I, Scott Harden, in my infinite restlessness and my limited sanity, hereby declare my next [potential] project. The idea is still in the earliest stages of development, and I have much to research (for example, I don’t even know if it’s legal) but it’s a cool idea and I want to try it. I know I’ll learn a lot from the project, and that’s what’s important, right? So, here’s the idea. I want to build an incredibly simple, low power radio transmitter that broadcasts data on a fixed frequency. Data is provided by (you guessed it) a picaxe chip! What data will it transmit? I’ll tell you! It could transmit… uh… err… um… okay it doesn’t really matter and I don’t even know, I just want to do this project! Maybe temperature and light intensity data or something. Who cares. Anyway, I want to put this whole deelibopper (temperature and light sensors, picaxe microcontroller, and transmitter) into a drybox (pictured). Once properly closed, this box will keep everything in pristine working condition by protecting against rain, heat, snow (not that we get much of that in Orlando), hurricanes, and perhaps even Florida panthers and bears (oh my). I’d make a glass (or plexiglas) window on the top so that light could get in, hitting solar panels, which trickle-charges the battery housed in the device as well. Pretty clever, huh?
My idea is to keep construction costs to a minimum because I’m throwing this away as soon as I make it. That’s right! Throwing it away. Parting with it – perhaps forever. My goal is to make it work so I can toss it in some random location (I’m thinking hidden on the roof of some building somewhere) and see how long it will run. Days? Weeks? Months? Years? How cool would it be go go to dental school, come back ~5 years from now, and have that transmitter still transmitting data. Super-awesome if you ask me. I’ve been poking around and I found someone who did something similar. They built a 40mW 10m picaxe-powered beacon (see photos and circuit diagram).
See the PICAXE chip in the center there? Remember, my ultimate goal is to learn from this project. I understand the basics of radio theory and amplitude and frequency modulation (AM and FM), but I’ve never actually built anything that does this. Yeah, I know, I could build a SoftRock radio like everyone says to do, but my educational grounding is in molecular biology. I know little about circuit-level electronics, electrical engineering, and radio theory… so my plan is to start small. This project is small enough to attack and understand, with a fun enough end result to motivate me throughout the process.
Early last week I did something surprising. Compelled by a newfound sense of freedom (I just graduated with my masters! yay!) and perhaps a little nostalgia, I decided to venture back into the psychotic world of CounterStrike. The game is quite old (released in 2000) but is a classic and is surprisingly well-furnished with online players. As I’m writing this, there are 33,125 (steam version) + 64,975 (version 1.6) = 98,100 players. That’s almost one hundred thousand players online this moment!
Anyone who knows me can tell you that I’m not a big fan of paying for software. In the case of Microsoft products, they’re a necessity (sorry linux people – it’s true – it’s often needed), but they’re easy to download/install illegitimately so they’re free. Counterstrike is somewhat similar. However, it’s a little more difficult than most other softwares. Because of the nature of the program (using an internet-based master server to find lists of servers to connect to, and connecting to servers requiring identification etc) any server who wants to be legitimate can block users who aren’t. In other words, with a fresh-out-of-the-box server, non-legitimate counterstrike users can’t play (they must be steam-verified). In fact, it takes a lot of work to set up a server to get around steam. These servers (called non-steam or nosteam) are few and far between, but they ARE usable.
Saturday afternoon I attempted to connect to non-steam servers with relatively good luck. There were lists of 100s of active, cracked non-steam servers I could play on, and I could log into all of them. The problem was my ping. Your ping is the time it takes for a message to travel from your PC to the server and back, usually measured in milliseconds. A low ping (fast rate of communication) is critical for fast-paced gaming. If your ping is 500 (half a second), you try to shoot at something but you’re shooting at where it was half a second ago. Pings around 30 are good. So, like I said, I could connect… but my pings were TERRIBLE! I was getting pings in the 100s, 300s, and even over 1000 (that’s more than a second!). I worked for two whole days trying to figure it out. I did everything. I concluded that only foreigners are smart enough to use nonsteam servers, as most of the cracked servers were in Russia, Western Europe, or South America. Although there were a couple (and I do mean a COUPLE) US-based nonsteam counterstrike servers, they were incredibly lame. Filled with bots (who wants to play against a robot?) and retarded kids. It was so frustrating to be so close to being able to play… but not quite… I got a couple servers to work well, but they were lame.
After two fulls days of pulling my hair out over this I cracked down and shelled-out the $19.99 to buy the stupid game in digital form (never got a box – just downloaded it from the website and created a legitimate steam ID) from www.counter-strike.net. Yeah, I cracked. I know. But, the way I look at it, I spent two full days working on this (everything from trying different wireless networks, wired networks, loading new masterserver files, etc.) for a total of at least 15 hours. If I had just dropped the twenty bucks on Friday, I would have had all of those hours of fun. And by fun I mean “more fun than going to a movie”. You see, movies are my yardstick of cost-worthiness. I know I’m trying to mentally justify myself here, but I’m thinking that going to a movie (with my wife) costs about $16 at the ticket counter and about $8 for a small soda at the snack bar (it’s scary). Movies are only ~2 hours of entertainment. Counterstrike will entertain me for many hours over the span of many days – possibly even many weeks. Therefore, purchasing a legitimate steam ID to be able to freely play counterstrike is a better return on my investment than going to a movie. So, instead of going to a movie on Sunday night, I purchased counterstrike.
I’m still pretty rusty and I don’t understand a lot of the new features (especially those related with the steam network), but if anyone wants to play with me I’d be obliged. I go by the nick “Tyrosine” and if I’m on, you can use GameTracker to find me. I’m playing Counter Strike Source and I go by the name Tyrosine. Yes, Tyrosine as in the amino acid. If you do decide to join me, you’ll have to put up with all of the spray painted signs I incessantly add throughout the levels. Yeah, that’s the molecular structure of Tyrosine. How creative.
For anyone interested here is a random clip of counter strike source being played… (I really just want to test out these new youtube embedding features!)
I was poking around the internet looking at various ways people made smooth-fading LED circuits and I came across the site of a guy who did something pretty creative that made me smile. Before I got too far, I wanted to mention that I saw a ton of plans involving fading LED intensity utilizing 555 timer ICs, but for my purposes an in-line (series) capacitor before the LED should do fine. Here’s the site which documents the project. Basically it’s a skull with red LED eyes which glow in response to hard drive activity. The capacitor makes the eyes fade in and out smoothly, as opposed to the jerky on/off flashing of standard hard drive activity LEDs. Video of the project result (.6MB XVID AVI) shows the effect. Very clever!
I know this type of thing has probably been done countless times, but I’d like to provide my contribution to the world of Google Maps Anomalies. At the coordinates of 28.486942,-81.727869 I located an airplane flying over a lake in central Florida. The thing that impressed me was that the blades of the plane appear to be standing still. How fast was this image taken? This plane is moving well over a hundred miles an hour, but it’s crystal clear. You can almost make out the pilot too. How cool is that? If you want to try to see this plane yourself, go to google maps and just search for the coordinates I provided. Good luck!
All right, here’s the scoop! I want to get my amateur radio license, but I’m a busy guy. I’ve decided to study from the pool of questions on the ARRL website. I downloaded the text version of the questions, wrote a python script to analyze it, and vwala! I generated a pretty and clean study guide that can be printed on 11 pages (double-sided), which is WAY better than the 120+ pages I would need if I printed their official PDF!
Here you can download no-nonsense questions and answers for the Technician license exam.These questions should be valid through June 30, 2010
