• Dave is back from vacation. He should have bought a Starlink mini (not as cheap as we thought) because his coverage was very poor throughout the trip.
• Space twitter
• Artemis II is going up soon (early Feb 2026)
• Billy makes artemis go up 
• Sparkfun and Adafruit are on the outs
• PJRC (and Paul Stoffregen) makes the Teensy and it is now produced exclusively by Sparfkun
• The pinout is open but the bootloader is proprietary and sold as the magic black box.
• Paul’s wrote about what was happening on the EEVblog forum
• Tim Lamb (Trash80) talked about teensy in his devices on episode 292 
• Chris modified a Tag Connect 10 pin footprint for an upcoming design
• RAM prices are wild right now!
• After following a tutorial on “Doom Coding”, Chris picked up using Claude Code
• A friend pointed out that more horizontal, open source programs like KiCad (version 10 coming soon) will have an advantage with LLMs/coding assistants over more vertically integrated tools. The vertical tools won’t be able to move as fast.
• Also in the Doom Coding exercise, Chris found an app called Terminus that allows connecting an Android device (and maybe iOS?) and getting a terminal interface from the phone using a USB-C cable in OTG mode.
• Zephyr builds in lots of capabilities
• Chris loves using Zephyr shells to build interfaces (even custom ones) to standard functions in Zephyr
• CES wrapped a week or two before this recording. The Donut lab solid state battery proposed impossible specs.
• Some engineers modified a Rivian to try and make the Cannonball Run. It was an interesting look into battery packs and what it takes to charge them fast.
• Dave and Chris took a long roadtrip to the Deep Space Network back in 2017.
• Piers Rocks has a great video about how PIOs work on the RP2xxx chips from Raspberry Pi
• The Raspberry Pi should always be viewed from the perspective of “what is cheapest”. The RP team mentioned that drove the decisions of external flash on the RP2xxx boards
• Past guest Jeff Geerling talked about some of the pricing challenges with RAM prices increasing

The post #713 – Rubber Duck Incarnate first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Dr Mark Palmeri, professor at Duke University!

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

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

• Dave is starting a new project for a lab timer called the uTimer
• Timelapse
• Geerling videos about clocks
• Mitxela clock
• Transflective displays
• Dave is looking at LCDs like this one
• Dropping Rs vs Ls
• Font chip
• .5mm pin pitch on the connectors
• Chris is making a new breakout board that is effectively a sensors shield for a Bluetooth chip. It’s the first time he’s using the service and it was a pleasant completely hands-off experience.
• Mike Harrison USB C barrel jack
• JLC DFM plugin for KiCad
• Python script to pull EasyEDA parts into KiCad
• Chris is designing around this $3 board with an nRF52840A
• de minimus tariff exemptions are gone in the us
• North Korea is putting forward software engineering candidates that are actually teams of workers
• Mini PC production at BeeLink
• Stephen Hawes on The Amp Hour
• Stephen documented the process of getting the Opulo v4 through certification
• Chris has solar install issues
• Dave is dealing with removing downpipes
• Dave is getting battery extension 50 kWh

The post #700 – Beware of the Overachievers first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Petr Dvorak of Beny Devices

• A to Z book about KiCad
• fancygit
• lazygit
• gitlol
• Customer types
• Brno – 30% of electron microscopes
• What is changing in electron microscopes? Higher voltage, no noise
• Electrostatic steering
• Transitioning to freelancing
• Regulations for freelancer vs employer
• Petr is a prolific poster of electronics content on his LinkedIn
• Show your work – Austin Kleon
• 3 years to get first client
• 1 month buffer of posts on LinkedIn
• Building repetitions
• Outliers / 10000 hours
• Lists of projects
• Constraints helping new engineers trying to learn electronics
• 8×32 pixel displays
• Petr in Shenzhen
• Gallup – top strength is learning
• Personality types
• Contact
  • Get a free eBook about KiCad on beny-devices.eu
  • Follow Petr on LinkedIn

The post #669 – Freelance PCB Design with Petr Dvorak first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome to Philip Salmony of Phil’s Lab YouTube channel

• Phil’s Lab YouTube channel, started in 2020
• The STM32 KiCad video when Chris learned of the channel
• Jim Williams app note about thermocouple app note
• Discrete
• Book
• devttys0 channel
• Jim Williams questions
• Mixed signal
• Akiba and Chris talking about Jazz
• Philip is not only a hardware consultant, he also works at a drone startup in Denmark.
• Philip learned KiCad through friend
• Level of people coming in?
• Z-Transform
• Philip likes working on electronics that have an effect on music
• Part shortage
• Philip is building a new board with the Xilinx Zynq
• Zynq toolchain
• Eurocircuits
• Sign up for the course!
  • Course overview
  • Course purchase page

The post #573 – Mixed Signal Education with Philip Salmony first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• CM4 vs CM4-Lite
• The connector for a board implementing a CM4 is the Hirose DF40C-100DS-0.4V(51). Unsurprisingly, these are very hard to find right now.
• Complaints
• There is a new site for commercial Raspberry Pi stuff (now a .com domain)
• Apex Electronics in LA
• Tempo Automation is going public via SPAC
• Flux (a new online CAD tool) raised $12M
• This seems similar to Upverter, which was acquired by Altium and is still around in a slightly modified form
• Advanced designs
• Collaborative design work
• KiCad lost control of the kicad-pcb [dot] org domain name when it was sold by a former team member, everything should be directed to KiCad.org
• Dave insists that Wordstar pioneered the use of ctrl+c, ctrl+v
• Acrylic vs Silicone conformal coat
• Dave is looking at building his own microphone pre-amp using the THAT4320, an analog front end chip for audio systems

Thanks to freesvg.com for the Grumpy Cat image

The post #563 – Grumpy Collaboration first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Chris didn’t take any notes this week because he was busy assembling. Here are some guesses at the links:

• InteractiveBOM
• Paul Daniels schematic tool
• iBOM ported to EAGLE

See links on The Amp Hour subreddit for anything discussed from there

The post #561 – Assembly Chat first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave has more computer woes. He still “shops” from the dumpster room though!
• Chris has been working with NodeJS which has so many dependencies it stresses him out
• Altium rejected a bid from Autodesk
• Jon Evans, one of the lead KiCad devs, is an upcoming guest on Chris’s other podcast for Contextual Electronics.
• Solidworks is made by Dassault Systems (who also make military gear?)
• Solidworks rebadges Altium as “Solidworks PCB”
• Past guest (and co-worker of both Chris and Dave!) Matt Berggren is one of the leading product developers at Autodesk PCB.
• The LM3914 display driver
• Past guest Philip Fredin made a “DIP conversion” package using a PCB and stamped metal
• Toyota Production System
• Stopping the line in TPS
• Continuous integration / continuous deployment
• Apparently Tesla is doing some form of this with their cars?
• Chris got to catch up with past guest Sam Zeloof, who is nearing the end of undergrad (already!). He mentioned the cost of a lithography machine (EUV) is near $100M
• Bosch has a new semiconductor plant for making sensors
• TinyML on microcontrollers
• Past guest Brian Faith talked about doing something like this using their platform SensiML
• Popping a 5000A fuse

Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels

The post #546 – Thousands Of Dependencies first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Apple released the AirTag, which is for asset tracking. People on twitter are reverse engineering them, including former guest Colin O’Flynn:
  • https://twitter.com/colinoflynn/status/1391168784271032320
  • khttps://twitter.com/0x31337/status/1395064352785399808
  • https://twitter.com/ghidraninja/status/1392185552502501377
• Bluetooth COVID tracing apps
• iFixit AirTag teardown
• Sidewalk Labs is a group at Google. Sidewalk is a new technology using LoRa available from Amazon.
• CNSA just landed on Mars.
• Airbags vs powered descent
• For F-150 Lightning is coming and will be able to power your home.
• Vehicle to Load (V2L)
• Hyundai Ioniq 5 is coming soon
• Higher charge rate cables have liquid cooling
• Buying cars
• Car shops servicing EVs…will they end up listening to The Amp Hour instead of Car Talk?? (no)
• Dave is in the midst of an audio amp repair. It’s a VFD failure. Part 1, Part 2.
• Service manual
• Right to repair summit in Canberra
• Chris has been to Canberra with Dave back in 2016!
• Zephyr developer summit
• Supplyframe was bought by Siemens for $700M
• Itchy and Scratchy Money
• Zach ‘Hoeken’ Smith moved to the beach upon cashing out from Makerbot
• KiCad / Altium library setup
• “Choice leads to suffering” ~ Yoda, probably
• Dogfooding
• Audacity telemetry

The post #543 – Cassette decks have browsers? first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

The post #531 – Footprints and Symbols with Natasha Baker first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. They have been writing about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it impacts electronics designers, such as our listners. Paul Golata from Mouser Electronics talks with Chris during the ad break about how AI is changing the world for the better. To check out the free resources, including an eBook about AI, go to TheAmpHour.com/mouserai

• • We have discussed telepresence before
  • Chris was able to check out an X Ray machine at mHUB
  • Chris’s first job was a co-op at Audiopack. This is where he met past guest Dave Young.
  • Audio is an odd field. Dave did a bunch of videos with Doug Ford before about the field.
  • Bird RF was another of Chris’s past co-op jobs…but never learned RF while he was there.
  • Chris got his assembled boards back
  • EEVBlog video about optimizing for one machine
  • Video on reflowing QFN
  • Domestic vs international assembly costs
  • $4K hand pick and place machine
  • Chris interviewed Stephen Hawes on the Contextual Electronics Podcast, who is building a DIY pick and place
  • Mike’s Electric Stuff has a great PnP setup because he knows to re-use parts so often
  • Mike also recently did a teardown video about an underwater radio
  • Chris recalls a talk about underwater electronics from 2017, from Nic Bingham
  • Pu pu platter
  • Chris recently got back from travel and posted a bunch of new Instagram photos
  • Dave has been posting more to Instagram as well, lately.
  • KiCon will be happening in a modified form this year. It will be a developer conversation on October 3rd. Submit questions on social media using the hashtag, #AskKiCadV6
  • For the 3 mistakes with layout video, Dave was attempting to install the Digikey library, but did not end up finding the part he wanted.
  • SnapEDA created a KiCad plugin
  • Check out this awesome photo of an optics table

When your experiment’s optics table has optics tables pic.twitter.com/vADJLSrJW4

— Dr. Cℏarles D. Brown II (@CDBrownII) September 8, 2020

The post #508 – Doomed To The Flatland first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome back, Tim ‘Mithro’ Ansell!

