Having successfully built the oscillator and housed it in a nice project case, I showed my friend Phil G3MGQ. I help Phil teach students in a local school with a view to them passing their radio licences (We had four passes last term!). When Phil saw the oscillator, he enquired whether I would further develop the circuit to include an on board LED for silent cross-classroom comms and a built in micro switch Morse key. This would mean that the board could be used without the need to case it.

I set about shuffling the components around to make it usable as an uncased unit. The first iteration turned out to have a few issues.

I added a base plate to protect the soldered connections from being shorted on the surface it was being used on. This is fixed with M3 nuts and bolts which can also stand in as feet (although I added stick on rubber feet on my one). Although obscured in the above image, the nut in the bottom left could not been fixed since the pitch potentiometer is too close.

The micro switch Morse Key is very close to the volume potentiometer and this makes it hard to use. Whilst on the subject of the mocro switch, I managed to get the footprint wrong, making the outer connections .5mm too close to the center. I managed to force a micro switch in to test the above circuit but I have since corrected the footprint.

This is the next version of the board and will be fabricated shortly. As you can see, I have moved the components around again. The pitch potentiometer now gives enough space for the nut to be fixed. The micro switch Morse key is on the far right, for ease of use although this entailed moving the key socket to the rear.

Design and fabrication files for this version of the board will be uploaded once proved to be accurate.