Notices

there was a discussion about amateur radio for the Zaurus a while back on the OESF forums, where someone wanted to make a morse paddle for the zaurus so that a disabled friend could enter text into it using morse code.

I'm sure with a simple USB keypad or even a bluetooth mouse you could turn the tablet into a trivial tone generator. Add a timer and decoder and you'd have a text entry system which would probably be more accurate than handwriting recognition.

Another idea broached was to use the handheld computer as an oscilloscope - see xoscope software - but I am not sure what sampling rate the tablet is capable of, and whether the headphone jack is dual purpose output and input?

Headphone jack has a microphone input; there's been some speculation about writing a DSP task and getting higher sampling rates, but in practice, it's limited to 8kHz sampling rate. It should be straightforward to get it functioning as a scope, but there's not much use for a 2 kHz BW scope.

The morse key option is certainly possible. It wouldn't be the easiest thing to hook up as a generic input method, but doing a tone generator is definitely plausible.

I used to be big into APRS using Xastir running in Cygwin and used play around with AFU-Knoppix
Now it looks like there is Digipup
http://www.w1hkj.com/flpuppy.html

Guess I should look in my closet and pull out and dust off my trusty Kenwood D700. I haven't used it in almost a year.

73s
KD5QZG

I've been getting to know my way around the scratchbox, and have been having a stab at getting AX.25 support on the N800.

So far, I've built a modified diablo kernel with AX.25 support with MKISS. I've not yet got a TNC hooked up to try it out. I've also been working on building libax25 which I have a now have a diablo deb for, and this is also installed on my N800.

Next there's ax25-tools. I'm having some dependency issues building the deb for that, but the code compiles in scratchbox, so the individual tools are there for manual addition to the tablet and immediate gratification. I'm hoping to get some AX.25 packets flowing through my N800 soon.

if anyone else is interested in this stuff, let me know.

cheers,

fnord

yes, definitely, even if only for the intellectual exercise!

I am wondering about those USB oscilloscope modules around, whether they offload enough processing to allow the tablet to be an effective scope.

For the morse key, I reckon a USB numeric keypad would do, or even a USB mouse, the mouse button simply activates the sound; or use left and right as an iambic (is that the term?) key.

Hey guys, I'm no amatuer radio operator, but I do know this.

If you install Debian (see the easy Debian install threads in "Alternatives" forum) you get a shed load of apps for this area. When I tried Debian, there must have been 50 available from the repos. I couldn't even figure what most of them did !

Awesome, or at least mostly awesome.

The kernel with ax.25 support, libax25, ax25-tools and ax25-apps are working well on diablo, and decoding APRS traffic using KISS mode over USB serial with my Elcom USB uTNT v3.0 GPS/BT. The bluetooth is very iffy on the TNC, but is has worked occasionally, so that may also be viable if it is just a fault with my TNC hardware.

Due to the issues I've had with bluetooth, I've rebuilt the kernel with FTDI and Keyspan USB/serial drivers. The Elcom TNC needs FTDI and I have a Keyspan adapter. If anyone has a need for other USB/serial drivers built into a kernel with AX.25 support, let me know and I'll build them in.

I just need to figure out how to get rid of the odd dependency problem with ax25-tools in order to build a deb for them. They build OK from configure;make but dpkg-buildpackage moans about libfltk1.1-dev (>= 1.1.2-2) xlibmesa-gl-dev | libgl-dev, which are unlikely to get satisfied. I think there are some obscure GUI tools in there somewhere, probably for legacy satellite modes IIRC so I'll try and wheedle that stuff out.

Hopefully I'll post the kernel image and a bunch of debs in the next couple of days. If anyone wants to live on the edge with what I have now, also let me know.

So far, kissattach, listen, mheard are working. The TNC isn't wired up for transmission yet, as I've only had it just over a week.

fnord.

rig control would be nice... a quick port of the xclass libs would bring rx320 and tt516 (Ten Tec Argonaut V) control to the n8x0 easily since USB serial is supported...

logging would also be a natural?

<sigh> time and motivation are against me...

I haven't had much luck with the Debian approach, at least not so far. I'm interested in seeing psk31/gpsk31 work, as well as predict / possibly predict-gsat even if it's only one sat at a time or slow updates. It's unfortunate we're limited to only 8khz audio.

I need to learn how to use the scratchbox. Does anyone have a pre-configured VMware appliance / scratchbox to share?