Category: website

It occurs to me that I’ll likely be writing about the Significant Other project for a while, so it now gets its own category on the blog. I’ll go back and fix the tagging on older posts to be consistent.

The main board and relay board prototypes are in a final enough state that I can begin to work on firmware. Rather than start from scratch, particularly as I don’t have a lot of experience with this type of project, I decided to look at similar projects with open source code for both ideas and potentially as a scaffold for this project’s firmware.

I have come across the K3NG cw keyer, which is as full-featured a keyer as you could ever want, and which is written in such a modular and generalizable way that it can be made to fit on a variety of chips, depending on their resources and which features are included in the build. The package also includes a serial interface, command-line mode, and debugging features that should make the development process as painless as it can be.

I hadn’t seen this project while I was planning the main board, but the hardware layout envisioned in the K3NG keyer was very similar to what I had come up with, so it took minimal work to get it running on my main board.

The K3NG code lives in a sourceforge repository, and one of my first concerns was how to manage the code base. Considering that the S.O. is a specific design (and perhaps one that only I will ever care about), it seemed reasonable to take the most recent version and start a separate repository — I guess this could be considered a fork. To keep things organized, I’ve deposited that code, some test programs for individual subsystems, and the schematic on GoogleCode.  As with other projects, I’ll update the repository whenever I’m working on any of these files.

I spent a few days reading and pondering the K3NG keyer code to get the gestalt. It is very well organized, and every feature can be enabled/disabled through compiler directives.  It may be poor programming practice, but I decided to thin out the code to make it easier to work with. I realize that having features commented out so that they are never compiled has the same effect in terms of final size of the compiled code that will be programmed onto the chip, but I felt that I needed to remove sections that are not part of the intended application for the S.O., particularly since I’ll be adding other features.

Consequently, with some reluctance, I performed some surgery, removing fun stuff like code practice, CW receive decoding, and the extensive winkey emulation functions. In developing this device, the code will become less general. For example,  instead of an expandable number of buttons, the S.O. front panel will have four. All feature selection will take place through these buttons and the LCD display, rather than via the paddles. This is consistent with the design goal of not being able to leave behind anything when heading into the field to operate — if you forget the paddles, you should still be able to have QSOs. To that end, the front panel buttons have been modified so it is possible to press two of them at a time — in a pinch, the front panel buttons themselves will be able to serve as a straight key or iambic paddles.

For all I took out, the core keyer functions still take a good deal of space. I’ll have to see what the trade offs are in implementing a menu-driven interface and then in adding the clock, frequency counter, and antenna tuner functionality. Fitting it all in will take some doing — I hope it is possible. I’m sure that during development,  I’ll have to turn off some features to test others if I want to make use of the serial interface and debugging features.