Projects Archives - Jacob N Calvert

Why the Alinco DR-735T can’t transmit at 9600bps

March 7, 2021

The Alinco DR-735T is a very capable, dual band, dual VFO, full duplex, cross-band repeat capable radio, with an industry standard mini DIN TNC connector on the back for working packet. While I was reading about the capabilities of this radio in its manual, I noticed that it can received 9600bps packet radio, but can only transmit up to 4800bps. The reason why was not intuitively obvious to me upon first glance at the radio’s specifications, so I went deeper…

Who knew installing Windows could be so hard?

July 16, 2020

Jacob

Projects

Recently, I upgraded my wife’s 2-in-1 laptop to an SSD from a 5400RPM platter drive. The hardware installation, which is usually the tricky part on laptops, ended up being the easiest part. Installing Windows 10 ended up taking me down a road for a couple of hours filled with frustration and irritation with not only Microsoft, but ASUSTek too! Here’s my experience. The Problem The standard installation procedure for Windows via USB for a good while has been to dd…

Better JTAG on the Cheap with the FT232H

March 5, 2020

Jacob

Build Your Own, Programming, Projects, Systems, Testing

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about using the FTDI FT232R as a cheap JTAG debugger. I’ve been using it for a bit now to play with my Raspberry Pi 3B, and now that my code size has grown, the FT232R is just too slow to cut it. Here’s a breakdown: on the FT232R, the max speed I can set the adapter to is 3MHz. This has given me a transfer speed (loading via GDB) of around…

Building a Customized Linux Image for Raspberry Pi with Yocto + Docker Support

December 22, 2019

Jacob

Build Your Own, Programming, Projects, Uncategorized, Virtualization

Motivation I recently stumbled upon HypriotOS while looking for Docker-ready distributions for my Raspberry Pi 3B+. I flashed this onto and SD card and started playing around with it. It works incredibly well, but I noticed that it was built for armv7l which is a 32-bit implementation. Since the Raspberry Pi 3B+ has a 4x core Cortex-A53 which is 64 bit, I wanted to make use of the 64 bit processor! I’ve worked with Yocto before (in fact, my day…

Hacking a Smart Outlet

November 17, 2019

Jacob

Programming, Projects, Systems

IoT Everywhere Everything, and I mean everything is “smart” these days. Everyone has heard of the Internet of Things, and we are living through the emergence of some incredibly revolutionary connectivity. Some pretty cool and useful concepts have come out of it, admittedly, but there’s also some drawbacks. I really enjoy the idea of having smart outlets that I can command with my voice, and there are outlets-a-plenty on Amazon, but can I trust them? I’ve decided to use my…

There’s a new USB-UART chip in town

October 4, 2018

Jacob

Projects

I love Hackaday. I read it almost every day. Yesterday I a blog post caught my eye and I wanted to share it. Most of the time if you want to add a USB interface to your project, you’ll have to get an FTDI chip, or one of those similarly operating knockoffs. But those chips require additional external circuitry that you may not want to fool with (I know I don’t). This Hackaday blog post introduces a neat little chip, the CH330.…

Into the 3D printer game I went!

September 27, 2018

Jacob

Projects

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at 3D printing, but prices were too high and the machines required too much maintenance… until recently. I’ve purchased a Creality Ender 3 printer from Amazon in the past month or so. I grabbed the printer, along with a roll of grey AmazonBasics PLA, and decided to try my hand at 3D printing. My “all-in” budget was around $250, shipped. Now this printer is unique in several ways. It has a heated…

Build Your Own: Clean Boost Guitar Pedal Part 2

June 17, 2018

Jacob

Build Your Own, Music, Projects

The parts have arrived! It’s time for assembly. PCB and Parts are here! The printed boards from OSHPARK arrived recently and so did the components. Below is a list of the components I selected for this board. Item Mfg Qty Description Enclosure Hammond 1 Aluminum enclosure for stompbox Resistors Elegoo 1 525 pack of assorted resistors from 0-1M Diodes MclgclM 1 100 pack of assorted diodes DC Barrel Jack ThreeBulls 1 12 pack of 5.5mm x 2.1mm Op-amp Fairchild 10…

Build Your Own Router – Part 2

April 19, 2017

Jacob

Projects

BYOR part deux Hello all! I’m back again with part two of the Build Your Own Router Series! In this post, we’re going to do the following: Talk about our proposed network architecture Set up our interfaces Set up a DHCP server and define our subnets Define some subnet ranges for our devices Set up some DHCP reservations Set up a DNS cache server Set up some basic iptables rules and forwarding What you must have before this point You…

Build Your Own Router – Part 1

April 10, 2017

Jacob

Projects

Hi all, Since many folks these days are talking about VPNs and improving their online security, I thought I’d write a series on my approach to this. In this series, I want to cover the following: Why would you build a router to improve your privacy? What are the basic skills needed for building your own router? What hardware is needed? What software is needed? What does all this effort buy me? I’ll address these questions and more as I…