We are doing a 2025 listener survey! Answer the survey and put in your email to win one of three Jumperless OG units donated by Kevin Cappuccio (past guest of the show). Last day to input is June 1st.

This episode was recorded Monday the 12th, which has implications on discussions.

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

Trying out generating show notes using NotebookLM from Google. We’d love your feedback in the comments.

The post #694 – Voltage, Vibes, and VOCs first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Jeff Geerling of the Jeff Geerling YouTube Channel!

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

The post #651 – Learning Computing with Jeff Geerling first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• The Hyper Encabulator (natural successor to the Turbo Encabulator and later the Electro Turbo Encabulator that Dave was part of)
• DALL-E is the AI art engine that made our artwork this week.
• The cool thing you missed at the Tesla AI day (eevblog)
• Laura from Oxide Computer was on the show talking about servers
• The “Open Compute Project” is the FB project Chris was thinking of.
• Robotic Ice Cream Fail
• Fast food robots are being promoted in the press currently. But that’s nothing new! NYtimes has a history of “robots doing jobs” at fast food places.
• Jack of All Trades
• Chris is working on what he calls a “Lego” prototype, basically PCBs to replace just point to point wiring between other breakout boards.
• He has been working on an IoT Trashcan Monitor Reference Design and also wrote about the process (and made a video about it)
• The NXP RT1062 is on the Teensy 4 and is a beast of a part…600 MHz microcontroller
• Chris is also looking at getting a milling machine again
• Past guest John Saunders got started with a milling machine in his NYC apartment (hence NYC CNC)
• Dave made a video about how to shop for enclosures…and forgot he made it because of Chris!
• Dave is looking for an enclosure with an angled screen.
• Shopping for boxes is the only activity we’d consider in the metaverse
• Chris has been working on remote hardware training, including build systems for firmware.
• Dave has been doing low power auditing in the home, looking for power leaks.
• X vs Y cap
• Romex is a commercial term for power cables in the wall in the US
• The Smart Grid episode with Paul Zawada is a good reference for people learning about power
• Dave made a recent video about the financial viability of battery backup in the home.
• Vampire power
• Federal Pacific Panels Blow up! Chris had one in the house he bought in 2009 (it was replaced)
• Video of the measurement

The post #604 – Robo Fry Guy first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Ray Ozzie, founder and CEO of Blues Wireless!

• Chris had a Notecard / Notecarrier in front of him from a training he attended.
• Blues describes the Notecard as a “data pump”.
• Ray first encountered the cellular IoT space with the Safecast project, which started in March 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Former guests Akiba and Bunnie also worked on the Safecast project.
• The earliest versions of monitoring were Geiger + GPS + cellular. Sometimes they collected data onto SD cards when cellular wasn’t available.
• When the towers were available, it was 3G. Early prototyping was with Adafruit Fona 3G modules and Voltaic panels. Later prototypes included LoRa networks.
• There were software solutions involved using Balena.io (formerly Resin.io)
• Solarcast boxes
• PSM (power save mode)
• PTCRB certification
• Craig Mundie
• Ray had formerly worked at Microsoft, where he took over as Chief Software Architect when Bill Gates stepped down to work on his foundation.
• Ray also worked at places like
  • Data General
  • Software Arts
  • Iris Associates
  • Groove Networks (the acquisition of which brought Ray to Microsoft)
• Ray’s early days were programming on TRS80s and using Intel 8080s to help Physics grad students do their experiements.
• Ray has a range of huge software projects he’s worked on
  • Visicalc
  • Lotus123
  • Lotus Symphony
  • Lotus Notes
• Competition in the 90s
• Chris is amazed at hearing about how early software was built, which reminded him of the Xerox Parc book discussed on the show previously.
• Ray referenced this “org chart for Microsoft” with guns pointing at one another. (found here)
• 300 to 2400 bps upgrades was a big deal!
• Ray on working on tech in the ‘good old days’: “You knew where it was going but it took so much longer to get there”
• The Blues Notecard is built on top of the STM32L4R5, which has 640K RAM, and 2 MB Flash. It felt familiar to Ray because of his early programming days on similarly constrained computers.
• Drawing people into orbit to increase impact
• Ray is a Computer History Museum fellow as of 2021. Tributes from Bill Gates and Mark Cuban. Ray will be helping to induct Don Bitzer for his work on PLATO.
• Storage Tube
• Blues Wireless was Ray’s solution to the problems of cellular IoT
• Developing connectivity into products
• PIC32 talking to cellular
• Ray gives an example of how an engineer might retrofit an older product with a Blues Notecard
• Dev.blues.io is the hub for people building with Blues. It has links to the Notehub, which is how you interact with your data coming back to Blues.
• Uri / Wokwi episode
• “we dont’ provide the glass”
• A cellular Notecard is $50 for hardware, 10 years of cellular data (500 MB), plus consumption credits on the Blues Wireless Notehub. Most people sending back data won’t go over limits unless they’re trying to send a lot of data.
• Powered applications can save on session overhead by staying connected. Also applications can queue “notes” (data packets) and then send all of them at once to cut down on the need for multiple sessions to the cell tower. The data will synchronize to Notefiles (database).
• Chris asked for Ray’s predictions for 5-10 years out, since Ray has been very successful in the many parts of his career. Ray wants to get 10s of billions devices and thinks this will enable a lot of new things.
• Find Ray online!
  • @rozzie on twitter
  • Ray’s LinkedIn
• Check out the main site at blues.io and check out the developer portal at dev.blues.io. Ray recommended picking up a kit to get started.

The post #603 – An Interview with Ray Ozzie (Blues Wireless) first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• • Dave and other YouTubers have been making reaction/explainer videos about Veritasium’s video, “The Big Misconception about Electricity”
  • Feynman lectures
  • How electricity gets to you (Wendover)
  • World’s largest solar array using HVDC
  • Photonicinduction
  • Electric Buses
  • Linus Tech Tips is growing their lab (and business)
  • Do career prospects change for people above 40 in the hardware industry? How is it different from the software industry, discussed on hacker news?
  • Chris recently went full-time at a startup called Golioth. Not mentioned on the show, but Chris also wrote about it here.
    • Started by former guest Jonathan Beri
    • Golioth is built to work with Zephyr RTOS currently.
    • In a former episode, Chris talked about hiring Bilal to write drivers for cellular modems, but that still wouldn’t hook into databases, it just throws MQTT packets at a server.
    • Chris was able to build a proof-of-concept using cellular modems in 3 hours total.
  • Sam Feller (former Engineer Blogs writer) wrote about keeping in touch using a CRM.
  • Amazon Re:Invent is offering private 5G networks in factories

The post #569 – Electric Fields, Son. first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

This episode was sponsored by Mouser Electronics. Check out TheAmpHour.com/immersive for more information about Immersive Technology and how it might change your engineering workflow.

Welcome, Florin of the Voltlog YouTube Channel!

• Florin is a YouTuber and consulting engineer based out of Romania.
• Chris has many of the low cost finds that Florin discusses on his channel, often on the “In The Mail” segments. His focus on low cost comes from the hassle of importing and paying VAT on equipment.
• Florin likes that Mouser allows him to pay the taxes up front.
• He got into electronics early and eventually ended up selling dev boards to his school based on the PIC32.
• After school, he went to work in the automotive space, including for Continental
• Florin once met up with past guest Andreas Spiess, while he was visiting Romania.
• Automotive videos come from his general interest in cars but also working on automotive chips for Freescale in France from 2011-2012

• ECU
• The ESP32 CanLite has GPIO in addition to LIN/CAN
• CAN bus is a protocol, without any requirements on the formatting of the message (or frame)
• The parts (and the entire product) would need to work over a wide temp range to be useful in a car long term.
• What are users doing with the CanLite?
  • Grabbing info from car
  • Interfacing with CAN
• We have discussed CAN bus with Macchina on the show before
• CAN works with a “lowest wins” bus topology.
• Florin is also consulting when he’s not making videos. People find him via YouTube.
• He has had 3 Different labs, in his latest, he made a custom workbench:

• IoT
• Florin recently got into ham radio (callsign: YO4VLT) and built a UHF repeater/gateway:

• His new office also has a Tasmota floor heater, so he built a control board for it

• Looking for gift ideas for the holidays? Florin has you covered:

• Chris asked for 2 recommendations off the list:
  • Cheap option: a metal plunger for syringes for dispensing paste or flux
  • More expensive, but still around #100: a Uni-T waveform generator:

• Find Florin online:
  • YouTube
  • Twitter
  • Tindie

Automated Transcript

The transcript is autogenerated from Zencastr, our recording software. We attach no guarantees to its accuracy, but offer it as a way to make the show more accessible: 568 – Voltlog – Auto-Transcript

The post #568 – YouTube to Consulting with Florin of Voltlog first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Thanks to our sponsor Mouser Electronics. This week Chris and Paul discuss Industrial Automation during the ad break.

The post #558 – Toasted Marshmallow Connectors first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

We recorded this all on video as well:

• Colin is an assistant professor at Dalhousie University, where he got his PhD. He is moving out of that role (and likely into a role as an Adjunct) as of 8/31. Private sector, FTW!
• Side channel analysis
• Colin has been testing the security of the doorlocks on his new building
• Samy Kamkar was on episode 308, and is now working on a smart doorlock system.
• Jon Beri (ep 526) also mentioned doorlock security and the vertical nature of the industry
• The point of university
• Colin is doing remote training for Black Hat this year.
• Getting access to the pins on the Apple AirTag
• “Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, What’s really inside Apple’s U1 Chip”
• Apple U1 Chip
• advancedsecurity.training
• Meetups
• The new(er) Chip Shouter kit is for Fault Injection
• Colin tried it on early Trezor wallets
• It’s surprising there isn’t a stamp of approval like a UL certification for embedded device security.
• How can you test your product for security issues?
• The ARM PSA is a self checklist and certification program.
• Colin has been working on The Hardware Hacking Handbook with Jasper van Woudenberg. The book is due out in November.
• Smart Locks – Schlage
• Starlink dish
• Ransomware for IoT
• Dumping firmware
• Unlocking firmware
• Sourcing woes
• ChipWhisperer Husky is coming out soon, keep an eye on Crowd Supply for the latest news about the
• Colin has been using his Desktop PNP less often
• How should you get started? Try the ChipWhisperer Nano
• Colin is taking Matt Venn’s Zero to ASIC course

The post #552 – Shouting at chips with Colin O’Flynn first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. They are on the show talking about predictive maintenance this week and how the technology will change industries like automotive and industrial processing. To learn more, check out TheAmpHour.com/predictive.

Welcome Pete Staples of Blue Clover Devices!

• Blue Clover Devices (BCD) is “The IOT ODM“
• ODMs are a flavor of CM where they do more of the design work
• Busy EEs use their services to take on more of the design work
• Most products are on a 9 month cycle. Some smaller designs (like a recent SiFive dev board) are shorter timelines.
• Facilities:
  • Started in LA
  • Shenzhen
  • Now have an SF office (where Pete is located)
• They reluctantly started mfg in China, because CMs wouldn’t take on the work.
• The factory started with “Screwdriver work” (assembly), but have moved on to PCBA and precision cable
• Core of workers help to mentor younger workers
• Pete took an MBA class in operations but he didn’t expect the difficulties with manufacturing
• Container party
• Taking stuff to china: comes down to economics. Doing it for products making less than $1M per year doesn’t make much sense.
• Learn manufacturing locally first.
• Pete checked out CMs in the bay area and didn’t think they could add much value otherwise.
• Devices like the LPKF and Nano Dimension Dragon Fly aren’t good substitutes for a PCB house
• BCD’s flagship product is the PLT
  • PLT200 – targets IoT devices like nRF52 (described in Embedded.fm episode)
  • PLT300 – targets Linux devices
• The PLT acts as a bridge between developers and factory
• Programming and testing devices on a line
• Internally:
  • Programmable power supply
  • Souped up JLink
  • DMM
    • Volage
    • Current
    • Freq counter
  • Linux computer
  • UART interaction as well
  • CAN bus
• Many test stands are Labview based, so they are tied to that location
• With the PLT, can have one in the US and one in the factory
• Revision control and using CI/CD
• Not built for design validation (like NI or test equipment mfg)
• How does PLT talk back?
  • PLT cloud – a portal to manage devices
  • Needs to be a secure connection
  • Slack app integration
• The PLT hooks to the ICT (In Circuit Tester)
• Supports 48 digital and 45 analog test points
• The cassette is custom, but can be used again with future designs
• Webhooks allow for pulling serial numbers
• Box is enrolled to an organization
• PLTs used in China
  • Not blocked, but network isn’t always reliable
  • Needs internet to work
• YAML test script
• Different steps might be connecting up to the PLT
• Test Plan Reference
• Scanner / label printer works at a lower level than Jan was talking about on the show
• Release can be Zebra label format
• How is data being used?
• Example: product with 3 circuit boards
• Gage R&R
• PLT running Zephyr and linux
• Trends: things are going up market and have more Linux in them. There will still be a separation due to power, cost.
• Blue Clover is working on having less environmental impact after the pandemic
  • Working with people in the climate neutral community
  • Food and apparel have talked about sourcing their materials
• Check out bcdevices.com for more info
• Twitter @petestaples
• To get a free USB cable: email pete@bcdevices.com

The post #544 – Standardizing Manufacturing with Pete Staples first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Matt Liberty, creator of the Joulescope!

• The Joulescope solves the problem of measuring current with a high dynamic range.
• There are very different sense resistors when measuring active current vs sleep current
• Chris learned this when working on electrometers at Keithley.
• The key thing is keeping the burden voltage low so it does not brown out low voltage systems
• Chris is planning on using the Joulescope to measure the ABC board
• Matt recommends starting with a power budget
• It’s also important to understand how to set up triggers for the joulescope, such as a GPIO
• Joulescope sits in the middle of the device under test (DUT) and the power supply of the system.
• The front panels can be swapped out. It comes with USB and binding posts by default.
• Default view is multimeter view, but the real magic is looking at the power profile.
• There are many pitfalls in low power electronics, such as backpowering a pin
• Some people are using Joulescopes in opearations/deployment to test devices are performing as expected.
• There is an open source Python library
• Matt describes why some elements are open vs closed source
• GPIB
• LXI
• Most traditional test equipment doese a capture and transfers the buffer (either to a computer or a screen)
• The Joulescope and other headless equipment streams the data. This is similar to the HackRF (episode) and Saleae (episode).
• Streaming vs Buffering
• Isochronous timing
• USB limitations means you cannot have too many Joulescopes that are plugged in to a single system.
• Competition
  • High end test equipment from Keysight
  • uCurrent
  • Current ranger
  • Nano ranger
  • Otii Arc
  • Power Profiler 2 kit
• This is a different way of working and might feel weird to people that grew up with knobs and dials
• Matt’s background is in consulting, mostly around firmware (though he does hardware and FPGAs)
• A main task while consulting was working with the firmware to lower power, hence the desire to build the Joulescope
• When hunting down current problems, Matt recommends “Divide and conquer”. Other things to look at:
  • Check voltages across resistors
  • Pullups to VCC and not turning off power rails properly
  • Backpowering pins via protection diodes
  • Odd problems he has seen
    • Flux residue causing more leakage current than expected
    • Capacitor leakage (through the series resistance)
• Matt was on Embedded.fm a couple of years ago
• Lower power modes in STM32 clock tree
• Matt’s tactic for a simple low power system: “Turn everything on, do what you need, go back to sleep”
• Matt has discussed struggles to get the product out in the world on the Consulting Forum.
• Matt has been a solo consultant since 2011. He knows how to carve out consulting time, in this case his “client” was his own project.
• But why develop a product?
• Matt’s Contract Manufacturer (CM) is 15 mins up the road
• Matt has set up a test station at his CM and trained the technician who watches the devices that fail testing.
• Parts on allocation
• Lot size is still 500
• Matt was recently on the Hello Blink show talking about hiring subcontractors. He has managed employees in the past at Hillcrest.
• 2 FPGAs internally, both of them Ice40 (but not using the open toolchain yet)
• This is an isolated design, meaning you can safely plug it into your USB port and whatever is being tested is galvanically isolated.
• Device side FPGA does math on the other side of the isolation barrier
• The host side FPGA doesn’t do as much
• Device FPGA is there to be really responsive and to handle both ADCs in lockstep
• Open source FPGA toos
• Current model is the JS110, Matt is not sure on other models yet. He would like to focus on two models that try to go lower cost / higher performance (2 separate things)
• CMRR
• Possibly going to make a module that acts like a high current sensor
• Supporting multiple versions of hardware
• Matt’s lab is all scripted using python
• Buy a Joulescope for $799, more than 1/10th the price of a similar class of instrument.
• Matt now has two distributors overseas, and is hoping to be part of the Digikey marketplace soon, to avoid needing to get on Approved Vendor Lists (AVLs) at large clients.
• Twitter
• Linkedin

The post #527 – Measuring Current with Matt Liberty first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Jonathan Beri, founder of Golioth!

