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:

April 22, 2016An Interview with Omer Kilic
Welcome, Omer Kilic (@OmerK)
Omer has an academic background. His thesis started off being about FPGAs.Towards the tail-end of his research, he started exploring Erlang for embedded devices.
He programs using Erlang, which was created by former mobile phone giant Ericksson (device making has tailed off, they still do network infrastructure).
They had a phone called the T28 that was well designed.
Erlang can uses the "actor model" of concurrency, which maps really well into the hardware domain. It's used for the backend of apps like WhatsApp. More info at http://www.erlang-embedded.com/
Chris had spend the day at the London Science Museum. It was fantastic!
Omer has worked with a few hardware companies in the past, including doing work on large manufacturing operations in China.
Now Omer is the CTO and Chief Hacker at Den Automation.
Nothing replaces being able to sit next to each other during development.
While in China last time, Omer tried talking to big semi with mixed results. It was easier to get a few chips in the market as an experiment.
Omer has talked about access to chips in the past at OSHUG.
The main problem with intelligent devices is interoperability. How do you get multiple devices to talk to one another without loads of software?
Setting standards aren't the answer, there was a relevant XKCD about that very topic.
Usually it's companies saying "use ours!" and this only rarely actually works out in the end (like Motorola with SPI)
The National Microelectronics Institute (NMI) will host a talk in May, falongside BCS (British Computing Society) and OSHUG. The event is called the NMI Open Source Conference.
Open source can be something people hide behind and use as an excuse for mediocrity in their products.
The company was started by Yasser, now only 20ish years old! They raised 500K of seed funding
We put a chip in it!
The Internet of Shit is a great novelty account. They recently tweeted about the stats of people planning to use Javascript in their devices.
The Den Automation devices will be a connected wall switch and socket, along with a couple of auxiliary helper devices. Sockets in the UK have switches on them as well. At first they will only be making UK based devices.
Each socket/plug will have power consumption monitoring and also will allow the user to "label" which device is plugged into it.
The problem is that they are building the entire socket/switch from scratch. This means lots of regulatory hurdles. The British standards must be passed, as well as CE for RF.
The problem with dynamic languages (like Javascript) is the overhead required if it is to be run on each device.
Den already is utilizing a PLM because of the impending regulation process.
The decision to move production to China should not be taken lightly. There was a Wired UK series on production there.
The initial funding for the project was raised on Seedrs, they are are raising a second round now.
See more about the project at http://getden.co.uk/
Omer has given another talk about IOT called "The IOT Hardware Kerfuffle"
Many thanks to Omer for talking about the connected device market and doing manufacturing with a small team! It turned into a constructive conversation about getting products to market.
...more
1h 19min
April 14, 2016Live from Serbia with Mike Harrison
Welcome back, Mike Harrison (@mikelectricstuf)
Mike is in Belgrade with Chris, both attended and gave talks at Hackaday Belgrade (will be posted eventually)
Mike gave a talk about the Eidophor
They will also both attend Resonate.io but neither will speak.
The fun continues in the UK!
April 19th - Beer and electronics meetup! We'll be at the Yorkshire Gray on Theobalds Rd starting at 6:30.
April 20th - "Nerd Nite" event
April 21st - There is an Open Source Hardware Users Group meeting.
Mike recommends learning (uppercase) cyrillic to help get around places like Serbia or Russia.
Consulting projects continue to get more interesting, you can see them on whitewing.co.uk
There is a new project that was installed in terminal 2 of Heathrow airport
Holiday decorations in Hong Kong
There was a fixture to program physical locations of the assembled PCBs.
All high level comm was done using RS485.
Selfridges on Oxford St
Mike saved the setup time by starting a truck using a drill battery.
Uses the APA102.
Test jigs are critical in field jobs, especially time critical ones like busy installs.
Trade shows for other industries
Mike went to one for wearable tech, ended up going to underwater exploration instead.
Saw the company that makes the underwater buoy that Mike tore down. (Sonardyne)
Museums
Tesla museum was underwhelming, but Mike saw the first ever radio boat.
Chris and Mike went to the science museum together and saw the Galaksija (previous guest Voja Antonic's design)
Devices
Mike has been designing devices using loads of 0402 white LEDs. He also gets $0.01 4mm LEDs on aliexpress.
Osram Duris E
Reverse engineering
Mike has experience reprogramming analog(ue) phones. This was done by modifying or moving the ESN of a device.
