I had been searching for a radio with a built in reception meter for a month or so, frequenting thrift stores and such, but to no avail. At about the moment that it would have been too late, I happened to find the seemingly perfect one sitting in the garbage of the next-door neighbors house. I immediately took it apart, cleaned the spider webs (and spiders) out of it and found the circuitry for the level meter. I hooked it up to the PIC micro-controller and saw that with a simple ADC reading I could tell the quality of radio reception.

To turn the dial, I wanted a mechanism which somehow reflected the physical constraints of life, servos naturally have this in there ability to only turn 180 degrees (does anyone know how to get the little degree circle on the keyboard?). Anyway, I had two servos, which is good because I like to use things which I already have ( and since I had already dropped a chunk of money into a failed project...), So the idea of creating a two servo, one to turn and one to lift allowing the other to re-cock itself, seemed natural.

I drilled into the face of the radio and stuck in two limit switches which would tell the servos when it was at the end of the dial and had to start going in the other direction. I like creating systems which are simply apparent and available for the viewer. The viewer can follow the wires from the microchip and easily see how the tuning bar hits a switch and causes the direction of the servo to change. Likewise another wire goes into the speaker which the Radio Runner has taken over in order to analyze the data (though this part is slightly weak in that there is really no reason it has to be vocalized).

that's it

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