The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

#635 – Low Power Connected Devices with Andrea Longobardi

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Welcome Andrea Longobardi of AL2tech!

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