Copasetic Flow

 Raspberry Pi released the Raspberry Pi Radio Module 2 today. It's the same wireless module supporting both WiFi and Bluetooth that's used for the Pico W and the Pico 2 W, but it's packaged as a standalone module . Photo of Pi Radio Module 2 from release announcment I don't know if we'll wind up using this module on Project TouCans, but the external antenna you can see on the right-hand side of the module abovoe has been enticing at various points during the project. I know that extending the antenna would violate the conformance and RF certification that the module provides, but Project TouCans isn't a commercial product yet anway, so... There are games we can play with just the module itself though. The first of which would be to move from a Pico-W to a Pico and move the processor module inside TouCans, leaving only the wireless module on the ouside of the device.  TouCans Current Setup with Pico-W on the Outside This should make the whole rig more rugged, bu...

 When I started down the road of putting a Raspberry Pico-W in charge of the Morse code key and on/off switch on our 20 meter rock-locked, QRP CW rig, Project TouCans, last year, I came across many, many microPython code examples where the entire point was to WiFi connect your Pico-W to your home router and then access it from other devices.  KO6BTY and I however, mostly use Project TouCans while out camping for POTA/SOTA. Consequently, the 'home router' route, (pun intended), didn't seem helpful. Ultimately, I found code example for setting up a Pico-W as a network as an access point as opposed to a client. That worked. We were able to WiFi connect a laptop to Project TouCans to turn the rig on and off and send either auto-keyed or straight key CW . It did however, lock whichever device into TouCans exclusively. That wasn't too big of a problem though, because I could make POTA self-spots and check out our signal on various SDRs using my smart phone. Then, yesterday, a...

 The WiFi straight key on Project TouCans is up and running! There were a few steps to the process. First, I realized yesterday that most of my audio delay issues with the sidetone on the Chromebook that I usually use to control Project TouCans keyer were caused by using the Linux Chrome browser  on that machine as opposed to the built-in Chrome browser. I'd originally made this choice becuase I thought running the Linux browser with the  --disable-web-security argument was the only way to make cross-origin resource sharing accesses from the keyer's locally served, (via file), web page, to the Pico-W.  It turns out I was incorrect about that. by using fetch, fetch(`http://192.168.4.1/light/skgo?msg=${cwmsg}`, { mode: 'no-cors' })         .then(() => console.log("CW message sent successfully."))         .catch(err => console.error("Error sending CW message:", err)); with a no-cors mode. This results in the browser issuing ...

 Project TouCans has an issue with Pico-W power supply noise acting as RFI over the rig's Bluetooth audio system. I found an interesting "fix" yesterday that I do not suggest you replicate. What I believe I did was to capacitatively couple the VBUS pin to ground. VBUS is where power comes into the Pico-W in TouCans. When I accidently placed the ground wire for the Pico-W near the VBUS pin, the helecoptering noise went away. You can se that teh ferrule is support just above pin 40, the VBUS pipn. Meanwhile, the socket for the wire is resting on top of the USB connector for the Pico-W board. I used the keyer a bit more. That's how I know I didn't just short the VBUS and ground lines; a thing that would have disabled the keyer altogether. I'll experiment with this more today, but the incident hints at a simple and more polite, less dastardly dangerous fix that could remove the noise. Here's a video QSO with AB9CA from US-4571 Juan Bautista Trail where it pass...

 One remotely controllable switch that Project TouCans has been missing is an on/off switch. Once the rig's up in the air, it's powered until we bring it bakc down or the battery goes dead. We're working on changing that. A few weeks ago after reading about Darlington arrays on a ham radio forum message I can no longer locate, we put a plan in place. K06BTY got our twow main comcponents soldered ont a board and we stepped away from the project for a few weeks. We're back and just about ready to go. Here's what we have now K06BTY installed our keyer relay dead-bug style using superglue below the single-pole double-throw power relay . We're using the Darlington relay pictured at the top of the column to protect the Pico-W from directly delivering current to the relay coils, an activity that can destroy at least the GPIO portion of the Pico-W, (ask me how I know.) More updates soon. For step by step progress updates see TouCan's github page for this project .

 I spent a lot of time this week working on getting radio frequency interference from the rig itself and the Pico-W that controls Project TouCans out of the audio output. Some of this work was not fruitful. Turns out the audio wiring does not belong in Project TouCans no matter how much the Pico-W may induce helicopter blade audio overtones in the rig's headphone routing. Some of the work, however, not only removed the helicopter noise, it was a simple patch, like scissors and tape and cardstock simple. Please allow me to introduce the cigar box Pico-W Noise Suppressor. At present, the Pico-W rides atop the heavy duty opto-isolated relays that it uses to control Project TouCans internal keyer. As it turns out, the helicopter noise was being coupled into the audio output through these relays. Bear with me, there are a combination of audio issues that I'm optimizing for here. It's kind of like the old lady that ate a fly story. Audio ground needs to be routed through the sa...

