The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast
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A weekly podcast about the electronics industry. Occasional guests. Lots of laughs.
#727 – Boat Anchor Warehouse
Yesterday at 12:40 AM
AI Data Centers & Local LLMs: Dave discusses his noise concerns regarding a new AI data center and its diesel backup generators being built near his office. Chris shares his experience running local AI models like Gemma 4 on a laptop using the Hermes orchestrator for tasks like coding and internet research.
USB Power Delivery Chips: Discussion of the CH224, a USB PD negotiation chip that works via DIP switches or pin strapping without requiring programming. They also touch on the CH32 X33/X35 series, which integrates similar PD functionality into a microcontroller.
CH224 LCSC Product Page
Dave’s Werewolf US...
#726 – Arduino’s Invisible Touch with Massimo Banzi
06/17/2026
Welcome, Massimo Banzi of SuperModerno and co-founder of Arduino
Introduction and SuperModerno: Massimo introduces himself as a “friendly nerd” and discusses his new project, SuperModerno The project aims to explain the “behind the scenes” of technology to prevent people from becoming “slaves to the platform” The History of Technology: Massimo expresses his passion for technology’s history, emphasizing non-American innovators to show Europeans they can also lead in technology, citing the UK-based origins of the Arm processor The Legacy of Olivetti: He highlights Olivetti (founded in 1908), which moved from typewriters to creating the Programma 101, the first desktop comput...#725 – The Secret Life of Circuits with lcamtuf / Michał Zalewski
06/04/2026
Welcome Michał Zalewski, AKA lcamtuf!
The lcamtuf Substack is where Michał is writing most these days Chris first found and geeked out about the CNC guide on the lcamtuf original site (discussed many times here) Michał is interested in the craft of teaching electronics He recently published The Secret Life of Circuits with No Starch Press Use the code AMPHOUR26 for 30% off The Secret Life of Circuits valid from June 1st through June 30th It was announced on his blog here Deriving fomulas from basic trigonometry sometimes bugs people who think electronics should only work with cal...#724 – All Heat, No Useful Work
05/25/2026
Chris just got back from a work trip to Madrid
He also got to hang out with Matt Venn (and coworker Mike Szczys) in Valencia
Dave has a new data center going in across the street
Chris enjoyed this episode of Prof G Markets where they talked about the impact of data centers on power and the rise of “behind the meter” generation
Dave without internet for a week. Chris has had multiday losses after fiber has been cut in his neighborhood.
Humanoid robots…on a plane!
Chris has been working on 0201 components on a tiny Bluetooth board
The Ir...
#723 – BeagleBoard’s Back with Jason Kridner
05/07/2026
Welcome back, Jason Kridner!
Jason has previously been on the show Episode 59 (!) Episode 378 alongside Robert Nelson The BeagleY AI was the first board that mimic’ed the RPi form factor PocketBeagle 2 is still a small altoid tin form factor with a new processor The Zepto is a new product targeting a $1 price point for microcontrollers Many boards in the Beagle catalog now run Zephyr, and BeagleBoard.org recently joined The Zephyr Project as members and contributors Click Brand is the official bards from MikroElectronika that implement the open source Mikrobus Chris started using Mikrobus while designing ear...#722 – AI Tooling with Matt Liberty and Luke Beno
04/23/2026
Welcome back Matt Liberty (Joulescope) and Luke Beno (Werewolf.us)
Matt has been a guest on episodes 527 and 607 Luke was a guest on episode 272 Luke launched a new cable manufacturing and power supply company in the US called Werewolf.us Matt is working on the JS320 We discussed how PartsBox is a great ERP solution but Matt and Luke decided to go fully custom with Claude Code. Jan Rychter was a guest on episode 542 We discussed the differences with Product Lifecycle Maintenance. Michael Corr of the recently acquired Duro Labs was on episode 577 CAM workflow A...#721 – Chip Design for Fun (and Waffles) with Julia Desmazes
