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 438 episodes available.

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast episodes:

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
July 25, 2024#674 – Turtles as a Service
Murphy
More efficient with cooled panels
Battery storage solution
Server rack batteries
Chris has been doing hardware Livestreams
Geofence
n8n, Similar to Zapier, IFTTT
Home assistant
EE Grad wants some insight on new tech
https://4dsystems.com.au/
Scott Williams of Xentronix recorded with Dave and then Chris
Saw at Electronex
My Cousin Vinny
Embedded World North America is happening in Austin in October. There is a vendor map now.
Voltnuts
Open source book
Tiny Tapeout
Tantalum Caps from AliExpress
What’s next for ASML
Ben Krasnow printing PCB traces again
...more
59min
July 15, 2024#673 – Lifelong Learning with Bitluni
Welcome, Matthias Balwierz / Bitluni / Luni!
Midi pedals
Old projects
LED walls
Dunning kruger
Sonar scanner
Aliens
Romulus
Lifelong learning
Beamforming
Previously had worked on something similar in the medical field but didn’t realize it was the same tech
ESP32
Gowin FPGA
Video generation / crt control
R2R
cnlohr videos for making PCBs
ESP32 VGA
PCB mill
Failing
Tiny Tapeout bringing down costs like PCBs
Jeri doing “home etching” (making silicon at home)
Building the meme project on TT02
GIF construction set
Almost like a ROM on board, on each clock it exposes the next byte on paralell output
Luni hasn’t submitted to each tiny tapeout but is building a new project
Browser assembler that runs in the handheld gaming: “Luni-Asm”
cpu + gpu to get vector output
Bitluni live youtube / Bitluni – twitch happens Weds at 8 pm CEST
Community helps
Writing memory controllers
Bus master because internal SRAM is so expensive
Expense of flash/ram is in IP
People running test structures the tiles
FPGAs, Gowin – 9K standard up to 25k
Gabriel / Lushay Labs – Tutorials for FPGAs
HDMI connector
Some IP blocks from Gowin
Yosys support
VS code tools and simulation
Gowin FPGA designer
Learning clock domains
Moving back to art
Demoscene came from the cracker scene
Different categories / limits
4K category only allows 4K of memory for images and sound (generated)
White demo competitions
Contact
bitluni
github
twitch
...more
1h 7min
June 30, 2024#672 – Silicon Revolution with Matt Venn
Welcome back, Matt Venn of the Zero to Asic Course and Tiny Tapeout!
(Due to illness and some life stuff happening, my recording setup was crap. Apologies. I also leaned heavily on Matt’s notes, so some of the following links will be out of order. Think of it like an ad hoc scavenger hunt…fun!)
Matt was last on the show on episode 616, about 18 months ago
Tiny Tapeout has continued, now working on it’s 8th run. the 5th run is shipping soon.
Uri Shaked made Wokwi compatible with making chip designs and then compiling them to verilog for later processing by open source tools
12 bit SAR ADC on TT07
linux capable riscv
Analog ASIC design with digital standard cells!
We had previously posted Matt’s review of 2023 and aims for 2024
Siliwiz
ASIC inside synchrotron
Touring IHP (Germany) facilities
Interview with Nordic Semi designer
People are building analog structures on Tiny Tapeout
There’s a new course on Zero to Asic that will be about Analog (sign up for the waitlist)
There are some new tools being developed
surfer – browser based waveform
moosic – logic locking plugin for yosys
eqy – formal equivalence checking
Matt will be doing a TT workshop at supercon 2024
TT08 will have a demoscene competition – VGA and sound output – what’s the coolest thing you can fit in 1 tile? You have until Sept 6th 2024 to submit!
Not discussed, but on the list and interesting!
Silicon Supply Chains with Ed Conway
An early analog design (temp sensor) on TT03
Get TT quality stickers
...more
1h 14min

FAQs about The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast:

How many episodes does The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 438 episodes available.

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