• Home assistant
• Homelab subreddit
• Solar assistant
• proxmox
• CarPlay / android auto
• NUCs
• Video Interview with Lee (since posted as #684 of TAH)
• 25K pound amplifier repair and associated EEVblog forum post
• Louis Rossman also talking about the copyright claim
• How the Fairlight CMI changed Music
• Read more here
• Synths / woodworking are hobbies that will eat all free cash flow (and Chris is considering the latter…)
• Pat Gelsinger has stepped down / retired / been forced out at Intel
• Intel will now have co-CEOs. As past guest Luke Wren wrote on Mastodon, “Based on historical trends I predict the number of Intel co-CEOs will double every two years“
• Startup in Ohio will apparently be making Quectel parts for the US market. We expect to see lots of silliness like this in the next few years because of forthcoming tariffs…

A full 3 hour discussion with the legendary Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne 1, SOL computer, VDM-1, Pennywhistle modem, and the inventor of social media. Covering everything from the Berkeley free speech movement, the counterculture movement, his career, through to Obsorne and how he invented social media with Community Memory.

His book: https://www.amazon.com/Me-My-Big-Idea…

https://felsensigns.com/

00:00 – Full 3 hour talk with Lee Felsenstein
08:24 – University of California at Berkeley, and the Free Speech Movement.
29:04 – First Junior Engineer job at Ampex
36:20 – The first hackathons with Richard Greenblatt
37:33 – Hackers, Heros of the computer revolution
1:03:36 – Techical career at Ampex
1:12:52 – Atari Computers and Steve Jobs, Nolan Bushnall, and Allan Alcorn
1:15:00 – He tried to pitch social media to Steve Jobs
1:22:15 – Designing the Pennywhistle 103 modem +
1:25:36 – Marty Spergel selling kits
1:31:53 – Steve Wozniak and how the Apple 1 is NOT a personal computer
1:43:42 – Osborne Computers
1:53:22 – Osborne 1 physical design
1:57:57 – Osborne 1 development timeline
2:01:19 – The Osborne Effect wasn’t what killed the company

• AI tools for helping with coding (but NOT layout, amirite)
• Troubleshooting as a skillset
• Stick meme
  • 
• Dave got an updated electrical box
• Home assistant
• Keith Burzinski episode (ESPhome)
• Toothbrush show
• Andreas Spiess discussing Bluetooth proxy
• Ian Scott Johnson DIY home automation
• Electrarc240 reviews every element of a linear power supply
• India power cables
• Buried cables
• Spotify is bricking the Car Thing but others are trying to save it
• “injurnear”
• Chris recently developed and coded up a cellular connected relay board for a Smart Locker application

• Chris has been troubleshooting a PCB with a dead short on inner layers (put in by board house by mistake)
• Don’t Touch My Gerbers shirt
• “Is there an AI tool that will fix this for me?” … No
• Chris dumped a bunch of current in the board and looked at it with this thermal camera
• 6.5 digit DMM to track down shorts
• Etching problems in the old days
• 100% etest
• Adding rails to PCBs for production
• Reddit discussion thread: why not work on a product? That is, Dave, the wise one.
• Videos
• Live stream issues
• Post from Twitter: Is 2 layers all you really need? This person thinks so, or is trying to convince themselves as much.
• Armchair quarterbacking
• Ian Johnston replacing the display on an 8.5 digit DMM
• Jack Ganssle has posted his final newsletter (The Embedded Muse)…happy retirement! Jack has been on the show twice:
  • Episode 54 (!)
  • Episode 489
• Ward Christensen, Inventor of BBS and XModem, (and former listener of the show!) has passed away
• Dave is interviewing Lee Felstenstein for our next episode

Welcome Lukas Henkel of OV Tech GmbH, a product design firm based in Nuremburg Germany!

• Miniturization and the limits of miniturization
• Price is a constraint
• Using standard PCB tech (off the shelf)
• Open source SIP
• Steps
  • Conventional pcbs / components
  • Silicon inductors embedded in boards
  • Bonded Bare dies / stacked
• Need volume to make it work
• Requirements to fit into ______
• iMX8 ULP – 0.4mm CSP
• SIP Footprint
• Module abstraction layer talk
• Framework laptop
• Software support / BSP
• SIP will be different than PiMX8
• Crowdsupply campaign launching 2-3 weeks and delivery in Dec/Jan
• OpenSource laptop
• CM4 vs PiMX8
• SPI Flash with backup partition
• Secure element SE050
• Footprint for coral tpu and Halo 8
• Trying to solve the problem of vision use cases
• Marketing using layout / products but also making money on it
• Katerina show
• Visualizing simulations
• Developing intuition
• OpenEMS
• Usability is based on python scripting
• Using Blender for heat map
• BVTKNodes uses .vtk file output
• Multiphysics solvers
• Things that drive Lukas
• For HDI, Thinking in 3D / 2.5D and being able to visualize
• Layers ranging from 4 to 18
• Any layer design for SIP
• Wurth electroncis for high density “any layer stackup”
• Article series on altium for the open laptop
• Follow Lukas on LinkedIn

Lukas also was a co-founder of PCB Arts. We had his cofounder Saber on the show in the past.

