My quest has been to find ways to work radio while in the house TV room. My first attempt to use an IC-7300 was with Icom software which required dedicating a Windows machine for the connection. I was attracted to the Wfview project to use a $15 rockchip Armbian bullseye computer that was already mounted on the wall under the radio. It has a 2 line lcd display and a python script started by cron every minute to display local and GMT date and time.
It’s now workable enough to re-purpose the Windows machine. The process I’m using:
Putty SSH in to linux.
Use wfview to power on IC-7300 and then terminate wfview.
Start wfserver to serve IC-7300.
Start wfview and WSJT-X on old Windows laptop. Make QSOs.
When done, stop wfserver and use wfview to power off IC-7300
Some random notes:
wfserver no longer compiles at 1.59 Master version, so I am using 1.58. I’m sure the focus is on 1.60 so I don’t expect that to be a problem long term. (Besides, wfserver 1.58 works fine.)
I use VcXsrv as my Windows X-server. I gave up trying to get VNC working on Armbian. I’m quite used to native X applications.
If I try to run wfview via X from radio connected box, Windows closes wfview running native because the load is too high on this old laptop. So switching to wfserver fixes my Windows load issue.
Yes, correct that I can not power on from the client wfview. https://termbin.com/xdht
wfserver keep logging the same line over and over: Opened port: “ttyUSB0”
This is very interesting. Power On is a complicated one. We have to send some special stuff over the line and basically everything CI-V-related will fail waiting on this to finish. This is one reason wfview has a mandatory 3 second wait time after issuing the Power On command.
You can also use rigctl to send it, here is how I do my IC-7610:
#!/bin/bash
echo "Powering on IC-7610."
cd ~/Documents/projects/Hamlib/tests
./rigctl -m3078 -r /dev/IC7610 -s 115200 -C rts_state=OFF \set_powerstat 1
cd $OLDPWD
and
#!/bin/bash
echo "Powering off IC-7610."
cd ~/Documents/projects/Hamlib/tests
./rigctl -m3078 -r /dev/IC7610 -s 115200 -C rts_state=OFF \set_powerstat 0
cd $OLDPWD
for example. I’m changing directory there because my distribution’s hamlib is ancient and lacks this particular radio definition.
