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Is There Such a Thing as a Homebrew System?

 There's been a lot of talk about what is and isn't homebrew lately. I started hearing the all-in-good-fun contention around the Soldersmoke DC Receiver Challenge.

A few days back, the conversation wandered over to the comments section of a HackaDay post. In that post, I found the following quote from The Tao of Programming: 

"When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas."

While it's cobbled together from modified kits, TouCans, suspended in its dipole beneath a Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory rain shield, will always sit in my heart as a manifestation of "the simplest harmony between machine and ideas"

That makes me wonder if there should be a catetory known as a homebrew system. Sure, TouCans has kits, but they're modded to fit the application. They're also powered and controlled by a homebrew Darlington array buffered momentary contact relay (keyer) and a latching relay (power), that sit on their own breadboard. The signals for that are in turn supplied by a Pico-W which has modified  keyer code that was originally intended to drive an LED along with a microPython web server running WebSocket. The power for everything is provided by an Imuto 100 Watt capable, (we use far less power of course), power brick with its voltage dialed to 15 Volts (yet another mod two the RockMite and Tuna Topper) by a Adafruit USB-C power negotiation and delilvery board.

The rig is controlled by a smart phone app cobbled together by handing ChatGPT the original Python control code and asking for a translation to JavaScript. Then! Throw in the future plan of modding the RockMites keyer to hold the key down while keying the frequency shift control for RTTY, and you've got yet another 'feature'. That feature's already been simmed in JavaScript once again using ChatGPT to provide the scaffolding.



Maybe all of that makes it a homebrew system? It's made it fun at any rate :)

What do you think? Is 'homebrew system' a valid new term? Have you built a homebrew system? Have one on the drawing board? Tell us about it!

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  1. Bill MearaJuly 5, 2025 at 6:55 AM

    Hamilton: You may have to include this kind of "rig" in the system! https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2015/04/our-new-sponsor-homebrew-4-u.html 73 Bill N2CQR

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. antigrav_kids KD0FNRJuly 5, 2025 at 10:41 AM

      Hehehe, that's kind of awesome! The more I read, the more I started to wonder what day the post was from :)

      Delete

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