The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

• Dave has been reverse engineering 10 pin connector from the ultrasonic gas detector he got in a recent mailbag
• Intrinsically safe
• Executive Decision
• Dave is deciding between discrete logic vs micro
• Chris recommends the RP2040 and utilizing the PIO (kind of doing both)
• Die shots of the RP2040 W
• 74HC164 datasheet
• “Richer than Bill Gates’
• Back to school – Triple Lindy
• Chris is currently reading Accelerando
• Dutch town installs secondary traffic lights on the ground for texters
• Tour from temporary labor workers inside of the Digikey fulfillment center
• LCSC “wireless antistatic wristbands”
• JayCar warehouse video
• Stacey Higgenbotham reported on how Helium isn’t making much money. Are any of you being targeted to utilizing the connectivity from the Helium network?
• Nordic Semiconductor is recruiting a RISC-V designer. Interesting what this implies about other chip companies hiring RISC-V designers. Espressif’s new chip line are mostly RISC-V.
• We have been talking about RISC-V for a few years now, but the project started in 2010.
• Google and Skywater announced they’re moving down to a 90 nm node. Chris recently found out Skywater is a former Cypress Semi fab.
• Semtech (owners of the LoRa IP and makers of chips) are buying Sierra Wireless (a cellular module maker). Uh…why?
• Google starts testing AR glasses
• Meta lost 2.8B on the metaverse last quarter…

Thanks to Kate Ter Haar for the photo of the matches

For the original show notes, check out the original page: https://theamphour.com/196-an-interview-with-mike-engelhardt-spice-simulator-synteresis/

Mike Engelhardt is the creatore of LTSpice. Mike is no longer at Linear Technology, and Linear Technology is no longer a company (now part of Analog Devices), but the simulator is still awesome!

To listen to all episodes in your podcast listener back to episode one, use the LibSyn feed (our hosting platform): https://theamphour.libsyn.com/

• Dave received his Tilt5
• We had Jeri on the show 5 (!) years ago when CastAR had folded
• Troubleshooting
• Fewer kickstarters
• Chris wrote about using Wireshark to troubleshoot Thread networks
• Electrical Engineers on the brink of extinction?
• The conversation partially became about SW vs HW salaries, but ultimately people projected whatever they wanted onto the headline.
• Naomi (@RealSexyCyborg) mentioned that EEs are harder to find in Shenzhen
• CHIPS act still not passed in US
• Sam Zeloof says you can buy everything you need to make 5 nm transistors on Alibaba (no word on lithography)
• Spectrum article about RISC V
• Matt Venn (Zero to ASIC) interviews people at the Free Silicon Conference

AVX Fellow and 40 year capacitor industry legend Ron Demcko joins Dave to discuss film capacitor failures and capacitor technology.
This episode is best viewed in video format on the Amp Hour Youtube channel, as Ron and Dave discuss slides and photos in this video discussion for an EEVblog video on why a film capacitor failed. But we are sure you’ll still find the audio podcast version very enjoyable and educational.

• Chris just got back from Embedded World in Nuremberg where he was showcasing stuff for his company Golioth. Embedded World is happening again in March 2023.
• Electronica is another German trade show happening in November in Munich (above image is from 2014 Electronica)
• Are there any good remaining US based trade shows? Or outside the US?
• Howard Johnson episode
• DaveCon
• Browsing at trade shows is one of hte main benefits
• Dave’s son is taking an online cosmology course
• “AI layout” company raises $25M
• Freight DHL
• RS-449 has um…a lot of pins
• VT100 “Dumb terminal”
• EIA
• IEEE1394 (which was branded FireWire for Apple’s implementation)
• Chris has been reading Tony Fadell’s book Build
• New Raspberry Pi Pico W is $6 and has an RP2040 and WiFi
• Dave is interested in the PIO. The Embedded RPi team talked about PIO on the show.
• The net effect of shortages
• Inside Curious Marc’s lab (Daniel from Keysight hosts tour)
• Former guest Zach Barth has decided to shut down Zachtronics (maker of ShenzhenIO) to pursue other projects.
• Turing Tumble

