If you're a regular reader of The Cubical Ruins, you'll notice a.) that I haven't posted in a while, and b.) that a few new widgets have popped up in the right-hand column of the site. While I haven't posted an article in while, I have stayed busy.
My last article was on my new ADS-B flight-tracking setup with an antenna, FlightAware dongle, and Raspberry Pi single-board microcomputer. Since then, I've spent the summer working to improve my home office/radio station in other ways as well. I've added a dedicated LCD screen for my Inovato Quadra "HAM Clock," which provides helpful real-time data about when and where each region of the globe is active and able to be contacted from my station. I have updated the flight-tracking widget on CubicalRuins.com. I have set up a weather station outside and configured it to send weather data to my home network; additionally, I've added a widget with live weather data from my newly set-up weather station. And lastly, in what was probably my most challenging endeavor, I catalogued my entire baseball card collection in an SQL database, published the database online, and added a "Player of the Day" widget that features one card on CubicalRuins.com each day.
HAM Clock
The HAM Clock was probably the easiest project of the summer. I initially bought the Inovato Quadra, which runs HAM Clock, in 2023 when I first got my amateur radio license. I had it plugged into one of the auxiliary HDMI ports on my television so I could watch it on the TV like I would a Blu-ray player or game console. Once I discovered that cheap, bare-bones HD LCD screens exist after buying one for my ADS-B system, I purchased a Hosyond 10.1-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen monitor for my HAM Clock so it could exist as a stand-alone display above my radio rig, where it would be more useful. Plus, now I can watch TV and make use of my data while playing radio.
HAM Clock on stand alone LCD display
Flight-Tracking Widget
Around July, I noticed that my old "What's Up There?" widget had stopped displaying planes and flight data. This is where I had to put my software development and support hat on for the first time regarding one of my new "vibe coding" inventions. In real-world web development, ongoing maintenance is critical. It's not just about building an app and watching it go; it needs to be constantly monitored for glitches, bugs, and underlying system changes that can disrupt or break the application. For example, with CubicalRuins.com, I have to be on the lookout for news about changes, updates, and reported system issues with Squarespace (my hosting service) and Google, my web editor and dashboard. If an upcoming change requires me to update a back-end service, security certificate, or API key, I need to make sure I complete those updates on time so my website stays available.
ADS-B widget
Initially, I used API keys from my FlightRadar24 and FlightAware accounts to provide the aircraft images and data on the widget. But in each case, those services cancelled their free API services, leaving my widget blank. An API key is a passcode that allows you to "fetch" live data from one system or website and publish it in real time on your own. API keys often start out free, especially if companies want to entice new customers to try out their services, but eventually—if the service is popular—they may move to a subscription model.
Using advice from ChatGPT, I set up a new widget with no API key. Instead of using a subscription service, ChatGPT suggested that I use an embedded map from Airplanes.live that requires no API key, so that's what I did. The new widget is not only more stable because it does not require an API key, but it genuinely looks nicer, too.
Here is the HTML code for CubicalRuins.com's new "What's Up There?" widget.
Live Weather Station Data
As you may have guessed, I'm a bit of a nerd for real-time data.
Between my UHF/VHF (regional) and HF (worldwide) radios, my police, fire, and EMS scanner, my ADS-B flight-tracking system, and HAM Clock display, I've got a lot of data and info streaming into my home office/radio station here in Ohio. And now, that includes live weather data.
I recently invested in a two-piece weather station from Ambient Weather Network (AWN), which includes a heads-up display for inside, and a rig with temperature, pressure, humidity, wind, and rain sensors for outside. Not only does the station feed data to the heads-up display, but it also records and tracks it on the AWN app, along with data from other users who have AWN stations at home as well. So, you can get extremely accurate and local weather data from anywhere. In fact, the nearest national park, Cuyahoga Valley National Park, has dozens of AWN stations throughout it, so there are a lot of stations around me providing all kinds of weather, geological, and atmospheric data.
My weather station
Since I now have digital weather data being sent to my AWN application, I knew I could export that data to other venues, such as an LCD screen (like my HAM Clock or flight-tracking systems), or send that information to my website. Since I already had a factory-made heads-up display for the weather in my house, I thought it would be neat to create my own API key to send my live weather station data to my public website. This way, visitors would know if it's raining or snowing on my head, or whether or not I have been sucked into the air by a tornado.
ChatGPT helped me log into the web version of AWN, access my raw weather data, and create an API key to send that data to third-party sites and apps. In this case, an API key made sense because it's not fetching data owned and collected by another company; it's using my own data. So, there would be no risk of the data stream going dark because the data provider cancels the service or raises the cost. As long as my weather station is up and running, the widget will work and be available to you for free!
Here is the HTML code for CubicalRuins.com's new Weather Station widget.
SQL Baseball Card Database
This project had an interesting origin. At work, we are increasingly being asked to learn, use, and experiment with AI tools such as Claude by Anthropic. While I've already used Claude to answer technical questions, I never really used it to develop or enhance any software applications. I just didn't have any work-related projects I could think of using Claude for in my line of work. So, I decided to ask Claude to help me build an SQL database for all my baseball cards, many of which I've had since I was a kid in the late 1980s.
My Cards
Once I built and stylized the main baseball card website, I created a widget for it right here on CubicalRuins.com. Using the same embed strategy I used for my new flight-tracker widget, I added a tile to the right with a random player or card featured from my collection. My baseball card spin-off is now live!
The project was also a refresher in SQL database architecture, as well as CSS, JavaScript, and HTML coding. So, while my baseball card library is just a personal hobby project, it definitely shows that I can utilize Claude for professional projects in the future. However, professional stuff is boring, so we'll continue to focus on sports, cat lasers, sci-fi horror films, video games, and HAM radio contests here on The Cubical Ruins "family" of websites.
Here is the GitHub repository for my baseball card database.
The baseball card database
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