The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

Eric Pan is the founder and CEO of Seeed Studio, an open-source hardware and manufacturing platform based in Shenzhen, China. He joins Chris to discuss Seeed’s journey from early open-source roots to modern robotics, navigating the hardware ecosystem in Shenzhen, bridging the gap between semiconductor companies and developers, and how physical AI and low-cost hardware platforms are transforming in...

Kjetil Meisal, CEO and co-founder of Norwegian semiconductor startup ONiO, joins Chris to discuss the development of ONiO.zero, a revolutionary batteryless microcontroller powered entirely by ambient energy harvesting.

Dave and Chris catch up on the shift toward practical hands-on engineering education at universities, open-source robotics, calculator forensics, mentoring young engineers, AI-assisted PCB layout tools, reverse-engineering scope RF sections, and why Chris wants to be “the Walmart greeter of electronics”

Andy Kong is creating Chargerless, a pre-seed wearable biometric device that runs on 1 minute of sunshine per day. He joins Chris to talk about low power design, unconventional power schemes, the weird signals of the human body, and more.

Kevin Cloutier is the North American Lead for Physical AI at a global engineering consulting firm and a computer engineer who is passionate about taking complex computations to the edge. He joins Chris to discuss the transition from legacy, statically programmed factory robotics to modern, imitation-learning-based “Physical AI,” building and calibrating the affordable $200 3D-printed SO101 robot a...

Robert Fennis joins Chris to demystify the black magic of RF and talk about his open-source, Python-based 3D electromagnetic solver, EMerge. They discuss why simulation is like building a pyramid of knowledge, how silk screen can completely de-tune a patch antenna, and Robert’s quest to build the “IKEA of FEM solvers” so hardware developers everywhere can simulate their designs without relying on...

Dave and Chris celebrate 16 years of the show (1st episode was August 10th, 2010) by launching a brand-new static website featuring searchable transcripts and a “pissed-old amber” SVG scope with a working focus knob–and links to merch!. They also discuss Dave’s new employee, 10 cent RISC-V debuggers, and why naming your startup after an un-Googleable Australian cryptid is a bad move

Dr Greg Charvat, CTO and co-founder of Teradar, joins Chris for a 5th appearance on The Amp Hour to talk about how terahertz frequency radar will revolutionize the automotive space and far outstrips the capabilities of LIDAR and Blobbology

Welcome Alex Haro, CEO of Hubble Chris welcomes Alex Haro, co-founder and CEO of Hubble , to discuss the ambitious task of connecting billions of Bluetooth devices directly to space The “banner level spec”: Hubble enables any off-the-shelf Bluetooth chip to communicate with low Earth orbit satellites using a software-only firmware update Alex describes the system as a global “Fin...

AI Data Centers & Local LLMs: Dave discusses his noise concerns regarding a new AI data center and its diesel backup generators being built near his office. Chris shares his experience running local AI models like Gemma 4 on a laptop using the Hermes orchestrator for tasks like coding and internet research. USB Power Delivery Chips: Discussion of the CH224, a USB PD negotiation chip that works...

Welcome, Massimo Banzi of SuperModerno and co-founder of Arduino Introduction and SuperModerno: Massimo introduces himself as a “friendly nerd” and discusses his new project, SuperModerno The project aims to explain the “behind the scenes” of technology to prevent people from becoming “slaves to the platform” The History of Technology: Massimo expresses his pass...

Welcome Michał Zalewski, AKA lcamtuf ! The lcamtuf Substack is where Michał is writing most these days Chris first found and geeked out about the CNC guide on the lcamtuf original site (discussed many times here) Michał is interested in the craft of teaching electronics He recently published The Secret Life of Circuits with No Starch Press Use the code AMPHOUR26 for 30% off The Secret Life of Circ...

Chris just got back from a work trip to Madrid He also got to hang out with Matt Venn (and coworker Mike Szczys) in Valencia Dave has a new data center going in across the street Chris enjoyed this episode of Prof G Markets where they talked about the impact of data centers on power and the rise of “behind the meter” generation Dave without internet for a week. Chris has had multiday l...

