Introduction
The Beier-Electronic Sound Speed Controller SFR-1 is a really neat bit of kit that allows the adding of sound and lights to RC models. It can be configured using their custom software called Sound Teacher. The software can use a custom cable (K-USB-2) to communicate with the SFR-1.
So the problem is as follows. The Sound Teacher software was designed to run on windows and only windows. In this post there are steps outline to get the software installed and communicating with the SFR-1 using wine on Linux.
I am not an export with wine but these are the steps that worked for me and helpfully it will help someone else get started.
Installing Sound Teacher with Wine
First we create a folder to hold the wine bottles.
mkdir ~/Wine
Then we configure the bottle with winecfg
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=$HOME/Wine/SoundTeacher winecfg
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=$HOME/Wine/SoundTeacher winetricks
Select the default wineprefix as this was set with the input variables. Press OK.
In the next screen select the Install a Windows DLL or Component and press OK
From the next section I selected the following package to install. Again I don't know if these were need but the application did run afterwards.
wsh57
vcrun6
vb6run
After selecting the components press OK
Next from the menu select the Install a font opinion and select OK.
From here select corefonts and press OK. Errors may happen after pressing OK and it can take some time to run. The errors can be ignored.
At this point the menu for the prefix should be back on screen. Now press cancel twice to exit out of winetricks.
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=$HOME/Wine/SoundTeacher wine path/to/SFR-Installer.exe
Configuration for K-USB-2
The first thing to do is plug the K-USB-2 cable into the computer. To check that the cable is detected run the following.
ls -la /dev/ | grep ttyACM0
Next change the permission for the device.
sudo chmod 777 /dev/ttyACM0
From the wine bottle remove the com5 port. This will be linked to the ttyACM0 device.
rm $HOME/Wine/SoundTeacher/dosdevices/com5
Link the com5 port to the ttyACM0 device
sudo ln -s /dev/ttyACM0 $HOME/Wine/SoundTeacher/dosdevices/com5
Check that the has being created successfully. The com5 port should now point at the ttyACM0 device.
ls -la $HOME/Wine/SoundTeacher/dosdevices/ | grep com5
If it fails to link try the steps again and failing that some more debugging is going to be needed.
Check that it is all working.
After doing the this configuration it is time to check that all is working. The Sound Teacher should now via the K-USB-2 be able to connect to the SFR-1. Launch the Sound Teacher software and connect the K-USB-2 to the SFR-1. In lower right corner there is the diagnoses button. Clicking this will start the scan for the port and once complete a window will pop up with information on the SFR-1.
Possible debugging
I have had issue where the SFR-1 is not detected. When debugging the I found that the com port had reset to the default again. To fix the issue I redid the steps in Configuration for K-USB-2. Afterwards the I restarted the diagnosis step and everything was detected.
Conclusion
Of course it would be nice to have a native app but from looking at the windows app that is never going to happen. The app does not have a nice UI and doesn't really need one to be functional.