Today’s episode is sponsored by Mouser Electronics, who are discussing RISC-V. Check out their page on resources about RISC-V and how you can purchase kits that include chips using the open source ISA and learn more about how they can benefit your project.

• What makes IoT so hard? “It’s a system of systems”
• Commercial off the shelf (COTS) systems are whitelabeled hardware with custom firmware/software
• We use a brief example of a forest fire sensor using the ABC board
• Firmware and security models
• AWS IoT vs Azure IoT platforms
• Implications of choosing a cloud provider
• Jon has a background in hardware
• He started at Google working on Firebase. Later they attempted a “Firebase for Arduino” that did not pan out.
• He then joined Nest shortly after the Google acquisition, working on the communications.
• Procurement and planning was interesting for Nest, especially because they added sensors that weren’t available to the user / firmware right away.
• Thread is a protocol that creates mesh network on a wide range of radios
• Every device can talk to one another
• It uses 2.4 GHz and is built on top of 802.15.4
• How do thread devices get back to the internet?
• OpenThread runs on nrf52840
• Tutorial on OpenThread
• After Nest, Jon went to Particle and worked on embedded
• OpenThread based
• There were lots of adventures with early Cat-M1 on the Ublox R410B
• Particle bought RedBear, a Chinese startup with a lot of RF knowledge
• Hardware is designed by Mohit Bhoite, who has been on Embedded.fm and also is a circuit sculpture master
• Jon’s last job was at WeWork (RIP?)
• He wanted to learn more on the cloud side of things.
• There were a number of WeWork sites spread out over 600 buildings. Each of these has a physical security need (door locks, turnstiles, etc)
• The challenge is that his team didn’t own or have the ability to change the hardware
• Wanted to build the experience
• Proxy (startup)
• Going towards solving some of these problems
• Physical constraints
• ABC board
• Vertically integrated embedded platform
• Particle B523
• Hardware matters
• Android Things, now depricated
• Building scooters
• Nest door lock with Yale
• FreeRTOS with AWS
• Who do you hire to do the “in-between” hardware and the web?
• Reasons IoT products fail
• IT cares about setup, managing it, integrating into business process
• Enterprise cnversations and managing devices
• Fleet management
• Fleet stuff is normally for the business person
• Golioth
• Jon wrote about CoAP and how it works
• Chris wishes there is a site like BuiltWith…but for IoT devices
• Protocols are an arbitrage opportunity
• Internet is now standard part of RTOSes
  • Mongoose
  • Contiki
  • Riot OS
  • NuttX
• HALs (Hardware Abstraction Layers) or PALs (Platform Abstraction Layers)
• “Where’s the porting guide vs where’s the hello world”
• Find Jon on
  • Twitter
  • Zephyr slack
  • The Interrupt (associated blog)
• Sign up for more info about the upcoming platform on Golioth.io
• More info about Jon’s stealth mode startup on Stacey on IoT

Thanks to our Patrons for sponsoring today’s show as well!

The post #526 – Why IoT Is Difficult with Jonathan Beri first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• We resume our discussion of “specialist” vs “generalist”, as discussed many other times on the show.
• We started out talking about how Chris recently hired Bilal, who is a great developer focused on Zephyr. We discuss  how that kind of focus can be useful to a young developer.
• Chris was first exposed to Zephyr on the BeagleConnect, a new IoT product that uses Greybus coming from the BeagleBoard.org foundation soon.
• Past guest Greg Davill – MJ of home assembly?
• 10x engineer
• Book recommendations:
  • Ultralearning
  • Mastery
  • First 20 Hours
• Anti-Recommendation
  • Range
• Tom Brady talking about his improvment over time
• Michael Phelps (long arms, swimmer) vs Hicham El Guerrouj physiology (long legs, distance runner). Chris later realized this was discussed in James Clear’s Atomic Habit book.
• Nick Yarris on the Joe Rogan podcast
• Should we have called the episode, “Chris and Dave talk sports”?
• Next week we’ll have Jay Carlson on to talk about his recent tome on building Embedded linux systems, ask your questions here.
• Jay also wrote The Amazing $1 microcontroller
• Chris used the “Send to Kindle” Chrome plugin to read on his Kindle
• Jay has been on two great episodes of Embedded.fm, 226 and 303
• The $1 micro page is how Chris started working with the EFM8LB1
• Raspberry Pi 4 Compute was recently announced
• It is on an 8 year cycle. No one wants to get a “Last time buy” notice, espeically when designed into an industrial scenario.
• Baremetal programming on the TinyAVR 0
• Chris was surprised Dave hadn’t heard of a “long range radio power transmitter“, but apparently it’s an older article!
• Bare Conductive (where past guest Stefan Dzisiewski-Smith works) wrote about how they have maintained an office, albeit changed in the era of COVID
• Dave mentioned Altium used to have “half cube” (low walls) but not like the startups do with a truly open office plan.
• WeWork has glass boxes
• Dave is downsizing commercial property
• “Does this DMM bring me joy?” a la Marie Kondo
• Both Dave and Chris downsizing
• Dan Anderson, the creator of the pink polyethelene bags, talks about static (content warning: not PC)
• 345 kV substation and 34.5 kV substation reviews

Thanks to our Patrons for sponsoring today’s episode. You can become one of them by going to Patreon.com/TheAmpHour. A special thanks to our corporate sponsor Binho.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

The post #514 – Focus, Dammit first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Jared Wolff of Circuit Dojo!

• Jared is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology (which Chris also considered attending). He did co-ops while there, like we talked about on last week’s episode.
• While on co-op at Cisco, he was in the cable group and marveled at the techs doing repairs with magnet wire.
• He is an east coast guy at heart, so he moved back to Connecticut eventually
• Jared worked at Apple for a while, but the lifestyle is difficult because of time requirements and stressful travel. He was also there when Steve Jobs was still around and there was a bit of over the top hero worship.
• Nordic’s early bluetooth chipset was the nRF8001, which was a transceiver over SPI (no micro)
• Working for startups was interesting if you thrive on doing a lot of different things
• Burnt out on his last startup, decided to ride his motorcycle up and down the west coast. He got sick and ended up diagnosing himself with Valley Fever, a fungal infection prevalent in one of the places he visited.
• After healing up, he went to Taiwan for 4-6 monhs.
• There is a semiconductor fabrication program at RIT. There is a silicon ingot in a display case out front there.
• While recovering from burnout, a previous mentor hit him up for the IoT project.
• Mix of international and domestic manufacturing in his past
• A lot of military nearby in CT
• Comparison quotes with Taiwan, it was only a few dollars more for domestic production.
• Currently building a board with an nRF9160 module, the new cellular module from Nordic Semiconductor.
• Current status of nRF9160 is that it is shipping and working on different carriers throughout the world on Cat M1 networks.
• What does it take to get a modem talking to towers?
• Modems abstract commands in software
• Jared will be testing for FCC, ISED, CE
• Working with Resin
• The cellular module is pre-certified but carriers still want you to test your design on their network.
• Verizon requires over the air firmware capabilities, in case something goes wrong. The nRF91 firmware OTA is on the application side, which is unusual.
• Jared is hoping the modem will have bluetooth at somepoint as well. The external wideband antenna he is using might be good enough.
• Crowdfunding had an external antenna included.
• There are different categories of cellular service. Most cellphones operate with Cat 4 or Cat 6 connections. The higher the category, the faster the speed.
• Cat M1 is the slowest on LTE. NB-IOT is different equipment, so it isn’t even considered to be LTE.
• Based on the development from Nordic, Jared is using Zephyr to run his board.
• It’s an Real Time Operating System, but “feels” like linux for embedded. Zephyr is built on top of the chip’s SDK. “West” is the downloader that pulls in necessary dependencies, based upon a definition file.
• Huge library of boards available
• Jared wrote a post on how to create your own drivers on Zephyr
• The Device tree maintains swappability
• The nRF91 board is based on the adafruit feather form factor. Jared had previously created the air quality wing, which had various sensors:
  • TVOC
  • Humidity / Temp
  • Particulate sensor
• Compatibility matrix on the Nordic site
• Chris recommends checking what kind of coverage you have with open signal.
• Though the first board run is no longer for sale, some boards are available soon. You can get a discount on a board at jaredwolff.com/amphour
• You can also follow along on Jared’s progress on his blog, where he also writes about firmware tests.

The post #509 – Cellular IoT with Jared Wolff first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

500 episodes of goofing around, including during our only in person meeting

Episode 500! About 10 years in! (our first show was August 10th, 2010)

• Dave consolidated a BOM on a recent video
• Analog Discovery 2’s are out of stock just about everywhere: a mixture of sourcing problems and high need for schools
• Dave noticed a mistake while doing a breadboard class
• James (Baldengineer) goes over the Miller Plateau
• Dave watches some ahem…interesting…movies on Amazon Prime
• Motivation of school/gym
• The Skywater PDK was announced. Tim Ansell (past guest) will return next week to discuss more.
• Dave predicts Apple will buy a semiconductor company
• “Cheap as chips”
• DIN now has an OSHW standard. Read the actual standard here.
• DIN connector
• DIN is a German standards agency
• Okie Dokie Dr Jones
• ESP32 s2 review by Andreas Spiess
• Former guest Sam Zeloof shows off how he does photolithography in his home semiconductor lab.
• The Coming Chip Wars of the 21st Century (Steve Blank)
• Capacitor factory video
• Chip printer (we all knew that was coming)
• Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
• Anton Petrov channel explaining papers
• RF PCB simulation cookbook
• The Navy Electricity and Electronics Traning Series
• “IoT in 5 Days” eBook (from 2015)
• Alan Wolke has been putting out videos about VNAs (that Chris wish he had access to a few months ago!)
• The Intuitive Guide to Maxwell’s Equations
• Chris has been reading “Ultralearning”
• Want to win a dev board from QuickLogic? They are running a Crowd Supply campaign for the “QuickFeather”. Answer the questions below for a chance to win:

The post #500 – Two and a Half Orders of Magnitude first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Dr Ming Zhang, CEO and founder of zGlue!

• What is zGlue? It’s a company that helps engineers integrate Chiplets into a single package, AKA heterogenous chip integration.
• ASIC are monolithic and require much higher capital investment and testing.
• The key advantage of zGlue is miniturization
• zGlue has an reference chip they publish called the Omnichip. It has Bluetooth, temp sensor, memory, and other sensors, 7 Chiplets in total.
• The output package is an LGA that is 8 mm x 6 mm.
• The system complexity needs to be high enough for it to matter: it’s unlikely engineers will need this service to put together 2 simple chips.
• It means working outside the PCB workflow, which will be an adjustment. The new workflow is entirely within the ChipBuilder environment though.
• The Chiplets a placed onto a “Smart Fabric”, which is a programmable interconnect with some small functions built in.
• There is also “common denominator IP”, like LED drivers and security elements
• The example Omnichip targets IoT products
• Good candidates for zGlue are constrained system by design, which means they probably fit into a theme like “IoT” and the associated included elements in the smart fabric.
• zGlue also support custom smart fabric, but there will be added cost, time for getting it made/tested.
• This “bigger LEGO board” is different than what Adrian Tang talked about, making custom systems for each design.
• How does smart fabric handle power/analog/RF? RF on the top metal, the analog and power are different “taps”. The more digital a signal, the deeper it goes into the fabric. The metal requires customization in the mask.
• There are “Templates“, which should help people get started, as well as an “Open Chiplet template“, which was released 2 weeks ago with Google.
• physics decisions based on design rules
• Go shopping on zGlue on their “Chiplet Store“
• Templates are top down
• There is no licensing agreement required for each chip, because it’s like buying the chip off the shelf (sans the polymide package). Almost all Chiplets are off the shelf parts.
• Example templates:
  • Edge node AI (detect gestures and voice)
  • Medical
  • Industrial
  • Wearables
  • Smart Graziery
• For pricing, there is a unit cost and development cost. The best way to get started is the “Shuttle program”, which is $25K for 10 components (and includes development cost).
• Once you get to production, there are options for consignment or non-consignment
• Development takes about 1 to 3 months.
• You can buy some of their “off the shelf” components for even less, such as the GEM1, GEM2, or Omnichip design.
• They use TSMC for silicon fab and ASE for assembly.
• At the assembly facility, the Chiplets come on tape and reel and are placed in a similar manner to other components.
• Who does Ming say they’re targeting? “Hardware innovators”, namely people that are trying to go impossibly small or impossibly fast.
• For the brave, you can communicate directly with the smart fabric during debug.
• Ming thinks all things will converge and many designs will go towards this path in the future.
• zGlue was conceived to stack things and they will start going from 2D to 3D designs in the future.
• For more information, check out the specific links above or check out zglue.com.
• They will be exhibiting at DAC/SemiCon West (July 20-24) with a “Virtual Booth”. The link for that is not yet active, but you can register for the event

The post #499 – Discussing Chiplets with Ming Zhang first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Andreas Spiess!

• You may know Andreas from his YouTube channel about connected devices and electronics, as “the guy with the Swiss accent”
• The content on the channel is for intermediate people
• A lot of his content is piecing things together
• His newest video shows how to use tire pressure monitoring systems for home brewing
• The advantage of age is having seen a lot and having “lots of hooks in the brain”
• Goethe wrote “I didn’t have enough time to make it this short“
• Andreas got started in the 70s, working on a forbidden fm transmitter
• CB radio wasn’t allowed in Switzerland at the time.
• He was in military service, where he learned Morse code.
• He later worked in Cameroon and Damascus for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
• After a degree in EE, he realized he made his hobby into his job.
• After an MBA, Andreas started doing product management.
• He also had a product that was a Morse code trainer. These were the topics of his first few videos on YouTube.
• “Every engineer should go into sales” to learn about things like sales pressure and budgeting.
• PhD in sales of investment goods.
• Using tech used in manufacturing (SPC) but applied to sales.
• First you had to find a process
• ERP systems
• Automation for buying parts
• Rules are important for automation
• “The most applied rule is ‘it depends’. This requires trained people which is expensive.”
• Even AI is finding out the rules
• “The most valuable world in the world is no”
• ESP32, ESP8266
• Rules based influenced on IoT interests
• First computer was TRS80
• James Bruton
• Ben Krasnow’s cookie machine
• Ben Krasnow’s video on laser traces.
• Multiple Dimensions is a company that Andreas helped get started. They make 3D PCBs, shown in the video above.
• Videos about antenna performance
• Influence of battery life on antenna
• Was first meant for PCBs and then later antennas were figured out
• Sleepwalking an ESP32
• Using both cores on the ESP32
• Building a reggae robot.
• AvE and This Old Tony
• Fleet management
• IoT App Story
• OTA updates
• Other things coming on the channel like BLE
• Micro (circuit) python vs arduino
• Will be doing a video with Damien George
• Benchmarks of micropython
• Check any of Andreas’ videos for contact info. He’s on FB and Twitter but mostly YouTube.

The post #435 – An Interview with Andreas Spiess first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Maarten Engelen, founder and CTO/MD of Hiber!

(Not discussed, but relevant: an article about the launch late last year)

• Chris met Joris last year while in Amsterdam, who now works at Hiber and introduced him to Maarten
  • 0h 0m 46s
• Maarten had no previous experience in satellite tech
  • 0h 0m 55s
• Space industry in the Netherlands
  • 0h 1m 8s
• Not just Amsterdam
  • 0h 8m 34s
• Delft University
  • 0h 8m 55s
• ESTEC – ESA research center in Noordwijk
  • 0h 9m 13s
• Iridium satellite
  • 0h 14m 2s
• Windows update over satellite
  • 0h 14m 8s
• Lifetime of orbit is limited
  • 0h 16m 27s
• Drag on the satellites
  • 0h 17m 24s
• Why not do a further out orbit?
  • 0h 18m 24s
• Benefits only add up over large distances
  • 0h 21m 26s
• Doesn’t have a huge effect on the antenna
  • 0h 21m 52s
• Is the antenna on the satellite directional?
  • 0h 23m 27s
• Helical antenna
  • 0h 23m 41s
• Reaction wheels
  • 0h 24m 44s
• ADCS – Attitude Determination and Control System
  • 0h 24m 47s
• Sun sensors
  • 0h 26m 57s
• Magnetic sensors
  • 0h 27m 11s
• Star tracker
  • 0h 27m 16s
• Talking about the module
  • 0h 33m 29s
• Running at 400MHz
  • 0h 33m 42s
• Lower bitrate
  • 0h 34m 10s
• Currently once per day, maybe once per hour in the next year
  • 0h 34m 55s
• Licensed band
  • 0h 35m 43s
• MSS band (mobile satellite services)
  • 0h 35m 48s
• ITU is part of the UN
  • 0h 35m 56s
• Coordination process is the same
  • 0h 36m 39s
• There’s no iSM band for space
  • 0h 36m 58s
• Each RF map was developed separately
  • 0h 39m 14s
• What the module looks like
  • 0h 41m 16s
• Downlink is used scheduling right now
  • 0h 43m 17s
• They’re SDRs, so can get new firmware and open up new bands
  • 0h 43m 48s
• Sleep vs transmit currents
  • 0h 45m 26s
• 100 nA deep sleep
  • 0h 45m 32s
• 3W peak power
  • 0h 45m 54s
• Conservify
  • 0h 47m 25s
• Use cases
  • 0h 48m 4s
  • IT and M2M is very broad
    • 0h 48m 14s
  • Logistics
    • 0h 48m 26s
  • Smart Ag
    • 0h 48m 33s
• This small country feeds the world
  • 0h 49m 46s
• Targeting industries that save money
  • 0h 50m 58s
• Costs for the service – $1 / month
  • 0h 52m 22s
• or $6 / year
  • 0h 52m 40s
• Modem is 40 euro right now
  • 0h 53m 8s
• Currently has GPS capabilities
  • 0h 58m 23s
• Certification is done for you
  • 1h 0m 44s
• FCC exception for whitelabel goods (ovens, dishwashers)
  • 1h 4m 7s
• Found via @talldarknweirdo and @brouhaha on Twitter
  • 1h 5m 22s
• To learn more, go to Hiber.global or follow @HiberGlobal on twitter or Facebook
  • 1h 5m 46s

Image Credit: @awscloud_jp

The post #427 – An Interview with Maarten Engelen first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, John Davis! He is a sales engineer who owns/runs Paul Davis Automation, a rep company in Cleveland Ohio focused on the industrial automation space. John also uses his hands-on sales experience to develop accessible industrial electronics for his company Three ML, LLC.

