There's a new remote control station controller from George at Pactena. You guys are going to know him from the Ham Radio workbench and or the pac Tena antennas that he makes. He came up with this complete almost plug and play run on a Raspberry Pie system to control your repeater remotely, but your HF radios and your HAM radios in your hamshack remotely. And it's brand agnostic. It's not tied to one brand like Icom, YESU, Kinwood Flex or anything like that.
It'll work for just about anything. It adds a bunch of different stuff to it. It's all plug and play. It runs Node red for monitoring. We're going to talk about it today. This is a cool project and I hope you guys enjoy it. Tell us what the I mean, just start at the beginning, I guess, tell us what this is what we're looking at here, because when I got this, this is the box of stuff that I've got here, and and this this is this is I didn't do this on purpose. This is just how messy
I always keep my bench. So you're a Ham Yeah exactly, Yeah, yeah, so yeah, tell us George, thank you for being here today. First, off and tell us what we're looking at here. This is I see you're operating under the name Sierra Radio Systems. And is that new or have I just not heard that before?
No, nobody's ever heard of it before, because we've seen a Radio Systems. I started that twenty years ago, actually nineteen and a half years ago, and the purpose for that company is to make repeater control systems and accessories, and so we've been making repeater controllers ever since then, mostly used by very large multi site linked networks. So this is not like a little tiny controller. These these repeater controllers are three U ras with a bunch of boards.
It's it's pretty fancy, and the market for that is very very specialized, so it's only people who are building big network linked repeater systems would buy such a thing. And so that's what that where that started.
Okay, okay, good, okay, Well that's a little background of that, because I think most people would would know that you're either George from Pactenna or from ham Ray to a work bench. So that was just another name that I saw in Michael's video, but also on these labels here. So I'm like, okay, I just wanted to clarify that. All right, good, so tell us what we're looking at here.
Okay, So in a way, if I go back to we just talked about repeater control systems. So I've been building control systems for over twenty years, and one of the other interests of mine, besides portable operating and building repeaters, is remote operating. And so I've thought for many years that I should build some kind of remote station control thing and leverage the experience I had with repeater controllers.
So I started working on some projects a couple of years ago to build some remotely controlled co x switch is for my shack, just for my own personal use, and made a couple of early versions of that that we made available through the Hamradio Workbench podcast. We made a four port cox switch at the time. And so this last year I decided that I was thinking about this for long enough I should actually make something. So I started seriously working on what I'm calling the station
chin controller. And so I think it would be useful to find, well, what is a station controller, Because if you walked up to any Ham and say, hey, you know, what's the station controller, they wouldn't know what you're talking about.
It could realistically, it could mean several things, right exactly. Yeah, I mean yeah, it's kind of a generic turn. But yeah, okay, good deal, all right, good go ahead.
So so the way I think about it, station controller, Each of those two words really kind of mean something. So what's the station. So the first definition of station is my hamshack, So that's my station. But there's other kinds of stations too. If you have a repeater up on a mountaintop, that's a station as well. Or maybe you really think about remote operating where I'm you know, traveling and I'm going to use my laptop to connect back to my station at home, some remote controlling my station.
So that's this could be anything that you want to remotely monitor or control. So the controller part of station controller really means monitoring key vital signs in the system and being able to control a lot of them. So if you think about, let's say you're doing a remote HF HAM station. You've got a flex radio or an Allcraft or an icom or whatever, and you want to remote that radio. There's several things you have to have
in place to successfully remote a radio. So obviously you have to be able to control the radio and you have to be able to send audio back and forth from your client laptop, tablet, whatever to that station. Now, that part of the problem is being solved largely by the radio manufacturers. So if you look at radios, let's say ten years ago and before then, most radios have serial ports, so they're controllable through a serial port, but you have to have some third party piece of hardware
software to deal with it. But the modern radios, at least the i'd say the mid to high end radios today are architected with remote control in mind. So Flux from the beginning was really a remotable radio, and they're probably the best example of that today. Allcraft K four series is also built in a way that makes it naturally remotable. The Icon ninety seven hundred and the seventy six to ten and other Icon radios make it easier to remote because they have network connections and they can
pipe audio. So that part of the problem is kind of being solved, and I really didn't want to address that. So there's other people already doing it, so that's great, But when you think about building a remote station, that's not everything you need. In addition to the radio functionality. You also need to be able to control and monitor the environment around the radio itself. So what does that mean. You know, at a bare minimum, you need to be able to remotely turn the power on and off to
the station. And by the way, it's a convenience, it's a safety issue, but it's also a legal requirement. So if you are operating a remotely a remote transmitter, you have to have some kind of control on the transmitter. And the best example goes back to you know, building a repeater. You know, part of the regulations are you have to have some way to control that repeater transmitter to be able to turn it off if something goes haywire. Same thing is true for your remote hamshack, So you
need to remotely turn power on and off. But then there's a lot of other stuff you might want to do. You might want to, for example, switch between antenna's. Maybe you have a dipole and a vertical or a beam and a dummy load, and you want to switch your radio between different antennas. Perhaps you want to monitor some key measurements, like what's the battery voltage if I'm running out of battery system, what's the solar panel voltage. Do I have AC power in the shack or did I
lose power? Which is not uncommon for a lot of remote stations. A very critical thing you want to monitor is the transit line. So what's the forward power from my transmitter to the antenna and what's the reflected power coming back from the antenna. So if you have a highest WR you want to know about that and take some appropriate action. So you might want to measure the temperature on your amplifier or inside the shack or outside
the building, you know. So the list goes on and on, so it really boils down to you need to be able to monitor voltages and switch closures and flip relays, measure RF wattage, et cetera. So all of that kind of stuff is what the station controller addresses.
Okay, good, Yeah, add an AMP into the mix and you've got even more stuff. You need to power off and on and adjust RF output on the radio perhaps, you know, depend on what the amp is and that kind of thing. So yeah, okay, that all makes sense.
Good. So, by the way, just give you an example. I was talking to Mike VA three MW yesterday and Mike's been doing remote station operation for many years, and his remote station is like one hundred miles from homes, so it's not like you could just walk over there and flip a switch. And he's he has one of my station controllers, and he's planning to replace the stuff that he's been using for a while with the system permanently. And and he said, guess how many relays I need? That?
No idea, man, how many do you need? He said, I need twenty four relays?
Oh my gosh.
So now that you know, Mike is kind of I would say, at one end of that you know, complexity spectrum, because he has lots of antennas and and a lot of stuff he wants to switch. So that's kind of at the high end of the of the range. But you know, things could get pretty sophisticated.
Is it expandable to that many?
Oh? Yeah?
Okay, okay, Well that's good to know. Cool. Okay, So what so so we've got so let's I guess the next step is just let's talk about the the image that you have. So this all runs from a Raspberry Pie and you're currently the image you currently use, or maybe the software for the image is running on best run on Raspberry Pie three, and I know you said you were going to work on a Pie five later. I don't know what the status on that is, but.
Yeah, the Pie five is running now. Actually there's a little bit more to it than that. So so if I take a step back before you top into the Raspberry pipe part, the architecture of the system is very modular, so you can think about that there's a control computer and then there are devices, and the control computer can be almost anything. And so when I'm making a package product, I need something that the customer can just take out of a box, literally plug it in and have it work.
