The Amp Hour

Lots of talk about CAD, Education, Startups and China today! Sparkfun is having a soldering contest! Just like paying for FedEx, people are almost always willing to pay for faster service. Dave is working on his MakerBot directly after recording the show today. Chris is off on a trip to go do a technology transfer [...]

Chris is back from Hawaii, and we are joined once again by Jeff Keyzer of Mightyohm.com. All about Sabaticals, and trying to get out of working for a living :-> We ridicule a Spray-On Antenna in a can! We are reluctant to mention a new reality TV show called Top Engineer. Before auditioning, be sure to [...]

Whilst Chris is on his belated honeymoon, regular cohort Jeff Keyzer from Mightohm.com takes over. Jeff has been travelling again: He barely survived Berlin for New Years, what with their readily available fireworks, unlike Australia. The Edison National Historic Park in New Jersey Another surplus shop tour, including the TWR swap meet. Will Detroit just [...]

Dave's choice of an Arduino as the brains of his new power supply is giving him strife. They are manufacturing the 6502 again! Similar to how Rochester Electronics makes old parts. "Programming (Hardware) is like sex: One mistake and you'll support it for the rest of your life!" Chris is looking at a new project [...]

Happy Chinese New Year! Find out how to say it on YouTube. Or how to say it as a hardware engineer! Dave wasn't able to get parts from AliBaba. So is he a locavore now? Locatech? Ugh, terrible term. Dave's new boards are from NZ! http://www.pcbzone.net Chris likes the LPKF S43, which can dispense solderpaste right [...]

Chris visited a FabLab today (not a fab!) to work on some projects and hang out with friends. Chris has also been reading Neil Gershenfeld's book of the same name, FAB. Melbourne had its first MakerFaire, though Dave was not able to go, unfortunately. Dr. Howard Johnson offered rewards for finding errors in his book, [...]

Welcome Dr. Howard Johnson! He has published two reference books that are a must-have for the field of high speed signal propagation: High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic High Speed Signal Propagation: Advanced Black Magic Howard hails from Twisp, WA. Martin Graham, the co-author of his book, was also his longtime mentor [...]

Happy New Year! We hope 2012 will be a great year for The Amp Hour and all of our listeners! We have a new theme by Paul Stevenson! We love it! Chris has a ham exam scheduled for next Sunday! Dave has been chasing a hum at his new studios, he took a spectrum snapshot [...]

Welcome to Ben Krasnow! (Also seen as bkraz333 on YouTube) We decided we had to have Ben on the show once we saw his crazy LED in a contact lens video: Ben started as a researcher/technician with a TMS lab, which led him to starting his own business, Mag Design and Engineering. That also led [...]

Thank you, thank you to all of our donors. We are currently shopping for Virtual Private Servers and will hopefully have zippy web service by the end of the calendar year! If you're still interested in joining the cause and helping out, please check out our Donation page. Thanks again! Thanks to PStevenson for including [...]

Welcome back Jeff! Joining us for some holiday fun! Chris started a new engineering job today! Dave is getting the keys to his new lab today! Jeff is attending DorkBot Austin tonight! Reminds Chris of PechaKucha. What should we call a group of nerds standing around? Chris likes the term, "a grumbling of [...]

Chris reveals (to those that did not already know) that he used to work at Keithley Instruments and recently left to go work at an unnamed company. Chris has the whole week off! He wrote more about leaving his engineering job on Engineer Blogs. Keithley was recently bought by Danaher, who also owns Tektronix, Fluke, Seabird [...]

This weeks special guest is John Edmond, the co-founder and Director of Advanced Optoelectronics Technology at Cree, Inc in Durham, NC. John talks about the history of Cree and how they built the company with no venture capital. Awesome! Lots of technical LED talk on manufacturing, Stokes loss, Haitz's law and chemistries involved in [...]

Chris explains what he thinks Thanksgiving was about (or what he thought it was about, he's no historian). The Daily Show had a segment about "Evacuation Day" and the history behind it. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Happy Evacuation Day www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor [...]

Chris has been issued a challenge to get his (ham) technician's license by the new year. Can he do it? Do 10 others want to do it with him? If so, we can get Dave to sing on air! (or can we?) Dave has a beef with the Agilent U1272A's data export capabilities. Perhaps Dave [...]

