Hotspot ⁽²⁾

You know the phrase 'memory like a sieve'? Well, that's mine. I just received a 3.2" Nextion display via Aliexpress which arrived after only a few days from China. This was to be a display for the M17 hotspot. But there were a few unexpected hurdles! First off, I could not remember the connections from the GPIO pins of the Pi to the Nextion. It's actually really easy, pins 4, 6, 8 and 10, but it took me an age to find that information on the web. Onthe Pi 4B the GPIO pins are numbered from the top (the opposite end from the USB and Ethernet connectors) with odd numbers on the left and even on the right. There are plenty of diagrams on the web. So pin 4, which is +5V is the second one down on the right, pin 6 is next down and 0v, then pin 8 which is transmitted data from the Pi, and pin 10 is received data to the Pi. The Nextion display came with a cable with a connector for the display. This has red for +ve, blue for data from the display, yellow for data to the display and black for 0V.

The latest addition to the shack is a Connect Systems Inc CS7000-M17 Plus hand held radio. I got this because of interest in the M17 mode - see https://m17foundation.org/ generally for information. The radio came from KB Cubed in the US (https://www.kbcubed.com/), not solely because the price had been reduced but also they were able to ship to the UK whereas other suppliers could not, or as far as I found anyway. It comes with a USB programming lead that attaches to the side once a cover is removed. However, as it came with the M17 mode already installed I have not yet needed this. The radio, being the Plus model will also do DMR which means I may no longer need the MD380 but I have yet to try this out. As there is no M17 activity around here I also needed a hotspot. I run the excellent pi-star package for DMR and POCSAG but there is a future issue - the main branch of the MMDVM software will no longer support M17 and once pi-star updates my hotspot would cease to function. As there is a WPSD branch with M17 retained I decided to set up a hotspot…