Spring has arrived

Ben (10) and I went out for a little storm spotter drive tonight. Actually we drove to a nearby hilltop and took a few photos of lightning one county to our south. The photo is nothing special but it was the first photo of the night and it had a bolt in it. (I only shot three images before it started raining, 2 of the 3 had lightning in them.)

It was kind of an interesting shake down trip.

• The GPS + D700 are configured for APRS
• The APRS configuration is now posting my info to Spotternetwork.org
• My iPad2 is wifi tethered to my DroidX phone
• Radarscope is setup on my iPad and it can talk to the spotter network
• Ben learned how to use my iPad
• We are able to get good radar info on the iPad in the field
  
• We found a nice location to shoot lightning photos that has a good view looking to the NW-W-SW about 12 minutes away from the house
  

Overall it was a pretty nice spring evening.

73 de NG0R

Sunday Projects (Si570+PicEL III)

Today was a busy day around the NG0R QTH.  We picked up groceries, then put on the second coat of paint in the new office/shack. (It is looking pretty nice!)  Late this afternoon I finally got a chance to go visit the workbench. I had a box from KangaUS sitting there looking for some quality time.



Craig AA0ZZ released the latest module for his PicEL board. It is a Si570 daughter card. I had the good luck of seeing a prototype at Craig's home about a year ago. I ordered two daughter cards and one control board. (They were here 3-4 days after placing the order.) My plan is to have one daughter card on the PicEL III board and then to have one standalone control board+daughter card for use over at the workbench.

For this afternoon I decided to focus on assembling one of daughter cards before the dinner bell.



There are three surface mount parts: 2 voltage regulators and the Si570.



It takes about 30-45 minutes to put it together the first time as you read through the directions. The parts count is pretty low and there is plenty of space for the soldering iron.



I removed my 16F628 and dropped in the supplied 16F88 and programmed it without an issue. (On my Ubuntu workstation I have Windows XP running in a Virtualbox session and used the Pickit 2 loader with the PicEL III)

I took the PicEL III and Si570 daughter card back to the workbench and plugged it into my ancient oscilloscope and everything looked good. I then plugged the system into my spectrum analyzer. I noticed that the Si570 + FETs are harmonic rich but nothing that a simple lowpass or bandpass filter would not solve in a real world application.

I did notice that power level changes slightly over frequency. There is about 12dB difference at the low frequencies vs at the highest frequencies. (10MHz --> 157MHz)



Based upon my initial testing I am pretty impressed with the Si570 daughter card. I am looking forward to assembling the standalone control board and the additional daughter card in the up coming days.

I have three Si570 chips sitting on the shelf waiting for me to find some time to be able to figure out to write some code to make them do their thing. Craig's PicEL III + daughter card provides an excellent development platform to start working up some code prior to need to build my own standalone board for debugging some future projects.

http://cbjohn.com/aa0zz/index.html

http://www.kangaus.com/si570_project.htm

This was an enjoyable Sunday afternoon project.

73 de NG0R

Linux Backups

I have been looking for a good offsite backup tool/service that works with Linux. I see that a lot of people use Mozy or Carbonite. The challenge is that those tools do not support Linux.

While I have been hunting for service that does support Linux I have been using rsync and external USB drives. I was even planning to get a safety deposit box at a bank to store the extra drives and rotate them. (ummm... good plan but I have yet to make that visit to the bank.)

To make this even more complex I have a LOT of data and I have a relatively slow connection to the internet. (That is part of the joy of living in rural America.)

I read an interesting blog post today. There is a service called "CrashPlan" that provides your standard online/offsite backup. The interesting part is that they support Windows+Mac+Linux+Solaris.




I setup a free 30 day account today so that I can try out the service. If it works ok I will end up buying the family plan... aka: 2-10 computers and unlimited storage.

I downloaded the Linux client and installed it on my workstation running Ubuntu 10.10 64bit. You run the install script, answer a few questions, then you will need to reboot the computer, and after the couple of minutes that took to do the install you are in business.

It will backup local disk, external drives, and NAS.

I setup a subset of my home directory for a backup and excluded the crazy large portion of my NAS mount. It is running right now and will take a day or so to complete.

At first glance it looks like an ok service. It will run attended or unattended, it covers a several OS types, and they have a family plan. So far... I am interested and hope that this work out. I would like set this up on all of the PCs and laptops in the house.

