The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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.