I didn't want anyone to think I've dropped off the face of the earth being more than a week since I posted..
I've not felt overly well.. something is going around Cedar Rapids that everyone I know feels dead tired all the time.. I have it too no doubt.. all I want to do is sleep... even more so than normal! That makes it harder to force yourself to work on projects until midnight when you get home at 8:30 PM from work! :O)
I showed off the SDR-Cube to the Collins ARC, ordered a TFT display from China (touch screen $29 bux delivered) on e-bay and got some PIC32MX's to play with sampled.. I want to port the DSP-Cube GPL'ed software to that platform... that'll take me a while to get the stuff and to hack it together and to then get something running. I sampled and got some PHY's from National Semiconductor (thanks NS and Microchip) and will make the PIC32MX795's I have do Ethernet as well. I'd like to lay out a board with a PIC32MX, a National PHY and magnetics, with the interface to a CODEC and the TFT module... maybe in calendar 2011.. we will see. It takes a lot of time to do this and I'm thinking Kicad instead of Eagle this time.. so I need to learn that as well... In the meantime it will be protoboards and point to point.. but that's fun too...
Being that I am a masochist I also ordered off a BeagleBoard-xm. I think that could be a higher end SDR platform than the DSPic and PIC32MX. My talk at the Collins ARC convinced me to pull the trigger on this.
I fixed up the shack PC on Saturday (yesterday)-- windows update, etc. I worked the Feld-Hell sprint... it was unusually fun.., and also later that night decided to load, dual boot Ubuntu on to the PC, while listening to the AM guys on the Antique Radio QSO Party. I did this all on the old Kenwood because I didn't want to futz with the temperamental Flex-1500 and only run QRP 5W... maybe when the AN-762 is done...
I am a Linux advocate, but for God's sake, people-- will you ever just get a distribution done that works out of the freakin' box? The Ubuntu 10.10 ran off the CD okay but crashed big time when I installed it dual boot with Windows. This has happened for the last three years/attempts (once a year) at installing Ubuntu. What happened this time is that the computer I put it on (the shack PC) is a dual Pentium-D "mini" PC that I added a "small form factor" (it's a SFF machine) Nvidia card to... I wanted dual monitors and no ATI I could find would fit!
Well.. the install set "X" up the Ubuntu boot for the proprietary NVIDIA drivers but never installed them! Huh? What? CANONICAL: NO FRICKIN' EXCUSE! NONE. NADA. Next time: Fedora! You bunch of Commies! (That's another issue I don't like about Ubuntu.. but I won't make this political except for hints of my ideas...)
No "NORMAL" person wants a four hour @#$@#ing debug session after the install. I'm a freak, and I don't want it. Last three times I've had it and it's always been because of my "weird" hardware. You know what? It's not weird and that is an excuse whether you like it or not!! And all three of my computers being weird? Nope it's Ubuntu thats weird.. sorry... It's been video 2/3 times too..
I installed the NVIDIA proprietary driver directly.. it worked fine after that. But that was hours later...Once I finally updated half the CD (over 400 MB!) from my slow satellite internet (why the hell did I get the CD image on the fast connection at work in the first place? You suck Canonical...Sorry no other way to say it!) and then got the thing to finally come up in recovery mode in console mode and typed "startx" and saw the error... uugh...
Got on the net and found how to install the NVIDIA "horrible proprietary" driver manually.. did it, rebooted it and it just worked. Hmm.. how bad is proprietary software? Maybe a lot.. but in this case it made the system usable.. which is more than it was from the Canonical Ubuntu stock install! !!!!
Really.. I don't want to hear that crap that Windows is harder to install than Linux.. Ubuntu is supposed to be the desktop Linux "for everyone" (Commies... sorry I did it again...).. and I'm a software engineer who at one time submitted stuff for the Kernel.. and because of this was able to debug a basic install that I shouldn't have. What? 15 years after the first Linux install I did? NO EXCUSE.. NONE... I got it but it was insane to have to debug the install on such common hardware!
If I want to be serious about running Android on the BeagleBoard-xm I needed to get a decent i386 Linux running again.. so I am there. And I'll be happy to run Linux again.. but it's the last Ubuntu I'll ever do.
I do have an image of Android for the TI ARM based Beagle ready... hopefully Mouser will ship 3/8/11 like they estimate. I figure that board will be a good learning experience for me.. maybe I can get my nine-year old to program that. I have to say that I plan on teaching my children programming the way I learned it... that is from small "embedded" (I did 8080's and Z-80s starting in 1977 and back then that wasn't embedded... but that is the power of current "embedded")...8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to doing the BeagleBoard to VisualStudio. If I can teach them that way I'd feel good about doing that so the kids can actually understand low level...
I operated the FeldHell contest this weekend plus some random PSK.. so I finally got on the air again too.. I need to get my CW up so I can do some.. but, my god.. 40 WPM+ on the DX contest.. I'll never get there.. I'm too retarded when it comes to "automatic" responses to learn Morse that way... hopefully I'll get on the weekend of 3/5.. I really want to get those 25 countries I need for DXCC and those 15 states to finish up WAS...
Again, being licensed for 25 years I'm trying to make up for lost time on the radio front.. I'll get there eventually...
I did build up the filter bank on the K5OOR board.. but haven't had time to tweak on a VNA on work yet.. I will post details when I get there... until I do... Sayonara...
No comments:
Post a Comment