The Lost Art of Tree Fishing

Now that the Northeast seems to have finally shaken off the icy grip of winter, I've taken the first reluctant steps outside of my cave to engage in some outdoor activities. This week I found myself "tree fishing" - which is my self-coined euphemism for hanging a random wire style antenna in one of my backyard trees to use for ham radio communications. This process involved me, standing outside and hurling a spool of bright yellow fishing line into the tree, over and over again, until I managed to toss it over a branch of sufficient height. I then attached some thin nylon rope to the line and pulled it over the branch, finally completing the process by securing 29 feet of suitable wire to the rope and hoisting that up into the air. The antenna was connected to a 9:1 UnUn transformer, which I housed in a water proof box mounted on some stockade fence a short distance from the tree. The UnUn also has connections on the box for a ground wire acting as a counterpoise - which is running across the yard perpendicular from the antenna and a RG58 coax which is running up to the second floor office where it is connected to a 20 watt Xiegu G90 HF transceiver. This configuration works fairly well with bands 10 - 40 meters, and I had great success hearing stations as far away as Ireland and Scotland on 20 meters. I'll probably keep this up as a temporary HF solution through the summer while I figure out a more permanent installation for the fall.

 

My Neighbors must have been scratching their heads to see me flinging a spool of fishing line up into the tree over and over again. We finally managed to get the antenna hung from a reasonable height. 

 

The Xiegu G90. A surprisingly capable low-watt HF transceiver. Now if only 10 meters would open up!

 

 

 

-=CYBERDECKS=- (and why build one?)

A cyberdeck is a personal, portable computer inspired by classic cyberpunk fiction—think Neuromancer, Ghost in the Shell, or Blade Runner. Unlike a laptop or phone, a cyberdeck is usually hand-built, customized, and unapologetically weird. It might live in a Pelican case, a 3D-printed shell, or a hacked-together metal box, often featuring a small screen, mechanical keyboard, exposed wiring, and blinking LEDs. Under the hood, it’s commonly powered by a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer, running Linux and whatever tools the builder finds interesting.

People build cyberdecks not because they’re practical, but because they’re personal. A cyberdeck is a rejection of sealed, disposable technology in favor of something tactile, understandable, and modular. Building one is a way to learn about Linux, electronics, networking, radio, programming, and hardware—all while making something that feels like it came out of science fiction. 

 

I built my cyberdeck with a spare Raspberry Pi 3B+ board I had lying around, running Raspberry Pi Lite OS. I extended 2 of the USB ports and the ethernet port out to the main panel, which is made of ABS plastic, cut to fit into the opening on a Pelican 1300 case. My plan is to use this machine for software development, networking experiments, and maybe some software defined radio experimentation (more on that to come).

 

To give the Deck more cyberpunk street cred, I slapped a sweet "Legalize Recreational Plutonium" on the side. My plan is to expand the functionality of this unit over time. Some enhancements I'm considering include some blinking LEDs (maybe to give a visual indication of wi-fi strength or some other signal), adding an Arduino to the mix, and creating a custom speaker/antenna mount to handle software defined radio stuff.

Housing a Linux computer inside a broken Atari 2600 cartridge

 I started thinking pretty soon after completing the custom cable channel project of housing a Raspberry Pi UNO into a repurposed cable box from the 1980s about other novel and interesting ideas to house single board computers. I recently was tidying up my work space and my eyes fell on a stack of Atari 2600 cartridges that failed to boot when testing them. It was during the process of taking the casing for a fairly grimy copy of Surround apart it dawned on me that these cases are the perfect size to house a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which I happened to have a couple just sitting on the desk mocking me for not using them.

