Various projects and back from the land of the sick

[Terry Fox]

Hello there tacoistas.  My recent bout with bad bronchitis is fading into the past, and I’m once more able to concentrate on something more sophisticated than breathing.

I have various projects that I was wondering what others might be doing similar stuff.

1.  Anyone doing stuff with the Raspberry Pi?  I still have two on order from Allied, but took a chance and ordered a third from Newark on Aug.8.  It showed as backordered, but the Pi was at my front door on Aug.13.  So, I have one here, but no power supply (not a fan of using the new oddball mini-USB connector for 5V @ 750ma or more).  I have a couple of projects in mind, starting with SDR control, then possibly as a device to suck in analog I/Q samples and making them available over the local LAN.  I see John Melton has two Pis running, one as the SDR server, the other as a thin-client SDR back end.  He overclocks the Pis to 1GHz to achieve sustained throughput.

The Pi has two things going for it: 1) more powerful processor than the Arduino; 2) you can run Linux on it.  Of course, that second one is a double-edged sword!

2.  I am also interested in using wifi with Arduinos.  I have several different Arduino things going on, and want to try wifi to remove the wires.  I have a Wifly shield from Sparkfun, and a LinkSprite(?) shield from ebay, but haven’t gotten far in doing anything with them yet.

3.  Anybody doing anything with the hsmm-mesh stuff?  I'm interested in both the range capabilities, and running any actual useful apps on top of the mesh – in other words using a mesh network to do something useful.  Mel and I both have a few nodes each now, and are making plans to attempt to cross the Ashley River, the distance between us is about 1 mile.  A few trees and one house are in the way, I may be able to bounce off the side of a different house.  I’ve tried a free Windows video conference program (VideoNet), but cannot get it to reliably work.  Apparently, Win7 has problems with it, and using XP is flaky here as well.

4.  I’m still playing mostly with SDRs, and SDR-related stuff.  I finally built my SDR-Widget and got it mostly running.  Maybe I’m thick, but I am having problems figuring out what firmware to run with what Windows drivers.  To me, that project needs some serious organization, which I think it is finally getting.

That’s it for the moment.
73, Terry, WB4JFI


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