The Sony D50 service manual that Dave tore down had a great service manual. Some of the old phones used to have those, but they were hard to get.
The eeproms were something like 9346
Mike had to write disassemblers and then read the output to figure out what was going on. He also ended up tracing program flow using a logic analyzer
Vodaphone had prepaid phones, others were not well implemented and ended up giving away free calls.
Mike ended up emulating the Dallas UID chips with a small board in order to reprogram the ESN.
The last time Mike was on an Amp Hour episode he talked about using PICs.
Write the bootloader first...and make sure it's rock solid!
Image linked from Twitter, also features @szczys
...more
1h 36min
April 01, 2016Call In Show #4
Chris will be leaving for Europe soon. If you're interested in getting together, here are the days he'll be there:
Berlin, April 5th and 6th.
London, April 19th, 20th.
The London meetup will be at the Yorkshire Grey (2 Theobalds Road WC1X 8PN London) at 6:30 pm on April 19th.
Watch @chris_gammell's twitter account for any last minute updates/changes.
Callers!
Trevor
He works on wholesale electricity and was wondering about how they change voltages on generators. Chris eventually started talking about different taps on the windings, but that could be wrong still.
Trevor is also interested in DSP
Chris suggested a theoretical book by Oppenheim.
Dave mentioned the free online DSP guide.
This is in hopes of hacking Zwave devices.
Get in touch! Either correct us in the comments below or talk to Trevor directly on Twitter: @trevorstweeting
Todd
He's from the Upper Peninsula, making him a "Yooper"
Surface wave transmission line by N6GN. Some YouTube videos:
https://youtu.be/-VWBUDJv2n0
https://youtu.be/Q1oXTZiBXV0
https://youtu.be/2irtYGsb5kg
https://youtu.be/GxcwdmcLxHM
They hope to also use it for powering weather ballons / quads, not just transmitting signal. This would be useful for a technology like Makani (now owned by Google)
Sam
Wavetek 27xt
He was asking about whether to start a kickstarter with a friend and whether he can focus on a problem that is sufficiently technical.
Chris recommends the book "Scale"
Arsenio
Arsenio called in to our first callin show about his rocket. There was an issue with i2c layout and the library. He has since gotten a 1054Z at Dave's recommendation. And has shipped off his first board to OSHpark!
He's having issues with spiders in the workshop. Not as big as the one Dave had in his workshop a few years back.
Dave recommended trying something like an ultrasonic cockroach repeller. Chris recommended asking Tim and Greg from Backyard brains who have been on the show before.
Chris
He's working with a battery powered ATTiny 84 board that controls an RC boat. Recently switched from a linear regulator to a switching power module...and started blowing stuff up.
Dave predicts that it is SCR Latchup on the logic. He has made a video about that before.
This could possibly be solved with an N-channel mosfet controlling power distrbution to the rest of the board.
Intel news
Andy Grove passed away.
Intel is toning down their process jumps, indicating a shift in the predictive power of Moore's law.
William
The Fried Circuits USB tester has steadily added features, but he's not sure how to get more resolution at the low end. This is a dynamic range problem.
Current chip is the INA219, also has been looking at the INA169
The new USB C version requires 24 super narrow pitch pins and does not allow for any breaks in the line because of the high speed signals.
Thanks to everyone who called in! We'll continue to refine this type of show and keep trying to answer your questions!
...more
1h 10min
March 25, 2016An Interview with Timothy Lamb
Welcome Timothy Lamb of Spectral Motion!
Tim works in the special effects industry at Spectral. They worked on special effects in films like Hellboy.
He has been working with Mark Setrakian who often prototypes using platforms like MaxMSP.Tim also helped to create some of the effects for the Robot Combat League which aired on SyFy.
The rates in the industry are rather low. People often do it for passion.
The Hellboy gun is in the lobby of the Spectral office. Some other peoeple try to replicate it on sites like the Replica Prop Forum. Adam savage has also talked about this before on Still Untitled. Adam was building his own version.
DMX is a form of controlling lights for theater applications (among other things). This is a protocol that looks similar to RS485.
These days Tim is working with an Jordan Wolfson, an artist. He has had famous pieces on display in the past, including this super creepy "stripper robot"
Tim also performs "chip tune" music under the name trash80. There are some really catchy tuns over there! He wrote some code that used the game link: this became the arduinoboy, which is very useful for MIDI sounds.
In the future, Tim would like to try his hand at projection mapping with moving targets, such as robots.
