Welcome back, Mike Harrison!

• This is Mike’s 5th appearance on The Amp Hour!
  • 135
  • 224
  • 294
  • 412
• Mike’s work is working on large light installions, so there has been a bit of a lockdown slowdown.
• He’s spending his time developing a product that will be a dimmer for AC based LEDs
• Leading edge vs trailing edge dimming
• SI8751
• Mike mostly cares about turnoff time
• DMX controlled dimmer
• The supply chain is still catching up post COVID. Chris is having trouble finding (higher) pressure sensors and crystals.
• Mike suggests MEMS oscillators, like the Microchip programmable oscillators
• SGS Thompson
• AKM fire
• WS2812
• LED accelerated life testing
• Any instruction that involves “very carefully” means…no
• Satellite that fell over
• Daniel from Keysight alluded to a forklift giong through a 100K device
• “It’s Perfectly Legal for Your Chinese Manufacturer to Copy Your Products” (maybe a bit click-baity)
• Mike’s clients mostly don’t care about IP
• PIC32
• Hall effect sensing chip
• Thresholding ADC
• Mike likes the ease of MPLABX
• Chris has beend dealing with Simplicity Studio
• Old PIC parts required an external UART to talk to an RS485 transceiver (no internal UART)
• The number of PIC variants
• XRays are not prevalent in Australia because of required liceneses.
• Both Mike and Dave have EVs
• Mike has a 2018 Hyundai Kona
• Christmas vacation commercial
• 35 kWh vs 64 kWh pack on a Tesla
• Charging standards
  • CCS
  • Chademo
• V2G (vehicle to grid)
• CCS is a hardware standard spec’d by a software person
• Qualcomm’s “GreenPhy”
• Kona and Kia had issues with chargers that support solar (didn’t do detection for 3 phase)
• Dave could start the EEVEV brand in Australia (a Sinclair C1 with 20 kWh battery?)
• Xiaopeng china
• Mike thinks self driving will happen a lot sooner than Dave does
• Tesla fooled by someone’s face
• Cameras vs lidar
• Mike says 5 years
• You wouldn’t download a car
• SD card location on Hyundai
• Gridserve
• Charge at home is $0.015 per mile
• Working from home
• Cave Day
• Mike’s Micro-rant about Lattice charging $500 for software on old CPLDs
• Next week we’ll talk to Brian Faith from QuickLogic

Many thanks to our Patrons, for this and all the other episodes throughout 2020! We would be nothing without them. Check out Patreon.com/TheAmpHour if you’d like to join the crowd. A special thanks to our corporate sponsor Binho, who now distribute the Sensepeek PCBite.

Thanks to Juan Pablo Colasso for the picture of the LEDs

The post #524 – LEDs and EVs with Mike Harrison first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome back, Mike Harrison of Mike’s Electric Stuff!

This week Mike joins Dave to talk about LEDs, low cost parts and tiny tiny components. The links below (links contributed by Mike). Chris is away on vacation and will return next week:

• UK electronics shows :
  • Engineering Design show UK
  • Southern Manufacturing show
• 7-segment displays for ants
  • Image from twitter
  • Product page ( bottom of page)
  • 0.8mm high digits :
  • Needs a wire-bonder to use
  • Used for head-up displays etc. for military ( can’t use OLED due to limited temp range)
• News :
  • Jitx “Autorouter”.. I think (Hackaday article)
    • Pricing of Jitx
  • World’s shortest scheduled flight to go electric
  • Apple iphone warranty fraud
  • $3.7 Billion…!
  • Boston Dynamics at it again!
    • Parkour
    • Dancing dog will kill us and dance on our graves
    • James Bruton’s openDog project
• Useful stuff :
  • Online gerber viewer
  • LCSC (low cost parts site from China, part of JLCPCB)
    • DC-DC converter with chip buried in PCB
  • Mike’s Ethernet decoding scope add-on
• Mike’s recent installations, as seen on his consulting site page Whitewint

The post #412 – 3 Cent Micros And 1000s of LEDs first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome back, Mike Harrison (@mikelectricstuf)

