/var/log/irl

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-08

I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on documentation, tests and tidying up. It’s good to keep technical debt in check and while no new big exciting features got made today on anything, lots of hard work was done.

I started the day on documentation, adding details on the new -b flag for aprsisd and details on which packets will be sent to APRS-IS. I also added a reference to the APRS-IS specifications to both the aprsisd(8) and the aprsis-filter(7) man pages.

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-07

I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on writing unit tests for aprsisd.

I’ve added a few unit tests to test the generation of the TNC2 format packets from AX.25 packets to upload to APRS-IS. There’s still some todo entries there as I’ve not made up packets for all the cases I wanted to check yet.

These are the first unit tests I’ve written for HamBSD and it’s definitely a different experience compared to writing Python unit tests for example. The framework for the tests uses bsd.regress.mk(5). The tests are C programs that include functions from aprsisd.

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-06

I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on gating from the Internet to RF.

In the morning I cleaned up the mess I made yesterday with escaping the non-printable characters in packets before uploading them. I ran some test packets through and both Xastir and aprs.fi could decode them so that must be the correct way to do it.

I also added filtering of generic station queries (?APRS?) and IGate queries (?IGATE?). When an IGate query is seen, aprsisd will now respond with a station capabilities packet. The packet is not very exciting as it only contains the “IGATE” capability right now, but at least it does that.

Contact

• iain@learmonth.me
• irlxyz
• irlxyz