Hi all
Open Source is tough, for many reasons. When I was in my IT career it was hard enough managing a small team of paid professionals who were supposed to be subordinate. Hats off to Linus Torvalds for succeesing on Linux. I know he's supposed to be all sorry now for his abusive management style... personally I wonder if being harsh was a big reason why it worked out so well. Maybe I was too nice, to be any good at it!
Cloning can also be a big problem.
Regarding QSX, I do NOT agree to, or support, people collectively or individually developing their own code for it. Primarily for fear of cloning. Not that it would be at all easy to undercut the price. But even clones at a non-competitive price are damaging. For me it's the entire 2018's worth of work, and more.
In fact developing your own code for QSX is not easy anyway. The QSX microcontroller will only run QSX code. The chip is permanently read-locked and write-locked and the debug ports are disabled, at the time the bootloader is written in. The bootloader can only load QSX binary files from USB memory stick. QSX binary files are encoded using 256-bit AES encryption. The only way to develop your own code would be to remove the microcontroller and replace it with a blank one. Not impossible by any means, but not trivial either.
On the other hand, QSX will have a command language (in addition to CAT control), similar in concept to macros in Elecraft Radios. But a richer-featured language and with much more flexibility. Therefore quite a lot of "programming" tinkering for customization purposes can be done even standalone (No PC) just by plugging in a USB keyboard.?
There is space in the enclosure, under the rear PCB, for additional hardware such as a small RPi etc. So I think a very worthy community effort, for those that want to do such things, would be developing useful enhancements in an add-on RPi to control the radio. It could be a very powerful, compact and power-efficient combination.?
73 Hans G0UPL?
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