The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

#712 – Robots Everywhere with Aaed Musa

Welcome Aaed Musa! Aaed is a YouTuber who builds a variety of robots and a mechanical engineering student at Purdue. He just completed his undergrad degree and is now working on his Master’s degree. I believe he is the first Amp Hour guest who is still a full time student. His channel has a great variety of builds including designing all the way down to gearboxes. Aaed says the MIT “mini cheetah” launched many low(er) costs builds of robots, including his own. Boston Dynamics (and many others) announced their new ATLAS robotics platform at CES this year. FOC motor controller Backlash is a measure of how much movement you have between the teeth of gears (and thus how accurate you can be with open loop control) Ball bearing balancing robot Inverse kinematics Past guest of the show James Bruton was a model for the builds that Aaed does what does the glue look like His recent build uses…rope…to build a robot dog? A Capstan drive has virtually zero backlash “relatively new rope” DM20 High precision speed reducer using rope the impacts of materials on design processes Juicero Relationship with classmates and professors as a YouTuber Purdue Engineering Aaed picked up electronics from youtube What’s his take on LLMs? Making next CARA open source New video recently came out about a spinning top bulk of the cost is in the motors and motor controllers growing up in the age of youtubers

#711 – Medical Electronics Education with Mark Palmeri

Welcome Dr Mark Palmeri, professor at Duke University! Mark has been at Duke since 1996, and has completed undergraduate, graduate, medical, and PhD degrees here (!) He has focused on making medical devices and now teaches others to do the same in his Biomedical Engineering (BME) courses Verification and Validation (v&v) is a large constraint in getting a regulated medical device to market BME design fellows is a program that guides students towards real world use cases and design projects The courses that Mark runs reminds Chris of “automatic job offers” that Chris has heard about for classes like those taught by former guest Larry Sears (at CWRU). Also SMPS design courses at UT Dallas and microarchitecture courses like those taught at University of Michigan. Teaching the skills of troubleshooting / debug Putting together circuits like Legos There are difficulties when teaching students with various levels of experience, namely how deep to go on any particular subject and how much background to provide. Mark has been flipping a circuit course on its head, instead prompting students with ideas like “how do you capture bio signals electronically and pull them into a microcontroller” Tools of the trade for Mark’s courses include KiCad ngspice (built in to KiCad) Jupyter notebooks VS code Git Zephyr Talking about power as an intuition builder, as opposed to currents or voltages V&V requires that you have a quality management system (QMS) IEC60601 Going through companies that have  QMS can be a shorter path for bringing a device to market Even face shields needed to go through that process when COVID hit Firmware and embedded in BME at graduate level Mark and students in BME Design Fellows course have been working on a Tympanometer, targeted at resource constrained industries Mark also teaches students how to use Zephyr, as opposed to how most educational programs migrate towards arduino A challenge for teaching Zephyr is the devicetreed They target Nordic Semiconductor parts, which have great support and educational resources Mark experienced a “vertical learning curve” when first migrating designs to Zephyr a few years ago Complicating things is that most students haven’t coded in C, if they have done much code at all Teaching how to lock to a particular version with Zephyr manifests Using CI/CD for automated builds Focusing on state machines early on, using Zephyr’s state machine framework (SMF) All of Mark’s courses are on github under his username mlp6 Teaching stack vs heap Mark only ever has taken one official progrmming course The benefits of experiential learning Accreditation is a constant challenge with non-standard courses and testing Duke is taking retrospective and prospective looks at the space of education Problem sets are moot these days Mark gave a great example about teaching a student about Bode Plots “Thats a trick problem” is something Mark hears wrt testing (when it’s definitely not) “Getting the reps in” is an important concept in educational contexts, and something Chris really resonates with Building open ended problems vs closed The more open ended a problem, the more time it take to grade / evaluate TI-85 / 83 / 92 calculators Jupyter notebooks as a way to track progress and have students show their work More about the tympanometer project They have been working with Duke hospital, a major benefit for Mark and his BME colleagues Continuous middle ear infection that causes scarring that causes lifelong loss Sound reflection under vacuum is an indicator that more testing is needed The key innovation is making it lower cost and allow a layperson to do the screening to hand off a child to get more screening at a pro clinic BME Design Fellow students getting to design the various parts of the design They have multiple sources of funding: private, nih, etc Value engineering in medical space Mark points out the philosophical question on whether you can reduce costs by reducing testing … but thinking about whyat that takes to satisfy that need Find Mark online mlp6 on Github His Duke homepage tymp project article Find him on LinkedIn Duke BME design fellows / on LinkedIn

