Different Things, Hamshack, AI Coding

 I've been slowly cleaning my shack, and doing very little operating. I turned the radio on Last Saturday, but all the real hams were at Hamvention, so I didn't hear nuffin'. I'm in the middle of re-finaling my QDX radio, and I did some testing on a 2m J-pole I have for my mobile radio. What I really need is a way to Charge my 10AH SLA battery, so I can power my radio off of that. I probably need a combo current meter and voltage meter.

Yet another project...

I did do some python coding using Chat GPT to help me get a raspberry pi camera to take a picture. My goal with that is to take a pic, post it to a web page, and notify interested parties, perhaps some widget on this blog to indicate that I'm live in the shack. Right now, I've got a script to take a picture, one to take a live video stream (no audio), and I'm working on a very simple app to take a picture and post it to a web page. Here's a couple pictures of my workbench. They are of a streaming video from my Pi Camera. At the bottom of the right corner of the monitor, you can see the Pi, and the camera. I have it pointed at the QRP Labs QDX I'm working on. You can see the empty final pads on the radio on the video monitor. The weird colors in the top image is because of the way the initial script interpreted the RGB values. Once I added a step to convert the RGB values, the colors came through correctly.

First Image, Funky Colors

Ahhh That's better!

I'll probably have to migrate my shack computer to something more heavy duty than the RPI 2b that I've had for about 10 years i guess. I got it from my dad on a trip home for the 4th of July one summer. This has been the most interesting thing I've done with it. I have a RPI 4b now, with 2gig ram. There's a good chance I might do a "cyberdeck" type build in my portable shack box with that one. That's still in the design phase. I think I know what I want with it, to include a bluetooth keyboard, close to full size, battery operation for all the things inside, built in antenna with tuner/feedline. Once I have a system set up, I think it will get easier to make another. The key to what I want is to build around the radio. I've considered building a radio dedicated to this, perhaps 3 band (40/20/15m) all mode (not an optional feature), the on board computer needs to do digital coms and logging for all modes at the same time. 

I sense an Uber Project coming on....