u/SparkyFix

I’m in the process of developing an idea on the daisy seed but I keep running into a fairly significant issues. Basically, the codecs on them keep permanently dying; something is frying ‘em. I have a fairly vanilla setup here: USB is connected and I have the codec outputting directly to my sound card, which works for a while and then… they die. Never to return from the grave. I’ve recently added some 1uF coupling caps on the outputs, in case there’s a bias issue. That board hasn’t died yet. These are Rev7 boards in case that helps.

Anybody else run into this issue?

My (layman) understanding of physics is that time dilation increases with gravity. My expectation is therefore that as a black hole collapses, time will slow, and that effect will increase as the collapse progresses. My question is, then, that if the local timeframe slows down as the matter is compressed, wouldn’t that mean that all the black holes that we observed are still collapsing, albeit right on the cusp of a singularity, but moving very (increasingly) slowly towards that final state in a kind of Zeno’s paradox kinda way?

Does that imply that cosmic expansion is a result of continuing infall of matter in the “host universe”. Would it also imply that deflation is plausible as a result of the evaporation of that black hole?

I don’t have a physics background but have been excited by these recent conjectures and potential evidence from cosmic rotation… the above ideas seem intuitive but I guess the fact that a black hole is a singularity for which time doesn’t exist kinda destroys the argument that there might be some kind of continuing relationship between outside and inside?

I’ll preface this by saying that almost all my experience has been in the audio-frequency arena, being primarily related to electronic music, however I have been increasingly drawn into the dark realms of HAM radio and am now thinking about building a station monitor from a CRT I have spare…

My general plan is as follows:

1. IF from my transceiver (around 4.9MHz) into the station monitor.
2. I’ll internal generate a slow triangle wave via a relaxation oscillator. Frequency and amplitude to be controllable via front-panel knobs.
3. This is used to modulate an RF pulse generator, centered at ~5.35MHz, which is passed through an aggressive low-pass at ~ 7MHz to remove harmonics. I’d like to be able sweep this +/- 500Khz as a maximum, when the triangle is running at max amplitude.
4. These get mixed, probably via an SA602, to give me a result at around 455KHz, which I then pass through a ceramic band pass filter.
5. The result gets rectified, mildly low-passed (controllable) and this is the Y-axis for my CRT board.
6. X-axis comes from the triangle wave.

So my main front panel controls would be the gain, sweep frequency, sweep amplitude (bandwidth around center), smoothing and Y offset.

Does this sound like a workable plan? My main sticking point is the 5MHz VCO. It seems like a frequency that isn’t really built for much and the only IC I’ve been able to find is the SN74LS624N. Pretty much everything else looks like it’s made for much higher frequencies or audio-range. I’d really like to avoid making something out of discretes, having recently wrestled with a voltage-controlled Colpitts…

My (very small, very rural) department has a chance to spend some “slush fund money”. For absolute needs, we can use our normal funding or apply for grants. We’d therefore be looking to spend the money on some nice-to-haves that we’d normally not be able to get funding for. We’ve considered things like extra meters or a gear dryer (the latter we decided to weld ourselves, once we saw that thousands of dollars would just get us an avant-garde pipe-art installation with a blower) but so far don’t really have any good ideas; we’re a bit too used to operating on fumes.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions? The funding (source: a donation) is a few thousand dollars (US) so can’t go totally wild. All opinions welcome!