2020 has been a hard year. With family medical issues, a dying (and now passed) dog, the end of 2020 was particularly rough.
There’s one bright point - I soft launched DMR.Tools, specifically to help my first user.
A member of a forum I frequent (let’s call them “Rod”) had an issue with getting his TYT MD-UV380 working on Windows 7. It seems that Windows 10 has the correct drivers automatically, but Windows 7 needed DFU drivers installed manually. Just learning that that was the issue naturally took some time and troubleshooting.
Rod is normally a Mac user, and so his troubles presented an opportunity to prove programming radios doesn’t have to be tied to Windows, and definitely doesn’t require fighting driver issues.
DMR.Tools runs in the web browser - no app to install, no drivers to download, nothing at all. On any modern browser, you can edit codeplugs for single and dual band TYT DMR radios.
On Chrome browsers on Mac, Linux, and Android, you can even read and write the codeplugs to the radio - again, with no drivers, no installed software.
Anyway, I hurried to get something up and running even though it’s not fully featured so that Rod could know for a fact that his problems were driver issues and not a bad cable or radio - and it did that job admirably.
Cool feature: It can read and write multiple radios simultaneously, which I know you’ve never seen before.
(Update 2024: Video demos removed. Sorry!)
The UI is naturally a work in progress - and maybe a little programmer art. If you have ideas about how it could look, feel free to contact me.
Right now, the total of the publicly enabled features are the encryption key support (MD-UV380 only for now) and USB reading and writing. I’ve got zone and channel editing prototypes, and auto-generation of codeplugs for a list of DMR IDs in the works.
(un)Related
On a related note, the TYT MD-430 manufacturer’s software doesn’t install on Windows 10 - it’s because TYT relies on LibUSB, which isn’t signed. You need to disable driver signing enforcement to get it to work.
The MD-430 is based around a C7000 (as opposed to the C5000 of the MD-380, and C6000 of the MD2017 and MD-UV380).
Unlike the previous radios, the MD-430 seems to speak a serial protocol rather than DFU, so this and the Anytone radios will be my motivation to add serial support to my software. When I do add it, the driver issues from the OEM developer won’t apply to my software.
On a further related note, I need to write up a post about how updates to Progressive Web Apps within Vue are not at all a solved problem.
And remind me to make a post about how ES6 proxies made my code literally 1000x faster when modifying codeplugs.