Introducing Project TouCans!

I've alluded to Project TouCans over the last several posts, but I've yet to introduce it. Today is the day!

Project TouCans is the new, very compact, packaging of the RockMite 20 with an attached TunaTopper amplifier suspended in a halfwave dipole antenna. Here's the design drawing Diaze and I made

In short, both components are suspended from the top of a pineapple can. The tuna-sized can the Tuna Topper shipped in is flipped over and used as a rain cover and antenna mounting structure. The antenna is mounted to the red and black banana plug binding posts at the top of the assembly. You saw a picture of the latest incarnation of TouCans in yesterdays post. Here's the original—and more colorful—project in its first incarnation

The Ethernet port is the same one used by the Rockmite in the Flying Rockmite—for that matter, the radio is also the same one used in the most recent flying Rockmite. The first coil of Ethernet cable is attached to the pineapple can using electrical tape.

Here's a look at the original board spacing:

The boards are now spaced about a quarter of an inch further apart.

This is the Rockmite seen from the bottom of the tuna can which was cut open and left open to provide a cooling air mass for the amp's FET. (It was also left open out of sheer laziness and eagerness to try out the radio and amp.)

All RF connections are made with twisted pair throughout.

You've been reading about our learning moments with Project ToucCans for the last few days, so I won't repeat those details here. Suffice to say that the rig is getting better every day, and we're making more QSOs per day than ever before from our home station!

A few more images:

Project TouCans QSL card:

That's the rig hanging from the antenna slightly out of focus on the right hand edge of the image.

The calls and spots from Project TouCans—located in our San Francisco backyard—thus far:

Comments

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

The Alcubierre Warp Drive Tophat Function and Open Science with Sage

I transferred yesterday's Mathematica file with the Alcubierre warp drive[2] line element and space curvature calculations to the +Sage Mathematical Software System today, (the files been added to the public repository [3]). If you haven't used Sage before, it's a Python based software package that's similar in functionality to Mathematica. Oh, and it' free. I also worked a little more on understanding the theory, but frankly, I made far more progress with the software than the theory. What follows will be a little more of the Alcubierre theory, plus, a cool Sage interactive demo of one of the Alcubierre functions[1], as well as a bit about my first experience with using Sage. Theory The theory is fun, but it's moving slowly. Here's the chalk board from this morning's discussion Alcubierre setup the derivation using something called the 3+1 formalism which means we consider space to be flat, (in this case), slices that are labelled ...

How Many Files Can You Add to a GPT Project? An Interview with GPT-5 on Limits, Context Engineering Tips, and Chats

Setting the scene: I’m tinkering with Project TouCans, knee-deep in radio logs, SQLite dumps, and Cesium code. Naturally, I’m wondering if shoving all this into one GPT Project is a recipe for brilliance… or for disaster. So I turn to Vril — you know, after Brainy from the Legion of Super-Heroes , because what else do you call your AI sidekick who always has the answers? Time to ask him straight up. [ As an aside, yes, GPT-5 has decided to sometimes call me Vail. I'm not sure why to be honest. Also, I asked Vril, er GPT-5, to write up our interview for me. Apparently, me asking it to 'Bro' up a few stories, just for fun, has convinced Vril that I use 'Like,' more than I actually might. ] Me (Vail): So Vril, how many files can I throw into a GPT Project before it just starts choking? Like, is there some magic number where the context window taps out and everything falls apart? GPT-5 (Vril): Great question. There’s no single hard file limit. What matters is ...

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog