Computing ⁽³⁶⁾

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…

After a long delay (other work, life getting in the way, general laziness etc) I ran some more tests on the Pibox. With the fans disconnected (actually, one disconnected itself!) and the case assembled I've been running the box to see how bad the temperatures get. With two of the three Pi cards operating, and all 3 powered up, pi-star, which is on top due to the DVMEGA hat settles at 60 degrees C, and the utility Pi which has a Discone attached settles at 50. So not actually bad. I think what I will do is go back to Plan C or whatever it was and run the fans via a transistor hanging off the GPIO port of one of the cards so the fan comes on if it is getting a bit steamy. For now, at least it means I can run pi-star 24/7 again, especially as I had to upgrade it by hand as it has missed a lot of the overnight updates. And it saves me having to run mains power into the loft.

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…

I had an idea that my RSP2 SDR could sit in the loft driven by a Pi in the shack. The Pi in question had DireWolf and a DVB-T stick watching APRS traffic. Ideal, I though. Hmmm. I really thought this would be easy and a web search suggested that it should all work, my plan being to use the Pi to serve the SDR remotely from one of the laptops.  My first attempt was to install a fresh Raspberry Pi OS and install SoapySDR and SoapySDRPlay. However, various bits of SoapySDR failed to compile due to some things not being found, even though I followed the instructions to the letter. A web search found only two identical but unanswered questions, so no help there. More searches. SDRPlay have a useful looking image for the Pi where it will run in a number of modes, including soapy remote. This seemed just what I wanted. It all went in and the Pi throws open port 1234 which web searches indicated as the right thing for it to do. However, SDRPlay refuses to play whatever I try. I have again followed what instructions I can find regarding remote operation, some of which…

I have an old netbook, a Samsung NF110 that is hopelessly underpowered now with only 1Gb RAM and a 1.66GHz Atom CPU. It used to run Windows 7 (can you imagine?!) and was ok for basic word processing when I got the thing and had a really good battery life. I installed Ubuntu on this a while ago and found it very slow. I recently put Ubuntu 18.04 on, simply because I use this on the desktop. Yesterday I wanted to see if it could provide another screen and run pskreporter and it sat there for 10 minutes allegedly loading Firefox. Hmmm. I remembered at that point that I had planned to put it on eBay anyway but wondered why on earth it was just so slow with Linux. Enter Lubuntu. Lubuntu 12.10 has given the poor little thing a new lease on life. It is actually usable and no Gnome awkwardness. I'd still rather it had a little more RAM (like, I dunno, 8 times as much!) but it always was a handy little PC so it can remain in the shack now. And on Lubuntu - well sort of - I installed LXDE on the shack PC as…