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

225225 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 446 episodes available.

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast episodes:

February 20, 2024#659 – Altium…Acquired!
Renesas buying Altium
Altium bought Octopart in 2017
Tasking debugger
Cloud focus after reorg
History of Protel / Altium – started in 1985 by Nick Martin
Turbo Pascal
CAD tool for windows in 90s
protel99
Altium Buys Morfik in 2010
Nick booted out
After the reorg, the stock steadily grew
You can watch the Renesas/Altium announcement on Zoom
There is also a slide deck available
Dave linked an article from the financial press in Austrailia
Zuken
Altera is apparently spinning back out
Steve Liebsen on The Amp Hour
Intel is getting a $10B chunk of the CHIPS act money
Steve Sanghi (Microchip) discussed the act when he was on the show
Synergy flavored milk
Other properties we forgot were part of Altium:
Circuit Studio
Upverter (formerly on the show!)
Gumstix
Autotrax – Taylor’s version (DEX PCB just…took the name?)
...more
1h 14min
February 13, 2024#658 – Uncle Al’s Eating Garbage Again
AI tools for recording
32 bit recording
Pool robot
Home assistant
Power points in the ceiling in Dave’s office park
CH32V003 board
CNLohr episode
rv003usb library
Mike Harrison doing a video about a CH32V003 standalone programmer
nRF24
Low cost modules Chris bought on Amazon
Samy Kamkar on the show
Samy talk about balloons
Drone shows
Time difference of distances
Dave’s video about HP atomic clocks
XKCD Radiation Dose Chart
DTCXO
In the Bond movies they’re not nerds
LCD and fonts
AI pin
Vision Pro
iFixit teardown
Chris will be at Embedded World again this year, come say hi!
...more
1h 8min
February 05, 2024#657 – Automating the Home with Keith Burzinski
Welcome Keith Burzinski of Nabu Casa and the ESPhome project!
Nabu Casa is a commercial venture that supports the open source Home Assistant (HA) project
Hardware
Home assistant allows your smart home to not require an outside connection, which is crucial to breaking free of large cloud providers.
Chris just got a Zigbee dongle and switched outlet working in under a minute on HA
Automation and triggers
Users share their automation routines on the HA subreddit
mmwave detecting heartbeat
What is esphome?
Abstraction / using YAML for business logic
Deciding when to go custom
Keith got started doing a PR for an IR remote
Nixie clocks
Boldport / Saar
Getting hooked on SMT builds
Keith made an STM32 based Tube Clock that Chris was very impressed by at a Chicago meetup
Keith reworked the sensing for his HVAC by fusing multiple custom sensor boards
Presence sensor – mmwave + IR sensor
Geodesic dome
Tiny fresnel lenses on low cost PIR sensors
Fixing thermostat in apt
Creating a network of temp sensors and weighing
SRE = site reliability engineer
Nabu Casa cloud service
The year of the voice
Home assistant YouTube
Hardware: Blue, yellow, green
How often are people reprogramming their devices
ESPhome discord
ESPhome.io
See devices that can be reprogrammed to work with ESPhome
Reddits
ESPhome
Homeassistant
...more
1h 24min
January 22, 2024#656 – Pneumatic Tubes, Straight To The Home
Dave just drove 4500 km / ~ 2800 miles
Dumpster room tier on Patreon?
Hyperloop failure
Florida train video (Wendover)
Pipedream
Series of tubes
Guam capsize
Hugo site builder, based on Go
Dreamweaver
Chris recommends buying a foldable lightbox (Light this)
Chris’s blog post when he was going to meet Dave for the first time
Dehumidifiers are raising money based on ridiculous hype
Spec Sheet for Genesis Systems
Chris just got a chest freezer, was surprised at the low energy needs
Power charges
Texas grid article on NYT after recent deep freeze
Energy mix in NC
Beta voltaic
Used for aerospace
Bantam Tools (Bre Pettis) acquires Evil Mad Scientist (Lenore, Windell)
Vulnerabilities in the ESP32 RISC V parts
Will people make tools to make it easier to crack into something, like discussoned the CAN episode with Ken Tindell
Dave might get a free pick and place, the TVM920
Video about the 1980s “drink robots”
Chris’s daughter is really into robots and gondolas
Pool robots videos on EEVblog2
...more
1h 15min
January 09, 2024#655 – The Twelfth Day of Keyzermas
Welcome back Jeff Keyzer of Mightyohm
Orthodox Keyzermas
Twelfth Day of Keyzermas
Jeff has been taking care of his ailing cat for the past years and learned a lot about administering medicine
RF
8753 / Copper mountain
Shariar sometimes features Copper Mountain VNAs on the Signal Path
Step attenuator
NanoVNA
Pallav Aggarwal articles
Murata modules
Chip down cellular
Seattle visit
The big dark
Input shaping
Printing with .25mm
Tek TM500
Scope on a monitor arm
