Doing easy things the hard way.

One of the few things I really like about my Blackberry was the red blinky light that let me know if anything new happened. The iPhone is a great device, but it is easy miss that you have a new email or text. Apple has create a centralized place to collect all of these new…

OpenMHz.com After a bit of work, I have put together a system that lets you monitor the radio system for DC Fire, EMS & City Services. Everything gets recorded and can be played back through a website. Thanks to the magic websockets, any new call that comes in gets added to the top of the…

I have been playing around a bit and found an easy way to receive and playback digital LMR. More and more of the radio systems are going from narrow band FM to Digital. This makes it tough to listen to them on GQRX. DSD is a great program which can decoded the audio you get…

I was one of the lucky recipients of Mike Ossmann‘s awesome HackRF Jawbreaker boards. I have a Ubuntu laptop I can play around with at work, but MacBook at home. I am not complaining! I wish I had a Mac at work too. Anyhow I wanted to get it up and running on my Mac,…

While it is great to have the latest headlines up on your message board, it is even better being able to add in a message about how thankful you are that it is Friday. The final touch for my LED Message Board project was to add in a web page that made it easy to…

In the past couple of posts, I have documented how I built a LED Message board using some modules from Sure Electronics and then wrote a C program to scroll messages across it. This of course cool, but to really make it insteresting you need interesting messages to scroll. To get interesting messages you have…

While hooking up my Sure LED Matrix up to my Raspberry Pi using USB worked… it could work better. Using the Driver board from Sure, you can only scroll character by character which doesn’t look that smooth. So instead of using the driver board to interface with the matrixes, I directly connected it to the…

I have my Raspberry Pi setup at work and it is stuck behind a proxy. Here are some helpful tips I have found from across the web:   Requests from Node var http = require(“http”); var options = { host: “proxy”, port: 8080, path: “http://www.google.com”, headers: { Host: “www.google.com” } }; http.get(options, function(res) { console.log(res);…

I got a Eye-Fi Wifi SD Card for Christmas. It works great on my Canon 5d3 and gives me the wifi uploading that Canon should have baked in from the start (they added it into the cheaper 6d, ugh!). It can upload to a number of online services, including Facebook. I set it up and…

In addition to offering cool LED modules, Sure Electionics also offers a nice Demo / Driver board to go along with them. The only bummer is that the driver board needs a Windows Java program to run if you want to send text to it, to be displayed. I did some backwards engineering and looked…