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

Happy holidays to everyone and all that. Delia and I just got back from her aunt’s house after eating far too much tasty food. I’m now the proud owner of a number of shirts courtesy of Delia’s family, a few more t-shirts, a neat mug, and PixelBlocks from Delia (in addition to the EV mode kit and floor mats for the Prius she already gave me on the solstice,) and a Garmin nüvi 250W from my dad.

Over the weekend Delia and I got the new TV hooked up, and it’s looking good. I also decided to go ahead and get the Xbox 360, and I’m rather glad I did, as the TiVo HD turned out to be dead on arrival. For some reason it was stuck in a reboot cycle and couldn’t get past it’s initial welcome screen. TiVo support was pretty cool about it and are doing an advanced ship RMA on it, so hopefully I’ll have that soon. The Xbox has been filling the time we would have normally spent watching TV, so it works out, I suppose. For games, we picked up Assassin’s Creed for me, DDR and Katamari for Delia.

Unfortunately my bad luck with new devices has extended to the Garmin my dad sent me. It powers up then complains that it has no maps and is therefore useless. Garmin’s online support is equally useless it seems, as they try to load pages from RFC1918 private address space, or try to redirect you to hosts that don’t exist in the DNS. Their phone support is, of course, closed for the holiday. Hopefully tomorrow will be more fruitful.

All in all though, I’m happy. I still think Delia spent too much on me, and I feel bad that I didn’t get her more, which seems to happen every year.

Gaming, Geek Stuff gps, holiday, tivo, xbox360

Okay, so a few months back I purchased one of these USB GPS to use with my laptop for road trips and wardriving. It seemed to simple enough, it’s a Prolific 2303 USB to serial adapter chip coupled to a NMEA GPS receiver, but I was having some weird issues where it would sporadically stop working when being used in my car. After doing some testing, I determined that it ran fine off the laptop’s battery, but cut out immediately if I plugged my laptop into my AC inverter. My guess is that the AC inverter wasn’t spitting out a very clean sine wave, and that the power fluctuation was being carried through my laptop’s AC adapter and through the USB port to mess up the GPS.

So, three possible solutions came to mind immediately. 1) Get a better AC inverter that spits out a cleaner AC sine. This would probably be expensive, and there’s only so much you can do with a car’s DC power supply anyway. 2) Get a better AC/DC adapter for my laptops. My thinking here was that something other than my laptops-for-less adapter might do a better job of scrubbing it’s DC output. 3) Some sort of USB power regulator (no idea if such a thing exists, or really how to build one.)

After doing some digging online, I found a couple boards talking about audio humming from PCs plugged into AC inverters, which presented a forth option: a DC-DC power adapter for my laptop. I did a little more digging and discovered that Targus makes such a device that works with my laptop, and it’s even sold at CompUSA.

So, before my Sunday D&D game, I stopped by CompUSA in Nashua and picked one up. Tried it out a little before game, and again on the way home from Denny’s. GPS worked the entire time, so I’d say this fixed it up nicely. Overall I’m rather happy with it, though the $80 price tag was a little much. I guess that’s what I get for buying a cheapy GPS in the first place. The Targus device is pretty cool though, and the DC-DC thing should be more efficient than the DC-AC-DC rig I had running before (and I don’t get interference on my FM radio anymore!) There’s some accessories you can get for it to charge all sorts of things, like my Clie or my cell phone, which I might consider down the road.

Geek Stuff gps, laptop

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