Hardware Hacking and Radio Connections

In this a recent blog posting Dan KB6NU writes about hardware hacking. The more I think about it, how cool would it be if manufacturers like Elecraft or Ten-Tec would open source some or all of the software code for their radios so people could develop replacements or extensions?

I'm sure there are parts of that code they wouldn't want to let out but I still think it would be neat if they gave us an API so we could drop in our own filtering, control links, etc.

Speaking of radio control and modifications, the more I use my Icom IC-7200 the more I like it. A favorite feature is the built-in USB port that provides both rig control and access to the on-board audio-codec for digital modes. Once you install the drivers the USB port lets you use the sound card built in to the radio instead of the one in your PC. Makes a very nice single cable solution.

73 -- Tim N9PUZ

Where Does The Time Go?

Hmmm, 18 days without a post. What gives here?

It seems like since the holidays began I've been going non-stop although for the most part it's all been good stuff. The only Ham related item is that in December of 2009 I was elected to the Secretary position of the Sangamon Valley Radio Club here in Springfield, Illinois.

I hope to get back to some radio work and projects soon. Of course I'll be sharing those adventures here.

73 -- Tim, N9PUZ

Happy New Year and Welcome to 2010!

It was a busy December 2009 here. Lots of work and home projects that were necessary but largely uninteresting. I hope everyone's year ended on a good note and that 2010 will be good for you.

I just barely participated in ARRL Straight Key Night last night. Hope to make a few more contacts today.

73,

Tim, N9PUZ

DDS Sine Wave Generator

I have not had a chance to experiment with this yet but it's pretty interesting. I ran across a project using an Arduino board from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne where they generate a nice looking sine wave in software from 0 to 16kHz. The project is found here

This picture from the project's web page shows the Arduino board with a low pass output filter and a picture of a generated wave form on the oscilloscope. behind it. The web site mentions they have used a similar system to generate audio tones for a WSPR project as well.

73,

Tim, N9PUZ

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One of my recent projects was a WM-2 watt meter from Oak Hills Research.


The WM-2 is a solid piece of test equipment with 5% accuracy and three power ranges: 5W, 1W, and 100 mW. I have a couple of small QRP transceiver projects in mind for the winter and the WM-2 seems like it will be a useful addition to my test bench.

Evaluation: The components in the kit are very nice quality. The meter movement and quality of the dial face are very nice. The instructions, while thorough could benefit from a couple of actual pictures vs. drawings in a few places but all in all if you pay attention to the instructions you'll end up with a working instrument right from the start.

73,

Tim N9PUZ

ARRL Sweepstakes - Phone

Pssst, hey kid... wanna do Worked All States in a weekend? This is Sweepstakes Phone weekend. There will be many, many operators on all trying to make as many phone contacts as possible beginning mid-day Saturday. Hope to put a bunch of you in the logbook!

73,

Tim, N9PUZ

MCP9700A Temperature Sensor Arduino Library

I've done a little polishing on my code for using the Microchip MCP9700A Temperature Sensor and converted it to a library for the Arduino. I'm releasing it under the GPL in case it might be of use to anyone else. You can download it here:

MCP9700A.ZIP

This is my first attempt at an Arduino library. Comments welcome.

73,

Tim, N9PUZ

Temperature Sensing on the Cheap

Recently I was experimenting and needed a temperature sensor in a TO-92 type package. After a little searching I discovered the Microchip MCP9700A. This sensor is a bargain at about $0.36 each in single quantities from Mouser.

The interface is dead simple. Vcc, Ground, and an output that you can hook directly to an ADC input of a micro. The part I chose measures from -40C to +125C and outputs 10 millivolts per degree. If you need Fahrenheit temperatures it's easy enough to do the conversion once you know Celsius.

I tested the sensor out with one of the Arduino boards and easily had it measuring and displaying room temperature in about hour.

73,

Tim N9PUZ

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Well, here in central Illinois we just wrapped up receiving many inches of rain in just a few days. I know some of you would love to have a bit of it and believe me if there was a way I'd certainly share.

Over the course of the last couple of days we've had some sump pump problems to resolve. These included:

• The outlet line plugging up because of the pump sucking up some gravel,
• Replacing the pump,
• Having to run a secondary utility pump because so much water was coming in that the regular one could not pump fast enough.

Why would you care about any of this? Well, there's a lot of down time in the middle of the night tending pumps, etc. and I got to thinking about some ways to monitor this ground water situation. There isn't a full formed project in my mind yet but some things I think might be important include:

• A sensor to detect the water level in the sump well being above a certain level and the pump not running.
• The amount of time the pump has run in the past hour. Actually, the amount of water that has been discharged would be cool but that might really complicate the system. I don't want the monitoring/measuring to decrease reliability.
• An audible/visual alert in the main living space if there are problems.
• A system to send me a text message if there are problems for when I'm not at home.

I'll be giving more thought to this. Other important household things are in the same vicinity as the sump so I may give some thought to anything I may want to watch over in terms of the furnace, etc. as well. All this looks like a job for one of those Arduino boards I've been tinkering with.

73,

Tim N9PUZ

Another Breakfast Success!

This past Saturday there was another successful "No Host Ham Radio Breakfast" here in Springfield, Illinois. We had good attendance with I believe about 51 people from quite a few of the surrounding counties.

I highly recommend that people do something similar wherever you live. Essentially I just pick a date and then start talking it up on the area radio nets, sending emails, etc. On the chosen date we meet at a buffet style restaurant for breakfast and spend a couple of hours catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. The only "official" activity aside from eating is a chance for everyone to introduce themselves and mention any local activities coming up with their organizations.