A sentient AI would definitely take better show notes

• Altium rap
• Chris has been reading “Iron Emipres“, which is a book about building out train infrastructure.
• Mark Rober has a new kit service and workshop. Chris thinks this was designed by an AI because of how it appeals to our demographic.
• It’s amazing how YouTube will influence future engineers. Dave grew up with The Curiosity Show. Chris grew up with Bill Nye the Science Guy.
• Chris has been prototyping with laser cutting using Ponoko
• Chris got to tour the Computer History Museum while at the Zephyr Developer Summit (recap article).
• Palm Pilot
• HP 200LX
• Psion Series 5
• Intel has their own museum
• Google AI research claims the AI is sentient
• War Games
• Cruise now has a pass for operating in SF at restricted times.
• 9 euro
• NY has passed Right to Repair
• Apple might be forced to adopt USB C
• EEVblab Right To Repair
• ITAR
• Russia and Belarus can’t buy parts over 25 MHz

Images generated from here, using the prompt “A computer screaming at a microphone”: https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini
Audio intro generated here: https://resemble.ai

The Altium stories flow as Ben Jordan discusses working at Altium with Dave!

Ben was a long time Altium employee and PCB and product specialist and still makes Altium tutorial videos on Youtube.
He has also worked for Autodesk on Fusion 360.
Ben now has his own consulting company Jordan DSP and co-hosts a regular live Youtube show with Bil Herd

Follow him on Twitter

Welcome back, Simone Giertz!

• Simone returns to The Amp Hour to discuss her new venture selling products (Yetch.store) that she has been designing.
• Simone was last on the show in 2017 on episode 331.
• She has been doing more voice overs so that she can focus on the work while recording. Chris mentioned past guest James Bruton recording as he goes along.
• Truckla
• She’s interested in random everyday problems and solving them
• Course showing how she designed a fruitbowl
• Moved to LA
• Scissor lamp – will likely become a product for sale (As Seen On YouTube)
• Taking things to production
• The Everyday Calendar is a capacitive touch calendar that mounts to your wall and allows you to track a habit throughout the year.
• The Calendar was on sale in the MoMA store!
• Design For Manufacturing meant reducing costs, so she didn’t want to do pushbuttons (especially because there would be so many)
• Kickstarter
• The product design firm has 1.5 employees, but soon will be 2 people.
• Setting prices
• Puzzle table
• Screwdriver ring
• Margin invites counterfeit
• Scraps chair
• Future flatpack engineering for furniture sales?
• Having to think about new challenges for selling things: certification in different markets, sales tax, etc
• Collaborate moving stuff into engineering
• High cost items like the Vesta Board
• “make your own gnome”

• Dave helped someone on Twitter who was looking to identify a part.
• Chip of the Week: Honeywell SM351LT
• Please make a dumb car
• Also discussed back in 2011 on The Amp Hour!
• Shahriar from TSP reviews a 60 GHz chipset 😮
• New test equipment that the EEVblog forum uncovered
• EV Conversion after 10 years (2019)
• Bob Simpson was on episode 112 of The Amp Hour (Tek engineer who converted a BMW)
• Chris is struggling to get back into FreeCAD after being away for a couple weeks / months.
• YouTuber talking about a Hydrogen breakthrough for cars.
• Are Construction EVs a thing?
• Catepillar announced mining trucks that are EV
• Pat Gelsinger’s Plan To Fix Intel
• SMB: Small Businss or Super Massive Blackhole?

Welcome Laura Abbott of Oxide Computer!

• Laura will be giving a talk at the upcoming Hardwear.io conference in Santa Clara about the (second!) vulnerability she found in the LPC55S69
• Oxide servers are built to be secure from the ground up.
• Root of trust
• The vulnerability Laura found was a buffer overflow in the firmware update mechanism of the LPC55S69.
• TPM
• Cortex M33
• Trust Zone M
• Service Processor – baseband management controller
• What does a server board look like?
• Power management
• Their customer Root of Trust OS is called Hubris
• Open compute project
• Many of the projects at Oxide are programmed in Rust (programming language)
• Memory unsafe stuff
• How do you know rust will run on a part? You can see if there is a “crate” available for the part (Rust installer/package manager)
• Writing updates for processors
• How often does firmware get update on servers?
• Host processor talks to management network onboard, it delivers firmware images to the lower layers.
• What is a Root of Trust task that it might do on a daily basis?
• Laura explained some of the challenges of working remote on hardware
• Laura moved from software into security/hardware. Perviously she had been doing kernel development.
• She is still a Technical Advisory Board Member at the Linux Foundation
• Getting started with kernel
• Follow Laura on Twitter at @openlabbott