The first stage was to completely disassemble the old cartridge, which honestly is a bit more challenging than it probably should be. I got pretty lucky removing the original labels, so I was able to reuse them after everything is assemble. There is only 1 phillips head screw to remove, but there are 6 plastic clips which require you to deal with before the casing will come apart. I used a small sized slotted screwdriver to carefully push the clips in and manage to get the thing apart, but I could definitely see people breaking the tabs and/or scarring up the plastic of the cartridge while trying to get these things disengaged. After that it's pretty straightforward. The dust cover assembly slides out, and nothing is holding the game ROM in place. I opted to save my ROM, since I'm still going to see if I can rehab the pins to check if it might actually boot after a good scrubbing.

The next step was to hot glue the offsets in place inside the cartridge to mount the Raspberry Pi. I decided to run a very bare bones distro of the Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32-bit) which comes with no desktop. My goal here is a totally basic Linux system hidden inside an old Atari cartridge. Maybe I'll install Stella or some other 2600 emulator on it at some point - I imagine it would be pretty cool to play 2600 games on a computer housed inside an actually 2600 game.

After testing to make sure everything worked, I reassemble the case and glued the orginal labels back into place. Since the Pi Zero W uses 2 micro USB connections (one for USB stuff and one to power the board) I decided to put a red dot of paint underneath the power connection, since you can't easily read the board to prevent me from inadvertently mixing up the connections.

 Fun project that was totally a spontaneous use of time that I should have allocated to doing something else. 

Low-Powered FM Radio Transmitter with an Arduino and Si4713

Arduino boards are fantastic and versatile for constructing a wide range of electronics projects. One of the greatest strengths are the abundance of electronic modules that are available to add project specific functionality. I picked up a Si4713 board awhile back and decided to spend some time setting it up with an Arduino to see if I could get a functional low-powered FM transmitter running. The Si4713 boards are easy to come by and relatively cheap (I think I paid well under $20 including shipping for mine from a seller on ebay), and have minimal work required to get them hooked up. They come with headers that will need to be soldered onto the board and a very thin wire that is meant to serve as an antenna (which will also need to be soldered to the board). 

The wiring between the Si4713 and the Arduino (I used an Elegoo Mega 2560 R3 I had lying around for this project) is as follows. Adjust the wiring and code as necessary depending on the model of the Arduino you use and your preferences for the reset pin.

Wiring:

VIN

-

5V

GND

-

GND

SDA

-

SDA (Pin 20)

SCL

-

SCL (Pin 21)

RST

-

Pin 2

GPIO1

Optional (RDS interrupt)

leave unconnected unless needed

You will need to install the following Adafruit libraries for the board to work: 

Adafruit_Si4713 Library

Adafruit_BusIO

Adafruit_GFX (if you want to later display station info)

I tried a couple variations on getting a functional sketch. I finally figured out that a persistent problem I was having involved the reset pin not properly resetting after the Mega has been disconnected from the power source and then rebooted. Modifying the sketch to allow for a delay to allow the pin to reset properly seemed to correct this. The updated sketch is below:

#include <Wire.h>
#include <Adafruit_Si4713.h>

#define RESET_PIN 2 // match whatever wiring you selected
Adafruit_Si4713 radio(RESET_PIN);

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(115200);
  delay(500);             // time for power to stabilise
  pinMode(RESET_PIN, OUTPUT);

  // Toggle reset: LOW -> HIGH with pauses
  digitalWrite(RESET_PIN, LOW);
  delay(50);
  digitalWrite(RESET_PIN, HIGH);
  delay(200);

  Wire.begin();
  Serial.println("Attempting to find Si4713...");

  if (!radio.begin()) {
    Serial.println("Couldn't find Si4713");
    while (1) {
      delay(500);
      Serial.println("Retrying...");
      if (radio.begin()) {
        Serial.println("Found Si4713 on retry!");
        break;
      }
    }
  }

  Serial.println("Si4713 found!");
  radio.tuneFM(10110);
  radio.setTXpower(88);
}
void loop(){}

