List 30 things that make you happy.
The 30 things that make me happy are every day of the month i spend together with my wife. Times are not always easy but times with her are golden.
Author: Stephanos Blog
Now we add Aviation as a topic!
I’ve always had an interest in aviation. From childhood, I’d build plastic airplane models, graduating to balsa wood models… Had several U-Control planes that fortunately I was able to use at the local playground– this was before the days where now everything is highly regulated and you really can no longer do fun things in parks, but that’s another story.
I built many model rockets… never to fly them because I lived in the city… no where to fly them, no way to get somewhere to fly them. When I became an Adult and had a car, I did fly one once in a huge field in a park… got chased away, because even as early as the 80’s they started not allowing fun stuff. Parks in my county are strictly for nature, and people to sit and do nothing but enjoy being outdoors. Sure there are trails and walks, for bikes and walkers, nothing at all for model rockets or airplanes, you can metal detect to your heart’s content, but you are not allowed to dig, you can go rock hunting, but you can’t take a rock home with you… The county parks department said, absolutely nothing found in a park can be removed from a park.
Well that did not deter me from building a model glider plane in around 1995, my first radio controlled airplane. Got it all done, went out to a park, launched it with a surgical tubing launcher and promptly crashed it straight down into the ground….. Turns out you really need an instructor to learn how to fly a model airplane.
I’ll back up a bit… in 1988 I did become a student pilot and flew honest to goodness Cessna 150s/152s… Got to the point of being able to solo practice, and did a solo cross country… I didn’t finish.
In 2004 I met my future wife, at that time I had been a boater for the prior years, and just getting out of that hobby… I had sold my boat, and began my life with her, the topic of aviation never came up.
Now we’re both retired, and I have hobbies to keep from being bored, but my wife really only has reading as a hobby. One day recently (summer 2024) there was an ad on TV for an air show coming up at our county airport. She seemed mildly interested, not enough to go to it, and I– even though I like airplanes, would not likely go to an air show…. been there done that, camped out once at EAA Oshkosh. been to a few other local airshows… You get to stand in hot blazing sun, or in rain… There’s a huge crowd. and parking is always a problem.
But even so… One day when we were both bored, and looking to just go out for a drive, I said, hey… do you want to go out to the airport to see the planes take off and land? Answer: YES…
So now I haven’t done that since I was a child… My father would drive us out to a spot at the far end of the longest runway (The one the airliners use).. Theres’ a spot next to the fence where years of plane watchers have essentially created a nice parking spot.. in fact the county puts gravel there, so it’s semi-official. Well we drove out there and I found the spot. Parked there and, well we saw one plane… See it was a Saturday.. we’re not such a major airport… My wife said.. lets’ go… I said, hey… it’s Saturday… lets check out the local model airplane flying field… “Sure!” I remembered from years ago that there was a field in one park about a half hour away that a local club maintains… we drove out there
And we had great fun watching them fly the model airplanes… Now I’m still surprised, my wife was so interested in model airplanes — we never talked about it, she never expressed an interest.. but here we are now with a great common interest.
On the way home she said “So are you going to buy a model airplane?”, “You want to?”,, “Yes”… and that was it… I bought a trainer, joined the AMA (required to use the field), signed up with the FAA, required for the size plane I bought… Passed a test… Required to fly said plane.
Since then we’ve been doing daily visits to check out the airport, I now know where on the web to get flight schedules, I have an app that gives me tower radio to listen to… And now daily visits to the model field to fly — something.
Now during the week, we’v never seen another person flying a model out there, seems like for most people it’s a weekend thing, even for the retired guys… Have no idea why… once my trainer came in, we put it together… charged up the batteries and went out to the field… I did a decent takeoff… made a turn, another turn… then on the turn (Base) to bring it back to the runway… dive and crash into a bush on the far edge of the field. Broke one wing….(It’s a foam plane so was easy to fix)… Still we had great fun.. and I went home and got a model airplane flight simulator (RealFlight Trainer edition)… and decided, I’ve got to get real good in the simulator before I try that again….