• Chris and Dave discussed the “beta” function for MOSFETs on Falstad circuit simulator
• We found some references online to “beta” (like this archive from McGill University) but it doesn’t seem to be a normal characteristic? Maybe an approximation term?
• Dave and other EE YouTubers were mentioned in Derek’s 2nd video about the light bulb experiment and energy flowing in fields (Veritasium).
• Dave mentioned Alpha Phoenix as doing the simulations on this, but Chris later looked up it was the Ben Watson video that Chris was referencing during the recording.
• Rick Hartley
• Lumped element model, where would we be without you?
• Bit rot
• Chris has been digging into Segger Ozone and SystemView, the latter first brought up on the show with Brian Amos
• Dave bought a bunch of gear from an optometry business at auction.
• Bubblegum tapshoes
• Dave heard about this STM32F3 part with a super fast timer internal…yep, still can’t get it.
• Open Source HW/SW Microinverter
• Chris asks Dave if he would put something like that on his house.
• Paul Zawada episode
• Enphase Microinvterter
• Zappi charger
• Leigh Brady Episode
• Chris will be doing a webinar this week about the things you don’t know about IoT systems.
  

  Photo by Ron Lach

Welcome, Leigh Brady!

• Leigh got his start working in different companies in the US as young engineer from the UK as part of the Mutual Defense Agreement
• Throughout the episode we explored different themes
  
  • Specialist vs Generalist
  • US vs UK hiring
  • Big vs small companies
  • Defense vs Industrial companies
• UK Apprenticeship
• V curve
• System engineering
• Deriving requirements
• What is the atomic unit of a system engineer?
• F35/JSF
• Lockheed IRAD – Internal Research and Development
• Sandia National Labs
• FPGAs in defense / space
• “It’s always cosmic rays”
• Single Event Upsets
• “Triple modular redundancy” is so commonplace in designs there are now buttons in CAD to generate the logic to triplicate a circuit and have the 3 units “vote”
• Bleeding edge FPGA tools vs open toolchain
• Chris recalls Xilnx ISE with F16 on the CDs
• Long term supply contracts
• Jumping the line with defense companies in the US – “DPAS – defense priorities and allocation system“
• Big vs small
• Leigh is now back in a big company
• When should an engineer target a big vs a small company in their career?
• Training / Budgets / Sampling are better at big companies.
• Mentorship
• Phillip Salmany (Phil’s Lab) talked about the difficulties finding mentors as a young engineer out on his own.
• UK Chartered Engineer
• PE / EIT vs Chartered
• Leigh worked on nuclear weapons at a past company in the UK
• It is, unsurprisingly, a heavily regulated industry.
• IEC61508
• Part of the job is verifying non-proliferation among other countries
• Nuclear deterrant
• Chris referenced a Ukraine treaty where they gave up their nuclear weapons and ambitions, co-signed by the US, UK, and … Russia. This was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
• Russia control room story about not firing when they detected launches from the US. It’s widely believed that Stanislov Petrov prevented a Nuclear war
• There are never active nuclear tests anymore (good), so the majority of work revolves around testing and modeling
• Is there a “better moustrap”?
• What does it look like when new requirements come down from the gov’t?
• Did Leigh wear a white lab coat?
• We were introduced by former guest Carmen Parisi, who worked with Leigh at Wasatch Photonics
• Optics have tight timing requirements, especially around the image sensor.
• Leigh is now working on medical devices at Phillips.
• Medical isn’t as slow as Chris thought, nor is FDA planning as dreadful as Chris thought.
• “Trust but verify” on part specs
• Mapping past experiences into new job
• Chris mentioned the discussions with Charles Aylward about not having any control mechanisms or backup as a consultant.
• Leigh said there are certain scenarios where a solo consultant won’t be a good fit and that “Two people working in a team are worth three”
• You can reach Leigh on LinkedIn and elsewhere on the web as Engineer Leigh

• Dave declares the chip shortage is over! The scopes from a contest 1 year ago have shipped.
• Adafruit video asking Microchip for parts. Adafruit helped popularize the SAMD21 and SAMD51, which are tough to get ahold of

https://twitter.com/factory_400/status/1519398997303054337

• Dave finally tried taking his EV to 100% charge
• “blowing the carbon out”
• American pickers
• On our subreddit, someone was asking about PCB fabs (and assembly)
• An apocryful story about firms buying finished goods and destroying to get parts out of them (the DailyMail is a rag)
• Josh from Macchina (Earl was on The Amp Hour on episode 388) had emailed Chris about XScomponents. There are some listings on there, but don’t get your hopes up!
• Diamond district effect
• Dave is a really big fan of Bluey
• Belkin is apparently trying out (or giving credence to wireless charginge). Dave was unconvinced (back in 2018)
• Open vs closed cavity
• Chris presented to the Thread Group and talked through some of the things he understands about it on the show. This video was pretty helpful.
• Chris’s wrestling name would be “The BOM Dropper”…apparently.
• Dave got some PCB art in the mailbag. He made a followup video about the “5 layers” of PCB artwork.

