#JEALOUS
Uniden Remote Head Project
- Thread starter MA-radio-guy
- Start date
It was the last one too. The hotel bar was closed but it's a good thing since I really did need to get up and interact with others despite not wanting to.
Anyway, I bought a power inverter for the laptop and worked on it from the back seat on the ride back home and I think I have it working now. I'm sure there will be something that will come up that I didn't think of but for now it's displaying everything perfectly. I put the 300 ms timer in the usb read buffer function which calmed it down and stabilized it. It seems to work fine there and everything runs smooth with no more timeouts or radio overrun issues causing delays. It's visually as responsive as the display.
I need to move all the variables for the display lines out to make them public so they can be read by other functions and then start working on the actual display interaction such as button events and pushing the data to the display. Also need to work on the icons that are represented by the non display characters that the terminal converts to command notations. I'm just happy the base data handling and parsing seems stable now.
Anyway, I bought a power inverter for the laptop and worked on it from the back seat on the ride back home and I think I have it working now. I'm sure there will be something that will come up that I didn't think of but for now it's displaying everything perfectly. I put the 300 ms timer in the usb read buffer function which calmed it down and stabilized it. It seems to work fine there and everything runs smooth with no more timeouts or radio overrun issues causing delays. It's visually as responsive as the display.
I need to move all the variables for the display lines out to make them public so they can be read by other functions and then start working on the actual display interaction such as button events and pushing the data to the display. Also need to work on the icons that are represented by the non display characters that the terminal converts to command notations. I'm just happy the base data handling and parsing seems stable now.
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Now we are getting somewhere...
Not the prettiest thing ever but it works and is good enough to stick in the ride and get the job done. The buttons work and I put touch areas on the System Dept Channel lines so it works like a HomePatrol. That will be nice when mobile so I can just touch the channel to stop it. I have a 0 and STS on there still which are just for debug purposes.
I picked up another Teensy board at Microcenter today and ordered a lexan housing kit. Hopefully it will be ready for the Jeep soon. Once I get all the nagging little details worked out I would like to work up some decent looking buttons and maybe put rotary encoders on the side for actual knobs. Also need to tweak the font so it displays the RSSI graph and other special icons appropriately.
I picked up another Teensy board at Microcenter today and ordered a lexan housing kit. Hopefully it will be ready for the Jeep soon. Once I get all the nagging little details worked out I would like to work up some decent looking buttons and maybe put rotary encoders on the side for actual knobs. Also need to tweak the font so it displays the RSSI graph and other special icons appropriately.
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Dont want to hijack this thread, but anyone have something similar for 346xt or 15x scanners?
eorange
♦RF Enabled Member♦
Looking good! I know you mentioned you had some timing issues with reading the data which you've probably fixed by now. But I ran into the same thing when reading BC780 data over the RS-232 serial port. I had to play with buffer sizes and timeouts. It's definitely unlike any other serial protocol I've had to work with, but I got it working. For anyone who's interested -> ReadResponse()
erikorange/Arduino
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Thanks I'll definitely take a look.Looking good! I know you mentioned you had some timing issues with reading the data which you've probably fixed by now. But I ran into the same thing when reading BC780 data over the RS-232 serial port. I had to play with buffer sizes and timeouts. It's definitely unlike any other serial protocol I've had to work with, but I got it working. For anyone who's interested -> ReadResponse()
erikorange/Arduino
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It seems stable at about 200 ms. The problem is balancing the timing with the display's ability to draw it all. If I go too fast I get display buffer overruns. I managed to run out of display memory and can't make one for trunk analyzer but I'm thinking of either adapting an existing page as dual purpose or going a different route.
Using pages and only writing when display fields differ saves a lot of bandwidth but eats the memory.
I might just do an on the fly create text field command for each field for a couple of less used page layouts. That way I can reuse one blank page.
As it is now detail, simple, menu and close call are working.
Another issue has been icons and certain text fields. They use a modified font to create the up and down arrows, the func F, to Scan, FMN/FM etc..
