Dilshan R Jayakody’s Web Log

This tuner circuit is a quick prototype which I build to test the RDA5807M FM radio tuner IC. RDA5807M is a single-chip tuner IC with RDS and MPX decoder, and it equipped with I 2 C interface for control. The main reason to build this prototype is to understand the behavior of this chip. The prototype version of the RDA5807M receiver. At the time of this design, the website of the RDA microelectronics is not accessible from my location. Because of this reason, I download different versions of RDA5807M datasheets from the internet. While going-through those datasheets, I observed that it comes with limited information. Finally, I decided to build this receiver to verify some of those parameters and to review the RDS functionality of the chip. I build this receiver around ATmega16A MCU. I choose this MCU because I got a few of ATmega16A MCUs in my inventory and also due to the higher number of  I/O pin count. RDA5807M module. In this design, the volume is contro...

USB Morse Keyer is a microcontroller-based auto keyer project with following features: USB / straight key / iambic key inputs. Support for both standalone and USB operating modes. 64-character USB typeahead buffer and 6-character Morse key typeahead buffer. Support 5, 10, 15 WPM. 6-page message memory. 1W Audio output. Audio and PTT output interfaces. 32 character display  Final view of the USB auto keyer. The USB interface of this unit is designed to work with most of the operating systems. It emulates a virtual serial terminal to transfer keystrokes to the keyer. In most of the operating systems, this interface works without installing any additional device drivers. To submit keystrokes user can use any serial terminal software such as PuTTY , Hyper Terminal , Minicom , etc. This keyer is designed to work with 7V to 16V DC input voltage. The most recommended working voltage is 9V. The bottom side of the USB auto keyer. To reduce the dimension of the P...

This quick post is about the verification script which I did to test the PT8211 DAC functionality. This script is designed to work with Arduino boards and, I tested with Arduino Due and Arduino Mega 2560 boards. The script is self-explanatory, and it emulates the I2S interface and communicates with the PT8211 DAC. The output waveform of PT8211 on Arduino Due board. With this script, PT8211 generate sine wave in both channels. The frequency of the waveform is dependent on the clock frequency of the Arduino board. In Due board, PT8211 generates 0.052kHz sine wave on both channels. Connections between PT8211 and Arduino. The test setup is quite straightforward. I2S and power pins of PT8211 need to connect to the Arduino board in the following order: Serial clock ( BCK ) - Pin 22 Channel selector ( WS ) - Pin 23 Data ( DIN ) - Pin 24 VCC - 5V (Mega 2560 board) 3.3V (Due board) GND - GND Left and right channels of the DAC is connected to oscilloscope or frequenc...

A few years back I purchased Honeywell CL15AE evaporative air cooler and it is15L indoor air cooler manufactured by JMATEK (for Honeywell). Sine last week this cooler became dead, and the only thing which I can see live is its red color power indicator. After disassembling the unit I see that most of the components of the controller PCB are rusted and damaged.  As I observed the main reason for corrosion is the absence of protective varnish on the top side of the PCB. The original control board of CL15AE cooler. At first, I restore all the damaged parts in the PCB with new parts, which including SS8050 , SS8550 , transistors and a few of electrolytic capacitors. After replacing those components, the unit starts to beep during power up but failed to power on. Damaged SS8050 and SS8550 transistors. After some tests, I figured out the problem is in SONiX SN8P2602 8-bit microcontroller.  Due to unavailability of microcontroller and it's firmware I decided to pr...

Simple NTP clock is a maintenance-free clock application developed to work on single-board computers like Raspberry Pi , Orange Pi , etc. This clock application uses the Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) to get the time and display it on seven segment display which I designed . This application is designed to work on most of the Linux based systems and had minimum dependencies with system libraries and peripherals. I developed this application to work with Allwinner H2 Plus based Orange Pi Zero board, but this can compile for other platforms without doing any modifications on the source code. NTP clock on Orange Pi Zero. To compile this application issue the following commands: make clean make Parameters related to this application are available at config.json file. This file can be used to specify the NTP server, time zone, and display module port. The source code of this project is available at github.com .

This project is about an open source, USB based, 10 digit seven segment display unit. This unit is specifically designed to work with POS systems and banking applications. Initially, this system is developed to work with PC based systems, and later it was modified to work with other platforms and applications. Final view of the USB seven segment display module To simplify the communication interface this unit is designed to emulate a COM port in the host terminal. Because of this feature, this module can work with many systems without having any additional device driver(s). To extend the scope of this unit, it also comes with an option to switch between " direct mode " and " API mode ". In " direct mode " application or host device can directly send characters to the display unit over the emulated serial communication channel. The " API mode " is intended to provide more extensive features with this unit. All the " API mode ...

The 1750Hz tone bursts are often used to trigger repeaters. There are several methods to build 1750Hz tone generators which including TC5082 divider , using MCUs, etc. In this post, I present another 1750Hz tone generator which I built using 74HC4060 high-speed 14-stage binary ripple counter and 7.168MHz crystal. In this design, 74HC4060 is used to drive the crystal and divide its output by 4096. By using 7.168MHz crystal, this circuit produces 1750.0Hz square wave output with a 50% duty cycle. A prototype version of the 1750Hz tone generator. This circuit is extremely simple to build, and I construct my prototype using a breadboard. I tested this generator by connecting its output to my Baofeng UV-5R handheld transceiver and it gives an excellent result. The key motivation to build this generator using 74HC4060 is, because of its common availability. Most of the tone generators which I found on the internet are built using MCUs or by using rare ICs, because of that rea...