#713 – Rubber Duck Incarnate
Dave and Chris discuss staying connected while traveling, building terminal interfaces for custom hardware, using coding tools, the Teensy and recent events surrounding the manufacture, Zephyr, Raspberry Pi PIOs, and more!
The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast
January 26, 20261h 9m
Show 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