what excites you

[donkey]

Just today I got my hands on 2 raspberry pi's. these little suckers have been on my wishlist for 3months. today my arduino experiments open up to a whole new area. I can actually get a completely dedicated arduino setup using the Pi for gui and the harder tasks.
with a few modifications I can have several items open on the pi reading data while detecting sunlight, solar power, temperature etc and all the while able to control my beer robot........ up until now I have been experimenting but to have a central hub for it all at around $40 (plus the addition of my arduino shields etc) is starting to make me feel excited again. the best part is the universal remote portion........ my kids are hating my app for changing the tv channels from the other end of the house... this is just freaking awesome in my books.
a friend is helping me with coding and I got tutorials galore helping me. as you can tell I am getting excited.... so I thought to myself what recently has got you excited about electronics, what keeps your flame for this hobby burning?

 

[davenn]

hmmmmm

my big Xmas pressie to myself for last Xmas .... finally got it early Feb!!
was my new amateur transceiver radio, a Kenwood TS2000X

This had been my dream radio for the last ~ 4 yrs and one that I never really expected to own as they sit at ~ $3000. But then july 2011, came the loss of a job due to company closure with the eventual redundancy etc payout. After paying off some serious debt, I was able to have a splurge and ordered one of the radios.

It does all the HF bands 1.6 - 30MHz 100W out
50-54 MHz 6metre band, 100W
144-148MHz 2M VHF band, 100W
430 - 450MHz 70cm UHF band, 50W and finally the deal clincher
1240 -1300MHz 23cm SHF band, 10W

It is all mode --- AM, FM, SSB, CW and digital across all bands
has pretty respectable DSP (digital signal processing) for both receive and transmit
It has twin VFO's ... that is the freq display directly above the large central tuning know can be switched between VFO A or B
that could be a few kHz apart or on totally separate bands. it also has a totally independant VHF and UHF sub band receiver that uses the freq display on the right side of the LCD panel So I can monitor audio from 2 separate freq's simultaneously.
It can also be set up as a cross band repeater .... set a receive freq on the sub band receiver and a transmit freq on one of the main band VFO's ... so it will retransmit whatever is received on the sub-band receiver pretty cool
Ohhh ..... VFO = Variable Frequency Oscillator

yeah ... its a thing of beauty haha

Dave

 

[donkey]

but can it make you a nice coffee first thing n the morning? lmao

 

[LEDFlashIsAboutMyLimit]

Beautiful.

hmmmmm

my big Xmas pressie to myself for last Xmas .... finally got it early Feb!!
was my new amateur transceiver radio, a Kenwood TS2000X

This had been my dream radio for the last ~ 4 yrs and one that I never really expected to own as they sit at ~ $3000. But then july 2011, came the loss of a job due to company closure with the eventual redundancy etc payout. After paying off some serious debt, I was able to have a splurge and ordered one of the radios.

It does all the HF bands 1.6 - 30MHz 100W out
50-54 MHz 6metre band, 100W
144-148MHz 2M VHF band, 100W
430 - 450MHz 70cm UHF band, 50W and finally the deal clincher
1240 -1300MHz 23cm SHF band, 10W

It is all mode --- AM, FM, SSB, CW and digital across all bands
has pretty respectable DSP (digital signal processing) for both receive and transmit
It has twin VFO's ... that is the freq display directly above the large central tuning know can be switched between VFO A or B
that could be a few kHz apart or on totally separate bands. it also has a totally independant VHF and UHF sub band receiver that uses the freq display on the right side of the LCD panel So I can monitor audio from 2 separate freq's simultaneously.
It can also be set up as a cross band repeater .... set a receive freq on the sub band receiver and a transmit freq on one of the main band VFO's ... so it will retransmit whatever is received on the sub-band receiver pretty cool
Ohhh ..... VFO = Variable Frequency Oscillator

yeah ... its a thing of beauty haha

Dave