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:

July 31, 2023 #641 – Power Transmission with Toby Robb
Fellow Aussie Toby Robb joins Dave to discuss everything related to mains power generation and transmission and his role as a linesman.
Ask Toby a question here:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/amphour/im-linesman-and-electrical-fitter-in-powerline-distribution-in-australia-ama/
Links:
TransGrid’s substation design standard https://www.transgrid.com.au/media/zgogqoqg/1-1-substation-primary-design-standard-rev-2.pdf
https://www.energy.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-08/2019_10_NSW_ServiceAndInstallationRulesOfNSW_underlined.pdf
...more
1h 13min
July 25, 2023#640 – Software Defined Power Supplies with Werner Johansson
Welcome Werner Johansson of Qoitech!
Chris and Werner met when Werner gave a talk at HDDG in 2017
The talk focused on Xmega parts, which have a 2 Msps ADC
Qoitech is a Sony spinoff, where Werner was working on testing batteries on the cellphones.He had previously also worked on automation during linux mainline work.
Serial port control is an important thing when doing automated testing
CDB assist
PSOC5-LP has a CPLD in it
The Otii Arc was the first product from Qoitech, it’s a 2 quandrant power supply. They started in 2015/2016.
Chris asked if Werner had previously had used the Keithley 2306
Field testing is an imporant area for the Otii product line. “Measuremenets on the go” are easier with the extruded case form factor.
No computer will give you USB PD output power of more than 15W. Test equipment would benefit from a full 200W
Analyzer (Twinkie?)
A hub might be possible
USB Extended Power Range (EPR) will allow 240W
Are you sure you should plug that into your computer? Reminder about the OMG cable discussed on the show with MG
New EPR at 48V has specific shape for arcing
When designing a power supply for tattoo machine, it could only weigh half the weight of the cable (64g)
Software defined buck boost was discussed on CNLohr episode
Digital control is easier to get stable than analog because of programmable delays in the pipeline. You need to measure how long it takes to get the output to “show up”
Audio project real time jam sessions
The new product from Qoitech (that Chris got to see at Embedded World in 2023) is the Otii Ace
PJRC convinced Werner to check out the NXP RT106x family (instead of RT105x)
Otii is working on battery stuff
Arc has been out since 2017, but was limited output voltages 500 mv – 5V
Ace came out recently and goes up to 25V at 5A
3 isolation domains in Ace – chassis, banana jacks, expansion ports
Want resistor on low side for coloumb counter
Can stack Aces up to 200V
Dealing with RFI when different domains
Increased sample rate
8 simultaneous sampled ADCs
Turns readings into audio signals for RT1060, which allows data to stream easier
There is one reference voltage driving everything in the design, they send frequency spike across gaps to all isolated sections using RF isolators
Hard time getting the RT1060 parts during shortage
Battery stuff
Stepping through the battery internal resistance
Edging into the world of SMUs
Building a curve
Replaying battery data
Battery emulation
Continuous integration testing
Syncing to firmware
Battery aging
Devices running on coin cells
Cycling and automated testing and see it degrade over time
Thinking of batteries as impedance devices
Batteries having a passivation layer
“Low power” means different things to different people
Teardown of battery emulator
Low power is less than 200W
Qoitech equipment has been used in testing and production, including “in-the-loop” testing
“Generational degrade” when using previous versions of the product to validate new versions of the product. Instead they have a NIST traceable DMM in the loop
Chris mentions ever calibration shop has a Fluke calibrator. Apparently the HP 8753 wasn’t available in EU because of RoHS.
To learn more about Werner and the Qoitech team, check out the Otii Ace page
...more
1h 12min
July 17, 2023#639 – Daaaamn We’re Duuuummmb
Dave has been traveling around Australia with family. He made a video about an old solar thermal facility.
Chris also has been traveling, he gave a talk at the Embedded Open Source Summit about doing embedded training.
Solar thermal efficiencies
What is the efficiency of a mirror?