After I verified that the transmitter was operational, I decided I needed something cool to transmit. One of my first exposures to short wave radio was listening to "numbers stations", which are famously mysterious stations that broadcast cryptic messages. I fired up Garageband and recorded some esoteric sounding number station inspired audio ala' "Stranger Things" that I could endlessly loop on my station. I grabbed a receiver capable of tuning in FM and dialed up my frequency. I don't have to tell you how cool it was to hear my message looping over the radio! I did some proximity testing, moving the radio around the room and it seems like the effective transmission distance using the basic thin wire antenna provided with the Si4713 is about 15 feet. I believe I could improve the distance by building a better antenna, such as an optimized quarter-wave antenna - which might possibly extend the reach a bit more (maybe 25-30 feet).

Some future enhancements to this little radio station I can envision include: building a better antenna, fitting everything into a suitable enclosure, and adding an old ipad shuffle for audio to make this a truly mobile radio station.
 

Constructing a homebrew "Cable Channel" Part 2

 It's relatively easy to use a Raspberry Pi to approximate the experience of having your own custom cable television channel similar to what folks of a certain age may remember from their youth. In a previous post I went over some of the basic steps to get a Raspberry Pi 4 set up as a "retro box" that automatically plays a curated collection of movies and shows from the 1970s, including period correct public service announcements and commercials. After a couple of weeks of testing - which was essentially just letting the box run to make sure that the flow of the programing actually felt like watching period correct television - I decided that I needed to ramp things up. It wasn't good enough to just have a Raspberry Pi that played old movies and commercials. Any modern computer can do that. This needed to actually have the entire aesthetic of a classic 1970s cable channel. It needed to dress the part.

That's where eBay comes back. Some quick searching and I was able to locate an untested cable box circa early 80's for parts/repair that had a buy now price of only $3.81 (plus $12 for shipping). This box included a front channel display and was roomy enough to house both the Raspberry PI and an Arduino UNO (more on that below). I decided to go with the 80's style box, since the larger encloser would make it much easier to work with, and I had some ideas about utilizing the front channel display screen.

 

When the box arrive it was immediately obvious that the particular Jerrold 550 Starcom converter had lived a rough life. The was some serious damage to one corner of the plastic face plate due to what I can only attribute as "falling damage" from being dropped on a hard surface, and the unit was covered in old masking tape and 40+ years of grime. I also noticed that the unit's enclosure was secured with rivets, probably since the majority of these units were distributed by local cable companies and they didn't want to make it easy for industrious hackers to open them up to try to figure out how to get free Home Box Office. The first step was to drill out the rivets so I could take the unit apart.

 

After I parted the case out I spent some time scrubbing the case down with dish detergent and using a liberal amount of Goo Be Gone to get all that sticky tape residue cleaned up. Once everything was clean and dry, I could spend some time attending to the smashed corner of the face plate. I had a couple of options for the repair, but I decided that the easiest (and structurally most secure) fix would be to recreate the corner using Green Stuff two-part epoxy. For folks not familiar with Green Stuff, it essentially is a two-part epoxy that you mix by hand and then mold like a really rigid Play Dough into to place. It is typically used a lot when kit bashing models for games like Warhammer 40K, when you need to sculpt a custom piece, and maybe adhere a particularly tricky portion of a model together. It works well, can be easily sculpted, and takes simple water-based acryllic paint just fine. I eyeballed the amount that would be needed to recreate the missing/damaged corner, mixed it up, and then went to work sculpting the corner as best as I could. Green Stuff sets pretty quickly - typically with 5-10 minutes - so I didn't have the luxury of time here. My goal was good, not great. After the epoxy set I mixed up a fairly good approximation of the color of the faceplate using acrylic paint to blend the repair in as best as I could. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. From across the room it's not noticeable and the Green Stuff actually made the faceplate much more sturdy that it was previous to the repair.

