There has been a good deal of progress on both the hardware and software fronts. Button “plungers” of the proper length arrived, along with nuts and bolts (2mm size) to retain the display in the transparent lid, so it is now possible to see how a Control Head will look:
The ruler and quarter provide a sense of scale: the box is easily held in one hand, but it fills the hand. The box is large enough to hold the entire 2-band receiver, and a battery. The four white dots are the button plungers mentioned above, and serve as the “menu” buttons. The black knob below the display operates the rotary encoder, which can be pressed to activate a fifth button.
Firmware now includes a linkbus (inter-processor communication), allowing the Control Head to communicate with and control the Digital Interface, and thus the receiver. The Receiver board has not yet been populated.
The Control Head can now instruct the Digital Interface to fully configure the Si5351 clock chip, set the main volume, the tone volume, and report ADC readings. We are getting close to having a platform that can support receiver debugging and testing.