It’s 2021 and that’s great. 2020 turned out to be a horrible year for obvious reason.
As for this site… I guess it’s time to update a few things and be more productive. The DDS VFO project still garners a lot of people and maybe a few new projects I have in mind will make it to this blog. Who know? Till then, 73!
Yes. This website and the project pages are still active. No, I don’t have an update on the VFO upgrade. Maybe this Summer, when I have some more time, I’ll get to posting the latest version I have been working on.
In the meantime… THANK YOU VERY MUCH to all who visit my site, try one of my projects, and send me a note about. I appreciate it.
Rich
AD7C
More than two years ago I posted a project to this site detailing how I took a little DDS unit I found I eBay and controlled it with an Arduino UNO and LCD. The result was a very simple and stable VFO that just about anyone could build. It was also dirt cheap to replicate. I posted the code, put up some horrible schematics, and let it sit. I never thought much of it.
Little did I know that so many people would be interested in what I had created. I’ve been contacted by a lot of people, sent a lot of pictures of users units, helped a few people trouble shoot some issues, and even got published in a few books. What I do get the most is questions. A lot of questions. So to fix repeating myself a lot on emails here are some of the most popular email questions I get about the AD7C DDS VFO.
Q: Does it work?
A: Sure does. 200+ people have contacted me thanking me after they build the same project.
Q: I get an error on compiling. Something about “rotary.h not found?”
A: You did not import the rotary library correctly.
Q: Do I have to pay you if I build this?
A: No, but you can always donate to rvisokey@yahoo.com via PayPal if you wish. I’ll be extremely thankful!
Q: I wish it had THIS feature or THAT feature. Can you add that to the code and send it to me?
A: I could but what would be the fun in that? Learning coding is part of the fun so open up the Arduino code and give it a try yourself.
Q: Can I use any rotary encoder or does it have to be the same model you used?
A: So long as the rotary encoder outputs gray code you should be OK but I can’t guarantee that.
Hopefully that helps quickly answers some questions. I am working on a new version of the code. Nothing special but I am cleaning up a few sections. I don’t like that I have two versions of the code (IF and NON-IF version) so I am combining them into one and allowing a simple code change decide which way the user would like it to function. That and a few other improvements. I’ll post when I am done. Don’t worry… it will be 100% compatible with the existing schematic so no changes there.
Go melt some solder.
73,
Rich
AD7C
I have updated the code to my Arduino DDS VFO sketch so the current set frequency is stored in EEPROM and recalled again upon boot-up. The code is 100% drop-in compatible with the old code and no re-wire is required. Simply upload the new sketch and your done. The frequency writes to the EEPROM after 3 seconds without changing. This was required so as not to overload the EEPROM as there are a finite amount of writes (100,000) before it may go bad. You can alter the delay time in my code as it is well documented.
View the entire project page for more details. If you have additional questions… just ask!