Week Notes: TouCans and Other Birds, Power Cycling, Soft Keys, and Night Ops

TouCans continues to fly on its own! We need to work through the bluetooth transmitter turning itself off to save power. We also need to work through strategies to extend battery life with the Pico-W. At the moment, I'm looking into the MicroPython machine.lightsleep method. It looks like I can suspend operation of the Pico-W for a set amount of time after which it will automatically wake back up. This might be particularly handy for camping expeditions where I could essentially snooze the rig while I snooze.

Work continues on the straight key via WiFi for the rig.

Yesterday I hauled the rig around with me all over Lands End hoping for a chance to set up a POTA. It didn't happen, but I did find out that the rig travels well. No issues at all when I reinstalled it in the backyard.

As far as kinda cool pictures of the rig for the week, I managed to capture it framed between an almost full moon and Orion

It appears that the local aviary life think that TouCans was more than an apt name the rig. While wind testing the rig last week, I noticed a bird fly through the video, behind the rig. I've been learning ffmpeg over the last few weeks, and this was a really cool result!

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