Magic Button

It’s been a while since I’ve done a ‘re-print’ series post. Once in a while it’s fun to pull something out of the archives of my old blog, and ressurect it here. In this case, I was reminded of a couple older posts when I was cleaning up my YouTube channel (which here means deleting all my videos off of it and moving them to a peertube instance.) For now I won’t go into the specifics of the move, other than to say for me YouTube was just a place to stick the very small number of videos that I share in my blog posts. At the end of the day, peertube is better suited for that purpose, for a whole host of reasons.

Anyway, as I was moving videos, I stumbled across these two, which reminded of their original posts. I’ve combined them into a single post for this reprint.

The stuff I show in both of these videos I’ve since switched over to being controlled with node red. The hardware is still the same, but doing the control with Node Red has made it much easier. I’ll have to write something up on that in the near future.

Where Did That Noise Come From?

Like many shacks, mine has a number of different audio sources. When you’re trying to pick a signal out of the noise, or even just trying to sort out which computer made the “ding” sometimes it can be challenging. My solution to this problem involved some VU meters, an Arduino Uno, and a relay board. This one is easiest to describe by just showing you, so check it out:

The code that runs on the Arduino to do this is still a work in progress, but if you’d like to grab a copy or dabble, you can snag it from one of my github repositories. (More on this later - but I just started a github to enable sharing all the technical details about the shack!)

​Enjoy!

More Over-the-Shoulder Updates

​ I’m not generally a video person, but here’s the second post in a row with a video to provide the update on the progress in my shack! Aren’t we so lucky?

​ Last time I was sharing some info on the VU meters/Relays/Arduino arrangement that I came up with to give me an indication of which thing in the shack was generating audio. This time, the update is more about progress towards getting some additional shack automation, and eventual remote operation ability. We start off with the shack “powered down” (mostly) so that you can see everything “come-to-life.” My very amateur code is available on Github (search for user N3VEM on github and you’ll find it) and the boards and relays I’m using are listed below as Amazon Affiliate links. (P.S. I switched from an Arduino Uno to an Arduino Mega for the control functions between the last video and this one as well. )