ACOM Director Plus – Technical Preview 2

6th September 2018
M0YOM
ACOM Director, Amateur Radio, Projects
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ACOM Director Plus Technical Preview 2 is now available for download.

Please see https://www.m0yom.co.uk/acom-director-plus-technical-preview-1/ for details on the Technical Previews i’m currently releasing.

This version adds a whole new user interface which whilst it’s far from the final one is very indicative over how it will look. It is also fully functional in terms of monitoring the state of the amplifier and providing Operate/Standby control as well as band change control.

As with Technical Preview 1, this has no installation routine, you simply run the self extracting download and launch the “ACOM Director Plus.exe” file.

ACOM Director Plus can be installed side by side with the original ACOM Director software.

You can download it here

ACOM Director Plus – Technical Preview 2

ACOM Director Plus – Technical Preview 1

4th September 2018
M0YOM
ACOM Director, Amateur Radio, Projects
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An update on ACOM Director? surely not. As many of you will have noticed, i’ve been somewhat silent for a while on the new version of ACOM Director, this has been down to a number of reasons, some personal, some work related and some due to some technical challenges getting it to do what I wanted it to.

Personal and Work issues aside, ACOM Director has been through 2 entire re-writes since the last update I posted, I won’t go into all the underlying reasons, however i’m now happy with the approach i’ve taken which will allow some exciting capabilities in the future. ACOM Director has now been re-written from the ground up and as such i’ve decided to create a whole new version which i’m calling ACOM Director Plus.

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ACOM Director 2.0 Update

15th May 2016
M0YOM
ACOM Director, Amateur Radio, Programming, Projects
10 Comments

Just a quick update as a number of people have been asking about the progress on the new ACOM Director version 2. I had hoped to have it completed by now, however work and life commitments have meant that progress has been slower than expected. However I am now able to dedicate 2 days a week to working on it so things should get moving at a good speed again now.

The ACOM600S protocol is now implemented along with a new user interface to match the look of the ACOM600S. I’m just working on unifying ACOM Directors own protocol so it can support both types of amplifier without having to use two different versions, once this is complete I will be releasing an alpha version so we can get any bugs ironed out of the basics before adding some of the more advanced features I’m wanting to include.

My aim is to have a version released that you can all try out sometime in June.

In the meantime, here is a quick video of the new user interface in test mode showing the operation of the new bar graphs.

ACOM Director 0.8.0 – DXLog Support – Now Available

20th September 2015
M0YOM
ACOM Director, Amateur Radio, Projects
4 Comments

I’m pleased to announce that ACOM Director 0.8.0 is now available. Following on from the introduction of Logger32 support for frequency tracking in version 0.7.1, this version now contains support for DXLog integration to allow the ACOM 2000A to track the frequency of your radio for users of DXLog.

Version 0.8.0 also contains many changes behind the scenes in preparation for support of other hardware being added in the future.

Please note that this version is largely untested as I no longer have access to a real ACOM2000A anymore and rely on a “virtual” software emulated ACOM2000A for testing.

You can download it here

Easily Install Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi 2 from Windows 8

8th May 2015
M0YOM
Guides, Programming
2 Comments

Having recently purchased a couple of Raspberry Pi 2’s to play with, I was intrigued to see what the recent Windows 10 IoT version was like running on it. Being able to run a windows platform on something like a Raspberry Pi would open up a lot of opportunities to put these great little computers to work.

I faithfully downloaded the image from Microsoft (you need to be registered to download it, but you can find details on how to do this on google pretty easily). Once downloaded I set about writing the image (in this case an FFU file) to an SD card. This is a fairly simple process using the DISM tool. This is where my problems started, when running the command to write the image to the SD card I would receive the error “The /applydrive option is not recognized in this context”. It seems that you can only use the Windows 10 version of DISM and I’m running Windows 8.1. Not having a spare machine to install Windows 10 Preview on I began the usual Google search to figure out how to install Windows 10 IoT on the Pi using windows 8.

There are a few guides out there, but none of them are that simple, so I figured I’d put together this simple guide to help anyone else in my position wanting to try the Raspberry Pi Windows 10 release if they only have an earlier version of windows.

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Scanning for Malware on cPanel

25th March 2015
M0YOM
Sys Admin
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I look after a number of cPanel servers and recently had a need to scan them for malware. After a bit of searching around I found Linux Malware Detect from R-fx Networks.

Malware Detect was very easy to install on CentOS (the flavour of linux I use for my cPanel servers). The installation process involved only a couple of lines in a terminal whilst logged in as root.

cd /usr/local/src/
wget http://www.rfxn.com/downloads/maldetect-current.tar.gz
tar -xzf maldetect-current.tar.gz
cd maldetect-*
sh ./install.sh
maldet --update-ver
maldet --update

Once installed you can easily start a scan by running

maldet -a /home

This will scan the whole home directory, alternatively for a more targeted scan

maldet -a /home?/?/public_html

Will only scan the public_html folders of each account on the server.

Scanning seemed to work quite well, however it was extremely slow. In order to correct this it is possible for Malware Detect to make use of the ClamAV scanning engine. Provided this is installed (which it should be!) Maldet will use this as it’s scanning engine and will improve the scan performance significantly. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work, however cPanel installs ClamAV into a different location from the one that Maldet expects. To correct this a link can be added so that Maldet can find the ClamAV scanning engine properly.

ln -s /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/clamscan /usr/bin/clamscan

 

FTDI – Serial Killer, Not quite

25th October 2014
M0YOM
Amateur Radio, Electronics, Guides
8 Comments

Many of my fellow radio amateurs will be familiar with USB to Serial adaptors, the lack of RS-232 ports on modern computers mean they see plenty of use within the radio amateur community especially for CAT control of our Radio’s.

One of the most popular (and the one offering the best compatibility) is the FT232R chip from the scottish company FTDI. They have built a reputation for producing great USB UART IC’s with excellent compatibility and more importantly drivers that are included within windows. These devices are found in thousands of other devices from aurduino’s to 3D printers. Their popularity however means that there are a whole host of clones and couterfeit devices out there, most of which are indistiguishable from the real thing and it seems that FTDI have decided to do something about it by rendering these fakes inoperable.

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