My Pi Journey

[VK5PJ]

Hi,
for those who want to set a static IP address on their PI, you can find some good instructions here: http://www.circuitbasics.com/how-to-set ... pberry-pi/ that take you through the process of editing some files..

Now if you are pluging in a USB device, how do you know what the PI knows about?? Open a terminal session (yes looks like an old DOS box) on your PI and issue the command lsusb (List USB)

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 pi@vk5pj-pi:~ $ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd FT232 USB-Serial (UART) IC
Bus 001 Device 008: ID 041e:30d3 Creative Technology, Ltd Sound Blaster Play!
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 046d:c52b Logitech, Inc. Unifying Receiver
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 0424:7800 Standard Microsystems Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0424:2514 Standard Microsystems Corp. USB 2.0 Hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0424:2514 Standard Microsystems Corp. USB 2.0 Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
pi@vk5pj-pi:~ $ 

From that listing, the first line "Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd FT232 USB-Serial (UART) IC" is showing my serial interface to the radio I use for CAT and PTT is there and the second line "Bus 001 Device 008: ID 041e:30d3 Creative Technology, Ltd Sound Blaster Play!" shows my Creative Soundblaster USB sound card. From this information I then know that my serial device and my sound card device are recognised by the PI and are ready to go.

I do not want to make this a full blown tutorial but will post snipits of helpful pointers that relate to AR aspects of the PI.

[VK5PJ]

Now assuming you have already installed WSJT-X from the list of software (previous posts) then inside WSJT-X the setup looks the same but the options you select may seem a bit foriegn to you.

Firstly lets look at CAT and PTT control . .



Okay, select the RIG in the normal way, in my case and 'Icom IC-910' then we need to select the CAT serial port. Linux denotes these by the device type it sees, all serial devices are seen as /dev/ttyxxxx infact if you look in the folder /dev on the PI you will see all the devices it knows about but I digress.

In my case the serial port is '/dev/ttyUSB0' where 'USB0' means the first USB serial device that is connected to the PI, if you connected a second one, it would be '/dev/ttyUSB1' I hope that makes a bit of sense.. For PTT control you can see from the graphic I have selected the same serial port '/dev/ttyUSB0' but I am toggling the RTS line to cause PTT on the radio (thats how my little interface box is setup to do PTT).

If you click the "Test CAT' button, it should do a test and then the button should turn Green to show success, if not an error will be reported to you. Once the TEST CAT button is green, you can move on to 'Test PTT' which should turn RED when it has keyed the TX line.

Now onto the more complicated Audio feed

[VK5PJ]

Audio in WSJT-X

now firstly you need to know there is NO Microphone input on a Raspberry PI base board, it has a headphones port so you can play audio but no input. This means you either need an external USB sound card or rig with direct Audio. For the audio side I use Creative Sound blaster USB's as it is widely supported and I have used them with great success over the last 10 years. An example of a rig with direct Audio is an Icom IC-7100, which supprised me by working first time when connect to the PI (no drivers needed or excessive fiddling about), was up and running in FT8 inside of 5 minutes.

This example carries on from my basic setup of the IC-910 via my rig interface and Soundblaster USB sound card.

So in WSJT-X on the Audio TAB, mine looks like:



Okay, take a deep breath, the pull down options for both 'Input' and 'Output' reveal quite a list of devices (gulp), so which one is the one I need? To be honest for me it was trial and error, WSJT-X will give you a nasty error message if you have it wrong but with the power of hindsight the tip was that the device description starts with: 'plughw:CARD=xxxxxxx,DEV=0' once again, the DEV-0 is telling you it is Device 0 or the first device of that type and the 'plughw' is telling me it is 'a plug and play hardware device' (my USB Soundblaster card). Not my finest hour but I got there in the end..

The next hump is how do I set audio levels arrrgh! In the top bar of the PI there is a speaker Icon, by default it is controlling the inbuilt sound device for audio playback. Right click on the Speaker Icon and tick the "USB device 0x######" (there will be numbers instead of the #### on your PI that are unique to your USB device) as being the default device (whew). Now go back to the Speaker icon menu (right click) and select the option 'USB Device Settings...' This will open an audio Mixer, there are two main tabs, Playback (speakers) and Capture (Microphone) so this is how you set the audio levels for WSJT-X Receive and Transmit.

