Sunday update

It's been a reasonably productive week at 'WGV Towers. Quite a lot of new switch and rotary encoder functions have been added, rounding out the control options nicely.

I now have 40 switch functions and 32 rotary control functions, with probably a few more of each yet to implement. This is considerably more than I originally envisaged and that has caused me to slightly rethink the way that these functions might be presented to the operator.

Switch functions
There are four possible ways to invoke a switch function:

• A physical push button or toggle switch
• The VFO control LED push buttons
• The push switches on each encoder
• Touch areas on the screen

Of these, the last one, touch areas, is the one that has seen the most development in the past week. Nine on/off functions such as RIT, XIT, APF and noise blanker on/off have been implemented for each VFO by touching the relevant area on the main display screen. This has the potential to free up a large number of physical buttons, although it is possible to have both a touch and a button for the same function if desired.

Another possibility that I am looking into is long and short button presses having separate functions. This is a fairly common concept and should not be too hard to implement.

Encoder controls
The Flex radio offers some 40+ control functions, most of them applicable to each slice. Many of these are of little value to the controller but nevertheless, I already have 32 controls defined, spanning the two VFOs.

Realising that these controls fall neatly into two categories - regularly used and infrequently needed - I have now implemented an encoder command set switch to support two sets of controls per encoder. If the encoder switch is used to switch controls then this means that each encoder can have a total of four assigned controls. On my 8 encoder prototype this means that the software can project up to 32 controls onto the front panel. Hopefully that'll be sufficient!

Max/Min/Step
When I first laid out the design for the encoder controls, I envisaged that a control would have a maximum and minimum value and a step value that could be configured at will. At the time, I could see no need for these values to be anything other than integer.

Experience has shown that this was wrong. For example, one control is display brightness and this has a range of 0 to 15. As the encoders produce 48 pulses per revolution, this meant that zero to full brightness occurred in just a quarter of a turn! So I have now implemented floating point numbers for the Max/Min/Step values. By setting the brightness control step to 0.25 the 16 steps now occupy a full turn on the encoder.

All in all, quite a lot of progress this week.