And I think the best recipe for that's a Raspberry Pie and I made a module that the pie sits on. We'll talk about what it does probably a little bit, but you could use the node red low that I wrote off the shelf to control everything. And to do that, the minimum thing is you just need a computer that can run node red. So you can take any old beater computer you have sitting in the shack, put noe red on it, plug in a ten dollars interface and
you can control the modules from that. Or you can get my prepackaged purpose built board that has some advantages if you want to go with the turnkey solution. So so my recommendation off the shelf is to use the note this running node red on a Raspberry Pie three. I tested on a Raspberry Pie five. It runs fine. Of course I don't have a four. Somebody else ran
it on a four and it's fine. But you can put node red on any Windows Mac PC, you know, Linux computer you want, and you could run this application. The other thing is being modular. That interface between the control computer and the modules is very easy to even write your own or create your own control surface. So let's there's kind of two in my mind, there's kind of two kinds of hams. There's hams that just like want to go buy a thing and use it, and
there's hams that want to design and build something from scratch. Yes, and this is applicable to both. So my primary target market, if you will, for this is the first case where someone just wants something out of a box. But if you said, well, you know, I know how to program, I know how to write ithon, I want to write my own program on a Mac and control your hardware, then I provide all the specs to do that. And
you could easily do that yourself. Okay, although that's not I think that's one out of one hundred.
But yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like, yeah, every time I put up a video about out of the Box Antena, people are always commenting how you can build that yourself, and I'm like, yeah, you can. But some people just want to get on the air and have fun.
So I tell you, Jason, I'd say ninety percent in my experience, like more than ninety percent of the people that buy something just want it to work, right, Yes, yeah, They're interested in how it works because hams are you know, technically inquisitive, right, so they want to know, like, how does it do that? But and they also want to know that if they ever want to extended themselves they can.
But most people are like, yeah, that's fine, I'd brother and just work because I'm too busy with life to you know, write, reinvent that wheel.
Yeah true, true? Okay, good, all right, Well we have this image here running on a PIE three and uh and I have that piped over here to my one of my HDMI capture ports. So that's what it looks like right there. And I've got this this mouse here wouldn't work in quite well. But I've got it. If I keep it on this this pad on my desk,
it's fine. So but this is a stock like I just imaged this last night, and you kept every time you would announce a new revision, I'd be like, ah, okay, so I'd download a new vision new I had Revision five installed or flashed, I should say, And then you told me about eight last night. So that's what that's what this is right now, this should be Revision eight. And uh, and I guess we need to probably do we need to connect it to the internet.
Now.
You just need to connect it to your land so it gets a land interress.
Okay, that's even so so small, I can't even so we.
Could even do it without looking at the Raspberry Pie. So when you can install it, the most the simplest way to do it, you don't even have to look at the Raspberry piek. We just plug all the hardware together because what will happen is when it boots up, the Raspberry Pie will send the IP address to the display on the controller and then so you don't even have to lug into the pie ever you don't want to.
But you'll have to uh yeah, yeah, yeah, so I would have to have an Ethernet port for that. I was going to see.
Yeah, so what you want to do is have a Ethernet from your land into the Raspberry Pie and then and then we'll hook up all the control hardware and when it all powers up, then the Pie will send the IP address to the display on the control module.
I just got to find an Ethernet cable that's long enough to reach over here.
That's the only thing.
How close does the Pie need to be to the rest of these peripherals.
You need to have a cable that goes from the Pie. The Raspberry Pie sits on a host adapter, a custom board, so the Ethernet goes into the Pie. And then you'll notice there's there's three other No, not that one. There's one one of the larger white modules.
Oh, it says host adapter on it. There.
I go that one, opening that up.
Good, good, good, Okay, that's let me switch to the overhead here.
Yeah.
I got the box in the mail and I'm like, and I opened it up. I'm like, oh my gosh, how long is this going to take to put together?
So? Yeah, yeah, the good news is is that the thing will take you the most time is is figuring out how to screw it to the wall or right something. The actual system of connection is really very straightforward.
Okay, good, okay, So that's the host adapter.
So let me explain a couple of things. So you'll take your Raspberry pipe. You want to power it down and plug it into this this board here right here. Yeah, right, So the Raspberry pie flips upside down in the gp I O hitter plugs right into there.
All right, so let me let me do a graceful shutdown because I'm I'm always the guy that's just pulling the power out of a Raspberry Pie and people are like, I want to say something about that. So all right, that's fine. Let's see.
So, by the way, we talked about the Pie three versus five, and so yes, just a couple thoughts there. I think the best platform to run this thing on is the Pie three. And the reason is PI three takes less energy than the five, puts out less heath than the five, and it's more than fast enough to run this application. And they're also very inexpensive. So you can buy a Raspberry Pie three for thirty five bucks. Yeah, from eight of fruits, so you know they're about as
cheap as they come. Okay, you can unplug that USB thingy. Yeah, okay, and now flip it over and plug it in with the header. There you go. Now when you plug it in, you'll notice on this one this is the beta hardware and it plugs in fine, but the USB connector touches the base plate, the production ones that's cut out, so it doesn't hit the little base plate there right here. Yeah, yeah, there's an old notch there. Okay, so let me explain what's on that board before we hook it up.
Good.
So on the lower left hand corner you'll see a very familiar powerful connector. So there's two power jacks there. There's a power pole and a two point one millimeter barrel jack. Those are just hooked in parallel. This is the power into the system. So one of the things running a Raspberry Pie is you know what are you going to power it with? And you know you rather than running off of the USB waalwart that plugs in here, I built a power supply onto the board. So right
above the power pole that's the fible power supply. So it creates a nice, you know, bible rail to run the Raspberry Pie. Then up along the very top edge on the right hand side, you'll see three RJ forty five connectors. Those are not Ethernet, and I need to make a sticker to put on that says this is not an ethernet not ethernet. Okay, yeah, So I'm going to use a term here. I want to define this term because I'll be using this over and over again.
So the method that I use to interconnect all of the modules is a network kind of connection network quotees that I call the device control network. The device control network can be either done wired or wirelessly. In this case it's the wired version. And so what I'm putting on those RGA forty five connectors is data and power.
So if we were to power let's say just the Raspberry PIEH module and then what you have to the right of it, which is the four port HF coax relay, the only connection between the two is a little piece of Cat five cable or Cat six cable. So in the bags there somewhere there's a short piece of Cat five cable that we'll use to hook into that co ed switch. Also rotate the coax switch one hundred and eighty degrees. So the connectors are on the bottom this one, yeah,
flip it around there you go. Okay, okay, So those four little black RG forty five's that's the hub for connecting to the modules. So you can plug a little piece of CAT five cable between any one of those three connectors and the one there you go, yeah, just between those two, and that will provide data and power to that Cox relay. So that's the only connection you need to make, so it's really easy.
Oh, it's probably that I was looking for. That piece of Cat five is probably in there an installation kit, right, yeah, okay, good, okay.
So so while you're doing that, so the other things that are on that Raspberry Pie post adapter, there's a green connector up at the top. That's an auxiliary connector that has power and data also on it in parallel with the RJ forty fives, and there's there's times when you might want to use twisted pair for data or have you know, twisted pair to power it instead of using a connector, so you have that option. Also, you'll notice that right below the green connector there's two headers
that are unpopulated. Can you take a wild guess what that's for?
No, I don't know.
