Micro Basics

I recently saw a cute little, inexpensive GPS module offered at Digikey that includes dual PCB antennas (I assume, maybe it's one large antenna?). The company offering it, Antenova, focuses on antennas, in particular PCB antennas, and I expect this module mainly showcases their technology.

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I recently purchased my first GPS receiver and found my first Geocache, something I've been wanting to do since 2000 when geocaching came to be.

I purchased the Magellan eXplorist 400 with Topo 3D as a bundle from Sam's Club. Read my impressions of this GPS on my first Google Page Creator page - something I also wanted to try out, and will likely review another time.

I entered the schematic and layed out a quick PCB for the wireless intercom project. I want others to be able to build it, and I know many people don't like to work with SMT so I designed it to support both SMT and through hole components.



It makes a fairly compact package - about 2" x 1.7" x 1" not including the batteries. As you can see, the SMT version is thinner. The weight difference between the two is insignificant.

SMT version:

Earlier this month Google announced that it was archiving internal Google presentations on Google Video. I've heard about these, and have often desired to be part of Google just to partake in these (and other) learning experiences, so this announcement excited me agreat deal.

I had expected, that like other Google services, there would be a feed that could be associated with a search term, but was disappointed to find that I could not simply append "&output=rss" to the URL to get a feed as you can with Google News for instance.

I completed assembly of the basic prototypes for version 3 of the wireless intercom:

I had a succesful first test of one-way communication for the RF900DV modules from Laipac. This is the beginning of version 3 of my bicycle intercom. Since I've never posted about this before, a little introduction is in order:

About 3 years ago my sister and I became very active in road cycling, specifically Ultra-Cycling events such as 24 hour races, 500 mile races, and the penultimate Race Across America - a 9 day, 3000 mile race across the USA from the Pacific ocean to the Atlantic ocean.

http://unipage.org/ Unipage looks interesting

Build a Homemade Media Center PC - DigitalDame2 writes "PC Magazine's Loyd Case explains how to build a Media Center PC of your own, how to choose the parts for a custom project, and tips for the Motherboard." I imagine you guys might have some other opinions on what parts and tools to use for the task... [Slashdot]

We started our PVR home entertainment system with a Hauppage WinTV PVR-250, and then upgraded to an ATI HDTV Wonder in 2004 to watch the summer Olympics in 1080i. Needless to say I can't watch our old TV anymore - everything about it is poor compared to using the HDTV Wonder.

Here is some interesting Trivia about Micro Basics...

I've determined that one of the things I'd like to do is start providing regular content to this website. I started off many years ago using Frontpage 97, then simply went to updating the static html files by hand. That takes too much time to simply add a quick article or newsbit, so I'm employing a CMS to make this easier. It will also aid me in improving the site layout and design, given that content will be separate from layout.