Hi Drew,
I’d like to help by working on a driver for my IC-V80 HT. How to start?
What platform are you on? Windows? If so, get started with these instructions:
http://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/DevelopersWin32Environment
Once you're able to run chirp directly from the source tree, you can start work on a driver. Take a look at the template driver for a start, which is in chirp/template.py. Also look at some of the other Icom drivers, since they share a lot (like all of the clone code). You may want to start by taking something similar and simple, like the ict8.py file as a starting point. Copy that to icv8.py and change the names within the file. Simply doing that will cause the new model to show up in the download box.
Here is the rough set of steps after that:
1. Figure out what the model identifier for that radio is. This can be done by trying to download it and watching the debug log to see what it finds from the radio. Change the _model in your driver to match.
2. Figure out what the size of the device's memory is. Do this by setting the memsize in your driver to something large and trigger a download. The debug log will tell you what the last address was before the radio stopped sending.
3. Capture the "end frame" from the end of the clone process in the debug log during step 2, and adjust in your driver appropriately.
4. Now you should be able to get a clean download from the radio. Save that to a .img file and start examining it in a hex editor. Depending on how the radio is designed, this may be obvious, or it may require doing a series of changes on the radio, followed by a download, followed by looking at the hex dumps. You'll be modifying the MEM_FORMAT structure definition in your driver file to tell it where and how the memories are laid out.
Once you get to step 4, we may be able to help you spot some common Icom-isms to get you started.
Make sense?