It’s a while since I did any dabbling with my implementation of the Valve Wizard’s Valve Analyser, in part because of being distracted by other projects, but also because I haven’t had any call to test any valves of late. The distractions have included my digital guitar pedal based on the Daisyseed and a DIY Leslie cabinet. However, Merlin’s recent update to his Valve Analyser has prompted me to refresh both the firmware and PC software, focusing on a more streamlined UI purely for testing (i.e. no design tools or modelling).
Both the firmware and software have been re-written from the ground up, including a move to QT6, but the underlying architecture is essentially the same. This is because it was easier to get GitHub Copilot to write the code afresh using the earlier versions as a reference. I have included a test mode in the firmware which allows the Arduino to simulate an ECC83 or EL84 in order to test the PC software.
Another shift I have opted for is PlatformIO in VS Code instead of the Arduino IDE. Imho, this is a much more productive development environment which also supports many more devices. I have a couple of cheap ESP32 modules and it handles these with ease – although I haven’t decided what to use them for yet.
As ever, everything is on GitHub:
https://github.com/olivergardiner/ValveTesterFirmware
https://github.com/olivergardiner/ValveTesterSoftware
Note that, per Merlin’s current hardware, the firmware now has no heater control as it is assumed that the heaters have an external supply. The original hardware project (which uses RS Designspark) is also on GitHub but will soon be updated to one that is largely SMT using EasyEDA from JLCPCB.
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