This week notes will be a bit different. I was able to take notes that are roughly timestamped! Let us know if these are useful or accurate. They are links where relevant:

• Mechatronics
  0h 2m 58s
• John is a Manufacturer’s rep
  0h 4m 7s
• Chris had written about the difference between sales and mkt rep
  0h 4m 52s
• Distributors
  0h 6m 51s
• John’s first sales experience was in retail selling bicycles
  0h 13m 29s
• How do you make money?
  0h 15m 4s
• Amazon affiliate is a type of “affiliate marketing”
  0h 17m 8s
• Ladder logic
  0h 24m 5s
• Relay logic
  0h 24m 34s
• PLC software
  0h 25m 56s
• Fiberglass plant
  0h 28m 55s
• Automation is key
  0h 30m 57s
• manufacturing in us, germany
  0h 31m 55s
• cost of switching/upgrading
  0h 33m 58s
• Shampoo, hamburger buns
  0h 36m 38s
• Push the button story (which I may have mis-attributed!). Here’s Sam’s product I mentioned.
  0h 38m 51s
• Most installs are incremental upgrades
  0h 40m 8s
• Rockwell encompass
  0h 40m 36s
• Encompass partner producs
  0h 41m 15s
• Industrial networks
  0h 43m 56s
• Different types of real time
  0h 48m 53s
• Ethernet Industrial Protocol (IP), Profinet, Ethercat
  0h 49m 18s
• RS485, ModBus
  0h 51m 3s
• three-ml
  0h 53m 42s
• The line between value and problem solving
  0h 54m 17s
• Industrial raspberry pi
  0h 57m 16s
• Industrial IoT
  1h 0m 37s
• Medium voltage switchgear
  1h 2m 20s
• Monitoring bus bar temp
  1h 3m 16s
• 7M electricity bill / month
  1h 4m 33s
• Machine Pix twitter account
  1h 5m 56s
• Vendor relationships are important
  1h 6m 20s
• Daemon, which inspired DC Darknet
  1h 9m 7s
• Going into sales
  1h 12m 27s
• “There is no specification for how to do sales”
  1h 18m 13s
• Reach John on twitter at @johnprdavis
  1h 20m 0s

The post #385 – An Interview with John Davis first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave had some strife switching his workstation over to Win10. Chris had some strife with…talking this week.
• The 121GW Kickstarter is live! (wasn’t during recording). It uses the Hycon HY3130 multimeter chipset.
• Psychology of crowdfunding campaignsHackaday is putting out a new journal
• Autodesk just laid off 13% of their workforce
• Digikey releases an atomic footprint library for KiCad!
• The dangers (and historical context) of “bottom view” of footprints
• KiCad 5.0
• There’s a room at FOSDEM 2018 for Open CAD projects
• Colin Furze AMA
• List of Electronics youtubers over on the EEVblog forum
• Coin cell challenge
• Amazon announced their version of FreeRTOS at the Re:Invent conference
• Jack Ganssle (Embedded.com? EEtimes? Can’t find a link with Jack talking about it) has done RTOS surveys and a large percentage “roll their own”
• Tesla unveiled a large truck. How the hell will they charge that thing?
• Silicon is “Unforgiving,” Says Apple’s Chip Chief Johny Srouji (duh)
• An internet of things flop means some connected lights won’t work anymore
• Solid state battery technology from uTexas, with R&D lead John Goodenough (great name!) Thunderf00t did a video about the “perfect battery”
• An interview with a toy designer.

Thanks to the manchester library for the picture of magazines

The post #370 – Alternate Info Sources first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Mrs EEVblog inadvertently ordered an IoT dishwasher. It has not been allowed to phone home.
• Dave hadn’t heard of Wireshark, which is a diagnostic tool that lets you watch network traffic.
• Jon Oxer talks about hard wiring lightswitches with CAT5
• Amazon key is a new device that will let the couriers (delivery drivers) into your home. No thanks!
• Chris has finally been playing with MQTT. This was after watching a talk by Elliot Williams, who had posted a series of articles on Hackaday in the past about the service.
• Chris was at Superconference last weekend (see the streamed talks here). Dave thought Jeri looked sad in a picture Chris tweeted and implored him to give her a hug.
• The badge turned out great (discussed in past episodes). Badge hacking was even more intense this year.
• Discussions about app development for the 121GW meter. How many people will use the app?
• Dave needs to launch his kickstarter to hit his delivery date!
• Telephone protocols/bandwidth
• Schottky diode cross section! The electronupdate channel has a couple cross section videos.
• Quake (the video game) redrawn on an oscilloscope. Todd Bailey told us about his project that did something similar.
• TechShop has shut down. They have details on their site as a PDF as well.
• Is it possible to compare a makerspace to a (physical) gym?
• How I built this podcast with Chipotle founder.
• “Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out”
• When Gerry Roston (Civionics) that was on the show, he was a big proponent of Steve Blank who says you need to ‘Get out of the building’.

Thank you to Wikipedia for the picture of the taser

Transcript! (new)

Chris Gammell: This is the Amp Hour Podcast, released November 19th, 2017, episode 368, the EEVblog spark gap generator.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I’m Dave Jones from the EEVblog.

Chris Gammell: I’m Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Dave Jones: It happened.

Chris Gammell: What happened?

Dave Jones: My home got invaded by an Internet of Things’ appliance.

Chris Gammell: I saw your tweet of that. Is it Miele, [Mila 00:00:45]? How do you say that?

Dave Jones: [Milay 00:00:47], that’s how you pronounce it here, I don’t know. [Milay 00:00:49].

Chris Gammell: I know they make vacuums. What did you get?

Dave Jones: It’s a German company. I got a dishwasher. Obviously it wasn’t me. It was Mrs. EEVblog got a new dishwasher. She just, like the other one, she was fed up with it just completely. We had it for 10 years.

Chris Gammell: It’s the replacement cycles. Here’s the real question. Was it even an option to get something without internet connection these days, like high-end?

Dave Jones: I don’t know because I didn’t go shopping for it. She didn’t even go shopping. She just ordered it online.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: Yeah. I just came home yesterday and here was a new dishwasher, “Please install it.”

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, a dishwasher that greeted you once you entered the house?

Dave Jones: Yeah, “Welcome home, Dave.”

Chris Gammell: “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t clean that dish.” “Open the dishwasher door Hal.”

Dave Jones: It does. It opens on its own. It pops the door open after it’s finished. It’s got a little actuator that opens the door.

Chris Gammell: One of these days you’re going to be recording and you’re going to be like, “My bank account’s empty, what happened? My dishwasher stole all my online currencies.”

Dave Jones: Laundered it. It’s not a laundry but that would have been fun there if it was a washing machine.

Chris Gammell: Tell me about it. What does it do?

Dave Jones: I don’t want to know. I was installing it. There’s an install process where you can set for water hardness, the hardness of the water and there were all sorts of time and date and everything just because of the timer. Then I popped up with Miele at home and then I instantly knew what that means. I went, “This thing has Wi-Fi access doesn’t it?” She went, “Uh-huh (Affirmative),” as in, uh-huh (Affirmative).

Chris Gammell: It’s a feature. The crazy thing folks is the dishwasher said, “Uh-huh (Affirmative).” A brave new world here, buddy. Here’s a product idea for you, Mr. Product Design Company. You could sell it with every IoT device, the EEVblog Spark Gap Generator. Instantly block all RF in your house by flooding the spectrum.

Dave Jones: It just applies that directly to the RF output transistor, boom, poof, magic smoke, magic smoke mode.

Chris Gammell: Is it like you just don’t put it on your network then? Had you even tried it?

Dave Jones: No, I didn’t even try it. I didn’t want to try it just out of principle.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say you should get a Mi-Fi or a controlled attack surface like a cellular to Wi-Fi modem thing. Then just hook it up to that and then just put a Wireshark on there too and see what it’s doing. I would be very interested.

Dave Jones: Wireshark?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, Wireshark.

Dave Jones: I can imagine what it is. It’s a little device that sniffs Wi-Fi RF stuff.

Chris Gammell: Technically it used to do it on Ethernet. I’m pretty sure it works on Wi-Fi as well but it just watches all the raw traffic going through.

Dave Jones: Is this a commercial product, open source product?

Chris Gammell: I don’t think it’s open source but I think it is free. The last time I used it, it was free. Let’s see.

Dave Jones: It’s just an app, is it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think it’s maybe a premium thing or no, it says GPL so yeah.

Dave Jones: You stick it on your phone or your modem?

Chris Gammell: There you go. There’s your video for the day. You can just watch what it does. Basically, it’s really good for troubleshooting. I was working on an Ethernet product and I learned about it from our friend who wanted to just troubleshoot as we were trying to negotiate network traffic and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: It’s a network protocol analyzer, cool.

Chris Gammell: Exactly but it’s an entire level. You’ll see handshakes and stuff like that going down.

Dave Jones: It’s got a graph. Is that a spec? No, what is that? No, that’s something else.

Chris Gammell: I think it’s just statistical.

Dave Jones: I’m sorry I thought that was an RF spectrum, I was going to get very excited.

Chris Gammell: I think it shows how many pings are happening so you can just see what’s going through.

Dave Jones: That’s pretty cool. It’s got its own, what’s an AirPcap NX USB dongle?

Chris Gammell: It looks like that’s for doing the Wi-Fi stuff.

Dave Jones: If you’ve already got your Wi-Fi built into your notebook or whatever, you can just run it over.

Chris Gammell: I’m not sure. I don’t know. It might need special queuing for that stuff, either way it’s great for that stuff. Maybe take a look, see if it’s calling home. Did you read the brochure at least?

Dave Jones: I didn’t. I haven’t read it, no. I’m sorry.

Chris Gammell: I imagine that you get a notification when your dishes are done.

Dave Jones: Your phone or you can maybe remotely start and stop it or check the progress on your phone.

Chris Gammell: All things that are not necessary.

Dave Jones: It’s totally not necessary.

Chris Gammell: A lot of things can be handled with timers.

Dave Jones: It does have a timer on it. Start the dishwasher during the day. We do this. We start it during the day. We use our solar power.

Chris Gammell: When you got low power rates?

Dave Jones: Yeah because we’ve got that extra solar.

Chris Gammell: I used to do that at night. I would do it at night when it was lower rates too.

Dave Jones: For us, it’s the opposite because during the day when we piecing away the solar. If we don’t use it we lose it almost because we get paid.

Chris Gammell: The feed-in tariff?

Dave Jones: The feed-in tariff, we get paid. I really have to investigate again the battery solutions for solar battery solutions because apparently they’ve halved in price in the last year since I last looked. [Crosstalk 00:06:26] because they were very expensive. I’m sure they still are but they’ve come down a lot.

Chris Gammell: We talked about that. Maybe we talked about the DIY powerwall and then there was a response video that was very funny to that. I do follow, as a result of that whole thing, I started following a couple YouTube channels out there that are focused on that stuff. It’s a good way to research out there.

Dave Jones: A tip for people, if you’re going to do response videos, I haven’t watched the whole thing but we just rant this stuff off the top of our head. None of this is prepared. It’s not like we’ve done our research and this is the final word in power.

Chris Gammell: I got another one of those this week too. I was like, “We just do our thing.” This is me and Dave having coffee or just hanging out by the water cooler. This is me and Dave catching up for the week.

Dave Jones: I literally rode my bike in, walked into the office.

Chris Gammell: Healthy.

Dave Jones: Turned on the computer and pressed record.

Chris Gammell: He’s a sweaty mess right now folks.

Dave Jones: I am, so much so I had to leave the air-con on even though [Crosstalk 00:07:37].

Chris Gammell: Back to your IoT device that’s going to kill you. I guess the real question is, is there a real device in your mind that would be worth having connected like that?

Dave Jones: A home appliance you’re talking about?

Chris Gammell: Sure. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It’s got to be a white good?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That’s a good way to classify them.

Dave Jones: White goods, I can’t think of it.

Chris Gammell: Your solar tracker is or is not?

Dave Jones: No. It’s connected to the internet. I’ve done a video but it’s not connected to my Wi-Fi at all. It’s just got a 3G GSM automatically to the website. That I don’t mind because I never have to touch it and I don’t have to worry about my Wi-Fi going down or locking up or doing whatever.

Chris Gammell: Cellular solutions are the best solutions.

Dave Jones: Says the man who works for …

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That makes sense. Not that that’s not a thing to see what’s going on with you.

Dave Jones: No but that is purpose design. That is all taught. Solar monitoring, you’ve got to do it somehow whether or not you connect, you have a dedicated computer right next door that logs it via USB or whatever or whether or not you connect to your home Wi-Fi. Whether or not you were doing that like Blue Cheese like I was before, every week it keeps the data for a couple of weeks, I’d login with my Blue Cheese app on my phone. I’d suck down the data and then upload it.

Chris Gammell: A cable replacement solution at a certain point.

Dave Jones: A cable replacement solution almost, yeah. It’s just a matter of where you store the data and this one automatically stores it on the solar analytics’ website which went down the other day by the way. It’s been down for a week.

Chris Gammell: The sun still worked, right?

Dave Jones: It still goes but yeah, it went down for a week.

Chris Gammell: That will be really interesting to hear as you do that.

Dave Jones: Apparently it didn’t lose data. They’re saying, “We’re having issues with our data but the data’s been saved. Trust us.”

Chris Gammell: Trust us? Yes.

Dave Jones: I haven’t checked since. I should check after the show if it’s come back on yet. Anyway, the answer is no. Let’s go through the list. Lights, no, I’m sick of that crap. A dishwasher, no.

Chris Gammell: What’s it called, Jon from SuperHouse, he just posted a good video about that but that’s all DIY as well and it’s internal, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That’s the real question. I guess it’s what escapes your house, right?

Dave Jones: Right, yup. He’s done videos on you shouldn’t rely on the internet. He’s into home automation but not remote home automation unless he’s changed his stance on that.

Chris Gammell: No, I don’t think so. If people didn’t see, Jon’s been on the show before. He doe’s SuperHouse now. He also does free …

Dave Jones: He’s always done SuperHouse TV. He’s been doing it for …

Chris Gammell: I mean it’s his fulltime thing now because that is a company. He has a video where he was just showing how he wires up the, it was all Ethernet based though which was interesting.

Dave Jones: Yeah because it’s bloody reliable.

Chris Gammell: Right, exactly.

Dave Jones: You can get cable any day of the week.

Chris Gammell: I agree. I’m sorry, keep going. Lights, no?

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: Dishwasher, no?

Dave Jones: Dishwasher, no. I don’t see the point. Washing machine, no. A dryer, no. A fridge, everyone craps on about it, “All fridges will be internet connected because you’re going to reorder your food from bloody Amazon or whoever.”

Chris Gammell: If you happened to store all your search code on the fridge then you could really save your ass. I don’t know if you’ve seen the last season of Silicon Valley.

Dave Jones: No, I haven’t.

Chris Gammell: You’ve got to watch it.

Dave Jones: I’ve got to watch it, I know.

Chris Gammell: Season four, it was good.

Dave Jones: All right.

Chris Gammell: Fridge, no?

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: Oven, no?

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: Was it June? What was that really expensive toaster oven? Is it June or something else? No, June’s the door lock.

Dave Jones: There’s another one. Juicer, no.

Chris Gammell: Juicer, tea infuser?

Dave Jones: Tea infuser, that’s right. We talked about that one last week. I would have to say that if anything.

Chris Gammell: He’s apoplectic here folks.

