Explore every episode of the podcast The Amp Hour

Kjetil Meisal, CEO and co-founder of Norwegian semiconductor startup ONiO, joins Chris to discuss the development of ONiO.zero, a revolutionary batteryless microcontroller powered entirely by ambient energy harvesting.

Dave and Chris catch up on the shift toward practical hands-on engineering education at universities, open-source robotics, calculator forensics, mentoring young engineers, AI-assisted PCB layout tools, reverse-engineering scope RF sections, and why Chris wants to be “the Walmart greeter of electronics”

Andy Kong is creating Chargerless, a pre-seed wearable biometric device that runs on 1 minute of sunshine per day. He joins Chris to talk about low power design, unconventional power schemes, the weird signals of the human body, and more.

Kevin Cloutier is the North American Lead for Physical AI at a global engineering consulting firm and a computer engineer who is passionate about taking complex computations to the edge. He joins Chris to discuss the transition from legacy, statically programmed factory robotics to modern, imitation-learning-based “Physical AI,” building and calibrating the affordable $200 3D-printed SO101 robot arm using the LeRobot open-source framework or Intel’s Physical AI Studio, and orchestrating complex robotic systems entirely on local edge hardware.

Robert Fennis joins Chris to demystify the black magic of RF and talk about his open-source, Python-based 3D electromagnetic solver, EMerge. They discuss why simulation is like building a pyramid of knowledge, how silk screen can completely de-tune a patch antenna, and Robert’s quest to build the “IKEA of FEM solvers” so hardware developers everywhere can simulate their designs without relying on insanely expensive proprietary software.

Dave and Chris celebrate 16 years of the show (1st episode was August 10th, 2010) by launching a brand-new static website featuring searchable transcripts and a “pissed-old amber” SVG scope with a working focus knob–and links to merch!. They also discuss Dave’s new employee, 10 cent RISC-V debuggers, and why naming your startup after an un-Googleable Australian cryptid is a bad move

Dr Greg Charvat, CTO and co-founder of Teradar, joins Chris for a 5th appearance on The Amp Hour to talk about how terahertz frequency radar will revolutionize the automotive space and far outstrips the capabilities of LIDAR and Blobbology

Alex Haro, CEO of Hubble, joins Chris to talk about building a network of terrestrial and space (!) based Bluetooth infrastructure to track low power devices across the globe, without a data plan or a GPS module onboard.

Dave and Chris discuss a massive “boat anchor” warehouse clearance, 0201 board assembly, Texas Instruments’ stealthy datasheet updates for classic op-amps, the latest in local AI models, and paper-based electronics art

Massimo Banzi is co-founder of Arduino, the worldwide project built upon easily accessible embedded hardware. He joins Chris to talk about the design, rise, struggles, and eventual exit of the company, and what he’s now doing with Supermoderno.

Michał Zalewski (lcamtuf) is a security researcher, author, electronics enthusiast, and calculator collector. He joins Chris to talk about his new book The Secret Life of Circuits and his interest in the field of electronics and explaining things to others.

Dave and Chris discuss the infrastructure and massive energy demands of AI data centers, injecting power through a programming header, Linux changes, and dogfooding your own projects.

Jason Kridner returns to The Amp Hour after his first appearance 15 years ago to talk about the BeagleBadge and Zepto boards that showcase new capabilities in the Linux and Zephyr space. The BeagleBoard.org project is still focused on building open source, affordable, and accessible Linux and embedded hardware.

Past guests Matt Liberty (Joulescope) and Luke Beno (Werewolf.us) join Chris to talk through using AI tooling for small businesses in the hardware and firmware space. Both have built custom ERP systems, among many other tooling for their businesses, in a fast moving environment.

Julia Desmazes joins Chris to discuss designing chips for fun and getting an entire design done in 2 weeks to make a tapeout deadline. Julia built accerlators and has continued to dive deeper into on and off chip tooling for greater visibility into the silicon she gets back from the fab.

Dave and Chris discuss Golioth getting acquired by Canonical (makers of Ubuntu), trying out OpenClaw in the lab, changes to space plans, big new factories, Arm making chips, and more!

Alex is founder and CEO of Efficient Power Conversion, a leading manufacturer of GaN MOSFET’s. Alex is also the inventor of the original Power MOSFET and HEXFET at International Rectifier. Also, former CEO of International Rectifier (founded by his father!), https://epc-co.com We cover everything from inventing the power MOSFET on his first day on the job to silicon physics, AI data centres and humanoid robots. Enjoy.

Zachariah Peterson joins Chris to discuss doing PCB layout and creating content for engineers looking to learn more about how to build their own PCBs

This week we talked about upcoming travel, solid state transformers, battery testing, new small circuit boards, and a bunch more.

David Ray joins Dave to talk about the history of electronics manufacturing and how he has built a high mix manufacturing business while regularly educating the public about how electronics work.

Founder of Pebble and CEO of CoreDevices, Eric Migicovsky, joins Chris to talk about the history of the Pebble Watch and resurrecting the hardware to serve a very loyal ecosystem. Along the way, Eric has continued to create new gadgets like the Index 01 ring.

Martin Rowe is a long time technical editor for publications like EE World, EDN, and Test and Measurement World. He stops by The Amp Hour to talk about the things he has seen and the people he has met in the electronics industry, and he’s still going strong!