• Tim has been on the show twice before:
  • First time was talking about microcontroller and making a device out of that
  • Second time was talking about FPGAs
  • Third time is looking at creating the ASIC
• Tim says the next level down will be making the actual chips like Sam Zeloof, but he prefers bits to atoms.
• Talk at Chaos with Bunnie about dabbling in the others’ fields, like thinking about the lifetime of software (and applying quality engineering)
• What is an open source PDK? Github repo
• Three main components to building an IC
  • The RTL and design (code)
  • The tools – compiler / interpreter in SW
  • How does the physics work?
• Called the PDK – process design kit
• In machine readable form
• Similar to the stackup of a PCB
• Tim likes the tool SKiDL by past guest Dave Vandenbout.
• Mike Englehardt has been on before talking about SPICE.
• Why were PDKs secret before? Especially since it would be very hard to reverse engineer the PDK
• In the 80s it was open, but it changed over time. Chris posits because of VC investment? Now it’s cultural that the chip industry is not open
• “Open source has won in the sofware world” and the arguments feel the same
• QuickLogic officially supporting their tools with open source tools, as stated in a blog post by CEO Brian Faith
  • We are still taking entries to win a board from episode 500
• RISC V ISA (instruction set architecture)
• “The secret power of open source means engineers don’t have to spend time talking to lawyers”
• Open source standardizes legal equations
• The ASIC world has many groups of lawyers
• Only ideas that people are extremely confident about will get explored
• Moore’s law slowing down, compute needs growing
• Taking risks is hard because of all the roadblocks
• RISC V has opened up the ISA space to try exploring ideas that others had written off as bad ideas
• Tim gave a FOSSi “Dial Up” talk, which we will refer to at different timestamps to discuss the slides he reviews.
• Single core has flattened out for 10 years (7 minute mark on the video)
• More cores needs more memory bandwidth
• Power consumption issues
• Tim is in a group the focuses on developer productivity at Google
• That’s why they’re contributing to tools to make things faster
• Security is also dependent upon how fast you can deploy changes
• Making hardware accelerators using TPUs
• Using machine learning to develop TPU
• 130 nm came out in 99 (26 minute mark)
• The PDK and resulting silicon will be used for areas where cost > performance, like IoT.
• Good for microcontroller, but not a high speed
• Beagleboard has PRUs
• They expect some users will make specialized devices, like putting a RISC V per pin or similar.
• What’s the plan for analog?
• First thing released was digital standard cells, but they plan to publish low level transistor models, including parametric models. Unfortunately they are currently blocked on getting that work released.
• What tools are available?
  • Similar to FPGA toolchain sides
  • First step for FPGA and ASIC is synthesis, like using Yosys (lead by Claire Wolf)
  • P&R is different
  • More freedom in ASICs
    • QFlow ASIC PNR (Tim Edwards)
    • FPGA PNR are different toolchains:
      • NextPNR (lead by Dave Shah)
      • VPR (grandfather of Quartus 2)
    • DARPA launched a program called IDEA (Andreas Olofsson), which resulted in another PNR for ASICs: The Open Road project
• Tools for doing an open source flow
  • Submitted list by sine_osc
  • Magic (older than the BSD license!)
  • KLayout
  • SPICE
    • Xyce is fast
    • LTSpice used by LT designers
  • Schematic capture is still not easy (maybe KiCad?)
• Google will be doing a free shuttle run for open source chips
• Will be sending it to eFabless, they will bundle the shuttle
• 40 designs total (unless they get a large response)
• Wafer chip scale package (CSP) 4x4mm
• 50 i/o, 40 will be for design
• Might send back chips on castellated PCB
• To get your design approved, it must be using the right license.
• They will release a full list of licenses that will work, but Apache2 is guaranteed.
• Also needs to pass DRC, which will be published in the repo soon.
• Skywater PDK slack channel
• Lottery system if they get more than 40 designs
• Will be starting first run in Mid-November, Will be doing more runs after that.
• Out of 16 mm^2, only 10 mm^2 is available. The rest will be for “the harness”, a RISC V processor that can connect ‘virtual GPIO’ to turn things on or off.
• As a reference for size, could probably fit 10 RISC V cores on the 10 mm^2
• In contrast to MOSIS or Europractice, they want to fab out 100 – 400 of the chips so that they can share.
• Slack channel skywater-pdk
• J-Core, an SH based processor
• Power PC is now an open ISA
• Tim has published an Inspiration document.
• If you’re interested, you should join the mailing lists, especially the announce one.
• The slack invite link is on the announce list. They will try to set up an invite bot for later.
• Check out the FOSSi dial up talk series for future information about development.
• Mohammed from eFabless will be giving a talk about Open Road and will be showcasing demo chips, which are currently out for manufacturing. These might act as good templates.
• Need tutorials on all of the software (KLayout, MAGIC)
• Project from University of Michigan, FASoC, treats analog design like digital design.
• “Screaming inside their heart”
• Craig Bishop episode
• Adrian Tang episode
• The physics act more ideally in the small space of silicon
• Hoping to have a similar OSHpark for silicon
• “Chips4makers” is one that is trying to make “the OSH Park for ASICs”, but they are more focused on retrocomputing.
• Trying to seed and build an ecosystem
• “The things that will be most successful in this space will be those that build on each other and work together”
• Traditional ASIC designers should be prepared to do thing differntly
• Can open source be profitable? IBM bought Red Hat for $30B
• The next wave of software is “software AND”, the hardware is just a means to an end
• Contact Tim directly: tansell@google.com
• Better to go on the slack and ask there

The post #501 – Discussing the Open Source PDK with Tim Ansell first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Today’s show is sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz. We hear in the ad today from James Lewis (@baldengineer) about how to use an oscilloscope and how probe capacitance can affect measurements. For more information about the scope discussed today, check out AskAnEngineer.us.

• Seth Hillbrand did a KiCad stream working on Medtronic’s ventilator files.
• Will be interesting to see how the license for the released files changes once the pandemic is over.
• FormLabs SLA printer
• Spreadsheet of every project
• Dave did a repair video after an inductor blew in a found laptop
• Kits for parts, parts drawers
• Alvaro (past guest, remote correspondent and co-host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast) uses PartsBox.io and a barcode scanner to set up a home inventory system for electronic components.
• Dave considered buying the inventory of an electronics hobbyist.
• IPC standard pad sizes
• Density heat map
• Members of The Amp Hour Patreon now get access to an exclusive Discord server. We’re looking for other ways we can give back to our Patrons.
• 3H meetups are going virtual as well. Have you always wanted to join a 3H? There is one a Chicago meetup coming up on Tuesday April 14th. Join the 3H discord if you’d like to connect any time.
• The Myth of the 3 Capacitor Values
• Eric Bogatin on the show
• Application notes for FPGAs
• Eric’s Rules of Thumb articles
• We were asking some questions posed from our Patrons on Discord
• Microcap is free now
• Mike Engelhardt on the show
• After listening to our episode with John Day, an apps engineer was asking if there were other practical app notes that don’t exist and should be made.
• TI AN-1148
• Keithley Low level measurement handbook
• Microchip app note about LCDs

Thanks to peakpx for the sowing picture

The post #488 – Sowing Discord first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Kerry Scharfglass (@borgel)!

This episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits, who are operating throughout the COVID-19 shutdown to serve medical customers (and normal customers too!). If you need priority service for a medical device related to Coronavirus, please let them know upon checkout. All other orders will be on a non-standard timeline guarantee (because of staffing, priority orders), but will have the same high quality assembly that Screaming Circuits is known for.

• Kerry was using Upverter for layout and switched to KiCad.
• He was designing a badge for DEF CON, which he did multiple years.
• The Dragonfly Badge was based upon Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age
• Synchronizing clock over IR helped each piece of hardware coordinate patterns.
• Kerry has done two HDDG talks:
  • From 1 to 100: Scaling and Selling a Personal Electronics Project’
  • Design for Manufacturing
  • There was another talk by Whitney Merrill about Badgelife that helped Chris understand people were building real hardware.
• Kerry Supercon talk about “medium scale”
• SnapEDA
• Talk with Nadya, Ben, and Zach
• Things learned from ‘small scale hardware war games’
• Photos of units, colorful diagrams
• “All the different things you use profit for”
• Moving from 4 layer to 6 layer
• Kerry’s first job out of school was at Lab126, the company that makes hardware for Amazon.
• At the time, they had released the Kindle and KindleFire.
• He was working on a prototype for what became the Echo.
• A (wearable) ring for Echo
• Wallwart that is cheap enough to throw into everything
• OMAP3 with DSP core
• Tracking COVID cases using phones
• Wake word on device
• Initial integration with Hue worked over UPnP
• Built with Yocto
• After Lab126, Kerry started working at Mindtribe. They were recently acquired by Accenture.
• Dockless scooter
• Speed to market as a design constraint
• How did it impact the firmware side of things?
• “If you can’t communicate with the client about what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what you’re building at all”
• Whiteboarding as a skill in front of clients
• Mercilessly hack away at requirements
• Chris has dealt in the past with consultants who are rude (and doesn’t want to be like that).
• Kerry is now the Lead firmware engineer at Span.io. They are making power panels that can work better with solar and battery systems.
• Things that are different as a full time engineer vs a consultant: “I have all of the skin in the game instead of some of the skin”
• Moving into management vs moving to smaller company
• Storage + Solar
• The Powerwall doesn’t show up as a full system, it needs to be integrated by an electrician or similar.
• Industry is different than commercial
• “Designing for service”
• One customer is the home owner, one is the installer
• EEVblog videos about solar
• Changing wifi connection by the installer
• Altium to KiCad converter
• Hackaday articles
  • Inner workings of a PCB
  • Embedded file systems (LittleFS)
• Check out more about Span.io

