Project TouCans Lab Book: The Weekend of Gentle Debug

Note: The following will probably change over time, and is not ready for primetime. It's in the nature of a lab book entry so that I don't lose information about changes to Project TouCans.

I dodged a lot of near disasters this weekend by waiting to make sure I understood what was going on before acting.

The day before what I'm going to detail here, the Pico-W that's been in in outdoor service on TouCans for just over a year gave out. It was the curse of the Butterfield Overland Trail. I may never activate that park here in San Francisco. Not only do I not make many QSOs at the locations I've tried, the rig also tends to become damaged in one way or another. This time, the Pico-W jsut wouldn't boot after I got home. It also wouldn't respond to a direct USB connection anymore.

When I replaced the Pico-W, I thought we'd done a better job of revision controlling our code than we had. I loaded code onto the new Pico-W, and nothing! I assumed the Darlington array was shot (add picture.) I was wrong. The code had a bug in it, (introduced by ChatGPT annd not caught by me, or at least, not revision controlled after fix.) That bug was causing the relay activation code to never be entered.

Did I mention that there were propagation issues? Owing to an increase in solar winds, TouCans and the F2 layer weren't playing nicely together the way they typically do. Utah was receiving TouCans later in the day, if at all. This made for tense debugging moments because our usual first, easy check is to watch TouCans signal on the Utah SDR at 14057.4 kHz.

Then, there was sending from a hole. I was really glad that I didn't start deep radio surgery, but (somewhat) patiently just kept transmitting. It turned out my new transmit location along the Juan Bautista National Historic trail was in a rather significant and different dale, (as opposed to a hill), in San Francisco. That coupled with propagation conditions meant that our other bellweather, W6YX, the club station at Berkeley, didn't spot TouCans on the reverse beacon network either. It wasn't until the F2 lit up enough that the rig was seen at W6YX on what has to have been vertical incidence skip.

Thanks to the oddball propagation, I decided it couldn't hurt to replace TouCans' the battery, which had also been in use for over a year. The battery had been discharging more and more quickly and the change seemed easy enough. so I replaced it. (I'll post more soon on the internals of the battery pack. It had outgassed enough that it had completely taken its own case apart which made it easy to inspect.)

There has been wonkiness in the power leading to the rig. While doing the battery replacement, I found out why. The power wire literally broke in two out of the USB-C board that provides power to the rig as shown below.

The wire in question is the orange one that's hanging in space propped on the USB 4 male-to-male barrel. Kind of cool, that meant the rig was ready to go right?

Well....

TouCans came back to life noisy. For TouCans, that's always meant a frayed or loose wire somewhere, no matter how much I try to deny that's the case each and every time. I moved the speaker wire around, (white and black cloth insulation above), and decided the issue was the new battery. It wasn't...

I took TouCans to US-4571 at City College to operate, a site that almost always makes TouCans happy, and after one QSO with AI5IN, the keyer stopped working. I could still turn the rig on and off, but I couldn't use the key anymore. The next phase of debug had begun.

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Copasetic Flow

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