brainwagon

I like to see hummingbirds. They seem completely incredible to me, like little hyper Swiss Watches, buzzing around the garden. I’ve seen a few of them in our yard, but I’ve been meaning to encourage them showing up more, so I recently installed a feeder. While the syrup level has gone down, I have never […]

Early in 2012, I posted a small version of Tiny BASIC that I had adapted to run on the Arduino. It is based upon code which was written by Mike Field, and based upon an earlier version of TinyBasic for the 68000 written by Gordon Brandly, which owes its roots to Palo Alto Tiny BASIC, […]

I intended to play around with some of the NRF24L01 radio modules I have around, but my brain didn’t feel up to it after a day of debugging. So, instead i dusted off a Parallax PING))) sensor that I’ve had around for a long time. I thought it might be fun to see if I […]

Without a lot more explanation, I did a bit more work on my implementation of Conway’s life, reducing the overhead so I can implement the full 128×64 bit resolution of the OLED display. I also hardcoded an initial pattern: the classic Gosper glider gun. It runs at about 1.625 frames/second, so a new glider is […]

I received a couple of email and twitter queries about various aspects of the code, so I thought I would add a followup to yesterday’s post. First of all, I received a query as to whether it was “open source”. Frankly, the code is so minimal and so obvious I didn’t even consider it worthy […]

I had a few minutes, so I thought I’d try making a graphics demo that runs on the tiny little 0.96″ OLED display I mentioned last week. One of the first programs I ever wrote was an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, having learned about it from Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific […]

I’m pretty old school when it comes to development. To me, writing code is something I like to do with vi (the editor that I learned three decades ago) and compile with Makefiles, especially for code that I do myself. In general, I prefer to do my development on either Linux or Mac OS too, […]

In what quite possibly might be the most boring video ever produced, I recorded myself changing the LCD panel out of my Chromebook. It’s 17 minutes of riveting youtube goodness. Skip down to the bottom if you want to watch. But here’s the story if you’d rather just read a paragraph. My wife bought me […]

Use the “bc” arbitrary precision calculator you can probably find (or install easily) on your Linux box. > bc -l bc 1.06.95 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty’. scale=50 4*a(1) 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937508 User input is in bold. the scale […]

As my recent video showed, I have a lot of development boards. I also have a fair number of little boards that are useful to plugin to these development boards to accomplish various tasks. Yesterday, I received a little OLED board that I thought I’d try hooking up and let you know about my experience. […]

One of my recent posts highlighted the big pile of development boards that I have lying around. This week, I actually added to that pile in a couple of ways: I found a pair of Beagle Bone Blacks that I had misplaced, a couple of Propeller boards, and most significantly, I ordered an ODROID-C1 from […]

Happy Albert Einstein’s birthday! And we are just a few minutes away (in our time zone anyway) from 9:26. Huzzah! I’m going to celebrate by making Shepard’s Pi(e) for dinner.

This morning, the Tweeti-verse (I can’t believe I just used that word) informed me that Thomas, LA3PNA had constructed a VHF beacon using the Si5351, and I was tagged as somehow helping: VHF beacon with the Si5351. code: https://t.co/OkgZXKFSKc , video: http://t.co/hbZl9F76Aj based on code from @brainwagon @NT7S — Thomas S Knutsen (@la3pna) March 9, […]

A few years ago, I created my own Python implementation of the Plan13 satellite prediction code written by James Miller (G3RUH). The Plan13 algorithm isn’t very complicated: you can easily run it on processors like the Arduino (in fact, I used it for my ANGST satellite tracker) But somehow, I managed to misplace the source […]

I like reading old books and old magazines. Luckily, the Internet is making a lot of that kind of material available online for free. A couple of quick links to some items I’ve found recently on the subject of amateur radio: Radio News was published from 1919 to 1959. PDF scans of every issue are […]