Support for RC-28 USB encoder planned?

I’ve built my own controller which connects via the Remote Port. I’m looking at how I might use the USB port instead … I’ve got a spare Uno plus a USB host shield and have at least got some connection info using an example sketch, but now stumped trying to discover how to initialise then establish a USB connection to the internal CI-V bus.

Here is my existing device 15 LED Compact Smart CI V Controller - YouTube

Any advice on the USB connection would be welcome.

Has there been any progress on this? Also, have you considered being able to “map” the buttons to different functions, i.e. cw keyer for xmit button? I’m 10,000 away from my station, and would love to operate CW from here :wink:
Thanks for the great work…and do you have a way to donate?

FYI>> Support for RC-28 has been added to Win4icomsuite.

I would think the code came from the RC-28 emulation project.

I really hope the RC-28 support will make it into Wfview.

Add an option to the Tune button for sending a low power carrier for tuning remote tuners and amplifiers and things would be great!

73… Ken - VE5KC
(IC-7300)

Hi Ken,

We are focusing on the shuttle usb controllers for now. I’ve been testing with the ShuttlePro V2 this week and it’s really excellent.

If you or anyone else is willing to loan out an RC-28, then we could probably get it going. I think that would be most useful after we get the Shuttle support complete, since they will share a lot of the same code.

—E
de W6EL

I have an RC-28 I’d be willing to loan for the project. Feel free to send details on where you want it sent. I’ve been playing with Win4Icom (unregistred) and that software has it working.

Also, another thing it does is interface with Icoms virtual comm port if you want to use the "Remote Utility’ for connecting to the radio. I have found that the remote utility is a very stable way to connect to the radio from my remote location with bad internet, and makes Win4Icom run much better and smoother. Perhaps thats an option with WFView.

Hi Paul,

wfview has both a virtual serial port provided as well as a TCP/IP hamlib-compatible connection. Both can be used to run additional programs at the same time, sharing control of the radio. You can also do similar tricks to share the audio, for example, with a decoding program like fldigi or WSJT-X.

As for the RC-28! Thank you! I think what we will do is finish our work-in-progress support for the ShuttlePRO and ShuttleXPress USB controllers first. Once we get that working, we’ll have a good feel for how to do controllers. Phil has actually already written some code for the RC-28, but we’ve only had an emulated device to practice with thus far. When we get the shuttle code out, we may take you up on it!

Thanks again,

–E
de W6EL

how can you program such a button so that it uses the transmit/receive function of wfview ?

Christophe

so what encoder works today? I have an RC-28 but will buy anything that works today. I only use Mac.

Phil has merged the code for the RC-28 into the master branch.

By default, that code is disabled, but when it is ready we will enable it.

If you’re building it yourself, you can look at the file wfview.pro, where it has this note:

#Uncomment The following line to enable USB controllers (Shuttle/RC-28 etc.)'
#DEFINES += USB_CONTROLLER

However, I have not tried it in a while and I don’t know how far along it is.

It’s probably something we will look at more closely after 1.60 comes out.

–E

Thanks Elliott,

I prefer to use a Macbook for my home use so I wasn’t able to use the Icom RS-BA1 software. I bought it anyway and ran it on a Windows notebook and it runs okay. I also bought the (quite expensive) SDR-Control software that runs on a Mac. It has a very polished display and user interface and tuning on my Macbook trackpad is much easier than with Wfview and as we know tuning is probably the most used function. It also supports my RC-28 which is a delight to use but rather expensive.

There are videos online showing SDR-Control operating. You might want to look at what he has done. I have the view with the products I design that you can often learn a lot from other products, copy the best features and improve them.

I have ordered one of these USB encoders to try. The thing can be programmed to make the knob and the buttons do almost any keystrokes. So I will set it up to output repeated left and right arrow keys when you turn the knob and might make a button do PTT.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004686648194.html?spm=a2g0o.cart.0.0.262838daM3pjnR&mp=1

There is one tweak you might like to make which would also help everyone else. Currently the left and right arrow keys step the frequency down and up but only after you have clicked on the tuning knob. Unless there is some other good reason for that, it would make it nicer if the left and right arrows always changed frequency without having to click on the tuning knob wheel first.

The main reason I have come back to Wfview is that I was using SDR-Control on my IC-7610 but I recently had a moment of madness and bought a reasonably priced second hand IC-7851. SDR-Control does not support the 7851 and Marcus the author says there are not enough of them out there to justify his time, plus he says he cannot afford to own one for testing. He is right of course but amazingly you generous guys have made Wfview work perfectly with the 7851.

I intend to operate my radio at my beach house eventually so I have some other apps that let me change antennas, turn on my linear and any day now, rotate my beam. I also have a WiFi smart plug that lets me reboot my radio if it won’t connect or gets locked up. Those smart plugs are very cheap and reliable and they bounce the tiny amount of data (probably through some Chinese server) which means that there is no need for port mapping and they will even work through a firewall. If you are worried about being hacked we also use a pile of the more expensive Shelly devices at work for load shedding hot water cylinder and aircon until we get a new mains transformer installed. The Shelly.cloud devices are great and have a good reputation.

