Looking for a mobile antenna

I'm shopping for a new 2m/70cm mobile antenna, and it looks like the most economical route is a TRAM 1181

Jerry, VE6-AB has had good luck with his, so I'm interested to see how it performs on my mobile.

Been away for awhile...

Well, I've been away from the Amateur Radio world for a number of years, but a couple of factors have "encouraged" me to get re-involved.....

First, I work at SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology) and they have an Amateur Radio Club. Membership has been dwindling and so I'm one a few hams that still access the shack. Also, CARA (Calgary Amateur Radio Association) has a VHF and UHF Repeater here on campus and so they need access to be able to service their gear.

Secondly, I have a friend who has been involved for may years, Jerry Clement, VE6AB and he has been sharing with me the advances they have made in APRS and other VHF digital technology. So I think it's time for me to check out how I can merge my interest in Amateur Radio with my interest in Raspberry Pi Single Board Computers.

Office Raspberry Pi

Here is a photo of my office Raspberry Pi (normally I've got the meter hooked up to measure the current flow to the Raspi). The power is quite intermittent here in the office, so it's not unusual to corrupt the SD card and right now I've got it in my PC to reflash.

I've learned the hard way to ensure I backup the SD card on a weekly basis.

I'm designing an uninterruptable power supply for my Raspi and will post it once I have it completed.

Jumbled Mess

This jumbled mess is my primary temperature logger (raspi15) with a LAMP stack that logs all of the data to the mysql database. Raspi16 is turned on three times a day to receive backup files & data and then shut down so that if I ever have a power outage, I’m hoping that raspi16 won’t be on and I will be able to use the data to restore my original. So far… So good…..

Garage Raspberry Pi

This pic is of the Raspberry Pi web server in my garage office. In the last year, I have setup a Pi in my garage hooked to 3 Temperature Sensors. One at the ceiling, one at my desk, and one outside. Then I’ve added a Pi in my house to monitor the house temp and one at my office to monitor the temp there as well.
All are running wheezy and a LAMP stack, recording the temps into a mysql database.
All of the data is then consolidated into the Pi in my garage.
The sensors are DS18B20, Dallas One Wire devices and I’m using the python programming as suggested on the www.adafruit.com website. These folks have amazing tutorials and a great selection of parts for Single Board devices (and much more!). I have made purchases from them and highly recommend them.
Another good site to purchase electronics in Canada is canada.newark.com.

New RasPi Breadboard and i2c tinkering

My Raspberry Pi Breadboard

Originally I have been using an Adafruit Pi Dish which is a clear piece of plexiglass with a mounting for the Raspberry Pi and an Adafruit GPIO cable and cobbler included.
Here is a link: Adafruit Pi Dish

This had been working great, but the drawback was the lack of breadboarding space.

So plan be was of course to put both breadboards side by side.... and well.... that wasn't very convenient since I seemed to always be pulling the wires out of one or the other.

So then I finally decided to mount the Raspberry Pi to this breadboard. The breadboard is mounted on a steel plate and I simply lined up the holes in the Pi (rev 2), drilled them with my drill press, and used some 4-40 screws with 1/4" standoffs to mount the Pi. I also have the USB and Ethernet cables tye-wrapped to the metal backing on the breadboard so I don't stress the ports on the Pi.

Right now you see it with 2 x 28 pin IC's. They are MCP23017 port expanders. The one on the bottom left has 3 Red LED's attached to 3 of the outputs. The one in the center runs to a 7 segment display that I'm using just to test the outputs of the MCP23017.

The switch on the right of the breadboard is simply there to give me a mechanical/electrical input to the Pi.

To the left of the breadboard you see an Adafruit 16 x 2 line display module........
I must have been dreaming when I purchased it, because it is the Aruino shield module and so has all of the pins to plug into my Freeduino.....

But I wanted to use if for my Pi.... and fortunately I was able to just hook 5V, GND, and the 2 i2c lines to it and it works great!

Well great after I downloaded the software from Adafruit via github and use it in my python programs.

Right now I'm playing with sensing the button presses on the display and running various bits of Python code.

THANK YOU LADYADA!
For your awesome learning modules.
These have allowed me to hook DS18B20 temperature modules to my Pi as well as all of this i2c playing that I have been doing lately.

If you haven't been by, check it out: Adafruit Main Website

And their learning website

Been almost 5 years....

Well now, it has almost been 5 years since I started this blog.....

Originally to post my woodworking trials and tribulations, which were short lived. Postponed by my house renovations that never seemed to end....

Add to that life.... (add your own personal story here!)

Then once the renos were caught up (cause you're never really completed....), I got sidetracked by that little device called a Raspberry Pi.

And have been playing with that quite a bit over the last 6 months or so.

So I'll start to take some pics of the work I've done logging inside and outside temps with my Raspi's and share them online.

Thanks for reading,
Robin