Good luck on your journey. . . will update what it looks like with the IC-7100 plugged in over the next few days.

[VK4MIL]

Audio in WSJT-X

now firstly you need to know there is NO Microphone input on a Raspberry PI base board, it has a headphones port so you can play audio but no input. This means you either need an external USB sound card or rig with direct Audio. For the audio side I use Creative Sound balster USB's as it is widely supported and I have used them with great success over the last 10 years. An example of a rig with direct Audio is an Icom IC-7100, which supprised me by working first time when connect to the PI (no drivers needed or excessive fiddling about), was up and running in FT8 inside of 5 minutes.

This example carries on from my basic setup of the IC-910 via my rig interface and Soundblaster USB sound card.

So in WSJT-X on the Audio TAB, mine looks like:



Okay, take a deep breath, the pull down options for both 'Input' and 'Output' reveal quite a list of devices (gulp), so which one is the one I need? To be honest for me it was trial and error, WSJT-X will give you a nasty error message if you have it wrong but with the power of hindsight the tip was that the device description starts with: 'plughw:CARD=xxxxxxx,DEV=0' once again, the DEV-0 is telling you it is Device 0 or the first device of that type and the 'plughw' is telling me it is 'a plug and play hardware device' (my USB Soundblaster card). Not my finest hour but I got there in the end..

The next hump is how do I set audio levels arrrgh! In the top bar of the PI there is a speaker Icon, by default it is controlling the inbuilt sound device for audio playback. Right click on the Speaker Icon and tick the "USB device 0x######" (there will be numbers instead of the #### on your PI that are unique to your USB device) as being the default device (whew). Now go back to the Speaker icon menu (right click) and select the option 'USB Device Settings...' This will open an audio Mixer, there are two main tabs, Playback (speakers) and Capture (Microphone) so this is how you set the audio levels for WSJT-X Receive and Transmit.

Good luck on your journey. . . will update what it looks like with the IC-7100 plugged in over the next few days.

Thanks PJ for these posts my problem with the sound was with the signalink in MSK144 it it was overdriving the audio in and was clipping it if I turned the signalink off it was OK and I tried adjusting the volume in PI and the RX level on the signalink very strange indeed

[VK1JA]

Getting a Pi up and running interests me a lot!

I have a Lime SDR Mini here that would be a perfect match with the Pi3+ and I've got so many things I want to do with the Lime SDR Mini, but the OS is a big hurdle me me to get over.

Also I've had bad experiences with Ubuntu, and it is a steep learning curve.

I'll be following this thread with great interest!

[VK5PJ]

How to get a 'screen shot' in linux and in particular on your PI...

In the main menu, go to 'preferences' then 'add remove software' In the new window that opens, type 'screenshot' into the search and hit enter. In the list returned in the right section, look through the list to find 'screenshot application for GNOME' tick this one and click on OK (bottom right).

This installs the wanted application to the 'Accessories' section of the main menu. This little app works a lot like the Windows snipping tool, you can select 'whole screen', 'current window' or 'select area'. So next time you want to get a copy of a screen to send to a mate, you will be able to do it like a pro and they can be impressed you did it from a PI.

[VK5PJ]

Do you want to connect to a Windows file share on a PC in the shack or house?

https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/q ... -pi-client

In my case I created a folder on the shack PC called 'Shared' and from Windows Explorer you right click on the folder and select Properties, from their select the Sharing Tab. Now use the option for "ADVANCED Sharing", in there tick the 'share this folder' and give it a simple all lowercase name (no spaces or tricky stuff okay?).

On the permissions button tick them all for 'everyone' Click OK.... and exit (OK) all the dialoges on Windows.

Move to the PI and we firstly have to install some packages.... yes this is how Linux stays so slim, you only install what you need

here is a good reference for what you need to do: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/q ... -pi-client

That is a good reference site, now no matter what I did, I had to supply a username and a password to connect to my Windows PC,

eg. Pi# : sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.0.3/shared /mnt/shared -o user=WindowsUser,pass=WindowsPassword

P.S 'sudo' means run this command as if I am a privileged user.

