Monday, April 6, 2015

Multi-Featured VFO

Download MultiFeaturedVFO.ino
Download Rotary.Zip (click on Down Arrow at top of page)
Jason's Arduino Si5351 Library (click on Download Zip) and install it directly into the new Arduino IDE as mentioned in my last post.
Hardware Layout for this program can be found here.
**4/17 Jason has a new library https://github.com/etherkit/Si5351Arduino
You can download a corrected version of MultiFeaturedVFO.ino here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7yCOxNJVhR5UE9OQS14djI0anc/view?usp=sharing

//------------------------------- Set Optional Features here --------------------------------------
//Remove comment (//) from the option you want to use. Pick only one
#define IF_Offset //Output is the display plus or minus the bfo frequency // this line will be used
//#define Direct_conversion //What you see on display is what you get
//#define FreqX4  //output is four times the display frequency
//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can output frequencies up to 160Mhz. Keep this in mind when you use the 4X frequency option.
You can also tune in 1Hz increments if you so desire.
Also, I use clk0 for VFO output and clk2 for BFO.

Jason's latest library has a calibration sketch that can be accessed by:

You can easily adjust the frequency correction using the Serial Monitor and the keyboard. Make note of the offset and put it into si5351.set_correction(); in the VFO sketch. The correction is no longer stored in the board EEPROM so do not comment out the set_correction line as I had mentioned in the past. Also when using the current hardware setup, nothing will change on the LCD while adjusting the frequency - only on a frequency counter.
Looking at the above screen you will notice three Si5351 libraries in my "user libraries" folder. The Adafruit_Si5351 is not a problem since the header file uses a different name. The "Si5351" and "Si5351Arduino-Jason" share the same header file name. I did get an error that said something like "multiple libraries were found for si5351.h files - you must die". Both were Jason's newer library but the one, "Si5351Arduino-Jason" had all the newer upadates and examples so I deleted the "Si5351" folder.

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Arduino now allows you to add Zipped libraries


It seems with the newer version of the Arduino IDE you can now download a library and add it without having to unzip it (Add .ZIP Library...). It also adds the library to the proper place in the Arduino User directory.  


Further, it seems to not care about hyphenated folder names. I download the latest version of NT7S's Si5351 library into my downloads directory and by adding the library as above and it worked just fine. User libraries are now listed in a section called "Contributed libraries" which shows up when you click "Include Library" on the above menu. This should make things a little less confusing.