[TowerTalk] wireless rotor

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Wed Apr 10 10:06:44 EDT 2013


On 4/10/13 6:38 AM, Charles Lind wrote:
> I've been using Green Heron Everywhere for three years to control a rotor
> and switching for five antennas with no failures or downtime.  Saves a lots
> of expensive cable, the groundhogs can't eat the wireless signal, and if
> something were to go wrong, I wouldn't have to dig up 400 feet of cable.
> Chuck, N8CL
>
>

this really is how hams should be heading.. with cheap wireless 
interfaces, Arduinos with 802.11 or Zigbee, etc.

There's a nice $50 relay board from Velleman (K8056) that has 8 SPST 
relays on it and can be controlled by RS232, TTL serial, discrete 8 
bits, or a RF receiver module.  They also have 16 and 4 relay boards.
THere's probably a ton of things from SparkFun that stick right onto a 
Arduino.


There's even a new Ethernet Relay card from Velleman
http://www.velleman.eu/products/view/?id=407510
$150 on Amazon..  Pretty slick.

There's a Arduino with Ethernet built in and lots of example programs 
out there to do basic control stuff (or complex control stuff).

It won't be long before someone builds an open source rotator controller 
using an Arduino and H bridge or relay board. They're cheap, easy to 
learn to program (either in C using free tools, or in the sort of C-like 
Arduino IDE) and plenty smart enough to run a control loop for a rotator.

Get yourself a nice WiFi bridge (I like using the 5 GHz band so I don't 
have to fight all the 2.4 GHz stuff) and you're done.



And, hey, it uses *radio*... we can move beyond wired telegraphy to, 
gosh, wireless.

(I will happily buy a beverage of choice for the first person who 
controls their antenna with a spark gap transmitter and coherer, though. 
  Very steampunk..)



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