The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

By The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

A weekly podcast about the electronics industry. Occasional guests. Lots of laughs.... more

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FAQs about The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast:

How many episodes does The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 451 episodes available.

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast episodes:

October 03, 2025#704 – Applied Embedded Electronics with Jerry Twomey
Welcome Jerry Twomey (Effective Electrons) author of the book, Applied Embedded Electronics: Design Essentials for Robust Systems. Chris first heard Jerry on Embedded.fm last year.
Jerry’s Background and Book Motivation: Jerry shares his quick history, moving from the Boston area to San Jose (Silicon Valley) and eventually to San Diego, where he has worked across diverse sectors including consumer electronics, aerospace, defense projects, DARPA research, and medical electronics. His book focuses on how to develop robust systems, providing guidance that is timeless rather than applications manuals that quickly become outdated.
The Analog Problem: Although modern systems may be digital end-to-end, Jerry emphasizes that the predominant causes of failure and design difficulties are often analog in nature. Academic study often teaches ideal signals but neglects real-world issues like inductance, noise, and cross-coupling.
Consulting Experience & Troubleshooting: Jerry discusses being called in to fix systems that failed strenuous regulatory testing for medical devices, where reliability is first and foremost (similar to an aerospace way of thinking). Failures often stemmed from basic issues like a lack of ESD protection, absence of error correction in data streams, insufficient detection of errors, and common mode noise rejection problems.
High-Speed Data and Signal Integrity: At high data rates, communication becomes a “communications channel problem,” not truly a digital one. When bits are underneath a tenth of a nanosecond, the communication turns into multiple standing wave transitions. The two primary limits on performance are rise and fall times and distance traveled.
Real-World Applications: Jerry has worked extensively on medical devices, including early-generation Dexcom glucose monitoring systems (two on-body monitors and a hospital insulin pump/monitor), and a wearable EEG monitor. He also worked on a system that required packing five video cameras into an endoscope distal head, measuring 11 mm in diameter and 13 mm long.
Architecting Systems and Identifying Bottlenecks: When starting a new project, Jerry suggests defining needs and interfaces and looking at the system as a black box. Engineering time should focus on the bottleneck—the hardest part of the system. For medical implantables, this might be minimizing power consumption down to virtually nothing, which could take up 90% of the effort.
Power System Design: Jerry advises purchasing commercial AC-to-DC converters due to competitive pricing. He notes that switching supplies (buck converters) commonly introduce noise that can lead to EMI failures or corrupt sensitive analog front ends. A classic case of “digital thinking in an analog scenario” is when a sensitive analog front end is powered by a noisy switching converter.
Working with Embedded Teams: Jerry prefers guiding embedded teams toward “self-discovery,” using bench time and empirical measurement (such as comparing grounds on a scope) to demonstrate non-ideal connections and grounding issues. He advises against the “seagull manager” approach.
Grounding Best Practices: For integrated circuits (chips), designs must be fully differential because securing a good hard ground reference is impossible. On singular circuit boards, a common uncut ground plane (dedicated ground plane, often multiple layers stitched together with vias) is the recommended approach. Cutting the ground plane is discouraged as it can create a slot antenna, increasing the signal radiating from the board by about 7 dB. Jerry has published rules on grounding.
