16

TCB Dev / OP-Config Qt 6 upgrade

« on: December 31, 2024, 09:27:34 AM »

Afternoon,

I tried to use the latest OP-Config with the new board from Torro and found that even though the latest version had the High DPI fix in it I still got the weird old formatting issue, which was strange.   So I had a bit of a tinker and I have upgraded the whole application to Qt 6.8.1 (Using Qt Creator 15).

I know on previous blogs there may have been some other reasons Luke hasn't previously upgraded the software level but I'm not totally sure what those reasons are.

I had to make a couple of small changes to the code to handle some deprecated functionality (QRegExp needed replacing and some of the currentIndexChanged functions no longer support QString) and I corrected a couple of items in the help files as well.

There was one initilization routine that was setting a QByteArray to values of '\0' that crashed the whole app.   I couldn't see why this was actually needed and commenting it out has made things work so that might need a look into later.

I had previously looked at using the QHelpEngine API for the documentation to get around using the Qt Assistant but it turned out it might be quite a lot of work to figure out how to open a new window with that in it so instead I worked our from the old InnoSetup post and a few other docs how to build the application and a include Assistant.exe and the required libraries as part of the installer.   I've scripted it and included all of the extra files needed to be able to produce the setup.exe automatically.

It's actually a bash shell script i run in gitbash on windows rather than a bat file but that was just because I could more easily do stuff like use which to find files on the path without having to figure out how to do that in Windoze.

I've branched from the master branch into my own repo and generated a pull request of my changes here:  https://github.com/OpenPanzerProject/OP-Config/pull/1

I need to do a little more testing with it I think but the core functionality works.  There are a couple of things niggling at the minute that I need to look at.

1) Connecting to the TCB directly is flakey and doesn't work very often at all.  There were a couple of small changes due to deprecation of functions in the SerialPort library so it might be related to that.   However, using snoop first and then connecting seems to work pretty much every time so that is the already known work around.

2) Downloading the latest hex for the TCB claims to work but "can't save" the file.   I need to look into that one.

I don't know what the numbering strategy is for version control at the moment and I figured a major upgrade of the software is probably big enough to increment to 0.94.0 which I have done for now but obviously that can be changed.

Hope that all makes some sense anyway and if anyone has chance to test it and find any issues let me know.

I have this working with the new TCB and need to fit it in to my Sherman but I may also be looking again at using some separate components and different sound options again.  Currently using the Taigen card and the engine running sounds are a bit more limited than I thought they might be.   Better than sounding like a Henglong Tiger 1 though!

17

News & Announcements / Re: OPEN PANZER Tank Control Board from TORRO

« on: December 17, 2024, 03:22:25 PM »

Unboxed this afternoon.

If others are interested I took a short video of the unboxing and some images of the cable set that is included.  Not sure the video will attach here though.

I took a picture of the page that talks about all the wires having to exit at the same end of the board (when the connectors are clearly spread around all 4 edges, that's fun) and the use of the iron ferrite cores to avoid electro magnetic interference.   Those are clunky as hell.    Not sure if this is meant to protect the board from interference or protect everything else from the board.

Either way I don't believe you get any of that with the henglong boards or other manufacturers so hey ho.

I'm also intrigued by the massive piece of heat shrink tubing they supply.  This "must be applied over the whole board".  I get that you want to protect the board but really?  Seems a bit overkill?

18

News & Announcements / Re: OPEN PANZER Tank Control Board from TORRO

« on: December 17, 2024, 12:48:24 AM »

There I was thinking ooh that was easy and the board was due for delivery today when up pops an email from FedEx asking for some money due to the VAT and some import fees.   Bummer.  😂

Naturally being a suspicious person getting emails like that always raises an eyebrow but it looks legitimate.

The Torro page with the price on it says the price includes 19% VAT though so I may need to check what the heck they are charging extra for as it claims to be included..... hmm.

Checked on the Torro website with the language set to English etc and the items clearly state the price includes 19% VAT (screenshot) so I have emailed Torro to have ask.   I'm hoping it's just a cock-up and I get reimbursed but we shall see.

Doh....   Just checked the invoice on the order and all the prices are exclusive of VAT on the invoice so I correctly wasn't charged VAT in Germany and the duties into the UK are correct and expected.

The extra "disbursement" charge of £12.75 and another £4 odd for the FedEx fee (can't see the exact value now) is a bit annoying though.

Plus the currency conversion charged by Paypal pushes the cost up a little more for those in the UK so bare this in mind if you order one.   

19

News & Announcements / Re: It's all over?

« on: December 11, 2024, 02:59:07 PM »

Where would you put the ferrite cores anyway?   Power line or motor cables?

