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Messages - LukeZ

Pages: [1] 2 3 4 ... 81
1
Open Panzer Help / Re: Barrel smoker
« on: January 21, 2025, 08:05:44 AM »
I'm glad you got it working!

2
Open Panzer Help / Re: Barrel smoker
« on: January 19, 2025, 10:12:37 AM »
Hi Paul, yes, I think you are getting to the relay circuit. The instructions on that page make clear that their smoke unit is intended to be connected to the throttle channel of the radio, meaning it provides smoke while driving, so it will not work with for barrel smoke.

3
Open Panzer Help / Re: Barrel smoker
« on: January 19, 2025, 03:06:45 AM »
Hi Paul, I haven't experimented with the little circuit board that you show in your picture, but from what I can find on the internet it looks like it is intended to be used as "driving smoke" and not "barrel smoke." I suspect it wants you to attach the servo cable to your throttle channel, and smoke will be created as a function of your driving speed.

As Chris says you could try connecting the servo cable to the recoil servo output of the TCB. Maybe it will work or maybe not.

But what is guaranteed to work is the relay method described in the Wiki. You won't need the circuit that came with your smoker, but you can still use the air pump and the smoke box, just wire them as explained in the Wiki.

4
Open Panzer Help / Re: Henglong Airsoft Motor Spins but doesn't operate?
« on: January 18, 2025, 10:16:55 AM »
Thanks for reporting back, I'm glad that's all it was!

5
Open Panzer Help / Re: Henglong Airsoft Motor Spins but doesn't operate?
« on: January 18, 2025, 07:59:08 AM »
Hi Chris, have you tried swapping the motor wires? I haven't tested one of these units, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if Heng Long decided to use a red wire for negative...

6
Open Panzer Help / Re: Gear shifting
« on: January 17, 2025, 02:54:20 PM »
Hi Tanker, no the TCB doesn't have any gear-shift functionality.

7
Open Panzer Help / Re: Best Sound Board for TCB
« on: January 13, 2025, 11:24:59 AM »
"Best" is relative to what you need or want. Benidini is certainly the best in terms of sound quality and options, but of course as Jürgen says, it's discontinued. The Chinese have cloned it, but I don't know how hard or easy it is to get the firmware for it. I'm sure it exists on the internet somewhere if you search for it.

The Open Panzer sound card is not in production, and the processor that it uses was discontinued forever during the Covid crisis, so that one is out.

The Taigen sound cards are cheap and plentiful, though of a lower sound quality.


8
TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade
« on: January 05, 2025, 01:06:53 PM »
Thanks for testing Chris. As far as I can tell from your screenshots, the application looks the same on your hi-res screen as it does on mine, so that appears to be finally fixed. I've seen screenshots other users have posted before this update, and you're right, the text was all messed up and nearly unusable. It's shameful that this problem took so many years to resolve. I am extremely grateful to you for taking it upon yourself to work on this, for the benefit of everyone. I see from your commits on GitHub that you started tinkering a year ago this month! I know you must have spent a great deal of time and effort; just getting Qt going is a major undertaking.

I feel confident enough in these alterations now that I've accepted your pull request and the changes have been merged into the source repo.

I've also created an official new release (numbered 0.94 as you suggested), and it is posted to the Downloads page or available for updating within any prior version of OP Config.

Once again thanks for all your help. If you come across anything else that needs attention, just let me know.

9
TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade
« on: January 02, 2025, 03:13:22 PM »
Hi Chris, I made a very slight change to the serial connection process which seems on my end at least to improve the reliability of connections to the board. I've committed them to your repo, if you want to test it out.

10
TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade
« on: January 02, 2025, 08:16:55 AM »
Thanks for confirming, and also for fixing the Hex downloader. Since we're putting them now in the user's Downloads folder, it seems that we should put them in a folder with a better name than just "firmware," so I've changed that to OpenPanzer.

That was a good idea about InnoSetup removing those other files, and indeed that wasn't hard to do. I've gone ahead and had it remove both the Assistant cache as well as the hex downloads. I guess one could go either way on the second one, but if it were me I'd rather not have junk files laying around. Every hex can easily be downloaded from the website so it's not like the user can't recover them, even without OP Config.

I've committed these changes to your fork and a few other minor things.

If you make any other changes go ahead and also commit them to your fork rather than the source OP Config repo, and when it's stable I'll pull in the entire request.

Right now my setup is really crazy as I've kept the old version of Qt and everything else alongside the new, for dev purposes. But I'll clean it all up when we do the final over-write. 

Are there other issues that we should address? I know there is the flakiness of the serial connection, that has always been an issue and I can revisit it but I don't think it is affected one way or the other by the upgrade to Qt6.

I should also say that I don't actually have a high-resolution monitor, so I can't really see what the program looks like in regards to the problem we were originally trying to fix. I assume it does look better?

11
TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade
« on: January 02, 2025, 06:04:41 AM »
The problem with %QDesktopServices::AppDataLocation% is that it appears to be deprecated so it's hard to test what exactly it thinks that should be. No doubt it's using the new QStandardPaths collection but the documentation hasn't been updated so that adds to the confusion.

But I had some ideas after sleeping on it. I tried a few things and got it working, and only after I got it working, did I find in the documentation where it would have told me how to get it working. 

If we empty the value in the XML cache directory element like this:  <cacheDirectory base="collection"></cacheDirectory>, or if we just remove it entirely (the documentation implies it's optional), then regenerate our .qch and .qhc files using the createqhcp.bat script of course, amazingly now Assistant works. But there is no subdirectory created in Program Files, I had to search high and low for where it had put the cache file, which turns out to be:
C:\Users\*username*\AppData\Local\QtProject\Assistant\

That's definitely a better place to put it, though not very intuitive.

