The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

Welcome back Tim Ansell! Tim’s past appearances and previous work Discussing Tomu on 375 Discussing Fomu on 456.3 Discussing the open source PDK on 501 Tim’s previous work at Google involved releasing a manufacturable open-source PDK (Process Development Kit), which contains the fundamental information needed to create integrated circuits. Key open-source tools discussed include OpenROAD (a...

Dave bought a lemon laptop Chris officially has solar that is installed, working, and is effectively an appliance at this point… Duke Energy and North Carolina nuclear mix The impact of batteries on the grid The Duck Curve is something Chris and Ari discussed on ep650 Open circuit voltage on panels Dave did a repair on a tennis ball machine Chris designed a board with test points too small A...

Welcome back Todd Bailey of Starlight Engines , now Muon Space ! (11 years later) Todd was on Episode 194 of The Amp Hour , when he was consulting in the art and design space and building instruments like Where the Party At (WTPA). He was designing ‘robot doors’ for Calvin Klein’s house, discussed last time. Through Andy Reitano, Todd learned about a role at  Lockheed Martin (a U...

Dave is starting a new project for a lab timer called the uTimer Timelapse Geerling videos about clocks Mitxela clock Transflective displays Dave is looking at LCDs like this one Dropping Rs vs Ls Font chip .5mm pin pitch on the connectors Chris is making a new breakout board that is effectively a sensors shield for a Bluetooth chip. It’s the first time he’s using the service and it wa...

Welcome Back, Andrew Seddon! Founder and CEO of CircuitHub . Andrew was first on episode 131 of The Amp Hour CircuitHub has a partnership with Worthington Assembly Worthington and CircuitHub host the Pick Place Podcast Mimicing silicon manufacturing Common parts library Setting the factory up to have only 50k SKUs in house for speed of loading / attrition Driving people to 2000 parts was the origi...

Welcome Matt Brown of Brown Fine Security ! Matt has been reverse engineering a “smart” smoker controller that talks back to AWS IOT Jeff Geerling talking about his dishwasher Storing private keys on the device?? Threat models Key rotation What is the best case scenario for an IoT device? Secure boot / trust zone Keys encrypt flash storage Chris has designed in the ATECC608 before Repl...

Welcome Tim from Mitxela ! Introduced by Mike Harrison , past guest of the show Fluid pendant Volumetric display London hackspace https://matthias-research.github.io/pages/tenMinutePhysics/index.html FLIP in Blender CHNT36ta Pick and place doing 0201 Precision Clock Sewing machine (check out that GIF!) Secret life of machines – Tim Hunkin Isaac Singer Tim has many Lathe projects on the hardw...

Dave found a wrist mounted DMM that looks…inadvisable We’ll discuss the survey results next time! Florin Cocos of VoltLog Great Scott Sam Aldaher on the show last week Gerald Undone did a studio tour with Captain Disillusionment Short videos Dave using a go-pro on a bike Separate gyro file to stabilize D-y hybrid inverter Chart Remote shell Cline Chris is finally getting solar open ene...

Welcome Sam Aldhaher , power engineer and 3D graphic artist! Sam has always been interested in art…and power engineering He primarily works in Blender and has been for 5-6 years Inputs and outputs Starting from Altium / KiCad for eCAD Blender doesn’t accept step files, it works with meshes like STL KiCad -> Blender is a good flow , as there are add-ons to import KiCad Making a good...

We are doing a 2025 listener survey ! Answer the survey and put in your email to win one of three Jumperless OG units donated by  Kevin Cappuccio (past guest of the show ). Last day to input is June 1st. This episode was recorded Monday the 12th, which has implications on discussions. Dave recently returned from Melbourne for Dave’s recent visit to Electronex . Dave saw past guest Scott Will...

Welcome back Dr Colin O’Flynn of Dalhousie University and New AE tech! Colin has been on the show twice before Episode 239 in 2015 Episode 552 in 2021 Colin continues to publish/do research around side channel attacks Now he’s targeting different ports / Jitter measurements JTAGulator RF Mixer Side channel with power Can you fix it on a chip? Targeting an SD Card port because there&#82...

We are doing a 2025 listener survey ! Answer the survey and put in your email to win one of three Jumperless OG units donated by Kevin Cappuccio (past guest of the show )  Note: this was corrected from the original, these are not v5 units, they are the original Jumperless units. Apologies for the confusion ~CG Chris signed on to get solar installed He’ll be taking advantage of Duke Energy&#8...

Welcome back (for a third time!) Michael Gielda of Antmicro Michael and Chris usually see each other around the Zephyr booth at Embedded World , but not this year Antmicro continues to work on Zephyr , which targets hardware using  Devicetree Renode Mult-node testing code aethero Data center in space Cosmic shielding corporation Tying the simulation to reality How do you know an actuation has happ...

