Silly Arduino Project #1: A Trivial Beacon

October 30, 2008 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

While waiting for my K1EL keyer kit to show up, I was twiddling my thumbs, and remembered that I had an Arduino microcontroller board sitting around. I originally bought it for an aborted robotics project, but haven’t touched it in months. I redownloaded the development environment, and a few minutes later, I had it happily blinking a Morse beacon message on pin 13, as well as typing the beacon message repeatedly out on its serial port.

It’s a trivial program, and the Arduino is capable of much, much more. When I get home, I’ll solder together a simple keying circuit and try it out on my FT-817.

Addendum:

Here’s the code running while hooked to my FT-817.


Comments

Comment from Chris Herd
Time 5/23/2009 at 4:43 pm

Hi

Is it possible to get a copy of the code from you?

Thanks for the great idea.

Comment from David Cheeseman
Time 7/8/2009 at 8:31 pm

Have you published the source for this anywhere? Do you have to do anything special with the microphone lines to get it to be audible over the ham radio or did you just hook it up to an analog out and send out the tones? Thanks in advance for any reply!

Comment from Mark
Time 8/4/2009 at 2:41 pm

David,

I believe what he’s doing is keying the rig in CW mode from the Arduino. You’re hearing its built in side tone generator. I don’t think he’s sending audio out over SSB.

The code snippet appears to hold the output pin on for either a long (dash) time or a short (dot) amount of time. Standard coe is, as I recall from my youth (LOL) dash is 3 times dot length. Character spacing is a dot unit and word spacing is a dash length. So from all that you can determine the rest….

enjoy!
73,
Mark, WB2SMK

Pingback from innismir.net — Arduino Project #1: Trivial Morse Beacon
Time 12/29/2009 at 8:45 pm

[…] see if I could whip something up from scratch. I had bookmarked Mark, K6HX’s entry about an Arduino based Morse Code Beacon and decided to take a crack at it. My code is a bit of a kludge, but it does […]