Copasetic Flow

 I got my Halikey to work on my ChromeBook again! Regular readers might remember that I chose poorly when my ChromeBook asked what I wanted to do with the Halikey, assign it to Linux or Android? The correct answer was not to choose . Both choices are wrong. After a bit, the dialog box will simply disappear if you don't answer. Then, everything works fine. The settings stored my choice in a place I couldn't find... until today... and so, no more ChromeBook HaliKey for me. Here's what made everything better. I went to the ChromeBook's settings and wound up at the Manage USB devices tab. It wasn't easy to figure out. I have yet to find a path to this screen. Here's what you can do. Select settings in your Chromebook. Click into the 'System preferences' tab. Search for usb, but do not hit enter. Notice the , 'Linux development environment' selection. Choose it from the drop down. Then, click on 'Mange USB devices in that screen. You'll land a...

 When I started down the road of putting a Raspberry Pico-W in charge of the Morse code key and on/off switch on our 20 meter rock-locked, QRP CW rig, Project TouCans, last year, I came across many, many microPython code examples where the entire point was to WiFi connect your Pico-W to your home router and then access it from other devices.  KO6BTY and I however, mostly use Project TouCans while out camping for POTA/SOTA. Consequently, the 'home router' route, (pun intended), didn't seem helpful. Ultimately, I found code example for setting up a Pico-W as a network as an access point as opposed to a client. That worked. We were able to WiFi connect a laptop to Project TouCans to turn the rig on and off and send either auto-keyed or straight key CW . It did however, lock whichever device into TouCans exclusively. That wasn't too big of a problem though, because I could make POTA self-spots and check out our signal on various SDRs using my smart phone. Then, yesterday, a...

 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...

 The WiFi straight key on Project TouCans is up and running! There were a few steps to the process. First, I realized yesterday that most of my audio delay issues with the sidetone on the Chromebook that I usually use to control Project TouCans keyer were caused by using the Linux Chrome browser  on that machine as opposed to the built-in Chrome browser. I'd originally made this choice becuase I thought running the Linux browser with the  --disable-web-security argument was the only way to make cross-origin resource sharing accesses from the keyer's locally served, (via file), web page, to the Pico-W.  It turns out I was incorrect about that. by using fetch, fetch(`http://192.168.4.1/light/skgo?msg=${cwmsg}`, { mode: 'no-cors' })         .then(() => console.log("CW message sent successfully."))         .catch(err => console.error("Error sending CW message:", err)); with a no-cors mode. This results in the browser issuing ...

 It turns out MicroPython for the Raspberry Pi Pico-W doesn't support threads. Ask me how I know. :) I'm adding a straight key to Projec TouCans for SKCC straight key month . Getting the straight key to work on its own was pretty straightforward by tweaking and incorporating code that ChatGPT provided. The next step, after proving the key worked at all, was to get it to play nicely on the Pico-W with the autokeyer code that's already there. The auto-keyer is accessed over WiFi, (TouCans used to be used solely while embedded in a dipole antenna several feet of f the ground.) I asked ChatGPT to write some code for me that would enable me to easily switch back and forth between the straight key and the auto-keyer. The auto-keyer blocks while waiting on a socket access call, that's kind of a problem if you're not using the auto-keyer. ChatGPT's solution was to place the straight ke code and the auto-keyer codes in separate threads. It sounded good, but like I said,...