[hpsdr] K.I.S.S. Konsole Released

[Phil Harman]

All,

For some time I've be experimenting with a very simple, no frills, PC SDR Console suitable for beginners to play with. I've called this K.I.S.S. Konsole and once you see it you will understand why!

Whilst PowerSDR,  SDRMAX, VR etc are fine if you know how to program they are a bit daunting for the novice programmer to start playing with.

KISS Konsole is written in C# using the free VS 2008 IDE. The code is heavily commented and aimed at the newbie programmer. It's straight line code with as simple a format as possible.  It's based on early work by Phil Covington, N8VB, and his excellent SharpDSP code base.

I've placed all the code here in SVN:

svn://206.216.146.154/svn/repos_hpsdr_kiss


The structure of the directories are as follows:

\branches   - directories containing alpha code from some of the developers. Since it's alpha code the usual caveats apply!
\tags          - directories containing previous Stable Releases
\trunk         - directories containing current Stable Release, Beta Relapse for user testing, Documents etc


See the \trunk\README file for instructions as to how to get started and where to obtain the free software so you can develop the code yourself.

If you are interested in learning some basic skills in PC SDR code then have a play and share your results.  There are many  features missing so by all means add them and share them with the group. You will find TODO's all the way through the code - have a go at some.

Depending in your level of skills here are some of the features you may want to have a go at:

Novice Programmer:

- Add your callsign to the top of the form
- Clean up the user interface, place controls where you want them
- Add tabbed menus, allow values to be set, stored and recovered.

Intermediate Programmer:

- Refactor the code - split it into obvious classes
- Remove the frequency slider, improve the mouse drag tuning and enable the mouse wheel for tuning when the mouse is over the bandscope
- Add frequency and amplitude readout to the bandscope
- Add a calibration routine
- Add click tune
- Add an S Meter

Expert Programmer:

- Add support for Penelope
- Make the bandscope run under DirectX or OpenGL to save CPU cycles
- Add a waterfall
- Add a tuneable bandscope based on data from USB EP4


There are only two requests if you want to make your code available to others via SVN 

1. You make your code available under the terms of the GNU General Public License; and 
2 . Any code you write MUST HAVE SUITABLE COMMENTS in it - too many comments will get you a higher grade! If you find/know a better way of doing something then explain in the comments how it works and how its implemented.

My thanks to Bill, KD5TFD, for mentoring along the way and David, WA8YWQ, and Joe, K5SO, who took my original code and actually made it work with Mercury.

As it stands the code only supports Mercury and only runs under Windows XP.  If someone has the urge to port it to other operating systems, or rewrite it in  C++, Perl, Python...  etc.... then by all means go ahead.

Thanks to Richard for setting up a Wiki page for KK at  < http://openhpsdr.org/wiki/index.php?title=KISS_Konsole > .

Please note that you MUST update update your code in Mercury to V2.7 in order to run KK. 

The sand pit is open... come and play!

73's Phil....VK6APH 

P.S. This is version V1.0.0 of KK - the usual caveats apply!

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