Dave Jones: If anything, it would probably be the fridge. I wouldn’t personally but if things are going to be internet connected, probably the fridge and the reorder thing because people are such lazy bastards.

Chris Gammell: How about a security monitor?

Dave Jones: I have a security system. You can.

Chris Gammell: It’s like what Nest is getting into, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah and Amazon with the let the couriers in.

Chris Gammell: We didn’t talk about that didn’t we?

Dave Jones: The survey is that 50% of Americans think that that’s not a bad idea, I’d give that a try.

Chris Gammell: Money back guarantee.

Dave Jones: Yeah, a security system. Anyways, security systems and all that, security systems’ back to base has been a big thing for 40 years, 30 years or whatever since dialup phone lines.

Chris Gammell: I saw a commercial for a Honeywell system that’s like the August Smart Lock. The ring, there’s a doorbell and all these things that are camera based but then what’s it called? Honeywell came out with one where it’s a security system but it’s literally filming inside your house. I’m okay with external. I had a friend or I was talking to my coworkers about this when we stayed in an Airbnb.
I’m okay with an external facing camera. Maybe not the safest thing but at least has a practical purpose. Whose at the door and blah, blah, blah?

Dave Jones: Right and to check who’s up the alleyway or whatever.

Chris Gammell: Check if your package is safe and all that stuff. It’s a big thing. Internal cameras, I am staring at my webcam right now and there’s a piece. There is an old Amp Hour business card covering it. Yes, there are microphones.

Dave Jones: Who have we had on the show that covers up the mic?

Chris Gammell: Mike Osman unplugs the TV.

Dave Jones: Mike Osman is the one? Yeah, I thought it was.

Chris Gammell: Yeah or maybe who else was that? I think maybe Joe Fitz also talked about that.

Dave Jones: When security researchers start covering up their webcams.

Chris Gammell: I think this is just a matter. I mean it just creeps me out. Cameras in a home really creep me out. Even phones sometimes. That’s a convenient thing I think but yeah.

Dave Jones: Says the man who has had a webcam in his lab.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. You can watch Dave right now folks. I don’t know. I was at Supercon this weekend and there was a very good talk by Elliot Williams, one of the editors at Hackaday. He was just talking about basically doing everything we’re talking about here, he was talking about doing it himself but he was talking about doing it all behind the firewall.
He’s doing MQTT which is the transfer protocol. Doing it with ESP-8266 or ESP-832 and then what was the last thing? I guess maybe some kind of hub. Basically you don’t need to go outside your house. You want to know when your dryer’s done, your washer’s done or whatever, he made a device that’s just a button and a light and it shows, it’s connecting those two things. He’s publishing within the firewall dryer/status and then he just watches that.
It was a really great presentation. It was some pretty high level overview but I’m excited for that talk to come out. It encouraged me. Dave, I got MQTT working. That’s something where I said I couldn’t do it for I don’t know why but I just said that.

Dave Jones: I still don’t know what it is.

Chris Gammell: It’s basically just like a published protocol. It’s like, I’m going to say all this stuff wrong but basically it’s a way to publish what you’re doing and then you have a central server. You can setup on a Raspberry Pi, you can setup a broker it’s called. Then you have clients. It’s brokers and clients or broker and clients. In this case, let’s talk about the dryer.

Dave Jones: Practice rip-off the clients, yeah?

Chris Gammell: That’s a different thing. You have a client on your dryer for instance. Maybe you have a temperature sensor there and it says the temperature is 100-C. Maybe you broadcast that. You just broadcast it but you say where the end point is which in this case is the broker and you say 100-C, 100-C, 98-C, 80-C, 70-C or whatever.

Dave Jones: Is it all encrypted?

Chris Gammell: That’s the piece I’m not sure about. I’ll get back to that. The broker basically stores that stuff and then you could subscribe to that from other services assuming again, I don’t know about the security piece but then you could have a phone or you could have an app or you could have a piece of hardware. In this case, Elliot showed a button with an LED and it subscribed to that. Basically it was just going to the server and watching.
I’m sorry, it got rebroadcasted out of the broker I believe and then this device that says now it’s just watching for the dryer messages, it’s the dryer temperature and then he’d set the threshold. Once he gets below a certain threshold, the lights goes on and it says it’s ready to be done and the button resets it. Simple, right?

Dave Jones: Yup. I thought a mechanical timer. You throw clothes in, you set timer, you come back and it switches itself off, magic.

Chris Gammell: Yes, I agree but this is like if you wanted a notification system, that’s one way to do it. He said he has a four-floor really narrow house. That’s why. Whether or not that’s needed, that’s an argument. The thing that was interesting to me is he did the same thing then for monitoring solar. He was talking about having basically a serial out from a DMM or something like that, went to the MQTT, was published into his broker and then he just watched it elsewhere and was able to graph it.
Again, you can do that locally but this is the wire replacement thing we were talking about and that also was interesting to me. This is a general problem solving tool or a skill set. Yes it is Wi-Fi or some other protocol base but it was very interesting from that perspective. I’ve known about this, MQTT for a while but I didn’t really see it.

Dave Jones: There’s a whole bunch of other ways to do it.

Chris Gammell: Of course.

Dave Jones: It’s like the same thing, it’s just you add another flavor.

Chris Gammell: Of course. I think MQTT is one of those things where we’re going to keep hearing about it especially with more and more devices, even some of the stuff that might be commercially available.

Dave Jones: I was going to say you think that commercial stuff might start. It’s an ISO standard.

Chris Gammell: Is it?

Dave Jones: Yup.

Chris Gammell: It’s been around for a long time, I know that. Adafruit has a great tutorial about getting started on the server and then it got to the point where it setup the broker on their service, Adafruit.io which is one of their new data services. You could totally do that. However, you don’t need to and that’s the key point of the whole thing. Basically, your broker could be outside your house but it also could be inside your house and that’s the key thing.
That’s really the flexibility that I want because you could say the server is Adafruit.io or you could just say Raspberrypi.local or whatever your address of your …

Dave Jones: Thingy-me-bobbies, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That’s going to be the thing that allows us to keep our sanity. If you have a service and it’s built to work with both.

Dave Jones: Once again, if your firewall gets hacked then they’re straight in. They’re looking at you through the webcam.

Chris Gammell: You wouldn’t use this for webcam but I know what you mean. Yes, I agree. There’s always and that’s a bigger thing and it should be encrypted but I haven’t gotten that far yet. I don’t know. I think in terms of just practical, in terms of a practical implementation of “IoT,” this is the closest I’ve gotten. It’s pretty cool. That was great and I’m looking forward to that talk. I’ll post the link when we find it. There are some good talks.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Can we not talk about Internet of Things?

Chris Gammell: I got to hang out with a lot of good peoples this weekend to.

Dave Jones: Peoples?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, lots of people. A lot of former guests were there. That was nice. Hopefully a lot of future guests were there.

Dave Jones: You gave Jerry a hug?

Chris Gammell: Yes, of course. Jerry was there.

Dave Jones: He posted this photo. Jerry’s in the background looking off alone like alone, it was so funny.

Chris Gammell: It was just the only shot I got of everyone at once. David prompted me to give Jerry a hug. It was really nice.

Dave Jones: You didn’t just walk up to him from behind?

Chris Gammell: No. That would be creepy. It was really great.

Dave Jones: Less creepy than, “Dave Jones said I’ve got to hug you?”

Chris Gammell: Right, “Mr. Jones sends his regards hug.” Lots of hardware hacking this weekend and hung out with Mike and what that man did with that badge was very interesting.

Dave Jones: In the end I didn’t see it. Has it been published?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I’ll send you that post. Like we talked about the last time, it was like a PIC-32. I was like, “All right I’ll give it a shot, MPLAB, whatever.” I got all that stuff installed. I opened it up and I’m like, “I have not programmed firmware in a very long time. I have no idea what I’m going to do.” Not to mention, I mean it was a pretty advanced firmware to start with. It was doing image transforms and stuff like that but some people were doing that stuff. It was tough to get my head around but some people did. That’s great.

Dave Jones: I’ve got the link. I’m having a look.

Chris Gammell: You had not seen the preliminary versions either?

Dave Jones: I’ve seen the handmade board and stuff.

Chris Gammell: It was pretty similar to that. It was just like solder mask on top of that. The big stuff like any project, you think about, you’re dealing with this too now, is the firmware takes at least twice as long. The hardware is suck-y but once you get it working, it’s pretty fixed. You’re not like, “Let’s just throw another feature on here, let’s redo all this.” No, it’s on firmware now. Do the most you can with the firmware then rev too can be a big iteration but yeah, it’s good to get your hardware right the first time if you can.

Dave Jones: It is.

Chris Gammell: He ended up putting a scope on there which was insane.

Dave Jones: That’s what it was? Okay. That’s why you could see the wave folds. I thought it was generated.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. He did a microphone into that too and stuff like that. He had these crazy LEDs. I think there’s a link to the badge hacking. Someone made a 3-D printer. They used the screen to expose an SLA type printer.
What have you been up to? How’s your product going?

Dave Jones: My product? Yes. It’s eminent we had a last minute kerfuffle.

Chris Gammell: As you do.

Dave Jones: As you always do. They’re being shipped tomorrow, 50 units. I’m getting it. It’s happening. The kick start needs to happen in the next few days.

Chris Gammell: You’re on that shipping deadline you were saying, right? You want to get it before Christmas.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I’m physically not capable of shooting a polished video and editing a polished video. It’s just not possible.

Chris Gammell: I can write you some chunky piano music.

Dave Jones: I thought about shooting a spoof. You’re starting out like it’s all polished and you go, “It’s bullshit.”

Chris Gammell: You turn the lights on and it’s like, “All right. Let’s get this shit done. Come on. You know what you’re getting.”

Dave Jones: It’s just my crudely stitched together thing voiceover. I was going to voiceover the whole lot and then I go, “Who cares?”

Chris Gammell: Your voice?

Dave Jones: Exactly. I’ll just use the in-camera mic, just shoot in camera. I shot it. I was shooting shots of all the different features working and I was just doing a voiceover on top of that, speaking as I normally do just to remind myself what to say in the voiceover. Then I ended up just using that audio that I wasn’t serious about using anyway. It’s like, “I just couldn’t give a shit.”

Chris Gammell: We talked about it last week. The people already know what they’re getting.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Either people want it or they don’t. My video is not really going to sell it to them.

Chris Gammell: It’s not exactly like the magical $99 point too or whatever the point is where people will just do it on a whim.

Dave Jones: It’s a multi-meter. It’s either you’re in the market for a $200 class multi-meter or you aren’t.

Chris Gammell: Is that what it’s going to be? I didn’t know that.

Dave Jones: The kick starter will be around that.

Chris Gammell: What’s the SRP? Is it $299?

Dave Jones: I don’t know.

Chris Gammell: Go higher.

Dave Jones: Go higher you think?

Chris Gammell: Go higher and discount man.

Dave Jones: The problem was is that my original intention was that it was going to be a $200 retail meter, a $200 class meter and then the prices just crept up and up and up to a point.

Chris Gammell: Margins being what they are. You said the chip you had to source could be more expensive.

Dave Jones: We had to add another voltage reference there, a bit of voltage reference adds on more cost, this and that. All of a sudden I said, “I’ve got to supply my own probes now.”

Chris Gammell: You’ve sourced the probes you mean?

Dave Jones: I’ve outsourced. I’m using the Bowman Probes to go with it.

Chris Gammell: Those are really good though. I like those.

Dave Jones: They’re nice but still they cost, that’s cost I hadn’t factored in.

Chris Gammell: Logistics and all that stuff. Still doing your no BS packaging, are you doing that?

Dave Jones: Yeah. I’m doing the no BS packaging. I’ve got a thousand cases sitting here next to me in 14 boxes.

Chris Gammell: A thousand?

Dave Jones: A thousand custom cases as in zipper, soft zipper cases.

Chris Gammell: The carrying case.

Dave Jones: They don’t weigh much but they cost a fortune to ship because of the volume of them.

Chris Gammell: Shipped to you at a thousand a time you mean?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Shipped to me at a thousand a time, I was shocked at how much it cost with a thousand cases.

Chris Gammell: That’s by a thousand little cuts, right?

Dave Jones: Cases, yes, a thousand zipper cases.

Chris Gammell: You don’t think about it either?

Dave Jones: No.

Chris Gammell: It’s worse when you’re doing sourcing of individual components when you start going, “I’m buying from not one distributor, buying from five distributors and this part, that extra part.”

Dave Jones: The five distributors and you get hit with five different courier charges.

Chris Gammell: You don’t factor that in, you get rush payments and all that stuff. That’s all top line cost you have to factor in. It could really get up there. That’s where it starts to make sense to have a courier account and stuff like that, to have a UPS or DHL number or something like that.

Dave Jones: I won’t give you details but part of the last minute kerfuffle was wondering whether or not we’d make another change to the hardware. I came back and said, “Look, we can do it.”

Chris Gammell: Don’t do that.

Dave Jones: Maybe, kind of, we can still deliver some before Christmas, maybe. Then they said, “By the way, we’ve already got 2,000 boards in stock.”

Chris Gammell: It would have been a board change?

Dave Jones: They’re X-dollars each and I would have to eat that cost because they weren’t going to have a buyer of that because it was a change that I wanted.

Chris Gammell: What was the cost? This is just the PCB you’re saying?

Dave Jones: It was multiple dollars per board. It’s like a four-layer board. It’s a complex four-layer board and it’s not small. It’s not 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. It’s bigger. It’s about 20.

Chris Gammell: That’s another one that sneaks up on you, you don’t think about it. The decision starts like, “We should really do six layers, we should really do four layers or whatever.” Four layers’ isn’t bad.

Dave Jones: It’s not bad these days but it is an additional cost. They said, “Look, we’ve already got 2,000 boards in stock. Okay, we can scrap them if you want to make some changes.” I go, “No, let’s just hold off.”

Chris Gammell: Was this a change that would be nice to have thing, it wasn’t critical?

Dave Jones: It’s one of those nice-to-haves. No, it’s not a critical thing. It’s just one of those nice-to-haves.

Chris Gammell: That’s why you do a rev 1.1 and then the new and improved. Release a bunch of firmware changes with it too. It’s almost like planning for that. It’s better to get it out.

Dave Jones: Then I figured that we go and once these things hit, once there’s a thousand out there, people are going to find issues.

Chris Gammell: That’s right and it’s also true.

Dave Jones: They found issues with my BM-235 meter and they worked on that for two and a half years. They were so careful and then they released it and then the reports started coming in and they had to make some hardware changes.

Chris Gammell: You do the best you can and then you deal with it. You’re right. I think that’s what you’ve got to do. I think that if you wait too long, you’re just never going to get it out, right?

Dave Jones: You’re never going to get it done, yeah. I just had to go look and just go ahead. It’s fine.

Chris Gammell: That’s good. That’s a good call. Cool man. Firmware crunching continues?

Dave Jones: Yes, the app and everything. The app is taking forever and we’re really not even close to a real polished app.

Chris Gammell: It’s tough. It’s a lot of UI stuff.

Dave Jones: I was talking to David the other day because he’s back on it working again because the release is eminent and we had to have something for the video.

Chris Gammell: You could fake that.

Dave Jones: Yeah but we’re engineers, we don’t fake shit. It’s against our conscience.

Chris Gammell: It wouldn’t be the first time man. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Dave Jones: Anyway, we’re all talking like with hindsight, was it a mistake to try and do this cross platform thing? That was the whole idea from day one is that he’s going to write it so it’s truly cross platform. It will compile for all the platforms out there and he went, “Probably.” I was like, “Yeah.” It looks like he reckons Linux is going to be really hard. It’s not just going to automatically compile for Linux. There’s just so much stuff.
I’m sure those who’ve tried to do true cross platform development have realized this. A lot of people told me when I said I was doing cross platform, everyone went, “Good luck.”

Chris Gammell: This is a computer application though or a phone application?

Dave Jones: Both.

Chris Gammell: That’s another thing. Now you have even more.

Dave Jones: It’s currently working on Windows, either desktop or tablet-y type Windows or it’s working for Android. It should in theory compile for Mac and IOS but we don’t have the physical devices to do that yet but we’ll get those. Linux is the other one. Linux is the hard one apparently.
Just the way all the libraries, the graphical libraries and the interfaces and things work. It’s just apparently it’s not pretty, David’s telling me.

Chris Gammell: That’s too bad. It’s one of those things where you’re not going to make everyone happy either way. It’s either not going to be the best experience or you’re not going to offer it or whatever, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Out of the box, if you get a meter next month, it’s probably not going to have an IOS version of the app.

Chris Gammell: I think the real question too is, are people even going to use it, the app?

Dave Jones: Maybe not, right. Yeah, one of the big selling points is that it has Bluetooth. How many people are going to use it? Probably not many, as you said, most of them are going to use it as a regular multi-meter, it’s just nice to have.

Chris Gammell: Just to have a good API and then just to have someone else do the app later.

Dave Jones: If you want to do double, it’s got a micro SD card, just log to the SD card and then just import it the old fashioned way.

