A Crummy Commercial

I received the Triplett MM350 from DigiKey on Wednesday: It's a little smaller than the Metex ME-11 - I was expecting 3 x AA cells but they are AAA cells.  The ones supplied are carbon zinc so I'll have to keep an eye on them - don't want a leak.  The battery door is a little easier to open than the Metex which has an awkward slide and captive machine screw.  I did try the temp sensor which works fine but it was hard to insert the banana plugs, a tight fit. But the thing I really wanted to try was the frequency counter and duty cycle percentage as they might be used to measure Morse code speed and element weight.  So I hooked it up to a PK-4 keyer and nothing !  Then I realized that the counter needs an AC waveform not a positive pulse train.  So I connected a 100 uF cap in series with the output and voila, I've got frequency: The red LED display is the Morse Speedometer from the project page: http://wb9kzy.com/projects.htm  The MM350 reads 13.71 Hz wh...

I do get microcontroller code requests for kits.  I always say NO.   "oh I won't share the code with anyone else"   Yes, I know you won't because I won't give out the code ! :) I can understand these requests, sometimes from DX customers - certainly the DX requests are reasonable considering that I stopped selling outside the US.  I usually suggest that they use some kind of US based forwarder like a friend or relative but this isn't always possible. I have shared PIC based projects in the past: http://wb9kzy.com/projects.htm  I spent time on these, tried to document them but got feedback maybe two times ?  Partly this is due to the general move to Arduino and beyond and partly due to assembly code.  I claim no special expertise, I am a self taught coder.  I suppose the opposite could be true: too many comments/suggestions/feedbacks turning into a huge time sink. I dunno, is it time to post hex files (if not source code) ?  Not yet,...

Lately Youtube doesn't want to let me watch videos in Firefox's Private Browsing mode.  Youtube wants me to sign-in to "protect the community" - sure Youtube, you guys are nothing if not protectors.   I like to watch videos in Private Browsing window because it won't mess up my feed when I am signed into Youtube in regular browsing. Here's what I found that works, sort of: 1) find an embedded Youtube video like this one on Soldersmoke: source: https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2025/06/alan-w2aew-measures-minimum-discernible.html  2) start playing it 3) pause the video 4) right click it (in Firefox)  5) select Copy video URL at current time 6) paste that URL into a new window and hit return 7) hopefully enjoy the video  OR  search for a different video and watch that Sometimes some additional wriggling is required, like doing a refresh of the screen.  Sometimes it doesn't work.  When it doesn't I switch the VPN to another IP address and try again. O...

Recently I was working on a project and realized that it would have been nice to have a 2nd multimeter to measure current while the Radio Shack meter was measuring voltage.  In addition, the Radio Shack is getting creaky, previously mentioned here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/03/loss-of-trust.html  And finally, a customer made a kit inquiry asking about Morse weight measurement aka duty cycle.  Well it turns out that a lot of recent meters can measure both frequency AND duty cycle, nice ! I looked at the inexpensive Fluke meters which aren't cheap at over $100.  And the HP  Keysight handhelds are like twice that much.  But one name caught my eye: Triplett. https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/11/tempted-by-triplett.html   Triplett has a range of offerings but this one is about the cheapest that includes frequency and duty cycle: notice the Hz/Duty button and the Hz% rotary switch position https://www.triplett.com/products/mm350-4000-count-true-rm...

I was considering another blog post about the Morse Dial Timer kit: http://wb9kzy.com/mordial.htm  when I realized something.  For some reason I had thought that the 16F676 PIC had 64 bytes of EEPROM.  But in reality it has 128 byes of EEPROM.  So the kit has a 60 character Morse memory when it could have been 64 characters longer or 124 in total. But that probably would drive most users crazy considering the ungainly method that is used to record the memory.  :) Still I may try changing the code (and then the docs) to make use of the upper 64 bytes - we'll see how it goes. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm 

Martin Clausen created a PIC programmer back when I first started using PIC microcontrollers around the turn of the 21st century: https://web.archive.org/web/20051226170059/http://www.rotgradpsi.de/mc/picprog/picproge.html The programmer hardware was driven by a PC parallel port, remember those ?  It was a command line DOS program that could be invoked in a batch file.  I used it with my late, lamented Sharp laptop.  It was a perfect way for me to develop PIC code.  Note that this was still the bad old days of EPROM PICs so I had my trusty Walling EPROM eraser right next to my keyboard.  Crash and Burn development ?  More like Erase, Burn and then crash ! But then the Sharp met an untimely death due to a bad hard drive.  I moved on to a Thinkpad and Windows.  The PIC programmer was a PICkit which could handle the newer parts like PIC12F683 which was used for the PK-4 keyer chip.  I depopulated the Clausen Picprog: and then in 2003, built a di...

A customer reported that he had trouble with his Keyall HV+ kit while trying to key a Heathkit SB-200 amp: http://wb9kzy.com/keyallhvplus.htm  The SB-200 has a 6.3 VAC filament transformer which has a grounded center tap.  This means that there isn't enough DC voltage to overcome the red LED in the Keyall HV+ circuit.  One workable solution is to replace the LED with a short circuit which allows enough voltage for the 3.3 volt regulator to function. I learn something new every day :) Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm