Ted is a fan of soldering AND stock photography

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

• Ted is a lifelong electronics hobbyist
• He studied engineering physics in college.
• Full color faxes were a thing in Japan but never took off elsewhere.
• After working on scanning equipment, he moved on to doing networking work.
• He also did some consulting after Cisco.
• Mid-way through his career, he went back to graduate school.
• Wrote a paper about finding telephone wires using LIDAR for helicopter pilots.
• Transitioned into AR, sort of like Projection Mapping. It was used for architectural daylighting simulation.
• Going back to school is tough for what you remember. Ted had to relearn linear algebra. He recommends using Gilbert Strang’s lectures, which gave more context.
• After school, Ted did consulting with a few partners, mostly New England.
• Ted got started posting to Hackaday with 2016 HaD prize.
• His first entry was the “Diode clock“, which utilizes the fact that diodes act like switches for RF when you pass DC current through them.
• “Upping serendipity quotient”
• Using diodes as an AND gate
• Using pin diodes for a doppler radio project
• 1n4007 can act as a crude pin diode at certain frequency
• Built digital clock that uses diodes for the counters
• Assembly instructions – 46 boards!
• Power supply is around 6 MHz
• One of his other popular projects is the Tritiled, which helps figuring out where things are in the dark
• Based around the idea of tritium lights
• Modern LEDs are extremely efficient at a certain current
• Droop happens at higher currents
• The 8 GHz sampling oscilloscope is a more recent project
• Research came out of the diode clock
• Schottky diodes for sampling
• Tek S4 sampling head 14.5 GHz
• Diodes can switch in 10-15 pS
• Stroboscopic effect
• Equivalent time sampling
• Tek 11801 from 1989
• Nyquist still applies
• Verifying on the bench is difficult
• Paper from picosecond pulse lab
• Jim Williams using an avalanche diode or a step response diode
• Looking at RMS error
• Another architecture 1975 by SP McCabe
• Using a fast comparator to sample waveform, similar to a successive approximation ADC
• ADCMP582
• That’s the time base calibration
• What will people be able to build with an 8 GHz scope?
• Using it to measure transmission lines on PCB boards
• Using Time Domain Reflectometry
• Ted has a splitter TDR head
• Tracking generator + Spectrum analyzer = Scalar network analyzer
• Rigol came out with cheap spectrum analyzer, DSA815, Ted got one of the early units
• Tracking generator outputs signals that are the same as the frequency on the spectrum analyzer
• Ted gave a talk about this at last year’s Hackaday Superconference
• There is no phase in an SNA
• SNAs are harder to calibrate
• Paper was about how to do two measurements to compensate for errors in the generator
• Chris has a friend doing Python scripting on test equipment via their ethernet jacks.

You can find Ted on Twitter, Hackaday.io and as a writer for Hackaday

Welcome, Ben Eater! You may know Ben from his YouTube videos showing how to build a breadboard 8 bit computer

• Ben’s background is in software/networking
  
  • 0h 0m 33s
• He has been an electronics hobbyist for a long time
  
  • 0h 1m 21s
• Digital electronics – Albert Paul Malvino
  • 0h 3m 0s
• The 8 bit computer started for a hackathon
  
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• Bottom up learning
  
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• We depend upon abstractions
  
  • 0h 15m 19s
• We have leaky abstractions
  
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• Micro instruction
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• 16B of memory
  
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• Instruction or data
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• Program with dip switches
  
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• Program in and then switch into run mode
  
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• 4 registers
  
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• ALU
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• Output register
  
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• Can go a couple hundred hertz
  
  • 0h 24m 26s
• Instructions and microinstructions
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• Combinationatorial logic circuit
  
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• Control word
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• Assembly programming and register model
  
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• Optimizations
  
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• every instruction takes 6 clock cycles
  
  • 0h 34m 24s
• What does the community look like?
  
  • 0h 35m 6s
• 14 breadboards
  
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• Accessibility
  
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• Using TTL logic chips
  
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• Can stick an LED on an LS output
  
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• The community is mostly on the subreddit /r/beneater
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• Ben is now selling a kit
  • 0h 39m 43sTTL
• Comes with the LS chips
  
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• Seeing how people struggle
  
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• microcosm of the education system
  
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• Extrinsic motivation
  
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• Dopamine loops
  
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• Ben previously worked at Khan Academy (KA)
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• In his student days he didn’t like math
  
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• Stumbled on a bug when checking out KA.
  
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• Volunteered time to KA.
  
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• Hired on in 2011
  
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• They are a non-profit tech company
  
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• Taught classes in the networking space
  
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• Books on education
  
  • 1h 1m 16s
• Mindstorms by Seymour Papert
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• Logo programming language
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• Turtle
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• Mindset by Carol Dweck
  • • 1h 6m 4s
• Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset
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• Metacognition at Khan
  
  • 1h 8m 6s
• Game designers have figured this out
  
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• Mario level 1
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• RSA animate of Dan Pink
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• Mastery Autonomy Purpose
  • 1h 15m 15s
• Making more videos, there is a newer one about CRCs
  • 1h 19m 28s
• Find Ben on Reddit, YouTube, or Twitter
  • 1h 20m 38s

Welcome Kieran O’Leary, principal of Mixed Signal Systems!

• Chris knows Kieran via the consulting forum. You can apply to join here.
• Went to school in Cork, Ireland
• Hard IP inside of FPGAs started on the Virtex2 pro
• Now they’re doing FPGA next to RF sections (which from a noise perspective is crazy)
• FAEs vs AEs
• “Applications engineers are responsible for shepherding the design from development into the customers hands”
• AEs understand the need for trust with a customer
• Kieran has worked at Xilinx, ADI and Wolfson
• “If your client is pushing through a million units a week, it’s a statistical certainty that any problem in the silicon is going to surface”
• Sometimes you don’t want the cutting edge silicon
• “You want to be on the leading edge but not on the bleeding edge”
• Making eval and dev kits at chip companies
• Was it more about making a breakout board? Or something interesting?
• Walking through silicon coming from the fab
• Hand carrying the silicon back from the packaging facility
• Pinouts move sometimes!
• Custom sockets are expensive to make.
• THD measurements might look poor if the connection between the socket and the device look bad
• Boards for the general public need better supporting collateral
• In 2012, Kieran decided to move into consulting
• He often helps clean up technical debt on the hardware side of things
• Things to watch out for in Signal Integrity
• “Current flows in loops, either you or Maxwell will determine the return path”
• Dr Howard Johnson on The Amp Hour
• Split ground planes
• “There’s nothing foolproof to a sufficiently proficient fool”
• Troubleshooting EMC problems
  
