Flight tracking!

My wife and daughter are in Germany visiting while I'm stuck here at home messing around with some of my projects and having to work. 😀

Having the ability to track flights all over the world is a pretty cool modern ability. As is being able to message each other from 37000 feet, traveling at 680MPH, over the Atlantic ocean.

As much as I enjoy my retro things and often long for the days of old, being able to keep in touch with loved ones, in real time, all over the globe is a very awesome thing!

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-08-21, 02:37:

If it's vaguely similar to a phone system it maybe uses a higher voltage to ring, the ring current/voltage being used for the buzzer at your end and the lock at the other end. While the simple mic and amplifier part runs off only 6-12V

I checked some more but nothing. Beyond my knowledge. Thanks for the input, btw, you are right with the 6-12 V, it's 8. 😀
There's an IC (sop-24 or 20) that drives the impulses through the only available cable. It's probably faster if I buy a new one. Troubleshooting this involves having to ask someone downstairs to ring.

Anyway, the IC isn't marked with anything recognizable.

Maybe so static electricity killed something. It's 12 years old stuff.

It's possible that the slugs and cores get magnetised in some cheap buzzers, solenoids and relays over a decade or so, and giving them a sharp whack with a hammer if you can hit solid metal or connecting them up in reverse fixes things for a while.

Got a camera that got 19V instead of 12V and didn't turn on. It had a 'black box' that turned out to be shorted.

The one on the bottom left corner by the screw. It's between +12V and ground marked as T13 on the PCB though on its own casing it labeled as C13 and not much else to identify buy so I can only assume it's either a puffer cap or inverse voltage protection.

Without it the camera works... mostly. It turns on, and boots, I can reset it with the physical reset button and access it's menu, but half the time it turns on there is no stream. When it works it seems to work reliably (I left it on for almost 2 weeks on my workbench), when it isn't I don't know what makes it boot properly. Maybe unstable voltages? Or it just misses the 'black box'? Something else also got fried too?

Seems to be a decent camera worth saving.

RandomStranger wrote on 2024-08-22, 18:41:

Got a camera that got 19V instead of 12V and didn't turn on. It had a 'black box' that turned out to be shorted. […]
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Got a camera that got 19V instead of 12V and didn't turn on. It had a 'black box' that turned out to be shorted.

The one on the bottom left corner by the screw. It's between +12V and ground marked as T13 on the PCB though on its own casing it labeled as C13 and not much else to identify buy so I can only assume it's either a puffer cap or inverse voltage protection.

Without it the camera works... mostly. It turns on, and boots, I can reset it with the physical reset button and access it's menu, but half the time it turns on there is no stream. When it works it seems to work reliably (I left it on for almost 2 weeks on my workbench), when it isn't I don't know what makes it boot properly. Maybe unstable voltages? Or it just misses the 'black box'? Something else also got fried too?

Seems to be a decent camera worth saving.

I would assume the same as you, based on it's labeling, that it's a bypass cap. Placed there to reduce noise so it doesn't effect the device (and to help prevent it from interfering with other devices). Perhaps not having it there to clean up the power is affecting the performance of the camera? I don't suppose you have an ESR meter, or perhaps a capable multimeter, to test and see if the cap it any good?

If it was me, and If you know the load of the circuit when in use, you could get a rough estimate on the cap value and replace it if you can't determine it's value via a tester. It doesn't have to be exact, anything close in the uF range and over the voltage of the circuit should work. Better than not having one anyway. If all else fails, at least you would know if that was your problem or not, and you're no worse off than you were when you started.

StriderTR wrote on 2024-08-21, 17:33:

Flight tracking! […]
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Flight tracking!

My wife and daughter are in Germany visiting while I'm stuck here at home messing around with some of my projects and having to work. 😀

Having the ability to track flights all over the world is a pretty cool modern ability. As is being able to message each other from 37000 feet, traveling at 680MPH, over the Atlantic ocean.

As much as I enjoy my retro things and often long for the days of old, being able to keep in touch with loved ones, in real time, all over the globe is a very awesome thing!

I picked up an RTL SDR device to track aircraft from home. Only cost me about $50 and I can see who's flying over my city. It's not practical, but it's fun to play around with.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-08-23, 06:00:

StriderTR wrote on 2024-08-21, 17:33:

Flight tracking! […]
Show full quote

Flight tracking!

My wife and daughter are in Germany visiting while I'm stuck here at home messing around with some of my projects and having to work. 😀

Having the ability to track flights all over the world is a pretty cool modern ability. As is being able to message each other from 37000 feet, traveling at 680MPH, over the Atlantic ocean.

