Silly Arduino Project #1: A Trivial Beacon

Published on 2008-10-31 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.