#695 – Making The Invisible, Visible With Sam Aldhaher The Amp Hour Electronics podcast

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#695 – Making The Invisible, Visible with Sam Aldhaher

2d ago 1:15:13

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Welcome Sam Aldhaher, power engineer and 3D graphic artist!

Sam has always been interested in art…and power engineering
He primarily works in Blender and has been for 5-6 years
Inputs and outputs
Starting from Altium / KiCad for eCAD
Blender doesn’t accept step files, it works with meshes like STL
KiCad -> Blender is a good flow, as there are add-ons to import KiCad
Making a good visulalization is all about lighting, materials
Building library of models
Modeling magnetic fields
Research in wireless power
openEMS vtk format
The marjority of tooling is glued together with python
ElectroMag Nodes – Sam‘s tool – $1
Right hand rule
Developing intuition
Elmer finite element solver
Past guest Katerina Galitskaya also visualized RF and talked about the differences of testingi n a chamber vs building a visualization
FastHenry is inductance tool that was created in 80s at MIT for wirebonds. Didn’t have a visualization front end, like SPICE
3D whiteboard
Using Blender to prototype and then taking it to other tools (CST, Ansys)
Validating on the bench with an impedance analyzer
Simulating power loss is difficult
Quality factor
“CAD is too perfect”
Adding surface imperfections
Node system is similar to simulink, adding blocks (Chris also thought this sounded like the effects in Davinci Resolve)
Lighting
Making the background dark means you don’t need to have far field details
Tutorials
Blender Guru – how to make a donut
Sam’s video about how to draw components on a PCB in Blender
Doing the same with Geometry nodes in Blender
Ability to create things procedurally
How to create ICs in Blender
Using LLMs for python glue code
What is a shader?
HardOps tool, simplifies workflow (shuffle button)
Visualizing an Inverted F antenna in Blender
Remembering that videos are just still frames in order
Electric fields propagating on the antenna itself
Radiated electric fields (red and blue and black)
OpenEMS generates GBs of data
Blender geomtry goes out to OpenEMS so it’s geometrically linked
What if it was a ceramic antenna instead of a metal inverted F?
Simulating 60 GHz from a radar chipset
Meshing – sample points in space
simulating points in time
Impacts of stubs / squares on microwaves
Human Hand Interaction with 60GHz Electromagnetic waves
SAR simulations – how much heat do you generate
Simulating motor windings on a PCB
The above was a collaboration with past guest Carl Bugeja
When to switch from near field (electro) vs far field (openEMS)
Calculating values with inductance calculator
FastHenry tool on Github
Sam’s work on artstation
ZS smart watch

Fast track if listeners want to get better at this art
- Learn blender – donut
- KiCad -> Blender reference
- Play with geometries nodes (ElectroMag Nodes, Fast Henry)
Find Sam on social

296 episodes

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