  1. Check the values on the schematic
  2. Take a nearfield probe and see what you see
  3. Look for common culprits
     
     1. See where signals are jumping over a split plane
     2. Termination resistors in the wrong place
•  Helps to add placeholders for future filters and termination
• Maxwell was Scotish, so there is a statue commemorating him. There is a Maxwell museum, as well!
• Follow Kieran on Twitter!
• His company Mixed Signal Systems is also on there.
• Kieran helped run the EMC Compo 2015 – The 10th International Workshop on the EMC of Integrated Circuits
• 12th int’l is coming up in China

• 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

• Teardown 2019 was a great event!
• These are a couple of shorter interviews, meant to show what the networking is like in a conference setting. It’s not for everyone, but I think it’s a good thing to try at some point.
• Interview 1
  
  • Jesse Vincent of Keyboardio
  • Watch Jesse’s talk from HDDG a few years ago
  • Jesse also wrote a great blog post about another negative experience. (also check out the other updates on their kickstarter campaign)
• Interview 2
  
  • Adrian Studer, creator of the Wegmatt AIS receiver.
  • He was giving a talk on reverse engineering called “It’s 8051s All the Way Down”. Video isn’t available yet but slides can be found here.
• Interview 3
  
  • Zach Archer of Control Z Inc
  • He did an interactive display for the Seattle Symphony recently (and is now looking for new work).
• Interview 4
  
  • A recap with Piotr Esden-Tempski and Jeff Keyzer

The image for this episode is during the “puzzle hunt” section of Teardown (Jeff Keyzer is the only guest shown). I was on the winning team, but did nothing of consequence to help them out.

• 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

• KiCon talks have been announced! The conference isn’t just for people using KiCad
• Electronex shares space with a PCB conference
• Dave went to a meetup last night with employees of a former startup.
• Dave is considering going to HW startup conference in Queensland
• uSupply chugging along
• Finding bugs in the GCC compiler
• Custom planar transformer will be lower cost, lower profile
• Billing for hours
• Attaining specs
• Joulescope by Matt Liberty is similar to the uCurrent. He was just on Embedded.fm discussing his new product.
• ST(? NXP?) board for doing measurements
• Qoitech Otii
• nRF91
• Amazon and big players working with IoT. Think this is the show referenced.
• FreeRTOS with AWS will be supporting early RISC-V chips
• MongooseOS
• Past shows with Mike Harrison
  
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  • 294
  • 412
• Apply to the Consultant Forum
• Latchup is a conference for open silicon happening in Portland May 4-5
• Kickstarter and China
• Former guest Robert Feranec talks about how to make cheaper PCBs
• Tympan is an open source hearing aid and will be launching a campaign for their rev D version soon
• Grace Hopper discusses nanoseconds

• Ozzy Man
• Uploading files to manufacturers like JLC
• Positive vs negative layers
• Etchant
• Kickstarter and China Manufacturing: You’ve got it all wrong
• Cost of the first prototype
• Building with custom stuff
• OSHWA will not be doing a conference in September in China
• Video about free energy
• Dave is working with some OLD chips
• Working with an unprotected 18650
• LCDs don’t flow in freezer temps
• Temperature cycling
• USB 4.0 Spec Announced

• Chris will be dealing with everything after KiCon
• Cadence Allegro
• The downsides of someone showing you how to do things
• The Feynman method
  • Pointer example
• Current through a capacitor
• Building up intuition first
• 100 page debate Walter Lewyn lecture on kirchoff
• Electroboom built a device to test the theory (which started the debate on the forum)
• Big Clive nearly put himself in the hospital!
• Dave had a Nobel Laureate — Barry Marshall — over to the lab
• Testing it on himself
• Article discussing the signal integrity decisions of the BeagleBone Black
• Eric Bogatin on The Amp Hour
• 1 in a million problems
• Dave’s example of a best case board
  
  • gnd
  • signal
  • gnd
  • signal
  • gnd
  • signal
  • gnd
  • signal
  • gnd
  • power
• Choice of termination might matter more
• Blind and buried is better than whole vias
• Chris made a video about what blind and buried vias look like
• PCB Shopper
• Getting coupons for PCB reviews
• Dave has been on YouTube for 10 years!
• There will be a KiCad course at Microchip Masters
• Latchup Conference is happening the first weekend in May in Portland
• Former guest Bil Herd is doing a video series testing high speed PCB 
• Ring of Chronos high speed cameras
• Former guest David Kronstein and his company Krontech are coming out with new v2.1, they did a teardown of the camera
• Great Scott did a video about battery management
• Solar plus storage costs are under $0.10 per kwh
• Are the costs actually coming down?
• There’s nothing better than lithium ion coming soon
• South Australia installation Saved $40M already
• Chris has been listening to a book/lecture series about energy generation and storage
• The KiCad banana!

Thanks to lady traveler for the brain mechanics picture

• Dave is judging the Keysight innovation challenge
• EEs talk tech
• May 1996 issue of Elektor had a very similar project to Dave’s later project (which he didn’t know about). He has previously reviewed Electronics Australia magazines and their demise.
• ISP1016 CPLD 
• Dave made a video about the logic analyzer
• 40 MSPS
• Timing analysis mode vs state analysis mode 
• Throwing a scope on it
• Custom heat sinks
• Volumetric efficiency
• The form factor informs the design
• Aluminum extrusion video (how to get the heat out)
• Heat sink design video
• Heat sinks on previous incarnation of uSupply
• Plastic melt story
• DP832 power supply has thermal shutdown problems
• Error stack up inside on a hot sydney day
• Precompliance
• The Practicing Mind

• 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 Chrissy Meyer, partner at Root Ventures!

• We previously had talked to Avidan Ross, the founder and partner at Root Ventures. 
  
