brainwagon

If I am going to get going on this mirror again, I need to dust off and/or build some new test equipment. I never really did make an adequate Foucault/Ronchi tester, preferring to do all my testing at the workshop, but frankly, that seems a cowardly on my part. I suppose I’ll have to figure […]

Even recent readers of this blog may not know of one of my old passions: building telescopes. Back when I was ten or eleven years old, I read an article in Popular Mechanics or some such that told how you could build a telescope from scratch, including grinding and polishing your own mirror (most amateurs […]

Yesterday I just had a few minutes to hack around, and I decided to marry a sketch that used the TinyGPS++ library to the clock display that I had working the other day. I’ve been hopping back and forth between the Arduino and the Teensy LC as a development platform. Since I still had the […]

In a previous post, I wrote some interrupt driven code to refresh a multiplexed 8 digit, 7 segment display. Every 2 milliseconds, the Arduino triggers an interrupt, and then clocks out sixteen bits to a pair of chained 74HC595 shift registers, and then returns. That displays a single digit. The next interrupt displays the next […]

A couple of days ago, I wrote about experimenting with a little Chinese 8 digit, 7 segment LED module that is driven by some 74HC595 shift registers. My initial experiment in driving it with the Teensy was successful: I got a nice, steady display with a simple interrupt driven scheme which displays each digit for […]

A former colleague of mine, Erin Tomson, has been running a kickstarter that I’ve been meaning to talk about, but here it is, only a couple hours before the end of it, and she’s currently $382 short of her $50,000 stretch goal, and I haven’t written anything here. Sorry Erin! Anyway, I think of Modulo […]

I’m getting more confident flying the DJI Phantom 2, which means that I’m closer to having my first crash as I try to do more aggressive things. Mind you, the Phantom 2 pretty much has training wheels on it: no matter how hard you lean the stick to one side or the other, the copter […]

A few weeks ago, I was scanning the Deal Extreme website, and ordered a few different LED displays, not because of any pressing need, but because I wanted to have some display options available if I needed some for a project. I was especially interested in cheap LED displays. One of the ones I ordered […]

At lunch today, I managed to get a quick flight in before the field was taken over by soccer players. Unlike my early attempt, this time the gimbal was working. The footage is not all that interesting, since I don’t have FPV setup, I can’t see what the camera is aimed at, which makes the […]

I was working on some additional software to power my nascent WSPR project. I’ve been thinking that rather than using an Arduino, it would be better to use the Teensy, so I’ve been experimenting a lot with the Teensy LC. My idea was to wire up my Ultimate GPS and an I2C based DS3231, and […]

You’ve probably heard the expression that somebody is a “man of few words”. I’m not that guy. I’m a man of many words. I love to talk. I love to write. And yet, it is an odd paradox that when you actually feel like you have something to say, the words fly from you, leaving […]

Yesterday, I got a small 4 digit, 7 segment LED display board in the mail from dx.com. Cost was around $3 shipped, and the module uses a 4 pin interface (power, ground, clock and data). Originally, I thought it was I2C, but like other modules I have received based upon chipsets made by Titan Micro […]

Previously, I wrote about a project I called the Big Box O’ RF. I’ve shifted goals a bit, and done some experimentation, and have changed some of my goals and approach. First of all, I’ve changed the goal a bit. Instead of being a piece of test equipment, I’m actually more interested in using it […]

One of the things that I really like about the Teensy LC (besides its low price) is that it has three hardware serial ports. Hardware serial ports are just nicer than the SoftwareSerial ports that you see on the ordinary Arduino platform. While the latest support for SoftwareSerial ports on digital pins work reasonably well […]

I mentioned that during yesterday’s aborted attempt to fly quadcopters from a regional park resulted in a visit from the “Can’t Possibly Have Fun Police”, informing us that short sighted regulations against flying had been enacted in Eastbay Regional Parks. The entire incident was recorded remotely from Joachim’s Phantom 2. With soundtrack! (This is what […]