Engineering Intuition vs. LLMs: Jerry notes that intuition is gathered through painful learning experiences and guidance from experienced designers. He expresses concern over the reliance on LLMs (Language Learning Models), which, while improving, can confidently provide incorrect answers, especially regarding complex topics like signal grounding.
Limits to Moore’s Law: CMOS scaling is approaching physical limits, likely unable to go below 10 or 11 nanometers. Modern performance gains are achieved through more parallel processing, not significantly faster clock rates, which have plateaued around 5 GHz due to parasitics and timing limitations. Jerry’s article discusses this topic.
RISC Architectures: The industry benefits from migrating to RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) architectures (like ARM) because they eliminate useless architecture and transistors associated with complex instruction sets (like x86).
Find Jerry on Effective Electrons and on LinkedIn
...more
51min
September 25, 2025#703 – Building wafer.space with Tim Ansell
Welcome back Tim Ansell!
Tim’s past appearances and previous work
Discussing Tomu on 375
Discussing Fomu on 456.3
Discussing the open source PDK on 501
Tim’s previous work at Google involved releasing a manufacturable open-source PDK (Process Development Kit), which contains the fundamental information needed to create integrated circuits.
Key open-source tools discussed include OpenROAD (a backend compiler for IC design) and Open Lane (an end-to-end suite turning chip descriptions (RTL) into manufacturing data (GDS)). Andreas had been on the show talking about his work on OpenROAD. Not discussed on the show but after Efabless went away, Open Lane has been replaced with LibreLane.
Efabless, a VC-backed startup, shut down in early 2025 due to investor disagreements. Efabless previously provided pooled manufacturing access (similar to OSH Park for PCBs) using the SKY130 process from Skywater in Minnesota.
A Skywater run costs $200k–$300k, which Efabless divided by 40 to reach roughly a $10k price point per slot.
Tiny Tapeout
Matt Venn’s Tiny Tapeout program further subdivides the manufacturing costs, making it the cheapest way to create custom silicon, typically costing around $300 per design.
Tiny Tapeout lowers the barrier to entry, allowing people to “just try it and see if you like it,” similar to writing a “hello world” program.
The program has already processed almost 3,000 projects, demonstrating high community demand when costs are low.
Despite limitations, advanced projects are possible: a developer taped out a Linux capable SOC using open-source tools and the Tiny Tapeout space.
Introducing Wafer Space
Tim started Wafer Space, based in Singapore, to provide community access to open-source manufacturing after Efabless ceased operations.
Wafer Space focuses on the GF180MCU PDK (Global Foundries 180 nm process), which is a much cheaper technology manufactured in Singapore.
The core offering is a low-volume production run: $7,000 USD gets you 1,000 chips back. This volume is enough for prototyping and shipping a small product (e.g., 500 units).
The design envelope area is 3.8 x 5 mm (20 mm squared) using the 180 nm process.
Interested parties should sign up via the Crowd Supply page. The deadline for purchase is the November 28th and submissions are due by December 3rd, with delivery by March 15th.
Manufacturing & Packaging
By default, customers receive bare silicon die
Tim is working with PCB manufacturers (like JLC PCB, PCB Way, Seed Studio) to offer Chip on Board (COB) wire bonding assembly onto custom PCBs (think black epoxy blob on a PCB)
COB packaging is significantly cheaper (sub-$2) than standard packaging houses (which often charge around $7 per chip).
This approach also provides faster iteration speed, as PCB manufacturers offer quick turnaround times (sometimes 3 days) compared to typical packaging houses (3 months)
Getting Started & Resources
If you are new to chip design, starting with Tiny Tapeout’s click and drag tools is highly recommended. Matt Venn previously talked/sang about Siliwiz
More advanced tools include Verilog and VHDL (coding style) or KLayout and Magic (drawing shapes, similar to PCB design).
To follow the project or seek help, join the Wafer Space Discord