What is the efficiency of a transformer?
Power engineering class
Nic Bingham giving a talk about high pressure electronics
Chris was inspired from CNLohr’s episode where he talked about building a switcher. He recently bought a bunch of CH32V003 parts.
WSJ article about Chiplets (Archive)
Chiplets have been mentioned on the show a bunch before
Ming Zhang
Craig Bishop
Dave reviews the Analog Discovery 3. This is Chris’s daily driver at this point, especially when on the move.
While searching for something during the episode, Chris stumbled onto an old reddit post from 9 years ago about how they decide where to build fabs.
Chris and Dave both felt dumb while watching Shahriar’s Starlink teardown
Kathy Loves Physics will be doing videos about Maxwell’s equations
...more
1h 5min
July 09, 2023#638 – Building AR Headsets with Aedan Cullen
Welcome, Aedan Cullen!
Chris first learned of Aedan from his 2022 Hackaday talk about building an AR system
AR is “Augmented Reality”, but that term is different depending on the company / headset (think “magic leap” vs “google glass”)
Got into AR because of robotics, he had be doing software around SLAM and CV
Interacting with objects in 3D space
The first board he was working with was the Jetson TK1
Magic Leap’s “Lightpack” had a Tegra in it
Apple’s new Vision Pro is more like VR with passthrough (and creepy eyes!)
Being able to wear an AR unit all day
Resolution matters
What is it worth spending power on in a headset?
The previous rev used the AllWinner D1 RISCV and can support one camera
Which way should you point a camera on a pair of glasses?
MIPI DSI outputs and DSP processing
Lots of SIPs available for high density designs
Octavo makes SIPs out of other companies’ silicon.
Jason and Robert from BeagleBoard talked about Octavo when they were on the show
ECX337 from Sony needs 10V
Torex power modules helped save space too by being stacked on top of the inductor
Sony uses LVDS (FPDlink) and not MIPI
Offloaded processing to a phone or computer
Power
Wi-Fi vs bluetooth
New goal is to minimize power during processing, now it’ll be efficiency around WiFi and Display
With OLEDs you can selectively turn on pixels
Goal for the battery is 8 hours for “all day”
What is Aedan’s “requirements space” and what’s driving it?
Cost has become a concern for new boards
Using an assembly house to have one known-good assembly board
What’s on the new board?
The new display has MIPI DSI
The display doesn’t support 2 lane DSI out of the box
Displays are sometimes configurable in terms of how many lanes with registers
What do the lanes refer to? Each pair (“Data lane”) is a differential pair
Most displays will do 4 lanes (8 conductors) at 1Gbps
“Giganibbles per second”
Silicon backplane with OLED on top
ViewTrix
The processor is the NXP iMX RT500
“This is design is made for Garmin”
Aedan is coding it in Zephyr
Drivers are in MCUexpresso
DCnano display driver in Zephyr
no GPU driver in Zephyr
2D GPU in the chip
WiFi module is the same as the past rev, the Si Labs WFM200S
Sending compressed data over the WiFi link
Mechanical
Tweaking displays and 3D printed mounts
Prism
Flex cables
XReal / NReal
Using your brain as the combiner
Zach from Voidstar
Aedan just went to the Augmented World Expo in May. “No one was wearing an AR display around the conference”
Vision for the future
Follow Aedan online
GitHub
Twitter
...more
1h 9min
June 25, 2023#637 – CH32V003…fun! with CNLohr
Welcome to the show, CNLohr of the YouTube channel of the same name!
CNLohr has been working on projects and a library for the ch32v003, the $0.10 RISC V part
Dave has made a video about that part, using the official toolchain from MounRiver
How far will you take the chip?
