[Today’s run: 6.8 miles]
I recently picked up an old IBM notebook computer for use with my radio stuff. I was able to load a version of Linux on it (the free unix-like operating system) and it seems to be working pretty well.
Today I worked on getting the serial port set up to talk to my GPSDO. The GPSDO writes out a message every 16 seconds. I’d like to gather those into log files and then do some statistics work on them.
It has been quite a while since I have done much with serial ports from a linux box in a scripting environment (even longer for C programming).
I got the serial port figured out using minicom, a terminal/modem program. While that was working I ran ‘stty -g < /dev/ttySx > saved.stty’ on another window (for the right ‘x’ to match my serial port). That saves the serial port settings in a file.
Then I got out of minicom. I ran ‘stty `cat saved.stty` < /dev/ttySx’ which puts those settings back in place. Then I could run ‘cat /dev/ttySx’ and see the logging lines showing up on the screen. From there it was pretty easy to create a little script to write the logging to a file. I took the opportunity to add timestamps in UTC to every log line.
I want to get the TRF logging program installed on this laptop, then I can use it for contest logging. I don’t think it has the horsepower to use for digital modes, but time will tell.