Tony Cox
@thesoupdragon.bsky.social
CEO, UK Biocentre, Milton Keynes. @ukbiocentre.bsky.social Vintage HP test equipment enthusiast. Electronics tinkerer and fixer-upper. Opinions are my own.
More or less complete. Added auto-cal and (after a couple of dead ends) I got Tx back-off working using LoRa’s channel activity detector (CAD) system. Packet Tx will delay up to a limit and if still stuck they are dropped. Reduces collisions dramatically when traffic is high.
Writing to an EEPROM *safely* via I2C and avoiding bus lockup during frequent hardware interrupts triggered by LoRa network packets arriving is REALLY hard!
After several weeks of learning about LoRa networks my sensor network is finally running. Custom sensors based on a RAK3172 broadcast to a Heltec LoRaV3 receiver which filters and aggregates data. This sends the data via a high speed (wired) UART to a NodeMCU. This bridges data to WiFi and MQTT.
Floral theft! This bee is far too big to crawl into the Hosta flower - so it heads up to the neck of the flower, cuts a neat hole and “steals” the nectar. Crafty 🐝
I see Greater Anglia Trains don’t have Ticket Inspectors any more - they have Revenue Protection Officers. Jeez.
Constant current source is working well. Stable 250uA with a diode to add temperature stability.
This is definitely going to be a soldering challenge. It may be time to invest in a hot air station.
These Heltec LoRa V3 dev boards are really good for learning/testing ideas but with only 36 pins (many performing overlapping, incompatible functions) you rapidly hit limitations (eg external SPI conflicts with SX1262 radio chip). The docs are a bit limited too. So it’s Kicad time.
My LoRa cryo-freezer monitor is coming on nicely. Doesn’t look much but PT100 RTD, battery monitor and door open sensor are all working. Power to RTD only switched on while reading. “Power is everything”, as they said on Apollo 11.
Help please! Can anybody identify this pcb-mounted wire press/clamp connector?
Experimenting with a couple of LoRa sensors. The Heltec LoRa ESP32 v3 boards seem capable and easy to set up in the Arduino IDE. They come with neat 3D printed cases. The ESP32 ADC is not great - but with careful calibration it’s ok. Will be interested to see how long the 1100mAh LiPo lasts.
Hand soldering these SOT-23 3.3V LDOs is proving a challenge. I don’t have a hot air soldering gun so it’s a filed down standard tip and lots of concentration.
My breakdown cover renewal quote from the AA was £93.92. Despite everything being online they explained that £50.40 of that was an "arrangement and administration fee". Suffice to say I'm now covered with The RAC on equivalents terms for £50.
Why on Earth is eBay asking for my National Insurance number?! Well, whatever the reason, forget it!
Quick tip for those who don’t have or don’t want to use a second email account for setting up additional accounts: If you have a Gmail account, you can create unlimited variations by adding a +suffix to your email handle.
FUTURE-AI: international consensus guideline for trustworthy and deployable artificial intelligence in healthcare www.bmj.com/content/388/... A set of 30 best practices to operationalise trustworthy AI in healthcare were defined addressing technical, clinical, socioethical, and legal dimensions.
Is governing by executive order any different from being a dictator? Asking for a friend.
The Guardian is not pulling its punches today. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
‘In a real sense, US democracy has died’: how Trump is emulating Hungary’s Orbán
Trump has moved to gut the federal government, fire critics and reward allies – a path similar to ‘would-be dictators’ like Orbán, experts say
theguardian.com
Phone developers: if you force me watch a full screen advertising video *before* I even get to the app home screen it’s an instant delete. No matter how useful the app may be.
Birthday present to self :-) I’ve been looking for an HP5370A time interval counter for some, er, time - and this one is in mint condition. It even has all its feet! 🥳
Just (re)discovered my first (2005?) assembler dev board in the garage. This is an 8051 self-build kit by @paulstoffregen.bsky.social and it still works after ~20 years. So good that he still keeps the documentation available on his website. I think the afternoon just disappeared…
My end-of-year goal was to move all my daily work reporting R scripts from Windows to an Ubuntu server. The Windows task scheduler is truly arcane and I find cron much more friendly plus the whole “spaces in directory names” on Windows drives me a bit mad.
Adobe recognise that their new Acrobat UI pop-ups and AI-assistant nonsense is so annoying they give you the option to “Disable new experience”.
I want to automatically set the datetime on an i2c RTC from my WiFi network. But first it seems I have to flash an updated firmware to the ESP8266 chip on a WIFI shield with an Arduino - its a really arcane process.
Having fun remaking some of my first Forrest Mims circuits from 1980. Even found an ancient Maplins receipt for some components :)
