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The C-F-R Project

Project Description

The C-F-R project is a Radio Motherboard (RMb) that initially will have three plugin daughter cards. The RMb will provide power to all daughter cards and will handle all connections between daughter cards and from daughter card to the outside environment. Following are listed the three types of daughter cards. Listed under each are specific instances in order of my preference.

  • Controller - this will be a microprocessor which will handle input for frequency and perhaps volume. Some possible controllers will be:
  • Frequency generator -
  • RF device - This will be a small receiver, transmitter or transceiver that will have its oscillator circuit replaced by the input from the Frequency generator. Some possible candidates here would be:
    • RockMite - normally a rock-bound transceiver from Small Wonder Labs.
    • TwoFer - a now retired VXO transmitter kit from Henderson QRP.
    • SoftRock Lite - and SDR receiver from Tony Parks.

The initial setup that I envision is having the Arduino for the controller. Initially input to the Arduino would be supplied from terminal emulator running on a PC or PDA. A frequency would be typed in and sent to the Arduino. The Arduino would conver the frequency into a hex frequency tuning word required by the frequency generator, in this case a DDS-60. The DDS-60 would generate the frequency and feed it to the RF device. If good progress is made, the initial RF device will be a TwoFer transmitter, since the RockMite is on order with a month or two wait. The Twofer is for 40m so should be usable anywhere in the CW segment of 40m.

Project Hardware Setup

Arduino

The Arduino is bootloader that is loaded into an Atmel chip, and is also an IDE used to create C code that is loaded into the chip using the bootloader. Our project will use Atmel's Atmega168. We will be using the Really Bare Bones board (RBBB) from Modern Device. There is a lot of information, both hardware and software for the Arduino. See The World Famous Index of Arduino and Freeduino Knowledge

We will build the following interfaces to the Arduino:

  • Hardware serial RS232 - connection to PC for loading software
  • Software serial RS232 - Palm PDA as I/O device
  • PS2 mouse - encoder type input
  • Serial LCD - display output of frequency, etc.
  • Lines to Si570 board to send frequency tuning word

Si570

RockMite

Project Software

Right now I am using the W0CNN C program untouched to run the ATMega168 on the BareBones Board. It defaults to 10 MHz, so it is good for a test. To change frequencies he used push buttons that existed on the development board he was using and LEDs to indicate status to him. I hope to get the RS232 interface working so that you can type in a frequency or shift and see the frequency redisplayed. This should allow a PDA to send the adjustments. Ultimately I would like to have a rotary shft encode change the frequency and display it to an LCD.

We also need to convert the program into Arduino libraries to make it easy to include in your programs.