A few years ago, I picked up a Canon Vixia HF R800 HD camcorder used off eBay for $200. I was tired of filling up my phone with long-form video recordings (family weddings, etc), and I liked having the large optical zoom.

I was thinking of upgrading this year to 4k, and it seems that everything is either $150 scamware off Temu or at least $1k jobs from Canon or Sony.

Obviously I expect a price hike for 4k, but is it that much more expensive to make a 4k camcorder? Five years later, and they're still 5x more expensive than 1080p?

Took me a few days to get around to it, but here's two SDRs tuned to 137.9125MHz (frequency for APT from NOAA18) and 152MHz (frequency I found with some pager traffic).

Though there wasn't always a perfect correlation (I assume there are other pager frequencies in use), there were definitely instances where a pager message corresponded perfectly with the broadband signal dip at the APT frequency. This is a solid 10+ MHz away and through a SAW filter, so I suspect the dip is less overloading the SDR and more some internal gain adjustment? I had auto-gain turned off.

Either way, it doesn't seem to impact my APT signal reception, it's just an odd quirk.

I'm trying to write a simple bash script that opens up GQRX, sends it some TCP commands, then closes it down.

Unfortunately, I've found that when I close the program like this, the next time it opens, it will pop up a window saying "crash detected" and ask me to review the configuration file. This prevents the app from loading unless someone is present to click the dialog box.

This error only seems to happen when I try to close the program using the bash script. Closing it by just clicking the X doesn't cause this problem next time it's launched.

I think I'm closing the app too aggressively which terminates it before it can wrap up its affairs, and it interprets this as a crash. What's the best way to close the app to keep this from happening?

I've tried:

• pkill -3 gqrx
• pkill -13 gqrx

But the problem persists. Is there an even softer way to close an application?

Got a pack of C. Crisps from Costco two weeks ago, and they were awful. Little flavor, mealy texture. They looked beautiful, but that had zero crunch, and really bland flavor.

Figured it was a bad batch and bought another dozen from Fred Meyer. Same thing.

Is something going on in the world of apples? I get they’re not in season, but this seems extreme.

5:59 PM, Frasier reveals that he’s going to Chicago. 6:01pm, he’s back at EP 1 with his dad moving in.

Thanks CoziTV for keeping it going strong.

I'm an EE by trade focusing on embedded devices, but most of my work is in relatively low-power STM32 applications. When I stopped following developments in hobby kits, it was mostly Arduino Unos slowly driving I2C OLED displays.

Now suddenly, there are embedded Raspberry Pis and ESP32s doing realtime facial recognition and video feeds.

Is there a good place to look to catch up on what's now possible with these embedded devices?

Also, while I enjoy the ease of the hobby kits, I'm also interested in more mass-production-focused solutions.

Do guns wear out? Do they end up in landfill? You always hear about guns being sold, but never about what happens to them at the end of their useful life.

All but one cut. Plugs left behind. Station hasn’t even opened.

I'm working on implementing the PID compensator on the top of page 20 here. I've already got a circuit working, but it oscillates a ton, and I was hoping to tune it with a better strategy than just guess and check.

The datasheet doesn't go into a lot of detail on how it's supposed to work, but I found a whitepaper that covers single-stage PID compensators in more detail here.

I've got this compensator working, I've modeled it in spice and the poles and zeroes show up where they should, but I have no idea how to actually tune it to my system.

My understanding is that I need to fit the equation (3) on the second link to the form kp + kds + ki/s, but it's an algebraic nightmare.

What I'm hoping for is some derivation of the PID constants in terms of the components in my system. Then I can work on one of the many tuning methods. The datasheet even assigns names to components implying that they're responsible for setting one of the constants (Cd and Rd for derivative term for example), but I'm fairly certain they can't be completely isolated like that.

Also, if the answer is just that I need to re-learn how to do partial fractions, I'm okay with that.