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The Freedom7 HF Transceiver project really consists of multiple projects. One is pure design and experimentation. Another is product assembly, manufacture, and evolution. Lastly, an overlooked but oh so important project of documenting, accounting, journaling, recordkeeping, and just describing the parent project in detail for well-informed progress, decision-making assistance, and reduced anxiety moving forward.

I generally push into new design and experimentation with ease. Yet, I begin to stress when it comes to assembling a vision of the completed product. And, I almost paralyze at the thought of documentation for something I’ve figured out completely. I am currently procrastinating the documentation for the first components I’ve completed and tested. These are passive LC band-pass filters.

With this post, I’ll outline how I plan to break this procrastination and do each component’s documentation. I have been using Donald Knuth’s TeX typesetting system to produce my most important and formal documents. I’ll share my outline for breaking this procrastination and also produce a PDF sharing my band-pass component’s TeX documentation.

Here are the numbered but unordered considerations for documenting each Freedom7 HF Transceiver component:

Series of iterations of component on paper from simple box to full detail
What is it and what does it do?
What are its interfaces?
Does it need power? Voltage? Amperage need?
Active or Passive and why? Pros and cons?
Does it need outside (external) control, configuration, tuning (once or operator), etc?
Does it require testing, tuning during manufacture, adjustment, trials, reset (internal or operator), etc.
Shielding?
Ground plane concerns?
Possible floating pins?
Consists of the following parts? Footprints for PCB? Costs?
Calculations, modeling (LTSpice), paper trials, etc. or any deep technical analysis?

Here’s an example TeX document that’s unfinished. I’ll add the considerations shown above and replace this when the formal document is complete. This is provided here to show the type (TeX) of document I’ll use to reference each component as I go.