The post #487 – An Interview with Kerry Scharfglass first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits, who can place the newest and smallest pitch parts, even on low run, quick turn assembled boards (their specialty)

• Dave will be taking his new BlackDiamond spot 325 headlamp when he goes canyoning
• Lithium battery can be 4.8V out of the pack
• Forum on mfg
• Chris Church was on the Macrofab Engineering Podcast talking about the Coronavirus effects on manufacturing
• Bill Gates in documentary about viruses
• Zoom stock really taking off due to coronavirus
• DO NOT USE THIS CHIP
• NAS in the Trash (eevblog video)
• Intel C2000 atom processor bricks devices
• LPC clock 0
• Errata on C2000
• Episode next week will be with a designer who does 300 GHz +  designs (?!)
• Chip of the Week: The Tibbo Plus1. It’s an all-in-one SOC that runs Yocto Linux.
• Chris has been challenged with board clearances and is hoping KiCad v6 DRC improves some features.
• Morse Blinkies as a Service: a web program by Ian Ross that generates circuits on demand…to make morse codes.
• It uses SKiDL, which is a text based netlist plugin for KiCad written by former guest Dave Vandenbout. Dave gave a keynote about SKiDL at KiCon 2019
• EEVblog JTAG video / Boundary Scan
• Tag Connect
• Making a toaster from scratch
• How we record the amp hour

Thanks to Simon Scarfe for the picture of the headlamp scariness

The post #482 – Shine A Light first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits. Listen to the episode to hear about the monster through-hole pick and place machine they have on premises for their legacy customers. Check out this link to get an instant quote on your next board assembly.

Welcome back, Ben Krasnow!

• We first talked to Ben 8 years ago.
• YouTube has changed quite a bit since then, as has Ben’s channel:
  • It’s now called “Applied Science” instead of the original bkraz333 (though that link is still the official one)
  • It now has 600k viewers and many Patreon sponsors
• When Chris asked about replicating the paper setup (like from a research paper), Ben says it’s a recipe. It’s easier to follow and get started.
• An artist had exclusive license to use
• Vantablack, which made Ben wonder if he could make some. (spoiler: he can)
• Applied Science gets lots of great feedback from technical viewers, including some who have insider knowledge.
• Since the last episode Ben was on he worked at
  • Valve Software, with past guests
    • Jeri Ellsworth
    • Jeff Keyzer
    • Alan Yates
• After Valve, Ben went to go work for GoogleX in 2014. They wouldn’t tell him what he was working on!
• At 6 years, this is his longest running gig.
• Joined science team with 20 people, which has grown into Verily Life Sciences. He’s able to talk about (some) things now.
• Ben has been on Embedded.fm twice in the meantime:
  • 119
  • 184
• Verily announced an accommodating contact lens, which helps with presbyopia
• Though Ben didn’t work on that project, he had previously made am LED contact lens
• Verily have a micro-fab on site for making and prototyping such small devices.
• Ben’s lab is a bit more simple, he says it almost looks like his home lab.
• Chris compared the research portions to Bell Labs
• When the team hits a wall, they focus on finding and integrating new tech.
• Chris asks if the development is a push or a pull. As in, does the customer request certain technology or do they “deliver” it to the market and test whether it will work?
• Verily is working with a US centric view, especially given the high costs of the US medical system.
• Being an inventor type person in healthcare includes figuring out what the market looks like
• How much iteration?
• Verily have made hundreds of certain devices to test whether they can be manufactured “at scale” and that they will work in large numbers.
• Primarily they partner with other (medical) hardware makers and Verily licenses the tech to the OEM.
• A common demo in the Verily lab is a little motor that uses combustion because battery technology isn’t power dense enough for what they need
• Ben often gets comments about safety on the YouTube channel
• He likes to be application driven
• Wikipedia op amps
• Ben is a KiCad user, he likes the push and shove feature.
• One of his most popular video shows vinyl and LP under a SEM. The tough part is pulling out the bitstream, which he currently does with a Teensy.
• Rubber band fridge
• Drill through EDM
• Ben tried over 80 different methods to get PCB traces on a piece of plastic. This is a good example of the importance of starting from a paper or a patent.
• Chris thinks that Ben is a great example of the behavior defined in Grit
• Tim Ferriss talking about fame/money
• Cookies DOE
• Exceptionally hard and soft
• Ben kept blowing up the controllers for the Apollo Electroluminescent display. Ben later gave a great talk about the experience at Supercon
• Needed a source of radioactive material, which are apparently easily acquired in static brushes for LPs.
• Want to hang out with Ben in person? He’s usually at the Hackaday Supercon
• Follow Ben on Twitter and be sure to subscribe to the Applied Science YouTube channel
• Books mentioned in this episode:
  • Elon Musk Biography
  • Skunkworks

The post #480 – An Interview with Ben Krasnow, 8 years on first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• KiCon is over! The only thing that really went wrong is Chris lost his wallet briefly.
• Former guest Chris Anderson (@Chr1sa on twitter) is no longer going to TED conferences
• Matt Foley motivational speaker
• Simone Giertz is our only past guest who has given a full TED talk (?)
• Derek Kozel
• Dave “threw a grenade”
• PCB wars
• Dave made two predictions
  • Displace the low end tools
  • There will be a commercial venture supporting KiCad at some point
• We discussed something similar in episode 188
• KiCon Developer panel
• Chris stood up a site for Reality Instruments, which is for add-ons for the Valve Index
• Open source hardware
• Names matter, don’t lock yourself in
• Trademarks and brands
• Tim Poole of Subverse
• Anki shuts down, lays off staff
• They had just done a new Kickstarter project
• Boston Dynamics’ Spot Mini showcased during a Tech Crunch event
• James Bruton
• Silicon Valley is a documentary
• The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley (documenatry about Elizabeth Holmes / Theranos)
• Mousr
• Brian Benchoff posts about the cost realities of low volume production
• A twitter thread about #badgelife and getting started with electronics

Image from the SNL Sketch “Motivational Speaker”

The post #441 – Motivational Speaker first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Anool Mahidharia – Lumetronics
• AJ Keller – Neurosity
• Uriel Guy – Light Art
• Ste Kulov – HD Retrovision
• Craig Bishop – Craigjb.com
  • Craig was also a guest on the Hackaday Podcast this week

The post #440.3 – Interviews with Anool Mahidharia, AJ Keller, Uriel Guy, Ste Kulov, and Craig Bishop at KiCon 2019 first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

This is the first of a couple episodes that will be posted from KiCon 2019.

This interview was in two parts with some of the developers from the KiCad project (there are many people involved with making KiCad a reality). We talked with:

• Wayne Stambaugh
• Maciej “Orson” Suminski
• Tomasz Wlostowski
• Jon Evans
• Seth Hillbrand

Thanks to Piotr Esden-Tempski (our first remote correspondent) and Alvaro Prieto (co-host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast) for help with recording.

(Image above: Seth Hillbrand, Wayne Stambaugh (facing away from the camera), Maciej “Orson” Suminski, Tomasz Wlostowski, Jon Evans, all working together on KiCad development at the end of the conference)

The post #440.1 – An Interview with the core KiCad development team first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• KiCon talks have been announced! The conference isn’t just for people using KiCad
• Electronex shares space with a PCB conference
• Dave went to a meetup last night with employees of a former startup.
• Dave is considering going to HW startup conference in Queensland
• uSupply chugging along
• Finding bugs in the GCC compiler
• Custom planar transformer will be lower cost, lower profile
• Billing for hours
• Attaining specs
• Joulescope by Matt Liberty is similar to the uCurrent. He was just on Embedded.fm discussing his new product.
• ST(? NXP?) board for doing measurements
• Qoitech Otii
• nRF91
• Amazon and big players working with IoT. Think this is the show referenced.
• FreeRTOS with AWS will be supporting early RISC-V chips
• MongooseOS
• Past shows with Mike Harrison
  • 135
  • 224
  • 294
  • 412
• Apply to the Consultant Forum
• Latchup is a conference for open silicon happening in Portland May 4-5
• Kickstarter and China
• Former guest Robert Feranec talks about how to make cheaper PCBs
• Tympan is an open source hearing aid and will be launching a campaign for their rev D version soon
• Grace Hopper discusses nanoseconds

The post #432 – Check The Dummy Box first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome, Julia Truchsess, founder of Pragmatic Designs!

See all products discussed on today’s show in the Pragmatic Designs Gallery.