That's all right?
An LCD screen or No? That is that a? Is that a pie Star?
No, it's a it's a hell Tech B three meshtastic radio.
It's meshtastic. Oh wow, okay, all right, yeah, okay.
So so you can take a Healtech V three module and plug it into those headers and then you see the little SMA connector above it.
Yes, right there, that's for the that's for.
The meshtastic antenna. So let me take a little time out and explain this.
Yeah, that's uh yeah, how is that gonna work? Okay?
Yeah, now you know.
Now I'm curious.
Okay, you don't need mesh tastic at all for the system to work, okay, period. And that's and it's not shipped with it by default because you don't you don't need it.
Right.
So, when the architecture of the system is such that you have the main controller, which is your Raspberry Pie, and then you have one or more modules which will measure a voltage, switch an antenna do whatever it does. And I mentioned there's two ways to connect between the Raspberry Pie and those modules. You could do it wired, and the wired method is using Cat five cable that
brings over the data and the power. And normally, if you have a controller all together, you would just hook up Cat five cables between the different modules and it just works. Now, there's scenarios where you want this device to be farther away than is convenient, and like maybe you have a tower that's a couple hundred feet away from your station, and maybe you want to do your Cox switching or your WAP meter or something at the tower, not in the station. So how would you do that.
So there's two ways to do it. You could run a very long piece of Cat five cable, which is fine because this you can run this data up to a couple thousand feet no problem. So you could just run a big, old long piece of Cat five cable to the other side and it would provide power end data to the other end. Or what you could do is replace that Cat five cable with a wireless radio a data link. And there's two kinds of radios that we support. One of them is is a nine hundred
megahert data radio module that looks like this. You simply put in a pair of wires into the into the block there in power and this will transmit the data to another one just like this at the other end. So you now have a nine hundred megahert point to point link. Or you could plug in the Meshtastic radio and do the same thing over Meshtastic, so you can have at the other end. I didn't I didn't send you one of these. This this is a future thing.
This is this is the mesh Tastic module all by itself. So so I could have this mestastic radio with Cat five connection to a control module, okay, and so I can send the command there. The system can send the commands back and forth over Mesastic. Now, having said that, let me let me make a couple important points. Point number one is I don't recommend to deploying this on long fast.
Oh yeah, for sure.
Because you're going to be like, hey, Bob, you want to have lunch and then here's you know, every thirty seconds is some data from some machines somewhere. So that would drive people crazy. So if you're going to use mesh Tastic, you need to create your own separate channel. And that also means you can turn an encryption if
you want. The beauty of the meshtastic radio is that I can run the meshtastic app on my phone and I can actually watch the traffic, and I could even send commands, you know, if I know the command format from my phone. Now. So that's what the meshtastic thing could be used for, but it's not required. In fact, there's a downside to meshtastic. The downside to it is it is latency. So these nine hundred megahert data radios are much lower latency than meshtastic. So I only recommend
using the meshtastic stuff in if it's really necessary. Like I have a site upon hill, I have no internet to the site. I can send a mesh tastic message to the repeater site and I only ever need to like turn off the power, so it's not like a lot of traffic. Then the meshtastic thing is fine. But for for normal like hi activity networks, I don't recommend it. I would use the regular data radios or the cable is much more reliable.
Okay, anyway, so I.
Just want to get that meshtastic thing in there.
That's pretty cool. I mean, yeah, I wasn't expecting to see that at all, So okay, good, good.
Okay, So that's it for the Raspberry Pie module. By the way, another maybe one last thing. Most of the people who are going to get this system, I think they're just gonna want to buy it, take it out of the box, plug it in, and use it. So I can supply the Raspberry Pie board. I mean that that post adapter and the Pie itself and the image desty card. So you literally just plug in power and and data and you're done. If you want to build
your own, and of course it's cheaper this way. You can just get the boards, apply your own Raspberry Pie, create your own sd card image, and go from there. But it's you know, up to you, all right, whatever you do.
Yeah, okay, good to know. Okay, excellent.
All right.
So we're back over here, and these are those Ethernet cables.
Okay, so take one of those cables and plug it into one of the three connectors on the Pie.
Doesn't matter which one, doesn't matter.
They're all bust together, okay, all right, and then plug the other one into the OAX really okay, Okay, Now we just need to apply power to the Raspberry Pie, and that's a powerpole or a barrel connector. So twelve volts into the Raspberry Pie connectors.
So we want to power it from here, not from over here.
Correct, you never you never touched the Raspberry Pie.
You never have to touch it again, okay, all right, And.
It'll run off of a you know, one or two am ballboard or your bay station power supply. So one of the reasons for putting the powersplan here is every hamshack has twelve bolts, and if you're going to use the like the Raspberry Pie, a walwort, you have to have separate power for the rest of the modules. It's like there's no point, so you might as well just have one bovolt power input. It's actually a wide range input.
You can run it on anything from about ten or eleven volts up to about eighteen or twenty volts.
So that's good, okay.
You know. Like so actually, while you're doing that a little sidebar for a boat station, one of the things you want to do is be able to run this thing off the battery if available. So in my station, what I do is I take a bio no battery and I plug the bio eno charger into the wall, and I plug the two millimeter jack into the battery and then I have a little jumper that goes from the bio Eno batteries power pole to the power pole
on the Raspberry Pie. So now the whole station controller is going to be running off of the battery and it's constantly being.
Charged, constantly being charged.
That's good.
And if I lose if I lose power at the station and the station controller is still.
Up, okay, let me run inside and get one of my bioinos because my overhead I've got it sitting over here. This is my overhead camera, and I've got another camera that looks at my power supply and my incoming and my twelve volt connection. But it's it's over here to the side, so I don't have a I don't have a power supply right here. Okay, so let me go grab that. So let's take like a five minute break and we'll we'll start again here in a second.
Sounds good.
So there's no lights or into anything else. There's no indicators on here to see that this is powered on yet.
Oh yeah, there is, but but it's it's not. Yeah, you don't have twelve volts on there?
Not seeing that? Is that the same walwort?
That's just twelve volt walwort. It's a two point one millimeter barrel.
Is that the same barrel that's on a bioin O Yeah? Okay, okay, So are we plugging into the pie or we plug it in elsewhere.
Into the pie?
Into the pie? Okay, now there we go.
So on the display on the co X switch, one minute after power is applied on the display, it's gonna give you an IP address, so watch for that. So ideally you'd have the network connection plugged and then power it up, but it'll probably be fine.
So okay, okay.
It takes a minute for everything to boot up, and at the very end of that boot process, it'll report what the IP address.
Is, gotcha? Okay? Right now it says selected port one. That's all it says.
Yeah, so by default co export one selected. So while that's booting, let me explain a few things on the co X switch there. So, first of all, this is an HF co X switch, meaning it's good from zero to sixty megahertz, so HF plus six meters. It turns out, actually it's not awful at two So if you really could use it on two meters, it's it's not ideal it was not designed for two meters, but it has maybe half a dB of insertion loss, which is nothing
you had designed for. But it's not horrible, but it's really intended for where it's got like almost zero insertion point five dB insertion loss. Okay, the configuration on the B and C connectors there, it's from left to right. It's port one, port two, common port three, port four. So if you had one radio and four antennas, you'd plug your radio into the middle one and then and then the antenna's or dummy load would connect to the other ones. If you have four radios and one antenna,
then the one antenna goes to the center port. All of the relays are latching, which means that whatever position you put it in, if you pulled power from that board, it would stay connected. And that's important if you're preparing for, you know, emergency situations where you're gonna lose power. The last thing you want is to turn on your radios in like the antenna's is connected, so so that stays connected.
