Have fun at LFNW. If you run in the the Jupiter Broadcasting crew make sure you introduce yourself and say Hi. They seem to be ham curious and could use a little push to get licensed. About a year ago they did a very well received episode of Linux Unplugged with former host Noah Chelliah KC0SKE. He will probably be around too. I know they like to record little mini interviews and play them in their podcasts so that might be a great signal amplifier to reach an even wider audience.
When I last attended LFNW I 2012 or 2013 they had a booth. I'm not sure if they do anymore since they have gotten more involved in organizing the fest. It sounds like they may be running the grill.
DJ - At the moment, it's a one-of-a-kind, but I'll get ZR Business Manager KD7WSF to speed up on making merch available. Amazing that ZR has fans that want merch 😄.
Regarding my high rate of new projects / products, one thing that has really made it easier is that I try to use the same enclosures and board outlines as much as possible. Using one extruded aluminum chassis (available from Adafruit, or directly from the Chinese supplier) lets me design starting from a board template that I know is going to fit. My face and back-plates are circuit boards, again using a template design so the screw and connector holes are known, or at least easily manipulated. In some cases the face and back panel designs are physically symmetrical which lets me design a single panel, with a different silk-screen on each side. This reduces cost and effort (although in any case these faceplates are stupidly cheap). Other boards are designed to fit inside a small die-cast box, commonly available from multiple suppliers. Simple boards also start from a common template. Of course there are exceptions, and I don't always get the mechanical details exactly right, but starting from known-good physical designs really improves my success rate and speeds up the mechanical design. This way I can concentrate of the electronics without having to constantly reinvent the wheel.
Paul - Apparently "use PCBs as endplates" is a popular technique as I just heard it mentioned on a podcast by another producer of Zero Retries Interesting hardware (https://g1lro.uk/). I had kind of assumed that they were fully metallic and were cheaply produced with a computer controlled engraver (like callsign badges), but the PCB technique makes more sense.
Would be hilarious to get a stack of cheap PCBs as business cards.
The PCBs are way less expensive than having an anodized aluminum plate engraved. My last batch of endplates (for the RX-888 clock adaptor replacement endplate) cost me $13 for 50 pcs, and this gets me silk screening on both sides, with choice of solder-mask color. The solder mask is remarkably rugged, but but perhaps that's not so surprising seeing that it generally needs to go through high-temperature reflow. Of course you need to have other things in the order or the shipping cost kills you - $50 is a typical medium-fast shipping charge (and you can pay more for faster service).
One trick is to use a permanent marker (Sharpie) on the raw edges of the board, in a color that matches the soldermask. It ends up looking pretty good!
And FWIW, JLCPCB will also make circuit boards (and so panels) on an aluminum substrate. But the solder mask and silkscreen ink colors are pretty limited. It's still cheap though.
BTW, I will be at the Dayton Hamvention, mostly hanging out with the HamSci and TAPR folks. I will have some of the Turn Island products with me for show and tell. I look forward to meeting a lot of interesting people!
Paul - Sigh... have fun. I'd be hanging out with the AMSAT and TAPR folks and other Zero Retries Interesting exhibitors. I think I'm at my full quota of flea market finds... but it would probably be compulsive to go out and check it out... "as long as I'm there...".
I'm also going to the AMSAT dinner. I do hope to run into Phil Karn at Dayton-- At the HamSci seminar he and I had some good conversations about new modulation and protocols that would be useful for time-of-flight measurements. I'm so happy that the FCC got rid of the HF symbol rate restriction! Lots of details to work out yet...
Ready - Thanks for that mention. Without going into details, although I was aware of K7VE's death within a few days of his passing, I was asked not to write about it until it became otherwise public. Now there are a number of memorials to K7VE, two of which I reference in my memorial to K7VE in Zero Retries 0150.
