Radio and rails...

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!

It’s been an impressive two days on 2m FT8. Yesterday (3/march) pskreporter showed that I had been received in GI, EI, GD and GW as well as right down into Devon, and today similarly so with the exception of Ireland and the addition of GM. Not bad for my cobbled together dipole in the loft. Of course it’s likely that all the reports are from stations with humungous antennas but hey, a report is a report. And yes, tidying the loft is on my to-do list!

(updated) As I am learning morse, well, in theory anyway, I wanted a decent morse key. I think a straight key will be best but I want something decent and not naff looking or ex-military. I like the look of the Bencher (probably because it’s shiny!) but I have no idea of the feel of any of these keys and looking around for comments shows that everyone likes their own - to be expected of course. Back in December 2020 I had actually ordered one that gets good reviews but it never came. After three emails to three separate contacts and never getting a reply I turned to PayPal and got a full refund within two days. Two months was long enough to wait for the key to fail to arrive. I suspect the order was messed up by our rather stupid exit from the EU and the resultant complexities… but to not receive any reply, well, that’s just not good customer service. So... I got this instead, it's so shiny!

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.