Then I got to wondering why I had that strange attribute base="collection" in the XML tag. So I removed that attribute but left the rest, like this:
<cacheDirectory>OpenPanzer/OPConfig</cacheDirectory>
...and then regenerated and tried again. Guess what, now it sticks the cache file here:
C:\Users\*username*\AppData\Local\OpenPanzer\OPConfig\

Exactly what we want. I still didn't understand why that fixed it, but knowing what the problem was, I was able to find the answer. If we go to the same link I provided before, and scroll down even further, there is actually information about this base attribute. If it is specified as "collection", that tells it to create the cache file in a directory relative to where the original collection resides, which in our case is program files. If set to "default" or nothing, it goes to AppDataLocation. Not sure why I had used the first option, but that was ten years ago, what did I know then!

So that is cleared up. I committed a change to your repo, I would be grateful if you could test to verify that it really works!

12
TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade
« on: January 01, 2025, 02:09:41 PM »
Hi Chris, I've wept and gnashed my teeth today and made some progress, all the ins-and-outs of which I won't bore anyone with. But I can compile the program, create a installation package, install it, and it seems to work.

I only have an Arduino Mega for testing, I don't have a TCB or even an RC radio. So for testing I am only able to confirm that I can connect to the processor (as you say, rather flaky this), load firmware, and read/write settings.

The problem I have yet to overcome and which I've given up on for today, is related to what you described as Blooming Windows Security, though in a different place.

The new version of Assistant (I am taking the assistant.exe from Qt\6.8.1\mingw_64\bin\, I assume this is what you did?) doesn't access the .qhc file directly that we so conveniently provide in the "help_files" folder, but rather as described on this page creates a copy of it in a "cache directory" which is a subfolder in "help_files," created when the Assistant is first called at runtime. Of course, "help_files" is a subdirectory of our program installation folder, and Windows does not permit the creation or modification of files within the Program Files directory, so this fails.

That link I provided tells us that we can modify the cache directory if we want, in the XML .qhcp file. However, that doesn't help us, it just changes the name of the cached subfolder, which will always be in the same folder as our .qhc file, it doesn't refer to an absolute path somewhere. Even if it did, there is no way I can see to point it to something like the Windows environment variable %LocalAppData% because this is an XML file and not a script, so that variable is not going to be parsed (I tried).

You'd think this would be a problem for the whole world but Google has not shown me other users who've struggled with this same issue. Maybe no one is using Assistant.

It seems strange you would not have experienced this same thing? Assistant works fine when I'm running from the debug/release folder created by QT Creator, because there we don't have file write permissions, but once installed in Program Files it doesn't.

The good news is it will not be a problem to divert our downloaded Hex files into the user appdata folder, though I haven't yet made that change.

I committed some changes to your fork (strangely I seem to have the permissions to do so), these are just fixing some fonts and formatting that seem to have been changed by the new Qt Creator.

13
TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade
« on: December 31, 2024, 11:47:21 AM »
Hi Chris, I saw your pull request earlier and have been browsing the changes. Thanks for taking on yourself such a major challenge!

I myself probably have forgotten by now why I did or didn't do things in the past, but if I recall, some of the reasons I never updated previously was because of the loss of QtAssistant, and also because the one time I made a serious attempt, there were found to be some bugs in what was then the next version of Qt that caused other problems equally as bad as the screen scaling one. So it went nowhere, but the screen scaling issue has remained a pain for those users with high resolution monitors, and it if could be fixed it would certainly be a very worthwhile improvement. Nevertheless it has taken the energy of a motivated person such as yourself to move this forward. Indeed, yours is the first pull request received on any component of the entire Open Panzer project since its inception a decade ago, so I congratulate and thank you once more!

By the way, I see you posted a thread about QtAssistant nearly a year ago, which I somehow never noticed! My sincere apologies.

Anyway, I am going to install the newer version of Qt and see if I can compile your branch and do some testing. If I need to make changes I believe it should be possible for me to push to your pull request (or at any rate make a pull request to your fork), so we can continue development there until such a time as it's ready for merging.

It might take me a while to remember all the things I've forgotten which were necessary to even get Qt to run, but I'll keep you posted.

14
Open Panzer Help / Re: Flysky FS-i6S 2,4G 10CH AFHDS 2A Sender
« on: December 27, 2024, 10:16:03 AM »
Hi Paul, yes this transmitter will with Open Panzer, I have used it myself. Select any FlySky receiver that has iBus, such as the FS-A8S, FS-iA6B, or the FS-iA10B. There are probably others as well. All of them will give you 10 channels with iBus, even if the receiver is otherwise listed as 6 channels.

15
News & Announcements / Re: OPEN PANZER Tank Control Board from TORRO
« on: December 18, 2024, 02:44:33 PM »
Hi Fuzzy, thanks for those pictures, that's interesting to see. 

The included cables are exactly the same ones that used to be included with the Hobby King board, so that is good.

The page that talks about the ferrites and heatshrink is the same information I remember from the report I mentioned in the other thread. To be clear to anyone wondering about all these precautions, I take the liberty of informing everyone that these ferrite cores, the whole-board heatsrhink, and the other recommendations about wire routing, are NOT NECESSARY and can be ignored entirely. It's absurd they even have to be included, especially the cores which cost money and are just going to end up in the trash, but this is the state of things in the world we live in.

Their ostensible purpose is not to protect the board itself, but rather to protect your neighbor's pacemaker (as user Bayou so colorfully put it). But if our neighbors have survived carrying cellphones in their pocket and 5G radiation flying every direction all around us, they will probably survive our toy tanks.

(PS: The forum can't accept video files directly, though you can embed YouTube videos. Don't put yourself to any trouble on that account, I appreciate the information you've provided!)
 

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