I bought an antique telegraph sounder a while back, and I’ve been working on a project that will click out emails from my Etsy store when I get an order. I’ve gone through several generations, and come up with something I really like. What follows is a description of my process for going from concept to finished piece. The code & PCB are open-source, and can be found on my github.
Generation 1 – Paper
The end goal I had in mind was to be able to push messages over the network, and have the telegraph sounder tap them out in Morse code. I’ve used Arduino as a platform for similar projects before, but wireless communication with the Arduino is either a pain or a significant cost, so I targeted the Raspberry Pi instead. I found a blog talking about the required electronics to make the sounder work, and I worked it out on paper using only a few components.
Generation 2 – Bread boarding
The next step was to get the first prototype. I played around with my circuit on a breadboard until it worked (I went through a few iterations while trying to get the switching mechanism working correctly). I also wrote the code required for the Raspberry Pi.
Read More: Concept to Finished Piece – Generations of an Electronics Project