OSH Park

Was looking at the HopeRF mini-transceiver boards, and in the comments of a Sparkfun site, there was a link to a breakout board on OSH Park, which puts in daily orders to a USA-made PCB fab.  2-layer boards are $5/in for 3 copies of the board, with a 12 calendar-day turnaround.  Cool!

I'm going to need to learn how to layout boards....  Incidentally, the mini-boards are cheaper on eBay.

RPi Radio

I'd posted before about SDR, and have tried PiFM.  Why not put them together?  Apparently someone has done it, based on an article on Hackaday linking to a post on some guy's blog.  He uses it to transmit data at about 9600 baud.  I'm more interested in using this to transmit voice: basically getting a huge transmit range relative to normal HTs for a fraction of the cost!  The RPi is $35; the SDR dongle, $10; a small LCD display, $20; some filtering hardware and wire for the transmitter, $5; you'd need a USB mic and a LiPo battery to complete the setup.  Well, I've read that SDR hogs power, but even so, this could be really cool...!

I almost forgot, there's a TNC kit for the RPi available as well.  Although if the receiver's digital, that'd be unnecessary.

Displays

This isn't really a link, just an idea so I don't lose it.  Thinking about interfacing with an RPi, one of the limitations of having multiple displays is the bandwidth required to drive them all at full-speed.  What if you don't need to play video on all of them--maybe just one--and could get by with a couple extra displays for UI that run slower?

I'm thinking windowed interfaces could just transmit bitmap deltas and block transfers to handle UI operations, and either would render a sprite bitmap cursor or respond to touch.  In any case, the actual bandwidth required isn't that much most of the time, and could be handled using "low-speed" interfaces.  Call it "low-bandwidth graphical interface"?

Displays for the RPi

I was bothered by the DSI port on the RPi that's going unused.  So I went looking for DSI displays and found via a forum that the RPi Foundation is working on one.  The guy who came up with HDMIPi did a preview.

Supposedly one will be able to use both displays at once.  Awesome!!

The "DSIPi" is to be 7" at 800x480, good enough for DVD video.  The HDMIPi is 9" at 1200x800; 720p, but not full HD.  I think the DSIPi will be good for a car video player project, but the HDMIPi will be good for keeping me from hogging the family TV!

Software-Defined Radio

Someday I'd like to get into this.

SDR @ Wikipedia
About SDR dongle hardware
SDR for $20?!
RPi as an SDR server

Blurb Regarding the RNC Rule Change

Forbes ran an article regarding the RNC rule change from 2012.

Rather than only requiring a candidate to have a plurality of the delegates from five states in order to have one’s name placed into nomination, the rule was changed to require a candidate to have a majority of delegate votes in at least eight states as a prerequisite to nomination.

Will anyone be able to meet that criteria? It may be an interesting road to 2016.

ClimateGate

Prof. Hal Lewis' resignation letter from the American Physical Society is a scathing indictment if I've heard one:

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist. [emphasis added]

Yeah.