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I'm having so much fun

While the rest of the world gripes and moans about the rapidly rising cost of DRAM and GPUs, I've been having a ball with the cheapest and simplest of computers.

I really have to say that the past couple of weeks have been very nostalgic and reminded me of the early days of my involvement with computers where there was no internet, programming was pretty simple and the closest thing we had to AI was a small BASIC program called Eliza.

Recent 3am programming sessions have seen me huddled over a keyboard, gazing carefully at a screen and scribbling notes in a 1E5 exercise book ruled in 7mm grid lines.

More recently, a womans voice can be heard from time to time, enunceating vital phrases from a small speaker while a blinky LED flashes.

It's almost fifty years since I first started tinkering with microcomputers and cutting code to make them do useful stuff but this feels just like the old-days.

Okay, instead of a puny 8-bit 2650 processor that was limited to addressing 32KBytes of RAM and which ran at a paltry 1MHz I'm now rocking a 4-core ARM processor at 1.5GHz and there is 4GB of RAM on tap if I need it -- but the fundementals remain the same.

Yes, I've been revising my ADSB alarm, the device that detects and reports approaching aircraft for the benefit of those who wish to fly drones and RC model aircraft while preserving the utmost in safety.

I built and coded the first prototype of this device about five years ago now and have been meaning to release it as an Open Source project for anyone to build but have never really gotten around to tidying up the few loose ends that remained. Over the holiday break however, I decided that I'd been farting around long enough so put in a concerted effort to get it "release-ready".

While testing what was to be the release version I suddenly realised that there was a huge problem.

Previously I'd been testing this with a bunch of other flyers at our local airport. Whenever an aircraft came within 5Km of the airfield at an altitude which indicated that it may be going to land or pass low enough to be endangered by our models, the alarm would start beeping. On hearing the beep it was a simple matter to look at the screen and watch the approaching aircraft on its simulated radarscope.

The system worked very well in this situation, enabling us to add an extra layer to the Swiss-cheese safety model on which most aviation safety systems are built.

However, while testing out in the field when I was flying alone, wearing FPV goggles the shortcomings of this version became immediately apparent.

If I was flying, with my goggles on, and the alarm began to beep, what should I do?

Since, in most cases, I was flying at a park or other place where I would not expect an aircraft to be coming in to land, I could perhaps simply make sure I was flying low enough that even if it did fly directly overhead there would be no risk created by my craft.

On the other hand, it might be prudent to land, take off the goggles and take a look at the device's LCD display to see exactly how high, how far away and from what direction the aircraft was approaching. However, to do this every time the alarm went off would be annoying and ultimately unnecessary in 99 percent of cases.

Never the less, I wanted a better solution so I decided to add a voice to the system and doing so has been a lot of fun, from a system-design and coding perspective.

After many hours of work, testing and debugging, the ADSB alarm now enunciates all the essential information in a lovely feminine AI-generated voice.

Now I can leave my FPV goggles on because whenever an aircraft comes into the warning zone, the lovely lady inside my Raspberry Pi comfortingly keeps me up to date -- even letting me know how long it will be before the aircraft flies overhead, if indeed it will do so.

I've even taken the time to optimise the code so that the whole thing runs in well under 1GB of RAM (under 512MB actually) so it can be implemented on even the cheapest Raspberry Pi 5 (currently less than NZ$80). I'm also working on a version for the RPi Zero 2 W which sells for under NZ$40.

Also, because this new version doesn't need an LCD screen, it'll work entirely by voice enunciation, the total cost of the build is lower than it was for the original device and may even squeeze in under NZ$100.

I'd almost forgotten the joys of building projects like this and the buzz one can get from turning ideas into functional devices that solve real-world problems.

Hmmm... what shall I build next?

Carpe Diem folks!

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