Stay tuned!

To HDR or not

I am experimenting with HDR images. There is probably fine line in the middle and I have yet to find it.


The image above is standard image

The image below is the HDR image


The HDR image looks surreal and almost dream-like.  The challenge in this image is the fact the sky is completely blown out and creates a massive backlight.  From an artistic point of view I enjoy working with the HDR version of the image but from a journalistic point of view I prefer the raw image.

I have an old bias, having been a photojournalist much earlier in my professional life I believe that photos should largely be untouched other than maybe adjusting the brightness and contrast similar to what we used to do in our dark rooms.

If I can learn to dial in the HDR tools a bit more I would lean towards using an HDR version of this image.

Canon T3i - first images

I took a couple of vacation days this week while the kids are on spring break. The boys and I decided to head out and try to capture a few pictures with the new camera.  It was kind of a tough day for photos: late winter gray with mostly overcast skies as another storm approaches.

The first image is a HDR image. I opened the Kisxx X4 RAW file and made three source images with at different brightness levels. I then loaded them into Qtpfsqui on my Ubuntu workstation to merge them into a single HDR image.


The car was a random sighting on MN12 between Litchfield and Willmar


BNSF 4343 near the end of the Marshall sub where it enters the Willmar yard.



BNSF 3128 as it enters Benson eastbound towards the Willmar yard.

Some better light would have been nice but frankly I was just happy to get outside for a little while and shoot some photos.

Canon T3i Raw + UFRaw (Ubuntu)

I recently bought a Canon T3i. I tend to shoot raw images (vs JPG).  I figured that I should validate that I can open the latest Kiss x4 Raw format on my Ubuntu machines prior to taking a short photo trip. Sure enough the new Kiss X4 format was newer than the plug-in that I use for GIMP.

After about 15 minutes of searching around for how to update UFRAW from 0.16 to  0.18 I stumbled across the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/ufraw
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ufraw gimp-ufraw

The notes were found at:
http://www.lffl.org/2011/02/ufraw-018-su-ubuntu-gnulinux-1010-1004.html#more

After updating the plug-in I am now able to load & edit the raw images.  Time to hit the road with the camera and see what we can find.

Pic + Si570 notes & ideas

I am compiling a list of ideas, notes, and links for people working with PICs and Si570 devices. I have some future projects that I am researching for when I have some homebrew time.

PicAxe + Si570 (some interesting notes on freeze & unfreeze)
http://www.dspradio.org/df7tv/src11


Si570 vfo with 16f628 and Si570
http://g4oep.110mb.com/si570vfo/570VFO.htm

Office Ideas

I have been working on the drywall in my new office in the basement. I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. With the hope that I am nearing the completion of the drywall I am starting to think about the finishing touches for the new office.

One of those items is a new desk of some sort to try to efficiently utilize the same. As I was searching the Internet for "U" shaped desks I found a website that allows to put modular pieces together in a computer model. http://www.bush-furniture-online.com





















My new office will be an "L" shaped room.  Ideally I would like to put in a "U" shaped desk with three work surfaces. (Work computer, home computer, and the NG0R amateur radio station.)

I am also hoping to put in some sort of futon or small couch in the office. Since this will be a man cave eventually I would like put up a flat screen tv on the wall in the corner of the room.

I spent about 2 hours today modeling the room with different ideas and different sized objects. it is kind of funny to try to visual the room and the objects within the room (Yes, it is ubber geeky.)

73 de NG0R

Sunday activities

A busy Sunday here....

• I made a run for groceries with monster 1 & 2
• Spent some time chatting on 75m (3.740mhz) about filter design
• I spent about 90 minutes running filter models in the AADE software
• I spent a couple of hours taping the drywall in the new office/shack
• To end the day I am talking with the QRP folks on Echolink

It would be nice to think that I might able to move into the new office sometime this year!

73 de NG0R

Direct Conversion Receiver

I spent part of the afternoon messing with a Direct Conversion Receiver on a breadboard.  I experimented with with crystals, free running oscillators, and using a signal generator.



Audio Clip

I took the board over to N0FP's QTH and did some additional experimenting with it. We connected his signal generator to the board and a bandpass filter and spun the dial. The audio clip was captured with my DroidX phone recording the audio from the an amplified speaker.

It was interesting to adjust the LO drive compared to the RF drive level.

73 de NG0R