• Mike is in Belgrade with Chris, both attended and gave talks at Hackaday Belgrade (will be posted eventually)
• Mike gave a talk about the Eidophor
• They will also both attend Resonate.io but neither will speak.
• The fun continues in the UK!
  • April 19th – Beer and electronics meetup! We’ll be at the Yorkshire Gray on Theobalds Rd starting at 6:30.
  • April 20th – “Nerd Nite” event
  • April 21st – There is an Open Source Hardware Users Group meeting.
• Mike recommends learning (uppercase) cyrillic to help get around places like Serbia or Russia.
• Consulting projects continue to get more interesting, you can see them on whitewing.co.uk
  • There is a new project that was installed in terminal 2 of Heathrow airport
  • Holiday decorations in Hong Kong
    • There was a fixture to program physical locations of the assembled PCBs.
    • All high level comm was done using RS485.
  • Selfridges on Oxford St
    • Mike saved the setup time by starting a truck using a drill battery.
    • Uses the APA102.
    • Test jigs are critical in field jobs, especially time critical ones like busy installs.
• Trade shows for other industries
  • Mike went to one for wearable tech, ended up going to underwater exploration instead.
  • Saw the company that makes the underwater buoy that Mike tore down. (Sonardyne)
• Museums
  • Tesla museum was underwhelming, but Mike saw the first ever radio boat.
  • Chris and Mike went to the science museum together and saw the Galaksija (previous guest Voja Antonic’s design)
• Devices
  • Mike has been designing devices using loads of 0402 white LEDs. He also gets $0.01 4mm LEDs on aliexpress.
  • Osram Duris E
• Reverse engineering
  • Mike has experience reprogramming analog(ue) phones. This was done by modifying or moving the ESN of a device.
  • The Sony D50 service manual that Dave tore down had a great service manual. Some of the old phones used to have those, but they were hard to get. 
  • The eeproms were something like 9346
  • Mike had to write disassemblers and then read the output to figure out what was going on. He also ended up tracing program flow using a logic analyzer
  • Vodaphone had prepaid phones, others were not well implemented and ended up giving away free calls. 
  • Mike ended up emulating the Dallas UID chips with a small board in order to reprogram the ESN.
• The last time Mike was on an Amp Hour episode he talked about using PICs.
• Write the bootloader first…and make sure it’s rock solid!

Image linked from Twitter, also features @szczys

The post #294 – Live from Serbia with Mike Harrison first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

And are Mouser breaching customer confidentiality?

The post #224 – Meracious Mike Manuduction first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Mike Harrison of Mike’s Electric Stuff and White Wing Logic!

• Mike’s YouTube channel and videos are likely how many of our listeners know who Mike is.
• Mike has been featured on our show in the past, both as the contributor of the show’s name and sending in photos of his awesome bench!
• He started in a repair department, where he learned to troubleshoot and prank people!
• Later jobs included early IT work with early IBM PCs.
• While at that job, he started designing with the BBC Micro (based on the 6502 CPU) and for the ACORN (now ARM) Archimedes family.
• Many programs Mike writes to interface with lower level stuff is in Visual Basic 6 (now defunct). Chris says there is a downgrade path from .NET.
• He got started with PICs when they were transitioning from Mask ROM parts to One Time Programmable (OTP) parts and a customer needed an alarm system that could output different types of alarms.
• Mike is also a registered consultant with Microchip, which has netted him a job or two in the past.
• He got started with LEDs at Dorkbot in London
• The arts have gotten a boost in London from the Section 106 planning development, which mandates all money spent on building must have some portion go to development (including the Arts).
• Mike’s lab has a pick and place machine in the lab (cost around £8K) which he wrote software to optimize.
• He uses PCAD and does the layout first (!)
• Mike has worked on multiple UFO projects, including one in Gdansk, Poland and one in Seattle for Halo 4
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uynq2cs1xeU[/tube]
• The UK scene, especially the art and architecture scene, is vibrant right now.
• Working with “Technology Will Save Us”, Mike designed the Lumiphone (a soldering project with LEDs and Theramin that costs less than £3) and the Bright Eyes Glasses, which was a Kickstarter campaign.
• Mike is obviously known for his great teardown videos!
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osAKuPGhK3I[/tube]
• The baggage X-ray machine took a friend and a van to haul back to his shop…and he broke even on the project!
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPyE29ABmoA[/tube]
• A more recent project has 2106 LEDs and 2106 PICs, one per LED.  This new design could have issues if Microchip has supply chain problems, as Steve Sanghi’s letter about lead times seems to suggest.
• Mike thinks a good way to get into art is to make your own. He cited the quadcopter stage show.
• See the silly emails Mike has gotten over the years at his “Muppet alert” page.
• You can find Mike on Twitter at @Mikelectricstuf

Many thanks to Mike for taking the time to speak with us!

The post #135 – An Interview with Mike Harrison – X-ray Examining Xenogogue first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.