[chirp_devel] An introduction, and warning of an upcoming new radio driver

[AG6QR]

Hello!

I'm Rich Cochran, AG6QR.  I've worked as a software developer for many 
years, using many languages and tools, but not too much with Python or 
Mercurial yet.

For quite some time, I've been meaning to write a driver to support the 
Yaesu FT-2900 radio.  I had entered comments on issues #328 and #925 
regarding support of this radio.  But between work, kids, and other 
things, progress had been stalled until a couple of weeks ago.

Now I'm happy to report that I have a working driver that can upload and 
download memories, supporting frequency, name, tone, DCS, squelch type, 
skip, step size, offset, and duplex fields.  I basically took the 
existing FT-2800 driver, and I support everything it supports, plus step 
size (but the internal memory layout is very different between the 
FT-2900 and FT-2800).  I can add new memories, delete them, move them 
around, edit all the fields, and upload/download to and from the radio.  
I do not support banks (yet), nor do I support global radio settings, 
and there are a few esoteric features, like odd splits or separate CTCSS 
tones for transmit vs receive, which are still lacking.  I'd like to 
continue enhancing the driver in the future, but I think it offers 
enough solid functionality now to be useful to many people.

When I put an image in the test directory, my driver now passes all the 
tests (the tests found an issue with 12.5kHz step size which I have 
since fixed -- thanks to whomever thought to include that).

I haven't yet run my source through the pep8 checker script, and the 
source tree where I've done the driver development is a couple of weeks 
old.  I intend to grab the latest source, run my code through pep8, 
verify that it's all still working, and I think I'll be ready to submit.

Have I missed anything?  If not, I'll e-mail the .img file as an 
attachment to this list, and email the new ft2900.py as a Mercurial 
patch.  It'll take me at least another evening or two to do this.

--Rich Cochran/AG6QR