Adventures of a Tech, avonturen van een techneut

Om dingen even in perspectief te plaatsen moet je gewoon even wat berekeningen maken. We gaan Nederland van het aardgas afhalen (de burgers) omdat? https://www.ad.nl/wonen/nederland-heeft-nog-lange-weg-te-gaan-gasverbruik-stijgt~aaf1527e/ In USA fakkelen ze 2123763,4944 m3 aardgas af per UUR (bij winning van olie, gas is ongewenst daar, opslag niet handig, goedkoper om te fakkelen) 1.8 miljard cubic feet per dag... Ons Nederlandse gasverbruik (huishoudens) is : 1500 m3 per jaar per huishouden Even rekenen 2.1 miljoen m3 per uur, dat is 24 * 365 * 2.100.000,00 = 18.400.000.000,00 m3 aardgas affakkelen per jaar (even de rekenmachine pakken) 18.400.000.000 / 1500 => aantal huishoudens Nederland dat is voor 12.3 miljoen huishoudens (met gasverbruik van 1550 m3/jr) Naast het opbranden lozen ze ook nog gewoon aardgas direct in de atmosfeer. (genaamd Venting) Waarom moet ik ook alweer van het aardgas af? Niet voor het milieu en de toekomst van onze kinderen,

I am using ESP32 IDF for some private experiments. (more info later) I really like it, not like some Arduino hobby IDE, that is a  half done, non-professional project. I see a lot of people writing stuff like "do ESP32 in Arduino" this is completely backwards, you should avoid anything Arduino-related. You can not use Arduino in a real project, it can not be controlled, it is doing "magic" things and breaks everytime. You guessed it: I do not like it. ;-) The ESP-IDF works really well uses cmake, is well documented, I use visual studio code insiders or clion van jetbrains to coordinate my coding and GIT to store my stuff. I am really impressed with how well it works. Including flash-upload, debugging all works fine. A few days ago I updated the IDF to the latest version and got errors: $ git checkout master $ git pull remote: Enumerating objects: 1492, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (1492/1492), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (213/21

Flux core. It is not going anywhere soon!

http://www.hamradio.in/circuits/grid_locator_system.php This code will convert a Maidenhead locator to Latitude/Longitude in degrees. It seems that everyone tries to implement this, but I can not find any clean source code... So here is my implementation, 2 ways, from lat,long -> maidenhead and reverse... This is plain "C" code tested on linux, but I will include it on my STM32F4 dev board. typedef struct { double latitude; double longitude; int errorcode; } lat_lon_t; uint8_t to_upper( char c) { if (c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') { return c - 0x20; } return c; } // the equator and the 0 meridian are the reference // we call them +90 (instead of 0) and +180 (instead of 0) to prevent negative numbers // the world is divided into 18 * 18 fields (324 fields total) // these fields are sub-divided into squares and sub-squares and sub-sub-squares etc forever // but only 5 iterations make sense (size of a ho

Thanks to KiCAD and PCBWAY things look very nice. The PCB arrived to my door in 6 days after sending the data to PCBWAY.COM Time to heat up the soldering iron (vapour phase soldering is my way FYI, not the iron anymore) Debugging in action, LED blinking, GDB running, Clion as my primary IDE for this project, integrates with CubeMX from ST. New V3 STLINK works great. The blink was active only 6 days after sending the PCB data to China. How about some fast development!

Conditions are good today. I have my little transmitter with about 0.1 Watt of RF power (could be less). I get my data across the globe : look here 40m band, from Netherlands to Antarctica, USA, Australia and more. This is fun. I am using a QRP labs kit : https://qrp-labs.com/ultimate3.html My antenna is a piece of wire of about 10 meters hanging out of the window not a real antenna! So much fun with so little RF power! Best regards PA2LVD

Maxtor Shared Storage NAS 300 GB Summary of long adventure: TL;DR. ONE DISK IS NOT AN OPTION FOR A NAS - Audience : advanced users - linux skill required : yes - strong opinion : yes - frustration : yes It looks so nice in the picture : storing data on a NAS, not on the local system. You can access it from anywhere in the network, all is fine. Until.. The NAS breaks down and you forgot the backups.. I had this NAS for a long time (several years), somewhere safe in the house, in a dry and protected and cool place, nobody would be able to find it, a digital safe, connected to my local network. It seems a smart idea, but it really was not. Here is my summary of trouble to get my data back. 1) The NAS did not appear in my network anymore 2) Checked power supply, switches, cables 3) conclusion, NAS is bad 4) reboot, does not come online again 5) open it up, take out harddisk, how hard can it be? Right? I connected the disk to my machine with one of those PATA/

Today I received an envelope addressed to my company in the mail from EBN (European business number, Netherlands department) It looked official and impressive, it had a return envelope. I needed to return the form to : EBN, PO BOX 11 35 58, 20435 Hamburg. It had some forms inside, that I needed to fill in and return, looked almost legit.  No big deal right, fill in and return? But I read all the small print (gray on lighter gray) too, and it is a deception, when you return this form you actually sign a contract with a company DAD GmbH in Germany for 977 euro per year. They will put your name on a website for this amount of cash. It is clearly stated in the small print on grey paper, EBN is not related to any organisation or institution of the European Union or Commission. My advise, do not open, just throw it in the trash immediately! Not worth the time or money. Have a good day! Some other people received it too :  https://www.fraudehelpdesk.nl/alerts/european-business-