Previously, I have read about a wireless Morse thermometer designed by Steve Weber, KD1JV. I played around with the basic idea in a YouTube video I made. It basically powers a little Colpitts oscillator from an IO pin on an Arduino. Weber’s circuit did much the same, just using a small 8 pin AVR and a temperature sensor to send the current temperature via Morse code.

Over on the Open Emitter blog (sorry, don’t know whose blog this is) there is a twist on this basic idea: instead of using a separate oscillator, use the oscillator that drives the microcontroller as the emitter (probably of just a few microwatts into a short wire antenna). To on-off key the oscillator, the Atmel chip is put into power-down mode, and woken up via the watch dog timer. I think it’s a cool idea, and worthy of experimentation. I’ve got some ATTINY85 chips on sale (just $1.10 each) which will probably be breadboarded into a test circuit, using either some of my 10.140Mhz crystals or maybe some of the 80m or 20m crystals that I have lying around.

Check out the article:

Tiny Beacon

I’ve been busy lately, and have done almost nothing radio related. But John was kind enough to point out to me that Bill, N2CQR of Soldersmoke fame had posted a mention of me, and I surfed over to his blog to have a peek.

His post that apparently uses my code to send Morse which is tracked by the Reverse Beacon Network

Awesome. It’a actually pretty gratifying to see how often this simple (at least for me) code has been used and reused by people. I think of this code as being almost too trivial to worry about, but it’s clear that there are lots of people who are using the Arduino to try to get into some very simple code and electronics projects. I think that’s awesome! There are a number of authors/technocrats/philosophers who are saying that those who don’t learn to write programs are simply going to be left behind: appliance operators in life, and that those that do will be able to achieve. I don’t know that it’s true, but I do think some passing knowledge of programming can be leveraged into cool projects, and I’m glad to see that Bill has taken his first steps into the world of Arduino, and glad that I could be a part of it.

Addendum:

You can get my code from this blog post.

I made a couple of different videos using variations of this code. I was inspired to make this video after seeing Steve Weber’s “Temp2Morse” project, which basically keys a small oscillator powered directly from the pin of an ATTINY processor (in his case) or an Arduino in mine.

I used another variation of this code to interface a PS/2 keyboard to the Arduino, and then used it to key my FT-817:

(Apologies if you all have seen these before, but I thought they might be new to some of you.)

Tap… tap… tap… Is this thing still on?

Apologies to my loyal readers (reader?) for the lack of recent updates. A combination of work pressure, family visits, general lassitude and other distractions have caused the writing muse to flee, and every time I sit down to write something down, I have just felt physically tired and unable to write stuff down. But the good thing is: the days are getting longer, my project at work is shipping, and I’m hoping that May will mark the beginning of some good new projects.

Some things I have in the works:

• A number of Raspberry Pi related projects. In particular, I’ve got most of the parts for a little robotic platform that will carry a Raspberry Pi and a webcam. It’s my first real complete homebrew robotics project, which is kind of cool.
• I’ve been experimenting with 3D printing, and hope to do some more.
• Weather is improving, so the urge to get my RC airplanes back in the air.
• I need to get back to some radio projects. I was up to 43 states on my WAS via JT65, it would be great to polish that off this summer.

Stay tuned!