brainwagon

I spent some more time hacking on my emulator today. The key to getting an emulator to work is to have good, clear references on how the system works, and some example code that torture tests your simulator. Except for the DAA instruction (more on that later), the documentation for the 8080 is pretty good, […]

I’ve been trying to get out and record more ARISSAT-1 passes, in the hopes of getting some nice SSTV images. If you follow @brainwagon on twitter, you are likely to see some of the more mundane images that I’ve been getting thusfar. I keep hoping to snag some truly great ones, but thus far, the […]

One of the more gratifying benefits of blogging is that it provides an opportunity to meet people who share your interests and enthusiasms. A few months ago, I became aware of the crew on the #savagecircuits IRC channel on AfterNET and started hanging out there. Various group members like Atdiy, whisker, JohnS_AZ, MakerDino, and Roy_Eltham […]

A couple of days ago I got intrigued by this cool project which ran CP/M on an AVR. The basic idea was to equip an AVR with an external RAM, and then write a compact 8080 emulator to run on the AVR. Instead of floppy drives, the AVR accesses data stored on a small SD […]

Dan alerted me to the fact that Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart passed away. On the Project Gutenberg site, Dr. Gregory Newby wrote a very nice obituary: Michael S. Hart – Gutenberg. I also liked this quote from Hart: “One thing about eBooks that most people haven’t thought much is that eBooks are the very […]

Jeff, KE9V pointed at the following article via Twitter: Are ‘ham’ operators going the way of 8-tracks and VCRs? The author actually meanders a bit (into the why we call it “ham radio”, for some odd reason, but his main point seems to be this: As National Public Radio found last March, amateur radio is […]

I’ve always been fascinated by emulation and virtual machines, as well as retro-computing: resurrecting the old machines of my past. I never owned an old CP/M machine, but there are still some neat projects where people construct there own, and simulators like SIMH and YAZE-AG are good software simulators. But what I always wondered was […]

Roger has found another real gem of a link: a great book called The Boy’s Book of Crystal Sets. Flipping through it, it seems awesome, and Roger recommends it as an influential book of his youth. Worth checking out. Roger G3XBM’s Amateur Radio Blog: Boy’s Book of Crystal Sets.

Got a short recording of ARISSat-1 this evening. Not 100% sure, but it may have transitioned into low power mode at the end of this recording, I seemed to lose carrier and couldn’t reacquire the satellite. In any case, here’s the recording, and the one decoded SSTV image (not too exciting, but pretty clear). ARISSat-1 […]

I got a tweet from twisst, the ISS pass prediction robot yesterday indicating that I’d have a good pass around 8:25PM. While I am fighting off a cold, the weather was beautiful and nice, and so I ran some path predictions to see what the path looked like, and also checked on ARISSat-1’s path to […]

No commentary, I just found a reference to this module in this cool article on making a VGA scoreboard. The author intends to send information to an AVR using this module, and the price and capability seems pretty good. Wireless Bluetooth RS232 TTL Transceiver Module – Free Shipping – DealExtreme.

As anyone who reads my blog with any regularity will tell you, I like to read and learn new things. The problem with being self taught and also easily distracted means that you often learn a great deal, but don’t always perceive the connections and scope of what you are learning. I found another example […]

Today I noticed an editorial by founding member of the Eagles, Don Henley asking for the passage of the PROTECT IP Act currently stalled in the U.S. Senate. The basic of idea of the PROTECT IP act is that the Attorney General or private intellectual property rights holders can ask the court to issue an […]

Tom mentioned that a new supernova had been found in M101, a spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. While I used to be a bit of a telescope maker, and could generally find my way around the sky, I wasn’t one hundred percent certain I knew where to find M101. So, I turned to my copy […]

I’ve been making some minor tweeks to the excellent 1024 px WordPress theme that I started using a few weeks ago. I found a small issue with the CSS for images that are supposed to be center (a priority mistake meant it didn’t work) and I’ve made a few other minor tweaks. I finally got […]