The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

Welcome back Jeff Keyzer of Mightyohm Orthodox Keyzermas Twelfth Day of Keyzermas Jeff has been taking care of his ailing cat for the past years and learned a lot about administering medicine RF 8753 / Copper mountain Shariar sometimes features Copper Mountain VNAs on the Signal Path Step attenuator NanoVNA Pallav Aggarwal articles Murata modules Chip down cellular Seattle visit The big dark Input shaping Printing with .25mm Tek TM500 Scope on a monitor arm Test equipment intervention Jay Leno turbine car episode Selling on eBay, including stuff made during the process of making parts for Jeff’s equipment Tek groups.io Fluke in Seattle / now Everett Vintage Tek Museum Being set up to ship things Shipping CRTs CRTs are in vogue again (?!) Low latency Retropie Oscilloscope music paying premium for RCA / Heathkit Jeff was off to Hardware happy hour (3H) Seattle Led Zeppelin had many references to Lord Of The Rings. Past guest and Chris’s former roommate Steve Kreuzer was a huge LZ fan.

CES is coming up and there’s good attendance as one of the last remaining large electronic shows in the US Tradeshow are all bunched up in April for Chris in 2024, specifically Embedded World and Embedded Open Source Summit Dave gives a synopsis of the latest Smarter Every Day video (about NASA) Smarter Every Day video about NASA talk Lunar lander training abort Apollo guide SP287 Speeding up podcast…how fast can/do you go? Last minute designs at the end of the year ESP32 / NRF9160 board limitations Cheap as chips – podcast about fish and chips Siglent oscope SDS7000A Innovators dilemma for car manufaucturers…and scopes too! Kia Carnival Kasm vs Codespaces Home Assistant ESPHome YAML NSW tour video / Quantum Smart home fraturing AI New guide to Shenzhen, updated by Naomi Wu

Welcome Benjamin Cabé of The Zephyr Project! Benjamin is the developer advocate at The Zephyr Project, which is both a Real Time Operating System and an ecosystem (or almost like a “distro”, rather than an OS) Benjamin does videos on the Zephyr YouTube and maintains an awesome blog / newsletter The ecosystem is deep: Chris recently learned there is a state machine framework Multiple people involved in dev like an OS The Platinmum Members includes chip companies like NXP, Nordic, ADI There are 600+ boards supported in the ecosystem (and more if you do custom) Devicetree is a tough concept, but a powerful one that was borrowed from Linux Who is the audience for Zephyr? Chromebook embedded controller What’s the smallest processor that Zephyr can run on? M0s can run it no problem Chris thinks one of the benefits is the ability to bolt new stuff on to a project Simulation through Wokwi (Past Guest Uri) or Renode (Past Guest Michael) Using different levels of abstraction zephyr i2c init Benefits of abstraction Swapping out chips (bubblegum tapshoes) Tying stuff together (bolting stuff on) Infrastructure with CI/CD Zephyr doesn’t have an official IDE but VScode “just works” Helper tools from Nordic Open Source Hobby projects Dev survey Custom Keyboards (ZMK) RP2040 support Arduino recenlty joined the project Layers of abstraction Architecture (ie. arm, nios2, x86) SOC (available peripherals surrounding the core) Board (PCB definition which might have:) SOC Memory Peripherals / Sensors Check the tree and PRs for sensors that might be in-flight Compared to Arduino IDE Choosing ecosystems Weekly newsletter Things you didn’t know you needed: NMEA subsystem In Jay Carlson’s 2nd appearance on the show, he said “I’m reading more code than I’m writing” Benjamin’s profile photo is of his artificial nose he created a few years ago Making a machine model for bread (pandemic) It uses TFLite What is the project doing? (in parallel) Acquire data Machine learning inference Display update Network interface Benjamin reimplemented the Nose in Zephyr using ZBus (Chris recorded a video with the author of this subsystem) Like an MQTT broker on device Some of the concerns I (Chris) had when I was starting was not understanding RTOS concepts (threads, queues, etc). Brian Amos was on the show talking about his book, which is a great way to get started with these ideas. Threading / work queues The importance of a project when starting out Starter hardware Hero devkits (Chris likes the nRF9160-DK as a starter board or the nRF5340-DK) M5stack boards iMX8 Jumping down to Zephyr from Linux MPU + MCU Tight integration Zephyr can run POSIX code What about the the RT in RTOS? Does this operate realtime often? (timing critical) BOM cost and software cost Security and dependencies Join the Zephyr discord to talk to other people using Zephyr TechTalks / YouTube Interested in going to a conference in Seattle in 2024 for Zephyr? The ZDS / EOSS CFP is open now!

