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Chris just got back from a work trip to Madrid He also got to hang out with Matt Venn (and coworker Mike Szczys) in Valencia Dave has a new data center going in across the street Chris enjoyed this episode of Prof G Markets where they talked about the impact of data centers on power and the rise of “behind the meter” generation Dave without internet for a week. Chris has had multiday losses after fiber has been cut in his neighborhood. Humanoid robots…on a plane! Chris has been working on 0201 c...
Welcome back, Jason Kridner! Jason has previously been on the show Episode 59 (!) Episode 378 alongside Robert Nelson The BeagleY AI was the first board that mimic’ed the RPi form factor PocketBeagle 2 is still a small altoid tin form factor with a new processor The Zepto is a new product targeting a $1 price point for microcontrollers Many boards in the Beagle catalog now run Zephyr , and BeagleBoard.org recently joined The Zephyr Project as members and contributors Click Brand is the official ...
Welcome back Matt Liberty (Joulescope) and Luke Beno (Werewolf.us) Matt has been a guest on episodes 527 and 607 Luke was a guest on episode 272 Luke launched a new cable manufacturing and power supply company in the US called Werewolf.us Matt is working on the JS320 We discussed how PartsBox is a great ERP solution but Matt and Luke decided to go fully custom with Claude Code. Jan Rychter was a guest on episode 542 We discussed the differences with Product Lifecycle Maintenance. Michael Corr of...
Welcome Julia Desmazes of Tales on The Wire Follow along with the blog post we discuss Two Weeks Until Tapeout Matt Venn – TinyTapeout – Episode 616 and 672 Andreas Olofsson – openroad/openlane – Episode 254 and 650 Tim Ansell – Wafer.space – Episode 375 , 501 , and 703 JTAG How do you know that tooling is or isn’t working? Accelerator Rabbithole with floating point ( post updated after recording ) BFloat16 Follow Julia on GitHub https://github.com/Essenceia Kapla (official website , not the muc...
Canonical (the makers of Ubuntu) acquired Golioth , meaning Chris is moving from a 12-person startup to an organization of over 1,200 people Dave found this chart of Canonical products on wikipedia to be useful An increase in professional travel from zero weeks to six weeks per year following the acquisition, including “sprints” in cities like London The naming convention for Ubuntu releases (Year.Month) and the importance of Long Term Support (LTS) versions for backporting security vulnerabilit...
Alex is founder and CEO of Efficient Power Conversion, a leading manufacturer of GaN MOSFET’s. Alex is also the inventor of the original Power MOSFET and HEXFET at International Rectifier. Also, former CEO of International Rectifier (founded by his father!), https://epc-co.com We cover everything from inventing the power MOSFET on his first day on the job to silicon physics, AI data centres and humanoid robots. Enjoy.
Welcome Zachariah Peterson of Northwest Engineering Solutions ! Zach listed the various places people can find his work, including The Altium YouTube channel Zach’s YouTube channel His personal technical blog The Altium Blog various industry conferences like PCB West 01:10 Zach mentions that he has been creating video content and seminars for several years, traveling to places like Denmark to teach high-speed design. 01:10 They discuss the recent acquisition of Altium by Renesas and how the comp...
Chris will be having a meetup in London March 8th, 2026 click here for more info . He will also be at Embedded World the following week at various events. Dave is also headed to a meetup in Sydney that he has presented at in the past. The “lazy man move” for meetup organizers: scheduling events within walking distance of home to simplify travel logistics. Chris provides details on his latest high-density hardware project, a 22mm circular board packed with 0201 components, Bluetooth, and a suite ...
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, SeaSats ! Check out their open positions making autonomous ocean vehicles. Welcome David Ray of Cyber City Circuits • The “Retro Electro” Series: David explains his passion for writing historical articles for Digi Key, focusing on “giants” like Orstead whose contributions to electricity are often overlooked. • Career Background: David details his path from Marine Corps radio repair to cash register and Motorola radio repair. • Starting the Business: In lat...
Welcome Eric Migicovsky of Pebble ! Pebble is back after Eric worked with Google to open source PebbleOS and he reaquired the naming rights Eric returns to the hardware space after 7 years, including working at yCombinator , a famous accelerator for early stage startups, and on Beeper , a cross platform app for messaging. While discussing the difficulties of hardware project, Chris brought up a recent post about a high wattage lamp project HN One thing Eric likes about hardware projects vs softw...
Welcome Martin Rowe of EE World ! Martin is a long time journalist in the electronics space, having worked at magazines like EDN, Test and Measurement World, EE World, and more! Kenneth Wyatt Concentrated vs diffuse information Product reviews Unitrend scope video Tek 5 series B Wirecutter for test equipment / parts Skepticism Webinars – 3 levels Martin has an HP34401A early model Touring T&M companies Littelfuse Martin is in the Boston area Boxborough has multiple EMI labs Article on buildi...
Dave is back from vacation. He should have bought a Starlink mini (not as cheap as we thought) because his coverage was very poor throughout the trip. Space twitter Artemis II is going up soon (early Feb 2026) Billy makes artemis go up Sparkfun and Adafruit are on the outs PJRC (and Paul Stoffregen) makes the Teensy and it is now produced exclusively by Sparfkun The pinout is open but the bootloader is proprietary and sold as the magic black box. Paul’s wrote about what was happening on the EEVb...
Welcome Aaed Musa ! Aaed is a YouTuber who builds a variety of robots and a mechanical engineering student at Purdue. He just completed his undergrad degree and is now working on his Master’s degree. I believe he is the first Amp Hour guest who is still a full time student. His channel has a great variety of builds including designing all the way down to gearboxes. Aaed says the MIT “mini cheetah” launched many low(er) costs builds of robots, including his own. Boston Dynamics (and many others) ...
Dr. Mark Palmeri from Duke University details his unique approach to biomedical engineering education, emphasizing practical skills, problem-solving, and the use of open-source tools like KiCad and Zephyr RTOS. He explains the critical role of Verification and Validation in medical device development and shares insights from his student-driven tympanometer project aimed at low-resource communities. The discussion also covers balancing foundational knowledge with modern tools and the evolving landscape of engineering education.
Chris got back from his honeymoon to the Galapagos, see photos on the updated version of his blog. Dave encountered a super secret podcast location Before leaving on vacation, Chris went to an event mentioned in episode 708 launching a new Tektronix scope. The parent company has been Danaher -> Fortive -> Ralliant (now based out of Raleigh) Large budget events Don Mcmillan is technically funny Open Circuit The Way Things Work Discman teardown Neo the home robot Humane AI pin ‘tugging on th...
Dr Barry Marshall won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease. But Barry is also an electronics hobbyist and vintage HP and Tek oscilloscope and vintage computer enthusiast. He visited the EEVBlog lab and sat down with Dave for an impromptu discussion about all sorts of things. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2005/marshall/facts/...
Welcome Davide Andrea , author or The Electronic Connector Book ! And many thanks to Blues for sponsoring this episode of The Amp Hour! Get 10% off your next order in their online store for a development kit by using the code AMPHOUR. Davide is an engineer working on Battery Management Systems at Elithion He got into writing and editing books via a postcard sent to him after he gave a talk For many years he was an editor at Artech house He works on Lithium BMS systems for large setups How do you...
Thanks to our sponsor Blues this week! Visit the Blues store and use the code AMPHOUR to get 10% off your first order of a kit. Capacitors go pop on Dave’s audio setup , the Presonus monitors Ground loops causing HDMI cable sparking Chris was watching Jetman videos and got an ‘Is that real?’ from the kid. We find ourselves asking the same with all the AI generated video these days. Fight between mehdi/electroboom and walter lewin about KVL Arduino bought by Qualcomm ! They also released the Ardu...
Welcome Joren Vaes , design engineer at SOFICS Simulation is critical when designing analog devices based on a PDK from the fab Parasitics are significant, especially with new nodes having upwards of 16 metal layers Chris complained about a class where the professor made them draw planar structures with graph paper with colored pencils Large fabs on leading edge nodes have 1800 page textbook of rules Because the constraints get tighter, that book gets longer for each node 2 nm mass production on...
Contextual Electronics is “still a thing”. Sydney hosted the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) . The IAC is the “big space event of the year,” held annually in a different city. Chris noted that US space funding seems low, leading some friends to move from NASA to private industry. Dave recorded two walkaround videos: a 30-minute bird’s eye view using a GoPro on a pole and a physical hour-long walkaround. Large companies had private stands, while smaller, two-man companies had sub-booth...
Welcome Jerry Twomey ( Effective Electrons ) author of the book, Applied Embedded Electronics: Design Essentials for Robust Systems . Chris first heard Jerry on Embedded.fm last year . Jerry’s Background and Book Motivation: Jerry shares his quick history, moving from the Boston area to San Jose (Silicon Valley) and eventually to San Diego, where he has worked across diverse sectors including consumer electronics, aerospace, defense projects, DARPA research, and medical electronics. His book foc...
Welcome back Tim Ansell! Tim’s past appearances and previous work Discussing Tomu on 375 Discussing Fomu on 456.3 Discussing the open source PDK on 501 Tim’s previous work at Google involved releasing a manufacturable open-source PDK (Process Development Kit), which contains the fundamental information needed to create integrated circuits. Key open-source tools discussed include OpenROAD (a backend compiler for IC design) and Open Lane (an end-to-end suite turning chip descriptions (RTL) into ma...
Dave bought a lemon laptop Chris officially has solar that is installed, working, and is effectively an appliance at this point… Duke Energy and North Carolina nuclear mix The impact of batteries on the grid The Duck Curve is something Chris and Ari discussed on ep650 Open circuit voltage on panels Dave did a repair on a tennis ball machine Chris designed a board with test points too small Accupuncture jbc High cost vs low cost rework tweezers Nanofix YouTube Channel Tested Ugly multimeter revie...
Todd Bailey returns to discuss his career evolution from art and musical electronics to the demanding world of aerospace. He shares insights from his time at Lockheed Martin and early commercial space startups like Astra, emphasizing the importance of system design and learning from challenges. The episode culminates in his venture, Starlight Engines, pioneering solid zinc propellant for electric propulsion, which was eventually acquired by Muon Space.
Dave is starting a new project for a lab timer called the uTimer Timelapse Geerling videos about clocks Mitxela clock Transflective displays Dave is looking at LCDs like this one Dropping Rs vs Ls Font chip .5mm pin pitch on the connectors Chris is making a new breakout board that is effectively a sensors shield for a Bluetooth chip. It’s the first time he’s using the service and it was a pleasant completely hands-off experience. Mike Harrison USB C barrel jack JLC DFM plugin for KiCad Python sc...
Welcome Back, Andrew Seddon! Founder and CEO of CircuitHub . Andrew was first on episode 131 of The Amp Hour CircuitHub has a partnership with Worthington Assembly Worthington and CircuitHub host the Pick Place Podcast Mimicing silicon manufacturing Common parts library Setting the factory up to have only 50k SKUs in house for speed of loading / attrition Driving people to 2000 parts was the original intent, but didn’t hit the mark Level of production needs to be high Many parts need to work in ...
Welcome Matt Brown of Brown Fine Security ! Matt has been reverse engineering a “smart” smoker controller that talks back to AWS IOT Jeff Geerling talking about his dishwasher Storing private keys on the device?? Threat models Key rotation What is the best case scenario for an IoT device? Secure boot / trust zone Keys encrypt flash storage Chris has designed in the ATECC608 before Replacing Certificate Authority (CA) cert in grill firmware Matt has a Linux hardware / reverse engineering backgrou...
Welcome Tim from Mitxela ! Introduced by Mike Harrison , past guest of the show Fluid pendant Volumetric display London hackspace https://matthias-research.github.io/pages/tenMinutePhysics/index.html FLIP in Blender CHNT36ta Pick and place doing 0201 Precision Clock Sewing machine (check out that GIF!) Secret life of machines – Tim Hunkin Isaac Singer Tim has many Lathe projects on the hardware projects page Flag Steam Engine Learn how to machine from MrPete222’s YouTube channel Schlock Mercenar...
Dave found a wrist mounted DMM that looks…inadvisable We’ll discuss the survey results next time! Florin Cocos of VoltLog Great Scott Sam Aldaher on the show last week Gerald Undone did a studio tour with Captain Disillusionment Short videos Dave using a go-pro on a bike Separate gyro file to stabilize D-y hybrid inverter Chart Remote shell Cline Chris is finally getting solar open energy monitor Emporia vue Sense We talked with Joe Bamberg when he worked there Driving back from canberra Ben Kra...
Welcome Sam Aldhaher , power engineer and 3D graphic artist! Sam has always been interested in art…and power engineering He primarily works in Blender and has been for 5-6 years Inputs and outputs Starting from Altium / KiCad for eCAD Blender doesn’t accept step files, it works with meshes like STL KiCad -> Blender is a good flow , as there are add-ons to import KiCad Making a good visulalization is all about lighting, materials Building library of models Modeling magnetic fields Research in ...
