220 karma · joined December 1, 2017
This seems to be specific to PA game laws and at least at a glance, seems like it might be entrapment by the game wardens.
Also there's more complexity and overhead on a pi for simple tasks. And you potentially have to worry about updating the system and packages and other maintenance.
Not saying microcontrollers like the ESP32 are completely invulnerable to failure but it certainly is less likely.
And for another anecdote on uptime, I have a few Arduino-powered devices operating 24/7 for well over a decade now.
Yet I've been feeding ADSB-Exchange and FlightAware from a Pi Zero for years and never had SD card problems.
I really like Alpine Linux for the Pi, running in it's own read-only mode where changes must be committed to disk. But unfortunately, Pi-hole isn't compatible with Alpine (at least last time I checked)
As far as activities, the sky isn't even the limit! Sort of a joke there as there are all sorts of radio astronomy / space-related RF, a few are: bouncing signals off meteor trails and aurora, communicating w/ satellites and the ISS, pulling weather imagery straight from NOAA satellites, conducting EME ("earth-moon-earth") communications, the list goes on.
You really don't need huge antennas or anything like that unless you start getting into something very specific and/or high power. Even using the lower frequency band (still called "HF" high frequency), you can use a very small diameter wire that you can temporarily toss up in a tree and talk to people around the world. The length of that wire grows the lower in frequency you are operating but it's still a small light wire you can wind up and toss in a pack.
You can buy a Baofeng UV5R handheld ("HT") for under $20 USD and start listening to people on local repeaters and listen in on weekly "nets" conducted on those repeaters straight away. A repeater is just a powerful station that is ideally somewhere high that rebroadcasts your communication to a wider area than a handheld could do. You'll see some criticism of that radio and other budget radios by some of the more grumpier types but they are a great way to get started for not a lot of money. You can also listen to NOAA radio weather reports with one, which is particularly useful if you are in an emergency situation, power outage, etc. If you get licensed (hamstudy.org is a great resource for this) then you can talk on those repeaters and direct ("simplex") to other local hams.
That Baofeng handheld operates on VHF and UHF bands, specifically the 2 meter band and 70 cm bands (you'll typically see bands listed in meters and millimeters, this is roughly how long the radio wave [wavelength] is for that band - e.g. 2 meter band is 144 MHz to 148 MHz, and a 148 MHz radio wave is 2.053373 meters long) These bands aren't really great for long distance communication. You can make/buy an antenna and make a contact with the astronauts on the ISS though!
Depending on your interests, it's a lot of fun building radios from kits or completely doing it yourself. There's a whole subset of "QRP" (reduced power) communications where people use tiny low power radios and still make contacts around the world. There's an activity called POTA (Parks On The Air) and SOTA (Summits On The Air) where people will set up in a park or on a mountaintop and try and make as many contacts as they can in a period. You'll often see them using small QRP low-power radios.
You can send images and video (SSTV - Slow Scan TV and ATV - Amateur Fast Scan TV) over the air, there are lots of digital modes / packet radio where you can send emails, messages, and a plethora of other activities.
SDR (Software Defined Radio) is fun as well, they are basically USB sticks you can hook up to a computer and receive a wide range of signals. I run one that monitors for ADS-B beacons on nearby aircraft and I feed that to some of the flight tracking sites. You can listen to shortwave broadcasts from other countries and pretty much everything mentioned above (and more!) You can check out some online at http://websdr.org/
Suggesting 3D printers should be more like ink/laser is 1000% the wrong direction. 3D printers exist _because_ of open source, it isn't some "artifact" holding them back
But your point is still valid!
If you have an "old fashioned" 24VAC line, you could add a rectifier and buck/step-down power module to drop that to 5VDC. Or just unhook the 24VAC transformer and install a 5VDC one.
It would have been neat to see how much the RGB ring lighting up white helps in no/low light cases. All in all, nice writeup!
I have zero problems with Brave; I don't use the crypto bit (not for me) and I still use uBlock Origin with it as Brave + uBO seems to do the best job at blocking garbage that I've seen so far.
I'm OK if you want to try returning "similar" results but there should be a way to 100% disable this, otherwise it makes your search borderline worthless.
"M" is used quite frequently for million along with "K" for thousand. "MM" as million is used in conjunction with "M" for thousand, but that's a different notation set. "M" & "K" usage is generally much more popular than "MM" and "M", at least in any areas I've been.