Okay.
The display on the on the module will show you the current state of that board, so it'll tell you which inten is connected. There's a way that you can actually change the labels. So if let's say Port one is your vertical in Port two is your beam or whatever, there's a way you can put that specific text on the display.
Gotcha, you don't need the display.
I think nine times out of ten people are going to just put this in a closet and close the door and they don't even need the display. And this displays. Literally, the display just unplugs from the module. You don't even need to use the display, but for this purpose it's good to see it. So that's the basic connections. There's
some auxiliary stuff up at the top. The green terminal block connectors provide additional The one on the right is additional network in power that parallels the RJ forty five. There's a two point one millimeter barrel connector next to the RJ forty five. Those are all hooked up in parallel, so we run the power over the Cat five cable. You could take twelve volts into the barrel connector on the coax relay and then I'll just feed power over
to the Raspberry Pie. So any of those connectors are all busted together.
Okay.
The last thing is on the upper left green terminal block. There's four pins on there, and there's actually eight, but four of those pins, if you momentarily connect them to ground, like through a push button, it will actuate the relay. So in addition to controlling the relay over the network, you can also have a set of switches to manually control the relay if you like.
Okay.
Also, you'd notice there's a USBC connector on the upper left or yep, yeah, and so in normal operation you
never touch it. But if you on all of the modules, they all have USBC connectors that are connected to the CPU on the board, and the purpose for that is mainly to configure that module if you need to do anything custom So the way the systems designed normally, you'd never ever need to configure anything, but there's some corner cases where you like, you might want to adjust something, and then that's the way you can go into it with a dumb terminal and just type in commands and
configure it. Also, when the device boots up, if you plug in a dumb terminal, you'll see all the different steps the thing goes through when it's booting, so you can see what's going on. It's it's kind of interesting to see once. But yeah, but you don't have to do that.
Yeah, okay, okay, all right, Well it came up and it said IP addressed a minute ago, but it was blank.
Okay. That means that it didn't that the thing didn't catch the uh ip address. So let's let's let's pretend we're doing it from scratch. Now, look over on the Raspberry Pie board. You'll see next to the barrel connector there's a tiny switch. It says shut down.
Yes, right, there's that button.
Just hold that button for a second. Just hold it for a second. Lego. Okay, So now you're your Pie is going to shut down. So this is this is a better than the yank and the power. So okay, if you yank the power on an SD card Raspberry Pie, theoretically you can corrupt the SD card. So whenever you shut it down, it's better if you actually do a proper shutdown. Okay, So by now it should be shutdown. So disconnect the twelve vaults and plug it back in.
So a couple other things. We'll go through the other modules in a little bit here, but currently there's three different kinds of control modules. This is the four port coacs really obviously, there's a module that we call the General Purpose IO or GPAO module, and that's a pretty universal module. It gives eighteen different channels of monitoring your control. So it's got built into it for DC volt meters.
They could measure zero to fifty volts. It's got four small signal SPST relays, so you can have dry contact closures built in. It's got four open collector outputs that could be used to control a large twelve relay or like on a flux radio for example. There's the soft power on off remote jack on the back. You can take one of those open collector outputs, hook it to the RCAA jack on the flex and remotely turn the
flux on and off through that jack. There's four op to isolated digital inputs, so you can have a switch closure of some kind like a door alarm or any other you know, switch to ground kind of input. And then there's two temperature probes. In the temperature probes, they're included in the package. There there's like a three to six meter or three to six foot cable with little
silver metal cylinder at the end. It's got a digital temperature probe and so you can put those in the room, tape it to the PA or whatever you want to measure the temperature and other Otherwise, everything else is is similar to the co X switch in in that there's the network connection, the power connection, the auxiliary connections. Uh, the same idea as the as the co X switch. So what would you use the gp A board for.
You'd use that to let's say, turn your power supply on and off, to measure the battery voltage, et cetera. So it's general purpose kind of application. Okay, did you did you catch the IP address on the.
Well, it was still blank, so I don't. I don't think it's uh, it's not gonna link. Well no, this I don't remember if the Raspberry Pie is supposed to have a link light or not.
But I don't think so.
I didn't think it did.
Okay, Well, you know what we could do is is, uh, you could plug in your your monitoring keyboard and all that stuff. We just go right into the pie or we can sssh into it.
Either way, well, you'd have to have an IP addressed a sensation to it. Right.
No, you can use the name of the computer. So if you have putty or something handy on your I do we could do that?
Yeah?
Okay, let's give it a try.
Okay. Uh, I could also open up my router. If it did pull an IP address from the router, it says host does not exist. I'm thinking that it's not I'm thinking it's not connect.
I think it's not connected.
Yeah, I think it's not connected. So, but it's plugged into the same switch that I have my both of my computers and my Flex Rado and everything else on. So I don't know if this piece of coax is bad or or what the deal is with that.
Can you unplug your flex and or something else and plug it in?
That's all behind the desk over there. That is a bad piece of coax. I have link lights on the Raspberry Pie now.
Ah so so how about that?
Does it does show up? Is linked links likes?
Yeah?
Oh it does?
Yeah?
Never knows that? Okay.
Yeah, I can't say that I have either. So I've got a bad power pool and a bad coact and bad.
Is there anything else I can help you with debugging your shout right exactly?
Yeah? I can't remember the last time I use that Ethernet on anything. Okay, do we need to reboot for it to grab an IP or should it do it by itself.
Well, let's do If you reboot, it will do that. But let's go in through SSH and I'll show you how to do that.
Okay, all right, so let's pull that back up and just.
Say awesome, okay, okay, perfect log in as Sierra s I E R R A.
By the way, but I don't know what it is.
Yeah, you're not You're not old enough.
Oh okay.
So if you go back to the to the seventies era of radios when they had solid state receivers and tube finals, A very popular final tube in it, like in the Kenwood radios, was a sixty one forty six. So there's a pair of sixty one forty six is there? That's your tricky for the day.
All right.
So now now we're logged into the PIE. So what you see there on the prompt since the name of the this is a little minute show. But since the name of the of the PIE is station controller, the prompt would be like half the screen, so it's abbreviated to just the dollar sign and the name of the directory that you're in, which is Tilda. Here that means you're logging directory. Now, to make things really easy, type the word menu, hit return. Okay, so there's your little
utility screen. The very first thing says get RPI IP address, so type one and hit return.
Oops.
Okay, okay, there's your IP address.
Yeah one, okay, good.
That's all you need to know.
Okay.
At this point you never have to do this ever again. The other things on the little utility menu here are just housekeeping things. If you want to go hack around in your Raspberry Pie to customize it, then this. For people who are not very familiar with Linux, this menu helps you just find convenient configuration files and let's your recoot the machine and stuff like that. So so we're done with this. This is all you need to do. So we can just exit out of here and then pull up a browser, take.
The take the automatically added s out of your HTTPS prompt.
Okay, there we go.
And by the way, if you want to run this with HTTPS, then that's that's the user's problem to sort out how you want to run us securely.
But gotcha, okay, okay.
Now what you're looking at here this is the dashboard as as supplied on the SD card image. That is shipped with the product, and this has the control panel for three modules, or the gp io module, for the co x switch module, and for the RF wat meter module, which the want meter module. You don't happen to have that board because when I shipped you your your kit, I didn't have those those modules yet there there I have them now, so we could do that another time. Now.
The beauty of node read is is you could just take this as as I ship it and just use it and never customize it and it'll be fine. Or you can go in and customize it. So like if you said, well I want three coax relays, well you can go into the NOE red editor and you can just copy my coax relay code and change the address and it'll just work. So it's really easy to enhance and modify this to meet your own custom needs, or you can just use it out of the box the
way I ship it. So what you see on the upper left hand corner, that stack of green and red boxes, those are the four or rather the eight relays on the gpio module. The big box in the lower left those are the four ports on the antenna switch. So you'll notice that the antenna switch. LEDs are lit up green red red red. That's because we're communicating with the co X switch. The GPIO modules not plugged in, so
those LEDs are grayed out. So because there's no data, So I preloaded labels in those four COAX positions, vertical beam, something else and some dummy load or something. You can change those labels. That's really something to do. But let's go ahead and select a different port. So click your mouse on one of the one of those green bars here at clicking okay, here click and you'll notice also on the board the led changes. You can tell which
which one is selected. So when you when you click the this is important to kind of know for the reliability of the system. When you click a button like that to select the antenna, the dashboard sends the command over the network, the wired network to the co X relay and says, I want antenna number two. What the board does is it first of all, it disconnects whatever it was cooked up to before. It waits a short
period of time like three hundred milliseconds. Then it connects in whichever port you selected, So you're you're you're never gonna have the chance of shorting anything out, so there's a time gap between disconnect and connect. Yeah, and like I said, they're latching relays, so if you pulled all the power right now, that circuit will still be in place,
so it'll still be operational. The other thing that happens is after the board makes that relay switch the board, then the control module sends a message back to the dashboard to say, here's my current state, and my current state is Port one, three and four are off and port two is on. So when you see the LEDs change color, that's not because you press the button, it's because the remote device sent a message back saying here's my current state. So that way you know something happened.
So if you press let's say vertical antenna and it never changes to green, then something happened and the message never made it. Maybe there's a collision on the network, or something got unplugged, or who knows. So just because you press the button doesn't mean it happens it only you only know what happens when the indicator says it. So click vertical antenna. The top up one again. So it took about a second or two for the LED to update. The relay actually switched immediately.
Yeah, you could hear the relay click immediately and then it clicked again, and then that's when the LED. Immediately after the second click is when the LED changed.
Right. So again what happens is press the button, the module gets the message, disconnects the relay first click, very slight pause, connects the new relay, second click, sends the message back to the dashboard. Dashboard updates the LED. All that takes one second or so for that tap.
Okay, cool, and and that's it.
I mean that that's all it takes to you know. The the biggest pain is like buy network cables bad. So I mean yeah, if you have a good if you have a good network connection power supply, this whole thing will take five minutes, right, So that's that's that.
Okay.
So these so there's there's four options for voltmeter and four options for temperature sensor. Are those something I have here or is that something to be added later?
Oh?
No, you got there. Let's go ahead and hook that up. So let's let's go back to the bench and we'll look up the gpio module.
Okay, yeah, this is just one of these Ethernet cables.
Yeah, I'll plug it into one of the black connectors on the on the pie board and then plug it into the first bonding connector. Okay, and you don't have to reboot anything. It'll all self heal when it when it comes up. So the so the board's up and running now, okay, so if we if we go back to our dashboard.
Yep, yeah, it's already lit up. They're all red but it's all lit up.
Yeah, so it's so it's already gone an update. So go ahead and click one of the green relay buttons on like one of the first four ones. You'll hear it click like really one.
Yep, slight click.
There you go. So, so what you see here is, uh, there's the really one, two, three, and four are the the little white Ellie or led the little white relays on the board. Those are a single pole, single throw, two amp maximum contacts and you can put whatever you want through there that's two amps or less. Then the next four relays are open collector outputs, and what that means is that when those are active, that output will be pulled to ground. So there's a five hundred milliamp
capable transistor that's pulling that signal to ground. So it's a solid state kind of a switch. And what would you use that for if you if you said, well, I need to switch like a thirty amp power relay. Okay, you go get a power relay with a twelve volt coil and you would hook up twelve volts to one side which I supply out of the board, or and you hook up the open collector output to the other side of the relay and it'll just there you go.
There's some little relays that are in your installation kit. There are little dinrail mountable, skinny little relays that I put in there that you could hook up to that as an example, okay, okay. Then to the right of that it says digital input. There's four opto isolated digital inputs. And what this means is if any of those four inputs are pulled to ground, then that LED will turn on. So what would you use that for, Well, like if you have a remote site, you might want to put
a door alarm on the building. You're on the cabinet or you know. I mean, it's a universal thing. It's a switch closure. Then to the right of that it says vaultmeter. And like you said, there's four voltmeters stacked up there. So the voltmeters on this system can read from zero to fifty volts DC and they're all system ground referenced, which means they all whatever you're measuring that twelve volts it has to be the same ground potential as the controller. Okay, so typically I mean and normally
it would be. And what would you use the voltmeters for? Like in my station, I have it hooked up. The first thing I hook it up to is the output of my power supply because I want to know, you know, if the power supply is working or sagging or whatever, and if I'm on battery backup, I want to measure the battery voltage, which could be the same point in
the system. So let's say, for example, if your station has a big hundred damp hower lithium iron phosphate battery, you want to hook up one of your vaultmeter inputs to that battery, and you might have a charger or power supply keeping that battery topped off, and when you lose AC power, the battery is still running, but you want to see what the battery voltage is to make sure it's still looking healthy. Then to the right of that are temperature probes. There are three on the dashboard.
There's two jacks for temperature probes, and the software supports a third one that's not on the board, so there's really two temperature probes. And again those are little. There's like a three to six foot cable with a little capsule at the end, a little metal capsule. Yeah, you plug in the wire through a terminal block and then it'll tell you what the temperature is. No calibration required.
Now, these are all connected through these four here on the bottom of the gpio board.
Yeah. It so hold up the gpio board so you'll see. Yeah, there's a row of connectors at the bottom. So and if you look at the there's a little plugs that plug in there. So the actual place where you put the wire is a pluggable connector. So there's a little block and you it's a rising clamp thing, so you unscrew it. You stick in the wire and screw it down, and then you plug that thing into one of those.
Connectors into here.
Yeah.
Okay.
The nice thing about that is, let's say for some reason you want to remove the controller. You don't want to unscrew eighteen wires or more right, you know, So you just unplug the terminal blocks and swap out the board or whatever, and you'll see silkscreen on the top of the board. It'll tell you that. The left block is the analog voltmeter input. So each pair of pins is like voltmeter one in ground voltmeter two ground voltmeter, three ground voltmeter four ground. That's the eight pens on
that block. The next one over is the open collectors, so each pair of pins is like open collector output and in a twelve volt power out so you can you can power a relay. The next block over are the four little white internal SPST relays, so that's two pins per relay, okay. And then the fourth block to the right is the pulled the ground digital inputs.
Through the offers right okay.