Welcome back, Jason Kridner! Jason has previously been on the show Episode 59 (!) Episode 378 alongside Robert Nelson The BeagleY AI was the first board that mimic’ed the RPi form factor PocketBeagle 2 is still a small altoid tin form factor with a new processor The Zepto is a new product targeting a $1 price point for microcontrollers Many boards in the Beagle catalog now run Zephyr , and B...

Welcome back Matt Liberty (Joulescope) and Luke Beno (Werewolf.us) Matt has been a guest on episodes 527 and 607 Luke was a guest on episode 272 Luke launched a new cable manufacturing and power supply company in the US called Werewolf.us Matt is working on the JS320 We discussed how PartsBox is a great ERP solution but Matt and Luke decided to go fully custom with Claude Code. Jan Rychter was a g...

Welcome Julia Desmazes of Tales on The Wire Follow along with the blog post we discuss Two Weeks Until Tapeout Matt Venn – TinyTapeout – Episode 616 and 672 Andreas Olofsson – openroad/openlane – Episode 254 and 650 Tim Ansell – Wafer.space – Episode 375 , 501 , and 703 JTAG How do you know that tooling is or isn’t working? Accelerator Rabbithole with floa...

Canonical (the makers of Ubuntu) acquired Golioth , meaning Chris is moving from a 12-person startup to an organization of over 1,200 people Dave found this chart of Canonical products on wikipedia to be useful An increase in professional travel from zero weeks to six weeks per year following the acquisition, including “sprints” in cities like London The naming convention for Ubuntu re...

Alex is founder and CEO of Efficient Power Conversion, a leading manufacturer of GaN MOSFET’s. Alex is also the inventor of the original Power MOSFET and HEXFET at International Rectifier. Also, former CEO of International Rectifier (founded by his father!), https://epc-co.com We cover everything from inventing the power MOSFET on his first day on the job to silicon physics, AI data centres...

Welcome Zachariah Peterson of Northwest Engineering Solutions ! Zach listed the various places people can find his work, including The Altium YouTube channel Zach’s YouTube channel His personal technical blog The Altium Blog various industry conferences like PCB West 01:10 Zach mentions that he has been creating video content and seminars for several years, traveling to places like Denmark t...

Chris will be having a meetup in London March 8th, 2026 click here for more info . He will also be at Embedded World the following week at various events. Dave is also headed to a meetup in Sydney that he has presented at in the past. The “lazy man move” for meetup organizers: scheduling events within walking distance of home to simplify travel logistics. Chris provides details on his...

Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, SeaSats ! Check out their open positions making autonomous ocean vehicles. Welcome David Ray of Cyber City Circuits • The “Retro Electro” Series: David explains his passion for writing historical articles for Digi Key, focusing on “giants” like Orstead whose contributions to electricity are often overlooked. • Career Background: David...

Welcome Eric Migicovsky of Pebble ! Pebble is back after Eric worked with Google to open source PebbleOS and he reaquired the naming rights Eric returns to the hardware space after 7 years, including working at yCombinator , a famous accelerator for early stage startups, and on Beeper , a cross platform app for messaging. While discussing the difficulties of hardware project, Chris brought up a re...

Welcome Martin Rowe of EE World ! Martin is a long time journalist in the electronics space, having worked at magazines like EDN, Test and Measurement World, EE World, and more! Kenneth Wyatt Concentrated vs diffuse information Product reviews Unitrend scope video Tek 5 series B Wirecutter for test equipment / parts Skepticism Webinars – 3 levels Martin has an HP34401A early model Touring T&...

Dave is back from vacation. He should have bought a Starlink mini (not as cheap as we thought)  because his coverage was very poor throughout the trip. Space twitter Artemis II is going up soon (early Feb 2026) Billy makes artemis go up  Sparkfun and Adafruit are on the outs PJRC (and Paul Stoffregen) makes the Teensy and it is now produced exclusively by Sparfkun The pinout is open but the bootlo...

Welcome Aaed Musa ! Aaed is a YouTuber who builds a variety of robots and a mechanical engineering student at Purdue. He just completed his undergrad degree and is now working on his Master’s degree. I believe he is the first Amp Hour guest who is still a full time student. His channel has a great variety of builds including designing all the way down to gearboxes. Aaed says the MIT “m...