AmateurRadio.com

As I am messing around with Arduino and its various bits and pieces I noticed quite quickly that whilst I can look through a bunch of code and pick out familiar items like serial.print and lcd.print. They seem fairly self explanatory to me. Other commands and, I’m going to call them words but you’ll understand why in a minute, just seemed a world away from my vocabulary.

My background is mechanical engineering, so limits and fits, materials, stress and strain are the areas of vocab I’m familiar with. Calling functions, variables and strings needed a bit more explanation in my world and previous attempts at understanding this went a bit wrong as there the language is the barrier. By language in this sense I mean C++, VB etc. See its getting complicated already!

If its all getting too much for you then try Codeacademy. I’ve had a few lessons with the primary idea of learning the lingo and nothing else really. The lessons are very well structured and the little exercises that go with them as well as the projects help to test your knowledge. I’m still finding that its worth while writing things down in a notebook but understanding the difference between a function and a variable has helped me get my head round a new subject for me. I will never be a code ninja but being able to understand more than a few keywords in someone else’s code will undoubtedly help me get into the position where I can look through other peoples code and understand what is going on as well as adapt it if necessary for my own purposes. 

Yesterday I had an email from Raspberry Pi saying that today there would be an announcement about the the keenly awaited device. Today I took a look at their website and found out that they are almost ready to ship the low cost ARM based devices that run a Linux called Fedora. the specs are available at both RS and Farnells, two component suppliers here in the UK.

In case you couldn’t wait to click through then blow are the specifications lifted straight from the RS website. From what I can gather there will be two variants, one called model A and the other called model B aptly enough. The difference being the addition of LAN and some other undisclosed features on the Model B.

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer board that plugs into a TV and a keyboard. It’s a miniature ARM-based PC which can be used for many of the things that a desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays High-Definition video.

Features

• Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
• GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
• GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
• 256MB RAM
• Boots from SD card, running the Fedora version of Linux
• 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
• HDMI socket
• USB 2.0 socket
• RCA video socket
• SD card socket
• Powered from microUSB socket
• 3.5mm audio out jack
• Header footprint for camera connection
• Size: 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm

Price £21.60

All this for just £21.60! I sound like an advert but if the blurb matches the ability to programme the little blighter (easily) then this must be a concern for the Arduino crowd. Before we all get too excited though the RS website allows you to register interest and you’ll be getting one each at first.

For those who are following the progress of the ultra cheap pc proposed by Raspeberry Pi, I received this email this morning.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation will be making a big (and very positive) announcement that just might interest you at 0600h GMT on Wednesday 29 February 2012. Come to www.raspberrypi.org to find out what’s going on.

Eben Upton
Executive Director, Raspberry Pi Foundation

Perhaps they’ll be announcing pricing and delivery of what should be very useful lightweight PC’s (is that even the right way to describe them?)

The amount of 6 and 10 reports that I was hosting was begining to cause me a headache with space so I’ve shifted them onto a Dropbox public folder which can be accessed here. There is limited demand for these older reports but I hope they are useful to someone. Let me know if there are any problems.

I’ve long been a user of smartphone’s and always felt that in the past they were able to offer a lot in terms of being able to make and receive calls then the applications or apps that run on them we additional bonuses. Nowadays the primary selling point of a smartphone is not to do the basics like calls and text (SMS) messaging are the apps. My HTC desire S is like many other that run the Android OS in that it has access to the Android Market and its ever growing list of extras. A little run down on the ham radio one I have is as below. There’s no great explanation as to their functionality as its all on the Android Marketplace

APRSdroid – APRS on your phone. Well worth the money especially now that it supports messaging.

Echolink – Ro real need to introduce this application. Just does what you need to make use of the Echolink network

Electrodroid – A collection of electrical references

Hamsatdroid – Satellite prediction for your phone. Very effective with a simple interface.

Morse code reader – Like all readers its not as good as your ear and as such is limited but a simple application

Morse CT – The trainer that if it was a person would have given up on me learning the code a long time ago. A very patient trainer.

Repeater – Repeaters in you local area. Shows you the distance to your nearest repeater.

Satellite AR – A mixture of Google sky maps and hamsatdroid with a nice ‘point at the sky and see where the satellite is in real time’ interface. Does more than amateur radio satellites.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but these are the ones that have been installed and used. I’ve tinkered with the idea of a log book for when I’m portable but nothing so far has stood up to the old pencil and paper. If a developer makes one that can pick out call signs then that would be smart but I can imagine that’s not going to happen in the near future.

I know there are apps for digimodes like PSK-31 but nothing for things like WSPR or any of the exotic ones. As the next generation of phones come out and these become functional but obsolete the ability to repurpose them must be on someone else’s mind and not just mine.

Well I can call it a summit because it features in Wainwright’s book but it really something to write home about as far as height for me. But, there’s always a but, I decided to go with the XYL, kids, mother in law (not sure what the shorthand is for one of those) and two dogs. Abigail is my eldest at 5 years old and Sam is only 3 so to them this was a veritable Himalaya.

Progress as you can image was at their pace and eventually I had an extra 20Kg on my shoulders as we went back into the cloud near the summit of Dodd (LDW-174). The summit is low at only 502m but the propagation into both Southern Scotland and Northern Ireland was in effect and I managed a summit to summit before the kids / XYL got bored. Needless to say the dogs didn’t bat an eyelid.

So I’m off the mark for this year and hopefully I’ll be able to get a few SOTA and WOTA summits in this year although I think I’ll avoid carrying the kids. The lake district is an excellent place to live and visit and I’m glad to have made some new contacts for the log and I hope it will help WOTA to grow and grow

I’m just about old enough to remember to tie up my shoelaces in the morning (Although its taken me 2 days to remember that I broke my shoelace and as yet haven’t remembered to open the drawer and replace it with the one I knew I bought a while ago). So I can remember that its quite easy to ‘Just upload your photo’s’ to this site or ‘just back up every 10 minutes’ or other mundane tasks that your computer should do for you without even questioning it. In fact it should almost be law that stuff is backed up as soon as you put it on your PC without having to ‘Just set this or that up’.

Where am I going with this?

The answer is recently I found If this then that (ifttt) and have used it to do simple tasks like cross posting and other little tasks on web based systems that it current supports.

Another one I found is Dropbox automator which like the name suggests does stuff to folders and files in you Dropbox folder as soon as you put them in. A pretty handy tool for when, like me you need to re-size photos for putting in this blog, uploading documents to Google Docs and other little boring jobs.

Hope you get some use out of these services like me, now where’s that shoelace before I forget