Chris Gammell: This is like a product argument right here, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: This is what do you spend your time on, what do you offer and all that stuff.

Dave Jones: At the moment, we’re dealing with dropped and corrupted packets. It’s like, “Where the hell are these things coming from?” The more research we do it’s like, “Yeah, that’s just Bluetooth.” It’s like, “Great. Thanks a lot.”

Chris Gammell: I was looking at that because I was looking to do a Bluetooth microphone just when recording on my cell phone or something like that for a really lightweight video setup. I kept asking around about it and as far as I can tell, yes it does exist of course.

Dave Jones: People use them for their phones.

Chris Gammell: Headsets like the jaw bone and all that stuff.

Dave Jones: Yeah but everyone says they’re shit.

Chris Gammell: The reason for that is the lower bandwidth as well. They cut out a bunch of the frequency content anyways because you want to get the really high tune-y kind of stuff so you can get the audio fidelity.

Dave Jones: It has to fit in a 1.5 kilohertz bandwidth.

Chris Gammell: There’s also some stuff about getting through lower bandwidth systems. This is all the telephone-y stuff from the old days, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, of course.

Chris Gammell: Which I know nothing about but yeah, there are certain frequency content you can cut out without really much worry anyways but that doesn’t really work when you’re trying to record a video unless you want to sound like you’re recording through a cell phone, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, that’s right. No, it’s crap. It’s just not workable. They’re just not designed for that. They’re designed for mobile phone calls and that’s it. For those who don’t know, back in the day, you know why modems were so slow back in the day?

Chris Gammell: Capacitance?

Dave Jones: No, the bandwidth, the same thing. It’s because they had to fit in the 1.8 kilohertz bandwidth of the phone line. The phone lines had the X amount of bandwidth. They had to develop all these X modem and all these X protocols. Your X-32 bits and all your other wiz bang protocols, it eventually got up to 56-K for a regular modem.
All that technology, all that signal process and technology had to be designed to get around the bandwidth limitation of the phone line.

Chris Gammell: I remember reading about some of that stuff in that Bell Labs’ book. They talked about it a little bit. I thought they were talking about doing multiplexing by you maintain the frequency band, like you’re saying the 1.5-K but then you shift it around because you have more analog bandwidth but you basically stack a bunch in the channel, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Then you shift them up and down?

Dave Jones: It all has to do with signal rates and all sorts. They’ve got all sorts and really I’m not an expert on it.

Chris Gammell: I don’t know much either. That probably contributed to some of the ability to do that with Bluetooth.

Dave Jones: 3,100 hertz, 3,400 hertz. It’s something like that.

Chris Gammell: Versus the 20-K that you and I are hopefully getting right now?

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Our very low voices, our very high voices.

Dave Jones: Once again, Bluetooth, mobile phones do a similar thing. People say, “Why do mobile phones sound crap?” It’s because of the limited bandwidth.

Chris Gammell: They intentionally compress that audio in the first place, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: They try and do the best they can but I think they do. That’s what codec-s do. We’re on a codec right now for Mumble that’s compressing it down and stuff like that and then read that and compressing it. We should move on to something we know anything about.

Dave Jones: We have issues when there’s dropped packets and things like that because then it’s got to restart the algorithm because when you drop a packet or two, you lose syncing the algorithm and it’s going to restart and you get that break in the audio or however it manifests itself based on the particular codec.

Chris Gammell: Then you think about Bluetooth too. Bluetooth, it’s a pretty busy channel to start with. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff that is talking on that these days. I assume that if you’re trying to stream data which it’s not really made for in the first place, it can get pretty easily interrupted. That’s probably what you’re seeing with those corrupt packets, right?

Dave Jones: Yup.

Chris Gammell: Good luck.

Dave Jones: Yeah, thanks.

Chris Gammell: It sounds like that sucks.

Dave Jones: It’s one of those things, it’s like, “God, never again, Bluetooth.”

Chris Gammell: As it goes, you’ll find out, right? That’s the thing you’ve got to put in the market so you see what people think about it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Put it out there. The good thing is that the software will get better and better. The first release of the modem, we expected to be full of bugs in the feature and then tons of people will come back with feedback and then we’ll slowly fix all the issues.

Chris Gammell: I still think about that from that microphone that you had told me about, the H-1 that I have. That 1.1 firmware was a killer. It turned it from a handheld microphone to a streaming microphone. That changed the entire nature of the product which is amazing.

Dave Jones: Yeah and it was just software, that’s it.

Chris Gammell: Those changes aren’t as common but that transformative nature can be really. It’s at least worth updating the firmware for, that’s for sure.

Dave Jones: I just got an e-mail yesterday from Charles at TRIO Test. Did you know that the Siglent Spectrum Analyzer, that low-cost spectrum analyzer, it only had 10 hertz resolution bandwidth?

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh (Affirmative).

Dave Jones: He said, “The new firmware update turns it into one hertz,” which is pretty killer. He said, “Just update the firmware and you’ve got one hertz resolution bandwidth.”

Chris Gammell: That’s pretty cool.

Dave Jones: No hardware changes.

Chris Gammell: I will say that is the benefit. I have the Analog Discovery as well. I know you have reviews on software based scopes.

Dave Jones: I like the Analog Discovery. I’ve done videos on that. I think it’s a nice little product.

Chris Gammell: Yeah but I’m just saying that that’s a very baked in thing where it’s all software controlled. We’ve thrown in other audio analyzers. Obviously it’s still limited by certain physical bandwidth stuff but it’s got an FPGA board. As long as you get the analog stuff right in the front end and then you’ve got the FPGA and then the software stuff, it’s a nice little update stack.

Dave Jones: Cool bananas.

Chris Gammell: I’m a fan.

Dave Jones: All right. Let’s get into some news.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say what you can update after the fact is a Schottky diode.

Dave Jones: This is great. I am totally stealing this idea.

Chris Gammell: What is it?

Dave Jones: I’m totally stealing it. It’s from Electron Update is the YouTube channel. I can’t say I’m subscribed but I’m going to.

Chris Gammell: Go on now.

Dave Jones: I just clicked the subscribe button. Electron Update, what he did is he took a through-hole Schottky diode of 1N5817, just a standard one and sawed it in half so that you can see what’s inside. He did a cross section cut. When I first saw the title of the video, I went, “How the hell did he do that? Has he got some special thing?” No, it’s sandpaper. What he does is he puts the component in epoxy resin first. He encapsulates it in that.
It basically can’t move. The leads can’t bend. Everything’s encapsulated in a hard, I assume it’s a hard epoxy, I haven’t watched the whole thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It’s like a two-part that that hardens.

Dave Jones: It’s one of those two-part epoxies, one of those clear epoxies. Then he simply started rubbing it on sandpaper and just got finer and finer and finer and finer. It’s just incredible.

Chris Gammell: The mosquito falls in the amber and then we extract it and dino DNA.

Dave Jones: That was a good impersonation.

Chris Gammell: I love that dino DNA.

Dave Jones: Spare no expense.

Chris Gammell: That’s right. He’s done this with other stuff too like surface mount inductors and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Really?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I’m totally stealing this. I’m sorry, I don’t know his name, he runs the channel, but sorry dude, I’m totally stealing that. I’ll give him credit but I’m so stealing it.

Chris Gammell: It’s a cool idea. It’s just to keep the package together, that’s the main idea, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, it’s to keep it all together.

Chris Gammell: There’s no epoxy internally, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. You could try and do it without that but the good thing about the epoxy is that you have something to hold onto as well when you’re rubbing that sucker. It reminds me of how all the scientists, experimental scientists back in the day used to do things. It’s like, “You have sandpaper.” You think, “How did they shave off these atomic layers?” Sandpaper.

Chris Gammell: Right or when they’re doing stuff with carbon nano tubes, we use Scotch Tape.

Dave Jones: Scotch Tape to peel off an outer layer.

Chris Gammell: It’s Scotch Tape and carbon, what do you think we did? It’s simple.

Dave Jones: How did you polish that 10-meter diameter space telescope mirror? Sandpaper cloth.

Chris Gammell: Do anything else, one inch at a time man.

Dave Jones: One atom at a time. They just keep rubbing it and rubbing it. That’s great. Anyway, hats off to that very cool shout out.

Chris Gammell: Lots of good electronic stuff this week too. Did you see the quake on an oscilloscope?

Dave Jones: No, I haven’t seen the quake. Did someone captured a real quake that happened?

Chris Gammell: No. I’m sorry, Quake the video game.

Dave Jones: Quake the video?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Bloody hell.

Chris Gammell: They’re just using the display. It’s silly but its fun.

Dave Jones: It’s just an XY thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly the vector drawing stuff. That never gets old to me. I don’t know.

Dave Jones: How have they converted it to vector?

Chris Gammell: I think this is probably the same way like Todd Bailey, when he was on the show, he told us I think they needed to redraw the actual stuff, right?

Dave Jones: Right, okay. It’s not like they compiled the original source code, okay.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Got it.

Chris Gammell: I guess an earthquake would also be interesting. I don’t know what you would show for that though.

Dave Jones: Anyway, it’s just one scene. They’ve just drawn one scene and they’ve penned around so you’re holding a gun and there’s a key over there and some walls and stuff. That was basically a software. That’s a software thing.

Chris Gammell: No, not necessarily.

Dave Jones: No?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Sometimes to draw those vectors you need to have some hardware acceleration tips.

Dave Jones: Okay, you think its hardware. There’s the hardware linked to the hardware.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it’s true. Speaking of hardware we’ve got some news today that’s unfortunate but not too surprising.

Dave Jones: Inevitable I would say. I think we’ve talked about it before. Let’s discuss it again. Tell us.

Chris Gammell: A TechShop unfortunately is filing bankruptcy and a chapter seven bankruptcy which is the bad one apparently. I don’t really know much about it.

Dave Jones: They’ve closed all their doors instantly. How many shops did they have? How many locations did they have?

Chris Gammell: I think they had eight.

Dave Jones: Eight?

Chris Gammell: They had a couple in California.

Dave Jones: This was only a US based thing?

Chris Gammell: As far as I know, yeah. They just opened one in Brooklyn.

Dave Jones: Who was behind it? Who was the money behind it?

Chris Gammell: I don’t know about funding. I think they might have been VC-backed.

Dave Jones: Were they a startup? VC-backed, okay, right.

Chris Gammell: They were for-profit and that’s one of the things they talk about.

Dave Jones: They were for-profit, yeah. For people who don’t know, they were a maker space. It was basically the first attempt to commercialize maker spaces. That’s what they say here. It failed. It was the experiment to see if you could commercialize it.

Chris Gammell: It made it 10 years. That’s something.

Dave Jones: That’s pretty. I haven’t delved in details, was that losing money every year for 10 years?

Chris Gammell: No, I don’t think so but they’ve been stealing too.

Dave Jones: They started out making a profit did they? There were some years when they may have or?

Chris Gammell: I think they may have. If you go to Techshop.ws which is their website, it’s now just a PDF but they have a history of what happened. They have acquisition interest contact forms, if you want to buy the TechShop.

Dave Jones: If you want to buy the gear. All the vultures are coming now. Now, I’m interested in TechShop because they’re selling.

Chris Gammell: I didn’t realize that it pretty much opened in time with Maker Faire, 2006-2007.

Dave Jones: I didn’t know that. I didn’t realize it was that old.

Chris Gammell: It’s been around for a long time and you’ll see them at most Maker Faire-s and stuff like that. The way I talk about it, usually the way I explain it to people is it’s like a gym for nerds. You go there and you pay a monthly fee and then you can use the equipment.

Dave Jones: Use all the stuff, yeah.

Chris Gammell: It works the nerd muscles. Much like a gym it’s a for-profit model. Obviously Dave you’re a gym-going person.

Dave Jones: I am.

Chris Gammell: Gyms are based on the idea that not everybody’s going to be there all the time and that the relative cost of per square foot is low. I’m not sure that this matched that as well. The cost per square foot of these things is pretty high.

Dave Jones: The analogies are excellent between a gym because both of them, you can get a home gym and you can do your own stuff. There’s a lot of people who don’t have the space, that’s fine but even the ones who do have the space, they buy their treadmill, they buy their cable machine and they buy everything else.

Chris Gammell: The bow-flex man.

Dave Jones: I’ve had my own home gym. It comes down to a motivation thing, working out on your own sucks.

Chris Gammell: Assuming you have the space, sure.

Dave Jones: Of course you never get the variety of the machines and things like that and free weights and everything else. You’ve got no one else to workout with generally.

Chris Gammell: I think the social aspect shouldn’t be underestimated to be honest in both cases really.

Dave Jones: This is a similar thing. We’ve talked about this before. The revolution that’s happened in our industry in terms of low-cost equipment, you can equip your own lab that has all this stuff, that has the laser cutters, the 3-D printers and all the big machines and things like that. Many people are doing this so you don’t need a TechShop.

Chris Gammell: Maybe. It’s an accessibility argument for sure but I think it’s a little bit broader than that. Yes, equipment availability is a problem. Sometimes that’s also solved by traditional maker spaces which are usually lower cost. I think TechShop in the Bay Area was 150-160 a month. It’s not cheap. It’s for premium gym practice.

Dave Jones: The other thing is the location as you’ve got to have the time to commit. That’s why hacker spaces and maker spaces appeal more to your …

Chris Gammell: City dwellers.

Dave Jones: City dwellers.

Chris Gammell: City slickers.

Dave Jones: Your single people or the kids who live on campus or something. That’s why university ones do quite well because you live there generally. You’re always there and stuff like that.

Chris Gammell: I think that is part of it.

Dave Jones: Whereas me, how many times have I visited my local hacker space? Once.

Chris Gammell: I think that’s different though too. I agree with all the points you’re making but I don’t think that’s ultimately what the problem was. I think the big problem is just the market size. Everybody at least in theory should go to a gym or workout or whatever. Obviously some people are going to run outside or not workout at all or whatever. I just think that this is a negative view coming from me, I just don’t think there’s as much need for this.

Dave Jones: No. I don’t think there’s a huge need either because once again …

Chris Gammell: At least at the scale sizes that are required for gyms and stuff, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah because you can do everything at home. If you want a 3-D part you can just order it, can’t you, in the US on Shapeways or whatnot? You don’t even need a 3-D.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you can do that. You can make X, Y, Z. You could do lots of services. It’s not even that. It’s just a capacity argument. Why are there so many gyms in the US? It’s because there’s a lot of people and there’s a lot of need and the relative cost of operating a gym is a big upfront investment and then a low cost of maintenance. You have to maintain the machines but really it’s more about staff.

Dave Jones: It appeals to almost the entire population.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Now, in this case it has to be a very specific group and it’s a high cost of maintenance specifically.

Dave Jones: Not only do you get hit with the limited market size, then you get hit with those who can physically afford the time and location to get there. You’re limited that way again and then you’re limited in terms of how many people would need that stuff.

Chris Gammell: From a capacity argument as well, I think this is going the other direction now but I think in a capacity argument. Everybody who’s been to a gym has seen the, “Please don’t spend more than 30 minutes on a treadmill,” which is a problem solved for me but they say that as a capacity thing. Many of the operations that they’re even talking about, again this going in the opposite direction of what I’ve said before but a milling machine takes 10 hours or depending on the size of the part, there’s 24-hour prints. You’ve done long prints before on 3-D printers.

Dave Jones: There’s hardly ever a print I’ve done that takes less than an hour or two.

Chris Gammell: If you truly charge for the cost of each, of a footprint, electricity and maintenance and all that stuff and then you try to amortize over all the people in the group, it’s just a really tough equation to crack. I think they even said in their PDF that without proper corporate backing or grants or anything like that, it becomes really difficult. Then the fact that they were trying to do it with a for-profit model versus nonprofit model which is what prevented them from getting some of those grants, that was also detrimental they said.
It’s like they played with a lot of different models and I know a lot of people that loved it there. It seemed like a good community. It seemed like they did everything well.

Dave Jones: Of course you’ll have your die hard people who think this was the greatest thing that changed their lives.

Chris Gammell: Of course, businesses started through here. I think it’s a successful experiment but it’s an unfortunate ending. It’s too bad because now a lot of people that … hopefully something will rise up out of this, maybe a smaller more agile version. Maybe it’s a small shop with just desktop tools. Do you know what I mean? It’s a co-op instead.

Dave Jones: Maybe. Right, it could be a co-op based system, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right or it’s just people go to more maker spaces or start new ones or whatever.

Dave Jones: If you try and run it as a for-profit, I think it’s forever doomed. It’s going to be forever doomed.

Chris Gammell: I really do wonder about that. Obviously for-profit gyms exist but those are the big constraint differences.

Dave Jones: We see a lot of gyms go out of business.

Chris Gammell: That’s true.

Dave Jones: Part of that is market flood.

Chris Gammell: That too.

Dave Jones: Everyone jumps on the bandwagon, just the numbers out there.