As much as I enjoy my retro things and often long for the days of old, being able to keep in touch with loved ones, in real time, all over the globe is a very awesome thing!

I picked up an RTL SDR device to track aircraft from home. Only cost me about $50 and I can see who's flying over my city. It's not practical, but it's fun to play around with.

I have one of those as well, mounded in my living room window, but I just use it to listen to local marine, HAM, and whatever else I can find. I thought about putting together something to pick up ADS-B and display it, but there's not a lot of air traffic over my little town. Still, might do it, just for giggles and, for the same reason I use it for now, just to see what I find.

SDR is a lot of fun to play with and it still amazes me that when I was growing up, you would have needed hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in equipment to listen in on what can be heard today for $50 or less. My dad was a HAM, so I grew up around it. I never got into HAM myself, was too expensive, but I did get into CB radio. Most people had one in the vehicle where I grew up and I had a nice base station setup. My buddies and I used to keep in touch that way. Good times.

On a side note, we were so close to towers in my area that back in the early 90's we discovered we were able to use old portable televisions to pick up phone cell phone conversations and listen in. Not 100% sure what was going on there, but it worked really well. 😜

There was a few opportunities on a TV with a continuous tuner, first down between channels 1 and 2 on the lo-VHF there was the possibility of picking up 49mhz "cordless" house phones, then in the high VHF around 7 and 8 you might have found some oldschool "Radio Telephone" equipment which were basically lunchbox sized things with a handset, less "cellular" those, more medium distance. Then early analog cellular you could have found in the 600mhz or 700mhz UHF bands. I think you could catch some military aviation once in a while too, but not much of that was in the clear, maybe interservice and tanker operations.

I'm wondering why Lenovo has "helpful" software that suddenly decides to update drivers in the middle of a Windows update. Then it asks you if it fixed the problem you were having. This is a P series ThinkPad, not some $300 Walmart special.

I had a successful video capture from a locked-down DVR over HDMI, so that's good. It looks like 720p is the best resolution to use with the poor quality of the source and the speed of my desktop. I don't really want to hammer that laptop with video rendering (it throttles a little at 100% load, but not as bad as my work laptop dropping to 2.3GHz), even though it's the fastest thing I have. The desktop (i5-8500) took 34 minutes to render a 4-minute 1080p video with Kdenlive (only trimming the start and end points and amplifying the audio because the DVR audio peaks at -15dB) while holding 3.9GHz (which should be the all-core turbo frequency) the whole time.

Otherwise, I've been avoiding modern computer stuff (unless you count my job, which is not in IT). There's too much stuff selling your data and presenting childish name-calling as news.

Fixed a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, model SM-G935F from the car boot sale today.

Original mainboard had a fried power IC, that could not be repaired.
Went and bought a local gold G935F w/ broken screen, swapped it in, glued the backside panel back.

Currently set up, and updated to the latest update.

Ordered another 2 TB Samsung T7 shield . They were one sale and couldn't pass up. This will be be the third. These seem to be the direction I am going with storage.

darry wrote on 2024-07-24, 04:48:

386SX wrote on 2024-07-21, 19:25:

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2024-07-21, 19:17:

I recently started experimenting with different DVD upscaling methods, and am really pleased with the results. So pleased, in fa […]
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I recently started experimenting with different DVD upscaling methods, and am really pleased with the results. So pleased, in fact, that I've managed to convince myself to begin the insane job of upscaling my entire Star Trek DS9 box set. This is something I've been wanting to do since 2020, when excited whispers of how awesome upscaled DS9 can look started appearing on the internets.

I know that upscaling an entire 7 season box set sounds like a ton of work, but I actually don't think it'll be that much of a hassle. First, it helps immensely that I still have the full MPEG2 rips on my server. My grand plan is to perform one upscale a day, then watch the finished episode in all its 10-bit 1424x1080 glory at night. Easy peasy, right? Second, I haven't watched DS9 in absolute ages, so now would be the time to rewatch the entire series anyway. Taking on a huge re-encode project in this way just makes perfect sense.

So after playing around with a compendium of buttons and sticks, I believe I've found the perfect mixture of quality and speed. And check it out! As expected, images that are easy to upscale, such as text and star fields, receive the biggest boost:

But even Quark gets a significant uptick in clarity after he passes through the bazillion and one transistors of a GPU. I mean, just look at this sexy master of acquisition. Don't you just want to reach into your screen and massage his incredibly detailed ears? Those aren't 480i lobes anymore baby! Rawr!

