#651 – Learning Computing with Jeff Geerling
11/21/23 • 63 min
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
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
Previous Episode
#650 – Accessible ASICs with Andreas Olofsson
Welcome back, Andreas Olofsson of ZeroASIC!
- Andreas was on the show back in 2015 (ep 254) talking about the Parallela, a crowdfunded parallel calcuation board by his then-company Adapteva
- What is enabling more open source to happen?
- Unit economics really impact silicon designs
- Open source effects have been having a positive effect on the industry. Andreas maintains a meta repo of 400 tools.
- Fewer fabs than 2008, mask sets still expensive
- Semiconductor singularity
- Andreas is deep into the world of “chiplets”
- This is the basis of his new company ZeroASIC
- Before he started that he was a program manager at a little outfit called DARPA
- Andreas focused on lowering costs, with the idea that 3 people should be able to design a chip
- He worked under Bill Chappell, the director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO)
- OpenROAD
- POSH
- CHIPS
- TinyTapeout
- Andrew Kang UCSD
- Chiplets
- We had Ming Zhang on to tlk about ZGlue, but that was a slightly different architecture
- What is a chiplet?
- AXI on chip
- SERDES
- Types of interconnect
- Organic
- Types of output
- SIP, Chip, SOM
- ZeroASIC is Andreas’ latest company
- They started by releasing a Silicon compiler project
- New thing is take system customers and build them an ASIC
- Optimizing speed and cost
- Mostly targeting aerospace and defense
- Try it out yourself on the ZeroASIC emulation page
- Their main processor is a Quadcore RISC V
- There are no off the shelf chiplets
- eFabric Active Interposer
- Defining a standard
- arm made a standard called amba
- AIB from Intel was opensourced
- Getting external contributors (hardware vs software)
- LatchUp – Fossi
- Personal passion drives people to contribute
- You’re really buying a datasheet from a big company
- Loading the design to AWS
- Check out the ZeroASIC openings
- Read about how ZeroASIC is democratizing chip making
Next Episode
#652 – For a couple weeks there…
- You may have noted a few weeks off in September...Chris was busy with a new kiddo!
- Starship launch was awesome, but Blue Origin might beat them to market?
- Chris has been troubleshooting some boards he had made recently. It was pre-baby so sleep deprivation can’t explain some of the screw ups!
- PCB Carolina was a local tradeshow
- TechTechPotato talks about layoffs at SiFive. Article about the layoffs.
- RP1 show
- RetroPie
- Oversupply in the market is hitting some silicon vendors
- Dr Michael Burry (highlighted in The Big Short) has been shorting the semiconductor industry
- At the end of the movie the epilogue talks about how Dr Burry is watching water as well, possibly why he’s shorting semis?
- Chris wondered if Steve Sanghi mentioned why they’re still in Arizona while he was on the show
- Nuclear Diamond Battery video
- SnapEDA
- “off by one letter” error while ordering parts
- PCF85063BTL vs PCF85063ATL
- Scotty does a tour of the WorldSemi (makers of the WS2812B) factory, it’s awesome!
- Ben Hencke of ElectroMage makes the PixelBlaze, which is a great way to drive LED strips
- Dave was talking to past guest of the show, Andrea Morello, about future changes to Quantum computers
- China is turning off exports of Germanium and Gallium, which could impact the upstream supply for the chip industry, including around specialty semis.
- Breakdown
- Bunnie writes about why the US shouldn’t put restrictions on RISC V (agree!)
- KiCon has happened in Europe and China now, check out the talks on the KiCad YouTube channel.
- Future (distributor) was acquired by WT Microelectronics out of Taiwan
- Check out this 1975 tour of a UNIVAC manufacturing plant
If you like this episode you’ll love
Episode Comments
Generate a badge
Get a badge for your website that links back to this episode
Select type & size
<a href="https://goodpods.com/podcasts/the-amp-hour-electronics-podcast-88383/651-learning-computing-with-jeff-geerling-37406291"> <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/goodpods-images-bucket/badges/generic-badge-1.svg" alt="listen to #651 – learning computing with jeff geerling on goodpods" style="width: 225px" /> </a>
Copy