What you can do , go to the Windows PC and create a windows user from the Control panel that is not an admin and use that username and password for the conenction to the PI, that way you never expose the password of the priviliged user you currently use (most people run every day as an ADMIN on windows)

Will add more to this particular topic soon as when I try to connect to my Network storage at home it fails .. Hmmph

[VK4MIL]

How to get a 'screen shot' in linux and in particular on your PI...

In the main menu, go to 'preferences' then 'add remove software' In the new window that opens, type 'screenshot' into the search and hit enter. In the list returned in the right section, look through the list to find 'screenshot application for GNOME' tick this one and click on OK (bottom right).

This installs the wanted application to the 'Accessories' section of the main menu. This little app works a lot like the Windows snipping tool, you can select 'whole screen', 'current window' or 'select area'. So next time you want to get a copy of a screen to send to a mate, you will be able to do it like a pro and they can be impressed you did it from a PI.

thanks again PJ you are a wealth of PI wisdom

[VK4MIL]

VK4RTT 6m beacon on my Pi IC7000 and my new MiniproSC interface

[VK4EA]

Screenshot from 2018-10-12 18-24-52.png

VK4RTT 6m beacon on my Pi IC7000 and my new MiniproSC interface

give that bloke a license, clever stuff


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[VK4MIL]

Screenshot from 2018-10-12 18-24-52.png

VK4RTT 6m beacon on my Pi IC7000 and my new MiniproSC interface

give that bloke a license, clever stuff


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[VK5PJ]

now I guess I should provide full disclosure.. I work with Linux most days as part of my IT job BUT only from the Linux CMD line (shell via SSH) on our enterprise system so all this GUI stuff we are doing with the PI is all new to me.. so I am learning as I go along too.

[VK4MIL]

now I guess I should provide full disclosure.. I work with Linux most days as part of my IT job BUT only from the Linux CMD line (shell via SSH) on our enterprise system so all this GUI stuff we are doing with the PI is all new to me.. so I am learning as I go along too.

[VK4EMS]

Gday Peter there is a handful of us vk4's that have just recieved our PI +3 so we appreciate all the info you are supplying and hopefully can make it to the end with a bit of hair left!! thanks for your efforts vk4ems

[VK4MIL]

Pi watching 50.293 WSPR seeing the odd meteor ping

[VK4MIL]

my sound card settings for signal link and miniprosc

[VK5PJ]

Okay, so is your PI's clock in sync?

A PI does not have an onboard realtime clock so at each boot it MUST sync its system time from an online source.

This web site has some discussion and helpful hints on getting a PI to have accurate time, while some of the chatter on the page is not helpful, I will try to distill it down to what you need https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/q ... after-boot


Warning: this is all done in the CONSOLE, buckle up and lets open a 'Terminal' session, lets see if the usual linux NTP (network time protocol) software is installed

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pi@vk5pj-pi: $ sudo /etc/init.d/ntp stop
sudo: /etc/init.d/ntp: command not found
pi@vk5pj-pi: $ sudo ntpd -q -g
sudo: ntpd: command not found

nope... the above code shows up the PI does not have this 'ntp' package installed.. hmmm
-------------------------
Okay lets make sure the normal PI time setting tools are there and working

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pi@vk5pj-pi:$ sudo timedatectl set-ntp True
pi@vk5pj-pi:$ timedatectl status
]      Local time: Sun 2018-10-14 07:34:45 ACDT
  Universal time: Sat 2018-10-13 21:04:45 UTC
        RTC time: n/a
       Time zone: Australia/Adelaide (ACDT, +1030)
 Network time on: yes
NTP synchronized: yes
 RTC in local TZ: no

That looks good, so maybe the original time set routine works okay BUT I believe this does not keep the clock in sync and only does a sync at boot. For Ham digital modes we may need to get more regular time syncs.. enter NTPd stage left..