  • 0h 0m 30s
• They try to target talented founders and not the company
  
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• Rose Hulman
  
  • 0h 8m 10s
• Lincoln Labs
  
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• Went back to school at Stanford for an EE MS/PhD
  
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• She started at Apple and the iPhone launched the first week on internship
  
  • 0h 11m 27s

• Started as a PM
  
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• Anti-GANTT charts
  
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• Baijiu
  
  • 0h 15m 10s
• Chrissy helped ship 3 generations of iPod touch, one nano and the beginning of the Apple Watch.
  
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• Apple makes scaling look easy
  
  • 0h 17m 5s
• They have developed the formula over decades
  
  • 0h 17m 28s
• Walking into Foxconn
  
  • 0h 18m 37s
• Dealing with the different layers of manufacturing
  
  • 0h 21m 5s
• Final assembly and PCBA is normally the same location
  
  • 0h 21m 20s
• Vertical integration is more competitive at scale
  
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• DJI is a good example
  
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• Early stage startups have access to higher levels of integration…but it doesn’t always make sense
  
  • 0h 23m 37s
• “Think really long and hard about who you’re choosing, make sure [the manufacturer is] a good fit for your size and complexity”
  
  • 0h 24m 41s
• 1 in a million problems are actual problems for high volume production.
  
  • 0h 26m 17s
• Tiger team
  
  • 0h 26m 45s
• The problem is getting a line moving
  
  • 0h 28m 8s
• Glue machines
  
  • 0h 28m 56s
• HDDG talk
  
  • 0h 30m 1s
• DfM
  
  • 0h 33m 25s
• Mechanical parts seem to have less consistency
  
  • 0h 37m 38s
• Electrical is a bit more cut and dried
  
  • 0h 38m 43s
• Big companies are talking to suppliers from day one
  
  • 0h 41m 43s
• With companies like Apple, these discussions are shrouded in secrecy
  
  • 0h 42m 33s
• “You have to be high touch if you want to be fast”
  
  • 0h 43m 47s
• Joined Square with 300 people
  
  • 0h 46m 9s
• Cost was everything
  
  • 0h 46m 46s
• Developing hardware for businesses was different
  
  • 0h 47m 15s
• Sales cycles can take a while
  
  • 0h 48m 24s
• It requires the perfect spacing between iterations
  
  • 0h 49m 24s
• Was a founding member of the startup Pearl Automation
  
  • 0h 50m 41s
• They made wifi based backup camera for users
  
  • 0h 51m 42s
• So much of startup success is timing
  
  • 0h 52m 28s
• Learned about how to be a startup, which was useful for her time now at Root.vc
  
  • 0h 54m 30s
• Different for VCs that write lots of checks
  
  • 0h 56m 41s
• Root invests in 6-8 companies per year
  
  • 0h 57m 25s
• Instrumental.ai
  
  • 0h 59m 18s
• They do final inspection that can automatically flag anomalies 
  
  • 1h 1m 0s
• What are you Interested in the hardware space now?
  
  • 1h 3m 24s
• Chrissy is interested in tools for manufacturing, like supplier discovery
  
  • 1h 4m 7s
• We’re far away from the promised “dark factories” in the world of automation
  
  • 1h 4m 53s
• Reach out about opportunities, either on LinkedIn or via their site.
  
  • 1h 6m 30s
• The next step is to come in to brainstorm!
  
  • 1h 7m 47s

• KiCon is over! The only thing that really went wrong is Chris lost his wallet briefly.
• Former guest Chris Anderson (@Chr1sa on twitter) is no longer going to TED conferences
• Matt Foley motivational speaker
• Simone Giertz is our only past guest who has given a full TED talk (?)
• Derek Kozel
• Dave “threw a grenade”
• PCB wars
• Dave made two predictions
  
  • Displace the low end tools
  • There will be a commercial venture supporting KiCad at some point
• We discussed something similar in episode 188
• KiCon Developer panel
• Chris stood up a site for Reality Instruments, which is for add-ons for the Valve Index
• Open source hardware
• Names matter, don’t lock yourself in
• Trademarks and brands
• Tim Poole of Subverse
• Anki shuts down, lays off staff
• They had just done a new Kickstarter project
• Boston Dynamics’ Spot Mini showcased during a Tech Crunch event
• James Bruton
• Silicon Valley is a documentary
• The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley (documenatry about Elizabeth Holmes / Theranos)
• Mousr
• Brian Benchoff posts about the cost realities of low volume production
• A twitter thread about #badgelife and getting started with electronics

Image from the SNL Sketch “Motivational Speaker”

This is the first of a couple episodes that will be posted from KiCon 2019.

This interview was in two parts with some of the developers from the KiCad project (there are many people involved with making KiCad a reality). We talked with:

• Wayne Stambaugh
• Maciej “Orson” Suminski
• Tomasz Wlostowski
• Jon Evans
• Seth Hillbrand

Thanks to Piotr Esden-Tempski (our first remote correspondent) and Alvaro Prieto (co-host of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast) for help with recording.

(Image above: Seth Hillbrand, Wayne Stambaugh (facing away from the camera), Maciej “Orson” Suminski, Tomasz Wlostowski, Jon Evans, all working together on KiCad development at the end of the conference)

Welcome, Bart Dring!

• Hobby of motion contollers and CNC
• Got started at Williams pinball (who also make games like Joust and Space shuttle)
• A lot of wear in pinball cabinets.
• Got the itch to move onto a “real engineering” job.
• Microwave for deep space networks
• Multi kilowatt units with high power dissipation
• Waveguide switches
• Getting heat out of the potting
• Used on things like news trucks and DSN satellites.
• Military specs for harsh environment
• CNC machines were discussed by past guests:
  