You may have noted a few weeks off in September…Chris was busy with a new kiddo! Starship launch was awesome, but Blue Origin might beat them to market? Chris has been troubleshooting some boards he had made recently. It was pre-baby so sleep deprivation can’t explain some of the screw ups! PCB Carolina was a local tradeshow TechTechPotato talks about layoffs at SiFive. Article about the layoffs. RP1 show RetroPie Oversupply in the market is hitting some silicon vendors Dr Michael Burry (highlighted in The Big Short) has been shorting the semiconductor industry At the end of the movie the epilogue talks about how Dr Burry is watching water as well, possibly why he’s shorting semis? Chris wondered if Steve Sanghi mentioned why they’re still in Arizona while he was on the show Nuclear Diamond Battery video SnapEDA “off by one letter” error while ordering parts PCF85063BTL vs PCF85063ATL Scotty does a tour of the WorldSemi (makers of the WS2812B) factory, it’s awesome! Ben Hencke of ElectroMage makes the PixelBlaze, which is a great way to drive LED strips Dave was talking to past guest of the show, Andrea Morello, about future changes to Quantum computers China is turning off exports of Germanium and Gallium, which could impact the upstream supply for the chip industry, including around specialty semis. Breakdown Bunnie writes about why the US shouldn’t put restrictions on RISC V (agree!) KiCon has happened in Europe and China now, check out the talks on the KiCad YouTube channel. Future (distributor) was acquired by WT Microelectronics out of Taiwan Check out this 1975 tour of a UNIVAC manufacturing plant

Welcome Jeff Geerling of the Jeff Geerling YouTube Channel! Jeff sounds so calm one his videos because he records after the kids are in bed He started working with dad at the radio station when there was a transition in radio to digital / online. Jeff had an early job as a technology explainer while making manuals at the station. Jeff still makes videos with his Dad on the Geerling engineering channel  Ham radio vs broadcast 1 Million Watts on the Supertower Calling the FCC CamOX facility Keeping people interested during videos Mars 400 RPi clusters It’s a good exercise because it helps those building it understanding the limitation of spreading across computers Drupal website on cluster “The constraint gives me the story” A good starter project? Maybe the project pi cluster /r/homelab NAS, monitoring, VPN, pidramble Home Assistant ESPhome yaml files: better than xml, JSON is better Devices should only be added to the house if they are: Local, additive, private X10 Smart stuff in the house Interested in the embedded side LLM Jeff became Chris’s de facto Pi5 analyst RP1 episode PCIexpress Jeff discusses RISC V

Andreas Olofsson, Co-founder of ZeroASIC, discusses accessible ASICs and open-source impact on silicon designs. He explains the concept of chiplets and the basis of his company ZeroASIC. They offer a drag and drop interface for customers to create custom ASICs. Andreas also talks about the advantages of their assembly process and the potential of ZeroASIC in aerospace and defense. The podcast covers topics like ball grid arrays, system-on-module, AWS servers, ML chiplets, remote work in hardware development, and circuit design with Lego-like bricks.

Kathy Joseph, a physics enthusiast specializing in the history of the Cathode Ray Tube, joins Dave on an entertaining episode. They delve into the fascinating origins of the CRT, discussing the crucial role of Professor Plucker, the discovery of electron flow, and the artistry of Geisler tubes. They also touch on the discovery of x-rays, the challenges faced in the development of electric television, and debunking free energy scams. The hosts recommend 'The Nintendo Library' and reflect on their decision to quit social media.

James Adams and Liam Fraser from the Raspberry Pi Hardware team discuss the RP1 chip, RP2040 updates, sourcing chips, IP block updates, prototyping on FPGAs, openness in Raspberry Pi's hardware, and hidden signatures on the Raspberry Pi board.

Dave hangs out with experienced guest Fran Blanche. They discuss challenges in NASA's projects compared to SpaceX, building electronic tube testing racks, frustrations with file management systems, storage nightmares, challenges of the YouTube algorithm, and the mystery of model builders behind early rocket designs.

Chris is out of stock on Tindie and will no longer be a seller (though he was barely one to start with). Props to all the sellers out there! Media mail is a low cost post option in the US Colin Mitchell allowed people to pay with stamps instead of money orders back in the day There is always a struggle for hardware engineers to price a product at the value in the marketplace and not just the cost of parts Teardown of DHO800 Heatsink testing (live during the show) CFD Controlled depth routing We discussed Joe Grand’s thin boombox last time, Dave watched a talk where he explained more of the process Scotty from Strange Parts did an awesome tour of the JLC PCB Flex factory Skewed expectations Dave was wondering why during the production assembly of scope that they populated caps but not silicon Intel is investing in ARM, RISC V (say what now?) eBay U1273A meter Old stock 30 year old tek chips