First thing I asked Jerry is how I can make better designs. It was...a multipart answer. theamphour.com/704-applied-...

@mith.ro was interviewed by @chrisgammell.bsky.social about the @wafer.space service! Find out more at wafer.space!

It was awesome to be on @chrisgammell.bsky.social 's Amp Hour podcast again. Find out more about my latest endeavor to make custom silicon manufacturing accessible and follow @wafer.space and bookmark wafer.space to keep up to date!

What happens when one of the main providers that enables #opensource #silicon to thrive...shuts down? Companies like @mith.ro's new wafer.space jump in and offer an even more compelling option. $7K for 1000 chips on the GlobalFoundries GF180MCU process. Learn more: theamphour.com/703-building...

Custom jig, custom "chip holding solution" 😂

You ever re-learn that lesson over and over to make larger test points? Yeah, me neither theamphour.com/702-test-poi...

More open source hardware! This one is a smaller add-on board, but in service of making lots of #bluetooth nodes that connect using Golioth's Bluetooth-to-Cloud service. blog.golioth.io/open-sourcin...

With #tariffs in the US and different PCB assembly options, it can be tough to optimize for cost on a project. I talked about my experience using JLC assembly + #KiCad on episode 700 of The Amp Hour. Other topics included #solar, #batteries, #bluetooth. theamphour.com/700-beware-o...

12 years ago, I talked to Andrew Seddon who was building a datasheet/footprint tool for #PCBdesigners. CircuitHub has since transformed into a digital factory for on-demand PCB assembly. We discussed #tariffs, #domesticmanufacturing, AI changes that to the industry theamphour.com/699-circuith...

How hardware engineers fall asleep (an #asmr reading the #eu #cyber resilience act)

Another Hardware Happy Hour is coming up on July 29th in Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill (and actually Cary for this one). Please share it with anyone you know in the area who might be interested: lu.ma/s3jyicee

I love watching Matt Brown's videos reverse engineering #iot products that have ...let's say "less than stellar" security implemented. He shows his hardwaer #reverseengineering and we get to follow along and learn with him. I talked to Matt on ep698 of The Amp Hour theamphour.com/698-hardware...

Tim from Mitxela kind of does it all: (super tiny) electrical, (super tightly written) firmware, (super nicely finished) mechanical. We dug into what motivates him to keep making and how he hyper optimized things like the fluid (LED) pendant. Check it out here: theamphour.com/697-leds-eve...

I have always wanted something like an #ssh connection to the #iot devices I work on. Today we published about how to use #Golioth RPCs and a simple front end to do just that. glth.io/remote-shell

Fun fact: MCP Servers aren't new, they actually have been around for a long time but Clippy (the original AI agent) got TOO powerful

I'll be speaking at @crowdsupply.bsky.social #Teardown2025 in just over a week! I'll walk through how to automatically generate a #KiCad database library based on part data stored in Aligni #PLM software. Slide deck PDF in the link below if you want to take a sneak peek: cgnd.dev/posts/teardo...

Me running a Discourse forum in 2025 trying to determine if a post was written by a human...

Do you understand how #RF and #magnetics work? Any time I check out Sam Aldhaher's visualizations, I do just a bit better. We spoke on The Amp Hour this week about how to get started in #blender and build out visualizations using tools like #openems and #elmer_fem. theamphour.com/695-making-t...

I'm working on a video where Rajeev from Conexio optimized a #zephyrrtos program and hardware configuration to send every hour without needing batteries. Uses a Nordic nRF9151, solar panel, and supercap blog.golioth.io/upcoming-web...

If you haven't seen Sam Aldhaher's visualization of #RF signals, you're missing out! I got to speak with him on #TheAmpHour this week and loved learning how #Blender can be used as not just visualization, but also a tool for calculation (with the plugin ecosystem) theamphour.com/695-making-t...

Really enjoyed having Colin O'Flynn back on the show for a 3rd time. We chatted security, FPGAs, small scale electronics manufacturing, and the world of academia. theamphour.com/693-small-sc...

probing a 20V rail with a DMM and my watch decides to buzz the "time to move" reminder right as the DMM leads make contact...

I've gotta up my demo game. Tried showing my nephews and niece my "cool electronics" that I brought with me. Turns out that an embedded cellular device that interacts with the internet is just par for the course. Needs more blinky or bombastic output. Good test audience though!

I talked about my upcoming solar install on TAH this week. Also wacky tariffs, peak power pricing, tiny electronics (AirTag clone course), oscilloscope triggering, and more. Fill out our 2025 Listener Survey to be entered to win a Jumperless (OG) Breadboard! theamphour.com/692-like-a-s...

