Today I finally permanently soldered my headset connector into my board, which means I can actually pick up the project and carry it in one piece.

Since I’m cannibalizing an off the shelf headset for the Baofeng, the wires inside my cable were super tiny and had enameled insulation. For now I’m using the fire method for stripping these but it’s not ideal: the insulation lights on fire and flames travel along the wire. Apparently fine grit sandpaper or some scary chemicals work pretty well. I think I’ll try sandpaper next time.

Barring any issues that come up, I think this means I won’t have to make hardware changes for a while. I’d like to make a PCB for this instead of perfboard, and probably use an ESP32 castellated module instead of a breakout board, but in the meantime I think I’ll work mostly on software.

On the software side, I coded up a PTT pin (up until now I had just been holding the PTT button when I wanted to transmit 😅), and fixed a bug with the formatting of my APRS locations, so now they are actually being parsed correctly by aprs.fi.