The World of Amateurs: Talking to Each Other and Your Projects
HDDG (Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic!) is a discussion group hosted by Supplyframe where SMEs, educators, professionals, and makers come together to share their ideas and projects in the realm of electronic hardware design, development, and products. During these local meetups, guests and attendees alike can highlight demonstrations, help others, and provide community announcements.
There are also special ‘office hours’ where there are meet & greets with the presenters who are more than happy to have a Q&A session with their latest builds or any other questions you might have. The idea behind the HDDG is to give those interested in electronics to see what the process of building them is like, a behind the scenes view if you will.
Electrical Engineer Kenneth Finnegan set the stage for HDDG 26 with an overview of his hobby of amateur radio, focusing on what the different Title 47 FCC rules mean for different communications products and their frequencies, including Unlicensed (Wi-Fi, cordless phones, Zigbee modules), Citizen Band radios (CBs), and Commercial (police, fire, EMT, etc.). Ken made it easy to understand the different frequency spectrum that could be utilized by amateur enthusiasts and how easy it is to become licensed by the FCC (a 35-question multiple answer test).
For the second part of his talk, Ken focused on Automatic Packing Reporting Systems (APRS). These systems provide a digital communications protocol for exchanging information/data over a large number of stations (known as digipeaters) covering a large local area, and that data can include everything from GPS coordinates to text messages as well as a variety of telemetry.
As long as you become licensed, you can build or buy your APRS trackers and modems for any number of projects as the APRS system is global. For instance, you could outfit a weather balloon with a tracker that will grab weather telemetry and transmit it back to you from wherever it may be located.
Although the APRS protocol and packet types may seem like an all-exclusive system for tracking and telemetry gathering, it actually can be used for any number of applications, including IoT and data aggregation projects. Ken has a repository of projects on his blog site that go beyond his amateur radio endeavors, including a plan to spin-up 15 to 25 Raspberry Pi desktops in the wild. You can also check out the latest semiconductor applications from his employer Lam Research.
