The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

• Chris just got back from Teardown 2019. Shows next week will be with guests that he interviewed during the conference, while Dave is away.
• While there, Chris did two workshops, both with FPGAs and the open toolchains.
• The first was a workshop with our sometimes co-host Piotr Esden-Tempski. The workshop involved the 1bitsquared iCEBreaker.
• This used the Yosys toolchain by past guest Clifford Wolf (holy moly that interview was two and a half hours!)
• It also uses NextPNR, which was discussed by Piotr, Clifford and Dave at Chaos Communication Camp
• Altera is now Intel FPGA, if you didn’t remember.
• Git paper
• VHDL vs Verilog
• “Cross platform code” works between two separate chipsets meant for USB C
  • Richtek RC1716
  • TI TUSB422
• USB C PD
• Dave was actually discussing cross VENDOR code, because of the standard register format between the chips.
• Chris also took a workshop with Sean “Xobs” Cross that involved 3 levels:
  • Micropython
  • C written for a RISC V processor (soft IP core)
  • Writing hard logic for the FPGA
• Xobs is co-creator of the Novena laptop and the creator of the Fomu project.
• The Fomu was inspired by the Tomu, a project of past guest Tim Ansell
• Raspberry Pi 4 announced with new specs. Dave not impressed.
• The new Sparkfun Artemis Module puts TensorFlow lite onto a Cortex M4 processor with Bluetooth.
• This is similar to the Audeme project (in a much smaller form factor) by Gerald and Bertrand.
• Dave has made a video about how voice recognition was done in the 80s.
• Udemy is moving to a model where creators must be exclusive. The video is by past guest of the show Robert Ferenec.
• Chris is looking at buying a simple VNA.
• The “Buy/Sell section” of the EEVblog forum links to auctions. Dave recommends finding labs that are shutting down.
• Past guest Derek Kozel suggested to look at the HP 8753, based on this wonderful reference site.
• Beware the phrase “Pulled from (a) working environment”
• One last thing from Teardown, Kate Tempkin did an amazing talk about USB analyzers and software around decoding USB traffic.
• Building a STM32 open source multimeter.
• Simone Giertz (yep, also a past guest!) built a “Truckla” and showed how she did it!

Thanks to Billie Ward for the image of the “fantastically overpriced junk”