  • John Saunders
  • Nadya Peek
• Sending steps to machines was easier with a parallel port. Now need something like a USB to parallel.
• Started doing tutorials on Instructables, wanted to win a contest with a human powered Segway to win Epilog laser.
• Started to document along the way on Buildlog.net
• First comprehensive laser cutter kit out there, the 2.x laser sold 400 kits
• Maker Slide was a system for building machines. The Kickstarter raised $25K
• Since it was open source, others re-started KS campaigns 5 times around the world
• Factory for extrusion is like 300m long
• Wrote a yield optimizer to spit out a better way to cut material in his garage.
• Laen (OSH Park) also talked about optimizers when he was on the show.
• Approached Inventables to fulfill Maker Slide orders.
• Worked out a deal for a royalty, they still pay it on orders.
• Inventables makes Easel, which is a web based program for working with their routers.
• Inventables also took on the Shapeko, designed by Edward Ford. That machine is made out of Maker Slide.
• GRBL is the motion controller behind all of Bart’s CNC machines.
• It started with the creator interested in optimizing the code to put on an Arduino.
• RAMPS controllers
• Plug in stepper drivers
• G-code
• Bart ported GRBL onto PSoC5
• Why PSoC5? Bart likes the graphical interface and uses it a lot for prototyping.
• Motion planner
• Started looking at ESP32 for Bluetooth/WiFi
• Robots run off the phones
• Angus doing Arduino stuff for Espressif helped to move things along.
• API has public functions for RTOS, so it was harder in a real time control sense.
• Plan was to use primary core for GRBL, other core for communication.
• Bart put the project down for a while, but Jeroen Domburg (Sprite_tm) convinced him to try again.
• The processor had a lot more RAM than other boards, especially Arduino.
• Finished September 2018
• Tindie sales
• Complete web UI for sender
• Web page has jogging controls and configuration
• Hoping to put an Easel-like program on there
• Nickelbot
• Square coasters with traction feed (Coasty the Coaster Toaster)
• Exotic kinematics
• Polar coaster
• Converting polar to Cartesian coordinates
• Drawbot badge
• Hobby servos
• “Adorably wiggly lines“
• Workshop at Supercon
• Scripting in python
• Polar Platform String Art Machine
• Open loop vs closed loop
• Twang
• Follow Bart on twitter as @buildlog

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)

Welcome Ken Burns of TinyCircuits!

• TinyCircuits is located in North East Ohio (NEO), in Akron.
• Ken also attended the University of Akron
• Decided to stay in the Midwest
• Past guest Todd Bailey talked about going to a job for working with graybeards
• Ken used to work for Avid, which was later bought by Avnet/E14.
• Since it’s a design shop, he got to try out different types of electronics.
• This included learning the entire process and taking it to a CM.
• Wireless HART developed by Rosemount (now Emerson), based on 802.15.4
• MACtek made a PC based interface device for wireless HART
• Dust networks bought by LT
• The standard uses a negotiated time for when to wake up to save power.
• Pepperl and Fuchs bought out Mactek
• Decided to leave Avid to start a company
• Wanted to make a smart sensor platform
• This was late 2000s (2008), so Arduino was getting started
• TinyDuino (and the other boards with the same form factor) is 20×20 mm
• TinyCircuits have launched 3 kickstarters
• Digispark was 2 months prior
• This was early kickstarter days. His Kickstarter video recorded rough.
• The stretch goal was to do mfg, inspired by companies like Dimension Engineering
• Couldn’t have done it otherwise because of the volumes being low per board
• Kickstarter money worked as seed money
• Design was done, but the manufacturing all the problem
• Example system is a processor board + USB shield + GPS (for tracking cats)
• Was in MAKE magazine for that kit
• Everything is open source
• Didn’t need as many feeders as they got for the PNP machine.
• Bought a used machine
• Machine was from 1996
• It had 80 feeders included and was bought with the reflow oven
• All delivered for 25K
• Juki
• Started with 0402
• Bought it from a company that was reputable
• A month of tinkering to get it started
• The bigger learning curve is making consistent product
• “Paste is by far the most critical step in the process”
• Yields started at 40%
• Need to use fresh paste every time
• Yield is 99% now
• Dek 265 helped make things more consistent.  Got it a year after original stuff for $3K
• They are now running with a Panasonic SP60
• Got a new PNP 2 years ago, also from Juki.
• New machines allows small runs or big runs
• Allows testing of a lot of different products
• It’s gotten much cheaper to send it out than when they started.
• Doing manufacturing allows you to do a higher mix, which might be cost prohibitive with sending out to a CM.
• TinyCircuits has done some CM work where it makes sense. Ken says they’re not going to offer ISO9001 or anything.
• It makes sense if the customer wants something custom designed
• Robotic golf caddy
• Chris asked what customers are asking for at TInyCircuits.
• Roadmap is higher end stuff
• Whiskers are breakout sensors.
• They are now funding on Kickstarter!
• 5 pin input mux allows you to talk to different versions of the same sensor (up to 16)
• Dealing with the Tariff
• Selling batteries on digikey
• “18650 is the biggest thing we sell on eBay”
• Selling on digikey and mouser
• Johnny 5 / firmata (used by past guest Jason Huggins)
• Latest stuff supports circuit python
• Little Bits sold to Sphero for unknown amount after raising $70M.
• Working with group out of MIT
• tinycircuits.com
• They work out of the old Goodrich plant in Akron

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

Welcome, Travis Goodspeed!

• Chris and Travis first met at after ESC Chicago in 2010.
• TI Developer conference 2008 got into msp430
• Chronos watch, had an “open source” design, much of the info was missing.
• The GoodWatch project has an RPN calculator, assembler , disassembler, radio onboard
• The chipcon430 was targeted at electric power meters
• POCSAG
• dapnet
• IM ME
• P25 PTT
• Travis wrote a jammer for P25
• Why special agent johnny still can’t encrypt
• Sandy Clark
• IM ME uses the same radio core
• P25 is 4FSK
• DMR
• The MD380 is a digital mode HT radio (larger than a baofeng) for HAMs that costs about $90
• MD380 tools on github
• “As soon as open tools catch up, I jump ship to them”
• The GoodFET project was built upon a similar msp430 Flash Emulation Tool
• Mask ROM bootloader in msp430
• Mike Ossmann wanted to redesign and paid Travis $5 for the files. This became the GreatFET.
• Goodwatch also has python env
• Travis got into ham radio at SkydogCon
• Old tv newsvan
• Facedancer project, now run by Kate Tempkin
• Initially was for testing usb vulnerabilities
• Time of check to time of use check
• Kate attacks the Nintendo switch
• Studebaker
• Vapor lock
• Knoxville
• Recon Montreal
• Camp++
• Follow Travis on Twitter @travisgoodspeed
• Do you know anyone at TI? Please have them reach out to Travis about the TI conference and how to bring it back

Welcome JP Norair of Haystack Technologies!

• Chris knows JP from the Consulting Forum. Want to join us? Apply here
  • 0h 0m 40s
• LoRa
  • 0h 1m 49s
• Chirp Spread Spectrum
  • 0h 1m 53s
• LoRaWAN
  • 0h 3m 16s
• The standard initially came from IBM
  
  • 0h 3m 23s
• Formed the LoRa alliance
  • 0h 3m 34s
• Comcast strategy shifting
  
  • 0h 4m 9s
• Sigfox was a competitor
  
  • 0h 4m 55s
• Senet
  • 0h 6m 53s
• Campus deployments
  
  • 0h 8m 44s
• Moving data on LoRaWAN
  
  • 0h 9m 25s
• Was probably meant for meter reading
  
  • 0h 10m 17s
• Haystack
  
  • 0h 11m 30s
• DASH7
  • 0h 11m 35s
• Savi
  • 0h 11m 58s
• Asset tracking on a global scale
  
  • 0h 12m 49s
• Exposed to technology standardization
  
  • 0h 15m 43s
• iso18000-7
  • 0h 15m 59s
• People who are contacting are using LoRaWAN and it hasn’t worked
  
  • 0h 20m 11s
• QOS means there are packets that are received correctly
  
  • 0h 21m 21s
• LPWAN is not that mature
  
  • 0h 22m 58s
• Borrowing from space based telemetry
  
  • 0h 23m 6s
• Claude Shannon – Information theory
  • 0h 24m 15s
• There is built in error correction in the LoRa hardware
  
  • 0h 27m 43s
• Matt Knight episode from ToorCamp
  • 0h 27m 55s
• Alphabet soup of standards
  
  • 0h 32m 26s
• One of them specifies a convolutional code
  • 0h 32m 35s
• Soft decision
  
  • 0h 33m 39s
• Proprietary stuff sweetens the deal
  
  • 0h 35m 56s
• LDPC error correction
  • 0h 36m 9s
• Startups are willing to take a risk
  
  • 0h 40m 25s
• Bigger companies are worried about failing
  
  • 0h 40m 33s
• Working with startups
  
  • 0h 41m 52s
• Larger businesses are willing to pay for time and materials
  
  • 0h 42m 1s
• Payment on milestones
  
  • 0h 42m 34s
• Selling hardware allows you to put cost into it
  
  • 0h 44m 3s
• Mobile vs fixed
  
  • 0h 45m 22s
• Link budget
  • 0h 49m 7s
• ITU region 2
  
  • 0h 49m 50s
• RSSI
  • 0h 51m 41s
• Fresnel zone
  • 0h 55m 33s
• SolPad
  • 0h 58m 33s
• Have to be ready to bounce between full time and consulting
  
  • 0h 58m 50s
• Not a solar company
  
  • 0h 59m 36s
• Battery backed storage and conversion solutions
  
  • 0h 59m 40s
• John from Cree
  • 1h 1m 24s
• Doing GaN inverters
  • 1h 1m 28s
• Smaller inductors
  
  • 1h 2m 9s
• Roof mounted inverters and batteries
  
  • 1h 3m 15s
• Shahriar talking RF
  • 1h 7m 13s
• Trying to broaden expertise
  
  • 1h 7m 18s
• Dash7 over a wire
  
  • 1h 9m 6s
• RS485
  • 1h 9m 33s
• Sometimes wireless feels like it’s actually more reliable than something like RS485
  
  • 1h 12m 8s
• JP has a person site called Indigresso
  • 1h 19m 3s
• Using MATLAB to simulate antennas
  
  • 1h 20m 28s
• Johanson antennas
  
  • 1h 23m 1s
• Making a different frequency antenna by adding extra wire
  
  • 1h 24m 11s
• Start with a higher freq chip antenna and modify it downward
  
  • 1h 24m 25s

• Holidays coming up!
• Chris is planning on making a reference design when things are slow
• Chris just bought a HP 8753D
• Neither Dave nor Chris has paid 4 digits for test gear recently
• Shahriar regularly buys and repairs high cost gear.
• Some VNA cal kits go for $1800
• Dave just got some transfer standard capacitors. They’re 60 years old and still cost $50-$100 each.
• Test gear anonymous thread on EEVblog forum
• Chris joined a mailing list about fixing up HP/Agilent/Keysight gear
• Mailing list australia
• Dave tracks forums just by leaving tabs open
• Discord/Slack/Discourse are all kind of a mess for tracking what’s going on.
• Teddy running the BranchEducation about how do PCBs work
• He’s got the knack
• 747 simulator videos
• STM32 tool install video
• Jason Kridner & Robert Nelson episode
• Writing firmware
• “I’m a thrasher”
• Konrad Beckmann’s advice on Twitter
• The new “AI” solution for getting PCBs designed…
• Dave is doing (actually already posted) a textbook review
• The X Chapters of Art of Electronics – Expanded chapters
• “The whole blinkin lot”
• Floyd, Malveno, Smith
• Dave is a “Floyd man”
• Former guest Jeremy Blum just released the second edition of Exploring Arduino
• Favorite episodes
  
  • Chuck Peddle
  • Tom Lee
  • Jeri Ellsworth
  • Dave and Shahriar (5G)

Thanks to onefox for the image of salt

Welcome, Craig J Bishop!

