Cold-Warm-Hot Reset buttons

[moixacfz]

Hey:)
This is a great tool. However, for my use I need the option to Cold Restart the device. It would be helpful if there would be an option to do that.

P.S. Why was this written in tkinter and not in pyQt?

[semuadmin]

Hi @moixacfz

Glad the tool is proving useful.

To take your first query, I do in fact provide Hot, Warm and Cold Reset functions in the sample pygpsclient.json configuration file. If you place this file in your home directory, PyGPSClient will automatically load the provided user preset UBX configuration commands and you can select them from the UBX Configuration Preset panel:

The relevant preset command strings are:

"Force HOT Reset (!!! Will require reconnection !!!), CFG, CFG-RST, 00000000, 1",
"Force WARM Reset (!!! Will require reconnection !!!), CFG, CFG-RST, 00010000, 1",
"Force COLD Reset (!!! Will require reconnection !!!), CFG, CFG-RST, ffff0000, 1",

These use a reset mode (byte 3 of the payload) of 0x00 = "Hardware reset (watchdog) immediately". These will typically result in an Error in stream read failed: [ErrNo6] Device not configured error (which passes for an acknowledgement), but you can simply reconnect via the PyGPSClient settings panel.

Refer to your devices Interface Specification for details of all the options available with the UBX-CFG-RST command.

In answer to your second point, it's coded in tkinter simply because that's included as standard in most Python distributions, it's well documented, it's (relatively) easy for novice contributors to learn, it readily supports all the functionality I need, and apps can be distributed under a BSD-2 license. Admittedly, the UI looks fairly 'old school', but I'm far more concerned with functionality than cosmetics. Plus - and this is purely a personal view - I passionately dislike the C++ Qt SDK.

The pros and cons of tkinter vs PyQT are well documented e.g. tkinter vs PyQt. If I'd known it was going to evolve as it has, I might have chosen a different path, but a rewrite at this point would take more time and effort than I'm willing or able to expend. If I ever did rewrite, it would probably be as a web app using e.g. Flask (or one of the newer web frameworks) with a JavaScript UI.