We finally managed to get the programming software, radios and cables in the same room for the Motorola GM4340s we have. The radios are for doing 70cm packet data in Aberdeen, with them finally programmed and tested we need to make a computer radio interface.

The GM340 has an accessory connector on the rear, rather than hacking together something using the microphone jack we can use this. The connector is 0.1" pitch so we can just connect female pin headers to it.

Our connector needs to hook into audio in, audio out, PTT and ground. I soldered these connections on a strip of female pin header and connected them to two TRRS jacks that were lying around. I pulled off the PTT and a ground line to another block of female header so we could connect that to a GPIO on a pi.

With this hacked together connector we were able to do some packet between a pi and another radio.

It is Sunday, so that makes seven days of writing .

Reading: Diamond Age, Crooked Little Vein

I have added some parsing data for the andes core firmware format I wrote about before . kaitai is quite nice to write binary formats out with the result is reasonably understandable:

meta:
  id: andes_firmware
  endian: le
seq:
  - id: image_header
    type: image_header
    size: 32
  - id: ilm
    size: image_header.ilm_len
  - id: dlm
    size: image_header.dlm_len
types:
  image_header:
    seq:
      - id: ilm_len
        type: u4
      - id: dlm_len
        type: u4
      - id: fw_ver
        type: u2
      - id: build_ver
        type: u2
      - id: extra
        type: u4
      - id: build_time
        type: str
        size: 16
        encoding: UTF-8

The power of kaitai comes from its integration into languages, there is a compiler output to dot that you can play with online . Using that compiler I could generate a png from the dot file like so:

dot -Tpng andes.dot > andes.png

I have done a lot today, but accomplished very little. I think more often than not these days happen. Here is a cool talk about archivist activities around games:

Reading: Diamond Age

I finally had the need to dynamically change my font size in urxvt. If you search you will find keybindings to do this, such as the ones recommended in this thread . With my teeny planck keyboard, i3 , and tmux I don't really have room in my head for learning other keybindings.

In that thread there is also a printf command that changes the font size via a terminal escape code.

alias biggest="printf '\33]50;%s\007' \"xft:Source Code Pro:pixelsize=30\""
alias big="printf '\33]50;%s\007' \"xft:Source Code Pro:pixelsize=20\""
alias small="printf '\33]50;%s\007' \"xft:Source Code Pro:pixelsize=10\""
alias teeny="printf '\33]50;%s\007' \"xft:Source Code Pro:pixelsize=8\""
alias normal="printf '\33]50;%s\007' \"xft:Source Code Pro:pixelsize=12\""

I added the above aliases to my zshrc .

Reading: Babylon's Ashes, Diamond Age

It looks like all the FOSDEM 2017 videos are up and available. Direct links for my two talks:

1. QoS Challenges fro Realtime Traffic
2. Transport Evolution on top of the BSDs

I posted the slides earlier here

Reading: Babylon's Ashes, Diamond Age