• Julia got started with Lionel Trains
  • 0h 1m 21s
• Chris and Julia met on the KiCad forums
  • 0h 1m 39s
• Hickok Scope
  • 0h 2m 27s
• Heathkit
  • 0h 2m 54s
• Moved into professional days
  • 0h 3m 33s
• Electro Harmonix
  • 0h 4m 41s
• Mike Matthews
  • 0h 4m 54s
• Bob Myer worked at Bell Labs
  • 0h 5m 5s
• EH Big muff pi distortion pedal
  • 0h 5m 18s
• EH8000
  • 0h 6m 35s
• Adaptive filter
  • 0h 8m 7s
• Synthesizer in 78
  • 0h 13m 1s
• Set up EH in Britain
  • 0h 13m 34s
• Space Drums
  • 0h 14m 3s
• Crash Pad
  • 0h 15m 23s
• Soft Cell (who wrote “Tainted Love”, which I think is the song we were discussing)
  • 0h 16m 25s
• Collectibles
  • 0h 16m 59s
• The clockworks
  • 0h 17m 7s
• EH had quality problems in 81
  • 0h 18m 30s
• Consumer
  • 0h 20m 34s
• Greeting card
  • 0h 22m 43s
• VLSI chip
  • 0h 22m 49s
• 4 bit cops processors
  • 0h 24m 54s
• Quadlogic
  • 0h 25m 27s
• ATE for power
  • 0h 25m 50s
• PLMX
  • 0h 26m 4s
• Power line communication
  • 0h 26m 55s
• X10
  • 0h 27m 54s
• Playtime products
  • 0h 29m 44s
• “real engineer”
  • 0h 30m 45s
• Worked 5 years out of a spare bedroom
  • 0h 32m 1s
• Toy industry
  • 0h 32m 54s
• Low cost sound chips
  • 0h 35m 56s
• Shenzhen in 87
  • 0h 38m 48s
• Figuring out the Taiwan trading company to figure out the voice chip
  • 0h 39m 31s
• Coding up on DAT tapes
  • 0h 40m 6s
• Winbond in the speech business
  • 0h 41m 27s
• Power Speech
  • 0h 41m 40s
• TI LPC speech
  • 0h 44m 12s
• Magic bottle baby
  • 0h 45m 27s
• LR44 cells
  • 0h 46m 42s
• Singing tree
  • 0h 48m 18s
• Digital picture frames
  • 0h 48m 22s
• $450 when they came out
  • 0h 48m 59s
• Digi-Frame
  • 0h 49m 25s
• Licensing a design
  • 0h 52m 28s
• 22 or 23 granted patents
  • 0h 55m 6s
• Spin master
  • 0h 57m 3s
• Feasibility studies
  • 0h 58m 7s
• Toy factories have costing engineer
  • 1h 0m 42s
• Came back to Connecticut
  • 1h 1m 47s
• Zildjian cymbals
  • 1h 2m 13s
• Perforated cymbals
  • 1h 3m 23s
• Zildjian gen16
• Cymbal being hit in slow motion
• Microchip design partner
  • 1h 12m 49s
• Consultant stuff from factory
  • 1h 15m 46s
• TUV Rheinland
  • 1h 15m 57s
• EMC consulting
  • 1h 18m 1s
• Henry Ott on The Amp Hour
  • 1h 20m 54s
• Keith Armstrong
  • 1h 21m 0s
• 3D printer stuff
  • 1h 21m 53s
• Zortrax
  • 1h 23m 16s
• KiCon
  • 1h 24m 20s
• Express PCB
  • 1h 24m 38s
• Power distribution
  • 1h 29m 15s
• Skill building
  • 1h 30m 26s

The post #424 – An Interview with Julia Truchsess first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

This episode is all business! Well, not ALL business, Chris also mentions KiCon 2019, which will be taking place in April of 2019 in Chicago. Sign up to give a talk here!

• Chris gives a terrible account of Thanksgiving, here’s the real history of it.
• Dave has a new accountant
• Accounting system
• ERP systems
• Net 30
• Lean manufacturing
• Forecasting
• Lines of credit
• Apple I line of credit
• DUNS
• Dave ends up giving lines of credit to advertiser
• Tindie selling is a great way to get started as a small electronics producer
• Dave’s former assembler charged 1 cent per joint
• When bootstrapping a business, the initial profit becomes the cash pad
• Dave did a video about how to price things
• 2.5x multiplier
• MBAs don’t teach about small business normally
• Lifestyle business
• Hit by a bus test
• Dave is treating labs like a hermit crab
• KiCon is a KiCad user conference happening in April 2019 in Chicago IL
• New NeoDenUSA video shows how to set up the NeoDen4
• We are now on Pandora Podcasts! You can apply to be a beta customer.

Thanks to Burning Bridges for the photo of the cards

The post #417 – Cash Is King first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave’s identity was stolen
• Sneakers
• Hackers
• Open Hardware Summit
• Supercon
• Humble indicator LED
• Mike’s smallest LED flasher
• Flashing light prize
• Macrofab contest
• Supercap
• Blinking LED
• Digikey changed UI
• Chris started selling on Tindie
• “the moore’s law of ecommerce”
• Aliexpress stuff
• Power supply panel
• Official stores on Aliexpress
• Discussion about creating footprints in CAD (centroid)
• Old CAD packages are referenced to pin 1
• Snap grid is never referenced to the grid
• ESP32 example
• The 74HC00 footprint we discussed
• Open Parts Library
• KiCad Digikey Library
• Locally cached libraries?
• sci.tech.electronics
• Internal part numbers
• Tronnort software 14 pin chip analyzer
• TRON – Trace On
• eCommerce ruined the need for chip harvesting
• RPi 3 with PoE video
• PoE uses 48V
• Official explanation (might not be right?)
• Dave just posted the video from the 2nd EEVblog meetup
• Indiana Jones in the bunker
• Solar Observatory, white sands
• Carl Sagan – Contact
• Yasuka Maezawa is taking 8 artists to the moon with him on the SpaceX BFR
• Cody wants to go

The post #408 – Tronnort Software Rises Again! first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris has decided to once again hang his shingle and do design consulting via his company, Analog Life, LLC
  • 0:00
• This is after a year at Hologram, who have changed directions on hardware, leading Chris to look for design opportunities elsewhere.
  • 0:01
• Art installation
  • 0:02
• Dave doesn’t like consulting
  • 0:12
• Startups offering equity
  • 0:17
• “Proof of blink”
  • 0:17
• Things to do when you’re stressed:
  • Write about how you’re feeling
  • Talk to (your significant other)
  • Learn something new
  • Publish something
  • Go for a walk
  • Meditate
  • Go through your contacts, reach out to people you haven’t talked to in a while
  • Read a book
  • Ponder the nature of the universe and how massive it is and how not much really matters after all
  • Think of ways to make a difference
  • Mentor younger engineers
  • Ask for advice from more experienced folks
  • Answer forum posts
  • Listen to music
  • Play some music
  • Post a funny tweet about electronics
  • Post a business idea to Twitter
  • Do a live stream
  • Create a silly piece of PCB art
  • Ask Twitter what they want to learn right now
  • Plan a training course
  • Listen to an off topic podcast or audiobook (fiction)
  • Do some pushups!
  • Drink a biiiiiig glass of water
  • 0:24
• Rightsizing
  • 0:26
• Magic smoke escape tag
  • 0:27
• 110 GHz scope from Keysight
  • 0:28
• Shahriar visited the LeCroy factory to look at a previously “fastest scope” front runner (100 GHz)
  • 0:30
• Forum post about the inside of the scope
  • 0:31
• Dave is doing another meetup Weds Sept 5th
  • 0:35
• IMTS is coming up in Chicago. Chris will be doing a meetup with the folks from Bolt and there is a meetup at mHUB with former guest John Saunders.
  • 0:36
• Dave did a Live Stream trying out KiCad again
  • 0:38
• Dave is looking at a learning system using KiCad
  • 0:44
• Olimex does high end SBC boards using KiCad
  • 0:45
• Eagle moving upmarket
  • 0:46
• Altium Nexus
  • 0:47
• Traps in chips (EEVBlog #1115) showcases why it’s important to read the datasheets
  • 0:51
• Bunnie’s talk at ToorCamp
  • 0:56
• Finding bugs in datasheets
  • 0:58
• Goodfear badge
  • 1:01
• Leaded Zeppelin (see below)
  • 1:02
• Chris just put in a talk for Supercon. You should too!
  • 1:05

Thanks to Tomás J. Sepúlveda for the picture of the blink man

The post #404 – Proof Of Blink first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris got to hang out with Jeff Keyzer while in Seattle (he was on the show!)
  • 0:01:00
• There were other podcasts recording at ToorCamp. Past guest Alvaro of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast was recording and the Darknet Diaries were also there.
  • 0:02:00
• Dave has been working on Custom LCDs. They were delivered and Dave got them tested.
  • 0:03:00
• Scotty from Strangeparts visited the JLC board house
  • 0:09:00
• PCBshopper is where we normally point people to find a good board house.
  • 0:09:00
• Dave made a “How to panelize” video
  • 0:10:00
• KiCad has an append tool
  • 0:11:00
• Chris tried out a gerber based tool called FAB3000
  • 0:13:00
• There’s a tool that is open by a company called “This is not rocket science”
  • 0:14:00
• Chris will be using the NeoDen4 at mHUB
  • 0:15:00
• Chris will be giving a KiCad workshop at the Hardware Hacking Village at DEF CON
  • 0:17:00
• This will be similar to the 4.0 version of Getting to Blinky
  • 7/18/2018 5:51 PM
• eMeter teardown by YouTuber called “Play with junk”
  • 0:19:00
• KiCad 5 is on the way
  • 0:21:00
• It is able to read in EAGLE files, Chris was discussing OBD++
  • 0:21:00
• Altium crippling Circuit Maker with a random sleep timer?
  • 0:22:00
• Looks like Upverter will be taking over in the future anyway
  • 0:25:00
• Adafruit released CircuitPython 3 
  • 0:28:00
• The US tariff on Chinese electronics and equipment went into effect on July 6th.
  • 0:29:00
• This was partially in response to stolen IP from Micron technologies
  • 0:31:00
• The Macrofab podcast had a good discussion on it and an article explaining how it might affect you.
  • 0:32:00
• Past guest Bunnie Huang also wrote about how this will impact hardware designers
  • 0:33:00
• Want to learn more about digital logic? Play the NAND game!
  • 0:44:00
• There’s a new hacking game out called ExaPunks, made by the company of former guest Zach Barth (makers of Shenzhen I/O)
  • 0:46:00
• Zork
  • 0:49:00
• Mel Chua wrote about education for deaf engineers and the difficulties of teaching engineering in sign language
  • 0:51:00
• The Hackaday Superconference was announced! Submit a proposal to a great hw con
  • 0:58:00
• Arm may have been playing dirty with a site about the RISC-V instruction set. It has since been taken down and was hopefully a misunderstanding.
  • 1:00:00

Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash

The post #400 – Once Every Couple Months first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Mike Ossmann and Jeff Keyzer join the show at the same time!

