Homebrew Roundtable: Freq Counters, PA Power & AI Agents

Well, should we talk a little bit about the project, the frequency counter? Boy, I'm sure you have some stories, Tobias.

I also have some things I've been trying to figure out as well.

Yep.

Let's see.

So for me, I have powered it.

I'm at the point where I haven't really done any troubleshooting yet, but I powered it up and I didn't get... anything other than the black squares.

And so you were saying you had run into a similar issue.

So I know I need to kind of dive in and see what is going on there.

But there are a couple of things that I learned while doing this.

And I really like what you said, Mitch, about the fact that you rebuilt your radio a second time around, because I'm actually considering maybe doing that on my project.

Here's my frequency counter.

And here's the screen.

And you can see maybe how it's built.

But the thing that I can't really see it that well.

The thing that I ran into that I think I'm going to probably try to reconsider in future is I used solid core wire.

Instead of stranded wire.

And for me, the solid core wire did not solder to the pads, especially the pads where the the me pads where the the IC circuits went.

uh very well in fact i would solder it and think i had it and then i'd go to bend it a little bit and it'd pop right off and so it was really surprising to me and so one of the things that i think might be a problem is i may not have good solder joints on some of my connections to my ic circuits and finding that i mean i may be able to find that but even if i do Cephas Storm?nk?a?zom?nk?a?zom?nk?a?zom?nk? which was a solid core, popped off easily, and it was so hard to get back on.

I just think that for me, I'm going to go to some stranded wire for ISP if it's something like this, where it's an IC circuit or the screens and stuff like that.

And another thing that I thought was good, though, that I, I think I was smart in doing was on the screen here.

I put pins on my screen and then I just use little these little plug things and I plugged them all in so that I can reconnect if I need to on the screen.

So, so basically I just soldered in pins.

on the end here, connector pins.

And then these wires can plug in and out.

And so that was smart on my part.