brainwagon

Here is a snapshot from my QRSS grabber earlier today. You might want to click it to see it full size: I’m curious: what phenomenon is causing the strong line doubling of the signals near the bottom? Note: not all the signals demonstrate this phenomenon, and it’s relatively rare, and commonly just fades away. Also […]

I’ve recently begun to try to systematically (if somewhat erratically) equip my home office (it aspires to be a lab) with the necessary parts and tools that I need to assemble projects which interest me. The reason for this is simple: if you have the tools, material and space to do a project, you will […]

Allright, I was playing Skyrim most of the day, and didn’t really have my brain firing at it’s highest level when I sat down and decided to try to put something together. We’ve all been there, right? I realized that I had some of this cool RGB LED strip that I ordered from Tayda Electronics, […]

I could of days ago, I blogged about WA0UWH’s Propeller Beacon. Over the last couple of days, I worked on fixing a few small issues with my old beacon code, and have an experimental QRSS grabber up and running on qrss.info. And, what’s totally cool is that I’m hearing Eldon’s QRSS beacon, just over 700 […]

I’ve received a couple of requests for my own Arduino Basic modifications. They are pretty straightforward and small, but might be of some use, and I probably won’t have a chance to do any significant work for a couple of more weeks, so I thought I’d just toss them out there for consumption. This is […]

My twitter intro says that I am an “enthusiast for enthusiasm”. When I wrote that, it was simply because there are some questions that I really think aren’t helpful at all. Questions like: Why didn’t you just buy X instead of building your own? Didn’t somebody do that years ago? Why are you playing with […]

Today, through a bit of serendipity involving twitter and the web, I managed to have lunch with Nanode designer Ken Boak, who happened to be on an unrelated visit to the Bay Area this week. We exchanged brief messages for the first time a couple of weeks ago, as I was intrigued with his idea […]

This link will make my various Propeller loving readers happy: Eldon, WA0UWH received a Propeller microcontroller board for Christmas, and decided to try to use it to create a QRSS beacon. With other microcontrollers you generally just program it to generate a keying signal that passes into a FSK input on some other transmitter/oscillator. But […]

Well, this morning I did a bit more work on my G0UPL beacon kit. As I mentioned yesterday, I got was having difficulty with the frequency swing: despite a very tightly wound gimmick, I was getting just a little over 1Hz or frequency shift. Late last night I decided to just try a new one: […]

I ordered myself one of Hans Summers’ QRSS beacon kits before Christmas, and it arrived a few days ago. Yesterday, I started tinkering it together, and today got it hooked up and began testing. First, the good news: The oscillator is running. I was able to adjust it with the trimmer to get it into […]

Well, to test my nanode‘s Ethernet capability, I put it on the web! Check it out by clicking this link. Hurrah! Not too impressive, but consider: it is dynamically generated on an eight bit microcontroller that costs about $35, Ethernet included. Perhaps not as cool as the Raspberry Pi, but unlike the Raspberry Pi, you […]

My wife is the best. She listens to me even when I yammer on about the most boring and geeky of topics, and does so with patience and grace. What’s more, she even remembers what I talk about, and I reap the benefits at Christmas time. I mentioned Nanode about a month back, because I […]

Okay, I’ll confess: I’ve spent a bit too long playing Minecraft, both on a shared server, and even by myself in single player. I find it kind of soothing to create models, rather like playing with blocks or legos. But Eric Haines (a long time friend, and one of the people who was most influential […]

I’d like to thank each and every follower and friend of the brainwagon blog for their encouragement, for their attention, and for their continued participation in my little stream of consciousness experiment on the Internet. To all you, and your friends and family, I’d like to extend my best wishes for a Happy Holiday and […]

I was intrigued by @monsonite’s challenge to extend Tiny BASIC for the Nanode. I don’t have a Nanode, but I do have some Arduinos, and extending Mike Field’s Tiny BASIC port to include some additional Arduino functionality seemed pretty straightforward. An hour or so staring at the code told me pretty much all I need […]