• Mike and the Great Scott Gadgets crew made Creme Brulee for the entire camp, more than 650 servings!
• Chris later had a Creme Brulee delivered via tacocopter
• They also designed the firefly badge, that used the jar.
• Jeff is making more kits these days and also repairing old sports cars.
• We discussed learning KiCad and generally the difficulties of learning electronics and software.
• Alvaro ended up kidnapping Mike when the episode was over…

The post #397.7 – Impedance Matching with Jeff Keyzer and Michael Ossmann first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Yes, it’s true. Dave and Chris talk about IoT in earnest, mostly because Chris brought it up.

• See below (or use this link) to take our yearly-ish survey for a chance to win a 1000x from Keysight. Also win more during the Keysight Wave event (formerly Scope Month)
• Dave and David are testing the lifetime of a range switch using a jig.
• Using the HY3131 datasheet you could in theory write your own firmware for the 121GW. An EEVblog community member started reverse engineering the firmware.
• FOSDEM
• Tjeerd in the background making a face at Chris showing hardware
• KiCad 5 Announcements
• Chris is looking to talk to people doing KiCad manufacturing. Sign up to get notified about future discussions here.
• Richard Ginus (past guest) helped design the TWTG / TTN gateway. He did a better job of explaining it than Chris does here. There is an EU version (868 MHz) and a US/Aus version (915 MHz). Dave was looking at this lower cost one.
• Jereon on the show talking about the ESP32.
• LoRa stuff by Andreas Spiess, including super cheap gateways. You can get them here as well (but watch the video for caveats about them).
• SigFox is a similar offering but with a reversed model to TTN (charge for access to the towers)
• MickMake does great videos with weekly roundups of new boards, including lots of connected products.
• Particle announced their new mesh products! Each board has an nRF52, which uses OpenThread to create the mesh (AFAIK).
• Don’t use Iota for IoT (apparently)
• Ben Heck is moving on! But you can try out for his job
• Circuit boards…in spaaaaace!

The post #380 – Just Terrestrial and Space Things 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.

Welcome Jason Huggins (@hugs) from Tapster Robotics!

• There is a Chicago 3H Meetup happening Tuesday, November 28th
• He started the Selenium web testing project in 2004 at ThoughtWorks. In 2008, he started Sauce Labs, which makes cloud-hosted testing infrastructure based on Selenium.
• In 2013, Jason helped fix Healthcare.gov
• Early robots were on Tindie which was featured for playing angry birds
• Current robot is the “Sidekick 1.5”
• Different robots over the years have been cartesian, delta and now SCARA.
• Check out this robot sorting pancakes.
• All of the robotics was based on the idea Jason had for building a robot art project with linear actuators. In the mean time there have been examples like the Coca Cola billboard and the MIT inFORM project.
• Nadya Peek has talked about how MIT Media Lab is good at getting the paper and promo but not delivering thousands of a thing.
• pinthing.com was Jason’s software prototype.
• Lego technic
• Jason is a big fan of the ease of using Fritzing. Jason liked the “1 minute shield” video.
• He was also the reason Chris created the simpler version of KiCad tutorials called “Shine on you crazy KiCad“
• Backflip robot
• Robot operating system
• Jason doesn’t work with many languages that don’t have a REPL. We first heard this term when Tony DiCola was on the show talking about micropython.
• “Speed is always a feature”
• “As they say, go big or go home…I went home” (to Chicago)
• There was a singular investor from Indie.vc, Bryce Roberts. He had also been an investor in the Chumby
• The typical archetype of a user is “the boss of test engineer”.
• The testing is done via that web driver protocol.
• Jury sides with T-Mobile in federal lawsuit over theft of ‘Tappy’ robot technology by Huawei
• The Tapster is open source hardware and software! You can find the work on Github under the tapsterbot account and on hugs’ account
• He’d love to chat with you if you’re into kinetic sculpture or are a software or robotics expert. Ping Jason on twitter or via email

The post #369 – An Interview with Jason Huggins first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave played with an ECG kit…shirtless.
• Chris started a new YouTube project called Science Not Silence. He is growing algae as a basic science experiment and doing other projects to alleviate frustrations.
• Future projects will be using the CE header. Headers are nothing new, of course. Digilent uses the Pmod and Seeed has their Grove connector.
• NXP is spinning out their passive business called Nexperia
• Be careful with naming, esp on the internet: You might get Boaty McBoatface
• Audiofools could test and test cabling but would still “hear” differences
• James Randi offered a million to people that could prove their case.
• China factory implemented robots…to expected ends. To be fair, it does appear this is a car manufacturer.
• CGP Gray’s “Humans Need Not Apply” is a classic on the coming age of automation.
• Apparently Vizio TVs are tracking user habits. Do you trust a “Smart TV”? Or other device? Sparkfun created an “Alexa Kill Switch” More discussion on the topic at the EEVblog forum.
• Chris has been looking into TAILS, which boots an entire OS off a USB stick. Reference podcasts like Steve Gibson’s Security Now for more knowledgable discussion on these topics.
• Olimex built a DIY laptop in KiCad! A build PDF is found here.
• Wayne, the KiCad project lead, discussed the upcoming roadmap at FOSDEM.
• Former guest Great Scott made a fun video about building a DIY battery pack with standard Li-Ion cells.

Next week, we’ll be welcoming Bunnie back to the show! Ask your questions here. Listen to the first time we had him on (ep 84!) in the past.

Thanks to FlashPro for the image

The post #335 – When the TV watches you first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Dave and Chris discuss the news!

• Dave just got back from a holiday. He couldn’t keep away though and posted videos from the beach!
• Dave is focusing on logistics, using shipping from DHL and WordPress / Woocommerce for the interface.
• Marketing is tough for engineers but David Kronstein did things right. Spending marketing dollars on hardware for people to review.
• EAGLE has switched to a subscription model. Dave made a video about it.
• Switching to KiCad? Chris made Getting To Blinky 4.0 which is a decent start at trying out the program.
• Watching technical videos? Chris recommends the Video Speed Controller Chrome plugin. Speed up or down any HTML5 video.
• A bit of a jump. LTspice went from version 4 to version…17! Likely due to the ADI acquisition of LinearTech. We interviewed creator and maintainer of LTspice, Mike Engelhardt!
• Chris noted that the Falstad Simulator (which went online a couple years ago) now has current and voltage visualization, similar to the EveryCircuit android app.
• Nvidia simulated photographs of a moonwalk to debunk online wackos.  The Mythbusters had done a similar thing with a physical model.
• The Trump administration is messing with science. This will not stand. We enjoyed the badlands national park reactions.
• The AT&T archive videos are fantastic, check out this one on wave behavior
• Jeff Keyzer (Mightyohm, yessah!) posted his pictures of his tour to Bell Labs.
• When you’re depressed (or stressed) make something.
• Dave is working on his custom multimeter, almost as a project manager. A new role for Dave!
• The gadget apocalypse is upon us!
• Captain Disillusionment did another video about the Cicret bracelet
• GoPro slashing staff.
• Chris was intrigued by a new variation on a business model showcased at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Do not forget to announce the drawing for AoE

The post #333 – Science, Not Silence first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Martin Lorton is thinking about selling off his stack of gear. Chris is excited for the opportunity serendipidy might bring.
• Dave got an email about how to find a new job. One way is to just email, using a tool like Email Hunter. However you should be very cognizant of the person’s time you are emailing.
• Louis Rossman made a cryptic video about the future of his channel. It might turn out ok. Chris hadn’t heard of him until Louis did a popular AMA.
• The Juno probe has gotten to Jupiter and was successful!
• The Megaprocessor is awesome. 43.2K transistors. Should people learn processors? Maybe. But there probably isn’t time for the general EE audience.
• Rudolf Kalman has passed away. If you don’t know, Kalman Filters are present in many sensor applications these days.
• EAGLE was bought by Autodesk (for an estimated $20M, no official numbers). Autodesk has a large suite of tools now:
  • Fusion
  • Inventor
  • Tinkercad
  • Circuits.io
• Adafruit did an interview with Dave and Chris’s former co-worker (worked with both of them individually!). Matt didn’t answer all the questions.
• Chris thinks a CAD tool is like Religion. You’re not changing without a “Catalyzing Change Agent”
• Circuit Maker continues to lack features, but Altium finally reduced the price on Circuit Studio, which puts it into competitive territory.
• Surprisingly, Chris still recommends learning KiCad (using something like Getting to Blinky)
• Our episodes will start uploading to The Amp Hour youtube channel. This will allow deeplinking of the audio.
• Dave has been releasing videos of his chat with Karsten about space electronics.
• We will be having a call in show next week! Email feedback@theamphour.com if you’d like to join in on Skype.
• Chris will be in Chicago from the 15th to the 17th! Get in contact if you’d like to hang out (chris@theamphour.com)
• Limor did an interview with the CEO of Digikey.
• The Daredevil Camera is a fantastic use of paralleled signal processing!
• Dave had forgotten he already made a video about orders of magnitude back in video 286!

Thanks to CGPGrey for the image of the bottles

The post #306 – Catalyzing Change Agents first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave has been struggling with his Windows7 upgrade.
• Chris released a new version of KiCad tutorials, which was needed because of software upgrades. MeowCAD was listed as a possible open source alternative to KiCad, though it doesn’t look like many are developing it. Dave knows someone named Meow Meow.
• Dave’s manufacturing/design partner relented and is switching from a PIC16 to a PIC32.
• It’s amazing how much time is spent in organizations simply maintaining lines of communication.
• Dave has been sort of acting as a manager, but mostly offers his opinion.
• There was discussion about whether Dave’s product should be 0pen source on the forum.
• Competitive advantage these days comes down to cost of components and branding.
• Chris gave a talk on “Top down electronics“, which made him rethink about how he thinks about modules.
• uBeam
  • The former VP of Engineering discussed why he joined a shonky sounding startup.
  • Dave wrote about uBeam on Aug 14 2014
  • Lee Gomes of IEEE wrote an indepth post about uBeam
  • Why uBeam is everything wrong with Silicon Valley
• Other links we mentioned
  • Elecia’s post about stock options
  • Japanese satellite borked on sw upgrade
  • Cypress is paying $500M for an IoT business

The post #298 – Don’t Turn It On, Don’t Take It Apart first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Tindie joins Hackaday!
• Dave has been using Shopify for his platform to sell his uCurrent.
• Contextual Electronics will have an embedded portion. Chris is bringing on people to help.
• CotW (sorta): TimerBlox
• Vagrant is a program that helps to script installs. CE will have a fully formed image for getting up and running with Linux/KiCad/dependencies.
• When Colin K was on the show, he talked about designing with modules and the tradeoffs in cost/certs. Jeff Rowberg also mentioned similar things when he was on the show (sorry I blanked on your name, Jeff!)
• PunchThrough just announced the Bean+.
• Chris asked how to explain switching converters without math. He didn’t realize Dave had made a video about this back in his early days.
  
