New features

It's been a bit of a busy time chez WGV recently, so I've not been able to make much progress on the controller project. The last few days has, at last, seen a flurry of activity and there are new features to report!

Firstly, I had been concerned for some time that the number of switch functions that could be supported, especially on the Mini-controller was insufficient. There is, of course, an easy solution that is fairly common in modern equipment - short and long presses of the same physical switch for differing functions. So that's what we now have. This effectively doubles the number of switch functions for a given number of physical switches and I think that should be adequate.

This involved quite a few changes! Firstly the I/O controller code had to be changed to recognise different hold times and respond accordingly. It still has no idea what these switch presses mean - it simply passes on the fact that the switch has been pressed for a long or short period. This in turn has created a minor change in the I/O protocol to the Host controller but it's been possible to do this without sacrificing backwards compatibility.

Of course the Host controller needed quite a fair chunk of new code, as did the Profile Manager. This is all completed and the code is now in use as my main station system, so I should tease out any bugs quite quickly. So far so good!

Next, I realised that it is quite hard to always know what a switch press has done, a problem that is exacerbated with the new long/short press code. I already had a solution in the way that encoder changes are shown as a pop-up note on the controller screen, so I have adapted that code to also show switch press functions.

With this work completed, I realised that I could afford the luxury of a few new switch functions, so we now have zeroing functions for the APF, noise blanker, wideband noise blanker and noise reduction functions. These can usefully be the long press functions of the existing, respective on/off switches. That's how I have configured it on my controller and it seems logical enough.

Finally, I have significantly improved the code around radio connection, detection of radios that have disappeared off the network and reconnection. This is really a tidy up exercise but the code is now much more robust in this area.

It's nice to be back cutting code!