This week we are sponsored by Keysight. Amp Hour listeners get a bonus entry if they sign up for the upcoming Keysight Wave event using this link, which starts on March 2nd. You can also view some of the content discussed in the ad this week, such as the The ESD Checklist, 4 easy ways to blow up your test gear, and Can a cable electrically damage equipment?

Welcome, Paul Thompson, CEO of Pakton Technology

• Pakton make electric fence controllers
• Dave found a Pakton controller in the dumpster
• Paul thinks it was sent out for EMC testing and never came back
• Transformer
• SCR
• MOV
• Follow @JVAtechnologies on Twitter (the brand behind Pakton)

• Chris is trying to making a remote controlled blinky thing for < $1
• Dave suggested the Padouk $0.03 microcontroller, which now has a C compiler (read more about it on the EEVblog forum)
  
  • (Chris later remembered Samy has a talk about lighting up balloons)
• Mike Harrison on Embedded.fm discussing PICs
• Switching costs
• Chris will be at Chaos Camp this year!
• Shahriar reviews the Deepace VNA
• RF layout book
• Difference from SI
• Routing requirements
• Spectrum analyzer
• TI’s Antenna Selection Guide
• Where do we store files
• Dave has been dealing with isolated power and data on usupply
• Chris really enjoyed Kate Tempkin’s talk about USB 
• TS80 can only power from USB quick charge and not PD
• Dave giving a talk on solar roadways
• Chris will be (is currently) helping past guest of the show Joe Fitzpatrick doing hardware training at Black Hat.
• Alibaba is working on a homegrown chip based on the RISC V architecture
• More focus on RISC V is a small silver lining of the trade war.
• Russian chips from back in the day, 74 series
• RISC V from scratch
• Chris was on a 3M podcast talking about his excitement around RISC V and open toolchains.
• LCSC is getting investment, which means its less interesting as a point of insight into Chinese branded chips..
• Dave got back from celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch. He has been publishing videos over on his EEVdiscover channel.
• Aria tracking planes
• Dave and Chris did an episode while driving to Canberra to visit the DSN.
• You can listen and watch along the Apollo 11 launch in “realtime”
• Dave highly recommends watching the Apollo 11 movie at an iMAX.

Thanks to Suzanne Nilsson for the image of the ladder

• Chris has been making antennas on a mill and measuring them on a VNA.
• Past guests Pete Bevelacqua and Jeff Keyzer offered their help about the
• Hardie Pienaar was nice enough to simulate the antenna Chris cut to show what it should look like. It matched the reality well (this is the cover image for the episode).
• Alan Wolke made a great video about how to use Smith Charts
• Chris had to buy a bunch of n-type connectors, leading to a term he called “KonnectorPanik”
• Apple is moving some of its manufacturing out of China
• Looking up the term “student destinations” for different schools shows where students go on to work and how much they make. We looked at Carnegie Mellon’s recent reporting.
• We heard about Kong.cash from Paul Gerhardt. It’s a “physical cryptocurrency” based upon the Etherium blockchain (Chris edit: trying to hold it together to get to the good parts here).
• There is a flex PCB with UV printing and on-board security chip that allows users to validate transactions.
  The ATECC608A holds private keys, and enables a bunch of internet connecte devices these days.
• “The chips are a keypair that identify the bill to an escrow contract. That contract holds a value timelocked for 3 years. You can check that the value is still there via NFC and even interface to it via the electrical connectors.”
• Dave did a (non-crypto) wallet review
• Dave also did a teardown of (not just) a millivoltmeter. The hinged design and metal cans over each section were beautiful.
• Dual display AC millivoltmeters
• OnShape bought by PTC
• Openscad, a project started by past guest Clifford Wolf
• Flash memory is bricking Teslas
• Someone posted about a “chip printer” on Kickstarter. What the heck is an n-type filament?
• There’s a $5 FPGA board coming to Seeed studio (h/t to Frank Buss) based upon the Gowin FPGA from Alcom

Welcome Christina Cyr, CEO of dToor and the Cyrcle Phone

• This was their 5th year at CES. Mostly hanging out at Eureka Park, which is the startup area
• 2 years ago saw companies doing encryption for voice data because of creepy speakers, now they have gone mainstream.
• Startups are only allowed to be there for 2 years.
• This year dToor got coverage on BBC, CNET, The Daily Mail
• Enclosure company didn’t finish, so Christina 3D printed
• CTA is Consumer Technology Association. $97 to join and worth it.
• Wyze cameras, selling for $19.99
• Random connections from having a booth
• Christina works out of WeWork. Previously she was at Extra Slice in Bellevue, wanted a landline (LAN connection) for older builds of linux
• Metrix Create, Sodo also shut down
• Volunteers at their booth:
  
  • Aileen McGraw, WeWork Labs Manager
  • Xuny Haley, CoMotion Labs Manager
  • Nalin Chuapetcharasopon, Crowdfunding Expert
  • Anna Chuapetcharasopon, EdTech Consultant
• Former guest Scotty Allen dropped by.
• How did this phone get started?
• Phone wasn’t fitting in a pocket in 2014
• People wouldn’t take cardboard prototypes seriously
• Decided to use Seeed Studio’s phone kit with a different “skin”
• Presented as a phone for women, that was a mistake
• Featured in the telegraph out of context
• Demographics were 50/50
• Marketing tech products to women
• Apple Watch is taking the place of similar kind of role
• Joel Telling (3D printing nerd) goes to the hospital, after his watch alerted him to tachycardia
• Unity (software)
• The 4G version of the phone has
  
  • Dual SIM
  • Two headphone jacks
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon
  • Transitioning from micro-b to USB-C
• Working with vendors
• 4 vendors that have the snapdragon
• Tier 1 and Tier 2 companies
• Vendors want to hear 100K units
• Navigating working with vendors
• Looking at doing testing in China for FCC
• Dealing with Tariffs, as batteries and LCDs are coming directly from suppliers
• CES Tech Talk – Caught in the Crossfire: How Tariffs Impact Tech with Austere Sage Chandler, Vice President—International Trade, Consumer Technology Association (CTA)
• Harmonized Tariff Code 
• Different goods have different Tariffs
• Should have been an LLC instead of an S Corp or C Corp
• NRE for a completely custom display is $6M!
• Circular display is off the shelf, with 800×800 outer dimensions
• The 4G LTE phone will have a “tangential foot” (see image below)
• Module comes with Android 9
• Christina put together a document for hardware startups in Seattle, might be useful to listeners even if not in Seattle
• Cyrclephone.com
• @CyrChristina

Today’s show is sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz. We hear in the ad today from James Lewis (@baldengineer) about how to use an oscilloscope and how probe capacitance can affect measurements. For more information about the scope discussed today, check out AskAnEngineer.us.

• Seth Hillbrand did a KiCad stream working on Medtronic’s ventilator files.
• Will be interesting to see how the license for the released files changes once the pandemic is over.
• FormLabs SLA printer
• Spreadsheet of every project
• Dave did a repair video after an inductor blew in a found laptop
• Kits for parts, parts drawers
• Alvaro (past guest, remote correspondent and co-host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast) uses PartsBox.io and a barcode scanner to set up a home inventory system for electronic components.
• Dave considered buying the inventory of an electronics hobbyist.
• IPC standard pad sizes
• Density heat map
• Members of The Amp Hour Patreon now get access to an exclusive Discord server. We’re looking for other ways we can give back to our Patrons.
• 3H meetups are going virtual as well. Have you always wanted to join a 3H? There is one a Chicago meetup coming up on Tuesday April 14th. Join the 3H discord if you’d like to connect any time.
• The Myth of the 3 Capacitor Values
• Eric Bogatin on the show
• Application notes for FPGAs
• Eric’s Rules of Thumb articles
• We were asking some questions posed from our Patrons on Discord
• Microcap is free now
• Mike Engelhardt on the show
• After listening to our episode with John Day, an apps engineer was asking if there were other practical app notes that don’t exist and should be made.
• TI AN-1148
• Keithley Low level measurement handbook
• Microchip app note about LCDs

Thanks to peakpx for the sowing picture

• We have a sponsor and a new form of advertising this week. Here are some of the links mentioned:
  
  • Wave sign-up link (gets bonus entry)
  • The ESD Checklist
  • 4 easy ways to blow up your test gear
  • Can a cable electrically damage equipment?
• Impersonation scam
• Dave may be moving back to his old office park.
• 
  Working in constrained space
  
• 
  Chris mentioned that in Skunkworks they pushed to declassify some of their work because it was such a hassle.
  
• 
  The SR71 was actually the RS71 but it was written poorly and they worked to just change the designation.
  
• Barrie Gilbert of ADI has passed away
• 
  Some videos of him teaching:
  
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQNJVtcFrCc
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sATM6gi7bn8
• Computer History Museum
• 
  Chris had previously confused Dave’s friend Doug Ford (the microphone maker) with Doug Self (an author about audio principles)
  
• KiCon 2020 will be at CERN!
• They have lots of events at CERN, including an upcoming one on analog computing.
• Fermi is a national lab outside of Chicago
• Astra is a new low payload, high frequency rocket startup out of the bay area.
• Former guests have worked there, but weren’t able to mention it previously.
  
