{"id":1281,"date":"2022-09-28T17:33:48","date_gmt":"2022-09-28T17:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/g6rzr.com\/?page_id=1281"},"modified":"2024-10-07T19:18:43","modified_gmt":"2024-10-07T19:18:43","slug":"a-replacement-display-for-the-ft290r-mk-i-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/g6rzr.com\/?page_id=1281","title":{"rendered":"A replacement display for the ft290r mk I"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/h4>\n

I am the proud owner of an FT290R which I bought in the 80\u2019s when I was first licenced as a G6. I think it\u2019s an excellent radio, so I bought another one to have in an alternative location. It had a display fault, but I am an electronics engineer by trade so I figured it couldn\u2019t be that hard to fix.<\/p>\n

As usual I was wrong, there were a number of stumbling blocks as follows:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The display itself cannot be sourced as a direct replacement<\/li>\n
  2. There was little information I could find about the driver IC<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So, the above two points ruled out simple replacement of the parts.<\/p>\n

    I searched further and found references to two very good sources of information<\/p>\n

    ZS1KE\u2019s reverse engineering design <\/a>and Dave Crump G8GKQD article in Radcom, December 2016<\/p>\n

    Both of these were very informative about how the display is updated but obtaining the displays was challenging so I descried to do my own redesign based on cheap Arduino and OLED display.<\/p>\n

    Design<\/h4>\n

    The display is constantly updated from the FT290R microprocessor, and the display data is delivered over a 4-bit bus in something similar to ASCII.<\/p>\n

    My biggest challenge was that I wasn\u2019t sure that the simple Arduino could keep up with the refresh rate of the display updates. It turned out that it wasn\u2019t a problem at all.<\/p>\n

    I also wanted a cheap and flexible design so that elements of customisation would be possible, and the Arduino seemed ideal for that.<\/p>\n

    Circuit<\/h4>\n

    The display is constantly updated from the FT290R microprocessor, and the display data is delivered over a 4-bit bus in something similar to ASCII.<\/p>\n