Shacktopus Debut

Well, the first waypoint has been reached... a public showing of the Shacktopus system. It was certainly not finished (no RigNexus and no cabling), but the gross packaging was completed in time for the Sea-Pac amateur radio convention in Seaside, Oregon.

That's Budd, W3FF, of Buddipole fame examining the box; Jeannie and I are working the booth. She's now a ham, by the way, and had a ball with her first glimpse of the radio-geek culture... preparing her somewhat for Field Day, a week later, when she discovered the double-X advantage of having a YL voice during a contest on HF.

Anyway, the Sea-pac show was very useful, even though we have nothing to sell just yet. Seeing peoples' reactions and listening to their questions helped refine the message; I had been so immersed in the design that I had not yet polished anything even approaching the requisite "30,000-foot view" or "elevator pitch" that summarizes a project in a manageable number of words.

Field day was fun, although we didn't really take advantage of any of the Shacktopus functionality beyond the radio, antenna-related hardware, and external solar/battery power. We participated with the K7IP group in Skagit county, and I made 16 contacts on 5 watts (well, OK, 15 of them were helped a bit by a tri-bander beam on a tower). But still, the cost-per-QSO on the FT-817 is now down to $40 or so. Can't wait to actually play with this instead of looking at it as a complex engineering project.

Here's what the box looks like at the moment. The big green block in the middle is actually made out of Divinycell foam... for the convention, I needed something to fill the big empty space and show what's coming up. The board that we are designing to live in that spot is the RigNexus, based on an Atmel ATmega128 CPU. It runs the audio mixing matrix, a big SPI chain that handles lots of I/O, communication with the SMBUS battery charging system, analog data collection with on-board flash storage, a universal active filter, bluetooth to the PDA, DTMF decoder for remote control via UHF, a speech synthesizer, audio recorder, local UI with an LCD, and general housekeeping... including powering up the Linux board when the system needs to become net-enabled. More on all this both here and on the Shacktopus site as it develops; I'm diving into a huge learning curve that includes Eagle CAD, the Atmel architecture, and active-object state-machine architecture.

Cheers and 73,
Steve N4RVE