  • Jeri Ellsworth (her most recent show talking about CastAR’s flameout)
  • Todd Bailey
• 
  Chris just finished the Elon Musk Biography
• 
  We heard from our listeners about Starlink and were pointed at this fantastic animated video showing how it all will/might work.
  
• 
  COTW – The OnSemi (nee Fairchild Semiconductor) FSBB20CH60C
  • 
    Is it technically a DIP? Since it has staggered pins
    
  • 
    2500V RMS
    
  • 
    Designing for transients
    
• Creepage and clearance
• Putting a slot can help increase the creepage spec.
• 
  Creepage and clearance changes with altitude
  
• How much time do you spend in various parts of your office/lab throughout a project?
• 
  Task switching
  
• 
  Chris was on Embedded.fm talking about firmware, it will be out later this week.
  
• Former guest Ron Quan has a new book out about Troubleshooting. His past books were:
  
  • Build your own transistor radios
  • Electronics from the ground up

Welcome Trammell Hudson!

This episode is sponsored by Rohde and Schwarz. Check out AskAnEngineer.us for more info about their value line test equipment.

• Trammell likes to gets things to the Proof of Concept stage, and then “hand off the keys to the repo”
• Matthew Garrett quote, (paraphrased) “I don’t think I’m very good with computers, I’m just bad at knowing when to give up”
• Taking good notes is a big part of Trammell’s process, which resulted in the site linked above.
• Magic lantern firmware
• Started from CHDK firmware, which is GPL
• Starts with looking at the updates that the vendors ship, then getting code execution
• Toggling the firmware out on an LED
• Disassembler tools:
  
  • Hopper
  • Ida
  • Ghidra
• He’s currently playing with Ikea smart bulbs and dimmers
• Gave a talk at Hack in the Box about “time of check, time of use”
• Project called Linuxboot, replaces x86 firmware with linux software
• Trammell’s newest project is the SpiSpy
• Logs all the flash memory accesses
• Tool was built to speed up firmware dev that revealed security hole
• Built with the ECP5
• Gave a talk about SpiSpy at CCCamp
• Hard to emulate the real time flash, since you have to serve up a response in 1 clock cycle
• DRAM is too slow, so it’s necessary to start the row/column reads before they have all of the bits
• Retrocomputing
  • PDP11
  • Mac SE
• Former guest of TAH Fabienne did the ROM dump scarves
• Archive.org documents old file formats
• Teensy4
• Scanlime had a tiny85 act like an RFID
• Trammell replicated and extended this work
• RFID doesn’t transmit back from the passive device side, it just shorts the coils together
• PSK31
• 13 hz of bandwidth
• SpiSpy project had a bus contention problem, scope saved the day
• Vector stuff
• Used dual DAC to drive the XY
• Former guest Todd Bailey also did vector work on the VEC9
• CRTs don’t move instantaneously
• Vector generation needs to model the magnetic drivers
• Added tunable parameters to the screen driver code.
• Later CRTs had color
• Had a write up in POC | GTFO
• Worked on Robots with others at NYC Resistor
• Puma Robot Arms were reverse engineered and turned into shuffleboard robots
• Using a scope for the quadrature decoding
• Trammell is a full time Security Researcher
• Thunderstrike was a vulnerability that allowed code insertion via the thunderbolt cable on the mac.
• Linuxboot replace proprietary boot software in servers and other hardware with linux
• Independent bios vendor
• Bulk of the code comes from intel
• Unix wars of 80s and 90s
• OEMs do “not invented here”
• Gave a talk about it at 34c3
• Build your own custom firmware for the lamps
• Check out all of Trammell’s projects on trmm.net
• Find Trammell as @qrs on Twitter or Mastadon

The image is a capture from a 1 kilopixel Cyclops sensor that Trammell re-projected through an oscilloscope (link)

• Chris has almost finished reading Eccentric Orbits and has been working on satellite comms in the meantime.
• Flat earther documentary on Netflix, Behind The Curve
• Satellite internet is en vogue again, with Elon Musk launching Starlink and pasts guests like Maarten Engalen (Hiber)
• 5G distances are pretty short (depending on the implementation)
• Discontinuing 3G in Australia
• GSM wasn’t a big factor yet during the timeframe of Eccentric Orbits (1993 – 2002ish)
• Shahriar did a review of the Siglent SVA1032X and Chris is getting a demo unit soon!
• The HP8753ES was another one on Chris’ watch list, but it’s a “boat anchor” (heavy piece of test equipment)
• The TDS220 was one of the earlier scopes that changed the standard for how much space it took up on the bench top.
• Dave advertises when there are auctions on the EEVblog forum “Buy / Sell” section. This is a good way to find an auction house to sign up for future notifications.
• Gerbers were a standard format used for photo plotting. The aperture was how wide the light beam was opened as it passed across the board.
• Chris has a “residency” where he gets to try out a Bantam Tools machine. He talked with MG about milling circuitboards a couple months ago.
• The Dragonfly is another machine that supposedly “prints” layered PCBs. It would work well as a super crisis option, but probably not for most PCBs.
• The plan is for Chris to mill out antenna shapes, like those shown in TI App Note 58 (AN058)
• Dave and David have been working with the Richtek USB C processor
• Seeed Studio has some new boards coming out with a RISC V Bumblebee core, made by Giga Devices. The part number is super confusing!
• ARM is allowing custom instructions to be added to the Cortex cores, ostensibly because they’re feeling pressure from the RISC V option.
• In Dave’s new video about LED lights flickering, the part he was looking at was marked the same as a datasheet, but had a completely different implementation.
• Chris released Getting To Blinky 5.0 videos
• A writer at Digikey tore down and reviewed a $17 power supply
• The device we were discussing on episode 460 was a process meter (Dave made a video about it). It ended up selling out very quickly.
• Dave is a doctor-certified tight ass (hence knee problems)
• We are doing our 2019 survey! Please consider filling it out, we will have prizes for people randomly drawn for filling it out.

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Thanks to Stew Dean for the photo of the anchor

Welcome, Nash Reilly of Sonos!

• Chris and Nash met at OSHWA 2018
• Nash is from Montana and went to engineering school at Montana State University.
• His first job out of school was at Micron over in Boise, doing SO DIMM testing for large scale customers.
• He actually tested for things like Cosmic Ray strikes, discussed many times on this show.
• Interned at Sonos when it was 100 people
• Watching how the vendors change their tune as you get volume up
• His role at Sonos started in sustaining engineering
• Making sure supply chain is stable
• Spent 4-5 weeks per year in China, even had to leave vacation to fly to China.
• “Type 2 fun”
• Smoke jumpers for Intel
• Hank Zumbahlen episode
• Staying well grounded
• Lee Hill’s Silent Solutions
• I2S clocks hurt emissions, are often a problem during testing.
• Blog post about emissions
• Solutions for I2S clocks
  
  • Changing the output impedance of your driver
  • Put a small external RC filter
• Howard Johnson on the podcast
• First 20 pages of the Black Magic book
• Most DACs/ADCs aren’t as finicky as they used to be
• I2S is just SPI in one direction
• Sigma Delta DACs
• Oversampling and modulating in the reverse direction
• THD is like a noise measure, but also has distortion
• Audio Precision test equipment
• Analog Dialogue
• Charty Party
• 30 ms for it to be instantaneous to a human
• Humans are more sensitive to phase delta
• Latency is constant for digital signals
• 3rd edition of AoE
• ADI AN-283
• The Way Things Work
• How do you maintain quality over low quality speakers that are out there?
• Clicks and pops
• “A class D amplifier is just a motor driver with an LC on the output”
• Layout starts to impact things
• Chapter 8 of AoE for low noise design
• Sonos Port
• 20 people in his group, including digital, analog, layout
• Current project has 10 people in total or so
• 1600 total people working at Sonos
• Sonos Amp
• Had to do a custom class D amplifier
• Needed to design in real time control
• Sonos use Linux computers internally for the high level control
• Microcontrollers for controlling other elements of the design faster
• Nash is in charge of making sure the digital section is put together well and writing test plans
• An example schedule: December start (talking with vendors), April schematic, June testing
• For the Sonos Move, Nash worked on an earlier incarnation.
• Nash’s main site/blog
• Find him on reddit
• Nash is @cushychicken

Welcome Dr Thomas (Tom) Lee of the Microwave Integrated Circuits Lab (SMIrC) at Stanford University!

This episode is sponsored by Rohde and Schwarz. Check out AskAnEngineer.us for more info about their value line test equipment.

