brainwagon

This is just a short set of updates for my weekend projects, meant to keep me in the habit. I’ll write up a more complete version of these projects going forward. First of all, a new acquisition. My Anet A8 3D printer has proven to be, well, not the most reliable of gadgets. I still […]

I haven’t posted an update here recently, but I am (mostly) living up to my New Year’s resolution to spend at least 30 minutes a day working on a project. This has taken the form of some stupid but necessary chores (like fixing the broken pull cord on my lawnmower) but has mostly taken the […]

Today, I finally lost my freaking mind with respect to Comcast. First of all, some background. I’ve have been a Comcast customer since 1999 when I moved into my house. For the most part, the service itself has been reasonably reliable and effective. I don’t have a lot of technical quibbles with them. But their […]

LB3RE sent me a link to this awesome HF beacon by Anthony, F4GOH and Christophe, F4GOJ that has many of the same features as my (as yet still in-progress) beacon transmitter does. And, of course, his actually exists, so it’s already infinitely more awesome than my idea. I was particularly interested in his very simple […]

I was working on some additional software to power my nascent WSPR project. I’ve been thinking that rather than using an Arduino, it would be better to use the Teensy, so I’ve been experimenting a lot with the Teensy LC. My idea was to wire up my Ultimate GPS and an I2C based DS3231, and […]

Previously, I wrote about a project I called the Big Box O’ RF. I’ve shifted goals a bit, and done some experimentation, and have changed some of my goals and approach. First of all, I’ve changed the goal a bit. Instead of being a piece of test equipment, I’m actually more interested in using it […]

One of the things that I really like about the Teensy LC (besides its low price) is that it has three hardware serial ports. Hardware serial ports are just nicer than the SoftwareSerial ports that you see on the ordinary Arduino platform. While the latest support for SoftwareSerial ports on digital pins work reasonably well […]

I hooked up my new DS3231 clock module to an Arduino that was being fed with the one pulse per second input from a locked GPS, and counted the number of pulses from each. In 3170 seconds, the clock module generated 103874565 pulses, for an average pulse per second of 32768.0015773 pulses per second. That’s […]

Greetings readers. I’m hopefully wishing there is still more than one. This weekend was the Bay Area Maker Faire 2015, the 10th incarnation of an event which has become increasingly (even frighteningly) popular. I’m tempted to channel Yogi Berra, who said “Nobody goes there. It’s way too crowded.” Anyway, I got out of my house […]

Yesterday, I mentioned the idea of using the cheap ESP8266 as a clock source for a WSPR beacon transmitter. My initial idea was to basically write code for the Arduino that connected to a remote NTP server, formulate UDP packages… sounds like a pain. But then I found that there was alternative software I could […]

Yesterday I finally found a copy of the code that I wrote years ago to figure out the tone sequence for messages used by the Weak Signal Propation Reporter system. To avoid losing it again, I decided to put both the C versions and the Python versions on my github page so that even if […]

I tinkered together a circuit for a buffer amplifier that I thought would be good to use with the AD9850 DDS board I have. In particular, for the purpose of this exercise, I was trying to preserve the nice sine-wave nature of the DDS input, and present it at the output into a 50 ohm […]

As I’ve mentioned over the last few months, I have piles of different development boards, and lots of little display modules and the like. I’ve been thinking of doing a simple radio project, aimed at helping further experimentation with QRP (low-power) radio homebrewing. Inspired by Pete and Bill over at the Soldersmoke Podcast, I thought […]

I was originally licensed under the callsign KF6KYI (Kenwood-Yaesu-Icom, or what I prefer, Kiss Your Iguana) but when I upgraded to Extra a few years back, I dug around and was lucky enough to snag the callsign K6HX (missed out on getting the highly desirable K6TT, which would have been AWESOME). I never really gave […]

I read this today: AMSAT is excited to announce that we have accepted an opportunity to participate in a potential rideshare as a hosted payload on a geostationary satellite planned for launch in 2017. An amateur radio payload, operating in the Amateur Satellite Service, will fly on a spacecraft which Millennium Space Systems (MSS) of […]