With any successful wireless system, you want to have some theoretical basis that your transmitted information can reach its intended receiver with enough power to be deciphered correctly. This is the basic idea behind a link budget where you compile information about your radio hardware and setup such as transmitter power, receiver sensitivity, antenna gain,… Continue reading Simulating Helium with HotspotRF
After about a week of running my Nebra Indoor Helium Hotspot, I began to look into upgrading my antenna. The stock antenna was doing pretty well and was picking up witnesses from 10s of kilometers away and its beacons could be heard by 10-12 other hotspots in my area. I was earning an average of… Continue reading Easy Helium Outdoor Antenna Upgrade
I previously create a PCB patch antenna using the Matlab antenna design toolbox and had some pretty good results, but the narrow bandwidth of patch designs means that small errors in the simulation parameters cause a shift away from your desired frequency. My old post into the details of my journey of learning about patch… Continue reading 2.4GHz PCB Patch Antenna V2 Design with Matlab
I have been hearing about Helium for a while now and it seems to be gaining traction with n number of gateways now scattered throughout the world it is starting to become a viable solution to providing an IoT backend. The incentive to gateway owners being the HNT cryptocurrency that is mined when they provide… Continue reading Nebra Helium Hotspot Miner
In a traditional beamforming application, the goal is to design an antenna whose radiation pattern points in a specific direction instead of just being purely isotropic. This directionality can be used as spatial filtering and is achieved in many different ways. One way is to use a directional antenna, such as a dish whose directionality… Continue reading Adaptive Beamforming with LMS
While playing with the magnetometer sensor on the Arduino for my DIY smart bike project I had an idea that I might be able to use a magnetometer as a crude communications receiver. The question being, Can we transmit data, by modulating a magnetic field, to a computer using a magnetometer sensor as a receiver,… Continue reading Magnetic Communications
The Ambasat-1 is an open-source Sprite Class Satalite that you can assemble, program, and have launched into space! Your very own satellite in space! When most people hear the word satellite they think of multi-million dollar devices that are way out of the reach of your average maker. But the cost of satellites and their… Continue reading Getting Started with the Ambasat-1
Doing color correction in a program like Divinci Resolve we can see these interesting plots based on your loaded image, like the one below. These are called color scopes, they are primarily used to identify the pixel colors as you traverse the image from left to right. They are useful for photographers and videographers to… Continue reading Python Color Scope
Interchangeable lens cameras are amazing feats of engineering, but as photographers trying to capture that perfect image you are sometimes saddened to realize that there are big black smudges scattered throughout your digital image. These black spots or smudges are caused by small specs of dust and debris that settle on the image sensor and… Continue reading Automatic Sensor Dust Removal
I was getting pretty fed up with my Macbook Air 2011 webcam now that we are on a constant stream of Zoom video conferences and calls. And with the shortage of nicer webcams in stock I started to look into weather it was possible to use my older DSLR camera as a makeshift webcam. I… Continue reading Mac DSLR Webcam
