Jack W8TEE provides a bit more insight into the JackAL board that uses the Teensy 3.6 to give lots of processing grunt.
Jack suggests that he and Al were going to put an SWR meter on the JackAl board, but have backed away from it for this iteration. The main reason was because of the board size. The nano-acres it would take on the board would raise the PCB cost above the 100x100mm size to do it right for the possible power levels that might be involved. That doesn’t mean you can’t add one…
The good news: Right now, there are about a dozen “empty” pins available on the board for experimenting. They are currently using less that 15% of the 1MB of flash memory and less than 10% of the 256K of SRAM. That includes code space for some features that we’ve coded for (e.g., a RTC) but have not implemented yet (e.g, adding a button battery to power the Teeny’s RTC in sleep mode).
The Teensy is a 3.3V device, so we have an onboard regulators for 5V and 3.3V. Al and Jack think this will up the “fun level” for hackers considerably…at least that’s our intention.
The bad news: They got caught in some kind of Chinese holiday and other “delays” to get the PCB. Al ordered the board since he did all the work on the EE design. It seems our Beta PCB order got pushed to the back of the line.
When Jack wrote to them and pointed out that he was disappointed with their service, especially after ordering more than 1000 boards from them last year, the order suddenly went from “In line” to “shipped” in under 24 hours. They received the board this week and discovered errors on the board (2 from the design team, 1 from the manufacturer of the board). The Beta board will have some “hairs” on it.
Jack and Al will be demoing JackAl at FDIM, but not all of the features will be implemented. The order for the new board will be sent this week. We’ll immediately send it to our Beta testers and then make it available via an announcement on the BITX20 list.
Al and Jack look forward to seeing uBITx constructors at FDIM!