All posts by Michael LeBlanc

Amateur Radio, Arduino

Military Room Escape Movie Prop

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Well, hello there. It was a long, dreadful, record-breaking winter here in Nova Scotia. Although most of the snow has melted, it’s still unseasonably cold. I heard on local radio today that people are calling it “springter”. My last post was in October, and since then I’ve been occupied with teaching, promoting NSCAD programs in China and chairing an academic department; things that are either not blog-worthy or worth repeating publicly.

Weather Sensing Invention

Around the time of my last post, I had stumbled upon what I think might be a new invention relating to weather sensing. With the help of Kevin Buchan, NSCAD’s research consultant, I issued a proposal to Innovacorp for an Early Stage Commercialization Fund grant to help develop a working prototype. I heard at the end of February that I didn’t get the grant, so that’s off the table for the moment. By the way, my friend and colleague Sol Nagler received funding for his “Narratives – A Geolocative Interactive Storytelling Mobile Application” project. At least, I thought he was my friend. 😉

Radio

Over the past number of years, I’ve been utilizing tiny RFM12 and RFM12B 434 MHz radio units to send and receive sensor data around the house. These units use Arduino ATMEGA 328 microcontrollers and the Jeenode Library. I hope to talk more about this long-term project in future posts.

The more I worked with these magical devices, the more interested I became in their inner workings. Specifically, I wanted to know:

  • how to get the RF energy from the little circuit out to the world
  • what kinds of environmental factors affect the propagation of the RF energy
  • how to maximize and direct the RF energy from the sensor to a base receiver

However, in my research I was confronted with a wall of my own ignorance; as I searched for answers, more questions kept popping up. So I decided to undertake a long-term study, and as part of that plan I applied for my amateur radio license. I took the test on March 31 and received my Basic with Honours license, which allows me to use all of the HF, VHF and above amateur radio bands using standard commercially-designed and built radios. I want to be able to design and build my own transmitters, but that will have to wait until I can pass the Advanced license test. My callsign is VE1LEB. The VE1 prefix indicates my location as Nova Scotia, Canada.

Changshu K-4 Heavy Key
Changshu K-4 Heavy Key

So what’s the “Military Room Escape Movie Prop”? It comes from the AliExpress listing for a Chinese Army Changshu K-4 morse code key that I received in the mail yesterday. These keys have been in service in the Chinese military from the early 1960’s. It weighs one kilogram and it’s a thing of beauty! Morse code hasn’t been a requirement for amateur radio licensing in Canada for ten years, but I’m learning to send and receive anyway and hope to take the 5 wpm test in the Fall to get this function added to my certification.

So until next time, 73!

design, education

Design is in the Details

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Recently sent to design students:

If you’re receiving this email, you have sent me information regarding your third assignment, but what you’ve sent is not what I’ve asked for.

When I was just out of school and had a burgeoning illustration career, I made a terrible mistake: I gave an art director what he didn’t ask for, thinking that he was getting better than what he’d asked for. I re-did the assignment, but word got around, and I never got another assignment in that industry. It may have been a good thing for me in the long run, but it was a difficult lesson to learn.

So please look carefully at the assignment brief and consider that if you do not pay attention to details, you may slide through school, but your career as a designer will be a short and/or unhappy one!

-Michael

design, The Technology of Good Intentions, World Wide Web

RAzer: Another headline cutup program

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RAzer results
Results using join word ‘in’ from headlines on Aug. 30, 2014

RAzer is an extra Python gadget behind the rear end of Media Circus.

The source text for Media Circus are ‘cutups’ of headlines, retrieved from RSS feeds of news agencies. Up until this month, I have been using an online php program called ”cutup“ that accesses feeds from the Toronto Globe and Mail and the CBC, cuts them up and re-presents them on a web page. The strategy for this program is simple: count the words in headline 1 and split it through the middle, do the same with headline 2, then combine the front of headline 1 with the back of headline 2, and vice versa.

RAzer retrieves headlines from 12 world sources and re-combines them by identifying common “join words”, such as ’in‘, ‘on’, ‘of’, ‘the’, ‘at’, ‘to’, ‘into’, ‘as’, ‘from’ and ‘over’. Like cutup, the interface is through the web, but in this case the user has a choice of join word, the number of headlines to generate, and whether or not to retrieve a fresh set of headlines. The form data is sent through a post action to a Python script on my little RaspberryPi.

I like number 8: EGYPTIAN COURT SENTENCES BROTHERHOOD LEADER TO LIFE IN DIGITAL CURRENCY.

And by the way, here’s another reason to own an RPi: although I’m very happy with my web hosting provider Hostgator, shared hosting accounts have a defined set of Python libraries that are installed, and you can’t add new ones. In the case of RAzer, I needed the feedparser library, which was not included, so I had to use my little guy.