Si5351A/B/C Configuration Software

Version 0.2, April 2019
by Électro-Bidouilleur (electro@bidouilleur.ca)

Description

This software allows to configure Silicon Laboratories Si5351A/B/C Synthesizer chips when supervised by an Arduino Uno or Nano board. Once the Arduino has received a configuration from this software, it will re-load the Si5351 chip with that same configuration at every power up or reset. The Arduino (properly configured by this software) is required as the Si5351 chip does not retain its configuration when power is removed; it must be re-configured at power up.

The software is written in Python 2.7 programming language. Thus it is fully compatible with the Linux and Windows (7, 8, 10) operating systems. Although it has not been tested, the software should also run properly on the Mac OS.

This software covers a superset of functions offered by the Si5351 family of chips. The user must understand the limits imposed by the Si5351 model (A, B or C), such as the number of channels available or the support for an external reference input. A good comprehension of the Silicon Labs' Si5351A/B/C Datasheet document is recommended.

This software was designed with the objective of exploiting the most common Si5351 features. Thus, it allows to configure the chip for most applications, but not all of them. Examples of features that are not implemented are VCXO support, phase adjustment (other than simple inversion) and support for output channels 6 and 7. In an application where one or more of the missing features is required, the user can still use the proposed hardware by programming the Arduino Nano using the "Raw data Transfer" program. That Python script is included along with this one. In such case, various Si5351 registers will need to be programmed separately, which is more tedious.

Pre-requisites

Windows

Linux

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install python-serial

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install python-tk

Operation

Legal Notice

This software is “Free software” (as defined by the Free Software Foundation), which means it respects users' freedom and community. The users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve this software.

Note

This text is extracted from the About.html file provided with this software.