Arduino in the Cloud I saw a recent post on the Make blog about the new cloud ecosystem for Arduino which has been dubbed Arduino Create. Since this will most likely be the future of Arduino, it seemed wise to get an early look at the platform. It includes quite a few features, but the… Read More Wideband Transmission #9
If you wouldn’t mind, I would like to draw your attention to my latest post on the Etherkit App Notes blog. In it, I detail how to create a 10 milliwatt WSPR beacon using nothing more than the Etherkit Si5351A Breakout Board, an Internet-connected PC, and a low-pass filter. A simple project, but one that… Read More 200,000 Miles Per Watt
Happy New Year 2015! 2014 was a bit of a mixed bag here. It’s been a transition year for Etherkit, as I reorganize and reorient the business for a renewed push to get the CC1 and other new products to market. I believe that good things are beginning to happen there. On a personal level,… Read More Wideband Transmission #6
I’ve had a good response to the Si5351A Breakout Board when it was posted on Hackaday last month. There have even been a few folks who went through the trouble of ordering PCBs from OSHPark so that they could build their own copies of the board for experimentation. One of them, Tom AK2B, even constructed… Read More Si5351A Breakout Board Update
I appreciate all of the interest in the Si5351A Breakout Board that I have available on OSHPark. I apologize for not having this available sooner, but here is a GitHub repository which hosts the KiCad design files and a PDF of the Breakout Board schematic, which lists the part numbers for the reference oscillator and… Read More Si5351A Breakout Board Documentation
The theme of this blog post is not lots of tedious work, but refinement leading to good results. First off, let’s talk about the funny I2C address on the parts which I received from Mouser. Since Digi-Key has no order minimums and very inexpensive shipping available (in the form of USPS First Class mail), I… Read More Si5351A Investigations Part 6
The Si5351 library for avr-gcc that I’ve been promising for the last four posts is finally in a state where I feel comfortable releasing it, so I’ve posted it on GitHub. I think that the documentation posted on the README file and inside the code should be enough to get you going, but if you… Read More Si5351A Investigations Part 5
Since the previous Si5351 Investigations post, I’ve made quite a bit of progress integrating the Si5351 into a grabber receiver. First, let’s look at the grabber receiver architecture and how the Si5351 is used in it. Above you can see the basic block diagram of the receiver. The front end has two switchable plug-in bandpass… Read More Si5351A Investigations Part 3
It has been another productive weekend with the Si5351 here in the shack. Since the last report, I’ve made significant progress in confirming that the Si5351 may be a good candidate for use as a LO in a radio. After getting the most basic communications with the Si5351 going via the Bus Pirate, my next task was… Read More Si5351A Investigations Part 2
I don’t know if the guy who created this is a ham (he does say he’s an engineer), but it’s a neat application of some old-school technology. He uses a PIC 12F510 to output a Hellschreiber modulated square wave right to his PC’s sound card line in port. I really get a kick out of… Read More A Hellschreiber Clock!