04/09/2026
Welcome Julia Desmazes of Tales on The Wire
Follow along with the blog post we discuss Two Weeks Until Tapeout Matt Venn – TinyTapeout – Episode 616 and 672 Andreas Olofsson – openroad/openlane – Episode 254 and 650 Tim Ansell – Wafer.space – Episode 375, 501, and 703 JTAG How do you know that tooling is or isn’t working? Accelerator Rabbithole with floating point (post updated after recording) BFloat16 Follow Julia on GitHubhttps://github.com/Essenceia Kapla (official website, not the much cheaper alibaba version): Dimity Grinberg personal blog#720 – Hyper Growth and OpenClaw Interns
04/01/2026
Canonical (the makers of Ubuntu) acquired Golioth, meaning Chris is moving from a 12-person startup to an organization of over 1,200 people
Dave found this chart of Canonical products on wikipedia to be useful
An increase in professional travel from zero weeks to six weeks per year following the acquisition, including “sprints” in cities like London
The naming convention for Ubuntu releases (Year.Month) and the importance of Long Term Support (LTS) versions for backporting security vulnerabilities
Ubuntu Core’s role in embedded Linux devices, utilizing an immutable kernel and “snaps” for field update
Dave believes he influenced the Emergency...
#719 – Inventing the Power MOSFET with Alex Lidow
03/20/2026
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.
#718 – Layout Review with Zachariah Peterson
03/11/2026
Welcome Zachariah Peterson of Northwest Engineering Solutions!
Zach listed the various places people can find his work, including The Altium YouTube channel Zach’s YouTube channel His personal technical blog The Altium Blog various industry conferences like PCB West 01:10 Zach mentions that he has been creating video content and seminars for several years, traveling to places like Denmark to teach high-speed design. 01:10 They discuss the recent acquisition of Altium by Renesas and how the company is trying to balance enterprise features with the needs of individual users. 03:15 He notes that the pricing for professional design software ha...#717 – Back on the road in ’26
03/04/2026
Chris will be having a meetup in London March 8th, 2026 click here for more info. He will also be at Embedded World the following week at various events.
Dave is also headed to a meetup in Sydney that he has presented at in the past.
The “lazy man move” for meetup organizers: scheduling events within walking distance of home to simplify travel logistics.
Chris provides details on his latest high-density hardware project, a 22mm circular board packed with 0201 components, Bluetooth, and a suite of sensors, noting a move from BGA to QFN for better assembly reliability.
There is sign...
#716 – Electronics Manufacturing History with David Ray
02/26/2026
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, SeaSats! Check out their open positions making autonomous ocean vehicles.
Welcome David Ray of Cyber City Circuits
• The “Retro Electro” Series: David explains his passion for writing historical articles for Digi Key, focusing on “giants” like Orstead whose contributions to electricity are often overlooked.
• Career Background: David details his path from Marine Corps radio repair to cash register and Motorola radio repair.
• Starting the Business: In late 2019, David cashed in his retirement to buy pick-and-place machines and start his own factory.
• Teaching the First Lady: Davi...
#715 – Shiny New Pebble with Eric Migicovsky
02/10/2026
Welcome Eric Migicovsky of Pebble!
Pebble is back after Eric worked with Google to open source PebbleOS and he reaquired the naming rights Eric returns to the hardware space after 7 years, including working at yCombinator, a famous accelerator for early stage startups, and on Beeper, a cross platform app for messaging. While discussing the difficulties of hardware project, Chris brought up a recent post about a high wattage lamp project HN One thing Eric likes about hardware projects vs software is that “hardware projects can be done” as in they have a defined end state A more...#714 – The Measurement Blues with Martin Rowe
02/03/2026
Welcome Martin Rowe of EE World!
