The Amp Hour

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

The Amp Hour is a weekly conversation about electronics and the people who design them.... more

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FAQs about The Amp Hour:

How many episodes does The Amp Hour have?

The podcast currently has 745 episodes available.

The Amp Hour episodes:

August 08, 2022Best way to find a leak
Dave has been reverse engineering 10 pin connector from the ultrasonic gas detector he got in a recent mailbag
Intrinsically safe
Executive Decision
Dave is deciding between discrete logic vs micro
Chris recommends the RP2040 and utilizing the PIO (kind of doing both)
Die shots of the RP2040 W
74HC164 datasheet
"Richer than Bill Gates'
Back to school - Triple Lindy
Chris is currently reading Accelerando
Dutch town installs secondary traffic lights on the ground for texters
Tour from temporary labor workers inside of the Digikey fulfillment center
LCSC "wireless antistatic wristbands"
JayCar warehouse video
Stacey Higgenbotham reported on how Helium isn't making much money. Are any of you being targeted to utilizing the connectivity from the Helium network?
Nordic Semiconductor is recruiting a RISC-V designer. Interesting what this implies about other chip companies hiring RISC-V designers. Espressif's new chip line are mostly RISC-V.
We have been talking about RISC-V for a few years now, but the project started in 2010.
Google and Skywater announced they're moving down to a 90 nm node. Chris recently found out Skywater is a former Cypress Semi fab.
Semtech (owners of the LoRa IP and makers of chips) are buying Sierra Wireless (a cellular module maker). Uh...why?
Google starts testing AR glasses
Meta lost 2.8B on the metaverse last quarter...
Thanks to Kate Ter Haar for the photo of the matches
...more
1h 7min
July 31, 2022 An Interview with Mike Engelhardt (Re-broadcast)
For the original show notes, check out the original page: https://theamphour.com/196-an-interview-with-mike-engelhardt-spice-simulator-synteresis/
Mike Engelhardt is the creatore of LTSpice. Mike is no longer at Linear Technology, and Linear Technology is no longer a company (now part of Analog Devices), but the simulator is still awesome!
To listen to all episodes in your podcast listener back to episode one, use the LibSyn feed (our hosting platform): https://theamphour.libsyn.com/
...more
1h 33min
July 25, 2022Wow, Dave REALLY likes Top Gun
Dave received his Tilt5
We had Jeri on the show 5 (!) years ago when CastAR had folded
Troubleshooting
Fewer kickstarters
Chris wrote about using Wireshark to troubleshoot Thread networks
Electrical Engineers on the brink of extinction?
The conversation partially became about SW vs HW salaries, but ultimately people projected whatever they wanted onto the headline.
Naomi (@RealSexyCyborg) mentioned that EEs are harder to find in Shenzhen
CHIPS act still not passed in US
Sam Zeloof says you can buy everything you need to make 5 nm transistors on Alibaba (no word on lithography)
Spectrum article about RISC V
Matt Venn (Zero to ASIC) interviews people at the Free Silicon Conference
...more
1h 3min
July 18, 2022 Capacitor Schoopage with Ron Demcko from AVX
AVX Fellow and 40 year capacitor industry legend Ron Demcko joins Dave to discuss film capacitor failures and capacitor technology.
This episode is best viewed in video format on the Amp Hour Youtube channel, as Ron and Dave discuss slides and photos in this video discussion for an EEVblog video on why a film capacitor failed. But we are sure you'll still find the audio podcast version very enjoyable and educational.
...more
1h 26min
July 11, 2022Trade Show or Conference?
Chris just got back from Embedded World in Nuremberg where he was showcasing stuff for his company Golioth. Embedded World is happening again in March 2023.
Electronica is another German trade show happening in November in Munich (above image is from 2014 Electronica)
Are there any good remaining US based trade shows? Or outside the US?
Howard Johnson episode
DaveCon
Browsing at trade shows is one of hte main benefits
Dave's son is taking an online cosmology course
"AI layout" company raises $25M
Freight DHL
RS-449 has um...a lot of pins
VT100 "Dumb terminal"
EIA
IEEE1394 (which was branded FireWire for Apple's implementation)
Chris has been reading Tony Fadell's book Build
New Raspberry Pi Pico W is $6 and has an RP2040 and WiFi
Dave is interested in the PIO. The Embedded RPi team talked about PIO on the show.
The net effect of shortages
Inside Curious Marc's lab (Daniel from Keysight hosts tour)
Former guest Zach Barth has decided to shut down Zachtronics (maker of ShenzhenIO) to pursue other projects.
Turing Tumble
...more
1h 7min
June 20, 2022AI aren't sentient yet...right?
A sentient AI would definitely take better show notes
Altium rap
Chris has been reading "Iron Emipres", which is a book about building out train infrastructure.
Mark Rober has a new kit service and workshop. Chris thinks this was designed by an AI because of how it appeals to our demographic.