On weekends we would go see the experienced pilots flying their planes, got to talking to them… They are the nicest people. So I decided to join their club… On Tuesdays they have open training, and so one Tuesday I got my first real lesson just making turns, with an instructor on a buddy box. It was at that point I realized… model airplanes don’t quite fly the same as full size airplanes… I might write a post explaining that… So I have to set aside anything I remember about my full size flight training, and pick up model airplane flight training.
Well One week day I was like… I know I should not fly my airplane till I’ve learned how to do it, but we wanted to fly … something… So we went to a local hobby store and bought a beginner helicopter.
Now you’re going to say –woah! helicopters are even harder to fly than airplanes… and yes that’s true for a “real” model helicopter.. they are expensive, big , and frankly they look pretty dangerous… The beginner helicopter, Blade 150 FX, is designed to make it a lot simpler to fly… a lot like a drone.. It has built in stability, so it’s doing a lot of correcting for you to keep it from just crashing.. and it’s quite small, light enough that you don’t need to register it with the FAA.. and I found, if I fly it over grass, It can sustain falling from a pretty great height without damage — it’s so light.
So now almost every day we take a trip out to the model field, and I practice… just hovering… and wow.. after a few sessions I’m getting the hang of it… basically one problem with it is since it is so light you can’t fly it in much wind… in wind up to about 4mph.. it’s not a problem,, I’m learning how to use the controls to keep it under control and roughly hovering (well over about a 10 foot diameter)… today in a 6mph wind… I learned that it will weather vane into the wind… so now I have to use both sticks simultaneously… to keep it oriented the way I want it with the equivalent of the rudder control, and in a hover with the throttle, and the equivalent of ailerons and elevator.
So expect more about airplanes here!
I would have a spider tattoo except for all the judging…
Quite a long time ago, I was working in my career and I got it into my head I wanted a small tattoo. I thought a lot about what it would look like, and had some cute ideas,.. So I decided upon a small spider. Nice and simple.
Well a tattoo is a commitment, so that summer on vacation in the 1000 islands, I got a temporary tattoo of a spider put on in one of the gift shops. Right on my left wrist.
The next work day I was at the coffee pot, and a co-worker remarked… “Stephen, I didn’t think you were that kind of person!”
Basically people got judgy in a corporate environment about a simple little visible tattoo.
So I gave up the idea.
What I found in my life is people treat you very differently based on the appearance you present. Especially in a corporation.
For instance, I was computer science/researcher my whole carrier, so I basically wore jeans, sneakers, and sometimes a nice shirt, sometimes a t-shirt. As I walked the halls I was pretty invisible except to people who I worked directly with, who’d say hi to me.
Well one day I decided to try something. Wear a button shirt and a tie. I did that for a few days and found that now as I walked in the halls, managers who never acknowledged me before would say “Hi, hows it going?” as they walked by.
Once the experiment was over I went back to my normal attire.
I See Little Reason to Buy a Raspberry PI again
Like a lot of computery hardwary people, I have been buying and setting up Raspberry PI 4’s for various tasks around the house.
For instance I replaced an aging Mac Mini house file server with a Raspberry PI 4 and a 2 disk software Raid1. And one of my 3D printers is controlled by a Raspberry PI 4 with OctoPi installed on it.
But also last summer I set up a Pi 4 system, on a battery and solar panel, out in the garden to do weather satellite image receving over an SDR radio.
Before the pandemic, PI 4’s were relatively cheap, and they run Raspberry PI OS (a linux veriant) or even Ubuntu. So you get a PI board, a case, heat sinks, fan and power supply and you have a low cost computer that runs a real operating system.
Except when the chip shortage came, PI 4’s were very expensive just for the board, and are only now coming down in price, probably mostly because they introduced the PI 5. Well lets look at the economics of it… A PI5 board alone is selling for about $100 on Amazon. To use it as a general purpose computer, you need to add a case, a power supply and active cooling (PI 4 got by with just a fan, the 5 seems to need more elaborate cooling) .. so the power supply costs about $20, and the case plus cooling costs about $25… You have to add a micro SD card to this, pick a size, so we’re looking at about $150ish for a PI computer, and that’s without a monitor, keyboard and mouse — in some applications I run headless anyways.
