I'm in the same place as my ROOPHLOC entry from the year before
last. Then I think I said something about trying to build an optical
link to use for the next year's attempt, and I made a start but
didn't get it finished. Two years later it's still not finished. I
have got most things together but the response of the receiver isn't
quite right - needs some hysteresis but somehow my attempts at
adding that have only made things worse. Actually drawing out the
circuit rather than just plugging parts into a breadboard would
probably help.
Today I at least got the transmitter part (an array of LEDs that
flash when the RS232 signal goes Low) working well, and I thought I
might have a blitz on it this evening to get it off the workbench
and rigged up for installation on a tripod. But no, too lazy, so I'm
back to using my regular mobile broadband modem instead. Which is
what the optical link would end up talking to anyway because it's
what I use for my home internet.
Its a full moon which might have made things hard from a background
light perspective anyway, but actually it's really nice compared to
last time I did this here when it was pitch black. There's a lot
more life to the night out here on a full moon, and a relatively
warm night as well. There's a nice warm north wind blowing over me
right now in fact. Frogs croaking, sheep baaing, cows mooing, ducks,
magpies, and some unidentifiable birdlife that chattered on its way
over top of me a few moments ago, plus the odd bat - always heard
but never seen.
So a nice little exercise in outdoor communications even if they
haven't turned out optical. Much better than next weekend when it's
set to be wet and cold, a stark contrast to the 30degC heat of
today. I think I'll leave that holiday I was considering then off a
little longer again on that basis too.
Well I'll leave it at that. I've only really posted to the phlog
from that old mid-90s PC I use this year, and I can't run my phlog
update script on the Aussies server because it's all containerised
and SFTP-only now. I was going to make an SFTP-based version but
unsurprisingly I never bothered. So I'll just edit the gophermap
manually to include this post and leave the RSS feed to tomorrow
morning. I'm using my 'new' laptop, the Thinkpad T60, because its
got more battery life than the other one.
Everyone must have got boozed up watching the footy then gone to
bed, there's a remarkable lack of any car headlights flickering in
the distance that I've noticed so far. One airplane droning away
in the background now though. Anyway, goodnight from under the empty
moonlit skies of Australia.