• Tom is friends with two past guests, Jeri Ellsworth and Kent Lundberg
• Tom owns a LOT of scopes (200 or so)
• First scope was a Heathkit
• The Tek 485 had nice user design
• “I didn’t like an intermediate layer.”
• John Addis and Wink Gross designed the important parts of the 485
• The 485 added a superfast square wave to the front panel important for calibrating a 350 MHz scope
• Protection circuits
• Tom got started in electronics fixing TVs
• He then went to work for the founders of Wavetek (but not directly for the company) with people like Joe Deavenport
• Tom went to MIT and worked under Jim Roberge (check out the video series where Jim is lecturing on-camera)
• He proposed a thesis that was the world’s first integrated CMOS radio
• Marvin Minsky
• “The thesis doesn’t change the world…it changes you”
• CMOS was considered crap, was mostly used for wristwatches and calculators
• Other types of MOS and BJT circuits were considered to be much better.
• Tom used MOSIS, the IC bundling service mentioned on this program before.
• Didn’t have PDKs
• Magic from Berkeley allowed Tom to see the DRC errors as they happened.
• He ended up building an FM radio…without any inductors!
• Made gyrators into inductors
• Moved to Analog Devices where he learned a lot from Barrie Gilbert and Paul Brokaw
• Moving back to California and went to work for a startup RAMBUS
• Stanford wanted someone to do RF and give a first class on RF chip design
• Tom started in 1994 and started the first microwave IC lab.
• Tom and his grad students created the first GPS CMOS receiver
• Used to be 1 GHz and above is microwave
• Many of Tom’s students are (truly) seeing Maxwell’s equations for real for the first time
• What are the mental models?
• Tom said he “inflicts history on students”. This is also in the early chapters of Tom’s book, Planar Microwave Engineering
• Maxwell didn’t use vector calculus, he used quaternian form.
• Every course Tom teaches has a lab, including his undergrad lab which involves copper tape and making a radio.
• A lot of faculty have never built stuff
• He is now working with students on mmwave and 5G (because that’s where a lot of the research dollars are right now)
• Beamforming to get aggregate bandwidth
• Printed electronics for power delivery, serving devices that are in the mW level not the W level
• Feature sizes of CMOS
• Tom is on the board of Xilinx
• Tom is taking a year sabbatical and working on a book about instrumentation
• He hopes to ask many of the creators about the secrets inside the test equipment he often is reverse engineering
• Jim Williams told him to buy a rubidium clock (standard) at a flea market.
• Worked at DARPA, where his office funded development of a chip scale atomic clock
• That chip subsequently released a bit of smoke in the space station…
• Read more about Tom’s research on his group’s website

• Chris has been reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, among other things
• Debugging with GDB
• Jay Carlson on Embedded.fm
• The Amazing $1 Microcontroller
• EEVblog2 video with David, using volatile inside interrupt routines
• Rubber ducking
• Keeping notebooks
• A scan of an engineer’s notebook from 1978 while designing the Atari 400 and 800
• Grass Valley Group, later merged with Tek
• Chuck Peddle interview
• Dave’s video about engineering notebooks about a PC based logic analyzer
• What are modern versions of lab notebooks? Evernote? One note?
• Feature Phone from Germany (CCCamp)
• The $8.70 “mystery item” was in fact a Process Meter (DMM with a constant source built in)
• Boston Dynamics is now commercially selling their Spot robot
• Buying industrial robot
• Former guest James Bruton
• Re-using stuff you know
• Former guest Jeri Ellsworth is crowdfunding the Tilt5 project. She talked about this on episode 394, specifically how CastAR burned out and how she was buying the assets to restart as Tilt5.
• Being disciplined during troubleshooting

Thanks to evarinaldiphotography for the rubber ducky photo

This is a re-airing of our episode with Chuck Peddle, recorded in March of 2015.

View the notes from the original episode here.

We chose to re-air the episode because Chuck passed away earlier this month (Hackaday, NYtimes, Engadget, Team6502) and this is one of our favorite episodes. We look forward to more great interviews like this one in 2020!

Welcome, Jonathan Georgino of Binho!

• The Binho is a USB host adapter targeted at manufacturing floors, but also can help people quickly talk to devices using i2c, serial, SPI and GPIO.
• There are a couple of options out there for manufacturing: Some are robust and expensive, others are hobbyist
• Using scripts and adapters for production line programming
• Career started at GE in St Marys, working on a CAN sensors
• Got a Saleae logic analyzer, wrote to Mark and Joe, went to go work with them.
• Mark and Joe were on episode 237 of The Amp Hour
• Helped to design the Logic 8, 8 pro and 16.
• Jonathan took away that products should be a pleasure to use, easy to understand
• Making it accessible in multiple ways
• Mark recently talked to Limor about the Saleae
• After Saleae, Jonathan went to go work at the Wonder Workshop (WW)
• Other consumer Robot startups having a hard time. We talked about Anki on episode 441.
• WW focuses on the educational market, where you need to be prepared for 1 year sales cycle and need a curriculum for the teachers who will be using it.
• Blockly or Scratch to program the robots
• Variables are tough for kids to understand (or big kids, like Chris).
• When designing for the educational market, need to design for robustness and compliance testing
• Testing comes out of the IEC standards, with different ones for each country.
• Partnered with toy manufacturer in China to make the robots.
• Jonathan was only EE up until production
• Dash has 12 different PCBs, with one that has 3 processors and 2 SPI flashes on board.
• Blockly is an open source project from Google
• “Changing careers is the best way to learn and grow”
• After WW, Jonathan moved to Zola, who are doing off grid for African countries.
• He got to visit Tanzania and see the product in action. There wasn’t as much needed on the EE side of things.
• Then he joined Pi, now Spansive
• They were working on a wireless charging device using A4WP, banking on new phones adapting it as a standard (it wasn’t)
• The experience in China manufacturing was that there are devices available but they are low cost and have janky UI.
• Most popular on the market are from Total Phase
• Can connect to Binho using Python API or any application that can pass in ASCII characters
• Can hook into any of the existing tools
• Some people are using a Raspberry Pi for testing
• Under the hood it’s an m0, with protection for overcurrent
• Also have a GUI
• Built in Xojo to be cross platform
• Use pip to install binho host adapter
• Jonathan advises you to put your pins onto the board the first time your board is made
• Continuous integration for firmware
• Rigol has python libraries, as does the Saleae. These might be python on top of GPIB.
• Check out Jonathan’s personal site and the Binho site.

Welcome, John Day, Technical Fellow and FAE from Microchip!

• John has worked at Microchip for 27 years! It was almost startup when he joined in 1993.
• He previously had worked on IO subsystem modules at DEC and had interacted with FAEs.
• He did some research on the company before joining, by checking out their databook
• John’s first computers were the C64 and the TRS80.
• Microchip was a spin-off of General Instruments in 1989, with Steve Sanghi as the head of the company (still in charge!)
• Focus was on low cost components, like ROM
• We take In Circuit Emulators (ICE) and In Circuit Programmers (ICP) for granted these days, in the 80s and 90s you could only really use emulators.
• With the lower costs, engineers could go to production on an EPROM. This made more devices “field programmable”.
• Why was the PIC was different when it came out?
  • There really weren’t C compilers
  • Most programmers are not familiar with the ISA
  • Used to be writing direct assembly code
  • Didn’t have a lot of peripherals
  • Wouldn’t have a peripheral for i2c/smbus or similar
  • Timing would be really critical
  • PIC was single cycle
• The first part was the PIC16c64, it had no interrupts, 512 words.
• Microchip was early movement into flash, the first component with it was the PIC16f877 in 1997
• They were also the first to have in circuit debugging; John Andrews and John Day chatted about having this and did a proposal for the debug registers to the chip designers. The software group followed. This was for MPLAB 8.
• ICD1 was developed outside of Microchip, but later pulled in house
• It came up after talking to customers about their needs
• The PIC32MZ was another good example of working with customers. They talked with Clint Cole and Keith Vogel of Digilent. They ran into an ADC non linearity that drove changes to the silicon.
• PIC32EF
• In order to issue and errata, engineers need to cut down source code to minimal size for isolation of the issue.
• John gets to work with automotive, gaming, commercial, and a lot more types of customers.
• Sometimes he finds himself writing code for customers, like special IP that is needed. This happened for a high volume part that needed better test coverage to find errors that happened once every million units. It turned out to be a brownout problem.
• John used and likes his Saleae logic.
• Microchip started an analog products group in late 90s, especially because a lot of the IP was developed for the microcontrollers.
• They bought Microsemi / Actel 2 years ago.
• FAEs at Microchip now have “specialist areas”
• ATC chips are ultra secure chips that hold root keys
• App Notes
  • The LED Cube is a Harmony reference design, meant for PIC32, Harmony3
  • In-Circuit Serial Programming (ICSP) of Calibration Parameters 
  • D/A Conversion Using PWM and R-2R Ladders to Generate Sine and DTMF Waveforms  
    • DTMF for Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS)
    • The R2R ladder is also used on OpenScope
  • Piecewise Linear Interpolation on PIC12/14/16 Series
    Microcontrollers
    • Linearizing a sensor with low power components
• App notes can take a while: the LED cube took over a year. This is because they’re publishing them, in addition to their regular job.
• People expect code generator / configurator tools these days, so the nature of app notes have changed.
• John assigns himself personal projects to learn new technologies
• Building Nixie tube clock to learn boost converters, ethernet stacks (this is shown in the photo above)
• Aside from microcontrollers, John is a huge fan of Pinball
• “You can always have space for a pinball machine”. In fact, he fit a pinball machine in his college dorm room.
• Gottleib Genie
• Ran on Rockwell 4 bit micros – 3 of them
• Batteries used to retain settings, but they would leak and destroy MPU
• Ralph Fien in Germany took MAME project and made a pinball machine, which all ran on a RPi
• 3 PIC18s to talk to IO
• There are drivers on separate boards, similar to TIP102s.
• 4 bit latches on the bus
• Periphieral IO Expander (PIA)
• NI-WUMPH
• Mission Pinball Framework (MPF) allows you to write all your game rules in Python.
• Ben Heck made a custom pinball machine
• John’s first machine was a 1973 Gottleib Kingpin, for which he did a restoration.
• You can hear John on The Classic Pinball podcast for episodes 27 and 28.
• John has had some interesting experiences as an FAE:
  • He was offered a gig (in cash) to build a cable tv descrambler
  • UPS design for a customer in a bad neighborhood
  • Almost blowing himself up while building high voltage power supply during co-op
• John is a fan of Dave’s teardowns and learning from them

Today’s episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits. Listen to the episode to hear about the monster through-hole pick and place machine they have on premises for their legacy customers. Check out this link to get an instant quote on your next board assembly.