And then along the upper top the two three pin connectors in the middle. Those are the two temperature probes.
Oh okay, okay, so specific probes for temperature okay, good.
Good, And again those are not thermal couples. They're not. They don't require calibration. It's a digital temperature probe. You just plug it in, it just.
Works, okay.
Nice.
What's this one here, that's a system connector.
All the boards have this and it's just extra connections for network and power. So if for some reason you didn't want to use the RJ forty five, you had a twisted pair you want to plug in, So let me give you kind of here's a here's a like an advanced tip. So one of the things you could do. If you're in the normal use you don't have to do this, but if you're curious and want to see
what's going on in the network. Inside your installation kit, there's a little USB dongle, that little blue dongle, and on the on the back end of the dongle is a little two pin screw terminal and what that's for is it's a there you go. So so that's a USB comport ftd I chip in there, and it goes from the USB connection numerates a comport converts it to RS forty five, which is what my network connection is,
and that's what those two pins are. So on that upper left hand corner terminal block, there's two pairs of what's called the AB signals for the RS forty five. So you can just take a piece of ZIP cord, you know, like you're you know one E gauge block and red zip coord and put it between the terminals on that little blue thing and then two pins on that extra system bus, and then you could pull up putty and you could watch the traffic on the network
going back and forth between. Oh nice, the Raspberry Pie and the module. Now, for a normal you know, appliance plug and play black box kind of deployment, you'd never do that. There's no reason the world you'd ever want to do that. But it's it's if you're curious what's going on, you want to see what's actually happening under the hood. It's kind of fun to watch the traffic bouncing back and forth. So what you'll see is the Raspberry Pie will will pull each of the modules, so
it'll say, hey, module number one, what's your status? Module one will measure all the inputs and send them all back to the dashboard. Then it'll go to Module two. Then I'll go to module three, and so it round robins through all the three modules if you have the third one there, and then updates the so the dashboard is updated about every thirty seconds automatically, or if you command anything on a board, it will automatically update that module when you do the command. Okay, so that's the
that's the basics. You've basically done the setup now. Now the the only other work to do is to actually hook it up to something.
Yeah yeah, yeah, So these are these are all B and C connectors here, so I would need like a well, currently I have the alpha delta four position switch on my for my HF radios because I have I'm trying
to remember my lady's configuration. I think I have one antenna to the common and then I have my my flex and my Icy seventy seven hundred that go and and then oh and then I have an extra cable that comes up here on the work bench for doing video stuff whatnot, plugging in extra radios and whatnot, and they all go to the one antenna right now. So I would probably want to plug that antenna into this middle poord and but those are all PO twifty nine, so I have to get some adapters, which.
Is so or look at you look at your bag. You might find some co X cables in there.
Oh I did see those, yes.
Yeah, break those out?
Oh yeah, okay, so yeah, so B and C on that end and PEL two fifty nine on that end.
Okay, yeah, good, So those are going to be optional. They don't come with with the with the board, but h and the reason is that people may just be using B and c'st I mean most of us for our HF radios, we use PEL two fifty nine, two fifty nine, right, So they'll be available as options to go with the kit. Now you might say, well, why the world use B and C connectors? And and there's
a good reason for that. If you're if you're building a device like this where it's on a printed circuit board, there is no such thing as a SO two thirty nine or end connector for a PC board. They don't exist. So the only connector that you can really use is a B and C or like an SMA. I don't want to do that. So so bn C is a perfectly fine connector and it keeps the it keeps it kind of compact to boot.
So it's also a lot smaller. I thought that's what you're going to say, is they're just five in a row, So two thirty nine would take a whole lot more room than this.
Exactly, So okay, exactly. Now I'm thinking I may build a bigger switch box in the future with more connections with it's a box that has can you know, so two thirty nines But that's like someday maybe.
Yeah, okay, all right, good local IP address to connect to this system station controller from within the land.
So that's a good question. So so right now that that problem is up to the user to figure out. So the simple answer I'm not wild about. The simple answer is you open a port on your router and when you're and you know the wane address of your router, so when you're out and about, you point to the wine address and the port and then you'll see the
web page. Now the problem with that, of course is now that's a vulnerability, right, you know idea but like when you run your flex, you have to open up you know, ports to talk to your flex, correct, although
smart link does kind of help you with that. So one of the things that that we're working on is is looking at doing a something similar to smart link where you would have a a server you would log into which would then essentially proxy to your your device at home, which would give you a layer of security.
So that's probably a better approach. You know, a lot of people will do a VPN or they'll do some of you know people, there's a lot of hams who are really networking experts, and they'll just they have sixteen different ways they'll do it. But for the casual, non network expert, then besides opening up ports, we're looking at at having a proxy service to make that available. But that that's not going to be a free thing. That's
like a subscription thing. But that's that's not our business model is not to have a subscription model where you have to use a service. This is all self hosted and self run and and that would just be like an option if you really want to do that. But and that's not available yet anyway, probably later this year.
Right right, Yeah, okay, we can all always us like some sort of remote desktop or V and C for sure to get into your network, which is what I use.
Yeah, Actually, remote desktop is a really good idea because that way you don't even have to yeah, you just point to that. And now, by the way, the other things you see in this dashboard here on the right hand side is the RF want meter. You don't have that module there, but but I did get those modules there. I've got them now they're up and running. They're they're
working fine. The way the RF module works it looks very much like the coax really, except it's got two ports on it to talk to two RF directional couplers, so that means you can essentially have two want meters built into the system for one with each module you can have more modules, but it's two. So the way it works is is I didn't want to make the actual directional coupler itself, and there's a fella who I've worked with before that makes them that are they're very good.
He has a company called wave Node, and wave Node makes want meters and they make their own directional couplers and it's very easy to integrate their directional coupler into my system, so I just built it around their couplers. So their directional couplers are a little box. There's two connectors, so two thirty nine or n and they make different wattage and frequency range models, so there's three of them
that are supported in the system. Currently. There's a the HF one meter a coupler which is zero to two thousand watts HF and six. There's a low power HF one that's good for zero to sixty watts, and then there's a UHFVHF model that's good up to I think a couple one hundred watts up to three hundred or up to five hundred mega hertz or something. So for
like two meters, you'd use the UHF one. You can plug any of those three directional couplers into either of the two ports, and then there's a way that you tell the wat meter what the personality is of that thing. So let's say I have an Let's say I have
my Flex radio and my Icon ninety seven hundred. I would take the HF coupler, plug it into port one, take my VHF coupler, plug it into port two, and then I would go through the USB port on the module with putty and there's a couple of commands that tells it what kind of module I'm using, and then everything is pre calibrated and goes from there. So there's a couple of ways that the WALP meter thing works.
