Sometimes you start on a project and wonder if you're going to get all the resources you're going to need at a reasonable price. Other times its support from the wider and generally very helpful ham community. Suffice to say that without the internet I would be completely stumped a lot of the time.
In defining my winter project (Arduino satellite rotator) I was going through the background stuff and stumbled across a ham in the US (Nimit, K6XOX) who has clearly got a lot more experience in these things and has produced a rotator controller that works with the Yaesu protocols and works with his set up. A bit of email tennis later and I'm on the cusp of ordering a PCB off him that uses the same microprocessor that's in the Arduino only without the unnecessary parts.
He has sent through a manual that is excellent and seems keen to promote his gizmo, if a little reluctant to send a PCB outside of the US. This PCB helps to remove one of the issues I had which was likely to be the biggest stumbling block, the software side of the project. I have had some good practice using existing tutorials to turn on and off LED's, making the Arduino talk to the internet but failed miserably to get it to display a simple 'Hello World' on a LCD despite checking, double checking and triple checking the wiring, software and PC based bits.
this project is a long way from being finished and in reality hasn't really started but so far its been a very good educational experience
No comments:
Post a Comment