Week In Review: TouCans Straight Key, ChatGPT, Tuna Salac Sender, and Halikey

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 that I asked it to also histogram dit/dah timings of the key commands sent to TouCans.

I got more work done on prototyping video QSLs. We've had czml QSO maps that display in Cesium for a while. I asked ChatGPT if it was possible to do screen captures of each QSO automatically. ChatGPT dumped out code that automated the process.

On the heels of that code, I asked ChatGPT to add the abliity to create images of the dit/dah historgrams after a CW session That worked well, but it was at about this point that ChatGPT started making a few mistakes.

The keyer works by sending the time in milliseoncds to hold the straigh tkey down and then amount of time to release it. ChatGPT took out the code that sent hte key-up times. This led to munged code and that resulted in me adding a CW replay button to the CW metronome. Sure enough, when I played back the dits and dahs, they were munged. That provided the clue to double check the key down adn key up times.

A day later, using the straight key on the Chromebook and working to make the histogram peaks as narrow as possible, TouCans was spotted on the RBN!

there wsa one last issue. Teh straight key occasionally locked me out of the keyer altoghter. A few debug messages show ed that this only happened when the number of key down and key up delay digits exceeded 800. I learned how to loop the Pico-W's server code to ensure the entire message sent to the keyer was pulled in in 800 byte chunks. That solved the lockup issue.

The next step was to see if the WiFi keyer would work with a Halikey as opposed just using a keyboard key as a straight key. I asked ChatGPT ot translate Python code written by Mark Smith into JavaScript. ChatGPT got almost all the code correct, but left the serial port sampling code out of the sampling loop. That was a simple fix, and the WiFi keyer and metronome now work with a Halikey!

By this time, I'd passed quite a bit of code to ChatGPT for contest. ChatGPT also seemed to be making more errors as time progressed. I wonder if it was a demonstraion of somethign pointed in an article that Simon Willison reviewed:

"Every model seems to get confused when you feed them more than ~25-30k tokens. The models stop obeying their system prompts, can't correctly find/transcribe pieces of code in the context, etc." --Paul Gauthier

Meanwhile, KO6BTY and I built our QRPME tuna salad senders, (iambic keyers), following along with Rex Harper's buildathon. the imabic keyer is up and running with Halikey!

It was a busy week, but a lot of fun!

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Copasetic Flow

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