One thing is is that you can you can probe the status of the module, and the dashboard every thirty seconds probes every control module. It says what's your status. So when you do that, if there's any power being measured from either of those ports, it will show up on these gauges. So you can see the upper right hand corner is port one, so that's the first coupler. One meter is forward power, the other meter is reflected power, and then below that is walt meter two. The second port,
same thing, forward and reflected power. So this is kind of the passive way to do it, where it's just constantly measuring it and giving you an update about what's going on. The Other thing you can do is you can force a test. So the buttons below that says run are a want meter test on port one and on port two. Now what that does is it keys the transmitter, measures the power and returns the value. So this is really more useful for remote operating. So think
about this way. When you're operating remote, You're not gonna want to watch the want meter constantly. What you want to do is maybe when you start, you know, I land in Hawaii, I pull out my tablet, I want to connect to my flex and I want to see, you know, how much power am I putting out? So you go to the dashboard, you hit run want meter test, and it'll tell you the ford and reflected power and then you'll say, okay, I'm good to go, and off
I go. Now, the way that works is on the want meter board, there's a couple of extra optional pins, and one of the pins on each port is a push to talk line. So when you press that first big green button, it tells the want meter first of all, to key the radio. So it pulls the PTT line low, keys up the transmitter, then measures the wattage, and then
unkeys the transmitter and returns that wattage back to the user. Now, currently, if you're if you're in, you have to put the radio it like into CW mode and then and then you have to do a key down with the PTT then and it'll work just fine. One of the things that I want to do with this is to add the the like, for example, the Flex Radio Control API, so that it'll it'll tell the Flex radio to do
that automatically. I've had requests to add HAMLEB to the dashboard so you can hook up you know, your Icon seventy three hundred and do the same thing. So those are enhancements that I'm going to make to this over time. But right now that that's the way it works. The other thing that's that's useful is if let's say you're using this on a repeater system, there is also a an optional input pin that is a PTT input, and you might say, well, I want that. So so imagine this.
You've got the want meter on your two meter repeater M and one day you go, you know what, the I don't repeaters off the air? What's going on? And you you know, you key up, You don't hear anything. You go to the dashboard, you hit run the run the power test, and it comes back with zero watts. Okay,
I zero wats is a problem. But I want to know did the transmitter think it was being keyed up at the time, because if you measure zero watts, that's either really bad or irrelevant because the transmitter is not keyed up. So so you can both monitor the state of the of the PTT line to the transmitter and you can also force it to PTT through the through the want meter.
Okay, nice, Okay, Okay? These what meters you're talking about from wave note? Are that is that a is it a hardware or is that software?
What meter?
Oh no, it's it's a piece of hardware. So when you buy a want meter from Wave, note they have a control head and they have a directional coupler. Okay, so to use with our system, you don't need the want meter control head at all. Right, all you need is the directional coupler. And and by the way, the HF directional coupler is like sixty five bucks. Oh, I mean it is really really reasonably priced. Yeah yeah, okay, that will force the MP address out into the module.
That's what it did. Yep, that's exactly what it did. Okay, Yeah, this module right here.
And then on the dashboard you'll notice that in the upper left hand corner of the dashboard there's the usual little hamburger.
Yep.
If you click on that, you'll see there's a second page that's Pie monitor. So this is a generic Pie computer status page.
Okay. Every time I do a video about a Raspberry Pie something something, people are always commenting, Wow, that's see you tumberature is high. It's like, well, yeah, it's not. I've got the heater going because it's forty degrees outside right now, and there's no fan on this pie. Is there a there? I guess Since applies upside down, you can't really add a fan to the CPU.
On this thing, not not to the not to the top side. So it's yes, it's not just air cooled. Usually they don't tend to rend quite this high. But it seems to be fine.
Normal, it's a little high, but again it's it's warm in here right now, so I can adjust that accordingly. But yeah, good, But that's that's good that you could monitor the actual pie though you can see how much it's just disk space and whatnot.
So so this is.
The beauty of node red that I built this dashboard and you can just go use it and it does what it's supposed to do and you never have to touch it. Or I think, like a lot of us, the first time you use something, you don't want to. You don't want to start scratch, you want to just start working. But once you start to get the hang of whatever the thing is, then you start thinking, you know, I could do this if only I had a way
to get to it. And so the nice thing about node red is you can extend it as much as you want and become as much of a node red guru. And there's literally thousands of people doing this because if you go to groups dot io and go to the node red hand Radio forum. There's like two thousand plus members of that forum alone. Wow, So there's a whole lot of people out there that are doing these things, you know, like Mike and like Kyle A. Zero Z and a lot of other people that are very knowledgeable.
And to add functionality, it's really pretty easy. You just go to through the web browser, you point to a different IP address, you see all the flows and you can modify them or copy them or add in something else and it just works. And so what we're going
to distribute is is this software in two forms. One is the SD card image, which has the operating system pre configured with all the things that you have to do, and there's like a dozen or two things that have to be done to configure it properly, but that'll all be pre configured on the STD card or on the image that you could download. And then there's the flow, which is the dashboard that's also pre installed, of course, but that will evolve over time as we add more
things to the NOE re read environment. There may be new libraries to add or new flows with new features, and those will be separately downloadable, So you don't have to reimage the thing, although you could or just download the new flow and run that.
What kind of time frame you looking at before this is available to the public.
So the first thing I wanted to do is well, step one is proved to myself that it works. So that was really twenty four was mostly like, you know, get it to work to the point that I'm happy to share it with somebody else. My second goal was to get beta's out by the end of December, and so currently there are eleven there's eleven beta sites, the
last two of which I still have to ship. So there's nine betas that are actually out in the field right now, two more to get shipped, and all the feedback I've gotten so far, there's nothing in any of the feedback that would lead me to change anything on the hardware, or even the firmware for that matter, although I can think of more things I want to do, but for right now, I think it's pretty pretty stable
and solid. Then most of what I've been doing in the last couple of weeks has been documentation because there's one hundred and one questions that people have, and so I've been trying to capture all those that one of the reasons for the beta is to find out what you know, what people like or what they don't like, or what's working and not working. And so far, so far, everything is working the way it's supposed to be working, and most of the feedback are things that I just
haven't gotten to yet, which is good. So anyway, that's sort of the background. I'm My goal was always to have them available for sale at hand Bension, so I'll be at hand Benson this year. I'll have them with me for sale, but based on the way things are going right now, I will probably have them for sale before then. So most likely I would say February March probably they'll be put up for sale. I stop to figure out the final pricing for all this and and
how you know, what all the variations are like. For example, my first thought a long time ago was I'll just put instructions on how to configure a raspberry pie, and you know, people will just have their own raspberry pie. They'll just get the Raspberry Pie motherboard and then do the pie themselves. Everybody in the beta group are experienced, you know, they've they've done this sort of thing before.
They they're raspberry Pie Linux not a problem. Everybody was like, this is a pain in the neck, so really totally, you know, And it turns out that the documentation was actually not too bad, and it's like do this, do this, do this, do this. You know, in a half hour, you're done building the image. But you know, even people that are very experienced are like, like, I'm too busy with life to do this. Can I just get it?
And so I so I decided that, you know, I'll just distribute the pre created SD card image like you imaged. And in fact, I bought a pile of Raspberry Pie threes because I know for sure there's people that are like, I don't want to screw the thing into the board, I just want to get it. So what I'm gonna do, Jason, is is for those people who just want to spend the money and get it and literally go click, click,
and it works. Then I'll have everything pre configured, you know, Raspberry Pie, I'm out of the board, SD card installed, everything is, you know, done, click it together, You're done. And for those people who who are thinking, you know, this is great, but I want to spend as little as I can, and I've got stuff you know, I got a Raspberry Pie, I've got a you know whatever, I got cables, you know, then I'll probably have some of this stuff as kind of not kit form but
like pieces. So you know, you can get the Raspberry Pie board without the Raspberry Pie or you can get it with it. But if you get it with it, I get to pay somebody to create the image and install it and test it. So that's not free. So it costs me money to do that, so I have to like jack up the price. So if you want to do your own, that's great. You want me to do it for you, that's fine too, it just costs
a little bit more. So right now I'm shooting for every one of the modules in the like fully baked, you know, mounting hardware, everything ready to go out the door, probably somewhere in the two hundred dollars price range per module. Okay, So what that means is is if you wanted the most basic configuration, you'd get the Pie module and let's
say the gpio or the COAC switch module. So it's like four hundred bucks to start and two hundred bucks to increment up every additional module, or if you want to you know, do it, diy a bunch yourself and you know BYO raspberry pie and all that sort of thing, then maybe starting around three hundred. So that's kind of the price range that that I'm looking at.