Martin is a long time journalist in the electronics space, having worked at magazines like EDN, Test and Measurement World, EE World, and more! Kenneth Wyatt Concentrated vs diffuse information Product reviews Unitrend scope video Tek 5 series B Wirecutter for test equipment / parts Skepticism Webinars – 3 levels Martin has an HP34401A early model Touring T&M companies Littelfuse Martin is in the Boston area Boxborough has multiple EMI labs Article on building an anechoic chamber PCB East was in Boxborough now in Worcester (“Wuh – Stah” 😀 ) International Microwave Symposium (IMS) inBoston this year Wh...#713 – Rubber Duck Incarnate
01/26/2026
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...
#712 – Robots Everywhere with Aaed Musa
01/20/2026
Welcome Aaed Musa!
Aaed is a YouTuber who builds a variety of robots and a mechanical engineering student at Purdue. He just completed his undergrad degree and is now working on his Master’s degree. I believe he is the first Amp Hour guest who is still a full time student. His channel has a great variety of builds including designing all the way down to gearboxes. Aaed says the MIT “mini cheetah” launched many low(er) costs builds of robots, including his own. Boston Dynamics (and many others) announced their new ATLAS robotics platform at CES th...#711 – Medical Electronics Education with Mark Palmeri
12/22/2025
Welcome Dr Mark Palmeri, professor at Duke University!
Mark has been at Duke since 1996, and has completed undergraduate, graduate, medical, and PhD degrees here (!) He has focused on making medical devices and now teaches others to do the same in his Biomedical Engineering (BME) courses Verification and Validation (v&v) is a large constraint in getting a regulated medical device to market BME design fellows is a program that guides students towards real world use cases and design projects The courses that Mark runs reminds Chris of “automatic job offers” that Chris has heard about for clas...#710 – Tugging on the Nerd Heartstring
12/06/2025
Chris got back from his honeymoon to the Galapagos, see photos on the updated version of his blog.
Dave encountered a super secret podcast location
Before leaving on vacation, Chris went to an event mentioned in episode 708 launching a new Tektronix scope.
The parent company has been Danaher -> Fortive -> Ralliant (now based out of Raleigh)
Large budget events
Don Mcmillan is technically funny
Open Circuit
The Way Things Work
Discman teardown
Neo the home robot
Humane AI pin ‘tugging on the nerd heartstring’
Nikola / Trevor Norton
Auto concept cars
Rigol MHO 900 videos, already hacked, paid hack
EEVb...
#709 – Nobel Prize Winner Dr Barry Marshall
11/10/2025
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.
But Barry is also an electronics hobbyist and vintage HP and Tek oscilloscope and vintage computer enthusiast. He visited the EEVBlog lab and sat down with Dave for an impromptu discussion about all sorts of things.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2005/marshall/facts/
#708 – All the Connectors with Davide Andrea
11/03/2025
Welcome Davide Andrea, author or The Electronic Connector Book! And many thanks to Blues for sponsoring this episode of The Amp Hour! Get 10% off your next order in their online store for a development kit by using the code AMPHOUR.
Davide is an engineer working on Battery Management Systems at Elithion He got into writing and editing books via a postcard sent to him after he gave a talk For many years he was an editor at Artech house He works on Lithium BMS systems for large setups How do young engineers learn about connectors, but...#707 – Welding with an HDMI Cable
10/28/2025
Thanks to our sponsor Blues this week! Visit the Blues store and use the code AMPHOUR to get 10% off your first order of a kit.
Capacitors go pop on Dave’s audio setup, the Presonus monitors Ground loops causing HDMI cable sparking Chris was watching Jetman videos and got an ‘Is that real?’ from the kid. We find ourselves asking the same with all the AI generated video these days. Fight between mehdi/electroboom and walter lewin about KVL Arduino bought by Qualcomm! They also released the Arduino Uno Q, a single board computer running Debian that als...#706 – Leading Edge Analog with Joren Vaes
10/18/2025
Welcome Joren Vaes, design engineer at SOFICS
Simulation is critical when designing analog devices based on a PDK from the fab Parasitics are significant, especially with new nodes having upwards of 16 metal layers Chris complained about a class where the professor made them draw planar structures with graph paper with colored pencils Large fabs on leading edge nodes have 1800 page textbook of rules Because the constraints get tighter, that book gets longer for each node 2 nm mass production on finfet currently with TSMC 22 was the last classic cmos Finfet, looks like a devil ‘gate all around’ / nanos...#705 – Psst…Hey buddy, wanna buy an Octopus?
