[DSP-10] DSP-10

[Bob Larkin]

Here are a couple of thoughts, not resulting from any particular 
knowledge or study.  So feel free, you wizards, to jump in and 
straighten me out.

First, the original work on UHFA for the DSP-10 was done in 1996, about 
17 years ago!  The only practical programming system I could find was C 
purchased from either MS or Borland.  These were very specific for the 
MS DOS operating system.  Borland C was used along with the Borland DOS 
graphics environment.  This actually worked pretty well, at least for 
the time.  But, it is strictly MS DOS (or something that emulates it).  
This is either  a restriction, or perhaps an opportunity to keep the old 
Laptops/PC's alive.

These days, I would consider portability to be crucial.  This would help 
deal with this years platforms and next years as well. If one wanted to 
start from scratch, there would be endless directions one might go.  
What is more interesting is to look at what might be done to convert the 
existing UHFA Borland C programs into something more universal, but not 
leaving C (or C++).  This is to minimize the effort.  I understand that 
some of the interface toolkits like Qt or GTK+ can produce code to work 
with dynamic libraries in all the major operating systems. They work 
with C++, amongst other languages.  As I understand Qt, say, the program 
just says it needs a window, dialog box or control, but somebody has 
already written the various libraries to make those things happen. And 
they all respond to the same calls, regardless of the OS.  All math 
calculations of signal-to-noise, or whatever, stay as is. This is 
actually a lot of the program.

If all that was a reasonable task, it might be worthwhile.

One thing that would be easy to do is a simple program that transmits a 
bunch of dots to see how "real time" the various OS are.  That might 
give an idea as to whether it is worth considering.

Thoughts?

73, Bob  W7PUA

On 04/27/2013 12:45 PM, Bob DeVarney W1ICW wrote:
> Out of curiosity, has anyone gotten ( or tried to get ) the DSP-10 
> working with a Raspberry PI running a DOS window? A friend has a PI 
> and is doing so nifty work with one of the rtl-sdr SDR dongles on it..
>
> 73 de W1ICW
>
> On 4/27/2013 2:36 PM, Courtney Duncan wrote:
>> On Apr 15, 2013, at 11:08 AM, wb2srf at juno.com wrote:
>>
>>> Enjoy reading the activity I have not used my DSP-10 in quite a 
>>> while. Does anyone have software that will run on either a Apple or 
>>> Windows 7 using a USB to serial converter Kind Regards,Bob Johansen
>>> _________________
>> Bob, it was on my list to do a MacBook UI for this for several years 
>> and I did quite a bit of preparatory work but never really got to 
>> first base.  Recently, I realized I'm getting older faster than I'm 
>> making progress so am re-evaluating my approach to projects like this.
>>
>> What I did do was try to load and operate the DSP-10 over a Keyspan 
>> USB to comm port interface with the standard tools (EZFAST, etc.) 
>> running in both Virtual PC on the PPC Mac and Parallels on the Intel 
>> Mac.  Both failed due to some unreasonable handshaking constraint in 
>> the EZ-KIT UART or handling software itself.  There was some 
>> discussion of this on the list some years ago when several people 
>> were upgrading to Windows XP and, if I recall right, somebody 
>> eventually got something to work.  You might dig around in the 
>> archives around 2007 and see if you can find it.  I don't know if 
>> anyone ever got a Windows 7 setup to work.
>>
>> Courtney, n5bf/6
>>