 I don't use the nascent straight key mode of the Project TouCans 20 meter ham radio as much as I could because the onboard Pico-W that serves as the control center and keyer of the rig, historically, has had unreliable Wi-Fi performance. (Alas, I partially blame the Windows laptop that sends the straight key signals as well.) Sadly, this can result in the key being stuck down which requires me to lower the radio and reset the keyer. While I've marveled at the fact that a laptop could be 20 feet from the Pico-W and have just adequate communications, and a signal level that showed as medium to weak. That's all, apparently, been fixed with a simple flip of the Pico-W. Literally. The Pico-W had power supply connection issues when mounted in a plug board directly on the rig like so: It's not too, too hard to see why. The battery leads are smallish, and were by no means a compression fit into the plugboard. I fussed fussed with this configuration, but to no avail. Also? ...

TouCans has always had an issue of accumulating charge... somewhere. This manifests itself as the Rockmite's keyer chip rebooting the first time the key is closed after a long delay (on the order of minutes usually.) The downside of all this is what happens next. The keyer (even though it's in straight key mode) is unresponsive until the Rockmite is power cycled. Here's the thing though. TouCans' power source is in the air now. It's in the antenna with the rest of the rig. It's up there: Consequently, cycling power has become a bit of an issue. Not to worry though. KO6BTY and I added two additional relays this morning, (we're eventually going to also be able to toggle the RockMite's programming line to be back to  working on two frequencies.) We changed the keyer code just a bit to interpret a capital 'P' as a command to reboot the Rockmite. The command fires GPIO-17 on the Pico-W. That pin is used as the control line on the first addit...

 Project TouCans is still on the air! I made a QSO with W2AZZ last night, and the rig was spotted in Europe again last night. The rig has a bit of an issue in that the Pico-W drains its two AA batteries over the course of less that 12 hours. For POTA outings of a few hours, this won't really be an issue. For our POTA camping outings, this is a bit more of a problem. We're going to look into ways to have the Pico-W got into a semi-sleep mode via firmware. The plans I'm thinking of right now would entail the keyer turning off its WiFi and then checking back in say every two minutes for 30 seconds. Seems like kind of a reasonable tradeoff. I mean, I've had tube rigs that needed that long to warm up :)

Powered TouCans made its first QSO today. The operator on the other end was K8IIJ north of San Diego, CA. Rather fittingly it was a QRP to QRP QSO!  KO6BTY had the idea to power the Raspberry Pi Pico-W from the same Imuto battery bank as well. We'd abandoned this idea early on in the prototype stages of the keyer because RFI on the battery return line from the rig would flumox things about 7 characters into a CQ call. I thought we might have better luck now that the battery line's only six inches long. We had different luck. In this incarnation, the Pico is unable to make WiFi connections when powered by the brick, so back to the 2 AAs we went. In other news, the rig survived its first unintentional drop test this morning! The cranky antenna connector acted up again. This time, the bolt simply stripped away from the threads dropping the rig ten feet to the ground. The Bluetooth audio transmitter popped its stereo cable on both ends, but that was the extent of the damage! The ri...

 When we talk about wireless we usually mean propagation. But what if a ham radio didn't even have a feed line!? Project TouCans has done exactly that! If you're new here, the goal of Project TouCans has always been to have a simple, (I know, it doesn't look simple at the moment), radio that alleviates the operator from needing to think about feelines and SWRs. (Becuase I'm the operator and I don't like thinking about those sorts of things.) The first, very fruitful, year long iteration of this was to move the radio into the antenna. The rig still had wires descending to the ground for the keyer controls, power, and audio though. They all traveled along an Ethernet cable terminated in an RJ-45 jack at either end. There was RFI. It was not as cool as it could have been. Over the last two weeks KO6BTY and I finally accomplished our ultimate goal: We got rid of the Ethernet cable!!! A week and a half ago, we rid ourselves of the need for keyer wires by adding a Pico-W...

 We built a keyer! KO6BTY was gifted a FT-840 by the family of a silent key over the holidays. (It was very, very nice of them. Thank you all!) She also received a straight key kit from W1REX . (Thanks Rex!) Daize—as she's kown in these pages—quickly constructed her key; she and I added a 10 meter dipole to our now  growing antenna farm; and the kid was up and transmitting CW on 10 meters with her technician class license! Also! She's a new SKCC member! Here's the thing though. Neither one of us is good enough with a straight key—she's better than I am to be frank—to convince the Reverse Beacon Network that our callsign is actually decipherable. So, to make sure our signal was getting out and to help people spot us for event lke SKCC's SKM. Project TouCans has a memory keyer in the Rockmite that works quite admirably for just this sort of thing, but now so much the venerable FT-840. That's ok though. We built our own autokeyer ! Here it is in all it's early...