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dalethomas81 / HamMessenger

HamMessenger is a portable device that uses a ham radio and the APRS protocol as a medium to send and receive text messages.
GNU General Public License v3.0
298 stars 18 forks source link

All-in-one? #10

Open Kongduino opened 3 years ago

Kongduino commented 3 years ago

Hi!

I am looking with interest at this project, and the first thought that crossed my mind was, wouldn't it be simpler to run everything on one board? After all the Mega has enough pins, and you could integrate MicroAPRS into your own code. GPL 3.0 allows for it, AFAIK.

Also, along the same lines, wouldn't an ESP32 for instance be more practical? I understand, from reading the code and docs quickly, that you need to convert to 3v3 anyway. It'd also offer more choices in terms of input: BLE, WiFi (small web server) etc.

Anyway, this looks like a great project, and I'll be watching! :-)

dalethomas81 commented 3 years ago

Hey @Kongduino, you are definitely right with most everything you said. This is one of those projects that sort of just evolved over time. I recently decided that I would open it up for others to enjoy and hack.

I truly believe that the final form of hamMessenger will look much different than it does now. I am more focused on the functionality but maybe I should take it another direction?

Hopefully, this next round of boards will be good enough that others can be comfortable enough to build it and give some feedback.

At the end of the day, this is just a hobby for me. My hope is that others with more design experience and better programming skills, such as yourself, can help shape HamMessenger into what it should be!

Kongduino commented 3 years ago

Thanks for your kind words.

I've started reading the code, both yours and MicroAPRS, to get a better understanding. I'm not a ham radio amateur – I've been toying with the idea of getting my license, though – but work with LoRa, so we're cousins, of sorts :-)

The idea of using a pair of Baofeng and Megas is quite attractive though!

hatonthecat commented 1 year ago

Hi Dale (and Kongduino :),

I had a similar idea, and I just got into amateur radio. I've been interested in an all-in-one, but using some of the lower bands and running it on solar ion capacitors: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/171