:: ham and eggs from frgo ::

The new year 2009 startet with a lot of changes - new company, new job, new ideas. One of those ideas was to reduce our CO2 footprint - and we quickly set on a set of things we wanted to do: Setup a photovoltaics plant that tracks the sun, and Setup solar panels to create heated liquid supporting our heating system. So, here it is: Step 1: Setting up the photovoltaics system. The tracking mount is on a mast that is about 5 meters high, and puts the DC panels right on top of our garage. When fully lit by the sun we will be able to get 4.5 kVA peak from the plant, amount to 6000 kWh per year. I shot a few photos from the poor craftsmen working in strong rain... This shows the truck taking heavy steel parts to the mast - only a few centimeters from our neighbour's house. As we had a major construction going on at the house at the same time they put all the parts straight into our garden - creating, well, a bit of chaos .... After about half-an-hour the fast-hardening cement w...

The RF amplifier will work with the tetrode tube GU-84b. On the left you see the anode voltage transformer - that beast delivers 2 500 Volts at 2 Amperes in continuous service. Current work is to program the controller that handles the operation of the power supply. The controller is based on the AVR microcontroller ATmega16 - a very flexible 8 bit CPU that can be programmed in C language using the GNU C compiler gcc in its avr-gcc incarnation ...  All this is done on a MacBookPro using publicly available tools on Mac OS X (10.5.2 currently). It's pure fun - I can tell you. You should try it one day... Oh, btw, the transformer weighs a woppy 52 kg.  Building the cabinet for the power supply is just about to be completed - and was not an easy task. But hey, it's just a hobby ... Now for the details - An AVR code excerpt: // ---------------------------------------------------- // MAIN // --------------------------...

Aloha! Wow - I always refused to have a blog. Now, well, here it is - my own blog. I don't know yet how frequently I will post or what the posts will be about. So, this is the all-in-one-you-must-have-a-blog first post. There's some other places I can be found:  USENET newsgroup comp.lang.lisp - watch out for posts from "frgo". On the ether: I enjoy doing Ham Radio. If you listen carefully on the 20m band (14.000,00 kHz to 14.350,00 kHz) you might hear me under my callsign DG1SBG. I am also QRV on 145.450 MHz in the VHF band in FM. You have to be close to my locator JN48rn though to hear me - it's VHF after all. Hope to CU! Yours truly - frgo.