hr50-remote-display/README.md

# Hardrock-50 Remote Display

The Hardrock-50 is a 50W power amplifier for amateur radio QRP transceivers. It has a display showing valuable information like the selected band, the SWR, power, temperature etc. Since I am using the HR50 in a remote station, I cannot directly access those information via the display.

However, the HR50 offers serial communication via a USB port. This project tries to solve this problem with the help of a separate, wifi enabled hardware display. It consists of the following two components:

* Heltec ESP32 board with display
* a python flask application, which represents the communication via the serial interface in the form of an API

This diagram shows which components are required and how the communicate:

![Diagram](diagram.jpg "Diagram")

This is how the display looks like in action:

![Photo of the Heltec board](hr50-remote-display.jpg "Photo of the Heltec board")


## Preconditions

### Hardware

* Heltec ESP32 Wifi Dev Kit Board with OLED

### Software

* Arduino IDE
* HR50-Api: [https://git.qrz.is/clemens/hr50-api]

### Libraries

* Heltec Libraries: [https://github.com/Heltec-Aaron-Lee/WiFi_Kit_series]
* ArduinoJson
* HTTPClient
* WiFi

## Configuration

Edit the following lines inside the Arduino sketch:

```
const char* ssid = "<ENTER_HERE_YOUR_WIFI_SSID>";
const char* password = "<PASSWORD>";
String api_url = "http://<ENTER_HERE_THE_IP_OF_YOUR API_SERVER>:5000/status";
```

## Error handling

* If wifi is unavailable or misconfigured, the device will show "No Wifi!" on the screen
* HTTP Errors will also displayed on the OLED
* When you key up your TRX and therefore the HR50, no serial communication is possible. The latest gathered information will still be displayed on the screen but there will be a "(!)" in the third row as an indicator for this situation.