MorseMaster II shaped code

How many zillions of 555 based code practice oscillators are there beeping away ?  Probably quite a few - I remembered that my MorseMaster II project has one, previously mentioned here:

https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/02/bad-cap.html 

  But the original MorseMaster II design by Mike, KJ4LN cleverly upgraded the 555, adding shaping to the waveform and RC filtering:

So I thought about adding those circuits to my MorseMaster.  One interesting note: the 555 in the Morsemaster II runs continuously so really the circuits add keying, shaping and filtering.  The steady 555 current doesn't matter that much considering the power used by the microcontroller is fairly high.

First, using a solderless breadboard, here are the full pulse and the zoom in on ramp up / down waveforms all at the the collector of Q4:

.

4 ms rise time

8 ms fall time

Next, here is the shaped square wave, with rise and fall zooms:

That's about as far as I gotten so far, I'll add the filter and LM380 amplifier next.

Here is a link to the Morsemaster II manual online (the source of the schematic above):

thanks to N4MW: http://www.n4mw.com/cp247.htm

manual: http://www.n4mw.com/cp247.pdf

I was still working at GTE when I built my MorseMaster II so it was fairly easy to key in the 1024 bytes of the code and program a single chip 8748 microcontroller.  Since I've butchered my Intel Prompt 48 (head bowed in shame) I wouldn't be able to program any more 8748s now although programming EPROMs isn't that hard.  But a three chip build (8035,EPROM and latch) is more of a chore than a single 8748 microcontroller chip build.  Anyway I can't remember which version of the MorseMaster I have, I'll have to look into that.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm