Much has happened since my last status report on my attempts to observe the galactic hydrogen emission at the famous 1420.4 MHz hyperfine structure line. Now, the new setup is finally proven to be basically working, and in this post I want to describe some of the changes I did. New data acquisition module Most importantly, I replaced the spectrum analyzer by a self-made data acquisition unit which is basically […]
i2c is a protocol to communicate with microchips. It is widely used if the required data rate is not that high (up to few thousand bytes per second or similar). Reading data from some client (which could be some sort of sensor, or an Analog-Digital-Converter for example) with the Raspberry Pi is usually as easy as just reading from a device file (/dev/i2c-0 for example), specifying the device address beforehand, […]
I’m planning to build another radio telescope (I’ll write more about that once it’s a bit more advanved), and for that, I need to solder a lot of SMD stuff — mostly because many of the parts I need are only available in SMD. This has a few advantages — especially it’s cheaper and smaller — but it can also be very difficult to do with a soldering iron, for […]