Great comics from OhmArt! Be sure to check them out and buy some of their merchandise! Tales from the cube talks about a label over an EPROM...has anyone seen this article? Bill Schweber wrote about the persistence and insanity of engineers chasing problems. Katie Luper is a former lawyer going back to school for [...]

Happy Halloween! Has anyone heard of people giving away circuits as a Halloween? Did you know: CR2032 batteries reference the size of the battery? Chris didn't! The BeagleBoard folks just released the BeagleBone! It looks great! Also, kudos to the folks at TI, especially those on the team. Dave has a deposit in on [...]

Welcome back Jeff! Jeff's new setup is on Flickr! As are the pictures of his new cases for the Geiger Counter kit. He cut out the new cases at the ATXHackerspace using the ULS laser cutter. There's a new Design News Radio Show. You can listen...if you trade all your information. Dave prefers using off-the-shelf [...]

SPEED PROBLEM UPDATE: The MP3 is now hosted on Dave's EEVblog dedicated server and should be much faster, please try again. . Dave lost the bid for a lab which we discussed last week. Shoutouts: Jim Williams' desk is moving to the Computer History Museum. Chris wants to turn it into a wishing well. EE [...]

SPEED PROBLEM UPDATE: The MP3 is now hosted on Dave's EEVblog dedicated server and should be much faster, please try again. . Dave lost the bid for a lab which we discussed last week. Shoutouts: Jim Williams' desk is moving to the Computer History Museum. Chris wants to turn it into a wishing well. EE [...]

Dave is buying a new place! It's not a house in Cleveland, nor a Castle in Europe, but he'll be doing nerdy things there! And as Dave likes to say, at least it's not Detroit (with all apologies to Detroiters out there). Dave"s new place is walkable, unlike the campuses of Silicon Valley and the [...]

NOTE: Yes, there were some audio issues this week in the first half of the show. We'll get back to our better quality next week, sorry for the ears we offend. Lots of fun this week as we get back to the old format of Chris and Dave just shooting the breeze. Hope [...]

We're joined once again from our friend Jeff Keyzer of MightyOhm.com, calling in from NYC. He is wrapping up weeks of travel, most recently at the Open Hardware Summit and the World Maker Faire. Welcome once again Jeff! Chris is a married man! Sorry all you throngs of lady-listeners to The Amp Hour, [...]

Welcome to our guest this week, Joe Grand! Hardware hacker, electrical engineer and former TV host! (but not a washout as Joe was saying) Joe gave us a behind the scenes look at being part of a TV show (all the design docs here). His 13 episode show was Prototype This on The Discovery [...]

Wow...kind of a long episode this week (but totally worth it), due to having TWO guests on the show! Jason Kridner of the BeagleBoard Project and Texas Instruments and our regular co-co-host, Jeff Keyzer of MightyOhm.com. Some of Jason's favorite projects for the BeagleBoard are robotics, including some that utilize the libfreenect library. [...]

Chris has a new mic! An AT2020 USB microphone. Dave uses a Samson C01U USB microphone. The Jacksonville police mistake LED lightbulbs for a bomb! Whoops! Shonky Product of the Week: The ADE651, a scam bomb detector. Similar to a dowsing rod...in that it's full of crap! Shoutouts: Fake EE Quips has created a bingo [...]

Welcome to another awesome guest: Alan Yates, VK2ZAY! Alan works on pyrotechnics for fun(?!) While he's not worried about burning out over doing similar hobby/paid work, Chris has written about burn out recently and how that might be a part of it. He also is an active ham operator, mostly working with PSK31 [...]

Another week of bouncing from topic to topic. This week included robots, entrepreneurs, OSHW, FPAAs, Ecology and LEDs! Whoo, that's a lotta stuff! Elon Musk is an enviable entrepreneur and engineer. Great video piece on him on Bloomberg.com. Google buys the Motorola handset business for $12.5 billion. Chris thought it was for access [...]

Just when you thought the names of episodes couldn't get any weirder... US economy seems to be diving again, hopefully it will not seriously impact the electronics industry. If it does, Chris thinks startups will be even more reliant on Angel Investors like Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail) Is DIY finally going mainstream, [...]

