brainwagon

The great thing about doing a real project like my satellite tracker is that it makes you learn a lot, in a whole lot of different areas. In other words, it’s good exercise! And thus, it is good when you discover something doesn’t quite work right: you have another opportunity to learn. Well, today, something […]

There is a lot to like about the Arduino, but I can’t help but think that the existing library system removes some of the power that the AVR could supply in its effort to handhold new users. I’m not the only one: the guys over at makehackvoid.com have written a new set of runtime libraries […]

Qu8k – BALLS 20 – Carmack Prize Attempt – High Altitude Rocket On-board Video – YouTube

I need to think up a better name for this project. Calling it the “Arduino/Gameduino Satellite Tracker” is just too damned cumbersome for words. Progress was slow today. I woke up around 4:00AM with a sore throat and a miserable cough. A quick trip to the urgent care clinic when it opened reassured me that […]

I’ve had this rant percolating in my head for the last few days, and can’t let it carry into the weekend, so you all with have to bear with me. First, the caveat: I’m a happy iPhone/iPad/MacBook user. These products are (for me) so clearly better than the products from other manufacturers that they replaced […]

My cat Scrappy decided it was time to film a brief progress video of my Arduino/Gameduino satellite tracker. I completed the basic port and testing of my Plan13 implementation to C++ for the Arduino, and got it running pretty well. It doesn’t seem to be much more compact than Bruce Robertson’s qrpTracker code, but it […]

Long time readers of my blog may remember that I’m interested in rainbows (not unicorns, just rainbows). A while ago, I wrote a simple simulation that showed the formation of the primary and secondary rainbows by simulating the refraction of water inside a single raindrop. These two bows appear opposite the sun in the sky. […]

Yesterday, I was sitting at my desk at Pixar when a Twitter alerted me to the passing of Steve Jobs. I remember feeling mostly shock. While I knew that he was ill, and this was the likely outcome from his stepping down as the Apple, I still couldn’t help but feel a bit amazed that […]

Okay, I got about half of the Plan 13 code ported to C++. It’s a fresh port of the original BASIC code, but modularized into objects better, and with a few bits of tidiness that C++ provides over basic. I estimate another hour or so to finish the code, if I work carefully and efficiently. […]

Another cool link in my blog searching: constructing speakers out of paper and strips of copper foil. High-Low Tech – Paper Speakers.

It seems that lots of people I know have been working on radio and computer controlled drone aircraft. I just recently found Mark Harrison’s blog, and he’s got a bunch of cool things. For instance, he linked to John Decker’s See How It Flies, an online textbook on the principles of flight. Very cool stuff. […]

Well, tonight I had some mild success! My Gameduino satellite tracker is up and running! It’s not got much in the way of a user interface, but it here you see the ISS position marked with a purple/magenta dot, and then dots showing the position of the ISS every three minutes for the next two […]

I had a project in mind for the Gameduino, part of which requires the display of a world map. But the Gameduino has a relatively limited amount of memory, and the “background” graphics is character mapped: instead of providing complete flexibility to plot individual points, the Gameduino memory is organized as a 64×64 array of […]

This article was linked from hackaday, and seems very, very cool. Sure, GPS receivers are cheap, but building one is cool. I am not likely to be doing a project like this, but it’s cool to read about. Homemade GPS Receiver.

My face is red. I had claimed yesterday that nobody had tried to decode my SSTV challenge, when in fact both Ken and Eric decoded it. Eric was the first, who sent me this decode: It’s a bit noisy, because he just played the sound file on his laptop and decoded it on a PC […]