Wow...kind of a long episode this week (but totally worth it), due to having TWO guests on the show! Jason Kridner of the BeagleBoard Project and Texas Instruments and our regular co-co-host, Jeff Keyzer of MightyOhm.com. Some of Jason's favorite projects for the BeagleBoard are robotics, including some that utilize the libfreenect library. [...]

Chris has a new mic! An AT2020 USB microphone. Dave uses a Samson C01U USB microphone. The Jacksonville police mistake LED lightbulbs for a bomb! Whoops! Shonky Product of the Week: The ADE651, a scam bomb detector. Similar to a dowsing rod...in that it's full of crap! Shoutouts: Fake EE Quips has created a bingo [...]

Welcome to another awesome guest: Alan Yates, VK2ZAY! Alan works on pyrotechnics for fun(?!) While he's not worried about burning out over doing similar hobby/paid work, Chris has written about burn out recently and how that might be a part of it. He also is an active ham operator, mostly working with PSK31 [...]

Another week of bouncing from topic to topic. This week included robots, entrepreneurs, OSHW, FPAAs, Ecology and LEDs! Whoo, that's a lotta stuff! Elon Musk is an enviable entrepreneur and engineer. Great video piece on him on Bloomberg.com. Google buys the Motorola handset business for $12.5 billion. Chris thought it was for access [...]

Just when you thought the names of episodes couldn't get any weirder... US economy seems to be diving again, hopefully it will not seriously impact the electronics industry. If it does, Chris thinks startups will be even more reliant on Angel Investors like Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail) Is DIY finally going mainstream, [...]

Embedded industry maven and prolific writer, Jack Ganssle, joins us on The Amp Hour this week. Dave called Chris a "young whippersnapper" (actually "young feller", but the same sentiment) in writing about Jeri's chip making. A former colleague of Jack's maintained that spec's for computers were driven by the porn industry and how much [...]

Happy Birthday to us! One year in the bag! Thanks for all of our wonderful listeners! From the EEVBlog forums, user "dics" is listening to The Amp Hour on a breadboard! Awesome! Tech Shop SF is matching donations on a new campaign to spread the word of Hacker/Makerspaces in the community. Chris's alma [...]

Our initial try of Google Plus "Hangouts"! Hopefully all the interuptions and the concentration on a new medium didn't interrupt our usual shabby quality of podcast (thereby downgrading our rating to "godawful"). We had fun and hopefully will be able to use it to pull in guests in an easier way and somehow [...]

What would be the best way to create a "cough switch" or "kill switch" for a USB based podcasting microphone? EMSL created an AWESOME 555 Timer Footstool. Such a great replica! Design Spark corrected us on what their new plugin does, in relation to Google Sketchup. Dave is wondering what kind of criteria to [...]