Here's a link to the 10th anniversary: https://makezine.com/article/home/food-beverage/pringles-can...
Currently #27: The anatomy of a smart bulb https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808230
The OG smart bulb I made back in March of 2003 https://web.archive.org/web/20090923154300/http://www.oreill...
Where I live, we only have wireless internet options, so antennas are critical infra.
Interestingly, its sort of hard to find antennas optimized for specific frequencies. Most affordable options seem to be "wide band" generalist antennas, e.g. 900mhz-6ghz. Meanwhile the nearby tower might have the best signal on a specific band.
I looked into making log periodic/yagi antennas and it seems surprisingly simple and cheap. It seems possible to make something out of PVC and copper wire that can outperform a commercial antenna costing several hundred or more.
which I think makes very clear the principle of a Yagi-Uda antenna which is that different sized antennas are above or below resonance so they are behind or above the input signal in phase. The central antenna is driven, the other two are not, but when the frequency is right the phasing of the antennas is such that the signals reinforce each other in the desired direction.
What threw me the first time I built one is the "hairpin" impedance matching network which is a single-turn coil that looks to me (from the viewpoint of DC electronics) like a short circuit so it took a bit of faith to hook my radio up to it and hit the "transmit" button.
Amazingly though I was able to talk to people in Rochester, NY with my 5 watt handheld and that antenna using a repeater on top of a ski resort mountain 80 miles away.
If you can't find what you're looking for, scratch that itch.
Do you ever regret being bitten by this bug? I was bitten by it as well, at an early age.
It worked out OK for me in that I've made lots of money, but I feel that it's come at the expense of possible greater impact and glory should this neurodivergent mind have latched onto something more "real" instead.
I wonder how this experience has been for others.
I know that i am not alone in this feeling...as i have heard others my age - and who were orignally not going to "go into tech as a career" - cite similar feelings. Maybe its burnout, or maybe i feel that too much intelligence in tech is wasted on getting silly clicks and things (as the famous saying goes about this age's greatest engineers, etc.)...or maybe a combination of many factors (not excluding age). Anyway, yeah, others have such a feeling about *working* with computers. ;-)
at least in our society money is a measure of impact, or at least desired impact, but of course there are other measures.
I'm a bit puzzled by your perspective because I dropped out of music school because I felt I could make more impact writing software :)
Phones tend to not have swappable antennas so you’re limited to doing something like using a parabolic dish to concentrate signals, and positioning the phone at the focal point.
Maybe you could construct something like a yagi antenna using a phone as the driven element…
The Pinephone also has one, IIRC.
Here's another one: https://piped.video/watch?v=X2oImlGIviE
w = v / f
We know v will be 300 (rounded up based on the speed of light mentioned above). For f, we need to plug in the Wi-Fi frequency.
You could just use 2.4, but in order to be a little more accurate, we will use two more decimal places. For channel 6 in the 2.4GHz spectrum, we need to plug in 2.437. Solving for w yields ~123mm.
w = 300 Mm / 2.437 GHz w = 123.102175
Now that we know the (w)avelength for our radio (f)requency, we can begin calculating the dimensions of the can based on the guidelines mentioned previously.
> w = 300 Mm / 2.437 GHz
Has the wrong unit for c, it's missing the "per second"
At least wireless ISPs don’t bother with spectral diversity on consumer fixed links.
Predicting constructive/destructive interference… you’ll need to do some radio-mobile plots (I think that was the software with topographic maps built in).
Got some flak from my 1st Sergeant at the time, but that was about it. At least I could raid in WoW, unlike everyone else on that godawful WISP.
It was the first time I purchased Pringles.
https://www.youtube.com/c/andrewmcneil/videos
Much theory and DIY concepts for cool antenna designs. I like the BiQuad design:
These days? With mobile data anywhere I'm likely to go, that's more trouble than needed. Aside from that, modern WiFi isn't really conducive to external antennas.