New services offering open-source silicon manufacturing include IHP (Europe/130 nm) and Chip Foundry (US/Skywater), increasing ecosystem resiliency.
Website: Wafer.space
Sign up on the CrowdSupply campaign
...more
59min
September 15, 2025#702 – Test Point Accupuncture
Dave bought a lemon laptop
Chris officially has solar that is installed, working, and is effectively an appliance at this point…
Duke Energy and North Carolina nuclear mix
The impact of batteries on the grid
The Duck Curve is something Chris and Ari discussed on ep650
Open circuit voltage on panels
Dave did a repair on a tennis ball machine
Chris designed a board with test points too small
Accupuncture jbc
High cost vs low cost rework tweezers
Nanofix YouTube Channel
Tested
Ugly multimeter review
...more
1h 7min
August 22, 2025#701 – Electric Propulsion with Todd Bailey
Welcome back Todd Bailey of Starlight Engines, now Muon Space! (11 years later)
Todd was on Episode 194 of The Amp Hour, when he was consulting in the art and design space and building instruments like Where the Party At (WTPA). He was designing ‘robot doors’ for Calvin Klein’s house, discussed last time.
Through Andy Reitano, Todd learned about a role at Lockheed Martin (a US defence company) working on sonar for submarines.
“What a good job is”
Fun
Lucrative
Skills / teach you
Todd, Andy, and other Lockheed Martin friends worked on the VEC9 discussed in ep194
Clearance was required to work on sonar
Military electronics had some differences from his past work, but Todd was interestingly complementary of requirements driven design / waterfall
Chris and Todd were hanging out in a bar before he moved over to working on space and Todd mentioned he wanted to be Zefram Cochrane and do interesting things that matter (in space).
Star Trek First Contact (gah, I said generations)
Past guest Shawn Meehan talked to Todd and that’s how he started working at the “stealth space startup” at the time
Astra
HBO (not Netflix) special called Wild Wild Space
Other past guests of the show who were at Astra include Charles Aylward and Jeri Ellsworth
Silicon Valley Startup
“When the heavens went on sale” (book)
Commercial space by SpaceX
Rocket Lab was second
“Fail on stage”
Booster state of that rocket motor control
Electric turbo pump
Delphin engine
Cryogenic / feedback was hard
Alameda indoor test facility
Meant to fit in shipping container (8×8.5×40 ft)
System design and market requirements (launches don’t want small rockets)
Working remote
No place like home Jim Williams essay
Leaving Astra
Staying in the trenches
Rocket Lab
3rd stage “Kick stage, now known as “Photon“
Things you can work on in space
Radios
Sensors
Power
Electric propulsion (EP)
Apollo fusion – Alex Zannos (Contemporary) and Mike Cassidy (CEO)
After working on fusion didn’t have legs, they switched to working on Hall effect thrusters
“Low earth orbit is 50% of the way to anywhere in the solar system”
Rocket equation
Stage fires then falls off
Kick stage is 3rd stage
Accelerating an ion beam
Delta V book
Rocket efficiency
“Seconds of ISP” How much mass do you use to go distance
Asteroid mining
Who buys EP?
SpaceX built their own Argon thruster
Torque rods / reaction wheels
Apollo successfully pivoted
Acquired by Astra space / finished the apollo constellation engine
In 2022, Todd and his cofounder Mark Hopkins started Starlight Engines after some initial proof points and then fundraising
Had opinions about EP
Goebels and Katz textbooks about EP
Busek electric propulsion is a family business that has tried all kinds of EP. Run by Vlad Ruby & son Pete.
Starlight is based on solid Zinc propellant
Traditionally it’s Xenon
“The honda civic of hall effect sensor systems”
The atomic mass of Zinc is light
“Lickable EP”
Discharge converter runs the ion beam
Custom magnetics
300W – 800W
28V spacecraft bus
“Plume divergence”
Need to go from solid to gas
Cathode is a thermionic emitter “Like a tube amp”, it emits to boil off electrons
Zinc gets caught in electron cloud, knocks an electron off to make ions, ejected from a positively charged plate nearby.
Novel propellent is a differentiator
Starlight had a scrappy factor, like they built their own vacuum chamber (for 15K!)
