brainwagon

Carmen bought a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter for my birthday, which I’ve been a little too chicken to put into the air so far. But John and Joachim were interested in flying theirs today, so I decided to give it a whirl. Initially, we headed out to Miller/Knox park, out near the old location of […]

I hooked up my new DS3231 clock module to an Arduino that was being fed with the one pulse per second input from a locked GPS, and counted the number of pulses from each. In 3170 seconds, the clock module generated 103874565 pulses, for an average pulse per second of 32768.0015773 pulses per second. That’s […]

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was not enormously satisfied with the accuracy of the DS1307 clock module that I got from China. It was hard to argue with the less than three dollar price tag, but I was hoping that the accuracy might achieve 20ppm (less than two seconds of drift per […]

My tinkering with using the Adafruit GPS as a time base has yielded some results. I’m still getting a few spurious interrupts when I feed my buffered PPS signal into the interrupt pin on the Arduino, but they are relatively few and far between (and quite regular in appearance). A few short notes, followed by […]

I picked up an Adafruit GPS module while at the Maker Faire. It’s a cool little module. I had a couple of old GPS modules: a Parallax PMB 648 and a Garmin 89, but this one is pretty nifty: It is small. It is breadboard friendly. It has a one pulse per second (1PPS) output […]

I mentioned in my Maker Faire wrap up post that I had spoken with Ben Krasnow, the science guru behind the Applied Science Youtube channel. If you haven’t watched his videos, by all means, go over there and give it a whirl. Between playing with chemicals, low temperatures, rockets, X rays, and electron microscope, it’s […]

Greetings readers. I’m hopefully wishing there is still more than one. This weekend was the Bay Area Maker Faire 2015, the 10th incarnation of an event which has become increasingly (even frighteningly) popular. I’m tempted to channel Yogi Berra, who said “Nobody goes there. It’s way too crowded.” Anyway, I got out of my house […]

Yesterday, I mentioned the idea of using the cheap ESP8266 as a clock source for a WSPR beacon transmitter. My initial idea was to basically write code for the Arduino that connected to a remote NTP server, formulate UDP packages… sounds like a pain. But then I found that there was alternative software I could […]

Yesterday I finally found a copy of the code that I wrote years ago to figure out the tone sequence for messages used by the Weak Signal Propation Reporter system. To avoid losing it again, I decided to put both the C versions and the Python versions on my github page so that even if […]

Just a head’s up that I’ll be at the San Mateo Maker Faire this Saturday, May 16th. If anyone if exhibiting or attending, either drop a comment here, or email me, or just send a tweet message to @brainwagon (you do follow me, right?) and we can try to get together and say hi. I […]

I tinkered together a circuit for a buffer amplifier that I thought would be good to use with the AD9850 DDS board I have. In particular, for the purpose of this exercise, I was trying to preserve the nice sine-wave nature of the DDS input, and present it at the output into a 50 ohm […]

As I’ve mentioned over the last few months, I have piles of different development boards, and lots of little display modules and the like. I’ve been thinking of doing a simple radio project, aimed at helping further experimentation with QRP (low-power) radio homebrewing. Inspired by Pete and Bill over at the Soldersmoke Podcast, I thought […]

I was trying to make some headway on my robotic platform project, so I went digging through boxes in my office to find the large, 12v SLA battery that I know I have somewhere. While searching I found a bunch of stuff: hundreds of red LEDs in a pack, two Arduinos, a Sparkfun breakoutboard for […]

I was originally licensed under the callsign KF6KYI (Kenwood-Yaesu-Icom, or what I prefer, Kiss Your Iguana) but when I upgraded to Extra a few years back, I dug around and was lucky enough to snag the callsign K6HX (missed out on getting the highly desirable K6TT, which would have been AWESOME). I never really gave […]

I read this today: AMSAT is excited to announce that we have accepted an opportunity to participate in a potential rideshare as a hosted payload on a geostationary satellite planned for launch in 2017. An amateur radio payload, operating in the Amateur Satellite Service, will fly on a spacecraft which Millennium Space Systems (MSS) of […]