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

4.9

224224 ratings

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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 431 episodes available.

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast episodes:

December 10, 2024 #684 – Lee Felsenstein: The Computer Revolution & Counterculture
A full 3 hour discussion with the legendary Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne 1, SOL computer, VDM-1, Pennywhistle modem, and the inventor of social media. Covering everything from the Berkeley free speech movement, the counterculture movement, his career, through to Obsorne and how he invented social media with Community Memory.
His book: https://www.amazon.com/Me-My-Big-Idea…
https://felsensigns.com/
00:00 – Full 3 hour talk with Lee Felsenstein
08:24 – University of California at Berkeley, and the Free Speech Movement.
29:04 – First Junior Engineer job at Ampex
36:20 – The first hackathons with Richard Greenblatt
37:33 – Hackers, Heros of the computer revolution
1:03:36 – Techical career at Ampex
1:12:52 – Atari Computers and Steve Jobs, Nolan Bushnall, and Allan Alcorn
1:15:00 – He tried to pitch social media to Steve Jobs
1:22:15 – Designing the Pennywhistle 103 modem +
1:25:36 – Marty Spergel selling kits
1:31:53 – Steve Wozniak and how the Apple 1 is NOT a personal computer
1:43:42 – Osborne Computers
1:53:22 – Osborne 1 physical design
1:57:57 – Osborne 1 development timeline
2:01:19 – The Osborne Effect wasn’t what killed the company
...more
0min
November 20, 2024#683 – Troubleshooting is the skill
AI tools for helping with coding (but NOT layout, amirite)
Troubleshooting as a skillset
Stick meme
Dave got an updated electrical box
Home assistant
Keith Burzinski episode (ESPhome)
Toothbrush show
Andreas Spiess discussing Bluetooth proxy
Ian Scott Johnson DIY home automation
Electrarc240 reviews every element of a linear power supply
India power cables
Buried cables
Spotify is bricking the Car Thing but others are trying to save it
“injurnear”
Chris recently developed and coded up a cellular connected relay board for a Smart Locker application
...more
1h 3min
November 06, 2024#682 – Your Mind Is The Tool
Chris has been troubleshooting a PCB with a dead short on inner layers (put in by board house by mistake)
Don’t Touch My Gerbers shirt
“Is there an AI tool that will fix this for me?” … No
Chris dumped a bunch of current in the board and looked at it with this thermal camera
6.5 digit DMM to track down shorts
Etching problems in the old days
100% etest
Adding rails to PCBs for production
Reddit discussion thread: why not work on a product? That is, Dave, the wise one.
Videos
Live stream issues
Post from Twitter: Is 2 layers all you really need? This person thinks so, or is trying to convince themselves as much.
Armchair quarterbacking
Ian Johnston replacing the display on an 8.5 digit DMM
Jack Ganssle has posted his final newsletter (The Embedded Muse)…happy retirement! Jack has been on the show twice:
Episode 54 (!)
Episode 489
Ward Christensen, Inventor of BBS and XModem, (and former listener of the show!) has passed away
Dave is interviewing Lee Felstenstein for our next episode
...more
1h 8min
October 31, 2024#681 – Compact High Speed Design with Lukas Henkel
Welcome Lukas Henkel of OV Tech GmbH, a product design firm based in Nuremburg Germany!
Miniturization and the limits of miniturization
Price is a constraint
Using standard PCB tech (off the shelf)
Open source SIP
Steps
Conventional pcbs / components
Silicon inductors embedded in boards
Bonded Bare dies / stacked
Need volume to make it work
Requirements to fit into ______
iMX8 ULP – 0.4mm CSP
SIP Footprint
Module abstraction layer talk
Framework laptop
Software support / BSP
SIP will be different than PiMX8
Crowdsupply campaign launching 2-3 weeks and delivery in Dec/Jan
OpenSource laptop
CM4 vs PiMX8
SPI Flash with backup partition
Secure element SE050
Footprint for coral tpu and Halo 8
Trying to solve the problem of vision use cases
Marketing using layout / products but also making money on it
Katerina show
Visualizing simulations
Developing intuition
OpenEMS
Usability is based on python scripting
Using Blender for heat map
BVTKNodes uses .vtk file output
Multiphysics solvers
Things that drive Lukas
For HDI, Thinking in 3D / 2.5D and being able to visualize
Layers ranging from 4 to 18
Any layer design for SIP
Wurth electroncis for high density “any layer stackup”
Article series on altium for the open laptop
Follow Lukas on LinkedIn
Lukas also was a co-founder of PCB Arts. We had his cofounder Saber on the show in the past.
...more
1h 7min
October 21, 2024#680 – Catching Rockets with Musk Sticks
Starship 5 landed on chopsticks! (you know, in case you have been offline for 2 weeks)
Dave’s EV had a stuck cable
Portable charger is surprisingly good
CCS Charging standard
Fast charge 36/50 kW
MKBHD Chevy Silverado review
JLC is now offering silkscreen QR codes to have individually marked boards

