
• Moved to LA
• Scissor lamp – will likely become a product for sale (As Seen On YouTube)
• Taking things to production
• The Everyday Calendar is a capacitive touch calendar that mounts to your wall and allows you to track a habit throughout the year.
• The Calendar was on sale in the MoMA store!
• Design For Manufacturing meant reducing costs, so she didn’t want to do pushbuttons (especially because there would be so many)
• Kickstarter
• The product design firm has 1.5 employees, but soon will be 2 people.
• Setting prices
• Puzzle table
• Screwdriver ring
• Margin invites counterfeit
• Scraps chair
• Future flatpack engineering for furniture sales?
• Having to think about new challenges for selling things: certification in different markets, sales tax, etc
• Collaborate moving stuff into engineering
• High cost items like the Vesta Board
• “make your own gnome”

The post #592 – Product Design with Simone Giertz first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Laura Abbott of Oxide Computer!

• Laura will be giving a talk at the upcoming Hardwear.io conference in Santa Clara about the (second!) vulnerability she found in the LPC55S69
• Oxide servers are built to be secure from the ground up.
• Root of trust
• The vulnerability Laura found was a buffer overflow in the firmware update mechanism of the LPC55S69.
• TPM
• Cortex M33
• Trust Zone M
• Service Processor – baseband management controller
• What does a server board look like?
• Power management
• Their customer Root of Trust OS is called Hubris
• Open compute project
• Many of the projects at Oxide are programmed in Rust (programming language)
• Memory unsafe stuff
• How do you know rust will run on a part? You can see if there is a “crate” available for the part (Rust installer/package manager)
• Writing updates for processors
• How often does firmware get update on servers?
• Host processor talks to management network onboard, it delivers firmware images to the lower layers.
• What is a Root of Trust task that it might do on a daily basis?
• Laura explained some of the challenges of working remote on hardware
• Laura moved from software into security/hardware. Perviously she had been doing kernel development.
• She is still a Technical Advisory Board Member at the Linux Foundation
• Getting started with kernel
• Follow Laura on Twitter at @openlabbott

The post #590 – Finding Hardware Flaws with Laura Abbott first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Leigh Brady!

• Leigh got his start working in different companies in the US as young engineer from the UK as part of the Mutual Defense Agreement
• Throughout the episode we explored different themes
  • Specialist vs Generalist
  • US vs UK hiring
  • Big vs small companies
  • Defense vs Industrial companies
• UK Apprenticeship
• V curve
• System engineering
• Deriving requirements
• What is the atomic unit of a system engineer?
• F35/JSF
• Lockheed IRAD – Internal Research and Development
• Sandia National Labs
• FPGAs in defense / space
• “It’s always cosmic rays”
• Single Event Upsets
• “Triple modular redundancy” is so commonplace in designs there are now buttons in CAD to generate the logic to triplicate a circuit and have the 3 units “vote”
• Bleeding edge FPGA tools vs open toolchain
• Chris recalls Xilnx ISE with F16 on the CDs
• Long term supply contracts
• Jumping the line with defense companies in the US – “DPAS – defense priorities and allocation system“
• Big vs small
• Leigh is now back in a big company
• When should an engineer target a big vs a small company in their career?
• Training / Budgets / Sampling are better at big companies.
• Mentorship
• Phillip Salmany (Phil’s Lab) talked about the difficulties finding mentors as a young engineer out on his own.
• UK Chartered Engineer
• PE / EIT vs Chartered
• Leigh worked on nuclear weapons at a past company in the UK
• It is, unsurprisingly, a heavily regulated industry.
• IEC61508
• Part of the job is verifying non-proliferation among other countries
• Nuclear deterrant
• Chris referenced a Ukraine treaty where they gave up their nuclear weapons and ambitions, co-signed by the US, UK, and … Russia. This was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
• Russia control room story about not firing when they detected launches from the US. It’s widely believed that Stanislov Petrov prevented a Nuclear war
• There are never active nuclear tests anymore (good), so the majority of work revolves around testing and modeling
• Is there a “better moustrap”?
• What does it look like when new requirements come down from the gov’t?
• Did Leigh wear a white lab coat?
• We were introduced by former guest Carmen Parisi, who worked with Leigh at Wasatch Photonics
• Optics have tight timing requirements, especially around the image sensor.
• Leigh is now working on medical devices at Phillips.
• Medical isn’t as slow as Chris thought, nor is FDA planning as dreadful as Chris thought.
• “Trust but verify” on part specs
• Mapping past experiences into new job
• Chris mentioned the discussions with Charles Aylward about not having any control mechanisms or backup as a consultant.
• Leigh said there are certain scenarios where a solo consultant won’t be a good fit and that “Two people working in a team are worth three”
• You can reach Leigh on LinkedIn and elsewhere on the web as Engineer Leigh

The post #588 – Siloed Engineering with Leigh Brady first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

The Frantone pedal as used by The Hives’ Nicholaus Arson and Vigilante Carlstroem  VIDEO

How VHS tapes are manufactured VIDEO

NOTE: This episode is also available as VIDEO

The post #586 – Fran Blanche Version 3 first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Charles Aylward of Grizzly Peak Systems!

