Portsdown progress

It really is taking me far too long to get this sorted out. But, finally some progress has been made… at least I now have a decent case and the screen mounted. So far, there is very little else in the case other than the Lime and Pluto, the screen, the Pi and a 12V to 5V converter. But at least there’s plenty of space to add all the other necessary bits and pieces.

The screen was the most awkward thing to mount as it is designed to fit easily into a plastic surround with the Pi directly behind. For that, the 4 mounting screws fit directly to the case. But here I want it in the front panel. My rather less than elegant solution was to get some 1/4″ square aluminium bar, make holes for 4 M3 nuts and bolts and tighten these to become studs – these are in the horizontal pieces as shown in the pic. These were then epoxy glued to the front panel. Two more bars then take the screen, with spacers so the screen isn’t pulled back too much when tightening.

Anyway, elegant or not you can’t see it from the front! Still to go on yet are the three push buttons and encoder / tuning wheel for the Langstone transceiver part of the kit. As for the rest, well, one thing at a time! But anyway it works… as shown by yet another successful 6″ transmission to the Winterhill box sat on top!

More ATV fiddling

After finding the dead LCD screen that was to be a 5.6GHz ATV receiver it also turned out that the 7″ Pi screen on my Portsdown setup had similarly died – just white lines on the screen. No amount of stripping, reassembling and general fiddling fixed it. A new screen did.

Anyway, I now have a Winterhill receiver. This came from a fellow ham and saved me building one. As is usual with any new box one absolutely must try it right away, which is how I discovered the bust screen on the Portsdown. After that was replaced I successfully sent a test card 40 inches across the desk! Small steps… and at least the Winterhill is in a nice box unlike my Portsdown which is still waiting for a suitably sized case – why is it all the nice metal boxes are a few mm lower than the 7″ display needs. Huh.

Categories

Tags

Recent Posts

Archives

Links