brainwagon

As a followup to my post yesterday regarding Arduino BASIC, here’s a contest challenge to extend the Arduino basic to drive the Nanode, an Arduino compatible microcontroller board that extends the conventional Arduino with Ethernet and other cool features. The challenge is to make a good hack using Tiny BASIC: perhaps by extending the BASIC […]

Edsger Dijkstra, Dutch computer scientist and winner of the 1972 Turing Award wrote: It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. While I have respect for his great contributions to the field, in my […]

My experiments with generating RTTY signals yesterday made me begin to think about generating RTTY signals with an Atmel/Arduino setup. The obvious way is to use PWM and a low pass filter to approximate a sine wave. While doing a bit of research, I found the following link which seemed to be nearly ideal: it […]

So, this morning, I was trying to test my understanding of the ITA2 code used in amateur radio teletype communications. I wrote up an encoder, generated some test audio files, and tried decoding them with fldigi. It mostly worked, but I had some difficulty with certain punctuation marks. I was curious what the problem should […]

While looking at the hadie high altitude balloon project, I got to thinking about making a microcontroller that could send RTTY. I knew that traditional Baudot (more properly the ITA2 code) was a five bit code with codes designed to switch back and forth between “letters” and “figures”, but I had never looked at the […]

While listening to the Amateur Radio Newsline podcast this week, I was interested to hear that a group of hams from Ireland had launched a balloon which transmitted digital pictures back from the balloon while it was at altitude, using a version of dl-fldigi. While I was familiar with fldigi, I hadn’t heard of this […]

My early success with making tasty no knead bread has sent me off on the Internet looking for additional recipes. As a complete breadmaking newbie, I have a lot to learn, but luckily, there is lots of good websites to help me understand and extend my tiny skills in this vast topic. The best of […]

For some reason, I’m getting back into the universe of QRSS, or very slow Morse code. I goofed around with this for a while, writing some software to record audio and produce the necessary FFTs so that you can read Morse from these incredibly long Morse messages, but lately haven’t done much lately. Hopefully, that […]

A couple of years ago, I was big into QRSS and wrote some software to do unattended captures of the portion of the 30M band where people were operating beacons. It was through this rather unconventional means that I first discovered Alan, VK2ZAY, as his callsign scrolled across in DFCW. If you look at this […]

Well, it’s done! Here’s my ATtiny13 controlled Christmas LED hat. It consists of an 8 pin, ATtiny13 microcontroller, a pair of 2N3904 transistors and some 1K resistors, a 7805 voltage regulator with two filter caps, and a switch, all mounted on a Radio Shack perfboard inside an Altoids tin. I’m rather pleased with the way […]

While waiting for my bread to rise the other day, I moved my breadboard ATtiny13 circuit that blinked two leds to a small Radio Shack perfboard, added a couple of switching transistors (2N3904s) to power the LEDs, and built a small 7805 regulator (which doesn’t yet have any filter caps, I’ll get to that). But, […]

Tonight I baked up my second loaf of no knead bread. The first batch was promising, but was a bit dense. I used ordinary all purpose flour, and for whatever reason, I didn’t seem to get as high of a rise as I thought I should. This time, I decided to try some King Arthur […]

Don’t you hate it when you see something that you want to investigate further, but then you can’t remember what the project is called? That’s what happened to me: I recently saw some cool little web server, implemented as a single C file, and that could either embed or be embedded in other applications. And […]

I needed to know the pinouts for various AVR chips and the 6 pin ICSP cable they used. I found this cool little one page sheet that had that, and more. Saved for future reference: Microcontroller cheat sheet.

Frequent readers of this blog might be shocked to learn that I’m not entirely consumed by the usual geeky topics that I post about. Among other things, I also like to cook, and as the holidays approach, I like to try to find a few new recipes and techniques. This week’s experiment was one of […]