Copasetic Flow

 Everything old is new again. OK, I just said that to sound fancy. Actually though, the Project TouCans CW histogram , (you know for measuring the consistency of your dits and dahs while sending Morse Code), uses WebUSB and Web Audio , (respectively), to implement a connection to the serial port, where it listens to a Halikey, and to generate a sidetone. That's the old part.  Here's the new part, (to me anyway). It turns out both of those web capabilities are either documented by or a result of something called Project Fugu . I stumbled across the Google Develper site while browsing, (pun totally intended), through the extensions in my Chrome browser. It turns out Chrome Apps are going away, (finally a Google technology I didn't use is disappearing), and should be replaced by, (in Google's estimation), Web Apps, (which are referenced as Progressive Web Apps by Google Gemini.)  The capabilities available are pretty cool and include Web Bluetooth and a File System...

 There's been a lot of talk about what is and isn't homebrew lately. I started hearing the all-in-good-fun contention around the Soldersmoke DC Receiver Challenge . A few days back, the conversation wandered over to the comments section of a HackaDay post. In that post, I found the following quote from The Tao of Programming :  "When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas." While it's cobbled together from modified kits, TouCans, suspended in its dipole beneath a Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory rain shield, will always sit in my heart as a manifestation of "the simplest harmony between machine and ideas" That makes me wonder if there should be a catetory known as a homebrew system. Sure, TouCans has kits, but they're modded to fit the application. They're also powered and controlled by a homebrew Darlington array buffered momentary contact relay (keyer) and a latching relay (power),...

 Raspberry Pi released the Raspberry Pi Radio Module 2 today. It's the same wireless module supporting both WiFi and Bluetooth that's used for the Pico W and the Pico 2 W, but it's packaged as a standalone module . Photo of Pi Radio Module 2 from release announcment I don't know if we'll wind up using this module on Project TouCans, but the external antenna you can see on the right-hand side of the module abovoe has been enticing at various points during the project. I know that extending the antenna would violate the conformance and RF certification that the module provides, but Project TouCans isn't a commercial product yet anway, so... There are games we can play with just the module itself though. The first of which would be to move from a Pico-W to a Pico and move the processor module inside TouCans, leaving only the wireless module on the ouside of the device.  TouCans Current Setup with Pico-W on the Outside This should make the whole rig more rugged, bu...