Pibox progress

I gave the pibox a present today in the form of a 3.2" Nextion display. It came with a bezel which I wanted because I could guarantee not to make a neat hole in the panel. Oddly, the bezel was black in the advert but came unfinished... The screen runs off a USB port on the Pi via a CP2102 USB to TTL dongle, and the wires that came with the Nextion just reach the dongle which in on the far side of the box. It was surprisingly easy to set up, albeit I had to wrestle the Windows PC to set up the Nextion editor as I did not have a spare SD card to download the HMI file directly to the Nextion. Of course, this exercise was very much a 'got a new thing, must get it working immediately' type job and I will take time now to read up on it all and maybe find different displays, but it has at least turned a boring blue box into a blue box that appears to have a purpose!

For a while now I've been pondering whether to get a Windows PC. For starters, SDR Console needs it as do other SDR packages. But other than watching them come and go on eBay I never took the plunge. However, as I've taken all the electronics out of the workshop due to it always being damp I had a spare Lenovo ThinkCentre PC, one of the very small things. I already use one as the home server but this other one was destined to run a DCC setup for a model railway that is still just a pile of bits. It ran Ubuntu but when I got it it came with Windows 10. All I had done was swap hard disks, keeping the Windows one just in case I ever needed it. Well... ...it is now in the shack and SDR Console has been installed and all is well. We had a screen lying around which is full HD, a much better display option than the old laptop I had been using. And with it being a fresh Windows 10 it's not (yet!) cluttered up. One strange thing though. I set up SDR Console just as I had on the…

The PiBox is almost completed. It's taken far too long due to all sorts of silly things like having to get fans because a dry run indicated the poor little boards were getting a bit hot, having to get bolts for the fans because I had none long enough, and having to get a connector for the 1-wire (actually 3 wires!) lead from the central heating sensors. So, there is is. Two fans on the left, 5V PSU bottom right, gigabit Ethernet switch above that, then the Pi's: top is the PiStar with the DVMega board which has coax to the rear panel and then a dummy load, middle is the ASD-B and central heating monitor Pi, and the bottom is a general purpose one with various bits on such as rtl_tcp. The lower two boards have USB-A sockets on the rear of the case for the two SDR sticks, one for the ADS-B antenna and one to attach to a Discone for general use. But there is an issue. I had originally intended this to sit in the shack but those fans are just too annoying. Not loud, but constant. I suspect the box will end up in the…