XPost: rec.radio.amateur.moderated

KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

///////////////////////////////////////////
Arduinos and Picos and keyers, oh my!

Posted: 31 May 2021 12:06 PM PDT http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kb6nu/tVpu/~3/TYCxYmHVKfE/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

The Arduino Nano.

This post is going to be a bit of a ramble. Forewarned is forearmed.

Six years ago, I did my first project with an Arduino and built a K3NG
Keyer. More specifically, I built the DJ0MY Nano Keyer, which is a keyer
that uses an Arduino Nano and the K3NG software. Its a nice design, and it
has been working reliably here since I  built it, but there are a couple of drawbacks.

The biggest drawback is that because it uses a Nano, the entire feature set wont fit in memory. I had wanted to be able to connect a keyboard sometimes
and send with a keyboard. The K3NG software has that feature, but there
isnt enough program memory to do that and accept WinKeyer commands. Since supporting WinKeyer commands is more important, I had to forego the
keyboard input.

I could have used an Arduino Mega. With its larger program memory, I would
have been able to get all of the features that the K3NG software has to
offer, but the DJ0MY board was designed to have the Nano plug directly into
it.
Fast forward

Fast forward a few years, and I run into a guy whos looking for someone to design a simple, microcontroller-based product for him. Armed with my
extensive (hah!) knowledge of Arduinos, I enter into an agreement with him
to do this.

Needless to say, this project turned out to be a lot more difficult than I
had anticipated. In the course of building several different prototypes, I
used a Nano, then a Pro Micro, and then finally just a plain, old Arduino
Uno. One good thing to come out of all this bumbling is that I now have at least some knowledge of the many different versions of Arduinos on the
market.
Enter the Raspberry Pi Pico
Raspberry Pi Pico

Of course, there are a bunch of other microcontrollers on the market. Way
too many for me to keep up with. One of the latest entries that would be of interest to amateur radio operators is the Raspberry Pi Pico. This baby was introduced in January, and  its getting a lot of publicity. It costs only
$4, and it has a lot of advantages over the Arduino.

One thing that I really like about it is that it has way more memory than Arduinos. It has 2 Mbytes of flash memory and 264 kbytes of RAM. Compare
this 32 kbytes of flash and 2 kbytes of RAM for the Nano.

I also like the fact that you can program the Pico using  MicroPython (or CircuitPython) instead of the C++ language used by the Arduino. Instead of using the Arduino IDE, to program the Pico you used the Thonny IDE. Thonny
is an open-source Python development environment available for Windows,
Mac, and Linux (including Raspberrry Pi) computers. I already have it on
the Raspberry Pi 4 computer that Ive been using for microcontroller
software development.

I have a couple of Picos on order and will probably start messing around
with building a keyer on top of it. That should be something fun to do. If youve played around with the Pico and have some words of wisdom for me, Id
love to hear them.



The post Arduinos and Picos and keyers, oh my! appeared first on KB6NUs Ham Radio Blog.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)