I was about to put in an order for one, because lately I’ve been designing and building my own microcontroller boards, and frankly, I risk, due to my inexperience, blowing out a USB port on my expensive laptop if I plug it in and have something wrong in the wiring. So I figured, hey, buy a cheap Raspberry PI system and you only risk blowing out a port on a $100 computer board.
Well If all I want to do is run the PI as a terminal emulator to my boards, that’s fine, and probably I could get PlatformIO running on it and I can do Arduino sketch development right on the PI… but as I have advanced in things, I see I’m leaving Arduino land and I want to run more serious IDEs from chip makers themselves. For instance Microchip’s MPLAB X, which will run on linux, but not on a PI.
That got me looking for what very cheap PC could I buy instead of a PI, and I found, on Amazon, a $155 Intel N95 based computer. It’s about as long as a PI enclosure width wise, and depth is about twice a PI enclosure. so still a tiny single board computer, that has all the IO and video ports a PI has, plus USB-C, and like a real computer, it comes in a case, with a power supply and whatever cooling it needs, there are notable advantages over a PI 5. First it is an x86-64 machine, comes with Windows 11 installed and of course will run Linux if you want. Second, it has a real 512 gig SSD, as opposed to running off a micro sd card like a PI, and has 16 gigs of ram installed (upgradable), wheras the PI 5 seems to max out at 8 Gigs.
So price wise, there’s no reason now to buy a Raspberry PI system, and performance wise, well I’ve set mine up, installed the IDE I will be using, and found for sure it blows away a PI 4 performance wise, (I don’t know about vs a PI 5, I don’t have one).
The only reason I thought a PI could still have an advantage is that you can run a PI off a battery… But this N95 machine has a DC input jack on it, and the wall wart that comes with it is only 12v 3a. So hey… no problem running that off a 12 volt battery.
For the last decade I’ve only travelled by car.
Daily writing prompt
You’re going on a cross-country trip. Airplane, train, bus, car, or bike?
I have traveled by train before… it’s cute, but slow, and inconvenient. I’ve travelled by bus before. In that phase of my life I had frequent colds, because of exposure to others on the bus. I’ve travelled by plane before— I dislike that immensely.
On the other hand, I enjoy road trips, and only see those in my future.
Leaving Arduino Land for Greener Pastures
As I mentioned in a previous post, I built my own minimum ATMega 2560 board to help with my Z80 single board computer project. Here is a video update on where I’ve gone as far as programming microcontroller boards.
Save the Environment! Drink Drip Coffee!
Speaking of phases… for years we used one of those, not to be named, brands of coffee maker that uses individual coffee “pods”… You make one cup at a time.
Well there are problems… One problem: It’s slow, so for a party, we still had to use a percolator.. Another problem is that you generate a lot of waste with those plastic pods, and also the coffee grounds, which will normally decompose are sealed inside that plastic.
But the other big problem is the machines don’t last very long. Like for us, based on the amount of coffee we brew, the machines were lasting only a year, or maybe 2. So that’s more expense, and now a big hunk of electronics waste to get rid of.
So, fed up with that, I bought a drip coffee maker… This maker has metal foil, reusable baskets for the grounds, and it has 2 sides. One side is for single cups, and the other side is for a 12 cup pot.
Now the morning coffee ritual… Get up, and smell the nice fresh ground coffee as you put 5 table spoons of it into the basket… fill up the reservoir, and in a few minutes you have 6 cups of coffee!
The only daily waste, is coffee grounds.
Here’s a non-technical blog post…
Usually I write about something technology based, but here is just a post about life.
When the pandemic started, and we were stuck at home all the time we instituted two things… Eat a little ice cream every day, and always keep fresh cut flowers in a vase on the dining room table.
Well this Valentine’s day we expanded, I bought a special flower arrangement for my wife and once those flowers withered, we decided, hey, let’s keep two vases of cut flowers going.
So now we have a vase of flowers in the living room too… and it’s just nice.
Well it was one big phase…
Daily writing prompt
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
My whole life is one phase blending into another phase… I don’t say goodbye.. It’s all me.
And on to Electronics!
