PIC 16F628A + Basic

I spent some time tonight bonding with my 16F628A



I have been struggling a little bit to make my FOR LOOP display stuff in the proper location on the LCD display. As is turns out that I need to look at the LCD library in more detail to understand the various sub procedures that are available in the library.

It is incredible what you can learn by reading. I found that there were several similar ways to accomplish my task after bonding with the User Manual.

Several cool things: My FOR LOOP is working, I can insert characters dynamically into the LCD, and I can use a string as an array.

Overall it was a pretty neat experience once I finally got into the rhythm of the tool set.

73 de NG0R

XP dual boot to an existing Ubuntu system

On the PC (running Ubuntu 10.4) that I have interfaced to my radio gear I have the occasional need to dual boot back to XP. Here are the notes for how to get the dual boot working properly with grub 2.

Existing Ubuntu 10.4
Install XP (Grub will get overwritten by XP)

Boot Ubuntu 10.4 via a LiveCD or USB thumb drive

sudo fdisk -l
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt   (assumes that we are using sda)
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
sudo chroot /mnt
nano /etc/default/grub  (make any updates that you might need)
update-grub
grub-install /dev/sda (installs grub to the MBR)
grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

Press Ctrl+D to exit out of the chroot.

sudo umount /mnt/dev
sudo umount /mnt/sys
sudo umount /mnt/proc
sudo umount /mnt

reboot

Notes from : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2

Father Hennepin State Park

For the long holiday weekend we made the short trek (93 miles) from Kingston, Mn over to Isle, Mn. (Father Hennepin State Park sits on the shore of Mille Lacs Lake.)

Ben(9) and Joe(7) stayed in the tent. Jacob slept in the rear bunk of the camper. Cristy and I used the front bunk of the Roo.


On Saturday we ran over to Kathio State Park (west side of Mille Lacs Lake.) The naturalist had a kids program on how to make a fishing rig out of a pop can.



Jacob trying out his fishing rig near the dam.


Ben trying out his fishing rig.


Joe trying out his fishing rig.


A couple of the wild flowers in our camp site.


A quick of picture of an albino deer that resides in the park.


Overall we had a nice weekend and enjoyed spending some time with the Christie family. The park was pretty full but relatively calm. (Lots of boats, RVs, kids on bikes, and mosquitoes.)

Toroid Calculator

http://www.dl5swb.de/html/mini_ring_core_calculator.htm



I have not tried this particular tool. I have a couple of others but thought that I should document the link to test with later.

73 de NG0R

74HC240 as an amp

I am reading about the 74HC240. Talk about a cool part. People are getting .5 watt of RF by using four gates. In a 20 pin DIP this is a $0.20-$0.40 part.



Some interesting reading:


http://www.qsl.net/5z4ft/74hc240qrp.html

http://brainwagon.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Picture-1.png

http://www.swharden.com/blog/2010-05-24-solar-powered-qrss-beacon/

http://spazioinwind.libero.it/ik1zyw/hardware/qrpp/10m.html

http://www.qsl.net/kj5tf/n7ksb.html

http://www.hanssummers.com/qrss/qrsstx.html

http://py2ohh.w2c.com.br/trx/digital/rfdigital.htm

http://radioman.blog.co.uk/2008/03/05/diversity-mept-propagation-beacon-3820469/

http://www.madisoncounty.net/~kj5tf/n7ksb.html

http://www.seboldt.net/k0jd/hcbuffer.html

73 de NG0R

Ubuntu 10.4 + VirtualBox... USB permissions

I was having a hard time getting the USB ports to work properly with Ubuntu 10.4 LTS 64bit and VirtualBox 3.1.6 r59338   It turns out that the USB group was missing.

Steps:

• open SYSTEM>ADMINISTRATION>USERS AND GROUPS
• Click on USER AND GROUPS and then click on MANAGE GROUPS
• Then click ADD then enter the group name as usb (lower caps) change the group id to 85
• Click the check mark for your group member (your user name) and click OK.
  

It appears to require a reboot to pick up the permissions. There is probably a simpler way than the reboot but I am not sure what service to restart to see this so the reboot was quick painless.

Now I can add & remove the USB devices on the fly with my virtual machine.

Here is where I found this info:
http://forum.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=30906&sid=83b22991a9c34aa69ff180fbc5fb7b20&start=30

Lightning Trip

Near Glenwood, Mn


Most of the lightning last night was rain wrapped but we did manage to snag some photos as the storm crossed a large lake and regenerated. 6 hours of driving round trip to get a couple of images.  :-)

NG0R is back on APRS

Where is the truck located right now:
http://findu.aprsfl.net/cgi-bin/find.cgi?call=NG0R-9&radar=***

Here is an example of the APRS image over a radar map.
(It is shrunk down to 500 pixel wide on the blog)


I will post some more links as time progresses. Some our friends and family follow our Internet breadcrumbs to see where we are camping and/or where my photo trips might be leading me.

Some D700 Notes:
http://www.aprs.org/D7xx/d700-faq.txt

http://www.aj3u.com/tm-d700-tips/

73 de NG0R

PS...

http://aprs.fi/info/NG0R-9

http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/breadcrumb.cgi?call=ng0r-9&geo=usa.geo&start=10000

Pac Man turns 30

Google is awesome....


Pac Man turns 30 and Google put up a web version of the game as their Google logo for today.

Facebook = evil empire?

Kind of funny given the news about Facebook recently


xkcd has some great social commentary