BBC Micro bit hardware designs are now available on github
I think the profile of the nRF51 is about to take a big leap forward, as the previous closed hardware design for the BBC Micro-bit, which has been rolled out around a million school children in the UK,...
View ArticleDon’t buy this smartwatch / fitness tracker !
Just a quick post about another smartwatch / fitness tracker that I was miss-sold on eBay Its title was A16 Bluetooth Smart Watch Health Wrist Bracelet Heart Rate Monitor Sports New Do NOT buy this...
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Arduino STM32 NeoPixels (WS2812B) using SPI DMA
RGB LED strips (aka Neopixels) have been around for a number of years now, so I’ve been somewhat behind the curve in not having tried these interesting devices until now.However I recently bought a 1M...
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Investigating a RCWL 9196 / RCWL-0516 “Radar” motion detector module
A new type of “Radar” motion sensor has been getting a lot of attention in the last couple of months, but no one seemed to know how they worked, so I decided to buy a few of these very cheap devices...
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Arduino on the ID100HR fitness tracker
Some time ago…, Goran Mahovlic commented about how he was trying to run Arduino on an IDo 003, fitness tracker / smart watch which uses the nRF51822. As I’ve been interested in smart watches for some...
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New nRF52832 based smart watch available (ID107HR Plus)
It looks like the same company who make the ID107 HR have brought out a new product called and ID107 Plus, which uses the better nRF52832 MCU I ordered 2 of these from AliExpress and they arrived a few...
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Github gists for viewing images from an Arduino
I find I’m often writing small snippets of code which I’d like to share but don’t warrant setting up a Github repo. I often end up posting them on the stm32duino.com forum as they are often STM32...
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Resurrecting an old Kenwood TS-50 HF Ham radio
I’ve had a full ham radio license since I was a teenager, and when HF radio was popular in the 1990’s I bought a Kenwood TS-50 HF transceiver. Since my last house move, its been gather dust, so this...
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Cheap “5V 1W” solar panel
I’ve been investigating solar power options for some external monitoring devices, so I invested in three (3) “5V 1W” solar panels from eBay, the amazing price of $1.69 AUD each (around $1.20 USD or...
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LiPo battery charging from a 1W 5V solar panel
In my previous post, I reviewed some “5V 1W” solar panels, with a view to using them to power some IoT devices, and in this post I’ll show my experiments and conclusions about using the panel to charge...
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Radioddity GD-77 DMR transciever initial obsversations
I received a Radioddity GD-77 Digital Mobile Radio, handheld transceiver, as a Christmas present, for use with Ham radio, and have spent several weeks setting it up, and working around its various...
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Radioddity GD-77 is almost certainly a Tytera MD-760
I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that Radioddity is just a brand name of Tytera for some time, as it seemed strange that the Radioddity GD-77 just happened to fit into the Tytera MD-380 charger. Then...
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Building a Amateur radio DMR contacts list
One cool feature of Amateur radio DMR, is that the other station’s details can often be shown on the transceiver’s display. The trick is to have the other station’s details installed as a Contact in...
View ArticleExtending the frequency range of the GD-77
Following on from my initial post about the Radioddity GD-77 DMR transceiver, I’ve now found all the places in the CPS software, where it stores the frequency limits imposed on the “Basic information”...
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Starting to investigate the GD-77 USB connection
Like many other hand held radios, the Radioddity GD-77 comes with a programming adaptor cable, which has 2 jack plugs at one end, and appears to have a USB interface in the USB plug end of the cable....
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Re-engineered Radioddity GD-77 CPS
The Radioddity GD-77 is a great DMR radio, however the CPS (PC software used to setup the transceiver), is not the most user friendly piece of software I’ve ever come across Ideally the CPS would be...
View ArticleRadioddity GD-77 : No transmit power bug
The Radioddity GD-77 has a serious bug in firmware version 3.0.6 which causes its transmit power to be set to zero. This problem normally occurs if the radio performs a Factory Reset because it finds a...
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GD-77 CPS and ActiveClient USB communication analysis
In my quest to improve the GD-77 CPS, I have been investigating the way the CPS and also how ActiveClient (which manages the DMR-ID system) communicates with the GD-77 and I have found that that both...
View ArticleAdding new features to the GD-77 CPS
Just a quick teaser about a new feature I’m adding into the Community version of the CPS Douglas DF4DQ sent me a link to a standalone utility called “GD77Generator”, which can import contacts into the...
View ArticleNew Radioddity GD-77 CPS and Firmware (version 3.1.0) released
I’ve just received a copy of the new CPS and firmware for the GD-77 I made the slight mistake of installing the new version of the CPS, only to find it had overwritten my old CPS (DMR.exe). I’m...
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