Sorry it has been so long

Sometimes things come up, and I don't have time, other times things come up and I want to make time. This week was pretty exciting. It contained a few disappointments too, but overall, it was positive, and I feel the need to share.

Some of the tough stuff, to start with. I went to Minnesota to get my airplane. When I left it last fall, it was all signed off and ready to go. The prop needed torquing and a quick going over, and it was ready to fly. Things started out tough, and I kept wanting to quit, but people kept encouraging me, so I kept going. About 2:30 on Sunday, lined it up on the end of runway 10L, pushed the throttle forward, and it rolled and rolled and rolled. Finally at about 80kts, and most of the way down the runway, I gave up. The plane wouldn't rotate. It seemed to be running fine, but I couldn't get it off the ground. When I got back to the hangar, I found it wouldn't idle on the one mag. It shouldn't have taken that much runway, and it seemed to be down on power. Something to look into, but I needed to catch a plane at 4:30 if I was to get home for work on Monday, so I abandoned it for that trip. I'll give it another shot in a couple weeks.

I get some EE Times emails, and one this week had a new National Semiconductor 12bit A/D convertor that can do over 2G samples/second. Wow! talk about the perfect software defined radio (SDR) chip. That is amazing, and I am sure it will start appearing in some radios soon. Think about Nyquist theorem, it should allow hooking up to an antenna, and getting usable data up to almost 1GHz. No down convertors needed!
The app sheets National has on their page seem to reflect this also.

More good news on Hack-a-day, Heathkit is going to start building kits again! Their kits were top notch, and I certainly built my share of them. I still have a couple, and hope they maintain the quality. They are looking for ideas for kits to add. They are promising a wireless pool monitor as one of their first kits, and I hope it is good, since that is something I have considered building myself. Especially in the winter, going out and messing with the pool is a hassle.

Tonight, I went to MicroCenter, the closest place where I know I can get printer ink, and other PC accessories. I was able to get a Linux compatible USB WiFi device for my laptop. Asus makes it, I'll let you know if it works. I so much miss Linux at home. I have it at work but it is so crippled it is almost as bad as windows! While I was there, it appears they are setting up a little Maker Space with Make magazine, and various kits, including Arduino and various sensors and shields. The prices weren't bad either. Hack-a-day is saying Radio Shack is trying to be hobbyist friendly too.

We will just have to see what happens. Hopefully there will be some solid follow through, and Heathkit will be good, radio shack will be helpful, and the economy will pick up.

Lots of Distractions

I've been messing with a few things, the kids had a cubmobile race, and my wife had plenty of things for me to mess with. Along the way, I've been only reading about stuff. This week, Hackaday had some talk about this Jerri person who is building a FPGA software defined radio. I've been reading hackaday for a couple years, and always find some really cool info.

It turns out this Jerri person is Jeri Ellsworth, another self taught engineer. Instantly I respect her, but after seeing her work, I am even more impressed. She publishes a vlog, and a blog about her hobby work, and some other stuff. I've only been reading about her a couple days, but I thing this is really good info.

She is up to part 6 of her vlog reporting about this, and will end up publishing on element14. Suddenly I know about element14. Well, I knew about it a while ago, but never really paid any attention it is, since I had no idea if they sold something, or what they did. I've been getting EE Times and Embeded Systems Design magazines for about 20 years, and they are getting thinner and thinner, probably a sign of the times.

I've always enjoyed Circuit Cellar Ink, and still have issue 1, and a bunch of older Byte magazines, where Steve got his start. The price is up to almost $40/year ($45 for print) for the magazine, and that is scarey, and sad. It eliminates a bunch of people from being able to afford it, or thinking really hard about the magazine. It has always been at the high end, with limited advertising, and great content, but now I think it went too far. We will see how long that lasts.

The other thing I saw, Garmin has an "affordable" transponder for ADS/B. Turns out it is a 1090ES transponder. Well, that is a non-starter for GA as far as I am concerned. The FAA wants everyone below 18000ft to be using UATs, not 1090es transponders. This transponder is still about $2500, and UAT's are
still priced less. I am guessing this is "affordable" in the business jet jargon.

I promise to get back to my original project, check back next week.

tom

I quit, but I'm back

I almost gave up on the project. Financial times were getting tight, I was frustrated about all the other stuff that I needed to take care of. Some clown was able to get into my paypal account, and take all my ebay sales money, plus a little more. Paypal made things good, but it took a couple weeks to work out. A couple other things happened, and I was able to make the money deal work out.

