Andy Webster Upgrades His Yaesu FT-817 Transceiver with an Arduino-Powered Secondary Display
Dissatisfied with the information available on a radio's built-in display, Webster set about creating his own accessory panel.
What is a radio amateur to do when a commercial off-the-shelf transceiver fails to bring up important information on its built-in display? If that radio amateur is Andy Webster, the answer is make a secondary display from an Arduino Nano and an LCD.
"Like so many I love getting out portable with my [Yaesu] FT-817 but I do seem to spend so much of my operating time fiddling through the soft-keys," Webster explains, "because my most used functions (CW narrow filter, power and keyer settings to tune an ATU, A/B, A=B, etc.) are spread across different “pages” of the A,B,C assignments. Compared to the sublime experience of using my Elecraft K2 the FT-817 can be a little frustrating!
"Last month, inspiration struck and I thought I could cobble together a small microcontroller and a little OLED display with some buttons to provide some extra soft-keys for the radio using the CAT serial port."
Webster started the project with a breadboard prototype, built around an Arduino Nano with a small organic light-emitting diode OLED) display panel. "I tried a couple of cheap OLED displays and they look great indoors," he notes, "but weren’t quite up to the job in full sunlight which is fairly typical in my portable operations.
"I switched to using a Nokia 5110-style LCD for better daylight readability and lower power consumption. Adding an ADUM1201 digital isolator and a B0505S-1W isolated DC-DC converter to the prototype board (modules acquired very quickly from eBay suppliers) gave me some isolation and lowered the interference which I guessed would disappear when I made the design on PCB with good ground planes around the signal lines."
With the prototype complete, Webster switched to creating something a little more professional than a bunch of loose components on a breadboard: A custom printed circuit board, designed in the open source electronic design automation (EDA) package KiCad. "I heartily recommend it, it was so much easier than [Autodesk] Eagle and quite an enjoyable tool."
The finished accessory pulls in information which would previously have required paging back and forth between multiple screens, while placing it on the top rather than the front of the device — a much more comfortable location for field use. Webster isn't quite ready to share the project's source code, though: "My code is pretty rubbish (my coding style involves a lot of Stack Overflow and copy/paste!)," he says, "and not safe for public consumption."
The full project write-up is available on the SWLing Post blog.