Curriculum: Edge, Embedded and RF
Subject: Curriculum: Edge, Embedded and RF
4 chapters
1. Phase 1 (Months 1–2): Radio fundamentals with an SDR
[Verse 1]
Twelve-dollar dongle plugs in like a tiny silver key,
RTL-SDR the Four, antenna leaning off the balcony,
Flash the driver, open up SDR++ or Gqrx glowing green,
A waterfall of color where the empty air had been.
[Chorus]
Dial it in, dial it in, frequency's the address of the wave,
Bandwidth's the width of the door that lets the signal through the gate,
AM rides the volume, FM rides the pitch, FSK just flips a switch,
OFDM stacks a hundred tiny whispers in one ditch,
Above the noise floor, below the budget's ceiling line,
Gain up on the antenna — that's the only friend you'll find tonight.
[Verse 2]
Link budget's just a bank account of decibels you spend,
Transmitter is the paycheck and the noise floor is the rent,
Nine hundred megahertz takes the long way round a wall,
Two point four gigahertz hits that same wall and just stalls,
Longer wave bends further, shorter wave gets stopped and torn,
That's why the lower frequency travels farther, carrying less each mile it's borne.
[Verse 3]
First I catch the local FM, a voice out of the static hush,
Then dump1090 wakes and paints the sky with planes that rush,
Little triangles crawling on a map above the coast,
ADS-B whispering altitude and call sign like a ghost,
Spin the dial to one-thirty-seven, watch NOAA drift on by,
Lines of grainy cloud unspool like film against the sky,
Near the harbor, AIS hums the names of ships at sea,
Then I spot the Wi-Fi hump, and a drone link ticking underneath.
[Chorus]
[Bridge]
Twenty hours of study, ISED wants to know
You won't fry the neighbor's radio or jam the trucks below,
Pass the Basic, get a callsign stitched into your name,
Then a HackRF or a LimeSDR steps into the frame —
Now you're not just listening, you're a voice out in the static,
Legal, licensed, keying up — the room's no longer just an audience.
[Verse 4]
Read the Hobbyist's Guide to the RTL by lamp light, page by page,
RAC's own Basic study guide to build you for the stage,
Twenty hours, one exam, a folding chair at the local club,
Trade your questions for a callsign and a fingerpicked warm hum.
[Verse 5]
Solder up a dipole, cut it half the wavelength through,
Copper wire and coax feedline, that's the antenna's simple truth,
SWR meter tells you if the power's coming back,
Trim an inch and test again until the numbers track,
Every build starts crooked, every signal starts unclear,
Somewhere down in all that static lives a story you can hear,
Ham nets on the weekend, trading callsigns overseas,
Bouncing voices off the ionosphere on a random skip and breeze.
[Chorus]
[Outro]
Dial it in, dial it in, the air was always talking loud,
Frequency, bandwidth, modulation — pull it down out of the cloud,
Antenna gain and noise below, and budget keeps the whole thing alive,
Ninety, two-four, near or far — now you know the reason why.
2. Phase 2 (Months 3–4): Embedded and the flight stack
[Verse 1 - Male]
Solder smoke and a single LED,
I toggle a pin, watch the heartbeat breathe,
ESP32 humming, Rust keeps me sane,
Borrow the bus, never fight the compile pain,
Wired up the IMU, whispering through I2C,
Six axes talking tilt and gravity,
Every reading stamped, then written to flash,
So when the board reboots, memory won't crash
[Verse 2 - Female]
Cross the compiler, aim it far from home,
Building for a Pi while I'm sat here alone,
Ship the binary, headless and lean,
No screen, no mouse, just a blinking green,
Systemd's the shepherd, keeps my service alive,
Watchdog's got teeth if the loop don't survive,
Restart on failure, log to a file,
Small board, big patience, that's embedded style
[Chorus]
Blink, borrow, log it to the flash,
Read the tilt before you spend the cash,
Sim it, then spin it, that's the only way,
Gazebo first before the props hold sway,
MAVLink's the language, packets flying clean,
ArduPilot, PX4, same dream machine,
Blink, borrow, log it, simulate, then fly,
Ground before the sky, ground before the sky
[Verse 3 - Male]
Software-in-the-loop, no motors to fear,
Waypoints on a map that only I can steer,
Set a mission, watch the drone obey,
Failsafe triggered, bring it home, okay,
QGroundControl chatting, telemetry streams,
Every heartbeat message backing up the dreams,
Crash it in the simulator, laugh it off, restart,
That's how the real ones learn their craft
[Verse 4 - Female]
Under two-fifty grams, no license, just the joy,
Foam and carbon whispering like a careful toy,
Or the five-inch racer, screaming FPV,
Basic RPAS card, Transport Canada's decree,
Flight controller flashed with ArduPilot's core,
Props on last, always, check it twice more,
Bench test the compass, calibrate the horizon,
Rise on the throttle only when you're wisened
[Bridge]
Open up the Rust book, chapter on the borrow,
White's "Making Embedded" for the questions of tomorrow,
Read the ArduPilot docs before you touch the stick,
Patience in the params, nothing here is quick
[Chorus]
Blink, borrow, log it to the flash,
Read the tilt before you spend the cash,
Sim it, then spin it, that's the only way,
Gazebo first before the props hold sway,
MAVLink's the language, packets flying clean,
ArduPilot, PX4, same dream machine,
Blink, borrow, log it, simulate, then fly,
Ground before the sky, ground before the sky
[Outro - Duet]
Blink, borrow, log it — count it down,
Sim it, then spin it, feet still on the ground,
When the code is steady and the loop runs true,
That's the day the quad lifts off with you
3. Phase 3 (Months 5–6): Autonomy and denied environments
[Verse 1]
Small computer, riding shotgun by the flight controller's spine,
a node is just a whisper with a job and a design.
