1

Open Panzer Help / Re: Barrel smoker

« on: January 19, 2025, 01:48:45 AM »

Oooh…. I wonder if the recoil servo connection could be used for this anyway?

It fires when the trigger does and drives the servo to recoil the barrel for a period of time and then recoil for a period.

If you only wanted the fire part then setting the recoil time to 0ms would remove the reversal part (possibly, I haven’t checked the code) but at least the servo would operate to make some smoke first?

I am also assuming you aren’t using the recoil servo already and that the servo recoil while fire as well as the mechanical one when checked in OpConfig.

2

Open Panzer Help / Re: Barrel smoker

« on: January 19, 2025, 01:33:06 AM »

Ah…

I looked at the image again and as can see this has a 3 pin DuPont connector for connection to a servo.   So it is different to the one LukeZ originally needed the relay for.

There are multiple servo connectors on the TCB but they won’t be setup to do this probably.   Not sure if you could use the I/O ports in the same way LukeZ did with relay either.

Does the manufacturer say anything about what the signal to the servo connection should look like?   I would assume a shortish own signal that would tell the smoker to operate and the power is just on directly from the battery?

It might be possible to use one of the relay outputs to drive the servo but it probably won’t be setup to do that at the moment in the code.

3

Open Panzer Help / Re: Barrel smoker

« on: January 19, 2025, 01:18:23 AM »

Hallo Kettenpaul,

Hast du dir diese Seite https://openpanzer.org/wiki/doku.php?id=wiki:tcb:tcbinstall:barrelsmoke,  das Sie zu dieser Konversation https://openpanzer.org/forum/index.php?topic=265.0?

Mit Strom und Anschluss a den ‘Flash“-Anschluss am TCB sollten Fassraucher wie dieser funktionieren.

Entschuldigung für das schlechte Deutsch, dafür kann ich nur Google und dem englischen Bildungssystem die Schuld geben!

Chris.

4

Open Panzer Help / Re: Gear shifting

« on: January 18, 2025, 10:04:27 AM »

 Don’t have an Elmod board so I have no idea how that works.   Do you just push the stick forward and it does it by itself or do you trigger the gear shifted somehow and that makes the motor run faster?

Does the tank lurch or something when the shift takes place?

It’s an interesting idea.  Would need to see what the gear shift on a real tank looks like as well I guess.  😀

5

Open Panzer Help / Re: Henglong Airsoft Motor Spins but doesn't operate?

« on: January 18, 2025, 09:45:09 AM »

That is entirely possible...  I traced the wires through after I realised that the gearbox on the BB unit is one directional.   Swapped the motor wires and yeah it works ok now.  Doh!

Also I am going from the BB unit through the 360 slip ring so it's possible it got swapped over there as well.   I just turned the XH connector on my adaptor round.

6

Open Panzer Help / Henglong Airsoft Motor Spins but doesn't operate?

« on: January 18, 2025, 06:54:39 AM »

Hi all,

Wiring up the TCB to the Henglong Sherman and I've made a couple of adapters so I can connect the existing Henglong plugs to the TCB, including one to allow the two XH connectors from the BB unit motor and trigger switch to connect to the 3 pin RECOIL connector on the PCB. 

Basically it just puts the two black wires to pin 1 and then wires the red from the motor to pin 2 and the red from the trigger switch to pin 3.

When operating the cannon the motor seems to try at least to spin and makes a horrific noise doing it but the mechanism doesn't fire so it never hits the trigger switch.  After a while it stops.

I've tried with an old spare BB unit as well and it did the same thing.    Am I missing something?

Obviously the Airsoft rewiring instructions are for the Taigen unit but I assumed the henglong would be the same as it's just a motor and a microswitch.

Cheers,

Chris.

7

TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade

« on: January 04, 2025, 10:33:59 AM »

As far as I can tell all you have slightly increased the Blitz Timer and remove the specific call to SendInit().

Previously it was a bit strange that it setup the timers and then called SendInit() and the first thing the Blitz timer did was call it agian and I wasn't totally sure why it needed to do that.   Now without calling SendInit() delliberately it seems to connect perfectly every time now which is soo much nicer!

It also connects ok from the snoop still as well so nothing changed there.   It seems to work brilliantly so that's a good improvement.

As for the High DPI and the screens themselves I am using an old MacBook Pro (2015) with a Retina display running at 2880 x 1800 and with the last few tweaks you have made the fields look pretty good.

Obviously with the older version and the non High DPI setting the screen was all over the place with fields overlapping and text fields being output in all sorts of font sizes and it was mostly unusable like that.  With the settings now in Qt6 it looks really good.

I've attached shots of each screen just for reference.  They all look really good to me.

I need to build a small conversion board from my current Henglong Sherman wiring now to interface with the TCB (I have a 360 degree rotation slip ring to the turret connections so I don't want to directly rewire the Airsoft and will do it with a small PCB and some XH/PH connnectors instead so that it is reversible.   Once I have that sorted and wired in I will do some more testing
and see if there is anything else I can think of.