Welcome back, Ben Krasnow!

• We first talked to Ben 8 years ago.
• YouTube has changed quite a bit since then, as has Ben’s channel:
  
  • It’s now called “Applied Science” instead of the original bkraz333 (though that link is still the official one)
  • It now has 600k viewers and many Patreon sponsors
• When Chris asked about replicating the paper setup (like from a research paper), Ben says it’s a recipe. It’s easier to follow and get started.
• An artist had exclusive license to use
• Vantablack, which made Ben wonder if he could make some. (spoiler: he can)
• Applied Science gets lots of great feedback from technical viewers, including some who have insider knowledge.
• Since the last episode Ben was on he worked at
  
  • Valve Software, with past guests
    
    • Jeri Ellsworth
    • Jeff Keyzer
    • Alan Yates
• After Valve, Ben went to go work for GoogleX in 2014. They wouldn’t tell him what he was working on!
• At 6 years, this is his longest running gig.
• Joined science team with 20 people, which has grown into Verily Life Sciences. He’s able to talk about (some) things now.
• Ben has been on Embedded.fm twice in the meantime:
  
  • 119
  • 184
• Verily announced an accommodating contact lens, which helps with presbyopia
• Though Ben didn’t work on that project, he had previously made am LED contact lens
• Verily have a micro-fab on site for making and prototyping such small devices.
• Ben’s lab is a bit more simple, he says it almost looks like his home lab.
• Chris compared the research portions to Bell Labs
• When the team hits a wall, they focus on finding and integrating new tech.
• Chris asks if the development is a push or a pull. As in, does the customer request certain technology or do they “deliver” it to the market and test whether it will work?
• Verily is working with a US centric view, especially given the high costs of the US medical system.
• Being an inventor type person in healthcare includes figuring out what the market looks like
• How much iteration?
• Verily have made hundreds of certain devices to test whether they can be manufactured “at scale” and that they will work in large numbers.
• Primarily they partner with other (medical) hardware makers and Verily licenses the tech to the OEM.
• A common demo in the Verily lab is a little motor that uses combustion because battery technology isn’t power dense enough for what they need
• Ben often gets comments about safety on the YouTube channel
• He likes to be application driven
• Wikipedia op amps
• Ben is a KiCad user, he likes the push and shove feature.
• One of his most popular video shows vinyl and LP under a SEM. The tough part is pulling out the bitstream, which he currently does with a Teensy.
• Rubber band fridge
• Drill through EDM
• Ben tried over 80 different methods to get PCB traces on a piece of plastic. This is a good example of the importance of starting from a paper or a patent.
• Chris thinks that Ben is a great example of the behavior defined in Grit
• Tim Ferriss talking about fame/money
• Cookies DOE
• Exceptionally hard and soft
• Ben kept blowing up the controllers for the Apollo Electroluminescent display. Ben later gave a great talk about the experience at Supercon
• Needed a source of radioactive material, which are apparently easily acquired in static brushes for LPs.
• Want to hang out with Ben in person? He’s usually at the Hackaday Supercon
• Follow Ben on Twitter and be sure to subscribe to the Applied Science YouTube channel
• Books mentioned in this episode:
  
  • Elon Musk Biography
  • Skunkworks

500 episodes of goofing around, including during our only in person meeting

Episode 500! About 10 years in! (our first show was August 10th, 2010)

• Dave consolidated a BOM on a recent video
• Analog Discovery 2’s are out of stock just about everywhere: a mixture of sourcing problems and high need for schools
• Dave noticed a mistake while doing a breadboard class
• James (Baldengineer) goes over the Miller Plateau
• Dave watches some ahem…interesting…movies on Amazon Prime
• Motivation of school/gym
• The Skywater PDK was announced. Tim Ansell (past guest) will return next week to discuss more.
• Dave predicts Apple will buy a semiconductor company
• “Cheap as chips”
• DIN now has an OSHW standard. Read the actual standard here.
• DIN connector
• DIN is a German standards agency
• Okie Dokie Dr Jones
• ESP32 s2 review by Andreas Spiess
• Former guest Sam Zeloof shows off how he does photolithography in his home semiconductor lab.
• The Coming Chip Wars of the 21st Century (Steve Blank)
• Capacitor factory video
• Chip printer (we all knew that was coming)
• Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
• Anton Petrov channel explaining papers
• RF PCB simulation cookbook
• The Navy Electricity and Electronics Traning Series
• “IoT in 5 Days” eBook (from 2015)
• Alan Wolke has been putting out videos about VNAs (that Chris wish he had access to a few months ago!)
• The Intuitive Guide to Maxwell’s Equations
• Chris has been reading “Ultralearning”
• Want to win a dev board from QuickLogic? They are running a Crowd Supply campaign for the “QuickFeather”. Answer the questions below for a chance to win:

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Welcome Dr Ming Zhang, CEO and founder of zGlue!

• What is zGlue? It’s a company that helps engineers integrate Chiplets into a single package, AKA heterogenous chip integration.
• ASIC are monolithic and require much higher capital investment and testing.
• The key advantage of zGlue is miniturization
• zGlue has an reference chip they publish called the Omnichip. It has Bluetooth, temp sensor, memory, and other sensors, 7 Chiplets in total.
• The output package is an LGA that is 8 mm x 6 mm.
• The system complexity needs to be high enough for it to matter: it’s unlikely engineers will need this service to put together 2 simple chips.
• It means working outside the PCB workflow, which will be an adjustment. The new workflow is entirely within the ChipBuilder environment though.
• The Chiplets a placed onto a “Smart Fabric”, which is a programmable interconnect with some small functions built in.
• There is also “common denominator IP”, like LED drivers and security elements
• The example Omnichip targets IoT products
• Good candidates for zGlue are constrained system by design, which means they probably fit into a theme like “IoT” and the associated included elements in the smart fabric.
• zGlue also support custom smart fabric, but there will be added cost, time for getting it made/tested.
• This “bigger LEGO board” is different than what Adrian Tang talked about, making custom systems for each design.
• How does smart fabric handle power/analog/RF? RF on the top metal, the analog and power are different “taps”. The more digital a signal, the deeper it goes into the fabric. The metal requires customization in the mask.
• There are “Templates“, which should help people get started, as well as an “Open Chiplet template“, which was released 2 weeks ago with Google.
• physics decisions based on design rules
• Go shopping on zGlue on their “Chiplet Store“
• Templates are top down
• There is no licensing agreement required for each chip, because it’s like buying the chip off the shelf (sans the polymide package). Almost all Chiplets are off the shelf parts.
• Example templates:
  
  • Edge node AI (detect gestures and voice)
  • Medical
  • Industrial
  • Wearables
  • Smart Graziery
• For pricing, there is a unit cost and development cost. The best way to get started is the “Shuttle program”, which is $25K for 10 components (and includes development cost).
• Once you get to production, there are options for consignment or non-consignment
• Development takes about 1 to 3 months.
• You can buy some of their “off the shelf” components for even less, such as the GEM1, GEM2, or Omnichip design.
• They use TSMC for silicon fab and ASE for assembly.
• At the assembly facility, the Chiplets come on tape and reel and are placed in a similar manner to other components.
• Who does Ming say they’re targeting? “Hardware innovators”, namely people that are trying to go impossibly small or impossibly fast.
• For the brave, you can communicate directly with the smart fabric during debug.
• Ming thinks all things will converge and many designs will go towards this path in the future.
• zGlue was conceived to stack things and they will start going from 2D to 3D designs in the future.
• For more information, check out the specific links above or check out zglue.com.
• They will be exhibiting at DAC/SemiCon West (July 20-24) with a “Virtual Booth”. The link for that is not yet active, but you can register for the event

Today’s episode is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. Learn more about Fog Computing and the other high level topics they are featuring on Mouser’s site using the link TheAmpHour.com/fog-computing

Welcome, Dr Andrea Morello!

• EEVblog forum thread
• EEVDiscover channel video version of this interview
• Quantum Computing Concepts – A web series with Professor Andrea Morello

Today’s episode is sponsored by Keysight, who recently started Keysight University. We hear from Daniel Bogdanoff and Jit Lim about USB, including the specs on the newly announced USB 4.0. To check out the USB 4.0 Pitfalls course and many more classes about test and measurement, check out Keysight University.

Welcome, Dr Brock LaMeres!

