Copasetic Flow

 I've spent a lot of time getting Project TouCans' straight key back up and running better than ever before this month, and it finally paid off! I made a QSO with N2KPJ this morning! That's San Francisco to New York on 5 Watts! Hopefully I'll have a video QSL later, but in the mean time, There's a look at the station as it appeared this morning, indoors and everything! (Well, I was indoors. The rig was still outside.) Videos I've also cleaned up my dit/dah timing in a week's worth of practice . Here's my latest:

 While Halikey on my Windows 10 box just worked,  my Windows 11 machine had forgotten that serial ports had ever existed.There's a fix for this online, but it took me a bit longer than I thought to go through the driver update process. The steps were outlined here . (I used the answer from RobinsonSilvestre. I can't find a way to link to that exact response. Just in case, I've also copied the response below.) The very first step was to find my Halikey in the Windows Device Manager. For me, it appeared under "Other devices". I figured this out by counting the number of entries in "Other devices" before and after I plugged in my Halikey. With my Halikey attached to a USB-C drive, my count of rows went up by one. I determined which entry was new, (I can't remember the name, or I'd document it here), I figured out which device to right click on to update the driver for the Halikey so I could follow the above linked procedure. Next, I found the driver...

 I started out the week without a straight key for TouCans. By the end of the week, I'd worked with ChatGPT to make the WiFi straight key for TouCans into something pretty cool that worked on both Windows and Chromebook. (Alsthough, Windows is one cool thing ahead at the moment, I'll get to that.) Having decided I wasn't going to be able to get a wired straight key, i took another look at why I'd gone down the wired straight key path. TouCans has had a WiFi sraight key since last year. The issue is that it didn't work with the Chromebook. It was written in Python, and it was a bit more of a chore than I wanted fix it.  Linux on the Chromebook didn't want to provide keyboard access so that a key could be pressed as a straight key.  It also didn't want to provide speaker access, so there was no sidetone. I decided to do an end run and asked ChatGPT to translate the Python version of the WiFi straight key to JavaScript. ChatGPT pulled off the task so perfectly ...

 I finally found my Halikey yesterday! And even better, I was albe to put it to use pretty quickly. The tiny (to me) device used to link CW keys with computers had migrated to the floor below the end table where the cool baggy of Halibut Electronics stickers. For our house, with four kids and a dog, that wasn't much of a migration at all in the grand scheme of things. I first tried to use my Halikey with a Chromebook. I'm still working on that. I then got to work on Windows. Benefitting from the Chromebook debug work, (about an hour's worth), the Halikey was up and running in about 10 minutes!  Once again , I asked ChatGPT to translate code , (this time from a pull request from Mark Smith ), from Python to JavaScript. Most of my time in debug on the Windows box was realizing that ChatGPT had somehow taken the serial port sampling code out of a loop. I finally noticed that I could get different serial port signal values if I reloaded the page while shorting out two key le...

 The WiFi straight key on Project TouCans is up and running! There were a few steps to the process. First, I realized yesterday that most of my audio delay issues with the sidetone on the Chromebook that I usually use to control Project TouCans keyer were caused by using the Linux Chrome browser  on that machine as opposed to the built-in Chrome browser. I'd originally made this choice becuase I thought running the Linux browser with the  --disable-web-security argument was the only way to make cross-origin resource sharing accesses from the keyer's locally served, (via file), web page, to the Pico-W.  It turns out I was incorrect about that. by using fetch, fetch(`http://192.168.4.1/light/skgo?msg=${cwmsg}`, { mode: 'no-cors' })         .then(() => console.log("CW message sent successfully."))         .catch(err => console.error("Error sending CW message:", err)); with a no-cors mode. This results in the browser issuing ...

Use any key but 'esc' as a CW Key The app provides keyer sidetone on key down. As you key, it maintains two histograms: the one on top, (blue bars), measures the the lengths of your dits and dahs; the one on bottom, (green bars), measures the length of your pauses between dits and dahs, your pauses between letters, and your pauses between words.   Demo Video

 I added a new feature to the CW metronome, namely the ability to download a png image of your histogram to share document your improvement or to share  with others. Once again I used ChatGPT to sketch up the initial code , and then went from there. I'm definitely building software I wouldn't take the time to build otherwise. You can try the new feature on the existing CW metronome page . There's a demo video below. Videos

Use any key but 'esc' as a CW Key The app provides keyer sidetone on key down. As you key, it maintains two histograms: the one on top, (blue bars), measures the the lengths of your dits and dahs; the one on bottom, (green bars), measures the length of your pauses between dits and dahs, your pauses between letters, and your pauses between words.   Demo Video

 Using my camera as a camera and my computer as a computer just works better. The video files from POTA and SOTA outings on the new camera weigh in on the order of GBs of data. That makes for some pretty great videos, but also for slowish transfer speeds, especially from the camera's USB port out to the desktop computer at home. The camera, a Panasonic Lumic DC G100D was clocking 15 MB/s downloading data to the computer. Switching to a Thunderbolt USB-C cable moved things to 16 MB/s. When I tried to move video files from the computer back into the camera's SD card, that data rate was even slower at aout 5 MB/s. Fortunately, 12 year-old Mota, (internet alias), got a GameBoy knockoff for his sib for Christmas. The little gadgete uses a micro-SD card, and so yesterday Tawnse asked if we could get an SD reader so we could  move games on and off the machine. I ordered one. This morning, when I tried to use the SD port on said reader to move files from the camera's SD card, they...

 Last week, I asked ChatGPT to create header maps per QSO from a CZML map of my POTA outing. It dumped out code that I had to fuss a little bit with, but that did the job admirably. The output is text-encode png images in the console of the Cesium Sandcastle window. I would then download those images by copying them into an html file, opening the html file in a browser, and downloading each of the images individually. That was cool, until... Last night, I made 51 QSOs at US-4571 in San Francisco. That's a lot of files to download individually, so I asked ChatGPT: Please write a JavaScript, do not use React, that can save all the images from web page locally. It responded with code that downloaded the first 10 images. I asked it for a fix That only downloaded the first ten. Please modify the code so that it downloads all the imags and uses .png as the default extension. and it produced a modified version of the code that handily downloaded all 50. See the d...

Initial Prototype Use any key but 'esc' as a CW Key This mostly does not work. Chaging the browser mode to 'View in Desktop Mode' helps with a better histogram display. For me, the sidetone is not useful in this version.  The app provides keyer sidetone on key down. As you key, it maintains two histograms: the one on top, (blue bars), measures the the lengths of your dits and dahs; the one on bottom, (green bars), measures the length of your pauses between dits and dahs, your pauses between letters, and your pauses between words.   Demo Video