So, I’ve been slowly working on the lights in the hackerspace. I’ve rewired them using Weidmuller WDU2.5 terminals on DIN rail, as this is what I use in work. It’s a pretty great system and lets me have clean wiring, easy to read wiring and things will probably be safer. The next steps I’d like to take are to implement the Internet of Shit on our LED lamps above the main workspaces. Because these are lights and need to be used by real people, they cannot be solely internet connected, that would be ridiculous. This means I’ll need to consider per-LED-BANK physical buttons to compliment my software implementation. We’ve got 4 banks of LEDs, so 4 inputs and 4 outputs will be needed. …

This is a continuation of this post about my previous failures at DATV. Debug, Defrag, Defuzz and Start Again Okay, so Bournemouth didn’t go so well. Let’s try again - this time reading manuals and stopping to think. The goal for this project is simple - transmit and receive a DVB-S signal. Hardware What tools do I have available? CCC Camp Badge (HackRF) RTL-SDR Numerous Raspberry Pis Laptop (Linux) Probably a whole other pile of things Software There’s a few things I know about that could use: …

So I’ve been curious about running more FreeBSD for a while, it’s kind of an interesting OS. I’ve been dipping my toes in the water by managing to install it on my hackbook (HP Compaq TC1100) with the intention of taking it to 32C3 as my main device. FreeBSD has some lovely architecture features that I really enjoy - the base system is more or less an immutable image between installs, bar a few files… At least it is in my use case. No fancy kernels for me, etc. Any tweaks you do make to the base system you can easily be reminded of by comparing yourself to it. …

Digital Amateur Television After the RSGB Convention’s DATV talk, I’ve been super curious about playing more with DATV (Digital Amateur TV). It’s pretty cool - transmit broadcast standard video using low powers and homebrewe equipment. I remember many moons ago Iain, tj and I came up with an MPEG4 proof of concept and streamed Citizenfour between a hackrf and rtl-sdr. Naturally, to do it properly, I’m going to have to advance my license (work in progress, honest). Before we hit that stage, though, I can work on receiving and fiddling about on an SDR at home. …

See Day 1 notes for the first half of this piece! Convention’s over! I left Milton Keynes at roughly 1630 after a full day of lectures and after a stopoff in Glasgow made it home at 3am. Total round trip of 1003 miles! That’s a long way to go for some radio chat. Day 2 was again insteresting, enthusing and inspiring - here’s a compressed colletion of the notes I took. …