Test equipment intervention
Jay Leno turbine car episode
Selling on eBay, including stuff made during the process of making parts for Jeff’s equipment
Tek groups.io
Fluke in Seattle / now Everett
Vintage Tek Museum
Being set up to ship things
Shipping CRTs
CRTs are in vogue again (?!)
Low latency
Retropie
Oscilloscope music paying premium for RCA / Heathkit
Jeff was off to Hardware happy hour (3H) Seattle
Led Zeppelin had many references to Lord Of The Rings. Past guest and Chris’s former roommate Steve Kreuzer was a huge LZ fan.
...more
1h 21min
December 19, 2023#654 – Pseudo Code…Pseudo Good
CES is coming up and there’s good attendance as one of the last remaining large electronic shows in the US
Tradeshow are all bunched up in April for Chris in 2024, specifically Embedded World and Embedded Open Source Summit
Dave gives a synopsis of the latest Smarter Every Day video (about NASA)
Smarter Every Day video about NASA talk
Lunar lander training abort
Apollo guide SP287
Speeding up podcast…how fast can/do you go?
Last minute designs at the end of the year
ESP32 / NRF9160 board limitations
Cheap as chips – podcast about fish and chips
Siglent oscope SDS7000A
Innovators dilemma for car manufaucturers…and scopes too!
Kia Carnival
Kasm vs Codespaces
Home Assistant
ESPHome
YAML
NSW tour video / Quantum
Smart home fraturing
AI
New guide to Shenzhen, updated by Naomi Wu
...more
1h 7min
December 11, 2023#653 – Benjamin Cabé Nose Zephyr
Welcome Benjamin Cabé of The Zephyr Project!
Benjamin is the developer advocate at The Zephyr Project, which is both a Real Time Operating System and an ecosystem (or almost like a “distro”, rather than an OS)
Benjamin does videos on the Zephyr YouTube and maintains an awesome blog / newsletter
The ecosystem is deep: Chris recently learned there is a state machine framework
Multiple people involved in dev like an OS
The Platinmum Members includes chip companies like NXP, Nordic, ADI
There are 600+ boards supported in the ecosystem (and more if you do custom)
Devicetree is a tough concept, but a powerful one that was borrowed from Linux
Who is the audience for Zephyr?
Chromebook embedded controller
What’s the smallest processor that Zephyr can run on? M0s can run it no problem
Chris thinks one of the benefits is the ability to bolt new stuff on to a project
Simulation through Wokwi (Past Guest Uri) or Renode (Past Guest Michael)
Using different levels of abstraction
zephyr i2c init
Benefits of abstraction
Swapping out chips (bubblegum tapshoes)
Tying stuff together (bolting stuff on)
Infrastructure with CI/CD
Zephyr doesn’t have an official IDE but VScode “just works”
Helper tools from Nordic
Open Source
Hobby projects
Dev survey
Custom Keyboards (ZMK)
RP2040 support
Arduino recenlty joined the project
Layers of abstraction
Architecture (ie. arm, nios2, x86)
SOC (available peripherals surrounding the core)
Board (PCB definition which might have:)
SOC
Memory
Peripherals / Sensors
Check the tree and PRs for sensors that might be in-flight
Compared to Arduino IDE
Choosing ecosystems
Weekly newsletter
Things you didn’t know you needed: NMEA subsystem
In Jay Carlson’s 2nd appearance on the show, he said “I’m reading more code than I’m writing”
Benjamin’s profile photo is of his artificial nose he created a few years ago
Making a machine model for bread (pandemic)
It uses TFLite
What is the project doing? (in parallel)
Acquire data
Machine learning inference
Display update
Network interface
Benjamin reimplemented the Nose in Zephyr using ZBus (Chris recorded a video with the author of this subsystem)
Like an MQTT broker on device
Some of the concerns I (Chris) had when I was starting was not understanding RTOS concepts (threads, queues, etc). Brian Amos was on the show talking about his book, which is a great way to get started with these ideas.
Threading / work queues
The importance of a project when starting out
Starter hardware
Hero devkits (Chris likes the nRF9160-DK as a starter board or the nRF5340-DK)
M5stack boards
iMX8
Jumping down to Zephyr from Linux
MPU + MCU
Tight integration
Zephyr can run POSIX code
What about the the RT in RTOS? Does this operate realtime often? (timing critical)
BOM cost and software cost
Security and dependencies
Join the Zephyr discord to talk to other people using Zephyr
TechTalks / YouTube
Interested in going to a conference in Seattle in 2024 for Zephyr? The ZDS / EOSS CFP is open now!
...more
1h 7min
November 28, 2023#652 – For a couple weeks there…
You may have noted a few weeks off in September…Chris was busy with a new kiddo!
Starship launch was awesome, but Blue Origin might beat them to market?
Chris has been troubleshooting some boards he had made recently. It was pre-baby so sleep deprivation can’t explain some of the screw ups!