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pi@vk5pj-pi:/etc $ sudo apt-get install ntp
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  libopts25
Suggested packages:
  ntp-doc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libopts25 ntp
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 34 not upgraded.
Need to get 609 kB of archives.
After this operation, 1,826 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/raspbian/raspbian stretch/main armhf libopts25 armhf 1:5.18.12-3 [61.4 kB]
Get:2 http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/raspbian/raspbian stretch/main armhf ntp armhf 1:4.2.8p10+dfsg-3+deb9u2 [548 kB]
Fetched 609 kB in 2s (217 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package libopts25:armhf.
(Reading database ... 157490 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libopts25_1%3a5.18.12-3_armhf.deb ...
Unpacking libopts25:armhf (1:5.18.12-3) ...
Selecting previously unselected package ntp.
Preparing to unpack .../ntp_1%3a4.2.8p10+dfsg-3+deb9u2_armhf.deb ...
Unpacking ntp (1:4.2.[code]

8p10+dfsg-3+deb9u2) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.24-11+deb9u3) ...
Processing triggers for systemd (232-25+deb9u4) ...
Setting up libopts25:armhf (1:5.18.12-3) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.6.1-2) ...
Setting up ntp (1:4.2.8p10+dfsg-3+deb9u2) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.24-11+deb9u3) ...
Processing triggers for systemd (232-25+deb9u4) ...[/code]


Now we neet to edit the ntp.conf file to set which servers we should sync from.

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pi@vk5pj-pi:/etc $ sudo nano /etc/ntp.conf

once the 'nano' editor is on the screen, make these changes: add the bits in Blue then comment out with a # the bits in red or if you like remove all the bits in red altogether as we want NTP to check servers closer to home.

# pool.ntp.org maps to about 1000 low-stratum NTP servers. Your server will
# pick a different set every time it starts up. Please consider joining the
# pool: <http://www.pool.ntp.org/join.html>
server 0.au.pool.ntp.org
server 1.au.pool.ntp.org
server 2.au.pool.ntp.org

#pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
#pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
#pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
#pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst


In the block below we can do a check that our settings in '/etc/ntp.conf' are okay by stopping the service and then running it manually. If you are ever wondering why a lot of Linux processes have a 'd' at the end of there names (ntpd vs ntp), this has become a standard to designate that this is a 'daemon' which means it is run by the system as a service and is not meant to be run interactively by the user.

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pi@vk5pj-pi:/etc $ service ntp stop
pi@vk5pj-pi:/etc $ sudo ntpd -gq
14 Oct 07:51:01 ntpd[9600]: ntpd 4.2.8p10@1.3728-o Sat Mar 10 18:03:33 UTC 2018 (1): Starting
14 Oct 07:51:01 ntpd[9600]: Command line: ntpd -gq
14 Oct 07:51:01 ntpd[9600]: proto: precision = 1.510 usec (-19)
14 Oct 07:51:01 ntpd[9600]: Listen and drop on 0 v6wildcard [::]:123
14 Oct 07:51:01 ntpd[9600]: Listen and drop on 1 v4wildcard 0.0.0.0:123
14 Oct 07:51:01 ntpd[9600]: Listen normally on 2 lo 127.0.0.1:123
14 Oct 07:51:01 ntpd[9600]: Listen normally on 3 eth0 192.168.0.165:123
14 Oct 07:51:01 ntpd[9600]: Listen normally on 4 lo [::1]:123
14 Oct 07:51:01 ntpd[9600]: Listen normally on 5 eth0 [fe80::5564:d983:f53b:2040%2]:123
14 Oct 07:51:01 ntpd[9600]: Listening on routing socket on fd #22 for interface updates
14 Oct 07:51:09 ntpd[9600]: ntpd: time slew -0.002948 s
ntpd: time slew -0.002948s
pi@vk5pj-pi:/etc $ sudo service ntp start

pi@vk5pj-pi:/etc $

Now I do expect I will have to fine tune my settings in the '/etc/ntp.conf' to get it to check sync a little more often but for today I have run out of time to look into that.

[VK4RF]

Finally crack it.
VK4RTT 6mtr beacon on Pi

[VK4MIL]

Finally crack it.
VK4RTT 6mtr beacon on Pi

well done

[VK4MIL]

VK4RF and I made a QRA64A contact on 52.065 using our PI's Thanks for the test Rick