I think the "no host" format is important to the success. By that I mean that there is no club or organization sponsoring the get together. It always seems like there are people who don't like the local club, don't like the nearby club, don't like the ARES group, etc. Yet somehow if there's no organization involved they're able to come eat and have fun. People. Go figure.

73,

Tim, N9PUZ

Looks like the FCC is going to write some rules regarding net neutrality so that broadband providers won't be allowed to provide priority of their own services like telephone, etc. over those of competitors. This NPR story has more information.

I guess I have mixed emotions. On one hand if it's my "pipe" I think I ought to have some rights to provide the best service/speed with my own products. On the other hand I see the desire to make things "even" because in a lot of places consumers may only have one or two options for broadband Internet.

73,

Tim, N9PUZ

Arduino, Part II

Okay, I think I'm officially an Arduino fan. At least for one of a kind projects.

The board I recently purchased worked flawlessly. Beyond that a little web searching reveals all sorts of useful add-on hardware that is fairly reasonably priced. There are a host of accessory boards, or shields in Arduino-speak that make your life easier and your project easier. Some of the available shields include plain prototyping shields, ethernet shields, WiFi shields, ZigBee shields, motor controller shields, and on and on.

73,

Tim N9PUZ

Arduino

Recently I acquired an Arduino Duemilanove. I realize a lot of you probably think I'm coming to the party a bit late but I'm an embedded systems developer by profession and I have all sorts of code snippets for various micros, in-circuit programmers, etc. In short, I've just never had a need to pay extra for a board with a bootloader and software libraries.

A new project came up and it's a "one off" that didn't really justify a custom circuit board, etc. I was searching for reasonable priced boards that used the Atmel AVR processors and was reminded of the Arduinos while looking through the Sparkfun Electronics web site. If you ignore for a moment that they are the Arduino design and have their bootloader the fact is several of these boards are less than $18US in single quantities! They use either the Atmel AVR ATMega168 (16K) or ATMega328 (32K) micro so they are fairly capable in bare form at a price that's hard to beat.

When my board arrived I decided to have a look at the Arduino software and programming environment. I have to say there are some nice looking features and my plan right now is to try things out by using it for this current project.

One more thing that's very cool about Arduino... not only is the development environment, compiler, etc. freely available but it is available in Windows, Linux, and Macintosh formats so you can easily program on your computing platform of choice.

I will report more observations as things progress.

73,

Tim, N9PUZ

Reaching Escape Velocity

I love to read. Mostly about technical subjects but frequently about the exploits of others who do what I consider to be really cool things. One such guy is Steve Roberts. He once spent a few years of his life building an outrageous, high tech bicycle called BEHEMOTH then rode it around the country. 17,000 miles of riding. He's on to building a high tech microship now.

This week I got a copy of Steve's book Reaching Escape Velocity. So far it's a great read but it's not about technology per se. It's about how to launch gonzo engineering projects with the help of sponsors, volunteers, and a little help. Details of the book are here along with order info.

73,

Tim, N9PUZ

Winlink Testing -- Success

The Winlink Testing mentioned in an earlier post was a success. Over a two day period the only two stations that appeared in my "heard" list were KA9VAU and KA9STB. Both were far enough away that it had to be a VHF band opening and not potential interference.

I will make an announcement in all the usual places but by the end of the month N9PUZ-10 and N9PUZ-3 will move to 145.610 MHz.

Tim N9PUZ

Winlink Testing

Around noon local time on September 18 I switched the N9PUZ-10 RMS Packet gateway to a frequency of 145.610 MHz. That's the designated ARES digital frequency for Illinois. I'll be leaving it there through the weekend to monitor for any other heard traffic and to give anyone who cares to listen a chance to monitor for beacon messages, etc.

I anticipate moving the gateway and the N9PUZ-3 (alias SPI) packet digipeater to 145.610 MHz by the end of the month unless some unforeseen problem comes up.

73,

Tim, N9PUZ

New Web Site... The Work Continues

Work is slow but steady on the new, revamped web site. You can get a peak at the new N9PUZ now.

A Full Weekend

It was a ham radio weekend here. On Saturday I went to do a site survey in Carlinville, Illinois. I'm helping the club down there set up a VHF Winlink 2000 Gateway similar to N9PUZ-10 that I operte in Springfield. The Illinois ARES organization has an initiative to make Winlink 2000 available in each of the State's 102 counties and we're trying to do our part.

Sunday was the Capitol City Century bike ride. My home club, the Sangamon Valley Radio Club always coordinates APRS trackers and phone operators for SAG vehicles, rest stops, etc.

This coming Saturday is the annual Peoria Superfest. One Illinois' larger hamfests. I'm making my list...

73,

Tim, N9PUZ

Web Site Updates

I'm in the process of making some updates to my main web site. It's going to undergo some much needed reorganization and I'm moving it to a different host.

The new site will be hosted at www.hams4u.com/n9puz. My old domain name and web site are still active at www.n9puz.com and once the changes are a little further along that domain name will be pointing to the new site.

Thanks for all the reader support!

73,

Tim, N9PUZ

ARS Spartan Sprints

The first Monday of each month, September 7th this September, is the monthly ARS Spartan Sprint. The sprints are short, fun QRP contests. It is a contest but these are really friendly operators. They'll go as slow as you need them too and don't be surprised if you get a short rag chew when you meet someone new. Only two hours. Lots of fun.

73,

Tim, N9PUZ