As mentioned in the last Wideband Transmission, I recently viewed a presentation from CppCon 2016 which convinced me that a lot of my preconceived notions about the (lack of) suitability of C++ for use in microcontroller applications might be misplaced. The standard lore (go ask Wes Hayward W7ZOI his opinion of lore) states that C++… Read More Arduino C++ Investigations – Introduction
It’s not easy for me to admit that I need help, but sometimes one has to swallow his pride a bit and do that in order to move forward. Now is one of those moments for me. As I noted last year, it’s been a bit of a tough time for my family lately, and my… Read More Rattling the Cup
OpenTechLab If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time, you’ve probably observed that I’m a big fan of all things open source, especially on the hardware side of things. One area where OSHW seems to be lagging a bit is in the test & measurement department, so it was a very pleasant… Read More Wideband Transmission #10
I know that quite a few of you are, like me, owners of the Rigol DSA815-TG. It’s been a reliable workhorse in my lab since I’ve acquired it, but the one thing I believe that I’ve wanted to most from it is a an RBW minimum of 10 Hz instead of the specified 100 Hz.… Read More Nice DSA815 Upgrade
It has been awfully quiet on the public front here for sure, but I have been working on quite a bit of things behind the scenes here at Etherkit Galactic HQ. It’s been a challenging year since I last wrote about the personal things going on here, but things have been going reasonable well after… Read More Market Research
I know that the updates here have been extremely sparse. For that I do apologize. Things are slowly starting to settle into a new normal around here, and I’ve been able to regain the ability to put time back into work. There’s a large to do list on my whiteboard, and many of the things… Read More Break My New Library
Those of you who have followed my blog for a while may be aware that our household has relied upon Linux for years. Earlier on, it was Ubuntu, and then later I migrated to Linux Mint shortly after the Unity environment was released for Ubuntu. I do have a dedicated Windows box for use in… Read More Linux Mint 18 Has Arrived
Arduino in the Cloud I saw a recent post on the Make blog about the new cloud ecosystem for Arduino which has been dubbed Arduino Create. Since this will most likely be the future of Arduino, it seemed wise to get an early look at the platform. It includes quite a few features, but the… Read More Wideband Transmission #9
Back when I was working at Tektronix (wow, this summer it’s been 10 years since I graduated with a AAS in EET and started at Tek), they had a one-time program where an employee could purchase a new TDS1000/2000 series oscilloscope for half of the list price. This was back in the day before the… Read More TDS1012 LED Backlight Retrofit
It’s nice to see we hams, who I think suffer from a bit of an image as throwbacks in the larger maker community, get some recognition for the good stuff we’ve accomplished. Today on Hackaday, a nice article about Manhattan and Ugly construction was posted, with ample coverage given to the fact that a lot… Read More Nerd Famous