The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#46 – Autorouter, Datasheets & Obscure Chips – Cloddish Collegiate Conversations

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  1. I like chip of the week. I can look it up and learn lots because smarter people than I have talked about it. It connects listeners to the show.

  2. i-MIEV! so cool! please do a teardown of the “fast-charging” plug, I bet it’s a 380Vac three-phase plug and nothing else.

    PS: Jeri talking about the AD620, you two talking about the AD633; I always wanted to do crazy stuff with those.

    • I’ve talked about the AD620 and AD623 on here before.
      I think we’ve actually talked about quite a few chips, but COTW makes it easier to highlight.

      • I’d known them for some time, but they’re so fricking expensive to buy here, anyway I’ll import 2 of each to play arround (AD620 for a low power ECG / EEG, AD633 for a realtime audio level compressor)

      • I figured it out. Some of the links I had seen were using “theamphour.com” instead of “www.theamphour.com”. The one without the doubleyous was failing to bring me here.

        But now they both seem to work. *shrug*

  4. Hi Chris, it really depends on what areas you work in. Electronics is such a huge field, there are frequent little gems that pop up and amaze me. Sometimes it’s a new understanding of something I’ve used for years. Multipliers are the mathematical ideal for RF mixing (in practice though, noise is a huge issue – receivers operate over a huge dynamic range). They are also common in measuring systems for calculating RMS values or instantaneous power measurements.

  5. As someone else already pointed out about toporouter – do the gerber files get unreasonably large because of all the curves? I thought toporouter was a novel idea. I hadn’t seen an autorouter that would do that before. I’m one of these people that likes to put tracks where i think they should go though. Even if i’m on a deadline.
    ——————————–
    I tried EE at UWS Nepean but dropped out. One major factor was that is *was* such a hike each day. I probably would’ve liked to live on campus. I probably would have stayed.
    ———————————-
    Forget what DARPA wants. The challenge should be to produce a quadcopter that can fly to, and carry from your local all night kebab place, a kebab. Of course you have to train the shop owner not to freak out.
    ——————————–
    Mal’s bike is neat. I’m amazed at the reported single charge “mileage”. I didn’t have a go. Murphy’s law says i’d break it.
    ——————————-
    Speaking of mm and inches and pdf’s and datasheets – It’s really annoying when dimensions diagrams aren’t specific about which units they’re using. You can figure it out with reason and logic but it’s not supposed to be a bloody puzzle.

  7. I enjoyed #46 today. I couple of quick things…

    You mentioned how programming kind of forces one to know English. Did you know that Ham Radio is (or used to be) similar? Although the picture is changing now, it used to be that all countries required you to learn Morse Code in order to get a ham radio license. By international convention, all morse code transmissions are sent in English. Thus, all hams had to know some English. Of course, the morse code requirement for licensing has been dropped in the US and some other countries have done the same, so it’s not as universal as it used to be.

    On the topic of multiplier ICs – I remember one of my favorite “Pease Porridge” articles in Electronic Design discussed an application to get very high accuracy multiplication by using expanded scaling with opamps and a multiplier. Great article:
    http://www.national.com/rap/Story/0,1562,9,00.html

  8. I love how you say the shape of the Earth is just a theory. It’s a parody of how people unaware that a thoery is a proven hypothesis say you should be cautious about teaching kids scientific theories.

    You can see the curvature of the Earth from 30,000 ft if you look closely. I’d love to take a suborbital flight once it’s safe and affordable for tourists. Only a handful of human beings, the Apollo astronauts, have ever been so far that they can see the Earth as a sphere, not just a curved plane.

    Most people who don’t want to change to the metric system cannot tell you the basics of imperial units. “It’s about 250ml.”
    “I don’t understand metric units. Tell me in regular old normal units.”
    “Okay, it’s something like 8 oz?”
    “Uhhh… Is that like a shot glass worth, a can of pop, or a large bottle, like about yay much?”
    Therefore I think there would be no problem with transferring everything to metric.

    I used a multiplier chip on a supply that drove heating lamps used in chip fabs. They needed to limit total power. The voltage and lamp resistance could change, so we monitored current and voltage and multiplied them with an analog multiplier. It’s probably all done in software now.

  9. The reason for the use of English in amateur radio is simple – most people around the world have some basic familiarity with it. If you were a Bulgarian speaking only his native language, you wouldn’t get many DX contacts! As radio was developed in the early days mainly in the UK (and then US) it is natural that it tends to be in English. I guess the same is true for aviation.

  11. Dave’s fiasco with Altium sounds somewhat like the start of ESNUG. The guy started a email list to better support the Synopsis tools. After a while, he got a lot of cease and desist letters from various corporate lawyers. He stuck to his guns and eventually, the CAD vendors figured out that ESNUG was actually helping the company’s customers.

    Funny isn’t it?

  12. So if Altiumforum.com isn’t then what about
    altiumcapital.com, altium.net, altiumwealth.com
    and alltiumgroup.com to name but a few ???

    And since you guys are on the imperial/metric debacle, in Southern Ireland the distances between towns are clearly marked in km whereas the speed limits are quoted in mph – Wot!?

    Now the funny thing is, all the tourists think the speed limits are also in km/hr much to the annoyance of the locals.

    Bah!

    • Another Altium user had a forum at altiumdesigners.com and they didn’t say a thing.
      Altium must not like me and my views, they must think I’m a threat to their authoritarian views of the industry.
      Funny thing is, I was employed with the specific purpose of giving them “real world perspective” on their product, it was in my employment contract!

      Dave.

  13. I think the Earth is toroidal, how else would the Moon pass through the middle like it does?

    And on the subject of Ham radio, is Chris planning to learn Morse code (if he doesn’t already)?

  14. cotw! cool. I found the AD633 for potential use in restoring my PS-X65 Sony turntable. I put the questions on EEVForum.

    It would take the first signal- the analog output of a magnetic field sensor IC for commutation of the motor and multiply it by the gain signal coming from the speed control PLL circuit. The result is an amplitude modulated sine wave for driving the motor (X2 for two phase motor). I may not complete it though – I realized it will be far easier to buy a junk table for parts and replace the bad hall effect sensor board. Still like the chip though – very cool.

    good show guys, thanks!

  15. When Altium was naming its versions Winter 09, Summer 09 etc, I never quite figured out if it was the northern or southern hemisphere they were talking about. I always worried if I was 6 months out of date, or if half the world just got a version with the opposite name to what they were in. Now I wonder if the Altium management realized that the world was round and on a tilt? Good thing is they don’t stick with the names for long. I bet they will go from AD10 straight to AD12 next year.

  16. So what was the aside about paper?

    We use 8.5×11 in the u.s. and the rest of the world uses a4??? Isn’t it the same size?

    • A4 = 11.7 x 8.3 in. Derived from A0 and the Golden Ratio ie folding a sheet of A0 in half down the long edge gives you a sheet of A1 size who’s length to wide ratio is the same as the A0 sheet 1.41:1. This can be repeated for all the A sizes and the ratio remains the same. 8.5 x 11 does not achieve this.
      How sad am I? 🙁 Lol