buildDeviceDriver had no case for "httpgen", so the generic board fell through
to the WebSwitch driver: it polled an address it had never been given, reported
itself offline, greyed out every relay button, and sent none of the configured
URLs. Nothing in the interface said so — the board was configured, saved and
listed, and simply did nothing. deviceKey did not cover the URLs either, so once
that is fixed, correcting a typo in one would still have handed back the cached
driver holding the old address until a restart.
Two shapes of home-made switch could not be described at all:
- a bit-mask board whose four URLs differ by one character
(/Set0/1, /Set0/2, /Set0/4, /Set0/8) — {value} in the pattern now takes the
number from the per-relay box, keeping the address in one place;
- a board numbering its channels from zero — {relay-1}, since giving up the
pattern for eight hand-typed URLs was the only alternative.
The pattern decides what the per-relay boxes hold, and the grid says which as
soon as {value} is typed: guessing per box ("does this look like a URL?") would
change meaning on a typo, which is not a thing to do to something wired to an
antenna. A URL typed without a scheme gets http:// like the named boards get
from relayBase; https:// is passed through untouched.
Host and the connection test are gone for this type. It has no address of its
own — its relays may each live on a different box — and no status to read, so a
test could only ever answer "OK, 4 relays". Save was greyed out without a host,
which made a complete configuration of four full URLs impossible to store.
Cluster filters no longer persist across launches. A band lock set weeks earlier
is invisible to whoever set it: the counter reads 76 spots live, the grid is
empty, and the search goes to the cluster instead. Nobody loses work by
re-ticking a chip. Grouping and the panel state still persist — they change how
spots look, never whether they appear.
An operator was about to build band→relay mapping into the custom URL rows.
It already exists, and better: relay auto-control has a per-relay "band" rule
driving webswitch, KMTronic, Dingtian, Denkovi and USB boards. It holds state
so a relay is only commanded when its wanted position changed, reads the
boards live before the first apply so it does not re-command one already in
place, and carries per-relay labels. A URL fired on a band change has none of
that, and would have been a second definition of "which antenna on which band"
— the drift that cost us a week on counties.
So the gap was only the hardware: a hand-made switch is none of the five named
types. It is now the sixth, "HTTP relay": an ON URL and an OFF URL, either as
one pattern with {relay} substituted, or one pair per relay. The per-relay
form is the reason it exists — these boxes often have URLs with nothing in
common between channels (…/FF0101 and …/FF0201), which no pattern can express.
Status is remembered rather than read: most have no endpoint worth trusting.
The cost is stated in the code and the panel — after a restart every relay is
re-commanded once, which is harmless on a board with no memory and far better
than assuming an antenna is already selected.
And the Connections panel now says so, exactly where the wrong choice is made:
picking a band change with a URL transport shows a note pointing at Station
Control. The URL transport stays — a lookup pushed to a webhook or a QSO to a
dashboard is an event, not a state, and Station Control has no place for it.
rouggy