Read the README file!

Hello all.

I hope everyone is staying sane in these interesting times!
I find retreating to my shop is often a good way of keeping sane, so make stuff! It helps!

We had another STEM club meeting last week and this time we had media presence! There's a brief shot of my sweater helping kid1 with the project but most of the footage is, rightfully, of Ralph and the kids (Kid2, seen below in his yogurt bedecked shirt was disappointed that he didn't make the news.). This weeks project was hoop gliders. They're simple little things, made up of a straw and some some strips of paper, but they fly surprisingly well. The concept Ralph was trying to get across was actually iteration and documentation. He tried to communicate the idea of controlled experimentation by having them change one piece at a time and seeing how the resulting glider performed. Of course it devolved into a mass of straws and paper wings, but that's to be expected. I only had to retrieve one glider from the stacks this time around.





I've made some progress on the BITX40! With the expert help of Yves D., Engineer Extraordinaire, I was able to locate the issue in the Arduino code that was causing so many compiling errors in my hack-up of the Si5351-Arduino VFO circuit.

Days of internet research returned no results for the error I was seeing (at least, no results that my novice experience could parse). The key was Yves' comment that the only issue with open source software like Arduino code is that the same iteration and documentation process Ralph was trying to communicate to the kids is mostly non-existent. The code gets changed for whatever reason, sometimes good ones, but that the changes don't tend to propagate across the larger community very well. That spurred me on to dig a bit deeper into the files included with the newest sketch. Finally, I found and dug into the wall of text that is the README file for the VFO sketch and sure enough, listed in there is a description of changes that were made to the libraries which require some minor tweaking of the code to compile properly. Now, of course, that README file was available to me the whole time, but it took me embarrassingly long to find it. So there are two morals to this story: first read the README files! All of them! Second, document your modifications. Do it one at a time, and write them out clearly so that you or some other poor soul who comes after you, can see the changes you made and make the appropriate modifications. If the original author hadn't documented properly I would have had very little hope of coming up with working code. Of course I had to look in the right place to find the answers I was looking for, but knowing where to look is often the hardest part of problem solving.

Lastly, at the recommendation of Micheal, N1FBZ, who I think was horrified to learn that I did not have a frequency counter, I picked up this $12 cymometer on eBay. I've got it "boxed" up in a piece of PVC and I'm actually pretty happy with the way it came out. My wife thinks it looks like an explosive device from some movie. I tested it out on the VFO circuit for the DC Receiver project and was happy with both the performance of the meter and the fact that it showed the VFO right where I want it to be. It tunes from about 6.8 to 7.4 MHz. It's a bit wide, but that's no big deal.

OK, I'm done, quit reading and go build something!

73 de KB1VNA
Eric