• I heard of Charles from past guest Todd Bailey, they worked together at Astra. Charles is also a member of the Consulting Forum.
• Astra is a “new space” company
• These are non-traditional companies (sometimes startups), that move a bit faster with modern software methods and using more commercially available hardware (non-rad hard parts)
• Past guests in “new space” companies Joris (Hiber), Shaun (Planet), Brent and Bryce (SpaceX, Relativity Space)
• Astra provides a smaller launch vehicle (rocket), which means the ride share equation changes.
• The rocket equation means it could be advantageous to launch a smaller rocket.
• Chris thought of Charles when he thinks of software and hardware rigor.
• How do you know you’re ready to launch?
• Charles was the software engineer for the early launch vehicles.
• Design reviews early on had fewer people but pulled in other people. Todd was working on electronics.
• 6 months to launch
• There’s no dev kit for starting a rocket.
• A rocket is a distributed system
• Multiple clock domains
• Lossy comms
• Charles and Todd talked through some guiding principles
  • “No modes”
  • “Debug data and test data is first class data”
  • “The principle of least surprise”
  • “Boot causes no action” (powering on a system causes no action)
  • “The system is only hot under control”
  • “Only a single source of control at a time”
  • “Messages are globally unique”
  • “When you’re sending commands to subsystems, you are sending the absolute state”

• Some other (out of order) thoughts around the guiding principles discussion
  • Cataloguing all software failures on space systems
  • Need to design in wider data channels as a result
  • Exposing parts of the RTOS stats
  • Safety related
  • Default off states
  • Pointy side up, fire side down
  • Nodes on a network
  • Babbling node
• Deterministic system
• Priorities are similar for all systems on a launch vehicle
• What are the constraints of the system?
• Creating a walking skeleton
• Deciding to put ethernet on board
• Desirement
• “Judson’s Razor”
• Using an RTOS
• Classes of real time contrsaints
  • Soft
  • Firm
  • Hard
• Real Time Systems – Hermann Kopetz
• Hard Real Time Computing Systems – Giorgio C Buttazzo
• PID loops
• So what was it like at Astra?
• Charles joined in 2017, first launch 364 days later
• They launch things like cube satellites (10x10x10 cm)
• The vehicles can go up to 100s of kg
• Still getting new space contracts
• Startups
• “Rigor gets a bad rap because of agile”, but there’s a crossover point for investing in the setup of new systems.
• In consulting, there is often pressure is high to get first proto out quickly
• Azonenberg’s checklist on github
• “What happens if the test fails?” You need to have recovery time baked into a schedule and a plan
• Contact
  • Twitter
  • Freelance info
  • Email
  • LinkedIn
• Other links, sent from Charles after the recording
  • I left Astra before this particular launch, but Scott Manley has a good/fun video on what happens when your systems don’t “fail fast” but instead “fail operational”
  • You asked where one can pick up some of this stuff (regarding rigor etc). A lot of my early thinking on robust software was formed by Robert Rasmussen from JPL. He has published a lot but by far the best synopsis on thinking about dealing with inevitable errors (fault tolerance) as not a special case, is in this paper. This basically ties right in with the “observability” thing we discussed.
  • Another good foundation for coding standards is the JPL “powers of ten” paper. There are things I disagree with, and outright reject, e.g. pointers can’t be used safely, but, like the principles we discussed on the show, it’s not that there’s some prescriptive golden list, it’s just that you want to build out a complete list like this of your own. Pulling what you think makes sense from JPL P10 or MISRA can really help.
  • The best way to contact me is probably twitter.

Click image for link to Charles’ site with explanation

The post #584 – Software for Rockets with Charles Aylward first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Brian Amos, author of Hands-on RTOS with Microcontrollers

• Learned about the book from past guest Phillip Johnston. Also talked to Alvaro Prieto (Unnamed RE) about FreeRTOS.
• “How do I RTOS?”
• When do you want to use a Real Time Operating System (RTOS)?
  • Assume you can from a state machine
  • User interface you’ll want it
  • Communication capability (IoT devices)
• Differentiating OS vs RTOS
• Amazon acquired FreeRTOS in 2017
• FreeRTOS is a bottom up methodology
• It’s possible to make a completely statically allocated memory for a project (no heap, no malloc, etc)
• Simple examples around reading a sensor, pump status, screen, internet
• System level design decisions
• Interrupt Service Routine (ISR)
• Ticks are important
• How did Brian get into this?
• Brian was working on a product that had a
  • Telos module
  • MSP430
  • TinyOS
  • nesC?
• James Grenning’s book on TDD for embedded
• Modern micros can do a lot in parallel, especially using hardware like DMA
• Troubleshooting an RTOS
  • SEGGER Ozone (debugger)
  • SystemView
  • Percipio Tracealyzer
• Many of the graphics in the book are available on Brian’s github page as CC by SA licensing
• Page 48 graphic
  • 
• Brian taunts us on Page 98 showing lots of STM32 parts in stock…
  • 
• NucleoF7 board used in examples (unsurprisingly…out of stock)
• There’s an onboard debugger that you can reprogram to Segger
• Going through exercises
• Working with HALs
• Logic analyzer for troubleshooting
• Embedded Linux
• Still goes bck to superloop
• Find Brian on:
  • LinkedIn
  • GitHub
  • Amazon book

The post #581 – Real Time Operating Systems with Brian Amos first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.