 

Once the plastic was repaired I started brainstorming how to use the front channel display. I immediately though about using an Arduino UNO to power a small LED screen, since I'd used that pairing to great effect on a couple of smaller projects. I suppose I could have powered the LED's from the Raspberry Pi, but to be honest it was quicker and easier for me to wire up the display to an extra UNO R3 I had and I was able to repurpose a sketch that I had written for a handheld snake game. The Pi can power the UNO via USB, and if I ever want to change the display it is super easy to do (and doesn't affect the functionality of the Pi). It also gives me to option of adding a module for a remote control if want later down the line. I played around with different text for the display, finally settling on having an asterisk gliding across the display. It looked cool and I'm a sucker for moving LED's (let's just blame that on "Knight Rider"). After some tweaks for placement and a couple of generous blobs of hot glue to hold the screen in place, I had a functioning display that I could easily modify to anything that used a basic character set.

 

 

The final stretch was just to drop the Raspberry Pi into the box and get everything secured. I cut and glued some rubber welcome mat materials to the bottom of the case to assist with giving everything a nice, non-conductive floor to mount the pieces on, and mapped out the most efficient layout to screw everything down.

 

And there it is...a working retro "cable channel" that lives inside a period correct cable box with a customizable LED front panel. Eventually I will add an Arduino remote control module that I will use to change up the front display to a couple of different visual options. I still need to come up with a reasonable plan for cable management that will allow me to plug in a mouse and keyboard into the back. I can remote into the box from another computer to add videos if I want. Overall, I'm pretty stoked on this little project. I'd like to make another one at some point using a Raspberry Pi 3 with composite video so I can easily run the signal to one of the CRT televisions I have. This is the first project I'm done that has utilized both the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino boards and I love the flexibility of having both in a build. Now it's time to watch some TV!
 

Let's create a cable TV channel!

I’ve become infatuated with Raspberry Pi single-board computers recently, and thanks to a low-grade eBay addiction, I now have several of them just sitting around, mocking me to make them useful. Recently, I read about someone who turned one into a sort of personal cable channel, and I got fired up on the idea of creating my own “cable channel” of highly curated videos—which I’m sure nobody else would want to watch.

It probably would have been easier to just follow the tutorial I found online for this type of project, but as usual, I felt it necessary to reinvent the wheel for the sake of “learning.” For me, the basic parts of getting a home cable channel working are:

1. Figure out how to randomize/play/loop videos from a folder

2. Determine how to “broadcast” the content (HDMI, Wi-Fi, etc.)

3. Decide what content to use

I kept the first part simple. Since I’d be running this project on a spare Raspberry Pi 4 with Pi OS, I decided to use VLC as the media player. VLC natively does everything I needed (randomize, play, loop from a folder), and it can be controlled via terminal/bash scripts—perfect for making everything restart automatically if the system reboots.

I skipped the broadcasting question for now and focused on getting the system running. The fun part, after all, was deciding on a theme for my channel and grabbing videos! I’ve always been a movie buff and grew up watching late-night “midnight movie” flicks on TV, so it was a no-brainer to load up the Pi with movies and shows that fit that vibe.

I could have taken the easy route and gone straight to the Internet Archive, but instead, I pulled material from YouTube. A little-known fact: YouTube not only streams video content but also allows you to download files. Since I’d need a large number of videos, I wrote a quick Python script to batch-download user-curated playlists. Python makes this easy with the pytube library, which was designed for this purpose. The script asks for a YouTube URL and a save location, then pulls down the highest-quality stream available.

At first, I ran into certificate errors on macOS. Instead of troubleshooting libraries, I just ran the script on an Ubuntu machine and it worked without issues.

The flow is straightforward:

1. Prompt for the YouTube URL and the save folder

2. Use pytube to get the highest-resolution stream

3. Download it to the folder

It’s a short and simple tool, but it does the job—a quick way to grab videos for offline viewing. After downloading a bunch of nostalgic movies and TV shows, I started scraping vintage 1970s commercials too. Since VLC randomizes playback, there’s a chance that after a movie or show, one or two commercials will play before the next feature. After raiding YouTube’s vaults, I had a solid library for my channel. Then came the fun part: testing and tweaking.

Long story short—it worked! It feels like watching a real TV channel from the 1970s. Videos flowed seamlessly from one to the next, with a nice balance of movies, shows, and commercials. (I might add more commercials later—it’s surprisingly fun to see a 1972 McDonald’s ad pop up.)

My startup bash script launches VLC at boot, runs everything in fullscreen, randomizes playback, and loops continuously without showing the user interface:

#!/bin/bash
vlc --fullscreen --loop --random /home/pi/Videos/

Right now, I have the Pi hooked up to a spare TV via HDMI, but I’m tempted to pick up an HDMI-to-RF modulator so I can run the channel on a CRT I keep around for playing Nintendo. Ideally, I’d love to broadcast to multiple TVs around the house—but I don’t know if I want to run 100 feet of coax cable just to watch Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of in every room.

Or do I?

 

 

 

Through a Glass Darkly: Building a Philip K. Dick Inspired Text Adventure in Python

As someone who's spent countless hours lost in the paranoid, twisting realities of Philip K. Dick's novels, I’ve always thought it would be fascinating to bring that sense of dislocation and uncertainty into a playable form. At the same time, I have a deep love for the classic text adventure games of the 1980s, especially Infocom’s masterpieces like Zork, where every room, every object, and every line of text contributes to an immersive narrative. It occurred to me that blending these two interests could produce something truly engaging: a text adventure where nothing is quite what it seems, and every discovery feels like piecing together fragments of a memory.

I decided to code this game in Python, keeping a few core design goals in mind. First, I wanted the game to feel like an Infocom adventure, so I structured it around a series of interconnected rooms, each with its own description, items, and NPCs. The player moves through these spaces using simple two-word commands like "go north" or "take wallet," much like the old parser systems that made classic interactive fiction so approachable and fun.

The game engine itself is data-driven. Rooms, items, and NPCs are all stored in dictionaries with unique identifiers, which makes it straightforward to expand the world later. Each room defines its exits, items present, and NPCs in place. Items can have clues associated with them, and NPCs can offer dialogue that hints at larger mysteries. Using Python’s dataclasses made it easy to encapsulate these properties while keeping the code readable and maintainable.

Player actions are handled through simple functions tied to verbs: go, take, use, talk, and so on. For instance, when the player uses the take command, the code checks whether the item is present and portable, adds it to the inventory, and collects any associated clues. Use commands allow the player to interact with objects or room features to trigger additional story events, like unlocking a door or revealing hidden information. There's also a clue and memory system that monitors the player’s discoveries; once enough clues are collected, the player recovers a key memory, which acts as a milestone in uncovering their identity.

Save and load functionality was also important, reflecting the classic adventure game experience where progress mattered. The game can save the current room, inventory, NPC states, and collected clues to a JSON file, and restore everything from that file later.

The narrative logic is built around the idea of memory recovery in a dystopian world—a theme central to Dick's work. The player starts with no memory and must piece together their identity by exploring the environment, interacting with NPCs, and collecting items. Clues are scattered across the world, and certain items or interactions trigger additional revelations. The balance between exploration, discovery, and narrative progression aims to capture the same unsettling tension found in Dick's novels, where reality is mutable and perception is unreliable.

This project was a perfect pairing for my interests: the procedural, logic-driven structure of a text adventure married to the thought-provoking themes and disorienting world-building of Philip K. Dick. It's designed to be extensible, so I can easily add more rooms, items, and puzzles in the future. For fans of either classic interactive fiction or Philip K. Dick's writing, this game represents a small but enjoyable intersection of those worlds—a place where the past, memory, and reality are constantly up for interpretation.

The code can be downloaded here if you want to try it out.

Now to see if ChatGPT can pass the Voight-Kampff test...

