Tech Projects

FlightAware – ADS-B Receiver

I’ve been fascinated by radio for many years. This was begun by the magic of Short Wave radio, then by the kind and generous provision of some exposure to amateur radio by a kind local ham – G0KOK.

During the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, we had some time, so decided to build a FlightAware receiver. It uses a Raspberry Pi, with an eBay purchased aerial mounted to the garage wall.

You can take a look at my statistics here.

AirPi – Weather Station

As a first RaspberryPi project, we created our own instance of an AirPi. This was a project created by two students some years ago, who have since gone on to do other great things.

I decided to use this as a way to show my son how to solder. Purchaing the PCB from a far sighted person on eBay and then lowly building the kit of parts – and duly assembling. It reminded of me of being a 9-10 year old and creating a 20m-band HF communications receiver.

While we used the original software, I ended up finding a fork by Haydn Williams, which was much more usefufl and contained the integrations.

To make this useful, I integrated it with the marvellous Ubidots SaaS data platform, to visualise the data. In the future, I would lke to capture all the data in a massive SQL database, to be able to keep my own long standing weather records, creating a time-series for this area.

You can take a look at the immediate readings here.

Digitising Our Music

In preparation for the eventual purchase of some form of streaming enabled, in-house music system and to declutter the house of CDs – I digitised our entrie CD collection. When I say ‘entire’, I mean almost everything that I thought worthy of taking up hard disk space.

The techie bits…

The CDs were digitised in both FLAC and AAC formats, using dbPoweramp. This was done on a standard laptop, with the filepaths used to save the files on a NAS. There are approximately 700 CDs, using approx. 290GB. In addittion to dbPoweramp, I used the bliss audio plugin on the NAS to correct some cover art issues.

Mobile Playback

I use a Cayin N3Pro (the one with the valves) to play my hi-res music. This includes both the FLAC versions of the digitised CDs and other hi-res tracks I’ve purchased and downloaded, since I’ve pretty much stopped buying CDs now.