Its never easy

But I’m getting closer to getting a PCB made. I’ve solved the issues with the drill files but have now got a new problem. The schematic has now been corrupted, meaning I’ll have to redo that. it shouldn’t take long but its a case of one step forward and two back at the moment. I really wanted to get this PCB order before Christmas but it may not make it. Still here’s a little shot of the Gerber files rendered as a pcb by one of the online Gerber viewers called Mayhew Labs. Its nice to see it almost in the flesh as it adds another check to the process before I go ahead and spend money on (hopefully not) practice boards.

One day I’m just going to have to lump it and press the button. There are only so many checks you can do but I’ve had a check by our local homebrew superhero Kevin, M0KHZ and his eye is far better than mine.

Progress with the shack clock

I've spent a bit of time over the last day or so putting together a schematic for my Arduino / MSF60Khz shack clock. The previous iteration has been sat on my desk in breadboard form doing exactly what it should but a bit ugly.

I've designed the schematic on Eagle and made a bit of progress with support from the Arduino forums and think I'm nearly there. The eventual aim is for the club to have another option for those looking for a bit of soldering for the next step in their licence, or just as a simple thing for the shack.

I hadn't appreciated how long it would take to get the spaghetti on the paper and I'm sure there'll be more efficient ways to do it but here's my first attempt after considerable help from the forums.



If you're interested there are more details on the project pages which will be updated in due course.

I'm sure there are those who could do this in a few minutes, but, for the more challenged like myself it has been quite a steep curve to climb but a worthwhile one. It'll be lovely to get something finished before the end of the month but we'll see how well it goes. I'm struggling a bit with the PCB with little things like mounting holes and getting the correct drill size / grid.

If anyone fancies being a checker for this and the board then I'm always happy to accept guidance.



Whoever spots all the errors first wins a prize!

 

 

A bit of spare time and look what happens

I took this week off as it was the kids half term and the great British weather meant that not much of it was spent outside. The idea was to get out on the bike and get on the air on the fells. Not a chance! Time for a bit of radio with the helpful hands of a 4 year old and a bored 6 year old.

The shack PSU had packed up again and after wrestling with it for a few hours I gave up and took the Atmega 328 IC out of my Arduino Uno after programming it with the MSF clock code to attempt to build a very bare bones design that will be my first PCB since about 1990, when I made a truly iconic lights on reminder for my non existent car at University.

The video is just me powering up the clock and getting quite excited that it worked. Enjoy.

[youtuber youtube='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmtNlicvjpI']

MSF Receiver project

Just a quickie to say that I've started a new project page to show you how I got on making an accurate clock with the MSF 60Khz time signal, an Arduino and someone elses code. The detail is all here

MSF60Khz receiver clock

A while back I got myself an MSF60Khz receiver from a company called PV electronics. The receiver is tuned to 60Khz so that the time signal from Anthorn in Cumbria can be received and data output to a serial connection. It struck me that it would be a good project to make a clock using my Arduino.

Being a novice at programming I thought (quite naïvely) that a library would be available for decoding the serial information and that it would be quite simple to follow what's going on in the code and therefore learn a bit more about coding these versatile microprocessors. Well I was right in one respect, there is a library, but the content needs better explanation for me to understand. This is more directed towards needing an understanding and patient tutor to explain the content.

Still with the information in the code the output is to a serial monitor that comes with the Arduino IDE. The simple task of converting the output to an LCD was done and I can happily say I now have a nice, accurate shack clock that doesn’t need a PC to run. I could have bought one for about 83p off eBay but it has been quite a satisfying build to make it all up.

Here it is in all it’s glory on YouTube.

[youtube]c71VrKSfeQU[/youtube]

There’s still a bit of work to be done with the LCD readout as it hangs on the ‘Got Carrier’ part and won't move onto the ‘Synchronising’ and ‘Reading Fix’ parts. if I delete the lcd.print (“Got Carrier”); line then it works. I don’t get it at the moment but I hope to get a proper fix soon.

I fancy designing a PCB and getting it printed so I can run it as a finalised project.