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Show HN: Silly Morse code chat app using WebSockets (noamtamir.github.io)

78 points by noamikotamir ↗ HN
My dad just bought a new printer. I joked and asked if it also had fax and a scanner. He said yes, not realizing I was making fun of him, so I asked if it also supported Morse code. That made it clear :) Anyway, I decided to take the joke too far and build a silly Morse code chat app for fun.

30 comments

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tannerjames711
That’s awesome that you can see everyone’s at once. Cool design.
Xorger23
Pretty neat. It would be cool if it had an automatic decoder
sandwell
Very cool. It does get a bit chaotic when there are a number of people keying. If there was the ability to add a narrow filter then it could be usable for a QSO (radio contact)!

There are some other apps designed for having QSOs - VBand[1] and Vail Repeater[2].

Finally if you want to learn to use morse code on the air check out Long Island CW Club[3]

[1]: https://hamradio.solutions/vband/ [2]: https://vailmorse.com/ [3]: https://longislandcwclub.org/

CamperBob2
Yeah, it'd be nice if you could click on user names to toggle the ability to receiver or ignore transmissions from those user(s).
mapasj
Really nice graphic design. If you build it out more, maybe you can teach users Morse code. Maybe a toggle button for decoding the dots and dashes.
spcebar
If you're interested in learning morse, there's a great app for Android, "Morse Mania: Learn Morse Code" from which I learned. It's surprisingly easy to pick up the basics but requires a good bit of practice to be able to parse it in real time.
nickcw
That is quite fun! Not a lot of people know morse code so there is a lot of QRM (man made interference).

It is amazing how good the human brain is picking out signal from the noise.

I did spot one other Ham a fellow Brit (G4) but didn't complete a QSO (a contact). 73 (kind regards) de M5NCW

rickydroll
I have forgotten so much Morse code. I definitely need a decoder.
halb
Very cool! I built something similar a long time ago: https://morse.halb.it and it blows my mind that it's actually being used by people
call_me_bunny
This is good fun - any way of getting the alphabet on the screen for quick reference?
keepamovin
That is super cool and fun. Well done. :)
wartywhoa23
Not so much a communication tool but more like a realtime music collab one :)

Feels like a meeting on a remote island shore where nobody understands each other's language, but it's still hella fun :)

hshdhdhehd
Thats layer 0 let's build a TCP stack on it.
NSUserDefaults
Better add a profanity filter quick. /s
nickcw
Ha ha! I did notice one use of the F-word. Then again if you understand Morse code you are probably happy to hear anything you understand in the chaos!
filt
It seems like it refreshes from blank every time anyone joins or leaves the room. Which happens about once every half second. It leaves me too less time to write anything meaningful.
yuvadam
This is neat despite having the annoying reset bug, would be cool to practice my CW skills on this.
austin-cheney
I am really surprised people aren't using WebSockets for absolutely everything at this point. The only strength to HTTP is that its session-less, which is convenient for one off data requests that prefer anonymity without authentication.
p0w3n3d
I think it's not accurate. It missed a beat
royskee
I called CQ for a bit but nobody on at the time seemed to know Morse. Neat idea though, and with the different tones for different users it would be possible to overcome the background noise of people playing around.
epiccoleman
I had a blast with this. I got Claude to write a function for encoding a string to Morse and sending it, and then a patch that displays a 10-character rolling display next to the name of other users. From what I can tell with zero Morse code experience, most users are just sending random characters by accident.

I was pretty pleased to see it work when I ran two windows side-by-side, called `sendMorse('never gonna give you up')` in one window, and then watched it roll through the display on the other window.

Code here, if you'd like to try the same thing: https://gist.github.com/epiccoleman/58560a6469a163050f7aa888...

CamperBob2
One suggestion might be to highlight the last letter received in the chart. If the user clicks on one of the other user names, then only transmissions from that user should be decoded.
noamikotamir
Thanks for all the feedback! I added a few of your feature requests :) will try to fix bugs and add some more over the weekend
drpython
looks great! i need something like this for my retro video game project