The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

Welcome Jeff Geerling of the Jeff Geerling YouTube Channel!

• Jeff sounds so calm one his videos because he records after the kids are in bed
• He started working with dad at the radio station when there was a transition in radio to digital / online. Jeff had an early job as a technology explainer while making manuals at the station.
• Jeff still makes videos with his Dad on the Geerling engineering channel
• Ham radio vs broadcast
• 1 Million Watts on the Supertower
• Calling the FCC
• CamOX facility
• Keeping people interested during videos
• Mars 400
• RPi clusters
• It’s a good exercise because it helps those building it understanding the limitation of spreading across computers
• Drupal website on cluster
• “The constraint gives me the story”
• A good starter project? Maybe the project pi cluster
• /r/homelab
• NAS, monitoring, VPN, pidramble
• Home Assistant
• ESPhome
• yaml files: better than xml, JSON is better
• Devices should only be added to the house if they are: Local, additive, private
• X10
• Smart stuff in the house
• Interested in the embedded side
• LLM
• Jeff became Chris’s de facto Pi5 analyst
• RP1 episode
• PCIexpress
• Jeff discusses RISC V

• • Dave and other YouTubers have been making reaction/explainer videos about Veritasium’s video, “The Big Misconception about Electricity”
  • Feynman lectures
  • How electricity gets to you (Wendover)
  • World’s largest solar array using HVDC
  • Photonicinduction
  • Electric Buses
  • Linus Tech Tips is growing their lab (and business)
  • Do career prospects change for people above 40 in the hardware industry? How is it different from the software industry, discussed on hacker news?
  • Chris recently went full-time at a startup called Golioth. Not mentioned on the show, but Chris also wrote about it here.
    • Started by former guest Jonathan Beri
    • Golioth is built to work with Zephyr RTOS currently.
    • In a former episode, Chris talked about hiring Bilal to write drivers for cellular modems, but that still wouldn’t hook into databases, it just throws MQTT packets at a server.
    • Chris was able to build a proof-of-concept using cellular modems in 3 hours total.
  • Sam Feller (former Engineer Blogs writer) wrote about keeping in touch using a CRM.
  • Amazon Re:Invent is offering private 5G networks in factories

• Chris knows Charlie from going to college together. Charlie inspired Chris to dive deeper into electronics.
• Charlie got started with a RadioShack 130 in 1 kit (apparently Sparkfun still sells these!)
• RadioShack training showed Charlie that they were more interested in selling batteries and phone subscriptions. Now they’re selling Cryptocurrencies? (ugh)
• What do aspiring electronics students do now that there are no stores?
• Kids seem to like Snap Circuits
• Charlie was teaching with the Microbit but has switched to Adafruit’s Circuit Playground
• Classrooms can sign up to talk with the space station, at least for a few more years. The ISS is going to be decommissioned at some point (no plans before 2028) and then might be replaced by private stations.
• Communication for students between 6 and 14 can vary wildly.
• For many kids, it’s about tying learning back to the top level.
• Wimsherst generator / machine
• How do you teach things that are less intuitive, like programming? Make things as visual as possible
• There are lots of teaching resources on Code.org
• Abstraction isn’t possible before young brains reach a certain age / developmental level.
• Learning good habits
• “Kids these days”
• Linking technology to modern examples: How do children understand an iPad and compare it to the electronics they work on in class?
• Chris talked about Consumption vs Creation
• A handheld Spectrum Analyzer (SA) is a great way for young people to understand radio
• Charlie is a ham radio enthusiast and enjoys DXing
• Outside of teaching, Charlie also works on designs with vacuum tubes. He also has a project mimicing non-linearities of tubes using JFETs.
• Building resiliance hapeens when you build confidence
• Interactions with parents
• Commonsense.org helps parents and teachers understand how children can safely interact with elements of the internet.
• Positive Discipline
• Charlie is now teaching with CircuitPython on the CircuitPlayground. There is an experimental module with uses WebUSB to program the boards, which enables them to use Chromebooks for development (commonly used in US schools)
• Line folllower that reads colors
• Chris asked Charlie about developing electronics and attempting to sell into the education ecosystem. Their mutual classmate (and former guest) Zach Fredin did this with the NeuroBytes
• Olimex makes a $4 (6) robot kit
• Find Charlie online
  • QRZ.com
  • larrabeelabs.com
  • ssesh.org

• LUNA
• ESP32-S2
• TI is building new fabs in the US
• Why are computers all 80 columns wide?
• Unintended consequences: railways are about two horses wide
• Chris has been reading Dealers of Lighning: Xerox PARC and the dawn of the computer age
• Douglas Engelbart
• “The mother of all demos”
• Hackers – Steven Levy
• Lee Felsenstein
• SDS 930
• Computer History Museum
• Dave is thinking about getting a standing desk
• Embedded World was rescheduled to June, Chris will be there!
• Counterfeit copy of the bible
• The ARM sale to NVidia will likely be blocked, they’re going public instead
• Open source solutions to problem sets in The Art of Electronics 3rd Edition
• LaTeX
• Quantum dynamics and the question from Veritasium
• Xi’an AeroSemi (not “John Aerosmith”) part that Chris is looking at
• Wobbly 2400 SMU. Dave heard it could be a burnt out backup battery but wasn’t able to validate that fix. Chris mentions a possible problem he heard about.
• Combiscope repair
• Tin Whisker growth

Thanks to Pete Birkinshaw for the histogram(agraphical) image