#710 – Tugging on the Nerd Heartstring

Chris got back from his honeymoon to the Galapagos, see photos on the updated version of his blog. Dave encountered a super secret podcast location Before leaving on vacation, Chris went to an event mentioned in episode 708 launching a new Tektronix scope. The parent company has been Danaher -> Fortive -> Ralliant (now based out of Raleigh) Large budget events Don Mcmillan is technically funny Open Circuit The Way Things Work Discman teardown Neo the home robot Humane AI pin ‘tugging on the nerd heartstring’ Nikola / Trevor Norton Auto concept cars Rigol MHO 900 videos, already hacked, paid hack EEVblog forum Unknown chinese fpga Stephen Hawes working on a PCB that can be laser cut for super quick turn boards Oxide and Friends podcast KiCon (US) 2025 Talks

#709 – Nobel Prize Winner Dr Barry Marshall

Dr Barry Marshall won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease. But Barry is also an electronics hobbyist and vintage HP and Tek oscilloscope and vintage computer enthusiast. He visited the EEVBlog lab and sat down with Dave for an impromptu discussion about all sorts of things. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2005/marshall/facts/

#708 – All the Connectors with Davide Andrea

Welcome Davide Andrea, author or The Electronic Connector Book! And many thanks to Blues for sponsoring this episode of The Amp Hour! Get 10% off your next order in their online store for a development kit by using the code AMPHOUR. Davide is an engineer working on Battery Management Systems at Elithion He got into writing and editing books via a postcard sent to him after he gave a talk For many years he was an editor at Artech house He works on Lithium BMS systems for large setups How do young engineers learn about connectors, but for tribal knowledge within larger companies? Digikey catalog is a good search for connectors overall Industrial cinch by Harting Should you design a custom connector (“no”) Davide also built and maintains an online tool for finding connectors called Identiconn Fretting is when vibration causes a connector to fail Davide had to go to Bell Labs docs to look up some specs Chris remarked that Identiconn is a McMaster (Carr) style browsing experience Vendors divide based on how the fields are set up, because that is actually logical for them selling parts. It’s harder for finding/discovering components though. On distributor sites, the connectors are grouped by how they were bought Chris asked Davide about things that have gone wrong in his career with connectors FFC doesn’t connect back into the socket after the tab is ripped away ribbon cable vs ffc, CIC vs FPC IDC – insulation displacement connector Davide has filled in with generated terms where there are no defined language for a family/type of connector, such as with “bump idc” connectors “dual beam? Chris and Davide did a joint search for the high density CM4 connector that mounts the Raspberry Pi module to another board Gender of connectors (note: there is a great discussion about the historical nature of using gender for connectors in the book) Pin vs plastic gender Shrouded vs enshrouded gaziatea (sic) – poem from the 1800 USB type A connector Self mating APC7 – self mting connector Anderson connectors TNC BNC search PFFE for the dielectric on a BNC/TNC Magnetic connectors with pogo pins Example connector from Hyte Crimps were designed in the 50s The source of having so many power connectors is … imperialism? tahiti / fiji / nz all have different connectors Why antennas are male/female is…money? And regulatory silliness via the FCC Davide has also written about and is working on lithium ion batteries A sodium ion battery book (self published, unlike the LiIon books) should be out next year The Connector Book is self published. Your purchase directly supports Davide’s work…and you get the web tools for free! “peak lithium” What is required when refining sodium for batteries? The voltage range and charging needs are different for Sodium Ion. For instance, the range goes from 4V to 2V Find Davide on his various websites, on LinkedIn, on StackExchange, and on reddit