https://twitter.com/eevblog/status/1519527884540776448

• Stippling is a technique of adding grayscale to two tone printing. Chris used this on the art for this episode.
• Using the ESP32-S2 as a USB to UART chip
• Eric Migicovsky wrote about Why Pebble Failed
• We had CTO of Pebble (Andrew Witte) on the show back on episode 175

Fran Blanche and Dave discuss publishing, newspapers, Frantone, manufacturing, the kit business, ebay, and pontificate what we would be doing if the Internet didn’t exist.

The Frantone pedal as used by The Hives’ Nicholaus Arson and Vigilante Carlstroem  VIDEO

How VHS tapes are manufactured VIDEO

NOTE: This episode is also available as VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuFqB9ZeqKI

• Dave has been posting videos from his time at Electronex 2022
• Chris will be attending and presenting at Zephyr Developer Summit in June.
• Chris will also be at Embedded World in late June
• Walkthrough video from Dave at Electronex 2022
• There was a larger focus on manufacturing
• The Art of Custom Test Jigs
• Force of pogo pins
• Chris asked about best trade show demos people had seen. We liked past guest Mark Garrison’s response:

https://twitter.com/Marcus10110/status/1507522287192338440

• Trade show teardown
• Antmicro released a Snapdragon 845 base board design in KiCad
• The logistics of corn farming
• Smarter Every Day did a video on grain silos
• Australia warns of critical shortage of engineers
• ABC engineer book
• Mercedes is backing their self driving software (legally)
• Chris has been working with Thread at work

Welcome Charles Aylward of Grizzly Peak Systems!

• I heard of Charles from past guest Todd Bailey, they worked together at Astra. Charles is also a member of the Consulting Forum.
• Astra is a “new space” company
• These are non-traditional companies (sometimes startups), that move a bit faster with modern software methods and using more commercially available hardware (non-rad hard parts)
• Past guests in “new space” companies Joris (Hiber), Shaun (Planet), Brent and Bryce (SpaceX, Relativity Space)
• Astra provides a smaller launch vehicle (rocket), which means the ride share equation changes.
• The rocket equation means it could be advantageous to launch a smaller rocket.
• Chris thought of Charles when he thinks of software and hardware rigor.
• How do you know you’re ready to launch?
• Charles was the software engineer for the early launch vehicles.
• Design reviews early on had fewer people but pulled in other people. Todd was working on electronics.
• 6 months to launch
• There’s no dev kit for starting a rocket.
• A rocket is a distributed system
• Multiple clock domains
• Lossy comms
• Charles and Todd talked through some guiding principles
  
  • “No modes”
  • “Debug data and test data is first class data”
  • “The principle of least surprise”
  • “Boot causes no action” (powering on a system causes no action)
  • “The system is only hot under control”
  • “Only a single source of control at a time”
  • “Messages are globally unique”
  • “When you’re sending commands to subsystems, you are sending the absolute state”

• Some other (out of order) thoughts around the guiding principles discussion
  
  • Cataloguing all software failures on space systems
  • Need to design in wider data channels as a result
  • Exposing parts of the RTOS stats
  • Safety related
  • Default off states
  • Pointy side up, fire side down
  • Nodes on a network
  • Babbling node
• Deterministic system
• Priorities are similar for all systems on a launch vehicle
• What are the constraints of the system?
• Creating a walking skeleton
• Deciding to put ethernet on board
• Desirement
• “Judson’s Razor”
• Using an RTOS
• Classes of real time contrsaints
  
  • Soft
  • Firm
  • Hard
• Real Time Systems – Hermann Kopetz
• Hard Real Time Computing Systems – Giorgio C Buttazzo
• PID loops
• So what was it like at Astra?
• Charles joined in 2017, first launch 364 days later
• They launch things like cube satellites (10x10x10 cm)
• The vehicles can go up to 100s of kg
• Still getting new space contracts
• Startups
• “Rigor gets a bad rap because of agile”, but there’s a crossover point for investing in the setup of new systems.
• In consulting, there is often pressure is high to get first proto out quickly
• Azonenberg’s checklist on github
• “What happens if the test fails?” You need to have recovery time baked into a schedule and a plan
• Contact
  
