Amateur radio enthusiast Joshua Mesilane was preparing for the popular activity of fox-hunting (not wiley canine-like animals, the "activity wherein participants use radio direction finding techniques to locate one or more radio transmitters hidden within a designated search area"). However before heading off the LCD on his Yaesu FT-857D turned out to be faulty, so instead of replacing the entire display unit Joshua instead decoded the output from the transceiver and used an Arduino terminal shield and an LCD Keypad shield to display the frequency, for example:
And over a short period of time, he also added "arrays to store the hunt/frequency information and to allow automatic toggling between hunts so that when you get to the next hunt all you need to do is push a button". That's pretty awesome - he saved a lot of money by not paying for a new Yaesu display and programmed the whole thing in a short amount of time. For more information, including the full story and code - visit Joshua's website here. And for more, we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.
When experimenting with various items and an Arduino, it can be difficult and time consuming to mess about connecting wires of various sizes to the board. As you can see Joshua has chosen our Freetronics Terminal Shield for Arduino - which neatly solved the problem:
Apart from having a larger than normal prototyping area, there are terminal blocks for every Arduino pin, three LEDs for general use and a reset button on the shield. Great for experimenting and fast I/O connections - so order yours today.
