[McHUG] Meet to Eat and now Repeat

[Rich Mitchell]

Gentlemen,

We had a good "meet to eat" Friday evening.  Especially now that my Zipit is able to connect to Yahoo via WiFi.  Haven't figured out how to type in a URL to get to other sites, but Yahoo was an icon.

Pete brought up the fact that the Timonium Hamfest "Dirty Bird" telemetry was much more difficult to copy than the telemetry from our Hamfest in October.  The thought was that for windy conditions we might need to stabilize the payload more.  Saturday I was musing over that observation from a "horological" perspective and it hit me why this happened.  Initially clocks were regulated by pendulums.  If they ran to slow you would shorten the rod of the pendulum and lengthen it to slow down the clock.  In our launch at Timonium we had a very short string between the balloon and the payload.  At Westminster the string was at least twice as long.  So its period of oscillation would have been much longer.  A longer string should solve our problem.

We also discussed the Robotfest that Steve mentions in his note from earlier today.  We have the opportunity to exhibit at Jim Cross' table.  This is where we really need to get the Arduino involved.  The plan is to design and build a shield that would couple to the output from an HT, isolate the tone using the LMC567, translate it using Steve's Morse reading program and put it out to an LCD and also to EEPROM.

Good stuff seems to be happening on the Charleston front.  We need to come up with a compatible date to learn how K0BRA does his toaster oven soldering.

I guess these are sort of minutes of our "meet to eat" but I won't go into the teramisu we had for desert.

Rich
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McHUG - Physical Computing ;) 
MicroController Ham User Group