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Sunday, April 7, 2013

Power Supply Refactoring - part 4

Another weekend have passed, and along with it a few more results as I slowly but steadily walk towards completion of the project. The digital voltmeter/ammeter displays have still not arrived from China. This is the last piece of hardware missing. Adding time to the equation and all the elements necessary to complete the project are available.

Friday, April 5, 2013

Power Supply Refactoring - part 3

Bit by bit the work is advancing. I have finally defined the schematic diagram from the entire power supply circuit. It includes also the PIC based fan control.



Monday, April 1, 2013

Power Supply Refactoring - part 2

The parts from Mouser have arrived (was pretty quick..wouldn't the shipment have been taken care of by FedEx):


Friday, March 29, 2013

Power Suppy Refactoring


In this previous post I had the chance to present and tear down my old custom-made power supply. It worked flawlessly for about 10 years. I decided to buy a new linear lab power supply because I needed something better with more features such as constant current operation and digital display of both voltage and current.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

NOAA APT Satellite - Night time weather pictures!


My first and accidental attempt at receiving images from a weather satellite was surprisingly very succesful. However as I only started capturing the RF signal late in the satellite pass, it was only possible to retrieve a small portion of the transmitted image.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Receiving weather satellite images with cheap hardware

Before the Internet, anyone willing to independently obtain satellite imagery from the source would need to buy expensive equipment capable of decoding the analog slow scan video images transmitted by weather satellites  such as the NOAA APT ones. Today there are four of these NOAA satellites still operational, the NOAA-18, 17, 15 and 19. All of these are sun-synchronous satellites, which means these orbit the earth at around 800 Km of altitude and cross every latitude at approximately the same mean local solar time for each pass. This kind of orbit is useful because of the consistent illumination (by the sun) of the target upon each pass.

Monday, February 11, 2013

AMIRO - Autonomous MIni ROver


In a recent past I have been very active blogging about this project, which have occupied a portion of my free time in a rather pleasurable manner. After a period of pause I thought of bringing this project back to life, but not without providing an overview of what have been done.