I had to modify some characters or just draw images of them.
eorange
♦RF Enabled Member♦
My sweet spot was 500ms for serial buffering. It was total trial and error. I don't have display performance problems on my BC780 remote head because it was just a 4x20 LCD.
With your display...any chance it supports double buffering? This is where you write to your display in offline memory, and then a single subsequent operation repaints the display with the contents of that offline memory. It's used to boost performance. My ADS-B decoder is rPi based and uses a display (see avatar), and I used double buffering just because it was supported in pygame.
You made a lot of good progress, keep going!
With your display...any chance it supports double buffering? This is where you write to your display in offline memory, and then a single subsequent operation repaints the display with the contents of that offline memory. It's used to boost performance. My ADS-B decoder is rPi based and uses a display (see avatar), and I used double buffering just because it was supported in pygame.
You made a lot of good progress, keep going!
That reminds me of the u8glib2 graphics library method that paints half the display stores the other paints that loads the other back and forth. I don't believe the display can do that unless I turned off everything and used the raw command format and handled it all with something like u8glib2.
But it's doing okay now and it is super smooth in appearance matching the updates of the radio with almost no perceptible delays. The biggest hangup is the use of the touch buttons and squeezing out a serial transmission in between all that display activity. If you try to use the up or down channel to fast it can hang a bit.
But it's doing okay now and it is super smooth in appearance matching the updates of the radio with almost no perceptible delays. The biggest hangup is the use of the touch buttons and squeezing out a serial transmission in between all that display activity. If you try to use the up or down channel to fast it can hang a bit.
eorange
♦RF Enabled Member♦
Good to hear. I've learned to live with "perfect is the enemy of good enough" on these types of hobby projects. Given what you can do with cheap hardware...it's pretty cool no matter what.
The rPi is nice but that comes with all the linux overhead, which is why I actually prefer the Arduino if possible. I've been thinking about trying an ARM board as mentioned earlier in this thread...I used to do embedded development for a while so that's kinda up my alley.
The rPi is nice but that comes with all the linux overhead, which is why I actually prefer the Arduino if possible. I've been thinking about trying an ARM board as mentioned earlier in this thread...I used to do embedded development for a while so that's kinda up my alley.
So true. If I can't duplicate everything exactly I become frustrated.
My next biggest hurdle is a housing. Apparently nobody uses 5" displays for anything. I had hoped to find something like an empty thermostat housing or baby monitor but haven't had any luck bring the simple lexan cut out type things that don't cover the sides.
My next biggest hurdle is a housing. Apparently nobody uses 5" displays for anything. I had hoped to find something like an empty thermostat housing or baby monitor but haven't had any luck bring the simple lexan cut out type things that don't cover the sides.
Stupidfatkid
Member
Looking good! I know you mentioned you had some timing issues with reading the data which you've probably fixed by now. But I ran into the same thing when reading BC780 data over the RS-232 serial port. I had to play with buffer sizes and timeouts. It's definitely unlike any other serial protocol I've had to work with, but I got it working. For anyone who's interested -> ReadResponse()
erikorange/Arduino
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I created a remote display app for the 780 back in 2006. I remember struggling with the RS-232 as well. It is strange. Never felt I nailed it, but got it working enough.
I forgot about that. Weird to hear KCMO EDACS again. Do you recall what the font was?
I haven't yet found one that matches exactly what they are using, then again maybe that is different from the SDS series font but it looks similar.
I haven't yet found one that matches exactly what they are using, then again maybe that is different from the SDS series font but it looks similar.
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eorange
♦RF Enabled Member♦
That's a good way to put it. At some point I felt lucky and just ran with it.
Stupidfatkid
Member
I could probably tell you if I could find the VS project files, but all that stuff is long gone.
I need to look, I might actually still have it.
I had been debugging against the display. I don't know why I hadn't been using the simulator connected live to the device all this time. It's much faster and easier.
eorange
♦RF Enabled Member♦
Not sure if this helps, but maybe start with this bezel: Nextion 5" display Bezel by Cmndr114
Stupidfatkid
Member
You may be already aware, but Uniden used to sell the BC-RH96 that worked on both the BC436XT and the BCT15X. They're now practically impossible to find at a reasonable price.
Protype one
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