Since I'm limited building antennas at home, I use vband for getting better in cw. One serious problem with vband is the latency introduced by the processing. The latency causes the side tone generated in the browser to have a certain delay. Some people seem to be able to cope with it but for me it destroys my keying. So I needed a device that allows to attach a paddle to my pc that also generates its own side tone without any noticeable delays.
Enter the vail adapter created by Neale Pickett. This great piece of soft- and hardware is compatible with vband, implements an improved protocol for vail and is able to generate a side tone by itself. The nicest part about it is that it needs almost no hardware. In its simplest form, it just needs a seeeduino board with some wires attached. So ...
... "building" a vail adapter is actually not more than creating something like a breakout board inside a case. I added two small capacitors to debounce the paddle contacts and a R/C lowpass filter to improve the side tone, but both aren't really necessary.
I added a push button because I had plans for some software changes, but it is currently unused. The pot is used to adjust the volume. Since I'm exclusively using a paddle, there's just one socket for a key. The adapter is powered from USB so there's no power socket.
For programming the adapter, the arduino IDE is required. I made one quick change to the software: The startup tone uses a very high frequency which I dislike, so I changed it.
diff --git a/vail-adapter.ino b/vail-adapter.ino index 9cd6581..7390ed1 100644 --- a/vail-adapter.ino +++ b/vail-adapter.ino @@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ #define DIT_KEYBOARD_KEY KEY_LEFT_CTRL #define DAH_KEYBOARD_KEY KEY_RIGHT_CTRL -#define TONE 3000 +#define TONE 600 #define MILLISECOND 1 #define SECOND (1 * MILLISECOND)