Mike-WE0H wrote: > You got my vote on open source or finding someone to work on updates > on occasion...
Mike (et al), The K2's present MCU is maxxed (no code space left). That's the main reason there's been no further development on it. But it's also a very mature product. Requests for changes or additions are very rare. And just to complicate things, there's no way to upgrade K2 firmware over the serial port, as on the K3. K2 firmware updates at present involve swapping in a new chip. There is, however, a newer PIC available that I believe is pin-compatible with the K2's that would double the code space and allow for a "boot loader" (to make it electronically upgradeable). I'm looking forward to building the code for this part and trying it out sometime. Regarding open sourcing the K2 code: It would take far more of my time to prepare for this than to just make any needed changes myself. To pack everything the K2 does into a small amount of code space required that much of it be written in assembler, which is inherently more abstruse than C (etc.). It also required the creation of a proprietary, heavily optimized real-time OS. There are a dozen or so state machines and a unique interrupt structure where every cycle is carefully counted. Even though the code is well-documented, I'd want to create theory-of-ops and maintenance documentation before I tried to hand it off to another programmer. This is often necessary for projects where you don't have the luxury of writing everything in an encapsulated, object-oriented language, such as on a PC with virtually unlimited code space. Meanwhile, I save all of the suggestions I receive (or see posted) regarding future K2 functionality. 73, Wayne N6KR --- http://www.elecraft.com ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
