For those of you who never saw Ron in his entire life, first of all, why?
Second of all, Ron is every year here to go to everyone, he didn't miss almost a single
edition, and he's very known for flying drones overhead, doing weird things with antennas,
blowing up balloons, putting balloons into trees, and doing weird stuff, and we keep inviting
him back, why? Because Steinego is such an awesome technology, and he always has the
best LEDs around. I'm even wearing Steinego right now.
So she, so she. So we continue this saga, Ron has been here for years, talking about
going without wires, and he always brings a bunch of wires. I have no idea when that's
got to be fixed. So let's go for the last round of go without wires, the last one,
last episode or not. We'll see. Ron.
I am dead program, some people call me Ron a couple of humans called me Dad, but on all the
internet I cosplay Dad program. Technology is for higher, very subtle. I have a small
consultancy called the hybrid group, where we create the software that makes your hardware work.
And we have a few open-source projects that some of us work on, including this little one you may have
heard of called Tiny Go. Wow. So, FastM 2021, I showed us how to go without wires.
Then in FastM 2022, we went further to go further without wires. Then in FastM 2023, we go even further
without wires. In FastM 2024, we go without wires strikes back. FastM 2025, return to go without
wires. And now, FastM26, go around the world without wires. So I just want to explain,
because some people keep bringing this up and I just want to get us out of the way,
what do I mean when I say without wires? Well, obviously wireless communication is
existed for quite some time. Here we have some smoke signals by some indigenous Americans painted
by a settler. Here we have talking drawn communication from Africa. This is actually a whole chapter
in an amazing book called The Information. I really recommend. But when I'm immune is electronic
wireless communication. So here we have me and then lots and lots of wires and then space and then
a whole lot more wires and then you. Okay, so I just want to make sure we understand the relationship
between the wires and the no wires. All right, got that out of the way. So naturally, in the
early days of electronic wireless communication or wired communication, actually, more code.
More code really changed everything with the telegraph. And here we see a more code key. So more
code used electrical wires to turn the signal on and off and make it clicking sound. And thanks to
that clicking sound, we had something created by Samuel Moore's called Morse code. And so Moore's
code takes each of the levers and numbers in the Moore's code alphabet, alphabet numeric system,
and represents it either as a dot or a dash. A dot is a short signal, d, in the nomenclature,
and a dash is a long one, dot. So a is dda, b is da, d, d, d, d. You may have heard this one
before. S is d, d, d, d. Oh, is da, da, da. S is d, d, d. Yeah, you've heard this before, right?
So Moore's code is just one of the various wireless protocols supported by a new package that I've
been working on for a few months called the time to go wireless package. So the difference between
this and the other packages is these are only the protocols. It's not the actual hardware support.
So you may have seen my talk a few years ago about Lora where we're migrating all of the
Lora and Lora when wireless protocols into this and that we have a lot of other wireless
protocols as well. But let's take a look and listen in on Moore's code in audio form.
So trying to go in Moore's code would be da, d, d, d, d, d, d, d, or sorry, da, d, d, d, d, d,
da, d, and then da, da. You remember that one from the SOS? Okay. So let's take a look at the
code if we have interference. We do. Oh my gosh, that's good. All right. Yeah. It does work upon
occasion. All right. So let's take a look at this program. So our message is just the word time
we go. So we're going to in our transmitter. We're then going to tell what frequency we're transmitting
on, which is going to be an audio frequency of 1200 hertz, one we can hear. And then three times
we're going to transmit our message, sleeping five seconds in between since Moore's code is kind of slow.
And the way that we're actually giving this to happen is by using a transmitter, which is using an
audio player. It just takes that player. Sorry, it's not 1200. It's 440 hertz. And then
configure it. And then we will play that using a couple of packages, the beep and the beep
speaker package. That way we can actually hear this on my computer. Okay. So far so good. So
one of those listen in, if we can, um, Moore's audio. And for this, I've got my delight
from a key grip. Why are these just speaking? All right, let's hear her.
That was the old.
