Arduino Logger

Sometime ago after a long discussion with a fellow ham, we has concocted this idea to create a logging application using an arduino. The whole thing has sat stagnate for so long, with the parts to make it sitting in the box for many many months, that I decided it was time to pull them out and start to put some work into the ideas.

Basically you have an Arduino Uno, PS2 Keyboard, SD Card Reader, and 20×4 LCD with I2C to form up the basics of the unit. At a latter stage i may also include a RTC clock so that you do not have to manually enter date and time, but for now, i am not sure how will both the LCD and RTC would work together on the I2C port together and if one or the other is going to hog to much time slice.

The basic idea can be seen in the image above. Feature wise, it will be able to take your call, todays date and mode, their call, time, rpt rx, rpt tx, and some short notes like the name and location as well as being able to change mode on the fly and also being able to create a new log file as needed. This is something i wish to use myself while out portable, so i can leave my expensive laptops and their battery hunter or expensive tablet at home. Yeah i have had a tablet die on my portable and lost over 150 log entries from 3 WWFF parks. The way the data will be saved in my arduino logger will be every new entry a backup will be made and the new entry will be written to file, worst case scenario you lose 1 entry, not 100’s. Unless the card explodes and well then you are totally buggered anyway. Here is a small video of where we are at with the project and in a few days i should have something very usable happening.

UPDATE:

Added in a real time clock so that there is no date and time entries, we can just poll the clock and get the data we need.

Finished off the basic setup, of Your Call, Band and Mode.