The device is not known to be operational in space yet (they sell it but don’t operate it, so it’d be tough to know)
“Give the first one away”
Have sold 4 propulsion systems
Muon space needed a propulsion system and instead decided to buy the company. They weren’t put off by “two guys in a garage and contractors”.
Muon builds things like fire detection satellites
For more info about their past work and see pictures of the plumes, check out Starlightengines.com
To see the new things they’ll be working on, check out Muon space
...more
1h 31min
August 07, 2025#700 – Beware of the Overachievers
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
...more
1h 16min
August 01, 2025#699 – CircuitHub, 12 Years Later with Andrew Seddon
Welcome Back, Andrew Seddon! Founder and CEO of CircuitHub.
Andrew was first on episode 131 of The Amp Hour
CircuitHub has a partnership with Worthington Assembly
Worthington and CircuitHub host the Pick Place Podcast
Mimicing silicon manufacturing
Common parts library
Setting the factory up to have only 50k SKUs in house for speed of loading / attrition
Driving people to 2000 parts was the original intent, but didn’t hit the mark
Level of production needs to be high
Many parts need to work in conjunction
Reflow
PnP
Throughhole
Selective soldering
Inspection
Need to solve for the whole setup. Making smt 10x better doesn’t make overall 10x better
Starlink manufcaturing localy
PCB fabs in the US, 50 left, getting rolled up under Private Equity (as are things like machine shops)
AI with VCs
How it impacts the electronics industries
KiCad
More AI stuff
Automation on checking
Still humans involved
PDKs for chip companies
File checking / JLC
Types of customers
10 largest companies on the planets
It’s individuals who order and try it out, that often becomes a repeat business thing
Customers / types of boards / size of orders
More startups who also want production
Future serving lower cost areas
Proto service 2-4 layer black soldermask (unlisted)
See the CircuitHub capabilities
Going high volume
People making weekly or monthly units and spreading it out
Spinning up custom in-house high volume
Flattenting the price curve
Tariffs
New customers approaching them because of it
Can consumer be done in the US?
...more
1h 24min
July 17, 2025#698 – Hardware Security with Matt Brown
Welcome Matt Brown of Brown Fine Security!
Matt has been reverse engineering a “smart” smoker controller that talks back to AWS IOT
Jeff Geerling talking about his dishwasher
Storing private keys on the device??
Threat models
Key rotation
What is the best case scenario for an IoT device?
Secure boot / trust zone
Keys encrypt flash storage
Chris has designed in the ATECC608 before
Replacing Certificate Authority (CA) cert in grill firmware
Matt has a Linux hardware / reverse engineering background
Flash is always external
Ghidra / idapro / binwalk
Security cameras are 99% linux based (battery based cameras might be embedded)
Best practices
Encrypted firmware
hidden uart / jtag
Keys
Are linux devices “worth more” to a security researcher?
CVSS risk scoring system
Attack vector
Vulnerabilities are better if it can be a remote executed
Linux devices have more compute
Bluetoothe LE
Ability to enumerate
Scale reverse engineering
Chris has discussed the silliness of a bluetooth toothbrush on the show before
Tools / Software of the trade
xgeku firmware reader
picoemp
PCBite
Saleae
SDR USRP B200
Universal radio hacker
Stick-to-it-ness
Matt just came back from hardwear.io, one of his new favorite conferences
Find Matt at the embedded systems village at DEF CON
Follow Matt via his YouTube channel
Matt has a new IoT Security newsletter starting up
...more
1h 8min
July 08, 2025#697 – LEDs Everywhere with Tim from Mitxela
Welcome Tim from Mitxela!
Introduced by Mike Harrison, past guest of the show
Fluid pendant
Volumetric display
London hackspace
https://matthias-research.github.io/pages/tenMinutePhysics/index.html
FLIP in Blender
CHNT36ta Pick and place doing 0201
Precision Clock
Sewing machine (check out that GIF!)
Secret life of machines – Tim Hunkin
Isaac Singer
Tim has many Lathe projects on the hardware projects page
Flag Steam Engine
Learn how to machine from MrPete222’s YouTube channel
Schlock Mercenary (Comic)