Despite being a casual user, I'm deeply uninterested in the future of AI. I can't tell if I'm due to be removed from the "tech gene pool" or if I'm immune to some kind of manic mind virus. Every time a breathless piece about the amazing advancements of the technology pops up, I'm reminded. Ah well.

Hardware decisions are expensive over the long term. What if you could simulate a huge range of chips at the beginning of your design to determine which one to use? Michael Gielda of Antmicro and I spoke on about understanding your problem space in intricate detail theamphour.com/691-system-d...

This looks awesome! Such a high density design with really amazing capabilities

I've been challenging myself to make some really tiny PCBs using Bluetooth chips (nRF52840). I talked about it on TAH this week (among other things), and hope to share the boards soon. theamphour.com/690-clap-on-...

What happens when you take a switch matrix and allow any net (strip) on a breadboard connect to any other net? Well, really interesting things, it turns out. I talked to @architeuthisflux.bsky.social about the Jumperless breadboard and how it all works theamphour.com/689-a-jumper...

I'm a simple woman who enjoys drag soldering

This week on The Amp Hour: the Tandy 200, test equipment cashflow, the return of the Pebble watch, GPT trying its hand at CAD, solar output...and more https://buff.ly/4aUVzQ6

Update: send more pickles, these didn't work

I've been waiting my whole life to play this concert. If you're near #MadisonWI weekend after next, come watch Star Wars while a live orchestra plays the incredible John Williams score live.

Current status: taking mental health advice from a pickle container

I chatted with the embedded team at @raspberrypi.com about the #RP2350 on The Amp Hour. It's an amazing "dual dual-core" part that is finding its way into many products. We chatted #hardwaresecurity and #lowpower, as those were key enhancements over the #RP2040. theamphour.com/687-the-rp23...

OpenAI's nightmare: DeepSeek R1 on a Raspberry Pi 5 ;) www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1sN...

I chatted with the embedded team at @raspberrypi.com about the #RP2350 on The Amp Hour. It's an amazing "dual dual-core" part that is finding its way into many products. We chatted #hardwaresecurity and #lowpower, as those were key enhancements over the #RP2040. theamphour.com/687-the-rp23...

The US President is currently blocking our infectious disease early warning system by cutting off communication between the CDC and the WHO—communication that is *essential* to the health and wellbeing of the country he purports to govern. He is putting every American at risk.

PS: the White House appears to be halting trillions of dollars in federal aid starting Tuesday until agencies determine grants are consistent with Trump’s executive orders. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202... 12/12

Here's the tower during the day.

I'm going to start a regular stream about #opensource silicon. Topics will include design, verification, #fpga, openlane, formal, #tinytapeout, #ASIC bringup, chip validation. If you're interested, please let me know what days / times work for you: doodle.com/meeting/orga...

Very happy to see @thejazzemu.bsky.social made it over here from the other place. This song from the forthcoming new album is higher budget, higher weirdness, and listening to it makes me feel high. Check it out. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKm7...

2025 is the year of the Pick and Place Desktop! :-D Well...maybe for me? I enjoyed recording with @hawes.dev about the @opulo.io Lumen and all of the experiments and successes as they have built up the company and open source machine I hope to have some day. theamphour.com/686-a-bencht...

For the #makergiftexchange last week with friends, I made a POV clock. Using one RGB LED and a seven segment display, it draws up to 21 characters and a full circle of 180 virtual pixels on a spinning circular PCB. Loosely inspired by Bob Blick's "Propeller Clock." 🧵1/3

2025 is the year of the Pick and Place Desktop! :-D Well...maybe for me? I enjoyed recording with @hawes.dev about the @opulo.io Lumen and all of the experiments and successes as they have built up the company and open source machine I hope to have some day. theamphour.com/686-a-bencht...

I used to get upset/scared when people talked about how we're almost certainly living in a simulation. Now I'm rooting for it.

What's this? Oh, nothing much. Just KICAD VERSION 9RC2 dropped! We are only a couple weeks away from the final release. Test out the nightly builds now and see if you can find any showstoppers that we can fix before that happens. forum.kicad.info/t/stable-ver...

I've been building a new API for #KiCad for the past year, and we're getting ready to release the first version of it with V9 at the end of the month!

This week at @golioth.io I have: - Done PCB rework - Written embedded firmware - Written network and backend cloud services - Implemented additional platform observability tooling - Moved some manual provisioning of infrastructure into IaC It's a great time to join a full stack startup!