Hello all,

At the risk of sounding lame, here is why we haven't yet shipped last week.?

First, the radios are all tested and ready to ship. We ran into a problem with the Pico, Let me explain this. Get a coffee and sit down...

BEFORE:

The original zbitx had just a small crummy OLED display. The idea was that you read an IP address shown on the OLED display and type it into your phone/tab/pc and use it as a remote head from your favourite device. That continues to happen. However, if you have seen the pictures of the zbitx, we have also added a 3.5 inch TFT LCD display to the radio. This is a? 480x320?TFT touch display. It is not as common as the 320x240 display that is used in uBitx, it is half the resolution of the standard sbitx v3.We insisted on this display as FT8 needs at least 10 lines of decodes to be useful. There was a shortage of these from January onwards, we started getting them only by February last week. These are apparently commonly used in ebikes and they got wiped out in the Christmas sales.

THEN:

The Raspberry Zero 2, that powers the zbitx (zero bitx because of? the RPI zero in it), can't handle this display as the GPIO pins on it are all used up. Hence, the zbitx sports a new microcontroller, the Raspberry Pico W (with Wifi and Bluetooth on it!) that handles the front panel. This offloads the user interface to this microcontroller that handles the 3.5 inch TFT display. The two talk to each other over the I2C bus (Pi is the master, Pico is the slave).

NOW:

Future updates to the front panel (like moving the comms between the zbitx and the front-panel to bluetooth or even wifi to make it a remote head) will need a way to update the firmware to the Pico. It is usually done with an Arduino IDE running on a computer with micro USB cable from the PC to the Pico. That is the easy part. The hard part was that getting the Arduino going on a PC, installing the Pico package and then the TFT display libraries is like pulling teeth. There has to be a better way. We realized this last week when I shipped out the Pico firmware to our folks at HF Signals. If they(HF Signals) couldn't get the Arduino IDE setup on their PC within minutes, I?was very skeptical and most users of zbitx would.

SO, the Plan is ...

First, we are shipping the micro USB cables with the radios that will allow the raspberry pi zero to move the latest firmware from zbitx's sbitx folder to the Pico. Second, we are getting a new update script that will copy the latest firmware over from the Pi to the Pico. That is taking this weekend. I took a break from writing it to post this email, I will work through this weekend and hopefully get it shipped to HF Signals in the next 24 hours.

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I hope this explains the further delay. Thanks for the understanding. We will of course keep the list updated with the progress.

73, f