LCD Performance and UI decisions in the beacon project

The beacon project is back on the front burner.  Frankly, one of the reasons that it has been stalled so long is because of the lousy UI performance.  The rotary encoder triggers an interrupt so I never lose control turns.  However, the display updates are very laggy and the amount of lag varies considerably.  I *HATE* laggy UIs and until now have not looked into why.  Frankly the I2C LiquidCrystal library was apparently a hasty adaptation of the original LCD library without regard to performance.  It was taking more than a dozen I2C commands for a single character to be updated, let alone the additional ones for cursor positioning and the like.  Bogus.  All bits are written simultaneously now and the lagginess is completely gone.  Sweet!  Many thanks to Kevin who pointed out the great work by falconfour in a comment to one of my previous posts.  Nice to be back on track and re-energized to complete this project.

I spent a lot of time talking to my pal Eldon about UI decisions.  I will be making some changes to the value setting library for alpha-numeric fields to see if the new paradigm works a little cleaner for non-numeric fields.

Another concept that we kicked around was the effect of TX percent on multi-band operation for WSPR.  Since WSPR frequencies have been cleanly defined for all bands, I am considering having TX percent of 100% mean the beacon will cycle through all bands on each two minute window.  A setup UI would be created to allow enable/disable of each of the bands.  See my previous post for a list of bands supported by this beacon (all up to and including 6 metres).  So, if you truely wanted to send 100% of the time on one band, you would have to disable all other bands as well as setting TX percent to 100%.  Otherwise, the beacon would sequence through the list of enabled bands every two minute window.  I am interested in feedback on this idea.  I think it makes sense to enable this multi-band mode only on TX percent = 100% as otherwise, i would have to completely rethink the meaning of TX percent when multiple bands are enabled.

Also regarding multi-band operation, I plan to make some concession for external low-pass filter selection based on the currently selected band or frequency.  Interested in feedback on what this might look like.  Some ideas:

1. Provide the frequency to an external function that takes care of the magic itself and leave the details up to the implementer.
2. Provide an enable bit (or a counter that is decoded by external hardware) that can be used trigger external relays to select an appropriate low pass filter which is set by one of the following:
• The function described in #1 above as implemented by someone else.
• Providing a set of configurable cutoff frequencies for the various external low-pass filters and automatically selecting one as appropriate based on frequency.
• Define one filter per WSPR band and select based on frequency.  This is simple, but may be somewhat inappropriate as for example it makes little sense to have separate low pass filters for both 12 and 10 metres where one would suffice.

I have decided to replace my current rotary encoder with a different one from BI Technologies.  The Model EN11 rotary encoder is a nice, inexpensive (even in single unit quantities from Mouser) item that adds a push button and detents.  My current encoder had no detents and frankly, I prefer having them.  If desired, it can be ordered with or without the switch or the detents.  I will be using the switch to change the tuning rate rather than a separate push button.  See the datasheet here.  Thanks to Eldon for providing a sample of this encoder to me to try out with the beacon project.

Eldon and I also revisited the whole topic of what frequency to display on the LCD when in WSPR mode.  Most folks that use the great software by Joe Taylor are used to setting the rig display (on 30 metres for example) to 10.138700 MHz and generating tones in the 1400-1600 hz range to feed into your SSB transmitter.  The actual transmit frequency can be set by double clicking in the "waterfall" display or by typing it in to the "Tx:" frequency edit box.  One idea kicked around was to only display the WSPR band (30 metres, 20 metres, etc) and an offset from the start of the WSPR band.  The offset is only 200 hertz total.  This sort of makes sense to me, but I have an uneasyness when I don't know precisely what frequency I am transmitting on.  Joe Taylor's software shows the exact transmit frequency.  For example, if you clicked in the middle of the 30 metre band, it will show 14.140200 in the "Tx:" frequency box.  What is not clear to me is precisely what that frequency means since WSPR signals are composed of four separate tone frequencies that are separated by 1.4648 Hz.  In the absence of clarity from Joe's documentation, I have chosen to define the transmit frequency like this:

Each symbol is 1.4648 Hz apart and the displayed transmit frequency is mid-way between symbols 1 and 2.  Band edge operations need to take this into account if you wish to stay within the defined WSPR frequency range with the entire 6 Hz spectrum occupied by the complete WSPR signal.  Anyone have further thoughts or comments on this?

Anyway, it is nice to be back on track and making progress on my beacon again.