brainwagon

I’m pretty much near the end of where I wanted to be for the Arduino/Gameduino project: all the major functions that I originally wanted to include are in and working. I’ll be doing a video about it shortly, so I’ve begun to think about what my next project could be. While doing this project, I […]

A few months ago I acquired a used IC-735 from my boss, and other than getting it hooked up and using it for the occasional bit of RX, I haven’t actually powered it up and done any QSOs with it. Part of the reason is my inherent “mic-fright”, but I also know that my impossibly […]

Once I get my current project off my table, I’m going to start working more on the payload for a high altitude balloon launch. Today, I noticed that Paralllax added a nice little atmospheric pressure sensor. It claims to have a range of about 10 mbar to 1200 mbar, which covers pretty nicely the range […]

Wow. Pretty good jolt today. I was sitting in my office when I began to feel some high frequency shaking, starting weak, but then growing sharply in intensity. I’ve been in California long enough that such things don’t usually perturb me too much, but this one was as strong as I can remember in the […]

I’ve pondered creating something like this a bunch of times: a way to visualize all the satellites currently in Earth orbit. Somebody beat me to it, using Google Earth and a .kml file. It’s pretty astounding just how packed low earth orbit is, and it’s cool to check out the band of geostationary satellites as […]

I had an idea for a project that doesn’t require a full Arduino: a small 8 pin processor would work just fine. But how to program them? It turns out you can use an Arduino as a programmer. Check out the instructions: High-Low Tech – Programming an ATtiny w/ Arduino Sadly, I only have the […]

I was going to tidy up my breadboard layout for the satellite tracker I’ve been working on, and I thought it might be nice to use some software to test out various layouts. It also has the side effect of documenting the circuit, at least minimally. I decided to give Fritzing a try, which is […]

I must admit, I had my misgivings about the prospects of a movie based upon Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball. After all, Moneyball is a book about how Billy Beane took the Oakland Athletics to unheard of success on one of the most meager payrolls in the major leagues using a (then) unconventional view of baseball […]

In seeking some more details on the inner workings of the Wire library for the Arduino, I chanced across this rather informative link on the Arduino Playground website: Arduino playground – WireLibraryDetailedReference Of particular interest to me was the description how requestFrom worked. It doesn’t just issue the request: it calls the low level twi_readFrom() […]

I noticed something while reading code that uses the Wire library for the Arduino, such as you might find below… Arduino playground – I2CEEPROM Check out this two line fragment from the read function: for ( c = 0; c < length; c++ ) if (Wire.available()) buffer[c] = Wire.receive(); Is anyone else struck by the […]

I really like librivox.org. For those of you who may not have heard of it before, it’s an effort to take works in the public domain and record them as mp3 and ogg files for anyone to download. It’s an awesome resource: I’ve listened to many of their recordings, and while the quality can be […]

Forbes.com contributor Kyle Smith posted a provocative editorial today, which I thought deserved some commentary: Steve Jobs Was A Lousy Role Model – Forbes He does have a point, and it’s a point that I’m willing to concede: that asking the very rich for advice on how to run your life is probably not very […]

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Several people have forwarded this article on to me, where free software advocate Richard Stallman had this to say about Steve Jobs: Stallman: Jobs exerted ‘malign influence’ on computing • The Register. Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. As Chicago […]

While I’m still trying to shake a respiratory infection, I’m hoping that by the weekend I’ll be hale and hearty enough to attend this years Pacificon 2011. It’s a bit of a drive for me in the North Bay, so I suspect I might be there only for Saturday, but it’s remotely possible I’ll try […]