• The board in Dave’s old intro used a Virtex 5, which Chris thought that past guest Philip Freidin worked on. Dave needed to do Bit Error Rate Testing (BERT) after running traces on that board it was so high speed.
• Dave and David2 will be switching away from using (Altium) CircuitMaker on the uSupply project. They will be using KiCad!
• Chris is reinstalling KiCad now that he has a Windows 10 box. The eevblog forum has a post about which EE programs are affected by the upgrade.
• Chris asks about recycling programs for electronics (and making sure they aren’t just shipped off to a 3rd world country).
• Silicon is the 2nd most abundant element in the earth’s crust.
• Our wonderful patrons on Patreon now cover the cost of sending a microphone to each guest we have on. You can help contribute as well!
• If you cannot help financially, you can give us a review on iTunes. We’re currently lagging in popularity behind a dentist podcast! (to be fair, looks pretty good) 

The post #261 – Recycle All Your Microcontrollers first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave wants The Amp Hour to have a Loony Toons intro. Old Bugs Bunny cartoons used to have an entire orchestra.
• YouTube is giving $100K to develop a new series. Dave wants feedback on what he should develop. Chris suggested “dancing” + “soldering” and calling it “dancing with the scars”.
• Chris has a new t-shirt design that represents a “solder jockey”. You can get one on Teespring.
  
• Chris has ben trying out the ESP8266 with a Teensy 3.1.
• At Maker Faire there were a wide range of tools that were interesting:
  • Shaper (formerly Taktia) was even more impressive this year. Chris things it will change woodworking for novices.
  • Circuit printers by Cartesian Co and Voltera
  • Carbide3D CNC machine was there, which has a great software tool flow (similar to other milling machine Othermill). The Nomad (by Carbide3D) also had a recent piece about milling boards beautifully.
  • Pick and Place machines from OpenPNP, Firepick delta and the LitePlacer (which Dave now has)
• Chris also saw a TM-245 at a Seeed Studio event (they just opened an office in the bay area).
• Dave is getting an Inventibles X-carve (the smaller one).
• Radio Shack was noticeably absent from Maker Faire, and from paying back their small suppliers. This year at Maker Faire, Google took over the “Learn to Solder” tent.
• Chris Anderson gave a great talk about the Next Maker Movement (now at 2.0):
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKDv37fHZu0[/tube]
• As Chris mentioned, computing is basically free. New platforms like the CHiP and the Onion Omega make super powerful hardware ubiquitous. 
• Chris thinks there should be silly connected stuff everywhere. The Internet of ________
  • Hammers
  • Toilet paper
  • Whatever
• Dave backed the Lily quadcopter, recently announced.
• Vicash asked on our subreddit about the point of learning basic electronics. There are some great discussions on that thread. Chris stressed top down learning.
• After recording, Dave did and extended blab also about this topic.
• Chris got to go on a tour of the Tesla factory (under NDA, no pictures). The robots were amazing. You can see some of them featured here:
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_lfxPI5ObM[/tube]
• Dave has been trying out the Beta version of CircuitMaker, now mostly available to people. Dave also found that not committing projects allows them to stay “private”. 
• Chris saw a talk by Adam and Matthew of Wayne and Layne about the future of KiCad at Maker Faire.
• Chris is looking for an embedded engineer to help out with Contextual Electronics (pay will be revenue sharing from member fees). Email chris at theamphour.com with the title “Contextual Electronics Embedded” if interested.

This week turned out to be a jam packed episode! Please let us know what you thought in the comments!

The post #251 – Shifting Away From DIY – Pedetentious PnP Progress first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Chris Church and Parker Dillmann of Macrofab!

• Macrofab is a new contract manufacturing service to allow for low cost single or multi board runs using a very friendly UI interface.
• The facility is in downtown Houston. There is a brewery next door and the Houston MLS team plays down the street.
• Someday they would like to bring PCB manufacturing in house so that they can get a 24hr turn on assembled boards. They recently announced that a 5 day turn is available.
• Macrofab has raised 2 angel rounds, one in fall of 2013 and one in mid 2014.
• Listeners should try out the service using the demo link that shows the price of a propeller dev stick board.
• A big way of lowering costs is having users verify rotation and alignment of the parts from the placement files (derived from the uploaded EAGLE, KiCad or DIPtrace files.
• Another way of keeping costs down is using the house parts. The labor is free on all of those parts. There is currently only a part library for EAGLE, others coming later.
  
• Macrofab has a Universal GSM2 pick and place, built in the mid 2000s. It can do 0402 parts, up to 6000 parts per hour. There are 32 feeders per side plus platform tray of 28.
• Reflow is the long time sink for a lot of boards. They can also do selective solder for through hole parts.
• There are 4 full time employees at Macrofab plus a range of part time line workers.
• For the low quantity boards, a lot is placed by hand. Each part received after being bought is also recorded for lot control.
• Programming firmware is done in house, but is disabled even though it’s shown in the UI.
• Currently the UI can do 2 layer but 4 layer is coming soon.
• The low quantity boards are done by OSHpark and bundled or higher quantity boards are ordered as panels from Korea.
• Solderpaste is done with kapton (for low quantity) and stainless stencils (for higher quantity). Parker wants to get a solderpaste printer. 
• They want to solve the problem of providing enclosures by the end of this year.
• Chris and Chris are both fans of the schematic as a control document. This requires revision control and only making changes in the schematic (the “canonical representation”).
• The Macrofab group focuses on API “microservices” and a strong UI with a lot of tool tips (mouseovers) to help explain the different features.
• Interested in working at Macrofab? Send an email with a resume/portforlio to jobs [at] macrofab.net

It was great hearing about the future of getting boards made from the Macrofab guys! We hope to talk to them as they keep expanding!

The post #243 – An interview with Macrofab – Macro Manufacturing Mechanization first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris is traveling and thinking about his portalab once again. This may require a set of modular test equipment built into the case.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIEeyKCg_2c[/tube]
• Perhaps a “MIDI for control surfaces” for portable test equipment would be a good solution going forward?
• Dave’s intern, also named Dave, has been working out well. He has been using SolidWorks to design a case for a project. 3d design skills continue to be valuable in the marketplace.
• New CAD makers have been entering the market. Extremely well funded OnShape has a browser based CAD tool (similar to Upverter) that has been in development for 3 years. Perhaps this is the future?
• Chris has been learning Autodesk Fusion 360, also free to use for new folks
• Giving away student licenses seems like a no brainer. Dave’s intern learned Altium and Solidworks because it was free to students. Chris mentioned that small companies may struggle even giving away their software.
• Chris wrote about using Github and KiCad together. This continues to be a good tool combination.s
• The Arduino group has been embroiled in trademark legal issues. Read about it from Massimo here or from the court documents here.
• This has interesting implications in the (open) hardware industry as people/companies will likely:
  1. Get more paranoid about up front agreements.
  2. Innovate and collaborate less openly because of potential downsides.
• Mooooore consolidation in the electronics industry
  • Microsemi is acquiring Vitesse
  • Cypress is acquiring Spansion
• You can dream up new circuits…using psychedelics? Chris has used a floatation tank to think about control system problems.

Thanks to BusinessSarah for the Venn diagram picture

The post #242 – Can’t We All Just Get Arduino? – Tardiloquent Trademark Tirade first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris used a (new) shoe as a mic stand this week. EMSL asked on Twitter if Chris was making his own ASICs now.
• Dave’s lab internet has been out for 3 days now due to broken fiber.
• Do you develop or use a tablet for your electronics?
• Chris wrote about an experiment of trying to do layout while on a plane. Conclusion: Unless you prep properly, the airplane test might not be a good measure of whether online CAD tools are a good fit.
• Do you download datasheets? Or do you use Google as a repository?
• In Dave’s latest video, he talked about white van speaker scam after finding speakers in the junk room.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3B_KKyntQE[/tube]
• Even though there may be slightly fewer white van scams, crowdfunding sites continue to pump them out, the latest (gag?) being a Perpetual Magnetic USB Charger.
• Slightly better–though still disappointing–the Printeer recently threw in the towel after realizing they couldn’t deliver $500 3D printers from their garage alone. When they talked to Dragon Innovation, they said the company would need $1M+ to make the manufacturing run make sense.
• That doesn’t seem like much money when compared against the amount that Samsung is spending on their new chip fab: $15B!!! Must be for all the automation and robots.
• Speaking of robots, “Humans Need Not Apply” is an interesting look at the upcoming threat to human labor as more and more jobs are consumed by automation and robotics.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU[/tube]
• Chris has read about this before in “The Second Machine Age”.  The authors have also been on the Innovation Hub podcast in the past talking about this book.
• The Sparkfun Engineering team lays out how much time goes into which tasks for product design. 
• In the Kasparov vs Deep Blue match, Kasparov ended up throwing in the towel after being shocked by a non-standard moe.
• Chris just launched another Teespring campaign for a new design. Get your “I have the power” teeshirt now.
  
