Over the last few months I started to develop the first add-on/expansion board for the VUHFRadio Module. This add-on board adds a TFT Screen, buttons and a battery manager IC/circuit so that the VUHFRadio Module can be used portable without a PC. This add-on board was planned since the begging of the VUHFRadio Project and is now finally starting to become reality.

The add-on module fits on top of the VUHFRadio inside the same enclosure and is connected with two cables, one for the communication over a UART interface and one for power. Bellow is a figure showing this new add-on board with the current GUI (not all that is shown is functional yet):

As can be seen in the picture, some components have not yet arrived, under them the buttons... The figure also shows the current GUI look. Some functionalities are already implemented and tested, under them showing the current RSSI value, the updating the RSSI bar, displaying the RF Frequency offset, as the green bar, and changing some of the settings like the RX Bandwidth and AGC speed.

The Module communicates over a UART interface with the VUHFRadio Module and uses the same CAT commands as the Module uses to communicate over USB. I'm working on expanding the CAT commands as needed to get as much of the configurations and settings of the transceivers available over the interfaces. The current CAT command list can be downloaded as pdf from the website.

The battery managing circuit has not yet been tested, not all needed components have arrived. As soon as I get them I'll post an update.

A new page was also added for this add-on board with all the design files and a interactive GUI to show better how it looks IRL: Radio Interface and the software is available on GitHub.

I sometimes post about progress of the GUI development, and other new projects on both twitter and Instagram.