Welcome to stefanolandi.com

Category: Electronics

  • Wait…where did Summer go?

    Holy smokes, Oct 8th already, what happened to August, wait…what happened to June?! Wow, I can’t believe how fast the Summer came and went, I had so many plans, so many projects, things I wanted to do, things I wanted to see, and now we are in the colourful foliage of yet another Autumn, which mind you, is my favourite time of year, and then another long Montreal Winter.

    I’m not complaining really, as it has been a productive Summer, I finally got to work on regrading the Eastern side of our land next to the house and raise it so that it formed a proper swale between our house and the neighbors which will hopefully mitigate the water flow coming from the back yard, which was turning and dumping straight into our garage drain and into our sump pit in the basement, and threatening to flood said basement as it has done on several occasions. The last time this happened was the last straw and I told my spouse, enough of this, I’m going to regrade the land and see if I can cut the water drainage by at least 50%. I’m happy to report that after all the work of building a small retaining wall and back-filling it with dirt to create a positive gradient away from the garage and the drain, the water drainage I believe has been mitigate by more than probably 75%-90%, so I’m ecstatic.
    With this almost finished now, I only have a few paver stones to finish installing and levelling, I’ll be able to bring my project indoors where I have the basement walls to finish covering and some time during the Winter I’m going to start replacing the kitchen floor and the countertop.

    What else is on the horizon? Well, I’m currently working on launching or perhaps re-launching my slandi.net page, which used to be my main domain and is still the domain for my email. Several years ago I came up with a neat acronym for that domain, Stefano’s Laboratory of Analog and Digital Inspirations, it fit the letters perfectly and also one of the ideas of what I wanted to do with my website/blog long-term, use it to share some of my passions, be it electronics, computers, photography and music. I say both analog and digital, not only because it happens to line up with the letters in my domain/name but it also encompasses my dual-love of what is digital and also what is purely analog, be it technology from simple tools to art forms such as painting, sculpture or woodwork. In fact, I used to love to carve wood but haven’t done so in many many years, so it may be something to re-discover in the years to come. As for the Analog side of things, I’m thinking of getting back into simple discrete electronics and have started re-reading some old electronic books that I got from Radio Shack more than 45 years ago now.

  • Blogging cliff #274

    Blogging cliff #274

    I know, a rather strange, cryptic title, but it really is how I feel about my blog these days, it has simply done its best Lemur imitation and jumped off the proverbial cliff, probably some 274 times by now. So where do I begin, or continue, as the case may be?

    Well, I still have the Toyota Yaris, it’s proven itself reliable, gets me to work in relative comfort but it yawn worthy, as I knew it would be but it’s not without it’s faults. It has a terrible exhaust leak, giving it, what might sound like an anemic growl, but worst than that, the leak is causing the Oxygen sensors ahead of and behind the catalytic converter to do their best politicians and lie to the ECU (Electronic Control Unit) into thinking there is much more Oxygen than is actually coming through the combustion chambers and so the car is running rather rich and kind of stumbles its way to work, like some kind of four-wheeled drunk sailor. In any case, I went under the car several months ago in an attempt to replace the leaking exhaust gasket, something the ECHOs and Yaris’ are known for, however, in my haste I ended up ordering the wrong part and so the gasket fit too loose and is not making the right contact with the flange against which it is supposed to rest. I’ve ordered the correct gasket and hopefully this coming Saturday I’ll put the car up on ramps, climb back underneath and attempt exhaust repair No. 2

    I recently ordered to Meshtastic devices from Aliexpress, so what the heck is that?! Well, in a nutshell, it’s basically a tiny radio that connects through a network of other tiny radios and also one to send text messages wirelessly without the need for cell towers or big corporations, think of it as a federated, crowdsourced messaging system. The small device, in my case, a Heltec Version 4 connects to my phone through bluetooth and a special App. I set it up, but unfortunately, the rather small antenna, if I can even call it that, that came with the device is puny and might be fine if you’re in a densely populated area with lots of other Mesh devices. These radios operate on the 900Mhz range, so just shy of the microwave range and require, what is called Line-of-sight communications. Therefore any buildings, mountains, altitude changes, or even the curvature of the earth, take that flat earthers, will prevent the radios from reaching each other. However, because of the store and forward nature of these radios, as long as you can connect to one node, as they are called in the mesh world, then you can through a number of hops, another mesh terminology, send a message to someone many kilometers or tens of kilometers away. So far, I was able to load the software onto my device, connect to it through the App on my phone and the device has picked up all sorts of nodes on the network but I have yet been able to send out a message successfully or have it acknowledged. I blame this on the fact that almost all of the nodes around me are too far away from me to reach with my diminutive antenna, and no that’s not a euphemism! I’ve ordered better antennas from Aliexpress, which hopefully will arrive in a week or so and will continue testing. I bought two of these units, with one going to a friend but he is still in the midst of getting his going. We are 5Km from each other as the crow flies BUT the terrain between us rises some 20m above sea level and we are both around the same altitude, so our connect prospects, at least directly are slim. As I was typing this I noticed another node appear in our neighbourhood, so perhaps through a series of hops we might be able to connect. I’m still very new at this and very much a neophyte, but I’m having lots of fun.

    If you’re still with me this far, thank you. I don’t have any illusions that my blog is even read, perhaps by only one person (Hi S!) but I kind of promised myself that I would ‘try’ to get back into regular blogging about my life, the happenings in and around my hobbies and interests, and generally share a little about myself to the world. Thanks for reading.