All right, can you go in Moore's code? Wow. Okay. Don't go far, but I was. All right,
how radio, but you don't have, but you know, you can relax for a minute. We have a couple of
slides. How radio works, the two long didn't read the addition since I've never actually explained
radio. And I use it all the time. So radio, actually electromagnetic ways were discovered by
Heinrich Hertz in 1887. An amazing discovery, but he himself thought it was a very little practical
value. That's kind of amazing. A few years, sorry, skip to slide there. Nicola Tesla was able
to receive radio waves with his amazing experiments with coils. But unfortunately the term
laboratory fire that took place in 1895 destroyed all of his work, all of his papers,
the rental backups. So, uh, that basically caused him to have to start over entirely from scratch.
That same year, Judea Lamar Coney demonstrates wireless telegraphy for the first time. He tries
to get a grant from the Italian government, not only do they not give him a grant, he actually
refer him to an institute for the insane. There's a whole story between all of this, that's a whole
another talk. Anyway, what actually is happening is electromagnetic waves. They're traveling,
we have electricity, and we have magnetism, and they're actually related together. Maybe you
already knew this because we can take electricity and create magnetism, an electromagnetic,
or we can take magnetism and create electricity. That's what a turbine does. And so, an antenna
is just really a piece of wire that's sensitive enough to receive these electromagnetic waves,
and then somehow amplify them so we can actually turn that into some kind of useful
information. A.M. radio, for example, the last bastion of true freedom. I am not kidding, but
anyway. A.M. radio uses amplitude modulation. If we want to actually be able to transfer information
that we can hear, and we want to do it on a single frequency, we need to be able to take that,
and we instead of modifying the frequency we modify the amplitude of how loud it is, and with
this modulation, we can take a single frequency and create multiple frequencies within it. The
dynamic range is very limited as is the frequency range, which is why it's typically used for
spoken word broadcasts. So, a crystal radio is a powerless device that connecting an antenna
with a detector, which is nothing more than a crystal generally made of germanium,
a coil, which is nothing more than wire wrapped around something that does not conduct generally,
or that does, depending on what kind of coil you're trying to make, headphones, which is nothing
more than a P-A-Z electric crystal that vibrates when you apply electricity to it. Also, you can
create electricity when you apply pressure to it, remember that electromagnetic thing, and then
the ground. Well, you can actually make a crystal radio using a razor blade and a pencil.
You've ever seen movies from like almost 100 years ago. The razor blade is serving as the capacitor,
it's accumulating the charge, and a little bit of pencil because the lead pencil actually has
some graphite, which is graphene, which is got germanium in it. Yes, we can actually, as long as we
have something we could listen in, like a little tiny headset, which we can make from any sort of
P-A-Z electric buzzer, we can listen on broadcasts. So, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to
use this offer to find radio, because this is the 21st century after all. So, a software to find radio
is a sophisticated device with a built-in radio that's able to take and utilize that in a digital
form, taking the analog broadcast and converting them to digital so we can then do things with them.
For example, listen in. So, I'm going to use Raspberry Pi Pico for this, which you've seen a
couple of these show up, very handy device. So, microcontroller, it's not a single board
Linux computer, but it can actually do quite a lot, like networking and controlling trains.
So, I'm going to use a random wire antenna. This is actually a term of art. It means any piece
of wire that's not the correct length generally much shorter than the right length for the
antenna of the frequencies you're trying to transmit. So, the reason why this is a little bit of
a problem of because of harmonics. Who here plays music? Not enough. Well, you may have noticed
when you hear music that you don't just hear that first sound, you actually hear other sounds on
top of it, whether known as harmonics. Well, this happens also in the electromagnetic frequencies,
and it can be quite a problem because it can create terrible interference with other devices.
So, in order to get around that, we're going to use something called a low-pass filter,
which does kind of like what it sounds like, it only lets the low frequencies pass. That way,
all those harmonics, which will be disrupting everyone's Wi-Fi and cellular and other frequencies,
microwaves. So, let's take a quick look at the hardware. Oh, I actually have to run my
program with the video. Let's see. Oh, yes. Make sure video.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's working. Yeah. There we go. This is actually using one of my other projects
washing vision. So, oh, there's my board. So, here we got our, we see it? Yes. We got a Raspberry Pi
Pico. Then we've got my little low-pass filter, which is just made out of two resistors and a
capacitor. And then let's take a look at my random wire antenna. Oh, I didn't put it. Oh, here it is.
It is, in fact, a length of random wire. I did not lie. This was just a piece of random wire I had
around my workshop. So, let's try and get it on scramble because, and time is, do you need to be
on a length? All right. So, we'll plug this in, hopefully, to the light spot. Well, it's actually work.
And let's extend the antenna. Yes. Yeah, here we go. This should totally work. No interference.
Speaking of, if the video cuts out all of a sudden on the stream, this is why.
All right. Is it still plugged in? Yeah. So far so good. All right. So, I'm going to actually move
this out of the way now because I have to plug it into my computer to give it some power.
But you've seen what we're going to do. Oh, actually, let me also show you my antenna.
So, normally you need to have a big antenna, but I have a very small one. The reason I can use
such a small antenna is because it's both very, very noisy and also it has a nine volt battery.
So, let's take my antenna and also carefully hook it up to my tripod that I use for these purposes.
Yeah, it's totally work. Good now. Yeah, it'll receive it. All right. Cool. So, we got that.
All right. We've looked at the antenna. All right. More is code code. We should look at the code.
If you still haven't been in that. Yes, we do. All right. So, this is very similar to what we saw.
Wait, is this also the audio? No, I just forgot to change the description. Oh, well, my bad.
So, this looks exactly the same because it's almost exactly the same. Right. The main difference
is what happens when we transmit. So, since I'm going to actually use radio. So, for this,
we're going to again use the wireless Mars package and then we're going to use the machine
package and the radio is actually going to be nothing more than a pin on the Raspberry Pi
because all we really need to do to make a transmitter is to create some type of frequency
that is the frequency we want to transmit over and over again. So, we can do that by using pulse
width modulation. Normally, it's a control mode. There's things, but it's a cool hack to be able to
use it in order to actually transmit. In this case, on the 540kHz band, which is AM radio.
And so, we initialize our transmitter just by initializing the pulse width modulation.
We're going to generate the sine wave since what we want to do is something we can hear.
We don't just want to have a- No, we actually want to be able to hear the same Morse code
sound that we heard a few minutes ago through the speaker, but this time we're going to be hearing
it transmitted using AM radio. And then, all the rest of this is just using the AM radio.
You know, I am violating Patricia's rules about not using the routines. Sorry, this was a-
Yes, I will work on that. All right. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So, let us see if we can
actually get- Oh, yes. So, for this, we're going to need to start my-
Let's start up my SDR. All right. Cool. All right. We need to actually switch it so that we're in
AM radio mode, and that we have our automatic gain control turned on, and that we are then listening
to the correct frequency, which as I recall was 540kHz. Yes. Oh, and one other really important
thing, we need to have our device output so we can- Oh, maybe we can hear it through the HDMI.
Let's find out. We hear it. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be pulsing like that.
I feel like that- Okay, yeah, that's more like it. I think with the HDMI audio. All right.
So far, so good. Let's mute that for a minute. All right. Where were we? Oh, yes. So, let's go back
to our code, and so now I'm going to flash the- What's it called? Oh, I'm AM, of course.
I'm going to actually flash my board right now with the new time you go program,
which if the demo gods have had their way with me enough, this particular weekend,
let's see what happens. Oh, we have to unmute.
I'm not hearing anything.
440 is the audio frequency. 540kHz is the broadcast frequency.
It might be that I need to move the antenna away from all these other wires.
I keep you an antenna personnel. Oh, whoops. That definitely disconnected the antenna.
All right. Okay, let's watch when we go. Okay, you can have that then.
Okay. Walk that way. A little further. A little further. Now stop.
All right. Let's try plugging this in again. Oh, wait, all of them. It goes here.
And let's try switching to the audio output on my computer because I felt like
that may have had something to do with it.
And then let's make sure that my antenna is all connected on any point, it's always a thing.
Somebody else can hold the antenna, just give it.
Oh, yeah, but let's see if it's over here. Oh, maybe it stopped at the plug-in again.
No, it's making that sound terrible noise. I think there's just too much interference here for A and
right here. It could well be. Well, let's just move on. But it does actually work,
even in my hotel room warm, the middle of the atrium. But we don't have time to mess with that too much
more. So, all right. Well, one demo not quite so great. Thank you, antenna person.
Okay. Well, moving on, moving on. After I'm radio. So after I'm radio,
uses frequency modulation. So frequency modulation, instead of modulating the amplitude,
like we can see here, instead of modulates the frequency, there's several reasons why that's
very important. One of them is when the problem with A and radio is the further away you get from
the source, the weaker the signal gets and you can't just amplify it all equally because then it
starts getting distorted. Frequency modulation, you can basically amplify this much as you can
because it modulates the frequency instead of the amplitude as you can see in this cool animated
gif from Wikipedia. And one of the things we can do with frequencies, modulations do something
called frequency shift king, where we have some binary digital data and we have a carrier
frequency, whenever it happens to be. And so we can modulate that signal, sorry, based on the
frequency and that way we can get multiple frequencies that represent individual binary digital values.
So let's make this smaller. The reason why this is kind of important is that it's very easy
to disrupt radio signals. This is showing some examples here, even when you have direct line of
site, depending on the wavelength of the frequency of the signal you're trying to transmit,
it can be blocked by the ground itself because your antenna is not high enough. That could have been
what happened. Road traffic is trucks drive by and it keeps intermittently coming in and out
every time a truck drives past. You finally know this. And of course obstacles in the way.
Yeah, I have some direct experience with that myself. But if we use the correct frequencies,
then we can take advantage of a thing known as ground wave propagation. During the daylight
hours when we're being bathed in solar radiation from our beautiful sun, the signals we send
if they're in the correct wavelength will bounce off the ionosphere, bounce and go literally
around the earth. We can transmit or receive for thousands of kilometers. It's pretty amazing.
So I myself really like transmitting on the 20 meter band, which is 14 to 14 320 megahertz.
And one thing is to know is with antennas, size does matter. Because it depends on the wavelength.
If we see here 5000 megahertz, it's only a 15 millimeter antenna. If we look at 868 megahertz,
which is the lower and lower wind frequencies, a mesh plastic, it's an 86.33 millimeter antenna.
So it's something you can put in your pressure pocket. Now we get to the 433 megahertz.
Well, when we're talking about the 20 meter band, we are talking about a 10 meter long antenna.
Yes, it's kind of hard to carry one of those around. So you also need a radio license.
These are license frequencies, not like a 68 or some of the other ones here in Europe,
915 in the US and some other countries. To use these frequencies, you actually need a radio license.
And when you get a light radio license, you get a call sign. I am Echo Alpha 1 Juliet Zulu Hotel.
So you can reach me. QRH. All right, all of this is in order for us
who work at TASA. The time you go aeronautic and space alliance.
And to high altitude and beyond, that's our motto.
And so I worked for the last couple of months on a little thing called tiny global 3,
which is the time you go control solar powered high altitude peak ovaline space cluster.
But yesterday's list of did not actually go as planned.
Like, yeah, I couldn't work with it.
Yes, the winds of fate were not kind to our lift off. There's a very skeptical person.
But amazingly, after several minutes of sky fishing,
which is what it's actually known as to those of us who had to do it before,
some people cheered about five minutes earlier, and that was definitely premature.
But yes, it did take off. And I was really rather tired. I knew that to speed up an amazing video,
taken by friend Moritz, which shows the entire spectacle. And here we see tiny global 3 flying off
into the upper reaches of our atmosphere, destination above the troposphere, where it would be able
to get above the weather. So, however, the payload did not survive close contact with
terrestrial lifeforms. It's very sad, but our online tracker, we can see that unfortunately,
never saw a signal. Maybe I shouldn't have picked Channel 404.
My test on Channel 416 did work. So lessons learned, my friends, lessons learned, at least it
wasn't 100 million euros blowing up on the pad. So, you know, that's good. So, so what is whisper?
I keep saying whisper, WSPR. So, I don't explain right after I start this. Do I have time to
do it or should I stop? All right. I don't say right after I start this demo for reasons,
I don't explain right after I start this demo. All right. So, I think I still have
okay, we need to run this, my SDR. Okay, this time we need to change to 19,
something or another, don't worry about what that is, because it will adjust, but we need to change
our mode to USB, and we need to turn off our automatic game control, and we need to change our
output so that it's outputting to a virtual sound device. All right. The reason we need to do that
is I'm actually going to run another open source program called WSJTX.
So, WSJTX is a program which is able to decode the audio received by the software to find
radio, and then figure out what protocol it is and show us some information. So, let's see
by the other of the settings, and we set to the right radio. Let's see if my, okay, yes.
