Nuts and Volts - January 2018

I’m always late to the party, but when I do arrive, I’m armed with quite an arsenal of information thanks to NV.

For example, I purchased a PICkit3, but I haven’t used it yet. I know I won't need that for the D-Stick but I may want to modify a PIC soldered to a board some day. If it wasn't for NV, I might have never known about the D-Stick or the Parallax FLiP.

I recently built the Numitron Clock by Bill van Dijik from the September 2016 issue. I also built the ESP8266 Weather Clock by Craig Lindley from the November 2016 issue. This was after I said I would never do anything with a PIC or Arduino.

I wound up customizing Craig's code for fun, using the Arduino IDE to make the changes. After a short time, things got pretty easy.

I have been using Homeseer for home automation. There is a Homeseer plug-in that allows Arduino integration. It's compatible with Uno, Mega, and the like over USB or Ethernet. It's also compatible with NodeMCU over Wi-Fi. It easily interfaces to common I2C displays.

Because of my work with Craig's clock, I was able to get sensors, loads, and displays easily interfaced to my Homeseer system. I’m comfortable customizing the sketch and uploading with the IDE.

NV has quite a variety of interesting and useful articles. I found it interesting how many times I just said, "That's nice" but then took up the project a year later. I realized then that I knew so much about it only because I remember reading it in NV.

For me, the real value of the articles takes a little time to be fully revealed and appreciated. Keep up the good work!

Rick Swenton W1RHS

Wow, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts/history with N&V. I hope you enjoy your retirement.

Bryan Bergeron

BITX40 Mods

Excellent November 2017 issue!

I too am one of the unwashed masses building a Bitx40.

There are a couple of "required" hardware mods: one to add a cap to the output LPF to make the transmitter strictly legal in the US; and one to add a pair of diodes to protect the receiver front end from a strong nearby transmitter.

There are many more enhancement mods out there; groups.io/g/bitx20/topics is a good resource.

Allard PE1NWL is the go-to guy for Bitx40 software updates. As of this writing, he has released v1.26. Updates include USB, LSB, CW, RIT, and Dual VFOs.

Some of these updates require additional hardware mods. Most only require the addition of a function pushbutton. The v1.xx series remains backward-compatible with the vanilla Bitx40 as shipped by Hfsigs.

Mike WA6ISP has an upgraded Raduino. The RaduinoX provides headers for the Arduino Nano, a better mounting for the 5V regulator (fixes a hot regulator issue), and a connector for a rotary encoder et. al.