20

News & Announcements / Re: It's all over?

« on: December 11, 2024, 11:15:03 AM »

According to the Torro page it does come with 1x Cable set (Item No.: OP-01014).

Which includes some of the cables needed to connect to other components.

At the moment it is going for 125 euro so around £100 UK.   Still a lot cheaper than an ElMod setup when you add all of the bits on top that are needed for a Henglong tank!

They stock the Sabretooth as well so appear to have thought it through anyway.

21

News & Announcements / Re: OPEN PANZER Tank Control Board from TORRO

« on: December 11, 2024, 11:10:16 AM »

Oooh....

I hope LukeZ is getting some royalties from Torro for that!   

I still haven't been able to find the time to play with an Arduino/Raspberry pi alternative so I might get one of these to play with and add a Taigen Sherman sound board to.

It is nearly Christmas after all.  Maybe treat myself.

 

22

Show and Tell / Re: WH.TKSZ-16S

« on: February 06, 2024, 04:03:07 PM »

Run through Google translate:

“I found it by chance online. Aliexpress /WH.TKSZ-16S
It looks like it's always just one sound.

It's expensive, but if you want to build a new model!

And professional electronics engineers will definitely find a way to change the sound.”

So basically an alternate control board with specific sound sets.

23

Open Panzer Help / Re: OP Panel size

« on: January 11, 2024, 07:05:06 AM »

I had a little play and it does improve a bit if you scale the layout down a bit.

It's still not perfect though.  I've attached two screens.   Both are on a high resolution of 2880*1800.  One at 200% text scaling, the other at 100% (you don't appear to go smaller).

Interestingly, if you have OP-Config open when you are up at 200% and then scale down to 100% it also scales most of the field values (although not all of them) and it's much more readable.

If you scale first and then open OP-Config it doesn't scale the field values so well.

Hope that helps for now anyway.

24

Open Panzer Help / Re: OP Panel size

« on: January 11, 2024, 06:48:49 AM »

Hi Steve.

There is an issue with running the downloadable installer version of OP-Config on High DPI/Resolution monitors.

There is a fix for it but it hasn't made it to a downloadable installer version yet.

I think there are two options at the moment and one is easy, one not.

1) Change the Scaling and Layout options on Windows.   The reduces the size of the text so the field labels at least are readable although the text in the fields themselves is still a bit too big.  How to reduce DPI

2) Uncomment one of the lines of code and run it yourself locally.... this requires the use of the Qt Creator software.

I might try and see if I can work out how to build a new installer version that I could send you somehow but I'm not sure what the process is for building that yet.

I did mention this on another thread here: https://openpanzer.org/forum/index.php?topic=313.0 but haven't pursued it further yet.

Chris.

25

Open Panzer Help / Re: OP-Config not finding I-Bus radio with an FS-A8S and Arduino Mega

« on: January 10, 2024, 02:13:34 AM »

Good morning all,

Luke was absolutely correct (as usual  ), it did turn out to be something simple.   Using the ibus2pwm example program from the IBusBM library I tried to see if the serial port was seeing anything at all from the receiver and it wasn't.

Tried a few other things and nothing.   Did some more googling (and I had already done quite a bit before but not found this) and discovered a comment on this forum (https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?2792377-FS-A8S-help) complaining that to switch the FS-A8S receiver from the default ibus to sbus you had to press and hold the bind button for 2 seconds and it wouldn't remember it (rendering sbus a bit useless).

This is in addition to setting the output mode on the transmitter (which was already ibus).

In my initial attempts to get things working I had tried a couple of times to rebind the receiver without any obvious success but it looks like in attempting to do that while the receiver had power (which isn't the process for binding anyway) I must have switched it to sbus output and it looks like they fixed it's ability to remember the setting.  With the transmitter set to ibus and not having the required reversing circuitry needed for sbus connections nothing was getting through.

Pressing and holding the bind button for 2 seconds (while powered and bound to the transmitter) it suddenly started spouting serial data out!   Woohoo!  I now have 10 channels in Op-Config to play with.

The receiver came with the transmitter and the manual for the transmitter doesn't contain any information about the receiver at all so knowing you have to actually do something on the receiver to switch between the modes is voodoo at best. 

Sorted...   

26

Open Panzer Help / Re: OP-Config not finding I-Bus radio with an FS-A8S and Arduino Mega

« on: January 09, 2024, 05:20:43 PM »

Found the section in opsettings.h for tcb diy to switch the pins to 20/21 for MG and Airsoft so will have a play with that too.