Chris Gammell: The optimist in me hopes that there’s enough of a market for this because more and more people are joining the field. The pessimist in me says that’s not the case and even if it was that it’s difficult to operate in this space.

Dave Jones: I’ve looked into it as well. I’ve looked into making one, pun intended.

Chris Gammell: It would be a very interesting thing.

Dave Jones: I was looking to starting one up and then I just ran the numbers.

Chris Gammell: Let’s do it as an estimate. How many people would be interested in that in Sydney you think? Assuming you had the most perfect location in Sydney which does not exist.

Dave Jones: Let’s say a couple hundred if you put it near a uni somewhere.

Chris Gammell: A couple hundred, charge what, $100 a month?

Dave Jones: That’s impossible for a student. That’s impossible for a uni student. That’s where your market is. The market is you can’t afford it.

Chris Gammell: Some of your stuff’s cutoff there, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Then you have some people that are doing business stuff but then they’re startups and they’re not necessarily flushed with cash either. They might not want to raise the money or may not have raised money. It’s a difficult space to be in.

Dave Jones: I think there are one or two TechShop type ones in Sydney, I’ve never been to them.

Chris Gammell: That would be an interesting thing to find out.

Dave Jones: They’re more into woodwork and crafty stuff rather than.

Chris Gammell: Then you think about the security stuff, the insurance security and all that. I had joined that space, mHub and I’m still a member. I’m going to be working out of there more for my job now.

Dave Jones: They’ve got desks where you can make it your mobile, make it as a temporary office.

Chris Gammell: It’s a 60,000-square foot facility and there’s a lot of fun toys in there but I’ll tell you what, 40,000 of that is meant for renting out as a business because that’s where the real business is and they’re nonprofit and they’re backed by the city and there’s all these corporate sponsorships.

Dave Jones: What’s the name for that? What’s the name? Is that Hot Office or something, Hot Desk?

Chris Gammell: Hot Desk.

Dave Jones: Hot Desk-ing?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Hot Desk is also a word people might know.

Dave Jones: They provide a chair or a table. Do they provide big screen monitors and stuff, you just plug your notebook into and they provide the internet and the power?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Usually that stuff’s flexible too. It’s just like a mailing address and you have some that share the venue.

Dave Jones: You get someone to sign for packages?

Chris Gammell: Exactly. It’s definitely cheaper than running, renting an office. It’s more expensive than hanging out in a coffee shop all day but you have more amenities and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: You appear as a bigger entity when you’ve got somebody who, you’ve got a concierge who takes your calls often in your company name. We’ve got this here in the building I’m in.

Chris Gammell: We don’t have those.

Dave Jones: You can rent a little 10-square meter office space. It’s basically not enough room to swing a cat but you get a concierge who will. You get a dedicated phone number and they know when that phone rings to answer it as if they’re your secretary.

Chris Gammell: That’s a great idea.

Dave Jones: They’re, “Hello, welcome to X, Y, Z Company,” it’s just like that.

Chris Gammell: For me it’s just, “Hola, this is Contextual Electronics. Hold please.”

Dave Jones: They are recently popular because it can make you look and sound important and bigger than you are which in some industries matter.

Chris Gammell: It sounds like I just have the sweet Mexican woman who sounds suspiciously like Chris. It’s interesting to see. I would love to hear from our listening audience to hear if there are other models.

Dave Jones: Was there any hint that this was going to shutdown or was it just like you came in one day and the doors were locked? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The doors were locked, yeah. I never had that happen to me. I know people that have had that happen at restaurants they’ve worked at and stuff. It’s unfortunate.

Dave Jones: Inevitable. You could have almost banked money that this was going to happen unfortunately.

Chris Gammell: I wouldn’t have guessed that. I don’t know enough about them.

Dave Jones: If you went in and analyzed, it’s like, “Yeah,” obviously doing it as a for-profit thing. Maybe as a co-op thing where everyone puts their own money in that helps fund the thing, everyone’s a part owner and whatnot then there’s more incentive to turn up and make it work.

Chris Gammell: It’s tough too. I lived in the suburbs. Nothing like that is going to exist out there. I think the real question too, I think the social piece is totally worth paying for. You just get connections from that stuff. I don’t need like my space just got a new big ass milling machine that I am not going to be using. I just don’t need that capability but some people do.

Dave Jones: What’s gas milling?

Chris Gammell: I said big ass.

Dave Jones: Big ass.

Chris Gammell: It’s a big ass 3-D milling machine.

Dave Jones: I thought it was gas milling.

Chris Gammell: No.

Dave Jones: I’m sorry. That’s what I heard. I’m trying to read something at the same time. I wasn’t paying attention.

Chris Gammell: Our best to them. It’s unfortunate.

Dave Jones: I think it’s one of those things where they kept hoping that they would get new funding at the last minute and then they’re just like the money literally ran out. That’s so common. We’ve mentioned that on here before. It’s like nobody wants to admit to anyone that they’re on the brink of bankruptcy because you’re always hoping that that funding would come through and save it.

Chris Gammell: You can’t be like, “We’re in trouble. We’re in trouble,” because then if you do sell then you sell for a very poor price.

Dave Jones: You can’t be negative, yeah. If you’re running a tech startup for example, it’s very non-CEO like to go to your employees and, “Look, we’re in deep shit if this money doesn’t come through.”

Chris Gammell: People run for the exits too.

Dave Jones: Then they run for the exits. For the good of the company, you almost essentially have to lie by omission basically. That’s an enormous part of your job really is to keep the hope alive which you can argue as either fair or not fair, employees should be informed but if they’re informed then they’re going to jump ship, tough one. Hats’ off for them for making it work for so long.
Anyway, it’s an experiment everyone knows. I’ve got a friend of mine who did a startup and it’s like, “We’re going to do this.” They’ve got some VC-backing or some private backing anyway

Chris Gammell: Angel funding.

Dave Jones: It’s something like that, angel funding which kept them going for a year and they went. In the end, they went, “Right, it’s been a year. We’ve tried this. We know the market. There is just no market for this thing.” It was a service-based thing and they went, “Look, there just is no market for this. We tried and it’s just not there. Let’s fold up and walk away and we learned. There is none. It’s just not possible to do this.”

Chris Gammell: There’s a podcast I started listening to that’s been around for a while called How I Made This. It’s good. It’s an MPR-based podcast, really good. They had the founder of Chipotle on. He’s a really good speaker and just really good everything. Just really has his stuff together surprisingly. Not surprisingly but he’s telling the story. Do you know what Chipotle is by the way?

Dave Jones: I’ve heard of it.

Chris Gammell: Do you guys have it in Australia? I don’t even know if you have it in Australia?

Dave Jones: No, I don’t or not that I’m aware of.

Chris Gammell: It’s a burrito place. They make burritos. It’s really big in the states and it’s just really pretty well sustainably sourced food rather and they’ve got 2,500 shops.

Dave Jones: I’ve never seen one here.

Chris Gammell: The thing that was amazing to me as he’s telling the story of the genesis, it came from the idea of the mission. The burritos, they were in the mission in San Francisco and he brought it to Boulder. He said they made more money in the first month or he made enough money in the first two months to pay off his father’s $80,000 loan that he gave to him which he was very grateful for.
Imagine having that in the electronics industry. If you sold more meters than you possibly could, you hit some unknown market need, I’m not saying that it’s easy at that point but how often does that happen where it’s like, “Of course.”

Dave Jones: I’d say, “Right. Obvious.”

Chris Gammell: Good on this guy for hitting that need and for making a product that people love so much but at the same time damn, that’s rare.

Dave Jones: You don’t know until you try it and that’s the thing.

Chris Gammell: Remember when Gerald was on and we were talking to him about that? Gerald, I forgot his last name but he was Civionics and he was talking about shopping an idea around. This is again going back to that product idea.

Dave Jones: That’s right, yes.

Chris Gammell: He finally found it which is great but that fit is so important. You shouldn’t even think about building, you know the fit because people, obviously like DMMs, you don’t have to know the specific one you’re making but you know they’re like DMMs.

Dave Jones: My new micro supply for example. It’s not your regular power supply so I don’t know.

Chris Gammell: You have no idea if people will use it, right?

Dave Jones: I don’t. I can have my gut feel based on my 30 years in the industry and what I want but whether or not that, you just don’t know.

Chris Gammell: Let’s go to a fictional thing. We talked at the top of the show about the EEVblog Spark Generator which I’m probably going to name this show after, the Spark Gap Generator. You don’t know if that’s a need in the market. You shouldn’t go and build a thousand of them. Obviously we’re not even talking about TechShop at this point because they built very slowly and they seem to measure their needs. You just don’t know. The idea is that a company builds something that everybody needs and wants right away.
That’s like talking about Bill Gates as the founder of Microsoft. He’s the one out of thousands that was super successful. That does not happen that often. Most people flounder around a lot more and fail a lot more.

Dave Jones: It’s not possible. You could have the best minds in the industry, the best people and you can brainstorm until the cows come home for an idea. It doesn’t, in the least way, guarantee it’s going to be successful. You can have people, a whole bunch of people being successful 10 times in a row, they can get together and build the world’s best idea for a widget or whatever it is service and it may completely flunk. There’s a lot of subtle things which go into the success of a product or service.

Chris Gammell: The market is a fickle mistress.

Dave Jones: Being the engineers that we are, some things are just like you can tell somebody that’s not going to work and you’re shattering their dreams.

Chris Gammell: Dave loves doing that.

Dave Jones: I love doing that.

Chris Gammell: Does he ever.

Dave Jones: I made a career of doing that.

Chris Gammell: That’s right.

Dave Jones: It’s like yeah but you can.

Chris Gammell: It’s the logistics thing too, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Market fit, you and I probably don’t have much, aside from through an engineering space.

Dave Jones: The Juicero for example. Holy crap, you could have told them that. This is just freaking a joke. They’re all, “But we won’t know until we try it.” Yeah, we know.

Chris Gammell: Maybe a dash of common sense in there or are listening to the sourcing or whatever.

Dave Jones: What’s the whole quote? I’m not sure who it’s ascribed to but, “Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.” We don’t want anyone’s brains to fall out. Now people can get blinded by their personal. People just get blinded by their idea. They think it’s just so groundbreaking and wonderful.
The classic one, did I talk about this? I was watching the Shark Tank. Do you guys have Shark Tank?

Chris Gammell: I hate that show.

Dave Jones: Anyway, the wife likes it. Anyways, it’s cringe worthy to me. This woman, I think I tweeted it. I don’t think we talked about it on here. This would be the last thing for the show. She came on and it’s like she had a luggage finding tag which has a barcode on it. They went, “Yeah and what?” She went, “It’s a luggage finding tag that hooks up. Scan it on the internet and your details and people can scan, get an app on their phone and then they can find your lost luggage or your lost camera or whatever you attach these barcode tags to.”
I just face-palmed and went, “There are already.” I didn’t even need to check. I already knew that there were 50 identical products on the market. Older sharks went, “You know this isn’t unique, right? How much money have you put into this?” She went, “I mortgaged my house and put a quarter of a million dollars into this idea. My son who’s a tech guy, he really believes in it.” They had to be blunt with her. They went, “Just take the losses, this will never ever work.”
During the show I was checking and sure enough, a hundred other people have done exactly what they did.

Chris Gammell: On Amazon probably already for sale and that kind thing?

Dave Jones: Yeah, already for sale. They didn’t even do the most rudimentary check.

Chris Gammell: Not to mention that’s just a dumb idea in the first place.

Dave Jones: It’s not a bad idea if you’re the first to do it maybe.

Chris Gammell: It’s not a bad idea. Who’s going to scan your tag for you?

Dave Jones: No, no one’s going to do it.

Chris Gammell: Tile is good because it does it without anyone interacting with it.

Dave Jones: Let’s just say in theory if you’re the first to come up with the idea, maybe you can get some early market traction perhaps just ignoring the fact that it’s not a very practical idea. The most rudimentary Google search could show that your idea wasn’t in the least way unique. How could you? She mortgaged her house because she believed in it. Nobody, obviously nobody had the guts to tell her. They went, “What have you spent the money on?” “App development.”

Chris Gammell: Marketing.

Dave Jones: The app wasn’t even. Yeah marketing and the app wasn’t even finished. They just had to tell her seriously.

Chris Gammell: That’s rough.

Dave Jones: Reality check. You get blinded by your idea and you just ignore everything else that points towards it not working. I guess we’re all going to be guilty of it at some point.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say you’ve got to get out of the building, right? That’s what Steve Blank talks about. Got to talk to some real humans at some point?

Dave Jones: Yeah. That’s it.

Chris Gammell: Man, as soon as possible. There you go Dave. Release the micro supply right now and get some feedback.

Dave Jones: You’ve seen it.

Chris Gammell: I’ve seen it.

Dave Jones: Did you think it was a?

Chris Gammell: I gave some unsolicited suggestions. I think it will be interesting to see the specs. It looks like a piece of test gear.

Dave Jones: It looks like the real deal, right?

Chris Gammell: It looks like the real deal, yeah.

Dave Jones: It’s a niche market and everyone is not going to have a need for this thing. It’s deliberately not if people think it’s going to be a bench power supply, traditional.

Chris Gammell: You already have a market. That’s another thing. If Tag Lady had owned barcodescanners.com for 10 years, that changes the equation, right?

Dave Jones: Right, got it. Anyway, there you go.

Chris Gammell: This has been a great product stuff, product based thing this week of waffling. We have been waffling like it’s our job. It kind of is.

Dave Jones: We don’t really get paid for this.

Chris Gammell: That’s right. You get what you paid for.

Dave Jones: Yup.

Chris Gammell: Cool, man. Let’s waffle again next week, yeah?

Dave Jones: Yup.

Chris Gammell: It’s all good.

Dave Jones: Catch you next time.

The post #368 – The EEVblog Sparkgap Generator first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Longtime HP/Agilent/Keysight engineer John Kenny showed up at Dave’s lab to chat for a bit
• Dave has tasked David with setting up a new EEVblog meetup.
• Bootloader on the 121GW
• Konami code
• Never trust an engineer with a clean workbench
• Dave has room to set up a Pick an Place kit, the liteplacer
• MacroFab is opening a new facility in Mexico. Chris talked about this more on the Macrofab podcast.
• Chris signed himself up for some manufacturing pain this week when his 0402 boards come back
• OpenGL mode in KiCad

• Mike Harrison is making the Superconference badge
• The Krack vulnerability
• Our favorite twitter account is back at it again:

i don’t understand why tesla thought requiring internet on a giant fucking battery glued to your wall was a good idea pic.twitter.com/CAoO7NPcRd

— Internet of Shit (@internetofshit) October 17, 2017

• Snake plissken 666 in Escape from LA
• Should IoT devices self terminate? Dave was going to 555 circuit that kills itself
• Dave and David are looking at making a custom LCD for the uSupply.
• Babelfish headphones!
• The Woz is starting an educational site called WozU
• Circuit Python 2.1 is out!
• Is the C language dying? Nope!

Image credit: Matthew Hurst

The post #364 – The Endless Y2K first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Alvaro and Jen from the Unnamed Reverse Engineering (URE) podcast

• They were both inspired by Micah’s coastermelt videos
• Both have worked in consumer electronics places, such as Amazon and Apple.
• Paul’s reaction video
• OTA
• High volumes enables early access to new chips but also sometimes means errata on that new silicon.
• Consumer electronics makes heavy use of reference designs
• Empathy driven design (Chris Svec on embedded.fm)
• BSP = board support package
• Alvaro mentioned previous guests Mark and Joe from Saleae
• The early shows of the URE feature
  • Dmitry Greenberg
  • Micah Elizabeth Scott (Scanlime)
• SiliconPr0n
• Mountainview Reverse Engineering meetup
• Zachtronics episode
• Find Alvaro at alvarop.com / @alvaroprieto
• Find Jen at rebelbot.com / @rebelbotjen

The post #363 – An interview with Alvaro and Jen from the URE Podcast first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris will be joining Hologram as a developer advocate. Past discussions around 3G projects were people like Akiba, Gerry and Brandon (wifi connectivity)
• Dave wants to see a chart of data update rate on wifi vs 3g (and how it impacts battery).
• Chris and Dave both use Sendy. which is a front end for Amazon SES.
• Acquisitions!
  • Altium has bought Upverter. Upverter was on The Amp Hour in 2013. Dave is excited about the eeConcierge service.
  • Dragon Innovation was bought by Avnet. Scott Miller was on the show back in 2012.
  • IXYS was bought by Littelfuse. They paid $750M.
• Dave got fuse quotes from a Japanese mfg that were 1/5th the cost of list fuses! These are what you can buy on his site in multipacks.
• 121GW meter will be released on October 20th. It will surely sell out, make sure you’re on Dave’s mailing list!
• Dave will be launching another Kickstarter. Chris suggested he does Kickstarter Gold like Zach Dunham did.
• People are building DIY Powerwalls at home. Tesla is selling theirs at a lower cost than we thought.
• Plethora wrote about why crowdfunded projects fail.
• Dave was contacted by the new owner of Lily Drones threatening legal action over the trademark. Dave had made a video about it while on vacation. The “Nominative Fair Use” case with NKOTB guides judicial action over this.
• AvE did a review of the Cubiio, but was talking about the laser but not the manufacturability.
• Chris wrote about “Solo Engineers” and was really thinking about the campaign/design that David Kronstein (Tesla500) ran for the Chronos 1.4 camera.
• Andy Gelme almost got in trouble with the LiFX bulb because of the stretch goals. This changed the rules on KS that you need a real project.
• Sonos is bricking speakers if you don’t accept their terms and conditions.
• There is a pacemaker with 250K units in the field that requires a firmware update.
• An engineer was sentenced to 40 months in prison for meddling with emissions output on Volkswagon vehicles. No word yet on the executives going to jail.

