Minima hardware build

I have spent some time today organizing my Minima hardware so that it is not quite so fragile and breadboard-ish in preparation for starting to put together my own rig.

I am comfortable that I have the software in good shape and it is time to think about pulling together my own build.

Here is what I have for a front panel.  There is a 20 column by 4 line display, three push-buttons and a rotary encoder.  Readers of my blog may recognize this as the panel for my beacon project which is being re-purposed for this project.

I have mounted an I2C daughter board on the LCD in order to reduce the number of pins required to support the LCD.  I am not going to use the plethora of buttons I have seen on other designs.  I am also using a commercially available Arduino Uno board rather than build a controller board.  I have mounted it on the back of the LCD.  The remainder of the electronics of the radio will be in the bottom of the box.

I am replacing the potentiometer tuning with a rotary encoder and adding my iambic keyer code to the main Minima sketch.  If sufficient flash is available, I will also add my Arduino beacon code to the mix.  This may require an ATMega2560 device with its larger flash and RAM.  There may be sufficient space, but RAM in particular is getting a bit tight.