Tag: MW0MWZ

Pi-Star, XLX, and YSF

If you thought that the big amateur radio news of the day is that Andy Taylor has pushed Pi-Star 4.1.0 to general release, I’ll have some other news for you in a moment. But first things first.

If you’re already running a 4.1.0 RC (release candidate), please logon to your pi-star device via ssh and issue the following commands:

sudo pistar-update
sudo pistar-upgrade

If you’re running a pre-4.1.0 system, you’ll need to:

  • Backup your configuration
  • Download the 4.1.0 image from the Pi-Star website
  • Unzip the downloaded file
  • Burn the .img file to an SD card
  • Copy the zip (don’t unzip) of your configuration backup to the SD card
  • Boot the new image

The bigger news today is that Andy has pushed the new G4KLX YSFGateway code into the Pi-Star image. This means that you can now directly connect to XLX020 and change reflector modules from your Fusion radio using Wires-X Passthrough commands.

You’ll have to enable the WiresX Passthrough slider on the Yaesu System Fusion Configuration section of the Pi-Star web gui. If you have an FT-70DR or another radio with an upper case only display, enable the UPPERCASE Hostfiles slider in the same section.

The process may vary a bit between radio models. The general idea is that you first initiate a Wires-X sequence to connect to XLX020. Next, you exit Wires-X mode and initiate another Wires-X sequence to connect to the module of your choice. If you just want to talk on module A, the 2nd connect is not necessary as you’ll default to module A.

Some radios, such as my FT-70DR, do not pull down a room list and you have to manually enter the module number. In that case, use 04001 for module A, 04002 for module B, and so on.

Have fun with this great new feature that makes the most of Pi-Star, XLX, and Yaesu Fusion.

73 de K2IE

Turn off HDMI on Pi-Star (Easier)

Here’s an even easier way to turn off HDMI on your Pi-Star image running under Raspbian. If you’re running one of the Pi-Star 4.0 release candidates, the tvservice command may already be installed. You can check by issuing the following command:

which tvservice

If it is installed, just add the HDMI off command to /etc/rc.local.

# Turn off HDMI
/usr/bin/tvservice -o

If you’re running Pi-Star 3.x, I learned that you can install tvservice from a .deb package.

sudo apt-get install libraspberrypi-bin

For some reason this did not turn up during my initial searches but was pointed out over in the Pi-Star Forums by Dennis (W1MT).

It also seems that Andy (MM0MWZ) is considering adding a button in the future which would allow turning off HDMI from the web interface.

Turn off HDMI on Pi-Star Image

It is common practice on headless Raspberry Pi computers to turn off the HDMI to save some power. Even without a monitor attached, the HDMI hardware seems to draw ~ 50 ma of current. However, in the interest of saving space in the image, Pi-Star (as distributed) lacks the necessary tvservice command to turn off the HDMI hardware.

This command is part of the Raspberry PI “userland” package, which for some reason is not packaged as a .deb. So you’ll have to grab the code off github, but it is pretty easy. Before starting, make certain that you have expanded the filesystem of your image to fill the SD card.

sudo pistar-expand
sudo reboot

After the reboot, do the following:

rpi-rw
git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland
sudo apt-get install cmake -y
cd userland
./buildme

Add the libraries to the ld.so search patch by creating a file named “userland.conf” in /etc/ld.so.conf.d. In that file add the following line:

/opt/vc/lib

Next, update the ld.so search path:

sudo ldconfig -v

You can now run the tvservice command:

## Status
sudo /opt/vc/bin/tvservice -s
## Turn off HDMI
sudo /opt/vc/bin/tvservice -o

All that is left to be done is to add the HDMI off command to your /etc/rc.local file so that it will run every time the system boots.