10/09/2025
Contextual Electronics is “still a thing”.
Sydney hosted the International Astronautical Congress (IAC). The IAC is the “big space event of the year,” held annually in a different city.
Chris noted that US space funding seems low, leading some friends to move from NASA to private industry.
Dave recorded two walkaround videos: a 30-minute bird’s eye view using a GoPro on a pole and a physical hour-long walkaround.
Large companies had private stands, while smaller, two-man companies had sub-booths within their country’s larger rented stand (e.g., South Africa, Germany, Poland).
Niche companies included those selling “space connecto...
#704 – Applied Embedded Electronics with Jerry Twomey
10/03/2025
Welcome Jerry Twomey (Effective Electrons) author of the book, Applied Embedded Electronics: Design Essentials for Robust Systems. Chris first heard Jerry on Embedded.fm last year.
Jerry’s Background and Book Motivation: Jerry shares his quick history, moving from the Boston area to San Jose (Silicon Valley) and eventually to San Diego, where he has worked across diverse sectors including consumer electronics, aerospace, defense projects, DARPA research, and medical electronics. His book focuses on how to develop robust systems, providing guidance that is timeless rather than applications manuals that quickly become outdated. The Analog Problem: Although mo...#703 – Building wafer.space with Tim Ansell
09/25/2025
Welcome back Tim Ansell!
Tim’s past appearances and previous work Discussing Tomu on 375 Discussing Fomu on 456.3 Discussing the open source PDK on 501 Tim’s previous work at Google involved releasing a manufacturable open-source PDK (Process Development Kit), which contains the fundamental information needed to create integrated circuits. Key open-source tools discussed include OpenROAD (a backend compiler for IC design) and Open Lane (an end-to-end suite turning chip descriptions (RTL) into manufacturing data (GDS)). Andreas had been on the show talking about his work on OpenROAD. Not discussed on the show but after Efabless went away, Open...#702 – Test Point Accupuncture
09/15/2025
Dave bought a lemon laptop
Chris officially has solar that is installed, working, and is effectively an appliance at this point…
Duke Energy and North Carolina nuclear mix
The impact of batteries on the grid
The Duck Curve is something Chris and Ari discussed on ep650
Open circuit voltage on panels
Dave did a repair on a tennis ball machine
Chris designed a board with test points too small
Accupuncture jbc
High cost vs low cost rework tweezers
Nanofix YouTube Channel
Tested
Ugly multimeter review
#701 – Electric Propulsion with Todd Bailey
08/22/2025
Welcome back Todd Bailey of Starlight Engines, now Muon Space! (11 years later)
Todd was on Episode 194 of The Amp Hour, when he was consulting in the art and design space and building instruments like Where the Party At (WTPA). He was designing ‘robot doors’ for Calvin Klein’s house, discussed last time. Through Andy Reitano, Todd learned about a role at Lockheed Martin (a US defence company) working on sonar for submarines. “What a good job is” Fun Lucrative Skills / teach you Todd, Andy, and other Lockheed Martin friends worked on the VEC9 discussed in ep194 Clearance w...#700 – Beware of the Overachievers
08/07/2025
Dave is starting a new project for a lab timer called the uTimer
Timelapse
Geerling videos about clocks
Mitxela clock
Transflective displays
Dave is looking at LCDs like this one
Dropping Rs vs Ls
Font chip
.5mm pin pitch on the connectors
Chris is making a new breakout board that is effectively a sensors shield for a Bluetooth chip. It’s the first time he’s using the service and it was a pleasant completely hands-off experience.
