Re: Using hamlib for CW keying

[Drew Arnett]

Hamlib is great and really achieved a lot.  Very neat what clients can
do with that library for sure.

But, all in one solutions sometimes get, um, interesting.  cwdaemon
defined a protocol.  So, anyone can write a replacement, that tlf and
others, can use.  And they have.  cwdaemon itself doesn't support
every type of keying hardware.  Nor did some of the alternatives that
implemented the protocol.

On my todo list is to read the hamlib rigctld protocol to see if it is
a candidate for the same approach.  No, I don't think hamlib should go
away or anything like that.  But, to do something custom, like have an
application listed to the cwdaemon and rigctld ports and wring what it
can from the KX3 or K3 CAT protocol might be interesting.  Or
something along those lines.  Sounds like someone has already tried
something along these lines.

Interesting stuff.

Drew
n7da

ps.  A couple of years ago, when I looked at the cwdaemon protocol, I
also looked at the packets generated by several different client
applications.  Some send more data than the protocol requires, and
cwdaemon doesn't complain.  IIRC, all had trailing nulls, some a
single null byte and some several.  So, I reported that in debug mode:
 
https://github.com/drewarnett/pywinkeyerdaemon/blob/master/pywinkeyerdaemon.py#L126

On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 8:45 AM Nate Bargmann <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Thanks for that, Olaf.
>
> Here is a crazy idea I had that someone might like to experiment with.
> I thought of using a serial port multiplexer, assuming such a thing
> exists and I found https://github.com/danielinux/ttybus as one of the
> first hits, to have Hamlib and cwdaemon share the same port.  For the K3
> and other radios that don't use hardware handshaking, this may work
> well.  cwdaemon keys CW via the DTR pin and the K3 can be configured to
> key CW via DTR or RTS.  In theory, since Hamlib and cwdaemon use
> different pins, this should work.
>
> Another idea is to not bother with a multiplexer and just direct Hamlib
> and cwdaemon to the same port and see what happens!  So far I've not
> tried this hare-brained idea myself...
>
> 73, Nate
>
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