 

27

Open Panzer Help / Re: OP-Config not finding I-Bus radio with an FS-A8S and Arduino Mega

« on: January 09, 2024, 05:06:47 PM »

Excellent thanks Luke.

I tried a few permutations of settings but still not detecting the I-bus.  Will have a go with that sketch and check if the receiver is outputting anything.

I even hooked up a few LEDs to check the outputs when activating switches and things.  A little confused that the MG LED doesn’t have a pin on Arduino but I assume that is just a PIN number allocation in the code and I should be able to tweak that.  I guess the Arduino pin layout is the way it is because you designed the pins were they were convenient on the chip when mounted directly but they are relocated to different places on an ardunio board?

28

Open Panzer Help / OP-Config not finding I-Bus radio with an FS-A8S and Arduino Mega

« on: January 09, 2024, 03:01:11 PM »

I have been trying to get OP-Config working with an Arduino Mega standard board (well I say standard it’s an “Elegoo” model rather than Arduino) and it fails to read the radio when trying to use I-bus.

I’m using a FlySky i6s with a FS-A8S as per the recommendations on the wiki.  I have the output mode set to PPM and Ibus for serial.  I connect the ibus cable to pin 15 as per the guide for Arduino but op-config fails to find the radio.

If I connect the ppm cable to pin 3 it finds it ok and can read the data ok.  Ppm of course only gets the 8 channels and I was hoping to use ibus to make use of the extra couple of switches.

Before I go trying to diagnose if pin 15 is even getting a signal or if the receiver/transmitter are even talking ibus is there anything I am missing or any known issues/workarounds?

Pretty sure the code on the TCB project is set to subs initially by default and the tries ppm and ibus.  Not sure which it tries next but it either isn’t getting ibus or not seeing it on pin 15.   

Might have to go and put some diagnostics in the radio class to see if it’s even trying or if the receiver is duff.

29

TCB Dev / Re: QtAssistant/Help Files

« on: January 04, 2024, 02:45:54 AM »

I haven't gotten to actually look at how the application is being built yet to include the assistant and the help_files and plugins and things.   

It doesn't included them by default in the debug build for the application so I assume this is done as part of the actual build process of the installer/exe program iself.

I haven't found any notes yet on how Luke did this other than he didn't use the Qt build tool itself.

If you see this and have any pointers Luke that would be appreciated.  I can work around it by just copying the right files/folders into the debug folder for now anyway to poke things :-)

30

TCB Dev / QtAssistant/Help Files

« on: January 04, 2024, 02:42:40 AM »

Following previous conversations about the OP Config tool, I have been having a nosey at the Qt Assistant issue and why the help files no longer work.

Turns out the use of QtAssistant is more intended to be used on machine that has Qt installed specifically but you can (and as Luke has) bundle the Assistant application as part of the build.   There is also a QtHelpFile API in the Qt suite now that can be used to display the content of helpfiles within any type of window you like but will take a look at that later.

Poking the current deployed version of OPConfig on my machine I have tried to launch the qch collection file using the Assistant.exe included in the build and get a library error initially (see attached files) but that is because I ran the assistant from within the assistant folder.  The library file it moans about is in the main directory and if you run the assistant from there it works although the actual display then has no content.

The actual application uses assistant\assistant to call the tool anyway so that's probably correct, why the qch file appears to be empty is different.

I get the same if I use the actual QtAssistant on my Qt install to point at the deployed qch file as well so not sure why the qch file would be empty or perhaps it is just because I haven't specified a page in the call but on a newly generated qch I don't need to so that's strange.

If I generate a new qch file in the source I get output but most of the links in the TOC don't actually work and try to open an "untitled".   Turns out in the qhp file each of the sections is referenced using .\ in the file location which appears not to be working.   removing the .\ renders the section links operable again.

e.g.
<section title="Program Layout" ref="./formlayout.html"></section>   -- doesn't work
<section title="USB Drivers" ref="drivers.html"></section>                -- works

I'm also getting some interesting output in some of the help files where certain graphics or links are used (DodgyGraphics.png).

The HTML file itself displays fine so it looks like rendering of the h4 heading type in the css is a bit broken.  Somef  othe spacing is as as well on other pages and the fonts appear to be a but up and down.

The h4 entry is meant to be non-repeating but it appears to be ignoring it:

h4
{
   margin: 0px;
   padding: 0px;
   border: 0px;
   margin-top: 20px;
   margin-bottom: 10px;
   font-size: 18px;
}
h4.entry
{
   padding-left: 15;
    background: url('images/h4_icon.png');
    background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

These all look very much like issues that probably were absolutely fine on older versions of the application 8 years ago but Windows and/or Qt have moved on and things have gone a bit squiffy.

Fun fun fun :-)