• Brock came from industry. He was working at HP and took classes at night to work on his Masters and PhD. The classes in his program had few traditional students. The profs were working engineers.
• After graduating, he stuck around to teach classes and loved it. He wanted to make it part of career.
• Using (modern) CAD tools in school
• Application was tied to the tools
• Chris went to a conference of EE Dept Heads (ECEDHA) and was put off by their unwillingness to try new tools.
• Teaching with captive tools in virtual machines?
• To get the context of the material, you have to show the application.
• Brock likes to show the historical aspect of engineering, or the “Rapid historical evolution of technology”. As an example: the battles between Tesla and Edison (War of the currents)
• Another example is how Intel (“INTegrated ELectronics” made up the name, if you didn’t know) hasn’t really been around that long, historically (<50 years).
• Brock teaches every level at MSU:
  
  • Beginners: EE 101
  • Middle of curriculum: Logic circuits and design
  • Advanced: Embedded systems
  • Grad level: Digital design, including real world problems like signal reflections (Editor’s snarky note: so analog too!)
• MSU has been dealing with COVID-19, like any other higher ed institution. But Brock was already teaching classes online.
• He has written books and paired it with youtube videos, so it wasn’t a huge transition for a lecture class.
• However, there was a range of experience across the campus, especially the profs who weren’t super digital savvy.
• Brock was interested in distance learning 10 years ago, especially addressing problems with the labs.
• He got a grant from the NSF to research how students could access equipment on campus and perform the lab somewhere else. This was before the availability of the low cost instruments of today.
• Chris asked how they measuring engagement / frustration
• It’s a wide range: Students that need full engagement is not 100%. In fact, there’s a percentage that don’t want interaction at all. “They just want to crank”
• Breaking the class into different groups based on learning patterns means more time to engage the students who are struggling.
• Engineering is more about internalizing
• The thing that is missing is self-regulation: “If you’re stuck on something for 30 minutes…then stop”
• They do a large number of low stakes homework assignments to track progress. It helps let them know when students get left behind and he’s not a fan of exams.
• Vocational education vs traditional education.
• Senior design class is a must to be ABET accredited. Students learn that the circuit design is not the problem. It’s the “everything else”
• Brock started working with NASA, continuing on his work designing FPGAs with HP. NASA wants reconfigurable hardware to accelerate computation, but also want to reprogram on the fly. Reconfigurable hardware can also flush out faults in space.
• They came up with a digital platform: Rad PC
• Processor voting on the output. “Voting” = 3 circuits produce outputs: if one crashes, the two that are the same will validate the broken one. This results in triple modular redundancy.
• They have gone up to space a bunch of ways!
  
  • Put on sounding rockets
  • Put on the ISS (!!!)
  • Two cube sats
    
    • Rad Sat U
    • Rad Sat G
• Internally, the hardware has a bunch of monitors all over the place, including error correcting code (ECC).
• MROM
• Rad hard parts are expensive and hard to get, so they’re trying to use commercial FPGAs.
• Chris asked about the overhead “cost” of having monitoring internally on FPGAs.
• Looking at MTTF
• The mission itself is driving a lot of the requirements
• Other ventures like Planet Labs (past guest), SpaceX (past guests) also are using commercial hardware with smaller mission horizons.
• Any missions requires an analysis of how to burn up.
• They’re currently working on a project to go to the moon! Part of the Artemis Program.
• The computer will use the landers and rovers radios for talking back. Brock’s computer will connect to the Lander and the Lander will take care of all the data (over some satellite uplink).
• Their Cube Sats are amateur band using SATNOGS for base stations.
• New book/course that’s coming out, which is an Intro to Embedded Systems course reboot at MSU.
• Took a different approach, a different way of learning
• Wanted every student to come to class with the micro attached to their laptops, so a $10 dev board/platform was the goal.
• Brock is passionate about reducing costs for students, especially because of the public school charter.
• Previous target was Freescale processor, but the dev boards will still $100.
• The lecture for this class leads right into the lab, hosted in a room with more infrastructure.
• Wrote the book/recorded videos.
• A new book about Embedded Systems is coming out this week!
• Breaking down material into smaller chunks
• Some students are faster than others students
• Chris asked if the students coming out of the class, but Brock says it’s tricky to figure out “are they better”.
• Regular employers for MSU students? Bozeman has a strong optics community, as well as large scale employers like Boeing in Seattle.
• Brock was named a Boeing Professor, which means he got a grant to work on the program.
• Check out more about Brock:
  
  • His Montana.edu page
  • The new course Youtube channel

New ad music by Eric Skiff

• Tweet about determination vs intelligence
• Praising a child for their effort instead of their innate intelligence
• Scott Galloway talks about 3rd tier universities being in trouble
• He also has a relatively new podcast
• The nRF52840 has a security vulnerability
• Taking obsolete parts into production
• How to create PCB modboards
• Castellated edges
• Adafruit found a USB C connector that is power only!
• @foone was posting some amazing connectors on twitter
• Drab olive
• Reverse drawing
• 747 video
• Former guest Alan Wolke talks about how a VNA works
• Video of RF connector
• DSA – Dynamic Signal Analyzers
• We will be taking questions for our 500th episode, which is coming up!
  
  • Record your question for us using your setup at home or via an online voice recorder
  • Make sure you include:
    
    • Your name
    • Where you’re calling from
    • Your question (of course)
  • Email it to feedback@theamphour.com and let us know whether you would be interested in joining us live on the show.

Welcome Eric Klein of Lemnos Labs!

• Eric is interested in technologies that have moved outside simply the “benefit of the iPhone” (which past guest Chris Anderson talks about)
• This includes things like batteries and ESCs, prevalent in robotics. LIDAR has also dropped in price in orders of magnitude.
• Venture capital (VC) really started in Silicon Valley with the chip industry
• There are two opposing forces in VC:
  
  • Excited about the future, so they want to invest in things like rockets and robotics
  • Venture capital needs returns and doesn’t like risks
• In hardware companies it’s extra tough, since the 1st 15 employees might need to have 10 disciplines
• “I need a hardware company to carry a 4x multiple”
  
  • Dealing with low volumes is tough for any hardware business, but extra tough when asked for that multiple and possibly selling into a consumer marketplace.
• Eric’s background is consumer hardware, working at Apple in his early days.
• Lemnos started at 30% consumer, but is now down to 5%. How does it shift from 30 to 5% over time?
• Eric asks himself, “What new solutions will be opened up in 1-5 years?”
• 3 or 4 years ago they looked at the lowered cost of components and how this impacted applied robotics
• Venn diagrams
• “Shooting in front of the duck”
• Transition from internal combustion engine (ICE) to electric infrastructure
• This includes direct things like renewables (solar, wind), but also energy banking and storage.
• One company Lemnos backs is called Electriphi, which schedules power charging for things like electric bus fleets.
• 2nd order effects
• Another company Lemnos is invested in that is doing robotics is Path Robotics. There are over 200K welding positions and the average age of welders are 50+. Eric visited a performance muffler place in Cleveland, where they were interested in using assisting robots.
• AI is actually reinforcement learning, not true AI.
• What else is on the list of Venn diagrams?
• Eric is also interested in aircraft and transport. There is increasing in “thinking”, “sensing”, and “communications”, so that leads to more focused autonomy for aircraft.
• Elroy Air is another portfolio company that helps villages in Alaska to get supplies.
• Eric is a personal investor (not through Lemnos) in Zipline. They started in Africa, no roads to get medical supplies to a village.
• Marble is an autonomous sidewalk delivery robot, but it has run into regulation problems. Now Marble is helping create rules in places they deploy to with localized governments.
• “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” ~ William Gibson
• College campus might be a decent place to deploy autonomous sidewalk vehicles. Starship did university deliveries.
• There is also potential market space for moving WIP between builds for manufacturing.
• Former guest Greg Charvat works at Humatics on indoor robots doing position finding without GPS>
• How does Eric consider pitches for funding?
• “The thing you didn’t study is storytelling”
• Eric was an intern in 1990 at Apple and lauded Steve Jobs’ ability to tell the story of technology.
• Hardware company requires 3 or 4 components
  
  • Hardware
  • Software
  • Business
  • Storytelling
• Eric will want to see a team of 2-3. The reason he usually says no to an investment is because the team wasn’t there.
• Chris asked where to seek out the sales-focused person?
  
  • At uni, you head over to the business building
  • Career development
  • Chris recommends meeting new people via a site called LunchClub.ai (the link here is Chris’ personal link and will get non-monetary “credit” for using it, but feel free to just go to the site and sign up on your own)
• Kipp Bradford
• Eric reminds people about the importance of networking
• Dishcraft is another portfolio company looking to take robotics to the restaurant dishwashing industry.
• Migrant labor peaked in the US in 2010
• Pay rates are similar as Sous Chef (Chris was surprised by this)
• Linda (the founder) looked at the problem and asked about automation
• Restaurants think about plate counts
• They can wash dishes as a service, akin to a diaper service or a linen service
• “You can put anything in front of an aas”
• The seed round is for proving market fit and reducing technical risk
• Approached by entrepreneur about how they might solve a problem for the business model
• Eric’s podcast for Lemnos is called “Into the Forge” and has 3 seasons available. He wants to capture stories of the variety of backgrounds of entrepreneurs. “Going to MIT is not necessary”
• How else does Eric recommend to meet people and network?
  
