RadioJove system repairs and mods
Last week we noticed that the cable connected to the southern dipole antenna of the RadioJove system was broken/disconnected. Not a surprise as it has been up for over six…
Tardis wheels
A few weeks back we changed out the six regular wheels that moved the Tardis Observatory off from the telescope, to four inverted V wheels on an angle iron rail.…
testing the lens
We purchased a canon 75-300mm zoom lens for astronomy purposed, but have not yet had a lot of chance to try it out. So in the daylight of the backyard…
Spring is coming, winter is going
Whilst waiting for aurora in the north, Kim took an image to the south last night. This is with our *old* Canon EOS Rebel (300D) 18mm f3.5, 30 sec exposure…
Linux kernel 4.9.x stable
How a major version can make a difference! This is from last November: Over a month now of seeing almost daily lockups and kernel panics and crashes of the 4.8.x…
next raspberry pi project
Now that the 1st Raspberry Pi Project has been up and running for a good and solid two months with the Starlight Cascade Gardens and Observatories Weather Station, it is…
Continuing unstable linux kernel 4.8.x
Over a month now of seeing almost daily lockups and kernel panics and crashes of the 4.8.x series of linux kernels used in fedora 24 and now 25. The problem…
Unstable linux kernel
For about a month now, ever since we started using the linux fedora 24 kernel series 4.8.x, we have been having intermittent crashes and lockups of four of our linux…
tesla powerwall
Today (Friday 2016 Oct 28) will be an announcement from Elon Musk about the Tesla Powerwall. This is a very interesting concept of storing power in your home and trying…
WeatherPi issues
The Raspberry Pi called Weatherpi, has been out of action the last few days. Turned out there were some power issues and in some fashion the database was corrupted with…
Raspberry Pi projects #2 and 3
We have completed the R&D portions of projects 2 and 3 with the Raspberry Pi and am amazed at how flexible these things are. #2 was as a display controller…
Raspberry Pi rules!
Yay! Success! After a year.. or two.. the time and pi and motivation all came together in the space of under an hour last night. Since 2002 we have had…
Linux Fedora 24 upgrades
Linux Fedora 24 came out today, after many weeks of delays. This is the operating system of choice for servers. The system was running an uptodate Linux Fedora 23 prior…
Sid2 shut down
We shut down SID2, the Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance system on Sunday 2016 April 24th. Over the last 2 years we have set it up indoors, moved it to an outside…
LX200GPS command and control
I am attempting to upgrade the software command and control of the meade lx200gps (2003) and have some issues. The only software I have that has run reliably is handyavi…