• Octopart and a coalition of manufacturers have started collaborating on the Common Parts Library. We talked about this 2 weeks ago, when we found out Seeed Studio is doing the “Open Parts Library”. Seeed is part of the coalition.
• This week Chris will be at a meetup in San Francisco where former guest of the show and Electric Imp engineer Brandon Harris will talk about subGHz RF.
• Chip of the week: The Altera MAX10. They also recently published a useful eBook called FPGAs for dummies.
• Chris got to see 1o57, creator of the past few DEFCON badges, speak at the Hackaday 10th Anniversary party (great talk, definitely worth watching)
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCL7dE-nqg[/tube]
• JohnnyMac (also a collaborator on the badge) talked about the Parallax Propeller. This design for the Propeller was recently released to the open source community. They are also hard at work on the new Propeller 2. 
• Chris was asking Dave about PIC vs AVR, having only used the latter.
• Much like the browser based CAD tools, we have derided the browser based IDE in the past. The mbed platform/stack looks interesting though and if it “just works”, we’re willing to give it a try. 
• ARM and Atmel released an “IoT” dev board using mbed and a 6 LoWPAN radio module.
• Bolt wrote a great piece of reality check for people, “No, you can’t manufacture like Apple does“.

The post #219 – Get Smart About Automation – Caducous Cyborg Concerns first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave has been dealing with people saying he has changed. He proved them wrong by doing a simple calculation.
• Chris just returned from Maker Faire NY. He decided to go after the discussion last week.
• Former guest of the show Ryan O’Hara and Chris discussed the multitude of 3D printers and how they may have jumped the shark (see above)
• GE paired with FirstBuild to let users “hack their fridge”.
• FirstBuild will be launching the Green Bean on IndieGoGo in the coming months. Chris encouraged them to do a self starter instead and it got awkward.
• Dave is now a government adviser! (sort of). They were asking about crowdfunding and will be publishing a report about how that can affect the economy there.
• There is a often-cited report on the main EEVblog site.
• Dave also got to try out a Tesla! Check out his footage on his secondary channel (EEVblog2).
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RRKWORDPxM[/tube]
• The Intel Edison has some very impressive specs (dual core Atom, Quark microcontroller, wifi, bluetooth, runs linux). However, it consumes 20-30 mA in it’s “off” state (though we didn’t have exact numbers on what that state is and what it involves).
• Sparkfun is working with Intel on helping get the development boards and education into the hands of hobbyists and engineers. Former guest (along with the rest of the Sparkfun Engineering team) Mike Hord was there showing some of the new features.
• Chris also got to try the new tool from Altium, CircuitMaker. He was told that once the design is downloaded, it will be cached locally (allowing you to work on layout). However, if you need a new part, it seems that the libraries will all be in the cloud.
• Lots of devices and device makers are moving upmarket with more sophisticated offerings. People that are just trying to sell electronic assemblies (with no case, firmware, software, marketing, etc) may find themselves outmatched by an increasingly crowded and sophisticated set of veterans.
• EMSL showed off an impressing version of this with their new machined EggBot.
• The SeeMe CNC Part Daddy was an impressive feat though it was “just” an open frame 3D printer…because it was 15 feet tall! Wowsa!
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRL5IVQdcw4[/tube]
• Dave thinks the eventual move towards increasing levels of sophistication means melted plastic is out…printing with LEGO blocks is in!
• Former guest Adam Wolf and Matthew Beckler (of Wayne and Layne) showed off a cool new script for KiCad that allows the .POS files to be pushed directly to the low(ish) cost Pick’n’Place machine. They also showed a pretty zippy version of assembly:
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ughvx2P5CW8[/tube]
• Solderpaste stencil squeegying is fast, but there are solderpaste printing machines out there that are amazing.
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK_AdDDQ1SI[/tube]
• Another small run assembly shop is coming online soon called MacroFab.
• There were other former Amp Hour guests there this weekend: Jason Kridner, Ian Daniher, Trey German.
• There is a new SMU kickstarter in the works called Xtralien
• Chris was interviewed by former guest Martin Lorton on his show. They talked about the voltage feedback in a power supply.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlZIcD2WX5c[/tube]
• Have any listeners ever signed up for classes or a university program at a tradeshow? How did it work out? Please let us know in the comments.

The post #217 – 3D Printed Shark Jumps – Edifying Edison’s Energy first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Dave’s mother got cheated out of a vacation when her cruise ship broke! Chris knew someone who has been on the Oasis of the Seas, the largest cruise ship built to date.
• Dave worked at a company on Garden Island in Sydney’s Central Business District. He worked there two months and subsequently left it off his resume.
• Do you ever leave stuff off your resume?
• Dave just returned from Electronex where he had a trade booth, which listed The Amp Hour! The big hits were the microscope and core memory:
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vJ0c0ioAXY[/tube]
• Dave is also looking at foregoing a bigger lab and instead getting a bigger space.
• Apple released a new smart watch, will be interesting to see how it changes the sensors game.
• Chris just got back from the Hardware Workshop in San Francisco (notes available here). It was more “business” focused than electronics.
• This coming weekend is the World Maker Faire in NY. Chris said on the show that he wouldn’t be there, but changed his plans!
• Altium will be officially releasing their new free PCB tool.  Dave has a list of the upcoming features. One possible showstopper is that you have to save your files to the cloud (no local copy).
• Chris will continue working with KiCad.
• Breakin (Breakdance) and Breakin’ 2 (Breakdance 2), Electric Boogaloo. 80s classics!
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMDbBSyS1Rk[/tube]
• Chris’s is working on a new component search engine! A new way to discover parts called Parts.io. There is an Alpha signup as well.
• Chris got to meet the folks from Seeed studio and learned about their Open Part Library. This should reduce cost if you send a board to them. They also have an EAGLE library with the part footprints.
• This is similar to what CircuitHub is going to be trying with the part bundling. Andy talked about CircuitHub way back on episode 131.
• Do other CMs publish their part lists? It would be good to create a database or wiki page with links to these.
• Chip of the Week: The TI FDC1004, “Capacitance to Digital Converter”
• There was a wonderful teardown of a Tesla 85 kWh battery pack. The pictures show the multitude of networked 18650 lithium cells.
• We wonder about what happens when a fuse blows. Chris recalls when Bob Simpson was on the show he talked about bypassing cells if necessary.
• We also learned that Vincent Himpe (also a former guest of the show and prolific EEVblog forum member) recently got a gig as the lead PCB designer for Tesla! We’ll try to get him back on the show at some point.

Thanks to Charlie J for the picture of the guts of a Rolex

The post #216 – Last Minute Decisions – Obdurate Onepercenter Obstacles 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.

This week’s show will have a very simple set of links due to the nature of the show. If there are any “must have” links that you think will benefit your fellow community members, please let it in the comments. Otherwise, we will update the notes on 8/13.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the image of the Hype Cycle.

The post #211- Design Reviews Are Important – Habitual Hype Hebetude first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris recently announced that he is releasing all of the KiCad videos from the Contextual Electronics course.
• There is also a new site over at KiCad.info and there is a forum to talk about KiCad at forum.kicad.info
• We also still have an IRC channel! There are also channels for KiCad and Electronics on Freenode.
• Dave used to own AltiumForums.com but they got antsy about him owning that.
• The “Lithium Ion super cap in a battery” is being updated to say they’re using homemade graphene capacitors.
• The current requirements are insane, the dynamic current would be higher than most car chargers.
• GE claims to have made a fuel cell breakthrough and are in early production.
• Another gimmicky crowdfunding was someone claiming to have replicated Wardenclyff.
• Weird Al has a new song about conspiracy theories called “Foil”.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-0TEJMJOhk[/tube]
• Dave recently got into OK Go videos, citing the Rube Goldberg as his favorite.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w[/tube]
• OK Go was part of the White House maker faire
• Dave has camera woes after losing an entire day of footage going through old magazines.
• National Instruments recently released a headless unit/multitool. The specs for the scope appear that they are using off the shelf silicon (100 MHz for 2 channels).
• Dave mentioned that there is also a wireless head unit for multimeters from Agilent. It is ruggedized for field work.
• Fluke also has been pushing their safety equipment.
• The hard problem to solve is streaming data back across a wireless connection (especially if you expect it on a particular ).
• Dave recently found that low scan rates on the RF section of MDO3000 lock up the keys on the scope.
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6R3uynR9Kk[/tube]
• A Cleveland accelerator is now looking for hardware startups.
• Dave found out there is also a hardware accelerator in Sydney.
• Many of our listeners will be tempted by VC/accelerator money as well. Just be sure you know why you’re taking money for a company idea.
• Ben Einstein of Bolt (another hardware accelerator) wrote a piece on why so much money is heading into hardware.
• Littlebits released their CloudBit module, which connects their platform to the internet. Chris was interested to know that people are using it as prototyping. 
• Google is giving $1 million for the “Littlebox challenge”. It’s all about trying to get the maximum power density for a microinverter.
• The EDA solver is meant to be a way to search through available components for a PCB and pick the best ones. It will be interesting to see if that kind of thing works for non-example designs.

