Software companies, listen up. If you’re not going to make your products open source, at least have the guts to allow independent evaluation of your technology – especially when you service the public sector. First it was Diebold with their horrible, horrible scandal surrounding voting machines. Now, it’s all about a breathalizer system used in Florida.
Grow up, Diebold and CMI. Your antics make you look less mature than the people actually committing voting fraud and DUIs.
Curse the digital world. Curse it all to hell.
I was re-researching SCA broadcasts, and finally read up on all of this IBOC HD Radio digital broadcast stuff. And I read back on an older Motorola technology called Symphony. It really looked like Motorola’s effort was all we needed. Digital-quality broadcasts in analog, with multipath resolved and dynamics concerns virtually eradicated. Symphony looked like the way to go. But digital broadcasts are winning out anyway, and I can’t figure out why.
And yet all we end up with is digital everything, presumably because people like zeros and ones better. And, they prefer telling you whether you’re allowed to make a copy of a specific sequence of zeroes and ones or not. Grrr. There’s so many interesting things that can be done with analogue signals in general. And our technology has clearly caught up without having to redo everything as digital. The days of just rigging up a simple AM radio out of parts you have lying around your basement are going fast…
I’m angry again. There is a better way, I’m sure of it. We can fix this. Even if I have to have classes and classes of Grade 3 kids building AM transmitters and receivers, just to prove it can be done.
While in Tokyo, I shopped at the world famous Akizuki Denshi, a small electronics shop that sells, amongst other things, fabulous kits. On the chart for this weekend: a PIC chip programmer (photo of my kit, assembled, including the 4.0 upgrade) that I’ve been needing for a while, and a JJY clock receiver (Peter Evans’ assembly, photos and translation). There’s one modification to the kit I made: rather than directly choose the polarity of the DC jack via hard-wiring the jumpers on the lower left, I used a bit of a pin header I had left over from the JJY clock receiver kit and some leftover 2-pin jumper blocks from my PC. (It’s unfortunate they didn’t do what Tristate did with their JJY receiver, where a rectifier is used to accept either polarity of DC voltage input. Ah well, it keeps the component count and cost down, I guess.)
Now, I’d wanted the JJY clock receiver to run off of WWVB, the similar station broadcasting out of Colorado, and to set up an NTP stratum 1 server for my house. So I bought a 60kHz ferrite antenna and 2 60kHz crystals to run the thing. I built it up yesterday, and powered it up, only to realize that the signals have some differences in both their encoding and their bit patterns.
So, sooner than I’d been expecting, I built up the PIC programmer so I can reprogram the JJY clock receiver to understand WWVB. Rewriting the code will be my project for this week; it’s reasonably straightforward, but this is my first taste of PIC code. At a glance it looks very 6800-esque, with some reminiscence of 6502 (naturally). I think I’ll enjoy PIC assembly. ^_^
I’ll post a photo of the JJY … er, WWVB receiver once it’s working.
I found it — my bondage MIDI cable! Back in the old days of PC sound cards, a special cable shipped with your Sound Blaster. This cable sported 2 MIDI plugs and connected to the joystick port. It also had a passthrough connector for a joystick.
It turns out that you can screw the passthrough plug into the joystick plug, and then screw it closed. You can do this around someone’s neck (if they’re particularly anemic). Then, the MIDI portion makes a GREAT leash.
I kid you not. Jalapeno and Tolim and I had hours of fun leading tsk around the NJ apartment with one of these. He was such a good little….never mind. ;)