Radio and rails...

Well. Further to my previous post where all hope seemed to have gone out of the window I finally made progress today, but not the way I set out to. First off, I pulled a Raspberry Pi 4 from another project and sat the CaribouLite HAT on it. Next was a fresh installation of DragonOS. But this time it did open the ssh port - I've no idea why it did not before and note I am being unscientific here as I changed the Pi, but I am not going backwards. Then, time for install.sh... All seemed to go well but the software failed to compile completely. Searching on the errors I added #include to two source files, cariboulite/software/libcariboulite/src/CaribouLiteCpp.cpp and cariboulite/software/libcariboulite/src/CaribouLite.hpp. Stripping out all the 'apt's and 'depmod' from install.sh and running it again and the software compilation completed! I had already added and commented out the necessary lines in /boot/firmware/config.txt so a reboot was all that was needed to kick it into life. The driver was loaded - lsmod|smi showed this and also /proc/device-tree/hat now exists, both precursors to success according to the notes and YouTube videos. Running sudo SoapySDRUtils --find showed the card, and, finally (!), running SoapySDRServer…

I came across this via a post someone made somewhere - actually it might have been an email on a group. Anyway, with a tx/rx range top to 6GHz I thought, why not? It arrived quite quickly from Crowd Supply via Mouser with Crowd Supply charging the VAT but no other taxes on arrival. I duly mounted it on a spare Raspberry Pi 3B with a fresh Bookworm 64 bit OS and followed the installation instructions at https://github.com/cariboulabs/cariboulite but I always got various errors and never got to a working system. The errors were mainly surrounding the SMI driver and the kernel headers. There seemed no way round this one, and thus no working system. Following on from another complaint I downloaded and installed DragonOS, a 64 bit variant with lots of SDR utilities built in. Once installed, although the developer stated that ssh is available from first boot and does not need the usual empty ssh file it is not - the system does not open port 22 but does open the vnc port so I then had to find out which of my desktop systems has a vnc viewer as I never use it. When I found one…

Drat, double drat and triple drat. When I moved URLs about this blog, reconstituted from the original before I briefly moved to Write Freely, was all fine. But I overlooked the fact that the Wordpress database held onto the old URLs in all the images. So all the original posts that had images now have blank space. I am working my way back through these to sort each post out. Annoyingly it is not just a straight URL swap as there were differences in the older version of Wordpress as was, so I need to remove and re-add each one. Oh well... Update: I think I found and fixed them all.

Not long ago a telegraph pole appeared on the street outside our house to take wires between two existing poles. I think it was placed so that those wires didn’t come across our land as they seem to droop quite a lot. Associated with said pole, and others in the area are pole mounted fittings to do with BT’s full fibre offering. Today, a flyer came in the mail offering full fibre service at various speeds. That will make a change to our current 15Mbps ADSL. But there may be issues. Do we need the speed? Well, currently we can watch fairly good res YouTube on one TV, a BBC program on another, and all the less bandwidth hogging tasks that happen all the time such as Pi-Star, various Internet links to various bits and bobs, email, general web browsing etc. We only notice issues where video games peg out and Windows OneDrive sets off synchronising at full whack. Currently I have OneDrive (not mine, I don’t even use it!) configured to play nicely (honestly, if you’ve ever let it fully loose it’s a real bandwidth hog, quite unlike iCloud which never seems to get in anyone’s way and still…

I thought I was going mad today. I wanted to print some rails for the FT817 and I already had the sliced files on the SD card in the 3D printer. I selected the first (there are two, one is a mirror of the other) and told it to print. Nothing. Reset the printer and tried again. Nothing. Opening the SD card on the Mac showed the file to be 0 bytes, which is certainly was not as I had printed it before. Ok, copy it again and try again. Nothing! Right. Delete all the files on the SD card - I have them all on the Mac anyway. Copy just the files for the rails across and try again. Nothing! Looking at the SD card via a terminal window - I must admit to be my favourite UI - it was full of all sorts of junk. Going duff perhaps? Ok, use a recycled 8Gb micro-SD in a holder, delete all the files currently on it, copy the rails across and try that. Ah, the files did not delete so it's full of old junk and I can't spot the files to print. Back to the Mac. Tried 3…