[Hamlib-developer] Re: Kenwood TH-D7A(G) patch

[Francois R. <fgr...@su...>]

Hello Stephane,

> Great! I love patches! And yours is now commited to cvs.
> You're right, the TH-D7 is using a protocol similar to the Kenwood table
> top rigs, but with some changes. It turns out I own a TH-F7E, and even
> though I don't have the protocol specs, it looks like the commands are the
> same as the TH-D7, hence the kenwood/th.c file.

Here is some more. ;-) Should I add the commands to the th.c or thd7.c
file?   Do you know how similar the TH-F7E/TH-D7 are?
 
> > It seems that some duplication can be avoided if the
> > kenwood_transaction is responsible for adding the terminating
> > character (either, ';' for older radios and <CR> for TH)
> > based on the radio being used.
> 
> sure! Actualy, I don't like at all kenwood_transaction().
> So feel free to crush it and rewrite it correctly, in the light of the
> different Kenwood protocol variants. If not sure how to do it, we can
> discuss about it. That'd be neat if kenwood_transaction could handle
> rigs error codes without having to pass an ack_buf. Thus when no response
> is expected, ack_buf = NULL would be better than ack_len = 0.

I agree. I have an idea or two.  I will start looking into a better 
transaction routine. 

I aspect that still bother me is how async messages should be handled.
How does the callback infrastructure of hamlib work? I don't quite
follow the Icom implementation.

> > Also, it seems that the *data_len parameter is not returning
> > any value.  I always get zero length, but the buffer contain
> > the correct string.
> 
> okay, time to take a closer look.

Almost all the Kenwood command are string based. Thus we can work
with strings instead of buffer/length.  See the read_string
function I added with the Easycomm patch. It is basically a 
replacement for the port_transaction function.

btw. Why the difference between read_block and fread_block?

Cheers
  Francois Retief

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Electronic Systems Laboratory (ESL)
University of Stellenbosch
South Africa
Tel. +27-21-808-4472

** Developers of the SUNSAT micro-satellite **
http://sunsat.ee.sun.ac.za