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What's "Digital QRP Homebrewing" all about? Our Objectives We have two goals – education and practical example projects. From the educational perspective, large semiconductor manufacturers regularly bring increasingly capable digital circuits to market and the QRP community can really take advantage of these new capabilities. Our inherently technical bend makes us naturally suited to apply these powerful new chips in ways perhaps not even thought of by the manufacturers. We’ll be spotlighting a new digital chip in each issue and provide tangible ways to take advantage of its features and capabilities. We’ll explore the hardware interface aspects, the programming techniques, and at times the actual programming and debugging hardware available for it. Then in order to take advantage of all this newfound knowledge, we’ll present QRP-related projects using these chips – digital circuits and software routines that you’ll be able to build up for use in your own shack. Nothing brings home an educational concept like actually building a project that uses some new-fangled chip and seeing the resultant signals on a ‘scope or as some kind of modulated RF coming out of your rig. To help get the hardware, software and tools onto our benches, we’ve arranged the involvement of kit designers from QRP clubs around the world. These designers will share their design insights and allow us to buy and use their kit’s board as the basis for our own projects here. We also have contacts with several big semiconductor vendors that will be able to provide us sample and at-cost chips, programming software and other programming tools. We’ll even be kitting up some of these projects for those readers wishing to follow along with us in a step-by-step manner. Yes indeed, we’ll certainly have practical projects for you, so be ready to melt some solder with us with every issue! Three-Part Format to the Column We will have a standard and readily identifiable three-part format to each installment of our Digital QRP Homebrewing column. The first two parts will constitute the actual printed column in each issue of QQ, and the third part will be virtual on the Internet. Part 1 of each column spotlights a microcontroller or digital chip newly introduced by a manufacturer, a chip used in a QRP club’s kit, or one that’s been around for a while just begging for use in a QRP project. This part of the column will introduce the microcontroller and describe its operation in typical applications. Equally important, we’ll also describe ways to program and debug the chip – e.g., the development environment (editor, compiler, debugger), and the programmer used to get your software downloaded to the chip. A sampling of chips and projects to be featured in the Part 1’s of this column include:
The beauty of the technical spotlight we will give for each of these microcontrollers (and others) is that a circuit board, eval board or entire product is already available. By using this existing hardware platform, the involved reader can easily implement the exercises we feature for it. So if your favorite controller, digital chip, or kit is spotlighted in one of our future columns, you’ll be able to dive right in and follow along with this column! You’ll be able to augment or modify the existing functionality, and even put your own new program into that PSK31 Beacon. Or picture the scenario where you've just purchased the Keylite kit from the Knightlites and built it up as a nice memory keyer. You’ll then be able to use the information, tools and techniques covered in our column to program the Keylite PIC to do Morse character recognition, talk to your PC over a serial port, keep the time and annunciate in Morse, serve as a marker generator ... the list is endless! Part 2 of each column focuses on the design, evolution and implementation of a common “digital breadboard”. We’ll build upon this breadboard pc board in each issue to produce a platform for performing experiments and working projects in the QRP shack. One of the first activities is to design a pc board for our “Digital QRP Breadboard”. It will need to contain a number of peripherals that QRPers find useful in applications around the shack – an LCD, shaft encoder, DDS chip, audio amplifier, RS-232C serial port, general purpose I/O buffers, and a daughterboard expansion port all provide convenient design flexibility. The Digital QRP Breadboard pcb and base components will be offered as a kit to interested QRPers in order to provide a common platform with which we all can experiment from issue to issue. Of course, one could instead build up the circuits easily on a piece of perf board … either way we’ll have a common design upon which we can grow. Together we’ll design and program a growing library of software routines for the Breadboard. Each issue will bring additional functionality to the project that can be used on the bench, with your rig, or perhaps even coupled with an N2CX test circuit covered in his “Test Topics and More” column here in the pages of QQ. (Don’t you just love synergy!) We’re already working with the chip manufacturers and software tool providers to give us deals on related applications for editing, downloading and debugging. Use of these common tools will further enable us to all “be on the same page” during the evolution of this project. Such a deal! Part 3 of each column concerns the virtual aspect of this whole adventure called the “Digital QRP Homebrewing website.” Immediately available and of course “turned on” 24 hours a day, we’ve constructed this online version of the column to contain all the basic information and references used in the printed column, as well as a bunch of additional information and projects that we couldn’t fit into QQ. We’ll even be updating the website in between issues of QQ so readers can have a dynamic and useful watering hole for processor data sheets, circuit diagrams, source code listings, tools and utilities, reader contributions, useful links to manufactures and other related projects, errata listings and expanded information from this printed column, and more. This will surely be a site to bookmark! The Digital QRP Homebrewing website can be found at www.qrparci.org/digitalqrp.
Page last modified:
November 28, 2001 . |