{"id":492,"date":"2011-01-11T00:52:48","date_gmt":"2011-01-11T05:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=492"},"modified":"2011-10-21T15:54:17","modified_gmt":"2011-10-21T20:54:17","slug":"first-successful-homebrew-gear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=492","title":{"rendered":"First successful homebrew gear"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned before, one of the joys of ham radio is to invent engineering challenges and then solve them as cleverly as possible. And it’s a great excuse for hardware hacking. Over the weekend, I built a teensy morse-code radio (on a single fixed frequency!) called the Rockmite<\/a>… but I’m still trying to debug why it’s not working.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a much simpler project arrived at my door: a tiny circuit board that turns any two pieces of metal into morse code paddles. By simply making touch-contact with the metal, the resistance triggers the ‘dits’ and ‘dahs’. My goal was to combine this with my existing keyer (a device that creates perfectly-timed morse code, which sits between your paddles and your radio.)<\/p>\n

Here’s a short video showing the two circuit boards hooked up by temporary wires:<\/p>\n

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I first tried fitting the keyer board, paddle board, and a 9V battery all into an altoids tin, but alas — the keyer board’s controls were too tall for the tin, and I didn’t feel like disconnecting them and mounting them directly to the walls of the tin. But then I had a great idea! If the paddle board only needed 6V to operate, I could stack two coin-cells together. And then the coin cells and paddle board could be stuffed into the keyer’s existing<\/em> black plastic enclosure!<\/p>\n

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Notice how the two coin cells are tucked into a slitted styrofoam peanut. To change the batteries, I just yank the electrodes out of the peanut, drop new batteries in, then re-stuff the elecrodes back in. Meanwhile, I hooked up the batteries to a toggle switch added to the back of the device. I had to drill an extra hole for the paddle wires to come out as well. Here’s the finished product:<\/p>\n

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And finally, a short video where I demonstrate how it works:<\/p>\n

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A huge thanks to Dale N0XAS for the picokeyer<\/a> circuit and to Sumner WA1JOS for his touch keyer board<\/a>. Great fun to combine them!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned before, one of the joys of ham radio is to invent engineering challenges and then solve them as cleverly as possible. And it’s a great excuse for hardware hacking. Over the weekend, I built a teensy morse-code radio (on a single fixed frequency!) called the Rockmite… but I’m still trying to debug […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ham-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=492"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions\/573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}