A Short History of the Morserino-32
January 2017: MetaLab, a „hackerspace“ in Vienna, Austria, was planning a workshop for the upcoming „Makerfaire“. A sketch was produced during the meeting by OE1WKL, and a functional prototype developed by him within a few weeks. It was an Arduino Nano-based Keyer, CW Generator and Decoder.
“metaMorserino”:
- MetaLab
- Morse
- Arduino
OE3HBS designed a PCB and a case, and prepared 20 kits for the workshop. All kits were sold on the first day, and during the following months more than 100 kits were sold.
Full documentation (manual in German and Spanish) and source code are still available on bit.ly/metamorserino. User interface is in English, as are comments in the source code.
In a meeting with OE6RDD from CW School Graz it became clear, that this was a nice toy, but to become a really useful gadget many more features needed to be incorporated, and that the Arduino was not powerful enough for that.
January - May 2018: Built a first prototype based on ESP32 (Heltec Module) on breadboard
- Ported the existing metaMorserino software to the new platform
- Added a number of new features to the software, amongst others:
- Echo trainer
- LoRa transceiver
- Had to design a protocol for packing Morse code information into a packet transport protocol for LoRa
- Lots of very useful input by CW School Graz
- Designed a 1st version PCB (with most parts as SMD)
June 2018: First demonstration at the HAM RADIO show in Friedrichshafen (Germany)
October - November 2018: Kickstarter campaign to fund the first batch of kits. Financial goal reached in 2 hours, campaign funded > 300 kits in total.
October - November 2018: First edition sold out after 2.700 kits. Re-design of PCB for 2nd edition.
By 2025 more than 10.000 kits have been sold.
As of October 2025, the Morserino is being sold by QRP Labs.