One More Board

We'll make it up in volume

As Project Yamhill nears actual physical implementation, it’s time to start building some more real-time, two-way communication. If you’d like to participate in Project Yamhill chat, please click on the link below. Thank you!

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OK, I got slightly sidetracked. When I started doing the design review of all of my recently created PCBs, I realized that I really wanted to get one more design together for this tranche of boards from China. I’ve known that I wanted to create a simple CW keyer to use in future transceivers, and as a standalone product as well. This isn’t a number one priority, but I knew that I was going to have to write keyer code for the Project Yamhill front panel anyway, so I might as well just lay out a simple, basic Arduino-based keyer, which I can then leverage the code from to port right over to Project Yamhill.

EtherKeyer Mini Breadboard Prototype

I wanted to use a microcontroller chip that is still available in DIP packaging, so that it could be soldered by hand by just about any builder. The natural choice seemed to be one of my favorites: the ATtiny85. The nice thing about this chip is that it has a lot of support for it, including an Arduino core. In laying out my initial circuit and looking at programming options, I stumbled upon a relatively new bootloader option that I had never heard of before, called Urboot. The bootloaders for the ATtinyx5 series that I remember working with in the past were pretty flaky, but this one was supposedly very stable and full-featured. So I decided to give it a try, and incorporated it in this project.

After studying all of the numerous options for configuring the bootloader, I figured out how to set it up so that it was able to connect using the same pins as the UART pins used in the Arduino board support serial library as well. By connecting my USB-UART bridge’s DTR pin to the RESET line of the ATtiny85, I was able to reliably flash a HEX file created with Arduino IDE onto the ‘85, and then run a sketch that could communicate with the PC on the same bridge. Pretty neat, and makes debugging a hell of a lot easier for the rest of the sketch!

By using my Etherkit Morse library for Arduino, it’s trivially easy to send CW from the PC serial terminal, via the UART, to the keyer. Here’s a video of me doing so, keying the Twin-T code practice oscillator that I talked about in my previous Substack post:

Not bad for a cheap little 8-pin microcontroller. Now that I’ve worked out the circuitry needed for this keyer, I can finish this board design and then resume my design review for the rest of the tranche. I still need to write the actual keyer code, but that can wait until after the PCBs are done and ordered. I’m a little behind schedule, but Chinese New Year is still a month out, so as long as I get the designs to fab by early next week, I think I’ll be just fine to beat the holiday.

A Few Personal Notes

Lately, after designing a new CW rig, and watching lots of POTA activation videos, I’ve been inspired to really get good at CW, to the point where I can operate without conscious exertion at around 22-ish WPM, especially on the busy end of a pile-up. I’m not super far from that goal, as I can currently copy at around 15 WPM with a decent accuracy rate, but when I actually get on the air, I’m still a bit self-conscious and it’s definitely not a natural process.

I know that there’s no substitute for just doing something over and over again in order to level up your skills in that particular field, so I’ve started working on a new habit that I will try to make at least one CW POTA QSO each day that I’m at home. So far I’m off to a good start, and I really want to keep the momentum going. I also have been putting on CW POTA/SOTA activation YouTube videos in the background while I build circuits (shout out to K4SWL, K2EJT, and K7NOM on YouTube). I’m certain that the long stretches of background Morse Code really do help to train my brain, even if I’m not actively trying to decode (which I still have noticed that I’ve been decoding callsigns even if not paying close attention). Once I get a little lull in the bench work here (when all of my PCBs are off to the fab) I plan to do a CW POTA activation at a nearby park.

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Lastly, we’ve had a flock of hens here on our country estate for over a year now. This is my first time raising chickens and it has been a neat learning experience. It’s been cold and rainy here for the last couple of weeks, and I noticed this last week that one of my hens was droopy looking and slow to move around. Over the weekend I got very concerned because I found her in the pouring rain outside the coop, laying down and not even really moving. She didn’t fight me at all when I picked her up, so I knew that something was very wrong. Without going into a long story, I ended up bringing the poor thing inside our house in order to try to recuperate her. I stuck her inside of a dog crate lined with puppy pads so that she could have a comfortable place to rest. For the first 24 hours she was inside, she almost didn’t move at all, other than to occasionally open her eyes and move her head slightly. She didn’t eat feed that we put out, nor drink water.

I had no idea what wrong with her but at this point I was very worried she was going to die, especially after not drinking for at least 24 hours. A bit of web searching recommended that we give her electrolyte water, or even some Gatorade. I didn’t have any chicken electrolyte packets on hand but I did have some Gatorade, so that’s what we ended up giving her. I held the hen and then forced her beak open, and Jennifer squirted little bits of Gatorade in her mouth at a time, making sure she swallowed them. Dear reader, that seemed to have done the trick! The Gatorade was administered in the evening, and after sleeping the night and then getting another dose the next morning, the hen started making an excellent recovery! She soon began gulping a bunch of water on her own (probably too quickly at first…have you ever seen a chicken vomit?), and then started getting interested in the feed in her crate.

So about three days after she first began to bounce back, she seemed nearly fully recovered, and I let her back out with her flock today. She was zipping around our property like mad and obviously felt way better than she had in weeks. A happy ending to a story that I was very worried was going to go the other way. Now that I have that new skill acquired, my friends have dubbed me with a new title: Esteemed Chicken Nurse.