Thanks to Low Voltage Labs for the picture of the pumpkin made in KiCad

The post #209 – Headless Units and Baseless Batteries – KiCad Kickoff Kopophobia first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Chris is currently in Florida, a somewhat crazy state. Don’t believe him? Check out this “gameshow” called “Fake or Florida”:
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG5EdFAy3FI[/tube]
• Dave is busy testing the boards from his Kickstarter. He still has more than 1500 for the assembly house to test!
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UESc7ms4efo[/tube]
• This is also why Dave has been developing a precision current source.
• People have asked why he isn’t using a flying probe machine? The overhead is too high for low number of pass/fail tests.
• Dave likes controlling a lot of aspects of the operation, including shipping, because he is able to optimize.
• Chris decided to optimize for time by offloading the shipping of PCBs for Contextual Electronics.
• Do you panelize boards? Here is another great resource about how and why to do it.
• Can anyone compete if they’re not using some component of “Free” these days?
• Touchstone Semiconductor seems to be shut down; Silicon Laboratories bought their IP for $1.5 million. 
• They’re not alone, Radio Shack is closing up 1,100 stores as they figure out their business model is crap.
• Dave saw the same thing happen when Dick Smith sold to Woolworth’s.
• Analog Devices also decided to close up a tiny bit of their shop; they will no longer offer an ADI branded version of MultiSim (the simulator from National Instruments). Dave points out there may be SPICE based tools in the future. 
• Many vendors buy their tools from third parties; LT Spice was formerly switcherCAD. We’ll have Mike Engelhardt on the show in April!
• TI (formerly National Semi) WebBench adds schematic modification and simulation. This might finally make the tool useable!
• Another entrant into the fray (and one that has yet to prove its usefulness) is Schematics.com
• One thing that WILL be working is former guest Adam Wolf taking on the nightly builds of KiCad for OSX!
• Chris spills his idea that someone should start a Red Hat for KiCad; basically a company dedicated to serving corporate customers with supported open source tools. Then feed the enhancements back to the community like Red Hat does with CentOS.
• Dave wants to call it “Tinfoil Hat” or alternately “Copperclad Hat”.
• Cereamic capacitors can fail…and 80% of the time it’s from the mechanical assembly of the boards they’re on.
• This can cause capacitors to “sing”. Dave used to do this purposefully when building ceramic hydrophone elements.
• Speakers can be microphones and microphones can be speakers. Chris enjoyed Innovation Hub talking about how the Beatles did this for “Paperback Writer” Daytripper.
• Ceramics aren’t always the answer! Sometimes you need a minimum esr for switching regulators.
• Sometimes other capacitive elements can be sensitive. Former guest of the show Mike Harrison (Mike’s Electric Stuff) showed how PIC microcontrollers are pressure sensitive!
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCXCLR3xq8U[/tube]
• There are now 50 Billion ARM devices in the world! Dave doesn’t think that is susprising, but Chris does giving that it’s mostly recent growth (since the iPhone) that things really exploded.

Thanks to Scott Kellum for the Florida picture

The post #188 – Capacitors, Simulation and Closures – Deonerated Design Dealmaking first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Scott’s popular soldering videos (which out rank Dave’s) took 100s of hours to learn about (Scott was a novice when he started), make and perfect (Scott continues to be a perfectionist).
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NU2ruzyc4[/tube]
• He often teaches himself electrical concepts and even went to IPC soldering training. He studied as a mechanical engineer and now works on software.
• The Curious Inventor site also has a wonderful KiCad tutorial (written) that helped Chris back when he was learning.
• Scott used KiCad to design the Vmeter, a capacitive touch device that acts as a MIDI controller.
• The device went through FCC testing, with the help of a friendly FCC engineer. All it took were some strategically placed ferrites. 
• This is not uncommon for products to get in trouble; a few years back there was an FCC court case with Behringer, an audio device manufacturer.
• Scott works out of Atlanta and now works full time after deciding not to run the Curious Inventor store/distributorship anymore.
• He now works at Equipcodes, which makes interactive manuals for field training.
  
• There is an awesome video on the Curious Inventor channel showing an Augmented Reality overlay of a circuit. 
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfVQ4N-u0sk[/tube]
• Scott is impressed by 123D Catch and how they can make 3D images from photos. 
• Much of the coding they do at work uses a Google apk, which stitches things together using go, python.
• The program used to make the overlay video used the Unity engine which is mostly C# and Javascript
• Back in college as a grad student Scott designed and interacted with a drum robot! Awesome!
• The future of computing will be dependent on MIPS/watt. This could be dependent on battery tech or have alternate on-demand generators.There is a cool triboelectric generator that could do this on your handheld device.

Scott’s personal blog is called Imponderable Things where he discusses any topic that strikes his fancy. Be sure to catch his video explaining Bitcoin! Thanks to Scott for stopping by to tell us about all of his varied projects!

The post #183 – An Interview with Scott Driscoll – Impacable Interdisciplinary Inventor first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

We’re going to try a new way of posting links this week. It falls in line with how we post them to our twitter feed as well. Each link allows for discussion on a per link basis, which continues from the time the link was posted (reddit account required).

If there are any missing links, please let us know in the comments below!

• Reddit links
  • A course for how to use Altium for high density digital designs
  • Homebrew Computer Club reunion lights up Silicon Valley
  • Why GitHub is not your CV
  • Awesome old Electromagnetic Spectrum poster!
  • Micro Python: Python for microcontrollers by Damien George 
  • New Ninja Blocks platform for connecting your house
  • The EX¹ – rapid 3D printing of circuit boards
  • Design and build a PCB from scratch, using #KiCad (Getting To Blinky)
  • KiCad: CERN’s Contribution to Free/Open PCB Design
  • Wireless Power Transfer With The LTC4120
• Videos
  • Mike’s Electric Stuff Flir teardown
    [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtqUE67BUDI[/tube]
  • Jeremy Blum’s EAGLE series (equivalent to the “Getting To Blinky”)
  • KiCad push and shove traces
    [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHDAHpR5Ls[/tube]
  • The Espruino Javascript Platform
    [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1TsCmDhFtk[/tube]
  • Ben Krasnow deposits traces onto substrates
    [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYgIuc-VqHE[/tube]

The post #172 – CAD courses and cross platform creation – Printing Propaedeutic Patterns first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

Welcome Adam Wolf of Wayne and Layne!

•  Wayne and Layne started when Adam and Matthew met…back in 6th grade in Minnesota! Later they both attended the University of Minnesota.
• Adam now works at Digi, the makers of Xbee. More specifically, he works helping people develop embedded solutions at
  Etherios (formerly Spectrum).
• One of the projects he worked on for an extended period was Android. It’s useful to quickly bolt a GUI onto a product.
• Chris has briefly played with Android using one of the Liquidware dev kits.
• Adam and Matthew developed the Bricktronics shield to offer a low cost entry to combining Lego and Arduino. This was designed with John Baichtal, who co-wrote The Cult of Lego.
• The kit is based on the huge interest in Lego Mindstorms. There are 550 teams FIRST Lego Robotics teams that compete each year…in Minnesota alone! How crazy is that??
• The standard kit includes the NXT, which has an ARM SAM 9 chip on board. The newer EV3 runs full Linux.
• Wayne and Layne had problems with audience culture clash at the beginning, especially before their book MAKE: Lego and Arduino Projects was fully released to the public.
• Adam is not a member of the KiCad Dev team; however, he does a nightly build of KiCad and helps guide others to doing the same.
• He also watches the dev mailing list regularly (an act all in and of itself) and noted that there is talk about change in library lookup (possibly online libraries and immediately EAGLE compatibility)
• This stems from people being paid to work on KiCad, such as the awesome people at CERN.
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHDAHpR5Ls[/tube]
• There are many new features in the pipeline, it’s all about whether you want to try them out in your test builds.
• Adam and Matthew recently were featured at an event that helps promote STEM for women in Africa. Their Blinky POV kit was featured and has been built all of the world. 10s of thousands have now been sold!
• Another popular W&L product is the video game shield, which uses Wii nunchucks to control a B&W video output.
• The nunchuck uses i2c, but the problem is they’re always at the same address since they’re normally connected to a Wii controller.
• Newer projects work with the ChipKit PIC32 Arduino compatible board. There is also compatibility with theFubarino mini and the Fubarino sd.
• These were developed in conjuction with Brian Schmalz who works with Sparkfun and sells some stuff through their store.
• The new boards can handle audio by storing it in SRAM and doing some manipulation of memory locations.
• Microchip makes i2c and a SPI SRAM that makes it easy to bolt more memory on (compared to squeezing down to an Arduino’s tiny memory)
• Adam’s personal (somewhat dormant) site is FeelsLikeBurning.com. He also regularly updates his Google+ page (especially at the beginning of the year).
• Adam and Matthew are also offering a special offer to listeners of The Amp Hour. Go to WayneAndLayne.com/TAH and enter the code “tahoct” for 10% off kits.

Many thanks to Adam for being on the show! Next time we’ll have Dave and Matthew as well!

Also, if you haven’t yet, don’t forget to buy a white version of our logo t-shirt from The Amp Hour! The campaign ends on Thursday!

The post #167 – An Interview with Adam Wolf – Brick & Board Biuners first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.

• Happy Halloween! Has anyone heard of people giving away circuits as a Halloween?
• Did you know: CR2032 batteries reference the size of the battery? Chris didn’t!
• The BeagleBoard folks just released the BeagleBone! It looks great! Also, kudos to the folks at TI, especially those on the team.
• Dave has a deposit in on the new place!
• CadSoft is releasing EAGLE 6 soon! It will now use XML data.
• Chris is working on KiCAD tutorials right now:

• Download KiCAD for Windows, Mac or Linux.
• The XML data on EAGLE 6 will help with diff-ing files. EMSL has a great article on the usefulness of visual diffs.
• If people know of a good system for FPGA project revision control, please let us know.
• Dave is a judge for the Dangerous Prototypes 7400 Contest! Lots of great entries so far!
• The IEEE sent out a note to their email alert recipients about the less-than-desirable title for a recent email:

• In brighter and awesomer news, The White House has a video encouraging young female scientists and engineers to “Start Breaking Stuff!“. Great advice!
• India has waaaaay more schools than they need for engineering students.
• Robots are getting creepier and are now walking upright. The petman robot from Boston Dynamics…one step closer to the Terminator!
• Reminds Dave of one of the robots from his childhood favorite show The Thunderbirds.
• Robots are also useful, like the agrarobots in this recent hackaday post.
• They’re also a career opportunity as more and more jobs are taken over by robots.
• Silicon Valley is looking for software talent as well, even outside of those with degrees. Learn on the job, right? Perhaps going from high school to “the pros” is a good way to entice engineering extracurriculars in school?
• Or perhaps SV should adopt a model more like Germany’s apprentice system and co-develop curriculum with schools.

The post #67 – BeagleBoard successors, CAD & Robots – Haussmannized Halloween Hypostrophe first appeared on The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast.