#713 – Rubber Duck Incarnate
The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast
00:00
Outro
Dave and Chris wrap up, mention future guests and episodes, and sign off for 2026.
Play episode from 01:08:32
Transcript
Transcript
Episode notes
- 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 EEVblog forum
- Tim Lamb (Trash80) talked about teensy in his devices on episode 292
- Chris modified a Tag Connect 10 pin footprint for an upcoming design
- RAM prices are wild right now!
- After following a tutorial on “Doom Coding”, Chris picked up using Claude Code
- A friend pointed out that more horizontal, open source programs like KiCad (version 10 coming soon) will have an advantage with LLMs/coding assistants over more vertically integrated tools. The vertical tools won’t be able to move as fast.
- Also in the Doom Coding exercise, Chris found an app called Terminus that allows connecting an Android device (and maybe iOS?) and getting a terminal interface from the phone using a USB-C cable in OTG mode.
- Zephyr builds in lots of capabilities
- Chris loves using Zephyr shells to build interfaces (even custom ones) to standard functions in Zephyr
- CES wrapped a week or two before this recording. The Donut lab solid state battery proposed impossible specs.
- Some engineers modified a Rivian to try and make the Cannonball Run. It was an interesting look into battery packs and what it takes to charge them fast.
- Dave and Chris took a long roadtrip to the Deep Space Network back in 2017.
- Piers Rocks has a great video about how PIOs work on the RP2xxx chips from Raspberry Pi
- The Raspberry Pi should always be viewed from the perspective of “what is cheapest”. The RP team mentioned that drove the decisions of external flash on the RP2xxx boards
- Past guest Jeff Geerling talked about some of the pricing challenges with RAM prices increasing
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