Mike Harrison USB C barrel jack
JLC DFM plugin for KiCad
Python script to pull EasyEDA parts into KiCad
Chris is desi...
#699 – CircuitHub, 12 Years Later with Andrew Seddon
08/01/2025
Welcome Back, Andrew Seddon! Founder and CEO of CircuitHub.
Andrew was first on episode 131 of The Amp Hour CircuitHub has a partnership with Worthington Assembly Worthington and CircuitHub host the Pick Place Podcast Mimicing silicon manufacturing Common parts library Setting the factory up to have only 50k SKUs in house for speed of loading / attrition Driving people to 2000 parts was the original intent, but didn’t hit the mark Level of production needs to be high Many parts need to work in conjunction Reflow PnP Throughhole Selective soldering Inspection Need to solve for the whole setup. Ma...#698 – Hardware Security with Matt Brown
07/17/2025
Welcome Matt Brown of Brown Fine Security!
Matt has been reverse engineering a “smart” smoker controller that talks back to AWS IOT Jeff Geerling talking about his dishwasher Storing private keys on the device?? Threat models Key rotation What is the best case scenario for an IoT device? Secure boot / trust zone Keys encrypt flash storage Chris has designed in the ATECC608 before Replacing Certificate Authority (CA) cert in grill firmware Matt has a Linux hardware / reverse engineering background Flash is always external Ghidra / idapro / binwalk Security cameras are 99% linux based (battery based cameras might be embe...#697 – LEDs Everywhere with Tim from Mitxela
07/08/2025
Welcome Tim from Mitxela!
Introduced by Mike Harrison, past guest of the show Fluid pendant Volumetric display London hackspace https://matthias-research.github.io/pages/tenMinutePhysics/index.html FLIP in Blender CHNT36ta Pick and place doing 0201 Precision Clock Sewing machine (check out that GIF!) Secret life of machines – Tim Hunkin Isaac Singer Tim has many Lathe projects on the hardware projects page Flag Steam Engine Learn how to machine from MrPete222’s YouTube channel Schlock Mercenary (Comic) Sprite tm on The Amp Hour Gameboy advance link cable Writing a gameboy emulator Emulators got him into electronics No$...#696 – It Works With Option Number 5
06/19/2025
Dave found a wrist mounted DMM that looks…inadvisable
We’ll discuss the survey results next time!
Florin Cocos of VoltLog
Great Scott
Sam Aldaher on the show last week
Gerald Undone did a studio tour with Captain Disillusionment
Short videos
Dave using a go-pro on a bike
Separate gyro file to stabilize
D-y hybrid inverter
Chart
Remote shell
Cline
Chris is finally getting solar
open energy monitor
Emporia vue
Sense
We talked with Joe Bamberg when he worked there
Driving back from canberra
Ben Krasnow makin’ magnets!
Bluetooth videos
#695 – Making The Invisible, Visible with Sam Aldhaher
06/04/2025
Welcome Sam Aldhaher, power engineer and 3D graphic artist!
Sam has always been interested in art…and power engineering He primarily works in Blender and has been for 5-6 years Inputs and outputs Starting from Altium / KiCad for eCAD Blender doesn’t accept step files, it works with meshes like STL KiCad -> Blender is a good flow, as there are add-ons to import KiCad Making a good visulalization is all about lighting, materials Building library of models Modeling magnetic fields Research in wireless power openEMS vtk format The marjority of tooling is glued together with pytho...#694 – Voltage, Vibes, and VOCs
05/22/2025
We are doing a 2025 listener survey! Answer the survey and put in your email to win one of three Jumperless OG units donated by Kevin Cappuccio (past guest of the show). Last day to input is June 1st.
This episode was recorded Monday the 12th, which has implications on discussions.
Dave recently returned from Melbourne for Dave’s recent visit to Electronex. Dave saw past guest Scott Williams there (he has been interviewed by both Dave and Chris). Scott’s company Xentronics is also a Golioth partner They discussed service providers in the electronics indus...#693 – Small Scale Electronics Manufacturing with Colin O’Flynn
05/13/2025
Welcome back Dr Colin O’Flynn of Dalhousie University and New AE tech!
Colin has been on the show twice before Episode 239 in 2015 Episode 552 in 2021 Colin continues to publish/do research around side channel attacks Now he’s targeting different ports / Jitter measurements JTAGulator RF Mixer Side channel with power Can you fix it on a chip? Targeting an SD Card port because there’s a clock Other clocked things like displays / RF State of hardware security RPi episode (RP2350) OpenTitan Root of Trust Episode with Laura Abbott from Oxide Open vs closed about security Guidelines for wha...#692 – Like a steam engine in your house
04/15/2025
We are doing a 2025 listener survey! Answer the survey and put in your email to win one of three Jumperless OG units donated by Kevin Cappuccio (past guest of the show) Note: this was corrected from the original, these are not v5 units, they are the original Jumperless units. Apologies for the confusion ~CG
Chris signed on to get solar installed He’ll be taking advantage of Duke Energy’s PowerPair, a program to get a bulk amount for the battery and ongoing payments to act as a virtual power plant. Telsa Powerwall 3 Teardown Australian politicians are p...#691 – System Designer Lets You Try Every Part with Michael Gielda
03/24/2025
Welcome back (for a third time!) Michael Gielda of Antmicro
Michael and Chris usually see each other around the Zephyr booth at Embedded World, but not this year Antmicro continues to work on Zephyr, which targets hardware using Devicetree Renode Mult-node testing code aethero Data center in space Cosmic shielding corporation Tying the simulation to reality How do you know an actuation has happened RESD – Renode sensor data format Drone data example Finding and testing the variety of use cases Borderline criteria Fuzzing Kenning AutoML Anomaly detection on an MCU with Kenning Co-op example Adding System des...#690 – Clap on, clap off, lights flicker
03/12/2025
Meetup.com doubled their prices so the 3H Triangle group moved to Luma (same is true for SF, Seattle)
Note taking apps after Evernote was gutted: Joplin, Obsidian
Battery leakage in a DMM
Causes of leak
The PCB of a Tonie box with an SD card glued in place. Board has an ESP32-S3. (Product page)
Design decisions – Latched / unlatched EEVblog video
Pulse stretcher
3rd mode ‘break on open’
Chris is working on a design inspired by the Apple AirTag
Golioth just launched Bluetooth support (recorded prior to this announcement)
It has an nRF52840 and NFC onboard, with a bunch...
#689 – A Jumperless Breadboard with Kevin Cappuccio
02/26/2025
Welcome Kevin Cappuccio, creator of the Jumperless Breadboard (v5 and before)
Check out the Jumperless v5 on Crowd Supply OG Jumperless Video This update shows a bunch of images with the breadboard off 3M whitelabels their breadboards (because of the adhesive?) Breadboard spring clips Spring clips (in 3D) Elecrow 369 CH446Q, a clone of Zarlink MT88161 FPAA Resistance of the traces BSky#688 – The Tandy Train
02/12/2025
Tracking test equipment on one long homepage…the emporer of test equipment
If you track it, it’s not hoarding…it’s curation
Very specific piece of junk wood
Garage
Solar
Amber allows you to sell power back in Australia at some wild rates
Dave is trying out case design in OpenSCAD…it looks…ok
Pebble is returning to the world after Google open sourced the OS (kudos)
Andrew Witte, former CTO of Pebble, was a guest on the show
Tandy200
Annie Lennox on the train with her Tandy (see cover image)
Capacitive forming / reforming
Electric Dreams
Multimeter repair
Tandy