Dave and Chris discuss staying connected while traveling, building terminal interfaces for custom hardware, using coding tools, the Teensy and recent events surrounding the manufacture, Zephyr, Raspberry Pi PIOs, and more!

Aaed is a YouTuber who builds a variety of robots and a mechanical engineering student at Purdue. He joins Chris to talk building robots and robotics components from the ground up, with a focus on lowering the cost and barrier to entry. They also discuss modern engineering education.

Dr Mark Palmeri is a professor at Duke University in the Biomedical Engineering (BME) field. He joins Chris to talk about using open tools (KiCad, ngspice, Zephyr, Jupyter notebooks, Python) to build educational resources and how he shares those courses with the world outside of Duke. He also walks through the Tympanometer project, built with Duke BME Design Fellows.

Dave and Chris are back after a long vacation absence to talk about high end events, new scopes, fast board assembly, and nerds nostalgic for the sci fi future that never was.

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.

Davide Andrea is the author of The Electronic Connector Book and Principal of Elithion, a company that designs Battery Management System. He joins Chris to talk about the wide and wonderful world of connectors.

This week Dave and Chris discuss test equipment, the Arduino acquisition, Zephyr, Altium pricing, private equity owning YouTube channels, audio circuits, and more!

Joren Vaes is a design engineer at SOFICS working on simulating and delivering analog IP blocks on leading edge nodes like the 2 nm node from TSMC. Listen to how they bend physics to their will to make the chips that power our modern electronics.

This week Dave and Chris discuss DIN rail, IAC (featuring Space Lube), begging for Moonlanders, batteries, 10x-priced connectors, Gridfinity, concrete slabs, and more.

Jerry Twomey, author of Applied Embedded Electronics, joins Chris to talk about how to build more reliable hardware when there are embedded components involved. And these days, there are almost always embedded components involved.

Tim ‘Mithro’ Ansell returns to The Amp Hour to discuss his new Singapore based wafer sharing service called wafer.space. Now that Efabless is no more, this venture will aim to make silicon even more accessible to the masses, driving down the costs on a per chip basis. For $7K, you get 1000 chips delivered on a 180 nm process from Global Foundries.

Dave and Chris discuss solar, nuclear, making new injection molds from old ones (or not), and how to probe poorly placed test points with tiny needles.

Todd Bailey has been busy in the 11 years since he was last on the show. He has designed submarine sonar and many different pieces of space electronics, the latest being a hall effect thruster that uses solid propellant for his now sold company Starlight Engines.

Dave and Chris record after a long break between episodes together and discuss new electronics designs they’re working on, solar and battery installations, dealing with tariffs, and building at JLC.

Andrew Seddon, founder and CEO of CircuitHub, joins Chris to talk about how CircuitHub has changed over the past 12 years as a startup and how they are continuing to push the boundaries of high mix domestic electronics manufacturing.

Matt Brown is a hardware and IoT security researcher. He joins Chris to talk about best practices for securing hardware that talks to the internet and share stories of products that didn’t pass muster.

Tim from Mitxela stops by the show to discuss his extensive portfolio of projects involving, hardware (tiny LEDs), firmware (ridiculously low power processing), software (emulating gameboy), and mechanical (machining jewelry grade objects)

This week Dave and Chris discuss solar optimization, short videos, useless products, cameras, energy monitors, Bluetooth, magnets, and more!

Sam Aldhaher is a power engineer and 3D graphic artist, his Blender visualizations have helped many people understand how RF flows in a variety of circuits. Sam joins Chris to talk about how to get started in Blender and the variety of tools available once you do.

In this episode, Dave and Chris cover environmental monitoring, trade shows, manufacturing, tariffs, new test equipment, and AI coding.

Colin O’Flynn returns to The Amp Hour for a 3rd time to talk about recent developments in security, FPGAs, small scale electronics manufacturing, and the world of academia.

In this episode Dave and Chris discuss solar installs, wacky tariffs, peak power pricing, tiny electronics, oscilloscope triggering, and more.

Michael Gielda returns to the show (for a third time) to talk about the work Antmicro is doing to extend hardware, firmware, and silicon design. Their new tool System Designer allows even more high level testing of full systems, in addition to their popular Renode tool.

Dave and Chris discuss bluetooth boards, what happens when batteries leak, new cellular capabilities in iPhones, AC flicker, old oscilloscopes, and more!

Kevin Cappuccio joins Chris to talk about the Jumperless Breadboard, an advanced platform for prototyping and interacting with circuits that you place onto the breadboard.

Dave and Chris discuss the Tandy 200, test equipment cashflow, the return of the Pebble watch, GPT trying its hand at CAD, solar output…and more

The RP2350 from Raspberry Pi is a dual dual-core (Cortex-M33 and Hazard 3 RISC V) microcontroller with extensive peripherals. Some of the Raspberry Pi team (James Adams, Chris Boross, Liam Fraser, Luke Wren) join Chris to discuss how the chip evolved from the RP2040, including interesting security and lower power enhancements.

Stephen Hawes started Opulo, a company that builds the Lumen Benchtop Pick and Place. Opulo designs open source hardware and sane software for building your own PCBs in your lab.