• Craig designed and built the Gameslab, which is a custom gaming platform built with a Xilinx Zynq part (XC7Z035). (Update: Craig has been posting more about the Gameslab on his site here)
• Bought reballed chips on PCBs. They were actually a $1200 chip he got for $80.
• Episode with Ryan Cousins
• There is apparently a kit for counterfeiting Xilinx chips
• National lab has a pdf on how to detect counterfeits
• Digilent Zybo
• Craig built the board on the JLC 6 layer process at 210×100 for each board. $150 for 5 PCBs.
• DDR3 chip was .8mm pitch
• Using stack up to calculate impedance/prop delay
• Used an excel sheet to track delay and skew for nets, since KiCad can’t track delays between layers
• FPGA on chip delays are also stated in the datasheet and need to be accounted for.
• Running Rust on STM32L0, on kernel modules in A9, applications / games
• Sense resistors with instrumentation amps going to the ADC to measure each rail’s current draw.
• BQ24250 chip for charging with configurable registers
• Zynq doesn’t necessarily need the bitstream programmed first. Instead the A9s boot first and can load the bitstream.
• Every game brings its own hardware
• Can put the Gameboy hardware into the fabric!
• Craig doesn’t like verilog, so he uses a higher level language called SpinalHDL. It is a fork of Chisel, which is based on Scala.
• Each of the above languages are strongly typed. Loosely typed means you can convert between data types, like in C.
• “Verilog is becoming the assembly language of FPGAs”
• ZipCPU
• AXI bus
• Most designs need to reimplement different hardware blocks. But there are libraries in Chisel, which can implement things easier.
• Vex Risc V
• Created a frame buffer for the LCD and some 2d graphics acceleration on the Gameslab.
• Learned to program to make PC games. This was part of the idea behind the Gamesphere project as well.
• PIC18F452 in a 40 pin DIP
• Used AT91R4000 for the game sphere
• Andrei LaMothe wrote the book “The Black Art of video game console design”
• Cypress dual port SRAM
• Craig’s first “big boy job” was working for a a neighbor up the street starting a semiconductor packaging company (Tim Olson)
• Deca Technologies was opening a Wafer Level Chip Scale packaging fab in the Philippines.
• After iphone came out, there was a lot of demand for low profile complex chips.
• Raspberry Pi photon problem
• Added a “squishy” layer to the silicon, and then exposing certain parts of the silicon to the interconnect.
• The graphics problem was that they wanted to make the chip bigger but the silicon smaller
• EWLB from Infineon looks like a plastic wafer.
• Can put two chips next to each other
• There was a paper about the subject (has the image Chris and Craig were discussing during recording).
• Sometimes the parts are placed 30 microns to the left, which is not good for the substrate they are placed upon.
• Can get really expensive PnP machines but they go slow.
• The microscope would spit out X, Y and rotation, but it scales with chip complexity, such as when there are two chips.
• Needed to do traces between them
• Craig’s job was to take the output and do some autorouting between them.
• Feature sizes were 1 micron
• Package design looks like PCB design
• Cadence sells System in Package designer but is really Allegro with different plugins.
• Can people do their own SIP?
• Craig thinks that design will move towards more SIP
• Split die architecture
• Split it into a few pieces: This will help improve yield and flexibility, as well as modularity.
• Chris asked about Chiplets, a topic that is championed by Dr Subu (sp?)
• Chiplets are going to do interconnect in silicon, not plastic
• Example is BLE and micro
• Adaptive alignment
• Craig gave a talk at KiCon about how Autorouters work and how they have been improving.
• Not your grandpa’s autorouter
• Freerouting is nice and available but it’s not the latest
• TopoR
• Moving towards interactive design (P&R), but Craig thinks it should go the other way.
• Generative design would be better
• Dave Vandenbout’s SKiDL talk
• Craig was briefly interviewed by Piotr and Alvaro at KiCon
• Find Craig on his personal site where he is documenting his projects (craigjb.com) and also find him as @craig_jbishop on Twitter.
• Check out the Phoenix 3H (hardware happy hour) if you’re in the area!

• WeWork problems
• Chris is gearing up to buy a boat anchor (VNA) discussed in episode 462
• Leaving stuff on the bench
• Dave thinking about downsizing, possibly starting “The Tiny Lab Movement”
• You have to focus on one thing in a small space
• Mr Carlson’s Lab has a bunch of Patreon-only videos for learning about electronics
• Dave talked about flex PCBs this past week. It’s not a flex tutorial, but one might be on the way eventually.
• Former guest Dan Hienzsch has started a site called Manufacturing Reports, where he reviews PCB fabrication houses. Dan was also recently on the Macrofab podcast.
• TG-130 vs TG-180
• Former guest Ted Yapo expanded on the 8 GHz scope he discussed on the show during his talk at Supercon
• Select on test
• Chris gave a talk on RF at Supercon
• A highly automated warehouse in the UK burned down after a rogue robot lit on fire
• Comparing logic elements between part vendors
• Reasons to put FPGA into a product
• Goofing TX and RX
• Dave and David are trying to fit everything into 32K chip on STM32
• Mike Harrison’s talk about LEDs
• GreatScott explaining USB C (and USB PD)
• Yageo is buying Kemet

Thanks to Ales Kladnik for the image of his father’s cramped lab

This week, Chris recorded the show with 3 different guests at the Hackaday Superconference. This is an annual hardware conference with about 500 attendees in Pasadena, CA.

Guests on this week’s show:

• Jereon “Sprite_tm” Domburg
• Syvain “tnt” Munaut
• Matt Venn

The conversations focused around the conference badge and its differentiating feature from many other electronic conference badges: It was all implemented on a Lattice ECP5 FPGA using RISC V cores and was in a GameBoy form factor. Most interestingly, it was all done using the Symbiflow open source toolchain. We called out other guests we’ve had on the show before while recording:

• Sprite’s first appearance (359)
• Clifford Wolf (Yosys, PicoRV32) on TAH (374)
• Clifford Wolf and Dave Shah talking with Piotr Esden-Tempski at CCCongress (423)

Contributed after the show aired: Matt Venn sent in links about the PicoRV32 and a reminder of the Symbiotic EDA youtube channel.

Read more about the conference badge on Hackaday.

Welcome, Ryan Cousins of Krtkl!