  • Twitter
  • Freelance info
  • Email
  • LinkedIn
• Other links, sent from Charles after the recording
  
  • I left Astra before this particular launch, but Scott Manley has a good/fun video on what happens when your systems don’t “fail fast” but instead “fail operational”
  • You asked where one can pick up some of this stuff (regarding rigor etc). A lot of my early thinking on robust software was formed by Robert Rasmussen from JPL. He has published a lot but by far the best synopsis on thinking about dealing with inevitable errors (fault tolerance) as not a special case, is in this paper. This basically ties right in with the “observability” thing we discussed.
  • Another good foundation for coding standards is the JPL “powers of ten” paper. There are things I disagree with, and outright reject, e.g. pointers can’t be used safely, but, like the principles we discussed on the show, it’s not that there’s some prescriptive golden list, it’s just that you want to build out a complete list like this of your own. Pulling what you think makes sense from JPL P10 or MISRA can really help.
  • The best way to contact me is probably twitter.

Click image for link to Charles’ site with explanation

This episode is brought to you by Mouser Electronics. This week we hear about Digital Therapeutics. Go to TheAmpHour.com/digitalhealth to learn more.

Welcome, Paul Zawada of Syntonous LLC!

• Paul was nice enough to respond when we said we were hoping to talk to someone about the grid/smart grid. He is an “operations technology engineer”, which means he straddles the line between the power side and the technology side of things.
• What are grid operators’ appetite for new tech?
• SCADA
• How do blackouts happen?
• Generation, transmission, distribution
• i2r losses are why they operate long distance transmission at 765 kV.
• China’s grid has newer tooling, which allows it to go at higher voltages.
• You can tell the voltage of transmission lines by “counting the bells”. It’s roughly 15kV per bell and they do odd things to the shapes of insulators to prevent arcing.
• Video about the Ohio blackouts in 2003 we talked about last week
• Where does control happen for “the grid”?
• PJM
• Frequency determines the health of the grid
• Bike analogy
• Tesla battery – Hornsdale Power Reserve
• Moving to a renewable grid has some potential issues
• Grid has “inertia” due to the spun up generators. They’re working on modeling “Synthetic inertia” for a more renewable grid.
• “A disturbance in the electromotive force” (I’m sorry Dave, that title was too long)
• Dave asks why does the voltage go up on his setup?
• RMS voltage vs Vpp
• The Power Triangle
• ELI the ICE man, CIVIL
• 99% of the time, loads are inductive
• The role of reactive power in the grid
• VARs
• VAR tends to control the voltage
• Real power determines the frequency
• Hawaii example of a local grid with a lot of solar (and that’s kind of a problem)
• Capacitors help to balance the grid when it there are too many inductive loads.
• “Grid Following inverter” (vs “Grid Forming”)
• Dynamic inverter
• 4 quadrant inverter 
• “Don’t call it imaginary power”
• IEEE1547
• Inverters have to be able to deal with frequency changes and take setpoints from the grid
• The 50.2 Hz problem
• Smart Grid
• California Rule 21
• Smart meter and Power Line Carrier Standard (PRIME)
• Communication with meters
• WISUN
• COSIM
• PLC
• Private LTE
• Brokers
• Pool analogy
• Stability of the grid wasn’t built for two way flow
• Managing a wide range of inverters is difficult
• Standard for comms by SunSpec (Smart Inverter Standards)
• Control systems with SCADA
• While analyzing hte grid, they use a state estimator (which is a mathematical model of the various sources in a grid system) and then do real time contingency analysis
• Spinning reserve
• Rolling blackout is when the grid systematically takes different parts of the grid offline to preserve the overall ability to deliver power.
• Texas example
• Dave asked about available power on the grid
• Steel recycling takes a TON of power.
• Different wires from generation (in Texas)
• Community Energy Storage (“Backyard Batteries” w/ Four-Quadrant Inverters)
• Wind turbine go to DC first (because of variable wind speeds), but are then feed to an inverter
• Proposed Soo Green HVDC Link [Underground]
• Grain Belt Express: Proposed Kansas-Missouri-Illinois HVDC Transmission Line
• Pacific DC Intertie
• Silicon transformer
• Paul’s pet peeve is people asking him about “exploding transformers”. It’s almost always a fuse or a cable shorting to ground.
• Expulsion Fuse Blowing (NSFW Language)
• Another Expulsion Fuse Blowing
• DC vs AC arc
• 250VDC control of relax elements in power plants
• Air Blast Circuit Breaker
• “(The grid is) the most complex machine we ‘ve ever built”
• Consulting and day job AND he is working on a Doctorate of Technology at Purdue. We’re grateful he found time to talk to us as well!
• Follow Paul on Twitter! @engineerz