Links are always available throughout the week on our subreddit /r/TheAmpHour or follow our twitter account @TheAmpHour

Thanks to the Wikimedia Commons for the merge sign

The post #358 – Mergers and People Acquisitions first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome back, Akiba from Freaklabs

• Contextual Electronics members now get the “academic pricing” on the Analog Discovery 2. That device is made by Digilent. We had Clint Cole on the show in the in the past.
• Akiba just got back from Europe for vacation. Prior to that he was working on a World Bank/Egyptian Government project instrumenting waste systems to prevent dumping.
• The project uses 3G modules, simcom 5320e
• Of course this topic made us think of the @InternetOfShit twitter account.
• The field radio Akiba favors is a point to point 802.15.4 radio.
• This is instead of using LoRa, which is a 900 Mhz sensor protocol by Semtec
• Ubiquity long range
• The septage project was build on similar technology as the rice field monitoring project Akiba has been working on for a few years now.
• Akiba’s next project will be drones, possibly working with agriculture.
• During reboot of multiple product, Akiba is planning on organizing into product lines
• IEEE ACM article (behind a paywall, unfortunately)
• During a discussion of lifestyle businesses, Chris mentioned the book the E-myth. In it, they talk about “primary aim”
• While discussing the AD2, Akiba mentioned $50 test fixtures in china (see images below)
• Chris wrote about solo engineers.
• Beers in akiba’s workshop
• Dangerous prototypes now offers Dirty Cables and Dirty Decapping
• Follow Akiba on Twitter as @freaklabs

Thanks to gtzecosan for the image of the septic system

The post #355 – The Internet of Septage (with Akiba) first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• The security bot the went in the drink
• Watching robots fall over
• When the Boston Dynamics robot finds his voice
• Dave reviewed a Trezor wallet
• Bitcoin pizza day
• $25 multimeter
• Chris has been playing with the Analog Discovery 2. Another user made a curve tracer with one.
• List of electronics youtubers on eevblog forum
• Clamping zener in transistors (EEVblog1000)
• Dave is doing self-imposed contest judging to give away a scope.
• Should you be desoldering parts? If you’re starting out? Probably.
• Why’s it called “contextual” electronics?
• Glass is back!
• Particle raised 20M
• IoT Degree
• Naomi (@RealSexyCyborg) tweeted about the a new innovation…a library.
• You should be following the Internet of Shit on twitter
• TechCrunch wrote about a new metal printer raising 120M. But it’s still a prototyping tool.
• 350kW solution by porsche. It needs to be efficient! We had posted about this 99% efficient inverter.

The post #353 – IoT Degree first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

We once again welcome Jonathan Oxer!

• Jon was previously on episode 123 of The Amp Hour.
• Jon runs Superhouse.tv, a channel about creating home automation. He also runs Freetronics, a kit company run out of Melbourne, Australia.
• Jon also previously had a software company, which he sold at an effective loss. During the job search, Jon got frustrated with the requirements for most jobs and posted about it on Facebook.
• In the past, Jon has felt imposter syndrome (so say we all)
• He may end up doing consulting, Chris recommended this document about being a good consultant.
• DIY home automation
• Power-Over-Ethernet isn’t talked about as much as it was, but is still a popular category for Freetronics.
• Jon helped to design the Ardusat, which had a very different set of constraints. It had a total production run of 5
• The Lightning McQueen teardown was impressive for how it was constructed.
• Jon was impressed by a totally robotic milking system.
• If you like drones, you should check out the UAVfutures YouTube channel.
• Sumo bots are small competitive robots that try to knock their competitor out of the circle.
• LIN interface Superhouse.tv episode
• Angus Gratton hung out with Jon and Chris and consulted on all things ESP32 for Jon.
• Chris discussed “replay circuits” which seems like it would make it easy to “clone” a device controller. Jon can emulate using a 433 MHz shield he designed. He has given a conference talk about it as well.
• Samy and Joe scared Chris into thinking about security (among others).
• OpenHAB is a way to control devices throughout the home.
• Jon talked in a past video about the risks of having a device “calling home” as a method of control.
• Want to hire Jon? Email him here.
• Follow him on Twitter as @JonOxer
• Check out his sites: Superhouse.tv and Freetronics.com.au

The post #349 – An(other) Interview with Jon Oxer first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Chris is headed to Australasia in less than a month! Interested in meeting up? Check out the post about the trip here. And get in touch if you’re interested!

• Dave has been hacking the 1000x scope (in two parts!): part 1, part 2
• The bandwidth is tied to Claude Shannon’s Information Theory.
• Dave did a monster survey! Over 10,000 respondents. Chris thinks that there might be a slight cult of personality going on.
• The Vault 7 was a huge CIA leak to Wikileaks.
• Chris has been loving The Idea Factory (which he just finished). It was very interesting learning about the personal nature of a lot of the big names. Claude Shannon was a huge tinkerer who built flame throwing trumpets and rocket powered frisbees and Chess playing automatons
• The AWS outage affected a bunch of IoT devices. Jon from Superhouse.tv made a video about how some devices went down.
• There were some super fancy electronics created that can survive on the surface of Venus.
• Elecia and Chris from Embedded.fm are doing March Madness for Microcontrollers
• Dave has used the Basic Stamp in the past. It’s actually a layer programmed on top of a PIC part.
• There is an IoT Teddy Bear that was insecure and leaked a bunch of messages and images onto the internet.
• We can speed up terraforming Mars if we (somehow) install a huge magnetic field.
• Chris only understands terraforming from watching Firefly.
• The Martian has been released in a “classroom friendly version“.
• Electric meters are reporting 6 times lower than normal, but Dave thinks it’s likely just power factor.
• Chris wanted to talk about the dangers of hooking signals directly to platforms like a Raspberry Pi.

Thanks to volvob12b for the picture of Millford Sound

The post #339 – Look at nature and meet nerds first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Avidan Ross of Root ventures!

• Root is a seed stage fund concentrating on hardware in 3 categories:
  • Low cost robotics
  • picks and shovels
  • Supplychain mfg / logistics
• Some of the portfolio companies our audience might recognize:
  • Particle
  • Shaper (nee Taktia) – Former guest Jeremy Blum now works there and former guest Nadya Peek talked about her friend founding the company.
  • Instrumental – consumer electronics / yield tools. Wrote last week about the Note 7 fires.
• The stages of funding
  • Seed – build initial product, find product fit
  • Series A – Trying to scale and grow (might have sold $1M, want to sell $10M)
  • Other series – > proven, VCs trying to get a piece of the lower risk pie
  • Series B is almost always done with an excel spreadsheet
• Hardware is the “Triple black diamond” of the startup world
• Avidan’s background:
  • Start building modems
  • Was the CTO at a energy/hardware investment company
  • “Capital efficient hardware” was the trigger and he started the fund about 6 years ago
• Avidan gave a talk at the Hackaday Supercon about food hacking
• The Root Venture fund raised $31,415,926.53 fund.
• Avidan weighs in on the June oven and Juicero. Dave talks about Paul Reynolds blog about it.
• Avidan studied glassblowing at the Sydney college of the arts. Later traveled to Instanbul, Sweden to study.
• Patents are good for the defensive case, but the open source model isn’t necessarily a great solution.
• Particle example – open source hardware, fleet management web software is
• Steven Levy interviewed Eric from Pebble.
• 1/3 of companies in Root are consumer, rest are B2B / industrial
• Arcam, bought by GE
• 3 ways for Root to exit
  • Company goes public
  • Company gets bought
  • Root.vc can sell part of their share (sold on the secondary market)
• HAX, Bolt, Lemnos, Highway 1
• Reach them on Twitter! @RootVC, @AvidanRoss, @Kane
• Also check out Kane’s account @MachinePix for awesome animated GIFs.

The post #327 – An Interview with Avidan Ross first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Did you know you can suggest guests for The Amp Hour? Be sure to check out our posts of past guest shows first though.
• Chris is starting to do pro-bono engineering. Check out the details and submit an application for help on his blog.
• Jesse from Keyboardio did a box o’ stuff from the Shenzhen markets. We also featured his tweet a while back comparing the smart watch to starbucks breakfast.
• Dave really liked the Wired video special about Shenzhen.
• Wired also did a video about the production of a 737 at Boeing.
• If you’re going into production, Jim from Mindtribe wrote about the tests to consider.
• Mouser tracked an order through their warehouse on video.  Pick and pack for warehouses is still the domain of humans but solutions like Amazon’s Kiva could speed that up.
• We enjoyed devttys0’s “Faux Intelligent Light Switch“. A nice analog circuit!
• More attacks from IoT devices. Recode asks, “Should the manufacturers be held responsible?“
• XKCD gives guidance on passwords. Chris prefer’s the “Ready Player One” method of quoting songs for passwords (to log into VR), his favorite being “No one in the world gets what they want and that is beautiful.” (They Might Be Giants)
• Shenzhen is copying Kickstarters before they even finish funding. Good or bad?
• Dave is flabbergasted at how much money a juicer raised ($120M). We are planning to have a VC on soon to discuss similar issues.

Thanks to Barnaby Walker for the picture of monster feet

The post #321 – Monster Scale Production first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

(Note: changed the title to “Decoupled” instead of “Decoupling” as said in the intro as it sounds less negative)

• FPGA intel
• Narrative
• Kickstarter Pick and place
• Wazer
• South Australia
• Squirrel power!
• IoT DDOS
• Upverter
• HaD badge
• /r/nicechips
• MacroFab episode
• Chinese Part
• Revision control tweet
• Patreon
• Chloroform the amps

Thanks to Windell Oskay (EMSL) for the image of the capacitors!

The post #317 – A Decoupled Episode first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Dmitry Nedospasov (@nedos),

• Dmitry is from Russia, grew up in US, and moved to Germany for university (undergrad and PhD) at TU Berlin.
• He is a a hardware security researcher, like past guests Mike Ossmann and Colin O’Flynn
• Dmitry gave a great talk about these topics at 30c3 last year (also where the image above is from)
• There are different types of getting into chip level attacks
  • Semi Invasive
    • If you shine IR light light at the back of a thinned wafer you can see photonic emissions.
    • This requires high end equipment but there are some DIY versions.
    • Or you can use a saser pulse to flip bits and potentially probe the crypto key
    • To thin the wafers, you use a CMP, chemical mechanical planarization. This is similar to the one done in a fab but on a much smaller scale. One brand is an ASAP CMP
  • Fully invasive
    • Focused ion beam to modify the silicon.
    • Microprobing – making a probe pad with a laser
    • Chris Tarnovsky does a lot of these type of attacks.
• Dmitry recommends the book Murdoch’s TV pirates. This was about the hacking of Pay TV.
• Another area of attack are printer cartridges. The ones from vendors giving away printers are encrypted so you have to continue to buy the ink from them.
• Intellectual property law says that you can replicate the signals (nothing is protecting those) but you cannot steal the firmware. So as long as you emulate, you should be fine (that won’t stop companies from suing you though). 
• Playstation modding/hacking was another big thing back in the day.
• Dave was asking about RFID credit cards because he just did a video about RFID jammers. Many of the terminals use the  EMV standard.
• There have been pictures of “less than sophisticated” attacks on metros lately.
• Levels of security
  • Low
    • Bank card
    • SIM
  • Medium
    • E-Passport
  • High
    • Pay TV
• Dmitry was invited to a conference about industrial control systems (ICS) in Vienna. This may have been a mistake based on the fact that Dmitry works with IC’s (note the apostrophe), but there are still lots of issues. The stuxnet hack comes to mind (though that was very sophisticated and software based).
• Industries that are hurting for security
  • IoT security
  • Medical
  • Cars
• Dmitry has spent the week doing training a Recon. The conference is nearly  50% hardware talks and has tons of on site training.
• This particular class Dmitry is giving is teaching workflow for day to day hardware reverse engineering.
  • Building stuff with FPGAs, such as a custom protocol analyzer (using a Papilio board)
  • Also probing projects that were created on Olimex boards.
  • Using external test equipment like a Saleae logic analyzer.
• Dmitry also will be at ToorCon in San Diego. 
• He also gives on site trainings (outside of conferences) and will possibly do one in Berlin later this year. Check out his website toothless.co for more info on the trainings.
• Contact Dmitry if you’re in Europe and interested in hardware security. He has too much work and is looking to hire people. Contact him on Twitter, his handle is @nedos

Many thanks to Dmitry for telling us more about hardware security! It was a great look into how people can get into probing silicon for all its secrets!

The post #303 – An Interview with Dmitry Nedospasov first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Omer Kilic (@OmerK)

• Omer has an academic background. His thesis started off being about FPGAs.Towards the tail-end of his research, he started exploring Erlang for embedded devices.
• He programs using Erlang, which was created by former mobile phone giant Ericksson (device making has tailed off, they still do network infrastructure).
• They had a phone called the T28 that was well designed.
• Erlang can uses the “actor model” of concurrency, which maps really well into the hardware domain. It’s used for the backend of apps like WhatsApp. More info at http://www.erlang-embedded.com/
• Chris had spend the day at the London Science Museum. It was fantastic!
• Omer has worked with a few hardware companies in the past, including doing work on large manufacturing operations in China.
• Now Omer is the CTO and Chief Hacker at Den Automation.
• Nothing replaces being able to sit next to each other during development.
• While in China last time, Omer tried talking to big semi with mixed results. It was easier to get a few chips in the market as an experiment.
  
  
• Omer has talked about access to chips in the past at OSHUG.
• The main problem with intelligent devices is interoperability. How do you get multiple devices to talk to one another without loads of software?
• Setting standards aren’t the answer, there was a relevant XKCD about that very topic.
• Usually it’s companies saying “use ours!” and this only rarely actually works out in the end (like Motorola with SPI)
• The National Microelectronics Institute (NMI) will host a talk in May, falongside BCS (British Computing Society) and OSHUG. The event is called the NMI Open Source Conference.
• Open source can be something people hide behind and use as an excuse for mediocrity in their products.
• The company was started by Yasser, now only 20ish years old! They raised 500K of seed funding
• We put a chip in it!
• The Internet of Shit is a great novelty account. They recently tweeted about the stats of people planning to use Javascript in their devices.
• The Den Automation devices will be a connected wall switch and socket, along with a couple of auxiliary helper devices. Sockets in the UK have switches on them as well. At first they will only be making UK based devices.
• Each socket/plug will have power consumption monitoring and also will allow the user to “label” which device is plugged into it.
• The problem is that they are building the entire socket/switch from scratch. This means lots of regulatory hurdles. The British standards must be passed, as well as CE for RF.
• The problem with dynamic languages (like Javascript) is the overhead required if it is to be run on each device.
• Den already is utilizing a PLM because of the impending regulation process.
• The decision to move production to China should not be taken lightly. There was a Wired UK series on production there.
• The initial funding for the project was raised on Seedrs, they are are raising a second round now.
• See more about the project at http://getden.co.uk/
• Omer has given another talk about IOT called “The IOT Hardware Kerfuffle“

Many thanks to Omer for talking about the connected device market and doing manufacturing with a small team! It turned into a constructive conversation about getting products to market.

The post #295 – An Interview with Omer Kilic first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris is selling a “Bodge” shirt
• Dave has a new outro on his latest repair video.
• Chris just got back from SXSW down in Austin. They used to have lots of chip companies, some of which remain:
  • AMD sold to Global Foundries
  • Silicon Labs is still there.
  • Freescale and IBM are somewhat reduced.
• The panel Chris was on included former guest of the show Scott Miller of Dragon Innovation. The topic was DFM for getting to scale. Chris focused mostly on making designs robust.
• Another trend at SXSW was IoT and ways of controlling the software layer. The physical interfaces to these devices still leaves something to be desired.
• Chris mentioned the industrial HART standard as a possible analog to the problem that connected light switched need.
• Artificial Intelligence just beat a world Go champion 4 games to 1. 
• Dave likes the Numberphile video explaining the math of chess.
• Chris has been making 2 minute videos trying to explain problems that beginners don’t know much about when starting out. Things like electron flow vs current flow, what ground means. Dave has made a video asking, “Does current flow through a capacitor?“
• This may end up becoming a book some day, titled Top down electronics
• The Hackaday Prize 2016 was announced! It’s new judges and new  structure this year.  
• The Keysight scope contest is having lots of legal woes giving away scopes.
• What would happen if The Amp Hour started a political party? What does it look like if an engineer was in charge of legislation? What do they optimize?
• Dave mentioned the TED talk about Basic Income. Chris said this is an eventual solution to “what happens when robots take all of our jobs?”.
• The BeagleBone organization is participating in the Google Summer of Code and you can help out!
• Great bumper sticker, “The cloud is just someone elses computer”
• Another interesting BBB project, the Bela works for super low latency audio. 
• Mike’s video about the layers of a PCB was awesome! He machined each layer at a time to expose the copper. 
• The 1953 Transistor documentary by Bell is a great retro look at the early days.
• A user posted some fun pictures of the Shenzhen markets. 

