Toots · Hackerific

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.

It's Alex! A soft brown mastodon holding a handheld radio in their right hand and carrying a blue bag over their shoulder — Alex, the mastodon.radio mascot

Posted status:

Mar 3, 2019

Just 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.

A view of the Dragon capsule from the ISS. The capture is a round white object in top right, and a small indistinct second of the ISS in in the bottom left. The capsule has a bulge on top, which is the open nose cone, and several small apertures in a ring, which are part of the docking system.

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Posted status:

Mar 2, 2019

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!

A small circuit board taped to a bench. On the left are two crocodile clips attached to two small wires which go under the board. These provide external power. Coming out of the centre of the board is a ribbon cable. This goes to the UART. The board is rectangular with a relay on the bottom right corner and small screw terminals at each end.

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.

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Posted status:

WSJT-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

#hamradio #amateurradio

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Posted status:

Feb 27, 2019

Absolute genius: https://medium.com/skills-matter/the-horrors-lurking-in-your-legacy-codebase-616d7d631f35

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Posted status:

Feb 25, 2019

Didn’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!🤔

A cheap eBay crystal analyser. This is a small PCB with a row of five seven-segment displays, a PIC chip and a few other components.

This shows a cable winder with some green antenna wire, some black feeder (a thin coax) and a small capsule of plastic pipe. The pipe contains a small tuned circuit.

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Posted status:

Feb 22, 2019

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!

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Posted status:

Feb 20, 2019

I 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.

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Posted status:

Feb 19, 2019

Does 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!

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