Celebrating one year back in the hobby…

Today marks my one year anniversary of my return to amateur radio. To celebrate, I presented a talk on the Raspberry Pi to our local radio club, the McHenry County Wireless Association. As promised, I am uploading my slide deck, … Read More

Arduino, Raspberrry PI, or any SPI enabled device: Speak Now!

I happened across an interesting Kickstarter project, BIG BUDDY TALKER , an inexpensive way to add natural sounding speech to your next project. It features more than 1000 sounds (visit the Kickstarter to see the current list of words) that … Read More

Fitbit Sleep Data Analysis

Do you ever wonder how your sleep patterns stack up against other Fitbit users? Well, the people at Fitbit did. They gathered 2015 sleep data from over 10 million Fitbit users and compared the statistics by generation (Millennial, Gen X, … Read More

Raspberry Shake online!

Today, I received my Raspberry Shake (an inexpensive professional grade personal seismograph) that uses a Raspberry Pi for data collection, processing, and uploading data (if you choose to share seismic data with the world).

It took only a few minutes … Read More

Measuring reaction time

For a science fair project, Jeremy wanted to design an experiment to measure the effects of different types of distractions on a person’s reaction time.  In order to accurately measure the time required to respond to a stimulus, two PIC … Read More

Expression Evaluator

I discovered the beauty and elegance of expression evaluators a number of years ago when I needed to develop an easy to use report generation module for a commercial software product using flat files — yes, it was before the … Read More

GOLDEngine for Java

The GOLD Parser is a parsing system developed by Devin Cook that can be used to parse existing programming languages, scripts, or structured data files. It can even be used to develop your own domain specific language (DSL).  There are … Read More

Stereo FM Transmitter

My quest was simple: Have the output of my iPod transmit to my car’s FM radio. I tried a number of devices which worked to some degree.  However, either the signal drifted with temperature or the signal was so week … Read More

SuperProbe

When my Radio Shack logic probe gave up the ghost a while back, I took it apart only to discover that the probe consisted of two piggy-backed printed circuit boards and an estimated 20-30 parts. It was time for a … Read More