Sprite tm on The Amp Hour
Gameboy advance link cable
Writing a gameboy emulator
Emulators got him into electronics
No$ (“nocash”) emulator
AVR instruction set
MIDI
CNLohr on The Amp Hour
https://mitxela.com/projects/slide2
Forcing
brainfuck (language)
quop
movfuscator
Puzzles
Spacechem (Game)
Zach Barth of Zachtronics on The Amp Hour
babaisu
LED errings
watchdog timer allows ridiculously low power
1 way loader
autobauding
Find all of Tim’s projects on mitxela.com
Watch the latest videos on the mitxela youtube
...more
1h 16min
June 19, 2025#696 – It Works With Option Number 5
Dave found a wrist mounted DMM that looks…inadvisable
We’ll discuss the survey results next time!
Florin Cocos of VoltLog
Great Scott
Sam Aldaher on the show last week
Gerald Undone did a studio tour with Captain Disillusionment
Short videos
Dave using a go-pro on a bike
Separate gyro file to stabilize
D-y hybrid inverter
Chart
Remote shell
Cline
Chris is finally getting solar
open energy monitor
Emporia vue
Sense
We talked with Joe Bamberg when he worked there
Driving back from canberra
Ben Krasnow makin’ magnets!
Bluetooth videos
...more
1h 4min
June 04, 2025#695 – Making The Invisible, Visible with Sam Aldhaher
Welcome Sam Aldhaher, power engineer and 3D graphic artist!
Sam has always been interested in art…and power engineering
He primarily works in Blender and has been for 5-6 years
Inputs and outputs
Starting from Altium / KiCad for eCAD
Blender doesn’t accept step files, it works with meshes like STL
KiCad -> Blender is a good flow, as there are add-ons to import KiCad
Making a good visulalization is all about lighting, materials
Building library of models
Modeling magnetic fields
Research in wireless power
openEMS vtk format
The marjority of tooling is glued together with python
ElectroMag Nodes – Sam‘s tool – $1
Right hand rule
Developing intuition
Elmer finite element solver
Past guest Katerina Galitskaya also visualized RF and talked about the differences of testingi n a chamber vs building a visualization
FastHenry is inductance tool that was created in 80s at MIT for wirebonds. Didn’t have a visualization front end, like SPICE
3D whiteboard
Using Blender to prototype and then taking it to other tools (CST, Ansys)
Validating on the bench with an impedance analyzer
Simulating power loss is difficult
Quality factor
“CAD is too perfect”
Adding surface imperfections
Node system is similar to simulink, adding blocks (Chris also thought this sounded like the effects in Davinci Resolve)
Lighting
Making the background dark means you don’t need to have far field details
Tutorials
Blender Guru – how to make a donut
Sam’s video about how to draw components on a PCB in Blender
Doing the same with Geometry nodes in Blender
Ability to create things procedurally
How to create ICs in Blender
Using LLMs for python glue code
What is a shader?
HardOps tool, simplifies workflow (shuffle button)
Visualizing an Inverted F antenna in Blender
Remembering that videos are just still frames in order
Electric fields propagating on the antenna itself
Radiated electric fields (red and blue and black)
OpenEMS generates GBs of data
Blender geomtry goes out to OpenEMS so it’s geometrically linked
What if it was a ceramic antenna instead of a metal inverted F?
Simulating 60 GHz from a radar chipset
Meshing – sample points in space
simulating points in time
Impacts of stubs / squares on microwaves
Human Hand Interaction with 60GHz Electromagnetic waves
SAR simulations – how much heat do you generate
Simulating motor windings on a PCB
The above was a collaboration with past guest Carl Bugeja
When to switch from near field (electro) vs far field (openEMS)
Calculating values with inductance calculator
FastHenry tool on Github
Sam’s work on artstation
ZS smart watch
Fast track if listeners want to get better at this art
Learn blender – donut
KiCad -> Blender reference
Play with geometries nodes (ElectroMag Nodes, Fast Henry)
Find Sam on social
LinkedIn
Twitter/X
YouTube
Instagram
EEVblog forum
...more
1h 16min

FAQs about The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast:

How many episodes does The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 451 episodes available.

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