Embedded industry maven and prolific writer, Jack Ganssle, joins us on The Amp Hour this week. Dave called Chris a "young whippersnapper" (actually "young feller", but the same sentiment) in writing about Jeri's chip making. A former colleague of Jack's maintained that spec's for computers were driven by the porn industry and how much [...]

Happy Birthday to us! One year in the bag! Thanks for all of our wonderful listeners! From the EEVBlog forums, user "dics" is listening to The Amp Hour on a breadboard! Awesome! Tech Shop SF is matching donations on a new campaign to spread the word of Hacker/Makerspaces in the community. Chris's alma [...]

Our friend and previous guest, Jeri Ellsworth, returned to the show to talk about her latest projects. And holy wow, they are prettygreat! Jeri discusses the process of making transistors in your home using household chemicals, silicon wafers and a small kiln or oven. More info on her process of making the chips [...]

Our initial try of Google Plus "Hangouts"! Hopefully all the interuptions and the concentration on a new medium didn't interrupt our usual shabby quality of podcast (thereby downgrading our rating to "godawful"). We had fun and hopefully will be able to use it to pull in guests in an easier way and somehow [...]

What would be the best way to create a "cough switch" or "kill switch" for a USB based podcasting microphone? EMSL created an AWESOME 555 Timer Footstool. Such a great replica! Design Spark corrected us on what their new plugin does, in relation to Google Sketchup. Dave is wondering what kind of criteria to [...]

This week focused more on electronics! Think we talk about something too much or too little? Let us know in the comments! Chris finally got a chair and wowsa does it make a difference! Finding parts online can be tough with distractions, apparently extended internet use can affect the brain. What's a datasheet [...]

Though it's been a sad week for the field of analog engineering, we want to honor Bob Pease and Jim Williams' passing. They were wonderful educators, engineers and people and we felt honored to even talk about them on the show. Please share any comments you might have about either of these two great [...]

Very sad news, Jim Williams of LTC analog fame has suddenly passed away The Art of Electronics 3rd Edition is the Duke Nukem Forever of the electronics industry. Jeff reminisces about his old Commodore Amiga and mentions the Amiga on an FPGA, and Dave talks about Jamma consoles. Agilent impress with their response to the [...]

The Amp Hour has a new server! Let us know if it is working ok for you. Daniel Garrido linked here from his project site. Some great projects over there! (sorry if I butchered your name!) Open Hardware Summit is on again this year and are looking for entries for presentations. Bre Pettis of [...]

Dave is a daddy! Congrats to him! See Dave's intro video to his new "project" below. If you have suggestions for who to have on the show, check out the thread on the EEVblog forum (or leave comments below) Should the Jones' be worried about electromagnetic radiation sensitivity for the baby? Only if [...]

This week it's back to just Dave and Chris...almost feels weird without more people! We'll get more guests on soon. Dave is in his studio with freshly made acoustic panels! Throughout the week, Chris has been mistaking BAMF to mean "Badass MotherF*#$%@!" when in fact they've been talking about the Bay Area Maker Faire. [...]

This week we have our first 4 person Amp Hour! Welcome to the Ed McMahon of The Amp Hour, Jeff Keyzer, and the young star of the maker scene, Jeremy Blum! Happy birthday to Jeremy! How do people say "Arduino"? Friend of the show and 555 contest entrant, Jason Pruitt linked here recently from his [...]

Lots of fun and lots of discussion points this week! We talked about schools, contests, more contests, ham radio, 3D transistors and our first Chip of the Week! New-ish podcast about scientific computing. We found out about it when Ayah and Alicia from the Open Hardware Summit were on there. Jason Struble (@strube09) linked [...]

This week is another threesome. Chris & Migthyohm Jeff are jury-rigged up in a hotel room at the ESC conference. New startup kit business Nerds Like Us Sebastian (@sgtech) linked to us on his blog Chris & Jeff visited Halted Electronics & Weird Stuff Dave retold the Robert Cringely's DEFCON hacker conference story [...]

This week focused mainly around building a kit business, namely keeping costs down, keeping revenues in check and how to license your project. Jigish linked to us from his site. Thanks! The Nottingham Hackerspace, Nottinghack, was pushed out of their old space and needs help funding a new one. Can hackerspaces thrive in [...]