brainwagon

Sigh. The new version of WordPress is doing stupid things with images. I’ll fix them later. Okay, so roughly a month ago, I said that I was interested in rebooting this blog, and then once again I lapsed into silence. It’s tough to make something a new habit, even if it is something that you […]

Okay all, it’s been a while. If anyone is reading this, then welcome back to the brainwagon blog. I’ve been blogging off and on for about fifteen years, but in the last year have found that it’s basically been hard to do anything meaningful here. Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the unfortunate illness and passing […]

Why does the blog look different?

A couple of years ago, I decided to try to get into the entire 3D printing “revolution”. I liked the idea of being able to do some actual design of custom parts, and then be able to render them in plastic. I first bought an Anet A8 kit, and then later a Creality CR-10 which […]

Part of my recent interest (obsession) with getting my shop equipped for wood working is that I want to return to an activity that I used to do a lot more of: telescope making. In particular, my six and eight inch Dobsonian telescopes that have been relegated to the garage, collecting dust could use some […]

You would think that with the shelter-in-place orders that we are all under, that I would have had a lot of time and energy to get back to blogging again. I mean for the last eight weeks, I’ve been having to find ways to entertain myself, and in the past blogging has been part of […]

So, I’ve had a minimal AREDN network running at my house for the past few week or so, and it is working well. To recap where I stand today, I have three different pieces of RF hardware: a Mikrotik hAP ac lite, which looks like a small router or network switch. This is widely described […]

So, I have a spare computer out in my shop which I have used to host various small bits of networking. Previously I used it to host reports from my solar powered WSPR beacon. I thought it might be nice to make it available on the AREDN network as well. This machine uses “conceptron” as […]

Okay, minor lesson learned about AREDN. I had tried creating a couple of additional services and reserved a couple of DHCP devices on my node K6HX-GLUSB150, but then decided to move the hardware to a new location and wire it to different hardware. So I did, and then tried to delete those services. On the […]

I didn’t have a lot of time to do further experiments with my tiny AREDN network, but I did figure out a few things. To recap: I currently have three devices which have been flashed with AREDN firmware: a Microtik hAP ac lite (which serves as the indoor hub and wireless access point), a TP-LINK […]

For anyone reading this from some more distant point in the future, I’m in my fourth week of self-isolation to help halt the spread of the coronavirus. I’m exceptionally lucky: I’ve continued my job from home, working surprisingly effectively with a reasonably fast network connection as we try to put our next movie release in […]

I’ve got an opportunity to potentially loft a small camera module on a high altitude balloon launch next month. I had written some very simple code for an ESP32-CAM module which can be had for about $7 direct from China, or 2 for $10 from Amazon with Prime. The other day I decided to see […]

Okay, I had some scrap 1/4″ plywood in the shop, so I decided to go ahead and see if I could make a T-Trak module. I went ahead and ordered some additional Kato Unitrack via Amazon Prime, as well as some really cheap budget scale trees, and set to work. I set the dimensions for […]

Okay, I’m super busy at work these days at work, but I do still have time to muse about projects that I’ll be getting to once my current project wraps up sometime in about 12 weeks. If you were following my blog, you saw that my intention was to get a couple of very small […]

So, I earlier this week I was working on making a wooden box as part of my skill building in woodworking. Actually I made two boxes, but that’s a different story. Here is the better of the two, made from some scrap cedar fence posts: Rabbeted the sides into the front and the back, and […]