The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

Dave and Chris discuss Golioth getting acquired by Canonical (makers of Ubuntu), trying out OpenClaw in the lab, changes to space plans, big new factories, Arm making chips, and more!

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.

Zachariah Peterson joins Chris to discuss doing PCB layout and creating content for engineers looking to learn more about how to build their own PCBs

This week we talked about upcoming travel, solid state transformers, battery testing, new small circuit boards, and a bunch more.

David Ray joins Dave to talk about the history of electronics manufacturing and how he has built a high mix manufacturing business while regularly educating the public about how electronics work.

Founder of Pebble and CEO of CoreDevices, Eric Migicovsky, joins Chris to talk about the history of the Pebble Watch and resurrecting the hardware to serve a very loyal ecosystem. Along the way, Eric has continued to create new gadgets like the Index 01 ring.

Martin Rowe is a long time technical editor for publications like EE World, EDN, and Test and Measurement World. He stops by The Amp Hour to talk about the things he has seen and the people he has met in the electronics industry, and he's still going strong!

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!

Aaed is a YouTuber who builds a variety of robots and a mechanical engineering student at Purdue. He joins Chris to talk building robots and robotics components from the ground up, with a focus on lowering the cost and barrier to entry. They also discuss modern engineering education.

Dr Mark Palmeri is a professor at Duke University in the Biomedical Engineering (BME) field. He joins Chris to talk about using open tools (KiCad, ngspice, Zephyr, Jupyter notebooks, Python) to build educational resources and how he shares those courses with the world outside of Duke. He also walks through the Tympanometer project, built with Duke BME Design Fellows.

Dave and Chris are back after a long vacation absence to talk about high end events, new scopes, fast board assembly, and nerds nostalgic for the sci fi future that never was.

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.

Davide Andrea is the author of The Electronic Connector Book and Principal of Elithion, a company that designs Battery Management System. He joins Chris to talk about the wide and wonderful world of connectors.

This week Dave and Chris discuss test equipment, the Arduino acquisition, Zephyr, Altium pricing, private equity owning YouTube channels, audio circuits, and more!

Joren Vaes is a design engineer at SOFICS working on simulating and delivering analog IP blocks on leading edge nodes like the 2 nm node from TSMC. Listen to how they bend physics to their will to make the chips that power our modern electronics.

This week Dave and Chris discuss DIN rail, IAC (featuring Space Lube), begging for Moonlanders, batteries, 10x-priced connectors, Gridfinity, concrete slabs, and more.

Jerry Twomey, author of Applied Embedded Electronics, joins Chris to talk about how to build more reliable hardware when there are embedded components involved. And these days, there are almost always embedded components involved.

Tim 'Mithro' Ansell returns to The Amp Hour to discuss his new Singapore based wafer sharing service called wafer.space. Now that Efabless is no more, this venture will aim to make silicon even more accessible to the masses, driving down the costs on a per chip basis. For $7K, you get 1000 chips delivered on a 180 nm process from Global Foundries.

Dave and Chris discuss solar, nuclear, making new injection molds from old ones (or not), and how to probe poorly placed test points with tiny needles.

Todd Bailey has been busy in the 11 years since he was last on the show. He has designed submarine sonar and many different pieces of space electronics, the latest being a hall effect thruster that uses solid propellant for his now sold company Starlight Engines.

Dave and Chris record after a long break between episodes together and discuss new electronics designs they're working on, solar and battery installations, dealing with tariffs, and building at JLC.

Andrew Seddon, founder and CEO of CircuitHub, joins Chris to talk about how CircuitHub has changed over the past 12 years as a startup and how they are continuing to push the boundaries of high mix domestic electronics manufacturing.

Matt Brown is a hardware and IoT security researcher. He joins Chris to talk about best practices for securing hardware that talks to the internet and share stories of products that didn't pass muster.