So, let's change our frequency to the 20 meter band. All right. Now, in order to do this,
I brought another device. Now, I could start, wait, one last thing before I will show it to you
in a minute, but let's actually plug it in. This has to be done very quickly. Oh, where's my device?
I have to have only every two minutes, can we send a signal? So, I don't have much time to plug this in.
Yes. It must be plugged in right on time because I didn't have time to make it slightly more
user friendly. All right. On my mark, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, engage.
List off. Are we seeing any signal? No. Shoot. We have to wait for the next window. Oh, man.
Oh, it's good. I forgot to pick play. That would have been helpful, huh?
You can see the signal coming in loud and clear, but since we didn't start at the right time,
I won't be able to decode it. But that's okay because I can explain a couple things in the meantime.
So, what is whisper? It's the weak signal propagation reporter. It is a way I originally created
just for a ham or our amateur radio enthusiast. We're able to kind of communicate with each other
and say, how's my signal coming in? And it communicates at 1.46BOD. 1.46BOD. That means,
1 transmission takes 110.6 seconds to send 162 bits. This is long distance communication,
like with other planets, even, right? Mostly with stars. So, transmissions must start on even
UTC minutes. You need really accurate time for this to work, which is why I have a GPS on my
belief. So, here's an example of showing our FSK4. You see there's the four different
frequencies, and they're being demodulated in order to be able to interpret the whisperer protocol.
And so, our whisper transmitter is over Raspberry Pi PK2, and it's started built in SIA 5351 frequency
generator, which all it's doing is generating frequencies, which we then amplify and put through our
antenna. Another random wire antenna, since I don't have the ability to carry around 10 meters of
antenna with me. But actually, I do have the ability to carry around two five-needed long antennas.
Let's take a look at the hardware. So, let's see, where did I put it? So, here is my...
Closer. Closer. So, this is actually the board that was inside of time ago of a free.
It's a Raspberry Pi PK2 that's been soldered to a carrier board on how it's got the GPS, and it's also
that's the SIA 5351. These are the random wire antennas, which as you can tell are quite a long
way from 10 meters in size. So, that's not really that much of a problem when you have antennas
like I have, which is my antenna. So, my antennas that I made, that I carry around on the balloon
are made from very, very thin copper wire that I've spooled up on this handy-dandy roll of
recycling material. So, can you see the wire? No, of course not. It's because it's like
I think 38 gauge wire, but in terms of, it's actually quite strong. Me waving my arms around
madly yesterday. I was actually pulling the thing out of the tree by the antenna. So, maybe
that had something to do with the problem. I don't know. All right. So, let's put back real fast and
see if we have another window for transmitting. Oh, we just missed it. Oh, no wait. So, even minutes.
We still got a few seconds. All right. There we look at the code. I hope someone's keeping
track of time. So, in this case, it's very similar to the other code we saw because we're still
using the wireless repo, but this time we're using the Whisper sub-package. So, Whisper uses
something on NaidenHug, which is able to convert GPS coordinates into four-letter or six-letter
off-and-umeric codes, dividing the entire planet Earth into grids. We can see here my call sign.
And then we put that into our buffer, and then we just simply transmit that, put it in standby mode,
and that's it. So, that's actually what the code was doing that you saw that we need to,
so theoretically, we'd be looking at the transmission data right now. So, we still have some seconds left.
All right. This time, let's go to work. Three, two, plug in. All right. You see we're transmitting.
And are we getting data? Yes, we are getting some data. So, if we wait,
actually, I was getting data before. It's kind of amazing. These are, I guess this was from
earlier when I was testing it was actually received some while I was just talking, it did
receive some. So, whoa, amazing. You can see me transmitting here. There's my call sign right now
we're in jail of 20 and zero kilometers away from the transmission source. Wow, so that's actually
worked. Amazing. applause. All right. So, I really encourage you to connect all the wires
and connect them to your things and then talk to the things, not using wires that are far, far away.
Check out the tiny go new wireless repo. We're about to have our first release,
tiny go drivers package. We have support for oh so many things from Bluetooth, which I actually
talked about during my first bill without wires. So, I thank you so much. Check out
tiny go.org and here we are. That program.