...more
1h 6min
March 18, 2016Artificially Intelligent Party Platform
Chris is selling a "Bodge" shirt
Dave has a new outro on his latest repair video.
Chris just got back from SXSW down in Austin. They used to have lots of chip companies, some of which remain:
AMD sold to Global Foundries
Silicon Labs is still there.
Freescale and IBM are somewhat reduced.
The panel Chris was on included former guest of the show Scott Miller of Dragon Innovation. The topic was DFM for getting to scale. Chris focused mostly on making designs robust.
Another trend at SXSW was IoT and ways of controlling the software layer. The physical interfaces to these devices still leaves something to be desired.
Chris mentioned the industrial HART standard as a possible analog to the problem that connected light switched need.
Artificial Intelligence just beat a world Go champion 4 games to 1.
Dave likes the Numberphile video explaining the math of chess.
Chris has been making 2 minute videos trying to explain problems that beginners don't know much about when starting out. Things like electron flow vs current flow, what ground means. Dave has made a video asking, "Does current flow through a capacitor?"
This may end up becoming a book some day, titled Top down electronics
The Hackaday Prize 2016 was announced! It's new judges and new structure this year.
The Keysight scope contest is having lots of legal woes giving away scopes.
What would happen if The Amp Hour started a political party? What does it look like if an engineer was in charge of legislation? What do they optimize?
Dave mentioned the TED talk about Basic Income. Chris said this is an eventual solution to "what happens when robots take all of our jobs?".
The BeagleBone organization is participating in the Google Summer of Code and you can help out!
Great bumper sticker, "The cloud is just someone elses computer"
Another interesting BBB project, the Bela works for super low latency audio.
Mike's video about the layers of a PCB was awesome! He machined each layer at a time to expose the copper.
The 1953 Transistor documentary by Bell is a great retro look at the early days.
A user posted some fun pictures of the Shenzhen markets.
...more
1h 6min
March 11, 2016An Interview with Mark Morin of Nufern
Welcome Mark Morin of Nufern!
NuQ Laser
Nice chart that breaks down a bunch of connectors.
Ytterbium
Erbium
Jobs:
Nufern Careers
Electrical Engineer
Embedded Software Engineer
ASE - Amplified Spontaneous Emission
Recommended Reading
World Class Designs: Analog Circuits 978-0-7506-8627-3 Photodiode and current drive circuits
Introduction to Classical and Modern Optics 0-13-124356-X If you want to try and figure out what will reflect, or refract / absorb this is a place to start.
The discussed obsolete component was the MRF553
...more
1h 13min
March 04, 2016Documentation Is A Waste Of Time
Travel and potential meetups!
Chris will be traveling in April to Europe.
Berlin for 2 days
London for 2 days
If you can help set up a meetup for The Amp Hour, please email [email protected]
Chris will be giving a talk at Hackaday Belgrade and attending Resonate.io
There may be an Australia trip and subsequent road trip with Dave in August. Maybe we could see the telescope in Canberra and listen to Voyager.
Chris will also be in Austin at SXSW next week at the Hardware House.
Bunnie was on embedded.fm talking about design culture in China. You can still preorder the book here.
There is fidelity loss in documentation, especially if you're relying on key designers. Dave has once been told "Documentation is a waste of time".
Cut and paste in documentation used to be just that. It was all stored in A3 folders (in Australia).
The Rasberry Pi 3 was just released! They are still focused on education (as Matt Richardson told us about on the show), but are continuing to integrate more features like wifi and bluetooth.
Dave just got a high speed camera (1000 fps) and is looking for things to film. He did a test shoot looking at a VFD (that Chris used to work on!).
The Gates foundation put out their letter about energy and time. Energy stuff does't usually square with super heroes.
Chris thinks photosynthesis (or general biological conversion) is an interesting way to eventually harvest energy.
Thanks to phobia for the shot of the fail documentation
...more
1h 1min
February 26, 2016Call In Show #3
Our third (non-embedded) call in show!
Callers
Mahesh called in about a recommendation on soldering irons for his business in India.
Sebastian was having his micro lock up when his wall wart was leaking current (assumed) onto the device and then it was shorted to chassis via a USB ground.
Aaron called in asking about how to change careers
Brian called in from Trinity College asking for advice on getting through an engineering program.
Paul was also interested in changing careers, thinking about going from test engineering to design.
Adam was wondering about resources for learning about high speed design.
Dave and Chris both recommended Robert Feranac's Fedevel Academy. He teaches high speed design using Altium.
