Categories
Hardware

Guerrilla Wifi?

This week, I tried some different firmware on the ESP8266 modules that I have. I flashed a version of NodeMCU which allows Lua scripts (and other files) to be uploaded. By using this software: https://github.com/reischle/CaptiveIntraweb I was able to turn the ESP8266 into a wifi access point which serves a static site, regardless of what web […]

Categories
Hardware

RFID Business Cards

I was lucky enough to get some vouchers for Amazon for my birthday recently. I bought some things I needed, but then had a couple of pounds left on the voucher. I decided to ‘waste’ this on some MiFare Classic 1K RFID cards. These can be formatted to the NDEF standard, which means that many […]

Categories
Hardware

Adventures with the ESP8266

I first saw an ESP8266 board at OggCamp as part of a central heating control project. Recently, I’ve been researching a project for CodeClub that needs to control devices remotely over some kind of radio link and so I thought it was time to get to grips with these devices. They turned up in the […]

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Amateur Radio Hardware Isle of Man

Digital Voice in Amateur Radio

Analogue signals are great in that they are simple enough to generate and demodulate, but they suffer in that the signal quality degrades when sent over a noisy radio link. With radio voice systems, this is heard as pops, crackle, hiss etc. and the problem gradually gets worse as signals get weaker. Human ears do […]

Categories
Hardware

Printing from a Chromebook

Chromebooks are nice machines, but of course they dance to Google’s tune. Google are usually pretty good at adopting open standards but occasionally they think they can do better. There are established protocols for printing over a network, but Google have ignored these entirely by ensuring that all Chromebooks only support Google Cloud Print printers! […]

Categories
Stuff

What I learned at OggCamp 2015

I attended my first ever OggCamp on the weekend of 31st October / 1st November. Having never been to any kind of ‘unconference’ before, I didn’t know quite what to expect. So here’s a few thoughts on what I learned: Free culture and free software types are a friendly bunch. This happened even before I […]