Copasetic Flow

 When hammering out CW on the amaetur radio bands, or anywhere else for that matter, it's important to be consistent. Your dahs should sound  like your dahs, your dits like your dits, and other hams should be able to tell where a word stopped and another one started. So, it occurred to me that since I was using the straight key for TouCans, I could have the JavaScript that communicates the key down and up actions to TouCans monitor and record my dah and dit lengths along with intra-character, (time between dahs and dits), intra-word, (time between letters), and word spacings. I asked ChatGPT if it could addd two histograms to measure these values to the web page I asked it to make for the web page yesterday, and voila! Right! I also asked ChatGPT to add a 'Practice Mode' button so that when I was practicing I didn't have to worry about calls being made to the Pico-W on TouCans. ChatGPT cranked out all the histogramming code quite easily. The only small snag was asking i...

 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,...

Use any key but 'esc' as a CW Key The app provides keyer sidetone on key down. As you key, it maintains two histograms: the one on top, (blue bars), measures the the lengths of your dits and dahs; the one on bottom, (green bars), measures the length of your pauses between dits and dahs, your pauses between letters, and your pauses between words.   Demo Video

 I've had issues with my movies on the last two Panasonic cameras I've owned, (the latest is a DC G100 that I'm quite pleased with), showing up 8 hours before, (in file listings), pictures that were taken right next to them (in the scheme of actual time.) I figured out that there are  other date fields availabe in the file viewers that have the correct time. Here's a video short of how to to do that. Maybe I'll ask ChatGPT if there's a way to code up something that will make the dates actually match across all the fields later.

  I follow both SolderSmoke and Ham Radio Work Bench, so I've been avidly watching the SolderSmoke driect conversion reeiver challenge thrown down by Bill Meara. Bill's said something for year's that's intrigued me: you gotta be able to understand how an RF mixer works. That was paraphrased, of course. I haven't had much success along those lines until today.  Looking at the Wikipedia entry for Frequency Mixers, I bludgeoned my way through the diode section, and I finally get it. (OK, I'm a little miffed that I have to take on faith the expression for the current through an ideal diode, but I can let that slide for the moment.) Lo and behold, after a series expansion and a binomial multiplicaiotn, there was the promised expression for the sine of one frequency times the sine of another. Using a high school trig identity, that can be rewritten as a sum of waves one of which is the sum of the two frequencies and one of which is the difference. That's not al...

 And I still haven't activated this POTA site! Still, it was fun and the view was nice. Only two QSOs this time, but I think that's about as many as I've every managed on this trail. Next time maybe :)

 I used ChatGPT to get a quick and dirty protoype for an application that would make a map of each individual QSO from a given CZML map I had already created. All in all, it took ChatGPT and I about 20 minutes to come up with a prototype of an application that takes one of my CZML POTA maps, walks through it QSO by QSO, creates a label on the map with embedded QSO information and then dumps out a text encoded PNG image of the QSO on an OpenStreets map. =======================draft notes, skip to next equals line till polished============== Here's my first question to ChatGPT: Can I write Javascript that positions and frames a Cesium Ion map based on data read in through a czml file? I quickly followed that up with  Please write a method to zoom to any polyline defined in the czml file. Zoom to each polyline, wait three seconds, and then zoom to the next polyline in the order they are defined in the file. Next, I asked for a single line at a time: Please modify the method...