Back last spring and summer I was doing photography, and especially astrophotography. Well I eventually decided it was effecting my sleep cycle because in the summer you have to get up in the midnight to like 4am range for good dark skies. So I said “Wait till winter. It will be dark after dinner.”
But in the winter it is too cold! So instead of astrophotography I’ve been doing Ham Radio — which got to be a problem when I ran out of things to say on the radio, and so now I’m back on to electronics.
So I dusted of my Z80 computer design work, and redesigned it as a spiffy single board computer. One conundrum I had in last year’s design was that I did not want to set aside space for an EPROM, since I have no idea yet what sort of OS I was going to put on it, I had no idea how to size it. Many designs on the web just give it 16k or 32k of EPROM… which is huge.
But I stumbled upon a nifty chip… it’s a 128k NVRAM… what it is is low power, but pretty fast static ram with a built in lithium backup battery… So now that’s the best of both worlds… It will act like a ROM in that it will retain it’s memory when powered off, but I don’t have to know at hardware design time how much memory to set aside for the OS..
So I had panel switches in my design so I could manually “toggle” in a bootstrap program, to then pull in the OS off of something like an SD card, but instead what I decided to do was just make another board to program the NVRAM with a basic “ROM monitor”.
So I designed and, wow, already built a tiny Arduino compatible Atmega 2560 board to be the controller in the programmer. It was my first real SMD component board, and my first use of a cheap reflow oven I bought quite a while ago, but hadn’t used yet. The board is very basic, all it has on it is the 2560, a USB-UART chip, a 16mhz resonator. So very basic and also I brought out 16 pins, +5v, 3.3v, Gnd, 28 GPIO pins, and AREF (4 of the GPIO pins are also ADC inputs). Well I made the board key shaped so that the header pins are on an outboard portion of the board so that it is breadboard friendly — the 2560 is a big chip and would not normally fit on a board that fits on a breadboard.
So 28 GPIO pins is exactly what I need to program the NVRAM chip… that’s 17 address lines, 8 bidirectional data lines, and 3 control lines (~CE, ~WE, ~OE).
Once built and debugged, I wrote a first version of the ROM monitor, but this one compiled for the 2560 and targeting the NVRAM chip. I can do only basic things… Examine and deposit individual memory cells, and, wow, I can also do Kermit file transfers for over the serial port file receives… So now I realized I don’t need panel switches on the Z80 board since it will have a Z80 compiled version of the monitor, which will also be able to pull in executables via Kermit.
And with about a days’s work, it worked! I did spend an additional earlier day trying to implement YMODEM, but found that protocol is not very well documented, and since Kermit is very well documented, and simple, I ultimately went with Kermit.
I built a version of the NVRAM programmer on a breadboard. It did work, but is just a mess of wires, and so it would be hard to remove and put back the NVRAM, or even the 2560 board– which I assume I’ll do as I develop the final monitor for the Z80…
You can see in this pic that the the 2560 board would normally cover all the pins on the breadboard, thus the key shape to allow room to plug wires onto the breadboard… the footprint is the same as a .1 by .6 pitch 32 pin DIP socket.
So I designed a PCB board for the task that I can plug the 2560 in and it has a ZIF socket for the NVRAM chip. Note those 3 resistors hanging out up at the top of the breadboard… Those are pull-ups on the 3 control lines… Since I am re-using the 3 SPI pins as GPIO pins, and the 2560 uses a combination of RESET and SPI to program itself, it’s pretty critical to not have anything active on the SPI pins during system RESET. Well the SPI pins landed as 3 of the data pins for the NVRAM chip… also one of the data GPIO is also for the onboard LED….. so the first time I powered it up I had a light show as the NVRAM chip had floating control lines it was doing strange things on it’s data lines, and the 2560 was struggling to figure out what sort of program was coming in to the chip. Adding pull-ups was all that was needed, the NVRAM chip now comes up with it’s data lines tri-stated.
OUCH! I actually made the same mistake when I sent the board out to have the PCBs made. I forgot to put the pull-ups into the schematic… But it’s all good now… except I’ll have 3 spare PCB’s for my mistake that I can hack pull-ups onto if I need them. All I need to do is wait about a week for the boards to come in…
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