Okay, that's fair for all it for all it does, that's pretty good, I think so.
Yeah. I mean the thing the challenge here in doing a ham radio business is like, if you built this thing and sold it to the commercial world, you'd charge more than twice the price or something. Yes, yeah, but you know, we're all Hams, and we're all cheap and and you know we want the good thing, but we don't want to pay any money for it. So you know, I'm sort of riding that fine line between you know, this being financially successful and just a pain in the neck.
Sure, yeah, totally cool. Has anyone ever mentioned adding a camera to it so that you can remotely monitor your hamshack?
No, that's never come up. You certainly could do that. I mean, I know a lot of remote guys who do do that.
I mean, that's not an uncomping I yeah, I know, I know a couple of remote guys that have just like you know, I mean, they have temperture sensors like I know one guy who has a house in the mountains in Colorado eleven hundred feet above sea level. I want to know eleven eleven thousand feet above sea level, I think, And and he has a tower out there, and he's got it. He's got the tower set up for to become a one hundred and sixty meters vertical antenna. But he's got a I think a step ir on
top of it. But he's got the total remote control system set up, and I think he just pieced it all together himself. He runs flex mostly and and he he was talking. He was like, man, I sure would like to see what's going on, but the most important thing that being in the mountains of Colorado. He wants a temperature sensor. He's like, I don't want it to get too cold, you know, if the heater stops working or whatever. So temperature sensor is really important. But it
is nice. It would be nice to be able to see your hamshack from you know.
So there's two reasons human you kind of want to use a camera that I've seen this is an industrial kind of IoT applications. I've seen this done a lot where people put cameras up to look at their equipment. They do it for two reasons. One is they want to see the equipment to see if it's like physically intact. Right. So there's that mechanical side of it. I get that, and that's that's a thing. But a lot of times I've seen people have like a panel of meters and
a camera looking at the meters. I'm replacing that. True, So, and it's much more useful than having a camera. So, and the reason is, first of all, it takes less data, right, you can actually you could, by the way, let's say you have a repeater site or a remote radio site where you have no Internet, which is kind of hard to do with a like a flex, but let's say
it's a repeater you got no internet. You could put a like a twenty year old packet TNC on a two meter repeater at the repeater site and run all of the data that goes from the Raspberry Pie to the remote site over a low bandwidth data link. It'll work fine. Yeah, So you can actually monitor and control stuff remotely using a Laura radio, using a DNC or whatever. So you know, there is that aspect of it as well.
Okay, that's just something I thought of when you were talking about all the stuff that could be added to it.
So, by the way, one thing we didn't really talk about is automation. Okay, so so far, what we've really looked at is kind of the core capability, which is I want to have a dashboard that shows me what's going on, and that's great, and you know, if you want to go control something that's appropriate, or if you want to just take a glance at what's going on, that's fine. In the case let's say your your your friend's case up in the mountains where he wants to
know when it's too cold. Well, you can keep looking at the dashboard every three minutes, or you could add some automation and node red. So this is really where node red is super powerful. So you could enhance the flow that I provide by stitching a few things together. So, for instance, it's very easy to do something like I scrape the data from the modules every thirty seconds, so you'll get the temperature every thirty seconds. Now all I'm
doing is displaying that on the gauge. You could add a little couple of objects to that flow and you can say, okay, if the temperature is below X, then do something. So if the temperatures below X, turn on the heater, or if the temperatures below X, send me a text message. If the temperatures below X, then you know, I don't know, do something. So it's very easy to start to connect these things together to really automate stuff.
So like another an example, I have a user right now who has a repeater site and they have a power amplifier on the repeater and it's like a it's like a two hundred something want Motorola quantar or whatever thing. What they want to do is they want to be able to take the amplifier out of the circuit and
run low power if the amplifier fails. So what they're doing is putting co X which is on either side of the amplifier and the WANT meter, and if the reflect power ever it gets above a certain amount, they'll take the power amplifier out of the circuit and just run straight through and then send a text message to say, you know, hey, that the reflective power is too high. We've just taken the PA out of the circuit. Or you could you could imagine you could do the same thing.
Let's say AC power fails, you're on battery backup. You're on battery backup. Turn down the power or disable the PA or you know whatever steps you would take to switch to the low power operational mode, and all that stuff could be done automatically with in like you know, five minutes with no dread.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. Hmm. Yeah. I think this is a great project. It's I didn't quite understand what the purpose was when you first emailed me, and I'm like, because you you had mentioned repeater controller. I'm like, okay, yeah, that that's that's fine. I don't I don't own a repeater side. But now that I see this capability here in the remote ham shack, that's
this is a really neat tool, I think. I think there there's a lot of room for expansion, a lot of room for adding new things to it, to see what people want to do. So I think this is a great project. George. I appreciate your time today.
Sure I got one little, one little other side application I could touch, sure of.
Yeah.
Yeah, so here's one other thing. Do you have a stream deck?
I don't know.
Okay, now you know.
I act Yeah, yeah, I had I ran the software version on an Android tablet for a while now it worked fine, but yeah, I've never never purchased the actual hardware.
So in my shack, I have one of the antenna switches in the shack, and I have a stream deck. So for those people who don't know, stream deck is a little box with buttons on it, and it's normally used to run programs like OBS or b whatever. But what I wanted to do is I want to do all my antenna switching either through the web page or through the push buttons. And so I wrote a little utility that runs on Windows and so you press a button and the utility translates that button press into the
command that will switch their antenta relay so on. You know, right in front of me in the shack, I have the stream deck, and each stream deck button has a picture of the antenna or actually the radio. I have one in that case, I have won antenna and four radios. So I've got a little flex icon, a little allocraft icon, a little icon icon, and then auxiliary and so I just I pressed the mechanical button. I don't look at the web page for this, I just pressed the mechanical button.
On the you know, on the stream deck, and it sends the command to the network to switch the antenna. Really, so there's there's all kinds of ways you could use this stuff.
So yeah, yeah, definitely, that's that's fun. I've heard of people interfacing stream decks directly with their flex radio before to change stuff. Yeah, so yeah, that's that's not a new thing, but yeah, that's that's great. That will interface with that as well. So cool man. Well, can't wait to see how it progresses. And uh what what new things people come up with? And are you going to You said you're going to hamvention? What about hammcash any any.
No, No, no plans to go there. Uh okay, but so ham Mention will be the first place where I'm going to show it off.
Okay, okay, sounds good. Well, thanks for your time today, George. I appreciate it, and we're gonna follow this along as it goes. We'll get together again in a few months and see how you're doing with it.
Thanks a lot, Jason, really appreciate it.
Yep, thank you.
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