Repeater Controller

A friend of mine ask me to get involved in desgning a repeater controller to replace the aging system running one of the larges repeater networks in canada. The current system is from the early 80’s and defines the expression “rats nest”.

Current ideas

  • CAN for the repeater boards to talk.
  • SD Card to store configuration and voice ID (SPI)
  • DTMF Decoder chip (simplify the code in the micro
  • Status and configuration over RS232 (with flow control)

Well from ideas to implementation, the hardware design will be done by another ham. I will be doing the software, for this I need to get him a general idea of what the hardware should have.

diagram.gif
So there is the start of the diagram, I’m sure it will change as we add and remove blocks to it. Yeah i know it is small, dont want to give away the info just yet!