After having a Wires-X node that is connected to a repeater for a few years, I had always felt a need for a way to schedule times to connect to different rooms. I didn’t have the skills to do it myself, but Yaesu had always advertised that “plug-ins” could be written for Wires-X to do all kinds of neat things. But they never published the requirements and only created one plug-in in 10 years. That may be a topic for another time.
So when I heard Doug, N9TOW, in late 2017 mention he had written a way to automatically connect to different rooms at different times, I was all in to try it out. I contacted him via email, a after a few back and forths, I was using his Python script and Windows Task Scheduler to automatically connect to different rooms on a schedule. It requited a few additional libraries to be installed, but the main Python file was just a few lines of code. You also needed a new Python file for each event. But it did work.
Chris at hamoperator.com also posted about it, but I don’t believe it was widely adopted. It worked fine for a couple of years, and around 2020, updates in Python eventually caused it to stop working. I contacted N9TOW, and he hadn’t been updating his code. I think got me going again by having me revert back on my Python version, but I got the feeling he had moved on from that project.
I am not sure when or where I heard about Bill, W9LBR, and his Wires-X Scheduler. It may have been on hamoperator.com. Bill had written another Wires-X scheduler using Python. He was uploading it to a Groups.io page that I was not familiar with. So I joined that group and followed Bill’s instructions on loading/updating Python and the required libraries. This software included the scheduling, some settings and had many more lines of code. It had some issues, but was quite an advancement over the N9TOW version. As a number of people starting using the software, Bill started improving it and by 2023, it was working very well.
What does it do? Well you can create a weekly (or daily, monthly, etc) schedule to connect your node to different rooms at different times. You can set a time to disconnect from a room, and set the Timeout Timer and Return To Room settings as well.
In early 2024, Chris K9EQ created an installation for all of the required software to simplify things. It may not get updated as often, but surely if anything critical came up it would.
K9EQs installation is located at: https://wp.hamoperator.com/projects/wxscheduler/
W9LBRs source files are kept here: https://groups.io/g/YaesuSystemFusion/files/Wires-X
(You will need to join the group to gain access)
Either method worked fine for me. The W9LBR method requires some command line work, but not hard if you can follow the directions.
