ICOM Commander

I acquired my IC-7300 in 2017. It is a fantastic radio in my opinion, 5 stars. It does have a few quirks and I found an article recently called IC-7300 Paddle or Key by ON7DQ that tries to address a couple of them. One is switching from low to high power, the rotary encoder changes 1 watt per step so it takes quite a few cranks to accomplish your goal. The other is switching from straight key to keyer mode. My old IC-746Pro had separate jacks for each type of key, but the 7300 has only one which requires a trip through the menu system to make the change. ON7DQ provides both functions using an Arduino Nano and two pushbuttons.

I gave the Arduino project a try (version2 provides both functions) and aside from the fact that I dislike Arduino in general, I was not completely satisfied with the result. Each button requires either a short or a long press so 4 commands can be issued. As you can see from the photos below, I chose to make a unit with 4 buttons and large easy to read labels.

Project Inside Project Outside

The project provided a few challenges which I enjoyed. I chose to use an ATtiny84A since it is small and has enough I/O for the project. However there is no UART, so I had to implement a bit-banging solution using one I/O port. Fortunately the project only sends data to the radio, it does not receive anything. I got some help from Marcel Meyer-Garcia who provided a module for the same processor and clock speed I used. I just had to add a simple routine to send blocks of data (rather than strings or characters), and tweak the baud rate a bit. I chose to use an external 8MHz crystal oscillator rather than the internal clock, the idea being it is more accurate so one less thing to worry about.

inside

The rest of the project is as simple as can be, as seen in the schematic below. If you choose to build the project, you can simplify it by eliminating the crystal and using the internal oscillator. One way to check its frequency is to temporarily enable the fuse to output the clock signal on PB2 and measure it with a frequency counter. Interestingly my crystal oscillator measured 8.000410 MHz. This is useful information for then tuning the baud rate in the Tx module. At 9600 baud you want 104.167 microseconds for each bit sent. The author's code shows OCR0A = 103; this is pretty close unless your clock is somewhat off. Ideally for an accurate clock you might use 104, but there is overhead when an interrupt occurs which adds a little to the time before the timer is reset. Anyway as he says if the reception is not 100% you can try increasing or decreasing the value by 1 or 2.

Schematic

There are a few customizations you can make to the code. If your radio is a different ICOM model, you must change the define TO_ADDRESS in main.h to whatever the address is for your radio. You can also change any of the 4 CIV commands in main.c to different commands of your choice by updating the data in function serial_send_cmd(). The command formats can be found in the ICOM manual under Remote Control (CI-V) information.

Download WinAVR C source code for the Controller

Back to VE3LNY's AVR Project Page