Spaceblimp pictures part two.
As promised, here are the pictures I took at the HacDC Spaceblimp prototype launch on Saturday.
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Tag: hacdc
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Spaceblimp pictures part I.
Here are two sets of photographs from the Spaceblimp test launch yesterday, from R. Mark Adams, Pam, and Christine, and from Bokunenjin.
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Spaceblimp test launch writeup, part one.
A couple of months back I mentioned that HacDC had thrown its hat into the ring of the Hackerspaces In Space competition held by Workshop88. The past few months have been a whirlwind of activity designing and fabricating circuitry, running simulations, carving a number of chassis out of high density foam, installing hacked camera firmware and writing code for the microcontroller. Folks with much better engineering skills than I put together all of the interesting stuff - the microcontroller board, the transmitter, the camera controller, and stuff like that. Aside from helping wherever I could I spent most of my time …
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HacDC Spaceblimp trajectory track.
Screenshot from aprs.fi:
If anybody's monitoring APRS, the Spaceblimp's callsign is W3HAC-11. We lost the probe a few hours ago and can't pick up its telemetry. If you pick anything up or you happen to find the probe itself in Virginia please get on 146.415 MHz (voice net) and tell us!
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Physical engineering non sequitur.
The toy panda bear is propping up one side of the microwave at HacDC.
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Test object from the HacDC RepRap.
It is said that toy banana slugs are a good test object for RepRaps because they're moderately complex. Here is one of the nicer ones printed out at HacDC thus far.
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Busy times, crazy life.
It's been a really busy week or two so I haven't had time to write much. I realize that it's only common sense, but I still find it amusing that I have the least time to write about what's going on when the most is happening. Funny, how that happens. Anyway, once the opportunity presents itself I like sitting down to make an attempt at describing everything that's been happening. I've mostly been posting hit and run messages to Twitter lately (like everybody else on the planet these days) because I can do that without looking up from everything else …
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Chaos, robots, and Faith and the Muse - all in DC!
Last Friday evening brought with a second attempt at the Chaos in DC meetup in Silver Spring, Maryland. I'd driven out there straight from work because I wound up leaving the office late, and when you factor in travel time it really wasn't a good idea to to do too much driving that night. In other words, there was no way I was going to drive two hours home through rush hour traffic on the DC Beltway, get there when the meetup began to pick up a few things and meet up with Jason, and then drive two hours back …
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Packets.. get them packets...
From the HacDC space blimp meeting a couple of weekends ago: telemetry proof-of-concept.
Clockwise from left to right: Windbringer, HTX-202 hand-held ham radio, remains of breakfast, random PS/2 stuff from R. Mark Adams' workshop, keyboard, someone else's laptop, 35 watt linear amplifier, USB-to-serial converter, TinyTrak 4 TNC, LCD display for TinyTrak.
We get signal?
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Misadventures in microcontrollers.
I've spent my free time over the past couple of days hacking away on my current project-slash-obsession and thus I've been doing a lot of reading up on microcontrollers, or at least the basics of them. Knowing nothing about them as a technology or about sound synthesis for that matter, I find myself having to start from first principles, which are never as easy as they seem to grasp no matter how much experience you have under your belt. I'm trying to design a synthesizer coming at it as a code jockey as well as a musician (or one-time musician …
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