• Don’t forget to fill out the 2019 listener survey! Closes November 22nd
• Krtkl’s embedded/FPGA platform is called Snickerdoodle, which is based on the Xilinx Zynq.
• Ryan and his team got started working in the medical field working on mechatronics, doing the same stuff over and over again for customers.
• Saving time from development risk
• Example where “wires” on a base board were hooked up
• Greg Davill’s fantastic bodge wiring
• The Snickerdoodle has a low end and high end product option:
  
  • Snickerdoodle One is 115
  • Snickerdoodle Black is 245
• piSmasher
• Customers are doing up to 10K units per year.
• Started the company about 5 years ago
• Biggest area of interest is in video space
• Running up against the edge of what the part can do
• Since they are targeting industrial customers, Krtkl have to keep supporting older boards
• Challenge has been keeping community engaged
• There are other Zynq modules out there, like the Zed board ($450). These are more like traditional dev boards.
• Crowdfunded 4 years ago on Crowdsupply
• Ryan was surprised how critical (ahem) people were of the product.
• Chris checked and he said something nice on the interview with Clint Cole
• Software layer is an important differentiator
• Krtkl supported Ubuntu Linux out of the box
• Working on streamlining the IP, they might eventually have an “app store” for reconfigurable logic IP blocks.
• Custom peripherals need still need drivers in Linux
• “Getting linux to run on this thing was more effort than building the hardware”
• Zynq book
• Pynq, which shows how to use Python for FPGAs
• How are customers using this product?
  
  • Dual core system running 6 axis arm
  • Remote sensing, needed to be lower power. They put the high power module in the FPGA in deep sleep mode.
  • Company doing pinball accessory
  • Smart retail applications
• There are really two main categories: mechatronic or high bandwidth (things like video)
• It’s a mix for how many are using linux
• Krtkl is consulting on 2-3 development projects at any given time
• “If you want to get a consulting business off the ground, start a crowdfunding campaign”
• Still waiting on one line item from the crowdfunding campaign to have shipped out 100% of orders.
• Check out the company at krtkl.com and their main product at snickerdoodle.io
• Read more about the strife during the crowdfunding campaign on their update page of Crowdsupply
• Reach out to Ryan by email
• Read more about getting started on the Snickerdoodle campaign
• “It’ll only get better with time”

Ted is a fan of soldering AND stock photography

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

• Ted is a lifelong electronics hobbyist
• He studied engineering physics in college.
• Full color faxes were a thing in Japan but never took off elsewhere.
• After working on scanning equipment, he moved on to doing networking work.
• He also did some consulting after Cisco.
• Mid-way through his career, he went back to graduate school.
• Wrote a paper about finding telephone wires using LIDAR for helicopter pilots.
• Transitioned into AR, sort of like Projection Mapping. It was used for architectural daylighting simulation.
• Going back to school is tough for what you remember. Ted had to relearn linear algebra. He recommends using Gilbert Strang’s lectures, which gave more context.
• After school, Ted did consulting with a few partners, mostly New England.
• Ted got started posting to Hackaday with 2016 HaD prize.
• His first entry was the “Diode clock“, which utilizes the fact that diodes act like switches for RF when you pass DC current through them.
• “Upping serendipity quotient”
• Using diodes as an AND gate
• Using pin diodes for a doppler radio project
• 1n4007 can act as a crude pin diode at certain frequency
• Built digital clock that uses diodes for the counters
• Assembly instructions – 46 boards!
• Power supply is around 6 MHz
• One of his other popular projects is the Tritiled, which helps figuring out where things are in the dark
• Based around the idea of tritium lights
• Modern LEDs are extremely efficient at a certain current
• Droop happens at higher currents
• The 8 GHz sampling oscilloscope is a more recent project
• Research came out of the diode clock
• Schottky diodes for sampling
• Tek S4 sampling head 14.5 GHz
• Diodes can switch in 10-15 pS
• Stroboscopic effect
• Equivalent time sampling
• Tek 11801 from 1989
• Nyquist still applies
• Verifying on the bench is difficult
• Paper from picosecond pulse lab
• Jim Williams using an avalanche diode or a step response diode
• Looking at RMS error
• Another architecture 1975 by SP McCabe
• Using a fast comparator to sample waveform, similar to a successive approximation ADC
• ADCMP582
• That’s the time base calibration
• What will people be able to build with an 8 GHz scope?
• Using it to measure transmission lines on PCB boards
• Using Time Domain Reflectometry
• Ted has a splitter TDR head
• Tracking generator + Spectrum analyzer = Scalar network analyzer
• Rigol came out with cheap spectrum analyzer, DSA815, Ted got one of the early units
• Tracking generator outputs signals that are the same as the frequency on the spectrum analyzer
• Ted gave a talk about this at last year’s Hackaday Superconference
• There is no phase in an SNA
• SNAs are harder to calibrate
• Paper was about how to do two measurements to compensate for errors in the generator
• Chris has a friend doing Python scripting on test equipment via their ethernet jacks.

You can find Ted on Twitter, Hackaday.io and as a writer for Hackaday

• 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 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, 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.

• 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

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

Welcome Ken Burns of TinyCircuits!

• TinyCircuits is located in North East Ohio (NEO), in Akron.
• Ken also attended the University of Akron
• Decided to stay in the Midwest
• Past guest Todd Bailey talked about going to a job for working with graybeards
• Ken used to work for Avid, which was later bought by Avnet/E14.
• Since it’s a design shop, he got to try out different types of electronics.
• This included learning the entire process and taking it to a CM.
• Wireless HART developed by Rosemount (now Emerson), based on 802.15.4
• MACtek made a PC based interface device for wireless HART
• Dust networks bought by LT
• The standard uses a negotiated time for when to wake up to save power.
• Pepperl and Fuchs bought out Mactek
• Decided to leave Avid to start a company
• Wanted to make a smart sensor platform
• This was late 2000s (2008), so Arduino was getting started
• TinyDuino (and the other boards with the same form factor) is 20×20 mm
• TinyCircuits have launched 3 kickstarters
• Digispark was 2 months prior
• This was early kickstarter days. His Kickstarter video recorded rough.
• The stretch goal was to do mfg, inspired by companies like Dimension Engineering
• Couldn’t have done it otherwise because of the volumes being low per board
• Kickstarter money worked as seed money
• Design was done, but the manufacturing all the problem
• Example system is a processor board + USB shield + GPS (for tracking cats)
• Was in MAKE magazine for that kit
• Everything is open source
• Didn’t need as many feeders as they got for the PNP machine.
• Bought a used machine
• Machine was from 1996
• It had 80 feeders included and was bought with the reflow oven
• All delivered for 25K
• Juki
• Started with 0402
• Bought it from a company that was reputable
• A month of tinkering to get it started
• The bigger learning curve is making consistent product
• “Paste is by far the most critical step in the process”
• Yields started at 40%
• Need to use fresh paste every time
• Yield is 99% now
• Dek 265 helped make things more consistent.  Got it a year after original stuff for $3K
• They are now running with a Panasonic SP60
• Got a new PNP 2 years ago, also from Juki.
• New machines allows small runs or big runs
• Allows testing of a lot of different products
• It’s gotten much cheaper to send it out than when they started.
• Doing manufacturing allows you to do a higher mix, which might be cost prohibitive with sending out to a CM.
• TinyCircuits has done some CM work where it makes sense. Ken says they’re not going to offer ISO9001 or anything.
• It makes sense if the customer wants something custom designed
• Robotic golf caddy
• Chris asked what customers are asking for at TInyCircuits.
• Roadmap is higher end stuff
• Whiskers are breakout sensors.
• They are now funding on Kickstarter!
• 5 pin input mux allows you to talk to different versions of the same sensor (up to 16)
• Dealing with the Tariff
• Selling batteries on digikey
• “18650 is the biggest thing we sell on eBay”
• Selling on digikey and mouser
• Johnny 5 / firmata (used by past guest Jason Huggins)
• Latest stuff supports circuit python
• Little Bits sold to Sphero for unknown amount after raising $70M.
• Working with group out of MIT
• tinycircuits.com
• They work out of the old Goodrich plant in Akron

• Chris spent too much of his camp working on giving a talk
• Dave winged it when he spoke at a Renesas 2010 event
• Dave recorded at the hotel room afterwards
• At Disneyland Star Wars you can build your own droid
• James Meigs of Popular Mechanics
• RF slides
• The talk Chris gave at CCCamp is now posted as well
• Hank Zumbalen on The Amp Hour
• App note “Staying Well Grounded”
• Book on RF layout
• Scotty from Strangeparts JLC video
• Does anyone know of a standalone loss leader factory?
• Dave building the programmer for the 3 cent micro
• $10B lost to trade war so far for Electronics Manufacturers
• Tariff
• During the show we found it acts like VAT or GST, it’s added to the end product/delivery area
  
  • ie. Dave does not get charged Tariff even though he gets parts coming from China via the US
• Chris has started seeking out tutoring
• Mentorship
• Dave learning French and German
• The term “Professional Engineer” will be a protected term in Victoria (Australia)
• Wi-Fi was invented at CSIRO
• How to to pronounce various hexadecimal numbers, incluing 0xDEAF (“dotty ernest annty frost”)

Thanks to fdecomite for the picture of “Hexadecimal in the outdoors”

Welcome Tim “Mithro” Ansell, Sean “Xobs” Cross and (returning co-host) Michael Ossmann!

• Past guest appearances
  
  • Tim Ansell on #375
  • Michael Ossmann on #440.2 (at KiCon), among many other episodes (search for Michael Ossmann in past episodes)
• Sean did the firmware on the Novena, an open source laptop he designed with Bunnie. We discussed this on episode #336.
• Tim and Sean are working on the Fomu, discussed on the show after Chris took the workshop at Teardown.
• Dave later was asking Chris about why open source and RISC V is relevant (on episode #449), which he struggled to voice. This episode discussed the relevance of these technologies.
• There was a recent CS update about the Fomu going to camp, including a talk that Sean gave about the Fomu.

• We recorded this live at CCCamp 2019. The featured image is a shot of camp at night.
• This crossover episode features the following two podcasts
  
  • The Hackaday Podcast
  • The Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast
• With guests
  
  • Alvaro Prieto
  • Mike Szczys
  • Elliot Williams

Chris and Alvaro (UNRE), talked with Schneider and Rahix of the Card10 badge team at CCCamp 2019. This was the first of a few interviews done at camp.

• Wiki page about the badge. It is assembled from two individual boards:
  
  • The Fundamental Board
  • The Harmonic Board
• Schneider has worked on the past 2 badges
  
  • Rad1o (2015)
  • R0ket (2011)
• Sensors on board:
  
  • Temp, humidity, etc – BME680
  • 9 axis, sensor fusion – BHI160
  • Magnetometer – BMM150
  • ECG – MAX30001
  • Pulse sensor – MAX86150
• Join the conversation on their IRC channel: freenode.net#card10badge

Thanks to @szczys for the picture of the badge!

• Dave reviewed the Vion multimeter…and was a bit underwhelmed.
• What percentage of dev boards are used?
• The multimeter chip
• GPIB
• Robby Newell shared a sweet testing setup
• Lock in amplifiers
• Raw research stuff
• Jitter analyzer
• $200 scope? Chris has a friend who claimed the DS1054Z is lower priced now.
• Rigol rolled their own ASIC, the Phoenix chipset, doesn’t have boxcar average
• This is a rolling average after the ADC, higher ENOB
• Why digital scopes look noisy
• Jeri Ellsworth in her first Amp Hour interview said she wanted to skip the country after messing up a mask ROM
• The US Navy will replace touchscreen controls
• Dave interviewed John Kenney from Keysight (linked video is part 1 of 4)
• Chris realized the parts he talked about in #453 were actually NCNR parts (non-cancellable non-returnable)
• Returning parts
• Ordering parts for long lead times
• Shootout of 10 cent micros
• It was actually the SDCC compiler for the 3 cent micro
• GigaDevice  parts (link to LCSC) are STM32 replacement components.
• These are not exactly a new phenomenon, Dangerous Proto posted (a link to a site) about it nearly 2 years ago
• Zeptobars also did a die shot of one of the parts

Welcome, MG (Mike Grover)!

• Check out all of MG’s exploits on his site mg.lol
• There is a compilation video that is awesome/terrifying for all the things that cable implants can do
• The “peanut gallery” during recording was Piotr and Joe Fitz.
  
  • Joe FitzPatrick was a guest on episode 346
  • Piotr has been a guest (or host!) on the following episodes:
    
    • 356
    • 409
    • 423
    • 440.2
    • 450
• We were helping out with a training at Black Hat called Applied Physical Attacks 3 and 4
• MG managed to use his mill with soldermask to get some really impressive results!
• Including things like…BGAs! (holy crap)
• The video about “hardware addiction”

• 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