Have fun at LFNW. If you run in the the Jupiter Broadcasting crew make sure you introduce yourself and say Hi. They seem to be ham curious and could use a little push to get licensed. About a year ago they did a very well received episode of Linux Unplugged with former host Noah Chelliah KC0SKE. He will probably be around too. I know they like to record little mini interviews and play them in their podcasts so that might be a great signal amplifier to reach an even wider audience.
When I last attended LFNW I 2012 or 2013 they had a booth. I'm not sure if they do anymore since they have gotten more involved in organizing the fest. It sounds like they may be running the grill.
Ben - Thanks for that suggestion. They are here and I'll try to chat them up when they're not broadcasting.
Zero Retries hat you say? Do you have Zero Retries Polo shirts or T-shirts for sale? :-)
DJ - At the moment, it's a one-of-a-kind, but I'll get ZR Business Manager KD7WSF to speed up on making merch available. Amazing that ZR has fans that want merch 😄.
Regarding my high rate of new projects / products, one thing that has really made it easier is that I try to use the same enclosures and board outlines as much as possible. Using one extruded aluminum chassis (available from Adafruit, or directly from the Chinese supplier) lets me design starting from a board template that I know is going to fit. My face and back-plates are circuit boards, again using a template design so the screw and connector holes are known, or at least easily manipulated. In some cases the face and back panel designs are physically symmetrical which lets me design a single panel, with a different silk-screen on each side. This reduces cost and effort (although in any case these faceplates are stupidly cheap). Other boards are designed to fit inside a small die-cast box, commonly available from multiple suppliers. Simple boards also start from a common template. Of course there are exceptions, and I don't always get the mechanical details exactly right, but starting from known-good physical designs really improves my success rate and speeds up the mechanical design. This way I can concentrate of the electronics without having to constantly reinvent the wheel.
Paul - Apparently "use PCBs as endplates" is a popular technique as I just heard it mentioned on a podcast by another producer of Zero Retries Interesting hardware (https://g1lro.uk/). I had kind of assumed that they were fully metallic and were cheaply produced with a computer controlled engraver (like callsign badges), but the PCB technique makes more sense.
Would be hilarious to get a stack of cheap PCBs as business cards.
The PCBs are way less expensive than having an anodized aluminum plate engraved. My last batch of endplates (for the RX-888 clock adaptor replacement endplate) cost me $13 for 50 pcs, and this gets me silk screening on both sides, with choice of solder-mask color. The solder mask is remarkably rugged, but but perhaps that's not so surprising seeing that it generally needs to go through high-temperature reflow. Of course you need to have other things in the order or the shipping cost kills you - $50 is a typical medium-fast shipping charge (and you can pay more for faster service).
One trick is to use a permanent marker (Sharpie) on the raw edges of the board, in a color that matches the soldermask. It ends up looking pretty good!
And FWIW, JLCPCB will also make circuit boards (and so panels) on an aluminum substrate. But the solder mask and silkscreen ink colors are pretty limited. It's still cheap though.
BTW, I will be at the Dayton Hamvention, mostly hanging out with the HamSci and TAPR folks. I will have some of the Turn Island products with me for show and tell. I look forward to meeting a lot of interesting people!
Paul - Sigh... have fun. I'd be hanging out with the AMSAT and TAPR folks and other Zero Retries Interesting exhibitors. I think I'm at my full quota of flea market finds... but it would probably be compulsive to go out and check it out... "as long as I'm there...".
I'm also going to the AMSAT dinner. I do hope to run into Phil Karn at Dayton-- At the HamSci seminar he and I had some good conversations about new modulation and protocols that would be useful for time-of-flight measurements. I'm so happy that the FCC got rid of the HF symbol rate restriction! Lots of details to work out yet...
Sad news. John Hays K7VE of NW Digital Radio is an SK.
https://groups.io/g/OpenDV/message/2057
Ready - Thanks for that mention. Without going into details, although I was aware of K7VE's death within a few days of his passing, I was asked not to write about it until it became otherwise public. Now there are a number of memorials to K7VE, two of which I reference in my memorial to K7VE in Zero Retries 0150.