In this article I will attempt to give an account of my CW trainer in all its shameless excess. The “Mother of All Keyers“ (MOAK, for short; Photo A) is now capable of conversing in Morse, not in the way an advanced modern chatbot would converse, but let’s be candid, an exchange of signal reports is not exactly a fluid conversation, either! No matter, if conversation becomes too stilted, or if you need something to help you sleep, the MOAK will read to you from a book! How about a bedtime story—in Morse, of course?
The earliest version of this project dates to a ham radio club meeting several years ago at which one of the members passed around an Arduino Unobased device he had made. This ‘show and tell’ made me curious to explore the Arduino platform. Around that same time, my wife, Rebecca Milligan, N4EFS, was learning Morse code, and had built the Arduino-based Morse trainer described by N4TL in the September 2016 issue of QST. I decided to design and build a similar device, as a way of learning about Arduino, and possibly to incorporate additional features that might be useful for training. The original MOAK user interface consisted of two push-buttons, a potentiometer (speed control), and a 4-line LCD. A photo and circuit description of this original project can be found at <https://tinyurl.com/yeyv83k4>.
Early iterations of the MOAK were not terrible. One original feature was pseudo-text. The MOAK generated a sort of gibberish that resembled English, though not actual English language words. Copying pseudo-text was perhaps more challenging than copying 5-character groups. Sending practice consisted
