[aprssig] OpenTracker KISS support
Scott Miller
scott at opentrac.org
Thu Sep 1 11:41:26 EDT 2005
Thought I'd make this announcement here as well, since I know several people
have asked about something like this in the past. I suspect this is mostly
going to be of interest to Basic Stamp and PIC experimenters, but if you can
think of any other applications, let me know.
I've just released a new firmware image for the OpenTracker hardware that
turns it into a very basic, dumb KISS sender. It's basically half a KISS
TNC with a very small (160 byte) buffer. Not very useful for general
packet, but it should work fine for embedded telemetry devices and such.
Once the new firmware is loaded, you can send it KISS frames as 4800 baud.
It uses very simple XON/XOFF flow control, and will send an XOFF as soon as
it gets a packet queued. It'll wait for the channel to become available,
send the packet at 1200 baud, and send an XON to the host. It also supports
the KISS commands to set TX delay and to exit (which in this case calls the
bootloader and resets.) Only channel 0 is supported.
If you load this firmware on an OpenTracker (using the otwincfg.exe program)
you can always switch back to the standard tracker firmware later. If
there's any interest in this for embedded applications, I might make up a
mini-kit, with just the processor, crystal, and capacitors for the
oscillator circuit. Everything else you'd need to put it into your own
circuit is readily available at Radio Shack.
If you're interested, email me or check out the OpenTracker Yahoo group for
more information.
Scott, N1VG
http://n1vg.net/opentracker
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