Copasetic Flow

 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...