  • Going to conferences like Supercon
  • Hardware Happy Hour
  • Feed of all the virtual hardware stuff
  • Using meetups as a way to troubleshoot
• Reach out to Eric directly:
  
  • eric@lemnos.vc
  • @sircoolio on Twitter

Image courtesy of ARM video of Eric speaking

• Dave has been playing with a “Mint in box” Vintage Intel dev board
• Huffing my way to freedom
• Bake in the stackup on the gerbers, and they’ll always see it in the cam program
• Chris recalls Ted Yapo doing a test coupon for his sampling oscilloscope project.
• Dave talks about using the extra space on a panel to make test coupons in his panelization video.
• It was an “Instant sackable offense” at Dave’s past company for not ESD testing before coming into the lab, because they were working on boards that cost 6 figures.
• Chris has been thinking about team size (mostly because he’s normally a team of 1 or 2)
• Dave mentioned they always had a 2 person rule for board power ups, to make sure they didn’t miss any steps.
• Matt Parker’s book “Humble Pi”
• The Hyatt Regency tragedy reminded Chris of statics class. Tom Scott made a video about this as well.
• Team size also has Dave and Chris talking about Management. Dave didn’t mention much, but there was also a thread on the EEVblog forum about software management.
• Discussing troubleshooting and being happy when you find the source of a problem.
• AC switching on
• RCS radio
• Polaroid teardown
• Vintage Soviet control rooms
• Mimic panel
• Power topologies
• An app note from past guest Eric Bogatin about the differences between a TDR and VNA.

Thanks to Wikimedia for the truck picture we expertly photoshopped…

• There was a large electrical fire where Chris lives in Chicago.
• Chris is launching a new course for Contextual Electronics making a board with Bluetooth and cellular.
• This lead to Quectel sending him a development board for the EG91
• DB9 is still alive! It was paired with a RS-232 chip on the dev board Chris got
• Dave is doing a 5 part series about programming the 3 cent micro
• The first one is about making the programmer
• Dave wants to call out the “$0.01 linear regulator”, the SSP6206
• The cheapest regulator on Digikey is the NCP115, but it has a PITA package to solder (1mm x 1mm!)
• Carl Bugeja calls out a haptic driver (meant for the buzzer on your cell phone) that can be used as a small motor driver.
• Chris has been dealing with smaller pitch parts using his new microscope. This model was recommended in a recent Voltlog video about microscopes.
• XC6206 is another low cost linear regulator.
• CE forum post about microscope recommendations
• HEPA fume extractor video
• Alvaro explains his part setup at home
• Review of a $100 handheld scope
• Dave has also done a cheap handheld scope review
• Flux removers
• Working with magnet wire
• Ripping caps off of a board
• “Are we the baddies?”
• KiKit panelization tool in KiCad
• Limor from Adafruit panelizing boards in EAGLE
• Knocking parts off of a board with a chisel (eWaste Ben)

Thanks to Mark Ittleman for the image of the pita on a conveyor

Another episode with people talking about consulting for electronics! Welcome to our guests, listed clockwise from the top left in the episode photo.

• Alex Klimaj from ARK Electronics in Utah in the US.
• Jeremiah Gillis from Embedded Bytes, Inc in Wyoming in the US.
• Kieran O’Leary from Mixed Signal Systems, Ltd in Scotland in the UK. Kieran has been on the show on his own in the past.
• We all know each other from the Electronics Consultant Forum. If you’re interested in joining you can apply here.

Notes from the show:

• Episode 409 was also about Electronic Consulting. That episode inspired the consultant forum as a place to discuss issues related to the field.
• Working with remote clients, before and during the lockdown.
• All have considered making hardware for sale outside of client work.
  
  • Alex has made the LiPow
  • Kieran does courses and has made some demo boards for SI issues
  • Jeremiah will be making some mod hardware for his Mazda RX7
• Chris liked the idea of building a reference design after Ryan Cousins from KRTKL was on the show talking about how the Snickerdoodle is a lead generation tool.
• Having a niche is also important.
• The Long Tail (written by past guest Chris Anderson)
• Past guest / co-host Greg Charvat has written niche books that lead to opportunities at startups as a CTO.
• Schedules at home lab are tough, but not that different than before for the attendees. Kieran is used to working in the middle of the night (it was 1 am during the call for him)
• Alex recorded a video of mountain biking using a Skydio drone
• Keeping up on the latest trends via podcasts. We didn’t mention it directly but this included the machine learning episode on embedded.fm.
• Classes are always a good way to learn too, but might be more limited.
• Looking at job postings also calls out what skills are in demand. Chris referenced the HN who’s hiring posts.
• Chris wishes there was an Audm for Engineers, that reads you technical articles and/or summaries. If you’re interested email chris@theamphour.com with the subject line “Audm for engineers”
• How are you rigorous?
  
  • Standard processes in place
  • Jeremiah is learning from the medical industry, since there are more regulations. This includes things like unit testing that links back to a requirement.
• Tracking time for quality, including how well they are doing for estimates.
• Asana with Everhour
• Book: How to measure anything
• The important thing is to check whether it’s done or not. “Are we happy? Yes or no”
• A great tip: Every block in the schematic gets a number for PCB reviews
• Using a balance sheet as a budget check. Adding custom categories to your Chart of Accounts (with your accountant’s blessing) means you can categorize with more fine control.
• Some of the accounting/tracking tools we use:
  
  • Xero
  • Quickbooks
  • Zoho
• Spend your time billing hours
• War stories
  
  • Once there was a layoff, one the employees was nice enough to update Kieran on the situation
  • Jeremiah war story about client
• “I declare Force Majeure!”
• So you want to be a consultant. Also referenced in Jack Ganssle’s series on being a consultant.
• Things to learn in the next 5 years:
  
  • Business strategy (Trillion dollar coach – Bill Campbell_
  • DC power storage and EVs
  • Measuring progress (Measure What Matters – John Doerr)
• Consulting forum application
• Follow our guests online!
  
  • Kieran O’Leary on Twitter, LinkedIn and his personal site
  • Jeremiah Gillis on LinkedIn, his company site
  • Alex Klimaj on Twitter, LinkedIn and his company site

Yes, we know those are US dollars

This episode is sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz. Check out their reviews of their new product line at AskAnEngineer.us, including a video review from friend of the show Shahriar from The Signal Path.

• Dave is back to the old lab
• Chris had a single nail painted after his recent injury.
• Arcade Bust
• JAMMA board
• Video about confidence and traceability at Agilent
• Marc Andreeson wrote about how “it’s time to build”
• MIT response to that post
• Past venture capitalists on The Amp Hour
  
  • (Adjacent to a lot of VC) Scott Miller
  • Avidan Ross
  • Chrissy Meyer
• Yahoo was a shareholder of Alibaba when it went public
• Modular electronics
• Chris’s partner asking why his job was necessary…
• Water proof, oil proof cases
• Syzygy connector standard
• SamTec
• Piotr Esden-Tempski streaming making a PMOD
• Dave’s LED light video
• Color temperature
• CRI
• CFL is green
• Doug Ford LED stuff
• Electroboom video on LEDs
• Cable capacitance
• Photon counter video
• Teaching electronics current
• Dave’s tweet about a new type of RF chamber

Thanks to geralt on Pixabay for the photo of the high margin way to make money…

Today’s episode is sponsored by Saleae, makers of the Logic 8, Logic 8 Pro and Logic 16 Pro. They’re looking for your feedback in a survey and you can win a Logic 8 for your bench (or a 2nd one)! Go to Saleae.com/amphour to take the survey and enter to win.

Welcome, Ben Heckendorn AKA Ben Heck!

• Latency gaming
• Niche of niches
• Pinball machine market
• Maker Faire
• Revision 3 Editing. Ben Heck show.

(Editor’s note: These are Dave’s notes from recording)

This episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits. If you need a hand with your rework or getting your design spun up to full production, they can help.

Welcome back, Jack Ganssle! Jack was one of our first guests on The Amp Hour on episode 54.

• There have been 435 episodes of The Amp Hour and 185 editions of The Embedded Muse since our last episode. Jack has been publishing TEM since the late 90s! Consistency matters.
• Jack gets great feedback from readers, and you should be one of them! Subscribe to TEM to get a newsletter every other week!
• He is currently doing a Salary Survey, if you’d like to participate.
• One of Jack’s early scopes was a Tek 545
• Jack also started making videos since we last talked, including equipment reviews.
• The “cry of despair” is that the code is crap
• Renesas Synergy gives a code guarantee
• What is still the challenge with all of these things?
• So many communication standards!
• Paying someone allows you to give someone to yell at
• RTOS roundup
  
  • VXworks has had reports of problems and popularity seems to be dropping off. Instead, Wind River is doing more embedded Linux.
  • Jack likes Micrium as an RTOS
  • Amazon bought FreeRTOS
  • Microsoft bought ExpressLogic
• How have things spread and changed in the world of micros since the last show? Like we discussed then, 8 bit isn’t dead (and still isn’t).
• SiLabs won’t characterize their parts
• RISC V
• 196 from Intel was not well supported.
• Cross platform stuff
• He got his first taste of Linux/Unix stuff starting Maryland’s first ISPs in ’91.
• Training business during COVID has completely cut off (obviously)
• Jack does training all over the world, including Australia! He even joined Dave for a video while he was there. His course is called “Better firmware, faster“
• The focus is on quality. The average team spends 50% of work on debug.
• Jack prefers designed firmware systems. “Know where we’re going before we start building”. The best engineer he ever had would stare at the ceiling for weeks, designing the system in his head.
• Books about Agile methods
  
  • “Agile! by Bertrand Meyer
  • “Extreme Programming Explained”, by Kent Beck
  • “Balancing Agility and Discipline” – Barry Boehm
• War stories
• Chris’s bosss used to say “little R, big D” for engineering organization.
• Jack gave a great bodge wire example: you wouldn’t leave bodge wires all over the board for production, you would fix it in the next rev! Same goes for software.
• It only works when all the engineers have bought into the process.
• Space shuttle was 1 bug per 400K LOC
• How to get better results:
  
  • Code review
  • Michael Fagan review process
  • Working to a firmware standard, like MISRA
  • Use metrics to track the team.
• How do solos get better (in addition to above)? Put it on the shelf before testing it
• Card decks for programming in the 70s
• Segger code coverage tool
• Tools won’t tell you edge conditions
• Audit (QA) joke
• Fuzz testing
• The tragedy of the crashes of 737 Max airplanes and what we can learn from it. “They believed the sensor data”
• Angle of attack sensor
• Wonky temperature displays
• Pay attention to your “goesintas and goesoutas”
• Ada has a concept of “Design by contract”
• Canticle for Liebowitz
• Reach out to Jack at jack@ganssle.com

Photo taken from EEVblog #818

Today’s show is sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz. We hear in the ad today from James Lewis (@baldengineer) about how to use an oscilloscope and how probe capacitance can affect measurements. For more information about the scope discussed today, check out AskAnEngineer.us.

• Seth Hillbrand did a KiCad stream working on Medtronic’s ventilator files.
• Will be interesting to see how the license for the released files changes once the pandemic is over.
• FormLabs SLA printer
• Spreadsheet of every project
• Dave did a repair video after an inductor blew in a found laptop
• Kits for parts, parts drawers
• Alvaro (past guest, remote correspondent and co-host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast) uses PartsBox.io and a barcode scanner to set up a home inventory system for electronic components.
• Dave considered buying the inventory of an electronics hobbyist.
• IPC standard pad sizes
• Density heat map
• Members of The Amp Hour Patreon now get access to an exclusive Discord server. We’re looking for other ways we can give back to our Patrons.
• 3H meetups are going virtual as well. Have you always wanted to join a 3H? There is one a Chicago meetup coming up on Tuesday April 14th. Join the 3H discord if you’d like to connect any time.
• The Myth of the 3 Capacitor Values
• Eric Bogatin on the show
• Application notes for FPGAs
• Eric’s Rules of Thumb articles
• We were asking some questions posed from our Patrons on Discord
• Microcap is free now
• Mike Engelhardt on the show
• After listening to our episode with John Day, an apps engineer was asking if there were other practical app notes that don’t exist and should be made.
• TI AN-1148
• Keithley Low level measurement handbook
• Microchip app note about LCDs

Thanks to peakpx for the sowing picture

Welcome, Kerry Scharfglass (@borgel)!

This episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits, who are operating throughout the COVID-19 shutdown to serve medical customers (and normal customers too!). If you need priority service for a medical device related to Coronavirus, please let them know upon checkout. All other orders will be on a non-standard timeline guarantee (because of staffing, priority orders), but will have the same high quality assembly that Screaming Circuits is known for.

• Kerry was using Upverter for layout and switched to KiCad.
• He was designing a badge for DEF CON, which he did multiple years.
• The Dragonfly Badge was based upon Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age
• Synchronizing clock over IR helped each piece of hardware coordinate patterns.
• Kerry has done two HDDG talks:
  
  • From 1 to 100: Scaling and Selling a Personal Electronics Project’
  • Design for Manufacturing
  • There was another talk by Whitney Merrill about Badgelife that helped Chris understand people were building real hardware.
• Kerry Supercon talk about “medium scale”
• SnapEDA
• Talk with Nadya, Ben, and Zach
• Things learned from ‘small scale hardware war games’
• Photos of units, colorful diagrams
• “All the different things you use profit for”
• Moving from 4 layer to 6 layer
• Kerry’s first job out of school was at Lab126, the company that makes hardware for Amazon.
• At the time, they had released the Kindle and KindleFire.
• He was working on a prototype for what became the Echo.
• A (wearable) ring for Echo
• Wallwart that is cheap enough to throw into everything
• OMAP3 with DSP core
• Tracking COVID cases using phones
• Wake word on device
• Initial integration with Hue worked over UPnP
• Built with Yocto
• After Lab126, Kerry started working at Mindtribe. They were recently acquired by Accenture.
• Dockless scooter
• Speed to market as a design constraint
• How did it impact the firmware side of things?
• “If you can’t communicate with the client about what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what you’re building at all”
• Whiteboarding as a skill in front of clients
• Mercilessly hack away at requirements
• Chris has dealt in the past with consultants who are rude (and doesn’t want to be like that).
• Kerry is now the Lead firmware engineer at Span.io. They are making power panels that can work better with solar and battery systems.
• Things that are different as a full time engineer vs a consultant: “I have all of the skin in the game instead of some of the skin”
• Moving into management vs moving to smaller company
• Storage + Solar
• The Powerwall doesn’t show up as a full system, it needs to be integrated by an electrician or similar.
• Industry is different than commercial
• “Designing for service”
• One customer is the home owner, one is the installer
• EEVblog videos about solar
• Changing wifi connection by the installer
• Altium to KiCad converter
• Hackaday articles
  
  • Inner workings of a PCB
  • Embedded file systems (LittleFS)
• Check out more about Span.io

• Chris stupidly did a workout while working from home during the COVID-19 shutdown
• Chris has a new “lab” at home as well
• O’Reilly shut down events business
• Chris went to the Solid Conference in the past, run by Jon Bruner (who used to work at Formlabs but has moved on)
• Conferences going virtual
• Open Source Ventilator discussion on Hackaday
• Regulation for medical
• Dave getting stimulus from the Aussie gov’t
• Chris is getting a custom cable made
• Custom LED sign
• Product update
• Solus glass
• Chris finally went LeadFree with GC10
• Greg Davill discussed this paste when he was on the show
• Heat profiles were tough to find
• Dave warned against mixing of thermal mass components
• Vapor phase oven
• Forgot boards in the oven
• Dave made a video about LLC resonant converters, but it was a different topology (showing how many there are out there)
• Cuk (chook?) power supply
• Walt Jung
• Contactless fluid measurement app note from ADI
• Akiba on the show talking about ultrasonic montioring of water levels
• Learning in Lockdown days
• Dave is working on testing Akaline leakage (again!)
• Fluid leaking happens from a low load
• Batteries can develop a reverse charge!
• VAT (and associated processing fees) on small packages coming into the EU will be changing

Thanks to crises_crs for the lego xray photo

Welcome, John Day, Technical Fellow and FAE from Microchip!

• John has worked at Microchip for 27 years! It was almost startup when he joined in 1993.
• He previously had worked on IO subsystem modules at DEC and had interacted with FAEs.
• He did some research on the company before joining, by checking out their databook
• John’s first computers were the C64 and the TRS80.
• Microchip was a spin-off of General Instruments in 1989, with Steve Sanghi as the head of the company (still in charge!)
• Focus was on low cost components, like ROM
• We take In Circuit Emulators (ICE) and In Circuit Programmers (ICP) for granted these days, in the 80s and 90s you could only really use emulators.
• With the lower costs, engineers could go to production on an EPROM. This made more devices “field programmable”.
• Why was the PIC was different when it came out?
  • There really weren’t C compilers
  • Most programmers are not familiar with the ISA
  • Used to be writing direct assembly code
  • Didn’t have a lot of peripherals
  • Wouldn’t have a peripheral for i2c/smbus or similar
  • Timing would be really critical
  • PIC was single cycle
• The first part was the PIC16c64, it had no interrupts, 512 words.
• Microchip was early movement into flash, the first component with it was the PIC16f877 in 1997
• They were also the first to have in circuit debugging; John Andrews and John Day chatted about having this and did a proposal for the debug registers to the chip designers. The software group followed. This was for MPLAB 8.
• ICD1 was developed outside of Microchip, but later pulled in house
• It came up after talking to customers about their needs
• The PIC32MZ was another good example of working with customers. They talked with Clint Cole and Keith Vogel of Digilent. They ran into an ADC non linearity that drove changes to the silicon.
• PIC32EF
• In order to issue and errata, engineers need to cut down source code to minimal size for isolation of the issue.
• John gets to work with automotive, gaming, commercial, and a lot more types of customers.
• Sometimes he finds himself writing code for customers, like special IP that is needed. This happened for a high volume part that needed better test coverage to find errors that happened once every million units. It turned out to be a brownout problem.
• John used and likes his Saleae logic.
• Microchip started an analog products group in late 90s, especially because a lot of the IP was developed for the microcontrollers.
• They bought Microsemi / Actel 2 years ago.
• FAEs at Microchip now have “specialist areas”
• ATC chips are ultra secure chips that hold root keys
• App Notes
  • The LED Cube is a Harmony reference design, meant for PIC32, Harmony3
  • In-Circuit Serial Programming (ICSP) of Calibration Parameters 
  • D/A Conversion Using PWM and R-2R Ladders to Generate Sine and DTMF Waveforms  
    • DTMF for Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS)
    • The R2R ladder is also used on OpenScope
  • Piecewise Linear Interpolation on PIC12/14/16 Series
    Microcontrollers
    • Linearizing a sensor with low power components
• App notes can take a while: the LED cube took over a year. This is because they’re publishing them, in addition to their regular job.
• People expect code generator / configurator tools these days, so the nature of app notes have changed.
• John assigns himself personal projects to learn new technologies
• Building Nixie tube clock to learn boost converters, ethernet stacks (this is shown in the photo above)
• Aside from microcontrollers, John is a huge fan of Pinball
• “You can always have space for a pinball machine”. In fact, he fit a pinball machine in his college dorm room.
• Gottleib Genie
• Ran on Rockwell 4 bit micros – 3 of them
• Batteries used to retain settings, but they would leak and destroy MPU
• Ralph Fien in Germany took MAME project and made a pinball machine, which all ran on a RPi
• 3 PIC18s to talk to IO
• There are drivers on separate boards, similar to TIP102s.
• 4 bit latches on the bus
• Periphieral IO Expander (PIA)
• NI-WUMPH
• Mission Pinball Framework (MPF) allows you to write all your game rules in Python.
• Ben Heck made a custom pinball machine
• John’s first machine was a 1973 Gottleib Kingpin, for which he did a restoration.
• You can hear John on The Classic Pinball podcast for episodes 27 and 28.
• John has had some interesting experiences as an FAE:
  • He was offered a gig (in cash) to build a cable tv descrambler
  • UPS design for a customer in a bad neighborhood
  • Almost blowing himself up while building high voltage power supply during co-op
• John is a fan of Dave’s teardowns and learning from them

This episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits. As discussed in the ad this week, Duane Benson has written about the importance of good footprints and avoiding via-in-pad on the Screaming Circuits blog.

• Coronavirus has a lot of people working from home. Dave says Chris should have finalized the “portalab” project talked about many years ago.
• Chris travels with his Analog Discovery 2 (which can be bundled with Contextual Electronics), the Aneng 8008 (recommended by Dave), and an assortment of dev boards.
• Schools are telling students not to come back to Uni for Coronavirus.
• Dave needs to refresh his $50 DMM shootout for people working at home.
• Clint Cole from Digilent was on the show talking education
• Chris finally got a 121GW and likes it! But he needs to update the firmware.
• Hot air + soldering iron is a good buy if you’re going to be at home. If you’re moving around a lot, perhaps a TS100 or TS80.
• Dave was tempted to buy an Electric Ute (pickup truck). It was a DIY project built with love (video)
• Chevy Volt discontinued in the US, but the Chevy Bolt is an interesting replacement with a long range. It may end up in Australia, but many of the EVs are expensive there.
• Dave doesn’t plan on building a DIY powerwall (battery storage for excess solar capacity) but Paul Kennett and Jehu Garcia (couldn’t remember his name) both have multiple videos about this topic.
• 150K limits on business deductions in Australia
• Dave’s workspace is up for lease! Work near Dave…with him as your landlord!
• Boosted Boards laying off people, because of tariffs. Phil from adafruit wrote about this and also how adafruit has been dealing with the tariffs and the COVID-19 shutdowns in China.
• Discussion on the forum
• 10 day hospital build in China
• Seeed Studio started the OPL a few years back. They since have introduced the “Shenzhen OPL“, which isn’t a method of making parts more genericized, but instead lists a lot of parts that might not be available outside of the China supply chain.
• Dave thinks businesses will be so hard up for revenue, that the next EEVblog meetup will be at the Sydney Operahouse
• The Open Hardware Summit was all virtual. You can watch the videos on their playlist of the event.
• The CERN OHL v2 is now out. Watch Javier Serrano from CERN discuss it during his Open Hardware Summit talk.
• Unsurprising headline: “Reclusive Engineer Stays In Lab”
• Chris played “the man behind the curtain” when a last minute board incident meant that he needed to simulate parts of a system using an Analog Discovery 2 with some scripting.
• A fun page of Bit Twiddling (bitwise operations) for writing tight C code.
• Dave is a recursion fanboy, he used it in his formula solver program back in the day.
• Check out this visualization of Moore’s Law and how processors have tracked it pretty well.

This episode is sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz. Check out their reviews of their new product line at AskAnEngineer.us, including a video review from friend of the show Shahriar from The Signal Path.

Welcome, Dr Adrian Tang of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)!

• Adrian is the only CMOS chip designer at JPL (though he has grad students)
• He got his PhD at UCLA working on ultra high frequency devices. Check out some of his projects on his personal website.
• JPL has instruments that can measure these high frequencies.
• Terahertz spectroscopy
• There’s a noise floor in the universe, but gases tend to emit at certain frequencies in the 50-500 GHz region.
• Resonance in the THz range
• Pressure has to be low
• Trying to process as much bandwidth as possible
• Try to get 3GHz of bandwidth out of devices.
• 4000-8000 point FFT
• Power budget might only be 50W on a satellite.
• Was doing commercial CMOS previously
• Horn antenna + lens
• Tempest D mission
• Using cosmic background as a cal point
• What is the output data?
• Time domain data
• Using the LO to remove the movement of the spacecraft
• Doppler properties
• Herschel telescope
• Reflector to focus it down into the feed is about a meter
• Has to be accurate to lambda over 20
• Goes into a receiver feed
• Mixer needs an LO
• IF comes out of the mixer at 3-4 GHz
• Takes it through the IF chain
• Amps and filters
• Apply a window function
• Polyphase filter
• Compute the FFT
• 1 sample isn’t enough to see something
• Average over 1000s of samples
• Rosetta orbiter was put out by ESA
• The more spectrum, the more chance to discover something
• RekTangLE balloon mission
• Measuring NO2 at 570 GHz
• Did have a failure
• This was one of the first CMOS chip to do atmospheric measurement
• Isotopes have different lines
• Heavy water and regular water
• Heavy water is naturally occurring
• Everywhere you go, the ratio is comparable, in the solar system
• Moreau on a jovian comet
• How have things moving into CMOS?
• Active and Passive Receivers
• Northrop Grumman makes some of the only amplifiers that can operate up to 600 GHz
• Past guest Tony Long talked about (relatively) high frequencies and works at NG
• Passive is a mixer first instead of an amplifier first
• Schottky mixer
• Express sensitivity in terms of difference
• Hot electron bolemetric mixers
• Exotic semiconductor junctions
• What has improved?
• Windfreak
• Packaging is not simple
• Waveguide is the only thing that will work at 100G
• They do a lot of the fab in house at JPL
• Measuring snow in the Sierras using Ku band radar
• SWE – Snow water equivalent
• SpectreRF
• Built in self test
• Everything on chip is the best case
• Using different process technologies
• 65 nm process technology cannot work with 180 GHz signals.
• What is this stuff useful for?
• Short range 60 Ghz
• Ken Cooper
• Threat detection, 680 GHz radar, 30 GHz bandwidth
• Another balloon “whatsup” will go up soon. Read about it and other balloon launches (past and present) here.
• Astros – 8 px, multi THz telescope
• Ground penetrating radar
• UAV snow sensor
• Check out more of Adrian’s work on sadcircuitdesigner.com
• Or check out his papers on his “articles” page

Today’s episode is sponsored by Screaming Circuits, who can place the newest and smallest pitch parts, even on low run, quick turn assembled boards (their specialty)

• Dave will be taking his new BlackDiamond spot 325 headlamp when he goes canyoning
• Lithium battery can be 4.8V out of the pack
• Forum on mfg
• Chris Church was on the Macrofab Engineering Podcast talking about the Coronavirus effects on manufacturing
• Bill Gates in documentary about viruses
• Zoom stock really taking off due to coronavirus
• DO NOT USE THIS CHIP
• NAS in the Trash (eevblog video)
• Intel C2000 atom processor bricks devices
• LPC clock 0
• Errata on C2000
• Episode next week will be with a designer who does 300 GHz +  designs (?!)
• Chip of the Week: The Tibbo Plus1. It’s an all-in-one SOC that runs Yocto Linux.
• Chris has been challenged with board clearances and is hoping KiCad v6 DRC improves some features.
• Morse Blinkies as a Service: a web program by Ian Ross that generates circuits on demand…to make morse codes.
• It uses SKiDL, which is a text based netlist plugin for KiCad written by former guest Dave Vandenbout. Dave gave a keynote about SKiDL at KiCon 2019
• EEVblog JTAG video / Boundary Scan
• Tag Connect
• Making a toaster from scratch
• How we record the amp hour

Thanks to Simon Scarfe for the picture of the headlamp scariness

This week we are sponsored by Keysight. Amp Hour listeners get a bonus entry if they sign up for the upcoming Keysight Wave event using this link, which starts on March 2nd. You can also view some of the content discussed in the ad this week, such as the The ESD Checklist, 4 easy ways to blow up your test gear, and Can a cable electrically damage equipment?

Welcome, Paul Thompson, CEO of Pakton Technology

• Pakton make electric fence controllers
• Dave found a Pakton controller in the dumpster
• Paul thinks it was sent out for EMC testing and never came back
• Transformer
• SCR
• MOV
• Follow @JVAtechnologies on Twitter (the brand behind Pakton)