Tiny Packet Network (TPN) Node Reference Platform

I completed the build of three (3) Tiny Packet Network (TPN) Nodes. Each node is on a Plexiglas platform with white door handles so they can be stacked easily. The platform has the Arduino UNO board and a small proto-board. The proto-board contains the 433 Mhz transmitter and receiver modules a NeoPixel and a potentiometer connected to the A0 analog port on the UNO. These nodes will be used to further the development of the distributed power nodes. The potentiometer can be used to set a battery level and the NeoPixels by color will reflect what each node is doing (e.g. RED = providing power, GREEN = receiving power, WHITE = standby (no action), YELLOW = error, etc.)

Capacitive Battery Charger round 2 (Fail)

I did not have any luck with the  first round of the capacitive charger and thought maybe I need more charging current. The TRW swap meet was today so I kept my eyes peeled for capacitors and founds some 20 uF 200 volt units and grabbed 2 for $5 (good deal). More capacitance will increase the current ability. I swapped in the the first one and I was charging at .75 Amps. It sat there at 10 volts  after an hour and was not going up. I placed the second 20 uF capacitor in parallel and now had 1.5 Amps of charging current. After a couple more hours the voltage had gone down to 5.5 volts. I think this battery is not recoverable in this manner. I will keep the parts handy and try it on some Seal Lead Acid (SLA) batteries if I find any cheap.

Capacitive Battery Charger

I was inspired by the capacitive battery charger by Mikey Sklar HERE and I am hoping to re-cover a 140 Ah marine battery using this technique (4 years old). I just looked at his documentation and found I had most of the parts except the the capacitors which I got for $2 each. I wired mine up like the drawing below and monitor it with my multi-meter. My battery was sitting at only 6 volts at the beginning. After putting the charger on it for a while it jumped up to over 11 volts and was climbing for a while. After 20 hours it is now at 11 volts and  I did check the current and it is pulling about 1/2 amp. I am going to let it rest a day and hit it again and maybe leave it on for several more days and see what  happens.

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.