Heya,

I'm going to build a controller for an IC-R5 handheld radio scanner for a
computer science (digitech) project. The idea is to be able to type in the
frequency I want in my computer and then have an electric motor dial in
that frequency on my scanner. I'll be using a stepping motor and some
controller the circuit design of which seems to be a homebrew of the
polytechnic school I attend. What I'll be doing is programming the logic
of the controller and writing a computer application for Linux which tells
the controller what to do.

My question is; do you know of any projects similar to this? I'm
mostly looking for inspiration and pitfalls to avoid. Any comments and
insight you might have is most welcome.


Now the following part probably isn't relevant here, but I just wanted to
tell what I intended to do with it.

On the computer-side of this I intend to have some more advanced
functions. My program will be able to accept a list or range of
frequencies and then tell the controller to dial them in order.
The headphone output of the scanner is sent to the microphone jack on the
computer. My program 'listens' for any sound and if it find a signal it
stops telling the controller to dial frequencies, freezing on the signal.
Since the scanner has an automatic function (Auto squelch) to be silent
when there's no signal and only make sound when there is a signal, this
isn't very difficult to do.
The audio is sent to speech recognition software, and if something
intelligible comes out it listens and logs what it hears. If there is
nothing intelligible there, it tells the controller to keep dialing.
Alternatively it could listen for digital transmissions and attempt to
decode what digital mode it is in, and log the output of that.
There's no end to the things I could do with this thing, but primarily I
intend to have the logs written to the root window of my desktop, creating
a cool effect that will earn me geek points like crazy. =)
Attacking number stations to unveil matters of national security is just a
side-project. Eheh.


(Please note that I'm X-posting this, but I'll still be checking both
groups for replies so feel free to post to only one of them.)

--
Nosforit