My laptop had a flakey hard drive, so I bought a new one. 50GB for $500. Sure the 1TB drives aren't a lot more, but they are 3-1/2" ones. Internal laptop drives are a little more expensive. IT works better than before, plenty of space, but I still have to load all the software. I've gotten everything loaded, and the arduino talks to it fine. Tonight I installed Java, and waiting for eclipse to download.

I still have very little time, but I am making progress. I've built the protoboard. I modified it to be stackable with the bluetooth module, and am testing with an LM34, for the OAT sensor. Once I get the Eclipse installed, along with the amarino software fully configured, I should be good to go with the screen layout. I guess that is something I could have been working on all alone.

Keep the notes coming in. Love the feedback.

It works!

I finally got the itread studio stackable bluetooth card. It works right out of the box (or appears to, I haven't actually written code to make it do something). It connected right to the amarino app on the phone. I was a little nervous about plugging this into a mega arduino, since it doesn't have the same pinout as the basic arduino. Using the schematics for both the arduino and the shield, and dang, they line up. Being stackable, the pins are still usable (mostly).

I also ordered some blank prototype boards from itread studio. They are the mega sized ones, so I shouldn't loose anything. The board appears to have space to put one of the bluetooth boards, so I may be able to replace this shield with the prototype board. I should plan it out, and put things in eagle so that I can build a engine monitor shield. It only takes time.

I would like to get more folks coming to this site. I am looking for good ideas to get this promoted. It seems I am not spending enough time building to finish, so I don't feel strong about pushing things until I am done, in case I don't finish.

Feedback would be welcome.

I am still here.

I just haven't done anything in a week. Lots of kids stuff, and work. I did order that other bluetooth card, and sold some more on eBay, so maybe I can get another Arduino. Maybe I should save up for a new laptop, my  wife wants a new desktop.

Maybe I am the only one in the world who doesn't respect some certain big time aviation mapping company in the world. I think their maps are cool, but their software stinks. I've been dealing a bit with that all week in my professional life, and it seems I sort of being ostracized. Weird, it is like the airplane manufacturer that owns the mapping company is pulling some serious strings. But, the CEO of our company is kind of pushing them.

Hopefully I get to keep my job. Then I can buy more computers.

Amazing things happen in 24 Hours

My bluetooth card showed up a couple hours after I wrote the last post. Wow! that cars is smaller than I imagined!

So where to start. Well, the documentation leaves something to be desired. Seed has a Wiki page that has some pointers, including the pinouts of the card. It seems to be quite capable. But, so far I can't get it to work. I don't know if I need to connect more than power and Rx/Tx? It appears it needs to run on 3.3V, and my ArduinoMega has a 3.3V pin, so that seems right. Lots of grounds on the board, so that seems good. I connected reset, but this page made it seem like I didn't need to, so I disconnected it. Back in the day, We used to connect pins 6, 8, and 20 in the DB-25 connectors to get around hardware handshaking, so I connected RTS and CTS, but nothing.

I also had some issues with libraries and installing them. The Zip files come with a sub directory, so I'd install a new library in libraries/foo/foo/ well the apps wouldn't compile. I got pretty frustrated, but moving the libraries up to the proper place (IE libraries/foo) the code would compile.

How about this; http://iteadstudio.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=7&products_id=157, there is a schematic and everything! It is a little confusing, their schematic has a level converter (RS-232) but the pinout shows TTL level. Hmmm... 

I also found this card, for $19 I should buy it, since it'll get me prototyping area too. There seem to be many Arduino to Bluetooth solutions available.

I've got some other things to do, I'll get back to this.


I'll see when I  can get back to this.

Google is Helping!

This week Google has their developer conference, and they announced the Android Open Accessory Development Kit (AODK). It is based on the Arduino board, and talked USB. Buying from Google is expensive, but hackaday has a user who figured out how to use  any old Arduino to do the same thing. I need to look into this some more, since I am cheap, and have lots of ideas for the Arduino Android connection.

Seed Studio still hasn't devlivered the bluetooth shield I ordered a couple weeks ago. It is giving this vendor a black eye in my view. I probably out to write to them before complaining too much.

Not much progress on this project in the last week. Mostly working on stuff around the house. Floor upstairs, end of school year kind of things.

Write if you have thoughts.