#569 – Electric Fields, Son.

Explicit content warning

12/06/21 • 65 min

The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

- 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

- 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

Previous Episode

#568 – YouTube to Consulting with Florin of Voltlog

This episode was sponsored by Mouser Electronics. Check out TheAmpHour.com/immersive for more information about Immersive Technology and how it might change your engineering workflow.

Welcome, Florin of the Voltlog YouTube Channel!

Florin is a YouTuber and consulting engineer based out of Romania.
Chris has many of the low cost finds that Florin discusses on his channel, often on the “In The Mail” segments. His focus on low cost comes from the hassle of importing and paying VAT on equipment.
Florin likes that Mouser allows him to pay the taxes up front.
He got into electronics early and eventually ended up selling dev boards to his school based on the PIC32.
After school, he went to work in the automotive space, including for Continental
Florin once met up with past guest Andreas Spiess, while he was visiting Romania.
Automotive videos come from his general interest in cars but also working on automotive chips for Freescale in France from 2011-2012

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m2UW_pron4

ECU
The ESP32 CanLite has GPIO in addition to LIN/CAN
CAN bus is a protocol, without any requirements on the formatting of the message (or frame)
The parts (and the entire product) would need to work over a wide temp range to be useful in a car long term.
What are users doing with the CanLite?
- Grabbing info from car
- Interfacing with CAN
We have discussed CAN bus with Macchina on the show before
CAN works with a “lowest wins” bus topology.
Florin is also consulting when he’s not making videos. People find him via YouTube.
He has had 3 Different labs, in his latest, he made a custom workbench:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmjLSHljyD4

IoT
Florin recently got into ham radio (callsign: YO4VLT) and built a UHF repeater/gateway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EprSIw-5l6w

His new office also has a Tasmota floor heater, so he built a control board for it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZS3ggG0QJI

Looking for gift ideas for the holidays? Florin has you covered:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3mq0lt7Vlw

Chris asked for 2 recommendations off the list:
- Cheap option: a metal plunger for syringes for dispensing paste or flux
- More expensive, but still around #100: a Uni-T waveform generator:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgDaWwS72QQ

Find Florin online:
- YouTube
- Twitter
- Tindie

Automated Transcript

The transcript is autogenerated from Zencastr, our recording software. We attach no guarantees to its accuracy, but offer it as a way to make the show more accessible: 568 – Voltlog – Auto-Transcript