KC8LPZ

New Side Project

We had a board meeting tonight, and afterwards we were talking. Our Net manager for the Tuesday Night Net is having a problem printing to a USB printer rather than a serial printer. We thought about a driver that "fakes" a COM port while actually routing the connection to a USB device (my HT connects to a computer this way. If only the Kenwood software worked), but then anyone else that runs the net would have to set that up, and not all hams are, shall we say, computer experts.

So, I think I'll see what I can come up with as a web app. That way it's very easy for our net manager to hand off a net to someone else to run, without having to worry about setting up any software or sending them any data, and the printing issue is irrelevant. The existing software is a DOS based program that I suspect has been in use a long time, so maybe something more updated and flexible wouldn't be a bad idea.

So, we'll see. I'll be hosting it on github, so when it gets going soon here I'll link to it. If anyone's curious, it'll be in Python using Pylons, just because that's been my latest "thing to learn and play with in spare time" thing lately. The requirements are pretty minimal, so at least to start, it shouldn't be too long-term of a thing to get to a usable state. Maybe more long term, I'll make it something other clubs and groups could use, either as a self-hosted thing, or just something they could make an account on and use.

The New Side Project by KC8LPZ, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.