• Starship 5 landed on chopsticks! (you know, in case you have been offline for 2 weeks)
• Dave’s EV had a stuck cable
• Portable charger is surprisingly good
• CCS Charging standard
• Fast charge 36/50 kW
• MKBHD Chevy Silverado review
• JLC is now offering silkscreen QR codes to have individually marked boards
  
  That’s the board that Chris has been designing on a livestream each week
• 1 wire UID (pioneered by Dallas, then Maxim, now Analog…le sigh)
• Dave is selling a new Bryman multimeter, the BM2257 (teardown photos)
• Chris just returned from Embedded World North America, doing a demo at the Joulescope booth
• Chris also gave a talk at the Zephyr meetup which will be released in a few weeks
• Hackaday article about their comment section and project/article feedback
• References
• Musk Sticks
• NC floods might impact the supply chain due to Spruce Pine NC being a source for quartz. We didn’t read this article, but it was a better explainer than we had at the time.
• Meshtastic objects to the proposed FCC changes

Dan Esparon from Inovor Technologies in South Australia joins Dave to discuss all about the engineering of designing and launching satellites!

Dan works for Inovor Technologies, an Australian company that designs and builds satellites entirely in-house!

Recently they designed and launched the aussie Kanyini satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
https://www.inovor.com.au/missions/

They design and build their own Flight computers, ADCS systems, UHF radios, Battery modules and Solar Arrays in Australia.

Welcome Katerina Galitskaya!

• Chris started following Katerina’s antenna posts on LinkedIn
• Monopole vs dipole
• Lower frequences are harder bc longer wavelength
• PCB size half of frequency
• Place antenta on the shorter side
• How to ruin your PCB
• When to go to a antenna engineer?
• Where will the device be?
• Antenna environment
• Start from vacuum, start adding elements
• Dummies in the lab. The one in the episode photo is a dummy head filled with liquid (?!)
• SAR – Specific Absorption rate
• Simulation vs lab work (dimensions)
• Anechoic chamber
• When to go with custom antenna?
• Buying off the shelf antenna?
• New Airpods with fancy 3D antenna
• Ben’s video about laser sintered antennas
• MIMO / Beamforming
• the failed promises of 5G
• When to simulate
• Some open source programs out there (“EMSee”?)
• Simulating vs visualizing
• Most of the time it’s not about vizualizing fields
• What is the iteration elements of the antenna?
• Satellite antenna design
• Good to go external
• Thinking about the dielectric const of case
• Follow Katerina on LinkedIn!

• Spam calls
• Keysight released the HD3, a 14 bit ADC oscilloscope (teardown video)
• Chris will be at Embedded World North America, please let him know if you’ll be there!
• Chris will be at the Joulescope stand along with former guest Matt Liberty
• This is one of the only tradeshows for general electronics in the US, Embedded Systems Conference went away many years ago. Chris, Dave, and Jeff (yesssah!) recorded at ESC in episode 41!
• Bootstrapping new conferences
• Cellular power modes
• Dave old GSM video
• PSM / eDRX
• ALT1350
• Dave got a smart meter on his home setup
• EDMI 
• EEVblog forum post about leaky power bill
• Maybe a trickle
• Chris has been trying out Meshtastic, which is based on LoRa. Check out Jeff Geerling’s video for a good overview.
• meshtastic subreddit
• People posting about airplanes flying overhead (example post) like ham radio contacts
• Meshmap

• Chris has been moving house, which partially explains the terrible audio problems the past few episodes…
• For a lab, Chris believes in
  • Lots of wire shelving (with epoxy coating)
  • Everything on wheels (including shelving and workbenches)
  • As much storage as you can get
• Chris has been doing livestreams of hardware design for Golioth.
• The module he is designing is called the Drachm (“dram”)
• The hardware Chris has been working on for the past 2 years is now open source
• Flox video with machine learning on a camera also featured Chris
• Altium finalized their acquisition by Renesas. The price already went up (discussed previously)
• Raspberry Pi released the RP2350 while we were away
• Inductor polarity on the RPi Pico 2
• RP2350 Datasheet
• You can choose the processors you want (Dual m33, dual RISC V)
• Microchip was offline due to …. HACKERS
• Dave has been trying out a new home battery storage system
• NMC vs LFP
• Reverse cycle
• There have been lots of layoffs in tech, including 15K (!) at Intel
• Layoffs.fyi
• Being sued for a battery review? Say it aint so

Welcome Shawn Hymel!

• Shawn will be transitioning out Developer Relations at Edge Impulse. He will now be building courses full time. (this was recorded before Shawn announced his departure)
• He want’s to be like a Professor, which partially explains his signature bowtie
• Should people go into content? What about Developer Relations more specifically?
• New courses will include FreeCAD and 3D printing and will be published by Digikey
• Part design in FreeCAD
• 0.22 in Mango Jelly
• Learning modeling vs learning an actual program
• Scoffolding
• Making a Zephyr course
• Zephyr / Golioth training
• Ecosystem vs RTOS
• Workshop at Harvard
• Trying to train on hardware
• What should engineers know about ML
• Andrew Ng’s course on Coursera
• Updated for NumPy / Python
• Understand Neural Networks
• Can treat them as a black box
• More important to understand statistics and data science
• Hot dog / not hot dog (silicon valley)
• Model zoos
• Hugging Face
• Coprocessing on U55 – U85
• ToorCamp
• Michael Cheich
• Robert Ferenec
• Marketing courses
• Running
• You can find Shawn as ShawnHymel on most social
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Mastodon
  • Bluesky
  • TikTok
  • Instagram
• You can also check out his site, shawnhymel.com