2 Bit Hacker

So, I finally went and took the test to get my amateur radio license. I’m now have a technician class license, callsign KB1QYW.

Now I just need a radio so I can do something with the license.

I’m still primarily interested in doing APRS and other packet applications, so I’ve been looking at radios with built in TNCs. At the moment I’m mainly drooling over the Kenwood TM-D710A, which can do everything I want, and more, but runs about $600 new. Looks like an ideal mobile unit for what I want to do.

I’ve also been pointed toward the upcoming Yaesu VX8-R, which also appears to have a built-in TNC, but is a handheld, rather than a mobile. From what I’ve heard, it should be considerably cheaper than the TM-D710A, but is overall less functional.

Either way I end up going, I’ve got some ideas for integrating a radio in my automobile with a PC. I’m thinking the car PC could pull in APRS data from the radio, OBD2 data from the car, GPS data, and perhaps video from a forward mounted camera. It should be pretty easy to rig up something to read the locations of other stations from the radio and insert them into a database for GPSDrive to read waypoints from, displaying them on a map along with my current position.

I’ve also been tossing around the idea of correlating position to fuel economy, creating a sort of fuel consumption heat map which could then be used to adjust my repetitive drives to more efficient routes. I don’t think this will be all that hard, just need to figure out how to get the current MPG number from the Prius, record it along with the current GPS coordinates, and then perhaps hack up Kismet’s gpsmap to plot that data instead of wireless access points (or in addition to.)

As far as hardware for the mobile PC, I’ve recently been looking at the IEI IBX-500A, which has enough serial ports for all the inputs I want, along with built-in 802.11 wireless. Not sure if the CPU would be fast enough for everything I want to do, but I think it’d work. I’ve also been looking at the VIA Artigo, which is a bit smaller, and a little faster, but has a fan and no built-in wireless.

Not that I can afford to do any of this just yet, but it’s fun to think about…

Amateur Radio car pc, gps, hardware, radio

I often have a number of projects floating around in my head that I’d like to get done around the apartment. Largely for my own tracking, I’ve decided to list them here, roughly in the order I’d like to get them done.

1. Home Server: For a while now I’ve been wanting to build a NAS box for the apartment. A place to backup all my important files from other systems so I don’t have to worry about what I’m losing when I randomly decided to format and reinstall my OS. I was originally thinking of reusing an older Mini-ITX board I have kicking around, giving it a SATA controller and a few large hard drives. I’ve also wanted to do my own router for the apartment. I’m currently using a Linksys WRT54g running dd-wrt, which works fine, but I’d like more control. I think the most economical solution is to combine the two projects into a single Home Server, probably running FreeBSD. It’ll need at least 2 network interfaces, and preferably 4 or more SATA channels. I could easily reuse one of the 5 or so motherboard I have kicking around the apartment, as I don’t need a ton of CPU power or memory. Software wise, just the normal file sharing stuff, NFS, Samba, a web server, maybe look into WebDAV.
2. HTPC: I’d still like to get a Home Theater PC hooked up. I tried this a few years ago without much luck, but now that I have a TV with HDMI inputs, it should be nice and easy. I originally wanted to do this with MythTV, but I think I’ve cooled on that. I think it’ll actually run Windows, primarily for the ability to play streaming Netflix.
3. Replace Desktop: Now that a couple of guys at work have eee PCs I’ve been reconsidering my own systems. I rarely use my desktop at home anymore (perhaps repurpose it to HTPC?) so I’ve been tossing around the idea of replacing the desktop and my ThinkPad T43 with a heftier laptop, like a T61 or an ASUS G1S. Basically, a laptop decent enough to game on if I feel like it. Then pick up an eee to use for portability and quick things like checking e-mail or fixing stuff for work. The Nokia n800 works pretty well for the latter things currently, but the lack of keyboard hurts a bit. And the eee PC is a plain x86 CPU, so I could run XP on it and be able to use Slingbox, which would be nice.
4. Car PC: Yeah, still keeping this dream alive. Some day I’ll build it. It seems to be getting easier though. Bluetooth GPS, Bluetooth serial adapter on the OBD2. Maybe someone will figure out how to hack into the Prius MFD by then.

Projects car pc, hardware, HTPC, nas

For the past week or so I’ve had a brand new toy, a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It’s a pretty slick device, 802.11b, Bluetooth, an 800×480 touch screen, running a Debian-derivative Linux. I haven’t done a lot of hacking on it yet, but just the built-in apps are pretty nice. I have installed Kismet, and it makes a nice little wardriving platform, though I’ll need to get a Bluetooth GPS if I want to track where I see APs.

I’m also planning on getting a Bluetooth OBDII adapter, so I can run Carman, a pretty nice looking application for monitoring vehicle information. I think with a GPS and the OBDII adapter, I’ll be able to use the 770 in place of a car computer for a while. A second cover for the device could be mounted to the dash relatively easily to give it a stable place to sit while I’m driving.

There are a couple of slight annoyances with it though. For some reason Nokia decided to go with RS-MMC flash cards for it, which are probably the rarest of the sub-SD flash card standards. But that’s not too big a deal. The on-screen keyboard requires two taps to get to some oft-used symbols, like hyphen, which makes it a pain when I’m doing stuff on the command-line. I’m considering trying out a Bluetooth keyboard with it, maybe even a Frogpad, though I’m not sure if that would make text entry more or less of a pain.

I do like the built-in apps though. The e-mail and RSS feed readers are usable, though not terribly special. The default web browser is Opera, and does an excellent job of rendering pages for the small screen. They included a Jabber client, which works well for Google Talk, but can’t handle multiple accounts online at a time, and refuses to connect to our internal Jabber server at work.

Here are some gratuitous screen shots:

Geek Stuff car pc, n770

Finally got around to making some updates to my website today. I had been putting off working on the rest of the templates for WordPress, and finally fixed a couple of them today. I still have the archive pages to update to match my style, but the individual post pages work right now (for example, this one.) I like how the WP template system works, it’s a lot easier to deal with than MovableType’s, and you can use pretty much any PHP you want.

Also did some poking around to find a power and data cable for my GPS and found this site. They make and sell an alternative to the overpriced cables from Garmin, including the eMax cable. I think I’ll buy one once I have the money to spare. I figure it’d pay for itself after it takes the place of a few packs of AA’s that I usually go through on roadtrips with my GPS. I’ve also been thinking of starting to use the GPS with work, marking points for each dealership. I figure I could eventually make a map with all our customers marked on it, which would help out any new drivers that come along. At least, I would find such a map helpful.

And all that GPS thinking got me thinking about the Mobile PC project again. There’s a lot of slick hardware out there for the project now, including a Mini-ITX enclosure specifically designed for car PC’s. And I got to chatting with about it, and we got to thinking that having the box be able to participate in a mesh network with other car PC’s in the area would be pretty useful. Something like MeshAP would do nicely, then you could do all sorts of fun stuff like VoIP communication between vehicles and shared music collections and vehicle tracking information. The VoIP stuff got me thinking that using Bluetooth headsets connected to the Car PC would be pretty cool.

I think it’s something I should definitely spend some time on, especially if I can ever get the equipment together to actually implement such a setup.

Anyway, I think that’s enough rambling for now. I think my WoW addiction is fading, and my brain is starting to grind on all these ideas again.

Projects, Website car pc, gps, wordpress