PCB Carolina was a local tradeshow
TechTechPotato talks about layoffs at SiFive. Article about the layoffs.
RP1 show
RetroPie
Oversupply in the market is hitting some silicon vendors
Dr Michael Burry (highlighted in The Big Short) has been shorting the semiconductor industry
At the end of the movie the epilogue talks about how Dr Burry is watching water as well, possibly why he’s shorting semis?
Chris wondered if Steve Sanghi mentioned why they’re still in Arizona while he was on the show
Nuclear Diamond Battery video
SnapEDA
“off by one letter” error while ordering parts
PCF85063BTL vs PCF85063ATL
Scotty does a tour of the WorldSemi (makers of the WS2812B) factory, it’s awesome!
Ben Hencke of ElectroMage makes the PixelBlaze, which is a great way to drive LED strips
Dave was talking to past guest of the show, Andrea Morello, about future changes to Quantum computers
China is turning off exports of Germanium and Gallium, which could impact the upstream supply for the chip industry, including around specialty semis.
Breakdown
Bunnie writes about why the US shouldn’t put restrictions on RISC V (agree!)
KiCon has happened in Europe and China now, check out the talks on the KiCad YouTube channel.
Future (distributor) was acquired by WT Microelectronics out of Taiwan
Check out this 1975 tour of a UNIVAC manufacturing plant
...more
1h 8min
November 21, 2023#651 – Learning Computing with Jeff Geerling
Welcome Jeff Geerling of the Jeff Geerling YouTube Channel!
Jeff sounds so calm one his videos because he records after the kids are in bed
He started working with dad at the radio station when there was a transition in radio to digital / online. Jeff had an early job as a technology explainer while making manuals at the station.
Jeff still makes videos with his Dad on the Geerling engineering channel
Ham radio vs broadcast
1 Million Watts on the Supertower
Calling the FCC
CamOX facility
Keeping people interested during videos
Mars 400
RPi clusters
It’s a good exercise because it helps those building it understanding the limitation of spreading across computers
Drupal website on cluster
“The constraint gives me the story”
A good starter project? Maybe the project pi cluster
/r/homelab
NAS, monitoring, VPN, pidramble
Home Assistant
ESPhome
yaml files: better than xml, JSON is better
Devices should only be added to the house if they are: Local, additive, private
X10
Smart stuff in the house
Interested in the embedded side
LLM
Jeff became Chris’s de facto Pi5 analyst
RP1 episode
PCIexpress
Jeff discusses RISC V
...more
1h 4min
November 13, 2023#650 – Accessible ASICs with Andreas Olofsson
Welcome back, Andreas Olofsson of ZeroASIC!
Andreas was on the show back in 2015 (ep 254) talking about the Parallela, a crowdfunded parallel calcuation board by his then-company Adapteva
What is enabling more open source to happen?
Unit economics really impact silicon designs
Open source effects have been having a positive effect on the industry. Andreas maintains a meta repo of 400 tools.
Fewer fabs than 2008, mask sets still expensive
Semiconductor singularity
Andreas is deep into the world of “chiplets”
This is the basis of his new company ZeroASIC
Before he started that he was a program manager at a little outfit called DARPA
Andreas focused on lowering costs, with the idea that 3 people should be able to design a chip
He worked under Bill Chappell, the director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO)
OpenROAD
POSH
CHIPS
TinyTapeout
Andrew Kang UCSD
Chiplets
We had Ming Zhang on to tlk about ZGlue, but that was a slightly different architecture
What is a chiplet?
AXI on chip
SERDES
Types of interconnect
Organic
Types of output
SIP, Chip, SOM
ZeroASIC is Andreas’ latest company
They started by releasing a Silicon compiler project
New thing is take system customers and build them an ASIC
Optimizing speed and cost
Mostly targeting aerospace and defense
Try it out yourself on the ZeroASIC emulation page
Their main processor is a Quadcore RISC V
There are no off the shelf chiplets
eFabric Active Interposer
Defining a standard
arm made a standard called amba
AIB from Intel was opensourced
Getting external contributors (hardware vs software)
LatchUp – Fossi
Personal passion drives people to contribute
You’re really buying a datasheet from a big company
Loading the design to AWS
Check out the ZeroASIC openings
Read about how ZeroASIC is democratizing chip making
...more
1h 4min

FAQs about The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast:

How many episodes does The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 446 episodes available.

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