Tim from Mitxela stops by the show to discuss his extensive portfolio of projects involving, hardware (tiny LEDs), firmware (ridiculously low power processing), software (emulating gameboy), and mechanical (machining jewelry grade objects)

This week Dave and Chris discuss solar optimization, short videos, useless products, cameras, energy monitors, Bluetooth, magnets, and more!

Sam Aldhaher is a power engineer and 3D graphic artist, his Blender visualizations have helped many people understand how RF flows in a variety of circuits. Sam joins Chris to talk about how to get started in Blender and the variety of tools available once you do.

In this episode, Dave and Chris cover environmental monitoring, trade shows, manufacturing, tariffs, new test equipment, and AI coding.

Colin O'Flynn returns to The Amp Hour for a 3rd time to talk about recent developments in security, FPGAs, small scale electronics manufacturing, and the world of academia.

In this episode Dave and Chris discuss solar installs, wacky tariffs, peak power pricing, tiny electronics, oscilloscope triggering, and more.

Michael Gielda returns to the show (for a third time) to talk about the work Antmicro is doing to extend hardware, firmware, and silicon design. Their new tool System Designer allows even more high level testing of full systems, in addition to their popular Renode tool.

Dave and Chris discuss bluetooth boards, what happens when batteries leak, new cellular capabilities in iPhones, AC flicker, old oscilloscopes, and more!

Kevin Cappuccio joins Chris to talk about the Jumperless Breadboard, an advanced platform for prototyping and interacting with circuits that you place onto the breadboard.

Dave and Chris discuss the Tandy 200, test equipment cashflow, the return of the Pebble watch, GPT trying its hand at CAD, solar output...and more

The RP2350 from Raspberry Pi is a dual dual-core (Cortex-M33 and Hazard 3 RISC V) microcontroller with extensive peripherals. Some of the Raspberry Pi team (James Adams, Chris Boross, Liam Fraser, Luke Wren) join Chris to discuss how the chip evolved from the RP2040, including interesting security and lower power enhancements.

Stephen Hawes started Opulo, a company that builds the Lumen Benchtop Pick and Place. Opulo designs open source hardware and sane software for building your own PCBs in your lab.

This week Chris and Dave discuss the changes at Intel, being in control data in your home lab, bogus copyright claims for repair videos, and more!

A full 3 hour discussion with the legendary Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne 1, SOL computer, VDM-1, Pennywhistle modem, and the inventor of social media.

Chris and Dave discuss updated house wiring, making smart relays capable of switching power, how to design a linear supply, and using AI tools to help troubleshoot code (but NOT layout)

Chris and Dave discuss troubleshooting a dead short in a PCB, the slow march of time, retirements, whether 2 layers is sufficient on PCBs, and much more!

Lukas Henkel, CEO of OV Tech, joins Chris to talk about high speed design while utilizing incredibly small form factors. They discuss open source SIPs, a CM4 replacement board, FEM modeling, and more!

Chris and Dave discuss identifying boards, amazing rocket catches, recent travel to trade shows, the impacts of the floods on the supply chain, EV charging, and more!

Dan Esparon from Inovor Technologies in South Australia joins Dave to discuss all about the engineering of designing and launching satellites!

Katerina Galitskaya is a Senior Antenna Engineer who is currently designing base station antennas. She joins Chris to talk about simulating, visualizing, and thinking about the design of antennas. Listen for everyday design rules and stories of interesting antenna designs.

This week Dave and Chris talk about Meshtastic (a meshing layer on top of LoRa), new scope specs, cellular modems, power, and a new Embedded Conference in the US.

Dave and Chris record together after a long hiatus because Chris spent the summer moving boxes between two houses and reorganizing his lab. Also hardware livestreams, open source hardware, new battery storage, layoffs, and more!

Shawn Hymel is an engineer and content creator who recently left his developer relations job at Edge Impulse to work on developing courses full time

Dave and Chris return to talk electronics trade shows, API tools, solar and batteries, automation, and more!

Bitluni joins Chris on The Amp Hour to discuss FPGAs, ESP32 projects, custom silicon, building around memes, and continually challenging yourself to learn something new.