Saturday, April 7, 2012

More propeller keyer work

I decided this evening to put a little more work into the propeller keyer.  I have added a keyboard interface to it.  If your propeller board supports a PS/2 keyboard, you can set the keyer mode to keyerModeKBD and it will use the keyboard for input rather than the paddles.  A typical keyboard interface would look like this:


The clock is wired to pin 27 and the data to pin 26, to allow the standard keyboard library to be used.

Realistically speaking, it is difficult to type blind on a keyboard, especially when you can type faster than the morse code is sending without visual feedback as to what you are typing.  It would be more realistic to implement some sort of LCD display to show keyboard input, allow backspacing, while the keyer is sending the buffer.  However, I have not yet implemented those components though I have all the necessary pieces.

I took the morse code tables from my QRSS beacon and added all the defined punctuation characters so as to have a complete implementation.  I will be sharing a new version on github as soon as I have the code completed and tested sufficiently.

I have implemented the ability to change the morse code send speed from the keyboard.  The up/down arrows change the speed by 1 WPM whilst the left/right arrows change the speed by 5 WPM range limited for 5 WPM to 60 WPM.

I plan to add memories for canned messages that can be sent with a function key press stored in EEPROM which will include serial/sequence number substitution for contest work.

No comments:

Post a Comment