brainwagon

I’ve stopped hacking on my Arduino/Gameduino satellite tracker for now. Here’s the final video demonstrating it running: I’m currently working on the final schematic which will be posted on this permanent page. The code will be available github.com, for right now, it includes the library that I wrote that does the satellite prediction. I’ll be […]

I got one of these boards the other day for free: STM32L-DISCOVERY – STMicroelectronics. Even if you didn’t get one for free, they seem to be pretty cheap: Nu Horizons has ’em for around $15, Mouser has them for $11.67, which makes them pretty much cheaper than every Arduino you can order. But what do […]

Happy Halloween! Here’s a little project I’ve been working on for Halloween… I’ve created a separate page with the details: it’s pretty rough right now, but I’ll try to tidy it up as time goes on. Feel free to mail me with any direct questions to serve as incentives to documenting the project better. brainwagon […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Well, it wasn’t so much a difficulty with the Hilbert transform as a difficulty with my understanding. But with the help of my good friend Tom, my understanding was soon put right, and I thought it might make an interesting (in other words, horribly boring to anyone but myself) post, and at the very least, […]

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, […]

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 […]

A couple of weeks ago, I programmed an Arduino to take digitized sound stored in its rom, and send it out via PWM of an LED. A couple days after that, I used the same code to send voice using a small 5mw laser module. Ever since then, I thought it would be good to […]

A few weeks ago I did an experiment that stored an 8 bit PCM file in the flash memory of an Arduino, and then used PWM to flash a laser at a high rate so I could transmit that audio over a long distance to a solar cell based receiver. A few days ago, I […]

I was in the mood to melt some solder, but didn’t really have a lot of time and/or brainpower last night, so I turned to my box of little electronics kits that seems to have been growing over the last few years. I located a small plastic bag which contained tanjent’s “bliplace”, a tiny kit […]

The other day, I showed how the Arduino could be used to generate PWM audio and send it over a very short distance using an LED. In my ever increasing pile of parts, I had some small 5mw red laser diode modules. These modules are supposed to be driven by direct connection to three 1.5 […]

I haven’t had all that much time to work on the Gameduino between holidays, visiting family and a business trip, but I have been meaning to put together a simple “button box” for the Gameduino, basically consisting of just four buttons (L/R/thrust/fire). I suppose I could have included hyperspace too, but 4 buttons was sufficient […]