It's amazing how YouTube will influence future engineers. Dave grew up with The Curiosity Show. Chris grew up with Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Chris has been prototyping with laser cutting using Ponoko
Chris got to tour the Computer History Museum while at the Zephyr Developer Summit (recap article).
Palm Pilot
HP 200LX
Psion Series 5
Intel has their own museum
Google AI research claims the AI is sentient
War Games
Cruise now has a pass for operating in SF at restricted times.
9 euro
NY has passed Right to Repair
Apple might be forced to adopt USB C
EEVblab Right To Repair
ITAR
Russia and Belarus can't buy parts over 25 MHz
Images generated from here, using the prompt "A computer screaming at a microphone": https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini
Audio intro generated here: https://resemble.ai
...more
1h 9min
June 14, 2022 Publicly Traded Hobby with Ben Jordan
The Altium stories flow as Ben Jordan discusses working at Altium with Dave!
Ben was a long time Altium employee and PCB and product specialist and still makes Altium tutorial videos on Youtube.
He has also worked for Autodesk on Fusion 360.
Ben now has his own consulting company Jordan DSP and co-hosts a regular live Youtube show with Bil Herd
Follow him on Twitter
...more
1h 9min
June 07, 2022Product Design with Simone Giertz
Welcome back, Simone Giertz!
Simone returns to The Amp Hour to discuss her new venture selling products (Yetch.store) that she has been designing.
Simone was last on the show in 2017 on episode 331.
She has been doing more voice overs so that she can focus on the work while recording. Chris mentioned past guest James Bruton recording as he goes along.
Truckla
She's interested in random everyday problems and solving them
Course showing how she designed a fruitbowl
Moved to LA
Scissor lamp - will likely become a product for sale (As Seen On YouTube)
Taking things to production
The Everyday Calendar is a capacitive touch calendar that mounts to your wall and allows you to track a habit throughout the year.
The Calendar was on sale in the MoMA store!
Design For Manufacturing meant reducing costs, so she didn't want to do pushbuttons (especially because there would be so many)
Kickstarter
The product design firm has 1.5 employees, but soon will be 2 people.
Setting prices
Puzzle table
Screwdriver ring
Margin invites counterfeit
Scraps chair
Future flatpack engineering for furniture sales?
Having to think about new challenges for selling things: certification in different markets, sales tax, etc
Collaborate moving stuff into engineering
High cost items like the Vesta Board
"make your own gnome"
...more
1h 6min
May 30, 2022Olive-a The World
Dave helped someone on Twitter who was looking to identify a part.
Chip of the Week: Honeywell SM351LT
Please make a dumb car
Also discussed back in 2011 on The Amp Hour!
Shahriar from TSP reviews a 60 GHz chipset :-o
New test equipment that the EEVblog forum uncovered
EV Conversion after 10 years (2019)
Bob Simpson was on episode 112 of The Amp Hour (Tek engineer who converted a BMW)
Chris is struggling to get back into FreeCAD after being away for a couple weeks / months.
YouTuber talking about a Hydrogen breakthrough for cars.
Are Construction EVs a thing?
Catepillar announced mining trucks that are EV
Pat Gelsinger’s Plan To Fix Intel
SMB: Small Businss or Super Massive Blackhole?
...more
1h 5min
May 23, 2022Finding Hardware Flaws with Laura Abbott
Welcome Laura Abbott of Oxide Computer!
Laura will be giving a talk at the upcoming Hardwear.io conference in Santa Clara about the (second!) vulnerability she found in the LPC55S69
Oxide servers are built to be secure from the ground up.
Root of trust
The vulnerability Laura found was a buffer overflow in the firmware update mechanism of the LPC55S69.
TPM
Cortex M33
Trust Zone M
Service Processor - baseband management controller
What does a server board look like?
Power management
Their customer Root of Trust OS is called Hubris
Open compute project
Many of the projects at Oxide are programmed in Rust (programming language)
Memory unsafe stuff
How do you know rust will run on a part? You can see if there is a "crate" available for the part (Rust installer/package manager)
Writing updates for processors
How often does firmware get update on servers?
Host processor talks to management network onboard, it delivers firmware images to the lower layers.
What is a Root of Trust task that it might do on a daily basis?
Laura explained some of the challenges of working remote on hardware
Laura moved from software into security/hardware. Perviously she had been doing kernel development.
She is still a Technical Advisory Board Member at the Linux Foundation
Getting started with kernel
Follow Laura on Twitter at @openlabbott
...more
58min

FAQs about The Amp Hour:

How many episodes does The Amp Hour have?

The podcast currently has 745 episodes available.

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