Meetup.com doubled their prices so the 3H Triangle group moved to Luma (same is true for SF, Seattle) Note taking apps after Evernote was gutted: Joplin , Obsidian Battery leakage in a DMM Causes of leak The PCB of a Tonie box with an SD card glued in place. Board has an ESP32-S3. ( Product page ) Design decisions – Latched / unlatched EEVblog video Pulse stretcher 3rd mode ‘break on o...

Welcome Kevin Cappuccio, creator of the Jumperless Breadboard (v5 and before) Check out the Jumperless v5 on Crowd Supply OG Jumperless Video This update shows a bunch of images with the breadboard off 3M whitelabels their breadboards (because of the adhesive?) Breadboard spring clips Spring clips (in 3D) Elecrow 369 CH446Q , a clone of Zarlink MT88161 FPAA Resistance of the traces BSky Schematic...

Tracking test equipment on one long homepage… the emporer of test equipment If you track it, it’s not hoarding…it’s curation Very specific piece of junk wood Garage Solar Amber allows you to sell power back in Australia at some wild rates Dave is trying out case design in OpenSCAD…it looks…ok Pebble is returning to the world after Google open sourced the OS (kud...

Welcome James Adams , Chris Boross , Liam Fraser , and Luke Wren ! The last time the RPi team was on the show was about the RP1 (#648) The order of parts being released was RP2040->RP1->RP2350 Check out the datasheet for the RP2350 Learning from silicon Security  and  power  states The part is a “Dual dual core” The Arm side is a Dual M33 The RISC V side is a  Hazard 3 processo...

Welcome, Stephen Hawes ! Chris interviewed Stephen back in 2020 for his second episode of The Contextual Electronics Podcast. It was when Stephen was still working at Formlabs and the Lumen/Opulo were a glimmer in his eye. The Lumen v4 is a Benchtop Pick and Place machine that works with  OpenPNP Where are we in relation to reprap? Powered feeders Videos about eeprom KiCad pos file Can reliably pl...

Home assistant Homelab subreddit Solar assistant proxmox CarPlay / android auto NUCs Video Interview with Lee (since posted as #684 of TAH) 25K pound amplifier repair and associated EEVblog forum post Louis Rossman also talking about the copyright claim How the Fairlight CMI changed Music Read more here Synths / woodworking are hobbies that will eat all free cash flow (and Chris is considering the...

A full 3 hour discussion with the legendary Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne 1, SOL computer, VDM-1, Pennywhistle modem, and the inventor of social media. Covering everything from the Berkeley free speech movement, the counterculture movement, his career, through to Obsorne and how he invented social media with Community Memory. His book:  https://www.amazon.com/Me-My-Big-Idea… https...

AI tools for helping with coding ( but NOT layout , amirite) Troubleshooting as a skillset Stick meme Dave got an updated electrical box Home assistant Keith Burzinski episode (ESPhome) Toothbrush show Andreas Spiess discussing Bluetooth proxy Ian Scott Johnson DIY home automation Electrarc240 reviews every element of a linear power supply India power cables Buried cables Spotify is bricking the C...

Chris has been troubleshooting a PCB with a dead short on inner layers (put in by board house by mistake) Don’t Touch My Gerbers shirt “Is there an AI tool that will fix this for me?” … No Chris dumped a bunch of current in the board and looked at it with this thermal camera 6.5 digit DMM to track down shorts Etching problems in the old days 100% etest Adding rails to PCBs...

Welcome Lukas Henkel of OV Tech GmbH , a product design firm based in Nuremburg Germany! Miniturization and the limits of miniturization Price is a constraint Using standard PCB tech (off the shelf) Open source SIP Steps Conventional pcbs / components Silicon inductors embedded in boards Bonded Bare dies / stacked Need volume to make it work Requirements to fit into ______ iMX8 ULP – 0.4mm C...

Starship 5 landed on chopsticks! (you know, in case you have been offline for 2 weeks) Dave’s EV had a stuck cable Portable charger is surprisingly good CCS Charging standard Fast charge 36/50 kW MKBHD Chevy Silverado review JLC is now offering silkscreen QR codes to have individually marked boards That’s the board that Chris has been designing on a livestream each week 1 wire UID (pio...

Dan Esparon from Inovor Technologies in South Australia joins Dave to discuss all about the engineering of designing and launching satellites! Dan works for Inovor Technologies , an Australian company that designs and builds satellites entirely in-house! Recently they designed and launched the aussie Kanyini satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket https://www.inovor.com.au/missions/ They design and...