That’s the board that Chris has been designing on a livestream each week
1 wire UID (pioneered by Dallas, then Maxim, now Analog…le sigh)
Dave is selling a new Bryman multimeter, the BM2257 (teardown photos)
Chris just returned from Embedded World North America, doing a demo at the Joulescope booth
Chris also gave a talk at the Zephyr meetup which will be released in a few weeks
Hackaday article about their comment section and project/article feedback
References
Musk Sticks
NC floods might impact the supply chain due to Spruce Pine NC being a source for quartz. We didn’t read this article, but it was a better explainer than we had at the time.
Meshtastic objects to the proposed FCC changes
...more
1h 10min
October 11, 2024 #679 – Satellite Design Engineering with Dan Esparon
Dan Esparon from Inovor Technologies in South Australia joins Dave to discuss all about the engineering of designing and launching satellites!
Dan works for Inovor Technologies, an Australian company that designs and builds satellites entirely in-house!
Recently they designed and launched the aussie Kanyini satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
https://www.inovor.com.au/missions/
They design and build their own Flight computers, ADCS systems, UHF radios, Battery modules and Solar Arrays in Australia.
...more
0min
October 01, 2024#678 – All About Antennas with Katerina Galitskaya
Welcome Katerina Galitskaya!
Chris started following Katerina’s antenna posts on LinkedIn
Monopole vs dipole
Lower frequences are harder bc longer wavelength
PCB size half of frequency
Place antenta on the shorter side
How to ruin your PCB
When to go to a antenna engineer?
Where will the device be?
Antenna environment
Start from vacuum, start adding elements
Dummies in the lab. The one in the episode photo is a dummy head filled with liquid (?!)
SAR – Specific Absorption rate
Simulation vs lab work (dimensions)
Anechoic chamber
When to go with custom antenna?
Buying off the shelf antenna?
New Airpods with fancy 3D antenna
Ben’s video about laser sintered antennas
MIMO / Beamforming
the failed promises of 5G
When to simulate
Some open source programs out there (“EMSee”?)
Simulating vs visualizing
Most of the time it’s not about vizualizing fields
What is the iteration elements of the antenna?
Satellite antenna design
Good to go external
Thinking about the dielectric const of case
Follow Katerina on LinkedIn!
...more
1h 6min
September 23, 2024#677 – Watt Is The Deal
Spam calls
Keysight released the HD3, a 14 bit ADC oscilloscope (teardown video)
Chris will be at Embedded World North America, please let him know if you’ll be there!
Chris will be at the Joulescope stand along with former guest Matt Liberty
This is one of the only tradeshows for general electronics in the US, Embedded Systems Conference went away many years ago. Chris, Dave, and Jeff (yesssah!) recorded at ESC in episode 41!
Bootstrapping new conferences
Cellular power modes
Dave old GSM video
PSM / eDRX
ALT1350
Dave got a smart meter on his home setup
EDMI
EEVblog forum post about leaky power bill
Maybe a trickle
Chris has been trying out Meshtastic, which is based on LoRa. Check out Jeff Geerling’s video for a good overview.
meshtastic subreddit
People posting about airplanes flying overhead (example post) like ham radio contacts
Meshmap
...more
1h 2min
September 03, 2024#676 – Moving House (And Lab)
Chris has been moving house, which partially explains the terrible audio problems the past few episodes…
For a lab, Chris believes in
Lots of wire shelving (with epoxy coating)
Everything on wheels (including shelving and workbenches)
As much storage as you can get
Chris has been doing livestreams of hardware design for Golioth.
The module he is designing is called the Drachm (“dram”)
The hardware Chris has been working on for the past 2 years is now open source
Flox video with machine learning on a camera also featured Chris
Altium finalized their acquisition by Renesas. The price already went up (discussed previously)
Raspberry Pi released the RP2350 while we were away
Inductor polarity on the RPi Pico 2
RP2350 Datasheet
You can choose the processors you want (Dual m33, dual RISC V)
Microchip was offline due to …. HACKERS
Dave has been trying out a new home battery storage system
NMC vs LFP
Reverse cycle
There have been lots of layoffs in tech, including 15K (!) at Intel
Layoffs.fyi
Being sued for a battery review? Say it aint so
...more
1h 10min
August 09, 2024#675 – Changing Course with Shawn Hymel
Welcome Shawn Hymel!
Shawn will be transitioning out Developer Relations at Edge Impulse. He will now be building courses full time. (this was recorded before Shawn announced his departure)
He want’s to be like a Professor, which partially explains his signature bowtie
Should people go into content? What about Developer Relations more specifically?
New courses will include FreeCAD and 3D printing and will be published by Digikey
Part design in FreeCAD
0.22 in Mango Jelly
Learning modeling vs learning an actual program
Scoffolding
Making a Zephyr course
Zephyr / Golioth training
Ecosystem vs RTOS
Workshop at Harvard
Trying to train on hardware
What should engineers know about ML
Andrew Ng’s course on Coursera
Updated for NumPy / Python
Understand Neural Networks
Can treat them as a black box
More important to understand statistics and data science
Hot dog / not hot dog (silicon valley)
Model zoos
Hugging Face
Coprocessing on U55 – U85
ToorCamp
Michael Cheich
Robert Ferenec
Marketing courses
Running
You can find Shawn as ShawnHymel on most social
Twitter
LinkedIn
Mastodon
Bluesky
TikTok
Instagram
You can also check out his site, shawnhymel.com
...more
1h 17min

FAQs about The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast:

How many episodes does The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 431 episodes available.

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