Clocking on

A few spare moments today allowed me to breadboard the PIC LCD clock.  Although I didnt include the setting buttons, instead using a flying ground lead to pull down the appropriate pins. The first PIC programmed on my PICkit2 worked just fine.

Even this circuit is overkill on a PIC! Theres a 4MHz crystal there, plus 2x 22pF caps - the PIC 16F628A can do all that internally!

So now I have a known working programmer, I can check out the rest of my LCD modules, and ive moved onto breadboarding the AD9850 DDS module controller. I'll test the LCD drive and memory store/recall routines first, then add the encoder, and finally the DDS module itself.

Im looking into maybe buying a Clansman PRC-320 HF manpack of my own, and one of the things I would be doing to it is adding an external VFO and frequency display system!

A big problem I have though is that out of my selection of LCD modules, I have only one 16 x 2, and no 4 line modules. The controller project specifies a 4 line module, but will work with a 2 line unit. The trouble is, my 2 line x 16 character module has a non-standard pin-out, and I cant get it to work with the DDS controller code.  Ive tried the DDS code against one of my 16x1 single line displays, and it does display the frequency (or rather, what the chip thinks the frequency might be, with neither DDS module nor encoder attached!). So, ive ordered a few various LCDs and an encoder from China.