Friday, June 12, 1992
As per tradition, the afternoon of graduation for EET candidates was spent showing off their projects to the staff and each other. This was an informal deal, since grades had been in a week ago, but expected, and some had already presented at a more appropriate time, such as the evening folks. But the usual list of suspects were on hand.
Nick's hand-down favorite is Bud's coffee maker. It sports a prosthetic plastic case on the side with an LED readout and some buttons. He'd used a real-time clock to set the time to brew, and as a bonus, if you push a toggle button you can display the temperature of the water and press it again to see the current going into the coil. Granted, Bud is a retired cop who took the program partly for amusement and partly to pursue a leisurely second career in appliance repair, should do quite well and they’ll all miss his stories from days on the beat.
Most of the group had met if not exceeded their goals or had come close, but others had set the bar high and treated it as an experiment then reported what they learned. Steve Collins had opted to see how far he could get teaching the 6809 to play chess, and so there was always someone siting there with him. Nick realizes he needs to learn chess.
When it comes his turn, he just gives an overview and rolls the tape. Sure enough the cursor starts to jit-jit at those seemingly random intervals and then the announcement lines, more spaces, and this gets some cheers and claps, then it goes into the meat of the bulletin. Nick could have also grabbed some maritime weather forecasts but had never gotten around to recording any, so we're sticking to what works. But for some reason, probably due to constant wear on the same source tape, the printout was a bit off here and there, such as a bunch of dashes for a table header rendering series of A's.
"AHHHHHHH" fires Goody from right behind Nick and he jumps, looks back,
"You scared me."
Goody just pats him on the shoulders and chuckles. The readout proceeds and Nick explains what we are seeing and mentions there are also weather reports and such to be decoded if one knows where to look.
Someone asks, "Are you going to do any transmitting, to talk to someone with this?"
"Well I don't have my license yet, but might, I was inspired to do this by my granddad, he was always into radio, did it in the service."
"Oh he's passed on?"
"Yeah, a couple years ago."
Goody breaks in, "we're all sorry for your loss and certainly you have done him proud with this, great tribute."
From around the table some agreement, "Good job, Nicko...good stuff."
He's a little choked up, "Thanks guys." After a moment, "so yeah, this is basically the schedule for when they send the Morse code practice...the speeds, frequencies....oh that's nice, 'RTTY, AMTOR, and ASCII in a revolting schedule..." which obviously meant revolving schedule.
This gets a laugh, someone chimes, "Stupid computers."
Nick then fields a couple questions about the modem circuit, the PLL chip, and points out it's all available at your friendly local Radio Shack store, with a cartoonish grin, and this seems to be what earns the final applause. He's done.