Reviving a dead Atari 2600 (Part One)

 

Anybody who knows me fairly well can probably attest to my love of video games, particularly retro games. In many ways, I grew up alongside the home video game industry. My first console was the venerable (and much-maligned) Atari VCS—later renamed the Atari 2600. A good friend’s family bought one, and as soon as I sat down to play, I was hooked. I pleaded with my parents to get one, and we eventually struck a compromise: if I saved up $100, they would cover the remainder of the cost. It took me well over six months to gather the funds, but I did it, and I’ve been a console owner of some kind ever since.

The 2600 is a special machine, in my opinion. Yes, its graphics are crude by almost any standard, and most of its games are quick simulations or basic shoot-’em-ups. But over time, those early programmers truly mastered how to squeeze lemonade out of those lemons. Games like Demon Attack (Imagic), Pitfall! (Activision), and Yar’s Revenge (Atari) pushed the limits of what even the original engineers thought possible. I’ve always believed that’s the beauty of the system—like most things in life, it’s the limitations that force us to think creatively and come up with novel solutions.

With that in mind, I was stoked to find a very early "Heavy Sixer" listed on eBay for $20 (shipping included). The catch, of course, was that the seller listed it with the caveat: "Dead. Parts Only. As Is." Okay, sounds like a challenge to me…

I was pleasantly surprised when the console arrived. Even though the seller was shipping a broken machine, they had taken the time to package it well, preventing any unnecessary damage in transit. The system didn’t come with a power supply, so I borrowed one from my trusty four-switch "Woody" and hooked it up. After connecting it to a CRT tuned to channel 3 and loading up a copy of E.T., I powered it on—only to find that it did absolutely nothing. No black screen, no glitchy garbage, just the everlasting static of channel 3 on an analog television. The seller was honest! So, I proceeded to open up this relic of my childhood and take a look inside.

The console had about 40 years' worth of "patina," both inside and out—a lot of settled dust, caked in place. I started by blowing it out as thoroughly as I could with some canned air. While I had it apart, I gave the case a good soak in hot water with dishwashing detergent to clean it up. One thing I noticed was the manufacturing date on the RF shielding—May of 1982. That meant this was actually a "Light Sixer," not a Heavy Sixer. The Heavy Sixer/Light Sixer distinction refers to the number and type of switches on the console. The earliest models had six switches, while later versions had four. Heavy Sixers, the earliest models, are highly collectible and command premium prices when in working order. No worries, though—I was still excited to have a cool project to work on.

Looking over the motherboard, everything initially seemed pretty good. There were no noticeable burn marks or swollen/leaky capacitors. However, I did notice that one of the contacts for the power input seemed to be missing some solder. It looked like a chunk had broken off. Two out of the three pads associated with that component had massive mounds of solder, but the first had almost nothing in comparison. I could even see the tab of the component peeking through the board. Could this be it? Could it really be that easy? Maybe.

I grabbed my soldering iron and carefully added solder to the open connection, making sure not to bridge any surrounding gaps. One surefire way to fry these old boards is to accidentally bridge the first and second power connections. The second and third can be bridged, but connecting the first and second? That makes smoke appear—not ideal.

 

Once I finished, I hooked it back up to the CRT and tested it with Space Invaders… and voilà! Well, sort of. The system powered on, loaded the game, and started the familiar color-flipping demo that Space Invaders does. But the sound was full of white noise, and the colors on the screen looked washed out. The game played fine, though, which was a huge success—it proved the machine wasn’t totally dead. It just wasn’t feeling great.

After a quick consultation with an electronics-savvy friend, they suggested I replace the electrolytic capacitors on the board. Over time, capacitors dry out and notoriously cause issues like the ones I was seeing. Fortunately, a diehard community of enthusiasts is dedicated to keeping these machines alive, offering repair and maintenance kits for the Atari 2600. A quick Google search led me to a company selling a "refresh and caps" kit for less than the cost of a couple of decent pizza slices.

I’ll post an update as soon as my kit arrives and I get a chance to swap out the old components!