Rudy was wondering if we have tried OpenSCAD. Neither Chris nor Dave had.
Rudy also has a bet going with his son about when self-driving cars will be implemented (5 or 10 years?).
Andy is building a fridge that is meant to age steaks. He is building buttons for the control in KiCad and wanted to know about making hatched planes. This is not directly available in KiCad, but there are some workarounds.
Another great set of questions this show! We'll be back for future shows where you can call in. Check out our post about how people could contact us this time and keep an eye out for future announcements.
Thank you to rfduck for the picture of the phone.
...more
1h 23min
February 19, 2016Pull The Trigger
Chris needs a PCB checklist to ensure each board that comes out has the important pieces on it.
Dave used to use the 3D viewer to inspect his board and see it from a different perspective.
Chris has been learning Fusion 360 for 3D models. Dave and David have been learning OnShape.
Why we started from scratch
Coworking feels like a pipe dream, though people continue to try it. Chris prefers Git for revision control, Dave prefers dropbox.
Chris was on The Engineering Commons a few weeks back talking about being a cross discipline engineer.
Making custom components can be addicting, but there are tradeoffs with doing so. David2 hasn't been burned yet!
Sometimes you just need to pull the trigger and accept there will be bodge wires.
PIC announced they now have cloud tools. It's a popular hobby tool since it gave access to reprogrammability.
The PIC16C84 (which had an eeprom) was introduced in 1993. Even in assembly, you can do amazing things. Former guest Voja has done just that on some of his projects.
The AVR was introduced in 1996.
PIC stands for "peripheral interface controller". It was first made by General instruments.
Web based tools are more and more common, Dave and Chris are actually ok with it. The mbed tool (mentioned on the embedded call in show a bunch) is used often. Even Jack Ganssle seems to be on board in his TEM newsletter.
Lead time can severely impact product development times.
Cash flow is an important business concept, because you need to front the money in order to get parts ready for purchase. Dave has worked on projects that had up to $1M in part purchasing before a single board was manufactured.
When you remove a shunt that is passing current past a 50 kW AM station...it makes some noise.
Bob created a $50 optical inspector for the boards he is manufacturing.
Dave will be doing a giveaway on the forum, which is part of the Keysight "scope a day" giveaway.
The scope is spec'd at 1GHz--and worth $15K--isn't needed for most people. Is it better to instead sell the two Dave is giving away and then give away lower cost scopes?
...more
1h 17min
February 12, 2016An Interview with Saar Drimer
Welcome Saar Drimer of Boldport!
Saar started at Xilinx in the Virtex group, working on testing silicon. The parts needed to be tested in ZIF (zero insertion force) sockets.
After Xilinx he went back to academia at Cambridge, joining the security research group. Knowing hardware was an advantage! He did research on protocol for securely updating firmware.
Later research was on the implementation of Chip and Pin security (and trying to break it)
Saar published papers about a man in the middle attack and a relay attack.
After a postdoc at the computer lab, Saar started Boldport.
The company was initially meant to improve FPGA software via The Boldport Flow. The goal was to make FPGAs more intuitive but not necessarily easy to beginners.
When Gate Rocket (cosimulation software company with funding) flamed out, Saar saw it might not work.
Then came PCBmodE, a software to help people make boards. The flow:
It uses JSON files, converts to SVG
Edit that with InkScape
Updates JSON files after modifications
Generates Gerbers
JSON file contains shapes and co-ords
Saar fabricated his first PCBmodE board in 2013. Version 4 of PCBmodE was just released.
Dave's friend has made a board with 5+ soldermask colors.
In case you missed it, Saar was published in Marie Claire for his Haute Circuits.
ERC/DRC is mostly "knowing what you're doing" when doing PCBmodE. However, Eurocircuits does online DRC, Saar uses that. He also thinks regardless of package, using outside tools helps to find different errors.
Saar gave a talk at FOSDEM in the EDA Dev room. It was set up by Javier from CERN. One of Saar's talk was about PCBmodE, the other about the EDA industry itself.
The Boldport Club is a monthly subscription program where you get a different board every month (purchased in 3 month increments). The first 3 will likely be:
Cordwood puzzle
Pease board
Emergency kit
You can find Saar on Twitter on @boldport. Find more info about PCBmodE and BoldPort on their respective websites.
...more
1h 19min

FAQs about The Amp Hour:

How many episodes does The Amp Hour have?

The podcast currently has 745 episodes available.

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