Topics are the wires strung invisible in air,
publish to the dark and trust that someone's listening there.
Tf2 keeps the bones aligned, the frames from drifting loose,
camera talks to body talks to world — no room for truce.
Two brains under one hull now, the autopilot and the mind,
the Pixhawk flies the muscle, the companion reads the sign.
[Chorus]
Vuela sola, sin señal, sin cadena al cielo — fly alone,
no GPS, no madre nave, just the drone and what it's known.
Nodo, tópico, la brújula de hueso — tf2 holds the bone.
Autonomía, mi amor, is a system on its own.
[Verse 2]
Orin Nano humming quiet, or a Pi with Coral bolted tight,
YOLO boxes hunt the color, hunt the shape, hunt through the night.
Fifteen frames a second minimum or the target starts to blur,
draw the box, predict the center, lock the gimbal, make it purr.
Detect, then track, don't lose it in the static and the glare,
the edge does what the cloud can't — no signal, still aware.
[Verse 3]
GPS is just a whisper from a satellite, easy to erase,
so optical flow reads the ground rushing beneath the drone's own face.
Visual odometry stitches frames like footprints in the snow,
terrain matching checks the fingerprint of valleys down below.
This is why the trenches learned to trade the sky for glass —
fibre-optic FPVs, a leash of light that jammers cannot pass.
No frequency to steal, no static veil to throw,
just a thread unspooling, quiet, where the enemy can't go.
[Chorus]
Vuela sola, sin señal, sin cadena al cielo — fly alone,
no GPS, no madre nave, just the drone and what it's known.
Nodo, tópico, la brújula de hueso — tf2 holds the bone.
Autonomía, mi amor, is a system on its own.
[Verse 4]
A jammer floods the channel, screaming louder than the truth,
drowns the tiny handshake between the stick and the roof.
Frequency hopping dodges — a hundred doors, one key,
ExpressLRS and LoRa built to duck and disagree.
Meshtastic scatters whispers, node to node to node,
no single throat to strangle when the message finds its road.
[Bridge]
Build the eye that finds the color, sworn to nothing but its sight,
send the pulse on a hopping frequency through the copper-colored night.
Then write the darker half — the way you'd choke its only vein,
and after that, the harder page — the way it lives again.
Cómo lo cazo, cómo lo blindo — both sides of the same coin,
the hunter and the hardened — capstone, where the lessons join.
[Outro]
Nodo. Tópico. Frame.
No hay señal, no hay culpa, solo el vuelo y su nombre.
Autonomía, al fin, sin cadena, sin control remoto —
just the drone, the dark, and everything it's already learned.
4. Habits
[Verse 1]
I keep a notebook open wide, not locked in some drawer,
every photo of the antenna, every trace I saw,
the spectrum waterfall in blue, the script that made it run,
I post it public, line by line, before the habit's done.
[Chorus]
Schreib es auf — write it down, don't let the moment fade,
Щоденник, my diary, is how the craft is made,
one habit keeps me honest: the photo and the code,
Gewohnheiten, звичка — the weight that we both hold.
[Verse 2]
Once a month I sit and read an interview from the front,
a drone-unit voice from somewhere east, plainspoken, blunt,
or a RUSI page, a CNA line, dissecting the machine,
I hunt one fact that shifts my build — one change I hadn't seen.
Maybe it's the jamming pattern, maybe the battery drain,
maybe how they patched a firmware fix in freezing rain,
I write it down beside my build, a single honest note:
"this changes how I solder now" — that's the line I quote.
[Chorus]
Schreib es auf — write it down, don't let the moment fade,
Щоденник, my diary, is how the craft is made,
one habit keeps me honest: the photo and the code,
Gewohnheiten, звичка — the weight that we both hold.
[Verse 3]
I scribble marginalia — small notes that hug the edge,
where afterthought meets insight on the page's ragged ledge,
a frequency that drifted, a resistor gone too warm,
each scrap becomes the memory that guides the newer form.
No filter, no performance, just the raw and dated proof,
a capture from a Tuesday, a mistake without a roof,
because the ones who documented, decades on, get read —
the habit is the teacher when the datasheet's left for dead.
[Verse 4]
Some nights the signal's silent and there's nothing new to log,
just static on the waterfall, a stubborn, empty fog,
but even then I write it: "nothing changed today,"
because the discipline's the point, not what the data say.
I think of all the builders lost to history's careless hand,
the ones who kept no record, and we don't understand
what worked, what failed, what circuit saved a life out in the field —
so I write for them as much as me, a debt that I must yield.
[Bridge]
Jeden Monat, one report — кожного місяця, one more thought,
not for likes, not for show, für die Werkbank, for the fight,
documentation is the compass when the datasheet's out of sight,
Щоденник, Tagebuch — two words that mean the same delight.
[Chorus]
Schreib es auf — write it down, don't let the moment fade,
Щоденник, my diary, is how the craft is made,
one habit keeps me honest: the photo and the code,
Gewohnheiten, звичка — the weight that we both hold.
[Outro]
So keep the log, and keep it public, keep the trace, the frame,
one lesson every month can quietly rewire your aim,
Щоденник, Tagebuch — small habits, patiently sown,
the notebook and the reading — that's the habit you now own.
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