Simple ATMEL 328P chip Arduino

I picked up a couple on items at the TRW swap meet this weekend to help in the Micro controller area. I will need several Arduinos to do the Tiny Packet Network testing. Even as cheap as Arduino UNOs are they could always be cheaper when you need several. Tim Larsen has a booth at TRW and sells many Arduino components including a bare bones Arduino kit for $8 HERE. The $8 kits get you the ATMEL 328P chip pre-loaded with the Arduino boot-loader, a 16 Mhz crystal and the couple of caps. You still need a way to load your code. If you want to program it easily, you will need a USB FTDI adapter which you can attach for programming and then you remove it afterwards.

I wired this up on a proto-board and was able to get the standard "Blink" running. I hope to make a simple PCB for this design soon.

Uploaded Version 0.33d

The current working Arduino alpha code for the Tiny Packet Network digipeater node is now on sourceforge HERE.

Tiny Packet Network Progress

I had a chance to work more on the Tiny Packet Network (TPN) protocol that I had previously been calling TinyAPRS this weekend. I changed the protocol  a bit from my original ideas and now coded  a basic digipeater, but didn't have enough Arduino's to create enough nodes to really test it.

A friend dropped by with his Arduino (and coding knowledge) and I was then able to get two (2) full Digipeaters, one (1) monitor and a transmit only system that injects beacon packets. Below is a trace LOG from the monitor of the traffic on the network. The trace shows the Arduino time in mills (milliseconds) and then the packet data after the ">" symbol. In the figure below, the first two lines are beacons from node 33 and 34. Line 3 is a beacon from node 5. Notice that node 5's beacon hop count is 2 in that packet. Line 4 shows node 33 has digipeated node 5 and decremented the hop count  to 1. At line 5, you see node 34 digipeated node 5 as well. Then on line 6 node 34 digipeated node 33's packet from node 5 and the hop is now zero (this is a 2 hop digipeated packet!).

Once we add a few more features to the code it will be posted on SourceForge in the Distributed Power Node project. The code used here was version 0.33d based on 0.30g (Thanks Gary!).

Nostalgic in 2014 - Vintage CPU

2014 got me thinking about some the early computers I used back in the day. I found a COSMAC 1802 ELF CPU emulator HERE and played around a bit with it in toggle mode since I had an ELF in the 70's and dreamed of getting TinyBASIC. I found TinyBASIC for it and got that going with the emulator. What fun...

I then wondered if anyone had done and a IMSAI emulator and I found Z80sim, complete with CP/M and MBASIC. I located Super Star Trek in BASIC and ran it... so cool!

The best find was the TRS-80 Color Computer emulator HERE. It was possible to even run OS9. I am hoping to run a friends BBS software that he wrote in the 80's once we can figure out a way to get the software off the original machine.