Being able to remotely reboot a radio is wonderful. But for now I mostly use Wfview from my soft office (bed) at night after a bath or early in the morning and if I hear anyone I would like to work I shoot downstairs and operate from my shack. I have worked some locals on 40m from my iMac at work. I shut my office doors and my staff probably think I am on a business Zoom call :grinning:

You might want to have an option to turn off the waterfall as I have found that using the bandscope with peak that fades out over time is really showing the same information as the waterfall with less screen space. I have the peak fade working on Wfview and it looks great with a light grey colour. SDR-Control also lets you have lots of meter options so I have it set up to show SWR which I think is very useful when operating remote as it shows up any antenna problems. Wfview might have that hidden away somewhere?

SDR-Control has another useful feature (for your future consideration) that lets you remap keys so I have set up “P” to toggle PTT.

(Attachment image001.tiff is missing)

These are good suggestions.

Yes, wfview does have a secondary meter; you can choose SWR, ALC, COMP, Audio, and some other options. Check “Secondary Meter” under Settings on the User Interface page. You can also change the polling rate to make the meter more (or less) responsive.

Eventually we will build a more customizable UI with the option for more than two meters at a time (I too like to see this sort of thing).

You can use the + and - keys for tuning, also, you can modify with shift plus and shift minus, or control shift and control minus (command key for you mac users). You’ll need to use plus and minus keys on the numeric keypad for best results. We have so many key commands so that you can easily browse around. You may want to check out the full list.

–E
de W6EL

Thanks for that. Have turned on SWR meter. The + and – doesn’t work on a Macbook as you normally get to them with shift but that jumps a kHz.

The left/right arrows are very convenient but after I have clicked on the band scope to jump to a signal I then have to click on the tuning knob to get the arrows to work again. Could the arrows please work all the time?

Hi Peter,

I’ll see what I can come up with. I agree that it is needed. When I’m on my laptop it’s not as easy to use as it is with my desktop with a full keyboard and mouse.

Arrow keys may be problematic if the widgets (knobs and sliders) are stealing those keys. But I will see if I can find something compatible and not used already.

–E
de W6EL

Ok Peter,

Just for you, I have mapped H,J,K, and L as follows:

J and K are alternates for minus and plus. They can be modified with shift (smaller step) or control/command (larger step).

H: Decrease frequency by the selected tuning step
L: Increase frequency by the selected tuning step

The arrow keys are problematic with UI accessibility; they are basically already “spoken for” by the standard user interface widgets.

This is working and in the “cwcw” branch of the code, which will make it to version 1.60 soon.

–E
de W6EL

Hi Elliott,

Thank you so much.

I will program the USB knob to spit out H and L and that should work fine.

Some of my nerds at work have these devices that they use to control various things on their PCs.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004653766052.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.5.2c1e1802vlHyKQ

I will let you know how the cheap Chinese knob works out. I have an RC-28 but it was US$300 plus another $50 freight to New Zealand freight which is a bit too much for many guys.

I really think that a nice tuning knob is by far the best way to tune a radio.

When will 1.6 be released?

(Attachment image001.tiff is missing)

Hi Peter.

If we know the protocol that the knob uses, we could potentially add it to the USB_CONTROLLER code for more fine-grained control. Currently this supports the ShuttleXpress and ShuttlePro (with limited support for the RC28). I can potentially add USB_CONTROLLER support in the next Windows/Mac releases. We haven’t enabled it by default yet as it requires an additional library to be included (libhid) this isn’t a problem for Mac/Windows as they are self-contained packages containing all necessary libraries.

73 Phil M0VSE

~WRD0001.jpg

for linux you can download the package and install yourself with your favourite package manager tooling.

the linux one can also be enabled then if we release it as default. But as Phil said: It’s WIP so
don’t complain if it doesn’t work enough yet :wink:

Hi Phil,

Thanks. I will have the USB controller in a couple of weeks. I will program it up the day I get it and see how that goes. They are very flexible in what they can do so it might not need any support from Wfview. I figure I will try setting the radio tuning to 1Hz and then set the USB tuning knob to spit out lots of H or L keystrokes.

Elliot said

H: Decrease frequency by the selected tuning step
L: Increase frequency by the selected tuning step

But I think he probably means H will go increase and L will decrease as it seems logical that H is to go Higher and L is to go Lower. But it doesn’t matter either way.

73 PETER ZL2LD

FIY, I am still running v 1.2c. (never touch a running system)
And I tried ShuttleXpress.

In my case the problem with the keystrokes is that they are obviously
delayed by the program that about only one keystroke/second is
possible. So if you turn the ShuttleXpress-wheel in an acceptable
speed or make the keystrokes on the beyboard (internal or USB) the
additional keystrokes are suppressed.

And it is NOT the keyboard setting. In another programm I can make
more than 10 keystrokes/second and with the pad it is possible to move
the virtual VFO much faster. Must be something in the program.

Hi Peter,

Good observation, I had not picked up on that way of looking at it.

H is decrease
L is increase

Why? It is the standard cursor motion for vi, a text editor many of us nerds use. vi uses HJKL for cursor motion in the command mode, which is convenient when you are using a terminal without proper arrow key support or just don’t wish to reach over to the arrow keys! H is left, L is right. So, the motion of the cursor is similar to the spectrum.

I agree, it is odd when you think about it in this context. However, look at the keyboard, visually the H is on the left and the L is on the right. Placing my hands on the keyboard, it’s pretty easy to get used to.

–E
de W6EL