Nuts and Volts - September 2015

Nuts & Volts (ISSN 1528-9885/CDN Pub Agree #40702530) is published monthly for $26.95 per year by T & L Publications, Inc., 430 Princeland Court, Corona, CA 92879. PERIODICALS POSTAGE PAID AT CORONA, CA AND AT ADDITIONAL MAILING OFFICES. POSTMAS TER: Send address changes to Nuts & Volts, P.O. Box 15277, North Hollywood, CA 91615 or Station A, P.O. Box 54, Windsor ON N9A 6J5; cpcreturns@nutsvolts.com.

4 September 2015

06 Q&A

Reader Questions Answered Here Students ask questions on radio propagation and troubleshooting.

10 PICAXE Primer

Sharpening Your Tools of Creativity

PICAXE-PC Serial Communication — Part 3.

Experimenting with an interrupt-based method of improving the 20X2 response time that’s faster than anything we’ve used so far.

16 Open Communication

The Latest in Networking and Wireless Technologies

Getting Back into Ham Radio — Trials and Tribulations.

Equipment choice can be harder than you think — especially when you can’t install antennas.

62 The Ham’s Wireless Workbench

Practical Technology from the Ham World

RF Interference.

RFI is everywhere, but fortunately there are ways to keep it in line.

68 The Design Cycle

Advanced Techniques for Design Engineers

Take Your PIC of a Super-Fast Embedded Computing Machine.

It just doesn’t get any better than this. It’s time to gather the components, get the circuit boards made, lay down the parts, and write the code. When the dust settles, you’ll have built a super-fast 32-bit embedded computing machine that can converse via multiple logic-level serial ports, a true RS-232

port, USB, and Wi-Fi. If all of that data is important to you, just store it away on the onboard microSD card. And it does get better. You can have it in two flavors: the PIC32MX575F512H or PIC32MX795F512L.

44 Adding Color to the Commodore PET

Go retro with this PET project that will get you re-learning everything about these old machines.

■ By Steve J. Gray

52 Beyond the Arduino — Part 6

To the Power of I2C. We’re going to raise the bar and connect our AVR microcontroller to modules with a little more intelligence.

■ By Andrew Retallack

September 2015

05 DEVELOPING PERSPECTIVES

Building Sandcastles in the Digital Sandbox

18 NEW PRODUCTS

21 SHOWCASE

67 ELECTRO-NET

76 NV WEBSTORE

79 CLASSIFIEDS

80 TECH FORUM

82 AD INDEX

Departments

NEW! Vintage Computing Series 22 Little Book of Horror It may seem like just an innocent edition sitting on the counter ... but wait! What is that noise?

■ By Bill Elwell

27 Flame On, Dude!

Give your Jack-o-lantern (or whatever props you may be using) some cool faux flames this season.

■ By Jon McPhalen

32 Single Chip Audio Spectrum Analyzer Makes Singing Easier

Get those talking props in sync with this audio spectrum analyzer that has a variety of uses — from tone detection to real time audio analyzation for controlling servos and other devices.

■ By Steven R. Bjork

38 Haunting 201 — Thirteen Electronic Projects to Elevate Your “Scare Game”

Continuing with the idea from last year’s special Halloween edition, here are some ghoulish ideas to take this year’s haunts up to the next level — electronically, of course!