The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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 calculus Software geeks follow the site, often getting lots of attention on Hacker News Row hammer DRAM There were no Information Security degrees in the early days, so the field was made up of folks with backgrounds in math and EEs Fuzzing for security SMBC cartoon for blming humans Books American Fuzzy Lop The Tangled Web P0f v3 Silence on the Wire Security stuff (including books on the subject) ages over time, as opposed to electronics On the subjects of Calculators (and Michał’s collection) Calculators are a footnote in the history of computing, but still intriguing Dead ends in calculators CRT displays on calculators Nixie tubes Discrete moving into logic gates into processors Mechanical calculators are rare and get a high price online Working with transistors The Secret Life of Circuits start with FET based transistors vs BJT BJTs are often right after diode chapter because of the multiple junctions in an NPN, but that doesn’t make it easier to understand Projects A recent project involved making a clock out of current meters  Woodworking and AI example Want to see all lcamtuf articles in one place? Sokoban Sir box-a-lot

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 Iran War and subsequent rise in petroleum product sourcing issues is starting to impact the PCB industry PCBs we are used to ordering at low cost (JLC, PCBway, etc) are normally loss leaders to get larger business later Chris found his low cost microscope from Florin/Voltlog trinocular video  lcamtuf will be on the show soon, Chris bought a CNC mill because of a single webpage of his making TagMod board is a new breakout Chris made for injecting power through a 10 pin TagConnect cable. NXP devboards somehow have LEDs as bright as the sun Dave has been revisiting his solar analytics (update: he figured out he’s getting charged more too!) Chris has been working at Canonical (makers of Ubuntu, new owners of Golioth) for a few months now. That was the trip to Spain. Dogfooding your own product Chris created a backronym: “Application Level Program Optimization” or… ALPO Chris built a new vibe coded project for talking to Zephyr devices using Web Serial and passing firmware packages over SMP CI/CD Debian now requires “fully reproducable” builds to harden against supply chain attacks Veritasium video about Linux bug

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 early prototypes of the BeagleConnect Freedom The Freedom board talks over wireless to boards like the BeaglePlay Application spaces for different boards FPGA based board Cheeseburger robot? Well yes, but also Cheeseburger robot Mitchells vs the machine Krazam Click boarfds now have eeprom / ClickID as a 1-wire identifier with a uuid Beagleplay has 802.15.4 Project ARA popularized the idea of Greybus MotoMods from Motorola was another implementation that worked on the Moto Z Using Freedom for prototyping WebAssembly …on microcontrollers? Jason says he doesn’t really like MCUboot Entering the linux ecosystem bb-imager Techlab is a way to easily extend peripherals for the PocketBeagle Known working targets Michael Welling designed the baconbits mini cape as a learning platform The BeagleBadge is a new formfactor shown in the title image for this episode. It runs on a new low cost TI part running Linux and yes… it runs Doom The Badge can also talk on Meshtastic Working with the memory shortage Bao – Bunie and Xobs Bella / Gem Beagle5fire RISC V boards RV32 Claire Find Beagle and Jason online Schedule a meeting with Jason There is also a Discord And a Zulip instance You can get Beagle merch

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 fully verticalized PCB factory is something Jonathan Hirschmann talked about on episode 299 Jeff Bezos is investing 100B in a fund that is looking at automation in the factory using AI Matt recently had success with Claude Code and verilog programming Saleae for hardware in the loop using their APIs Other tools to check out pyelf pdfdk blast superpowers skill (by past guest at Teardown Jesse Vincent) Luke used OpenClaw to power a chat agent in his ERP system Working with distributors TI backlog Chris recently learned that Digikey has a developer API Cocotb verification framework (in Python) Luke is working on vision experiments for inhouse developed AOI solutions

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

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 Situation Surcharge at DHL after asking why it is still happening Dave's transition to a “Hipster Dave” persona, complete with a secondhand Mac and a goatee The implementation of OpenClaw, a scripting service that interfaces with LLMs to act as an “automated intern” for repetitive administrative tasks Chris really likes this video showing how to use OpenClaw Using OpenClaw to automate forum registration approvals to combat high volumes of bot activity The security implications of AI agents, emphasizing that they should be treated like interns with limited access to sensitive data and separate accounts ARM released its first physical server chip, measuring approximately 70mm, marking a shift from a pure IP company to a hardware competitor. The Super Micro CEO smuggling scandal, where the founder was accused of smuggling $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips. The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and its requirement for nearly all CE-marked electronic products to be updatable by December 2027. Potential impacts of the CRA on one-time programmable (OTP) devices and the necessity of maintaining firmware support for five years post-product life. SpaceX's plans for a “Terafab” a manufacturing facility ten times larger than a Gigafactory designed to verticalize the entire supply chain from silicon wafers to final packaging. Editor’s note: despite cool tech stuff happening, Elon is…so lame. NASA's cancellation of the Lunar Gateway project in favor of a direct path to establishing a moon base within the next five to seven years. Pop culture recommendations including the series For All Mankind and The Expanse, along with the book Delta V.

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

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 significant skepticism regarding "solid-state transformers" and tech articles claiming they will replace the traditional power grid, with the hosts citing efficiency losses that become massive at megawatt scales. A fascinating look into global supply chains reveals how a single AI prompt can be traced back through layers of manufacturing to sugarcane fermentation and high-purity quartz mines in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The creeping normalization of biometric face scanning in public spaces, from water park lockers to international airport terminals. The marketing tactics behind Donut Lab's solid-state battery claims, explaining how "independent third-party testing" can be carefully hand-picked to avoid industry standards. They want us  to talk about it like this The nuances of UL certification explains how companies sometimes use specific lab reports to imply broader official endorsements that do not actually exist. Dave shares his experience watching the show Silicon Valley with his son and discusses the "hideous accuracy" of the Australian public service comedy Utopia. The pros and cons of modular hardware are debated, covering the Framework laptop's "Ship of Theseus" repairability model versus high-end gaming tablets like the Asus ROG Flow Z13. Dave's viral social media quest for the best Linux distribution leads to a consensus on Linux Mint as the top choice for beginners, fueling the ongoing joke about the "Year of the Linux Desktop". Recent industry news highlights the release candidate for KiCad 10 and the discovery of a three-cent Paduk microcontroller performing auxiliary functions inside Rode wireless microphones. Pimoroni did extreme an cooling project back in 2024 that successfully overclocked the RP2350 microcontroller to 800 MHz. We just found out about it from a post from Jeff Geerling.

David Ray joins Dave (Jones) 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. 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/

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.

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$ ("nocash") emulator AVR instruction set MIDI CNLohr on The Amp Hour https://mitxela.com/projects/slide2 Forcing brainfuck (language) quop movfuscator Puzzles Spacechem (Game) Zach Barth of Zachtronics on The Amp Hour  babaisu LED errings watchdog timer allows ridiculously low power 1 way loader  autobauding Find all of Tim's projects on mitxela.com Watch the latest videos on the mitxela youtube

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 Cappucio 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! Dan works for Inovor Technologies, an Australian company that designs and builds satellites entirely in-house! Recently they designed and launched 3 cube sats on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket: Kanyini, Waratah Seed, and CUAVA-2 https://www.inovor.com.au/missions/ They design and build their own Flight computers, ADCS systems, UHF radios, Battery modules and Solar Arrays

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 Mestastic (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