Moving from knowing the arm instruction set to the RISC V instruction set
The benefits of knowing assembly
The CH32V003 is a RISC V part in the low end space made by WCH. CN thinks it’s about eqiuvalent to an AVR
You can buy a dev board on Tindie (this is the one Dave and Chris have)
Compiler tooling is done for you
AVR GCC
While discussing Espressif entering the market the way in which they did, CN said, “There’s only going to be one of these in all of computing”
Community reversing esp8266 using a virtual machine that had a leaked toolchain on it.
Compared to cc2500 / mediatek / realtek
ESP8266 without an RTOS “nonOS SDK“
lwip and wifi stack
Community port of FreeRTOS onto the ESP8266
CN worked on the “NoSDK 8266“
It didn’t have the WiFi enabled which meant timing wasn’t critical and he could overclock it to 380 MHz
Minecraft on a microscope slide
Ethernet on an AVR
Other people in this space
igor plug
lwusb is massive (relative to the space on the CH32V003)
What about the support burden of writing things yourself?
Chris made a comparision to college
USB on CH32v003
CNLohr already had hardware on hand for decoding and debugging the USB stack
He livestreamed the development!
Chris said he was not sure he could livestream, but CN said that the audience acts like rubber ducks and pair programming
ESPUSB
vusb on avr
Does communicty work like this have an influence on the market?
Padouk 3-8 cent micro
Grainuum library (later figured out it was written by past guest xobs!)
lufa / tinyusb
What are the physical requirements to implement USB without a transceiver? Only real thing is you need a pullup on the USB D- line
You also need to change pins from intput to output in the window of responding
Can make HID devices, but everything is low speed USB (1.5 Mbps)
CN built the Nixie tube controller
On GitHub there are examples on how to use various aspects of the part
The chip has DMA
During the chip shortages, CN was browsing lcsc and found a 10:1 transformer and wondered if he could make a flyback with it
Single wire debug
Check out the CH332V003fun library on github
Getting started
The next few months CN will be working on getting everything to be really good for the library
There will also be support for other (larger, more expensive) parts
Join the Discord! (cnlohr)
Follow CNLohr on YouTube
...more
1h 16min
June 19, 2023#636 – Discovering Cursed Connectors
Chris and Dave try to figure out what’s going on with the Rode Go 2
PCB photos from a reddit post
Chips on board
Nordic Semiconductor nRF52810
Renesas (Dialog) DA14195
SmartCores ATS8233
Maker Moekoe’s soldering setup
Chris is buying and using random connectors from Amazon. Dave says it’s Chris discovering DIN connectors
Non standard cable connectors
Cursed connectors
Tracker in the car for insurance price reduction
3G shutting down in Australia later this year. Already mostly done in the US.
Shoe phone
EAGLE support / sales will officially end in 2026
This monster board of throughhole components with 74 series logic
Chris will be giving a talk and showcasing at the Embedded Open Source Summit in Prague next week.
...more
1h 5min
June 05, 2023#635 – Low Power Connected Devices with Andrea Longobardi
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
1h 17min
May 30, 2023#634 – The CAN bus can! with Dr Ken Tindell
Welcome Dr Ken Tindell of Canis Labs
Ken heard episode #631 where Chris was talking about a Noisy Rude Bus and he objected. Stringently (it seems Ken has since pulled down the posts, but they were in good fun)
Chris had been planning to talk about Ken’s recent awesome post about CAN hacking and cars being stolen, so he asked Ken to be on the show!
CAN was invented to reduce weight in car cable harnesses, which were increasing rapidly with more electrical features being included.
CAN vs LIN
CAN was expensive, but LIN is cheap because it’s bit banging the protocol from a microcontroller
There are bridges to go between CAN and LIN buses.
Modern cars have 20-100 ECUs (controllers), but it depends on the features the car has. But that’s not just microcontrollers, Ken estimates that could be as high as 700.
Chris and Ken both had dealth with Philips / Freescale / NXP / Motorola as silicon vendors in the automotive space
How does a tiny microcontroller get data onto the bus?
