The straight key is up and Ummm... Limping!!!

Wireless TouCans made its first straight key QSO with N2TNN last night! There are definitely kinks to work out in the straight keyer—most of them having to do with the keyer locking on—but I was able to hobble along at about twelve words per minute to complete the QSO!

As you can see, the QSO was just about coast to coast, from San Francisco to Gloucester, VA on five watts!

For now, the straight keyer constructs a stream of keyboard key up and key down times in milliseconds. When the op hits the 'esc' key, that list is sent to the Pico-W that lives on the rig. The Pico-W then holds down the key for the first number of milliseconds in the list, releases the key for the second number and so on. Essentially, it records the op's fist, and then plays it back just a little bit later.

Next steps include auto-buffering up key presses and shipping them off so that the op isn't bothered with that part of the process. Another nice feature might be a relay that shuts off the audio out line in stright key mode while the op is keying. The script does a fine job of making a sidetone... At least on Windows boxes. Turns out that Linux boxes don't like to give PyGame access to speakers quite as easily, but anyway...

Here's a video of the contraption in operation:

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