Apologies to anyone who uses the RSS feed and has seen posts being republished as I’ve been making changes to the site. Apart from fixing a few typos and updating the semantic layout, the major change has been a slight update of the colour palette to one that uses the Solarized scheme.
I’ve had a few projects on the go and will hopefully have something to write about them soon. In the meantime, here’s a rough list of things I’ve done:
New(ish) colour scheme.
Changed article headings to second-level (the site title is now the only top-level header).
Discovered there’s a <main> element in HTML5, so substituted that in for the <div id="main"> that I’ve been using since discovering CSS somewhere around the year 2000.
Added a link to the RSS feed at the bottom of the home page because most browsers seem to have removed buttons for feeds.
Post archive is now organised by year rather than month.
Got rid of the by tag archive because I’m bad at tagging and honestly I don’t post enough here to justify it.
Changed the permalink structure to omit the month of the post, then remembered what ‘permalink’ means and reverted it.
As a birthday present, I recently bought myself my first oscilloscope. After researching the various makes and models for a fair while, I eventually decided on the Siglent SDS1104X-E. It’s a four channel model, with 100 MHz bandwidth and options to add a waveform generator and digital input.
Given this is my first ‘scope, I started a bit of reading to find out how to best use it. In the process, I came across an interesting post on the EEVblog forums indicating that it was possible to ‘upgrade’ the 1104X-E to the 200 MHz 1204X-E. This, of course, generated a fair bit of interest, with people eventually coming up with a method to extract the license keys from the oscilloscope’s memory.
I didn’t have a whole lot of luck with this, as I wasn’t able to get the version of busybox linked in the post to actually save a core dump. In addition, I wasn’t particularly fond of having to use a modified firmware file from a file sharing site as the first step in the process. After a bit of reading (particularly this blog post from 2007 and a post on the chumby forum), I managed to come up with a slightly different method.
Update (5 April 2019): the myraidrf repositories are now out of date. If you’re running Ubuntu 18.04, your best bet is to install gnuradio from the default repositories and use the instructions on the Analog Devices Wiki to build the gr-iio blocks from source.
I’ve been interested in Software Defined Radio (SDR) for a while, and after tinkering with an RTL-SDR for a while decided to get something with a larger tuning range and transmit capability. Although I was originally planning to buy a HackRF One because of the well-established community around it, I ended up going with the Analog Devices ADALM-PLUTO as I was able to get it for significantly cheaper (approximately NZ$100 including shipping - the HackRF is easily NZ$500+).