Hardrock-50 Remote Display

The Hardrock-50 is a 50W power amplifier for amateur radio QRP transceivers. It has a display showing valuable information like the selected band, the SWR, power, temperature etc. Since I am using the HR50 in a remote station, I cannot directly access those information via the display.

However, the HR50 offers serial communication via a USB port. This project tries to solve this problem with the help of a separate, wifi enabled hardware display. It consists of the following two components:

• Heltec ESP32 board with display
• a python flask application, which represents the communication via the serial interface in the form of an API

This diagram shows which components are required and how the communicate:

This is how the display looks like in action:

Preconditions

Hardware

• Heltec ESP32 Wifi Dev Kit Board with OLED

Software

• Arduino IDE
• HR50-Api: [https://git.qrz.is/clemens/hr50-api]

Libraries

• Heltec Libraries: [https://github.com/Heltec-Aaron-Lee/WiFi_Kit_series]
• ArduinoJson
• HTTPClient
• WiFi

Configuration

Edit the following lines inside the Arduino sketch:

const char* ssid = "<ENTER_HERE_YOUR_WIFI_SSID>";
const char* password = "<PASSWORD>";
String api_url = "http://<ENTER_HERE_THE_IP_OF_YOUR API_SERVER>:5000/status";

Error handling

• If wifi is unavailable or misconfigured, the device will show "No Wifi!" on the screen
• HTTP Errors will also displayed on the OLED
• When you key up your TRX and therefore the HR50, no serial communication is possible. The latest gathered information will still be displayed on the screen but there will be a "(!)" in the third row as an indicator for this situation.