Prioritized traffic
CAN indentifier field has priority baked in
Bus works like a giant AND gate where the lowest address wins
11 bits
How to unwind CAN traffic
Packing signals into CAN frame
Tools to reverse engineer
Protocol decoder for sigrok
CAN HG
250kb is slow
CAN bus bandwidth
There is Ethernet in cars now, especially with more and more cameras
Bandwidth vs latency
Addressing through a gateway
Atomic broadcasts means you know that each device has processed it
Protocol hacking
Trucks aren’t OEM based so more vertically integrated
SAE J1939 standard in trucks
If say Toyota develops the CAN messages, DBC files decode everything.
But manufacturers don’t publish them, so some car messages are reverse engineered
Accessories bus
Who has access to DBCs?
Diagnostic systems
OBD2
CARB
CAN is physical ISO 11898
CAN XL has IP packets, so you can use wireshark
Ken has written about wireshark
CAN 2.0, CAN FD
Devices on a bus are normally all bare metal or RTOS because of the timing requirements
OSEK standard
Embedded system abstraction
Dealing with the magnitude of decisions making in the automotive industry
Chris asked about whether self-driving will happen in 5 or 20 years? (ie. does he agree with Chris or Dave). It was the latter, sadly.
Autonomic Cars podcast with Dr Phil Coopman
...more
1h 9min
May 22, 2023#633 – Engineering Optimization
Welcome to the Luddite Hour, where Chris and Dave discuss the merits of Embossing Tape
Steve Sanghi was on the show last week, Chris disagreed with some of his points about paying for tools
Chris talking himself out of a job?
Ken Tindell wrote about a CAN hacking device that unlocks cars through the headlights. He will be our guest next week!
Vincent Himpe is on the job market. He was our longest running guest at 3 hours.
Hiring engineers means paying for their optimization
Once chips start to standardize that optimization, it gets commoditized
VU Meter LED bars: LM3914 / LM3915
Person detection with TinyML: The Person Sensor
AM Radio: MK484
CNLohr using the CH32V003 and Nixie tubes. He will be a future guest! Charles also started the CH32V003fun library.
Former guest Eric Schlaepfer on a podcast with former guests Ben Jordon and Bil Herd
Flipper Zero on YouTube
HS01 review view
The Pine-cil soldering iron
Projects
Dave reviewed a escooter on eevblog2
Thingy91 / buzzer video
...more
1h 5min
May 15, 2023#632 – Steve Sanghi – Microchip CEO for 31 Years!
Dave talks with Steve Sanghi who was Microchip CEO for 31 years, now Executive Chair.
Check out his new book, Up and to the Right. How Microchip was built into one of the biggest and most pofitable chip companies in the world.
In this episode we discussed:
The early microcontrollers, ROM, EPROM, EEPROM, FLASH
Semiconductor Fab’s and locations
How the US Government CHIPS act is a golden handcuffs trap
US/China rhetoric
What really happened durign the covid supply chain crisis
How 90% of medical devices use Microchip parts
Lead times
Respect for the chip manufacturers and supply chains
Just-In-Time becomes Just-In-Case
How the Toyota production system works and how it had to change
The impacts of a potential war in Taiwan
How does it make sense to make thousands of part variants?
The secret to making part varients
Why Microchip chose MIPS vs ARM
Atmel didn’t make any money!
Pricing discipline
How buying Atmel almost didn’t happen, and how Dialog Semiconductor goofed it
Draconian NDA terms
Atmel was bloated
RISC-V plans
Customer Driven Obsolescence
Foundry vs In-House limitations
Open Source FPGA tools?
Third party tool support
Why not offer free optimised compilers?
It’s all about black swan events, down cycles, pointy haired bosses, and how All your Cost Bases Beyong To Me
Hobbyist vs professionals
How Microchip is the largest aerospace chip maker in the world. Nothing leaves earth without a Microchip part in it.
Radiation hardended parts
Market value profitability
Will Microchip ever get acquired
Strained US vs China relations
...more
1h 7min

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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