{hacking,music,electronics,radio}
Here are the toots from my Mastodon account. If you’re into ham radio and technology this is a great inclusive server with an awesome mascot called Alex.
Just had a first play on 2m FT8 with my new FT818ND. Max distance so far is 138 km, not bad with 5 watts.
Of course now I want to replace my 2m feedline with something better than RG58 and check everything’s watertight.
→ View toot on mastodon.radioJust caught some of the SpaceX/NASA Dragon docking webcast. Totally mind blowing (albeit slow) action and a successful dock! In a couple of hours they should be able to open the door and go in.
Just my shiny new µArt ( https://www.crowdsupply.com/pylo/muart) to flash some custom firmware on a couple of cheap Sonoff wifi switches ( https://www.banggood.com/DIY-Wi-Fi-Wireless-Switch-For-Smart-Home-With-ABS-Shell-p-1019971.html). They now work with Alexa without some dodgy third party cloud service.
It’s funny that the USB UART I used cost considerably more than the devices!
Of course these switches don’t have any sort of earth passthrough, so I guess I’ll need to add something if I want to use them with almost anything useful.
Also, the firmware I used was Tasmota ( https://github.com/arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota/) which supports other cool things like MQTT as well as Belkin emulation.
→ View toot on mastodon.radioWSJT-X 2.0.1 dropped earlier in the week: https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/wsjtx.html
The release notes list bug fixes rather than shiny new things: https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/Release_Notes.txt
→ View toot on mastodon.radioAbsolute genius: https://medium.com/skills-matter/the-horrors-lurking-in-your-legacy-codebase-616d7d631f35
→ View toot on mastodon.radioDidn’t manage to do everything I wanted to this weekend, but I did manage to build my £3 crystal tester, and this SOTABEAMS end fed tuner, plus wire it up ready for a test a tune on 40m.
I also managed to make up some test resistors to calibrate my cheap SARK 100 antenna analyser clone.
Actually I’m pretty happy with that list of stuff!🤔
Enjoyed watching this eevblog video on making a DIY EMC probe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xy3Hm1_ZqI
I definitely don’t need one, but it’s cool nonetheless!
→ View toot on mastodon.radioI always find https://crontab.guru/ super useful when tweaking cron entries. It’s more convenient than the man page and simpler than embedding a big comment at the top.
→ View toot on mastodon.radioDoes anyone on @mastodon.radio and in the UK fancy a Gherkin keyboard PCB set? I have two sets of the main PCB, top & bottom plates going spare and will happily post them on.
Info on my builds at: https://hackerific.net/2017/10/08/building-a-30-key-keyboard/
and the original idea at:
http://www.40percent.club/2016/11/gherkin.html
They’re tiny and so hard to use, but super fun!
→ View toot on mastodon.radioAmazing! There’s a hand #soldering world championship!
https://www.elektormagazine.com/news/hand-soldering-world-championship
→ View toot on mastodon.radio