Making a DIY programming cable for the Tait 8105 Radios

I am currently building a project that utilises two Tait 8105 UHF radios. I needed to upgrade the firmware and configure the radios, but couldn't find a programming lead in the UK for sensible money. After a bit of research, I managed to build my own using a FTDI TTL-232RL USB adapter and a DB9 Breakout board.

Using UDEV rules to ensure a USB serial device always links to the same location in /dev/

If you're using several USB serial adapters on a linux machine, you may have found that their /dev/ names change after a reboot. This can be frustrating if each serial port is plugged into a specific device and you want to always access it using the same /dev/ name.

Fortunately, udev rules exist that allow you to symlink a serial device to a name, persistently. Udev rules are very powerful and support lots of tweaking, but for now I will cover the basics of assigning a USB serial device a static name.

More engineering trains at Moorgate

I regularly pass through Moorgate Tube Station on the way to and from work, and one of the disused platforms is often used for storing engineer trains and equipment.

Recently there was a collection of diggers and a bull dozer, all with tracks and wheels for using the rails-

Puppet: Dipping my toes in the water

A need has arisen to get to grips with Puppet, a configuration management tool aimed at simplifying the management of large clusters of servers by creating a 'template' that's then applied to multiple devices, rather than making configuration changes manually to each server.

The tutorial below is heavily drawn from Melissa Anderson's Digital Ocean tutorial here, but I tend to find writing something down helps it stick, so here goes.

A Raspberry Pi Based ADS-B receiver (Aeroplane Tracker)

I recently purchased a 868/916 MHz Antenna which allegedly has a frequency range of 800 - 2500 Mhz. It's my intention to use this with a UKHASnet node, but this will require some planning and construction.  Rather than waiting I thought I'd put it to use, and some members of the London Hack Space have been playing with PiAware, a software image that allows a Raspberry Pi and RTL-SDR dongle to receive ADS-B  location data from Aeroplanes and forward it to flightaware.com, a popular site for viewing live Aeroplane locations and additional information.

As I had all the required bits, I thought I'd give it a go.

A Raspberry Pi and RTL-SDR based APRS iGate

APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System) is an amateur radio based system for real time communications. These can include GPS location, short messages, weather reports and other telemetry such as the location of an amateur radio repeater.

APRS messages are often sent from low powered devices with limited range, so the protocol includes the use of digipeters - a device that receives an APRS message and then retransmits it, and iGates, devices that receive APRS and then send it to centralised systems over the internet.

One of these systems is aprs.fi, a site that stores and displays APRS data-

A few members of my local club (London Hackspace Radio Club) have been experimenting with APRS and found signal coverage is a little patchy in London, so I've decided to setup my own iGate. I'm hoping I will be able to pick up signals from the near by M25.

For more information, click 'read more'

Push notifications from Tasker to Telegram

My father recently went on holiday and complained that because I didn't have WhatsApp he couldn't send me photos whilst he was away. I don't use WhatsApp for various reasons, primarily because it's tied to a mobile number, so I explored the alternatives.

I've dabbled with Telegram in the past and heard good things, so I thought I'd give it another go. The API is a lot more open than the previous instant messenger I was using (Google Hangouts) so I wondered to how 'hackable' it was. After some research I stumbled upon the ability to send notifications from Tasker (A 'scripting' type app for Android) to Telegram

Click 'read more' to see how to get Tasker to send notifications to Telegram