The Amp Hour

Happy New Year! We hope 2012 will be a great year for The Amp Hour and all of our listeners! We have a new theme by Paul Stevenson! We love it! Chris has a ham exam scheduled for next Sunday! Dave has been chasing a hum at his new studios, he took a spectrum snapshot [...]

Welcome to Ben Krasnow! (Also seen as bkraz333 on YouTube) We decided we had to have Ben on the show once we saw his crazy LED in a contact lens video: Ben started as a researcher/technician with a TMS lab, which led him to starting his own business, Mag Design and Engineering. That also led [...]

Thank you, thank you to all of our donors. We are currently shopping for Virtual Private Servers and will hopefully have zippy web service by the end of the calendar year! If you're still interested in joining the cause and helping out, please check out our Donation page. Thanks again! Thanks to PStevenson for including [...]

Welcome back Jeff! Joining us for some holiday fun!   Chris started a new engineering job today! Dave is getting the keys to his new lab today! Jeff is attending DorkBot Austin tonight! Reminds Chris of PechaKucha. What should we call a group of nerds standing around? Chris likes the term, "a grumbling of [...]

Chris reveals (to those that did not already know) that he used to work at Keithley Instruments and recently left to go work at an unnamed company. Chris has the whole week off! He wrote more about leaving his engineering job on Engineer Blogs. Keithley was recently bought by Danaher, who also owns Tektronix, Fluke, Seabird [...]

This weeks special guest is John Edmond, the co-founder and Director of Advanced Optoelectronics Technology at Cree, Inc in Durham, NC.     John talks about the history of Cree and how they built the company with no venture capital. Awesome! Lots of technical LED talk on manufacturing, Stokes loss, Haitz's law and chemistries involved in [...]

  Chris explains what he thinks Thanksgiving was about (or what he thought it was about, he's no historian). The Daily Show had a segment about "Evacuation Day" and the history behind it. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Happy Evacuation Day www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor [...]

Chris has been issued a challenge to get his (ham) technician's license by the new year. Can he do it? Do 10 others want to do it with him? If so, we can get Dave to sing on air! (or can we?) Dave has a beef with the Agilent U1272A's data export capabilities. Perhaps Dave [...]

Great comics from OhmArt! Be sure to check them out and buy some of their merchandise! Tales from the cube talks about a label over an EPROM...has anyone seen this article? Bill Schweber wrote about the persistence and insanity of engineers chasing problems. Katie Luper is a former lawyer going back to school for [...]

Happy Halloween! Has anyone heard of people giving away circuits as a Halloween? Did you know: CR2032 batteries reference the size of the battery? Chris didn't! The BeagleBoard folks just released the BeagleBone! It looks great! Also, kudos to the folks at TI, especially those on the team. Dave has a deposit in on [...]

Welcome back Jeff! Jeff's new setup is on Flickr! As are the pictures of his new cases for the Geiger Counter kit. He cut out the new cases at the ATXHackerspace using the ULS laser cutter. There's a new Design News Radio Show. You can listen...if you trade all your information. Dave prefers using off-the-shelf [...]

SPEED PROBLEM UPDATE: The MP3 is now hosted on Dave's EEVblog dedicated server and should be much faster, please try again. . Dave lost the bid for a lab which we discussed last week. Shoutouts: Jim Williams' desk is moving to the Computer History Museum. Chris wants to turn it into a wishing well. EE [...]

SPEED PROBLEM UPDATE: The MP3 is now hosted on Dave's EEVblog dedicated server and should be much faster, please try again. . Dave lost the bid for a lab which we discussed last week. Shoutouts: Jim Williams' desk is moving to the Computer History Museum. Chris wants to turn it into a wishing well. EE [...]

Dave is buying a new place! It's not a house in Cleveland, nor a Castle in Europe, but he'll be doing nerdy things there! And as Dave likes to say, at least it's not Detroit (with all apologies to Detroiters out there). Dave"s new place is walkable, unlike the campuses of Silicon Valley and the [...]

NOTE: Yes, there were some audio issues this week in the first half of the show. We'll get back to our better quality next week, sorry for the ears we offend.   Lots of fun this week as we get back to the old format of Chris and Dave just shooting the breeze. Hope [...]

We're joined once again from our friend Jeff Keyzer of MightyOhm.com, calling in from NYC. He is wrapping up weeks of travel, most recently at the Open Hardware Summit and the World Maker Faire. Welcome once again Jeff!   Chris is a married man! Sorry all you throngs of lady-listeners to The Amp Hour, [...]

Welcome to our guest this week, Joe Grand! Hardware hacker, electrical engineer and former TV host! (but not a washout as Joe was saying)   Joe gave us a behind the scenes look at being part of a TV show (all the design docs here). His 13 episode show was Prototype This on The Discovery [...]

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 friend and previous guest, Jeri Ellsworth, returned to the show to talk about her latest projects. And holy wow, they are prettygreat!   Jeri discusses the process of making transistors in your home using household chemicals, silicon wafers and a small kiln or oven. More info on her process of making the chips [...]