Copasetic Flow

 You can now play the CW Simon game on your desktop with your own iambic paddles and a Halikey Serial . (We hope to have support for Halikey Midi soon.) I was a little worried that the serial version of the Halikey was going away , but I'm super-psyched to see that it's back! I'm still pretty psyched about phone keying, so expect to see more features there, and maybe some hardware as we move forward, but there are a lot of hams with iambic keys, and so, voila! The video walks through the basic process of using a Halikey with the game. If there  are any questions, suggestions, or issues, please let us know in the comments below. References More on the CW Simon game

 On Tuesday, I mentioned that I'd be adding Halikey as an iambic keyer to the CWSimon game. Iambic keying enabled by Halikey is something I've been meaning to do for a while, but each time I start, I realize I'm going to need to start with serial port signal inspections, and set the project back aside. This is the exact sort of thing vibe coding is good for, pushing through the parts of projects you don't want to bother with. So, this morning, I put ChatGPT 5.3. A few minutes and a design coversation later, ChatGPT cranked out the web page for me that you'll see in the video below. Here's the app itself if you'd like to experiment with your serial Halikey. Halikey Serial Signal Test Bench Connect to a Halikey and watch for serial control-signal changes. Each change will be logged below with the signal name and new state. Connect Halikey Disconnect Clear Log Status: Disconnected

 The 11 year-old and I played CW Simon through two airports and plane rides last night. We got a little better at sending CW, and bothered absolutely no one. Haptics rock ! But what if you'd rather practice Morse with your own set of paddles, not on a smart phone touch screen? By the way, did I mention that the smart phone easily supports 20 wpm iambic keying ? Still want your own paddles? Ok, ok, ok, ok. We're working on adding Halikey support! We've got a code basis to work from becuase there are other apps in the Project TouCans portfolio, namely the CW Fist-ogram —a tool for practicing your dit/dah timing consistency—and the inter-person, internet CW transciever . that already support Halikey. Both those tools were built for the OG serial Halikey. I was worried that device was going away and therefore was delighted this morning when I saw that the serial version will continue to be sold along with the spiffy new MIDI version of the Halikey! I perused the new User...

 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...