It seems like now days every man and his dog has a DDS/Digital Synth VFO project happening. I have had a couple and I am pretty sure that there are even Gerbers floating about on my blog for that very thing and was one of the very first boards I ever designed and laid out.
Well, times are a changing and rather than just a simple VFO, I have designed a board to control all aspects of radio control. To fit all the functions into one microcontroller required a bit of a step up and the use of an ATMega because I needed that many digital pins.
So what does it do? Well:
1. Real time clock and keyboard for logging contacts, digital modes like RTTY and keyboard CW.
2. Rotary encoder for the SI5351a VFO obviously.
3. 8 push buttons for various functions like band changing, mode changing and setting the attenuation level. On my front end board i have a 32 step rf attenuator in 0.5db steps, and for selecting 1 of 2 audio filters, but this might change yet and become DSP audio filtering with a lot more options at a latter stage.
4. Setting relays both bandpass and lowpass filters for 4 bands and selecting one of 2 IF Filters.
Now i am only releasing the board files, the software is something you are going to have to write yourself, because my code is not complete and probably wont be complete for sometime. I have most of the basic functionality written, but it all needs fleshing out and cleaning up. Now its nice when someone does it all for you, but, this will be pretty slick when complete and well, i dont want anyone making a commercial product out of my work and so the code will probably never be released. But these board files will save you hours of work, even if you have to code it all yourself.
Gerber files for this board can be downloaded from here: http://robs-blog.net/Files/ControlBoard.zip