Chris.

8

TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade

« on: January 02, 2025, 06:22:14 AM »

Good find Luke,

Yes I can confirm that it works fine for me and creates the cache files in the AppData folder structure for my user as it should.

The firmware download still tries to use Program files of course but we should be able to use the QStandardPaths to find something like the downloads folder to do that as well and problem solved!

e.g.

QStandardPaths::DownloadLocation   14   Returns a directory for user's downloaded files. This is a generic value. If no directory specific for downloads exists, a sensible fallback for storing user documents is returned.

I've tweaked the SaveWebHexToLocal function to use the "writableLocation" of the Downloads folder and it works fine :-)

It still creates the firmware directory if it doesn't exist and deletes an existing copy of the file before saving it.   Obviously once it is in the downloads and used it is the responsbility of the user to delete it afterwards if they want to.

Which does beg the question of whether an uninstall should leave the AppData/Local/OpenPanzer folder hanging around or not so  I might see if the InnoSetup uninistaller would be able to remove that as part of the uninstall.  Probably leave the downloads alone though.

9

TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade

« on: January 02, 2025, 05:13:15 AM »

According to the docs you can specify the cache folder location in the configuration for the collection and QtAssistant is supposed to create the cache in the location supplied by %QDesktopServices::AppDataLocation%.

https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/assistant-custom-help-viewer.html

At the moment the cache is set to:

        <title>OP Config Help</title>
        <applicationIcon>images/helpicon_32.png</applicationIcon>
        <cacheDirectory base="collection">OpenPanzer/OPConfig</cacheDirectory>

But it is definitely not trying to create it in the appdatalocation unless something is overriding it?

Obviously another workaround for this issue (and the hex download) is to run op-config as Administrator it can then do what it needs to to create the cache files and the firmware folder without needing to manually grant permissions.

There must be a way to get the Qt App to work in a more security friendly way though.

10

TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade

« on: January 02, 2025, 04:58:42 AM »

Damn...  Maybe I didn't try the help file from the proper install or something as I just reinstalled and tried it again and I get a failure too.  I could have sworn I checked the help after running the install but maybe I did it without running an uninstall first or something and already had permissions or an old copy of the folder?   Not sure.

Attached the error I got and if I grant write permissions to All Users on the help_files folder and restart then it can create the required files and works ok.

I must have missed it first time.

11

TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade

« on: January 02, 2025, 04:46:54 AM »

https://1drv.ms/u/c/c6afd11e9584c0c7/EQYc4q5Zkn5FvL3u7hPV_w0BIa_wYkzV2tHIXz6RZCfojw?e=aeWQUU

12

TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade

« on: January 02, 2025, 04:45:47 AM »

Hmm yes it is strange I don't seem to have the problem but then I also have the Qt full installation on that machine.

If I get a minute I might launch a VM and see what happens with a clean build without Qt or Op-config already installed.  I did use the uninstall a couple of times during testing to remove the old one but a clean build might help.

Maybe I have done something different in the way I built the installation package using my little script that avoids that particular problem?   My install includes an extra "help" folder that your original install didn't have when I create it using windeployqt.

The only file in that directory is a helpplugin.dll file so I can't see how that would make a difference.

I have uploaded my setup.exe to a OneDrive folder and will provide a link so you could possibly try with that and see if it makes any difference?  Maybe I built it differnently somehow?  Maybe it's just windows security being a pain.

As you say, downloading the hex file to a more accessible folder (perhaps even the users download folder or provide them with a field to supply a location ought to be easy enough to work around that one.

13

TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade

« on: December 31, 2024, 04:35:46 PM »

For the upgrade I just used the Qt Maintenance tool to install the 6.8.1 version and specifically adding the QSerialPort extra.

14

TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade

« on: December 31, 2024, 04:33:16 PM »

Hi Luke, yeah the high Dpi setting is deprecated in qt6 as it is supported by default so I removed that bit completely.

You will notice I removed a few other older bits like the doc creation scripts for the older versions.  I tend to find that leaving old versions around for a while is helpful but you rarely remove them again and they just hang around. Source control should handle that stuff for you so you can get them back if you need to.

I’m hoping you like the build script as well.  It didn’t take long to knock up and could be further improved potentially to also regenerate the help files and compile the code as well. 

I did have qt being able to build the release properly at one point but then it stopped working and I haven’t figured out why yet so I just used the debug version for now.

15

TCB Dev / Re: OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade

« on: December 31, 2024, 09:48:42 AM »

Of course....   Blooming Windows Security.

By default the Flash function tries to download the HEX file into the /firmware folder of the current application.   Which when it has been installed using the OPConfig_Setup.exe a) doesn't exist and b) wouldn't allow a non system admin to write to it within elevating permissions.

It can be workaround by manually creating the firmware directory and granting write permissions to All Users.

Might be a way to get the InnoSetup to do this by default or set the firmware directory to a folder that does allow the download?