• Brain computer interfaces
• Chris is still finishing up a book on PARC. Hearing about management decisions made him upset.
• Dave is fighting to get through Ready Player 2
• Position JWST mirrors with nanometer accuracy (video)
• More about mirrors from NASA
• How alignment is being done
• Dave’s son is getting into Kurzgesagt (amazing YouTube channel)
• Chris and his daughter like The Universe app, though looking at info about M87 (Virgo Alpha) gave Chris a panic attack
• Shenzhen is on lockdown after COVID has gotten worse in Hong Kong and some has crossed the border.
• During a (very) brief search during the show we found 90% of electronics production is done in Shenzhen? Can that be right??
• Packaging is expanding in the US, but Chris is skeptical it will put a dent in the supply chain.
• How technology impacts working conditions (in this case, calling out the monitoring of truckers)
• DRM labels or paper
• On the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast, they interviewed a Starlink reverse engineer, who was recording from Kyiv as air sirens were going off.
• Ghidra
• Reverse engineering a Tesla keyfob
• Substation
• Highest volume individual
• Chris has a new meetup group in the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill). Please help spread the word!

Photo by Luan Rezende from Pexels

Welcome, Brian Amos, author of Hands-on RTOS with Microcontrollers

• Learned about the book from past guest Phillip Johnston. Also talked to Alvaro Prieto (Unnamed RE) about FreeRTOS.
• “How do I RTOS?”
• When do you want to use a Real Time Operating System (RTOS)?
  
  • Assume you can from a state machine
  • User interface you’ll want it
  • Communication capability (IoT devices)
• Differentiating OS vs RTOS
• Amazon acquired FreeRTOS in 2017
• FreeRTOS is a bottom up methodology
• It’s possible to make a completely statically allocated memory for a project (no heap, no malloc, etc)
• Simple examples around reading a sensor, pump status, screen, internet
• System level design decisions
• Interrupt Service Routine (ISR)
• Ticks are important
• How did Brian get into this?
• Brian was working on a product that had a
  
  • Telos module
  • MSP430
  • TinyOS
  • nesC?
• James Grenning’s book on TDD for embedded
• Modern micros can do a lot in parallel, especially using hardware like DMA
• Troubleshooting an RTOS
  
  • SEGGER Ozone (debugger)
  • SystemView
  • Percipio Tracealyzer
• Many of the graphics in the book are available on Brian’s github page as CC by SA licensing
• Page 48 graphic
  
• Brian taunts us on Page 98 showing lots of STM32 parts in stock…
  
• NucleoF7 board used in examples (unsurprisingly…out of stock)
• There’s an onboard debugger that you can reprogram to Segger
• Going through exercises
• Working with HALs
• Logic analyzer for troubleshooting
• Embedded Linux
• Still goes bck to superloop
• Find Brian on:
  
  • LinkedIn
  • GitHub
  • Amazon book

• Dave has been reverse engineering a MOSFET that burned out on his LED panel.
• SM4303 Datasheet
• APM4303 Datasheet
• Chris has been looking at ideal diode controller
• Dave has been trying to reverse a deep discharge of battery
• SloMo Guys blow up capacitors and it’s AWESOME!
• Floating Solar Farms
• Common sense skeptic video
• We recorded an episode driving down to the Deep Space Network in Canberra
• Our email address (Feedback@theamphour.com) is working again! For now!
• We are looking to talk to power engineers, please let us know if you know anyone.
• Smart grid
• Chris was asking about localize power storage in the home without having solar panels
• Software salaries are huge at FAANG/MANGA companies, in part due to the stock portion of compensation, also known as an RSU
• FUIFV
• Google is making employees going back to the office (and now Apple too!)
• Looking to change jobs? There are lots of posts in newsletters like The Embedded Muse, The Prepared, and The Analog
• Hacker News also has a “Who’s Hiring” post on the first of the month.
• Revenue per employee
• Cost of engineers
• “I Quit! – Why Millions of People Are Quitting Their Jobs” – Cold Fusion TV