Copasetic Flow

 We finally got all of the relays to work at once! We've been using a HFD2 003 M L2 D latching relay as the on/off switch for Project TouCans. I should say, we've been trying to. The most recent issue was that our keying relay was rated for 12 Volts nominal coil voltage due to a previous design decision that went away in favor of 3 Volts. A Digikey order later and some kinda messy soldering and we had the 3 Volt relay in. I left the 12 Volt relay in place because on occasion in the past, we've had to run the keying line through a second relay as a passthrough (literally using the 'normally closed' portion of the relay) to make the entire system happy enough to key the rig. That wasn't the case this time as it turned out, but it was also easier to just leave the relay in there because it's superglued dead bug style to the circuit board. The latching relay along the shorter wires to the Rockmite/Tuna Topper II pair are delivering plenty of current. The rig was...

Over the weekend, KOTBTY and I got to spend more time moving the CW key relay inside Project TouCans and adding a power on/off latching relay. As you can hear and see in the video below, the latching relay is up and running! Thanks for Simon Willison for the Claude artifact that enabled me to easily package up the video below. Ha, that's interesting! It's not so much a video packaging as a video thumbnail tool , which is of course what it said it was. Well, here's the video all bundled up into an iframe ready for your viewing—and listening—pleasure. I'll have to work with the gang on a version of the tool that outputs iframes soon. What you can see in the video: the Darlington array has two control leads coming into it from the PICO-Ws GPIO 17 and GPIO 18 pins, (the orange and red wires respectively.) Now that we're using a latching relay, we need one control wire to latch the power on and a second wire to latch the power off. Positive rely coil power is attached...

 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 .