The post #291 – Artificially Intelligent Party Platform first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave was asked to be an expert witness…no way! Past guest Jack Ganssle has done this many times, as has Michael Barr.
• Dave’s rebranded multimeter is up for sale soon and he has been struggling with WooCommerce.
• Both Chris and Dave have put out unintended public links/posts.
• Security in general on IoT is terrible, you can now search webcams that are just open on the internet.
• Up until the late 70s, the Nuclear launch codes in the US were 000000.
• Bunnie is crowdfunding a new book about electronics in Shenzhen. Both bunnie and Akiba have been on the show in the past talking about this topic (as have others!)
• Chinese new year is coming up! Beware! Shouldn’t we just make it an (electrical) engineering holiday?
• Chris has been working with Class D Amplifiers as part of Contextual Electronics. It’s a new field for him. 
• FTDI is back at it, bricking chips with their interface software in new and innovative ways.
• Dave makes the comparison in PR to the Fine Brothers, who recently had a drastic turnaround in their asshattery. 
• If you need an alternativeUSB to serial, try the MCP2200.
• Jonathan is launching the beta for PCB.ng, a new assembly service that is priced by the area of the circuit board.
• The Hackaday square inch contest would do well pricing their assembled boards in this way.  Dave had a project called the uRGB.
• Dave is hoping to start assembling his pick and place machine kit (on a cart?)
• The Aeroscope is a new wireless with impressive specs. We’ll need to wait on the cost and the actual performance.
• Bluetooth Smart can talk to both BLE and BT classic.
• The dean of MIT graduate education is leaving to start a new school with no degrees, majors.
• Udacity has been announcing a lot of interesting things like Nanodegrees and paying students back for finishing in 12 months.

The post #285 – Something’s Serially Wrong Here first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Luke Beno of Analog.io!

• Analog.io is a data collection and charting website where you can view and share datastreams with others.
• Luke entered Analog.io (including a hardware component) into The Hackaday Prize.
• This is used for keeping track of lots of data over time, but Luke uses it for tracking beekeeping. 
• The site does not directly collect data, currently Analog.io pulls mainly from data.sparkfun.com. That server runs the open source phant.io.
• Luke says it’s easiest to get started using an Electric Imp or a Particle board.
• The boards make http requests which get recorded by phant.io. Notification based upon trigger levels is not currently supported. 
• As platforms get larger, holes in server reliability become more apparent.
• Dave and Chris have been reading Free by former guest Chris Anderson.
• One example of a likely purchaser of services would be monitoring temp/humidity of vacation home (making sure the heat isn’t broken). 
• There was a kickstarter about a bee hive with a direct tap.
• Other similar platforms include xively and thingspeak.
• Luke has a tutorial for getting up and running using a tiny temp/humidity board and an electric imp. 
• The service used to be called imp.guru, but changed names.
• The electric imp uses a server/agent scheme. 
• You don’t always need to use an Electric Imp, it just makes compiling and downloading (or updating) code easier.
• Instead, Luke targeted a lower power solution using a sensor node built with an MSP430 and an NRF24 radio. The base had another NRF24 radio and an ESP8266 to talk to the wifi network. 
• Google is making a new router called OnHub.
• Chris sees parallels to Distributed Control Systems.
• The day of recording is BTTF day (Oct 21st, 2015).
• Dave was very concerned about power consumption.
• MQTT has a “broker” that acts like a satellite. Anyone subscribed to the broadcast message will get the data packet that is submitted by a device.
• SmartThings was bought by Samsung and acts as a connected home router.
• LoRA has 7 mile low power RF coverage. There is a kickstarter for this with the Things Network.
• APRS is a ham radio version of multi node system. 
• Luke utilized the 43oh.com forums to build his system. 
• Software for his stack
  • He programmed using Energia for the MSP430 (arduino style).
  • He used arduino for esp8266
  • The Sparkfun server running phant.io is NodeJS
  • Analog.io is Ruby on Rails.
  • In browser processing and mapping is javascript/angular.js
• In his day job, Luke is an ASIC architect for Triad Semiconductor.
• He attempted to answer why aren’t there low pin FPGAs with tons of resources like Dave wants (some are starting to hit the market).

The post #272 – An Interview With Luke Beno of Analog.io first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Amazon is getting into the IoT cloud business.
• Chris views this similarly as Electric Imp with the server and the client (the small battery powered device). Brandon was on the show talking about it.
• It’s not always just pushing commands down to a battery device. Sometimes the devices publish to graphing services like analog.io/imp.guru.
• Adafruit and Sparkfun also have publishing services, which Dave thinks will be hopeless against a service like Amazon.
• Amazon has a set of development boards that already work with the service.
• While Dave doesn’t think the second place people will work, he has uploaded videos to Daily Motion (vs YouTube) as a hedge in case they ever usurp the big dogs.
• Pirate Electronics is a nice electronics educational program online. However, they recently wrote about why they chose Python for microcontrollers (which aren’t actually micros), which seems like they are optimizing for the wrong thing.
• National is making some older parts EOL, though it may be that it’s only certain versions of chips (packages, lead free, etc). The LM567, a tone detection chip, is on the list of EOL.
• Dave asks about how a die shrink works at a fab. 
• Analog and Maxim Integrated may soon be….integrated. What will we call them, Maximalog?
• There have been over $110B in mergers so far this year.
• Dave remembers how Maxim released new databooks consistently. Referencing the parts contained within required the cross reference in the index. 
• Parts.io is now fully open to the public, no registration required. Chris was also on The Sparkgap Podcast talking about how to find op amps (and Parts.io as an extension of that). 
• The conference that Chris is helping set up (The Hackaday Superconference) is now open for registering for tickets.
• There will soon be a 19 hour flight from Perth to London. Dave recalls traveling 48 hours (with time changes) to get to Europe.
• You can communicate with the Amsat Fox-1, which is now in orbit. 
• Chris is back on the robots train. What won’t automation and robotics do into the future? 
• The Skarp had funding suspended on Kickstarter. What does this say about future projects that have a “prototype”.

The post #271 – Amazon Moves In, Dave Says Run first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris has been working on Contextual Electronics for 2 years.
• Dave has been busy with his new project, Huxley!
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKf_SIdCH1Q[/tube]
• Atmel is apparently shopping around for buyers. This may have something to do with their margins being similar to grocery stores.
• This comes at a time of other huge mergers and acquisitions
  • Avago buys Broadcom
  • Intel buys Altera
• Apparently OnSemi and Microchip put together a hostile bid back in 2008.
• Companies getting bought always has the looming threat of not being able to buy parts after the company changes. Chris mentioned this can create interesting scenarios where replacement projects require solutions like FPGAs. 
• Dave recently tore down a Sony Walkman, which had some interesting single in line packages.
• These can get 8 hours battery life on alkaline batteries. Dave has been talking about batteries lately:
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iEshd6izgk[/tube]
• The DARPA robotics challenge happened recently. Teams programmed humanoid robots to complete a series of tasks like walking through doorways, turning a water valve and driving a car.
• It was about as fun watching the robots fall over as it was watching the best robots win.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo[/tube]
• We have talked about the $9 CHIP board in the past, Olimex debunks some of the cost using quotes from the chip maker.
• The WiFi charger is back in the news, but there is some solid analysis by physicists as well.
• We are put off by the struggle over “the OS for IoT”. Google is trying with their Brillo platform.
• Chris gets to tour SpaceX! They recently took $1B from investors (mainly Google/Fidelity) to raise money for building satellites.
• Limor (from adafruit) did a great interview with Paul Horowitz. There was also a text interview with both AoE authors on E14.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCI3B5eT9NA[/tube]
• The Open Hardware Summit was announced and will be on September 19th in Philadelphia.
• The Amp Hour t-shirt in black is once again available for purchase (for a limited time). For a short time, you may also be able to buy the Solder Jockey t-shirt.
• Chris will be speaking at Solid in two weeks, if you’re there say hi!

Thanks to debaird for the image!

The post #253 – Consolidate All The Things – Zonked Zelotic Zaitech first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave has been busy trying to characterize the front end of the Rigol scope (DS1057A) he did a teardown of last week.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9P1Am9aFU[/tube]
• Chris laments trying to go back to making 2 layer boards after being spoiled by 4.
• Dave will be giving a presentation to a physics conference next year. He will get to go check out some of their awesome lab gear sooner.
• The Hackaday Prize 5 finalists have been chosen with some help from Dave.  Chris helped to cull the initial list of 850 entries.
• One of the popular favorites, the $300 Pick and Place didn’t make the cut and wrote about 3D printing jumping the shark. We hope the device ends up in the market at $300!
• Chris took a step towards home manufacturing by beginning to hack together a toaster oven for reflow. He will be using the Contextual Electronics BenchBudEE board for control.

Beginning my project to hack a toaster oven into a reflow oven using the @ContextualElec BenchBudEE pic.twitter.com/KHUVNnlEng

— chris_gammell@chaos.social (@Chris_Gammell) October 16, 2014

• There is a simpler version available on Kickstarter now called the Zallus. It has a nice looking touchscreen interface.
• Dave has an oven controller that only uses LEDs for indicating which part of the cycle the device is in (ramp, soak, reflow, etc), but it still gets the job done. It also has a “learn mode” so it can be recalibrated when there are different thermocouple placements or different amounts of thermal mass in the chamber.
• Chris has been on a buying streak lately. He just got bit by the robot bug and bought the RedBot from Sparkfun.
• On the IoT side of things, Chris picked up the Light Blue Bean, which allows easy Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity  (but only from a mac for n0w). They also got their module certified for sale if you fall in love with it.
• Dave started using Patreon for viewer support. He can send special footage to backers on there.
• The Annonabox is a Kickstarter sham; they raised over $600k before their funding was put on hold when they couldn’t substantiate their claims about designing their own hardware.
• Chris will be travelling to Electronica in Munich, Germany this year. The amount of money being spent is already pretty ludicrous: Digikey is giving away a Tesla (and that likely won’t be the craziest thing there).
• We re-opened our campaign for the black Amp Hour t-shirts (and sweatshirts).
• Want your fix of “Workbench of the Week” even though we don’t ever do that on The Amp Hour anymore? Check out the /r/Workbenches subreddit.  The /r/nicechips subreddit also acts as a good proxy for “Chip of the week”
• Dave is planning on digging out a fun old chip: The SPO256
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t6P_8OkBVQ[/tube]
• Chris has been creeped out by the Internet of Things: watching the temperature in the Analog Life Lab tells you lots of things about what’s going on there. It was build using Luke Beno’s tutorial and board. This is also the argument for why Google bought Nest. Dave used to have a service like this before the webapp shut down.
• Another Google acquisition, you can watch Dave in his lab on Dropcam, even highlighting when there was movement using the historical function.
• Fellow Ohioan, Ken Burns (who is currently running the TinyScreen kickstarter) recently wrote about why he started his business in Akron. It’s possible to start a business just about anywhere, it was interesting to read his reason for Akron.
• Chris thinks that talent pool is a big factor in deciding where to locate a business. The Technical Illusions team (builders of the CastAR, founded by Jeri), just decided to move down to Mountain View to get access to a bigger pool.

Next week on the show we’ll be talking to Bil Herd, designer of the Commodore 128. Get your questions in here: Next Week on the show: C128 designer, Bil Herd

The post #221 – Warming Up To IoT – Tendentious Thermal Tools first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris was having issues with his internet provider (or so he thought). Chris is afraid of the possible TimeWarner/Comcast merger.
• Dave heard about a pristine version of an early Superman comic going on eBay for $3.2M.
• On a episode of Innovation Hub, an expert or risk talked about about HP betting on the HP35. Did he forget about everything before that??
• Can anyone think of an early version of a popular technology that has sold at auction for big money?
• Dave got to see an Apple I at the Sydney Powerhouse, where the 2nd Sydney mini-Maker Faire was going on during the weekend.
• Dave had a fireside chat with the Bluechilli CEO (yet to be posted)
• The Rome Maker Faire is another “major” Maker Faire. It will coincide with the open hardware summit in Rome this year.
• They announced the speaker list for the OHS and it looks like a great mix of familiar faces and new ones.
• Chris will be at the Hackaday 10th anniversary party in LA.
• Chris gave a talk about KiCad at the Hardware Didactic Galactic. He had to install KiCad on a Mac using a virtual machine running Ubuntu.
• Chris will be at the Hardware Workshop in San Francisco and we’ll have another meetup if you’re in town.
• Dave announced the changes coming to Altium.
• They took some of Dave’s suggestions for the top 5 for Altium when he thought they were bringing out a low cost tool:
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GjBFQgVWv0[/tube]
• Chris asks about open design formats and how much that affects OSHW. Presentation:

• The new KiCad forum (forum.kicad.info) is going well, Discourse has turned out  to be great forum software.
• If you want to donate to get CERN to spend more time on KiCad, you can do so here.
• When do you decide to pull the trigger on a CAD program upgrade?
• Dave used to use a “best bet” version of new builds of Altium while working there and designing hardware.
• The XL741 is a new kit from EMSL, which shows how a 741 op amp is put together.
• Hardware companies continue to raise money: Electric Imp just raised $15M. You can hear our interview with Brandon Harris when he was on The Amp Hour.
• Is there any way to avoid the standards wars in the emerging internet of things.
• One thing that will limit IoT is the takeup of IPv6.
• Samsung bought IoT company SmartThings for a rumored $200M.
• Chris was enamored with an online book about DSP that was posted to the subreddit. Dave informs him that this book has been around for a long time.
• NPR published a piece about women in engineering and how workplace culture and how there is a 40% fallout. Dave and Chris agree about the impact of the workplace on retaining women, but think the numbers need to be normalized against men leaving the workforce.

Thanks to panavatar for the original picture of the secret bear.

The post #213 -Travel Recaps and Altium Announcements – Artisinal Aussie Assemblage first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Brandon Harris of Electric Imp!

• Hugo started the company after leaving Apple (after briefly working at Nest). He worked on an Apple stock notifier (that turns green or red depending on stock direction). The frustration around connecting XML and JSON lead to the Imp.
• Brandon and Hugo worked together at Apple on the iPhone.
• Around the Electric Imp offices, one of the employees made the “IoTEA”, a notification system for when the kettle is ready.
• Electric Imp wants to be the AWS of IoT.
• There are currently three different versions of Imp hardware:
  • IMP001 is the SD card.
  • IMP002 is the solder down device.
  • IMP003 is the lower cost, no antenna module manufactured by Murata.
• Each of these has the Broadcom wifi chipset, the same used in iPhones.
• The main processor is the STM32 Cortex M3.
• The coding language for the Electric Imp is Squirrel. They started with Lua, both of which are scripting languages.
• The application team created a freefall detection device, something you throw in the air and it connects to the internet and sends a packet before returning to your hands.
• DHCP is the slowest step in the connection process.
• The Imp runs eCos, they call it impOS.
• Using the SD card you are limited to 6 pins, it can help to use an i2c expander. Bit banging has to go through the SPI port.
• Because it is an RTOS instead of a superloop, it can be a tough adjustment for normal Arduino users.
• The Nora reference design is a multi sensor design with qualification of the power. Quirky has a similar product called Spotter.
• There are a wide variety of other reference designs to pull from.
• The sleep modes sip current in different modes:
  • Deep sleep: 4-6 uA wakes on timer or interrupt
  • On with wifi off: 1-2 mA
  • On with wifi on: 5-6 mA
  • Everything on: 100 mA
• Nora reference design has battery info/comparison. It gets roughly 60K wakes on 2 AA alkalines. Nora does 15 mins between uploads, 1 min wake for each read.
• Wifi is TDMA.
• BlinkUP is how you get the info into a device, it uses a phototransistor on the bottom of the SD card (or you have to add one)
• Adam Wolf told us about how they do something similar at Wayne and Layne.
• Brandon hopes future products will try bluetooth, cellular.
• They tried to put their reference designs into the public domain, which wasn’t allowed. Instead they licensed with the X11 open source license.
• All of the necessary code and drivers for the Electric Imp are on their Git Hub repo.
• Their main competition is SparkCore; the differentiating factor is that Spark allows you to run on their servers, whereas Electric Imp helps to make the process smoother.

The post #202 – An Interview With Brandon Harris – Impish Internet Iamatology first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.