Admittedly, it's a tad ridiculous that it takes this much computing power to make DVD-res video look better on a modern digital display than it did on a progressive-scan CRT television. But better than DVD-on-CRT it finally is, which makes me very happy indeed.
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Impressive result. More info the methods, softwares, encoding acceleration or whatever suggestions?

I second that.

Oh shoot, sorry guys! Just noticed the notifications!

The initial set up was actually pretty convoluted, and it took a while to get all of my madVR settings and Avisynth scripting down pat. Basically, I run the original stream through madVR to do an an initial upscale to 720p, as well as perform chroma upsampling, luma sharpening, detail enhancements, compression noise reduction, and banding artifact removal. From there, it goes into Topaz Video Enhance AI to do the final upscale to 1080p. I then feed the resulting PNGs into x265 for encode. I don't actually encode on GPU, since I like the finer control, better compression efficiency, and higher output quality offered by x265 on the CPU. Plus sixteen 5GHz cores can spit out 1080p HEVC in no time. Besides, it's the upscaling process (which is performed by the GPU) that takes the most time, not the final encode. Final step is timestamp correction, since 90s StarTrek does that weird thing with the dual frame rates. Let me tell you, that freakin' bewildered me when I was trying to piece this whole insane process together for the first time.

Initial madVR passthrough is absolutely key though. Doing an upscale on the madVR-enhanced frames looks so much better than just Topaz on its own.

Now that I've got it all worked out and largely automated, it's a breeze. Each 45 minute episode takes around 6 hours to complete. I just let it run while I'm outta the house; by the time I'm back, we have a freshly upscaled episode to watch - yay!

I connected my newly acquired 65$ Sodola SL-SWTGW218AS 2.5G Ethernet managed switch (YOLO) . I did not trust the featherweight 12V 1A PSU that came with it, so I substituted a known good working one. Still waiting on some 2.5G NICs for my NAS and some of my other PCs . I might yet get some dual port 2.5G NICs . I don't expect to need much more for home use any time soon .

Well, that sets up my modern activity for the day then, trying to remember where I put that 2.5GB NIC in case it's useful, heheh. Yeah I guess from that you can tell I am not yet using any speed more biglier than 1GB... and anything I need to do 1GB has onboard, so the 2.5 is just sitting waiting for a pal or an onboard one to die.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-09-04, 19:24:

Well, that sets up my modern activity for the day then, trying to remember where I put that 2.5GB NIC in case it's useful, heheh. Yeah I guess from that you can tell I am not yet using any speed more biglier than 1GB... and anything I need to do 1GB has onboard, so the 2.5 is just sitting waiting for a pal or an onboard one to die.

My Internet is not fast enough to benefit from this, but backups to my NAS definitely will.

30ish $ for a PCIE 2.5GB NIC (USB is really flaky on the only ports I have left available) makes on realize just how far we've come in the last 25-30 years on commodity networking .

Right, nothing is ever fast enough for backups. I wouldn't lose a whole lot for internet sharing if I was on 10Mbit though, I'm on that "shared bus" cable network type connection, so it drops below that some evenings. The other guys, well they were telling me I could have fibre a half dozen years before it got within a mile of my place, then I'm still not sure they can give me anything but a "fibre to neighbourhood" hookup for less than the top end package, which given that I know the last hundred meters of copper is rotten as all hell which is why I had to give up on DSL, might mean I get a handful of megabits and nothing when it rains.

But yeah, local networking seems to go up 10x in speed a decade now for what is the reasonable price point. Don't seem long since 100Mbit was the high end though. 2.5Gbit seems like a weird number to be at really, but I think it's some sweet spot where PCIe ver 3.0 cards can be 1x .... maybe 10Gbit gets normal when PCIe 7.0 gets around. I've got some, but I seem more weirdly reluctant to use USB NICs than USB Wifi for some reason, feels like something I just use for emergencies.

My new speakers and other stuff I brought lately.

I found a Ubuntu 14 installation on an old HD.
Wanted to update/upgrade it up to 24 but it won't go past 17 without errors. 🤣
I quit because I have no time to toy with it but it was fun for a couple of hours while doing other stuff. Also, I did on a random motherboard and maybe that's the issue.
Yes, I used dvds to do it. Well, I got a 500GB disk for further tinkering.

I think even if you sort out the errors at 17, you get a new set of problems trying to get past 20/21

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-09-06, 12:38:

I think even if you sort out the errors at 17, you get a new set of problems trying to get past 20/21

This sounds like good life advice.