Yeh just what the world needs….

Nooooo not another cw keyer and oscillator project, well yes…. It was built as a combination of other projects so they all fitted in one box.

(shown above is a 3D Render from KiCad )

WHY!!!?, well a project was needed to illustrate the use of Kicad I wanted to combine some other projects into one unit.

The project started as an oscillator, then an oscillator and keyer, then oscillator, keyer and small audio amp.

Why another practice oscillator? Well so many are harsh sounding squarewaves with very abrupt envelopes and something smoother sounding was needed. So the oscillator is a twin t oscillator with some envelope shaping as described in this article by K4ICY and the keyer is the Open Source Keyer from Jan DK3LJ , which was further modified by Jack AL4SV and K3NG, details here.

The keyer and oscillator are battery powered in case the box gets used portable and keyer and oscillator have been kept separate (hence the two batteries ).

The front panel provides input for straight key and paddles. There is a switch to select between the shaping of the rise time of the envelope, and trimmers on board to allow the two envelopes to be customised. eg one for paddles, one for sk.

An low level audio output is provided for feeding into a microphone input, eg on your pic or mixer, for practicing over zoom, or taking part in LICW classes.

The finished real PCB is shown above.

There are a few things I would do differently next time, but thats for another blog entry.